Soon after the conclusion of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China last month, General Secretary Xi Jinping visited the site of the first national congress of the CPC together with the other members of the newly-elected Standing Committee of the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau.
The 19th CPC National Congress drove home the message that China is at a great historic turning point. But Xi cautioned, no matter how far the Party has come, it should never forget where it has come from and what its purpose is.
The CPC has always been a party of deeds, not words. The history of the Party and development of China indicate the Party was created by history, and has been creating history. It has distinguished itself from other political parties in the world with its outstanding ability to make long-term plans, and more importantly, carry out those plans.
The Party's plans serve not only the Chinese people, but also the whole world. The Party has never concealed its global vision since its first national congress in Shanghaithough only 13 delegates attended the meeting in 1921 which was not reported by any mediaafter leading China to become the world's second-largest economy and lifting nearly one-fifth of the world's population out of poverty, it is time for the Party to materialize its vision for the future with actions.
The nation will mark the 40th anniversary of the reform and open-up in 2018, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 2019, the realization of a moderately well-off society in 2020, and the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Party in 2021.
These anniversaries serve as milestones to look back on what has been achieved over the past decades and highlight that the bright prospects for the Party and the country in the new era cannot be attained without reform, innovation and determination.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 10:27:43|Editor: Lu Hui
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by Luis Rojas
MEXICO CITY, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- A mix of political uncertainty and slowing economic growth in Latin America may cause investors to take a more cautious approach to investing in the region in 2018, according to experts.
Elections in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico could turn Latin America into a political "minefield," said Marcos Casarin, head of Latin America Macro Research at London-based Oxford Economics.
Similarly, Gabriel Casillas, deputy general director of economic analysis at the Mexican bank Banorte, said all eyes will be on the region's No. 1 and No. 2 economies, Brazil and Mexico.
"Any election will lead to a degree of caution, especially among short-term financial investors," said Casillas.
China Investment Corporation (CIC), a sovereign wealth fund established in 2007, has substantial sums invested in Mexican financial assets.
For the CIC and funds like it, the 2018 presidential race presents a potential risk for short-term investors, although it can also present an opportunity for longer term investments, said Casillas.
A recent survey published by Mexican daily Reforma showed the progressive candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador leading in the polls.
Some worry that the leftist front-runner of July's elections may cause political turbulence and make the markets jittery, despite the fact that as mayor of Mexico City he teamed up with big business, and the likes of business magnates, to promote the rehabilitation of the downtown area.
Also, for the first time, independent candidates not affiliated with any political party will be able to compete in the presidential contest. With lots of contenders and no second round, the winner could triumph with less than 30 percent of the vote.
In Brazil, surveys show left-leaning ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is the favorite ahead of the October 2018 elections, but it is still unknown who his rivals will be or even whether Lula will be able to run given the current corruption cases lined up against him.
The prospect of power changing hands always makes the markets nervous, especially when it's a tight race, said Alicia Puyana, professor of economics at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences.
"Next year, with the elections, since we don't know what is going to happen or who is going to win ... investors will curb their investment and cause chaos," said Puyana.
That's the price of democracy: it has its risks and rewards, she said, adding "If we don't know who is going to win, that is an indication that no one is manipulating them (the elections)."
While the elections present a challenge, South America must define how it plans to become a more strategic partner for China, instead of a mere consumer, said Jose Luis de la Cruz, general director of the Mexican Institute for Industrial Development and Economic Growth.
"2018 will offer China opportunities in Latin America, where the only thing is to get a clear handle on the region's political axis," he said.
Oxford Economics estimates China's gross domestic product (GDP) could grow between 6 and 6.5 percent in 2018 and 2019.
It is projected that Chinese investment flows towards Latin America would reach 250 billion U.S. dollars by 2025.
To safeguard that investment, said the experts, countries in Latin America need to combat the region's two biggest problems, crime and corruption, to establish a more stable climate that can weather the handover of power.@ "The region has failed to create a solid institutional framework that can be somehow insulated against electoral changes," said de la Cruz.
"The construction of institutions that can guarantee the continuity of sound economic growth, programs and a basic agenda is still pending to protect from political ups and downs," the expert said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 10:52:47|Editor: ZD
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SYDNEY, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The fisheries minister of Kiribati has appealed to the international fishing community for better access to fish stocks in the high seas in a bid to ensure sustainable development in the industry.
"We in Kiribati have no land-based natural resources available as a means of stable and secure livelihood for our people as our lands are made of poor coralline soils thus prompting Kiribati to look elsewhere for a sustainable source of revenue," the Pacific Islands News Association quoted Minister Tetabo Nakara as saying.
Nakara, who was speaking during the weekend at the 14th regular session of the Western Central Pacific Commission, stressed the importance of fishing on the high seas for his country's economy.
He also highlighted the economic impact of an annual three-month restriction on devices used to attract fish stocks.
Tuna fishing contributes significantly to Kiribati's annual government revenue "that supports, amongst others, crucial funding for our education system, medical care, other basic needs that the government is obligated to deliver as services to its 110,000 inhabitants", he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 10:52:48|Editor: ZD
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SYDNEY, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Australia's major wool sector looks poised to sustain a return to strong growth, fueled by record high prices and robust demand from increasingly affluent Chinese consumers, latest industry figures and analyses showed.
Scott Carmody, trade consultant for the nonprofit Australian Wool Innovation industry group, told Xinhua recently that demand is now the strongest in three to four decades, with "Chinese influence on the market exerting extreme upward pressure on wool prices in Australia".
In U.S. dollar terms, wool prices are not as high as they were about five years ago, but the weaker Australian dollar against the greenback now meant that Australian producers were getting paid more in the local currency, he said.
Chinese wool buyers were paying about 14 to 15 U.S. dollars a kilogram for the material back then, but the price is about 12.50 U.S. dollars now. Prices have since hit a high of more than 16 Australian dollars a kilogram, industry figures showed.
"The record high prices that everybody's talking about is in Australian dollar terms. That's very important for our wool growers because that's what they like," said Carmody.
"China has the capacity to push the market even higher as long as demand remains strong. And what we're seeing at the retail levels is that there's been so much wool at retail and many different products that people are seeing the capacity for the market to hold at these levels or even improve."
Australia is the world's dominant wool producer, with its top-grade Merino sheep helping fuel annual exports of about 3 billion Australian dollars (about 2.28 billion U.S. dollars).
Chinese demand makes up more than 70 percent of that market, with its businesses manufacturing the raw material into an increasingly wide variety of products such as sportswear and shoes beyond traditional garments, said Carmody.
"China remains our most important customer. Almost 100 percent of what it bought was manufactured and re-exported because the Chinese consumer could not afford to pay the premium price for wool. That was probably 15 to 20 years ago. Today, about 60 percent of wool is staying in China for Chinese consumption. The affluence that has grown very rapidly in China has helped wool prices," he said.
Matt Dalgleish, wool market analyst for Australian agriculture market analysis group Mecardo, told Xinhua recently the Chinese market remains "incredibly important" for Australian wool.
At the same time, the contraction of Australian wool suppliers in the past few years have also affected the higher prices and more producers switching back to the industry to tap the current growth might affect its development moving forward, he said.
There is also a limit to what foreign buyers are prepared to pay for and the danger of wool becoming a "niche" product if it gets too costly, with other fabrics and material offering alternatives, said Dalgleish.
"If we get to a situation where there's a sustainable, long-term, high-price of wool, that would certainly attract other nations and producers in other countries to start investing in the quality of sheep flocks to be able to get to the stage where they can produce wool of a high standard as well," he said.
"Australian wool helps guarantee the quality of our clothing products," Song Jianmin, chief supervisor of Chinese conglomerate Nanshan Group, told Xinhua recently. Other than garments and textiles, the company has businesses ranging from aviation and aluminum to health and education. It processes more than 5,000 tonnes of Australian wool annually for its business.
"There are multiple factors for the high wool prices. Australian wool supply has been slipping and producers have had to adjust ... our group has been keeping close track of the developments."
"We're also working with the industry in terms of technological innovation, product research and other areas. Quality continues to be an important priority for us," Song added.
Source: Xinhuanet| 2017-12-04 11:09:36|Editor: Lu Hui
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by Luigi Gambardella
In Europe, we are used to joke about why women so much appreciate French and Italian men and why Germans produce the best cars in the world. This may sound like stereotypes, but there is a truth behind it. Latin lovers are curious about their partner and her interests. They want to make her feel special and seek to anticipate their wishes: make a remark that tunes in into her thoughts, invite her to a restaurant she will like, give her a present that she was silently dreaming about. In fact, Latin lovers spend a lot of time talking and listening so as to understand and predict their partners wishes. And nothing is more seducing for a women, than a man who can anticipate her wishes. Northern Europeans spend that time at work or designing new products. Their view is that economic success will allow them to afford all commodities that women could dream of.
This reflects the dilemma of mankind: invest time in affective relations or in productive activities?
But the internet will soon allow to overcome the dilemma. The dilemma will be the common threat of the gathering this weekend of the most influential key decision makers and high tech company leaders in Wuzhen for the World Internet Conference.
Open sharing goes together with digital economic development. Open sharing generates consumer data, which on its turn, allows better focusing products and services. This is what is known as the revolution brought about by big data and artificial intelligence. And China is now in the lead for two reasons.
The first is a huge market of more than a billion consumers. The essence of big data is to use data from an as vast as possible population to find correlations and predict future behavior. The size of the Chinese market contributed decisively to the success of Ctrip and Alibaba. These companies collected a massive amount of data about consumer choices. In a second stage, their algorithms deduced from these data, predictions allowing to make targeted proposals to clients, which on its turn, increased sales.
A second reason is the tremendous development of IT processing power. Predictive algorithms are still in their infancy but can be improved and refined by computers on the basis of whether or not the predictions derived from these algorithms materialized. The worlds fastest computers are Chinas Sunway TaihuLight at Chinas National Supercomputing Center and the Tianhe-2 at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou.
At the same time, China can still learn from Europe. Today two paradigms for the development of the internet are competing: the Chinese model, government led, and the US model, Wall Street led. The problem that I see with the US model is that Wall Street has no interest for the rural areas. The digital divide is a hot issue also in Europe. Presidents Xi Jipings October speech for the 19th Party Congress reflected concerns in China, very similar to these in Europe. Avoiding a digital divide at the expense of the rural areas is a priority issue. Like in other areas, China and the EU share very similar concerns.
More than many European countries, China is confronted with massive migration from rural areas to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area. In the digital age, it should no longer matter so much whether you live in the capital town or rural areas. But what we see is massive network investment in the densely populated areas and less or no investment in the poorer, rural areas. Given its geographic size, the problem is even more acute in China than in European countries. But solutions are similar. I think for example that a government led single 5G and fiber network deployment in the rural areas, open for all Chinese telecom operators, would be a best practice of China that would be copied globally.
The global advantage of China is in equipment and services relating to high capacity digital communications. However, opportunities for China will only be maximized if globally fiber to the home networks are deployed, which will also serve as the basis for 5G networks. There is a chicken or egg paradox. If Chinese industry wants to reap the full benefit of its technological leadership, a pre-condition is the global deployment of pervasive fiber to the home networks. Chinese companies should therefore cooperate and create joint-initiatives with European fiber to the home companies, to help the latter in increasing their footprint. Once deployed, fiber networks will be the superfast internet infrastructure on which Chinese artificial intelligence will thrive.
As an Italian, I should likely fear that outcome. Once the Chinese developed artificial intelligence will allow any man in the world to learn and anticipate the wishes of his partner, we latins will lose our current unique advantage.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 11:02:50|Editor: Yang Yi
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by Xinhua writer Liu Chang
BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Michel Haese's first visit to Shenzhen was purely a coincidence.
What was more unexpected for the 55-year old German was that this Chinese city would help make his childhood dream come true.
DREAMLAND FOR START-UPS
When he was a kid, Haese loved to build things with whatever he could find -- cans, lids, ribbons, motors, lamps, batteries. Growing up, he tried being a radioman, a photographer, but he never abandoned his dream of becoming an inventor.
Haese first heard about Shenzhen as a special economic zone in China more than 20 years ago at the world's largest computer expo in Hannover, Germany.
In 2011, Haese planned to visit a traditional electronic fair in Hong Kong, but a friend of his dragged him to another one. There he met some Chinese entrepreneurs who later invited him to travel to the southeastern Chinese metropolis to see their factories.
"Shenzhen is a paradise for development," he said. "If you have any requirements or needs for new electronics, I go downstairs and I can find them." He was referring to Huaqiangbei, one of the world's largest and most bustling electronics markets packed with small shops selling all kinds of electronic gadgets.
Haese is now the chief executive officer of his own start-up in Shenzhen. His primary invention, the "Lapscreen," is more of a notion than a product. With a Lapscreen, one can project all the functions of a smartphone onto an A4-paper-sized portable full-HD monitor, like typing a story or watching a movie. With it, Haese hopes to share his "portable office" idea with willing partners from the whole world.
Haese is certainly not the only dream chaser who regards this mega city as his ultimate destination.
Cyril Ebersweiler is the co-founder of HAX Accelerator, a seed accelerator focused on hardware start-ups based in Shenzhen and San Francisco. Together with 10 hardware firms, the 38-year-old Frenchman founded HAX in a garage in Shenzhen in 2011.
"One thing we discovered while leveraging the supply chain for these start-ups was that Shenzhen was a good place to prototype -- and not just consumer electronics hardware, but also extremely complex hardware for the health, robotics, and fabrication spaces," he told Xinhua.
For six years, HAX has sought to speed up business ideas from 3D printers to drones, as well as other consumer product devices for more than 145 start-up companies. It offers guidance and expertise from start to finish.
Every year, Ebersweiler brings teams whose members come from all over the world, more than half of them from the United States or Europe, to Shenzhen. "What we had to develop at the time was an effective way for them to be operating in China," he said.
In Ebersweiler's opinion, it is Shenzhen's unique advantage to have a lot of small factories supporting the big ones. He calls it "the long tail of manufacturing in China." He has also been spearheading a "lean hardware" movement to refashion the way products are made by integrating the prototyping phase and manufacturing phase as much as possible.
He believes the city's prevalent culture of open sources is precisely what start-ups need to do small manufacturing runs effectively with a lot of flexibility and comparatively low cost so as to reduce time to the market.
"It's very difficult, or it's actually impossible to do that in Silicon Valley. You have to go online, order something, waiting for four or five days, get it shipped, play with it, doesn't work, do it again," he said.
NURSERY FOR GLOBAL BRANDS
Shenzhen has not only helped new businesses to break out of the shell, but also nurtured many of China's world-class technological enterprises, especially in the global smartphone industry.
Huawei, China's Shenzhen-based telecommunications giant, was founded in 1987. It has now become a leading global smartphone manufacturer.
According to analysis by consulting firm Counterpoint Research, it has overtaken Apple in terms of global smartphone sales in June and July, the first time in history.
Thanks to designs with large displays and advanced camera functions, Chinese cellphone makers have now become increasingly popular among overseas customers.
Matilda von Sydow leads a local philanthropic group in Oslo, Norway. She now uses Huawei's P10 lite phone.
"I'm very pleased with my purchase ... As an android user I see no reason to choose another brand, the phone has all the qualities I'm after plus more," she said, noting that many of her friends and family members also use Huawei phones.
Elliot Mulley-Goodbarne, a news editor with Mobile News, a leading mobile industry trade newspaper in Britain, told Xinhua that he believes Huawei's success is a testament to high quality and more reasonable prices.
Compared to Huawei's venture in the developed world, Transsion Holdings, also headquartered in Shenzhen, has its eyes locked on the continent of Africa.
The market share of mobile brands under Transsion reached 38 percent in Africa last year, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC), a key provider of market intelligence and advisory services for information technology and telecommunications. It means that for every three mobile phones sold in the continent, one is made by Transsion.
Transsion's investments in many of the African countries have not only made it a household brand on the continent, but also brought real benefits to Africans.
In 2011, the company set up a smartphone plant in Ethiopia. It now hires 1,600 local employees.
Alemseged Teka came to work for the Chinese phone maker when the factory opened. In six years, he was promoted from a worker at the assembly line to the chief of the production planning department. Now he earns a pretty handsome income.
"The Chinese company has changed my life," he said, adding that in Ethiopia, many want to find a job there because the cellphone industries offer good pay.
While producing handsets for global customers, Chinese companies from Shenzhen have also ventured into infrastructure for mobile services to get local people connected to the wider world.
Huawei, since 2013, has worked with the Zambian Information and Communications Technology Authority and local carriers to deliver network coverage to remote areas. In 2014, it helped connect more than 500 villages for the first time by installing 169 base stations in remote areas of the country's 10 provinces.
HEART OF INNOVATION
Building up their business from almost ground zero, some of Shenzhen's tech firms used to battle for their share of the market with low-priced copycat products. Cheap, low-end, fake were among the words most commonly used to describe their products.
With years of robust market competition and development, that image has changed. Innovation has been a key factor to help force the change.
At this year's IFA Tech Show in Berlin, Huawei unveiled its own Kirin 970 chipset, which is designed by its subsidiary HiSilicon Technologies. The chip has been built into Huawei's new flagship Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro phones launched last month.
Innovation also blossoms in the development of mobile software and applications.
First released in 2011, Wechat is a social media mobile application software developed by Shenzhen-based Tencent. The company said earlier this month that the app now has 902 million active daily users, among whom hundreds of millions are outside China. For many of them, Wechat has simply become a way of life.
Meanwhile, as more and more foreign countries have approved the use of Chinese mobile payment services, many Chinese tourists have begun to use Wechat Pay instead of cash when they travel abroad. According to Zheng Hongmin, who is in charge of Wechat Pay's operation in the Asia-Pacific, Wechat Pay is now available in 19 countries and regions for payments in 12 currencies.
These technological booms and creative successes have not come lightly.
Seeking to excel in innovation, tech firms like Huawei are investing like crazy.
Huawei now has the biggest research and development (R&D) budget of any Chinese company. Last year alone, it has invested 11 billion U.S. dollars in R&D, and its Kirin 970 chipset is a result of many years of such investment.
Meanwhile, these companies pay great attention to international cooperation when it comes to innovation. Huawei has set up research labs in Russia and France to improve cellphone designs. Tencent has opened an artificial intelligence laboratory in the U.S. city of Seattle.
The local government in Shenzhen has also put forward many preferential policies to make sure that the city can attract more talent, including more generous subsidies and allowances and better scientific research conditions.
In September, Barry Marshall, a Nobel Laureate for Physiology or Medicine, launched a biomedical engineering lab with Shenzhen University. It is the fifth such lab in Shenzhen that has the input of Nobel prize winners.
Next year marks the 40th anniversary of the start of China's reform and opening-up policy. Four decades ago, few could imagine that such a tiny fishing enclave could become a hub for tens of thousands of start-ups and host some of China's most successful tech companies. It is a miracle of collective and continuous endeavor.
Haese, the German inventor, said Shenzhen has given him more inspiration and hope than any other place in the world.
With its spirit of openness and innovation, the city, driven by the hopes of hundreds of thousands of people like Haese, will continue to create miracles.
(Xinhua reporters Yang Jun, Huang Kun, Ma Dan, Jin Zheng, Liu Lina also contributed to the story.)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 11:43:02|Editor: Lu Hui
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Clashes between the Houthis and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh aggravate the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. (AFP Photo)
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Sunday expressed concern over the recent escalation of armed conflict in Yemen, with other UN leaders demanding the immediate resumption of commercial shipments to Yemen for the sake of the starving population.
CONCERNS ABOUT NEW FIGHTING IN YEMEN
"The secretary-general is deeply concerned about the sharp escalation of armed clashes and airstrikes in (the capital city of) Sanaa and other parts of Yemen over the past several days," said Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric in a statement.
"This latest outbreak of violence could not come at a worse time for the Yemeni people, who are already caught up in the world's largest humanitarian crisis," said the statement, referring to the clashes between Houthi rebels and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two forces were previous allies against forces loyal to President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.
The new clashes, which broke out on Wednesday in Sanaa and then spread to other parts of the country, have resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, including civilians.
The secretary-general called on all parties to the conflict to cease all air and ground assaults, said the statement.
The new conflict and the blockade imposed on Nov. 6 by the Saudi-led military coalition, which is fighting Houthi rebels, have caused significant shortages of critical supplies, especially food and fuel, and resulted in price hikes, curtailing access to food, safe water and healthcare, said the statement.
"The secretary-general calls for the urgent resumption of all commercial imports, without which millions of children, women and men risk mass hunger, disease and death."
Although the Saudi-led coalition has partially lifted the blockade, UN humanitarian shipments still face impediments.
"Fighting is restricting the movement of people and life-saving services within Sanaa city. Ambulances and medical teams cannot access the injured, and people cannot go outside to buy food and other necessities. Aid workers are unable to travel and implement critical life-saving programs at a time when millions of Yemenis rely on assistance to survive," said the statement.
The secretary-general called on all parties to the conflict to abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law. "It is paramount that civilians are protected, that the wounded are afforded safe access to medical care, and that all sides facilitate life-saving humanitarian access."
Guterres reiterated that there is no military solution to the Yemen conflict. He urged all parties to the conflict to engage meaningfully with the United Nations to revitalize inclusive negotiations on a political settlement.
JOINT CALL FOR LIFTING BLOCKADE
In a joint statement on Saturday, leaders of various UN agencies called on the Saudi-led coalition to immediately allow the resumption of commercial imports, especially food, fuel and medicines to Yemen.
"Without the urgent resumption of commercial imports, especially food, fuel and medicines, millions of children, women and men risk mass hunger, disease and death," warned World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, UN Development Programme head Achim Steiner, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, UNICEF chief Anthony Lake, World Food Programme head David Beasley, International Organization for Migration Director General William Lacy Swing, and UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock.
The partial lifting of the blockade of Yemen's Red Sea ports by the Saudi-led coalition in recent days is allowing humanitarian organizations to resume the provision of life-saving assistance to people in desperate need.
Ongoing commercial import restrictions have led to shortages of fuel, food and other essentials, driving up prices and devastating lives and livelihoods. The price of wheat flour has risen by 30 percent, while the price of fuel has doubled and that of trucked water has skyrocketed by 600 percent in some locations, said the statement.
Urban water networks in seven cities have run out of water and now depend on humanitarian organizations to fill in the gap. Other cities will shortly be in a similar situation if the blockade is not lifted, which would leave 11 million people without safe water.
In other areas, people are reducing their food consumption to dangerous levels in order to pay for the rising cost of water trucking, or are turning to contaminated water sources to meet their basic needs. This further compounds the risk of disease, especially among children, said the statement.
Less than half of the health facilities are functioning, and more hospitals and health centers will close should fuel and water supplies not improve. Sewage networks in six main cities are compromised, threatening a renewed spike in the country's cholera outbreak, which has reached almost 1 million suspected cases and killed over 2,200 people, it said.
"Yemen remains on the cusp of one of the largest famines in modern times," it said.
Nearly 400,000 children suffer from severe acute malnutrition and face an increased risk of death. More than 8 million people could starve without urgent food assistance coming into Yemen. With 90 percent of the country's food imported, the lack of commercial imports through Red Sea ports would alone push a further 3 million people into starvation, said the statement.
"The threat of widespread famine in a matter of months is very real," it warned.
This imminent catastrophe is entirely avoidable, but it requires immediate action by the Saudi-led coalition, said the statement.
While three ships carrying food have been granted permission to berth at Hudaydah seaport in recent days, four fuel tankers and 10 ships carrying food have all been waiting for permission to enter port, it noted.
"Together, we call on the coalition to urgently open up all Yemeni Red Sea ports fully and to facilitate the entry and free flow of humanitarian and vital commercial goods," it said.
UN Special Envoy for Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed on Saturday stressed the need to protect civilians as clashes broke out between the rebel alliance in the Arab world's poorest country.
"We are deeply concerned by the implications of these events on the civilian population," said Ahmed in a statement. "We urge the parties to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law including their obligations to respect the principle of distinction, proportionality and precaution. All sides must exercise restraint and ensure that their attacks are never directed at civilians or civilian objects. We caution against the serious impact of armed violence against civilians."
He called on the parties to urgently come to the negotiating table and to engage in the peace process. A political solution is the only way out of the prolonged conflict in Yemen, said Ahmed.
A civil war has been raging in Yemen since 2015, pitting forces loyal to former President Saleh against his successor Hadi, who was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia. A Saudi-led military coalition started a military campaign against the forces loyal to Saleh and the Houthi rebels who were fighting alongside them, in a bid to restore the Hadi-led government.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 12:33:11|Editor: Lu Hui
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WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The parents of a fifth-grade girl in the U.S. state of Colorado said their daughter killed herself after being bullied at school.
Ashawnty Davis, 10, died last Wednesday at a local children's hospital, two weeks after she was found hanging in a closet at home.
At the end of October, the girl was involved in a fight at school. Her parents claimed that her daughter was confronting a bully. The fight was recorded by another student and posted on an app called Musical.ly.
The app company made a statement that they were absolutely heartbroken to hear about that.
The parents insisted that the Cherry Creek School District should have done more to stop the bullying that led to their daughter's death. According to them, bullying incidents have happened in a number of cases involving teens over the past couple of years.
The school district issued a statement that "We do not tolerate bullying of any kind in our schools and we have a comprehensive bullying prevention program in place at all of our schools," according to local media.
The parents are now determined to hold educators accountable in cases of bullying and to figure out an anti-bullying policy that actually works.
"With the last breath in my life I'm going to make sure that the unfortunate kids are able to go to school comfortably and learn," the mother of the girl told local media.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 12:58:15|Editor: Zhou Xin
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HAVANA, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- An aging population and brain drain of professionals to the better-paid private sector are affecting some state-run enterprises in Cuba.
"I used to earn 550 Cuban pesos (CUPs, 22 U.S. dollars) a month. Now I make at least 250 Convertible Pesos (CUCs, 250 dollars) at the same time," Frank, a 27-year-old engineer who only wanted to be known by his first name and left his job at a state-run company to join a new cooperative making metallic structures, told Xinhua.
Each CUC is worth 25 CUPs. The average salary of a college graduate working at a state-owned company is about 500 CUPs a month, far from enough to keep pace with the rising living costs, especially in the capital Havana.
Jorge Cuevas Ramos, member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), also warned of the impact of these trends at the closing of the First National Conference of the Transportation Workers Union.
The party official said the lack of specialists, technicians and operators was undermining the quality of work and ability to meet deadlines in the transportation sector, including airports.
According to the National Statistics Bureau (NSB), 3,201,000 people worked in state-run entities in 2013, while 1,717,800 workers were employed in non-state-managed activities (including agricultural cooperatives).
By 2016, 2,881,500 workers were employed by state companies, and 1,881,100 people were in the private sector, including agricultural and non-agricultural cooperatives, a decline of 319,500 workers in three years for the public sector, while the private sector grew by 163,300 people in the same period.
An aging population is another factor that is affecting Cuba, not just the state-run enterprises.
During his speech to transportation workers, Cuevas urged Cubans to prepare the human resources needed in the immediate, short and medium terms.
In Cuba, 19.8 percent of the population of 11.2 million people is over 60, as reported last August by the NSB.
The proportion of elderly is growing due to low birth rates, youth migrating abroad and increased life expectancy.
Meanwhile, population growth has remained at zero since 2014, according to NSB data released three months ago.
The National Demography Research Center has forecast that by 2030, Cubans aged 60 or more will reach 25 percent of the population, representing a serious economic and social burden on the island's government and health system.
The government has already taken several steps to address the issue, including offering families incentives for having children, delaying the age of retirement to 65, expanding geriatric health services, and building more nursing homes.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 13:24:38|Editor: Yang Yi
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Directors of "Forefinger Town" winning the Bronze Age Experimental and Animation Award, speak at the awarding ceremony of the Hua International Short Film Festival (HISFF) in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 3, 2017. The HISFF is the first and only international short film festival for filmmakers of Chinese descent. It received 2,137 films from 131 countries and regions since it called for entry in August. Together with 3 special screening films, 30 nominated films will go on an international festival tour in New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney. (Xinhua/Chen Yehua)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 13:23:19|Editor: Liangyu
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SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- The Breakthrough Prize Foundation on Sunday announced here the winners of the 2018 Breakthrough Prizes in fundamental physics, life sciences and mathematics, together with several other prizes to encourage young scientists.
The announcement was made at an annual event held in Silicon Valley in San Francisco in the western U.S. state of California.
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to Charles Bennett from Johns Hopkins University, Gary Hinshaw from the University of British Columbia, and three scientists from Princeton University, Norman Jarosik, Lyman Page Jr. and David N. Spergel, to recognize their major insights into the deepest questions of the universe.
The prize in life sciences went to Joanne Chory from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Don W. Cleveland from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of California, San Diego, Kazutoshi Mori from Kyoto University, Kim Nasmyth from the University of Oxford, and Peter Walter from the University of California, San Francisco.
The prize honors the biologists' transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life, and the work that contributes to the understanding of neurological diseases.
The foundation awarded the prize in mathematics to Christopher Hacon from the University of Utah, and James McKernan from the University of California, San Diego, to recognize their major advances in the field as the best mathematicians in the world.
"It is always the right time to celebrate great scientists," said Internet investor and science philanthropist Yuri Milner, who is one of the sponsors of the Breakthrough Prize. "All of our futures depend on them."
For the sixth year, the Breakthrough Prizes, the most generous science awards, were presented to recognize the contributions of the world's top scientists, with each prize amounting to 3 million U.S. dollars.
"The Breakthrough Prize was created to celebrate the achievements of scientists, physicists, and mathematicians, whose genius help us understand our world, and whose advances shape our future," said Breakthrough Prize co-founder and Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
"The world needs their inspiration, and their reminder that even though it doesn't always feel that way, we are making steady progress toward building a better future for everyone," Zuckerberg said.
In addition, two separate third-prize awards in new horizons in physics and new horizons in mathematics were given to six young researchers to encourage them to explore new scientific progress in their future studies.
The New Horizons in Physics Prize was shared by Christopher Hirata from Ohio State University, Andrea Young from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Douglas Stanford from the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University.
The New Horizons in Mathematics Prize was awarded to Aaron Naber from Northwestern University, Maryna Viazovska from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Zhiwei Yun from Yale University, and Wei Zhang from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University.
This year, a total of 22 million dollars was awarded to the recipients of the 2018 Breakthrough Prize.
Since its inception in 2012, the Breakthrough Prizes, dubbed "the Oscars of Science," have awarded close to 200 million dollars to honor paradigm-shifting research in fundamental physics, life sciences and mathematics.
Ma Huateng, also known as Pony Ma, chairman of China's Tencent company, will join as one of its founding sponsors, the foundation announced on Dec. 1.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 13:23:21|Editor: ZD
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SEOUL, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The combined air forces of South Korea and the United States on Monday kicked off their biggest-ever joint air force exercise on the Korean Peninsula, mobilizing about 230 fighter jets, bombers and other combat planes, Yonhap news agency reported.
The South Korean air force was quoted as saying that the Vigilant ACE air combat exercise will be jointly conducted with the U.S. Seventh Air Force from Monday to Friday to enhance joint wartime operation capability.
It was the largest-ever air force drill between the two allies as it involved more than some 12,000 personnel.
The massive air combat drill came less than a week after the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) launched Hwasong-15, which it called a newly developed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), on Nov. 29.
It traveled some 1,000 km after being lofted as high as 4,600 km, according to South Korea's military. It said the DPRK missile is fired at a normal angle, and it could fly as long as 13,000 km, reaching Washington D.C. in the United States.
Joining the Vigilant ACE would be 24 U.S. stealth fighter jets, including six F-22 fighters from Okinawa, Japan, six F-35A combat planes and 12 F-35B stealth fighter jets from the U.S. air force base in Japan.
U.S. strategic B-1B Lancer bombers reportedly planned to stage a bombing exercise during the joint air force drill.
In addition, six EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets and dozens of F-15C and F-16 fighters will be mobilized to the air combat drill.
From the South Korean side, F-15K, KF-16 and FA-50 fighter jets will participate in the drill.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 13:33:23|Editor: Yang Yi
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by Xinhua writers Yuan Quan and Cao Yiming
NANNING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- At least once a month they gather on decks or in the red-roofed house at the center of the water, sitting on stools to hear or study the latest theories and policies of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
For the 6,000 residents of Tianshengqiao Township, Longlin County in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the "lecture on water" is the most popular and effective channel to understand Party policies. Speakers are mainly village and township Party chiefs. Local technological advisors are also invited to teach aquaculture.
Liu Jian, Party chief of Tianshengqiao, has been a frequent speaker since he took office in this small remote mountain town in October 2016. He says most of the population belongs to ethnic minorities, including Zhuang, Miao and Gelao.
The villagers used to grow rice. After the construction of a hydropower plant in the 1990s, they farmed fish and began living off the reservoir, which borders Yunnan and Guizhou provinces.
"Most villagers spend all day on water, busy working. They have little time or opportunity to learn about the world outside," says Liu.
Seen from the mountains, the floating fish pens, large and small, checker the green lake like a chessboard.
The red-roofed "lecture room", at the center of the reservoir, is particularly eye-catching. Local people call it the "New Era Institute of Peasants", which is believed to be a nod to the Peasant Movement Training Institute of 90 years ago.
In the 1920s, revolutionary pioneers of the CPC, including Deng Xiaoping, set up peasant movement institutes in remote mountain areas in Guangxi. They publicized revolutionary theory, conducted military training, and organized armed struggles, which laid the foundation for the uprisings and revolutionary bases.
In past decades, local Party officials gathered villagers at the meeting room of a government building in the town center to hear reports. Because of the long distances and worries about their work, few people were willing to go. "The attendance was low and people were not happy," says Liu.
In 2014, the Tianshengqiao Township Committee of the CPC decided to move the meetings "onto the water".
"We used to sit on the podium, waiting for an audience. But now we stand on a boat and get close to villagers, telling them events and policies from Beijing," says Liu.
Villagers travel by boat to the meetings. Lectures usually last 40 to 50 minutes and attract more than 20 boats each time. Audiences can reach a hundred.
Some people wear Party emblems and some come in colorful ethnic costumes. The elderly bring their grandchildren, and women weave while listening. Some people take notes.
Speakers use local dialects and the Zhuang language. Though outsiders do not understand, the locals appreciate it.
Speeches with difficult concepts are "translated" into examples and stories based on simple daily life.
Liu in recent lectures explained the essence conveyed at the 19th National Congress of the CPC, stressing the content about "pursuing a rural vitalization strategy" and "safeguarding the property rights and interests of rural people".
A meeting last month focused on medical insurance. Some villagers thought it was unnecessary, but after half an hour of discussion, they realized the benefits.
Liu convinced them that insurance would save money on treatment: "Without insurance, you will pay more if you go to hospital. Moreover, the local government has offered reimbursement of fish farmers' medical bills. It would not cost much."
On the water, speakers' voices are louder and gestures more frequent. But they no longer fear losing their audience. Laughter often echoes on boats.
It is also a popular class on fish farming. In the early years of the reservoir, people did not understand how to farm fish. Pursuing high production led to fish diseases, severe pollution and huge losses.
Shi Zhongyu, a local aquaculture expert, lectures three or four times a year on the water. "In the past, the fish farmers could hardly make a living, because they lacked knowledge and training," he says.
Every winter, he tells the fish farmers to lower fishing net density and not to feed too much, so as to maintain nutrition levels. He can explain, while demonstrating, how to feed on the water - an impossible task previously.
In 2012, only 15 households were fish farmers, but now the number is 200 - almost half the town's population.
Wei Bin attends every "lecture on water" with his wife. They understand the economic benefits of the classes.
Through lack of knowledge, he lost tens of thousands of yuan in 2012. But his annual income has risen from 1,000 yuan to more than 10,000 yuan over the past four years.
Aquaculture has become a pillar industry in the county. In 2016, two of five poverty-stricken villages were lifted out of poverty.
Longlin County has 31 villages setting up "lecture rooms". Some are known for speakers using folk songs to explain national policies so the less-well-educated can understand.
"We plan to expand the speaking team by inviting ethnic villagers or experienced fish farmers. They will make the lectures on water more attractive," says Liu.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 14:08:30|Editor: Lu Hui
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Palestinians say the U.S. will set off "ticking bomb" if it recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moves US embassy to Jerusalem. (AFP Photo)
BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A possible U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital this week ignited regional debates over the impact the move would have on peace efforts in the Middle East.
HISTORIC REVERSAL IN U.S. STANCE
U.S. President Donald Trump's adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner said Sunday the president hasn't decided yet whether to make the recognition or to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
"He's still looking at a lot of different facts," Kushner said at an event held by the Brookings Institute, a leading think-tank based in Washington, D.C.
Kushner's remarks came after U.S. media reported last week that Trump could announce a decision on Wednesday to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, reversing the decades-old U.S. stance which upholds the city's status should be decided in negotiations between concerned parties.
The status of Jerusalem is one of the ultimate questions for the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, which was stalled since April 2014 following nine months of U.S.-sponsored talks without major progress.
The status of the city is not settled as the Palestinians want to make East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel in 1967, the capital of their future independent state, while Israel declared the integral city of Jerusalem as its capital, a claim not recognized by the international community.
In 1995, former U.S. President Bill Clinton signed a law requiring that the U.S. Embassy in Israel must be relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, unless the president issues a waiver every six months.
Since Clinton, all presidents have signed the waiver, supporting the city's fate should be decided through negotiations between Israel and Palestine.
This week marks a turning point for Trump, who last signed the waiver in June. He vowed during his presidential campaign last year to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel.
However, it is now expected that he may postpone the implementation of his promise.
A TICKING BOMB FOR REGIONAL PEACE
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry on Sunday called for holding urgent meetings of the Arab League (AL) and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to discuss the Jerusalem issue.
On the same day, the AL warned against "hazardous consequences" if the United States recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Saeed Abu-Ali, AL assistant secretary general for the occupied Palestinian and Arab lands, said that such U.S. recognition would give Israel the green light to continue its breaches of international resolutions, urging Washington to act as an "impartial broker" of the peace process.
On Twitter, Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said he spoke with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on dangerous consequences of the recognition.
"Such a decision would trigger anger across Arab Muslim worlds, fuel tension & jeopardize peace efforts," he wrote.
Over the past several days, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been having contact with and seeking support from Arab and Western leaders, warning about the potential destructive effects of the likely U.S. move.
The possibility of a U.S. acknowledgment is a "ticking bomb" which will destroy the peace process in the Middle East, analysts said.
Mohammed Daraghmeh, a Ramallah-based writer and political analyst, pointed out that such a decision represented a historic reversal in the U.S. position on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
He said that such a decision was very dangerous, as it "imposes a preemptive stance on one of the most important ultimate questions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Arab-Israeli conflict."
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has lasted for decades.
Israel is blamed by the international community for the deadlock of the peace process since 2014 due to its settlement expansion policy, which is rejected even by its strongest ally, the United States.
The Palestinians seek to establish an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital in the light of the two-state solution proposed by the United Nations and based on the pre-1967 borders.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 14:13:33|Editor: Lu Hui
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GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- At least three Taliban local commanders were killed and six others injured after Afghan air force conducted airstrikes on militants' vehicles convoy in Ghzni province on Sunday, a local official said Monday.
"Afghan air forces targeted the vehicles, carrying the Taliban militants, as a result their three local commanders were killed and six more insurgents injured," Ghzni police chief Mohammad Zaman told Xinhua.
The militants vehicles were completely destroyed during the strikes, the official added.
Taliban militants have yet to make comment.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 14:33:38|Editor: Jiaxin
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DAVAO CITY, Philippines, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Six people were killed in a clash between government troops and leftist rebels in southern Philippines on Sunday, the military said on Monday.
The latest fighting which erupted in the upland town of Lake Sebu in Mindanao's South Cotabato province happened hours after insurgents stormed a police station in Misamis Oriental province, also in Mindanao that wounded six policemen.
Two soldiers and four New People's Army guerrillas died in the hour-long fighting in the village of Ned, according to Major Ezra Balagtey, spokesperson of the military's Eastern Mindanao Command.
The incident was the latest violent confrontation between Philippine security forces and the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) after President Rodrigo Duterte ordered a halt of talks between the two sides.
The NPA has been staging a leftist insurgency in 60 Philippine provinces since 1969, which resulted in over 40, 000 deaths.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 14:38:40|Editor: Jiaxin
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JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- At least six Islamic States (IS) militants have been killed during drone strikes against the hardliner group in Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province, Attaullah Khogiani, spokesman for provincial governor said Monday.
The unmanned aircrafts targeted the hideouts of IS militants in Haska Mina district on Sunday afternoon, killing six fighters on the spot and injuring few others, according to the official.
IS militants are yet to make comment.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 15:28:52|Editor: Mengjie
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LASHKARGAH, Afghanistan, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A total of 500 youths after completion of an eight-week training course have been commissioned to Afghan National Army (ANA) in Helmand province, a military official said Monday.
"A total of 500 people have completed their eight-week training course in the training center of national army in Helmand province on Sunday and joined ANA to serve the nation," a senior army officer in the southern region Gen. Wali Mohammad Ahmadzai told Xinhua.
At the same event, a total of 900 soldiers after completion of military training in northern Balkh province, joined the national army couple of days ago.
The Afghan government and NATO-led Resolute Support mission have speeded up the training process of defense security forces of Afghanistan to bolster the war against militants in the conflict-plagued country.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 15:33:53|Editor: Mengjie
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SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A large crowd of Cubans gathered here on Sunday in commemoration of their revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, with a massive gala and vigil, as part of a series of weeklong political and cultural events held across the Caribbean island country.
"I am Fidel," a slogan that came up naturally among Cubans after the death of the late Commander in Chief one year ago, was frequently repeated in chorus by the attendees during a gala at the Jose Maria Heredia Theater.
A video was displayed on the screen at the theater, showing incumbent President Raul Castro's speech on Dec 3, 2016, a day before the ashes of his brother and predecessor were interred in a private ceremony at Santiago De Cuba's Santa Ifigenia Cemetery, 1,000 km east of Havana.
Government and political leaders attended the event on Sunday, including the Second Secretary General of Cuban Communist Party Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, and First Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
Broadcasted by the national television, artists and speakers recalled with songs and poems the revolutionary life of Fidel Castro, while a big screen at the back of the stage showed continuously the crucial moments of his life through images and videos.
On the same day, a massive vigil was held at the Antonio Maceo Revolution Square in the city to remember the leader who had led the country for 48 years.
The next morning, there will be a pilgrimage from that place to the Santa Ifigenia cemetery to pay tribute to Castro.
Over the past week, tributes have taken place throughout the country with book presentations, exhibitions, workshops, concerts and vigils, among other activities, held in different cities.
Castro died on Nov. 25 last year at the age of 90. After his death, the State Council decreed nine days of national mourning, and this year although normality reigns, many agree that Fidel's legacy and ideas should be remembered.
Cubans feel as if he were physically present and time hasn't erased an event that shocked this Caribbean nation and the world.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 15:43:59|Editor: Mengjie
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WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump's tweets over the weekend defending himself against the ongoing investigation into possible collusion between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia have further complicated the issue and U.S. lawmakers have warned the president may have obstructed justice.
Trump tweeted before dawn on Sunday that he never asked former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) James Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn, the president's then national security adviser who on Friday pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and pledged cooperation with the bureau, blowing a dramatic turn to the investigation.
Trump's account, however, contradicted the testimony made by Comey -- who was fired by Trump in May -- to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in June in which he said Trump asked him to drop the probe into Flynn's alleged contact with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last December, weeks before Trump assumed presidency.
The Sunday tweet followed an even more contradictory one sent on Saturday in which the outspoken president wrote: "I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
Flynn, a retired lieutenant general of the U.S. Army and one of Trump's most trusted aides during the campaign and transition, was forced out of the White House in February, only acknowledging that he didn't tell Vice President Mike Pence in full about the nature of his conversations with Kislyak.
It later came to light that one of the topics discussed in the Flynn-Kislyak phone call was the sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration. Neither Trump nor Pence expressed concern at the time that the FBI was also misled, according to the Associated Press.
The AP said Sunday that Trump's tweet indicated he knew at the time that Flynn had done something that was against the law. Lawmakers are thus more suspicious that Trump, by demanding that Comey drop the Flynn case after knowing the latter had lied to the FBI, engaged in obstruction of justice.
"The president knew he (Flynn) had lied to the FBI, which means that when he talked to the FBI director and asked him to effectively drop this case, he knew that Flynn had committed a federal crime," Adam Schiff, senior Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was quoted by the Reuters as saying when appearing in the ABC program "This Week".
"Then you get the case of obstruction of justice," Schiff added.
Meanwhile, Diane Feinstein, a Democratic senate and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that she believed the latest development of the investigation and Trump's "continual tweets" pointed toward an obstruction of justice case.
"I see it most importantly in what happened with the firing of Director Comey. And it is my belief that that is directly because he did not agree to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation. That's obstruction of justice," said the Democrat. Comey refused to "let Flynn go" as he was asked by Trump, and got fired by the president.
In an effort to extinguish the fire fanned up by Trump's seemingly self-destroying tweets, John Dowd, the president's personal lawyer, told the Reuters on Sunday that he drafted the Saturday tweet and "made a mistake."
"The mistake was I should have put the lying to the FBI in a separate line referencing his plea," Dowd said, according to the Reuters. "Instead, I put it together and it made all you guys go crazy. A tweet is a shorthand," he was quoted as saying.
When interviewed by other media outlets, the lawyer declined to answer questions about how and when Trump learned of Flynn's alleged lies to the FBI, but the Reuters quoted him as saying the first time the president knew it for a fact was when Flynn was charged.
The White House has been trying to portray Flynn's contact with Kislyak as an independent move after which he lied to his colleagues, but the New York Times reported Saturday that Flynn was in close contact with other senior members of Trump's transition team both before and after his conversations with Kislyak
An email written by a transition adviser of Trump's that was revealed on Saturday indicated that a number of the president's aides had been informed that Flynn was going to discuss Russian sanctions with Kislyak before he made the December phone call.
The Times, which obtained the full content of the Dec. 29 email written by K.T. McFarland, said McFarland described the sanctions imposed against Russia by the Obama administration as an attempt to delegitimize Trump's election victory.
The paper further quoted McFarland, who was Flynn's deputy during his less-than-one-month tenure as National Security Advisor, as saying in the email that the sanctions, in retaliation to Russia's alleged meddling in the election, could also make it much harder for Trump to ease tensions with Russia, "which has just thrown the U.S.A. election to him."
The report said it was unclear whether McFarland really believed Russia swayed the election in Trump's favor, citing a White House lawyer as saying she only meant the Democrats were portraying it that way.
Trump habitually takes to Twitter in his own defense, whether it be explaining his policy decisions or fending off criticisms against himself. However, frequently expressing views on an ongoing criminal investigation is largely seen as inappropriate for a president.
"You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said, "I'd be careful if I were you, Mr. President."
Trump's lawyers were also said to have begged him not to tweet about Russia or the investigation, but the president insisted on responding to the Flynn case, only to see his effort overshadow an otherwise triumphant week for him as the Senate passed a significant tax overhaul.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 15:49:04|Editor: Mengjie
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Zhang Dejiang, chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, attends a symposium marking the fourth National Constitution Day in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2017. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei)
BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislator has called for better promotion of the principle underlying rule of law that the Constitution and the law are above everything else and that everyone is equal before the law.
Such a principle should become a voluntary act of all people, Zhang Dejiang, chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, said at a symposium marking the fourth National Constitution Day on Monday.
At the symposium, Zhang said the major policies of the Communist Party of China Central Committee regarding the implementation of the Constitution and the oversight to ensure compliance with the Constitution should be carried out in a comprehensive manner.
The principles of the Constitution should be firmly observed, the spirit of the Constitution should be promoted, and the obligations mandated in the Constitution should be performed, he said.
He also demanded efforts to integrate the process of sound lawmaking, strict law enforcement, and impartial administration of justice with the cause of developing a socialist culture of rule of law.
Source:Xinhua| 2017-12-04 16:45:30|Editor: Mengjie
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Aerial photo taken on March 9, 2017 shows the Shanghai free trade zone (FTZ) in Shanghai, east China. In the first three quarters this year, foreign trade in the Shanghai FTZ rose 16.2 percent year on year to 997.6 billion yuan (150.2 billion U.S. dollars). The 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China held in October 2017 in Beijing, capital of China, ushered in a new era of the socialism with Chinese characteristics. (Xinhua/Ding Ting)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 16:09:15|Editor: Mengjie
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WUZHEN, Zhejiang, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Four sculptures stood in great contrast to the advanced technology on display in Wuzhen Internet International Conference and Exhibition Center; however, they attracted just as much, if not more, attention from visitors.
The "Cyber Cocoon Kids" art installation, presented by UNICEF China at the on-going World Internet Conference, shows the four key online risks for children: cyberbullying, excessive internet use, online child sexual abuse and oversharing personal information.
Artist Xie Yong and creative director Kevin Wang came up with the concept of "Cyber Cocoon Kids" to represent the potential isolation that can occur when children inhabit a cyber world that parents and caregivers do not fully understand.
"Protecting children online is a vital issue in internet governance, and also closely linked to the Sustainable Development Goals," said Fatoumata Ndiaye, UNICEF deputy executive director.
At the conference, UNICEF also co-hosted a Child Online Safety Forum bringing global experts to share learning, experience and practice in this area.
"The internet offers children access to a whole world of possibilities to learn, connect and play," said Rana Flowers, UNICEF Representative to China. "As policy makers, digital industry representatives or as parents and caregivers, we need to protect children from the worst that digital technology has to offer and expand their access to the best."
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 16:34:26|Editor: liuxin
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JAKARTA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The number of foreign holiday makers coming into Indonesia from January to October this year picked up on yearly basis, but the volcano eruption in the country's Bali resort island has impacted on the arrivals in October.
The national statistics bureau announced on Monday that total foreign tourist arrivals by October this year grew 23.55 percent to 11.62 million from a year ago.
In October alone, the number of foreign visitors coming into the country was up 11.33 percent to 1.16 million people on yearly basis, head of the bureau Kecuk Suhariyanto said.
However, on monthly basis, the arrivals were down 4.54 percent in October due to Mount Agung volcano eruption in Bali resort island, he added.
"The impact of the volcano eruption in Bali decreased the number of foreign visitors coming into the island," he told a press conference.
The number of holiday makers coming into Bali island contracted 15.99 percent to 462,263 people in October on monthly basis, compared with 550,238 people in September, the official said.
Mount Agung volcano in Karangasem district, some 70 km from tourist hub of Kuta has been on the top alert level since September and forced nearly 144,000 people to evacuate and had led to the closure of the airport in the island for several times over volcanic ash.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 16:34:28|Editor: Yurou
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NEW YORK, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. video streaming service giant Netflix has acquired Day and Night, its first online series produced in the Chinese mainland.
Netflix unveiled a deal last weekend with Alibaba's flagship video service platform Youku to stream the 32-episode detective drama series in 190 countries and regions outside of China, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The drama features a recused police officer who tries to clear his twin brother from an appalling murder case as a special consultant, while at the same time helping his former colleagues solving other mysteries.
Without casting super stars, the show is widely praised for its lead actor Pan Yueming's superb acting as twin brothers with distinct characteristics.
The drama has been a blockbuster in China since its debut in August, securing over 4.6 billion views on Youku alone.
It has also been rated a 9 out 10 on Douban, a Chinese review site on books, movies and dramas, which often gives harsh comments.
"The cultural industry is undergoing robust growth in China, and I believe the export of high-quality content will help people around the world gain a better understanding of the soft power of China," Yang Weidong, president of Youku, told the SCMP.
"I'm delighted that Youku can become a pioneer in driving this initiative," he added.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 16:39:30|Editor: liuxin
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WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- As Brussels has become increasingly upset with U.S. president's provocative policies on Europe, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's chance of roping in the U.S. allies during his current visit to Europe seems slimmer than ever.
Tillerson's five-day trip to Europe starting from Monday, his seventh since taking office in February, will take him to Belgium, Austria and France for a group of bilateral and multilateral events.
The purpose of this trip, a senior State Department official requiring anonymity said on a Friday teleconference with media, was to "reiterate America's commitment to the transatlantic alliance" and commitment to the defense of Western institutions and the West as a community of shared interests and values.
ESTRANGEMENT ON VALUES
According to the official, the themes Tillerson will hit on the trip are expected to echo his earlier speech on U.S.-Europe relations, where he said an important part of the ties is about shared values.
However, the two sides across the Atlantic Ocean have been thrust in bitter odd right before Tillerson embarks on the tour.
The Netherlands and Britain have both protested President Donald Trump's earlier decision to retweet anti-Muslim video clips of a Britain-based far-right group, which allegedly depicted violence carried out by Muslims.
"Trump's (re-posting) of anti-Islamic videos has put a great strain on U.S.-UK relationships," Darrell West, a senior fellow with think-tank Brookings Institution said, noting the incident occurred "at a delicate time as Britain is negotiating its exit from the European Union."
Trump's tweets have sparked a row between the White House and British Prime Minister Theresa May, who said Trump was "wrong" to re-tweet what she described as "hateful narratives."
"British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far-right which is the antithesis of the values that this country represents: decency, tolerance and respect," she said in an earlier statement.
For his part, Trump shot back via twitter: "Don't focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom," referring to recent Islamist terror attacks in England.
In Friday's teleconference, the anonymous official said Tillerson himself "feels very strongly about those values."
"I would also say just the scope of the agenda that we're managing with European allies and partners I think speaks for itself," he said, "We're going into this trip focused on those critical areas including in the realm of values."
ALIENATION ON TRUMP POLICIES
Tillerson will also underline the necessity of burden-sharing among the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, which experts said will put another strain on U.S.-Europe relationships.
Trump has urged European allies to step up their defense spending to 2 percent of the gross domestic product, threatening to consider cutting off the U.S. defense support of those who did not make it.
However, the European nations argued that they have made their share of contribution when supporting the U.S. initiatives in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Asking more from them is "insatiably avaricious."
In the teleconference, the official defended Trump's rhetoric, saying Tillerson in the trip "will continue to make the point that NATO is safer and stronger when all allies are sharing -- are shouldering their fair share of the defense burden."
"The burden-sharing agenda is partly about whether allies are spending more on defense, but it's also about what allies are doing," the official added.
Brussels and Washington have drifted apart over Trump's endorsement of Brexit and tougher immigration law, as well as his rejection of the Paris climate accord, Iran nuclear deal and the United Nations Educational,Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Trump's latest attempt to close the office of Palestine Liberation Organization in Washington and his reported plan to announce Jerusalem the Israeli capital this week have sparked wide resentment and hostility in Europe.
All of these signs, experts said, will make Tillerson's job harder than that of any of his previous trips.
DIFFERENCES ON RUSSIA
Tillerson is expected to meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Vienna on the sidelines of the the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ministerial meeting on Dec. 7, when the two chief diplomats will "have a fairly robust set of discussions on a lot of global issues -- DPRK (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea), Ukraine, and certainly Syria," according to the State Department.
Tillerson "feels very strongly about this portion of the agenda," the official said, "It needs to be an outcome that would have a U.N. force encompassing the contested area and not just ratifying the gains that the Russians have made on the ground."
The statement, together with Tillerson's Europe speech which hinted Russia was Europe's most immediate threat, would make his meeting with Lavrov more difficult and largely fruitless.
Analysts argued that Tillerson's effort to underline the Russian threat to Europe was nothing short of a tactic to loop in the U.S. European allies and hence make them more dependent on the U.S. military and financial support.
However, the European nations, still major importers of Russian oil and gas, might find Tillerson's rhetoric unflattering. Moreover, the West, in desperate need of Moscow's cooperation on securing de-escalation zones in Syria, among others, will drift other NATO members further apart from Tillerson's agenda.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 17:09:39|Editor: liuxin
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Photo released by Pakistan's Press Information Department (PID) on Dec. 4, 2017 shows Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi (4th R) attends a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis (3rd L) in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan. (Xinhua/PID)
ISLAMABAD, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis arrived in Pakistan on Monday for talks on bilateral and regional matters with focuses on anti-terrorism cooperation and Pakistan's role in peace in Afghanistan, officials here said.
Mattis is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and the Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa in his day-long visit. It was Mattis' first trip to Pakistan as defense secretary.
The Pentagon said Mattis' visit aimed to continue the dialogue between the two sides about the South Asia strategy that U.S. President Donald Trump announced in August.
"The U.S. remains committed to a pragmatic relationship that expands ... cooperation on shared interests while reinforcing President Trump's call for action against terrorist safe havens," the Pentagon quoted the secretary as saying earlier, adding that the visit is "a continued dialogue, in what our vision is for the Afghan peace process."
Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesman Muhammad Faisal has said the visit of the U.S. defense chief is part of the continued interaction between the two countries.
"This clearly indicates that dialogue between both the countries to bridge gap in perceptions is ongoing. We are trying to find common grounds and move forward in our bilateral relationship with the U.S. in a positive and cooperative manner," the spokesman said last week at his weekly briefing.
Regarding the U.S. policy on South Asia, the spokesman said "there was a difference in understanding and perceptions on both sides."
He added that thereafter, a dialogue started by a meeting between Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this year.
Mattis is the second senior U.S. official to travel to Pakistan after Trump declared strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Pakistan in October for talks over the new policy, which the United States claims will defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and to pressurize them to join peace process.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 17:14:41|Editor: Mengjie
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DOHA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Qatar has accepted the invitation by Kuwait to attend the upcoming summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Kuwait, Qatar's English newspaper Gulf Times reported Monday.
Speaking at a forum organized by the Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies in Doha Sunday evening, Qatar's Foreign Minister, Mohamed Al Thani stated, Qatar has accepted the invitation to attend the summit, amid the region's worst political crisis in years.
"I will attend the ministerial council tomorrow and the emir will attend the summit," Al-Thani said.
"It is important that the GCC system remains alive," he added.
Al-Thani commented on the accusations of supporting terrorism by its neighbors, saying "they are baseless. These accusations have been only claims and nobody has submitted any proof yet."
Earlier, Kuwait sent out invitations to the GCC member states, but it was not clear whether the other leaders would attend the summit.
The GCC council is a political and economic alliance of countries in the Arabian Peninsula. It's scheduled to hold the ministerial meeting Monday evening and the leaders meeting on December 5.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 17:14:42|Editor: Mengjie
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DHAKA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh's first ever female combat pilots have joined a U.N. mission, authorities have said.
Inter Service Public Relations (ISPR) of Bangladesh Army in a press release Sunday declared the deployment of Flight Lieutenant Nayma Haque and Flight Lieutenant Tamanna-E-Lufty at the peacekeeping mission of United Nations in Congo.
Both Nayma and Tamanna had earlier made history by becoming the first female combat pilots in the Bangladesh Air Force (BAF).
Accordding to the statement, they were selected based on their professional excellences in line with BAF selection procedures.
They performed duties in different BAF squadron after successfully completing 65 hours of basic helicopter conversion training, said the ISPR statement.
Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Abu Esrar had earlier urged them to perform their duties with "honesty, professionalism and sincerity" and to "bring honor for the Air Force as well as for the country".
BAF started its journey to U.N. Mission by sending peacekeepers to Bosnia Herzegovina in 1993.
Some 6,430 BAF members so far reportedly completed their UN peacekeeping missions in countries including Kuwait, Timor-Leste, Cote d'Ivoire and Mali.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 17:19:43|Editor: Yurou
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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R back) and visiting Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar meet the press after their talks in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2017. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling)
BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi Monday called on all parties concerned to abide by relevant UN resolutions on the Korean Peninsula issue.
Wang made the remarks when meeting the press after talks with visiting Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar. He was asked to comment on the U.S. decision to consider imposing more sanctions on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) after its recent missile test.
"After two months of relative quiet, tensions on the Korean Peninsula have increased again," Wang said. He added that it was a regret that the parties involved failed to seize on China's appeals.
"China has always been open-minded to new propositions to resolve the issue, however, the stipulations and spirit of UN Security Council resolutions should be a common principle for all parties to follow," Wang said, adding that UN Security Council resolutions represent the common will of the international community.
Wang said China has fully implemented relevant UN resolutions on the issue and opposed the nuclear and missile programs of the DPRK.
He said China firmly opposes actions to increase the tension on the Korean Peninsula and has always been working to promote peace and dialogue in accordance with all previous UN resolutions.
"Propositions and measures that are against or not included in the resolutions lack international legal support and will jeopardize the execution of UN resolutions," Wang said.
The Republic of Korea and the United States launched a large-scale joint aerial drill Monday. The Vigilant Ace drill will run until Friday.
"The situation on the Korean Peninsula is highly sensitive, and we hope that relevant parties can avoid provocation and do more to ease tension," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said later Monday.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 17:19:44|Editor: ZD
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BANGKOK, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Thailand's fugitive former premier Yingluck Shinawatra has not obtained a British passport, Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai said on Monday.
His comment followed earlier news reports that Yingluck had been given the British passport after she had reportedly sought political asylum in Britain.
Don said such possibilities were not officially reported by any authorities, Thai or British. Neither has the British embassy in Bangkok filed any report about Yingluck to the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs as yet, he said.
Thai media earlier reported that Yingluck was seeking political asylum in Britain after she had unexpectedly departed Thailand and secretly traveled to the United Arab Emirates in August.
Yingluck reportedly fled the country via Cambodia, which shares border with Thailand, and found her way to the Middle East country after she had failed to show up before the Supreme Court.
In absentia of the former female leader, the Supreme Court delivered a final verdict and sentenced her to a five-year jail term on duty negligence and misconduct charges pertaining to a rice program which had been implemented by her Puea Thai (for the Thais) Party-led government and reportedly incurred an estimated 500 billion baht (about 14.7 billion U.S. dollars) in state losses several years ago.
Yingluck was said to have visited her brother, former Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra, in Dubai where he has been taking self-exile since nearly a decade ago.
Thaksin and Yingluck were deposed by military coups in 2006 and 2014 respectively.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 17:24:46|Editor: ZD
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BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong will visit the United Kingdom from Monday to Thursday and co-chair a meeting on people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.
The meeting, the fifth of its kind in the China-UK high-level people-to-People dialogue, will be co-chaired by Liu and British Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, according to foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang.
During the visit, Liu will meet with officials of the British government and members of the royal family, and sign a host of cooperative agreements on people-to-people exchanges, Geng said at a daily press briefing.
He expressed hope that the visit will promote political mutual trust, strengthen cultural and people-to-people exchanges, and further boost bilateral ties.
Source: Xinhuanet| 2017-12-04 17:34:22|Editor: Zhou Xin
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As the highlight of 2017 Hainan International Tourism Island Carnival, 2017 Hainan World Leisure Tourism Expo kicked off recently in south China.
Up to now, exhibitors and guests from more than 30 popular travel destination countries and regions, such as Thailand and Italy, were invited to participate in the expo.
Moreover, famous Chinese travel agencies, international hotel groups and travel transportation services providers attended the event as well.
Activities including China Leisure Tourism Development Forum, Macao Promotion Week, discounted tourism products sale, special themed arts performances and other promotion events for tourist cities were held during the expo.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 17:34:51|Editor: Liu
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NANNING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The number of people who passed through the China-Vietnam border port of Dongxing in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region this year hit a record high of 9 million on Monday, the border control office said.
Dongxing is the third largest land port in China, and the only port connecting China and Vietnam via both land and sea. Since 2013, China has allowed foreigners to apply for visas in Dongxing, which has increased the number of tourists from around the world using the city to enter China from Southeast Asia, according to the local tourism bureau.
Tourism on the China-Vietnam border is booming, thanks to government policies and abundant resources. Meanwhile, easy access and affordable facilities have helped draw Chinese tourists from the north to visit the area during winter, according to an border control officer.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 17:39:52|Editor: ZD
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BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- China and Japan will hold their eighth round of high-level consultations on maritime affairs in Shanghai on Tuesday and Wednesday, a foreign ministry spokesperson said Monday.
Officials from the foreign ministries, defense ministries, maritime law enforcement and management departments of both sides will attend the talks, spokesperson Geng Shuang told a routine news briefing.
China expects to fully exchange views with Japan on maritime issues of common concern, in a bid to strengthen understanding and mutual trust, Geng said.
The China-Japan High-level Consultations on Maritime Affairs were set up in 2012. The last round of consultations was held in Fukuoka, Japan in June this year.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 18:09:57|Editor: Liu
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BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- China's central authorities have called for the setting up of supervisory commissions on village affairs, according to a guideline released Monday.
The village affairs supervision committees will help to "overcome unhealthy tendencies, curb corruption, promote harmony and stability and improve governance in villages," according to the guideline issued by the general offices of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council.
The commissions will be made up of three to five people to specialize in management or accounting. They will be voted in at the village meeting or villagers' assembly.
The commissions will be responsible for supervising village affairs and financial management, as well consulting village opinion for suggestions.
The commission will ensure decision making processes are in accordance with standard procedures, and ensure full disclosure in village affairs.
Supervision must also be strengthened on village construction projects, and agriculture and poverty alleviation funds, the guideline said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 18:30:06|Editor: Yamei
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MADRID, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A judge in the Spanish Supreme Court on Monday morning refused to grant a bail to Catalonia's former deputy leader Oriol Junqueras and three others detained for their role in the Oct. 27 independence declaration.
The ruling by Supreme Court magistrate Pablo Llarena also allowed six others detained over the matter to leave prison after paying 100,000 euros each.
Junqueras faces charges of rebellion, sedition and the misuse of public funds, while the two leaders of two Catalan grassroots separatist groups, known as the "two Jordis," face sedition charges and have so far spent 45 days in prison.
Also among those denied bail was Catalan interior spokesperson Joaquim Form.
It had been expected that all 10 Catalan separatists could be allowed to leave prison after accepting the application of Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, which temporarily suspends Catalan autonomy until the new regional elections scheduled for Dec. 21.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 18:40:09|Editor: liuxin
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NEW DELHI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A passenger plane of national carrier Air India, on way to the southern city of Chennai from Dubai, was diverted to India's financial capital Mumbai Monday, following a medical emergency on board.
A male passenger complained of chest pain on Air India flight number AI 906, following which the pilot decided to divert the Airbus A321 aircraft to Mumbai, a spokesperson for the airline told the media.
The plane, which was carrying 164 passengers, apart from crew members, landed at Mumbai international airport, where the passenger was disembarked and checked by doctors, before flying for its destination.
The passenger has been checked by airport doctors and certified fit for travelling onward to Chennai, the spokesperson said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 18:40:10|Editor: liuxin
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YANGON, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A total of 155,169 undocumented Myanmar migrant workers returned home from Thailand in the past five months, according to a release of Myanmar's Home Ministry Monday.
The migrant workers, who returned during the period between June 29 and Dec. 3 , include 66,980 women workers.
Undocumented Myanmar migrant workers have been returning home since the end of June although Thai authorities have delayed the full enforcement of a new labor law introduced in late June.
The law originally aimed at tackling human trafficking and regulating foreign workers in Thailand but sparked panic and prompted more than 60,000 foreign workers to leave the country then , many of them from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.
The influx has overtaxed social agencies and border crossing as border gates restricted the number of crossing to only 100 people a day, causing hardship for many Myanmar migrants to have enough food and lodging while waiting for the border crossing, reports said.
The new decree in Thailand imposes heavy fine on employers and employees who do not have work permits.
About 4 million legal and 1 million illegal Myanmar workers are reportedly staying in Thailand.
In a bid to solve the problem of undocumented Myanmar migrant workers who are returning home out of fear of the new labor law, authorities of the two countries negotiated on issuing official documents to the workers, the authorities said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 18:50:12|Editor: liuxin
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WELLINGTON, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The New Zealand government on Monday approved the regulations banning microbeads, which are found in personal care products such as facial cleansers, bath scrubs and toothpaste.
Minister for the Environment David Parker said that microbeads get washed down the drain but are too small to be fully captured by the waste water treatment systems.
These minute plastic particles enter the marine environment where they accumulate, do not biodegrade, and are mistaken for food, which causes long-term damage to New Zealand's marine life, Parker said in a statement.
"This ban contributes to global efforts to reduce the amount of plastic ending up in our oceans," said Associate Minister for the Environment Eugenie Sage.
The changes align with similar initiatives in the United States, Britain and Australia, Sage said.
Public consultation on the proposed regulations took place in January this year and drew wide public support, she said, adding that many submitters urged the government to broaden the scope of the proposed ban to include other products containing microbeads.
In response to public opinions, the regulations have been widened to include all "wash-off" microbead-containing products for exfoliating, cleansing or abrasive cleaning purposes, which includes household, car or other cleaning products as well as personal care products, according to the ministry.
"The market for these additional products is minimal, but we want to prevent a future market developing," Sage said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 18:50:13|Editor: Mengjie
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Hi, here is what you need to know about China in the past 24 hours.
SYDNEY -- Australia's major wool sector looks poised to sustain a return to strong growth, fueled by record high prices and robust demand from increasingly affluent Chinese consumers, latest industry figures and analyses showed.
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BEIJING -- China and Japan will hold their eighth round of high-level consultations on maritime affairs in Shanghai on Tuesday and Wednesday, a foreign ministry spokesperson said Monday.
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NANNING -- The number of people who passed through the China-Vietnam border port of Dongxing in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region this year hit a record high of 9 million on Monday, the border control office said.
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HONG KONG -- Police of China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on Monday were investigating a robbery of a shop in downtown Hong Kong, where 14 luxury handbags worth 1.4 million Hong Kong dollars (about 180,000 U.S. dollars) were stolen.
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BEIJING -- Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi Monday called on all parties concerned to abide by relevant UN resolutions on the Korean Peninsula issue.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 19:05:17|Editor: Mengjie
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MACAO, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Legislative Assembly of China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) voted on Monday afternoon to suspend legislator Sou Ka Hou from his duty, the first legislator to have his mandate suspended in the Macao SAR.
Among the 33-member Legislative Assembly, 28 legislators voted for and four against the suspension of Sou's mandate.
Sou was accused of the crime of aggravated disobedience. The beginning of the trial was originally scheduled for Nov. 28, but was postponed in response to a request by the Legislative Assembly, according to the First Instance Court of the Macao SAR.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 19:20:21|Editor: liuxin
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LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A Taliban district chief Daud Alfat and four others were killed after aircraft pounded militants' vehicle in Nahr-e-Saraj district of southern Afghanistan's Helmand province on Monday, a local official said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 19:25:27|Editor: liuxin
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JERUSALEM, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Israel's Defense Ministry called off a test of its Arrow-3 anti-ballistic missile system after a safety failure in the simulated target was found on Monday, the ministry said in a statement.
"The trial was cut short after the target (missile) that was launched did not meet the safety codes of the test, which had been set in advance," the statement read.
The target missile was supposed to simulate a ballistic missile fired at Israel in a joint test by the Israeli Defense Ministry and the United States' Missile Defense Agency.
The Arrow-3 is Israel's most advanced missile-defense system. It is part of the country's multi-layer defense doctrine, which includes Iron Dome, a system aimed at intercepting short-range rockets from Gaza; David's Sling, which can intercept medium-range missiles owned by the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization in southern Lebanon; and the long-range Arrow-3 anti-ballistic-missiles system.
In December 2015, Israel's Ministry of Defense said it successfully test-launched the Arrow-3 interceptor, marking the system's first validation.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 19:30:29|Editor: liuxin
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NAIROBI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- More than 60 delegates are set to meet in Nairobi on Wednesday to discuss ways of fostering business and trade within the supply chain networks along the Eastern and Southern Africa transport corridors, organizers said on Monday.
The meeting organized by the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Business Council (CBC), a private sector association comprising investors involved in exporting and importing across the 19-member bloc, will also validate the study carried out in the transport corridors (north and north south corridors) in 2017.
"The focus of the study has been to show how corridors can generate economies of scale in agriculture and other priority sectors through fostering potential business partnerships that will be identified along the transport corridors," CBC said in a statement issued in Nairobi.
It said the key outputs of the study will be an assessment report and a Business Guide that will facilitate sustainable business partnerships between the potential buyers and existing supplier enterprises operating along the targeted corridors.
The Dec. 6-7 meeting will have the participation of more than 60 regional delegates, where the players in the agro-industry sector will engage in the dialogue to highlight and address various issues affecting the sustainability and growth of the agro-industry sector.
A total of eight countries -- Zambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda -- participated in the study.
The study comes at a time when there has been very low local sourcing from within the corridors from large corporates especially.
The CBC said the meeting creates a platform for establishing and strengthening regional business linkages in the agro industry in the transport corridors.
"Once sustainable business partnerships are created there will be increased volumes of trade intra- regionally," it said.
According to the CBC, the study has since been concluded and a number key products, potential buyers and suppliers were identified as well as challenges faced by the small and large corporates.
"From the said countries, the meeting will bring together more than 60 participants drawn from horticulture, agro processing, manufacturing companies, dairy companies, corporates and farmers within the agriculture sector, trade institutions and other stakeholders supporting agriculture development in the region," the CBC said.
According to the CBC, the agriculture sector is faced with many challenges such as prohibitive cost of transport, lack of market information, high government taxes, porosity borders, corruption, lack of trade information and so on.
"Despite being hit by these challenges, the sector continues to play a key role towards economic development," it said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 19:45:36|Editor: Mengjie
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by Zhu Junqing
BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. opposition to recognizing China as a market economy within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is in reckless disregard of the relevant WTO rules, and is intended to make an excuse for its trade protectionism by misleading the public.
By submitting a statement of opposition to the WTO as a third-party brief in support of the European Union in a case brought by China, the United States tried to mix the concepts of the surrogate country approach and market economy status to mislead the public for its selfish interests.
Last year, China filed a WTO dispute case over surrogate country approach, arguing the approach should be dropped after the expiration date on Dec. 11, 2016 in accordance with Article 15 of the accession protocol.
In fact, the case has nothing to do with whether China has been granted market economy status or not, as there are no standards in the WTO rules for the status.
As Liang Guoyong, economic affairs officer at the Investment and Enterprise Division of United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, said, the case is about "surrogate country approach," not "market economy status," which means the former is within multilateral trade rules, while the latter is regarded as a domestic law issue.
The practice to mix the two things together, he said, apparently contradicts multilateral trade rules and also breaks some countries' international commitments and promises.
Furthermore, it is clear that such behavior is a U.S. planned attempt to protect its trade with China and a part of its efforts to contain China's rise.
According to the General Administration of Customs, China's exports to the United States in the first three quarters increased 18.7 percent over the same period of 2016, and China's trade surplus with the United States in the first 10 month expanded 7.3 percent to reach 225 billion U.S. dollars.
The robust growth in China's exports to the United States and the appreciable trade surplus could be a catalyst for the U.S. administration to maintain a tough stance on China.
Such behavior is just reminiscent of the domestic laws of certain WTO members in the Cold War era, and the refusal would put trade ties with China at risk.
On the other hand, China has established and continuously improved its market economy system, which has earned worldwide recognition. So far, more than 80 economies have recognized China as a market economy.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 19:50:39|Editor: liuxin
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BELGRADE, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Serbian police have uncovered seven drug labs, seizing 128.5 kg narcotics together with weapons and explosives, and detaining 139 suspects during the past week, the country's interior ministry said in a press release on Sunday.
The drug labs were in three different cities -- the capital Belgrade, Sabac in the west and Subotica in the north -- and some of them were designed to grow "especially rare hallucinogenic mushrooms," according to the release.
Among those detained, 96 were for possession of drugs while 43 for illegal possession of weapons.
Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovi commended all police officers who have participated in the week-long operation and highlighted the fact that "14.5 kg of explosives were seized, of which 11 kg were seized...in the Krusik Arms factory."
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 19:55:42|Editor: liuxin
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MANILA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) have said that 264 armed rebels have been killed or arrested since this February, local media reported on Monday.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer, a major English newspaper, quoted Col. Edgard Arevalo, the AFP Public Affairs chief as saying that besides those killed or arrested, 573 New People's Army (NPA) members had voluntarily surrendered. A total of 622 firearms were recovered from the NPA rebels.
NPA is the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and now about 3,800 NPA armed men continue to fight against the central and local governments, mainly in the poorest provinces of the Philippines.
The Philippine military also called on the remaining communist rebels to lay down their arms or be killed.
"While we are hopeful that more NPA (members) will surrender in the coming days, our troops on the ground will continue with our relentless operations against those who remain active in their violent and destructive criminal activities," Arevalo said in a statement.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte signed a proclamation to formally terminate talks with the CPP in November and later told leftist rebel leaders to surrender or face punitive actions.
The rebellion in the Philippines began in 1969 and reached its peak in 1987 when it boasted 26,000 armed guerrillas.
Since 1986, the Philippine government has been trying to reach a peace deal with the leftist rebels but failed to make any headway.
Peace negotiations with the rebels were suspended in 2011.
The Duterte administration revived the talks with the rebels in August last year. But the talks have since bogged down due to a series of attacks launched by the rebels against troops and civilians.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 20:00:44|Editor: liuxin
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BANGKOK, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Two people were killed and 15 injured after a pickup truck collided with a dozen motorbikes in eastern Thailand's famous tourist destination Pattaya on Monday.
The accident happened on Monday morning when the 44-year-old pickup truck driver suddenly fell unconscious. The truck plowed through more than 10 motorcycles taking students to school, resulting in two deaths, according to local media.
The injured had been rushed to hospital.
The truck driver has been attacked by an angry crowd, said police.
Police also said the driver admitted he has been treated for epilepsy. Result of the driver's alcohol test appeared negative.
Police has not charged him yet as the case is under investigation.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 20:00:45|Editor: liuxin
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VALLETTA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announced Monday that authorities have arrested eight people in connection with the recent murder of a journalist.
The arrests came seven weeks after Daphne Caruana Galizia, a blogger and investigative journalist focusing on corruption and organized crime among other subjects, was killed in a car bomb attack near her home.
The suspects were captured in a joint operation by the armed forces, police and security services, and they are all previously known to the police, Muscat said at a press conference, adding that the police now had 24 hours to charge them.
The prime minister stressed that while he felt a need to update the nation on what was ultimately an issue of national security, he could not divulge too many details as the probe was still ongoing.
Asked whether he believes the arrested carried out the attack and whether their arrests could lead to the identification of a mastermind, Muscat refused to elaborate, only insisting that he has "a clear idea" of what their involvement was and that the government is committed to bringing the perpetrators to justice.
The killing of the 53-year-old journalist sent shockwaves throughout the world. The European Commission has called on Malta to get to the bottom of the crime.
The Mediterranean country observed a national day of mourning in her honor and has offered a 1-million-euro (1.19 million U.S. dollar) reward for information about her murder.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 20:05:47|Editor: liuxin
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KIGALI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank and the Rwandan government on Monday signed a funding deal worth 125 million U.S. dollars toward Rwanda's energy development.
The deal was inked by the Rwandan minister of finance Claver Gatete and the World Bank representative to Rwanda Yasser El-Gammal in Kigali, capital city of Rwanda.
The funding which is in form of a concessional loan is expected to enable fiscally sustainable expansion of electricity services in the central African country. It also aimed to improve the operational efficiency, affordability, and accountability of electricity service, according to the ministry of finance.
The support is part of the World Bank's three year Development Policy Operation (DPO) series project worth 325 million dollars, a continuation of the World Bank's current financing in the energy sector in Rwanda worth 386.7 million dollars, according to the lender.
Monday's funding will be followed by two other series, each worth 100 million dollars, said the bank.
According to the ministry's statement, the DPO will specifically strengthen planning capacity for least-cost access expansion, introduce improved accountability and transparency in implementing electrification programs, among others.
Speaking after the signing event, Gatete said the Development Policy Operation would help Rwanda achieve sustainable development of the power sector.
The program supported by the DPO series is based on a clear set of reforms that will help Rwanda lay the groundwork for successful energy sector development during the implementation of the National Strategy for Transformation for the period of 2017 to 2024, he said.
The proposed operation supports the Rwandan government in taking many of reform measures, initiated in previous World Bank operations, forward in a structured, pragmatic and transformative manner, Yasser El-Gammal said.
Rwanda targets to increase electricity production both on and off grid to ensure that all households have electricity by 2024, from the current 22 percent, Rwandan Prime Minister Edouard told the parliament in September when presenting the government's development strategy up to 2024.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 20:11:10|Editor: Yamei
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Combo photo taken on Sept. 11, 2017 shows models presenting creations designed by Genqoi Tashi, a fashion designer of Tibetan ethnic group, in Lhasa, capital of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. Genqoi Tashi, 34, established his own fashion brand Yeeom, which combines traditional culture of the Tibetan ethnic group and modern fashions, in 2012. Genqoi Tashi has made the fashion brand Yeeom known worldwide and takes orders from India, Nepal and European countries. (Xinhua/Purbu Zhaxi)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 20:25:53|Editor: liuxin
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by Burak Akinci
ANKARA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Turkey is cautiously pleased on the United States pledge to stop arming Syrian Kurdish fighters, that Washington has viewed as a key player against the Islamic State (IS), an issue that has been a major source of tension between the two countries.
With anti-IS operations in Syria coming to an end, the U.S. will focus on holding territory instead of arming the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday.
Turkey considers the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the YPG, to be the Syrian affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a terrorist organization listed by Turkey, the U.S. and the EU. However, the U.S. has supported the PKK and the PYD as its ally on the ground in combating IS in Syria.
MATTIS MAKES CLEAR: U.S. TO STOP ARMING YPG
"The YPG is armed, and as the coalition stops offensive (operations), then obviously you don't need that," Mattis said. "You need security, you need police forces, that's local forces, that's people who make certain that IS doesn't come back."
Mattis did not say if there had already been halt to weapons transfer.
Last week, in a phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former reportedly said Washington will stop supplying weapons to the YPG. Trump promised to stop the "nonsense" of arming Syrian Kurds, according to Turkish officials.
But after this pledge, the Pentagon officials immediately announced that the U.S. will go on cooperating with this militia, profoundly confusing minds in Ankara.
Washington's military support for the YPG has been a major source of tension between the U.S. and Turkey. The main concern is that weapons supplied to the YPG will end up in PKK hands in Turkey.
"US MOVE COMES LATE"
"It is a satisfactory move that comes late. From the outset we said to our American interlocutors that you cannot combat a terrorist organization (IS) with supplying arms to another terrorist movement (YPG)," told a Turkish government source to Xinhua.
"We need to monitor very closely what will happen on the ground. The U.S. has already shipped tens of thousands tons of military material to YPG. We have to make sure that these arms do not continue to fall into the hands of the PKK," explained this source on the condition of anonymity.
Less than 24 hours before the Pentagon's chief statement on the Syrian Kurdish militia, Erdogan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin told reporters that "any kind of support given to the YPG is a support given directly or indirectly to the PKK and constitutes a threat to Turkey's national security."
Experts think that the U.S. pledges towards Syrian Kurd militia is somewhat aimed at calming the Turkish ally's nerves.
ANKARA DAZED AND CONFUSED
"There was a deep deception in Ankara after confusing statements from the U.S administration," Serkan Demirtas, Hurriyet Daily News Ankara representative told Xinhua.
This expert on international affairs argued that the statement made by the U.S. defense secretary asked more questions than it answered.
With the poor record-keeping to track weapons supplies, denounced in May by Amnesty International, getting weapons returned to the U.S. from the YPG, will be easier than done, added Demirtas.
Experts believe that the heavy weapons will be easier to recollect but that lighter weapons will stay in Syria. The U.S. will also leave civilian construction vehicles, such as cranes, bulldozers and trucks in the region to help locals with reconstruction.
Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu recently announced in parliament that Turkish security forces tracked at least 4,000 truck loads of weaponry shipment to Syrian Kurds.
Meanwhile on the ground, the YPG militia said on Sunday it had fully captured Deir al-Zor's Province (bordering Iraq) eastern countryside from the IS with the help of both the U.S.-led coalition and Russia, a military victory that puts even more pressure on Turkey efforts to break international support to the Kurdish fighters.
Since the start of Syria's conflict in 2011, the YPG and its allies have carved an autonomous regions in the north, controlling nearly a quarter of Syria.
Since November a small group of Turkish soldiers have established several observations spots inside the northwestern Idlip Province of Syria and avoided serious clashes with the Kurdish forces.
However, Turkish President Erdogan has repeatedly threatened to launch a full scale offensive against the Afrin region, a strategically sensitive area in Turkish eyes.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 20:40:59|Editor: liuxin
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TUNIS, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The 2018 Tunisian state budget, dictated by the 2018 finance law, has shown remarkable rise in education and security, observed some analysts.
The new budget amounts to 35.85 million dinars (14.34 million U.S. dollars), and grows 4.3 percent compared to that of 2017. It is based on certain constants such as growth of 3 percent, an average of 54 dollars for a barrel of oil, and a budget deficit controlled at 4.9 percent against 6.1 percent in 2017.
The Tunisian Prime Minister Youssef Chahed said that the government will mitigate the budget deficit to 5 percent by 2020, as forecast of this new finance law 2018 expects a debt ratio of 71.4 percent of GDP, or 76,200 million dinars (30,408 million dollars) against 69.6 percent of GDP for the current fiscal year.
GOV'T FOCUSES ON EDUCATION, SECURITY
The budget of the ministry of education records an increase, which some local observers called "spectacular," of 13 percent in the overall budget, equivalent to 4,925 million dinars (1,970 million dollars).
Approved with 101 votes in favor, three abstentions and six refusals, the budget of the ministry of the interior for 2018 records an increase of 12.6 percent compared to 2017 to reach 2.88 million dinars (1.15 million dollars).
Meanwhile, the budget of ministry of defense stands at 2.233 million dinars (890,000 dollars), with an increase of 10.7 percent compared to 2017.
Some analysts say that this increase in budgets is explained by the "war" waged by the Tunisian government against religious extremism that planned in the last three years a series of attacks in various governorates of the country, even in the capital Tunis.
The Minister of Interior Lotfi Braham confirmed the acquisition of 3,500 vehicles for a cost of 140 million dinars (56 million dollars) between 2015 and 2016. "For the year 2018, an envelope of 122 million dinars (48.8 million dollars) will be injected for the acquisition of security equipments," he said, addressing to the deputies of the Assembly of People's Representatives.
In addition, he announced the intention of his department is to negotiate the necessary financial means to develop 19 border posts with Algeria and Libya, for an envelope of 12 million dinars (4.8 million dollars).
"A TIMID DIPLOMATIC BUDGET"
The budget of the Tunisian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was approved with 138 votes in favor and 14 against. In total, this represents 211,324 million dinars (84,529 million dollars) with an increase of 6.8 percent compared to the 2017 budget.
"Such a budget will not achieve the ambitions of Tunisian diplomacy," said Tunisian Minister of Foreign Affairs Khemais Jhinaoui, at the meeting of the approval of the budget of his department.
According to the head of the Tunisian diplomacy, this envelope will serve the coverage of the expenses of the central administration of 90 diplomatic missions, of which only 10 is on the African continent.
"Our representations are still weak in Latin America, and our presence is timid in Asia or even nonexistent in other countries such as Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, even in Europe, we have no representations in some Eastern European countries that express an interest in us, including Denmark," the Tunisian minister also regretted.
TOURISM KEY SECTOR OF THE TUNISIAN ECONOMY
Considered as one of the key sectors of the country's economic recovery, Tunisian tourism is registering towards the end of this year, the beginnings of a recovery after three years of mourning by terrorist attacks targeting governorates, known to be a showcase for foreign tourists.
Proof of this is the suspension of travel restrictions to Tunisia from several European countries including Scandinavian countries and recently Britain, in addition to the return of world-renowned tour operators -- including Thomas Cook and TUI -- which have officially resumed activity on the Tunisian destination.
For the year 2018, the budget of the ministry of tourism amounts to 151,032 million dinars (60,412 million dollars), of which 63,032 million dinars (25,212 million dollars) for management expenses, up 7.3 percent while development expenditures are estimated a 2.9 percent growth compared to 2017.
The Tunisian Minister of Tourism Salma Elloumi announced that tourist revenues have reached, until Nov. 20, 2017, an envelope of 2,524 million dinars (1,009 million dollars), which is an increase of 17 percent compared to the same period of last year.
Tunisia has so far welcomed about 6,122,000 tourists, a growth of 24 percent compared to 2016 in the same period. According to Elloumi, this performance is explained by the rise in the European market, including in France, Germany and Britain.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 21:01:08|Editor: Zhou Xin
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File photo taken on Feb. 27, 2012 shows Yemen's former president Ali Abdullah Saleh attending the inauguration ceremony of the new President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi in Sanaa, capital of Yemen. A senior Houthi official confirmed on Monday that former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, his nephew, relatives and the general secretary of Saleh's party were killed. (Xinhua/Mohammed)
SANAA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A senior Houthi official confirmed to Xinhua on Monday that former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, his nephew, relatives and the general secretary of Saleh's party were killed.
"Saleh and his party's Assistant General Secretary Yasser al-Awadhi were killed on Monday morning while they were trying to escape through Khawlan district on the southeastern outskirts of Sanaa on their way to escape to Saudi-backed government-controlled Marib province, " the official confirmed to Xinhua.
"Saleh's nephew Tarek was killed also early Monday morning in his home in Haddah quarter in the capital Sanaa," the official said.
"Saleh's party's General Secretary Arif al-Zuka was also killed in Sanaa," the official added.
The security situation and clashes in the capital Sanaa and surrounding provinces have eased.
Meanwhile, Saudi-led coalition warplanes were still hovering over the capital.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 21:26:15|Editor: Mengjie
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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) holds talks with visiting Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2017. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling)
BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- China appreciates Mongolia's reiteration that it will firmly adhere to the one-China policy and respect China's core interests and major concerns on issues related to Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said here Monday.
Wang made the remarks during talks with visiting Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar.
"China and Mongolia are friendly neighbors," said Wang, adding that the new Mongolian government has sent a clear message to the Chinese side on maintaining mutual trust and properly handling sensitive issues, and the country has expressed a strong desire to deepen cooperation with China.
According to Wang, China welcomes Mongolia's attitude and believes bilateral ties will continue in the right direction and benefit the two countries.
He said China will, as always, respect Mongolia's independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity and respect the Mongolian people's choice of development pattern.
"The Mongolian side's declaration is very important. It has increased the two sides' mutual trust," Wang said, emphasizing that trust is a key factor to ensure China-Mongolia relations are healthy and stable.
For his part, Tsogtbaatar said the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which has outlined a blueprint for China's future development and set the goal to promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, makes an important contribution to world development and will bring opportunities to neighboring countries.
He said the Mongolian side firmly adheres to the one-China policy and maintains Tibet and Taiwan are inalienable parts of the Chinese territory. Mongolia is willing to promote the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries to a new high on the basis of respecting each other's independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and core interests.
During the talks, both sides agreed to enhance exchanges at all levels and keep the current momentum in high-level exchanges.
Both sides agreed to coordinate the Belt and Road Initiative with Mongolia's Prairie Road development initiative, build a cross-border economic cooperation zone and begin feasibility research for a China-Mongolia free trade agreement. China will continue to support the Mongolian side to overcome economic difficulties with free assistance and loans programs.
Both sides agreed to facilitate people-to-people exchanges in culture, education, technology, sports, and tourism, and to convene the first meeting of a joint committee on China-Mongolia people-to-people exchanges as soon as possible.
Both sides agreed to push forward the construction of the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 21:31:18|Editor: Yamei
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Photo taken on Dec. 4, 2017 shows an aircraft of the Chinese air force taking off for a drill at an airport in China. The Chinese air force said Monday that its surveillance aircraft had recently conducted high-sea drills in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea to improve combat readiness and safeguard the country's "strategic interests." (Xinhua/Zhang Lei)
BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese air force said Monday that its surveillance aircraft had recently conducted high-sea drills in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea to improve combat readiness and safeguard the country's "strategic interests."
The aircraft took an air route that was not previously flown to areas where they had never been, said Shen Jinke, spokesman for the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force.
The air force's fighter jets, airborne early warning aircraft and surface-to-air guided missile forces coordinated with surveillance for the training, Shen said.
The Chinese air force will conduct high-sea exercises under combat conditions on a regular basis, the spokesman said.
Yemen's Houthis announced the killing of ex-President Ali Abdullah Saleh while he was escaping on Monday. (Reuters Photo)
SANAA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A senior Houthi official confirmed to Xinhua on Monday that former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, his nephew, relatives and the general secretary of Saleh's party were killed.
"Saleh and his party's Assistant General Secretary Yasser al-Awadhi were killed on Monday morning while they were trying to escape through Khawlan district on the southeastern outskirts of Sanaa on their way to escape to Saudi-backed government-controlled Marib province, " the official confirmed to Xinhua.
"Saleh's nephew Tarek was killed also early Monday morning in his home in Haddah quarter in the capital Sanaa," the official said.
"Saleh's party's General Secretary Arif al-Zuka was also killed in Sanaa," the official added.
The security situation and clashes in the capital Sanaa and surrounding provinces have eased.
Meanwhile, Saudi-led coalition warplanes were still hovering over the capital.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 21:36:20|Editor: liuxin
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COLOMBO, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Sri Lankan government on Monday vowed to end impunity for crimes against journalists and expedite investigations into the killing and disappearance of journalists in recent years.
Minister of Finance and Mass Media, Mangala Samaraweera, said that while Sri Lanka was one of the most unsafe places for journalists, the government of Maithripala Sirisena had succeeded, to a large extent, in creating a safe space required for freedom of expression.
"We must keep on working hard to sustain and safeguard this space, and we still have a long way to go in terms of completing investigations into past crimes, including the murder of journalists in the past," Samaraweera said at the opening of the UNESCO Regional Conference on Reinforcing Regional Cooperation to Promote Freedom of Expression and the Rule of Law in Asia through Ending Impunity for Crimes against Journalists,
"This is an important occasion for us locally, to renew our commitment to justice, in memory of all the journalists who have been silenced, and in recognition of the importance of a free and independent media, for advancing peace, development, and good governance in our country," Samaraweera added.
Samaraweera further added that that Sri Lanka remained firm in its commitment to work with the international community, including UNESCO, to work towards ending impunity for crimes against journalists, and to uphold the rights of journalists around the world who place themselves at risk every day, to give voice to the voiceless.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghw said that the government welcomed the UN Plan of Action process to protect the safety of journalists and Sri Lanka would continue to strengthen its democracy to ensure the smooth implementation of the UN Action Plan.
"I am proud to say that we have achieved great global recognition for the steps we have taken in only two years," Wickremesinghe said, adding that those who were responsible for all cases of attacks and harassment on journalists would be brought to justice.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 21:41:21|Editor: liuxin
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COLOMBO, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lankan Department of Meteorology in its weather forecast on Monday warned its citizens to refrain from fishing and marine activities on Tuesday and Wednesday due to depression in the Bay of Bengal.
The department said the low pressure area in the South-East of Bay of Bengal was located 1,300 km away from Sri Lanka by Monday.
It said it would develop into depression and was likely to move close to Sri Lanka on Tuesday and Wednesday.
"It is expected that the wind speed can increase up to 70 to 80 km per hour in the deep and shallow sea areas around the country, 90 to 100 km per hour over the Bay of Bengal and 50 to 60 km per hour over the island," the department said.
Therefore, the department asked its citizens to refrain from fishing and marine activities in the sea around the country during these days.
Sri Lanka has been battered by inclement weather conditions recently, with 100,000 people affected and 14 people dead.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 21:56:28|Editor: Mengjie
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PARIS, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, on Monday revealed the name of the panda baby, the first ever panda cub in the country, at a naming ceremony at a zoo in central France.
Joined by Chinese officials, Brigitte Macron, who is also the new panda's godmother, announced that the four-month-old cub had been named as Yuan Meng.
Born on Aug. 4, the baby Panda He had been referred to as "Mini Yuan Zi" referring to his father Yuan Zi, who arrived with his female partner Huan Huan in central France's Beauval zoo, in January 2012.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 22:01:30|Editor: Mengjie
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ADDIS ABABA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopian Foreign Affairs Minister on Monday called for strengthening the socioeconomic partnership between Ethiopia and China.
Workneh Gebeyehu made the call during his meeting with the newly appointed Chinese Ambassador to Ethiopia, Tan Jian. The foreign minister has on Monday received copies of credentials of the incoming Chinese ambassador.
According to Gebeyehu, the ties between Ethiopia and China has shown consistent upward trajectory over the past years. Gebeyehu further called on strengthening the socioeconomic relations among the two countries to "a higher level."
Gebeyehu, who noted the Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn's visit to China during the Road and Belt Initiative Summit of May 2017, also said that the relationship between the two countries "has grown to an excellent level, where the two countries enjoy a comprehensive cooperation and partnership."
The foreign minister, who has also lauded the previous Ambassador of China to Ethiopia, La Yifan, also expressed his high hopes that the ties between the two countries "will even grow to a higher level during the new ambassador's tenure."
According to the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Tan Jian on his part also commended the success of the bilateral cooperation that the two countries have witnessed in trade, investment, infrastructure, manufacturing and other sectors over the years.
The Ethiopian government has previously indicated that its relation with China is given due emphasis as it remains one among the major priority partnerships both in the diplomatic and other sectors.
Ahmed Shide, Ethiopia's Minister of Transport, had previously told Xinhua that Chinese engagement has benefited the east African country both in business and people-to-people relations.
"In the last 20 years the level of economic cooperation with China has grown very fast. It will facilitate industrial manufacturing development, boost Ethiopia's competitiveness," Shide stressed.
"Chinese engagement in Ethiopia is harmonious, contributing to the development of Ethiopia," Shide said, adding that "Chinese personnel, be it workers and businesspeople, are contributing to the development of Ethiopia."
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 22:01:30|Editor: liuxin
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By Abu Hanifah
BALI, Indonesia, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Despite the ongoing visually calming condition in Bali's volcano of Mount Agung, authorities have yet to consider downgrading the alert status as magmatic activities remained high.
The intense movements of magmatic activities were clearly detected by the seismic records, leading the authorities to take extra cautious stance in anticipating the developing condition, an official monitoring the volcano said here on Monday.
"Seismic records show that pressures inside the volcano has not been released by the previous eruptions. The volcano is very active and capable of pressurization to cause the eruptions," Devy Kamil Syahbana, the head of Eastern Region Volcano Mitigation Subdivision at Indonesia's Center for Vulcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (PVMBG) told Xinhua.
Besides the seismic records, the geochemical indicator also showed that sulfur dioxide remains high at present, indicating that magmatic activities inside the volcano were still wildly progressing, he added.
The escalating activities inside the volcano was contradicted with the visual observation with 500 meters of white smoke seen spewing out of the volcano, a view that can be regarded as minor volcanic activities, according to Devy.
Citing the latest results of satellite image, he said that the new lava materials brought up by volcanic process from the previous eruptions have covered one third of the 60-million--cubic-meter volume of Mount Agung crater, making it a huge potential danger for the people should the eruption take place.
"Based on those observations, activities of mount Agung until today is still high, therefore the alert status remains level 4," Devy told Xinhua in an interview conducted in the PVMBG monitoring outpost in Rendang village in Bali's Karangasem regency.
The volcano's latest alert status was imposed since Nov. 27 following an eruption of black smoke and ash towering 1,500 meters above the volcano summit, forcing the airport in the resort island to be shut down.
Reflecting upon Mount Agung's devastating eruption 54 years ago that claimed more than 1,500 lives, Devy said that the calming situation in the surface cannot be used to assume the hazard level in the volcano.
The deadly 1963 eruption took place when people thought that the volcano had already inactive after it did not actively seen of emitting smoke in weeks prior to the final big eruption, he said.
According to him, the condition in Mount Agung is now quite similar to the period prior to its deadly eruption in 1963.
"We can learn a lesson from Mount Agung's eruption in 1963. At this moment we are in a intermittent phase after several eruptions. But there is possible that it may not like the scenario that occurred in 1963," Devy said, adding that the volcano has a specific character which is different from other volcanoes in the country.
"This is the complexity of Mount Agung, which is unpredictable. We can only closely monitor its development so as to minimize the impacts of the disaster for the people," he said.
As of last week over 43,000 refugees were sheltered in over 220 shelters outside the red zone areas, waiting in despair to see the end of their misery related to the raging of the volcano.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 22:06:33|Editor: liuxin
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ANKARA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Turkish border troops detained Sunday 2,222 people for illegal border crossing, the Turkish military said on Monday.
About 2,131 people were held as they were attempting to enter illegally into Turkey from Syria, while 11 others were seized as they tried to cross the border into Syria, according to a statement released by Turkish General Staff.
Another 80 people were detained at the Greek border, 70 of them tried to illegally travel to Greece from Turkey, the military said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 22:11:34|Editor: liuxin
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RAMALLAH, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A Palestinian senior official called on the United States Monday to avoid taking any move that would affect the status quo of Jerusalem.
Both moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital would be unacceptable and would entail risks, said Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister Ziad Abu Amr during his meeting with U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem.
The move would be "offensive and contrary to the role of the U.S. administration as a mediator and a sponsor of the peace process," said the Palestinian official.
"It will disqualify the United States from playing a role in the peace process and will close every door to a serious negotiation, as well as will push the entire region into more tension and instability," he added.
The Palestinian leadership would have to break up any previous understandings it had achieved with the United States, should the U.S. administration decided to change its stance on Jerusalem, warned Amr.
The U.S. administration would also be held responsible for any possible consequences of its moves on Jerusalem, he said.
He further urged the United States to reconsider its position and to preserve the "remaining chances" of achieving peace between the Palestinians and Israel.
U.S. media said that U.S. President Donald Trump was considering acknowledging Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and might announce that on Wednesday.
Trump's adviser Jared Kushner said Sunday that the president had not yet made a decision regarding the recognition.
Trump issued an exceptional decision to maintain the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv last June, which is expected to expire this month, but it is not clear whether he will renew his decision or not.
Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem is considered by the Palestinians as a provocation and destruction of the peace talks.
The peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel have been stalled since April 2014. The U.S.-sponsored talks that lasted for nine months achieved no tangible results.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 22:11:36|Editor: Yurou
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NEW DELHI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- India's legendary actor and veteran Bollywood star Shashi Kapoor passed away Monday, at the age of 79, family members said.
"The actor was admitted to the Kokilaben hospital in Mumbai. He was administered several rounds of dialysis at the hospital and today evening he breathed his last," a family member told media.
Born on March 18, 1938 in Kolkata city in India's eastern state of West Bengal, Kapoor made his debut in 1961, as the lead actor, in the Hindi film Dharamputra.
Prior to it, he began his acting career as a child artiste in the 1940s. Reports said he acted in more than 175 films mainly in mainstream Bollywood and art films. Kapoor has worked in English films too.
The actor's performance has been widely acknowledged and has been felicitated with several awards.
Kapoor's death has been widely condoled in India. A number of people took to social networking websites to express condolences and recalled their association with the deceased.
Kapoor earned acclaim for his performance in notable Hindi films which include Deewaar, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Junoon, Shaan, Namak Halaal and others.
He had been suffering from ailments for the past few years. Local media reports said Kapoor will be cremated on Tuesday.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 22:16:37|Editor: liuxin
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RIYADH, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Saudi-led coalition issued on Monday a warning to residents of Sanaa to stay away from Houthi militias' sites for their safety, Al Sharq Al Awsan online news reported.
The Arab coalition fighting in Yemen launched several air raids on Houthi military sites on Sunday evening near Sanaa airport and Dulaimi base, sources confirmed to Al Arabiya local news.
The sources confirmed that the coalition raided Houthi militia positions west of the capital Sanaa on Sunday.
The air raids come a day after the coalition made a statement announcing its support for Yemeni uprising against Houthis. The coalition said it is determined that it has maintained its position on all Yemeni ground.
The past three days have witnessed deadly clashes between supporters of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his former Houthi militia allies.
The fighting raged at dawn on Saturday between the two sides, which led to at least 80 supporters from both sides having been killed.
Meanwhile, the elected Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi called upon the staff of the United Nations and international organisations to leave Yemen for their safety.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 22:36:44|Editor: yan
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KAMPALA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The two-week joint East Africa Standby Force (EASF) peacekeeping and security training exercise closed on Sunday in Sudan, Ugandan military spokesperson said here on Monday.
Lt. Col. Deo Akiiki, Ugandan deputy military spokesperson in a statement issued here said that Sudan's minister of defense Lt. Gen Awad Mohamed Amed Ibin Oaf presided over the closing ceremony of the field training exercise, dubbed "Mashariki Salaam II," at Gebeit Training Area in Port Sudan.
The Sudanese minister commended the support and cooperation from 10 EASF partner states in the training, which he described as a clear manifestation of their commitment toward peace and security in the region and the global community.
Uganda's state minister for defense, Charles Engola and Uganda's deputy Chief of Defense Forces Lt. Gen. Wilson Mbadi attended the closing ceremony.
The Ugandan military dispatched a contingent of 106 soldiers led by Brig. Michael Nyarwa, the commander of Marine Brigade to participate in the two weeks training.
The exercise that kicked off on Nov. 25 to Dec. 3 attracted over 1,000 troops from the 10 EASF countries to help boost the capabilities of the forces in peacekeeping, conflict and terrorism management, and combating human trafficking in the region.
The troops were drawn from Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti, Burundi, Comoros, Somalia and Seychelles.
The exercise is a key benchmark to test the regional organization's ability to respond to crisis situations in the region and beyond when tasked or mandated to do so by the African Union.
The exercise was also attended by military representatives from China, the European Union and the United States.
EASF is a regional force, whose mandate is to enhance peace and security in the eastern Africa region. It is one of the five regional multidimensional forces of the African Standby Force.
EASF was established in 2004 for rapid deployment and intervention, peace support and stability operations and peace enforcement.
It has since conducted a number of field training and command post exercises in Kenya, Djibouti, Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, respectively.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 22:46:46|Editor: Zhou Xin
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ISLAMABAD, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis told Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on Monday that his visit aimed at finding common grounds in order to create a positive, consistent and long-term relationship with Pakistan, according to Pakistani Prime Minister's Office.
Mattis paid a day-long visit here for talks on security issues that focused on anti-terror cooperation and peace in Afghanistan.
The office said in a statement that Mattis emphasized that in view of his long association with Pakistan, he was "keenly aware of the sacrifices rendered and the lives lost in Pakistan's fight against terrorism and extremism; and his personal respect and appreciation for the professional abilities of Pakistan's armed forces."
He also underscored the "importance of continuing and deepening cooperation for the common objective of eliminating terrorism from the region, according to the statement.
Abbasi, for his part, underlined the need for a broad based engagement to strengthen partnership and enhance cooperation between the two countries, adding that no other country benefits more from peace and stability in Afghanistan than Pakistan.
"He agreed with Secretary Mattis that both Pakistan and the U.S. have common stakes in securing peace and security in Afghanistan for the long term stability of the broader region," the statement further said.
The prime minister vowed that Pakistan, in its national interest, would continue to conduct intelligence based operations all over the country to consolidate the gains achieved in the last four years, reiterating that there are no safe havens in Pakistan and the entire nation was committed to its resolve on eradicating terrorism in all forms.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 22:46:47|Editor: Zhou Xin
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Bee producers explain to visitors how honey is made during the 9th Festival of Honey and Bee Products held at the Peace and Friendship Indoor Stadium in Neo Faliro, a southern suburb of Athens, Greece, on Dec. 3, 2017. It's a sweet gathering when over 250 bee products makers from across Greece gathered this weekend in Neo Faliro, southern Greece, to exchange their techniques and seek cooperation with traders from Europe and Asia. (Xinhua/Lefteris Partsalis)
by Alexia Vlachou
ATHENS, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- It's a sweet gathering when over 250 bee products makers from across Greece gathered this weekend in Neo Faliro, southern Greece, to exchange their techniques and seek cooperation with traders from Europe and Asia.
Under the auspices of the agriculture and food ministry, experts, amateurs, and connoisseurs came together for three days for seminars, honey tastings, bee-keeping demonstrations, and children's shows. Meanwhile, chefs prepared honey-inspired dishes, sweets, and made cocktails.
"Within the nine years of the festival, we have seen small producers expand their small cottage industries to a level where they can export to Europe and other regions," said George Stathis, a member of festival's organizing committee, to Xinhua.
"Producers provide their honey to hotels in Hong Kong. Greek honey is included in hotels' breakfast and restaurants in countries across the world," he noted.
Unique in color, aroma, taste, and thickness, Greek honey -- the beverage and food of the ancient Greek Gods known as nectar and ambrosia -- has been used both as a food and a source of therapy since ancient times.
Greece produces an average of 14,000 tons of honey per year. The small Mediterranean country is the third largest honey producer in Europe behind Spain and France. But Greece has more beehives "per acre" than any other country in Europe, according to Stathis.
There are currently about 27,000 to 30,000 beekeepers across Greece. About 60 percent of them have 50 to 60 hives, but professional beekeepers own more than 200 hives and earn at least 50 percent of their annual income from them.
Meanwhile, the average consumption of honey in a Greek family is 12 kg per year.
"The target is to reach up to 15 to 16 kg per year," Stathis said.
Regarding exports, Stathis stressed that honey should not have a prohibitive cost for consumers abroad. "The pricing is not the same in Greece and China for example, but producers and operators have succeeded in not quadrupling its price when exporting it," he said.
Another advantage of honey is that it is a food source with no expiration date. "You may see raw, pure Greek unprocessed honey crystallize. This is natural with raw unfiltered honey. You can simply place the jar in a bowl of warm water and the crystals will melt," Stathis explained.
As a country with abundant flora in the Mediterranean basin, and more than 7,500 different species of herbs, plants, wildflowers, and trees, Greece has a wide range of honey.
The honey produced in Greece comes mainly from pine and fir trees, while some honey is produced from the flower nectar from thyme, orange blossom, cotton, heather, and sunflower, among others.
Besides honey, by-products like beeswax, propolis, and royal jelly used in the cosmetic industry can boost exports, experts pointed out.
"There are organic products from bees' products at affordable prices," Stathis explained.
During the festival, which is considered one of the most significant industry events in Greece, visitors could also see producers harvest royal jelly, render beeswax from honeycomb, collect bee's venom, which is used in the pharmaceutical sector, among other interesting activities.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:01:50|Editor: Zhou Xin
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BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The United States is throwing cold water on the growing geniality of trade relations between itself and China with its rebuke of the latter's bid for recognition as a market economy in the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The U.S. government recently formally opposed to China's bid, citing decades of legal precedent and what it sees as signs the country is moving in the opposite direction.
The truth is that denial of such status for China will give the U.S. government useful tools to launch trade probes into Chinese imports under the excuses of dumping goods at unfair price advantages.
REFUSAL DISTORTS FACTS
The U.S. decision comes as the Trump administration is seeking to bridge the trade deficit with China for the so-called fair and balanced trade. To achieve that end, it is tempting to turn a blind eye to China's concrete moves of market liberalization, international observers said.
Since China has implemented the opening up and reform policy, it has made consistent efforts to improve its market economy system, which has won global recognition. The U.S. refusal distorts facts, according to a spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce.
China is now the world's largest goods trading nation, being the top trading partner of more than 120 countries and regions.
Su Qingyi, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the "non-market economy status" has not held China back from making those achievements.
The United States will not benefit from a battered bilateral trade relationship considering its interwoven interests with China. Protectionist measures also impair the interests of U.S. companies and consumers.
Over the past three decades, bilateral goods trade surged from 2.5 billion to 524.3 billion U.S. dollars. Low-cost and high-quality Chinese products have helped raise the living standard of Americans.
While much of the U.S. political campaign rhetoric focused on jobs leaving the United States, Chinese investment is supporting more jobs on that side of the Pacific.
UNDERMINED INTEGRITY
In response to the U.S. rejection, Chinese commerce ministry official Wang Hejun said it undermines the seriousness and authority of multilateral rules.
Article 15 of the Protocol on China's accession to the WTO in 2001 has clearly dictated that China will automatically switch over to market economy status when the surrogate country approach expires in 15 years, which means, on that day, the legal foundation for treating China as a non-market economy is gone.
The United States is setting a bad example by breaking international rules, Su said.
Honoring contracts is the basic principle of the market economy, and the United States is breaching this principle, said Bai Ming, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation.
The U.S. rejection reflects its panic and ideological prejudice, said Zhang Jingwei, a researcher with Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies under the Renmin University of China.
Analysts said that China is likely to take legal action at the WTO against members who are not observing the rules, including the United States. Further retaliatory trade measures may also be considered.
Even if an all-out trade war is avoidable, no party will emerge unscathed, Zhang said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:01:51|Editor: yan
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TRIPOLI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's Hyundai announced it will return to Libya early next year to complete suspended power plant project, according to a Libyan government official.
"South Korean delegation, including South Korean embassy officials and representatives of Hyundai, held talks with officials of the General Electricity Company regarding security arrangements for the Company's sites in Libya, in preparation for the official return of Hyundai," an official of the Libyan state-owned General Electricity Company told Xinhua.
"The Korean delegation visited the municipality of Janzur, just outside of the capital Tripoli, and personally saw the security arrangements necessary to secure the location of the western Tripoli power plant project. It was agreed that the project's contractor Hyundai will return in January or February 2018," the official added.
South Korean companies in November demanded security guarantees for their return to Libya and resuming suspended power plant projects.
Unknown gunmen earlier in November kidnapped four foreign workers, three Turks and one German, who worked in a power plant in the southern Libyan city of Obari, 1,100 km south of the capital Tripoli.
After security forces failed to free the four workers, the remaining 300 foreign workers left the city.
Libya has suffered frequent power blackouts that last as long as 12 hours a day after foreign companies doing regular maintenance pulled out amid violence and chaos.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:11:53|Editor: yan
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TRIPOLI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- At least two soldiers were killed and three others injured in clashes between army forces and extremists on Monday in the Libyan eastern city of Benghazi.
"The military operations are continuing in Ekhrebish area. Two of our troops were killed and three others were wounded as a result of the clashes with terrorist fighters," Miloud Al-Zwai, spokesman of the army's special forces, told Xinhua.
"Information about the liberation of the last terrorist stronghold is not true," Al-Zwai added, stressing that the military operations would soon be concluded.
A military source told Xinhua on Saturday that conflicts between the Libyan eastern-based army and militants in Benghazi had killed 17 people in November.
Benghazi, Libya's second largest city and the birthplace of the 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Muammar Gaddafi, has witnessed a three-year war between the army led by General Khalifa Haftar and extremist groups.
Haftar announced earlier in June the taking over of the entire city of Benghazi and defeating the rival armed groups. However, some militants still remain in the city and mainly use landmines.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:21:55|Editor: Jiaxin
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Brigitte Macron (4th L), wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui (1st R), Former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin (2nd R) and Chinese Ambassador to France Zhai Jun (1st L, Rear) pose for photos during a naming ceremony of a panda baby in Saint-Aignan, France, on Dec. 4, 2017. Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, revealed the name of the panda baby, the first-ever cub born in the country, at a naming ceremony at a zoo in central France on Monday. Joined by Chinese officials, Brigitte Macron, who is also the new panda's godmother, announced that the four-month-old cub's name was Yuan Meng. (Xinhua/Chen Yichen)
PARIS, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The first panda cub born in France on Monday got its name from its special godmother, the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, along with the blessing of Chinese First Lady Peng Liyuan.
Joined by Chinese officials, Brigitte Macron attended the naming ceremony at the Beauval Zoo south of Paris, and announced that the four-months-old cub will go by the name of Yuan Meng, which means "dream comes true" in Chinese.
In a congratulatory message, Peng said that she was pleased to select the name together with Brigitte and that the name carries the people's best wishes for the little panda and high expectations for the China-France friendship.
Pointing out that the panda is not only a national treasure of China but also an envoy and witness of the China-France friendship, Peng said Yuan Meng's birth embodies the bright future of bilateral relations, which are entering a new stage of development.
She conveyed her wish that the cub will grow up healthy and strong and bring more happiness to the French people, especially the children.
Born on Aug. 4, the baby panda had been referred to as "Mini Yuan Zi" after his father, Yuan Zi, who arrived in France with his female partner, Huan Huan, in January 2012.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:26:59|Editor: yan
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NAIROBI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations on Monday decried the rising use of mercury in artisanal gold mining.
Ligia Noronha, director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Division of Technology, Industry and Economics (DTIE), told a media briefing in Nairobi that mercury is a metal that has documented negative health effects on the small-scale miners.
"In order to address the rising use of mercury amongst artisanal gold miners, we are working with other partners to phase out the use of mercury so as to protect human health," Noronha said during the Third Session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA).
Noronha said rising demand for gold has increased the use of mercury and this poses a threat to miners. She noted that women are disproportionately affected by the heavy metal.
At the same time, the UN environmental body called for data on the use and environmental impact of mercury in order for governments to make more informed policies.
Mercury is a popular chemical among small-scale gold miners because it is effective in the separation of gold particles from the sand.
The impact of mercury on human health is huge as those who have prolonged contact with the pollutant lose their cognitive abilities while women can give birth to defective babies.
In order to eliminate the threat posed by mercury, the global community signed the Minamata Convention on Mercury in order to protect humans from the adverse effects of mercury.
Noronha said the UN is collaborating with other organizations to look for alternative processes that small-scale miners can use to extract gold.
She noted that there is need to strike a balance between reducing use of mercury and protecting jobs.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:32:00|Editor: yan
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CAIRO, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A total of five terrorists were killed on Monday in a fire exchange with police forces in Egypt's Delta province of Sharqiya, Egyptian Interior Ministry said.
In a statement, the ministry said six terrorists were also arrested in the security operation.
Security forces located the terrorists' hideout in a desert area between the 10th of Ramadan City and Belbis City of Sharqiya province, 60 km north of Cairo, the ministry said, adding the terrorists opened fire at police forces once they realized their presence.
According to the statement, four machine guns, ammunition and three handmade bombs were found at the hiding place, which was also used as a training site by the terrorists.
Egypt has been fighting against a wave of terror activities that killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers since the military toppled former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013 in response to mass protests against his one-year rule and his currently outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group.
Terror attacks in Egypt used to be centered in North Sinai before spreading nationwide and killing hundreds of policemen and soldiers over the past few years.
Last month, a terrorist attack against a mosque in the country's North Sinai killed at least 305 Muslim worshippers, including children, and wounded over 120 others.
Although no group has yet claimed responsibility for the mosque attack, fingers are pointed at a Sinai-based group loyal to IS group, which has claimed most of the terrorist activities in Egypt over the past few years.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:32:01|Editor: yan
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KUWAIT CITY, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Kuwait on Monday spoke highly of the intact unity among the Gulf Cooperation Council states amid various kinds of challenges over the years.
The Gulf Cooperation Council's (GCC) unity and solidarity is still intact, standing against various kinds of challenges and trials over the years, said Kuwaiti First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Sabah Al-Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah Monday.
Sheikh Sabah Al-Khaled delivered opening speech to the 144th Foreign Ministers meeting, held ahead of the 38th GCC's Summit on Dec. 5-6. He said the presence of meeting's participants will contribute to the success of the summit.
Stressing the importance of the upcoming summit, the Kuwaiti Foreign Minister said that it will contribute to the continuation of the council's success.
The Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah and his fellow GCC leaders hope that the summit will continue to be the venue that serves the people of the region and carries on the rapid development of GCC nations, Sheikh Sabah Al-Khaled added.
The Kuwaiti Foreign Minister hoped that the summit will meet the aspirations and dreams of the people in the region and continue the GCC's strong stride towards a bright future.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:37:04|Editor: Zhou Xin
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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) holds talks with visiting Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2017. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling)
BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- China appreciates Mongolia's reiteration that it will adhere to the one-China policy and respect China's core interests and major concerns related to Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Monday.
Wang made the remarks here during talks with visiting Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar.
"China and Mongolia are friendly neighbors," Wang said. "The new Mongolian government has sent a clear message to the Chinese side on maintaining mutual trust and properly handling sensitive issues, and the country has expressed a strong desire to deepen cooperation with China."
Wang said China welcomed Mongolia's attitude and believed bilateral ties would continue in the right direction.
He said China would always respect Mongolia's independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity, and the Mongolian people's choice of development pattern.
"The Mongolian side's declaration is very important. It has increased the two sides' mutual trust," Wang said, emphasizing that trust was a key factor to ensuring healthy and stable China-Mongolia relations.
Tsogtbaatar said the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China had "outlined a blueprint for China's future development and set the goal to promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, as well as making an important contribution to world development that would bring opportunities to neighboring countries."
He said Mongolia "firmly adheres to the one-China policy and maintains Tibet and Taiwan are inalienable parts of the Chinese territory. Mongolia is willing to promote the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries to a new high on the basis of respecting each other's independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and core interests."
During the talks, both sides agreed to enhance exchanges at all levels and keep the current momentum in high-level exchanges.
Both sides agreed to coordinate the Belt and Road Initiative with Mongolia's Prairie Road development initiative, build a cross-border economic cooperation zone and begin feasibility research for a China-Mongolia free trade agreement. China will continue to support the Mongolian side to overcome economic difficulties with free assistance and loans programs.
Both sides agreed to facilitate people-to-people exchanges in culture, education, technology, sports, tourism and among the young people, and to convene the first meeting of a joint committee on China-Mongolia people-to-people exchanges as soon as possible.
Both sides agreed to push forward the construction of the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor.
Later in the day, Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi also met with Tsogtbaatar.
Briefing the Mongolian Foreign Minister on the 19th National Congress of the CPC, Yang called on both sides to "respect each other's core interests and major concerns and deepen mutual political trust."
He said China and Mongolia should "seize the opportunities derived from the Belt and Road Initiative to strengthen bilateral ties and benefit people of both sides."
Expressing his congratulations on the success of the 19th CPC National Congress, Tsogtbaatar said his country stood ready to boost the two countries' comprehensive strategic partnership.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:42:06|Editor: yan
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MOGADISHU, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Somalia has agreed to develop a transition plan immediately with support of the international community ahead of exit of African Union troops.
Participants at the day-long Somalia Security Conference agreed that work would begin at once on a realistic, phased, conditions-based transition plan with clear target dates to transfer security responsibility from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) to the Somali security forces.
"As a first step all stakeholders would develop a process to plan for transition by Dec. 31 with a view to completing a draft transition plan before the Joint Review of AMISOM requested by the Security Council in 2018," they said in a joint statement.
The meeting, which brought together representatives of the government and federal member states, the AU, UN, EU and other international partners, said the transition plan will need close cooperation and partnership between the government, federal member states and AMISOM, in order to achieve clear outcomes.
"The transition plan will lay the foundations for activity over the coming months and years and will set out the strategy, priorities, milestones and conditions for transition, including on stabilization and state-building activities as well as military, police and justice plans, in order to ensure a lasting peace," they said.
"These should be affordable, accountable, and acceptable forces, able to provide security across Somalia. They will require transparent and effective financial and human resources systems in place, and frameworks to ensure human rights compliance as a matter of urgency," it added.
The pan African troops are expected to relinquish the security of the key towns, to the Somali forces, through a conditions based transition plan, to allow them take the lead responsibility as part of the planed exit.
Under the exit strategy, some 1,000 soldiers will be withdrawn from Somalia by Dec. 31 and AMISOM will deploy extra 500 police officers who will strengthen training and mentoring for Somali Police.
President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, widely known as Farmajo, who opened the conference, called for donor support to strengthen the capacity of the country's security forces in preparation ahead of exit by AU troops to help secure the gains made.
"The current security requirement far exceeds our economic means and we urgently request the international community to increase its diverse and generous support if we are to protect the gains we have made thus far," Farmajo said.
The Somali leader admitted that financing the security sector presents a huge challenge for which Mogadishu has to find sustainable solution with timely commitment from the donor community.
"We must address the critical security gaps before transitioning security operations and full responsibility to well trained, equipped and supported Somali security forces," Farmajo said.
During the conference, government institutions committed to continue to lead the implementation of the National Stabilization Strategy to tackle the underlying drivers of conflict and set the conditions for economic growth.
They said civilian-led stabilization interventions will remain critical to consolidating security gains and extending the legitimacy and credibility of the authorities.
"All Somali's leaders agreed to continue to initiate local solutions to prevent recruitment and radicalization to violent extremism and enable effective human rights protection, conflict resolution, including through local governance structures and civil society," they said.
Participants also recognized the roles of youth, women and local reconciliation efforts to prevent further recruitment and radicalization and will prevent and counter violent extremism and terrorism as a durable, sustainable and long term solution.
AMISOM promised to continue supporting the transition through the priority tasks including securing main supply routes, securing key population centers, to mentor and assist Somali security forces, both military and police, in close collaboration with the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) and in line with the National Security Architecture.
The pan African body also committed to further degrading Al-Shabaab, and implementing the transition process by continuing joint AMISOM-Somalia National Army (SNA) efforts in executing these tasks.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:42:07|Editor: Zhou Xin
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Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Martin Schulz (C) arrives for a meeting with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the Bellevue Palace in Berlin, capital of Germany, on Nov. 23, 2017. (Xinhua/Shan Yuqi)
BERLIN, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The seek for a new German government is moving to a new stage, as the leadership of the German Social Democrats (SPD) on Monday gave its approval to a potential relaunch of a "grand coalition" with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU).
German media reported that the SPD leadership was in favor of entry into talks over the formation of a new government without any fixed expectations of the result. Katrin Budde, Governor of Saxony-Anhalt, was the only member of the party's governing committee to abstain from her vote.
The decision cleared a significant hurdle left for Germany to resolve its current political impasse after the collapse of "Jamaica" coalition negotiations.
"Jamaica" refers to the traditional colors of the three parties, the Union (black), the FDP (yellow) and the Greens (green) coincide with that of the Caribbean state's national flag.
However, SPD leader Martin Schulz has announced that a final decision will only be made by the Social Democratic base at the upcoming party conference on Thursday.
The SPD felt "obliged to explore in talks, whether and how the SPD can support a new federal government," a resolution produced by the party leadership on Monday read.
The document further stated that "there was no prior determination (of a political course of action) and no automatism (towards a grand coalition)." Another option that is still being considered alongside a new "grand-coalition" is for the SPD to lend its legislative support to a CDU/CSU minority government.
The SPD governing committee will assess the outcome of discussions with the CDU and CSU and make a subsequent recommendation on the basis. The party base will be able to vote on a blueprint for the start of preliminary talks on Thursday, as well as on the transition to official coalition negotiations thereafter.
The published blueprint lists a number of "essential" points which must be met for the SPD to consider cooperating with a cabinet led by veteran Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU). These include harmonizing corporate taxation throughout the European Union (EU) and introducing a system of EU-wide minimum wages, both of which are likely to prove thorny subjects in prospective negotiations.
Furthermore, the SPD is calling for reforms to Germany's pensions and healthcare system, as well as raising taxes on the top income bracket to generate funds for public investment in education, faster internet speeds, roadworks and affordable housing.
Yet even before Schulz has the chance to clash with the CDU and CSU over these issues, the former president of the European Parliament is widely-anticipated to face considerable resistance to a renewal of the "grand-coalition" at Thursday's party conference.
The SPD youth organization has launched a "no grand-coalition" campaign, lending voice to fears that the party could become even further marginalized with regards to its voter share during another official term in the shadow of Merkel. This sentiment is shared by some senior party members, including Manuela Schwesig, governor of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Malu Dreyer, governor of Rhineland-Palatinate.
The conference will also decide Schulz's personal future in the SPD as he seeks another term as party leader.
Immediately after his electoral defeat in September, Schulz originally vowed to return with his party to the opposition benches. He only recently softened his stance after a dramatic appeal by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier after the Free Democratic Party (FDP) triggered the collapse of "Jamaica" coalition negotiations and thrust Germany into a rare moment of political crisis.
A Forsa opinion poll for the broadcasters "RTL" and "ntv" showed on Monday that the FDP has haemorrhaged electoral support since the controversial decision to abandon "Jamaica" talks. Only 8 percent of respondents said they would now cast their vote for the FDP compared to a 10.7 percent voter share secured by the party in September's federal elections.
Photo taken on Nov. 29, 2017 shows the site of a car bombing attack in Aden, Yemen. (Xinhua/Murad)
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Sunday expressed concern over the recent escalation of armed conflict in Yemen, with other UN leaders demanding the immediate resumption of commercial shipments to Yemen for the sake of the starving population.
CONCERNS ABOUT NEW FIGHTING IN YEMEN
"The secretary-general is deeply concerned about the sharp escalation of armed clashes and airstrikes in (the capital city of) Sanaa and other parts of Yemen over the past several days," said Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric in a statement.
"This latest outbreak of violence could not come at a worse time for the Yemeni people, who are already caught up in the world's largest humanitarian crisis," said the statement, referring to the clashes between Houthi rebels and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two forces were previous allies against forces loyal to President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.
The new clashes, which broke out on Wednesday in Sanaa and then spread to other parts of the country, have resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, including civilians.
The secretary-general called on all parties to the conflict to cease all air and ground assaults, said the statement.
The new conflict and the blockade imposed on Nov. 6 by the Saudi-led military coalition, which is fighting Houthi rebels, have caused significant shortages of critical supplies, especially food and fuel, and resulted in price hikes, curtailing access to food, safe water and healthcare, said the statement.
"The secretary-general calls for the urgent resumption of all commercial imports, without which millions of children, women and men risk mass hunger, disease and death."
Although the Saudi-led coalition has partially lifted the blockade, UN humanitarian shipments still face impediments.
"Fighting is restricting the movement of people and life-saving services within Sanaa city. Ambulances and medical teams cannot access the injured, and people cannot go outside to buy food and other necessities. Aid workers are unable to travel and implement critical life-saving programs at a time when millions of Yemenis rely on assistance to survive," said the statement.
The secretary-general called on all parties to the conflict to abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law. "It is paramount that civilians are protected, that the wounded are afforded safe access to medical care, and that all sides facilitate life-saving humanitarian access."
Guterres reiterated that there is no military solution to the Yemen conflict. He urged all parties to the conflict to engage meaningfully with the United Nations to revitalize inclusive negotiations on a political settlement.
JOINT CALL FOR LIFTING BLOCKADE
In a joint statement on Saturday, leaders of various UN agencies called on the Saudi-led coalition to immediately allow the resumption of commercial imports, especially food, fuel and medicines to Yemen.
"Without the urgent resumption of commercial imports, especially food, fuel and medicines, millions of children, women and men risk mass hunger, disease and death," warned World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, UN Development Programme head Achim Steiner, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, UNICEF chief Anthony Lake, World Food Programme head David Beasley, International Organization for Migration Director General William Lacy Swing, and UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock.
The partial lifting of the blockade of Yemen's Red Sea ports by the Saudi-led coalition in recent days is allowing humanitarian organizations to resume the provision of life-saving assistance to people in desperate need.
Ongoing commercial import restrictions have led to shortages of fuel, food and other essentials, driving up prices and devastating lives and livelihoods. The price of wheat flour has risen by 30 percent, while the price of fuel has doubled and that of trucked water has skyrocketed by 600 percent in some locations, said the statement.
Urban water networks in seven cities have run out of water and now depend on humanitarian organizations to fill in the gap. Other cities will shortly be in a similar situation if the blockade is not lifted, which would leave 11 million people without safe water.
In other areas, people are reducing their food consumption to dangerous levels in order to pay for the rising cost of water trucking, or are turning to contaminated water sources to meet their basic needs. This further compounds the risk of disease, especially among children, said the statement.
Less than half of the health facilities are functioning, and more hospitals and health centers will close should fuel and water supplies not improve. Sewage networks in six main cities are compromised, threatening a renewed spike in the country's cholera outbreak, which has reached almost 1 million suspected cases and killed over 2,200 people, it said.
"Yemen remains on the cusp of one of the largest famines in modern times," it said.
Nearly 400,000 children suffer from severe acute malnutrition and face an increased risk of death. More than 8 million people could starve without urgent food assistance coming into Yemen. With 90 percent of the country's food imported, the lack of commercial imports through Red Sea ports would alone push a further 3 million people into starvation, said the statement.
"The threat of widespread famine in a matter of months is very real," it warned.
This imminent catastrophe is entirely avoidable, but it requires immediate action by the Saudi-led coalition, said the statement.
While three ships carrying food have been granted permission to berth at Hudaydah seaport in recent days, four fuel tankers and 10 ships carrying food have all been waiting for permission to enter port, it noted.
"Together, we call on the coalition to urgently open up all Yemeni Red Sea ports fully and to facilitate the entry and free flow of humanitarian and vital commercial goods," it said.
UN Special Envoy for Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed on Saturday stressed the need to protect civilians as clashes broke out between the rebel alliance in the Arab world's poorest country.
"We are deeply concerned by the implications of these events on the civilian population," said Ahmed in a statement. "We urge the parties to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law including their obligations to respect the principle of distinction, proportionality and precaution. All sides must exercise restraint and ensure that their attacks are never directed at civilians or civilian objects. We caution against the serious impact of armed violence against civilians."
He called on the parties to urgently come to the negotiating table and to engage in the peace process. A political solution is the only way out of the prolonged conflict in Yemen, said Ahmed.
A civil war has been raging in Yemen since 2015, pitting forces loyal to former President Saleh against his successor Hadi, who was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia. A Saudi-led military coalition started a military campaign against the forces loyal to Saleh and the Houthi rebels who were fighting alongside them, in a bid to restore the Hadi-led government.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:57:14|Editor: Zhou Xin
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TOKYO, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Some 70 business leaders, former senior officials, experts and scholars exchanged views on enhancing bilateral cooperation at the third round of Sino-Japanese Entrepreneurs and Former High-level Officials Dialogue that kicked off in Tokyo on Monday.
Zeng Peiyan, former Chinese vice premier and Chairman of China Center for International Economic Exchanges, and Yasuo Fukuda, former Japanese premier, are among the participants of the dialogue.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and political heavyweights attended a reception of the dialogue Monday evening.
Abe said at the reception that Japan and China are close neighbors, and the two sides have reached an agreement on consolidating and enhancing the momentum for improvement in bilateral ties, deepening bilateral and multilateral cooperation in various areas and jointly exploring third party markets during a meeting of leaders of the two countries last month.
He said that the Sino-Japanese entrepreneurs and former high-level officials dialogue is playing a more and more important role in promoting pragmatic cooperation between the two sides and he hopes the dialogue could continue to provide new impetus to bilateral economic cooperation.
Zeng said that Chinese leaders attach great importance to bilateral relationship with Japan, and China has been constantly advocating pushing for the steady and long-term development of bilateral relations based on the four important political documents between China and Japan and in the spirit of taking history as a mirror while facing forward to the future.
As this year marks the 45th anniversary of the normalization of China-Japan diplomatic ties, leaders of both China and Japan expressed their wishes to enhance bilateral ties, Zeng said.
He added that while the steady development of bilateral ties is in the interests of both sides, economic and trade cooperation is one of the most important mutual interests of the two sides and serves as a bedrock of bilateral relations.
It is sincerely hoped that the two sides could further enhance mutual trust and create a better political environment for bilateral economic and trade cooperation, Zeng added.
The Sino-Japanese entrepreneurs and former high-level officials dialogue, coorganized by China Center for International Economic Exchanges and Japan Business Federation and held in Japan and China alternatively, is aimed at enhancing mutual trust and understanding between entrepreneurs of the two countries and providing positive energy for bilateral relations.
At the third round of dialogue held this year, participants exchanged views on new ideas of economic and trade cooperation, with the focus on trade, investment and industry cooperation as well as third-party market exploration.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-04 23:57:15|Editor: yan
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SRINAGAR, Indian-controlled Kashmir, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Two militants and a trooper were killed, while another trooper was wounded Monday in a gunfight in restive Indian-controlled Kashmir, police said.
The gunfight erupted at village Nussu Badergund, Qazigund of Anantnag district, about 75 km south of Srinagar city, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir.
An Indian army spokesman Col. Rajesh Kalia told Xinhua they have killed two militants in the stand-off.
"Two militants were killed this evening in a gunfight at Nussu Badergund, while as a soldier was martyred and another wounded fighting them," Kalia said.
According to Kalia the operation in the area was in progress.
"Initially militants ambushed an army convoy near Bounigam village, during which an Indian army trooper was wounded," a police official said. "The trooper was immediately removed to hospital in Srinagar."
However, army chased the militants, who took refuge inside a residential house and fired upon them, triggering a fierce gunfight.
Locals said they heard heavy gunfire and sound of blasts.
"The gunfight began after contingents of army and police cordoned off the locality especially the suspected house," Ghulam Hassan, a local told Xinhua. "The sound of gunfire and blasts reverberated in entire area."
Police said protests broke out in the village during the gunfight with locals clashing with government forces.
People assembling at gunfight sites in support of militants and attacking government forces with stones has evolved as a new phenomenon of resistance in the region.
Meanwhile, region's Police Chief, Shesh Paul Vaid said they have recovered two bodies of militants.
Anti-India sentiment runs deep in the psyche of majority of Kashmiris. Irate residents defying curfew and restrictions took to roads and clash with police.
A guerilla war is going on between militants and Indian troops stationed in Indian-controlled Kashmir since 1989. The gunfight between the two sides takes place intermittently across the region.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:02:17|Editor: Zhou Xin
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HANGZHOU, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- On Nov. 28, Yuan Xiaolin personally handed over the keys to the 100,000th Volvo vehicle owner in the Chinese market in 2017, marking a new annual sales record.
Yuan, senior vice president of Volvo Car Group, said an annual sale of 100,000 vehicles in China will be a normal thing for the company in the future.
In the past three years, Volvo's global sales have seen significant growth, especially in China, which has become its biggest market. In 2015, Volvo sold 81,588 vehicles in the country. A year later, sales jumped to 90,930.
Back in 2010, only 22,000 Volvo cars were sold in China that year. The good performance in the Chinese market has become a strong impetus for reviving Volvo brand glory.
The success is traced to technology and market cooperation between the group and Geely, the company which acquired Volvo in 2010. The powerful supporting ability of Chinese manufacturing industry and the comparatively cheap labor in China also contribute to Volvo's success.
The acquisition has benefited both Volvo and Geely.
For Volvo, China has become a key link in Volvo's manufacturing strategy.
From 2015, Volvo's S60 Inscription models, manufactured in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, started to be exported to the United States. This year, Volvo's S90 models, produced in Daqing, in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, have been transported to Belgium via trains connecting China and Europe.
Volvo Car Group CEO Hakan Samuelsson said that China will play an increasingly important role in the group's global manufacturing strategy.
While Volvo continues to make breakthroughs, Geely has also gone through a transformation. Seven years after the acquisition, it has gained more reputation and stepped up efforts to expand globally.
On the same day that Yuan handed over the keys, the jointly developed LYNK 01 hit the market in Zhejiang Province. The car's manufacturer, Lynk & Co, uses Volvo engines and scalable platform architecture, while employing Geely's compact modular architecture and transmission.
In June, Geely signed an agreement to acquire a 49.9 percent stake in Malaysian automaker Proton. In November, Geely's Belarus factory was completed. Sedans made in the factory will be sold in Belarus, as well as in other Eurasian Economic Union member countries.
Geely plans to make more breakthroughs, cooperate with others and become a leader in the global auto industry, according to Li Shufu, Geely chairman.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:07:19|Editor: Yang Yi
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Brigitte Macron (2nd L), wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, looks at a panda baby before a naming ceremony in Saint-Aignan, France, on Dec. 4, 2017. Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, revealed the name of the panda baby, the first-ever cub born in the country, at a naming ceremony at a zoo in central France on Monday. Joined by Chinese officials, Brigitte Macron, who is also the new panda's godmother, announced that the four-month-old cub's name was Yuan Meng. (Xinhua/Chen Yichen)
PARIS, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, revealed the name of the panda baby, the first-ever cub born in the country, at a naming ceremony at a zoo in central France on Monday.
Joined by Chinese officials, Brigitte Macron, who is also the new panda's godmother, announced that the four-month-old cub's name was Yuan Meng.
Born on Aug. 4, the baby panda had been called as "Mini Yuan Zi," referring to his father Yuan Zi, who arrived with his female partner Huan Huan in central France's Beauval zoo in January 2012.
"Yuan Meng is the energetic and vigorous fruit of the Franco-Chinese friendship," said Macron.
"Yuan Meng and his parents are the illustration of a dialogue that has always been fruitful between our two countries who, for centuries, have got along and understood each other," she added.
The panda baby who will return home to China at the age of three, can be seen by visitors to the zoo as of Jan. 13.
On Aug. 4, Huan Huan gave birth to twin cubs, the first panda babies born in France. She took care of the first cub immediately after its birth, but abandoned the first after the second cub was born, a common practice among pandas.
In the wild, female pandas raise only one cub, the "strongest", the one that has the most chances of survival.
There are about 2,000 pandas in the world. They are classified as a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:07:21|Editor: yan
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KAMPALA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Uganda's ministry of health on Monday appealed to nurses and midwives to call off their planned strike scheduled to start Tuesday.
Minister of Health Ruth Aceng told Xinhua that the government is working to address the demands of nurses and midwives for higher salaries, allowances, health coverage and better working conditions.
"We ask the nurses and midwives to call off the planned strike and continue to work normally as their concerns are already being handled by the government," Aceng said.
In a Nov. 30 circular to over 21,000 nurses and midwives, Paul Byenkya, general secretary of Uganda Nurses and Midwives Union (UNMU), asked the union members to lay down their tools effective Tuesday to protest over low pay, allowances and poor working conditions.
"Following UNMU's submission to government demanding the implementation of schemes of service for nursing and midwifery cadres, salary increment and allowances, the government has not responded," Byenkya said. "Therefore, the scheduled date for laying down tools still remains Tuesday."
The strike comes barely two weeks after doctors on Nov. 25 halted a three-week strike following government commitment to increase salaries and improve working conditions in public hospitals by Dec. 15.
The nationwide nurses and midwives strike is expected to paralyze operations in public hospitals and health facilities.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:07:22|Editor: yan
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BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- You Quan, head of the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, met with a visiting delegation of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce (HKGCC) in Beijing Monday.
You, also member of the CPC Central Committee Secretariat, said that he hoped the HKGCC could comprehensively and precisely implement the "one country, two systems" principle and the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
He said upholding the principle of "one country, two systems" and promoting national reunification in Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era is fundamental guarantee for the practice of "one country, two systems" and maintaining lasting prosperity and stability in Hong Kong.
You also stressed the importance of taking care of Hong Kong's younger generation, noting that the tradition of "loving the motherland and loving Hong Kong" needed to be passed on.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:17:24|Editor: yan
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BUCHAREST, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Over 4,600 people have applied for international protection in Romania since the start of the year, the General Inspectorate for Immigration (IGI) announced Monday in a release.
Most of the applicants are from Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, said the IGI release, adding that the last group of people.
Since the beginning of this year, the number of refugees who entered Romania across the Black Sea has increased noticeably, with frequent news reporting about refugee boats intercepted by the Romanian Coast Guard.
There were 1,886 asylum applications in 2016, up 49 percent from 2015, according to earlier data provided by immigration authorities.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:17:25|Editor: yan
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KAMPALA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Ugandan military said on Monday it has begun the withdrawal of 281 peacekeepers as part of condition-based drawdown of its over 6,000 troops deployed in Somalia.
Ugandan military spokesperson Brig. Richard Karemire told Xinhua that phased withdrawal is in compliance with the African Union- and United Nations-approved reduction of 1,000 uniformed personnel serving under African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) by the Dec. 31 deadline.
"The reduction has already started and UPDF (Uganda People's Defense Force) shall be in compliance by Dec. 31 as required by UN Security Council Resolution 2372," said Karemire.
In August 2017, the UN Security Council extended the mandate of AMISOM until May 31, 2018, and approved a reduction of its uniformed personnel to a maximum 21,626 by Dec. 31, 2017, with an eye toward the gradual handover of responsibilities to Somali security forces.
Special Representative of the African Union Chairperson for Somalia Francisco Madeira announced last month that some 1,000 soldiers from the 22,000 strong regional force will be withdrawn from the Horn of Africa country by Dec. 31.
AMISOM is comprised of troops drawn from Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti who are deployed in six sectors covering south and central Somalia.
Karemire said the phased withdrawal of troops and gradual handover of security responsibilities will be based on the ability of the Somali National Security Forces to ably take over the country's security.
As part of the military drawdown, the pan-African body will deploy an extra 500 police officers to strengthen training and mentoring for Somali police.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:22:27|Editor: yan
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KIGALI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Rwanda on Monday launched a nationwide campaign for green growth to promote and share experience on green growth and climate resilient strategy.
The five-day Green Growth Week was unveiled during a high-level policy dialogue on the country's Green Growth and Climate Resilience Strategy in the Rwandan capital Kigali. It is in line with the progressive green policy-making around the globe.
The Rwanda's green growth week, set to conclude Friday, will review progress and advance aspirations in implementing the country's green growth and climate resilience strategy, according to the Rwandan ministry of environment.
Rwandan focuses on achieving green economy and this will be done through numerous campaigns geared towards promoting the green growth and climate resilience strategy across the country, said Rwandan minister of environment Vincent Biruta at the launch.
The week will provide a platform for policymakers, practitioners and partners from various sectors to contribute to Rwanda's green growth agenda, strengthen climate services, and promote awareness of green cities and buildings and their development, said the minister.
"The Rwanda's green growth week is timely given the work we have recently undertaken to develop sector strategic plans and the national strategy for transformation. We can only achieve these national development targets if green growth is at the heart of everything we do," he said.
The green growth week will feature the launch of the construction of Mageragere wastewater treatment plant in Mageragere sector, Nyarugenge district in the Kigali city suburbs, and two technical workshops -- one on establishing a national framework for climate services and the other on project development and financing for district officials, according to the Rwandan ministry of environment.
The week will conclude with a "green walk" in Kigali on Friday, according to organizers.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:27:28|Editor: yan
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BERLIN, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- German police launched a regional manhunt on Monday after an unknown suspect sent explosives by post last Friday to a Potsdam pharmacy near a Christmas market in an attempt to blackmail the parcel delivery service DHL.
Spokesperson of the Brandenburg Police Office Torsten Herbst said on public broadcaster ZDF that his forces were looking for a perpetrator active in the region around Potsdam where the suspicious package was delivered.
The recipients became aware of the potentially lethal danger posed by the device due to the discovery of wires and paint marks. Police were subsequently able to defuse the bomb. German civilians have since been warned by Brandenburg's governor Karl-Heinz Schroeter (SPD) not to open suspicious mail and to contact authorities.
The author of a letter addressed to the affected Potsdam pharmacy threatened to send further mail bombs unless DHL gives in to their demands for a payment of millions of euros. Security forces currently assume that an individual perpetrator is responsible for the blackmailing attempt, but haven't ruled out the possibly that a larger group could be behind the attack.
Meanwhile, Thuringia governor Bodo Ramelow told press that a second DHL package which may have contained a live grenade was confiscated at the Thuringian State Chancellery in Erfurt on Monday.
Nevertheless, Ramelow described reports which explicitly linked the separate incidents as "pure speculation" at this point.
Police confirmed on Monday that they had already received two dozen tips from the public about the identity of the mail bomber without yet having found a promising lead. A special investigatory commission of around 50 officers has been formed in an urgent bid to solve the case.
German authorities believe that the same perpetrator also sent an explosive device via mail in November which caught fire when it was opened by an online mail order company in Frankfurt.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:32:30|Editor: yan
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WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Labor Department on Monday signaled that it would scrap a Barack Obama era legislation that bans employers from pooling workers' tip.
In a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the Labor Department said workplaces "would have the freedom to allow sharing of tips among more employees."
"The proposal would help decrease wage disparities between tipped and non-tipped workers -- an option that is currently restricted by a rule promulgated in 2011 that has been challenged in a number of courts," the Labor Department said.
The Labor Department noted that "back of the house" employees, such as cooks and dish washers, contribute to the overall customer experience, but may receive less compensation than their traditionally tipped co-workers.
Tip regulations are included in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, according to the 2011 adjustment, employers were not allowed to pool tips among all employees.
Restaurant advocate groups have been fighting against the tip pooling ban, which they said adds to pay disparity between different restaurant employees, while some worker advocates worry there may not be enough oversight to ensure that employers redistribute the tip fairly.
The notice would be available for public comment for 30 days starting on Dec.5.
Tipping has been a tradition in the U.S. service industry for about a century, where small amount of money is customarily, though not mandatorily, given to waiters, taxi drivers, among others.
There has been increasing discussion in the U.S. media on whether the culture should be observed.
Some argue that in effect tipping does not necessarily improve the standard of service, and service establishments may take advantage of the culture to pay employees less.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:52:38|Editor: yan
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VILNIUS, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A number of imported used cars from Germany, which are considered as waste and can't be used on Lithuanian roads, significantly increased recently, Lithuania's state enterprise Regitra responsible for registering vehicles in the country announced on Monday.
According to a statement released by Regitra, Lithuanian buyers tend to be misled by a friendly price and good external condition of used German cars, however, it appears in Lithuania that the vehicle can't be used due to certain requirements.
"Most often we consider the vehicle inappropriate for exploitation or waste in cases when the car is crashed or mechanically irregular. However, some of the vehicles being transported from Germany to Lithuania might have perfect exterior and nevertheless, be not eligible for registration as they do not meet some standards, such as European Union's carbon emission standards," Darius Jurgutis, director of Regitra, was quoted as saying in the statement.
He warned Lithuanian buyers to be cautious, and underscored that cars, which are considered as waste, are being sold illegally.
According to existing law, vehicles considered as waste in Lithuania or other countries, can't be included into official Regitra's register.
Regitra, however, did not elaborate on specific figures, such as the number of cars considered as waste that have been transported from Germany to Lithuania.
According to Jurgutis, Regitra approached the German's Federal Transport Authority in order to exchange information on possible illegal activities in Germany's used car market.
Regitra advised Lithuanian drivers who plan to acquire a used German car to carefully evaluate the vehicle's documentation and follow certain rules which indicate that the car might be not eligible for exploitation.
Regitra operates under Lithuania's Ministry of the Interior. It keeps the registration of vehicles and vehicle drivers in the country.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 00:57:40|Editor: yan
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KAMPALA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Ugandan military and police officers on Monday joined their regional counterparts for a two-week joint East Africa Community (EAC) command post exercise on peace support operation, counter terrorism and disaster management.
Lt. Col. Deo Akiiki, Ugandan deputy military spokesperson, told Xinhua that the officers will participate along the other five EAC partner states armies and police in the exercise code named "CPX USHIRIKIANO IMARA 2017" that kicked off on Monday in the Tanzanian city of Dar-es-salaam.
Uganda on Friday dispatched a team of 40 military and police officers for the two-week joint command post exercise that kicked off on Monday until Dec.17.
"The exercise is aimed at improving the skills of the troops to deal with instability and security in the EAC region," said Akiiki.
At least 240 military, police and civilians from the EAC partner states of Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and South Sudan will participate in the command post exercise.
The exercise aims at engaging the EAC armed forces and civilians in the planning and conduct of integrated peace support operation, disaster management, counter-terrorism and counter-piracy in order to improve capabilities to jointly combat complex security challenges.
Security remains a primary concern for the EAC partner states due to instability in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Somalia.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 01:02:41|Editor: Lu Hui
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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang holds a welcome ceremony for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau before the second meeting of the Annual Dialogue between the Chinese premier and the Canadian prime minister in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2017. (Xinhua/Zhang Duo)
BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- China and Canada Monday agreed to issue a joint statement on climate change and clean growth during the second meeting of the Annual Dialogue between the Chinese premier and the Canadian prime minister.
The two sides also agreed to establish two ministerial-level dialogues between their respective departments of environment and clean energy.
During the talks with visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang affirmed the positive roles of the annual dialogue between prime ministers, the annual meeting of foreign ministers, economic and financial strategic dialogue, as well as the national security and rule of law dialogue.
He called on the two countries to expand common interests on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.
Li suggested the two sides expand two-way investment, encourage enterprises of the two countries to invest in each other and jointly explore third-party markets.
He called on the two sides to tap cooperation potential in areas such as clean technology, aviation and aerospace, civilian nuclear energy and agricultural science.
Li said the two sides should promote cultural exchanges and successfully run the China-Canada "Year of Tourism" next year.
He said he hoped the two countries could strengthen communication and coordination in international and regional affairs and join hands in coping with global challenges including climate change.
"China and Canada, both as important countries in the Asia-Pacific region and major trading countries in the world, should send positive signals on promoting trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, which is also in the common interests of both sides," Li said. "China will open its door even wider to the outside world," he said, promising that "China's business environment will get better and better, and China will continue to be a hot destination for international investments."
Trudeau said he appreciated the achievements of China's economic development and China's role in international affairs.
He said Canada was willing to work with China to maintain high-level exchanges, enhance economic and trade cooperation, expand people-to-people exchanges and promote friendship in the spirit of mutual benefit.
"Canada supports free trade and has actively participated in the globalization process," Trudeau said. "Canada will strengthen communication and coordination with China to jointly advance globalization and free trade to make a contribution to the sustainable development of the world."
After their talks, the two leaders witnessed the signing of three cooperative documents on education, food safety and energy.
Li told the press that both sides had agreed to discuss the feasibility of a China-Canada free trade agreement with a pragmatic and open attitude.
Trudeau called for more closer cooperation in dealing with global challenges such as climate change.
He said Canada was ready to work with China to "push forward cooperation in tourism, education, culture and people-to-people exchanges, in a bid to promote common prosperity and build long-term, stable and dynamic Canada-China ties."
Before their talks, Li held a welcome ceremony for Trudeau at the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 01:52:54|Editor: Zhou Xin
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JUBA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan said on Monday that it hopes to benefit from rising global oil prices to shore up its battered economy in the wake of more than three years of brutal violence that cut off production in its northern oil fields.
Minister of Petroleum Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth told journalists that the market is appreciating after pump price peaked 65 U.S. dollars per barrel a day (bpd) on the global market, which he said benefits the war-torn country to earn more revenue accrued from its oil.
"The oil market is appreciating now very well the oil price is going up its 65 dollars a barrel and yet in South Sudan it's something we need to cerebrate because our economy is driven by oil. We are going very well in the oil industry," Gatkuoth said in Juba after arriving from attending the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meeting in Vienna.
He added that global oil price is very good and that both OPEC and non-OPEC members like South Sudan have agreed to continue with the oil cap to stabilize the market.
South Sudan depends 98 percent on oil to finance its fiscal budget and the 2017/18 approved budget totaled to 300 million dollars.
Gatkuoth revealed that production has since declined due to conflict and they were working to improve on current output.
"If you look at the production in Dar Petroleum or DPOC in Paloch, we used to produce 270,000 bpd but now we are producing 135-140,000 bpd. Then if you go to GPOC we used to produce close to 200,000 barrels a day but now we are producing zero. So we have agreed with Sudan to resume the production there," he disclosed.
In October, President Salva Kiir and his Sudan counterpart Omar Bashir met in Khartoum and agreed to speed up resumption of oil production.
Gatkuoth also said that oil giants Total and Tullow were coming to invest in some of the country's oil blocks.
"Total is coming back for B1, B2 and you have Tullow being committed to making sure that we are going to seal the deal with them. After the oil conference here in Juba a lot of oil companies are interested to come to South Sudan," he said.
Meanwhile, he also said that they were in talks with regional countries like Kenya and Uganda to construct oil pipeline that will cater for mostly the oil in the southern part of South Sudan, while the oil in the northern part continues to flow through Sudan.
"In the southern part of South Sudan we will have to have an alternative pipeline, but the oil that are actually in the northern part they will continue to go to Sudan. So we are in discussion with Uganda and Kenya to see alternative route that can be used," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 02:23:04|Editor: yan
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NAIROBI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) on Monday launched a secure digital radio system to help improve its efficiency in wildlife surveillance in the country and thus protect elephants and rhinos from poachers.
KWS said a 7 million U.S. dollars digital radio system extended to Kenya by the French government is capable of covering a wide area compared to the previous analogue system, besides being configured to send audio and text messages.
"The system has the capability of transmitting data as well as GPS tracking among other features that are set to revitalize wildlife protection and management by KWS," the wildlife agency said in a statement issued in Nairobi.
It said radio system will also help improve communication among security personnel in three KWS conservation areas -- Tsavo, Southern and Central Rift where rampant poaching is.
French Minister for Ecological and Inclusive Transition Nicolas Hulot, who commissioned the digital radio system in Nairobi, said the system is secure with inbuilt encryption and the sound is clearer.
The minister said France is encouraged by the stringent efforts KWS is making to conserve and manage wildlife, noting wildlife security is mainly dependent on timely intelligence communication among security personnel.
Wildlife conservationists have decried the entry of organized crime syndicates into the illegal wildlife trade, most notably of rhino horn and elephant ivory, which they said, has created a crisis situation in many African countries.
Kenya says the wanton killing of elephants, rhino and other wildlife species is having a huge impact on the tourism sector and the authorities have stepped up surveillance on traffickers of ivory.
Heavily-armed criminals kill elephants and rhinos for their tusks, which are used for ornaments and in some folk medicines.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 03:18:19|Editor: yan
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TIRANA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama on Monday announced the launch of a legal initiative to insure households and businesses from floods.
The move aims to provide cover for flood-related damages to businesses and households and serve as a mechanism that would reduce the country's significant fiscal exposure to disasters.
Speaking at the Civil Emergency Coordination Committee meeting, Rama said that Albania was the only country that had not endorsed such a law and this was why flood-hit people were left adrift waiting from the state budget.
"It is needed that all Albanian people and enterprises should be aware, like in any normal country, to insure households and businesses from floods," Rama said at the meeting.
Such proposal is made at a time when most of Albania's territory is under water due to the massive floods that swept Albania in recent days.
Rama said that the past investments proved beneficiary to the diminished results of the disaster, however, he added that it was crucial to make a number of interventions so that river beds and forest green belts were restored.
Meanwhile, referring to the data published by the Albanian Financial Supervisory Authority (AFSA), it turns out that Albanian citizens are not very interested in insuring their house, property or businesses against the natural disaster damages.
AFSA data showed Monday that some 32,725 contracts were issued in insurance against Fire and Natural Forces portfolio for the ten-month period from January through October this year, down from 35,891 insurance contracts issued during the same period of in 2016.
Liu Yunshan (C), a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, attends an unveiling ceremony of the Confucius Institute of Kiev State Linguistic University in Kiev, Ukraine, Sept. 6, 2013. (Ma Zhancheng)
KIEV, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Confucius Institute of the Kiev National Taras Shevchenko University (KNU) on Monday was awarded the Order of Glory, a Ukrainian award recognizing individuals and organizations actively involved in promoting Ukrainian ties with other countries.
The Confucius Institute of the KNU won the prize for its "significant contribution to the development of Ukrainian-Chinese cooperation in the field of education, science and culture."
Sun Kewen, the Chinese director of the KNU Confucius Institute, received the award during a ceremony in Kiev from Pavel Kochubinsky, the president of the All-Ukrainian Foundation for International Communication, known as the "Ukrainian People's Embassy", under the patronage of Kraine's first president Leonid Kravchuk.
"On behalf of the first Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, I want to present the Order of Glory to the Confucius Institute of the KNU for its outstanding achievements in raising the level of cultural and scientific cooperation" between Ukraine and China, Kochubinsky told the ceremony.
For his part, Sun said it is an honor for the Confucius Institute of the KNU to receive such an award.
"In 2007, we signed an agreement on the creation of the Confucius Institute at the KNU. For these 10 years, we have trained about 10,000 people. The award that we have received today is recognition and acknowledgement of our merits," Sun said.
The Confucius Institute at the KNU was the second Confucius Institute set up in Ukraine.
Kravchuk was elected the first president of Ukraine after the country gained independence from the former Soviet Union via a referendum in December 1991, and served until July 19, 1994.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 03:33:23|Editor: yan
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ABUJA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Nigerian government on Monday said it will open up opportunities for collaboration among scientists the world over to take part in the study of the Atlantic Ocean, the second largest in the world.
Minister of Science and Technology Ogbonnaya Onu at a ceremony in Abuja told participants at a summit, which coincided with the opening of a fact-finding facility mainly set up for the studying of the Atlantic Ocean, that the West African country will deploy experts and welcome keen interest from scientists across the world to study the ocean with a total area of about 106,460,000 square kilometers.
Onu said the knowledge about space and the oceans is yet very limited, noting "both hold a lot of promise for the future of humanity."
The newly opened Atlantic International Research (AIR) Center placed Nigeria as a founding member of a world group to study the Atlantic Ocean, using science and technology tools, particularly in the application of space science and technology.
Onu, speaking at the summit, tagged "Science, Technology, and Nigeria/Portugal collaborative framework," said Nigeria's involvement in the study of the ocean could not be overemphasized, considering its large coastline bordering the ocean, its economic significance as well as huge population, to mention a few.
"The research facility will provide the opportunity for Nigerian scientists, engineers and allied professionals to join other scientists to study and explore the Atlantic Ocean to the benefit of Nigerians and other citizens in the world," the official added.
The Atlantic Ocean covers approximately 20 percent of the earth's surface and about 29 percent of its water surface area.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 03:33:25|Editor: yan
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JERUSALEM, Nov. 4 (Xinhua) -- Israel signed an agreement to join the U.S.-led Power Africa initiative here on Monday.
The agreement was signed between the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Power Africa, led by USAID, aims to connect 60 million African households to the electricity grid and add 30,000 megawatts to the power currently installed in the continent by 2030.
Israel joins the program as part of its campaign to strengthen economic ties and cooperation with African countries.
This is great partnership between Israel, the United States and Africa and this is an initiative that will electrify Africa literally and figuratively, said Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the singing ceremony.
It is said that the agreement is expected to create numerous business. Israeli companies in the energy field will be given priority in African projects as part of the agreement between Israel and the United States.
Following the agreement, Israeli companies are able to take part in the Power Africa initiative and will receive a diverse toolbox to promote power generation projects and to connect consumers across the continent.
Israel's international position has changed greatly because of Israeli technological prowess in bettering the lives of people in so many areas, said Netanyahu.
Power Africa is comprised of 12 U.S. government departments and agencies, and it is a diverse coalition of more than 140 public-private sector partners, including bilateral and multilateral partners, international organizations, civil-society organizations, and more than 130 private sector companies.
To date, the U.S. government has disbursed about 500 million U.S. dollars and made more than 2.6 billion U.S. dollars in financial commitments towards Power Africa's goals.
Israel helped agriculture in Africa in the 60s and now can help every realm of life in the beginning of the 21st century, said Netanyahu, "It's a remarkably positive development and we are going to continue this step after step."
China's success in bridging the gap between academia and the private sector was the highlight of a lead-up event over the weekend to the third United Nations Environment Assembly, the world's highest-level decision-making body on environmental issues, which is scheduled for Dec 4-6 in Nairobi, Kenya.
The lead-up event - the UN Science Policy Business Forum on the Environment - focused on private-sector green solutions to overcome the planet's pollution crisis and identified opportunities to grow green technology markets, driven by scientific advances.
More than 300 participants met to discuss how to strike a balance between building sustainable businesses and conserving the environment. Recommendations from the event will inform the assembly.
At the two-day event, themed "Science for Green Solutions", Chinese scholars explained how the country's timely response to global market demand is strengthening environmental conservation.
According to Li Fengting, deputy dean of the College of Environmental Science and Engineering at Tongji University in Shanghai, universities are playing a key role in the transformation of businesses located in special economic zones. Those businesses have been hailed as the engines of China's economic fortunes.
The university entered into a joint venture with the private sector in the development of Tongji-Rim Intellectual Economic Zone, currently China's largest industrial design cluster.
"The joint venture started small, at about $151 million. A decade later, cash flow has grown to $5 billion. It contributes about 1 percent to Shanghai's GDP. This model is very successful and we are replicating it here in Africa," Li said, adding that collaborations have been created with universities in Kenya, Zambia and Ethiopia.
Chen Tian, deputy secretary-general of the Beijing municipal government, said in the forum session called "Tackling Beijing's Air Pollution Challenge: Lessons Learned" that Beijing is willing to cooperate with cities in Africa.
"The challenge Beijing is facing today will be the challenge African cities must meet tomorrow," Chen said, "We will be happy to share our experience with African countries through training and some joint research projects."
At the session, Chen shared with academia and enterprises the measures, effects, experience and lessons learned from Beijing's air pollution control efforts. Chen has been involved in crafting environmental protection policies in the capital over the past 20 years.
"Through 20 years of pollution control, Beijing has fostered a great environmental protection industry, which has provided services for economic growth," he said.
Liu Jian, the UN Environment Programme's chief scientist, said environmental issues need to move up the priority list for key stakeholders.
"There are 12.6 million people dying of pollution yearly. Everyone needs to be candid about this conversation and play their part," he said during the opening session of the UN Science Policy Business Forum on the Environment.
He said the need to bridge the gap between academia, entrepreneurs and policymakers is urgent because the consequences of ignorance will be difficult to reverse in the future.
"The private sector needs to take its own initiative. It should be the agent of change," he said.
Contact the writers at panzhongming@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 12/04/2017 page4)
Ukrainians stand knelt in front of the memorial to victims of anti-government protests at Maidan in Kiev, Ukraine, during the second anniversary of the Euromaidan Revolution on November 22, 2015. (Xinhua/SIPA)
KIEV, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- More than 2,500 civilians were killed and about 9,000 others injured in eastern Ukraine since the start of an armed conflict in April 2014, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Monday.
In its "Ukraine Humanitarian Needs Overview 2018" report published here on Monday, the OCHA said that about 200,000 people living along the contact line between government troops and pro-independence insurgents are regularly experiencing the injury or loss of their loved ones or neighbors.
About 1,500 clashes between the conflicting sides occur near the contact line each month, endangering civilians, the report said.
Landmines and other remnants of war also pose a threat to people, it said.
Later in the day, the special monitoring mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which observes the situation in eastern Ukraine, said that at least 400 civilians were either killed or injured in the conflict this year.
In April 2014, the Ukrainian government started a military operation against armed groups, who seized cities and towns in Donbas region and declared independence from Kiev.
The confrontation has snowballed into the violent conflict, which has killed more than 10,000 civilians and combatants and left about 24,000 injured.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 04:03:34|Editor: Zhou Xin
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Palestinians say the U.S. will set off "ticking bomb" if it recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moves US embassy to Jerusalem. (AFP Photo)
By Keren Setton
JERUSALEM, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- In a welcome move to some and a controversial move to others, U.S. President Donald Trump is reportedly expected to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital later this week.
Any such announcement has inflammatory potential in an already volatile region.
Israel has controlled the western part of Jerusalem since its inception in 1948. In 1967, after the Mideast war, Israel captured the eastern part of Jerusalem from Jordan and declared both parts it's united capital.
The move was never recognized by the international community, including Israel's closest ally, the U.S..
The Palestinians see eastern Jerusalem as the future capital of their state.
Jerusalem is home to all of the Israeli government offices and while foreign embassies are situated in Tel Aviv, dealings with the Israeli government are done largely in Jerusalem, the capital that no one recognizes.
Jerusalem is home to sites holy to Islam, Judaism and Christianity, making it a focal point for many people around the globe.
Now, in what seems to be an attempt to appease both Israel and his constituents on the evangelical right, Trump may recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital in order to cushion the blow on an undelivered election promise, transferring the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, another controversial move.
It is still unclear, however, whether the U.S. will make such a move, and if so, will it recognize both sides of Jerusalem as Israel's capital? Or just the western side?
"Trump is a friend of Israel and he thinks that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and recognizing the historic links between the Jews and the city is the right thing to do," Prof. Efraim Inbar, President of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, told Xinhua.
Inbar believed Trump will be "ambiguous" about what part of Jerusalem the U.S. will recognize.
"Nobody really disputes Israeli sovereignty over west Jerusalem," Inbar added. While there is a de-facto recognition of western Jerusalem as Israel's capital, this sovereignty remains unrecognized by the whole of the international community.
Up until now, both Israelis and Americans have repeatedly said that the status of Jerusalem needs to be determined in bilateral negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis.
American media has quoted U.S. Defense officials saying a new policy on Jerusalem would endanger American diplomatic missions worldwide, further highlighting how delicate the matter is.
On Sunday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned that such a move would jeopardize renewed American efforts to promote a deal between Palestinians and Israelis. These efforts come years after stalemate between the sides and have yet to materialize into anything meaningful or concrete.
The Palestinians have also warned of violence in response to any American move.
"The Palestinians...have always been threatening that it will be the end of the world and the end of the peace process and the beginning of war, but there is no peace process and the Middle East is a war zone anyway...so those threats don't really make any sense," Prof. Emmanuel Navon told Xinhua.
Navon is a professor of international relations at the Tel Aviv University and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies.
"I really do not believe a symbolic declaration from the U.S. government will make any difference in a region that is already falling apart," said Navon, referring to the political instability surrounding Israel, mainly in Syria and Lebanon. "This might be used as an excuse by Hamas (a Gaza-based Palestinian militant organization) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) for a surge in violence as it has done in the past," Navon added.
"Even if there will be some kind of wave of violence as a result of an American decision, it will eventually die down, it will not continue for long," said Prof. Inbar.
But any wave of violence, lengthy or not, will result in loss of life on both sides.
A group of about 25 Israeli activists who have held senior positions in the Israeli government in the past sent an urgent letter on Monday to Trump's senior advisor, Jason Greenblatt.
In it, they warned of the implications of such a recognition.
"(This) will further deepen the asymmetry between the two sides, severely harm the prospects for peace and could ignite the entire region. It could severely harm the prospects for peace for generations to come," the letter signed by former Israeli Ambassador Ilan Baruch, read.
In a statement released by PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) Secretary General ahead of an expected announcement, Saeb Erekat said the move would promote "international anarchy."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has remained silent on the issue in recent days.
While Israel enjoys improved relations with Egypt recently, Egyptian officials have reportedly also warned of the American move. The flurry of warnings from the Arab world mean they are taking the reports of Trump's intent seriously.
But it is highly unlikely that an American move will result in a severing of ties between the few Arab countries that currently maintain relations, official or not, with Israel.
"These relations are primarily based on interests...this will continue," Prof. Inbar told Xinhua.
In a region accustomed to the cyclical nature of waves of violence, an announcement by the American president may in fact lead to a temporary upsurge. It will add more fuel into an already boiling cauldron.
But with Israel and much of the world treating Jerusalem as its de facto capital, there will unlikely be significant change on the ground.
Bee producers explain to visitors how honey is made and how a bee hive is organized and functions during the 9th Festival of Honey and Bee products in Neo Faliro, a southern suburb of Athens, Greece, on Dec. 3, 2017. (Xinhua/Lefteris Partsalis)
by Alexia Vlachou
ATHENS, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- It's a sweet gathering when over 250 bee products makers from across Greece gathered this weekend in Neo Faliro, southern Greece, to exchange their techniques and seek cooperation with traders from Europe and Asia.
Under the auspices of the agriculture and food ministry, experts, amateurs, and connoisseurs came together for three days for seminars, honey tastings, bee-keeping demonstrations, and children's shows. Meanwhile, chefs prepared honey-inspired dishes, sweets, and made cocktails.
"Within the nine years of the festival, we have seen small producers expand their small cottage industries to a level where they can export to Europe and other regions," said George Stathis, a member of festival's organizing committee, to Xinhua.
"Producers provide their honey to hotels in Hong Kong. Greek honey is included in hotels' breakfast and restaurants in countries across the world," he noted.
Unique in color, aroma, taste, and thickness, Greek honey -- the beverage and food of the ancient Greek Gods known as nectar and ambrosia -- has been used both as a food and a source of therapy since ancient times.
Greece produces an average of 14,000 tons of honey per year. The small Mediterranean country is the third largest honey producer in Europe behind Spain and France. But Greece has more beehives "per acre" than any other country in Europe, according to Stathis.
There are currently about 27,000 to 30,000 beekeepers across Greece. About 60 percent of them have 50 to 60 hives, but professional beekeepers own more than 200 hives and earn at least 50 percent of their annual income from them.
Meanwhile, the average consumption of honey in a Greek family is 12 kg per year.
"The target is to reach up to 15 to 16 kg per year," Stathis said.
Regarding exports, Stathis stressed that honey should not have a prohibitive cost for consumers abroad. "The pricing is not the same in Greece and China for example, but producers and operators have succeeded in not quadrupling its price when exporting it," he said.
Another advantage of honey is that it is a food source with no expiration date. "You may see raw, pure Greek unprocessed honey crystallize. This is natural with raw unfiltered honey. You can simply place the jar in a bowl of warm water and the crystals will melt," Stathis explained.
As a country with abundant flora in the Mediterranean basin, and more than 7,500 different species of herbs, plants, wildflowers, and trees, Greece has a wide range of honey.
The honey produced in Greece comes mainly from pine and fir trees, while some honey is produced from the flower nectar from thyme, orange blossom, cotton, heather, and sunflower, among others.
Besides honey, by-products like beeswax, propolis, and royal jelly used in the cosmetic industry can boost exports, experts pointed out.
"There are organic products from bees' products at affordable prices," Stathis explained.
During the festival, which is considered one of the most significant industry events in Greece, visitors could also see producers harvest royal jelly, render beeswax from honeycomb, collect bee's venom, which is used in the pharmaceutical sector, among other interesting activities.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 04:23:42|Editor: yan
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UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Jeffrey Feltman, the United Nations under-secretary-general for political affairs, will visit the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) from Tuesday to Friday, the United Nations said on Monday.
Feltman will meet with DPRK officials to discuss "issues of mutual interest and concern," said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, at the daily news briefing.
"He will also meet with the United Nations Country Team and members of the diplomatic corps, as well as visit UN project sites," said the spokesman, adding that "Mr. Feltman is also visiting China while in the region."
The visit was first raised in September, but was finally confirmed on Nov. 30, Dujarric said.
Shortly after the DPRK's ballistic missile launch on Nov. 29, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting and called for all measures possible to prevent escalation of tension on the Korean Peninsula.
As the United States and South Korean air forces conducted their biggest-ever joint military drill, the DPRK on Monday warned the United States that it was pushing the two countries to the "brink of nuclear war."
"Given the grave risks associated with any military confrontation, in exercise of its primary responsibility the Security Council needs to do all it can to prevent an escalation," Feltman said at the emergency meeting.
Addressing the Security Council meeting, Wu Haitao, China's deputy permanent representative to the UN, said the top priority in view of the current "grave situation" was for all parties to exercise restraint, implement UN sanctions, and strive for early resumption of dialogue and negotiations.
File Photo: Soldiers attend a military parade in central Pyongyang, April 15, 2017. (Xinhua/Zhu Longchuan)
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Jeffrey Feltman, the United Nations under-secretary-general for political affairs, will visit the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) from Tuesday to Friday, the United Nations said on Monday.
Feltman will meet with DPRK officials to discuss "issues of mutual interest and concern," said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, at the daily news briefing.
"He will also meet with the United Nations Country Team and members of the diplomatic corps, as well as visit UN project sites," said the spokesman, adding that "Mr. Feltman is also visiting China while in the region."
The visit was first raised in September, but was finally confirmed on Nov. 30, Dujarric said.
Shortly after the DPRK's ballistic missile launch on Nov. 29, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting and called for all measures possible to prevent escalation of tension on the Korean Peninsula.
As the United States and South Korean air forces conducted their biggest-ever joint military drill, the DPRK on Monday warned the United States that it was pushing the two countries to the "brink of nuclear war."
"Given the grave risks associated with any military confrontation, in exercise of its primary responsibility the Security Council needs to do all it can to prevent an escalation," Feltman said at the emergency meeting.
Addressing the Security Council meeting, Wu Haitao, China's deputy permanent representative to the UN, said the top priority in view of the current "grave situation" was for all parties to exercise restraint, implement UN sanctions, and strive for early resumption of dialogue and negotiations.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 04:53:53|Editor: Zhou Xin
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LUSAKA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Zambia on Monday launched a strategy aimed at tracking all survivors of gender-based violence.
The Gender-Based Violence Survivors Income Generating Activities Tracking Strategy, launched in collaboration with the International Labor Organization (ILO), will help in keeping a track record of survivors in order to help them with income generating activities.
Ministry of Gender Permanent Secretary Felix Phiri said during the launch that the strategy has been developed due to an increase in gender-based violence cases which was a source of concern to the government.
The strategy, he said, will help the survivors with income generating activities in order to boost income levels as evidence has shown that poverty was one of the causes of gender-based violence.
He further urged victims of gender-based violence to report the cases to relevant authorities as failure to do so has perpetuated the vice.
ILO acting director Ezra Sakala said the organization has developed tools to assist the vulnerable people in society such as survivors of gender-based violence.
He said under the project, 6,500 survivors have been reached with various empowerment activities.
Zambia has seen a rise in gender-based violence, with a week hardly passing without such reports in the local media.
Last month, the government launched 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence whose theme is "Leave No One Behind, End Gender-Based Violence Now."
It is an international campaign to challenge violence against women and girls and it runs from November 25 to December 10.
According to figures from the police, Zambia recorded 16,090 gender-based violence cases from the first to the third quarter of 2017, compared to 13,092 cases during the same period last year, representing 18.6 percent increase.
On the other hand, the police have so far recorded 55 gender-based violence related murder cases.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 05:34:05|Editor: yan
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RABAT, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Three illegal migrants died when their boat sank off northern Morocco Monday, local media reported.
Meanwhile, 40 others were rescued in the boat accident, Hespress.com news site cited local authorities in the northern city of Larache as saying.
The rescued were sent to a local hospital to receive treatment, the same source said, adding that an investigation is underway.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 05:39:08|Editor: yan
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LONDON, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- British Defense Minister Harriett Baldwin unveiled a cutting-edge project Monday that will see lightweight bullet-proof vests protecting soldiers in war zones.
Baldwin was briefed about the new armor project when she visited Ministry of Defense's high-security defense research labs at Porton Down, which, a United Kingdom science park, is situated slightly northeast of Porton near Salisbury, in Wiltshire, England.
She spoke with scientists who are creating a lighter, more flexible body armor for soldiers which uses a unique synthetically adjusted ceramic material that can stop bullets.
"We've spent millions on innovation this year, developing technologies like a new way to uncover insurgents' fingerprints to mini-drones that investigate chemical hazards," she said. "The goal is always to help our armed forces defend the UK, and this next generation of armor will make our troops even more alert and effective on the battlefield."
Research has indicated soldiers wearing the ceramic armor could see a 35 percent weight reduction, which could make them faster and more comfortable in a war zone, whilst maintaining a high level of protection.
The synthetic biology for the eight million U.S. dollars armor project has been running for four years and scientists are now ready to put samples through hardness testing and live-fire testing.
A billion U.S. dollars innovation fund for cutting-edge science and technology has seen a number of exciting projects developed, the Ministry of Defense (MOD) said.
Included are a pocket-sized drone and a mini-detector known as Snake Eyes which are amongst the new high-tech gadgets set to investigate future chemical or bio-hazards.
A world-first has seen British soldiers controlling 4x4 vehicles with Xbox-style controllers, and a British driverless truck leading U.S. military trucks in an unmanned convoy. It provided a glimpse into the future of getting much-needed supplies to the front line, said the MOD.
A new lightning-fast protection system, Icarus, which will be able to detect and defeat threats to armored vehicles within 100 milliseconds has also been developed, add the MOD.
The Defense Accelerator fund has so far seen 630 proposals and innovative ideas for defense and security being assessed, with 147 of the proposals so far winning government funding.
Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai (R) and Ukrainian First Vice Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzov sign the meeting minutes of the second meeting of the China-Ukraine Inter-government Cooperation Committee in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 24, 2013. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)
KIEV, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine wants to join efforts with China to translate their cooperation potential into practical results, a senior Ukrainian official told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview.
"Our task is to turn the opportunities and the potential, which are being widely discussed now, into concrete practical projects," said Natalia Mykolska, deputy minister of economic development and trade of Ukraine.
Ukraine attaches a great importance to its long-term economic cooperation with China, Mykolska said, adding that the two countries have all opportunities for pushing the partnership forward given the complementary advantages of each others' economies.
"For us, China is a strategic partner in the economic sphere and trade. Ukraine and China can effectively work together on foreign markets. Ukraine can become China's gateway to the European Union (EU), and China for us -- a strategically very important market and a source of investment," Mykolska emphasized.
Mykolska, who headed a Ukrainian delegation to the meeting of the Chinese-Ukrainian Subcommittee on Trade and Economic Cooperation in Beijing last month, highlighted that the two countries have developed a roadmap to carry forward the economic partnership.
"We have defined a string of very important areas on which Ukraine and China will focus next year. The agriculture sphere, including food and drinks, is among these priority areas." Mykolska said, noting that Ukraine is interested to produce power engineering equipment and electrical appliances jointly with China.
Another important sector Mykolska cares within the partnership is machine-building. "We could produce machine-building products in Ukraine, using the know-how of both -- China and Ukraine," she explained.
Among other areas for joint cooperation, Mykolska named renewable energy and high-tech industry, pointing that the two countries may establish good tandems on the global digital market with the combined advantages of China's powerful hardware facilities and Ukraine's software developments.
While speaking on the business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, Mykolska said more and more Ukrainian companies are preparing to do business with China.
Mykolska said China is defined as a "market in focus" under the "Export Strategy of Ukraine". "We are at the stage when this interest should begin to turn into major projects," she said.
In a move to deepen the B2B cooperation, on Nov. 14-16, Mykolska led a business delegation to China's Global Food and Hospitality Expo in Shanghai.
The trade representative of Ukraine stressed that the Chinese market is very attractive to Ukrainian food producers due to its size.
"Currently, it is important for us to increase the supplies of ready-to-eat products to the Chinese market. Among them, we can name dairy products, which are gaining popularity in China, and healthy food products -- fresh and frozen fruit and vegetables," Mykolska said.
Besides, Ukrainian berries, meat products, juice, beer and wine, confectionery, baby food and organic goods can find specific market niches in China, she added.
According to the official, to gain its foothold on the Chinese market, Ukrainian agri-producers stand ready to manufacture "personalized" products specifically for Chinese consumers and produce goods under the trademarks of Chinese companies.
"We can offer high-quality products at a competitive price. And what is extremely important for the Chinese consumers -- an individual approach," Mykolska said.
Ukraine, which is rich in natural resources and has the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the EU and some Western countries, is also interested in attracting Chinese investment to jointly produce various goods for foreign markets, Mykolska said.
She pointed that the bilateral and multilateral cooperation could be carried out under the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative.
"This Initiative is very important for us. Ukraine has trade and economic relations with all participants of this initiative. This makes us a natural partner not only for each of these countries but also a natural partner for the entire Initiative," Mykolska emphasized.
Next week, a Chinese delegation headed by Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai is set to visit Kiev to participate in the meeting of the Chinese-Ukrainian intergovernmental commission.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-12-05 06:39:27|Editor: Zhou Xin
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by Fuad Rajeh
SANAA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The killing of Yemeni former President Ali Abdullah Saleh by Houthi militants on Monday has opened the door for a broader conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, analysts said.
Saleh ruled Yemen for 33 years until protests that erupted during the Arab Spring in 2011 forced him to relinquish power. In late 2014, Saleh allied with the Houthi militants and seized power from the internationally recognized government led by President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
But the Houthi-Saleh alliance broke down lately with the two sides fighting each other in the capital Sanaa and other regions under their control in the past week. Prior to the armed clashes, both sides were trading accusations over failing the Yemeni people amid a deepening crisis and looking for foreign support.
The murder of Saleh has a different impact on Saudi Arabia and Iran, some analysts said.
Saudi Arabia has lost a card which could help it eradicate the Iranian threat in Yemen. Before his killing, Saleh withdrew from the alliance with the Houthis and welcomed talks with Saudi Arabia on condition that it halts airstrikes and a blockade.
The latest developments, Saleh's murder in particular, will open the door for a broader conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the country, the analysts said.
Nabil Albukiri, a Yemeni researcher in international affairs, said Saudi Arabia is the target of Iran's projects in the region.
"Iran's influence in Yemen poses a serious threat to Saudi national security. Definitely Saudi Arabia will not allow Iran to threaten it," he said.
Saudi Arabia has been bombing the Houthi militants since they seized power with support from forces loyal to Saleh in late 2014. It accuses Iran of providing weapons to the Houthis including ballistic missiles, some of which were fired into Riyadh, the Saudi capital. But Iran and the Houthis have denied the claims.
The future Saudi-Iran conflict in Yemen could be more complicated as both sides are expected to try to attract and lure tribes to fight on behalf of them.
Many pro-Saleh tribes are now expected to either join the legitimate forces or avoid supporting the Houthis.
Yaseen Al-Tamimi, a Yemeni political writer and analyst, said Iran will seek to keep its successes in Yemen.
"I expect Iran to open direct communication channels with the Houthis in order to provide more support to them," Al-Tamimi said.
In response, Saudi Arabia is expected to mobilize and support all forces and political groups opposing the Houthis, he said.
Nevertheless, the murder of Saleh means that Iran has won in Yemen so far, he added.
Faris Al-Beel, a Yemeni political analyst, also said that, after Saleh's death, Iran has now become the main player in Yemen.
"Iran's win will definitely be reflected on the struggle for regional influence. If Saudi Arabia fails to use the murder of Saleh perfectly, Iran will strengthen its presence and threats. No one will defeat it then," Al-Beel said.
A proxy war in Yemen between the two regional powers will only deepen the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, such as famine.
Yemen is already facing a grave humanitarian crisis aggravated by a large-scale cholera outbreak. Two thirds of the Yemeni population are in need of humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations.
Belgium is swinging to far right politics in dealing with migration and travel visas. The recent anti-Moroccan statements by Belgian Migration Minister Theo Francken show a worrying trend taking place in the home of EU institutions.
In a case of recidivism fueled by animosity to anything Moroccan, Belgian Migration minister has described Morocco along with Tunisia as unsafe countries.
Francken, in 2007, has also sent an email describing Moroccans as little scum. Last October, he compared Morocco to Sudan saying that these are countries where human rights are not respected.
Even worst, in 2011, he spitted his venom on facebook describing Moroccan presence in Belgium as bringing no added value.
Francken hardline stands against migration and asylum are inspired from his belonging to a far-right Flemish nationalist party N-VA that is a relic of the collaborationists with Nazis in the WWII. Hence, the humanitarian approach will give way to nationalistic policies restricting right to international protection and tightening the grip on migrants.
Morocco and Portugal convene in Rabat this Monday their joint high level meeting to look into ways to boost cooperation ties between the two countries in all fields of common interest.
This two-day encounter, chaired by the two countries Prime ministers, Saad Eddine El Othmani and Antonio Costa, is expected to be crowned with the signing of several business deals.
During their last high level meeting held in 2015, the two countries signed nine cooperation agreements in security, energy, shipping, tourism, training and scientific research.
The two countries are currently looking forward to setting up an undersea power connection, which would be the second Europe-Africa link. At present, Portugal exports its excess energy to its neighbor Spain, which then feeds into the European system via France, while Morocco has a growing rate of demand.
Besides the energy sector, the Moroccan-Portuguese cooperation also covers culture, higher education and scientific research, aquaculture, agribusiness, textile and construction.
Some 200 Portuguese companies are installed in Morocco, operating in various sectors such as pharmaceuticals, food industry, building, cork industry
Morocco is a major partner of Portugal in the Arab world and the second in Africa, after Angola (former colony of Portugal). Portuguese exports of goods and services to Morocco increased by 18.5 pc in 2015 while imports grew by 12.2 pc.
To enhance further economic relations and trade exchanges between the two countries, a Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Services of Portugal was set up.
According to some experts, the two countries can launch joint cooperation projects in Africa and particularly in Portuguese-speaking African countries as Morocco is expanding its presence in the African continent. Hence, there are huge joint business opportunities for a triangular cooperation and partnership.
Vice Dean of the University of Mohammed I in Oujda Abdelkader Hakkou denounced in the strongest words his arbitrary and abusive detention by Belgian authorities upon his arrival in Charleroi Airport on Friday evening.
The Professor was invited by the Francophone Free University of Brussels (ULB) but he ended up being locked up at the secure asylum center at Steenokkerzeel in Flemish Brabant.
Belgian authorities justified the arrest on grounds that the Professor did not have the correct visa.
The professor for his part vented his frustration and disappointment at the detention and the conditions in which he was held on a metal chair all night long.
It is dissapointing to see that this degrading treatment takes place in a democratic country that respects human rights, he said.
The Dean of the ULB Yvon Englert deplored the incident saying that Belgium is on the wrong track. We need to stop following the far right.
Reports that US President Donald Trump will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel have received a wary response and warnings of a new Palestinian uprising.
Trumps confirmation of the reports is expected to take place in a speech on Wednesday. If the US happens to announce that it will move its embassy to Jerusalem that would amount to a trigger of a new conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
For Israelis, the US recognition of Jerusalem as their capital- something no US president has done since Israels founding- will give legitimacy to their occupation of eastern Jerusalem and their overall settlements policy.
Such a recognition would also destroy all attempts at relaunching peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians in so far as it prejudges the outcome of the peace process in which Palestinians hope to set up their capital in East Jerusalem.
As soon as reports about this future game-changing announcement emerged, leaders of the Palestinian authority rallied to avert such a decision.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said he was seeking meetings of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League to discuss the issue.
Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, called on Saturday for a new intifada if Washington recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or moves its embassy to the disputed city.
Since 1995, it has been US law that Washingtons embassy in Israel must be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in line with Israeli government wishes.
But every six months since the law was passed, successive US presidents have signed a waiver to hold off on a switch, which would enrage Palestinians and their Arab supporters.
Trump has signed the waiver once after vowing to Jewish-American supporters that he would be the president to finally make the switch permanent.
When the villain flips. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
In the eyes of the law, Michael Flynn is now a convicted felon for lying to the FBI. His sentence is still a ways away, but chances are that his decision to cooperate with Robert Mueller, the special counsel prosecuting crimes related to Russias role in the presidential election, will result in light punishment. Self-interest is always a driving force behind pleading guilty. Family is the most important thing in life, tweeted Flynns son hours after his fathers guilty plea, alongside a picture of Flynns grandson. But for God and Muellers grace, the younger Flynn likely wont be criminally exposed; when all is said and done, the older Flynn could receive only a probation sentence.
But Mueller is not one to give away his game. And unlike Donald Trump, the self-styled master deal-maker, the special counsel is also not one to make deals that wont net him results and results that are perfectly confined to his mandate to unravel the extent of the Kremlins hold on the Trump campaign. In a statement that shows Flynn will deliver, the retired lieutenant general vowed to set things right a step he took in the best interests of my family and of my country. By framing his cooperation in terms of the things that matter most to him, including his long career in the military, Flynn has signaled that he wont take a bullet for fools who havent done a thing for him or the country.
There are indications that Flynn is done with the White House, and that the White House is done with him. The Trump administrations official response to Flynns guilty plea casts him as a former Obama administration official, who served as Trumps national security adviser for just 25 days, and is now a proven a liar. Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, reportedly feigned ignorance about Flynns lies to the FBI and shifted blame to an Obama holdover, Sally Yates, for not being candid with him about the crime. Trumps own outrageous weekend tweet essentially admitting to obstruction of justice also throws Flynn under the bus. Its no wonder Flynn now feels abandoned by a president who was once his fierce defender and comforter in the face of mounting legal troubles even after his unceremonious ouster.
A Brief History of Michael Flynn's Downfall
Its hard to say what changed between Flynn and Trump in the months since Muellers appointment. But when even Fox News begins to sound dire about the presidents prospects in the slow and steady special-counsel investigation, theres reason to believe that the public aint seen nothing yet. Beyond this, the president of the United States has steadfastly, repeatedly, and consistently denied that he had any knowledge of any involvement with the Russians, Andrew Napolitano, a longtime legal analyst, told Fox News Shepard Smith on Friday. If General Flynn contradicts that in a credible way under oath, we have a very serious problem on our hands.
Recall that it was the FBIs open investigation into Flynns dealings with the Russian ambassador, then led by James Comey, that prompted Trump to demand loyalty from the fired FBI director during a private dinner at the White House; by then, Flynn had already lied to the FBI about his liaisons with Russian officials. When Comey refused and refused to drop the Flynn matter, which was still ongoing Trump got rid of him. Did the president do this out of impulse and fear that if Comey kept digging, he might discover that his campaign and transition team did, in fact, systematically reach out to and make nice with Russian interests? Could Trump have knowingly deputized Flynn to lead these efforts and not want anyone to find out? Or maybe Flynn was truly behind the search for Hillary Clintons missing emails from Russian hackers.
Muellers probe exists to get to the bottom of these questions. The fact that we know for a fact, through Flynns plea deal, that he actively worked with transition officials to undermine a sitting presidents sanctions against Russia shows that theres much more to this unfolding case than meets the eye. Predictably, as it has done in the past with Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos, the Trump administration will deny and deflect that it ever had anything to do with those thus far prosecuted. Theyll all be derided as minor players with little access to or influence with the president never mind that Trump himself once regarded Flynn a strong enough player to be considered a running mate.
Having been rolled over by the Trump train, Flynn now has every incentive to roll over on the Trump team. If that means implicating Jared Kushner, who is in legal jeopardy of his own, or Mike Pence, who appears to be testing out alibis in order to distance himself from lyin Flynn, theres nothing stopping him. The trouble for the administration is that Mueller has proven so adept at keeping his cards close to him that when hes ready to drop the next gauntlet the White House, once again, wont know what hit it. Expect more confusion, plea deals, and offers to cooperate.
As of Saturday morning, Trump seemed unfazed by Flynns disloyalty, insisting that collusion is not a thing to be worried about. Ill go ahead and add that, legalistically speaking, collusion is not even crime. But if his unhinged weekend tweets are any indication, the Russia investigation is no doubt consuming him. What Trump and others in his circle should be worried about is that even efforts to conceal and cover up noncrimes can amount to indictable offenses, including and up to obstruction of justice. Since the Trump administration isnt exactly a model of prudence and backstabbings could be in the offing, Mueller may have his work cut out for him.
Shock me, shock me, shock me with that unpresidential behavior. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Picture it: Hours after FBI Director James Comey reveals that the bureau is reopening its investigation into Hillary Clintons private email server days before the 2016 election, President Obama launches into a public tirade. He calls Comey a liar, suggests that theres a widespread conspiracy within the FBI to get Donald Trump elected, and laments that the FBIs credibility is now garbage.
Now imagine the reaction from Republicans in Congress. Is the harshest criticism a warning that President Obama should choose his words more carefully, for his own sake?
Of course, President Obama said no such thing, and if he had he would have been denounced by Republicans, and probably many Democrats, for threatening the independence of the FBI. Yet, unsurprisingly, GOP lawmakers had little to say after Trump attacked the bureau in a series of tweets on Sunday morning.
So General Flynn lies to the FBI and his life is destroyed, while Crooked Hillary Clinton, on that now famous FBI holiday interrogation with no swearing in and no recording, lies many times...and nothing happens to her? Rigged system, or just a double standard? Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Many people in our Country are asking what the Justice Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and acid washed 33,000 Emails? No justice! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI agents role in Clinton probe under review. Led Clinton Email probe. @foxandfriends Clinton money going to wife of another FBI agent in charge. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Report: ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE Now it all starts to make sense! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
As the L.A. Times notes, it appears Trump was tweeting along with a Fox & Friends discussion of the news that Peter Strzok, as the FBIs deputy head of counterintelligence, was removed from Special Counsel Robert Muellers team last summer after he and another agent exchanged texts that expressed negative views about Trump. Strzok played a significant role in both the Clinton email investigation and the probe of potential links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Per the Times, the team at Fox News suggested this was proof that Comey colluded with Strzok to make sure Clinton would be cleared, and Trumps associates would be indicted months after both Comey and Strzok ended their involvement with the probe.
The morning show team also suggested that Strozks alleged bias was evidence that he and Comey had colluded to improperly clear Clinton of criminal charges in the email probe while somehow implicating the presidents associates in wrongdoing related to the special counsels Russia investigation.
Co-host Pete Hegseth summarized his concerns, saying: Comeys being briefed on Hillary Clintons email investigation by a guy whos in the tank for Hillary Clinton, which is the greatest fear that we all have: that the deep state has infiltrated the so-called Justice Department or the FBI.
The only notable Republican rebuttal on Sunday came from Senator Lindsey Graham, who said that while he thinks some of Comeys decisions as director were very, very wrong he does not agree that the FBI has no credibility. Then he offered a warning to the president: Theres an ongoing criminal investigation. Comey may be part of it. You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril.
.@LindseyGrahamSC: You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril, Id be careful if I were you, Mr. President, and Id watch this pic.twitter.com/K8KsfOg7Ri Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) December 3, 2017
Graham was probably referencing Trumps earlier tweet that suggested he knew Michael Flynn had lied to the FBI when he fired his national security adviser, then urged Comey to go easy on him. Understandably, Trump potentially admitting to obstruction of justice in a tweet was the main topic of debate on Sunday, but former Justice Department officials many of whom were fired by Trump remained hung up on the president attacking the FBIs integrity:
I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is, and always will be, independent.
Me (June 8, 2017) pic.twitter.com/OZ1ZiBrMNL James Comey (@Comey) December 3, 2017
The FBI is in tatters? No. The only thing in tatters is the Presidents respect for the rule of law. The dedicated men and women of the FBI deserve better. Sally Yates (@SallyQYates) December 4, 2017
This is true. So many men and women in the FBI put their lives on the line for us around the clock. Every day I worked with the Bureau was an honor. Thank you for your service. https://t.co/bYBrJAMWnm Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) December 3, 2017
Nope. Not letting this go. The FBIs reputation is not in tatters. Its composed of the same dedicated men and women who have always worked there and who do a great, apolitical job. Youll find integrity and honesty at FBI headquarters and not at 1600 Penn Ave right now Eric Holder (@EricHolder) December 3, 2017
Every day, FBI Special Agents put their lives on the line to protect the American public from national security and criminal threats, said a statement from Thomas OConnor, president of the FBI Agents Association, which represents 14,000 current and former agents.
Agents perform these duties with unwavering integrity and professionalism and a focus on complying with the law and the Constitution. This is why the FBI continues to be the premier law enforcement agency in the world. FBI Agents are dedicated to their mission; suggesting otherwise is simply false.
The president lashing out at the nations top law-enforcement agency is the type of thing that should get everyone riled up, not just those he attacked. But to be fair to lawmakers, Trump has been picking fights with the intelligence agencies since before his inauguration and at this point one cant be expected to address all of his threats to the rule of law.
When the order is regular. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
On Friday, Senate Republicans rewrote the American tax code over lunch and passed their (partially handwritten) legislation around 2 a.m. the following morning.
not at all weird, very regular, very normal pic.twitter.com/3D77KMFICm Dylan Scott (@dylanlscott) December 1, 2017
Mitch McConnell never subjected his blueprint for restructuring the worlds largest economy to a single hearing. His caucus never invited experts to offer insight into the bills implications for housing, health care, higher education, outsourcing, or tax evasion. This haste had an upside for the Senate GOP: It allowed the party to pass deeply unpopular changes to the tax code before the public had time to learn about them.
But approaching major legislation like an Adderall-addled sophomore approaches an overdue term paper came with a minor drawback: It forced the party to pass a tax bill before they had time to read it.
In hindsight, McConnell should have asked for an extension. While Republicans were manically outlining their plans to take from the poor to give to the Trumps, they also, accidentally, nullified all of their corporate donors favorite deductions.
Three Ways Trumps Tax Code Benefits Him And His Family
This screwup like most of the tax plans oddest features was born of a math problem. Due to arcane Senate rules, the Trump tax cuts can only add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. Last Thursday, the Senate tax bill already cost about that sum, and then McConnell started making expensive promises to his few holdouts. Susan Collins wanted a $10,000 property tax deduction for Americans in high-tax states; Ron Johnson wanted a 23 percent business-income deduction for the company that his family owns. This left the Senate Majority Leader searching under the tax codes couch cushions for new sources of revenue.
Eventually, he came upon the corporate alternative minimum tax (AMT). At present, most corporations face a 35 percent (statutory) rate on their income. But by availing themselves of various tax credits and deductions, most companies can get their actual rates down far below that figure. To put a limit on just how far, the corporate AMT prevents companies from paying any less than 20 percent on their profits (or, more precisely, on the profits that they fail to hide overseas).
The GOP had originally intended to abolish the AMT. But on Friday, with the clock running out and money running short Senate Republicans put the AMT back into their bill. Unfortunately for McConnell, they forgot to lower the AMT after doing so.
This is a big problem. The Senate bill brings the normal corporate rate down to 20 percent while leaving the alternative minimum rate at 20 percent. The legislation would still allow corporations to claim a wide variety of tax credits and deductions it just renders all them completely worthless. Companies can either take no deductions, and pay a 20 percent rate or take lots of deductions and pay a 20 percent rate.
With this blunder, Senate Republicans have achieved the unthinkable: Theyve written a giant corporate tax cut that many of their corporate donors do not like. As The Wall Street Journal reports:
The biggest consequence could be the research credit, often used by manufacturers, technology firms and pharmaceutical companies, and the National Association of Manufacturers said it was working with policy makers to address the issue.
Under the credit, companies get money back from the government for what they spend on innovation, often for wages of scientists and engineers. Corporations will claim $10.3 billion in research credits in 2018, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
Murray Energy Corp., an Ohio-based firm and the largest privately held U.S. coal-mining company, complained that the AMT decision and the Senates tougher limits on interest deductions made a mockery out of so-called tax reform. Robert Murray, the companys chief executive officer, said the Senate tax plan would raise his companys tax bill by $60 million.
What the Senate did, in their befuddled mess, is drove me out of business and then bragged about the fact that they got some tax reform passed, Mr. Murray said in an interview Sunday. This is not job creation. This is not stimulating income. This is driving a whole sector of our community into nonexistence.
Graduate Students React to the Republican Tax Plan
McConnells mistake has two big implications. First and foremost, it means the Senate will almost certainly have to vote on a tax bill again before one goes into law. Previously, it looked as though Paul Ryan had enough votes in the House to pass the Senate bill as is. This took pressure off the partys conference committee (the House and Senate leaders tasked with reconciling each chambers bills). Worst-case scenario, the House could just rubber-stamp the Senates work. Now, that option is deeply undesirable. It remains overwhelmingly likely that Republicans will pass a giant tax cut. But their task is now a bit more difficult.
The second implication is that McConnell is going to need new revenue. In all probability, Republicans are going to drop the alternative-minimum tax rate well below 20 percent. That will put the bills price tag over $1.5 trillion. Right now, some of the Houses most heinous revenue raisers including the infamous tax on graduate student tuition are not in the Senate bill. Chances are now somewhat higher that these odious provisions will make it into the final legislation, as Republicans will once again be desperate for pay-fors. That said, its also possible that the GOP will simply revise their bills corporate rate up to 22 percent, now that President Trump has given the party permission to do so.
Regardless, the AMT fiasco is bound to be the tip of an iceberg of unintended consequences. Senate Republicans wanted to pass their (indefensible) tax bill before anyone had time to figure out what was in it. They succeeded a bit more literally than theyd planned.
I am certain I can defeat Mr. Bannon in politics, or in sport. Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
A few weeks after Mitt Romney dined on frogs legs with Donald Trump and made meme history, Roger Stone claimed that the president-elect only interviewed Romney for secretary of State because he wanted to torture him. A year later, the former Trump advisers claim seems pretty credible; now that Romney is eyeing a run for the Senate in Utah, both the president and Steve Bannon are reportedly looking to undermine him.
Earlier this year 83-year-old Utah senator Orrin Hatch said hed consider retiring in 2018 if he could find someone really outstanding to run for his seat, and called Romney perfect for the position. Romney has reportedly been gearing up for a run, but now Hatch is dragging his feet and Trump is encouraging him to run for an eighth term. Politico reports that Trump has been telling friends he doesnt want to see Romney in the Senate, and on Monday hell make a big show of support for Hatch. Trump and the senator will take Air Force One to Salt Lake City, where the president will sign an executive order announcing he will reduce the size of Utahs Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, which Hatch has been pushing for.
Trumps opposition to Senator Romney isnt that surprising. Despite delivering a passionate anti-Trump speech during the primaries, Romney has occasionally praised Trumps work as president. However, hes also criticized Trump enough to get under his skin; Romney called on Trump to stay in the Paris climate agreement, blasted his response to the violence in Charlottesville, and undermined Trumps response to the Roy Moore scandal.
Theres been less coverage of Trumps affinity for Senator Hatch, but its similarly easy to understand. As Senate Finance Committee chairman Hatch helped push Trumps tax cuts through the Senate last week. Hatch has also stood by Trump through some of his most difficult moments. After the Access Hollywood tape, Hatch said, Im not going to judge him by mistakes he made a decade before or more. After Trump retweeted Islamophobic videos last week, Hatch said he wasnt aware of the controversy, then offered some general praise: Ill say this for ya. Hes been one of the best presidents Ive served under, and the reason is hes not afraid to make decisions. Hes not afraid to take on the big boss around here.
Trump is not hindered by ideological considerations, but his former strategist is. According to the Washington Examiner, Bannon is considering endorsing Hatch a Mitch McConnell loyalist whos been in D.C. since 1976 though he cant stop declaring war on the GOP Establishment.
If Steve had a choice between Orrin Hatch and Mitt Romney, he would pick Hatch ten times out of ten, a source close to Bannon told the Examiner.
It seems unlikely that many Utahns are waiting breathlessly to see who Bannon thinks should be their next senator or Trump for that matter. Trump received just 46 percent of the vote in the heavily Republican state, with independent Evan McMullin taking 22 percent of the vote. In poll conducted two months ago, 75 percent of Utahns said Hatch should not run again, and Hatch came in third in a theoretical 2018 Senate race. The winner by far: Mitt Romney.
Lets not jump to conclusions with this guy. Photo: Joe Buglewicz/Getty Images
President Trump finally came out and said, via Twitter, what everyone already knew: He supports Roy Moore.
Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2017
Later on Monday, Trump went one step further and personally called Moore.
"Go get 'em, Roy!" - President Trump
Just got off the phone with President Trump who offered his full support and said he needs a fighter to help him in the US Senate.
I look forward to fighting alongside the President to #MAGA! Judge Roy Moore (@MooreSenate) December 4, 2017
In a statement, the White House said, The President had a positive call with Judge Roy Moore during which they discussed the state of the Alabama Senate race and the President endorsed Judge Moores campaign.
Moore, who is neck and neck in polls with Democrat Doug Jones in the unpredictable special Senate election in Alabama on December 12, has been accused by several women of inappropriate sexual relationships while they were teenagers. Proceeding with a playbook that recalls Trumps after the Access Hollywood tape came out last year, Moore has vehemently denied every allegation, maintaining that every woman who has come forward is lying. In a state consistently hostile to Democrats, this defiant strategy has been at least somewhat effective; a poll released on Sunday showed that 71 percent of Alabama Republicans believe the charges are made up.
After the initial allegations came out, almost every major national Republican disavowed Moore but not President Trump. The man who has now taken to denying observable reality about his own past with women made it clear to his advisers that he was skeptical of Moores accusers. Roy Moore denies it, he said. And, by the way, he gives a total denial. And I do have to say, 40 years is a long time.
Still, the White House hadnt explicitly offered the divisive Republican its support, though Trump has knocked Doug Jones on Twitter and Kellyanne Conway gave Moore a quasi-endorsement on Fox & Friends in November.
Though Trump has said he will not campaign personally for Moore, he is holding a rally this Friday in Pensacola, Florida, which is close to the Alabama state border, and Moore has encouraged his supporters to attend. It was only a matter of time before Trump stopped playing coy and expressed his true affinity for the man who has been disbarred twice for flouting federal law.
Meanwhile, Establishment Republican disgust for Moore has already waned, just as it did with Trump in 2016. On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had previously called for Moore unfit for office and had entertained the notion of not seating him in the Senate at all, said he would let the people of Alabama make the call.
President Trump. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Republicans have tended to dismiss Donald Trumps attacks on the rule of law as the naive utterances of a political novice. When confronted with evidence that Trump has repeatedly pressured Senate Republicans to end their investigation of the Russia scandal, Republicans told the New York Times that the president merely still has the mind-set of a businessman rather than a politician.
But Trump continues to make it chillingly clear that his unceasing attacks upon the system are neither accidental nor a mistake borne of naivete. Trump believes he commands the government with the same totality he commands his business. His lawyer, John Dowd, has elevated this assumption to official presidential doctrine in an explosive interview with Mike Allen. A president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitutions Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case, he says.
It is easy to hyperventilate about various Trumpian offenses, but Dowd is claiming on Trumps behalf virtual immunity from the law. The powers he is asserting, and the dangers it would bring, have almost no limit.
There are two ways a president could abuse the power of law enforcement. The first is offensive, to direct it as a weapon against his political enemies. The second is defensive, shielding himself and his allies from any accountability, and thereby enabling them to commit crimes without consequence. Trump has expressed frequent interest in both methods. Trump has harangued the FBI and the Department of Justice for failing to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server. Clintons email server was investigated by the FBI in 2016, but the bureau concluded no rational prosecutor could bring charges. Trump has shown no compunction in asserting his belief that, now that he controls the presidency, if Trump demands the FBI lock somebody up, they should lock her up.
More pertinent to Trumps needs of the moment is his demand for immunity from any mechanism of legal accountability. Trump does not accept the legitimacy of any legal restraint. He repeatedly demanded the FBI director pledge personal loyalty to him, and fired him when he failed to demonstrate his obsequience to the presidents satisfaction. He did something similar to the U.S. Attorney in New York, who has legal jurisdiction over much of Trumps financial world. He has publicly attacked Special Counsel Robert Mueller and threatened, publicly and privately, to fire him. (He has reportedly held off because Ty Cobb, another of his lawyers, has unrealistically promised Mueller will conclude his investigation quickly and in Trumps favor.) The new reports of his attempts to quash the Senate investigation fit a pattern that has no exceptions.
It is true, as Trumps Republican defenders say, that he does not grasp the differences between his role as business owner and his role as elected official. But that is not a defense. It is a restatement of the accusation.
Trumps belief that the entire government should operate on his personal behalf in exactly the same way as his employees at the Trump Organization is a worldview incompatible with republican government. Imagine the 2020 election conducted in an atmosphere in which Trump can sic law enforcement upon his opponent, and in which his supporters can commit any crimes they want on his behalf, secure in the knowledge that the president will protect them from prosecution.
Limits on the presidents authority over law enforcement, both formal and informal, are an essential bulwark against authoritarianism. Trump has been testing those limits since he assumed office. He and his agents continue to batter them, and each new attack is met with slightly less incredulity as numbness sets in.
The Uganda Police Force says they have finally made a breakthrough in identifying the people behind the recent serial murders of young women in Entebbe and Nansana areas.
Police detectives have been hunting for the killers of more than 19 women in Entebbe, Katabi and Nansana in Wakiso district between June and September.
The killings which were done in almost similar fashion included; attacking young women in the middle of the night, sexually assaulting them, strangling them to death before inserting sticks in their private parts.
Police, now says, they have finally come to a conclusion of who exactly was behind the killings after forensic evidence pinned two of the 13 suspects arrested two months ago.
Residents of Katabi at the scene where one of the body of the murdered women was found
Police was last week given results of the analysis taken by the government analytical laboratory to compare semen samples picked from the victims to the DNA of two of the suspects.
According to a document which URN has seen, eight of the samples picked from different crime scenes in Nansasa municipality matched the DNA of Ibrahim Kaweesa a boda boda cyclist, while five of the samples picked in Katabi town council matched the DNA of William Ssenoga.
The Inspector General of Police (IGP) Kale Kayihura also confirmed the 'breakthrough' and thanked the team of detectives and other security agencies that have been investigating the killings.
"We now have both the confessions and the scientific evidence to back our findings. Unfortunately our criminal justice system says even these guys are innocent until proven guilty by a court of law so we are waiting for our final victory in court, " Kayihura said.
While the samples were collected two months ago from the scenes of crime and from the victims and stored in Wandegeya, nothing had been done to analyse them until last week. The government analytical laboratory did not have reagents to use in analysis of the samples.
Kayihura says police had to find some reagents for the analysts to use and bring the investigation to a conclusion.
"DGAL [Directorate of Government Analytical Laboratory] doesn't have a budget for some reagents and that sometimes interferes with the smooth running of our investigations," Kayihura says.
Most of the arrested suspects, including Ssenoga and Kaweesi, were picked after witnesses testified to police that they had been seen with the victims on the nights they disappeared and were found killed.
Kaweesa was also implicated by a group of boda boda cyclists who claimed to have seen him taking one of the victims into the bush where her body was found three days later.
Former President Robert Mugabe's relatives claim that they severed relations with their daughter-in-law former First Lady Grace Mugabe more than two years ago.
The Mugabe clan, which includes the Mugabe, Jenami and Matibiri families, accuse their daughter-in-law Grace of being allegedly disrespectful to family elders, showing off and sowing seeds of disharmony within the family.
Mrs Mugabe is said to have last visited her husbands Zvimba rural home two years ago due to her alleged bad relations with the in-laws. Mrs Mugabe and her husband now spend most of their time at one of their multiple farms in Mazoe area, Mashonaland Central province.
Robert Mugabe and wife Grace
Mr Mugabe's uncle, Ben Matibiri, told VOA Studio 7 that Mrs Mugabe usually uttered things that are unbecoming of the first family, belittling everyone as she tried to use borrowed powers at every opportunity.
Matibiri said Mrs Mugabe was the complete opposite of the former presidents first wife, the late Sally Hefron Mugabe, who he said was a great daughter to the family who took care of everyone's problems and needs.
"Sally (Mugabe) was more like a daughter to me. She took care of the family unlike the present wife of Mugabe who is talkative and don't know what to say at the appropriate time."
Matibiris sentiments were echoed by his nephew, Clemence, who claimed that Mrs. Mugabe was disrespectful to family elders and had a penchant for exhibiting her power to whoever cares.
"She (Grace) was fond of controlling everyone wherever she is failing to take her role as a daughter-in-law in the family," said Clemence.
Mugabe, Zvimba neighbour, Fidelis Chinyanyi, also made a comparison between Mrs Grace Mugabe and the late Sally Mugabe, saying the former is no longer respected by the Mugabe clan.
Another neighbour of the former president, who declined to be named for fear of being victimized, said Mrs Mugabes behavior is very embarrassing to all of us
Former president Robert Mugabes relatives believe that his wife may have caused his downfall for making unbecoming utterances in public when she attacked former vice president Joice Mujuru and then current president Emmerson Mnangagwa. Mrs Mugabes spokesperson and her relatives were not reachable for comment.
The National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) has closed Iganga-based Busoga University citing unending irregularities at the institution.
According to a General Notice No.1065 of 2017 published in the gazette, dated December 1, the university is not allowed to advertise or recruit any students henceforth.
Take notice that the National Council for Higher Education has revoked the provisional license of Busoga University and it has ceased to operate, reads the notice addressed to the university vice chancellor.
The revocation of the licence does not affect the validity of any certificate, diploma, degree or other academic award granted by the university when still under the provisional license.
Busoga University has been closed
The notice further specifies that the reasons for revocation of the provisional license are; absence of adequately qualified staff, admission of students without the requisite admission criteria, illegal affiliation, poor financial health and teaching of unaccredited programmes.
Others are; lack of up to date student records, failure to conduct progressive student assessment and irregular graduation of students who do not qualify.
NCHE executive director, Prof John Opuda-Asibo, indicates in the notice that, the council shall set up a technical committee to work with the university to support their placement of eligible students to recognised higher institutions.
Last year, complaints were filed to the council that Busoga University awarded suspicious degrees to over 1,000 South Sudan and Nigeria nationals, which led to investigations into the matter by NCHE. It was alleged then that the students had only spent about four months at the university.
The recent closure means that Busoga University can only reapply for a license to operate again after two years from the date of revocation (November 27, 2017), according to Section 98 (3) of the University and Other Tertiary Institutions Act.
nangonzi@observer.ug
The extradition trial of infamous business tycoon Vijay Mallya has just begun and all eyes are on the Westminster Magistrates' Court. The 61-year-old faces charges relating to now defunct Kingfisher Airlines defaulting on loans to the tune of Rs 9,400-crore from a consortium of 17 banks in India & another case involving a Rs 900-crore loan from IDBI Bank.
The judgement, to be delivered in the next 10 days, would decide if he can be legally forced back to India to face trial.
If the judge rules in favour of extradition at the end of the trial, UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd must order Mallya's extradition within two months.
However, in the past, India's attempts to bring back defaulters have failed. Besides Mallya, others whom India has sought to extradite include Lalit Modi, Ravi Sankaran, Nadeem Saifi and Tiger Hanif.
According to data from the Ministry of External Affairs, 121 people who fled India and are being pursued for alleged crimes back home, but the host countries are yet to take a decision in India's favour.
Mallya, who has been staying near London since March 2016, had objected to his extradition to India saying CBI has converted the Kingfisher Airlines loans case into a criminal matter and have no case against him.
His extradition trial will now determine whether he can be legally forced to go back to face the Indian courts.
Source: MEA, news reports
It has been nearly a year since the government implemented demonetisation and the effects of the decision are still being witnessed and analysed. While the move has been hotly debated, it comes as no surprise that it has triggered a massive growth of mobile wallets and its usage in the country.
However, the point of contention with regard to mobile wallet usage was that each individual wallet could only be used in insolation and users could not transfer money between two different mobile wallet operator.
On October 4th 2017, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced that it would allow e-wallets of private firms to interoperate. So, users of one wallet app will now be able to transact with users of a different wallet app. This facility is currently functional under the state-owned Unified Payment Interface (UPI), available only to banks and those e-wallets built on the UPI platform.
This move comes along with other sweeping reforms that the RBI plans on undertaking in order to facilitate a smoother digital payments eco-system which could influence more businesses and customers to adopt digital transactions. The government envisions a Digital India 2.0 and this is just one of the many steps it is taking to ensure that their mission is fulfilled.
In its directive, the RBI set December 31, 2017 as the compliance deadline for the new set of rules which includes stricter Know Your Customer norms for e-wallets. It also added that the operational guidelines on interoperability will be issued separately.
Good news for e-wallet operators
The overarching reaction to this announcement from the digital payments industry so far has been on the positive side. It is speculated that interoperability would inevitably lead to a far greater adoption of mobile wallet technology.
With the implementation of this resolution, it will force mobile wallet companies to work harder in differentiating themselves from the competition. Discounts and incentives alone will not work, these companies will have to build additional differenciators to add customers and retain their loyalty in frequently using their e-wallets.
For the longest time, e-wallet operators have claimed that banks had the upper hand when it comes to mobile transfers because of Unified Payment Interface (UPI) which is a single window mobile payment system launched by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). But once interoperability is in place, it should make transfers between wallets just as simple and convenient.
The new regulations also make India a more conducive market for new players like Amazon Pay, Apple Pay and Google Tez to enter and perhaps bring in newer technologies and intelligence.
Customers laud the decision
Customers too have pointed out in the past that it is cumbersome to keep track of all the different cashbacks in different wallets. Furthermore, it is also draining on smartphones to have multiple payments apps which serve one singular purpose. With this move, customers will finally be able to narrow down their choices and find the app that works best for them.
From a business perspective
Most offline and online businesses are only enabled to accept payments from a few wallets. Offline businesses find it especially difficult to keep up with wallet acceptance from various providers since each wallet has a different acceptance flow.
Thus if wallets become interoperable and payments can be accepted through any wallet, it will make transactions simpler and faster for both the customers and the merchants, and it will increase wallet usage.
In a macro economic sense, interoperability is not just about wallet to wallet, it is also about wallet to service providers, bank to wallet, wallet to merchant and so on. The potential for growth within the industry and in collaboration with other industries is immense. Such a move will definitely help place India in a better position in the digital world.
Now the onus lies on both the government and digital payments companies to ensure that the infrastructure and awareness is sufficient within the eco-system to facilitate these transfers. After all, India is a cash economy at the end of the day and to take the cash away from the Indian is no easy feat.
Article is written by Ajay Adiseshann, Founder & CEO, PayMate India
CIA Director warned Pakistan against safe havens
WASHINGTON: CIA Director Mike Pompeo has warned Pakistan that if it does not eliminate the alleged safe havens inside its territory, the United States will do everything we can to destroy them.
As Defence Secretary Jim Mattis arrives in Islamabad on Monday to persuade Pakistan to support the new US strategy for Afghanistan, the Trump administration is sending mixed signals to its estranged ally. The new strategy seeks Pakistans support to defeat the Taliban in the battlefield as Washington believes that only a defeat will force them to reconcile with the Afghan government.
Talking to journalists aboard his plane on Sunday, Secretary Mattis said he did not plan to prod Pakistan into action because he expected Islamabad to adhere to its promises to combat terrorism.
He disagreed with a journalist who suggested that Mr Mattis might end up butting heads with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa when he meets them in Islamabad on Monday on his first visit as the Pentagon chief.
The VOA radio quoted Mr Mattis as telling the journalist that this was not his style. Thats not the way I deal with issues. I believe that we [can] work hard on finding common ground and then we work together.
But the CIA director sent a harsher message when asked at the Reagan National Defence Forum in Simi, California, on Saturday how would the Trump administration persuade Pakistan to adhere to its new Afghan strategy.
Mr Pompeo said: You begin by seeking their assistance.
The CIA director noted that Secretary Mattis was travelling to Pakistan to make clear the presidents intent and will deliver the message that we would love you to do that. And that the safe haven inside of Pakistan has worked to the detriment of our capacity to do what we needed to do in Afghanistan.
He then explained how the Trump administration would deal with the situation if Pakistan turned down Washingtons request to destroy safe havens. In the absence of the Pakistanis achieving that, we are going to do everything we can to make sure that that safe haven no longer exists, he said.
Since 2004, the CIA has conducted drone strikes in Fata and recent media reports have suggested that the Trump administration may expand those strikes to cover other areas inside Pakistan.
Mr Pompeos predecessor, Leon Panetta, also shared with the forum his experience of dealing with Pakistan as the Obama administrations CIA chief.
Pakistan has always been a problem. It has been a safe haven for terrorists who cross the border and attack in Afghanistan and go back into Pakistan, he said.
We have made every effort possible, during the time I was there, to convince Pakistan to stop it. But Pakistan, as Mike knows, has this kind of two-wedge approach to dealing with terrorism, he added.
On one hand, yes, they do not like terrorism, or attacks from terrorism in their country. But at the same time, they dont mind using terrorism as leverage to deal with Afghanistan and to deal with India.
Mr Panetta claimed that Pakistan has had this policy since his days at the CIA and thats why Pakistan has always been a question mark.
Referring to US efforts to persuade Pakistan to cooperate, he said: I hope that Mike (Pompeo) and Jim Mattis are successful in making clear to the Pakistanis that got to be able to see a little broader and they have to go after terrorists within their own territory. Unless that happens, we are going to continue to have problems in Afghanistan.
The moderator turned to Mr Pompeo and asked if Pakistans approach had changed. Not yet, said the CIA chief.
NAB suspended hearing of Sharif family corruption references
An accountability court in Islamabad on Monday suspended the hearing into corruption references filed against members of the Sharif family as it awaits the Islamabad High Court's decision in connection with a petition filed by ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif, which seeks the consolidation of the references.
The high court's decision is expected to be announced in the afternoon today. The hearing at the accountability court will resume after the decision is announced.
Earlier today, Nawaz, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law retired Captain Mohammad Safdar had arrived at the accountability court after landing at Islamabad airport. The former premier was welcomed at the court by a large number of PML-N workers
The bureau's prosecution team and three witnesses had also appeared before the court.
As the hearing had begun, Advocate Khawaja Harris, the counsel representing the Sharifs, had requested the court to suspend proceedings till the high court announces its decision.
In turn, the court suspended proceedings till 1pm as the advocate told the bench that the verdict is expected to be announced at that time.
Harris also told the bench that the hearing at the high court is expected to begin at 11:30am.
As the hearing was suspended, Nawaz, Maryam and her husband left for Punjab House. It is uncertain whether they will appear before the court when the proceedings resume.
On November 24, the high court had reserved its judgement on the petition seeking clubbing of the references filed against the former premier and his close relatives.
Nawaz's lawyer had argued before a two-member bench of the high court that similarities had been noted between the references and sought the consolidation of at least two references Azizia Steel Mills and Flagship Investment references.
The lawyer pointed out that the references list the same three individuals as accused and added that six out of 13 witnesses in both references were also the same.
During today's hearing, the NAB is expected to declare Ishaq Dar a proclaimed offender, as the 10-day period given to the former finance minister to appear before the court in connection with the reference filed against him expires.
The former finance minister has repeatedly failed to join the trial into the reference filed against him for allegedly possessing assets beyond his known sources of income.
In a previous hearing of the case, the court had declared Dar an absconder and warned his guarantors of the confiscation of surety bonds worth Rs5 million if the accused did not join trial proceedings.
For some time now, the minister has been in London where he is undergoing medical treatment.
A five-member bench of the Supreme Court on July 28 had directed NAB to file references against Nawaz and his children in six weeks in the accountability court and directed the trial court to decide the references within six months.
The Supreme Court also assigned Justice Ijazul Ahsan a supervisory role to monitor the progress of the accountability court proceedings.
NAB had filed three references on Sept 8 against Sharif and his family, and another reference against Finance Minister Ishaq Dar. The three references against the Sharif family are related to the Flagship Investment Ltd, the Avenfield (London) properties and Jeddah-based Al-Azizia Company and Hill Metal Establishment.
The Senior Minister, Mr Yaw Osafo-Maafo, has urged the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC) to review the criteria used in selecting winners for the prestigious Ghana Club (GC) 100 Awards to break the tradition of the financial sector dominating the list.
Reacting to the continuous dominance of rural banks in the Club 100, he said: The number of rural banks on the list of the GC100 companies is too high and going forward, a separate awards scheme should be developed for banks and financial institutions to make room for companies in other sectors of the economy to feature in the awards.
Mr Osafo-Maafo said this last Thursday at the 16th edition of the Ghana Club 100 Awards in Accra on the theme: Industrialisation A tool for job creation and Accelerated Economic Development. It brought together top players in the private sector, captains of industry, as well as leaders from the public sector.
He said the country was enjoying a lot of goodwill from countries around the world presently and that would translate into economic growth if the private sector could consolidate and expand its businesses to create more jobs and increase governments revenue generation.
When the private sector grows and pays more taxes, that is how the economy will grow so the government will continue to engage the private sector to help it expand for the benefit of the economy, Mr Osafo-Maafo said.
The Senior Minister also hinted that the government was likely to spend more in 2018 to help grow the economy.
Source: Daily Graphic
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Chavez Cuanto te queremos!
Por culpa de Chavez
Cerveza Polar
Algun dia Colombia volvera a la ideologia de Bolivar
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LOS REVOLUCIONARIOS NO TOMAN CACA-COLA No se trata solamente de un capricho, sino de una sana actitud en todos los sentidos. Desde la solidaridad con el pueblo colombiano donde la empresa Caca-Cola ha cometido los mas grandes abusos contra sus trabajadores incluyendo el presunto secuestro y asesinato de los dirigentes del sindicato, hasta la proteccion de la salud de nuestros hijos, enviciados por ese jarabe de cola y azucar, que les produce obesidad prematura. Pensemos tambien los revolucionarios, que ese dinero que gastamos en los refrescos es utilizado por esas empresas para financiar el terrorismo en nuestro pais. Es cierto, no se trata solo de la Caca-Cola, sino tambien de la cerveza, de los cigarrillos y todos esos articulos innecesarios y mas que eso, daninos para nuestra salud. Podriamos incluso pensar en un dia de parada para cada uno de ellos. Es cuestion de irnos organizando. Pero para empezar, que tal si dejamos de comprar Caca-Cola y sus similares?
Cuando lo extraordinario se vuelve cotidiano...
Discurso del Acto de Grado en Barinas en 12 de Febrero del 2005 Queridos Graduandos:
Mas que un discurso, quiero dirigirles algunas palabras que escribi anoche, despues de visitar en las clinicas, a los estudiantes heridos, a consecuencia de los enfrentamientos con la policia de hace apenas dos dias.
Me ha tocado por razones del destino, ser la persona que les otorgue el titulo que bien merecieron con sus estudios. Y me siento sumamente orgulloso de serlo. Me consta que la Universidad de Los Llanos Occidentales Ezequiel Zamora, a pesar de lo dicho por los enemigos de esta universidad, es una universidad de primera.
No tendremos la mejor planta fisica, en los salones hace calor. En el comedor hace calor. Pero no es en lo material que las cosas deben valorarse. El mayor capital es el ser humano. Y en eso, nuestra UNELLEZ, lo digo con conocimiento de causa, esta sobrada. Los llaneros venezolanos son nobles, valientes, de coraje.
En la UNELLEZ hacen vida, en este momento, aproximadamente 67000 personas. El 97% de ellas son estudiantes. Jovenes que, como Ustedes hasta el dia de hoy, buscan ese titulo, que constata los anos de dedicacion y de estudio.
Los jovenes son el rio de la vida, ustedes graduados deben ser los capitanes de esos barcos que naveguen por el rio de la vida.
Nuestra Patria atraviesa momentos muy dificiles porque decidio dejar de ser esa matrona de edad vetusta y complaciente, para ser joven, rebelde y altanera. Nuestra imagen ya no es la de una acaudalada ricachona mayamera. En nuestro rostro brilla ahora la sonrisa del Che Guevara, con su diente delantero torcido, su pelo largo y su boina con la estrella.
Entender esto, a mi me ha tomado practicamente toda la vida. Tengo 53 anos, y ya perdi mi oportunidad de derramar sangre joven a causa de un ideal.
Ustedes son jovenes, estan en la flor de la vida. No cometan por favor el error de renunciar a su instinto de rebelion. El Che Guevara fue Ministro de a Economia en Cuba. Los billetes y las monedas se adornaban con su rostro. Nada de eso le importo. Primero fue a Angola donde paso un penoso ano de combate. Despues se fue a Bolivia, donde encontro la muerte. El Che era el ultimo que comia, el que cargaba la mochila mas pesada. Siempre se sacrificaba por los demas en un estoicismo que mas parecia fervor religioso que ideologia marxista.
Si quieren un modelo de vida. Ahi lo tienen.
Dije hace unos momentos que el 97% de la poblacion de la UNELLEZ es estudiante. Se imaginan Ustedes la Universidad que podriamos tener si todos los estudiantes tuvieran la abnegacion, la combatividad del Che?
Los momentos que se avecinan van a requerir de una gran unidad del pueblo venezolano. La alternativa de continuar siendo libres o regresar a la pobreza se nos planteara en los proximos dias de forma enmascarada, o quizas peor, desenmascarada, vestida con uniforme de soldado del Imperio.
Por nuestra parte podemos esperar lo mejor. La macroeconomia no podria ir mejor, la justicia social ha mejorado notablemente. Las misiones ocupan un papel muy importante en el pago de dicha justicia social. Aqui en Barinas ya hemos cumplido con dos de las misiones, la mision Robinson y la mision Sucre. No hay analfabetismo y no hay exclusion en la educacion superior, en estas tierras de Zamora.
Pero ay malhaya! Son precisamente estos exitos los que nos hacen mas antipaticos al Imperio. Para ellos, somos inclusive un mal ejemplo que se esta contagiando al resto del continente y cuidado sino al resto del mundo.
Nunca venceremos al Imperio. Estara siempre ahi, acechando. Por lo menos hasta que el mismo no se autodestruya. Porque, sepanlo senores, el neoliberalismo es canibal. Cuando le ataque el hambre, se devorara a si mismo.
Ustedes, queridos graduandos, a partir de hoy pasan a conformar la elite profesional que debe sostener este pais en los proximos cuarenta o cincuenta anos. Anos decisivos para el logro de nuestra libertad y del rescate de nuestra Soberania.
No se dejen comprar. No se dejen corromper. No se dejen gritar. No se dejen pisar. Que nadie les diga que comer, o que vestirse, o que leer. Sean siempre autenticos, rebeldes, contestatarios. Pero eso si, profundamente patriotas, dignos de ser hijos de Bolivar.
Muchas gracias y que Dios los bendiga.
Alguna duda?
Medio siglo de Holocausto Palestino
Oscar Zanartu Nacio en Caracas en 1960. Ha realizado exposiciones individuales en las galerias Minotauro, Clave y San Francisco, y en salas de Coro, estado Falcon, y Puerto Ordaz, estado Bolivar. En Paris su obra ha sido exhibida en el Centro Cultural Tanagra, en la Exposicion Cite Internationale des Arts, en las galerias De Mars y Arver Space, al igual que en la Galeria Municipal Levallois, en Levallois Perret (Francia). En muestras colectivas, su obra se ha expuesto en Belgica, Francia, Estados Unidos y Venezuela; en Caracas intervino en la exposicion "Del genesis a la memoria", 1995, organizada por la Fundacion La Previsora. En 1982 obtuvo el Premio Nacional Critven y en 1990 la Mencion de Honor Jose Antonio Paez, en la Embajada de Venezuela en Paris. En 1991 se le concedio el primer premio de Pintura Itinerante, en Levallois Perret, Francia.
OZ1
OZ2
OZ3
OZ4
Homenaje a Jason Galarraga
La Victoria de Samotracia
Odalisca
Mas fotos de la nevada del pasado agosto 2008
La Sierra Nevada de Merida
Nuestro precioso Churum Meru
Homenaje a Picasso
Autoretrato
Sabes lo que bebes en una Coca-Cola?
La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.
Mi profesion?
Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.
Sal en la Coca Cola?
A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.
De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:
Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gusto
Acido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)
azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)
Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantas
Mucha Cafeina
Conservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o Potasio
Dioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebe
Sal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracion
El uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.
Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.
Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.
En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).
Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.
La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.
Bebidas Light?
Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el
Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.
Publicado por loretahur
En realidad, la formula secreta de la Coca-Cola se puede detallar en 18 segundos en cualquier espectrometro optico, y basicamente la conocen hasta los perros. Lo que ocurre es que no se puede fabricar igual, a no ser que uno disponga de unos cuantos millones de dolares para ganarle la demanda que te metera la Coca-Cola ante la justicia (ellos no perderian).La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gustoAcido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantasMucha CafeinaConservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o PotasioDioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebeSal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracionEl uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el aspartamo , despues de tres semanas mojado, pasa a tener gusto de trapo viejo sucio.Para evitar eso, se agregan una infinidad de otros productos quimicos, uno para alargar la vida del aspartamo, otro para neutralizar el color, otro para mantener el tercer quimico en suspension porque sino el fondo de la gaseosa quedaria oscuro, otro para evitar la cristalizacion del aspartamo, otro para realzar el sabor, dar mas intensidad al acido citrico o fosforito que perderia su sabor por el efecto de los cuatro productos quimicos iniciales... y asi sucesivamente.Un consejo final !!Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.Publicado por loretahur
MARGARINA o MANTEQUILLA La margarina fue producida originalmente para engordar a los pavos; cuandolo que hizo en realidad fue matarlos.Las personas que habian puesto el dinero para la investigacion quisieronrecobrarlo asi que empezaron a pensar en una forma de hacerlo.Tenian una sustancia blanca, que no tenia ningun atractivo como comestible,asi que le anadieron el color amarillo, para venderselo a lagente en lugar de la mantequilla.Que tal esa?... Ahora han sacado algunos nuevos sabores para vender mas alos incautos como usted y yo.CONOCE USTED la diferencia entre la margarina y la mantequilla?Siga leyendo hasta el final... porque se pone bastante interesante!Comparacion entre mantequilla y margarina:
1.- Ambas tienen la misma cantidad de calorias.
2.- La mantequilla es ligeramente mas alta en grasas saturadas: 8 gramos,comparada con los 5 gramos que tiene la margarina.
3.- Comer margarina en vez de mantequilla puede aumentar en 53% el riesgo deenfermedades coronarias en las mujeres, de acuerdo con un estudiomedico reciente de la Universidad de Harvard.
4.- Comer mantequilla aumenta la absorcion de gran cantidad de nutrientesque se encuentran en otros alimentos.
5.- La mantequilla provee beneficios nutricionales propios mientras lamargarina tiene solo los que le hayan sido anadidos al fabricarla.
6.- La mantequilla sabe mucho mejor que la margarina y mejora el sabor deotros alimentos.7.- La mantequilla ha existido durante siglos mientras que la margarinatiene menos de 100 anos.
Ahora... sobre la margarina:
1.- Es muy alta en acidos grasos trans. (Si, esos que recien ahora loscientificos descubrieron que son malisimos y los gobiernoscomenzaron a prohibirlos) .
2.- Triple riesgo de enfermedades coronarias.
3.- Aumenta el colesterol total y el LDL (el colesterol malo) y disminuye elHDL (el colesterol bueno).
4.- Aumenta en cinco veces el riesgo de cancer.
5.- Disminuye la calidad de la leche materna.
6.- Disminuye la reaccion inmunologica del organismo.
7.- Disminuye la reaccion a la insulina.
Y he aqui el factor mas inquietante (AQUI ESTA LA PARTE MAS INTERESANTE! ):A la margarina le falta UNA MOLECULA para ser PLASTICO...!!Solo este hecho es suficiente para evitar el uso de la margarina de porvida, y de cualquier otra cosa que sea hidrogenada (esto significaque se le anade hidrogeno, lo cual cambia la estructura molecular de lassubstancias).Usted puede ensayar lo siguiente:Compre un poco de margarina y dejela en el garaje o en un sitio sombreado.Dentro de unos dias notara dos cosas:
* No habra moscas; ni siquiera esos molestos bichos se le acercaran (esto yale debe decir a usted algo).
* No se pudre ni huele mal o diferente porque no tiene valor nutritivo; nadacrece en ella. Ni siquiera los diminutos microorganismos puedencrecer en ella.Por que? Porque es casi plastico!!
No a la guerra, Si a la Paz
Misterios de la ciencia...
Los costos de la guerra
medicos y capitalismo...
Capitalismo...
medicos (2)
Quien educa a nuestros hijos?
Los Medios...
Sin Palabras...
Chistes feministas
- Cual es el problema, Eva?
- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz...
- Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.
- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...
- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.
- Que es un hombre?
- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.
- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.
- Cual es el truco?.
- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.
- Cual?
- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.
Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas? Porque todos son unos cerdos
Un dia, en el Paraiso, Eva llamo a Dios: Tengo un problema.- Cual es el problema, Eva?- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz... - Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.- Que es un hombre?- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.- Cual es el truco?.- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.- Cual?- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas? Porque todos son unos cerdos
Ellas...
Ellas (2)...
Tres venganzas femeninas VENGANZA NUMERO 1
Hoy mi hija cumple 21 anos y estoy muy contento porque es el ultimo pago de pension alimenticia que le doy, asi que llame a mi hijita para que viniera a mi casa y cuando llego le dije:
-Hijita, quiero que lleves este cheque a casa de tu mama y que le digas que: Este es el ultimo maldito cheque que va recibir de mi en todo lo que le queda de su puta vida!!! Quiero que me digas la expresion que pone en su rostro.
Asi que mi hija fue a entregar el cheque. Yo estaba ansioso por saber lo que la bruja tenia que decir y que cara pondria.
Cuando mi hijita entro, le pregunte inmediatamente: -Que fue lo que te dijo tu madre?
-Me dijo que justamente estaba esperando este dia para decirte que no eres mi papa!
VENGANZA NUMERO 2
Un hombre que siempre molestaba a su mujer, paso un dia por la casa de unos amigos para que lo acompanaran al aeropuerto a dejar a su esposa que viajaba a Paris.
A la salida de inmigracion, frente a todo el mundo, el le desea buen viaje y en tono burlon le grita:
- Amor, no te olvides de traerme una hermosa francesita Ja ja ja!!
Ella bajo la cabeza y se embarco muy molesta.
La mujer paso quince dias en Francia.
El marido otra vez pidio a sus amigos que lo acompanasen al aeropuerto a recibirla.
Al verla llegar, lo primero que le grita a toda voz es:
- Y amor me trajiste mi francesita??
- Hice todo lo posible, - contesta ella - ahora solo tenemos que rezar para que nazca nina.
VENGANZA NUMERO 3
El marido, en su lecho de muerte, llama a su mujer. Con voz ronca y ya debil, le dice: - Muy bien, llego mi hora, pero antes quiero hacerte una confesion.
- No, no, tranquilo, tu no debes hacer ningun esfuerzo.
- Pero, mujer, es preciso - insiste el marido - Es preciso morir en paz.
Te quiero confesar algo.
- Esta bien, esta bien. Habla!
- He tenido relaciones con tu hermana, tu mama y tu mejor amiga.
- Lo se, lo se Por eso te envenene, hijo de puta!!!
machismo y cibernetica
Chiste machista La NASA ha enviado al espacio una mision experimental tripulada por dos monos y una mujer.Apenas abandona la atmosfera, se establece comunicacion con Houston.
-Atencion, simio 1, verifique sistemas hidraulicos, controle adecuada presion de los propulsores de arranque. A 60.000 pies disminuya un 25% la velocidad.
El simio hace la sena de OK.
-Atencion, simio 2, nivele al cruzar la estratosfera y active sistemas anticongelantes. No olvide monitorear sistemas de comunicacion e indicadores de presion. Comprendido?.
El simio hace la sena de OK.
-Atencion, Houston llamando a mujer: no se olvide.
-Mujer: Si, si, ya se! -interrumpe enojada- que no me olvide darles de comer a estos monos de mierda y que no se me vaya a ocurrir tocar nada!.
.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti.
Un abogado mantiene un romance con su secretaria.Al poco tiempo, esta queda embarazada y el abogado, que no quiere que su esposa se entere, le da a la secretaria una buena suma de dinero y le pide que se vaya a parir a Italia.Esta pregunta: Y como voy a hacerte saber cuando nazca el bebe ? El abogado responde: Para que mi mujer no se entere, tan solo enviame una postal y escribe por detras: Spaghetti. Y no te preocupes mas, que yo me encargare de todos los gastos.
Pasan los meses y una manana la esposa del abogado lo llama al bufete, algo exaltada: Querido, acabo de recibir el correo y hay una postal muy extrana viene desde Italia. La verdad, no entiendo que significa.El abogado, tratando de ocultar sus nervios, contesta:Espera a que llegue a casa, a ver si yo entiendoCuando el hombre llega a casa y lee la postal, cae al suelo fulminado por un infarto.Llega una ambulancia y se lo lleva. Ya en el hospital, el jefe de cardiologia se queda consolando a la esposa y le pregunta cual ha sido el evento que precipito tan masivo ataque cardiaco.
Entonces la esposa saca la postal y se la muestra diciendole: No me explico, doctor; el solamente leyo esta postal. Vea usted mismo lo que trae escrito.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti."Tres con salchicha y albondigas y dos con almejas
Gol !!!!
Chistes de Borrachos Entra un borracho a su casa todo manchado con lapiz labial por todos lados hecho un desastre, y la mujer le pregunta:-Hombre que te paso?Y el borracho le responde:-No me vas a creer, me pelee con un payaso!
Este es un borracho que entra en un bar y le dice al camarero:-Me da cinco copas de whisky?Al rato:-Me da cuatro?Al rato:-Me da tres copas?Despues:-Me da dos copas?Luego le dice:-Me da una copa?Y le dice al camarero:-Ves? Cuanto menos bebo, mas borracho estoy!
The 95th annual National Christmas Tree display in Washington D.C. features ornaments designed and painted by Girl Scout Troop 3415 in Queensbury.
Girl Scout leader Lisa Wells wrote in an email that six girls, Jayden Abrahamson, Selena Beckwith, Kiera Carpenter, Zayda Seebeck, Nevaeh Howe and Bethany Wells, teamed to research state symbols and paint various attractions or symbols to represent New York state on plastic bulbs.
Wells said the girls painted ornaments the week before Thanksgiving in preparation for the unveiling on Dec. 1. Troop members illustrated the Adirondack Balloon Festival; a blue bird; race horse and jockey; Niagara Falls; NYC skyline including the twin towers of light; Big Apple; a girl hiking; a campsite with fire; baseball for the Hall of Fame; Rockefeller Center Christmas tree; 1980 Olympics and a New York City skyline with a yellow taxi.
The ornaments adorn New Yorks tree on the Pathway of Peace in Presidents Park. It is one of 56 trees that represent each state, territory and the District of Columbia. The ornaments will be on display through Jan. 1 as part of the America Celebrates display.
We are delighted, and honored, to be chosen to participate in the America Celebrates display located in one of our countrys most recognized National Parks, said the members of Troop 3415 in a statement made to the National Park Service. We have the chance to represent our state and showcase the fun and exciting things New York has to offer. We have worked hard to research our states symbols, and Girl Scout traditions, and believe visitors will be proud of our work.
Wells wrote that some members of the troop attended the tree lighting ceremony on Thursday, but were unable to see the tree due to security with President Donald Trumps attendance.
One ornament was taken from the state tree outside and placed inside on the tree at the White House Visitor Center, Wells wrote.
Will Doolittle projects editor Follow Will Doolittle Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today
I read "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" by P.D. James recently. This novel was published in 1972 and was the first in her Cordelia Gray series, which followed her Adam Dalgliesh series.
Dalgliesh is a seasoned police detective and superintendent, while Gray is a young, inexperienced private detective, who in "An Unsuitable Job" has just taken over the agency where she worked after the suicide of her mentor and boss.
James is much freer with this sort of protagonist to put her in dangerous, unpredictable situations. Dalgliesh is smart and careful, and he has the whole police apparatus supporting him. Gray is out on her own, winging it, and her improvisations are exciting and fascinating.
I haven't been a big fan of English mystery writers, but I'm beginning to appreciate their expertise in creating beautifully realized worlds. Gray's exploits are rougher than is usual from English detectives, and that makes her more appealing to American readers like me.
James is a masterful writer lively and precise and so good that you rarely are aware of her style. As a reader, you inhabit the skin and the sensibilities of Cordelia Gray, realize secrets as she realizes them and panic as she panics, and the experience is thrilling.
GREENWICH About 15 years ago, doctors told Tiffany Sloan that her daughter Justice wouldnt live past the age of 5. Diagnosed with alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, 2-year-old Justice spent more time in the hospital than she did at home as her body battled serious liver and lung disease.
When she was 5, the Make-A-Wish Foundation granted her wish to go to Disney World.
I went right from the ICU to a plane to go to Florida the next day, said Justice White, a now 17-year-old high school senior from Greenwich.
Her seven days in Florida at the Give Kids the World Village was the first time Justice wasnt hooked up to monitors and surrounded by doctors.
I had a pin that got me to the front of every line, Justice said, and thats all I remember.
But Sloan remembers the trip as pure happiness, 24-hour ice cream, daily presents and, of course, Mickey Mouse.
Youre looking at your child like, This is it. Then Make-A-Wish comes in and you have that hope again. You see them laugh and smile. There are no needles being stuck into them and no monitors going off. People need that.
Since 2009, Justice has been giving back to the Make-A-Wish Foundation and helping to grant childrens wishes by collecting letters to Santa and delivering
them to Macys annually. For every letter written to Santa, Macys will donate $1 to the Make-A-Wish Foundation to grant the wishes of children with critical illnesses.
I thought that would be a good way to give back for the wish that they gave me, Justice said. So my first year, my goal was 1,000 letters and I didnt think that I was going to get it. And by the time that we delivered the letters, I had over 10,000 letters.
By collecting letters to Santa, Justice has been able to grant the wishes of at least seven children. Wishes cost about $10,000 each. This is potentially her last year, because she plans to attend college for nursing next year, a career path chosen because of her medical journey.
Justice has already collected nearly 9,000 letters this year, and will make trips to Macys on Friday and again on Dec. 23 to deliver letters personally. The family is also hoping to grant the wish of Lilly Spicer, a first-grader at Greenwich Elementary who lives with the family.
Lilly suffers from neurofibromatosis 1, a brain disorder that causes her to develop tumors throughout her body. Over the summer, a tumor ate through Lillys tibia, requiring surgery. She also has a tumor in her brain.
She wants to go to Mickeys house, Justice said.
Justice will be collecting letters until Dec. 22. Letters can be written by anyone no age limit and written on any kind of paper. Letters to Santa can be mailed to Justice White, 2913 State Route 40, Greenwich, NY 12834; or emailed to Justice at justicewhitesloan@gmail.com.
GREENWICH A proposal for a new cell tower has upset some Bald Mountain residents who are concerned about their view of the hill.
Hudson Valley Wireless wants to expand its broadband coverage by putting a 120-foot permanent wireless internet cell tower on the mountain.
But some residents arent sure they want to sacrifice their view for the service.
The wireless company is looking to replace a temporary 80-foot cell tower with a taller one. The company will seek a variance from the Zoning Board of Appeals on Thursday night, because the tower is too tall and too close to adjoining property lines, according to Zoning Board of Appeals Chairman John Farndell.
Town code requires a setback of 1 1/2 times the height of the tower from adjoining properties, which means the setback would have to be 180 feet for the permanent tower, and its not, Farndell said. The site is about 90 feet from one property boundary.
Temporary towers dont always need the same approval that a permanent structure would need, according to code requirements.
Citing concerns about aesthetics, some residents argued at the last Planning Board meeting on Nov. 16 that theyre willing to sacrifice their service for the mountains natural beauty.
The new tower wouldnt be disguised, according to Farndell.
Resident Dave McFee said the tower would be in his backyard and asked for a buffer zone between the tower and his property, according to the Nov. 16 meeting minutes. The buffer request would be handled by the Zoning Board.
Lorraine Ballard told the board last month that she doesnt have great coverage, but its a cost shes willing to pay versus having a tower on a beautiful hill, according to the minutes.
Its a very visible hill. Are you willing to pollute the whole town? she said.
Some residents said they were concerned about the environmental impact. Others wanted more proof that theyll definitely get total coverage by putting up the tower, because the area is hilly and they already have spotty coverage with the temporary tower.
Hudson Valley stated in its application that it reviewed all existing towers and vertical structures within Washington County and determined that the available space for antenna colocation is not suitable for our deployment needs. Thus, Bald Mountain is the only place to have the tower.
If the variance isnt approved, the applicant will either need to move the location or make the tower smaller, Farndell explained. It will go back to the Planning Board regardless of their decision Thursday night.
Farndell said he wasnt sure how he felt about the variance and is waiting to hear the publics input.
Planning Board Chairman William Tomkins said board members decided at the last meeting to bring in a third party to review the submitted work. He said that will be discussed at the next Planning Board meeting at 7 p.m. Dec. 14.
The application, site plan and minutes from the previous meetings are on the Planning Boards webpage.
The public hearing will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday at the town office.
HEBRON Ken Fish Jr. doesnt know who shot him last weekend as he walked across a field in Hebron after an afternoon of hunting.
But he says he is sure the round that clipped off the majority of two middle fingers on his right hand didnt come from his rifle.
Fish was recovering this week from the loss of the majority of the index and middle fingers on his right hand and a cut to his thumb, injuries suffered around dusk Nov. 25 as he and his brother-in-law, another man and another relative walked in a field near county Route 30.
He said he believes someone shot at them, and he has had to hire a lawyer to try to figure out what is going on with the state investigation.
The shooting remained under investigation by the state Department of Environmental Conservation on Monday, and no one has been charged.
Although the Washington County Sheriffs Office report indicated officers initially believed the injury was accidentally self-inflicted, Fish said he knows it was not.
The DEC has refused to discuss the investigation last week or on Monday, saying only that the investigation was ongoing. If DEC officials are looking for a shooter, they have done nothing to alert the public to that fact or to seek information from members of the public for potential assistance.
Until the investigation is completed, we have no information to share, DEC spokesman David Winchell said.
Washington County sheriffs Capt. Tony LeClaire said his agency was only involved in the case for a short period of time before it was determined state conservation officers would be the lead agency. Conservation officers generally enforce hunting, fishing and other environmental laws, including investigating hunting accidents.
Neither the Sheriffs Office nor State Police have been asked for assistance since.
We assisted them until their investigators could get there, and then it was turned over to them, LeClaire said.
Washington County District Attorney Tony Jordan said his office has not heard from investigators since being made aware of the shooting the afternoon it occurred.
Fish, 43, of Moreau, gets choked up and angry as he discusses the incident. He spent nearly four days in Albany Medical Center and lost his two fingers from the first knuckle up.
The trio were hunting on land they have permission to use, having gotten there in the early afternoon. They were walking out around 5 p.m. when the injury occurred.
At first, Fish thought his gun may have gone off accidentally and backfired.
They asked me what happened and I said, My gun must have backfired, but then I checked and my gun hadnt been fired, he said.
When the damage to the stock was noted, it became clear to him the shot came from elsewhere.
It was an incredibly loud bang and the gun jumped away from me, Fish said. It came from behind us. Someone took a shot at us.
He said there is a hole in the wooden stock of his gun where he believes the round entered before hitting his hand. His rifle holds four rounds and all four were still in the gun afterward. Conservation officers checked the guns of the two men with him and concluded they had not been fired, according to Fish.
At one point, an investigator told Fish they found footprints into a swampy area nearby that they werent able to follow.
As he wonders who shot him, Fish said he has been having nightmares and is trying to figure out how to adjust to life with his injuries. He is righthanded and works as a general contractor.
My boss has been great, but its hard. Have you ever tried to write lefthanded? he said. This whole thing is just killing me.
Family members have set up an online fund to help Fish with medical bills at www.gofundme.com/kenny-fish.
Editor's Note: This story was corrected to reflect Mr. Bovair was headed back to the nursing home from a medical appointment.
QUEENSBURY The Queensbury man who died Friday after he was hurt in the nursing home van in which he was riding suffered broken ribs and a broken back in the incident, but police did not know Monday what caused his death.
The state Department of Health has joined the Warren County Sheriffs Office in investigating the death of Peter D. Bovair, 70, after the van he was in stopped short Friday in traffic on Main Street and he was thrown from his wheelchair.
Bovair was a resident of the Warren Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing and was being taken back to the home from a medical appointment around 5 p.m. for an unspecified reason when he was hurt.
Police said the wheelchair he was in was secured in the van, but he was not wearing a restraint to keep him in the wheelchair. Police said there was a restraint in the vehicle for a passenger such as Bovair, and they were researching whether a belt was legally required.
Warren County sheriffs Lt. Steve Stockdale said the driver of the van told police another vehicle stopped short in front of the Warren Center van. He said the driver of the vehicle ahead of the van did not remain at the scene, as no collision occurred, and had not been located.
An autopsy was performed on Bovair over the weekend at Albany Medical Center, and Stockdale said the cause of death was found to be internal trauma.
Stockdale said it was unclear whether any tickets or criminal charges were going to be filed. He said it is often difficult to tell whether the responsibility lies with the person who stops short in front of a vehicle, or whether the vehicle behind is to blame for a crash or near-crash.
State Vehicle & Traffic Law states that a driver of a motor vehicle shall not follow another vehicle more closely than is reasonable and prudent, having due regard for the speed of such vehicles and the traffic upon and the condition of the highway.
A spokesman for the Department of Health said the agency had no comment on the matter as of Monday.
The Departments investigation into the death of a resident at Warren Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing is ongoing, said agency spokesman Jeffrey Hammond. As this remains an active investigation, we cannot comment further.
Jeffrey Jacomowitz, a spokesman for Centers Health Care, which owns the home, said the companys investigation was ongoing Monday.
QUEENSBURY A bowl of condoms discretely placed in a bathroom at the town Senior Center is causing an uproar.
The centers new director, who has worked there for a year, put out free condoms in response to frightening statistics from the state Department of Health. In this region, a third of the people who are diagnosed with HIV or AIDS are older than the age of 50.
But the president of the centers board of directors a retired cardiologist, David Schwenker said the condoms shouldnt be at the senior center.
It creates difficult discussions, he said.
He also questioned whether the statistics about seniors with HIV and AIDS were true.
Overall, seniors are one of the fastest-growing groups to get sexually transmitted infections, according to the state Department of Health. And, perhaps because they arent as worried about HIV as other groups, senior citizens are more likely to develop full-blown AIDS, doctors are discovering. Thats harder to treat than HIV.
Outside New York City, seniors received 23 percent of the new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in 2015, the latest year for which statistics are available, the report says.
In this region, which includes Albany County, seniors received 33 percent of the new HIV/AIDS diagnoses. In raw numbers, 20 seniors were diagnosed in this region in 2015. The state did not release the ages of each newly diagnosed patient by county, since there are so few - just two new patients in Warren County and one new patient in Washington County. But it is in the population. As of 2015, there were a total of 74 people with HIV or AIDS in all age groups in Warren County and 105 patients in Washington County. (Corrected.) The statistics exclude prisoners, who are more likely to have HIV/AIDS than the outside population.
People with HIV/AIDS are living full lives with treatment, which means many patients also live long enough to become senior citizens. In New York, half of all the people who have HIV or AIDS are now age 50 or older, the report says.
Those sobering statistics got the attention of Queensbury Senior Center Director Kathryn Cramer.
No one wants to talk about old people having sex, she said. I discovered horrifically that older women were the highest group of HIV. Theres no material for older people. So the first thing I did was put out the condoms.
She got 1,000 condoms donated to the center, put them in bowls in the bathrooms and added signs with cheerful commentary such as, Has Kathryn lost her mind? The signs direct seniors to look at a red folder on the bulletin board. It can be discretely removed and read at one of the tables or couches at the center and includes information about sexually transmitted infections and the infection rate among seniors.
At first, no one wanted to discuss the condoms. But the folder was well-read. And after 10 months, 750 of the condoms were gone.
For people who didnt want to talk about it, someones taking them, Cramer said.
But she added that people did begin to talk.
At first, their initial reaction for some of them was, why is this relevant? Why is this here? she said. Once I told them why, I told them, I care about you, and any issue I hear about thats affecting you, you bet Im going to address it. Once they knew why, they embraced it.
Some women told her theyd never used a condom, having grown up at a time when sex outside marriage was heavily stigmatized. They married early, had children, and are now widowed and finding themselves in a very different situation.
Boy, the conversations weve had! Cramer said. We joke about it. Phase one was getting them used to it, getting the giggles out.
Next year, she wants to have Public Health do educational programs.
But she was shocked when Schwenker suddenly objected to the condoms last week, upon learning that a reporter had asked about them.
Cramer began calling board members for support, and said she might quit if the board unilaterally removed the condoms. She then took most of this week off.
Schwenker stopped short of saying he would remove the condoms.
Its one of the things Kathryn takes it upon herself to promote, without taking it to the board, he said, but acknowledged there had been a mention of it at a board meeting and that he knew about it.
He said he thought the condoms were removed shortly after being placed in the bathrooms and was surprised to learn they were still there.
Its the board that should be making these decisions. Not me, not any individual, he said. Im not sure the town should be doing public health. I think public health issues, (county) Public Health should be doing it.
Other programs about public health are appropriate, and are offered by the center without special approval of the board, he acknowledged. The center has run programs on long-term care insurance and on picking nursing homes.
Thats not available in the community in other ways, readily, he said.
He added that if condoms are going to be distributed, it should be kept quiet.
It has to be something on the side, he said, adding, This is creating a controversy, believe me. Its promoting something that people are going to be unhappy about.
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Taiwans government in its latest efforts to transform the islands economy has launched a campaign to promote what it calls 5+2 Major Innovative Industries (here referred to as the 5+2 Plan). In support of this campaign, Taiwan Life Insurance Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of CTBC Financial Holding Co. Ltd., announced on November 28 that it will participate in the acquisitions of preferred shares of Taiwania Capital Buffalo Fund Co. Ltd. and common shares of Whole Max Green Power Co. Ltd. These deals are expected to contribute to the governments two key industrial initiatives the building an Asia Silicon Valley and the development of a domestic green energy sector.
Taiwan Life stated that the investment targets promoted by the government under the 5+2 Plan meet the long-term return expectations of its insurance fund. Taiwan Life may also consider other related targets that turn up in the future if they are suitable to its investment strategy. In the case of Taiwania Capital Buffalo Fund, Taiwan Life has acquired preferred shares that are worth TWD 400 million. This sum will help the venture capital firm in raising funds for projects related to the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart machinery. Taiwania Capital Buffalo Fund is actually a part of Taiwania Capital Management an operation backed by Taiwans government. The purpose behind the creation of this state-level investment company is to accelerate the upgrading of domestic enterprises and the development of niche technologies unique to the island.
Whole Max Green Power is a team under Giga Solar Materials Corp., a company that specializes in photovoltaic solutions and is a subsidiary of GigaStorage Corp. Currently, Giga Solars assets related to solar power plants in Taiwan and abroad (e.g. Japan and the Philippines) have come to at least 30MW. Furthermore, projects under its development have achieved overall conversion efficiency rates of 80% or above. Taiwan Life has committed TWD 327 million into Whole Max Green Power, and this transaction took place right after Taiwan Life invested in Star Shining Energy Corp., which is another domestic solar energy company. For Taiwans green sector, the cash injections from Taiwan Life will stimulate further development and growth.
Taiwan Life pointed out that the government encourages life insurance companies to invest their funds into the industries affected by the 5+2 Plan because these deals can be legally registered as special projects that advance public utilities and social welfare. The major industries or fields that the 5+2 Plan currently covers include Asia Silicon Valley, biotechnology, green energy, smart machinery, national defense, new agriculture initiatives and circular economy initiatives. Taiwan Life stated that it is focusing on the green energy sector because this area fits into the companys sustainable development strategy and fulfills its corporate social responsibility. By supporting environmental sustainability, Taiwan Life is doing its part in the betterment of the community.
ROCK ISLAND ARSENAL, Illinois - As part of the Army's ongoing World War I observance and First Army's Centennial commemoration, First Army will host a World War I discussion panel, Wednesday, Dec. 13, at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, beginning at 7 p.m.
The panel will include military historians and authors Dr. Mitchell Yockelson and Col. (Retired) Douglas V. Mastriano, along with George Eaton, Army Sustainment Command and Rock Island Arsenal Historian. The topics discussed will include Gen. John Pershing's role with the American Expeditionary Forces, First Army's involvement in the Meuse Argonne offensive, Sgt. Alvin York's importance to First Army, and the World War I "Christmas Truce."
One of the enduring myths in American legend is Abraham Lincolns first love, a girl from his early Illinois home of New Salem named Ann Rutledge. The subject remains hotly debated among Lincoln scholars today.
The relationship and its impact on Lincolns life has been depicted as one of the great love stories of all time and made Ann Rutledge into a folk hero. Her father, one of New Salems founders, owned a tavern where Lincoln boarded for a time when he arrived in the village in 1832. Nineteen-year-old Ann was engaged to John McNamar, who had returned to his native East, apparently on business.
According to the legend, Lincoln and Ann developed a romantic attraction despite her betrothment, but she fell gravely ill and died in 1835. The loss of his first love plunged Lincoln into despair.
However, the legend often goes further, claiming Lincoln loved Ann so deeply that he threw himself on her grave in hysteric sobbing, and could never love another including his wife, Mary, whom he married in 1842. Anns impact on his life was so sweeping that her memory left him with lifelong melancholy and even drove him to his political greatness, affecting his decisions in the White House.
The story, though, is not supported by definitive proof. No letters between Lincoln and Ann exist, and New Salem settlers, when interviewed decades later, were divided on the possibility of any romance. Some of Anns relatives recalled a relationship, though offered no specific details. In a visit decades later, former New Salem friend Isaac Cogdal claimed that Lincoln described a romance, though many scholars question Cogdals credibility.
A reference to the affair was made in 1862 in a newspaper in nearby Petersburg, Ill., three miles north of New Salem, that many believed was from a political enemy of Lincoln. Many, though, credit William Herndon, Lincolns former law partner, with the origin of the legend.
Herndon came across the story while researching a book on Lincoln in the mid-1860s. Though Herndon offered descriptions of Lincolns everyday life that are invaluable, scholars have discounted many claims made by Herndon, an alcoholic who apparently was motivated by money.
Billy Herndon gave us some wonderful information about Lincoln, said Dr. Wayne Temple, a nationally recognized Lincoln researcher from the Presidents hometown of Springfield, Ill. But when he began to analyze things, he ran into trouble, and his work kind of falls apart.
Many scholars believe Herndon championed the Rutledge story to damage Mary Lincoln, the Presidents widow, whom Herndon despised. The sentimental tale of the beloved fallen Presidents tragic romance with a lovely country girl also appealed to the general public, who were often influenced by the negative perceptions of Mary.
Movies, popular magazines, poets such as Illinoisan Edgar Lee Masters, and folk tales further embellished the story with little regard for existing evidence, solidifying Anns place in American lore.
In the late 1920s, Lincoln scholar Paul Angle ruefully said that ninety-five percent of visitors to Springfield and New Salem are firmly convinced that Ann Rutledge was the only woman Lincoln ever loved. The romance was strongly rebuked in 1945 by James Randall, a foremost Lincoln scholar from the University of Illinois, but still enjoys periodic waves of popularity among historians.
New research in the 1990s, particularly by Knox College professor Douglas Wilson, argued that Herndons informants from New Salem were credible and that a romance was likely. Like many historians, I consider modern research, and I think those studies are very worthy, said Dr. Cullom Davis of Springfield, another acclaimed Lincoln authority. I think the idea of a relationship between Lincoln and Ann is plausible.
However, many modern scholars agree that any romance did not have an encompassing effect on Lincolns later life. Herndon was wrong on that, said Davis, a retired professor from the University of Illinois satellite campus in Springfield. Theres no reason to think that any affair with Ann Rutledge affected Lincolns life in that way.
Critics note that Lincoln was romantically involved with another woman, Mary Owens, mere months after Anns death, casting doubt on the idea of Lincolns deep mourning. In addition, Ann was no longer living in New Salem when she died, as her family had moved to Sand Ridge, seven miles away. Before her grave was moved to Petersburg, Ann was buried at Sand Ridge, which also throws a different light on the image of Lincoln throwing himself on her grave.
Temple points to an often-overlooked fact about the Rutledges Sand Ridge home. Their farm was owned by McNamar, Anns fiancee, said Temple. Its harder to imagine Lincoln and Ann carrying on with her family living on her fiancees property. I cant imagine they would have seen as much of each other anyway, based on the distance to Sand Ridge on horseback.
Skeptics also assert that Lincoln would have not become involved with a woman who belonged to another man, and that his well-documented awkwardness around the opposite sex would have hindered a romance. In addition, Lincoln may have had other things on his mind, as he was elected to the Illinois House in 1834.
Today, there are still plenty of believers in the story. Roger Norton, a Florida-based enthusiast who administers several respected online discussion forums on Lincoln, says that the definite majority of members think Lincoln was involved with Ann.
Norton himself supports the story, but discounts any lasting influence on Lincoln. I dont think there was any extreme impact on the rest of his life, added Norton. After a few months of sadness, I think he was back to normal.
The story remains an indisputable part of American culture. Anns grave in Petersburg remains one of the towns most visited sites, while in Springfield, the Ann Rutledge Pancake House was a popular eatery in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, a train named the Ann Rutledge has carried Midwestern rail passengers on Amtrak and its predecessors for decades.
On the heels of the Trump administration holding steady on the Renewable Fuel Standard last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has asked for a waiver from the law, citing economic worries.
Abbott made the request in a letter dated Friday, a day after the EPA finalized renewable fuel volumes for 2018.
At 19.29 billion gallons, the volumes of renewables that must be blended into the nation's fuel supply are roughly the same as in 2017.
In his letter, Abbott said refiners are having difficulty with the RFS, especially because of the volatility and cost of the credits that demonstrate compliance. He noted that hundreds of thousands of jobs in the state are tied to the refinery and related industries.
"Yet the strength and resiliency of the industry and by extension, Texas economy is threatened by a restrictive federal mandate," Abbott wrote.
The credits, called RINs, are the currency of the RFS. Refiners earn them by blending renewables into the fuel supply or they can buy them from others.
Renewable fuels advocates said the request won't withstand scrutiny.
Gov. Abbotts waiver request doesnt come anywhere close to meeting the very high threshold required by the statute for proving severe harm,'" said Bob Dinneen, president and chief executive of the Renewable Fuels Association.
The association said renewables are helping the economy in Texas through ethanol production in the state and lower cost fuels that are now available.
The industry also disputes the idea that high cost credits are hurting the refiners. It says that refiners are recouping costs through higher margins.
The EPA's final renewable figures last week were met with mixed reaction in Iowa and the Midwest. The requirements for conventional renewable fuels, such as ethanol, were maintained but Midwest lawmakers and industry officials complained the biodiesel figure for 2019 fell short of the available capacity.
Refiners were disappointed, saying the Trump administration had caved to farm state political interests.
A Texas woman accused of causing a serious crash in downtown Davenport that left one woman dead earlier this year will soon learn her fate.
In court documents filed Monday, Chief District Judge Marlita Greve said she will render a verdict in the case of Lauria Lee Kelly, 58, of Alvarado, on Friday in Scott County District Court.
Kelly is charged with homicide by vehicle-reckless driving in the death of Cynthia Elaine Jones, 53, of Davenport. If convicted, she faces up to 10 years in prison.
During a bench trial Oct. 25, Assistant Scott County Attorney Kimberly Shepherd called six witnesses who testified about the deadly crash on Jan. 30.
Police say Kelly was driving her blue 2005 Dodge truck east on 2nd Street at a high rate of speed just before 6 p.m. and struck the rear of a red Chevrolet Monte Carlo that was stopped at the red light at 2nd and Brady streets.
The force of the impact caused fatal injuries to Jones.
The driver of the Buick, Jessica Russell, was seven months pregnant at the time of the crash and had to be extricated from her vehicle. She was taken to a local hospital, where she was monitored because she was having contractions.
Russell testified at Kelly's bench trial that she suffered whiplash and was "very worked up emotionally" but was OK. Her unborn son also was OK, she said.
Cpl. Kris Mayer, a crash scene investigator for the Davenport Police Department, testified that while he could not determine exactly how fast Kelly was driving, he estimated that she was driving at "interstate speeds."
The speed limit downtown is 25 mph.
Mike Priester, a concrete driver, testified that he was driving east on 2nd Street between 5:30 and 6 p.m. that night, headed toward the post office, when he heard what sounded like a tornado siren "for a really long time."
He said that he cracked his window and realized that it was a car horn that sounded like it was stuck and that the sound appeared to be coming from a Dodge Ram truck.
Priester said he pulled into the post office parking lot and the truck pulled in behind him. He then jumped out of his truck and walked toward the Dodge Ram.
"I noticed there was a pile of clothes on the passenger side, Texas license plates, kind of threw me off," Priester said at trial. "Then the lady looked at me and she goes King Jesus, I salute you.'"
Kelly was found competent to stand trial earlier this year.
In a brief filed early last month, defense attorney Harlan Giese Jr. said that Kelly at the time of the crash suffered from such a diseased or deranged condition of the mind that she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
INDEPENDENCE An Independence, Iowa, man who was found frozen in a field with a pistol and bags of meth last winter has pleaded guilty to drug and firearm charges.
Troy Donovan Postel-Vargason, 35, also pleaded guilty to gun charges in connection with a 100-mph chase from LeClaire to Clinton County in August.
Postel-Vargason entered his pleas to charges of possession of meth with intent to distribute, possession of a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking and two counts of felon in possession of a firearm Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids. Sentencing will be at a later date.
According to court records, Independence paramedics were called to a field two blocks from Postel-Vargasons home on First Street East on Feb. 9. At the time, Postel-Vargason was shivering and unable to move and suffering from frostbite, and medics were concerned his toes may need to be amputated because of damage from the cold, court records state.
He was holding an Under Armour drawstring bag that contained two gallon-sized bags with an estimated 500 grams of ice meth, court records state.
Medics transferred Postel-Vargason to University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City for treatment. Authorities believe he had left his home the prior night following an argument and spent the night in the field, records state.
Officers who responded to the field found about $600 in cash and a 9 mm Hi-Point handgun with an obliterated serial number. Investigators restored the Hi-Points serial number and determined the gun had belonged to an Independence resident whose home was burglarized in November 2016.
A search of Postel-Vargasons own home yielded a .380-caliber Ruger pistol, according to court records.
In April, federal authorities charged Postel-Vargason with gun and drug charges in the field incident, but authorities were unable to locate him at the time.
On Aug. 15, a LeClaire police officer attempted to stop his Ford Escape after a Scott County deputy observed him with a gun and a machete, according to court records. The chase reached speeds of more than 100 mph in 55 and 65 mph zones, and he allegedly threw a 9 mm Ruger handgun with a scratched-off serial number from his vehicle during the chase, records state.
The pursuit continued until his tires were deflated, and he was arrested on state charges of operating while intoxicated, eluding and felon in possession of a firearm in Clinton County in connection with the chase, record state.
Postel-Vargason also is awaiting trial on eluding charges in Black Hawk County stemming from a Dec. 1, 2016, pursuit. A sheriffs deputy attempted to stop him for running a red light at Raymond and Dunkerton roads at 2:45 a.m., and the 120-mph chase lasted about 40 minutes and ended when his vehicle was cornered in a residential yard. He was allegedly carrying a club when he was arrested.
Democrat Fred Hubbell said Monday the state should partner with the private sector to add at least 50 to 75 in-patient mental health beds in Iowa, part of a plan he released to change the way mental health services are provided in the state.
Hubbell, one of seven Democrats running for his party's nomination for governor, released a four-page plan Monday, a day ahead of a forum on the topic in Des Moines.
Hubbell also said he would reverse last year's move to turn management of the state's Medicaid program over to private management and institute a review to determine "the most cost-efficient program that provides the necessary services." All of the Democrats running for governor have criticized the change.
Hubbell, who recently toured the state to talk about mental health issues, said it is a topic that comes up wherever he goes and the state must do better.
"Iowans are paying a high human cost and also high financial costs because of the inadequacies of our mental health system," he said. Hubbell blamed "fiscal mismanagement" under former Gov. Terry Branstad and Gov. Kim Reynolds, as well as the decision to close state-run mental health institutions.
Hubbell cited a study saying Iowa is last in the nation in the number of state-run mental health beds. And his plan called for "at least 50-75 high-intensity mental health beds for in-patient treatment in a public/private partnership."
There were no other details provided.
Iowa Department of Human Services Director Jerry Foxhoven has defended the state's approach and said the focus on in-patient mental health beds is shortsighted.
Reynolds also has questioned how Democrats will be able to pay for a Medicaid program that goes back under the state's management.
Part of Hubbell's plan also dealt with the shortage of behavioral health providers. He said the state should put more effort into programs like loan forgiveness to lure professionals to the state.
The plan also would more closely coordinate services for mental health and addiction; "empower" local communities to determine their own needs and provide a range of services; encourage more utilization of tele-psychiatric services; create a mental health program for children and provide more help to law enforcement to deal with the opioid problem and incarceration diversion programs.
In response to Hubbell's plan, the Reynolds campaign responded that 150,000 more Iowans are getting mental health coverage than in 2011, when she became lieutenant governor. Also, the campaign said the number of inpatient psychiatric beds have increased since 2016 and so have investments to try to entice behavioral health professionals to the state.
"There's more to do, which is why we are focused on concrete solutions and progress to help Iowans in every corner of the state," said Pat Garrett, a spokesman for the Reynolds campaign.
Last year, billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker derided Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for not releasing detailed income tax filings.
The question is who his investors are, and whether there are any in China or Russia that are affecting his personal income, Pritzker said of Trump, adding that the future president was obfuscating in order to avoid being discovered as a liar.
And then last week, Pritzker released only the first two pages of his income tax returns going back three years. Pritzker told reporters for weeks that he hadnt released the returns sooner because the task was so complex. Um, two pages aint complex.
Pritzkers real income appears to come from various private trust funds. He disclosed last week that his trusts paid $25 million in state taxes and $129 million in federal taxes between 2014 and 2016. Pritzkers personal income taxes were a tiny fraction of that amount. During the same time period, he revealed that he paid only $636,000 in state income taxes and $7.7 million in federal income taxes on his personal income.
He refused to divulge the tax returns for those trusts (which really would be complex) because, his campaign claimed, other members of his extended family also benefit from those trusts. OK, fine. But how about divulging the names of his trusts? Tracking down these trusts is a difficult business because theyre shrouded in such secrecy. Names would help.
When a politician refuses to divulge something, particularly after criticizing others for not doing so, you gotta wonder what that person is hiding.
The Pritzker family all but invented off-shore trusts. No family in the US can copy the Pritzkers in using offshore entities to gain tax advantages, claimed Forbes Magazine back in 2003.
But, try as I might, I couldnt convince Pritzkers campaign to release the names of his trust funds.
So, in an attempt to pry Pritzkers information loose, I reached out to Chris Kennedys gubernatorial campaign and asked if they would release the names of the trust funds Kennedy benefits from. They did.
Heres the list: Robert F. Kennedy 1959 Trust; The Christopher G. Kennedy 1987 Trust; The Sheila B. Kennedy 2011 Trust; the Christopher G. Kennedy 2001 Trusts for Children; Trusts U/W George Skakel and Ann Skakel; Trusts U/W Robert F. Kennedy; The Scudder Trust; Christopher G. Kennedy 1997 Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust; [street address deleted by me] Melrose Avenue Resident Trust I and Trust II and [street address deleted by me] Island Avenue Residence Trust I and Trust II.
George Skakel was Kennedys maternal grandfather. He was from Chicago and founded the fabulously successful Great Lakes Carbon Corporation. U/W is an acronym for under the will of and means it was created as part of somebodys last will and testament. The Scudder Trust appears to invest in renewable energy and environmental stuff.
That Island Avenue trust is for a 14-room summer house in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts called Brambletyde, which was recently described by Curbed.com as a stately waterfront mansion with magnificent views of Nantucket Sound and just one neighbor. President John F. Kennedy and his family stayed in the mansion during the summer of 1963. The Zillow website pegs the worth of the four-bedroom, 6.5 bathroom, 3,379 square foot house at $6.3 million. Taxes are $66K per year.
Ah, the rich.
But Kennedys a pauper when compared to Pritzker. As mentioned above, Pritzkers paternal grandfather was a pioneer in using trusts to avoid taxation. AN Pritzker, took the family fortune from $250,000 in the 1920s to an estimated $2 billion at his death in 1986, according to Forbes. But when he died in 1986, his heirs told the IRS that ANs net worth was a mere $25,000. The feds didnt buy it and the Pritzker family ended up paying the government $9.5 million plus interest nine years later, Forbes reported.
JB Pritzkers sister Penny, who served as President Barack Obamas Secretary of Commerce, is mentioned in the so-called Paradise Papers, a massive ongoing research project into the uber-wealthy and mega-corporations conducted by journalists all over the world. Ms. Pritzker transferred shares from two Bermuda companies to a company owned by trusts that benefit her children after she was confirmed for the Cabinet post. Her familys myriad offshore trusts were a big issue during her confirmation hearing.
Alas, Kennedys decision to reveal his trust funds names did not move the Pritzker campaign one iota closer to disclosing the names of Pritzkers trusts.
This aint over.
After he proposed legislation to expose government emails to public review, state senator and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Billie Sutton accepted a challenge from the Journal on Oct. 26 to release the emails from his legislative account.
But he has not yet delivered. His attempts to divulge his emails have been stalled, he has since said, by Legislative Research Council concerns about the potential release of confidential information.
The LRC maintains the email accounts of legislators and has given Sutton a list of 11 kinds of information that should be redacted before his emails are released.
Ensuring these items are not included will require a manual review of the emails I provide to you, and LRC is not able to help with this process, Sutton said in his most recent email correspondence with the Journal. Therefore, I will need time to manually work through the emails reviewing them for any of the issues raised by the LRC.
Sutton, of Burke, added that because of the time involved and the lack of help from the LRC, he will release only a couple of weeks worth of emails.
The Journal sprang the request on Sutton during an interview at the newspapers office for the Mount Podmore political podcast. The full 20-minute interview, which includes Suttons answers to questions on a range of topics including gun laws, abortion, capital punishment and transgender rights, was posted Monday to the Journals website and to iTunes and other podcast apps.
Sutton proposed legislation Oct. 5 to the Legislatures Government Operations and Audit Committee that would, among other things, remove correspondence from the list of records that are exempted from transparency requirements. That change would open access to government emails, which are not currently considered open records in South Dakota.
When asked Oct. 26 if he would release emails from his legislative account to the Journal, Sutton answered with one word: Sure.
Earlier in the interview, he had explained the philosophy behind his proposed legislation.
If youre doing things correctly, you shouldnt have to worry about your emails being public, he said.
Since then, in email correspondence with the Journal, Sutton said the LRC advised him to redact the following from his emails before releasing them: personal information such as Social Security numbers, financial documents, executive session information, juvenile documents, personnel records, transcripts, student records, medical records, proprietary or trade secrets, Revolving Economic Development & Initiative meeting documents, and confidential disclosures.
The Journal contacted the other declared gubernatorial candidates all Republicans and also asked for their emails.
Marty Jackley, a Republican and the states current attorney general, said he supports legislation to make government emails public and would release his own existing emails, but only if the Journal could obtain a written waiver of confidential privilege from somebody who has exchanged emails with him. The Journal did not obtain such a waiver.
Justin Brasell, campaign spokesman for U.S. Rep. Kristi Noem, issued the following statement.
Kristi believes transparency in government is essential, and she understands many have concerns, the statement said. As this debate progresses, shell be listening closely to South Dakotans, narrowing in on the best, publicly debated reforms to make sure the state government is genuinely more accountable to the people.
Gubernatorial candidates Terry LaFleur and Lora Hubbel each expressed support for making government emails public records and a willingness to make their own emails public if elected, but both added that because they are not currently in elected office or working in government jobs, they have no government emails to release.
Montana's state auditor on Monday released an advisory memo saying agreements for treatment and payment made between patients and primary care providers without involving insurance are allowed and not regulated by his office.
Direct primary care plans have been advocated for before in Montana, including in a bill passed in the last legislative session and vetoed by Gov. Steve Bullock. They involve a patient paying a monthly fee, similar to a membership, to a provider in exchange for care.
In a press release, state Auditor Matt Rosendale said his memo would help expand health care options but also said people should still have insurance coverage for major or unexpected health care expenses. He called direct primary care a "good alternative for many people seeking routine or basic health care treatment."
Montanans should have as many options on the table as possible to meet their health care needs as they see fit, Rosendale said. Direct primary care is yet another way for consumers to access routine, preventative, or preliminary health care.
Rosendale, a Republican, said there are already some direct primary care providers operating in Montana, but the advisory memo makes things more clear for physicians who want to establish those care practices.
In his release, Rosendale included comments from Carol Bridges, a doctor with CostCare Direct in Missoula, which will transition to a direct primary care model Jan. 1.
CostCare will use a monthly membership mode, Bridges wrote, saying that arrangement would save money and make providers more accessible.
In his veto of a direct primary care bill this year, Bullock wrote the plans "offer little or no added value to most consumers" and "charge fees for treatments already covered by a consumer's health insurance, such as preventative care that insurance covers at no out-of-pocket cost to the consumer."
Direct primary care "is bad for Montanans, because it allows providers to charge unnecessary fees for services already covered by insurance and fails to deliver the administrative savings it promises."
The bill Bullock, a Democrat, vetoed also was "touted as cutting insurance-related administrative expenses," the governor wrote, but did not prevent providers from selling plans to patients while accepting insurance from others, meaning the provider would still have the same insurance-related overhead "but receives another income stream at the consumer's expense."
In 2015, when Rosendale was a state senator, he also carried legislation to allow direct primary care that was vetoed by Bullock. In that veto, Bullock wrote almost exactly the same objections as he did in 2017.
The state of Montana is suing Purdue Pharma, the makers of the opioid drug OxyContin, saying the company has lied to conceal the danger of the drug and created thousands of addicts.
Attorney General Tim Fox announced the lawsuit Monday.
One drug and one company stands above the rest as the most significant purveyor of addictive and all-too-often deadly opioid-based prescription drugs, Fox said. The states complaint alleges that this company has gone to great lengths to conceal the dangers of their product while misleading and exploiting physicians in a way that creates thousands of addicts dependent on their drug.
Since 2000, more than 700 Montanans have died from opioid overdoses, and between 2011-2013 more than 7,000 went to the emergency room because of a prescription drug overdose.
The lawsuit is filed on behalf of all counties in the state. Several Montana counties have recently planned to sue opioid manufactures, and this lawsuit is separate from those actions.
In September the state of Washington announced it was suing Purdue, while the city of Seattle filed its own lawsuit against Purdue and other companies.
In 2007 Purdue admitted to federal charges of mis-branding OxyContin and paid a $634.5 million fine after an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department. It also paid a $19.5 million settlement to 26 states and the District of Columbia.
The Associated Press reported Monday that Robert Josephson, a Purdue spokesman, said the company denied the allegations in the lawsuit and is working to be part of the solution to the opioid crisis.
The complaint alleges Purdue misrepresented the likelihood that long-term use of OxyContin would lead to addiction and that the company claimed the drug would improve overall health and did not disclose the long-term side effects of opioid use.
The lawsuit also says Purdue falsely claimed long-term opioid use is safe and effective for pain treatment, told doctors that OxyContin works for 12 hours when it knew it did not for many patients, claimed a new generation of opioid deterred abuse and were safer when the company knew that was not true and falsely claimed opioids are safer than alternative, non-narcotic treatment.
Purdue also has advocated an unsubstantiated concept of "pseudo-addiction" that suggested a patient seeking more medication was not addicted, but their pain was being under-treated, and doctors should prescribe a higher dose of opioids, the complaint alleges.
The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief to stop what it calls deceptive marketing practices by Purdue and damages for the public health epidemic it says the company has created, as well as for what the state has paid for opioid treatment through the Montana Medicaid program and the Montana Healthcare plan, as well other costs of addressing opioid addiction in the state, along with maximum civil penalties. It also asks that Purdue turn over all profits from selling the drug.
Which side may have bombed Mr. Salehs house Houthis angry at his betrayal or the Saudi-led bombing campaign and the exact circumstances surrounding his death were not immediately clear. There were unconfirmed reports that he had been killed while trying to flee the city.
The Interior Ministry, which is controlled by Houthi rebels , reported that Mr. Saleh had been killed, and a video circulated online that purported to show the former presidents body, although it could not be independently verified.
Ali al-Bukhaiti, a Yemeni politician who is well connected with Mr. Salehs party, the General Peoples Congress, also said the president had died. The news is 100 percent true, he said.
Ahmad al-Hawati, a resident of Sana, was told by relatives living near Mr. Salehs complex that it had been bombed by rebels, and an official in the General Peoples Congress also said the complex, on a busy street, had been bombed. The official declined to be identified by name because he had not been authorized to speak to reporters.
Saleh had been known for years as a shrewd and dogged survivor of Yemens tangled, tribal politics. He once compared his years in office to dancing on the heads of snakes.
Photo
In the latest fighting, he was initially allied with the Houthis, themselves loosely aligned with Iran, but the relationship became fissured and he seemed to be tilting to the Saudis.
I call upon the brothers in neighboring states and the alliance to stop their aggression, lift the siege, open the airports and allow food aid and the saving of the wounded, he said in the televised speech, and we will turn a new page by virtue of our neighborliness.
The Saudi-led coalition seemed to welcome his remarks. A statement on the Saudi-owned news outlet Al Hadath said the coalition was confident of the will of the leaders and sons of Mr. Salehs political party to effect a rapprochement.
The Angolan authorities recently deported 4,766 illegal immigrants who were mining diamonds illegally in Cambulo, Lunda Norte Province.
More than 20,000 illegal diamond miners had already left the country on a voluntary basis.
Angonoticias quoted a migration and foreign office (EMS) spokesperson inspector Rodrigues Zeca as saying that some of the people deported were from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He said immigrants deported between last Sunday and Monday included 114 women and 65 children.
The drive to push illegal diamond miners out was initiated two months ago and would extended to other municipalities that make up the Lunda Norte Province.
Illegal diamond mining had been a source of headache for Angolan officials despite efforts to put the practice to an end.
Security guards allegedly working for a private company in the diamond-mining region of Lunda-Norte were filmed torturing illegal diamond diggers in June 2016.
Independent news site Maka Angola founded by human rights journalist Rafael Marques posted a clip on YouTube then, which exposed the vicious and sadistic violence against the weeping men.
Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished
Jacobin Magazine, 26 November 2016
by David Seddon
Recent elections in Nepal may further entrench divisions that have stalled democratic progress for a decade.
Between May and September of this year, Nepal held its first local elections in twenty years. Soon, they will elect a new parliament and form new provincial councils, which were created after the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a federal republic in 2007a8.
The local elections unfolded in three stages: three of the seven new federal provinces voted on May 14, 2017; three more followed suit on June 14, and the last province went to the polls on September 18.
The turnout in all seven provinces was high, indicating the enthusiasm with which the Nepali electorate greeted this long overdue opportunity to make their views known to the parties and their candidates. The involvement of the Madhesi parties, which represent the people of Nepalas southern plains, was particularly important, given their effective exclusion from power in Kathmandu.
On September 27, 2017, as most of the results from the last stage of voting had come in, UN General Secretary AntAnio Guteress congratulated Nepal on this major step forward. After years without an elected government at the local or national level, Nepalis regarded these elections as a potential break with the political stasis of the last ten years. But the results, which keep the same three major parties in power, show that the nationas future remains uncertain.
The Erosion and Return of Democracy
In 1997, a year after the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (CPN-M) launched their insurgency against the monarchy, new local district and village councils took office. Their terms of office ended in 2002, but no new elections were planned, nor were the incumbentsa mandates extended. The escalating conflict between the Maoistsa Peopleas Liberation Army (PLA) and government forces, including the Armed Police and the Royal Nepalese Army, made elections a dangerous prospect, and neither side thought a vote would serve their interests.
In October 2002, King Gyanendra dissolved the national assembly, sacked the prime minister, and appointed his own government. Thanks to what was effectively a royal coup, Nepal had no elected government at either the local or national levels.
For the next four years, local government was conducted a to the extent that it could be a by officials appointed by the central government and the king, or by the Maoists where they held sway. By 2004, the rebels effectively controlled large swaths of the countryside, while government forces held the municipalities and district centers. The military made periodic forays into rural areas, including into the Maoist strongholds, but won little ground.
In February 2005, the king, despairing of his governmentas inability to deal with the insurgency, intervened. He declared a state of emergency, severely restricted the media, banned political parties, and harassed, detained, and jailed many of their leaders, as well as the leaders of civil society and human rights organizations.
The foreign powers with an interest in Nepal a notably India, the United States, and the United Kingdom a had, until this point, supported the monarchyas efforts to crush the Maoist rebellion, which they regarded as a terrorist threat. In 2005, however, the international community turned on the king and called on him to restore normality.
In an effort to grant his new regime some legitimacy, the king held municipal elections. But the main political parties boycotted the vote, and its results were widely regarded as fraudulent. The parties, which had generally supported the king against the Maoists, now formed a seven-party alliance in hopes of restoring some form of democracy to Nepal.
This alliance built support in most of the major towns, including Kathmandu, where they held pro-democratic rallies. Despite international pressure and some leadersa efforts to construct a conservative alliance that would support a constitutional monarchy, the king refused to abandon his position as head of state.
Forced to decide which posed a greater threat to democracy, the king or the Maoists, the alliance eventually concluded that a ceasefire and peace agreement with the Maoists was the better of two bad options. After a flurry of negotiations, it came to terms with the rebels in November 2005.
The next April, the seven parties were involved in a mass peopleas movement that forced the king to cede power and convinced the Maoists to participate in parliamentary democracy. That November, they signed a detailed Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). The Maoists then joined the other parties to form an alliance that would bring about the return of democracy.
In 2007, an interim parliament and interim government, headed by veteran Nepali Congress party leader Girija Prasad Koirala, agreed not only that the king should go but that the monarchy should go as well, officially making Nepal a republic. They further decided to elect a Constituent Assembly, charged with drafting a new constitution, and to initiate a restructuring process to create a new government framework organized around new rural and municipal bodies.
In January and February, the Madhesi people rose up across the plains because they felt politically marginalized by mainstream politicians they regarded as ahill elites.a Their actions forced the alliance to recognize Madhesi interests in the new federal state.
Elections for the new Constituent Assembly took place in April 2008 with a mixed system of proportional representation and first-past-the-post races. To the surprise of most commentators a and the revolutionaries themselves a the Maoists won the most seats (229 out of 601), nearly twice the number the Nepali Congress party claimed (115). The United Marxist-Leninist party (UML) came third, with 108 seats.
The two major Madhesi parties a the Madhesi Jana Adhikar Forum Nepal and the Terai-Madhesh Loktantrik Party a secured only seventy-five seats between them.
With some 40 percent of the assembly, the Maoists could drive forward significant change. The newly elected assembly voted that Nepal would become a federal secular republic, and, after considerable maneuvering between the various parties, it elected the Maoist leader, Comrade Prachanda, prime minister. For a short while, Nepal seemed ready to draft a new constitution and hold local and national elections within a new institutional framework.
A Stalled Assembly
A number of serious obstacles soon blocked the way. First, parliament couldnat agree on how to define the new federal structure or identify the federal states and local constituencies. Relatedly, the various factions within Nepali society disagreed over what role regional, caste, and ethnic interests should play in this restructuring process.
For the next three years, the Maoists, who had changed their name to the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (UCPN [M]), the Nepali Congress, and the UML jockeyed for position under constant pressure from the Madhesi parties.
After a bruising clash with President Ram Baran Yadav, who belonged to the Nepali Congress party, over the appointment of the army chief of staff, Comrade Prachanda resigned, and the UMLas Madhav Kumar Nepal took over. The new prime minister led the interim government from May 29, 2009, to February 6, 2011, then gave way to another UML leader, Jhala Nath Khanal, who held the post for only six months until he handed control back over to the Maoists. Dr Baburam Bhattarai became prime minister on August 29, 2011.
During this tumultuous period, the government extended the Constituent Assemblyas term three times, until the Supreme Court set a fourth and final deadline: the assembly had to draft the constitution and establish the new federal framework by May 27, 2012.
When that day arrived with no new constitution, Bhattarai dissolved the house and announced elections for a second Constituent Assembly.
The November 2013 elections yielded significant change. The Nepali Congress party secured the largest number of seats (196 out of 575), and the UML finished in a close second (with 175). The Maoists came third, with only 80 seats a a loss of 149. Voters were punishing the Maoists for their ineffectiveness in government. Undoubtedly, many former supporters turned against the erstwhile revolutionaries for failing to make progress on the major economic and social reforms they had promised. The Maoists lost the substantial backing they had won over years of struggle, and now faced an existential crisis.
The party split into several different factions, with the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) remaining formally committed to parliamentary democracy. Several offshoots sought to regain their revolutionary credentials.
At the same time, the Nepali Congress party and the UML were fraught with internal struggles for power and influence. The Madhesi parties also split, having failed to break into the central nexus of political power and gain the recognition they felt they deserved.
Given this fractured political situation, the Constituent Assembly remained virtually powerless, and Nepal continued to suffer from an ineffective government and an incoherent vision for the countryas future. The interim government remained in place for a year, first under Bhattarai, then under a nonpartisan acting prime minster. On February 11, 2014, the elderly Sushil Koirala of the Nepali Congress party took over, but his health deteriorated, and, on October 12, 2015, the UMLas Khadga Prasad Oli replaced him.
In the meantime, in April and May 2015, a series of earthquakes devastated Nepal, damaging or destroying hundreds of thousands of buildings and leaving just as many people without homes, schools, health centers, transport infrastructure, or livelihoods. This disaster, followed by a particularly heavy monsoon that led to landslides and widespread flooding, had a debilitating effect on Nepali politics.
The second Constituent Assembly, held hostage by the major partiesa vested interests, proved no more effective than the first at identifying the new federal states and their constituent rural and urban subdivisions. This, combined with divisions within the government and even within the various parties, made progress towards the promised a and long-awaited a local and parliamentary elections difficult. Indeed, the assembly took until September 2015 to release a draft constitution, which proved highly contentious.
Eventually, in August 2016, Comrade Prachanda, now operating under his civilian name as Pushpa Kamal Dahal and serving as leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre), became prime minister again. He announced that, even if the government had not finalized the precise definition of the new federal states, a Local Body Restructuring Commission (LBRC) would identify the constituencies for local elections over the coming months. New bodies would replace the existing structure of municipal-, village-, and district-level committees, and local elections would take place in the seven provinces that had been more or less defined.
New Framework for Elections
The LBRC then initiated a complex process of local engagement to establish a framework for elections. Considerable controversy surrounded these negotiations in almost all of the preexisting districts, village development committees, and municipalities as they determined the borders and names of new local bodies, both rural and urban.
At the beginning of January 2017, the LBRC proposed 719 new local bodies, divided into 6,553 wards, as the framework for the local elections, leaving a number of aautonomous special areasa to be decided later. One dissenting committee member remarked that the proposals did not adequately consider population in the two proposed Madhesi provinces or physical access in the hills and mountains. Despite this disagreement, the government and the Constituent Assembly approved the proposal.
Of the new local entities, 256 (35 percent) are in twenty districts across the Madhesi plains. Overall, the LBRC identified 462 village councils (rural areas), 241 municipalities (small towns), 12 sub-metropolitan centers (large towns), and 4 metropolitan areas (cities). According to the new constitution, these local bodies officially came into existence when the cabinet received the LBRCas report and local media published it at the end of January 2017.
For both logistical and political reasons, the elections took place in three stages: the first, in 283 new local bodies in 34 districts in the central northern provinces on May 14, 2017. The 436 local bodies in provinces 1, 5, and 7 voted on June 14, and, finally, province number 2 went to the polls in September. The vote was delayed there because disagreements over the involvement of the Madhesi parties werenat settled until June.
Across Nepal, the UML emerged as the big winner. This party has long been communist in name only: one faction even allied itself with the monarchy during the Peopleas War. This party has the strongest base in the hill areas and has often opposed Madhesi claims. Unsurprisingly, the UML performed significantly less well on the plains than elsewhere, but it nevertheless won more positions in all categories than its closest rival, the Nepali Congress.
The Nepali Congress had not performed as well as it had hoped in the first two rounds, where it came a poor second to the UML. It had anticipated a better showing on the plains, where Madhesi voters a particularly in province 2 a do not favor the UML. It did get better results there, but these gains were not sufficient to win overall, handing it second place in all categories.
The main Maoist party came a distant third, with fewer than half the number of positions secured by the Nepali Congress. Despite having managed to dominate the Constituent Assembly in 2008 and to elect two prime ministers between 2008 and 2013, the Maoists have now lost significant ground.
The Madhesi parties suffered thanks to disunity in the months leading up to the elections, but they performed best in province 2. However no single Madhesi party could rival the Nepali Congress, which easily won the province.
The UML performed better than expected and even managed to come fifth in province 2. The Maoists gained roughly the same number of positions as the Federal Socialist Forum. All of these parties owed their successes to specific localities. Former Maoist leader Bhattaraias new party, Naya Shakti (New Force), whose agenda is not clear, and is mainly a personal following, barely made a showing at all.
These results, particularly in province 2, will have a major impact on Nepali politics. Local concerns played an important role in determining the electionsa outcomes, and they will not help heal the division between the hills, where the UML performed strongly, and the plains, where the various Madhesi parties proved unable to unite. Nor will it ease the tension between the UML and the Nepali Congress.
New coalitions will undoubtedly emerge as parties prepare for the parliamentary and provincial elections planned to take place soon. The UML and the Maoists first proposed an alliance, then a merger, ostensibly to counter the Nepali Congress but arguably also to ensure the Madhesisa continued marginalization. The alliance included Naya Shakti (New Force), but the merger will probably involve only the two major parties, UML and the Maoist Centre.
It remains to be seen whether these local elections mark a new democratic era for Nepal or simply the birth of a new oligarchy and the continuation of the opportunistic politics that have characterized the past five years. What it does not mean a despite the partiesa names a is a genuine alliance of forces commitment to direly needed social and economic reforms.
About the Author
David Seddon is co-author of Congo: Plunder and Resistance. He is the coordinator of an essay series for the Review of African Political Economy site.
The presence at the 5th AU-EU summit in Abidjan of a high-ranking Moroccan delegation, led by King Mohammed VI in person, has blocked the way to the malevolent schemes of its opponents, including Algeria and South Africa.
These two countries seek to mend fences for the pseudo- Sahrawi Republic SADR after the bitter failures it suffered at the level of Europe and the United Nations.
The Sovereigns accompanying delegation will not miss the opportunity of the AU-EU summit to dismantle the Polisarios separatist theses, particularly to the dozen African English speaking countries that still recognize the pseudo-SADR.
Morocco would actually try to convince these countries to withdraw their recognition of the SADR especially that at present, a number of these countries such as Zimbabwe, Angola, and even South Africa are like Algeria facing socio-economic and political problems.
The ultimate goal is to rally eventually two-thirds of the vote of the 54 AU member countries needed to exclude SADR from the pan-African organization.
Moreover, the Polisario owes its presence in Abidjan only to the president of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat. After the refusal of Cote dIvoire, the host country, to invite the SADR to the AU-EU summit for the simple reason that the Sahrawi entity is not a sovereign state, Moussa Faki Mahamat sent, at the last minute, a formal invitation to SADR as member of the AU not as member state.
The European Union has distanced itself from this formality. The head of EU diplomacy, Federica Mogherini, could not be clearer, when she affirmed on November 22 in Brussels, before Faki Mahamat, that the SADRs presence in the Abidjan summit does not mean that the EU will recognizes it.
It is therefore a new blow to the Polisario and its supporters who have moved heaven and earth to transfer the AU-EU summit to the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, instead of Abidjan, the capital of Cote dIvoire, one of Moroccos major allies.
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SCOTUS with a set of intriguing big and small cases as it winds down 2017 oral arguments | Main | As one former member of Congress enjoys release from prison after five years, another one gets sentenced to five years in Florida federal court
December 4, 2017
Two Justices make statement about Alabama capital case in which cert is denied
There was not too much of note in today's order list from the Supreme Court, though sentencing fans might be intrigued by Justice Sotomayor's short statement, joined by Justice Breyer, regarding the denial of certiorari in Floyd v. Alabama. Here is how the statement starts and ends:
Petitioner Christopher Floyd was sentenced to death by an Alabama jury that was selected in a manner that raises serious concerns under our precedent in Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B., 511 U.S. 127 (1994), and Foster v. Chatman, 578 U.S. ___ (2016). Although the unique context of Floyds case counsels against review by this Court, I find the underlying facts sufficiently troubling to note that in the ordinary course, facts like these likely would warrant a courts intervention.... That we have not granted certiorari should not be construed as complacence or an affirmance of all of the reasoning of the courts below. The unusual posture in which Floyd raised his Batson and J.E.B. claims warrants caution in the exercise of the Courts review here. Yet, courts reviewing claims in circumstances like these must be steadfast in identifying, investigating, and correcting for improper bias in the jury selection process. Such discrimination casts doubt on the integrity of the judicial process, and places the fairness of a criminal proceeding in doubt. Powers v. Ohio, 499 U. S. 400, 411 (1991) (citation omitted).
December 4, 2017 at 01:43 PM | Permalink
Comments
Appeals are only for mistakes of law, not of fact. The reasoning is that the original court, the trier of fact, had the competence to assess the evidence.
This philosophy is nowhere in the constitution. It turns the appeal into a nitpicking of irrelevant and pointless mistakes. These are literally infinite and limited only by the creativity of the appellate lawyer. They can make things up, and persuade other nitpickers on the bench of their correctness. They can keep this process going into infinity, along with make work. Once done with violations of federal rules, they can start on ratified treaties, then on international laws to which we have agreed.
This is very 13th Century, and very French. In that time, any defense lawyer who allowed his case to reach substance felt utterly humiliated. It is also very fraudulent, and a form of theft of tax dollars. It brings opprobrium on the justice system, and makes the owners of the law, the public, hate you lawyers.
Posted by: David Behar | Dec 4, 2017 1:59:18 PM
DAVID,
What about Writs of Error Corum Bob is?
Posted by: Docile the Kind Soul in Oregon | Dec 6, 2017 4:07:23 AM
Meh^100 Coram Vobis
Posted by: Docile the Kind Soul in Oregon | Dec 6, 2017 4:09:45 AM
Post a comment
For instance, in its comparison of 54 cities in Asia, Europe, the US and Australia, the top two markets that offered the highest yields in the world remained Vietnams gateway cities including Hanoi at the first position with 8.65 percent yield and Ho Chi Minh City at the second position with 7.86 percent yield.
Additionally, increasing capital inflows and currency movements have resulted from cap rate compression. However, buoyant demand has inevitably lead to more new prime office completions and vacancy rates are finally beginning to creep up.
Investors have generally adopted a positive outlook for local office markets, their confidence bolstered by strong economic growth expectations.
The most active markets have been China, followed by Japan and Hong Kong (
China) . However, the supply is limited, investors have increasingly turned their attention to development projects in secondary locations.
Savills Vietnam manager said that Vietnams office market had shown excellent performance, especially A-grade segmentation with occupancy rates exceeding 95 percent in downtowns in big cities such as Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
Because Vietnams economy has grown well lately and it integrated with the world, the Southeast Asian nation welcome more investors.
Accordingly, Savills announced in the third quarter of the year, demand of realty market in Vietnam will increase. Optimism has dominated the Asian office sector as cheap money has continued to flood local markets and rents and capital values have continued to rise across the region. Supply of office in HCMC will soar by 8 percent per year along with growth of rental output.
Savills predicts within three next years, the rate of office rent maintain high and rental cost will leap by 8.4 percent yearly in average.
By MINH HUY Translated by UYEN PHUONG
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!)
I thought it was a snake at first sight, but when I read the photo caption I learned it is a caterpillar living in the south of Vietnam, said Giang.
Giang was attending an exhibition titled Pulsation Biological Diversity in Vietnam and Taiwan, which opened on December 1 at the Hanoi Museum. It is divided into two exhibit spaces featuring the natural diversity of Vietnam and Taiwan.
Now I know that the Formosan sambar deer is the largest native animal species in Taiwan and Dahanshan Cookeina sinensis fungus grows in clusters on the floor of humid forests, Giang said. At first glance, they resemble little white cups, adorable in appearance.
The Taiwan section showcases the works of landscape and ecological photographers who have long been recording the mountains, rivers and diverse life-forms of Taiwan, according to Shih-yu Hung, director of the national museum of Taiwan.
Framed as works of art, this collection brings life and new visual style to traditional landscape and ecological photography, he said. Through these images, one can observe the beauty of life arising from the rich ecological system and establish an emotional connection with nature.
The exhibition offers visitors a visual tour to various places in Taiwan such as Da An River, Mutelebu Peak, Xueshan Range and Lanyang River.
It is divided into five major themes exploring Taiwans geographical and biological diversity.
The first one, "Rhythms of Nature", reveals how the diverse terrain of Taiwan combined with its humid climate have nurtured a highly variable ecosystem.
Nearly 60 percent of Taiwan is covered by forests. The interdependency of organisms in this setting is highlighted in "Cosmos in the Forest".
In "Secrets under Water", images taken underneath the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Taiwan reveal a variety of beautiful and mystical life forms.
"Urban Nature" demonstrates the concrete forest, a unique ecosystem present in highly developed areas, maintained by humans and animals together.
"For the Love of Diversity" shares four on-going stories of ecological conservation.
The exhibition also displays Vietnams diversity of landscapes such as deserts, mountains, tropical forests, sub-tropical forests, cave systems, wetlands, rural villages and cities.
Vietnam is home to about 322 species of mammals, 900 birds, 450 reptiles, 250 amphibians, nearly 10,000 species of insects and 700 species of fresh water fishes, according to Nguyen Tien Da, director of the Hanoi Museum.
The exhibition reflects the richness of the local nature through photos of stunning beauty spots, national parks and nature reserves as well as of rare species living in Vietnam such as the red-shanked douc (Pygathrix nemaeus), which is an endangered species living in Son Tra Nature Reserve in Da Nang.
Da said he expected that the exhibitions use of new technology in lighting and video art would bring visitors rare experiences.
Its not only watching photos displayed on easels. We want visitors to feel close to the nature and approach the flora and fauna naturally and emotionally at this exhibition, he said. Visitors can also interact with the nature by choosing photos of beautiful landscapes as backgrounds and taking photos. These photos will appear immediately in a digital album of the exhibition. Above all, we want to evoke the love for nature in peoples hearts.
The exhibition will run until February 25 at the Hanoi Museum, 2 Pham Hung Street, Nam Tu Liem district, Hanoi.
Vietnamplus
PRIMGHAR, Iowa Precision Agriculture and Animal Science Days, hosted every fall by Iowa State University (ISU) Extension and Outreach staff in Northwest Iowa, was recently awarded the Governors STEM Advisory Council Seal of Approval for 2017.
The Iowa Governors STEM Advisory Council focuses on increasing student interest and achievement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics throughout the state. Their goal is to prepare youth for career paths in STEM fields.
The Iowa Governors STEM Seal of Approval was created to enculturate, sustain and spread STEM thinking. It indicates that the program or event -- Precision Agriculture and Animal Science Days -- advances Iowas STEM initiatives, and helps spread STEM thinking and education throughout the state.
Precision Agriculture and Animal Science Days was first held in 2015 and has become an annual event that brings together high school agriculture education students and teachers with college and agriculture industry members.
SIOUX CITY | Rick Myers has been playing the grandfather character in "The Nutcracker Ballet" for so long, it's not a big deal if he misses a
In-store price: $219.95
$219.95 Increase from 2016: 4.7%
4.7% Online price: $269.00
$269.00 Increase from 2016: 9.8%
PNC: "This gift's spike in price can be fully attributed to the Pear Tree's increase (+5.2% from $189.99 to $199.95), while the Partridge remained flat. The Pear Tree spiked due to increased cost of living for workers and limited supply of larger, more mature trees."
DAY 2. TWO TURTLE DOVES
In-store price: $20.00
$20.00 Increase from 2016 : 0.0%
0.0% Online price: $ 95.00
$ 95.00 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
PNC: "These birds had no love lost as prices remained steady, after a hefty increase of 29.3% in 2016."
DAY 3. THREE FRENCH HENS
In-store price: $181.50
$181.50 Increase from 2016 : 0.0%
0.0% Online price: $281.50
$281.50 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
PNC: "Its been a quiet year for the French Hens. There was no change in their price or pecking order, due to steady supply and demand in the past year."
DAY 4. FOUR CALLING BIRDS
In-store price: $599.96
$599.96 Increase from 2016 : 0.0%
0.0% Online price: $370.00
$370.00 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
PNC: "It was business as usual this year for these feathered friends. Their price was unchanged, selling right at market value. No need to call for a discount to stimulate sales."
DAY 5: FIVE GOLD RINGS
In-store price: $825.00
$825.00 Increase from 2016 : 10.0%
10.0% Online price: $899.75
$899.75 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
PNC: "After five years with unchanged pricing, Gold Rings are shining bright, jumping up 10% since last year, due to increased demand and popularity. Ooo la la!"
DAY 6: SIX GEESE-A-LAYING
In-store price: $360.00
$360.00 Increase from 2016 : 0.0%
0.0% Online price: $1,488.00
$1,488.00 Increase from 2016: 10.2%
PNC: "Despite a slight increase in food prices, geese just laid back this year as the goose market remained stable and their pricing, unaffected. In years past, the goose market had fluctuated due to the avian flu."
DAY 7: SEVEN SWANS-A-SWIMMING
In-store price: $ 13,125.00
$ 13,125.00 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
0.0% Online price: $ 15,165.00
$ 15,165.00 Increase from 2016: 0.3%
PNC: "Although historically the most unpredictable gift of the bunch, the swans swam in a straight line in 2017, staying the same price as last year."
DAY 8: EIGHT MAIDS-A-MILKING
In-store price: $58.00
$58.00 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
0.0% Online price: $377.28
$377.28 Increase from 2016: 3.2%
PNC: "The Maids-A-Milking are chugging along at the same price as last year, reflecting the stagnant federal minimum wage, which hasn't changed since 2009."
DAY 9: NINE LADIES DANCING
In-store price: $7,552.84
$7,552.84 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
0.0% Online price: $8,322.55
$8,322.55 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
PNC: "Despite a growing economy and rising demand for dancers, dance companies did not raise wages (and thus, prices) for the fifth year in a row."
DAY 10: TEN LORDS-A-LEAPING
In-store price: $5,618.90
$5,618.90 Increase from 2016: 2.0%
2.0% Online price: $13,373.35
$13,373.35 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
PNC: "The price to hire high-flying men to entertain your true love rose after two years of stagnant growth."
DAY 11: ELEVEN PIPERS PIPING
In-store price: $2,708.40
$2,708.40 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
0.0% Online price: $2,475.00
$2,475.00 Increase from 2016: 12.5%
PNC: "No price increase in the pipeline for these musicians. After their wage increase last year for the first time since 2013, the cost to hire Pipers in 2017 remained the same."
DAY 12: TWELVE DRUMMERS DRUMMING
In-store price: $2,934.10
$2,934.10 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
0.0% Online price: $1,620.00
$1,620.00 Increase from 2016: 0.0%
PNC: "The Drummers kept the beat steady with unchanged pricing after a much anticipated wage and price increase last year."
This covers the cost of buying each gift once. However, if you include the cost of all the repetition throughout the carol, it would cost $157,558 in-store or $204,848.65 online.
STORM LAKE, Iowa | An Alta, Iowa, man was arrested after his vehicle was stopped for a traffic violation Friday.
Storm Lake police arrested Roberto Tarin, 19, after they alleged his driver's license has been revoked. In addition, police alleged they could smell marijuana coming from his vehicle.
After being granted consent to search the vehicle, investigators reportedly located and seized 11 small baggies of marijuana, packaged for street sale, and more than $150 in cash.
Tarin was charged with possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance -- marijuana (class D felony); and driving while revoked (aggravated misdemeanor). He was booked into the Buena Vista County Jail on a $5,000 bond.
SPENCER, Iowa | A man faces felony charges after stealing a tractor and leading officers on a slow-moving chase through a Spencer neighborhood early Saturday morning.
At 1:35 a.m., police checked on a report of a suspicious tractor in the parking lot of First English Lutheran Church, 1311 E. 18th St. When officers attempted to stop the tractor, Jeremy Starkson, 38, drove away.
Officers pursued the tractor into residential areas on the east side of Spencer. During the slow-speed pursuit, Starkson swerved at law enforcement officers several times while they deployed stop sticks.
Starkson eventually drove onto a lawn at 317 E. 10th St. When he attempted to exit the lawn, Starkson allegedly intentionally drove the tractor into a squad car.
Starkson was removed from the tractor, which had been determined to have been stolen from a Spencer residence earlier on Saturday, and was arrested.
He was charged with assault on person with certain occupations (class D felony), theft in the first degree (class C felony), driving while barred (aggravated misdemeanor), eluding (serious misdemeanor), and reckless driving (simple misdemeanor). He was booked into the Clay County Jail.
STORM LAKE, Iowa | Overheated wiring from a portable electric heater is believed to be the cause of a garage fire on Sunday morning.
Upon arrival at 5:23 a.m., firefighters observed an unattached garage at 424 Superior St. was fully engulfed in flames.
Firefighters were able to extinguish the fire without further incident. Estimated at $15,000, the garage and its content were considered total losses.
No injuries were reported at the property, which is owned by Matthew DeWall, of Bellevue, Nebraska.
The Storm Lake Fire Department was assisted by the Storm Lake Police Police Department at the scene.
STORM LAKE, Iowa | A Storm Lake man was arrested Friday following a domestic disturbance at a residence at 533 Oneida St.
When Storm Lake Police arrived, they located Manuel Jovel-Bermudes, 30, and an adult female at the home. Investigators alleged Jovel-Bermudes engaged in an argument, assaulting the female and taking away her phone while preventing her from calling 911.
Jovel-Bermudes was charged with domestic assault, third degree (class D felony), and obstruction of emergency communications (simple misdemeanor). He was booked into the Buena Vista County Jail and was being held without bond.
No injuries were reported.
SIOUX CITY | A Sioux City teenager was sentenced to 10 years in prison Monday for a string of burglaries in Sioux City's Leeds neighborhood.
Joseph Tapia, 18, pleaded guilty in Woodbury County District Court to three counts of second-degree burglary from an Aug. 3 crime spree and one count of third-degree burglary for a 2016 burglary.
Tapia admitted to breaking into homes in the 4500 block of Perry Way, the 3900 block of Madison Street and the 3900 block of Monroe Street on Aug. 3. He also admitted to breaking into a garage in the 2500 block of East Solway Street on June 29, 2016, and stealing a $3,000 bicycle, which he tried to sell.
Tapia was ordered to pay restitution in an amount to be determined to the victims jointly with his two co-defendants.
Jeremy Mahaney, 19, of Sioux City, is scheduled to stand trial Jan. 23 on two counts of second-degree burglary and single counts of first- and third-degree burglary, second-degree theft and operating a vehicle without the owner's consent.
Henry Deleon, 17, of Sioux City, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of second-degree burglary and single counts of first- and third-degree burglary and second-degree theft. His attorney has filed a motion to have his case transferred to juvenile court and a January hearing has been scheduled.
SPIRIT LAKE, Iowa | A Spirit Lake man was sentenced Monday to a year in jail for shooting a woman in the leg.
Scott Sidles, 55, had pleaded guilty in Dickinson County District Court in September to a felony charge of reckless use of a firearm and a misdemeanor charge of assault with a dangerous weapon.
District Judge David Lester ordered Sidles to spend a year in jail, minus time already spent in custody, on the misdemeanor assault charge. Lester suspended a 10-year prison sentence and placed Sidles on probation for five years on the felony firearm charge.
Charges of attempted murder, intimidation with a dangerous weapon and willful injury were dismissed.
Sidles admitted during his plea hearing that on Oct. 2, 2016, he fired a .22-caliber pistol recklessly from the driveway of his home in the 1200 block of Fargo Avenue in Spirit Lake and shot his next-door neighbor, who was sitting in a chair on her patio, in the leg.
SIOUX CITY | A midtown neighborhood is changing in the 1900 blocks of Jackson and Nebraska streets.
Homes are being sold along both sides of the street, soon to be demolished.
That is being done in order to get rid of the more-than-century-old Hunt Elementary School in the 2000 blocks of the streets, in order to build a new one just to the south by the year 2022.
Some people living in the area are fine with the changes, even though it means they must move.
"Just on this block alone, they are displacing 20 apartments, and that doesn't include the other street," Carmen Janssen said.
Janssen, who lives in one of six apartments in the chopped-up old Victorian home at 1909 Jackson, supports the new school. Janssen has lived in the rental unit for three years, and is debating whether to stay in Sioux City or move nearer to her hometown of Sheldon, Iowa.
She said the rentals don't get great upkeep, pointing to new upstairs graffiti from Thanksgiving week, while noting there are a lot of police calls to the neighborhood. That's why Janssen said "it is a blessing" to have a new $20.5 million school to in some way freshen up the neighborhood, which is far from an affluent portion of Sioux City.
"It is a godsend, because this place needs to go. It helps improve the community, with the school," Janssen said.
The current Hunt Elementary is at 615 20th St. The school dates to 1906, making it by far the oldest in the citys public school system.
Sioux City School District officials keep hitting early benchmarks in the planning process to construct a new Hunt Elementary School by 2022. They are nearing the quest to buy all needed 11 properties.
Also, the school board members on Monday made the decision not to add a third floor of classrooms, since there won't be enough students to warrant the $2 million cost.
District Director of Operations and Maintenance Brian Fahrendholz said plans are falling into place. A final design of the building is underway.
"We are pleased with our progress at this time...We are on schedule to open a new Hunt Elementary in the fall of 2022," Fahrendholz said.
The Sioux City School Board in August purchased the first of 11 properties needed for clearing, to have enough space to build the school. Properties have been bought on both sides of the 1900 block of Nebraska Street.
The school board on Monday approved the $170,000 purchase of a property owned by Lou and Janice Jackson at 1909 Jackson St., where Janssen lives, in a price that includes relocation and moving expenses. Others have gone for $120,000 and up, and the goal is to have all purchased by spring 2018.
Only three homes and two parking lots are left to buy to have all the land needed for the 80,000-square-foot school, which will house students from grades pre-kindergarten through fifth.
The school district is underway with one other school construction project, as the new Bryant Elementary School about nine blocks north is slated to open in August 2019.
While Hunt comes after Bryant, the details keep getting addressed with frequency. Also in the Monday school board meeting, board members followed the recommendation by the district's Building Oversight Committee to keep the school to two levels and not build a third floor.
Director of Elementary Education Brian Burnight said projected student numbers from the neighborhood did not necessitate building the school with three levels, particularly since that cost would be $2 million. He said there are 434 students now living in the Hunt attendance boundaries.
"A two-story Hunt will have the capacity for 450 students, allowing all students that reside in the neighborhood an opportunity to go to their local school. The addition of a third story would raise the capacity to 575 students, which is not warranted based on current and projected student numbers," Burnight said.
SIOUX CITY | Sioux City's two highest-paid employees could see a 4 percent pay bump next year.
The City Council will vote Monday whether to raise the salaries of city manager Bob Padmore and city attorney Nicole DuBois, effective Jan. 1, based on their performance evaluations.
Under the new proposed salaries, Padmore -- the city's highest-paid employee -- will make an annual salary of about $182,780 next year, along with a $5,200 car allowance. Padmore's salary had previously been $175,750.
DuBois' new salary will be $137,900 next year, up from $132,596 this year.
A survey of city manager salaries in Iowa conducted in April 2017 showed Padmore was the 10th-highest-paid city manager in the state under his previous salary. His new salary would put him at eighth-highest, according to the numbers in the survey. Sioux City is Iowa's fourth-largest city.
Iowa's top-paid city manager position is Cedar Rapids manager Jeff Pomeranz, whose base salary is $292,818, according to the report.
The job responsibilities of city managers and administrators differ due to different styles of government.
Padmore was appointed city manager in 2014 after a stint as assistant city manager. DuBois was hired by the city in November 2008 and was promoted from assistant city attorney to city attorney in October 2011.
Dubois' and Padmore's salaries are the only two directly approved by the council. Their performance reviews are also conducted by the mayor and council.
Old YMCA demolition
In other action, the council will consider the demolition of the former YMCA building at 722 Nebraska St. for the second time this year.
The council had deferred demolition of the vacant structure in July after hearing plans from Paul Bernard -- managing member of Residential Equity Partners LLC, the Concord, California-based company that owns the building -- to invest around $3.3 million in the property to turn the structure into an office building, for which he already has two prospective tenants.
The building has sat vacant since 2009, when the Siouxland YMCA sold it after moving across the river into the Norm Waitt Sr. YMCA building on the South Sioux City riverfront. It has changed hands twice since then, with conditions going downhill following gutting work that landed a former owner in prison for violation of asbestos removal standards.
An earlier version of this story included an incorrect last name of a city employee. The name has been corrected.
Grand Meander
Downtown Spencer, Iowa, comes alive with activity 5 to 7 p.m. on North Grand Avenue. Enjoy free samples of goodies and hot chocolate, children dancing, carolers caroling AND Santa will make his way down Grand starting at 6 p.m. to help light the Jaycees Christmas tree in front of the police station.
Monday Night Jazz
Come join us for an evening of jazz 7 p.m. with the Reggie Schive Big Band at The Marquee, 1225 Fourth St. $5 at the door!
Gloves of Love Program
Storm Lake Police Association invites citizens to join the members of the association in hanging childrens gloves and other items of donated clothing along with non-perishable food items on or near the tree at the Storm Lake Police Station, 401 E. Milwaukee Ave., Storm Lake, Iowa. After collecting the donated items the Police Association will take all of the donated items to the Upper Des Moines Office to be distributed to children and families in need throughout the community. Call 712-732-8010 for more information.
DES MOINES The only member of the Iowa Senate not affiliated with one of the two major political parties said the 60,000 people he was elected to represent are being denied equal access to the legislative process because majority Republicans have refused to grant him committee assignments.
Sen. David Johnson of Ocheyedan, who changed his voter registration from Republican to No Party in June 2016 over his disagreements with now-President Donald Trump, said he is pressing for full committee participation in the upcoming 2018 legislative session.
Johnson said there is well-established precedent in Iowas legislative archives for Senate and House independent members to serve on committees. The refusal of Senate GOP leaders to grant him the customary committee assignment amounts to legislation without representation, he said.
Like every one of my Senate colleagues, I represent about 60,000 Iowans, yet last session Republican leadership rejected my repeated requests to be appointed to vote on standing committees, Johnson said in a statement Monday. Those are votes denied to my constituents, who have been largely left waiting at the committee altar.
In a Nov. 25 letter to Senate Secretary Charles Smithson, the chambers nonpartisan administrative officer, Johnson contended his independent status creates a third caucus with minority standing. Our chamber rules do not define majority and minority to mean a system of only two political parties, Johnson wrote. Neither does the Iowa Constitution.
Johnson said he has yet to receive an official response. The 2018 session convenes Jan. 8.
Republicans currently hold a 28-20-1 majority in the Senate, pending a Dec. 12 special election in District 3 to fill the vacancy caused by the recent resignation of Sen. Bill Anderson, R-Pearson.
Johnson noted that Senate Democrats gave up one voting seat so he could serve on the Senate Natural Resources and Environment Committee during the 2017 session. But, he said, that committee slot should go back to a Democrat. Johnson said Senate leaders need to follow a rule allowing him, like any senator, to serve on up to six standing committees, which mostly deal with policy matters.
I can introduce legislation and can vote on the Senate floor, he said. But Republican leaders have blocked that very critical middle step, voting in committee to determine whether proposed legislation advances to the full Senate.
According to Johnsons research, the last independent elected to the Iowa Senate was William Schmedika of Hardin County in 1923.
Included with my letter to the secretary are scores of pages copied from legislative documents showing that Sen. Schmedika was appointed to committees, was given bills to consider in subcommittee and voted in committee, Johnson said. My constituents are entitled to the same.
Johnson said he has not ruled out pursuing legal action if Senate officials do not comply.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Dix, R-Shell Rock, issued a statement saying Sen. Johnsons criticism is without merit given that as majority leader he only appoints members of the Senate majority to committee assignments.
Since Sen. Johnson chose not to be a Republican, he is not a member of the majority and is a member of the minority. As rule 34 states, Committee appointments shall be made by the majority leader for members of the majority, after consultation with the president, and by the minority leader for members of the minority, after consultation with the president.
His complaints regarding committee assignments should be addressed to the individual with authority to appoint minority members to committee assignments, the minority leader, Dix office said in its statement. The Senate minority leader currently is Sen. Janet Petersen, D-Des Moines.
Senate President Jack Whitver, R-Ankeny, issued a similar statement, saying that during the 2017 session, we updated the Senate rules to assure the minority leader will appoint minority members to committees and the majority leader will appoint majority members to Senate committees. We will continue this practice for the 2018 session.
SIOUX CITY | Jacquie Rygh fondly recalls visiting the Little Yellow Dog in his fenced-in doghouse in the lobby of the Martin Hotel, where her father worked.
The year was 1939; and the pup to be auctioned off to raise money for the Journal's Mr. Goodfellow Charity was a black Scottish Terrier named "Zero."
"I sat on the floor and played with that dog," said Rygh, who was 9 years old at the time and crazy about the pooch.
In fact, Rygh's father, Worth Waltermire had founded the Ancient and Effervescent Order of the Little Yellow Dog Auction Club three years earlier in 1936. Proceeds from the auction benefit the Mr. Goodfellow Charity, which provides gifts and books to underprivileged Siouxland children at Christmastime. The first pup, Skippy, was sold for $25.
The origins of the Mr. Goodfellow Charity, however, go back even further to 1914 when a reporter bought a needy boy and his sister a pair of mittens. That act of generosity sparked a desire to help others and the newspaper started a drive to help those in need. Over the years, the charity has grown into a community event spearheaded by the Ancient and Effervescent Order of the Little Yellow Dog Auction Club.
Oscar Hoberg, a Sioux City jeweler, took notice of Rygh's affection for Zero and told her father that he would place a single bid on the dog. If he ended up winning the auction, Hoberg said he would give the dog to Rygh.
"My dad told me all this and I was beyond belief being excited," Rygh said.
On auction day, one week before Christmas, the Martin Hotel lobby was packed with onlookers, many were farmers who had brought their own small farm animals to be put on the auction block, according to Rygh, who remembers the floor being covered with straw. She stood with her mother on a balcony scouring the crowd down below for Hoberg.
"I'm searching and searching for Mr. Hoberg, and I kept saying to my mother, 'I don't see Mr. Hoberg at all in this crowd,'" Rygh said. "I was beside myself. 'He's not down there. He's not down there in that crowd.'"
Five minutes before the close of the hour-long auction, Rygh said she heard a man shout, "$300," from the back of the lobby. The crowd grew silent. That bid was quite the chunk of change during the Great Depression.
"It knocked everybody for a loop," Rygh said of Hoberg's bid. "He walked forward and the action stopped at that point. ... I was presented the dog. He was playful and he never lost his beautiful black, glossy fur."
Decades later, the Mr. Goodfellow Charity remains close to Rygh's heart. Rygh, a longtime volunteer, has collected donations year after year for the charity to purchase Christmas gifts for children. Finally, in 2014, she became one of the first female members of the Auction Club.
"I was just absolutely thrilled by it. I'd been so involved over so many years," she said.
Gregg Lucken, a member of the Auction Club who has been involved with the Mr. Goodfellow Charity for more than 30 years, was among a group of five anonymous donors who bid $14,500 on Truffles, the 2012 Little Yellow Dog.
Lucken, who said he got involved with Mr. Goodfellow because he has a soft spot for children, unexpectedly became the chocolate-colored American water spaniel's owner.
"It kind of happened on the spur of the moment. She came home to live with us and has been a wonderful dog," he said of Truffles, who is a constant reminder of the Mr. Goodfellow Charity. "She likes to run and retrieve. She likes to swim. Other than that, she's just a very loving, cuddly dog that has been just a wonderful companion for us."
Lucken said he thinks the Mr. Goodfellow Charity has endured more than 100 years because it hasn't strayed from its mission and the need for it persists.
"The mission of Mr. Goodfellow is very simple and it's been this way for 100 years -- we feel that every child, no matter what their circumstances, deserves a gift at Christmastime. We don't deviate from that," he said.
Think a minuteWhen she was born in 1874 in the European nation of Hungary, Kincsem did not look at all like a champion racehorse. In fact, she so lacked the strong features of a winner that her owner immediately sold her.
Kincsem became the new owners least valuable horse, so he put her in the smallest, darkest stall at the end of the stable. A few nights later a small gang of gypsies stole Kincsem. The thieves were caught and the horse returned to her owner. He asked the gypsy leader why of all his 59 beautiful horses, the gypies had chosen to steal Kincsem? The gypsy chief answered: Horses, like people, do not have to be beautiful to be great.
Interestingly Kincsems name means My Fortune. Yet her size and features were not right for a race horse, especially her skinny hind legs. But in June of 1876, as a two-year-old she ran her first race...and won. No one was more surprised than her owner. Two weeks later she raced and won again!
Strangely, Kincsem started every race in last place. In those days they did not have starting gates, and she always stood lazily behind the starting line and did not begin running until after the other horses were already racing down the track. Then she would shoot from the starting line, kick in to high gear, and pass them all to win! Eventually Kincsem was entered to run against the winner of the German Derby, Europes biggest horse race. Ten thousand people watched in wonder as this ugly, skinny mare beat bigger, stronger stallions. There had never been a champion like this before...nor since. Incredibly, Kincsem won every race she ran as a two-year-old, and also as a three-year-old! In fact, to our knowledge no race horse in history has ever equaled Kincsems lifetime record. In 54 major races, she won every single race! This unwanted, skinny mare became the Queen of the Sport of Kings. One of the ugliest horses ever born became the greatest horse that ever lived. Maybe you have felt rejected or disrespected and looked down on. But the One Who created you values you as His unique masterpiece who is as important as any other person in the world. Others may see your apparent weaknesses but He sees your special strengths. He loves you the way He made you, and He does not want you to look like or be like anyone else. He designed you with your own special personality, abilities and appearance. If you ask Him to take full charge of your heart, Jesus will help you fully become the one-of-a-kind man or woman He made you to be. Just think a minute
PRINCE FREDERICK, Md.
Disclaimer: In the U.S.A., all persons accused of a crime by the State are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. See: so.md/presumed-innocence. Additionally, all of the information provided above is solely from the perspective of the respective law enforcement agency and does not provide any direct input from the accused or persons otherwise mentioned. You can find additional information about the case by searching the Maryland Judiciary Case Search Database using the accused's name and date of birth. The database is online at so.md/mdcasesearch . Persons named who have been found innocent or not guilty of all charges in the respective case, and/or have had the case ordered expunged by the court can have their name, age, and city redacted by following the process defined at so.md/expungeme.
(December 4, 2017)The Prince Frederick Barrack of the Maryland State Police (MSP) today released the following incident and arrest reports.DISORDERLY CONDUCT, RESISTING ARREST: On 11/27/2017 at 8:45 pm, Trooper First Class Costello, Trooper Keyser and Trooper Backus responded to a residence in the 2100 block of Chaneyville Rd. for an attempt to locate a wanted subject to serve an arrest warrant. The wanted subject was located, was cooperative and was placed under arrest. At that time, was walking towards the residence and became aggressive towards the officers while they were placing the arrested subject into the vehicle for transport. After numerous verbal commands to stay back and stop, Harrison continued to cause disruption. He was placed under arrest for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Both subjects were incarcerated in the Calvert County Detention Center.POSSESSION OF BUPRENORPHINE: On 11/28/2017 at 9:38, Trooper Backus responded to the Prince Frederick Walmart Parking Lot for a report of CDS activity being observed by an off-duty officer. A strong odor of marijuana was emitting from inside the vehicle where the activity was observed., was arrested for possession of Buprenorphine for which she did not have a prescription. Cunningham was incarcerated in the Calvert County Detention Center.THEFT: On 11/30/2017 at 8:43 am, Trooper First Class Harrod responded to the 1700 block of Goah Way in Sunderland for a reported theft. The victim reported a Christmas tree, a Candy Cane decoration and an extension cord were all removed from the front porch of the residence. Investigation continues.TELEPHONE MISUSE/HARASSMENT: On 12/1/2017 at 10:00 am, Trooper First Class Matthews received a report of telephone misuse and harassment complaint for a residence in Sunderland. The victim reported receiving threatening messages and repeated text and calls from a relative for over a month.d, was contacted by law enforcement and told to stop texting and calling the victim. Bell continued to leave threatening messages and sending repeated texts. An application for Charges requesting Bell be charged on a Criminal Summons has been completed.POSSESSION OF COCAINE: On 12/3/2017 at 2:06 am, Trooper First Class Costello stopped a vehicle on Rt. 4 near Fox Run Blvd. in Prince Frederick for traffic violations. A K-9 scan was requested and resulted in a positive alert., was found to be in possession of cocaine. He was arrested and incarcerated in the Calvert County Detention Center.DUI ARREST:, was arrested on 12/02/2017 @ 11:36 pm by TPR. R. Backus.
Citing a First Amendment violation, the anti-LGBTQ hate group Liberty Counsel filed a suit in federal court against the city of Tampa for enacting a ban on gay conversion therapy for minors.
Liberty Counsel is representing Robert Vazzo, LMFT, David Pickup, LMFT, and their minor clients and their parents in the case against the city. A noted figure in the gay conversion therapy industry, Pickup raised eyebrows last month when he introduced a flamboyant flag dancer as the opening act at an anti-LGBTQ conference in Texas.
According to a statement released by Liberty Counsel, "Ordinance 2017-47 violates the First Amendment by imposing a viewpoint and content-based prohibition on the speech of licensed professionals in Tampa who offer change counseling." Liberty Counsel further claims that the ordinance violates the rights of clients under the Florida Patient's Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
Tampa's ban on gay conversion therapy was passed by the City Council unanimously last April. The ban, which levies fines on mental health practitioners and counselors who engage who purport to change or curb a minor's sexual orientation or gender identity. Similar bans are in place in Miami Beach, Wilton Manors, Miami, North Bay Village, West Palm Beach, Bay Harbor Islands, Lake Worth, El Portal, Key West, Boynton Beach, Tampa, Delray Beach, Riviera Beach, Wellington, Greenacres, Boca Raton and Oakland Park.
Metro notes that under the ordinance, anyone caught engaging in the practice can be fined up to $1,000. Repeat offenders can face fines as high as $5,000. However, there is an exemption for those affiliated with religious organizations who are not licensed therapists.
At the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, Expedition 54-55 prime crewmembers Scott Tingle of NASA (left) Anton Shkaplerov of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos, center) and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA, right) pose for pictures Nov. 29 in front of a Soyuz spacecraft simulator as part of their final crew qualification exam activities. They will launch Dec. 17 on the Soyuz MS-07 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a five-month mission on the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/Elizabeth Weissinger. NASA
The next crew to launch to the International Space Station is in Russia today for traditional ceremonies before heading to the launch site in Kazakhstan. Back in space, the Expedition 53 crew is preparing for the departure and arrival of a pair of cargo ships next week.
Three new crew members from Russia, the United States and Japan are getting ready for their Dec. 14 launch aboard the Soyuz MS-07 spacecraft to the space stations Rassvet module. The Expedition 54-55 crew consists of Soyuz Commander and veteran station resident Anton Shkaplerov and first-time Flight Engineers Scott Tingle and Norishige Kanai.
The trio was in Star City today talking to journalists before heading to Moscow to tour Red Square and lay flowers at the Kremlin Wall where famed cosmonauts are interred. Next, the crew will head to the launch site Dec. 4 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where they will stay for final launch preparations at the Cosmonaut Hotel.
Meanwhile, the orbiting Expedition 53 crew is packing the Cygnus cargo craft with trash before it ends its mission next week. First, ground controllers will remotely detach Cygnus from the Unity module with the Canadarm2 on Dec. 5. Cygnus will then be maneuvered over the Harmony module for a GPS test to assist NASAs Commercial Crew Program.
Next, astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba will take over the robotics controls and release Cygnus back into space on Dec. 6. It will orbit Earth until Dec. 18 then enter the Earths atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean for a fiery, but safe demise.
SpaceX is getting ready to replenish the station with its Dragon cargo craft scheduled to deliver about 4,800 pounds of crew supplies and science gear. Dragon is targeted to launch Dec. 8 from Florida atop a Falcon 9 rocket and take a two-day trip to the station. Vande Hei and Acaba are training to capture Dragon with the Canadarm2 when it reaches a point 10 meters from the station. Ground controllers will them remotely install Dragon to the Harmony module where it will stay until Jan. 6.
On-Orbit Status Report
Probiotics Operations: Today a crewmember conducted the second half of the third sampling phase for the JAXA Probiotic investigation that began on GMT 331 with fecal sample collections. Todays activities included saliva sample collections and a questionnaire. Some species of harmful bacteria such as Salmonella grow stronger and more virulent in the microgravity environment of space. At the same time, the human immune system is weaker in space, leading to increased health risks. The objective of the Probiotics investigation is to study the impact of continuous consumption of probiotics on immune function and intestinal microbiota in astronauts under closed microgravity environment This investigation studies the effects of beneficial bacteria (Probiotics) to improve crew members intestinal microbiota as well as their immune function on long-duration space missions.
TangoLab-1 Transfer from Cygnus (OA-8): After completing the short demonstration of TangoLab-1 operations in Cygnus that began on GMT 326 last week, today the crew powered down and removed TangoLab-1 from Cygnus and returned the facility back to EXPRESS Rack 4. The facility will be powered back up in ER4 and returned to its nominal capability. TangoLab-1 is a reconfigurable general research facility designed for microgravity research and development and pilot manufacturing aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Plant Habitat Sound Level Meter (SLM) Measurements: The crew performed ten Plant Habitat acoustic measurement sets with varying Environmental Control System (ECS) fan speeds between each measurement set. The fan speeds were controlled via ground command. The data from the measurements will be used to assess the environmental factors when the Plant Habitat facility is used in the JEM. The Advanced Plant Habitat Facility (Plant Habitat) is a fully automated facility that will be used to conduct plant bioscience research on the International Space Station (ISS). It occupies the lower half of the EXpedite the PRocessing of Experiments to Space Station (EXPRESS) rack and two International Subrack Interface Standard (ISIS) drawers, providing a large, enclosed, environmentally controlled chamber.
NeuroMapping: Today two 52S crewmembers set up the NeuroMapping hardware and performed their Flight Day 90 tests in strapped in and free floating body configurations. The NeuroMapping investigation studies whether long-duration spaceflight causes changes to brain structure and function, motor control, or multi-tasking abilities. It also measures how long it would take for the brain and body to recover from possible changes. Previous research and anecdotal evidence from astronauts suggests movement control and cognition can be affected in microgravity. The NeuroMapping investigation performs structural and functional magnetic resonance brain imaging (MRI and fMRI) to assess any changes that occur after spending months on the ISS.
Human Research Program (HRP) Collections (Biochemical Profile and Repository): A 51S crewmember conducted his return minus 15 Day (R-15) blood, and urine sample collections to support the Biochemical Profile and Repository experiments. The samples were placed in the Minus Eighty Degree Celsius Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI).
The Biochemical Profile experiment tests blood and urine samples obtained from astronauts before, during, and after spaceflight. Specific proteins and chemicals in the samples are used as biomarkers, or indicators of health. Post-flight analysis yields a database of samples and test results, which scientists can use to study the effects of spaceflight on the body.
Repository is a storage bank used to maintain biological specimens over extended periods of time and under well-controlled conditions. This repository supports scientific discovery that contributes to our fundamental knowledge in the area of human physiological changes and adaptation to a microgravity environment and provides unique opportunities to study longitudinal changes in human physiology spanning many missions.
Earth Imagery from ISS Target Operations: The crew captured images and video footage of the Namib Desert, the Mediterranean at Night, Fishing Boats, along the Gulf of Thailand, and Southern Tip of India. The Earth Imagery from ISS investigation creates a series of videos, showcasing Earth from space. These videos will be taken with cameras on the International Space Station in 6K hi-resolution, then integrated into videos for screensavers for public enjoyment, exploration, and engagement.
Dragon OBT: In preparation for the upcoming arrival of SpaceX-13 Dragon, the crew performed training of the offset grapple case for Dragon capture. The crew performed a series of onboard training (OBT) sessions to maintain proficiency prior to a vehicle arrival.
Cygnus cargo operations: Disposal cargo loading operations continued on the OA-8 Cygnus vehicle. Today, the crew removed TangoLab-1, and loaded disposal cargo on the vehicle. Cargo loading will continue until hatch closure, which is planned for Tuesday, December 5th.
Todays Planned Activities
All activities were completed unless otherwise noted.
Marrow Breath And Ambient Air Sample Collection Subject
ARED Photo/TV Reminder
HRF Generic Frozen Blood Collection Double Spin Collection
Probiotics Saliva Operations
HRF Generic Refrigerated Centrifuge Double Spin Configuration
Probiotics Salive Sample MELFI Insertion
HRF Generic Urine Collection Male Subject
Probiotics Question
HRF Generic Sample MELFI Insertion
MORZE. Log Entry of Liquid and Food (Medicine) Intake
Max Cycle Ergometer w/ Vibration Isolation & Stabilization (CEVIS) Portable PFS Partial Set Up
Max Cycle Ergometer w/Vibration Isolation & Stabilization (CEVIS) Portable PFS Power Up
HRF Generic Refrigerated Centrifuge Spin Conclude
ISS HAM Service Module Pass
Environmental Health System (EHS) Surface Sample Kit (SSK) Collection/Incubation
NeuroMapping Experiment Neurocognitive Test Subject
Return equipment conference Tagup with specialists
Verification of ??-1 Flow Sensor Position
??? Maintenance
Conference of Search and Rescue (????) specialists with returning crew
HRF Generic Frozen Blood Collection Conclude And Stow
Max Cycle Ergometer w/Vibration Isolation & Stabilization (CEVIS) Portable PFS Subject
Diagnostics of FGB ???? instruments 11?156?. Tagup with specialists
Diagnostics of FGB Power Supply System Filter Units (??-2) and Main Bus Assembly (???-2).
HRF Generic Sample MELFI Retrieval And Insertion Operations
Crew Departure Prep
Waste & Hygiene Compartment (WHC) Water Container (???) Remove and Replace
Max Cycle Ergometer w/Vibration Isolation & Stabilization (CEVIS) Portable PFS Partial Stow
Orthostatic Stability Evaluation with LBNP (without PC)
Environmental Health System (EHS) Microbial Air Sampler (MAS) Kit Sample Collection
TangoLab-1 From Cygnus Move
Temperature and Humidity Control (THC) Oxygen Generation System (OGS) Avionics Air Assembly (AAA) Flow Measurement
Crew Departure Preparations for Return to Earth
Environmental Health System (EHS) Sound Level Meter (SLM) Setup and Operations
On-board Training (OBT) Dragon Offset Grapple
Flushing ???
MORZE. Experiment setup
TIMER. Experiment setup and initiation of video recording
MOTOCARD. Experiment Session. Tagup with specialists
Photo/TV Camcorder Setup Verification
MOTOCARD. Operator Assistance with the Experiment
Onboard Training (OBT) SSRMS Debrief Conference
Onboard Training (OBT) Robotics On-board Trainer (ROBoT) Setup
N2 Nadir Hatch to Unlatch Hardstop
Inventory Management System (IMS) Conference
Photography of ??228 mockup temperature sensors on the external surface of MRM2
Countermeasures System (CMS) Max Cycle Ergometer w/Vibration Isolation & Stabilization (CEVIS) Portable PFS Conclude
Multi Omics Item Gathering
Transfer Cygnus Cargo Operations
TIMER. Experiment Ops Video Termination and Cleanup
Manufacturing Device Feedstock Canister, and Extruder Exchange
Acoustic Monitor Setup for Static Measurements
Plant Habitat Sound Level Meter Data Transfer and Stow
Cygnus Cargo Operations Conference
Flight Director/ISS CREW CONFERENCE
Photo T/V (P/TV) Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED) Exercise Video Stow
Completed Task List Activities
Orbital ATK-8 Cargo Environment Sensor (CES) Data Download
Ground Activities
All activities were completed unless otherwise noted.
SSRMS ops to support Dragon Offset Grapple OBT
Standard commanding
Three-Day Look Ahead:
Friday, 12/01: Max CEVIS, Sabatier Return, ZBOT Hardware Stow, Circadian Rhythms
Saturday, 12/02: Weekly Housekeeping, Crew Off Duty
Thursday, 11/30: Crew Off Duty
QUICK ISS Status Environmental Control Group:
Component Status
Elektron On
Vozdukh Manual
[???] 1 SM Air Conditioner System (SKV1) On
[???] 2 SM Air Conditioner System (SKV2) Off
Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Lab Operate
Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Node 3 Standby
Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Lab Idle
Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Node 3 Operate
Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA) Shutdown
Urine Processing Assembly (UPA) Standby
Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Lab Full Up
Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Node 3 Off
Development practitioners and policymakers are increasingly experimenting with public-private partnerships (PPPs) in agricultural value chains. These PPPs aim to bring private sector expertise and market opportunities to marginalised farmers through high quality value chains. But do they work for farmers?
Research Ive carried out on four PPPs in Ghana (maize), Indonesia (cocoa), Rwanda (tea) and Uganda (oil palm), all supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), found clear benefits. Outcomes of the PPPs included new investment in impoverished regions, an increased availability of inputs and finance for farmers, and productivity gains. Despite these results, however, farmers were often dissatisfied with the arrangements. At one level this is perhaps unsurprising, as there is often distrust between farmers and their buyers. However, what was puzzling for me was that where the results in terms of productivity and short-term household gains were the strongest (Uganda), the farmers were the least satisfied.
The conclusion I reached is that farmer satisfaction with value chains is not only determined by tangible results, but also judged on the fairness with which they are being treated, in terms of the decision-making processes within the chain and the related behaviour of chain partners. Relevant factors that affect this include:
Transparency the sharing of relevant information on procedures, plans and objectives, alongside price and market information with farmers who are supported to make sense of it all. A positive example here comes from the PPP in Ghana, where farmers not only had information on prices, crop budgets, loan applications and the selection of input providers, but also support from a local NGO to better understand this information.
the sharing of relevant information on procedures, plans and objectives, alongside price and market information with farmers who are supported to make sense of it all. A positive example here comes from the PPP in Ghana, where farmers not only had information on prices, crop budgets, loan applications and the selection of input providers, but also support from a local NGO to better understand this information. Two-way communication and conflict resolution measures open communication between farmers and buyers that enables farmers to understand (and contest) decisions, as well as help buyers to better understand the farmers context. Communication mechanisms should also allow farmers to voice complaints and suggestions, and ensure that concerns are acted on. In Ghana, again, district value chain committees meet regularly, providing a forum for exchange and a mechanism for dispute arbitration.
open communication between farmers and buyers that enables farmers to understand (and contest) decisions, as well as help buyers to better understand the farmers context. Communication mechanisms should also allow farmers to voice complaints and suggestions, and ensure that concerns are acted on. In Ghana, again, district value chain committees meet regularly, providing a forum for exchange and a mechanism for dispute arbitration. Informal but reliable agreements to purchase crops or provide ongoing support. Such agreements provide stability and security based on mutual understanding, but do not impose limiting conditions on farmers, unlike formal contracts (which are often used to enforce conditions on farmers, rather than protect their interests). In both Rwanda and Uganda, substantial company investment in local processing factories represented a very tangible long-term commitment. However, in Uganda, the enforcement of loan repayments based on poorly understood contracts was a point of grievance.
to purchase crops or provide ongoing support. Such agreements provide stability and security based on mutual understanding, but do not impose limiting conditions on farmers, unlike formal contracts (which are often used to enforce conditions on farmers, rather than protect their interests). In both Rwanda and Uganda, substantial company investment in local processing factories represented a very tangible long-term commitment. However, in Uganda, the enforcement of loan repayments based on poorly understood contracts was a point of grievance. Farmer empowerment through strengthening collective action (rather than imposing farmer organisation from the top down) and fostering interdependence between farmers and buyers. In Rwanda, although farmers are dependent on the factory, they also control half of the land producing tea, creating an interdependence between the factory and the farmers.
Building these factors into PPP arrangements enables farmers to participate in decision-making and wield some power in value chains. They are not simple solutions. However, the purpose of governments engaging with and supporting companies through PPPs is not to support private investments that would have happened anyway. PPPs should improve the quality of value chain relationships and create public benefits, which would not be attained through market forces alone.
The majority of food and other agricultural outputs worldwide are produced by smallholder farmers, but they often have problems participating in profitable value chains. Power and information are divided asymmetrically between partners. Producers are often not sure if there will be buyers next season and what the current market prices are, while buyers are not sure that producers will keep their commitment to supply the agreed quantities at the expected quality.
Our experience shows that in order to link smallholder producers to profitable value chains in an inclusive, well-informed and empowered manner, they need to be given special attention and focus in public-private partnerships. For this purpose, the public-private-producer-partnerships (4Ps) approach was developed. Over the last 3 years, the development organisation, SNV, has implemented the Partnering for Value project funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development with the aim to elaborate the 4P approach. We used independent brokering services in five countries (El Salvador, Mozambique, Senegal, Uganda and Vietnam) to bring producers (and their organisations), private enterprises and public-sector actors together.
During this process, we found that a number of dimensions linked to commitment, trust, governance and capacity contribute to the success and sustainability of these partnerships.
Creating trust and commitment
Partners formulated commitments towards each other, which formed the basis for a 4P arrangement. Through a joint process of business plan development, implementation and review, the partners developed trust and confidence in each other.
Smallholders often complain about the price they get for their products: they dont know if the price on offer, or the market price, is a fair price which gives them a good profit. Companies, on the other hand, often grumble that producers are not reliable and side-sell their produce despite prior agreements, even when inputs are supplied in advance by the company.
An effective 4P partnership has partners who show a high level of accountability towards each other based on trust, commitment and discipline. If a group of producers signs an agreement to supply 20 t of grain to a processor, they should keep that agreement. The same holds of course for the buying enterprise, who should keep their off-take commitment and pay as agreed.
Through joint action, individual smallholders have shown to be able to empower themselves, make informed choices and negotiate better deals. The neutral broker often had an important role in facilitating this process and making sure that the voice of producers was heard.
Governance of the partnership
In 4Ps, the producers are not only seen as suppliers of raw materials, but as partners who have an equal say in decision-making on important points, such as who will be responsible for post-harvest storage and warehousing, or how input supply will be organised so that producers can maximise time efficiency.
We learned that regular face-to-face review meetings between the partners, facilitated by the neutral broker, are important to avoid friction or conflict. At the same time, misunderstandings, differences of opinion, or false assumptions are inevitable and every partnership goes through such a phase. The role of the broker is essential in these early stages to mediate between partners and hold the partnership together.
A second important learning is that the partnership should be governed by some sort of written agreement. These should, however, not be exclusive agreements in which one partner forces the other partner to only do business with them. Producers should have the liberty to engage in multiple agreements with different buyers, as long as they respect each agreement and vice versa.
Capacity development
Partnership brokering is more than just bringing partners around the table and facilitating the development of a shared business plan and agreement. The business cycle should be supported by a capacity development trajectory, which enables partners to better understand each others needs.
This capacity strengthening will, in most cases, be focused on improved business practices and management skills. Many rural farm entrepreneurs and rural agro-enterprises do not yet have an established business culture of record keeping, and therefore do not have the records to inform their decision-making or convince potential financiers to invest in the growth of their business venture.
4P as a tool for development
The bottom line of the 4P concept remains, of course, that such a partnership brings benefits to smallholders, such as their increased confidence to operate in high-value markets. We have seen that producers participating in 4P partnerships get access to better inputs and can thus produce a higher value harvest, which sells at a higher price. At the end of the day, the producer needs to make a profit. The fact that partners are working together and are even continuing the 4P partnership beyond the project is a highly valued result for us, in which the producers of these partnerships are taking part in agricultural markets as real entrepreneurs.
Though Puerto Rico has moved off the front pages of the news, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria two months ago is nonetheless still very real citizens of the island, and many are still in major need of assistance. If you live in Portland, you can help aid your fellow Americans by taking part in Portland Feeds Puerto Rico, a weeklong pop-up series featuring Puerto Rican-based chefs and barista taking over the kitchens and espresso machines all around town. And the first coffee event takes place tomorrow with 2014 and 2015 Puerto Rico Latte Art Champion and owner of Santruce-based Cafe Comunion Abner Roldan taking over Water Avenue Coffee.
Roldan has been active over the past two months, trying to raise funds to reopen his cafe. Now that his GoFundMe has reached its $5,000 goal, Roldan continues to raise funds for others in Puerto Rico. Starting at Water Avenue tomorrow, Roldan is teaming up with Kali Solackowner of Cafe Regina in Santruceto serve coffee and chocolate-covered churros from Portalnds 180 Xurros, with the proceeds going to the Cosa Nuestra Relief Fund and the Animal Rescue relief fund.
Roldan and Solack will then move on to Foxy Coffee on Wednesday to serve coffee from Puerto Rico with games of dominoes, traditional Puerto Rican music, and more churros. On Friday, the duo will be taking over Stumptown Coffees downtown location for more coffee and more churros. Their last stop will be on Sunday, where they will join forces with visiting chefs Paxx Caraballo and Mario Pagan at Ataula Restaurant for a Puerto Rican brunch service.
Though not hosting Roldan or Solack, Upper Left Roasters is joining a handful of restaurants, cocktail bars, and wine spots featuring specials as part of the fundraising efforts. Just ask for the #PDX4PR special.
For more information on PDX Feeds Puerto Rico and to see a full list of participating locations, visit their official website. And if you are unable to attend but still want to help their cause, #PDX4PR is accepting donations directly through their website.
But Id rather help out by drinking coffee and eating churros.
Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
*top image via PDX Feeds Puerto Rico
Western Australian Racing Industry Hall of Fame Inductee Fred Kersley met celebrated American trainer Erv Miller at the barrier draw function for the 2017 TABtouch Inter Dominion Final.
Born on December 11, 1966 in the Amish community of Arthur in Illinois, Miller has put together a remarkable record as a trainer, and since the USTA began keeping training records in 1992, Miller has trained 5,100 winners of some $78,691,123 in stakes.
Those figures place Miller in fourth place on the stakes-money won list of American trainers and third on the list of leading trainers by number of races won.
By way of comparison, Western Australias leading trainer, in terms of career wins, Gary Hall Sr., has trained the winners of some 2,446 races and $33,619,313 in the same period. Kersley trained 2,285 winners, including 1,565 in Perth, where he was a 14-time Premiership Trainer before switching to Thoroughbreds where he gained fame as the trainer of the legendary Perth galloper Northerly.
Northerly won 19 of his 37 career starts and stakes of $9,341,850, including nine Group One wins in the Cox Plate (2), Australian Cup (2), Underwood Stakes (2), Caulfield Cup, Yalumba Stakes and Railway Stakes.
In 2004, Miller was honoured by the Illinois Harness Horsemans Association with its Person of the Year Award, and in 2005 Miller was presented with the Brian Pinske Memorial Award for his achievements on the Grand Circuit.
That same year, 2005, Miller won the Glen Garnsey Trainer of the Year Award from the United States Harness Writers Association and the Delvin Miller Trainer of the Year Award from the Grand Circuit.
Among the better horses that Miller has trained are the 2010 Breeders Crown Two-Year-Old Colt and Gelding Trot champion Manofmanymissions, the three-time Dan Patch Award winning pacer Loyal Opposition (56 wins in 98 starts and $2,861,294) and the unbeaten two-year-old pacing filly Incredible Tillie (12 wins from 12 starts as two-year-old for $512,782).
Miller also trained Lis Mara, Shark Gesture and Shadyshark Hanover, and that trio of stallions is currently standing at stud in either New Zealand or Australia.
Erv and his son Marcus like the chances of Western Australias champion Chicago Bull in the Inter Dominion Final, and at the barrier draw they followed their opinion by paying second top price of $2,550 for Chicago Bull in the Inter Dominion Calcutta.
(Australian Harness Racing)
Dresden Agricultural Society President Lucille Laprise has been quoted as saying that Dresden Raceway will continue on, even if the slot machines which are currently located at the track end up being relocated to Chatham in a few years' time.
In an article by Chatham This Week, Laprise conveyed that racing at the track will continue with or without slot-machine gaming.
The raceway will still continue. It was just an added feature to have the slots next door to us, so they complemented one another. The races are forging ahead strong, so well be fine.
Two weeks ago, a spokesman for Gateway Casinos went on the record as saying that slot machines will remain at Dresden Raceway until at least 2020. The statement came amid comments from municipal officials which indicated that Gateway is planning to eventually relocate its Dresden gaming operations to Chatham.
Laprise has echoed the same sentiment.
She told Chatham This Week that a representative from Gateway contacted her directly in regard to the potential move. They just wanted to give us a heads up to what their plans were," Laprise was quoted as saying.
News of the potential relocation comes as Gateway is in discussions with the Western Fair District about the future of gaming and potential expansion at the London, Ont. fairgrounds.
(With files from Chatham This Week)
By Delana Isles
A CASE built entirely around circumstantial evidence and which was said not to be "sure win by the prosecutor, was this week swiftly voided by the Court of Appeal.
The three justices convened on Monday (November 27) to deliberate Cortez Simmons conviction and life sentence for the murder of Kaziah Burke.
But it was quickly evident that the 2013 murder of the young father is not yet solved to the satisfaction of the court, as the judges wasted little time in rejecting the guilty verdict of 11 out of the 12 jurors and a subsequent life sentence by the chief justice.
Representing Simmons were attorney Alvin Garland and Queens Counsel Jacqueline Samuels Brown, who presented arguments in favour of no case submissions on the part of the prosecution as well as whether Simmons should be granted an acquittal or a new trial.
The justices, who presented a swift judgement in quashing the conviction after reviewing written submissions, were however not sold on the arguments for acquittal, and instead ordered that Simmons be retried.
Trinidadian jurist, Evans Welch represented the Crown as a special prosecutor.
Death of a father
Burke was shot multiple times and killed on April 13, 2013, at Uncle Doughs bar on Airport Road in Providenciales.
Simmons was first convicted on March 25, 2015, after an intense three weeks and three days trial.
Following the verdict, the prosecutor had told the press that he did not think it was a sure win as the case was built on circumstantial evidence.
He said: "What I would say, the evidence was not overwhelming but it was sufficient that the conviction was safe and was on good grounds, but it certainly was not an overwhelming or the strongest case I have ever prosecuted but there was enough which warranted the verdict that came back.
Simmons was sentenced to life in prison by Chief Justice Margaret Ramsay-Hale following the verdict by the 12 member jury, of which 11 found him guilty of murder, and one not guilty.
Before delivering their verdict, the jury had requested the transcripts of the two forensic analysis of the gunshot residue (GSR) found on Simmons truck to help in their deliberations.
The transcript they requested related to a single particle of gunshot residue that police had lifted from Simmons truck.
The prosecutions expert from the United States, Michael Martinez, was able to analyse the residue and prove that a firearm was recently fired, hence the transmission of GSR from the defendants hand to the door handle.
The other GSR transcript requested by the jury related to the defences forensic expert from the United Kingdom, Angela Shaw, who testified that such a small amount of residue is not tested in her jurisdiction and that it could have gotten on to the handle by environmental contamination.
However, the chief justice had informed the jury that those transcripts could not be provided, and sent them back to the jury room for further discussions.
Shortly after they came back with a verdict of 10 guilty, two not guilty. But they were sent back by the judge, who instructed them to try to reach a unanimous verdict, or a verdict of 11 to one.
About an hour and a half later, the foreman advised the judge that they could not reach a unanimous verdict; but had managed to reach a verdict of 11 to one.
Ramsay-Hale accepted the verdict and sentenced Simmons to life imprisonment.
GSR evidence
Responding to a query as to the effect the GSR evidence had on the verdict, the lawyer noted that it is very difficult to say.
At the time, the prosecutor had expressed uncertainty as to the effect that the GSR testimony had on the jury.
He had also stated that he would not have pursued a prosecution on the basis of just the GSR alone, a single particle, but with all of the circumstantial evidence taken together, then a different situation arises.
In her directions to the jury, the chief justice had told the jury that they could reject the GSR evidence, but can still consider the rest of the evidence when determining the guilt or innocence of the accused.
One of the most significant testimonies during the 2015 trial came from Booker Odena, who testified that he had given the gun back to Simmons after a shooting incident at the Digicel cinema on Leeward Highway on March 17, 2013.
It was later established by forensic evidence that the same gun used in that shooting was used to kill Burke on April 13.
However, it was later established during the trial that Odena had lied to the police about being the shooter at the cinema shooting, but later confessed after he was shown video footage which showed he was the gunman on March 17.
The court heard that after seeing the footage, Odena admitted to the police that he took the gun from Simmons and fired it while at the cinema, but that he had given the gun back to Simmons following the incident.
The prosecution presented that Simmons was the last known person to have possession of the gun, and that the jury should believe that Odena was telling the truth about that even though he had initially lied to the police.
In further directions to the jury before the verdict, the chief justice had directed them that if they do not accept Odenas testimony then that would be the end of the case.
Simmons girlfriend, Aisha Freitas had testified on behalf of her boyfriend, telling the court that on the night Burke was killed, the accused arrived home and told her that they were leaving as some people would be coming by to make trouble.
Freitas told the court that she and the defendant then drove around in his white Tacoma truck, which video footage presented in court showed had stealthily driven away from the vicinity of the murder scene shortly before.
She testified that they eventually drove to a deserted spot in Discovery Bay where they spent the night, before returning home the following morning where he was arrested by police who arrived at his home.
By Olivia Rose
PREMIER Sharlene Cartwright Robinson has urged the international community to pledge their commitment to help rebuild countries and territories ravaged by hurricanes Irma and Maria.
The TCI leader led a delegation to the Caricom-UN High Level Pledging Conference at the UN headquarters in New York last week.
The two-day event explored how UN and Caricom member states could pool their resources and cultivate a shared vision geared towards Building a more climate-resilient community.
The TCI, as a Caricom associated member state, had the opportunity to deliver a presentation on the territorys recovery needs, priorities and recovery strategies following the impact of the hurricanes.
Premier Cartwright Robinson in her presentation to the UN and Caricom under the theme: Vision for a resilient Caribbean - Building partnership for transformation called on all partners to honor the pledge to the 2030 agenda commitment which states "leave no one behind.
She said: "Collaborate with us in achieving a proactive, climate-smart, community driven, bottom-up approach to a more sustainable and resilient Turks and Caicos Islands.
The premier reminded the gathering that building back better is expensive, and not an easily attainable goal, especially since a high percentage of the territorys population was adversely affected with no insurance benefits.
"Hurricanes Irma and Maria impacted all islands across the Turks and Caicos Islands, she said.
"The immediate challenge, apart from the provision of the basic human needs of food, water and shelter, was to restore communications - most essential in an archipelago, restore electricity, water, and provide support to the hospital and to aid in the safe departure of tourists.
She added: "Humanitarian aid critical assessments have shown that four to five feet of coastal erosion was recorded at the popular Grace Bay beach.
"This paints a lucid picture of the adverse effects on our coastal environment that is hinged on our main bread winner - tourism.
She stressed that there is an urgent need to engage in coastal protection efforts in the TCI.
"Humanitarian aid, particularly development action is also critical for the Turks and Caicos Islands at this time; CDEMAs Initial Damage Assessment Report revealed that 80 percent of the housing stock was damaged due to the impact of hurricane Irma.
"Five hundred and eighty households across the islands received level one through four damage to their homes.
Premier Cartwright Robinson leveraged the opportunity to encourage experts with strong technical experience in urban and land planning and building code application, particularly roofing design, to assist the Turks and Caicos Islands in its rehabilitation process.
She called on the conference to reverse traditional development principles, such as, "relief first and development later.
Delivering the keynote address at the high level meeting, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said: "A new and better deal is needed for Caribbean islands if they are to build climate resilience.
He spoke of seeing a "level of devastation I had never seen in my life in places like Dominica and Barbuda.
It is estimated that $1.1 billion worth of damage was caused by hurricanes in the Caribbean this year, with total economic losses of $400 million.
Guterres called on financial institutions and donors attending the conference to work together to achieve a "new and better deal with coordinated risk sharing and concessional lending terms.
"Today must be about more than speeches and pledges.
He added: "We should not let the people be punished once by nature and twice by outdated economic policies.
He said the meeting should be seen as an opportunity for countries to forge a partnership for a better future.
Former US president Bill Clinton was the special guest at the post-lunch session of the conference.
Arrest order for 1 of Messi's brothers
AP, Buenos Aires :
A prosecutor in Argentina has ordered the arrest of one of Lionel Messi's brothers.
Authorities say that Matias Messi illegally carried a gun. The weapon was found inside a blood-stained boat after he crashed it in the Parana river.Prosecutor Jose Luis Caterina says Messi is being investigated and will eventually be detained for illegally possessing a firearm in "a suspicious context."The 35-year-old is recovering from a fractured jaw and other injuries at a hospital in Argentina's Santa Fe province.
US, South Korea begin largest-ever joint air drill
North Korea has called the US-South Korean exercises an \"all-out provocation\"
AFP :
The US and South Korea on Monday kicked off their largest ever joint air exercise, an operation North Korea has labelled an "all-out provocation", days after Pyongyang fired its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile.
The five-day Vigilant Ace drill-involving 230 aircraft, including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and tens of thousands of troops-began Monday morning, Seoul's air force said.
Pyongyang over the weekend blasted the drill, accusing US President Donald's Trump's administration of "begging for nuclear war".
The annual exercise comes five days after the nuclear-armed North test-fired a new ICBM, which it says brings the whole of the continental United States within range.
As tensions surged, US Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican and foreign policy hawk, warned that the US was moving closer to "preemptive war" with the North.
"If there's an underground nuclear test (by the North), then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States," Graham told the CBS show "Face the Nation".
The isolated and impoverished North has staged six increasingly powerful atomic tests since 2006 -- most recently in September.
In recent years Pyongyang has accelerated its drive to bring together nuclear and missile technology capable of threatening the US, which it accuses of hostility.
"The preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures. Every missile test, every underground test of a nuclear weapon, means the marriage is more likely," Graham said.
His remarks echoed those of Trump's National Security Adviser HR McMaster, who told a security forum on Saturday that the potential for war with the North "is increasing every day".
This year's US and South Korean wargames feature a number of powerful jet fighters newly mobilised for the event, including six F-22s and 18 units of F-35 combat jets, the US air force said.
It also involves simulated precision attacks on the North's military installations, including its missile launch sites and artillery units, Yonhap news agency said, citing unnamed Seoul sources.
The North has boasted that the Hwasong 15 ICBM tested on Wednesday is capable of delivering a "super-large" nuclear warhead anywhere in the US mainland.
Analysts agree that the latest test showed a big improvement in potential range, but say it was likely achieved using a dummy warhead that would have been quite light.
They say a missile carrying a much heavier nuclear warhead would struggle to travel as far.
They are also sceptical that Pyongyang has mastered the sophisticated technology required to protect such a warhead from the extreme temperatures and stresses encountered as the missile hurtles back to Earth.
The latest launch, which saw the missile drop into Japan's economic waters, was condemned by Tokyo's parliament Monday, which slammed the North's rogue weapons programme as an "imminent threat".
"This is a frontal challenge against the international community that must not be tolerated," added the resolution by Japan's upper house, which came as the country's hawish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said talking to the reclusive state was "meaningless".
The North's leader Kim Jong-Un has presided over significant progress in the country's widely-condemned nuclear and missile programmes since taking power in 2011.
Syrian, Russian jets bomb residential areas in eastern Ghouta
People are seen during shelling in the town of Hamoria, eastern Ghouta in Damascus, Syria,
Reuters, Amman :
Jets believed to be Syrian and Russian struck heavily crowded residential areas in a besieged rebel enclave near Damascus, killing at least 27 people and injuring dozens in the third week of a stepped-up assault, residents, aid workers and a war monitor said on Monday.
Civil defense workers said at least 17 were killed in the town of Hamoriya in an aerial strike on a marketplace and nearby residential area after over nearly 30 strikes in the past 24 hours that struck several towns in the densely populated rural area east of Damascus known as the Eastern Ghouta.
Four other civilians were killed in the town of Arbin, while the rest came from strikes on Misraba and Harasta, the civil defense workers said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, said the casualties on Sunday were the biggest daily death toll since the stepped-up strikes began 20 days ago. The monitor said nearly 200 civilians were killed in strikes and shelling, including many women and children, during that period.
The Eastern Ghouta has been besieged by army troops since 2013 in an attempt to force the rebel enclave to submission.
The government has in recent months tightened the siege in what residents and aid workers have said is a deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war, a charge the government denies.
The United Nations says about 400,00 civilians besieged in the region face "complete catastrophe" because aid deliveries by the Syrian government were blocked and hundreds of people who need urgent medical evacuation have not been allowed outside the enclave.
Eastern Ghouta is the last remaining large swathe of rebel-held area around Damascus that has not reached an evacuation deal to surrender weapons in return for allowing fighters to go to other rebel-held areas farther north.
"They are targeting civilians ... a jet hit us there, no rebels or checkpoints," Sadeq Ibrahim, a trader, said by phone in Hamoriya.
Britain's May in Brussels for Brexit moment of truth
AFP :
British Prime Minister Theresa May will try to seal a deal on Brexit divorce terms with EU chiefs on Monday, with the Irish border still the key stumbling block as months of tense talks reach a decisive moment.
May will meet European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker and EU president Donald Tusk in Brussels for what the bloc says is the "absolute deadline" for an improved offer from London.
European officials said a deal on separation issues-which would allow the opening of crucial talks on a future post-Brexit trade deal at an EU summit on December 15 -- was "difficult but doable".
But while there has been progress on Britain's Brexit divorce bill and the rights of European citizens living in Britain, the fate of the frontier between Ireland and British-ruled Northern Ireland risks torpedoing a deal.
"Discussions are in a sensitive place right now," Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said on Monday morning as the Irish cabinet prepared to hold a special meeting on the issue.
"Hopefully we'll find a way forward today but if we can't do that then the Irish government position isn't going to change."
Tusk effectively backed Ireland's right to veto the unlocking of the next phase of talks when he met Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in Dublin last week, saying if Ireland was not satisfied then neither was the EU.
London has however rejected the EU's deadline and, ahead of next week's summit, appears keen to push the talks to the wire.
First use of nuclear weapons would be counterproductive
Daryl G Kimball :
Over the past year, cavalier and reckless statements from President Donald Trump about nuclear weapons and his threat to unleash "fire and fury" against North Korea have heightened fears about Cold War-era policies and procedures that put the authority to launch nuclear weapons in his hands alone.
Partially in response, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for the first time since 1976, held a hearing on the "executive's authority to use nuclear weapons." The Nov. 14 hearing should be just the start of a process that leads to changes that reduce the risk of nuclear miscalculation and establishes that the United States will not be the first to use nuclear weapons.
Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet/Russian nuclear arsenals have been slashed through verifiable arms reduction agreements. Yet, each side still deploys 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons as permitted by the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which is far more than required to deter a nuclear attack.
Each maintains a significant portion of its land- and sea-based forces on a prompt-launch posture to guard against a "disarming" first strike. The resulting launch procedures would, in some scenarios, give the president only minutes to decide whether to avenge such an attack with hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles.
These policies increase the risk of catastrophic miscalculation. In the nuclear age, there have been several incidents in which false signals of an attack have prompted U.S. and Russian officials to consider, in the dead of the night and under the pressure of time, launching nuclear weapons in retaliation.
Continuing to vest such destructive power in the hands of one person and requiring launch decisions to be made in minutes, and without congressional authorization, is undemocratic and dangerous.
No reliable safeguards are in place to prevent an impulsive and irrational decision by Trump to use nuclear weapons.
Days after the Senate hearing, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, Air Force Gen. John Hyten, tried to assuage congressional concerns, saying he would push back against a nuclear strike order from the president if it were "illegal." That is cold comfort given the general acknowledged that, if the president insists, "we'll work out a legal option."
Rather than accept such empty assurances, Congress should demand and the Pentagon should provide more information on U.S. nuclear employment strategy, including targeting data, attack options, damage expectancy requirements, and estimated civilian casualties; and it should publicly review the legal rationale for these plans, which are currently not shared with members of Congress.
Despite the dangers, defenders of the status quo argue that altering the current system, including forgoing the first-use option, would undermine the credibility of deterrence and somehow encourage aggressors.
In reality, the current "launch under attack" policy is unnecessary because U.S. nuclear forces and command-and-control systems could withstand even a massive attack, particularly the submarine-based weapons, and remaining nuclear forces would be more than sufficient to deliver a devastating blow to any nuclear aggressor.
Eliminating the requirement to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles under attack would increase the time available for the president and other civilian and military advisers to more soberly weigh the possible use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for a warning of an attack against the United States or its allies.
Furthermore, given the conventional military superiority of the United States and its allies, there is no plausible circumstance that could justify legally, morally, or militarily the use of nuclear weapons to deal with a non-nuclear threat.
Nuclear weapons are not necessary to deter or respond to nuclear terrorism or to a potential chemical or biological weapons attack or cyberattack by state or nonstate actors. Even if there were to be a conventional military conflict with Russia or North Korea, the first use of nuclear weapons would be counterproductive because it would likely trigger an uncontrollable and potentially suicidal nuclear exchange.
As Vice President Joseph Biden said in remarks delivered in January 2017, "Given our non-nuclear capabilities and the nature of today's threats, it's hard to envision a plausible scenario in which the first use of nuclear weapons by the United States would be necessary or make sense."
Given the indiscriminate, widespread, and long-term consequences of nuclear weapons, it is also hard to envision a nuclear first use scenario that is "legal" despite Pentagon claims that current nuclear weapons employment options meet the principles of "distinction and proportionality and seek to minimize collateral damage to civilian populations" as required by the Law of War.
The Senate's recent hearing on nuclear weapons use policy must not be its last. It is past time to move away from outdated and dangerous, prompt-launch nuclear procedures. The fate of millions of people should not depend on the good judgment of one person, no matter who he or she may be.
(Daryl G. Kimball is Executive Director, Arms Control Association).
Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy
Harun-or-Rashid :
Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (1892-1963) was a politician, Prime Minister of Pakistan. Born of a distinguished family of Midnapur in West Bengal in 1892, H S Suhrawardy obtained BSc (Hons.) and BCL degrees from Oxford University, and later on called to the Bar at the Gray's Inn, London. In 1920 he returned to India and got involved in active politics.
During his political career, Suhrawardy held various important offices including the Deputy Mayoralty of the Calcutta Corporation in 1924, Labour and Commerce Minister in AK Fazlul Huq's Praja-League coalition government formed following the 1937 elections, Civil Supplies Minister in the Khwaja Nazimuddin Ministry during 1943-1945, the Prime Minister (Chief Minister) of undivided Bengal during 1946-1947, Law Minister in Mohammad Ali's Cabinet in Pakistan during 1954-1955 and the Prime Minister of Pakistan during 1956-1957.
Suhrawardy was an able political organiser. He proved his ability while he had been the General Secretary of the Calcutta Khilafat Committee in the 1920s. Starting his practical political life as a labour leader in Calcutta, within a short period of time he succeeded in organising as many as 36 Trade Unions among seamen, railway employees, jute and cotton mills workers, rickshaw pullers, cart drivers, etc.
On the eve of the 1926 Council elections he founded the Independent Muslim Party. At the time of the next Council elections held in 1929, Suhrawardy organised a new body, namely the Bengal Muslim Election Board. He founded the United Muslim Party in Kolkata preceding the 1937 elections with himself as its Secretary.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah initiated a move to reinvigorate the Muslim League in order to contest the ensuing elections as an All India body of the Indian Muslims. At the call of Jinnah, Suhrawardy and his newly founded party joined his fold. It is thought that mostly due to Suhrawardy's organisational ability the Muslim League was able to form a coalition ministry with Fazlul Huq's Krishak Praja Party winning 39 seats on its own out of 121 Muslim seats. As its General Secretary from 1937-1943, Suhrawardy was engaged in organising the Bengal Provincial Muslim League throughout the length and breadth of the province.
Suhrawardy led the campaign against Fazlul Huq causing the collapse of his Ministry (1941-1943). He was the architect of the Muslim League's comprehensive victory in Bengal in the 1946 elections in which it secured 114 seats out of 121 reserved seats. This electoral success was seen by many as a justification of the Muslim demand for Pakistan.
Within a period of seven years from the establishment of Pakistan, the Muslim League was routed from East Bengal at the hands of the United Front in the first provincial elections held in 1954, in which Suhrawardy had a prominent role. He was one the leaders of the anti-Ayub united movement during 1962-63 under the banner of National Democratic Front (NDF).
Before partition, Suhrawardy upheld the interests of the Muslim community. In 1932 he attended the third Round Table Conference in London as a representative of his community. He was an ardent supporter of the Separate Electorate System for the Muslims. Suhrawardy was the mover of official resolution of the Delhi Muslim Legislators' Convention held on 7-9 April 1946 by the initiative of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. During his Chief Ministership there occurred the 'Great Calcutta Killings' on the occasion of the Muslim League's Direct Action Day (16 August 1946) in support of the demand for Pakistan.
On the eve of the 1947 partition Suhrawardy envisioned the establishment of a state in Eastern India comprising the whole of Bengal and Assam and the adjoining districts of Bihar. This came to be known as his scheme for Greater Independent Bengal. As it is widely known, on the eve of the 1947 partition Suhrawardy in collaboration with some Bangali Hindu leaders, namely, Sarat Chandra Bose, Kiran Shankar Roy and Satya Ranjan Bakshi initiated a move for a United Independent Bengal as a third dominion alongside India and Pakistan. Abul Hashim, the then Secretary of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League, also extended his full support to the project. However, it was unsuccessful.
Unlike many others, Suhrawardy did not come to Pakistan immediately after partition. Rather he stayed back in Kolkata engaging himself in a peace mission along with Gandhi. On the other hand, his relation with the Muslim League high command, now at the helm of affairs of the new state of Pakistan, was far from cordial. In 1949, his membership of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly was terminated by the Liaquat government on a plea of not being a permanent resident of the country.
Later on when Suhrawardy involved himself in Pakistan politics he was in favour of solving the Bangali-non-Bangali problems within the framework of united Pakistan on the basis of equal rights and power-sharing. Thus, he became a wholehearted supporter of the parity formula between the two wings, and the creation of one unit in West Pakistan.
Suhrawardy was a firm believer in constitutional rule. This led him to join Mohammad Ali's 'Cabinet of Talents' in 1954 as Law Minister ignoring the initial reservation of his party.
He made a significant contribution to the framing of the 1956 Constitution of Pakistan. As Law Minister, he played a leading role in the signing of the 1955 Muree Pact between the leaders of the two wings of Pakistan which paved the way for the formulation of the Constitution.
As a politician, Suhrawardy was reputed for his pragmatism. For instance, in view of the overall backwardness of the Bengal Muslim community, he was a staunch supporter of separate electorate for them. However, as soon as Pakistan was established he opted for joint electorate holding the view that this was essential for the growth of a common nationhood among peoples irrespective of caste, creed, colour and religion. During his Premiership he got a bill adopted to this effect in the National Assembly of Pakistan. Suhrawardy breathed his last on 5 December 1963.
-Banglapedia
Female military pilots join UN Mission for first time
Two female military pilots Flight Lieutenant Nayma Haque and Flight LieutenantTamanna-E-Lutfi are joining The United Nations Peace Keeping Mission in Congo for the first time in Bangladesh.
UNB, Dhaka :
For the first time in the history of Bangladesh two female military pilots are joining the United Nations Peacekeeping mission in Congo.
Flight Lieutenant Nayma Haque and Flight Lieutenant Tamanna-E-Lutfi will leave here for Congo UN Mission on Thursday for one year, said an ISPR press release. Before their departure they spoke to media at BAF Base Bashar, Dhaka Cantonment on Monday. Considering professional risks and challenges for being a combat pilot, after necessary selection process, BAF selected the two female officers for basic helicopter conversion
flying training in Bell-206 helicopter in 18 Squadron of BAF Base Bir Sreshto Matiur Rahman, Jessore.
In the process, they started their ground training on 03 August, 2014 and on successful completion of ground training, they started their flying training on 23 September 2014. After approximate 25hours of training, they were able to fly solo flights successfully. On 17 December, 2014 both the female pilots successfully completed initial phase of primary helicopter flying training which is very important to become a helicopter pilot.
After Completion of 65hours of Basic Helicopter Conversion training, they performed duties in different operational squadron of BAF. They also completed training course on MI-17, MI-171 and MI-171 SH helicopters. They received training in aviation medicine course from India. They both performed as operational pilots in Operation Uttaron in CHT
Suhrawardy`s 54th death anniv today
Staff Reporter :
The 54th death anniversary of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy will be observed in the country today (Tuesday).
The unparallel leader of all Indian politics, who had dedicated his entire life to ensure the welfare of the people by upholding democracy, died at a Beirut hotel in Lebanon on this day (December 5) in 1963. He was alone in the hotel suite at the time of his death.
Suhrawardy was a Bengali politician and statesman in the first half of the 20th-century.
He served as the Premier of Bengal in British India and was the fifth Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Different political, socio-cultural and professional organisations have taken elaborate programmes on the occasion.
The programmes include placing wreaths at the grave of the great leader, discussions, Qurankhwani, Milad and Doa Mahfil.
Meanwhile, President Abdul Hamid and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina have issued separate messages on the occasion.
In his message, the President said Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy is a unique name in the history of politics and democracy in the sub-continent.
He said the nation remembers with due respect the contributions of Suhrawardy to establishing and flourishing democracy, and developing socio-economic condition of the people of this region.
The President expressed his belief that the life and works of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy will encourage the future generation to devote themselves in democratic spirit and people's welfare.
In her message, the Prime Minister said Suhrawardy worked throughout his life for establishing democratic rights of the people and flourishing non-communal politics.
He was vociferous in the struggle for socio-economic development of the Muslims in the subcontinent and upholding their political rights, she added.
The Prime Minister said mass people's organisation Awami League had flourished further under the skilled leadership of Suhrawardy.
Under the leadership of his successor Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the greatest Bangalee of All Time, Bangladesh achieved its independence, she added. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy was born in a respectable Muslim family at Medinipur in West Bengal on September 8 in 1892.
BASIC Bank's ex-chairman Bachchu quizzed by ACC
bdnews24.com :
The Anti-Corruption Commission or ACC has questioned former BASIC Bank Chairman Sheikh Abdul Hye Bachchu over a Tk 35 billion loan fraud accusation.
Bachchu appeared at the ACC offices in Segunbagicha around 9:30am on Monday in answer to a summons. ACC officials began questioning him around 10:45am. The ACC began questioning people in connection with the loan fraud investigation on Oct 22. Bachchu says he believes he is not guilty of the loan fraud. He made the remark in response to a question from the media after the interrogation.
The former directors of BASIC Bank questioned so far are Md Anwarul Islam, Anis Ahmad, Quamrun Naher Ahmed, Prof Kazi Akhtar Hossain, Shakhawat Hossain, Fakhrul Islam, AKM Kamrul Islam, Jahangir Akhand Salim, Shyam Sunder Sikder and AKM Rezaur Rahman. The former BASIC Bank executives are being questioned after several rounds of Supreme Court observations regarding corruption at the bank.
The ACC opened an investigation into the state-run bank after allegations that Tk 35 billion in loans had been illegally distributed from the Gulshan, Dilkusha and Shantinagar branches between 2009 and 2011.
BASIC Bank is accused of giving loans without collateral and using false documents and fictitious names and organisations in violation of rules and regulations. After nearly four years of investigation, the ACC filed 56 cases at three police stations in Dhaka, accusing 156 individuals. Twenty-six are bank officials. The rest are connected to lending institutions and bank oversight organisations. But the absence of Bachchu and other prominent members of the board of directors on the list of suspects prompted controversy.
The ACC claimed they had not found any evidence of Bachchu's involvement.
The parliamentary standing committee on the finance ministry was unhappy with the ACC findings and the central bank opened a separate investigation into the matter. In February 2016, Finance Minister AMA Muhith claimed the investigation into BASIC Bank had found evidence of Bachchu's roles in frauds tied to loans, appointment and promotion. In August, the Supreme Court's Appellate Division expressed its anger that Bachchu and the board of directors had not been named suspects in loan frauds and money laundering.
The court warned the ACC not to 'pick and choose'. Facing criticism, an ACC director told the media that Bachchu would be called in for questioning, even though he was not on the list of suspects.
Bachchu, a former Jatiya Party MP, was appointed the chairman of the bank in 2009. His appointment was renewed in 2012. Bachchu resigned in 2014 amid pressure following the emerging allegations. The finance minister said Bachchu would not be let off the hook.
Acute gas crisis hits Tongi, Gazipur industrial belt
Anisul Islam Noor :
The industrial production in Tongi-Gazipur belt has been affected due to acute gas crisis as Petrobangla diverting of gas to upstream power plants, industrialists and Businessmen alleged.
Following gas crisis many manufacturing industries have been suffering due to damaged material or defect in product's quality. To avert such damage, the industry will be forced to shut down, said Ariful Haque, owner of dyeing factory in Gazipur.
Factories in the industrial belt are now operating at one-third of their capacity, which may lead to labour unrest and default of huge sum of bank loans," owner of a ceramics industry said.
Such disruption of production, he cautions, may even cause sudden shutdown of factories.
Concerned officials of Titas Gas Transmission and Distribution Company Limited (TGTDCL), however, blamed the Petrobangla for gas crunch.
Concerned people said, if the gas crisis or low pressure of gas with poor electricity voltage is being continued for three to four months in the industrial belt, manufacture oriented industries would suffered immensely with poor electricity voltage. It often causes for huge volume of industrial wastage and reduction of production efficiency.
The industry insiders said, a factory in the belt requires 04 PSI (production per square inch) as optimum gas pressure but the pressure, at times, comes down to as low as 0.1 PSI, these days especially during the daytime. "Gas pressure in the area becomes normal around 10pm/11pm and stays for not more than 08 hours until 6am/7am," an entrepreneur of the industrial belt informed.
Asked, an official of Titas said they are at present getting nearly 250 million cubic meters (MCM) less in recent weeks against their current demand of 1,800 MCM gas in Titas franchise.
The downstream Titas franchise area covers greater Dhaka region, which includes Gazipur alongside some other adjoining districts, and greater Mymensingh, he said.
A Petrobangla source said gas supply on priority basis to a number of upstream projects including power plants as reason behind supply shortage.
When asked, Managing Director of Akij Group Sk. Bashir Uddin termed the situation 'really worrisome.'
According to him, two of Akij Group companies situated in the area Akij Printing & Packages Limited and Dhaka Tobacco Industries jointly contributed nearly Tk 35 billion (3,500 crore) to the national exchequer in the 2016-17 fiscal year.
"But we are very much worried about our industrial output this year as production disruption following the twin crises involving gas supply and power supply. Both will eventually disrupt our retail business in every phase," he quipped.
This often results in a high rate of industrial wastage and reduction of production efficiency, he added.
Bangladesh Auto Re-rolling Steel Mills & Association Chairman Manwar Hossain, who is also Anwar Group Managing Director, echoed the same concern.
The businessman, who has a steel factory called Anwar Ispat Limited in the industrial belt, called for immediate introduction of ECM (Electronically Controlled Meters) to check unabated gas engineering in the area, which he deems to be yet another reason for gas supply crunch.
Titas officials, according to him, are encouraging co-generation scheme to help address the severe gas crisis. But he said co-generation will require stable and smooth gas supply.
Government should ensure at least 10-15 years of smooth gas supply to encourage co-generation as, what he said, any industrial investment requires 20 years of payback period.
TGTDCL Deputy Managing Director Engineer Abdul Wahab Talukdar, who is also the Project Director of Sripur-Joydevpur Transmission Pipeline Project, said, "We cannot do anything to address the crisis if there is a lack of adequate gas supply."
He also admitted that priority-based power plants' gas supply being the reason behind the current spell of gas crunch.
Local sources alleged, illegal and unapproved gas connections in various industries in and around the zone are also affecting gas supply badly, among other reasons.
Moving bombs!
Staff Reporter :
Autorickshaw drivers from Dhaka and Chittagong City urged the authorities not to give extension of the expired CNG-run three-wheelers any more.
They termed the expired three-wheelers as 'moving bombs'.
"These old autorickshaws have turned into moving bombs. These vehicles are using expired gas cylinders because replacements are not available. These can explode anytime leading to casualties. So it is not safe for our and passengers lives. We do not want to drive these anymore," said the drivers council chief Sakhawat Hossin Dulal.
The drivers who are demonstrating in demand for new vehicles asked the BUET's Mechanical Engineering Department not to recommend expansions of those expiree vehicles.
They have submitted a memorandum to the department of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology on Sunday with this demand.
Leaders of Dhaka and Chittagong units of CNG Autorickshaw Workers' Unity Council have taken part in demonstration in front of the university's main gate before submitting the memorandum.
They tried to organise a rally at the Central Shaheed Minar but police stopped them.
The protesters alleged that the CNG Autorickshaw Owners' Association was trying to get permission to extend the expiry date of those vehicles submitting application in this regard to the Road Transport and Bridges Ministry.
"The authorities had already extended the expiry date of the autorickshaws in the two city several times from nine years to 15 years," said Sakhawat Hossin Dulal.
He said also, "The owners are now trying to get more extension though these autorickshaws' often cause accidents."
He said that they will go on strike for 48 hours from Dec 27 as they push an eight-point charter of demands. If it is not met, they will stage a nonstop strike from Jan 15.
Their demands are replacing expired autorickshaws with new vehicles in Dhaka and Chittagong.
Distributing 5,000 autorickshaws among the drivers in Dhaka and 4,000 in Chittagong.
Cancelling app-based transport services like Uber and Pathao.
Dropping provisions that go against workers' interests from a draft transport law.
Cancelling practical test for renewing driving licence.
No case for unauthorised parking.
Stopping 'harassment' of drivers.
Allowing registered autorickshaw drivers to travel anywhere in Dhaka district.
Rahul Gandhi likely to head Congress party
NDTV :
Rahul Gandhi, the scion of Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, is expected to be elected unopposed as the President of India's main opposition Congress party marking a generational change of the grand old party with a
contest appearing extremely unlikely. No one else is likely to challenge him by the deadline of filing nominations this afternoon, reports our New Delhi correspondent.
Rahul today filed nomination papers to head the 132-year-old Congress party, India's main opposition, replacing his mother who has held the top organisational post for a record number of 19 years in a row.
Support to resolve Rohingya crisis
UNB, Phnom Penh :
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Monday sought support from Cambodia for a durable solution to the Rohingya crisis as it threatens the peace and stability of this region.
"As we continue our bilateral negotiations with Myanmar for Rohingyas' safe return to their homeland, I requested Prime Minister Hun Sen for his support for a durable solution to the crisis," she said.
Sheikh Hasina was delivering her joint press statement with the Cambodian Prime Minister at the Peace Palace here after the official talks between the two countries. Hasina said they, during the talks, discussed some of the emerging security challenges facing the region and expressed their common resolve to fight terrorism and extremism. "We've also discussed the Rohingya crisis that threatens peace and stability of our region. Bangladesh continues to shelter more than 1 million Rohingyas, among them around seven lakh Rohingyas fled atrocity in Myanmar and took shelter in Bangladesh recently," she added. Describing Cambodia as a close regional neighbour of Bangladesh, Hasina said the two countries share common aspirations to promote peace, security and development. "We cooperate closely in many regional and global fora, including at ARF, ASEM, ACD and the UN." She said her visit to Cambodia has been extremely fruitful as Prime Minister Hun Sen and she remain committed to taking Bangladesh-Cambodia relations to all new heights and dimensions. The Prime Minister commended her Cambodian counterpart Hun Sen for the robust growth and development of Cambodia. Hasina said a major focus for Bangladesh this time was on intensifying trade, economic and technical cooperation. "We have signed 10 bilateral agreements and MoUs during this visit," she said. The Prime Minister said Bangladesh has proposed holding the first Joint Commission to be headed by two Foreign Ministers in Dhaka next year.
Hasina said, Bangladesh and Cambodia are also considering a proposal for opening resident diplomatic missions in each other's capital. She said the MoUs signed on technical cooperation in the areas of labour and vocational training, ICT, fisheries and aquaculture and tourism will foster multi-dimensional cooperation.
Mentioning that regional cooperation has also received major focus in today's discussions, Hasina said she was happy to receive Prime Minister Hun Sen's assurances of support to Bangladesh's Sectoral Dialogue Partnership aspiration with Asean. "As a Ganges basin country, Bangladesh also looks forward to working with Cambodia towards our membership aspiration at the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation Forum."
She said, the Bengali and the Khmer nations share ancient cultural linkages, a Sanskrit and Pali inspired script, and a common new year in the month of April. About the Rohingya crisis, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said they, during the bilateral talks, discussed it and said it is really a burden to Bangladesh.
"We highly appreciate Bangladesh (for giving shelter to the forcibly displaced Rohingya nationals from Myanmar) even though Bangladesh has a population of over 160 million, but Bangladesh took the refugee issue on its shoulder," he added. Hun Sen also hoped that both Bangladesh and Myanmar will work together smoothly for the safe return of the refugees back to Myanmar. The Cambodian Prime Minister said, "In the bilateral discussions, we've a very fruitful result in which we're looking forward to working together for prosperity."
He said, Cambodia supports the request from Bangladesh to be the sectoral dialogue partner of Asean while Cambodia will also work to achieve this goal.
Hun Sen expressed his heartfelt thanks for all the support that Bangladesh extended to the people of Cambodia.
He also noted that through this 2nd official visit of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to Cambodia after her first one in 2001, the bilateral relations of the two countries will further be strengthened.
The Cambodian Prime Minister also expressed his gratefulness to Sheikh Hasina for inviting him to visit Bangladesh again saying, "I accepted it with pleasure."
Fund gap widens
Only 34pc of required money realised: Needs are massive, says UN Coordinator
Special Correspondent :
Only 34 per cent of the $434 million fund required to provide assistance for 1.2 million people, including host communities, has so far been raised, says a report on Monday.
The UN agencies earlier appealed for the fund from the global community to response to the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh. There are more than 830,000 Rohingyas in Cox's Bazar: 625,000 of them have poured over the border since August 25.
One hundred days after the start of the most recent influx, the Inter-Sector Coordination Group (ISCG) released the report highlighting the overall status of the humanitarian response to the Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Bangladesh.
"Humanitarian partners are working round the clock to respond, but the reality remains that the needs are massive and urgent, and the gaps are wide. More funding is needed," said Mia Seppo, UN Resident Coordinator in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, but more land is needed to improve conditions in the congested camps, said the UN official.
These Rohingyas are now living in ten different camps, and among Bangladeshi host communities.
One of the camps has become the largest and fastest growing refugee camp in the world, where approximately half a million people are living extremely close to each other without access to basic services such as toilets or clinics, said the report.
"The government of Bangladesh is struggling to cope with the world's most rapidly developing humanitarian crisis. We already sought global help to share the burden to the unprecedented crisis," Md Shah Kamal, Secretary to the Disaster Management and Relief Ministry, told The New Nation.
The Monitoring Report, which covers the first two months of the response from August 25 to October 31, highlights the work of the government of Bangladesh, in cooperation with humanitarian partners who are working to provide relief services for the refugee population and Bangladeshi host communities. Of the 1.2 million people in need, around half have been reached with assistance.
The report also explains the challenges and gaps that remain.
The risk of disease outbreak is high, and the impact of a cyclone or heavy rain would be massive.
There is not enough land to provide adequate living conditions for the more than 830,000 Rohingyas that now crowd Cox's Bazar.
The report defines life-saving priorities for the coming months.
These include improving nutrition, preventing and managing disease outbreak, adequate planning for the new camps, and improving protection across all areas of the response.
"It (Rohingya refugee crisis) is one of the most severely underfunded crises in the world. The global community must extent their funding support to save lives and protect the Rohingya people," an official of UN aid agency told The New Nation yesterday.
He added, "Funding is a major constraint. We need more fund to keep pace with intensifying needs of the refugees who arrived Bangladesh's border town Cox's Bazar fleeing violence and persecution in Myanmar."
The mass exodus of refugees into Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh began August 25 after Rohingya insurgents killed nine police officers, triggering vicious reprisal attacks by the Myanmar security forces on Rohingya minority community.
Rohingya refugees earlier described, heart-rending accounts of "killings, arson, rape, torture, and other abuse,"
The UN Aid official, preferring anonymity, warned the arrival of a huge number of displaced people in Cox's Bazar "created massive socio-economic and demographic pressure on Bangladesh" and added that other human security risks exist including "fear of epidemics."
Dhaka, Phnom Penh sign 10 instruments
UNB, Phnom Penh (Cambodia) :
Bangladesh and Cambodiaon Monday signed 10 instruments, including one agreement and nine (MoUs), aiming to enhance cooperation in various fields, including tourism, agriculture, civil aviation, ICT and technical education between the two countries.
The instruments were signed after the official bilateral talks between Bangladesh and Cambodia held at Peace Palace in Phnom Penh here in the morning. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina led the Bangladesh side at the talks, while her Cambodian counterpart Hun Sen led his home side. The two prime ministers witnessed the signing of the documents by ministers and high officials concerned of both the countries.
The agreement signed today is on cooperation between the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI) and the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce. The MoUs inked today are on cooperation in the field of tourism, aquaculture and fisheries, ICT and related industry, MoU on cooperation between the governments of Bangladesh and Cambodia over labour and vocational training. An MoU on cooperation and collaboration on preserving war history, war monuments and war relics, MoU on the modalities for Institutional Cooperation Under the Joint Trade Council, MoU on Cooperation and Collaboration on matters related to implementation of SDGs were also signed. Besides, MoUs were inked on academic cooperation between Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies and the International Relations Institute of Cambodia as well as on Institutional Cooperation on promotion of Investment between Bangladesh Investment Authority and the Council for the Development of Cambodia. Civil Aviation and Tourism Minister Rashed Khan Menon, State Minister for ICT Division Junaid Ahmed Palak, Chief Coordinator on Implementation of the SDGs Md Abul Kalam Azad, Foreign Secretary
M Shahidul Haque,Secretary of the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock Maksudul Hasan Khan, Secretary of the Ministry of Liberation War Affairs Aparup Chowdhury, FBCCI President Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin and BIDA Executive Chairman Kazi M Aminul Islam signed the relevant agreement and MoUs for the Bangladesh side. Besides, the ministers and senior officials concerned of the respective ministries and organisations of Cambodia signed the documents for their respective sides.
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Sparta Community Hospital has added to its staff, welcoming Dr. Abdullah Al Sawaf as a neurologist.
Al Sawaf will begin seeing patients Dec. 14 at Bradbury Rural Health Clinic, 211 S. Burns in Sparta. Appointments are available by calling 618-443-1362.
Al Sawaf is an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and SIU HealthCare. He is a neurologist who specializes in epilepsy and seizure disorders.
He earned his medical degree at The University of Jordan in Amman, Jordan, and completed his residency in neurology at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Dr. Al Sawaf completed his internship at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, then completed a fellowship in neurophysiology/epilepsy at University of Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
The Southern
A study being done by the S.C. Commission on Minority Affairs is likely to confirm what is already known or suspected those who spend the most on lottery tickets are the least able to afford them, and that most lottery scholarships are awarded in urban population centers rather than in poor rural areas where per-capita lottery spending is the highest.
Benjamin Washington Jr., the commission's program manager for research, told The Post and Courier's Prentiss Findlay that part of the focus will be on the correlation between counties where people spend more of their income on lottery tickets and the availability of lottery money for higher education.
"I'm thinking about the I-95 corridor in particular," Washington said, referring to the 36 mostly poor school districts along the interstate sometimes called the "Corridor of Shame," after a documentary of that title decried the poor state of public education there.
A previous study showed that residents in poorer counties tended to spend the most on lottery tickets and get less back in scholarships.
In Allendale County, where the state has taken control of the school district in an effort to improve educational outcomes, lottery spending per capita was about $819 per year and 41 percent of residents live in poverty. But only $8.1 million in lottery scholarships were awarded.
Similarly, in Bamberg County, where 32 percent of residents live in poverty, per-capita spending on the lottery was about $1,000 per year. But just $8.8 million in scholarships were awarded there.
By contrast, Richland County residents spent an average of $580 on lottery tickets and received $195 million in scholarship funds. The numbers in Charleston County were about the same $585 in per capita lottery spending and $173 million in scholarships.
In Greenville County, per-capita spending on the lottery was just $375 on average, but $282.7 million in scholarships were awarded there.
Hopefully, the commission's study will help change attitudes about buying lottery tickets and perhaps inspire changes in how lottery scholarships are awarded.
With a recent change in what constitutes a passing grade 60 instead of 70 about 25,500 more high school students are expected to become eligible for merit-based lottery scholarships over the next four years. The Commission on Higher Education has warned that there won't be adequate lottery funds to pay for the increase, and has recommended raising scholarship standards accordingly.
Lotteries are tantamount to a tax on the poor. And in South Carolina, it appears to be doubly so, with the state's poorest citizens essentially subsidizing scholarships for students in higher-income areas.
This editorial is from The Post and Courier of Charleston via The Associated Press.
By Azernews
By Kamila Aliyeva
The United States continues its way towards withdrawing from major international agreements and initiatives.
Since President Donald Trump took his office, the country has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and UNESCO.
Its next target became an international declaration aimed at improving global migration and refugee issues.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sent an official statement to the UN which stated that Washington will no longer participate in the Global Compact on Migration as it doesnt correspond to the immigration policy pursued by the country.
Although we will continue to work in a number of directions in the UN, in this case, we simply cannot faithfully support a process that could undermine the U.S. sovereign right to apply our immigration laws and ensure the security of our borders, the statement said.
According to Tillerson, the U.S. supports international cooperation on migration issues, but sovereign states bear the main responsibility for ensuring that migration is safe and legal.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said the declaration's approach is simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty.
No country has done more than the United States, and our generosity will continue. But our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone. We will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country, Haley said in a statement.
The UN General Assembly expressed disappointment over the U.S. latest decision.
The U.S. has been a part of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants since it was unanimously adopted by approved by 193 members of the UN General Assembly in 2016.
The declaration reached last year called for protecting the rights of refugees and migrants and helping them resettle and providing access to education and work.
The decision to withdraw from the declaration is consistent with the efforts of U.S. President Donald Trumps administration to limit immigration and refugee settlement.
In January, Trump signed an executive order that temporarily banned citizens from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the U.S. European leaders, the United Nations and international groups have condemned Trumps order. The UN refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration called on the Trump administration to continue offering asylum to people fleeing war and persecution, saying its resettlement programme was vital.
In October, the ban ended, althouh the White House announced that the U.S. would temporarily delay processing for refugees from eleven high-risk countries.
Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) has partnered with National Health Insurance Company Daman (Daman), to seek opportunities for the growth of the insurance-related FinTech ecosystem (InsurTech) in Abu Dhabi and the UAE.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU), which marked a new partnership between both organisations, was signed by Dr Michael Bitzer, chief executive officer at Daman, and Richard Teng, chief executive officer of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of ADGM.
The agreement enables ADGM and Daman to collaborate closely on a range of technology-related initiatives that serve to support entrepreneurs, start-ups and technology firms who are active in the InsurTech environment. The Daman and ADGM teams will specifically explore and participate in joint innovation projects on the development and application of technologies related to insurance and insurance management.
Dr Bitzer said: We are proud to support ADGM in creating a global FinTech hub here in Abu Dhabi. We believe that this partnership will support the programmes outlined in the Abu Dhabi Plan concerning the development of a financial services sector that support economic diversification and the promotion of entrepreneurship among SMEs. With Damans unique experience and capabilities; and ADGMs robust regulatory framework, there will be a lot we can do encourage and nurture new types of insurance solutions fit for the 21st century.
Teng added: Based on an industry report, the technology spent in the global insurance industry is expected to reach $205 billion by 2019. Yet the state of InsurTech is still at a stage of infancy. We are pleased that to partner with the leading home-grown insurance company Daman to look at how we can both actively contribute towards the development and deployment of technology and innovative solutions in the insurance space.
We look forward to tapping on Damans wealth of experience and extensive market to identify and create initiatives that serve the needs of Abu Dhabi and the UAE. At the same time, ADGM will engage the relevant stakeholders and industry leaders to foster a conducive InsurTech environment and ecosystem. TradeArabia News Service
Sodic, one of the regions leading real estate development companies, has signed a contract with Greater Cairo Water Company to connect 1,000 houses to the fresh water network in Ezzbet Khair Allah.
The signing comes following a protocol agreement that is already in place between Sodic, Holding Company for Water and Wastewater, Cairo Governorate, the GIZ and under the auspices of The Egyptian Ministry of Housing, Utilities and Urban Development.
The project is planned to be carried out over one year and is fully funded by Sodic at an estimated cost of E1 million ($56,516).
The signing ceremony took place at the premises of the Holding Company for Water and Wastewater and in the presence of Magued Sherif, Sodics managing director, Mostafa El Shimi, the managing director of Holding Company for Water and Wastewater and chairman Mamdouh Raslan.
The scope of work includes connecting the chosen homes to the fresh water and wastewater networks in place in Ezbet Khairallah, installation of a fire fighting network, provision of vocational training on construction besides setting up of water and wastewater connections.
The project will also see employment of youth in the collection of water tariffs and create water consumption awareness programs in the schools of Ezbet Khairallah.
"At Sodic, our CSR initiatives focusing on education and rehabilitation, impact the lives of over 7,000 families every year," stated Magued Sherif, the managing director of Sodic.
"The first phase of the fresh water project in Ezzbet Khair Allah will benefit more than 1,000 families," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Industrial Development & Renovation Organization of Iran (IDRO) has signed an agreement to establish a joint company for building solar panels with the Chinese company Sunshine and Hong Kong-based Konda Energy.
Deputy head of IDRO for promoting advanced industries and energy megaprojects, Fardad Daliri, said that registering the company will begin in a month after finalization of its articles of association, reported Irna.
IDRO will own 30 per cent of shares in the company.
IDRO seeks to establish the industry, use existing capabilities in the country and commission a research and development (R&D) unit in the technology, he said.
Earlier, IDRO conducted feasibility studies on producing solar panels from silicon after signing a cooperation deal with the German company Schmidt.
Seven industrial units producing solar panels are operating in Iran and the countys share of solar electricity is set to increase, the Irna report said.
1. As the new year begins, cyber threats such as ransomware will continue to pose a serious threat to enterprises and individuals around the globe, especially as the method continues to prove profitable, and offers virtual untraceability for cybercriminals. Ransomware provides a 1:1 relationship with the victim, requiring no overhead for production of web-injects, managing money-mules, or cashout - with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin allowing cybercriminals to obfuscate clean funds with dirty money through services like tumbling, mixing and coin laundering.
2. Targeted ransomware attacks on enterprises are also likely to be on the rise, as companies have the capital to pay higher ransoms than individuals. Criminals will continue to become more sophisticated, better resourced, and more patient, and will look to target businesses with higher value ransoms.
3. Business email compromise (BEC) and Business email spoofing (BES) attacks will also continue in 2018. This is where threat actors profit from sending emails to employees who have access to company funds, and from compromising the computer, email account, or email server of the victim organization in order to intercept and alter, or initiate business transactions. We assess that these schemes will likely continue to grow in popularity due to their low barrier to entry and high payout potential.
4. Targeted attacks on banks will likely remain a threat, especially as organized criminal organizations engage in online banking fraud as one of means of generating income. Some organisations will focus on non-European and US banks, which are perceived to have weaker security controls and less robust business processes than most of the major Western banks. However, malware targeting is diverse and not limited to major banks. Wealth management companies and their high-net-worth customers will also be targeted, as are payroll processing portals.
5. The dependability on AI/machine learning in cybersecurity will continue in 2018, as more cybersecurity professionals and companies understand the benefits of an AI/machine learning in the way of streamlining and enhancing threat detection and response, especially when coupled with human threat analysis.
6. Internet of Things vulnerabilities will also be increasingly targeted by criminals, especially as the IoT network is fast expanding its user base with the likes of smart home assistants, smart cars, and all smart things. For example, one Secureworks researcher discovered eight vulnerabilities in his own the smart automobile, which would allow unauthorized users to unlock the doors or gain the vehicles location. Weve also tested several manufacturers secure keycard systems and discovered vulnerabilities which would allow an attacker to lock or unlock doors, as well as add or remove badges to a system. This could potentially allow an attacker to physically enter a company and plug in a device to deliver malware.
7. The shortage of skilled cybersecurity workers will continue, proved by the zero percent unemployment rate, according to Gartner. However, the industry should do more than just attract existing talent in the pool, it must ensure that it is both nurturing and retaining that talent for the long-term future. We also must focus on inspiring young talent, by appealing to students at university and hosting open information days.
8. Cloud security will become a greater priority for businesses, as more companies move their data to the cloud. When companies move IT assets to the cloud, they have an opportunity to realise cost savings, accelerate innovation, and improve IT performance, however, the benefits of cloud usage come with data security dangers. As such, there will be an increased need for cloud security consulting, especially in light of the upcoming GDPR regulation.
9. The imminent arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its subsequent effects will be largely felt across the industry, with those organisations not protecting data and staying compliant with security regulations exposed and fined up to 10 million ($11.88 million) or 2 per cent of worldwide annual turnover. With security risks at an all-time high organisations must be prepared, and have a robust cybersecurity awareness programme, which includes adequate breach monitoring, detection, and reporting processes, that are well documented and accessible to all employees. Worryingly, 22 per cent of large enterprises still do not have a defined incident response and management procedure in place, according to research from Frost & Sullivan, so we predict there to be some major names being made examples of in light of failing to adhere to GDPR next year.
10. Given all of the previous points and potential impact, we expect businesses and security leaders to prioritise cybersecurity investment and insurance in 2018. In fact, trillions of dollars are being poured into cybersecurity over the next four years, covering everything from complete infrastructure overhauls to talent acquisition to basic software defence tools.
About the author
Mahmoud Mounir is the regional director of Secureworks, a top provider of security solutions for organizations to prevent, detect, rapidly respond and predict cyberattacks.
French fashion label ba&sh has marked its entry into Saudi Arabia with the opening of its flagship store in Jeddah at Red Sea Mall.
Founded by best friends Barbara Boccara and Sharon Krief, the contemporary ready-to-wear brand continues its expansion across the GCC region in partnership with Al-Futtaim, following openings at City Walk and Robinsons, Dubai and City Centre Bahrain.
The ba&sh store, which has been designed to look like a Parisian apartment, will showcase the Fall Winter 2017 collection.
Al-Futtaim is one of the most progressive regional business houses headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Al-Futtaim employs in excess of 42,000 people and operates in 29 countries through more than 200 companies. TradeArabia News Service
Dubai Holding, a global investment conglomerate, and Sevens Holding have announced the signing of a management agreement for Jumeirah Group to operate a luxury hotel in Bahrain.
The 167-key hotel, which will be called Jumeirah Royal Saray - Bahrain, is scheduled to open on February 27, 2018.
The agreement marks Jumeirah Groups entry into the Bahrain hospitality market and is a strategic milestone for the world-renowned luxury hospitality brand.
Edris AlRafi, chief executive officer of Dubai Holding, said: "We have been looking to bring Jumeirah to Bahrain for a number of years and we are delighted to partner with Sevens Holding for Jumeirah Royal Saray - Bahrain. This signing is a significant landmark in achieving our strategic expansion goals worldwide, and this elegant hotel will be an excellent addition to the Jumeirah Group portfolio. We are very much looking forward to welcoming guests from the local community, as well as introducing this stunning destination to international travellers."
Commenting on the agreement, Mohamed Al Kayed, chief executive officer of Sevens Holding said:""The Bahraini tourism industry is increasingly growing, with rising inflows of business and leisure travellers visiting the Kingdom on an annual basis. We are excited about our partnership with Jumeirah Group, and are confident that the Group's global track record of outstanding hospitality, together with our local market expertise will further enrich the regional luxury hospitality market at large."
Jumeirah Group is one of the world's most luxurious hotel groups and operates a world-class portfolio of hotels and resorts of distinctive design, including the flagship Burj Al Arab Jumeirah. The group's portfolio extends globally with hotels and resorts in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Frankfurt, Mallorca, London, Maldives and Shanghai. - TradeArabia News Service
Have an event, trend or general energy happening youd like to see in the Energy Journal newsletter? Send it to Star-Tribune energy reporter Heather Richards at heather.richards@trib.com. Sign up for the newsletter at www.trib.com/energyjournal.
Last week in numbers
Friday oil prices: West Texas Intermediate (WTI) $58.26 Brent (ICE) $63.63
Natural gas weekly averages: Henry Hub $2.93, Wyoming Pool $2.57, Opal $2.62
Baker Hughes rig count: U.S. 929, Wyoming 25
Quote of the week
Before I go through the areas where I would like to see changes, I need to be clear about the things that I do not want to see changed." -- Gov. Matt Mead on proposed changes to federal sage grouse plans
Pushback on EOG wells in Denver Basin
Landowners are worried about proposed injection wells near their subdivision outside Cheyenne. EOG's talent at tapping the Denver Basin has brought the oil and gas field to some unsuspecting locals who are appealing to state regulators to keep the wells at a distance.
Oil prices head towards $60
The nudge up in price has many surprised, others saying the positive trend will continue as supplies tighten faster than predicted.
Coal to solar
Wisconsin's largest utility wants to retire a coal plant that burned coal from five separate Wyoming mines in the last year.
In a related announcement, the group is looking to add solar power.
The trend of closures is a significant concern to operators in the PRB who are holding on to a shrinking market.
Wyoming delivers consistent message on grouse
The closing of a comment period on opening up sage grouse management plans across the West drew comment from a host of Wyoming agencies, the governor and diverse organizations.
The governor repeated a message heard since the summer, that the sage grouse plans don't need major revisions like those floated from the Interior Department.
In kind with a list of updates suggested by the governor, state agencies proffered changes that would eliminate confusion and alleviate some concerns brought by ranchers or industry.
Environmental groups that have been outspoken in their distaste for the Interior's direction on grouse management were joined by industry and agriculture groups in a plea to follow Wyoming's strategy -- prioritize conserving the bird in some areas, development in others.
In other news
A Wyoming man freed after spending nearly a quarter century in prison for a crime he didnt commit is still struggling to make ends meet. Now, his friends are trying to provide the financial help that the state has so far failed to do.
Andrew Johnson was convicted of a 1989 rape and sentenced to life in prison. He spent almost 24 years there. In 2008, state legislators passed a law allowing prisoners to petition for post-conviction DNA testing.
Johnson applied for the testing and the rape kit performed on Johnsons accuser contained her then-fiances semen, not his. She had said at trial that she had not had sex with anyone during the time period of the alleged rape.
Although he was eventually freed from the sentence associated with his wrongful conviction, Johnson has not received restitution from the state for the two-plus decades he spent in prison. Wyoming is one of 18 states that does not pay restitution to people incarcerated for wrongful convictions, according to the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that works to exonerate wrongly convicted people through DNA testing.
Chris and Rebecca Merrill, of Laramie, met Johnson shortly after his exoneration. Their interest in the first Wyoming man to be exonerated on DNA evidence led them to help him financially, Chris Merrill said. After developing a friendship over the course of four years, the Merrills started an online fundraiser to help Johnson with his bills.
We really believe his society, and thats us, owes him a debt, Chris Merrill said by phone Thursday.
Im part of it.
Upon reading a Star-Tribune article chronicling Johnsons financial woes after his release, Chris and Rebecca Merrill decided they wanted to help him. The couple contacted Johnsons Rocky Mountain Innocence Center lawyer, Jennifer Hare Salem, who put them in touch with another lawyer, and eventually Johnson.
The couple bought Johnson a used Toyota, ensuring he would no longer have to walk to doctors appointments or work.
They have stayed in touch since. Chris Merrill said he talks to Johnson by phone on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. Merrill, who worked for the Star-Tribune from 2008 to 2009, said that although Johnson is working, its nothing to get ahead.
Chris Merrill said that, as a citizen of Wyoming, he owes Johnson a debt. Johnsons society wronged him and Merrill said hes part of it.
After realizing there was only so much they could do for Johnson, the couple started an online fundraiser in an attempt to make restitution on behalf of Wyoming citizens. The fundraiser went live on Wednesday night and had raised $1,950 for Johnson by Friday afternoon. The fundraiser goal was set at $100,000, or which would equate to roughly $4,000 for each year of his incarceration.
When the government fails to do the right thing, Chris Merrill said, Its up to private citizens to pick up the slack.
Legislation that would have provided restitution to wrongfully convicted people has been proposed in Wyoming but has never become law. A 2014 version of the legislation would have provided up to $500,000 to people who were wrongfully incarcerated and then exonerated through DNA evidence. The legislatures two chambers failed to come to a consensus in that years budget session.
Johnson sued the city of Cheyenne in April, alleging police officers had failed to properly investigate the case and withheld evidence, which led to his conviction. In July, a federal judge ruled in favor of the city. Appeals filed in the following four months have not yet yielded a victory for Johnson.
Johnson said through Merrill that his attorneys had advised him not to speak to the press, given the ongoing appeals process. A Friday call to Johnsons Cheynne attorney, Aaron Lyttle, went unanswered.
The fundraiser can be found at https://www.gofundme.com/westandwithandrew.
ACT scores of UW freshmen increase
LARAMIE The average ACT score of incoming University of Wyoming freshmen increased between fall 2016 and 2017.
The Laramie Boomerang reports the average ACT score for incoming freshmen rose from 24.4 in fall 2016 to 24.7 in 2017, for a five-year high. Thats even as the university increased its first-year class size by 9.3 percent.
The average ACT score for graduating Wyoming high school seniors also rose between 2016 and 2017, from 20 to 20.2.
That score has barely fluctuated since 2011, when the state began administering the ACT to 100 percent of its students.
University of Wyoming admission requirements state a first-year student must have a score of at least 21 or an SAT score of 1060 as well as a 3.0 grade point average.
Authorities say two held on suspicion of Billings slaying
BILLINGS, Mont. Billings police say two men in custody are under investigation in the killing of a man whose decapitated body was found at an abandoned transient camp.
The Billings Gazette reports that 31-year-old Donald Ray Cherry and 33-year-old Jeffrey Glen Haverty were being held at Yellowstone County Detention Facility.
Police declined further comment, pending a Monday court appearance for the two men.
The body of 41-year-old Myron Wesley Knight was found Nov. 15.
Deputy County Coroner Cliff Mahoney said Knight had been decapitated and suffered multiple blunt force trauma injuries.
Welcome to 307 Politics. This launched as an email newsletter a few weeks ago and for the first time this week is also appearing in print. I still encourage anyone who is not already on the email list to sign-up at trib.com/email to receive a longer version of this column with more coverage of state and federal politics in your inbox on Monday mornings.
***
THRONE FINDS HER BITE Democratic gubernatorial candidate and former state lawmaker Mary Throne is the only serious candidate to have entered the 2018 race, with Republicans Mark Gordon and Ed Murray yet to announce their plans. But since launching her campaign in August, Throne hasnt really been able to explain what sets her apart. She touts her Wyoming roots and common sense policies like economic diversification, but moderate Republicans like current governor Matt Mead and Gordon can do the same and Gordon wouldnt have the baggage of a D next to his name on the ballot.
But speaking to me at a downtown Casper cafe Thursday, Throne seemed more passionate about what the state is doing wrong: namely, neglecting its cities and towns. Throne has made support for local governments a key platform point and she doubled-down in the interview.
She attacked the budget passed in 2016, her last year in the Legislature. Throne specifically criticized the decision to slash social services like tax assistance to the elderly while setting aside funds for a new state office building not too far from Metro Coffee Company where we were speaking before a meet-and-greet with voters.
We made a lot of fiscally stupid decisions, she said.
The new state office building is something of a linchpin for the development of Caspers Old Yellowstone District, and attacking its construction seems odd given that if she is going to have a shot at winning the race, Throne will need to capture a large share of the vote in Natrona County, one of the states largest counties and far more friendly to Democrats than other regions. Dave Freudenthal, the last Democratic candidate to win an open governors seat race, won 55 percent of the countys vote compared to just 49 percent statewide.
(For trivia fans, that race was against current Senate President Eli Bebout.)
Throne, who lives in Cheyenne, did say she supported the economic development and jobs a new building might bring and has made support for local governments writ large a key part of her platform.
State government has to change its attitude toward local governments, Throne said. They sort of make them come hat-in-hand to the Legislature and beg for money.
Lawmakers need to recognize that municipalities are important service-delivery providers for state residents and that quality of life in Wyoming communities is a key factor in whether businesses decide to locate or grow here. This still doesnt really separate Throne from, say, Mead, who recently called for the Legislature to continue sending at least $105 million to local governments.
But by latching onto local government funding, Throne may hope to avoid being attached to her partys more abstract national policy positions, many of which are deeply unpopular in the Cowboy State. She also pushed a good government theme in the interview, calling for a clearer budgeting process.
Were the least populated state in the country, she said. We can make this simpler and easier for the public to understand.
While Throne has stepped up travel around the state, her campaign operation remains, in her words, lean and mean, with only campaign manager Bri Jones on staff and no office or significant investment in yard signs or major advertising so far.
***
WYOMING CATCHES A (TAX) BREAK Wyomings tax code has been criticized as an impediment to economic diversification, but the GOP tax plan offers one bright spot for taxpayers in the Cowboy State. While Republican lawmakers from high-tax states are up in arms over the proposal to eliminate the ability for people to deduct their state and local taxes on federal returns, Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead said the change could be a boon to Wyoming.
States without income tax are subsidizing those other states, Mead said last week. Wyoming would be in favor of the elimination of that off-set.
***
PRINCE TESTIFIES Erik Prince, the founder of notorious private security contractor Blackwater, would be an interesting challenger to Sen. John Barrasso in next years Wyoming senate contest.
The brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, Prince has now found himself wrapped up in the weird and amorphous blob of allegations surrounding supposed collaboration between Trumps presidential campaign and Russia. Prince testified Thursday behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee regarding a January meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian businessman who has ties to the Kremlin.
While the ranking Democrat on the committee suggested he had more questions, Prince has no plans to return.
Ive already wasted four hours of my life on that, he said after the meeting.
A race between Barrasso and Prince would no doubt be chock full of allegations of carpet-bagging and insufficiently supporting Trump. Prince comes loaded with baggage from both his Blackwater days and, now, the Russian investigation. But if Prince runs against Barrasso on the basis that the Wyoming senator is too close to establishment Republicans, it could be hard to attack his ties to Trump or his past as a tough-guy mercenary.
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THE BIG ASK Mead has asked the Legislature to allocate $37.5 million from the states rainy day fund (officially known as the Legislative Stabilization Reserve Account or liz-rah) for... its not quite clear. The Endow executive committee doesnt release its official recommendation until later this month and the request was made as a placeholder for ENDOW initiatives.
Thats an appropriate use of the rainy day fund, Mead told reporters Thursday in Cheyenne.
Meads making quite an ask without anything tangible to peg it to, but even fiscal conservatives in the Legislature like Bebout have agreed that economic diversification efforts are a good use of the rainy day fund. This may be an expenditure that sneaks through in whats expected to be a tight budget session in February. The nearly $40 million sum also shows that Mead is getting serious about Endow, which was created last year with just a $2.5 million stipend. If the Legislature approves his current ask, it will be hard for future governors to abandon the 20-year effort or decide they want a new diversification program after Mead leaves office next year.
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SAFER REZ ROADS The Senate approved the John P. Smith Act to improve road safety in Indian Country last week. Its named for the former director of transportation for the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes on Wyomings Wind River Reservation and was co-sponsored by Sen. Mike Enzi. I wrote about Smith when he died last year. He led the tribal transportation department for 27 years and was heavily involved in the national Intertribal Transportation Association.
This legislation couldnt have a better namesake. Wyomings John Smith was a life-long advocate for transportation safety who earned respect across the countryincluding at the White House, Barrasso said. I look forward to the House passing this bill soon and adding to John Smiths already impressive legacy of improving lives across Indian Country.
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TWO PERCENT COWBOY Andrew Graham had a good scoop for WyoFile, finding that only 2 percent of Barrassos 2017 fundraising came from Wyoming donors. Yikes.
The campaign is proud of the many supporters Senator Barrasso has from around the country who share our Wyoming priorities to create good jobs, lower taxes, protect American freedom and eliminate federal regulatory overreach, is how his chief of staff Dan Kunsman spun it. Given that arguably Barrassos best bludgeon to attack 2018 challengers with is that they dont have roots in Wyoming or ties to local communities, the lopsided fundraising total could prove problematic.
The roundup
PILING ON CFPB Enzi co-sponsored a bill last week to rein in the unusually high salaries at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a Republican boogeyman that the Trump administration is doing its best to kill.
The need for Congress to bring accountability to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is long overdue and the bureaus lavish spending on employee salaries is a key example of why, Enzi said.
NO TRIGGER FOR CHENEY I wrote a long story about the GOP Senate tax plan last week. Barrasso and Enzi both support the bill but said they did not favor a provision that would automatically raise taxes if the economic growth Republicans expect from the cuts did not materialize. I didnt hear back from Rep. Liz Cheney, who will have to vote on a compromise version of the bill, but she also opposes it.
We need to cut taxes, not raise them, Cheney spokeswoman Maddy Weast told me by email. Critics of the tax plan worry that a ballooning deficit as a result of the legislation will be used to justify cuts to programs like Medicare and Social Security.
MUCH ADO ABOUT? For all the talk of unreasonably high education spending in Wyoming, consultants hired by the state found that we spend similarly to similar states.
In only two of ... 12 areas special education and gifted and talented did Wyoming spend significantly more than the average, writes Star-Tribune education reporter Seth Klamann. For special education which is reimbursed fully by the state Wyomings model pays more than $18,000 per student. In 2017-18, the state will spend about $238 million.
TRUMPS TREE
Students from Rawlins Middle School were in Washington, D.C. last week to hang handmade decorations on the National Christmas Tree.
It was pretty fun, sixth-grader Owen Wolfe told the Rawlins Times. It was the first time I have ever made something for a different state.
A COSMETIC FIX?
Casper City Council is considering a resolution to state its opposition to anti-LGBT discrimination. Casper and other Wyoming cities scored low marks for LGBT-friendliness in the Human Rights Campaigns annual scorecard released earlier this year, and a resolution might help nudge that score upward. But its not an ordinance, meaning it would have no legal weight, and city officials dont seem to think theres any problem with discrimination in Casper to begin with.
We have an image problem, said Councilman Charlie Powell, per Katie Kings coverage in the Star-Tribune.
A note to online readers: We had some technical difficulties with the online sign-up for this newsletter last week, so if you tried to sign-up your email may not have actually been added to the list. Try one more time at trib.com/email.
An icy winter storm made travel difficult across Wyoming on Monday, closing roads and causing crashes.
Portions of Interstate 25 were closed Monday morning to high profile vehicles between Casper and Buffalo. The Wyoming Department of Transportation advises no unnecessary travel for sections of I-25 from Glendo almost to Kaycee.
Two semi trucks jackknifed along southbound Interstate 25 near Hat Six Road in Casper, blocking the highway for a few hours.
Wyoming Highway Patrol Captain Shawn Dickerson was helping a driver stuck on the side of the road about 8:20 a.m. and watched the crashes occur. A truck was attempting to pull the car out of where it had gotten stuck when a semi truck attempted to slow down as it passed. The driver of the semi lost control, however, and the semi jackknifed and struck the truck, Dickerson said.
Nobody was injured in that crash, Dickerson said, but moments later more vehicles collided while attempting to stop on the blocked interstate. A vehicle failed to stop in time and clipped an SUV before rear ending a trailer being pulled by a pickup. Three people from that crash were transported to the hospital for complaints of pain, Dickerson said.
The crash was cleared about 11 a.m., according to a Wyoming Department of Transportation tweet.
I would encourage drivers to slow down, Dickerson said Monday morning. This was entirely preventable if they had reduced their speed and been a little more careful.
Interstate 80 from Rawlins to Laramie closed at 4 a.m. Monday because of winter conditions. The highway did not reopen for several hours.
Portions of some highways including U.S. 30 and 287 near Laramie and Wyoming Highway 789 also closed along with Highway 59 from Douglas to the Campbell County line. Stretches of other southeastern, central and northern Wyoming highways carried black ice advisories or other travel warnings.
After Wyoming experienced a mild fall, the winter storm brought colder temperatures and high winds to the region. Wind gusts were recorded up to 67 mph north of Kaycee and 54 mph south of Casper, according to the National Weather Service.
Breezy conditions were expected to linger, with wind chills down to 10 degrees below zero.
Gusts were expected to reach up to 60 mph east of the Laramie Range. Slightly warmer temperatures and drier conditions were expected to return to the state by midweek.
JERUSALEM Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday ordered his backers to reword a contentious piece of legislation that could potentially stifle a police investigation against him, in what appeared to be an attempt to defuse rising public anger against the long-ruling Israeli leader.
The so-called recommendations bill would end the polices current practice of recommending to prosecutors whether to indict suspects upon completing their investigations. It also aims to stem leaks from the investigations themselves, stating that no police recommendations be made public and penalizing those found leaking to the media.
The bill has been pushed by Netanyahus staunchest allies in the Likud Party, whipping up criticism that the beleaguered prime minister himself was seeking to pass legislation that would in essence change the current rules for police investigations and protect him from embarrassing revelations they may have discovered.
Unfortunately, the debate over the recommendations bill has turned into a political weapon against an elected government, Netanyahu wrote on Facebook. He said he asked a lawmaker behind the bill to ensure that it be worded in a way that it wont apply to the investigation taking place into my affairs.
On Saturday, tens of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets of Tel Aviv for an anti-corruption rally calling on Netanyahu to resign. It was one of the largest demonstrations yet against Netanyahus lengthy rule. Organizers hope the grassroots movement picks up steam and becomes a regular Saturday night ritual that eventually forces Netanyahu from power.
I think the time has come to change the government. The government is corrupt. Were sick of the corrupt, said protester Avi Elmozlinu.
Earlier Sunday, Israeli police questioned a close Netanyahu ally seen as the driving force behind the bill on separate corruption charges. Coalition whip David Bitan was grilled in relation to accusations that he promoted the interests of criminals in return for debt relief years ago.
The bills future remains unclear. Netanyahus Likud party was set to bring it to a parliamentary vote on Monday, but the bill was removed from a committee agenda Sunday evening.
Consumers search for your services online every single day. Search engines such as Google want to give them the right results. Here are a few simple tips you can do yourself to make it easier for the search engines to promote your business.
Your business has many online profiles, some of which you are not aware of. The information on each of these profiles needs to be accurate. It is especially important that your name, address and contact information are correct. If the search engines detect conflicting data about your company, what are they supposed to do? How do they know which reference is correct? If your competitor has consistent data and yours is not, which profile do you think Google will display to the consumer?
Start by entering your business name into Google. Scroll down and open each reference to verify the information on that site is correct. Pay special attention to sites with star review ratings, since consumers tend to visit these sites regularly.
There are free automated tools from Google that test your website for search engine optimization performance. Simply enter your website address, hit enter and look at the results. A good place to start is Googles PageSpeed Insights. The most powerful one of all is Google Search Console. Your websites performance as outlined in these analytical tools is extremely important.
Any online reference containing information about your business is a potential asset. These include your website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, BBB profile and more.
Most businesses should have these basic online assets: a website, a Google company page, LinkedIn and Facebook pages, a Yelp profile and a YouTube company channel. They should all have the same data and should all point back to your website.
We've collected a few front pages from newspapers.com to give you a look at some Dec. 4 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.
A young mountain lion was spotted in the foothills near Tucson over the weekend, according to the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
Apparently the mountain lion was spotted late Saturday morning on the patio of a foothills home.
The department said the animal left the area without any incident after it became aware that humans were nearby.
Although the department said sightings like this are pretty routine in the foothills, residents should still report any sightings to the department as soon as possible so that they can evaluate and track their movement.
To contact the department, call 623-236-2701 or visit https://www.azgfd.com/.
Housecat: A young mtn. lion on a patio in Tucson late Sat. morning. It left the area without incident. Although such sightings are routine in the foothills, report them ASAP to 623-236-2701 24&7 so that we can evaluate risks and track their movement. pic.twitter.com/HEu5O5Zs4z AZ Game & Fish Dept (@azgfdTucson) December 4, 2017
Thousands of vehicles go through automatic car washes in Tucson each week, but not all of them come out looking better than before, some local consumers say.
Websites such as Yelp and the Better Business Bureau are home to numerous complaints about inferior work or costly damage incidents at several area car washes.
For example, the Mister Car Wash chain the citys top purveyor of suds and polish with 15 Tucson locations has a D-minus rating with the BBB.
The company often doesnt respond when customers complain to the BBB about broken windows, dangling door mirrors, scratched side panels and other types of damage allegedly caused by the car-wash machinery or employees, online complaint records indicate.
Mister Car Wash CEO John Lai disputes that the firm is unresponsive and said the number of complaints is tiny compared to the 1.7 million cars washed each year in the Tucson area.
Lai says the firms damage rate in Arizona is less than .03 percent or one in 3,500 cars and said the company willingly pays for repairs when it determines it was at fault.
While one damage claim is too many, we continuously work to provide our customers with a safe wash for their vehicles and operate one of the safest car wash chains in the country, he said.
In addition to the small number of complaints we receive, we also get thousands of rave reviews, he added.
52 COMPLAINTS
Headquartered in Tucson, Mister Car Wash has more than 250 locations across the country, making it Americas largest car-wash chain.
Customers nationwide, including at least five from Tucson, have filed a total of 52 complaints with the Better Business Bureau in the last three years 36 of which the company did not respond to, according to the BBB.
One was from a retired University of Arizona professor who said Mister Car Wash at North Oracle and West River roads broke the passenger window and window mechanisms on her 2012 Fiat in June.
Repairs cost nearly $500, which she paid out of pocket after the company said it wasnt responsible, said the professor, who wasnt named in the BBB complaint.
The location the professor complained about has a Yelp rating of 2.5 stars out of five. Of the 25 Tucsonans who posted reviews, two claimed their vehicles were damaged.
Lai, the CEO, maintained in an email interview that the Better Business Bureau is not a reliable source of information. He pointed to a 2010 news story about a Los Angeles BBB later ejected from the national BBB network that was accused of giving negative ratings to businesses that were not BBB members.
Asked if thats how Mister Car Wash got its negative rating, Lai did not answer the question.
Susann Miller, spokeswoman for the BBB of Southern Arizona, said the companys D-minus rating is based solely on its failure to respond to complaints. Given its track record, Mister Car Wash does not qualify for BBB accreditation, she said.
Lai said the firm has resolved nearly all the complaints by reaching out to customers directly, rather than through the BBB.
We have elected not to respond to the BBB complaints since we find that very few people use them as a source of relevant reviews, he said.
NEW HEADACHES
New technology aimed at making vehicles safer is causing headaches for car-wash owners and increasing potential for damage claims, according to Professional Carwashing and Detailing, a national industry organization.
Anti-collision features such as automatic braking, for example, can occasionally deploy without warning inside car wash tunnels, setting the stage for collisions.
Sensors, locking systems and more engaging at the wrong time can definitely give owners and customers a thing or two to complain about, the organizations website said.
Soft-cloth car-wash systems, which aim to protect a vehicles finish, can entangle trim and side view mirrors and tear them off if they were loose to begin with, the website said. Even seemingly minor damage like a detached mirror can cost up to $1,000 to fix, it said.
Many car washes now pre-screen vehicles for loose parts and pre-existing damage. Some, including Mister Car Wash, have video cameras inside wash tunnels to help determine what happened if something goes wrong.
But even those safeguards arent foolproof.
Michael Walton, 50, said his 2003 Dodge Ram truck recently sustained $1,000 worth of damage at one of the citys newest car washes, Dynamite Car Wash Hypersonic on East Ajo Way near Interstate 19.
Workers there, who are required by company rules to inspect every vehicle for pre-existing damage, cleared Waltons truck to enter the wash tunnel, he said.
Halfway through, Walton said, the machinery stopped briefly and he heard a real loud pop. The metal housing that secures the trucks antenna was twisted and hanging when the truck emerged, he said.
Employees wouldnt let him see the video of the incident and claimed the problem was pre-existing, he said.
Waltons wife, Nancy, who was with her husband when the incident occurred, said the couple got the runaround when they asked to see the footage.
An assistant manager said to come back the next day when a manager was on duty, but when she came back the manager wasnt there, she said.
Evo DeConcini, who owns the car wash, said management typically shares video footage with customers who complain and said his staff has assured him that occurred in the Waltons case.
We generally side with the customer in a situation like this, and always make genuine efforts to go above and beyond when it comes to customer service, said DeConcini, who stressed that complaints are rare.
Walton, meanwhile, said hes shopping around for somewhere else to take his familys three vehicles and is feeling uneasy about it.
Once youve have a bad experience, he said, its hard to know who you can trust.
Help India!
By Siddhant Mohan, TwoCircles.net
Senior advocate Ujjwal Nikam, who was the special public prosecutor(SPP) in Mohsin Sadiq Shaikhs murder case, has opened up for the first time on why he withdrew from his position of the special public prosecutor (SPP).
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While talking to regional news channel ABP Majha, on November 30, Nikam said that it was one Member of Parliament and a journalist who opposed his appearance in the case.
The journalist and the MP who were not named by the Nikam allegedly opposed his appointment as SPP because Nikam had been felicitated by the Hindu outfits.
On May 19, 2017, Maharashtra state government cancelled Nikams appointment as the SPP in Mohsin Shaikhs murder case following a request raised by the Nikam himself. RV Chavan, the Section Officer at Law and Judiciary Department, passed the order regarding the same.
Mohsin Shaikh, a Pune-based engineer in a private firm, was allegedly attacked by the members of Hindu Rashtra Sena (HRS) on June 2, 2014.
In his interview to ABP Majha, Nikam said, One day, I got to know that a journalist and a MP had written to the government, with clippings of media reports, that Ujjwal Nikam has been felicitated by Hindu organisations in the past, due to which he will not be able to do justice.
According to the Nikam, the journalist and the MP had written to Prithviraj Chavan then the Chief Minister of the state much earlier before his resignation and government took no cognisance of their complaints.
I have been felicitated at many places in Maharashtra. I am not aware who is in the photographs with me, said Nikam in the interview.
Nikam talked about his apprehension in the case that if the accused were acquitted even after his all efforts the journalist and the MP would tell people that they had already informed the government about this.
So with honest intentions, I resigned from the case and did not mention any reason, said Nikam.
If the documents procured by the Indian Express to be believed, it could be Hussain Dalwai, the Rajya Sabha MP and Congress leader, who wrote a letter to Maharashtra CM in 2014 stating that Nikam should not be assigned as SPP in the case.
Another name could be of social activist Anjun Inamdar, the member of Rashtrapremi Kruti Samiti, who wrote to Chavan in the same year of 2014 opposing Nikams appointment as SPP.
TwoCircles.net tried to contact Uwal Nikam on two occasions. One was immediately after his withdrawal from the post of SPP, and second after Nikams interview on November 30. We got no response to the concerned questions from Nikams office.
After Nikams withdrawal from the case, Mohsins father Sadiq Shaikh -who was stunned by this development- tried to contact Ujjwal Nikam and Maharashtra state government showing faith in Nikams intentions and his work with the case.
Unanswered from all sides, Mohsins family applied for the appointment of Rohini Salian as SPP in the case. By the time Rohini Salians appointment could get confirmed, Ujwala Pawar appeared in the case as SPP and has been representing the family of Shaikh ever since.
Help India!
By Mirza Mosaraf Hossain, TwoCircles.net
A decade after the agitations and protests over the Tata factory in Singur and the damage it caused to the then Left government, it seems the Trinamool Congress, which led the protests against the Tata factory has learnt little. The Mamata Banerjee government, which came to power on the back of immense support from the people, is trying to cheat locals of Bengal in a manner similar to the Nano factory, albeit in Bolpur and not Singur.
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In 2001, the then Left government had acquired 294 acres farmland under the West Bengal Land Acquisition Act of 1984 from farmers of Shibpur, a Muslim-dominated locality about two km from Bolpur in Bengals Birbhum district for industry purposes with the promise that each family of the land givers would be offered a job. A total of 1,100 farmers gave their lands for a compensation of Rs 48,000 per bigha. Another 119 farmers denied giving their lands and five farmers refused to take compensation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnsX4RzHRM4&feature=youtu.be%20
TMC leader Anubrata Mondal threatening the DSP to arrest the farmers protesting against the WB government. Video courtesy: News Today, Kolkata
Although the land was taken as early as 2001, it became clear soon that there was little in the name of progress on the front of establishing industries, giving jobs to locals etc. Angered by the lack of any forward movement, in 2008 farmers who had given their land organized a day-long protest with the support of a number of organizations like the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML), Association for Protection and Democratic Rights (APDR) and State Organizing Committee (SOT) in front of the SDO Office of Bolpur demanding either industry or their lands. Since then, the protests have been frequent, although without much results.
In 2010, the then opposition party Trinamool supported the demands of the farmers and Partha Chatterjee, now education minister, in a meeting in the locality assured them that they would bring either industry or return the lands to the farmers if they come in power in the 2011 general election. But when they succeeded in winning Bengal and ousting the Left government, they failed to keep up their promises. Heartbroken, the farmers started to plough their lands after three years of the Trinamool Party in power and continued it for more two to three years.
In January of this year, Mamata Banerjee in a conference in Kolkata declared that a housing industry and a Visva Bangla University would be established at the land acquired in Bolpur. According to sources, HIDCO, West Bengal Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation, has been given the responsibility for the housing project and it has been priced at Rs 70 lakh per bigha. Although this was the first news in years about what the government was planning to do with the acquired land, this news only angered the locals further as they had been made to believe that their children would be employed in the industries set up here. This led to farmers, who had been initially stayed away from protests, to also join their fellow farmers and fed up of the government promises, they formed Shibpur Jamihara Krishak Monch, for taking back their cultivable lands.
In April, a case was filed in the Kolkata High Court by Bikash Bhattacharya, a lawyer in Kolkata HC and a firm supporter of the protesting farmers challenging the governments decision. The HC gave the verdict in favour of the farmers and issued a stay order. The final hearing will be held soon in the forthcoming days.
On November 15, some of the organisations, lawyers and farmers who lost land had a gathering in the Shibpur locality. The petitioner Bikash Bhattacharya, Abdul Mannan, the Opposition Leader of Bengal from Congress Party, Miratun Nahar, an educationist and social activist, were supposed to meet the gatherings of the land looser farmers. But local Trinamool workers under the leadership of Anubrata Mondal, the district President of Birbhum Trinamool Party, held them back. Mondal even threatened the DSP to arrest all who came to join the gathering. A skirmish occurred when the Trinamool workers opened fire and started to beat the farmers present there. Two farmers, Mirza Jasimmudin from Sabirganj village, who gave 25 bighas land each and Anarul Sk from the same village, who also gave 7 bighas for the same cause, were arrested. Although a case was filed against the TMC goons, police did not pick them up instantly as they did with the farmers. The case was filed against them under the non-billable 307 of IPC instead of 325 as their involvement was only with protests.
Shailen Mishra, an advocate at Bolpur Court who has been working with the farmers on the issue, spoke to TwoCircles.net. The government is playing with the lives of the thousands of farmers. When they wanted to come to power, they promised to keep the interests of our people at heart. How can the same people now play with the lives and livelihoods of thousands of farmers? He added, I dont think a university would take nearly 900 acres land for its establishment. By saying that a housing project would be set up here, the government is working like a broker. The leaders would loot crores of money from this housing project whereas the life of the poor would continue to be so.
Alam Sekh, a 55-year-old who gave his lands for the projects, asked, We gave our land for the industry in the hope that our children would be offered jobs. But what is the point of taking land from us if the proposed industry is not taking place?
Another farmer who pledged his land, Zulfikar SK from Nurpur village, said. The farmlands that we have are the sole means of our livelihood. We gave it to the government even with very low compensation hoping that we will be offered some permanent employment through which we will be able enough to run our families. If we get to know that the government would do business with our land, we would not have given our lands.
Help India!
By Vishal Gulati
Nairobi, (IANS): This year has been the deadliest for environmental women defenders, with 200 assignations reported across the globe, and most of them were killed over land and forest conflicts, rights activists said on Monday.
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Paying a tribute on the inaugural day of the three-day third UN Environment Assembly here, they highlighted the important role of women human rights defenders for a pollution-free future.
Two hundred environmental and women human rights defenders have been assassinated this year, mostly killed over land and forest conflicts. Only last week, we lost Elisa Badayos from the Philippines. But these conflicts are greatly aggravated by pollution, Priscilla Achakpa of the Womens Major Group (WMG) said.
In the Niger Delta, communities continue to resist against the oil spills from Shell, which have devastated their lands.
In Lagos, the waste scavengers resist eviction.
Pollution is not incidental but is a deliberate and inevitable consequence of a profit-oriented economy of mass production of harmful plastics, pesticides and fossil fuels, Achakpa said.
Helen Hakena of Leitana Nehan Womens Development Agency of Papua New Guinea added: We have suffered a 20-year war, which has had a terrible impact on women. Sixty-two per cent of the men confessed to having raped women.
Even though the war has ended, women still face immense aggression from the conflict of resources on our land, where an international mining company operated the largest open pit mine in the world. The Panguna mine has destroyed and polluted our land, forest, rivers and food sources, and seeps all profits away.
In Kenya, the headquarters of the UN Environment Programme, some 5,000 people are exposed to mercury pollution in artisanal and small-scale gold mining sites.
Mercury is banned under the Minamata Convention, negotiated here at the UNEP. In the impoverished community that Im working with they dont have much option. Mining gold and mixing it with mercury is the only knowledge they have and the main source of income, said Griffins Ochieng from the Centre for Environmental Justice and Development.
The WMG was created at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil where governments recognized women as one of the nine important groups in society for achieving sustainable development.
The WMG is an official participant in the United Nations processes on Sustainable Development.
Over 4,000 heads of state, ministers, business leaders, UN officials and civil society representatives gathered here to mull ways to tackle the global menace of pollution.
Aussies make technology firms hand over their cash to state coffers. blog
Australia makes multinationals pay more tax. An audit by the the OECD brought to light how much money the big companies owed. With countries toughening up the rules, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the tax avoiders to keep all the profit. Australia a Hits a Multinationals a With a New a Tax a Rules
The OECD recommended ways to stop the cash going to tax havens. Nations have taken notice and passed new legislation. Australia's rules are clear: if you earn in Australia you must hand over the tax. Large businesses will have no choice. 3 Australia b Hits b Multinationals b With b New b Tax b Rules 3
Messing around with intercompany transfers between international branches to artificially reduce income will also face obstacles. The mother conpany providing overpriced inputs to outlying branches will end. Microsoft, Apple and Google have had their wings clipped. Australia c Hits c Multinationals c With c New c Rules
Like the United States, Australia plans to lower the corporate tax rate. Soon countries like Ireland will lose out as money flows elsewhere. There will be a race to the bottom as governments move the rate lower and lower.
multinationals hits international e cash e oecd e hand ato government billion public avoidance share fair profits inquiry multinational million cut deals outcome laws settlements report settlement corporations time told king tony apple's photo president agree bills foreign system trump donald revenue funds restructuring sceptical individual naming agreed recommendations secret register senate global worth court chevron commissioner jordan chris ato's paid years issues director managing confidential taxed hearing claims tech cent change greater tested law dpt hit office maal unknown remains audits diverted anti-avoidance || saved || feeds anti-avoidance diverted audits remains unknown maal office hit dpt law tested greater change cent tech claims hearing taxed confidential managing director issues years paid ato's chris jordan commissioner chevron court worth global senate register secret recommendations agreed naming individual sceptical restructuring funds revenue donald trump system foreign bills agree big president photo apple's tony king told time corporations settlement report settlements laws outcome deals cut million multinational inquiry profits fair share avoidance public billion government ato || australia's audit corporate large firms, business, funds, cash, investment, economics, banks, lending, earth, collateral, ||
TECHNOLOGY
With Pembrokeshire County Council proposing to increase council tax by either 5 per cent or 12.5 per cent, it is clear that many local authorities are using Westminster's cuts as an opportunity to squeeze households during a time they have felt the pinch enough. Pro-liberty group Forge Wales said if this county council can afford to award its former chief executive with a 280,000 payment on top of their 190,000 a year salary, why is it Pembrokeshire residents may have to foot the bill for their awful spending habits?
"It is apparent council tax also impacts many households"
Introduced in 1991 to replace Thatcher's hated poll tax, council tax is based on valuations that are 25 years out of date. The eight council tax bands determining this regressive tax that funds local services are still based on 1991 property prices. Families residing in properties worth 320,000 and above pay the highest Band H levy. A house in London worth that much in 1991 would now be priced at 1.6 million, that's according to property agent Savills.
"The entire system is based on a postcode lottery"
The entire system is based on a postcode lottery. Band H homes in Westminster pay an average of 1,400 a year. In Weymouth, that bill would come to 4,000 a year.
The Financial Times argued that by reforming these bands, councils, whose budgets are being squeezed by soaring social care costs, would be able to charge properties based on their value in certain parts of the country.
However, business rates were reformed earlier this year. They were based on 1993 property values and many of them were landed with significant bills that they could not afford at a time of uncertainty caused by Brexit and soaring National Living Wage costs.
Towns have been losing shops since the 2008 Recession and business rate rises are only likely to make that worse as time progresses.
It is the same with council tax reform. Many households' budgets are being squeezed and unless the Government formulates a plan that will compensate families losing out as a result of a reform of this annual levy, they should leave it well alone, as they did in 2005.
The political consequences could be devastating. And many local authorities would use it as an opportunity to charge residents even more than they currently do.
"That does not mean council tax reform should be avoided"
That does not mean council tax reform should be avoided altogether. But Pembrokeshire County Council's plans will impact low-income families the most. They have not explained how they will be compensated. It is guaranteed there are areas of spending they can slash to prevent this rise. The problem is with parties' management of local councils, not a lack of money.
This is the wrong time to change council tax bands and Mr. Hammond was sensible to avoid it this time.
Award-winning documentary filmmaker and fine-art photographer Miguel Gandert shows his work highlighting his mestizaje heritage, and the fusion and tension of the relationship between Spanish Colonial and Native Cultures of the Americas. Runs through 12/29.
Querer means to want, to desire, to be in a place, with its people. In folk terminology, querencia is such a place, the center space of desire, the root of belonging and yearning to belong, that vicinity where you first beheld the light. Querencia, in collective terms, is homeland. ~Enrique Lamadrid, Nuevo Mexico Profundo
Miguel Gandert tells stories. He tells stories of his homeland, New Mexico (and beyond), its people and the cultural practices that distinguish communities from each other while simultaneously revealing their kinship. You will have to form your own words, however. Ganderts stories are told through penetrating, black and white photos. A primary focus of his work is his own mestizaje heritage and the fusion and tension of the relationship between Spanish Colonial and Native Cultures of the Americas.
Miguel Gandert, a native of Espanola, NM, is an award-winning documentary and fine-art photographer and filmmaker. His photographs have been shown in galleries and museums throughout the world and are in numerous public collections including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the National Museum of American History and Art at the Smithsonian.
Querencia: Rituals of the Rio Arriba opens Friday, October 6 at the New Mexico Humanities Council, 4115 Silver Ave SE, Albuquerque. An artists reception will be 6:00 pm 8:00 pm with an artist's discussion at 7:00 pm. The exhibit closes December 29, 2017.
Pembrokeshire County Council is considering hitting residents with a 12.5 per cent rise in council tax this month.
The proposal was leaked to Blasting News by Forge Wales, a pro-liberty and enterprise group in Wales. Pembrokeshire County Council is due to hold a full council meeting in December to debate whether a 5 per cent rise or a 12.5 per cent rise in council tax is necessary to raise any lost revenue.
"It is an option which is being explored"
Unaffiliated Pembrokeshire County Council Leader David Simpson told Blasting News: "The County Council has not decided to introduce a 12.5 per cent council tax rise for residents.
It is an option which is being explored. At a meeting earlier last week, the Council's Cabinet members asked for two alternative budgets to be presented to the meeting of full council in December 2017 for full consideration.
"One will be based on on council tax by raising 5 per cent and the other will be based on a rise of 12.5 per cent."
The proposals have caused an uproar with Forge Wales. Their spokesperson told Blasting News: "Pembrokeshire County Council has also unnecessarily spent 3 million on the purchase and renovation of their Cherry Grove Offices, despite any issues with capacity at County Hall.
"The council needs to ensure it has cut any non-essential spending before looking to take an extra 12.5 per cent from local residents."
The county council is seeking to discover how they can retain 16.7 million in savings in the 2018/19 budget.
Councillor Simpson said the council has already identified 10.7 million worth of funds and that an additional 2.4 million would be raised from a 5 per cent council tax rise.
He said there is still a shortfall of 3.64 million, which is why a potential rise of 12.5 per cent is being explored.
The Council Leader added that no final decisions have been made yet.
"Any amount of council tax that is due to go up is being used to help compensate the huge drop in funding"
Conservative councillor Aaron Carey said any amount of council tax that is due to go up is being used to help compensate the huge drop in funding from the Welsh Government and the cost of supplying services.
He refused to comment on what the Pembrokeshire Conservative Group's position on the council tax proposals is without further information on the consequences to both low income households and the amount of service provision available.
Pembrokeshire County Council came under scrutiny in October 2014 by Wales Online for wasting council tax on paying former chief executive Bryn Parry-Jones with a severance package of around 280,000, which was smaller than the original 330,000 sum being suggested at the time.
The Wales Audit Office objected to the original figure after ruling that any cash payments he received were unlawful in lieu of pension contributions.
Then Labour leader Councillor Paul Miller applied for a High Court injunction against the settlement.
"This is the same county council that treated its former chief executive to a severance package of 277,000 on top of his annual salary of 190,000"
A Forge Wales spokesperson said: "Forge Wales are concerned about Pembrokeshire County Council over the consideration to raise council tax by 12.5 per cent.
This is the same county council that treated its former chief executive to a severance package of 277,000 on top of his annual salary of 190,000."
Labour councillor Josh Beynon said even though he was not a councillor when Bryn Parry Jones was chief executive, he has always been against Mr. Parry-Jones' "ridiculous" severance package and the Porsche he was also awarded with.
He added: "Workers on lower pay scales wouldn't get a car, so why should the chief executive?"
Councillor Simpson defended the council's decision at the time, saying: "Pembrokeshire County Council members approved a settlement figure during a private session, in relation to the departure of Mr. Parry-Jones in October 2014.
We have no comment about the make and model of the car used by him.
"The current Chief Executive is Mr. Ian Westley, who was appointed on an interim basis in October 2014, and a permanent basis in July 2015."
Even though the search for San Juan, the Argentine submarine reported missing on November 15 was officially called off, there are still ongoing attempts to find what may remain of it in the sea. Most recently Panther Plus, a Russian underwater drone, while exploring the search area for the missing sub, photographed a shipwreck lying on the seabed. Yet according to an Associated Press report which referred to the Argentine Navy, the find belonged in fact to a fishing vessel sunken much earlier than San Juan.
According to Enrique Balbi, a navy spokesman, the military regrets that the families of the missing seamen were reassured, as the news of the find was released before blurry photos taken by the Russian apparatus were properly analysed.
One of the images was given priority for review last Saturday as it showed a ship-like object estimated to be about 60m long which was located at 477m (1,565 feet) below sea level within the search area. The object's size first appeared to roughly match that of ARA San Juan which is 66m long.
San Juan, the went missing on 15 November after having successfully completed live torpedoes war games. It had 44 crew members aboard at the time of its disappearance. As Balbi said, These are hours of intense pain and anguish [for relatives] in light of the loss of their loved ones, our 44 comrades.
Argentina's missing submarine confirmed sunken with no survivors
Built in Germany by Thyssen Nordseewerke, the lightweight single-hull design San Juan was laid down in 1982 and launched the following year.
The submarine went missing as it was returning to its permanent base in Mar del Plata from the southern port of Ushuaia. According to the navy, the vessels captain reported water having entered the snorkel which caused one of the subs batteries to short circuit.
Within few hours of San Juan's last radio transmission and in the vicinity of the vessel's last known location an acoustic anomaly compatible with an explosion event was detected.
After an extensive search, some 200 nautical miles (370 km; 230 mi) southeast of San Jorge Gulf hopes of rescuing the crew alive were abandoned on 30 November, as this type of submarine carries oxygen for no more than seven days when submerged.
First female submarine officer aboard
The 44 servicemen on board the missing submarine included Eliana Maria Krawczyk, Argentina's first female submarine officer. Following these events, the Russian Defence Ministry decided to send Panther Plus, a new ship-based submarine drone to assist in search of San Juan.
A baby albatross died from a plastic toothpick. Its mother mistook the item for food and fed it to the young. It stuck in the gullet leading to its death. This has been revealed in the latest documentary BBC series "Blue Planet II" of Sir David Attenborough.
Sky News reports that the 91-year-old iconic TV presenter has expressed concerns about plastic waste that is clogging the world's oceans. He wants people to realize the consequences, and take action to prevent cluttering the Environment with plastic discards so that the future of humanity is not doomed.
The matter is serious, because the survival of marine life, including animals and birds, is at stake. The death toll due to plastics runs into thousands, and the reasons are either ingestion of plastics or getting entangled in them.
Global warming and overfishing
Sir David Attenborough also brought up the importance of checking global warming and controlling overfishing to ensure a healthy environment. Both are harmful to the well-being of our planet Earth and everyone will have to go in for measures to contain these evils that, like the plastic wastes, threaten the world. It is not only about marine lives but also about vegetation that bears the brunt of global warming.
While on the subject, the veteran broadcaster took a dig at US President Donald Trump, who did not sign the Paris accord on climate change.
Sir David Attenborough explained that the accord was to tune the world to a common frequency, and he hoped that the United States would finally sign the accord because it would be for the benefit of the entire planet and not be isolated in tiny sectors.
Positive action is required
Protecting the environment is the responsibility of not only a few groups of like-minded persons but must become a way of life for all.
Plastic waste is a major threat to marine lives as well as land-based animals. According to Sir David Attenborough, in a rough estimate, nearly eight million tons of plastic winds up in the sea annually and a portion sinks to the bottom, while the remaining portion keeps floating around. This is non-biodegradable material and continues to accumulate in the oceans, which is not a desirable situation.
One method to reduce such waste is to go in for alternate material like paper.
It all boils down to the control of various parameters that disturb the ecological balance and result in abnormalities like flash floods, hurricanes, drought conditions, and forest fires. These are creations of man, and he must find remedies to ensure that the world remains healthy for future generations.
The verdict involving the death of Kate Steinle has been announced and the president isn't happy. After hearing the news of a not guilty ruling, Donald Trump took to Twitter.
Trump on Kate Steinle
In 2015, Kate Steinle was walking with her family on the San Francisco waterfront when she was fatally shot by a bullet. The bullet came from the gun of Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had previously been deported five different times. Zarate's defense claimed that he accidentally shot her after aiming for the pier. Due to San Francisco being a sanctuary city, Steinle's death quickly became a hot topic in the world of politics.
After announcing his plan to run for president in 2015, Trump used the tragedy as part of his talking point to push for stricter boarder control and immigration laws, in particular getting rid of all funding for sanctuary cities. Steinle's death became the inspiration behind "Kate's Law," which aims at harsher punishment for illegal immigrants who enter the United States after being previously deported. On Thursday night, a verdict in the trial involving Steinle's death was reached, with the jury in San Francisco finding Zarate not guilty of assault with a firearm. In response, Trump gave his thoughts during a tweet on November 30.
A disgraceful verdict in the Kate Steinle case! No wonder the people of our Country are so angry with Illegal Immigration. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 1, 2017
Taking to Twitter on Thursday night, Donald Trump expressed his frustration with the not guilty verdict of Jose Ines Garcia Zarate.
"A disgraceful verdict in the Kate Steinle case!" Trump tweeted.
Not stopping there, Donald Trump continued with his anger. "No wonder the people of our Country are so angry with Illegal Immigration," Trump concluded. As of press time, it's unknown whether the president or Republicans in congress will push for additional action on immigration in response to the verdict.
I am disappointed and angry at the not guilty verdict for Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an illegal alien who had several felony convictions & was deported from the US five times. Justice must be served for Kate Steinle. https://t.co/IxiL9WCU50 Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 1, 2017
GOP reaction
In addition to Donald Trump lashing out at the verdict, other top Republicans expressed their thoughts.
"I am disappointed and angry at the not guilty verdict for Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an illegal alien who had several felony convictions & was deported from the US five times," Texas Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted out.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions expressed displeasure over the Steinle murder trial verdict in a statement that claimed San Francisco's decision to release Zarate "led to the preventable and heartbreaking death of Kate Steinle." Read more: https://t.co/meMWBLyAVc pic.twitter.com/sxTphChdM7 NBC News (@NBCNews) December 1, 2017
Attorney General Jeff Sessions also released a statement, which was in line with the president and Ted Cruz. "When jurisdictions choose to return criminal aliens to the streets rather than turning them over to federal immigration authorities, they put the publics safety at risk," Sessions said. While Zarate was found not guilty of assault with a firearm, he was found guilty of a felony for being in possession of a firearm, and will be sentenced for that crime at a later date.
It looked like Nate and Sheila of "Married at First Sight" were going to be just fine, but it turns out that this isn't the case. Today, Sheila Duhon went to her Twitter page to call Nate out for cheating and say that their marriage is over. A few fans thought she might have been hacked, but it has been up for a while now and it looks like it is all legit.
What did Sheila reveal?
Shelia went to her Twitter and called him out without even thinking twice. She said, "Just got a call from the woman who's been sleeping with my husband...the same woman who he called on the honeymoon." Fans are shocked that she said this on her social network.
She was even responding to fans and saying that Nate did admit to it, so it wasn't like this woman was just trying to get to her. It is true and they are over according to her.
A lot of people feel like she shouldn't have gone to her social network to speak out about this yet, but she doesn't seem to have a problem with her decision. Sheila Duhon explained that she went to Twitter so fast because she is done. She doesn't doubt her decision at all.
After that, she went on to say, "I am so done. I honored my covenant with God. God said adultery is means for divorce." It sounds like she is totally done with her marriage and will be filing for divorce very soon. There doesn't seem to be any way that she will try to work things out with him after what just went down.
What is Nate saying?
So far, Nate isn't saying a word. The fans are watching his Twitter account and hoping for an update, but there isn't one at all. If Sheila was hacked, then you would think that he would be posting about it. For now, everyone is just going to have to wait and see what happens. It sounds like they are over, and if Nate has been with this same girl since they got married it wouldn't be surprising at all if he ends up with this person.
Right now, the fans are waiting on a statement from the couple. It is very likely that they will speak out to a magazine and explain that they are done, but this is all a big shock to everyone. Nate and Sheila really never seemed like they would make it to some and others thought they were the perfect couple.
Are you shocked to hear that Nate and Sheila aren't going to make it?
Do you feel like she will divorce him like she says? Sound off in the comments below on your thoughts and don't miss "Married at First Sight" when the show returns to Lifetime with a new season. They have already been looking for new contestants for the show.
Everyone saw Mark and Nikki on the show "90 Day Fiance." This couple has a really big age difference, but somehow they were able to make their relationship work. Now, Starcasm is sharing that the lawsuit they filed against TLC has now been thrown out. This couple hasn't been on any of the follow-up shows and they also aren't on social networks. They seem to have really moved on from anything to do with reality television. They don't want any part of being on the show or even on any update shows. It is surprising that they would be on the show at all as secretive as they are being now about everything.
How are these two doing now?
There are really no updates on them at all. Back in March, Mark left a review of a restaurant online and he mentioned his wife at the time. That seems to be the latest update from Mark and Nikki. They aren't even talking at all on social networks so it makes it hard for people to get updates on how they are doing. They were spending time together in Hawaii recently. It looked like they were having fun. Mark and Nikki seem to have worked even though a lot of people didn't think that they would.
So what is the deal on the lawsuit?
It turns out that back in May of this year the lawsuit was thrown out. Somehow at the time, Nikki and Mark were able to keep it out of the news.
Basically, the judge decided that they signed a contract to be on a reality show and there is nothing that they can file a lawsuit on. The contract actually says that they can edit things however they want to do it, so they can't sue for that either. The only way that they could have won this lawsuit was if they could prove that they did something on purpose to defame the duo or fraud them, but that wasn't the case either.
One thing that came up in the lawsuit is the fact that they get paid $1,000 per episode. Mark has also filed a lot of lawsuits in the past, so it wasn't like this was something new to him. It didn't work out for him this time around, though. Mark may have won some money in the past, but the one against TLC didn't end up helping him get rich at all.
Are you shocked to hear that Mark and Nikki seem to be still together? Are you shocked to hear that their lawsuit against TLC was thrown out? Sound off in the comments below, and don't miss new episodes of "90 Day Fiance" when they air on Sunday nights on TLC. Nikki and Mark won't be there, but we can continue to get updates on the other couples in the franchise that are willing to keep sharing their stories.
In recent weeks, several reports have revealed that Donald Trump has been telling his aides and select members of congress that it wasn't actually his voice on the now infamous "Access Hollywood" tape. In response, the man who was next to the president when he allegedly made the controversial remarks has decided to speak out.
Billy Bush on Trump
With one month remaining before voters made their way to the polls last year on Election Day, Donald Trump was hit with an October surprise in the form of an audio tape that was recorded prior to an interview with "Access Hollywood" back in 2005.
On the tape, Trump could be heard speaking to then host Billy Bush on a bus where he bragged about being able to use his fame and fortune to touch women as he pleased, stating, "When you're famous, they let you do it. Grab 'em by the pu**y." The tape quickly dominated the news cycle, resulting in a rare public apology by Trump, which was done on national TV. Over the next four weeks, a dozen women came forward to accuse the former host of "The Apprentice" of sexual assault and harassment, putting further pressure on his campaign. Despite this, Trump was able to weather the storm and pulled off the shocking upset over Hillary Clinton, which has since been marred by allegations of possible collusion with Russia.
Fast forward to present day and Trump has been privately telling people that the "Access Hollywood" tape was a fake and that it wasn't his voice on the recording. As seen in an op-ed during the December 3 edition of the New York Times, Bush has come out to correct the record.
Op-Ed Contributor: Billy Bush: Yes, Donald Trump, You Said That https://t.co/T1RB2jlIEe The New York Times (@nytimes) December 4, 2017
"He said it," Billy Bush writes to start off his New York Times op-ed, in reference to the comments made on the "Access Hollywood" tape.
"Of course he said it. And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America's highest-rated bloviator," Bush continued.
President Trump has questioned the authenticity of the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged about being able to grope women, despite the fact he immediately apologized when the video surfaced https://t.co/d72OVKIuxX pic.twitter.com/jfjw97ATUu CNN (@CNN) December 3, 2017
Billy Bush went on to detail his regret, explaining that, along with the others with him at the time, "were guilty of sacrificing a bit of ourselves in the name of success." Bush expressed heartfelt remorse for those who have accused Donald Trump of sexual assault ans harassment, referring to them as "culture warriors" during a time of need.
Bush went on to note that his public op-ed was about "reckoning and reawakening," while concluding that he hopes it reaches every one of the men who were on the bus with Trump that day.
Moving forward
With Billy Bush coming out to finally tell his side of the story about what took place during his conversation with Donald Trump, only time will tell if the president decides to respond. In recent days, the commander in chief has expressed his frustration over a variety of issues on social media, and it's expected that he could do so with Bush in the near future.
Metropolitan Opera Music Director Emeritus James Levine led four performances of Giuseppe Verdis Requiem with a dazzling cast between Friday, Nov. 24, and Saturday, Dec. 2 (the performance under review). He helmed the world-class Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the peerless Metropolitan Opera Chorus. The four soloistssoprano Krassimira Stoyanova, mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Semenchuk, tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko, and bass Ferruccio Furlanettowere stellar standouts. Since its 1901 Metropolitan Opera premiere, this work has now seen the footlights 53 times.
Everything Music and Theatre explains what makes this monumental work so great and points out a few highlights.
Choral high points
So many fantastic moments, so little time. Running the sonic gamut, choral murmurs open and close this colorful work, requiring utmost restraint and control by the massive chorus, numbering 114. At the other extreme, overpowering high-decibel concerted passagesthe recurring Dies irae (Day of wrath) and the grim, growly Rex tremendae (Dreadful King) among themcannot help but envelop the audience in a sonorous tsunami. In the first of four iterations of the Day of wrath, the chorus ominously hisses, accentuating the ess sound in numerous words of the passage: Quantus tremor est futurus, quando judex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus (What trembling there will be, when the judge shall come to examine all things thoroughly).
Mezzo moments
Verdis mezzo-soprano takes a leading role among the soloists, intoning arias and leading ensembles. The Russian volcanic vocal voluptuary Ekaterina Semenchuk delivered all her numbers with gorgeous tone and legato, never more-so than the Liber scriptus aria in the Dies irae, where her sturdy, dusky high range made you wish she were a soprano and her powerful burnished lower range made you glad shes notwith contralto characteristics, evocative of the inimitable late Elena Obraztsova.
When darkness shines
Mors stupebit (Stupified Death), the bass spooky, hushed opening solo, comes on the heels of the blazing fanfare of trumpets, trombones and French horns of Tuba mirum (Marvelous trumpet). Verdi veteran Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto succeeded in engaging in the requisite hair-raising quietness, whereas his later superb solo with chorus, Confutatis, became a great showpiece, spun with incredibly gorgeous tone, perfect volume and all the angst the Latin text contains.
Tenor tunes
The tenors is the first soloist whose voice makes a showing. His lyrical Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy on us) intrudes upon the orchestral and choral opening, burning brightly upward. The remaining soloists follow in a brief round. Ingemisco (I tremble), the tenor aria, is everything youd expect from a Verdi opera, in this most operatic of so-called sacred works. Towering Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko ardently dispatched it, having no trouble in the treacherously high passages, executing an unconvincing trill at first, but acquitting himself nicely upon repeat.
Soprano standouts
Verdis soprano, normally the protagonist in his operas, takes a seemingly supporting role at first, singing often in ensemble, as part of the quartet of soloists and in two duets with the mezzo-soprano.
Only in Libera me, Domine (Deliver me, Lord)the final 15 minutesdoes she fully own the stage, interacting with the chorus and singing what could be called a three-part aria: at first frantic, then suppliant and finally sedately resigned. Soprano Krassimira Stoyanova gleamed and glowed at the high end of her register and was frightening in the steely strength of her lowest range. Her three distinct iterations of Salva me (faint and helpless, then stronger, pleading, and finally imperious) in the Rex tremendae section and her ascent to the heights, far above the quartet and resounding clearly over the orchestral and choral tutti, were astounding, utterly moving.
Formidable foursome
The soloists were all well and good in their moments of holding the stage individually.
Teaming up in quartet they were sublime, like when the soprano describes Michael the standard-bearer. Above her sustained (16-second) floated pianissimo, the orchestra and her three colleagues undulated in modulating major-to-minor keys simply breathtaking. Ms. Stoyanova here deftly, touchingly executed a melting messa di voce (a sustained note that gradually increases, then decreases, in volume)much more difficult than it sounds in words. As mentioned, their concerted work, mostly with repetitions of the phrase Salva me, could not help but move the hardest heart; the desperation conveyed brought tears to the eyes.
Orchestral pearls
The two brass fanfares (in Tuba mirum and the veritable marching-band Sanctus) are the most glaring examples of Verdis mastery of full-throttle orchestration.
But an early passage, in Liber scriptus, takes the ear back in time to Amneris in Aida, three years earlier (1871), and farther still, to Azucena in Il trovatore (The Troubador; 1853). The flute and piccolo flourishes in Libera me bring to mind Amelias Act-II gallows scene in Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball; 1859). On the quiet side, nothing is so ethereal as the shimmering orchestra, created by soft violin tremolos, at the beginning and end of various sections.
Golden silence
Verdis dramatic use of the grand pausea slash of complete silence at the height of full vocal and orchestral volumeis spine-chilling. In the chorus Tuba mirum (Wondrous trumpet), a few seconds lapse before the reverberating ends, following ante thronum (before the throne), creating understated drama when the subsequent bass solo, Mors stupebit (Stupefied Death), begins at an eerie whisper.
The soprano negotiates such an abrupt cut in Libera me, following the line dum veneris judicare saedum per ignem (when you come in flames to judge the world). Sneering, heckling contrabassoons answer.
James Levine Conducts First @MetOpera Performance of Verdis Requiem Since 2008 https://t.co/0n0WtVjzwj with @KrStoyanova Playbill ClassicArts (@playbillarts) 14 November 2017
Platinum conductor
James Levine has lovingly led the last 17 performances of Verdis Requiem at Metropolitan Opera, last seen there in 2008. As in any work he conducts, he lavishes love on the soloists while creating perfect balance between the magnificent orchestra and Chorus Master Donald Palumbos matchless onstage chorus. Turning in his wheelchair to face the audience, he received their raucous ovation while everyone onstage warmly applauded him and the orchestra. This is truly an event not to miss.
jill zarin shared a heartbreaking update with "RHONY" fans, posting an Instagram message that gave an update on her husband's cancer battle as he reportedly nears the end.
The reality television star celebrated her birthday this week, and posted a picture on Instagram of a beautifully crafted, layered cake. In the update, Jill Zarin noted that she has been trying to take advantage of every moment since her husband was diagnosed with cancer. The "RHONY" star said that he continues to "astound doctors" with his progress against the cancer, but the message itself was bittersweet given his grim prognosis.
"I am most grateful to God who continues to give Bobby and me more time together," she wrote. "When Bobby always said to me 'cherish the moment' I never knew the power of that message until now."
Jill Zarin added that she and Bobby are continuing to fight against his Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer and that Bobby has astounded his doctors with his determination to fight the disease despite long odds against him. The "RHONY" star also thanked friends and fans for their many messages of support, saying she reads all of them to gain strength during the difficult battle ahead of the couple.
Bobby Zarin's cancer progressing
Jill Zarin's husband had originally been diagnosed with thyroid cancer close to eight years ago, but it has recently surged back and now spread into his brain, the "Real Housewives of New York" star shared with fans.
Those close to Jill Zarin said that Bobby's outlook does not look good, but she is trying to remain positive during his cancer battle. It has been a difficult road for Bobby, with People magazine noting that he also had to undergo Gamma Knife Radiosurgery at the noted MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Jill Zarin staying by her husband's side
While Bobby Zarin has a difficult battle ahead still, his wife will be there to support him. A source close to the couple told Radar Online earlier this month that Jill has been hesitant to go to public events as her husband's health declines. The source claimed that Jill Zarin has been by his side constantly, but that Bobby insisted she leave to make a brief appearance at a recent event.
As Bobby Zarin continues to battle cancer, Jill Zarin has pulled back on her other obligations, including appearances on television. Once a staple on "Real Housewives of New York," she has returned only briefly since her firing more than three years ago.
In order to pass on advance information to its people about an impending nuclear attack from North Korea, the authorities in Hawaii have decided to make use of its sirens. It conducted a test that lasted for a minute with the purpose of checking their serviceability because the devices had been put in cold storage after the end of the Cold War.
Sky News reports that the sounding of the warning system would become a regular monthly feature to ensure that the Hawaiians are warned, and their safety is ensured to the extent possible.
However, the testing revealed that some of the 385 odd units installed across the islands either malfunctioned or the required decibel to attract attention was absent.
This was especially true along beaches where the sound of the waves drowned the sound of the sirens. Obviously, these must be fixed, and soon.
Importance of Hawaii
Hawaii is the state located nearest to the Korean peninsula and is also headquarters for the military in the Asia Pacific region. A number of key bases, including Pearl Harbor, are in the vicinity. That is probably the reason why North Korea has selected Hawaii as one of its probable targets. Hence, the authorities have tested the sirens which will be used to inform its population about an approaching aerial threat.
The test had been planned some time ago but was finally carried out when Pyongyang claimed to have launched its most powerful missile to date.
It was labeled as a weapon that could strike the US mainland and is a matter of concern.
Tension rises in the Korean peninsula
The latest ICBM launch of North Korea after nearly two months of apparent quiet has shocked the world. The height attained by the missile and the distance it traveled is significant from Americas point of view because such a weapon could target any location in the United States.
The tension in the Korean peninsula could escalate further since a joint military exercise is scheduled between the US and South Korea, and Pyongyang views this as an act of aggression.
As far as Hawaii is concerned, in the event of an attack, it would get less than 20 minutes time before the missile strikes. Therefore, the sirens will come into action to warn the people who are outdoors to seek out suitable shelters.
In todays fast-moving world, people are always on the move and, any sudden attack could wreak havoc on people and their surroundings.
The state's Governor, David Ige, has tried to reassure the Hawaiians by saying that the possibility of an attack is remote.
State Councilor Yang Jiechi, a member of the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau, addresses delegates to an international seminar in Beijing at its closing session on Sunday. FENG YONGBIN/CHINA DAILY
High-level meeting calls on attendees to reject isolationism, support multilateral trade system
The Belt and Road Initiative serves the interests of people of all countries and provides a platform for building a community with a shared future for mankind, political party leaders from more than 120 countries said in a joint statement issued in Beijing on Sunday.
They voiced their "earnest expectations and best wishes" for realizing the Belt and Road in the Beijing Initiative document adopted at the closing session of the Communist Party of China in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting.
In the statement, the leaders from nearly 300 political parties and organizations said forging a new form of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice and win-win cooperation is imperative to the building of the community with a shared future for mankind and a better world.
They called on countries to stay away from isolationism and exclusionism and support a multilateral trade system, and they commended the CPC's efforts and contribution in promoting the building of the community with a shared future and a better world.
Building the community and a better world requires political parties and leaders to undertake their historic duties and carry forward the spirit of hard work, State Councilor Yang Jiechi said at the closing session.
Also, the leaders should have a sense of innovation, always act with a problem-oriented approach, and create platforms for exchanges, Yang added.
In his keynote speech on Friday, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, elaborated on the CPC's idea of building the community with a shared future, and showed determination to boost world development and prosperity, Yang said.
Various attending political parties spoke highly of Xi's speech hailed the CPC's historical contribution and expect China's further navigating role, Yang added.
Pierre Ngolo, general-secretary of the Congolese Labor Party and president of the Senate of the Republic of Congo, said China fulfills its duties efficiently, promotes unity, friendship and safety among people in the world and works for enabling everyone to benefit from development.
"The Belt and Road is one of the best examples," he said, adding that the unprecedented high-level meeting, transcending the self-interests of the various political parties gathered, charts the course for the community with a shared future.
The meeting will become "a new impetus" for development in the world, he said.
Dashzeveg Amarbayasgalan, general secretary of the ruling Mongolian People's party, said the meeting has had sufficient discussions on co-building the Belt and Road.
Views have been exchanged effectively and the meeting has turned a new page for exchanges among political parties in the world, he said.
Dmitry Novikov, deputy chairman of the Central Committee of Communist Party of the Russian Federation, said the Belt and Road Initiative is promising in reinforcing economic cooperation among countries and will boost the upgrading of political and cultural cooperation among them.
China is the world's second-largest economy, it has huge potential politically and economically, and it benefits the Chinese people and facilitates efforts in building an equitable world of justice and allowing every country to have a share of development, Novikov said.
The Beijing Initiative will also introduce more possibilities to bilateral cooperation, such as those between China and Russia, he added.
Major global challenges such as terrorism and climate change allow no country to sacrifice others for its own self-interests, and political parties should join hands in efforts to tackle the thorny issues, political leaders say.
These recommendations were made by speakers addressing the second plenary session and closing session of the Communist Party of China in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting in Beijing on Sunday.
Marina Sereni, vice-president of Italy's Chamber of Deputies and a member of the leadership of the Democratic Party of Italy, said new threats require "strong cooperation and political dialogue".
"Fighting climate change and poverty...are tasks that no country can face and beat alone," she said.
Nafie Ali Nafie, secretary-general of the Council of African Political Parties, said political parties have great understanding of the actual situation at the local grassroots level, they know best the top concerns of the local community and their operations greatly supplement government efforts.
Political parties should boost the resolution of issues through advancing legislative campaigns in their respective countries, and offer solutions that meet the expectations of people from all walks of life, he said.
Olga Epifanova, deputy chairwoman of Russia's State Duma, warned that terrorism is like a plague in the 21st century and some countries have failed to translate into actions their commitment to fighting terrorism.
Epifanova raised the refugee issue in Europe and noted that some European countries have failed to accept refugees as required by the European Union.
Mohammed Moussaoudja, vice-president of Algeria's People's National Assembly and leader of the National Liberation Front, said that as Africa Union's anti-terror center is located in his country, the fight against terror should transcend borders and become a real worldwide fight.
With peace and tranquillity under threat in the world, the United Nations' fundamental role in resolving the challenges should be reinforced, and South-South cooperation is particularly important, he said.
As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China is a "major player" on the global stage in this regard, he added.
Jiko Fatafehi Luveni, leader of the Fiji First Party and speaker of Parliament of the Republic of Fiji, called for concerted global efforts in taking on climate change as a clean environment is critical to the island nation in the Pacific Ocean.
The Fijian speaker said China has pushed for the implementation of the agreement approved at the Climate Change Paris Conference, helping offset the impact of climate change on the world.
Choo Mi-ae, head of the ruling Minjoo Party of the Republic of Korea, said no thought could be significant if it is not put into practice, and a resolute fight should be made by all countries against challenges including ecological imbalance and terrorism.
Choo called on attending parties and delegates to build the community with a shared future and reinforce unity within and operations by political parties.
Sunday, Dec 3, was the 26th International Day of Persons with Disabilities since its designation by the United Nations in 1992.
China has made much progress over the past decades in helping its people with disabilities through legislation protecting their rights in education, job opportunities, healthcare and daily life.
In his congratulatory letter last Thursday to the High-Level Intergovernmental Meeting on the Midpoint Review of the Asian and Pacific Decade of Persons with Disabilities (2013-22), President Xi Jinping called for special attention in taking care of people with disabilities, because they are "equal members of the global family".
According to an article by my colleague Liu Xuan from Beijing, Kaveh Zahedi, deputy executive secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, praised China, saying that "in the past five years, a million people with disabilities in China have been absorbed into the labor market. That's because 3,000 employment centers are dedicated to people with disabilities and 30,000 people worked on connecting people with disabilities with job opportunities."
Through rapid and massive urban transformation, Chinese cities have become friendlier and more accessible for people with disabilities. People can probably find more tactile paving on sidewalks in major Chinese cities these days than in New York and Washington.
That is a laudable feat.
However, many problems still need to be fixed, and relevant laws need to be strictly enforced to protect the rights of the vulnerable.
For example, many "blind lanes" on sidewalks often lead to bicycles or obstacles that stand in the way. Some of the tactile ground surface indicators were clearly designed to look decorative rather than practical and user friendly to those who need them.
The definition for someone with a disability must be different in China and the US. There are nearly 83 million Chinese with disabilities, accounting for 6.3 percent of the population. In the US, the rate is 12 to 19 percent, according to various surveys.
With such a large population of people with disabilities, the group is often not as visible in Chinese cities as in US cities.
My sense is that not only should more laws be formulated and strictly enforced to protect their rights, the whole society needs to be educated to show more respect to this group.
The recent case in Beijing of a visually impaired woman being denied entry to the subway system simply because her guide dog was not wearing a muzzle was appalling. It has already triggered a heated debate on the rights of the physically challenged population.
Guide dogs for the visually impaired are still a new phenomenon and in short supply in China. They appeared only after millions of Chinese were deeply moved by the 2004 Japanese movie Quill - The Life of a Guide Dog.
Buses equipped with ramps and lifts are still hard to find. Bus drivers and fellow bus passengers are often not as friendly as they should be towards the handicapped.
I still recall my first trip to the US in 1993 when I spent a year in Honolulu, Hawaii. As I took the No 4 bus between the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus and my apartment in Waikiki, I witnessed numerous occasions of wheelchairs and mobility scooters getting on and off the bus.
The drivers were always very helpful. They lowered the bus and deployed the ramp or lift and then helped secure the wheelchair in the bus. Equally amazing were the passengers, who were always patient and friendly, unlike what's typical in many Chinese cities.
In fact, going back to China after that trip, I kept telling everyone that people in wheelchairs were treated like emperors in Honolulu.
In a recent case, I observed a woman in a wheelchair getting on a DC Circulator bus. As far as I could tell, the driver had done a good job deploying the ramp, but the woman complained it wasn't good enough. So the driver did it over again.
In Washington, I often marvel at the people in wheelchairs and mobility scooters moving freely in supermarkets and bookstores, living a life just like most people.
These are the kind of scenes I hope to see in Chinese cities.
Contact the writer at chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com
US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. [File photo/Agencies]
UNITED NATIONS - The United States has quit negotiations on a voluntary pact to deal with migration because the global approach to the issue was "simply not compatible with US sovereignty," said US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
In a statement released late on Saturday, the US mission to the UN noted that President Donald Trump made the decision.
"No country has done more than the United States, and our generosity will continue," said Haley, whose parents are immigrants from India. "But our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone."
"We will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country," she said.
Trump campaigned last year on a promise to deport large numbers of immigrants and build a wall on the US border with Mexico to help tackle illegal immigration and crime in the United States. Since he took office in January, he has also moved to ban US entry by people from select Muslim countries.
With a record 21.3 million refugees globally, the 193-member UN General Assembly adopted a political declaration in September last year in which they also agreed to spend two years negotiating the pact on safe, orderly and regular migration.
Former US President Barack Obama's administration backed the resolution, known as the New York Declaration, which also asked UN High Commissioner for Refugees Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein to propose a global compact on refugees for adoption in 2018.
"The global approach in the New York Declaration is simply not compatible with US sovereignty," Haley said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres regretted the US decision, his spokesman said on Sunday, but expressed hope the United States might re-engage in the talks.
"The positive story of migration is clear: it needs to be better told. Equally, the challenges it throws up need to be tackled with more determination and greater international coordination," UN spokesman Farhan Haq said.
Three days of preparatory talks begin in Mexico on Monday ahead of the start of formal negotiations in February over the non-binding pact.
Haley's predecessor Samantha Power mocked the US move.
"How to further insult your Mexican neighbor, turn your back on humanity's most desperate, and make America irrelevant on a hugely destabilizing global crisis in one easy step," she posted on Twitter.
While former UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said on Twitter: "On migration, national solutions logically do not exist ... Going it alone is a lose-lose proposition."
Agencies
Businesses across Canada will benefit from a strengthened economic relationship with China, the world's second-largest market, according to Mary Ng, member of the Canadian Parliament, who briefed journalists on Friday in Markham.
"The prime minister's trip is an excellent opportunity to explore increased economic ties between China and Canada and how that can create jobs and grow the middle class here at home," said Ng. "This is great news for the business and academic community in Markham and across Canada."
MP Shaun Chen also highlighted the significance of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's visit.
"As the world's second-largest economy, China is a market with significant opportunities for growth," said Chen. "The potential economic benefits of a stronger relationship between our two countries will help Canadian businesses, grow our middle class, create new jobs and increase our shared prosperity."
The MPs will join Trudeau from Dec 3-7 as he meets with Chinese government and business leaders to build on the progress the two countries have made since the prime minister's first official visit to China in September 2016.
As one of Canada's most diverse cities and its high-tech capital, the city of Markham has developed a strong and successful relationship with China. Representatives from Markham's business community and academic institutions also shared their goals of ensuring that the local community remains a beneficiary of strengthened economic ties and partnerships with China.
"Markham has benefited significantly from the large population base of Chinese business owners that call Markham home," said Richard Cunningham, president of the Markham Board of Trade. "We welcome and applaud the opportunity for the Canadian government to continue to explore ways to increase opportunities for large multinational businesses, as well as to grow tourism, which will greatly benefit local small and medium businesses."
"Huawei Canada supports the efforts to promote positive trade business partnerships between Canada and China," said Steve Lu, president of Huawei Canada.
"We are proud of our Canadian footprint, the investments we are making to support Canada's ICT ecosystem and the innovative technologies we are bringing to Canadian consumers and small businesses," he said. "This is helping to create jobs and sustain Canada's leadership in communications."
Rhonda L. Lenton, president and vice-chancellor of York University, which currently has 37 academic agreements with leading Chinese universities, said: "We believe strongly in the value of creating international partnerships with countries like China, which help to facilitate important research and scholarly collaborations and student and faculty exchanges."
The prime minister is expected to promote a progressive trade agenda and tourism initiative that will create good, middle-class jobs and more opportunities for people in both countries.
renali@chinadailyusa.com
A declaration expressing the determination of overseas Chinese to firmly oppose Taiwan independence was adopted at the annual conference of the Association for the Peaceful Unification of China (APUC).
The conference, also known as the Cross-Straits Peaceful Development Forum, was held on Saturday in New York.
The declaration also calls for safeguarding the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations and national reunification.
More than 300 officials from the Chinese mainland, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, along with members of APUC across the US, representatives of Chinese in the US and scholars attended the forum.
Dun Shixin, director-general of the Department of Hong Kong, Macao and Overseas Affairs Related to Taiwan at the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, said that for many years, cross-Straits exchange on culture and economy has developed "from none to present, from less to more, from indirect to direct, and from one-way to two-way".
Cross-Straits trade volume has risen 120 times over the past 30 years, and the number of cross-Straits personnel exchanges has reached nearly 117 million.
"This fully shows that the cross-Straits relations have a profound economic and public opinion foundation," Dun said.
Li Kexin, minister of the Chinese embassy in the US, said that the recently concluded 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which made a clear strategic arrangement for the development of China in the next 30 years, provided an in-depth explanation on settling Taiwan-related affairs in the new era.
Li said he believes "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" isn't a reality without complete national reunification.
"It is the fundamental interest of the Chinese nation as well as the necessary requirement for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation to solve the Taiwan issue and realize the complete reunification of China," he said.
"All Chinese people should actively promote the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations and create and accumulate conditions for the ultimate realization of the reunification of the country."
Guest speakers expressed that the path of cross-Straits peaceful development is welcomed by the international community.
After the forum, Zhao Yumin, acting Chinese consul general in New York, spoke of his appreciation at a reception.
"We are deeply grateful to the 4.5 million Chinese in the US and tens of millions of Chinese overseas. Without your efforts, rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will not be realized completely," Zhao said.
xiaohong@chinadailyusa.com
Vice-Premier Liu Yandong has kicked off an official visit to the United Kingdom that will last from Monday until Thursday and take her to the cities of London, Edinburgh, and Oxford.
Liu will co-chair the fifth-annual UK-China High-Level People-to-People Dialogue the highest level Sino-UK dialogue to be held in the UK this year. Jeremy Hunt, Britain's secretary of state for health, will also co-chair the event.
While in the UK, Liu will meet with a number of senior figures, including UK Prime Minister Theresa May, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, and Princess Anne and Prince Andrew at Buckingham Palace.
"The UK-China relationship is strong and continues to deliver benefits for both countries, so I am delighted to welcome Madame Liu to the UK for the People-to-People Dialogue," said Johnson.
Hunt said: "I am delighted to once again co-chair the People-to-People Dialogue, which will reaffirm the strong ties between the UK and China and underline our commitment to working together to solve some of the biggest issues facing the world today."
While on the visit, Liu will witness the launch of the UK-China Joint Science and Innovation Strategy, participate in a forum of CEOs involved in the creative industries, and join a roundtable of young leaders, including young parliamentarians.
The meeting, which is also known as the P2P Dialogue, will cover 10 policy strands. The subjects that will be talked about are: health, education, culture and creative industries, science and innovation, tourism, sport, issues affecting young people, regional cooperation, issues impacting women, and social equity.
This year's P2P theme is the "Spirit of Youth", which connects to a UK government campaign that aims to inspire the next generation of leaders in China and the UK and the promotion of deeper collaboration and exchange.
At the meetings, ministers are expected to agree upon a range of initiatives, including a new joint UK-China health agreement that will advance work to tackle a number of healthcare challenges. The initiatives will also further collaboration on female leadership and empowerment, and strengthen existing collaboration between higher education institutions.
"I think the future for the UK-China relationship is very exciting and we've already established a 'golden era' in UK-China relations," said Barbara Woodward, the UK's ambassador to China ahead of Liu's visit. "I think we'll see a deepening and broadening of our overlapping interests with China, and opportunities for building a very bright future together."
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HA NOI Standard & Poors (S&P) Global Ratings has upgraded the long-term credit rating for Vingroup from B to B+, the highest rating in Viet Nams real estate industry.
From the beginning of 2017 to now, Vingroup was also the only real estate company in South East Asia to be upgraded by S & P.
According to S & P, Vingroup is rated to have a better market position than some of its peers and the same ranking in Southeast Asia.
Specifically, in real estate, Vingroup is forecast to reach sales of VN74 trillion for the year 2017. Last year, the group sold some 15,000 apartments, villas and townhouses, accounting for some 24 per cent of the high-end market share in major cities.
Vingroups sales is projected to continue growing in the next two years, thanks to the strategy of diversifying products across all segments, from mass to high-end, especially with the establishment of the brand, VinCity. With the positive improvement of Viet Nams economy, S&P forecasts sales of Vingroups real estate will reach VN70-75 trillion between the 2017 and 2019 period, double the groups sales revenue in the previous years.
Besides real estate for sale, Vingroups real estate for lease is also expanding. Vincom Retail is maintaining its position as the biggest commercial centre operator in Viet Nam, accounting for 60 per cent of the market share in Ha Noi and HCM City, with nearly 1.2 million sq.m of retail floor area.
"Vingroup has a much better market share in major operating segments being the leading player and a significantly larger operating scale. The companys operations are also more diversified than peers, with 15-20 per cent of gross profit from the more stable shopping mall leasing, retail, hospitality, and healthcare segments. We therefore assign a positive score to Vingroup in our comparable rating analysis," S&P stated in the report.
With a strong financial status and a well-developed network of operations over the years, S&P forecasts that Vingroup will be able to meet its business expansion, including the auto industry.
Previously, Vingroup was also given a B + rating by Fitch Ratings with stable prospects. Being highly appreciated by international organisations has confirmed the growing credibility of the group and it is the foundation for a belief that Vingroups business will continue do well in the future. VNS
HA NOI The increasing number of Vietnamese suppliers who provide parts and components to Samsung would not only help Samsung Viet Nam (SEV) reduce its production costs, but also develop the countrys auxiliary industry, according to Kim Dong Hwan, SEVs deputy general director.
However, SEV has still been hard pressed to search for local vendors who could provide hi-tech spare parts, Hwan told the media at a visit to three firms joining in its consultation programme for vendors - an event held by Samsung South Koreas experts last week in the northern province of Bac Ninh.
He said that half of SEVs 29 Vietnamese tier-1 vendors are providing just simple spare parts and components in its supply chain.
Meanwhile, Samsung has been searching for local support firms in the hi-tech area. Samsung has some 150 support companies, both local and FDI, to maintain its production in Viet Nam. This means that Vietnamese firms accounted for only 20 per cent of SEVs demand for auxiliary products, due to the weak ability of local firms.
To increase the local firms capacity as well as respond to the call of the Vietnamese Government for improving their competitiveness, Samsung organised the consultation programme for 130 local companies with an aim that some 50 Vietnamese companies would become SEVs tier-one vendors by 2020.
The number of Samsungs tier-1 Vietnamese vendors has increased dramatically, from four businesses in 2014 to the current 29 business. These vendors are participating in the supply chain for Samsungs plants in Viet Nam, including SEV, SEVT, SEHC (Samsung Electronics HCM City Complex), Samsung Display Viet Nam (SDV), Samsung SDI Viet Nam and Samsung Electro-Mechanics Viet Nam.
Last week, Samsung Viet Nams management board paid a visit and surveyed six vendors, including Manutronics Viet Nam JSC, Tien Thanh JSC, Bac Viet Technology JSC (Bac Ninh), Nhat Minh Company, Minh Man Manufacturing Trading and Printing Labels Co Ltd, and Vinavit Corporation. The six vendors participating in this consulting programme have gained excellent results in improving production and increasing their competitiveness capabilities.
Samsung has also collaborated with the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) to expand the business consultation programme, by establishing an Advisory Board to build and implement the programme on a large scale.
Chu Thi Thu Phuong, chairman of Manutronics a tier-2 vendor for SEV, and Samsung Electronics Viet Nam (SEVT), producing compact disc (CD, DVD, CD-R) and hi-tech electronics assembly, said the consultation programme helped them expand production, changing management ideas and working habits. It also helped to reduce the error rate by 63 per cent, thus increasing productivity by 20-35 per cent and decreasing equipment loss rates by up to 82 per cent.
Samsungs 9-month profits
Samsung Group has announced impressive business results during the first three quarter of the year, with a significant contribution by Samsung Viet Nam.
According to the South Koreans integrated financial report in the third quarter of 2017, the groups revenue was $152.45 billion, with a profit of $26.2 billion.
Samsungs four companies in Viet Nam include SEV, SEVT, SDV and SEHC, which contributed total revenues and profits of $45.6 billion and $4.95 billion, respectively. Specifically, SEVs revenues rose 0.5 per cent to $13.4 billion, while profits rose by 44 per cent to $1.64 billion during this period. VNS
PARIS Viet Nam and the European Union (EU) are working to finalise legal and language related issues in the EU-Viet Nam free trade agreement (EVFTA), prior to the official signing and ratification of the trade deal next year, said Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Quoc Khanh.
At a workshop on the EVFTA held by the French Business Federation (MEDEF) and the Asia Centre in Paris on December 1, Khanh emphasised the common goal of the two sides to implement the agreement after it is inked, adding that the Vietnamese Government is outlining a specific plan for carrying out the agreement.
For his part, chief of the negotiation delegation of the EVFTA Raffaele Mauro Petriccione noted that the approval process for the agreement could take a long time, since the EU is a trade bloc with many members.
Participants to the workshop appreciated Viet Nams active foreign economic-trade policy and highlighted Viet Nams leading role in recent global events, especially the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum held in a Nang.
According to Marie-Christine Pocin, a senior advisor from Frances Ministry of Economy and Finance, Viet Nam has a consistent policy of integrating its economy into international trade, and France has been developing various fields to promote poverty reduction.
Viet Nam plays a positive role in the process of regional economic integration, she stressed.
Nguyen inh Cung, director of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), highlighted the importance of the EVFTA agreement in Viet Nams integration process.
The trade agreement brings great benefits to the country, as it is estimated it would generate an additional 2.5 per cent to Viet Nams GDP by 2020, and 4.6 per cent by 2025, he said.
The agreement is expected to help increase Viet Nams exports to the union, while creating new jobs for the Vietnamese labour force, especially for those working in rural and agricultural areas.
It would also make it easier for Viet Nam to import advanced technologies, which would help improve the countrys economic rankings.
Viet Nam is the third largest trade partner of the EU in ASEAN, with trade reaching 41 billion euros (US$48.7 billion) in 2016.
Viet Nam mainly exports electronics, textiles, footwear, rice, seafood and coffee to the EU, while imports hi-tech products, industrial machines and pharmaceuticals. VNS
HA NOI The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has approved a plan to implement urgent solutions in response to the European Unions (EUs) warning about illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
Many solutions have been devised according to the EUs recommendations. They include aligning the legal framework with regional and international regulations, implementing effectively the amended legal regulations for IUU fishing, and implementing effectively the international regulations and management measures through strict punishment.
In addition to this, Viet Nam will address the shortcomings in the monitoring system to serve the certification of the origin of aquatic products, improve the fishing boat management system, enhance cooperation with regional countries, and comply with regulations on fisheries data collection and report.
Viet Nam was served with a yellow card warning by the EU in September for failing to combat IUU fishing, and it has been offered the opportunity to take measures to rectify the situation within six months.
To this end, the EC has proposed an action plan for the country. The yellow card is followed by a green card if issues are resolved or a red card if they are not. A red card can lead to a trade ban on fishery products.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development plans to organise a national conference with 28 coastal cities and provinces to discuss the IUU issue and provide them with technical guidance to ensure their compliance with IUU fishing regulations.
Viet Nam has favourable geographical conditions to develop its seafood industry, thanks to its long coastline of over 3,260km and more than 3,000 islands and islets.
Fisheries is a key sector, whose output has been consistently rising in the recent years.
The country hopes to become a leading seafood exporter by 2020.
Last year, Viet Nam earned US$1.2 billion by exporting aquatic products to the EU, $357.8 million of which was from seafood shipments. The figure hit nearly $1.05 billion in the first nine months this year. VNS
HA NOI Algeria is conducting all the necessary procedures to export dates to Viet Nam. In particular, some Algerian enterprises have found Vietnamese partners to negotiate conditions to distribute this fruit to Viet Nam.
The statement was made by a representative of Algerias Ministry of Agriculture at the third international exhibition on dates, which opened on Saturday in Biskra Province -- one of the localities with the strongest agriculture sector in Algeria.
The three-day event introduces high-grade dates harvested in oases in southern Algeria, including the popular one -- Deglet Nour. It also features items made from dates, such as date jam, date honey, handicrafts made from date palm (furniture and jewellery) and the regions agricultural products such as vegetables, fruits, cattle, milk and dairy products. In addition, the exhibition also introduced equipment for agriculture, livestock and cultivation.
Sadek Khalil, director of the Biskra Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the expo drew a lot of enterprises from African, European and Asian nations with the main goal of promoting agri-products and seeking trade partners.
According to statistics, Algeria exports some one million tonnes of dates annually, ranking fourth in the world in terms of total output (making up some 14 per cent), after Iran, Egypt and Tunisia. However, the total output of Algerias export dates ranks only eighth and is equivalent to one-sixth of Tunisias output -- the worlds largest producer and exporter of dates.
The dates exhibition attracted the participation of 160 Algerian and foreign firms, as well as diplomatic organisations, including the Embassy of Viet Nam in Algeria. VNS
HA NOI The United States Department of Agricultures Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has given permission for fresh mango fruit imports from Viet Nam to enter the US, effective December 29.
According to the Viet Nam News Agency Television (Vnews), after analysing the potential plant pest risks, APHIS scientists determined that mangos from Viet Nam can be safely imported under a systems approach.
APHIS defines the systems approach as a series of measures taken by growers, packers and shippers that together minimise pest risks prior to import into the United States.
In this case, APHIS explained that the systems approach for mangos from Viet Nam included orchard or packinghouse requirements, irradiation treatment and port of entry inspection, to protect against the introduction of plant pests and diseases.
The agency is also requiring these mangos be imported in commercial shipments and accompanied by phystosanitary certificates verifying the fruit was produced under these conditions. These certificates must include an additional declaration stating the fruit was inspected and found free of black mango spot. VNS
HA NOI Viet Nam and Nigeria are seeking to boost co-operation in trade and investment to tap the significant potential between the two countries.
At the Viet Nam-Nigeria Trade and Investment Forum in Ha Noi on Monday, oan Duy Khuong, vice chairman of the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the two countries had significant room to boost co-operation.
Khuong said Viet Nam was entering a new development period in 2016-20 with a stable macro-economy, high gross domestic product growth rate and total trade revenue of US$359 billion.
Viet Nam was an important gateway for Nigerian firms to penetrate other markets, especially ASEAN markets, Khuong said, adding that Nigeria was a potential market for Viet Nam in Africa.
Khuong said the two sides had potential to boost co-operation in agriculture, agricultural processing, garments, mining and building materials.
Nigeria wanted to import products that were Viet Nams strengths and Viet Nam wanted to import raw materials for processing.
Oye Akinsemoyin, president of the Nigeria-Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, expected the two countries would further promote their co-operation in processing agricultural products.
The trade revenue between Viet Nam and Nigeria averaged more than $250 million during the past five years.
In 2016, bilateral trade reached $303.84 million, up by 23.8 per cent over the previous year.
Viet Nam mainly exported ships, phones and components, garment and plastics, as well as chemicals, machinery and electronic products to Nigeria and imported cashew and wood from this African country. VNS
HA NOI National carrier Vietnam Airlines (VNA) will enter into a codeshare agreement with Bangkok Airways to operate flights between Viet Nam and Thailand.
This will create travel options for passengers and expand the air network to popular destinations of the two countries.
Under the agreement, passengers can buy Vietnam Airlines tickets from Ha Noi/Ho Chi Minh City to Bangkok and then connect to Thailands domestic destinations via Bangkok Airways, including Chiang Mai, Phuket, Koh Samui, Krabi and Chiang Rai. Passengers only need to book seats and make a one-time flight booking with Vietnam Airlines for the entire journey.
Passengers of the two airlines also have more diversified route options between Viet Nam and Thailand, including the Bangkok-a Nang route operated by Bangkok Airways with a frequency of one flight per day and the Ha Noi/Ho Chi Minh City-Bangkok route operated by Vietnam Airlines with a frequency of six flights per day.
According to the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA), the Southeast Asian aviation market has high potential, reflected by the strong growth and high demand for travel. Six out of eleven Southeast Asian nations have achieved double digit growth in passenger traffic, of which the route between Thailand and Viet Nam reached total increase of 30 per cent last year, almost double compared with five years ago.
This increasing trend is expected to continue in the coming years, CAPA said. VNS
HA NOI Hoa Phat Group has decided to invest VN1 trillion (US$43.9 million) in building a high quality post-tensioning steel factory, Vu Thi Anh Tuyet, deputy director of Hoa Phat Equipment and Accessory Company Limited, said.
The plant is located in Dung Quat Economic Zone in the central province of Quang Ngai and will be the first high-quality steel factory in Viet Nam.
It is built to replace steel imports and add value to its closed production model of the Hoa Phat Dung Quat iron and steel production complex.
The project has a capacity of 160,000 tonnes per year, including three high-end products -- PC bar, PC Strand and PC Wire. These products are used in large-scale infrastructure projects that require high technology, high load capacity and safety, such as towers, viaducts, cross-sea bridges, high buildings and cables. Moreover, these products help optimise space and material costs, shortening the time of construction work.
The post-tensioning plant is located right next to the complex, resulting in significant savings in transportation costs and inventory, as well as meeting the production schedule and delivering the goods quickly. Thus, the advantageous location will lower the cost of products and raise competitiveness compared with imported goods.
The project will make use of opportunities to upgrade the value chain of Hoa Phats steel products. With a modern and synchronous production line from Europe, Hoa Phat post-tensioning steel factory has potential to meet the demand of related products, ensuring the highest quality.
According to Tuyet, Viet Nam imports 100 per cent of post-tensioned steel products from China, Thailand, Indonesia, Republic of Korea and Japan, with annual output of over 70,000 tonnes of PC Bar and PC Strand steel to build infrastructure in the country. In the first nine months of 2017, this figure increased to 85,000 tonnes, an increase of 21 per cent over the entire previous year.
Hoa Phat post-tensioning steel factory is expected to meet 100 per cent of the demand for construction of domestic infrastructure projects, supporting the country in actively investing in development, reducing dependence on the external market, restricting the bleeding of foreign currencies and providing the market with products of high quality and stability.
The plant is scheduled to be implemented within 12 months from the beginning of 2018, right after being allocated land, and officially launched in early 2019. VNS
Experts said at a conference held in Ha Noi on December 1 that this incorporation was crucial to ensuring sustainable development. Photo baobaohiemxahoi.vn
HA NOI Five years after a national green growth strategy was approved, there is still a lack of understanding, particularly at provincial levels, about incorporating it into local development plans.
Experts said at a conference held in Ha Noi on December 1 that this incorporation was crucial to ensuring sustainable development.
Economic institutions should be steered towards greening sectors and areas in all localities, said Phan uc Hieu, deputy head of the Central Institute for Economic Management.
There should be added focus on promoting research and widening application of advanced technology in production in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve the natural environment, he said.
A general greening of production, lifestyle and consumption should also happen, he added, explaining that an environmentally-friendly lifestyle should be built, gradually.
However, despite all the talk, green growth still received little attention from ministries, sectors and localities, he stressed.
Tran ai Nghia of the Institute on Rural Development Policy and Strategy also said awareness of the importance of incorporating green growth into development plans of localities remained limited.
Meanwhile, there was overlapping between relevant ministries, agencies and localities as well as a shortage of human resources needed for the incorporation to happen, he added.
He proposed some measures for localities, like restructuring agricultural production towards green growth, increasing connection between production, processing and preservation industries, developing production models in harmony with the environment that match actual conditions in the locality.
Development interventions should be of high feasibility in line with available resources and development strategies of each locality, while leaders of relevant ministries and agencies need to allocate resources effectively and reasonably to localities, he said.
Le Viet Thai of the German International Co-operation Organisation (GIZ), suggested that technological solutions be applied to improve labour productivity and use natural resources effectively and economically.
Economist Nguyen Thi Kim Dung said community participation and capacity as well as financial feasibility should be paid due attention when implementing the national green growth strategy.
Other experts recommended that localities study and assess their environment situation, level of pollution and build roadmaps to deal with issues relating to waste treatment and production in line with green growth targets.
They should also invest tangibly in knowledge-building, communication and advocacy, accelerate regulatory action and promote environmentally-friendly consumer behaviour, they said.
Viet Nam approved a national green growth strategy in 2012. The strategy, which has a vision until 2050, identifies three key tasks reducing greenhouse gas emissions, promoting clean and renewable energy, and practising environmentally-friendly production and consumption.
The meeting heard that five ministries and 30 cities and provinces in the country had formulated action plans on green growth and were implementing them. VNS
HA NOI After three months of being shut for annual restoration, Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum will be reopened for the public tomorrow.
The regular restoration has been made in line with procedures, Major General Nguyen Van Cuong, head of the mausoleums management board, reported to Prime Minister, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, during his visit to the mausoleum on Sunday.
According to Cuong, the body of President Ho Chi Minh has been kept in the best condition, while the surrounding scenery and infrastructure have been improved to offer a better welcome to both domestic and international visitors. At the same time, the security and order at the mausoleum have also been ensured in the past three months.
With previous annual restorations lasting some two months, this years restoration has taken one month longer as the project includes many important categories.
Phuc highly appreciated the efforts of the mausoleums management board, as well as their dedication to serve visitors, who have kept growing by 12 per cent, as compared to the previous year.
He encouraged them to continue to fulfill next years missions, particularly in strengthening the cooperation with relevant agencies in researching and applying science and technology in preserving the body of President Ho Chi Minh in the best condition.
The Prime Minister also suggested the opening of a tour, which will connect Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum to surrounding landmarks such as the Imperial Citadel of Thang Long, Ha Noi Flag Tower, Ho Chi Minh Museum and K9 Relic Area.
The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum is an important landmark of the capital city and stands integrated to the political and social history of Viet Nam. President Ho Chi Minh was embalmed after passing away on September 2, 1969. The granite mausoleum, modelled after Lenins tomb in Moscow, was built from 1973 to 1975 with materials donated by people from all over the country. It was opened to the public on August 29, 1975. VNS
Mai Liem Truc
Dr Mai Liem Truc, former deputy minister of Post and Communications, talks to the newspaper Nong thon ngay nay (Countryside Today) about the need to finalise the draft Law on Cyber Security
The draft Law on Cyber Security has been revised 14 times, but there are still outstanding controversial issues. Do you have any comments on the latest draft edition of the law?
First of all, referring to the adjusted framework of the draft law, much of the contents on safety, security, technology and technique in the 14th draft edition of the law are in line with the Law on Internet Security, which came into force on July 1, 2017. However, there are two major differences concerning the management rules and the State management agencies. These two points will cause difficulties for law enforcement officers and enterprises in implementing the law.
In my opinion, quite a few components on the law contradict some existing laws as well as Viet Nams commitments to a few international laws. For example, the draft law requires foreign suppliers of telecom services or Internet services to establish a representative agency in Viet Nam. Such a requirement is not regulated in any WTO documents or the Europe-Viet Nam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA).
How do you think the component of the draft law that requires foreign suppliers of telecoms and internet services in Viet Nam to have operation licences and to establish mechanisms to verify users personal information when they create accounts aligns with Viet Nams commitments with the WTO, EVFTA or the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement?
I must say the requirement to open the market on telecoms and Internet services across the border has always been a very important and sensitive issue during negotiations for the Viet Nam-US Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) or the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and other future free trade agreements.
Viet Nam has officially committed in the WTO and the EVFTA that all cross-border telecoms and internet services are unlimited, neither the requirement of having their representative offices in Viet Nam.
In addition, the Chapter on E Commerce in the TPP agreement, which Viet Nam signed in February 2016, says The proposal on server location violated a commitment relating to Location of Computing Facilities (Article 14.13) in the Electronic Commerce Chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Former Vietnamese Minister of Trade Truong inh Tuyen, who participated in many negotiations for the TPP and also was a signatory to the Agreement, said, The topic had been thoroughly discussed before it was written into the TPP treaty.
Thats why Viet Nam should honor its commitment. And that totally conforms to our policy to continue to integrate deeper into the international economy in the course of national development.
Do you have any concerns that locating the main server abroad will complicate the management of Vietnamese agencies?
I should say quite a lot of information on the social network, like Facebook, is biased and incorrect. To minimise the negative impacts of the Internet on our social network over the last 20 years, concerned Vietnamese management agencies and Internet users have used a combination of the technical measures such as firewalls; legal administrative measures; and communication and education campaigns to screen falsified information against the Party, Government and society.
The Government has instructed all public agencies and organisations to practice transparency in their activities and launched movements to combat slanderous campaigns against the nation.
Do you think that once the Law on Cyber Security is passed by the National Assembly it will have negative impacts on business opportunities for Vietnamese enterprises, as well as the general publics access to information?
The Vietnamese Party and Government have committed to simplifying all administrative procedures and promised to offer favourable conditions for all enterprises to develop so that the people can have better lives.
I myself dont think that when the law is passed by the National Assembly it will have negative impacts on our peoples access to information. However, if the law is approved and it has negative impacts on enterprises activities and the peoples access to information, then Viet Nam will surely lag behind other countries and its window of opportunity to succeed in industrial revolution 4.0 will become close.
The location of the servers is not as important as efforts to ensure cyber security for the data that the servers store. VNS.
A NANG Asia and Europe need to forge stronger ties in key areas like education and sustainable development to improve connectivity and foster inclusive growth, senior officials said on December 1.
Accordingly, the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF)s Board of Governors (BoG) approved 13 new projects in education, governance, public health and sustainable development for the coming year.
The two-day, 37th BoG meeting also agreed on two projects proposed by Viet Nam: one on Asia-Europe Lifelong Learning and Vocational Training co-operation; and the other on Implementation of Sustainable Development Goals in the Cambodia-Laos-Myanmar-Viet Nam (CLMV) Mekong sub-region.
The governors noted that ASEF had succeeded in promoting mutual understanding between the two continents through cultural and people-to-people exchanges.
They also agreed that the ASEF needs to further strengthen partnership and mutual co-operation in the era of digitalisation for better connectivity and sustainable, inclusive growth.
The BoG meeting also reviewed projects designed to realise ASEAN vision 2025 and implement the ASEM Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.
They agreed that the next meeting would be held in Romania in 2018.
Global influence
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Bui Thanh Son said "ASEM, with ASEFs unique role, has grown beyond our initial expectations and established itself as a platform for enhanced connectivity between countries, civilisations, peoples and businesses of the two continents."
ASEM has been and continues to be an important factor in shaping the global setting in the 21st century.
Son emphasised that the Fourth Industrial Revolution has created hopes for higher productivity, but there were also growing concerns about its transformative implications, environmental degradation and uneven distribution of the benefits of economic growth and globalisation.
The 13th ASEM Foreign Ministers Meeting in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar, last month discussed how best to create a stronger partnership between Asia and Europe for a future of shared, inclusive and sustainable growth and prosperity.
We need to translate commitment into concrete actions on sustainable and inclusive growth, poverty eradication, comprehensive and quality connectivity, sub-regional and remote areas development, quality education and human resources development in the digital age, gender equality and empowerment of women and girls, Son said.
More efforts should be made to deliver on the promise of climate change, disaster risk reduction, sustainable management of natural resources, and food-water-energy security, he added.
Son said the approved projects will serve as a crucial preparatory step for the upcoming 12th ASEM Summit in Brussels next year and foster reflections on a vision for ASEM in the coming decades.
The 37th BoG meeting, which closed on December 1, was held at the Furama Resort in a Nang City. VNS
By Thu Trang
QUANG NINH Luu Thi Tan is a happy, relieved mother.
The 26-year-old ethnic Thai woman has given birth to two healthy daughters with minimum fuss, which in itself might not be something extraordinary, but considering that she and her husband are, in her own words, "floating on rivers all day to earn our living," she has reason to be thankful.
It is thanks to the careful support and supervision of local medical workers during her pregnancy and delivery that Tan was able to safely deliver her two children.
The native of the central province of Thanh Hoa used to be worried about many women in her community and hometown give birth at home, exposing themselves to a lot of risk.
After their marriage, Tan and her husband moved to Van Yen Commune, Van on District in the northern province of Quang Ninh.
They fish in rivers for a living and earn about VN2-4 million (US$90-180) per month. Despite this, she was able to receive good, regular care, courtesy the Van Yen Commune Medical Station.
Although my husband and I are on the boat most of the time, the medical workers still call and tell me to return to the mainland for examination, said Tan.
She had four prenatal examinations during her pregnancy, and vaccinations on schedule.
Thanks to the good care, I did not have any problems from when I became pregnant till giving birth to my daughters safely, she said.
When her date drew close, the staff asked her to move to the Van Yen Commune Medical Station and wait for delivery.
Tans first daughter is five years old and her second daughter is two months old. They have also received their vaccinations on schedule.
Luu Thi Tan (right) listens as a staff of the Van Yen Commune Medical Station advises her on taking care of her baby daughter. VNS Photo Thu Trang
No doctor
Le Thi Chien, head of the Van Yen Commune Medical Station, said that despite a manpower shortage, the staff tried their best to take care local residents health, especially pregnant women and women in the child-bearing age.
The station does not have a doctor. With 338 households in the commune, the two physician assistants and two nurses are kept busy all day.
On average, about 30 women in the commune get pregnant each year, so there is need for constant attention.
We go to different houses in the commune and inform the women how important it is to breastfeed their babies for at least the first six months. We also guide them on the weaning process and try to ensure that vaccinations are administered as scheduled, said Chien.
The station also conducts courses on reproductive health for young persons and women having children under two years old in the commune.
District support
In providing reproductive healthcare for women and girls, the commune station is helped by medical staff at the district level.
Vu Thi Thanh Thuy, deputy director of the Van on District Medical Centre and also head of its Obstetrics Ward, said four doctors and nine nurses in the ward worked with all their heart to fufill their tasks.
All women of child-bearing age are given information and advice related to reproductive health and safe pregnancy, said Thuy.
The medical staff regularly attends professional training courses in the province and also in other localities.
The centre receives a lot of support from upper-level hospitals, said Thuy.
In serious cases, we consult with provincial obstetrics and paediatrics hospitals and ask for guidance, she said.
Thanks to this co-operation, patients do not have to move around much, and are able to save a lot of time and effort.
Midwives, nurses are heroes
Visiting the Van Yen Commune Medical Station and the Van on District Medical Centre, Bjorn Andersson, regional director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Asia Pacific Regional Office, said I have very good impressions of what happens in the clinics and how the patients are treated."
Andersson said that he found that at the medical station and centre in the commune and district, respectively, he found that the staff maintained good contact with patients as they discussed with young pregnant women how they were feeling, and found out if they were getting enough nutrition and food.
The medical staff is doing heroic job. Midwives and nurses who help women deliver safely, they are heroes, he said.
Viet Nam has made progress in reproductive health and reproductive rights, he said.
A doctor examines a newborn at the Van on District Medical Centre. VNS Photo Thu Trang
Three zeroes
Delegates attending the 9th Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights (APCRSHR), which was held in Ha Long City, Quang Ninh Province from Monday to Thursday last week, lauded Viet Nams efforts to affect changes in sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in the country.
The conference was hosted by the Viet Nam Public Health Association with support from the UNFPA and other partners.
It was the first time that the conference is being held in Viet Nam, which has faced big challenges on SRHR-related policies and legislation.
Speaking at the conference, Natalia Kanem, executive director of the UNFPA, said that Asia-Pacific and the world have embarked on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, underpinned by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
We seek to achieve a life of dignity for all to truly leave no one behind. At UNFPA, we are about to embark on a strategic plan to fulfill three transformational zero goals for our region and our world: zero maternal deaths, zero unmet family planning needs, and zero gender-based violence and harmful practices, she said.
We applaud Viet Nam as a shining example for having reached Millennium Development Goal 5, improvements in maternal health, ahead of time, she said.
But even before pregnancy and childbirth, every woman and girl should enjoy her right to freely decide when or whether to start a family and how many children she wants to bear. Planning and spacing pregnancies are still key to reducing maternal deaths, said Natalia Kanem.
Health and sustainable development
In a message sent to the conference, Minister of Health Nguyen Thi Kim Tien said that to sustain gains under the Millennium Development Goals and to attain targets of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, especially in mountainous and remote areas, among ethnic minorities and other population groups, Viet Nams health sector will focus on a number of population and reproductive health themes.
She said that the country would continuously develop its reproductive health regulations and policies, and implementation of good practices and replicable models which are responsive to the health challenges and needs of ethnic minorities, adolescents and youth, ageing population, as well as migrants and workers in industrial zones.
She said the health system would be strengthened toward achieving universal healthcare and better access to reproductive health services with priority given to vulnerable populations and disadvantaged areas.
The nation would invest in the expansion and improvement of the quality of adolescent and youth-friendly health services, including the strengthening of comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education and life skills in the school system, and establishing specific contraceptive programmes for young and unmarried people, she said.
In another message, Vice President of Viet Nam ang Thi Ngoc Thinh, said that she was optimistic that this conference in Viet Nam will provide an excellent platform for scientists, researchers and programme officers in Viet Nam to meet, listen, share experiences and come up with comprehensive solutions.
She said that over the last few years, the Vietnamese Communist Party and Government have enacted many policies and legal documents, allocated resources for family planning and SRHR, and have achieved many important outcomes. The indexes in this field are relatively good compared to other countries with the same level of per capita income, she said.
Statistics compiled by the health ministry shows that Viet Nams performance on the health of mother and child is better than many countries at the same per capita income level. The maternal mortality ratio (MMR) declined significantly from 233 in 1990 to 69 per 100,000 live births in 2009.
The United Nations estimates that Viet Nams MMR further declined to 56 per 100,000 live births in 2015. The infant mortality rate has also decreased significantly from 44.4 in 1990 to 14.9 per thousand in 2014. The under-five mortality rate also went down from 58 per thousand in 1990 to 22.4 per thousand in 2014. VNS
YEN BAI Two schoolboys, aged 6 and 9 years, reportedly drowned while playing in Khe Dai Stream in the northern mountainous province of Yen Bais ong Tam Ward on Sunday afternoon.
According to an initial investigation, the two boys fell into the stream when they were playing nearby. The six-year-old boy studied at Nguyen Trai Primary School and the nine-year-old boy studied at Yen Ninh Primary School.
Local rescue teams discovered the bodies of the two boys at about 5pm on the same day, after a one-hour-long search.
Representatives from the locality visited the two boys houses to offer condolences to their families. VNS
HCM CITY HCM City will adopt the co-operative model to develop its agriculture, the administration has decided.
Speaking at a workshop on December 3, the citys Party Secretary Nguyen Thien Nhan said: To develop the citys agricultural production, besides choosing right plants and animals, the most important factor is choosing the best model.
He pointed out that the ratio of agricultural workers in the city has fallen sharply from 5 per cent in 2000 to 1 per cent last year.
Globally, the co-operative model is the most popular, not households or joint ventures, he said.
Households do not know what the market needs: the market wants high-quality products, a large number of them and with brands, and food quality and safety. All can be addressed through the co-operative model.
Besides, co-operatives would find it easier to approach banks since they have proper production plans and enough customers, can adopt technology and farm more efficiently than households, he said.
If HCM City wants to sustain its agriculture, authorities must switch the production model from household to co-operatives.
Currently, some 77 per cent of the agriculture is carried out by households while co-operatives account for only 5 per cent.
Le Thanh Liem, deputy chairman of the city Peoples Committee, said: Farmers profits at co-operatives are 30 50 per cent and co-operatives are a must for agricultural development.
The city has 230 agricultural production groups and 1020 per cent of them should be upgraded into co-operatives soon, he said.
The city has already issued support policies for newly established co-operatives but related authorities should implement them gradually.
The Department of Agriculture and Rural Development along with relevant authorities should educate farmers for them to understand the benefits of the co-operative model and its success.
According to the department, the city has 41 co-operatives with 2,235 members, and plans to set up seven model co-operatives in Cu Chi, Hoc Mon, Binh Chanh, Nha Be and Can Gio districts.
The department has suggested that the city should send well-educated staff to manage co-operatives for the first three years at a salary of over VN11 million (US$500) a month, Tran Ngoc Ho, deputy director of the department, said. VNS
SEOUL South Korea and the United States kicked off a major air force exercise here on Monday with two dozen US stealth jets mobilised.
The five-day Vigilant ACE (air combat exercise) comes less than a week after North Korea fired a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and declared the completion of its "nuclear force".
The annual training has drawn keen media attention.
Its known as the largest-ever combined air force drill between the allies, involving more than 230 warplanes and around 12,000 personnel.
They include six F-22 Raptors and six F-35As, which have been deployed temporarily to Korea for the practice.
It marks the first time that six Raptors, not just a few, have joined an exercise simultaneously in Korea. A dozen F-35Bs operated by the US. Marine Corps will take part in the training, flying from their base in Japan.
Other assets include two B-1B Lancer bombers, six EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets, and dozens of F-15C and F-16 fighter jets.
South Korea has fielded F-15K, KF-16, FA-50 and F-5 fighters, as well as other planes.
"Its aimed at enhancing the all-weather, day and night combined air power operation capabilities of South Korea and the US," South Koreas defense ministry said.
The allies will conduct the drills under various wartime scenarios, it added.
The US Seventh Air Force said, "The realistic air combat exercise is designed to enhance interoperability between US and Republic of Korea forces, and increase the combat effectiveness of both nations." YONHAP
UNITED NATIONS The United States has withdrawn from a United Nations pact to improve the handling of migrant and refugee situations, deeming it "inconsistent" with its policies.
"The US Mission to the United Nations informed the UN Secretary-General that the United States is ending its participation in the Global Compact on Migration," the US said in its statement on Saturday.
Though widely seen as a symbolic move, it was condemned by rights group Amnesty International, which slammed it on Sunday as a "devastating abdication of responsibility in the worlds largest refugee crisis."
In September 2016, the 193 members of the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted a non-binding political declaration called the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, which pledged to uphold the rights of refugees, help them resettle and ensure they have access to education and jobs.
"The New York Declaration contains numerous provisions that are inconsistent with US immigration and refugee policies and the Trump Administrations immigration principles. As a result, President (Donald) Trump determined that the United States would end its participation in the Compact process that aims to reach international consensus at the UN in 2018," the US statement read.
US Ambassador Nikki Haley said that the United States would continue its "generosity" in supporting migrants and refugees around the world, but added: "our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone."
The United States "will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country. The global approach in the New York Declaration is simply not compatible with US sovereignty," Haley said.
Miroslav Lajcak of Slovakia, the current UN General Assembly president, said on Sunday that he regretted the decision.
Lajcak "stresses that migration is a global phenomenon that demands a global response and that multilateralism remains the best way to address global challenges," a statement from his office read.
Farhan Aziz Haq, a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres added: "We regret the decision but there is still plenty of time for US re-engagement. This should not disrupt the clear, unanimous outcome of the New York Declaration for such a global compact."
Under Trump and his "America First" policies, the United States has withdrawn from several global commitments made under the administration of president Barack Obama, including the Paris climate deal.
More recently, the United States pulled out of the Paris-based culture and education body, UNESCO, accusing it of "anti-Israel bias." AFP
CEDAR FALLS After 80 years of serving the needs of students and professors, a College Hill business is becoming part of the University of Northern Iowa.
UNI announced Monday it has signed a letter of intent with University Book & Supply Inc. to purchase the bookstore for $2.4 million plus inventory costs at the time of closing. The only bookstore near campus, it has served as a main source for student textbook purchases.
Six stockholders own the store, at 1009 W. 23rd St. Among those are Kathleen Hesse and Doug Johnson, respectively president and vice president of the business, and its largest shareholders.
Kathleen and I are getting pretty close to retirement age, and so we started looking at our options, said Johnson, noting the other stockholders were not willing to buy them out. It was really coming to light the university might be interested. We approached them with the idea.
Store owners have been working on an agreement with UNI over the last several months, he said. Theyve made it public now because the Iowa Board of Regents will consider the request at its meeting Wednesday.
Were excited that they were really willing to work with us, said Johnson.
The university expects the transaction to be complete by March 1, according to a news release. No general education funds will be utilized in the purchase.
Michael Hager, the universitys senior vice president for finance and operations, said there are two primary reasons the acquisition is a fit for UNI.
First and foremost, students will continue to have convenient access to the textbooks and course materials necessary for their educational experience, he said in the news release. With UNI owning the bookstore it will operate as a not-for-profit entity, which will offer UNI students the lowest possible pricing every year. Taking advantage of this opportunity is another element of the ongoing UNI initiative of providing a high-quality education at a reasonable cost.
In addition, the acquisition will keep ownership and control of this business in the Cedar Valley, which we feel is very important, noted Hager.
Johnson said those same reasons are important to the current owners. We knew the university would be able to do some things that we wouldnt be able to if they run it as a nonprofit, he explained.
Textbook sales account for more than 60 percent of University Book & Supplys business. The store, which serves the broader community as well, also sells other books, apparel, teacher resources and school supplies.
The book selling business has gone through massive changes in recent years with the advent of online retailers and electronic books, developments that also have affected textbook sales.
Weve been fortunate that at the University of Northern Iowa weve been the sole bookstore, said Johnson. Weve taken pride in that. We felt weve been fairly competitive, but its a challenge just like anything else.
He called the current situation unique among regents institutions, noting the University of Iowa and Iowa State University already operate their own bookstores. Nationally, most (public universities) have their own or lease out to another company, said Johnson.
The store originated as Lattas Bookstore in 1937 at 909 W. 23rd St. It moved to the current address in 1962, eventually growing to 28,000 square feet. In a renovation completed in 2003, the store expanded to an adjacent building, adding another 24,000 square feet.
The store employs 20 people full time and 15 to 20 people part time. University officials declined to comment on any changes that would be made once the sale is complete.
Its really just an agreement in principle. The final agreement has not been signed, said Scott Ketelsen, a UNI spokesman. It would be premature to say anything in detail.
The holidays are a terrific time of year to share your many talents while helping others. The Volunteer Center of Cedar Valley has listed below a number of great ways to get involved in service.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northeast Iowa has the opportunity for community members to give back by adopting a Little or a Little and their family for the holiday season. All ages of Littles are available, and accommodations can be made for the family size if needed. Gifts are needed by the week of Dec. 18 to allow delivering of the gifts.
The American Red Cross seeks a volunteer driver to deliver blood goods from the Waterloo office to hospitals and sites in Dubuque County. This opportunity exists Monday, Tuesday and Friday beginning at 9:30 a.m. until no later than 4 p.m.
Americans for Independent Living needs volunteers to sort and display donated household items, clothes, linens and towels and more.
The Salvation Army serves lunch Monday through Friday. Volunteers participate from 11:15 a.m.-12:45 p.m. by keeping food stocked, serving food and assisting with clean-up.
The ARC of the Cedar Valley will hold its annual Holiday Cookie Walk on Dec. 9. They need homemade, decorated cookies and Christmas candy dropped off at the North Star Community Services between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Dec. 8.
House of Hope needs volunteers between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Dec. 16 to hang drywall. Skilled help will be present so volunteers ages 16 and older are welcome to come, regardless of skill level.
Volunteers will wrap gifts for shoppers at the Crossroads Mall in Waterloo on Dec. 15. Gift wrapping is offered for a donation to the Northeast Iowa Food Bank. Each dollar donated provides four meals to those in need in northeast Iowa. wrapping shifts are available from 2-4 p.m., 4-6 p.m. and 6-9 p.m.
Various volunteer opportunities at the Northeast Iowa Food Bank are available through the holiday season including assisting with the backpack program, Cedar Valley Food Pantry and as an agency shopping worker.
Volunteers are needed through Dec. 23, excluding Sundays, to ring bells for Salvation Army red kettle donations at 20 retail locations throughout the Cedar Valley. Kettle sorters are also needed at the end of each afternoon and evening shift to count and organize donations.
Northeast Iowa Area Agency on Aging is seeking volunteers to deliver meals to home-bound seniors throughout the Cedar Valley from 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.
The Habitat for Humanity ReStore needs volunteer cashiers, organizers and or customer assistants.
Many of the Cedar Valleys nursing and retirement communities need volunteers to assist with various holiday events and activities planned.
Girl Scouts of Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois needs a volunteer to manage cookie sales for the Waterloo Service Unit from Jan. 1-March 31.
Contact the Volunteer Center of Cedar Valley at information@vccv.org or 272-2087 to get involved.
WATERLOO -- Three people were wounded in two separate shootings Sunday.
It wasnt clear if the shootings are related.
In the latest attack, which took place in the 100 block of Western Avenue around 10:45 p.m. Sunday, 21-year-old Juanrez Jefferson of Waterloo flown to University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City.
As of Monday afternoon, he was in critical condition and undergoing surgery, according to police. Police said he was shot numerous times.
Details of the shooting werent immediately available, but several neighbors called 911 after hearing gunfire, said Capt. David Mohlis with the Waterloo Police Department. He said the injured man was taken to Covenant Medical Center by private vehicle.
The shooting happened outside, and a vehicle in the area was also struck by gunfire, Mohlis said.
Earlier on Sunday, at 12:37 a.m., residents in the 800 block of Beech Street called after hearing gunshots.
Officers found spent shell casings in the area, and two people showed up at UnityPoint Health-Allen Hospital with gunshot wounds moments later. He said 18-year-old Daeshon Wright of Waterloo had been shot in the right thigh, and a 17-year-old male had been shot in the right arm. Their injuries arent considered life threatening.
WATERLOO A Waterloo man has been sentenced to prison for trying to steal a handgun from a downtown pawn shop in 2016.
Judge Leonard Strand sentenced 19-year-old Sahjit Mcyle Phillips to three years and five months in prison during a Thursday hearing in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids. Phillips had pleaded guilty to a charge of theft of a firearm from a licensed dealer.
He will serve three years of supervised release following his prison time.
Prosecutors said Phillips was inside Levi Brothers Jewelry and Loan in October 2016, and when the employee who was helping him stepped away, he grabbed a .45-caliber Kahr pistol and ran off. He allegedly entered a home a few blocks away, took a cell phone from the resident and hid the weapons in a closet. He was found a short time later by authorities.
While he was out on bond for the gun theft, Phillips allegedly shot Jeremiah Taylor of Cedar Rapids in the buttocks in the area of West Fourth Street and Western Avenue. He was currently awaiting trial in state court for charges of willful injury and intimidation with a weapon.
DENVER Wind in the Willows is a classic English childrens fantasy novel that sprung out of bedtime stories author Kenneth Grahame told his son.
Dave Larson, a former Denver City Council member, came up with a similarly named project, Willow Wind. But its no fantasy. It came out of a different dream that seniors in Denver should have a place to stay in the same town they lived their entire lives and not be isolated at home alone.
The dream is about to come true.
Willow Wind is a 24-unit assisted living community on the south end of Denver, adjacent to Brothers Market. The $4 million facility will be open and ready for occupancy in January.
It fills a community need, Larson said, and he has a proven track record. He runs the Walnut Court and Colonial Manor senior housing complexes in Waterloo. And he has a partner to make it work Western Home Communities. Larson owns Willow Wind; Western Home will manage it.
Larson and Western Home worked together before on Walnut Court.
They do a great job, Larson said. Great brand, good people that work there. Outstanding. No need to re-invent the wheel. They pretty much have it figured out. In fact, the building is similar in appearance to many of the Western Home buildings on the South Main campus in Cedar Falls.
Amy Terrill, who grew up in Denver, will manage the facility. She previously worked 20 years at UnityPoint Health-Allen Hospital on the north side of Waterloo, which serves many Denver residents.
Willow Wind has 17 one-bedroom units and seven two-bedroom units. It will have a marketing and activities coordinator, a beauty shop, community living room, transportation and other features. It also has a private dining area for family gatherings.
The big thing I like about it is the social aspects, Larson said. It gives people an opportunity to be social with people in their own age group. Theyre not homebound.
The facility also provides three meals a day and laundry services. Residents also may have priority for higher level of care at other Western Home facilities if and when the need arises. The rooms feature wide doorways, walk-in closets and handicap accessible bathrooms.
The facility is almost done except for finishings and furnishings. We started a year ago last September with dirt moving, Larson said. But the project had been contemplated for a long time.
My grandparents lived in Harmony, Minn., and they went to assisted living, he said, and decided, I had the senior housing with Colonial Manor and Walnut Court, and said, This is something Denver should have.
He said he talked to Western Home and moved ahead with the project. And I would only go ahead and do it if the Western Home would manage it. Theres no way I would do it otherwise. Having that brand in our community, the Western Home brand, is priceless. Very fortunate theyre willing to manage this, and it works on their mission, Larson said.
Western Home manages several other similar facilities around the area, Terrill said, including Cresco, Grundy Center and Jesup. This will be modeled pretty closely to the one in Jesup, she said, which is about 4 years old, with updates based on suggestions from that facilitys staff.
More information about Willow Wind may be obtained at (319) 984-5867.
Democrat Fred Hubbell said Monday the state should partner with the private sector to add at least 50 to 75 in-patient mental health beds in Iowa, part of a plan he released to change the way mental health services are provided in the state.
Hubbell, one of seven Democrats running for his party's nomination for governor, released a four-page plan Monday, a day ahead of a forum on the topic in Des Moines.
Hubbell also said he would reverse last year's move to turn management of the state's Medicaid program over to private management and institute a review to determine "the most cost-efficient program that provides the necessary services." All of the Democrats running for governor have criticized the change.
Hubbell, who recently toured the state to talk about mental health issues, said it is a topic that comes up wherever he goes, and the state must do better.
"Iowans are paying a high human cost and also high financial costs because of the inadequacies of our mental health system," he said. Hubbell blamed "fiscal mismanagement" under former Gov. Terry Branstad and Gov. Kim Reynolds, as well as the decision to close state-run mental health institutes.
Hubbell cited a study saying Iowa is last in the nation in the number of state-run mental health beds. His plan called for "at least 50-75 high-intensity mental health beds for in-patient treatment in a public/private partnership."
No other details were provided.
Iowa Department of Human Services Director Jerry Foxhoven has defended the state's approach and said the focus on in-patient mental health beds is shortsighted.
Reynolds also has questioned how Democrats will be able to pay for a Medicaid program that goes back under the state's management.
Part of Hubbell's plan also dealt with the shortage of behavioral health providers. He said the state should put more effort into programs like loan forgiveness to lure professionals to the state.
The plan also would more closely coordinate services for mental health and addiction; "empower" local communities to determine their own needs and provide a range of services; encourage more utilization of tele-psychiatric services; create a mental health program for children and provide more help to law enforcement to deal with the opioid problem and incarceration diversion programs.
In response to Hubbell's plan, the Reynolds campaign responded that 150,000 more Iowans are getting mental health coverage than in 2011, when she became lieutenant governor. Also, the campaign said the number of inpatient psychiatric beds have increased since 2016 and so have investments to try to entice behavioral health professionals to the state.
"There's more to do, which is why we are focused on concrete solutions and progress to help Iowans in every corner of the state," said Pat Garrett, a spokesman for the Reynolds campaign.
Anti-bullying
speaker at HCC
WATERLOO Hawkeye Community College will host anti-bullying and suicide awareness advocate Kirk Smalley for two presentations at 9:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Wednesday in Tama Hall on Hawkeyes Main Campus, 1501 E. Orange Road, Waterloo.
Smalleys son, Ty Field-Smalley, committed suicide at age 11 after being suspended from school for retaliating against a bully who had bullied him for two years. Stand for the Silent was founded in 2010 by a group of Oklahoma high school students after they heard Tys story. Since then, Kirk and Laura Smalley have taken their message to more than 1,000 schools and spoken to more than 1 million kids.
Both presentations are free and open to the public. This event is organized by Cedar Valley Stand for the Silent; Alive and Running; and the Minds, Action, People, Society Club, a student-run organization at Hawkeye Community College for students with interests in psychology, sociology and social work.
HCC makes best
vet colleges list
WATERLOO Hawkeye Community College has been selected for the Military Times Best Colleges List, formerly known as Best for Vets. The annual rankings factor in the results of Military Times comprehensive school-by-school survey of veteran and military student offerings and rates of academic achievement.
As with all Military Times rankings, the Best Colleges List is an editorially independent news project that evaluates the many factors that help make colleges and universities a good fit for service members, military veterans, and their families. More than 600 colleges took part in this years detailed survey, with fewer than half making the list.
Hawkeyes Military and Veterans Services office includes a coordinator and resource center providing veterans with a central point of contact and making it easy for a one-stop-shop approach to determining funding and resources. Hawkeye has many resources for veterans, including a personalized approach to transitioning into the academic environment, tutoring, and campus-based disability and counseling services.
Hawkeyes veterans services coordinator, Robin Knight, has many years of experience in working with student veterans. The office of Military and Veterans Services, located in the Brock Student Center, coordinates the colleges services to the military and veteran students and their families.
Waterloo man
wins $10,000
WATERLOO Mark Burke of Waterloo claimed the 52nd of 72 prizes of $10,000 available in the Iowa Lotterys $250,000 Riches scratch game last week.
He bought the ticket at Hy-Vee Wine & Spirits, 2126 Kimball Ave.
County health
to host forum
WATERLOO The Black Hawk County Health Department will host a legislative forum from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday in room 201 of the Pinecrest Building, 1407 Independence Ave.
KWWL news anchor Ron Steele will moderate the forum, which is sponsored by the board of health and will include discussion on health care funding, oral health and tobacco prevention and control.
State legislators from the area have been invited to attend and the event is open to the public.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff
Nov. 30, 2017 | PADUCAH, KY
By West Kentucky Star Staff Nov. 30, 2017 | 11:00 PM | PADUCAH, KY
The McCracken County Jailer is under investigation for perjury.
A spokesperson for Kentucky State Police confirmed Thursday that there is an ongoing investigation, and they are consulting with a special prosecutor on how to proceed, but could not comment further.
Documents obtained by West Kentucky Star indicate that State Police got a search warrant earlier this month for the McCracken County Jail, and detectives wanted to see personnel files, training materials, policy and procedure manuals, and Jailer Tonya Ray's email account.
Police were looking for evidence against Ray since they believe she lied under oath just before the scheduled trial of former Deputy Jailer Sgt. Ben Green in October. He was facing multiple charges of official misconduct for moving inmates without permission, which led to some inmates saying they were assaulted.
However, detectives say Ray testified that the jail's current manual, which she said was from 2010, didn't include the policy on how inmates were classified and housed at the jail. Based on that information, the charges against Green were dismissed.
In an affidavit, a State Police detective says he later learned that a 2012 version of the policy manual existed, and that Ray knew about it because she received an email copy the day before Green's alleged violation in February. The detective says she updated the name of the jailer on the document and sent it back. That manual included the policy that Green allegedly violated.
The affidavit also cites evidence that former Jailer Bill Adams showed the McCracken Fiscal Court a copy of the 2012 manual at a meeting in February, and it contained the section that Ray claimed she added after becoming Jailer.
Ray was named Jailer from several candidates after Adams retired in March. She recently filed paperwork to run for the office in the November 2018 election. A request for a comment from Ray on the investigation has not been answered.
Dec 4, 2017 | By Tess
Dutch design duo Eric Klarenbeek and Maartje Dros have created a 3D printable biomaterial made from algae. The new filament, which is currently featured in the Change the System exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, could offer an eco-friendly alternative to fossil and oil-based plastics.
Klarenbeek and Dros, both graduates from the Design Academy Eindhoven, have been working towards the development of a sustainable, environmentally friendly polymer material for some time. Klarenbeek, for his part, has been working on the development of 3D printable biomaterials for at least the last six years (he even created the worlds first 3D printed chair made from living fungus).
Now, however, Klarenbeek and Dros have been working with a different type of natural material to create a printable biopolymer: algae. In short, the designers have developed a method for cultivating living algae, drying it out, and transforming it into a 3D printable filament.
According to the designers, this eco-material could be used to manufacture a broad range of commonly used products, including shampoo bottles, garbage bins, tableware, and more. Ultimately, they hope to be able to scale up their algae-growing system in a localized way in order to replace fossil and oil-based plastics completely.
Notably, algae not only presents environmental benefits because it is natural, but it is also capable of filtering out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In fact, algae itself grows through the absorption of CO2.
As the design duo explains, The algae grow by absorbing the carbon and producing a starch that can be used as a raw material for bioplastics or binding agents. The waste product is oxygen, clean air. And what's more eco-friendly than clean air?
As designers, we love nothing more than producing mass: products and materials, they added. So, for us it's the golden formula. Everything that surrounds usour products, houses and carscan be a form of CO2 binding. If we think in these terms, makers can bring about a revolution. It's about thinking beyond the carbon footprint: instead of zero emissions we need negative' emissions.
The innovative materials research, which has been supported for the past three years by Wageningen University, Salga Seaweeds, Avans Biobased Lab in Breda, and other organizations, recently came to the attention of the Luma Foundation in Arles, France.
Now, Klarenbeek and Dros are splitting their research time between their lab in the Netherlands and their open research and algae production lab at the Luma Foundation. In the Netherlands, the duo are working on cultivating seaweed, while the Arles-based lab is growing local algae. Both materials are being used to produce the same products, however.
Both have exactly the same form, but they are made from local materials. This is the change we believe in; designing products that are distributed via the internet but made locally, explained the designers.
Going forward, the team is hoping to establish what they call a 3D Bakery, which would essentially be a local network of biopolymer 3D printers. Kind of like 3D Hubs, but just for environmentally friendly algae-based 3D printing.
"Our idea is that in the future there will be a shop on every street corner where you can 'bake' organic raw materials, just like fresh bread, said Klarenbeek. You won't have to go to remote industrial estates to buy furniture and products from multinational chains. 3D printing will be the new craft and decentralized economy.
Though it may be awhile before we see 3D Bakeries popping up, Klarenbeek seems confident they could become a reality within the next ten years.
The designers are currently exhibiting their 3D printed algae samples at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. As part of the exhibition, Klarenbeek and Dros are even growing algae in the museums pond, which they will transform into a filament and use to 3D print a replica of a glass object from the museum.
If you happen to be in the Rotterdam area, the exhibition is on until January 14, 2018.
(Images: Florent Cardin, Studio Klarenbeek & Dros)
Posted in 3D Printing Materials
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Boris Smith wrote at 4/10/2018 10:03:41 PM:very interesting, keep up with the good work!
Dec 4, 2017 | By David
As concrete 3D printing continues to revolutionize construction projects all over the world and change the way people think about architecture, many companies and research institutions are putting a lot of effort into continuing research in this field, hoping to advance the technology and discover new ways that it can be implemented. The most recent developments have come from the Technical University of Munich, where researchers have been experimenting with a number of different concrete AM processes, the most promising of which is the relatively new 'selective binding' approach.
These research activities are being conducted in a collaborative effort between the TUMs Chair of Timber Stuctures and Building Construction and the Centre for Building Materials. The German Research Foundation (DFG), along with the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB) research initiative "Zukunft Bau", provided the funding to support these ongoing research projects, some of which have just recently been launched.
The main advantage that 3D printing offers for construction is improved freedom of design, as well as the increased ease and speed with which prototypes can be put together. As opposed to using formworks and molds, 3D printing processes can create concrete structures by selectively depositing material exactly where it needs to go, which then will solidify in place. This allows for much more complex shapes to be made, which would be impossible with conventional techniques, and these more intricate structures allows for improved properties. For example, a concrete pipe could be made with much thinner walls due to its being supported by an elaborate internal bracing structure, which saves on materials as well as reducing weight without sacrificing strength.
The most common concrete AM technique used has been the standard extrusion method, which extrudes pre-made concrete from a nozzle, similar to how FDM 3D printing creates structures from thermoplastics. Selective binding is a newer method, which extrudes a mixture of water and cement instead of concrete. The build area is primed with layers of sand, and they will gradually set to form concrete shapes after being doused with the extruded material. The excess sand is then removed.
The TUM team had to build a selective binding unit in order to test out this latter concrete additive manufacturing process, which took around three years to perfect. Their over-dimensioned 3D printer fills an entire laboratory room in the basement at their premises. Before initiating the 3D printer, sand is first distributed using an automatic scattering system. A three-dimensional system of tracks moves the print head around, allowing it to be positioned at any specific point in the working space, as required by the project. The nozzle can then apply fluid exactly where it needs to go.
Successful printing depended on getting the right thickness of the layers, the right grain size of the sand, an appropriate speed for the print head to move at, and the right type of nozzle, amongst other things. Engineers from the TUM Centre for Building Materials helped out with optimizing the printing parameters. The team is now developing a 3D printer whose print head will be equipped with several thousand nozzles. which will make it possible to manufacture components with volumes of approximately ten cubic meters, the height of a storey in a building. This will be the first time parts of this size have been made using this selective binding technique, and tests should start next year.
The team also made some advances with the more common extrusion 3D printing method, in terms of the materials used and the system adopted to process them. One project saw wood chips being added to the standard concrete mix, which can provide integrated thermal insulation due to the extra air in the material, protecting buildings from undercooling in the winter or overheating in the summer. This lightweight wood-concrete is just as resilient and insulating as conventional gas-aerated concrete, but its printability means that it can be made into much more elaborate structures. A newly designed computer-controlled robotic arm was used to move the print head and extrude this new material more efficiently, precisely placing the concrete strands on top of one another in order to form the desired structure.
According to Dr. Klaudius Henke of the TUM Chair of Timber Structures and Building Construction, "Additive manufacturing is extremely attractive for construction: It enables a wide range of shapes at high levels of cost-efficiency, even in small batch sizes... (It) will change architecture. The technology not only allows more versatile shaping, but also more variety, since each component can be individually designed without incurring any additional costs."
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Nissim Hasson M. S., M. ASCE, Civil Engineer wrote at 12/6/2017 12:56:58 AM:It is a great innovation to use these 3D printers to make suchs a beautiful concrete work. Plese, receive my congratulations.Salvatore J. Monte wrote at 12/5/2017 9:08:34 PM:Read your 3-D concrete article with interest. We can surface modify the Portland cement surface with 1.5-nanometer organometallics by a patent-filed process to increase the Portland cement reaction with water and reduce the water to cement ratio by one-third or increase the flow (decrease the slump) by making the mortar "more wettable", thus facilitating 3-D processing. The surface modification also makes the mortar more compatible with polymerics and improves bonding and anti-corrosion performance to steel reinforcements. Salvatore J. Monte P.E., B.C.E., M.S.-Polymeric Materials, Fellow (SPE) BOG PIA President Kenrich Petrochemicals, Inc.
by Misha Lepetic
As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart.
~ The Wizard of Oz
There is an old joke that deserves to be made popular again. A CEO is touring the company's newest factory. The manager, with a great deal of pride, points out how everything is automated. As the tour reaches the final room, the CEO notices a man sitting sullenly in the corner, with a leashed dog sitting next to him. Somewhat surprised, the CEO asks why the man is there, to which the manager responds, "It's his job to feed the dog." Stumped, the CEO asks why the factory would need a dog. The manager responds, quite matter-of-factly, "Why, to keep the man from touching the equipment."
At least one telling of the joke can be attributed to Warren G. Bennis, a scholar of organizational psychology and more-or-less originator of the field of leadership studies. But what is more interesting to me is the fact that Bennis's version of the joke goes back to 1991an indication that we have been thinking about technological unemployment for a long time. When I originally heard the joke, probably sometime in the mid-90s, I savored it for its absurdist connotations: man and dog, locked in an eternal, Monty Python-esque loop of feeding and guarding, so as to guarantee no interference in the well-tempered functioning of the machine that has almost entirely replaced them both.
But these days what resonates for me more profoundly is the notion that these two still have jobs, regardless of how marginal such jobs may be; someone still has to feed the dog, and someone still has to keep the man from messing up the machinery that does the actual work. The real subtlety in the joke is that any presence should be needed at all, and yet it is somehow still required. The jobsfor both man and dogare a fig leaf, but ostensibly the owners of the factory have decided that such a fig leaf is necessary, or at least desirable. Why is this?
I was reminded of this joke when recently contemplating the ubiquitous headlines that sensationalize the wholesale replacement of human labor by non-human capital. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media prefers the drama of entire sectors of labor being sidelined. For example, an evergreen topic is the imminent wipe-out of heavy truck driving, which accounts for 1.8 million jobs in the United States, or nearly doubling to 3.5 million jobs, if you include taxis, delivery vans and the like. But paradigms are rarely overturned quite so rapidly, and the story that is already unfolding before us is much trickier to unravel, and more interesting.
*
What's necessary to understand from the start is that automation progresses fitfully and partially. It is driven by firms that seek local optima, and once achieved may remain there for quite some time, since a firm has no incentive to categorically replace all possible jobs if there is no reason to do so. Instead, it will approach automation instrumentally, as a way of limiting its exposure to the risk of existing and budding competitors. This risk-based approach was a cornerstone of JK Galbraith's economic thought, which he termed the technostructure', that I explored more fully earlier this year.
But even this, more measured assessment is still a massive sea change in the way that labor is structured. Nevertheless, there are plenty of commentators who maintain the old chestnut that technological change always creates new opportunities for workers. One of the more reliable standard-bearers in this regard is The Economist, which recently wrote that:
technology is creating demand for work. To take one example, more and more people are supplying digital services online via what is sometimes dubbed the "human cloud". Counter-intuitively, many are doing so in response to artificial intelligence.
Put another way, as automation broadens its interventions from the manufacturing and supply chain industries into services, what we are seeing is a re-emergence of piecework, but in a digital context. What does this look like in practice? Sometimes it is explicit, as evinced by Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which since 2005 has been doling out human intelligence tasks' that pay meager amounts to home workers for microwork' such as audio transcription, image tagging, and even participation in experiments and surveys run by social scientists.
More interesting is the way in which human work is being concealed behind the facade of automation, or even passed off as the latter. Facebook's personal assistant M made a splash when it debuted in August 2015, as competition to Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. Its selling point was the notion that M could handle a much broader range of requests than either Alexa or Siri, but by November enterprising journalists had deduced that any success M may have had in this brutally competitive field was mostly due to the fact that the technology had an undisclosed number of humans backing it up.
In one case, technology reporter Mat Honan asked M to deliver a parrot to a rival journalist's office. I suppose people do this sort of stuff in the Bay area with some regularity, because M was quickly able to find Happy Birds, a company that rents out birds for events. But Honan's request was built to test what happens "when M ventures in the outside world which is a large part of its promise. It has to bump up against humans, and when it does, it drops the pretense of AI altogether and becomes just another cog in the gig economy." In this case, M shape-shifted into a human contractor, who called Happy Birds several times in order to negotiate the deal. Additionally, a similar call went out through another gig economy platform to see if anyone could resolve the client's request.
What does this tell us? For one thing, it points out the implicit ways in which we mold ourselves to our toolseven tools as allegedly flexible as virtual personal assistants. If Siri gives up on a request and just searches the web, then we know not to be so complex the next time around. Facebook, however, is hoping to carve out a more decisive market share by addressing a much larger variety of requests. Quoted in MIT's Technology Review two and a half years later, project lead Alex Lebrun noted that:
People try first to ask for the weather tomorrow; then they say Is there an Italian restaurant available?' Next they have a question about immigration, and after a while they ask M to organize their weddingWe knew it would be dangerous, and it's wider than our expectations."
It's also worth remarking that, in that intervening time, M's maximalist approach has allowed its user base to expand only minimally, from a few hundred users in August 2015, to about 10,000 in April 2017, all of whom are based in the same geographic area (guess which one). Obviously, with great scale comes great responsibility.
So here is one scenario where The Economist indeed has a point. As automation seeks to turn all of lived experience into a service, it still needs to have humans behind the curtain, pulling the levers that the software cannot. And even if M gets to the point that it can negotiate a parrot rental via telephone with a human interlocutor, people are still needed to drop off and pick up the birds, and so on; the physical world abides. But at the same time, once M knows how to negotiate for parrots, it need never receive that training again. At a certain point it will be able to translate that knowledge into negotiating for piglets, or hot air balloon rides, or what have you. There will be fewer edge cases, and therefore fewer people needed, although I am convinced that, if M is to maintain its position as the personal assistant that is closest to being a concierge, there will always be a watchful human standing by, ready to catch the occasional request to have my hotel room decorated with pictures of Jeff Goldblum.
*
At least with M, Facebook has admitted the ruse. Other companies have not been so forthcoming. Expensify, a startup that allegedly automates every step of the expense reporting process', would seem to have the perfect solution for this onerous task. Customers scan their receipts, and the company's SmartScan service uses optical character recongition (OCR) to make everything machine-readableexcept for when it's not. Here's a recent tweet I picked up on the matter:
"I just went browsing through @expensify's jobs on MTurk. Found boarding passes, hotel receipts (name, dates, details), medical receipts, addresses, signatures, and a whole lot of burgers and burritos. I also just turned off SmartScan, because that's super creepy."
Expensify knows that too many failures to read a crumpled or blurry receipt will cause customers to abandon its product. You don't sign up for a service that will only be able to handle two-thirds or three-quarters of your month's expenses. So it's sensible to create a backup system to handle the edge cases. But it's no surprise that Expensify, like any other young company, would seek to cut costs and contract out this workin this case, to some random guy sitting at home in his pajamas, willing to sign a flimsy NDA on Mechanical Turk. The consequences of these decisions may range from simply a sketchy regard for privacy, to all-out alarm bells when one realizes that this leaky approach may provoke everything from HIPAA violations (when it comes to medical information) to outright criminality (consider a network that gathers scanned images from multiple Turk contractors, in search of identity information). In the meantime, Expensify played coy to inquiries as to who, exactly, was eyeballing clients' receipts; not a good look, as the kids say these days.
Other manifestations of this behind-the-curtain phenomenon play a far more important role in technology that is coming down the pike. Specifically, driverless cars not only rely on state-of-the-art instrumentation and machine vision processing to sense their environment, but also require small armies of humans to correctly tag the results for training' the neural networks correctly. This human component tends to be underreported, which is a bit odd, given the homogenous nature of most technology reporting. A common example is this CityLab piece, happy to grapple with the ins and outs of signage recognition and such challenges, but doesn't mention the human component in the data preparation strategy of any of several companies in the industry.
More realistically, the Financial Times gathered a whole passel of quotes from leaders, academics and executives in this field that reflected how much work it actually takes to present these systems with clean, useful training data:
"Machine learning is a myth, it's all Wizard of Oz type workThe labelling teams are incredibly important in every company, and will need to be there for some time because the outdoor environment is so dynamic."
"We need hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of hours of data" for self-driving vehicles to go everywhere, requiring "hundreds of thousands of people to get this thing done" globally.
"It is very hard to get people to talk about this.They all like to say it's machine-learning magic'."
What is striking about all three of these casesFacebook M, Expensify, and the autonomous vehicle industryis their reluctance to admit to the continued need for human labor. On the one hand, given the fact that the gig economy is here to stay, one would think this an opportunity for Silicon Valley types to trumpet their job-creating prowess. But this doesn't seem to be happening. Rather, are humans kept behind the curtain because their presence is considered a failure of engineering, code, business execution, or all of the above? Perhaps the world is just not as technologically fungible as we have always been told by these entrepreneurs? Or maybe it's simply that all these jobs just suck, and everyone knows it?
*
But the kingdom of digital piecework is much more extensive than any of these examples indicate. In fact, we may be thinking about it in completely the wrong way. What if we are, all of us, doing this work all the time? A recent book by Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi proposes the umbrella term heteromation' to encompass not just the sort of digital piecework discussed above, but any sort of offerings we make while online:
Heteromation includes many kinds of self-service (e.g., check your own groceries), volunteer work such as citizen science, creative engagement (e.g., in computer gaming), microwork (Amazon Mechanical Turk), writing online customer reviews, and a wide range of other activities that provide economic value to companies and organizations, but little or no monetary compensation to laborers that is, most of us People are already "working alongside machines"but they are not getting paid for it, or not very much. The debate is a false battle between AI and peoplewhen in fact the critical issue is that people are working, but the terms of labor are radically changing. Seduced into (gaming, social media) or forced into (self-service, gatekeeper apps like Academia.edu) participation in heteromated labor, we supply [that labor]; capitalism has, remarkably, found its way to free or very cheap labor with absolutely no obligations to laborers as human beings with basic needs.
Consider the platforms that would simply not exist without that collective effort: not just Facebook or Twitter, but also review sites like Yelp, or the crowdsourced traffic displays on Google Maps. The question of how little technological progress' would there be if we paid labor more is only a starting point. It yields to a larger question: would we have any of the current stable of technologies if we valued labor at all? And we cannot even begin to consider questions of how to value our labor if we cannot agree on whether to value it. That is, if we consider the conveniences afforded to us by these platforms to be commensurate with the amount of effort we put into collectively building them, then this moots any further discussionwhich seems to be where we are these days. So it is ironic to consider that such a subtle yet thorough restructuring of work is indeed transpiring right before our very eyes, when, at the same time, there are other rumblings that childcare, caregiving and such other, traditionally unpaid activities, should finally be recognized as labor and valued as such.
In the end, it's cold comfort to maintain, however correctly, that workers are rarely shut out of the employment sweepstakes permanently and unconditionally. But as machines learn to do more, labor is relegated to those marginal activities that machines have not yet mastered. Workflows are fragmented and never not under threat. So even if overall automation may take years to encompass an entire process, labor will still lay a claim to it, however diminishing, until its participation is purely administrative, or even incidental. Returning to the place occupied by truck drivers, Flynn Murphy, a truck driver himself and author of The Long Haul , writes:
The only human beings left in the modern supply chain are truck drivers. If you go to a modern warehouse now, say Amazon or Walmart, the trucks are unloaded by machines, the trucks are loaded by machines, they are put into the warehouse by machines. Then there is a guy, probably making $10 an hour, with a load of screens watching these machines. Then what you have is a truckers' lounge with 20 or 30 guys standing around getting paid. And that drives the supply chain people nuts.
Truckers aside, a reader may justifiably grouse that one employee monitoring an otherwise automated process is pretty much an automated process. And while we're not very close to the joke at the beginning of this piece, we're probably not that far off, either. Of course, it would be funnier if there were a dog involved, but there's a slim chance it'll make it through the last round of layoffs.
by Brooks Riley
For most of us, the act of looking at a painting is, and should be, subjective. The baggage we bring to the confrontationhow we see, what we notice, what we know, how we feel, what we like or dont likeis as individual as a finger print, and often highly idiosyncratic. Like the proverbial horse, we can be led to a painting, but we cannot be made to like itif were honest. We may well like it, or appreciate it (divorcing like from value), even if weve been led to it. But we can also be cajoled, or conned, into liking it or appreciating it because weve been told its a masterpiece.
Sometimes I feel Im being stalked by Leonardo da Vinci. He tiptoes in and out of my life at irregular intervals, calling attention to himself and exhorting me to believe in his painterly genius. Its aesthetic harassment, and hes had plenty of enablers over the centuries, telling me I should give in to him.
The first time I saw the Mona Lisa, at 14, the first thing I noticed were her eyebrows, or rather the lack of them. Like a homing pigeon, my attention swiftly bypassed the painting as gestalt and zoomed directly into a detail that delivered a personal shock of recognition. I didnt see the smile, I didnt try to read her expression, I didnt try to see where she was looking, I didnt notice the landscape outside the window behind her. I was fixated on that delicate bone along which her eyebrows might have stretched like a delicate punctuation mark on an expression.
In spite of my dark brown hair, I was born with almost no eyebrows, only a few beige weeds scattered helter-skelter in a landscape of pale skin, invisible even from a short distance. At 14, when all my friends had lovely, well-defined brows, my lack of them was a source of adolescent insecurity that eventually faded when the teasing stopped.
By the time I saw the Mona Lisa for the second time, at 22, Id found out that Lisa shaved off her eyebrows according to Renaissance fashionI was born too late. This may be what led bandleader Mitch Miller to tell me, when we met, that I looked like a few Madonnas hed seen at the Frick. It had to be the eyebrows, or the lack of them.
Da Vinci showed up again while I was living in the tiny principality of Liechtenstein for a few months, just as its prince was selling the familys only da Vinci painting, the Ginevra de Benci, to the National Gallery in Washington for a tidy sum that seems like peanuts today. Seeing it on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, I found it refreshingly different from the Mona Lisa, Ginevras hard sullen stare somehow more intriguing and mysterious than Mona Lisas placid smile over our right shoulder. At the time I was surprised that such a national treasure could be sold away without local protest. When I posed the question, the news dealer in Vaduz shrugged. The prince can do what he wants. As Ive since learned, the prince needed the money.
Back in Washington, I made the pilgrimage to see the Ginevra de Benci. There was something exquisitely delicate and old-fashioned about it, like a painting from an earlier century of someone portrayed as an icon of herself. And I sent a postcard of it to my brilliant, neurotic, decades-older half-sister Jane, a successful songwriter who happened to be obsessed with Leonardo da Vinci. Convinced that a certain painting attributed to someone else was, in fact, a true da Vinci, she plunged into research, hand-wrote an 800-page manuscript and left Texas for the first time in her life to take it to a NY publisher. Told that her theory would need to be vetted by experts, Jane, already in the throes of serious paranoia, took the manuscript back to Texas and burned it. Theres more to this story, but its safe to say that da Vinci ruined her life.
He wasnt done with me, either. A few years ago, approached to translate a German novel in which Mona Lisa comes alive to haunt and taunt a contemporary painterWoody Allens The Kugelmass Episode without the humorI was less than enthusiastic, horrified at the thought of spending serious time with a painting I grudgingly admired whose protagonist I found woefully uninteresting.
Now hes back, with another questionable work, the Salvator Mundi, which just sold last month for $450 million. To try to understand what it is that bothers me about da Vinci, Ive spent the intervening weeks immersing myself in his paintings (I just cant seem to shake this guy.). My conclusions might seem superficial, especially to art historians, but it would take another lifetime to properly prove them. Id rather spend the rest of this life with Albrecht Durer.
In spite of his genius, Leonardo lacked a personal aesthetic sense, or an own style. Not a metteur en scene, he was a bricoleur en scene, tinkering around with elements of a painting without paying much mind to its aesthetic whole. Given his prodigious talent, he could have been a great artist. But as a polymath without equal, his interest in painting was scientific, analytical, experimental, but not necessarily artistic. Its not an accident that he put his ability to paint at the bottom of his qualifications when he applied for a post with the Duke of Milan. He had other things on his mind. As Jean-Pierre Cuzin, a former curator at the Louvre aptly put it, For him the painting doesnt count. What counts is the knowledge.
By the time he became obsessed with sfumatoa technique that renders paintings more realistic by smoking away the lines of demarcation, creating the illusion of reality through a suggestion of 3-dimensionalityhis descent from greatness was precipitate. Sfumato a la Leonardo is a two-dimensional form of embalming that turns everyone into generic figures, like Madonna Barbie dolls against backdrops that often look like back projections. Through his application of sfumato, the faces lose character, becoming waxy figures in a Renaissance Madame Tussauds gallery, or in the case of the Salvator Mundi, the Shroud of Turin. The ragazzo pazzo posing as John the Baptist in his last painting also belongs to this sfumato festival.
Its no wonder that authentication of da Vincis works is so difficult. No two paintings are related in any discernable way unless he painted them twice, which he seems to have done more than once. Hes a painter without a styleessentially a jack-of-all-styles.
It all started well enough. Early works like The Annunciation (in collaboration with Verrocchio) with its cinemascopic one-point perspective seem to suggest a desire to find a style or at least a completed unified image. Early on he also painted my favorite, the Lady with an Ermine, a painting I love in spite of that right hand on steroids (An L.A.M. scan of the painting reveals an earlier hand thats smaller and a scrawny grey weasel instead of the ermine.). Here I recognize a potential for mise-en-scene in the dynamic polyhedron-esque variation on portraiture with a protagonist whose alert curiosity, aimed off-stage left, immediately invites us to wonder, What is she looking at? If theres a masterpiece lurking in da Vincis oeuvre, its this one. That gaze, clear and unsullied by sfumato, could almost stand as a metaphor for the painters own constant distractions, off-stage from painting.
Leonardo da Vinci was not a consummate painter. He was first and foremost a scientist, inventor and experimenter, with an excess of artistic talent to help pay the rent and a trove of notebooks to document his true obsessions. What I admire and envy about him is that thirst and drive to know everything, and his inventive imagination. Id prefer to curl up with his codices, which is how Id probably feel most at ease with him.
Leonardos talent allowed him to delve into the mechanics of life and body, the techniques of a craft, including painting, and bold imagined mechanisms of the future. Its not difficult to detect a case of ADD to a rarified degree. Endowed with extraordinary capabilities, polymaths get easily distracted. They experiment feverishly on one or three things before rushing off to some other new challenge. Da Vinci once said that no painting is ever finished, only abandoned. I rest my case.
Disclaimer: My opinion is defiantly subjective, probably not at all original, and all too brief, but is informed by considerable time and energy spent looking at the forest as well as the trees.
This week's list of happenings includes endless wine, LED-lit flash mobs, jaw-dropping art and more.
Monday, December 4th: Hear Budd MacKenzie Speak on Everyday Humanitarianism @ Commonwealth Club
When: 6:00pm to 7:15pm
Where: 110 The Embarcadero (Embarcadero), commonwealthclub.org
Why: Start off your workweek with an empowering, enlightening, open-hearted fireside chat with Budd MacKenzie, as he discusses his work with women, children and the needy in war-torn Afghanistan. He will also limelight about what we can do to effectively help those who we may not knowbut are an ocean's-length away. Tickets ($20) can be bought on Eventbrite; if you're a student or a member of the Commonwealth Club, the talk is free to attend.
Tuesday, December 5th: Ungulate Like a Jellyfish @ Union Square
When: 7:30pm to 9:30pm
Where: Union Square, airbnb.com
Why: Come this Tuesday evening at Union Square, join a gaggle of other biophilic creatives and create an LED flash mob in an ode to everyone's favorite saline invertebratethe jellyfish. Tickets ($65) can be bought on Airbnb, and each attendee will be given their own illuminated jellyfish puppet to both use at the event and later keep.
Wednesday, December 6th: See 'Prussian Blue' During Its Opening Week @ YBCA
When: 11:00am to 6:00pm (Gallery Hours)
Where: 701 Mission St. (SoMa), ybca.org
Why: Assembled by the celebrated oil painter, Yishai Jusidman, Prussian Blue is a series of paintings using just one colorPrussian blue, one of the earliest pigments artificially developed and used by European paintersto visualize sites of the Holocaust. Tickets ($10) can be bought online at ybca.org or at the door.
Thursday, December 7th: See Golden Gate Park Light-up for the Holidays @ Conservatory of Flowers
When: 6:00pm to TBD
Where: 100 John F Kennedy Dr. (Golden Gate Park), sfrecpark.org
Why: Swing by Golden Gate Park this Thursday night to see the Conservatory of Flowers become a canvass of sorts, danced by an LED light show to help celebrate the start of December. Admission is free, but space will undoubtedly be tight and precious to come by.
Friday, December 8th: Talk, Walk, and Drink Wine @ Fillmore Street
When: 4:00pm to 8:00pm
Where: 2001 Fillmore St. (Pacific Heights), eventbrite.com
Why: Sip and walk at this Friday's Fillmore holiday wine walk. The tasting event will include merchants offering wine samples inside their stores throughout Fillmore Street from Jackson to Eddy. Tickets ($25) can be bought on Eventbrite and include unlimited tasting and some merchandise swag.
Saturday, December 9th: See an Aerial 'Winter of Love' Show @ Circus Center
When: 7:30pm to TBD
Where: 755 Frederick St. (Inner Sunset), circuscenter.org
Why: Featuring Circus Center's faculty, advanced adult recreational students, and pre-professional youth program trainees, this family-friendly show will immerse you in the sights and sounds of high-flying aerialists and impossible acrobatics. Revisit San Francisco's righteous, fun-loving, summer-of-love past. Tickets ($25) can be bought on ovationtix.com.
Sunday, December 10th: Treat Your Eyes and Ears at 'Klimt and Rodin: A Musical Encounter' @ Legion of Honor
When: 3:00pm to 4:30pm
Where: 100 34th Ave. (Sea Cliff), facebook.com
Why: Cap-off a well-spent, diverse weekend with an afternoon of music inspired by Gustav Klimt, Auguste Rodin, and their cultural milieu, organized in collaboration with San Francisco's Opera Parallele. Tickets ($10+) can be bought at legionofhonor.famsf.org, but they're selling quickso jump on it!
Mineral Resource 40.8 Mt @ 1.4% Li20
James Bay Major Resource Upgrade
Perth, Dec 4, 2017 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Galaxy Resources Limited ("Galaxy" or the "Company") ( ASX:GXY ) ( GALXF:OTCMKTS ) is pleased to announce a significant mineral resource upgrade resulting from the 2017 drilling campaign at the James Bay Project in Quebec, Canada.
Highlights
- Significant increase in the mineral resource to 40.8 Mt @1.40% Li20, all classified as Indicated (JORC 2012)
- Current mineral resource is west of the James Bay Road and it remains open to the east and in the west at depths greater than - 335m below surface
- Numerous untested pegmatite's outcrop and sub-crop elsewhere within the claim area of the project
- Metallurgical test work for process design already well advanced in Perth, Western Australia
- Further drilling for infrastructure sterilization has commenced
- Mine design and planning work has been awarded to Mining Plus
- Feasibility Study preparation ongoing, upgrade of resources to reserves expected in H1 of 2018.
The current JORC 2012 recoverable mineral resource is reported below in Table 1 (see link below), as is the prior mineral resource in Table 2 (see link below). Factors used to demonstrate "reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction" are listed in Table 3 (see link below). The mineral resource estimate was completed by SRK Consulting (Canada) Inc. who are independent of the issuer for both JORC 2012 and Canadian NI-43-101 reporting standards. Additional reporting to the Canadian standard is mandatory in Canada for project development.
Reported at cut-off grade of 0.62 % Li20 and within a conceptual open pit shell formulated to demonstrate "reasonable prospects of eventual economic extraction as tabulated (see Table 3 below). All figures rounded to reflect the relative accuracy of the estimates. Mineral resources are not mining reserves and do not yet have demonstrated economic viability.
Reported at cut-off grade of 0.75% Li20 and within a conceptual open pit shell formulated to demonstrate "reasonable prospects of eventual economic extraction" with factors as tabulated (see Table 3 in link below).
Galaxy Resources' Managing Director, Anthony Tse said the increase in resource confirms the James Bay project as a world class hard rock lithium asset, as highlighted by the grade, quality and scalability of the deposit.
"One of the key attributes of the James Bay project is that due to its high grade, scale, low stripping ratio and superior location, it will be one of the lowest cost hard rock lithium projects in the world. The pegmatite system is substantial in size and the deposit remains open at depth and also open to the east, which offers significant potential for growth, both in terms of the resource and ultimately future ore reserve."
Additional ASX disclosure - Material Changes to Mineral Resources (Section 5.8.1, Chapter 5 ASX listing rules)
Geology and geological interpretation
The spodumene-bearing pegmatite bodies of the James Bay project are irregular dykes up to 60 meters in width and over 200 meters in length. The pegmatite intrusions generally strike south-southwest dipping moderately to the east-northeast (215deg/60deg).
Based on core drilling data, surface geology mapping, and outcrop channel sampling provided by Galaxy, SRK created a three-dimensional model for the main pegmatite dykes. The bodies were modelled from logged pegmatites, not Li2O grades, as implicitly derived intrusions or vein contact surfaces in Leapfrog Geo software (version 4.0.1). The resulting geological model incorporates 18 pegmatite dykes. Sixteen pegmatite bodies were created as intrusion contact surfaces with a spheroidal interpolant. Two smaller pegmatites (550 and 850) were created with the vein modelling tool within the boundaries defined by hanging wall and footwall surfaces.
SRK also modelled the overburden material, consisting of glacial till, using the logged drill intervals and mapped outcrops. The three-dimensional model is clipped to a topography surface created from a Lidar survey provided by Galaxy.
Sampling and sub-sampling techniques
The maiden 2010 mineral resource had been based on 14,457m of diamond drilling and 201.3m of horizontal channel sampling, from 102 drill holes and 45 channel samples. This updated mineral resource estimation is supported by an additional 33,339 m of NQ core drilling in 157 diamond drill holes. (see Figures 1 and 2 in link below). All sampling is half NQ3 sized core. Sample lengths average at 1.290m. A total of 9,194 assays were completed by ALS Canada by the Li 0C63 Open Beaker method. An additional 1,093 standard and blank assays were submitted with the sample stream. These include 514 duplicates and 513 blanks. Results for check assays between ALS and SGS have been received.
Mineral Resource classification criteria
SRK is satisfied that the geological modelling honours the current geological information and knowledge. The location of the samples and the assay data are sufficiently reliable to support resource evaluation. The sampling information was acquired primarily by surface channel sampling and core drilling on sections spaced at twenty-five to fifty metres. The eighteen modelled intrusive pegmatite dykes were investigated by several boreholes providing sampling to approximately twenty-five to forty metre spacing. Most pegmatite dyke domains have been sampled by a sufficient number of boreholes to model the spatial variability of lithium oxide. Accordingly, all block estimates within the conceptual pit shell have been classified as Indicated.
Sample analysis
All samples were weighed, crushed and pulverized at ALS Canada. These were processed at ALS Val d'Or located at 1324 Rue Turcotte, Val d'Or, QC, Canada. Methods used were CRU-31,CRU-QC,LOG-21,SPL-21,WEI-21. Samples were processed at ALS Vancouver located at 2103 Dollarton Hwy, North Vancouver, BC, Canada. This is a four-acid digest method. This is analysis for lithium ore grade by method Li- OC63. This assay is for ore grade Li by specialized four-acid digestion and ICP-AES finish, with Li-specific CRMs. It is best suited to Li-bearing silicate sediments. Li range is 0.01-10%. The method precision is 5%. Assays are within expected tolerance. Umpire assaying has been completed.
This method is suitable for analyzing lithium in geological samples. A ~0.4g sample is first digested with three acids (HCLO4, HF, and HNO3) until dryness. The residue is subsequently re-digested in concentrated HCL, cooled and topped up to volume. The samples are analyzed for Li by ICPAES spectroscopy.
Estimation method
The evaluation of mineral resources involved database compilation and verification, construction of 3D wireframes, the definition of mineral resource domains, sample compositing, capping, sample statistical analysis, block modelling and grade estimation; grade validation, mineral resource classification and mineral resource tabulation.
Estimation was by geostatistical methods with hard geological domain boundaries. Block modelling (10 x 3 x 10m block size) was informed by variography and sample composition using ordinary kriging methods in octant search. Block modelling was validated by nearest neighbour and inverse distance methods.
Cut-off grade and the basis for cut-off grade
The cut-off grade (COG) applied is 0.62 % Li20. The COG is based on metallurgical test work that requires a head feed mineralised to support beneficiation to a spodumene product at grades and qualities that meet market requirements.
Mining and metallurgical factors
Material modifying factors have been applied to demonstrate "reasonable prospects of eventual economic extraction" by open pit, drill, blast, truck & shovel methods. Process recovery is planned to be by crush, optical sort, deslime and DMS recovery at a 2Mtpa (million tonnes per annum) throughput. Factors applied are tabulated (see Table 3 in link below). Mineral resources are not mining reserves and do not yet have demonstrated economic viability.
ABOUT THE JAMES BAY PROJECT
The James Bay Pegmatite swarm is located 10km south of the Eastmain River and 100 kilometers east of James Bay. The property is accessible by paved road from the James Bay Road which cuts through the property close to the 381km road marker on the highway Route/109 from Val d'Or, Quebec, Canada. Val d'Or is approximately 526km westward from Montreal, Quebec. A large, multi-service truck stop is located at marker 381. Discovered in the 1960's and then known as the Cyr property the site consists of a swarm of 33 pegmatite dykes that belong to the rare-element 'class', the LCT (Li-Cs- Ta) 'family' and the albite-spodumene 'type' per the classification by Cerny (1991). Two new major pegmatite dykes have been discovered in this current campaign as well as smaller swarms eastward of the known extents. The mineralised pegmatite is open at depth and to the east. The lithium bearing mineral contained in the pegmatites is spodumene LiAl (Si2O6), a member of the pyroxene group of minerals. The pegmatite swarms have dip direction ~N 125 degrees E., dip steeply at ~60 degrees and form a corridor of discontinuous dykes about ~4km in length and ~300m wide. This outcrop is to about 15-20m above the surrounding muskeg/swamp.
This phase of drilling and mineral resource estimation is complete. Feasibility studies are ongoing and the James Bay Project Notice has been submitted to both the Federal Government of Canada and the Quebec Government for determination.
To view tables and figures, please visit:
http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/D09FLNU8
About Galaxy Resources Limited
Galaxy Resources Limited (ASX:GXY) (OTCMKTS:GALXF) is an international S&P / ASX 200 Index company with lithium production facilities, hard rock mines and brine assets in Australia, Canada and Argentina. It wholly owns and operates the Mt Cattlin mine in Ravensthorpe Western Australia, which is currently producing spodumene and tantalum concentrate, and the James Bay lithium pegmatite project in Quebec, Canada.
Galaxy is advancing plans to develop the Sal de Vida lithium and potash brine project in Argentina situated in the lithium triangle (where Chile, Argentina and Bolivia meet), which is currently the source of 60% of global lithium production. Sal de Vida has excellent potential as a low cost brine-based lithium carbonate production facility.
Lithium compounds are used in the manufacture of ceramics, glass, and consumer electronics and are an essential cathode material for long life lithium-ion batteries used in hybrid and electric vehicles, as well as mass energy storage systems. Galaxy is bullish about the global lithium demand outlook and is aiming to become a major producer of lithium products.
Share Purchase Plan Oversubscribed
Adelaide, Dec 4, 2017 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Investigator Resources Limited ( ASX:IVR ) (the Company) is pleased to announce that that the Share Purchase Plan (SPP), announced on 9 November 2017, has closed oversubscribed as a result of strong support from its shareholders.
Applications in excess of $1.18M were received and subject to cleared funds the Directors will scale-back applications. As a result of the proposed scale-back, SPP subscribers will receive approximately 84.38% of the number of SPP Shares applied for.
Up to 45,454,545 fully paid ordinary shares were offered under the SPP at an issue price of $0.022 each to raise $1,000,000 before costs (SPP Shares). Subscribers to the SPP were also offered one free attaching option, exercisable at $0.035 each on or before 31 December 2020, for every one SPP Share subscribed for under the SPP (SPP Options), as approved by Shareholders at the Company's Annual General Meeting held on 30 November 2017. The Company's intention is for the SPP Options to be listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) subject to meeting ASX listing requirements. The SPP Options were offered under a prospectus issued on 9 November 2017.
Allotment of the SPP Shares and SPP Options is scheduled for Thursday 7 December 2017 and refunds will be provided to SPP subscribers by cheque and mailed to their registered address as soon as practicable.
The proceeds from the SPP will be used to advance the Company's exploration projects, primarily to explore for resources extensions of the Paris silver deposit and satellite silver targets with IP geophysics and drilling. Drilling is scheduled to commence this week.
The Board of Directors wishes to thank all Shareholders for their ongoing support.
About Investigator Resources Ltd
Investigator Resources Limited (ASX:IVR) is a metals explorer with a focus on the opportunities for greenfields silver-lead, copper-gold and other metal discoveries in South Australia.
The Company's priority is progressing the development pathway for the Paris silver project with the preparation of a pre-feasibility study. The Paris Mineral Resource Estimate is 9.3Mt @ 139g/t silver and 0.6% lead, comprising 42Moz of contained silver and 55kt of contained lead, at a 50g/t silver cut-off. The resource has been categorised with an Indicated Resource estimate of 4.3Mt @ 163g/t silver and 0.6% lead for 23Moz contained silver and 26kt contained lead, and an Inferred Resource: 5.0Mt @ 119g/t silver and 0.6% lead for 19Moz contained silver and 29kt contained lead.
The Company has applied an innovative strategy that has developed multiple ideas and targets giving Investigator first-mover status. These include: the Paris silver discovery; recognition of other epithermal fields and the associated potential for porphyry copper-gold of Olympic Dam age; extending the ideas developed at Paris-Nankivel and using breakthrough government Magneto-Telluric surveying to rejuvenate targeting with the Maslins IOCG target as the next priority drill target.
Minister for International Trade, Greg Hands and Lord Faulkner, UK Trade Envoy to Taiwan, attended the launch of a vital new trade link from the UK to the Far East in Friday - when the UK's only direct flight to Taipei left Gatwick for the first time.
The majority of UK airfreight is exported in the hold of long haul passenger aircraft and this four times a week China airlines service will provide both UK and Taiwanese businesses with the fastest access to both markets, in addition to carrying business and leisure passengers.
According to the UK Government, approximately 300 UK companies are currently located in Taiwan in financial and business services, ICT, telecommunications, infrastructure, environmental technology, creative industries and marine industries, with around 180 Taiwanese companies currently based in the UK.
The UK is seen by Taiwan as a world leader in the creative industries and cultural and educational links are growing with approximately 30% of all Taiwanese who study overseas - around 8000 students - doing so in the UK. Taiwanese tourism to the UK has also risen sharply since the lifting of the visa regime for visits of under six months in 2009.
The China Airlines service is the latest in Gatwicks flourishing 60+ strong network the worlds largest for a single runway airport and one that will soon be followed by new services to Buenos Aires, Chicago and Austin in the New Year.
Guy Stephenson, Chief Commercial Officer, Gatwick Airport, said: We welcome China Airlines to Gatwick for the launch of this new service that will provide a vital link between the UK and Taiwan at a critical time in our economic history. The new route will boost trade between our two enterprising economies and help our businesses to get goods to market as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The airport is increasingly connecting the UK to more and more long haul destinations across the globe and our 60+ long haul network now includes destinations in China, the Far East, Africa, South America and across the US.
International Trade Minister, Greg Hands said: This renewed direct flight between London and Taipei is another vote of confidence in the British economy, and the growing trade links between the UK and Taiwan. I know well the huge opportunities Taiwans vibrant economy presents to British businesses and this flight will make it even easier for firms looking to satisfy the growing Taiwanese demand for quality British goods and services.
Roger Han, VP of Europe for China Airlines said: Were delighted to be back in the UK this year, with the inaugural flight marking the ease of travel between the UK and Taiwan.
As the only non-stop service between the two countries, we want to highlight to travellers the benefits to travelling to Taipei, for business or leisure purposes. In addition, our extensive route network offers destinations throughout Asia and onward to Australia for British travellers to enjoy.
UK Trade Envoy to Taiwan, Lord Faulkner said: Im delighted by the reintroduction of direct flights from London to Taipei. Im a veteran traveller to Taiwan and have been convinced of the huge potential for both economies to benefit from better trade links for some time. Personally I can vouch for the immediate impact on business, as I will be a leading a business delegation over in January and am thrilled we can add some precious hours to our itinerary.
President Muhammadu Buhari and his Ivorian counterpart Alassane Drame Ouattara Wednesday called on Togolese political stakeholders namely the opposition and ruling regime to work towards a solution in order to solve the ongoing political instability before it escalates and puts the region into danger.
Both leaders met on the sidelines of EU-Africa summit in Abidjan to discuss the political crisis which has begun since August 19 and caused the death of over 15 people and an influx of refugees in Ghana.
We must have a solution in Togo. The friends of the opposition and authorities must talk to them on the steps to jointly take to achieve stability. They must work towards gaining the trust of each other.
There will be regional consequences for instability in Togo and this will surely come at a cost to development, President Buhari said.
The region and the African Union (AU) have been closely looking at the crisis unfold. President Buhari received last week Togo President Faure Gnassingbe who also doubles as the Chairperson the regional economic bloc (ECOWAS).
On a visit to President Ouattara also last week, President Gnassingbe indicated that he was opened for dialogue and expected the opposition to make a forward move.
A coalition of 14 opposition parties have risen against the President who has been in power for 12 years after taking over from his father who ruled for 38 years.
They demand the reinstatement of presidential two-term limit.
Ghana and Guinea are mediating the crisis for a genuine dialogue to take place early next month.
The US military has received a go-ahead from the government of Niger fly drones over sub-Saharan country in a region dogged by terror groups.
The agreement between two parties was sealed last week according to the Voice of America (VOA) citing Pentagon spokeswoman, Army Major Audricia Harris.
The government of Niger and the U.S. stand firm in working together to prevent terrorist organizations from using the region as a safe haven. For operational security reasons, I will not comment on specific military authorities, Harris told VOA.
The announcement comes nearly two month after four American soldiers and four of their Nigerian counterparts plus their interpreter were killed in a militant attack on October 4, near the village of Tongo Tongo.
The men died after members of a U.S. Special Operations Task Force accompanied 30 Nigerien forces on a reconnaissance mission from the capital, Niamey, to an area near Tongo Tongo, were attacked after meeting with local leaders.
The US military has been assisting the Nigerien army to gather intelligence, to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions.
American forces currently man a drone base in the central city of Agadez but the pilotless aircrafts are only used for surveillance, reports say.
Jihadist movements have gathered steam in the Sahel region where Libyan arms have been circulating following fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 in a NATO-backed revolution.
Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania and Mali have formed the Sahel G5 group to combat terrorism in their territories and at their borders.
The African Development Bank (AdfB) has agreed to allocate 150 million euro for the Cameroonian government and its partners in the construction of Nachtigal dam, 65 km north of Yaounde expected to produce 420 megawatt.
The future dam will be built on Sanaga river already receiving two other dams.
The Cameroonian government is teaming up with Frances Electricite de France and World Bank subsidiary, SFI, for the project to cost a total of 1.05 billion euro.
The three partners will operate under Nachtigal Hydro Power Company (NHPC), an umbrella company regrouping the three.
Construction works of the future dam will start next year and energy production is slated for 2022.
The project will help the Cameroonian government increase the national electricity accessibility by 30 per cent.
Around 48 per cent of the countrys population has access to energy despite the fact that central African country accounts for the third Southern Saharan country with hydroelectric energy capacity, 12,000 megawatt.
2014, was a different era all together for BJP, they won with majority and people supported them for change, but within three years of BJP ruling, the anger against government started mounting. BJPs own voters turned against them and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had to go through lots of criticism. While BJPs rivals, especially in the Hindi heartland, were busy carving and cubing data on caste equations. The opposition, this time, is well placed and planned to give befitting reply to BJP and Modis every claim. Earlier Narendra Modis rallies used to be packed with audiences to know how he will bring Achhe Din. The more his rivals asked the electorate not to trust him, the more Modi talked about development. But entire picture changed now as the voters have stopped trusting Modi and his development and Achhe Din promises. The rallies are going with empty chairs. BJP and its leaders resorted to all sorts of foul language, they have nothing to claim or show the promises that they delivered. Meer attack on Nehru-Gandhi and Congress has flopped and people are not ready to buy Modis jumlas. The anger against BJP is very much evident in Gujarat. The inescapable conclusion seems to be that, in 2014, Modi had a better narrative than his opponents. To the electorate, pushed against the wall by a non-performing government at the Centre, Modis promise of better days made more sense than apocalyptic fear of riots.
BJPs early campaign script for 2017 Assembly polls promised to take off from where Modi had left in 2014. There seemed to be, despite media reports of social engineering and a soft Hindutva line, a renewed and refreshing focus on development. In early January, BJPs campaign language was one of hope, aspiration, fight against black money and a call to rise above caste equations in a mind bogglingly complex demographic. Cut to February. BJPs tone has become angry. There are fewer calls for development. The calls to rise above caste and community equations have lessened. From a positive campaign in early January, it has turned overwhelmingly negative. Leave alone his generals; even Modi seems to have abandoned politics of hope and aspiration for invective rhetoric. Whereas, earlier he would mainly ignore rivals and focus on transformative oratory, of late he replaced it with a personalised campaign against Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi. He invented an acronym, S-C-A-M (SP, Congress, Akhilesh and Mayawati) and asked voters to teach them a lesson. As the days are nearing in Gujarat, Modi and Shah had gone insane with their language; Modi questioning the birth of Indira and Rajiv and Shah calling former PM a Namuna (sample). These are people left with no constructive subject; Gujarat residents were fooled for 15 years trusting Modi but somewhere his shift from Gujarat to Delhi, has cost him a lot. Moreover, BJP still has leadership crises; there is no prominent face like Modi in his party.
Forget about Gujarat, but BJP leaders across the country have foot in mouth on various occasions. BJP MLA Sangeet Som was caught showing video clips of Muzaffarnagar riots, Amit Shah promised anti-Romeo squads, slammed SP and Congress for dynasty politics and held a last-minute mollification meeting with Jats of western UP to address their concerns. The Jats, a crucial BJP vote bank, are widely reported to be disillusioned and angry with the party. In short, BJP seems to have faltered on their strength. Instead of presenting the electorate with a simple yet convincing narrative, they are desperately searching for a better story to trump the one told by Akhilesh. They have been reduced to making the same mistake which Modis rivals did in 2014 run an anti-campaign.
BJPs problem is that notebandi or demonetisation happened at a very wrong time for UP. What we are witnessing now is the second stage where the initial euphoria over fight against black money has been replaced by voter anger at the decimation of the informal economy. This will change, for sure. All metrics suggest that India will witness a V-shaped recovery in the third stage. But till that happens, the job losses and contraction of rural economy will have its repercussions and BJP is feeling the heat. Assuaging the anger of voters, who appear willing to teach BJP a lesson, isnt easy in such a short amount of time. The early campaign language of aspiration of hope has therefore turned into one of desperation for BJP. In every assembly election after 2014, Modi hit the campaign trail well after other party leaders had got into the act. This is not the case in Gujarat. Shah, too, formally kick-started the party campaign from Vallabhbhai Patels birthplace, Karamsad. This may have happened for several reasons. First, Modi did not groom his replacement as Gujarat chief minister. Consequently, his shadow still looms across the state. Second, the local leadership failed to tackle the Patidar agitations, who continue to rage against the administration since mid-2015 demanding reservations in government jobs and education. The Prime Minister might have reminded the audience about the surgical strike ordered by his government in September 2016 on terror camps across the Line of Control in Kashmir after an attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri, and compared the response to the one after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. Modi said that the election in his home state is a contest between development and dynastic politics. Modi also hit out at Congress leaders, including the Congress vice-president, over allegations of impropriety in the Rafale fighter aircraft deal. Blaming the Congress for everything, Modi has started and ended his political parries but this time the opposition was equally strong to expose his claims.
Finally, Dalit anguish, in response to the ugly incident in Una in July 2016, has not been addressed. This will be a test for BJP as they cannot take for granted the votes of business community and Patidars. Also AAP is in the fray. Although AAP does not have winning chance but it will divide the vote. This time BJP has failed to disjoint Congress. Rahul Gandhi not only has gained maturity but become very aggressive in Gujarat, people have once again shown acceptance for the Congress.
The two-phase elections to the 182-member Gujarat assembly will be held on 9 and 14 December and the results will be declared on 18 December.
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With few days to go for Gujarat assembly polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a jibe at Congress party saying that Congress presidential election is rigged and criticised the party for following dynasty politics. He took potshots at Congress and termed Rahul Gandhis expected elevation to Congress president as Aurangazeb Raj. Modi has always been known for making mockery of the Congress party prior to every election. Often he uses unparliamentary language against opposition party to gain an upper hand over them. While addressing a rally at Dharampur, Modi said that Congress does not have integrity and one family has been looting India for decades.
He criticised the Congress for adopting divide and rule policy and said that the party is following the footsteps of British and dividing the country on communal lines. He attacked Rahul Gandhi for calling GST Gabbar Singh Tax. The PM went a step further by stating that former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had covered her face while addressing a rally at Morbi in Gujarat. Even BJP president Amit Shah is not far behind when it comes to attacking Congress over various issues. Shah had referred Manmohan Singh as Mauni baba. He added that Singh used to undertake foreign tours but people remained unaware about it. Shah said that Congress lacks youth leaders and hence, have outsourced their leadership to divide votes on the basis of caste and communalism.
Turkey Confiscating Christian Property, Prohibiting Christians From Worshiping
St. Gabriel Assyrian Monastery, Tur Abdin, Turkey, established 397 A.D. ( AINA) The government of Turkey is now confiscating Christian property and prohibiting Christians worshipping in their churches, which have also been confiscated. This is happening in certain areas of Turkey, but soon it will be widespread. Here is the report: The severe persecution and widespread "hatred" that Christians and other minorities experience in Turkey has been detailed in a report by a U.S.-based nonprofit international policy council and think tank. The Gatestone Institute wrote in a report released Monday that Christians are persecuted by government officials and are severely abused by the public on social media. It listed a number of articles, such as one from August 2017 in the Armenian-Turkish weekly Agos, which reported that "Armenian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians have not been able to worship in their churches for the last three years."
"This is because virtually the entire town -- and all Christian properties belonging to the indigenous Armenian, Assyrian (Syriac), Chaldean and Protestant communities -- was included in an expropriation plan adopted in March 2016 by the Turkish cabinet," it pointed out. "Among the Christian properties expropriated are the Armenian Catholic, the Chaldean Mor Petyun and the Armenian Surp Giragos churches." What is more, even Muslims who have refused to shun Christians or Kurds have been targeted, the think tank said. "For instance, a 76-year-old Muslim grandmother in Diyarbakir who is active in a Kurdish political movement has been harassed by Turkish police for being a 'hidden Armenian,' simply because she reads the Bible as well as the Quran," Gatestone reported. Christian pastors have been imprisoned, such as the case of American Pastor Andrew Brunson, who was arrested last October. Watchdog groups, such as the American Center for Law and Justice, have accused the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of keeping him in prison without any cause. Turkish officials finally announced the charges against Brunson at the end of August, however, accusing him of "gathering state secrets for espionage, attempting to overthrow the Turkish parliament and government, and to change the constitutional order." The Gatestone report noted that Yazidis, Alevis and women in the region have also been abused by Turkish authorities, while dozens of Kurdish journalist have been imprisoned. "This hatred of Christians and Kurds in Turkey is not restricted to government officials. It is widespread among the public, as well, and expressed extensively on social media," Gatestone explained. It pointed to Twitter abuse, where Armenians and grandchildren of survivors of the 1914 Armenian Christian genocide are called "infidels," "vile and treacherous," with some saying that all Armenians "must die." "The situation of minorities in Turkey and their persecution by Turkey -- a member of NATO and perpetual candidate for EU membership -- must be told as often and as loudly as possible," the report urged in conclusion. Amnesty International has slammed Erdogan's government as well, accusing the president of having a "human rights meltdown" after the arrest of the group's Turkey director Idil Eser. "This is not a legitimate prosecution," Salil Shetty, Amnesty's secretary general, said in a statement in July following the arrest. "This is a politically motivated persecution that charts a frightening future for rights in Turkey."
Qatar Airways has gained accreditation to the highest level of IATAs Environmental Assessment programme (IEnvA), becoming the first Middle East airline, and the fifth worldwide, to achieve IEnvA Stage 2.
Qatar Airways group chief executive, Akbar Al Baker, (left) was presented with the certificate by IATA director general and chief executive Alexandre de Juniac, during Mr Al Bakers inaugural meeting as the new chair-elect of IATAs board of governors in Geneva on 1 December.
Qatar Airways initiatives include a systematic approach to aviation fuel efficiency, which has cut its fuel use by 1,800 tonnes fuel for example by optimising drinking water upload and reducing the use of engines while taxing on arrival at Hamad International Airport.
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A 33-year-old Birmingham man has been arrested and charged with sexual abuse of a child.
The Jefferson County Sheriff's Office announced charges Monday against Armando Torres Escobar. Chief Deputy Randy Christian said deputies were called on Aug. 4 to a Pinson Valley home to investigate the reported sex abuse.
The girl had gone to her mother and told her that a family friend had been engaging in inappropriate sexual contact with her, Christian said. Sheriff's detectives immediately launched their investigation.
On Nov. 29, Escobar contacted investigators through his attorney and agreed to turn himself in. He did so the following day, and was booked into the Jefferson County Jail to await formal charges.
On Friday, the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office issued warrants formally charging Escobar with two counts of sexual abuse of a child under 12, and one count of sexual abuse by force.
He remains in the jail with bonds totaling $150,000.
A man is dead in east Alabama and a Georgia teen in custody after a weekend shooting in Cherokee County.
Sheriff Jeff Shaver late Sunday night said the homicide happened overnight Saturday at a home in the Salem community. Deputies and investigators responded to the home where they found the victim - described only as a white male - with a gunshot wound to the head.
Cherokee County Coroner Jeremy Deaton pronounced the man dead at the scene.
Shaver said sheriff's office investigators assigned to the Major Crimes Unit, as well as coroner's officials and the Jacksonville State University Center for Applied Forensics, processed the crime scene.
The suspect - 19-year-old Matthew Gonzalez - was taken into custody early Sunday morning by the Georgia State Patrol on a DUI charge. Cherokee County Chief Investigator Josh Summerford and Investigator Michael Green interviewed Gonzalez at the Paulding County Sheriff's Office in Georgia, Shaver said.
In addition to the DUI, Gonzalez, of Cedartown, Gal., was charged by Georgia troopers with violating the open container law, driving without a license and cited for a taillight violation. He was booked into the Paulding County Jail at 4:07 a.m., and remains jailed on bonds totaling $2,466.50.
Shaver said Gonzalez is charged with capital murder in Alabama and will be extradited back to Cherokee County. No additional information was released.
A Chilton County man is charged with felony corpse abuse in connection with the case of a Clanton mother whose body was found in Shelby County last month.
Anthony Scott Germany, 42, of Jemison, was arrested by the Shelby County Sheriff's Office on Friday, according to court records made public Monday. He is charged with abusing the corpse of Melissa Ann Cleckler, whose body was found Nov. 2 on Egg and Butter Road near Oak Drive in Columbiana.
Authorities have said the 27-year-old victim's body had been at the location for a couple of days before the discovery. Her remains were sent to the Alabama Department of Forensic Science for autopsy. Investigators have not disclosed how she was killed but the case is being investigated as a homicide.
No one has been charged with causing Cleckler's death.
Sheriff John Samaniego on Nov. 21 announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to the person or people responsible for Cleckler's death. Samaniego was offering a $5,000 reward for information to help bring the case to a close. Crime Stoppers is offering an additional $5,000.
The arrest warrant for Germany said the crime happened on Oct. 18. It said he did "abuse the corpse of Melissa Ann Cleckler by knowingly treating the corpse in a way that outraged ordinary family sensibilities" by removing the corpse from a house, transporting it by vehicle and dumping it on Egg and Butter Road.
The charging documents do not list the address of the house. It wasn't immediately clear whether anyone else has been charged in connection with the case.
This story will be updated if more information is released by the sheriff's office.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a ruling issued today, refused to hear the appeal of Alabama Death Row inmate Christopher Anthony Floyd, who says prosecutors struck 10 of 11 blacks from the jury pool at his trial.
Floyd appealed earlier this year to the U.S. Supreme Court after a ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court last year.
The Alabama Supreme Court's decision came despite a previous U.S. Supreme Court order that told the Alabama court to take another look at Floyd's case in light of a similar case in Georgia - Foster v. Chatman. In the 2016 appeal of that case, SCOTUS reversed a conviction for discriminatory jury selection involving prosecutors' striking blacks from the jury pool.
However, the Alabama Supreme Court in November 2016 concluded that the Foster case did not require a change in the outcome of Floyd's case, and again affirmed Floyd's conviction. Floyd then turned again to SCOTUS.
In 2005, Floyd was convicted in Houston County for the murder and robbery of Waylon Crawford. Floyd was sentenced to death.
In selecting the jury for Floyd's case, the prosecutor and Floyd's lawyers exercised a total of 36 peremptory challenges, according to the state supreme court order. Prosecutors used its 18 challenges to remove 10 of 11 African-American venire members and 12 of 18 female venire members. Floyd's lawyers removed one African-American and seven female venire members. The final jury consisted of six white male jurors, six white female jurors, two alternate white male jurors and one alternate African-American female juror.
Floyd, who is white, did not object to the jury based on Batson v. Kentucky-- a previous U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting racial discrimination in jury selection, court records show.
In Monday's rejection of Floyd's appeal, SCOTUS did not render an opinion. Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, with which Associate Justice Stephen Breyer concurs, issued a statement.
"Although the unique context of Floyd's case counsels against review by this Court, I find the underlying facts sufficiently troubling to note that in the ordinary course, facts like these likely would warrant a court's intervention," Sotomayor wrote. "During voir dire, the Houston County District Attorney's Office exercised peremptory challenges against 10 out of 11 qualified African-American venire members, and used 12 of its 18 strikes against women. The prosecutor also marked the letter "'B,' as in black," next to the name of each potential African-American juror."
"That we have not granted certiorari should not be construed as complacence or an affirmance of all of the reasoning of the courts below," Sotomayor wrote. "The unusual posture in which Floyd raised his Batson and J. E. B. claims warrants caution in the exercise of the Court's review here. Yet, courts reviewing claims in circumstances like these must be steadfast in identifying, investigating, and correcting for improper bias in the jury selection process. Such discrimination "'casts doubt on the integrity of the judicial process,' and places the fairness of a criminal proceeding in doubt."
The Alabama Attorney General's office and Alabama Department of Environmental Management have filed a complaint against the Utilities Board of the city of Daphne, alleging that the utility did not properly report sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) to the department, failed to meet its water monitoring requirements and did not properly notify the public after spills.
The complaint was filed Nov. 16, about two months after environmental group Mobile Baykeeper sent Daphne Utilities a notice of intent to sue under the Clean Water Act for vastly under-reporting sewage overflows from its wastewater treatment plant on Main Street in Daphne.
A public relations firm representing Daphne Utilities issued a news release saying the utility would work with ADEM to address the issues in the complaint.
"Once this notice was received, Daphne Utilities' management reached out to ADEM, in a show of good faith, of its willingness to cooperate with its regulatory agency," the statement reads.
"As a government body, funded by rate payers, Daphne Utilities will always work to ensure compliance with all state and federal regulations and to cooperate with those agencies to correct any deficiencies."
The ADEM complaint, filed this month in Baldwin County Circuit Court, alleges the following:
The utility "discharged pollutants from the aforementioned point source, Outfall Number 0011, to the Blakeley River in violation of the limitations established in the Permit."
The utility "failed to collect and analyze samples in accordance with the Permit requirements."
On three occasions, ADEM said the utility did not meet its requirement to inform the department within five days of a sewer overflow.
The utility "failed to submit accurate SSO Reports to the Department within the timeframe required," by later revising initial submitted reports on how much was spilled and which water body was the "ultimate destination" of the overflow material.
The utility on three occasions did not notify the county health department of sewer overflows, as required by law.
Thirteen SSO reports did not detail any efforts to notify the public of the overflows, another requirement of the utility's permit.
The state complaint cited sewer overflows that took place as far back as July 2013 and as recently as Oct. 22.
The complaint may throw a wrench in the Mobile Baykeeper Clean Water Act case, which has not yet been filed.
Any citizen can file lawsuits for Clean Water Act violations, unless the federal or state agencies are "diligently prosecuting" the same violations, according to one legal scholar. The required 60-day notice of intent to sue gives state agencies time to intervene in Clean Water Act cases.
The news release from Daphne Utilities said ADEM's actions in this case "generally precludes any lawsuit by any environmental group related to the same issues."
Casi Callaway of Mobile Baykeeper said her group was not necessarily blocked from pursuing action against Daphne Utilities, but that the group was evaluating its options going forward.
"We do not trust ADEM to drive this at all," Callaway said. "There have been years of violations and years of bad acting and ADEM only looked at them when we filed the 60-day notice of intent to sue."
Callaway said the utility's decision to under-report or improperly report sewage spills was especially troubling, adding that the utility would have faced few legal consequences if it had simply reported accurately where, when and how much was spilled.
"Every time there's a spill that reaches the water, the public is at risk," she said. "If the public knows about it, they have the opportunity to protect themselves. If they don't, they don't.
"They're putting people's health at risk for no reason."
Daphne Utilities said in the news release that it has made some changes since Mobile Baykeeper filed its notice of intent to sue, including 24-hour staffing at the wastewater treatment plant, upgraded monitoring and alarm systems and additional operator training.
"Following the accusations by the environmental group, Daphne Utilities' board of directors immediately initiated an independent investigation of these allegations and to further demonstrate the board's intent to fully cooperate with ADEM," the release said. "Daphne Utilities, its board, and its management are fully committed to correcting any problems found during this independent investigation."
Daphne Utilities' PR firm said the utility would not have any additional comments on this case due to the ongoing legal actions.
The Alabama Ethics Commission voted today to set aside fines against three candidates and three political action committees that were late in filing campaign finance reports this year.
The Legislature passed a law in 2015 setting up the civil fines for late filers. This year is the first election cycle for the fines to be in effect.
After hearing descriptions of what happened in each of the six cases, the majority of the commission agreed that it was appropriate to drop the fines.
"It seems like in all these cases a lesson has been learned," Commissioner Frank C. "Butch" Ellis of Columbiana said.
Commissioner Charles Price said, "It's not like these folks are not trying to comply."
The commission voted 4-1 to drop the fines. Commissioner Beverlye Brady of Auburn voted against the motion.
Brady said she considered the circumstances unfortunate but did not think the commission had the authority to step into the role of the Legislature and "contort or change the law."
"I find that it's an awkward position to be in," Brady said.
Price noted that the Legislature included the right to appeal in the law.
The PACs that filed late were the Shelby Dems PAC, the Shelby County Republican Party and AL Lenders PAC.
The PACs eventually filed all the late reports.
At a courthouse square rally Sunday in Scottsboro, Frances Taylor spoke in support of Roy Moore after an invitation from organizers, in part, because she is a woman.
That was the rally's sales pitch from Chris Cox, the founder of Bikers for Trump - the event organizers whose rumbling motorcycles shattered the quiet of the largely deserted downtown area on a warm December afternoon.
Taylor's voice, Cox said before the rally, held special significance in light of the allegations of sexual misconduct made against Moore. Taylor is the president of the Alabama Federation of Republican Women.
Moore has repeatedly denied the allegations.
"We're the ones who have worked with him," Taylor said in an interview after the rally. "We have been in the campaign office with him. We've been in the chambers. We worked with him when he was on the (Alabama) Supreme Court. We have worked with him, we have been at church with him. We feel like we know him. He's not a stranger to us.
"This accusation doesn't fall in line with what we've seen and believed."
About 125 people attended the rally - most arriving on motorcycles - and virtually all supporting Moore in his bid to win the Alabama Senate special election on Dec. 12 against Democrat Doug Jones.
Moore was invited to attend and apologized in advance for his absence in a Sunday morning phone call, Cox said. Moore was campaigning in the southern part of the state on Sunday, Cox said, though his campaign announced no public events for Sunday.
Both Jones and Moore spoke at churches on Sunday morning while Jones took part in a fish fry in Tuscaloosa on Sunday afternoon.
"We're not going to use the pulpit to put people down. We're going to bring people together to talk about the issues." - Beulah Baptist Church pic.twitter.com/7IAaM1lVUV Doug Jones (@DougJones) December 3, 2017
A lone protestor attended the rally. Jenni Carter of Scottsboro, who said she was a Democrat supporting Jones, stood among the Trump supporters holding a "No Moore" sign above her head during the rally.
She caught the eye of state Rep. Ed Henry, another of the rally's speakers.
"Mitch McConnell is here today," Henry said from the stage. "Did y'all know it? He's got a sign right here that says 'No Moore.'"
He pointed at Carter as he spoke.
Henry also took the opportunity to criticize McConnell, the Senate majority leader who has said he believes Moore's accusers and called on him to exit the race. On Sunday, though, McConnell appeared to soften his position on Moore.
"I promise you, Mitch McConnell, the Democrats, the establishment Republicans, they do not want Roy Moore in Washington D.C. because they know full well he is going to be a light, a bright light, a very bright light in Washington D.C.," Henry said. "They will not be able to hide and he will expose them for the traitors and the cowards that they are."
After the rally, Henry tweeted a photo of Carter standing next to another female, who held a poster board that said, "He may be a pedophile but at least he's racist, right?"
In his tweet of the picture, Henry posted, "I bet the press makes it out like these people mattered."
I bet the press makes it out like these people mattered. pic.twitter.com/fFmQF7kDR2 Ed Henry (@Ed_Henry_HD9) December 3, 2017
"I am against Roy Moore," Carter said. "I do not believe he ought to be in the Senate. It's not a Republican or a Democratic problem. It's the fact that he's a liar. He hides behind his Bible. He goes upon his moral principles - he does not have any moral principles. Anybody who is a sexual predator does not belong representing the state of Alabama."
As Carter spoke with reporters, Gerald Miller of Jackson County stood about 20 feet away and shouted, "Democrat baby killer!"
Miller cited his opposition to abortion as cause for his protest of her protest.
"She can protest all she wants to," he said. "She has the right as an American. But she's a baby killer. All Democrats are baby killers. They believe in the baby-killing Democratic Party."
The brief conflict lasted only a few seconds before the rally began and never escalated to any level of concern. Scottsboro police provided security at the rally.
Also attending the rally was Tony Goolesby, an organizer of Moore's rally last week in Henagar who was caught on video shoving a cameraman attempting to video Moore's arrival. Miller said Goolesby was his cousin.
From the stage, both Taylor and Henry made the case for voters to go to the polls and cast their support for Moore.
Afterward, asked if she could understand hesitancy to vote for Moore in the aftermath of the allegations, Taylor said those allegations do not equate with the Roy Moore she knows.
"I understand that terrible things happen to people," she said. "I absolutely understand and I support those men and women who have had something terrible happen to them. But that is not the person we have worked with. It's not as if we've worked with him for a year or two years. We've had 30 years with him and that is a substantial block of time.
"It's hard to take that and say, there's that (dismissing years of knowledge of Moore because of the allegations). The fear is once that sort of thing happens, then everybody becomes guilty - everybody. And that's not the person we see, that's not the person that we know."
Forty-seven year-old Gandhi family scion has emerged as the main challenger to PM Narendra Modi for 2019 polls.
Indias oldest political party, the Indian National Congress, has the decks cleared for electing its new president, Gandhi family scion and current vice president, Rahul Gandhi.
No one challenged his presidency bid on Monday. Forty-seven-year-old Rahul was nominated by former Indian president and senior Congress leader Pranab Mukherjee and former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Flanked by senior party leaders like Kamal Nath, Moti Lal Vora and Sheila Dixit among others, Gandhi arrived to the beating of drums at party headquarters 24 Akbar Road, in the capital New Delhi on Monday.
Rahul has been the darling of Congress men and Congress women. Today is just one more step in his quest for serving the people of the country by Manmohan Singh, ex-PM
#IndiaWithRahulGandhi was the top trending topic on Twitter in India, as the 47-year-old filed his bid for the top job.
When he formally takes over, he will become the 16th president of the Congress party succeeding his mother, Sonia Gandhi, who served as president of the party for 19 long years.
Three members of the Congress party have been Prime Ministers, including Rahuls father Rajiv, grandmother Indira and great-grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru.
The Indian National Congress party has ruled India for most of the years since independence from British colonial rule in 1947. It was formed in 1885 to foster opposition to the British Raj (rule).
But the party has been in a state of decline for the past few years.
Enormous challenges
With his elevation, Rahul Gandhi faces enormous challenges. His party is facing its biggest crisis since Independence.
Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah have vowed to make India Congress-mukt (Congress-free).
Modi took a dig at Rahuls elevation on Monday at al election rally in the western state of Gujarat.
I congratulate the Congress on their Aurangzeb Raj. For us, the well-being of the people matters and 125 crore [1.25 billion] Indians are our high command, Modi said, obliquely equating Rahul to medieval Muslim ruler Aurangzeb.
The Congress party had delivered its worst performance to date in the 2014 general elections when the party was reduced to 48 members in the 545-seat parliament. They have also lost many state elections since then.
Saeed Naqvi, senior commentator and analyst, said Rahuls elevation was on the cards for a long while.
Naqvi said that there were distinct opinions about Rahul one based on his public utterances while those who met him privately painted a different picture.
A leader has got to stand on a stage and connect with the public. That electricity, that charisma he does not have but he might develop these over a period of time.
So far, his record is unsatisfactory, he said.
The party, however, is extremely confident in its leader. Congress leader and a former minister, Shashi Tharoor, described him as the renaissance man.
Rahul has been the darling of Congress men and Congress women. Today is just one more step in his quest for serving the people of the country, the former PM Singh said on Monday.
Senior Party leader Kapil Sibbal told Al Jazeera that Rahul has been extremely effective in countering the BJP and the party will rally behind him.
He worked briefly at a management consulting firm in London before being elected as Member of Parliament from the partys traditional Amethi constituency in 2004.
Rahul was born in 1970 to Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi. He has an MPhil degree from Cambridge Universitys Trinity College.
The 38th summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council starts on Monday with preliminary meetings, and comes as the blockade on Doha imposed by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates reaches six months.
Qatar has been accused of supporting and funding terrorism, charges it vehemently denies.
In June, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain imposed an air, sea and land blockade on Qatar, halting Qatar Airways operations.
Overall, 18 destinations in the region are now out of bounds for Qatar Airways, which has also been forced to close its offices in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The closure of Qatars only land border, with Saudi Arabia, means more of the countrys food has to be brought in by air.
Food was primarily imported from Dohas Gulf Arab neighbours before the shutdown, and is now sourced from Turkey and Iran.
Kuwait, which has played the role of the mediator, is hosting this years summit. Whether or not it will have a positive effect remains unclear.
The agenda of this years summit has not been made public, but there are expectations that the crisis will be at the forefront of discussions.
If your destabilisation is taking place and there is chaos already, I will not hesitate to declare a revolutionary government until the end of my term, warned firebrand Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in October, amid growing domestic opposition to his presidency.
The threat of suspending the countrys democratic constitution was just another iteration in Dutertes long-running flirtation with authoritarian rule. However, over the succeeding weeks, as the Southeast Asian country prepared to host world leaders for the East Asia Summit, the Filipino leader tried to downplay the provocative statement. He insisted that the threat wasnt final policy (yet), but, instead, just an exploration of various scenarios to address the countrys need for order and stability.
Yet this didnt prevent Dutertes supporters from openly calling for the suspension of the countrys democratic constitution in favour of an imperial presidency. On November 30, pro-Duterte civic organizations held rallies in major cities, where they advocated for an outright establishment of a revolutionary government.
Philippine democracy has never looked as brittle in recent memory, with a growing number of Filipinos brazenly expressing their profound disenchantment with democracy and embracing authoritarian fantasies in the person of Duterte. And whats happening in the Philippines is eerily echoed across emerging market democracies, ranging from India to Turkey and Indonesia.
Populist art of governance
Like any modern populist, Duterte has presented himself as the voice of the Filipino people, the knight in shining armour who shields the nation against criminals and foreign threats, and, without lacking a tinge of millenarianism, as the Philippines last hope for national salvation.
As Jan-Werner Muller argues in his latest book, What is Populism?, populists are inherently illiberal and, over the long run, risk sliding into full-fledged authoritarianism as they implement their vision of collective revival. This is precisely because of their exclusive claim to represent what French Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau termed as the general will namely, the collective interest of the people.
In Duterte's conspiratorial narrative, a cabal of oligarchs, liberal civic groups, insurgents and criminal syndicates are hell-bent on unseating him. by
For populists, Muller argues, they and only their supporters have monopoly on the true interest of society, while critics are automatically dismissed as ungrateful citizens or, even worse, treasonous elements opposed to change. Any opposition is dismissed and derided as a plot by the enemy of the republic.
Evidence-based and pluralistic public debate, which German philosopher Jurgen Habermas termed as communicative rationality, is supplanted by a more stridently us-versus-them struggle for the soul of the nation.
No wonder then, for instance, Duterte often lashes out at his critics, accusing them of hatching a destabilisation plot against his government in order to preserve an oligarchic status quo.
The tough-taking president often speaks with moral conviction, accusing his opponents of sabotaging his administrations key policies. In Dutertes conspiratorial narrative, a cabal of oligarchs, liberal civic groups, insurgents and criminal syndicates are hell-bent on unseating him.
Other democratically-elected populist leaders, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have often deployed similar language against their critics.
The upshot of populism is often the progressive emaciation of liberal institutions, which aim to curb the powers of political leaders based on the rule of law, and the principles of pluralism, which presume no single group or individual has monopoly on truth and public interest.
Autocratic nostalgia
Of crucial importance isnt so much Dutertes rhetoric, but the fact that a growing number of Filipinos are subscribing to what I call the strongman syndrome: the simplistic belief that a decisive leader with strong political will can single-handedly address complex 21st-century problems, which beset rapidly-developing nations like the Philippines.
According to the latest Pew Survey, 50 percent of Filipinos support autocratic rule in their country. In fellow, emerging market democracies such as Indonesia (52 percent) and India (55 percent), the majority support a strong leader who has little respect for democratic checks and balances.
Another, recent study, published earlier this year in the Journal of Democracy, shows that the majority of citizens in the Philippines, as in India and Turkey, prefer a strong leader who doesnt have to bother with elections at all. It is precisely within this context of autocratic nostalgia that thousands of Duterte supporters took to the streets of Metro Manila on November 30, beseeching the president to institute extraordinary measures to fix a failed [political] system.
Democracy has simply lost its currency in the imagination of too many people, gradually paving the way for fulfillment of most pernicious authoritarian fantasies. by
They called for, among other things, legislation of tough internal security measures against enemies of the state, increased spending on national security and law enforcement, as well as suspension of the democratic constitution in favour of a powerful presidency and a federal form of government.
To be fair, attendance at the pro-Duterte rally was relatively poor, with only a few thousand showing up. Also, in an apparent show of force, pro-democracy activists in the country held their own counter-rallies, accusing the Duterte administration of lurching towards full-fledged authoritarianism. More importantly, the powerful Philippine military has, so far, openly opposed the institution of a revolutionary government.
Yet, widespread autocratic nostalgia, as well as the landslide election and enduring popularity of populist leaders such as Duterte, underline growing dissatisfaction with liberal democracy across the post-colonial world. Democracy has simply lost its currency in the imagination of too many people, gradually paving the way for fulfillment of most pernicious authoritarian fantasies.
The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
In a no mans land along the Syria-Jordan border, an estimated 55,000 Syrians escaped the horrors of Syrias conflict only to languish, abandoned in the desert as one country after another evades responsibility for their safety and wellbeing. Some have been there since at least June 2016.
In a statement to the media on November 9, Jan Egeland, the United Nations humanitarian adviser on Syria, highlighted the complexity of the Syrians situation. Considering Jordans total refusal to provide aid across the border, he said, the UN with the help of Russia and the United States has finalised a plan that would provide aid from inside Syria. Inshallah soon, he said.
Inshallah soon is not good enough for the desperate people stranded there. Their situation is steadily deteriorating, as the winter cold sets in.
The Syrians are living in makeshift tents and mud huts in deplorable conditions in an informal camp known as Rukban, in a desert area just north of a raised sand barrier, or berm near the convergence of the Iraqi, Syrian, and Jordanian borders. They were trapped there when Jordan sealed the border following an attack on its soldiers there that was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) in June 2016.
In addition to denying Syrians the right to seek asylum, Jordans border closure has impeded delivery of life-saving humanitarian aid and severely restricted humanitarian agencies capacity to operate there. The last partial aid delivery was almost six months ago and reached only 35,000 people, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.
Jordan should not reject any Syrian seeking asylum at its border and send them back to face persecution or worse. by
On October 8, Jordan announced an end to even limited humanitarian assistance to Rukban from its territory. Its foreign affairs minister, Ayman Safadi, said that Rukban camp will never be a Jordanian responsibility. He said that aid must come from the Syrian side. The Syrian government itself has made no promises to deliver aid to the camp and has a long track record of blocking humanitarian assistance to opposition-held areas leaving people there to starve.
When aid groups have tried to deliver aid from government-held areas into rebel-held areas, in addition to the serious difficulties of getting the governments permission, they have experienced ongoing hostilities, removal of life-saving material from aid packages, inconsistent access, and attacks on humanitarian convoys.
We recently spoke to four residents at the berm by phone. Abu Ahmed, a refugee from Palmyra who arrived in the Rukban camp over a year and a half ago, described the chaos, poverty, and suffering that characterises life there. He said his wife has severe kidney problems, which he blamed on polluted water and the lack of adequate medical care.
She is in a lot of pain, he said. It doesnt go away. She is the mother of six, the youngest is only one and a half years old. If something happens to her, it will be a catastrophe for us.
About the closed border, he said, If my wife poses a national security threat, then you can cuff her when you let her in, but please let her in.
Other residents told us they had not had access to drinkable water for 15 days, resulting in diarrhoea and dehydration for children and adults. One resident said that the water is so salty, it is as though we are drinking from the Dead Sea.
Jordan should not reject any Syrian seeking asylum at its border and send them back to face persecution or worse. Tragically, at this point, the issue is not about fundamental principles, but rather about what, at a minimum, Jordan needs to do to prevent deaths in the desert. The immediate need is to allow life-saving aid to cross its border into Syria, but it should also allow in vulnerable individuals and those needing medical care. The plan by the UN, US and Russia to work on a cross-line delivery from Damascus should help to calm any concerns that Jordan has that it will be left to bear the responsibility for Rukban on its own.
Other countries with a stake in the conflict, such as the United States and Russia, also have a role in ensuring the safety and well-being of those at risk. However, international collective action has been consistently marred by diverging interests and backsliding on commitments, even for issues as noncontroversial as access to aid. This failure has spelt catastrophe for people on the ground, with Rukban as only one in a string of horrific examples.
Residents of Rukban need a place where they are safe where their children do not come under attack or starve to death. The US, Jordan and Russia should stop passing the buck and resolve the serious humanitarian crisis in Rukban camp now. The critical, immediate imperative is for Jordan to re-instate cross-border aid delivery and allow the most vulnerable people to enter the country. The absence of real political will and quick collective action is hampering any solution, and the clock is ticking.
The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
It comes amid an intensified conflict between Houthi rebels and pro-Saleh forces, who were allies before the ex-president called for dialogue with their rival, the Saudi-led coalition.
Yemens ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh has been killed in Sanaa, the radio station of the Houthi-controlled interior ministry said.
Footage circulating on social media on Monday appeared to display a body resembling Saleh, with one video showing how armed militiamen used a blanket to move the corpse into the back of a pick-up truck.
It comes amid an intensified conflict between Houthi rebels and pro-Saleh forces, who were allies before the ex-president called for dialogue with their rival, the Saudi-led coalition.
Al Jazeeras Marwan Bishara explains why Salehs death was revenge.
Refugees in Greece are attempting to find a secure hiding place aboard trucks, in the hopes of being driven onto one of the ferries bound for Italy.
The number of refugees trying to enter Europe via the Greek city of Patras has grown at least four-fold since borders were closed last January.
Living in abandoned warehouses, mostly single men from Pakistan and Afghanistan fight nightly battles with Moroccans and Algerians to find a way through into Italy.
They attempt to find a secure hiding place aboard a truck, in the hopes of being driven onto one of the ferries bound for Italy.
Al Jazeeras Jonah Hull reports exclusively from Patras, Greece.
Shafik says he is still considering running in 2018 presidential poll but that he will need to explore his bid further.
Ahmed Shafik, former Egyptian prime minister, says he is still considering running in next years presidential elections but that he will need to explore the option further.
Appearing on Egypts Dream TV channel on Sunday evening, Shafik denied that Egyptian authorities had kidnapped him, as was claimed by his family after he vanished upon his arrival in Cairo on Saturday.
Today I am here in the country, so I think I am free to deliberate further on the issue, to explore and go down and talk to people in the street so theres a chance now to investigate more and see exactly what is needed to feel out if this is the logical choice, Shafik said.
The presidential hopeful landed in the Egyptian capital on Saturday after he was deported from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where he found refuge in 2012 when he narrowly lost the presidential elections against Mohamed Morsi.
While in exile in Abu Dhabi, he was placed on trial in absentia in Egypt and found guilty of corruption charges. He was later acquitted, clearing a path for his potential return to his home country.
It is unclear why Shafik was deported from UAE, but commentators said he may have insulted his Gulf hosts by appearing in a video message, released by Al Jazeera, in which he said he was barred from leaving the country.
Shafik was planning to go on a European tour to campaign for his presidential bid among the Egyptian diaspora.
The UAE is a strong supporter of Egypts incumbent leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
After Shafiks disappearance upon his arrival in Egypt, family members feared he had been kidnapped by Egyptian authorities.
The 76-year old later denied this in his TV appearance on Sunday evening.
Dina Adly, Shafiks lawyer, said on Sunday evening that her client had checked into a hotel and was in good health.
I had a meeting with Shafik an hour ago at one of the hotels in New Cairo and confirmed his health, Adly wrote on Facebook.
He confirmed that his health was good and that he was not subjected to any investigations, she added, without mentioning the name of the hotel where she met Shafik.
It is unclear why Shafik was staying at the hotel and not at his familys residence.
No legal restrictions
A former air force commander, Shafik was prime minister for one month in 2011 during that years Arab Spring uprising.
On Friday, Egypts Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said he sees no legal restrictions that could prevent Shafik from running in next years elections against President Sisi.
I see no reason why he should not run. I say that as a layman. I know hes had some issues with the judiciary. I am not sure whether those have been resolved or not, Shoukry said in a meeting in Italy.
But in principle, he is free to represent himself to the electorate. As in any society, its up to the electorate to decide.
Shafik is not the only person planning to challenge Sisi in the presidential election. Khaled Ali, a prominent Egyptian rights lawyer, has also voiced his intent to contest the 2018 elections.
As the 38th Gulf Cooperation Council summit approaches, analysts question whether it can heal the current rift.
It remains unclear whether the upcoming Gulf Cooperation Council summit in Kuwait will have any positive effect on the ongoing fractures between Qatar and a number of Gulf states, analysts say, as the regional body gears into a symbolic rather than functional role.
The 38th summit approaches amid the backdrop of a six-month blockade on Qatar imposed by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, who have accused Doha of supporting and funding terrorism. Qatar has vehemently denied the allegations.
The GCC, a political and economic alliance of countries in the Arabian Peninsula, was established in 1981 to foster socioeconomic, security and cultural cooperation.
Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE gather every year to discuss cooperation and regional affairs.
While this years summit has been marred by questions on whether or not it would go ahead, GCC Secretary-General Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani has arrived in Kuwait and met Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah to discuss preparations.
According to diplomatic sources, foreign ministers of all six member states will meet on Monday in Kuwait City for a preliminary meeting.
The agenda of this years summit has not been made public, but there are expectations that the crisis will be at the forefront of discussions.
There is serious concern [about] the continuity of the crisis and its impact even on the blockading countries, said Mahjoob Zweiri, an associate professor at Qatar University with expertise on Gulf politics, adding that questions will be asked on how long the crisis will last.
Zweiri said that the desire to find a solution is emerging because of the fact that nothing has been achieved.
Qatar has rejected the demands put forth by the Arab quartet, who have also not achieved anything and are losing economically, he said.
War of media
Kuwait has played the role of mediator, but little progress has been made, and media incitement from the Arab quartet against Qatar has continued. Most of the provocation has come from UAE officials, whose government has made it a cybercrime for their citizens to show sympathy to Qatar, an offence that is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Saudi and Bahrain have similarly criminalised expressions of support for Qatar.
Last week, the Emirati head of security, Dhahi Khalfan, called for the headquarters of the Al Jazeera Media Network in Doha to be bombed.
The alliance must bomb the machine of terrorism the channel of ISIL, al-Qaeda and the al-Nusra front, Al Jazeera the terrorists, Khalfan tweeted.
UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash also used Twitter to accuse Qatar of playing a role in an attempt to save the Houthi militias in Yemen, at the same time as the alliance between the armed group and former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has deteriorated into clashes.
Qatars foreign affairs media director, Ahmed bin Saeed al-Rumaihi, rejected the claim, saying that it is unprecedented for an official source to declare something baseless and rooted in flimsy allegations.
If there is a desire or a good will for reconciliation, one of the things that should be stopped immediately is the war of media, Zweiri said.
If there is serious consideration for reconciliation, this should be stopped immediately as a goodwill gesture so that the environment of the summit can be positive.
Role of GCC today
Whether the GCC still has a relevant function and role in the region is questionable. Though it was created for the purpose of solidifying union ranks, the blockade imposed on Qatar by its neighbours has largely annulled these principles.
The Gulf states have in the past differed in their views on several issues that have unfolded in the region over the past two decades.
Luciano Zaccara, a Gulf politics researcher at Qatar University, says that the role of the GCC has been diminishing ever since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, with the six states illustrating various approaches to the war and its consequences.
This has been enhanced during the wave of protests that swept the Middle East in 2011, known as the Arab Spring, Zaccara noted.
The Arab Spring only stressed those diverse approaches to regional and internal threats, making very difficult for the members to agree on what was considered a priority in terms of threats and challenges and how to tackle them, he said, referencing the Yemen war, the Bahrain crisis and Syrias ongoing civil war.
This has shed light on Saudi Arabias dominant role within the GCC.
Saudi domination
In 2014, a rift between the GCC countries lasted eight months when Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain suspended ties with Doha over Qatars support for the Muslim Brotherhood a group the blockading countries labelled as a terrorist organisation.
Doha was accused of breaching the 2013 GCC security agreement and of harbouring hostile media, a reference to the Doha-based Al Jazeera network.
By then, Zaccara says, it was made clear that there was one state, Saudi Arabia, that was determined to impose its criteria on the rest of the councils states.
Referencing the current and ongoing crisis, Zaccara says that the rift has demonstrated the councils futility in determining what its priorities are, and how it tackles its challenges as a unit.
I would risk to say the GCC has no role to play nowadays.
Qatar has confirmed its participation in the upcoming summit, implying that Doha will not leave the GCC voluntarily, says Jocelyn Sage Mitchell, a political science professor at Northwestern University in Qatar.
That would be seen as provocative and would worsen a delicate situation. However, it is worth considering whether the council exists beyond a name any more, Mitchell told Al Jazeera.
Since its creation, the council has largely functioned as a protection mechanism for the rulers against internal threats, largely by banding together on a conservative path led by Saudi Arabia, she added.
However, Mitchell believes that the blockade has aided Qatar politically and socially.
The lessening of Saudi influence over Qatari domestic politics and society is an opportunity for the Qatari leadership to move forward on several important issues. We have already seen this movement in the permanent residency law, in increased protections for workers, and most recently with the appointment of four women to the Shura Council and a promise of legislative elections soon, she said.
Following the war in Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition of mostly Arab Sunni states launched an offensive against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, Oman was on the brink of being expelled from the council for not adhering to Saudi Arabias geopolitical agenda.
It is clear to me that as far as the GCC is not following the priorities set by Saudi Arabia, and to some extent the UAE there is no way the council would be effective if Qatar, and maybe Oman as well, are outside the council, Zaccara told Al Jazeera.
A GCC with five, four or even three states will just be an extension of Saudi policies, he added.
Future prospects
Nobody is satisfied with the current status quo, Zaccara said, and the GCC remains unable to make a move to resolve the crisis.
In this context, the GCC has proven its uselessness, Zaccara said.
He believes that the crisis, if prolonged, will not heavily affect Qatars economy. But Qatar cannot afford being blockaded forever, Zaccara added.
Even though the country [Qatar] is facing the crisis very well, the blockade cannot be sustained permanently by the four states without harming their own economies as well, he said.
Foreign ministers meet in Kuwait City in one of the highest official encounters since the row over Qatar began in June.
Foreign ministers of six Gulf countries have met in Kuwait in one of the highest official encounters since a Saudi Arabia-led quartet of Arab countries severed relations with Qatar.
Mondays gathering came a day before a key summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a regional Arab alliance currently facing its worst diplomatic crisis because of the row over Qatar.
Sheikh Sabah Al Khaled al-Hamad Al Sabah, Kuwaits foreign minister, while opening the preliminary meeting, said the GCCs unity and solidarity remain intact despite various challenges and trials, the Kuwait News Agency (KUNA) said.
KUNA said Abdullatif bin Rashid al-Zayani, the GCC secretary-general, called for the maintenance of strategic ties between the member states while describing the ministerial meeting as one of the successes of the summit.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatars foreign minister, previously said he hopes the GCC summit would provide a blueprint for ending the regional dispute.
The agenda of this years summit has not been made public, but the crisis is expected to feature at the forefront of discussions.
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE cut ties with Qatar on June 5 after accusing it of supporting terrorism. Qatar has strongly denied the allegation.
Kuwait, the main mediator in the standoff, sent out invitations to all GCC member states last week. However, it is not clear if all heads of state will attend the two-day summit.
Qatars Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Kuwaits Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad Al Sabah are the only heads of state confirmed to attend.
Difficult situation
Al Jazeeras Jamal Elshayyal, reporting from Kuwait City, said the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain find themselves in a difficult situation.
On one hand, if they attend, itll be taken as a sign of weakness by their people after months of accusing Qatar of terrorism, and saying that Qatar should be ostracised, he said.
However, if they dont attend, they will be accused of sowing disunity among the GCC and standing in the way of Kuwaits efforts to bring everyone to the table.
In October, Sheikh Al Sabah warned of the potential collapse of the GCC if the crisis continued.
The last GCC summit was held in Bahrain in 2016.
The GCC was established in 1981 for closer economic, trade and security partnerships on the Arabian Peninsula.
Thousands of people have been demonstrating on the streets of Honduras, as the countrys military prepares to enforce a nationwide curfew for the third night in a row.
Thousands of people have been demonstrating on the streets of Honduras, as the countrys military prepares to enforce a nationwide curfew for the third night in a row.
Violent protests followed last weeks close general election. The electoral commission has not yet declared a winner.
Demonstrators express a general mistrust of the National Elections commission, calling for a fair vote recount.
Al Jazeeras Manuel Rapalo reports from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
Rights group says DR Congo drafted ex-M23 fighters last year to crush protests against President Joseph Kabila.
At least 62 people were killed as security forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) recruited former rebel fighters to quash protests against President Joseph Kabila last year, a rights group claims.
In a report on Monday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said more than 200 former M23 fighters were mobilised, during country-wide protests that erupted after Kabila refused to step down at the end of his term.
As well as killing scores of people, Congolese security forces and M23 fighters arrested hundreds more between December 19-22, 2016, HRW said.
The accusations come amid renewed fears that DRC could witness a repeat of violence, as Kabila has delayed a new vote until December 2018.
Ida Sawyer, Central Africa director at HRW, said the governments covert operations to recruit fighters from an abusive armed group to suppress any resistance show how far President Kabila and his coterie are willing to go to stay in power.
HRW said its findings were based on more than 120 interviews, including 21 M23 fighters, commanders and political leaders.
Explicit orders to use lethal force
The mainly Tutsi ethnic group was the largest of dozens of armed groups in eastern Congo, until its defeat by Congolese and UN forces in November 2013. Hundreds of fighters fled, taking refuge in Rwanda and Uganda.
Many live in military camps there, awaiting amnesties promised under a peace deal.
Between October and December 2016, as protests against Kabila escalated, senior Congolese officers drafted the former rebels, gave them new uniforms and weapons and deployed them to Congos main cities, Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, and Goma.
To protect the president and quash protests, the M23 fighters were given explicit orders to use lethal force, including at point-blank range if necessary, HRW said.
The rights group renewed calls on the international community for sustained, targeted and well-coordinated pressure on Kabila to step down and allow for credible and peaceful elections.
Kabila had taken power after his father was assassinated in 2001, and was elected in 2006 and 2011.
According to the constitution, Kabila cannot seek a third term.
The vice president of Iraq has accused President Emmanuel Macron of going against Frances constitution by interfering in foreign affairs after he called on Baghdad to disband Shia militias that proved crucial in the fight against ISIL.
Macron met Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), on Saturday in France.
Macron later called on the central government in Baghdad to dissolve the powerful militias known as Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) which have now been integrated into Iraqs military.
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Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi vice president, criticised Macrons comments in a statement late on Sunday.
Frances constitution calls for non-interference in other countrys internal affairs. We are baffled by the French presidents calls for dissolving the Hashd al-Shaabi, which is a legal and official institution in Iraq, he said.
We strongly reject this as interference in our domestic affairs. We reject the imposition of any other states will on the Iraqi government and people.
Hashd al-Shaabi played a major role in defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) after the armed group took over large expanses of the country in a rapid offensive in 2014.
ISIL has now been expelled from the major cities, including Iraqs second largest, Mosul.
Macrons statement was also denounced by the vice president of Iraqs parliament, Humam Hammudi.
We expect the international community, especially France, to show respect for the noble warriors, many of whom have perished in Iraq for the sake of world peace, Hammudi said in a statement on Monday.
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The Daesh [ISIL] terrorist group would have stabbed France in the heart if it hadnt been for the Hashd al-Shaabi.
At a joint news conference in Paris with Iraqi Kurdish leaders, including Barzani, Macron called on Saturday for the demobilisation of all militias in Iraq that fought ISIL, also known as ISIS.
France calls for a constructive national dialogue to engage in Iraq, Macron said.
Having a strong, reconciled, pluralistic Iraq which recognises each of its components is a condition for the immediate and medium-term stability.
The central government in Baghdad has been in a dispute with the KRG since it held an independence referendum that resulted in a yes vote in September.
Iraqi forces backed by militias responded by seizing the oil-rich Kurdish-held city of Kirkuk in October along with other disputed territory.
Thousands of Rohingya refugees have set up camp in an area known as no mans land between Myanmar and Bangladesh.
Thousands of Rohingya refugees have set up camp in an area known as no mans land between Myanmar and Bangladesh.
The Bangladesh military wont allow aid agencies to operate inside the camp, which leaves the refugees in a vulnerable position.
Some of the refugees told Al Jazeera that they feel trapped and afraid.
Al Jazeeras Charles Stratford reports from Tumru, Bangladesh-Myanmar Border.
Infighting between Houthi rebels and former President Ali Abdullah Salehs forces continued for the fifth day.
Yemens Houthi rebels have gained control of the majority of the countrys capital from former President Ali Abdullah Salehs forces, a Sanaa-based activist told Al Jazeera.
Only small pockets remain, Hussain Albukhaiti, who has close ties to the Iranian-backed Houthis, said on Monday.
Albukhaiti spoke to Al Jazeera before the news of Salehs death. The former Yemen president was killed later on Monday in fighting in Sanaa.
Albukhaiti said that fighters had secured key areas south of the capital, including the very strategic Al-Mesbahi residential area, which is approximately 200 metres from Salehs home.
The area around his home is completely surrounded and may be taken over by the Houthis within the next few hours, he said.
Clashes continue
Other key places that have been taken over by the Houthis include a building where Salehs son, Ahmed Abdullah Saleh, resides, and the local al-Saleh mosque.
As clashes continued between the two former allies for the fifth, consecutive day, Albukhaiti noted that infighting was centred on one street.
On Sunday night, the Saudi-led coalition launched air strikes in and around Sanaa, targeting the capitals abandoned airport and the ministry of interior, said Albukhaiti.
Earlier this week, Saleh had expressed his openness to talks with the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi rebels, in what the fighters called a coup against their fragile alliance.
Saleh made the comments on Saturday, as deadly infighting between forces loyal to him and Houthi rebels continued.
The Saudi-led coalition praised Saleh for taking the lead in the conflict.
The former allies have been fighting the Saudi-led coalition for control of the country since March 2015, when Riyadh and several other Arab Sunni states intervened to reinstate the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
According to Albukhaiti, coalition air strikes have been targeting areas that are now under Houthi control.
He noted that the number of those who died and those suffering injuries surpasses 100 people including fighters on both sides as well as civilians.
The spokesperson for the United Nations Secretary-General voiced his concern over the sharp escalation of armed clashes and air strikes in Sanaa.
In a statement on Sunday, Stephane Dujarric said that the fighting has already resulted in dozens of deaths.
Fighting is restricting the movement of people and life-saving services within Sanaa city. Ambulances and medical teams cannot access the injured and people cannot go outside to buy food and other necessities, he said. The Secretary-General calls on all parties to the conflict to cease all air and ground assaults.
Infighting comes as the residents of the partially blockaded city are in dire need of humanitarian assistance.
The Saudi-led coalition imposed a blockade in October on the country, where nearly 80 percent of residents need humanitarian aid to survive.
Last week, amid mounting international pressure over the suffering of millions of Yemenis, some humanitarian aid was allowed to enter the country.
The International Committee of the Red Cross regional director, Robert Mardini, said in a Twitter post that the aid organisations medical warehouse was hit.
Mardini also said civilians were frightened and unable to leave their homes.
The war in Yemen is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, killing at least 10,000 people and leading to widespread hunger and disease.
The night was tough in #Sanaa, #Yemen. Massive urban clashes with heavy artillery & airstrikes. #Yemenis stuck in their homes, too scared to go out. Reduced access to water, health care, food & fuel. Increased vulnerability of #Yemenis put in harm's way. Robert Mardini (@RMardiniICRC) December 4, 2017
Large-scale military exercises involve stealth fighter jets and thousands of US and South Korean soldiers.
The United States and South Korea have begun large-scale military exercises south of the capital, Seoul, on Monday, involving hundreds of aircraft and thousands of soldiers.
The annual drill takes place amid rising tensions in the region, which saw North Korea test-launch its most advanced Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), allegedly capable of hitting anywhere on the US mainland, a week earlier.
More than 200 aircrafts are involved in the five-day war games, including six F-22 Raptors and six F-35 stealth fighter jets. About 12,000 US military personnel are taking part.
It is the first time that so many Raptors have been deployed simultaneously in an exercise in South Korea.
Al Jazeeras Kathy Novak, reporting from outside Osan Air Base in the South Korean city of Pyeongtaek, said the drills were part-training and part-show of force against North Korea.
They take place every year and always anger North Korea, which calls them a rehearsal for invasion, Novak said.
Before these drills went ahead, the North Korean foreign minister said that the US was begging for nuclear war by staging an extremely dangerous nuclear gamble on the Korean peninsula, she added.
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The joint war games known as Vigilant air combat exercise (ACE) are aimed at enhancing the all-weather, day and night combined air power operation capabilities of South Korea and the US, South Koreas defence ministry told local news agency Yonhap News.
They followed reports that South Koreas military created a decapitation unit with the aim of neutralising North Koreas leadership and destroying nuclear and missile facilities if war breaks out.
Tensions in the region have escalated in recent months with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump engaging in a war of words over the formers nuclear policy.
On Sunday, US National Security Adviser HR McMaster said Trump was prepared to take care of North Korea over their nuclear weapons programme.
If necessary, the president and the United States will have to take care of it because he has said hes not going to allow this murderous, rogue regime to threaten the United States with the most destructive weapons on the planet, he told Fox News.
Judge rules there was a risk of criminal reiteration, though admits there was little prospect of the defendants fleeing.
The Spanish Supreme Court has refused bail for four leading Catalan separatists, all facing charges of sedition.
Mondays ruling will keep former vice president of Catalonia, Oriol Junqueras, and ex-cabinet member Joaquim Form in jail. Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart, leaders of civic groups Assemblea Nacional Catalana and Omnium Cultural, respectively, were also refused bail.
The judge ruled there was a risk of criminal reiteration, though he admitted there was little prospect of the defendants fleeing the country, according to a court statement.
Six other former members of the regional cabinet, also charged with sedition, were set bail at 100,000 euro ($118,570) each.
Al Jazeeras Karl Penhaul, reporting from Barcelona, said: What the judge has taken into account here is that he believes the four most senior Catalan politicians that he has ordered remain behind bars wouldnt represent a flight risk. But, he does expect them to continue agitating in favour of Catalonias secession from the rest of Spain.
New round of elections
The pro-separatist parliamentarians also charged with rebellion and misappropriation of funds had called for their release in order to participate in Catalonias regional election on December 21.
Catalonias pro-independence parties are predicted to win 67 of the regional parliaments 135 seats but lose their previously held majority, according to a poll by the Sociological Research Centre.
By ruling that six can leave, he [the judge] sees that this is a lesser risk on their part. They could be free anytime today as they post bail, surrender their passports, and report weekly to the Supreme Court, Penhaul reported.
Effectively, they will be free now to continue campaigning for the upcoming regional elections in Catalonia on December 21, because that in a sense is why all this matters so much now. Tonight at midnight marks the official start of campaigning for the regional elections.
Spanish authorities called the vote after they took control of Catalonia following regional politicians declaration of independence on October 27.
The declaration was based on the result of a disputed referendum on independence, held on October 1. More than 90 percent of voters cast a ballot in favour of independence, although turnout was less than 50 percent.
Spain responded by enacting Article 155, a provision in the countrys constitution that permitted Madrid to dismiss the Catalan government and directly administer the northeastern region.
Meanwhile, Carles Puigdemont, Catalonias former president, faced an extradition hearing in Belgium on Monday as the Spanish government seeks to have him returned to the country to face charges of rebellion and sedition.
Puigdemont, who is in self-imposed exile, appeared in court in Brussels along with four other pro-separatists. A ruling was postponed until December 14.
Police detentions made across Malta as part of a joint operation with the armed forces and secret service.
Maltese police have arrested 10 people allegedly connected to the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia who died in a car bomb blast two months ago.
Maltas Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announced eight arrests at a press conference on Monday, and he later tweeted that two other individuals were also apprehended.
All eight initial suspects were Maltese nationals, and some were known to the police, Muscat said.
An additional 2 persons have been apprehended in #DaphneCaruanaGalizia murder probe, bringing total to 10 arrests. Authorities have all areas of interest under control since early this morning and searches are underway. Joseph Muscat (@JosephMuscat_JM) December 4, 2017
Police made arrests in several locations around Malta on Monday morning as part of a joint operation with the armed forces and secret service.
Muscat provided few details about the suspects, stating an unwillingness to say anything that might affect potential prosecutions.
The arrests were the first apparent break in the murder investigation, which is receiving support from the FBI, Europol, and Finnish security services.
Caruana Galizia, 53, was killed on October 16 after a bomb exploded in her car as she drove away from her home in Mosta, a small town outside the capital, Valletta.
She was well-known in the small island country for her popular blog, Running Commentary, where she highlighted alleged high-level corruption by politicians across party lines.
Caruana Galizia also covered criminal gangs and drug trafficking and was responsible for exposing Maltas links with the so-called Panama Papers document leak.
Half an hour before the explosion, Caruana Galizia wrote on her blog: There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.
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Investigators now have 48 hours to question the suspects before charging or releasing them.
Muscat was often criticised by Caruana Galizia, who he has described as his greatest adversary.
He has faced criticism from many, including Caruana Galizias sons, for the lack of progress in the investigation.
Fighting intensifying in Damascus suburb being targeted by Syrian and Russian jets despite its de-escalation zone status.
Despite being designated as a so-called de-escalation zone, jet fighters flown by the Syrian government and its Russian allies continue to bomb the besieged Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta.
The UN says fighting is only intensifying, despite a deal between Russia, Iran and Turkey stipulating that there can be no military activity in Eastern Ghouta.
This is supposed to be a safe area, but its not safe. Planes hit all day and all night. Where should we go? a witness told Al Jazeera.
On Sunday, about 30 people were killed by the air raids.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), it was the biggest death toll in a single day in at least three weeks, when pro-government forces escalated their attacks on the area.
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Eastern Ghouta has been besieged by President Bashar al-Assads troops since 2013 in an attempt to force the rebel enclave into submission.
The regime didnt respect the de-escalation agreement. The Russians said they would provide guarantees, but they didnt, Mounther Fares, spokesman for the Ahrar al-Sham rebel group, said.
The UN says about 400,000 civilians who remain trapped there are facing a complete catastrophe because the government has blocked aid deliveries.
The humanitarian situation in the besieged area is getting increasingly worse, the UN has warned.
At least 500 people are in need of immediate medical evacuation, malnutrition is rampant, and babies have died from lack of food.
The regime is trying to force the residents of Ghouta to accept being relocated to the north of Syria. But the people here wont accept this, they wont be forcibly displaced, said Hazem Shami, an activist in Eastern Ghouta.
In April, the government started an offensive on the area. Since then, the people had to smuggle in irregular aid deliveries, Al Jazeeras Zeina Khodr, reported from Beirut in neighbouring Lebanon, said.
In the past two months, supplies reached 20 percent of the 400,000 people trapped in Eastern Ghouta.
Abdul Malik al-Houthi lauds ousted leaders death at the hands of his fighters as victory against Saudi-led coalition.
The leader of Yemens Houthi rebels has praised the death of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the countrys overthrown president, as a victory against a Saudi-led military coalition that Yemen has been battling.
Salehs party has confirmed reports that he was killed in a roadside ambush on Monday outside the capital, Sanaa, after switching sides in the civil war, abandoning his Iran-aligned Houthi allies in favour of the Saudi-led coalition.
In a lengthy televised speech aired on the Houthi-run Al Masirah TV network, Abdul Malik al-Houthi said his fighters killed Saleh for his treason and congratulated Yemenis on this historic, exceptional and great day in which the conspiracy of betrayal and treason failed, this black day for the forces of the aggression.
He said the uprising of Salehs loyalists against the Houthi group was the greatest threat the Arabian Peninsula country had faced, but that it was defeated in three days.
He said the Houthi group officially called Ansar Allah (Partisans of God) would maintain the countrys republican system and would not seek vengeance against Salehs party.
The problem is not with the General Peoples Congress (GPC) as a party or with its members, Houthi said.
The GPC was Yemens ruling party under Saleh but is now divided.
Several warnings
Without mentioning Saleh by name, Houthi said that he knew about Salehs communication with the coalition and his efforts to turn against the Houthi group.
Houthi also said he had sent several warnings to Saleh.
We have notified the leader of the traitor and criminal militias to retract, be wise, to stop his militias from continuing committing crimes, he said.
Today is the day of the fall of the conspiracy of betrayal and treason. Its a dark day for the forces of the coalition.
Houthi also praised a missile launch announced by the group towards the UAE this week as a message against its enemies, advising against foreign investment in the UAE and Saudi Arabia as their campaign in Yemen continues.
The Houthi rebels had similarly fired a missile towards Saudi Arabias capital Riyadh last month, which official media said had been intercepted by the kingdoms air defence.
The official story was clear: Saudi forces shot down a ballistic missile fired by Yemens Houthi rebel group last month at Saudi Arabias capital, Riyadh. It was a victory for the Saudis and for the United States, which supplied the Patriot missile defense system, New York Times said in a report on Monday.
However, evidence analysed by a research team of missile experts at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, indicate that the missiles warhead flew unimpeded over Saudi defences and nearly hit its target, Riyadhs King Khalid International Airport, according to the report.
The Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the November 5 explosion in Riyadh, saying they fired a long-range ballistic missile that travelled more than 800km over the border with Saudi Arabia.
A spokesman for the rebels told Al Jazeera they launched a Burkan 2-H missile a Scud-type missile with a range of more than 800km towards Riyadh.
Videos on social media that evening showed smoke rising from an area near the King Khalid International Airport.
The Middlebury Institute analysis found that the warhead detonated so close to the domestic terminal that people jumped out of their seats.
The findings show that the Iranian-backed Houthis, once a ragtag group of rebels, have grown powerful enough to strike major targets in Saudi Arabia, possibly shifting the balance of their years-long war, the New York Times said.
Houthi origins
The Houthi rebels, seen at present as the most powerful political faction in Yemen, emerged in the 1990s as a movement to revive the Zaidi Shia traditions of Yemens historically dominant northern highlands.
The group originated in the northwestern province of Saada to protest at what their followers said was discrimination against them and their stronghold by the central government.
A crackdown by Saleh, then Yemens president, in 2004 led to the killing of founder Hussein al-Houthi, followed by six military campaigns to quell guerrilla warfare in the groups stronghold of Saada.
His younger brother Abdul Malek took over and stepped up the groups rhetoric against the government and its alliance with the US.
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In 2011, the eruption of protests in Yemen against Salehs long rule expanded the Houthis clout beyond Saada. Their populist and anti-corruption rhetoric won them some support in Sunni areas too.
Under a UN-sponsored power transfer deal, Saleh stepped down and was replaced by Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, his deputy, in 2012.
In July 2014, the Houthis took advantage of an unpopular move by the government to cut fuel subsidies and called for mass demonstrations in Sanaa.
In September, Houthi rebels took control of Sanaa and have since swept across the country.
On Monday, Hadi urged Yemenis to unite against the Houthi rebels, describing them as Iranian militias.
Hadi, who has been self-imposed exile in Riyadh in recent past years, delivered his televised speech just hours after the killing of Saleh.
I call on all Yemenis, in all the provinces, which are still under the rule of these criminal and terrorist militias, to rise up in their face and resist them. And our army will be the victor, he said.
We are with you, in the same trench, and with one goal, which is battling for the republic and the revolution, and the expulsion of the Iranian Houthi militias.
The UAE was behind the former presidents decision to turn his back on Houthi rebels, officials say.
Yemens former president, who once said that governing the Arabian Peninsula country was akin to dancing on the heads of snakes, reportedly turned his back on his rebel allies the Houthis, in a move planned and orchestrated by the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.
After he was toppled from power in 2011, it looked like Ali Abdullah Salehs dancing days might be over but for more than six years, the 75-year-old, known for his Machiavellian political manoeuvring, continued to be a key player in a conflict that has brought Yemen to its knees.
In a televised speech on Saturday, Saleh formally broke ties with the Houthis, saying he was open to a dialogue with the Saudi-led coalition that has been at war with his rebel alliance since March 2015.
As army units loyal to him clashed with Houthi fighters in the capital for a fourth successive night, Saleh blamed the rebels for the countrys woes, calling on his forces to ignore orders from the Houthi leadership.
Yemeni citizens have tried to tolerate the recklessness of the Houthis over the last two and half years but cannot anymore, he said.
I call on our brothers in neighbouring countries to stop their aggression and lift the blockade and we will turn the page.
The Houthis, who are believed to be backed by the kingdoms regional rival, Iran, accused Saleh of staging a coup, vowing to continue their fight against the forces of aggression.
The Saudi-led coalition that has been bombing Yemen since March 2015, said it welcomed Salehs overture, praising him for taking the lead in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
The decision by [Salehs] General Peoples Congress (GPC) to take the lead and side with their people, will free Yemen of militias loyal to Iran, the coalition said.
However on Monday, Salehs long and dominant presence in Yemeni affairs came to an abrupt end after he was brutally killed near Sanaa.
Houthi sources told Al Jazeera that Saleh was killed by the rebels in a rocket-propelled grenade and shooting attack on his car.
Planned in Abu Dhabi
Yemeni officials told Al Jazeera that Salehs decision to sideline the Houthis, which culminated with his death, was planned in Abu Dhabi earlier this year, in consultation with Saudi Arabia.
A Yemeni official told Al Jazeera that the unravelling of the Saleh-Houthi alliance was aimed at carving an exit for the coalition from the conflict.
Speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media, the official said: Mohammed Bin Salman [Saudi Arabias crown prince and heir to the throne] has been influenced by the UAE and thinks switching from [Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour] Hadi to Saleh will help end the war.
Leaked emails written by two former US officials in August suggested that Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, wanted out of the war, which he started in March 2015.
When the conflict began, analysts had initially expected the fighting to last only a few months, but the violence has shown no signs of abating, costing the coalition billions of dollars and claiming the lives of at least 87 Emirati troops and an estimated 200 Saudis.
According to the UN, thousands of Yemenis have been killed in the fighting and millions forced from their homes.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia have lost a lot of men in this war and it seems that with the UAEs help, Saleh, or one of his sons, could end it, the official said.
In a year or two from now, his son, Ahmed, or even former Prime Minister Khaled Bahah [who currently resides in the UAE], could be the next man to rule Yemen.
Intelligence Online, a Paris-based news and diplomacy publication, reported that MBS sent Ahmed al-Asiri, the former military spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, to Abu Dhabi in June to meet Salehs son, Ahmed, and discuss the possibility of forming a new government.
Ahmed, a powerful former military chief who once served as ambassador to the Emirates, has been living in the UAE for the last five years.
The publication also said that Mohammed bin Salman was lobbied by the UAEs Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Zayed, to ditch Hadi in favour of Saleh. It added that Mohammed bin Salman had warmed to the idea of a return to power of the former Yemeni president.
The UAEs trump card
Murad Alazzany, a Yemeni political analyst and professor at Sanaa University, told Al Jazeera that Salehs son was the UAEs trump card in the conflict.
The UAE has been keeping a hold of Ahmed should anything happen to his father. In that event, they plan to immediately dispatch him to Yemen to take over his [Salehs] role, Alazzany said.
The UAE has always had plans for him. Hes a tool, just like how former Afghan President Hamid Karzai was used by the US. When the time is right, theyll use him to do whatever they want.
For more than 30 years, Saleh ruled Yemen with an iron fist, setting up a complicated network of alliances between the countrys military, civil and tribal groups.
After handing power to his long-time deputy, Hadi, in 2012, as part of a Gulf and US-brokered deal in exchange for immunity from prosecution, Saleh continued to command several units of the military and chair the powerful GPC party that he founded.
When the Houthis surged south from their northern stronghold of Saada in September 2014, Salehs system of patronage and corruption enabled them to seize control of Sanaa.
Saleh has been playing the Houthis for years ... He did this when the Salafists started growing in power in the north. Initially he backed them, then he switched and supported the Houthis. Then he betrayed the Houthis. This is what he does. by Mohamed Qubaty, a former Yemeni ambassador
In the lightning offensive, the Saleh-linked Bani Sufyan tribe helped facilitated safe passage for the Houthis through the northern province of Amran.
Most of the Yemeni army subsequently fell under the command of Salehs relatives or allies, while those who resisted, such as the 310th Armored Brigade in Amran, were easily crushed.
Huge stockpiles of weapons, including tanks, humvees, machine guns, missile launch pads, and large stockpiles of ammunition were obtained by military units, and later shared among Houthi-supporting tribal leaders.
Facing little to no resistance from the soldiers and police posted by Hadi to protect Sanaa, the Houthis asserted their control on the city with the explicit help from the Republican Guards organised by members of the Saleh family, a UN Security Council report said.
Saudi Arabia, along with several other Sunni Arab countries, then intervened in the conflict, launching an air campaign against the rebels in March 2015, perceiving their advance as an Iranian-orchestrated plot to destabilise the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
In May 2015, following Saudi-led coalition air raids on his home in Sanaa, Saleh officially announced the establishment of his alliance with the Houthis.
A year later, Salehs GPC party signed an agreement with the Houthis to form a political council to run the country.
A shaky alliance
However, cracks would soon emerge. In August, the Houthis condemned Salehs description of them as a militia. Relations would then deteriorate rapidly when Khalid al-Radhi, a senior member of the GPC and close Saleh adviser, was shot dead.
The Houthis, however, told Al Jazeera that they never forged an alliance with Saleh, arguing they had a popular mandate, with most of their fighters coming from historically loyal tribes.
We didnt need any allies to help fight this war, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a spokesman for the Houthis, told Al Jazeera.
We had no relations whatsoever with Ali Abdullah Saleh. The sons of Yemen banded together to join our ranks to fight against this oppressive Saudi-led coalition and Hadis militias.
Despite having fought the Houthis for years while in office, Salehs detractors say his alliance with the Houthis was a marriage of convenience, with both forces seeking to exact revenge on their mutual foes.
Saleh played the Houthis for years, Mohamed Qubaty, a former Yemeni ambassador, told Al Jazeera.
He always used a strategy of playing factions off each other. He did this when the Salafists started growing in power in the north. Initially he backed them, then he switched and supported the Houthis. Then he betrayed the Houthis. This is what he does.
Saleh even played one of his cousins and a member of his Sanhan tribe, the powerful General Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar, Qubaty added.
Ali Mohsin led six sporadic wars against the Houthis before finally defecting from Salehs government in 2011 and joining the opposition.
Saleh wanted to weaken Ali Mohsin and other dissident figures within the military who opposed the idea of Ahmed becoming president, Qubaty said.
Tensions between the two had been simmering for more than a decade, when Saleh began pushing for constitutional amendments, one of which included amending the presidential term of office from five to seven years.
This prompted speculation that Saleh wanted to remain in office until 2013, allowing his son Ahmed to reach the age of 40 the minimum age for a Yemeni president as per the constitution.
New front in Yemens war
Residents told Al Jazeera that Salehs death opened a new front in the countrys complex civil war, endangering historic tribal relations.
Osama al-Fakih, a human rights activist, said that coalition air attacks offered the only brief pause to the fighting. He said the sound of heavy shelling reverberated through the citys deserted streets into the early hours of Monday.
A journalist based in Amran told Al Jazeera that the Houthis launched a number of attacks on areas where Saleh loyalists are known to live. The source said that the house of Sheikh Mabkhout al-Mashriqi, a Saleh loyalist and member of the powerful Hashid tribal confederation, was shelled and destroyed on Sunday.
The Hashid tribal confederation reportedly allowed the Houthis safe passage through Amran province before the rebels seized the capital Sanaa.
The International Committee for the Red Cross said dozens of Yemenis had been killed in the fighting and hundreds more injured.
Our call to all parties: Civilians are not part of the fight, it said.
The clashes underscore an all-too familiar situation in war-ravaged Yemen, with forces loyal to Hadi seeing similar internal fighting between loyalists and pro-independence forces backed by the UAE.
Hadi has fallen out of favour with the UAE, with Abu Dhabi spending billions of dollars to support Aydarous al-Zubaidi, a prominent southern secessionist and prospective rival to the embattled president.
Emirati-backed forces have engaged in fierce firefights with forces loyal to the 72-year-old, and have been accused of preventing the president from returning to the coalition-held city of Aden.
Despite being at war with Yemen for more than two years, the coalition has failed to achieve its stated aim of restoring the legitimate government of Hadi.
The Houthis continue to hold most of the north, where more than half of Yemens population live.
Follow Faisal Edroos on Twitter: @FaisalEdroos
Uncertainty looms as ousted leader Saleh is killed amid ongoing conflict between Houthi rebels and Saudi coalition.
The death of Yemens former president Ali Abdullah Saleh raises doubts about the future of the war-torn country, as a Saudi-led coalitions fight against Houthi rebels will likely intensify, analysts say.
Saleh was killed on Monday by Houthi fighters his former allies and his death is considered a very big blow to his forces, said Hakim al-Masmari, editor-in-chief of the Yemen Post.
His house has been under siege for the last two days and today they attacked the house. He escaped he was found in a vehicle that had clashed with Houthi checkpoint forces, he told Al Jazeera from Yemens capital, Sanaa.
This is where he was killed along with a number of his senior aides.
Saleh, who ruled Yemen for more than three decades and played a pivotal role in the countrys ongoing civil war, had called on the Saudi-led coalition to lift the siege it imposed on Yemen in a televised speech on Saturday.
He also formally broke ties with the Houthis, saying he was open to dialogue with the military coalition that has been at war with his rebel alliance for more than two years.
While Saudi Arabia praised his remarks, the Houthis declared Salehs move a coup.
In 2015, Saudi Arabia, along with other Sunni Muslim countries, militarily intervened in Yemen to reinstate the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which was overthrown by the Houthi group the year before.
Salehs fragile alliance with the Houthi leadership was largely seen as an integrational one, bringing together his General Peoples Congress (GPC) party and the Houthi Ansar Allah faction, which were at odds with each other in the past.
Masmari noted Salehs death may lead the Saudi-led coalition to further escalate its military operations.
Since the recent split, the coalition has intensified air strikes on Houthi-controlled areas in Sanaa, targeting the abandoned airport and ministry of the interior.
No one wins
Joost Hiltermann, International Crisis Groups Middle East programme director, said the breakdown of the Houthi-Saleh alliance will increase fragmentation and conflict by adding layers of revenge.
Salehs GPC, a critical party of the centre, could fracture further, with many joining anti-Houthi fighters, Hiltermann told Al Jazeera.
No one wins.
The latest development is a major setback for the Saudi-led coalition, which includes the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a key player, he said.
They were staking their hopes on Saleh subduing the Houthis, but things seem to be turning out differently. It shows the bankruptcy of their military approach to the war, Hiltermann said.
Earlier this year, a series of leaked emails revealed Saudi Arabias desire to end the war in Yemen during talks with former US officials.
Though no official steps were taken to withdraw from the conflict, Hiltermann says Riyadh currently has fewer options for a negotiated exit.
If they decide to double down on air bombardments, it is civilians who will suffer on top of the humanitarian catastrophe we have already seen in Yemen, he said.
The rebel infighting comes as residents of the partially blockaded Sanaa are in dire need of humanitarian assistance.
The Saudi-led coalition imposed a blockade in October on the Arabian Peninsula country, where nearly 80 percent of residents need humanitarian aid to survive.
Last week, amid mounting international pressure over the suffering of millions of Yemenis, some humanitarian relief was allowed to enter Yemen.
Andreas Krieg, a political analyst at Kings College London, said the short term in Yemen will be a state of insecurity worse than before.
Saleh was an integrator. The Houthis killing him takes the glue out of the equation, Krieg told Al Jazeera.
Though it remains unclear if alliances on the ground will shift, Krieg believes it is bound to happen.
Coalition bombing was bad enough, now there will be a new level of civil war, he said.
Saudi Arabia wants to pull out of the expensive conflict, but now there is no way out of the war for the coalition.
GCPs future
Salehs death leaves wide open the question of a successor to lead the GCP.
Analysts question whether his followers will eventually pledge allegiance to the Houthis, or if they will regroup and ally themselves with leading figures of Salehs party.
His son, Ahmed Abdullah Saleh, a former commander of the Yemeni armys Republican Guard, has been residing in the UAE for more than four years.
Salehs nephew, Tareq Mohammed Abdullah Saleh, is an army general who has acted as Salehs military adviser for years.
According to Masmari, Tareq is expected to take the lead of military operations against the Houthi rebels.
Gamal Gasim, associate professor of Middle East Studies at Grand Valley State University, said Sanaas security may remain stable if the rebels expedite their control over the city.
However, if Tareq succeeds in rallying support of the Republican Guard as well as Salehs own Sinhan tribes, chaos in Sanaa could prevail.
It remains to be seen if Salehs son, Ahmad Saleh would go back to Yemen and assume leadership of whats left of his fathers forces, said Gasim, noting this would require the support of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Timing here is critical. If they want to succeed in that effort, they must make their move within a window of 48 hours.
French forces have assaulted the besieged town of Diabaly in central Mali, after an earlier rebel counter-offensive took the town, resident says.
The French bombing campaign, which continued through Monday night, came after the French ambassador to the United Nations said that his country launched the military intervention in the West African country because it believed that the existence of Mali was at stake.
Gerard Araud told a closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council that France was responding to calls for help from the government of the former French colony.
A meeting of the 15-nation UN Security Council on Mali expressed unanimous understanding and support for the military intervention, Araud told reporters late on Monday.
On Tuesday morning, Ibrahim Toure told The Associated Press by telephone that he heard explosions throughout the night, coming from the direction of Diabalys military camp.
Francois Heisbourg, special advisor at the Foundation for Strategic Research based in Paris, told Al Jazeera:
Either one of two things will happen; the Malian government, with ECOWAS and the French, will try to use the opportunity to go north, but if they do this they have to do it before the next 6 weeks and the rainy season, or they will have to wait until autumn. I think they are more likely to do the former.
Also Algeria has closed the border from the north, preventing the rebels from moving that way, therefore working in favour of an advancement by the French on the north.
They will never leave
A commander of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, one of the extremist groups controlling northern Mali, taunted the French. He said that his fighters control Diabaly, as well as Konna, the first town bombed by the French last week. He told AP: I would advise France not to sing their victory song too quickly. They managed to leave Afghanistan. They will never leave Mali.
Hours earlier, rebel fighters had responded to French airstrikes and military action with a counter-offensive in Diabaly, French and Malian authorities confirmed.
Araud said France had no other choice but to help the Malian government.
We will defend [the capital] Bamako. We will not let the southern part of the country, with its 13 million inhabitants, fall to terrorist groups, said Araud.
Francois Hollande, the French president, visited French troops stationed in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, confirming that a total of the currrent French military deployment consisted of 750 soldiers, but that number will increase.
Also on Tuesday, Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said that he believed that the presence of foreign troops in Mali would not encourage al-Qaeda recruitment, Reuters news agency reported.
Al-Qaeda-linked rebels overran the garrison village of Diabaly in central Mali, Frances defence minister confirmed in Paris on Monday.
French military forces, who began battling in Mali on Friday, widened their aerial bombing campaign against the rebels occupying northern Mali, launching airstrikes for the first time in central Mali to combat the new threat.
Al Jazeeras correspondent Nazanine Moshiri, reporting from the capital Bamako, said: There are reports of about 60 fighters being killed thus far while Doctors without Borders say they are very concerned about the lives of civilians in the region.
International support
The rebels, who come from several nations besides Mali, had been bottled up in the narrow neck of central Mali. But by now sweeping in from the west, they are now only 400km from Bamako, in southern Mali.
Before France sent its forces in on Friday, the closest known spot the rebels were to the capital was 680km away, although they might have infiltrated closer than that.
France is urging the Africanisation of the conflict, encouraging African nations to send troops to fight the rebels.
Besides France and the US, 11 other nations have pledged troops or logistical support. Over the weekend, Britain authorised the deployment of several C-17 transport planes to help the French military effort.
Malis north, an area the size of France itself, was occupied by al-Qaeda-linked rebels nine months ago, following a coup in the capital.
Dr Christiaan Barnard performed the worlds first human-to-human heart transplant on December 3, 1967.
This week marks a significant milestone in experimental surgery one that would be cheered, debated, and forever talked about. Fifty years ago, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard successfully performed the first human-to-human heart transplant.
Since then, thousands of lives have been saved by this groundbreaking technology, mostly in developed nations.
Five decades later, nearly 4,000 people have the surgery each year, with an average wait time of about 191 days.
So how far have we come since that medical milestone? And what heart technology will help shape the future?
Presenter: Laura Kyle
Guests:
Dr Stephen Westaby Royal Brompton Hospital, Imperial College
Dr Olivia Gilbert Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center
James Styan author of Heartbreaker: Christiaan Barnard and the First Heart Transplant
The case against Assange is as political as it is legal; where does it go from here? Plus, Kenyas election influencers.
Around North Florida Regional Medical Centers pond, 95,000 lights were lit Friday and outlined with Christmas trees, gingerbread men and snowmen.
About 10,000 people applauded and cheered at 6:15 p.m. when the lights turned on at the 28th Annual Pond Lighting Ceremony, which was hosted by the hospital, located at 6500 W. Newberry Road, and included free activities such as face painting, ornament decorating and pictures with Santa.
Donations from attendees and proceeds from food trucks at the event went to Gainesvilles chapter of Toys for Tots, a national organization run by the U.S. Marine Corps that provides gifts to children whose parents cannot afford them, said Bradley Palmer, the director of marketing and communications at the hospital. Most of the donations at the event were in the form of toys.
Its really part of a Gainesville tradition, Palmer said.
Individuals could exchange an unwrapped gift for a pass with access to all rides, such as a sled ride on a hill of fake snow. Attendees who didnt donate a gift paid for a pass to access the rides. The hospital used 24,000 pounds of ice to make the snow for the hill, which was a new addition to the annual event, Palmer said.
North Florida wanted to do something to really improve, he said. The sled-riding hill was our big addition.
This years ceremony was dedicated to the memory of Lance Cpl. Phillip Paul Clark, one of the hospital employees sons who was hit by an improvised explosive device in the Middle East in 2010, Palmer said.
Gainesville resident Terri McKimmey, 56, who has attended the event for more than 10 years, watched and listened to the Gainesville High School Naval Junior ROTC caroling Christmas songs. Other performers during the night included The Sedoctaves, a UF student a cappella group.
(Previous years) wasnt as good as this, she said about the ceremony. This is much better. I think the singing and lights are the most beautiful part.
Olivia Serrano, an 18-year-old UF business administration and psychology freshman, leads the a cappella group The Sedoctaves in their performance at the 28th Annual Pond Lighting at North Florida Regional Medical Center.
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While hunting for Pokemon in the UF Health Shands Hospital parking garage in June, Tillissa Barcias 6-year-old son, Austin, found a painted rock.
Tillissa noticed Rockin Alachua County FB was written on the back of the rock and searched the group. After the mother of two figured out it was part of a community-wide trend, the family got involved, she said.
These rocks are bringing these people together, she said. Its old people, and its young people. Its really neat.
Rock painting and hiding has become a popular activity around the state and in Gainesville, with at least four Facebook groups dedicated to the activity locally, including Rockin Alachua County, which has more than 1,600 members. The group, started by 42-year-old Gainesville resident Wendy Eckhardt, began in March after she heard about a similar group in Martin County.
Eckhardt and her husband and children were visiting family there and heard about the activity from a friend who had started a rock group. After going on a rock hunt with her two kids, who are 9 and 13 years old, she decided she wanted to see rock painting catch on in Alachua County.
When we got back up to Gainesville (my children) said, Weve got to start this, she said. I hadnt heard of anything up here yet, so I said, Alright, lets paint some rocks.
To kickstart the tradition in Gainesville, the family painted about 70 rocks and went from park to park, hiding them in plain sight, Eckhardt said. Now, members post on Facebook when they hide or find a painted rock.
We have developed this page in the hope that it will spread joy and brighten peoples day just as much as it has in other counties around Florida, Eckhardt wrote on the Facebook groups page.
The groups goal now is to continue to grow and get more people involved, Eckhardt said.
After being a part of the group for more than eight months now, Tillissa, 33, said rock painting is an activity she does with her family. During Hurricane Irma, the family stayed indoors and painted rocks.
Its the only thing they could really do that didnt require fighting or power, Tillissa said.
For her 4-year-old daughter Avery, rock painting is an occupational therapy as she has cerebral palsy, Tillissa said. Avery scribbles on the rocks and decorates them with stickers, with Trolls and Star Wars being her current favorites, her mother said.
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It really helps getting her left hand moving and actually using it, Tillissa said.
Gainesville resident Mischella Proebsting has painted more than 400 rocks with her two sons since she heard about the trend a few months ago.
I got hooked on painting rocks in my downtime and hiding them around town for everyone to find, Proebsting, 36, said. For me, rock painting was kind of therapeutic. (For) the boys, they enjoyed it because they could get their fingers messy and go crazy with the colors.
Proebsting said she heard about a person who was trying to conceive and found a rock with a baby painted on it.
You could paint something and hit close to home for somebody, she said.
Proebsting hosted a rock-painting party during the summer with about 10 other moms and their children.
For those who have never heard of it or never done it, you dont have to be Picasso to rock paint, she said. Its more about getting together and having fun.
Eckhardt said people who get involved with rock painting should write the hashtag #rockinalachuacounty on the back of the rock they paint before they hide it.
Participants can post about where they hid their rocks on the Facebook group, but they dont have to be on Facebook, Eckhardt said.
The whole point is just to encourage being creative and to get out there and enjoy doing something fun for other people, she said.
After a Bluetooth speaker caught fire in a residence hall room on the 10th floor of Beaty Towers West, about 150 residents were evacuated Saturday night.
At about 12:50 a.m., the speaker caught fire in a student room, and the rooms residents immediately moved the speaker into the bathroom before its small flames had a chance of spreading to other furniture, although the smoke alarm still went off throughout the hall, said University Police Sgt. Jeffrey Lamb. The alarm caused the entire residence hall to evacuate.
No damages major damages were reported, and there were no injuries, Lamb said.
Only thing damaged was the speaker, Lamb said.
When Jerry Gonzalez was playing League of Legends in his Beaty Towers West room late Saturday night, the last thing he expected was a fire alarm to send him and his entire dorm to the curb of Museum Road.
But after about 30 minutes waiting outside his on-campus home alongside other student residents, Gonzalez began to worry.
Two UPD cars blocked Museum Road just around the towers. Gainesville Fire Rescue firefighters had been inside the dorm hall for nearly 20 minutes.
Normally when an alarm goes off they send one truck, and were out here for like 10 minutes, the 21-year-old UF biology junior said. Its different this time.
By about 1:25 a.m., the crowd of students slowly huddled back to their residence hall, some laughing that the alarm amounted to nothing.
At the tail end of the crowd, AJ Riggins had remembered his key.
During the last drill at Beaty, which Riggins said happened a few weeks prior, the 18-year-old forgot his key in his 10th-floor room and was locked out. Once the alarm sounded Saturday night, he slipped on his jacket and walked out prepared, key in hand, he said.
After learning the fire was contained and his home was safe, Riggins said he was relieved and his only worry was deciding if he should return to the anime he was binge watching before the alarm.
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It was only a minor inconvenience, the UF psychology freshman said. I might just head back up, change and hit the sack.
When Satchel Raye first started making art, he used paint, stained glass and pencils.
Over the years, his medium shifted to dough, sauce and toppings.
When I make a pizza and its beautiful and crispy and caramelized and perfect, that makes me so happy, he said. I want to do it again.
The longtime Gainesville resident is known for the eccentric pizzeria that is Satchels Pizza, but Raye, 49, hopes that isnt the only legacy he leaves behind.
I would like to be thought of as an artist with a pizza shop, because really my art is what inspires me and drives me, he said.
***
Raye is constantly looking for opportunities to exercise his artistic side and add to his restaurant, which opened in 2003, he said. Sometimes, he doesnt have to go looking.
After a fire at Satchels Pizza in February 2012 left the kitchen in ruins and the restaurant flooded, Raye promised to come back with a restaurant even better than before, according to Alligator archives. Four years later, he found himself making the same promise.
On the night of Dec. 5, 2016, firefighters responded to a fire that had erupted at Satchels Pizza at about 9 p.m. Fifteen-foot-flames licked the roof of Lightnin Salvage Enterprises, according to Alligator archives. Raye arrived in time to watch the building burn to the ground. Denise Prodigo-Herrmann, the office manager for Satchels Pizza, arrived shortly after Raye.
I worked that day in my office in the restaurant, she said. I was here on the property, and I set the alarm before I left, and it seemed like everything was fine.
Standing before the blazing building, hand-in-hand with Raye and other staff, Prodigo-Herrmann knew somehow, everything would be fine.
As she combed through insurance papers and obsessed over the logistical nightmare of rebuilding, Raye was already thinking of ways to transform the building into something new, she said.
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He really treats this place like its an extension of him, Prodigo-Herrmann said. Its not called Satchels Pizza for nothing.
Raye has been putting in 19-hour days to to create the newly built Lightnin Salvage Enterprises, set to open in mid-December, he said.
The two-story building will include a playground, bar, live-music venue and gift shop for customers, as well as two offices and a break room for employees on the second floor. Raye said some of the space will likely not be complete for the opening in December, but he plans to throw a grand opening in the Spring.
The new space will also include a second ATM and two additional bathrooms for customers, he said. As for the interior decorations, Raye said the space will evolve over time, but getting it up and running is his first priority.
I think itll take me another 10 years to really create something as vibrant and as exciting and visually interesting as what we lost, he said.
With the grueling process of rebuilding added to his regular workload, Raye said he could never go about the task alone. But he hasnt just built a business over the past 14 years, hes built a family.
During long days, Raye motivates himself by thinking of his work family and his wife, Caroline, who can always make him crack a smile.
My life is between Satchels Pizza and my home, he said. My energy and my inspiration comes from my family.
Danny Lore has worked for Raye for 10 years. As the manager of Lightnin Salvage Enterprises, Lore looked on with Raye in shock as they watched the flames engulf the space.
Lightnin Salvage was just a big piece of art. It was a huge sculpture, Lore said. For him to watch that thing go up in flames, it was just devastating.
If it were anybody else other than Raye, Lore might be worried, but past experiences remind him that Raye tackles everything headfirst.
Lore recalls sharing an idea with Raye about remodeling the bar in Lightnin Salvage Enterprises. Two days after perusing Lores rough sketch of the design plan, he came into work to find that Raye had already cut a hole in the wall.
Once he gets his mind set that hes going to do something, he gets it done, Lore said.
***
Though rebuilding was hard work, Raye said art is intrinsic to him.
When he was 12 years old, Raye discovered his talent for pencil drawings. His parents enrolled him in an adult drawing class on Saturdays so he could be with artists closer to his skill level. At UF in the late 1980s, he honed his painting skills as an art major before transferring to the Atlanta College of Art.
At Satchels Pizza, Raye has found a way to weave together his two loves: making pizza and creating art. To him, its one in the same.
The pizzas are really mandalas. So when we make a pizza, were spreading these toppings out evenly and making a beautiful piece of art that somebody can eat, he said. I really feel like Im making art when Im making pizza.
When outsiders first catch a glimpse of Satchels Pizza, it might look more like an antique shop full of old knick-knacks than it does a restaurant teeming with art. But the recycled materials that cover nearly every inch of Satchels Pizza is part of what makes it so meaningful, Prodigo-Herrmann said.
I think that theres something very literal like when people touch objects and then they get passed on to be created into something else, she said. All of that energy really does play a part in what our place is all about.
Its an energy that draws customers to the pizzeria, said Mike Hill, 49, a seasoned Satchels Pizza-goer. The Gainesville resident has been frequenting the business for about 12 years. His go-to is a white pie and a chat with Raye.
Everytime we go, it seems theres some new project that Satchel is working on to improve his place, Hill said. Hes one of the most innovative people Ive ever met.
Rayes personality is evident in every corner of the restaurant, Hill said. From the vinyl on the booths to the ingredients in the homemade sodas, a little bit of Raye can be seen in everything.
His fingerprints are all over the entire place, Hill said.
Raye believes that his Satchels Pizza was so warmly received by the Gainesville community because his life was shaped by the town. He always knew it would be the right place to open his business. Although he spent much of his twenties and early thirties traveling to Jamaica, Mexico, Alaska, Europe, Thailand and other worldwide locations, Raye always found himself back in Gainesville.
I just feel like that this is where Im from, and so my art is reflective of this community, and this community can really relate to what I do, he said.
As Lightnin Salvage Enterprises prepares to reopen, Prodrigo-Herrmann said the community gets to be a part of a beautiful new beginning. Once again, Gainesville residents get to watch Raye artfully gather up the charred and smoky pieces of the past and turn it into a communitys treasure.
Over the years, you will now get to watch a new evolution of Satchels Pizza, she said, and it, again, will all come from him.
Satchel Raye, the owner of the pizza restaurant Satchel's, poses for a portrait.
About 15 years ago, nursing student Michael Bumbach put on his scrubs, washed his hands and walked into an open-brain surgery performed by a doctor another man.
But when he walked into the room, the doctor said, Wow; youre not the person I expected.
Bumbach, now a professor at the UF College of Nursing, said he still remembers the doctors reaction. Hes received the same sentiment throughout his time as a male nurse practitioner. He knows when people think of nurses, they dont always picture him but rather a woman in scrubs.
UFs own nursing college is dominated by women, with an average of about 93 percent of students enrolled being female, according to an analysis of UF enrollment data from the past five years. Other colleges like the UF College of Education and the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions also contain a majority of female students.
While women are prominent in these areas, men maintain a stronghold in the UF Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, the second-largest college at UF. With 6,976 undergraduate students enrolled in the College of Engineering in Fall 2016, only about 27 percent of them were women.
Bumbach said as a male nurse of more than a decade, people still ask him if he plans to become a doctor. Because hes a man, they expect him to move beyond nursing, he said, but he wants to remain in nursing and help diversify the profession.
Theres more and more of a push in nursing to say, Hey, why are we majority homogeneous, why is the nursing force mainly white women? Bumbach said.
When Bruce Qian walks into a class in the College of Education, hes often either alone or accompanied by only one other man.
When the 23-year-old education graduate student enrolled at UF in Fall 2016, he was one of 8,152 men seeking graduate-level degrees in education compared to 8,665 women.
The College of Education offers graduate-level online degrees, meaning on-campus classes may not reflect the actual ratio of men and women seeking education graduate degrees. But when Qian goes to class in person he said he notices few women.
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Even in China its the same picture, said Qian, who is a Chinese international student. Most teachers there are female.
The disparity is worse for undergraduates in the college which in the last five years has an average of 94 percent female undergraduate students.
In Fall 2016, there were only 30 men enrolled at the undergraduate level, compared to 380 women.
Tom Dana, the associate dean of academic affairs for the college, said the majority of undergraduate students attending UF for education are women interested in elementary and early childhood education.
It is low; were a female dominated field by and large, Dana said.
A lot of people who become teachers tend to be women.
Dana said he believes every education college has similar gender diversity numbers.
At the University of California, Irvine, which the U.S. News and World Report ranked alongside UF as the ninth best public university, less than 17 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in its College of Education in Fall 2016 were men, according to the universitys website.
Dana said while the College of Educations minors tend to attract male students, due to the minors involving math and science education, the college as a whole doesnt specifically recruit men, but rather looks for candidates interested in the profession.
We recruit for the best students we can locate, he said. We do try to reach out to any group of students that would become good teachers.
In the UF College of Engineering, three in every four students are men.
Curtis Taylor, the associate dean for student affairs in the College of Engineering, said the college is focused on improving the disparity between men and women. He said UFs engineering college went from having a 23 percent female enrollment in 2011 to a 28 percent female enrollment in 2017. UF has not yet added Fall 2017 student enrollment data to its online database.
This is a national problem, its a problem thats been around for a very long time, Taylor said. Theres a need for a cultural shift or a cultural change within engineering, as well as within the society about engineering. There still are many perceptions that contribute to less women going into engineering, engineering being a traditional male role.
At UF, Taylor said the engineering college works to welcome women in the program. Because the college gets no sway over admissions, Taylor said administrators focus on helping students have a better experience while theyre enrolled.
The college hosts different welcoming ceremonies for groups including women, graduate minority students and LGBTQ+ students. They also offer luncheons for women and encourage students to join the Society of Women Engineers, where they can meet mentors and learn from women working in the engineering field.
That goes a long way, having a mentor and being able to see people that look like you and have similar interests that youre aspiring to do, Taylor said.
Taylor said faculty in the college are important in fostering a culture of inclusion. In the past six years, the number of female faculty which includes professors, administrators and researchers in the College of Engineering went from 11 percent to 19 percent, and Taylor said theyre continuing to focus on diversifying faculty.
I think the general trend is occurring, one, because our dean, shes very focused on diversity inclusion, something that is extremely important, Taylor said.
The lack of female professors when compared to men is common in most of UFs colleges. From Fall 2011 to Fall 2017, the UF Warrington College of Business Administration had an average of about 29 percent female professors, and the UF College of Design, Construction and Planning had an average of about 31 percent female professors, according to UF faculty data.
Only the UF College of Journalism and Communications, the College of Education and the College of Nursing have had an average majority of female professors since 2011.
The disparity continues into UFs upper-level graduate programs, like the UF College of Veterinary Medicine, where female professors make up less than 30 percent of the faculty despite female students making up more than three-fourths of the veterinary schools population.
May Mansy, the president of WiSE, a club that promotes women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, said its important to have diverse faculty so women can feel welcome in the classroom.
Mansy, 31, said her friends have sat in on mechanical or aerospace engineering courses and found themselves the only woman in the room. They dropped the class shortly after, feeling uncomfortable.
Its a very intangible thing that gets instilled into the psychology of women in general, that if you see a certain field being represented by males most of the time, you dont feel welcome in there anymore, you dont feel like you belong anymore, unless you find yourself represented, she said.
Taylor said its important to have a diverse workforce, and he hopes UFs engineering college can be a model for other schools as they fight the national issue of gender differences in the field.
Its what students want, he said. And its also what companies want. They realize the workforce is a diverse workforce, and if youre going to have leaders in engineering, youve got to have leaders who can inspire people from different backgrounds.
UF researchers have been awarded a $10 million grant to study the red snapper population in the Gulf of Mexico.
Robert Ahrens, an associate professor in the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences fisheries and aquatic sciences program, will join other researchers to assess the fish population. Will Patterson, a UF professor, also received funding.
The grant is funded through an order from Congress and comes from the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ahrens said.
The study aims to find a better method of determining the number of red snappers in the Gulf of Mexico, Ahrens said.
The red snapper population in the Gulf of Mexico is an iconic species, Ahrens said. It represents some of the biggest challenges we face with respect to the management of fishery resources in the Gulf.
Since traditional assessments are not effective in counting population size, fishers believe the harvest restrictions put on the fish are too high and are having a negative impact on their revenue, Ahrens said.
UFs goal is to provide an alternative assessment of the red snapper population using methods like remote-operated vehicles, which count fish in a specific area. However, this method only works in clear water, so the group is looking into other methods as well.
The project will begin in 2018, Ahrens said. The team hopes to start the actual sampling of the population by late spring or early summer.
Tyler Ellman will never forget how he felt standing at Auschwitz.
It changed my entire perspective on life, on history, on the world and on my faith, Ellman, a UF theatre and telecommunication senior, said.
After returning from the March of the Living trip, where thousands of Jewish teens marched from the Auschwitz concentration camp to the Birkenau camp, Ellman began working on his play, which will debut tonight at High Dive, located at 210 SW 2nd Ave.
The play, Tap Dancing Through Auschwitz, will run today and Tuesday, with doors opening at 7 p.m. and the play beginning at 8 p.m. Ticket prices range from $6 to $12.
Ellman said the play is about six high school students who visit Auschwitz to learn more about their ancestors. The title refers to one characters nervous fidget, expressed through tapping his foot when in an uncomfortable situation.
Before going on the trip, I was going through a lot, Ellman, 22, said. You start to really look at life a different way when youre having issues that are so real, and then youre put into a whirlwind of a crazy absurd place like Auschwitz.
The plays director, Steven Breiter, helped Ellman revise the script during the four years Ellman spent writing. Breiter said the play would be good for the Jewish community.
(Its) a metaphor for how all these kids on this trip are uncomfortable and going through a tough time learning about their ancestors, Breiter said.
Ellman fundraised to rent the High Dive space with support from five different Jewish student organizations, including the UF Jewish Student Union, Lubavitch Chabad Jewish Center, UF Hillel and Alpha Epsilon Phi. He also received support from the Jewish Council of North Central Florida, Ellman said.
All of the proceeds from the play will be donated to the Arab American Community Center of Florida, an organization that helps Iraqi and Syrian refugee families, Ellman said. He said people say never again about the Holocaust, but must also focus on current injustices.
Dont be a bystander, make your voice heard, take action, he said.
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When Madeline Gangnes woke up to a push notification Saturday morning on her smartphone, her heart sank.
News that the Republican Party-led tax bill passed in the U.S. Senate 51-40 just before 2 a.m. Saturday left Gangnes, a 31-year-old UF English doctoral candidate, in a whirlwind of uncertainty, mulling over how shed be able to make ends meet under the new tax policy.
My stomach dropped, basically. I almost had a panic attack, she said. Pretty much all of us were freaking out today.
Doctoral students like Gangnes take issue with the Houses version of the Senate bill from Nov. 16, which would have their tuition waivers be considered taxable income. Graduate students who teach or perform research for their university often have their tuition waived by the federal government, a tax break about 145,000 students across the U.S. rely on, according to NPR.
For Gangnes, the new policy would mean instead of being taxed on her $20,000 annual stipend equivalent to $9.62 an hour she would instead be taxed as if she makes $30,700.
The House and Senate now have to reconcile their two separate bills before submitting a final version to President Donald Trumps desk, although only the House bill calls for taxing tuition waivers, according to The New York Times.
If the House bill provision passes, Gangnes said students from low- and middle-income families would have to reconsider graduate school altogether, tanking higher education participation nationwide. She said she fears senators wont fight against the House bill if push comes to shove.
Its definitely this feeling like weve been sold a bill of goods, we were told wed have this system in place for us to pursue this career that we love, she said. Now someones pulling out the rug from underneath.
Gainesville Mayor Lauren Poe said the bill would be an affront to local communities, given its proposed corporate tax rate cuts and the $1.4 trillion deficit the Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would add over the next 10 years.
Poe said he thinks its unprofessional how senators pushed for a vote in the middle of the night.
I probably know as much about that bill as the senators who voted for it, which isnt a good thing, he said. Its definitely not good for our community.
Amid student fears, the UF Graduate Assistants United union, which represents about 4,000 teaching and research assistants, is considering how to move forward. GAU spokesperson Josh Papacek said he feels UF should speak out against the bill.
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I think it would have been reassuring to the graduate students that the university is behind them on this issue, Papacek said. Should it pass, (GAU) should be working with the university to come up with solutions to this.
UF has been working with nonprofits like the Association of American Universities to lobby on Capitol Hill with its concerns of taxing tuition waivers, UF spokesperson Janine Sikes said.
UF President Kent Fuchs also wrote to Florida Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson ahead of the Senates vote, speaking out against the bills effect on students, and thereby universities, Sikes said.
We still have to wait on the reconciliation between the House and the Senate bills, Sikes said. Were doing what we can behind the scenes to get some changes.
In the meantime, Papacek said many graduate students will have to grapple with whether they can continue in their programs.
Its going to be difficult for a lot of people, theres already a lot of grad students that are living paycheck to paycheck, Papacek said. Even $1,000 more in their tax budget is going to cause grad students to make some difficult decisions as to whether they can still even be in school.
Potential trigger warning: This column cites anti-LGBTQ+ quotes in an effort to demonstrate how we must vote against anti-LGBTQ+ politicians.
On Thursday, members and allies of the LGBTQ+ community celebrated the news: The New York City Council passed a bill banning conversion therapy, the controversial and cruel therapy meant to turn gay people straight. As the bill goes to Mayor Bill de Blasio for signing, it seems as though weve finally got a speck of good news in the turbulent ocean of terrible sound bites weve heard for months on end.
This is certainly a victory. Gay conversion therapy has long been criticized as inhumane and downright wrong. According to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the techniques associated with conversion therapy are devoid of scientific validity and pose serious dangers to patients especially to minors, who are often forced to undergo them by their parents or legal guardians. Similarly, both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association have warned of the dangers of conversion therapy.
This therapy rests on the foundation that we must see same-sex attraction as a mental illness, a notion so grossly ancient and awful it boggles my mind people actually continue to think this way. It would be easy for me to think, especially as a white, middle-class woman, that the LGBTQ+ community has mostly emerged victorious from these hard-fought battles, that there is not much left to fight for. It seems simple to dismiss homophobic and transphobic remarks as the words of crazies, certainly not the mainstream and not worth correcting. But this is just not so.
Lets take a look at some contemporary elected officials and political hopefuls, for example. First up: Vice President Mike Pence. In 2016, Time magazine shared a collection of Pences remarks on LGBTQ+ issues throughout his time in the public eye. In 2006, he said in a speech that societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family, in reference of same-sex couples.
Last May, Pence opposed former President Barack Obamas initiative to let students use the bathrooms of their preferred genders. And just this October, while discussing gay rights, President Donald Trump joked that Pence wants to hang them all. (By the way, Mr. President, jokes are supposed to be funny.)
So right off the bat, both our president and vice president have spoken with anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and quite clearly do not serve as allies to the community. Can we even act surprised? Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, now known for horrendous allegations of sexual misconduct and assault made by multiple women, was disgusting even before his terrible actions came to light.
Twelve years ago, Moore compared homosexuality to bestiality. As a judge, Moore refused to acknowledge that the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex marriage constitutional across the country. Last week, Moore called the sexual misconduct allegations against him part of a conspiracy led by liberals; gay, bisexual and transgender people; and socialists alike.
We must work to ensure people like Moore do not hold elected office. Make sure other people know the dangerous views of those in and running for public positions. Share their views being sure to warn others of their wrongness and offense. Please, when the time comes, vote against these people. Support the LGBTQ+ community, whether you are a member or an ally. Help create and nurture a society where we are free to love and be loved by whomever we choose.
Mia Gettenberg is a UF criminology and philosophy senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
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House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes has issued an angry demand to the FBI and Department of Justice to explain why they kept the committee in the dark over the reason Special Counsel Robert Mueller kicked a key supervising FBI agent off the Trump-Russia investigation.
How objective can an investigation into Hillary Clintons email investigation be when the FBI agent who played a lead role was removed from it this summer for texting his pro-Hillary and anti-Trump sympathies? And why does House Intelligence committee Chairman Devin Nunes have to read about it in the New York Times and the Washington Post? As Byron York reports in the Washington Examiner :
Stories in both the Washington Post and New York Times on Saturday reported that Peter Strzok, who played a key role in the original FBI investigation into the Trump-Russia matter, and then a key role in Mueller's investigation, and who earlier had played an equally critical role in the FBI's Hillary Clinton email investigation, was reassigned out of the Mueller office because of anti-Trump texts he exchanged with a top FBI lawyer, Lisa Page, with whom Strzok was having an extramarital affair. Strzok was transferred to the FBI's human resources office -- an obvious demotion -- in July.
Are we to believe that Strzok was diligently and impartially examining evidence related to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump while being unable to contain his anti-Trump bias? Is he the only Hillary mole? Just look at Robert Muellers staff and James Comeys exoneration of Hillary Clinton after the infamous tarmac meeting between AG Loretta Lynch and unindicted conspirator in Uranium One William Jefferson Clinton. Stop when you detect a pattern.
This news comes as House Republicans, tired of leaks and finding out about things in the legacy media, are moving to find both the FBI and the DOJ in contempt of Congress for failing to provide requested material:
U.S. House Republicans are moving to bring a Contempt of Congress resolution against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray for stonewalling the production material related to the Russia-Trump probes and other matters. According to Bloomberg, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes and other Republicans decided to move against Rosenstein and Wray after the New York Times reported Saturday about the removal of a top FBI official assigned to Special Counsel Robert Muellers probe of the alleged Russia-Trump election collusion had been removed from the investigation.
If it's hurtful to Team Trump, it gets leaked. If it's damaging to Team Hillary, it's treated like the gold at Fort Knox. Thats not really surprising in a probe where Michael Flynn gets dinged for making false statements to the FBI, the same crime committed by famous Russian colluder Martha Stewart, but Hillary Clinton is not. But then, Hillary was never put under oath in an interview for which no notes were taken, unlike former FBI Director James Comeys meeting with President Trump. Comey did not attend that meeting, nor was a grand jury convened. And where are the Podesta indictments, pray tell?
Comey had the fix in for Hillary. We now know why the FBI made the absurd claim that it would not release its files on the Hillary Clinton email investigation for alleged lack of public interest. The FBI was covering up its obstruction of justice in the, er, matter knowing full well that former Director James Comey had already exonerated Hillary Clinton before the alleged investigation was complete and all witnesses had been interviewed, and months before Comey falsely claimed in his announcement that no competent prosecutor would take Hillarys case.
In withholding the files sought under Freedom of Information Act requests, the FBI forgot that it and former Secretary of State Clinton are and were employees of the American taxpayer, taxpayers who have a right to know whether justice is being served or denied. Claims that Hillary had privacy rights that trumped the public interest were absurd:
The FBI is declining to turn over files related to its investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clintons emails by arguing a lack of public interest in the matter. Ty Clevenger, an attorney in New York City, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in March of 2016 asking for a variety of documents from the FBI and the Justice Department, including correspondence exchanged with Congress about the Clinton email investigation. In July 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey famously called Clintons email arrangement extremely careless though he decided against recommending criminal charges. On Aug. 8, the FBI asked Clevenger to detail why the public would be interested. If you seek disclosure of any existing records on this basis, you must demonstrate that the public interest in disclosure outweighs personal privacy interests, the letter stated. In this regard, you must show that the public interest sought is a significant one, and that the requested information is likely to advance that interest.
Say what? Did it serve the public interest -- or James Comeys interest -- when he publicly detailed all the reasons Hillary Clinton should be criminally charged before saying lack of intent, a criterion which appears nowhere in the law, was the reason Comey was giving Hillary a get out of jail free card, a judgment he did not have the authority to make? Didnt his exoneration announcement violate Hillarys alleged privacy rights by detailing the criminal violations of a subject that was not going to be charged?
If James Comey was seriously looking for evidence of intent, he couldnt have possibly taken a single step without tripping over it. Wasnt having a private server that contained classified information, multiple devices that were later physically smashed, and using Bleach Bit to destroy 33,000 emails that were under subpoena sufficient evidence of intent?
Only a corrupt and complicit FBI director, acting as Hillary Clintons surrogate campaign manager, who months earlier had decided he would exonerate her, could ignore the damning evidence:
As FBI director last year, James Comey began writing drafts of a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton, even before all witnesses in the investigation -- including Clinton herself -- had been interviewed. The Senate Judiciary Committee obtained the Comey memos as part of its investigation into his firing by President Trump, which occurred on May 9. The revelation that Comey had begun drafting memos of his exoneration statement comes from transcripts of interviews given last fall by two FBI officials. James Rybicki, Comeys chief of staff, and Trisha Anderson, the principal deputy general counsel of national security and cyberlaw at the FBI, gave the interviews as part of an investigation conducted by the Office of Special Counsel into the FBIs handling of the Clinton email investigation. In a July 5, 2016, press conference, Comey said that he would not be recommending charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information despite her use of a private email server as secretary of state. While the transcripts of those interviews are heavily redacted, they indicate that Comey started working on an announcement clearing Clinton in April or May of last year, before the FBI interviewed 17 witnesses in the case, including Clinton and some of her top aides.
Having already decided that he would exonerate her regardless of the evidence explains why he did not attended the July 2, 2016 interview of Hillary Clinton, did not put her under oath, or ever impanel a grand jury in the, theres that word again, matter. The fix was in.
Yes, Virginia, this is a witch hunt. Robert Mueller III was appointed special counsel after his friend, the vindictive James Comey, committed a federal crime by leaking a memo which was a government record to the press. Mueller has picked staff and prosecutors as if he were stocking Hillary Clintons Department of Justice. He has picked a bevy of Clinton donors, an attorney who worked for the Clinton Foundation, a former Watergate assistant prosecutor, and even a senior advisor to Eric Holder. Objective professionals all (snarkiness intended).
Mueller is in fact colluding with Comey to enact revenge on President Trump for Comeys firing, something which even Comey said Trump was constitutionally entitled to do. There is no evidence of collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice. It is not obstruction of justice for a President to exercise his legal and constitutional authority.
But the facts and the lack of an actual crime will not stop Robert Mueller. Robert Mueller is following in the proud tradition of Stalins chief of the secret police, Lavrenty Beria. Just show him the man, or woman, and he will show you the crime.
And then theres Hillary mole Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe was in a key position overseeing the investigation of Hillary Clintons scandalous and treasonous handling of classified emails on her private server, a position from which he could assist FBI Director James Comey in putting the fix in. As Judicial Watch notes:
Judicial Watch today released Justice Department records showing that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe did not recuse himself from the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clintons unsecure, non-government email server until Tuesday, November 1, 2016, one week prior to the presidential election. The Clinton email probe was codenamed Midyear Exam. While working as Assistant Director in Charge of the Washington Field Office, McCabe controlled resources supporting the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clintons email scandal. An October 2016 internal FBI memorandum labeled Overview of Deputy Director McCabes Recusal Related To Dr. McCabes Campaign for Political Office, details talking points about McCabes various potential conflicts of interest, including the FBIs investigation of Clintons illicit server, which officially began in July 2015: While at [Washington Field Office] did Mr. McCabe provide assistance to the Clinton investigation? After the referral was made, FBI Headquarters asked the Washington Field Office for personnel to conduct a special investigation. McCabe was serving as [Assistant Director] and provided personnel resources. However, he was not told what the investigation was about. In February 2016 McCabe became Deputy Director and began overseeing the Clinton investigation. The Overview also shows if asked whether McCabe played any role in his wifes campaign, the scripted response was: No. Then-[Assistant Director] McCabe played no role, attended no events and did not participate in fundraising or support of any kind.
Of course, that statement was a lie. The exposing of Agent Strzok is just another shoe dropping in the course of a corrupt and criminal enterprise masquerading as an investigation in which the FBI, the DOJ, and now the special counsel are all involved.
Lady justice is not blind here. She has been bound and gagged and held for ransom by Robert Mueller and his political cronies.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investors Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
Did Brits Plant the Hillary Bomb?
Americans generally know nothing about our European "allies" and the nefarious plans they may occasionally hatch against us. But people familiar with history know how the British Foreign Office was a primary mover in getting the United States into World War I. Winston Churchill certainly wanted us to join the Brits in WWII, and after Pearl Harbor, we did. By the 1930s, the Soviets had deeply suborned and penetrated the U.K., and sentimental Marxism is still the main religion of Britain, though the name "Mohammed" is now the most popular name for baby boys. A BBC survey several years ago found that Karl Marx yes, good old murderous Marx is widely respected as "the greatest philosopher in history" by the BBC audience. No wonder, because the Beeb has been telling them so ever sing the Cambridge Spies were recruited by the Soviets in the 1930s.
Ian Fleming's famous James Bond series was plausibly written by former spy Fleming to cover up the truth, which was deep subversion by the Soviets of the British espionage apparatus in World War II and after. The public story of the Trump "dossier," bought by the Hillary campaign to discredit Donald Trump and now being used by corruptocrat Robert Mueller himself the swampiest of swamp creatures is that the DNC paid Fusion GPS, which paid Christopher Steele, a "former British spy," to write an opposition document on Donald Trump. To spice up that document, Mr. Steele imagined Donald Trump, his wife, and his family going to Moscow and hiring famously sexy Moscow prostitutes to urinate on the bed Obama was alleged to have occupied. Whether anybody bothered to change the sheets is not reported, but then the whole dossier reeks to high heaven. Among the many flaws in this story is Christopher Steele, nominally a "former" GCHQ spy, who was hired to do the deed. But when it comes to keeping the Brits informed of major developments in its biggest ally, the United States, there are no "former" spies. If Steele was hired by the DNC to come up with dirt on Trump, it was his clear obligation to report said hiring to his old bosses, who would naturally send it up the line to Theresa May, the current prime minister of the U.K. Ms. May is currently in a nasty political trap, caught between the will of the British voters, who want to get out of the corrupt and incompetent European Union, and the E.U. swamp itself, which is trying by hook and by crook to sabotage the British exit from that particular quagmire. Let's put it this way: if Chris Steele is an idiot, he might not understand that the DNC was giving him a golden chance to shaft Donald J. Trump, just when Theresa May wanted to (secretly) please the E.U. swamp and thereby also get gold star points from the U.S. swamp. Got that? If Chris hadn't put that Moscow pee-pee story in the "dossier," Theresa May would never have forgiven him. So Christopher Steele claims to be a "retired" spook, when we know damned well there is no such thing. If a former spook gets a golden chance to manipulate U.S. politics, he will be seriously remiss in not telling the May government all about it. And Theresa May will jump at the chance to manipulate our election, in just the way the Brits jumped at the chance to get us into WWI and WWII. Swamp calls to swamp, you might say. OK, so the "Russian attempt to throw the election to Trump" may actually be a British attempt (with E.U. help) to throw the election to Hillary. This is not some weird exception to the rule. Obama tried to throw the Israeli election to the left, last time, against Bibi Netanyahu, whom he hated on sight. The BBC, which occasionally resorts to telling the truth, once ran a wonderful comedy show called Yes, Minister, with the running gag of the elected minister trying to manipulate his purely appointed swamp department, only to be told time and time again by the chief bureaucrat that, alas, it couldn't be done. Yes, Minister is probably on the web today, and it's worth watching, because it served as a great warning that elections in the U.K. meant nothing anymore. No matter who was elected, the swamp would prevail. Now, the BBC is the original swamp propaganda department, always running talking points from the left and, these days, from the forces of jihad. Things got so bad at the BBC swamp that it protected serial child abuser Jimmy Savile, who ran the most popular children's program on the BBC, in spite of the fact that he abused hundreds of children. The U.K. media reported the Jimmy Savile perversion only after he died. The whole thing was shocking beyond belief, but it was consistent with jihad penetration of Europe, which we now see everywhere. Jimmy Savile was obviously protected by the police, the intelligence services, and the upper ranks of the BBC itself. Parents who complained to the cops received no help whatsoever. Pakistani child-"grooming gangs" are still reported today routinely in cities like Rotherham, and they are likely to exist in many other places. In rapefugee centers like Germany and Sweden, an increase in child and female abuse can be expected, because in shari'a law, women are second- or third-class citizens, and infidel children are celebrated targets. The Prophet himself "married" a six-year-old, but he was kind enough to wait until she was nine to consummate the marriage. So Europe is corrupted and suborned even beyond the standards of Washington, D.C. Question: Are we supposed to believe that Christopher Steele really didn't work with his old buds in the British swamp to make up and spread that anti-Trump dossier? The U.K. Guardian the old Stalinist rag from those times is now protecting Theresa May against Donald Trump's nasty tweet. But I'll bet it all started with ol' Chris Steele and the pee-pee dossier.
The signs are generally pointing in that general direction, however, so it would be a smart idea to stay informed about the developments.
Predictions by financial and technology experts tell us our world is headed for a cashless society , and thats not for our benefit. There might be merit to the claim, but we probably wont know until it may be too late.
RFID tags were the first signal
At the RFID tags were introduced as a convenient way to keep track of pets, it seemed like a reasonable move. When someone brings a lost dog to the vet, if the owner cant be found, the animal gets sent to a shelter.
If the dog has been microchipped, it can be reunited with its owner fairly easily. But then people began to tag their children and even themselves, which raised some concerns.
Those red flags were subsequently validated when RFID tags became mandatory for employees of Cincinnatis video surveillance company CityWatcher.com. Since then, RFID tags have been pushed as an easy way to manage ones finances: the suggestion has been made that an implant in your body may make your physical bank card superfluous someday.
The idea would be to implant everyone with an RFID chip that not only serves as a locator, but also connects you to your individual bank account wirelessly. If you dont pay your taxes or behave responsibly, access to your funds may simply be shut off.
The second signal: cash is becoming scarce and restricted
Many people assume the Federal Reserve is printing money as if its going out of style. The truth is, its not really printing money but doing something potentially more risky.
The Fed has been allocating $4 trillion to support investment errors and economy-sapping ideas, which some experts have asserted is blocking a true economic recovery. Regardless what the agency is doing, some have noticed its becoming increasingly difficult to use cash in our society.
For example, banks like JPMorgan Chase no longer allow cash deposits unless the person seeking to make the deposit has a Chase account in good standing. If your friend overdraws his account by $20, you cant assist him with a cash infusion unless you have a Chase account as well.
And if your account is in negative numbers, you must make up the deficit before you will be allowed to deposit funds on behalf of your friend.
Though its not yet illegal to possess cash, its almost as if were headed in that direction. Banks are being instructed to file a Suspicious Activity Report when a customer withdraws $5,000 or more from her own account.
The Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017 has inspired even greater concern. According to this bill, its illegal to possess more than $10,000 in unregistered assets of any kind, including cash, Bitcoin, bonds, and even prepaid phones and gift cards.
If you dont fill out a form to report your assets to the government, the authorities can take everything you own, even if your assets were obtained legally.
The one thing all the signs have in common is that, on some level, each was presented initially as a useful idea, and the public accepted it in some form. For example, microchipping pets was accepted, and evolved from there.
Such examples are reasonably obvious to the average person, though. A greater worry is when the signs arent obvious.
One that seems to have slipped below the radar is the rapidly growing popularity of Bitcoin. Profit potential aside, Bitcoin is the embodiment of the cashless society predicted by those who sought to warn citizens for years.
How do we know that Bitcoin and similar cybercurrencies are not being activated to persuade us willingly to accept the final step of moving to a cashless society? The only way to stay on top of coming developments is to pay attention to the cycles.
Everything moves in a cycle, and Bitcoin is no exception. First, it was largely unknown. Now its being embraced in certain circles. Next, it could become mandatory for particular types of transaction. It looks as if Visa may already be on that.
Our lives work in harmony with cycles and rhythms
Every facet of our lives is governed by specific and reliable cycles and rhythms. Food grows in a cycle, and when its eaten, the body breaks down food in a cycle.
For instance, your circadian rhythm -- the cycle that governs the biology of sleep -- adapts to natural fluctuations of available light. Natural sunlight is essential for producing Vitamin D3. The less light youre exposed to, the more your bodys cycles can be altered, and not necessarily for the best.
Similarly, the more we are exposed to mechanisms of control that are implemented in cycles, the more were likely to adapt to those limitations as the new normal. Bitcoin may be the latest and most influential and theres no denying its usefulness (for now).
The question is whether or not it may take an unexpected sharp turn in another direction.
Liberals like to repurpose words with positive connotations, like sanctuary, in order to add a false impression of sanity to liberal positions which are otherwise indefensible. In the case of the now ubiquitous Sanctuary Cities phrase, liberals hope to evoke Americans desire for fairness and our propensity to stick up for the little guy.
A sanctuary is a place where people can go to be safe. Generally speaking we think of good people going to sanctuaries to escape evil; some Jews found sanctuary from the Holocaust in England and the United States, for example.
After all, even if youre some coldhearted racist conservative, liberals reason, your heartstrings will be plucked by the idea of cruel ICE agents swooping in on a hard working undocumented family who pay their taxes, never take government aid, and work hard at jobs where they are underpaid because gringo bosses threaten to call ICE on them; jobs which no citizen would do.
Ignoring for a moment the prevalence, or lack thereof, of such illegals, and also ignoring the blacks who cant find a job because honest illegals will work for less, the reality is that Sanctuary Cities have nothing to do with honest illegals.
The only people who get sanctuary in Sanctuary Cities are criminals. Cities and states cant stop ICE from enforcing the law; laws supported by generations of Democrat politicians, by the way. They cant provide safe haven for honest illegals; not that they need to since honest illegals are not that frequently targeted even by the racist Trump administration.
But what local governments can do is shield illegals who commit additional crimes in the US from being deported. Sanctuary Cities do so by preventing the police from notifying ICE when an illegal has been arrested for a crime. Historically the police would notify ICE, ICE would go to the police station and conduct a safe -- for the illegal and the community -- transfer to ICE so that the criminal could be deported.
In Sanctuary Cities illegals who drive drunk, for example, are simply allowed back into society without ICE having a chance to deport them.
Thats right; Sanctuary Cities exist to ensure that illegals who drive drunk or commit a wide range of other crimes dont risk deportation. While the specific laws that illegals can break and be protected from deportation vary between different Sanctuary Cities they are not restricted to jaywalking, having a taillight out on their car, and littering. In fact, only if the offense is serious enough that the illegal is put in jail, at least temporarily, does the Sanctuary City policy have any role; if the illegal doesnt go to jail the jail cant notify ICE when hes going to be released so that ICE can pick him up.
The net effect of Sanctuary Cities is to ensure that illegals who continue to commit other crimes are shielded from deportation; thats right liberal politicians are working hard to increase the criminal population in Sanctuary Cities.
Havent you ever wished we could just throw drunk drivers out of your city so that they cant kill people you may know the next time they slip up? Well, we cant do that for citizens, including legal immigrants, but we can for those who sneak into our country. Yet the whole purpose of Sanctuary Cities is to ensure that criminals are allowed to stay in the country enabling them to commit more crimes.
Why would any sane person support such a thing?
Maybe its because liberals know that criminals are both likely to not be concerned about illegally voting and likely to vote for liberal candidates who work to make life easy for criminals -- so long as they dont prey on the rich people the politicians schmooze with.
Or maybe its the liberals all or nothing approach to issues; either we let all illegals stay or were going to force all of them out. After all liberals staunchly defend the right of a woman to abort her viable, pain feeling, unborn daughter because she, or her spouse, wants a boy so extremism in the protection of violence is nothing new to liberals.
Or maybe its because illegals provide cheap labor for rich white liberals, and even criminal illegals rarely prey directly on the ruling elites whose safety and prosperity is the main concern of modern liberals.
In any case, Sanctuary Cities do nothing to help illegals whose only crime was breaking into our country. In fact, it wouldnt be surprising if Sanctuary Cites were causing more suffering for the honest illegals.
The man who killed Kate Steinle, for example, doesnt speak English. Given that its not absurd to think that illegals like him, with criminal records and minimal English skills, would tend to prey on honest illegals more than on American citizens. If that is the case, then by protecting illegals who continue to commit crimes Sanctuary Cities are hurting the honest illegals they claim to be trying to help, not to mention the legal Hispanic immigrants.
But words have power, so whenever and wherever you see, hear, or read the phrase Sanctuary City make sure you explain to anyone you can, in a polite way, that the real term should be Sanctuary for Criminals Cities.
It wouldnt be shocking if most of the people who support Sanctuary Cities think that those cities protect honest illegals given the way the media covers the issue. Hence by shining a light into the swamp you might be able to get people who would normally vote for a liberal to realize that theres a huge difference between mass deportation and deporting illegals who drive drunk.
You can read more of toms rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious and feel free to follow him on Twitter
The current sex crimes dragnet sweeping across the country, pulling in celebrities, media millionaires, and politicians, has yet to reel in a high-profile professor from the hallowed halls of academia
In a 2006 Frontpagemag article entitled "Remembering a Sixties Terrorist," a woman named Donna Ron recounted what she described as "the defining event of my life."
As a sophomore at the University of Michigan in 1965, Ron was caught up in the antiwar movement when she met and dated Ayers. Two months after meeting Ayers, Ron alleges that he locked her in his apartment and told her she couldn't leave until she had sex with his roommate and his brother.
From FrontPageMag (warning graphic language):
Bill Ayers' apartment was around the corner and a half a block away from the sorority house Sometimes I would stop by... What I do recall is that when I was getting ready to leave Ayers told me I couldn't go until I slept with his roommate and his brother. At first I thought Ayers was joking. I got up; and went to the door. He moved quickly to block me at the doorway. He locked the door and put the chain on it. I went to the couch and sat down and told him that I had no intention of having sex with his roommate and his brother or him. He said that I had no choice but to do as he said if I wanted to get out of there. He claimed that I wouldn't sleep with his married roommate because he was black that I was a bigot. I felt trapped. I had to get out of the situation I was in and because he was so effective a guilt-tripper, I also felt I had to prove to him that I wasn't a bigot. I got up from the couch and walked over to the black roommate's bed and put myself on it and he [f-----] me. I went totally out of my body. I floated beside myself on the outside and above the bed looking at this black stranger [f---] me angrily while I hated myself. After that I had to go lie down on Bill Ayer's bed for his brother to [s----] me. Rick Ayers was a decent person, unlike his brother, and couldn't go through with it He started and stopped and let me go. I also thought I had to let Bill [s----] me but at that point he unbolted the door and I left. I remember going back to the sorority house and talking to my best girlfriend and telling her what had happened. But there were no words yet to describe it. There was no term "date rape" yet in our political vocabulary... I was a mess and felt it was my fault for letting it happen. I was ashamed. Back home at the end of the semester, I got my parents to send me to a psychiatrist.
In 2008, Ron repeated the details of her ordeal to WND, adding, "I was terrified. People underestimate terrorism by psychological intimidation. I felt like I was being held prisoner."
It's been almost ten years since Ron alleged that Ayers set up a gang-rape in his apartment. At the time, her story was confined to a few alternative conservative websites (ironic, considering that Ron was an Obama supporter and committed socialist).
Today, not only are women with similar narratives being heard, but the men they accuse are being held accountable.
The avalanche of accusations in recent weeks, beginning with Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, suggests that Ron's horrific encounter with Ayers could resurface. To date, Ayers's only response to Ron's accusation came in 2001. After discovering that the terrorist had gone on to fame and fortune at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ron emailed him about what happened at his apartment in 1965. Ayers said he "did not remember her."
Ron, who has resided in Israel for many years, may not be aware that the tide has turned here in the U.S., but the timing couldn't be more perfect to subject the terrorist to the same scrutiny as other outed alleged sexual predators. As a co-founder of the Weather Underground, Ayers boasted about the group's willingness to engage in all kinds of deviant sex. His admission makes Donna's story even more credible. Not only that, but her narrative and Ayers's sordid history suggest the real possibility that there may be more of Ayers's victims out there. Now the question is, after aggressively targeting other millionaire males, many of whom have lost their jobs, when will the mainstream media go after Bill Ayers?
The results of the mania surrounding sexual harassment and abuse is likely change both the workplace and dating culture, for good and ill. Instead of underlings fearing to offend lascivious bigshots, the bigshots now fear offending underlings. The people working the best jobs must operate on their best behavior or else. Is that such a bad thing? And what of a dude making a spontaneous pass at a [gal]? Whether he looks like Harvey Weinstein* or Brad Pitt may determine whether the response involves the police or fireworks. Must Gloria Allred chaperone our dates and Antioch College-style consent forms preface each escalation of physical intimacy? Every abolition of the Bad Old World ushers in a [bad] Brave New World.
The American Spectator has an article on sexual misbehavior in the workplace.
*Whose face, in the immortal words of Weekend Update, looks like chewed bubblegum rolled in cat hair.
NPR interviewed a black female reporter who was one of the few in any mainstream outlet to report on the misbehavior of R. Kelly. She acknowledged that the black community are not willing to discuss the problematic ones in their community. This seems to be true of women and gays also.
The Spectator article, fairly nuanced, discusses what may safely be called "primate behavior." To that extent, it will perhaps never be extirpated from the workplace. Even NPR almost admits that gorilla males can be sexist and that orangutans rape. (The NPR article is amusing, using the same argument as those who explain that blacks can't be racist because they don't have power to oppress. As if that were part of the definition.)
What can be done is to discriminate between Weinstein's predatory coercion and Monica's admission that when she went to D.C., she took her presidential knee pads. The classical Greeks acknowledged that young men needed a mentor and profited by the relationship (e.g., Socrates and Alcibiades, though their relationship was nonphysical and therefore not typical). The British Museum says classical Latin had no word for homosexuality, and indeed, the word "homosexualitatis" is said to have originated in the 19th century.
Relationships that include a power differential, like Monica's, and perhaps Eliza Doolittle's, can be problematic. Even when clearly voluntary, they are suspect. Medical ethics, for example, forbids physical intimacy between doctors and patients even for a time after the professional relationship is ended. There doesn't seem to be any penalty, though, unless the patient objects.
As Flynn points out, the mob's fury is indiscriminate, which makes any behavior modification in society unpredictable. Or perhaps predictably oscillatory, swinging from one extreme to another. How to make the necessary discrimination? Who shall draw the line, and where?
How many workplace romances will be inhibited by the new culture of zero tolerance? Will that be a good thing?
Will this usher in a new civility?
Will banter be tolerated? Flirtation?
Will we wind up missing the '60s?
Why are there no males objecting to female predation on schoolboys only the mothers?
Journalists are patting themselves on the back a lot these days
I have seen several journalists compliment news networks on their immediate dismissal of network stars these days on sexual abuse, comparing their reactions to the slow reaction in Congress. The blinders, ignorance, and self-adulation are worse than I thought. It seems obvious that NBC has known about Matt Lauer's hobbies for years. CBS and Charlie Rose's producers knew about accusations against Rose also, and Fox News obviously knew about Bill O'Reilly. The networks took their time for dismissal until stories were coming out.
Congress is worse because it has used taxpayer money and intentionally buried the information while congressmen lecture the rest of us and make laws from which they exempt themselves. They feel that they are special as they tell us who is fit for office and always demand more power and money for themselves while there is little or no transparency. People in the private sector, education system, churches, government, and media shouldn't pat themselves on the back. No one acted promptly and transparently on sex abuse. Some journalists and Democrats are also acting as if they should be exonerated by calling the Clintons out now, decades after their abuse of women and one year after wholeheartedly supporting the Clintons' return to the White House. Then I saw on Fox News Sunday morning that journalists have been vindicated in their reporting on the alleged Russian collusion and Trump because of the perjury charge against Michael Flynn. Of all the dishonesty and stupidity in the media these days, I thought this was one of the most ignorant things ever said. Democrats funded a fake Russian dossier to trash Trump; the fake dossier was fed to compliant journalists and Obama administration officials; the fake dossier was used as an excuse to spy on Trump officials; the spying was used to illegally unmask names, which were given to journalists. So what should journalists be proud of? No actual underlying collusion or crimes have been found, so why is Mueller investigating at all? Flynn was charged with perjury when there was no underlying crime, yet Hillary lied about classified emails, which was an actual crime, and Justice and journalists don't care. Journalists, Justice, and Democrats have never cared about Russian collusion at all. They care about destroying Trump and his agenda, nothing more. If Justice, Journalists, and Democrats cared about actual collusion, they would investigate Fusion GPS, the DNC, the Hillary campaign, the Justice Department, the Obama administration officials, and journalists for all using the fake dossier to go after Trump. It is no wonder journalists are held in such low regard when they pat themselves on the back for things they didn't do. It is similar to Al Gore claiming credit for inventing the internet and politicians pretending they can control the climate and sea levels.
And President Trump and his United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley have done it for all the right reasons, making this as applause-worthy as anything the Trump administration team has done.
To considerable pearl - clutching by global elites, the U.S. has pulled out of the United Nations' global framework for migration, known for now as the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants.
Just listen to the kvetching from the Guardian in its lede:
The Trump administration has pulled out of the United Nations' ambitious plans to create a more humane global strategy on migration, saying involvement in the process interferes with American sovereignty, and runs counter to US immigration policies.
More humane? Sorry pal, there's nothing humane about letting United Nations eurocrats and thirdworldocrats decide who comes to the states over the will of the citizens.
The humane policy is the one described by UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in a statement. She does us all proud:
In a statement issued on Saturday, Haley said: "America is proud of our immigrant heritage and our longstanding moral leadership in providing support to migrant and refugee populations across the globe But our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone." She said: "We will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country. The global approach in the New York declaration is simply not compatible with US sovereignty."
Because, arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, that's likely to be a problem despite what the U.N. and its media minions say. It's also just the sort of thing President Obama would sign off on, and did last year, with this framework for a pact. We know he agreed to take thousands of Syrian refugees into our country at the behest of the U.N., and just as bad, he even agreed to take Middle Eastern refugees from terrorist-infested countries denied entry to Australia for breaking their immigration laws, rewarding them with the much bigger prize for their lawbreaking with U.S. green cards.
Because being a citizen or resident of the United States was nothing special to Obama, the U.S. was just one nation as good or bad as others. Only being a citizen of the world was what was exciting. So of course, it was easy to sign off on the U.N. plan for "orderly" migration at our expense.
What Haley and President Trump have likely seen is how the phony claims of respecting sovereignty have come to naught on the question of migration in the European Union. Countries like Hungary and Poland that have sought to limit migration from backward countries brimming with angry, resentful terrorist-recruitment fodder (if not actual terrorists) have been demonized and threatened with sanctions by their overlords in the E.U. Given the heavy overlap between the coercive eurocrats and the U.N. bureaucracy, the U.S. can expect the exact same treatment if the U.S. doesn't agree to feed, house, shelter, pay, educate, and medically treat the millions of third-worlders awaiting the opportunity to pour in, with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill and watching their hospitals and schools crumble. And if we refuse, we will be held up to public scorn and sanctions. This is a losing proposition.
Would a U.N. bureaucrat really care if he let a few terrorists into the States? Given who runs the U.N., some would do it intentionally.
What's really at the back of this suspect framework is Europe's problem right now: that six millions migrants are straining to enter the European Union, drawn by its vast welfare benefits and the welcome mat put out by German chancellor Angela Merkel. Thomas Lifson notes the story here.
The whole obsession with a framework with its German "orderliness" orientation may be because of this very six million and Europe's unwillingness to shut its doors. Instead of taking responsibility for the mess it's made, and telling unsuitable migrants no, it's easier to fob it off on the U.S., insist it take the biggest quota, and Let Gringo Pay as the European elites virtue-signal their goodness.
Right now, the U.N. is trying to wheedle and flatter the U.S. back into the "orderly" (read: German-style) migration framework, citing America's generosity and experience.
The role of the United States in this process is critical as it has historically and generously welcomed people from all across the globe and remains home to the largest number of international migrants in the world. As such, it has the experience and expertise to help ensure that this process leads to a successful outcome.
Experience and expertise? Here's the experience and expertise for United Nations to learn from as it says it wants:
We are a nation of laws, and through our laws, we control our borders ourselves. That's what works. That's the experience, and that's the expertise.
President Trump and Ambassador Haley see the issue far more clearly than they are likely to given credit for.
I wonder who it was who suggested that a major Politico Magazine story on Chelsea Clinton entitled " Clinton Should Run for Cotton's Senate Seat " was a good idea? A reasonable guess would be members of the Clinton Machine who know that its days are numbered, now that Hillary Clinton is embarrassing herself with excuses for her loss and angry Sanders supporters feel the injustice of having the nomination stolen from their guy.
The problem is that there is no possible heir other than Chelsea to build on the name recognition inherent in the Clinton Brand, and Chelsea is...well...not exactly racking up successes that would appeal to Arkansas voters. True, she enjoys a spacious $15-million apartment in a trendy part of Manhattan, but she didn't earn the money for it, and her husband, whose last hedge fund was shut down after making bad bets on Greek sovereign debt, lacked the wherewithal. And I am not certain that fashionable New York digs count for much in Arkansas.
Still, the Clinton crowd sees her as glamorous:
But running for the Senate, she will not have makeup artists, expert lighting, and the option of choosing only the best look for exposure to the bubbas and bubbettes not that the glam look is necessarily an asset in Arkansas.
Chelsea embarrassed herself with her short but highly lucrative gig on NBC News. She washed out at McKinsey & Company, where brains, ambition, and hard work are essential. The only job she has managed to keep is at the (renamed) Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which is its own bundle of problems. By all means, let's vet Uranium One on the campaign trail.
The opportunities for cosmic justice are so compelling that I hope Chelsea ignores the troglodytes on the right and does listen to the courtiers desperate for another Clinton to unite behind who can feather their nests.
Go, Chelsea!
Europe slowly is realizing that it has seen only the beginning of its invasion by the poor of the Middle East and Africa. With Germany already reeling from a million refugees who flooded in from the Middle East, a classified German government report was leaked to the newspaper Blid.
The report said that one million people are waiting in Libya; another one million are waiting in Egypt, 720,000 in Jordan, 430,000 in Algeria, 160,000 in Tunisia, and 50,000 in Morocco. More than three million others who are waiting in Turkey are currently prevented from crossing into Europe by the EU's migrant deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Those 3 million in the care of an Islamist leader of Turkey with ambitions for a caliphate can't help but revive memories of Ottoman invasions and conquests of part of Europe that lasted for centuries. Erdogan can pull the trigger and release 3 million invaders anytime the blackmail payoffs don't satisfy him.
Even more migrants are moving toward Europe from Africa, regardless of the preferences of Europeans:
The former head of the British embassy in Benghazi, Joe Walker-Cousins, warned that as many as a million migrants from countries across Africa are already on the way to Libya and Europe. The EU's efforts to train a Libyan coast guard was "too little and too late," he said. "My informants in the area tell me there are potentially one million migrants, if not more, already coming up through the pipeline from central Africa and the Horn of Africa."
And:
The director of the United Nations office in Geneva, Michael Mller, has warned that Europe must prepare for the arrival of millions more migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In an interview with The Times, Mller, a Dane, said: "What we have been seeing is one of the biggest human migrations in history. And it's just going to accelerate. Young people all have cellphones and they can see what's happening in other parts of the world, and that acts as a magnet." German Development Minister Gerd Muller has echoed that warning: "The biggest migration movements are still ahead: Africa's population will double in the next decades. A country like Egypt will grow to 100 million people, Nigeria to 400 million. In our digital age with the internet and mobile phones, everyone knows about our prosperity and lifestyle." Muller added that only 10% of those currently on the move have reached Europe: "Eight to ten million migrants are still on the way."
The current globalized world may be unsustainable, given that improvements to communications and transportation have shown people in poor countries unable to develop their own modern economies that a better life is available elsewhere and within their reach. The welfare states of the European countries incentivize and facilitate their ambitions to migrate. The unwillingness of all but a couple of Eastern European countries to defend their borders and turn away undesired migrants seals Europe's fate.
There is a lot of wishful thinking about the new arrivals adopting Western values, but those same communications and transportation improvements mean that home country cultures (and religions) are able not only to sustain themselves, but to grow in the European environment. Welfare benefits superior to the living standards of home countries free up young males for mischief of all sorts.
Gatestone calls it an "African exodus of biblical proportions impossible to stop." I would add the condition "under current politically correct delusions" to that.
I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!
Much has been made of why Special Counsel Robert Mueller prosecuted former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But what about the lie itself, which President Trump has noted on Twitter was a pretty useless lie?
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2017
The conventional wisdom, as UCLA law professor Harry Litman lays out, is that Flynn "knew" that talking with the Russians, or rather, "negotiating" with them, as he extends the term, was "wrong and inimical to U.S. interests." I notice he doesn't use the word "illegal," and from a law professor, that's significant. Just "wrong."
As Jack Posobiec has found, it was actually all right.
I think Flynn lied because he was afraid. And he was afraid because he's a Washington swamp creature, even if a Trump-friendly one.
In the Washington swamp culture, nothing is worse than talking to a Russian.
Russia is our worst enemy, supposedly, and great amounts of spydom and security clearances hinge on keeping Russia as big an enemy as possible. More enemy, more government funds for the bureaucracies that hunt Russian spies. And more specifically, talk to a Russian, lose your security clearance. It no longer matters if you have had five wives and ten mistresses, smoked a ton of pot, have a minor criminal record, live with your girlfriend, practice devil-worship, or have mental health issues. As we have seen in recent years, pretty much anyone can get a security clearance these days; nothing personal will exclude you, no matter how risky. Ed Snowden shacking up with his pole-dancing girlfriend out in Hawaii is Exhibit A. That leaves just mere contact with the Russians as the main taboo, since something has to be taboo, or why else does anyone need a security clearance?
So Flynn, who White House officials have told me was never as pro-Russia as he was portrayed, lived in this swamp culture for years, and he was Russia-phobic like the rest of them.
Meanwhile, out in the business world, where President Trump hailed from, there were no such taboos. Businessmen who have been doing business with Russian firms have often had good experiences, and that has translated to goodwill. It wasn't just Trump; it was many American and European businesspeople. Trump's pro-Russia stance was appealing to people not affiliated with the state for this very reason.
Flynn likely lied to the FBI out of a reflexive swamp culture mentality of it always being bad to talk to the Russians. Had he been fully on board with Trump mentally instead, he would have gladly and loudly told Mueller's team: "Sure, I talked to the Russians, and we discussed sanctions and what we plan to do when in office," which is hardly "negotiating," as the UCLA law professor argues. It's just talking.
It certainly would explain Trump's astonished tweet about Flynn, given that nothing illegal was going on.
The UCLA law professor made some good points about how such discussions with Russians could gum up other diplomatic maneuvers. But that underlines why it's important for the Obama administration, not the incoming Trump team, to brief the Trump group and keep them informed before the inevitable change of power occurs. Obviously, they didn't.
And now poor Flynn is being swallowed by his own swamp. His problem is that he couldn't get out not even when he joined Team Trump.
WaPo dismisses Jew-hatred
To the Washington Post editors, the fact that more than half of all religious hate crimes in the U.S. are directed against Jews is not particularly troubling...and never has been. But now that Muslim hate crimes have increased to one quarter of all hate crimes, the Post reports that fact as "particularly troubling." Can the Post be any more blatant in its enmity toward Jews? Anti-Semitism in the media has been steady for at least a hundred years. The United States media did minimal if any reporting while 90% of European Jews were viciously murdered during the Holocaust even though they knew full well what was going on.
The Washington Post's "Hate rises year after year" (11/26/17) reveals Jew-hatred but dismisses it as if it were a "given." This egregious reporting has no place in today's society and in fact ends up being complicit in the enhancement of the oldest hatred by downplaying it. For all the bigotry and hateful claims that have been bandied about, the top media sources would do well if they spent more time in front of the mirror, looking inward.
It was not much of a contest. The ruling party, the PRI, won, with Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado elected and inaugurated president of Mexico. He followed Jose Lopez Portillo , a man so corrupt that most of my Mexican friends couldn't talk about him without using X-rated language. It got to the point that Lopez Portillo lived in seclusion because crowds would literally " howl like a dog " whenever he was around. In fact, I heard those howls myself one day as he walked into an expensive restaurant in Mexico City.
Back in 1982, I was living and working in Mexico City and experienced my first presidential election south of the border.
President de la Madrid turned out to be a decent man. At least his wife (the first lady) was not in the news every week with her extravagant spending. He left office with a decent reputation but couldn't break up the corrupt Mexican bureaucracy. He honestly tried, but those bureaucrats have a way of "leaking on you," as President Trump has learned.
A year ago, the current president, Enrique Pena Nieto, decided to do something about corruption. He named a commission. He tried to reform PEMEX and the super-corrupt teacher union.
Unfortunately, people are unhappy about the speed of the reforms again. It's hard to convince cynical Mexicans who have seen this movie before. This is from the N.Y. Times:
Mexico's landmark anti-corruption drive, inaugurated by President Enrique Pena Nieto under intense pressure to answer the scandals jolting his administration, is being blocked by the government's refusal to cooperate on some of the biggest cases facing the nation, according to members of the commission coordinating the effort. Attempts to look into the use of government surveillance technology against civilians, the embezzlement of tens of millions of dollars through public universities and allegations of widespread bribery to win construction contracts have all been thwarted, commission members say. Marred by scandals that have embroiled his administration, his allies and even his own family, Mr. Pena Nieto agreed to the creation of a broad anti-corruption system last year that was enshrined in the Constitution, a watershed moment in Mexico. But after nine months of pushing to examine the kind of corruption that ignited public outrage and brought the new watchdog into existence, some of its most prominent members say they have been stymied every step of the way, unable to make the most basic headway. After announcing the new system with great fanfare, they say, the government is now refusing to allow any serious investigations into its actions.
As my Mexican friends would say, "nada nuevo," or nothing new!
To be fair, I think President Pena Nieto, like President de la Madrid, did try to "drain the swamp," but it's very hard to do in Mexico.
Unfortunately, all of those decades of one-party PRI rule have made the bureaucracy so powerful that there is no commission or study that will change anything. It will take a Pinochet-like coup, or a strongman who breaks the back of the public-sector unions, or maybe a revolt from the states sick and tired of financing Mexico City.
So Mexico goes on, and Mexicans get more cynical by the minute. Do you think we hate the political class in the U.S.? Talk to any Mexican, and he will tell you what he thinks of politicians. (Warning: Cover your kids' ears when he really gets going!)
PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
Affixed to the wall near the city gate in the town of Dubrovnik on Croatias beautiful Dalmatian Coast, is a map showing the scale of damage the city suffered during the Croatian War of Independence (19911995). The black triangles denote damaged roof, the red boxes denote fires, and the black dots denote direct artillery hits. The damage has been repaired today, but from high points around the city one can clearly see where the bombs fell from the brightly coloured new roofs. While Dubrovnik recovered, the memory of the conflict lingers elsewhere, and nowhere more than in Kupari, located just 10 km to the east of the city.
Photo credit: Gzzz/Wikimedia
Kupari was once a hugely popular holiday resort. This holiday village first opened to tourists in 1919 when a Czech investor built the Grand Hotel on the shoreline. In those days Croatia was a part of the newly formed Kingdom of Yugoslavia, having seceded from Austria-Hungary after the end of the First World War. The stuccoed bricked walls, fluted pillars, and neoclassical swirls of the Grand Hotel is a reminder of Croatias Austro-Hungarian connection.
In the 1960s, Josip Broz Tito, the countrys supreme military commander decided that Kupari was the perfect place to send their army officers on holiday. Over the next two decades five more hotels containing over 2,000 beds were built for officers and their families. Nearby, just around the headland, a campsite was built with three more hotels, villas, and residential houses. Altogether, Kuparis hotels could accommodate up to 4,500 guests.
All the hotels are situated close to the waterline, shrouded in typical Mediterranean greenery, and with direct access to the beach. The camp, situated at a walking distance from the hotels, contained the administration building, a clinic, and other auxiliary structures. Further away from the hotels, at the end of a seaside promenade, is a detached group of amenities including residential buildings and villas and an underground structure where high government officials met.
Then, the Croatian War of Independence broke out in 1991. That summer, the Yugoslav Peoples Army moved into Dubrovnik and began bombarding the historic city. The JNA had captured virtually all of the peninsulas on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, with the exception of Dubrovnik itself. Over the months and years that followed, Dubrovnik and Kupari were subjected to heavy shelling and artillery fire, the scars of which remain visible till today in Kupari.
The biggest hotel, Kupari, was devoured in flames. Pelegrin Hotel was directly hit several times, and its interior was devastated when used for temporary accommodation by the Croatian Army servicemen. After capturing Kupari from the Croatian fighters, the JNA stripped the hotels bare, carrying away everything and anything of value.
After the War of Independence, Dubrovnik was rebuilt but Kupari was left bomb-scarred, broken and permanently closed.
Last year, the former military resort town was purchased by a private party. According to The Dubrovnik Times, all the existing hotels in Kupari will be destroyed to make way for a new five-star resort.
Photo credit: Bjoertvedt/Wikimedia
Photo credit: Igor Trklja/Wikimedia
Photo credit: Ben Fredericson/Flickr
Photo credit: Ben Fredericson/Flickr
Photo credit: Ben Fredericson/Flickr
Photo credit: Ben Fredericson/Flickr
Photo credit: Ben Fredericson/Flickr
Photo credit: Harry McGregor/Flickr
Photo credit: Gzzz/Wikimedia
Brexit means we will all starve says Downing Street winer maker
We are all going to starve because of Brexit. Over the newswires we read that the chief executive of Chapel Down, a Kent wine maker that supplies plonk to 10 Downing Street, telling us that Britons will starve if Brexit means an end to cheap fruit pickers imported from overseas.
Frazer Thompson opines: The biggest potential impact of Brexit is on agricultural labour. Kent has had eastern Europeans picking fruit in recent years, but well all starve if the labour issue is not sorted after Brexit.
Dead. All dead. And you thank Brexit for it. But hold on moment, why dont we and lets just toss this out there trade with other countries who have lots of fruit? Says Thompson: We want a resolution to allow us to have freedom of movement for labour to pick the fruit. This is something that affects all fruit farmers across the south-east of England. Im hoping it will be sorted out and I hope they wont close the doors, as if theres no one to pick the fruit, well have to import everything.
So British fruit remains unpicked because its too expensive to pick here and because its less expensive to pick over there we import the stuff. So whats the problem? Is that the English wine made from English grapes will be more expensive than the English wine made from Greek, Portuguese, Hungary or Romanian grapes? Or why not go outside the EU and buy grapes from places where labour is even cheaper, like Chile and South Africa?
Or why not get the fruit-pickers from within the EU zone visas?
Once upon a time, of course, fruit was picked by seasonal workers you know, people who went somewhere to do a job and then moved on. But if the peasants are too expensive for the farmer, why not invest in a machine?
Anorak
Posted: 4th, December 2017 | In: Money, News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
Damian Green: flagrant abuse is what we love best
The Daily Damian: a look at Damian Green in the newspapers. The story so far: the Deputy PM is accused of having porn on his PC and chatting up a younger woman, whose knee she says he touched. The Cabinet Office is investigating. Damian Green say hes innocent. Now read on
The Sun (page 6) says Education Secretary Justine Greening all but called for him to be sacked. Greening told BBC viewers to Andrew Marrs Sunday morning show that most employers would think it unacceptable to watch porn at work. On the other side (ITV) was Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, telling everyone that he trusts Damian Green and I believe what he says.
On Page 10, Trevor Kavanagh says the story is based on a politically motivated vendetta against Green by two bitter former police officers, Bob Quick and co-conspirator Neil Lewis. We learn that Quick led the scandalous raid on Greens office in 2008 over alleged leaks from the Home Office. Quick seized the computers. Lewis fund the porn. And then comes the worrying bit: thousands of perfectly legal images were copied against orders and squirrelled away by Lewis for future use. Kavanagh alleges its part of moves to get back at Theresa May for threatening to smash their Mafia-style trade union.
Over in the Mirror (page2 ), Justine Greening is telling Green to fall on your sword. Which isnt a euphemism for masturbation, rather a euphemism for career suicide, or maybe actual suicide. On page 8, Kevin Maguire wonders if the Tories would back an ordinary worker are MPs made extraordinary in anything but the glorious building they occupy? if police found thousands of indecent images on his or her desktop. Dunno. Maybe police should all check their PCs and let us know what occurs?
And how is watching porn on your PC any different from watching porn in a magazine or newspaper, say, perhaps one that on Page 41 offers readers the chance to call premium-rate phone numbers and get some X-RATED CHEAP CHAT from 18-94 years olds and REAL HOUSEWIVES? The Mirror does. And it offers no warning against doing so whilst at work, nor displaying the porny images that go with the adverts lest it offend workmates and paymasters.
The Mail (pages 6 and 7), says Lewis could be prosecuted as watchdog accuses him of flagrant violation of the publics trust in police. New Met commissioner Cressida Dick says the force is thinking about investigating Lewis. Dick, you will recall, was in charge when armed police shot dead innocent Jean Charles de Menezes as he waited for a train on the London Underground. No police employee was disciplined for that.
Speaking on BBC Radio London today, Dick said: All police officers know very well that they have a duty of confidentiality, a duty to protect personal information. That duty in my view clearly endures after you leave the service. And so it is my view that what they have done based on my understanding of what theyre saying what they have done is wrong, and I condemn it.
We also hear in the Mail from Eleanor Laing, who says deputy speaker of the Commons, who says in a letter dated November 14:
A member of my parliamentary staff has told me that, several years ago, before we had effective screening of our parliamentary computers, she used to find pornographic images on her computer every morning when she switched it on She was certainly not accessing pornographic sites deliberately or even accidentally. The material was just there on her computer every day. She simply deleted it. This happened before 2010.Thus, it would appear that material found in the parliamentary computer system can be proved to have been put there by some other means than by the deliberate actions of the person operating the computer.
Lax security in parliament. Who knew?
Over in the Guardian, a columnist thunders: !If Damian Green harassed a woman or lied, he must go. Yeah. If. But do consider it for as long as it takes to read 500-odd words about todays burning issue.
In other news: I took up porn to help me stop smoking, says man looking for five-minute work break.
Anorak
Posted: 4th, December 2017 | In: Broadsheets, News, Politicians, Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
(ANSA) - Strasbourg, December 4 - The European Court of Human Rights has asked the Italian government to assess whether keeping Marcello Dell'Utri in jail is a violation of his rights due to his poor health. The request was made during the conveying to Rome of documents related to an appeal filed in Strasbourg on December 20, 2014, by Dell'Utri.
Dell'Utri, a former right-hand man of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, is not entitled to early release because of the gravity of the mafia-related crimes he was convicted of, Italy's highest court ruled in October.
External collaboration in mafia association is a crime excluded from those where early release can be granted, the court said. Dell'Utri is serving seven years for colluding with the mafia in Palermo.
The 76-year-old former close aide to three-time ex-premier and media mogul Berlusconi and co-founder of Berlusconi's Forza Italia party was convicted in 2014 of acting as an ambassador between the centre-right group and the Cosa Nostra Mafia in his native Sicily.
He was extradited from Beirut to serve his sentence. Dell'Utri is also the former head of the media magnate's advertising arm and is credited with creating the media mogul's Forza Italia party in 1993, six months before it swept to victory in general elections.
In addressing the Strasbourg court, Dell'Utri said he had been convicted on the basis of a law that came into force after he committed the crimes he was convicted of.
He added that the charges against him were vague and imprecise.
(ANSA) - Rome, December 4 - The square around the Colosseum is a 'suk' and its illegal street hawkers must be cleared away from the iconic monument, newly appointed director of the Colosseum Archaeological Park, Alfonsina Russo, said Monday.
"Piazza del Colosseo is a suk, and we'll have to work to reach the goal of legality and also give the impression to those coming to Italy that it is a civilised country," she said.
Russo called for talks between the prefecture, the Rome police office and the city council. "It's clear that I'm not the one who must intervene but the council which, with ordinances, must clear the area and restore legality around the Colosseum.
She also called for a four-year-old accord between then mayor Ignazio Marino and Culture Minister Dario Franceschini to clean up the area to be revived.
BEIRUT - Former Yemeni president Ali Abdallah Saleh was killed on Monday while fleeing from the capital, Sanaa.
Several media outlets confirmed the news and sources near the former leader say that he was killed "by gunfire south of Sanaa". The Arabic version of the Iranian state television, Al-Alam, has published photos of what they claim is his corpse. But the spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Monday that the UN had not yet received independent confirmation of the killing of Yemeni former president
Brussels to rule on Catalan ex-president's extradition 14/12 Announcement by lawyers
(ANSAmed) - BRUSSELS, DECEMBER 4 - The decision whether to extradite former regional president of Catalonia Carles Puigdemont from Brussels to Spain will be made on December 14.
The announcement was made by his lawyers. "There is no decision", one of his lawyers said after the day's hearing, where "today the prosecutor repeated his request for the execution of the European arrest warrant and that Puigdemont be extradited to Spain to face charges of sedition and misuse of state funds.
Then former regional president's lawyers said that "there should not have been and there will not be any extradition to Spain, because we believe that the accusations against the Catalan government are not punishable in Belgium", and that if Puigdemont and the other members of his former government exiled in Belgium (Antoni Comin, Meritxell Serret, Clara Ponsati and Lluis Puig) "were to be extradited to Catalonia, there would be the risk of violation of basic human rights". Thus, the defense lawyers said, "the judge will reflect and will make his decision on December 14". (ANSAmed).
Catalans Junqueras, Forn stay jailed over 'risk of violence' Together with the 'Jordis'. Magistrate rules against release
(ANSAmed) - MADRID, DECEMBER 4 - A Spanish judge has ruled against the release from jail of Catalonia's former deputy president Oriol Junqueras, of former interior minister Joachim Forn and of separatist leaders Jordi Sanches and Jordi Cixart, over a "risk of reiteration of the crime", on the assumption that "their actions were directly linked to an outburst of violence".
The separatist front has always stressed that the 'process' aimed at making Catalonia independent was entirely peaceful and democratic and considers the 10 jailed leaders as "political detainees" of the Spanish State. Junqueras and the seven ministers were arrested at the beginning of November after the proclamation of the 'Republic' by the Catalan Parliament on October 27.
Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart, leaders of separatist civil society organizations Anc and Omnium, are in preventive detention since mid-October on 'sedition' charges over large, non-violent demonstrations in Barcelona on September 20-21 against a Spanish Guardia Civil operation against the Catalan government headquarters.
Ousted Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and four former ministers are in exile in Belgium on the wake of an arrest warrant and extradition request issued by Spain. The Belgian judiciary's procedure should last two months.
Eight out of the 10 'political detainees' and three politicians exiled in Belgium are running in elections scheduled on December 21. They are accused of alleged 'rebellion' for 'promoting Catalonia's independence' as part of their political agenda.
They risk up to 30 years in jail.
Puigdemont and Junqueras, the two leading candidates for Catalonia's presidency - if the separatist front should win, as forecast by polls -, will have to campaign respectively from Brussels and from jail. (ANSAmed)
Houthi rebels blow up ex-president Saleh's home in Sanaa Prior to news of his killing
(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, DECEMBER 4 - Gulf media sources reported on Monday prior to the news of his killing that one of the residences of Yemeni former president Ali Abdallah Saleh had been blown up on Monday by Houthi rebels. The source said that the Houthis had broken into several homes and buildings inside and outside of Sanaa that they believed belong to Saleh's supporters. (ANSAmed).
Malta: ten suspects arrested over reporter's murder Premier Joseph Muscat announces
(ANSAmed) - ROME, DECEMBER 4 - Maltese police have arrested ten suspects in connection with the murder of journalist Dephne Caruana Galizia last October, Premier Joseph Muscat was quoted as announcing Monday by the Times of Malta and on Twitter. The suspects are all reportedly Maltese nationals and were arrested following multiple raids.
Caruana Galizia was killed on October 16 in a car bomb attack.
''I have been informed of a security operation that took place this morning'', Muscat said, adding he believed it was in the best national interest to inform the public about the operation. ''The operation was carried out by police, Malta's armed forces and our security services following investigations carried out in the last few weeks'', he continued. The premier said there are ''reasonable suspects'' that they are involved in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Police now have 48 hours to question the suspects and decide whether to indict them. The premier then stressed he is involved ''more than ever'' in efforts to solve the case.(ANSAmed).
ISTANBUL - Turkish authorities have apprehended over the past week a reported 4,777 migrants and refugees who were trying to illegally cross its borders with the European Union or to enter the country, the interior ministry has said.
These include 41 migrants who were apprehended at sea.
The ministry said that during the same period security forces arrested 114 alleged human traffickers.
(ANSAmed) - ROME, DECEMBER 4 - The death toll from violent clashes in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, rose on Monday to 125.
The fighting has been underway for the past five days. Al Arabiya quoted the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in giving the new toll, noting that at least 238 have also been injured. (ANSAemd).
Yemen: no independent confirmation of Saleh's death, UN Spokesperson wants 'immediate cessation of Sanaa hostilities'
(ANSAmed) - NEW YORK, DECEMBER 4 - Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Monday that the UN had not yet received independent confirmation of the killing of Yemeni former president Ali Abdallah Saleh earlier in the day. He went on to urge all parties involved in the ongoing fighting to protect civilians and for an immediate cessation of hostilities in the Yemeni capital Salaa. (ANSAmed).
Yemen: Saudi Coalition raids to support Saleh Jets bomb positions of Houthi rebels in Sanaa
(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, DECEMBER 4 - Saudi-led Arab Coalition jets have bombed overnight positions of Houthi rebels in Yemen's capital Sanaa, in support of the forces of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has broken his alliance with the Houthis over the past few days, local sources were quoted as saying by Arab newspapers.
Suse van Meegen, a manager at humanitarian organization Norwegian Refugee Council, present in Sanaa, told the AP news agency that the new fighting and raids ''completely paralyzed humanitarian operations''.
Fighting between Houthi militias allied with Iran and Saleh's forces started on Wednesday last week in the capital.
Saleh, who was ousted in 2011, had forged an alliance three years ago with Houthi rebels, who are Shiite like him and are close to Iran, to fight the internationally-recognized government of President Abd Rabbo Mansut Hadi, his former deputy who is supported by Saudi Arabia.
In a televised speech broadcast on Saturday, Saleh asked the Saudi-led Coalition to end bombings targeting rebel forces and a blockade on Yemeni ports and airports, promising to ''turn over a new page'' in return.
From the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia's main ally, Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash meanwhile stated that ''the national uprising in Sanaa needs support'' to ''defend the Arabic peninsula against Iranian expansion and Houthi gangs''.
''Regardless of the outcome of the blessed uprising in Sanaa, it is clear that Yemenis have refused Houthi militias backed by Iran'', Gargash was also quoted as saying by Emirati newspaper Gulf News. (ANSAmed).
Yemeni ex-president Saleh killed while fleeing Sanaa Several media outlets confirm
(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, DECEMBER 4 - Former Yemeni president Ali Abdallah Saleh was killed on Monday while fleeing from the capital, Sanaa.
Several media outlets confirmed the news and sources near the former leader say that he was killed "by gunfire south of Sanaa". The Arabic version of the Iranian state television, Al-Alam, has published photos of what they claim is his corpse.
(ANSAmed).
Hamas vows another intifada if Jerusalem recognized capital 'It would be an attack on the city by Trump'
(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, DECEMBER 4 - Hamas has threatened to start another intifada if the US administration under president Donald Trump recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or if it were to move its embassy to the city. These decisions, Hamas said in a statement, "would be seen as an attack on the city by the US", adding that "we warn against such developments and we will ask the Palestinian population to resume the intifada if these unjust decisions concerning Jerusalem were to be adopted". The recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the transfer of the US embassy there would, Hamas said, guarantee for Israel "coverage to continue committing its crimes, including the 'Jewification' of the city and the emptying out of the Palestinian population". (ANSAmed).
NEW YORK - US President Donald Trump has not taken a decision yet on whether to formally recognize Jerusalem as ''Israel's indivisible capital''.
''He's still looking at a lot of different facts, and then when he makes his decision, he'll be the one to want to tell you, not me'', Trump's advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner said at an annual conference on U.S. policy in the Middle East organized by the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington in his first public outing since the plea deal involving fired national security advisor Michael Flynn.
Kushner said he tried not to mind media allegations and that his ambition was to get things done.
Kushner is alleged, as a leading member of Trump's transition team, to have directed Flynn in his contacts with the Russians - a charge that, if true, would take him at the center of the investigation led by special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
At the Brooking Institute, Kushner only spoke about peace in the Middle East, saying it is attainable.
He said the administration did not see a peace agreement as a piece of paper to be signed in hopes that everything would be all right, noting that it rather focused on the phase after a potential signature.
However, the public opinion's attention has focused on Jerusalem: Trump could announce between Tuesday and Wednesday the recognition of the city as Israel's capital, paving the way for a future move of the US embassy, which is currently located in Tel Aviv.
The announcement is not without tension: the Palestinians would likely consider such a move as a provocation as they want East Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state.
Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, (Abu Mazen) openly stated this: the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital could destroy nascent peace efforts of the White House in the Middle Eastern area.
''It would threaten the future of the peace process and it is unacceptable'', he said.
The actors called for strict actions against the people calling for such violent threats while talking at an event.
Mumbai: Bollywood stars Hrithik Roshan, Varun Dhawan and Sonakshi Sinha have said death threats being issued to fellow actor Deepika Padukone and 'Padmavati' director Sanjay Leela Bhansali are not "right".
The actors, who were speaking on the sidelines of an award event over the weekend, called for strict actions against the people calling for such violent threats.
"It is a clear indication of our level of evolution. We are still evolving as a society and as individuals. It is a reflection of the fact that we still have a long way to go to evolve into beings, that bereft of these problems and issues of assumptions and attacks. It is not right," Hrithik said, who has worked with Bhansali in 'Guzaarish'.
While Varun said India is a democracy and every one has the right to protest, but things should not turn violent.
"Protesting peacefully is fine. It is a democracy, and everyone should be allowed to voice their opinion and we should totally respect that.
"But making a (death) threat should not be allowed in a democracy. And I believe in our judiciary, I am sure they will manage it," he said.
Sonakshi said the kind of protest film and the cast members are facing is not "correct".
"... Whatever is happening is not right and it shouldn't happen. In our country, if threats are given openly, it is not a correct thing. I think strict action should be taken against it."
'Padmavati' got caught in a controversy after several Rajput groups alleged that history has been "distorted" in the movie.
Bhansali has been accused of filming a romantic dream sequence between Rajput queen Padmini (Deepika) and Sultan Alauddin Khilji (Ranveer Singh), a claim repeatedly denied by the filmmaker.
The movie was earlier scheduled to be released on December 1.
The makers deferred the release till they receive a certificate from the CBFC.
Chief ministers of BJP-ruled states such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat have also called for a ban on the period drama.
Shahid also comes down hard on the Karni Sena for threatening Deepika Padukone with physical harm.
Despite the informal gag order on him, the actor minced no words as he requested those protesting against Padmavati to watch the film before passing a verdict, and wished Deepika well.
Shahid Kapoor cant be kept quiet for long. As one of the most anticipated movies of his career, Padmavati, has fallen into trouble, Shahid forgets he has a gag order on him.
When asked if the situation has become tougher for his film to release, he rattles off, I dont think it has worsened. Its taking longer than what anyone anticipated; in the normal course of things it doesnt take so long. We were all surprised by the turn of events. Everyone is aware that the release date has been deferred. Things arent extremely bad, but its very strange that people are choosing to decide whats in the film without watching it; its very weird. I have been saying all along that you have to watch the film before forming an opinion. Why do you have so many preconceived notions about the film without knowing the facts of its content?
Shahid also comes down hard on the Karni Sena for threatening Deepika Padukone with physical harm. Its in terrible taste. Im surprised there are such things being said about a lady; Im shocked, he says.
Deepika Padukone in a still from film 'Padmavati'
The actor says that the team has had to abandon promotions in the absence of a release date. I had just started promoting the film with a radio trail, and it had to be stopped, sighs Shahid. However, once we get a release date, we will be everywhere.
Despite the troubles, Shahids director Sanjay Leela Bhansali was spotted in a relaxed mood, even as he had to step out with police protection. He was seen at the Mumbai airport with a posse of cops, as he left for New Delhi to appear before the parliamentary committee looking into the Padmavati controversy.
Im glad you feel he is relaxed. Ive not had the chance to meet him recently, Shahid says. My heart goes out to him. Hes probably the finest filmmaker Ive ever worked with and he has tried his level best. Eventually, its all subjective. In a democracy, everyone has a right to their opinion and one needs to respect each others opinions. Do things with love because you have to believe that the person in question isnt trying to deliberately harm us with his film. Sanjay has been at the receiving end of criticism, and he hasnt been able to show his film. For someone of his calibre, its not right for him to not be able to show his film at this stage in his career. Im just wishing and sending a lot of love and prayers to him everyday.
Shahid has been no stranger to release controversies, with Udta Punjab falling into trouble last year too. He, however, feels that the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) should be the one taking calls, and not anyone else, something that happened during Udta Punjab.
It has been a nice big circle, and were back to where we started from. The CBFC should be the right body to take a decision. Im hoping that sooner than later its already been pretty long that we should get moving. I saw a lot of problems in Udta Punjab, and the film eventually released. I believe that it will be the same with Padmavati. So, I want people to see the film with an open heart, and I will respect their opinions once they see the movie, concludes Shahid.
Sanskriti Media
The veteran actor was reportedly admitted to the hospital on August 22.
Mumbai: Acting legend Shashi Kapoor (79) succumbed to a prolonged illness at Kokilaben Hospital, Andheri on Monday. He is survived by his daughter Sanjana, and sons Kunal and Karan. The veteran actor was reportedly admitted to the hospital on August 22.
Dr Ram Narain, executive director of the hospital, said, Kapoor expired at 5.20 pm on Monday. Dr Narain, however, did not reveal the cause of his death.
President Ram Nath Kovind, expressing condolences over the veteran actors death via Twitter, said, Sorry to hear of the demise of Shashi Kapoor, well-known actor, with a repertoire of Indian and international films. His support for meaningful cinema as a producer and pivotal role in the theatre movement in India too are cherished. Condolences to his family (sic).
Stating that Kapoors contribution to the Hindi film industry would be remembered forever, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis tweeted, My deepest condolences to his family, friends and millions of fans.
Kapoor received the Padma Bhushan in 2011 for his contributions to the field of cinema. In 2014, he was conferred the Dadasaheb Phalke Award.
Rubbishing earlier reports, sources say that SLB has no plans to meet chief ministers to convince them to release Padmavati.
A Mumbai tabloid stated that the director intends to hold reconciliatory meetings with chief ministers of states banning Padmavati. However, sources close to Sanjay Leela Bhansali have condemned a report.
Completely denying the veracity of this report, the source said, This is clearly a brainwave of a bored journalist looking for some excitement in his work. There is no plan whatsoever to meet chief ministers or to make potentially reconciliatory gestures with any other group or individual at the moment. SLB went to Delhi to meet the parliamentary committee for an amicable discussion. That was done out of respect for the parliament. Apart from that, the director has no intentions of meeting anyone to convince them to release his films.
Another source close to Padmavati says the plan at the moment is to maintain a low profile. Theyre waiting for the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to view Padmavati and for the Gujarat elections to be over before locking in on another release date, says a source.
The question now is, why is the CBFC not viewing and certifying Padmavati?
This was the question Prasoon Joshi was repeatedly asked by the parliamentary committee. He doesnt seem to have any tenable answer to that, says the informed source.
Back to the Bhansali rumour, here is a warning from SLB to the speculative fantastical sections of the media: Just because I am not speaking, please do not presume you can get away with anything.
Hussain Haidry is an upcoming lyricist, whose evocative and thoughtful poem has won the hearts of one and all.
Mujhmein Geeta ka saar bhi hai, ek Urdu ka akhbaar bhi hai
Mera ek mahina Ramzan bhi hai, maine kiya toh Ganga snaan bhi hai
Main kaisa Musalman hoon bhai?
These are a few lines from Hussain Haidrys poem Main Hindustani Musalman Hoon, which he first performed at Kommune a space for artists, on February 10. Since then, the poetry has gone viral.
I got the idea of writing a poem on my own Muslim identity during my time in Kolkata while traveling to Bhutan for a solo trip in 2015. I wrote that poem in a small diary and lost it after returning to Kolkata. However, the first couple of lines stuck with me for over a year, until I was in Mumbai and I wrote a completely different poem with the same initial lines to be performed at open mics or poetry events held in Mumbai, shares Hussain, a Gujarati-speaking Bohra Muslim from Madhya Pradesh.
When asked whether he was talking about nationalism in the poem, the Bollywood lyricist and screenwriter says, I never really wanted to convey a message. It was just a poem that talked about how I thought of myself as a Muslim a person born under Islam but living in a country as diverse as India. It was meant to be just a piece that I would perform and get feedback and responses for. I am very grateful to Kommune for putting it up on their channel and to all the people who have liked it and even critiqued it. What touched me the most was that a lot of people across the country related to it and called those words their own.
However, one wonders whether Main Hindustani Musalman Hoon, which mentions several subjects such as the Bhagwad Gita, bathing in the Ganges and smoking and drinking could anger orthodox Muslims? I read a few critiques of the poem, some even from a sociological/ historical/religious angle. I found that some were legitimate arguments that made me read up and learn things, while some I didnt agree to, says the soft-spoken poet, who likes to read Sahir Ludhianvi and Amitav Ghosh.
Interestingly, this Indore-born chartered accountant and Indian IIM-Indore graduate left his job in Kolkata and moved to Mumbai to become a full-time lyricist and screenwriter. Gazal Dhaliwal and Varun Grover, who have been my friends since my open mic days in Mumbai back in 2010, helped me a lot. When I came back to Mumbai in 2016, I felt that I had lost my knack in writing poetry and that I needed at least a year to prepare academically to be able to write lyrics. They were, however, very confident that I could do it right away. But the pessimist in me kept thinking theyre just saying it the way usually friends do so that my hopes are not crushed. I just wanted them to guide me through the struggling phase and help me understand if I was on the right path, but instead they both helped me connect with Tanuja Chandra and Anurag Kashyap for their upcoming films, he recalls.
Obviously, that was a huge step forward for Hussain! It was largely because of their faith in me. The first two songs I ended up writing were for Qarib Qarib Singlle and then I worked for six songs in Mukkabaaz, says the 31-year-old.
In a series of tweets, Congress asked when BJP will respond to its senior leaders like Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha.
The reaction comes in response to Modi mocking the Congress over the upcoming election of its president, alleging the party had a history of rigging organisational polls. (Photo: File)
New Delhi: The Congress on Sunday hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for mocking its presidential election and, raising the issue of "internal democracy" in the BJP, asked him when he would answer questions posed by the leaders of his own party.
Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala raked up the names of former BJP top guns such as L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Sanjay Joshi, Keshubhai Patel and Anandiben Patel, alleging they were "victims" of Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah's "internal democracy".
"Dear PM, your love for 'Shahzad', 'Shah-Zada' and 'Shaurya' is now well known, but 'Nation wants to know' when will you reply to the questions raised by senior BJP leaders, 'Shourie' (Arun), Sinha (Yashwant) and Sinha (Shatrughan)," he posted on Twitter.
Surjewala further tweeted, "Blinded by rage and enmity, what unimaginable depths would you fall to?"
He also referred to senior BJP leaders such as Advani and Joshi in another tweet.
"Modiji, do tell Gujarat and country about the victims of yours and Amit Shah's 'internal democracy' in BJP, namely- Lal Krishna Advani, Keshubhai Patel, Hiren Pandya, Kanshiram Rana, Anandiben Patel, Murli Manohar Joshi, Sanjay Joshi, who were compulsorily lost in pages of history," he said.
Earlier, while addressing a poll rally in Gujarat, Modi had mocked the Congress over the upcoming election of its president, alleging the party had a history of rigging organisational polls.
The charge was raised after a Congress leader from Maharashtra, Shehzad Poonawala, alleged that the Congress organisational polls were "rigged" and state party delegates were not elected.
Modi said at the rally the outcome of the election to the top post in the Congress was a foregone conclusion.
"If you do not have democracy in your home (party) how can you practise it in the country," Modi asked.
Survivors have refused to give up even 33 years after the disaster.
Bhopal: The hope of survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, billed as the worlds worst industrial disaster that claimed lives of more than 15,000 people and maimed nearly six lakh others, getting justice has dimmed further following the recent merger of Dow Chemical with DuPont, experts apprehended.
However, the survivors have refused to give up even 33 years after the man-made disaster, and vowed to continue their battle for justice. Around 5000 survivors suffering from various illnesses such as cancer, respiratory problems and deformities following their exposure to the toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas leaked from the former pesticide factory of the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) in Bhopal on the intervening night of December 2-3, 1984, will make a representations to the supreme court appealing for speedy disposal of the case pertaining to the matter to give them justice, Bhopal Gas Peedit Sangarsh Samiti (BGPSS) president Abdul Jabbar, who is one of the survivors of the tragedy, told this newspaper on Sunday.
The matter relating to compensation the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy has been pending before the supreme court for the past 12 years.
Mr Jabbar said the recent development of merger between Dow Chemical and DuPont had not come as a surprise for them since This is the way the corporate work to get rid of their liabilities.
In September this year, the Dow Chemical and DuPont completed the planned $130 billion merger to form DowDuPont.
The UNs special rapporteur on hazardous substance and wastes Bastuk Tuncak has expressed apprehensions that the development might erase any remaining possibility of the victims of the Bhopal disaster seeing an effective remedy.
Dow Chemical had already disowned liabilities of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) after taking over the latter in 2000.
The UCC had paid $470 million dollar as compensation under an agreement settled between the government of India and the company after the tragedy. But, later the Centre had contested the compensation amount describing it meager.
Under the settlement agreement between the UCC and the government of India, the count of deaths and injured persons had been pegged at 3,000 and 1,02,000 respectively whereas the Bhopal claim court had estimated that 15,274 people were killed and 5,74,000 others injured in the tragedy.
The minimum punishment has been enhanced to 20 years rigorous imprisonment for gang rape of girls aged 12 or below in the bill.
As per government data, 12 girls and women are raped in MP and a gang rape is reported in every 32 hours. (Representational image)
Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Monday unanimously passed a historic bill awarding death to rapists of girls aged 12 or below, becoming the first Indian state to introduce capital punishment as a deterrence against child rapists.
Chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said, There are people in society who can be set right only by severe punishments. It (the legislation) will deal with them. We will also raise awareness in society against such crimes.
Those who indulge in such heinous crimes are not human beings but devils. They have no right to live. I hope human rights activists will not raise a hue and cry over the provisions of the bill, he added.
As per the exiting penal provisions, a rapist faces a minimum punishment of rigorous imprisonment of seven years, which may extend to imprisonment for life. The new bill provides death penalty or a minimum term of 14 years in jail or life imprisonment till death for raping girls aged 12 or below.
The Madhya Pradesh bill, named the Dand Vidhi (Madhya Pradesh Sansodhan) Vidheyak, 2017, will need the Presidents assent to become law. Under the bill, capital punishment will be awarded to convicts under Section 376 (A), which is related to rape, and Section 376 (D, A), pertaining to gang rape.
The minimum punishment has been enhanced to 20 years rigorous imprisonment for gang rape of girls aged 12 or below in the bill. It also proposes punishment for disrobing a woman, stalking or sex on the pretext of marriage and makes the offence by habitual offenders non-bailable and punishable.
Madhya Pradesh women and child welfare minister Archana Chitnis said, It is a historic bill. The legislation will certainly help check crimes against women, particularly the minors.
The bill comes close to the release of data showing that Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest number of rapes in the country in 2016.
As per government data, 12 girls and women are raped in MP and a gang rape is reported in every 32 hours. The number of cases of crimes against women has jumped from 22,061 in 2013 to 24,135 in 2015, while the number of rapes has increased from 4,335 to 4,391 during the period.
The hospital authorities had ordered an inquiry on December 1, saying the doctor concerned had been asked to proceed on leave immediately.
New Delhi: Two experts from the Indian Medical Association (IMA) have been included in the investigation team set up by Max Healthcare authorities to investigate the case of a premature baby being wrongly declared dead, the hospital said on Sunday.
The case pertains to the birth of twins (boy and girl) on Nov. 30. Both the babies were declared dead by the Max Hospital in Shalimar Bagh. However, the family later found the boy was alive.
The expert group set up by Max Healthcare to investigate the circumstances and protocols followed regarding the premature delivery (23 weeks/5 months) of the twins and the subsequent declaration of death at Max Hospital, Shalimar Bagh, is working towards concluding its detailed probe.
Dr A. Agarwal, chairperson, ethics committee, IMA and Dr Ramesh Datta, joint secretary, IMA, have been included as external experts in the group, Max Healthcare said in a statement.
The investigation is expected to conclude by tomorrow and the findings are expected to be shared thereafter, it said.
The hospital authorities had ordered an inquiry on December 1, saying the doctor concerned had been asked to proceed on leave immediately.
The government ordered its own probe into the incident. On December 2, health minister Satyendar Jain said that if the hospital was found guilty of medical negligence in its probe, its licence could be cancelled.
The mother was brought to the hospital from a nursing home in Paschim Vihar, police said. The parents were earlier told by Max that both the babies were stillborn, and were handed to them in a polythene bag, but just before their last rites, the family found the boy was alive. A case of attempt to commit culpable homicide has already been filed.
During interrogation he confessed to plotting to kill Mr Dey as part of his Jihadi activities, sources revealed.
Kolkata: Arrested ISIS suspect Mohammed Masihuddin alias Musa, who had allegedly planned to carry out an attack at Mother House, the Missionaries of Charity headquarters in Kolkata to target foreign national, tried to kill a prison official for jihad inside the Alipore Central Jail on Sunday morning. The injured Gokul Chandra Dey is a middle-aged jail warder.
He went to call Musa at his cell during Lock Out, a routine session which allows the prisoners to go out in a compound on the prison premises after the day starts, said director general of police (correctional services) Arun Kumar Gupta. Mr Dey has been posted for the job for the past two years.
Mr Gupta added, As the jail warder asked Musa to come out at around 8 am, Musa made some jihadi comments towards his fellow prisoners to incite them. As the jail warden intervened, he pushed him off to the ground and hit him with a piece of stone. He slit his throat with a small but sharp iron piece used in PWD works in prison. With deep injuries in throat, Mr Dey was rescued by his colleagues.
He was rushed to SSKM Hospital from where he was later shifted to Calcutta Medical Research Institute later. Mr Gupta said, His condition is stable now. A case under section 307 (attempt to murder) has been initiated against Musa. An investigation is underway. Senior prison officials visited the jail later.
Musa has been shifted from his cell no 2 in block 12 to a separate one.
During interrogation he confessed to plotting to kill Mr Dey as part of his Jihadi activities, sources revealed.
Originally from Labhpur in Birbhum, the 25-year-old terror suspect was arrested by the criminal investigation department from the Burdwan railway station in July of 2016 on charges of radicalising youths to join the ISIS.
He also reportedly had links to Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), whose leader Abu Suleiman had met Musa at the latters sisters wedding in March 2015.
Later, the National Investigation Agency took him in its custody to unearth the ISIS network and its plots in the state.
Musa was grilled by the Rapid Action Batallion of Bangladesh and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over ISIS network.
He has been lodged at the high security prison over a year. In December last year, the NIA in a chargesheet accused Musa of plotting an attack on the Mother House as a soft target to kill the American, British and Russian citizens who visit the place on AJC Bose Road in south Kolkata to pay homage to its founder Mother Teresa as a retaliation to the offensive against the ISIS in the Middleeast.
Musa came under the scanner of Indian investigation agencies after his e-mails and calls were traced to Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Syria. According to the NIA, he stayed in touch with several ISIS operatives, including leader Shafi Arman, in Syria through Facebook and Twitter, and was entrusted with building an ISIS module and recruitment in West Bengal.
US Defense Secretary Mattis says he wants to work with Pakistan; listening to one another without being combative, to address the problems.
Mattis is the first top US official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the new South Asia Strategy that was announced by President Donald Trump on August 21. (Photo: PTI/ File)
Washington: US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has said that he intends to work hard to find common ground with Pakistan in the fight against terrorism, which is necessary to restore the level of stability in South Asia to allow economic development.
Ahead of his visit to Islamabad, Mattis said he wants to work with Pakistan, listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective, and to address the problems.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Pakistan, since taking over the charge of the Pentagon. Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
Saeed is still roaming free, despite vigourous warning from the Trump Administration. "The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," Mattis told reporters travelling with him on his way to Pakistan from Egypt.
Mattis is the first top US official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the new South Asia Strategy that was announced by President Donald Trump on August 21.
"We know we have some common ground. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their innocent people and troops murdered and wounded by terrorists, so we know that there is a common ground," said Mattis.
Similarly, he said, there is common ground between Afghanistan and Pakistan, because there are terrorist groups that try to move back and forth in order to live in one and attack in the other.
"Now it is about how much more common grounds can we find by listening to one another without being combative with one another and listening to others perspective," Mattis added.
"But at the same time, as the (Pakistan Army Chief) General (Qamar Javed Bajwa) has said, he wants no havens for terrorists anywhere, so we will work together and we'll find that common ground, if we have the will to, he said.
"And then we'll work on how we address the problems where we can work together," the Defense Secretary said. Responding to a question, he said he would not characterize everything, over the past 16 years, as failures.
"There is clearly an abundance of areas where we have to double down, and I am optimistic at this point that because of what our adversaries, our mutual enemies are doing, that we can find ways to work together," he said.
Mattis said both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistan military, the NATO-led militaries of 39 nations have all been in fights in Washington.
"We've got to find a way to work together". He said there is "always an urgency to something" when 39 nations plus Afghanistan have their troops in the midst of a long war, where causalities are being taken.
"These are 39 of the most economically powerful, generally speaking, most long-term democratic institutions in the world. These are powerful nations morally, economically and diplomatically, and certainly militarily," he added.
Mattis said that it was essential in South Asia that all work together to restore the level of stability that allows for the economy to build.
"I mean, can you imagine a border between Pakistan and India where economic trade is not ongoing to the benefit of people on both sides of that border. We cannot only imagine it; it's a reality right now," Mattis said.
So, the US Defence Secretary said that we have got to work together on this, and there's a sense of urgency about that.
"There are people who are living below the poverty line in both those countries. So as you look at this problem, if you'll expand the problem you can understand the sense of urgency to move beyond violence and get back to the normal order of things," he said. Mattis is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and General Bajwa.
"General Bajwa is a mature officer with a deep background in not just military matters, but South Asia security issues, and we have got to find a way to move beyond this constant fighting that's characterized the area," he said.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait and Pakistan, since taking over the charge of the Pentagon.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding. (Photo: AFP)
Washington: US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said he intends to work hard to find common ground with Pakistan in the fight against terrorism, which is necessary to restore the level of stability in South Asia to allow economic development.
Ahead of his visit to Islamabad, Mattis said he wants to work with Pakistan, listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective, to address the problems.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait and Pakistan, since taking over the charge of the Pentagon.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
Saeed is still roaming free, despite tough warning from the Trump Administration.
"The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," Mattis told reporters travelling with him on his way to Pakistan from Egypt.
Mattis is the first top US official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the new South Asia Strategy that was announced by President Donald Trump on August 21.
"We know we have some common ground. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their troops killed and wounded by terrorists. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their innocent people murdered and wounded by terrorists, so we know that there is common ground".
Similarly, he said, there is common ground between Afghanistan and Pakistan, because there are terrorist groups that try to move back and forth, that do move back and forth in order to live in one and attack in the other, that sort of thing.
"So we know there's common ground; it's how much more common ground can we find by listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective," Mattis said.
"But at the same time, as the (Pakistan Army Chief) General (Qamar Javed Bajwa) has said, he wants no havens for terrorists anywhere, so we will work together and we'll find that common ground, if we have the will to.
Read: Act against terrorist safe havens or we will: CIA to Pakistan
"And then we'll work on how we address the problems where we can work together," the Defense Secretary said.
Responding to a question, he said he would not characterise everything over the past 16 years as failures.
"There is clearly an abundance of areas where we have to double down, and I am optimistic at this point that because of what our adversaries, our mutual enemies are doing, that we can find ways to work together," he said.
Mattis said both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistan military, the NATO-led militaries of 39 nations have all been in fights here. "We've got to find a way to work together".
He said there is "always an urgency to something" when 39 nations plus Afghanistan have their troops in the midst of a long war, where causalities are being taken.
"These are 39 of the most economically powerful, generally speaking, most long-term democratic institutions in the world. These are powerful nations morally, economically and diplomatically, and certainly militarily," he said.
Mattis said that it was essential in South Asia that all work together to restore the level of stability that allows for the economy to build.
"I mean, can you imagine a border between Pakistan and India where economic trade is not ongoing to the benefit of people on both sides of that border. We can not only imagine it; it's a reality right now," Mattis said.
So, the US Defence Secretary said that we have got to work together on this, and there's a sense of urgency about that.
"There's people who are living below the poverty line in both those countries. So as you look at this problem, if you'll expand the problem you can understand the sense of urgency to move beyond violence and get back to the normal order of things," he said.
Mattis is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and General Bajwa.
"General Bajwa is a mature officer with a deep background in not just military matters, but South Asia security issues, and we have got to find a way to move beyond this constant fighting that's characterised the area," he said.
The announcement comes days after the Lahore High Court ordered Saeeds release from the house arrest.
Saeed, who continues to be an influential person in Pakistan's certain religious groups despite being an internationally designated terrorist, announced on Saturday that he would contest the general election in 2018. (Photos: AP)
Islamabad: Former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, who earlier came in support of the terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), has now said that he would welcome an alliance with global terrorist and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed for the general election in 2018.
Responding to a question about having an alliance with JuD chief Saeed, Musharraf in an interview to Pakistan based Aaj News channel said, "so far, there has be no talks with them but if they want to be part of the alliance, I would welcome them,"
The former military ruler had in November announced the formation of a grand political alliance after a consultative meeting between representatives of around two dozen political parties, including the Sunni Tehreek, Majlis-i-Wahdatul Muslimeen, Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) and Mr Musharraf's own All Pakistan Muslim League (APML).
However, several parties dissociated themselves from Musharraf's Awami Ittehad alliance after he announced the formation of a "grand alliance" of 23 parties.
According to media reports, two major partners of the alliance - the Pakistan Awami Tehrik and the Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen - denied being part of the coalition headed by Musharraf.
Saeed, who continues to be an influential person in Pakistan's certain religious groups despite being an internationally designated terrorist, announced on Saturday that he would contest the general election in 2018.
The announcement comes days after the Lahore High Court ordered his release from the house arrest.
However, the JuD chief did not disclose anything about the constituency he would like to contest from.
Though, the JuD formed Milli Muslim League (MML) in August when Saeed was detained in Lahore, the party yet to be recognised by the Election Commission of Pakistan.
Saeed is a wanted terrorist by India and the United States for his alleged role in masterminding the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai that claimed 166 lives.
He even carries a bounty of 10 million USD (approx. Rs 66 crore) on his head for his role in the attack.
Musharraf had recently called himself as the "biggest supporter" of the LeT and its founder Hafiz Saeed.
Speaking on Pakistan's ARY News, Musharraf said, "I am the biggest supporter of the LeT and I know they like me and the JuD also likes me."
The former president added that he was always in favour of terrorist action in Kashmir, and the LeT and the JuD were the biggest forces to take on the Indian Army in the state.
by Nirmala Carvalho
The Syro-Malabar Church held a three-day conference. The work for life reaches the remotest rural villages. For Fr Shenan Boquet, the Indian Church is "an example for everyone". It is necessary to enter into conversations on life to defeat the culture of death.
Panvel (AsiaNews) The pro-life movement held a three-day seminar (30 November-2 December) in the diocese of Kaylan. The Eva*-Global Symposium focused on the protection of life
"We must invest in human beings by promoting and defending their dignity. It is imperative to protect life and the family through education, closeness, awareness and service," said Fr Shenan Boquet, president of Human Life International.
In the diocese of Kaylan, the pro-life movement is led by Fr Paul Kunduparambil. In addition to members of the India-based Syro-Malabar Church, people from all over the world took part in the conference, including the United States, like Fr Boquet himself and Human Life Internationals director Brain Cowles.
During the symposium, the meetings and cultural activities followed morning prayers and Mass. At its conclusion, Mgr Mar Thomas Elavanal thanked all those made it a success. He explained that its goal was to "promote the culture of life" towards which every "person living in this world has a responsibility".
It is a great joy to see so many people in India support and love life, Fr Boquet told AsiaNews. All across India, I can see that you are living the Gospel of life, he told participants.
The local Church has centres "supporting life in all its forms", even in the smallest villages and remotest rural areas. Some help abandoned children, the sick and elderly people; others rescue unwed women from human trafficking. Others provide marriage counselling, family assistance, or focus on biomedical ethics.
People of all ages are involved in the service of life without discrimination of caste or creed, open to serve every person. In fact, The Church in India is actively involved in defending life at all its stages, with love and acts of care, working for the cause of life. This is an example for everyone."
There are however challenges. Resources are a big one, not to mention the lack of will by political leaders to back the cause.
Maldistribution of resources, [and] lack of clean waters, sanitation, electricity [. . .] are all stifling the needs of families, Fr Boquet went on to say.
We [have to] look at the total spectrum of human life to address all aspects that support human life. Given the fact that some families live without medical care, water and hygiene, A real culture of life must [be designed to] raise the standards of life.
For him, An aggression against the family is an assault of human life. Thus, when resources are not distributed properly, violence is done.
What is more, It is urgent to include various disciplines medicine, sciences, public policy to defend life and the dignity of the human person.
Truth transcends political situations. We have to inform and reform minds. The latter are like students, to be taught, guided and given the right knowledge.
For the priest it is necessary "to enter into conversations, in India and elsewhere" to defeat "the culture of death".
"However, I am very encouraged, filled with great joy by the Churchs daily acts of kindness and love, defending and promoting the dignity of the human person and building a culture of life.
* Eva: Mother of the living.
Mgr Francis urges Catholics to reduce, reuse, and recycle through personal, family and community participation in ecological integrity. He calls on people to become "disciples of hope" in a situation that does not have none.
Penang (AsiaNews) Mgr Sebastian Francis, bishop of Penang and president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei (BCMSB), yesterday issued a pastoral letter for Advent at the start of the new liturgical year.
In it, he writes that We are all accountable for the situation the world is in and the future that will unfold. Let us not leave devastation as our legacy.
"Advent is a time of waiting for the final return of the Lord, who is our Hope and Salvation. And it seems that the world has never needed such hope and salvation as urgently as today," Mgr Francis says with reference to the global climate crisis and its devastating effects.
"Dangerous climate change is already happening; but we can avoid catastrophic climate change by personal, family and community participation in ecological integrity, he adds.
Quoting from the encyclical Laudato Si, the BCMSB president tells the faithful that "The Word of God clearly reminds us that we are responsible for caring for the rest of creation as stewards and not as owners."
The bishop urges Catholics to accept Pope Franciss call for "ecological conversion" and to change their lifestyle. "This means that true transformation of the world must come from within each one of us, not from without.
For this to happen, We must choose sacrifice over want, sharing over greed, and serving the common good of all creation over convenience. Only then can we truly be disciples of hope in a seemingly hopeless situation."
Hence, I call upon each and every one of you to be one in mind, spirit and action in this important mission, Mgr Francis writes.
Be true ecological citizens and disciples of hope. Love and pray constantly for all creation. Stop polluting, reduce the excessive consumption of unnecessary disposable materials such as paper plates, plastic cutlery sets, tissue papers and plastic bags, conserve water, save electricity and plant more trees.
In other words, REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE. Do all you can to build a just, resilient and ecological world from your homes to your communities, parishes and organisations.
Remember who you are: Gods own children.
by Bernardo Cervellera
News coverage overly focused on "saying / not saying" the word Rohingya. The Pope avoids trial by media, opting to outline constructive paths of hope. Full citizenship for dozens of ethnic groups and a development based on human dignity. The unity between the young and the different ethnic groups, admired by Buddhists and Muslims.
Rome (AsiaNews) - At the end of his trip to Myanmar and Bangladesh, Pope Francis said the fateful word: Rohingya. In saying it, he did not "slam the door shut " or tear his clothes, rather he asked forgiveness for the worlds indifference and caressed the faces of men, women and children whose family members were killed, or who had to flee from the military onslaught. The Pope met 16 in Dhaka, and all of them prayed and cried with him. "God - said Francis - is also Rohingya".
The global media were waiting for this word in order to condemn the violence of the Burmese army, denounce the inanity of the leader Aung San Suu Kyi, to plunge Myanmar under the weight of sanctions. In some respects, it gave the impression that this journey's significance hinged on that one word. But in this way, the media failed to show all the richness of the pontiffs message and the impulse that he has given to this region of the world which is both so rich and so poor.
It is true that in Myanmar Francis did not use the word "Rohingya", rather he spoke of all minorities (Kachin, Chin, Karen, Naga, Kaya, ...) who suffer the same things as Rohingya without ever making headlines . And the Roman Pontiff said that citizenship is necessary for all, the distribution of wealth, the collaboration to build peace in Burmese society. The decades of military dictatorship have created almost incurable wounds, violence and wars, but the pope has asked everyone, especially the Christians, to forgive and work for reconciliation to ward off the spectre of a war in which everyone loses.
This is why Pope did not court media praise or condemnation, instead he outlined constructive paths of hope. This is why in both countries, in Myanmar and Bangladesh, he spoke to young people to support their enthusiasm and propose a path of hope for the future. Young people who emigrate, who accept slave-like working conditions, or who take up arms, who risk living like the desperate. Francis asked young Christians to be catalysts of hope.
This means not burying oneself within the folds of one's own ethnic or religious group, nurturing suspicion towards others, remaining inert and sceptical, but opening oneself to encounter, sustained by the common dignity of every person.
The collaboration between religions is the other pillar of this journey: with the Islamic majority in Bangladesh and with the Buddhist one in Myanmar it is important to work so that the economic development under way in these two countries is founded on the mystery of human dignity, and not only on profit, the exploitation of labor and child slaves. Francis has shown that by valuing the religious dimension, one can have the common good more easily at heart.
He wanted to meet with the leaders of the religions both in Myanmar and in Bangladesh and with them he condemned the violence and terrorism that manipulate the name of God, but above all he pushed them to work together for a society of which man is at the center, whatever his ethnicity, because he is made in the image of God.
A final word on the Churches of these two countries, small minorities often in the cyclone of persecution. The Pope praised the Christians who, despite being a "mustard seed", give sustenance to the population and the poor in Bangladesh and Myanmar. The esteem that Christians enjoy is primarily due to their service: schools, hospitals, agricultural and labor cooperatives. But in this service, people discover with wonder the reasons for the love of Christ. It is not by chance that in both Bangladesh and in Myanmar the Church grows every year, there are abundant vocations and these small communities already send missionaries to other lands.
It was perhaps one of the first times that all the Christian ethnic groups of Myanmar and the dozens of Bangladeshi ethnic groups gathered together, arousing the admiration of Buddhists and Muslims. A good promise for the future.
Coopers opens $65 million malting plant
Cooper's new malting plant
Coopers has opened a $65 million malting plant at its Regency Park brewery in Adelaide.
Coopers says the 13, 000sq m plant is considered the most technically advanced malting plant in the world. The facility was officially opened late last week by the Governor of South Australia, the Honourable Hieu Van Le AC.
The project is the largest single investment since Coopers was first established 150 years ago. It was entirely funded by the business and will employ eight new employees.
Coopers Managing Director, Dr Tim Cooper, said at full capacity, the malting house will produce approximately 54, 000 tonnes of malt per year.
South Australian farmers are recognised as producing some of the best malting barley in the world and we will be looking to establish strong relationships with them into the future, Dr Cooper said.
Coopers will use 17, 000 tonnes of the 54, 000 tonnes of malt it plans to produce each year. The remainder is expected to be sold to both domestic and international customers.
The plant was constructed by South Australian building firm, Ahrens Group. The malting equipment was sourced from Buhler in Switzerland.
Some of the innovations we have incorporated include full stainless-steel construction, enclosed conveyors, together with advanced process control and monitoring, Dr Cooper said about the new malt plant.
In terms of water usage, process control and automation, this is the most advanced maltings in the world.
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Metcash feels the effects Aldis expansion into SA and WA
Independent grocery wholesaler Metcash is feeling the effects of Aldis expansion into South Australia and Western Australia.
In announcing its 2018 half-year financial results, Metcashs food pillar sales was $4.36 billion, a 1.4 per cent drop on its 2017 first half year results.
Supermarket sales fell 0.8 per cent on the prior corresponding period and supermarket wholesale sales declined 3.7 per cent.
There was a continued high level of grocery deflation (2.7 per cent) with Metcash attributing this to significant investment in price and promotion among its competitors.
Competitors expansion, particularly into South Australia and Western Australia, were also listed as a challenge.
Over the past two years, Aldi has entered SA and WA for the first time, establishing a number of new stores.
Sales continued to improve on the Eastern seaboard, while South Australia, and Western Australia remained weaker, Metcash reported in its financial update to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).
Despite the sales fall, earnings before interested and tax in Metcashs food pillar increased by 5.8 per cent to AUD $89.4 million reflecting positive earnings from convenience.
The Metcash Group as a whole also reported group profit after tax of AUD $92.9 million, a 24 per cent increase on the groups first half results for 2017.
Metcash further benefitted from its acquisition of Home Timber and Hardware from Woolworths with Metcashs hardware earnings before interest and tax increasing from AUD $14.6 million to AUD $27.1 million on the corresponding period..
Metcash liquor sales increased by 5.1 per cent to AUD 41.6 billion and earnings before interested and tax for liquor increased by AUD $0.5million to AUD $27.6 million.
Metcash Group Chief Executive Officer, Ian Morrice, said the first half results were very pleasing despite the continuation of some of the most challenging conditions in our history.
It was good to see earnings growth across all our pillars, as well as strong operating cashflows, Morrice said.
Metcash is currently halfway through its three-year Working Smarter turnaround program which Morrice said is delivering significant benefits, especially in Metcashs supermarkets business.
The savings achieved have been a kay factor in Supermarkets maintaining its earnings, despite the significant headwinds that include a continuing high level of deflation, Morrice said.
The financial results were Ian Morrices last as CEO of Metcash. Morrice will soon be handing over his CEO role to ex-Tesco executive, Jeff Adams.
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(GeorgeRudy/Bigstock.com) (GeorgeRudy/Bigstock.com)
As the number of international students studying in Australia reaches record highs, it is being suggested that institutions need to do more to make sure they offer what is needed to retain numbers.The most up to date figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows that in 2017 there were more than 550,000 students from over 190 different countries in Australia.The majority study in New South Wales and Victoria and while they are generally satisfied it is claimed that universities and colleges need to make sure they offer what students want as Australia needs to compete with higher education institutions in countries such as Canada, the United States, the UK and New Zealand in terms of popularity.The Australian Technical Management College (ATMC), which specialises in courses in business and management at campuses in Melbourne and Sydney, is working to improve the kind of experiences on offer for international students.Chief academic officer Professor Mike Clements said ATMC was working with universities and VET providers such as the University of the Sunshine Coast, Federation University, Charles Darwin University and the Baxter Institute to improve the experience of international students.'Our experience at ATMC is that our international students make a significant contribution to our economy that goes far beyond their initial enrolment fees. Specifically, we find that when we connect our students with meaningful learning opportunities, the economy sees a strong flow-on effect for years after they graduate,' he explained.'The key here is using the unique ATMC managed campus solution that keeps students engaged and connected to Australian business, culture, and education. The concept of delivery is based on a combination of academic excellence and expertise along with a highly focused student centred approach where the student experience is paramount,' he said.'This learning environment, in conjunction with our quality framework delivery mode, provides a very successful partnership with Australian Universities as a true differentiator in the marketplace,' he pointed out.He added that to improve international education, new initiatives such as managed campus solutions seek to maintain student retention rates, provide smaller classes and student services, link students to student placements and help educational institutions stand out in the global market.The aim is to make sure that all degree programmes offered are up to date at all times and relevant to the industry environment nationally and internationally. At the ATMC the class sizes are small, so that students enjoy the learning experience and don't get lost in the crowd.Staff are accessible and resources are put back into the College to develop facilities and services that benefit students with improvements to teaching facilities making sure classrooms are spacious and equipped with technology. Clements also believes that providing student mentors is vital, as is providing job placements.
Photo of Honda Civic courtesy of Honda.
American Honda Motor Co. is recalling 5,404 2017 Honda Civic sedans and coupes because improper heat treatment might have weakened the right halfshafts, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Honda dealers will inspect each halfshafts serial number and replace the part if needed. Dealers will also align the front wheels. There will be no charge for these services.
The recall is expected to begin Dec. 15, NHTSA said. Car owners can reach Honda customer service at (888) 234-2138. Hondas number for this recall is K0E.
Two gay men have been arrested in Uzbekistan and face charges of engaging in illegal sexual relations.
The two men, who are both in their twenties, met in early September and moved into a rented apartment in Tashkent.
Police told media last week that they conducted intrusive, forensic medical examinations to confirm that one of the men had allegedly engaged in repeated sexual intercourse. Consensual sex between men is punishable in Uzbekistan by up to three years in prison.
Potential prosecution is only the least of what gay people in Uzbekistan are liable to face in their daily life. Intimidation up to and including brutal physical assault is commonplace.
President Islam Karimov, who remarked in February 2016 that same-sex relationships were a vile phenomenon of Western culture.
If a man lives with a man, or a woman with a women, I think that something there isnt quite right, or some change has happened, Karimov said.
International rights activists have appealed with the Uzbek government to repeal Article 120 of the criminal code, which criminalizes sexual relations between men.
It is unacceptable to persecute people for the fact that they consensually engage in same-sex relations. Every person is free to determine their own relations. This incident is nothing but a demonstrative act of discrimination toward the LGBT community and reflects the policies of the current regime, said Nadezhda Atayeva, president of the Paris-based Association for Human Rights in Central Asia.
It has been reported that officials in Azerbaijan and Tajikistan authorities both areas of the former Soviet Union have sought to impress their conservative credentials by persecuting the LGBT community. Both countries have recently drawn up registries of people they suspected of belonging to their countrys gay and lesbian communities as part of a purported efforts to promote sexual health and moral behavior.
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Former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown was sentenced on Monday to five years in prison for fraud and other charges, according to court records.
Brown will also get a three-year supervised release.
Brown was convicted earlier this year of taking money raised for a charity as well as lying on her taxes and Congressional financial disclosure forms.
Her codefendants, Carla Wiley and Elisa "Ronnie" Simmons, pleaded guilty to the charges they were facing.
Simmons pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy and aiding and abetting theft of government funds, and Wiley pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to the U.S. District Court's sentencing order.
Wiley was sentenced to 21 months in prison with a three-year supervised release, while Simmons got four years in prison and a three-year supervised release, the sentencing order stated.
The 71-year-old Brown, who represented a district that at one point stretched from Jacksonville down into Orlando, was found guilty of 18 counts of fraud and tax evasion.
Brown served part of Central Florida in Congress for more than 20 years until she lost the Democratic primary in 2016.
She could spend the rest of her life in prison.
As Seminole Heights starts the holiday season and seeks to regain some normalcy after weeks of being on edge, the Tampa Bay Lightning are lending a helping hand.
Lightning captain Steven Stamkos, defenseman Victor Hedman and forward J.T. Brown will sign autographs as a show of support for local businesses in Seminole Heights on Monday afternoon.
The signings will take place at three separate locations. The locations are:
Steven Stamkos: Brew Bus Brewing - 4101 N Florida Ave
Victor Hedman: Fodder & Shine - 5910 N Florida Ave
J.T. Brown, along with Tampa Police Chief Brian Dugan: Ellas Americana Folk Art Cafe - 5119 N Nebraska Ave
There will be a limit of one autograph or posed photo per person.
The area has breathed a collective sigh of relief after the arrest last week of a suspect in the killings of four Seminole Heights residents.
Residents and police had been on edge since Oct. 9, when 22-year-old Benjamin Mitchell was shot to death. Two days later, 32-year-old Monica Hoffa, was slain. And on Oct. 19, Anthony Naiboa, 20, was killed after taking the wrong bus home from his new job. On Nov. 14, 60-year-old Ronald Felton was killed.
The Tampa Police Department will also be participating at all three locations, greeting and welcoming fans, while also helping to collect toy donations.
In order to receive an autograph or photo, fans are encouraged to bring new, unwrapped toys that will be donated to underserved elementary-aged children in Seminole Heights for the holidays.
President Donald Trump is taking aim at the FBI as the investigation continues into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
President Donald Trump says FBI's reputation at its worst in history
Tweet comes as FBI agent removed from investigation
Some speak out in support of FBI
It comes just days after his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
The presidents tweet comes as a senior FBI official was removed from special counsel Robert Mullers investigation into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election because the agent, Peter Strzok, sent messages that could be interpreted as showing political bias for Hillary Clinton and against Trump.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, said Mueller removed Strzok from the team immediately upon learning of the allegations. He would not elaborate on the nature of the accusations. The person who discussed the matter with The Associated Press was not authorized to speak about it by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Strzok also led the investigation into Hillary Clintons email server.
Report: ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE Now it all starts to make sense! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Former FBI Director James Comey, who was fired by Trump, responded by tweeting a quote he said back in June.
I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is, and always will be, independent.
Me (June 8, 2017) pic.twitter.com/OZ1ZiBrMNL James Comey (@Comey) December 3, 2017
Comey was not the only one who reacted to the president's tweet.
Nope. Not letting this go. The FBIs reputation is not in tatters. Its composed of the same dedicated men and women who have always worked there and who do a great, apolitical job. Youll find integrity and honesty at FBI headquarters and not at 1600 Penn Ave right now Eric Holder (@EricHolder) December 3, 2017
Strzoks removal almost certainly reflected a desire to insulate the investigators from any claims of political bias or favoritism. Trump and many of his supporters have at times sought to discredit the integrity of the investigation, in part by claiming a close relationship between Mueller and Comey and by pointing to political contributions to Democrats made by some lawyers on the team.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
House of Cards will return for its final season without Kevin Spacey.
'House of Cards' to return without Kevin Spacey
Production will resume early 2018
8-episode final season with Robin Wright as lead
The political drama will resume production in early 2018 with eight episodes with Robin Wright as the lead, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said Monday. Previous seasons consisted of 13 episodes each.
Speaking at UBSs Global Media and Communications Conference in New York, Sarandos said he was happy an agreement had been reached to continue the show and provide closure for fans, according to Variety.
In October, actor Anthony Rapp first told Buzzfeed that Spacey made unwanted advances toward him in 1986 when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26.
Days later, Media Rights Capital the production company behind "House of Cards" suspended production of the series after the sexual misconduct allegation against Spacey surfaced.
MRC later suspended Spacey while it investigated what it called serious allegations concerning the Oscar-winning actors behavior on the set of House of Cards.
Spacey is one of a number of high-profile men who have been accused of sexual misconduct following a New York Times expose about Harvey Weinstein.
The decision to continue House of Cards without Spacey comes after director Ridley Scott removed the actor from his completed film All the Money in the World weeks before its theatrical release. Christopher Plummer took over Spaceys role as J. Paul Getty.
The Texas Board of Nursing has suspended the registered nursing license of the the owner of a Nederland clinic raided by federal authorities this fall.
Kevin G. Morgan, 33, owns Optimum Medical Weight Control and Family Wellness, which was searched by officials from the Drug Enforcement Agency in October.
Police do not believe "suspicious" activity contributed to the death of a Liberty County sixth grader, according to information from the Liberty County Sheriff's Office.
Abigail Garcia, 11, was feeling ill when she got off the bus after school, and later had difficulty walking, the department said. She was taken to a Houston hospital where she later died.
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The welcome mat to Tommy Spears' Deweyville home sits about four feet above the ground, on the landing of the stairs leading up to his front door.
From his living room, Spears looks out over the surrounding neighborhood - the trees that use to loom above his house are at eye level outside.
His house, which flooded twice in the past two years, now sits 10 feet off the ground on stilts.
"If you're going to be here, you've got to do something," Spears said.
He said neighbors have joked that now that he's spent the time and money - nine days and $35,000 - to elevate his home, he won't have needed to, and it won't flood again, which he said he's happy to hear. "If raising the house stops the flooding, that's good," he said.
But for residents of the Newton County town, some of whom have flooded three times in as many years, future flooding seems a given rather than a question, fears looming as they continue to repair what the last floods destroyed.
Tired of repairs
After the historic Sabine River flooding in March 2016, Spears and his wife Estelle repaired the home where they've lived for 42 years, drying out walls and replacing floors.
As soon as they moved back in over the summer, they purchased flood insurance, though at the time they didn't expect to need it again, he said.
> > MORE: Thousands still await clean water after Harvey
The expense paid off. A year later, they repeated the process after Tropical Storm Harvey dumped rain across the region, filling Toledo Bend and prompting the Sabine River Authority to open the floodgates, flooding the town of Deweyville a second time.
"I ain't fixing to do that again," Spears said. "It was either move or raise it."
"They're planning to do it again next year," Estelle said of the SRA opening floodgates. The SRA declined to comment, citing pending litigation, but has said in the past that it is not a flood control agency.
The Spears hired a company to lift the home, raising it up with jacks and building supports underneath. Their new insurance coverage made it possible, he said.
"If I could, if I were a millionaire, I'd pay for everybody's house to be lifted up," Spears said.
An expensive fix
If she could, Annette Smart would raise her home too - along with her mother's, father-in-law's and niece's homes, which sit side-by-side near the land where the family blueberry farm used to be.
> > MORE: Future uncertain for Beaumont high school
The first flood wiped out the watering system, and the second took her will to keep it going on top of all the repair work, so they mowed down most of the bushes.
Her family is staying in their old processing facility, a metal building behind her house that they were able to clean out after the storm, while she and her husband stay in a camper outside. She's hoping to finish repairing her mother's home first, she said.
"I would love to raise my house, but its $250,000," Smart said, throwing her hands up in frustration. She said her mother, who is on a fixed income, is hoping to receive money from the federal funds the county received through the Community Block Development Grant program to help elevate her home.
"After two floods in two years, you start looking for the next one," she said.
Funding delayed
The $32.9 million the county was allocated from the 2016 floods won't be available until early 2018, Judge Paul Price said. By the time it makes its way to residents, it will be close to two years since the disaster that prompted it.
Seventy percent will be used for housing projects, including buyouts and home elevation, while the other 30 percent is earmarked for public projects, like bridges and roads. That breakdown is flexible, Price said, based on the community's needs. The Commissioner's Court approved giving $5 million of the money to Deweyville ISD for the replacement of its elementary school.
> > RELATED: Owner says there's 'no hope' for Adventure Kingdom after flood
Price said the county has hired a grant administrator and is "getting ready to sit down with the General Land Office, getting ready to finally start working part on the housing aspect" after months of "bureaucratic process."
Those who have already elevated their homes may be eligible for reimbursements from the grants, if they've documented damages and show receipts for the work, he said.
Fearing the future
Others have decided to leave, rather than fight the river again.
After spending almost a year in a FEMA trailer when her home was flooded and destroyed, Lydia Broussard and her family left Deweyville and moved to Orangefield.
"It was 100 percent totaled," she said of her house, leading to the decision to uproot and relocate. "This is our time to move and God telling us to move," she said.
> > PHOTOS: Most iconic photos from Harvey
When water levels started rising in the Neches River during Harvey, they evacuated to her mother's house in Deweyville, believing they would be safe there - only to be forced out again when the gates on the Sabine River were opened.
Their new home wasn't flooded, she said, but she would have been more prepared this time. The house is at a higher elevation, she said, and like Spears, she now has flood insurance.
"I don't care if I live on a mountain, I'm always going to have flood insurance," she said.
Hoping for change
Smart, who called the family's land "our own piece of heaven," said she's "planning on staying there until they put me in the ground."
"If we would've known this would happen in 2000 when we built it, we could have built it up," she said, but now, the cost of elevating is too high, so she'll continue to repair and rebuild as is, even though it means the family is using money from her husband's retirement savings.
They are considering installing an AquaDam or a retention wall, she said, though she knows that's unlikely to be a match for the intensity of another flood like 2016's.
She's hopeful that officials will speak up for the residents of the southern part of Newton County to implement changes with the SRA and the Kansas City Southern Railroad, which she and many others say has built up their tracks on the southern side of Deweyville, forming a dam that holds water once it's released from Toledo Bend and exacerbates flooding in the town.
> > PHOTOS: Aerial photos show extreme Harvey flooding
Parts of the railroad washed out in the 2016 floods, and some residents say their efforts to repair it and elevate it to avoid future problems have made things worse.
KCS said in a statement that company "showed elected officials that the railroad's restoration efforts after the washouts did not cause additional flooding to the Deweyville community, and that the restoration of the railroad did not bring it to a height greater than what it had been before the washouts."
A company spokeswoman said KCS engineers offered to work with elected officials on installing culverts to improve drainage, but that offer has not yet been accepted or requested.
Price said the county needs to work with the company to open up trestle space under the tracks that would allow water to pass through, rather than holding it in place but said that needs to be done in cooperation with Orange County officials to avoid worsening flooding there.
Officials look for a fix
The fastest way to prevent a future flood would be for the SRA and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which licenses Toledo Bend dam to generate power, to lower the standard water level at the dam, which would lessen the need to open floodgates on the river when the water level rises, Price said.
"We've had three or four rain floodings in three years, we're getting more rain with greater intensity in closer intervals," Price said, which should prompt the Commission to take health and safety concerns into consideration and lower the levels.
"The people up by the lake aren't going to like it, but what's more important, what's the bigger hurt?" he said. He said Southeast Texas officials have also spoken with state legislators about building more dams in the region, which could hold more water and alleviate future flooding.
Spears said that for now, regardless of what changes the SRA does or doesn't make, the elevation has provided a sense of security in a home that's been short on that for the last two years.
Standing on the screened-in porch of his own Noah's Ark, Spears waved his hand outside and said he's prepared for any flooding that isn't apocalyptic.
"If the water gets this high up here, I don't think anyone will be left in Deweyville, in Orange, in this part of the world," he said.
LTeitz@BeaumontEnterprise.com
Twitter.com/LizTeitz
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More than three months after Tropical Storm Harvey overflowed drainage districts, cut off water and prompted hundreds of boil-water notices across the Gulf Coast, access to safe water still seems a pipe dream for some.
Thirteen boil-water notices remain in effect across Harvey's affected areas, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality reported Friday.
Seven counties, including Orange, Newton, Matagorda, Liberty, Jim Wells, Harris and Angelina, are struggling to bounce back after Harvey's 50-plus inches swamped water systems, subdivisions and mobile home parks across Southeast Texas.
> > MORE: Parasites, degraded land among post-Harvey threats to local farmers
About 3,750 people in Harvey's affected areas haven't had clean drinking water since late August, according to the TCEQ.
More than 2,200 community water systems were compromised during Harvey. Two in Harris County have been deemed inoperative or destroyed. Of 1,743 wastewater facilities affected, three in Harris County still aren't operational, according to the TCEQ.
Janice Ratcliff, Rose City's water operator, said their boil notice hasn't been lifted because the plant hasn't met TCEQ standards for pH levels and other chemicals.
Running water was returned to the city's 600 residents on Sept. 28, but it still requires a two-minute rolling boil before it's safe to consume.
"It's been so touch-and-go," Ratcliff said. "It will run good for two weeks but then something will happen. It just makes no sense to remove the notice just to have to go right back on it."
> > RELATED: Future uncertain for Beaumont high school
The original goal was to have the order rescinded by Thanksgiving, but red tape and insurance issues have pushed back the installation of necessary equipment, Ratcliff said.
"It's crazy what they put us through," Ratcliff said. "It's just been delay after delay. We understand that insurance companies and FEMA were so overloaded, but a water facility should come first."
The plant has been operating manually, meaning Ratcliff and co-operator Angela Beenen have to do everything by hand.
"The electronic equipment can tell us immediately when there is a problem," Ratcliff said. "So it takes us longer to diagnose a problem, especially when we have to wait a few hours to do all the testing. ... It's just not nearly as accurate."
Testing of water samples used to be done in their lab, which had to be condemned. For now, they have been working out of a temporary wood building with no heat or air conditioning, unstable electricity and none of their equipment.
Rose City's hall, which also flooded, has been serving as a central distribution site.
Faith-based organizations have made sure Rose City is never without enough bottled water, and one Louisiana church brought turkeys for Thanksgiving, Mayor Bonnie Stephenson said.
"We've barely had any complaints from residents," Stephenson said of the recovery process. "They know that they're working as hard as they can to fix it. Nobody has gotten real mad yet."
Ratcliff agreed, saying she's grateful residents are still being gracious about the situation.
Stephenson's own home was one of the 268 structures destroyed in the flood. Living under the boil-water notice has not made life any more difficult, she said.
"My whole life has changed," Stephenson said. "Nothing is the same, it's like day and night. So it hasn't really bothered me personally."
MGstalter@BeaumontEnterprise.com
Twitter.com/morgGstalt
A college student from Spring pleaded guilty on Monday to plotting to join ISIS in Syria in a case that dates to the earliest American news reports about the terrorist group.
Asher Abid Khan, 23, admitted in a Houston courtroom that he conspired with others and attempted to provide "material support" to a foreign terrorist organization. The mechanical engineering student at the University of Houston ultimately ditched his plan en route to joining jihadist forces, but continued to talk of becoming a martyr after he returned home.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes set sentencing for March 5. Khan remains free on bond.
He is the fifth person in Texas to plead guilty to attempting to provide support for ISIS. An unrelated defendant, Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, 25, of Houston, pleaded guilty last year to providing material support to ISIS and is due for sentencing later this month..
According the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, 144 people have been charged in the U.S. with involvement in ISIS. The vast majority are U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
FBI investigators tracked the Klein Oak High School graduate on Facebook saying he wanted to join the violent jihadist network. According to court documents, he traveled to Turkey with plans to enlist in Syria, but he changed his mind after a phone call home in which relatives invented a family emergency to get him to return home.
Now Playing: Michelle Bandur reports. Video: KETV
Khan was indicted in May 2015 for attempting to join ISIS with a friend from high school who he knew from the same local mosque.
Prosecutors said in court filings that Khan was living with relatives in Australia when he exchanged Facebook messages with the friend, Sixto Ramiro Garcia, a Muslim convert. They chatted about their shared faith in the Islamic caliphate and their desire to dedicate their lives to something bigger than themselves.
In early 2014, Khan suggested they head to Iraq or Syria, according to court documents.
Khan is accused of helping Garcia, who was using the name Abdullah Ali, arrange a flight out of Houston and helping him through Facebook connect with a man agents called "a foreign terrorist fighter facilitator" in Turkey. Khan traveled from Australia, but his family persuaded him during a stopover to return to Houston telling him falsely that his mother had been hospitalized.
Khan communicated with Garcia, a.k.a., Ali, so he could find their contact, Mohammad, near the Syrian border, and promising that he'd come later, according to investigators.
An FBI agent testified at a previous hearing that once he returned to Spring, Khan continued to chat online with friends about his support for ISIS and his wish to die as a martyr.
Investigators believe Khan's hometown buddy, Garcia, went through ISIS boot camp. On Christmas Day 2014, the agent said, someone used Garcia's Facebook account to tell family members he had died for ISIS. Federal agents say they learned of Khan through Garcia's account.
Gabrielle Banks covers federal court for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and send news tips at gabrielle.banks@chron.com.
Prisoners at Alipore Central Jail in Kolkata wave to supporters of a local political party, Trinamool Congress, celebrating an electoral win, May 16, 2009.
Indian authorities said Monday they were investigating how an Islamic State (IS) suspect in custody got a weapon he allegedly used to try and slit a guards throat inside a high-security jail in West Bengals capital.
Mohammad Mosihuddin (alias Abu Musa), an inmate at Alipore Central Jail in Kolkata since his arrest in July 2016, attacked jail warder Gobinda Chandra Dey with a sharp iron object early Sunday while shouting extremist slogans, police said. Mosihuddin is being investigated in India for a possible link to an IS-claimed terrorist attack at a cafe in Bangladeshs capital that same month.
We have shifted him [Mosihuddin] to solitary confinement while we probe the attack, Arun Kumar Gupta, the states director general and inspector general of Correctional Services, told BenarNews.
Ujjwal Biswas, West Bengals minister for Correctional Administration, said police had charged Mosihuddin with attempted murder.
[A]n investigation is on. Jail authorities have also initiated an internal enquiry to find out how he got hold of the piece of metal, Biswas told Benar.
Jail guard Dey was attacked when he unlocked Mosihuddins cell during a routine check at about 7 a.m., a prison official told BenarNews on condition of anonymity.
[Mosihuddin] first hit the warder on the head with a stone and then tried to slit his throat while chanting Jihadi slogans. But other prison guards rushed to the spot in time and rescued him, the source said.
Dey was being treated at a private hospital and was out of danger, police said.
Mosihuddin, 26, a West Bengal native, is under investigation by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), the countrys top counter-terror agency, in connection with a terrorist siege at the Holey Artisan Bakery cafe in Dhaka that left 29 people dead, including 20 hostages and five gunmen on July 1-2, 2016.
He was arrested in West Bengals Burdwan district two days later, after Indian security agencies traced his calls and emails to Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Syria. He had an improvised gun, a 13-inch dagger and fake currency notes from Afghanistan and Syria, police said.
According to the NIA, Mosihuddin was asked to set up an IS cell in India by Bangladeshi national Abu Suleiman, a Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) operative allegedly linked to the cafe siege, and who remains at large.
Mosihuddin is one of about 100 Indian Muslims who have been arrested and are facing trial for alleged links with the Middle East-based terror outfit.
In its charge-sheet filed against Mosihuddin last December, the NIA accused him of plotting attacks on the Mother Teresa Missionaries of Charity and other locations in Kolkata with the aim of targeting tourists from the United States, United Kingdom and Russia.
Last year, Bangladeshs Rapid Action Battalion and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation sent teams to interrogate Mosihuddin.
Sabah Police Commissioner Ramli Din shows a modified shotgun allegedly used by Abu Paliyak, who was killed in a shootout with Malaysian security forces near Lahad Datu, Dec. 4, 2017.
Malaysian security forces killed a member of a faction of the Philippine militant group Abu Sayyaf during a shootout Monday in waters off Malaysias eastern Sabah state, the local police chief said.
Abu Paliyak or Commander Paliyak (alias Yusof), 31, was shot dead when he opened fire at security forces near Lahad Datu district, Sabah Police Commissioner Ramli Din told a news conference.
Paliyak had been an informant for the Remy Group, an Abu Sayyaf splinter that was involved in kidnappings and cross-border crimes on the states east coast, Ramli said.
We believe Paliyak was out at sea to observe the operations and movements of our security personnel and to relay the information to kidnap-for-ransom groups, Ramli said in Lahad Datu.
The Abu Sayyaf, or Bearers of the Sword, is the most violent of Muslim rebel factions in the southern Philippines and was notorious for beheading hostages. It claimed responsibility for a ferry bombing in Manila Bay that killed more than 100 people in 2004.
The group also was blamed for a spate of kidnappings at sea in recent years, in which Malaysian and Indonesian sailors were taken hostage.
Paliyak, according to Ramli, was involved in maritime hijackings and kidnappings in waters off Sabahs Lahad Datu and Kunak towns in 2014 and 2015. With Paliyaks death, authorities believe they have solved many of those cases, Ramli said, without elaborating.
The shootout occurred when a Malaysian patrol approached Paliyaks boat after it was seen operating in a suspicious manner, police said. The suspect allegedly sped off and fired a shot at the direction of the security forces, forcing them to return fire.
Police said they had recovered a modified shotgun from Paliyaks boat.
Paliyak was part of an 11-member Remy Group, which was involved in kidnap-for-ransom activities in the southern Philippines and Sabahs east coast, Ramli said.
Philippine authorities recently detained five group members and killed four other suspects, he said, adding the last member is believed to be involved in criminal activities in the southern Philippines.
Dr. Ng Su-Peing, the global medical chief of Sanofi Pasteur, addresses a press conference in Manila following a decision by the Philippine government to investigate the French pharmaceutical firms dengue vaccine, Dec. 4, 2017.
Philippine justice officials Monday ordered an investigation into a school-based anti-dengue immunization program after the countrys health department suspended it over a French pharmaceutical firms disclosure that its flagship vaccine could put people with no prior infection at risk.
Department Order 763, signed by Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre, directs the National Bureau of Investigation to conduct [an] investigation and case build up into the program in which more than 740,000 Philippine schoolchildren were given shots of Dengvaxia, a vaccine developed by Sanofi Pasteur.
The government is particularly concerned about an alleged irregular procurement deal with Sanofi Pasteur last year valued at 3.5 billion pesos (U.S. $69 million) that made the Philippines the first country in Asia to use the drug, Aguirre said in the order.
Should evidence be found, appropriate charges should be filed, the order said. It did not name individuals to be covered in its probe.
On Sunday, presidential spokesman Harry Roque appealed for parents and relatives of public elementary school children in Manila and nearby provinces, where pilot testing was done last year, to remain calm. He called on people to not spread unverified information that could cause undue panic.
We assure the public that as per the Department of Health there is currently no reported case of severe dengue infection to the individuals who received one dose of dengue vaccine last year, Roque said.
We will leave no stone unturned in making those responsible for this shameless public health scam which puts hundreds of thousands of young lives at risk accountable, he said in a statement.
The Department of Health is coordinating with the Department of Education to monitor thousands of students who have been vaccinated with Dengvaxia, Roque added.
The vaccination program had been hailed by the World Health Organization, which recommended that the government undertake a massive immunization project to combat dengue.
Dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever are acute viral infections known to affect infants, young children and adults. It is transmitted by a bite of an Aedes aegypti mosquito infected with any one of the four dengue strains.
The disease infects about 200,000 Filipinos every year, and the health department had hinted that the suspension was only temporary.
In a statement issued last week, Sanofi said it would propose that national regulatory agencies update labels in their stocks of the drugs to request that healthcare professionals assess the likelihood of prior dengue infection in an individual before vaccinating.
But health advocates had warned that it was too soon to roll out the vaccine in 2016. In December 2015, the Philippines approved the commercial sale of Dengvaxia, the first dengue vaccine developed by Sanofi, and it became commercially available here four months later.
Database
On Monday, Sen. Risa Hontiveros, vice chairwoman of a congressional committee on health and demography, called on government to create a database of all children who had received dosages of the vaccine.
Preliminary studies showed that nearly 10 percent of the nearly three-quarters of a million children who received Dengvaxia could be at risk, she said.
Our primary concern right now should be the health and welfare of all those children exposed to unnecessary risk, Hontiveros said. Laxity is not an option. We are racing against time. We must protect and ensure the good health of the children.
The French firm must be held responsible and culpable health officials accountable, she added.
While vaccination and immunization are protective and essential elements of preventive health care, implementing an immunization program that could do more harm than good to our children is the height of negligence that could border on the criminal, Hontiveros said.
Sanofi: full transparency
In a statement issued in Manila on Monday, Sanofi said it had made the finding public in full transparency with the Philippine Food and Drug Administration and the health department.
Consequently, we are proposing an update to the current vaccine label that physicians can make appropriate vaccination decisions with their patients to enhance the impact of the vaccine in the Philippines, where majority have been infected by dengue by the time they reach adolescence, Sanofi said.
It said Dengvaxia does not contain viruses that can make people ill with dengue or severe dengue, noting that severe dengue dengue infections were common complications.
Severe dengue is characterized as a potentially deadly complication due to plasma leaking, fluid accumulation, respiratory distress, severe bleeding or organ impairment, according to the World Health Organization.
As far as we know, as far as we are made aware, there are no reported deaths that are related to dengue vaccination, said Ruby Dizon, Sanofis medical director in the Philippines.
Former Philippine Health Secretary Janette Garin said the vaccination program was implemented in accordance with internationally set guidelines and that the government had consulted regularly with WHOs Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on immunization.
With the desire to resolve this deadly virus, the department started the vaccination program which has until now been seen to be strongly beneficial to nine out of 10 Filipinos, Garin told BenarNews. I welcome the DOJ (justice department) and Senate investigations. I will answer all questions at the right time, at the appropriate forum.
She said that, should authorities point culpability to her way, I am ready to face consequences.
Froilan Gallardo in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines, contributed to this report.
A female guerrilla from the communist New Peoples Army (NPA) commands a fighting unit in a camp on Mindanao island in the southern Philippines, November 2015.
Philippine communist rebels were sending a response to new threats from the government, when they raided a remote southern town and wounded four police officers in a weekend attack, a guerrilla spokesman said Monday.
The attack occurred days after President Rodrigo Duterte called off talks and threatened to officially put the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New Peoples Army (NPA), on a terror watch list.
The attack is a warning to the police and military that the NPA does not fear the threats of all-out war and martial law by the Duterte regime, Nicholas Marino, a local spokesman for the rebels, told BenarNews.
About 100 NPA rebels set up road blocks along the main highway and took over the town of Binuangan, in Misamis Oriental province on southern Mindanao island, before dawn Sunday.
They fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the towns police station, injuring four, including municipal police chief Senior Inspector Dante Hallazago.
The rebels failed in their attack on the police station and failed to get the firearms of the policemen, which was their target, said Superintendent Lemuel Gonda, regional police spokesman. The guerrillas fled after a two-hour battle with police.
Bus passenger Kimbo Velez said he saw three rebels armed with AK-47 rifles stop their bus and tell the driver to turn around. The gunmen also commandeered two trucks as get-away vehicles.
One of the armed men who carried a flashlight identified himself to us as an NPA rebel and warned our driver not to proceed, Velez said, adding that the driver and passengers were not harmed.
Futility of their distorted ideology
On Monday, the military said at least 14 NPA rebels had surrendered to troops in southern Agusan del Sur province and given up a cache of firearms. It said the surrender followed setbacks the group had suffered in recent weeks that decimated its ranks.
We are hopeful that more of them will realize the futility of their distorted ideology, said Lt. Col. Rommel Pagan, local army chief, adding that the military was committed to prevent the NPA terrorists criminal activities against our people and the communities.
Last week, 15 NPA guerrillas were killed in a clash with troops and police outside Manila, including a guerrilla leader and a young woman who was later identified as a university activist who joined the rebel ranks.
The NPA has been waging one of Asias longest running insurgencies since 1969. Thousands of combatants and civilians have died in the fighting, which has also stunted growth prospects especially in the countryside.
The U.S. government long ago placed the CPP-NPA, and its self-exiled founder, Jose Maria Sison, on its terror watch list, making it difficult for the group to receive financial contributions that fund its insurgency.
The group traditionally steps up attacks days before its Dec. 26 anniversary.
Duterte called off the talks in response to a recent NPA attack that left two civilians dead, including a baby girl. Three officers and six civilians were wounded in that clash.
Jeoffrey Maitem in Cotabato City, Philippines, contributed to this report.
For Immediate Release, December 4, 2017 Contact: Noah Greenwald, (503) 484-7495, ngreenwald@biologicaldiversity.org Completion of Northern Rockies Lynx Analysis Discredits Montana Senators' Rationale for Weakening Endangered Species Act WASHINGTON A document recently obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity shows that an analysis of the U.S. Forest Services management of Canada lynx critical habitat in the northern Rockies was completed in a timely manner in mid-October, undermining the pretext for legislation aiming to weaken the Endangered Species Act. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) introduced a bill, S. 605, to cripple the Endangered Species Act nationwide, citing delays by the Forest Service in a routine review required by the Act. But the timely completion of the lynx analysis debunks the claims about delays that underpin S. 605, and in fact shows the Endangered Species Act is working exactly as intended. The so-called controversy was always a ginned-up charade to relax environmental protections for endangered species as a favor to the timber industry, said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center. Sadly the Forest Service was complicit in this effort to weaken endangered species protections. The completed assessment shows what a total nothing-burger this whole issue always was. The analysis in question was completed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in less than four months. In contrast, the actual request from the U.S. Forest Service seeking the analysis from the Fish and Wildlife Service took twice as long to complete. The delays by the Forest Service provided the political fodder for Montanas senators to argue for sweeping changes to the Endangered Species Act. For decades the Fish and Wildlife Service has required land-management agencies to reassess their actions if a new species is listed as threatened or endangered or if critical habitat is designated on these lands. The reassessments normally take a few weeks to a few months to complete. Despite the routine nature of these consultations, the Forest Service refused to assess the impacts of its actions on Canada lynx after critical habitat was designated in 2014, losing multiple court cases, including a failed Supreme Court appeal in October 2016. With no recourse available save a congressional bailout, the Forest Service continued dragging its feet in 2017. The Trump administration seems to be deliberately dragging this out to push an agenda for weakening the Endangered Species Act, said Greenwald. Senator Testers and Senator Daines cynical legislation wouldnt solve anything at all in Montana, but it would harm countless animals elsewhere, and thats exactly what the Trump administration wants.
Days after the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs Service, Hameed Ali, accused shipping companies of aiding importation of arms into the country, the federal government has directed all containerised cargoes coming into Nigeria to be on a pallet.
The advocacy for palletisation of cargoes, according to the government, would aid manual examination of consignment while it awaits the installation of functional scanners in both seaports and land border stations.
Also, according to the federal government, it would help in forestalling further importation of illicit goods.
At a sensitisation workshop on revised import and export guidelines organised by the Ministry of Finance in Lagos, the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, directed all stakeholders directly involved in the export and import trade value chains to be acquainted with export and import guidelines to avoid sanction.
In her speech, Adeosun pointed out government's stance on compliance. She posited that any stakeholder found culpable violating the guidelines would be sanctioned.
"Furthermore, in order to ensure quick clearance of import at the Nigerian ports and borders, the additional responsibilities assigned to the relevant government agencies would be carried out in a well-coordinated and collaborated manner, while the sanctions specified for non-compliance with the provisions of the guidelines would be strictly and impartially applied across the board."
The minister, who was represented by the Director of Home Finance, Olubunmi Siyanbola, reiterated government's resolve on cargo scanning machines. She added that "government is working relentlessly to quickly put in order the scanning system so as to eliminate manual examination of goods and the associated delays."
At least, 2,671 firearms illegally imported into the country were intercepted by the Nigerian Customs between January and September 2017; all the arms originated from Turkey.
Last week, Ali had lambasted shipping companies for aiding the importation of the firearms, accusing them of altering the cargo manifest for the arms and changing them, most times, to steel doors.
The customs boss, in his visit to Lagos last week, hinted stakeholders that federal government was planning to enshrine pallet system into the shipment of all containerised cargoes. This, according to Ali, would ease examination and detection of illicit items.
Harping on Ali's position, the Minister of Finance reiterated that government is taking the implementation of palletisation of containerised goods very seriously.
"The plan was for this workshop to take place earlier than today to enable us allow a three-month grace period before full implementation of the guidelines, especially in recognition of the time lag that might be required for the commencement of full implementation of the government policy on mandatory palletisation of all containerised cargo imported into Nigeria."
The minister stated that full implementation of all import and export guidelines, particularly, pallet system would take effect in 2018.
"I wish to announce that the export and import guidelines will be fully implemented with effect from 1/1/2018.
However, goods already loaded for shipment to Nigeria prior to this date will not be affected by the palletisation policy.
"Let me also say that we have examined all concerns expressed by the trading public regarding the palletisation policy of the government. The list of cargoes of goods that may be exempted from palletisation, where it is absolutely necessary will be placed on the website of the Federal Ministry of Finance and Nigeria Customs service shortly."
The fastest and most affordable connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa enables Kenya to punch well above its weight in the IT sector generally. The country's advertising industry is thriving, generating twice as much revenue as in Nigeria.
The Worlds Most Eligible Bachelor campaign.
Kenyas internet advertising market was worth $120 million last year, compared to $65 million in Nigeria and mobile revenue accounted for 94% of the total. But many agencies are not paying enough attention to trends in the digital sphere which is being driven mainly by rapid growth in mobile internet access.
This year the internet is expected to overtake newspapers as the main source of advertising revenue, although it will still rank third behind radio and TV, according to a 2017 survey by PwC. But it is set to double in the five years leading to 2021, with revenues from the industry overall rising by 34%.
The good thing is we are seeing movement towards social media and digital campaigns, but there is room for more spending and more focus, says Monty Dhariwal, the MD at Express DDB in Nairobi and co-ordinator of the countrys Association of Practitioners in Advertising (APA).
The Worlds Most Eligible Bachelor
Ogilvy Africa grabbed the global limelight in April this year with a personal ad on the dating app Tinder, presenting the last northern white male rhino as the Worlds Most Eligible Bachelor in order to raise money for a breeding programme at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.
Within a week, it had garnered two million Tinder swipes in 190 countries and raised $160,000 dollars in donations. It scooped up five awards at Africas regional showcase, the Loeries, and three awards at the Cannes Lions Festival, and made headlines on top TV news outlets including CNN, the BBC and Al-Jazeera.
Industry executives said the campaign was a prime example of how Kenyan creatives can successfully target digital and social media. We decided to take a different approach instead of making the subject of rhino conservation sad and serious, we made it fun, says Ogilvy Africa CEO Mathieu Plassard.
It was a complete team effort were always looking at ways of innovating, especially in the social and digital space, bringing fresh ideas through the use of technology.
Research shows that advertisers allocated only 8% of their budgets to digital media in 2015, while Kenyans spent 22% of their media time online. Globally, the share of media budgets allocated to digital channels is steadily increasing it rose to 43% last year from 38% in 2015.
Untapped space in the creative field
The time which people will spend on their devices will of course increase according to the Connected Consumer Survey 2016, half of Kenyans used the internet in 2016, up from 45% in 2014 and well above the African average of 25%. It estimates that 44% of Kenyans now use a smartphone, compared with just 27% in 2014.
Data from Google also shows that Kenyans spend more time watching videos in 2016 there was a monthly average of 7.5 million U-tube views in the country compared with 2.9 million in Nigeria and just 1.0 million in South Africa.
The current approach in our industry is to adapt billboard, print, or TVC for digital by cutting it down, resizing it and so on. This is not enough we need to be developing interactive creative content for the digital space, in formats that work on mobile and on the go, says Waithera Kabiru, digital marketing specialist at Coca-Cola in Nairobi.
She acknowledges that while the growth of digital media usage in Kenya is significant, some forms of traditional media are still relevant to get the mass reach or brand awareness that most products require. The trend that will continue to grow is to take on an integrated marketing approach where TV, radio, digital, experiential and PR all work together, she adds.
We have seen the growing use of gifs, video, and boomerangs but not enough creative executions of these formats. We also need multiple creative formats for programmatic advertising, and for performance marketing. This is a largely untapped space in the creative field, she says.
Shortage of skilled talent
Jason Nartey, an experienced creative director who plans to set up his own agency in Ghana, says that there is a shortage of skilled talent. We need more specialists in this industry its not good to be a jack of all trades and master of none, he maintains.
Dhariwal points out that one of the challenges in Kenya is that there is no technical institution which can foster the development of skills in graphics or design for advertising. Its all self-taught so it gets limiting local talent requires mentoring, he says.
Plassard believes that one of the positive trends in Kenyan advertising is that the industry has developed a more competitive spirit. People are less comfortable with the status quo everyone is looking now at ways to push the envelope, to make a good idea into an excellent one, he says.
Competing for awards is part of the process. Last year, the Loeries partnered with the APA to relaunch the Kenyan APA awards after a 12-year hiatus and the event took place again this year on 1 December.
Its all very encouraging for our local creative industry there is now a platform for them to showcase their work, Dhariwal says.
I read an article recently where the reporter said, inter alia that, "internet advertising is up by 13% from 2015 to 2016," and it was based on information from a usually credible source...
But I'm not so sure.
It seems to me that it's open season for just about anyone to make whatever claims they like and back it up with assumptions like "according to WKRP, radio listenership is up" (you're probably too young to remember the programme WKRP but you get my drift).
On the other hand, I asked a highly placed source what they thought, and the reply was: I would actually be inclined to believe that digital has grown by 13% year-on-year, I think the digital space is the most unknown, confusing space and many large advertisers believe they must be in this space to succeed. I heard, for instance, that Mercedes Benz is spending about 50% of their ad budget in South Africa on digital and BMW is following suit.
Essentially, there are a lot of large clients throwing money at digital because it is the next "New Big" thing that you have to be in. I think there's a strong element of FOMO here (Fear of missing out).
What's happened, especially in the digital space, is that many surveys have one main goal to confuse.
For a clever salesman, with lots of big bullsh!t numbers, it is easy to convince a client that if you ain't on digital, you ain't gonna make it, especially when trying to reach millennials.
I'm not necessarily saying that the multitude of surveys available at the moment, across all media, are not to be trusted. But I do believe that many of those looking for the readership holy grail are bumbling around a bit.
I mean, we all know that research is wrong, don't we? It simply has to be but that that's not the issue. The theory is that, providing you have a number (based on some logic or other) then, although it's essentially wrong the subsequent surveys, using the same criteria, can illustrate the change and that's the important number.
It's not that you started off with, say, 1,000,000 readers, that's irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. What is important is that if, the next year, your readership is, say, 1,100,000, then you can make a reasonable assumption that your readership has increased by 10% no matter what the true number was to begin with.
It never fails to amaze me how few people in the industry can't seem to grasp that simple concept.
But digital is another animal completely. It's easy to get lost in page impressions, unique viewers, click throughs, session durations and whatever other terminology they think they can impress us with.
The other thing, as an aside, is the quality and functionality of so many websites many of whom seem to have only one objective, to make your visit as unhelpful as possible. But that's another subject for another time.
The bottom line is, in my opinion anyway, that nobody really knows what digital is and they can't draw meaningful conclusions because they're having serious problems in measuring it.
It's rather like Bitcoin, when you think about it. There are some who believe implicitly that it's the future and they're investing big time. But the majority are so unsure that they really don't know what to do except miserably watch the price go up and up and up. Then, at the other end of the scale, there are the diehards who refuse to believe anything other than it's a scam.
All very confusing in a confusing world.
So, has digital increased 13% year-on-year?
Well, your guess is as good as mine.
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KINSHASA, DRC - Swiss food giant Nestle announced Sunday that it would close its factory in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a potential market of 80 million people but one beset by poverty and political instability.
"We will close our factory and offices by the end of January and continue developing our economic distribution model through third parties," a spokeswoman for the group told AFP.
The decision affects 120 people and Nestle will offer laid-off employees "a series of compensatory measures more favourable than required by local labour laws," she said.
Nestle has been in the country since 2009 and opened a factory producing Maggi stock cubes, but has posted losses ever since. The food giant's investment of 15 million Swiss francs ($15 million) was a boost to DR Congo, which like other central African nations is seeking to grow its industrial base and move away from being merely an exporter of minerals.
In October the Congolese affiliate of Dutch brewing giant Heineken, Bralima, announced its own restructuring plan, with a company official saying that "a complete overhaul is necessary if the economy is going to function".
Rich in cobalt and coltan - used in electronic products - the country nonetheless suffers from grinding poverty which affects 80% of the population.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is also suffering a political crisis. Much-delayed elections to replace President Joseph Kabila have been scheduled for December 2018, but the opposition is demanding that the veteran leader step down sooner.
The vast African country has seen an outbreak of anti-government demonstrations since Kabila refused to step down in December 2016 on the expiry of his second and final term in office.
Kabila took office after his father Laurent was assassinated in 2001.
Source: AFP
MILAN, Italy - Luciano Benetton, one of the founders of the eponymous Italian clothing company, announced his return on Thursday to the helm of the struggling company.
"In 2008, I left the company with 155 million ($136 million) in assets, and am taking it back now with the 81 million losses from 2016. And this year it will be worse," the 82-year old said in an interview with La Repubblica.
"It is an intolerable pain. That's why I'm going back," he told the Italian daily.
The billionaire, who co-founded the company in 1965 and served as Benetton's chairman from 1978 to 2012, said that "while others imitated us, the United Colors lost their colour.
"We alone are to blame. The shops, which were reservoirs of light, became dark and sad like those in Communist Poland. We closed our doors in South America and the US."
He said the "worst sin" was having "stopped making sweaters: It's as if we removed the water from the aqueduct".
The Italian, who dropped out of school aged 14 and saved money to buy a knitting machine to make sweaters, blamed those who took over from him for the company's decline. The batton first passed to his son, who then handed over the reins to managers outside of the family.
The number of Benetton employees has dropped from 9,766 in 2008 to 7,328 today. Asked if jobs were at risk, Benetton said "we will give everyone a chance, but we must lighten the business".
Source: AFP
Heineken has laid the foundation stone of its first brewery in Mozambique, which will brew beers for the domestic market. The first bottle of beer is expected to come off the production line in the first half of 2019.
Located in the province of Maputo, between the Marracuene and Manhica districts, the brewery represents a $100 million (85 million) investment and will have a production capacity of 0.8 million hectoliters.
Heineken Mozambique started its activities in 2016 through a sales and marketing office, importing international beers including Heineken, Amstel, Amstel Lite and Sagres in the country to offer more choice to Mozambican consumers. The construction of the company's very first brewery is considered a major step forward for the its presence in the country.
With this significant investment, Heineken Mozambique is expected to create 200 direct jobs and support additional indirect jobs through its entire value chain.
Contributing to economic development
Aligned with its ambition of sourcing 60% of its agricultural raw materials in Africa by 2020, Heineken Mozambique says it will explore the possibility of locally sourcing the raw materials it will need to produce its beers. One of the objectives of this project will be to improve crop yields as well as the capabilities and living standards of Mozambican farmers, contributing to the economic development of the country.
Boudewijn Haarsma, Heineken Internationals managing director East & West Africa, stated: We are delighted to enter Mozambique, where we see promising long-term economic perspectives. The project is progressing well thanks to the support of the Mozambican Government and its commitment to bring investments into the country.
"Investing in a new market like Mozambique supports Heinekens ambition to expand its footprint and be the number one or a strong number two in all markets in which it operates. With our extensive experience and existing business in Africa, we also aim to be a partner for growth today in Mozambique as we already are throughout the continent. I am convinced our presence will contribute to the economic and social development that is already underway in Mozambique.
Many thought it would never happen, but Robert Mugabe has left the building. In the past few weeks, a lot has been said about this major change for Zimbabwe and expectations vary from very optimistic to very pessimistic. One thing is sure, however - there will be change.
One such a change that is often spoken about is a possible revival in the countrys agricultural sector. Zimbabwe was once a very productive agricultural country and in the lead in many agricultural industries. It has a strong educational system, a highly competitive spirit and definitely a lot of potential.
The countrys infrastructure is still in relatively good condition and a turnaround in its agricultural sector is a definite possibility if certain factors are put in place, says Theo de Jager, president of the World Farmers Organisation.
A look at the past
It has often been said that Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa and lost this status under the reign of Robert Mugabe. The hope of an agricultural revival then creates the expectation that the country would return to its breadbasket status.
But was Zimbabwe ever truly the breadbasket of Africa?
Without placing doubt on the potential and value of a Zimbabwean agricultural revival, it is important to get the facts of its former agricultural glory straight. In an article on www.africacheck.org, Wandile Sihlobo, head of economic and agribusiness intelligence at Agbiz writes that while Mugabes land reform programme seemingly contributed to a decline in Zimbabwes agricultural output, there is limited evidence to suggest that the country was a dominant player in Africas food production prior to that period, at least from a staple food production perspective.
A country should be able to meet its staple food consumption needs and simultaneously command a notable share in exports of the same food commodity to be considered a food basket, says Sihlobo. Looking at the production data of the key staple foods, maize and wheat, Zimbabwes production of these commodities has never surpassed a 10% share on the continent over the past 55 years. Overall, we view Zimbabwe as having been a self-sufficient food producer prior to its land reform programme. However, there is limited evidence to support the notion of Zimbabwe having ever been the breadbasket of Africa.
Making agriculture work
In an article on www.news24.com, Admos Chimhowu, a senior lecturer in Development Studies at the University of Manchester, identifies making agriculture work as one of four ways in which Zimbabwe can recover from the Mugabe era. Getting agriculture to work ought to be a core priority. Given the nature of structural changes, particularly the emergence of opportunities through global value chains, a key starting point must be an agricultural review commission to investigate current conditions for smallholder agriculture and recommend new policies required to transform in the sector, he writes.
Government policy will be key to achieving this, but according to De Jager there has been a focus on agricultural revival prior to the countrys change in leadership. For the past three years there has been a lot of discussion among the four major Zimbabwean agricultural organisations on getting agriculture back on track and speaking to government as one voice on this matter.
At the end of 2015, these organisations reached common ground about a strategy for revival in agriculture in rural Zimbabwe. They realised that infrastructure is still in relatively good condition and that revival in the industry is possible if the policy environment sees certain changes and if sufficient investment can be attracted. It is crucial that capital is attracted and for this, certainty on land ownership is crucial, hence the importance of policy change.
De Jager explains that the collective suggestion of these organisations to government was that white farmers who lost their land since 2000 and do not want to return, are compensated. They also suggest compensation for black farmers who are currently on the land and not utilising it optimally or do not want to farm further. This will make land commercially available for serious investors and farmers who want to work the land and use it to its full potential. Only then will progress be possible, says De Jager.
The organisations also collectively suggested that focus be placed on those agricultural industries that can, in the shortest term, create jobs and earn foreign currency. These are industries where we see a high level of global competitiveness, a high level of technology being implemented and industries that require a lot of expertise. This is why the organisations deemed it important that farmers who left Zimbabwe and lost their land be attracted back to Zimbabwe to bring a high level of expertise back to the countrys agricultural industry. There is, of course, the realisation that many of these farmers will not return and that other options will have to be considered in order to bring expertise into the industry.
Change in regime
A very positive indication is that the interim president, Emmerson Mnangagwa spoke along the same lines in his inaugural address and placed the focus on agriculture as the mainstay of Zimbabwes economic recovery.
What did Mnangagwa have to say on agriculture and land reform in his address:
We wish the rest of the world to understand that policies and programmes related to land reform were inevitable. Whilst there is a lot that we need to do by way of outcomes, the principle of repossessing our land cannot be challenged or reversed. The dispossession of our ancestral lands was the fundamental reason for waking the liberation struggle. It would be a betrayal of the brave men and women who sacrificed their lives if we were to reverse the gains that we have made in reclaiming our land. Therefore, I want to exhort beneficiaries of the land reform programme to show their value by demonstrating commitment to the utilisation of the land now available to them for national food security and for recovery of our economy. They must take advantage of programmes that my government shall continue to avail to ensure that all land is utilised optimally. To that end my government will capacitate the land commission so that it assists with all outstanding issues related to land redistribution.
My government is committed to compensating those farmers from whom land was taken in terms of our laws of the land. As we go in the future, complex issues of land tenure will be addressed both urgently and definitively. We dare not prevaricate on this key issue. Events leading to this historic day attest to the fact that we are a unique nation, one which is clear about what it wants and what it does not want.
[]
Our economic policy will be predicated on our agriculture, which is the mainstay and will create conditions for investment-led economic recovery that puts a premium on job creation. Key choices will have to be made to attract foreign direct investment to tackle high levels of unemployment while transforming our economy. The many skilled Zimbabweans who have left the country over the years for a variety of reasons must now come into the broad economic plan designed for the recovery and take-off of our nation. Of course, the fiscal and social infrastructure must be repaired and expanded to position our country in readiness for economic growth, employment creation, equity, freedom and democracy.
According to De Jager, he had a list of five issues that he wanted to hear in Mnangagwas address. I was relieved to hear all of these in his address.
This includes:
That he understands that agriculture will be the mainstay of the countrys economic recovery
That he understands that those agricultural industries that are labour and export-intensive will be the anchor of any agricultural revival and will need a lot of focus
That he understands that government will have to create a very investor-friendly environment and that such an environment will depend heavily on certainty
He spoke with his farmers and not about his farmers
He handled the topic of land compensation politically cleverly, speaking about compensation for both white and black famers and placing a lot of focus on land tenure security.
De Jager says a lot will depend on the way land compensations are structured and how much effort will be put into restoring the integrity of title deeds. Rapid revival and recovery is definitely possible, but it all depends on how effectively the new regime can bring certainty of land ownership and general certainty in the business environment back onto the table.
He adds that the reality might be much less of or even a slower revival than what is expected. We might see a political paradigm drag and some roleplayers may cling to the liberation ideology. There might also be inertia in investment appetite and financers may at first be wary of investing and lending. According to De Jager, challenging climatic circumstances may also temper the possible Zimbabwean agricultural revival. This comes at a time that we are wrestling with nature; a year of good rainfall will support such a revival, and poor rainfall will hamper it.
Craig Dealle, CEO of Foundations for Farming in Zimbabwe says he is cautiously optimistic about the future of agriculture in the country. Conditions on the ground will be much more favourable as long as a few basic fundamentals are put in place. And as long as words are put into action. Among these fundamentals is security of tenure, as it will lead to compensation of former farmers which will unlock dead capital as well as collateral for new farmers. I believe increased security of tenure will initiate a natural progression towards gifted farmers occupying the land based on profitability and not political patronage. Dealle also places focus on the importance of realistic producer prices and seeing local production of inputs resuming as the manufacturing sector revives due to the scrapping of detrimental indigenisation laws.
Another fundamental factor, according to Dealle, will be a focus on smallholder farmers. These farmers still hold the key and we have to move them from being subsistence farmers to commercial farmers no matter how small their plot of land is. Small-scale growers can be very profitable.
Everything, he concludes, will, however, be dependent on government will.
Impact on SA
De Jager says there are two sides to the impact a possible revival in Zimbabwean agriculture may hold for South Africa. The one side is that we will see increased competition if Zimbabwe ups its game as South Africa definitely benefited from lower Zimbabwean agricultural production over the years. He does, however, favour a focus on the other, more positive side. A possible Zimbabwean agricultural revival may hold definite opportunities for both South African farmers and agricultural business. Furthermore, the healthier our region is the better. Growth in the region will always be positive. We must just ensure that we benefit from this growth. Marike Brits, AgriOrbit
While property is a very popular and profitable investment in South Africa, without the right skills it can be a tough market to crack.
Its not easy to leap into property and make a success of it without a plan, says Tony Clarke, MD of the Rawson Property Group. Unless you have a natural instinct for it, a lot of capital, some capital, or a very skilled network of industry professionals, it takes a bit of time and preparation to develop the skills, knowledge and foundation that you need.
Despite the work involved, Clarke firmly believes that anyone with the right drive and determination can make a success of property investment. Here are his top tips on how to do exactly that.
Do your research
Like most things in life, the more you know about property, the better youre likely to do in it, says Clarke. That means taking the time to understand whats happening on the market, both locally and nationally, and getting a feel for trends and pricing that will help you recognise opportunities down the line.
Clarke says a good way to get started is to set up alerts on online property portals that will notify you of new listings in your area of interest.
If you can, keep an eye on properties for rent as well as for sale, he adds, to start familiarising yourself with the balance between purchase price and potential rental returns.
Leverage your network
Studying up on real estate trends is certainly important, but youre unlikely to ever surpass the expertise of someone whos been actively engaged in the industry for many years. For that reason, Clarke highly recommends building a network of specialist contacts who can advise and assist you in your property investment journey.
A lot of people seem to think genuine advice on real estate investment is hard to come by, says Clarke. Theres a lot of residual distrust of estate agents that has its roots in the distant past. In reality, todays agents are highly trained professionals who tend to be well aware of the value of building lasting relationships with clients by providing sound support and advice.
As an added bonus, real estate agents can often connect you with other industry professionals like attorneys, rental managers and even building contractors with whom they have had good, personal experiences.
Its definitely worth your while to visit a few agencies and find a team that you feel understands your needs, and is willing and able to help you do the legwork to launch a solid investment portfolio, says Clarke.
Know your limits
Most of us learn to swim in the shallow end, and Clarke recommends the same strategy for starting a property portfolio.
Dont overextend yourself to begin with, he says. Its far better to ease into things with one or two smaller properties that can form a stable base on which to grow your investment.
As part of this strategy, Clarke also recommends choosing a well-defined target market to begin with, such as student housing or apartments for young professionals.
By limiting yourself to one area, one type of property, or one type of tenant at the outset, you can tailor your investment more effectively, he says. Its a much simpler approach than trying to understand the driving forces behind several different markets at the same time.
Gear up for growth
Gearing is one of the biggest advantages of property as an investment, and is a valuable tool when it comes to growing your portfolio once youve established a stable investment base.
Gearing a property investment usually means using equity from one property to finance another, says Clarke, and can be a very effective way to minimise your finance costs and maximise your growth. It needs to be done mindfully, of course, to control your exposure and risk, but is one of the most powerful tools in any investors toolbox.
Know when to let go
While property is generally considered a low-risk investment, there is a chance that a particular property wont perform as well as expected. In this situation, Clarke says its important to learn the difference between a temporary performance slump and a permanent downward spiral.
Holding on to an underperforming asset isnt going to do you any favours, but neither is cutting the strings on a property thats just having some growing pains, he says. Learning how to tell the difference between these situations is a vital investment skill, and one that could save you more than few headaches over the course of your real estate journey.
The Department of Basic Education (DBE) in partnership with The Training Room Online (TTRO) will be rolling out digital learning into the public school sector of South Africa in the form of the DBE Cloud.
Karel Joseph Noppe Brooks 123RF.com
TTRO signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Department of Basic Education this year. The agreement sees them managing the learning platform, and aggregating quality Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) aligned digital content into the platform, from multiple content partners. The project combines many great initiatives, lessons learnt and best practices into one constantly evolving ecosystem, which drives true systemic change in South African education.
According to TTRO CEO Kirsty Chadwick: There are four key roles of the DBE Cloud platform namely: Learner, Teacher, Parent and School Administrator. The reporting of the platform rolls up from the individual learner profile; teacher/class profile; school; district; provincial through to the national DBE, that makes this platform accessible to all valuable stakeholders typically involved in a learners education.
While the platform gives learners access to five major components such as; access to a vast range of rich learning material, the option to view schedules and calendars, the ability to collaborate with their peers, the benefit of access to helpful resources and the mandate to have fun while learning. It also ensures the teacher has their own space to manage their learners development as well as their own professional and personal development. This solution thus has a comprehensive focus on learning both from the childs and adults perspective.
The DBE is so diverse in its offering that it also includes a Parent Portal which gives the parent access to their childs learning material, the ability to track their childs progress, the opportunity to communicate with the teacher, a view of their childs schedule and calendar, to print all compulsory learning material the teacher loads and the chance to complete courses aimed at adult-learning.
The initial DBE Cloud pilot has concluded, however UAT testing is in full swing until the end of 2017. Implementation of this exciting project starts in January 2018, so if you would like to get involved, contact TTRO.
The DBE Cloud development forms part of a larger vision which ultimately aims to develop the skilled citizen of the future. Using technology and caused based collaboration as the drivers, the DBE, in partnership with TTRO aims to drive systemic changes in education, by providing world class learning for free to its learners and teachers, thereby creating skilled citizens of the future that can complete locally and globally and is so doing, mobilise socio-economic reform.
For more information on how you can get involved with this initiative, contact TTRO.
IBTM World, which took place between 28 - 30 November 2017 in Barcelona, saw South Africa's deputy minister of tourism, Elizabeth Thabethe announce a delegate-boosting plan that seeks to broaden the variety of tourism products on the market, to propel the country's business events industry forward.
During the event, the South African National Convention Bureau (SANCB), a business unit of South African Tourism emphasised that South Africa and Africa is open for business and on an accelerated drive to increase our share of the global business events pie.
Thabethe explained that this drive entails bringing more high-value business events delegates to South Africa, aiding economic growth and sustaining much-needed jobs throughout the broader tourism economy this excludes the contribution that such events make to the local knowledge economy.
Aiding South Africas economic growth
Announcing the results of a three-year study into South Africas business events industry, Thabethe said South Africa hosts about a million business delegates every year and that the local events industry sustains more than 250,000 jobs, directly and indirectly.
She revealed that the business events industry contributes R115bn to South Africas gross domestic product every year.
This research proves what our industry has always suspected that South Africas business events industry contributes significantly to our broader tourism economy, said Thabethe.
More importantly, she added, the study shows that delegates have an appetite to experience South Africas leisure attractions and that most have the disposable income to enjoy an extended holiday add-on to their business trip.
Armed with this research, we want to entice business events delegates to come to South Africa, stay for longer and bring people with them.
To help achieve this tourism growth, the South African government has allocated R90m for a bidding support programme to enable South Africa to bid more aggressively for international association conferences, meetings, incentives and exhibitions over the next three years. This grant will give South Africa extra muscle to lobby for and attract big-ticket events, added Thabethe.
MICE and growing destination travel
The country is already widely regarded as a go-to destination for hosting international conferences, particularly in the medical and scientific field last years International Aids Conference being a case in point.
Such high-profile events are putting South Africa on the map as an exciting and cost-effective option for meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions. We have all the infrastructure, technical capacity, expertise and experience thats needed, not to mention extremely welcome, service-oriented and capable people. But more needs to be done for the countrys business events sector to reach its full potential, said Thabethe.
As part of the programme, the SANCB is spearheading a global delegate-boosting campaign, targeting members of the association conferences that are already confirmed to take place in South Africa over the next five years.
We have already started reaping the rewards of this fund, said Thabethe, revealing that since April, the SANCB had submitted 54 bids that could potentially contribute R1.6bn to the economy, attract 57,660 delegates and generate more than 214 combined conference days."
She noted that each time a blue-chip international event was hosted in South Africa, it not only added to the countrys prestige, It also delivers important socio-economic benefits to our people, which is why Africa is the best place to bring your next business event, meeting or conference.
A newly release application dubbed Datally made available free at the Google Play Store lets people see when games, social networks or other programs are using internet connections in the background, and then put a stop to it.
A "Next Billion Users" unit formed by Google chief executive Sundar Pichai set to work on Datally about two years ago, after travelling the world and finding that the cost of mobile data services was a vexation, especially in places where budgets are tight and smartphones are the main way people go online.
While smartphones seemed ubiquitous, it was common for them to be in "aeroplane mode," severing connections to networks out of fear of runaway mobile data costs, according to product manager Josh Woodward.
"Almost every app on your phone will run in the background - whether a game, video app, a chat app - without you knowing about it," Woodward said.
"Data is like money"
"Those living on Wi-Fi or with large data plans may not notice, but for many users around the world data is like money to them so they budget it."
Along with showing real-time smartphone data use, Datally reveals which apps are involved and lets people stop them as they wish.
"It really acts as a speedometer for your mobile data, along with the ability to block data if things are getting out of hand," Woodward said.
Datally also has a feature that helps people find nearby hotspots where they can connect to the internet without using telecom networks.
Google tested Datally earlier this year in the Philippines with half-million users, finding they cut mobile data use by about 30 percent, according to Woodward.
Datally works on Android smartphones with Lollipop (5.0) or newer versions of the Google-backed mobile operating system.
While the inspiration for Datally came from developing countries where smartphones are linking growing numbers of people to the internet but mobile data costs are onerous, the idea of cutting service bills has universal appeal, according to NBU chief business officer Dave Shapiro.
"We want to see as many people access as much of the internet as they can," Shapiro said.
It is often said in the aviation industry that Africa has the lowest number of flights but records the highest number of air crashes in the world.
anyaberkut
This has been a damning record over the years, but since the last few years, Africa has improved significantly. This was confirmed by the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
Airline operators in Nigeria were piqued during the recent International Civil Aviation Organisation World Aviation Forum (IWAF) in Abuja when the president of African Development Bank (AfDB), Akinwumi Adesina alleged that airlines in Africa do not maintain their aircraft and that explained why there is a high rate of accidents on the continent.
"Also, Africa needs safe skies. Africa is the riskiest of skies to fly in. While Africa accounts for only 3.4% of all flight departures, it represents over nine percent of all air accidents and 37% of total global air fatalities. Among the 200 airlines blacklisted by the EU, more than 50`5 are African! These are shocking and non-acceptable numbers," said Adesina.
"The reasons are several: old, poorly maintained and inefficient aircraft, poor safety standards, weak navigation systems, traffic management and generally weak inspection and oversight, and non-compliance with safety audits. These must change! Air travel must be safe - and safety should never be compromised," he said.
Many industry insiders argued that the figures mentioned by Adesina were from the old records; that African countries have improved their safety rating in the past four years. They insisted that there is improved air safety in the region.
The Chairman and CEO of Air Peace, Allen Onyema reacting to the statement credited to AfDB president said that Nigerian airlines are over-regulated by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and insisted they could compete with any airline in the world.
He explained that such comments affected insurance premiums paid by African airlines, which he said were having negative impacts on their performances and financial resources.
Onyema said that on the average, Nigerian airlines pay at least $2.8m for C-Checks of aircraft while their competitors could carry out such maintenances for a mere $500,000, adding that insurance premiums paid on aircraft is four times more than what legacy airlines pay around the world.
"Nigerian airlines as safe as their counterparts in Europe, America"
Onyema insisted that all Nigerian airlines were as safe as their counterparts in Europe and America despite the harsh operating environment in the country.
"Let me tell you something, which you know, NCAA, in fact, is safety-centric; maybe because of the accidents of the past. They hound the airlines into doing the right thing. We are over-regulated by NCAA. What they can allow in America and Europe, NCAA will not allow it here.
"The money we spend to maintain our fleet, the legacy airlines of this world do not spend it. I have never done any C-check that is less than $2.8m, yet all over the world, people do C-Check with $500,000 because some components that will expire in two or three months are still left on the aircraft because they are very close to source of spares and maintenance facilities unlike here that we have to do everything at a go.
"I disagree with Adesina on that statement because this is the assumptions the foreign countries hinge on. They tell you Nigeria is unsafe in order to add more to insurance premiums for themselves. What I pay as insurance premiums on one aircraft, the legacy airlines of this world would pay it on four aircraft. They tell you Nigeria is unsafe and yet, all of them still scramble to come here. It is what I call international aero politics, which is very bad," he added.
IATA in a recent statement rated the continent's airlines very high in terms of safety and maintenance of their fleet. According to the body, African airlines had significantly improved in safety, which explains why there had not been any commercial air accidents among the carriers in the past two years.
Vice-President, IATA, African Region, Raphael Kuuchi told ThisDay earlier in the year that there has been progressive report on air safety in Africa.
"The good news is that throughout the (IATA) conference, probably for the first time in many, many years you haven't heard Africa mentioned in relation to air accidents, which shows that a lot of things are happening positively in Africa. To start with, traffic is continuing to grow and IATA 20 year forecast indicates that Africa is going to be the fastest growing region in the next 20-35 years and about 5.1 percent growth year in year out. In addition to that; I am sure you all read the media release of IATA about our safety record in Africa which is unprecedented with zero loses for last year.
Kuuchi said Africa also got a number of African airlines which now come onboard IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA).
"I will be taking the message to African governments that much as we have seen safety improvements since the Abuja Declaration (which made IATA Safety Audit mandatory for African airlines) targets were announced in 2012 to the extent that now we are recording zero losses, we do not want to see airlines that are on the IOSA register drop off that register. And so government should help us."
Kuuchi said one of the provisions of the Abuja Declaration was that states should make the Abuja Declaration an integral part of Air Operator Certificate (AOC) renewal for airlines.
"We haven't seen that in many countries, so we will want African government to ensure that when you are renewing airlines AOC, you ensure that they have IOSA and that the IOSA is valid. Now if we do that, then we are going to ensure that once you are on the IOSA registry you must keep on it otherwise you will not get your next IOSA registration," he said.
Both ICAO an IATA have agreed that airline safety has significantly improved in Africa; it is the onus on regulatory authorities and the airline to maintain and improve the safety standard.
#Newsmaker: Kerry Hibberd to 'Change the World' w/ 'goodvertising' and Vodacom
Net#work BBDO strategist Kerry Hibberd is going to be swapping creative strategy for volunteering next year, as part of Vodacom's Change the World (CTW) programme...
Its not often that Boniswa Pezisa, Net#work BBDO group CEO, is proud of a staff members resignation. Im so proud that Kerry is going to be making the world a better place for South African school children. But, its not surprising that Vodacom sees in her what weve all seen over the past few years as colleagues. Our door will always be open! Kerry Hibberd Hibberd has chosen to volunteer at Olico Education, an NGO based in Diepsloot that uses a mix of tutoring and technology to help township school learners improve their maths skills. She looks forward to helping Olico develop and promote its free, Caps-aligned maths content to as many school-going youths as possible. I have been passionate about goodvertising for some time now and have actively sought out opportunities to do purpose-led work for my brands in my advertising role. Id been doing strategic work for Olico focussed on the goodvertising space as well, and when their leadership team told me about the Vodacom CTW opportunity where Vodacom pays your salary to use your specific skills at an NGO of your choice, I jumped at the chance. Here, Hibberd explains how she plans to change the world in 365 days Congratulations on being one of 20 applicants to be selected! What does this recognition and opportunity mean to you, and the agency? Congratulations on being one of 20 applicants to be selected! What does this recognition and opportunity mean to you, and the agency?
I am so excited to be part of the Change the World programme. When I received the call, it suddenly dawned on me that I had signed up for a full 365 days of difference. The opportunity excites and terrifies me Im joining a sector that wakes up every day to make positive dents in the way our society works. Why maths education and why Olico Education? Why maths education and why Olico Education? Its actually less about maths and more about unlocking the potential of kids who otherwise wouldnt have a chance. If you think about it, mathematics acts as a barrier for thousands of kids: low grades = less choices. Kids with low grades have less chance of unlocking opportunities to study what they want, be what they want and do what they want with their lives. Olico can help them change that through their programmes which use tech and tutoring to get learners where they need to be mathematically. According to a release sent to Bizcommunity, youll be helping Olico develop and promote their maths content to as many school-going youths as possible. How do you plan to do this? According to a release sent to Bizcommunity, youll be helping Olico develop and promote their maths content to as many school-going youths as possible. How do you plan to do this?
Being a strategist, I definitely have a plan! Its documented in a Project Charter and there are Excel sheets aaaahhh, a planners dream!
Essentially, my main goals are to create and promote new content that Olico has begun to work on, called Maths Clubs, which is in collaboration with SA Numeracy Chair Project, Axium, Kellelo and Wits. Then I need to help get them famous so that we can increase their impact and assist with fundraising!
Will you return to Net#work BBDO afterwards, or will you make a decision on your next steps closer to the time? Will you return to Net#work BBDO afterwards, or will you make a decision on your next steps closer to the time?
Ill take each day as it comes! But BBDO have been very supportive of my decision and have said their doors are always open. Thanks Net#work!
What will you miss most at Net#work BBDO? What will you miss most at Net#work BBDO?
Ill miss the crazy, experimental ideas that get thrown around every day. Sometimes we even made some crazy ideas come to life and that was always fun.
According to the release, youre the mastermind behind the Vagina Varsity campaign for Libresse. Why are you proud to be associated with this award-winning campaign in this way? According to the release, youre the mastermind behind the Vagina Varsity campaign for Libresse. Why are you proud to be associated with this award-winning campaign in this way?
I wasnt the only mastermind behind Vagina Varsity there was a big team behind this incredible campaign and it would never have happened without us all pulling it together. Ill always be proud of this particular piece of work because it was taboo-breaking and started conversations about vaginas, periods and female health that were totally silenced before. Vagina Varsity was also a major goodvertising case study for me proving that purpose-led work really works.
What change do you hope to see in the world in 2018? What change do you hope to see in the world in 2018?
Less armchair activism, more small, real changes. Dont just tweet about how bad something is. Go onto Thundafund or visit an NGO's website to donate that R50 to the people doing something about it. Its the cost of a burger and it really helps.
Olico currently has programmes and resources for learners from grades 1 to 12, and will soon also offer training to education providers and other partners who are interested in helping learners in their communities. Follow Hibberd and @olicoeducation for updates.
Considered to be one of the world's leading destinations for those wanting to sample cutting-edge cuisine that's steeped in rich history, Cape Town in the Western Cape offers amazing smorgasbord of food heritages, towering mountains, the beautiful and icy Atlantic Ocean to iconic architecture and vibrant culture.
Here is a five-foodie road trop guide to include on your next visit to Cape Town
La Petite Ferme Restaurant - Franschhoek
From Cape Town - 1h 8min (81.4 km) via N1 and R45
The fact that Franschhoek is situated only an hour from Cape Town isnt the only reason to visit this iconic Western Cape town. One of the most celebrated reasons to visit Franschhoek is for its restaurants, and this award-winning restaurant is a great place to start your trip to one of the Western Capes most picturesque and tranquil towns.
The Hussar Grill Stellenbosch
From Cape Town - 44min (50.5 km) via N2 and R310
The Hussar Grill has a long-standing history of quality food of impeccable standards. If you are a meat-lover, then Hussar should be on your list. It has provided the famous wine-producing town with excellent food since 1964.
Olympia Cafe - Kalk Bay
From Cape Town - 33min (30.1 km) via M3
This iconic Kalk Bay establishment has become a regular for locals and visitors alike. For years it has provided the Southern Peninsula region with quintessential pastries and bistro-style food. They pride themselves in hiring interesting staff members and are also dog friendly. Something to consider: they dont take reservations so you may have to wait for a table.
Cape Town CBD, Addis in Cape Town
This is a definitive Ethiopian dining experience in Cape Towns bustling city centre. It prides itself in everything that is Ethiopian; down to the last decorative ornament on the table. This is the authentic experience you have been looking for, short of visiting Ethiopia.
Bientang's Cave Restaurant Hermanus
From Cape Town 1h 36min (121 km) via N2 fastest route, the usual traffic
If visiting a restaurant which has literally been carved into an old cave isnt reason enough to venture to this iconic destination, then the fact that its within direct view of one of Africas best whale sanctuaries, should be. Hermanus is one of the most picturesque towns in the whole of the Western Cape for various reasons. This restaurant will help you reconnect with nature and is also a great place to bond and unwind with the whole family.
*Please note: distances from Cape Town to destinations taken from Google Maps.
British tourists have voted Cape Town the best city in the world for the fifth consecutive year.
Unveiling the results of a poll of 90,000 readers in the 2017 Telegraph Travel Awards, the UK media organisation said on Friday: "The world's greatest city? It's a coastal gem in the shadow of an iconic mountain, where fine wine flows and penguins roam. It could only be Cape Town."
The Mother City beat Vancouver and Tokyo to top spot, and the Telegraph said: "With all eyes on SA in 2018, the centenary year of Nelson Mandela's birth, few would bet against it repeating the trick in 12 months' time."
The announcement coincided with Friday's announcement that Joon, part of Air France, will fly direct from Paris to Cape Town three times a week from April 1 2018. Arrivals in Cape Town from France have grown by 35% in the last year, to 74,278.
Cape Town Air Access, a partnership between Wesgro, the Western Cape government, the City of Cape Town, Airports Company SA, South African Tourism and Cape Town Tourism, said the new service would replace Air France flights.
Wesgro CEO Tim Harris said: "This is not only good for our tourism industry, but also for business. Indeed, according to South African Tourism, 41% of travellers from France to Cape Town visit for leisure, and another 39% for business.
"This is precisely why Cape Town Air Access is so important for economic growth and job creation in the Cape. By making it easier for more people to visit our beautiful city and province, we will increase tourism, trade and investment, and most importantly, boost job creation."
Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille said: "We are excited about this news and express our thanks to Joon for their confidence in Cape Town. This will be a welcome boost to our efforts to position Cape Town as a globally competitive business destination. We look forward to welcoming more tourists from France, but also seeing more businesses and investors connect with us with much more ease thanks to these flights."
Economic opportunities MEC Alan Winde said: "Improving air access is a key priority of our Project Khulisa growth strategy, and we've seen the positive impact of increased air routes. International air arrivals have grown by 27% year on year."
Source: BDpro
Sally Burdett returns to e.tv's 8pm news bulletin on Monday 4 December.
Sally Burdett
From 4 December, e.tv is excited to announce a new lineup to its 8pm news, with Sally Burdett returning to the screen to anchor the bulletin.
For nearly 20 years, e.tv has established itself as an independent voice in the broadcast landscape of South Africa. News that is accurate, uncensored and unbiased has consistently drawn viewers to the countrys first independent free-to-air channel.
I am delighted to be back on e.tv, on a bulletin I have always loved, says Burdett. The news at 8pm will be to-the-point and hard-hitting, continuing a fearless tradition of seeking the truth.
As head of the anchor team at eNCA, South Africas most-watched 24 hour news channel, she brings a wealth of experience to this important broadcast. Burdett, who announced the news of Nelson Mandelas death live to e.tv and eNCA audiences in 2013, and who co-anchored the SABCs first post-apartheid radio news show, AMLive, in 1995, says we are living in equally important times. In this era of fake news, state capture and information overload, I see my job primarily as helping audiences navigate a path through a pivotal time in our countrys history.
Head of Terrestrial News Services, Phathiswa Magopeni has worked with Burdett for many years. We are glad to be able to infuse an experienced, authoritative energy into our news offering. Sally has always been a credible and consistent voice on the broadcast news circuit, says Magopeni.
e.tv MD Marlon Davids says that Burdetts return to e.tv screens is an exciting development. Sally is no stranger to South African viewers and we are thrilled to welcome her back to e.tvs lineup. She is a formidable journalist who brings a wealth of experience and gravitas to our news offering. Our prime time English news bulletin has always defined the direction of our news and current affairs programming on the channel and we are confident that our viewers will continue to enjoy the refreshed bulletin, says Davids.
Burdett, who has been part of the senior editorial team for some years now, will continue to work behind the scenes, helping the team develop new talent and produce strong editorial content.
The lunchtime news bulletin on e.tv will continue to be anchored by Duduzile Ramela, Monday to Friday.
Hidetoshi Kaneko, former vice president for Panasonic Corporation of North America, has been appointed as the new managing director of Panasonic South Africa.
Hidetoshi Kaneko
This appointment draws on his experience in logistics, manufacturing, supply chain, engineering, sales, marketing, after service and retail. It is this breadth and diversity of experience which has given Kaneko the uniquely holistic perspective which distinguishes his ability to grasp issues, develop strategies, and effect end-to-end solutions applied to the South African context.
In his three-month tenure thus far, Kaneko has restructured Panasonics internal departments to maximise efficiency, implemented a membership programme and revised Panasonics marketing strategy. Most prominently, his tenure has seen the implementation of Panasonics Finance initiative. According to Kaneko, We believe that all South Africans should have the opportunity to better their lives through Panasonic technology, and our newly-launched Finance Initiative makes this possible. Now everyone can gain access to innovative products for the betterment of their daily lives.
2018 rings in 100 years of technological innovation for the organisation, and it is Kanekos commitment to advancement and quest for zero defect that keeps Panasonic creating high-quality products that consumers love. His vision for the next year is to continue to uphold the company's core principles - contribution to society, fairness and honesty, co-operation and team spirit, untiring effort for improvement, courtesy and humility, adaptability and gratitude - in his endeavour to make products easily accessible to the everyday South African consumer.
After reading Willmar city council member Christianson under scrutiny for liking racist & mean Facebook posts, a reader contacted Bluestem with screenshots of Facebook posts by Vadnais Heights' city council member Craig Johnson's personal Facebook page.
The content Johnson shares is a froth of Hillary Clinton bashing, climate change denying, liberal mocking memes, along with pro-Catholic content. Along the way, Johnson expresses his loathing of a rage of public figures, living and dead, from freshman Minnesota state representative Ilhan Omar, DFL-Minneapolis, to Reformation leader Martin Luther.
Bluestem knows of no other elected official in Minnesota has been so inclusive in his scorn as to bash both Muslims and Lutherans. The screengrab at the top of the post announces Johnson's desire to see Representative Omar sent to prison.
Luther doesn't fare much better in an article Johnson shares from Church Militant, a conservative Catholic publication often critical of Pope Francis.
Johnson frequently bashes climate change, despite the fact of Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical on climate change or news of the Holy Father's recent statements. Example: the CBS News report, Pope Francis denounces climate change deniers:
Pope Francis denounced those who deny global warming and urged negotiators at climate talks in Germany to avoid falling prey to such "perverse attitudes" and instead accelerate efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Francis issued a message Thursday to the Bonn meeting, which is working to implement the 2015 Paris accord aimed at capping global emissions. In the message, Francis called climate change "one of the most worrisome phenomena that humanity is facing," and urged negotiators to ignore special interests and political or economic pressures and instead engage in an honest dialogue about the future of the planet. He denounced that such efforts are often frustrated by those who deny climate change, are indifferent to it, or think it can only be solved by technical solutions.
Here's a post typical of Johnson (we marvel at preferring the Farmer's Almanac over the Holy Father's encyclical):
And then there's Johnson's view of immigrants bringing disease to the New World (and he doesn't mean Lord Jeff Amherst's musing on smallpox blankets, either):
But Bluestem's favorite? Sharing "news" that the recent Keystone pipeline leak--the third significant leak in seven years--was caused by "Trump Haters":
Er, no, Trump-Haters had nothing to do with causing the leak. According to those environmental extremists at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, the Keystone pipeline leak was likely caused by 2008 damage incurred by the construction of the pipeline itself:
A federal agency says a leak in TransCanada Corp.'s Keystone oil pipeline in South Dakota likely was caused by damage during construction in 2008. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration issued a corrective action report Tuesday on the estimated 210,000-gallon oil spill. The report says a weight installed on the pipeline nearly a decade ago may have damaged the pipeline and coating. According to the report, weights are placed on the pipeline in areas "where water could potentially result in buoyancy concerns."
Curious about whether other members of Vadnais Heights City Council shared Johnson's high standards for evidence and civility, we consulted Mr. Google and the results weren't pretty. On November 9, the Pioneer Press reported in Vadnais Heights council member pleads guilty to disorderly conduct in domestic incident:
A Vadnais Heights City Council member pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct Thursday following allegations that he became violent and threatening toward a woman he was seeing. Terry Nyblom entered the plea in Ramsey County District Court in Maplewood, according to court records. The 53-year-old previously faced charges of disorderly conduct, interfering with a 911 call, misdemeanor-level domestic assault and fifth-degree assault. The other charges were dropped in accordance with Nybloms agreement to plead guilty to the disorderly conduct count, which is a misdemeanor. . . . While he remains a city council member, Nyblom was removed from his position as deputy mayor following the allegations. We didnt want this to distract from the ability of someone to lead our city, Vadnais Heights Mayor Bob Fletcher said. Fletcher added that while the city is disappointed by Nybloms alleged actions, it has no authority to remove him from office.
Yes, it's that Bob Fletcher.
Why Johnson's posts matter
At the West Central Tribune, Shelby Lindrud reported in Concerns raised over Ron Christiansons Facebook account activity; Professor: Elected officials are rightly held to a higher standard:
Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Hubert H. Humphrey School and Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, said that elected officials are rightly held to a higher standard because they represent all citizens of the city and certain speech can divide the community.
Screengrabs: All from Craig Johnson's personal Facebook page.
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The British government is mounting a crackdown on the virtual currency Bitcoin amid rising concerns about money laundering and tax evasion.
The British Treasury has said it intends to regulate the digital currency to bring it in line with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financial legislation.
Under the EU-wide plan, online platforms where Bitcoins are traded will be required to carry out due diligence on customers and report suspicious transactions.
The move is designed to end the anonymity which has made the currency attractive to criminals.
Parts of the NHS and other organisations around the world were brought to a standstill earlier this year by hackers who demand ransoms paid in Bitcoin to unlock their computers.
A British Treasury spokesman said: "We have clear tax rules for people who use crypto-currencies and like all tax rules, these are kept under review.
"We also intend to update regulation to bring virtual currency exchange platforms into anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing regulation."
Ministers now expect the EU-level negotiations to conclude early in 2018.
Labour MP John Mann, a member of the Commons Treasury Committee, said it would probably now want to look into the regulation of virtual currencies.
He told The Daily Telegraph: "These new forms of exchange are expanding rapidly and we've got to make sure we don't get left behind - that's particularly important in terms of money-laundering, terrorism or pure theft.
"It would be timely to have a proper look at what this means. It may be that we want speed up our use of these kinds of thing in this country, but that makes it all the more important that we don't have a regulatory lag."
The plan to regulate Bitcoin was originally set out by British Treasury minister Stephen Barclay in a little-noticed Commons written answer in November.
Mr Barclay said: "The UK Government is currently negotiating amendments to the 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive that will bring virtual currency exchange platforms and custodian wallet providers into Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing regulation, which will result in these firms' activities being overseen by national competent authorities for these areas.
"The Government supports the intention behind these amendments. We expect these negotiations to conclude at EU level in late 2017/early 2018."
Repeated warnings by British business chiefs about the huge costs of disruption caused by Brexit may be influencing even hardline Brexiters into changing their stance, writes Kyran Fitzgerald
The time for political posturing is drawing to a close as the talks on the first phase of the Brexit negotiations reach a climax. And amid all the tub-thumping and flag-waving, there are indications of a softening of attitudes among some leading figures in the Brexit camp.
True, there is still plenty of bluster abroad, not least from a few of the usual suspects north of the border, but the tone of some leading figures on the Tory right is noticeably more emollient.
This is particularly apparent when it comes to the ongoing discussions on the so-called divorce bill.
So what could be behind this subtle repositioning, assuming this to be the case?
Relations between the Conservative Party and the business community have long been close, but a distinct chill can now be detected, and with good reason. Put simply, a wave of disquiet is flowing across the business world in Britain and further afield as those in strategic positions ponder the impact on supply chains of a car crash style British departure.
In Dublin, the chief of one of the worlds largest logistics companies, Ceva Group, told a freight transport gathering that disruptions to the supply chain from a hard or disorganised departure could lead to a calamitous situation.
According to Leigh Pomlett, an increase of just two minutes in the average time it takes trucks to clear customs could cause 17-mile tailbacks in the port of Dover.
Car manufacturers and allied suppliers appear to be especially exposed in the event of a no deal scenario.
This is significant given that 1.7m cars were built in Britain last year, with annual industry turnover approaching 100bn. Four out of every five cars produced are sold abroad and manufacturers form part of a highly complex supply chain.
According to The Guardian, 300 trucks arrive each day at the flagship Honda plant in Swindon.
Under the just-in-time production system, just one hours worth of parts is held in reserve for the production line.
Delays at customs alone would have a severe impact on the plants future. Around 1,850 people are directly employed at the Ford plant in Dagenham in East London. These jobs could be on the line in the event of a hard Brexit, according to Stephen Armstrong, head of Fords European operations.
Mr Armstrong said he is spending at least four to five hours a week on Brexit-related matters.
Ford has built up a Europe-wide production chain.
More than 100,000 of its diesel engines are made in Dagenham, using more than 2,000 component parts from across the EU.
The engines are then transported to the huge Ford plant in Cologne for final manufacturing. A third of output is then shipped back to the UK.
Mr Armstrong estimates a hard Brexit could cost it 840m in tariffs alone. He rules nothing out when it comes to the future of Dagenham, predicting that a no-deal outcome under which World Trade Organisation rules apply to trade between the UK and the EU-27 would be a disaster for industry in Britain.
Across the auto industry as a whole, the mood music is bleak.
Investment is down by three quarters in two years as uncertainty grows. Brexit is not the only culprit. Standards on diesel emissions are being tightened, while the industry as a whole faces technology-led transformation.
The Society of Motor Manufacturers has set out its stall, calling for tariff-free trade, frictionless borders, a retention of access to talent, and the harmonisation of regulations.
The irony is that a hard Brexit would mean the effects would be borne by workers in the West Midlands and East London, who voted in their droves for Brexit.
The Brexit process also threatens to massively increase the regulatory burdens borne by businesses.
As a result of EU reforms, exporters no longer have to register for Vat separately in each EU national market, but can simply register in the member state of establishment.
An unravelling of these reforms will lead to a big increase in paper-pushing across the EU.
The Road Haulage Association has warned that food exports could be particularly badly affected by delays at customs.
Small companies could be especially affected by the added administrative burdens, with Intertrade Ireland estimating that the compliance bill for an SME in the North would reach 700,000 (792,600), wiping out its entire annual profit.
The true scale of the cost could be much higher when finance costs are accounted for.
The drop in sterling, combined with a more accommodative monetary policy from the Bank of England helped the UK tap a tourism boom, but the economic picture overall is less rosy.
It may be that the penny is finally beginning to drop at least among those Tory MPs with strong business links and a willingness to toss aside their blinkers.
Speaking in Dublin in recent days, the former Fine Gael leader and ex- finance minister Alan Dukes suggested that attitudes were changing, with the lead British negotiator David Davis showing signs of flexibility.
Mr Dukes suggested that the UK should propose for the day after Brexit takes effect, that a free trade agreement with equivalent effect to the customs union-single market should take effect immediately.
The EU could hardly refuse such an offer and the World Trade Organisation, as a body dedicated to free trade, could hardly obstruct it, he said.
Mr Dukes also called for a dispute resolution procedure to be put in place, designed to minimise the inevitable frictions between the realigned trading partners.
He warned the European Court of Justice to keep out of this process.
Here, we are up against an issue of critical importance.
If, as appears evident, the British are shifting position and appear more open to compromise, is the rest of the EU, from the commission to the member states, to the European Parliament, also willing to play ball?
The EU lead negotiator Michel Barnier has shown himself to be flexible, but the lead national governments, France and Germany, have appeared more rigid, particularly on the issue of the budget.
The EU is rightly concerned about the financial consequences of a British exit, but any desire to limit such consequences as much as possible must be kept in check in the pursuit of the higher objective of a soft Brexit.
One hopes that the Irish Government is, privately, counselling its EU partners to display maximum flexibility.
There is a real concern that the current enfeebled position of Theresa May is now mirrored in Germany, where Angela Merkel finds herself on the back foot, at least for now.
Ms Merkels pragmatism and political skills are needed as never before.
When she is finished with the task of negotiating a new German coalition, she needs to enter into close discussions with business leaders in her export-oriented country.
It takes two to tango, after all.
By Ruth Doris
An Irish clean technology company is developing a product related to the overconsumption of water and chemicals in crop production.
AquaRoot Technologies innovation system uses biodegradable polymers to enable farmers to make customised irrigation pipes on site.
Founder Vincent Farrelly has a technology background, having worked for over 20 years in life sciences and biotechnology in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe.
His idea recently won the Irish heat of 2017 Climate LaunchPad, after AquaRoot travelled to Cyprus to compete in the finals of the competition which looks for the worlds best green business ideas. Mr Farrellys idea stemmed from his interest in polymers and plant biotechnology. He began to look at the use of polymers in irrigation systems to find out if expandable foam could be used to make pipes on site using very basic 3D printing.
The AquaRoot platform will allow pipes for irrigation and drainage to be produced rapidly and more economically than current systems.
Were looking at the typical farmer who wants to create customised tubing or pipes whenever they want to, he said. Having received some funding, the company has worked with Athlone Institute of Technology to develop different types of polymers with different functions.
Like a tree root, it delivers water to and from, and takes water out of the soil. You can print on the surface of the ground, on concrete, asphalt or inject it into the soil, where it expands and behaves like a sponge. You can pull water out and pull water using capillary pressure or a suction pump. Its just a new way of bringing liquids in and out from one place to another, he said.
The system uses a very basic form of 3D printing extruding out the polymer compound to form a shape.
Once the substance is exposed to air, it expands to about 50 times its size and forms a honeycomb-like structure which the water can flow through like a sponge. You can also create a bore in the pipe into which you can flow fluid or water through. This forms near instantaneously, and within seconds youve got a structure, he said.
AquaRoots first structure is a very simple tube through which water can be drawn.
We provide the equipment for the farmer or irrigation specialist and they actually make the pipes on site. These things form very quickly and the idea is that you can actually plant seeds into them and you can grow plants in them, he said.
As far as Mr Farrelly is aware there is no system like AquaRoot on the market.
The potential environmental benefits are promising, especially in areas prone to drought or water restrictions. As the system allows for targeted watering and fertilisation of plants, it can provide big reductions in the use of water, fertilisers and pesticides.
Lets say a situation where youve got overhead irrigation on a field, youre actually watering the weeds, but with this, the water is going directly into the plants, feeding the roots. Youll be targeting the fertiliser and the pesticide and herbicide spray, he said. The biodegradable polymer can then be ploughed into the land or disposed of.
The potential savings in effort and labour are considerable. The big vision is to be able to modify a crop sprayer and to print, or extrude, the substance into pipe forms and lay an irrigation or drainage system on a large amount of land very quickly, Mr Farrelly said. While AquaRoots ultimate target is the international export market, it will initially focus on glasshouse horticulture.
Trials printing pipes in glasshouses to transport water and grow plants begin in early 2018. Another area hes looking at is hydroponics. One of the biggest problems of that system is the amount of infrastructure needed. What AquaRoot is offering is like an alternative to hydroponics, he said.
You can make structures like pipes, growing pots and chambers for plants. You put the plantlet in or the seedling in and flow through the water with nutrients in it and the plant grows in that, he said.
Getting to the finals of Climate LaunchPad has helped to open a few doors for AquaRoot in terms of making contacts and fine-tuning its pitch. The next step is to find partners and to get an angel investor on board, said Mr Farrelly.
By Padraig Hoare
Health food chain Freshly Chopped is to open five new stores around the country this week.
The Irish-owned firm said it would be opening its first Waterford store today, before increasing its footprint in Cork and Galway as well as opening two new stores in Dublin, creating 75 new jobs.
Freshly Choppeds first store in Waterford opens at City Square Shopping Centre, Arundel Square, while a store in Turvey, Co Dublin opens tomorrow.
The Maxol station on Glasheen Road near Wilton in Cork is one of three new restaurants opening on Wednesday, along with Galways Eyre Square and the IFSC in Dublin.
Brian Lee, co-founder and managing director of Freshly Chopped, said: We are delighted to be finishing the year on such a strong note, achieving what we believe is a first in the Irish food business. Opening five new stores in one week is a highlight of my professional career to date.
He added: Wednesday will be a landmark day in our history, as we travel around the country to open three outlets in three provinces, all in just 24 hours. Since we opened our doors in 2012, we have seen the demand for healthy fast food grow exponentially.
Freshly Chopped first arrived in Cork last July, opening at Spar in Little Island.
Founded in 2012 by Dublin entrepreneurs Brian Lee and Andy Chen, Freshly Chopped emphasises its more than 90 ingredients in its salad bowls, sandwiches and wraps.
By Ann O'Loughlin
A dispute over whether University College Dublin is entitled to a 15% shareholding in a fast-growing company involved in developing commercial processes for global pharmaceutical giants has come before the Commercial Court.
Applied Process Company Ltd, set up in 2011, now employs more than 100 people, expects to double its workforce in the next five years and is set to achieve revenues of almost 18m by the end of this year, it was stated in court documents.
Its primary business is the development of processes enabling pharmaceutical companies to speed up the commercial development of life-saving medical advances.
APC was formed by Professor Brian Glennon and Dr Mark Barrett from UCD's School of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering. Each own a 50% shareholding and they dispute UCD's claim of entitlement to a 15% shareholding.
UCD claims it had concluded an agreement with the company and the two shareholders, in return for UCD getting a 15% shareholding, APC would be established and/or approved as a "campus" company and would be permitted to participate in the Nova UCD Campus Company development programme.
APC and the two shareholders dispute that and say APC was not a campus company as it was not set up to commercialise the intellectual property of UCD.
They also say, given the affiliation both have had with UCD, and the "affection" they have for it, APC has been willing to make "very generous" contributions to the university, most recently offering to support it by some 1m over five years.
When the proceedings came before the Commercial Court today, Rossa Fanning SC, for APC and the two shareholders, said his side wanted them fast-tracked and UCD was not objecting to that.
When the judge suggested the case appeared suitable for mediation, counsel said it would want to see a detailed statement of claim before considering whether mediation was appropriate.
APC had been incorporated in 2011 but this claim had only issued almost six years later, counsel said. There was no executed agreement between UCD and the defendants and UCD's claim was "baseless and opportunistic" and arose because of the company's success, he said.
Counsel for UCD denied delay and said its position had been set out in detail for some time.
Mr Justice McGovern agreed to fast-track the proceedings, directed UCD to deliver its statement of claim next week and returned the matter to later this month for further directions.
By Tom Healy
The UK can prepare to exit the single market and the customs union but a hard border cannot be avoided somewhere.
We either have a border running around Slieve Gullion in Co Armagh, or we have a hard border running down the Irish Sea between Cairnryan and Belfast.
No amount of loose talk about cameras, technological solutions, flexibility and random spot checks can get around this very awkward truth.
There is some talk abroad that somehow a customs union would sort out the hard border issue and that the single market could be sacrificed. While preservation of the customs union would mitigate some of the disruptive impacts of Brexit, the effects of leaving the single market would be huge.
Many forget that modern-day trade is as much about compliance and standards as it is about tariffs and duties.
With the single market, we have, more or less, freedom of movement of labour and harmonisation of many rules and standards, but with the customs union, we merely have no tariffs on trade among members of the union and a common external tariff on goods but not on services.
The recent intervention by the British Irish Chamber of Commerce for a Brexit partnership was an heroic attempt to limit the fallout from Brexit. The document offers interesting and possibly feasible ways to unlock some of the impasse over the next two years, and not only over the next two weeks.
It reads as a serious, considered, desperate, well-informed and well-meant effort to retain much of the substance of the customs union and the single market while the UK prepares to formally leave the EU.
If the UK (all of it or some of it) leaves the customs union and the single market, there will be a hard border somewhere. It is merely a question of how and where.
A special arrangement for the North might just be politically heroic but technically possible. Language is one thing and the realities of managing trade and movements of people is another.
The possibility of some form of special status incorporating Northern Ireland after Brexit into a European customs union and single market while it remains part of the UK should not be ruled out. However, it would only work if there was a sufficient level of shared understanding and consensus. This seems very unlikely in the immediate future.
It may be argued that a special carve-out deal would be possible for the agri-food sector ensuring some degree of harmonisation of standards and reciprocal inspections. However, such opt outs (or opt-ins) would be complex, difficult to enforce and politically problematic and, in any case, confined to just one sector.
We should not forget that the bulk of cross-border or cross-island trade is from east to west, affecting
exporters or enterprises on the entire island.
In other words, a hard border running down the Irish Sea would have potentially negative consequences at least in the short-run for producers and exporters in both parts of Ireland.
There are no good options. However, the least-worst option would be continuing UK membership of the single market and customs union for as long as possible.
Failing that, some sort of arrangement for the North would be the least worst in the medium-term.
Would it work politically and would it involve significant short-term upfront economic pain as Northern producers and exporters lose hassle-free and cost-free access to markets in Britain?
Civil servants will be mindful of the saying, there is nothing that drafting cannot resolve.
Tom Healy is director of the Nevin Economic Research Institute
Irish medicinal cannabis refugee Ava Barry, 8, arrived home from The Hague over the weekend with her parents and was reunited with her siblings for a family Christmas, writes Olivia Kelleher.
Ava, who is from Aghabullogue, Co Cork, travelled to Holland last summer with her family to receive medicinal cannabis for a catastrophic form of epilepsy called Dravets Syndrome.
After two years of campaigning, her parents Vera and Paul this week received the news of the granting of the medicinal cannabis licence for Ava.
Paul Barry said it was great to be finally home.
We are delighted. We are going to have a normal boring Christmas. We are going to bring the kids to Santa, eat plenty of turkey and fall asleep in front of the TV. Twas a long road to get to here but it is worth it. But you have to ask where the compassion was?
Supporters, friends, and family turned out at Cork Airport to greet Ava as she was reunited with her brothers and sisters Sophia, Michael, and Elvera Mae.
Vera Twomey says that she is relieved that the familys nightmare is finally over.
We have had no ordinary life whatsoever. As for Christmas we will just have a few people around. But its going to be great to be home for it. I cant believe it has finally happened.
Ava is all smiles with her parents after meeting Santa Claus in the VIP lounge at Cork Airport.
Vera says that Ava has her freedom back now that she has a prescription for medicinal cannabis.
It is freedom for us. We have a medicine that works. We can speak openly and honestly about Ava having the THC form of cannabis. We dont have to hide in the shadows.
We know that CBD oil and THC work. Ava has got better and better every day. She is seizure free. THC has saved Avas life and changed her life and is the most humane form of medication. Now she is just dealing with ordinary childhood illnesses like bugs rather than multiple seizures a night.
Ms Twomey has branded the delay in obtaining a licence a disgrace.
The professionals in Ireland are looking at their professional equivalents in Holland and they want the training. It is a disgrace.
The consultants here are trained [on medicinal cannabis] and the education is provided by the equivalent of their department of health.
We felt such helplessness and powerlessness in Ireland. We landed on our feet here. The paediatric neurologists are extraordinary.
The mother-of-four said she feels a personal responsibility to help other people in similar situations.
It doesnt matter if you are the first, second or 23rd person to get medicinal cannabis. It is your duty to share some of your success and how it is achieved. I feel so sorry for people dealing with things like Lyme disease.
Ms Twomey thanked her supporters for their fundraising which enabled the family to move to Holland to obtain legal medicinal cannabis for Ava. She also paid tribute to friends, relatives and the wider community for contacting TDs and councillors urging them to fight for the family.
It has been going on for so long and I really appreciate what people have done for us. People have been amazing.
Over the course of her long campaign, Vera walked from Cork to Dublin in order to highlight the plight of her daughter. She incurred a knee injury on the trek to Dublin and was pushed in a wheelchair for the last few miles of her journey. She also travelled to Spain to get a prescription for medicinal cannabis only to have the drug confiscated at Dublin Airport.
Prior to using medicinal cannabis, Ava suffered up to 23 seizures a day. Her parents feared that she would lose her life during the course of her seizures and were living through a total nightmare.
This article first appeared on the Irish Examiner.
By Ann O'Loughlin
A doctor who exposed himself to a nurse and a teenage patient in two separate incidents has been struck off the medical register by the High Court.
Dirk Redman, who qualified as a doctor in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2007, and is now living in Namibia, exposed himself to a nurse colleague in Sligo General Hospital around April 19, 2014.
The following June 25, he exposed himself to a 15-year-old girl in the same hospital where he had been working as a registrar in the emergency department.
He was found guilty by a Medical Council fitness to practice committee of disgraceful and dishonourable conduct and found to present a serious risk to both working colleagues and the general public.
The committee recommended his registration as a doctor be cancelled.
The decision was confirmed on October 26 last by the full Medical Council.
Dr Redman, who was not represented and did not appear before the inquiry, did not appeal the matter.
Today, the Council asked the President of the High Court, Mr Justice Peter Kelly, to confirm the decision. Dr Redman was not in court or represented.
Mr Justice Kelly confirmed the decision and also noted the Council had also informed his original registering authority of the findings.
It is believed that a caustic substance was used during a serious assault on a woman in Dublin last Friday.
The attack happened the women, aged in her early 30s, shortly after 10pm in the vicinity of a path between Merrion Woods to Seamount Apartments, Blackrock, Co Dublin.
The Irish Blood Transfusion Service is putting out an appeal for extra blood donations between now and Christmas.
Pressure will be greater this year because Christmas and New Year both fall on a Monday - which are usually donor collection days.
By Fiona Ferguson
A man convicted of biting off part of another mans ear in a pub smoking area has been jailed for five years.
Sean Jackson (27), who was highly intoxicated, had no recollection of the events of the night in question and his lawyers submitted it was completely out of character for him.
Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard the victim was using the outside smoking area of a pub when Jackson bent down and bit part of his ear off. A witness saw part of the ear on the ground and alerted gardai.
Jackson, of Doon Court, Ballymun, Dublin was convicted by a jury following a trial earlier this year of assaulting the man causing him serious harm at Ardlea Inn, Maryfield Avenue, Dublin 5 on August 23, 2014. Jackson has 24 previous convictions.
Judge Martin Nolan noted that there had been a very minor altercation between the victim and Jackson. He said Jackson had been dissatisfied with the interaction and returned outside.
He said it appeared that the victim thought Jackson was going to say something to him but instead Jackson bit a large part of his ear off.
A witness identified Jackson as having committed the assault. He noted Jackson was drunk but said he had been responsible for getting himself into that state.
Judge Nolan said it was a serious assault which had serious consequences for the victim. He said it was reprehensible to bite part of someones ear off. He said he was taking seven years as his starting point for a sentence and noted there was moderate mitigation.
Judge Nolan imposed a five year sentence.
Defence counsel, Colman Fitzgerald SC, said Jackson had been extremely intoxicated at the time and did not remember the events of the night.
He said it was an appalling offence and an act which would revolt anyone.
He noted the contents of the victim impact statement outlined that the top half of one of the injured partys ears was now missing. He noted that the impact had been devastating from the victims point of view. Counsel said the offence was completely out of character for Jackson and drink had been a huge factor.
This appears to be significantly out of character and an anomaly as regards to the rest of his life which has been by and large decent and productive, said Mr Fitzgerald.
He said Jackson was a young man who always made a significant effort to work and had been in employment pretty much all his life. He handed in testimonials on Jacksons behalf.
Marie Torrens BL, prosecuting, handed in a victim impact statement which was not read in open court.
By Ann OLoughlin
A nurse who called a wheelchair-bound patient suffering from dementia "a dirty jew" before slapping him on the arm has had her registration cancelled by the High Court.
Marilyn Rillera (57), who had been working in the Maynooth Community Care Unit in Kildare before returning to her native Philippines, had been bringing the 87-year-old patient of the unit to the toilet in December 2015 when the incident happened.
The court heard the patient was being raised in a hoist to transfer him from his chair to the toilet when he became agitated. He raised his arm to hit Nurse Rillera but she held it and she told him: "You cant do that, you cant hit a woman, what are you, you dirty Jew", before slapping him on the arm.
Under the patients care plan, it was stated that he could have aggressive outbursts and the way to deal with them was to walk away and later talk to him and redirect the conversation.
A fitness to practice inquiry held by the Nursing and Midwifery Board heard she denied saying "dirty Jew" and said she had told him he was dirty. A care assistant who was helping to bring him to the toilet that day said however she was "100 per cent certain" the nurse said "dirty Jew".
The inquiry found her guilty of professional misconduct and recommended her registration as a nurse be cancelled.
The Nursing and Midwifery Board asked the High Court to confirm the decision.
The President of the High Court, Mr Justice Peter Kelly, said such conduct was completely unacceptable and completely contrary to the notion of what the nursing profession is.
There was every good reason for confirming the cancellation, he said.
By Ann OLoughlin
A pensioner who fears being made homeless has launched a High Court challenge arising out of a decision by Social Welfare officials to suspend paying her rent allowance.
The action has been brought by Ms Stela Vasile with an address at Malahide Road, Dublin who had been in receipt of State pension as well as rent supplement allowance.
Last December Ms Vasile was informed she was being investigated by the Employment Affairs and Social Protection and the payments were being suspended.
However twelve months on, the investigation has not been completed, arrears in rent have built up, and she now fears being made homeless.
Represented by Fechin McDonagh SC Ms Vasile seeks a High Court order compelling the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection to determine the investigation against her commenced twelve months ago.
She further seeks a declaration the continued suspension of her rent supplement is unlawful.
She claims the failure to complete the investigation is irrational and unreasonable, and the delay is a breach of fair procedure.
Counsel said in January her pension payment was restored, however the rent supplement has not be restored.
In April her landlord informed her that she was in arrears, and that he may have to serve an eviction notice. However the landlord had allowed her stay on, counsel added.
She had asked the Department to progress its investigation.
She was informed last June by the social welfare inspector conducting the investigation he would do his "absolute best to get the investigation done as soon as possible" but "it may be some time" as he had "many similar cases".
Solicitors for Ms Vasile wrote to the Department in October seeking the result of the investigation or the payment of rent allowance till the investigation is complete.
No response has been received, Counsel said.
Counsel said his client believed the investigation may have related to whether she resided full time at her apartment in Malahide Road.
She says she has resided there full time and is entitled to the payments.
Permission to bring the action was granted, on an ex-parte basis, by Mr Justice Charles Meenan yesterday (mon).
The case will come back to court next month.
By Tom Tuite
Prosecutors have dropped the most serious charge brought against businesswoman Deirdre Foley over redundancies at Clerys.
A connected charge brought against Natrium Ltd, which bought out the iconic department store on Dublins OConnell Street in 2015, was also withdrawn today.
Previous owners OCS Operations petitioned the High Court for liquidation on June 12, 2015. This was followed by the collective redundancies in which 460 people lost jobs; 130 of them were directly employed by Clerys, the court has heard.
Ms Foley was due to go on trial in January on a single charge of impeding a Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) inspector and three counts of breaking protection of employment laws. However, following legal argument about non-disclosure of earlier drafts of witness statements today the charge against Ms Foley for impeding the WRC on June 12, 2015 was dropped by the prosecution.
Dublin District Court heard this obstruction offence was the only charge against her which carried a potential jail sentence.
Natrium was also charged with obstructing or impeding a WRC inspector on June 27 last year at 25-28 North Wall Quay, the companys address. Deirdre Foley who has a 20% stake in that firm which was also due to go on trial in January as a co-defendant of Ms Foley and others.
During pre-trial legal argument today, Natriums solicitor James McGuill applied for an order to allow a computer expert for the defence examine computer files of the prosecution witness statements.
He said he had applied in accordance with Director of Public Prosecutions guidelines for copies of earlier drafts of statements made by the WRC inspector.
He said that he had been told that the computer documents had been revised 168 times, but it was not possible to access the earlier drafts. The prosecution had engaged in a process of deleting each draft and that, Mr McGuill argued, amounted to a destruction of evidence
A description of the documents properties could also say when they had been printed, but the hard-copies were not available.
He said that he was entitled to these versions which also included any possible emailed versions of the documents or drafts which may still be on computer servers.
He also submitted that the earlier drafts of the statements were essential for cross-examination.
He said disclosure already furnished shows that there had been 78 hours of editing of the statements and the material had been subject to multiple inputs over a protracted period of time.
The application was supported by Ronan Kennedy BL, for Ms Foley who has an address at Hollybank Avenue, Upper Ranelagh, Dublin 6.
Judge Brennan indicated that he would grant the order to allow Natriums computer expert to examine the computer files in question.
Breffni Gordon BL for the prosecution said that would not be a problem. However, following recess, Mr Gordon told the court that obstruction charges against Natrium and Ms Foley were being withdrawn.
No further charges remain against Natrium however, Ms Foley still faces trial on less serious charges under the Protection of Employment Act for failing to initiate consultations with representatives of employees, failing to supply them with all relevant information relating to the redundancies and not notifying the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation in writing, on June 12, 2015 which can result, on conviction, in a fine. She is contesting the charges.
Mark Redmond, of Belfry Dale, Citywest Road, Saggart, Co. Dublin is an employee of D2 Private Ltd, a firm owned by Deirdre Foley. He faces the same charges for allegedly failing to notify the Minister or consult with workers representative or provide them with relevant information about the redundancies.
Brendan Cooney, a director of OCS Operations Ltd, with an address at Weirview Drive, Stillorgan, Co. Dublin has the same charges plus an additional one under the Workplace Relations Act for giving false or misleading information to an inspector.
Mr Cooney and Mr Redmond also have a further charge alleging they failed to keep records as required to ensure compliance with Section 18.1 of the Protection of Employment Act.
Mr Cooneys case has been adjourned for mention until December 20 next.
OCS Operations Ltd has four charges. It operated Clerys Department Store and Warehouse, from 2012 until a liquidator was appointed in June 2015, when it ceased trading.
Its alleged offences are under the Protection of Employment Act for failing to initiate consultations with representatives of employees affected by the collective redundancies in OCS Operations Ltd, failing to supply employee representatives with all relevant information relating to the redundancies and not notifying the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation in writing, on June 12, 2015 the day of the Clerys takeover.
It is also accused of failing to keep records as required to ensure compliance with Section 18.1 of the Protection of Employment Act.
The case against OCS, Mr Redmond and Ms Foley was adjourned until February 6 next.
All the defendants have indicated that they would be contesting the charges.
The border remains the key stumbling block in the way of Brexit talks proceeding to the next stage. Here are answers to some of the key questions on the thorny impasse that threatens to derail the process.
Q. Why is the border so important to the negotiations?
After Brexit, it will become the UKs only land border with an EU member state. How that frontier is managed is one of the three key issues the EU wants assurances on - along with citizens rights and the "divorce bill" - before allowing Brexit negotiations to proceed to phase two on future trading relations.
It is proving the most difficult of the trio to resolve, with economic and social factors mixing with potent historical and political considerations.
Q. What does the border look like now?
There are almost 300 crossings between north and south along what was, during the Troubles, a heavily-militarised 310-mile frontier. Those checkpoints are either gone or lying derelict today as traffic passes freely from north to south.
Q. Why are there such major concerns that Brexit would change that?
It could be argued that Brexit itself is not the cause of the sticking point, more the type of Brexit envisaged by the UK government.
If the UK left the EU but remained in the single market and customs union the border problem might not be so complex.
But the UKs decision to leave Europes trading and free movement frameworks mean the border is set to become a crossing point between two different regulatory and economic zones.
This has prompted fears of a "hard border", with a return to check points - albeit for very different reasons to those erected during the Troubles.
There have been competing claims on whether such an outcome would undermine the extent of cross-border co-operation enshrined in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Some have even warned that a hardening of the border could reignite violence. Others have dismissed such dire predictions as dangerous scaremongering
Q. What does the EU want?
Brussels insists the retention of a "soft" border can only be achieved if either the whole of the UK, or just Northern Ireland, remain either within the single market and customs union, or some specially-tailored system that complies with EU regulations. This is the Dublin governments preferred option and the EU has made clear that Irelands concerns are its concerns.
Q. Why is this such a problem for the UK?
The British Governments very existence is dependent on its deal with the Democratic Unionists. While 56% of the population in Northern Ireland voted Remain, the DUP campaigned for Brexit and is set against anything that would see the region treated differently to the rest of the UK.
To do otherwise, it claims, would draw a border up the Irish Sea. The DUP has even accused the Irish government of pushing for regulatory alignment across the island as a backdoor bid to achieve a united Ireland.
Reports that No 10 was prepared to give ground and agree that Northern Ireland would continue to adhere to EU regulations post Brexit were met with an emphatic rejection by DUP leader Arlene Foster, in a statement that quickly snuffed out rumours of a Brexit breakthrough.
Q. So does the DUP hold all the cards?
Not quite. If its 10 MPs pulled put of their deal with the Tories, they would lose their new found influence at Westminster - endangering a linked 1 billion of Treasury funding for Northern Ireland - and face the prospect of what they characterise as the "pro Irish republican" Jeremy Corbyn becoming Labour prime minister after a snap general election.
Q. Are Mrs Mays problems confined to Northern Ireland.
No. The suggestion of a different regulatory regime for Northern Ireland prompted demands for the same from Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and London mayor Sadiq Khan.
- David Young, Press Association
By Tom Tuite
A religious sect leader, who claimed he imported a hallucinogenic drug to prepare a revered sacrament for his churchs ceremonies, has been spared a jail sentence.
Food producer and Santo Daime church leader in Ireland, Marcus McCabe, 56, from Burdautien, in Clones, Co. Monaghan, appeared at Dublin District Court to contest a charge under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
He said he believed the prosecution was against the fundamental rights of his church which has its origins in Brazil.
But Judge Gerard Jones said it was illegal according to the law of the land. However, he said he was giving the man a chance and struck out the case but warned that does not give you a licence to carry on.
He was accused of unlawfully importing 8.5 kilos of substance called N,N-Dimethyltryptamine at Terminal 2 at Dublin Airport on November 13, 2014. The Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) had directed summary disposal meaning the case should remain in the district court which could impose a 12-month sentence for the offence. The substance is also used in the Santo Daime churchs ayahuasca sacrament.
Defence solicitor Michael French told the court the substance had a nominal value and came from Brazil. He was instructed by his client that it was a sacrament.
Garda Liam Mangan told the court McCabe flew in through Dublin Airport but was stopped by customs officers. He had a bag in his possession which contained a certain item and a package was seized and sent for analysis, Garda Mangan said.
Garda Mangan said McCabe admitted he had it in his possession.
The accused did say he was using this material for a sacrament in his church, Garda Mangan said.
The substance was in a liquid form and no value could be put on it, the garda said.
Judge Jones enquired about the religion and McCabe got into the witness box to give evidence and explain why he had the liquid substance.
When sworn in he blessed himself and told the court he was a member of the Santo Daime faith, a Christian church originally from Brazil. His solicitor Michael French asked him if he could confirm what he did with the substance referred to by the garda.
He told the court that it was made into a tea taken with prayers.
Mr French put it to him that gardai believed it was prohibited and, in reply, McCabe said he felt that this was the result of a misunderstanding. I believe this substance is in everyone in this room and is common, he said, adding, it really is a misunderstanding of the sacrament.
He said it was administered during spiritual and Christian festivals throughout the year. He said people get great benefit in making the spiritual works and the sacrament was a real blessing for anyone who comes and participates.
He told Judge Jones this was done at his special house for church works in Clones and usually the services are attended by 15 to 20 people, possibly 25 for a festival.
Mr McCabe pleaded with the court that the prosecution was an interference with his churchs fundamental rights.
However, Judge Jones replied: According to your law you are acting in the law, but according to the law of the land it is an illegal substance.
It is not my law, this is something that is blessed, McCabe answered.
Judge Jones said he was going to give him a chance and not convict him, but added that he was not setting a precedent or giving Mr McCabe the right to use the substance.
He said he was striking out the case, however, he warned McCabe, that does not give you a licence to carry on.
The judge told Garda Mangan that he would accede to his request to make an order for destruction of the substance. However, the defence solicitor Mr French was instructed to object and said his client was very upset by this.
He said Mr McCabe has deep-rooted opinions and believed it was not illegal, but it was part of his religious beliefs.
The judge said he was giving him a chance and he was concerned about this substance. He asked if it was harmful and Garda Mangan submitted that it was an illegal high and he objected to the substance being handed back to Mr McCabe.
Judge Jones said he would deal with that issue on a later date telling the accused he was a lucky man.
Shashi Kapoor, a leading Bollywood actor and producer from the 1970s and 1980s, has died after a long illness.
A family member, Randhir Kapoor, said he died on Monday at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, where he was being treated for a kidney ailment.
Kapoor, who was 79, acted in more than 100 Hindi films and was also a key theatre personality.
He appeared as well in British and American films produced by Merchant Ivory productions, run by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.
His English-language movies included The Householder in 1963, Shakespeare Wallah in 1965, Bombay Talkie in 1970 and Heat And Dust, in which he co-starred with his wife, British actress Jennifer Kendal, in 1982.
Some of his popular Bollywood films were Deewar (Wall), Kabhie Kabhie (Sometimes), Namak Hala (Loyal Servant) and Kaala Pathar (Black Rock).
He co-starred with Amitabh Bachchan in each.
India's prime minister Narendra Modi said Kapoor's versatility could be seen in his films as well as in the cinema, which he promoted with great passion.
"His brilliant acting will be remembered for generations to come," he said.
Kapoor was a member of a family dynasty in the Bollywood film industry.
He was the youngest son of Prithviraj Kapoor, a veteran of Bollywood and the theatre.
Shashi Kapoor began acting aged four in plays produced and directed by his father.
He started in films as a child actor in the late 1940s.
He made his debut as a leading actor in movies in 1961.
The Press Trust of India news agency said Kapoor will be cremated on Tuesday.
He is survived by two sons and a daughter.
His wife died in 1984.
AP
President Donald Trump has thrown his full support behind embattled Republican US Senate candidate Roy Moore who faces allegations of historical child sex abuse.
Mr Trump tweeted early today that "Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama".
It was Mr Trump's most vocal endorsement of Mr Moore, who has lost the backing of many top Republicans since he was hit with allegations of sexual misconduct decades ago.
Mr Trump has assailed Democratic candidate Doug Jones and has defended Mr Moore against allegations of child molestation.
But the White House has said he has no plans to make campaign appearances.
Mr Trump tweeted: "We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!"
Mr Moore, contesting the seat created after Jeff Sessions became attorney general, replied to the endorsement by saying he "can't wait to help" Mr Trump "#DrainTheSwamp".
Mr Trump uses that phrase as a derogatory term for what he considers to be a corrupt system in Washington.
After Mr Trump's tweet, Mr Moore tweeted that "The America First agenda will #MAGA", a reference to Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan.
Later it emerged that Mr Trump also spoke with Mr Moore by phone.
White House Spokesman Raj Shah said the two discussed the state of the Alabama Senate race and that the president "endorsed Judge Moore's campaign".
AP
President Donald Trump has signed a proclamation to scale back two sprawling national monuments in Utah, pledging to "reverse federal overreach and restore the rights of this land to your citizens".
Mr Trump made his plans official during a speech at the state Capitol, where he was cheered by the state's Republican leaders who lobbied him to undo protections they contend are overly broad and close off the area to energy development and other access.
Environmental and tribal groups plan to sue to preserve monuments they say are vital to protect important archaeological and cultural resources, especially the Bears Ears National Monument, a more than 1.3 million-acre (2,030-square-mile) site in south-eastern Utah that features thousands of Native American artefacts, including ancient cliff dwellings and petroglyphs.
"Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington," Mr Trump said. "And guess what? They're wrong."
Around 3,000 demonstrators lined up near the State Capitol protesting his announcement. They held signs that said, "Keep your tiny hands off our public lands," and they chanted, "Lock him up!"
A smaller group gathered in support of Mr Trump's decision, including some who said they favour potential drilling or mining there that could create jobs.
The Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments were among a group of 27 monuments that Mr Trump ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review this year.
Bears Ears, created last year by President Barack Obama, will be reduced to 201,876 acres (315 square miles).
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, designated in 1996, will be reduced from nearly 1.9 million acres (nearly 3,000 square miles) to 1,003,863 acres (1,569 square miles).
Mr Trump also met with leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and toured Welfare Square, a church-run complex in Salt Lake City that aids the poor.
Mr Zinke accompanied the president aboard Air Force One, as did Utah's Republican senators, Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee. Mr Hatch and other Utah Republican leaders pushed Trump to launch the review, saying the monuments declared by Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton locked up too much federal land.
Mr Zinke has also recommended that Nevada's Gold Butte and Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou monuments be reduced in size, though details remain unclear. The former Montana congressman's plan would allow logging at a newly designated monument in Maine and more grazing, hunting and fishing at two sites in New Mexico.
Democrats and environmentalists have opposed the changes, accusing Mr Trump and Mr Zinke of engaging in a secretive process aimed at helping industry groups that have donated to Republican political campaigns.
AP
A hunter has died after being attacked by the wild boar he was trying to shoot, police in Germany said.
The man, 50, was on a boar hunt with a dozen others near the north-eastern town of Greifswald yesterday when he was attacked by the male boar.
A Spanish judge has ordered that four prominent members of the Catalan independence movement should remain in custody, including the vice-president of the ousted regional government.
He will now campaign in a polarised regional election from a jail near Madrid.
The judge set 100,000 bail for the six other Catalan politicians who had been jailed in early November, and ordered their passports to be confiscated.
The six were expected to leave jails near Madrid later in the day.
Meanwhile, Catalan ex-president Carles Puigdemont and four of his separatist allies heard that they will be judged on whether they can be extradited from Belgium to Spain on December 14, exactly one week before the election.
The group is refusing to return to Spain to face rebellion, sedition and embezzlement charges that can be punished with decades in prison under the country's criminal laws.
Mr Puigdemont's defence lawyer, Paul Bekaert, insisted that the Spanish charges were not punishable in Belgium and thus there were no grounds for extradition.
"We also highlighted the danger for the impediment of their human rights in Spain," he said.
Whatever decision is made on December 14, two appeals will be possible and a final ruling could well come only after the December 21 election called by Spain's central authorities, in which Mr Puigdemont is leading his pro-independence party's campaign.
Mariano Rajoy's conservative Spanish government disbanded Mr Puigdemont's Cabinet when it took control of Catalonia shortly after separatist regional politicians passed a declaration of independence in late October.
The early election is an attempt to find a democratic way out of the nation's worst crisis in nearly four decades.
But the vote is shaping up as a plebiscite between those for and against independence, with polls predicting a close race between the two camps.
Adding to the uncertainty, a Supreme Court judge decided on Monday to uphold the preventive jailing of ousted Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras, who tops the list for the left-republican ERC party.
ERC was part of the former Catalan ruling coalition with Mr Puigdemont's conservative party and is leading the polls before the new election.
Campaigning officially begins at midnight on Monday, and in the hours before that moment Catalan pro-independence groups hope to stage protests in front of town halls across the region against the Supreme Court's decision on the detained separatists.
Mr Junqueras and the other jailed politicians pledged last week to give up on efforts to seek unilateral independence for the wealthy northeastern region, in the hope of being freed.
But judge Pablo Llarena said in his decision on Monday that it remains to be seen if Mr Junqueras' pledge to abide by Spanish law is "truthful and real".
ERC spokeswoman Marta Rovira described the jailing as "a covert attempt" by Spain's central authorities in Madrid to get ERC out of the picture.
"This is a very clear attempt to win these elections without political adversaries," she said.
Carles Puigdemont
Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido was unmoved by the arguments of Mr Junqueras' supporters.
"Those who commit criminal acts must place themselves at the mercy of legal rulings," Mr Zoido said.
The magistrate also upheld custody orders without bail for the former regional interior minister, Joaquim Forn, and the leaders of Assemblea Nacional Catalan and Omnium Cultural, the two Catalan grassroots groups that have been the main drivers of the separatist bid in Catalonia.
A government-run poll published on Monday indicated that pro-independence parties would lose their slim majority in the Catalan regional parliament.
It gave ERC, Mr Puigdemont's Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia) and the far-left anti-establishment CUP party 66 or 67 seats out of the parliamentary 135 seats.
The election could be a close race between the left republican ERC party and the opposition business-friendly Ciutadans (Citizens), with 21 and 22.5% share of votes respectively, the CIS survey suggested.
AP
The US Supreme Court has allowed full enforcement of Donald Trump's travel ban affecting residents of six mostly Muslim countries.
The justices, with two dissenting votes, said today that the policy could take full effect even as legal challenges against it make their way through the courts.
The action suggests the high court could uphold the latest version of the ban that US President Donald Trump announced in September.
The ban applies to travellers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
Lower courts had said people from those nations with a claim of a "bona fide" relationship with someone in the United States could not be kept out of the country.
Grandparents, cousins and other relatives were among those the courts said could not be excluded.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have left the lower court orders in place.
The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals and the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, will be holding arguments on the legality of the ban this week.
Both courts are dealing with the issue on an accelerated basis, and the Supreme Court noted it expected those courts to reach decisions "with appropriate dispatch".
Quick resolution by appellate courts would allow the Supreme Court to hear and decide the issue this term, by the end of June.
Police in the UK are trying to track down two youths after a teenager was attacked on a train and forced to apologise for being gay.
The 19-year-old man was placed in a headlock and strangled until he eventually did what they said because he was struggling to breathe.
The incident occurred on a westbound Jubilee line train between West Ham and North Greenwich on October 21 at around 11.10am.
The victim and his friends were wearing fancy dress for an event they were attending when they were approached by the two youths who boarded at West Ham.
The two suspects verbally abused the victim for being gay and turned aggressive when they were challenged.
They forced him into a headlock, snatched his phone and threatened to stab him until he apologised for being gay.
Although they returned the phone, the two youths then got into a fight with the victim's friends in which a 25-year-old woman suffered bruising after being punched and pushed to the ground.
The victims left the train at North Greenwich.
The British Transport Police (BTP) released images of the two men on Monday and urged anyone who recognises them to come forward.
The BTP said in a statement: "Hate crime will not be tolerated by the British Transport Police. We believe everyone has the right to travel safely.
"We won't tolerate behaviour where someone is targeted because they are perceived to be different, or made to feel uncomfortable on their journey."
Hundreds of aircraft including two dozen stealth jets began training today as the United States and South Korea launched their biggest-ever combined air force exercise.
The war games come a week after North Korea test-fired its most powerful missile ever, an ICBM that may be able to target the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The five-day drill, called Vigilant Ace, is meant to improve the allies' wartime capabilities and preparedness, South Korea's defence ministry said.
The US Seventh Air Force sent major strategic military assets that include six F-22 and 18 F-35 stealth fighter jets for the annual training exercise in the Korean Peninsula. About 12,000 US military personnel are participating.
In total, 230 aircraft will be flying at eight US and South Korean military installations in the South.
Some local media report that B-1B bombers will also join aerial drills, but officials did not confirm their participation.
The training, held each year in late autumn, is not in response to any incident or provocation, the Seventh Air Force said in a statement.
North Korea's state media said the drill pushes the Korean Peninsula "to the brink of nuclear war". Such language is typical in North Korean propaganda because the country claims US-South Korean drills are preparation for invasion.
Nevertheless, tensions are at a particularly dangerous point as North Korea edges toward its goal of a viable arsenal of nuclear-tipped long-range missiles, and as US President Donald Trump ramps up his rhetoric toward the North, threatening, for instance, to unleash "fire and fury" against the country.
Pyongyang will "seriously consider" counter-measures against the drill, and the US and South Korea will "pay dearly for their provocations", the Korean Central News Agency said yesterday before the start of the exercises.
While many South Koreans typically ignore North Korea's rhetoric, some senior American officials have expressed concern following the ICBM test, North Korea's third.
Yesterday, Lindsey Graham, a Republican US senator from the state of South Carolina, said he believes it is time for US military families in South Korea to leave the country because conflict with North Korea is getting close.
The US government has not announced a formal decision to evacuate American citizens from South Korea, and there were no such signs in the diplomatic community in Seoul.
An evacuation of dependants by Seoul's closest ally and major military defender could prompt a panicked reaction by other countries, and among South Koreans.
In addition to American diplomats and other embassy workers, about 28,500 US troops operate in South Korea, many of whom take their families on their postings and live on huge, well-guarded military bases.
Also yesterday, the White House's national security adviser said Mr Trump will take care of North Korean threats by "doing more ourselves".
"The priorities that the president's given us to move as quickly as we can to resolve this crisis with North Korea," General HR McMaster told Fox News.
"If necessary, the president and the United States will have to take care of it, because he has said he's not going to allow this murderous, rogue regime to threaten the United States."
- AP
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October 31, 2022
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People have been questioning whose side Eugene is on ever since he joined the Saviors. Is he totally loyal to Negan? Or is he secretly working for Rick? This episode of The Walking Dead, titled Time for After, though, shows that Eugene still really is just on Team Eugene.
Will Rick Show Negan Mercy on The Walking Dead?>>>
Will Jadis Take the Deal?
Time for After begins with Rick still trapped in that storage container. Jadis and her people finally let him out, and he offers to make a deal yet again, which seems stupid. She can join Rick and the others, or die. Rather than answer, Jadis just takes pictures of him, which is super creepy. She says she took the pictures for a sculpture after but wont say after what.
Later, Jadis finally takes Rick out and brings out a Walker with melted metal on its head. Time for after, she says. Rick fights back, though, and knocks out some Scavengers and takes down the Walker. Jadis tries to shoot him, but he beats her too. He holds her head near the Walkers mouth. He says hes leaving and they should just run. Jadis tells her people to lower their weapons and agrees to join Rick. He tells her the Sanctuarys surrounded by Walkers. He wants her to come with him. Theyll wait for the other communities leaders and theyll all ask the Saviors lieutenants to surrender together. Then Rick will kill Negan.
Whose Side is Eugene On?
Eugene is super agitated and starts making a list of what he knows and doesnt know. Frustrated, he goes to Dwight. He tells Dwight he knows that hes the traitor. Negan charged Eugene with fixing the mess that Dwight made, so he tells Dwight to stop what hes doing and he wont reveal Dwights secret.
Instead, Dwight grabs Eugene and tells him that the Saviors, Negan and the Sanctuary are finished. The workers are angry, the Saviors are getting scared and it will all fall. All Eugene has to do is say nothing and let it all play out. Dwight says Eugene has seen what happened, heard the screams and smelled the burning skin in the Sanctuary. Eugene hasnt done those things yet, but he will. Once you do those things, you become those things and theres no coming back, no forgetting it, Dwight says. Eugene still believes in the Saviors and Negan, though.
Eugene then goes to check on the situation with the Walkers outside the Sanctuary. And its getting bad. They have a day, maybe two, before the Walkers get in.
On his way down the hall, Eugene is called in to the infirmary because Gabriels getting worse. He has an infection, and its affecting his organs. Gabriel asks him if hes going to help him get Dr. Carson out, but Eugene doesnt see a way to get him out. Plus, Eugene doesnt stick his neck out for other people and only looks out for himself. Gabriel says he should have faith, trust himself and do the right thing. He grabs Eugenes hand, and theres blood on Eugenes hand when he pulls away.
Later, one of Negans wives goes to see Eugene because they had a deal for him to fix a boom box for wine. He hasnt fixed the boom box and says they have more important things to think about because theyre trapped in the Sanctuary, but shes always been trapped in the Sanctuary. She refuses to give him the bottle of wine, but he says he needs it. The woman gives him the wine and says that she and Frankie had asked him for help earlier and he could have changed things for the better, but he only took care of himself and now he feels guilty about it so he cant sleep without wine.
Quiz: Who is your Walking Dead Battle Buddy in the Fight Against Negan?>>>
Is Rebels Mission Worth It?
Morgan has been scoping out the Sanctuary since he left the group. Hes communicating with someone on the radio when he notices Daryl, Tara, Michonne and Rositas truck.
Tara, Daryl, Rosita and Michonne try to formulate a risky plan to attack the Sanctuary when Morgan comes out. He offers to help and says there are other snipers who will help. Now is the time to finish this.
Still, Michonne and Rosita think this is too risky and they should listen to Rick and follow the plan, but Tara and Daryl are pissed at Negan and want to take action now. Ultimately, Rosita decides to leave, but Michonne says she has to see this through. Rosita says it feels better to do something than just sit and wait, but sometimes you have to wait anyway. She leaves by herself, but Michonne looks super conflicted.
Daryl, Tara and Michonne make it to the Sanctuary, while Morgan talks to them via radio. Michonne is clearly having regrets, though. She thinks what theyre about to do isnt right or worth risking themselves. Daryl thinks it is worth it, though. Michonne says she cant do it and heads out.
Can Eugene Save the Saviors?
Eugene, meanwhile, is called over to talk to Negan. Negan says a lot of people will die if the situation with the Walkers doesnt get fixed. The Sanctuary is about organizing strength, and Eugene and his brain are strong. He has to fix this.
Eugene goes back to his room and fixes the boom box. He has an idea when he looks at the speaker, so he goes searching around the Sanctuary for something. He gets emotional when he finds the coffin Sasha died in and takes her iPod.
Eugene comes up with a plan to put the iPod on a kite to drive away the Walkers. When hes about to launch it, though, someone clicks a gun and tells him not to turn around. Its Dwight! Eugene says that hes trying to free the Saviors, but Dwight says if he does that, Negan will kill all of Eugenes old friends. Eugene doesnt care. But Dwight says they can kill Negan, just Negan, and theyre almost there. Eugene says that if he doesnt free the Saviors from the Walkers, Negan will definitely kill him and, if he does, Dwight might kill him. So hell have to go through with his plan and risk Dwight shooting him. He flies the kite, but Dwight shoots it down. Thats when Tara, Daryl and Morgan attack.
Tara and Morgan start shooting, while Daryl puts a cinder block on the trucks gas pedal and has it crash into the Sanctuary. Walkers immediately storm into the Sanctuary and attack people, including the innocent workers.
At first, Eugene is pretty freaked-out, but then he gets furious. He storms over to Gabriel and says he will obey Negan; hell make sure Dr. Carson stays in the Sanctuary, hell survive and he wont feel bad about it.
Eugene then goes to Negan with a plan to get the Saviors out. Negan asks if Eugene realizes what hell do to Rick once theyre out, and Eugene does. Eugene also says he has something else to tell Negan, but then the rest of the inner circle comes in. Negan asks Eugene what his news is, but instead of ratting Dwight out, he says he fixed the intercom system. Eugene goes back to his room and absolutely loses it and starts drinking. He gets a little sick, though. Is the wine poisoned?
Ricks Plan Falls Apart
Rick, Jadis and some of the Scavengers eventually go to the Sanctuary, but its not surrounded by Walkers anymore like Rick thought. Rick grabs a radio and calls to his snipers, but nobody answers. Clearly, Ricks plan has fallen apart. And hes in trouble.
Did Eugene really get the Saviors out? Will Gabriel survive? Why didnt Eugene rat out Dwight? And can Rick really trust Jadis? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
The Walking Dead season 8 airs Sunday nights at 9/8c on AMC. Want more news? Like our Facebook page.
(Image courtesy of AMC)
Setting a precedent for private companies, the Bombay High Court here upheld the order of the Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) for a merger of scam-tainted National Spot Exchange Ltd (NSEL) with its parent, 63 moons technologies, earlier named Financial Technologies (India) Ltd).
The two-judge bench of Chief Justice Manjula Chellur and M S Sonak rejected the petition of 63 moons against the order; it, however, agreed to a stay on its operation for 12 weeks, for time to appeal. The company has decided to appeal to Supreme Court.
63 moons' share price closed in the five per cent lower circuit, at Rs 131.1.
The order clears the legal way for a government to order the merger of two private entities. Also noteworthy since NSEL is a limited liability company. Its liabilities, by the order, when confirmed by the court, will become 63 moons' once a merger takes place.
The government exercised its power under Article 396 of the Act.
"We will be moving the Supreme Court. We have full faith in the judiciary," said a 63 moons spokesperson.
MCA had issued a draft merger order in October 2014, followed by a final order in February 2016, citing the public interest. This followed the Rs 5,574 payment crisis in NSEL, involving the money of about 13,000 investors. MCA said its order would ensure the investors would get their money.
To which, 63 moons contended the government order would hit its 60,000-plus investors, for no fault of theirs'.
The payment crisis on NSEL came to light in July 2013, when commodities traded on the tainted exchange were found to be not backed by stocks in its warehouses.
63 moons has 99.9 per cent stake in NSEL. If a merger takes place, all Rs 5,270 crore of pending dues would be transferred on the books of 63 moons.
"It is a welcome judgement. The concept of limited liability allows you to trade and commerce, not to give you licence to commit fraud. The decision has reinvigorated the hopes of NSEL victims, who had almost given up," said Ketan Shah of NSEL Investors Action Group, a body formed to fight for recovery of the said dues.
Venkat Chary, chairman, limited, said in a statement that the order passed through an executive fiat is devastating for corporate India.
Terming it as a 'black day' in the history of Corporate India, Chary said this order has a serious impact on the limited liability concept, which is the cornerstone of the Indian corporate sector.
"This is a worrisome development for corporate India as the aftermath is likely to be chaotic, impacting investment flow into India by way of domestic investments, FDIs, FIIs and also the spirit of entrepreneurship, so vital for the countrys economic development as investors will always be scared to invest in parent with subsidiary companies," he said.
China's two biggest banks said they do not plan to finance a controversial Australian coal mine, in the latest blow to Indian conglomerate Adani Enterprises' long delayed project.
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and China Construction Bank said in separate statements they were not working on the project, after media recently reported that Chinese banks may get involved.
Adani is seeking A$2 billion ($1.5 billion) in financing by March 2018 for the A$4 billion first stage of its proposed Carmichael coal mine in the state of Queensland, a project that has been shrunk from a A$16.5 billion plan to make it more viable.
Adani declined to comment on its financing plans on Monday or the statements from the Chinese banks.
Australian and overseas banks have balked at granting loans for the project, which environmentalists oppose due to climate change and the potential for damage to the Great Barrier Reef.
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) said on Sunday it has no intention of financing a controversial A$16.5 billion ($12.5 billion) Australian coal mine being built by Indian conglomerate Adani Enterprises.
"ICBC has not been, and does not intend to be, engaged in arranging financing for this project," ICBC, China's biggest listed lender by assets, said in a statement on its Australian website.
"ICBC attaches great importance to its social responsibilities and keenly promotes 'green financing' ... This statement is made without any view on or prejudice towards the Carmichael mine project."
The mine's location 400 kms (250 miles) from a Pacific Ocean shipping terminal means financing infrastructure costs has been at the forefront of debate over the project's economic viability.
"China Construction Bank is not involved with, nor considering involvement with, the Adani Carmichael Mine project," an external spokesperson for China Construction Bank in Australia said in an emailed statement on Monday.
CCB in China was not immediately available for comment.
Reuters has previously reported that Adani was in talks with China Machinery Engineering Corp (CMEC) for a loan, which could have involved China Construction Bank or China Export Import Bank.
China Export Import Bank was not immediately available for comment.
Carmichael has been delayed by court challenges from environmentalists and indigenous groups concerned about climate change and the impact on native land and water supply, but those challenges have been rejected.
Adani hopes to start shipping coal from Carmichael by March 2020 in the first stage of the project, which it bought amid a coal boom in 2010.
Tyre makers have expressed concerns over the availablity of natural rubber (NR) in India, as domestic production levels continue to be less than the existing demand for the raw material in the country.
A bunch of countries will drive 68 per cent of incremental advertising expenditure in calendar year 2018, the worlds largest media agency GroupM said on Monday, with India being one of them. The others include the US, China, Argentina, Japan and the UK, all of which will help push up overall advertising growth in the world to 4.3 per cent in 2018 versus 3.1 per cent this year.
Lava, a multinational mobile handset maker based in Noida, will raise $30 million from a firm backed by a Chinese state-owned technology major, the Economic times reported. The Rs 193 crore-funding is meant to boost manufacturing and set up a local mobile-handset design center,
The Essar Group is planning to pay its dues to lenders so that it can take part in the bidding process for its steel plant in Hazira, Gujarat. Tata Steel, ArcelorMittal and others are reportedly keen to acquire it.
The Shapoorji Pallonji group is seeking opportunities for affordable housing projects in Kochi, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Indore, Ghaziabad and Coimbatore. It plans to develop 10-12 million sq ft in the second phase of its joint investment programme with World Bank arm IFC, Asian Development Bank and Standard Chartered Private Equity.
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An average 15 minutes of taxiing at six of the busiest airports in the country is likely to cost airlines Rs 2,000 crore annually by 2021, compelling them to explore ways to reduce fuel consumption and switch to greener ways of steering the aircraft on the ground.
According to a study, the total fuel burnt is likely to increase by 40 per cent by 2021--going up from 1,67,000 tonnes in 2016 to 2,34,000 tonnes--as airlines expand their operations.
Of the total 85 operational airports in the country, airports at Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata handle nearly 65 per cent of the total air traffic.
The cost of fuel burnt is likely to go up from Rs 1,400 crore in 2016 to nearly Rs 2,000 crore in 2021, according to the findings of the study carried out by Ashwani Khanna, vice-president, Delhi International Airport Limited.
Khanna, who was sharing his research at an event conducted by the Aeronautical Society of India, has taken into account the taxiing time of aircraft departing from the top six airports and calculated the cost of fuel burnt while taxiing at Rs 1,400 per minute for a narrow body aircraft and Rs 3,100 per minute for a widebody aircraft.
The fuel burn will also take its toll on the environment as carbon emissions register a proportionate increase of 40 per cent by 2021--up from 5,27,000 tonne to 7,39,000 tonne, the study said.
Aviation experts fear that with airport infrastructure failing to keep pace with the growth in traffic, waiting time for aircraft is only bound to increase and there is unlikely to be any respite for airlines in terms of expenditure on fuel.
"Slots are almost over at major airports. This situation will result in an increase in waiting time for both departing and arriving aircraft," said Joint Director General, DGCA, Lalit Gupta.
The experts say alternate ways of taxiing can help airlines save up to six per cent of their total fuel costs. Traditionally, an aircraft taxiing between the main terminal and runway uses jet engines causing a significant fuel burn.
Alternate ways of taxiing deploy an electric system with engines stopped.
WheelTug is one such taxi system which enables airplanes to taxi forward and backward with the help of electric motors installed in the nose wheels. These motors are powered by the aircraft's Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) and don't use the jet engine. It offers $500,000 in savings annually per aircraft, as per the manufacturers.
Full service carrier Jet Airways signed a Letter of Intent (LoI) with WheelTug in 2012.
According to the airline's Senior VP of Flight Operations Captain Sudhir Gaur, once WheelTug is implemented across its entire fleet, the airline aims at saving nearly 20,000 tonnes of fuel annually and reduce CO2 emission by 65,000 tonnes.
There is also the Electric Green Taxiing System (EGTS), which uses motors installed in the main landing gear wheels. Taxibot is a yet another system which involves a semi-robotic, pilot-controlled towing tractor which lifts and holds the aircraft nose wheel and then transports the aircraft from terminal to runway and back without using the aircraft's engine.
Jet fuel represents one of the largest expense items for an airline and accounts for nearly 30 per cent of its total operational costs, according to experts.
Indians who have parked their wealth in secret accounts in Switzerland are under the Income Tax (I-T) department's lens. The tax sleuths are reportedly in a rush to hunt such offenders down, in a move that follows another probe into names and entities involved in the Paradise Papers financial data leak.
Congress leaders, both young and old, were jubilant on Monday after filed his nomination papers for the party president's post and said his ascent to the top will help it regain the lost glory after a string of electoral reverses.
c, asking the ruling party at the Centre not to preach lessons as they cited the grand old party's "long-proven democratic" track-record.
"Rahul ji has been the darling of the Congress...," former prime minister Manmohan Singh told reporters at the Congress headquarters here after Gandhi filed his nomination.
"Congress president Sonia Gandhi has served the Congress party and, through the Congress party, the country for the last 19 years... will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party," Singh added.
Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad, hit out at the BJP for questioning Congress' organisational election process. He said it was the saffron party, which does not follow democracy within its fold.
"...those who have trust in machines to win votes, are preaching us on democracy," Azad said, reiterating his party's "EVM tampering" charge against the BJP.
. Photo: PTI
Former Union minister and party leader P Chidambaram took to Twitter to wish Gandhi "very best" as the latter threw his hat in the ring for the top job in the party.
Senior Congress leader Anand Sharma stressed that all leaders and workers were in unison when they backed Gandhi. He said it was a "conscious and considered" decision of the party delegates to nominate Gandhi for president's post.
Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu, who joined the Congress ahead of the state elections in Punjab earlier this year, hailed Gandhi as a "special leader with character" who, he added, has come to the forefront during hours of crisis.
"He has become matured, showed his character. The general is standing at the forefront alone and on the other hand there is this entire government. This is the sign of a leader," Sidhu told reporters here.
Party MP from Guna, Jyotiraditya Scindia, dubbed Gandhi's imminent elevation to the top post as a "new wave of hope".
Another party leader, Kapil Sibal, congratulated Gandhi on Twitter as he filed the nomination with "full support" from the party and called it a "historic moment".
All India Mahila Congress president Sushmita Dev dubbed Gandhi a "symbol of strength, compassion and integrity" and said it was an honour to be led by him.
According to Congress' central election authority chairman Mullappally Ramachandran, Gandhi is the sole leader in the fray for the party president's post, paving way for the latter's elevation.
Gandhi has been Congress' vice president since January 2013.
We don't know if the residents of beleaguered businessman Vijay Mallya's possible new home, Mumbai's Arthur Road Jail (in the event that he is extradited), will get along with him or not, but the locals of the English village of Tewin, where the fugitive liquor baron currently resides, appear to have taken a shine to him.
New Delhi: Hadiya, a 24-year-old Hindu woman from Kerala who converted to Islam, leaves the Supreme Court in New Delhi after a hearing on the Kerala Love Jehad case on Monday. PTI Photo
Pakistan has violated the ceasefire along the International Border and the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir more than 720 times this year, the highest in past seven years.
The delay by the health ministry in approving the sale of the first-ever dengue vaccine developed by French pharmaceutical major Sanofi Pasteur might seem like another case of red tape, but the health crisis unfolding in the Philippines shows that India might have narrowly avoided a disaster.
Expressing love for the word Hindustan, a Pakistani youth was arrested by police in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
Seeing "Hindustan Zindabad" written on the wall of a house in the Nara Amazai area of Haripur infuriated the local community, the daily Express news reported on Monday.
According to police, Sajid Shah had been booked for treason under section 505 of the Pakistani Penal Code. A police officer said that Shah had written Hindustan Zindabad on the outer wall of his home in Nara Amazi.
People told him to remove the slogan as it hurt their pride, the SHO said. Some people took pictures of the wall and emailed them to senior police officials.
"We have booked the young man on orders from the high-ups", he said, refusing to comment further.
Hindustan -- the Persian name for South Asia -- now commonly being referred as India after partition in 1947.
With no other challenger in sight and Shehzad Poonawala, the Congressman who (being married into the Vadra household) was thought to represent some unidentified interest withdrawing the gauntlet, there is hardly any doubt that on December 11 or 12 will become the new President of the Congress.
Hundred days after President Donald Trump announced his South Asia Strategy, the US has said that India "is a player" in Afghanistan and it supports New Delhi's move with regard to transit options to enhance its economic connectivity with the war-torn country.
"India has really shown that it is a player in Afghanistan and that it is interested in supporting Afghanistan in a very constructive way," a senior administration official told PTI.
The official speaking on condition of anonymity was reviewing India's role in the first 100 days of the South Asia Strategy that was announced by Trump in a speech on August 21.
"As you know President Trump in his August 21st speech called on India to play a bigger role in supporting Afghanistan and its economic development. I think India has been answering the call," the official said.
Referring to a very successful trade conference on Afghanistan in New Delhi in September, the official said it resulted in pledging of hundreds of millions in new deals.
India has established air corridor and now the airport door and now has sent its first wheat shipment through Chabahar port in Iran.
"So, the US is supportive of this. We totally support India building up its economic relationship and increasing the transit options so that they can be more economically engaged with Afghanistan. The US has noticed that India has been stepping up its economic engagement with the country," the senior administration official said.
Responding to a specific question on the Chabahar port given Trump Administration's policies with Iran, the official said the US does not want IRGC or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp of Iran to benefit out of any economic activities.
"But again, we understand that India has challenges in getting goods for Afghanistan," and its inability to have economic linkages because of the inability to trade through Pakistan, the official said.
"So, I think that there is an understanding (in the Trump Administration) that if India is to be more economically engaged in Afghanistan there has to be transit options for India," the senior administration official said.
In his South Asia Strategy speech, Trump had envisioned a major role for India in the economic development of Afghanistan.
"Develop its strategic partnership with India -- the world's largest democracy and a key security and economic partner of the United States is a critical part of the new strategy," Trump had said in his speech on August 21.
"We appreciate India's important contributions to stability in Afghanistan, but India makes billions of dollars in trade with the US, and we want them to help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development. We are committed to pursuing our shared objectives for peace and security in South Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific region," Trump had said.
The extradition trial of Vijay Mallya, wanted in India on charges of Rs 9,000 crores fraud and money laundering, today began at a UK court here, with the prosecution asserting that the embattled liquor baron had a "case of fraud" to answer.
The trial, however, was briefly halted as the courtroom had to be evacuated due to a fire alarm. The 61-year-old tycoon and others waited outside the Westminster magistrates court during the fire drill.
The trial began with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), arguing on behalf of the Indian government, presenting its opening arguments in the case which focussed on loans totalling around Rs 2,000 crores sought by the erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines from a consortium of Indian banks.
The CPS admitted that there may have been "irregularities" in the internal processes of the banks sanctioning some of those loans but that would be a question to be dealt with at a later stage in India.
"The focus of our case will be on his (Mallyas) conduct and how he misled the bank and misused the proceeds," said CPS barrister Mark Summers. He then went on to lay out a detailed chronology of events, with specific focus on a loan sought by Kingfisher Airlines from IDBI bank in November 2009.
The loan sought amounted initially to Rs 950 crores but was later reduced to Rs 750 crores, after it had received Rs 200 crores from UCO bank.
Meanwhile, Mallya was also sanctioned a loan of Rs 150 crores from IDBI in advance of the larger loan sought from the state-owned bank to meet "critical obligations to overseas vendors".
The CPS noted that in all the loans sought, "loss-making" Kingfisher Airlines had relied on nearly the same set of security pledges, which included the UB Groups reputation, Kingfishers own "brand value", a promised infusion of equity funds and a projected return to profit by the airline by February 2011.
"The airline had claimed that it had put proactive measures in place to improve performance," the CPS noted.
However, it was also a time when according to an industry analysis, the state of the airline industry was described as "grim" and as being in "intensive care".
"It was not a scenario in which a state bank would have entertained such loan requests," the CPS added.
The first day of the trial is expected to be taken up entirely by the CPS setting out the Indian governments prima facie case against Mallya, a fact that was not welcomed by his defence team.
Mallya's barrister, Clare Montgomery, told the judge that she had hoped to set out the defences opening arguments on the first day as well.
But the CPS said it will "not be rushed" as it lays out the complete chronology of events.
Meanwhile, Mallya watched the proceedings from behind a glass-windowed dock.
His defence team tried to get the judge to allow him to sit outside the dock near his defence team to access some of the complicated paperwork being relied upon, but the judge denied that request saying all defendants are expected to sit in the dock.
However,the judge has directed that a table be provided to Mallya for easier access to his paperwork.
Earlier, Mallya looked relaxed when he entered the court to stand trial on charges of fraud and money laundering related to his erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines owing several Indian banks around Rs 9,000 crores.
"These (allegations against me) are false, fabricated and baseless," Mallya told reporters outside the court ahead of the hearing.
A four-member CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) team from India had also arrived at the court ahead of the trial, one of whom nodded when asked he they were "confident" about their case.
Mallya, who has been out on bail since Scotland Yard executed an extradition warrant in April this year, will be in the dock for the duration of the trial scheduled to end on December 14.
A judgement in the case, being presided over by Judge Emma Louise Arbuthnot, is unlikely until early next year.
The CPS will need to demonstrate a prima facie case by producing evidence to show that the criminal charges against Mallya are justified and that he should be extradited to face the Indian courts.
Prison conditions in India are expected to be at the forefront during the hearing, with the Indian government providing assurances of protection of Mallya's human rights.
The tycoonhas been on self-imposed exile in the UK since he left India on March 2, 2016.
While on strict bailconditions, which includeproviding a bail bond worth 650,000 pounds, surrender of his passport and a ban on possessing any travel documents, the former Rajya Sabha memberhas been based at his Hertfordshire estate Ladywalk in the village of Tewin, nearly 50-km from London.
The CPS had presented "supplemental" charges of money laundering to previous charges of fraud against the businessman at an earlier hearing in October.
The judge had agreed to effectively re-open a fresh case so that all charges can be heard concurrently in court.
If the judge rules in favour of extradition at the end of the trial, the UKhome secretary must orderMallyas extradition within two months.
However, the case can go through a series of appeals in higher UK courts before arriving at a conclusion.
Judge Arbuthnot and her colleague, Rebecca Crane, at Westminster Magistrates Court have recently rejected two other long-pending extradition requests from India.
Bollywood celebrities Aamir Khan, Karan Johar and Ajay Devgn paid tributes to Shashi Kapoor, one of the stalwarts of the Indian cinema industry, who passed away on Monday at the age of 79.
The actor had been suffering from an old-age related illness.
The 'Dangal' star tweeted, "Shashi uncle was not only a great star and a passionate filmmaker, but also a wonderful human being. His work has always given Indian audiences great joy. His contribution to Indian theatre was huge, Prithvi theatre is the favourite venue of both performers and audiences alike. His passing away is a sad day for all of us. My condolences to Sanjana, Kunal, Karan and everyone in the family. May his soul rest in peace. Love and respect. a."
Here's what the other celebs tweeted:
Karan Johar: #RIPShashiKapoor ...the most charming and enigmatic actor ever...a gentleman movie star! His legacy in film and theatre is exceptional...thoughts and prayers with the family....his work will always live on...
#RIPShashiKapoor ...the most charming and enigmatic actor ever...a gentleman movie star! His legacy in film and theatre is exceptional...thoughts and prayers with the family....his work will always live on... pic.twitter.com/U9jsAGxGET Karan Johar (@karanjohar) December 4, 2017
You won't be forgotten. Rest in peace #ShashiKapoor ji. Ajay Devgn (@ajaydevgn) December 4, 2017
So sad to hear the passing of the most charming #ShashiKapoor ji, really saddened by this news. Pray for his soul to find peace. Thank him for the amazing memories he gave us all. Condolences to the Kapoor family. #RIP SIR. arjun rampal (@rampalarjun) December 4, 2017
Ajay Devgn: You won't be forgotten. Rest in peace #ShashiKapoor ji.Arjun Rampal: So sad to hear the passing of the most charming #ShashiKapoor ji, really saddened by this news. Pray for his soul to find peace. Thank him for the amazing memories he gave us all. Condolences to the Kapoor family. #RIP SIR.
Bipasha Basu: RIP Sir. You will be deeply missed by all #ShashiKapoor
Buoyed by a massive electoral win in the recently concluded Uttar Pradesh civic polls, the Yogi Adityanath-led state government has given final touches to nearly 12 new policies aimed at improving the industrial landscape of Uttar Pradesh.
Global financial hub Hong Kong is likely to emerge as the new gateway for overseas investors looking to invest in India, piping traditional destinations such as Singapore and Mauritius.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will for the first time attend an annual general meeting (AGM) of a leading business chamber, possibly sending out a signal that he wants to engage with India Inc at a time when the economy has started looking up.
Representatives of around 45 American companies met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at this year's Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) in Hyderabad and expressed their commitment to continue investing in India, a top Indian American business leader has said.
These representatives were part of a delegation of the US India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF), a newly set-up non-profit organisation focused on deepening business relations between the US and India and enhancing the strategic relationship between the two countries.
"I can't talk about the specifics (of the meeting with Modi) because it was off the record. But basically the companies did meet with the Prime Minister and they showed their commitment to continued investment into India," USISPF President Mukesh Aghi told IANS in an interview.
The US looks at building its relationship with India on two broad principles. "One principle is that economic prosperity of India is good for America. And the second principle is a militarily strong India is good for regional stability," Aghi said.
If India became economically more prosperous and there was more disposable income, people would tend to buy more US goods, or send more of their kids for education to the US, he said.
"If you look at this year, the enrollment of Indian students in the US went up by 12 per cent. So we have 186,000 Indian students in the US," he stated.
"That's one. Two, if you look at companies like Amazon, look at Uber, look at WhatsApp or Google, you know they have a tremendous market share in the Indian market. Their businesses grow because consumer spending is growing in India because of economic prosperity."
On the defence side, Aghi said that if India became more prosperous, it would spend more money on defence.
"If you look at the last three years, the procurement with India has gone up to $15 billion," he said.
"We are talking Make in India also from the manufacturing perspective of defence equipment. So, I think those principles are driving this relationship."
On the current business environment in India, Aghi referred to the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business rankings which saw India jumping from the 130th rank to 100th.
"When this government came in 2014, India's ranking was 142. And now it has come to 100. I think that is a positive sign and we will keep on urging the government to go to below 50. That should be the ambition," he stated.
About the economic reforms being undertaken by the Indian government, he said these have been certified by credit rating agency Moody's, which has upgraded India's sovereign rating to Baa2 from its lowest investment grade of Baa after 14 long years.
"What the government is doing is the right stuff -- which seems to send a strong message to investors also. Moody's ranking is a positive sign, very positive," he said.
On what were the key takeaways for USISPF from this year's GES, which was held on the theme "Women First, Priority for All", Aghi said: "I think the number one takeaway is that start-ups and entrepreneurship are important for job creation. That's what India needs".
He also stressed on the involvement and engagement of women entrepreneurs and women workers for the growth of GDP and economy.
"You know, a McKinsey report shows that by 2025, if you engage more women workers, it will have an impact of $12 trillion on the global economy," the USISPF president said.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has recommended telecom companies be allowed test subscribers before the commercial launch of services but their numbers should not exceed 5 per cent of the installed network capacity for a circle. Testing should be completed in 90 days.
PM Narendra Modi launched his two-day campaign for Gujarat Assembly elections 2017 on Sunday and spoke in a host of rallies in his home state driving BJP Gujarat election campaign. He narrated BJPs success stories and took potshot at opposition in his blitzkrieg rallies in the state. Here are the major things that PM Modi mentioned in his rallied throughout the day for Gujarat election polls.
Lakshman Dobariya of Jasdan in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat has seen his realisation drop from Rs 1,200 per 20 kg of groundnut to Rs 600 per 20 kg in the past five years. Although the state government announced a minimum support price (MSP) of Rs 900 per 20 kg right before the Assembly elections in the state, Dobariya is forced to sell his produce at market prices of Rs 500-600 per 20 kg. The queues at government procurement centres are unending.
My costs have risen from Rs 5,000 per bigha to Rs 8,000 while realisations have fallen from Rs 1,000-1,200 per 20 kg to Rs 500-600. This is accentuated by rising pest infestation and an erratic monsoon, says Dobariya.
Dobariyas experience shows how farm distress is brewing discontent among Gujarats rural electorate. The state government has pulled out all the stops to assuage the rural voter in the run-up to a crucial election. Among other things, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government announced a support price of Rs 900 per 20 kg of groundnut (or Rs 4,500 per quintal) last month, after market prices had crashed to Rs 3,250 per quintal.
The state government also unveiled a Rs 500-crore Budget for procuring groundnut. Sagar Rabari, convenor of Jamin Adhikar Andolan Gujarat that works with farmers, says with that kind of Budget, the government will be able to procure 110,000 tonnes of groundnut this season. The output was 2.96 million tonnes last year, and estimates suggest production this year will be 3.2 million tonnes. The majority of Gujarats groundnut farmers will be left in the lurch.
The government cannot procure all the stock because it also has to sell in the open market where prices are low. The roots of the problem lie elsewhere, in the lack of market and support infrastructure, says Rabari. But Chimanbhai Shaparia, Gujarats agriculture minister, says the government has increased the collection centres to 215 this year from last years 87. We are trying to reach where the farmers are, he adds.
Dobariya's woes do not end with low prices for his produce. Add loan repayments and crop insurance, and Dobariyas profits shrink drastically.
Gujarats agriculture grew at an average eight per cent between 2002-03 and 2013-14 and the slowdown since 2014-15 seems has delivered a crushing blow to the farming community. After shrinking by 1 per cent in 2014-15, farm GDP in the state has not recovered much in 2015-16.
Gujarat has faced drought, floods and delayed monsoon in the past five years. Experts say farmers woes have been aggravated by the lack of last-mile connectivity for irrigation with water from the Narmada. This has rendered many regions dependent on the monsoon, especially Saurashtra and north Gujarat.
A report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) on the Gujarat government has pulled it up for allowing Rs 97 crore worth of irrigation projects to remain incomplete for 14 years. Agricultural expert Hemant Shah says the area under Narmada water irrigation grew from 193,683 hectares in 2011-12 to 209,057 hectares in 2012-13 but remained stagnant over the next two years. At 209,057 hectares, this is 11.67 per cent of the target 1.792 million hectares, Shah points out.
But Shaparia does not think lack of irrigation will be a major issue in this election. This year, not only has rainfall been good but the government has ensured procurement at MSP for key crops. We will continue to work towards taking Narmada water into the hinterlands, he adds.
Not just groundnut, price erosion has affected Gujarats cotton crop as well. Five years ago, cotton yielded Rs 1,400 per bale of 170 kg. This has now declined to Rs 800. As a result, farmers have over the years reluctantly shifted to crops that require less water. A V Barad, dean of Junagadh Agricultural University, attributes the change in cropping in Gujarat to the monsoon and availability of Narmada water. After groundnut, Saurashtra was known for its wheat production. In the last five years, wheat has been replaced by spices such as coriander and cumin and pulses such as chana, he points out.
Debt trap
Just before the elections, the government waived interest on loans up to Rs 3 lakh for farmers. But this may not really help small and marginal farmers in the state, who make up for two-thirds of the total and are still dependent on informal channels of credit.
Agricultural advances in Gujarat stood at Rs 76,232 crore in June, according to the State Level Bankers Committee (SLBC), and gross non-performing assets (NPAs) were 5.76 per cent, or Rs 4,390 crore, of these advances. In fact, the gross NPAs have risen from 2.9 per cent of advances in March 2014 to six per cent now. Experts point out that the level of NPAs in Gujarat is lower than many other states, but this is primarily because farmers in the state borrow from moneylenders in years when the crop realisation is weak to repay banks.
An estimated 4.8 million families in Gujarat depend on agriculture for their livelihood, but agriculture accounted for only 16.6 per cent of the states GDP in 2014-15. Capital-intensive industries in the state have not created enough jobs.
The average monthly income of an agricultural household in Gujarat was Rs 7,926 in 2013. While this is obviously lower than in agrarian states like Punjab (Rs 18,059) and Haryana (Rs 14,434), the average daily income of a farmer in Gujarat (Rs 264) is lower than the daily wage of an unskilled farm labourer nationally (Rs 341).
It is not surprising that only 11 per cent of the crop area in the state was insured until 2014-15. The figure was higher for Rajasthan (49.7 per cent) and Madhya Pradesh (45.91 per cent). But there has been improvement according to the SLBC data, around 1 million farmers have been covered by the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana till August 2017. Around one-fourth of the states cultivable area has some crop insurance.
The job ahead is to push up Gujarats agriculture GDP. It has remained in a slow growth trajectory for a couple of years, rising from Rs 93,481 crore in 2011-12 to Rs 99,591 crore in 2014-15.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday attacked the Opposition party Congress for the "absence of internal democracy" during his two-day visit to poll-bound Gujarat. The Prime Minister's remarks came a day before Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi was scheduled to file his nomination papers for election to the post of party president.
The Election Commission today issued directions that no newspaper advertisement be published on December 8 and 9 in poll-bound Gujarat without its prior clearance, a policy the poll panel adopted after controversial ads were issued by the BJP during the 2015 Bihar elections.
The first phase of Gujarat election would be held on December 9 for 89 assembly seats.
In a direction to the Chief Electoral Officer of Gujarat, the commission said that instances of "advertisements of offending and misleading nature" were brought to its notice in the past.
"Such advertisements in the last stage of election vitiate the election. The affected candidates and parties will not have any opportunity of providing clarification or rebuttal in such cases," the poll watchdog said.
It said to ensure that no such instance is repeated and no untoward incident takes place because of any "inflammatory, misleading or hate advertisements", no political party, candidate, organisation or person will bring out ads in the print media on December 8 and 9 unless the contents are pre- certified by Media Certification and Monitoring Committee at the district or state level.
The newspapers, the commission said, should also be informed against bringing out advertisements which were not cleared by the committee.
During Bihar polls, the commission had clamped a ban on publication of two controversial advertisements printed by the BJP in the state.
One of the advertisements alleged that RJD supremo Lalu Prasad and JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar were "snatching the plate of Dalits" by planning to transfer the quota meant for Dalits and EBCs to minorities.
Another advertisement dealt with "vote ki kheti" or vote- bank politics. It claimed that the RJD, the JDU and the Congress leaders were "giving sanctuary" to terrorists to appease a particular community for votes.
Global investment firm KKR today announced that an entity wholly-owned by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) has become a significant minority shareholder in (KIFS), an alternative credit business in India. The NBFC leverages KKR's balance sheet and investment expertise to extend financing solutions to corporations and mid-sized enterprises with long-term capital needs across the country. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
State Bank of India will "redesign" its envelopes used to dispatch tax refund cheques of customers to cover their PAN and contact numbers, after an activist raised that the crucial personal information was visible to anyone which may result in misuse, the bank said.
The move comes nearly 16 months after activist Commodore (retd) Lokesh Batra raised the issue that the window envelopes used by SBI make it easy for someone to glance through permanent account number (PAN) and contact number of the tax payee and misuse it.
Batra wrote to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Urjit Patel, alleging that SBI was violating its directions on 'protection of customer's information' by sending crucial information about customers in "unsecured envelopes".
"...this systemic failures by must be breaching the personal information of very large numbers of People. I had reported this matter at the highest level in SBI..., but as of now no one has even blinked...and breaching of people's personal information is continuing," he wrote to the RBI Governor on November 28.
He said he had been "pleading" with SBI at the highest level for the past 16 months to ensure compliance with RBI directions, but nothing has changed.
After the RBI referred the matter to SBI, the bank responded by saying that "the envelops (window envelops) in which income tax refund orders are being dispatched to various assesses will be redesigned, so that the PAN number is not visible to anyone".
The First Ever International Conference on AYUSH and Wellness Arogya 2017 was inaugurated by the Minister of Commerce and Industry, Shri Suresh Prabhu and Minister of State for AYUSH, Shri Shripad Yesso Naik in New Delhi today. The three day exhibition cum conference is being held at Vigyan Bhawan from 4th to 7th December, 2017. Arogya 2017 has been jointly organized by Ministry of AYUSH and Ministry of Commerce and Industry of Government of India including Pharmexcil in partnership with FICCI to showcase the strength and scientific valuation of traditional system of medicine. Nearly 1500 delegates from India and 60 countries are participating in Arogya 2017. .
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Addressing the delegates, the Commerce and Industry Minister, Shri Suresh Prabhu said that Arogya 2017 is the first of its kind International Conference which has been organized in India. Through Arogya 2017, we have decided to share the traditional medicine knowledge of India with humanity across the world, the Minister explained. India, he said, however is not the only country with traditional medicine knowledge. Through this conference we also hope to learn from participants from other countries of the world and the Government of India will be very happy to work with all the countries in this sector, he said. .
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Minister of State for AYUSH, Shri Shripad Yesso Naik said that Ministry of AYUSH is trying to achieve comprehensive integration of AYUSH in the health services. Through the Ministry of AYUSH, we are not only promoting developmental activities of traditional medicine at National level but also looking at more international cooperation and collaboration opportunities at bilateral, multi lateral, regional and global levels. In this direction, declaration of 21st June as International Day of Yoga by the United Nations has generated global interest for yoga as well as lot of cooperation opportunities for exchange of Yoga information, expertise and qualified, certified and accredited trainers of Yoga. Similarly, through our collaboration agreement with WHO we intend to develop AYUSH technical guidelines and documents for the benefit of member countries, the Minister added. Shri Shripad Naik said that India has signed MoUs with some country Governments and also with International Universities for fostering cooperation in the area. We should build up the institutional mechanisms and the health systems with the evidence-based approaches, shared practical experiences and best practices of traditional medical systems, he added. .
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Secretary AYUSH, Vaidya Rajesh Kotecha said that India is perhaps the only country in the world with a separate ministry of traditional medicine which reflects governments commitment towards development of AYUSH system of medicines. We hope to increase the size of AYUSH sector three fold over the next five years including products and services, the AYUSH Secretary said. It is for this reason that the Government is following a multi prong strategy including signing of MoUs and agreements with large number of countries, collaborative research and academic activities and offering international scholarship in AYUSH among others. .
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DG Pharmxcil, Mr. Udaya Bhaskar; Secretary General FICCI, Dr. Sanjaya Baru; Deputy Secretary General FICCI, Mr. Vinay Mathur; DG Gyan Bharti, A. Jaykumar; AYUSH Expert in WHO, Dr. G Geeta Krishnan; MD Sri Sri Tattva, Shri Arvind Varchaswi also highlighted the steps taken by India in promoting the AYUSH Sector at home and abroad. .
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Aroyga 2017 is a comprehensive exhibition cum conference on Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, Unani, Siddhha, Sowa Rigpa, Homoeopathy and wellness. More than 250 manufacturers of alternative medicine are showcasing their products and services at International Arogya 2017. The mega event has brought key stakeholders of AYUSH sector together under one roof to showcase latest research and developments in alternative medicine systems of India and boost exports of AYUSH products. .
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A White Paper "AYUSH for the World" by Frost & Sullivan was launched at the event to offer a roadmap for AYUSH regulations and registration in ASEAN and BIMSTEC countries. It notes that India is the second largest exporter of Ayurvedic and alternate medicine to the world and has a potential to generate 3 million job opportunities. The Indian herbal market is valued at around Rs 5,000 crore currently, with an annual growth rate of 14%. .
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Twenty-two Sarpanchs of Kishwar district of Jammu & Kashmir visited Delhi as part of a Capacity Building Tour organised by the Army. During their two days' visit to Delhi, the Sarpanchs visited the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, PUSA where they were introduced to the latest developments in the field of agriculture. They were also introduced to techniques of polyfarming and Bio gas plants implementation by Dr Nafees Ahmed, officiating Head, CATAT, IARI..
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These 22 Sarpanchs who are farmers by profession and are mostly senior citizens, were also provided an opportunity to get insight into the rich heritage of the country through visits to India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhawan, Parliament House, Jamia Masjid and Red Fort..
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A delegation of journalists from Tripura representing the "Forum for Protection of Journalists" today called on Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh. The Journalists called for a high-level inquiry against violence and oppression on the journalists of the State. The delegation also cited the example of recent daylight killing of journalist Sudip Datta Bhowmik and the killing of another young television journalist Santanu Bhowmik two months earlier. .
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Dr. Jitendra Singh received a memorandum from the journalists and gave a patient hearing to them. .
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The Arab League chief has said a decision by US President Donald Trump to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital would boost fanaticism and violence, and not serve the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Trump's son-in-law and Middle East peace envoy Jared Kushner told the Saban Forum on Sunday that the President is close to a decision on whether to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
"It is unfortunate that some are insisting on carrying out this step without any regard to the dangers it carries to the stability of the Middle East and the whole world," Ahmed Abul Gheit, head of the Arab League, told reporters in Cairo.
Abul Gheit said the Arab League is closely following the issue and is in contact with the Palestinian authorities and Arab states to coordinate the Arab position if Trump takes the step.
Trump must decide on Monday whether to sign a legal waiver that would delay plans to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for another six months.
Every US President has done this since 1995, judging the time not ripe for such a move, and Trump is expected to begrudgingly do so for a second time this week.
But, according to diplomats and observers, he is also now expected to announce in a speech on Wednesday that he supports Israel's claim on Jerusalem as its capital.
Palestinian leaders are lobbying desperately against such a move, fearing it could provoke such fury in the Arab world it could sink peace hopes for a generation.
"Nothing justifies this act... it will not serve peace or stability, instead it will nourish fanaticism and violence," said Abul Gheit.
The move would "benefit only one side, which is the anti-peace Israeli government," he told reporters.
Israel occupied east Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967. It later annexed east Jerusalem in a move never recognised by the community.
The Palestinians see the eastern sector as the capital of their future state.
The traditional United States position is that the status of Jerusalem must be negotiated between the two sides.
Australian lawmaker Tim Wilson on Monday popped the question to his long-term partner Ryan Bolger on the floor of Parliament, during a debate to legalise same-sex marriage in the country.
The proposal, which came shortly after the same-sex marriage bill was introduced to the Lower House of Parliament, was greeted with applause from all sides of and the public gallery.
Addressing the Parliament in favour of the same-sex marriage bill, Wilson turned to thank Bolger, who was sitting with marriage equality advocates in the public gallery, for his support.
"There's only one thing left to do," he said, choking up slightly. Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?", The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Wilson as saying.
And the answer came back fast and loud as Bolger responded with a clear "yes".
Earlier in his speech, Wilson recalled when he had first presented Bolger with the rings that the pair has worn on their left hands for seven years.
"I said, 'I don't know what this ring represents, but will you take it as a sign of my commitment'. Thankfully the answer was yes," he said.
Wilson has been engaged to the school teacher for nine years and reaffirmed his proposal during a speech on the issue, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported.
According to ABC, the same-sex marriage legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives on Monday and is expected to pass easily after the debate on proposed religious protection amendments.
The bill was introduced by Liberal MP Warren Entsch, a long-time advocate for same-sex marriage.
Canada will continue to explore a free trade agreement with China, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Monday, as it weighs its options after the United States threatened to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Speaking after a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, Trudeau said if "done properly", such an agreement would benefit both countries and strengthen the middle class.
"It's an opportunity that makes sense for Canadian businesses," he said at the start of a five-day trip to China. "Canada is and always has been a trading nation. But the landscape of trade is shifting and we need to adjust to it."
Li said China remained open to exploring a free trade deal with Canada as part of joint efforts to safeguard world trade liberalisation and advance globalisation.
"We have an open attitude toward the process of negotiations, and an open attitude towards their contents," Li said.
Canada is considering whether to launch talks on a free trade deal with China, which wants a trade pact similar to the ones it has with Australia and New Zealand.
But Trudeau, aware of domestic unease at the idea, is moving slowly. Although polls consistently show Canadians are split over the merits of a trade deal, Canada needs to diversify exports to offset the possible damage done if the United States pulls out of NAFTA.
Trudeau's visit, which began on Sunday, comes as planemaker Bombardier Inc is eager to win a breakthrough order from Chinese carriers for its CSeries jet, whose fuselage is made in China.
But the chance of sealing such deals has become more cloudy after Canada encouraged Bombardier to sell a controlling stake in the CSeries programme to Airbus rather than a Chinese firm.
"On the agricultural front, I'm pleased to announce the Canadian beef and pork will have greater access to the Chinese market," Trudeau said, without elaborating.
China has been loosening restrictions on beef imports this year to feed the appetite of the country's growing middle class for more Western food.
Trudeau said he also agreed with Li a joint statement that affirms a commitment to "mitigating the global threat of climate change" and lays out a plan for closer collaboration.
Earlier on Monday, Trudeau promoted Chinese tourism to Canada at an event held at the headquarters of China's Twitter-like online media company, Sina Weibo.
Canada has said it will co-host a January meeting with the United States of up to 16 foreign ministers in Vancouver to produce "better ideas" to ease tensions over North Korea's nuclear and ballistic tests.
In late November, North Korea tested its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile yet, putting the continental United States within range and increasing pressure on US President Donald Trump to deal with the nuclear-armed nation.
Li said he discussed and regional issues with Trudeau, but did not elaborate.
The Chinese company, iFlyTek, uses sophisticated AI to power image and voice recognition systems that can help doctors with their diagnoses, aid teachers in grading tests and let drivers control their cars with their voices
With every new North Korean missile such as the one launched on Tuesday November 28 or nuclear test, all eyes are on China. Like previous American presidents, Donald Trump believes that the road to a diplomatic solution on North Korea runs through Beijing. He holds the view that, of any country, China has the most leverage over North Korea and therefore could quickly and easily solve the problem with the Kim Jung-un regime but is just not willing to do so.
Representatives from Swedish today met Commerce & Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu here, as the company looks to ramp up its presence in India.
However, IKEA has not sought any relaxation in local sourcing norms from the Union Government, and is confident that by 2022, 30 per cent of the products it sells in India will be sourced locally.
"We are positive about the change that happened over a year ago (on local sourcing norms) when it moved from first investment/first store opening to five years of first store opening," Patrik Antoni, Deputy Country Manager, IKEA India, told PTI after meeting the minister.
The company is set to open its flagship store in India by next year, and is in talks with Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra for sourcing wood for furniture.
The Swedish company earlier said it will recruit about 800 people for the store which will come up in Hyderabad.
Italian tax police have visited the offices of fashion company Gucci for fiscal checks as part of an investigation by Milan prosecutors into suspected tax evasion, a senior source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Saturday.
"Gucci confirms that it is providing its full cooperation to the respective authorities and is confident about the correctness and transparency of its operations," Gucci said in an e-mailed statement in response to a report about the tax police audit published by Italian daily La Stampa on Saturday.
The source with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the checks were carried out this week at Gucci's Milan offices and Florence headquarters.
The source said the Milan prosecutors suspected Gucci, which is part of French luxury group Kering, may have paid taxes on profits generated by sales in Italy in another country with a more favourable tax regime. The source did not give more details.
Gucci, the biggest contributor to Kering's profits and revenues, has enjoyed a revival in recent years, and in the third quarter of 2017 reported a 49.4 per cent rise in sales on a like-for-like basis - excluding currency swings.
Contacted by Reuters, a spokeswoman for Kering said the group had no further comment.
The stage was set for high drama when the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) met for its 173rd meeting at Vienna in Austria last week, with the whole world, including crude oil consumers like India, closely tracking the outcome.
Ireland has made "significant progress" in talks with Britain on the future of the Northern Irish border, but the sides are "not there yet", a spokesman for Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said on Monday.
On Nov. 29, President Trump retweeted a series of videos that purported to depict violence committed by Muslims. They had originated from the account of a far-right British ultranationalist who had been convicted for harassing a Muslim. The backlash was swift, with British Prime Minister Theresa May saying the President is wrong to have done this.
US Defence Secretary James Mattis arrived in Pakistan on Monday for his first visit to the country since taking charge at the Pentagon.
Mattis was received by officials from the Defence Ministry, Foreign Ministry and the US Embassy upon his arrival, a Foreign Office statement said.
During his visit, Mattis is expected to hold meetings with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Army Chief Gen Qamar Jawed Bajwa.
A day earlier, Mattis had told reporters that during his time in Islamabad he would look for "common ground" between America and Washington.
Mattis had also said that his discussions with the leadership in Islamabad will also focus on US President Donald Trump's South Asia policy which was announced in September.
The strategy seeks Pakistan's support to defeat the Taliban as Washington believes that only a defeat will force them to reconcile with the Afghan government.
Soon after the announcement, Pakistan had expressed its reservations about some of the policy decisions made in the strategy and totally rejected the misperception of not taking action against all terrorist groups.
"The US remains committed to a pragmatic relationship that expands cooperation on shared interests," the US secretary had said on Sunday while reinforcing President Trump's call for action against alleged safe havens.
CVS Health said on Sunday that it had agreed to buy Aetna for about $69 billion in a deal that would combine the drugstore giant with one of the biggest health insurers in the United States and has the potential to reshape the nations health care industry.
The United States has announced that it will not participate in the United Nations' Global Compact on Migration as it does not meet the policies and principles of the Trump administration.
US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said he intends to work hard to find common ground with Pakistan in the fight against terrorism, which is necessary to restore the level of stability in South Asia to allow economic development.
Ahead of his visit to Islamabad, Mattis said he wants to work with Pakistan, listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective, to address the problems.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait and Pakistan, since taking over the charge of the Pentagon.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
Saeed is still roaming free, despite tough warning from the Trump Administration.
"The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," Mattis told reporters travelling with him on his way to Pakistan from Egypt.
Mattis is the first top US official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the new South Asia Strategy that was announced by President Donald Trump on August 21.
"We know we have some common ground. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their troops killed and wounded by terrorists. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their innocent people murdered and wounded by terrorists, so we know that there is common ground".
Similarly, he said, there is common ground between Afghanistan and Pakistan, because there are terrorist groups that try to move back and forth, that do move back and forth in order to live in one and attack in the other, that sort of thing.
"So we know there's common ground; it's how much more common ground can we find by listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective," Mattis said.
"But at the same time, as the (Pakistan Army Chief) General (Qamar Javed Bajwa) has said, he wants no havens for terrorists anywhere, so we will work together and we'll find that common ground, if we have the will to.
"And then we'll work on how we address the problems where we can work together," the Defense Secretary said.
Responding to a question, he said he would not characterise everything over the past 16 years as failures.
"There is clearly an abundance of areas where we have to double down, and I am optimistic at this point that because of what our adversaries, our mutual enemies are doing, that we can find ways to work together," he said.
Mattis said both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistan military, the NATO-led militaries of 39 nations have all been in fights here. "We've got to find a way to work together".
He said there is "always an urgency to something" when 39 nations plus Afghanistan have their troops in the midst of a long war, where causalities are being taken.
"These are 39 of the most economically powerful, generally speaking, most long-term democratic institutions in the world. These are powerful nations morally, economically and diplomatically, and certainly militarily," he said.
Mattis said that it was essential in South Asia that all work together to restore the level of stability that allows for the economy to build.
"I mean, can you imagine a border between Pakistan and India where economic trade is not ongoing to the benefit of people on both sides of that border. We can not only imagine it; it's a reality right now," Mattis said.
So, the US Defence Secretary said that we have got to work together on this, and there's a sense of urgency about that.
"There's people who are living below the poverty line in both those countries. So as you look at this problem, if you'll expand the problem you can understand the sense of urgency to move beyond violence and get back to the normal order of things," he said.
Mattis is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and General Bajwa.
"General Bajwa is a mature officer with a deep background in not just military matters, but South Asia security issues, and we have got to find a way to move beyond this constant fighting that's characterised the area," he said.
(formerly Financial Technologies) was locked in lower circuit of 5% at Rs 131, down 7% from intra-day high on the BSE, after the company said the Hon'ble Bombay High Court has dismissed its writ petition on the National Spot Exchange Limited (NSEL) merger.
India is planning its own standards for . Known as Indian responsible mineral sourcing guidelines, these are being worked out on the lines of rules set out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
was up 5% to Rs 729 on the BSE in early noon deals after media report suggested that the companys pesticide project in Gujarat got the green panel nod.
Shares of two pharmaceutical companies Lupin (Rs 810) and Glenmark Pharmaceuticals (Rs 550) hit their respective 52-week lows on the BSE in intra-day trade in an otherwise firm market.
A blast in Nepal's Kathmandu left a candidate and 11 others injured on Monday, the last day of election campaigning for the forthcoming phase of the parliamentary and the provincial council poll.
Gagan Thapa, a Nepali Congress Candidate, was attacked during his campaign and public interaction walk in Chapali, the outskirts of Kathmandu.
Two of the injured people are said to be in critical condition and are undergoing treatment at the Tribhuwan University Teaching Hospital (TUTH).
The police is yet to identify the group behind it as well as the technique and the bomb used in the blast.
The Nepali Congress released a statement condemning the attack and declaring it to be against the democratic norms and values. It claimed the attack to be of an intention of killing the candidate.
"The attack was intended to kill the Nepali Congress leader, candidate and the cadres and we loath this sort of hideous act and we condemn this heinous act," read the statement.
As many as 15 million Nepalis are eligible to vote in the historic elections which are going to be the first one since the 10-year-long civil war that ended in 2006.
While the first round of the first poll under the new constitution adopted in 2015 took place on November 26, the second one is due on December 7.
Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, who also holds the charge of the home minster, has been criticised lately for not being able to appoint a new home minister and putting the nation's internal security at stake after the cabinet reshuffle about a month ago. He himself was targetted in a bomb attack during his election campaign in the Dang district.
Local people, however, seem to be unaffacted by such attacks and excited for the elections.
While talking to ANI, Bhupalman Karmacharya, a local said, "This sort of act is nothing but only an attempt to scare people. We will definitely go and cast our vote and there is no doubt about it."
The splinter group of Maoist Centre is under the suspection of being behind this attack but the base for the assumptions is yet to be cleared.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Nine people including four with militancy background have been arrested by the Tripura Police in connection with the kidnapping of four Tripura Gramin Bank (TGB) officials, who returned home on December 1-a week after their abduction.
The police have also recovered about Rs. 50 lakh from them.
Tripura Director General of Police A K Sukla, on Sunday, said, "Yesterday, we conducted raids in three districts, Gomati, Khowai and West district and apprehended nine people involved with this incident.
"Initially in the morning we recovered a sum of Rs 1, 37,870 from two places but after interrogation of the arrested miscreants, later in the evening we again recovered Rs. 47,50,000," he said.
All those arrested were produced in the court on Saturday.
Sukla informed that they were yet to establish links between those arrested and the two banned militant organisations - All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF) and Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT).
He added that along with combing operation, helicopters had also been used for the search operations.
TGB's Branch Manager Tanumoy Bhattacharjee, 30, Sujit Chandra Dey, 28, Raktim Bhowmik, 31, and Subrata Debbarma, 32, were abducted on November 24 while they were returning on their two vehicles.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
It seems like a miracle, as a team of researchers has discovered a lost 3,000-year-old castle Turkey's Lake Van.
According to archaeologists from the Van Yuzuncu Yil University, the ruins are thought to be those of a fortress built by the Uratu civilization, which flourished in the Iron Age between the 9th and 6th centuries BC.
Tahsin Ceylan, underwater videographer and head of the diving team, explained that other divers and archaeologists familiar with the lake advised the team they were unlikely to find much in the water, reports the Independent.
"There was a rumour that there might be something under the water, but most archaeologists and museum officials told us that we won't find anything," he added.
But they eventually found that the remarkable ruins are part of an extensive site which stretches roughly a kilometre.
Despite being underwater for centuries, the height of the visible sections of the fortress's remaining walls range between 10 and 13 feet high, the team explained.
Mr Ceylan told a Turkish newspaper that "many civilizations and people had settled around Lake Van. They named the lake the 'upper sea' and believed it had many mysterious things.
"With this belief in mind, we are working to reveal the lake's secrets," Mr Ceylan added that Lake Van had a history of around 600,000 years.
Archaeologists will come here to examine the castle's history and provide information on it, he noted.
Urartu, also known as the Kingdom of Van, was an ancient nation that spanned parts of modern day Turkey, Armenia and Iran.
Lake Van is thought to have been an important focus for the civilisation.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Monday urged Dasab Networks to scale up its present involvement in Andhra Pradesh.
During his meeting with Nam Min-woo, Chairman of Dasan Networks, Naidu said, "In Andhra Pradesh, we are connecting every home with FibreNet connection."
Dasan is a global network solution provider that develops and manufactures network equipment for fixed and mobile broadband services.
The Chief Minister urged him to scale up Dasan Networks' present involvement in Andhra Pradesh.
Andhra Pradesh has provided water, power and food security to the people, he said.
Min-woo said that they plan to soon start a manufacturing unit in India, and are looking for opportunities.
The Chief Minister invited him to come to Andhra Pradesh, for the Investors' Summit to be held in Visakhapatnam.
Earlier, he apprised South Korean business leaders of investment opportunities in the state during his first meeting with ancillary industries of Kia Motors here.
Naidu, who reached here on Monday morning on a three-day visit, said that there are bright opportunities for investments in India and Andhra Pradesh.
"Andhra Pradesh has good and growing infrastructure, well-maintained law and order and abundance of quality human resources".
Expressing that he is impressed with Korea's progress against all odds, the Chief Minister invited them to bring more investors to the state, for the establishment of a South Korea City.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
If the United States recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel then the consequences will be "hazardous", warned the Arab League in a statement released on Sunday.
The statement comes after U.S. media reported that President Donald Trump may recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital on Wednesday.
The league, headquartered here, said such move would further fuel instability in the Middle East, which is already battling with numerous conflicts.
"If implemented, it would mark a change in Washington's historical stance that sees the holy city as an occupied Palestinian city and an integral part of the occupied Palestinian lands," Arab League Assistant Secretary General Saeed Abu-Ali said in the statement.
While campaigning for the top post last year, Trump had announced that if elected, he would move the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognise the latter as the capital of Israel.
Jerusalem, considered holy by Jews, Muslims and Christians, is a disputed holy city.
Palestine considers it as the capital of their future state while the international community does not recognise Israel's claim on the whole city.
The League of Arab States, or Arab League, has 22 members. Palestine, which the League regards as an independent state, is too a member state. The league strives to strengthen the brotherhood among the member states to achieve a common goal.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
To spread awareness, Alzheimer's and Related Disorders Society of India (ARDSI), Mumbai Chapter organised "Awarathon Mumbai 2017" on Sunday at Worli Sea face, which saw participation from all strata of society, medical practitioners, caregiver, corporate people, NGO, volunteers.
Currently, more than 41 lakh Indians suffer from dementia, the most common being Alzheimer's Disease, which causes gradual decrease in ability to remember and think clearly eventually affecting a person's daily functioning. This 3-km Awarathon was organised to create more public awareness.
"This overwhelming response of participants to our Awarathon just shows that we are a sensitive society concerned about elders and senior citizens. ARDSI Mumbai Chapter, is striving to make our city of Mumbai a 'dementia-friendly city', with more awareness. We have received encouragement from Corporates and philanthropists to be a part of it. This event was possible only with the encouragement and support of Alkem Laboratories Limited, Police and Traffic Departments, BMC and of course all walkers present," said the Secretary of the ARDSI Mumbai Chapter.
This event was supported by Alkem Laboratories Ltd, which runs a large social media community 'Dementia and Alzheimer's Community of India' and has launched an awareness video that is currently catching a lot of eyeballs.
An official of Alkem Laboratories Ltd. said, "We are happy to partner with ARDSI, Mumbai Chapter and supporting their initiatives for this social cause as there is a real need to spread awareness and increase screening of Dementia. Due to social stigma, lack of awareness and that people often confuse forgetfulness associated as part of normal aging. Our social media initiative is a step ahead to spread awareness so that people can recognise symptoms early and avail of services of specialised Dementia DayCare Centre to help families lessen the onus of caring in their daily lives. Their counselling and support sessions help tremendously.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An Army jawan was injured on Monday in an ongoing encounter with terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir's Qazigund.
Earlier, there were reports of terrorists attacking an army convoy that was heading towards Srinagar.
The area has been reportedly cordoned off by the security forces.
Earlier on November 30, the security forces killed four terrorists in two separate encounters in Budgam and Sopore districts of Jammu and Kashmir.
Further details are awaited.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bangladesh has called for a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to discuss the human rights issue of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Recently, Bangladesh had sent a notice along with Saudi Arabia to the UNHRC in this regard, Dhaka Tribune has reported.
Their notice has received support of 33 of the 47 member states, and 40 other non-UNHRC nations.
The move comes just over a week after Sheikh Hasina-led government signed a bilateral agreement with Myanmar on Rohingya repatriation.
According to the national daily, Bangladesh also wants to discuss the human rights condition of other minorities living in Myanmar's Rakhine state with the UNHCR members.
Since the military action began in Rakhine in August, after some militants attacked security forces' post, over 6 lakh Rohingyas have fled the state to neighbouring countries, especially to Bangladesh.
As of now, 6.25 lakh refugees have taken shelter in the country.
According to Myanmar's 1982 Citizenship Act, Rohingyas are not considered naturalised citizens and, repeatedly, have been at the receiving end of the ethnic clashes in the country.
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A bomb, planted near a hotel where Nepal Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba has been staying for an election campaign in the Far Western region, was defused on Monday by a bomb disposal squad of the national army.
Kathmandu Post quoted the police, as saying, that the bomb was planted at a bridge, some 400 metres away from Hotel Devotee in Dhangadhi.
According to the report, the bomb was detected by a sniffer dog - during a search operation.
The security has been beefed up in Dhangadhi after the discovery of the bomb.
Leaders of various political parties are holding exhaustive election rallies and meetings in favour of their party in different parts of the country as the campaigning for second and final phase of parliament and provincial elections scheduled for December 7 is in full swing.
A 65 per cent voter turnout was recorded in the first phase of the elections.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Canada signed three trade agreements with China on Monday, as visiting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang formalised the memorandum of understanding (MoU) at a ceremony here.
The two sides signed an action plan on energy cooperation and two MoUs in food sector, according to media reports.
The signing of agreements comes after the two sides, in September last year, when Li was on an official visit to Canada, decided to double their bilateral commerce by 2025.
Trudeau, who is on a five-day (December 3-7) visit to the Asian economic giant, is also scheduled to meet top government and business leaders of the country.
Canada's pivot to other economic powerhouses comes following tough trade negotiations with the United States, which is Ottawa's major commerce partner and under President Donald Trump's administration becoming protectionist.
This is Trudeau's second visit to China since he assumed office in 2015.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In the wake of recent reports on Aadhaar data breach by various sources, results from a survey revealed that a majority of the respondents were uncomfortable in using their Aadhaar accounts to access e-commerce accounts or digital wallets.
In the recent past, the government has laid a lot of emphasis on consumers to link their Aadhaar with all important documents like PAN, bank account, mobile number, insurance policies and so on. There have also been reports that some e-commerce sites have been asking consumers to link their website accounts with Aadhaar when they are trying to track a lost package. Many other internet-based businesses like payment wallets have also mandated Aadhaar for the consumers to avail their services.
Internet-based companies like AirBnb, Uber and Ola have also been asking the user to upload a copy of their Aadhaar while registering on the site as a safety measure, so that their true identity could be ascertained.
In this regard, a survey was conducted by LocalCircles on around 20,000 people, broadly on the subject of using Aadhaar details on the aforementioned platforms.
The first poll asked if the citizens would feel comfortable in linking their Aadhaar with their e-commerce site accounts. 61 percent said they would not be comfortable while 30 percent said they were fine with it.
When asked if they would be comfortable in linking Aadhaar with their payment wallet accounts, 49 percent refused, while 33 percent agreed, and 18 percent were neutral.
A related poll asked citizens if there should be a financial penalty for banks, telecom providers or any other organisations that compromise their Aadhaar, bank or call/data transaction details, to which 94 percent replied in an affirmative. They said that in case of data leakage, the respective bank or telecom operator should be severely penalised to ensure that they keep the data security measure to the optimum levels.
Recently, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) while responding to some media reports which alleged that "210 Government sites made Aadhaar info public" assured that the Aadhaar data was fully safe and secure, and there has never been a breach or data leak at the UIDAI.
The UIDAI in a notification said the data on these mentioned websites was placed in a public domain as a measure of proactive disclosure under Right to Information (RTI) Act by government and institutional websites, which included the beneficiaries' name, address, bank account, and other details, which also included the Aadhaar number and were collected from the third party/users for various welfare schemes.
Meanwhile, LocalCircles is submitting this report to UIDAI and other stake holders, so that appropriate action could be taken, and cases of data leakage could be minimised.
The woman constable, who had filed a plea in the Bombay High Court seeking permission to undergo sex reassignment surgery, on Monday underwent a medical test at Sir JJ Hospital in Mumbai.
In her plea, the constable had also sought the court's permission to continue to work with the police force after changing her sex.
Earlier, she was denied permission by police officials to continue working after the surgery.
The cop, who has been serving the police force since 2010, took the decision to change her gender after she felt connected more with the masculine gender due to what she describes as hormonal imbalances.
Her lawyer claims that on diagnosis and medical consultation at the hospital in Mumbai, she was told that her hormonal imbalances were incurable and thus, she was adviced to undergo plastic surgery or sexual reassignment.
The lawyer appealed to the authorities to allow her to undergo the surgery saying his client's human rights were at stake.
He says he was seeking necessary orders as per the Maharashtra Police Rules ensuring the cop right to equality and life.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Indian Navy on Sunday continued the search and rescue operations for the fourth day over Southeast Arabian Sea and Lakshadweep and Minicoy (L&M) Islands in the aftermath of cyclonic storm Ockhi.
Ten naval ships, including capital ships like Chennai and Kolkata, were deployed over Southeast Arabian Sea and L&M islands.
In addition, eight aircrafts including long range maritime reconnaissance aircraft P8I were deployed throughout the day.
Total 55 persons were rescued on Sunday taking the total rescued persons to 145.
INS Kalpeni rescued fishing vessel (FV) Gracias with thirteen survivours and handed them over to the Kollam district collector.
INS Sharda rescued nine persons from FV Albus at Kavaratti. The ship then continued the rescue operations and saved another 12 persons from FV Infant Jesus off Kavaratti.
INS Chennai rescued 12 persons from FV Lord of Ocean north of Kavaratti and eight more persons from FV Jahova Hosseno off Chetlet island.
Jahovah vessel belonging to L&M islands had been missing for three days and was found after persistent search operations by naval ships. All 20 personnel are being escorted to safety to Kavaratti Island.
INS Shardul has disembarked all HADR material at Minicoy. The ship is equipped with Diving team and a Chetak for carrying out additional SAR operations.
INS Kolkata rescued nine persons from FV Akash 20 miles off Kapeni and personnel were brought to safety to Kavratti by naval Sea King helicopter.
One body was recovered by INS Kalpeni off Kollam and the same was handed over to civil authorities at Kollam by naval Sea King helicopter.
Three survivours rescued by Coast Guard Ship Samar have been air lifted to Kochi by Sea King B Indian Naval ships Chennai, Trikand and Kolkata are stationed around the islands with HADR materials.
The ships are equipped with desalination plants and will be able to provide the islands fresh water as and when required.
The total relief material carried would sustain approximately 5,000 persons for over a period of seven days.
Additionally, all naval units in the vicinity of L&M have been directed to provide fresh water in consultation with local administration.
All other ships at the disposal of the Indian Navy are continuing the Search and Rescue operations along the Kerala coast and around the L&M Islands in a systematic and planned manner to provide immediate aid to any person, vessel or boat in distress.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Amid the havoc caused by cyclone Ockhi, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday said that she will not lose hope and will leave no stone unturned in finding the fishermen stranded in the sea.
"I will not lose hope even for a minute, because if the boats, which went out 15 days back, can come back with the fishermen alive, then we will make every attempt to bring everyone back," Sitharaman told reporters here.
The Defence Minister further informed that 11 fishermen are also accompanying the Navy in the search operations.
"Fishermen were asking if they could join the search operations, and I agreed. Now 11 of them are already in search helicopters, so with the cooperation of fishermen, we will continue our search and rescue teams," she said.
Giving a rundown of the operation carried out by the Indian Navy, the Defence Minister said that she is duly updated every hour by the officers in the navy and the coast guard about the whereabouts of those found.
"I have spoken to the Chief Minister of Maharashtra to ensure that those boats, which have reached there, be given safe care and share of food, clothing and everything. When the seas are calmer, they can come back," Sitharaman added.
The Defence Minister was in the city to meet the families of fishermen affected by .
At the onset of the severe cyclone that jolted the southern part of the country, several naval ships were deployed for rescue operations.
Sitharaman, on Friday, had confirmed that six warships and two coast guard ships were deployed along with additional air effort.
Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday met the fishermen families affected by cyclone Ockhi at Vizhinjam, Thiruvananthapuram.
The Defence Minister assured them that the search and rescue operations are being conducted with full force.
"The search and rescue operations by the Indian Navy, Coastguard and Air Force will continue with full vigour," she said.
Sitharaman reached Kanyakumari on Sunday to take stock of the situation in the wake of the cyclonic storm, which has tormented the coastal areas of Tamil Nadu and Kerala and now Lakshadweep islands.
She informed that, so far, 357 fishermen, including 71 from Tamil Nadu, who had been stranded in sea due to Cyclone Ockhi, have been rescued.
Earlier on November 2, the Tamil Nadu authorities stated that the total number of deaths caused due to cyclone Ockhi has reached 19.
The state department also said that at least 690 people have been rescued so far, while 96 were still missing.
It further stated that 63 people have been hospitalized, while 74 houses have been fully damaged and 1,122 houses have been partially damaged.
The deadly cyclone, which has claimed many lives, lashed the coastal areas of Tamil Nadu and Kerala on Saturday with torrential rainfall and gusty winds.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Delhi High Court on Monday dismissed the interim plea of sidelined All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) T T V Dinakaran to get 'hat' symbol allotted for R K Nagar bypolls.
The High Court has left the decision in the hands of Returning Officer of the Election Commission (EC) to allot the symbol to Dinakaran as an independent candidate for the bypolls.
The court will hear the main plea filed by jailed AIADMK leader V K Sasikala and Dinakran challenging the Election Commission's decision to grant two leaves symbol to EPS faction of the party on February 12.
On November 30, Dinakaran approached the Delhi High Court challenging two leaves symbol order of the Election Commission.
Earlier in November, the election watchdog had ruled that the party's faction led by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister E Palanisamy and his deputy O Panneerselvam (EPS-OPS) would be entitled to use the name of the party and its reserved symbol, holding that it enjoyed majority in the party's legislative and organisational wings.
Following the ruling, Dinakaran, while addressing party workers, said, "I will win in R K Nagar by-election and take back 'two leaves' symbol."
Backed by her aunt Sasikala, Dinakaran had also laid claim over the symbol after a power tussle ensued in the party following the death of Jayalalithaa.
Dinakaran is also facing a two leaves symbol bribery case.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Global Network for entrepreneurs was launched during the Global Entrepreneurship Summit GES 2017 in Hyderabad aiming at providing a one-stop solution for assisting start-ups and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to set their feet.
With an aim to accelerate the entrepreneurial journey, the Global Network for Entrepreneurs' is unique in a two-fold manner. Firstly, its support mechanism covers the different stages of entrepreneurship from early growth to growth stage entrepreneurs to SMEs and secondly, it has customised offerings for various levels of the entrepreneurial journey.
This is a flagship initiative of the Wadhwani Foundation which has been known for its initiatives for job creation through entrepreneurship and skill development. This will not only act as a fulcrum to inculcate a culture of entrepreneurship at a time when the best and the brightest are avidly looking at entrepreneurship as their first and preferred career choice, but will also provide the necessary knowledge and networking resources to the start-up ecosystem.
Speaking during the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, Dr Ajay Kela, President and CEO, Wadhwani Foundation said, "We are very excited to roll-out the Wadhwani Global Network for Entrepreneurs. This is a one-stop shop for the entrepreneur looking to grow locally and globally providing all necessary resources, guidance, facilitated technology-led learning and networking opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs and startups to succeed, where the failure rates are abnormally high."
"This is a first-in-world initiative with global operations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. I foresee this as playing a major role in fulfilling the Wadhwani Foundation's efforts towards high-value job creation, globally," he added.
The 'Global Network for Entrepreneurs' is supporting aspiring entrepreneurs, early and growth stage entrepreneurs, curated mentors, advisors and consultants, trusted service providers and investors through the mobile apps and a dedicated site www.wfnen.org.
Wadhwani Foundation has nurtured entrepreneurship in colleges in India for 14 years through student courses and launched hundreds of entrepreneurship clubs in campuses. This programme inspires students and student outliers by providing facilitated learning through www.wfnen.org and Learn wise platform.
From short videos, blogs to events, webinars, bootcamps and case studies, there's plenty for student entrepreneurs keen on arming themselves with formidable skills required for business success.
The long-term goals to help establish vibrant entrepreneur ecosystems in 100 cities around the world to alleviate the global youth unemployment problem.
Wadhwani Foundation was founded in 2000 by Dr RomeshWadhwani with the primary mission of accelerating economic development in emerging economies through large-scale job creation. The Foundation is present in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, East Africa and Latin America operating in association with governments, corporates, mentors, investors and educational institutes.
The Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) inspires, educates, and supports student entrepreneurs, startups, and SMEs for creating high-value jobs. NEN has also ventured into creating city-based entrepreneurial ecosystems consisting of mentors, investors, and incubators supporting startups and SMEs.
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India and Germany on Monday signed a Government to Government Umbrella Agreement concerning Financial Cooperation in 2016 (II) under the Indo-German Development Cooperation.
With this in place, an amount of up to EUR 200 million will be formalised for financial cooperation in the form of loan for the project 'Climate Friendly Urban Mobility III' and EUR 11 million for accompanying measures in the form of grant for four projects.
The agreement was signed by H.E. Dr. Martin Ney, Ambassador on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany, and S. Selvakumar, Joint Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance on behalf of India.
Part I of the agreement had already been signed in May this year.
The following agreements were also signed, in addition to the above:
-A loan agreement for the project "Community based sustainable Forest Management - Component I Manipur" for EUR 15 million. The broad objectives of the project are restoration of degraded forests in upper watersheds, reclamation of abandoned shifting cultivation areas, biodiversity conservation, water resources conservation and livelihood improvement of forest dependent rural tribal people in the project area.
-A loan agreement for the project "Madhya Pradesh Urban Sanitation and Environment Programme" for EUR 50 million reduced interest loan and EUR 2.5 million grant. The broad objective of the project is to improve facilities for water supply, sanitation and sewerage treatment plant in selected towns of Madhya Pradesh, improve solid and liquid waste management and disposal systems, improvement of surface drainage systems for flood mitigation in selected towns of Madhya Pradesh.
- Loan Agreement for the project "Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Development Odisha - Phase II for EUR 55 million reduced interest loan with EUR 2 Million as grant. The basic objective of the project is to improve urban infrastructure by linking them with government priority. The broad objective of the project is to improve the urban infrastructure of Odisha and to provide better quality of life to the people.
-Loan Agreement for the project "Green Energy Corridor - Intra-State Transmission System in Maharashtra" for EUR 12 million reduced interest loan. The broad objective of this project is to put in place a transmission system for evacuating renewable energy.
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International experts have come out in support of Prof Naela Quadri Baloch, head of the Baloch Women Forum (WBWF), who had urged the United States to designate former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf as Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT).
A German activist and supporter of the Baloch cause, Claudia Heidelberg, told ANI she supported Prof. Quadri Baloch.
"I join Prof. Naela Quadri Baloch in requesting the US to designate Pervez Musharraf as a global terrorist, after coming out openly in media that he supports labeled terrorist organisations by UN Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD)," Heidelberg said.
The German activist called for an investigation by competent authorities in European Union countries to probe Musharraf's association with these terror organisations.
"Musharraf is not a private citizen and his words need to be taken seriously, it is utterly disgraceful on his part for open admiration, and support for a terrorist organisation," Heidelberg said, adding, "His remarks calls for an investigation by competent authorities in EU countries to probe his association-level support that he might have rendered to the LeT till date."
Heidelberg termed Musharraf as "butcher" for his alleged involvement in the murder of Baloch leader Akbar Bugti.
"Musharraf is known as the butcher of Balochistan; his hands are soaked with blood of Baloch. The has not forgotten his role in murder of Baloch leader Akbar Bugti," the German activist said, adding, "His ruthless use of US weapons against the Baloch was admitted in the past by the former governor of Balochistan."
Heidelberg also urged the EU member states to ban Musharraf's entry into their countries.
"I think it makes sense to request on behalf of my NGO BalochistanProject to urge all EU member states to deny him any right to enter into EU. I will inform my foreign minister about this and expect my colleague Reza Hossein Borr will inform the government of the UK as well," the German activist said.
"His comments have shown his criminal mindset that is not only a threat to the regional peace but to the whole international community," Heidelberg further said.
The German activist emphasised that terrorist organisation like the LeT and the JuD were uniting with the IS and the Taliban.
"These terrorist groups are uniting with international terror groups like the IS and the Taliban. Europe must undertake effective measures against such dangerous figures like Musharraf and send a message to all such individuals," Heidelberg
Echoing similar sentiment, a former research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, Dr Robert Darius, said Musharraf must be tried in the International Court of Criminal Justice.
"Gen Musharraf, the butcher of Balochistan, must have a trial in the International Court of Criminal Justice and must give back the money he took out of Pakistan in the form of charity to the poverty stricken people of Balochistan," Dr Darius said.
"The free must teach a lesson to this type of ruthless generals who butcher innocent people and rob their own people," he added.
Dr Darius said that the US State Department would serve the cause of human rights by designating Musharraf a terrorist.
"The US State Department will serve the cause of human rights and counter terrorism by designating the butcher of Balochistan, Gen Musharraf, as a leader in promoting terror and death in Balochistan!" he said.
"Musharraf's actions, while he was in-charge, promoted terrorism beyond Balochistan," he added.
Ealier, responding to a question about having an alliance with JuD chief Saeed, Musharraf, in an interview to Pakistan-based Aaj News channel, had said, "So far, there have been no talks with them but if they want to be part of the alliance, I would welcome them."
The former military ruler had last month announced the formation of a grand political alliance after a consultative meeting between representatives of around two dozen political parties, including the Sunni Tehreek, Majlis-i-Wahdatul Muslimeen, Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) and Mr Musharraf's own All Pakistan Muslim League (APML).
However, several parties dissociated themselves from Musharraf's Awami Ittehad alliance after he announced the formation of a "grand alliance" of 23 parties.
According to media reports, two major partners of the alliance - the Pakistan Awami Tehrik and the Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen - denied being part of the coalition headed by Musharraf.
Saeed, who continues to be an influential person in Pakistan's certain religious groups despite being an internationally-designated terrorist, announced on Saturday that he would contest the general election in 2018.
The announcement comes days after the Lahore High Court ordered his release from the house arrest.
However, the JuD chief did not disclose anything about the constituency he would like to contest from.
Though, the JuD formed Milli Muslim League (MML) in August when Saeed was detained in Lahore, the party yet to be recognised by the Election Commission of Pakistan.
Saeed is a wanted terrorist by India and the United States for his alleged role in masterminding the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai that claimed 166 lives. He even carries a bounty of 10 million USD (approx. Rs 66 crore) on his head for his role in the attack.
Musharraf had recently called himself as the "biggest supporter" of the LeT and its founder Hafiz Saeed.
Speaking on Pakistan's ARY News, Musharraf said, "I am the biggest supporter of the LeT and I know they like me and the JuD also likes me."
The former president added that he was always in favour of terrorist action in Kashmir, and the LeT and the JuD were the biggest forces to take on the Indian Army in the state.
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All the superhero buffs know that Damon Lindelof has been adapting critically-acclaimed graphic novel 'Watchmen' for the small screen at HBO for some time now.
But the information regarding exactly who will be starring and when the show will eventually debut is still kept under wraps.
But, it looks like we might have found who'll be portraying one of the key members of the team.
WWE Superstar John Cena is a household name across the world, and now it seems he's got his eyes on an exciting new prospect.
Taking to his Instagram account, Cena posted not one, but two different graphics relating to 'Watchmen'.
In the first image, she shared the iconic 'Watchmen' logo, with a blood stain on it, while in the second picture he posted the snap of fan-favourite character Dr. Manhattan.
This has led many to believe that he could be joining Lindelof's series in the leading role.
News of Lindelof's adaptation of 'Watchmen' for HBO first broke in June.
Among his other works, Lindelof is responsible for 'Lost' and 'The Leftovers', both of which which he co-created.
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The Jammu and Kashmir Police on Monday confirmed that Furkan, a Pakistani terrorist who took over as the divisional commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), after the elimination of commander Abu Ismail, was killed in an encounter at Qazikund in Jammu and Kashmir.
Along with Furkan, the other killed Pakistani terrorist, has been identified as Abu Mavia.
Jammu and Kashmir's Director General of Police (DGP) SP Vaid took to Twitter and said, "Furkan, a Pakistani terrorist who took over as Divisional commander of LeT after the elimination of Ismail was killed in today's encounter at Qazikund along with another Pakistani terrorist identified as Abu Mavia. Great success for security forces!"
A security personnel also lost his life during the encounter between the army and terrorists while a security personnel suffered injuries.
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A Delhi court has asked lobbyist Deepak Talwar to appear before it on January 18.
On Monday, Talwar was granted permission from appearance in person before Delhi's Tis Hazari court. However, the court asked him to appear on January 18.
Talwar is under Income Tax (IT) Department lens for Rs 1,000 crore undisclosed income.
Talwar is accused of using his influence to amend civil aviation-related bilateral agreements between India and various countries to directly benefit his clients - mainly Gulf-based international airlines.
He is facing five IT department complaints for receiving kickbacks worth hundreds of crores of rupees in individual and corporate bank accounts controlled by him and his family members in various tax jurisdictions, including tax havens, across the world.
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A team of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officers from India will be attending the extradition trial of embattled businessman Vijay Mallya, which begins later today.
The trial will continue on 5th, 6th, 7th, 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th of December.
Over the next ten days, Chief Magistrate at Westminster Magistrate's Court Emma Arbuthnot will hear the case presented by Britain's Crown Prosecution Service on behalf of the Indian government, and the defence on which Mallya will hope to thwart efforts to return him to India to face prosecution.
Mallya, who shifted to the U.K., is wanted in India for financial irregularities involving a total amount of Rs 9,000 crore as well as money laundering.
In an earlier hearing, he appeared before the Chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot at the Westminster Magistrate's Court.
After hearing both the parties, the judge said the trial would begin at 10 am (UK time) on December 4.
One of the main arguments of the defence is that he fears for his life in India, so the prosecution is preparing a submission by the Indian government outlining the security measures that will be in place for Mallya, once he is extradited to India.
Outside the court, Mallya refused to answer questions especially about Diageos' new lawsuit and his fear of Indian jails.
Mallya is out on a 650,000-pound bail bond following his arrest by Scotland Yard over fraud and money laundering charges.
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The Shalimar Bagh Max Hospital that has been hitting the headlines for quite some time now has decided to terminate the services of two of its doctors, who were involved in wrongly declaring a newborn dead last week.
A statement issued by the hospital authorities confirmed the termination of Dr A P Mehta and Dr Vishal Gupta's services.
"While inquiry by the expert group which includes external experts from IMA is still in process, we have decided to terminate the services of the two treating doctors, Dr A P Mehta and Dr Vishal Gupta in the case relating to the twin extreme pre-term babies," read the statement.
"This strict action has been taken on the basis of our initial discussions with the expert group and as a reflection of our commitment to higher standards of care," it added.
Yesterday, the hospital authorities had said that an investigation into the issue is expected to conclude today.
The Shalimar Bagh branch of the hospital was accused of medical negligence after an infant was found alive after being declared 'dead' along with his still-born twin by the hospital.
Following which, the Delhi Police sent a notice to the administration of Max hospital, seeking detailed information in connection with the case and asked the authorities to be present for an interrogation.
On Saturday, Delhi Health Minister Satyendra Kumar Jain warned of cancelling the hospital's license, if it continued with the negligence.
The hospital had handed over the newborns in a plastic bag to the family, but when the twins were brought to the burial ground, realised before performing the last rites, that one of them showed movements inside the bag.
They immediately rushed to a nearby hospital where the doctors confirmed one of them to be alive.
A medical negligence case has been registered under section 308 of Indian Penal Code (IPC) against the hospital.
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Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) leader Sandeep Deshpande and seven other party workers have been sent to judicial custody till December 18 for vandalising the Congress party office.
The MNS worker were arrested for vandalising the Mumbai Regional Congress Committee office near Azad Maidan on Friday morning.
The MNS supporters smashed barged into the office and smashed the windows.
The MNS leader and others were booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and Criminal Amendment Act.
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The Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Monday unanimously passed a bill awarding death sentence to accused in cases of rape and gangrape of girls below 12 years.
Speaking at the assembly, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said the perpetrators raping the minors have no right to live.
Chouhan's statement comes days after the Madhya Pradesh Cabinet approved death sentence be awarded to rape convicts in cases involving girls of 12 years of age and below.
Speaking at the state assembly, the chief minister said, "One (the accused) who rapes 12-year-old girl or minors is not human but demon and they have no right to live."
Chouhan further said that stalking has been made a non-bailable offence in the state.
On November 26, the cabinet approved amendment of the penal code to intensify the punishment awarded to rape convicts besides increasing the fine amount slapped on them.
The decision was taken in the wake of increasing cases of sexual violence against girl child and women in the state.
As per the data released by the Crime Records Bureau, Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest incidents of rape with 4,882 cases (12.5 per cent).
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Former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, who earlier came in support of the terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), has now said that he would welcome an alliance with global terrorist and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed for the general election in 2018.
Responding to a question about having an alliance with JuD chief Saeed, Musharraf in an interview to Pakistan based Aaj News channel said, "so far, there has be no talks with them but if they want to be part of the alliance, I would welcome them,"
The former military ruler had last month announced the formation of a grand political alliance after a consultative meeting between representatives of around two dozen political parties, including the Sunni Tehreek, Majlis-i-Wahdatul Muslimeen, Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) and Mr Musharraf's own All Pakistan Muslim League (APML).
However, several parties dissociated themselves from Musharraf's Awami Ittehad alliance after he announced the formation of a "grand alliance" of 23 parties.
According to media reports, two major partners of the alliance - the Pakistan Awami Tehrik and the Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen - denied being part of the coalition headed by Musharraf.
Saeed, who continues to be an influential person in Pakistan's certain religious groups despite being an internationally designated terrorist, announced on Saturday that he would contest the general election in 2018.
The announcement comes days after the Lahore High Court ordered his release from the house arrest.
However, the JuD chief did not disclose anything about the constituency he would like to contest from.
Though, the JuD formed Milli Muslim League (MML) in August when Saeed was detained in Lahore, the party yet to be recognised by the Election Commission of Pakistan.
Saeed is a wanted terrorist by India and the United States for his alleged role in masterminding the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai that claimed 166 lives.
He even carries a bounty of 10 million USD (approx. Rs 66 crore) on his head for his role in the attack.
Musharraf had recently called himself as the "biggest supporter" of the LeT and its founder Hafiz Saeed.
Speaking on Pakistan's ARY News, Musharraf said, "I am the biggest supporter of the LeT and I know they like me and the JuD also likes me."
The former president added that he was always in favour of terrorist action in Kashmir, and the LeT and the JuD were the biggest forces to take on the Indian Army in the state.
Few days ago, Natalie Portman revealed that she has 100 stories of sexual misconduct in Hollywood and has experienced same misconduct in the movie industry many times.
Now, in an interview with Mirror, the Oscar-winning actress has recalled one terrifying encounter that she faced during her initial years of acting.
Portman has revealed that she was lured on to a private jet alone with a Hollywood producer and "just one bed".
She said, "I was like, yeah, why wouldn't I accept a flight on a private plane with a big group of people? And I showed up and it was just the two of us and then one bed was made on the plane."
The 'Black Swan' star said she had "normalized" the behaviour and spoken out after the Harvey Weinstein allegations made her realise it was "super not ok".
She added, "That was really unacceptable and manipulative. I was scared."
The actress, who began acting her acting career aged just 13 in 1994 film 'Leon: The Professional', said people would comment on her body even as a child and admitted that she normalised harassment and discrimination to the extent she did not even realise it was happening.
"I think my first reaction when I heard everybody coming out was, 'Wow, I'm so lucky that I haven't had this,'" noted Portman.
Adding, "And then, on reflection, I was like, 'OK, I definitely have never been assaulted. But I've had discrimination or harassment on almost everything I've ever worked on in some way."
The 'Thor' star also shared that the Weinstein scandal will change Hollywood for good. She said, "There are so many things that we took for granted as part of our world. A lot of things that we just kind of put up with for reasons of maybe just being numb to it. But if you spent all your time reporting what was going on, that's all you would do as it's so pervasive. And yeah, it gets so built into the power struggles in every industry."
More than 50 women have accused Harvey Weinstein of sex abuse. Claims of harassment have also been made against actor Kevin Spacey, who apologised over one incident.
Sylvester Stallone and Ed Westwick have both vehemently denied claims made against them and Dustin Hoffman said of an allegation of harassment, "It is not reflective of who I am.
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Digital payment solution PayPhi, a product of Phi Commerce Pvt. Ltd. announced a strategic initiative that seeks to transform how consumers pay for LPG cylinders.
Cash has been the most predominant mode of payment for refills of LPG cylinder. In a move with far-reaching consequences, HP Gas consumers will have the opportunity to adopt one among several cashless payment options for paying for their LPG cylinder.
Cashless payments will not be restricted those who have cards, wallet and access to net banking but to anyone who has a bank account. Payments can be made using Aadhaar, UPI or BharatQR. The solution does away with need of mPOS as it is tightly integrated with the HP Gas delivery application.
To make payments, consumers have to simply provide their Aadhaar number and finger print at the time of delivery.
Fiscal year of 2016-17 witnessed a record growth of 9.8 percent in LPG sales. As many as 111.3 crore cylinders were sold in 2016-17. The subscriber base in rural India is expected to swell further with the success of Government of India initiatives like the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana.
"Paying for LPG cylinders with cash has for long been a pain point for consumers, gas agencies, and also for the OMCs. Now consumers do not need to keep cash at home waiting for the time of cylinder delivery and gas agencies do not need to waste time and effort in reconciling cash. This has the potential of spreading the digital payments wave to millions of people from India's interiors and this is what will help create the next wave of digitally empowered citizens," said Jose Thattil, Co-founder, and CEO of Phi Commerce.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday took another jibe at the 'dynastic politics' of the Congress Party by dubbing the party's Vice-President Rahul Gandhi's expected 'elevation' as an "Aurangzeb Raj".
"I congratulate the Congress on their Aurangzeb Raj. For us, the well being of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command," the Prime Minister said addressing a rally here.
In his comparison of Gandhi family with the Mughal rule, Prime Minister Modi also stated, "Mani Shankar Aiyar asked 'did elections happen during Mughal rule? After Jehangir, Shah Jahan came, was any election held? After Shah Jahan, it was understood Aurangzeb will be the leader' So Congress accepts it's a family party? We don't want this Aurangzeb rule."
The jibe comes following the nomination by Rahul Gandhi for the Congress' presidential election earlier in the day. The post is currently held by Rahul's mother Sonia Gandhi who has been at the helm since 1998.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has, time and again, attacked the Congress Party, accusing it of indulging in dynasty politics and feudalism, but the accusation came full force, when Maharashtra Congress Secretary Shehzad Poonawalla called out the process of electing party president as "rigged" and said he had information that the delegates, who were going to vote for the election, were fixed.
The Prime Minister also accused the Congress Party of defaming the BJP by propagating it is against Muslims.
"Disinformation like BJP does this and that against Muslims has been spread. This family party made it their main agenda to spread disinformation about BJP. But Gujarat people are not so naive, they have now become sensitive and aware to disinformation," he said.
Prime Minister Modi added to the accusation, alleging that the Congress Party has been indulging in divisive politics in a bid to win the upcoming Gujarat assembly elections.
"Earlier, Congress would go out of the way to show their secularism but now we are all seeing what they are doing in this election, where they are going. Unfortunately for them, Muslims know their real nature," Modi said, adding that Congress has always defamed Gujarat, and that it can neither tolerate nor accept leaders from the state.
The two-phase Gujarat polls will be held on December 9 and 14.
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President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday mourned the demise of Bollywood veteran Shashi Kapoor.
President Kovind took to Twitter to praise the actor for his contribution to the Indian cinema.
Recalling his role in the Indian cinema, the president said the actor's pivotal role in the theatre movement in India was cherished.
"Sorry to hear of the demise of Shashi Kapoor, well-known actor, with a repertoire of Indian and international films. His support for meaningful cinema as a producer and pivotal role in the theatre movement in India too are cherished. Condolences to his family (sic)," he tweeted.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his brilliant acting would be remembered for generations to come.
"Shashi Kapoor's versatility could be seen in his movies as well as in theatre, which he promoted with great passion. His brilliant acting will be remembered for generations to come. Saddened by his demise. Condolences to his family and admirers (sic)," the prime minister tweeted.
Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Smriti Irani said Shashi Kapoor's contribution to Indian Cinema was 'monumental'.
She further said the actor's passing away marked the end of an era.
"Saddened by the demise of legendary actor Shashi Kapoor ji. His contribution to Indian Cinema is monumental. Shashi ji's passing away marks the end of an era. My deepest condolences to his loved ones, colleagues and fans. May his soul rest in peace. Om Shanti!"
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh also expressed condolence: "With his impressive talent and inimitable mannerism actor Shashi Kapoor charmed a generation of Indians. He was a fine actor and a wonderful human being. Saddened to learn of his demise. May his soul rest in peace (sic)."
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley remembered the veteran actor as a towering personality of the silver screen and for his impeccable acting across the world.
"Condolences on the sad demise of veteran actor #ShashiKapoor ji. He was a towering personality of the silver screen & known for his impeccable acting across the world. My thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family. May the departed soul rest in peace," the finance minister tweeted.
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi also took to his social media handle to expressed grief on the demise of the veteran actor and said that he would always remain in people's hearts.
"A legend has passed away. Shashi Kapoor will remain in our hearts forever. My condolences to his loved ones and all his fans," he posted.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) general secretary Sitaram Yechury recalled the immense contribution of Shashi Kapoor to the Indian film industry and remembered him for his meaningful films.
"Shashi Kapoor will be remembered for making meaningful films, for his immense contribution to Indian theatre, and more. His was a long and distinguished innings which resonated with millions of viewers. Condolences," he tweeted.
Bollywood veteran Shashi Kapoor breathed his last on Monday evening. He was 79.
The actor had been suffering from an old-age related illness.
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Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani has hailed India's contribution in various sectors of Afghanistan.
Emphasising that India is a good partner of Afghanistan, President Ghani insisted that the Afghan government is committed to further strengthening bilateral cooperation with India.
President Ghani made the remarks during a meeting with the members of the Lower and Upper Houses of the Parliament to brief the lawmakers regarding his recent foreign trips and interactions, Khaama Press reported.
Dismissing misperceptions regarding the presence and role of India in Afghanistan, President Ghani said the Afghan government has no hidden deal with any country and no foreign state will be allowed to use the Afghan soil against the neighbours of the country.
According to Khaama Press, President Ghani further said that Kabul has shared interests with New Delhi and the Afghan government will continue to use the economic opportunities which have been provided by India for the development of the country.
Pakistan has long been opposing presence of India in Afghanistan but Afghan officials have repeatedly rejected such stance and even United States has also endorsed the constructive role of New Delhi in the rehabilitation of Afghanistan.
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Osmania University students on Monday staged a protest and did not allow the police to shift the body of Murli, who allegedly committed suicide in his hostel by hanging.
On Sunday, E Murali (21), a first-year student of MSc Physics, who hails from Doulapur village of Siddipet district, hanged himself in the bathroom of Maneru hostel of the campus.
According to reports, Murali, was missing from his room since Saturday night. He did not join his friends for breakfast and lunch. However, in the evening, they found his body hanging in the bathroom.
The students immediately informed the police who rushed to the hostel and claimed to have recovered a suicide note.
In the suicide note, he, reportedly, cited poor preparations for upcoming examinations as the cause for taking the extreme step.
Speaking to ANI, OU students joint action committee leader and president of the Unemployed Youth Association, K Manavatha Rai said, "Murli committed suicide because of unemployment. The state government is responsible for his suicide. Also, the government should give Rs. 50 lakh compensation to Murli's family or else we will not allow the police to shift the body from the hostel."
"The Telangana government has been sanctioning funds for many things regarding the state.then why they are not providing jobs for us. We will continue the protest and will not allow the police to shift the body until government takes responsibility over the matter," he said.
Meanwhile, the grieving mother Laxmi told ANI, "I struggled a lot working as daily labourer and supported my son in his studies. We did not think his life would end like this."
The South Zone Deputy Commissioner of Police, V. Satyanarayana, informed that a case has been registered, and they have initiated a probe into the matter.
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South Korea and the United States began massive joint aerial drills on Monday amid threats of a nuclear war from North Korea.
North Korea said on Sunday that the joint military drill of the U.S. and South Korea could trigger a nuclear war.
A commentary that appeared in state-run newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said that the five-day military drill was "all out provocation against" the country, and it may lead to nuclear war "at any moment".
The five-day Vigilant ACE (air combat exercise) is the largest-ever combined air force drill between the allies, involving more than 230 warplanes and around 12,000 personnel, which include six F-22 Raptors and six F-35As that have been deployed temporarily to Korea for the practice, Yonhap news agency reported.
Two B-1B Lancer bombers, six EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets, and dozens of F-15C and F-16 fighter jets have also been deployed for the drill apart from South Korea's F-15K, KF-16, FA-50 and F-5 fighters.
"It's aimed at enhancing the all-weather, day and night combined air power operation capabilities of South Korea and the U.S.," Yonhap news agency quoted a South Korea's defense ministry as saying.
The ministry added that the both sides will conduct the drills under various wartime scenarios, including simulated precision strikes on mock North Korean nuclear and missile targets.
The exercise comes less than a week after Pyongyang fired off a new intercontinental ballistic missile and claimed that it can reach the whole mainland of the United States.
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Simon Cowell, who is best known as a Britain's Got Talent judge and music producer, has recently revealed that after the scary incident at his London house, he is struggling to quit smoking and drinking.
The 58-year-old, who missed the first live shows of the current series after falling down the stairs, told the Sun that his efforts to quit the smoking and booze aren't going according to plan.
In October, the 'X Factor' boss got a shock to the system when he was rushed to hospital after passing out and falling down the stairs at his home.
He said, "I knocked myself out, and when I woke up, I thought, 'Is this heaven?' and then after I realised it wasn't, I thought I had broken my neck because the medics wouldn't let me move."
"I was thinking, 'Christ almighty'. You don't know what's wrong, and neither do they, so it is scary," the 'America's Got Talent' judge added.
Simon, previously revealed he wanted to change his ways of life in order to be a responsible father for his son Eric.
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Japan's Softbank Group Corporation is in expansionist mode with regard to India, investing in such as Ola, Flipkart, Paytm and Oyo Rooms. In the last few months, its investments in the global e-commerce market have been successful in keeping Amazon.com Inc, the world's largest online retailer, at bay.
Group Chairman Masayoshi Son has described acquisitions in Flipkart and Paytm as significant business achievements in the context of India as they are market leaders in their sectors.
Recent data appearing in the public domain indicates that Flipkart has a 60 percent share in India's e-commerce market, while Paytm has a 58 percent share of India's digital payments business.
In its latest earnings report, released last month, SoftBank reported a gain of 10.2 billion Yen ($89.3 million) on its India investments. In the one year since Son last visited India, SoftBank has pumped more than $4 billion into the Indian market, taking its investments in Indian start-ups to more than $6 billion .
Softbank's expansionist moves owed much to Nikesh Arora, its former president, who brought in a considerable foreign expertise and talent while helming the enterprise from October 2014 till June 21, 2016.
Among the talented persons he brought into SoftBank before his exit were Alok Sama (CFO, ARM) and Rajeev Mishra (Vision Fund), Marcelo Claure (Sprint).
Arora and his team were collectively taking Softbank to greater heights, but their proximity to Chairman Son raised eyebrows and reportedly made Japanese board members, including Chief Operating Officer Ken Miyauchi, uncomfortable and insecure. The Japanese were reportedly unhappy with foreign influence in core decision-making, seeing them as loud and disruptive, as also alien in terms of core values and sensitivities. The foreign talent is also paid much more than Japanese .
Nikesh, though, was responsible for making Softbank global in the real sense through key investments in the e-commerce sector. He decided to resign in June 2016. This definitely hit SoftBank for a while since finding a professional like Nikesh wasn't easy
The focus appears to be now on Alok Sama, Marcelo Claure and Rajeev Mishra. They were close to Nikesh and are under tremendous pressure despite their experience and credentials.
Alok Sama is involved in sourcing other deals and supporting transaction agreements related to the group and has been sidelined. Claure is said to be in the dock over alleged failures at Sprint . Rajeev doesn't have technology investing experience credentials and hasn't worked with this size of fund .
The fund has sprinkled money in a wide-ranging group of spread across biotech, bike-sharing and robotics in the hope of it impacting everyone's lives
There is speculation that if this politics continues, the performance of SoftBank may take a hit and it stands to lose much of its dream
The Japanese fear is not uncommon. In India, too, some of the headed by foreigners are said to be unstable. External expertise, therefore, may not be seen as entirely beneficial or rewarding.
India's second largest tractor brand exporter Sonalika ITL has recorded a 17 percent growth in international market in November 2017.
The company exported 1215 units of tractors, compared to 1042 units last year in the same month. The company is expecting 15 to 20 percent annual growth next year as well.
Sonalika, the youngest tractor brand with a strong belief in Make in India has built World's largest integrated tractor manufacturing unit offering customized tractors to suit diverse farming needs.
The company has a tie-up with Yanmar and has expanded its footprint to another 10 new countries in the year 2017. With this, Sonalika has expanded to 90 countries across the globe. By 2018, the company plans to enter 5 new markets. The export range will be equipped with engines complying with future emission standards.
"Our strategy has been to focus across HP segments and our tractors have become the preferred choice of progressive farmers not just in India but globally. To further strengthen our presence in Europe and US market, we have recently unveiled Solis 30 HST (Hydrostatic Transmission) in Agritechnica - Hanover Germany in Nov'17. Solis a well-recognized brand from ITL in Europe was very much appreciated in the exhibition for Solis 30 HST along with Solis22, Solis 28 and other tractors with next generation tractor platform. Through our tie-up with Yanmar, we are targeting five more markets in 2018," said executive director Sonalika ITL, Raman Mittal.
The incremental volumes are underpinned by encouraging response from Europe and Asia. Sonalika's export demand has also received a boost from markets in Africa, where the governments are encouraging agriculture mechanization.
Sonalika International currently has assembly plants in Brazil, Algeria, Iran and Cameroon, and exports semi-knocked-down, completely-knocked-down and fully-built tractors to approximately to 90 countries.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
To ensure security of women in the city, the Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police, Sulkhan Singh, flagged off women safety and awareness week from the IT Girls College, on Monday here.
Under this initiative, the Uttar Pradesh Police will visit various colleges and schools to make the students aware of how to be safe and the steps to be taken at the time of emergency.
The campaign, which will conclude on December 10, has been launched under the Uttar Pradesh Women Power Line 1090 initiative.
While addressing the gathering on the occasion, DGP Singh requested the students to be alert in order to avoid any mishap.
"The safety of women and girls is our prime concern. We assure you we will ensure your safety and help you to every extent. It is important to be aware of one's rights and government's initiatives for them. If a section of a society is unaware of their rights, then it becomes the reason of their downfall," DGP Singh said.
Singh further said it was not good to consider women victims, but it was important to support those who fell prey to any kind of assault.
He also advised the students to deal with a situation with confidence, not with aggression, adding it only invites unwanted enemies.
"We received information that the behaviour of the anti-romeo squad was not right. So, we are providing them training," he said.
Discussing about the measures taken by the police, DGP Singh said they were extending the reach of the 100 helpline number and are now even accepting complaints on Twitter.
We have also launched an E-FIR system and are accepting complaint through websites, he said.
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Police launched a search operation here on Sunday to trace two missing buffaloes of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Suresh Rahi.
The Hargaon MLA had filed a complaint in this regard after which the police began looking for the buffaloes.
"A case has been registered and the search for buffaloes is on," Sitapur Circle Officer Yogendra Singh told ANI.
According to the MLA, the two buffaloes are worth Rs one lakh each and hence he was compelled to file a complaint with the police.
In 2014, in a similar incident, dog squads, crime branch sleuths and police personnel were tasked with a 'buffalo hunt', when Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan filed a complaint after his buffaloes had gone missing.
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United States Defence Secretary James Mattis arrived for his maiden visit to Pakistan since taking charge of the Pentagon, on Monday.
He was received by officials from the defence and foreign ministries at the Nur Khan Airbase, Chaklala.
The US defence secretary is expected to meet Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa.
Mattis had, on Sunday, said he would want to find a common ground to work together with Pakistan.
Reportedly, the defence secretary was asked en route to Kuwait if he would prod Pakistan, to address its alleged support for the militants, when he visits there.
In his response, Mattis said, "That's not the way I deal with issues. I believe that we work hard on finding the common ground and then we work together."
Mattis had, in October, said the US would try "one more time" to work with Islamabad before taking "whatever steps are necessary",
Mattis' visit comes days after the release of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) leader Hafiz Saeed from house arrest in Pakistan following which the United States had strongly condemned Islamabad and called for his immediate re-arrest and prosecution.
The White House, in a statement, had said: "The United States strongly condemns the release of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) leader Haft Saeed from house arrest in Pakistan and calls for his immediate re-arrest and prosecution.
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Women activist on Monday condemned the molestation of a four-year-old girl in Kolkata's GD Birla Centre for Education School and demanded the school principle to be removed.
Speaking to ANI, Women activist Nilanjana Chakraborty said, "It is a proper case of sexual assault; it's totally unfortunate for such incidents to take place in our own city. Also, when an incident happens in a school then the management is held responsible and accountable for it."
"I have heard the interview of the school principle and I'm not satisfied. She has not handled this matter in a proper way. The school principle should be removed and action should also be taken against the management," she said.
Earlier on Dec 1, the West Bengal Police arrested two teachers for sexually assaulting the four-year-old girl.
Also, the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education has formed a three-member committee to investigate the matter and submit a report within 24 hours.
The school came under the ire of its students' guardians after parents of the minor and her doctors said she was sexually assaulted by school's physical education teacher.
Principal Sharmila Nath told that the school was also conducting an internal investigation into the matter.
"We are also doing an internal investigation, and I assure you that safety and security will be given top priority," she said.
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Houthi rebels have blown up the residence of Yemen's former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Few local media reports have stated Houthi rebels had gained control of the majority of the country's capital from Saleh's forces.
However, close sources have denied the reports that Saleh was killed.
Earlier today, the Iranian embassy in Yemen was set ablaze after the mortar shell struck amid the rebel fighting. The Anadolu Agency quoted sources, as saying, that the mortar shell triggered the fire at the embassy premises.
Reportedly, clouds of smoke could be seen coming from the building amid the clashes between the Houthi rebels and loyalists of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
However, it could not be figured out which party was behind the attack on the Iranian embassy.
Both Saleh forces and the Houthi rebels are battling to capture the capital city. The loyalists of Saleh last week had proposed for the talks with the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis to end the three-year conflict in Yemen.
The fighting has claimed more than 10,000 lives since then. The United Nations has described the Yemen conflict as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
On 12 December 2017
Austin Engineering Company will hold a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Company on 12 December 2017 To approve Unaudited Financial Results of the company for the second quarter ended on 30th September, 2017 as per Indian Accounting standard ( IND-AS)
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Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmer's Welfare, Shri Radha Mohan Singh has said that it is our main objective to attract youth including school children towards agricultural education. Shri Singh mentioned that Government of India has started celebrating many National and International Days related to agriculture for its integrated and rapid development. It was stated by Shri Radha Mohan Singh.
The Agriculture Minister said that two years back Government of India decided to celebrate National Agricultural Education Day on December 3 because it is the birthday of our first Union Agriculture Minister and Former President of India, Dr Rajendra Prasad Ji. Shri Singh further added that all State Agricultural Universities and ICAR Institutes are celebrating National Agricultural Education Day in a big way since then.
Shri Singh mentioned that the Government of India has started implementing many programmes towards strengthening Agricultural Education, Research and Extension for a long term and sustainable development in agriculture. With the development of new technologies, agricultural trends are changing daily. To maximize the use of advanced technologies, it is important to provide adequate strengthening of agricultural education. He expressed happiness that ICAR has initiated many new programmes to enhance the quality of higher agricultural education in the country. The government of India has increased the budget of Agricultural Education by 47.4% this year as compared to the financial year 2013-14.
The Agriculture Minister further said that in order to adopt quality and holistic approach to higher agricultural education, the Fifth Dean Committee Report has been implemented in all the Agricultural Universities. This is First-of-its-kind that all Graduate Level Courses of Agriculture and its related subject have been declared as Professional Courses, in which agricultural graduates will be able to get a better opportunity from professional work in the future. Agricultural graduates will get more benefit from declaring their professional degrees as this degree has now become similar to the engineering degree.
He also mentioned that agricultural graduates will get more opportunities to go abroad for higher education.
Shri Singh informed that in the Fifth Dean Committee Report, guidelines have been prepared for necessary administrative educational standards for the construction and implementation of contemporary courses for the subjects covered in agricultural education. He said that the Student READY programme has been started for graduates of agriculture and allied subjects to ensure new direction for entrepreneurship development better employability. The main objective of this programme is to provide confidence and complete skills to agricultural Graduates while studying at undergraduate level. Under this programme, there is also a provision for working with the farmers in the fourth year of the bachelor's degree. Apart from this, the system of training has also been widely given in the production industries. The stipends given to students under Student READY have been increased from Rs 750 / - to Rs 3000 / - per month.
Recognizing the immense potential of North-Eastern India, six new colleges have been opened by the Modi Government under the Central Agricultural University, Imphal. This has resulted in the increase in the number of agricultural colleges in North East India by more than 85 percent in the last two years and the number of total colleges has gone up to 13. Out of this, two colleges of Agriculture in Arunachal and Meghalaya State, two colleges of Horticulture in Mizoram and Sikkim, a College of Veterinary Science in Nagaland and a College of Food Technology in Imphal, Manipur have been opened. The Agriculture Minister said that the Central Government has set up two separate Indian Agricultural Research Institute, IARI-Jharkhand and IARI-Assam in Jharkhand and Assam respectively. The task of opening 4 new colleges under the Rani Lakshmibai Central Agricultural University, Jhansi is in full swing in the Bundelkhand region.
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For setting up JV to manufacture fuel pump module and IC connector assembly
Fiem Industries has signed a MoU with Aisan Industry Co., Japan and Toyota Tsusho Corporation, Japan for establishing a joint venture company in India to manufacture Fuel Pump Module and IC connector Assembly for two-wheelers and three-wheelers.
Fuel Pump Module will become mandatory for two-wheelers and three-wheelers w.e.f. April, 2020 under Bharat Stage VI (BS VI) regime. This is an advanced Emission Control System Product, which will have huge market in India under BS VI norms.
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Tata Motors said that its commercial and passenger vehicles sales in domestic market grew by 58% to 52,464 units in November 2017 over November 2016, due to growing demand across segments, introduction of new products and strong customer initiatives. During the above period, the company's sales from exports declined 12% to 4,927 units due to drop in volumes in key commercial vehicles international business markets such as Nepal and Sri Lanka. The announcement was made after market hours on Friday, 1 December 2017.
Hero MotoCorp said that its total two-wheeler sales grew by 26% to 6.05 lakh units in November 2017 over November 2016. Out of this, motorcycles sales were at 5.25 lakh units and sales of scooters stood at 80,046 units. The announcement was made after market hours on Friday, 1 December 2017.
Tata Steel said it had on 30 November 2017, executed definitive agreements to acquire the balance of 74% equity shares of Bhubaneshwar Power (BPPL) from JL Power Ventures for a cash consideration of Rs 255 crore. Tata Steel together with its 100% subsidiary TS Alloys held 26% equity shares in BPPL. The acquisition provides Tata Steel an opportunity to increase its captive source of power to meet its growing demand. The announcement was made after market hours on Friday, 1 December 2017.
Infosys announced that its board of directors has appointed Salil S. Parekh as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director (CEO & MD) of the company effective 2 January 2018. U B Pravin Rao will step down as the interim CEO and Managing Director effective 2 January 2018 and will continue as Chief Operating Officer and a whole-time Director of the company. The announcement was made on Saturday, 2 December 2017.
Vijaya Bank's board has accorded its approval for raising Rs 1300 crore by way of additional tier 1 bonds under Basel III for the FY 2017-18. The announcement was made on Sunday, 3 December 2017.
PTC Industries announced that the Advanced Manufacturing & Technology Centre (AMTC) project of company, situated at NH-25A, SaraiSahjadi, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, has commenced the commercial production of phase - I (existing capacity expansion) with effect from 1 December 2017. The announcement was made on Saturday, 2 December 2017.
Mirc Electronics (Onida), leading consumer durables player has informed that the board has approved issue of 1.92 crore equity shares and 1.92 crore warrants convertible into equity shares, on preferential basis at Rs 37.53 to non-promoters to augment its long term working capital and corporate requirements. The announcement was made on Saturday, 2 December 2017.
Alphageo (India) received notification of award of contract from ONGC, Vadodara (Gujarat) for an estimated contract value of Rs 154.77 crore. The announcement was made on Saturday, 2 December 2017.
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Two soldiers were injured on Monday when militants attacked an army patrol on the Jammu-Srinagar national highway in south Kashmir's Kulgam district, a police officer said.
The militants fired at the patrol team in Qazigund area which has been cordoned off for searches, the officer said.
--IANS
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Aditya Birla Health Insurance, a joint venture between Aditya Birla Group and South Africa based MMI Holdings Ltd, is expecting 75 per cent of its businesses to come from retail in the next five to six years, a company official said on Monday.
"In the last year (2016), we primarily started with corporate, while retail was low. In the first quarter of the current fiscal, about eight per cent of our business was from retail and in the second quarter, that became 32 per cent."
"It is growing fast. In the next five to six years we want not less than 75 per cent of our businesses to come from retail," Company's CEO Mayank Bathwal told reporters here.
The health insurer recorded a gross premium income of Rs 150 crore after one year of operation starting from October, 2016.
"Retail business constitutes about 20 per cent of our business currently while the rest comes from corporate," Mayank said.
Its gross premium income during April to September period of the financial year stood at Rs 96.2 crore.
In the corporate segment, the insurer would focus more on small and medium enterprises. "We are not keen to get into the space of large corporate and fight the pricing battle," he said.
The insurer has a pan India distribution presence across 34 cities, five bank assurance partners and over 8,821 direct selling agents.
--IANS
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Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal on Monday announced setting up of a Cabinet sub-committee with a mandate to carry out feasibility study for inclusion of Rabha, Tiwa and Mising communities under the Constitution's Sixth Schedule which makes special provisions of autonomy for tribal-dominated areas.
The Chief Minister said this while taking part in a meeting with the representatives of Autonomous Councils of the respective communities at Janata Bhawan.
Sonowal also assured the representatives that all the rights of the communities, including land rights, would be protected while executing the State Capital Region.
He said that implementation of the State Capital Region Authority would catapult progress of the areas within its jurisdiction.
"There is no cause to worry for the Rabha and Tiwa people and all their rights would be fully protected," he said.
Sonowal also assured that the Rabha and Tiwa Autonomous Councils would also be included as members in the State Capital Region Authority in a bid to safeguard the interest of the communities.
--IANS
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MIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi has said that the title suit of the Babri Masjid can be decided only on the basis of evidence and not on 'aastha' (faith) as the Sangh Parivar is demanding.
Addressing a public meeting here on Sunday, he voiced his apprehension that the Sangh Parivar might vitiate the atmosphere in the country on the issue before the 2019 elections to gain political mileage.
The Member of Parliament condemned the statements by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders that the construction of the Ram temple in Uttar Pradesh's Ayodhya will begin on October 18, 2018.
Owaisi wondered how they could make such a statement when the title suit was still pending in the Supreme Court.
He said such attempts could repeat the violence and bloodshed witnessed in the country in the 1990s during BJP leader L.K. Advani's Rath Yatra and after the demolition of the Babri mosque. He warned that this could weaken the country.
The public meeting was organised by the Joint Action Committee comprising various Muslim organisations just days ahead of the 25th anniversary of the demolition of the mosque on December 6.
In 1992, on that date, a large number of religious volunteers or "Kar Sevaks" gathered in the temple town and demolished the 16th century structure, leading to widespread rioting and political crisis.
Taking strong exception to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat's statement that only a temple could be built in Ayodhya, Owaisi said: "Muslims would not be cowed down by such threats."
"What is pending in the Supreme Court is title suit, which will be decided purely on evidence and not an aastha," he said.
Owaisi said Babri Masjid was not the issue of Muslims but an issue linked to secularism. "This is an issue which will decide the course of this country," he said.
The MP said he supports Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan's suggestion that the title suit should not be taken up for hearing till the criminal case relating to the demolition of the mosque was disposed off.
Owaisi also quoted former Chief Justice A.M. Ahmedi reportedly saying that had Justice Venkata Challaiah not permitted Kar Seva, it would not have led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
He said even 25 years after the demolition, the contempt of court case had not come up for hearing in the apex court.
The MIM president alleged that the BJP is returning to its real agenda as it has failed to provide jobs to the unemployed and demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax has hit the people and dealt a blow to the economy.
Babri Masjid Action Committee convenor Zafaryab Jeelani said it was not an issue of "aastha" but of the political interests of some communal groups. He recalled that even the FIR registered in 1949 states that idols were stealthily kept in the mosque.
He said some elements tried to spread the falsehood that it was the birthplace of Ramchanderji (Lord Ram) but this has nothing to do with facts.
The speakers called up on Muslims to peacefully observe the shutdown on December 6 to demand reconstruction of the mosque at its original place.
--IANS
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Nearly Rs 1 lakh was looted from a bank in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on Monday by Al Qaeda unit chief Zakir Musa and his associates, police said.
Senior Superintendent of Police, Awantipora, Muhammad Zahid Malik said Zakir Musa and his two associates burst into the Noorpora branch of J&K Bank limited in Tral area, fired in the air and looted Rs 97,256 before fleeing.
The incident occurred around 2 p.m., Malik said.
Zakir Musa has become the most wanted militant commander in the Valley after the Al Qaeda announced on its media affiliate, Global Islamic Media Front, that he had been made the chief of its unit, named Ansar Ghazwatul Hind.
Musa was earlier in the Hizbul Mujahideen.
Police had earlier said three unidentified gunmen had looted the bank branch.
--IANS
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A new exhibition in the German capital of Berlin is charting out how CIA-front organisations enlisted the art world in a propaganda war between two ideologies, which came to be known as "the battle for Picassos mind", a media report said on Monday.
The exhibition titled "Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War", is on display at the historic House of World Cultures building until January 8, 2018.
By promoting modern art movements such as abstract expressionism - and artists including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as showcases of America's creativity and freedom of expression, foreign intelligence services ended up shaping the modern world's aesthetic sensibilities, the Guardian report said.
Mixing archive pieces and works by contemporary artists, the Berlin show criticises the gallery's own role in the Cold War period.
"My belief is that public institutions like mine need to take responsibility for what they do," said Bernd Scherer, director of the House of the Cultures of the World.
"It has to be clear what position you are speaking from."
While the Soviet Union professed its belief in the use of art as a class-war weapon from the start, the US' support for liberal left but anti-communist organisations had been covert.
When the Central Intelligence Agency's methods were revealed by the US media in 1967, it caused a scandal and led to resignations, such as the British poet Stephen Spender stepping down as editor of the literary journal Encounter.
"You cannot overestimate the CIA's intelligence and efficiency: making culture part of their strategy required a genuine artistic sensibility. When you examine the individual measures employed, you quickly end up in a grey zone," the Guardian quoted Scherer as saying.
The centre piece of the exhibition is a display of the more than 20 artfully crafted literary magazines that were financed across the globe via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, such as Der Monat in Germany, Jiyu in Japan and Hiwar in Lebanon.
"It's hard not to admire the CIA's employees for their infallibly good taste," wrote the art critic of Berliner Zeitung.
--IANS
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Militants exploded a remote-controlled bomb here on Monday, police said. No one was injured.
The blast in Laingam village near Konthoujam Lamkhai in Imphal west district comes a day after the extension of the Disturbed Areas Act for one year under which the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 is imposed in Manipur.
Police sources said that the bomb was a powerful one. No insurgent group has claimed responsibility for it.
Police said that soon after the explosion, police and central forces rushed at Laingam village for launching a combing operation. However there was no arrest.
Chief minister N. Biren Singh, in charge of the Home Department, said: "Persons who do not want to see development in Manipur are resorting to violence."
Patsoi police station has registered a case.
People's Liberation Army, the military wing of the Revolutionary People's Front, had attacked a column of 31 Assam Rifles on Saturday by exploding three remote controlled bombs and then opening fire in the border district of Kamjong.
Though heavy exchange of fire continued for some minutes there was no casualty among the Assam Rifles troopers.
A few days earlier, one shop was bombed in the heart of the Imphal city. Owner of the shop, Ajit Patni, says that he did not get any extortion notice from the militants.
--IANS
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A joint team of CBI and ED is in London for the extradition hearing on Monday in a London court of liquor baron Vijay Mallya, wanted in India over non-payment of huge bank loans and a case of fraud and money laundering, an official said.
The CBI-ED team will assist their lawyers for securing Mallya's extradition -- the second extradition from the UK after signing an extradition treaty with the country 25 years ago.
The extradition heading is to being later on Monday in a Westminster Magistrates Court.
Indian agencies told IANS they are confident of putting up solid evidence against Mallya and he should get extradited.
According to sources, Mark Summers from Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will lead India's charge for the prosecution while Clare Montgomery will lead Mallya's defence.
A CBI official said they have submitted a 2,000 page dossier on Mallya, detailing how he cheated Indian public sector banks and diverted the loans taken for Kingfisher Airlines over the years.
Additional documentary evidence was also submitted in the Westminster Court recently, he added.
Union Minister of state for Home Kiren Rijiju last month held a discussion over Mally's extradition with visiting UK Minister of State for Immigration Brandon Lewis.
There are serious charges of financial irregularities against Mallya amounting Rs 9,000 crore.
Samirbhai Vinubhai Patel was the first to be extradited from Britain to India in late 2016. He was wanted in connection with the 2002 post-Godhra riots in Gujarat.
Mallya was rearrested on October 3 by police in London in connection with a fraud and money laundering case filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), and was released on bail by a London court soon after.
Continuing his scathing attacks on the Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday termed the party as "an empire" that can only be ruled by one single family. He also said that the Congress "disliked Gujarat and hated it" and so the people of Gujarat should "punish" the Congress.
Modi, on the second day of his two-day visit to poll-bound Gujarat, addressing a massive crowd at Malanpada in Dharampur, a Congress bastion, said: "The Congress dynasty which has reigned in Uttar Pradesh since five decades, have we ever maligned them, insulted them? Insulted other states? But not a single day passes when every Congress leader curses Gujarat. What is our fault? They cursed Sardar Patel. What was his fault? That he worked for the good of the country?"
Continuing in the same vein, Modi said, "Indira Gandhi had our Morarji Desai jailed for months. Why such animosity for Gujarat? Gujarat should teach them a lesson that they stop insulting Gujarat. Gujarat has never been on anybody's mercy."
Speaking about the election for Congress president, the Prime Minister said, "Congress has now abandoned all shame. Such persons (Rahul) who have been charged by the court, who is on bail, such persons whom we would not entrust the president post of a district, is now being given the president's post in the party. What kind of culture prevails in Congress?"
Citing a statement by senior Congress leader Manishankar Aiyar, who said "Did election exist when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan?", Modi taunted: "This is an empire where only the dynastic heir rules. Whereas for me, the people are my high command. We ask votes on the basis of development. You check out all the previous elections of 2002, 2007, 2012, where the Congress has only tried to paint a non secular picture of BJP."
Referring to the temple visits of the Gandhi scion in Gujarat, Modi said: "Look at the strength of the land of Sardar and Mahatma Gandhi, that after 70 years they have started visiting places. But people won't be fooled by that. There is a conspiracy to insult Gujarat and Gujarat won't tolerate."
Mentioning the recently held local body elections in Uttar Pradesh, Modi said: "The people of UP have now recognized the Congress and have wiped out them out, who ruled the state through five dynasties. Now the Congress has accepted that they cannot harm Modi in 2019 and now they don't have anywhere to go. So their target is to malign Gujarat. The Congress has always made people fight against people, tribal against tribal, educated against uneducated, communities and so on. But the people of Gujarat have rejected such a disruptive party."
And in his interactive style of asking question to the audience, Modi asked, "Have you ever read in newspapers that Modi took away so much money for himself? For his brother, for his relatives? Whereas what was on the other side - scams of loot in coal deal, helicopter deal, why? Since Modi is in Delhi, he has stopped all such loot. Instead now people ask what did Modi bring in."
On demonetization, Modi said, "Congress is angry with me for demonetization. Tell me are you angry with me for demonetization?" But without waiting for an answer from the crowd as he normally does, he continued, "The Congressman are worried that their scam money, corrupt money has gone. They are angry that Modi looted us. But remember all the looters of the country, Modi will extract every penny out from you and use it for the common man of the country. The money belongs to the country."
Alleging the Congress of not doing anything for the Other Backward Castes (OBC), the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST), Modi said: "All the previous governments did not do anything for these communities. As soon as our government was formed, we granted constitutional status to the OBC commission. Congress had halted that bill in the Rajya Sabha. I don't have to go and learn what backward living is."
Urging the gathered crowd to vote for BJP, Modi said, "I can see the target of achieving 150 seats for the BJP being fulfilled right in front of my eyes here. You will be deciding the fate of Gujarat on the 9th and you will have to punish the people who have disliked Gujarat."
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Congress on Monday issued its poll manifesto for the Gujarat assembly polls, promising debt waiver for state farmers and an assurance on reservation for the Patidars.
In case the Congress returns to power, farmers' debts will be waived and Minimum Support Price of farm produce at taluka level declared even before sowing starts, the party promised in the manifesto, which was released by the Congress state unit.
The Congress promised that without affecting the present 49 per cent reservation for scheduled castes and tribes as well as Other backward classes, the party's government will introduce a bill in the assembly at the earliest under Article 46 of the Constitution.
"The communities specified under Article 46 but which have not received any benefit under relevant laws will be given equal opportunities for education and economic development. The rights and privileges enjoyed by the OBCs will be extended to the Extremely Backward Classes category," the party said.
"In the next three years, the Congress government will complete all remaining works of micro network the Narmada canal. The farmers will be supplied 16 hours of daytime electricity and reduced connection charges. Farmers will be given three-phase electricity connections of up to two horse power connections," the manifesto said.
"Today, the people of Gujarat are living in constant fear and they cannot express themselves. We want to resurrect their trust in the government through this manifesto, which not only looks to improve the state Gross Domestic Product but also the Human Development Index. The Congress is the only hope for that to happen," Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee President Bharatsinh Solanki told the media here.
He said the Congress will revert amendments/changes brought in by the Bharatiya Janata Party government in land acquisition laws brought in by the then United Progressive Alliance government in 2013.
Besides, the Goods and Services Tax on agricultural equipment, inputs and produce will be exempted, the opposition party promised.
The Congress said a giant statue of Bhim Rao Ambedkar would be installed in the Gulf of Cambay (Khambhat), in a bid to appease the Scheduled Castes. Unutilised government surplus land will be alloted to landless SC families, the party said.
"There's a huge backlog of vacancies in government offices. The Congress will ensure filling of vacancies within six months. The Congress government will also abolish contractual system, fixed-salary jobs and regularised them all."
The Congress manifesto promised to make the state's women feel safer and secure.
"One-stop crisis centres will be set up in all districts to prevent violence against women. Women protection officers up to the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police will be appointed in each districts. The number of women police stations will be increased."
It also promised 25 lakh houses in five years under Indira Awas Yojana for the rural and urban poor and Rajeev Gandhi Awas Yojana for the urban lower and middle income groups.
--IANS
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A court here on Monday reserved its order on the bail plea of arrested meat exporter and alleged hawala dealer Moin Akhtar Qureshi in a money laundering case.
Special Judge Arun Bhardwaj said it will deliver the order on the plea on December 12.
Qureshi was arrested on August 25 after a case was filed against him last year under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act on charges of illegal forex dealings and tax evasion.
--IANS
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A CRPF trooper, who was on leave for his wedding scheduled for this week, died in a road accident near his village in Uttar Pradesh's Ghazipur district, an official said in New Delhi on Monday.
Alok Kumar Singh was returning home from Varanasi on Sunday when the vehicle he was travelling in collided with a tractor near Eshopur village in Ghazipur, the CRPF official said.
Singh, who was to get married on December 9, succumbed to his injuries during treatment in a hospital.
--IANS
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In a generational shift at the top in the Congress, Rahul Gandhi is all set to take over as party President next week after he filed his nomination papers on Monday for the post amid opposition jibes over dynasty in a contest with no one else in the fray.
The 47-year-old Gandhi, who will be the sixth Nehru-Gandhi scion to helm the party, filed papers at the Congress headquarters here amid cheers and celebrations by party leaders and workers. His mother and incumbent party President Sonia Gandhi signed the first nomination paper for election of her son.
Among the proposers was former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who called Rahul Gandhi the "darling" of the party. Manmohan Singh accompanied Gandhi when he filed the nomination paper.
In all over 90 sets of nominations were said to have been filed supporting Gandhi before the deadline expired at 3 p.m. on Monday. The last date for withdrawal is December 11 when he may be declared elected since there is no contest. Scrutiny of the nomination will take place on Tuesday.
However, the filing of nomination was not without controversy stoked by remarks of senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar who invoked the Mughal dynasty in the Congress Presidential election that Prime Minister Narendra Modi latched on to quickly to call it "Aurangzeb Raj".
"When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any election happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go to the heir," Aiyar said, retorting to the "dynasty" jibes of the BJP on Rahul Gandhi's election.
"But in a democracy elections are held. I openly invite (Shehzad) Poonawala to file the nomination and contest," Aiyar said, adding has anyone heard of Poonawala earlier.
Aiyar was replying to a question about BJP's criticism following Maharashtra Congress leader Poonawala alleging that election for Congress President was a sham and Rahul Gandhi's elevation was rigged.
Modi was quick to pounce on Aiyar's remarks. Addressing an election rally in Gujarat, Modi said: "Aiyar, who never shies away from showing loyalty to one family, proudly said -- When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any elections happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen?
"It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go the son. I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the wellbeing of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command," he said.
The Prime Minister also said that the Congress leaders admit that it is not a party but a "kunba" (family).
Modi at a poll rally in Gujarat on Sunday lauded Poonawala for exposing lack of internal democracy in the Congress. "Those who have no internal democracy can't work for people. I want to say to this youngster Shehzad - you have done a brave thing but this is sadly what has always happened in Congress."
Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said Modi was "suffering from Rahul Gandhi phobia".
Surjewala also said that Modi's "love for Shehzad, Shahzada (BJP chief Amit Shah's son Jai Shah) and Shourya (National Security Advisor Ajit Doval's son)" is well known to the world.
"But will Modiji tell when he will answer the questions of his own senior party leaders like Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha?" he asked.
Gandhi, who became the Congress Vice President in January 2013, will succeed his mother Sonia, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998. He is the sixth in the Gandhi-Nehru family to head the party after his great great grandfather Motilal Nehru, great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi.
Hundreds of Congress workers and leaders from across the country supporters thronged the party office ahead of the filing of nominations.
A large crowd of party workers were seen requesting the guards for a chance to meet their leader as he made his much awaited move.
Earlier Gandhi called on former President Pranab Mukherjee, who applied tilak mark on his head as a way of blessing.
On his elevation, Manmohan Singh said: "Rahul Gandhi is a darling of the Congress and he will carry forward the great traditions of the party."
Noting that Sonia Gandhi served as Congress President for over 19 years, Manmohan Singh said: "It will be yet another chapter for the party."
Among those who signed the various sets of nomination papers for Gandhi were Motilal Vora, Ahmed Patel, Tarun Gogoi, V.Narayansami, Ashok Gehlot, Kamal Nath, Anand Sharma, Jaipal Reddy, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mallikarjun Kharge, Salman Khursheed, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh and Karan Singh.
--IANS
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In a stern warning to Pakistan, the CIA chief has said if Islamabad does not eliminate terrorist "safe havens" in its territory, the US will do "everything" it can to destroy them.
The statement by CIA Director Mike Pompeo came ahead of US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis's visit to Islamabad where he will persuade Pakistan to support the new US strategy on Afghanistan. The Trump administration is sending mixed signals to its estranged ally, Dawn reported.
The CIA director sent a harsh message when asked at the Reagan National Defence Forum in Simi, California, on Saturday how would the Trump administration persuade Pakistan to adhere to its new Afghan strategy.
"Secretary Mattis) will make clear the president's intent. (He) will deliver the message that we would love you to do that. And that the safe haven inside of Pakistan has worked to the detriment of our capacity to do what we needed to do in Afghanistan," the Dawn quoted Pompeo as saying.
He explained how the Trump administration would deal with the situation if Pakistan turned down Washington's request to destroy safe havens. "In the absence of the Pakistanis achieving that, we are going to do everything we can to make sure that that safe haven no longer exists," he said.
Since 2004, the CIA has conducted drone strikes in Fata and recent media reports have suggested that the Trump administration may expand those strikes to cover other areas inside Pakistan.
Pompeo's predecessor, Leon Panetta, also shared with the forum his experience of dealing with Pakistan as the Obama administration's CIA chief.
"Pakistan has always been a problem. It has been a safe haven for terrorists who cross the border and attack in Afghanistan and go back into Pakistan," he said.
"We have made every effort possible, during the time I was there, to convince Pakistan to stop it. But Pakistan, as Mike knows, has this kind of two-wedge approach to dealing with terrorism," he added.
During his Pakistan visit, Mattis is expected to meet Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa.
--IANS
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Sacked Catalan President Carles Puigdemont will hear the final verdict on the European arrest warrant and extradition request against him filed by Spain on December 14, one of his lawyers said on Monday.
Puigdemont, who along with four of his former ministers is in self-imposed exile in the Belgian capital, is wanted in Spain in relation to an ongoing investigation into allegations of sedition and rebellion for his role in Catalonia's unilateral declaration of independence from Spain, which was branded illegal by the Spanish courts.
Puigdemont, along with Antoni Comin, Meritxell Serret, Clara Ponsati and Lluis Puig, who have been with him in Belgium since October 30, have been on probation since November 5 while the Belgian judiciary considers the arrest warrants and their extradition, Efe news reported.
His lawyers insist he will not receive a fair trial in Spain.
This latest development came a day before campaigning is set to begin for Catalonia's regional election, which on December 21 is set to reinstate the local parliament that was dissolved in the wake of the independence bid as Spain sought to take control of the region's autonomous institutions.
Puigdemont is expected to run as the leader of the newly-founded Junts Per Catalunya (JxCat) party, born out of the merger of Catalan European Democratic Party and independents.
Meanwhile in Madrid, Puigdemont's former deputy in the Catalan government, Oriol Junqueras, was refused bail by a Supreme Court judge, as were three other separatist figureheads.
However, six former Cabinet members were ordered to be released, with bail set at 100,000 euros ($118,635).
--IANS
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A Singapore Airlines flight on Monday was about to land on the small Juhu airport, mistaking it for the international airport, before the error was detected in the nick of time for it to land at the scheduled airstrip, officials said.
The Singapore-Mumbai flight SQ422, an Airbus A-350, was cleared to land on Runway 9 of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport at 10.35 a.m. but due to poor visibility, the pilots discontinued approach to Runway 9 at around 1,000 feet in accordance with the standard operating procedures, the airlines said later.
"The Air Traffic Control, Mumbai, then vectored the flight for a subsequent approach onto the same runway and the flight landed uneventfully at 10.48 a.m," it added.
"At no time did the pilots of SQ422 mistake Juhu airport for the international airport," the airline statement said.
Airport sources, however, said after it was noticed that the aircraft was about to land on the wrong airstrip, it was made to go around while landing clearance was awaited, which was granted by the ATC. The plane finally landed safely on Runway 9 a few minutes later.
Both the airports are about 1.5 km apart, regarding which a caution is issued to all pilots.
The Juhu airport, built in 1928, is used for general aviation activities and training purposes.
--IANS
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The war of words between the BJP and the BSP over civic poll results continued on Monday as the latter's supremo Mayawati dared the ruling party to direct all its 14 newly elected Mayors to resign and re-contest through paper ballot voting.
She was responding to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's rejection of her allegations on EVM tampering on Sunday.
"If she is so sure, she should get her party's Mayors in Aligarh and Meerut to quit and contest fresh elections. People who have won seats in elections held through Electronic Voting Machines are now questioning it," Adityanath had said.
Mayawati said his statement not only "smacked of arrogance of power" but also was akin to "ulta chor kotwal ko daante (a thief scolding a police officer)" .
The Bahujan Samaj Party leader also ridiculed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's statement who dubbed the Bharatiya Janata Party victory in Uttar Pradesh civic polls as "victory of BJP's vision".
"They could not manipulate the polls in Meerut and Aligarh as there was massive anger against the BJP and they feared a backlash in case EVMs were tampered with," the BSP leader said.
The BJP had rigged the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and the February-March Uttar Pradesh assembly elections as well, the former Chief Minister claimed.
--IANS
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Global warming is not only posing serious threat to glaciers, it will also result in a loss of 33 per cent of total ice volume in the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region by the end of the century, leading dire consequences for people living there.
"Climate is warming up. If it rises by 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of 21st century, we will see a loss of one-third of total ice volume in HKH region. This will be of glaciers, snow and ice," Dr Philippus Wester, scientist at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), said on Monday.
"It is one of the key findings of the Hindu Kush Himalayan Monitoring and Assessment Programme (HIMAP)," he added.
Addressing the "International Conference on Resilient Hindu Kush Himalaya: Developing Solutions towards a Sustainable Future for Asia" here, Wester said several studies have suggested that global climate warming should be kept to 1.5 degrees Celsius until the end of the century. But even this would be too hot for the HKH region, because it would mean 2.1 degrees Celsius rise in temperature there.
More than 400 experts including scientists, environmentalists and policymakers from 26 countries are taking part in the meet that began on Sunday. Over the next two days, the participants will discuss ideas for strengthening the fragile environment and solutions for mountain communities of the Hindu Kush Himalayas, which extends from Afghanistan to Myanmar.
Wester said the full report of the Hindu Kush Himalayan Monitoring and Assessment Programme (HIMAP) would be launched in mid-2018.
"HIMAP is an unique initiative, first of its kind for HKH region on the line of AMAP(Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme). It is a part of the HKH science policy dialogue to help policy makers from the region."
According to him, the report is like a mini-IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report specific to HKH region. "It is a long term integrated science policy initiative that aims to support policy change and sustainable solutions for problems in the mountains. It will make a difference as it is a landmark report."
A comprehensive assessment of the HKH region will assess the current state of knowledge of the HKH region, address critical data gaps and increase the understanding of various drivers of change and their impacts.
Based on the assessment, HIMAP will recommend a set of practically-oriented policy recommendations. The assessment process will involve a broad and diverse group of researchers, practitioners and policy makers, and culminate in a major publication with a highly-reputed international publishing house in 2017.
A. Kulkarni, scientist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, said it was a result of global warming that in most of the HKH region, glaciers were thinning, retreating and losing mass volume.
"It is a trend that is projected to continue with possibly large changes in the timing and magnitude of glacier melt runoff."
Kulkarni, who is attending the conference as part of a team of scientists behind HIMAP said: "In future, the volume of seasonal snow is going to decrease and the peak of stream discharge will come early and many springs will become dry."
Kulkarni told IANS here that if temperature rose by 4 to 5 degrees Celsius, then 70 per cent of glaciers will be lost by the end of century.
"If glaciers retreat, new lakes will be formed and this has already happened in Sikkim in India. There will be flash floods if they burst. This is the new risk for people living in the HKH region."
Another findings of HIMAP is that persistent winter fog would lead to greater air pollution and low visibility throughout the HKH region and the Indo-Gangetic plains. Air pollution has already increased and air quality worsened.
The HKH sources 10 major river systems in Asia that provide water, ecosystem services and livelihoods to more than 210 million people. The region holds and distributes water for more than 1.3 billion people living in the downstream river basins.
Climate change and other drivers of change in the HKH have already begun to impact ecosystems and communities, increasing vulnerability and exposure to natural disasters such as floods, droughts and landslides.
The region is also home to some of the most diverse cultures, languages, religions, and traditional knowledge systems in the world. For these reasons, the HKH region is clearly a major global asset, critical to the planet as a whole.
(Imran Khan is at Kathmandu on the invitation of International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development - ICIMOD to cover the conference. He can be reached at imran.k@ians.in)
--IANS
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A gunfight erupted between militants and the security forces on Monday following an attack on an Army patrol on the Jammu-Srinagar highway, police said.
The gunfight is going on in Kulgam district's Bonigam village after militants entered a building following the patrol attack which resulted in two soldiers being injured.
"Two to three militants are believed to be inside the building," the police added.
--IANS
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Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Monday called for Cambodias support in developing a sustainable solution to the Rohingya crisis and the minoritys persecution in Myanmars Rakhine state.
Hasina made the remarks during a discussion with her Cambodian counterpart Hun Sen in Phnom Penh on Monday, bdnews24.com reported.
"We have discussed some of the emerging security challenges facing our region and expressed our common resolve to fight terrorism and extremism," Hasina said during a joint statement.
"We have also discussed the Rohingya crisis that threatens the peace and stability of our region. Bangladesh continues to shelter more than 1 million Rohingyas, among them around 630,000 who fled atrocities in Myanmar and took shelter in Bangladesh recently."
Hasina asked for Hun Sen's support for a durable solution as Bangladesh continued bilateral talks to return Rohingyas safely to their homeland.
"We highly appreciate Bangladesh (for giving shelter to the Rohingya refugees)... even though it has a population of over 160 million, it took the issues of refugees on its shoulder," said the Cambodian leader.
Bangladesh let in a wave of Rohingya refugees since late August, when the Myanmar military launched a crackdown in Rakhine state over insurgent attacks.
The refugees in Cox's Bazar said the military and locals shot and killed people indiscriminately, raped women, looted and set fire to Rohingya homes.
Bangladesh and Myanmar signed an agreement on November 23 on the repatriation of recent refugees to their homeland.
The agreement specified the formation of a joint working group to begin the repatriation process within two months.
The Bangladesh government also attempted to enlist international support for the Rohingya crisis. The UN, EU, US, UK and other parties expressed their appreciation for Bangladesh's efforts on the Rohingya crisis.
--IANS
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With agriculture being one of the major pillars of India-Israel cooperation, Gil Haskel, the head of MASHAV - Israel's Agency for International Development Cooperation - is visiting India for the launch of the three-year action plan for the Indo-Israeli Agricultural Project (IIAP).
Haskel is paying an official visit to New Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai from December 4-7.
He will meet with senior officials of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer's Welfare and MEA and also inaugurate a Centre of Excellence for flowers in Thally, Tamil Nadu. Haskel will award two $10,000 grants to MASHAV Alumni to continue their projects in women empowerment and farmer empowerment in India, a press release from the Israeli Embassy said.
Israel Ambassador Daniel Carmon said, "The IIAP is MASHAV's biggest project outside of Israel, and it holds a significant portion of our bilateral relations. The success story of our agricultural cooperation is second to none, and it is only the beginning. We hope to see the same achievements in the fields of water, innovation and academia."
--IANS
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Actor Rajkummar Rao, who has been on an award-winning spree, says that he is not dreaming about the Oscars.
Rajkummar was named the Best Actor (Critics) for "Newton" and also won the Best Supporting Actor honour for "Bareilly Ki Barfi" at the Star Screen Awards here on Sunday. "Newton" is India's official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
But the actor said here: "I am not dreaming about Oscars. I know it is better to be just neutral and be happy about the fact that it is India's official entry for the Oscars this year."
In 2017, Rajkummar had six releases in a row, and they were successful. He said it is indeed a "sixer".
"It is kind of a sixer! I am happy about the fact that most of my films did well and people like my efforts and sincerity," he added.
The actor will be attending the Oscars ceremony next year with the "Newton" team.
Next year, Rajkummar will be seen in "Love Sonia", "5 Weddings", "Omerta", "Shimla Mirchi", "Fanney Khan" and "Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To Aisa Laga".
--IANS
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In a contradiction of its own policy, the Indian government has allowed over 1,300 tribal Buddhist refugees from Myanmar's Rakhine region to enter Mizoram. The refugees left their homeland because of the ongoing war between the Myanmarese Army and the Arakan Army, made up of Buddhist insurgents.
This comes nearly a month after the Union Home Ministry had directed the northeastern states to take strict measures to prevent Rohingyas -- who are Muslims -- from entering Indian territory despite persecution by the Myanmar regime.
The new group of refugees, belonging to the Chin and few other communities of Myanmar, have come to four villages in Lawngtlai district.
According to sources in the Mizoram government, the administration is struggling hard to bring down the rising tensions among the refugees and the residents of Laitlang, Dumzautlang, Hmawngbuchhuah and Zochachhuah villages.
According to the state administration, the refugees are being taken care of on humanitarian grounds as all of them came to escape clashes back home.
"It's been some six days since these refugees have arrived on Mizoram territory. They currently are in four villages of the Lawngtlai district and are put up at shelter homes, Buddhist homes, temples and many other places," T. Arun, Deputy Commissioner of Lawngtlai, told IANS over the phone.
He emphasised that the security threat in such a situation cannot be denied.
"We basically have two rules -- one relating to national security and other related to humanitarian assistance. Under the humanitarian rules we are providing food as we do not want any starvation deaths. We also have to guard against the outbreak of diseases," said Arun.
Additional police, health workers and doctors have also been deployed not just to keep a vigil on the new arrivals but also to keep a check on their health condition.
"The problem is that the population of each of the villages is just 200-400. The arrival of such a large number of people is a matter of serious concern," said Arun.
Mizoram's police chief emphasised that though they won't immediately term the arrival of the refugees a security threat, they are waiting for the situation in Myanmar to normalise so that they could be sent back.
"We won't call it a security threat at this juncture. They were alllowed into Indian territory due to the ongoing fighting in Myanmar. We are taking care of it and police forces are there. However, we are making sure there won't be any problem for the villagers due to the refugees. They have been confined to the four villages," Director General of Police Thianghlima Pachuau told IANS over the phone.
The current crisis in Myanmar comes nearly two months after the Myanmar Army had launched operations against the Rohingyas in Rakhine province. While the conflict led to more than 600,000 Rohingyas fleeing to Bangladesh, the United Nations Human Rights Commission called the strike by the Myanmar Army "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing".
The Indian government has taken measures, including asking the states in the region to seal their borders with Mayanmar, to prevent Rohingya refugees from entering the country.
Myanmar, the only Southeast Asian country which shares a 1,600-mile-long border with India, serves as its gateway to the other member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Four northeastern states -- Arunachal Pradesh (520 km), Manipur (398 km), Nagaland (215 km) and Mizoram (510 km) -- have an unfenced border with Myanmar.
Experts on Indo-Myanmar relations see the current influx as a temporary matter that is different from the Rohingyas issue.
"This is an issue that has emerged in the last few months. The arrival of Buddhist refugees is certainly a matter of concern as it affects people on the Indian side as well. However, this is different from Rohingyas," Khriezo Yhome, senior Research fellow at Observer Research Foundation and an expert on Indo-Myanmar affairs, told IANS.
According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees there are around 21,500 Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers in India. The central government, though, has sent a clear message that it would not be willing to accept them "because of security concerns".
The Supreme Court on October 13 asked the Centre to strike a balance between national security, economic interests and humanitarian considerations with regard to Rohingya women, children, old, sick and infirm
(Rupesh Dutta can be contacted at Rupesh.d@ians.in)
--IANS
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An Indian-origin US financier has been killed in a shark attack while scuba diving off a Costa Rican island in the Pacific Ocean, officials said.
Rohina Bhandari, 49, a Wall Street private equity manager from New York City, suffered fatal bites to both her legs during the shark attack last week while she was diving with a group near Cocos Island, a national park about 300 miles off the Costa Rican mainland, New York Post reported on Sunday.
She was a senior director at WL Ross & Co. LL, a firm founded by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and often attended New York City charity events.
She was dragged from the Pacific Ocean but could not be saved. Her 26-year-old diving instructor was also badly injured in last Thursday's attack.
The male instructor, who was conscious and in relatively stable condition, told officials that the shark attacked when his group was surfacing at the tail end of the dive in the waters.
According to the Costa Rican newspaper La Nacion, the guide noticed the shark approaching his group underwater and tried to scare it away. But as they surfaced, the shark went for Bhandari, tearing at her legs. The guide, too, suffered leg injuries.
Authorities said two park rangers and several doctors who were part of the diving tourism group of 18 people on the island trip organised by the Undersea Hunter Group, offered first aid in a desperate bid to save her.
Friends paid tribute to the Manhattan resident on Facebook. "Unbelievably sad and heartbreaking news that Rohina has died," wrote Julie Walker. "She was such a wonderful person who loved life. I will always remember her kindness, friendship and our adventures together."
Another friend wrote: "Your kindness and genuine warmth to those of us lucky enough to call you 'friend' was a blessing to behold."
--IANS
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Senior White House advisor Jared Kushner has said peace between Israel and Palestine was "achievable", although he added that the agreement should come from the countries of the region and not something imposed by the US.
"We do think it's achievable," Kushner said on Sunday, referring to an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
Looking relaxed and upbeat, President Donald Trump's son-in-law made the remark during a session session with Haim Saban, one of the Democratic Party's biggest pro-Israel donors, at the annual Saban Forum in the Willard InterContinental Washington Hotel, reports Efe news.
Kushner has been working for months to find a solution to the historic conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, a project that led him to make an official trip to the Middle East in where he met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Although Kushner said that there was a specific peace plan being developed, he provided no details about it, saying: "We've been deliberate about not setting time-frames.
"The President has a very long career of accomplishing things that a lot of people say weren't possible," Kushner said of the thorny problem of Middle East peace, which none of Trump's presidential predecessors has been able to resolve.
The comments come at a particularly delicate moment, given that the Palestinian National Authority announced on November 21 the suspension of relations with the US over the closure of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's office in Washington.
In addition, controversy has swirled around rumours that the Trump administration could recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital with an eye toward moving the US Embassy there from Tel Aviv to the city sacred to both Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians.
The Palestinians view East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state and oppose any change that legitimises Israeli control over that part of the city, which the Jewish state captured in 1967 during the Six Day War and annexed in 1980.
The seizure of East Jerusalem has not been recognized by the international community and no country has its embassy in Jerusalem.
All foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv, the country's business capital.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A court here on Monday posted to Wednesday the pronouncement of quantum of punishment on eight Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) men, including three Pakistanis, it had convicted of involvement in terrorist activities in the country.
Additional District and Sessions Judge Pawan Garg was slated to sentence, on Monday, the eight, convicted on November 30 of various charges under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, included conspiracy and recruiting persons for terrorist activities. They were also held guilty of being members of a terrorist organisation.
The eight arrested in 2010 by the the Rajasthan Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) were Asgar Ali, Shakkar Ulla and Shahid Iqbal (all Pakistanis) and Babu alias Nishachand Ali, Hafiz Abdul, Pawan Puri, Arun Jain, and Kabil.
They were in constant touch with Pakistan-based LeT commander Walid alias Vicky.
The court found them guilty under Section 13 (abetting unlawful activity), Section 18 (punishment for conspiracy), Section 18 (B) (recruiting for terror act) and Section 20 (punishment for being member of terrorist gang or organisation) of the Act, according to Special ATS Public Prosecutor Mahaveer Jindal.
The punishment for these offences varies from five year jail to life imprisonment.
According to the prosecution, the three Pakistani LeT men, who were lodged in different jails across Rajasthan and Punjab, tried to recruit Indians for anti-national activities, such as acts of terrorism, smuggling of explosives and printing of Indian fake currency.
The Rajasthan ATS had intercepted telephonic conversations among the LeT men lodged in various jails, the LeT commander in Pakistan and their recruits in India in 2010. The case was registered on October 21, 2010 and the chargesheet was filed in court on April 15, 2015. The prosecution presented 69 witnesses during the trial.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ten people have been arrested in Malta over the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Prime Minister said on Monday.
Galizia, who was a relentless critic of corruption and organised crime in the country, died in October in a powerful car bomb blast yards from her home.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said in an early morning press conference that there was "reasonable suspicion" that the arrested individuals were involved in the murder.
The police have 48 hours to question the suspects and decide whether to prosecute or release them. At least eight of the suspects were Maltese citizens, the Guardian reported.
The arrests followed an operation that lasted several weeks and involved police, the armed forces and security services assisted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the European Police Office.
"I would like to emphasize the commitment of the state and my own personal commitment to bringing the persons who may have commissioned and or executed this crime to justice," Muscat said.
Investigators believed that some of the suspects in custody had helped craft the bomb that killed Galizia, who had also been investigating the links between Maltese politicians and the Panama Papers, cases of government corruption and links drug traffickers had established on the island nation.
Malta's government offered a 1 million euro reward for information relating to the killing.
The crime moved the public both in Malta and abroad, though the journalist's sons, Matthew, Andrew and Paul, criticised the government.
Matthew had called Malta a "Mafia state" in which the government had allowed a culture of impunity to flourish and demanded that Muscat resign.
"He filled his office with crooks, then he filled the police with crooks and imbeciles, then he filled the courts with crooks and incompetents," he had said.
Matthew told the Guardian that his family were "in the dark" about the arrests and had not been offered any information. The family, he said, received a phone call from a magistrate's office after the arrests were known but did not have additional details.
The family have alleged that her murder was a "targeted killing".
Accusing Chief Minister Mukul Sangma of practising "one-upmanship", veteran Congress legislator Comingone Ymbon on Monday resigned as the Meghalaya Power Minister.
Ymbon's resignation came after two Independent legislators -- Robinus Syngkon and Rophul Marak -- withdraw support to the Congress-led Meghalaya United Alliance government last month.
Chief Minister Mukul Sangma, who was in New Delhi along with Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee President D.D. Lapang, to support the candidature of Rahul Gandhi for Congress presidentship, was back in Shillong on Monday evening to take stock of the political developments.
"I have put in my papers since I have lost confidence in the Chief Minister," Ymbon, who was inducted in the Mukul Sangma ministry on August 4, told IANS over phone.
"During my four months, as a Cabinet minister I understood his (Sangma) one-upmanship. He takes unilateral decision on programmes of the department which I was holding. What is the point of being a minister," Ymbon asked.
In fact, Ymbon's resignation is a major embarrassment for the ruling Congress party ahead of the last session of the outgoing Meghalaya Assembly, prior to the state going to polls in February next year.
The three-day session of the 9th Meghalaya Legislative Assembly will commence from December 8.
"In the days to come, I will also be resigning from the Congress party," the former minister said.
The two-time Congress legislator from Raliang Assembly constituency is expected to contest the upcoming Assembly elections on National People's Party ticket.
Four Congress legislators -- Rowell Lyngdoh, Prestone Tynsong, Sniawbhalang Dhar and Ngaitlang Dhar, besides Independent legislators Hopeful Bamon and Stephanson Mukhim are expected to contest the upcoming assembly elections on NPP ticket.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Metropolitan Opera on Sunday suspended James Levine, its conductor, after three men, including an Indian-origin guy, accused the former music director of sexually abusing them decades ago, when they were teenagers.
Peter Gelb, the General Manager of the Met, announced that the company was suspending its four-decade relationship with the 74-year-old musician and cancelling his upcoming conducting engagements, The New York Times reported.
According to the report, the three men described a series of similar sexual encounters beginning in the late 1960s. The Met has also asked an outside law firm to investigate Levine's behaviour.
"While we await the results of the investigation, based on these news reports the Met has made the decision to act now," Gelb ws quoted as saying.
He added that his actions had the support of the Met's board. "This is a tragedy for anyone whose life has been affected."
The accusations of sexual misconduct stretch back to 1968.
Chris Brown, who played principal bass in the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for more than three decades, said that Levine masturbated him in 1968 -- and then coaxed him to reciprocate -- when Brown was 17.
The incident happened at the Meadow Brook School of Music in Michigan, where Levine was a 25-year-old rising star on the summer programme's faculty.
The second man James Lestock levelled similar allegations saying he was a 17-year-old cello student when he was assaulted by Levine.
Ashok Pai, who grew up in Illinois near the Ravinia Festival, where Levine was music director, said that he was sexually abused by Levine in the summer of 1986, when Pai was 16.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday greeted Indian naval personnel on the ocassion of Navy Day.
"On Navy Day, greetings to all navy personnel and their families," Modi tweeted, attaching a video of the Indian Navy showing its prowess in the sea.
Navy Day is celebrated annually on December 4 to celebrate the Indian Navy's achievements and commemorate the sacrifices made by the personnel.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday will hold four rallies in Gujarat's Dharampur, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar, where polling is scheduled in the first phase on December 9.
"Will continue the campaign across Gujarat. Looking forward to addressing rallies in Dharampur, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar," Modi said in a tweet.
The second-phase of polling for the 182-seats-Gujarat assembly will be on December 14. The counting of votes will take place on December 18.
On Sunday Modi was in Bharuch where he addressed a rally and took a jibe at the Congress for opposing the bullet train project.
Continuing his two-day visit to the state, on Monday, he will visit Dharmapur in Valsad district and then he will be in Saurashtra's Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar.
Gujarat has been under the Bharatiya Janata Party-rule for the last 22 years.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Indian naval personnel observed the 46th Navy Day on Monday as President Ram Nath Kovind, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman greeted them and lauded their role in securing the country's borders.
Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba, Army chief General Bipin Rawat and Air Force chief Air Chief Marshal B.S. Dhanoa paid homage to martyrs at the Amar Jawan Jyoti here to commemorate the day.
"On Navy Day, my good wishes to all officers and men and women of the Indian Navy. Nation is proud of your commitment in protecting our maritime frontiers, securing our trade routes, and providing assistance in times of civil emergencies," President Kovind tweeted.
Prime Minister Modi also extended greetings to all Navy personnel and their families, in a tweet, attaching a video of the Indian Navy showing its prowess in the sea.
The Defence Minister, meanwhile, shared a graphic on Operation Trident, under which the Indian Navy attacked the Karachi harbour on December 4 during the 1971 India-Pakistan war.
"Let's salute the bravery, sacrifice and courage of our Naval heroes on 46th Navy Day," the Minister said.
Navy Day in India is celebrated to commemorate the attack on the Karachi harbour during the 1971 war by Indian Naval Missile boats. Operation Trident saw the first use of anti-ship missiles in combat in the region.
The day also commemorate the sacrifices made by the personnel of Indian Navy.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Dismissing reports that the was holding talks with them for their return to the party, Swaraj India founders Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav on Monday said there was no such possibility.
Bhushan retweeted a media report that quoted Aam Aadmi Party leader Kumar Vishwas as saying so and dubbed it as "absurd".
Kumar Vishwas on Sunday expressed displeasure over the AAP's functioning and said the party needed to go back to the basics.
He said the party workers were in talks with many of their colleagues who had since left the AAP, including Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, and apologised for any wrongs done by the party.
"There are no talks or possibility of our returning to AAP, which has betrayed all the ideals of the anti-corruption movement," Bhushan tweeted.
Yadav took to Twitter and said he was "surprised" on reading what Vishwas had said a day before.
"Really? Must be very secret, since both of us have not heard about it! In my knowledge, there is no possibility of this happening," he said in a series of tweets.
Yadav and Bhushan were sacked from the in March 2015 for alleged anti-party activities. They had hit out at chief Arvind Kejriwal over his "supremo style of functioning" and lack of transparency in the party.
In October 2016, the two launched a new political outfit Swaraj India.
Dismissing reports that the AAP was holding talks with them for their return to the party, Swaraj India national President Yogendra Yadav and its senior leader Prashant Bhushan on Monday said there was no such possibility, and denied any communication with AAP leaders and its founder member Kumar Vishwas.
Speaking to IANS, Yogendra Yadav said: "I was surprised to read the claim that some Swaraj Abhiyan colleagues will join AAP again. I would be happy to know who these people are and what was their status in Swaraj Abhiyan."
"I was very surprised to hear that there are talks going between AAP and us. At least I do not know of such talks. I have not spoken to Kumar Vishwas or any AAP leader for over two years now. I see no point in it. All this is idle speculation," Yadav said.
Bhushan retweeted a media report that quoted Aam Aadmi Party leader Kumar Vishwas as saying that the two were planning to rejoin AAP, terming it as "absurd".
Kumar Vishwas on Sunday expressed displeasure over AAP's functioning and said the party needed to go back to the basic idea of Swaraj, morality and inner democracy in the party.
He said the party workers were in talks with many of their colleagues who had since left the AAP, including Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, and apologised for any wrongs done by the party.
"There are no talks or possibility of our returning to AAP, which has betrayed all the ideals of the anti-corruption movement," Bhushan tweeted.
Yadav also took to Twitter and said he was "surprised" on reading what Vishwas had said a day before.
"Really? Must be very secret, since both of us have not heard about it! In my knowledge, there is no possibility of this happening," he said in a series of tweets.
Yadav and Bhushan were sacked from the AAP in March 2015 for alleged anti-party activities. They had hit out at AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal over his "supremo style of functioning" and "lack of transparency" in the party.
In October 2016, the two launched a new political outfit Swaraj India which also contested civic polls in Delhi.
According to sources, the AAP has decided to sack Vishwas and that the move by him is a bargaining tactic before the senior party leadership. The controversial statements by Vishwas are aimed to grab the attention of AAP leaders and party volunteers for bargaining a Rajya Sabha seat, sources said.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Delhi Labour Minister Gopal Rai on Monday said that workers should not be employed on a contract basis for jobs which are permanent in nature like cleaning, security and clerical work.
Rai said that the Delhi Advisory Contract Labour Board was formed last month to address problems faced by contractual employees and its first meeting will be held on December 20.
The board, headed by Rai, will have representatives from all major workers' unions, employers, two legislators and representatives from the government.
Rai said that the two main agendas of the Board will be similar pay for similar jobs and not hiring workers on a contract basis for jobs that are permanent in nature.
The Minister said that the board will identify all such jobs and develop a new system and also take the opinion of others who work on the issue.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
There is no terrorist outfit currently active in Tripura but some of the cadres of the state's extremist groups are hiding in neighbouring Bangladesh, Director General of Police Akhil Kumar Shukla said here.
Also, no militant outfits were involved in the abduction of four Tripura Gramin Bank officials, he told the media late on Sunday.
The four were kidnapped on November 24 by a gang comprising surrendered militants and local miscreants. However, the kidnappers released them on November 30 after taking a ransom of Rs 50,000 from the relatives of the hostages.
The DGP said that nine people, including four surrendered extremists, have been arrested and over Rs 48.85 lakh and a small vehicle recovered from them. "More people likely to be arrested in connection with the abduction," he added.
The United Forums of Bank Unions, a body of various bank employees associations, thanked the police for the hostages' release and the arrest of the culprits and recovering the ransom.
Meanwhile, the outlawed National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) in a statement said the outfit is now in a dialogue with the Government of India for amicable and peaceful solutions to the age-old political problem of Tripura and hence, its normal activities are suspended until further notice.
In its statement, mailed to various media organisations, the NLFT said that its members are not collecting any subscriptions or ransom from any people. "We therefore warn all concerned to refrain from such unlawful activities," the statement added.
Police officials said there was not a single extremist-related incident since 2015 in Tripura, which was earlier ravaged by terrorism for four decades.
However, police and intelligence officials had earlier apprehended that terrorist activities might resurface in the state ahead of the crucial assembly elections in February 2018.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The ladies club of the Pakistan High Commission here participated in an International charity bazaar organized by the Delhi Commonwealth Women's Association (DCWA) that saw a wide range of Pakistani textile products, including some well-known brands, exhibited at the stall.
A large number of people, including foreigners, visited the Pakistan stall on Sunday along with their families, and evinced keen interest and purchased various items, a press release from the Pakistan High Commission said.
Students of the Pakistan High commission School rendered an impressive performance, singing national songs and presented a tableau highlighting Pakistani culture at the event held at a hotel here.
Pakistan High Commissioner Sohail Mahmood and his wife Mahwish Sohail Mahmood lauded the contribution of the ladies club and the school students for their participation.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pakistani music artists Shafqat Amanat Ali and Salman Ahmad on Monday condoled the sudden demise of veteran actor-filmmaker Shashi Kapoor, remembering how he believed in peace and harmony among neighbours.
Shashi Kapoor -- who earned the epithets of 'the charming man' and 'the brave producer' -- died at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai at age 79 after a period of hospitalisation.
"At a loss for words as veteran actor Shashi Kapoor passes away. Spent countless hours watching movies of this legendary and charming actor while growing up. Rest in peace, sir," Ali tweeted.
The younger brother of late Raj and Shammi Kapoor, who were both actors par excellence, Shashi Kapoor started his tryst with acting at the age of four, with plays directed and produced by his father Prithviraj Kapoor.
The Kapoor dynasty has a house in Peshawar, Pakistan. It was constructed between 1918 and 1922 by Dewan Basheswarnath Kapoor, the father of Prithviraj Kapoor, the first member of the family to enter the film industry. The Kapoors shifted to India after the 1947 partition.
Pakistani sufi rock band Junoon's frontman Ahmad also posted: "A very kind man and a great actor. I met Shashi Kapoor in Karachi on the set of the film 'Jinnah'. He was co-starring with Christopher Lee. Shashi always believed in peace and harmony among neighbours. Free at last. (RIP)"
Shashi Kapoor started acting in films as a child in the late 1940s. His best known performances as child artist were in "Aag" (1948) and "Awaara" (1951), where he played the younger version of the character played by his elder brother Raj.
He made his debut as a leading man in the 1961 film "Dharmputra", and went on to appear in more than 150 Hindi films.
Shashi Kapoor, whose nuanced acts in memorable films like "Deewar", "Satyam Shivam Sundaram", "Trishul" and "Kabhi Kabhie" captivated Hindi film buffs, was married to English theatre actress Jennifer Kendal. He had three children -- Kunal, Karan and Sanjana Kapoor.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Monday filed his nomination papers for the post of party chief at its headquarters amid cheers and enthusiasm by party leaders and workers.
Gandhi signed a set of nominations in the presence of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, senior party leaders Kamal Nath, Motilal Vora, Sheila Dikshit, Ahmed Patel and Ashok Gehlot.
He accepted greetings from party leaders and chatted with them as they came to him to get his signatures.
Over 90 sets of nominations are expected to be filed supporting Gandhi whose election is a mere formality now, as there is no other candidate for the party's top post.
Gandhi will succeed his mother Sonia Gandhi, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998.
Hundreds of Congress supporters thronged the party office ahead of the filing of nominations for the party's top post.
A large crowd of party workers were seen requesting the guards for a chance to meet their leader as he made his much awaited move.
Rahul Gandhi became the Congress Vice President in January 2013.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi's long-delayed elevation as party chief is eventually taking place at a time when Congress faces an "existential crisis", as a party leader put it, and has huge electoral challenges in the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
Gandhi, 47, will be the sixth member of Nehru-Gandhi family to take the top position of the 132-year old party.
The change at the top is coming on the eve of assembly polls in Gujarat and the outcome there would be interpreted in terms of Rahul Gandhi's ability as a campaigner and vote getter.
But the next round of assembly polls in 2018 -- first in Karnataka and later in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh -- will be absolutely crucial for Rahul Gandhi for building the momentum to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha polls. The state elections, with Bharatiya Janata Party as the key rival, will also be first major polls directly under Rahul Gandhi's charge as party chief. Assembly polls will also be held early next year in Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura.
The challenges for Rahul Gandhi include fostering a new energy and enthusiasm in the Congress and evolving a new strategy to galvanise the party after a string of electoral losses since the 2014 Lok Sabha debacle. The Congress has to work hard at the grassroots to take on the relentless election machine of BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the party chief Amit Shah.
Gandhi has to take a call on forging a larger opposition alliance for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls under a "collective leadership" or projecting himself as the alternative against Modi with support of different parties. He was the face of Congress in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
Gandhi has been perceived as a reluctant politician due to some of his longish trips abroad, the delay in stepping up to the role of party chief, his not taking up a ministerial responsibility in two UPA governments and not properly following through some of the issues he raised.
Of late, he has been able to counter the perception with his sharp and aggressive attacks on Modi and the BJP. A trip to the United States where he had had interactions with think tanks appeared to have done a sea change to the image about him.
In Gujarat, where success will be a big morale-booster for the Congress, Gandhi has sought to create a broad social coalition and has forced Modi to react.
Congress' only major success since its debacle in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls has been Punjab while the BJP, in comparison, has tremendously expanded its footprint by winning states it had never done in the past. The BJP is making efforts to expand its base in states it has been weak including West Bengal, Kerala, Odisha and Tamil Nadu.
Another major challenge for Rahul Gandhi is to revive Congress in Uttar Pradesh, the state that sends the largest contingent of 80 MPs to parliament. Gandhi has twice led the party's campaign in the assembly polls but had come a cropper.
The results of the recent local body polls in Amethi and Rae Bareli, the Lok Sabha constituencies of Rahul Gandhi and his mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, have not been flattering for his image.
Congress has shrunk electorally, being now the fourth player in states such as Bihar, third in states such as West Bengal, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu as also Delhi. In the polls held to various assemblies since 2014, it has largely finished third or fourth. Sections, which were strongly with the party including Dalits, have drifted away.
Rahul Gandhi had been projected as a young leader who understands the language and idiom of the youth but Modi has been more successful in weaning away the section that has large electoral presence. The Congress also has to devise ways to woo the large middle class.
Gandhi, who is stepping into shoes of his mother Sonia Gandhi who helmed Congress for 19 years including 10 as the chief of the party heading the ruling coalition at the Centre, will need to be dexterous in his dealings with allies as also other opposition parties such as the CPI-M.
The crumbling of the ruling alliance in Bihar has been a setback for the party.
Senior leaders like Mamata Banerjee and Lalu Prasad have a comfort level with Sonia Gandhi and it remains to be seen how Rahul Gandhi fits into the role.
Within the party, Gandhi has to take several decisions including whether to project chief ministerial candidates in Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Rajasthan and who they will be.
Bringing about unity in faction-ridden state units and making the balance between the "old guard" and the younger aspirants will be other challenges.
Congress had to project nonagenarian Virbhadra Singh as chief ministerial candidate in Himachal Pradesh in the absence of a younger acceptable option.
Congress is now ruling only five states and a union territory and if it loses Gujarat and Karanataka next year, its chances of staging a comeback in 2019 will be further squeezed.
Though Gandhi's experiments to democratise the party's youth organisations have not entirely succeeded, he has had some political successes, including forcing the Modi government to go back on its proposed changes in the land acquisition Act.
The concerted opposition attack on the "flawed" implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) as also perception of unease among traders in poll-bound Gujarat has apparently forced the government to extend several concessions.
But the Congress or other opposition parties could not reap political dividends on demonetisation though it caused a lot inconvenience to people.
Though Gandhi had promised to "involve people in ways you cannot even imagine now" after the party lost in Delhi in 2013 assembly polls, the party fared far worse in the next polls.
Gandhi, who is into his third term as Lok Sabha MP, was made party vice-president in 2013 as a stepping stone to his eventual elevation.
--IANS
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(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Marking a generational shift, is all set to take over as Congress President next week as he was the only candidate to file nominations before deadline expired on Monday for the post amid opposition jibes over dynasty in a contest with no one else in the fray.
The 47-year-old Gandhi, who will be the sixth Nehru-Gandhi scion to helm the party, filed papers at the Congress headquarters here amid cheers and celebrations by party leaders and workers. His mother and incumbent party President Sonia Gandhi signed the first nomination paper for election of her son.
He has been party Vice President for over four years since 2013.
Among the proposers of 89 nominations -- all in support of Gandhi -- was former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who called the "darling" of the party. Manmohan Singh accompanied Gandhi when he filed the nomination paper.
The last date for withdrawal is December 11 when he may be declared elected since there is no contest. Scrutiny of the nomination will take place on Tuesday.
"Eighty-nine nominations from various states were submitted to the returning officer. Prominent Congress leaders filed nominations (on behalf of Gandhi) including the former Prime Minister, Congress Working Committee members, MPs, state Congress leaders," Returning Officer Mullapally Ramachandran told reporters.
Though Ramachandran did not divulge details, sources said all the nominations were in favour of "one candidate" -- obviously Gandhi.
Originally 90 nomination forms were issued but one could not be filed as there were not enough number of proposers.
However, the filing of nomination was not without controversy stoked by remarks of senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar who invoked the Mughal dynasty in the Congress Presidential election that Prime Minister Narendra Modi latched on to quickly to call it "Aurangzeb Raj".
"When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any election happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go to the heir," Aiyar said, retorting to the "dynasty" jibes of the BJP on Rahul Gandhi's election.
"But in a democracy elections are held. I openly invite (Shehzad) Poonawala to file the nomination and contest," Aiyar said, adding no one had earlier heard of Poonawala.
Aiyar was replying to a question about BJP's criticism following Maharashtra Congress leader Poonawala alleging that election for Congress President was a sham and Rahul Gandhi's elevation was rigged.
Modi was quick to pounce on Aiyar's remarks. Addressing an election rally in Gujarat, Modi said: "Aiyar, who never shies away from showing loyalty to one family, proudly said -- When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any elections happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen?
"It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go the son. I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the wellbeing of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command," he said.
The Prime Minister also said that the Congress leaders admit that it is not a party but a "kunba" (family).
Modi at a poll rally in Gujarat on Sunday lauded Poonawala for exposing lack of internal democracy in the Congress. "Those who have no internal democracy can't work for people. I want to say to this youngster Shehzad - you have done a brave thing but this is sadly what has always happened in Congress."
Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said Modi was "suffering from phobia".
Surjewala also said that Modi's "love for Shehzad, Shahzada (BJP chief Amit Shah's son Jai Shah) and Shourya ( Security Advisor Ajit Doval's son)" is well known to the world.
"But will Modiji tell when he will answer the questions of his own senior party leaders like Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha?" he asked.
Gandhi, who became the Congress Vice President in January 2013, will succeed his mother Sonia, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998. He is the sixth in the Gandhi-Nehru family to head the party after his great great grandfather Motilal Nehru, great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi.
Hundreds of Congress workers and leaders from across the country supporters thronged the party office ahead of the filing of nominations.
A large crowd of party workers were seen requesting the guards for a chance to meet their leader as he made his much awaited move.
Earlier, Gandhi called on former President Pranab Mukherjee, who applied tilak mark on his head as a way of blessing.
On his elevation, Manmohan Singh said: "Rahul Gandhi is a darling of the Congress and he will carry forward the great traditions of the party."
Noting that Sonia Gandhi served as Congress President for over 19 years, Manmohan Singh said: "It will be yet another chapter for the party."
Among those who signed the various sets of nomination papers for Gandhi were Motilal Vora, Ahmed Patel, Tarun Gogoi, V.Narayansami, Ashok Gehlot, Kamal Nath, Anand Sharma, Jaipal Reddy, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mallikarjun Kharge, Salman Khursheed, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh and Karan Singh.
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Monday called on former President Pranab Mukherjee to seek his blessings ahead of filing nomination for the Congress presidential election.
Mukherjee blessed the Gandhi-Nehru family scion by applying 'tilak' on his forhead and embraced him.
After meeting Mukherjee at his residence here, Gandhi met former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the party headquarters here.
Gandhi signed a set of nomination papers in the presence of Singh, senior party leaders Kamal Nath, Motilal Vora, Sheila Dikshit, Ahmed Patel, and Ashok Gehlot at the All India Congress Committee office here.
He accepted greetings from party leaders and chatted with them as they came up to him to get his signatures.
Over 90 sets of nominations are expected to be filed in support of Gandhi, whose election is a mere formality now, as there is no other candidate for the party's top post.
Gandhi will succeed his mother Sonia Gandhi, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998.
Hundreds of Congress supporters thronged the party office ahead of the filing of nominations.
A large crowd of Congress workers were seen urging security guards at the premises to let them in to meet their party leader.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The much-hyped and controversial Criminal Law (Rajasthan Amendment) Ordinance 2017 -- which promulgated to protect public servants against probe into on-duty actions and "gagged" the media, triggering national uproar -- met a silent death on Monday.
Senior Cabinet Minister Gulab Chand Kataria confirmed that legally, the ordinance has lapsed. Now its fate will be decided on December 27 when a committee meets to discuss it.
Drafted by the state government on September 6, the ordinance was introduced in the Rajasthan assembly on October 23.
As per the rule book, an ordinance is valid for 42 days after it gets tabled in the assembly, after which it lapses automatically. Going by this, the gag ordinance lapsed on December 4.
"Now, the ball is in the select committee's court. If the committee stops it, it will be dropped, and if the committee considers it to be ok, it will be reintroduced," said Kataria, who heads the select committee.
This committee is expected to submit its report in the first week of the next assembly session.
The announcement for the select committee was made on November 27 and its next meeting is scheduled for December 27.
The ordinance was meant to protect public servants from prosecution for on-duty actions.
The state government, via this ordinance, made it a must for judicial magistrates to seek government approval before taking cognizance against former and sitting judges and public servants on complaints filed under CrPC Section 156(3).
Even media was not spared under this ordinance and there were provisions of jail term of up to two years for journalists publishing or broadcasting such complaints which have not been approved by the government.
However, the government, in its defence, said that the gag ordinance aimed at curbing the misuse of CrPC Section 156(3).
As it was protested against from all corners of the country, the state government had to refer it to the select committee, thereby leading to the silent gagging of the "gag bill".
--IANS
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Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh will meet the Chief Ministers of five states, situated on the India-Bangladesh border, on Thursday in Kolkata on the issues of Rohingyas and influx of Bangladeshis and illegal cross-border trade, official sources said on Monday.
He will leave Delhi on Tuesday evening and chair the meeting with the Chief Ministers and Home Ministers of West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Tripura, a Home Ministry official said.
It would be the fourth in a series of meeting chaired by the Home Minister. Earlier, Rajnath Singh met with the Chief Ministers of states bordering Pakistan, China, and Myanmar.
Strategies to handle the Rohingyas and Bangladeshi refugees, apart from cross-border smuggling of fake Indian currency, narcotics, cattle and other illegal activities will be discussed.
As per Home Ministry's estimate, there are around 40,000 Rohingya in India, including 5,700 in Jammu. Only 16,000 of them are said to have registered themselves with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
As much as 2,217 km of the India-Bangladesh border is in West Bengal, 262 km in Assam, 443 km in Meghalaya, 856 km in Tripura, and 180 km in Mizoram.
The Chief Secretaries and Directors General of Police of the states concerned and senior Home Ministry officials along with those of Assam Rifles, security agencies and Border Security Force chief are likely to be present in the December 7 meeting.
Rajnath Singh will also inaugurate Thapa indoor sport complex and swimming pool at Dimapur in Nagaland on December 8 before returning to Delhi the same day.
--IANS
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On September 10, as the police lined up 10 Muslim Rohingya refugees in a police station on the outskirts of Jammu and lashed them with a stick and a belt, they had only one question: "Who killed the cow?" multiple refugees, including a minor boy who was detained, told IANS.
"We were crying and told the police that we did not do it, but they kept beating us for about 15 minutes," Hamid Hussain, 29, recalled about his second day in police detention.
Twelve Rohingyas -- including two women with breastfeeding infants -- were detained in Channi Himmat Police Station in south Jammu, for durations ranging from four to 11 days, and the men were allegedly beaten up by police.
A cow's carcass had been found in an empty parcel of land near the Rohingya settlement in Channi Rama in south Jammu. BJP members protested against the killing of the cow.
The detention and brutality that followed were confirmed to IANS by three persons detained by the police, community leaders, neighbours, and family members of two out of three refugees currently in jail for allegedly killing the cow.
"On the second day, police made us sit on the floor and stretch our legs. Then they hit us on our legs, back and hands with a stick and a belt," a scraggy-bearded Hussain said. "They tortured us a lot."
The refugees, who were let off by the police after periods ranging allegedly from "96 to 264 hours", said that they were "never produced in a court". A person cannot be detained for more than 24 hours and must be produced before a magistrate, according to the Code of Criminal Procedure.
"The infants were crying a lot in the police station," said 16-year-old Sayed Noor, who claimed to have been detained for eight days. "One was only four days old."
Vimla, 35, a Hindu woman, who stays in the same plot from where the Rohingyas were arrested, said the police asked her to come to the police station. "But we said that we are Hindu, how can we come? The police then told us to go back to sleep and left," Vimla said outside her shack. "I never went to the police station."
Rohingyas, termed as one of the "world's most persecuted minorities", have been facing military brutality in Myanmar, with the UN urging the government to end the "cruel military operation".
More than 800,000 Rohingyas have fled Myanmar in the last five years as a result of violence, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and there are around 21,500 Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers in India.
Jammu, with a large refugee population, has been witnessing protests by the BJP and the Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party (JKNPP) to "identify and deport Rohingyas".
Noor Hussain is one of the boys who, with others, was taken into custody by policemen as they stepped outside their mosque -- without any explanation. "Before I reached the jeep, an officer slapped me on the cheek," Noor said, adding "he appeared drunk."
The 16-year-old said that at night "they put us in the lock-up and bolted it from outside".
Stuck on the white wall of Channi Himmat Police Station is a list of rules. One of them reads: "Do not take a child/juvenile into police custody or keep them in police station at night."
Hamida Begum, 30, said she and another woman were detained for four days. "I had my seven-month-old son and the other woman had her new born baby girl with her," she said.
Kushnama, 20, wife of Noorullah, 22, one of the three Rohingyas currently in jail, said: "I do not have money to get him out (on bail) or to even visit him in the jail."
Mustaq Ahmad, 51, a Muslim from the Gujjar community, whose cow was found dead on September 9, said that within hours, a crowd, including hundreds of members of the "Shiva Sena and BJP", blocked the nearby highway blaming Rohingyas for "killing the cow".
When asked whether he saw any refugee killing his cow, Ahmed said "No", adding: "Who else would do it? It happened right next to where they live."
BJP's Jammu legal cell member, Hunar Gupta, also confirmed to IANS that "local BJP leaders had blocked the highway" in protest. In February, Gupta had filed a PIL for deportation of Rohingyas from Jammu.
The SHO of the Channi Himmat Police Station, Sajjad Mir, confirmed that many people were called in for questioning, but claimed that "they were sent back and not detained".
"If I get a chance, I want to ask the police: Why did you take him?" Kushnama said in her weak voice from under her burqa. "Every day I think he will come back today."
(Nikhil M Babu can be reached at nikhil.b@ians.in)
--IANS
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Russian strategic bombers continued to strike Islamic State (IS) terrorists in Syria on Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
Six Tu-22M3 long-range bombers took off from Russia and destroyed IS ammunition warehouses, equipment and strongholds in the southeast of Deir al-Zour province, Xinhua quoted a statement from the ministry as saying.
The warplanes were covered by Russia's Su-30SM fighters from the Hmeymim airbase in Syria. After completing the mission, the bombers returned to their base airfields.
This was the sixth airstrike by Russian strategic bombers since November 15 as Syrian government troops backed by the Russian air force were finishing expelling IS terrorists from the country.
Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russian military operations against terrorists in Syria were coming to an end, with the focus shifting to a political process.
To that end, Russia, Iran and Turkey are preparing for a Syrian National Dialogue Congress to be held in Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi.
--IANS
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The search for the ARA San Juan, the Argentine navy submarine that disappeared 18 days ago, was now focussing on an area where the ocean floor is 950 metres deep, as complaints by the family members of the vessel's 44 crew-members mount.
At his Sunday press briefing, navy spokesman Enrique Balbi said that Russia's remote-controlled submersible Pantera Plus will try to descend to the ocean bottom at a spot where a "contact" - that is, a possible metallic object - has been detected, reports Efe news.
The Russian undersea vehicle, which is being transported on board the Argentine vessel Islas Malvinas, on Saturday had descended to 477 and 700 meters at two other locations, but neither target proved to be the missing sub.
The ARA San Juan was sailing northwards some 432 km off Argentina's Atlantic coast when it went missing on November 15 after reporting a battery short-circuit caused by water entering the vessel via the snorkel.
Some three hours after the last communication, a sound consistent with an explosion was detected 27 km from the submarine's reported position, and the huge international search has focused in that region, with six vessels still at sea continuing with that effort.
At Balbi's daily update, the father of one of the missing sailors claimed that the navy had not provided him with any information about his son.
"You said that (the navy) informed the relatives but (I've received) nothing. I haven't received a single call," said Luis Antonio Niz, the father of one of the sub's officers, Luis Alberto Niz.
Balbi offered an immediate apology for the apparent oversight and took Niz's contact information, saying that the navy is not "infallible" and can make "mistakes".
On Sunday, most of the crewmembers' relatives left the Mar del Plata base en masse carrying Argentine flags and photos of their missing loved ones, stopping to speak with reporters and announcing that they were marching to the city's central square to call upon Argentine President Mauricio Macri to order a resumption of the "rescue" phase of the operation.
The rescue operations were discontinued on November 30 since calculations are that, even if the crewmembers were alive in a sunken vessel, they would have exhausted their available oxygen by then.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Veteran actor-filmmaker Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the 70s and early 80s, died on Monday at a hospital in Mumbai. But Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said he was getting condolence calls.
'"We're getting condolence calls in the office. Reports of my demise are, if not exaggerated, at least premature. #ShashiKapoor," Tharoor tweeted on Monday.
The mistake happened after a news channel's Twitter handle wrote Shashi Tharoor instead of Shashi Kapoor, who was 79.
But the politician has "no problem" as "mistakes happen. Glad to be able to crack a smile at a tragic moment".
Tharoor even paid tribute to the youngest son of late Prithviraj Kapoor and brother of late Raj Kapoor and Shammi Kapoor.
"I feel a part of me is gone. A great actor, smart, cosmopolitan, impossibly handsome and w/a name that was often confused w/mine. (My office got two calls from journalists today about my reportedly serious ill-health!) I will miss Shashi Kapoor. Condolences to his family and all his fans," he tweeted.
In Thiruvananthapuram, a close aide of Tharoor told IANS that the MP's office in Delhi has, since Monday evening, hadbeen getting a flurry of telephone calls from several people, including journalists, with all in a hushed voice asking about Tharoor.
The aide said initially all of them were indeed perplexed on how come a common cold and cough that Tharoor had since arriving in Nerw Delhi on Sunday night could lead to so many calls.
"Later, we understood when it surfaced there was a goof up committed by a TV channel who got it wrong after Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor passed away," said the aide.
Tharoor, who was in Kerala apital and was moving around for a few days after Cyclone Ockhi hit the district's coastal villages, had caught a bad cold and cough.
--IANS
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Music mogul Simon Cowell says he is struggling to quit the smoking and his drinking habit.
The music mogul vowed to cut down on alcohol and smoking after being rushed to hospital following a fall at his London home in October.
But he says he hasn't got very far, reports thesun.co.uk.
He said: "I knocked myself out, and when I woke up, I thought, 'Is this heaven?' Then after I realised it wasn't, I thought I had broken my neck because the medics wouldn't let me move. I was thinking, 'Christ almighty.'
"You don't know what's wrong, and neither do they, so it is scary. But I had every test under the sun and all they could find was low blood pressure. It has still been a wake-up call though. Up to that point, I was working flat out. Now I've quietened down a bit and I'm sleeping better.
"I'm not going to lie though -- whenever I'm seen out it's with a cigarette and a beer in my hand. So I think I've been rumbled as far as that goes.
At the moment, Cowell is busy judging "X Factor".
--IANS
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Two militants and a soldier were killed and another soldier injured in a gunfight that erupted on Monday between the security forces and militants holed up in a house in Jammu and Kashmir's Kulgam district, officials said.
Two terrorists were killed and a soldier killed in the gunfight, said Defence Ministry spokesman Colonel Rajesh Kalia.
According to a police official, the gunfight broke out when militants fired at an army patrol on the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway in Qazigund area of Kulgam, injuring two soldiers.
After the attack, the militants, said to be two in number, entered a private house which was surrounded immediately by the security forces.
"When the militants were challenged, they fired at the security forces, triggering a gunfight which continued for nearly four hours. Two militants have been killed, but the body of only one, who was a local, has been recovered," police said.
The house in which the militants were hiding was fully destroyed during the gunfight.
Traffic on the Jammu-Srinagar highway remained suspended because of the gunfight. Train service between the Valley and Bannihal town in Jammu region was also disrupted.
Meanwhile, Internet services were also suspended in south immediately after the gunfight started.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Condoling the death of veteran actor-producer Shashi Kapoor, Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Monday called him a "brilliant actor" and said "he has left a void difficult to fill in the world of cinema".
"A brilliant actor, he successfully contributed in paving the way for alternative pathbreaking cinema Nationally and Internationally," said Gandhi.
"He will be fondly remembered by all and has left a void difficult to fill in the world of cinema," she added.
Conveying her sympathies to his family and fans for this irreparable loss, Gandhi prayed for the departed soul.
Veteran actor-producer Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the 70s and early 80s, died on Monday at a hospital here. He was 79.
--IANS
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Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Monday signed as the first proposer on the first nomination paper submitted for the election of her son and party Vice President Rahul Gandhi to the post of party chief.
Congress leader Ashok Gehlot said Sonia Gandhi's signatures were at the top of the first nomination form submitted to the returning officer Mullappally Ramachandran in the election being held at the party's central office to elect the party's next chief.
"She (Sonia Gandhi) has signed. Her signatures are the first on the first proposal (nomination form) submitted for Rahul Gandhi," Gehlot told Aaj Tak news channel.
Monday is the last date for filing nominations for the post of Congress chief.
Gehlot, who is party incharge of poll-bound Gujarat, also lashed out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his remarks about the Congress organisational elections.
"The affection that Rahul Gandhi is getting in Gujarat is worth seeing. The Prime Minister is making comments about Congress organisational elections out of frustration. He should not have made such remarks. There is dignity attached to the post of Prime Minister," Gehlot said.
Modi had accused Congress of "lacking internal democracy" during an election rally on Sunday.
Gehlot also said that decisions concerning the BJP leadership are made by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. "I want to ask the Prime Minister, (BJP president) Amit Shah, is there democracy in your party? The RSS decides who will be the BJP president, who will be Chief Minister and who will be the Prime Minister. What right they have to talk like this?"
He said that seats were going empty at Modi rallies in Gujarat.
"Wait for Gujarat election results. Then there are polls in the states and then people will give their verdict in the 2019 polls. The way 'Modi, Modi, Modi' slogans use to be raised in the last election...See the meetings of yesterday, chairs were empty. There is frustration over defeat in Gujarat," he said.
He said the future of the Congress and the country will be bright under Rahul Gandhi and the support he is getting is reflected in Gujarat.
--IANS
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He's young and the hope for millions of islanders across the globe for whom the nutrient-rich water technology for sustainable agriculture instead of soil that he's promoting will help improve human health and resilience to climate change in the low-lying islands.
He's 28-year-old Eritai Kateibwi, a native of low-lying nation Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean that's under threat from climate change. He is winner of a 2017 UN Environment Young Champion of the Earth for his work on a hydroponics system.
Hydroponic is a technique of growing plants without soil in water containing dissolved nutrients.
According to UN Environment, Kateibwi, one of six inaugural winners, each representing a region of the world -- Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America and West Asia.
The award gives seed funding of $15,000 and mentorship to outstanding individuals, between the ages of 18 and 30, who have big ideas to protect or restore the environment.
"The problem in my country is that people are not eating healthy food. They don't have enough land to grow their crops. Climate change has made the rains irregular. When they can't grow their own food, they rely on unhealthy processed food," Kateibwi told IANS.
He is in this Kenyan capital to receive the award on Tuesday at the UN Environment Assembly where over 2,000 heads of state, ministers, business leaders, UN officials and civil society representatives are gathered to find new ways to deal with pollution.
"I flew home and got everything what I needed. My goal is to help every family and after training them. In the next 10 years, this project will spread throughout this island," the optimistic UN young achiever said.
"For young people, I would like to say: If they have an idea just do it," he said.
Kateibwi saw problems caused in Kiribati by reliance on imported, often unhealthy, food due to the challenges of growing fresh produce.
He feels that locally grown, nutritious food through hydroponics would reduce the problems as well as provide entrepreneurial opportunities to the local communities.
"The majority of my people live in (capital) Tarawa; they come to find jobs, education and health services, but end up living close to each other," he said.
"With the rising sea level and king tides, their crops are often destroyed. The Te Maeu Project will use hydroponics to allow almost anyone to grow produce at home and sell the surplus through a cooperative," he added.
He embarked on his project when he returned home as a graduate in finance from Utah's Brigham Young University, feeling empowered by his schooling.
Kateibwi's project, which relies on Kiribati's abundant sunshine but uses only 10 per cent of the water of traditional crops, has already been used to produce lettuce, Chinese cabbage and tomatoes within 30 days.
He plans to use the seed financing from the award to build 200 units. Families will receive training and purchase these through micro-financing, the proceeds of which Kateibwi will use to build and make available more units.
The system could have wider uses for other Small Island Developing States that face similar challenges in terms of climate impact and a lack of land to grow sufficient food.
UN Environment head Erik Solheim said: "From boosting food crops in the Pacific to sustainable fashion solutions in North America, it's a delight to announce the first Young Champions of the Earth."
"The breadth of innovation and ambition shown by the inaugural winners is nothing short of exceptional and proof that we must continue to channel support to the world's younger generation for the solutions we need to secure a sustainable future," Solheim added.
The six inaugural Young Champions were selected from more than 600 applicants.
(Vishal Gulati is in Nairobi at the invitation of United Nations Environment to cover its third annual session. He can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in)
--IANS
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The Uttar Pradesh Police's Special Task Force (STF) arrested three persons from Noida on Monday in connection with the killing of a BJP leader, police said.
BJP leader Shiv Kumar was shot dead in Noida on November 16 and STF said the contract killing was ordered by Arun Yadav, who had allegedly given Rs 50 lakh to the shooters to kill Kumar, a police officer said.
The reason behind the killing was animosity emanating out of the death of the father of Arun Yadav, which he suspected was the handiwork of Kumar.
Of the arrested trio, Naresh Jaat had shot dead the BJP leader and his gunner, while Dharmdutt Sharma and one more person had tracked the movements of Shiv Kumar and gave detailed information of his whereabouts.
The STF also disclosed that the killings were executed by the shooters of the Anil Bhati gang. Bhati is nephew of dreaded mafiosi Sunder Bharti.
Shiv Kumar was an active BJP member and had canvassed majorly for Union Minister and Noida MP Mahesh Sharma.
--IANS
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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A nine-member delegation of Tripura journalists met Union Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office Jitendra Singh on Monday to demand a CBI probe into the murder of two journalists from the state.
The team also plans to hold a demonstration in Delhi on Tuesday in front of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) office, Forum for Protection of Journalists (FFPJ) Convener Pranab Sarkar told IANS over phone from Delhi.
The FFPJ delegation - led by veteran editor Subal Kumar Dey - would also try to meet President Ram Nath Kovind, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Press Council of India Chairman Justice Chandramauli Kumar Prasad to press for their demand.
"After a series of agitations in Tripura we came to the national capital to press for our demand to protect the persons in Tripura," Sarkar added.
A local newspaper journalist Sudip Dutta Bhowmik, 50, was shot dead inside the Tripura State Rifles (TSR) 2nd battalion headquarters at Ramchandra Nagar in West Tripura district on November 21.
Young television journalist Santanu Bhowmik, 28, was hacked to death while he was covering protests of a tribal based political party at Mandai, 25 km from Agartala, on September 20.
PCI chairman, who is likely to visit the state to study both the incidents, took suo-moto cognizance of the journalists murder cases.
To probe the sensational killings, the state government had earlier constituted two separate Special Investigation Teams (SIT) headed by Deputy Inspector General of Police Arindam Nath and Inspector General of Police (IGP) G.S. Rao.
The SIT, led by Nath, has so far arrested four TSR personnel, including TSR second battalion Commandant Tapan Debbarma, who is a senior Tripura Police Service (TPS) officer (1998 batch) and waiting for IPS nomination.
In the Bhowmik murder case too, the SIT led by IGP Rao also arrested four youths.
The Congress has demanded a high-level inquiry into the murder. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has demanded a CBI probe and resignation of Chief Minister Manik Sarkar, who also holds the Home portfolio.
Both parties observed a state-wide shutdown on November 23 to protest the killings.
The ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) has criticised the BJP for politicising the journalist's killing.
"State government is on the right track in probing the unfortunate killings," CPI-M central committee member Gautam Das told the .
--IANS
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Two militants were killed and two soldiers injured in a gunfight that errupted on Monday between the security forces and holed up militants in Jammu and Kashmir's Kulgam district.
Police said militants first fired at an army patrol in Qazigund area of Kulgam district on the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway injuring two soldiers.
After attacking the army, the militants, said to be two in number, entered a private house which was surrounded immediately by the security forces.
"When the militants were challenged, they fired at the security forces triggering a gunfight which continued for nearly four hours, two militants have been killed, but so far, only one slain militant's body has been recovered who was a local," police said.
The house in which the militants were hiding was razed to ground during the gunfight.
Traffic on the Jammu-Srinagar highway remained suspended because of the gunfight. The train service between the Kashmir Valley and the Bannihal town in Jammu region was also disrupted.
Meanwhile, Internet services were also suspended in south Kashmir immediately after the gunfight started.
--IANS
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The state election commission in Uttar Pradesh on Monday strongly refuted an independent candidate's accusations about rigged EVMs used in the just concluded civic body polls.
Independent candidate from Saharanpur, Shabana, who triggered a storm by claiming that she got zero vote despite casting a vote for herself, has been slammed by the poll panel for alleging that the electronic voting machines (EVMs) were "manipulated".
An official of the poll panel on Monday said that the charge was "not only baseless but also mischievous as records show clearly that Shabana polled 87 votes".
Claims by Shabana had gone viral on the social media and were tweeted by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) as proof to back their claims that EVMs had been "tampered with" to help the ruling BJP in the civic polls.
Shabana's husband, Ikram, had initially claimed that there were 11 booths and that the family had voted in booth 388. But the family alleged that there were no votes for her when votes were counted.
Shabana contested from ward number 54 and told the media that EVM tampering had been proved by the fact that she herself did not get her own vote.
In the polls where the Bharatiya Janata Party captured power in 14 of the 16 municipal corporations, the opposition parties have been alleging that the official machinery was misused and the EVMs tampered with to favour the ruling party.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and social activist Prashant Bhushan had cited the case of Shabana in their tweets questioning the electoral process in the urban body polls.
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat on Monday lauded his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath for his drive against criminals and said that he will also ask the police in the hill state to emulate the crackdown.
Addressing an event in Gorakhpur, the hometown of Adityanath, Rawat said it was heartening to see that criminals in Uttar Pradesh were being sent to the "right place".
He was referring to the spate of police gunfights in the state in which several criminals have been killed and arrested.
Rawat also urged the parents to keep pace with the changing times. "Technology is changing the way around us. Even though many parents do not like it, we will have to adjust to the change which is also for good," he said.
The Uttarakhand Chief Minister also urged students to focus on their talents so that India could become the country Prime Minister Narendra Modi has envisaged.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, who also attended the event, called for a holistic education system where education was within everyone's reach and there was no discrimination.
Adityanath also said that there should be lesser holidays in schools and exhorted teachers and management of various schools to take part in the 'Swacch Bharat Abhiyan' to make it an even bigger success.
--IANS
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The 14 newly elected mayors of Uttar Pradesh's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will call on Prime Mminister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Tuesday, said a party leader.
According to state leaders, BJP's state Organisation Secretary Sunil Bansal would be part of the delegation.
While the meeting is being termed a courtesy call, the Prime Minister is expected to share with the new mayors, his vision of development of cities. A source told IANS that Modi will also seek and exchange ideas on how to improve the lot of the cities, improve garbage disposal system, and create more awareness about cleanliness.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and state BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey had met these newly elected mayors here on Sunday. Out of the 16 municipal corporations in Uttar Pradesh that went to polls late in November, the BJP candidates won the mayoral seats in 14, including in Lucknow, Agra, Varanasi, Moradabad, Kanpur and Allahabad.
--IANS
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Emphasising that the entire world was benefiting from Yoga, Union Commerce and Industries Minister Suresh Prabhu on Monday said this was possible only because nobody has a patent or proprietary rights over it due to which the practice could spread all over the world.
"No one knows who invented Yoga due to which no one gets royalty for it. This is the reason that knowledge of Yoga is available to all and entire humanity is benefiting. We believe it should be available to the entire world," said Prabhu, addressing the first International Summit on AYUSH and Wellness here.
Noting that India in the recent times had taken initiatives to promote its traditional medicine system, Prabhu questioned patents on matters related to knowledge, which can otherwise benefit the world to a great extent.
"I am happy that we are taking initiatives... In fact it is bounding duty to share knowledge and let the world benefit from it. Knowledge should never be preserved in one country and it should be allowed to spread across the world.
"Just imagine everything that we discover, everything that we can offer as a knowledge is patented or someone has proprietary right on it. How will one benefit from it? How will the world benefit from it?," asked Prabhu
The four-day Yoga event is being held in the backdrop of National Health Policy 2017 strongly advocating mainstreaming the potential of AYUSH within a pluralistic system of Integrative health care.
It will showcase the strength and scientific validation of traditional Indian systems of medicines in the global context, including Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa and Homeopathy (AYUSH), and facilitate their worldwide promotion, development and recognition.
The conference is being attended by 1,500 delegates from 60 countries.
Shripad Naik, the AYUSH Minister, said the government has taken many initiatives to popularise alternatives systems of medicine.
"The National AYUSH Mission was started in 2014. An agreement has been signed with WHO to develop benchmarks for Yoga, Ayurveda, Unani and Panchkarma. Five AYUSH information cells have been set up in Israel, Tajikistan, Peru, Russia, and Tanzania," said Naik in his inaugural speech.
A white paper, titled AYUSH for the World by Frost & Sullivan, was launched to offer insights into the regulatory requirements for herbal medicines in Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation nations.
Among the other senior dignitaries who attended the summit were AYUSH Secretary Vaidya Rajesh Kotecha and business chamber FICCI's Secretary General Sanjaya Baru.
--IANS
rup/him/vm
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram on Monday said large sections of youth of Gujarat have not accepted BJP and have rallied behind Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakor and Jignesh Mewani.
He said in tweets that the "youth of Punjab accepted Congress. So did youth of Goa and Manipur before the elections were stolen by the BJP. He was referring to the victory of Congress in Punjab and emergence as the largest party in Goa and Manipur in elections earlier this year.
"Why would the youth of Gujarat not acept Congress?," Chidambaram asked.
The former union minister was responding to a reported statement by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an election meeting in Gujarat that the youth are not ready to accept the Congress.
--IANS
vsc/vm
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Monday swore in Cabinet ministers, their deputies and ministers of state for provincial affairs at the State House here.
The swearing-in ceremony comes after Mnangagwa appointed a 22-member Cabinet last week.
Speaking to reporters after the ceremony, Mnangagwa said the interim government will be in office for about seven months, Xinhua news agency reported.
"The first 10 days have been hectic but I believe that with my team we will stand the challenge," Mnangagwa said.
He said he wants Zimbabweans to unite and "we must grow our economy". Mnangagwa inherits a faltering economy plagued by cash shortages, low foreign direct investment and massive unemployment.
In his inaugural speech on November 24, the President vowed to stamp out corruption and work to revive the economy so as to create jobs for the people.
--IANS
soni/bg
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Monday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi for keeping the youth of Gujarat unemployed and not implementing the 7th Pay Commission leading to the plight of contract and fixed salary workers in the state.
Keeping up at his 22 questions in the countdown to the Gujarat Assembly polls, as promised, Gandhi said: "22 salon ka hisaab, Gujarat mange jawaab. Gujarat ke haalat par Pradhanmantri se chatha sawal (as he directed his sixth query at Modi on Gujarat's condition).
"The double whammy of BJP government -- on one side the youths of the state are unemployed, while on other hand lakhs of contract and fixed salary workers condition is miserable.
"Despite Rs 18,000 salary per month as per the 7th Pay Commission, why only Rs 5,500 and Rs 10,000 is being paid to the fix and contract workers?" he asked.
Gandhi's question comes in the wake of the party's strategy to pose one question to Modi every day till the polling day on December 9.
Gandhi on Sunday raised concerns over safety, health, education and crimes against women in the state.
On Saturday, he questioned Modi on "extraction" of high fees from students by government educational institutes in Gujarat.
Polling for the 182-member Gujarat assembly will be held in two phases on December 9 and 14. The counting of votes will take place on December 18.
AAP leader on Sunday said the party was holding dialogue with those who left the outfit, including Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, to facilitate their return to the party fold.
The controversial remarks, however, were refuted by a party leader close to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
"If no one has joined a political party and wants to come here...if one has formed a political party and wants to merge their party with ours...if someone went back for doing social work after being unhappy with us...the list is long. From Subhash Ware to Anjali Damania, Mayank Gandhi, Dharamvira Gandhi to Prashant ji and Yogendra ji.
"We are synchronising the list (of such people). Dialogues are being held with them by volunteers. We will ask for forgiveness for the mistakes we did," Kumar said after an interaction with party volunteers at the AAP office here.
AAP founder members Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan were sacked by the party in April, 2015, for "anti-party" activities after they questioned party supremo Arvind Kejriwal's style of functioning.
Subhash Ware, on the other hand, was the party head of Maharashtra state unit, and was considered close to Yadav and Bhushan. Although, Ware continues to be a part of the party, the state unit headed by him was disbanded.
Ware, along with Mayank Gandhi, had opposed dropping of Bhushan and Yadav from the party's Political Affairs Committee (PAC). Gandhi later quit the party.
Dharamvira Gandhi, AAP MP from Patiala, was also suspended for alleged anti-party activities. Damania also quit citing the ugly slug fest between Kejriwal and Yadav-Bhushan.
Nevertheless, Swaraj India, political party formed by Yadav and Bhushan, dismissed Vishwas' claims and said those who drifted away from AAP's ideals were now appealing the activists of the Anna movement to return to the fold.
"Instead of appealing others to come back, they (AAP led by Kejriwal) should come back on the right path," Swaraj India chief spokesperson Anupam said.
Vishwas, who is believed to be "unhappy" with the present coterie around Kejriwal, also spoke about 'Aam Aadmi Party version 2'.
When asked to elaborate, the AAP leader said, "The second version (of the party) will focus on giving more priority to volunteers, who will act as 'anti-virus' in the outfit".
Vishwas' meeting with party volunteers comes a week after his announcement at the Ram Lila Maidan here that he would be interacting with the party cadre more often.
Speaking at the party's fifth anniversary last week, the AAP leader had lamented that the party had drifted away from its core principles and needed "course correction".
Attacking a section of AAP leaders, he had likened himself to 'Abhimanyu', the warrior son of Arjun in Mahabharat, and claimed that he would be victorious even in his death.
Vishwas is also considered one of the strong contenders for three Rajya sabha seats of Delhi, elections for which will be held in January next year.
Party sources said Vishwas was also upset that the AAP was "overlooking" him in the case.
A host of party heavyweights will be present when Congress Vice President files his nomination for the party chief's post at its headquarters here on Monday, with over 90 sets of nomination papers likely to be filed to support his candidature.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi and former prime minister Manmohan Singh will be among proposers for the candidature of for the party chief's post.
Accompanied by her mother Sonia Gandhi, Singh and other senior Congress leaders, will file his nomination papers for the election to the top Congress post tomorrow, the last date for filing of nominations.
According to party sources, there were apprehensions among the party leaders earlier over the incumbent president being among the proposers to Rahul Gandhi's candidature.
The sources said that Sonia Gandhi will be the first proposer in one of the four nominations Rahul Gandhi will file.
The former prime minister will be the lead proposer in another set of nomination form.
Six Chief Ministers -- Punjab's Amarinder Singh, Karnataka's Siddaramaiah, Himachal Pradesh's Virbhadra Singh, Puducherry's V. Narayanasamy, Meghalaya's Mukul Sangma and Mizoram's Lal Thanhawla -- are expected to be present when over 90 sets of nomination papers are likely to be filed by various leaders to extend support to Rahul Gandhi's candidature.
Congress state unit chiefs, senior leaders and Pradesh Congress Committee delegates will be present at the party's central office to express support to Rahul Gandhi ahead of his much-awaited elevation.
The Congress Vice President is likely to reach the party headquarters around 10.30 a.m. to file his nomination. He will sign sets of nomination papers to be filed before the Returning Officer.
Mullappally Ramachandran, the Returning Officer for the organisational election, told IANS that 90 nomination forms were taken by different states though not one has been submitted so far.
The process of nominations started on Friday. The last date for filing nominations is December 4.
Reacting to criticism over the election process, Congress Spokesperson Sushmita Dev told the media: "All I want to say is that it is happening under Election Commission supervision. When we talk about electoral democracy, I wish to say, we conduct (internal) elections while adhering to Election Commission rules. It is being done with full transparency. We have not violated any rules."
She said if someone was raising questions, what was the basis on which they were doing so. "I won't be able to comment about it. Only those who have raised the issue can explain."
On Sunday, many senior Congress leaders, its members of Parliament and PCC chiefs arrived at the party headquarters to sign the papers, including Sachin Pilot, Kapil Sibal, Rajeev Shukla, P.C. Chacko, Shobha Oza, Hamdulla Sayeed and others.
Apart from states and union territories, senior leaders on the Congress Working Committee (CWC), including former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, A.K. Antony, Ahmed Patel and Ghulam Nabi Azad are likely to submit different sets of nomination papers.
Led by former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan, 30 Maharashtra Congress leaders on Sunday proposed the nomination of party vice president Rahul Gandhi for the post of party president.
This proposal comes days after Maharashtra Congress secretary Shehzad Poonawalla called the election process "rigged", citing he had the information that the delegates, who were going to vote for the party president election, were fixed.
Meanwhile, the proposal was signed by Ashok Chavan, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Patangrao Kadam, Naseem Khan and others. It will be sent to the Central Election Committee conducting the AICC president post elections.
The process for the election began with a notification on November 30.
The last date for filing nominations is December 4 and Rahul Gandhi is also expected to file his nomination on the same day.
The final list of the candidates contesting the election will be published on December 11.
As many as 10 Uttar Pradesh Congress leaders had, on December 3, signed a proposal for the nomination of Rahul Gandhi as the party president.
Sonia Gandhi has been serving as the president of the party for over 19 years.
The elevation of Rahul Gandhi, who is presently spearheading the Congress campaign ahead of the December 9 and 14 Gujarat assembly polls, has been much talked about in party circles for around two years.
With Rahul Gandhi in all likelihood to be the only candidate in the fray, he could be declared the next Congress chief on December 5 after scrutiny of nominations.
He will succeed his mother Sonia Gandhi, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998.
Rahul Gandhi became the Congress Vice President in January 2013.
Maharashtra Congress Secretary Shehzad Poonawalla on Sunday maintained his stance on the presidential election of his party, appropriating Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and the party's alleged non-allegiance towards him.
Poonawalla also thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for praising him for his bravery and said, "The person whom I criticised [PM Modi] is supporting me, while the party [Congress] for which I gave my life is criticising me and saying that I am not a member of it."
Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Modi endorsed Poonawalla's allegations and called out the rival party for the lack of "internal democracy" within.
Analyse the truth friends: even today I criticised @PMOIndia (like always) yet @narendramodi ji praised me & dynasty slaves of @OfficeOfRG who I served selflessly for 8-9years (who cheer for Yashwant,Shourie) removed me!! Emergency has returned to dynasty's DNA? https://t.co/srpte76NlS Shehzad Jai Hind (@Shehzad_Ind) December 3, 2017
"A youngster Shehzad has exposed the rigging that is taking place in the Congress president poll. And Shehzad is a senior Congress leader in Maharashtra. The Congress Party has tried to muzzle his voice and wants to even remove him from their social media groups. What tolerance is this!" the prime minister said, addressing a rally in Gujarat.
The prime minister further dubbed the discord thus exposed within the Congress Party as indicative of its ineffectuality to govern a nation.
Speaking to ANI, Poonawalla said, "I did not raise my voice for the party ticket. I don't want the president post in Congress. I only said that we must try to end the dynastic and we must have elections for the president post, not the selection or coronation of . When I raised my voice for this, they said I was not a party member. If Sardar Patel was insulted by Congress leadership back then, I feel the same way today."
Speaking to media in New Delhi, Poonwala said that Congress Party had "no place for Shehzad [himself], but for shehzada [Rahul Gandhi]."
"I have been trying to raise the most important issue of dynastic and fair opportunity to the non-dynasts within the party for the past six to eight years. I also wrote to Rahul ji on this. Instead of answering my claims about delegates being fixed and one family one ticket rule - they are making baseless allegations against me that I am a BJP agent. I have to become a whistle-blower. I am not spineless like the other Congress leaders," he said.
"Main Shehzad hoon, shehzada nahin. [I am Shehzad Poonawalla, not a prince like Rahul Gandhi]. They don't have a place for me," he added.
Rubbishing Congress' claims that he was not a party leader, Poonawalla said, "If I was not a member of the Congress Party, why does my name appear in a letter signed by Ashok Chavan in April 2016 appointing me as Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee secretary?"
He showed the letter to the media as the proof.
On a related note, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been attacking Congress, alleging it of having sidelined Sardar Patel in the party cadres.
The fight over Sardar Patel's legacy escalated on October 31, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi attacked Congress for having tried to "run down and erase" the former's contributions to the unification of the country after Independence.
Meanwhile, Poonawalla claimed many Congress leaders, including Ajay Maken, Sandeep Dikshit, and Manish Tiwari, had termed the process to elect party president "rigged".
"I provided the proof of many Congress leaders calling this election rigged and many called it a proprietorship, but there was no answer from Congress. They humiliated me instead," he added.
The Congress leader further said he even called up Rahul Gandhi's office to stop the process, but they hung up his call.
"Today also I sent a message and made a call to to ask him for time so that I could give a proof before he files his nomination for this coronation; so that he has some morality and stops the process and takes the right decision. But his office insulted me and cut the phone," he added.
The Customs department at the airport here seized 1.2 kg of gold valued at Rs 35 lakh in two incidents and have arrested one person in this regard, officials said today.
Acting on an information that a baggage was lying "unclaimed" near a baggage conveyor belt area, an official release said on scanning the baggage it found 12 units of gold cut bits weighing 399 grams valued at Rs 11 lakh concealed in milk tins.
As the baggage was not claimed by anyone at the airport, the release said, passenger on seeing "tight scrutiny" carried out by the customs officials might have left the bags.
In the second incident, the customs officials intercepted a passenger who arrived from Riyadh to Chennai on December 1, as he was moving in a "suspicious manner".
Upon examination of his baggage, the officials seized seven units of gold bars weighing 815 grams valued at Rs 24 lakh, the release said.
The passenger was arrested under the Customs Act, 1962, the release added.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Supreme Court today admitted for hearing an appeal by Jammu and Kashmir government against a high court order for payment of compensation to the victims of 1991 Kunan-Poshpora mass rape incident allegedly by army personnel.
The top court directed expeditious hearing of the appeals filed by the state gvernment against various orders of the high court.
A bench of Justices J Chelameswar and Sanjay Kishan Kaul granted leave on the appeal of state government and said all the interim orders will continue.
In 2013, a writ petition was filed in Jammu and Kashmir high court alleging that army personnel belonging to the Rajputana Rifles and 68 Mountain Brigade had raided the remote villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Kupwara district and had committed mass-scale rapes and torture of villagers.
The charges have not been proved so far as there has been no progress in trial.
It was alleged that on the intervening night of February 23 and 24, 1991, separate teams of armymen had entered several houses in the villages, removed men of all ages into makeshift interrogation centers and tortured them. The plea alleged that over 30 women of the villages were raped by these personnel.
A SIT probe was sought in the plea for carrying out comprehensive investigation, besides seeking compensation and relief for the victims.
Standing counsel Shoeb Alam, appearing for the state government, said the compensation cannot be given as directed by the high court under provisions of Sections 545 (a)CrPC, which was introduced on April 24, 2012 and notified on April 23, 2013.
He said such a direction to pay compensation under a provision which did not exist at the time of the incident was contrary to law.
The state government also claimed that since the allegation was against army personnel, a direction to the state government for payment of compensation to the victims was without any legal backing.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A total of 2,604 fishermen from several parts of Tamil Nadu, including 220 from Kanyakumari district, stranded at sea due to cyclone Ockhi, have been rescued, Chief Minister K Palaniswami said here today.
He said 2,570 fishermen from various parts of the state had set out to sea in 284 boats, of which 2,384 in 205 vessels were rescued.
In Kanyakumari district alone, 220 fishermen of the total of 294 who set out to sea were rescued, he said.
"The information (about rescue) is being passed on to their kin," an official release here quoted him as saying.
The Chief Minister deputed top government officials, including police officers, to Kanyakumari to further speed up relief work and ordered them to complete damage assessment in Kanyakumari district and submit a report before December 11.
He said the Navy,Air Force and Coast Guard would continue their efforts to rescue the "remaining 186 fishermen, their 79 boats (from several parts of Tamil Nadu), apart from 74 fishermen of Kanyakumari."
Palaniswami chaired a meeting at the Secretariat here to take stock of relief and rescue efforts in the wake of 'Ockhi' and was briefed by officials about rescue and relief work.
Relief initiatives in Kanyakumari
---------------------------------
The Chief Minister ordered fisheries officials to provide appropriate relief to owners of damaged boats after completion of assessment in this respect.
He also ordered repairing of the damaged walls of Colachel Fishing Harbour in Kanyakumari District.
Out of the 2,391 persons in 29 relief camps in Kanyakumari, only 891 were presently being sheltered in nine centres as normalcy is returning, the release said.
"The Chief Minister ordered that they should be provided food, water, medicine and all amenities till they returned home." Also, he directed immediate relief to damaged hutments.
Out of about 15,000 uprooted trees, 9,252 have been cleared, he said, adding personnel could be deployed, if needed, from neighbouring districts, to clear the rest of it.
He directed immediate repairing of about 200 km of damaged roads, of which 60 km was National Highways, 40 km State Highways and 100 km rural and urban roads.
Out of the damaged 4,157 Low Tension electricity poles, 1,998 have been replaced while of the 2,426 High Tension poles, 972 were replaced.
"The Chief Minister ordered replacement of the rest of the electricity poles on a war footing and restoration of power supply to all areas in the next 48 hours," it said.
He announced a solatium of Rs four lakh to the kin of five victims in Kanyakumari. While three persons died after trees fell on them, two others were fishermen and their bodies were recovered yesterday.
He lauded offcials and government employees for their work and asked them to keep up the tempo till normalcy was fully restored.
Missing Nagapattinam fishermen
------------------------------
A 22-year old fisherman of Nagapattinam district caught in the cyclone fury was killed and his body was washed ashore in Lakshwadeep and it is being brought to Nagapattinam, a fishermen's leader said.
Also, there was no information about 26 other fishermen of Nagapattinam district, who ventured into the sea from Kanyakumari coast last week, leader of fishermen panchayat of Seruthur, Kalaiyarasan said.
Nagapattinam fisheries officials have contacted their counterparts in Kanyakumari and Kerala to get information about the 26 missing fishermen, he said.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Two persons were killed and five others injured when a driver dozed off and hit a tree in Khagaria district of Bihar this morning.
The seven persons were returning to their native villages in Khagaria district after attending a marriage ceremony at Bakhri in neighbouring Begusarai district, Gangaur Police Station SHO Gajendra Kumar said.
The incident took place on Khagaria-Bakhri road near Pahraja after the driver dozed off, lost control of the four-wheeler and hit the tree, the SHO said.
The deceased have been identified as Dipak Kumar (21), the driver of the vehicle and Sanjiv Kumar (28), the SHO said.
The injured have been admitted to nursing homes at Begusarai and Bakhri.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Five policemen, including three officers, and a photo journalist were injured in clashes with residents during an anti-encroachment drive in Jammu city today.
Jammu Development Authority (JDA) officials accompanied by police personnel had launched the drive to remove illegal structures constructed by the residents in Gole Gujral area of Jammu, a police officer said.
As they were removing the encroachment, a large number of residents, mainly from the Gujjar community, carrying rods, sticks and bricks, attacked the anti-encroachment team, he said. Five policemen and a photo journalist were injured.
The residents also pelted stones and bricks on the team and the photo journalist covering the drive.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Five terrorists were killed today in exchange of fire with security forces in Sharqeya governorate, security sources said.
They said that terrorists clashed with security forces during a raid on Belbeis-10th of Ramadan road in Sharqeya.
The raid came over a week after a terrorist attack on a mosque in North Sinai in which more than 300 people were killed.
Terrorist attacks, targeting police and military personnel, have increased following the ouster of former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by the military, following massive protests against his rule. Hundreds of police and army personnel have been killed since then.
The military has launched security campaigns in Egypt's restive North Sinai province, arrested suspects and demolished houses that belong to terrorists, including those facilitating tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A speeding car rammed into pedestrians on the Jammu-Pathankote Highway, leaving six persons injured, police said today.
The car carrying three persons to Jammu lost control and hit three pedestrians on the highway at Barwal Morh in the district last evening, police said today.
The vehicle later hit a tree, they said adding six persons were injured in the accident.
In another mishap last night, a truck carrying apples to New Delhi from Kashmir skidded off the road and rolled down into a canal in Bari Brahmana belt of Samba district, police said.
The driver and conductor of the truck escaped with minor injuries, they said.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Shares of 63 Moons Technologies today plunged 5 per cent to hit the lower circuit limit after the Bombay High Court dismissed its plea against the government's order for merging NSEL with the company.
The company said it will approach the Supreme Court, while chairman Venkat Chary said the merger order by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) "through an executive fiat is devastating for corporate India".
On the BSE, the stock of 63 Moons Technologies -- formerly known as Financial Technologies India (FTIL) -- plunged 5 per cent and got stuck in its lower circuit limit of Rs 131.10.
Similarly, on the NSE, the stock fell to its lower circuit limit of Rs 131.20, down 5 per cent from the previous closing price.
"The Honourable Bombay High Court has dismissed our writ petition. However, it has granted 12-week stay on the operation of the merger order," a company statement said.
It further said that "we will be moving the Supreme Court during this 12-week period. We have full faith in the judiciary and continue to believe that ultimately the truth and justice shall prevail."
In a separate statement, Chary said that Bombay High Court's "upholding of the merger order of NSEL with 63 moons passed by the MCA through an executive fiat is devastating for corporate India".
Terming it as a "Black Day" in the history of Corporate India, Chary said, this order has a serious impact on the limited liability concept that is the corner stone of the Indian corporate sector, by lifting the corporate veil by an executive order and without running a full evidence-led adjudication.
"This is a worrisome development for corporate India as the aftermath is likely to be chaotic, impacting investment flow into India by way of domestic investments, FDIs, FIIs and also the spirit of entrepreneurship, so vital for the country's economic development as investors will always be scared to invest in parent companies with subsidiary companies," he added.
Chary further said that even in the case of consensual merger of two government companies, the principle of natural justice, constitutional validity and stake holder voting (which are shareholders, creditors and employees) are taken into account; while in this case, where two private companies are involved, the rule book seems to have been thrown away by the MCA and shareholder compensation is also ignored.
"This will have a devastating impact on the Company Law and its foundations. This situation will result in a serious loss of confidence and of investment, and will raise questions as to whether we are really ruled by the company law and limited liability principles," he added.
On February 12, the Corporate Affairs ministry had directed the merger of scam-hit National Spot Exchange Ltd (NSEL) with parent firm FTIL, in a first-ever order to merge the two private companies.
In the wake of Rs 5,600-crore payment crisis at NSEL, the ministry had sought merger of the bourse with FTIL as well as replacement of existing FTIL management.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Seventy seven residents of Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) today travelled by the cross-LoC bus to meet their relatives on the two sides of the Line of Control, officials said.
Fourty eight PoK residents arrived here on the cross-LoC bus service via Poonch-Rawalakot in Jammu and Kashmir, a senior official said.
From India, 22 PoK residents returned on the LoC bus, while six freshers from India travelled on the LoC bus to PoK, he said.
The weekly bus service, popularly known as paigam-e-amun or message of peace, resumed on November 6 after remaining suspended for nearly four months owing to heavy Pakistani shelling along the LoC in Poonch district.
Billed as the biggest confidence building measure, the bus service was started on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad route in the Kashmir Valley in April 2005 and the Poonch-Rawalakot route in the Jammu region on June 20, 2006, to facilitate easier trade and travel between the divided families of Jammu and Kashmir and the PoK.
The trade between the two parts of Kashmir started in October 2008 on barter system.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Vice President Venkaiah Naidu today said the issue of including agriculture and culture in school curriculum would be taken up with ministers.
He was addressing the 19th convocation of Chandra Shekhar Azad agriculture and Technical University here.
"Both agriculture and culture should be part of the curriculum in schools...this issue will be taken up with the ministers and others," Naidu said.
He urged agri-scientists to help make the latest technique reach agriculture fields from laboratories.
Naidu stressed that people should never forget their mother-tongue and motherland and cited examples of head of governments of Russia, France, China who mostly speak their own language while visiting India, saying "it does not mean that they do not know English".
"I'm not against English but if we communicate in our mother-tongue it is always better," he said.
"Nationalism means respect to all. Namaskar is the culture of India, similarly Vande Matram means salute to the motherland," the vice president said.
He said if democracy meant independence it also meant complying with the rules and that difference of opinion was okay but the efforts to destabilise the country should never be allowed to succeed.
He emphasised on the importance of teachers, saying children these days are dependent on Google, which was a good source of information, but, he said, it could never take the place of teachers.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Megastar Amitabh Bachchan paid his tributes to MP-veteran actor Vinod Khanna, saying the untimely death of a friend is a "painful" experience.
The 75-year-old star remembered Khanna in his blog, after he paid homage to him at last night's Star Screen Awards here.
"Remembering a friend that has left us before time is painful and most sad... Our condolences and prayers for his soul..." wrote Bachchan, alongside his picture giving a tribute to Khanna.
The duo had worked together in several films such as "Amar Akbar Anthony", "Here Pheri", "Parvarish", "Muqaddar Ka Sikandar", among others.
Khanna passed away on April 27 due to cancer at the age of 70.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Analysts today welcomed the appointment of Salil Parekh as the managing director and chief executive at country's second largest software exporter Infosys, which has been struggling with leadership issues.
They said Parekh, who joins from French outsourcing major Capgemini, has a challenging job ahead but his association with technology companies with a strong perception on the emerging area of digital technologies is a positive.
"Parekh is yet to give his colour to Infosys story from here on, we believe that Mr. Parekh looks like a sensible choice for the job," domestic brokerage Angel Broking said in a report.
It said his tenure at Capgemini, and with others having a strong digital perception will be "useful".
Its peer Motilal Oswal also pointed to his association with companies with a better digital perception, like Accenture, TCS and Cognizant as a plus.
"Parekh has a strong technology background and rich IT services experience, and is unlikely to feel out of place in his new role," it said, also welcoming the timely appointment.
The 53-year-old was appointed for a five-year term starting January 2 next year by a board that is now led by co-founder Nandan Nilekani.
The announcement was made on Saturday. Speaking of the possible challenges for Parekh, Motilal Oswal flagged the spare of senior level exits in the company in the wake of leadership appointments in the past.
"Under the scanner would be leaders who were internal candidates for the role," it said.
It also said that this is Parekh's biggest assignment as he comes from a services mainstay and led many small and big business units.
It is a transformative time for the industry and "nothing is given", it warned.
The company scrip closed the session 2.80 per cent up at Rs 985.30 a piece on the BSE, as against 0.11 per cent gains on the benchmark.
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Anti-Maoist posters condemning violence have surfaced in various parts of Odisha's Koraput district, in a significant setback to the ultra outfits that are observing People's Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA) week.
The posters, signed by Koraput Yubak Jagaran Samiti, have appeared in the Maoist belts of Sunki, Pottangi, Ampabali, Padwa, Lamataput, a police official said.
The development comes days after the rebels made an appeal to the public to cooperate with them during their celebration week.
Charging the Maoists as agents of anti-development, the posters warned the left-wing ultras against killing people by falsely accusing them of being police informers.
"Don't be an obstacle to works of development in the tribal-dominated districts, including Koraput," a poster read.
Some of these posters show Maoists killing villagers, torching vehicles engaged in road construction work, and damaging buildings in remote areas, a police official said.
The anti-Maoist posters are a clear indication that people here are fed up with anti-development activities, said Koraput Superintendent of Police Kanwar Vishal Singh.
"People have realized that the Maoists do no good to the society. They simply make false promises of development, extort money and kill innocent people," Singh said.
They understand that Maoists have been trying to create an atmosphere of terror by unleashing violence and killing innocent locals, the SP said, adding that an inquiry has been launched to ascertain the identity of the people carrying out this anti-Maoist poster drive.
"Already on the back foot with their dwindling tribal support base in the district, the Maoists may try to launch some offensive to terrorise people during the PLGA week. That is why security forces have been put on high alert. The Maoists will not be allowed to regroup in the district," he added.
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Apollo Hospitals today said it has reached a milestone by performing over 100 robot assisted myomectomies.
Dr Rooma Sinha, Senior Consultant Gynaecologist, Minimal Access & Robotic Surgeon, Apollo Health City, accomplished this distinction of performing the "largest series of robot assisted myomectomies, in South Asia", Apollo Hospitals said in a statement.
Removal of symptomatic fibroids with uterine preservation in women who wish to conceive or otherwise retain their uterus is called myomectomy.
Sangita Reddy, Joint Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals, said," Robot assisted surgery enables greater reach, manoeuvrability, very little blood loss and minimises internal disruption. This technique will become the mainstream in due course.
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Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwest China might have been under the imperial rule of Chinese emperors much earlier than archaeologists previously thought, according to the recent excavation of a group of 3,000-year-old tombs, official media reported.
Experts from China's top archaeological research institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Peking University and Nanjing University, have gathered in Ningxia's Pengyang County to join the excavation of the Yaoheyuan Ruins, where an area of 620,000 square meters has been excavated.
Ma Qiang, who leads the archaeological team, told state- run Xinhua agency today that all of the tombs had been looted prior to the start of the official excavation earlier this year.
However, the team has found the main tomb of a Marquis- level ruler 13 meters underground. Although no bronze burial vessels with inscriptions identifying the owner of the tomb have been located, they have found two jade mantis.
A similar jade mantis was unearthed from China's World Heritage listed Yinxu archaeological site near Anyang in central Henan Province, which was an ancient capital city in the late Shang Dynasty (1300 B.C. to 1046 B.C.)
"The jade item provides strong evidence of the tomb owner's relationship with the imperial governments during the period from the late Shang to the middle of Western Zhou (1046 B.C. - 771 B.C.) dynasties," said Zhang Tian'en from the Shaanxi Provincial Archaeological Research Institute.
Liu Xu, a professor at Peking University, said the discovery of the ruins suggests that Ningxia was part of the imperial empire from the late Shang Dynasty, about 1,000 years earlier than previously believed.
The team has only excavated one quarter of the area, and Liu said it should contain another 40 neighbouring tombs.
Experts believe the area was a Marquis fief in the northern frontier of the dynasties.
Two horse burial pits and a chariot burial pit were excavated near the Marquis tomb. The large horse pit bears remains of 12 horses. There were four carriages found in the chariot pit. Archaeologists expect to find more remains of horses under the chariot pit.
As well as the tombs, the team has also discovered ruins of a bronze casting workshop, moats and water drainage and road networks at the site, the Xinhua reported.
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The Delhi High Court was today informed by the Centre that it has directed internet majors, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo, to shut down in India the 'Blue Whale' challenge game which is linked to the deaths of several children worldwide.
The central government counsel told a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar that it has also issued an advisory in this regard.
The submission was made during the hearing of a petition seeking immediate directions to restrain internet firms from uploading any material pertaining to the challenge game, citing cases of suicide by children in India and abroad.
The court dismissed as withdrawn the petition after petitioner advocate Gurmeet Singh said his grievances have been addressed.
The bench was apprised of the Supreme Court's order directing the Chief Secretaries of all states to issue directions to make school children aware of the dangers posed by virtual dare games like Blue Whale Challenge, saying they must be made aware of the "beauty of life".
The apex court had asked the Union Ministry of Human Resources Development to issue a circular to make school-going children aware of the perils of such dangerous games.
The Centre's counsel informed the high court that it has issued directions to internet majors - Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Microsoft and Yahoo to ensure that all links of 'Blue Whale' and of similar games are immediately removed from their platforms.
The sudden popularity of the lethal online game, in which the final task requires the player to commit suicide, had forced the government to issue directions to the internet firms to remove its links.
Yahoo India had said, in its response, that its internal policies and terms of services, already explicitly direct the users and prohibit uploading of any content that is unlawful, harmful, especially any act that could harm a minor.
Google India, which is a party in the case, had earlier told the bench that it was not a necessary party and Google Inc should be impleaded.
Facebook India had also raised a similar plea in its application seeking its deletion from the array of parties, saying that services for users outside USA and Canada was provided by Facebook Ireland.
The Blue Whale Challenge is reportedly a suicide game in which the player is given certain tasks to complete over a period of 50 days and the final task leads him or her to commit suicide. The player is also asked to share photos after finishing each challenge.
More than six children across India in the age group of 12-19 years have taken their lives allegedly while playing this game within a span of two weeks, reports have said.
Deaths of teenagers have also been reported from other countries including Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Argentina, Bulgaria, Chile and Italy, the PIL had said.
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The Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) today called on people to observe the 25th anniversary of the demolition of the 16th-century mosque peacefully and hold special prayers for early resolution of the dispute.
BMAC convener Zafaryab Jilani said the anniversary should be observed peacefully like previous years and all memorandums addressed to the government be handed over to the district magistrate.
Jilani, also a member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, asked Muslims to hold special prayers for early resolution of the issue, with all court cases being taken up on priority so that Muslims get the possession of the land.
Prayers should also be held for peace and harmony in the country, Jilani said in a statement.
He added that the memorandums - to be submitted to the district magistrate on December 6 - should also be sent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, demanding that the court cases related to the matter be taken up at the earliest and strong action be initiated against anyone harming the communal atmosphere.
He said sit-ins could be held on the day but attention should be paid to ensure peace and amity.
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The BJP is all set to encash its UP civic poll performance in Gujarat by utilising newly elected mayors for campaigning in the poll-bound state.
The BJP has won 14 out of 16 mayoral seats in civic polls in UP and all the newly elected leaders will be meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi tomorrow to seek his blessings.
Thereafter, they will proceed to Gujarat for campaigning for the Assembly elections there on December 9 and 14.
"The newly elected mayors will meet the prime minister over tea tomorrow in Delhi. They are all devoted party workers and will be used where ever the party needs them," BJP state general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak told PTI.
Amethi Nagar Panchyat Chairperson Chandrama Devi and Jais Nagar Palika Parishad Mahesh Pratap will be among those who will be meeting Modi.
Though Congress did not field any candidate in Amethi, the victory of a BJP candidate there is still considered a major blow to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as it is his parliamentary constituency and considered a Congress bastion.
The Congress lost in Jais and Gauriganj where Nagar Palika polls were held. In Amethi and Musafirkhana, where Nagar Panchayat polls were held, the party had not fielded anyone.
With the BJP's extensive campaign in the local polls in UP paying off, the sweeping win is considered as a boost to the saffron party in the midst of the high-decibel campaign for the Gujarat elections.
Counting of votes in Gujarat will be taken up on December 18.
The UP civic elections were touted as the first litmus test of Yogi Adityanath after the BJP stormed to power in March.
The saffron surge routed the Samajwadi Party and the Congress, both of which drew a blank in mayoral polls.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who has been drafted as the key campaigner in Gujarat and went on a nearly 90-day whirlwind tour of the state, described it as a "historic win".
He attributed the victory to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision and BJP chief Amit Shah's able guidance and added that the BJP will now look forward to achieving the goal of one hundred per cent success in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
"The victory of party has sent positive message among the people who are already admirers of Narendra Modiji. There is a significant population of people from east UP in Gujarat," said BJP leader and state spokesman Shalabh Mani Tripathi, who is campaigning in Gujarat for the past one month.
"Yogiji is already a star campaigner and our newly elected mayors with their success stories will add to our ongoing campaigning here," Tripathi said.
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A Delhi court today granted bail to two directors of a private firm, arrested in a money- laundering case relating to the alleged cheating of several banks to the tune of Rs 2,240 crore.
Additional Sessions Judge Sidharth Sharma granted relief to the directors of Surya Vinayak Industries Limited -- Sanjay Jain and Rajiv Jain, saying no purpose will be served by keeping them in further custody.
The court noted that both the accused were already granted bail in a case filed by the CBI in the matter, based on which the ED has registered the present complaint.
While seeking bail for the accused persons, advocate Vijay Aggarwal said the Jains were not required for investigation any further and should be granted the relief.
He also cited a recent Supreme Court judgement striking down a stringent condition for securing bail in money laundering cases, besides the order by which the accused were granted bail in the CBI case.
Special public prosecutor Nitesh Rana had opposed the applications of the accused persons on behalf of the ED, saying they might hamper the ongoing investigation if the relief was granted.
He had said the quantum of proceeds of crime was very high and if granted bail, the accused could have divert the crime proceeds which are yet to be attached.
Some of the accused were yet to be arrested, the ED had said.
The accused were arrested on August 22, days after they were granted bail in a related CBI case.
The CBI had earlier told the court that the four accused used more than 100 shell companies for routing and diverting the bank funds. The firm and the shell companies had no genuine business transactions, it had alleged.
The company had allegedly diverted bank funds to the tune of Rs 2,240 crore, which resulted in loss to the consortium. Over Rs 300 crore of working capital was also allegedly moved to six companies set up abroad, the agency had said.
The case was registered by the CBI on the complaint of Punjab National Bank (PNB), alleging that the accused were using over 100 shell companies for routing and diverting the bank funds.
In its complaint, the PNB had alleged that the company had diverted bank funds to the tune of Rs 2,240 crore, which resulted in loss to the consortium. It had alleged that they had cheated 17 nationalised and four private banks. Later, ED also registered a case in this regard.
It was alleged that the 100 shell companies used by the accused for routing and diversion of bank funds had no genuine business transactions.
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The Indian film industry today mourned the death of actor Shashi Kapoor, as friends and admirers -- led by Lata Mangeshkar, Shyam Benegal and Aamir Khan -- recalled his passion for cinema, while paying homage to a man known for his easy charm and good nature.
The actor, aged 79, breathed his last at the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital here at 5.20pm.
Director Shyam Bengal described him as "god's good man" and a beautiful human being.
"He was god's good man and a beautiful human being beyond anything else," Benegal, who worked with the late actor in "Kalyug" and "Junoon", told PTI.
Melody queen Lata Mangeshkar, a close friend of the actor, mourned his death.
"I just received the that Shashi Kapoor ji has passed away. I am really saddened. He was a good human being. My heartfelt condolences," she posted on Twitter.
Actor Aamir paid his respects to the actor, saying he was not just a "great star and a passionate filmmaker", but also a "wonderful human being".
"His work has always given Indian audiences great joy. His contribution to Indian theatre was huge, Prithvi theatre is the favourite venue of both performers and audiences alike. His passing a sad day for all of us. My condolences to Sanjana, Kunal, Karan and everyone in the family. May his soul rest in piece," Aamir wrote on Twitter.
Yesteryear actor Simi Garewal said she was deeply saddened by the demise of her friend.
"Am deeply saddened by the passing away of my co-star Shashi Kapoor. The last of that generation of Kapoors gone. A gentleman and friend gone. An era gone... All that remains are his films and precious memories," she tweeted.
Veteran actor and his co-star in several films, Shabana Azmi, posted on Twitter a black-and-white picture of the actor, with the caption, "We will miss you ...".
Noted film critic Aseem Chhabra, who penned the authorised biography on Shashi, "Shashi Kapoor: The Householder, the Star", tweeted, "I am heartbroken! It was expected but the loss of #ShashiKapoor has left me feeling very low, very empty."
Actor Saira Banu remembered him as a "bubbly person".
"I remember him as a bubbly person. He was full of fun, full of jokes and at the same time he was really a smart person," Banu, legendary actor Dilip Kumar's wife, told PTI.
Veteran actor Moushumi Chatterjee remembered him as a great actor and jovial person.
"He was a gem of a person, a very nice human being. He was a very protective person. He was a very talented hero. I learnt a lot of things from him in the beginning of my career," she told PTI.
Leading Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar recalled the late actor's classic line from "Deewar" and said it inspired aspiring artistes.
"Innumerable Bollywood dreams came to life watching your iconic dialogue, 'Mere paas maa hai.' Your tremendous contribution to cinema will always be remembered," he tweeted.
Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt said Shashi Kapoor revolutionised Indian theatre.
"Shashi ji also contributed to the theatre movement hugely. Prithvi Theatre is like a 'shrine'... His contribution to the alternate cinema movement is also huge," he wrote.
Director Hansal Mehta tweeted, "RIP Shashi Kapoor. The charming man, the brave producer, the lovely actor, my neighbour is no more."
Actor Ajay Devgn wrote, "You won't be forgotten. Rest in peace #ShashiKapoor ji." While Sanjay Dutt said the veteran actor would never be forgotten by his fans.
"Shashi Kapoor ji you will be missed always," the actor tweeted.
Actor-writer Vinay Pathak posted one of the late star's photographs on social media and described him as his personal "Prithvi Theatre genie".
"Nothing but diligence beauty and innocence... He was my Prithvi Theatre Genie! The stage is silent Truly a sad day!" he posted.
Actor Boman Irani tweeted, "Handsome is that handsome does ... He was. He did. He lives on."
Filmmaker Subhash Ghai said working with Shashi Kapoor was a learning experience for him.
"I worked with him in two movies. 'Gautam Govinda' and 'Krodhi' in late '70s. And learnt a lot from him like work ethics, discipline, time planning, compassion and above all his love and passion for good cinema and theatre development," Ghai tweeted.
Actor Shekhar Suman, who made his Bollywood debut with "Utsav", produced by Shashi Kapoor, said he was grateful to the late actor for giving him his first break.
"Saddest day of my life... The man to whom I owe my entire career. I am grateful to him for all my professional achievements, for giving me my first and the biggest break as a lead in 'Utsav' opposite Rekha... I'm heartbroken," Suman said in a statement.
A host of artistes paid homage to the late actor at his residence today. Among them were the Bachchans -- Amitabh, Aishwarya and Abhishek -- Rani Mukerji, Kajol, Kareena Kapoor, Saif Ali Khan, Boney Kapoor and Karisma Kapoor.
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A powerful bomb blast at a poll rally of the ruling Nepali Congress today injured 11 people including the former health minister here, police said, days ahead of the last phase of provincial and parliamentary polls.
The police said that 30 suspects have been arrested in connection with the incident which occurred at Chapali area in Budhanilakantha municipality, 10 kms north of Kathmandu.
The injured including Nepali Congress candidate Gagan Thapa were rushed to the Tribhuvan University Teaching hospital here.
Thapa, a former health minister who is contesting election from the Kathmandu constituency Number 4, has been discharged from the hospital.
The condition of one of the injured people is said to be critical.
Election campaign for Thursday's second phase of parliamentary and provincial elections will end at mid-night tomorrow.
The blast occurred three days before the second phase of the provincial and parliamentary elections on December 7.
Around 65 per cent votes were cast on November 26 in the historic first round of elections that many hope will bring the much-needed political stability to the Himalayan nation.
Of the total 15.4 million voters, 3.19 million were eligible to cast their votes in the first phase while the rest will exercise their franchise during the second phase.
The elections are being seen as the final step in Nepal's transition to a federal democracy following a decade-long civil war till 2006 that claimed more than 16,000 lives.
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A Spanish judge today ordered that four prominent members of the Catalan independence movement should remain in custody, including the No 2 of the ousted regional government, who will campaign in a polarized regional election from a jail near Madrid.
The judge set 100,000-euro (USD 118,000) bail for the six other Catalan politicians who had been jailed in early November, and ordered their passports to be confiscated.
The six were expected to leave jails near Madrid later in the day.
Meanwhile, Catalan ex-president Carles Puigdemont and four of his separatist allies heard that they will be judged on whether they can be extradited from Belgium to Spain on December 14, exactly one week before the election.
The group is refusing to return to Spain to face rebellion, sedition and embezzlement charges that can be punished with decades in prison under the country's criminal laws.
Puigdemont's defense lawyer, Paul Bekaert, insisted that the Spanish charges weren't punishable in Belgium and thus there were no grounds for extradition.
"We also highlighted the danger for the impediment of their human rights in Spain," he said.
Whatever decision is made on December 14, two appeals will be possible and a final ruling could well come only after the December 21 election called by Spain's central authorities, in which Puigdemont is leading his pro- independence party's campaign.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's conservative Spanish government disbanded Puigdemont's Cabinet when it took control of Catalonia shortly after separatist regional lawmakers passed a declaration of independence in late October.
The early election is an attempt to find a democratic way out of the nation's worst crisis in nearly four decades. But the vote is shaping up as a plebiscite between those for and against independence, with polls predicting a close race between the two camps.
Adding to the uncertainty, a Supreme Court judge decided today to uphold the preventive jailing of ousted Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras, who tops the ticket for the left- republican ERC party.
ERC was part of the former Catalan ruling coalition with Puigdemont's conservative party and is leading the polls before the new election.
Campaigning officially begins at midnight today, and in the hours before that moment Catalan pro-independence groups hope to stage protests in front of town halls across the region against the Supreme Court's decision on the detained separatists.
Today's developments once again exposed deep splits among Catalans. Pilar Gonzalez, a 76-year-old housewife walking her dog in Barcelona, said the jailed Catalan political leaders were "political prisoners."
But 53-year-old contractor Jose Luis Aguirre said the attempt to unilaterally break away from Spain "is an act that cannot be allowed."
Junqueras and the other jailed politicians pledged last week to give up on efforts to seek unilateral independence for the wealthy northeastern region, in the hope of being freed. But judge Pablo Llarena said in his decision today that it remains to be seen if Junqueras' pledge to abide by Spanish law is "truthful and real.
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Hong Kong carrier Cathay Pacific said today that one of its air crews spotted what they believed to be the missile fired by North Korea last week, as they flew between the southern Chinese city and the United States.
The North fired an intercontinental ballistic missile believed capable of hitting the US mainland last Wednesday.
A statement from Cathay said a flight crew had that day sighted "what is suspected to be the re-entry of the recent DPRK test missile".
Cathay did not give the location of the flight at the time of the sighting, but said the crew of the CX893 flight between Hong Kong and San Francisco had notified Japanese air traffic control "according to procedures".
Operations had continued as normal, the statement added.
Pyongyang said the missile reached an altitude of 4,475 kilometres and splashed down 950 kilometres from its launch site.
It also claimed the Hwasong-15 missile fired Wednesday can be tipped with a "super-large heavy warhead" capable of striking the whole US mainland.
Cathay said there is no current plan to change air routes, describing the flight as being "far from the event location".
"We remain alert and review the situation as it evolves," the statement said.
In a message shared with staff, Cathay general manager Mark Hoey said the crew had described seeing the missile "blow up and fall apart", the South China Morning Post reported.
Hoey said that another plane, CX096 which is a freight service between Hong Kong and Mexico, was only a few hundred miles away and could have been closer than the San Francisco flight, according to the report.
Analysts remain unconvinced that North Korea has mastered the advanced technology to allow the rocket to survive re- entry to the Earth's atmosphere.
The months-long nuclear standoff between North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un and US president Donald Trump has fuelled concerns of another conflict, after the 1950-53 Korean War left much of the peninsula in ruin.
A deputy commissioner of police and nine other Haryana Police officers have been booked by the CBI for allegedly abetting the suicide of an assistant sub- inspector.
Mahavir Singh allegedly ended his life by consuming poison in April last year and had left a six-page suicide note accusing a number of officials of harassing him, the agency's FIR said.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court in September this year ordered a CBI probe into the matter.
The CBI in its FIR has named then DCP Traffic Vinod Kaushik, Dy SPs Satya and Atma Ram (who was an inspector at the time of suicide) Inspector/SHOs Jagdish Prasad, Hardip Huda, Babu Lal, head constable Kulwant, an accountant of Gurugram Police Pawan, ASI Vikas and his brother Vijay.
Mahavir Singh's window, Chanchal Devi, had alleged that she was being pressured to drop the case and demanded a CBI probe, which was granted by the high court in September.
She had sought an investigation by the central agency in the case related to abetment to suicide of her husband, registered on May 2, 2016 at Ballabhgarh police station in Faridabad.
She referred to a suicide note left by her husband in which he had levelled specific allegations against several police officials, including high-ranking cops.
Chanchal Devi had said Mahavir Singh was posted at Gurgaon City police station and allegedly committed suicide by consuming poison in his village on April 28, 2016.
The family found his suicide note in an almirah next day in which he had alleged harassment and extortion threats by several police officials to save him from disciplinary action.
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Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu today began his three-day tour of the Republic of Korea, urging its industrialists to make the state their second home and invest big in it.
The Chief Minister held meetings with a host of Korean industrialists and told them that AP would like to make rapid strides, inspired by South Korea's success in manufacturing and technology.
Explaining what all his government had been doing to propel growth and prosperity in the sunrise state in the aftermath of bifurcation, Naidu made a strong pitch for Korean investments in different sectors like automobiles, power, textiles, food processing, electronics, etc, an official release issued here said.
"Indias Look East Policy will bear fruit only from our state," Naidu told the Koreans.
He also invited them to attend the Partnership Summit to be held in Visakhapatnam in February, it added.
Showcasing Kia Motors -- which is now setting up its car manufacturing plant in Anantapuramu district of AP -- as a mascot, the Chief Minister asked the South Korean business houses to explore possibilities of investing in AP as both of them shared many similarities like population and (geographical) size, said the release.
A group of 37 South Korean industries already signed Letters of Intent to invest a sum of Rs 3,000 crore in the state, he said.
Many ancillary units of Kia Motors confirmed a total investment of Rs 4,995 crore and provision of employment to 7,171 persons, the Chief Minister added.
A Korean township would soon be developed in the state, he said.
Naidu requested Hwang Chul-joo, CEO of Jusung Engineering that has 3.5 GW of solar power plants in different states of India, to set up a research and development facility in AP.
Jusung is currently developing the next-generation OLED bulbs and also has plans to set up a further one GW of solar power generating plants in India.
The Chief Minister, who is accompanied by Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu, Industries Minister N Amarnath Reddy and senior officials, visited the automobile manufacturing plant of Kia Motors.
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Senior Congress leader today accused the of playing communal for terming Gujarat leaders Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakore and Jignesh Mevani as "HAJ" and said there was no reason why the youths of the state do not accept Congress after Punjab.
In a series of tweets, Chidambaram said Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti leader Hardik Patel, OBC leader Alpesh Thakore and SC/ST leader Jignesh Mevani were articulating the demands of Gujarati youths for jobs and development and their campaign should not be "trivialised".
"Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakor and Jignesh Mevani are sons of the soil of Gujarat. To call them HAJ is playing the communal card and divisive politics," he tweeted.
Chidambaram's comments come after a poster was released on the social media showing upcoming Gujarat elections as a face-off between "HAJ" and "RAM", which stands for (Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay) Rupani, chief Amit (Shah) and (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi.
The former union finance and the home minister said large sections of the youth of Gujarat have rallied behind Patel, Thakor and Mevani and they have not accepted the .
"Youth of Punjab accepted Congress. So did the youth of Goa and Manipur before the elections were stolen by the BJP. Why would the youth of Gujarat not accept Congress?" he asked.
The two-phase assembly elections for the 182-seat Gujarat assembly will be held on December 9 and December 14. The counting of votes will take place on December 18.
The parents of students of the G D Birla Centre for Education organised protests for the fourth consecutive day today against the sexual assault of a four- year-old girl allegedly by two teachers of the institution.
The demonstrators of the Guardians Forum said they would participate in a meeting with the school management committee, to be held in the school premises tomorrow, as demanded by them.
The meeting would be attended by the school managing committee, representatives of the forum, senior police officers and officials of the state education department to resolve the impasse and ensure fool-proof security for their wards, a forum member told PTI.
The forum had turned down a request by the Kolkata Police yesterday to hold the meeting at an auditorium of the force. It stuck to its demand that the school management, including the chairman, come to the school for discussions.
"We are hopeful of a breakthrough as the school authorities have met two of our principal demands - sacking of the two accused teachers and agreeing to hold talks with the Guardians Forum on the main issue of fullproof safety of our children," a Guardians Forum member told PTI.
The forum also demanded that the authorities withdraw the notice of indefinite suspension of classes as the gaurdians are not against the functioning of the school, he said.
Asked about the demand for arrest of the school principal Sharmila Nath for allegedly suppressing facts about the alleged sexual assault, the member said, "We are happy that she has been summoned to the Kolkata Police Headquarters at Lalbazar. We have full faith in the law enforcing authorities and hope the two arrested physical training teachers will be punished in accordance with law."
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee condemned the alleged sexual abuse of the child. "It was an unfortunate incident. We all condemn this."
Banerjee told reporters here during the day that action should be taken against the perpetrators.
"I don't think that for a particular teacher or for two or three teachers, everybody should be blamed. All teachers are not bad. But there are some bad people. We have to take action against them," she said.
BJP Rajya Sabha MP Roopa Ganguly visited the demonstration site and said, "I have come here as a mother to speak to the mothers of children. I am also in favour of action against the principal and immediate reopening of the school."
As a section of guardians said they did not want to politicise the issue and the forum would continue the protest without any political backing, Ganguly said: "I am not here to do politics. I am here as a resident of the city - a worried citizen. A woman."
To a question by the media present at the spot, Ganguly said "I will raise the incident in parliament."
The West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights (WBCPCR) sought the medical report of the child from the police. It also sought the principal's arrest in the incident and said it would initiate legal action against the school management for shutting it for an indefinite period.
WBCPCR chairperson Ananya Chatterjee Chakraborti, who visited the school this morning, told PTI that Sharmila Nath could have dealt with the matter in a "sensible manner".
"On the contrary the principal denied the incident first. Under the POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act, she is also an offender. The arrest of the principal is much needed. I have spoken to the Kolkata Police commissioner and told him that she must be arrested," Chakraborti said.
The school authorities in a notice yesterday informed "parents and all concerned" that the junior and senior sections of the school would be closed from today.
In another notice, it said the two physical training instructors who were arrested on Saturday for allegedly assaulting the child have been "removed from service".
The school authorities also promised to extend full cooperation to the police in the investigations.
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China today declined to directly comment on the launch of the strategic Chabahar port in Iran but hoped that the project, which enables India to directly trade with Afghanistan besides rivalling Pakistan's Gwadar port, is conducive to regional peace and stability.
The first phase of the Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman coast was inaugurated yesterday by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, opening a new strategic route connecting Iran, India and Afghanistan while bypassing Pakistan, and reflecting growing convergence of interests among the three countries.
The port in Iran's Sistan-Balochistan province on the energy-rich nation's southern coast is easily accessible from India's western coast and is increasingly seen as a counter to Pakistan's Gwadar port, which is being developed with Chinese investment and is located around 80 kms from Chabahar.
Asked how China views the launch of the project, considering that China is investing heavily in Gwadar as part of the USD 50 billion ChinaPakistan Economic Corridor, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang declined to comment on it directly.
"As for the (Chabahar) port, I want to give you a principled answer. We welcome the development of friendly relations between the regional countries and conduct mutually beneficial cooperation," he said.
"We hope the relevant cooperation can be conducive to maintaining regional peace and promoting regional stability and prosperity," he said.
The Chabahar port is being considered a gateway to golden opportunities for trade by India, Iran and Afghanistan with central Asian countries besides ramping up trade among the three countries in the wake of Pakistan denying transit access to New Delhi.
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President Donald Trump will soon unveil a new national security strategy, his top aide has said as he alleged that revisionist powers like Russia and China are subverting the post-World War-II political and economic order to advance their own interest at the expense of America and its allies.
"President Trump will soon unveil the details of his new strategy," National Security Advisor Lt Gen H R McMaster told a gathering of American national security experts over the weekend at the Regan National Defence Forum in California.
The new strategy will focus on protecting homeland, advancing American prosperity, preserving peace through strength, and finally enhancing American influence.
McMaster said the US today is at a crossroads similar to the period of ex-president Ronald Reagan.
"Revisionist powers Russia and China are subverting the post World War II political economic and security orders to advance their own interests at our expense and at the expense of our allies," he said.
"The rogue regimes of Iran and North Korea are violating the sovereignty of their neighbours, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and exporting terror to other nations, jihadist terrorist organizations such as ISIS threaten all civilised people in every corner of the world," McMaster said.
These security challenges require a dramatic rethinking of American foreign policy from previous decades, he said.
America, under President Trump, is reclaiming the strategic confidence necessary for implementing this strategy through understanding in four areas, he said.
"First the values that define our nation. Second the full instruments of our power. Third the threats facing our nation and fourth the dynamic and competitive nature of our security environment," he said.
McMaster said Trump and his national security team have clearly described the threats that emanate from revisionist powers, rogue regimes and jihadist terrorist organisations.
"The administration's approach of principled realism also adopts a realistic view of our security environment. For this reason we do not base national security decisions on a rigid ideology but instead on our core national interests and clearly defined objectives derived from those interests," he said.
"Some threats are more obvious than others. On the recent Asia trip the president spoke out forcefully against unfair trade and economic policies which have disadvantaged American workers and companies. For too long Washington turned a blind eye to cheating and exploitive practices abroad," he said.
"We in large measure vacated the competitive economic space and the American people pay the price. We've also been clear eyed about the more obvious threat from North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile development," he said, adding the president is committed to the total denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
"The error of strategic patience is over. We will not repeat failed efforts of the past," he said.
"We want all people to have the opportunity to rise. We will compete but competition must be fair. Our economic relationships will respect our partners sovereignty over their economic destinies while ensuring that American workers and American companies are not unfairly disadvantaged," he said.
McMaster said Trumps new vision for a free and open ended Pacific imagines a community of nations that are strong, independent and thriving and a future of many dreams for the people of the region.
Confronting the security challenges of today will require US to reclaim its strategic confidence, he added.
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Coffee exports from India, Asia's third-largest producer and exporter, rose by 8.08 per cent to 3.61 lakh tonnes in January-November 2017 compared to 3.34 lakh tonnes in the same period of last year, according to the Coffee Board.
Italy, Germany and Russia were the major export destinations for Indian coffee during the period. India ships both robusta and Arabica varieties, besides instant coffee.
Robusta coffee exports rose by 10.80 per cent to 2,11,442 tonnes in January-November 2017 from 1,90,828 tonnes in the year-ago, the board dats showed.
Export of Arabica coffee however declined by 10.81 per cent to 44,084 tonnes from 49,431 tonnes in the said period.
The outbound shipment of instant coffee increased sharply by 86 per cent to 47,734 tonnes in January-November this year from 22,966 tonnes in the same period last year, the data showed.
Of the total exports, India exported 73,705 tonnes to Italy, 38,671 tonnes to Germany and 26,319 tonnes to Russia during the period under review.
Some of the major exporting companies include CCL Products India, Tata Coffee, Olam Agro and Coffee Day Global Ltd.
Coffee production had declined by 10.34 per cent to 3.12 lakh tonnes in 2016-17 crop year (October-September).
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Taking a jibe at Rahul Gandhi hours after he filed his nomination papers for the president's post, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath today said the party had become a "burden" which would disappear on its own after the elevation.
The chief minister also said the move in the would have no impact on Assembly elections in Gujarat.
"Hamey lagta hai ki party ek bojh ban chuki hai. Rahul Gandhi ke (adhyaksh) banney se yeh bojh apney aap samapt ho jayega ... (I feel the Congress party has become a burden. After Rahul Gandhi's elevation, this burden will end on its own)," Adityanath told reporters here.
The elevation would not affect the BJP in the ongoing Gujarat polls, he stressed.
"It will have no impact on the BJP's poll prospects in Gujarat, where there is no doubt about our victory," he said.
Gandhi, accompanied by a host of senior party leaders, including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, filed his papers for the party president's post earlier today.
The 47-year-old Gandhi scion is likely to emerge as the lone candidate in the fray, clearing the decks for his elevation and succeeding his mother, who held the post for 19 successive years.
"Rahulji has been the darling of the Congress...," Manmohan Singh told reporters at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters in New Delhi.
The last date for withdrawal of candidature is December 11. Polling, if needed, will be held on December 16.
The Congress today released its first list of candidates for the municipal corporation elections in Punjab, choosing to go with its "one family, one ticket" formula with the exception of sitting councillors.
The party, which announced names of 31 candidates for the Patiala Municipal Corporation, has decided to field all the sitting councillors, while taking a tough stand against rebels and deserters, a party spokesperson said in a release.
These decisions were taken at a high-level meeting chaired by Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh.
Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) president Sunil Jakhar was present at the meeting held in New Delhi along with AICC secretary and Punjab in-charge Asha Kumari and AICC secretary Harish Chaudhary, the release said.
The meeting decided that those who left the party in 2012 and 2014 will not be accommodated in the matter of ticket allocation for the municipal corporation polls.
However, those who contested and lost the municipal corporation elections earlier but remained steadfast in their loyalty to the party, would be considered for nomination, the spokesperson said.
In another decision aimed at rewarding loyalty and boosting party morale, it was decided to give preference to original Congress members over those who have joined from other parties, according to a party spokesperson.
There was no change in the party's policy with regard to ticket allocation from the one followed during the Punjab Assembly polls, the spokesperson said.
The success of the Congress in the state elections in February had shown that the merit and winnabilty were the right considerations in choosing the best candidates.
Elections to three municipal corporations -- Amritsar, Ludhiana, Patiala, and 32 municipal councils and nagar panchayats in Punjab will be held on December 17.
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Senior BJP leader and Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma today claimed that ordinary Congress workers are feeling humiliated and sad with party vice president Rahul Gandhi filing nomination papers for the post of party president.
Sarma, one of the most prominent leaders of the Congress in Assam before joining the saffron party, also said that despite belonging to the 21st century, Gandhi missed a historical opportunity to free the Congress from dynastic and feudal politics.
"By getting ready to file nomination for Congress President in what's a terribly opaque process @OfficeOfRG has humiliated ordinary workers. #ShameYouDynast," Sarma, also the state finance minister, said in his twitter handle.
The 47-year-old Gandhi scion is likely to emerge as the lone candidate in the fray, clearing the decks for his elevation to the party's top post, succeeding his mother, who has held the post for 19 years in a row.
"Those who dedicated their sweat & blood for @INCIndia are today silently sobbing on such treacherous lack of transparency in party. God bless @OfficeOfRG," said another tweet of Sarma.
The Congress, however, hit back saying Sarma does not know the history of the party.
In the long history of the party, only a few Congress presidents were from the Gandhi family, senior Congress leader Pradyut Bordoloi said.
On Rahul Gandhi's nomination, he said the process started about eight months back and it adhered to all democratic norms.
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Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Monday criticised the election strategy adopted by the Congress in Gujarat and said the party was "veering towards extremism".
The talks of Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi being a "janeu-dhari Hindu" (one who wears the sacred thread) and the deliberate sidelining of top leaders like Ahmed Patel indicate a worrying trend in the grand old party, Kumar told reporters on the sidelines of his weekly 'Lok Samvad' programme.
"These trends show the party is veering towards extremism in its quest for votes. This is something it has always accused the BJP of," he said.
The Congress has claimed that Gandhi was a "janeu-dhari Hindu" after a row erupted over the alleged listing of his name in the register for non-Hindus at the Somnath temple in Gujarat.
Kumar took exception to the use of the term "janeu- dhari", saying the sacred thread was a mark of "caste-based inequality, which socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan had once refused to wear and had also asked his followers to discard.
"By proudly flaunting janeu, the party has unwittingly alienated a large section of the society which has been at the receiving end of the rigid caste hierarchy," Kumar alleged.
Asked about Gandhi's nomination for the party president's post, he said: "The person to be elected for the top position in the Congress is predetermined. People may aspire to get a place in the lower rungs but can never assume the leadership of the party."
To a query about an audiotape that surfaced with a purported conversation between two senior Congress party leaders over Gandhi's elevation, Kumar said, "We do not believe in taking advantage of a crisis inside another party. It was their 'sanskar' (values) to have done so when we were going through a rough patch."
Kumar's remark was in reference to the Congress having come out in support of rebel JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav after the Grand Alliance split in Bihar.
The JD(U) president reiterated that he saw the saffron party in a very strong position in Gujarat and that the people there were proud of the fact that a son of their soil, Narendra Modi, has become the prime minister of India.
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik today requested Union Minister Nitin Gadkari to direct NHAI to immediately take up construction of a bridge over Brahmani river near Rourkela or allow the state government to build it with its own resources.
"I request your personal intervention to direct the NHAI for immediately taking up the construction of the 2nd bridge over Brahmani river near Panposh on NH-143 or alternatively, allow the state government to construct the six-lane bridge as a stand-alone project in the larger public interest," Patnaik wrote to the Union Road Transport, Highways Minister.
Letter to Gadkari was written barely hours after Patnaik assured a delegation that he would take up the matter with the Central government.
"If they (Centre) are not serious about the project, the state government will construct the bridge from its own resources," Patnaik had told the delegation led by senior BJD leader and MLA Mangala Kissan.
Patnaik in the letter stated that the unusual delay in commencement of the bridge work may result in a "disaster". The chief minister mentioned that he had earlier written two letters to Gadkari for starting the bridge work as a large number of people in the region depend on it.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during a public meeting in Rourkela in April 2015, had announced a second bridge over the river but work has not begun in that direction so far.
Hundreds of BJD youth activists staged a demonstration in Rourkela yesterday to protest against the delay in the project.
BJD leader and former minister Sarada Nayak pointed out that Union Minister Nitin Gadkari had also laid the foundation stone for the project during his visit to the state in July and assured the people that work would begin within 15 days.
"Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the construction of a second bridge in 2015 and Union Minister Nitin Gadkari laid the foundation stone in July this year. But four months have passed and work has not started yet," Nayak said.
Echoing similar sentiments, BJP MLA Dilip Ray, who led several agitations in the past two years for the cause, also expressed his displeasure over the matter today.
"The bridge was announced by the PM two years ago but the National Highway Authority of India has shown no interest in implementing the project," he said.
Union Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram, however, called Patnaik's announcement a "political gimmick" and said the government was serious about the project.
"Patnaik's announcement about the bridge today was nothing more than a political gimmick. The Union government has already initiated paperwork on the project and construction will begin soon," he added.
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The Madras High Court today directed the state registration department to correct discrepancies in it's website at the earliest without delay.
Disposing a PIL petition by one Sankaralingam, Justices K K Sasidharan and G R Swaminathan also ruled that registration authorities cannot decline to register documents offline since online registration was only in the pilot stage.
They also could not refuse to receive documents for registration by insisting that the registrants pay stamp duty only as per guideline valuation in the website.
The Judges said the statutory function of index creation must be performed only by the sub-registrar and could not be prepared by document writers or registrants.
The Petitioner sought a direction to correct all 'discrepancies' in the website of the registration department, especially in index matters and guideline values.
The judges said introduction and application of technology was imperative and the registration department must embrace e-governance totally though there may be initial glitches.
The registration department should respond with speed and alacrity with issues brought to the notice of the officials for remedial actions, the court said.
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The Coast Guard has rescued 183 fishermen stranded in choppy waters off the coasts of Kerala and Lakshadweep due to Cyclone Ockhi, a top official said here today.
"Till yesterday, 164 fishermen were rescued. Today, 19 more were rescued," Inspector General K R Nautiyal, Commander, Coast Guard Region (West) told reporters.
"The Coast Guard Region (West) at Mumbai is assessing the impact of cyclone in the sea area. It has tasked ships and aircraft for providing critical assistance to the fishermen at sea," he said.
According to Nautiyal, the Coast Guard District Headquarters at Cochin and Kavaratti were directed to provide necessary assistance to the stranded fishermen and shepherd them to shelter areas.
"The Coast Guard tasked 12 ships and deployed three Dornier aircraft and two helicopters for sea-air coordinated search and rescue assistance to the stranded fishermen at sea," the officer said.
"Operations are continuing and deployment of ships and aircraft continues in the affected area to search for those stranded," he added.
During the ongoing search operations, the Coast Guard personnel are braving extremely unfavourable sea conditions, he said.
As per the officer, the Coast Guard stations along the West coast were interacting with fishermen and assisting them with first aid and food as required.
Fishermen were being advised to remain inside harbour and not to venture out at sea till the system dissipates, he said.
Data of fishermen in shelter areas was being shared with the state authorities concerned to convey the same to the next of kin.
He said the Coast Guard Region (West) was disseminating advisories to authorities in Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Daman and Diu in the likelihood of the cyclone re-curving and making landfall along south Gujarat coast near Gulf of Khambat.
"Oil handling agencies in offshore development areas have also been advised to initiate cyclone contingency measures and initiate necessary evacuation of personnel from oil platforms well in time," he signed off.
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After leaving a trail of destruction in the southern coast, Cyclone Ockhi is expected to make landfall in coastal Gujarat tomorrow midnight with squally winds, which may cause heavy rains in several parts of the state during the next two days.
An India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast said, "The severe cyclonic storm Ockhi is now laid centred about 850 km south-southwest of Surat and is likely to cross south Gujarat and adjoining North Maharashtra coasts near Surat as a deep depression by mid-night of December 5."
Following the IMD prediction, Gujarat Chief Secretary J N Singh today took stock of the administrative preparedness to deal with any eventuality.
Revenue department's Principal Secretary Pankaj Kumar told reporters in Gandhinagar that the authorities concerned in the coastal region of the state have been directed to take all precautionary measures.
Two National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) teams each have been deployed at Surat, Navsari, and Rajkot.
The officer said the Army, Navy, and the Border Security Force (BSF) have been alerted in the view of the cyclone's landfall.
"According to the IMD forecast, Cyclone Ockhi would enter south Gujarat tomorrow midnight. This will the impact coastal areas from Umargam (in south Gujarat) till Gir Somnath district (in Saurashtra).
"We have directed local civic officials as well as the collectors to remain prepared and take all necessary steps for the safety of the people," Kumar said.
The principal secretary said collectors of the coastal districts have been asked to ensure that fishermen do not venture into the sea as it will remain rough.
"Those fishermen who have already gone into sea should return now. Many such fishermen are already on their way to the coast," he said.
Kumar said according to the IMD forecast, wind velocity would remain between 50 KMPH to 70 KMPH when the cyclone would make landfall.
In view of the adverse weather conditions, the RoRo ferry service between Ghogha and Dahej across the Gulf of Khambhat has been suspended. The service, inaugurated recently by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, would resume on December 6 subject if the weather conditions are suitable.
According to the IMD, Gujarat is very likely to experience a wet spell during the next four days.
"Heavy rainfall might occur in Valsad, Surat, Navsari, Bharuch, Dang, Tapi, Amreli, Gir-Sonath and Bhavnagar districts on December 5," it said.
In a port warning issued here, the MeT Centre said, "Sea condition would be rough. Fishermen (have been) advised not to venture into the sea till December 6. Hoist Distant Warning Signal Number 2 at all ports".
According to an official release, Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani held an urgent meeting with senior officials to take stock of the preparedness.
During the meeting, he was apprised that as many as 50 boats from Kerala had drifted towards Gujarat's Veraval coast due to the cyclone, it said.
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A 43-year-old Defence Security Corps personnel has been arrested for accidentally firing at three persons and killing one of them in northeast Delhi's Welcome area during a marriage ceremony, police said today.
On November 30, three persons were injured by a gunshot fired from a double-barrelled gun on 100 Foota Road, Durga Puri Chowk, Shiv Mandir.
All the injured men were admitted to GTB Hospital, where two men - Shah Alam and Sharik - were undergoing treatment. The third man, Bhanu Pratap (24), was declared brought dead by doctors.
Pratap worked as a motor mechanic at an automobile repair shop and the two injured persons had come to the shop to get their vehicles repaired.
The police said witnesses told them that a gunshot was fired from a car having an Army logo on both the number plates. The police scanned the footages of the CCTV cameras installed in the area and a dark grey coloured car having the Army logo on both the number plates was seen in Kabir Nagar.
They found that the vehicle was registered in the name of Rajesh Kumar, who had come to Delhi for a relative's wedding.
The police raided Kumar's house in Dastura in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh, but he was not found there and his house was locked.
He was susbequently arrested on December 2 from Delhi.
He told the police that he had joined the Indian Army, and during his posting in Jammu and Kashmir he had procured an arms license from Doda district.
In 2006, he left Army and was recruited in the Defence Security Corps - which provides security to defence installations of the three services - and at present he is posted at Jat Regiment, Meerut Cantonment as a constable.
He told the police that he had come to Delhi to attend the wedding of a relative. He said he accidentally fired from the gun while putting the gun into its cover, AK Singla, Deputy commissioner of police (Northeast).
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Aimed at abolishing contractual system of employment in certain sectors in the national capital, the newly-constituted Delhi Advisory Contract Labour Board has called a meeting on December 20 to discuss the issue.
Delhi Labour Minister Gopal Rai said the board, which had been formed by the Delhi government on November 14, will address issues related to contractual labours in the national capital.
In his Independence Day speech, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had promised that his government would abolish the contractual system in certain sectors, like sanitation.
Delhi Advisory Contract Labour Board is a 13-member tripartite statutory board with the labour minister as its chairman.
Besides two MLAs, it has representatives from both employers and employees' unions.
"The board has called its meeting on December 20 to discuss various agendas including abolition of contractual system in permanent nature works. It will also ensure equal wages for equal work for contractual employees," Rai said at a press conference here.
He said "large-scale" violations have been reported to the labour department by contractual workers from time to time related to non payment of notified minimum wages, violation of provident fund, employees' state insurance and payment of bonus among others.
In August this year, Kejriwal had said the AAP government would abolish contractual system in areas that require regular employment throughout the year.
"For example, sanitation workers are required to do their job through the year. We will abolish contractual system in regular jobs. However, we will not change this system in areas of temporary employment," the chief minister had said.
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For police assistance, people in Punjab can dial a common emergency number '112', which was launched today on trial basis under the Centre's nationwide emergency response system (NERS) project.
Designed on the lines of 911 operational in the USA, the NERS was conceptualised in the aftermath of the 2012 gang-rape of the woman in a bus in Delhi.
Under the project, '112' will be the single common number for help during emergency situations. All other emergency numbers like 100 for police, 101 for fire brigade, 102 for ambulance will be replaced by the common number.
A centre is being set up in Mohali for receiving calls from people in distress and the state police is expecting to officially begin the emergency number service in the next couple of months.
"The common emergency number '112' is under trial in Punjab and people can dial this number instead of '100' for police help," Inspector General of Punjab Police G S Dhillon, who is handling the project, said.
"We want people to dial this number so that if there is any bottleneck in the system that can be removed," the officer said, adding, "We have done mapping for '112' as per the Government of India instructions."
A majority of the people were still unaware of he emergency number '112'. The common emergency number will be launched in the next six months, he said.
"We will initially have 60 call receivers with a capacity of handling one lakh emergency calls per day," Dhillon said, adding the Centre had provided Rs 9.28 crore for this project.
Currently, Punjab police receive about 50,000 emergency calls per day on the '100' number, out of which just about one and half per cent cases are actionable.
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An inebriated Kolkata-bound passenger today created a ruckus at the domestic airport after being refused boarding pass for a flight as he had tickets of a different airline, sources said.
He also allegedly hit a senior Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) official, who tried to intervene in the matter.
Airport authorities said the drunk man got into a heated argument with an Air India official, who refused to give him a boarding pass as he had a ticket of a different airline.
The man also allegedly assaulted a senior CISF official, who tried to pacify him.
As the passenger was found to be drunk, he was detained by the airport police and his relatives were informed, authorities said.
Police were yet to file a case against him, they added.
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An encounter broke out in Qazigund area of south Kashmir today after militants opened fire on an Army vehicle, resulting in injuries to a soldier.
Militants opened fire on an Army convoy, which was on its way to Srinagar, at Qazigund, resulting in injuries to one jawan, a police official said.
He said the security forces cordoned off the area and launched a hunt for the militants.
The search operation by security forces has turned into an encounter with militants, the official said, adding further details are awaited.
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The European Union and Britain ended a flurry of top-level diplomacy today without a deal on the terms of their divorce, as agreement on how to maintain an open Irish border after Brexit slipped out of the negotiators' grasp.
But the two sides said they were within striking distance of consensus, setting up a hectic negotiating rush ahead of next week's EU summit which must decide whether to broaden the talks to the topic of future relations.
On a day that see-sawed between hope and disappointment, the leaders fell short of reaching what the EU considers "sufficient progress" on the divorce issues: Britain's exit bill, and rights of citizens affected by Brexit, and the status of the currently invisible Irish border, the main sticking point
"We had an agreement this morning," said Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, expressing disappointment at the last- minute glitch.
EU leaders want a deal on divorce terms in time for them to agree at a summit on Dec. 14-15 whether to move the negotiations on to the next stage of talks, including trade.
The lack of progress so far has raised concerns that Britain may not have a deal on key issues by the time it officially leaves on March 29, 2019.
"Despite our best efforts and the significant process we and our teams have made over the past days on the remaining withdrawal issues, it was not possible to reach an agreement," said EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
"This is not a failure," Juncker added after a long negotiating lunch with British Prime Minister Theresa May. May said that "on a couple of issues some differences do remain which require further negotiation and consultation."
But she said talks would reconvene later this week "and I am also confident we will conclude this positively."
The EU and the UK are nearing agreement on some divorce terms, including the size of the bill that Britain must pay as it leaves and the rights of citizens affected by Brexit. But the border issue has proved more intractable.
After Britain leaves the bloc, the currently invisible 500-kilometer frontier will be the UK's only land border with an EU country.
Britain says it wants to maintain a "frictionless" flow of people and goods with no border posts. But Ireland and the other EU nations are demanding to know how that will work if Britain is outside the EU's borderless single market and its tariff-free customs union, a looser trading bloc that includes non-EU states like Turkey.
Negotiators were discussing an agreement that would commit Britain to maintaining "regulatory alignment" between Northern Ireland and Ireland after Brexit. Both sides would promise to maintain compatible trading rules, keeping the border transparent for trade.
Irish and EU officials indicated that agreement was close. But then Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party, which props up May's minority government, announced it wouldn't support any deal that made special rules for Northern Ireland. The pro-British Unionist party opposes any special status that could take Northern Ireland further from Britain and closer to the Republic of Ireland.
The DUP has only 10 seats out of 650 in Britain's House of Commons, but without their support May's government would fall.
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A European satellite tracking the levels air pollutants around the world has beamed back new views of the Earth's atmosphere, including images of pollution drifting away from power plants in India.
The worst of this pollution runs from north of Patna in Bihar to south of Raipur in Chhattisgarh, scientists said.
The Sentinel-5P satellite is designed to make daily global maps of the gases and particles that pollute the air.
The first sample images released by mission scientists show plumes of nitrogen dioxide flowing away from power plants and traffic-choked cities.
S5P has even captured the ash and sulphur emissions from Agung volcano on the Indonesian island of Bali, which is in the midst of a big eruption.
Researchers from the Netherlands Met Office (KNMI) still need to complete five months of calibration work to get the satellite's data ready for public use.
When fully operational, the new Sentinel will be an extremely powerful tool to monitor air quality, according to principal investigator Pepijn Veefkind.
"It's been amazing to see how quickly we were able to get the satellite working. This is a big improvement on what we've been able to do before. In just a week, we've got more data out of Sentinel-5P than in several years of operation of a previous mission," Veefkind told 'BBC News'.
Sentinel-5P is the latest spacecraft in a fleet of Earth observers being commissioned by the European Union and the European Space Agency.
It was launched into an 824-kilometre high orbit by a Russian rocket on October 13 this year.
It carries an instrument called Tropomi - a spectrometer that observes the reflected sunlight coming up from the Earth, analysing its many different colours.
This helps detect the presence of trace gases such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulphur dioxide, methane, and carbon monoxide in the atmosphere.
The newly-constituted 15th Finance Commission held first meeting today and decided to involve think-tanks in drawing up its report that will primarily deal with devolution of revenue between the Centre and states.
The Commission, headed by former Planning Commission member N K Singh, also discussed the terms of reference of the panel and other procedural issues, a Finance Ministry statement said.
The meeting was attended by former Economic Affairs secretary Shaktikanta Das and other members of the Commission, Anoop Singh, Ashok Lahiri and Ramesh Chand.
"We covered a number of issues which need to be addressed. We went over the terms of reference (ToR) which have been given to us by the President and the best ways of addressing those wide-ranging ToR, procedures for consultation, the broad structure of ensuring that all stakeholders are fully consulted, particularly in respect of state governments," Singh said after the meeting here.
It will be the endeavour of the Commission to reach out to many research organisations in different parts of the country to suitably address the ToR, he said.
"If we look at the terms of reference, these are two frontal issues in the ToR. If you look at Article 280 of the Constitution, Article 281 and Article 282 are precisely on those kinds of issues... the Commission would need to study, analyse, examine and consult before it comes to any conclusion," he said.
Article 280C relates to other issues that cover a wide gamut of subjects that have been very carefully considered before they are referred to the Commission, he said.
On devolution, Singh said, "We did not discuss that, its far too premature to comment on an issue of that kind. That will require very careful deliberations and consideration."
The statement added: "The Commission was cognisant that it has been assigned wide-ranging ToR which needed to be suitably addressed. Towards this objective, it was felt that wide-ranging consultations with all stakeholders, including various ministries of the Union government, all state governments, local bodies, panchayats and political parties of each state government, needed to be expeditiously initiated."
The panel is keen to seek academic inputs from and have interactions with leading think-tanks and domain knowledge experts, which is expected to assist the Commission in its job.
The first meeting of the panel approved the setting up of its office at Jawahar Vyapar Bhawan on Janpath in New Delhi.
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Four persons were killed and five injured after an ambulance collided with a truck on the Amravati road here early today morning, police said.
The accident took place around 4 am when the ambulance, carrying nine people, was heading for a city hospital from Akola, a senior police officer said.
"Akash Bhalerao (12), who had a fractured leg, was being brought to Nagpur for further treatment by his relatives. The ambulance ran into a truck coming from the opposite direction near Power House on the Amravati road," he said.
Akash, his mother Vimal Bhalerao (30), Shriram Dharpawar (34) and Pramod Ban (30) were killed in the accident, the officer said, adding that the injured were taken to Mayo Hospital in the city.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hinduja Group firm GOCL Corporation Ltd today posted a 41 per cent decline in consolidated net profit at Rs 6 crore for the quarter ended September 30.
The company had posted consolidated net profit (for the quarter/period after tax) at Rs 10.3 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal, GOCL Corp said in a BSE filing.
The consolidated income of the company during July- September quarter dropped to Rs 119 crore, over Rs 133.8 crore in the year-ago period.
In a statement, the company said that "GOCL Corporation Ltd...has reported a consolidated gross income of Rs 119 crore (previous year Rs 121 crore) for the year Q2 of 2018 and consolidated net profit of Rs 6 crore."
GOCL is part of the international Hinduja Group and has diversified business interests. The current business activities of the company are in energetics, mining, infrastructure services and property development.
It operates through 3 major divisions with independent management structures.
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Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif are reuniting on the screen after five years and the superstar says he is happy to romance the actor in their upcoming film "Tiger Zinda Hai".
The duo, who has previously worked in movies such as "Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya" and "Partner", will reprise their roles in the soon-to-be-released sequel to "Ek Tha Tiger" (2012).
When asked how it was to romance Katrina after a long time, Salman told reporters, "It is good. It is always good to romance. As there's no fight, so it's good to romance."
The actor was speaking on the sidelines of Star Screen Awards here last night.
Katrina recently appeared on "Bigg Boss", which is hosted by Salman, to launch the film's second song "Dil diyaan gallan'.
The 51-year-old star is happy that both the songs of the movie have been well received by the audience.
"Katrina was with me on 'Bigg Boss' when she gave me this information that 'Swag se swagat' has earned some 50 million likes. Now, we have launched a romantic song. Let's see how it is received...
"Both the songs are nice and people are loving them. So, let's see what happens on December 22 and what's the destiny of the film," he said.
The "Dabangg" star also performed some of his biggest dance numbers at the award ceremony.
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The Supreme Court today said guidelines should be framed on the issue of right to protest so as to ensure a balance between the fundamental right of the citizens to protest and the maintenance of law and order.
The apex court's observation came as it issued notice to the Centre and the Delhi Police on a plea seeking to declare as illegal the banning of all assemblies and protests in central Delhi and the New Delhi area.
A bench comprising Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan observed that it was important to frame a guideline in this regard so that neither the fundamental right to protest was violated, nor any inconvenience caused to the public.
The plea has said that continuous imposition of prohibitory orders under section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) was an "arbitrary and unreasonable restriction" on the fundamental rights of citizens to hold peaceful protest.
The plea filed by an NGO, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan, has challenged the "repeated imposition" of orders by Delhi Police under section 144 of the CrPC, saying it virtually declared the entire Central Delhi as a prohibited area for holding any public meeting, dharna or peaceful protest.
The petition, filed through advocate Prashant Bhushan, has sought directions to formulate guidelines for holding public meetings, dharnas, peaceful demonstrations in parts of New Delhi.
"As per sub-section 4 of Section 144 CrPC, an order can be issued for a maximum period of two months. Therefore, the Delhi Police has adopted the tactic of issuing the same order repeatedly," the plea said.
It also sought to quash several orders passed by police from January to October this year by which the entire Central or New Delhi areas were declared prohibited areas.
The National Green Tribunal had on October 5 this year entirely banned protests at Jantar Mantar near Connaugust Place on the ground that it created nuisance for the local residents and violated environment protection statutes.
The plea before the apex court has claimed that, "With the NGT order banning protests at Jantar Mantar, it is evident that distancing a protest site from where it is most visible to the government and concerned authorities, will have the effect of diluting the impact that the protest seeks to gain.
"Besides the cost of using Ramlila Maidan for protests is Rs 50,000 per day which would make protests at the site practically impossible for the common citizens," it said.
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The Delhi High Court today pulled up the DDA and civic bodies over their failure to examine the feasibility of lands proposed for Mohalla Clinics in the city to provide adequate health facility to the people.
A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar also warned the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) of contempt action against its counsel for his inability to tell the court about the location of 245 sites proposed by the AAP government for Mohalla (locality) Clinics.
"We had passed a specific direction on the last date of hearing to examine the feasibility of sorting out the difficulties with regard to the Mohalla Clinics on the proposed sites.
"It seems the authorities concerned are not proceeding in the matter," the bench observed and directed the Delhi government's Principal Secretary to convene a meeting with all bodies like the DDA and all MCDs to examine the feasibility of land identified for these clinics.
It directed the agencies to place before it the status report with regard to the meetings and its final outcome and listed the matter for January 5.
The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board and Delhi Metro informed the court that they have identified 107 and around 20 sites respectively, for which no objection certificate has also been obtained from the authorities.
Delhi government counsel Sanjoy Ghosh said they have undertaken a massive exercise and identified possible sites where local clinics can be located.
He said due to non-availability of land, they were unable to set up these clinics which could provide medical care to every citizen within two kilometres of his or her residence.
The health project was delayed after complaints of irregularities were received by the LG, leading to a probe by the Vigilance Department. The lack of land for the project had also held it up.
The court was hearing NGO Justice for All's plea for direction to the authorities to allot adequate number of plots for construction of these clinics with permission to raise the appropriate temporary structures to run them.
Advocate Khagesh B Jha, appearing for the NGO, had alleged that the LG has now approved the scheme of Mohalla Clinics but due to multiplicity of agencies and difference of opinion among them has led to the scheme working in very slow pace.
Seeking direction to the Centre, DDA and MCD to remove the technical difficulties for construction of the temporary structures and running the clinics, the plea urged that the authorities be asked to depute doctors, staffs and provide proper facilities for their smooth functioning.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Delhi High Court today reserved its verdict on low-cost carrier IndiGo's plea against the decision of operator to partially shift its operations along with that of two other airlines, SpiceJet and GoAir, from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2.
"Judgement reserved," Justice A K Chawla said after hearing arguments on behalf of IndiGo, the Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) and the Centre.
In its plea, the airline has challenged DIAL's communication of October 21, asking the three air carriers to shift their flights to and from Delhi to Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru, to Terminal 2 (T2) from January 4, 2018.
All other flights of the airlines shall continue to operate from Terminal 1 (T1), had said in its communication.
has challenged the DIAL's decision on the ground that partial shifting of its operations would inconvenience passengers, especially those on hopping flights emanating or ending at those sectors, as T1 and T2 are not connected.
Defending its decision, said that T1 has already exceeded its capacity and if airline operations are not shifted partially, it would lead to overcrowding of the airport.
It also contended that in case of a fire or a terror threat, an overcrowded airport would have serious consequences for which DIAL alone would be answerable.
It also argued that the capacity of the three airlines' flights to and from the three sectors would amount to around eight million persons per annum (MPPA) and be shifting those to T2 would considerably reduce the burden on T1.
DIAL said its decision was not unreasonable as it had given the airlines enough time to arrive at a consensus.
is opposed to the shifting of its operations, saying if the DIAL decision is allowed, the airline would be spread across the three airports -- T1, T2 and T3.
It has sought striking down of the decision claiming that it was "irrational and ad-hoc".
The central government has supported the decision taken by the DIAL and contended that IndiGo's plea was not maintainable.
The Delhi High Court today expressed displeasure over keeping a donation box at Mahatma Gandhi's memorial at Rajghat here, saying this was a "disrespectful" gesture to the Father of the Nation.
A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar sought to know from the Rajghat Samadhi Committee, which maintains the memorial, who had installed the donation box and where do the funds collected in it go.
To this, the counsel for Central Public Works Department (CPWD) said it was put up by the Harijan Sevak Sangh, founded by Mahatma Gandhi himself, and the money goes to the organisation.
The bench observed that the charity box should not have been kept at the Mahatma Gandhi's memorial.
"Is this the respect we are giving to the memorial of the Father of the Nation which is visited by the citizens of India as well as those from abroad. It deserves every respect and requires to be properly maintained by all concerned," it said.
The bench directed the petitioner's counsel to personally verify the actual position related to the public amenities and maintenance of Rajghat and inform the Chief Engineer of CPWD, who will ensure its restoration.
It ordered that the Rajghat Samadhi Committee's secretary should ensure that the complaints in this regard are addressed at the earliest.
The court sought a compliance report before the next date of hearing, January 30 next year.
The court on November 24 had directed the Chief Engineer, CPWD to personally inspect the Rajghat Samadhi and all related premises.
It had asked the authorities to place the details of the works which were required to be completed at Rajghat as well as the timelines within which these shall be completed.
The court was hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) alleging that the monument set up in the memory of Mahatma Gandhi was not being properly maintained.
Petitioner Shyam Narayan Chouksey has claimed that the memorial "was not at all being properly and cleanly maintained", and despite being brought to the notice of the Committee and Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD), there has been no change in the situation.
In the PIL, Chouksey has submitted the photos of various deficiencies that he had come across during his visit to the monument in 2014 and then again in 2015 and 2016, when he claimed the situation had worsened.
Referring to deficiencies, he has alleged there were betel stains at the entrance, broken floor tiles, rubbish lying all around the monument, the white marble has turned black due to lack of cleaning while the green carpet laid for visitors to walk was damaged.
Two toilets were in very poor condition and unclean and at many places sewage lines are exposed and filled with garbage, becoming "breeding place for mosquitoes and other insects".
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President Juan Orlando Hernandez held a lead of more than 52,000 votes in Honduras' hotly disputed presidential race as the long-delayed count wrapped up, eight days after the election.
Hernandez led by a margin of 43 per cent of the votes over opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla's 41.4 per cent, according to the latest results published on the electoral tribunal's website. His edge expanded in the latest count from about 46,000 votes.
Tribunal president David Matamoros said 100 per cent of the ballots had been tabulated although the website still showed 0.04 percent left to count but the court was not declaring a winner yet.
"We will do that later," Matamoros said, adding that parties will have 10 days to challenge the results for the November 26 election.
The last ballot boxes that presented "inconsistencies" were examined without the presence of Nasralla and his Opposition Against Dictatorship alliance, which chose not to send representatives as vote tallying continued. Nasralla has called for a far broader recount as well as a redo of the entire election.
Both Hernandez and Nasralla have claimed victory. Nasralla had led in initial returns before a lengthy delay interrupted reports from electoral officials, feeding opposition complaints of irregularities. Officials blamed the pause on technical problems and denied any manipulation.
Nasralla told a big rally in the capital, Tegucigalpa, on Sunday that the magistrates of the electoral tribunal "are employees of President Hernandez," who ran for re-election despite a constitutional ban on doing so.
"The tribunal is not an independent organism and as such is neither credible nor trustworthy for the people," said Nasralla, a well-known TV personality. On Monday, he alleged that the special count was a "fraud" with "false, fixed, arranged votes."
Hernandez took to social media to urge calm and national unity.
"I extend my hand to all contenders and sectors of the country to build a new Honduras," he tweeted. "The results of this election leave us with a great hope. ... My commitment to working for peace and tranquility in Honduras is more alive than ever."
The US Embassy said in a statement that it was "pleased Honduran election authorities completed the special scrutiny process in a way that maximizes citizen participation and transparency."
It also said it supports international election observers working "to increase the transparency of the process" and called on politicians "to ensure a result that represents the will of the Honduran people."
Marisa Matias of the European Union observer mission urged electoral officials to be flexible and respect a reasonable time frame for parties to present any petitions or challenges. She added that the petitions the mission had seen so far "are reasonable.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Girls and women are more vulnerable to their own relatives and acquaintances than unknown persons on the issue of sex-related crimes, data from the Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) "Crime in India 2016" report has indicated.
Highlighting rape figures, the report has stated that "in 2016, the accused of rapes in 94.6 cases are none other than the victim's relatives including brother, father, grand-father, sons or acquaintances."
The report showed that in the year 2016, a total of 38,947 cases of rape were registered in the country under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) as well as Section 376 and other related sections of the Indian Penal Code.
Among these 38,947 cases, in 36,859 matters, accused are related to the victims, it said.
Similarly, it said that in 630 cases, victims were allegedly raped by grand-father, father, brother and son while in 1,087 cases the accused were acquaintances.
Besides in 2,174 cases, the accused are relatives and in 10,520 matters, it was neighbours who were facing charges of rape, it said.
In 600 cases, employers and co- workers are accused of rape, the report said.
The NCRB report also stated that in 2016, in 557 cases, the accused are live-in partners, husband and ex-husbands.
Similarly, in 10,068 cases, women were raped on the promise of marriage.
It also states that in the remaining 11,223 cases, the victims in some manner or the other knew the accused.
Expressing concern over these figures, Commission of Women (NCW) chairperson, Rekha Sharma told PTI, "In our society there is lot of restrictions imposed on girls. But now it is enough. Time has come when boys should be taught from childhood how to behave with women as per our social values."
She said that porn material is easily available on internet. In such a scenario, parents should keep a watch on the mobile phones and computers.
The Patidar-dominated Amreli is gearing up for a fight between two strong Patel candidates in the assembly segment, where farm issues are dominating the campaign discourse.
Sitting Congress MLA Paresh Dhanani is pitted against BJP heavyweight Bavkubhai Undhad, the legislator from the nearby Lathi seat who has been fielded from Amreli this time.
There is a talk in political circles here that Dhanani could emerge as a strong contender for the chief minister's post if he retains his seat and the Congress dislodges the BJP from power in Gandhinagar.
Dhanani, 41, is considered close to Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and had accompanied the latter during his campaign tours.
In the 2012 Assembly elections, Dhanani had registered a resounding victory - he won by a margin of more than 18 per cent votes over his nearest rival Dilip Sanghavi, a senior BJP leader and prominent cooperative leader.
The most important issue in this agriculture-dominated constituency, known for cotton cultivation, is farm distress, and the Congress seems to be cashing in on this.
The Patidars form 60 per cent of the population in the Amreli assembly segment followed by Kolis at 15 per cent.
Besides farm matters, issues like the impact of the Centre's demonetisation move and effects of GST on the diamond polishing industry are being raised aggressively by the candidates.
A section of farmers believes that the promises made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi regarding minimum support price (MSP) for farm produce and tackling issues related to agriculture have not been fulfilled.
"Modiji had promised us (MSP of) Rs 2,000 per 20 kg on cotton against Rs 1,500 given by the UPA government. But we are getting Rs 800-900, which is causing us a huge loss. Many of us have not got crop insurance money," said a cotton farmer, Pankaj Chavda.
Chavda added that the PM's pre-Lok Sabha election promise of giving farmers a support price that is 50 per cent more than production cost of a crop, too, remains a pipe dream.
In Amreli, where farmers mainly grow cotton, the crop has seen a sharp decline in prices this year, fuelling anger against the state government.
Amreli district Congress president Pankaj Kanabar said Chief Minister Vijay Rupani recently announced his government would purchase cotton at Rs 100 per 20 kg over and above the MSP.
However, Kanabar alleged only the farmers who were close to the BJP were getting this benefit. "It is a scam in which BJP's commission agents have made a lot of money while genuine farmers have been left out," he said.
The BJP candidate Undhad is trying to douse the anger of the Patidars against the ruling party by listing the efforts made by the Rupani government to address the grievances of the community.
Patidar quota stir spearhead Hardik Patel is expected to address an election rally in Amreli on December 6.
Undhad is battling the image of a politician who has switched sides. He started out as a BJP leader and later joined the Congress and became its MLA from Lathi in 2012.
He came back to the BJP fold in 2014 and was made a minister.
The BJP said it is on a strong wicket in Amreli as its candidate has developed strong links with the constituency, while the sitting MLA is hardly seen here.
"The BJP is strong because Bavkubhai lives here most of the time, while Congress candidate Paresh Dhanani mostly remains outside the constituency and is rarely seen here," said district BJP president Hiren Hilpara.
"As far as farmer issues are concerned, we are making sure all farmers get higher rate than MSP for their produce. The government is making purchases of groundnut and cotton which will continue till March next year," he said.
Voting in Amreli will take place on December 9.
There are a total of nine candidates in the fray, including four independents, but the fight is likely to be between Dhanani and Undhad. The NCP and the BSP have also fielded their nominees.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi today said the bilateral trade between India and Africa will cross USD 100 billion mark in next two years, owing to improvement in business environment in India and better connectivity across the African continent.
The bilateral trade between India and the African nations was recorded around USD 57 billion in 2015-16.
"Africa offers lucrative business opportunities for Indian micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) across diverse sectors such as FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), mining and minerals, telecommunications, construction and others," Naqvi said at a conference organised by Assocham.
He observed that India is attracting business leaders and investors from across the globe as the government has been able to build a conducive business environment aimed at inclusive growth, according to a press release issued by Assocham.
The minority affairs minister also said it is due to the various reforms ushered in by the Centre that even global rating agencies and noted economists have impressed upon India as a very 'safe and strong' investment destination.
In apparent reference the previous UPA government led by Congress, the Minority Affairs Minister said, "When we had come to power there was an atmosphere of policy paralysis and corrupt practices were prevalent but we have succeeded in reversing that through various reforms".
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India and Germany today signed several agreements, including a 200 million euro funding pact for climate-friendly urban mobility project.
The 'Government to Government Umbrella Agreement' concerning financial cooperation in 2016 (II) under the Indo- German Development Cooperation was formalised here.
"An amount up to 200 million euro for the financial cooperation in form of loan for project 'Climate Friendly Urban Mobility III' and 11 million euro accompanying measures in form of grant for four projects," was signed, said an official statement.
The Part I of the agreement had already been signed in May.
In addition, four other agreements were signed between Department of Economic Affairs with KfW, Germany under Indo- German Bilateral Development Cooperation.
One loan agreement is for the project 'Community based sustainable Forest Management Component I Manipur'. It was signed with KfW for a loan of 15 million euro.
The broad objectives of the project are restoration of degraded forests in upper watersheds, reclamation of abandoned shifting cultivation areas, biodiversity conservation, water resources conservation and livelihood improvement of forest dependent rural tribal people in the project area.
The other agreements were for projects namely Madhya Pradesh Urban Sanitation and Environment Programme; Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Development Odisha Phase II; and Green Energy Corridor Intra-State Transmission System in Maharashtra.
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The mother of an Indian engineer, who was sentenced after he sneaked into Pakistan from Afghanistan to meet a girl he had befriended on the internet, has appealed to President Mamnoon Hussain to remit the remaining period of her son's prison term.
In a letter to Hussain, the mother of Hamid Ansari said: "Mohtaram Sadar - your government has shown clemency to foreign nationals who have committed far graver offences than Hamid Ansari.
"The country's credit for listening to humanitarian calls will go up and the chances of relief for Pakistani citizens in Indian prisons might improve if you could remit the remaining period of Hamids prison term."
She said the period of Ansari's detention (three years) before conviction may be counted as sentence served, that he may he be released on humanitarian grounds, and that he and that he may be allowed to talk to his family on the phone.
The Indian national was tried in a military court and was awarded three years' vigorous imprisonment that started from December 15, 2015 and will end on December 14 next year.
Ansari, a Mumbai resident, suffered injuries after he was attacked by inmates in the Peshawar Central prison last year.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Ansari, an assistant professor at an Indian management institute, became friendly with a girl belonging to Kohat (in Kyber Pakhtaunkhawa province of Pakistan) through Facebook.
"When she feared the denial of her rights, he decided to come to her rescue. He could not get a Pakistan visa but was able to fly to Afghanistan and enter Pakistan, though without valid papers. He was arrested from a hotel in Kohat on November 14, 2012.
"Thus, for five years he has been in the custody of the Pakistani authorities. Charged with espionage and not with illegal entry into Pakistan, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment by a military court," says known rights activist I A Rehman.
"There is no doubt that Hamid Ansari committed an offence but his motives, love or a desire to help a woman in distress, are strong mitigating circumstances. He has already suffered enough for his naivete," he said and demanded his immediate release.
On the other hand, a Pakistani woman journalist who was allegedly kidnapped while pursuing the case of Ansari two years ago, has gone missing again two months after her return.
President of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances Justice (retd.) Javed Iqbal had said Shahzadi had been recovered from an area on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on Thursday night.
"Non-state actors and anti-state agencies had abducted her and she has been recovered from their custody," Iqbal said.
Rehman said Shahzadi has gone missing again. "Missing of Shahzadi two months after her return from two-year captivity is alarming."
He says Shahzadi, a young and poor journalist without any clout, had dreams of helping her fellow human beings.
"When she learnt that an Indian named Hamid Ansari was in trouble for trying to help a Pakistani girl, she thought this was a case that could help her establish herself as a bold human rights defender and a skilful journalist.
"She persuaded Ansaris mother to grant her authority/ permission to pursue the matter before the Peshawar High Court. She also met the Indian high commissioner at a public meeting, probably to seek his help in the case," he said.
The 26-year-old local reporter of Daily Nai Khaber and Metro TV channel had gone missing on August 19, 2015, when some unknown men allegedly kidnapped her while she was en route to her office in an auto-rickshaw from her home in a populated locality of Lahore.
On her return in this October she was not allowed to speak to anyone. Later, her family reported she has gone missing again.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic arm of IT major Infosys, today said it has signed four MoUs with the International Centre for TheoreticalSciences (ICTS), to support research and mentoring activities.
The Foundation has signed an MoU for the grant of Rs 4 crore towards its excellence program at ICTS, it said in a release.
Through this grant, the Infosys Foundation ICTS Visitor Fellowship will provide for 25 academics to travel to India each year for the ICTS programs and will also provide a travelgrant through the Infosys Foundation ICTS Excellence Grant for 20 academic members of the centre to travel abroad.
The grants aim at creating learning experiences for students to participate in academic activities abroad and forge partnerships with renowned educational institutions across the world, it added.
The International Centre for TheoreticalSciences of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore is a multi and interdisciplinary center.
The second MoU is for a grant of Rs 7.5 crore for organizing lecture series by distinguished experts internationally and within India.
This collaboration is aimed at creating an environment to exchange ideas and explore cutting edge research in basic sciences and Mathematics, the foundation said, adding, the lectures will be known as Infosys ICTS Chandrasekhar Ramanujan and Turing Lecture Series.
The Foundation signed the third MoU for a grant of Rs3.35 crore to benefit nearly 200 students, faculty members andpost-doctoral students (who will be referred to as InfosysProfessors and Infosys Fellows in all their publications andevents).
A grant of Rs 85 lakhs was committed for the Homi Bhabha Chair Professorship to support research and mentoring activities.
Under this MoU the Chair will be referred to as the Infosys Homi Bhabha Chair Professor.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Shares of Infosys today surged four per cent in morning trade on the bourses after the company announced the appointment of new CEO & MD Salil Parekh.
On December 2, Infosys said it has appointed Parekh as its CEO and Managing Director, concluding the three-month high-profile executive search at the country's second largest IT firm.
Following the announcement, shares of the company today opened on a bullish note at Rs 983.00, then gained further ground and surged 4.01 per cent to touch an early-day high of Rs 996.95.
Similar movement was seen on NSE, where the stock opened at Rs 980.00, then surged to an early-high of Rs 996.80, registering a jump of 3.96 per cent over its previous closing price.
The Bengaluru-based firm had initiated the executive search after CEO Vishal Sikka resigned in August following a protracted acrimony between the management and the founders.
UB Pravin Rao, who was filling in the CEO role on an interim basis, will now continue as Chief Operating Officer and a whole-time Director of the company, Infosys said in a statement.
Parekh, who will take over his role at Infosys on January 2, 2018 for a period of five years, was a member of the Group Executive Board at French firm Capgemini.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Shares of Infosys today settled with gains of nearly 3 per cent on the bourses after the appointment of the new CEO and MD Salil Parekh.
On December 2, Infosys said it has appointed Parekh as its CEO and Managing Director, concluding the three-month high-profile executive search at the country's second largest IT firm.
During the day, the company opened on a bullish note at Rs 983.00 then gained further ground and surged 4.01 per cent to touch an intra-day high of Rs 996.95 on the BSE. The stock however pared some gains and finally ended the day at Rs 985.30, up 2.80 per cent.
Oearly high the stock opened at Rs 980, then surged to an early-high of Rs 996.80, registering a jump of 3.96 per cent over its previous closing price. At the end of today's trading session, the stock was quoted at Rs 984.40, up 2.67 per cent.
Market analysts believe the uptick in the counter was largely because the appointment of CEO reduces succession planning uncertainty in the counter.
"The CEO appointment is faster than our expectation and reduces the uncertainty on succession planning at Infosys," Japanese brokerage firm Nomura said in a research note.
It further added that the current CEO designate has experience across a wide range of areas consulting, application services, cloud infrastructure services, integrating large acquisitions (Kanbay/iGATE) and scaling up the offshore delivery base of Capgemini to more than 100K people currently.
The Bengaluru-based firm had initiated the executive search after CEO Vishal Sikka resigned in August following a protracted acrimony between the management and the founders.
UB Pravin Rao, who was filling in the CEO role on an interim basis, will now continue as Chief Operating Officer and a whole-time director of the company, Infosys said in a statement.
Parekh, who will take over his role at Infosys on January 2, 2018 for a period of five years, was a member of the Group Executive Board at French firm Capgemini.
The Islamabad High Court today dismissed ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's plea to club three corruption cases against him.
A two-member bench issued a short order turning down his appeal and said that a detailed judgment would be issued later.
The cases were registered by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) on September 8 against Sharif, his family in the Accountability Court Islamabad, following a verdict by Supreme Court in the Panama Papers case.
The accountability court in Islamabad had on November 8 rejected a plea by 67-year-old Sharif to club his cases, which he challenged in the Islamabad High Court.
The IHC had completed the hearing and reserved the judgment on November 23, which it announced today.
The three cases against the Sharif family are related to the Al-Azizia Company and Hill Metal Establishment, Flagship Investment Ltd and the Avenfield (London) properties.
Earlier, the accountability court postponed hearing of graft cases against Sharif until this afternoon due to the expected verdict of the high court.
Sharif along with his daughter Maryam and son-in-law Muhammad Safdar appeared in the court.
His lawyer Khawaja Harris requested Judge Mohammad Bashir to suspend proceedings and wait for the Islamabad High Court's (IHC) decision on a petition by Sharif to club his three graft cases into one, as all were related to his alleged amassing of assets beyond the known sources of income.
The court after hearing the argument from the NAB prosecutor postponed hearing till 1 pm and allowed Sharif to go home but ordered him to be present when the hearing would restart.
Sharif and his sons, Hassan and Hussain, have been named in all the three NAB cases, while Maryam and her husband Safdar have been named only in the Avenfield case.
Maryam on November 23 had requested exemption from personal appearance from December 5, 2017 to January 5, 2018, while Sharif sought exemption from December 5-12.
Last month, Sharif was indicted in all three cases while his daughter Maryam and her husband Safdar, co-accused with Sharif in only one case, were also indicted along with Sharif.
Sharif's sons Hassan and Hussain have failed to appear in the court despite repeated summons which prompted the court to separate their cases.
Heavy security arrangements were made and hundreds of security personnel deployed around the court premises.
The cases are based on July 28 verdict by the Supreme Court which disqualified Sharif and ordered to launch three corruption cases against him and his family, and one case against finance minister Ishaq Dar in the Panama Papers case.
Dar had been relieved of his duties after the ailing politician, who was declared a proclaimed absconder by a court in the case, requested leave for three months.
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Gil Haskel, head of Israel's Agency for International Development Cooperation (MASHAV), is on an official visit to India beginning today.
Haskel will highlight the achievements of Indo-Israeli Agricultural Project (IIAP) during his visit to this country from December 4 to December 7.
A statement by the Israeli embassy in Delhi said apart from the national capital, he will visit Bengaluru and Mumbai.
"The IIAP is MASHAV's biggest project outside Israel, and it holds a significant portion of our bilateral relations. The success story of our agricultural cooperation is second to none, and it is only the beginning," Ambassador of Israel in India, Daniel Carmon, said.
Haskel will meet state government officials as well those of Union ministry of agriculture and farmer's welfare, and the external affairs ministry.
He will also inaugurate Center of Excellence for flowers in Thally, Tamil Nadu.
Haskel will award two USD 10,000 grants to MASHAV alumni to continue their projects in women and farmer empowerment in India, the statement added.
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A Jaipur court will pronounce on Wednesday the quantum of punishment to be given to eight Lashkar-e-Taiba members, including three Pakistani nationals, for their involvement in terrorist activities in the country.
The additional district and sessions court today heard arguments on the quantum of punishment to be given to the eight men, special public prosecutor Mahaveer Jindal said.
The eight LeT members were convicted under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act last week.
They were arrested by Rajasthan ATS in 2010 and 2011.
The court found them guilty under various sections of the Act on charges of conspiracy and recruiting persons for terrorist activities. They were also found guilty of being members of a terrorist organisation.
The Pakistani LeT members - Asgar Ali, Shakkar Ulla and Shahid Iqbal - have been lodged in various jails in India.
The other five are: Babu alias Nishachand Ali, Hafiz Abdul, Pawan Puri, Arun Jain, and Kabil.
All of them were in touch with an LeT commander based in Pakistan.
The Rajasthan ATS arrested them after receiving alerts from central intelligence agencies, which had intercepted telephone conversations between the LeT men and the Lashkar commander in Pakistan in 2010.
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Barely few miles away from Jammu city, Chatta farms boom with banana plants as the Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine's biotechnology-driven project to grow the fruit in the region has become successful.
The project has brought commercial cultivation of banana in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time in the history of agriculture.
The state is endowed with all kinds of fruits and is a net exporter to the rest of the country and abroad, but banana is imported here to the tune of Rs 200 crore per year.
"It is a big development for Jammu and Kashmir", Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine (IIIM) Director Ram Vishwahkarma told PTI.
"We have created a big economic opportunity for this region. If we can generate production of Rs 50 crore for next two to three years out of annual Rs 250 imports, it will be a big thing. It will create an economy and create employment opportunity," the director said.
In a 2-acre area of Chatta farm, 2,000 plants of Bhim Grand Naine (G-9) banana variety are booming, bringing happiness to a group of scientists led by Dr Rahul, who toiled hard for over a year for the commercial production of banana in Jammu.
"It was a dream come true for us. After facing many challenges and huge hurdles, we have been successful. It has opened a new economy opportunity for the region", Rahul said.
To bring commercial cultivation of banana to J&K, the CSIR-Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine jointly conceived a new biotechnology driven programme. This work was jointly done by CSIR-IIIM, Jammu, and Cadila Pharmaceutical, Ahmedabad.
After full trial and established tissue culture and agriculture practice, the IIIM director launched the J&K-grown banana fruit last week.
The director said that the productivity in Jammu is more than rest of the states in the country and it is bigger in size and very good in flavour also.
"People can get an economy of Rs 2.50 lakh to Rs 3 lakh per acre after deducting input from it", he said.
"There is huge lands available in Jammu. If people go for cultivation here it will not only generate revenue but will also reduce prices of bananas which are sold double than other states. We will try to introduce it as a social forestry in Shivalik ranges in Jammu with consultation with the forest department. It will also help check monkey menace in Jammu", he said.
While giving details of experimental work in growing the banana by tissue culture technique at IIIM, Vishwakarma said the samplings of the Bhim Grand Naine (G-9) variety were brought from Agro Division of Cadila Pharmaceutical Limited, Ahmedabad.
"This first cultivation trial was done by planting 2000 samplings of banana plants with the narrow spacing 2 X 2 meter in the month of August 2016 and fruit setting commenced in the month of July-August, 2017 while as the maturity and harvesting attained in 13 months", the director said.
"The plant grew to a height of 6.
5 to 7.5 feet and gave yield 20-30 kg per plant and 20-25 tonnes per acre. In term of economy involved, as per market analysis, price of banana in Jammu is approximately Rs 20 per kg. Thus on an average, 20-30 kg yield per plant gives Rs 250-300 per Banana plant", he said.
This crop will be particularly suit to Jammu region", Vishwahkarma said.
The directorsaid that the next target of IIIM is to introduce banana cultivation in Kashmir region through modern biotechnology approach (Polyhouses) which would be done in 2018.
In India, the most edible banana species are widely cultivated in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Assam, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.
In total, more than 164,000 acres of land in India is under banana cultivation which makes the country first rank in banana production.
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- CVS Health has agreed to acquire Aetna in a deal that could shake up the health care industry.
The deal, which still requires approval by antitrust regulators, is worth about $69 billion at $207 per share.
CVS Health President and CEO Larry Merlo said in a statement the merger "brings together the expertise of two great companies to remake the consumer health care experience."
"With the analytics of Aetna and CVS Health's human touch, we will create a health care platform built around individuals," he said. "We look forward to working with the talented people at Aetna to position the combined company as America's front door to quality health care, integrating more closely the work of doctors, pharmacists, other health care professionals and health benefits companies to create a platform that is easier to use and less expensive for consumers."
A merger of drugstore giant CVS with Aetna, one of the biggest health insurers in the U.S., could reshape the industry and change the health care experience as Americans face higher medical and prescription costs.
CVS said in a statement the merger will provide a "personalized health care experience" by connecting Aetna's network with more than 9,700 CVS locations and 1,100 walk-in clinics.
The pharmacy giant also said it envisions many locations offering a "community-based health hub dedicated to connecting the pathways needed to improve health and answering patients' questions about their health conditions, as well as prescription drugs and health coverage."
Copyright 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
A Kenyan woman has alleged that she was raped by a Nigerian man in Dwarka after he befriended her, police said today.
The incident was reported to the police late last night, they said.
The woman, in her 20s, told the police that she met the man at a restaurant in Vasant Vihar yesterday and they became friends, the police said.
He brought her to his home in Dwarka where he allegedly raped her and then fled, the police said.
A case was registered in this regard, they said, adding the man is yet to be arrested.
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A well-marked low pressure area over southeast Bay of Bengal is likely to become a depression and move towards Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh by December 6, the Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) said today.
Director of Area Cyclone Warning Centre, S Balachandran said the system was likely to turn into a depression in the next 24 hours.
"Around December 6 (Wednesday), it is likely to move northwestwards towards north Tamil Nadu and south Andhra Pradesh coasts," he told reporters here.
During the next 24 hours, isolated rainfall was likely in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, he said, and advised fishermen not to venture into "deep" parts of southern Bay of Bengal for fishing.
During the last 24 hours ended 8.30 AM today, there were isolated rains in one or two places in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, he said.
Aranmanaiputhur in Theni district in the state recorded the highest of 6 cm of rainfall during this period, he added.
The "very severe cyclonic storm Ockhi" over eastcentral and adjoining southeast Arabian Sea moved further northwards and lay centred at 5.30 AM today over eastcentral Arabian Sea near, about 590 km northnorthwest of Amini Divi, 690 km southsouthwest of Mumbai and 870 km south-southwest of Surat.
Ockhi cyclone, which crippled life in Kanyakumari district in Tamil Nadu, and parts of neighbouring Kerala, was "very likely to move north-northeastwards, weaken gradually and cross south Gujarat and adjoining north Maharashtra coasts near Surat as a deep depression by mid night" of December 5 (tomorrow), the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said.
Meanwhile, Tamil Nadu government officials said the process of assessing the damage in Kanyakumari was on and that a report will be sent to the Centre later.
On Friday, state Chief Minister K Palaniswami told Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a telephone conversation that the state would soon send a request to Centre seeking financial assistance post-Ockhi damage in the district.
Kanyakumari was battered by Ockhi, damaging standing plantation crops and power infrastructure even as people were rescued from flooded localities last week.
Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had yesterday said a total of 357 fishermen, including 71 from Tamil Nadu, stranded in sea due to cyclone Ockhi, were rescued.
Earlier today, Palaniswami reviewed the rescue and rehabilitation work in Kanyakumari with senior IAS officials.
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The hit onscreen couple of Madhuri Dixit and Anil Kapoor is set to reteam for a film after a gap of 17 years for Inder Kumar's "Total Dhamaal".
Last seen together in the 2000 film "Pukar", Madhuri and Anil have given several hits films like "Beta", "Parinda", "Tezaab", "Ram Lakhan", among others.
"I will be working with Anil ji after 17 odd years. I am really looking forward to it. It is a comedy, an entertaining film," Madhuri told reporters.
The third installment in the "Dhamaal" series, the film will reportedly also star Ajay Devgn, Riteish Deshmukh, Arshad Warsi and Jaaved Jaaferi.
Madhuri was speaking on the sidelines of Star Screen Awards here last night.
The veteran actor also said the Priyanka Chopra-backed TV show, based on her life is "definitely in the works" and she is excited about it.
New York-based writer Sri Rao has penned the comedy series about a Bollywood star who settles down in the suburbs of America with her bicultural family.
Madhuri left Mumbai after her marriage to Shriram Nene and moved to Denver, US, where she lived for 12 years. The actor returned to India in 2011, along with her husband and sons.
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The Madras High Court today rejected a plea for a direction to the President's office in New Delhi to consider the immediate release of Justice (retd) CS Karnan, who is serving jail term in the Presidency Prison in Kolkatta in a contempt of court case.
The Supreme Court had on May 9 convicted Justice Karnan, former judge of the Calcutta High Court, under the Contempt of Courts Act of 1971, and sentenced him to six months in jail.
He retired from the service on June 9 and was arrested on June 20.
The bench of Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice R Hemalatha rejected a public interest litigation filed by AP Gowthama Sidharthan, managing director of Dr Ambedkar Educational Foundation, New Delhi, for the release of Justice Karnan.
Sidharthan in the plea had claimed that Justice Karnan, a Dalit, had been victimised and was meted out social injustice.
The judges said they did not find any reference (in the petition) to the circumstances which led to the incarceration of Justice Karnan, who had been a judge of the Madras High Court and transferred to the Calcutta High Court.
At the time of arrest, he was no longer a judge of any high court. The respondents in the PIL - secretaries of the office of the President of India, department of Law and Justice, and secretaries general of the National Commission for Human Rights and the secretary of the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment -- are located in New Delhi, the judges observed.
"No case has arisen within the jurisdiction of the Madras High Court. Hence, the PIL is not maintainable and dismissed," the bench said.
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Four persons of a family were today killed and another injured, after a tanker rammed into their motorcycle at Dahegaon in the district, police said.
The mishap occurred this afternoon on the Manmad-Malegaon road, an official of Chandvad police station said.
All five members of the Chitalkar family were travelling on a motorcycle to Boygaon when the accident took place. While three persons were killed on the spot, another one died in the hospital, the official said, adding the tanker's driver was apprehended.
The deceased have been identified as Santosh Chitalkar, Asha Chitalkar, Savita Chitalkar and Bhooshan Chitalkar, he said.
Kin of the deceased alleged that the driver deliberately rammed the tanker into their motorcycle, as their was some old rivalry between him and the family, another police official said.
A case under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code was registered, he said, adding a probe was on.
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The Maldives is keen to seal a free trade agreement with China despite murmurs of disapproval from the main opposition MDP, as it will aid in economic growth in the Indian Ocean archipelago, a senior minister said today.
"China is eager to sign and the Maldives has seen the opportunity for the Maldivian economy to grow with it," Mohamed Shainee, the Maldives' minister of fisheries and agriculture said here.
He said the Maldives has seen that arrangements like the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) have not worked well in the region.
The landmark deal between the Maldives and China was rushed through parliament last week, hours after President Abdulla Yameen sought approval for its ratification.
The FTA would ensure zero tariff for Maldivian fish exports to China. Maldivians would also benefit in the health care and construction industries with value addition to Chinese imports from the country.
The opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) has said it is deeply concerned over the "sudden and rushed" FTA with China.
"The MDP is deeply alarmed that the Yameen government is entering a trade deal that will have immense economic repercussions on the Maldivian economy," a statement said.
The MDP has also urged the government to "suspend the implementation of the FTA to ensure the agreement does not place the Maldives in a geopolitically vulnerable position".
On ties with India, Mohamed Sharif, the Maldivian Ambassador to Sri Lanka, said China's position as Maldives' No 1 tourism market has taken a beating with number of tourist arrivals dropping.
"We are now looking to develop India as a tourism market. We have seen an increase in the number of young Indians travelling to Maldives. Maybe we can attract Bollywood stars to the Maldives," he said.
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The extradition trial of Vijay Mallya, wanted in India on charges of Rs 9,000 crores fraud and money laundering, today began at a UK court here, with the prosecution asserting that the embattled liquor baron had a "case of fraud" to answer.
The trial, however, was briefly halted as the courtroom had to be evacuated due to a fire alarm. The 61-year-old tycoon and others waited outside the Westminster magistrates court during the fire drill.
The trial began with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), arguing on behalf of the Indian government, presenting its opening arguments in the case which focused on loans totalling around Rs 2,000 crores sought by the erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines from a consortium of Indian banks.
It concluded the opening day's proceedings by asserting that they had "shown by virtue of evidence a prima facie case" against Mallya and the hearing should now move to the next phase of whether there were any "bars to extradition".
The CPS detailed "three chapters of dishonesty" by the former Kingfisher Airlines boss the first being misrepresentations to various banks to acquire the loans, then how he misused the money and finally his conduct after the banks recalled the loans.
"Instead of acting as an honest person and doing what he could to meet his obligations, he sets about erecting lines of defence," said CPS barrister Mark Summers.
The Indian government says the reasons why a court can conclude, that these were loans that the "defendant (Mallya) never intended to repay" and that the company and airline industry were in "intensive care" and heading only in one direction, Summers said.
Instead of absorbing those losses, which would "impinge on his lifestyle", Mallya chose to palm it off to banks, in particular state-owned banks. Several internal emails, the government claims, disclose the reality of the position which was misrepresented to the banks, he said.
The judge noted that businessmen in this position would be "hopeful that things will turn around", but the CPS said this was not the case with Kingfisher Airlines.
It went on to add that loans acquired in the name of rescuing the struggling airline were in fact used to pay off other debts, including paying the rent on a corporate jet "owned by Kingfisher but operated for the defendant's (Mallya) own benefit".
The CPS presented an email written by Mallya in December 2009 justifying the use of loans to "achieve round robins", confirming that he was open to using money received from banks for Kingfisher Airlines to repay other banks to settle overdue bills and charges.
This was "expressly prohibited" as part of the agreed terms of the loans provided to the then struggling airline.
He also failed in his obligations as a "personal guarantor" of the loans by failing to use 40 million dollars received from Diageo from the sale of shares in United Spirits Limited to repay some of the debt.
"Instead of honouring his obligations, he squirrelled away the 40 million dollars in trusts for his children," Summers said.
Mallya claimed later that those personal guarantees were secured by the banks under duress, a move the CPS highlighted was not the actions of an honest person.
The judge responded with a chuckle by saying it was "quite inventive though".
The CPS admitted that there may have been "irregularities" in the internal processes of the banks sanctioning some of those loans but that would be a question to be dealt with at a later stage in India.
"The focus of our case will be on his (Mallya's) conduct and how he misled the bank and misused the proceeds," said CPS barrister Mark Summers. He then went on to lay out a detailed chronology of events, with specific focus on a loan sought by Kingfisher Airlines from IDBI bank in November 2009.
The loan sought amounted initially to Rs 950 crores but was later reduced to Rs 750 crores, after it had received Rs 200 crores from UCO bank.
Meanwhile, Mallya was also sanctioned a loan of Rs 150 crores from IDBI in advance of the larger loan sought from the state-owned bank to meet "critical obligations to overseas vendors".
The CPS gave details of how much of this money landed in Mallya's Formula One motor racing team Force India, something the defence has characterised as "legitimate advertising expenses" as the team's cars carried Kingfisher advertisements.
These pertained to the money laundering charges levelled against Mallya, which the CPS said was not a "desperately important issue" for the judge to decide on, with fraud remaining central to the case.
"There is clearly no money laundering case," Mallya said in response to this assertion by the CPS at the end of the hearing.
The CPS noted that in all the loans sought, "loss-making" Kingfisher Airlines had relied on nearly the same set of security pledges, which included the UB Group's reputation, Kingfisher's own "brand value", a promised infusion of equity funds and a projected return to profit by the airline by February 2011.
"The airline had claimed that it had put proactive measures in place to improve performance," the CPS noted.
However, it was also a time when according to an industry analysis, the state of the airline industry was described as "grim" and as being in "intensive care".
"It was not a scenario in which a state bank would have entertained such loan requests," the CPS added.
Court was told that loans acquired in the name of rescuing Kingfisher Airlines were in fact used to pay off other debts, including paying the rent on a corporate jet "owned by Kingfisher but operated for the defendant's (Mallya) own benefit".
The CPS presented an email written by Mallya in December 2009 justifying the use of loans to "achieve round robins", confirming that he was open to using money received from banks for Kingfisher Airlines to repay other banks to settle overdue bills and charges.
This was "expressly prohibited" as part of the agreed terms of the loans provided to the then struggling airline, it said.
The first day of the trial is expected to be taken up entirely by the CPS setting out the Indian government's prima facie case against Mallya, a fact that was not welcomed by his defence team.
Mallya's barrister, Clare Montgomery, told the judge that she had hoped to set out the defence's opening arguments on the first day as well.
But the CPS said it will "not be rushed" as it lays out the complete chronology of events.
Meanwhile, Mallya watched the proceedings from behind a glass-windowed dock.
His defence team tried to get the judge to allow him to sit outside the dock near his defence team to access some of the complicated paperwork being relied upon, but the judge denied that request saying all defendants are expected to sit in the dock.
However,the judge has directed that a table be provided to Mallya for easier access to his paperwork.
Earlier, Mallya looked relaxed when he entered the court to stand trial on charges of fraud and money laundering related to his erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines owing several Indian banks around Rs 9,000 crores.
"These (allegations against me) are false, fabricated and baseless," Mallya told reporters outside the court ahead of the hearing.
A four-member CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) team from India had also arrived at the court ahead of the trial, one of whom nodded when asked if they were "confident" about their case.
Mallya, who has been out on bail since Scotland Yard executed an extradition warrant in April this year, will be in the dock for the duration of the trial scheduled to end on December 14.
A judgement in the case, being presided over by Judge Emma Louise Arbuthnot, is unlikely until early next year.
The CPS will need to demonstrate a prima facie case by producing evidence to show that the criminal charges against Mallya are justified and that he should be extradited to face the Indian courts.
Prison conditions in India are expected to be at the forefront during the hearing, with the Indian government providing assurances of protection of Mallya's human rights.
The tycoonhas been on self-imposed exile in the UK since he left India on March 2, 2016.
While on strict bail conditions, which include providing a bail bond worth 650,000 pounds, surrender of his passport and a ban on possessing any travel documents, the former Rajya Sabha member has been based at his Hertfordshire estate Ladywalk in the village of Tewin, nearly 50-km from London.
The CPS had presented "supplemental" charges of money laundering to previous charges of fraud against the businessman at an earlier hearing in October.
The judge had agreed to effectively re-open a fresh case so that all charges can be heard concurrently in court.
If the judge rules in favour of extradition at the end of the trial, the UKhome secretary must order Mallya's extradition within two months.
However, the case can go through a series of appeals in higher UK courts before arriving at a conclusion.
Judge Arbuthnot and her colleague, Rebecca Crane, at Westminster Magistrates' Court have recently rejected two other long-pending extradition requests from India.
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Liquor baron Vijay Mallya, out on a 650,000-pound bail bond following his arrest by Scotland Yard over fraud and money laundering charges, will return to Westminster Magistrates' Court here today as his extradition trial begins.
The 61-year-old businessman, who has been in self-imposed exile in the UK since March 2016 when he left India, is wanted in India on charges relating to his defunct Kingfisher Airlines defaulting on loans from various Indian banks amounting toRs9,000 crore.
The trial is set to open with opening arguments, followed by the witness statement of Dr B Humphreys, who is an aviation expert.
Others expected to give their statements for the defence include Margaret Sweeney, chief accountant at Force India Formula One racing team, Professor Lau as an expert on the Indian legal system, and Dr Alan Mitchell, a licensed medical practitioner and a former medical officer with the Scottish prison system.
The extradition trial itself, to be presided over by Judge Arbuthnot, is listed for hearings until December 14, with December 6 and 8 so far marked as non-sitting days. A judgement in the case is not expected until early next year.
If the judge rules in favour of extradition at the end of the trial, UKhome secretary Amber Rudd must orderMallya's extradition within two months. However, the case can go through a series of court appeals before the actual extradition order can be issued.
His extradition trial will now determine whether he can be legally forced to go back to face the Indian courts.
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West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today expressed grief at the passing away of veteran Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor, describing him as a legend.
The actor will be remembered for generations, Banerjee said in a tweet message.
"Saddened at his passing away. Shashi Kapoor a legend and actor will be remembered for generations for his great work in cinema," Banerjee said.
The legendary Bollywood actor, the romantic screen icon of '70s and '80s, died in Mumbai today.
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A 30-year-old Pune resident called up police posing as an aide of Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and got himself arrested so he could receive healthcare in prison, an official said today.
Amit Jagannath Kamble, a resident of Navi Peth in Pune, was arrested today for making calls to the Ahmednagar police and jail authorities posing as a personal assistant of Fadnavis, Superintendent of Police Ranjankumar Sharma said.
On November 29, Kamble called the police on phone and asked them to shift all the three convicts in the Kopardi rape and murder case to Pune's Yerwada jail instead of taking them to Nagpur prison, he said.
Sharma told PTI Kamble is suffering from a kidney ailment for the last four years and can't afford treatment due to his poor financial condition.
He commits petty crimes to get arrested and avail free treatment and receive healthcare inside the jail, the police officer said.
Kamble has several pending criminal cases against him in Deccan, Vishrambaug, Faraskhana and other police stations in Pune, police sources said.
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An unidentified person has claimed to be related to Hollywood star Samuel L Jackson, after he was arrested at the airport by the police on possession of weapons.
The man, called Jackson his "uncle", on being taken into custody at the LAX after he was busted for carrying weapons, such as knives, a long piece of rebar and a handful of tools, reported TMZ.
"My uncle's Samuel Jackson. Samuel L Jackson!" he said.
Law enforcement sources say the police was alerted about a suspicious man hanging around the airport with a potential bow and arrow.
When the cops approached, the insider said the man set ran away, setting off a brief chase before being tazed and taken down.
The man was taken to a hospital by ambulance, after apparently having suffered injuries.
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Irked by his wife questioning him over buying a costly mobile phone, a farmer killed her at their house on the city's outskirts, police said.
Balamurugan (38), a habitual drinker, had bought the Rs 9,000 phone and showed it to his wife Muthulakshmi at their house in Kinathukadavu late last night, they added.
When she questioned why he had bought such a costly phone as they were facing financial problems, Balamurugan in a fit of rage hit her on the head with a pickaxe, killing her on the spot, police said.
The farmer was arrested after police rushed to the spot on receiving information about the incident.
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The Delhi High Court today said the issue of marital rape, an act in which a spouse indulges in sexual intercourse without the other's consent, was of huge ramifications and tremendous importance.
The high court fixed January 2 next year to continue hearing arguments in the matter in which some NGOs, espousing the cause of women, have raised the issue of sexual violence in marriage in India.
The matter was listed before a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar which during the brief hearing noted the concern raised by the NGOs, RIT Foundation and the All India Democratic Women's Association.
The court asked senior advocate Raju Ramachandran, who is assisting it as an amicus curiae, to freely express his views on the issue in which the Centre has maintained that marital rape cannot be made a criminal offence as it could become a phenomenon which may destabilise the institution of marriage and become an easy tool to harass the husbands.
Ramachandran told the bench that he will come up with his views after hearing the submissions of the Centre and the NGOs.
Advocate Karuna Nandy, appearing for the two NGOs, tried to impress the bench by citing few studies and research to press for the prayer to declare forcible sexual intercourse between married couple as an offence.
She elaborated by referring to the 2005 data of National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) about the gravity of the situation.
However, without going any further, the bench deferred the hearing with the observation that "the issue has huge ramifications. It is of tremendous importance."
In a related development, the Supreme Court in its historic verdict in October this year, has held that sexual intercourse with a girl below 18 years of age, even by the husband, would amount to rape. It has criminalised sex with a wife who is not a major.
The apex court read down a provision in the Indian Penal Code of 1860 exempting males from being tried for rape if the wives were between the age of 15 and 18 years.
The top court's verdict will have ramification in the petition pending before the high court.
In the original petition before the high court, the petitioners had highlighted that the provision under the IPC did not consider non-consensual sexual intercourse with a wife, above 15 years of age, as rape.
The petitioners submitted that there was a need to strike down the exception clause under Section 375 of IPC that says that sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape.
The court is also hearing two intervention applications, one in support of pleas to make marital rape an offence and the other opposing it.
The Centre had advocated retaining the exception clause in Section 375 saying child marriages were taking place in India and the decision to retain a girl's minimum age as 15 years to marry was taken under the amended rape law to protect a couple against criminalisation of their sexual activity.
The NGOs' counsel had said that they have challenged the constitutionality of section 375 (rape) of the IPC on the ground that it discriminated against married women being sexually assaulted by their husbands.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
US Defence Secretary James Mattis today asked Pakistan to "redouble" efforts to confront militants operating from its soil as he met the country's top leadership here, amid Washington's concerns that Islamabad was not doing enough to dismantle terror safe havens.
Mattis held a meeting with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi after arriving here on his maiden tour to Pakistan to explore ways to effectively eliminate the threat of militancy, days after 2008 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed was released from house arrest.
The US Embassy in Islamabad said in a statement that Mattis told Abbasi to "redouble" efforts to tackle militants operating from Pakistan's territory.
"The secretary reiterated that Pakistan must redouble its efforts to confront militants and terrorists operating within the country," Pentagon Chief Spokesperson Dana W White said after Mattis concluded his inaugural trip to Pakistan.
Mattis also met Minister of Defence Khurram Dastigir Khan, Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa and Director General of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lieutenant General Naveed Mukhtar.
"Mattis recognised Pakistan's sacrifices in the war against terrorism," White said, adding that Mattis emphasised the vital role that Pakistan can play in working with the US and others to facilitate a peace process in Afghanistan that brings stability and security to the region.
Abbasi said Pakistan, in its national interest, would continue to conduct intelligence-based operations all over the country to consolidate the gains achieved in the last four years.
"The prime minister reiterated that there are no safe havens in Pakistan and the entire nation was committed to its resolve on eradicating terrorism once and for all in all its forms and manifestations," according to a statement by the Prime Minister's Office here.
Abbasi said no other country benefits more from peace and stability in Afghanistan than Pakistan.
He agreed with Mattis that both Pakistan and the US have common stakes in securing peace and security in Afghanistan for the long term stability of the broader region.
He also appreciated the US resolve not to allow the use of Afghan soil against Pakistan.
Recalling the longstanding relationship with the US, he underlined the need for a broad-based engagement to strengthen partnership and enhance cooperation between the two countries.
Mattis stated that the "purpose of his visit was to find common grounds in order to create a positive, consistent and long-term relationship with Pakistan," the statement said.
He underscored the importance of continuing and deepening cooperation for the common objective of eliminating terrorism from the region.
Relations between the US and Pakistan plummeted after President Donald Trump announced his new Afghan policy in August and directly blamed Islamabad for supporting the Taliban and the Haqqani network.
"We have heard from Pakistani leaders that they do not support terrorism. So I expect to see that sort of action reflected in their policies," Mattis said ahead of his trip.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo had said Pakistan's policy of using terrorists as leverage against India and Afghanistan has not changed.
"Not yet," he said when asked to comment on the issue even as he warned Islamabad that the US will do "everything it can" to ensure that terror safe havens no longer exist in the country.
Pompeo told the Reagan National Defence Forum in California over the weekend that this is the message that Mattis was tasked to deliver to the Pakistani leadership.
The visit of Mattis comes about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately arrest and charge 26/11 mastermind Saeed, in the absence of which it warned Islamabad of repercussions.
JuD chief Saeed, who has an American bounty of USD 10 million on his head, walked free on November 24 after a court ordered an end to his 10-month detention.
Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in Pakistan and gain their understanding.
"The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," he said earlier, on his way to Pakistan.
Mattis is the first top American official to visit Pakistan after completion of the first 100 days of the US' new South Asia strategy unveiled by Trump on August 21.
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The ruling Congress in Meghalaya has suffered another jolt with state party president and four-time chief minister D D Lapang deciding to opt out of assembly poll race, due early next year.
His announcement came a month after two senior leaders holding cabinet berths - deputy chief minister Roytre C Laloo and Roshan Warjri - expressed similar intentions.
The 85-year-old veteran leader met All India Congress Committee president Sonia Gandhi in Delhi yesterday to inform her about his decision.
"She wished me well and said I should continue to keep the party united and share my experience and advisories with the workers and leaders," Lapang said in a statement.
The former CM also exchanged greetings with Meghalaya party in-charge C P Joshi during a meeting called to discuss the elevation of Rahul Gandhi as Congress president.
He had informed Chief Minister Mukul Sangma about his decision prior to his meeting with Sonia Gandhi yesterday.
Lapang had won the Nongpoh seat in the 1972 assembly elections as an Independent candidate. He later joined the Congress and was elected chief minister in 1992, 2003, 2007 and 2009.
However, he never completed his tenure as the chief minister.
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Meghalaya Power Minister Comingone Ymbon today resigned from the Mukul Sangma cabinet due to personal reasons.
"I hereby tender my resignation as Minister i/c Power, GAD and CnRD w.e.f. from today the 4th December, 2017 on personal grounds," Ymbon said in a letter to Chief Minister Mukul Sangma.
Ymbon was sworn in as Minister in August this year. Sources close to him said that he would not seek re-election on Congress ticket for the state Assembly elections due early next year.
At least six other Congress legislators including former deputy chief minister Rowell Lyngdoh and his cabinet colleagues Prestone Tynsong and Sniawbhalang Dhar have announced that they would not seek Congress party ticket for 2018 Assembly elections.
Three other senior leaders of the party including party president and four times chief minister D D Lapang and two cabinet ministers have also announced they are not contesting next year's assembly elections.
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New York's prestigious Metropolitan Opera has suspended its eminent longtime conductor James Levine after three men, including one of Indian-origin, accused that he sexually abused them decades ago.
The company in a statement said that it was suspending its four-decade relationship with 74-year-old Levine and cancelling his upcoming conducting engagements after knowing about his sexual misconduct that took place from the 1960's to the 1980's, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met said.
"Levine will not be involved in any Met activities, including conducting scheduled performances at the Met this season," the statement said.
"While we await the results of the investigation, based on these new reports, the Met has made the decision to act now,"
it said.
The move to suspend Levine comes a day after one of Levine's accusers claimed he had sexual contact with Levine as a teenager.
One of Levine's accusers, 48-year-old Ashok Pai, who grew up in Illinois near the Ravinia Festival, where Levine was music director, said that he was sexually abused by him starting in the summer of 1986, when Pai was 16 an accusation he made last year in a report to the Lake Forest Police Department in Illinois, The New York Times reported.
Pai said that he first met Levine when he was four years old and his parents took him backstage after a Ravinia concert.
In 1985, when Pai was 15, he said, Levine gave him a ride home and began holding his hand in an "incredibly sensual way."
"I was vulnerable," said Pai.
"I was under this man's sway, I saw him as a safe, protective person, he took advantage of me, he abused me and it has really messed me up," he added.
Chris Brown, who played principal bass in the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for more than three decades, said that Levine masturbated him in 1986 and then coaxed him to reciprocate when Brown was 17 at the Meadow Brook School of Music in Michigan, the report said.
The third man, James Lestock said that Levine also masturbated him there that summer when Lestock was 17 and a cello student the first of many sexual encounters with Levine that have haunted him.
Levine served as music director of the Met from 1976 to 2016, when he assumed the position of music director emeritus.
Levine has conducted more than 2,500 performances at the Met. He made his debut there in June 1971 with Puccini's Tosca, becoming principal conductor in the 1973-74 season and music director in 1976-77.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi today likened the imminent elevation of Rahul Gandhi to dynastic succession of Mughal rulers, and castigated the Congress for abandoning "public modesty" by deciding to make a person, who is out on bail in a graft case, its president.
The prime minister also targeted the Congress over corruption during its rule, and spoke about the clean governance under him in Gujarat and at the Centre.
"The Congress has abandoned all public modesty. The Congress has gone bankrupt, as it is going to make a person who is out on bail in corruption case its president," Modi told a rally here in Valsad district of election-bound Gujarat, apparently referring to the National Herald case.
Political parties, he said, will think 17 times before making those out on bail even a district unit chief.
Modi said with the Congress deciding to make such a leader its president gave a glimpse of what culture the party will follow and the kind of leadership will emerge there in future.
"Mani Shanker Aiyar, who was a minister in the Congress government said 'did elections happen during Mughal rule? After Jahangir, Shahjahan came, was any election held? After Shahjahan it was understood that Aurangzeb would be the leader'.
"Does the Congress accept that it is a one family party? We don't want this Aurangzebi Raaj (Aurangzeb's rule)....For us, country comes first, 125 crore people of this country are our high-command," Modi said.
Referring to the BJP's resounding victory in the civic polls in Uttar Pradesh, Modi said, people in the Congress also think they would not been able to harm the BJP's prospects in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
So, the prime minister said, the thinking in the Congress is that if they could defeat the BJP in Gujarat, people of other states will listen to them.
"Will you allow that to happen? Will you stop the journey of development in Gujarat?" Modi asked the audience that responded with an emphatic 'no'.
Modi also took potshots at Rahul Gandhi over his frequent visit to temples during the poll campaign.
"In earlier days, there used to be a competition to show how secular they are. If one says that I am secular, the other will say he is four kg more secular, the third will say he is six kg more secular and the fourth would claim he is 10 kg more secular.
"But what is the competition for before 2017 (Gujarat) polls? After 70 years where all they have to go to?" Modi asked the gathering that shouted in one voice "temples".
He said the people of Gujarat were not fools and would see through the "deception" (of visiting temples for Hindu votes).
Asserting that he never faced any allegation of corruption in his long public life as chief minister and prime minister, Modi asked the audience," Have you ever read in any newspaper that I have taken any thing? have you read that Modi's brother or any relative took money? Have you read that son-in-law of our family has taken any money?" he asked, to which the crowd responded in the negative.
On the other hand, he said, the Congress governments were mired in scandals.
The prime minister said even the Congress has accepted that the BJP is not an anti-Muslim party, as unlike in the past elections, it is not branding BJP leaders communal this time.
"If you remember 2002, 2007, 2012 (polls), all Congress leaders would brand us as communal and anti-Muslim. But before the 2017 polls, no leader is saying that BJP is communal. This means the Congress has also accepted that the abuse they were hurling against the BJP was false and was meant for vote bank politics," he said.
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Indian Navy today continued search and rescue (SAR) operations in full swing for the fifth day over Southeast Arabian Sea and Lakshadweep and Minicoy islands in the aftermath of very severe cyclonic storm Ockhi.
The Navy said the whole of Lakshadweep and Minicoy islands are under the cover of its ships and aircraft with rescue and relief operations on in full swing.
The lndian Navy is determined to bring back normalcy to Lakshadweep and Minicoy islands most expeditiously, a Defence release said.
All other ships at the disposal of Indian Navy would continue the search and rescue operations and provide relief till normalcy is restored.
Eight naval ships, including frontline ships from Western Naval Command INS Chennai, Kolkata and Trikand, were deployed for rendering assistance to the affected islands, the release said.
In addition, all aircraft at the disposal of the Southern Naval Command, including long range maritime reconnaissance aircraft P8I of Eastern Naval Command, were deployed throughout the day, it said.
Swift action of the Indian Navy has saved 148 lives at sea, which includes 11 fishermen picked up by the Indian Naval ships Jamuna, Nireekshak and Sagardhwani, the release added.
Disaster relief material was disembarked at Minicoy yesterday and at Kavaratti and Kalpeni today by Indian Naval Ships Sharda and Chennai.
Four tonnes of relief material, including dry provisions (rice,dal, salt, dehydrated potato and onion),water, blankets, raincoats, disposable clothes, mosquito nets and dhurries has been handed over to the local administration, it said.
Disaster relief material of dry provisions and ready-to- eat meals are also being dispatched to Bitra lsland by Indian Naval helicopter from INS Dweeprakshak at Kavaratti.
INS Kolkata rescued nine persons, all from Kochi, from fishing vessel Island Queen 70 miles off Bitra Island, which was reported missing for the last 15 days.
The crew were found to be in satisfactory condition and their request for food, water and seamanship items was immediately met by the ship. Based on their request, the boat was escorted for two hours into fair weather.
A naval Sea King helicopter from Kochi, deployed at Kavaratti island, is being extensively used to transfer men and material between the islands, the release said.
In the meanwhile, INS Kalpeni brought back 11 Kerala fishermen rescued by INS Jamuna and INS Nireekshak to Kochi.
INS Shardul, which disembarked all relief material at Minicoy, is equipped with diving team and a naval helicopter to carry out additional SAR operations, it said.
The material would be enough for 2000 people for seven days, the release said.
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Senior NCP leader Praful Patel today attacked Prime Minister for the comments he had made on the forthcoming election of the Congress president while addressing a poll rally in Gujarat yesterday.
" commented on infighting in the Congress, which was unwarranted. He had termed the election (of Congress president) as a tussle between 'Shezad' and 'Shahzada'," Patel told reporters.
Addressing a rally, Modi had said that if one doesn't have democracy in his home (party), how can the person practice it in the country.
Modi also said that the outcome of the election to the top post in the Congress is a foregone conclusion.
"A youth called Shezad (Poonawala), who is a (Congress) party worker has raised questions over the process of the election and alleged that it is being rigged," the PM had said.
Patel said the Sharad Pawar-led party is contesting 58 out of the total 182 seats in Gujarat elections, to be held in two phases on December 9 and 14.
The senior leader said had the Congress sealed a pre-poll alliance with the NCP in Gujarat, the chances of the BJP's victory would have become remote.
The NCP and the Congress had fought state assembly polls in an alliance in 2002 and 2007.
The tie-up couldn't materialise this time as the Congress was livid with the NCP over its two MLAs in Gujarat purportedly voting for a BJP candidate against Ahmed Patel in Rajya Sabha election this year.
Patel said the BJP was losing the ground in Gujarat since the emergence of Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakor and Jignesh Mevani, who represent Patidars, OBCs and Dalits, respectively.
"After Modi's ascension to Delhi in 2014, the BJP failed to retain power in most of district and tehsil panchayats that went to polls, which reflected resentment against the saffron party," Patel said.
Attacking the prime minister, Patel said Modi was "maintaining silence" on the matters concerning the common people while raking up the "son-of-the-soil" issue in Gujarat.
Patel was referring to Modi's emotional appeals to the people of the state during canvassing.
"Modi should have talked about issues like farmer distress, atrocities on Dalits, discrimination against minorities, the plight of small and medium scale industries, the adverse impact of GST and demonetisation etc," the NCP leader said.
Taking a jibe at the BJP for drafting in senior Union ministers for the poll campaign, Patel said this reflects "nervousness" in the saffron party and that the "parivartan" (transformation) is imminent in Gujarat.
Nepal's first ever billionaire, Binod Chaudhary - who recently joined the ruling Nepali Congress - is set to contest elections even as he canvasses support for the party ahead of provincial and parliamentary polls this week.
Chaudhary, 62, whose ancestors migrated to Nepal from India around 150 years ago, has become a crowd puller on the campaign trail, addressing over 50 election rallies across the Himalayan nation.
He heads the USD 1.1 billion Chaudhary Group which runs 136 companies on five continents.
The second phase of elections to provincial assemblies and the parliament is scheduled for December 7 in 43 districts across Nepal.
Today is the last day of campaigning for the elections before the Election Commission deadline.
He is contesting the election on a Nepali Congress (NC) ticket to become an MP under the proportionate representation system.
In his campaign, Chaudhary has claimed that the economic road map drawn by him on behalf of the Nepali Congress will be the foundation for economic prosperity of the country.
"I have joined the Nepali Congress party to do something concrete for the country in the economic field. I had no more joy in being the only billionaire of a poor country. I would rather want to be a citizen of a country of billionaires," Chaudhary said.
"I would devote my time and energy to make the country prosperous so as to enable it to produce many billionaires like me," he said.
During a recent NC election rally in Nawalparasi district, where Chaudhary Udhyog Gram - an industrial area developed by his Chaudhary Group - is located, a huge number of locals had gathered to see the country's only billionaire.
Chaudhary's name first appeared in Forbes in 2013 on the list of the world's billionaires.
He also appealed to voters to vote for NC general secretary Shashanka Koirala, who is contesting the election to become a Member of Parliament from the district.
Chaudhary said a Nepali Congress-led majority government was essential for attaining political stability and economic prosperity for the country.
His joining the NC is seen as a major blow to the electoral alliance between CPN-UML and CPN-Maoist Centre, in their bid to capture power at the Centre.
Prime Minister and Nepali Congress president Sher Bahadur Deuba has not only handed the party's general membership to Chaudhary but also appointed him as the chief of its central economic committee.
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Two doctors, whose services were terminated by Max Healthcare, were today questioned by police in connection with the case of a premature baby being wrongly declared dead.
The questioning lasted about two hours.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Northwest) Aslam Khan said the two doctors, AP Mehta and Vishal Gupta, whose services were terminated by the Max Hospital, joined the probe today.
The DCP, however, refused to divulge further details.
Police said another doctor, a gynaecologist, was also questioned along with Mehta and Gupta.
Two nurses of the hospital were also quizzed. All of them were questioned for close to two hours, said an official privy to the probe.
Joint Commissioner of Police (Northern Range) Sagar Preet Hooda said the hospital had been asked to furnish the duty roster.
Police were also seeking opinion of experts in the case, he said.
Investigators had yesterday sent a notice to the hospital to join the probe and share documents and the CCTV footage.
The case pertains to the birth of twins (boy and girl) on November 30. Both the babies were allegedly declared dead by the Max Hospital in Shalimar Bagh. However, the family later found the boy was alive.
Police have already registered a case of attempt to commit culpable homicide against two doctors.
Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain had on December 2 said that if the hospital was found guilty of medical negligence in its probe, it's licence could be cancelled.
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The National Investigation Agency today questioned Shafin Jahan, days after the Supreme Court gave its nod to it to continue its probe into his marriage with Hadiya, a Kerala woman at the centre of an alleged love-jihad case.
Jahan was questioned a week after the Apex Court gave its nod to carry on investigation into the conversion of Hadiya and her marriage with him.
NIA sources said the probe team "re-examined" Jahan today for clarifying certain facts from his earlier statement.
They, however, did not elaborate as the matter is sub-judice.
The NIA had earlier investigated Jahan and submitted its statement before the Supreme Court.
The marriage of the couple was annulled by the Kerala High Court last December after her father alleged that his daughter was being indoctrinated and may be taken ISIS territories in Iraq and Syria by extremist Islamic outfits.
"We make it clear that the NIA investigation shall continue in accordance with law," the Supreme Court had said last week while allowing the 24-year-old woman to resume her studies at the homoeopathic college in Tamil Nadu's Salem.
She was placed under her parents' custody since her marriage was annulled by the Kerala High Court.
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Cautioning against knowledge being the exclusive preserve of a few, Union Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu today made the point that yoga benefits the whole world since the practice has not been patented.
He also highlighted India's belief that traditional knowledge must be shared with the entire humanity.
"Just imagine, the greatest inventor of how lifestyle should be managed is a person whose name we don't know, the person who invented yoga, nobody knows who invented yoga, there is no patent available," Prabhu said while addressing the Arogya 2017' conference here.
"He (the inventor) doesn't get any proprietory rights over it, he doesn't get any royalty for every time you practice yoga, this is a knowledge available to the entire humanity and we believe that such knowledge should be imparted all over the world," Prabhu added.
The minister is of the firm view that traditional knowledge should not be preserved and conserved within the four walls of India, but spread across the world so that people at large must benefit from it.
"In fact, when the world was discussing TRIPS, Trade- Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, we were thinking in the country, just imagine, of everything that we discover, everything that we can offer as knowledge. If it has to be patented and therefore it has to have some sort of proprietary rights over it, how will the world benefit?" he asked.
Minister for AYUSH (independent charge) Shripad Yesso Naik elaborated on the government's initiatives to popularise alternative systems of medicine.
"The National AYUSH Mission was started in 2014. An agreement has been signed with the WHO (World Health Organisation) to develop benchmarks for yoga, ayurveda, Unani and Panchkarma. Five AYUSH information cells have been set up in Israel, Tajikistan, Peru, Russia and Tanzania," Naik said.
A white paper titled AYUSH for the World by Frost and Sullivan was unveiled at the conference that offers insights into the regulatory requirements for herbal medicines in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) countries.
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A three-metre-high metal fence topped with razor wire in a North Korean port marks the front line of the United Nations' ban on coal exports by Pyongyang.
A mountain of North Korean coal -- which would once have been bound for China -- is piled up on one side of the barrier in Rajin harbour, stranded by the interdiction.
On the very next dock, around two million tonnes of Russian coal has come in by train and been shipped on to China this year by Russian port operator RasonConTrans.
Its activities are specifically excluded from the UN Security Council's sanctions resolutions -- but attempts have been made to use it as a way to bypass the restrictions.
"They asked but we said no, we don't do it," said RasonConTrans' deputy director Roman Minkevich.
The black mounds on the neighbouring wharf were evidence his firm was complying with the rules, he added.
"Behind the fence it's Korean coal, it's under sanctions now so it's still here," he told AFP.
He declined to elaborate on the source of the requests. "People," he said. "Different people."
The UN Panel of Experts on North Korea said in its midyear report that Pyongyang has been "deliberately using indirect channels to export prohibited commodities".
For years the coal trade was a lucrative earner for Pyongyang -- its main ally and key economic partner China imported 22 million tonnes worth nearly $1.2 billion in 2016.
But while Beijing says North Korean imports have come to a halt, RasonConTrans' business is booming.
Since starting operations in 2015 its volumes have doubled each year, and Minkevich is targeting three million tonnes next year, with a goal of five million in future.
It has between three and six ship movements a month at its pier -- number 3 in the port, which can take vessels up to 180 metres long -- loading 50,000 tonnes of coal on each, most of them heading for Shanghai.
Over a hill at the back of Rajin town stands a sprawling disused oil refinery, originally built to process crude from the Soviet Union, in the days of Communist brotherhood provided Pyongyang with cheap or free materials.
Locals blame sanctions for the closure but it has been inactive for years, its throttled chimneys standing sentinel over an unfulfilled economic dream.
Two large bronze statues of the North Korea's founder Kim Il-Sung and his son and successor Kim Jong-Il look out over Rajin.
Despite the looser economic rules applying in the area, the town is bedecked with propaganda slogans seen throughout the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the country is officially known.
Using North Korean labour -- North Korean women are particularly skilled crane operators, Minkevich notes, probably due to their care in performing repetitive tasks -- costs at Rajin are 30 to 40 per cent cheaper than at Russian ports.
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Aiming to revamp Lyngdoh committee guidelines and establish a better mechanism to resolve issues of students, National Students' Union of India (NSUI) will draft a bill in consultation with representatives of students union of colleges and universities across the country.
NSUI national president Fairoz Khan said a national convention will be held and students representatives from across the country will be asked attend it.
Resolutions passed in the convention will be part of the draft bill, he said.
"Cutting across party lines, parliamentarians will be invited to the convention and the draft bill will be submitted to them. They will be requested to introduce it as a private member's bill in Parliament," Khan said.
"The proposed law will apply to all students union elections across the country," Khan said.
The NSUI is demanding that direct elections be made compulsory in all colleges and varsities, the age to contest polls be reduced to 18 years and election expenditure be revised.
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Odisha's debt burden was Rs 66,656.56 crore in October, 2017 and is estimated to touch Rs Rs 76,744.12 crore by the end of 2017-18 fiscal, state Finance Minister S B Behera told the Assembly today.
Behera said this while replying to a question. He said the loan is being incurred for capital expenditure on infrastructural projects.
The finance minister said the state's loan burden was Rs 38,666.24 crore, Rs 37,730.04 crore and Rs 27,801 crore in 2014, 2010 and 2003 respectively.
Behera said while the state government has incurred loan of Rs 20,059.45 crore from provident fund, it got credit of Rs 46,597.11 crore from other sources like the Government of India, National Small Savings Fund, Open Market, NABARD, LIC, GIC, National Cooperative Development Corporation and Rural Electrification Corporation.
Official sources said the state government has taken loan worth Rs 5,500 crore from open market during the current financial year.
"The debt burden of the state is around 16 per cent of the gross state domestic product. It is well below the permissible limit of 25 per cent," Finance Secretary T K Pandey said.
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Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik today promised to fund the construction of a second bridge over Brahmani river if the Centre delays the project any further.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during a public meeting in Rourkela in April 2015, had announced a second bridge over the river but work has not begun in that direction so far.
A delegation from Sundergarh district, led by senior BJD MLA Mangala Kissan, met the CM this morning to press for their long-standing demand for the bridge.
"The Chief Minister assured the delegation that he would take up the matter with the central government. If they (Centre) are not serious about the project, the state government will construct the bridge from its own resources," an official statement issued by the chief minister's office said.
Hundreds of BJD youth activists staged a demonstration in Rourkela yesterday to protest against the delay in the project.
BJD leader and former minister Sarada Nayak pointed out that Union Minister Nitin Gadkari had also laid the foundation stone for the project during his visit to the state in July and assured the people that work would begin within 15 days.
"Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the construction of a second bridge in 2015 and Union Minister Nitin Gadkari laid the foundation stone in July this year. But four months have passed and work has not started yet," Nayak said.
Echoing similar sentiments, BJP MLA Dilip Ray, who led several agitations in the past two years for the cause, also expressed his displeasure over the matter today.
"The bridge was announced by the PM two years ago but the National Highway Authority of India has shown no interest in implementing the project," he said.
Union Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram, however, called Patnaik's announcement a political gimmick and said the government was serious about the project.
"Patnaik's announcement about the bridge today was nothing more than a political gimmick. The Union government has already initiated paperwork on the project and construction will begin soon," he added.
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Rajya Sabha MP Sharad Yadav said today that leaders of the opposition parties would be meeting in the next two days to discuss a strategy to prevent the tamepring of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in the forthcoming Gujarat elections.
Talking to the newsmen here late this evening, Yadav said that it follows the outcome of civic polls held in Uttar Pradesh where the ruling BJP bagged 14 of the 16 mayoral seats as well as a sizeable chunk of the Nagar Palika and Panchayat posts.
To support his claim, Yadav circulated a statement giving details of the BJP's performance in the 16 municipal corporations where EVMs were used and the Nagar Parishad and Panchayat seats where ballot papers were used.
"There has been huge noise around the wave of Modi and Yogi being the cause of the BJP's victory in Uttar Pradesh civic polls. Fact is that wherever voting was done through EVMs, BJP has won and wherever ballot papers were used, the BJP has lost," said Yadav.
He criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for comparing the elevation of Rahul Gandhi as Congress president to the rule of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.
Yadav said that Gandh did not run after power. "He could have become PM in 2004 and 2009 if he wanted to. I was witness to it," Yadav said.
He slammed the PM for not being able to provide jobs to seven crore youths as he had promised.
"Three and a half years have passed and only seven lakh jobs have been created. The PM has not provided 150 ppercent more that the Minimum Support Prices (MSP) to farmers nor has he provided a home to a single tribal in the tribal-dominated areas of Gujarat," said Yadav.
He also alleged that tribals were being subjected to police atrocities and cases being registered against them on the eve of the assembly polls.
Meanwhile Congress leaders from Gujarat met Chief Election Commissiner (CEC) AK Joti in Ahmedabad two days ago and urged him to deploy adequate security personnel in the sensitive constituencies in the state.
The Congress has also demanded that jammers should be installed at strong-rooms where EVMs will be stored after the polling.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Nine persons got a new lease of life after the organs of a 56-year old brain dead woman, a bank employee, were harvested on them.
The woman suddenly fell unconscious at her office here on November 30 and was rushed to K G Hospital, where she was diagnosed to be suffering from high blood pressure, cardio-vascular accident and intra-cerebral hemorrhage.
A team of specialists tried to revive her and her brain became dysfunctional yesterday and also suffered irreversible damage, Hospital chairman Dr G Bhakthavathsalam said.
After two mandatory apnoe tests, the doctors declared her brain dead in the evening, he said.
After getting consent of her son and daughter, the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, eyes, skin and bones were harvested today.
The Transplant Authority of Tamil Nadu has allotted the liver and one kidney to K G Hospital, another kidney to Sri Ramakrishna Hospital, eyes to Aravind Eye Hospital, skin and bones to Ganga Hospital, he said.
The heart and lungs were allotted to Fortis Malar Hospital/Global Hospital, Chennai, Bhakthavathsalam said adding this helped nine persons get a new lease of life.
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Pakistan's high court today questioned the legal standing of the agreement reached between the government and Islamist protest leaders, saying that none of the terms could be legally justified.
Activists of Tehreek-i-Khatm-i-Nabuwwat, Tehreek-i-Labaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLY) and Sunni Tehreek Pakistan (ST) religious groups started protests last month.
After the weeks-long protest that had virtually paralysed the capital, the government and leaders of the TLY reached an agreement on November 26 in which the former conceded to the latter's demands including dropping all the cases against the protesters.
"How can cases filed under the Terrorism Act be dismissed?" Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui asked during the hearing regarding the recent sit-in at the Faizabad Interchange in the capital, Dawn reported.
The Islamabad High Court (IHC), however, had noted a "number of serious objections on the terms of agreement" and expressed its displeasure over the army's role in the settlement made with the protesters.
"Who is the army to adopt a mediator's role?" Justice Siddiqui had inquired in the previous hearing. "Where does the law assign this role to a major general?"
The IHC recommended that the legal standing of the agreement should be discussed in a joint session of parliament.
Attorney General of Pakistan (AGP) Ashtar Ausaf, however, disagreed with the recommendation, saying that since the high court had taken suo motu notice of the matter, the judiciary should oversee it. He had appeared in court on Justice Siddiqui's orders, the report said.
The AGP requested the court to grant him some time to determine the legal position of the army's role as an arbitrator in the negotiations, saying that he was not in the country and needed time to prepare the report.
In a written order on November 27, the IHC bench had directed the attorney general to help the court determine how the armed forces could act as an arbitrator.
The Intelligence Bureau also presented a report on the botched operation against the protesters by the police while the chief commissioner of Islamabad submitted a detailed report on the protest.
The judge remarked that the protesters were guilty of blasphemy, pointing to the language used by the protest leaders and participants during the sit-in.
Pakistan's law minister Zahid Hamid was accused by the protesters of blasphemy after a reference to the Prophet Muhammad was left out of a revised version of the electoral oath. He called it a clerical error.
Hamid's resignation cleared the main hurdle in the lifting of siege of the capital by protesters.
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A Pakistani youth, who wrote 'Hindustan Zindabad' on the wall of his house in Khyber- Pakhtunkhwa province, has been booked for treason, a media report said today.
Sajid Shah had written 'Hindustan Zindabad' on the outer wall of his home in Nara Amazi area of the province, Daily Express quoted police as saying.
He has subsequently been booked for treason, they said.
Some local people told him to erase the slogan from the wall as it hurt their national pride, the police said.
Some people took pictures of the wall on their smartphones and emailed them to senior police officials.
"We have booked the young man on orders from the high- ups", the officer said.
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Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police Sulkhan Singh today asked the Anti-Terrorist Squad to assist in the probe initiated into pandrol clips gone missing from a railway track before the arrival of an express train.
As many as 77 pandrol clips, used in holding together railway tracks and concrete sleepers, were yesterday found missing between Badshah Nagar and Daliganj railway stations here just before the arrival of Kaifiat Express heading to Delhi from Azamgarh, North Eastern Railway (NER) PRO Alok Srivastava said.
The missing clips were detected by railway patrol staff Shiv Shankar and Sanjay, who immediately informed higher authorities.
An FIR has been registered in this regard against unidentified persons at Mahanagar police station here.
"The ATS has been asked to assist in the probe," IG (ATS) Asim Arun said.
According to railway officials, timely detection averted a major accident.
Train movement on the line was stopped for an hour.
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A political slugfest has erupted over the arrest of BJP MP Pratap Simha, with the party today holding protests against it, alleging that it was a "political vendetta" by the Congress government headed by Siddaramaiah.
Simha, arrested at Hunsur near Mysuru ahead of a Hamnuman Jayanti procession yesterday, is now out on a station bail which is granted at police station-level.
While the BJP alleged that Simha's arrest was part of a political vendetta and held protests at Bengaluru, Mysuru and other places, the ruling Congress chided him for his conduct.
Accusing Simha of attempting to dictate the police, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah questioned whether his conduct was befitting a person holding the position of an MP.
The chief minister said a case was registered against Simha on charges of assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty, rash driving and endangering life or personal safety of others, which were non-bailable.
"We could have arrested and sent him to jail, but considering that he is an MP I said not to do it," he told reporters in New Delhi.
Simha and others were taken into preventive custody and later arrested after he along with the organisers allegedly insisted on making changes in the specified route for the Hanuman Jayanti procession, ignoring the advice of the administration.
On being stopped by the police for his preventivearrest yesterday, Simha allegedly took the driver's seat of the vehicle he was travelling in and tried to drive off by knocking down barricades in the area.
Questioning the intentions of the government in restricting the procession, BJP state Chief B S Yeddyurappa accused the chief minister of indulging in vendetta politics.
"Do we have to take your (Congress government) permission for celebrating Hanuman Jayanti?" he asked.
Hitting out at Simha, state Home Minister Ramalinga Reddyalleged that the BJP was making such politically motivated statementskeeping in mind the upcoming assembly elections, followinginstructions from party chief Amit Shah.
Noting that the law was same for all, he claimed the BJP leaders, including Yeddyurappa, lacked basic knowledge of law. "It is high time that a workshop is conducted for them about it," he added.
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Congress leader from Maharashtra Shehzad Poonawalla today dubbed the imminent election of Rahul Gandhi as party chief as "Mughal style coronation" and said it is a "black day" in the history of the grand old party.
Poonawalla, who is in the limelight after he alleged that the organisational election in the Congress was "rigged" and gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi a stick to beat the opposition party with, called the polls "unconstitutional and illegal" that will be challenged "from Delhi to Amethi".
"My statement on Rahul Gandhi's Mughal style coronation - Black Day in history of my party...unconstitutional and illegal...will be challenged from Delhi to Amethi," he tweeted.
"Black Day - Rahul Gandhi is not the president of the Congress party but has been anointed like a Mughal king in a line of dynastic hereditory succession.
"As a member of the Congress party, I observe this as a Black Day in the history of my party," he said in a statement.
Poonawalla said the party of Mahatma Gandhi that once saw Maulana Azad become its president at the age of 35 years "is now the proprietorship of a Shehzada where no Shehzad (the Maharashtra Congress leader himself) can even contest a rigged election!".
Poonawalla said some "dynastic cheerleaders" claimed even before the filing of nominations ended at 3 pm that Rahul Gandhi was the president.
"This is because the entire world knows that this was a fixed match and a coronation. Only the crown was missing for the Shehzada!" he said.
The Congress leader said the road ahead may involve challenging (at the appropriate legal forum) the "cornonation" of the "Shehzada" (prince) by many workers who feel insulted, and recalled Sardar Patel who was "once denied his right".
"I believe in taking issues to the court of the people. From Delhi to Amethi it will be taken up. The stolen throne will have to be abdicated soon," he said.
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Rahul Gandhi was today hailed as the "darling" of the Congress by former premier Manmohan Singh after he was poised to become the party president and was also described as a "capable leader" who would make a "very good" prime minister.
As Congress leaders heaped praise on the 47-year-old scion of the country's most fabled political dynasty after he filed his nomination for the post of party president, Anand Sharma and Kapil Sibal described it as a "historic moment."
"Rahul ji has been the darling of the Congress...Rahul Gandhi will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party," the normally taciturn Manmohan Singh told reporters at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters here after Rahul Gandhi filed his papers.
Noting that Sonia Gandhi as Congress president has served the party and through it the country for the last 19 years, Manmohan Singh said Rahul Gandhi will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party.
Terming Rahul Gandhi as a "capable" leader, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad exuded confidence that he will turn out to be a "very successful" leader.
"And under his leadership, the Congress will regain power," Azad added.
Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh said Rahul Gandhi would make a very good prime minister.
"If you ask me, I think he will make a very good prime minister," said Amarinder Singh. Lok Sabha polls are due in 2019.
Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu called Rahul Gandhi a "special leader with character" who, he said has come to the forefront during times of crisis.
"He has become matured, showed his character. The general is standing at the forefront alone and on the other hand there is this entire government. This is the sign of a leader," Sidhu told reporters here.
Jyotiraditya Scindia, a party MP from Madhya Pradesh, dubbed Rahul Gandhi's imminent elevation to the top post as a "new wave of hope". Rahul Gandhi has been Congress' vice president since January 2013.
All India Mahila Congress president Sushmita Dev dubbed Gandhi a "symbol of strength, compassion and integrity" and said it was an honour to be led by him.
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Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi today hit out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, targeting him for unemployment among youth and poor wages to workers despite the 7th Pay Commission recommendations.
Gandhi has been attacking the prime minister over various issues in "a question a day" series on Twitter in the run up to the Gujarat Assembly elections, demanding answers from him for "unfulfilled promises" made by his party.
"My 6th question to the prime minister. BJP's double whammy - on one side are the unemployed youth, on the other are lakhs of fixed salary and contract workers who are unahappy.
"Despite the 7th Pay Commission fixing Rs 18,000 a month, why the fixed salary and contract workers are getting Rs 5,500 and Rs 10,000?" he asked on Twitter.
He had earlier hit out at Modi on issues concerning women's safety, education and health.
Gandhi has used the tagline "22 salon ka hisaab, Gujarat mange jawaab (Gujarat demands answers for 22 years of BJP rule)" with his posers to the prime minister.
The Congress vice president, who is leading his party's poll campaign in Gujarat, earlier accused the prime minister of "commercialising" education at the cost of government schools and institutions, and hitting students hard with fee hikes.
Gandhi earlier asked Modi why public money was "squandered" for purchasing power at higher rates from private companies in Gujarat.
He also asked why the people of Gujarat should pay for the "financial mismanagement" and publicity by him.
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The Rajasthan government looks to provide air connectivity to all districts either through its inter-state air services or the central scheme UDAAN, a senior official said.
While the Centre is pushing ahead with the ambitious regional air connectivity scheme UDAAN, the Rajasthan government's intra-state air services initiative has been operational for little over a year.
Besides, the state government has plans to start 'Palace on Wings' services to connect heritage properties, forts and palaces by air, according to Captain Keshri Singh, Director of Civil Aviation Rajasthan.
The government has plans to "connect all districts with air services either by intra-state or UDAAN or regular flight operations," he told PTI.
UDAAN or Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik scheme seeks to connect unserved and under-served airports in different parts of the country.
There are 18 state-owned airfields in Rajasthan besides AAI airports, defence airfields and private airstrips.
Among others, the state is working on efforts to bolster the aviation sector. These include "strengthening, extension and licensing of state-owned airstrips to make them compatible for regular commercial flight operations," Singh said.
The influx of Rohingyas and Bangladeshis and cross-border smuggling of fake currencies and drugs would top the agenda at a meeting of chief ministers of eastern states called by Home Minister Rajnath Singh on December 7 in Kolkata.
The chief ministers and home ministers of West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram will huddle for the day-long meeting where the influx of Rohingya and Bangladeshi immigrants and how to check it would be discussed threadbare, a Home Ministry official said.
These states share their borders with Bangladesh.
This would be the fourth meeting of the chief ministers of states, which share international borders, called by the home minister. Three separate meetings of chief ministers of states, sharing borders with Pakistan, China and Myanmar, was held earlier.
The meeting in Kolkata on December 7 is expected to chalk out plans on how to check the cross-border smuggling of fake Indian currency notes, narcotics and other illegal activities, the official said.
India shares a 4,096 km long border with Bangladesh of which 2,217 km falls in West Bengal, 262 km in Assam, 443 km in Meghalaya, 856 km in Tripura and 180 km in Mizoram.
As per the official estimate, around 36,000 Rohingyas are currently living in various parts of India.
Director General of BSF K K Sharma had last week said his troops apprehended 87 Rohingya Muslims along the Indo-Bangla border from the beginning of this year till October 31, and 76 were sent back to Bangladesh.
As per latest estimates, 9-10 lakh Rohingya Muslims have migrated to Bangladesh from Myanmar and the possibility of a spillover to India cannot be ruled out, he had said.
Illegal immigration from Bangladesh has also been a big concern for the north-eastern states and West Bengal for many years now, another Home Ministry official said.
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Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh Honorary Secretary Judy Evans today expressed desire to accept surgeons from India for training and teaching programmes in the UK and said that there is a lot to learn in India looking at the volume of work in medical science being done here.
The first visit of any member from the prestigious surgical Royal Colleges of UK to the North East region, Evans told reporters here that the 500-year old medical institution has for surgeons one-year and two-year placement schemes, besides short-term courses where surgeons from India can enroll after the General Medical Council in UK registers them.
Evans, who is a globally renowned plastic surgeon visiting, is in Guwahati to attend a seminar-cum-interactive session on 'Training of Surgeons Indo British collaboration' organised by Swagat Academy of Medical Sciences.
Asked about the cost of the training programmes, she said the salary paid in the placement was enough to take care of the period of stay in the UK.
Stating that the College has moved with the times, she said earlier it was involved in conducting exams only but in the past 10 years it has been engaging in making good surgeons in everyday life setting standards, structure and training to surgeons to make patient safety their priority.
Evans also inaugurated the first dedicated eye, nose, throat (ENT) and Head & Neck surgery centre at the Swagat premises that would be operational from January next year.
Dean of the Swagat Academy Subhash Khanna said the team of doctors would be available round-the-clock. Besides providing services for hearing impaired and affordable treatment, the centre will also have a dedicated Vertigo clinic, an allergy clinic with facility of skin prick allergy tests and immunotherapy treatment.
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Russia is and will remain India's key foreign policy priority, and the challenge before the two countries would be to nurture and foster the close ties amid fast unfolding global changes, a senior diplomat in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said today.
Vijay Gokhale, Secretary (Economic Relations) in the MEA, said past relationship between the two countries should not transmute into a "passive" present partnership, insisting there was no room for complacency in Indo-Russia ties.
He was speaking at the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), a leading think-tank.
Observing that the past few years have witnessed unprecedented changes in the world, Gokhale said Indo-Russia ties cannot remain isolated from global changes.
"Therefore, the challenge before all of us, whether in the government or outside, would be how to nurture and foster our 'Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership' amidst these fast unfolding global changes," he said.
The MEA official's comments came amid apparent unease in Moscow over India's growing ties with the United States.
Gokhale said there was a need to expand bilateral engagement between the two countries beyond the traditional fields of energy and defence.
Talking about connectivity projects, he said India supports such regional and international initiatives, but at the same time asserted that due sensitivity in respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity of states was essential, in an apparent reference to China's Belt and Road initiative (BRI).
India has expressed strong reservations over BRI as the USD 50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). CPEC is part of the BRI.
Referring to the Chabahar port project, Gokhale said it was the first step to build a sea-land link with Central Asia and Russia, that is both secure and sustainable.
"We appreciate the encouragement given by Russia to the Chabahar project," he said, a day after the first phase of the Chabahar port was inaugurated.
On regional issues, Gokhale said India and Russia have shared interest in peace, security and prosperity in Indo-Pacific, Eurasia and the world at large.
"Whenever we have divergences, these should be bridged in an appropriate way through discussion and better understanding," he noted.
On defence cooperation, Gokhale said India believes it was the opportune time to move from a buyer-seller format to joint production and investments, in order to bring a new dynamism to military co-operation.
"We invite the Russian defence industry to look at our new policies in this regard and to partner us, as India begins its journey to become a defence manufacturer," he said.
On economic cooperation, the MEA (Economic Relations) secretary said the current trade figures do not reflect the real potential.
"Russia could look at new opportunities to invest in India, for instance in infrastructure and logistics sectors. All our economic indicators suggest that ours is a market with long-term potential and stability," he added.
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Russian prosecutors today called for a 10-year prison sentence for former economy minister Alexei Ulyukayev who is accused of extorting a $2 million bribe from a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.
"I ask you to find Alexei Ulyukayev guilty," prosecutor Boris Neporozhny said in a Moscow court, asking for a 10-year prison sentence and a fine of 500 million rubles ($8.5 million).
"The guilt of the defendant in receiving a bribe is completely proven."
Ulyukayev was arrested last year while still a minister, allegedly caught red-handed in a sting operation to greenlight the acquisition by state oil giant Rosneft of a stake in oil company Bashneft.
He is the highest-ranking official arrested during Putin's 17 years in power.
Prosecutor Neporozhny accused Ulyukayev, who has spoken out against state intervention in the economy, of extorting $2 million from Rosneft chief Igor Sechin, who is a confidante of Putin, and is considered by many to be the second-most powerful man in Russia.
Sechin has refused to appear as a witness in the trial despite being summoned repeatedly, citing his busy schedule.
Ulyukayev has denied the charges, saying he has been framed. He says he accepted a basket from Sechin which he thought contained wine and other gifts.
Neporozhny accused the former economy minister of showing Sechin two fingers in an apparent code for $2 million.
"You personally took the bag with $2 million intended as a bribe," he said, adding that the former minister "tried to present himself as a victim of a provocation."
The prosecutor insisted that Ulyukayev had extorted the bribe despite not needing anything and "rolling in money."
In Russia, trials almost always end in a conviction.
Ulyukayev's arrest stunned the country's liberal elites, with Putin sacking him as economy minister in the wake of his detention.
Sechin became one of the most influential figures in Russia after building up Rosneft into the world's largest publicly traded oil company.
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The Supreme Court is likely to commence final hearing in the long-standing Ram Janmabhoomi- Babri Masjid title dispute from tomorrow, a day before the 25th anniversary of the demolition of medieval-era structure.
A specially constituted bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices Ashok Bhushan and Abdul Nazeer will be hearing a total of 13 appeals filed against the 2010 judgement of the Allahabad High Court in four civil suits.
The high court had then ruled a three-way division of the disputed 2.77 acre area at Ayodhya among the parties -- the Sunni Waqf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and the Lord Ram Lalla.
A sect of Muslims, under the banner of Shia Central Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh, had earlier approached the court offering a solution that a mosque could be built in a Muslim- dominated area at a "reasonable distance" from the disputed site in Ayodhya.
However, its intervention was opposed by the All India Sunni Waqf Board which had claimed that judicial adjudication between the two sects had already been done in 1946 by declaring the mosque, which was demolished on December 6, 1992, as one which belongs to the Sunnis.
Recently a group of civil rights activists also moved the apex court seeking intervention in the Ayodhya dispute and urged it to consider the issue saying it is not just a dispute over property but has several other aspects which would have far-reaching effects on the "secular fabric of the country".
In pursuance to the apex court's earlier direction, the Yogi Adityanath government has submitted English translation of exhibits and documents likely to be relied upon, as these were in eight different languages.
A battery of high profile lawyers including senior advocates K Parasaran and C S Vaidyanathan and advocate Saurabh Shamsheri will appear for Lord Ram Lalla, the deity, and Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta will represent the Uttar Pradesh government.
Senior advocates Kapil Sibal, Anoop George Chaudhari, Rajeev Dhavan and Sushil Jain will represent other parties including All India Sunni Waqf Board and Nirmohi Akhara.
The top court had on August 11 asked the UP government to complete within 10 weeks the translation of the evidence recorded for adjudication of the title dispute in the high court. It had said it would not allow the matter to take any shape other than the civil appeals and would adopt the same procedure as was done by the high court.
BJP leader Subramanian Swamy, an intervenor in the matter, had attempted to raise the issue of fundamental right of religion of the Hindus under Article 25 of the Constitution.
Many of the original plantiffs and defendants in the matter including Mohd Hashim, who was the first person to take the matter to the apex court, have died.
A three-judge bench of the Allahabad High Hourt, in a 2:1 majority ruling, had said the land be partitioned equally among three parties -- the Sunni Waqf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and Ram Lalla.
Schools are responsible for providing a safe environment to children and ensure that adults there do not pose a risk to them, the Delhi High Court has said and expressed shock over the way a private school here handled students' sexual harassment complaints.
A bench of Justices Siddharth Mridul and Deepa Sharma said a school is where a child is groomed for the society and it is the duty of every such institution to provide safe and healthy atmosphere for the psychological, cognitive and behavioural development of the students.
The court's observations came as it pulled up the management of Modern Public School here for not forwarding to the police the sexual harassment complaints made by some girl students against a male music teacher and brushing it under the carpet.
"In the present case, the manner in which the school authorities have handled the number of sexual harassment complaints received from young girls and their parents, really shocks our conscience.
"Instead of forwarding such complaints to the appropriate authorities for legal action, they felt satisfied by issuing a show cause notice calling upon the explanation probably preparing to take disciplinary action against the appellant (teacher). They must have felt relieved when the appellant submitted his resignation," the bench said.
It said this attitude of the school authorities encouraged the wrongdoers and discouraged the Samaritans - the brave girls who had the courage to make the complaints.
The court said it was an incumbent duty of all to build a protective net around children who have suffered any physical or emotional abuse.
It said that any lenient approach in such cases would adversely affect the psychology of the children who carry the scars of sexual abuse during their childhood to teenage and then to adulthood, without having the satisfaction that the wrongdoer had been punished.
The bench directed the school authorities to forward all the sexual harassment complaints of young girls received by them to the police for necessary action.
"We are aware that much time has elapsed, but the offence still stare stark at our face and we cannot close our eyes just by disposing of this appeal. The school authorities are also directed to extend their full cooperation to the police. The court shall be informed about the action taken within two weeks," it said.
The bench said children spend a considerable amount of time at school and if they face any harassment or untoward behaviour and report it to the administration, it is their duty to deal with such matters strictly.
The court's observations came as it dismissed the plea of Anirudh Kumar Pandey, the music teacher at Modern Public School here, seeking reinstatement. He was accused of outraging the modesty of girl students and misbehaving with women teachers in September 2000.
When the school had sought an explanation from him, he submitted his resignation which was approved by the school management and forwarded to the Directorate of Education (DoE) for approval. DoE accorded the approval and his services were dispensed with by the school.
Though he had later written a letter withdrawing his resignation, the school had already accepted his resignation.
The teacher, in his plea, claimed that the resignation was withdrawn by him before it was approved by DoE and his resignation was not voluntary and was extracted through coercion and duress.
The school, however, contended that it had received several complaints of sexual harassment against the teacher and his resignation had been accepted right away.
The bench said there was no merit in the teacher's appeal challenging an order of a single judge of the high court upholding the termination of his services.
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Catalan separatist parties that tried to break away from Spain would lose their absolute majority in regional parliament in elections later this month, an influential opinion poll showed today.
The central government's Sociological Research Centre (CIS) predicted that the three pro-independence parties would get 44.4 per cent of the votes and 66 to 67 parliamentary seats out of 135, just under the absolute majority of 68.
In the last regional elections in September 2015, they won 72 seats with 47.8 per cent of the votes.
The three parties opposed to independence would get 44.3 per cent of the votes and gain 59 to 60 seats, the poll suggested.
The poll was carried out across Catalonia last month, after the regional parliament declared independence.
Independence never materialised, however, as Madrid sacked the Catalan government after the declaration on October 27, imposed direct rule on the once semi-autonomous region and called elections for December 21 in a bid to "restore normality."
The poll, in which 3,000 people were interviewed, said just over 90 per cent of those questioned were completely certain to vote in the elections while five per cent will "probably" go.
Some 29 per cent of eligible voters, however, are still undecided as to whom they will elect.
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Alleged hawala dealer Mohammad Aslam Wani was today denied bail by a Delhi court in a decade- old money laundering case which also involves Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah.
Additional Sessions Judge Sidharth Sharma dismissed the bail application filed by the accused, saying the allegations levelled against him were serious and the stage was not fit for the grant of relief.
In the order, the court also considered the arguments advanced by the ED's special public prosecutor N K Matta, who had said that the only link to unearth the entire terror conspiracy the agency had were Shah and Wani, both currently in judicial custody, and if granted the relief, Wani will vanish and never be caught.
Opposing the application, Matta had also claimed that the allegations against Wani were of very serious economic offences which "could disturb the financial condition of the country".
In his application filed through advocate M S Khan, 36- year-old Wani has claimed that the probe regarding him was complete and he was not required for further investigation.
"They (ED investigators) have been investigating the case for a decade and still they are seeking more time. During this entire period, the accused was always available," Khan said.
The advocate said a 2010 trial court judgement clearing Wani of terror funding charges in 2005 case, based on which the current money laundering case was lodged in 2007, was confirmed by the Delhi High Court on October 31.
"The effect of confirmation of acquittal of the applicant (Wani) is that there is no material left to connect him with the co-accused (Shah) as it was not proved that money was recovered or was meant to be used for any illegal purpose (hawala)," he said.
The ED had in September filed a charge sheet against Wani and Shah, whose bail application in the case was also dismissed on August 22.
Wani was arrested by the ED from Srinagar on August 6 with the help of the state police and is currently in judicial custody. Shabir Shah was arrested by the agency from Srinagar on July 26.
The ED action against the two was in pursuance of an August 2005 case in which the Delhi Police's Special Cell had arrested Wani, who is alleged to have claimed he had passed on Rs 2.25 crore to Shah.
In 2010, a Delhi court had cleared Wani of terror funding charges but convicted him under the Arms Act. The ED had registered a criminal case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act against Shah and Wani.
On August 26, 2005, Wani was apprehended, with the ED claiming to have recovered Rs 63 lakh from him. It was also alleged that the funds were received through hawala channels from the Middle East, along with a large cache of ammunition.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Rebel JDU MPs Sharad Yadav and Ali Anwar were disqualified from the Rajya Sabha tonight, according to a communication from chairman of the House M Venkaiah Naidu.
Naidu in his communication said they cease to be Rajya Sabha members with immediate effect.
The Rajya Sabha chairman agreed to the JDU's contention that the two senior leaders had "voluntarily given up" their membership by defying their party's directives and attending events of opposition parties.
The JDU had sought their disqualification on the grounds that they had attended a rally of opposition parties in Patna in violation of its direction.
Yadav had joined hands with the opposition after JDU president and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kuamar dumped the Grand Alliance in Bihar and tied up with the BJP.
Yadav was elected to the House last year and his term was scheduled to end in 2022. Anwar's term was to expire early next year.
The former JDU president, who is at present in Gujarat to campaign against the BJP, is expected to respond to his disqualification tomorrow.
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Police have arrested three people in connection with the killing of RSS worker and journalist Rajesh Mishra in Brahmanpura village here, a senior police official said today.
However, gang leader Raju Yadav is still absconding and will be arrested soon, Superintendent of Police Somen Verma said.
"A number of police teams were involved to search the killers. Acting on a tip-off, six miscreants were travelling in two motorcycles yesterday, police intensified checking," the SP said.
"When the police signalled the bikers to stop, they turned away their motorcycle and started firing. However, one motorcycle lost its balance and the bikers fell and were arrested," he said.
They have been identified as Ajit Yadav and Jhanku Yadav (both residents of Bhabhua district in Bihar) and Sunil Yadav of Chandauli, the SP said.
Those who managed to escape are Raju Yadav, Govardhan Yadav and Pawan Yadav, he said.
"Rajesh Mishra used to publish against Raju Yadav and his gang members, who were involved in illegal mining. On October 21, Mishra was shot dead by three motorcycle-borne assailants, who also wounded his brother," Verma said.
The assailants, who came brandishing firearms, shot at Mishra, 40, when he and his brother Amitesh were at their shop in Brahmanpura Chatti area where they sold building material.
Mishra, who was shot in the head, was declared brought dead at the district hospital.
His brother, who was shot in the abdomen, has been referred to a Varanasi hospital for further treatment.
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The Tamil Nadu government has moved the Madras High Court to restrain Nissan Motor Company, which runs its unit here, from proceeding with international arbitration against the Centre in a dispute which involves, among other things, refund of Value Added Tax (VAT).
Opposing arbitration under the Indo-Japanese Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), the state government said it was not the remedy.
The remedy for Nissan and its Joint Venture partner Renault lay in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) entered with it and not the CEPA, to which Tamil Nadu was not a party.
Even under CEPA, the firm cannot go in for arbitration as it has gone to the High Court over a related matter which is pending, the state government contended in its plea.
According to media reports, Nissan initiated international arbitration proceedings against the Indian government seeking USD 770 million.
The Tamil Nadu government contended that Renault Nissan Automotive India Private Limited and Nissan Motor India Private Limited are not entitled to the claim, which is "exaggerated" and not "genuine".
The maximum subsidy (financial incentive/VAT refund) that can be paid was only around Rs 4,500 crore, the Tamil Nadu government said.
Justice Anitha Sumant, before whom the original application from the TN State Industries Department came up today, ordered notice to be issued to the authorities concerned.
According to the state government, it was found that RNAIPL and NMIPL changed their business model from April 1, 2012.
In tune with it, RNAIPL was treated as manufacturer and NMIPL as a marketing firm, thus showing that the entire sales was effected within Tamil Nadu. This change affected the very purpose and object of the MoU, the government said.
A steep increase in the output tax during 2012-13 and 2013-14 led to certain queries.
By changing the business model, a product sold either by Renault or Nissan, gains input value and gets subsidy.
As regards some products, if sold to NMIPL, it may result in subsidy for input as well as on sales to consumers, creating a scope for enjoying double benefit of input as well as output value.
After considering all these aspects, the department issued a Government Order and amended the TN Value Added Tax Act,2006,bringing the legal framework in tune with the change.
The aggrieved companies moved the High Court with writ petitions against the amendment and the related notice to it.
The firms obtained interim orders, the subject matter of dispute in the arbitration.
The petitions are not maintainable as the field was governed by the MoU which had an arbitration clause. Therefore without availing this alternative remedy, the petitions were filed and hence they were not maintainable, the state government said.
The subsidy/financial incentive/tax refund proposed to be given covered a period of 21 years from the date of commercial production and depended on manufacture and sale.
If the incentive was given in a shorter time span against the proposed period, there was a likelihood of the firms getting disinterested and it may affect the state.
In the case of Mahindra and Mahindra, it left the field within a short span after entering into an MoU in 2006, the state government said.
"By changing the business model, the consortium was making an unlawful gain and reached the target (of incentives to be paid by government) within a short span of time and with undue benefits, which were all against the state's interests.
As per CEPA, no investment dispute can be taken for international arbitration if the disputing investor went to a a court or tribunal over it.
If proceedings were withdrawn within 30 days from the date of filing the case, the disputing investor may submit the investment dispute to international arbitration.
However, the companies approached the International Arbitration without reference to this clause, the government said.
Since they challenged the amended provisions before the High Court, they are now disallowed from raising the same dispute before the International Arbitration, which is prohibited under CEPA, the government contended.
So far as the claim was concerned, the issue relates to subsidy under the heads of VAT and CST.
Disputing the claim, Tamil Nadu said it was invoking the arbitration clause in this respect as spelt out in the MoU it enetered with the firm in 2008.
"If at all the two companies are aggrieved...the remedy is to invoke clause 15 of the MoU and not CEPA...there are no obligations cast on the applicant (Tamil Nadu)," under the agreement.
"The companies, with a view to coercing the applicant (Tamil Nadu), are taking all sorts of pressurising tactics by invoking the arbitration clause in CEPA to which the applicant is not a party.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
US President Donald Trump is closely monitoring the progress in his new South Asia Strategy, which gives a major role to India, and is very much engaged in its implementation, a senior administration official has said.
Trump had sought a major role for India in bringing peace in Afghanistan and ruled out a hasty withdrawal of troops from the war-torn nation while announcing his new Afghanistan and South Asia policy in August.
"The president has been very closely monitoring the progress of the South Asia strategy. He's very interested in any progress that has been made," a senior administration official told PTI.
Trump had a meeting with his Defense Secretary Jim Mattis before he left on his visit to Pakistan. The defense Secretary is again likely to brief the president on his return.
On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly Session in New York in September, Trump met the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
"That was a good opportunity to hear from President Ghani on how the strategy was being received in Afghanistan," the official said.
Observing that Trump has been getting updates from his national security team on what's happening in Afghanistan, the official said the president is very much engaged and interested in how this strategy is progressing.
Asserting that the things are signs of encouragement in the implementation of the South Asia strategy, the official said it is moving in the right direction.
"We need to give more time for the strategy to take root," the official said.
"It's a multifaceted strategy. We're using all the tools that the US has its disposal military, economic, diplomatic. All these parts of the strategy are important. They all need to work in tandem together. The president is very interested in keeping track of how the strategy is going. And he is receiving regular updates," the senior administration official said.
In his August 21 speech, Trump had said that terrorists who slaughter innocent people will find no glory in this life or the next.
"They are nothing but thugs, and criminals, and predators, and -- that's right -- losers. Working alongside our allies, we will break their will, dry up their recruitment, keep them from crossing our borders, and yes, we will defeat them, and we will defeat them handily," he had said.
"In Afghanistan and Pakistan, America's interests are clear: We must stop the resurgence of safe havens that enable terrorists to threaten America, and we must prevent nuclear weapons and materials from coming into the hands of terrorists and being used against us, or anywhere in the world for that matter," Trump said.
Announcing his strategy, Trump said a core pillar of his new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions.
"Another fundamental pillar of our new strategy is the integration of all instruments of American power -- diplomatic, economic, and military -- toward a successful outcome," he said.
Describing Pakistan as an important part of his strategy, Trump had said the US can no longer be silent about Pakistan's safe havens for terrorist organisations, the Taliban, and other groups that pose a threat to the region and beyond.
Pakistan has much to gain from partnering with our effort in Afghanistan. It has much to lose by continuing to harbor criminals and terrorists, he had said.
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Two ultras of the outlawed Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA), who had fled during an encounter with the police, have surrendered to the police in Meghalayas South Garo Hills district, police said today.
The duo, who were close to GNLA chief Sohan D Shira, had surrendered in Baghmara police station yesterday evening but did not submit any arms, superintendent of police A Sangma said.
They had escaped along with Shira during the encounter with the police on November 16 at Halwa Atong village.
They got separated during the police combing operations. They trekked for days and arrived at Gittimggre village where they contacted church leaders for their surrender, which took place yesterday, Sangma said.
Shira is still absconding, the SP said.
Formed in 2010, the GNLA is demanding a separate Garoland on the lines of the Bodo Territorial Council in Assam and is involved in killing, kidnapping for ransom and terrorising people in the five western Garo Hills districts in Meghalaya.
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The Bombay High Court today directed that the matters pertaining to noise pollution, caused by the construction of the Metro III project, would be heard by a two-member judicial committee.
The court said this after the parties concerned failed to arrive at an amicable solution.
A division bench of Chief Justice Manjula Chellur and Justice M S Sonak was hearing a petition filed by lawyer Robin Jaisinghani, alleging that the construction activities for the project were resulting in noise pollution in the vicinity.
The bench had, last month, directed the parties concerned to hold meetings and arrive at an amicable solution, considering the fact that the metro project was important.
It had also appointed lawyer Zal Andhyarujina as amicus curiae (friend of the court) to assist it on the matter.
The bench was today informed by Andhyarujina that several meetings were held between the parties concerned and while most of the issues had been resolved, the only issue that remained unresolved was the work that was needed to be carried out at night.
"The MMRCL (Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Ltd) wants to carry out certain works at night, which involve the use of tunnel-boring machines and removal of debris from the construction sites. This is creating problems," he said.
The bench noted that certain sacrifices on the part of all the parties concerned were required in the interest of the public and the project.
"We had constituted a committee of justices B R Gavai and S M Kemkar to hear the matters pertaining to tree-cutting for the metro project. We are of the opinion that this committee can be relied upon to resolve the issues arising out of this petition too. We hope that the committee finds an amicable solution," the court said.
The 33-kilometre Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ Metro Line III project will connect the Cuffe Parade business district in south Mumbai to SEEPZ and the airport in the city's north- central suburbs.
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US Defence Secretary James Mattis today arrived in Pakistan with the issue of terrorist safe havens high on the agenda, after the release from house arrest of 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed last month.
Mattis landed at the Nur Khan Airbase in Rawalpindi where he was received by officials from Pakistan's defence and foreign ministries.
He will hold talks with civilian and military leaders including Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa.
Relations between the US and Pakistan have plummeted after President Donald Trump announced his new Afghan and South Asia policy in August and directly blamed Islamabad for supporting the Afghan Taliban.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Pakistan.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
JuD chief Saeed, who has an American bounty of USD 10 million on his head, walked free on November 24 after a court ordered an end to his 10-month detention.
The Pakistan government decided against detaining him further in any other case, pushing back against India's efforts to bring the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai terror attack to justice.
"The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," Mattis said on his way to Pakistan from Egypt.
Mattis is the first top American official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the US' new South Asia strategy unveiled by Trump on August 21.
"We know we have some common ground. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their troops killed and wounded by terrorists. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their innocent people murdered and wounded by terrorists, so we know that there is common ground," he said, ahead of his visit.
Similarly, he said, there is common ground between Afghanistan and Pakistan, because there are terrorist groups that try to move back and forth, that do move back and forth in order to live in one country and attack the other.
"So we know there's common ground; it's how much more common ground can we find by listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others' perspective," Mattis said.
"But at the same time, as the General (Bajwa) has said, he wants no havens for terrorists anywhere, so we will work together and we'll find that common ground, if we have the will to. And then we'll work on how we address the problems where we can work together," he said.
He said he would not characterise everything over the past 16 years as failures.
"There is clearly an abundance of areas where we have to double down, and I am optimistic at this point that because of what our adversaries, our mutual enemies are doing, that we can find ways to work together," he said.
Mattis said both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistan military, the NATO-led militaries of 39 nations have all been in fights here. "We've got to find a way to work together".
He said there is "always an urgency to something" when 39 nations plus Afghanistan have their troops in the midst of a long war, where causalities are being taken.
"These are 39 of the most economically powerful, generally speaking, most long-term democratic institutions in the world. These are powerful nations morally, economically and diplomatically, and certainly militarily," he said.
Mattis said that it was essential in South Asia that all countries work together to restore the level of stability that allows for the economy to build.
"I mean, can you imagine a border between Pakistan and India where economic trade is not ongoing to the benefit of people on both sides of that border. We can not only imagine it, it's a reality right now," Mattis said.
"So we have got to work together on this, and there's a sense of urgency about that," he said.
"There's people who are living below the poverty line in both those countries. So as you look at this problem, if you'll expand the problem you can understand the sense of urgency to move beyond violence and get back to the normal order of things," he said.
"General Bajwa is a mature officer with a deep background in not just military matters, but South Asia security issues, and we have got to find a way to move beyond this constant fighting that's characterised the area," he said.
Media reports suggested that Mattis faces a difficult task ahead as Pakistan is not happy over repeated US allegations of safe havens for militants in the country.
The Express Tribune yesterday said the civilian-military leadership will adopt a "clear cut and decisive" stance during the visit of Mattis that "only cooperation will get cooperation".
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
US Defence Secretary James Mattis today met the top Pakistani leadership here and reviewed current state of the bilateral ties and the war on terror, amidst Washington's concern that Islamabad was not doing enough to dismantle terror safe havens on its soil.
Mattis, who arrived today in Pakistan with the issue of terrorists safe havens high on the agenda after the release of 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed from house arrest last month, met Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi.
According to the state-run Radio Pakistan, they discussed different aspects of Pak-US relations especially the regional security situation.
Defence Minister Khurram Dastgir, Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif, Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal, National Security Adviser Nasser Khan Janjua, ISI DG Lt Gen Naveed Mukhtar and senior officials were present on the occasion, it added.
Mattis is also expected to meet Pakistan Army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa.
Relations between the US and Pakistan have plummeted after President Donald Trump announced his new Afghan and South Asia policy in August and directly blamed Islamabad for supporting the Afghan Taliban.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Pakistan.
Talking to journalists aboard his plane yesterday, Mattis said he did not plan to "prod" Pakistan into action because he expected Islamabad to adhere to its promises to combat terrorism, Dawn reported.
He disagreed with a journalist who suggested that Mattis might end up "butting heads" with Prime Minister Abbasi and Army Chief Bajwa when he meets them in Islamabad on his first visit as the Pentagon chief, the paper said.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo has said Pakistan's policy of using terrorists as a leverage against India and Afghanistan has not changed and warned Islamabad that the US will do "everything it can" to ensure that terror safe havens no longer exists in the country.
Pompeo told Regan National Defence Forum in California over the weekend that this is the message that Secretary Mattis was tasked to deliver to the Pakistani leadership.
The spy chief said said that nothing has changed with regard to Pakistan when it comes to using terrorist as a leverage to deal with Afghanistan and India.
"Not yet," he said.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately arrest and charge 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
JuD chief Saeed, who has an American bounty of USD 10 million on his head, walked free on November 24 after a court ordered an end to his 10-month detention.
"The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," Mattis said earlier on his way to Pakistan.
Mattis is the first top American official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the US' new South Asia strategy unveiled by Trump on August 21.
He said there is common ground between Afghanistan and Pakistan because there are terrorist groups that try to move back and forth, that do move back and forth in order to live in one country and attack the other.
"So we know there's common ground; it's how much more common ground can we find by listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others' perspective," Mattis said.
"But at the same time, as the General (Bajwa) has said, he wants no havens for terrorists anywhere, so we will work together and we'll find that common ground, if we have the will to. And then we'll work on how we address the problems where we can work together," he said.
Mattis said there is "always an urgency to something" when 39 nations plus Afghanistan have their troops in the midst of a long war, where causalities are being taken.
He said that it was essential in South Asia that all countries work together to restore the level of stability that allows for the economy to build.
"I mean, can you imagine a border between Pakistan and India where economic trade is not ongoing to the benefit of people on both sides of that border. We can not only imagine it, it's a reality right now," Mattis said.
"So we have got to work together on this, and there's a sense of urgency about that," he said.
"There's people who are living below the poverty line in both those countries. So as you look at this problem, if you'll expand the problem you can understand the sense of urgency to move beyond violence and get back to the normal order of things," he said.
"General Bajwa is a mature officer with a deep background in not just military matters, but South Asia security issues, and we have got to find a way to move beyond this constant fighting that's characterised the area," he said.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
America's spy chief has said that Pakistan's policy of using terrorists as a leverage against India and Afghanistan has not changed and the US will do everything it can to ensure that terror safe havens no longer exists in Pakistan.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo told Regan National Defence Forum in California over the weekend that this is the message that Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis was tasked to deliver to Pakistan during his meetings with the top Pakistani leaders.
"Mattis will deliver the message that says We would love you to do that. That is that safe haven inside of Pakistan has worked to the detriment of our capacity to do what we needed to do in Afghanistan and in the absence of the Pakistanis achieving that we're going to do everything we can to make sure that that safe haven no longer exists," he said.
Appearing on the same panel, former CIA director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that Pakistan has always been a problem.
"It's been a safe haven for terrorists who come across the border and attack in Afghanistan and then go back into Pakistan. We have made every effort possible during the time I was there to convince Pakistan to stop it," he said.
But Pakistan remains unconvinced, he added.
"Pakistan has this kind of two-edged approach to dealing with terrorism. On the one hand yes they don't like terrorism where the attacks from terrorists in their country. But at the same time, they don't mind using terrorists as leverage to deal with Afghanistan and to deal with India. That's the policy that they've been involved with," Panetta said.
"So, Pakistan has always been a question mark," he said and hoped that Mattis and Pompeo are successful in making clear to the Pakistanis that they've got to be able to seal their border and they have to be able to go after the terrorists within their own territory.
"Unless that happens we are going to continue to have problems in it," Panetta said.
Pompeo said that nothing has changed with regard to Pakistan when it comes to using terrorist as a leverage to deal with Afghanistan and India.
"Not yet," he said.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Legendary Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of '70s and '80s, died this evening. He was 79.
He took his last breath at the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital here.
Actor Randhir Kapoor, son of veteran actor Raj Kapoor, confirmed the .
"Yes he has passed away. He had kidney problem since several years. He was on dialysis for several years," Randhir Kapoor told PTI.
The funeral will be held tomorrow morning, he said.
"Shashi Kapoor expired at 5:20 pm on December 4 at Kokilaben Hospital in Mumbai," Dr Ram Narain fron Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital told PTI.
Born on March 18, 1938, to the illustrious and formidable theatre and film actor Prithviraj Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor hit the spotlight at the age of four, acting in plays directed and produced by his father. He started acting in films as a child artiste in the late '40s.
His best known performances as a child actor were in "Aag" (1948) and "Awaara" (1951), where he played the younger version of the character played by Raj Kapoor. Shashi Kapoor also worked as assistant director in the '50s.
He made his debut as a leading man in the 1961 film "Dharmputra" and went on to appear in more than 116 films during '70s and until the mid '80s.
Some of his memorable films include "Deewar", "Kabhie Kabhie", "Namak Halal", "Kaala Pathar" and others.
He was honoured with Padma Bhushan in 2011 and received the prestigious Dada Saheb Phalke award in 2015.
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The Jammu and Kashmir unit of the BJP said today that a well-governed state was the "only guarantee" against militancy, days after Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti asserted insurgency cannot be wiped out by killing militants alone.
BJP spokesperson S S Bijral said Mufti's assertion was a "virtual statement of truth", but he added that the "globally-established fact" that a "well-governed state is the only guarantee against militancy" calls for a careful reading.
At a police training school in Kathua on November 29, Mufti had said that militancy "cannot be wiped out by killing militants alone. We need to understand the reason and the real problem behind militancy".
She had also called for a "humane approach" to tackle militancy.
Brijlal, whose party is a partner in the ruling coalition in Jammu and Kashmir, said the state was the "most corrupt Indian state with governance leaving lot to be desired".
He said her message of "humane approach" was meant for the Indian security forces, who have killed nearly 200 militants in the Valley in 2017.
The BJP spokesperson said the militants in Kashmir "deserve the response they are receiving."
"Let there be no laxity in the resolve to end terrorism," he said.
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Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah today said his government will not allow communal violence in the state even if the BJP tried hard for the same ahead of the assembly polls.
His comments come in the wake of the arrest of BJP MP Pratap Simha near Mysuru, ahead of a Hamnuman Jayanti procession yesterday. Simha is out on station bail.
"We will not allow any communal violence in our state, however much the BJP tries, ahead of the (assembly) polls. We will deal it with iron hands," Siddaramaiah told reporters here.
The senior Congress leader condemned the behaviour of Simha for allegedly taking the driver's seat and knocking down barricades, causing injury to some police personnel.
Simha and others were taken into preventive custody and later arrested after he along with the organisers allegedly insisted on making changes in the specified route for the Hanuman Jayanti procession, ignoring the advice of the administration.
On being stopped by the police for his preventivearrest yesterday, Simha allegedly took the driver's seat of the vehicle he was travelling in and tried to drive off by knocking down barricades in the area.
Karnataka BJP chief B S Yeddyurappa, however, accused the chief minister of indulging in vendetta politics.
Siddaramaiah said ensuring law and order was the responsibility of the government.
"Therefore, two different routes were chalked out for smooth conduct of Eid Milad and Hanuma Jayanti processions," he said.
The Karnataka chief minister was in the national capital for showing his solidarity with Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, who filed his nomination for the party president's post.
Siddaramaiah later made a courtesy visit to Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu and Union Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu.
Exhuding confidence of winning the forthcoming 2018 assembly polls, the Congress leader said the party tickets would be given to those with a high potential to win.
"We will discuss with party workers and decide about ticket distribution. The candidates with winning prospects will be given the priority," he said.
Asked if the BJP's massive victory in Uttar Pradesh civic polls would have an impact on Karnataka, Siddaramaiah said, "The election of local bodies is different from assembly polls. There will not be any impact. We are confident of winning with majority seats".
Siddaramaiah also made it clear that he will contest from the Chamundeshwari Assembly constituency next year.
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Xiaomi India, popular for its smartphone brand, has plans to set up more plants and add capacity to manufacture phone and products in other categories.
The company currently has three manufacturing plants -- two for phones in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh and one for power banks in Noida, its Vice-President Manu Jain told reporters here.
"We are definitely exploring. We want to add more capacity. We want to set up more plants, not just for phones, even for other categories like Mi-band. There are many other categories...," he said.
From July 2014 to the beginning of this year, the company has invested more than Rs 3,000 crore in the country, Jain said.
The company is making fresh investments as more factories, service centres, R&D centre are being set up, he said. The investment figures would be known by this year-end.
Xiaomi claimed it is the number one smartphone vendor in India, as per IDC's latest Quarterly Smartphone Tracker, Q3 2017.
With a market share of 23.5 per cent and having shipped 9.2 million smartphones in the quarter, it has become the fastest growing smartphone brand in India, the company said.
Jain, meanwhile, allayed fears over the security of the Xiaomi phones.
"We don't collect any user data. Not at all. We provide some internet services...which means the user has to say, yes I want to use them. Even when the consumer opting these services, the data is sent to servers, they are fully encrypted. There is no security risk".
Xiaomi on Monday launched Redmi 5A in Hyderabad.
Yemen's president has ordered his forces to retake control of Sanaa, a presidential source said today, after the rebel alliance that forced his government from the capital collapsed amid heavy fighting.
Witnesses reported fresh clashes between forces loyal to ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh and Iran-backed Shiite Huthi rebels, who together seized control of Sanaa from the internationally recognised government three years ago.
Their alliance has unravelled over the last week, with fierce battles breaking out across the capital, accusations of betrayal and Saleh reaching out to the Saudi-led coalition battling the insurgents.
President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, whose government operates from the southern city of Aden, moved to take advantage of the chaos today.
"The president has ordered Vice President Ali Mohsen al- Ahmar, who is in Marib (east of Sanaa), to activate military units and advance towards the capital," an official in the presidency told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The government also reached out to Saleh and his supporters with an offer of amnesty.
"The president will soon announce a general amnesty for all those who collaborated with the Huthis in recent months and who have retracted that allegiance," Prime Minister Ahmad Obaid bin Daghr said.
"We will stand with everyone who stands against the Huthis... in the face of the Iranian threat," he said.
The Saudi-led coalition and the Yemeni government accuse Iran of arming the Huthis, which Iran denies.
The Saleh-Huthi alliance has been fraught since its inception in 2014, when the two ended decades of enmity and joined ranks to capture Sanaa from Hadi's government.
Saudi Arabia, accusing arch-rival Iran of backing the rebels, intervened in the Yemen war on behalf of the government the following year.
A Saudi-led military coalition has been hitting Sanaa with air strikes for months. A fresh wave today targeted areas near Sanaa International Airport and the interior ministry, both under Huthi control, according to residents and a source in the airport.
The coalition today warned Yemeni civilians to avoid rebel areas.
Residents near the airport said multiple air raids had shaken their homes late Sunday night and in the early hours of today.
An airport source said rebel bases near the location appeared to have been targeted, but the airport itself had not been bombed.
Residents reported that the fighting, which erupted Wednesday, had spread outside the capital.
Tribal sources in Saleh's hometown Sanhan, south of Sanaa, today reported intense overnight fighting between the Huthis and Saleh loyalists.
The Huthis today also claimed they were closing in on key members of Saleh's party.
Witnesses said clashes had erupted around the residence of Tarek Saleh, a nephew of the former president and a leader with his forces.
The clashes in the capital had killed some 60 people as of Sunday. There was no immediate information available today on fresh casualties.
Since 2014, Sanaa has been jointly controlled by Saleh and the Huthis, who set up their own government there after ousting Hadi's administration, and for two years fought the Saudi-led coalition together.
Saleh on Saturday announced he was open to talks with Saudi Arabia and its allies on condition they ended their crippling blockade on Yemen's ports and airports.
That dealt a serious blow to his already fragile alliance with rebel chief Abdul Malik al-Huthi.
The Saleh-Huthi split sparked fears of a new front in the Yemen war, which has already claimed more than 8,750 lives since the Saudi-led coalition joined the war.
The conflict has pushed Yemen to the brink of mass starvation and triggered what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Yemen's Huthi rebels today claimed that ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh had been killed as fighting shook the capital Sanaa following the collapse of his alliance with the insurgents.
The claim, which could not be independently confirmed, came as Yemen's long and devastating civil war took a potentially decisive turn.
Heavy clashes were reported in the city between forces loyal to Saleh and the Iran-backed Shiite rebels, who together seized control of Sanaa from the internationally recognised government three years ago.
Moving to take advantage of the chaos, President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, whose government is backed by a Saudi- led military coalition, ordered his forces to advance on the capital.
The Huthi-controlled interior ministry announced Saleh's death on the rebels' Al-Masirah television station.
A statement read on the channel announced the "end of the crisis of militias", referring to Saleh's armed supporters, and "the killing of their leader and a number of his criminal supporters".
A video given to AFP by the rebels showed what appeared to be a dead Saleh with a severe head injury, his body wrapped in a floral-print blanket.
An AFP photographer who approached Saleh's home in southern Sanaa today found it in the hands of the Huthis and was prevented from entering. The house appeared to have been damaged in fighting.
The alliance between Saleh, who ruled Yemen for more than three decades before resigning in 2012, unravelled over the past week, with at least 100 people reported dead in fighting, accusations of betrayal and the former leader reaching out to the Saudi-led coalition.
As witnesses reported continued heavy fighting today, Hadi ordered his forces to launch an offensive to advance on the capital.
"The president has ordered Vice President Ali Mohsen al- Ahmar, who is in Marib (east of Sanaa), to activate military units and advance towards the capital," a presidency official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The government also reached out to Saleh's supporters with an offer of amnesty.
"The president will soon announce a general amnesty for all those who collaborated with the Huthis in recent months and who have retracted that allegiance," Prime Minister Ahmad Obaid bin Daghr said.
The Saleh-Huthi alliance had been fraught since its inception in 2014, when the two ended decades of enmity and joined ranks to capture Sanaa from Hadi's government.
Saudi Arabia, accusing arch-rival Iran of backing the rebels, intervened in the Yemen war on behalf of the government the following year.
The Saudi-led coalition has been hitting Sanaa with air strikes for months, and a fresh wave today targeted areas near Sanaa International Airport and the interior ministry, both under Huthi control, residents and an airport source said.
The coalition today warned Yemeni civilians to avoid rebel areas.
"The coalition urges civilians to evacuate areas near positions held by the Huthis," read a statement published by Saudi Arabia's state-run Al-Ekhbariya TV.
"We ask civilians to remain at least 500 metres away from Huthi military vehicles and gatherings."
Residents near the airport said multiple air raids had shaken their homes late on Sunday night and early today.
An airport source said rebel bases near the location appeared to have been targeted, but the airport itself had not been bombed.
Residents reported that the fighting, which erupted Wednesday, had spread outside the capital.
Tribal sources in Saleh's hometown Sanhan, south of Sanaa, today reported intense overnight fighting between the Huthis and Saleh loyalists.
Witnesses said clashes had erupted around the residence of Tarek Saleh, a nephew of the former president and a leader with his forces.
Saleh on Saturday announced he was open to talks with Saudi Arabia and its allies on condition they ended their crippling blockade of Yemen's ports and airports.
That dealt a serious blow to his already fragile alliance with rebel chief Abdul Malik al-Huthi.
The Saleh-Huthi split sparked fears of a new front in the Yemen war, which has already claimed more than 8,750 lives since the Saudi-led coalition intervened.
The conflict has pushed Yemen to the brink of mass starvation and triggered what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Sankalp Phartiyal and Euan Rocha
MUMBAI (Reuters) - Investors on Monday cheered the appointment of Infosys Ltd's new chief executive, in hopes the Indian IT services firm can move past a costly boardroom spat, though questions remain over how the new boss will navigate strained corporate ties internally.
After well over a decade with Capgemini, Salil Parekh is returning to India to head Infosys, where he is tasked with reinvigorating growth, while keeping the peace.
Parekh joins Infosys, historically a bellwether of India's $154 billion IT services sector, as it attempts to heal following a nasty public spat between its board and founders that led to the dramatic exit of its previous CEO, Vishal Sikka, in August.
Shares in Infosys rose nearly 4 percent on Monday following Parekh's appointment as markets welcomed the board's move to tap an industry veteran with both deep experience in leading a consulting firm and knowledge of the Indian IT model.
But investors remain concerned about how he will deal with potential strains in the relationship with the founders, which cost Infosys billions of dollars in market capitalisation earlier this year.
"The incoming CEO will have to maintain a good rapport with the founders and take care of corporate governance," said R.K. Gupta, managing director at Taurus Asset Management, which owns shares in Infosys. "I believe both the CEO and founders will be cautious in their dealings with one another."
Parekh joins Bengaluru-based Infosys in January from Paris-headquartered Capgemini, where he headed their core application services business in key markets like North America and the United Kingdom, and their cloud services and cloud infrastructure businesses. He also managed Sogeti - a unit of Capgemini focused on digital transformation.
In its most recent quarter, Capgemini's digital and cloud services grew 23 percent in constant currency terms. Capgemini also reported 6.9 percent revenue growth in North America - a market largely under Parekh's watch and one which accounts for nearly a third of its revenues.
Infosys in comparison, saw its North American revenue grow at the pace of just 3.9 percent over that same period.
"We believe Infosys' slowing growth in the past 18 months has more to do with patchy execution rather than strategy," CLSA analyst Ankur Rudra wrote in a note to clients. "Infosys needed a dyed-in-the-wool execution focused leader who understands services and can build consensus."
DELICATE BALANCE
As CEO, Parekh will have to replicate some of his successes at Capgemini while being careful not to antagonise Infosys' founders, who own about 12 percent of the company, but command an outsized say in its direction.
The founders, led by Narayana Murthy, the doyen of India's IT services sector, engaged in a lengthy public feud with Sikka on issues ranging from flights on private jets, to over-spending on a takeover, and on the pricey rent for his U.S. office, to the largesse of payouts given to certain executives following their exits.
The spat culminated with the exit of both Sikka and Infosys' then chairman R. Seshasayee in August, and the return of one of its founders, Nandan Nilekani, as chairman. Nilekani, a highly regarded industry veteran, had remained silent throughout the public confrontation led by Murthy.
Shares fell nearly 10 percent on Aug. 18, the day of Sikka's resignation, hitting it lowest level since the start of his tenure in 2014 and wiping $3.45 billion off Infosys' market capitalisation.
For Parekh, being hand-picked by Nilekani should give him some cover. Two weeks ago, Murthy endorsed Nilekani, saying "absolutely, all is well," with Nilekani at the helm.
In a statement on Saturday, Murthy wrote, "I am happy that Infosys has appointed Mr. Salil Parekh as the CEO. My best wishes to him."
(Reporting by Sankalp Phartiyal and Euan Rocha; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Sam Holmes)
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Michael Holden
LONDON (Reuters) - India asked a London court on Monday to extradite tycoon Vijay Mallya to face fraud charges of palming off losses from his failing Kingfisher Airlines onto a state-owned bank.
Mallya denies any wrongdoing, and a court document showed his lawyers planned to argue that the case against him was politically motivated and aimed at quelling public anger in India over the accumulation of bad debts by state lenders.
Mallya, 61, has had business interests ranging from aviation to liquor. He is also the co-owner of the Formula One motor racing team Force India.
Long-haired and bearded, Mallya arrived at Westminster Magistrates Court wearing a dark blue pin-striped suit and gold-rimmed dark glasses.
He was mobbed by a large crowd of Indian reporters on arrival, and again later when the building was briefly evacuated because of a fire alarm and he had to step outside.
The case against Mallya centres on a series of loans Kingfisher obtained from Indian banks, and in particular from state-owned IDBI. Indian banks want to recover a total of about $1.4 billion that the Indian authorities say Kingfisher owes.
Mark Summers, a British lawyer acting for India, told the court at the start of a two-week extradition hearing that it was entitled to conclude that he never intended to repay money borrowed by Kingfisher from IDBI in 2009.
"His company was in intensive care ... it was heading in only one direction," Summers said. "As it went down, it was going to sustain huge losses."
"THE COST OF FAILURE"
Summers said Mallya faced a choice: to take those losses on himself and his lavish lifestyle, or to palm them off.
"The cost of failure could either be borne honestly by the defendant or they could be passed on banks, in particular a state-owned bank," he said.
Summers said the airline had offered the security of its brand name, a further large injection of equity and a commitment to start repaying the capital debt in 2011 when it forecast it would become profitable.
But Summers said these were deliberately misleading or overstated. The loans had been taken out under "false pretensions" which were "supported by valueless securities", he told the court and were then not spent how the bank had been told.
Part was used to clear money owed to other banks, to service a corporate jet used by Mallya, his family and friends, and for cash for Mallya himself, Summers said.
Some was also spent freeing up credit for Kingfisher at another bank. "Ultimately that money ended up in the defendant's motor racing team," Summers told the court.
Despite giving IDBI personal guarantees for the loans, the lawyer said Mallya had been "squirrelling money away to keep it from the bank" including 40 million dollars he received as part of a deal agreed with Diageo Plc (DGE.L).
Mallya's defence team were due to respond orally later in the hearing.
In a written document prepared before the hearing and seen by Reuters, his lawyers argued that the extradition request should be rejected because of a lack of evidence, the "abusive origins" of the case, the impossibility of a fair trial in India and detention conditions there being incompatible with British human rights laws.
"It is a case which has been driven in India not by evidential enquiry, but by a populist and misguided sentiment that the sheer size of the losses involved in the collapse of Kingfisher Airlines Ltd (KFA) must be indicative of some criminality somewhere," the document said.
"That sentiment has been stoked in India by politicians of every stripe, all of whom stand only to gain from the demonisation of KFA's former senior executives, the bankers who lent to it, and - crucially - the man who is now presented as the embodiment of all the ills of capitalism in contemporary India, Dr Mallya."
The judge will have to decide whether there is a prima facie case against Mallya and whether the alleged crimes would be offences in Britain as well as India.
The judge, England's Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, will have to decide whether there is a prima facie case against Mallya and whether the alleged crimes would be offences in Britain as well as India.
The hearing is due to conclude next week.
(Writing by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Aditya Kalra and Mayank Bhardwaj
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's anti-trust regulator has fined Monsanto Co 15 million rupees ($233,000) for being too slow in replying to questions in a competition probe into the U.S. seeds company.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) last year ordered an investigation into whether Monsanto had abused its dominant position as a supplier of genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds. (http://bit.ly/2AJ39ih)
The CCI, which is yet to complete its investigation, fined Monsanto for delays in filing replies, according to official documents reviewed by .
Monsanto responded to CCI's queries in August, but only after eight reminders issued between April 2016 and May this year, the watchdog's November order showed.
"The commission hopes and trusts that full cooperation shall now be provided," the CCI said in its order dated Nov. 14.
A Monsanto India spokesman said: "Monsanto continues to extensively cooperate with the CCI in the investigation and has been providing information in response to requests received."
"This order is related to a procedural matter and is subject to further orders from the Delhi High Court," he added.
Challenging the role of CCI and the nature of its probe, Monsanto has filed two separate cases with the Delhi High Court.
Monsanto is locked in a battle with Indian seed maker, Nuziveedu Seeds Ltd, one of the complainants at the CCI.
That battle sparked a series of government moves that prompted the world's biggest seed company to withdraw from some businesses in India, one of the world's most important seed markets, reported earlier this year. (http://reut.rs/2jbDq80) (http://reut.rs/2ncBknn)
(Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; Editing by Mark Potter)
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Two of India's state-owned oil refiners have issued tenders seeking to charter tankers for at least five years while giving preference to Indian companies, tender documents reviewed by Reuters showed, which would boost domestic shipping firms battered by slumping tanker rates.
India's Ministry of Shipping asked the refiners to issue long-term crude import tenders on a pilot basis and include a right of first refusal for Indian shipping lines, a government source familiar with the matter said on Monday.
The shift to the five-year contracts would give millions of dollars in tanker contracts to the Indian carriers, the source said.
This would help companies like Shipping Corp of India (SCI), Mercator Ltd, Great Eastern Shipping Co and Essar Shipping. The global tanker industry is grappling with an oversupply of ships that has depressed rates, with the benchmark Middle East to Japan route for Very Large Crude Carriers dropping 43 percent since the start of the year.
According to the tender documents sent out by Bharat Petroleum Corp, they are only seeking bids from Indian-flagged Suezmax tankers capable of carrying up to 1 million barrels of oil for a five-year period.
Indian Oil Corp's (IOC) tender document includes similar language but is seeking global bids for VLCCs capable of carrying Iraqi Basra Light crude for five years and grants Indian shippers the right of first refusal.
An IOC spokesman confirmed this is the first long-term VLCC tender the company has issued. There was no immediate response from BPCL.
India has in the past two years overtaken Japan to become the world's third-biggest oil consumer.
The country's shippers are pleased with the move.
"Granting five year shipping tenders to Indian companies will help the growth of India's fleet.. It will help us in arranging funds for acquisition of new vessels," said Capt. Anoop Kumar Sharma, chairman of India's top shipper SCI.
However, the companies may struggle to meet the tender requirements which stipulate that the vessels be no more than 10 years old at the time of charter.
SCI only has two VLCCs that are less than a decade old, the Desh Viraat and Desh Vishal, which were built in 2008 and 2009, respectively, according to fleet data on its website.
Great Eastern Shipping does not have any VLCCs in its fleet, according to its website, and Essar Shipping only has one VLCC, which is 12 years old.
Saudi Arabia has invited US firms to take part in developing its civilian nuclear power programme, Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said on Monday, adding the kingdom was not interested in diverting nuclear technology to military use.
Reuters has reported that Westinghouse is in talks with other US-based companies to form a consortium for a multi-billion-dollar project to build two reactors and that those firms are pushing Washington to restart talks with Riyadh on a civil nuclear cooperation pact.
Falih said Saudi Arabia was committed to restricting nuclear technology to civilian use.
"Not only are we not interested in any way to diverting nuclear technology to military use, we are very active in non-proliferation by others," he said at a joint news conference with US Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
KACARE, the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy, is the Saudi government agency tasked with the nuclear plans. It said last month on its website that it was in talks with Toshiba-owned Westinghouse and France's EDF.
"We hope that the two paths will converge - the commercial, technical discussions between KACARE and the American companies, while we work with our counterparts on the American side to address the regulatory and policy issues," Falih said.
Perry, who is on his first official visit to Saudi Arabia and will go on to the United Arab Emirates and Qatar this week, said it was "a bit premature" to comment on the negotiations.
"We are in the early stages of it but I think we both are working from the position of getting to yes," he said.
Washington usually requires a country to sign a peaceful nuclear cooperation pact - known as a 123 agreement - that blocks steps in fuel production with potential bomb-making uses.
In previous talks, Saudi Arabia has refused to sign up to any agreement that would deprive it of the possibility of one day enriching uranium.
The world's top oil exporter says it wants nuclear power to diversify its energy mix allowing it to export more crude rather than burning it to generate electricity. It has not yet acquired nuclear power or enrichment technology.
Reactors need uranium enriched to around 5 percent purity but the same technology in this process can also be used to enrich the heavy metal to a higher, weapons-grade level. This has been at the heart of Western and regional concerns over the nuclear work of Iran, Saudi Arabia's arch-rival which enriches uranium domestically.
Riyadh has said it wants to tap its own uranium resources for "self-sufficiency in producing nuclear fuel".
The kingdom sent a request for information to nuclear reactor suppliers in October, and plans to award the first construction contract in 2018.
Its nuclear plans have gained momentum as part of a reform plan led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to reduce the economy's dependence on oil.
Riyadh wants eventually to install up to 17.6 gigawatts of atomic capacity by 2032 - or up to 17 reactors. This is a promising prospect for the struggling global nuclear industry and the United States is expected to face competition from South Korea, Russia, France and China for the initial tender.
By Michael Holden
LONDON (Reuters) - Indian tycoon Vijay Mallya should be extradited from Britain to his home country to face fraud charges of palming off losses from his failing Kingfisher Airlines onto a state-owned bank, a lawyer acting for India told a London court on Monday.
Mallya denies any wrongdoing, and a court document showed his lawyers planned to argue that the case against him was politically motivated and aimed at quelling public anger in India over the accumulation of bad debts by state lenders.
Mallya, 61, has had business interests ranging from aviation to liquor. He is also the co-owner of the Formula One motor racing team Force India.
Long-haired and bearded, Mallya arrived at Westminster Magistrates Court wearing a dark blue pin-striped suit and gold-rimmed dark glasses.
He was mobbed by a large crowd of Indian reporters on arrival, and again later when the building was briefly evacuated because of a fire alarm and he had to step outside.
The case against Mallya centres on a series of loans Kingfisher obtained from Indian banks, and in particular from state-owned IDBI. Indian banks want to recover a total of about $1.4 billion that the Indian authorities say Kingfisher owes.
Mark Summers, a British lawyer acting for India, told the court at the start of a two-week extradition hearing that it was entitled to conclude that he never intended to repay money borrowed by Kingfisher from IDBI in 2009.
"His company was in intensive care ... it was heading in only one direction," Summers said. "As it went down, it was going to sustain huge losses."
"THE COST OF FAILURE"
Summers said Mallya faced a choice: to take those losses on himself and his lavish lifestyle, or to palm them off.
"The cost of failure could either be borne honestly by the defendant or they could be passed on banks, in particular a state-owned bank," he said.
Summers said the airline had offered the security of its brand name, a further large injection of equity and a commitment to start repaying the capital debt in 2011 when it forecast it would become profitable.
"The issue is whether those projections were honest," Summers said.
Mallya's defence team were due to respond orally later in the hearing.
In a written document prepared before the hearing and seen by Reuters, his lawyers argued that the extradition request should be rejected because of a lack of evidence, the "abusive origins" of the case, the impossibility of a fair trial in India and detention conditions there being incompatible with British human rights laws.
"It is a case which has been driven in India not by evidential enquiry, but by a populist and misguided sentiment that the sheer size of the losses involved in the collapse of Kingfisher Airlines Ltd (KFA) must be indicative of some criminality somewhere," the document said.
"That sentiment has been stoked in India by politicians of every stripe, all of whom stand only to gain from the demonisation of KFA's former senior executives, the bankers who lent to it, and - crucially - the man who is now presented as the embodiment of all the ills of capitalism in contemporary India, Dr Mallya."
The judge will have to decide whether there is a prima facie case against Mallya and whether the alleged crimes would be offences in Britain as well as India.
(Writing by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As the Supreme Court considers setting up a Constitution Bench to hear pleas on making Aadhaar card mandatory for various services such as bank accounts, insurance policies, PAN, mutual funds, PPF etc., a senior official has said that the government will give 3-6 months to link the unique identification number with PAN if the apex court rules in its favour, after which it may cancel all PANs that have not been linked.
The cancellation will weed out all duplicate PANs and make benami transactions void, the official said. Last week, Attorney-General KK Venugopal told the Supreme Court that the Centre was willing to extend the deadline for the linkage to March 31 next year. The current deadline for linking Aadhaar card is December 31, 2017. And the deadline for Aadhaar-Mobile SIM linking is February 6 next year.
The current deadline for linking the 10-digit alphanumeric PAN (Permanent Account Number), issued by the Income Tax Department, with Aadhaar is December 31. The government has indicated to the Supreme Court that it is willing to extend this deadline to March 31, 2018.
The official said that in the event of the apex court upholding the government position of making linking of PAN with Aadhaar mandatory and agreeing with the proposed deadline, a 3-6 month grace period would be given to allow all taxpayers to do the linking.
As of November, 13.28 crore out of 33 crore PANs have been linked to the 12-digit Aadhaar, he said. "The linking exercise is aimed at eliminating duplicate PAN cards which are being used by unscrupulous elements to avoid paying due taxes," the official said.
Not linking PAN with Aadhaar even after the grace period will render the PAN invalid, he said. "We can give 3 to 6-month window after December 31 for the linking," he said.
Last month, the government had told the court, which is hearing petitions against making Aadhaar linking to bank accounts, mobile phone numbers and others mandatory, that it is willing to extend the deadline to March 31, 2018.
This year, the government made the quoting of Aadhaar mandatory for filing income tax returns (ITRs) as well as obtaining a new PAN. "The duplicate PAN cards are the ones which are creating a major danger to the economy. They are the ones who are using this duplicate PAN for opening bank accounts and then they are transacting and they are not filing returns. So we need to worry about them," the official said.
Section 139 AA (2) of the Income Tax Act says that every person having PAN as on July 1, 2017 and eligible to obtain Aadhaar, must intimate his Aadhaar number to the tax authorities.
The government had in August extended by four months the deadline for linking PAN with Aadhaar till December 31, pending the Supreme Court verdict.
As the case is pending in the Supreme Court, the government is not enforcing the provision, the official said.
"There will be a time when, once Supreme Court clears it, we would like to give a date by which all have to link with Aadhaar and remaining will be cancelled.
"We will give a 3-6 month window... But after that the PAN, if it is not linked, will be cancelled. Our purpose is, all duplicate PANs should be eliminated which are not linked to Aadhaar card. So, all the Benami transactions will go," the official said.
The Supreme Court is hearing petitions challenging the government's decision on Aadhaar and has said it may consider setting up a constitution bench to hear pleas challenging the Centre's move to make Aadhaar card mandatory for availing various services and benefits of welfare schemes.
Back on October 25, the Centre had told the apex court that it was willing to extend the deadline for linking Aadhaar to various schemes to March 31, 2018, but only for those who were "willing to enrol for Aadhaar", not those who had already signed up.
with PTI inputs
Normal life might seem a tad bit unimaginable without the constant assistance of Google. But residents of China have a slightly different experience when it comes to Google. Google was shut down in China in 2010 following a showdown with the government over censor policies. Since then Google, Gmail, Youtube and its other products are banned in the world's second largest economy. But Google CEO Sundar Pichai hinting at a better future for the search engine in China said that it is helping Chinese companies gain global access.
"A lot of work Google does is to help Chinese companies", the 45-year-old Indian-born Google CEO, who has a BTech degree from IIT Kharagpur, said at a state-run global internet conference at the Chinese city of Wuzen. The conference was also addressed by Apple CEO Tim Cook and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
"Many small and medium-sized businesses in China take advantage of Google to get their products to many other countries outside of China," Pichai told the meeting, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.
After the ban, Google subsequently shifted its operations to Hong Kong. However, in its absence, Chinese firms like Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and JD.com emerged most powerful players, not only in the country but abroad as well.
Google and its products can be accessed in China through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) over which Beijing has stepped up a crackdown in recent times. Apple this year agreed to the Chinese government's requests to remove dozens of virtual private network (VPN) apps services that allow Chinese users to access blocked websites from its local App Store.
Skype, the calling app, was removed from its mainland App Store this autumn.
Pichai's attendance at the state sponsored internet meeting came after China recently lifted the ban on Google translation services.
Besides Google, a number of global social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter remain banned in China over fears that their presence would open-up to millions of China's social media users marginalising the official media.
The World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, near Shanghai, is an annual gathering of mainly Chinese internet officials and internet company executives as well as bureaucrats from developing countries.
The previous three conferences in 2014, 2015 and 2016 were not attended by top US tech executives including Cook and Pichai, the Post report said.
The Chinese government uses the event to pursue its argument that its censorship and regulation of the internet does not harm the development of technology and business prosperity.
Xi said that online developments were raising many new challenges to sovereignty and security, and China was "willing to work with the international community to respect cyberspace sovereignty and promote partnerships".
Finally Infosys India's second largest IT services company has made its choice. Salil Satish Parekh the man who helped build Capgemini's India operations is the new CEO and MD effective January 2018. Unlike IBM and Accenture, which recognized India's potential early in the late 90's and early part of the 21st century, Capgemini was slow in getting off the ground here. This was critical as having a large number of talented employees in a low-cost destination like India was critical to the success of a number of these multinationals. After a late start, it was under Parekh's leadership that Capgemini began to scale in India.
Today Capgemini which has revenues of about $15 billion and 190,000 employees has roughly a third of its headcount in the Indian operations. It was aided by the iGate acquisition too which had a large India base. Parekh was credited with the smooth scaling of Capgemini in India in spite of a late start and playing a key role in the iGate acquisition.
He was richly rewarded for this. He was eventually made the deputy CEO of the insular French company and even inducted into the group management team. Salil has primarily expertise in the European market where Capgemini has a large footprint.
53-year-old Parekh incidentally came to Capgemini when it acquired the consulting division of Ernst & Young, where he was a key leader in that practice. An IIT Powai aeronautical engineer, he also holds a master's in computer science and mechanical engineering from Cornell University
He takes over at Infosys during a challenging time in the company's 36-year history. His ability to get growth back at Infosys, improve morale, navigate issues with promoters and senior talent at the company, will be what observers will be watching. Parekh clearly has his task cut out.
Industry veterans have hailed Infosys' move to appoint Parekh as the CEO. Nasscom President R Chandrashekhar told PTI that Parekh is well entrenched in the industry and has international experience as well as a good understanding of Indian IT ecosystem. Parekh's appointment as the new Infosys CEO got a thumbs up from Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy. "I'm happy that Infosys has appointed Salil Parekh as the CEO. My best wishes to him," Murthy said.
On August 18, Vishal Sikka, the first non-promoter CEO and MD made a dramatic announcement that he would resign after being at the helm for three years. Sikka had said that he could not carry on his "...job as CEO and continue to create value, while also constantly defending against unrelenting, baseless/malicious and increasingly personal attacks."
The $3.5 trillion global IT services industry is undergoing a seismic shift with automation and Artificial Intelligence commoditising a large chunk of the market. Traditional models which served the $158 billion a year in revenue Indian IT industry well in the past like 'lift and shift' and 'labour arbitrage' have been upended.
The long wait is finally coming to an end for all Xiaomi enthusiasts. The Chinese company will be launching the Redmi 5 and Redmi 5 Plus on December 7 in China. The company confirmed the launch date from its Weibo account.
A new post from the company suggests that the Redmi 5 and Redmi 5 Plus will be launched with the latest MIUI 9 out of the box. So far, leaks have suggested that the Redmi 5 will feature a 5.7inch full display and the Redmi 5 Plus will feature a 5.9 inch display. Earlier, the device was spotted on the listing of Chinese regulator TENAA. So far, most major reports corroborate each other.
Redmi 5 and Redmi 5 Plus will feature a 1.8GHz processor which could be the Snapdragon 625. However, considering previous iterations of the device, Xiaomi might opt for a more budget oriented Snapdragon 450.
The device is expected to feature a much smaller 3200mAH battery in comparison to last year's Redmi 4. The Redmi device will come in three variants with 16GB, 32GB and 64GB variants.
In terms of camera, the device will feature a 12 Megapixel rear camera and a 5 Megapixel front facing camera. The smartphone will also come with MIUI 9 which will be based on Android 7.1.2. The leaks suggest that the device will come with a Hybrid SIM slot in China. However, similar to the Redmi 5A, the Indian variant might come with a dedicated MicroSD card slot.
Coming to the bigger Redmi 5 Plus, the device will come with a bigger 4000mAH battery and stronger Snapdragon 600-series chipset.
The launch is scheduled for December 7 and the company is expected to bring the new devices to India soon after the launch. The new Redmi series will help Xiaomi maintain its stronghold in the budget and mid-range segment.
CAMEROUN :: Cameroon, Anglophone Crisis: What is going on?
Albert Camus writes that "To misnamed things is to add to the misery of the world." Thus, what is going on in Cameroon with the Anglophones crisis where the number of death both from the military forces and the indigenous population continue to grow daily? Is it a rebellion, an insurgency, civil war, counter-insurgency, police operation, indigenous counter-violence, war of liberation?
The CL2P, in its informed expertise on human rights, has documented that the Anglophone-speaking Cameroonians do not feel the enlightened egalitarianism the regime of Yaounde is propagandizing daily. Consequently, rendering all the government politics of inclusion and diversity in Cameroon problematic. More, there is a mounting politics of direct coercion with extra-legal murders, imprisonment, military occupation and curfew which, taken together, turn Anglophone speaking Cameroonians into brutalized subjects of the government. This brutalization of the Anglophone Cameroonians points to a state of emergency which is not saying its name. Something that increasingly appears to be a state sponsored criminal enterprise. The real question, therefore, is it the military solution the best way to handle the Anglophone crisis?
The military approach is contradictory to any form of democratic self-governance and create, instead, a climate of insecurity and violence. The militarization of the Anglophone crisis is in no way an approach to develop transformational politics and democratic consensus.
Furthermore, the regime of Yaounde continues to operate in an archaic model of sovereign rights and failing to note that all the violation of human rights during this Anglophone crisis is more than likely to come up to the International Tribunal of La Hague.
This is where the CL2P is against all forms of escalation of violence in the ANGLOPHONE CRISIS: Particularly, the one that Mr. BIYA AND The Hawk of his regime are planning.
A warlike escalation that benefits first and only Paul Biya, and his obscene obsession with power and his wrongheaded determination to keep power by all means necessary as a celebration of obscene immortality.
This Not at all the United Cameroon we all hold dear. This is a Cameroon inherited and molded by 35 years of dictatorship from Ahmadou Ahidjo.
And it is time that we acknowledge a sad truth: Cameroon is currently fighting its second civil war. The Anglophone crisis is a second civil war - after the one led against the Boko Haram terrorists wars that could have been avoid if only a real process of inclusive dialogue had been initiated and then continued, and especially if it had not been for the nihilism and Machiavellians calculations of a tyrant and his hawks who find there an unexpected opportunity to indefinitely perpetuate their grips on power, alleging an "indivisibility" to identity, the antipodes of the principle of intangibility of the irritated borders of colonization in which recognize all Africans.
Hence, you cannot make a new Cameroon out of old Cameroonians, for the same reason that you cannot build a new car out of old parts. Likewise, no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved. No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better.
This is a dangerous moment in our history, about which we ought to be honest. If we follow the course we are on, we will see more unhappiness, more violence, more repressive national-security policies, less prosperity, less freedom, and less of anything that looks less than the few things we already have and many have nothing and found themselves enslaved in Libya or dead in the Mediterranean Sea.
The CL2P will continue to courageously speak truth to power, even at the cost of our lives, and will never give in to the sirens of ethnic cleansing aggrieved by the warlike rhetoric of the Yaounde regime against others Cameroonians minorities who are acting in civil disobedience for more than a year precisely because of their institutionalized marginalization by the Biyas regime.
The CL2P understands that those who oppose President Paul Biya are working to undermine the president, and, therefore, to undermine the country, and that they ought to be arrested as subversives or traitors. The identification of the president with the nation itself is a particularly poisonous and idiotic form of power-worship. But the president is not the country, and opposing the president irrespective of his agenda is not treason. It is politics.
Hence, the next time you feel yourself tempted to call one of your fellow Cameroonians a traitor, you should give some serious consideration to the infinitely preferable option of keeping your damned-fool mouth shut.
The Commitee For The Release of Political Prisoners
The amount in the draft budget is to fund two operational programs and a governance and institutional support program.
ADS
The Minister of the Public Service and Administrative Reform has presented the budget of his Ministry to the Committee on Finance and Budget of the National Assembly. Minister Michel Ange Angouin did the presentation on December 2.
The budget stands at 13, 277, 000, 000. Minister Angouin told the Committee that FCFA 600 million of the money will be used for investment. Going by his presentation, the execution of the budget would be implemented in three programs which include two operational programs and a support program.
One of the operational programs entitled Improving the Management of State Human Resources will gulp FCFA 735.9 million. This would cover reinforcement of capacities of personnel of public services, modernisation of career management and improvement of management of disciplinary files as well as reorganization of the management of the state staff. FCFA 306.4 million is allocated for the second operational program dubbed Entrenching Administrative Reform.
The support program known as Governance and Institutional Support is expected to consume FCFA 12, 234, 700, 000. According to the plan, this support program will ensure the implementation of the aforementioned operational programs. It will be implemented through eleven activities outlined by the Ministry.
MBOM Sixtus
ADS
| BY Ricki Green |
amaysim, Australias fourth largest telco, has launched a new campaign via Special Group to introduce its small but mighty $10 unlimited mobile plan.
The new product is being positioned as the low cost plan that gives many Australians true choice and greater value by removing things they may not need like big data inclusions, lock-in contracts and talk & text limits.
Says Hayden Ruawai, marketing director, amaysim.Our exciting new $10 mobile plan gives us the perfect opportunity to talk loud and proud to many Australian consumers in an integrated way. Our campaign is built around the just what you need comms platform that encourages Aussies to liberate themselves from the things they no longer need so they can get on with their lives.
Directed by Matt Devine (Revolver / Will ORourke), the films show scenarios of people getting rid of stuff they no longer need parents farewelling their 30-year-old-wanna-be- DJ-son, a man finally getting rid of the last few strands of hair and his hair dryer, and a man burning his ride-on lawn mower when he finally realises he no longer needs it for his tiny lawn. We see dramatic moments of liberation as the characters celebrate saying goodbye to the unnecessary things in their lives.
Over the last 18 months, amaysim has pursued a diversification strategy and now offers telco, broadband and energy plans as well as devices.
Says Cade Heyde, Special Group: We really value our relationship with the team at amaysim, working across their mobile team, and more recently partnering with them as they diversify their business and take the amazingly simple proposition to new categories.
The campaign has launched with national TV, radio, online, social and PR. Strategy and creative was led by Special Group, media by Kaimera, PR by Illuminate and performace media by iProspect.
Says Emily Bosler, founding partner at Kaimera: Were excited to work with amaysim as it launches this new product to a previously untapped market. This campaign is part of ongoing work were doing with the business as it looks to offer its loyal customer base additional services while attracting new consumers.
Client: amaysim
CEO Julian Origin
COO Isaac Ward
Marketing Director Hayden Ruawai
Senior Marketing Manager Rebecca Johnson
Brand Consultant Heidi Melville
Agency: Special Group Australia
Creatives Nils Eberhardt, Steven Thomson & Paul Bennell
Strategy Partner Dave Hartmann
Executive Producer Paul Johnston & Caroline David
CEO Lindsey Evans
Managing Partner Cade Heyde
Account Director Tori Magill
Account Manager Stephanie Wilkinson
Production Revolver / Will ORourke
Director Matt Devine
Managing Director / EP- Michael Ritchie
EP Pip Smart
Producer Alex Kember
Music composition and sound Rumble
Editor David Whittaker
Editing Company ARC Edit
Post Production Heckler
Project:
Media Agency: Kaimara
Emily Bosler
PR Agency: Illuminate
| BY Ricki Green |
Amid growing debate as to whether brands are overspending on digital media, Zenith research has found that the effectiveness of internet advertising has now caught up with digital ad spend.
Until 2015, brands struggled to make effective use of internet advertising, and their spend was not matched by the resulting brand experience (an accurate proxy of market share*). However, by 2016 internet advertising accounted for 34% of global ad budgets but produced 35% of brand experience. Internet advertising is now therefore working harder than advertising in other media.
For many years Zeniths Advertising Expenditure Forecasts reports have consistently reported sizeable increases in the internet share of advertising budgets. The December 2017 edition of the report is published today. For the first time Zenith has been able to demonstrate the ROI of internet ad spend, not just its scale. We used our proprietary Touchpoints ROI Tracker tool to compare internet ad spend to internet brand experience over the past few years.
In 2014 advertisers spent 27% of their budgets on internet advertising, which produced only 21% of brand experience. By 2015, though, brands were using internet advertising more effectively: it accounted for 30% of both budgets and paid brand experience, before tipping over in 2016, when brand experience exceeded budget share.
We expect internet advertisings share of global ad spend to continue to rise, reaching 40% in 2018 and 44% in 2020. Its value will rise from US$203bn in 2017 to US$225bn in 2020. The share of advertising expenditure allocated to internet advertising varies widely across the world. In the most advanced markets (Sweden and the UK) it will account for more than 60% of total expenditure next year, and it will account for between 50% and 60% in another six (Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Norway and Taiwan).
In Australia, internet ad spend will capture 52.1% of the market in 2017, ahead of the global average. Australia is therefore a leading digital market. Zenith forecasts 9.6% growth in internet advertising in Australia in 2018, compared to 3.4% growth for the advertising market as a whole. By 2020, internet will account for 60.3% of total ad spend in Australia.
The rise of the internet has had huge consequences for the other media, which are covered in detail in the executive summary.
Big platforms are capturing digital growth
The internet is driving the great majority of global growth in advertising it will account for 94% of the growth in ad spend between 2017 and 2020. And most of this will be captured by just five big platforms Google and Facebook, plus the Chinese platforms Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. Between them these five platforms increased their share of global internet ad spend from 61% to 72% between 2014 and 2016, and captured 83% of the growth in internet ad spend over that time. Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent accounted for 54% of the growth in internet ad spend in China, while Google and Facebook accounted for 96% of the growth in internet ad spend in the rest of the world. Between them Google and Facebook accounted for 76% of internet ad spend outside China in 2016.
Big countries are adding most ad dollars
In dollar terms, most of the growth in global ad spend is coming from a few big markets. We forecast that just two countries the US and China will contribute 47% of new ad dollars between 2017 and 2020. The five biggest markets the US, China, Japan, the UK and Germany will contribute 57%.
Big cities are driving global adspend growth
Big cities are driving global ad spend by concentrating growth in productivity, innovation and trade. Zenith has conducted a unique study that attributes ad spend to individual cities by estimating the value of their inhabitants to local, national and international advertisers. We forecast that the top 10 cities alone will contribute 12% of all global ad spend growth this year, and that the top 725 will contribute 60%.
We predict that between 2016 and 2019, ad spend in the 10 biggest-contributing cities will grow by a total of US$7.5bn, representing 11% of growth over these years. These ten cities will be, in descending order: New York (where ad spend will grow by US$1.4bn), Tokyo, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Houston, Dallas, Beijing, London and Chicago (which will grow by US$0.6bn).
Advertisers feel the pressure from digital transformation and polarisation of growth
Advertisers are feeling pressure from the rapid transformation of their businesses, exemplified by the rapid shift of marketing communications to online media in response to changing consumer behaviour, and the polarisation of growth to big platforms, big countries and big cities. At the end of November Zenith conducted the third in its series of exclusive surveys about brand growth among key Zenith clients. On a scale from 0 to 100 where 0 means everyone expects a decline in 2018, 100 means everyone expects growth, and 50 means the average expectation is for no growth the average response was 57, down from 67 this time last year. Food and drink brands have been the least affected, with a score of 66 this year, down just a point from 67 last year. Packaged goods, retail and telecom brands have all fallen to 50, expecting no growth, down from positive scores last year.
Says Vittorio Bonori, global brand president, Zenith: We are seeing a battle played out in business, marketing and media between big players and small players. Growth is coming from big countries and big cities, and being captured by big platforms. Brands should focus on upstream strategy, data-informed UX planning and downstream automation.
Says Nickie Scriven (pictured), CEO, Zenith Australia: In Australia we anticipate 3.4% ad spend growth year on year to 2020. In 2017 the highest growing categories were automotive brands driven by many new car launches and an increase in luxury car advertising; retail despite the substantial decline in October; and restaurants.
Ad spend growth is predominantly being driven by the ever growing fragmentation of the media landscape, with digital media now accounting for 52% of ad spend in Australia and forecast to grow by a further 10% in 2018. Google and Facebook are the main benefactors of this growth and this is likely to continue to 2020. Out-of-home continues to buck the trend and post year on year growth, buoyed by the digitisation of panels, inventory growth and investment in tech.
| BY Ricki Green |
Ikon has hired Hugh McGilligan (left) and promoted Pia Coyle (centre) to its national team, building its strategy and media investment offers and boosting inter-office collaboration.
McGilligan joins as the new national head of strategy. He joins the agency following a lengthy stint in New York working in strategy roles on brands as such as Verizon, Whirlpool, Mazda, Axe/Lynx, Heineken and Dos Equis. He leads a team of strategists, and works closely with creative, digital and media to raise creative output, drive innovation and ultimately deliver bottom-line results.
Says David Gerrie (pictured above right), CCO, Ikon: Hugh is an outstanding strategist who brings a wealth of diverse experience to this role. He has also demonstrated strong management skills and business development acumen, both of which will be a valuable addition to our national team.
Most recently at Millward Brown Vermeer in New York, McGilligan has also worked at Edelman, Hill & Knowlton, and Y&R Brands.
Coyle, promoted to national head of investment, joins McGilligan on the national team. She first joined Ikon in 2011 and has been promoted through several roles including head of media services and trading director.
Says Gerrie: Pia was an obvious choice to lead Ikons dynamic trading product and teams. Her unrivalled understanding of our clients needs and the rapidly evolving marketplace amplifies our cross-office offer. We are keen for her to take this next step and delighted to welcome her to the national team.
With Hugh and Pia now in their roles our national team is in an even better place to help drive the business across multiple markets. Its an exciting time for Ikon and its growing capabilities.
The new appointment and promotion follow the announcement that Ikon had unveiled a new national structure earlier this year.
| BY Ricki Green |
Creative agency Hunter has partnered with the local Miller Genuine Draft brand team to launch a new campaign. You know those nights that start out ordinary and end up anything but the nights that kick off with a couple of quiet beers and then turn into one of the best times of your life? Hunter and Miller Genuine Draft have channeled that vibe for the new campaign, reintroducing Miller Genuine Draft to the trendy Melbourne suburb of Windsor, fitting out a pop-up bar for three awesome nights of beer, music and food.
Taking a cue from Miller Genuine Drafts global branding and focus on a premium but approachable nightlife, Hunter hit on the Gold in Windsor concept to elevate the ordinary. That involved decking out a pop-up bar and a local maxitram in the black-and-gold styling of Miller Genuine Draft bottles, along with the Gold in Windsor message. Invitations were sent to trade and industry people a major target of the campaign as well as made available to the public, and patrons were treated to wagyu beef and brisket hors doeuvres, local musician performances (Horns of Leroy, Alice Ivy and The Harpoons), and plenty of Miller Genuine Draft to wash it down with.
The whole idea, from concept to execution, was turned around in eight weeks. Hunters people moved into the Uncommon cafe on Monday to refit it for opening night Thursday, and then had it back to Uncommon on Sunday.
Says Simon Hakim, CEO, Hunter: Were not telling people, hey, drink this beer. Instead were creating a theme with Gold in Windsor and were using it to own a suburb, or own a city, and creating a vibe.
The idea is something you could take anywhere and localise it. It could be Gold in Brisbane or if we were in Sydney, it could be Gold in Surry hills, or Gold in Newtown. The idea is the core taking something ordinary and finding a way to elevate it in a way that resonates for your brand.
| BY Lynchy |
Natasha Ann Zachariah who led The Straits Times Lifes Design section has joined DDB Group as Senior Writer at Telling Stories, Tribal Worldwides new film and content division.
Zachariah (pictured left) spent seven years at The Straits Times creating integrated content featuring high-profile architects, designers, start-ups owners and C-suite personalities. At Tribal, she will lead a team of scriptwriters and content creators.
Tribal Worldwides Film and Content division has recently produced over 400 films from online videos to TV commercial to 360-degree interactive video to Telemovies and even drama series for all their anchor clients in DDB Group.
We have built a team of agile content creators to create a repertoire of content for a new social environment. Natasha is a master storyteller with solid journalism skills and a Singaporean touch, said Jeff Cheong, President of Tribal Worldwide Asia.
| BY Lynchy |
UnionPay International has launched a new TV commercial featuring Joanna Dong the second runner-up of the recent Sing! China competition as one of the voices behind the remake of Frank Sinatras My Way. The commercial is produced by UPIs agency BLK J, Freeflow Productions, and Red Roof Records.
The commercial features the remake of the classic in six different languages Bahasa Indonesian, Burmese, English, Khmer, Laotian, Thai and Vietnamese. In the film, we see the
people of these countries being empowered by UPI to live life their way.
Vincent Ling, Deputy General Manager, UPI said, We have always taken a differentiated approach to the way we develop our business in Southeast Asia. We were the first global payment brand to partner mall management group AsiaMalls to roll out QR Code payment on a wide scale basis in Singapore, We also collaborated with local switches and partners in Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, sharing our Chip Card technology to upgrade their payment infrastructure, making payments more reliable and secure to foster their transformation into cashless economies. UPI is a company that endeavours to live up to our brand promise of Shared Growth, Mutual Benefits and Win-win cooperation- we do it our way too.
Joji Jacob, Creative Co-Founder of BLK J, added, UPI is a global brand that truly believes in
empowering Southeast Asia. All the creatives who worked on this project are from
Legal advice to the former ACT chief minister from British and Australian barristers says she took every reasonable step to renounce citizenship by descent from her English-born father Charles Gallagher before nominating for the July 2 poll, and that she meets the standard set by the High Court in recent section 44 cases.
"If you're a kid in a school who's not so great at maths or science but you're an amazing athlete, then yes, we should continue to challenge around maths and English, but also then what's the pathway for that particular child if they want to be an athlete of some sort, or a musician or a fashion designer or whatever the hell they want to be - an early childhood educator, a cleaner, who cares," she said.
The magistrate said if the "promise" of the law was fulfilled, there would be a place to send the girl that was both safe for her and those who cared for her.
"The fact that the renunciation did not take effect until a later date, because of the supervening imposition of an unnecessary bureaucratic request for further evidence of the Home Office, and the time it then took for the Home Office to process the request, is not to the point," the advice said.
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.
Elon Musk has somehow found the time to make a bid to build an airport link between Chicago OHare Airport and downtown with The Boring Company.
Late last week, the city of Chicago called for interested parties to submit plans for a high-speed train service from the airport and while The Boring Company has no interest in trains, Musk has thrown his hat into the mix anyway.
Taking to Twitter, the entrepreneur said The Boring Company will compete to fund, build, and operate a high-speed Loop from Chicago OHare. This Loop wouldnt be a version of Musks Hyperloop and instead a development of its rail-car network of tunnels previewed earlier this year.
The Chicago Sun Times reports that Musks solution to Chicagos problems would be an underground public transportation system where 8-12 passengers travel between destinations on autonomous electric skates at speeds of up to 150 mph.
Earlier in the year, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Musk was very interested in creating a solution for the city.
The opportunity for Chicago is endless and boundless It would be a tremendous investment, job creator and economic engine for the city that would pay dividends for decades ahead, Emanuel said.
They are very interested. And were gonna have `em now out to the city to explore further what we are doing and planning to see whether the tunnel approach is an alternative to the ones weve been discussing.
The Boring Company will compete to fund, build & operate a high-speed Loop connecting Chicago OHare Airport to downtown https://t.co/bRqKpzSJjz Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2017
VIDEO
The former Volkswagen executive who pleaded guilty to his involvement in the brands dieselgate scandal says he feels misused by the automaker.
In a letter penned to U.S. Judge Sean Cox a couple of days before his sentencing, Oliver Schmidt looked for mercy after pleading guilty in August to wrongdoing, claiming that was following a script issued by VW management when speaking with California Air Resources board executive Alberto Ayala.
I must say that I feel misused by my own company in the diesel scandal or Dieselgate.
In hindsight, I should never have agreed to meet with Dr Ayala on that day or better yet, I should have gone to that meeting and ignored the instructions given to me and told Dr Ayala that there is a defeat device in the VW diesel engine vehicles and that VW had been cheating for almost a decade. I did not do that and that is why I find myself here today, Schmidt admitted.
Schmidt was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States in early January 2017 having previously served as the head of VWs environmental and engineering office in Auburn Hills, Michigan.
Schmidt faces up to seven years in prison and a fine of up to $400,000 for his involvement in the scandal, Reuters reports.
PHOTO GALLERY
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles says it is interested in forming a technical partnership with Hyundai.
Speaking at the launch of the Alfa Romeo Sauber F1 squad, FCA chief executive Sergio Marchionne said the carmaker is searching for a closer relationship with Hyundai but is not seeking a merger.
We already buy components from (Hyundai) . lets see if we can agree on other points, especially for the development of transmissions and hydrogen, he said.
In the meantime, FCA is investigating other ways to make money, including a potential spinoff of Magneti Marelli, the brands major parts manufacturer. Additionally, robotics maker Comau could also be subject to a spin off and venture into the world of artificial intelligence, Reuters reports.
Whether it happens as a spin-off or a distribution to shareholders, or whether we will raise some money in the process all things to be discussed with the board, we havent made up our mind, Marchionne said.
Word of a potential tie-up between FCA and Hyundai first emerged in September. At the time, Korean media suggested that Hyundai could purchase FCA but it doesnt sound as if FCA is interested in such an arrangement.
PHOTO GALLERY
In the short time that the Opel Ampera-e was sold in Europe under GM ownership, the carmaker was reportedly losing 10,000 euros ($11,900) on every vehicle it sold.
On the back of reports that PSA wants a refund of almost $1 billion from GM following its purchase of the Opel brand, Reuters has uncovered the costs which GM was sustaining when selling the European variant of the Chevrolet Bolt.
As Inside EVs reports, this isnt good for PSA. When negotiating a deal with General Motors, the French multinational manufacturer would have thought the Opel Ampera-e could play an important role in it reducing emissions across Europe to meet stringent standards. However, the company is now left in a position of losing extraordinary amounts of money in continuing to sell the Ampera-e or killing off the vehicle and risk failing to meet EU emissions regulations.
On paper, the Opel Ampera-e has all the right figures to be an exceptionally popular EV available to the masses. In September, a pair of journalists in Germany were able to travel 754.9 km (469 miles) on a single charge with the Ampera-e, despite the hatchback only having a NEDC estimated range of 520 km (323 miles).
PHOTO GALLERY
Toyota recently introduced the FT-AC concept at the Los Angeles Auto Show and a new report is suggesting it could preview a production model.
In an interview with Motor Authority, Toyotas North American Group Vice President and General Manager, Jack Hollis, confirmed the automaker will launch a new subcompact crossover in the next two or three years. Hollis went on to say the model will be based on the TNGA platform that underpins everything from the C-HR to the Prius.
Toyota has introduced a number of crossover concepts in the past year and Hollis said the FT-AC, FT-4X, and TJ Cruiser concepts were all created to test the waters in the market and get feedback from consumers. He didnt say which direction the company is leaning but confirmed the upcoming crossover will be offered with all-wheel drive and have a base price that could start at under $20,000.
If the company is able to hit that price point, the model would be more affordable than the CH-R which starts at $22,500. It would also have the benefit of optional all-wheel drive which is something that is curiously lacking on the CH-R.
Photo Gallery
Photo: Contributed
This week: More on reminders, more on Tablet Mode, and more on Photos and movies.
Thanks for your feedback! You all rock!
More on ReminderFox
The flood of email continues from people horrified about the demise of ReminderFox. (See last weeks column.) In this weeks email, long-time reader Ron passed along some good news for fans of the ReminderFox extension:
"Just discovered that reminder fox works in Mozilla's Thunderbird (which I use for my Telus mail account and access daily). It is superior to the Google app as you can create repeats daily, bi-weekly, monthly and yearly."
Thanks, Ron!
If youre looking for an email program thats not Windows Live Mail or the horrible Mail program built into Windows 10, check this recent column where I mention Thunderbird and a couple of others.
More on Tablet Mode
Several people wrote to say that after an update to Windows 10 they couldnt find the taskbar on their laptops. Just going by the description of the problem by the first correspondent, I thought the problem might be that the taskbar had just been accidentally moved to someplace other than the bottom of the screen.
If that happens to you, follow these instructions to fix it and make it stay put:
Press the Windows Key and the I key (that's the letter i) at the same time to open Settings
Click on Personalization | Taskbar
Under Taskbar location on screen make sure you've selected Bottom
Under Automatically hide the taskbar in desktop mode select Off
Under Automatically hide the taskbar in tablet mode select Off
Under Lock the taskbar select On
Close the Settings window
That should put the taskbar at the bottom of your screen and make is visible all the time.
But that wasnt the problem! It turns out the laptops had been sent into Tablet Mode. If you want to know how to get out and stay out of that dilemma, take a look here.
More on the Photos app features that replace Movie Maker
Windows Live Mail and Movie Maker are part of the same suite of free programs no longer supported by Microsoft. Its now impossible to download Windows Live Essentials from Microsoft. But as I mentioned recently, the Fall Creators Update from Microsoft added some very cool features to the Photos app.
The Photos app is built into Windows 10. There is no charge for it. Once you have the Fall Creators Update installed, open Photos. Close it. Reboot the computer, then open Photos again. Youll see a notification that additional features are being installed.
After a couple of minutes, your Photos app is good to go. And its free. Read more about it here. If you are being asked to pay for this app, you are being scammed. There are excellent alternatives, both free and paid, and I mention a couple in that column. But this app is free.
Thanks to everyone who takes the time to comment and to make suggestions. I appreciate it! Keep your questions and comments coming.
This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
You need to take a break and watch this dog experience snow for the first time.
Alanna Kelly
The family of a missing couple who took off in a plane from Penticton are pleading for help from the public in searching for their single-engine Mooney aircraft.
Joint Rescue Coordination Centre Victoria has decided to suspend their exhaustive search as of 3:30 p.m. on Monday and will be transferring the case to the RCMP.
Over the last 9 days, Royal Canadian Air Force and Parks Canada aircraft have flown approximately 120 hours in extremely challenging weather and conditions, covering more than 22,000 square kilometres in the areas surrounding the last known location, and likely flight path, of the missing plane, said the JRCC in a statement.
Dominic Neron, 28, and his girlfriend Ashley Bourgeault, 31, left from Penticton Regional Airport at 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 25 and were expected to land in Edmonton, but never arrived.
The two were visiting Bourgeault's cousin for lunch in Penticton and were expected to return home to Edmonton. Neron's cellphone last pinged in the Revelstoke area and search and rescue crews were scouring the area 18km north of Revelstoke.
Parks Canada and CASARA, and the information provided by Telus, Rogers, NavCanada and NORAD, have all been involved in the extensive search.
Samantha McClellan last spoke to her sister the day she went missing when they were at the Penticton airport and Bourgeault said weather conditions were difficult to fly in.
We will be working with local RCMP and their search crews and we are really asking for anybody that has knowledge of that area, that has time and can come help us volunteer, she said.
"We are asking snowmobilers, cross country skiers, snowshoers, trackers," she said. We are pleading that anyone that can search and is knowledgeable of the area donate their time, the more bodies we have out there looking the better."
McClellan has been watching Bourgeault's three children aged nine, five and four years old since she went missing and said they are doing everything they can to stay positive.
The family is also reaching out to anyone who may have been on Highway 1 between 3 and 6 p.m. on Nov. 25 and saw the white and burgundy plane.
McClellan added that her sister used Snap Chat, an image messaging mobile application, when she was in the air on Saturday and they are hoping to gain more information about where it was sent from.
Anyone who can volunteer their time to assist in the search is being asked to contact Kate Sinclair at 780-951-3937.
"Our thoughts are with the families and loved ones during this extremely difficult time," said the JRCC in a statement.
Photo: Jafa Signs
A Penticton branding, design, signage and print company is providing free window signage to one local non-profit a month.
Every month, Jafa Signs will randomly draw from applications and provide a custom window-wrap valued up to $2,000.
As the new sole owners of Jafa Signs, we can now start to give back to our community, with the launch of our new Jafa Community Window Graphics Program, said graphic designer Dallas Fish.
Our work is all about promoting great organizations, business and their stories we are so excited to help not-for-profits tell their stories of their commitment to our community, a value we share.
The initiative is meant to help an organization deliver any message they want from fundraising, to celebrating volunteers or promoting an event or program.
More information on the community window program can be found here.
Photo: The Canadian Press
A lawyer for Kinder Morgan Canada says political opposition to the Trans Mountain project in Burnaby, B.C. has "poisoned the well" and disrupted the regulatory review process in the city.
In a hearing at the National Energy Board, Maureen Killoran laid out arguments about how lengthy delays in permit approvals from the city have set back the $7.4-billion pipeline expansion project.
Killoran says strong and vocal opposition by Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan to the project has created an atmosphere of opposition, even if he has not specifically interfered in the process.
She says that more than a year after the federal cabinet approved the project, and months of engagement with Burnaby, the company still has no local approvals in place to begin work on expanding oil storage and loading facilities in the city.
Burnaby, which has yet to present oral arguments, said in its legal filings that Trans Mountain's constitutional question is misguided and premature because the city has yet to make any decisions on the permits.
With no decisions yet made, Burnaby says it's up to Trans Mountain to prove that the city has improperly delayed the process and says the company has not done so.
Photo: The Canadian Press
The B.C. Court of Appeal has dealt a devastating blow to a group of injured veterans engaged in a landmark legal battle with the federal government.
The six veterans involved in the so-called Equitas lawsuit had alleged that they were unfairly treated because of a major overhaul in 2006 to the way the government compensates those injured in the line of service.
Chief among the changes was replacing lifelong disability pensions with a lump-sum payment, career training and targeted income support, which the veterans contended was worth less than the previous pension system.
The case, which was first launched in 2012 under the previous Conservative government but continued with the Liberals, was seen as having major implications for all recently injured veterans.
The Equitas veterans scored a victory in 2014 when a B.C. Supreme Court justice ruled that there was enough merit to the case which the group planned to turn into a class-action lawsuit to proceed to trial.
But after the federal government appealed the decision, the B.C. Court of Appeal on Monday struck down the veterans' claim in its entirety, with a three-judge panel saying the case had no chance of success.
Lawyer Don Sorochan, who is representing the Equitas veterans, was preparing to meet with his clients in Vancouver and told The Canadian Press he would have to consult with them to determine their next course of action.
One possible step would be to try to bring the issue to the Supreme Court of Canada.
While Monday's ruling represents a win for the federal government, it could actually represent a double-edged sword for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals.
That's because Trudeau campaigned with Equitas members during the last federal election campaign in 2015, and the Liberals were the only party that promised to reinstate the lifelong pensions.
Yet the Liberal government continued to fight the court case after coming to power, and has yet to reinstate the disability pensions for injured veterans.
The government has said it will provide more details by the end of the year, but even then, many veterans are worried that it will fall far short of the previous system of compensation.
Photo: Colin Dacre
An Oliver man was found not guilty of three sex crimes against a minor in Penticton court Monday.
The man, who can only be identified as TB due to a publication ban, was acquitted by Justice Alison Beames due to inconsistencies in the evidence of the now 15-year-old complainant.
I cannot be sure what happened, I do not know who to believe. That means the Crown has failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, she said, provoking exasperated gasps and tears from the family of the alleged victim in the gallery.
Beames said the relationship between TB (age 20 at the time of the allegations) and the complainant (age 9), was undoubtedly unusual and enough to raise suspicions.
It began after the accuseds father died in a 2011 car crash, and the complainant's mother began visiting the widow, bringing her child along.
The accused lived in the basement of his mother's house, the two became friends and were seen in public together at the movies, waterpark and ski hill.
TB has always denied anything sexual ever took place. The court heard he approached the police to give his side of the story shortly he heard a rumour circulating through the small community that he had molested the boy.
He was acquitted of sexual interference of a person under 16, invitation to sexual touching under 16 and sexual assault in connection to incidents that were alleged to have occurred in 2011 and 2012.
Let's hope this is the first day this kid can get his life back after six years, defence lawyer Don Skogstad said to reporters on his way out of the courtroom after the verdict.
His life?! shrieked a family member of the complainant standing in the hallway.
TB declined to comment while leaving out the back door of the courthouse.
Photo: Contributed The RCMP's Counter Attack is underway through December in the North Okanagan.
'Tis the holiday season and Vernon/North Okanagan RCMP will be out looking for impaired drivers.
For the month of December and into the new year, drivers are reminded that the detachment's traffic services and road safety unit will be conducting enhanced enforcement and Counter Attack road checks.
If your holiday festivities include alcohol, please arrange for a designated driver, call a taxi, take transit or use Operation Red Nose where available, said Const. Kelly Brett, RCMP spokesperson. Lets all do our part for a safe holiday season.
Brett said impaired driving is an entirely preventable cause of death and injuries, with immense costs and devastating effects to our communities.
The number of people killed in impaired-related crashes each year has significantly dropped with 40 years of Counter Attack, but impaired driving remains a top contributing factor in B.C.
Theres no excuse to drink and drive. If you plan to drink, leave your car at home.
Photo: Can. Red Cross Vernon resident Cor Zandbergen to receive the Red Cross' highest honour.
Vernon resident Cor Zandbergen is to be presented with the highest honour of the Red Cross.
Zandbergen is being honoured for his 16 years of dedicated service assisting thousands of people impacted by disasters in Canada and around the world, according to a press release.
On Tuesday, Zandbergen will be inducted into the Order of the Red Cross at a ceremony in Kelowna.
Zandbergen has responded to countless disasters including flooding, fires and ice storms across Canada and elsewhere, said the press release.
He currently leads the Red Cross North Okanagan personal disaster assistance team, ensuring emergency social services are available to people living across a land base of more than 7,800 km. His international work has taken him to flood-ravaged parts of Pakistan, as well as New Jersey and Louisiana after major hurricanes.
Zandbergen continues his work, playing a key role by mentoring new leaders in the Red Cross disaster management team.
The ceremony takes place Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. at the Canadian Red Cross Office, 124 Adams Road, Kelowna.
Photo: The Canadian Press
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board says the second mate of a tugboat fell asleep before it ran aground off the coast of British Columbia last year and spilled thousands of litres of fuel.
The American safety agency says records show the second mate relieved the captain of watch duty and missed a scheduled change of course for the Nathan E. Stewart before the articulated tug and barge crashed near Bella Bella on Oct. 13, 2016.
The board's report dated Nov. 21 says the second mate told investigators he missed the change of course because he had fallen asleep, which it says is the probable cause of the vessel running aground.
The vessel owned by Houston-based Kirby Offshore Marine was en route to the Port of Vancouver with an empty barge when it ran aground and partially sank in the Seaforth Channel.
More than 107,000 litres of diesel and 2,240 litres of lubricants, including gear, hydraulic and lube oils, were released into the Pacific Ocean from the 30-metre vessel.
The safety board says a contributing factor to the crash was also the ineffective implementation of Kirby's safety management procedures.
Based on statements from the crew, the board says there was a lack of documentation on safety rounds and no evidence that safety management procedures were implemented on board the Nathan E. Stewart.
Photo: B.C.government/Flickr File photo.
The B.C. government has announced it is funding thousands of new licensed child-care spaces.
Lumby is one area that will benefit from the investment.
The Bridge Educational Society is receiving $500,000 to create 43 spaces 12 spaces for infants and toddlers, 16 spaces for children aged three to five years and 15 school age spaces at Cedar Bridge School.
"I'm excited to be announcing that we are building thousands of child-care spaces throughout B.C., including more than ever before for Indigenous communities," Katrine Conroy, Minister of Children and Family Development said Monday. "Too many B.C. families are struggling to find child care. These new spaces will offer relief and hope to parents."
The government is spending $33 million in 52 communities on 103 projects that will create more than 3,800 child-care spaces.
Other communities that will benefit include:
Lake Country: The New Beginnings Early Learning Centre to receive $215,429 to create 50 spaces 20 for infants and toddlers and 30 for children aged three to five years.
Salmon Arm: The Kinder Play Child Care Centre to receive $250,000 to create 24 infant and toddler spaces.
Salmon Arm: The Neskonlith Indian Band to receive $500,000 to create 39 spaces eight infant and toddler spaces, eight spaces for children aged three to five years, eight preschool spaces, and 15 school-age spaces at the Switzmalph Child Care Centre.
A number of groups in Kelowna will be receiving government funding totally approximately $1 million.
According to dispatch, two people were transported to the hospital following an accident on Faudree Road and Highway 80.
No word yet on the cause of the accident or the severity of injuries.
CBS 7 News will continue to update you as more information becomes available.
The model for the movable components of buildings are cones of coniferous wood, which open (right) or close in dryness due to the different swelling behaviour of their fabric.
Mobile components on buildings such as blinds whose design was copied from naturally occurring solutions -- that is the subject of the research conducted by a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the University of Freiburg, and the University of Stuttgart. The aim is to outfit them with drive elements that can move without any energy input. Serving as a model here are pine cones, which utilize the varying swelling behaviors of their tissue to open when moist or close when dry.
Worldwide, the use of buildings accounts for 40 percent of total energy consumption. Around half of this is used for climate control. Although blinds and other mobile facade elements can be used to optimize the building shell's transparency to heat and light, their electric motors also require energy to move these systems.
"Sustainable architecture urgently requires new materials if it is to live up to the high energy efficiency and climate protection requirements", says the chemist, forest scientist, and materials researcher Professor Cordt Zollfrank. At the Chair of Biogenic Polymers on the Straubing Campus for Biotechnology and Sustainability of the TUM, he is researching the related basic principles. His goal is to develop drive elements and actuators which are able to convert signals into mechanical movements without consuming energy.
Together with architects, civil engineers, and botanists, he has found futuristic methods that allow natural mechanisms to be used to improve the energy balance of buildings. In a joint article the team reports on the status of the research in this area, and demonstrates the possibilities of the models from the plant world.
Material replaces motor
Ripe pine and fir cones close their scales when it rains in order to protect the seeds. However, when it is dry, they open up and release them. During this movement, the composition of the cell walls plays a crucial role. They are composed primarily of lignin, which does not swell much, and cellulose, which is good at swelling up. Due to the different orientation of the cellulose fibrils in the tissue of the scales, they curve inwards when humidity is high, and outwards when it is dry.
"The exciting thing about this is that the energy for these movements does not come from metabolic processes, but solely from physical mechanisms and material properties", says Professor Zollfrank. Via the combination of materials with varying swelling propensities, he has already succeeded at developing such biomimetic drive elements, called actuators. These elements are also composed of two layers of materials which absorb varying amounts of liquid and behave similarly to their naturally occurring models.
Overcoming physical limits
However, before they can be used on a large scale in architecture, the material researchers still need to solve one problem which affects scalability: The larger the cell or the tissue, the longer the time required for the water to penetrate its pores towards the inside. Something that takes two hours in a pine cone would take several years in a building. Hence, in order to utilize the hydraulics of pine cones for applications in architecture, a physical limit will first need to be overcome.
All a question of the right links
For this purpose, Zollfrank proposes a type of restructuring process at the material level. "We decouple the tissue size and take the whole thing to the magnitude of an individual cell", he explains. Via cleverly chosen cross-links, a loose cell complex is created whose individual components nevertheless still act like individual cells and absorb water extremely rapidly.
"The question now is how such cross-links can be designed as efficiently as possible and how to create them in any size", says Zollfrank. However, for later practical applications, he can also imagine porous biopolymer materials whose pores are filled with an extremely hydrophilic liquid (hydrogel). Material researchers are already working on this. It is only a matter of time before we find out which solution will ultimately make its way into the architecture of the future.
Advocate Sherman Hospital in Elgin is seen in 2016. Advocate Health Care is seeking to merge with Wisconsin's Aurora Health Care, the companies announced Dec. 4, 2017. (Gloria Casas / The Courier-News)
Advocate Health Care is ready to give a merger another try this time with Wisconsin giant Aurora Health Care, in a proposed deal that would create the 10th largest not-for-profit hospital system in the country.
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Under terms of the planned 50-50 merger announced Monday, neither system would pay the other cash, and the deal could close by the middle of 2018, pending regulatory approval. A combined health system, to be called Advocate Aurora Health, would have 27 hospitals and nearly $11 billion in annual revenue.
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No job cuts are expected as a result of the merger, according to Advocate President and CEO Jim Skogsbergh and Aurora President and CEO Nick Turkal, who would serve as co-CEOs.
Advocates last attempt to merge with a large health system didnt end well. In March, Advocate walked away from a 2-year bid to unite with NorthShore University HealthSystem after a federal judge ruled in favor of the Federal Trade Commission, which had challenged the deal. The failed attempt cost Advocate $15 million.
In that case, however, Advocate and NorthShores hospitals were much closer together geographically, with each having hospitals in Cook and Lake counties. The FTC had argued the combined health systems would have had enough leverage to impose price increases on Illinois insurers.
In this case, Advocates hospitals are in the Chicago area and central Illinois. Auroras hospitals are in Wisconsin, though it operates three health centers in northern Illinois. These markets are very distinct, Skogsbergh said. This is not a series of ZIP codes in the northern area of Chicago.
Skogsbergh said the merger would allow both systems to improve patient outcomes, lower costs and provide better patient services. We think ultimately this provides a more stable, more secure future for our organization, he said.
Like many hospital systems in Illinois and across the country, Downers Grove-based Advocate and Aurora, based in Milwaukee, have faced financial challenges in recent months. Hospitals nationwide have grappled with reimbursement rates from federal programs that dont cover the full costs of care, increases in unpaid medical bills known as bad debt, and reimbursement rates from nongovernmental insurers that no longer offset other costs, among other things. Both systems recorded lower operating income during the first nine months of the this year compared with the same period a year ago, according to unaudited financial statements.
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In May, Advocate announced it planned to make $200 million in cuts after missing revenue targets. In the fall, Advocate laid off about 75 of its 37,000 employees as part of those cuts.
But the CEOs of both systems said in an interview that financial issues didnt drive the deal. I think it would be a mistake to say Aurora or Advocate had a particular (financial) year and that caused them to seek each other out, Skogsbergh said. This is about a long-term play.
Aurora also recently announced it would increase prices for some services by 4.5 percent in 2018. But Skogsbergh said Chicago-area residents neednt fear the same thing happening here.
Youre not going to see price increases as a result of this transaction, Skogsbergh said. He said that in Illinois, health systems are price takers not price makers because of the dominance of insurer Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois. He also said Advocate has a track record of making health care more affordable. Advocate was recently cited by the federal government as saving Medicare the second highest amount of money in the country last year as part of a federal program meant to cut health spending.
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A single board of directors, composed of an equal number of members from Advocate and Aurora, would oversee the new system. The two systems already have jointly owned and operated ACL Laboratories, which has a number of locations in Wisconsin and the Chicago area, for about 20 years. Hospitals in the system would keep their current names.
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If the marriage goes through, Advocate and Aurora would not be the first hospital systems to grow by crossing state lines.
Its unlikely the Federal Trade Commission would challenge the Advocate-Aurora deal, given their mostly separate geographic footprints, said Lisl Dunlop, a partner at law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips who works on antitrust issues.
When you cant do a deal in your existing market like Advocate becoming a bigger regional system is a kind of logical extension, if youre deal-minded and want to be bigger, Dunlop said.
Research has shown that generally, hospital consolidation results in higher prices for insurance companies, and those costs can be passed along to consumers through higher premiums and other payments. Price increases are possible, but not as certain when it comes to mergers between hospital systems in different states, said Amanda Starc, an associate professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
lschencker@chicagotribune.com
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Twitter @lschencker
Airlines are cracking down on so-called smart luggage, like these bags from Bluesmart, with pockets that hold and charge electronic devices, citing concerns about the hazards of placing lithium-ion battery power banks in the cargo hold. (AP)
Planning to give or give yourself smart luggage this holiday season? Check the battery compartment first.
Starting Jan. 15, any passenger with battery-powered luggage must be able to remove the battery to bring the bag on an American Airlines flight. The airline announced the policy last week, citing concerns about the hazards of placing lithium-ion battery power banks in the cargo hold.
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We wanted to get out ahead of the holiday season given that its one of the trendy gifts for travelers, said American spokeswoman Leslie Scott.
Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines rolled out similar rules, while United Airlines and Southwest Airlines say theyre reviewing the issue.
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Smart bags have a wide range of features. Bag-maker Away says its $225 carry-on will charge a drained iPhone five times, while G-ROs version, at $374, comes with charging and GPS tracking. At $449, Bluesmarts carry-on includes those features and lets travelers lock their bag from a smartphone or weigh it on a built-in scale.
Many of the bags rely on lithium-ion batteries, which can overheat and pose a fire hazard, Delta said.
Last fall, the U.S. Department of Transportation banned Samsungs Galaxy Note 7 smartphone from flights after defective batteries caused some phones to burst into flames, prompting a recall. Batteries were also blamed for hoverboards that caught fire, also prompting airline bans.
American, Delta and Alaska all say they will require customers to remove batteries from any smart bag they check and pack the batteries in a carry-on similar to the way passengers are asked to bring spare batteries for other electronics in the cabin, where crew members can more easily identify an overheating device and quickly respond to a fire.
Passengers can leave batteries installed in carry-on smart bags, but must still be able to remove them in case they need to check the bag at the gate or on a later flight.
Tim Ryan, chief marketing officer at Chicago-based smart bag-maker Modobag, said its batteries are removable, though the company may consider making batteries easier to remove in an upcoming line of smart bags that are designed to be checked.
But Ryan took issue with the way airlines new policies treat all smart bags the same. The lithium batteries that power Modobags motorized luggage, which travelers can ride through the airport, use different technology than the lithium-ion batteries blamed for exploding smartphones and hoverboards, according to Ryan.
Its incumbent upon those of us in the luggage space to make sure we make the airline community aware and educate them on what our products are, and are not, Ryan said.
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lzumbach@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @laurenzumbach
Good food is derived from the good ingredient. Which is why the cook practices prejudice.
Her kitchen shows no tolerance for food coloring, bouillon cube, cornstarch or gelatin. Which strike her, respectively, as garish, salty, gluey and wiggly. She has no tolerance for garish, salty, gluey or wiggly.
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Until she attempts panna cotta.
Panna cotta is Italian for cooked cream. She figures any recipe that calls for Italian and cooked and cream must be good. Pint jar in one hand, wooden spoon in the other, she stirs happily, until called on to add gelatin. She shudders.
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The cook substitutes egg white, mindful that her dish might be mistaken for French blanc manger. She switches to whole egg, risking trespass into flan territory. She tries yolk only, offending creme brulee.
She whips the cream, producing something resembling mousse, but not something resembling tasty. She considers the thickening properties of the icebox and the been-there-done-that properties of ice cream.
None of her efforts yield what she seeks: a pure white mound of cold, thick cream. Having exhausted her supply of cream and of patience, she turns to the informed, only to learn that panna cotta can be bolstered by seaweed or fish glue. She sighs. And rips open a packet of gelatin.
Which works. Sprinkled sparingly, the granules bloom and plump, pulling together a pure white mound of cold, thick cream. Each spoonful offers a delicious lesson in tolerance and a convincing argument for wiggle room.
Leah Eskin is a Tribune special contributor.
leahreskin@aol.com
Panna cotta
Prep:
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20 minutes
Chill:
Overnight
Makes:
8 servings
1 cup whole milk
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1 teaspoon gelatin
1
1/2
cups whipping cream
1
1/2
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cups creme fraiche
1 cup sugar
1/2
vanilla bean
1 pint strawberries
1/2
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cup water
1
Soften:
Pour
1/2
cup milk into a bowl. Sprinkle with gelatin. Set aside.
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2
Simmer:
Pour remaining
1/2
cup milk, the cream, creme fraiche and
1/2
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cup sugar into a large heavy saucepan. Split the vanilla bean; scrape seeds and bean into the milk mixture. Heat to a simmer over medium-high heat, whisking constantly.
3
Thicken:
Pour a little of the hot milk mixture over the gelatin. Whisk smooth. Whisk in the remaining milk mixture. Let cool.
4
Chill:
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Discard bean. Pour mixture into eight 4-ounce ramekins or glasses. Cover and chill overnight.
Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. >
5
Serve:
Run a knife around the edge of the ramekins and unmold onto dessert plates or serve panna cotta right in the glasses. Slice strawberries. Heat remaining
1/2
cup sugar with
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1/2
cup water to a boil. Boil 3 minutes. Turn off heat. Stir in berries. Pour hot berries over cool cream. Enjoy.
Golden Globe nominee James Franco is in talks to play the late Chicago poet-author Shel Silverstein in an upcoming biopic he would also direct, Deadline.com reports.
The movie will be based on the 2007 book A Boy Named Shel by Lisa Rogak. Silverstein, who wrote The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends, grew up in the Palmer Square neighborhood and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Roosevelt University. He died in 1999 at the age of 68 while living in Key West, Fla. He is buried at Westlawn Cemetery in Norridge.
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It's unclear if the film will be shot in Chicago. Chicago producer Gigi Pritzker's MWM Studios will produce and co-finance the project, according to Deadline.
Franco was nominated last week for a best actor Golden Globe for his role in The Disaster Artist, a movie he also directed about the making of the 2003 cult classic "The Room. The Golden Globe winners are scheduled to be announced Jan. 7 at a ceremony hosted by Seth Meyers. Franco won a Golden Globe in 2002 for his portrayal of James Dean in a TV biopic.
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He was also nominated for the best actor Academy Award in 2011 for playing mountain climber Aron Ralston in 127 Hours.
tswartz@tribpub.com
Twitter @tracyswartz
[ RELATED: FX developing drama about Chicago bank fraud ]
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Travis Scott performs Dec. 1, 2017, in River North for the 35th anniversary of Nike's Air Force 1 sneaker. (Nike Chicago)
Rapper Travis Scott performed a surprise set Friday at Joy District in River North to help Nike celebrate the 35th anniversary of its Air Force 1 sneaker.
Scott is dating Keeping Up with the Kardashians star Kylie Jenner, but she did not attend the free, invite-only party. Scotts 45-minute set included Goosebumps, Pick Up the Phone, Antidote" and Butterfly Effect.
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Scott, 25, is becoming a familiar face in Chicago. He performed at the United Center in July as part of Kendrick Lamars tour. Scott made headlines in 2015 when he encouraged Lollapalooza attendees to jump the barricades into the security pit as he performed. He was sentenced to one year of court supervision after pleading guilty to misdemeanor reckless conduct.
He collaborated with Nike to reimagine the Air Force 1 as part of the new AF-100 collection. Two other collaborators designer Virgil Abloh and Chicago native Don C also attended the River North party.
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Nikes four-day anniversary celebration also included a Wicker Park pop-up that featured the AF-100 collection and a retrospective of the most iconic Air Force 1 styles.
tswartz@tribpub.com
Twitter @tracyswartz
[ RELATED: Kanye West returns to Chicago, joins Kid Cudi at Aragon show ]
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Both the Ravinia Festival and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are withholding comment over allegations of sexual misconduct by famed conductor James Levine, pending the outcome of ongoing investigations by authorities in Lake County and at New Yorks Metropolitan Opera.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported Sunday evening that the Met has suspended Levine after three men came forward with accusations that Levine sexually abused them decades ago, when they were teenagers.
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Met General Manager Peter Gelb announced Sunday that the company was suspending its four-decade relationship with Levine and canceling his upcoming engagements, after receiving questions from The New York Times about the accounts of the three men. The Met also has asked an outside law firm to investigate Levines behavior, according to the Times story.
The Times identified three men, one of whom grew up near Ravinia and said he was sexually abused by Levine starting in the summer of 1985, when he was 15.
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In a statement issued Sunday afternoon, the Ravinia administration said it learned of allegations raised against the Ravinia Festivals former music director (1973-93) late Friday afternoon and in media reports of those allegations the following day.
We understand from these articles that investigations are ongoing, the statement said. Ravinia finds these allegations very disturbing and contrary to its zero-tolerance policies and culture. Ravinia will take any actions that it deems appropriate following the results of these investigations. Ravinia has no other information to share at this time.
Ravinia President and CEO Welz Kauffman did not respond to the Tribunes requests for further comment.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association said in a statement that the orchestra has no comment on this issue at this time.
Levines manager at Columbia Artists Management also did not respond to Tribune questions.
A statement released by the Metropolitan Opera, where Levine was music director from 1976 to 2016 and has led more than 2,500 performances, said the company is working on an investigation with outside sources to determine whether charges of sexual misconduct in the 1980s are true, so that we can take appropriate action.
Levine currently holds the title of music director emeritus at the Met.
One of the worlds most prominent and respected conductors of opera and symphonic music, the 74-year-old Levine is being investigated following a mans report that he had been sexually abused by Levine three decades ago, beginning when the man was a teenager. The abuse continued for several years in Illinois and New York, according to a police report.
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Details of that report first appeared Saturday on the New York Post website. The story has since been reported in news outlets across the nation and abroad.
The Tribune received independent confirmation from the Lake County states attorneys office that the report was made to the Lake Forest Police Department.
Its information were reviewing, Lake County States Attorney Michael Nerheim said Saturday.
According to reports, one of Levines accusers, now 48, contacted Lake Forest police in October 2016 to report that hed had sexual contact with the conductor beginning in 1985, roughly midway through Levines tenure as Ravinia music director.
The complainant, whose name police have not revealed to protect his privacy, told Lake Forest police the abuse started in 1985, when he was 15 and Levine was in his 40s, and continued for several years in Illinois and New York. The young man lived with his parents in their home in Kenilworth.
"(Levine) started holding my hand in a prolonged and incredibly sensual way," the New York Post quoted the man as saying in the police report.
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He told police the abuse took place at the Deer Path Inn in Lake Forest, about 8 miles north of the Ravinia Festival grounds.
The alleged victim told police he was a classical music lover who hoped to become a conductor and that he was 4 years old when his parents first took him to Ravinia to meet Levine.
This spring, Ravinia announced that Levine is scheduled to begin a five-year contract next summer as Ravinia conductor laureate. The post was created specifically for him following the success of his return to the festival in July 2016 to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony.
The new title would also represent a kind of lifetime achievement award for a much-admired musician whose two decades at Ravinia represented, by any reckoning, an artistic watershed in the history of Americas oldest classical music festival.
It is too early to tell how the current investigation into Levines alleged sexual misbehavior will impact his scheduled return to Ravinia next summer.
The accusations against Levine, along with the several related inquiries, represent the first instance in which claims of sexual misconduct have reached the uppermost levels of the classical music world.
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John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
Chicago Tribunes Tony Briscoe contributed.
jvonrhein@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @jvonrhein
[ RELATED: Former longtime Ravinia conductor James Levine faces sexual misconduct investigation ]
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Depression afflicts an estimated 16 million Americans every year, many of whom go to their doctors in despair, embarking on an often stressful process about what to do next. These visits may entail filling out forms with screening questions about symptoms such as mood changes and difficulty sleeping. Doctors may ask patients to share intimate details about such issues as marital conflicts and suicidal urges. Some patients may be referred to mental-health specialists for further examination.
Once diagnosed with depression, patients frequently face the question: "Are you interested in therapy, medications or both?"
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As a resident physician in psychiatry, I've seen many patients grapple with this question; the most frequent answer I've heard from patients is "I'm not sure." Deciding between different types of medical treatment can be challenging, especially amid the fog of depression. Moreover, patients rely on doctors to help guide them, and we're often not sure ourselves which is the best approach for a specific patient.
People commonly associate psychotherapy with Freud and couches, but newer, evidence-based treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy have become prominent in the field. CBT helps patients develop strategies to address harmful thoughts, emotions and behaviors that may contribute to depression.
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There are many proposed explanations for how specific psychotherapies treat depression. These possibilities include giving patients social support and teaching coping skills, and researchers are using neuroimaging to study how these treatments affect depressed patients' brains.
Antidepressant medications are thought to work by changing chemical signaling in our brains. For example, one class of commonly used drugs - selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors - is designed to alter levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. These antidepressants may be effective for treating depression in some patients, but the neurochemistry of depression remains poorly understood, and we're still not entirely sure how these drugs alleviate depressive symptoms.
A number of recent studies highlight the uncertainty involved with these treatment decisions. Researchers have dedicated considerable effort to studying the relative effectiveness between psychotherapies and antidepressants, frequently without finding much difference. For instance, a study published in 2012 reviewed data from more than 100 prior trials and included more than 10,000 patients; although psychotherapies and antidepressants each worked better than placebo in blinded trials at reducing depressive symptoms, neither of these treatments was more effective than the other. Furthermore, psychotherapies and antidepressants did no better overall than alternative therapies such as exercise.
In 2014, research presented at the European Congress of Psychiatry suggested that CBT was just as good as, if not better than, antidepressants for the acute treatment of depression. A 2015 systematic review of randomized trials similarly found that antidepressants were no better than CBT across multiple measures for managing depression. And this year, a meta-analysis looking at dozens of studies found psychotherapies and medications were fairly alike at improving quality of life and functioning in people with depression.
If psychotherapy and medication are both used to treat depression, could using them together work even better?
This is a valid question, and one often brought up by patients. But the efficacy of combining these treatments is controversial in medical circles: Studies have come to different conclusions about it. As a result, many patients still receive one or the other first.
In 2016, the American College of Physicians released guidelines about using antidepressants as opposed to non-pharmacologic therapies for depression. After reviewing decades of evidence, a committee concluded that CBT and newer-generation antidepressants are "similarly effective treatments" for adults with major depression. The guidelines recommend that "clinicians select between either cognitive behavioral therapy or second-generation antidepressants" for treating patients with depression.
The authors of these guidelines also raise an important point: Doctors commonly turn first to antidepressants when treating patients with depression, even though evidence suggests alternate therapies are just as effective. The medications can also have side effects including nausea and vomiting as well as dangerous interactions with other drugs.
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Antidepressants rank among the top-prescribed types of medications in the United States, and surveys suggest that more than 250 million antidepressant prescriptions are filled annually nationwide. A 2015 JAMA study found that 13 percent of American adults took antidepressants in 2012, a figure that nearly doubled since 1999.
Does this mean antidepressants are overprescribed?
It depends on how you interpret the question. Antidepressant use has risen considerably in recent years, while psychotherapy use appears to be stable or declining; because these treatments are often equally effective in managing depression, this might suggest we're relying more on these drugs.
Some patients may prefer to take medications for depression. Many people do not have the time to participate in psychotherapies like CBT or psychodynamic therapy - a type of talk therapy that explores the interplay between unconscious feelings and distressing symptoms - which can span multiple hour-long sessions over months. Others may not have access to mental-health specialists who can provide appropriate therapy. Then there are patients who would rather take a pill in the comfort of their own home, instead of opening up about intimate experiences in a doctor's office.
The structure of our health-care system may also be a factor. Higher insurance reimbursements for medications rather than psychotherapies may make physicians quicker to pull out the prescription pad. The crunched time and administrative burdens of today's medical practice can lead to pressured patient visits that are more conducive to quick check-ins and pills than to in-depth conversations.
Patients should be aware that there are treatment options in addition to therapy and medication. Several studies have shown that exercise may be helpful in managing mild to moderate depression. For patients with more severe depression, transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroconvulsive therapy - approaches that use brief electric currents to influence brain activity - can be lifesaving treatments.
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As the ACP guidelines recommend, providers should discuss "treatment effects, adverse effect profiles, cost, accessibility and preferences with the patient" when treating depression. But in today's hurried medical environment, completing that task in a thorough and comprehensive manner can often be difficult, if not impossible.
Researchers are developing tools including brain imaging and genetic testing to help guide this decision-making. Such individualized treatment has long been sought in mental-health care.
These technologies have shown promise, but they remain far from standard clinical practice. And adding more tests to doctors' visits may ignore the central issue when treating depression: Do we have enough time to truly talk with our patients about their options?
Morris is a resident physician in psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigans office is investigating a bus company that serves University of Illinois students for potential civil rights violations, the latest fallout in response to the companys racially tinged weekend ad that disparaged Chinese students and the universitys admissions policies.
Madigans office announced Monday it had issued a subpoena for Suburban Express, a bus company based in Champaign that provides shuttle service from various universities to OHare International Airport and Chicago-area suburbs.
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The office is investigating whether the companys policies and practices violate the Illinois Human Rights Act, a probe based upon the weekend email promotion that boasted you wont feel like youre in China when youre on our buses, according to the statement. Madigan is seeking documents, records and other information from the company to evaluate its business operations.
Suburban Express has 30 days to comply with the subpoena, according to a statement from Madigans office.
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I am concerned that this advertisement may reflect that Suburban Express is discriminating against potential customers, Madigan said in the statement. Under the law, access to transportation must not be impacted or based on a persons race or national origin. My office is investigating to determine whether Suburban Express policies and practices violate the law.
Madigans office also encouraged people to file complaints against the company online or call her offices Civil Rights Hotline.
The companys owner, Dennis Toeppen, could not be reached for comment Monday,
The action from the attorney general is the latest in the fierce backlash and fallout for the company.
Earlier Monday, Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th, said he would file a City Council resolution next week to request that a representative of Suburban Express appear before aldermen to explain the ad as well as a second message that accused U. of I. of selling our university to the highest foreign bidder.
This is not acceptable in any way, Pawar said, adding, This is xenophobic, its bigoted, its racist. Its not right.
The alderman said he would also appeal to the citys Department of Aviation and its Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection to investigate Suburban Express business practices. For years, the company has adopted an aggressive stance in criticizing customers it says had violated its policies and toward competing bus companies, which it has disparaged on its website.
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Pawar, who sits on the councils joint committee for aviation and budget and government operations, said the city could exercise some regulatory authority over the company because it provides shuttle service to OHare.
Pawar said he wanted the company to come talk to the City Council about their stance on diversity, how they could have allowed a statement like this to go out knowing that they serve a large number of travelers of various backgrounds, and why they think that we, as city government, should allow them to continue operating out of the airport given their ugly stances. Toeppen would not be required to attend.
The City Council next convenes Dec. 13.
Later Monday, the company posted another statement on Facebook saying it had reached out to Pawar about the issue. The alderman confirmed someone contacted his office, but he said he had not spoken to anyone from the company as of Monday afternoon.
We screwed up and we know it, the statement read. Our apology was inadequate. We hope to open a dialogue with Alderman Pawar about our shortcomings and how to make our services more inclusive in the future.
Lilia Chacon, spokeswoman for Chicagos Business Affairs and Consumer Protection Department, said Suburban Express is licensed by the state, not the city.
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In Chicago this kind of language in marketing would not be tolerated, Chacon said in a statement. Because their service is a one-way transport, typically to OHare or suburban malls, they do not require a city license. However, because of concerns about the companys offensive marketing strategy we are referring this company for review by the Chicago Commission on Human Relations.
The Saturday ad sent via email publicized shuttle services from Urbana-Champaign to various Chicago suburbs throughout the universitys holiday break. Amid the list of perks being offered by the companys services the ad stated:
Passengers like you. You wont feel like youre in China when youre on our buses.
A second email later that day, titled Apology, dismissed those who characterized the ad as being racist. The message then shifted to pointedly criticize U. of I.s admission policies, incorrectly stating that Chinese-born students make up 20 percent of the student body, that the universitys primary motive in enrolling international students was money and that that number of nonnative English speakers places a variety of burdens on domestic students.
There are 5,868 Chinese students enrolled at Urbana-Champaign this fall 12 percent of the population, according to university data.
The messages quickly spurred angry responses from university officials and student groups.
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We cannot prevent a private company from operating in our community, part of the statement from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs read. But we can, loudly and unambiguously, say that the opinions expressed by Suburban Express are offensive, bigoted, insulting and in direct opposition to the values of this university.
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drhodes@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @rhodes_dawn
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Sen. Dick Durbin said Monday he is hopeful but not confident that Congress will pass the Dream Act and create a path to citizenship for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin on Monday said he is hopeful but not confident that Congress will pass the Dream Act and create a path to citizenship for immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children.
Durbin, the second-ranking Senate Democrat and a top sponsor of the bipartisan bill, is encouraging his colleagues to join him in blocking spending legislation if the legal status of Dreamers isn't resolved, a move that could lead to a government shutdown.
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We have to assert ourselves in the minority and make it clear that we are not going to vote for certain legislation and our votes are needed unless this is included as part of the package, Durbin said.
Congress faces a Friday deadline to fund the government through the end of next September.
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The Dream Act would grant "conditional permanent residency" to an estimated 1.8 million immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before age 18 and can meet requirements similar to those under the Obama administrations Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
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President Donald Trump dissolved the DACA program in September and set a March 5 deadline for Congress to act. By then, permits will begin to expire at a rate of nearly 1,000 per day.
So far, Ive gotten good responses. Not enough to say Im confident yet but certainly to say Im hopeful, Durbin said.
He joined business, labor and faith leaders, and Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-3rd,who said he is working with a bipartisan group on immigration reform, at the Illinois Chamber of Commerce on Monday to rally support for the Dream Act.
Its only common sense that DACA recipients are given a real opportunity to become U.S. citizens, Lipinski said. Even President Donald Trump, at a time or two, has agreed with that.
nmoreno@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @nereidamorenos
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A 19-year-old man was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of a 22-year-old man the day after Thanksgiving on the Far South Side, officials said Sunday.
Alec Aguilar, of the 10200 block of South Avenue G, was arrested Nov. 30 and ordered held without bail Sunday during a court hearing before Judge David Navarro.
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Prosecutors said Aguilar was captured on surveillance video following the victim, Manuel Salazar, in a gray car.
Salazar was fatally shot Nov. 24 about 10:15 a.m. in the 10000 block of South Avenue M by one of the three passengers in Aguilar's car. He was on his way to work and had no gang affiliation, according to Assistant State's Attorney Craig Taczy.
Aguilar pulled up next to Salazar at a red light and the group began flashing gang signs while covering the bottom half of their faces with their shirts. Aguilar was wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a "unique tribal pattern," Taczy said.
When the light turned green, Salazar and his driver continued down South Chicago Avenue, called 911 and tried to evade the gray sedan that was tailing them. Aguilar would speed up, slow down, brake check and pass other cars in traffic to stay with the victim, prosecutors said.
An unnamed co-offender fired shots from Aguilar's vehicle, shattering the rear windshield and striking Salazar in the back. The driver crashed into another car and assisted Salazar until paramedics arrived.
Salazar was pronounced dead at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. An autopsy Nov. 25 determined he died of a gunshot wound to the back, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. Salazar, whose death was ruled a homicide, lived in the 9600 block of South Avenue N, according to court records and the office.
Aguilar was stopped by Hammond police in the same uniquely patterned sweatshirt worn during the shooting, prosecutors said. He was later identified by a co-offender and by Salazar's driver. The gray sedan is registered to Aguilar's father.
He is scheduled to appear in court Monday.
Attorney Rhonda Crawford talks about what she did and did not do while filling in as a judge. She speaks at her attormey's office in Chicago on Sept. 22, 2016. (Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune/Chicago Tribune)
A Cook County judge who allowed a law clerk to wear her robe and hear traffic court cases in 2016 has been forced into retirement by a state oversight commission that found the judge was mentally unable to perform her duties.
The Illinois Courts Commission noted that Valarie E. Turner, first elected to the bench in 2002, suffers from Alzheimers disease. The commission said it was sympathetic to Turners mental health issues, adding that its decision was not meant to punish her.
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However, we cannot ignore that the complaint at issue in this matter was initiated based on (Turners) actions in allowing a person who was not elected or sworn in as a judge to preside over formal matters which could only be resolved by a judicial officer, the commission wrote.
Turner, 60, could not be reached for comment Monday. Her lawyer, Gino DiVito, declined to comment.
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The commissions decision, which was handed down Friday, appears to mark the end of Turners once-promising legal career, which began with law school at the University of Chicago, and with positions at the well-known Kirkland & Ellis law firm and the U.S. attorneys office. Under the states constitution, the commissions decision cannot be appealed and is final.
The Courts Commission ruling is another twist in an already tortuous legal path that has embarrassed one of the nations largest court systems. And the matter still is not fully resolved.
A separate criminal case against Rhonda Crawford, the law clerk who put on Turners robe and presided over traffic court cases, is ongoing. Crawford has pleaded not guilty to one court of official misconduct, a felony, and one court of false impersonation, a misdemeanor.
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The Judicial Inquiry Board, which investigates judges, a year ago charged that Turner was mentally unable to do her job. The board, however, made no allegation that Turner engaged in misconduct when she allowed Crawford to put on her robe and hear three traffic cases in the south suburban Markham courthouse. At that time, Crawford had won the Democratic primary for the 1st Judicial Subcircuit and was unopposed in the general election.
The Judicial Inquiry Board investigates and prosecutes allegations of misconduct or incapacity against judges. The board files formal complaints with the Courts Commission, which is made up of five judges and two members of the public. The commission can reprimand, censure, suspend with or without pay, remove from office or as in the case of Turner retire a judge.
DiVito, Turners lawyer, at the time was critical of the boards decision to pursue the matter with the Courts Commission, saying it set a terrible precedent for any judge who, like Ms. Turner, has an illness she did not cause and cannot control.
Turner told the Courts Commission that there was no need to take action because she stopped her judicial duties and swore never to return to the bench.
The commission, however, said that Turner chose to pursue temporary disability benefits that keep her in the position as a judge. She has not resigned or retired by accepting permanent disability benefits.
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The commission said that by letting someone who was not a judge hear court cases, Turner had brought the judicial office into disrepute, and diminished the publics confidence in the integrity of Illinois judges.
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Former President Barack Obama speaks during a leadership summit in New Delhi, India, on Dec. 1, 2017. He is set to address Mayor Rahm Emanuel's climate meeting of mayors on Dec. 5, 2017. (Manish Swarup / AP)
Former President Barack Obama will speak at Mayor Rahm Emanuels climate meeting on Tuesday.
Obamas afternoon speech will unfold as Republican President Donald Trump has said he will pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord in which nations agreed to lower carbon emissions. Trump also has reversed Obama-era domestic climate initiatives, saying he wants to bring back the coal industry.
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Emanuel released a statement welcoming Obama, who will appear in person to address the gathering.
President Obama helped lead the fight against climate change with bold and decisive action, and we are honored he will be joining the North American Climate Summit where local leaders from around the world will make meaningful commitments to climate solutions, Emanuel said.
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The two-day conference of mayors from the U.S. and beyond is the latest in a series of events Emanuel has hosted to try to take the lead on climate issues.
The North American Climate Summit will feature a signing of the Chicago Climate Charter on Tuesday. The charter will commit mayors from North American cities who sign it to reduce emissions and take other steps to help the environments in their cities, though its unclear how the charter would be enforced if signees dont live up to its standards.
Emanuel has hosted prior meetings with mayors to try to take the lead on water quality standards and environmental goals. Its part of what Emanuel has characterized as the leadership role many cities are taking in the face of federal government paralysis or indifference to these kinds of challenges.
jebyrne@chicagotribune.com
bruthhart@chicagotribune.com
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Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner has been Illinois chief executive for nearly three years, but on Monday he offered the observation that hes not in charge, suggesting Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan is.
Following an appearance at an Illinois Farm Bureau conference in Chicago, Rauner was teeing off on Madigan, one of his go-to targets, when a reporter asked him if the speaker has been around for more than three decades, hasnt the governor been in charge for the last three years.
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I wish I had. We would have our problems fixed. Illinois would be on a great future, Rauner said. Wed have 200,000 more jobs in this state, we would have lower property taxes in this state, we would have term limits in this state, if I was in charge. I am not in charge. Im trying to get to be in charge.
Madigan spokesman Steve Brown said he didnt know what to make of the governors comments.
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If hes not in charge, wed better figure out who is, Brown said.
The reelection-seeking governors comments came after hed been peppered with questions about Republican state Rep. Jeanne Ives, whose decision to mount a primary challenge against him marks a significant repudiation of him from within his own ranks.
Rauner tried to dismiss Ives as a fringe candidate, saying political attacks, theyre part of the process. He also said hed been the target of a political hit piece by the conservative National Review, which ran a cover story last week that labeled him the Worst Republican Governor in America.
While Rauner cast himself as the candidate with the best chance of anybody in the state to win the general election, his argument for his candidacy on Monday was focused more on Madigan than on any accomplishments of his own since he took office in January 2015.
Rauner accused the veteran speaker of running a mafia protection racket and having rigged the Democratic primary for governor.
We've been a state controlled by one person, one person, for 35 years, Rauner said. And until that changes, we don't have a good future.
Rauner said he couldnt get things done in Springfield because the General Assembly can block the major things. What I can control: Union contracts, incredible. Medicaid reform, incredible. Criminal justice reform, incredible. The things that I can control, were transforming the state.
While Rauner has executed new collective bargaining agreements with more than a dozen trade unions, he has been unable to reach agreement with the states largest public employee union and was barred earlier this year from attempting to impose his own contract terms on the workers.
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Rauners overhaul of the states Medicaid program has been criticized by Democrats as moving too fast and at too great of an expense to the state. And while Rauner has indeed presided over several significant changes to the criminal justice system over the nearly three years hes been in office, much of that work was made possible by lawmakers who sent bills to his desk for approval.
kgeiger@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @kimgeiger
A U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor takes off from a South Korean air base in Gwangju, South Korea, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. The United States and South Korea have started their biggest-ever joint air force exercise with hundreds of aircrafts including two dozen stealth jets. (AP)
SEOUL, South Korea Hundreds of aircrafts including two dozen stealth jets began training Monday as the United States and South Korea launched their biggest-ever combined air force exercise. The war games come a week after North Korea test-fired its most powerful missile ever, an ICBM that may be able to target the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The five-day drill, which is called Vigilant Ace, is meant to improve the allies wartime capabilities, South Korea's defense ministry said.
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The U.S. Seventh Air Force sent major strategic military assets that include six F-22 and 18 F-35 stealth fighter jets for the annual training exercise in the Korean Peninsula. About 12,000 U.S. military personnel are participating.
Some local media report that B-1B bombers will also join aerial drills, but officials could not confirm the reports.
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North Korea's state media said the joint drill pushes the Korean Peninsula "to the brink of nuclear war." Such language is typical in North Korean propaganda because the country sees U.S.-South Korean drills, which are held regularly, as preparation for invasion.
Still, always bad tensions are at a particularly dangerous point as North Korea edges toward its goal of a viable arsenal of nuclear-tipped long-range missiles, and President Donald Trump uses aggressive rhetoric toward the North, threatening, for instance, "fire and fury" toward the country.
Pyongyang will "seriously consider" countermeasures against the drill, and the U.S. and South Korea will "pay dearly for their provocations," the Korean Central News Agency said on Sunday before the start of the exercises.
While many South Koreans typically ignore North Korea's rhetoric, some senior American officials have expressed worry following the ICBM test, North Korea's third.
On Sunday, Lindsey Graham, a U.S. senator from the state of South Carolina, said he believes that it's time for U.S. military families in South Korea to leave the country because conflict with North Korea is getting close. The U.S. government has not announced a formal decision to evacuate U.S. citizens from South Korea, and there were no such signs in the diplomatic community in Seoul. An evacuation of dependents by Seoul's closest ally and major military defender could prompt a panicked reaction by other countries, and among South Koreans.
In addition to American diplomats and other embassy workers, about 28,500 U.S. troops operate in South Korea, and many come to their posts with their families, who often live on huge, well-guarded military bases.
Also on Sunday, the White House national security adviser said that Trump will take care of North Korean threats by "doing more ourselves."
"The priorities that the president's given us to move as quickly as we can to resolve this crisis with North Korea," General H.R. McMaster told Fox News in an interview.
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"If necessary, the president and the United States will have to take care of it, because he has said he's not going to allow this murderous, rogue regime to threaten the United States."
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"Happy graduation Debbie," it read in slanted cursive handwriting. "I wanted to give you this card myself. I know that you'll be a success in anything you do. Roy."
The inscription, Gibson said, was written by Roy Moore, the Alabama Republican nominee for U.S. Senate who in recent days has repeatedly denied the accounts of five women who told The Washington Post that he pursued them when they were teenagers and he was an assistant district attorney in his 30s. Since those allegations were published last month, four more women have come forward to allege that Moore made unwanted sexual advances. The accounts in The Post included those of Leigh Corfman, who said she was 14 when Moore touched her sexually, and Gibson, who said that she publicly dated Moore when she was 17 and he was 34, a relationship she said she "wore like a badge of honor" until she began reevaluating it in light of the accounts of other women, and now, Moore's own denials.
Shortly after the allegations first surfaced, Moore said in a radio interview with Sean Hannity that he did not know Corfman, but that he remembered Gibson as well as Gloria Thacker Deason, who had told The Post that she dated Moore when she was 18. He called each one "a good girl," and said that he did not remember dating them.
But at two campaign events in recent days, Moore has backtracked.
At a Nov. 27 campaign event in the north Alabama town of Henagar, Moore said, "The allegations are completely false. They are malicious. Specifically, I do not know any of these women."
At a Nov. 29 rally at a church in the south Alabama town of Theodore, Moore said, "Let me state once again: I do not know any of these women, did not date any of these women and have not engaged in any sexual misconduct with anyone."
Gibson said that after finding the scrapbook, she was not sure whether to make it public given the threats she received after publication of the original story. Then she heard what Moore said last week, she said, and contacted The Post.
"He called me a liar," said Gibson, who says she not only openly dated Moore when she was 17 but later joined him in passing out fliers during his campaign for circuit court judge in 1982 and exchanged Christmas cards with him over the years. "Roy Moore made an egregious mistake to attack that one thing my integrity."
The Moore campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment for this story.
Two of the other women named in The Post article have also pushed back in recent days against Moore.
In an open letter to Moore published on the Alabama news site Al.com after Moore's Nov. 27 speech, Corfman wrote that "I am done being silent."
"You sent out your spokesman to call me a liar. Day after day. Finally, last night, you did the dirty work yourself ..." she wrote. "What you did to me when I was 14-years old should be revolting to every person of good morals. But now you are attacking my honesty and integrity. Where does your immorality end?"
In a statement to The Post after Moore's Nov. 29 speech, Paula Cobia, a lawyer for Deason, recounted Deason's vivid memories of dating Moore, from specific restaurants she says they frequented, to the velvet-collared dress Deason says she wore when she says Moore took her to a social function at a Ramada Inn. Cobia said,
"No matter what lies Roy Moore may choose to tell now," Cobia said, "the truth was the first thing out of his mouth when it came to remembering Gloria."
Gibson, 54, now lives in Delray Beach, Fla., is a registered Republican, and is the founder of a company that provides sign language interpretation. Though she said the bulk of her work is in educational, medical and legal settings, her clients have included Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and Republicans such as the mayor of Miami. She said that despite requests from dozens of media outlets, she had "very carefully said absolutely nothing" after her account was first published in The Post due to a barrage of threatening hate mail she received, prompting her to notify her local police department. She and the other women have been accused by Moore's surrogates of lying, or being paid to spread false stories, or being part of a larger political conspiracy to defeat Moore.
Then she found the scrapbook and the graduation card with the slanted, cursive handwriting, which she said immediately reminded her of another woman, Beverly Young Nelson, who had come forward after the Post story was published. In an emotional news conference with the attorney Gloria Allred, Nelson accused Moore of sexually assaulting her when she was 16, and produced what she said was her high school yearbook with an inscription to her from Moore.
"I just couldn't imagine him doing something like that," Gibson said. "And then when I saw the interview from Beverly, and I saw his handwriting in her yearbook, my heart just sank. And when I saw what I knew to be Roy Moore's handwriting, I just began to sob openly."
Mark Songer, a former FBI forensic examiner now with the firm Robson Forensic, examined an image of the graduation card at The Post's request and said that it "appears to be naturally prepared." Songer also compared an image of the yearbook inscription to the image of the graduation card and said that "the style of writing, as well as certain letter features, appear to be similar." He stressed the need for a full and comprehensive handwriting examination to arrive at a final conclusion.
Gibson said she remembers Moore handing the card to her at the Etowah High School graduation ceremony in Attalla, Ala., where Gibson grew up about 10 miles from Moore's home. She remembers reading the inscription and writing below it: "Roy Moore inspires me because he is such a successful man himself. Also, he is about the only person I know of who seriously believes in me. I appreciate that. He's got to be one of the nicest people I know."
As she flipped through the scrapbook last week, Gibson said, she realized it contained other indications of her relationship with Moore, which she says began in March 1981, after he came to speak to her high school civics class.
On a page titled "commencement," under "My own guests," she had written "Roy S. Moore," just above "mom" and "dad."
On a page titled "remembrances," she had listed her graduation gifts line by line, including "$10, card" from "Roy S. Moore," and a check mark indicating she had sent a thank-you card.
On a page titled "the best times," she had written: "Wednesday night, 3-4-81. Roy S. Moore and I went out for the first time. We went out to eat at Catfish Cabin in Albertville. I had a great time." She had underlined "great" twice.
The scrapbook also contained a photo of Gibson as a high school senior, and when she saw it, she said, she thought to herself, "That's the age I was when I dated Roy Moore, because my braces were off."
As Gibson previously told The Post, she said that she and Moore dated for a couple of months. She said he kissed her by the swimming pool concession stand at a local country club, that he played his guitar and read his own poetry to her, and that things ended when she went off to college in another part of Alabama, though they still kept in touch.
She said she helped Moore when he was campaigning for circuit court judge in 1982, and remembers tucking fliers under windshield wipers at the Kmart parking lot.
She said that when she became engaged, Moore insisted on meeting her fiance to make sure he was "good enough for me." She said when Moore was first appointed as a circuit court judge in 1992, she sent him a gavel engraved with his name and a congratulatory note, and that her family and his exchanged Christmas cards some years.
She said that she held Moore "in high esteem," despite political differences with him, until she began hearing stories from other women who alleged that Moore pursued them as teenagers. She said that at first she did not want to believe the women.
"It takes what I thought was a very lovely part of my past, and it colors it, and it changes it irrevocably," she said. "It changes it permanently."
What made her decision to share the documents easier, she said, was watching and re-watching a video she has on her cellphone of Moore speaking last week and deciding that supporting the women who have come forward was more important than staying silent.
"At 34 minutes and 56 seconds into the video, he says, unequivocally, I did not know any of them," Gibson said. "In that moment, it changed my perspective. I knew he was a liar."
All votes in the CO-3 election won't be counted until the end of this week
Twenty four students from 16 universities in China and abroad won Chinese literature prizes at Fudan University on Saturday.
Their literature works included free verses, traditional style poems, prose, novelettes, dramatic literature and translated literature.
The Chinese literature award for university students around the world was set up last year by the university with 5 million yuan (US$756,150) of donation from Hu Jiarun, a young entrepreneur in his 20s to promote traditional Chinese culture and Chinese literature. It also aims at encouraging young students to inherit splendid tradition of Chinese culture and learn from excellent foreign literature to explore and innovate in literary creation.
This is the first year for the biennial Jiarun-Fudan Global Chinese Literature Award for University Students to be presented.
It had attracted more than 3,000 literature works and their authors included doctors of literature, science students, freshmen and some students known on campus for writing.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) will consolidate and deepen friendly cooperation with political parties worldwide, Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi said Sunday.
Addressing the closing ceremony of the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting in Beijing, Yang, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, called on the CPC and political parties worldwide to contribute to building a community of a shared future for mankind and a better world.
Referring to the keynote speech made by Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, at the opening ceremony on Friday, Yang said it expressed the CPC's determination to work with political parties worldwide to promote global development, share global prosperity and guide the world's future.
The international community spoke highly of the keynote speech and the contribution made by the CPC, he said.
Yang pointed out that it is a great cause to work together to build a community of a shared future for mankind and a better world.
He called on political parties and leaders to shoulder their historic responsibilities to build a peaceful world, contribute to world development, and safeguard the international order.
The meeting also released the Beijing Initiative at the closing ceremony on Sunday morning.
"We call on political parties around the world to join us in building world peace, contributing to global development and safeguarding the international order," the initiative said.
It also called on political parties to facilitate the building of partnerships, contribute to the building of world peace, promote global development, encourage mutual learning among civilizations, and be the guardians of ecology and the environment.
It proposed that the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-level Meeting should be institutionalized, and become a high-level platform for political dialogue with broad representation and global influence.
Lebanon [File photo]
The recent developments in Lebanon suggest that there are grave dangers lying ahead. It is feared that the Lebanese people could be caught in a conflict driven by the regional "great games" of the countries vying for supremacy at the cost of smaller nations.
The Cold War between Saudi Arabia and Iran is now an open secret. The two have been fighting directly and indirectly through resources and proxies at several places including Yemen, Qatar, Iraq and Syria. The resignation of Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri earlier in November while in Saudi Arabia shows that the rivalry has expanded to Lebanon.
The way he read out his resignation on the TV and remained at some secret place in Riyadh away from the world and his people back home suggested that the resignation could be the work of unseen hands.
But luckily he has emerged from hiding and was allowed to travel to Paris. Later he reached Beirut where he was able to resume his duties because Lebanon President Michel Aoun had not accepted the resignation.
Hariris presence in Lebanon will help to unfreeze the domestic political situation. However, the developments shrouding the circumstances of resignation may not become clear any time soon.
The dangerous Saudi-Iran rivalry is driven by religious motivations and geo-strategic considerations. It also has international overtones, as the United States is keenly watching the moves and deftly pushing the deck through different means and methods.
The Sunni-Shiite tussle is part of Islamic history but was previously limited to seminaries and mosques. It became political and later fiercely nationalists after Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979. The ruling House of Saud in the kingdom rivaled it by supporting radical Sunni Islam in the country and elsewhere.
The deadly killing of Shiites and Sunnis witnessed in several Muslim countries is just the tip of the iceberg, i.e. in the mistrust between the two sects of same religious tradition. Countries like Pakistan and Iraq are struggling to maintain sectarian harmony in the face of simmering tension.
The geo-strategic tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia is linked with the efforts to dominate the energy-rich Middle East. Historically, a country remained dominant if it was favorably aligned with the U.S. and its allied nations dependent on the oil.
Iran enjoyed the status until 1979 but lost it after hardline clerics won power. The Saudis are happily shouldering the onerous responsibility of providing free access to oil in the Gulf after Iran lost its previous status.
Another important lynchpin of regional politics is Israel. The security of the Jewish state is of paramount interest to the U.S., which will go to any length to ensure it. Here enters Lebanon which is a rare mix of politics, religion and ethnicity. Bordering Israel makes it both valuable and a prey for political predators.
Iran has successfully created a strategic highway to encircle Israel and Saudi Arabia through proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The last country is more important due to the presence of the powerful Hezbollah, which has a history of direct conflict with Israel.
Both Iran and Hezbollah are also involved in Syria which makes Israel feel more threatened. The threat from a common enemy is bringing Saudi Arabia and Israel closer. There are several indications of this trend, including the recent first ever interview by a top Israeli army general to a Saudi media outlet.
Hariri in his resignation accused Iran of interfering through Hezbollah in the affairs of his country. Since he is also a national of Saudi Arabia, his resignation cannot be taken as an isolated happening. Rather, it shows the increasing involvement of Riyadh and Tehran in domestic issues of Lebanon.
After Yemen, Lebanon could be the new hot front of the regional Cold War, which would shatter the uneasy peace in the country and further destabilize the entire region. Lebanons leaders, especially Hariri, can play a vital role in maintaining the calm. So, his decision to hurry home rather than staying away in the warm company of leaders in Paris is a notable development.
Hariri and his rivals in Hezbollah should realize that in the age of proxy wars and shadowy groups, the countries which can remain at peace, are those which keep a safe distance from powers that seek glory at the expense of weaker nations.
Sajjad Malik is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/SajjadMalik.htm
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
People of the Yao ethnic group celebrate the Panwang Festival at Shuibin Village of Gongcheng Yao Autonomous County, southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Dec. 3, 2017. The Panwang Festival is celebrated by the Yao people to pay tribute to the ancestors. [Photo/VCG]
Flash
Innovation leaders and government representatives from around the world said the remarks by Chinese President Xi Jinping in a congratulatory letter to the Fourth World Internet Conference were of great significance and practicality.
Delegates attend the Fourth World Internet Conference in the water town of Wuzhen, east China's Zhejiang Province, Dec. 3, 2017. [Photo/Xinhua]
In his letter, Xi said the development of the internet has posed many new challenges for the sovereignty, security, and development interests of the world's countries.
He said China hopes to work with the international community to respect cyberspace sovereignty and carry forward the spirit of partnership to commonly advance development, safeguard security, participate in governance, and share the benefits.
China has welcomed world countries to ride fast train of internet and digital economy, which is inspiring, said Vallobh Muangkeo, Secretary General of National Assembly of Thailand.
"We hope Thailand will share the benefit and happiness brought by the development of internet industry along China's'digital silk road,'" he said.
Luigi Gambardella, President of ChinaEU, the business-led International Association aimed at intensifying business cooperation and mutual investments in Internet, Telecom and Hitech between China and Europe, said the remarks showed Xi's commitment.
"Xi recognizes that there are many challenges ahead of us such as security problem and privacy protection. Today it's not possible to discuss future policy and regulation of the internet without China," he said. "Xi's words show that China is very keen to work with other countries to discuss the challenge and to cooperate."
Tatjana Matic, State Secretary of Ministry of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunications of Serbia, said common interests can only be realized when all countries become participants of the global cyberspace.
"I think it's critical to have all the countries come together to build a better future for our society," said Mohammed Almeshekah, Deputy Minister for Planning and Development, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Saudi Arabia.
He said it was amazing to see how hard countries were focusing on bringing more people online. "I think we are all in this together to combat challenge in cyberspace and figure out innovative solutions."
The conference, themed on "Developing digital economy for openness and shared benefits -- building a community of common future in cyberspace," runs from Sunday to Tuesday.
According to the organizing committee, over 1,500 guests from more than 80 countries and regions, including government officials, heads of international organizations, leading figures of internet companies, experts and scholars, attended the conference in the east China town of Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province.
Flash
A fire broke out at the Iranian embassy in Yemen's capital Sanaa after it was hit by a rocket shell on Sunday during clashes between supporters of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Houthis, who until this week were allies.
The Iranian embassy was attacked at around 4:30 p.m. local time (0130 GMT).
A security official said about 20 staff members of the embassy were trapped inside the building.
The embassy is located near the presidential palace and is close to the residence of a son of Saleh in southwestern Sanaa.
More than 100 dead bodies could be seen lying on the streets leading to the diplomatic complex in the Hadda area.
An official from the Houthi-controlled Interior Ministry told Xinhua that at least 200 militants from both warring sides had been killed and more others were wounded in the clashes near the Iranian embassy.
The embassy is located near the highlands controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, where the Saudi-led coalition launched airstrikes for five times on Saturday midnight.
The Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya TV reported late Saturday that the coalition attacked the highlands in support of the forces loyal to Saleh, who were fighting the Houthis in Sanaa.
The new change in the course of the Yemeni conflict came after Saleh and his supporters turned their weapons against the Houthi group, who had been an ally of Saleh in the battle against the Saudi-led coalition that supports the internationally-recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Saleh has voiced his readiness to hold talks with the coalition's leaders to reach a compromise.
Houthi leader Abdul-Malek al-Houthi accused Saleh of "betrayal," vowing to keep fighting against the Saudi-led coalition.
The coalition later welcomed Saleh's new stance and offered to provide support to fight the Houthi rebels, according to Al-Arabiya.
Sunday's clashes had been raging on for hours after the Houthis claimed to have fired a long-range winged cruise missile towards the Barakah nuclear reactor in Abu Dhabi of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to a statement by the Houthi-controlled Saba news agency.
"The missile hit the target accurately in Abu Dhabi," a Houthi military officer was quoted as saying.
But the UAE on Sunday denied the claims by the Houthis, while reassuring its citizens that the country is safe.
The UAE National Emergency Crisis and Disaster Management Authority (NCEMA) said in a statement that the UAE's air defense system "is capable of dealing with any threats."
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Flash
China and Japan will hold their eighth round of high-level consultations on maritime affairs in Shanghai on Tuesday and Wednesday, a foreign ministry spokesperson said Monday.
Officials from the foreign ministries, defense ministries, maritime law enforcement and management departments of both sides will attend the talks, spokesperson Geng Shuang told a routine news briefing.
China expects to fully exchange views with Japan on maritime issues of common concern, in a bid to strengthen understanding and mutual trust, Geng said.
The China-Japan High-level Consultations on Maritime Affairs were set up in 2012. The last round of consultations was held in Fukuoka, Japan in June this year.
China Aviation Daily | Dec. 04, 2017
Sydney Airport has welcomed China Airlines' new A350-900 service, which is expected to bring tens of thousands of extra tourists to NSW each year.
The first plane touched down yesterday at Sydney Airport, marking Sydney's first passenger Airbus A350 service.
Sydney Airport Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Kerrie Mather said the China Airlines service would help strengthen the NSW economy and support jobs.
"It's incredibly exciting to welcome Sydney's first A350 service with China Airlines," Ms Mather said.
"Not only will passengers be able to enjoy a fantastic product with an impressive new inflight experience, but more services mean a boost for tourism in our state.
"The move to double the number of daily services will mean about an extra 100,000 seats and an estimated additional US$48 million in annual visitor expenditure for NSW."
The A350 will replace China Airlines' current A330 aircraft and has been designed to incorporate fine-tuned mood lighting that conjures images of sunrises, sunsets and aurora within the high ceiling cabin, contributing to an exceptional level of comfort.
China Airlines' Oceania Vice President, Kelvin Chen, said the aircraft upgrade was a win for passengers.
"In its 25th year of operating to Sydney, China Airlines is very pleased to upgrade its Airbus A330-300 services to brand new A350-900 aircraft featuring the latest inflight product," Mr Chen said.
"Not only are we upgrading the passenger experience with these next-generation aircraft, but lifting frequency to offer twice daily departures to Taipei from December 17.
"This allows China Airlines to offer improved connectivity for the significant traffic flows between Sydney, Europe and Asia."
The 306-seat A350-900 brings Sydney into line with new London services and other key international connections, such as Frankfurt, Rome, Amsterdam and Vienna.
Tourism Australia Managing Director John O'Sullivan said growth in visitor numbers from Taiwan reflected the importance of North Asia as a key tourism market for Australia.
"Chinese airlines continue to be a huge driver of growth for our tourism industry, from both mainland and Greater China," Mr O'Sullivan said.
"This latest increase in capacity by China Airlines, as well as the added kudos of the new A350 aircraft now being deployed on the route, should hopefully help maintain that positive momentum."
NSW Tourism Minister Adam Marshall said the new China Airlines A350 service was a welcome addition.
"The aviation indu-stry is a key player in turbocharging to-urism growth in Sydn-ey and throughout rural and re-gional NSW," Mr Marshall said.
"We want to see more tourism dollars flying into Sydney and rural and regional NSW and into the pockets of local economies, and I look forward to welcoming increased visitation to our State as a result of this new service."
Sydney Airport is a leading airport globally for next generation aircraft. The state-of-the-art A350 is quieter and has a reduced carbon footprint compared to previous aircraft.
Contributed by Sydney Airport
China Aviation Daily | Dec. 04, 2017
Budapest Airport has signed a cooperation agreement with STO Express from China, and EKOL, the European 3PL company with a strong presence in Hungary.
The agreement establishes a cargo transportation network to deliver e-commerce products arriving from China to European customers.
STO Express will operate scheduled cargo flights to Budapest Airport, which is likely to generate a significant increase not only in total cargo traffic, but also in the field of e-commerce, the main profile of the Chinese company.
The agreement was signed during the annual conference of the "16+1 cooperation" initiative, comprising China and 16 countries from the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, which got under way this week.
At the economic, commercial, and financial forum organised as part of the conference, STO Express, a leading Chinese logistics company, announced that, in line with the efforts of the Chinese government, it is developing its relations with the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region.
As part of this, it has designated Budapest Airport as its preferred hub for air cargo transportation.
STO Express' first Boeing B747 cargo aircraft, filled primarily with e-commerce goods, arrived in the Hungarian capital in November, in the colours of Silkway Italia, initially as a charter flight.
Cargo traffic at Budapest Airport has increased by 36 per cent since December 2015. From January to October 2017, Budapest Airport handled a record of 103,800 tonnes of air cargo, up 14.5 per cent on the same period last year. Budapest has a balanced market share with exports at 52 per cent, and imports at 48 per cent.
The cooperation agreement was signed on behalf of Budapest Airport by Rene Droese, Director Property and Cargo, who commented: "On behalf of Budapest Airport, we warmly welcome this initiative by STO Express. Export-import between China and Hungary, and the entire CEE region, plays an important role in our rapidly developing market."
"We believe that Budapest and Budapest Airport provide the best place for distribution by STO Express in the CEE region, and we will do our best to prove this in the near future. Our new air cargo base, Cargo City, will commence operations in the summer of 2019.
"It is noteworthy that, based on market data, e-commerce accounted for four to five per cent of retail sales in Hungary this year, with 20 per cent growth in this segment from January to June, compared to the same period last year.
"In terms of specific figures, this means online transactions of approximately USD600 million during the first half of 2017. E-commerce is thus clearly one of the areas with the greatest potential in the market, including air cargo."
Contributed by Budapest Airport
PUNTA DEL ESTE - Chinese ride-hailing company DiDi is looking to break into the Latin American market, as indicated by a top leader of the company.
"Latin America is today one of the most important markets given its population of 600 million people," DiDi's vice-president of International Business, Gu Tao, told Xinhua on Saturday.
Gu was in Punta del Este, a resort city on a narrow peninsula in southeast Uruguay, for the 11th China-Latin America and the Caribbean (China-LAC) Business Summit, which ended Saturday.
Currently, DiDi is the "fastest growing company in China," and Latin America is part of its global expansion plans, he said.
"Latin America is really relevant for China, that's why we believe we can use our technology and experience to provide the same product in China and to our users in Latin America," said Gu.
Companies like DiDi, which has 21 million affiliated drivers, fill a need sparked by changing economies, he noted, citing a recent study that analyzed the growing pool of available drivers.
Some four million DiDi drivers were formerly laid off workers from a variety of industrial jobs in such sectors as steel in China.
The ride-hailing service generates 170 yuan ($25.7) per capita in income for some 2.6 million drivers each day, most of whom hold other part time jobs.
Analysts believe that China's sharing economy is on the rise, and high rate of growth is forecast to continue over the next few years.
"The sharing economy is growing rapidly in China and it is an opportunity for Latin America also. In our view, in the next 10 years, a family will no longer need to have its own car. All cars will be shared," said Gu.
"Today, in the larger cities, there are too many vehicles on the streets and they take up space. We believe technology can significantly change the automobile industry," Gu added.
In addition to ride hailing and sharing, DiDi offers chauffeur, test drive and car rental services, among others.
In the near future, "there will be self-driving cars and electric cars, and they will be shared. If one can instantly obtain a car anywhere, then he doesn't need a car" of his own, said Gu.
"I have a vehicle in Beijing and 95 percent of the time it's parked, I only drive it five percent of the time. So in the future, all cars will be shared," he predicted.
DiDi bought out Uber's operations in China last year, and has since dominated the ride-hailing sector.
SYDNEY Australia's major wool sector looks poised to sustain a return to strong growth, fueled by record high prices and robust demand from increasingly affluent Chinese consumers, latest industry figures and analyses showed.
Scott Carmody, trade consultant for the nonprofit Australian Wool Innovation industry group, told Xinhua recently that demand is now the strongest in three to four decades, with "Chinese influence on the market exerting extreme upward pressure on wool prices in Australia".
In US dollar terms, wool prices are not as high as they were about five years ago, but the weaker Australian dollar against the greenback now meant that Australian producers were getting paid more in the local currency, he said.
Chinese wool buyers were paying about $14 to $15 a kilogram for the material back then, but the price is about $12.50 now. Prices have since hit a high of more than A$16 a kilogram, industry figures showed.
"The record high prices that everybody's talking about is in Australian dollar terms. That's very important for our wool growers because that's what they like," said Carmody.
"China has the capacity to push the market even higher as long as demand remains strong. And what we're seeing at the retail levels is that there's been so much wool at retail and many different products that people are seeing the capacity for the market to hold at these levels or even improve."
Australia is the world's dominant wool producer, with its top-grade Merino sheep helping fuel annual exports of about A$3 billion (about $2.28 billion).
Chinese demand makes up more than 70 percent of that market, with its businesses manufacturing the raw material into an increasingly wide variety of products such as sportswear and shoes beyond traditional garments, said Carmody.
"China remains our most important customer. Almost 100 percent of what it bought was manufactured and re-exported because the Chinese consumer could not afford to pay the premium price for wool. That was probably 15 to 20 years ago. Today, about 60 percent of wool is staying in China for Chinese consumption. The affluence that has grown very rapidly in China has helped wool prices," he said.
Matt Dalgleish, wool market analyst for Australian agriculture market analysis group Mecardo, told Xinhua recently the Chinese market remains "incredibly important" for Australian wool.
At the same time, the contraction of Australian wool suppliers in the past few years have also affected the higher prices and more producers switching back to the industry to tap the current growth might affect its development moving forward, he said.
There is also a limit to what foreign buyers are prepared to pay for and the danger of wool becoming a "niche" product if it gets too costly, with other fabrics and material offering alternatives, said Dalgleish.
"If we get to a situation where there's a sustainable, long-term, high-price of wool, that would certainly attract other nations and producers in other countries to start investing in the quality of sheep flocks to be able to get to the stage where they can produce wool of a high standard as well," he said.
"Australian wool helps guarantee the quality of our clothing products," Song Jianmin, chief supervisor of Chinese conglomerate Nanshan Group, told Xinhua recently. Other than garments and textiles, the company has businesses ranging from aviation and aluminum to health and education. It processes more than 5,000 metric tons of Australian wool annually for its business.
"There are multiple factors for the high wool prices. Australian wool supply has been slipping and producers have had to adjust ... our group has been keeping close track of the developments."
"We're also working with the industry in terms of technological innovation, product research and other areas. Quality continues to be an important priority for us," Song added.
Northern Ireland, once an industrial powerhouse, wants closer ties with China to safeguard against uncertainty as the United Kingdom prepares to leave the European Union.
On Saturday, more than 100 provincial and municipal leaders from China gathered in Belfast, the province's capital, for the third UK-China Regional Leaders Meeting, a gathering created during President Xi Jinping's state visit to the UK in October 2015, at the start of the "golden era" of relations between China and Britain.
"Brexit has prompted us to more actively engage with new markets further afield, and China is a key focus," said Tim Losty, director of the Beijing bureau of Northern Ireland's executive office.
"Up until the last few years, we have looked to the UK, and Europe, and North America as our primary markets. Now, we have a government office in Beijing, we have a Chinese consulate here, some of our businesses have achieved success in China. China is less far away," Losty said.
Decision-makers from the provinces of Hubei, Liaoning, Jilin, and from the cities of Shanghai, Shenyang, Dalian and Benxi were all in Northern Ireland for the gathering. Shenyang and Belfast became sister cities in 2016, and Derry and Dalian became sister-cities this year.
Following the meeting, the Northern Ireland executive office signed agreements with the local governments of Liaoning and Hubei provinces to strengthen collaboration in areas including trade, investment, education, research, and development. Newry and Mourne district also signed similar agreements with the city of Changchun, the capital of Jilin province.
Northern Ireland, which enjoyed its most prosperous time as a shipbuilder in the 19th century, symbolized by the world-famous Titanic, which was launched in 1912, has experienced considerable economic decline in the 20th century as its once-mighty industries have become less needed.
In recent years, it has experienced a structural shift, thanks to newly emerging high technology and knowledge sectors, including creative industries, those involved in health service technology, and agri-food security, which Northern Ireland academics and companies proudly showcased during the summit.
Zhou Jianping, a director-general of the National Development and Reform Commission, said he sees potential for tremendous collaboration and experience-sharing between Northern Ireland and Northeast China, which are both developing new economies to replace declining manufacturing industries.
Such efforts in China's Northeast began in 2003 when the Chinese government launched structured incentive programs to help the provinces of Jilin, Liaoning, and Heilongjiang. The three provinces' per capita GDP grew from $2,000 in 2003 to $8,000 in 2013.
Zhou encouraged Northern Ireland's businesses to explore partnership opportunities with companies in Northeast China because the Chinese government launched a new round of incentive packages last year aimed at revitalizing the region.
"I suggest that, with this meeting as a good start, both sides should enhance communication and experience-sharing between old industrial cities from both countries, promoting overall and multifield cooperation," said Zhou.
The meeting followed October's 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which established China's future strategic direction. The National Congress proclaimed that China is entering a new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics, under which it will further open up its economy, promote cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, and favor extensive consultation, joint efforts, and shared benefits.
Wang Shuying, China's consulate general in Belfast, said the fact that China has entered a new era brings "a new strong drive to the China-UK 'golden era'", and more opportunities for collaboration with Northern Ireland.
The province's big push to strengthen its ties with China started in 2012 when Liu Yandong, who is now vice-premier, visited Belfast and opened the Confucius Institute at Ulster University.
In 2014, the Northern Ireland executive office opened a branch in Beijing. So far, 12 Northern Ireland companies have established offices in China, and four Chinese companies have invested in Northern Ireland through acquisition during the past two years.
China accounts for 1.3 percent of all exports from Northern Ireland, which is worth around 100 million pounds ($135 million) a year. The main exports are animal hides used to make leather, electronic control devices, and power-generating equipment.
BEIJING -- Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang will attend the opening ceremony of the 2017 Fortune Global Forum and deliver a keynote speech, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang announced Monday.
During the forum, Wang will meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister Peter O'Neill, Geng said at a press briefing.
The 2017 Fortune Global Forum will be held in Guangzhou from Dec 6 to 8.
A China Airlines passenger plane landed at a London airport on Friday after taking off in China. It was the first such flight for five years, offering what one airport executive described as a "vital trade boost" during a "critical time" for the United Kingdom economy.
The A350 touched down at Gatwick Airport in the afternoon, following a 13-hour non-stop flight from Taipei in Taiwan province. The plane, which can hold 306 passengers as well as freight, departed on the return leg to Taipei's Taoyuan International Airport that night.
The new route is the only non-stop service from the UK to Taiwan. China Airlines previously flew between Taipei and London's Heathrow Airport for two years between 2010 and 2012.
Gatwick Airport is the second-busiest airport in the UK and one of six international airports that serve the London Metropolitan area.
The majority of UK airfreight is exported in the hold of long haul passenger aircraft.
Greg Hands, the UK's international trade minister, said the new service which will run four times a week will provide both British and Chinese businesses with fast access to both markets, in addition to carrying business and leisure passengers.
"This renewed direct flight between London and Taipei is another vote of confidence in the British economy," Hands said from Gatwick Airport.
Guy Stephenson, chief commercial officer at Gatwick Airport, said the service will provide a new link between the UK and China during "a critical time in our economic history".
The health and nature of Britain's trading relationships with major economies, including China, is the subject of debate due to the UK's pending exit from the European Union.
"The new route will boost trade between our two enterprising economies and help our businesses to get goods to market as quickly and efficiently as possible," Stephenson said.
The UK economy has benefited from increased air traffic from China in recent years. Hainan Airlines launched a direct route between Beijing and Manchester, in Northern England, in June last year.
Since then, exports from Northern England to China have almost tripled, to 200 million pounds ($270 million) a month, and the amount spent by Chinese tourists in Manchester has doubled to 138 million pounds a year, according to a report by the Manchester China Forum and Manchester Airport.
By He Wei and Fan Feifei in Wuzhen, Zhejiang | China Daily | Updated: 2017-12-04 07:18
Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau, visits a self-service supermarket during the 4th World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Dec 3, 2017. [Photo by Zhu Xingxin/China Daily]
Businesses laud leadership's backing for technology-driven progress
China's growing openness and its digital economy's continuing impetus to social and economic development are big positives, business executives and experts said.
Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder and chairman of Airbnb China, a vacation home-rental platform, said President Xi Jinping's congratulatory message to the 4th World Internet Conference on Sunday showcased the open and supportive attitude of the country's leaders toward the digital economy as well as the increasingly pioneering role China plays in innovation.
"We want to continue working closely with the government, industry, businesses and the public in China, and believe that technology can bring the country and the world closer and promote people-to-people exchange," Blecharczyk said.
The key message from the conference is to bring the world together through candid exchange, dialogue and partnership, said RJ Pittman, chief product officer of eBay Inc.
"We are cheered by this repeated emphasis on creating a fair and just internet environment, with a special focus on international cooperation," said Pittman.
He also underlined the significance of cross-border e-commerce in driving international trade and promoting equality.
It is also a topic that Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau, touched upon in his address to the event.
One promising initiative on this frontier is the digital Silk Road. That is, accelerating internet infrastructure to develop artificial intelligence, big data and sharing economy, said Luigi Gambardella, president of ChinaEU, a nonprofit organization promoting digital and internet cooperation.
Xi is a leader who will "make China thrive in the digital age, while his speech touched on strengthening infrastructure networks and developing advanced manufacturing through the integration of the internet, big data and artificial intelligence", Gambardella said.
The government has given digital players space to experiment before enacting regulation and is now becoming an active supporter, said Jonathan Woetzel, a director of the McKinsey Global Institute. He identified China as a "global leader" in the digital economy.
The leaders' speeches are clear signs that Beijing has flagged digital economy as "an intrinsic source" to drive macroeconomy, said Shen Yi, head of the Cyberspace Governance Research Center at Fudan University.
Shen said China's leadership is adding substance to the governance and future of the internet, through introduction of concrete steps, with the private sector exerting a centripetal force.
"The speeches show China's unprecedented level of openness and the commitment to voluntarily abide by international standards," he said.
Agreed Huang Zhixiong, deputy director of the Institute of International Law at Wuhan University. "By respecting cybersovereignty and upholding cybersecurity, the country can bring dividends of internet development to its people and the rest of the world."
Wang Keju contributed to this story.
Winners and presenters of leading internet technology prize pose at a ceremony during the 4th World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province on Dec 3, 2017. [Photo by Zou Hong/China Daily]
Leading tech giants from China and the United States figured among the winners of top awards at the 4th World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province.
It was the second year that the World Leading Internet Scientific and Technological Achievement awards had been presented.
This year, Alibaba Group, Baidu, Huawei Technologies and Mobike Technology shared the honors with Amazon, Microsoft and Apple.
Technologies such as the internet of things or IoT, supercomputing, artificial intelligence and virtual reality featured prominently in the selections of the judges.
Few companies have had such a dramatic impact on the physical landscape of China and other cities around the world as Mobike Technology, with millions of consumers now renting its shared bicycles every day.
Wang Xiaofeng, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Beijing-based company, said he was sitting in his office with colleagues three years ago and wondered what the solution was to air pollution and traffic jams.
"We noticed also that the usage of bicycles had declined and wondered whether this could be reversed. We came up with a solution that combined smartphone technology with GPS tracking systems."
Mobike launched in Shanghai in April 2016. Now, it has 8 million bikes in 200 cities across the world.
Huawei Technologies won its award for its next-generation mobile communications 3GPP 5G pre-commercial system. It will launch a smartphone to support the technology in 2019 when its chip will be also launched.
"With the 5G technology, users will be able to download a 6-gigabyte file in less than two seconds," said Xu Zhijun, rotating CEO of the company.
Alibaba Group won the award for ET Brain, its next-generation cloud computing technology.
Zhang Yong, CEO of Alibaba, said developments in the internet field over the next 10 years could transform all sectors.
"They could be as significant as were the moon landings in a similar period of development," he said.
Baidu won its award for its new digital assistant DuerOS, which will take on Apple's Siri and other competitors.
Its digital assistant responds vocally to whatever question is asked of it, even on an emotional level.
Zhang Yaqin, president of Baidu, said at a news conference after the awards ceremony that people should not be concerned about artificial intelligence destroying jobs.
"Artificial intelligence is only a computer system. It does not have human consciousness or sense," he said.
Cybercrime is a threat to countries and companies alike, and needs to be dealt with through global cooperation, senior officials and information technology industry engineers said on Sunday.
"This (2017) has been a special year for the internet because it is the first time the number of global web users has surpassed half of the world's total population," said Dominique de Villepin, former prime minister of France.
He made the remarks during his address to the plenary session of the 4th World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, which opened on Sunday and will end on Tuesday.
"Cybersecurity is a global challenge and as the internet blends into our public sectors and daily lives, our privacy is also at risk," he said.
"We are entering a new age of collective responsibility, we need to strengthen multilateral cooperation and take political action to strengthen internet security and connectivity."
Eugene Kaspersky, founder of Kaspersky Lab, an antivirus protection and internet security provider, echoed Villepin's concerns.
In 1997, when Kaspersky Lab was found, its virus database recorded only around 500 malicious codes, he said.
This year, Kaspersky Lab has detected more than 90 million malicious codes already, totaling 500 million computer viruses and malware, he said.
"Cybercrime is an increasingly messy, massive and global issue," Kaspersky said. "Hackers are also becoming more professional, organized and advanced than ever before."
Kaspersky said his firm is currently monitoring more than 100 highly professional, sophisticated and large-scale cyberattacks. This number is 100 times higher than that in 2010.
Most people believe cybersecurity only concerns the virtual world and gadgets like smartphones and computers, he said. "But, in fact, the internet has connected everything in our lives."
From large infrastructure such as power plants and assembly lines to small gadgets like security cameras, traffic lights and hotel doors, "they are all connected to the network in one way or another".
"But they are not designed to withstand sophisticated cyberattacks and could be undermined," he said.
The worst-case scenario is for cyberattacks to seep and affect us in the real world, which is very possible, he said.
People interact with robots at the 301 Hospital in Beijing. The robots provide basic medical consultation services for people. [Photo by Fan Jiashan/for China Daily]
The digital-age marriage of business with high-tech is helping improve services in China's healthcare sector. A shining example is the Anhui Provincial Hospital of Central China.
Doctors there are well served by a smart, well-qualified assistant. 'She' records patients' symptoms, reviews computerized tomography scan images and makes initial diagnosis. Only, she is not human but a robot that runs on artificial intelligence.
Developed by iFlytek Co Ltd, a leading Chinese AI company, the robot aced the written test of China's national medical licensing examinationit is a test that aspiring doctors need to passin November, thus becoming the first device in the world to achieve the feat. It received 456 marks, 96 more than the minimum required to qualify.
The robot is iFlytek's pilot project at the Anhui hospital. It is meant to see how the robot could help in real-life medical cases.
The initiative is part of broader efforts by China to accelerate the application of AI in healthcare. This has become necessary as China's aging society struggles to find adequate number of high-quality medical facilities.
Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFlytek, said, "We will officially launch the robot in March 2018. It is not meant to replace doctors. Instead, it is meant to promote better people-machine cooperation so as to boost efficiency."
Unlike the AI-enabled Watson system of US tech company IBM, which only focuses on the treatment for cancer and major diseases, iFlytek is exploring how to use AI to both treat cancer and train general practitioners.
"General practitioners are in severe shortage in China's rural areas. We hope AI can help more people access quality medical resources," Liu said.
Jin Xiaotao, deputy head of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, said more efforts are needed to advance the application of AI in the medical sector.
In November, iFlytek was chosen by the central government as one of the four tech heavyweights to build the national AI open innovation platform by leveraging voice computing technologies.
The move put the Hefei-based company on a par with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Baidu Inc and Tencent Holdings Ltd, China's "Big Three" internet players.
iFlytek was formed at the University of Science and Technology of China in 1999, and has been focusing on voice recognition technologies for 18 years now.
Its AI-enabled user interface platform has accumulated 460,000 third-party developer teams in the past seven years.
In April, the company started a partnership with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, a premier medical university in the country.
The two sides set up a research center in Beijing to explore how to apply AI in medical treatments and training. Findings of research into brain science, neuroscience and other areas will be first tested in the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences' affiliated hospital before being promoted at other medical institutions.
Cao Xuetao, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, said AI can help accelerate medical research by boosting computing capabilities, and it can also efficiently use limited resources by offering partly automated solutions.
A forum on intelligent logistics, held in Hangzhou in May, attracted both logistics robot manufacturers and general public. Cainiao, the logistics arm of Alibaba, employs robots. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Major Chinese online retailers are increasing efforts to build intelligent logistics systems, by deploying robots and drones to enhance work efficiency.
JD.com Inc, China's second largest e-commerce player, has been at the forefront of this push for adopting innovative automation technologies. It has completed the construction of its first unmanned warehouse.
Located at JD's logistics center in Jiading district, Shanghai, the warehouse spans 40,000 square meters of floor space.
JD said all warehouse operationsreceiving goods, storage, packaging and sorting-are fully automatic. Handling capacity is expected to exceed 200,000 orders per day.
In August, JD launched the first unmanned sorting center in Kunshan, Jiangsu province. Again, the whole process, from parcel sorting to loading onto trucks, is fully automatic.
"As e-commerce is growing in China and around the world, robotics and automation will be a necessary solution to meet that explosion in demand," said Wang Zhenhui, CEO of JD Logistics.
"We are investing in this advanced technology, and other automation throughout our supply chain, with an eye on the long term."
During JD's June 18 shopping festival, the firm used unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs that are better known as drones, to deliver packages in Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi province.
Now, it plans to build 150 operational sites for drone deliveries to Sichuan province, using robots and automated cars to speed up the process.
Like JD, its competitor Alibaba Group Holding Ltd uses smart-ware in logistics. Alibaba's smart logistics network Cainiao Network Technology Co Ltd launched a flagship intelligent warehouse in Huiyang, Guangdong province, in October. It is served by a fleet of more than a hundred mobile robots.
The robots are responsible for moving goods in the warehouse. They are activated once a shopper places an order on Alibaba's B2C shopping site Tmall. The robot sends the shelf containing the parcel to a warehouse clerk, who will sort through the parcels and later ship the designated order to the customer.
In a traditional warehouse, a clerk usually sorts through about 1,000 products, and 60,000 to 70,000 steps are required per day to walk around the warehouse.
Now, thanks to the mobile robots, the clerk can sift through 3,000 products in the same shift, while walking only 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day.
Suning Commerce Group Co Ltd, another prominent e-commerce player, also said it would launch intelligent retail robots that can recognize the speech and expressions of consumers.
"E-commerce giants are aware of the significance of intelligent logistics," said Lu Zhenwang, CEO of Wanqing Consultancy in Shanghai.
"They have invested hugely in the intelligent logistics sector, on things like robots, unmanned sorting and handling equipment, drones and driverless cars to gain the upper hand in fierce competition."
Shanghai-based Yitu Technology, a startup engaged in artificial intelligence or AI and facial recognition technologies, is ramping up efforts to expand its presence in overseas markets.
It will apply AI to fields like urban public safety, healthcare and finance.
It plans to set up a research and development hub in Singapore, its first such facility outside of China.
The hub is expected to bolster Singapore's applications of AI in the areas of security and finance. Singapore will likely act as a gateway for the startup to expand across the world.
"Singapore is a strategic location for us to begin our overseas ventures," said Leo Zhu, CEO and founder of Yitu. Europe and Africa will be tapped next, he said.
The company's AI technologies have been used in a wide range of areas like security, finance, transportation and healthcare. It has formed partnerships with leading companies in these fields to provide integrated solutions.
For instance, its advanced facial recognition technology has been adopted by China Merchants Bank at over 1,500 outlets nationwide, enabling cash withdrawals at ATMs.
Similarly, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank has adopted Yitu's technologies in its video teller machines or VTMs for online banking.
Lin Chenxi, co-founder of Yitu, said there is still a long way to go before AI plays a significant role in rejuvenating any industry.
"There is still much potential for AI's applications in the healthcare sector. That will mean an improvement not only in the efficiency of treating illnesses but also the efficiency of doctors learning about how diseases can be cured," said Lin in an interview with Global Times newspaper.
Lin told GT this will require technology breakthroughs not just in computer vision, but in natural language processing, semantic comprehension and healthcare knowledge mapping.
Data accumulated over the course of unleashing the potential in AI's healthcare applications could also influence drug development.
Its intelligent diagnostic assistance system has been under clinical trials in dozens of hospitals in Shanghai and Zhejiang province.
The emerging 5G mobile communications technology is expected to help the global telecoms industry to create $3.5 trillion of output and generate 22 million jobs by 2035, according to a Qualcomm report. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Local groups scramble to gain competitive edge as technology becomes a reality
Chinese companies are scrambling to gain a lead in the race to commercialize 5Gor the next-generation mobile communication technologyas the country evolves from being a follower into a pioneering player in the global telecoms arena.
The super-fast 5G network is expected to allow consumers to download an 8-gigabit movie in seconds and help to make autonomous driving a reality, causing ripples across most industries and sectors in a new internet revolution.
The mobile technology is so important that it was highlighted in the government work report delivered by Premier Li Keqiang during this year's National People's Congress session in March. A report by the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology predicted that 5G will drive 6.3 trillion yuan ($946.8 billion) of economic output in the country by 2030.
China Mobile Communications Corp, the world's largest telecoms carrier by subscribers, said it aims to deploy more than 10,000 5G base stations by 2020 and aims to launch a pre-commercial 5G service in 2018.
Last November, the Beijing-based company outgunned foreign rivals to lead the global 5G System Architecture project, which it said will determine the "structure of 5G networks".
It came shortly after polar coding, a technology backed by Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, was approved as part of the global standards for 5G.
A visitor experiences 5G-based internet of vehicles techology at a communications show in Shanghai in June. [Photo by Long Wei/For China Daily]
"The progress highlights the rising influence of Chinese companies in the global telecommunications arena," said Xiang Ligang, CEO of telecoms industry website Cctime.
"It is a recognition of both their technological prowess and their brand influence." Currently, 5G standards are still under development by 3GPP, or the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, which promotes global wireless communications standards.
But the body announced it will accelerate the process and lock down the first version of global 5G standards around June in 2018signaling that little change would be expected to current technical specifications and vendors can get to work on standardized 5G equipment, experts said.
To pounce on the opportunities, China is rushing to finish its own series of 5G trials. The country's telecoms authority said in November that the country has started the third phase of 5G technical tests, as it aims to get pre-commercial 5G products ready as soon as possible.
Wen Ku, director of the telecoms development department at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said developments will be ramped up.
Wen said more efforts will be made to accelerate tests on network planning, systems, chips and other products in the industrial chain, which will help to lay down a sound foundation for the fast development of a 5G network in China.
The country has already established the world's largest 5G test field in Huairou district, Beijing, where about 30 telecom base stations were built and China Mobile, Huawei, ZTE Corp and a string of foreign tech companies have finished China's second phase of 5G research and development tests.
A 5G-connected robot performs at the China Mobile stand during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in February. [Photo provided to China Daily]
To accelerate the path to 5G, MIIT also detailed frequency bandsboth low, medium and high frequencies are involvedfor the development of the super-fast networks in China.
"A frequency band is as important to telecoms carriers as land is in the real estate industry," said Fu Liang, an independent telecom analyst.
"Specifying the designated frequency band for 5G tests will motivate enterprises to channel resources to that band, thus promoting faster development."
Companies are also building up massive financial resources to exploit the opportunities that will come.
US investment bank Jefferies said China's mobile carriers will invest at least $173 billion in 5G construction from 2019-25, an increase of 48 percent on the total spend on 4G from 2013-20.
"5G will no longer be a simple technology or system," said Huang Yuhong, deputy head of the China Mobile Research Institute.
"Instead, it is a platform in which the telecoms industry needs to be deeply linked with other sectors. That is a fundamental difference between 5G and 4G."
A local garment producer in Jiaxing uses internet technologies in its process management. [Photo by Bei Jing/For China Daily]
Fashion designer Lu Lyuzhu spent much of the first two decades of her career traveling around the world for business, attending exhibitions and fashion shows.
"Then I just wanted to settle down somewhere," said Lu, 42, whose hometown is in Baotou in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.
Lu became a woolen garment designer in 1995 after graduating from Tsinghua University.
The hope for a slower pace of life led her to Wuzhen in Tongxiang, Zhejiang province, a riverside town with a history of more than 1,000 years.
In Wuzhen, which is the permanent host of the annual World Internet Conference, the designer soon found huge opportunities. Tongxiang has long been the country's largest production center for woolen garments and other types of clothes.
Woolen clothes from Tongxiang currently account for about 70 percent of the domestic market share.
"In earlier years, the clothes produced here were considered of high quality mainly because of their wool content," said Lu.
Most of the local garment makers are family firms.
"People didn't pay much attention to design at first because they could still make their businesses profitable without such efforts. In recent years, they realized that design has become increasingly important in their operations," she said.
Some larger companies now attach greater importance to design and have built their own design teams, while most of the small producers cannot afford to employ their own designers, according to Lu.
She came up with an idea to create an online platform last year to help producers to cope with the changing market.
The idea didn't turn into reality until she met Fu Qian, who runs a new type of incubation center for startups, such as Lu's company, Fuhuizizai.
Fu named his incubation center Fengqi Teahouse, which incorporates both a teahouse and an online cloud platform.
"Taking advantage of internet technologies, the incubation center aims to link startups with capital, technology, human resources and other resources at home and abroad, and offers integrated support for entrepreneurship," Fu said.
Since it settled in Wuzhen in October 2015, Fengqi Teahouse has incubated more than 40 companies, with Lu's company being one of them.
Fengqi has been helping those whose business relies on smart technologies.
With Fu's financial support and technological guidance, Lu's company has been operating an online platform that was designed to serve multiple purposes.
"First, it is a platform for educating factory owners about fashion trends and helping to improve their awareness of good design, as many talented designers have been available for the online courses," Lu said.
"Second, it is also an exhibition platform that helps to promote good design to more people, especially in the garment production industry," she said, adding that it is also a platform for marketing.
Other companies incubated by Fengqi include the locally based Huateng Husbandry. The company uses cameras and smartphone apps to track the process of pork production.
"We are glad to see that nowadays there are more people starting their businesses with the help of smart technologies and online platforms, which breaks the limitations of physical locations and distances," Fu said.
The Fengqi Teahouse incubation center has received an investment of 870 million yuan ($131.6 million) from Ping An Real Estate, a subsidiary of Ping An Insurance Co.
Improved legislation and technology innovation in accordance with the changing face of cyber terrorism are key to ridding online social media of terrorists and their nefarious information, experts said at the 4th World Internet Conference on Monday.
Terrorist organizations spread harmful information on social media in new ways, as well as promote online recruitment and training, said Wang Yong, vice-president at the People's Public Security University of China.
"They hire high-level hackers to make their online attacks more difficult to be detected by the government and raise funds though digital currency," he added.
Mei Jianming, chief expert of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization International judicial exchange cooperation training base for anti-terrorism, agreed. Terrorists block investigations with new technology to keep them being active on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, he said.
"Terrorists can post a video link from cloud storage to a password-protected social media chat room without leaving physical evidence, which poses a bigger challenge to the cybersecurity of China," Mei added.
Statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center show that, as of June, China had 751 million internet users.
"As a country with the largest population of internet users and highly developed mobile and fixed network facilities, netizens should be constantly vigilant and on guard against terror-related information," said Zhang Jinping, vice-dean of counter-terrorism department at the Northwest University of Political Science and Law.
Terrorist recruitment and propaganda lie in internet users' receiving their information. The more people that receive their information, the bigger influences they make on others. So the anti-cyberterrorism campaign should focus on netizens' receiving counterterrorism information, Zhang added.
Ufuk Ayhan, vice-president of the Turkish National Police Academy, said, "Exchanges of experts and professionals from Turkey and China should be constantly arranged in order to strengthen the global cooperation to combat cyber terrorism."
Although the two countries have different situations regarding combating cyber-terrorism, the advanced technologies can be shared to maximize counterterrorism ability, he said.
The International Cooperation Along the Digital Silk Road Forum is held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province on Dec 4, 2017, the second day of the 4th World Internet Conference. [Photo by Xiang Wenjian/chinadaily.com.cn]
The ancient Silk Road was a trade route that for centuries connected East and West. In this technological era, it is being revived via synergized government development strategies, interconnected smart cities, and cross-border e-commerce.
The International Cooperation Along the Digital Silk Road Forum was held on Day 2 of the 4th World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, East China's Zhejiang province, with Chinese government officials, overseas dignitaries and tech heavyweights discussing the challenges and solutions for the digital future.
Hosted by Lin Nianxiu, minister of the National Development and Reform Commission of China, the first discussion centered on how countries can work together to collaborate in terms of digital development and policy strategy.
"Digital is the new driving force of the Chinese economy and growth," Lin said. "It is a great opportunity for countries to work together with a new ecological development mentality."
Former French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, said the digital economy has created "growth, empowerment, and development", and that 2017 is the first time in history in which more than half of the people in the world have access to the internet, compared with less than 20 percent just 10 years ago.
Such worldwide access has allowed China to exploit its advantages in the digital economy on the global market
"There has been a technological shift from the West to the East with the rise of internet champions in China as an alternative to the US monopoly," de Villepin said. "Then we have the opportunity to expand the internet far beyond the borders with the aim of sharing growth and development through international partnerships."
The former French prime minister suggested a Paris-style climate agreement to build a framework by which countries can work together on internet governance, security and development issues.
"The growing commitment of China in the digital economy is a chance for both the region and the world - it is a chance for regional development as the Chinese authorities have proven their willingness to position China as a cyber power expanding internet services from Asia to Europe and Africa along the Digital Silk Road," de Villepin said.
Cooperation on the Digital Silk Road has benefited the economy in Malaysia, according to Wee KaSioog, deputy president of the Malaysian Chinese Association, who cited the country's establishment of the world's first Digital Free Trade Zone outside of China, in cooperation with Alibaba.
Developing inter-connected smart cities
To connect the nodes along the Digital Silk Road, smart cities play a key role collecting all varieties of electronic data via sensors so that assets and resources can be managed more efficiently.
Peter Young, international partnerships manager at Future Cities Catapult, said that competition and openness was key to trying to build a successful smart city.
"We take the data from the city authorities, from the water systems, energy systems, transport systems, and make that open so that different companies can start to use that to produce new applications to solve city problems," Young said.
The problems faced by many cities wanting to become smart cities is making sure that all the infrastructure, networks and management are in place. For many older cities this is expensive and involves replacing entire systems and ways of management.
That will not be a problem for Neom in Saudi Arabia. The city, which is yet to be built, will install smart city infrastructure from the ground up and serve as an example for all others that follow.
Mohammed Al-Meshekah, deputy minister of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in Saudi Arabia, said that the $500-billion city on the Red Sea coast will be entirely focused around information communication technology.
Trading places in e-commerce
The third session of the Digital Silk Road Forum turned to the role that cross-border e-commerce plays in promoting international cooperation.
RJ Pittman, chief product officer for internet retailer eBay, remarked that the company's first ever online transaction was a cross-border trade back in 1995.
But just because a cross-border e-commerce platform is developed doesn't mean that there will be instant success. Liu Qiangdong, founder of JD.com, said that competition in Europe and the US is fierce and that selling products from that market to that market is nearly impossible.
"Instead we can bring Chinese brands overseas in big batches, such as Huawei and Xiaomi," Liu said. "Through this way, I believe in the future we will be able to compete in the US and in the European market."
Brand building is also key to attracting overseas customers. Xiaomi struggled on the international market for a long time before it became a success. Lei Jun, founder of the company, said that it had lost almost $1 billion before it decided to focus on a single overseas market to build overseas brand allegiance.
"We entered the Indian market and after three years we became number one," Lei said. "We can use the Digital Silk Road as a sample market to enter Europe and the US."
Lei said that Chinese brands have to build themselves up gradually so that they can become international brands, starting in the markets closer to home. India is an ideal market for Chinese companies, according to Lei, with more than 60 percent of all products sold in India coming from China.
"We want to transplant Chinese business models and ideas into other countries," Lei said.
The internet-based traditional Chinese medicine center in Wuzhen town, Tongxiang county of Zhejiang province has been in operation for over a week.
The first of its kind in China, the TMC center opened on Nov 25 in Wuzhen, the permanent host of the World Internet Conference, just in time to welcome the opening of the 4th session of the annual event.
Co-founded by We Doctor Group, Tongxiang county government and several TCM hospitals and universities across the country, the center is garnering attention brought by the World Internet Conference.
Robert Kahn, known as "father of the Internet", visited the TCM center on Dec 4, a day after delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the 4th World Internet Conference. He spent an hour learning about the long-distance diagnose system in the TCM center, with great interest.
The TCM center has also been attracting visitors from the Light of the Internet Exposition. "Visitors are very interested in the TCM center. This is one of the most common topics they would ask me when visiting our exhibits. Many of them go to the TCM center directly after leaving our exhibition area," said Chai Dongkai, staff from the marketing department of We Doctor Group, who has been communicating with visitors at We Doctor Group's exhibition area at the exposition.
"We want to show the world the charm of TCM, and Wuzhen is the perfect location. Tourists from around the world are flocking to the town all year round, not to mention the tech leaders and celebrities gathering in the town for the World Internet Conference every year," said Lai Min, PR manager of We Doctor Group.
Visitors can learn basic knowledge about TCM in the TCM center, through watching the display of TCM's history, introduction of Chinese medical materials and stories about famous Chinese physicians like Hua Tuo and Li Shizhen.
They can even have a test on machines developed by We Doctor, to find out their body habitus and get a free herbal drink based on their health conditions.
The establishment of the TCM center does not only give people around the world new access to learning TCM, but also brings great convenience to local villagers in Wuzhen.
"Many Chinese prefer to treat chronic diseases using TCM. Wuzhen residents used to take two hours' bus ride if they want to see experienced doctors in the Jiaxing Hospital of TCM and the journey is torturing for patients, especially if they have to do that on a regular basis," said Lai.
Now, experienced doctors from the Jaixing Hospital of TCM are invited to work in the TCM center in Wuzhen every day.
"I just started working here this week and haven't treated many local patients yet, but I think this is great. My colleagues in the Jiaxing Hospital of TCM can still contact me and ask me to help diagnose patients through the long-distance diagnose system in the Wuzhen TCM center, meanwhile I can treat patients in Wuzhen face to face," said Fang Shuilin, director of Chinese medicine at the Jiaxing Hospital of TCM.
The TCM industry in China is entering a golden era of development. According to the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the TCM industry in China grew by 20 percent in the past year. To regulate and support the development of the industry, the Law on Traditional Chinese Medicine went into effect on July 1.
Combined with the Internet technologies and great opportunities brought by the World Internet Conference, the TCM center in Wuzhen is striving to become a representative achievement of China's TCM development.
Liu Qiangdong, president of JD.com, addresses the Internet-driven Poverty-alleviation Forum at the 4th World Internet Conference underway in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province on Dec 3. [Photo by Xiang Wenjian/chinadaily.com.cn]
Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com are set to play a big role in the country's drive to alleviate and eliminate poverty in the coming years.
China is pressed for time to lift all people out of poverty by 2020, which is when the central government has pledged to finish building a moderately prosperous society in all respects.
Poor rural logistics is a root problem that has led to poverty in areas in Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, according to Liu Qiangdong, president of JD.com.
"A lot of high quality produce from rural areas have no price competitiveness when transported to cities like Beijing and Shanghai because of high logistics costs," Liu said while addressing the Internet-driven Poverty-alleviation Forum, at the 4th World Internet Conference underway in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province on Dec 3.
In a bid to solve the problem, JD.com has been actively building a logistics network to cover the whole country for the past 10 years.
By the year-end, logistics centers run by the company are expected to reach 500, to reach all 600,000 villages in China.
JD.com is also dedicated to exploring cutting-edge technology solutions such as automated warehouses and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to cut logistics costs and increase efficiency in rural areas.
Liu revealed that JD.com is building two large drone delivery systems in Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces.
In Sichuan, a total of 185 drone airports will be established, enabling the transportation of goods from mountainous villages in the province to any part of the country within 24 hours, according to Liu.
Alibaba, on the other hand, is also devoting great efforts to purge poverty.
Just a few days ago, the company set up a special fund to promote prosperity in China's rural areas. In the next five years, Alibaba will invest 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) to explore multiple ways to fight against poverty using internet technologies.
Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate company of Alibaba, has provided unsecured loan services to more than 2 million rural startups, said Jing Xiandong, the company's chief executive officer.
In addition to business loans, Ant Financial also offers free online medical insurance for impoverished families to prevent them from being devastated by high medical costs if a family member becomes critically ill.
Illness and its related costs are a major cause of poverty among China's rural population. As of the end of 2016, about 40 percent of impoverished people in rural areas suffer from some form of illness, statistics from the National Health and Family Planning Commission show.
"The service allows these families to insure and claim for compensation online," Jing said, adding that more than 350,000 rural people have been insured to date.
He also mentioned Alibaba's other plans to tackle poverty, including subsidizing college students in poor areas and planting trees where desertification hinders local economic development.
JD.com and Alibaba are not only the ones working against poverty, other domestic e-commerce companies such as Vipshop and Yigo have rolled out specific plans to promote the national poverty alleviation campaign, with more expected to join in the future.
China lifted 12.4 million rural residents out of poverty last year. There are still 43.3 million people living below the poverty line with an average annual income less than 2,300 yuan ($340), according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
A minister dialogue on internet inclusiveness and sharing was held on Monday during the three-day 4th World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, East China's Zhejiang province. The dialogue looked to promote policy coordination and international cooperation on the internet between China and the world, so as to narrow the gap between developed and developing countries and regions, and benefit everybody.
"The internet should be used to create fair opportunities for people to join in and benefit from, to promote the world economy and get it back to the track of prosperity, and to realize a win-win situation for all nations," said Li Wei, president of the Development Research Center of the State Council.
The internet is one of the most important outcomes that humans' technological revolution that has provided a significant and powerful tool for people to generate the wealth of both matter and spirit. Through extensive connection between people and things, the internet is able to create a great amount of new demand, new products, new industries and new business models. In addition, it can remarkably improve the production process and operation mode of traditional industries and help them restore vitality, according to Li.
Internet users in Europe and North America accounted for 85 percent of the global total, which means the rest of the world is still in need of internet development, said Dominique de Villepin, former prime minister of France, urging that all sides should drive cooperation in the internet field and make sure the internet economy develops in a more peaceful way.
"As the digital economy has brought fundamental revolutions to nearly all industries and fields, it is regarded as the important driving force in changing the manufacturing landscape. We've seen some companies are taking the lead, but most enterprises are in the process of transformation," said Xu Lejiang, vice-minister of the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, and executive vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce.
BEIJING Michel Haese's first visit to Shenzhen was purely a coincidence.
What was more unexpected for the 55-year old German was that this Chinese city would help make his childhood dream come true.
Dreamland for start-ups
When he was a kid, Haese loved to build things with whatever he could find - cans, lids, ribbons, motors, lamps, batteries. Growing up, he tried being a radioman, a photographer, but he never abandoned his dream of becoming an inventor.
Haese first heard about Shenzhen as a special economic zone in China more than 20 years ago at the world's largest computer expo in Hannover, Germany.
In 2011, Haese planned to visit a traditional electronic fair in Hong Kong, but a friend of his dragged him to another one. There he met some Chinese entrepreneurs who later invited him to travel to the southeastern Chinese metropolis to see their factories.
"Shenzhen is a paradise for development," he said. "If you have any requirements or needs for new electronics, I go downstairs and I can find them." He was referring to Huaqiangbei, one of the world's largest and most bustling electronics markets packed with small shops selling all kinds of electronic gadgets.
Haese is now the chief executive officer of his own start-up in Shenzhen. His primary invention, the "Lapscreen," is more of a notion than a product. With a Lapscreen, one can project all the functions of a smartphone onto an A4-paper-sized portable full-HD monitor, like typing a story or watching a movie. With it, Haese hopes to share his "portable office" idea with willing partners from the whole world.
Haese is certainly not the only dream chaser who regards this mega city as his ultimate destination.
Cyril Ebersweiler is the co-founder of HAX Accelerator, a seed accelerator focused on hardware start-ups based in Shenzhen and San Francisco. Together with 10 hardware firms, the 38-year-old Frenchman founded HAX in a garage in Shenzhen in 2011.
"One thing we discovered while leveraging the supply chain for these start-ups was that Shenzhen was a good place to prototype - and not just consumer electronics hardware, but also extremely complex hardware for the health, robotics, and fabrication spaces," he told Xinhua.
For six years, HAX has sought to speed up business ideas from 3D printers to drones, as well as other consumer product devices for more than 145 start-up companies. It offers guidance and expertise from start to finish.
Every year, Ebersweiler brings teams whose members come from all over the world, more than half of them from the United States or Europe, to Shenzhen. "What we had to develop at the time was an effective way for them to be operating in China," he said.
In Ebersweiler's opinion, it is Shenzhen's unique advantage to have a lot of small factories supporting the big ones. He calls it "the long tail of manufacturing in China." He has also been spearheading a "lean hardware" movement to refashion the way products are made by integrating the prototyping phase and manufacturing phase as much as possible.
He believes the city's prevalent culture of open sources is precisely what start-ups need to do small manufacturing runs effectively with a lot of flexibility and comparatively low cost so as to reduce time to the market.
"It's very difficult, or it's actually impossible to do that in Silicon Valley. You have to go online, order something, waiting for four or five days, get it shipped, play with it, doesn't work, do it again," he said.
Nursery for global brands
Shenzhen has not only helped new businesses to break out of the shell, but also nurtured many of China's world-class technological enterprises, especially in the global smartphone industry.
Huawei, China's Shenzhen-based telecommunications giant, was founded in 1987. It has now become a leading global smartphone manufacturer.
According to analysis by consulting firm Counterpoint Research, it has overtaken Apple in terms of global smartphone sales in June and July, the first time in history.
Thanks to designs with large displays and advanced camera functions, Chinese cellphone makers have now become increasingly popular among overseas customers.
Matilda von Sydow leads a local philanthropic group in Oslo, Norway. She now uses Huawei's P10 Lite phone.
"I'm very pleased with my purchase ... As an android user I see no reason to choose another brand, the phone has all the qualities I'm after plus more," she said, noting that many of her friends and family members also use Huawei phones.
Elliot Mulley-Goodbarne, a news editor with Mobile News, a leading mobile industry trade newspaper in Britain, told Xinhua that he believes Huawei's success is a testament to high quality and more reasonable prices.
Compared to Huawei's venture in the developed world, Transsion Holdings, also headquartered in Shenzhen, has its eyes locked on the continent of Africa.
The market share of mobile brands under Transsion reached 38 percent in Africa last year, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC), a key provider of market intelligence and advisory services for information technology and telecommunications. It means that for every three mobile phones sold in the continent, one is made by Transsion.
Transsion's investments in many of the African countries have not only made it a household brand on the continent, but also brought real benefits to Africans.
In 2011, the company set up a smartphone plant in Ethiopia. It now hires 1,600 local employees.
Alemseged Teka came to work for the Chinese phone maker when the factory opened. In six years, he was promoted from a worker at the assembly line to the chief of the production planning department. Now he earns a pretty handsome income.
"The Chinese company has changed my life," he said, adding that in Ethiopia, many want to find a job there because the cellphone industries offer good pay.
While producing handsets for global customers, Chinese companies from Shenzhen have also ventured into infrastructure for mobile services to get local people connected to the wider world.
Huawei, since 2013, has worked with the Zambian Information and Communications Technology Authority and local carriers to deliver network coverage to remote areas. In 2014, it helped connect more than 500 villages for the first time by installing 169 base stations in remote areas of the country's 10 provinces.
Heart of innovation
Building up their business from almost ground zero, some of Shenzhen's tech firms used to battle for their share of the market with low-priced copycat products. Cheap, low-end, fake were among the words most commonly used to describe their products.
With years of robust market competition and development, that image has changed. Innovation has been a key factor to help force the change.
At this year's IFA Tech Show in Berlin, Huawei unveiled its own Kirin 970 chipset, which is designed by its subsidiary HiSilicon Technologies. The chip has been built into Huawei's new flagship Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro phones launched last month.
Innovation also blossoms in the development of mobile software and applications.
First released in 2011, Wechat is a social media mobile application software developed by Shenzhen-based Tencent. The company said earlier this month that the app now has 902 million active daily users, among whom hundreds of millions are outside China. For many of them, Wechat has simply become a way of life.
Meanwhile, as more and more foreign countries have approved the use of Chinese mobile payment services, many Chinese tourists have begun to use Wechat Pay instead of cash when they travel abroad. According to Zheng Hongmin, who is in charge of Wechat Pay's operation in the Asia-Pacific, Wechat Pay is now available in 19 countries and regions for payments in 12 currencies.
These technological booms and creative successes have not come lightly.
Seeking to excel in innovation, tech firms like Huawei are investing like crazy.
Huawei now has the biggest research and development (R&D) budget of any Chinese company. Last year alone, it has invested $11 billion in R&D, and its Kirin 970 chipset is a result of many years of such investment.
Meanwhile, these companies pay great attention to international cooperation when it comes to innovation. Huawei has set up research labs in Russia and France to improve cellphone designs. Tencent has opened an artificial intelligence laboratory in the US city of Seattle.
The local government in Shenzhen has also put forward many preferential policies to make sure that the city can attract more talent, including more generous subsidies and allowances and better scientific research conditions.
In September, Barry Marshall, a Nobel Laureate for Physiology or Medicine, launched a biomedical engineering lab with Shenzhen University. It is the fifth such lab in Shenzhen that has the input of Nobel prize winners.
Next year marks the 40th anniversary of the start of China's reform and opening-up policy. Four decades ago, few could imagine that such a tiny fishing enclave could become a hub for tens of thousands of start-ups and host some of China's most successful tech companies. It is a miracle of collective and continuous endeavor.
Haese, the German inventor, said Shenzhen has given him more inspiration and hope than any other place in the world.
With its spirit of openness and innovation, the city, driven by the hopes of hundreds of thousands of people like Haese, will continue to create miracles.
BEIJING -- Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said the CPC is willing to work with other political parties around the world to promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind and create a better world.
Xi made the remarks while delivering a keynote speech on Friday at the opening ceremony of CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting in Beijing.
BUILDING COMMUNITY WITH SHARED FUTURE FOR MANKIND
Xi said the initiative of building a community with a shared future for mankind is being transformed from a concept into action.
"I'm delighted to see that the friendly cooperation between China and other countries is increasingly expanding and the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind is gaining support and endorsement from an increasing number of people," Xi said.
The concept of building a community with a shared future for mankind was put forth by Xi in 2013.
The Belt and Road Initiative is the practice of the concept, Xi said, adding the initiative has become a huge cooperation platform for countries concerned to realize their common development.
Proposed by Xi in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative aims to build trade and infrastructure networks connecting Asia with Europe and Africa via land and maritime routes.
In his speech, Xi said building a community with a shared future for mankind is in essence to connect the prospects and destinies of every nation and country closely together, share weal and woe, and turn planet Earth into a harmonious family.
He said efforts shall be made to build a safe world free of fear, adding a country cannot gain its security at the cost of others'. Threats facing other countries may be challenges to ourselves.
"Facing increasingly complicated and integrated threats, we shall not fight alone, nor shall we worship military force," he said, adding all countries should pursue a new concept of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security.
All countries should create fair, just and shared security to jointly eliminate the root cause of war and rescue people from pains brought about by war, he said.
In the meantime, countries should also strive to eliminate poverty and promote common prosperity, Xi said, citing challenges such as the North-South development gap, poverty, hunger and digital gap.
The old-school winner-takes-all mentality and beggar-thy-neighbor approach would not only block the doors of others, but also barricade one's own path. "They would erode a country's own roots for growth, and impair the future of whole humanity," he said.
The world should push for an economic globalization that is more open and inclusive, more balanced, more equitable and beneficial to all, to bring prosperity to all countries and create comfortable lives for children worldwide, he noted.
Xi went on to emphasize the significance of an open and inclusive world, urging the world to break cultural barriers and let all kinds of civilizations exist and grow in harmony.
Stressing the building of a clean and beautiful world with picturesque scenery, Xi called for efforts to ensure coexistence between man and nature, cherish the environment as we cherish our own lives, respect and protect nature, and safeguard the irreplaceable planet Earth.
NEW MODEL OF PARTY-TO-PARTY RELATIONS
Xi proposed to develop a new model of party-to-party relations, in which political parties seek common grounds while shelving differences, respect and learn from one another.
Political parties of different countries should work together for an international network of cooperation and exchange in various forms and at multiple levels, he said.
With an open vision and broad mind, the CPC is willing to carry out dialogues, exchanges and cooperation with peoples and political parties of other countries, he noted.
In the next five years, the CPC would like to invite 15,000 members of foreign political parties to China for exchanges, Xi said.
Xi also suggested that the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting be institutionalized and developed into a high-level political dialogue platform of broad representation and international influence.
The CPC has kept regular contacts with more than 400 political parties and organizations in about 160 countries and regions.
CHINA WILL NOT "EXPORT" CHINESE MODEL
Xi said the CPC would neither import foreign models of development nor export the Chinese model.
"We will not ask other countries to copy the Chinese practice," he added.
He reiterated that the CPC strives for both the well-being of the Chinese people and human progress.
Therefore, besides taking care of China's internal matters, the CPC will create opportunities for the world through China's development, said Xi.
The CPC, as the biggest political party in the world, will also explore the law of social development for humanity and share it with other countries, according to Xi.
He said that the CPC will, as always, contribute to world peace.
Noting that one of the founding missions of the CPC, established in 1921, was to end the plight of the country which had suffered long period of war and to ensure the people's survival, Xi stressed that the CPC "knows deeply the value of peace and holds firm resolve in maintaining peace."
To date, China has dispatched over 36,000 peacekeeping personnel and the country is acting as a major peacekeeping force and contributor of funds for UN peacekeeping missions.
There are currently more than 2,500 Chinese peacekeepers on UN missions in eight locations, safeguarding local peace and tranquility, despite difficulties and dangers.
He pledged that no matter what stage of development it reaches, China will never seek hegemony or engage in expansion.
Also, the CPC will continue working for common development around the world and contributing to exchanges and mutual learning among the civilizations of the world, Xi said.
EXCHANGES IN VARIOUS FORMS
After the opening ceremony, the first plenary session of the meeting was held, in which foreign delegates spoke highly of Xi's speech and expressed their willingness to work with the CPC to build a better world.
Wang Huning, member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and member of the CPC Central Committee Secretariat, attended the opening ceremony and the first plenary session.
Earlier the same day, representatives of attendees paid a visit to the Party School of the CPC Central Committee and visited an exhibition on China's achievements over the past five years.
Guests from Africa and Central Asia also had seminars with the CPC on the role of parties in building a community of shared future and promoting the Belt and Road Initiative, respectively.
Both events were held under the framework of the high-level dialogue, which has attracted over 600 representatives of nearly 300 political parties and organizations from more than 120 countries.
CASIC rolls out latest upgrade for intranet to prevent cyberattacks
China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp, a major defense contractor, has deployed the latest wave of technology in the country's largest secure intranet, which is entirely based on domestically developed hardware and software.
As one of the country's biggest arms-makers, CASIC pays great attention to information safety. Since the secure intranet project began in 2014, it has grown to connect about 20,000 computers and is the country's largest domestically sourced system, according to Shen Shiguang, deputy head of the Beijing Institute of Computer Technology and Application.
The institute is part of the CASIC Second Academy and is in charge of building and maintaining the intranet. The project was first aimed at replacing imported computers and software - which had been employed for a long time to handle classified defense information - with domestically developed technology. In September 2015, CASIC expanded the project to include all the company's computers dealing with commercial secrets.
The newly upgraded intranet features a high level of security. It is physically isolated from the internet and other publicly accessible networks, and because it is based on Chinese-designed hardware and software, it essentially eliminates the possibility of technical backdoors that are subject to hacking, Shen said.
He said a number of information security hazards have existed inside the networks and computers used by key Chinese organizations - especially those related to infrastructure and national security - since most of their processors, operating systems and storage devices were developed by foreign enterprises.
"Almost all nations of the world, especially big powers, are sparing no effort to make sure that their classified information is well protected," Shen said. "For China, if we couldn't have our own systems, our information networks would face intimidation or threats from foreign countries, and we wouldn't be able to upgrade or repair them."
Through steady improvements, most software on the CASIC internal system has become easy to use and runs as fast and as smoothly as those based on Intel chips and Microsoft software, he said.
"We will continue to build the network," Shen said. "We plan to take three years to make it connect with at least 50,000 computers within the company."
He added that the institute is leading a national program sponsored by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to promote secure intranet to government departments and enterprises tied to national security.
China's top leadership has repeatedly stressed the significance of information security. In February 2014, the Communist Party of China Central Committee set up the Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs, headed by President Xi Jinping.
Developing and adopting indigenous information systems does not go against the country's commitment to an open market, as no nation should be willing to entrust its secrets to foreign platforms, said Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and expert on information technology.
zhaolei@chinadaily.com.cn
Around 1,000 government officials and senior business executives will attend the 2017 Fortune Global Forum, which will open on Wednesday in Guangzhou, Guangdong province.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Chairman and CEO of Tencent Holdings Ma Huateng, Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma and Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Terry Gou will be among the participants, according to Alan Murray, chief content officer of Time Inc and editor-in-chief of Fortune magazine.
"Guangzhou is the ideal city to hold the 2017 Fortune Global Forum as it is the political, economic and transportation center in Guangdong province and the southern Chinese region," Murray told reporters at a news conference on Sunday.
The forum will last three days. This year's title is "Openness and Innovation: Shaping the Global Economy".
Of the companies to attend, 152 are among the world's top 500, with more than 50 having established their headquarters in Guangzhou. Their combined annual earnings exceed $9 trillion, and together they employ 23.5 million workers, Murray said.
Murray, who arrived in Guangzhou on Sunday morning, said the city looks more beautiful each time he visits. It is his third trip to the southern metropolis.
Zhang Hongbin, deputy director of the International Affairs Bureau at the State Council Information Office, said the Chinese government attaches great importance to the forum, which is expected to promote cooperation between China and foreign nations.
In 2016, Guangzhou's GDP was 1.96 trillion yuan ($296 billion), ranking it third among Chinese cities. Its exports reached 518.59 billion yuan, up 3 percent year-on-year, while total imports grew 3.3 percent to 337.84 billion yuan.
Last year, Guangzhou was the world's sixth-busiest seaport by cargo tonnage, while Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport ranked 15th in passenger volume.
Delegates at a high-level meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday read during a break the second volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, a book that proved popular at the meeting. FENG YONGBIN/CHINA DAILY
President Xi Jinping's new book on governance gained popularity among delegates from more than 120 countries to a high-level political party dialogue that concluded in Beijing on Sunday.
The second volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China was displayed with editions in a variety of languages available for representatives to the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting. The book was published and went on sale last month.
Mahfuz Ullah, a researcher, writer and environmentalist from Bangladesh, said that after reading the first volume of the book, which he got from the Chinese embassy in Dhaka and found wonderful, he was eager to read the second.
"The way he (Xi) is trying to explain the world's situation, especially given Xi's responsibility to the leadership, the community and the whole political process, that is very important," he said on the sidelines of the meeting.
The 19th National Congress of the CPC was very important because it set a new agenda and direction that is important for the whole world, he said.
"China is trying to make the globalization process more life-oriented, human-oriented and development-oriented," he said.
Marko Duric, vice-president of the Serbian Progressive Party and director of the Kosovo Affairs Office of Serbia, said reading Xi's book is a good way to learn from the CPC's experience and will help other political parties increase their own economic and social achievements.
"I took a look at this book, and I hope I will be able to find a lot of inspiring ideas and examples that we can learn from," he said.
The win-win cooperation China proposes got positive feedback during the meeting, he said.
Salvador Heresi Chicoma, general secretary of Peruvians for Change, said the CPC's newly elected leadership has significance not only for Chinese people, but also the world because the CPC is offering solutions on many global issues.
"It is very important for people in South America to have a book about the experience of the political administration here in China because it is a model whose characteristics are innovation and openness," he said.
Peru underscores the importance of developing relations and a very strong friendship with China, he said.
The book, covering 17 topics, collects 99 of Xi's speeches, conversations, instructions and letters between 2014 and 2017. The first volume was published in September 2014 and received widespread attention and praise from readers at home and abroad.
The new volume depicts the practices of the CPC Central Committee with Xi at the core in uniting and leading the Chinese people to uphold and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics in a new era.
Vice-minister says nation 'will take proactive measures' in light of bill
China pledged to keep a close eye on the unfolding impact of the United States' tax overhaul, which was passed by the Senate on Saturday, and it called for more tax policy coordination under the global governance framework.
The US Senate passed a major bill on a party-line vote whose main feature is a drastic tax cut for corporations - a reduction of tax rates down to 20 percent from 35 percent, the lowest level in decades. Taxes for individuals would also be eased modestly in the short run, but would quickly rise for middle-and low-income earners.
The bill still needs to be reconciled with the version passed by the House of Representatives - a final hurdle since some provisions may raise new objections from lawmakers.
Zhu Guangyao, vice-minister of finance, said at a forum on Sunday that China will "take proactive measures" in response to the US tax move, as the world's largest economy's tax policy adjustment is expected to have a major impact on other countries, including China.
The international community needs to pay close attention to the implications of the US tax changes for competition, labor productivity and wages, said Zhu, who stressed that members of the Group of 20 had agreed to set international tax policy coordination as one of the important issues to discuss at the 2018 summit, which will be held in Argentina.
But the bill, if passed, will not create large cash flows out of China and into the US, said Liu Shangxi, head of the Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences. Many more factors other than the tax rate shape the overall US business environment.
"There is no need for China to make immediate tax cuts and blindly follow what the US does, but it should adjust macroeconomic policies based on an assessment of the real domestic situation," Liu said. "One of our current priorities is to deepen value-added tax reform that targets a more market-oriented scheme for resource allocation and build a fair investment environment for enterprises."
Willem Buiter, an economist with Citi Research, a division of Citigroup Global Markets Inc, calculated in a recent note of Global Economics View that a cut in the tax rate on corporate profits in the US "has no impact on the incentive to invest", which implies "a zero impact" on the capital intensity of production and real wages.
The tax cut will send the US budget deficit skyrocketing by up to $1.5 trillion, which is expected to add a further burden to the already high debt level of the US government.
"Government revenues and social welfare expenditures may be under great pressure in the coming months if the bill is passed," Liu said.
The Communist Party of China's experience in ruling the Party and country are worth learning from, said delegates from African political parties at the Third China-Africa Political Parties Theoretical Seminar.
The seminar, which began on Wednesday in conjunction with the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting, was attended by 60 representatives of political parties from some 20 African countries.
Abdulrahman Omari Kinana, secretary-general of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, currently Tanzania's ruling party, spoke highly of the economic and social achievements China has made in the past years and expressed willingness to cooperate with China and other countries to build a community with a shared future.
Kinana said African countries have adopted similar guiding principles and agendas to work for, rely on and share development achievements with people, as the CPC has done with reducing poverty. African political parties have also proposed and formulated plans on development and poverty reduction.
"It's a huge challenge to improve the quality of life of our people, and we have been working really hard on it in the past decade," he said. "It is our duty to learn from China and the CPC's experience as well as successful examples."
Kinana said poverty reduction and economic development are the priority as Africa is the least developed continent, with over 60 percent of the population living in poverty. "Under the current situation, we must cooperate with China because we are about to go the way China has passed."
As secretary-general, Kinana said his party needs to follow the CPC's example on how to maintain stability as one generation passes the torch to the next and how to maintain political stability and keep solving problems that affect people.
"The key to Africa's prosperity is to realize an orderly succession of our state leaders. We ought to prepare the young generation so that they can take over the country from elder generations," he said.
Kinana also said Cham Cha Mapinduzi should learn from the CPC on fighting corruption, eliminating conceit and self-satisfaction, and improving working efficiency.
Bokary Treta, president of the Rassemblement de Mali party, created by a former Malian prime minister in 2001, agreed to further promote the training program for party members.
"The seminar said that we need to ensure discipline within the party, enhance the governing capability, and boost communications among party members. We can borrow China's democratic centralism to improve our leadership," he said.
The exchange with the CPC gave inspiration to have a policy to make the communication seminar an institutional and regular forum, which will enable multilateral communication on governing methods and leadership. "This is an very important platform that can further strengthen bilateral, even multilateral cooperation."
Treta suggested promoting the concept of building a community with a shared future through politics to raise people's awareness and ultimately reach the goal of gaining national benefit.
Ana Rita Sithole, member of the Polibureau of Mozambique Liberation Front, the ruling party of the country, said the strong desire for cooperation between China and Africa could break through the barrier brought by their great geographical distance.
She said people need to stick to the principle of jointly discussing and building whether they are facing opportunities or challenges.
China has made social and economic improvements under the leadership of the CPC, which also has consequences for the development and progress of Africans, since it shows that China is not walking toward development alone but together with other nations as well, Sithole said.
"Cooperation is the right way to build the community with a shared future," she said. "We will keep our faith and enhance the relationship with China for a better future."
NANNING -- At least once a month they gather on decks or in the red-roofed house at the center of the water, sitting on stools to hear or study the latest theories and policies of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
For the 6,000 residents of Tianshengqiao township, Longlin county in south China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, the "lecture on water" is the most popular and effective channel to understand Party policies. Speakers are mainly village and township Party chiefs. Local technological advisors are also invited to teach aquaculture.
Liu Jian, Party chief of Tianshengqiao, has been a frequent speaker since he took office in this small remote mountain town in October 2016. He says most of the population belongs to ethnic minorities, including Zhuang, Miao and Gelao.
The villagers used to grow rice. After the construction of a hydropower plant in the 1990s, they farmed fish and began living off the reservoir, which borders Yunnan and Guizhou provinces.
"Most villagers spend all day on water, busy working. They have little time or opportunity to learn about the world outside," says Liu.
Seen from the mountains, the floating fish pens, large and small, checker the green lake like a chessboard.
The red-roofed "lecture room", at the center of the reservoir, is particularly eye-catching. Local people call it the "New Era Institute of Peasants", which is believed to be a nod to the Peasant Movement Training Institute of 90 years ago.
In the 1920s, revolutionary pioneers of the CPC, including Deng Xiaoping, set up peasant movement institutes in remote mountain areas in Guangxi. They publicized revolutionary theory, conducted military training, and organized armed struggles, which laid the foundation for the uprisings and revolutionary bases.
In past decades, local Party officials gathered villagers at the meeting room of a government building in the town center to hear reports. Because of the long distances and worries about their work, few people were willing to go. "The attendance was low and people were not happy," says Liu.
In 2014, the Tianshengqiao Township Committee of the CPC decided to move the meetings "onto the water".
"We used to sit on the podium, waiting for an audience. But now we stand on a boat and get close to villagers, telling them events and policies from Beijing," says Liu.
Villagers travel by boat to the meetings. Lectures usually last 40 to 50 minutes and attract more than 20 boats each time. Audiences can reach a hundred.
Some people wear Party emblems and some come in colorful ethnic costumes. The elderly bring their grandchildren, and women weave while listening. Some people take notes.
Speakers use local dialects and the Zhuang language. Though outsiders do not understand, the locals appreciate it.
Speeches with difficult concepts are "translated" into examples and stories based on simple daily life.
Liu in recent lectures explained the essence conveyed at the 19th National Congress of the CPC, stressing the content about "pursuing a rural vitalization strategy" and "safeguarding the property rights and interests of rural people".
A meeting last month focused on medical insurance. Some villagers thought it was unnecessary, but after half an hour of discussion, they realized the benefits.
Liu convinced them that insurance would save money on treatment: "Without insurance, you will pay more if you go to hospital. Moreover, the local government has offered reimbursement of fish farmers' medical bills. It would not cost much."
On the water, speakers' voices are louder and gestures more frequent. But they no longer fear losing their audience. Laughter often echoes on boats.
It is also a popular class on fish farming. In the early years of the reservoir, people did not understand how to farm fish. Pursuing high production led to fish diseases, severe pollution and huge losses.
Shi Zhongyu, a local aquaculture expert, lectures three or four times a year on the water. "In the past, the fish farmers could hardly make a living, because they lacked knowledge and training," he says.
Every winter, he tells the fish farmers to lower fishing net density and not to feed too much, so as to maintain nutrition levels. He can explain, while demonstrating, how to feed on the water - an impossible task previously.
In 2012, only 15 households were fish farmers, but now the number is 200 - almost half the town's population.
Wei Bin attends every "lecture on water" with his wife. They understand the economic benefits of the classes.
Through lack of knowledge, he lost tens of thousands of yuan in 2012. But his annual income has risen from 1,000 yuan to more than 10,000 yuan over the past four years.
Aquaculture has become a pillar industry in the county. In 2016, two of five poverty-stricken villages were lifted out of poverty.
Longlin County has 31 villages setting up "lecture rooms". Some are known for speakers using folk songs to explain national policies so the less-well-educated can understand.
"We plan to expand the speaking team by inviting ethnic villagers or experienced fish farmers. They will make the lectures on water more attractive," says Liu.
BEIJING -- China's top legislator has called for better promotion of the principle underlying rule of law that the Constitution and the law are above everything else and that everyone is equal before the law.
Such a principle should become a voluntary act of all people, Zhang Dejiang, chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, said at a symposium marking the fourth National Constitution Day on Monday.
At the symposium, Zhang said the major policies of the Communist Party of China Central Committee regarding the implementation of the Constitution and the oversight to ensure compliance with the Constitution should be carried out in a comprehensive manner.
The principles of the Constitution should be firmly observed, the spirit of the Constitution should be promoted, and the obligations mandated in the Constitution should be performed, he said.
He also demanded efforts to integrate the process of sound lawmaking, strict law enforcement, and impartial administration of justice with the cause of developing a socialist culture of rule of law.
YINCHUAN -- Ningxia Hui autonomous region in Northwest China might have been under the imperial rule of Chinese emperors much earlier than archeologists previously thought, according to the recent excavation of a group of 3,000-year-old tombs.
Experts from China's top archeological research institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Peking University and Nanjing University, have gathered in Ningxia's Pengyang County to join the excavation of the Yaoheyuan Ruins, where an area of 620,000 square meters has been excavated.
Ma Qiang, who leads the archeological team, told Xinhua on Monday that all of the tombs had been looted prior to the start of the official excavation earlier this year.
However, the team has found the main tomb of a Marquis-level ruler 13 meters underground. Although no bronze burial vessels with inscriptions identifying the owner of the tomb have been located, they have found two jade mantis.
A similar jade mantis was unearthed from China's World Heritage listed Yinxu archeological site near Anyang in central China's Henan Province, which was an ancient capital city in the late Shang Dynasty (1300 B.C. to 1046 B.C.)
"The jade item provides strong evidence of the tomb owner's relationship with the imperial governments during the period from the late Shang to the middle of Western Zhou (1046 B.C. - 771 B.C.) dynasties," said Zhang Tian'en from the Shaanxi Provincial Archeological Research Institute.
Liu Xu, a professor at Peking University, said the discovery of the ruins suggests that Ningxia was part of the imperial empire from the late Shang Dynasty, about 1,000 years earlier than previously believed.
The team has only excavated one quarter of the area, and Liu said it should contain another 40 neighboring tombs.
Experts believe the area was a Marquis fief in the northern frontier of the dynasties.
Two horse burial pits and a chariot burial pit were excavated near the Marquis tomb. The large horse pit bears remains of 12 horses. There were four carriages found in the chariot pit. Archeologists expect to find more remains of horses under the chariot pit.
As well as the tombs, the team has also discovered ruins of a bronze casting workshop, moats and water drainage and road networks at the site.
Lin Songshu shares her experience and reflections with community residents in Yanji in Northeast China's Jilin province after attending the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China as a delegate. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
Since Lin Songshu came back to Yanji in Northeast China's Jilin province after attending the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China as a delegate, she's been busy sharing her experiences and reflections with everyone in her community.
Lin, the Party secretary of the Yuanhui Community, has been working here for 17 years.
In the activity centers, as well as in residents' homes, she's given with great patience detailed explanations to all their questions.
As a Korean Lin cadre, Lin chose the Korean language to communicate with ethnic Korean residents, especially those who are old, to help them better understand the report President Xi Jinping delivered at the congress.
She also chose some residents who are skilled in singing and dancing to integrate the spirit of the congress and cultural programs, which was a success.
China's top court has ordered judges to do more research in environmental cases related to the Yangtze River, to better protect the area and ensure justice is done.
In a guideline issued on Monday, the Supreme People's Court said civil and criminal court judges should pay greater attention when handling trials involving pollution or the killing of endangered wildlife.
Cases related to sustainable development, such as ecological compensation and green finance, should also receive more consideration, "as they are new kinds of environmental disputes", said Jiang Bixin, vice-president of SPC.
He said all judges should see environmental protection as a priority and work with governments to protect the river's diverse ecology.
The Yangtze River Economic Zone covers 11 regions, including Anhui province, Shanghai and Chongqing.
In March 2016, the central government released a development outline for the zone that highlighted the importance of environmental protection and stated that economic activity cannot harm the ecology.
Fu Zhanxiang is a national-level inheritor of intangible cultural heritage and creates pictures and handicrafts with birch bark. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
As a national-level inheritor of intangible cultural heritage, Fu Zhanxiang, 62, knows the skilled techniques to make pictures and various handicrafts using birch bark.
Fu, of the Hezhe ethnic group in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, presents scenes of the group's daily life, such as fishing and hunting, in his works.
Fu began to concentrate his attention on the techniques when he moved to a Hezhe gathering town in Raohe County 35 years ago.
Birch is grown in Northeast China. Strong and water-resistant, it is easily cut, bent or sewn, and has been a valuable building material since prehistoric times.
New York's Bard College Conservatory of Music will teach an undergraduate program in Chinese musical instrument performance starting next fall.
Bard will work with Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music to create the program, said to be the first of its kind at a Western college.
Students will be able to apply in January for a first year that will focus on the erhu, pipa and guzheng, all stringed instruments.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - The United Arab Emirates on Sunday denied a claim by Yemen's Houthi rebels that a missile had been fired toward the country's underconstruction nuclear plant.
The rebels claimed they had launched a missile toward the plant in Abu Dhabi in the first such strike toward the country.
"The National Emergency and Crisis and Disasters Management Authority denies the claim that the Houthis fired a missile toward the country," the UAE's state-run WAM news agency said.
"The UAE possesses an air defense system capable of dealing with any threat of any type or kind."
The statement added that the nuclear power plant was well-protected.
The National, a newspaper in Abu Dhabi, also reported that Barakah's operations were "unaffected on Sunday, while sources on the ground confirmed there were no signs of an attack to the structure."
The Houthis last month targeted the Saudi capital, Riyadh, with a ballistic missile that was intercepted by Saudi air defenses. It was the deepest strike inside the kingdom since the war between the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis and their allies began in March 2015.
Sunday's claim came amid heavy fighting in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, where the Houthis are facing off with fighters loyal to the country's former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, in the fifth straight day of street fighting as the alliance between the two unravels.
More than 80 people have been killed in the clashes, with about 120 injured.
The Houthis have accused Saleh of striking deals with the Saudi-led coalition, which has been waging an air campaign against the Houthi-Saleh alliance for nearly three years.
The UAE is an active member of the coalition and its forces have mostly focused on securing the southern region of Yemen. The country has lost 100 soldiers in the conflict.
Senior Houthi official Deif-Allah al-Shami said that the missile fired toward Abu Dhabi was a "message to the United Arab Emiratis for its political and financial support to Saleh".
He said that the UAE has hosted members of Saleh's family, including his son who was an ambassador to the UAE and believed to be residing there during the conflict.
The nearly three years of war in Yemen have killed over 10,000 people, mostly civilians, and pushed the Arab country into a humanitarian catastrophe and near mass famine.
Xinhua - AP
(China Daily 12/04/2017 page11)
Fashion designer Lu Lyuzhu spent much of the first two decades of her career traveling around the world for business, attending exhibitions and fashion shows.
"Then I just wanted to settle down somewhere," said Lu, 42, whose hometown is in Baotou in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.
Lu became a woolen garment designer in 1995 after graduating from Tsinghua University.
MANAUS, Brazil - The warning from our guide made clear that this "forest walk" would be anything but a leisurely stroll.
"Look before grabbing any branches because the ants bite. You will be in pain for 24 hours," says Jackson Edirley da Silva. "And watch where you step. You don't want to get bitten by a snake."
Our group, about a dozen tourists, got quiet.
The first international sand painting competition featuring idyllic life is held in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu province, Dec 3, 2017. [Photo/IC]
Sand painting is also called "art on the fingertips". Artists use sand to create marvelous pictures accompanied by light and music.
The first international sand painting competition featuring idyllic life was held in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu province, on Dec 3. The competition solicited contributions from September and more than one hundred artists registered to take part in the event. Fifty sand painting artists entered the final competition and brought a feast of art.
Red-braised beef, a h ighly recommended offering by Dan Cha Fan restaurant. [Photo by Gao Erqiang/China Daily]
An eatery in 'China's Venice' is enthralling visitors from different parts of the world. Xu Junqian reports in Wuzhen, Zhejiang.
Wu Xinhua cooks at a restaurant with no more than 50 seats in a town of 50,000 residents. He compares it to serving guests at a United Nations' dining room.
"Basically, I'm feeding and pleasing people from every corner of the world," says the 38-year-old, who has worked in the kitchen for over two decades.
The helmsman of Dan Cha Fan restaurant - the name literally translates as "bland tea and meals" - in Zhejiang province's water town, Wuzhen, means what he says.
He's running one of the most popular restaurants in one of the country's most popular tourist destinations. Wuzhen receives about 8 million annual visits.
The 1,300-year-old settlement is celebrated for its canal network and ancient architecture.
It underwent a major face-lift at the start of the century and became a hot spot on the tourism map about a decade ago. It has since drawn visitors with its waterways, rice paddy fields and traditional white buildings with black-tile roofs.
France, China partner on talents exchange
( chinadaily.com.cn )
Updated: 2017-12-04
The first-ever Forum Franco-Chinois sur L'Innovation (France-China Forum on Innovation) was held successfully in Beijing on Nov 24, discussing methods of high-level talents exchange.
Co-hosted by China's Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Innovation of France, the forum initiated an exchange project involving outstanding scientific researchers in both countries.
A total of 40 young scientific researchers from the two countries will be funded to carry out exchanges and scientific innovation cooperation in mathematics, physics, medicine, and biomedicine.
Ye Dongbai, head of the international collaboration division at the Ministry of Science and Technology, delivers a speech at the first-ever France-China Forum of Innovation in Beijing on Nov 24. [Photo/most.gov.cn]
Ye Dongbai, head of the international collaboration division at the Ministry of Science and Technology, said that France and China are dedicated to strengthening cooperation on projects, talents and bases. The joint laboratories strongly support cooperation on scientific and technological innovation between the two countries.
The head of the international and European affairs department of the Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Innovation of France, noted that France has regarded China as the most important partner in scientific research for a long time and is willing to promote taking cooperation to a higher level.
The head of the international and European affairs department of the Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Innovation of France, notes the historical partnership between China and France. [Photo/most.gov.cn]
Themed forums were organized as a platform for young researchers to discuss the establishment of talents exchange policies and procedures, expansion of scientific research innovation and cooperation and promotion of sustainable development of France-China joint laboratories.
The event also invited 40 scientific researchers to visit the Exhibition and Exchange Center of Zhongguancun Science Park. The park's cutting-edge innovation achievements in bio-health, intelligent transportation, and artificial intelligence stirred strong interest among the visitors.
On Nov 27, Premier Li Keqiang attended the sixth meeting of the leaders of China and 16 Central and Eastern European countries in Budapest, Hungary.
The 16+1 cooperation mechanism is one of the most significant cross-regional cooperation mechanisms globally. This year is the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the 16+1 cooperation.
Premier Li proposed five initiatives to further advance 16+1 cooperation at the meeting. The key to its fast development is to apply the principles of equality and consultation, mutual benefit, openness and inclusiveness and innovation, he said.
Li also announced that China will provide financial support for cooperation between China and the 16 Central and Eastern European countries.
Li announced the establishment of China-CEEC Inter-Bank Association and the second phase of China-Central and Eastern Europe Investment Cooperation Fund in a keynote speech to the seventh China-CEEC Economic and Trade Forum held in the Hungarian capital city of Budapest.
He said the China Development Bank will provide an equivalent amount of 2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) as development-oriented financial cooperation loans for the inter-bank association.
Analysts say that the 16+1 cooperation is a key part of the comprehensive strategic partnership between China and Europe and helps promote balanced development in Europe.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will start a trade and tourism dialogue with Chinese officials during his ongoing visit to China. Canada and China began to discuss a free trade agreement more than a year ago, following back-to-back meetings between Trudeau and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing and Ottawa. And from February to August, three rounds of exploratory talks were held between the two sides.
Trudeau's visit to China takes place after the fifth round of talks on the North American Free Trade Agreement ended in Mexico City amid simmering tensions.
Last year, the United States accounted for about three-fourths of Canada's exports, while Canada sourced almost two-thirds of its imports from the US. And while US direct investment in Canada amounts to some $306 billion, Canada's investment in the US is almost $370 billion. But US direct investment in Canada represents almost 20 percent of the latter's GDP, while Canada's direct investment in the US adds up to only 2 percent of the US' GDP. The outcome of the NAFTA talks is thus far more important to Canada than to the US.
If the US withdraws from NAFTA, that would start a six-month legal process before official termination. While the Donald Trump-led US administration may see this as a negotiating tool to force Canada and Mexico to accept its demands, the latter could use the time to complete trade talks with Brazil and the European Union.
Canada and Mexico are hedging their bets against a potential NAFTA collapse by pushing for deals with new partners, particularly China and some other Asian countries. In 2015, China bought 12 percent of Canadian exports, whereas Chinese exports accounted for 4 percent of Canada's total. An FTA between China and Canada could strengthen bilateral trade and investment by a great deal over time.
Last year, the combined investment from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong in Canada soared to $26.4 billion, which is almost half of Asia-Pacific investment in the country. But since the starting point is low, China was only the eighth-largest investor in Canada.
Canada's former ambassador to China Howard Balloch believes Ottawa "should be able to negotiate with China" during the NAFTA talks. Canada has a "huge interest" in China and trade diversification whatever the outcome of the NAFTA talks. Intriguingly, the NAFTA talks are likely to coincide with the period Canada and China would need to finalize an FTA agreement.
With a population of more than 1.3 billion, China is perceived as a lucrative market for Canada's agriculture and natural resources sectors. Last year, the Canadian Cabinet approved the plan to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline mainly to improve Canada's ability to get oil to China.
However, there is an intense debate over the proposed FTA with China. While Trudeau's Liberal Party supports greater bilateral trade, Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer opposes a bilateral FTA. Using the "China threat" card, Conservatives have criticized the Liberals for allowing Chinese takeovers of Canadian businesses, while taking advantage of Canadian concerns about human rights and environmental standards.
What about ordinary Canadians? A recent poll conducted by Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada shows a slight majority of 55 percent might support a Canadian-Chinese FTA, but UBC's recent poll indicates that 70 percent of Canadians support the idea and only 20 percent are against it. Such a shift would reflect greater economic interest in a bilateral trade dealbut also growing concern over the Trump administration, rising US protectionism and the potential NAFTA collapse.
While US officials have sought to subdue NAFTA tensions by extending the timetable for renegotiations, that may only end up pouring oil on the simmering fire. In Mexico, tight elections in mid-2018 will complicate the NAFTA talks; in Canada, Conservatives are positioning for the 2019 elections.
Nevertheless, Canada is losing faith in the US. According to UBC, 36 percent of Canadians believe the US is a "more responsible global leader" than China (28 percent). Yet 37 percent of Canadian citizens are "uncertain" about the matter. Moreover, China is seen as doing more to "maintain peace" than the US and two-thirds of Canadians believe China will be the "largest economic power" by the 2020s.
Amid the new uncertainty, Canada is likely to do what it can to sustain NAFTA over time, whileat least under Trudeauit is likely to seek a trade deal with China that would foster diversification, new investment at home and greater presence in Asia.
From China's standpoint, a bilateral deal with Canada would open new doors to North America and pave the way to the Free Trade Agreement of Asia Pacific, which would be broader and more inclusive than the current trade pact efforts.
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).
Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura has vowed to snap his city's six-decade sister-city relationship with San Francisco in protest against the US city accepting a statue of "comfort women" as public property.
"Comfort women", a euphemism for some 200,000 girls and young women who were coerced, kidnapped, sold or captured to be sexually exploited in Japan's military brothels before and during World War II, is a taboo term for many in Japan. And these people have been trying to sweep the issue under the carpet.
The statue in San Francisco features three womena Chinese, a Korean and a Filipinawith the two words, "sex slaves" inscribed on a plaque. Yoshimura has written several letters to his San Francisco counterpart Edwin Lee this year, saying some historians don't recognize the historical facts about "comfort women".
Ikuhiko Hata is one of those historians. In an interview with Yasuo Naito, editor in chief of Japan Forward, Sankei Shimbun's English-language website, Hata said the Republic of Korea uses the "history war" as a weapon and women were not abducted to be sexually exploited. He said that his research shows the women who worked in the "comfort stations" were not "sex slaves" and did not live under the cruel conditions.
Hata also said the wartime newspapers in Seoul carried advertisements for recruiting "comfort women", and the recruiters were not Japanese but Koreans. And he claims that the majority of "comfort women" in Japan and Korea were professional prostitutes. The "comfort women" earned 300 yen ($2.7 now) every month, he said, while Japanese soldiers were paid on average 10 yen.
In 1991, some Japanese lawyers said "comfort women" were "sex slaves" and took the issue to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Hata blamed some Japanese media outlets such as the Asahi Shimbun for spreading "fake news" about "comfort women" with the help of the Japanese lawyers, which was then drummed up into a worldwide issue.
In Hata's words, those women who endured a half century of humiliation and trauma, and yet had the courage to speak up, and those activists who helped dig out the truth and struggled to get the "comfort women" justice and respect were lying for personal or political reasons.
If the "findings" of historians such as Hata are true, Tokyo should not have signed an agreement with Seoul in 2015 to apologize to and compensate Korean "comfort women".
With the agreement, Japan wanted to bury the issue.
The "comfort women" issue, however, is not a "dispute" between Japan and the ROK alone. Jan Ruff-O'Herne, a Dutch Australian, was taken from an Indonesian prisoner-of-war camp where she was living with her family during Japanese occupation. Ruff-O'Herne fought shame to speak up and became an advocate for women's rights.
When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the Philippines in January, surviving Filipina "comfort women" asked for a formal apology and compensation from Japan for the atrocities they suffered at the hands of Japanese soldiers during occupation.
Former US congressman Mike Honda took the statue in San Francisco as a physical representation of something that happened in the past that needs to be learned about to prevent violence against women and end human trafficking.
But the Japanese government refuses to look into the country's dark past. After the ROK parliament designated Aug 14 as a day to commemorate Korean "comfort women", Japan criticized the move, saying it violated the spirit of the 2015 agreement. On Aug 14, 1991, Kim Hak-soon, a surviving "comfort woman", became the first to speak about her ordeal. Hundreds of others followed her.
Japan considers any occasion to pay respects to the "comfort women" in other parts of the world as a disgrace to itself. But it allows the country's right-wingers to demean the now elderly survivors and those who died carrying the Japanese insult that "comfort women" were nothing more than professional prostitutes.
Japan's attitude makes the 2015 agreement more like hush money for the ROK than a sincere apology for exploiting innocent women.
The author is China Daily Tokyo bureau chief. caihong@chinadaily.com.cn
ON FRIDAY, US President Donald Trump dismissed reports that he is considering replacing Rex Tillerson as the secretary of state. Beijing Youth Daily commented on Saturday:
The speculation surrounding Tillerson's future as secretary of state and his disagreement with Trump are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the US president's struggles to keep everything together 10 months into his presidency. That could hurt the country's image as a reliable world power and undermine its interests overseas.
Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil chief executive, was chosen to lead the state department for his expertise in "energy diplomacy". He has tried to keep his head down when he disagreed with Trump but he has still been openly confronted by the US president.
While Tillerson was in China looking for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, Trump said that he was "wasting his time". The US president has also been an outspoken critic of efforts by Tillerson to salvage the Iran nuclear deal.
The tensions seem to have reached a point where they are beginning to part ways. In a recent Washington speech, Tillerson lambasted Russia while extolling the US-Europe bond, despite Trump being keen to prevent the US' relations with Russia from further deteriorating.
Trump's public endorsement of Saudi Arabia amid the diplomatic crisis between Gulf nations has displeased Qatar, also a US ally, fueling confusion about Washington's Middle East policy and leaving Tillerson's state department in an awkward position. Also baffling is the Trump's about-face after a fruitful state visit to China last month. He relisted the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism and officially denied China's market economy status.
The eventful Trump presidency is a mirror of his lack of diplomatic experience and failure to see the bigger picture in a global perspective. Displaying his political and diplomatic views on Twitter weakens his stance as does his preference for a coterie of family members and confidants.
It is sad but true that the world may have to wait longer for the disorder to end.
The Fourth World Internet Conference opens in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, Dec 3, 2017. [Photo/IC]
MORE THAN 400 ENTERPRISES from some 13 countries and regions are attending the fourth World Internet Conference from Sunday to Tuesday in Wuzhen, East China's Zhejiang province. That number is about 100 more than last year. Beijing News commented on Sunday:
China is now home to about 750 million netizens and has the world's second-largest digital economy. It is also in an advantageous position in developing e-commerce and third-party mobile payments.
The annual Wuzhen conference has become a platform for the exchange of ideas between high-tech leaders from around the world, while the accompanying expo will witness the launch of 118 new products and 113 project signing ceremonies while match more than 1,200 projects with potential investors.
While the country is poised to advance global free trade, the Chinese internet is expected to provide most of the ammunition. The November 11 online shopping gala and the booming cross-border e-commerce aside, China has made notable progress in autonomous driving, building a 5G network for commercial use and the deployment of Internet Protocol Version 6.
But it is the sharing economy that shines the brightest, China is the first country to legalize online car-hailing services, and it has exported its short-hire bike services to overseas markets. Chinese participation in global rules-making has also expanded in the fields of cloud computing, the internet of things and smart manufacturing.
Hosting the Wuzhen meeting is not just about sharing China's success with the rest of the world but also inspiring more countries to tap into the internet through extensive exchanges. As internet companies are playing an increasingly bigger role, China can help them make the most of their ambitions.
Chinese delegates Zhuang Rongwen and Lin Nianxiu and those from Laos, Thailand, Turkey, Serbia, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia at a Belt and Road Initiative event pose at the fourth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Sunday. Zhuang (fourth from left) is Cyberspace Administration deputy head. Lin (fourth from right) is National Development and Reform Commission vice-minister.WU ZHIYI / CHINA DAILY
In the early days of the internet during the late 1960s, the technology wasnt purely meant for a worldwide access. It existed among a few interconnected networks in the United States and later joined by others in Europe. Later on came the World Wide Web (www), of which credit is given to Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Today the internet is accessible across the globe, from Wuzhen in China to Timbuktu in Mali, from the Samoan islands in the Pacific to the West Indies, and from Mumbai in India to all of Eastern and Western Europe, leaving it footprints in areas far from where it sprang.To take a cue from President Xi Jinpings 2016 statement, the development of the internet knows no national or sectoral boundaries.
This is true of this year theme for the 4thWorld Internet Conference held in the water town of Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, Developing Digital Economy for Openness and Shared Benefits-Building a Community of Common Future in Cyberspace. And I will add with no boundaries.
I am particularly interested in the keywords, Shared Benefits and Common Future. In our current digitized age of the internet of things (IoT), and high-tech products, the question I ask myself is, what will be the future of the internet with regards to the foundation currently being laid, bearing in mind that a century or two from now, our age of internet would be regarded as primitive?
To answer before I make a deduction, I say the internet today is supreme to what may come after it, simply because this is the foundation. Our generation is in the process of building a community of common future in cyberspace with a strong solid foundation in security, openness, and shared benefits, as themed for this years conference.
When Sir Tim, using the existing internet as foundation, created the web, quite rudimentary from what we see today, he specifically asked his superiors at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) to allow the innovation to be shared freely in order for the web to grow. And so it did. Decades later, that commitment to share has revolutionized the 21st century.
In local parlance, we say sharing is caring- the transfer of internet technology has transformed lives and changed communities across the globe. We are now in the age of big data and internet plus where information is shared across a wide range of platforms such as smart health, e-commerce, and internet finance, smart tourism, agriculture and areas including education and energy which have become 21st century marvels.
In Africa for example, in South Africa there is Snapscan, a mobile payment application, clones of Apple Pay and WeChat Pay that works using QR codes. In Kenya and Nigeria there is Sendy, an Uber-style motorbike delivery service that allows users to track their delivery via a phone application and in Ghana there is Paysail, a unique out-of-the-box payroll management application that organizes employee payroll embedded with Ghanaian tax codes. These are just a few of the innovation superhighway taking place on the continent as a result of shared internet technology.
In the US, China, Japan and South Korea, the internet is shaping technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Both large and small enterprises are adopting these technologies which incorporate the internet as a key element to promote their business and services. Sectors including design, cars, gaming, e-commerce, property and real estate are being transformed to what the future will look like.
These are some of the great advantages of the internet, which far supersedes the challenges we are encountering currently. Although the sophistication of cybercrime and the use computers for espionage remains unabated, the benefits of the internet are enormous.
In building a community of common future in cyberspace, security is of utmost importance, therefore ensuring that cyberwarfare for example is kept at bay is one of the key policies I hope would be strongly mooted at the conference to be attended by experts from fields including cyber security.
In sum, the ultimate purpose of the Wuzhen Conference, the fourth in as many years, is seeking for inclusiveness in the development of the internet for the greater good, which is why the internet should have no national or sectoral boundaries as stated by President Xi.
The author is a former Ghanaian Journalist.
A newlywed couple have their wedding photos taken in Prague, the Czech Republic. [Photo provided to China Daily]
A growing number of middle-class Chinese are opting for bespoke experiences. Xu Lin reports.
Wang Wei will never forget her trip to Italy in June - her first bespoke tour.
The 27-year-old and five friends enjoyed cultural heritage, natural landscapes and luxury shopping.
It enabled them to do what they wanted without having to make arrangements themselves.
"We each had different goals for the trip," Wang explains.
"The travel agency designed an itinerary that satisfied all of us. It was so relaxing."
And it offered convenience, says Wang, who works in a finance company in Beijing.
"We blew a tire. We didn't know what to do. But our experienced guide got another car to send us to the airport."
She also appreciated the guide helping them sample authentic food since they don't speak Italian.
China's National Tourism Administration named 2016 a milestone year for customized tours. A growing number of companies, including many online travel agencies, are emerging. They're attracting both capital and consumers.
"Service is paramount in our business. Customers are willing to pay for it," says Jia Jianqiang, founder and CEO of Beijing-based 6renyou.com, an online travel agency that specializes in domestic and international bespoke tours.
The company targets middle-class families. They're often busy with work and prefer to tailor their own itineraries while someone else makes the arrangements.
"It's more like a small group tour," Jia says.
"We offer a chartered vehicle with a local driver, who will guide them during the trip. It's convenient for those who travel with the elderly or children."
There are no standard products.
Elderly people tend to prefer slower schedules with Chinese meals. Children enjoy zoos, amusement parks, he says.
Customers can contact them during the trips if they encounter problems, such as flight cancelations.
"More customers trust online sales in the e-commerce era," Jia says.
"We can reach them and also lower our costs as the internet increases our efficiency. Prices are reasonable. About half of last year's customers used our services again this year."
Tourism consumption is low frequency, he says.
Vice-minister says nation 'will take proactive measures' in light of bill
China pledged to keep a close eye on the unfolding impact of the United States' tax overhaul, which was passed by the Senate on Saturday, and it called for more tax policy coordination under the global governance framework.
People protest against tax reform on Capitol hill in Washington DC, the United States, on Dec 1, 2017. The US Senate on Saturday morning narrowly passed the Republican bill to overhaul the tax code in decades, moving one step closer to the first major legislative victory of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans. [Photo/Xinhua]
The US Senate passed a major bill on a party-line vote whose main feature is a drastic tax cut for corporationsa reduction of tax rates down to 20 percent from 35 percent, the lowest level in decades. Taxes for individuals would also be eased modestly in the short run, but would quickly rise for middle-and low-income earners.
The bill still needs to be reconciled with the version passed by the House of Representativesa final hurdle since some provisions may raise new objections from lawmakers.
Zhu Guangyao, vice-minister of finance, said at a forum on Sunday that China will "take proactive measures" in response to the US tax move, as the world's largest economy's tax policy adjustment is expected to have a major impact on other countries, including China.
The international community needs to pay close attention to the implications of the US tax changes for competition, labor productivity and wages, said Zhu, who stressed that members of the Group of 20 had agreed to set international tax policy coordination as one of the important issues to discuss at the 2018 summit, which will be held in Argentina.
But the bill, if passed, will not create large cash flows out of China and into the US, said Liu Shangxi, head of the Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences. Many more factors other than the tax rate shape the overall US business environment.
"There is no need for China to make immediate tax cuts and blindly follow what the US does, but it should adjust macroeconomic policies based on an assessment of the real domestic situation," Liu said. "One of our current priorities is to deepen value-added tax reform that targets a more market-oriented scheme for resource allocation and build a fair investment environment for enterprises."
Willem Buiter, an economist with Citi Research, a division of Citigroup Global Markets Inc, calculated in a recent note of Global Economics View that a cut in the tax rate on corporate profits in the US "has no impact on the incentive to invest", which implies "a zero impact" on the capital intensity of production and real wages.
The tax cut will send the US budget deficit skyrocketing by up to $1.5 trillion, which is expected to add a further burden to the already high debt level of the US government.
"Government revenues and social welfare expenditures may be under great pressure in the coming months if the bill is passed," Liu said.
Students from the Central Conservatory of Music perform at a news conference in Beijing on Sunday. New York's Bard College Conservatory of Music will work with the college to create an undergraduate program in Chinese musical instrument performance. MA GUOHUI/FOR CHINA DAILY
New York's Bard College Conservatory of Music will teach an undergraduate program in Chinese musical instrument performance starting next fall.
Bard will work with Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music to create the program, said to be the first of its kind at a Western college.
Students will be able to apply in January for a first year that will focus on the erhu, pipa and guzheng, all stringed instruments.
Yu Feng, president of the Beijing school, signed a development initiative for the program and other joint efforts with Robert Martin, director of the New York school, on Sunday in Beijing.
Martin, who is a cellist, said he has been coming to China since the 1970s and had the idea of introducing a Chinese instrument performance degree program at Bard two years ago.
"The goal is to create a comprehensive and effective platform for Chinese music in the United States," he said. "I believe our partnership is what diplomats call a win-win situation."
Yu hailed the project as a "trailblazing step" for Chinese music worldwide that would create a new channel for cultural exchange between the two countries.
"Traditional Chinese culture is the basis of Chinese music and Chinese instruments," Yu said. "We will also introduce lessons such as calligraphy, traditional Chinese opera and Chinese poetry to our students."
In a video played for the announcement ceremony, Leon Botstein, president of Bard, said: "There has been much development regarding the absorption of the teaching of Western instruments and Western music. This needs to be balanced by the introduction of the great tradition of Chinese music and Chinese instruments to Western musicians, inspiring young musicians of the next generation."
Bard, a private liberal arts college founded in 1860, launched its music conservatory in 2005. The new program will build on its existing five-year music and liberal arts and science program to combine the professional study of traditional Chinese instruments with a Western-style liberal arts education. According to Yu, three professors from the Beijing school will become primary faculty members.
Outside the program, the initiative will also launch an annual Chinese music festival at Bard and an annual summer school for high school students. Both will focus on music from contemporary China. Seminars and scholarly conferences on Chinese music, art and social development will also be held in the US and China on alternate years.
Chinese conductor Cai Jindong will chair the committee overseeing the initiative. Cai, who was born in Beijing and studied violin and piano, went to the US in 1985 and joined the Stanford University faculty as professor in 2004. He has been guest conductor of major symphony orchestras in both China and the US.
"I have been working and living in the US for more than 30 years, and to me this program is like a dream come true," he said.
He noted that the development of Western music in China has a very long history, starting with Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the Italian believed to have been the first Jesuit priest to enter Beijing. Ricci gave a clavichord to Emperor Wanli of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in 1601.
"Chinese music never really developed in the West," Cai said. "We believe this program will make changes in the long run."
chennan@chinadaily.com.cn
BANGKOK - Buddhist monks chant next to a pink coffin where Dollar's small body is nestled among flowers - a $600 final farewell for the Shih Tzu at a Bangkok temple that administers elaborate pet funerals.
Dollar's owner, Pimrachaya Worakijmanotham, fights back tears as she takes a last fond look at her six-year-old pet dog, whose tousled greywhite body rests under jasmine garlands.
"This is the last time I can be with her ... so I want Dollar to receive good things," said Pimrachaya, dressed in black and wearing sunglasses, a framed photo of "her child" Dollar behind her.
Pet cremations, complete with Buddhist rituals, are popping up across Bangkok for dogs, cats and even monkeys.
In a devout Buddhist kingdom where religion and superstitious beliefs entwine, some pet owners believe the monkled send off will boost their pets' chances of being reincarnated as a higher being.
According to Buddhist belief, merit garnered in each life eventually leads to nirvana - the state of non-suffering.
"In this life, she (Dollar) couldn't go to the temples to make merit for herself. This is the only thing we can do for her," said Pimrachaya.
The trend is not unique to Thailand - Japan is particularly fond of lavish goodbyes to its pets.
Catching on fast
But in Bangkok it is catching on fast as Thais increasingly see pets as family members.
At least three temples offer daily services, including a monk-led ceremony, cremation and sprinkling of ashes in rivers - the symbolic ritual of returning earthly remains to nature.
Theerawat Sae-Han, the founder of Pet Funeral Thailand, said his company cremates more than 200 animals each month, from cats and dogs, to monitor lizards, snakes and baboons.
"Successful or famous animals like fighting cocks who won the awards will also be brought for cremation," said Theerawat, a former pet salon owner who jumped into the "good" business of full-blown pet cremation four years ago.
Surging demand for his service also reflects a shortage of public spaces in the capital.
"Before, we buried them in authorised parks or backyards but now it's rare to find ones in Bangkok," said Phrakru Samu Jumpol, a monk at Wat Krathum Suea Pla.
Prices start at around 3,000 baht (around $91) and go up to 100,000 baht for the most elaborate ceremonies.
But for pet lovers, the service provides spiritual succor at a time of great pain.
At the end of a ceremony to spread the ashes of her Siberian husky Maprang in November, teary-eyed Tipaporn Ounsiri found cause for optimism.
"If the next life exists, please come back and be my daughter, don't be born as a pet anymore," she said.
Agence France - presse
Containers are offloaded from a ship in the Tunisian port city of Rades, near the capital Tunis, September 28, 2015. [Photo/VCG]
TUNIS - The launch of a new shipping route will help Tunisia recover its regional positioning and enhance China's presence in the African continent, experts and investors have said.
The Spanish company Transglory inaugurated the maritime trade route that will link Tunisia's Rades port and Qingdao, Shandong province.
"Importing and exporting to and from this Chinese destination are consolidating similar services from other leading ports," said Louis Florensa, chief of Transglory's Development Department.
"Our main challenge, now fulfilled, is to be the preferential partner of Tunisian importers, with four weekly services from Hong Kong, Ningbo and two others in Shanghai."
Khaled Ben Abdallah, the director of foreign trade department at Tunisian Ministry of Industry and Trade, believes the launch of the line could generate a triangular trade platform linking China, East Africa and Tunisia.
He said the route will bring together all kinds of services, including health, tourism, equipment and information and communication technologies.
Tunisia has been trying to keep its African position despite its worsening trade deficit. By the end of October this year, Tunisia's trade deficit rose to 13 billion dinars (about $5 billion), from 10.78 billion dinars during the same period in 2016, according to the National Institute of Statistics of Tunisia (INS).
Imports reached 40.85 billion dinars, but exports were 27.64 billion dinars, according to INS.
The deficit mainly resulted from trade with some partners such as China, Italy and Turkey. With China, the deficit is 3.64 billion dinars, according to the INS of Tunisia.
"In the first 10 months of this year, we have seen a worsening of the trade deficit with China of about 486.8 million dinars," said Abdallah.
With adequate logistics that can link Tunisia and China economically, Abdallah believes the shipping line will give China greater access to North Africa.
"Political stability, security and a long-term strategy are already there to augur a successful future between Tunisia and China in trade and global economic partnership," Abdallah said.
Xinhua
PYONGYANG - The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has accused late Saturday US President Donald Trump of "begging for nuclear war" by staging "extremely dangerous" military drills on the Korean Peninsula and simulating real-scenario-attacks upon DPRK.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the United States is planning to carry out the largest-ever joint aerial drill with South Korea targeting the DPRK from Dec 4 to 8, which he said will push the current touch-and-go situation in the peninsula to a possible flare-up.
"More than 230 fighters from the US air force bases in Japan and South Korea including its latest stealth fighters F-22 Raptor and F-35, the US major strategic assets as well as some 12,000 US troops are to participate in the said drill," said the spokesman.
The United States and South Korea hold annual large scale military drills over the alleged threat from the DPRK's nuclear and missile programs.
The DPRK foreign ministry spokesman said this drill would be unprecedented in its size and nature of simulating actual combat situation and have the highest number of US major strategic assets including the F-22 Raptor and F-35 stealth fighters.
"The US is publicly touting the objective of the drill as enhancing the actual combat capability to disable the DPRK's major strategic bases in the early stages of war," the spokesman noted.
He pointed out that Washington has just wound up a large-scale nuclear war drill against the DPRK which involved three nuclear-powered aircraft carrier strike groups. Such exercises are fueling the speculation that a US nuclear attack on the DPRK is indeed possible and plausible.
"The Trump team is begging for a nuclear war by staging an extremely dangerous nuclear gamble on the Korean Peninsula," he said.
The tension in the Korean Peninsula is extremely high.
The DPRK test fired a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) - "Hwasong 15 " - last week which it said could hit the entire territory of the United States, thus marking the completion of DPRK's rocket weaponry system, according to Pyongyang's own description of its nuclear and missile system.
BRUSSELS - British Prime Minister Theresa May meets European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker for lunch in Brussels on Monday for what could be a breakthrough in Brexit talks.
Here is a timeline of the following 10 days that will determine whether Britain avoids further costly delays in giving business assurances of a smooth exit from the European Union and of free trade with its biggest market in the future:
Phase time
May wants the EU to open the second phase of Brexit negotiations concerning relations after Britain's withdrawal on March 30, 2019. The EU will only do that if there is "sufficient progress" in agreeing "divorce" terms, notably on three key issues: a financial settlement, guaranteed rights for EU citizens in Britain and a "soft border" with Ireland.
One, two, three ... progress
A deal on money is effectively done, EU officials said last week. There were indications of agreement on citizens' rights and of an understanding of how at least to move forward on the Irish issue to avoid holding up the rest of the package.
Brexit dance steps
As part of the "choreography" for a political deal, the EU set May an "absolute deadline" of Monday, Dec 4, to provide new offers in time for the other EU leaders to approve a move to Phase 2 at a summit of the EU-27 on Friday, Dec 15.
May is pushing for a simultaneous, reciprocal guarantee from the EU of a soft transition and future trade deal, which she may use to show Britons what her compromises have secured. The EU wants to have firm British offers which the 27 can discuss before leaders commit. The result is some complex dance steps:
Monday, Dec 4
11 am (1000 GMT) - European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and his Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier meet Guy Verhofstadt and his Brexit team from the European Parliament. The legislature, which must ratify any withdrawal treaty, insists EU judges must have the final say on enforcing citizens' rights.
1:15 pm (1215 GMT) - May joins Juncker and Barnier for lunch at the EU executive's Berlaymont headquarters. The plan is to sign a joint declaration on progress so far in the talks.
Wednesday, Dec 6
10 am - Juncker chairs weekly European Commission meeting at which Barnier will update them on progress. The Commission could then say there is sufficient progress to move to Phase 2.
3 pm - EU-27 envoys meet to prepare formal decision on sufficient progress to be taken at EU-27 summit on Dec 15 and to work on draft negotiating guidelines for future trade deal.
Monday, Dec 11
EU-27 sherpas meet to prepare the summit.
Tuesday, Dec 12
EU affairs ministers of EU-27 meet to prepare summit.
Thursday, Dec 14
4 pm - May attends routine EU summit in Brussels. Defence, social affairs, foreign affairs and migration are on the agenda.
Friday, Dec 15 - After May has left, EU-27 leaders hold Brexit summit. They could take one comprehensive decision on Phase 2 or break it down into separate ones on the transition and future ties.
January - Outline of EU transition offer may be ready, under which Britain retains all rights except voting in the bloc, and meets all its obligations until the end of 2020.
February - After agreeing their negotiating terms, EU-27 may be ready to open talks with London on a free trade pact that Brussels likens to one it has with Canada.
Financial settlement
The EU estimated at some 60 billion euros ($71 billion) what Britain should pay to cover outstanding obligations on leaving. EU officials say there is now agreement after Britain offered to pay an agreed share of most of the items Brussels wanted, especially for committed spending that will go on after 2020.
Both sides say there is no precise figure as much depends on future developments. British newspaper reports that it would cost up to 55 billion euros sparked only muted criticism from May's hardline pro-Brexit allies who once rejected big payments.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said on Saturday that London would be paying the EU 60 billion euros on Brexit.
Citizens' rights
Barnier is still seeking a commitment that the rights of 3 million EU citizens who stay on in Britain after Brexit will be guaranteed by the European Court of Justice, not just by British judges. May has said the ECJ should play no more role in Britain. But the issue could be vital to ensure ratification of the withdrawal treaty by the European Parliament. A compromise might focus on making clear that the ECJ has a role only for the existing EU residents, whose numbers will shrink over time.
Member states, some of which have taken a tougher line than the Brussels negotiators, are also insisting Britain make concessions on family reunion rules and social benefits.
Irish border
The EU wants more detail on a British pledge to avoid a "hard border" at the new land frontier on the island of Ireland that might disrupt peace in Northern Ireland. London says the detail depends on the future trade agreement.
EU officials say a hard border can be avoided only if rules remain identical on either side. Northern Ireland could stay in a customs union with the EU. But Britain, and May's crucial Northern Irish parliamentary allies, insist there should be no new barriers between Northern Ireland and the British mainland.
The EU says that means the whole of the United Kingdom would then have to follow EU rules, something Brexit campaigners do not want. Dublin says it may not be possible to reach a deal on sufficient progress by Monday but in the days after that.
Ireland, with the blessing of the EU-27, says it will veto any move to Phase 2 if Britain's border offer is unsatisfactory.
Reuters
Wu Jing (right) in a scene from Wolf Warrior 2. The actor will be in London this week for a film festival. [Photo/China Daily]
Wu Jing, the star and director of the Chinese box-office smash Wolf Warrior 2, will be among top actors and other talents on the red carpet in London at the fifth China-Britain Film Festival.
The event aims to showcase some of the best China-made movies, allow for the exchange of movie-related ideas, and act as a platform to promote Chinese culture to an overseas audience.
Kong Xiangxi, president of the China-Britain Film Festival, said: "We are very pleased that this festival can be one of the major events of Sino-British cultural exchange. It means that our past achievements are well-recognized by both governments and we feel that we should take more responsibility in the film industry, in order to tell good Chinese stories and to let Western countries know more about China."
The Great Wall actors Zhang Hanyu and Zheng Kai will also make appearances at the festival.
Yu Nan, who won the best actress award at the Paris International Film Festival for her role in the 2004 film Jingzhe, is expected to attend the London festival, as well as 16-year-old up-and-coming actress Zhang Zifeng.
This year's theme for the festival is "new era for a more modernized, global and prospective China-UK film exchange".
Organizers hope the festival will build bridges and open up a new chapter of film exchanges. The event also marks the 45th anniversary of the establishment of ambassadorial-level diplomatic ties between China and the United Kingdom.
Organizers say the event, which was launched in 2013, is one of the largest and most influential international Chinese film festivals outside China.
The festival's awards ceremony will be hosted by Chinese-American actor David Wu and its judging panel will include Chinese directors Zhao Hantang and Zhang Yibai.
Last year's awards saw Duan Yihong named best actor for his role in The Dead End. The movie also scooped the best film prize. Gong Li took home the best actress award for her performance in The Monkey King 2.
The festival also features a series of forums and talks aimed at motivating filmmakers and encouraging collaboration.
The fifth China-Britain Film Festival begins on Wednesday.
A choir of schoolchildren from Northern Ireland sings Chinese songs in Belfast's Parliament Buildings on Friday. [Photo/China Daily]
A group of Northern Ireland schoolchildren warmed the hearts of Chinese guests on a cold December day when they performed Chinese songs. The children had rehearsed for six weeks, with the help of Mandarin teachers from the University of Ulster's Confucius Institute.
The performance on Friday, inside Belfast's elegant and historic Parliament Buildings, preceded a welcome dinner ahead of the third UK-China Regional Leaders Meeting on Saturday that was attended by more than 100 provincial and municipal leaders from China. As trade relations between China and Northern Ireland grow, Mandarin has become more popular in the province. Friday's performance was given by children from Millburn Primary School and Grosvenor Grammar School, which both offer Mandarin lessons, thanks to the local Confucius Institute that was established in 2012. From its start five years ago, which saw two Mandarin teachers support 169 students, the University of Ulster's Confucius Institute has grown to comprise 51 teachers and 19,000 registered students. A quarter of the institute's 161 partner primary and secondary schools have made Mandarin learning compulsory for certain age groups. And students also gain exposure to Chinese culture, including calligraphy and music.
"Our Confucius Institute was established partly in response to existing demand from schools," said Liu Yan, director of the University of Ulster's Confucius Institute. While preparing to open the institute, her team sent out a survey to 1,241 primary and secondary schools in Northern Ireland. Around 500 responded by saying they would like to off er Mandarin lessons.
The Chinese government launched the Confucius Institute concept in 2004 as a way of promoting the Chinese language and culture abroad. Confucius Institutes are nonprofi t organizations and are affiliated with Western academic institutions, including secondary schools and universities. So far, 516 Confucius Institutes have been established in 142 countries and regions.
At the invitation of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Premier Li Keqiang arrived in Sochi on Thursday to attend the 16th Meeting of the Council of Heads of Government (Prime Minister) of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Premier Li Keqiang arrives in Sochi on Thursday to attend the 16th Meeting of the Council of Heads of Government (Prime Minister) of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. [Photo/Xinhua]
The organization has developed into a vital platform to safeguard regional security and stability and promote shared prosperity, Li said upon arrival. He said he was looking forward to working with other countries to promote cooperation in fields such as security, economics and people-to-people exchanges.
The premier also said he was looking forward to meeting with Medvedev in Sochi to deepen China-Russia ties and cooperation under the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
During the meeting, Premier Li will sign a number of cooperative agreements and meet with leaders from other countries.
One of the great stories in the Bible about community involves a paralyzed man and the friends who brought him to Jesus (Mark 2:1-8).
Imagine what life was like for a paralytic in the ancient world. This man's whole life is lived on a mat three-feet ...
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Image: Gali Tibbon / AFP / Getty Images
Christians United for Israel supporters march in Jerusalem in 2008.
American evangelicals love Israelif theyre older. But many younger evangelicals simply dont care, according to a new survey from Nashville-based LifeWay Research.
Three-quarters (77%) of evangelicals 65 and older say they support the existence, security and prosperity of Israel. That drops to 58 percent among younger evangelicals, those 18 to 34.
Four in 10 younger evangelicals (41%) have no strong views about Israel.
Fewer younger evangelicals (58%) have an overall positive perception of Israel than older evangelicals (76%).
And they are less sure Israels rebirth in 1948 was a good thing.
For the most part, younger evangelicals are indifferent about Israel, said Scott McConnell, executive director of LifeWay Research.
Most evangelicals support Israel
LifeWay Research asked 2,002 Americans with evangelical beliefs about a wide range of issues involving Israelfrom its place in the Bible to its treatment of Palestinians. The survey focused on Americans with evangelical beliefs, rather than self-identified evangelicals.
Overall, this group was supportive of Israel.
Sixty-seven percent have a positive view of that nation. Nine percent have a negative view. Twenty-four percent are not sure.
One-fourth (24%) support the existence, security and prosperity of Israel, no matter what Israel does. Forty-two percent support Israel, but not everything Israel does. One percent do not support Israel. Thirty-two percent have no strong views about Israel.
Few (14%) agree when asked whether Israels rebirth was an injustice to Arabs in the Middle East. Fifty percent disagree. Thirty-six percent are not sure.
About a quarter (22%) say modern Israel has been unfair to Palestinians. Forty-one percent disagree. Thirty-seven percent are not sure.
Younger evangelicals (19%) are more likely to see the rebirth of Israel as an injustice. Only 34 percent disagree. Forty-seven percent are not sure.
Among older evangelicals, 9 percent see the rebirth of Israel as an injustice, while 62 percent disagree. Twenty-eight percent are not certain.
Older evangelicals (49%) are more likely to disagree that Israel has been unfair to Palestinians. Young evangelicals (32%) are less likely.
Mitch Glaser, president of Chosen People Ministries, which helped underwrite the survey, said he was glad to see that most evangelicals support Israel.
Still, he found the decline of support among younger evangelical believers worrisome.
I am concerned for the obvious decline in support for Israel among millennial followers of Jesus, who either do not know what they believe or do not seem to care, he said.
Darrell L. Bock, a board member for Chosen People Ministries and director of cultural engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary, wonders if Israel is on the back burner for many younger evangelicals.
When they think about the Middle East, theyre more likely to think about Iraq or Iran or the impact of terrorism in the world, he said.
The terror attacks on 9/11 changed the Middle East equation, and young people just arent sure where Israel is supposed to fit, he said.
The Bible plays a big role
Most evangelical believers in the LifeWay Research survey say faith shapes their views on Israel.
Three-quarters (76%) say Christians should support the right of the Jewish people to live in the sovereign State of Israel. Five percent disagree. Twenty percent are not sure.
Sixty-nine percent say the Jewish people have a historic right to the land of Israel. Six percent disagree. Twenty-five percent are not sure.
Only 19 percent say Palestinians have a historic right to Israel. Forty-six percent disagree. Thirty-four percent are not sure.
Forty-one percent say Jewish people have a biblical right to Israel but have to share it.
Twenty-eight percent disagree. Thirty-one percent are not sure.
African-Americans with evangelical beliefs are least likely (54%) to say Jewish people have a biblical right to the land of Israel. They are also least likely (50%) to have a positive view of Israel.
Among other findings:
45% say the Bible has had the biggest influence on their views of Israel.
63% say they support Israel primarily because God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people.
22% are not sure if biblical promises about the land of Israel are still in force.
80% say God promised the land of Israel to Abraham and his descendants for all time.
80% say the rebirth of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
Author Joel C. Rosenberg, who also helped underwrite the survey, said most evangelicals see a connection between the Bible and the modern nation of Israel. But he said hes worried thats not the case for younger evangelicals, which could cause evangelical support for Israel to drop in the future.
Unless the church gives younger believers a healthy, balanced, solidly biblical understanding of Gods love and plan for Israel, overall evangelical support for the Jewish state could very well plummet over the next decade as millennials represent an ever-larger percentage of the overall church body, Rosenberg said.
Israel and Palestinians
Evangelical believers are uncertain how to resolve differences between Israelis and Palestinians. A quarter (23%) say Israel should sign a treaty allowing Palestinians to have a sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza. Thirty-one percent disagree. Forty-six percent are unsure.
Six in 10 (59%) say Christians should do more to love and care for Palestinians. Sixteen percent disagree. Twenty-five percent are not sure.
Among younger evangelicals, two-thirds say Christians need to do more to care for Palestinians. That drops to 54 percent among those 65 and older.
Most evangelical believers (73%) agree they are concerned for the safety of Christians in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Five percent disagree. Twenty-two percent are not certain.
Evangelicals are certain God wants the State of Israel to exist, said McConnell. But they think Christian love should include Palestinian people.
They believe God wants Israel to be there, he said, but they also think God cares how the nation of Israel acts.
Bob Smietana is senior writer for Facts & Trends.
Methodology:
LifeWay Research conducted the study Sept. 20-28, 2017. The study was sponsored by Chosen People Ministries and author Joel C. Rosenberg. The survey was conducted using the web-enabled KnowledgePanel, a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population. Initially, participants are chosen scientifically by a random selection of telephone numbers and residential addresses. People in selected households are then invited by telephone or by mail to participate in the web-enabled KnowledgePanel. For those who agree to participate but do not already have internet access, GfK provides at no cost a laptop and ISP connection.
Sample stratification and weights were used for gender by age, ethnicity, region, education and household income to reflect the most recent U.S. Census data. The completed sample is 2,002 surveys. The sample provides 95 percent confidence that the sampling error does not exceed plus or minus 2.7 percent. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.
Respondents were screened to include only adults with evangelical beliefs. Evangelical beliefs are defined using the NAE LifeWay Research Evangelical Beliefs Research Definition based on respondent beliefs. Respondents are asked their level of agreement with four separate statements using a four-point, forced-choice scale (strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree). Respondents are categorized as having evangelical beliefs if they strongly agree with all four statements:
The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.
It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior.
Jesus Christs death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.
Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive Gods free gift of eternal salvation.
LifeWay Research is a Nashville-based, evangelical research firm that specializes in surveys about faith in culture and matters that affect churches.
So much of life is spent waiting.
The mother waits months to hold the babe nestling in her womb. The parent devotes years of love and discipline in hopes of helping the child bloom. The Christian shares the gospel, trusting God to bring forth fruit in future days or months or years. And the farmer anxiously watches sun and rain for weeks to see if seeds will sprout. Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let your hands not be idle, we read in Ecclesiastes, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.
We know, of course, even as we wait, that many of the returns on our investmentswhether of time, money, teaching, love, or laborwill never be seen in our lifetimes.
The place where God taught me the most about waiting was the abortion clinic.
For ten years, once a week, every week, I waited outside the abortion clinics in the city where I was then living, offering help to the women and men going in and coming out. At most of the clinics, it was nearly impossible to initiate a conversation because the sidewalks were often far from the clinic entrances. But sometimes patients would walk by or even go out of their way to talk to mesometimes out of curiosity, sometimes out of anger, but most often out of desperation.
Most of the hours I spent outside the abortion clinic are now a blur of defeat and despair: an obscenity hurled by a passerby here; a confrontation with an angry boyfriend there; an occasional clash with volunteer escorts, clinic workers, or abortionists; freezing snow; sweltering heat; pouring rain.
However, punctuating all this failure every once in a while, a woman would change her mindquietly, tearfully, joyfully, or all threeand decide not to have an abortion.
I estimate conservatively that, in a span of ten years, over the course of my weekly shifts, I saw at least 2,500 women go into the clinics (quite possibly twice that). Roughly a couple dozen of them told me upon leaving the clinic that they had decided to keep the baby. Some of them accepted the help I offered while others said they didnt need it. And how many more changed their minds without ever speaking to me, I will never know on this side of heaven.
But even as I wait for eternity to reveal its secrets to us, God is gracious and kind in granting meand all of usglimpses now and then of the fruit of efforts performed in faith.
I received such a glimmer not long ago. It arrivedjust a message on Facebook on a lazy Sunday afternoon:
Im not sure you remember me. I met you 20 years ago outside of Women Services on Main St. I was only 15 years old. You saved my sons life. I was alone, there to start a two-day procedure. Day one of the would-be termination, they instructed me to wait at home come back the next day and have it completed. However, that night I felt my son move. The next day on my way into the building I met you. I believe you read me some scriptures and made me aware of other options. So I decided to have the laminaria removed and continue with the pregnancy. That day you took me home and you never left my side, took me to your church, linked me to several agencies. You were truly a blessing to me. Today my son is almost 20 years old, away at college beginning his sophomore year. I miss him so muchhes the best thing that ever happened to me. When I think of him I often think of you.
As I read the note, I became utterly undone.
I wasnt sure if I remembered the girl correctly, so I dug out my old journals and flipped through the pages of my entries for that year until I found it. As with many of the other women and girls who changed their mind at the clinics, I kept up with this one for a little while afterward, taking her to church and to lunch and talking to her father when he called to thank me. The pro-life ministry I worked with always threw baby showers for mothers and helped in various ways as long the help was needed and wanted.
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Often in these cases, however, by the time the baby comes, it becomes awkward for the women to be open with others about the decision they almost made, and they quietly move off into new lives birthed along with their babies into the world. (This is why I requested and received permission from the woman to share this story.) A year and a half later, I moved to another state and we lost contact.
Nonetheless, she never forgot me. In our subsequent messages, she confessed to finding and watching me on social media for a while before reaching out. You have always held a place in my heart, she wrote. She told me that as a single parent, she had managed to put her son through private high school and then to send him to a private college. Ive never finished college [but] worked in banking for 15 years, she explained. Every penny and thing I ever had, I saved for my son. I gave up so much for myself for my sonno regrets.
For most of us, its only human to want to know that somehow weve made a difference, and yet most of the important things in life require us to wait a long time before we see any evidence of that difference.
During those years of waiting in front of abortion clinics, I trusted that God would bring forth from my small efforts the fruit he saw fit. I was content to be obedient and faithful without reward. And yet, being offered just a sliver of that reward now, many years later, I am encouraged all the more to be faithful even in times when I dont see visible fruit.
In contrast to the cycles of karma in Hinduism and Buddhism, the nothingness of nirvana in Buddhism, and the instant access to paradise by the Muslims martyrdom, Christianity requires and rewards faithfulness in waiting. James 5:78 encourages believers:
Be patient until the Lords coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains. You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lords coming is near.
Waiting is the fertile soil of our sanctification and one of the hallmarks of Christian practice. And yet what a joy it is to see at last the blessings God enables us to harvest.
Somewhere out there, a 19-year-old college student is bringing his faithful mother a harvest of love and joy. How much more love and joy we bring our Father as we patiently await the fruit only he can bring.
Karen Swallow Prior is a professor of English at Liberty University and a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Meand Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More.
Tampa Change Counseling Ban Faces Legal Challenge
TAMPA, Fla., Dec. 4, 2017 / Christian Newswire / -- Liberty Counsel filed suit in federal court against the City of Tampa for its adoption of Ordinance 2017-47, which prohibits licensed counselors from providing and clients from receiving counseling to reduce or eliminate their unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors, or identity. The ordinance imposes significant monetary fines on counselors who provide such counseling.
Liberty Counsel represents Robert Vazzo, LMFT, David Pickup, LMFT, and their minor clients and their parents. These counselors provide life-saving counsel to minors and their parents or legal guardians who desperately desire to conform their unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors, and identity to their religious beliefs or conscious. The sacred trust between counselors and clients establishes a unique relationship that permits the clients to inform the counselors of their goals and receive counseling consistent with such goals. That therapeutic alliance has long been held sacred and inviolable. The City of Tampa, however, has decided to storm the office doors of mental health professionals, thrust itself into the therapeutic alliance, violate the critical privacy inherent in such a relationship, and disregard the fundamental rights of the counselor and the client.
Ordinance 2017-47 violates the First Amendment by imposing a viewpoint and content-based prohibition on the speech on licensed professionals in Tampa who offer change counseling. The ordinance also blatantly violates the rights of clients under the Florida Patient's Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which permits counselors to offer, and clients to receive, treatment methods that they and their mental or health care practitioner believe is in their best interest. The State of Florida is the only government body with authority to regulate mental health practitioners in the state, and local government bodies are not empowered to contradict state regulations.
The City of Tampa has no authority to enact such a regulation, which is directly contradictory to Florida law. The legislature squarely rejected proposals to enact similar counseling prohibitions state-wide.
"The Tampa law is a gross intrusion into the fundamental rights of counselors and minors, and represents government intrusion into the sacrosanct relationship between a counselor and the client," said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. "The City of Tampa has no authority to prohibit a form of counseling simply because it does not like the religious beliefs of a particular client. Tampa's prohibition is blatantly unconstitutional and causes harm to countless minors, and Liberty Counsel will not stand by as authoritarian members of council blatantly ignore the First Amendment," said Staver.
Staver also noted that there are other municipalities in Florida that have enacted or are considering similar change counsel bans. These too are unconstitutional.
Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.
Energy Intelligence Group, the publisher of 15 newsletters for the oil and gas industry, has sued more than a dozen energy companies and investment houses in Houston for violating federal copyright law by buying a handful of subscriptions of its pricey publications and passing them around the office to non-subscribers. With settlements reached in nearly all the cases, one is left.
That case is scheduled to go to trial Monday in U.S. District Court in Houston. The publishing company, which is based in New York City and London, accuses Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors of sharing its five subscriptions of "Oil Daily" with others in the investment firm who did not have their own subscriptions.
Like several other cases, the publishing company was inadvertently tipped off by an employee at Kayne Anderson who revealed passing along copies to others who did not have their own subscriptions.
RELATED: Specialty publisher alleges copyright violations
Kayne Anderson says that it did not violate copyright laws and disputes Energy Intelligence Group's' claims of financial loss, according to court filing. The firm manages $24.5 billion in assets and its specialties include investing in upstream oil and gas companies and energy infrastructure.
"This is a matter that should have been resolved three years ago but hasn't because of their unrealistic and unreasonable position," said Kayne Anderson spokesman Paul Blank.
Energy Intelligence Group alleges the forwarding copies of its publications distributed via email violates copyright laws. The practice is a vexing problem for publications that don't receive advertisements and rely strictly on subscriber sale
When a single copy is passed around something easy to do with email the publication loses that revenue.
"It kind of eats your lunch and takes your milk and bread off the dinner table," said John Hitchcock, managing director and vice president of the Energy Intelligence Group.
The company sells individual articles of "Oil Daily" for $9 and individual issues for $95.
The Energy Intelligence Group uncovered the alleged unauthorized distribution of copies when it received an email from an Kayne Anderson employee who is not on the subscriber list complaining the company did not receive its Feb. 5, 2014 issue of "Oil Daily," according to court documents. Soon after, the employee sent another email saying she received a copy from a co-worker so there was no need to send another.
The publishing company called to follow-up and discovered that one subscription of "Oil Daily" was routinely distributed to 20 or more individuals in the office, according to court documents.
The publishing company settled confidentially with other companies, including Enterprise Partners, Deutsche Bank Securities and Cheniere Energy.
Hitchcock said the settlements typically include an agreement to buy more subscriptions. "We manage to get people to see this is fair and to actually pay for it," he said.
Kayne Anderson began subscribing to "Oil Daily" in 2004, paying for one executive to receive the newsletter. In 2013, the company bought a multi-user license so five employees received the daily bulletin, according to court records.
But Energy Intelligence Group alleged that Kayne Anderson distributed unauthorized copies and sued Kayne for copyright infringement in 2014.
In May, Kayne challenged Energy Intelligence Group's underlying copyright by arguing that the publishing company's copyright registration certificates are invalid because the publishing company used the wrong copyright forms. Kayne asked the court to move the dispute to the federal Copyright office.
Energy Intelligence is seeking unspecified damages, including all profits Kayne Anderson made from using the information it gained by reading "Oil Daily."
EDDIE SEAL
Fitch Ratings warned Monday that Citgo Petroleum is a default risk following the recent arrests of the Houston refining company's top leadership in Venezuela.
The major credit ratings agency downgraded Citgo to a negative watch list with a "CCC" rating that describes Citgo as a substantial credit risk with a real possibility of defaulting. Citgo previously held a "B-" as a highly speculative risk that was still functioning OK financially. (Fitch is majority-owned by the Hearst Corp., the parent company of the Houston Chronicle.)
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Brookfield Property Partners, owner of Allen Center and other downtown skyscrapers, is expected to announce Monday that it has closed on a mega-deal to purchase Houston Center, giving the company control over an even greater portion of urban real estate.
The deal includes 4.2 million square feet of office and retail space in buildings spanning 9.2 acres and several blocks around the intersection of McKinney and San Jacinto on the southeastern part of downtown.
The buildings include the 46-story LyondellBasell Tower, the 51-story Fulbright Tower and the 40-story 2 Houston Center. The smaller 4 Houston Center and Shops at Houston Center are also part of the acquisition.
The purchase price was not disclosed but sources pegged the deal at about $875 million earlier this year.
The new owner said the complex has a "stellar tenant roster" but the building's lobbies, skybridges and plazas need upgrading and the offering of amenities need improving.
"The focus of our redevelopment efforts is going to be on enhancing the overall tenant experience," Travis Overall, executive vice president and head of the Texas region for Brookfield, said in an email.
He said the company is soliciting proposals from designers.
With some 12 million square feet, Brookfield is downtown's largest landlord of commercial space.
On the west side of downtown, Brookfield has undertaken a $48.5 million renovation of its Allen Center development.
Part of the renovations included the development of a one-acre park branded "The Acre." The greenspace has a plaza and lawn that can seat up to 1,500 people for concerts and other events. In late 2016, Brookfield also purchased the adjacent DoubleTree Hotel, where it is planning a renovation and rebranding.
Overall said the acquisition of Houston Center reflects the company's belief in the strength of downtown Houston.
"The combination of Houston Center's premier location, superior amenities, diverse tenant base and underutilized space, together with Brookfield's placemaking expertise and plans for meaningful capital upgrades, creates a significant and unique opportunity," he said in a statement.
Houston Center has changed ownership several times since the development broke ground in the 1970s.
Brookfield purchased the property from institutional investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which became the sole owner in 2011. HFF represented the seller.
The 5 Houston Center building is owned by Spear Street Capital and not part of the deal.
Brookfield, part of Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management, acquired Houston Center on behalf of a private real estate fund.
Bob Eury, executive director of the Houston Downtown Management District, said the property is poised for a redevelopment.
"The office campus of the future is changing," he said in a statement, noting how mixed-use developments are increasingly sought after by office tenants.
In addition to four office buildings, Houston Center has three stories of retail space filling 196,000 square feet.
The complex is 72 percent occupied. Brookfield has hired Transwestern to oversee leasing operations.
Separately, Brookfield is pursuing a deal to acquire national mall operator GGP Inc., which owns multiple properties in the Houston area.
Brookfield, which already owns about 34 percent of GGP Inc. stock, made an unsolicited bid for the rest of the company in a deal valued at $14 billion.
Chicago-based GGP confirmed the proposal in November and said it is being evaluated. Brookfield declined to comment further.
GGP's local properties include Baybrook Mall, Deerbrook Mall, First Colony Mall, The Woodlands Mall and Willowbrook Mall.
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No one disputes the prominence of Houston in the state's burgeoning barbecue scene. But a friendly face-off between Houston barbecue joints and Austin pitmasters on Sunday saw the capital city edge out H-town in smoked meats know-how.
At the HOU-ATX BBQ Throwdown, held Sunday at Saint Arnold Brewing Co., judges gave first place (a tie) to two barbecue joints representing the Austin area: Brotherton's Black Iron Barbecue in Pflugerville, and LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue of Austin. LeRoy and Lewis also won the People's Choice Award. Brotherton's entry was a "Pigpen and Pasture" banh mi pulled pork and beef cheek pate on crostini topped with house-made kimchi. LeRoy and Lewis turned in pork bacon ribs with brisket fried rice and house-made kimchi.
Now Playing: These tender, oven-roasted ribs are basted with our Melting Pot Barbecue Sauce, a sweet and tangy mix of several regional Southern sauces. Video: Brandpoint
Austin was represented by Brotherton's, LeRoy and Lewis, Hays Co. Bar-B-Que, Micklethwait Craft Meats and Valentina's Tex Mex BBQ. It was the first time the Austin restaurants served in Houston.
The Houston side of the barbecue battle was represented by Beaver's, the Brisket House, El Burro & the Bull, Gatlin's BBQ, Harlem Road Texas BBQ, Killen's Barbecue, My Yard Reaction BBQ, the Pit Room and Tin Roof BBQ.
There were long lines for Beaver's which served up smoked fried chicken with crackling cornbread; for Killen's pork "three ways" which included a spring roll filled with barbecue pork belly; and for El Burro & the Bull's smoked wild game chile Colorado.
"It's rich on top of rich," the Pit Room owner Michael Sambrooks said of his restaurant's entry of beef burnt ends on a shrimp cracker topped with cold smoked uni butter. "We want to step up our game every time we come to this."
Gary Fountain/For the Chronicle/Gary Fountain
Sambrooks said the competition was less a rivalry and more an appreciation of what Texas' top pitmasters can bring to the table. "We're not talking trash or anything," he said.
John Brotherton, owner of the winning Brotherton's, admitted he was a bit nervous planning for the competition. But also excited to be cooking for a Houston audience that truly appreciated good barbecue, he said.
"It's been really awesome, almost surreal," Brotherton said of his debut into the barbecue world with his Pflugerville outpost, which opened in May. "It's nice after all the hard work to see it paying off."
The HOU-ATX BBQ Throwdown, which attracted a sold-out crowd of 500, was produced by the HOUBBQ Festival.
1791: Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna, Austria, at age 35.
1945: Five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers mysteriously disappeared after taking off from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on a training mission with the loss of all 14 crew members. That fate of "The Lost Squadron" contributed to the mysterious legend of the Bermuda Triangle.
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Just call her Kendra Claus.
Kendra Scott, the Austin-based billionaire and jewelry designer, surprised passengers waiting to board a Southwest Airlines flight headed from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to Chicago's O'Hare last week. Scott, who was looking ever glam in a sweater in her signature yellow, took the microphone from a Southwest employee and announced: "The holidays can be stressful, so today you are in for some big surprises,"according to Texas Monthly.
As passengers got on the plane, Scott handed them each a gift bag full of jewelry, complete with a yellow eye mask that read "and to all a good night" with her logo.
Last year, an investment deal with private equity firm Berkshire Partners valued Scott's jewelry and home accessories line, which she started from her home in 2002, at more than $1 billion.
By the end of this year, Scott will have 75 stores across the United States as well as her first shop overseas, which opened in London in November within the Selfridges department store.
Scott has Houston ties. She's graduate of Klein High School.
A man is dead after he crashed into a flatbed semi-trailer in northeast Houston, according to the Harris County Sheriff's Office.
Jose Torres was driving his Volvo truck westbound in the 13700 block of Beaumont Highway around 9 p.m. Sunday. Nicolas Duarte, the driver of a Chevrolet Cruze, was behind him.
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FORT WORTH, Texas - Coming to grips with never again being able to work because of a debilitating disease or injury can gnaw at one's self-worth.
But 51-year-old John Tovar of Arlington never expected his spiral into full-on depression would come as a result of waiting just for the opportunity to state his case to qualify for Social Security disability benefits.
In Fort Worth, and across the nation, the system is backlogged to the point of near-absurdity. Local applicants can wait up to two years for a hearing before a judge, with many cities facing longer waits. A hearing is scheduled after applicants have already been denied - as most typically initially are - a process in itself that can take up to eight months.
And so as the bureaucratic clock creeps toward a hearing, many applicants are faced with slashed household income, dwindling or drained savings accounts and often no option left but to pile car payments, mortgage payments, prescriptions and groceries on to credit cards.
"Filing for disability was a last resort for me," said Tovar, who suffers from diabetes, nerve damage and carpal tunnel syndrome. "That's really one of the main reasons I did this, because we've been a two-income family for the longest time, and now my wife is the only one working. It makes me feel pretty worthless. What kind of took me aback was when they finally set up the final hearing, they said it would be anywhere from 12 to 18 months.
"Why would it be 12 to 18 months?"
The short answer is a lack of appropriate funding of Social Security by Congress.
"It's just a lack of staff, and it's tied directly to a lack of appropriations," said prominent disability attorney Charles Hall, whose law firm is based in Raleigh, N.C.
Social Security offices nationwide, including the downtown Fort Worth location, are understaffed and underfunded to handle the carousel of thousands of cases submitted each year. In Fort Worth, 10 administrative law judges are tasked with 5,899 pending disability cases, according to figures compiled by the Social Security Administration.
The average wait in Fort Worth for a hearing is 483 business days, or nearly two years. While it seems excessive, it's actually one of the speedier rates in the state and country. San Antonio's average wait is 527 days; the Rio Grade Valley is a whopping 622 days. Applicants in Miami wait for a hearing on average 759 days.
More than 1 million Americans are awaiting a hearing with an average wait of two years.
"In the last couple of years, we've seen applications decline, yet the backlog went from unacceptable to extremely unacceptable," said Mike Stein of Allsup, which represents people attempting to qualify for disability benefits.
Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee where he serves as the chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee and sits on the Health Subcommittee. Since becoming chairman, Johnson has held 18 hearings on the disability benefits program, including as recently as Sept. 6. In February, Johnson called on President Donald Trump to nominate a Social Security Commissioner, a position that remains unfilled.
"To make matters worse, these long wait times make getting back to work even harder for those who don't qualify for benefits. The status quo is unacceptable," Johnson said in a statement to the Star-Telegram. "That's why I recently held a hearing on this issue, where we discussed with the Social Security Administration what actions it's taking to address this issue and what obstacles it's facing."
Tovar and his wife have exhausted their rainy day fund, and then some.
Four years after nerve damage in his feet forced Tovar to leave his job at Poly-America in Grand Prairie - where he worked for 20 years, and where his wife, Mina, 47, continues to work - Tovar reluctantly applied for disability benefits in August 2016.
He just thought he'd surely eventually be able to find a job that didn't require him to be on his feet for hours a time. When the nerve damage spread to his hands and arms, Tovar lost all ability to work.
Tovar was denied disability benefits in July and requested a hearing in August. It could be two years before he gets that hearing.
Meanwhile, watching Mina wake up at 4:30 a.m. for work, then return to take care of the household, all on her salary of about $55,000, preys on his soul.
Along the way, he cashed in his 401(k) to pay off the remainder of the mortgage and clear credit card debt. But with only Mina's salary, rising medical and prescription costs are causing those credit card balances to balloon.
Expedited hardship cases mean a longer wait for those like Tovar.
Some wait so long they die before their hearing. Last year, 7,400 people on wait lists were dead, according to a report by Social Security's inspector general.
Disability benefits are not meant to replace salary. The average benefit is $1,037 a month. It won't help the Tovars pay down their credit cards again, but it could at least help them from piling on excessive debt.
"I've been thinking about that, too; what am I going to do if I get turned down?" Tovar said. "My condition is deteriorating. I'm just wondering what I'm going to do if it doesn't go through. Eighteen months from now, it's going to be worse."
Many claims that finally reach the hearing stage are declined. Of the 4,513 claims that went before a judge last fiscal year, 38 percent were denied.
A Fort Worth woman who has had breast cancer, has undergone heart surgery and suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that limits her lung functionality to 54 percent, filed her initial disability claim two years ago. She isn't scheduled for her hearing until early 2018.
She said she is "appalled at the process" and was too scared to be quoted by name for this story because she feared jeopardizing her chances at winning her claim or delaying the process further. She said she "has always worked and paid my taxes," but is now in "serious financial problems." If not for her ex-husband helping her pay bills, she said she would have lost her house through this process.
Making the system more efficient simply isn't in the cards until Congress chooses to appropriately fund Social Security so it can hire more administrative staff and judges.
"The problem is not enough funding from Congress. The local people work hard and work long days," said a Fort Worth disability attorney who asked not to use her name because she represents clients in front of the judges.
"The local office is trying to do what they can, but Social Security has always been that third wheel. Congress always finds reasons why they don't want to fund it."
ConocoPhillips said Monday that it has reached an agreement to recover more than $300 million from the government of Ecuador, which expropriated two of Conoco's significant oil assets in the country.
The settlement follows a 2012 arbitration finding that Ecuador violated the U.S.-Ecuador bilateral investment treaty. Ecuador will pay $337 million to a ConocoPhillips subsidiary, Burlington.
Don't expect Big Shale to rush and fill the hole left by OPEC in the oil market.
Executives from three of the biggest independent U.S. drillers say they won't increase activity just because prices rise after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies agreed to extend output curbs. The emphasis, instead, will be on maintaining spending discipline and generating profits to return to investors, according to Pioneer Natural Resources Co., Parsley Energy Inc. and Newfield Exploration Co.
While crude is trading near the highest level in more than two years as OPEC and its partners limit supplies in a bid to drain a global glut, investors have been concerned stronger prices would encourage U.S. drilling and undermine those efforts. The biggest oil crash in a generation began in 2014 as a boom in American shale output spawned a race for market share between global producers.
"Higher oil prices can bring in more cash to the balance sheet, and you can enjoy that cushion, but there's no need to chase additional activity," Matt Gallagher, Parsley's chief operating officer, told Bloomberg on the sidelines of Van Eck Associates Corp.'s U.S. Shale Forum in Singapore. "It's paramount that you've got to be disciplined and give visibility on spending."
That's not to say the companies won't grow. Pioneer, which drills in the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford shale plays, plans to boost output from about 300,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day this quarter to more than 1 million by 2026, Chief Financial Officer Richard Dealy said. Parsley also drills in the Permian, while Newfield is focused on the SCOOP and STACK plays in Oklahoma.
Cash Flow
The difference now is that shale drillers want to grow while generating free cash flow to return to investors via dividends or share buy-backs, said Shawn Reynolds, Van Eck's portfolio manager for hard assets. In years past, companies routinely outspent their cash flow by 20 to 30 percent in an attempt to grow production as fast as possible.
"I hope they are more disciplined this time around," Pioneer's Dealy said. "If oil prices are higher, that means our cash flow may turn positive that much sooner, but no real change in activity level."
Last week's decision by OPEC and its partners including Russia could potentially harm shale, Van Eck's Reynolds said. While companies with the most efficient operations and richest acreage can profit at an oil price of $50 a barrel, rising prices may mean hundreds of other small independent drillers with lower-quality sites could begin to break even on production and start drilling again, increasing costs for everyone. West Texas Intermediate futures traded at $57.81 a barrel at 10:20 a.m. London time.
"I don't like $27 oil, but I don't like $80 oil either," Gary Packer, chief operating officer for Newfield, said in an interview. "Inefficiencies get bred into this industry at high commodity prices, and I think we have built efficiencies within the unconventional space to deliver exciting returns for our shareholders in a $50 environment."
Shifting Strategy
As U.S. output increased, OPEC in late 2014 decided to pump at will to defend market share, exacerbating the price collapse that sent several shale companies into bankruptcy.
U.S. production has rebounded since OPEC reversed course last year and decided to cut output to force the world to burn through a glut of global inventories. Thursday's extension, which will prolong curbs from March 31 to the end of 2018, will allow American firms to raise supplies even more and steal market share from OPEC in places like China, Barclays Plc analysts Michael Cohen and Warren Russell said in a Nov. 30 report.
That idea is tied to the past, though, Newfield's Packer said. The shale industry of old was able to generate phenomenal growth at the expense of providing sound financial returns. The focus now is on the bottom line.
"What we're hearing today from our investors is they want to see more discipline," he said. "If investor behaviors change and they start rewarding production growth again, it can be a different outcome, but that's not the narrative that we have today."
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After months of seeking comments for stakeholders, public meetings, and input from as many sources as they could retrieve them, the city council of Dayton has given final approval to the Dayton Comprehensive Plan.
A record turnout for a community meeting last fall was the impetus for the framework of the original draft and since then, additional tweaks to the plan were made and a final draft presented to the community on the city's and the Dayton Community Development Corporation websites.
With no opposition on the plan during the public hearing, Dayton city council voted on the matter on Monday, Nov. 27, and unanimously gave the thumbs up to proceed with enacting the plan.
"The Comprehensive Plan is a major accomplishment for our community," said City Manager Theo Melancon.
"It is the first step in the process of visioning our long-term future. Public input was greatly appreciated and served to mold the final product greatly."
While many of the aspects of the plan will not come until years later, there are plenty of others that can begin in the near future.
"I am excited to begin executing on the plan over the coming months and years," Melancon said.
The city manager said infrastructure is something that will need to be planned out and installed over the long term.
"In the short term, moving forward with revitalizing downtown and having land use standards were strongly suggested by the general public. Those are things we are making strides on as we speak," he said.
Earlier this year, the council approved Kendig Keast Collaborative to continue their work for the city, this time in the Downtown Revitalization Plan, a much closer look into development for that area and keeping it vibrant.
"Another immediate term item is reaching out to industrial companies that may be able to help us expand our capacities in water and sewer services," the city manager said.
"The Comp Plan showed that we have some capacity to grow, but with the massive influx coming, we will need to be flexible in expanding our capabilities," Melancon explained.
Courtland Holman, executive director of the Dayton Community Development Corporation (DCDC), worked closely with Kendig Keast Collaborative representative Luis Nunez.
"This is a big deal because it gives a guideline to our city leaders on how to develop the city and ETJ as it grows," he said.
According to the city website, the plan's findings and strategies focus on the physical and economic aspects of Dayton's growth and development over a 20-year planning horizon.
One goal of the Comprehensive Plan, the site says, is to develop a unified vision, guiding principles, and "big picture" strategies that provide over-arching guidance for current and future decision-makers. The implementation section helps to ground these recommendations in reality by prioritizing short-, mid-, and long-term strategies - with an emphasis on near-term "catalysts" that activate desired change.
"The land use map tells us where we need drainage, where the citizens have asked for an amphitheater, where we want industry to grow and where planned development housing should be," Holman said.
Implementing the plan will also mean updating the outdated codes.
"We will scrape them and redo them and bring them up-to-date," he said.
Holman said one of the most important components of having the plan is it now opens up the door to financing opportunities that the city has not been able to cash in on in the past.
"This is the first step that will help us go for state, federal, and TxDOT funding that we couldn't go for because we didn't even have a base of a plan," he said.
There are funding sources everywhere, he added, that they can look into and know the Grand Parkway will be under construction next year and time is fleeting to get started on these plans.
Last summer, Holman and a delegation of seven others attended the regional International Conference of Shopping Centers (ICSC) in Dallas and they all had the same question.
"Do you have a comprehensive plan? Do you have a land use plan? If not, we're not interested in your community," Holman reported.
He said many of them are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in shopping centers, from small to acres of shopping, but will not invest in an area that does not have protected land use.
"They can't afford to fail," he said. "For two days, from booth to booth, that was the same question we heard over and again. That's why this is so important for the city as the growth comes our way," Holman said.
Since the approval, several of those shopping center developers have now contacted Holman to learn more.
The delegation will attend the larger ICSC conference in Las Vegas next spring, that makes 80 percent of the deals done in the country, in hopes of bringing home more business for the city.
To read the plan, visit the city of Dayton website, http://www.cityofdaytontx.com/
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A Pecan Grove man has pleaded guilty to possessing child porn and trying to skirt the terms of his bond, the Fort Bend County District Attorney's Office said in a press release.
Christopher Paul Cashman, 42, was sentenced to 6 years in prison on Nov. 29.
According to Assistant District Attorney Katie Peterson, Cashman was caught by undercover investigative software downloading child pornography images in 2015.
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A search warrant also revealed that Cashman was in possession of multiple child porn videos.
While out on bond on the possession of child pornography charge, Cashman forged receipts to show that he had paid his bond supervision fees, when he had actually not paid the fees, according to the Fort Bend County District Attorney's Office.
As a result, Cashman was also charged with forgery and pleaded guilty to that charge as well.
The child pornography investigation was a collaborative effort by the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce, including: the Fort Bend County District Attorney's Office, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office, Missouri City Police Department, and the Needville Police Department.
"This case highlights the importance of undercover internet investigations and reminds us that a child predator can live anywhere," said Peterson. "Law enforcement must remain ever vigilant and proactive to protect our most valuable resource, our children."
Cashman pleaded guilty in the 434th District Court before Presiding Judge James Shoemake. Possession of child pornography and forgery in this case are both third-degree felonies, punishable by two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. The defendant was probation eligible.
Peterson and Assistant District Attorney Michael L. Hartman prosecuted the case. Attorney George Parnham represented the defendant.
With the super moon nearly at peak, in a huge, candlelit tent hung with paper orbs, the Menil Collection's "Luminous" ball on Saturday was a glowing universe even without the addition of hundreds of shimmering outfits. Especially in the way that matters most for these things: The event grossed $2.5 million to support the museum.
Honoring chair and life trustee Louisa Stude Sarofim, whom Dominique de Menil hand-picked as her successor to lead the organization, the event drew a glittering crowd of 550, many of whom stayed late to hear awesome songstress Angelique Kidjo perform her African-rhythm-inflected adaptation of the Talking Heads' landmark album "Remain in Light." Talking Heads' keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison joined Kidjo for several songs.
The Menil only hosts a gala every five years or so, and it's worth the wait. Allison Sarofim (Louisa's daughter), Adelaide de Menil (not present), Phoebe and Bobby Tudor and Leigh and Reggie Smith co-chaired. Menil Foundation president Janet Hobby and Menil Collection director Rebecca Rabinow were, well, over the moon.
"Dominique de Menil understood that in order to ensure the Menil Collection's survival she must appoint a successor who believed as deeply as she did in the importance of the arts to human existence. She needed to find someone who had the intellect, sensitivity and will to keep the de Menils' vision alive and relevant someone courageous enough to alter her own life in order to make the enormous commitment of time, energy, and focus required by the task ahead," Rabinow said, noting how Louisa Stude Sarofim has led the organization "with unwavering grace, determination, and generosity."
Sarofim got chuckles describing how she didn't immediately say yes when Dominique de Menil called her years ago, in the days before cell phones, and asked her to carry on the mission. Sarofim said she was hoping to spend more time in Santa Fe. "Well, you know, there are all sorts of technologies these days," de Menil coaxed. Sarofim said she took the job because she respected the de Menils' approach to art, their spiritual values and their determination to transform Houston.
"The Menil Collection is a beacon of all of these things, a special and beautiful place for everyone to enjoy," she said. "It has the power to change lives."
The gala's theme was inspired by a postcard painting the Surrealist artist Max Ernst sent as a Christmas card in 1955 to Dominique and John De Menil. Guests were invited to roam the museum until midnight, although the drinks and dancing kept the scene hopping in the tent and foyer.
Among the many VIPs: Consul General of France Alexis Andres; Lois and George de Menil; Andee and Aziz Friedrich; Susan and Francois de Menil and their children Sophie, Conrad, and John; Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss; Hamish Bowles; JooYoung Choi and Trenton Doyle Hancock; Michael Heizer; Roni Horn; Caroline Huber; Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee; Janie C. Lee and David Warren; Allison Leland; Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso; Andrea and Bill White and Doug Lawing and Guy Hagsette.
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It was a wild night for nature lovers in the greater Houston area at the annual Twilight Gala.
On Friday, Nov. 17, nature supporters from across Greater Houston gathered at the Houstonian Hotel for the Nature Discovery Center's 23rd annual Twilight Gala, "A Wild Night for Wild Life." This year's gala - chaired by Rachel and Todd Auwarter, and Meghan and Ken Lutschg - celebrated the impact that natural spaces like the Nature Discovery Center and Russ Pitman Park have on peoples' lives.
Though Board President Ben Cowan acknowledged that the board considered canceling this year's gala "out of respect for those that have been displaced and lost property during the flooding of Hurricane Harvey, including so many in the neighborhood surrounding the Center," he went on to say that "there simply is no escaping the fact that the Twilight Gala is our primary source of community funding."
During his remarks at the dinner, Executive Director Henry Owen highlighted just how imperative that funding is, saying "Harvey left our community devastated and grasping for answers. The need for nature-based education and a deeper understanding of our environment is as important now as it has ever been."
More Information ABOUT THE HANA AND ARTHUR GINZBARG NATURE DISCOVERY CENTER Founded in 1988, the Hana and Arthur Ginzbarg Nature Discovery Center, a 501(c)(3) organization, ignites lifelong curiosity, understanding, and respect for nature through high-quality educational programming and its four-acre outdoor classroom, Russ Pitman Park. See More Collapse
The Center's year-round education programming impacts over 40,000 individuals, mostly kids, each year. Owen told gathered supporters that their donations were "an investment in the future generations of our community." And that they would "Help develop a generation of educated, emotionally-balanced, citizens who are grounded in nature."
Gala attendees supported the Center with a silent auction, a wine pull, and a special donation for nature education.
Funds brought in from the gala, totaling over $122,000, will be used to ensure that the center can continue to offer a diversity of nature-orientated programs for Houston families and schools, creating and strengthening personal connections with nature.
For more information about the Nature Discovery Center and its programs for children and families, and to learn how to support the Center through donations and volunteer service, visit www.naturediscoverycenter.org.
This year's community Thanksgiving celebration, hosted by Holy Covenant United Methodist Church, saw record numbers of guests come through its doors. The weather was deliciously cool and sunny, which set the scene for a beautiful outreach that was taking place both inside and outside the HCKaty campus.
Organizers calculated that in all about 1,600 meals were served. Clothed by Faith documented that they supplied 561 people with a week's worth of clothing.
This year, Randalls provided the Katy Community Feast with all the necessary turkeys and Midway BBQ supplied all the ham. Good Ole boys cooked the turkeys at no charge with a nominal fee for slicing and packaging while Westside Chevrolet contributed financially. Other goods or services contributed by local Katy businesses included: Children's books from Katy Budget Books, Spanish Bibles from Lifeway Christian Store, racks and hangers from Brammers, multiple breads and bagels from Panera Bread, piano music by musician, Steven Jones, and photography services from Photographyfray. Most of these Katy businesses have supplied services, goods, or funds every year since the start of this annual outreach.
The Thanksgiving Feast dates to 2003, when Kaye Brown and the Junior Mission at Antioch Baptist Missionary Church - on Danover Street in Old Town Katy - decided to ensure that no one in their congregation and surrounding church area went without a home cooked Thanksgiving meal. They began cooking out of their homes and small church kitchen. Meals were picked up by those in need and delivered to those who were homebound. Around 2008, people from other parts of Katy discovered what Antioch was doing and asked to join them in their efforts to serve those in need. Donations of coats and blankets were subsequently added to the mix.
In 2011, with Antioch Baptist Church's blessing, the decision was made to open the Thanksgiving Feast to all Katy residents who found themselves in need of a hot holiday meal. It was only through the generosity of some of our Katy businesses, Katy churches and other Katy organizations that the vision became a reality. A steering committee was formed, and the annual Katy Community Thanksgiving Feast was born.
First United Methodist Church in Old Town Katy provided the venue for that first celebration and for those held in 2013 and 2015. Alief Baptist Church of Katy opened its doors to the feast in 2012, and First Baptist Church of Katy hosted the event in 2014 and 2016.
In 2017, 12 Katy churches supplied the funds, side dishes, and volunteers in ministry needed to make the feast possible. Those churches include: Alief Baptist Church, Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, The Church at Cane Island, Epiphany of Our Lord Catholic Church, First Baptist Church of Katy, First United Methodist Church of Katy, Grace Fellowship United Methodist Church, Holy Covenant United Methodist Church, Kingsland Baptist Church, New Hope Presbyterian Church, St. Peter's United Methodist Church and Trinity Baptist Church.
Since 2011, Boy Scout Troop 557 those Scouts and their leaders have directed traffic and received side dish donations as they are dropped off at the church and assisted guests with carrying of packages to their cars.
A Kidz Corner was in full swing during the event. Acorn turkeys were crafted, pin the tail on the turkey games were played, and colorful drawings were made by many of the children who dined in or passed through. Two face-painters delighted the younger guests by creating their favorite design atop their smiling faces.
Most people in need of a Thanksgiving meal this year found out about Katy Community Thanksgiving Feast during their visit to Katy Christian Ministries. Others may have learned of it through flyers distributed at Christ Clinic, The St. Vincent de Paul Society at Epiphany of Our Lord Catholic Church and Texas Children's Pediatrics. People were asked to call in and pre-order their meals. Participants were invited to dine in, pick up meals to go, and if homebound, to sign up for meal delivery.
Five Katy non-profit agencies were on site this year to provide information about their services and answer any questions. They included: Christ Clinic, Clothed by Faith, Hope Impacts, Katy Christian Ministries and Pregnancy Help Center.
Tina Hatcher, executive director of Hope Impacts, has been bringing some of Katy's homeless to the feast and distributing meals later in the day since 2013. Rona Lee, with Clothed by Faith, has been a part of the steering committee since 2015. Clothed by Faith sets up its operation at the host church the day before and then on Thanksgiving Day is able to help address the clothing needs of those in attendance.
This Feast Day saw a flurry of activity from start to finish. The first family arrived at 7:30 a.m. and the last ones to be served came at 2:45 p.m. Meal orders exceeded 1.600 this year and the clicker count indicated that there would not be enough food to feed everyone. However, just as with the story of the loaves and fishes, no one left unfed. Leftovers were shared with the Krause Center.
Katy is a special community. What makes it even more special is when businesses, churches, individuals, and organizations unite to serve a common good. People who responded to the invitation for a free Thanksgiving meal, were greeted with hugs, offers of prayer and music that warmed the heart, then their tummies were filled with traditional Thanksgiving favorite foods followed by a distribution of donated books, Bibles, blankets, coats, clothing, diapers/wipes, and non-perishable food items.
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The night air may not have been particularly bracing at this year's official lighting of the Christmas tree outside Katy City Hall, but Juliann Pelton wasn't complaining.
Pelton and her family lived in New Hampshire before moving to Katy and she wasn't mourning the lack of snow drifts.
"It's awesome that they can wear flip flops," Pelton said, motioning toward one of Santa's helpers maneuvering a fidgeting boy toward the waiting lap of the jovial North Pole resident.
This year marked the 45th time the city had staged a formal tree lighting ceremony in front of Katy's city hall. Hundreds of people gathered around the tree to for Christmas performances from Katy choir and dance troupes.
Miles Pelton, 5, seemed to be more interested in how Santa arrived at the tree lighting ceremony - courtesy of the Katy Fire Department- than about seeing the man himself.
"He's a little boy. He was just staring at the fire truck," Juliann Pelton said.
Katy Mayor Chuck Brawner was the host and read "A Visit from St. Nicholas," better known as the "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" poem.
"I think it's great. There are a lot more people here than I expected," Brawner said.
"I'm so pleased this many people came in so they can see what's happening to downtown Katy. It's so important as we try to build these businesses back up."
With Hurricane Harvey still so fresh in the minds of the community, and with some Katy residents still not back in their homes, the importance of something like a simple Christmas event can't be overemphasized, Brawner said.
"This is a community - you look out here and there are families and children," he said. "These are the things that make a community great."
A hush fell over the town square as the countdown began. The crowd erupted into cheers as the Christmas tree suddenly exploded into light.
"This is our first time coming. It's beautiful," Pelton said. "They've really done a nice job."
The line to take a photograph with Santa - and maybe whisper a suggestion for a present into his ear - stretched down the street running in front of City Hall.
Sarah Harrington, who was waiting with her children Ellie, 9 and Anna, 5, was confident of a large crowd for the event - traditionally the start of the Christmas season in Katy.
"It's really great. I was hoping to see how many people turned out," Harrington said.
Her younger daughter enjoyed the lighting but said she really had no interest in take a photograph with Santa. As for Ellie Harrington, she was more than ready to check in with St. Nick.
"I love Christmas," Ellie shouted. "It's the best holiday ever."
Police Chief Art Acevedo called a press conference Monday to report that "actual surveillance video" showed a serial thief that his officers dubbed "the Grinch" was stalking city streets, responsible for breaking into cars and stealing gifts and purses all across Houston.
On the surveillance video, the suspect was wearing a Santa coat, a Santa hat, had greenish-brown fur and was galloping around and clicking his heels while pilfering vehicles.
"He's got a very distinct walking gait," a straight-faced Acevedo said. "Nobody's seen this character?"
Reporters were not quite sure at first whether the chief was serious -- and he wasn't.
Turns out there was no actual serial theft suspect and the fake Grinch video was staged by police, with the furry thief portrayed by an actor. The publicity stunt was aimed at warning shoppers to be vigilant of real thieves who target residents while they are out shopping at the mall during the holidays.
Acevedo warned holiday shoppers in Houston about leaving their shopping bags in the car unattended while they go back inside to continue shopping, saying it would be wiser to just go home and stow the gifts.
"Now, these types of thefts, specifically burglary of motor vehicles, have led to stolen gifts, missing purses and money, sad children and overall killing the holiday spirit," Acevedo said. "(Thieves) are looking for easy victims and easy prey. As you can see by this video, although it is a dramatization, what you saw actually happens in the city of Houston, all year round."
He added: "I hope we didn't give anyone any ideas about going around burglarizing vehicles in a Grinch outfit."
After the news conference, police and communications staff could be heard plotting another staged press event Wednesday in which HPD would demonstrate these holiday-season car thefts in a Target parking lot.
Their plan was to arrest the fake Grinch in the middle of the news conference as the actor tried to steal more gifts, then put him away in a police cruiser and let the media "interview him" from the window.
HPD did not have an update on any leads on the real thieves suspected of stealing holiday packages from more than a dozen neighbors in the Heights area last week, as the Houston Chronicle reported Friday.
The National Weather Service said a severe thunderstorm over Richmond could produce a tornado on Sunday afternoon.
The agency warned north central Fort Bend County and southwestern Harris County -- including Sugar Land, Rosenberg, Richmond, Pecan Grove, Cinco Ranch and Greatwood -- about the impending storm.
Residents are urged to move to a basement or interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building and to avoid windows.
The storm was moving northeast at 10 miles per hour at 3:32 p.m., according to the agency.
The dangers facing deportees, a series delving into brain injuries, and details of foreign bribery cases prosecuted in the Houston area - all in this week's in-depth and investigative reporting.
Deportees often become targets of criminal gangs
By Olivia P. Tallet
The latest flight from Texas loaded with deportees touches down without fanfare. The 87 men and 22 women are taken by bus to the Direccion de Atencion al Migrante looking none too happy as immigration officials drone at intervals: "Welcome to your country."
About three-quarters had been caught by the U.S. Border Patrol trying to cross into the country from Mexico. But about a quarter had been snared by the Trump Administration's roundup of undocumented immigrants -- both those with criminal records, who had been the primary deportation focus of the Obama administration, and anyone else in the country illegally.
Alive Inside:A Four-Part Series
By Mike Hixenbaugh
After deputy Nick Tullier was shot in the head, one doctor suggested removing life support. But he wasn't in a vegetative state, as physicians believed. Like thousands with similar injuries, Tullier was conscious, just unable to show it. Read how a Houston hospital restores patients with severe brain injuries at HoustonChronicle.com/AliveInside.
Harris County jail launches new program to combat opioid addiction
By Keri Blakinger
The Vivitrol is an innovative treatment option that soon will be available for inmates leaving the Harris County Jail. The state's largest county lockup has launched a pilot program that will begin offering the treatment to soon-to-be-released prisoners in hopes of preventing relapse and reducing recidivism.
Godofredo Vasquez
"It's really pretty exciting for us," said Dariel Newman, the jail's head nurse of quality improvement. "We see so many folks in here that their addiction is either the reason they were arrested or a factor."
Houston Marine's military interpreter finally reaches new home in Texas
By St. John Barned-Smith
Mohammed Younus Yousafzoy walked off Lufthansa Flight 440, bleary-eyed and dizzy from the two-day trip from Kabul. Then the 24-year-old arrived at Bush Intercontinental Airport Wednesday after receiving a special immigrant visa available to interpreters and others who helped the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But dwindling visas and delays have left thousands of former interpreters - who risked their lives to help the U.S. military since 2001 - waiting to leave countries where that support has exposed them to additional dangers and violence.
Elizabeth Conley/Chronicle
Houston a center of foreign bribery enforcement
By L.M. Sixel
Houston last year accounted for seven, or about one-fourth of the 26 cases brought by the U.S. Department of Justice under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Over the past decade, Houston federal court has become one of the busiest in the nation for cases involving bribes delivered abroad in large part because of the concentration of energy companies that do business worldwide.
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The call to worship came at 11 a.m. on rain slicked streets in downtown Houston.
Francisco Hernandez Lopez led his troupe of 130 feathered folk dancers onto the streets, joining hundreds of others.
Clouds of incense filled the air. Dancers twirled and leapt in unison to the pounding drums, their anklets clacking like angry rattlesnakes. The procession slithered through downtown Houston to acknowledge the annual festival to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico and the Americas.
"It's to transmit the love of the people to the Virgin," said Lopez.
A third generation performer originally from Cuernavaca, Mexico, Lopez has now danced in 14 festivals in Houston honoring the Virgin of Guadalupe. For Sunday's celebration, his troupe - from the Church of the Holy Ghost in southwest Houston - practiced for months.
His wife, Yolanda, led the troupe, carrying a brazier of smoking incense, while behind, their two children - Anthony, 9, and Samira, 6 - shuffled and twirled in time to the beat, pint-sized miniatures of the grown-up dancers.
"I'm amazed at their deep faith," said Fr. William Bueche, pastor of the Church of the Holy Ghost, who was carrying a feather-adorned maraca and walking with his parishioners. "How it's expressed. How much effort they put into it. And such an ancient tradition on our continent. It's a great gift to us in North America."
On December 11, Lopez and other members of the southwest Houston church plan to dance and pray from 7 p.m. to the next morning to celebrate, as they do every year, the miracle of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon of Catholic Christianity across the Americas.
More than 800 dancers
The legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe goes like this: in 1531, a Mexican peasant named Juan Diego crossed a hill near Mexico City and he had a vision of the Virgin Mary.
She appeared as a native Mexican woman and spoke to him in Nahuatl, asking him to build a church on the hill in her honor.
Diego told the archbishop of Mexico City the request, but the archbishop didn't believe him and sent him away. Twice more, the Virgin appeared to Diego, who pleaded with the unmoved archbishop. Eventually, the unbelieving archbishop asked for proof of a miracle.
The Virgin sent Diego to a high hillside in the middle of the winter, where he found a thriving patch of Castilian roses - flowers that did not grow in Mexico.
He gathered them in his tilma - or cloak - and took them to the archbishop. When he saw the archbishop - for the fourth time - he let the roses spill from the tilma on to the floor. On the fabric of the cloak remained an image of the Virgin Mary.
The miracle was credited with helping to evangelize the indigenous population of Mexico, and in 1961, Pope John Paul XXIII named the Virgin of Guadalupe "The Mother of the Americas."
The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City - the church built on the site where the virgin appeared to Diego - has become the most visited site in Catholic Christendom.
Ever since, Catholics across the world have celebrated the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe in early December.
On Sunday morning, more than 800 dancers from 30 churches across the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston gathered for the celebration, said JoAnn Zuniga, a spokeswoman.
They came from across southeast Texas and one troupe from as far away as Corpus Christi.
The procession represented the struggle between good and evil, said Roberto Chavez, 50, one of the organizers, pointing at a man dressed as a gruesome devil, trailed by a woman bearing crossed wooden swords.
"It's a devotion," he said.
In traditional costume
After the parade to the George R. Brown Convention Center, each troupe performed individual dances. Some were dressed as traditional Aztecas dancers - wearing headdresses (penachos), chest plates, and knee guards and bearing shields, maracas or lances - and "Matachines," dressed in headdresses and "naguillas," intricately embroidered vests and skirts.
At a break after the parade, Lopez's son, 9-year-old Anthony paused to grab a snack.
They'd practiced a lot, Anthony said. He was happy he had not forgotten the dance steps.
"We're going to go to mass," he said. "Then we're going to dance again."
He turned and walked off, his anklets clacking with each step.
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump on Sunday morning lashed out at ABC News, two days after investigative reporter Brian Ross made an erroneous report involving the president.
Ross had incorrectly reported Friday that during Trump's presidential campaign, Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election.
Later that night, Ross read a "clarification" on "ABC World News Tonight," saying Trump had actually asked Flynn to make contact with Russia after the election, when he was president-elect.
Flynn, who briefly served as Trump's national security adviser after the election, pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI.
ABC News apologized for the mistake Saturday and issued a full correction. The network also suspended Ross for four weeks without pay.
On Twitter Saturday night, Trump initially offered his "congratulations" to ABC News for "suspending Ross for his horrendously inaccurate and dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt."
Many Trump supporters, including the president's adult children, accused Ross of propagating "fake news" and linked his report to the Dow dropping 350 points.
On Sunday, Trump took aim at the network itself, calling for those affected by the stock market tumble to "consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused."
The network had "broken" Ross' report Friday with a tweet that read: "JUST IN: BrianRoss on ABC News Special Report: Michael Flynn promised "full cooperation to the Mueller team" and is prepared to testify that as a candidate, Donald Trump "directed him to make contact with the Russians."
Later Friday night, ABC then issued a "clarification," in the form of a new tweet and Ross' on-air appearance on "World News Tonight" with host David Muir.
The subsequent tweet, which has also since been deleted, read: "CLARIFICATION of ABC News Special Report: Flynn prepared to testify that President-elect Donald Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians .during the transition. - initially as a way to work together to fight ISIS in Syria, confidant now says."
ABC News was widely panned, even by those in the industry, for its bungled handling of Ross's error. Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer called the network's "clarification" a "cop out and just another reason for the decline in trust of the media."
Several lamented that ABC had given ammunition to those who have long accused the mainstream media of "fake news."
"This is not a 'clarification,' this is a huge effing difference," BBC senior reporter Anthony Zucher said on Twitter.
It wasn't until late Saturday afternoon that ABC issued a full correction and characterized Ross' mistake as a "serious error."
"We deeply regret and apologize for the serious error we made yesterday. The reporting conveyed by Brian Ross during the special report had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process," ABC News said in a statement. "As a result of our continued reporting over the next several hours ultimately we determined the information was wrong and we corrected the mistake on air and online."
The statement continued: "It is vital we get the story right and retain the trust we have built with our audience - these are our core principles. We fell far short of that yesterday."
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released an active tornado warning for Fort Bend and Harris County at 3:32 p.m. on Sunday.
The administration categorizes the urgency of the warning as "immediate" and is set to expire at 4 p.m. on Sunday, according to the administration's alert page. Locations impacted most by the warning include southwestern Sugar Land, northern Rosenberg, Richmond, Pecan Grove,
southwestern Eldridge / West Oaks, Cumings, New Territory, Cinco
Ranch and Greatwood, according to the warning.
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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Press issues delay delivery of todays Chronicle Times Due to press issues, print subscribers will not receive the Nov. 16 issue of the Cherokee Chronicle Times in the...
Galva man charged with his brothers murder A Galva man with an extensive criminal history in Storm Lake was arrested on Sunday night for allegedly killing his...
Cherokee enrollment up 10% over 7 years Enrollment at most of Buena Vista and Cherokee Countys school districts increased across-the-board, according to estimates submitted to the Iowa...
Book Basket Project underway at library The 23rd-annual Book Basket Project is up and running at Cherokee Public Library. This silent auction launched on Monday and...
Anda Automation Expands into Hungary Published: 04 December 2017 by Mike Buetow by Mike Buetow
HONG KONG, CHINA December 2017 Anda Automation, a leading provider of fluid application and custom design manufacturing equipment, is pleased to announce that it has partnered with InterElectronic Hungary, Ltd. as its distributor in Eastern Europe. InterElectronic offers lines for SMT and THT manufacturing for low-, medium- or high-volume production, as well as complete solutions for the automotive industry.
InterElectronic was founded in 2003 with headquarters in Budapest. A leading representative in its territory, the company provides complex turn-key solutions for companies working in the electronic industry. InterElectronic is an official distributor in Hungary and Romania, and offers some brands in Slovakia, Croatia and Slovenia. The company provides professional consultation, guidance and even integration of projects.
Anda offers precision coating, high-speed dispensing, plasma cleaning, high precision laminating, and customized dispensing solutions. The company serves the PCBA, 3D glass, camera module, CCM, fingerprint module and semiconductor industries.
Karoly Peics, Managing Director at InterElectronic, will represent Andas full line of high precision fluid dispensing equipment. He can be reached at +36 30 296-45-05 or karoly.peics@interelectronic.com. For more information about InterElectronic, visit www.interelectronic.com.
A.O. Centrul de Drept al Femeilor anunta concurs pentru selectarea expertilor nationali pentru dezvoltarea conceptului de sprijin psihosocial si a Curriculumului de instruire in acest sens
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Even if the whole movie wasn't awesome, that moment alone would be enough to elevate Se7en from another generic serial killer flick to a classic, and David Fincher from "the guy who botched Alien 3" to "the future director of Fight Club."
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But They Only Included It Because ...
Of course, "another generic serial killer flick" was exactly what the studio wanted when they bought the screenplay. The first thing they did was tell the writer to get rid of that ending to make the movie more marketable, and he did. And that's how it would have stayed, if they hadn't messed up and sent Fincher the wrong version.
According to Fincher, the draft of the screenplay New Line Cinema meant to send him included every cop movie cliche possible. Mills and Somerset were seen "driving on sidewalks to get to the woman, who's drawing a bath while the serial killer sneaks in the back window." That's the movie New Line wanted to make.
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However, when Fincher was offered the script to direct, New Line accidentally sent him the old version they definitely had no intention of making, and he fell in love with the gut-wrenching ending. It took Pitt and Freeman siding with Fincher to finally convince the producers -- Pitt in particular said he wouldn't do the movie unless "the head stays in the box" and they didn't reedit the scene afterward.
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But when Inside Edition had a set of triplets send their spit in to Ancestry.com and 23andMe, they got wildly different results from both services. Neither gave each triplet the same ancestry results -- which, considering they all came from the same womb, is pretty weird.
"Tests can be a crapshoot. For DNA tests, they use genetic markers, which are little variations in the DNA one or several groups may have, but others do not. The more markers there are, the more accurate the test will be."
Some companies may use 12, 37, or 67, while others claim to use more than 700,000 different markers. Any of those numbers can sound impressive with the right marketing spin behind them, but the simple fact of the matter is that nobody's method is perfect. "The best we can do is give a certain range based on those markers (or show who they are most similar to), and sometimes we'll move up a percentage point of an ethnic group if it doesn't add up to 100 percent."
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Inside Edition found differences of over 10 percent between the triplets they tested. That is not a small gap. If you were off by 10 percent on a DNA test, you could technically be a mouse. Maybe it's unreasonable to expect perfect accuracy from saliva you mailed to a lab. But a lot of people do anyway, and Morgan winds up dealing with their complaints.
"At least once a week, we'll get a call from somebody who took two or three other tests and then ours, and complains about how different they are. Usually it's 5-20 percent off, but we got an email from a guy showing how in one test he was 7 percent Irish, Scottish, and Welsh, then on another he was 33 percent, and then on ours 45 percent, and he wanted to know what was wrong with everyone. We wrote to him that each test is different because of the number and types of genetic markers used, which can skew data, but he wrote back and said that we were con men."
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Genetics experts from the University of Texas and the University of North Carolina have gone so far as to say that these companies are preying on people, because they don't truly have the information they need to pinpoint your origins on a map, and that it's not possible to trace unique ancestry that way. As they put it, "That's the beauty of this scam. The companies aren't scamming you. They're not giving you fraudulent information. They are giving you data, real data, and allowing you to scam yourself."
Classes are over, which means that I get to finally open some of the fun books that I've been meaning to read. Most of what I read is too low brow for me to have the courage to mention here. Plus, Mark tells me that the books in question have to have at least a distant relationship to credit and law.
A couple of days ago, Mark and I talked about Barak Richman's wonderful "Stateless Commerce".
Here is my next recommendation: Jeff King, The Doctrine of Odious Debt in International Law: A Restatement.
Jeff, who teaches at University College in London, was one of the pioneers in the rejuvenation of the Odious Debt literature in 2003-04, when Saddam's government in Iraq was overthrown. Indeed, it was his co authored article for a Canadian think tank - the Center for International Sustainable Development Law, that jump-started the literature. Now, thanks to Jeff and his co authors (and to Saddam too, I guess), there is a large and robust modern literature on the topic. Along the way, in the years that have followed, Correa in Ecuador and Maduro in Venezuela have helped keep interest in the Odious Debt idea alive through their shenanigans. Indeed, Mr Maduro may end up rivaling Saddam in his contributions to the revival of this doctrine whose origins go back to the days of the Czarist regime in Russia in the early 1900s. As an illustration, sovereign debt gurus Ugo Panizza and Ricardo Hausmann have a nice recent piece in Project Syndicate on the relevance of Odious Debt concepts in the context of Venezuelan debt (they have an idea for an Odiousness rating system).
Slipsters are familiar with the Odious Debt debate, I suspect, since Anna G was one of its pioneers. Plus, it is fascinating. Basically, it is a doctrine of international law that says that the debts of "odious" regimes that are utilized for the private illicit purposes of the rulers (and where the creditors almost surely knew this was the case), do not have to be repaid by successor governments. The problem with this doctrine though -- to my mind, and to that of many others like Andrew Yianni, Anna, Mark W, Anupam Chander, Adam Feibelman, Sarah Ludington, Lee Buchheit, Eric Posner, Paul Stephan -- is that it simply does not exist anywhere in international law (or that the basis for it is very very thin). There are some bits and pieces of historical precedent that one could arguably cobble together; but it strikes me as implausible that any modern court would accept the existence of a doctrine of Odious Debt today -- it is just too outlandish for them to do so without a more solid signal from the international community. At least, that was my view until Jeff's book showed up.
Jeff, in his superb book, argues otherwise -- he thinks there is much more of a basis for a doctrine of Odious Debt (and he very politely calls me out for having my head up my backside). And while I can't quite bring myself to go over completely to his side, I found myself nodding in agreement with a great deal of his analysis. It is nuanced, careful and thoughtful. Darn it! I don't think I've changed my mind, but that might simply be because I'm too stubborn.
Connecticut could lose a stalwart company founded in 1851, but the outcome for the state might well be better than what we would have seen in an Aetna-Humana merger.
Thats because Aetna and CVS have far less overlap than Aetna and Humana and Mark T. Bertolini, the Aetna CEO whos no fan of Connecticut, is not calling all the shots this time around.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin sees the deal as an important opportunity for the city and the state to build a relationship with a giant health care company rooted right here in New England.
Aetna has between 5,500 and 6,000 employees in Connecticut, almost all connected with the head office in Hartford, though many of those people work from home. The total number has drifted down from about 7,000 in 2010, even as Aetnas national employment has gone up because of acquisitions.
CVS, with more than 10,000 pharmacy locations in the United States, has more than 50 pharmacies in southwestern Connecticut. A merger might be unlikely to affect those numbers since Aetna does not have retail locations and a main goal of the merger would be to connect health coverage to the public where the public shops.
The announcement by Aetna and CVS Sunday night did not give details or even substantial hints at local employment and an Aetna spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment about it.
But the nature of the deal is to expand offerings to customers, not necessarily to cut costs, though thats part of all mergers. This transaction fills an unmet need in the current health care system, the companies said in a joint statement.
Details that emerge Monday and beyond will be telling.
The administration will continue to monitor this merger as it develops and as details emerge to ensure that the best interests of consumers and Connecticut are protected, Kelly Donnelly, a spokeswoman for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, said in a written statement.
Bronin said he believes the merger gives Hartford a chance to participate rather than see a shrunken Aetna presence and he said hes had some encouragement that the company wants to be part of Hartfords recovery.
I congratulate both Aetna and CVS Health, and look forward to working with the leadership of both companies as this merger moves forward, Bronin said in a written release. I think this deal could present an important opportunity for Hartford and for Connecticut to build a partnership with what would be the nations leading health care company.
Bronin said hes been in touch with Aetna and has reached out to CVS in Rhode Island. We need to seize that opportunity, and that means working with tremendous urgency to offer a fiscally-stable, business friendly environment with strong, vibrant cities and high quality of life in all of our communities.
The mayor added that Aetna executives whom he declined to name have assured me that the companys commitment to being part of a comprehensive, sustainable solution to Hartfords longstanding fiscal challenges remains in place even in the CVS deal.
Thats a reference to the capital citys brush with bankruptcy, which appears to have been averted at least for the time being through a state package that would include refinancing of the citys debt and additional state aid. As a taxpayer, Aetna could see relief through any form of municipal reorganization, in or out of bankruptcy.
Aetna joined with The Hartford and Travelers in pledging a $50 million fund over five years to help stabilize Hartford but only as part of a comprehensive plan. The city is expected to draw on that as the state aid and refinancing unfold.
Aetna CEO Mark T. Bertolini, who spends much of his time in New York, is the wild card, as he was focused on moving the headquarters to New York before the CVS deal emerged.
In the July 2015 Aetna-Humana deal, Bertolini pointedly assured Louisville, in person, that city, the home of Humana, would keep its local workforce of 12,000 intact. Bertolini made no such assurances in Connecticut, and hinted at possible workforce declines in the event of that merger which was shot down by a federal judge who agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice in an antitrust case.
Aetna, in fact, has a history of cutting staff in Connecticut after it makes large acquisitions such as Coventry Health Care in 2013.
This time around, the companies will plead with regulators that they have relatively little overlap, which could mean less savings wrung out of Aetnas Hartford base.
Also in mid-2015, Aetna expressed anger at Connecticuts fiscal crisis as the General Aseembly raised business taxes, as General Electric did separately. An increase in the state computing tax, Aetnas main objection, ended up not happening in part because of the companys lobbying.
The corporate headquarters can be expected to see job declines even if a New York move doesnt now happen. But global headquarters functions in Hartford amount to a small number of people, as Aetna has top corporate executives around the nation.
In the end, it seems odd that the company being acquired could leave its home state in better stead than the previous deal when it was the acquirer. But with political and economic logic upside down these days, that shouldnt surprise anyone.
Alex von Kleydorff / Hearst Connecticut Media
General Electric is cutting 80 jobs in Norwalk, its last major office center in southwestern Connecticut, affecting workers in its GE Digital unit that among other goals is attempting to link industrial systems to Internet-based controls.
Last year, GE moved some 500 employees to Norwalk from its former headquarters in Fairfield, after moving 200 senior executives to Boston, where it is now based, also relocating Stamford workers to Norwalk.
In advance of a contract expiration early next year, Sikorsky Aircraft workers ratified a new five-year contract covering the Lockheed Martin subsidiarys main helicopter manufacturing plant in Stratford, as well as a facility in Florida.
More than 1,900 Connecticut members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 1150 voted on the contract, with less than 70 opposing the deal. Sikorsky indicated the deal covers more than 3,100 employees in Stratford, Shelton and Bridgeport, as well as 700 people in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Sikorsky employs 7,730 people in Connecticut today, of 13,500 globally.
The contract marks the first major new labor agreement under Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin, which spent $9 billion in November 2015 to acquire Sikorsky from Farmington-based United Technologies. Last year, Sikorskys union approved concessions as part of Lockheed Martins negotiations with the state of Connecticut for $220 million in state aid to keep Sikorskys headquarters in Stratford.
The negotiating teams for both the company and the union worked hard to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides, said Jay Bennett, vice president of human resources for Sikorsky, in a written statement.
Teamsters 1150 Secretary-Treasurer Rocco Calo could not be reached immediately Monday for comment, with members crediting him in social media posts for leading the negotiations.
Sikorskys labor contract covers the gamut, from compensation and benefits to the processes through which union members can file any grievances over working conditions. Local 1150 received Lockheed Martins last, best offer on Friday, which included wage increases of 3 percent annually over the five years of the deal, not including periodic changes calculated from formulas estimating the cost of living.
Workers will also receive a signing bonus of $5,000 paid in two installments, the first in January and the second in 2021. In 2018, employees age 55 or older can choose one of two early retirement packages that award one weeks pay for every year of employment, plus one-time bonuses of $5,000 or $20,000 and with one or two years of medical insurance coverage.
Employees will pay $124 or $101 weekly for a standard family health insurance plan, at the upper end equating to $6,400 for the year and representing 20 percent of the companys cost, with Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin picking up the balance.
Lower-premium health plans are available for $20, $43 or $76 weekly that carry maximum deductibles starting at $6,000 before claims kick in for care from physicians authorized under the plans, and more than triple that amount for out-of-network care. The new agreement stipulates that beginning in 2023 new hires will be able to choose a high-deductible plan only.
Health care costs were a significant factor in Sikorsky workers going on strike for several weeks in early 2006, with the U.S. Department of Defense later warning United Technologies on the quality of its production as the company attempted to keep pace on orders with remaining staff not on the picket line. To this day, Local 1150 maintains an online Wall of Shame pointing the finger at workers who broke ranks to go back on the job.
Corrected from an earlier version that due to a reporting error misstated the signing bonus in the new Sikorsky contract, which was $5,000 in two installments.
Includes prior reporting by Amanda Cuda.
Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
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HARTFORD Consolidating the states 12 community colleges will cut roughly 190 jobs and ultimately officials hope save $28 million, a cost analysis released by the system president on Monday shows.
Not consolidating, warned Mark Ojakian, who oversees the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, could result in a doubling of tuition at the two-year colleges within five years.
We cant raise tuition that much, we would lose students, Ojakian said, making a financial case for his Students First plan with reporters in advance of a meeting Wednesday of the finance committee of the Board of Regents for Higher Education.
Ojakian predicted it will ultimately be approved by the full board on Dec. 14, with or without the blessing of faculty.
For two years, I have been talking about the need for change, Ojakian said. I have not seen from anybody another proposal.
Ojakian wants to keep all existing community college campuses including Norwalk, Housatonic in Bridgeport, and Gateway in New Haven open but make them branches of a single joint Connecticut Community College, with a single accreditation.
The plan, Ojakian argued, is needed both to provide the systems 53,000 students with better services and address the states dire financial condition.
More Information Crunching the numbers With consolidation Projected annual tuition increases2.5% New college deficit by 2022$13M Without consolidation Deficit in five years$62M See More Collapse
Faculty like Lois Aime, Norwalk Community College Senate president and chairwoman of the Community College Governance Assembly, remain unconvinced.
Norwalk Community Colleges Senate voted 30-0 last month to object to the plan. In addition, Aime said Capital Community College, Three Rivers, Gateway in New Haven and Tunxis have also voted thumbs down.
It is still smoke and mirrors, Aime said, after reviewing the five-year cost projections for the plan issued on Monday. We again have no specifics on the elimination of positions. What positions exactly?
Erika Steiner, chief financial officer for the system, said the position cuts would include no faculty or staff who directly deal with students such as counselors or advisers. Instead, the 6 percent cut in payroll would come from campus administration, facilities, finance, human resources, marketing and Information Technology departments.
In many cases, positions eliminated on the campus level would be consolidated into systemwide positions.
Each campus will still have a go-to person for academics and finance and staffing based on campus size.
That would appear to Aime to satisfy individual accreditation requirements.
Ojakian said it would not. He added even the accrediting body the New England Association of Schools and Colleges has questioned the long-term financial solvency of the states two-year colleges on site visits.
Even with the consolidation, and projected annual tuition increases of 2.5 percent, officials estimate the new state community college would be $13 million in the red by 2022. Without consolidation, Steiner projects a deficit of $62 million five years out.
The plan also anticipates flat funding from the state even though it has sustained cuts over the past several years and flat enrollment.
Ojakian said he believes the new model could lead to an increase in enrollment if better services increases student retention.
I think this is the most responsible step to take at this point in time, Ojakian said. This is the best path forward. I want to make sure that we are doing everything we can to cut costs and increase revenue that comes in.
Experts anticipated the consolidation, if approved by the board, would take two years to complete.
The state Department of Public Health has fined three Connecticut nursing homes including one in Derby for violations that injured residents or jeopardized their safety.
Birmingham Health Center in Derby was fined $330 after a resident, who is monitored with a WanderGuard ankle sensor, left the facility. A DPH investigation found that the resident had been on a medical absence and returned to the facility on July 19. On return, staff failed to place the WanderGuard ankle sensor on the residents leg. On July 20, the resident, who suffers from vascular dementia and atrial fibrillation, was reported missing at 1:25 a.m. The resident was found down the street and returned to the facility at 1:38 a.m.
Officials at the facility did not respond to a request for comment.
Other facilities facing penalties include Autumn Lake Healthcare at New Britain, which was fined $3,000 after staff incorrectly used a ventilator machine on a resident.
According to the state, on Feb. 2 a resident with chronic respiratory failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease complained of shortness of breath and was put on a trilogy machine, a type of non-invasive ventilator, after other interventions failed to help. The resident was placed on the machine but continued to complain of shortness of breath and subsequently was taken to a hospital for observation and returned to the facility the next day, according to the citation.
An April 3, DPH investigation found the trilogy machines cuff pressure an indicator that helps ensure the ventilator is working properly had been not been measured and adjusted correctly and staff had not been trained in how to use the device.
As a result of the incident, DPH ordered and received an immediate action plan from the facility that says it will not admit any residents who require use of a trilogy machine. Also, all licensed staff and respiratory therapists will be taught how to use the machine and other non-invasive ventilators, the citation states.
Officials at the facility did not return a call seeking comment.
Avalon Health Care Center at StoneRidge in Mystic was fined $1,530 after a resident was injured on two separate occasions during wheelchair transfers.
On Sept. 14, 2016, the resident, who was a known risk for skin breakdown, sustained a skin tear on the left leg when the leg hit a wheelchair leg rest as the resident was being transferred in a bathroom. On Nov. 5, 2016, the resident was taken to an emergency department and needed 13 sutures after suffering a 7-centimenter-long leg laceration after hitting a leg on a wheelchair leg rest, according to DPH.
In the second incident, a nurses aide received disciplinary action for folding up the leg rests, rather than removing them in accordance with facility policy.
Officials at the facility did not return a call seeking comment.
This story was reported under a partnership with the Connecticut Health I-Team (c-hit.org).
At the beginning of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, now remembered as a shameful precedent in our nation's history. With Roosevelt's signature, my father, Fred T. Korematsu, and almost 120,000 other Japanese Americans were incarcerated unconstitutionally on the theory that they would be disloyal and engage in espionage against the United States.
My father resisted and stood up for what was right. He was not going to submit to an order rooted in wartime hysteria, racism and xenophobia. Instead, he stayed in San Leandro, California, and tried to hide from authorities. He was arrested and convicted of evading the order, and he eventually appealed to overturn it. His case, Korematsu v. United States, reached the Supreme Court in 1944. Instead of asking probing questions, the court acquiesced to the government's position, failed to scrutinize whether the government's claims had any basis in fact, accepted the government's contention that the incarceration was a "military necessity" and ruled against my father. The court not only abandoned its critical role as a "check" on executive power, but disregarded the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. Justice Robert Jackson dissented, calling the decision a "loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority who could bring forward a plausible claim of urgent need."
In 1981, evidence was discovered that the government had suppressed, altered and destroyed material evidence proving Japanese Americans were not engaging in espionage and the mass incarceration was unnecessary. My father was able to use the evidence of government misconduct to overturn his conviction by the U.S. District Court, utilizing a rare legal action. Today, conservative and liberal legal minds agree that Korematsu and Executive Order 9066 were wrong, and should not be repeated.
Earlier this year, President Trump issued Executive Order 13780 followed by Proclamation 9645, ostensibly for "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States." This order banned visas and U.S.-bound travel from certain countries - all countries that happened to have majority-Muslim populations. Widely known as the Muslim Travel Ban, this executive order echoes the World War II incarceration camps separating those of a different ethnicity under the guise of national security. Both executive orders under Trump and Roosevelt target and discriminate against minorities, tear families apart and preach intolerance. And I believe we will soon see they are found to be unconstitutional.
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Because my father's conviction was vacated, the Supreme Court never had the opportunity to overturn its ruling in his case that upheld the mass incarceration, nor to define the limits of executive orders. This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit will have a chance to do just that when it reviews Trump's executive order.
If the courts uphold the travel ban, it will affirm that bigotry and intolerance take precedence over our core constitutional rights. We must stop repeating history by ignoring our past indiscretions. Korematsu is a reminder that while we may sometimes be afraid during times of crisis, fear should not prevail over our fundamental freedoms. The purpose of the Constitution is to protect the liberties that were given at the founding of our country.
In 1995, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg optimistically wrote in a dissent in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena that "a Korematsu-type classification . . . will never again survive scrutiny." In 2014, Justice Antonin Scalia unequivocally stated that the ruling from Korematsu was wrong. And Scalia gave a darker premonition: "But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again . . . In times of war, the laws fall silent."
The courts must not "fall silent" and must act diligently not to repeat the mistake the legal system made in my father's case. His liberties were compromised in 1944. It must not happen again. We need to be vigilant and remember my father's words: "Stand up for what is right!"
- Korematsu is the founder and executive director of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute and the daughter of the late Presidential Medal of Freedom awardee Fred T. Korematsu.
MILFORD - Three Staten Island, N.Y. residents have been arrested for allegedly trying to use counterfeit money at the Sears store in the Connecticut Post mall.
Police were called the store around 8:30 p.m. Saturday when they were told that the trio were in possession of numerous fraudelent $100, $50 and 20 bills, according to Officer Joseph Dempsey.
Jumped before he was pushed: Alan Milburn presented his departure as 'social mobility tsar' as a resignation on a matter of principle despite the fact his term had come to an end
How strange it is that Alan Milburn should routinely have been described as the Government's 'social mobility tsar', a grandiose title to which he never objected.
After all, the Russian tsar was the apex of a system of absolute social hierarchy. Now our social mobility 'tsar' has abdicated, protesting that the Government is doing nothing to bring about the more equal country that the Social Mobility Commission was designed to support.
In fact Milburn's abdication is no more voluntary than that of Tsar Nicholas II, 100 years ago. As Justine Greening, the Education Secretary, pointed out yesterday, he'd been doing the job for five years 'and his term had come to an end'.
In other words, Milburn jumped before he was pushed, and presented it as a resignation on a matter of principle.
In one respect, Milburn really did enjoy the status of a tsar: his pronouncements as chairman of the Social Mobility Commission were always accorded complete reverence not least on the BBC and were never subjected to any sort of critical review.
When this quango was launched in 2012 by the then coalition top team of David Cameron and Nick Clegg (largely, I suspect, because both men were embarrassed by their own exclusively private education and wealthy backgrounds), Milburn declared: 'We live in a country, where, invariably, if you're born poor, you die poor.'
He repeated this on many occasions and was never challenged on it by his many TV and radio interviewers.
But it is and was completely untrue. Even the Sutton Trust, an organisation dedicated to the cause of increasing the life-chances of the less well-off, has produced research completely refuting Milburn's central proposition.
Feared
Its most recent analysis, dividing society into quartiles by income, revealed that 62 per cent of sons born to fathers in the bottom income quartile, themselves escaped into the higher three quartiles.
Education Secretary Justine Greening pointed out on the Andrew Marr show that Alan Milburn jumped before he was pushed from the role
Moreover, as you would expect, there was social movement (as defined by income) in the opposite direction.
Only 42 per cent of sons born to fathers from the top income bracket managed to retain that position in the highest income quartile and 16 per cent of those born in the top income category slid all the way to the bottom.
So why did Milburn get away with it? Well, the Conservatives didn't dare criticise him because they feared especially under David Cameron that they would be seen as defending 'elitism'. And for Labour, Milburn's position was pleasantly in accord with their own claim that only a Labour government would represent 'the many, not the few'.
Funnily enough, it is within the Labour party of which the former Cabinet minister Milburn is still a member that there has been an actual retreat in working-class success.
In 1964, 37 per cent of Labour MPs were from a family background of manual work; by 2015 that figure had plunged to just 7 per cent.
David Cameron's government dare not criticise Milburn because they feared that they would be seen as defending 'elitism'
This process is even accentuated by its current leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as the resoundingly middle-class socialist pressure group Momentum tightens its hold on the selection process.
Ludicrous
On Saturday, the Mail reported 'Labour insiders' as saying that the son of a miner, Kieran Harpham, had been de-selected as a Sheffield councillor because he was 'too authentically working-class' and 'not Left-wing enough': he has been replaced by Janet Ridler, a historian from Sheffield's wealthiest suburb, Dore.
To be fair to Alan Milburn, he is far from a Corbyn fan. He is, to the contrary, a Blairite. And, echoing his former boss, Milburn presented Brexit as a curse on British society, which must somehow be lifted. 'Tough on Brexit, tough on the causes of Brexit,' was Milburn's ludicrous slogan yesterday which is as much as to say that he thinks the British people's decision to leave the EU was nothing less than a crime.
He went on to argue, confusingly, that if Theresa May didn't do what he said about social mobility, she would be 'betraying the families who voted for Brexit'.
His claim, such as it is, seems to be that those who voted to leave the EU did so as a protest against the nation's lack of social mobility, and its alleged adverse effect on their living standards.
It is an assertion both presumptuous and pompous, based on no evidence. If anything, the pro-Brexit vote in the Labour heartlands was one in favour of greater social cohesion, and against the form of mobility defined by the EU's absolute guarantee of freedom of movement.
Milburn's ludicrous 'tough on Brexit, tough on the causes of Brexit,' slogan suggests that he thinks the British people's decision to leave the EU is nothing less than a crime
The consequent unchecked level of immigration into the UK had many benefits, but the influx of millions of Europeans to work in this country also had a depressing effect on the wages of the unskilled. Such voters would, more likely, argue that the only way Mrs May could 'betray' them over Brexit would be to do what Mr Milburn wants and keep Britain inside the Single Market (which mandates freedom of movement).
But what is it, above anything else, which enables those from less well-off homes to have a chance of prosperity? A first-class quality of free education and the prospect of regular employment at the end of it. By both these measures, Britain has actually been upping its game and it has nothing to do with Mr Milburn's Social Mobility Commission.
Employment rates have been rising, for year after year, and the proportion of families without anyone in paid work has (thankfully) gone in the opposite direction down. The latter has much to do with the benefit reforms pioneered by Iain Duncan Smith.
His colleague, Michael Gove, was also instrumental, as Education Secretary, in driving up standards in state schools by demanding a greater level of rigour in both teaching and examinations.
The result of this has been a narrowing of the quality gap and public exam outcomes between state schools and private schools.
Again, this was no thanks to the Social Mobility Commission. It had nothing useful to say about improving the standards of teaching, and instead advocated lowering standards of entry at our top universities to those from the poorest homes. What a counsel of despair.
Of course we are an unequal society. As are all societies in all nations, always. But despite the self-serving cliches of the Left, last year in the UK income inequality defined as the gap between the earnings of the richest and the poorest fell to its lowest level since 1986.
Benefit reforms pioneered by Iain Duncan Smith, left, and the drive to improve standards in state schools by his colleague Michael Gove had nothing to do with Mr Milburn's Social Mobility Commission
And, as the Chancellor Philip Hammond pointed out in his Budget speech a fortnight ago, since 2010 the incomes of the poorest 10 per cent have grown faster, proportionately, than the richest 10 per cent.
Obsessed
It's true that we are in a long period of earnings stagnation: but this applies across the developed world. And it is simply not the case that Britain is at the bottom of the international league table in terms of social mobility.
We are probably more obsessed with class than any other nation, and accent still plays too much of a role in the way we treat each other.
But as Peter Saunders, emeritus professor of sociology at Sussex University explained in his recent Civitas pamphlet, Social Mobility Delusions: 'Social mobility is the norm in Britain, not the exception, and it covers the range from top to bottom. Politicians say our social mobility rate is one of the lowest in the Western world, but studies of class mobility put Britain around the middle of the international rankings.
'The chances of moving into a different class than the one you were born into are less than in Sweden, the U.S. and Australia, but better than in Germany, France or Italy.'
So do we actually need a quango called the Social Mobility Commission?
We can certainly do without another social mobility 'tsar'.
As a much in-demand celebrity stylist, Rebecca Corbin-Murray is familiar with the all of the red carpet faux pas her A-list clients are anxious to avoid.
And London-based Corbin-Murray, 35, says there's one thing high-profile women fear more than even exposed 'side boob' or a visible foundation line.
She says her clients are most worried about being snapped with an 'armpit vagina'.
The bizarre effect occurs when a star wears a tight dress that pushes their armpits up, creating a crease that resembles an entirely different area of a woman's body.
Red carpet fail: Jennifer Lawrence, seen here displaying the crease between the armpit and torso dubbed the 'armpit vagina', is believed to have coined the phrase at the 2014 SAG awards
Confession: 'I know I have armpit fat, it's OK... it's armpit vaginas,' she said at the time
The phrase is said to have been coined by Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, who complained about it at the 2014 SAG awards.
Famous and afraid: London-based celebrity stylist Rebecca Corbin-Murray, 35, said its one of celebrities' biggest worries
She told reporters at the time: 'I know I have armpit fat, it's OK... it's armpit vaginas.'
When she apparently coined the phrase, Lawrence had appeared on the red carpet in a tight sequin dress to a string of compliments from reporters.
But in her usual deadpan style, the actress said she wasn't feeling comfortable all dolled up.
She said that her dress was 'squeezing her breasts into her armpits.'
And Corbin-Murray, who works with stars like Emma Watson and Sophie Turner, has revealed that it's not just Lawrence who worries about the issue.
The fashionista claims the armpit vagina comes up 'all the time' among the women she works with.
She told The Times: ''Sometimes it's the weirdest part of their body [they worry about].
A-list clients: Corbin-Murray works with Harry Potter star Emma Watson, pictured at the Elle Style Awards in London in February with a so-called 'armpit vagina' in evidence
All smiles: Emma avoided the dreaded armpit vagina in a spaghetti strap dress at The Circle film premiere in Paris in June
The stylist has also worked with Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner, who displayed a bit of armpit vagina at the SAG Awards in 2016
'They say: ''I've got this horrible blah-blah'', and you think ''What are they even talking about?''
'The one that comes up all the time is the arm vagina.'
In May, model Chrissy Teigen revealed that she had gotten liposuction on her armpits nearly a decade ago to avoid the dreaded armpit vagina.
'I had my armpit sucked out,' she said in reply to someone who asked what was the craziest treatment she had ever received during an interview with Byrdie.
The procedure, she said, added 'two inches of length' to her arms and made her feel more confident while wearing sleeveless shirts.
Detailing the liposuction to Refinery29, she said: 'I had an armpit sucked out, which was one of the best things. It's a big secret, but I don't care. It was nine years ago or so.'
Coming clean: In May, Model Chrissy Teigen, pictured in February, revealed that she had gotten liposuction on her armpits nearly a decade ago to avoid the dreaded armpit vagina
Unintentional: The bizarre effect occurs when a star wears a tight dress that pushes their armpits up, like the form-fitting bustier dress worn by Beyonce in 2013
Whoops: Model Sara Sampaio's tight strapless created some unintended armpit bulge while she attended the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show viewing party in New York last month
The Sports Illustrated star further explained the effects of the procedure, calling it the 'dumbest' thing she has ever done. She said the effects turned out not to be permanent and noted she was thinking of getting it done one more time.
'And I had two inches to my armpit. Now it's back though, so now I've gotta pay for [liposuction] again. It was so easy,' she added.
'It made me feel better in dresses; I felt more confident. It was the dumbest, stupidest thing I've ever done. The dumbest, but I like it, whatever. I have no regrets, honestly.'
Beverly Hills-based plastic surgeon Sheila Nazarian told Allure that their has been a slow but steady rise in the number of requests for 'bra bulge' removal surgery over the past few years.
According to the doctor, it is 'young, active' women in their twenties, thirties, and sometimes forties requesting the fat-reduction surgery, which can be achieved through liposuction, CoolSculpting, or Kybella.
Nazarian noted that liposuction is the most common procedure for this type of fat removal, and it can be performed under local anesthetic in just a few hours.
When our children were born, I never thought they would still be living with us in their 20s.
I could just about imagine them starting school, then turning into surly teenagers before reaching the age of reason and waving goodbye for ever on their 18th birthdays. Yet here we are.
Like many parents in their 50s, we find our nest is still full. Fuller than ever, because the grown-up birds take up more space than before.
They havent been here all the time. Three times we packed the car, leaving just enough space for one of them to squeeze between the mini fridge and the portable clothes rail. You unpack them into a bleak student room and cry all the way home because you know things will never be the same your baby is all grown up.
There have been post-uni absences a year in South America, a stint at the European Parliament in Brussels, periods of flat-sharing with friends.
Sarah Long (pictured centre with her husband Malcolm and their children) says she never thought her children would be still living with them in their 20s
Tom, 28, studied Economics at LSE, where he also took a Masters in European Government and Politics. He is now an innovation consultant. Ben, 26, is an artist and graduate of the University of the Arts London. Rosie, 22, read Natural Sciences at Durham and is now a maths teacher in a secondary school.
But a parent with a spare room within walking distance of a train or Tube station is a sitting duck. If you were young, would you spend half your salary on renting a pokey room in a flat with an empty fridge if there was a comfy alternative with a stocked freezer? Thought not.
Im not the only midlife parent still with cuckoos in the nest: 3.4 million young men and women live with mum and dad, the highest figure since records began, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Higher house prices, people spending longer in education and many waiting to have children are all factors.
Nearly a third of men aged 20 to 34 still live with their parents, compared with a fifth of women. Its hardly surprising in view of the cost of housing, which has created this boomerang phenomenon and the rather cruel expression failure to launch.
This is the best restaurant in town, said my son recently to a couple of friends who had dropped by and who stayed for supper. And the cheapest, I thought, as they nodded their agreement.
Now our eldest is nudging 30, our dining habits have moved on, of course. We no longer all sit down together as we did when they were biddable kids. You never know who will be in, and when, and who they might bring with them.
Its more like a student house, but where nobody has their shelf in the fridge or writes their name on their milk carton. Theres no need when the fridge magically replenishes itself and there is a moveable feast of dishes. And did I mention the wine?
Pictured left to right, Ben, 26, Tom,28, Malcolm, Sarah and Rosie, 22. Sarah says the territories collapse if she goes away with Malcolm for a weekend
Thats not to say Im the only cook. I am often treated to my kidults offerings, usually involving pasta or fajitas. But their undisputed speciality is the full English breakfast, served at all hours.
We are territorial animals. The kitchen and living areas are open to all, while the boys basement is subject to its own hygiene rules and not to be entered by those of a sensitive disposition.
For historical reasons, because she is the youngest, our daughters room is above stairs, adjacent to ours.
I sometimes panic that weve made them too comfortable
Her clothes and belongings stray on to the landing, perhaps suggesting her wish to push back the boundaries and reclaim the entire floor. She even barges into our bedroom unannounced to inspect herself in our full-length mirror before heading out.
Luckily, we have our own ensuite bathroom, but this can be ransacked for toothpaste and essentials that are too boring for them to buy for themselves. Occasionally, an adult childs room may be requisitioned for our own overnight guests, provoking a martyred look as a sleeping bag is put on the sofa. The territories collapse if we go away for a weekend, which we do as often as possible.
The upside of having a house full of adults is you do not need to put security measures in place. No burglar would dare. The downside is word may get around that there is a free house.
This term came to my attention during the teenage years when a gathering would be planned according to whose parents were vacating their premises. The risks were greater then; you were likely to come home to broken door handles, carpet stains and tales of neighbours seeing young people sitting on your roof. It makes my blood run cold to think of it.
Sarah Long (pictured) says her friends used risky tactics to encourage their children to flee the nest, one decided to take a job in New York leaving the children behind
These days, they are more sedate; the worst you find is the radio tuned to an unfamiliar station and the odd broken cup or depleted bottle of vodka.
But there was once blonde hair on my pillow and an unfamiliar book open on the bedside table, which made me feel like growling, Three Bears style: Whos been sleeping in my bed?
The overnight-guest issue cannot be ignored. They are adults, it is their home and they may invite whomever they like.
I learned this lesson one morning when prowling into my sons darkened room to get his dirty laundry (I know, but the primeval nurturing urge is not to be denied.) While fishing out his shirts and boxers, I noticed a pair of stilettos on the floor and four bare feet sticking out of the bed. Mortified, I crept out unnoticed. He now does his own washing.
As well as the intimate friends, there are the more casual ones. During a phase when we were one child down, my son invited a friend to stay for a couple of nights. When I raised an eyebrow, he said he couldnt see the problem, as we had a spare room. The friend turned out to be a German girl (perfectly pleasant) hed met in Spain, who arrived with a large suitcase and her boyfriend and stayed for two weeks.
Theres no point in doing anything now, might as well wait until theyve left. When were 80
After this, I hit on the idea of taking paying guests students at an English language school who were grateful and, crucially, out all day. No more spare room, no more passing traffic.
Now we are a full house so the students are consigned to history. Im not too disappointed. While feedback was overwhelmingly positive, one 40-year-old Hungarian felt moved to point out that some shared areas were messy.
Tidiness is not my strong suit, so I cant point the finger of blame. No doubt its my fault for failing to indoctrinate a philosophy of everything in its place.
Where it used to be tripping over Playmobil figures and Lego, its now 20 pairs of shoes cluttering up the hall, headphones tangled up with newspapers on the sofa, the table groaning beneath laptops and files, walls covered in Post-it revision notes, an overspilling ironing basket and everyone helping themselves to everyone elses chargers.
Sarah says she is secretly loving having her children in the house as it creates the illusion of a busy household
You look at the scuffed walls, water stains and gradual decline of the decor and think: Theres no point in doing anything now, might as well wait until theyve left. When were 80.
Are we to blame? I sometimes panic that weve made them too comfortable. We belong to that liberal generation who pretend they are their childrens friends, imposing none of the restrictions we were subjected to at their age. This may backfire supposing they never leave!
Friends in a similar predicament have told me of interesting solutions. One couple waited until their kidults were travelling, then sold the house and moved into a hotel, transferring all possessions into storage.
Another friend has opted to abandon her full nest by taking a job in New York, but it strikes me as a risky tactic. Whats to stop them changing the locks?
The truth is, I secretly love it. Who wants to be a dreary nuclear couple sinking into quiet middle age when you can be surrounded by young people? Adult children bring friends home, creating the illusion of a busy household that lets you push back growing old.
I like nothing more than cooking giant casseroles of food. What is the point of a family-sized kitchen if you dont have a family to fill it? Theres no way Ill make a cake just for me and my husband two middle-aged people trying to be careful but a house full of hungry young people who need the calories is the perfect excuse.
For the time being, Im enjoying being the old sofa they flop back on to. But I hope they move out before theyre, say, 40. Get their own places and settle down. Then we can go and live with them.
I want to be a nightmare mother-in-law in the granny annexe theres something to look forward to.
Invisible Women by Sarah Long is out now (Zaffre, 7.99).
Time was when winter tights were a necessity rather than a luxury, something worn by people who valued function over fashion. The opaque tight went pretty much unnoticed until it laddered or gave way at the toe.
This winter, however, tights have marched back on to the style agenda with fashion houses including Chanel, Balenciaga, Givenchy and Gucci sending them down the autumn/winter 2017 runways. And things are suddenly very complicated. Never mind colour and denier. What about leg length and waistband depth? Invisible toe seams? Cellulite-reducing crystals woven into the fabric? Has madam considered a silk gusset?
Unsurprisingly, these high-tech tights are gasp-inducingly expensive. Its common for an opaque pair to cost upwards of 20 and many leading brands are stocking styles that pass the 100 mark. The hosiery designers would like you to stop thinking of tights as disposable and consider them as investment pieces. Rather like a pair of designer jeans.
Anna Pursglove rated 6 of the most popular tights available this season with surprising results
But are the new breed of pricey tights worth it? We put six of the fashion-world favourites to the wash-and-wear test . . .
LABEL-FREE LUXURY
Gerbe Futura 40 Tights, 29.50, luxury-legs.com
Appearance: 40-denier
Best for: People (like me) who hate labels in underwear these opaques have the size woven into the fabric. From luxury French brand Gerbe, theyre all about comfort with a flat waistband to prevent digging and rolling.
Wash test: We put all the tights through a 40c wash to test durability. This pair came through perfectly. You can yank them up by the waistband without damage. Theyre pingy so the fibres just snap back into place youd be hard pressed to ladder them.
Good fit? Perfect. Im only 5ft 3in, but there was no trace of the dreaded Nora Batty wrinkling around the ankles, nor did the waistband reach my armpits.
Verdict: Although the fit was great and its smart of Gerbe to have removed the labels (I have a minor obsession with ridiculously large and itchy labels in clothing), they dont seem radically different to M&S just costlier. 2/5
BIT OF A TALL ORDER
Heist The Eighty, 24, heist-studios.com
Appearance: 80-denier
Best for: People who dont like seams. This London-based company caused a stir last month when its ads were banned from the Tube for being overtly sexual.
But among the fashion set the tights are a talking point, primarily because they have no gusset seams and the foot seam is at the base of the foot rather than uncomfortably at the end of the toes.
She says Gerbe Futura 40 Tights (pictured) felt similar to M&S' despite the higher price
In other words, theres nothing to show through your clothes or get annoyingly twisted when youre dressing in a hurry. They also have a 5,000-plus thread count, making them much softer.
Wash test: Passed with ease. They have quite a matte finish so I thought they might rip when I yanked them, but those 5,000 spirals of nylon wind around every inch of elastane (most tights have about 500) so theyre much tougher than they look.
Good fit? No much too long. The situation may have been improved if I had bought the low-waisted version (22), but the length would still have been wrong.
Verdict: A tall person may well have marked these higher. 4/5
ROLLS ROYCE OF TIGHTS
Wolford Cashmere/Silk, 145, wolfordshop.co.uk
Appearance: Wool
Best for: People with plenty of disposable cash these are very much the Rolls Royce of tights. They have a clever design feature whereby the back is cut 3cm higher than the front, meaning they stay put when you sit down.
Wash test: You must wash these cold. A friend bought the same pair earlier this year and accidentally washed them at 40c. They came out looking as though they belonged to a five-year-old!
Anna says the tights from Wolford shrunk in the wash and that they don't feel any more luxurious than the cheaper ones available on the High Street
As life is too short for cool washing, I did the same and you guessed it they shrunk.
However, they passed my yank test with ease. This cashmere doesnt feel particularly soft, so you dont feel as though youre pulling something delicate.
Good fit? Rather large in the feet . . . before the wash, that is.
Verdict: They dont feel any more luxurious than the soft wool High Street tights that cost a fraction of the price. If theres a reason to pay 145, its lost on me. 1/5
CHIC BUT NOT CHEAP
Falke No. 1 Finest Cashmere Ladies Tight, 170, falke.com
Appearance: Wool
Best for: The sharp intake of breath when you tell people how much they cost!
Wash test: As with the Wolfords, the washing instructions stipulate cool wash only. However, I subjected them to the same 40c cycle and they came out completely unscathed.
She rated Falke No. 1 Finest Cashmere Ladies Tights (pictured) 2/5, as she says you can pick up similar ones at any department store
Good fit? Yes, and these tights feel soft. I was worried I might damage them, but nothing gave way.
Verdict: Softer than the Wolford pair, while clearly made of sterner stuff, but do I love them to the value of 170? I do not.
An extra point is awarded to Falke for producing cashmere you can warm-wash, but despite that, I still dont see how they look or feel radically different from a soft merino wool pair, which you can pick up for a fraction of the price at any department store. 2/5
MARVELS FROM M&S
Autograph Velvet Touch Soft Luxe Seamfree Opaque Tights, 10, marksandspencer.com
Appearance: 60-denier
Best for: People who havent got to grips with the idea of the investment tight.
Wash test: Passed perfectly. Like the Gerbe tights, these have a high ping factor, so no danger of ripping or snagging.
She rated M&S tights the highest as she believes you can get plenty of wear out of them
Good fit? Great. The only thing they dont have (which all the expensive pairs do) is tailored feet, but Im not clear as to why these are necessary. A perfectly serviceable way to render the ends of the tights foot-shaped, I find, is just to put your feet into them.
Verdict: Exactly as described on the packet and youll get plenty of wear out of them. You really dont need to spend any more than this on 60-denier soft opaques. 5/5
SLIM YOUR HIPS
ITEM m6 Beauty Anti-Cellulite Tights, 56, luxury-legs.com
Appearance: 60-denier
Best for: People worried about wobbly hips and thighs. These tights are made by a German company that specialises in medical compression garments the sort of support-wear doctors prescribe if you suffer from deep vein thrombosis.
Plus, say the designers, woven into the fabric are ceramic crystals that convert body heat to collagen-boosting infrared frequencies, thus reducing cellulite.
The name m6 refers to the pressure point at the ankle which is supposedly stimulated by these tights, making legs feel lighter.
ITEM m6 Beauty Anti-Cellulite Tights also rated highly however she deducted a point as surgeons are sceptical of clothing which can reduce cellulite
Wash test: No problems at all. There is no yanking these things up by the waistband. The extra compression of the fabric means you need to do the old gather-and-pull routine all the way up your leg.
Good fit? The squeeze of these tights is different to anything else Ive found on the market and does slim your silhouette without making you feel as though you cant breathe.
If youre having a can I get away with it? dilemma over that Christmas party dress, these tights might just convince you to give it a go.
Its also worth mentioning that this style comes in two leg lengths a real bonus for us short-legged women who are tired of tights that bunch around the ankle. Tall women will be similarly pleased by the longer leg, which means the gusset doesnt hover somewhere around your knees.
Verdict: A point deducted for the promise of permanent cellulite reduction. Ive spoken to many a plastic surgeon about whether anti-cellulite clothing works and all of them are sceptical. 4/5
Socialite Basia Briggs recounts her eventful life including her mother's attempt to kill her own husband, her rise and fall among Britain's social elite and how her mother's affair ended her marriage - but gave her a new life
When I was just 13, my mother tried to murder her second husband, Stefan and I helped her get away with her crime.
Her name was Camilla, and she was exceptionally beautiful. When Stefan first knew her, she could barely walk down the street without attracting attention; even shopkeepers would go misty-eyed when she spoke to them.
On the surface, Stefan had little to recommend him: he was glum, ugly and a man of few words. But hed built up a huge property empire, becoming the richest Pole in Britain so Mum married him for his money.
Inevitably, the thrill of wearing mink and getting her hair done daily began to pall. Worse, Stefan was always in a bad mood, and kept photographing Mum naked in erotic poses, then showing his favourite pictures to his friends.
I urged her to leave him, but the pull of his money was too strong. Mum didnt see why she should have to leave her luxurious home for some other woman to enjoy.
Instead, she decided to kill him. One night, she crept into the kitchen and turned on all the gas rings without lighting them. Then she opened the connecting door to a small room where Stefan lay sleeping, and went upstairs to bed.
The following morning, I was woken by Mum saying: Come and help, Stefan is almost dead!
Downstairs, the overwhelming smell of gas made my eyes water and my nose run. Spluttering and choking, we dragged an unconscious, blue-faced Stefan out of his room and dialled 999.
After the ambulance had taken him away, Mum admitted shed tried to murder him. Trembling with fear, she said the plan was to say that Stefan had accidentally gassed himself.
I was horrified. And even more so when we found two policemen standing outside Stefans ward.
'I urged her to leave him, but the pull of his money was too strong. Mum didnt see why she should have to leave her luxurious home for some other woman to enjoy. Instead, she decided to kill him. One night, she crept into the kitchen and turned on all the gas rings without lighting them. Then she opened the connecting door to a small room where Stefan lay sleeping, and went upstairs to bed'
Mum was near to collapse, so I piped up and told them that her husband was drunk on a daily basis and often put the kettle on, then forgot to switch off the gas. Hes very absent-minded, I said.
The police seemed satisfied. And, incredibly, so was Stefan when he discharged himself from hospital the next day. Our miserable life resumed, as if nothing of any great significance had ever taken place.
This grim tale may well come as a surprise to those who know me as a London socialite. But the truth is that I had a dysfunctional upbringing by a mother who was not only silly but totally irresponsible.
My parents had separated the year after I was born. Mum hated me seeing my father, who was a Polish-born aristocrat.
'It didnt help my mother encouraged me: she felt that having a wayward daughter at home would be damaging to her marriage, so she paid for a one-way ticket to Australia. Only days after arriving in the dreary Melbourne suburb where Graham (back, centre) lived with his parents, I realised Id made a huge mistake. The bronzed Adonis had turned into a slob'
Whenever she spoke about him, her eyes would glisten with hatred. Your father has only got one this size, shed say, holding up her little finger. It was years before I had any idea what she meant.
When I was still very young, she met a rich widower called Mr Henryk, who was around 50 and had a face reminiscent of the actor Sid James. I adored him. On my weekends off from boarding school, hed take me to the cinema or the Natural History Museum.
After wed moved in with Mr Henryk, Mum started another affair with a man called Mr Kieconski, who was in his mid 50s and ran an antique furniture shop.
Then aged around 27, Camilla never did go for younger men. At least, not then. Somehow, she managed to keep two lovers on a string, and we seemed like one big, happy family with me at the centre. One summer, we all went to Italy for a week together.'
I knew each man was as desperate as the other to marry Mum. But she miscalculated: each died within six months of the other of a heart attack, leaving her alone for the first time.
'When I wrote in desperation to Mum, however, she told me that Stefan was against me returning. So, aged 18, I married Graham, vowing to myself that Id one day escape'
I was distraught, and even more so when Mum wrote to me at boarding school to announce that shed hastily married Stefan. The next time she wrote, she included a map to show how to get to her new husbands home where Id live for the next six years. As Stefan didnt like the fact she had a child, I was told to use a separate entrance and have meals in my room. For breakfast, Id walk to a cafe in West London. I was effectively an intruder in what was supposed to be my home.
If youd met me at 14 a year after Mum tried to kill Stefan youd never have guessed I had such a difficult home life.
Masquerading as a 17-year-old, I flitted through London high society with a pack of public-school boys who drove E-type Jags or Aston Martins. Many were in line to inherit titles and they all had plenty of money. There were hunt balls in Wiltshire, house parties in Gloucestershire, clubbing at Tramp nightclub, dinners at the most fashionable restaurants and I was an integral part of it all.
My entree had been accidental: Olga, a girl Id known since childhood, introduced me to two of the boys, aged 23, at a coffee bar. it led to a party invitation and soon I was one of the crowd.
'Every boy I met seemed to fancy me though no one tried to seduce me; it was accepted that good girls didnt. I felt Id well and truly arrived'
Every boy I met seemed to fancy me though no one tried to seduce me; it was accepted that good girls didnt. I felt Id well and truly arrived.
When it was time for me to marry, I decided, my husband would have to be titled preferably a duke. Blimey, I thought, I might even get to marry the Prince of Wales!
My ambition in those days had few bounds. At 17, intrigued by my friends constant talk about sex, I decided that I ought to give it a try. But I wasnt about to compromise my reputation, putting at risk my chance of a top-drawer marriage.
So, idiotically, I decided to go to Spain to lose my virginity.
I travelled alone to a town called Javea, near Benidorm. And one balmy evening, as I was sitting in a bar, I noticed a handsome fellow observing me intently.
He was slim and muscular, with dark hair and fabulous teeth. Later that evening, he asked me to go for a drink with him. His name was Graham, he was 29 and he was an Australian doing Europe. A few nights later, I lost my virginity to him in his campervan.
I couldnt understand what all the fuss was about, but at least I felt grown-up. And more to the point, no one need know; I could still marry well and get the house in Sloane Square that had always figured in my pipe-dreams.
When I got home, however, I was appalled to discover that I was pregnant. My mother, whod probably had plenty of experience of abortions, volunteered to arrange everything.
Unfortunately, I ended up having a botched operation which left me convinced Id never be able to bear a child. I was so tormented with guilt that all I could think about was getting pregnant again.
My old acquaintance Olga, meanwhile, had gossiped about my misfortune to all our friends. And that really marked the end of my dreams, because I knew Id lost my chance of making a splendid marriage.
My only recourse, I decided, was to leave the country, marry Graham and try for a baby. Of course I was being irrational, but I was only a teenager.
These days Basia would rather be at home than mingling with the great and good over canapes and champagne. Pictured: Basia with her husband Dick and the Queen Mother
It didnt help that my mother encouraged me: she felt that having a wayward daughter at home would be damaging to her marriage, so she paid for a one-way ticket to Australia.
Only days after arriving in the dreary Melbourne suburb where Graham lived with his parents, I realised Id made a huge mistake. The strong, bronzed Adonis Id met in Spain had turned into a slob with a beer gut.
When I wrote in desperation to Mum, however, she told me that Stefan was against me returning. So, aged 18, I married Graham, vowing to myself that Id one day escape.
Within weeks, I was wretchedly unhappy. I dont think Graham was interested in anything but women, drink and limbo dancing having once won a prize for this in a drunken contest.
The more I had sex, the more I hated it. After ceaseless nagging, Id anaesthetise myself with whisky, swallow two Mogadons and brace myself for a mauling. I even bought a chocolate-flavoured laxative and used it to doctor Grahams puddings, which did wonders for suppressing his libido.
The one thing that kept me sane was the conviction that Id one day be free. And then I got pregnant.
After my son Adam was born, I wrote to Mum again. She said a screaming baby would upset Stefan and she didnt want anyone knowing she was a grandmother as she was only 40. Still, I was thrilled with my son and that made up for a great deal. I rocked him and sang to him, glorying in my extraordinary achievement.
I certainly wasnt expecting Mums next move a sudden announcement that she and Stefan were selling up for a new life in Melbourne.
When they arrived, I wept for the sheer relief of seeing her again. That hot summer, she and Stefan stayed with us while they looked around for a place of their own.
Basia's upper-crust accent betrays just a hint of her Eastern European heritage. Pictured: She meets the Queen
As Mum paraded around in her bikini, Graham would often put his arm around her waist and say: What a lovely mother-in-law Ive got.
It soon became clear that both she and Stefan were drinking themselves into a stupor every day.
Bloody hell, Im going to die out here, I thought. Im going to grow old and ugly with overwork and unhappiness and eventually turn to drink and gulp Valium and die.
By now, I loathed Graham. But my lack of interest merely increased his desire. Not only did he nag me to join a local wife-swapping group but one night he hit me for refusing him, leaving me with a black eye.
Life limped on for another three years. I had another baby, whom I named Camilla after my mother. And Stefans liver began to fail.
Mums newest obsession was to find out when he was going to die. She also started an affair with a married man who lived next door.
Drawing on all my reserves, I took myself in hand. I had highlights put in my hair, started applying make-up and joined a model agency.
For my first job, I had to stand next to a fridge for a local paper advert. Not exactly the cover of Vogue but I vowed to save every penny for my running-away fund.
Then three momentous things happened. First, Stefan died. Next, I asked Mum to honour her promise to take me home, but she insisted she wasnt ready.
And some months later, she came to me with a funny look on her face and said: Theres something I must tell you. She and my husband, she revealed, were having an affair.
I thought she was joking until she added: My goodness, hasnt he got a big one!
Mums expression reminded me of a snakes cold and watchful, waiting for my reaction. It took all my strength to ask her calmly to leave.
Afterwards, I realised I was free. I had money saved up, and my loyalty to Mum had been the one thing keeping me in chains.
I stole Grahams passport to stop him following me. Then, with a child under each arm and just one suitcase, I headed for the airport.
'I was on a mission to change everything about Dick, from how he dressed to the way he behaved and what he ate. I persuaded him there were better things to do each evening than lurch to the pub like reading books or going to the opera'
In London, my old friend Olga took us in. But I knew Graham might come after me, and I had to find a male protector as quickly as possible. As it turned out, I met him two days after arriving. Olga was doing her make-up when the doorbell rang, and I opened the door to find a beefy, dangerous-looking man leaning against the frame.
He was dressed like a spiv in a bomber jacket and a half-undone shirt. Nestling in his chest hair was a large scorpion medallion. When he said his name was Dick, I detected a strong Cockney accent.
We chatted for 20 minutes, and he told me he was a builder whod once been a nightclub bouncer. As I listened to him talking about how to control fights, I thought: Golly, this alarming man is just what I need.
He invited me for lunch at his flat, a musty basement in Paddington with smelly dustbins at the front. Later, he took me to a pub, where I met his friends a jovial bunch of small-time crooks, builders, plumbers and electricians.
On learning my name was Basia, they all hooted with laughter: if we ended up getting married, they chortled, Id be Basher Briggs.
Dick drove me home, stopping on the way for cod and chips. He was hardly the entree I needed to high society, and yet there was something special about him: Id detected a sharp mathematical brain.
Basia Briggs is habitually remembered as a socialite, friend of the royals and thrower of some of the capitals most lavish and celebrity-studded parties. She is pictured at the Old Royal Naval College
I moved in with him three days later. We both felt we were above each other: Dick looked down at me for having Polish parents, and I looked down at him for being a small-time, drunken Cockney builder who lived in a Paddington basement.
But somehow it worked and to show my gratitude for his support, I decided to make him prosperous.
He just needed a few introductions to the rich people Id known in my teens, I thought, and then hed get better contracts.
I was on a mission to change everything about Dick, from how he dressed to the way he behaved and what he ate. I persuaded him there were better things to do each evening than lurch to the pub like reading books or going to the opera.
My friends didnt like him but were usually too scared to be rude, though, as his temper was, by his own admission, volatile. A well-known estate agent in Bayswater made that mistake once. Dick picked him up, punched him and hurled him through the air. The hapless agent landed in the gutter.
Under Dicks rough exterior, however, was a man with the raw materials to make something of himself. He knew I was trying to remould him, and he wasnt averse. In fact, his business soon began to boom.
After my divorce from Graham came through, we got married. Id have preferred a wedding reception in Claridges, but the manager of his local pub had insisted on giving us a spread as a wedding present.
None of my friends approved of the marriage. My best girlfriend told me: You wont be able to bring yourself down to his level and hes not capable of rising to yours.
I look at Dick now, in his habitual attire of a three-piece pinstripe suit from Savile Row, with a stiff-collared shirt and gentlemans brogues, and laugh at her beastly comment.
After my divorce from Graham came through, we got married [to Dick Briggs, pictured] . Id have preferred a wedding reception in Claridges, but the manager of his local pub had insisted on giving us a spread as a wedding present
As for my treacherous mother, shed returned to London after two years. I dont know how her affair with Graham ended, but it continued for some time after I left Australia.
My son later mentioned that when he stayed at his grandmothers house, he found it confusing to see his father emerge from her bedroom in the morning.
She wasnt yet 70 when she died from sepsis in 2004. Her former lover my ex-husband died in the same year from cirrhosis of the liver.
I sat with Mum all that final day, holding her hand. To ease her passing, I told her shed been a very good mother. And although she was unconscious, I saw a large tear trickle down her cheek.
When her will was read, she had left everything to her final lover.
Adapted from Mother Anguish by Basia Briggs, published by Quartet Books on December 5 at 20. To order a copy for 16 (offer valid to December 14, 2017; p&p free), visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640.
It's that time of year again. As December 25 edges closer, the drinks start flowing.
With office Christmas parties, get-togethers with friends and long, boozy lunches in full swing, it's hard to avoid a drink - even if you're usually quite abstemious.
However, it is possible to celebrate the festive season and feel merry without expanding your waistline - and with this advice, you might save yourself a few hangovers too.
FEMAIL spoke to leading Australian nutritionist and TV chef, Zoe Bingley-Pullin, for her top tips for what to drink and what to avoid this month at events.
She also shared how you can make that big night out just a touch healthier.
FEMAIL spoke to leading Australian nutritionist and TV chef, Zoe Bingley-Pullin (pictured), for her top tips for what to drink and what to avoid this month at events
According to Zoe (pictured), the best thing to bear in mind when heading towards a bar this Christmas is that the clearer the drink, in general the fewer the calories
THE GOOD
Aperol Spritzers (stock image) can be a good idea, as can any spritzers or champagne
According to Zoe, the best thing to bear in mind when heading towards a bar this Christmas is that the clearer the drink, in general the fewer the calories:
'Cocktails made from a base of soda water, fresh juice and a spirit such as vodka or gin will be the lowest in kilojoules,' Zoe told Daily Mail Australia.
'The fewer the ingredients, the better too, so keeping it simple is the way to go.'
Zoe said it's a good idea to opt for cocktails 'which are not heavily sweetened and contain fresh ingredients such as herbs or cucumber'.
Some examples which fit this criteria include mojitos, Bloody Marys, Martinis, Spritzers including champagne and the perennial summer favourite - Aperol Spritz.
'Cocktails made from a base of soda water, fresh juice and a spirit such as vodka or gin will be the lowest in kilojoules,' Zoe told Daily Mail Australia (stock image)
THE BAD
While it might feel like joyous news that you can sip on spritzers and champagne to your (near) heart's content this Yule, there is also sadly some bad news.
'The cocktails to avoid this festive season are the ones which contain cream, ice cream, condensed milk and flavoured liqueurs,' Zoe said.
'You should especially sound the warning signs if anything sounds like a dessert as these cocktails are full of sugar and kilojoules and the body will opt to process the alcohol first, which means excess energy from the sugar and fat will be stored as fat.'
Among the examples Zoe cites as drinks which will do bad things to your waistline are Long Island ice teas (which, she says, 'usually contain up to five types of alcohol as well as sugar'), Pina Coladas (which are 'made from a base of coconut cream/milk and sweetened with pineapple juice) and Daiquiris - renowned for their huge sugar content.
'The cocktails to avoid this festive season are ones which contain cream, ice cream, condensed milk and flavoured liqueurs' - Espresso Martinis are especially bad (stock image)
She also warned against Espresso Martinis - which contain a potent triangle of sugar, caffeine and alcohol.
'Not only do Espresso Martinis contains flavoured liqueur and additional sugar, but they also have a dose of caffeine,' Zoe said.
'Alcohol is a diuretic, so adding caffeine, which is also a diuretic, to the mix can lead to increased dehydration and blood sugar deregulation.'
Zoe told FEMAIL she recommends one mineral or soda water per alcoholic drink, avoiding drinking on an empty stomach and instead choosing light foods like sushi (stock image)
'Protein-rich meals or snacks pre-drinking can help to regulate blood sugar levels,' Zoe (pictured) said - she also recommends avoiding deep-fried, high fat, sugary foods
TIPS FOR A HEALTHY NIGHT OUT
Finally, Zoe shared her tips for those who want to enjoy a healthy and happy night out over Christmas and the New Year.
Zoe told FEMAIL she recommends one mineral or soda water per alcoholic drink, avoiding drinking on an empty stomach and instead choosing light foods, including sushi, sashimi, salad, rice paper rolls and chicken salad.
'Protein-rich meals or snacks pre-drinking can help to regulate blood sugar levels,' she said.
'Then, avoid deep-fried, high fat, refined sugar foods when drinking - as the body needs to deal with the alcohol before it's able to process the energy from such foods.'
For more from Zoe Bingley-Pullin, please visit her website here.
Olivia Hotschilt (pictured) was born with a rare facial condition
A 22-year-old woman born with a rare facial condition has opened up about her struggles after she was taunted throughout school.
Olivia Hotschilt, from Alstonville in northern NSW, was diagnosed with the genetic disorder craniofrontonasal dysplasia - meaning parts of her skull fused prematurely, leaving her with eyes spaced apart and no nasal bridge.
At the tender age of five, her condition took a crippling toll on her life - and the bullying became so severe, she avoided looking at herself in the mirror.
Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, the young woman said she didn't realise she was different from other children until she started kindergarten.
'I was called an "alien" on the first day I walked into school,' she said.
'At first, I was so confused about it. I saw Olivia in the mirror but I didn't understand how I could have been an alien.
'I didn't notice it until other people noticed it. It took about a year to understand why they said that name.'
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The young woman was born with the genetic disorder craniofrontonasal dysplasia - meaning parts of her skull fused prematurely, leaving her with eyes spaced apart and no nasal bridge
She said she didn't realise she was different from other children until she started kindergarten at five years old
And everyday was a constant battle for Olivia growing up where she was faced with cruel taunts or stares wherever she was in public.
'Getting on buses to go off to school, kids would turn around in seats just to point and yell insults at me,' she recalled.
'At school, I was spending lunchtimes alone, or running from bullies because I'd get bashed, unless I'd run fast enough to hide in a classroom or toilet block.
'Sometimes, you wouldn't even eat because you're just too nervous in case somebody came up behind you and push you down the stairs.
'I could keep going on forever but if I didn't have any sort of abuse at school it was few and far between.'
Struggling with the condition, Olivia said she was constantly fearing for her safety.
'People would bend around me trying to avoid getting close to me. I was stared at and talked about,' she said.
'I was constantly on the look out in case someone wanted to hurt me.'
The affects of her condition made schooling even difficult because she didn't want to return to the classroom when she was subjected to bullying
Struggling with the condition, Olivia said she was constantly fearing for her safety after she was born with the rare facial condition
The affects of her condition made schooling even difficult because she didn't want to return to the classroom when she was subjected to bullying.
'I had more days off then attending school. I would fake being sick or bribe and negotiate how to get out of school,' she said.
'Because of my condition I had a few learning difficulties making schooling harder by missing so much to avoid bullies.'
The bullying eventually spiralled out of control, and Olivia said she started self-harming after cutting off all her hair.
'I cut my hair off and I started cutting myself... I stopped eating and it just spiralled,' she said.
'The constant torment and the constant reassurance that you are just your condition.'
The constant taunts left her feeling self-conscious to a point where she'd refused to look at herself in the mirror
Looking at her own reflection in mirror now, a confident Olivia said she feels stronger than ever
The taunts left her feeling self-conscious to a point where she'd refused to look at herself in the mirror.
'There was a time in my life where it was pretty hard to even find a photo of me. I would run from cameras and hide from mirrors,' she recalled.
'My face made me angry.'
But she was able to find the strength to love herself again following four life-changing surgeries to reconstruct her face.
Despite the operations, Olivia said she was still taunted by her fellow peers.
'It didn't change much, because my first operation was so major,' she said.
'I almost got bullied worse for being this weird, scared person. I had a big scar and no hair across my head.'
Olivia was born with the rare facial condition - meaning parts of her skull fused prematurely, leaving her with eyes spaced apart and no nasal bridge
Olivia said she didn't realise she was different from other kids until she started kindergarten
But after moving schools, she finally found acceptance following another surgery at the age of 16.
'When I moved school, [the students there] welcomed me and really supported me through schooling,' she said.
'I learnt that I wasn't this monster I would have been about 16 or 17 years old when I started to feel like the person I am today.'
Looking at her own reflection in the mirror now, a confident Olivia said she feels stronger than ever.
'When I see myself, I can see my scars on my face and in my hairline. But I can see the journey I've been on and I feel peaceful about it,' she said.
'I know who I am, I know where I've been and I'm thankful for the lessons and life I've been given.'
For confidential support 24/7, please call Lifeline Australia on 13 11 14.
Rather than musing on what might have been, Prince Harrys former flames Chelsy Davy and Cressida Bonas hit the town this weekend to show him what hes missing.
Both dazzling in embellished black evening dresses, vivacious law graduate Chelsy, 32, partied at Claridges in Mayfair, while last night actress Cressida, at 28 almost a decade Meghan Markles junior, attended the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.
Chelsy and Cressy are understood to have split amicably with Harry, preferring to pursue their careers without the pressure of being a royal consort.
Chelsy recently said she couldnt cope with the attention their relationship attracted.
Rather than musing on what might have been, Prince Harrys former flames Chelsy Davy (left) and Cressida Bonas (right) hit the town this weekend to show him what hes missing
Famous friends: Cressida, right, with Poppy Delevingne at the glamorous awards last night
Dazzling: Cressida Bonas and Skye Hallam practise their poses at the theatre awards
Classic beauty: Cressida wore her short blonde locks in soft waves as she stepped out
Glitz and glamour: Cressida Bonas looked breathtaking in a black gown last night
Car trouble for Hammond
Richard Hamster Hammond is grateful to have survived a life-threatening electric car crash in the Swiss Alps while filming Amazon Primes motoring show The Grand Tour.
But, taken alongside his coma-inducing blow-out in September 2006, it has created a practical challenge car insurance. They ask, have you had any accidents? he tells me. Er, just a bit. As a show our insurance is quite high and thats my fault.
Hammonds colleague James May quotes his premium as 5,000 a year, which seems cheap at half the price.
Hicks takes the mick out of reality star
Angelica Hicks, whose father is the godson of Prince Philip, poked fun at reality TV star Kim Kardashian with his cheeky snap
Angelica Hickss father, Ashley, is the godson of Prince Philip and her great grandfather was the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, but shes not too grand for jokes.
Illustrator Angelica, 25, posted this picture online of herself wearing a frilly bra and knickers over her jeans and T-shirt.
She was poking fun at the U.S. reality TV star Kim Kardashian, who was praised by a fashion website for turning underwear into outerwear.
Angelica wrote next to the snap: Same.
Meghan Markle is used to star billing, but the American actress must get used to an uncredited role in The Firm.
Although she was the big attraction at her first public engagement on Friday, she failed to gain a mention in the Court Circular, the official record of royal events.
It read merely: Prince Henry of Wales this morning met members of the public outside the National Justice Museum, Nottingham.
A courtier tells me: Ms Markle will not be included until after their wedding.
Harry Potter star Miriam Margolyes complains she has no casting couch scandals to report.
With regret, says the 76-year-old actress, Ive never been asked to go to bed with anybody to get a part.
First there was coffee in a cone, and now one small town bakery is providing the all-important caffeine fix inside one of our favourite breakfast pastries.
Kenilworth Bakery is the mastermind behind the doughnut coffee cup, a concoction sure to delight foodies and caffeine addicts alike.
The $8 creation is a cinnamon-coated doughnut, lined around the rim with Nutella, and a shot of espresso coffee topped with a bit of milk and foam in the middle.
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Kenilworth Bakery is the mastermind behind the doughnut coffee cup, a concoction sure to delight foodies and caffeine addicts alike
The $8 creation is a cinnamon-coated doughnut, lined around the rim with Nutella, and a shot of espresso coffee topped with a bit of milk and foam in the middle
Kenilworth Bakery owner Jenna Sanders told Daily Mail Australia that the doughnut was created with the help of award-winning Melbourne barista Fernando Santi.
'Fernando was looking to relocate and wanted to collaborate with us, and we came up with the idea of the coffee cup,' she said.
With Fernando's barista talent and Jenna and her father Jeff's baking skills, they were able to come up with a formula in which the coffee wouldn't leak through the doughnut.
The Sunshine Coast bakery has even provided a hot chocolate doughnut cup for customers who don't drink coffee.
The Sunshine Coast bakery has even provided a hot chocolate doughut cup for customers who don't drink coffee
Kenilworth Bakery owner Jenna Sanders and award-winning Melbourne barista Fernando Santi (both pictured) created the doughnut coffee cup together
This isn't the first time the internet has gone crazy for a Kenilworth Bakery creation.
Just a month ago the bakery went viral after launching the 1kg doughnut competition.
Customers were challenged to complete the mammoth $20 doughnut - available with jam, nutella, or custard - on their own in just one sitting.
With Fernando's barista skills and Jenna and her father Jeff's baking skills, they were able to come up with a formula in which the coffee wouldn't leak through the doughnut
Jenna estimates that between 150 to 200 people have completed the doughnut - getting their money back and a plaque on the wall - out of 2,000 challengers.
The doughnut, which Jenna said takes about four hours to make, is still available and now a favourite among families who choose to share the giant creation.
Jenna said it has been great watching the bakery's concoctions become a hit on the internet and making more people aware of what Kenilworth has to offer.
'Its really awesome, being from a small country town and getting on the map,' she said. 'We just had to be a bit creative.'
Just a month ago the bakery went viral after launching the 1kg doughnut challenge, a mammoth $20 creation available in jam, nutella, or custard
The weekly supermarket shop is a chore few people look forward to - and it can be even more arduous with kids in tow.
But spare a thought for the children, who have to endure trawling the aisles under the watchful eye of fraught parents, all while being told to 'be quiet' and 'put that back'.
Many of the bored tots captured in these photos shared on social media have resorted to entertaining themselves, either by escaping to the electronics aisle to watch television, or building a fort from cereal boxes.
Some desperate girls and boys were snapped leaning against shop windows in the vain hope a passerby might rescue them from their supermarket hell, while others, resigned to their fate, are seen curling up in trolleys to sleep until the ordeal is over.
Trolley tantrum: Fed up of trawling the supermarket aisles, this little girl hitches a ride
Sure, grocery baskets are a handy way to tote your twins around the supermarket - but where do you put the shopping?
Even a miniature supermarket trolley of his own isn't enough to persuade this little boy that shopping is fun
A bored little girl issues a silent cry for help from the depths of a shopping mall
This brother and sister duo found an entertaining corner of a supermarket and set up camp
A cute little girl adequately sums up the feelings of anyone who has ever found themselves in a branch of IKEA at the weekend
A little boy captures the feelings of every tot trapped in a supermarket on a Saturday morning
Chilling: The weekly 'big shop' would be more bearable if we could approach it like this girl
A little boy is so bored in the Apple store he feigns suffocating himself inside his mother's top
Is it over yet? The motion of the shopping trolley has lulled this fed up tot off to sleep
Crisis point: This boy is ready to leave the supermarket, and his family has probably picked up on it
No, that's not an offbeat window display, it's a desperately bored child
When Celeste Creel walks into a room, with her flowing dark hair, cute nose and sparkling eyes, she could have walked straight off the front page of newspapers worldwide.
Because the 32-year-old from California has a very famous doppelganger - Prince Harry's bride-to-be, Meghan Markle.
Celeste, who lives in Los Angeles, where Meghan is originally from and, like her, is an actress, said: 'I also work as a professional hand and leg model and, at a recent photo-shoot, the crew were talking and I could hear whispering.
'Then someone asked, "Was I her?". They meant Meghan. I had to say no.'
Now, keen to capitalise on her likeness to the future royal, Celeste - who has an 11-month-old daughter, Ruby, with her boyfriend, sketch writer and actor Bobby Quinn Rice, 34 is planning to tout herself as a Meghan Markle lookalike.
Actress Celeste Creel, 32, from California has a very famous doppelganger - Prince Harry's bride-to-be, Meghan Markle
At a recent photoshoot, the crew thought that Celeste was in fact the future royal bride, pictured one her first official royal engagement in Nottingham last week
'I've never even watched Suits, the series that Meghan made her name as an actress in,' she said, also admitting she had not heard of her before all the media hype over her relationship with Prince Harry.
'After I was told by a friend that I looked like her, I tuned in to see her on the show and I can definitely see our similarity.'
Professional hand and leg model Celeste, who was born in New York State, but moved to California to pursue a career in Hollywood a number of years ago, even sent her image to lookalike agencies in the UK who while impressed were unable to sign her as she was US-based.
As well as being an actress, Celeste is a professional hand and leg model and is now planning a new endeavour as a Meghan lookalike
'Meghan's come into the public conscious,' Celeste, who also runs a reiki healing school called Celestial Medicine, said. 'Her forthcoming wedding at Windsor Castle in May 2018 will make her even more popular.'
But it's not just their physical appearance which the two women have in common.
Celeste believes she may even have auditioned for some of the same roles as Meghan, 36, in the past.
'I think she won them though,' she laughed. 'We're also both in our 30s and bi-racial. We've had similar experiences of growing up bi-racial in California.'
Meghan's doppelganger with her boyfriend, Bobby, and their daughter, Ruby
Celeste says she can relate to Meghan's experiences of being a bi-racial actress in Hollywood
Like Meghan, whose mother, Doria Ragland, is black, and father, Thomas Markle, is white, Celeste's parents are of mixed racial heritage.
'My father, Bryant Creel, 72, who now lives in Tennessee and is American, is white and originally of Irish, English and Scottish heritage,' Celeste explained. 'My mother, Margaret Washington, 72, is American. Her ancestors were both Choctaw Native Americans and from the Democratic Republic of Congo'
And, like her famous double, Celeste is close to both her parents and considers her mixed race background to be a benefit and a blessing.
'My parents are wonderful. Both university lecturers, they are very bright and very loving,' she explained. 'But being a bi-racial actress in Hollywood is interesting. I wonder if Meghan, too, can relate to these experiences.'
The mother-of-one predicts that Meghan and Harry will make a great team, and would like to see them do more in the US
Although Celeste admits to having a limited knowledge of the British Royal Family, she is a big fan.
'As I understand it, the Royal Family in today's world, is more symbolic than anything else,' she said. 'But don't get me wrong, that's no small thing.
'They represent British heritage, and to some extent, British culture and identity and the history of the British empire.'
She also spoke kindly about Princess Diana, who, had she lived, would have been Meghan's mother-in-law.
Celeste Creel - Meghan Markle lookalike - and her daughter, Ruby
Like Meghan, whose mother, Doria Ragland, is black, and father, Thomas Markle, is white, Celeste's parents are of mixed racial heritage
Celeste predicts that Meghan will follow in the footsteps of Princess Diana by shaking up the monarchy
'Princess Diana brought real opportunities to the monarchy,' she said. 'She did this through her independence, establishing a separate identity tied to humanitarian efforts, divorcing Charles, and dating an Egyptian man.
'I sense that Harry is building upon the tradition of his mother's independent spirit. It is so touching.'
Referring to a television contest in the UK, for Meghan lookalikes, stifling giggles, she added: 'The contestants weren't wonderful.'
But, when it comes to the real deal, she thinks Meghan Markle and Prince Harry will make an indomitable team.
'I think they'll be a great couple. I would even like to see Prince Harry and Princess Meghan run my country, and shake things up over here.' she laughed. 'I think they would be wonderful.'
Pop star Kylie Minogue's ancestor was a thief who was one of the oldest women hanged in Britain, and now images of the spot where she was executed and Australian descendants have emerged.
Kylie's relative Dinah Riddiford was publically put to death aged 69 on top of at Gloucester Jail's gate house in 1816 - in an execution known as 'The Granny Hanging'.
Genealogists have revealed Dinah was Kylie Minogue's great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, and now an image has emerged of the Riddiford Family of Ballarat in Victoria Australia, taken circa 1929, believed to be her descendants.
Court records show 69-year-old Mrs Riddiford and her son Luke were jailed for stealing two sides of bacon and two pigs' cheeks. They also pilfered one piece of tongue, a large pat of butter in an earthenware pot and a small copper tea kettle.
Luke was spared the rope and sent to a penal colony in Australia.
The Riddiford Family of Ballarat circa 1929 - descendants of Dinah Riddiford the oldest woman to be hanged in England. Back row left to right, Cyril Victor, Lillian Ivy, Percy Ronald and Reginald Leonard. Front row left to right, William Thomas Frederick, Thomas William Cooke Riddiford, Stanley Gordon, Caroline 'Queenie', Celia Ann Kirkin and Ernest Arthur Harold
Kylie Minogue is the great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Dinah Riddiford, one of the oldest women hanged in Britain
But his mother was hanged on top of at Gloucester Jail's gate house in full view of a jeering crowd on September 7, 1816.
The execution occurred as part of the August Assizes - courts which sat every few months - that saw 17 death sentences issued.
Kylie's great-grandfather Morgan Riddiford was a labourer in Thornbury, a small market town eleven miles north of Bristol, Gloucestershire.
Born in 1824, he is thought to be the illegitimate son of Maria Riddiford.
Maria was the daughter of a Dinah Riddiford, who is thought to be the daughter namesake of the Dinah who hanged at Gloucester jail in 1816.
Little is known of Kylie's paternal heritage aside from that her father is a fifth generation Australian whose family probably originated in County Clare, Ireland.
The old execution chamber at Gloucester Prison, which stands over the gatehouse
Access to birth and marriage records is more restricted in Australia than in the UK.
Lucy Tyndall works for Jailhouse Tours which runs tours and themed events at historic prisons around the UK including the now closed HM Prison Gloucester.
She said: 'We didn't know anything about it until a man came in one day and told us Kylie was related to somebody who was hung here.
'We don't know where Dinah was kept, but we are pretty sure we know where she was executed.'
Gloucester Prison opened as County Gaol in 1792 and was substantially rebuilt in 1840. It is no longer a working prison and is now a tourist attraction
Jailhouse Tours manager Paul Ross said: 'Dinah was executed for something she probably wouldn't go to jail for today.
'It would be great if Kylie and Dannii could come to visit.
'I think in the early days going to a hanging would have been like watching Gloucester Rugby on a Saturday afternoon.'
New information revealed a number of Kylie's relatives did stints inside the notorious Gloucester jail during the early 1800s.
Kylie's great-grandfather George Morgan Riddiford, the father of Kylie's maternal grandmother Millie, spent time in HM Prison Gloucester for indecent assault.
Kylie and her sister Dannii are descended from relatives who were jailed in Gloucester in the early 1800s for a number of crimes, including indecent assault
He assaulted a 14-year-old farm girl as she wandered through a field in Thornbury, near Bristol.
When he was released he relocated to the small town of Nantyffyllon in South Wales where he started a family.
His daughter Millie would later emigrate to Australia after the Second World War as a '10 pom' assisted by a government scheme.
Alongside husband Dennis and children Jean, Carol, Suzette and Noel, she set sail in 1955 on the SS New Australia before settling in Queensland, north east Australia.
Carol, who was just ten at the time, met and married Ron Minogue a decade later. Together they had three children - Kylie, Dannii and Brendan.
HM Prison Gloucester opened as County Gaol in 1792 and was substantially rebuilt in 1840.
It closed in 2013 and is currently managed by Jailhouse Tours.
Meghan Markle will officially become royal in May 2018, and with great power comes great responsibility to follow court protocol.
But while Prince Harry's new fiancee has already mastered some of the rules, she still has some way to go in order to truly be a member of 'the firm'.
Her first official engagement on Friday saw her perfect the dress code, but she was seen striding out in front of her future husband - in a significant breach of royal protocol.
It should be Harry who walks ahead, as a 'blood member' of the royal family, with Meghan walking a few steps behind.
The Suits actress also needs to work on her royal wave, which is currently rather over-enthusiastic.
And after joining the royal family, Meghan will need to ditch her love of ripped jeans - as well as remembering to never cross her legs when in public...
Meghan Markle will officially become a member of the Royal Family in May, but she still has some way to go when it comes to court protocol
Deportment and posture
Meghan has previously been seen crossing her legs in public, ankles splayed apart - such as when seated next to her now fiance at the Invictus Games earlier this year.
Royalty should not cross their legs: something that the Duchess of Cambridge has mastered.
Catherine is usually seen with her legs at one angle with a slight slant, keeping her knees and ankles together.
The Queen and Duchess of Cornwall usually tuck one ankle behind the other, keeping their knees together when seated.
Walking
Meghan breached royal protocol by walking in front of Harry during her first official engagement on Friday
Although the Nottingham excursion last week was a big success, with Meghan handling excitable crowds with aplomb and ease, she did rather get ahead of herself. Literally.
Once she marries into the Royal Family she will need to remember it is her future husband who walks ahead. Non-blood royalty should always be one or two steps (or more) behind blood royalty when on official engagements.
Dress codes
The pre-(second)-marriage Meghan will need to tweak her royal wardrobe.
Although her outfit choice during Fridays walkabout in Nottingham was on point, her penchant for ripped and distressed jeans will need to be abandoned unless she wishes to distress the royal household.
However, the Suits star appears to already be mastering the dress code, William Hanson says
No selfies
Meghan will undoubtedly have given fans the chance for a quick selfie in her previous life, but thankfully she has already realised that royalty do not do selfies.
She very politely rebuffed a few of the crowd who asked on Friday, stating the more recent addition to royal protocol.
Waving
Meghan needs to tweak her waving, too.
When she greeted press photographers on the day the engagement was announced Meghans wave was somewhat clam-like, with her fingers rapidly opening and closing against her palm.
William says Meghan needs to learn the more restrained 'Windsor wave', which is less tiring
She will need to learn the more restrained (and easier on the hand) Windsor wave, which is much more subtle and less tiring.
Her arm should extend upwards at a right angle and the hand then moves from side to side in gentle right-left motions.
How to greet The Queen
Meghan will probably have already learned that The Queen is addressed as Your Majesty when you first see her and then, afterwards, as Maam.
Etiquette expert William Hanson also offers his 'cheat sheet' for Meghan as she prepares to join the royal family
Its entry-level stuff for any student of royal protocol to know that Maam should rhyme with jam not farm.
Prince Harry refers to his grandmother as Granny but I would suggest to Meghan that she sticks to the more formal Your Majesty and Maam. Familiarity does breed contempt, as they say.
As for all other members of the Royal Family, including the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, are called Your Royal Highness and then Sir or Maam (to rhyme with jam), accordingly.
For older members of the family she will probably stick to protocol and call them Your Royal Highness, but for people such as William and Catherine, Beatrice and Eugenie, I suspect she will use their Christian names.
Currently, Meghan is an American citizen and so when she meets any member of the royal family she will not need to curtsey.
When she becomes a UK citizen she will, however, need to start curtseying when she greets The Queen and other senior members of the royal family.
Harry refers to the Queen as 'Granny', but Meghan should stick to the more formal 'Your Majesty' and 'Ma'am'
In essence, Meghan will only take her future husbands position on the pecking order (formerly called order of precedence) when with him.
Although technically she would have to curtsey to Prince George and Princess Charlotte I suspect she wont not until they come of age, anyway.
To curtsey or not to curtsey
Just as when the now Duchess of Cambridge married Prince William, there is a protocol that Meghan will need to learn and remember when it comes to remembering who curtsies to whom once she marries Prince Harry.
When she is walking down a corridor at Kensington Palace on her own, she will need to curtsey to all blood members of the Royal Family.
The Duchess of Cambridge was seen curtseying to the Queen ahead of the Easter service
When she is walking down a corridor at KP with Prince Harry (once married) she will only have to curtsey to more senior members of the British royal family. (In ascending order: New Royal baby, Princess Charlotte, Prince George, Duchess of Cambridge, Duke of Cambridge, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales, Duke of Edinburgh, The Queen).
Dining etiquette rules
When dining with The Queen, either at state banquets or more intimate family meals, Meghan will need to remember that she should not start eating before Her Majesty.
She should also keep watching the speed of The Queens eating (usually very quick) as she should stop eating when The Queen stops eating even if she still has food left on her plate.
No one should start eating before the Monarch and no one should carry on eating after the Monarch has finished.
The royal bride-to-be will be dining with The Queen, either at state banquets or more intimate family meals. Pictured is the Duchess of Cambridge attending a banquet with the Chinese president and the Queen in 2015
Tiara time
Although royalty are associated with glittering tiaras and jewels, Meghan will not be able to be seen in a tiara until she marries Harry, as only married women wear tiaras.
It is ancient etiquette that the first time a woman wears a tiara is on her wedding day to symbolise the loss of innocence and crowning of love.
Women were not allowed to wear tiaras before they married and it was seen as very gauche for a women to go and buy her own - a woman was instead expected to have tiaras passed down to her by a relative.
Accordingly, the now Duchess of Cambridge was given a 1936 Cartier tiara by The Queen to wear for her wedding to Prince William in 2011 as the Middleton family did not have any tiaras in the family and I suspect theres a tiara shortage in LA, too, so a similar arrangement may be made.
Pronunciation
Although it wont be royal protocol, I would advise Meghan to swat up on the correct British pronunciation of key venues and places.
For example, it is Bucking-um Palace NOT Bucking-HAM Palace. It she will be getting married in SINT Georges Chapel not SAINT Georges Chapel.
Queen Maxima of the Netherlands made a personal connection with one schoolgirl as she visited communities devastated by Hurricane Irma.
The 46-year-old royal was photographed cuddling the little girl as she and husband King Willem-Alexander were given a tour of a village on the island of St. Martin.
The royals finished their three-day tour of the islands of St Eustatius, Saba and St Martin over the weekend, where they saw first-hand how residents are struggling to recover after the hurricane.
Touching moment: Queen Maxima of the Netherlands was photographed hugging a little girl
Devastation: The Dutch royals were given a tour of communities hit by Hurricane Irma
Stylish: The mother-of-three wore a lace blouse and a sand-coloured fedora for the visits
The final day of their tour involved a packed schedule, including a trip to a local school and a home visit to a family whose home was ripped apart in the hurricane.
The mother-of-three showcased her usual flair for fashion in a chic lace blouse keeping her cool in the humid weather.
Rarely seen without head gear Maxima could be seen wearing a jaunty sand coloured fedora for her engagements.
She wore her famous blonde tresses loose, sweeping stray hairs from her face with a pair of sunglasses, allowing her to showcase an ornate pair of sunflower earrings.
Recovery: The Dutch royals met with a woman who lost her home in the hurricane
Raising awareness: Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander on their three-day visit
Gentle nature: The queen speaks to a group of schoolchildren on the third day of her visit
She was joined by husband King Willem-Alexander who cut a more casual aesthetic with an open collared shirt and a pair of sunglasses.
The royal couple shared an intimate moment during the musical session where Maxima could be seen whispering into her husband's ear.
Their visit comes three months after Hurricane Irma left a trail of destruction across the the Netherlands island of Sint Maarten.
On Friday the couple enjoyed a scuba session off the coast of Saba Bank, Saba Island.
Festivities: The royal couple also took part in a music lesson and celebrated local culture
The king and queen later inspected reconstruction efforts on the island following the devastating tropical storm.
Thousands of homes across the island were flattened, while luxury yachts moored in marinas have been sunk or driven on shore by the hurricane-force winds.
Locals were forced to queue for basic aid and even water as the island's infrastructure has been utterly destroyed by the hurricane.
The royal couple's first stop on Thursday was St Eustatius, before they arrived at Saba island where they also joined in on Saba Day festivities.
They have been accompanied by the State Secretary for the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Raymond Knops.
Jared Kushner appeared to have a rather carefree start to his week, despite being thrown into the heart of the Mueller probe, having been implicated as the official who told Michael Flynn to contact Russian officials on behalf of the White House.
President Trump's son-in-law, 36, was seen leaving his family's home in the upscale neighborhood of Kalorama in Washington, D.C. shortly before 7:30 on Monday morning.
He smiled as he guided his daughter Arabella, six, towards a parked Secret Service vehicle, on his way to complete the school run.
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All smiles: Jared Kushner appeared to have a serene start of the week, despite having just been named as the mystery official who told then-Trump-adviser Michael Flynn to contact Russia
Greeting the day: The senior White House adviser, 36, was seen leaving his home in the upscale neighborhood of Kalorama in Washington, D.C. a bit before 7:30 this morning
Duo: Jared smiled as he guided his daughter Arabella, six, towards a parked Secret Service vehicle, on his way to complete the school run
Jared, who stuck to his classics in a suit and striped tie, kept his eyes trained on the car and looked relaxed while he seemed to listen to something Arabella was telling him.
Arabella, his and Ivanka Trump's eldest child, carried a multicolored backpack on her way to school.
Jared is currently facing increased scrutiny over actions taken during the transition period between the November election and the January 20 inauguration, due to the former national security adviser Michael Flynn's guilty plea on charges of lying to the FBI.
President Donald Trump's son-in-law was identified as a 'very senior' transition official who directed Flynn to contact foreign governments, including Russia, about a U.N. Security Council resolution last December.
Jared wasn't named in court papers, but a former transition official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to publicly discuss the matter confirmed his involvement.
Outing: Jared, who stuck to his classics in a suit and striped tie, kept his eyes trained on the car and looked relaxed while departing his house
Ready for a day of learning: Arabella, his and Ivanka Trump's eldest child, carried a multicolored backpack on her way to school
Attention: Jared is currently facing increased scrutiny over actions taken during the transition period between the November election and the January 20 inauguration
On Sunday, Ivanka also appeared perfectly relaxed while departing her D.C. home with her two eldest children.
The first daughter, 36, was all smiles as she stepped out of the house, holding the hands of Arabella and Joseph, four.
Meanwhile, her husband, Jared Kushner, appeared at the Saban Forum in town to take part in a question and answer session about the Trump administration's approach to the Middle East.
Jared, making his first public remarks on his efforts to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, said that the president continues to weigh his options on whether to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, or whether to proceed immediately in moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city.
'The president is going to make his decision,' Kushner said in a rare public appearance at the event hosted by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. 'He is still looking at a lot of different facts.'
Meanwhile, Ivanka and her children all appeared to be in their Sunday best, with Arabella sporting a black and white dress, white jacket and a bow on her head.
On their way: On Sunday, Ivanka, 36, left her DC home accompanied by her two oldest children Arabella and Joseph, four
At their best: Ivanka was all smiles, with the three all appearing dressed up in formal clothes
Little Joseph appeared to be wearing a dapper little suit, while mom Ivanka braved the December chill with bare legs, wearing a black skirt and cream sweater accessorized with chunky earrings.
The night before, Ivanka shared a touching photo of her youngest son, Theodore, one, bundled up in a baby sleeping bag. 'Best date ever! #SaturdayNight,' she wrote on Instagram.
On Saturday, Jared was seen with a grin on his face as he and Ivanka went for a jog - just hours after his name first surfaced in the former FBI Director Robert Mueller's investigation into possible links or coordination between Trump's campaign and the Russian government.
Kushner looked directly at the camera and grinned while he and Ivanka left their residence around noon wearing matching black sportswear.
The family were keeping up serene appearances, it seemed, even though the situation they are in is anything but.
A rare appearance: Ivanka's husband Jared was busy on Sunday appearing at the Saban Forum 2017 in Washington to discuss the Middle East
'Best date ever!' The night before, Ivanka shared this image of her youngest son, Theodore, one, in a baby sleeping bag
Ivanka and Jared were out and about for about 40 minutes before they returned from their run and it seems it is just what they needed after a chaotic week.
The first daughter had spent the past few days in India where she attended an annual entrepreneurship summit. She co-hosted the event alongside India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
At the speaking engagements and dinners, the First Daughter donned a series of printed gowns that were criticized by an Indian media outlet.
The Daily O, an Indian publication, lambasted Trump for her pricey 'Oriental-style' ensembles which they described as a 'superficial assimilation' of their culture. Ivanka has not commented on the matter.
Meanwhile, following claims that Jared is the mystery official, President Trump has been accused of obstruction of justice.
On Saturday, Trump appeared to tweet that he knew Flynn lied to federal investigators over his contact with Russian officials but that he never needed to lie himself because all his their interactions were 'lawful'.
'I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!' the tweet said.
On the run: Ivanka and Jared were spotted out for a run Saturday, apparently unbothered by the mounting tension over the FBI probe into Russia
Not fussed: Jared flashed a smile to photographers before heading out for a jog
All together: The pair were out and about for the light exercise outing for about 40 minutes
The tweet appeared to be a attempt by the president to defend Flynn and disprove suspicion that there was any collusion between his aides and the Kremlin.
Instead, it placed scrutiny back on him and fueled talk of a different offense entirely.
Stunned political pundits and Democrats quickly linked it to Trump's apparent request of former FBI Director James Comey to go 'easy' on Flynn the day after he was fired.
However, later on Saturday two inside sources told The Washington Post that it was Trump's personal lawyer, John Dowd, who made the tweet. It's not clear if the president saw it before it was posted.
Flynn was fired on February 13. At the time, the president said the decision was based on him misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his interaction with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 22.
He did not admit to knowing Flynn lied in an interview with the FBI in January.
On February 14, Trump met with FBI Director Comey. Comey claims he was asked during this meeting to 'go easy' on Flynn and drop the investigation into Russian collusion.
He was fired on May 9 and says it was because he never complied with this alleged request.
The president has never admitted asking him to 'go easy' on Flynn and said that he fired him over his handling of the Hillary Clinton email scandal - which many say won him the election - months earlier.
Two former drug addicts have revealed how they defeated their addictions while living 1,000 miles apart with the help of their dogs, before meeting by chance and later falling in love.
Katelyn Hoglund, (formerly, Katelyn Mae Price), 29, and her husband Jeffrey David Hoglund, 36, got married this year and are now living happily ever after with their beloved dogs - pit bulls Sally, Kilo and Kain, and a Great Dane called Jack.
But until their paths crossed two years ago, they were both battling deadly drug habits and led dark lives of deceit and crime.
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Locked up: Katelyn Hoglund, 29, was hooked on heroin while she was living in Huntington Beach, California, where she was arrested in 2012 for drugs, stolen property and fraud
Jeffrey Hoglund, 30, was abusing painkillers, heroin and meth in Seattle, WA, and in 2011 was arrested and charged with 14 felonies - seven counts of possession and seven of trafficking
Love at first sight: In September 2015, Jeffrey moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Katelyn was living and they met through mutual friends and fell in love over their adoration of animals
Former prostitute Katelyn was hooked on heroin while living in Huntington Beach, California, while in Seattle, Washington, Jeffery was abusing painkillers, heroin and meth.
Both had run-ins with the police, were locked up and ended up getting dogs after being released, which helped them both to stay clean, while giving each of them something to live for.
Katelyn's first pup, Zero, tragically died when she was in rehab but she later got two more - Jack, now two, and Sally, three, while Jeffrey had Kilo, now seven, and Kain, one.
Then, in September 2015, Jeffrey moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Katelyn was living at the time close to her family, and they met through mutual friends.
The recovering addicts bonded over their adoration of animals, fell in love and eventually moved in together with their four-legged friends.
Now he works as director of a drug abuse center, she's a financial analyst, and they've both been clean for four years - but say they couldn't have done it without their dogs.
Dogs: Both recovering drug addicts have always loved animals separately, and they said their dogs gave them something to live for when their lives were at an all-time low
Katelyn said, 'My life before consisted of nothing more than snorting pills and sticking a needle full of dope in my arm as many times as I could. Every single day.
'Death seemed so much more inviting than trying to exist another day. I was hopeless and desperate, but my dogs gave me purpose.
'There have been many times I've wanted to use and literally the only thing that stopped me is knowing that no one can take care of my babies better than me.
'They comfort me when I'm going through a rough time, they lick away tears and it's like they can read my energy - they know when I need a little extra love.
'When I look back at my old life, I get very sad for the little girl that couldn't find her way out of the dark.
'Every morning when I wake up, and every night as I lay my head down, I thank God for this second chance at life I've been given.
'I don't think I could have done it without my dogs.'
Jeffrey added, 'Kilo gave me the opportunity to love and care for something in a way than I never had before.
Puppy love: Jeffrey and Katelyn got married this year and are now living happily ever after with four dogs Sally, Kilo, Kain and Jack
Second chance: Katelyn said she couldn't have beat her heroin addiction without the help of her animals, I was hopeless and desperate, but my dogs gave me purpose'
'Sometimes I have the thought that if it wasn't for the love and caring that I learned through her that possibly I wouldn't have cared enough about me to get and stay clean.
'I'm a drug addict living a life free from the compulsion to actively try to kill myself and that is the most amazing miracle that I have ever witnessed.'
Katelyn fell into heroin addiction after graduating college in 2009 and moved to California where she says she was in an abusive relationship with a dealer.
In 2012, she was arrested and detained over aggravated possession of drugs, receiving stolen property, fraud and misdemeanor drug charges, and eventually went to rehab.
After completing treatment Katelyn broke up with her boyfriend, moved back home to Cincnnati, Ohio close to her family and got two dogs, pit bull Sally and Great Dane Jack.
She began attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings regularly and immediately afterwards would 'go home and snuggle them.'
Jeffrey was also trying to piece his life together, and says his turning point came in March 2010 when he came across a five week old pit bull puppy in a dope house.
Happy ending: Jeffrey described their recovery as 'a miracle' and Katelyn added, 'Now I have more than I could ever wish for, a life greater than I could have imagined'
Recovering: He works as director of a drug abuse center and she's a financial analyst, and they've both been clean for four years - but say they couldn't have done it without their dogs
He said, 'I asked how much for the little white girl, and was asked "What do you got?" "Bro, I got a quarter of weed and an iPod."
'And just like that, me, a low down piece of sh*t junkie was now the owner of the soon to be named Kilo.
'From that moment she began teaching me what it was like to care for something besides myself.'
Still addicted to drugs, Jeffrey hit a low point in 2011 when he was arrested and charged with 14 felonies - seven counts of possession and seven of trafficking.
He faced 15 years behind bars but pleaded guilty and after being granted 90 days of treatment and two years of probation, he managed to get clean.
He said Kilo became his 'rock' in that time, adding: 'She singlehandedly got me through some of my roughest times being clean.'
After two years off drugs, Jeffrey moved from Seattle to Cincinnati and went on to rescue another pit bull, Kain, who had been neglected by his owner.
Then, in September 2015, he and Katelyn met at a meal with mutual friends.
'We started cracking jokes like we had known each other for years. We very shortly found out we both loved dogs. And that's all it took,' Katelyn said.
The couple moved in together in earlier this year and got married in September with their beloved pooches by their sides.
Jeffrey described their recovery as 'a miracle' and Katelyn added, 'Now I have more than I could ever wish for, a life greater than I could have imagined.
'I have the love of four of the sweetest puppies and the man of my dreams all under one roof.'
To learn more about Katelyn and Jeffrey's journeys, visit their blog, Dogs and Other Unsolicited Advice, or visit theirFacebook page.
She is referred to as 'Britain's most beautiful royal' and tonight Lady Amelia Windsor proved she is worthy of her title.
The 22-year-old royal stunned as she arrived on the red carpet of the prestigious awards ceremony in London on Monday night.
The petite blonde showcased her enviable physique in a sheer lace gown as she stepped onto the red carpet at the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington.
Lady Amelia Windsor stunned in a sheer black dress as she arrived at the British Fashion Awards on Monday
Her revealing black lace gown was embroidered with gold and silver stitching representing constellations and featured bodice boning.
Amelia chose to go bra-less opting for a pair of nipple pasties to preserve her modesty and wore a pair of black oversize pants beneath her gown.
The granddaughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent chose to keep her accessories to a minimum adding a few statement rings to her ensemble and carrying a small mirrored clutch.
Dubbed 'Britain's most beautiful royal' Lady Amelia proved herself to be worthy of her title on the red carpet
The 36th in line to the throne kept her accessories to a minimum in the form of box clutch and paired her gold stiletto heels with a pair of black ankle socks
She added further glamour to her outfit in the form of gold stilettos, which she chose to pair with black ankle socks.
The former Edinburgh University student wore her signature blonde tresses in loose waves, allowing her to showcase as dramatic smokey eye and a slick of berry lipstick.
Lady Amelia, who is 36th in line to the throne, joined other stars such as Holly Willoughby, Millie Mackintosh and Poppy Delevingne for the annual event.
The former Edinburgh University student wore her signature blonde tresses in loose waves
The 22-year-old went bra-less preserving her modesty with a pair of nipple pasties
This year's categories include Designer of the Year, Emerging Talent and Model of the Year with winners decided by a panel of judges.
There will also be three special-recognition awards which will be presented on the night. The awards have set the goal of raising 10 million as a primary fundraiser for the Education Foundation.
It comes as no surprise to see Lady Amelia in attendance this evening with the young royal becoming a regular on London's social scene.
In April last year she was named Britain's 'most beautiful royal' by society magazine Tatler and has been spotted at several high profile fashion events including London Fashion Week in September.
She was hand-picked as a muse by Dolce & Gabbana, and featured in a campaign for the Italian power house alongside another royal; Princess Olympia of Greece.
Other guests in attendance included Holly Willoughby and Millie Mackintosh who both opted for chic black ensembles
Tess Holliday has added another tattoo to her growing collection of body art, and the latest addition features a curvy woman that looks just like her.
The 32-year-old model took to Instagram Stories on Sunday to show off her large tattoo of a red-headed woman wearing a bikini top and matching sarong, which she got inked on her shin just a few days after she shared a sultry photo of herself in a lace bra.
Tess couldn't resist gushing about her 'beautiful new shin tattoo,' which was done by artist Jackie Dunn Smith at Thunderbird Tattoo in Los Angeles.
Strike a pose: Tess Holliday shared a sultry photo of herself in a lace bra a few days before she revealed her new tattoo of a curvy woman that looks just like her
Work of art: The 32-year-old model got a tattoo of a red-headed woman in a bikini and sarong on her shin while visiting Thunderbird Tattoo in Los Angeles this weekend
Although it's unclear if the tattoo was designed in Tess's likeness, the woman on her leg has the same auburn waves and flushed cheeks that she does.
Tess's close-up photo of the tattoo sees the woman posed with her hands behind her head while surrounded by flowers.
The size 22 model is clearly a fan of the ink, but she admitted that the timing of her new tattoo probably wasn't the best.
Tess and her husband, Nick Holliday, are celebrating their six-year anniversary this week with a getaway, but she will be forced to refrain from some vacation activities while her leg is healing.
'No hot tubbin for me': Tess admitted the timing of her new tattoo wasn't great because she and her husband, Nick Holliday, were about to go on vacation
Growing collection: The size 22 model has tattoos all over her arms and legs
'Who gets a giant tattoo right before you leave on a mini vacation?!' she asked while sharing a picture of her leg propped up on a pillow. 'No hot tubbin for me.'
A tattoo typically takes three to four weeks to heal, and while it is okay to shower, continued exposure to water in a bathtub or hot tub could damage the tattoo.
Of course Tess knows the drill; her arms and legs are covered with tattoos, including portraits of Dolly Parton and Miss Piggy.
'My tattoos are like a living journal for me as each one is indicative of where I was at on life,' she told Stylist in 2016. 'I was inspired by everything from other artists to nature and traveling when getting them.'
Making memories: 'My tattoos are like a living journal for me as each one is indicative of where I was at on life,' she once said
Celebration: Tess and Nick are celebrating their six-year anniversary this week
During her trip to the tattoo parlor, Tess and Nick posed for a series of snapshots in a photo booth, which she shared on Instagram on Monday in celebration of her anniversary.
'As most of you know, @nickhollidayco & I got engaged in an old photobooth, & ever since then, its been our thing (but only the chemical photobooths),' she wrote.
'This week we celebrate our 6th anniversary of driving each other nuts & Im grateful for not only him, but the friends in our life like @jackiedunnsmith that make our hearts so full #havelovewilltravel #effyourbeautystandards.'
Nick reached out to Tess on Tumblr in 2012 to tell her he loved her body positive stance, and the two have been together ever since. Together, they are raising their one-year-old son Bowie and her 11-year-old son Rylee from a previous relationship.
Too cute: The couple got engaged in a photo booth, and Tess shared a new strip of snapshots of them on Monday to celebrate their anniversary
Surprise! Tess revealed in July that she and Nick were secretly married for two years while sharing photos from their private nuptials
Tess shocked her fans in July when she revealed that she and Nick had been secretly married for two years while sharing photos from their private nuptials.
A few days before she got her new tattoo, the advocate for body positivity shared a stunning black and white photos of herself in a lace bra while taking a dig at online trolls.
'Maybe its my cold medicine talking, but do you ever notice that the angriest ppl, the ones that are always trying to bring others down to their level are the ones who failed at life?' she asked.
' I say it in my book: No person who is content with their life spends their time b***hing about other people,' she continued. '2018 is gonna be the year all the fed up folks like me come for the ignorant ones & ignite real change. Lets love each other, k?'
A mother-of-two whose ovarian cancer made her stomach so bloated she looked eight-and-a-half months pregnant said she felt 'like Mary expecting a surprise Christmas baby'.
Andrea Oliver, 54, from Teddington, south west London, would often wear baggy clothes to disguise her 'bump', as the bloating eventually became so severe, she could barely eat or breathe.
She initially thought her symptoms were panic or anxiety related, but a string of tests revealed she had stage three ovarian cancer.
Recalling her shock diagnosis last December for the first time, Mrs Oliver, who is speaking to raise awareness about the disease, said: 'Everything I was going through weirdly reminded me of the nativity story.
'Mary learnt very quickly that she was having a baby and I felt the same.
'Id gone from feeling relatively okay to looking eight-and-a-half months pregnant, like I was expecting a Christmas miracle of my own.
'After my diagnosis on December 7, thats when the bloating really got so bad that I looked like I was with child.'
Andrea Oliver, 54, from Teddington, south west London, would often wear baggy clothes to disguise her 'bump' (pictured with her daughter Katie, last Christmas)
And on December 22, she had 5.5 litres of fluid drained from her abdomen, which medics then sent away for testing.
She continued: 'Before my diagnosis, Id made Christmas puddings for the big day.
'I do it every year, its a tradition, and all I could think about, because of my bloating, was not being able to eat them.
'After the fluid was drained, I felt such relief at being able to sit around and eat my Christmas dinner with my family as planned.
'My daughters call it "the weirdest Christmas ever", but, despite everything, we had a fantastic day.
'I laughed so much I ended up with a hematoma swelling caused by a break in the wall of a blood vessel at my drain site.
'My doctors told me that, if it was caused by Christmas cheer, it was fine.'
She initially thought her symptoms were panic or anxiety related, but a string of tests revealed she had stage three ovarian cancer (pictured with Katie in May 2016)
Recalling her shock diagnosis for the first time, she said: 'Everything I was going through weirdly reminded me of the nativity story' (pictured with some friends last month)
When did her ordeal begin?
Mrs Oliver's brush with cancer began back in October 2016, when she started going to the toilet more often than usual.
Assuming she had a simple urinary tract infection, such as cystitis, she tried to combat her symptoms by drinking lots of water.
Then, weeks later, she and husband Martin, 53 - who have two daughters, Isabelle, 19, and Katie, 22 visited their eldest girl in Malaga, Spain where she was studying.
But Mrs Oliver, who started experiencing stomach cramps and loss of appetite, recalled: 'I wondered if it may be to do with all the rich food we were eating.
'Then, back home, things got even worse especially my bladder symptoms.
'Id been asked to cover a big meeting for my boss at work, but just remember thinking, Theres no way my bladder will cope with sitting in that room all day.'
A wake-up call
Deciding to see the doctor, thinking her symptoms indicated panic or anxiety, Mrs Oliver had a harsh wake-up call.
She said: 'As I sat in my GPs office, as she reeled off symptoms for ovarian cancer, I wasnt overly worried.
'Id had a couple of scares before, so thought this would be another storm in a teacup.'
Mrs Oliver said: 'Id gone from feeling relatively okay to looking eight-and-a-half months pregnant, like I was expecting a Christmas miracle of my own' (pictured with her husband Martin, and two daughters Katie and Isabelle)
Mrs Oliver's brush with cancer began back in October 2016, when she started going to the toilet more often than usual (pictured with Isabelle this summer)
String of tests
Her GP immediately sent her for a string of tests at Kingston Hospital in Surrey, where an ultrasound detected pools of fluid around her spleen and abdomen.
After speaking with a consultant, it was agreed she needed a CT scan to investigate further.
She said: 'I asked the doctor exactly what they were checking for and I was told it could be cancer cells in my peritoneum.
'I didnt even know what body part they meant, but they explained it was a thin layer of tissue lining my abdomen.
'On the way home, I Googled it and what I found was awful. It seemed to say any treatment was more about management than cure.'
Days later, the results of Mrs Oliver's CT scan confirmed there were cancer cells in her peritoneum and her omentum a double layer of fatty tissue covering the lower abdominal area.
She was transferred to Londons Royal Marsden Hospital, where the type of cancer she had was reclassified as gynaecological, and a treatment plan was drawn up.
Beginning treatment
On New Years Eve, she began a six-cycle course of chemotherapy. She recalled: 'It wasnt the way I thought Id see out 2016.
'I was terrified of chemotherapy probably more than of cancer because of the side effects - but everyone on the ward was so lovely that I soon realised my fears were unfounded.
'We had a slight blip when I developed an allergy to one of the drugs I was given. I could feel my body shutting down bit by bit, before I passed out.
'Thankfully, doctors brought me round. At first, I was terrified of what might happen if I couldnt have the drug that was meant to make me better.
'But the medical team were amazing and managed to tweak my treatment plan to make it work.'
On New Years Eve, she began a six-cycle course of chemotherapy. She recalled: 'It wasnt the way I thought Id see out 2016' (pictured with Katie and Isabelle this summer)
Now, she is working with the charity Target Ovarian Cancer to raise awareness of the signs to look out for (pictured with Katie in Malaga, Spain, just before her diagnosis)
In March this year, Mrs Oliver had a radical hysterectomy and part of her abdominal wall was removed at the Royal Marsden.
HOW TO SPOT OVARIAN CANCER Ovarian cancer is where the disease originates from the cells in and around the ovary. In the majority of cases, ovarian cancer affects women over the age of 50, or postmenopausal women. One in 73 women will develop ovarian cancer in her lifetime. Signs and symptoms: Persistent abdominal pain
Persistent abdominal bloating
Urinary frequency
Acid reflux or heartburn
Feeling full quickly The two main treatment plans are: Surgery, including taking biopsies
Chemotherapy to kill cancer cells, recommended after surgery for most stages of ovarian cancer Ovarian cancer ranks fifth in cancer deaths among women and accounts for more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive system. Survival rates by stage: Stage I ovarian cancer: 92 percent
Stage II ovarian cancer: 70 percent
Stage III ovarian cancer: 39 percent
Stage IV ovarian cancer: 17 percent Advertisement
A pathology report also confirmed she had ovarian cancer, which doctors believe was the primary cancer which had spread to her peritoneum and her omentum.
And, after her treatment finished in May, she was declared NED no evidence of disease in June.
Now, she is working with the charity Target Ovarian Cancer to raise awareness of the signs to look out for.
Working with charity
She said: 'You think with something like cancer, symptoms will be loud and clear, but mine werent.
'Its so important to step out of your busy life for a moment and just consider if everything feels okay, or if anything has changed at all.
'Target Ovarian Cancer have a fantastic symptom diary app that Id encourage anyone to use.'
Mrs Oliver is also in training for a 14-mile walk, called the Marsden March, to raise money for the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, as a thank you to everyone who looked after her.
She continued: 'Every Christmas, we have a tradition to go to a carol service.
'I remember last year, sitting there thinking, "How many more Christmases am I going to see?"
'But the human kindness I saw while I was in hospital got me through the holidays.
'This has made me incredibly thankful for NHS staff, and how kind and passionate they are.'
Anyone willing to sponsor Mrs Oliver's walk can do so here.
A prominent vaginal mesh campaigner has died from sepsis which was triggered by her controversial implant, it has been reported.
Christina Brajcic, 42, from Ontario, Canada, passed away on Thursday following a four-year battle with persistent infections - as a result of her mesh.
During her final few months, she posted an array of videos detailing her struggle with the scandal-hit devices on her Facebook page.
Tributes have flooded in for the 'courageous' interior designer, who helped to raise awareness of the 'catastrophic' mesh, which leaves many in crippling pain.
The implants, which can shrink, twist, curl and cut through internal tissue, have ruined the lives of thousands of women, leaving some on the brink of suicide.
Ms Brajcic's death follows landmark moves by English and Australian health officials to recommend the controversial implants should no longer be used.
Christina Brajcic, 42, from Ontario, Canada, passed away on Thursday following a four-year battle with persistent infections - as a result of her mesh
It is expected that the NHS will follow the guidance from Nice, the Government's healthcare adviser - despite not being obligated to do so.
The verdict comes after the Government released its three-year investigation into the mesh scandal last September. It rejected calls for a ban at the time.
Australian watchdogs also banned the use of vaginal mesh implants for prolapse last week after a review found 'the benefits do not outweigh the risks'.
However, vaginal mesh remains a viable option for surgeons operating on women suffering from incontinence in both countries.
When did her problems begin?
Before her operation to have TVT mesh fitted in 2013, Ms Brajcic was 'fit and active', according to a fundraising page created since her death.
Ms Brajcic, who had her own business, endured mild stress incontinence following the birth of her two sons, Ben and Jake.
However, soon after the procedure she suffered debilitating pain - a complaint that has been raised by thousands of other women with the mesh fitted.
She then began to get constant infections - a problem suffered by scores of women that MailOnline has reported on since it backed calls for a ban.
During her final few months, she posted an array of videos detailing her struggle with the scandal-hit devices on her Facebook page
Tributes have flooded in for the 'courageous' interior designer, who helped to raise awareness of the 'catastrophic' mesh, which leaves many in crippling pain
THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF MESH Different types of mesh implants include: Mini-sling: This implant is embedded with a metallic inserter. It sits close to the mid-section of a woman's urethra. The use of an inserter is thought to lower the risk of cutting during the procedure.
This implant is embedded with a metallic inserter. It sits close to the mid-section of a woman's urethra. The use of an inserter is thought to lower the risk of cutting during the procedure. TVT sling : Such a sling is held in place by the patient's body. It is inserted with a plastic tape by cutting the vagina and making two incisions in the abdomen. The mesh sits beneath the urethra.
: Such a sling is held in place by the patient's body. It is inserted with a plastic tape by cutting the vagina and making two incisions in the abdomen. The mesh sits beneath the urethra. TVTO sling : Inserted through the groin and sits under the urethra. This sling was intended to prevent bladder perforation.
: Inserted through the groin and sits under the urethra. This sling was intended to prevent bladder perforation. TOT sling : Involves forming a 'hammock' of fibrous tissue in the urethra. Surgeons often claim this form of implant gives them the most control during implantation.
: Involves forming a 'hammock' of fibrous tissue in the urethra. Surgeons often claim this form of implant gives them the most control during implantation. Ventral mesh rectopexy : Releases the rectum from the back of the vagina or bladder. A mesh is then fitted to the back of the rectum to prevent prolapse. Advertisement
Ms Brajcic eventually became resistant to antibiotics, having been given so many during her four year battle with vaginal mesh complications.
It's reported she would be pumped full of strong medication in her local hospital's emergency department at least once a month.
Fundraising efforts
Kath Sansom, founder of Sling The Mesh, created a JustGiving page to raise 1,000 to send to Ms Brajcic's young sons. So far, it has raised 947.
Writing on the post, Ms Sansom, 49, said: 'Chrissy was a courageous woman who, despite her suffering, remained, calm, strong and beautiful.
'Let her death not be in vain.' Ms Sansom also described her as 'determined to spread the message to stop other women suffering'.
Sling The Mesh has almost quadrupled in members in recent months. Nearly 4,600, mostly sufferers, now support the cause to ban vaginal mesh implants.
When did the scandal come to light?
The scandal came to light in April, when the NHS tried to dodge media attention over the implants that left hundreds of women in agony.
Senior doctors immediately called for a public inquiry into the controversial mesh, with some saying the scandal could be akin to thalidomide.
Before her operation to have TVT mesh fitted in 2013, Ms Brajcic was 'fit and active', according to a fundraising page (pictured with her sons Ben and Jake and husband)
Ms Brajcic eventually became resistant to antibiotics, having been given so many during her four year battle with vaginal mesh complications
NICE RECOMMEND IT SHOULD BE BANNED Controversial vaginal mesh implants should be banned, Nice said last week. The health watchdog recommends the 'gold-standard' implants should not be routinely offered for treating organ prolapse but instead just used for research or after patients are made aware of the risks. In a series of documents about vaginal mesh implants to be published in December, Nice said that 'evidence of long-term efficacy is inadequate in quality and quantity'. It added that 'when complications occur, these can be serious and have life-changing consequences' Yet, Nice also said most women do not report complications after being fitted with such implants. The health watchdog only commented on organ prolapse and not urinary incontinence or hernias, which implants are also used for. Advertisement
At the time, it was reported that at least 800 women were suing the NHS and device manufacturers. However, it is unsure how many women are now looking to take action in Britain.
Mesh, introduced 20 years ago and dubbed 'gold-standard', was promoted as a quick, cheap alternative to complex surgery for incontinence and prolapse.
Because it did not require specialist training to implant, outraged women have since begged for tougher regulations to conduct such surgery.
High-risk device in the US
Vaginal mesh has been considered a high-risk device for nearly a decade in the US, with bodies accepting up to 40 per cent of women may experience injury.
Some studies, published in an array of scientific journals, have shown that pain, erosion and perforation from the surgery can strike up to 75 per cent of women.
The alarming evidence prompted officials in three US states to suspend the practice and saw them call for an urgent review into its safety.
It's reported she would be pumped full of strong medication in her local hospital's emergency department at least once a month
Scottish officials asked for it to be suspended in Scotland in 2014 pending a similar review, but hundreds of women are still believed to be having the surgery.
More than 10,000 women a year are fitted with mesh. But only 4,800 have suffered lacerations and nerve damage from the mesh breaking into tiny fragments.
However, campaigners stress these are just the tip of the iceberg and that actually there are thousands more - but they have been kept silent.
Leading mesh manufacturer Johnson & Johnson was forced to pay out $57 million in September to a woman fitted with the implant.
Ella Ebaugh, 51, from Philadelphia, was awarded the eight-figure sum after a jury found the company to be negligent and its product defective.
Anyone wanting to donate to Ms Brjacic's family can do so here.
Men who experience flu-like symptoms after having an orgasm are allergic to sex, researchers have found.
This rare and understudied phenomenon known as post-orgasmic illness syndrome, or POIS, is believed to be caused by men having an allergy to their own semen, either through contact or due to a rush of hormones released during climax.
Symptoms can develop within seconds, minutes, or hours after sex and cause men to experience extreme fatigue, runny nose, muscle weakness, fever and sweating.
And though the exact cause is unclear, researchers speculate that it may be affecting far more men who don't report their symptoms.
Men who experience flu-like symptoms after sex have post-orgasmic illness syndrome or POIS, a rare and understudied condition that can last between two and seven days
The condition was first reported in 2002 but since then about 50 cases have been examined where men experience a range of flu-like and allergy symptoms after ejaculating.
A study from Tulane University said: 'POIS negatively affects the life of patients by limiting sexual encounters, dampening romantic prospects, creating internal struggles to avoid eroticism, and affecting patients' schedules.'
WHY DO YOU GET A HEADACHE AFTER SEX? The 'sex headaches' - which affect men more than women - come in two forms, according to Dr Margaret Redelman. The first, called pre-orgasmic headache, is triggered by a build-up of pressure that increases as sexual excitement does. And the other, orgasmic headache, has an 'explosive, throbbing quality and appears just before or at the moment of orgasm'. The pain is described, 'as if you've been hit over the head with a cricket bat.' Annabelle Knight, sex and relationship expert at Lovehoney, said those lovers who enjoy the most lively sex are most at risk of the headaches. Advertisement
Other symptoms include mood disturbances, irritability, memory difficulties, concentration lapses and incoherent speech that can last between two and seven days.
The research published in Sexual Medicine Reviews highlighted two suspected causes for the post-sex illness.
The most common theory is that some men may be allergic to their own semen, or something in their semen, which causes an immediate immune reaction.
A semen allergy is an allergic reaction to a protein found in a man's semen that mostly affects women but has been known to also affect men when semen comes in contact with the skin or mouth.
A previous study conducted on 45 Dutch men used a skin-prick test, sticking the men with their own semen, to identify an allergy.
Of the 33 who were pricked, 87 percent of men experienced POIS symptoms that started within 30 minutes after ejaculation.
Complaints of POIS symptoms were reported in their head, eyes, nose, throat, and muscles once their semen came in contact with their skin.
'They didn't feel ill when they masturbated without ejaculating, but as soon as the semen came from the testesafter that they became ill, sometimes within just a few minutes,' Marcel Waldinger, study other and professor of sexual psychopharmacology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Reuters.
Another suspected cause, is that some men's opioid receptors, including endorphins, may be affected when released during orgasms.
Their bodies could be unable to cope with the rush of hormones being released when they have sex.
And because the cause of the condition is not fully known, treating it can be difficult.
But some men have been treated with antihistamines, selective serotonin inhibitors and psychoactive drugs including benzodiazepines.
Hyposensitization is also a possible treatment by decreasing men's allergy response through exposure, meaning the more they ejaculated the lesser their symptoms became.
And for some who can't find a proper remedy, abstinence may be their best route at avoiding the uncomfortable symptoms.
Doctors are recommending NHS patients pay up to 9,000 for non-emergency operations, from earwax removal to hip replacements, to beat waiting times as rationing fears rise.
The controversial move tells doctors to push 'self-pay' options, some of which cost nearly 9,000.
It is said to give GPs 'greater options to discuss with patients' but has sparked criticism from doctors and campaigners who brand the move 'shameless'.
This comes after news last week revealed patients are to be denied cough medicines, migraine pills and heartburn remedies under sweeping NHS rationing plans.
GPs will be told to stop routinely funding thousands of treatments for almost 40 conditions when they can be bought cheaply over the counter instead.
Breakthrough medicines for heart disease and arthritis may also be restricted in future, even if they have been approved by the rationing body NICE.
NHS bosses insisted they could no longer afford to pay for routine prescriptions and major new drugs on current budgets.
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GPs have been given a 'shopping list' of non-emergency operations to offer to NHS patients willing to pay privately to beat waiting for procedures in a move branded 'shameless'
THREAT TO HEART DRUGS Doctors could refuse to prescribe blockbuster drugs for heart disease, blindness and arthritis that are routinely offered abroad. NHS bosses said patients may be refused new medicines even though they had been approved by the rationing authority NICE. The body's decisions are meant to be adopted by local trusts known as Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). Yet NHS England said CCGs should not be expected to prescribe the new medicines if they could not afford to. The proposals outlined in an NHS England board meeting last week would lead to a huge postcode lottery of promising new drugs. NICE is due to assess dozens of new treatments next year, including those for heart failure, rheumatoid arthritis and a type of blindness known as age-related macular degeneration. NHS England documents say it would be 'unfair' on patients to 'set unattainable goals'. Advertisement
'Blatant marketing around healthcare'
Such 'shopping list' procedures are being offered by the company Care UK for close to 9,000 at a treatment centre in Emersons Green, Bristol, where NHS therapies are also carried out.
At the clinic, earwax removal costs 160, a tonsillectomy 1,935 and a hip replacement 8,994.
NHS patients seeking operations at Emersons Green treatment centre currently face a six to 20-week wait, which 'underperforms against national and/or local standards.'
Yet, some GPs have hit out against the move.
Dr David Porteous, a GP at the Fishponds Family Practice, in Bristol, said: 'To see an actual price list is the most blatant bit of marketing around healthcare I can remember seeing.
'In my memory it's never been as blunt as this, as shameless as this.
'It's part of the wider privatisation, but the more sinister thing is it normalises people paying for the healthcare that is provided free by the NHS - albeit with delays and obstacles.
'I see that as part of the dismantling of healthcare at the time of need. It's about removing the expectation of state provision of services.
He said: 'If a member of the public or a member of staff reads a leaflet like that, coming from an NHS provider saying "pay for your care" - people will just assume "this is what it is now, we have to pay."
'If that becomes the cultural expectation, that the state won't pay, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.'
'Patients will be paying when they should be getting their treatments free'
A spokesman for Care UK say they are using extra capacity at the centre to offer the self-pay operations and NHS patients would not be affected.
The company says the new self-pay scheme will let those who can afford it get around 'the pressure of growing waiting lists' and gives GPs 'greater options to discuss with patients.'
Mike Campbell of the campaign group Protect Our NHS said: 'GP services have experienced almost a decade of under-investment with doctors buckling under the pressures of a huge increase in patient numbers but a shortage of doctors.
'It is totally wrong that hard-pressed GPs are now being encouraged to recommend their patients to a private company where patients will be paying when they should be getting their treatments free.
'More people are having to pay for urgent procedures either by dipping into savings or by taking out health insurance. For those who can't pay, waiting lists grow.'
A Care UK spokesman said: 'Our focus will be on making use of otherwise unused theatre time to give easy, affordable access to procedures which have been restricted or deprioritised by NHS commissioners, but which are nonetheless beneficial to patients' wellbeing and quality of life.'
Patients would receive the same care they would on the NHS and it would help people who wanted to go private but did not have health insurance, the spokesman said.
A spokesman from the NHS Bristol Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) said: 'We commissioned Care UK to provide a number of planned care treatments on the NHS at Emerson's Green Treatment Centre.
'As a private provider of healthcare they are able to offer self-pay treatment for patients, which is completely separate from the NHS.
'We are keen to stress there will continue to be a clear separation from NHS and private treatments.'
Drastic-money saving measures to be enforced
Although the health service was allocated an extra 2.8billion by the Chancellor earlier this month, it was only a third of what bosses asked for.
As a result, executives announced last week a series of drastic money-saving measures to save hundreds of millions of pounds.
In the first instance, GPs will be told to 'restrict' the funding of medications from a list of 36 common conditions.
These include items which can be bought cheaply at supermarkets or pharmacies, such as treatments for coughs and colds, paracetamol and indigestion pills, as well as remedies for dandruff, cold sores and athlete's foot.
Officials also outlined a string of other rationing initiatives that could mean longer waiting times.
However, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt last week appeared to contradict the approach as he insisted the NHS had been given a 'significant' increase in funding.
He also urged hospitals to concentrate on saving money by taking steps to prevent patient neglect.
Among the announcements, health bosses also warned of:
Patients being refused new drugs for heart conditions, diabetes and blindness if their local NHS board decides they are too expensive.
Widespread rationing for cataract surgery, hip and knee replacements and IVF.
Longer waiting times for A&E, cancer treatment, routine operations and scans.
'The NHS should not be paying for low-value treatments'
The NHS is under severe pressure from the ageing population, migration and the growing toll of lifestyle-related conditions such as obesity and diabetes.
Although health funding has been increased by the Government year-on-year, experts say it has not kept pace with demand.
Ahead of this month's Budget, leading health-think tanks backed by NHS England, which runs the health service had asked for an extra 8billion for the health service over two years.
Chancellor Philip Hammond allocated 2.8billion last week while stressing that hospitals would need to cut waiting times in A&E and for routine operations.
Officials from NHS England began drafting plans to ration certain prescription medicines and other surgical procedures.
Yet last week they said the Government's refusal to pump in the cash they needed meant many more treatments may be cut. NHS England has drawn up a list of 36 types of treatments which GPs should no longer prescribe.
The restrictions would affect around 3,200 medicines and remedies.
They include cough mixture, migraine pills, anti-dandruff shampoos and paracetamol, which can be bought in supermarkets, chemists and petrol stations. Nappy rash cream, head lice treatment, ibuprofen and medication for athlete's food are also on the list.
Officials said rationing would save 190million a year while freeing up millions of GP appointments that would have been spent writing out prescriptions.
A consultation on the plans begins this month with a final list of 'restricted' medicines expected by next year.
Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said he was 'determined to make taxpayers' money go further'. He added: 'The NHS should not be paying for low-value treatments and it's right that we look at reducing prescriptions for medicines that patients can buy for a fraction of the price the NHS pays.'
'This would risk adversely affecting the most vulnerable'
Yet Rachel Power, from the Patients Association, said many would lose out as a result of political decisions about the funding of health care.
She warned of the 'complex consequences' of the NHS' drive to cut spending, including the relationship between GPs and their patients.
Don Redding from National Voices a coalition of 160 health and social charities said: 'If taken forward, these plans could mean that some treatments are only available to those who can afford them.
'This would risk adversely affecting those people who currently get free prescriptions, which includes some of the most vulnerable in our society and those who are just about managing.'
NHS England also announced that 11 less commonly-used treatments such as herbal supplements and homeopathy remedies would be restricted immediately.
Others include muscle-rubs, medicines for joint pain and strong painkillers, which are either expensive or considered ineffective.
Yet last week, the Health Secretary appeared to contradict NHS England's warnings by claiming they had been given a 'significant' increase to their budget.
He also said waiting times would get shorter, not longer, and urged hospitals to save money by taking simple measures to prevent neglect.
Addressing a conference in London, he said: 'The working assumption is that poor quality care is about the most expensive care.
'If someone has a fall that could have been avoided, they stay in hospital, maybe they then get a pressure ulcer and continue to take up a bed for one week, two weeks, three weeks, which is expensive for the NHS.'
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The first American child ever born from a uterus transplant is a 'beautiful baby boy' who is healthy, eating and out of his incubator, the medical team revealed on Monday.
The mother, who remains anonymous, is also healthy and recuperating from the groundbreaking birth a year after she received a womb from a nurse who lives near Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, where the operation was performed.
The hospital confirmed on Friday that the birth had taken place. Speaking at a press conference on Monday morning, Dr Robert Gundy Jr, who delivered the child, wept as he said it was the most special delivery he's ever experienced.
The family said in a statement that they feel 'blessed' to have been part of the study, and they hope the breakthrough demonstrates to their child 'that no matter what obstacles are in your path, with the right team working beside you, anything is possible'.
The team included one of the surgeons from Sweden, who delivered the world's first uterus transplant baby and was on-hand to offer expert advice.
But while Sweden's donors and recipients were all related, Dallas has had an unprecedented amount of 'altruistic' women offered this wombs to strangers, coming close to 200 - with interest soaring after news of this birth broke on Friday.
'This is a great day for medical research': Dr. Giuliano Testa, the leader of the uterus transplant clinical trial at Baylor, hailed the birth as a breakthrough as he held a press conference on Monday morning with the surgical team
Weeping: Dr Robert Gundy Jr (left), who delivered the baby, wept as he said it was one of the most special deliveries he's ever experienced
New pictures: The team also released some new images (including this, above) from the birth, which was first announced on Friday
Unseen: This image captured the team performing the c-section on the woman a year after she received a uterus transplant
The breakthrough comes after years of attempts by various hospitals to perfect the art of womb transplants, which has only been a success in Sweden. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio made headlines in early 2016 after transplanting a deceased donor's womb into a patient, but it had to be removed days later due to a yeast infection.
In October 2016, Baylor quietly announced it had performed four uterus transplants using living donors - the same approach as the Swedish team. Though three had to be removed due to poor blood flow, one was a success.
'There was something so tremendously special about this delivery,' Dr Gundy, who has delivered thousands of babies in his decades-long career, said tearfully.
'I've delivered thousands of babies but there was something about this that was so special...' he trailed off, adding 'sorry, I'm an emotional person.'
He continued: 'There was something so exciting about this because the patients were so excited and what they were willing to go through was tremendous.'
Dr Gundy explained they were all on tenterhooks throughout the pregnancy and heavily relied on Kristin Wallace, the coordinator between the family and the surgical team, to ensure the mother was having a smooth pregnancy.
'Kristen has shepherded us all through this. Every sniffle she had, every time she fell, we were just panicked about what would happen to the pregnancy, so it was difficult.'
Dr Gregory McKenna, a transplant surgeon at Baylor, added that this transplant was one of the most terrifying he has experienced.
'With a kidney, you know if it's working within seconds. With this, ultimately it's a year before you can find out.' So it's been a long run for us compared to what we normally do.'
On Monday, the team shared the staggering news that close to 200 women have offered up their uterus for other women to have as a transplant.
'When we started this, we were expecting relatives or people who knew the patients. But the number of altruistic donors was overwhelming,' Wallace explained.
'We are still going through all of them. It's going to take a while but we will get back to all of them!'
At the end of the conference the team shared a statement from the family: 'We consider ourselves profoundly blessed to have been a part of this study and we are optimistic that this initial success will lead to many more in the future.
'We humbly hope that our little boy can serve as an inspiration to those struggling with infertility, and demonstrate throughout his life that no matter what obstacles are in your path, with the right team working beside you, anything is possible.'
This is the first American baby born after a uterus transplant in Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. Pictured: Dr Robert T. Gunby Jr holds up the baby to show the mother
The baby's boy's birth was announced on Friday, a year after Baylor performed four womb transplants
On Monday, the new mother and father said they hope the breakthrough demonstrates to their child 'that no matter what obstacles are in your path, with the right team working beside you, anything is possible'
HOW IS A WOMB TRANSPLANT PERFORMED? The first step involves doctors removing some of the patients' eggs in order to fertilize them in a dish to create embryos. These are then frozen, until they are needed. Secondly, a womb, complete with two major arteries and four veins, removed from a from donor in a three-hour operation. The donated womb is then implanted into the patient during an operation that typically takes around six hours. The woman is then, as all organ transplant patients are, prescribed powerful immune-suppressing drugs to stop the transplanted womb being rejected by the body. Around a year later, when doctors are confident the transplant is a success, one of the embryos is thawed and implanted into the donated womb. If the pregnancy is a success, doctors ultimately deliver the baby via C-section. Once a woman has successfully carried one or two babies, the transplanted organ is then removed. Advertisement
Baylor has had a study underway for several years to enroll up to 10 women for uterus transplants.
In October 2016, the hospital said four women had received transplants but that three of the wombs had to be removed because of poor blood flow.
The hospital would give no further information on how many transplants have been performed since then.
But Time magazine, which first reported the US baby's birth, says eight have been done in all, and that another woman is currently pregnant as a result.
The first four cases involved 'altruistic' donors unrelated and unknown to the recipients. The ones done in Sweden were from live donors, mostly from the recipients' mother or a sister.
While little is known about the new mother, Time spoke to her donor Taylor Siler, 36, who is a registered nurse and mother-of-two in Dallas.
'I have family members who struggled to have babies, and it's not fair,' Siler told the newspaper. 'I just think that if we can give more people that option, that's an awesome thing.'
A doctor in Sweden, Mats Brannstrom, is the first in the world to deliver a baby as a result of a uterus transplant. As of last year, he had delivered five babies from women with donated wombs.
There have been at least 16 uterus transplants worldwide, including one in Cleveland from a deceased donor that had to be removed because of complications. Last month, Penn Medicine in Philadelphia announced that it also would start offering womb transplants.
Womb donors can be dead or alive, and the Baylor study aims to use some of both.
Doctors hope that womb transplants will enable as many as several thousand women born without a uterus to bear children.
To be eligible for the Baylor study, women must be 20 to 35 years old and have healthy, normal ovaries. They will first have in vitro fertilization to retrieve and fertilize their eggs and produce embryos that can be frozen until they are ready to attempt pregnancy.
After the uterus transplant, the embryos can be thawed and implanted, at least a year after the transplant to make sure the womb is working well.
A baby resulting from a uterine transplant would be delivered by cesarean section.
The wombs are not intended to be permanent.
Having one means a woman must take powerful drugs to prevent organ rejection, and the drugs pose long-term health risks, so the uterus would be removed after one or two successful pregnancies.
The American Society for Reproductive Medicine issued a statement Friday calling the Dallas birth 'another important milestone in the history of reproductive medicine.'
For women born without a functioning uterus, 'transplantation represents the only way they can carry a pregnancy,' the statement said. The group is convening experts to develop guidelines for programs that want to offer this service.
The best personalities are cultivated in California, according to a new study.
Year-round sunshine and mild temperatures were found to positively affect people's overall personalities based on key traits, while they said residents of colder climates, such as Massachusetts, are more likely to be rude and unpleasant people.
The study also pinpointed the perfect temperature for good personalities - suggesting that growing up in the average San Jose temperature of 71 degrees will produce the most agreeable, emotionally stable and open people.
And good weather not only leads to a spike in positive mood and personality, but those living in warmer areas are also less likely to suffer from seasonal depression.
Average Southern California weather of 71 degrees produces the best personalities, according to an international team of researchers
The hundreds of personality traits used to describe humans are largely captured by five broad dimensions called the Big Five: agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extroversion, and openness to experience.
Now an international team of researchers has examined 1.6million people in a large study spanning areas in the US and China to find out how weather influences those traits.
Researchers from the University of Texas were able to identify a positive association between those who grew up in a mild climate and the Big Five personality characteristics through a psychological assessments.
DO YOU HAVE SAD SYMPTOMS? According to the National Institute of Mental Health, symptoms of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) can include: A persistent low mood and/or low self-esteem Tearfulness, feelings of despair, guilt and worthlessness Carb cravings and weight gain Sleeping for longer than normal and finding it hard to get up in the morning. Nausea upon waking may also be a symptom Feeling lethargic and sleepy during the day Irritability and feeling stressed or anxious Lack of libido and/or loss of pleasure or interest in normal everyday activities Advertisement
Participants in the US ranked themselves from one to five on a 44-question self-reported personality test called the Big Five Inventory.
The study published in Nature found that residents of mild environments, such as California, scored higher on key personality traits including agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability than those living in colder conditions.
'The idea is that, as a warm-blooded species, humans have a basic need for thermal comfort,' Samuel Gosling, study researcher and professor at the University of Texas told Huffington Post.
'Pleasant temperatures encourage individuals to explore the outside environment, where both social interactions and new experiences abound,' he added.
Californians have 12 months to enjoy the outdoors, whereas those in the northeast spend around four months weathering the cold, which can lead to lower interest in socializing.
So while January can be spent on a 65-degree hike in the Hollywood Hills, Bostonians will be shoveling the snow off their car at below freezing temperatures, which could clearly effect personality and mood.
And the study determined that the further temperatures deterred either way from 71 degrees, the lower participants scored.
Researchers said the findings provide a new perspective on how and why personalities vary across geographical regions beyond previous economic theories including subsistence style and selective migration.
The study took into account age, gender and economic status, which proved to not sway the results - concluding that temperature plays a large role in personality traits.
Those who experience colder winters are also more likely to suffer seasonal affective disorder or SAD due to lack of sunlight.
SAD is a form of depression that affects more than three million Americans each year when the clock turns forward an hour and daylight is decreased.
Bostonians who experience temperatures below freezing have the reputation of being unpleasant and blunt, as seen in the gloomy Massachusetts-based movie Manchester by the Sea
It is categorized as a persistent low mood, low self esteem, feelings of despair and worthlessness.
Lack of sunlight can cause a drop in serotonin levels, a brain chemical or neurotransmitter that affects mood. And the winter months can increase melatonin levels, which induces sleep.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, seasonal depression is found in those who live further from the equator.
A study discovered that one percent of Floridians suffered from SAD whereas nine percent suffered in New England.
'When the ambient temperature is either too hot or too cold, individuals are less likely to go outside and therefore less likely to meet up with friends, to try new activities,' said Samuel Gosling.
This lack of interest in socializing due to weather resulted in a drop on the scale.
The NIH recommends getting as much sunlight as possible and exercising regularly to combat the harsh winters.
But if that seems impossible due to your location, maybe it's time to move to San Diego.
Samm Micklethwaite (pictured with her son Roman) was induced at 42 weeks and developed a sepsis infection
At 42 weeks pregnant Samm Micklethwaite was happy to be induced. Eight hours later, she was in labour, but after two hours pushing, and two failed attempts at delivering her baby with forceps, she had to undergo an emergency caesarean, 26 hours after her induction.
Not long after her son Roman was safely delivered, Samm, 33, a supermarket duty manager from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, developed a fever and started vomiting. I felt certain something wasnt right, she recalls.
Six hours later, Samm developed a pain she describes as ten times worse than labour in her abdomen, and begged for a doctor to examine her, only to be told by midwives that her discomfort was to be expected after her surgery.
Three days later, Samms heart rate suddenly dangerously spiked to 215 beats a minute three times the normal resting rate and she couldnt pass urine. A CT scan and X-ray revealed she had an abdominal infection, which had sent her body into septic shock.
I was in hospital for ten days, and barely remember any moments with my son, says Samm. Now, 14 months on, I am still suffering severe pain.
Samm and husband Wayne, who have started legal proceedings for medical negligence, are convinced that had she been induced earlier, she would have avoided both the emergency caesarean and the life-threatening infection.
The risk of a woman developing an infection after her waters have broken rises from 0.16 per cent after 37 weeks to 6.15 per cent at over 42 weeks, according to a study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 2003.
The risk of a woman developing an infection after her waters have broken rises from 0.16 per cent after 37 weeks to 6.15 per cent at over 42 weeks, according to a study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 2003
A prolonged pregnancy also raises the risks of placental abruption where the placenta separates from the womb, depriving the baby of oxygen and nutrients, and causing life-threatening bleeding: the risk is highest (0.44 per cent) at 42 weeks, according to a study in the same journal a year later.
But could inducing women before they reach 40 weeks reduce such complications? And, perhaps more importantly, could it also cut the number of babies being stillborn?
Last year, 696,271 babies were born safely in England and Wales but the stillbirth figures remain largely unchanged from the early Nineties and the UK is ranked 24th out of 49 high-income countries for stillbirths (where the baby dies after 24 weeks of pregnancy).
Last week, the health secretary Jeremy Hunt pledged to halve the rates of stillbirths, maternal and newborn deaths by 2025.
Rachael Seddon is tortured by the thought that had her daughter Hope been delivered just a few days earlier, she would not have been stillborn
He announced that all deaths will be referred to a new NHS safety investigator and, within a week of the cause of death being established, the findings will be shared with NHS trusts across the country to avoid a repeat of the same mistake.
But could there be a simpler, more radical way to reduce stillbirths by inducing women before 40 weeks?
Under current NHS guidelines, pregnant women are offered induction at between 41 and 42 weeks gestation.
Contrast this with Denmark, which has one of the lowest stillbirth rates in the world. This has been ascribed to the fact that a quarter of women pregnant beyond 37 weeks are now induced. Very few Danish women go to 42 weeks, following a national effort to prevent prolonged pregnancy, according to a study published in 2014 in the journal BMJ Open.
These findings were controversial, with commentators pointing out there were other factors involved.
But now a major UK study, involving 77,327 low-risk first-time mothers, has found inducing women at 40 weeks could reduce the number of stillbirths or deaths of babies within seven days of birth by a massive 66 per cent from 26 per 10,000 pregnancies to just eight.
The groundbreaking study, which looked at mothers over the age of 35, represents the strongest evidence yet that moving the offer of induction to 40 weeks might reduce the risk of stillbirth in this specific age group, which we know faces a greater risk of stillbirth and neonatal death, said Hannah Knight, of the National Maternity and Perinatal Audit at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, who led the study conducted jointly with the University of Cambridge and published in the journal PLOS Medicine.
In fact there are even suggestions that all women should be induced earlier, not just those aged 35 and older. An ongoing study in the U.S. is looking at inducing labour at 39 weeks as standard to see if it can improve birth outcome statistics.
Why we've got it wrong on 'overdue' babies So why do some babies go overdue in the first place? Research has suggested that higher weight gain in pregnancy, older maternal age and a family history of prolonged pregnancy may contribute. One simple explanation is that some pregnancies may be slightly misdated if the first day of the last period is used to calculate the due date. This method assumes that ovulation, and therefore conception, takes place two weeks later yet women may ovulate several days after this, or the embryo may take slightly longer to implant in the uterus. In theory, this could mean a woman is labelled overdue when shes not. It may also be that the ideal length of pregnancy varies considerably from woman to woman. A 2013 study, published in the journal Human Reproduction, based on hormone testing found that the length of healthy pregnancies varied by as much as 37 days. The researchers suggested that rather than the conventional due date, a range of dates would be more helpful while the duration of a womans previous pregnancies should be taken into account too, as that seemed to be a strong indicator of when subsequent babies would arrive. Professor Mark Johnson, an obstetrician at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, describes how this might work: If a womans first baby arrives before 40 weeks, for instance 38 weeks, her second and subsequent babies are either similar or move closer to the median of 40 weeks. The same is true of women who are closer to the other end of the spectrum. Either their subsequent babies will also be late, or they too will move towards the median of 40 weeks. Advertisement
The study, funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health, has recruited 6,000 pregnant women, randomly allocating them either an induction at 39 weeks or waiting for spontaneous labour.
The researchers hope to present their findings in February at the annual Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine conference.
Professor Mark Johnson, an obstetrician at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, says better birth outcomes in other EU countries are due to factors including better monitoring of foetal movement and fundal height (a measurement of the bump which can indicate if the baby is not growing properly and if there may be a risk of stillbirth or placental problems). But he suggests early induction is also key.
My view is that all pregnant women should be told that if they stay pregnant once at full term 37 weeks their risk of stillbirth increases week by week, says Professor Johnson. The only way to avoid that risk is to be induced earlier.
He told Good Health he thinks women should ideally be induced between 39 and 40 weeks.
But why is 39 weeks the focus, when the risks of stillbirth and infection increase after 37 weeks?
Professor Johnson explains that although 37 weeks has the lowest chance of stillbirth, theres an increased risk of the baby having breathing problems, as at this point the lungs are not mature enough and have more fluid inside them.
As the weeks pass this decreases, lowering the chance of the baby needing help breathing after birth. Roughly, the stats on breathing problems in relation to gestation decrease in this fashion one in 400 have breathing problems if delivered at 37 weeks, one in 800 at 38 weeks, then one in 1,500 at 39 weeks, says Professor Johnson.
Currently one in five labours in the UK is induced. Typically, prostaglandins (hormones that cause increased blood flow to an area) are administered using vaginal pessaries to soften and dilate the cervix; the next stage may be a drip containing oxytocin, to lead to contractions).
Still, the case for earlier inductions is not black and white. As Hannah Knight pointed out following the new UK study, there are potential downsides to inducing women earlier, not least the greater demand on NHS resources.
Further studies are needed to examine the impact of such a change in policy on NHS costs and womens satisfaction, she said following her report.
And although there may be good medical reasons for induction, it can lead to a more painful labour and is associated with higher risk of having a forceps or Ventouse delivery often with an episiotomy and these things can be traumatic, warns Kim Thomas, a spokesman for the Birth Trauma Association and author of Birth Trauma. Also, it can be highly distressing for a woman to be suddenly plunged into the later stages of labour.
While induction is safe and studies have shown no short-term adverse impact on mother or baby, induction of labour represents an intervention, is associated with costs to the service, and can be a more prolonged process than spontaneous labour, Professor Lesley Regan, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, told Good Health.
We welcome any new research which may help to reduce stillbirth and neonatal death rates.
The implications of such a change in policy would be enormous for both the health service and women themselves, so further research to determine the impact of such a change in practice is needed.
Dr Clea Harmer, chief executive of the stillbirth and neonatal death charity Sands, says: The decision whether to deliver or not requires good, reliable evidence about both the benefits and risks.
At Sands we hear from too many older bereaved mothers whose babies died after 40 weeks but who had no idea they were at a higher risk in retrospect they deeply regret that their baby was not induced in time.
She adds that the important thing is for mothers to be able to make genuinely fully-infor-med decisions about their maternity care.
Rachael Seddon is tortured by the thought that had her daughter Hope been delivered just a few days earlier, she would not have been stillborn.
The 28-year-old, who lives in Bolton, Lancashire, with her husband Joshua, 30 and their son Otis, two, was 39 weeks pregnant when she went to her local maternity assessment unit in November 2013 complaining of reduced movements and a feeling that something was wrong.
After a brief examination, where the babys heartbeat was heard, she was sent home.
Three days later, Rachael could no longer feel her baby moving so she returned to hospital, but it was too late. An ultrasound scan confirmed Hopes heart had stopped beating Rachael had to be induced.
Afterwards, a doctor told Rachael the placenta had been smaller than it should have been, which might have been to blame for Hopes reduced movements and death.
The post-mortem also found meconium a babys first stool in her lungs which can be an indicator of foetal distress. Ultimately, however, the exact cause of her death is unknown.
Rachael absolutely believes women should be induced earlier than full-term if they have concerns. The day after the delivery, I was told Hope had died no more than 24 hours earlier and that haunts me, says Rachael.
Perhaps if I had been induced at 39 weeks when I told them I was worried about her moving less, they could have saved my baby.
Visit sands.org.uk for bereavement support for anyone who has been affected by the death of a baby before, during or shortly after birth. Information for pregnant women can be found at saferpregnancy.org.uk
An injection that is commonly used to stop muscle weakness could put an end to snoring.
The jab contains a drug that causes muscles to contract. The theory is that injecting it into the roof of the mouth just above the throat will tighten the tissues in the throat that collapse, causing snoring as air squeezes through the obstructed airway.
In a new trial in the U.S., snorers are being given five jabs of the drug. The researchers say it could also be made into a gel thats directly applied to the roof of the mouth before bed.
An injection that is commonly used to stop muscle weakness could put an end to snoring
The treatment is being tested in people with sleep apnoea, a condition that affects one in five adults in Britain. It occurs when throat tissue collapses repeatedly during sleep, blocking the airway for up to ten seconds at a time.
This means that patients temporarily stop breathing a drop in blood oxygen levels then triggers signals to the brain, which instruct muscles in the throat to contract in order to reopen the airways.
Left untreated, sleep apnoea can lead to long-term problems, such as heart disease. The standard treatment is with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) devices masks worn by patients while they sleep. These deliver pressurised air to keep the airway open. Though effective, up to half of users find the masks cumbersome and stop using them.
The injections, being trialled at Emory University in the U.S., contain a drug called neostigmine methylsulphate. This is currently used for myasthenia gravis, a rare, long-term condition where the immune system mistakenly damages the signals between nerves and muscles, leading to muscle weakness.
Pointing a handheld device at joints could help to detect rheumatoid arthritis (RA) faster (stock photo)
The drug works by boosting levels of a brain chemical called acetylcholine, which, in turn, increases the nerve signals to the muscles telling them to contract.
In myasthenia gravis, this reduces such symptoms as droopy eyelids, difficulty swallowing and weak arms and legs.
In sleep apnoea, the theory is that this will make muscles around the throat contract which will pull back the tissues so they dont obstruct the airways, causing snoring.
In the new trial, 20 snorers will be monitored in a laboratory during induced sleep when they snore, they will be given the jabs.
The number and volume of the snoring sounds will be monitored immediately after and then again 30 days later using an endoscopy (where a camera on a long, thin tube is inserted through the mouth to examine the throat tissue) and with sound and video recordings while they are asleep.
If successful, the researchers say they plan to make a rub-on version of the drug, so that patients can apply it before bedtime.
Commenting on the treatment, Professor Jaydip Ray, an ear, nose and throat (ENT) consultant at Sheffield Teaching Hospital, says: Most snoring treatments are invasive, painful or cumbersome. Hence uptake and compliance are low.
This simple, non-invasive option, if successful, offers tremendous hope to these patients whose lives are blighted with this problem.
MEANWHILE, a vibrating device worn on the arm may also tackle snoring and sleep apnoea.
The device has a sensor that detects snoring sounds it then vibrates in three-second bursts to rouse the sleeper enough to stop snoring.
In a recent study at Ataturk University in Turkey, reported in the journal Sensors, when patients used the device known as Snorap they snored less often and less noisily.
Cancer treatment without side-effects
Using high temperatures to kill cancer cells a treatment known as thermotherapy can be effective, but its use has been restricted as it also carries a greater risk of damage to healthy tissue.
However, scientists from the University of Surrey and Dalian University of Technology in China have devised a new form of thermotherapy that reduces the damage to healthy cells.
The researchers have developed tiny particles (nanoparticles) that can regulate their own temperature. These intelligent particles are placed into the tumour and heat up to 45c hot enough to weaken or kill cancer cells without disturbing healthy ones. At that point, they then stop heating.
Implant in buttocks to stop constipation
Placing a pacemaker in the buttocks is being tested as a treatment for slow transit constipation (STC), where poor communication between the nerves in the large intestine and the muscular layer of the intestinal walls leads to slow bowel movements.
Scientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands are running a trial with 60 patients. The patients will have an electrode placed next to the sacral nerves (in the back); the electrode is attached to a matchbox-sized, pacemaker-like generator in the buttocks.
Its thought electrically stimulating the nerves will start communication between the bowel and brain and, therefore, get the muscles moving more effectively.
Why garlic may keep antibiotics working
A compound in garlic can make antibiotic-resistant superbugs respond to the treatment again.
In lab studies, scientists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark found that the compound ajoene was able to suppress a gene that allows Staphylococcus aureus bacteria which cause sepsis to stick to human tissue and multiply.
The findings suggest that the compound could be an effective drug when used with antibiotics.
The researchers are now planning to work with a manufacturer to develop an ajoene drug and test it on patients.
Handheld laser that helps detect arthritis in seconds
Pointing a handheld device at joints could help to detect rheumatoid arthritis (RA) faster.
RA is caused by the immune system attacking the joints, leading to pain and swelling.
The gadget, developed at the University of Twente in Belgium, fires soundwaves and a laser beam into joints such as the wrists, fingers and knees. The way the soundwaves bounce back and the reflections of the laser are converted by a computer program into an image that reveals the amount of inflammation.
This could speed up diagnosis. Early treatment can limit the condition and even put it in remission.
Could endometriosis raise risk of depression?
Women with endometriosis may be more vulnerable to depression and anxiety.
This was the suggestion from a recent study of mice at Yale University in the U.S. In endometriosis, cells that are normally found in the womb occur in other parts of the body, causing pain.
The researchers implanted endometriosis cells in mice and then put them through examinations used to test their mental health, such as picking them up by their tails depressed mice flop, but healthy mice squirm.
The mice given the endometriosis cells were more anxious and depressed. The researchers say that endometriosis reprogrammes the brain, though its not clear how.
Drink cherry juice for insomnia, says a Louisiana State University study. Participants who drank it two hours before bed for two weeks spent an average of 84 minutes longer asleep compared to people who had a placebo. It contains compounds thought to boost serotonin, a brain chemical linked to relaxation and sleepiness.
The first phase of the Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman was inaugurated on Sunday by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, opening a new strategic route connecting Iran, India and Afghanistan bypassing Pakistan, and reflecting growing convergence of interests among the three countries.
The port in the Sistan-Balochistan province on the energy-rich nation's southern coast is easily accessible from India's western coast and is increasingly seen as a counter to Pakistan's Gwadar Port, which is being developed with Chinese investment and is located at distance of around 80km from Chabahar.
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said Minister of State for Shipping, Pon Radhakrishnan represented India at the inauguration ceremony of the Phase 1 of the Shahid Beheshti Port at Chabahar - which was also attended by ambassadors and senior officials.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani inaugurated the strategic Chabahar Port on the Gulf of Oman
An India-Iran-Afghanistan ministerial-level trilateral meeting on Chabahar also took place on Sunday on the sidelines of the event where the three countries resolved to work towards integrated development of connectivity infrastructure including ports, road and rail networks to open up greater opportunities for regional market access and integration of their economies.
The Chabahar port is being considered a gateway to golden opportunities for trade by India, Iran and Afghanistan with central Asian countries besides ramping up trade among the three countries in the wake of Pakistan denying transit access to New Delhi.
'The routes of the region should be connected on land, sea and air,' Rouhani said at the inauguration ceremony.
President Hassan Rouhani: the new port will mean speedier and cheaper trade with Iran's neighbours
India has been closely working with Afghanistan and Iran to create alternative, reliable access routes for trade.
Under the agreement signed between India and Iran in May last year, India is to equip and operate two berths in Chabahar Port Phase-I with capital investment of USD 85.21 million (Rs 549.76 crore) and annual revenue expenditure of USD 22.95 million (Rs 148 crore) on a 10-year lease.
The MEA, in a statement, said: 'Radhakrishnan also represented India in the second India-Iran-Afghanistan ministerial- level trilateral meeting on Chabahar port in Chabahar today. Iran was represented by its Transport Minister Abbas Akhoundi and Afghanistan by its Trade and Commerce Minister Humayoon Rasaw.'
A ship bedecked with foreign flags docked at Chabahar in southeast Iran for the port's inauguration on December 3, 2017
In the meeting, the three countries assessed the progress in the development of the port and reiterated their commitment to complete and operationalise it at the earliest, which they felt would provide alternative access to landlocked Afghanistan to regional and global markets.
A joint statement issued after the meeting said the ministers also deliberated on trilateral pact relating to the mega connectivity project and expressed satisfaction on the completion of the ratification procedures by Afghanistan and India.
They welcomed the steps taken by Iran to complete the ratification process.
In May 2016, India, Iran and Afghanistan had inked a pact which entailed establishment of Transit and Transport Corridor among the three countries using Chabahar Port as one of the regional hubs for sea transportation in Iran, besides multi-modal transport of goods and passengers across the three nations.
The ministers discussed the next steps for full implementation of the agreement and moving towards its operationalisation.
Towards this endeavour, it was decided to finalise protocols related to transport and transit, ports, customs procedures and consular affairs.
Congress president-in-waiting Rahul Gandhi is set to take over the reins of the party next week and is expected to usher in a new era as the chief without a whip.
Highly placed sources in the party told Mail Today that in keeping with Congress tradition, a deputy to the top post is unlikely as Rahul is expected to be far more 'accessible' to the party's leadership, be it at the state or national level.
Senior party functionaries maintained that Rahul was brought in as the vice-president in 2013, almost 15 years after sitting party president Sonia Gandhi served without a deputy.
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi with warty leaders during filing of his nomination papers for the post of party president, at the AICC office in New Delhi on Monday
'He was chosen for the number two spot to prepare and groom him for the top job ahead. He had always shown immense promise and there was consensus in the party that he should eventually take up the mantle of the party chief,' said a senior party leader.
'Congress so far has had just three vice presidents or second-in-command leaders. It is not the norm but exception.'
Late Congress heavyweight Arjun Singh was the last vice-president of the party, appointed to the position in the 1980s when former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi served as party chief.
The current vice president is expected to take over from mother Sonia (pictured) next week
Kamalapati Tripathi served as working president in 1983 when Indira Gandhi was the prime minister, whereas HN Bahuguna became secretary general in 1980.
Several top leaders confirmed that a new vice-president is completely ruled out and appointing one would not only undermine the new chief's position but also create a fresh situation of looking for consensus over the candidate.
'What is the need for a vice-president? It is time for Rahul ji to consolidate the party and bring the old guard and young leadership together. He has already met state unit leaders and the party's senior national leadership one-on-one and intends to be accessible to everyone as the party chief. There is absolutely no need for a go-between or a deputy. He has prepared for and earned the position following years of hard work,' said a senior functionary close to Rahul.
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, accompanied by former prime minister Manmohan Singh, Sushilkumar Shinde, Anand Sharma and other leaders, during filing of his nomination papers for the post of party president
On Monday, 89 sets of nominations backed by 10 proposers each were submitted to the party's central election authority head Mullappally Ramachandran. The party's Constitution rules that nominations can be filed by representatives of candidates on their behalf so that if two rival leaders contest for the post, neither can be asked to back out nor pressurised to withdraw.
'At a time the fairness of these polls are being questioned, it must be clarified that the very process of polling cannot be more above board. Today, as the internal election authority receives 89 nominations, no one knows definitively if any other candidate is in the fray. Only once the nominations are scrutinised tomorrow will we know if polling is needed or not,' said a party source.
Senior leaders maintained that it is highly unlikely that another contestant might have filed a nomination. If all the 89 nominations filed on Monday are for Rahul, the election authority will still not declare him a winner until December 11, which is the last date for withdrawal of nomination.
'Rahul Gandhi is free to change his mind till then,' laughed a senior leader.
If elected unopposed, the party is set to celebrate its new chief's election in a grand show on December 15, after the second phase of polling in Gujarat.
Amidst the fanfare of Rahul filing his nomination at the party headquarters on 24, Akbar Road, on Monday morning, sitting president Sonia was conspicuously missing.
The first set of nomination had Sonia as the main proposer, along with veterans such as Ahmed Patel, Tarun Gogoi, Motilal Vohra, Kamal Nath, Mohsina Kidwai, Ashok Gehlot, Mukul Wasnik and Sheila Dikshit.
It was submitted by Dikshit as Sonia stayed away citing poor health. According to seniority of leaders, they grouped themselves into tens to file nominations backing Rahul, who accompanied former PM Manmohan Singh, the main proposer of the second nomination. The third nomination had CP Joshi, Mallikarjun Kharge, Randeep Surjewala, Amrinder Singh and Ghulam Nabi Azad as proposers.
Congress election process 'makes a mockery of democratic values
The BJP ridiculed the election process appointing Rahul Gandhi the Congress president, terming it mockery of democratic norms.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who led a scathing attack on the Congress, likened Rahul's imminent elevation to dynastic succession of Mughal rulers, and castigated the Congress for abandoning public modesty.
'The Congress has abandoned all public modesty. It has gone bankrupt as it is going to make a person out on bail in a corruption case... Political parties will think many times before making those out on bail, even a district unit chief,' Modi told a rally in Valsad district in election-bound Gujarat, apparently referring to the National Herald case.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, pictured here addressing an election campaign rally for state assembly election in Jamnagar on Monday, has hit out at Congress over the election
BJP spokesperson GVL Narasimha Rao too said all Congress leaders were forced to toe the line of the Gandhi family and anybody who objected to this dynastic rule run the risk of being removed from their posts.
'The farcical election process and the sycophancy of all family faithfuls in hailing this process is a sad commentary on the grand old party. It shows the Congress' total disconnect with today's India which values meritocracy and not imposition of dynasty,' Rao said.
'It is a great fall for the party that had stalwarts leading it.'
Senior BJP leader and Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma also took a swipe at the Congress, saying ordinary party workers were feeling humiliated with Rahul filing nomination for the post of party president.
Sarma, one of the most prominent leaders of the Congress in Assam before joining the saffron party, also said that despite belonging to the 21st century, Rahul missed a historical opportunity to free the Congress from dynastic and feudal politics.
As the sales of air purifiers and face masks increase by eight to 10 times in a month, and threefold in the last two days, doctors are still in doubt about the effectiveness of the defences terming them as valueless cosmetic products.
Driven by smog and high levels of pollution in the city, residents are making all sorts of efforts to make the air breathable.
Health experts have said that in India no study has been done to find out how authentic and efficient the respirators and air purifiers are.
Delhi has been chocking in a cloud of thick toxic smog for the past month - but are masks, such as the ones pictured, effective?
School children take out march to express their distress on the alarming levels of pollution in the city. No doctors are warning that face masks may not be effective
However, manufacturing companies claim that their products follow international standard guidelines, since India has set no such guideline so far. Companies thus, are using AHAM (American) and China certification.
'About 99 per cent of masks, available in the market, are made of clothes. These are similar to a cosmetic product. Only N-95 and N-99 respirators can protect us from particulate matters - that too if it is worn very tightly around the mouth and nose 24x7,' Dr Arvind Kumar, chairman of chest surgery at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital told Mail Today.
Sharing his personal experience of using N-95, 99 masks, Dr Kumar said people cannot wear these for more than 45 minutes.
'The pores are so tiny that it creates a lot of resistance to the passage of air. So, one needs to put more effort breathe while wearing it,' he said, adding that people are still not aware of how the masks should be used.
Doctors are not satisfied with the functioning of air purifiers as well. They have pointed out that air purifiers work in a closed room - just like air-conditioners.
Arvind Chabra, country-head of Blue Air, a company selling air purifiers, claimed that in the last month, sales of air purifiers have gone up by eight to 10 times and that they are highly effective, made following international standards guidelines.
Pollution has been smothering the area following crop burning early last month
Accepting the fact that air purifiers should be used according to the size of the room, Chabra told Mail Today: 'Even renowned schools have contacted us for the placement of air purifiers there. A lot of other groups have contacted us for the same.'
Echoing similar views, Dr Vikas Maurya, head of respiratory medicine at Fortis Hospital, said that surgical and cloth masks are meant for one-time use and also not recommended for places, where the pollution levels are high enough.
'It should be noted that the N-95 and N-99 masks are not advisable for asthmatic and COPD patients at all. This is because breathing while having put these on requires lot of pressure,' the doctor informed.
Taking cognigance of what the people in the Capital need, given the poor air quality, the city government has made all necessary arrangements for respiratory patients in hospitals.
Rajiv Yadhuvanshi, Delhi health secretary said: 'All the hospitals have adequate face masks, nebulisers, medicines and dedicated beds for chest patients. We have given health advisory and there is nothing to be in panic as of now.'
The Supreme Court is likely to commence the final hearing in the long-standing Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid title dispute from Tuesday, a day before the 25th anniversary of the demolition of medieval-era structure.
A specially constituted bench of CJI Dipak Misra and Justices Ashok Bhushan and Abdul Nazeer will be hearing a total of 13 appeals filed against the 2010 judgement of the Allahabad High Court in four civil suits.
The high court had then ruled a three-way division of the disputed 2.77-acre area at Ayodhya among the parties - the Sunni Waqf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and the Lord Ram Lalla.
A sect of Muslims, under the banner of Shia Central Waqf Board of UP, had earlier approached the court offering a solution that a mosque could be built in a Muslim- dominated area at a reasonable distance from the disputed site in Ayodhya.
However, its intervention was opposed by the All India Sunni Waqf Board that had claimed that judicial adjudication between the two sects had already been done in 1946 by declaring the mosque, which was demolished on December 6, 1992, as one which belongs to the Sunnis.
Recently a group of civil rights activists also moved the apex court seeking intervention in the Ayodhya dispute and urged it to consider the issue saying it is not just a dispute over property but has several other aspects which would have farreaching effects on the secular fabric of the country.
The owner of the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges has warned the pound could face a nightmare scenario if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister.
CME Group told investors and businesses that Theresa Mays Tory government had a weak grip on power and would probably be defeated if a poll was held.
Last week, Morgan Stanley said a Corbyn victory would threaten the economy.
Jeremy Corbyn: CME boss believes if Labour Party leader becomes PM the pound will face 'nightmare scenario'
Erik Norland, CME executive director and senior economist, said the Government was hanging by a thread, adding: Markets should probably be thinking carefully about the next prime minister.
In the event the UK takes a hard Brexit followed by a Labour victory, it could see Britain transform into a more socialist, centrally controlled economy just one that happens to be outside the EU. This is the nightmare scenario for the pound.
The collapse of Palmer & Harvey is to be investigated by MPs as concern mounts about a huge pension fund deficit.
Frank Field, chairman of the Commons Work and Pensions Committee, said he was also massively concerned by news that bosses received millions of pounds from the wholesaler as losses grew.
He said the committee would look into the matter as part of a wider probe into those raiding firms that then need rescuing.
High life: The 4m home of Christopher Adams Inset: Christopher Etherington
His comments came after thousands of staff were laid off by P&H weeks before Christmas, with trustees of its pension scheme warning the Pension Protection Fund of an estimated 80 million black hole.
Even if the fund steps in to rescue the scheme, thousands of former staff face having their nest eggs reduced.
Meanwhile, it has also emerged that a small group of P&H executives received almost 70 million in dividends from 2009 to 2016 after a debt-fueled management buyout.
The payments of at least 8.2 million a year continued even as losses at the company rose.
Last night, Field said: Im massively concerned about this. It is not just a one-off.
We are beginning to see a pattern of people raiding companies, then leaving them to be rescued by the Pension Protection Fund.
As a committee, we have got to propose to Government how we can exercise some clawback when it looks as though stewards of a company have fleeced it for their own benefit and left pensioners to face increasing cuts.
Public opinion on this has hardened people want the Commons to act. It is not just pensioners who have been affected, peoples jobs have gone as well. Its a doubly unforgivable act by people who have a duty of ownership.
You should not have the advantages and wealth that come from a successful business if you have actually failed that business. Struggling P&H, which is based in Hove, East Sussex, had been kept afloat by the tobacco companies that supplied it as bosses tried to negotiate a rescue deal.
Frank Field: Expressed concern after it was revealed that P&H may have 80m pension deficit
Last week, however, it ran out of cash and administrators were called in leading to an immediate decision to shed 2,500 staff.
Chief executive Tony Reed said he was dreadfully sorry.
But questions are being asked about why the firm continued to pay vast sums in dividends to shareholders even as it struggled.
Latest accounts show that P&H, the fifth-biggest private firm in the UK, paid 8.2 million to preference shareholders, despite losing 17.3 million in the year to April 2016.
It had already paid them the same amount the year before, despite an 8.5m loss.
The payouts began after the firms structure changed following a management buyout in 2008 that valued it at 345 million, led by former chairman Christopher Adams, 65, and former chief executive Christopher Etherington, 64.
Some of the directors, including Etherington, funded their share purchases using interest-free loans from P&Hs staff benefit trust.
P&H had to pay further millions for bank interest payments, refinancing and other fees related to the 2008 buyout.
But administrators will be unable to access millions of pounds in a ring-fenced firm, Buildtrue, that was set up to provide security to preference and dividend shareholders who want to redeem their holdings. It had 42 million last year, according to accounts.
A Change.org petition set up on Saturday to call for an investigation into the firms collapse had nearly 7,000 signatures last night.
Administrators at PwC, who are acting for P&H, did not respond to requests for comment last night.
Most Republicans believe the sexual assault allegations against US Senate hopeful Roy Moore are false, according to a new poll.
The poll, released Sunday by CBS News, shows that the Alabama Republican leads his Democratic opponent Doug Jones by six percentage points.
Moore was leading Democrat Doug Jones 49 to 43 per cent among voters likely to cast ballots in the December 12 special election, CBS said.
Among all registered voters the contest between the two candidates is an even 50/50 chance, the network said.
Moore, 71, has been accused of sexually assaulting nine different women when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. Eight of them claim they were teenagers when the then-judge pursued them - one as young as 14-years-old.
Most Republicans believe the sexual assault allegations against US Senate hopeful Roy Moore (pictured Monday November 27) are false, according to a new poll
The poll, released Sunday by CBS News, shows that the Alabama Republican leads his Democratic opponent Doug Jones (pictured on Tuesday November 28) by six percentage points
According to the CBS poll, 71 per cent of Alabama Republicans say the allegations against Moore are false, and believe that Democrats and the media are behind the accusations
Since the women came forward Moore has unleashed vicious attacks against them in an attempt to discredit their statement.
Following the allegations a number of Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, John McCain and even Ivanka Trump have denounced Moore and called for him to step down from the race.
But McConnell said on Sunday that if Moore is elected, the Senate will swear him in and then the Senate ethics committee would decide whether to investigate the allegations.
'We'll swear in whoever's elected and see where we are at that point,' McConnell said on CBS' Face the Nation.
'We can't stop him from being seated,' said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who was also interviewed on CBS.
'If there was an (ethics) investigation and all six members of the committee said they believe he was a child molester, that would be a problem.'
Bikers for Trump are pictured at a rally for Alabama Chief Justice and US Senate hopeful Roy Moore. Though Moore was accused of sexually assaulting nine young women, most Alabama Republicans believe the allegations aren't true
Bikers for Trump are pictured at a rally for Alabama Chief Justice and US Senate hopeful Roy Moore. Though Moore was accused of sexually assaulting nine young women, many believe that Democrats and the media are behind the allegations
According to the CBS poll, 71 per cent of Alabama Republicans say the allegations against Moore are false, and believe that Democrats and the media are behind the accusations.
According to the CBS poll, 71 per cent of Alabama Republicans say the allegations against Moore are false, and believe that Democrats and the media are behind the accusations. He was accused of sexually assault by nine women
Another poll a day earlier had Democrat Jones barely ahead.
The Washington Post-Schar School poll said Jones' support among likely voters stood at 50 per cent, versus Moore's 47 per cent.
President Donald Trump originally backed Moore's opponent in the Republican primary, Senator Luther Strange.
But Trump has since defended Moore, noting Moore has denied allegations of sexual misconduct. The president says he does not want Moore's Democratic opponent to win.
At the White House last week President Trump all but endorsed the Republican nominee when asked about the scandal.
'Well he denies it,' Trump told reporters. 'Look he denies it. He says it didn't happen, and you know, you have to listen to him also.'
Trump is slated to travel to a rally in Pensacola, Florida on Friday - a city just across the state line from Alabama - just days ahead of the Alabama election. The timing and location gives Trump an opportunity to express support for Moore.
Republicans hold a slim 52-48 majority in the Senate and are eager to maintain their advantage to advance Trump's legislative agenda on taxes, healthcare and other priorities.
A Philadelphia 76ers dancer had a heartwarming reunion with her army boyfriend at Saturday night's game.
Video shows the moment 23-year-old Angela is reunited with her 29-year-old beau, Sergeant Elliott Burgos.
She draws her hands to her face in disbelief when she sees him with a bouquet of flowers.
Philadelphia 76ers dancer Angela, 23, was surprised by her boyfriend, Sergeant Elliott Burgos, at last night's game
Burgos had been on an 11-month deployment in Kuwait. Angela had not been expecting him back yet when he surprised her
The couple posed for photos with the rest of the dancing team and the 76ers mascot
The lovebirds run to each other and she jumps into his arms for an extended embrace to the delight of the audience.
They then pose for photographs along with other members of the dance squad and the 76ers team mascot.
Angela was under the impression that her man was in Kuwait, ABC 6 Action News reports.
'Theres not many people who can surprise a loved one in front of 20,000 people, so Im a lucky man,' Burgos told Fox29.
He was on an 11-month deployment and Angela was under the impression that he would be returning the following week.
'Theres not many people who can surprise a loved one in front of 20,000 people, so Im a lucky man,' Burgos told Fox29
The couple has been together since September 2014.
They told Fox29 that they look forward to celebrating the upcoming holidays together.
The 76ers beat the Detroit Pistons 108-103 at last night's game.
President Trump reportedly summons White House staffers to his private quarters in the evenings in order to change assignments given to them by Chief of Staff John Kelly.
A report on Sunday in the Wall Street Journal claims the president often sidesteps the order and discipline Kelly has tried to impose on the West Wing by bypassing the regular scheduling of phone calls between staff and advisers that give Kelly control over the information he receives.
The President then specifically instructs them not to let Kelly know that they have spoken, it is claimed.
Chief of Staff John Kelly has attempted to impose discipline on the White House but a report by the Wall Street Journal suggests President Donald Trump has found the loopholes
According to the report, some of the president's friends have even been known use the First Lady Melania Trump as a way of getting messages directly to the commander-in-chief.
'If I don't want to wait 24 hours for a call from the president, getting to Melania is much easier,' one person said.
A spokeswoman for Mrs Trump said: 'This is more fake news and these are more anonymous sources peddling things that just aren't true. The First Lady is focused on her own work in the East Wing.'
The White House declined to provide comment.
Kelly was named chief of staff in July and has said his job was not to control the president but to bring a sense of order to the White House.
Kelly says he is purely focused on the day-to-day running of the White House, not policy
'I was not brought to this job to control anything but the flow of information to our president so that he can make the best decisions,' he said in an interview in October.
Kelly has managed to control some of the President's behavior and has stopped Trump's friends having their phone calls patched through to the Oval Office, it is claimed. He reportedly now requires them to make an appointment.
White House aides are also no longer allowed to simply barge into the office to speak with the president about whatever is on their minds, the newspaper claims.
However, a White House insider says Trump has developed 'workarounds' to dodge Kelly's rules.
'John has been successful at putting in place a stronger chain of command in the White House, requiring people to go through him to get to the Oval Office,' Leon Panetta, a White House chief of staff under President Clinton who knows Kelly, told the Journal.
There have been times when Kelly, left, has found cause to hold his head in his hands. Trump's friends reportedly now find it easier to communicate with him through his wife, Melania, center
'The problem has always been whether or not the president is going to accept better discipline in the way he operates. He's been less successful at that.'
With Kelly running the White House operations that frees up Trump to concentrate on his agenda.
'This is all just inevitable,' a person close to Trump told the newspaper. 'It's not that Kelly is wrong we all know he's terribly competent.'
White House staffers say that Trump's working relationship with Kelly remains strong and that the two men appear to have found an equilibrium that suggests Kelly could be in place for a long time.
As for Trump's tweets, Kelly has reportedly told staffers not to be influenced by them.
And the two men seem to have come to an understanding on the extent of their relationship.
'Kelly is too much of a general, and Trump is too much Trump,' a White House official told the newspaper, adding that the president holds his chief of staff in high regard.
At a briefing on Hurricane Maria relief efforts in Puerto Rico earlier in the fall, Trump noted Kelly's presence in the back of the room.
'He likes to keep a low profile; Look at him sitting in the back,' Trump continued. 'But, boy, is he watchingyou have no idea.'
A 12million foreign aid project was halted last night amid fears some of the money has gone to jihadis.
The British taxpayers cash was handed over to set up a civilian police force in Syria.
But one Al Qaeda-backed group has selected officer recruits while another extremist cell siphoned off cash in a protection racket.
It also emerged that a number of employees on the payroll of the Free Syrian Police were either fictitious or dead.
A 12million foreign aid project was halted last night amid fears some of the money has gone to jihadis, such as extremists from the Nour al-Din al-Zanki Movement (pictured)
The British taxpayers cash was handed over to set up a civilian police force in Syria. But one Al Qaeda-backed group - Jabhat al-Nusra (pictured) - has selected officer recruits
And its officers have stood and watched as women were stoned to death.
Boris Johnson pulled the plug on the project yesterday. Back in April however the Foreign Secretary announced it would receive an extra 4million on top of the 8million awarded since 2014.
Much of the money was handed over in bags of cash.
Britain is one of six countries funding the community-led policing scheme in opposition-held regions of Syria.
A Panorama investigation tonight will raise grave concerns about the way it is run by Adam Smith International, a foreign aid contractor which has been accused of making excess profits from handouts to the poor.
One police station at Koknaya near Idlib in north-western Syria was supposed to have 57 officers. But documents obtained by Panorama suggest that when ASI staff visited in September 2016 they could not find a single policeman.
The company said it used cash to fund the police because there was no practical alternative and that on subsequent visits the officers were accounted for.
It said it had identified only a few examples of dead officers staying on the payroll.
It also emerged that a number of employees on the payroll of the Free Syrian Police were either fictitious or dead. Pictured: A member of Jabhat al-Nusra
And its officers have stood and watched as women were stoned to death. Boris Johnson pulled the plug on the project yesterday. Pictured: Free Syrian Army fighter
But its documents also revealed that some police in the Aleppo area were made to hand over cash to an extremist group.
The report dated July 2016 warned that a fifth of salaries were being diverted to Nour Al Din Al Zinki to pay for the military and security support that Zinki provides to the five stations in areas under its control.
Officers worked with the group even though it is accused of atrocities including beheading prisoners.
ASI said it had strict guidelines to ensure detainees were treated fairly and that payments to the police stations involved were stopped in August 2016.
The Panorama documentary discovered evidence that the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda Jabhat Al Nusra chose recruits at a station in Idlib province. The Free Syrian Police has provided support for Al Nusra courts that hand out extreme punishments.
Its officers were present when two women were stoned to death near Sarmin in December 2014.
ASI said the policemen who attended the stoning were not formally under the forces control and have since been removed.
It claimed that at the station where Al Nusra picked officers, only six people with alleged links to extremist networks were employed from a headcount of 3,400 policemen.
The Panorama documentary discovered evidence that the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda Jabhat Al Nusra (a member of the group is pictured) chose recruits at a station in Idlib province
The Free Syrian Police has provided support for Al Nusra (members pictured here) courts that hand out extreme punishments. Its officers watched two women get stoned to death
On the diversion of funds, it said there was evidence that only $2,000 had fallen into the hands of extremists and none of it came from British taxpayers.
Tory MP Crispin Blunt said the Free Syrian Police should not be supporting extremist courts.
He said: The idea that British taxpayers money was associated with that would of course be wholly abhorrent.
Kate Osamor, Labours international development spokesman, said: Spent properly, Britains aid budget achieves incredible results and we must not shy away from working in conflict-affected countries.
'But if these allegations are true, British taxpayers will be rightly outraged. This investigation is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg.
ASI pulled out of the bidding process for new contracts with the aid department earlier this year following criticism over poor practices, rising profits and bloated salaries.
Britain is one of six countries funding the community-led policing scheme in opposition-held regions of Syria
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has pulled the plug on the project. The development budget rose to 13.4billion last year.
Interim chief Jonathan Pell last night said: We are incredibly proud of the acumen and dedication of the Access to Justice and Community Security (AJACS) team, delivering practical help and hope to people in one of the most difficult environments in the world.
There are high risks working in a fragile state in civil war. We mitigate those risks under the close control of the donors, and support AJACS because of its success in ending human rights abuses and establishing the rule of law in Syrian society.
'ASI will continue to vigorously refute the BBCs claims and defend the integrity of one of its most important projects.
A Foreign Office spokesman said the project had helped train 3,500 officers across 60 police stations, helping 1.6million Syrians.
The spokesman added: We take any allegations of co-operation with terrorist groups and of human rights abuses extremely seriously and the Foreign Office has suspended this programme while we investigate these allegations.
We believe that such work in Syria is important to protect our national security interest but of course we reach this judgment carefully given that in such a challenging environment no activity is without risk.
Ministers have been under pressure to improve the way Britain spends its foreign budget since Theresa May announced she would keep to David Camerons controversial target of 0.7 per cent of national income.
The development budget rose to 13.4billion last year.
Panorama will be shown tonight at 7:30pm on BBC One.
Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been slammed over a personal attack on prominent feminist writer Clementine Ford.
Yiannopoulos projected an old photograph of Ms Ford - and the word 'unf***able' - on big screens during talks in Adelaide and Perth on Friday and Saturday.
The attack was blasted by Twitter users - particularly as the photo apparently shows Ms Ford when she was about 19-years-old.
But Ms Ford said the incident 'doesn't bother me ... It's so unoriginal for a start.
'Besides, unlike Milo I got better looking as I aged.'
Milo Yiannopoulos had this image projected on big screens during shows in Adelaide and Perth last week
It was 34 degrees Celsius: Yiannopoulos is pictured here toting Gucci bags during a shopping spree in Perth this week
Musician Urthboy was not impressed: 'Milo crossed the line with the Clem Ford screen grab at his show,' he tweeted.
'Whoever works at his hotel needs to ensure the p**** gets no sleep.
'Penthouse needs to f*** off and die for promoting this s***'.
Another punter tweeted: 'In what universe is this okay?'
A third said: 'His immature desperation for attention never ceases to amaze me'.
A fourth: 'A woman's worth is not measured by whether she is "f***able" or not.
'I don't like Clementine Ford but it's not for reasons that relate to ... unattractivess' (sic).
Ms Ford called for calm from her supporters in a series of tweets, saying: 'To be very clear, calling me unf**kable is the absolute least of his offences.
'Please don't make me a reason for your protests.
'Please don't make me a reason for your protests': Clementine Ford fired off a string of tweets about the incident on Monday morning
'I have previously argued against protesting him or giving him attention but recognise this isn't a solution either'
Clementine Ford tweeted she 'couldn't care less what men think of her and will not be silenced by their disapproval'
'The 19 year old girl in the photo he's using would have cared very deeply about being labelled unworthy of male attention.
'The 36 year old me couldn't care less what men think of her and will not be silenced by their disapproval. What a wonderful thing that is.'
Yiannopoulos has maintained he would debate Ms Ford 'anytime, anywhere.'
The former technology editor of the American website Breitbart flew into Melbourne for the next leg of his speaking tour.
It's understood the venue which was to host his talks cancelled on him last Friday but organisers have found an alternative venue.
Yiannopoulos will attend at Parliament House for an event hosted by Senator David Leyonhjelm on Tuesday.
The extradition to the US of accused computer hacker Lauri Love is an attempt to override the British justice system, the UKs former most senior prosecutor has said.
Lord Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, said that the request from American prosecutors raises questions of sovereignty.
He added that the future looked ghastly for the vicars son, who has Aspergers, if he stands trial in the US where he faces a 99-year prison sentence.
Lord Macdonald, who was in charge of prosecuting policy in England and Wales from 2003-8, told the High Court that the usual practice would be to try Mr Love in the UK.
The extradition to the US of accused computer hacker Lauri Love (pictured) is an attempt to override the British justice system, the UKs former most senior prosecutor has said
Lord Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, said that the request from American prosecutors to extradite Mr Love raises questions of sovereignty'
Yesterday, he went further, saying that Mr Loves case raised questions of sovereignty and arguing that the student should be tried in Britain.
The general policy should be that where an offence is committed in this country, it should be tried in this country. Thats what our courts are for, he told the Mail.
We shouldnt be relying on other countries courts to deal with offences that have been committed here.
Its a question of sovereignty. Were a sovereign country, we have a criminal justice system. If this guy has committed an offence in the UK he should be tried in the UK.
We shouldnt allow foreign courts, American courts, to override our jurisdiction in the UK. Its not appropriate to allow foreign courts to override our courts. Thats whats happening here.
Lord Ken Macdonald QC is a practising lawyer and Warden of Wadham College, Oxford.
Mr Love, 32, is awaiting the outcome of his High Court appeal last week of the decision to extradite him to the US.
His family warn that the vulnerable young man will kill himself rather than face trial in the US on charges of hacking Nasa, the US Army and the FBI, among others.
Lord Macdonald, who was in charge of prosecuting policy in England and Wales from 2003-8, told the High Court that the usual practice would be to try Mr Love in the UK
Mr Love, 32, is awaiting the outcome of his High Court appeal last week of the decision to extradite him to the US
In his statement at court last week, Lord Macdonald said that those accused of similar crimes were generally tried in British courts.
He wrote that there was a general practice of prosecuting those people in the UK, with the notable exception of Mr McKinnon.
Almost all such cases have historically been dealt with by English or other relevant local courts abroad. This seems particularly to occur in the case of vulnerable defendants, he said.
He said extradition would be a breach of that policy, adding: Its a policy about sovereignty and its a policy about taking responsibility ourselves for criminal conduct that takes place in the United Kingdom.
We will arrest, try and, if theyre convicted, punish people who commit criminal offences in the United Kingdom. Were not going give people over to other countries for them to deal with them there.
It almost creates the situation where British justice is subject to American justice and thats not the way it works. Were an independent country.
He added that it was appropriate to try Mr Love in the UK as the British justice system had the resources to deal with him.
Extraditing unwell Mr Love, on the other hand, would not be appropriate as the US justice system was completely ill-equipped to deal with him.
Mr Love, 32, who has Asperger syndrome, lives with his parents, Alexander and Srkka (pictured earlier this year) near Newmarket in Suffolk
They have very poor conditions, very poor medical facilities. As a foreigner suffering from Aspergers syndrome locked in the American penal system I think his prospects look pretty ghastly.
Thats all the more reason for him to be tried here.
Lord Macdonald added: Fundamentally, we should not cede sovereignty over criminal offences committed in the United Kingdom to foreign states. Our own courts should always take precedence over the courts of other countries, particularly where the suspect is British.
We have our own criminal justice system which is perfectly capable of dealing with computer crime. Allowing our courts, rather than foreign judges, to do so is intrinsic part of the UK being an independent sovereign state.
During the two-day appeal hearing last week, the Lord Chief Justice, the most senior judge in England and Wales, heard that extraditing Mr Love was not in the interests of justice.
Mr Loves lawyers said there were overwhelming reasons of justice and humanity for his trial to take place in the UK.
They also said that 12 similar cases had been successfully prosecuted in Britain since the students arrest.
Three of those have been prosecuted since his extradition hearing last year, raising questions about why he has been singled out, they added.
If extradited, Mr Love, 32, would be the first British person to be extradited to face hacking charge in the US
Last year, the Mail revealed that Mr Love is the only one of more than 29 Britons accused of hacking US Government websites to face extradition to America apart from Mr McKinnon.
Every other accused person, many of whom were charged with more serious crimes, has been prosecuted and sentenced in Britain over the last 20 years.
The hackers prosecuted in the UK also faced far more lenient punishments, including community service.
If extradited, Mr Love, 32, would be the first British person to be extradited to face hacking charge in the US.
His case has striking parallels with that of Gary McKinnon who was spared by Theresa May following a Daily Mail campaign.
Following his case, she introduced the Forum Bar, which was designed to ensure British defendants face charges in the UK if that is where their alleged crime was committed.
The application of the bar is at the centre of Mr Loves appeal hearing.
Mr Love allegedly hacked US government websites from his parents home in Stradishall, Suffolk.
The decision of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett and Justice Ousley is expected in a months time.
White House Communications Director Hope Hicks could be the next target in Special Council Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.
If a timeline reported by the New York Daily News is correct the 29-year-old will have been interviewed by the special counsel before December 1 to find out what she might know about potential collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia.
She has previously denied that top campaign aids communicated with foreign dignitaries.
'There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign,' she told the Associated Press in November 2016.
'It never happened.'
If a timeline reported by the New York Daily News is correct, the 29-year-old will have been interviewed by the special counsel before December 1 to find out what she might know about potential collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia. Hicks is pictured with Trump on Tuesday Nov 14
She has previously denied that top campaign aids communicated with foreign dignitaries. Mueller is currently looking into whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russian operatives to secure a Republican win in the 2016 presidential election - he is pictured in June 2017
Hicks is one of multiple White House officials cooperating with the Mueller probe, along with the president's adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who interviewed with investigators earlier in November.
But Hicks' relationship with the president is unique - having been close with Trump since early on in the campaign - when it has been alleged the then-candidate's team worked with Russian operatives to secure a Republican win in the 2016 presidential election.
The news about her interview comes just after it was announced on Friday that former national security adviser Michael Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI.
Flynn spoke to Russian diplomat Sergey Kislyak while the Obama administration was in power - which is illegal under the 1799 Logan Act - and later lied about doing so to the FBI.
It was also reported that Flynn will be 'cooperating fully' with Mueller's investigation and that he said he will give information on Trump and his family members as part of a plea deal.
Jared Kushner allegedly told Flynn to reach out to Russian officials.
The news about her interview comes just after it was announced on Friday that former national security adviser Michael Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI on Friday, December 1 (pictured)
It was also reported that Flynn will be 'cooperating fully' with Mueller's investigation and that he said he will give information on Trump and his family members as part of a plea deal
Hicks was appointed communications director in September after both Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci were let go from the position.
She has been close to the president since traveling to Iowa at the beginning of the campaign in January 2015. She has now outlasted multiple more experienced staff members and has become one of the president's top confidants.
Hicks is one of multiple White House officials cooperating with the Mueller probe, along with the president's adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. She has been close to Trump since January 2015 when she joined his campaign
'After Ivanka, she knows him best in the White House,' one campaign adviser said, according to New York Magazine.
Since the president was elected it has been revealed that Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort and Carter Page all spoke with Russians in some manner in the time leading up to the campaign.
President Trump has denied that he knew anything about this or that it had anything to do with his electoral college sweep.
On Saturday night Trump said he is not worried about reports that his son-in-law could be dragged further into the Russia probe.
The White House has also said that Flynn went rogue.
But they may need to eat their words as the investigation continues. On Saturday it was revealed that emails - obtained by The New York Times - appear to show Trump's transition team, including Flynn, discussing tactics for keeping Russia on-side before he would enter office.
And at one point then-transition team member KT McFarland, who worked closely with the disgraced adviser, allegedly says that Russia 'has just thrown USA election to [Trump]'.
The emails - some of which were seen by the NYT and some of which were described to it - were sent among Trump's transition team on December 29, just hours after Obama announced sanctions on Russia.
The sanctions were made in response to the Russian campaign to scupper Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency.
Chris Betancourt and Dillon Hill are best friends.
When Dillon, 19, found out that Chris, who has lived with cancer since the fifth grade, had only one year to live, he decided to dedicate that year to his dear friend.
And so the pair will spend the next year completing a bucket list for Chris, 20.
They have created a website called My Best Friend: One List One Life and are documenting some of the bucket list items on a Youtube channel and on other social media sites.
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Chris Betancourt (left) and Dillon Hill (right) are best friends from Sacramento, California
Chris has lived with chronic myeloid leukemia since the fifth grade. He was told in September 2017 that he has only one year to live
The friends (pictured with another man at right) are devoting the next year to completing a bucket list for Chris. They also hope to find a bone marrow donor
They are raising funds via both GoFundMe and Patreon for their bucket list.
A post on the website by Dillon reads: 'In late October, Chris called and told me his cancer was returning.
'He said: ''I'm afraid I won't be able to experience the things I want to in life."
'I decided to drop out of college to spend time experiencing our bucket list together.
'We are actively looking for a Bone Marrow donor to help Chris win this fight, his last hope to defeat cancer once again.
'My Best Friend is the story of Chris' life. Join us in our journey to document, experience, and inspire all of the amazing things that make life worth living.'
Their website states: 'When Dillon's best friend was diagnosed at such a young age, he didn't quite understand what was happening but he knew he needed to help. He swore to become a doctor so that he could help Chris, but in the meantime Dillon brought as many video games as possible to help distract Chris from his hospital stay'
Chris had been enrolled as Sacramento City College and was studying to become an IT specialist
The duo became friends after Chris moved from North Carolina to California at the age of 10.
Chris was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia.
The website states: 'When Dillon's best friend was diagnosed at such a young age, he didn't quite understand what was happening but he knew he needed to help.
'He swore to become a doctor so that he could help Chris, but in the meantime Dillon brought as many video games as possible to help distract Chris from his hospital stay.'
In high school, Dillon, 'completely breaking best-friend policy,' dated Chris' sister.
When said sister took her own life, it brought the best friends closer.
Eventually, they even found a non-profit organization called Gamers Gift which brings virtual reality experiences to people who otherwise would not be able to experience them (people who are wheelchair-bound or are in a hospital, for example).
Both later went to college; Chris studied at Sacramento City College with the hope of becoming an IT professional.
Dillon told KCRA: 'It really comes down to he needs a bone marrow donor.' He added: 'If we can't do that and it comes to the worst possible case, and we lose Chris - the last year of his life is going to be documented and it's going to be shared with millions of people'
But in September 2017, he learned that the number of cancer cells in his body had dramatically increased and his doctors told him he only had one year to live.
And so, the best friends are doing their best to make the year count.
Dillon has taken a year off from college to experience the bucket list.
One recent video shows them distributing food to the homeless on Thanksgiving.
Also, the duo hopes to find a bone marrow donor to give Chris a fighting chance at survival.
Dillon told KCRA: 'It really comes down to he needs a bone marrow donor.'
He added: 'If we can't do that and it comes to the worst possible case, and we lose Chris - the last year of his life is going to be documented and it's going to be shared with millions of people.'
So far, the pair has completed four of the 79 items on their ever-growing bucket list.
They have 'gone around and given homeless people food and water,' 'yelled really loud in a quiet place,' 'ordered 100 of an item from a fast food place' and 'met someone from Reddit'.
The pair are raising funds for their bucket list on Patreon and GoFundMe are also documenting their experience on Twitter Instagram and YouTube
Brexit Britain received a boost today as Facebook opened its largest engineering hub outside the US in London today - bringing another 800 jobs to the capital.
Facebook chief Nicola Mendelsohn said the investment showed it is 'more committed than ever to the UK' while Philip Hammond said it is a vote of confidence in the country.
Meanwhile, a US investment fund is reportedly set to pump 1billion into creating a large biotech company in Britain.
Tory MP and leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg told Mail Online: 'It is no surprise that as the UK prepares to leave the European Union it becomes and even more attractive place in which to invest.'
Facebook's new 247,000 square foot office has opened today is in Rathbone Place, just off bustling Oxford Street in central London.
Chancellor Philip Hammond and Facebook vice president for Europe Nicola Mendelsohn take a tour of Facebook's new London offices. She said the engineering hub in London shows the social media giant is more committed than ever to the UK and Mr Hammond said it is a vote of confidence in the British economy
The new Facebook offices, which brings 800 new jobs to the capital, includes lots of trendy designs like these giant hand-printed letters
More than half the staff in the new offices will be engineers, providing new high-skilled jobs for Britain.
Ms Mendelsohn, vice president for Facebook Europe, said: 'The UK's flourishing entrepreneurial ecosystem and international reputation for engineering excellence makes it one of the best places in the world to build a tech company.
'And we've built our company here this country has been a huge part of Facebook's story over the past decade, and I look forward to continuing our work to achieve our mission of bringing the world closer together.'
The Chancellor, who visited the offices today on his 62nd birthday, said: 'I want to congratulate Facebook on the opening of their new London office.
'The UK is not only the best place to start a new business, it's also the best place to grow one.
The Facebook offices, pictured, has opened today is in Rathbone Place, just off bustling Oxford Street in central London
The trendy new office, designed by Frank Gehry - the architect behind the Guggenheim Museum in Spain - will also include an 'incubator space' for start-ups
'It's a sign of confidence in our country that innovative companies like Facebook invest here, and it's terrific news that they will be hiring 800 more highly skilled workers next year.'
The trendy new office, designed by Frank Gehry - the architect behind the Guggenheim Museum in Spain - will also include an 'incubator space' for start-ups.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan welcomed the 'fantastic' announcement.
He added: 'The launch of the company's incubator is set to play a crucial role in attracting vital talent to London and will help to pave the way for the next generation of successful start-ups.'
Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that a life sciences fund based across the Pond will pay 1bn to set up a biotech company in the UK.
The as yet unnamed investor will move a significant chunk of its operations across the Atlantic to the UK.
The announcement is a major boost for Theresa May's government which has said it wants the UK to be a world leader in the biotech industry.
A teenager has been charged over the terrifying abduction of a nurse who was allegedly shoved into the boot of his own car by masked men armed with knives and a gun.
Police allege the 17-year-old was one of three to attack Joe Brooker, 25, as he walked to his car at Pindara Private Hospital in the Gold Coast suburb of Benowa on Friday.
It's alleged the men, who were wearing balaclavas and armed with knives and a handgun, bundled him into the boot and drove him to an ATM where they forced him to withdraw cash.
A teenager has been charged over the terrifying abduction of Joe Brooker (pictured) who was allegedly shoved into the boot of his own car by masked men armed with knives and a gun
A group of teens allegedly confronted the male nurse at a hospital on Friday before forcing him into a car boot
He was then put back into the boot before his attackers crashed the car into the fence of a house at nearby Ashmore and fled, police said.
Mr Brooker was taken to Gold Coast University Hospital with non-life threatening injuries after neighbours rescued him from the boot.
He was discharged later in the day.
Police said the gang went on to steal a second car that rolled on Ashmore Rd about 4.45am on Saturday.
The teenager will appear in the Southport Magistrates Court on Monday charged with two counts of unlawful use of a motor vehicle, two counts of armed robbery, and one count each of torture and deprivation of liberty.
Investigations are continuing.
Mr Brooker was taken to Gold Coast University Hospital with non-life threatening injuries after neighbours rescued him from the boot
A sweet grandmother with an astonishing 14 grandchildren was asked to name all of them on live television - but she flatly refused.
The Sydney woman appeared on Sunrise alongside her friends as reporter Sam Mac visited an aged care home on Monday.
Speaking on Sunrise, the Sydney woman was put on the spot when a journalist asked the room of grandparents who had the most grandchildren.
Speaking on Sunrise, the Sydney woman (pictured) was put on the spot when a journalist asked the room of grandparents who had the most grandchildren
The Sydney woman appeared on Sunrise alongside her friends as reporter Sam Mac visited an aged care home on Monday
The group of elderly grandparents raised their hands as they told Sam how many grandchildren they had, but it was no contest for one woman who has an unbelievable 14.
When asked if she could name all of her brood, the grandmother suffered from a bout of stage-fright and simply laughed and replied: 'No. Not today.'
'Well at least she's honest,' the reporter replied, before asking the woman if she could name just one.
The doting grandmother then named only one grandchild, Ben, to which the room erupted in laughter.
When asked if she could name all of her brood, the grandmother (pictured) suffered from a bout of stage-fright and simply laughed and replied: 'No. Not today'
'Well at least she's honest,' the reporter replied, before asking the woman if she could name just one (Pictured is Samantha Armytage and David Koch)
'There you go Ben's her favourite,' the Sunrise journalist told Samantha Armytage and David Koch.
Host Samantha then offered up her own family tidbit by telling the audience her Catholic grandmother has 22 grandchildren.
'She would be able to name them all, I reckon,' she added.
Up to 2000 users of dial-a-dealer drug syndicates have been sent a text message by police asking them to come forward with information about the crime groups.
The numbers were obtained from mobile phones seized in a two-month New South Wales Police operation targeting cocaine dealers operating in Sydney.
'This ph no has been ID'd as part of a NSWPF Cocaine investigation in the Sydney area,' the text said. 'If you have any information please contact Crime Stoppers on 1300 333 000.'
Perhaps surprisingly, a police spokeswoman said dozens of those who received the text message had already replied.
About 2000 phone numbers were retrieved from the phones of those arrested in the operation
Police have sent a text message to about 2000 people whose numbers were found in an operation targeting dial-a-dealer cocaine syndicates in the Sydney metropolitan area
Strike Force Northrop was a two-month sting targeting 'dial-a-dealer' cocaine syndicates
Cocaine seized by Strike Force Northrop in an operation targeting dial-a-dealers in Sydney
A total of 36 people - 28 men and eight women - have been arrested by police who seized 468 grams of cocaine, 196 grams of MDMA, $120,000 cash, two loaded firearms and a number of cars.
But it is the location of about 2000 numbers on mobile phones seized by Strike Force Northrop that would have customers of the syndicates worried.
Detective Chief Inspector Stuart Bell said every number found on the phones would be contacted.
'What we'll be doing today is sending SMS text messages to each of those persons to ascertain if they can help us further with our inquiries,' Detective Chief Inspector Bell told reporters last Friday.
'If you are the recipient, it's in your best interest to contact them.'
Detectives and other police arrest a man as part of an operation targeting cocaine dealers
NSW Police arrested 36 people as part of an operation targeting cocaine supply in Sydney
Strike Force Northrop police arrest a suspect as part of a crackdown on cocaine supply
While the recipients were under no legal obligation to reply, dozens had done so by Friday evening.
The syndicates are alleged to have used a central phone number for customers to contact and organise a drug drop at a location of their choice.
Detective Chief Inspector Bell compared it to arranging the delivery of fast food.
'Just like ordering a pizza ... only illegal,' he said.
'These criminal groups have an extensive client base that individuals were contacting for the sole purpose of purchasing cocaine.
'They were operating a dial-a-dealer service.
The cocaine seized would have equated to about 500 street deals.
'It shows that the demand for cocaine is high,' Detective Chief Inspector Bell said.
A Glock 26 pistol seized by Strike Force Northrop in an operation targeting cocaine supply
Cash seized by officers from Strike Force Northrop targeting cocaine dealing in Sydney
The syndicates are alleged to have used a central phone number for customers to contact
'While the demand is high, we'll continue to run these types of investigations.'
The majority of those arrested face charges relating to the ongoing dealing of cocaine and others were picked up for possession.
They came from all walks of life, 'from corporates to unemployed', Detective Chief Inspector Bell said.
Strike Force Northrop was established in September 2017 by detectives attached to Redfern Region Enforcement Squad to target the ongoing supply of cocaine within the central metropolitan region.
Police have laid more than 120 charges in total and most of the defendants will face court in January.
Charges include supply prohibited drug, knowingly participate in criminal group, ongoing drug supply, deal with proceeds of crime and possess prohibited drug.
Police have laid more than 120 charges and most of those accused will face court in January
Theresa May's (pictured) hopes of a Brexit breakthrough are in jeopardy ahead of crunch talks with Ireland and others in Brussels today
Theresa May's hopes of a Brexit breakthrough are in jeopardy ahead of crunch talks in Brussels today after no breakthrough in Dublin over the UK's future border with Ireland.
The Prime Minister will travel to Belgium this morning ahead of a lunch with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and chief EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier.
She will then hold further talks with EU Council president Donald Tusk, who represents the interests of the remaining 27 member states.
The PM is also expected to telephone Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, whose last-minute threat to veto progress over border issues has thrown the careful choreography of a deal into chaos.
A source said the chance of progressing to a possible deal was now only 50/50 - which would be a huge blow to the Prime Minister.
Mr Varadkar and Mrs May were expected to speak by phone before he chaired a special Cabinet meeting at 9am today.
But EU sources have said that after talks through the night have failed to find agreement on four key areas, including a solid commitment to avoid a hard border between North and South when Britain leaves the EU.
If there is no agreement today the best case scenario is that it is sorted this week - the worst case scenario is that any agreement is pushed into the new year.
Mrs May had hoped to secure agreement on moving on to trade talks after persuading her cabinet to back an improved divorce payment worth up to 40billion to the EU.
In return, she is demanding assurances that Brussels will agree a comprehensive trade deal.
But, despite round-the-clock talks this weekend, key differences remain between the two sides, particularly over the Irish border.
The PM is also expected to telephone Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (pictured), whose last-minute threat to veto progress over border issues has thrown the careful choreography of a deal into chaos
A Government spokesman said today's meetings were now seen as no more than a 'staging post' ahead of a summit of EU leaders next week.
The four key demands made by Dublin First: Information around the transition period of the UK exiting the EU.
Information around the transition period of the UK exiting the EU. Second: Agreement on rights associated with the Common Travel Area, and what the arrangements would be on this.
Agreement on rights associated with the Common Travel Area, and what the arrangements would be on this. Third: A commitment that would see the Good Friday Agreement protected.
A commitment that would see the Good Friday Agreement protected. Fourth: A solid commitment to avoid a hard border between North and South and that rules and regulations of the Single Market and Customs Union cant diverge. Advertisement
The spokesman said there were 'plenty of discussions still to go' before a deal is struck.
Ministers are alarmed by the lack of a breakthrough. Some, including the Brexit Secretary David Davis, are warning privately that Mrs May will have to walk away if there is no agreement at next week's EU summit.
One source familiar with the talks said: 'If we don't make sufficient progress at this stage then the process is over.'
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt yesterday warned Eurosceptic MPs not to limit Mrs May's room for manoeuvre. 'The choice we face is not between this Brexit or that Brexit,' he said.
'If we don't back Theresa May we will have no Brexit, and she is doing an unbelievably challenging job amazingly well.'
Mr Hunt's intervention came as 30 Eurosceptics set down seven 'red lines' over Brexit.
The Leave Means Leave group said Mrs May should not make any payment to Brussels unless she received clear pledges in return, including a free trade deal and agreement that the UK would not have to accept any new EU regulations or European court rulings during a two-year transition period.
Signatories of the letter include former cabinet ministers Lord Lawson, John Redwood and Owen Paterson. They urge Mrs May to abandon the talks completely and go for a no-deal Brexit if Brussels refuses to agree terms next week.
The Prime Minister will travel to Belgium this morning ahead of a lunch with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured right) and chief EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. She will then hold further talks with EU Council president Donald Tusk
Today's talks are designed to determine whether 'sufficient progress' has been made on three key issues to persuade the EU to move on to trade talks.
What happens if Britain can't strike a border deal with Three possible outcomes: Best case: Dublin signs off on the joint EU-British 'text' meaning talks move on to Phase 2. Possible case: Dublin cannot agree text but agreement is secured later this week. Worst case: Talks break down and it is pushed into the new year - throwing Theresa May's Brexit timetable into chaos. Advertisement
The issues at the centre of the row are the size of the divorce bill, the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and the status of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
The divorce bill is now seen as the most straightforward issue, with EU sources indicating Brussels is ready to accept Mrs May's revised offer.
But differences remain on citizens' rights and Northern Ireland.
The Prime Minister had hoped to offer a 'compromise' on citizens' rights, which would give the European Court of Justice a minor, indirect role. But she has not yet persuaded her cabinet to sign it off.
The deal would allow the UK's Supreme Court to ask the ECJ for guidance in cases brought by EU citizens where there is no existing case law. EU citizens would lose the right to appeal directly to the ECJ a key Brussels demand.
Nigel Farage was dragged into the divorce bill row yesterday because his 73,000-a-year MEP's pension will be part-funded by Britain's proposed 40billion payment.
The UKIP leader rejected calls to give up the money, saying: 'Why should my family suffer?'
Facebook has backed post-Brexit Britain by opening a London office employing 800 staff. It will be the social networking firm's biggest software engineering hub outside the US.
Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook vice president for Europe, Middle East and Asia, said it was 'more committed than ever to the UK'.
Social media firms should limit access to their sites for vulnerable youngsters, Jeremy Hunt has suggested.
The Health Secretary said sites such as Facebook and Twitter are able to monitor whether young people are risking their mental health by spending hours online.
He suggested mobile phone technology that blocks messages from arriving when people are driving could be a potential solution.
Mr Hunt made the comments as he announced a 300million scheme to provide counselling and mental health support for school pupils.
It follows reports that nearly half of 11 and 12-year-olds have accounts on social media, despite a supposed ban on those under 13.
Appearing on ITV's Peston on Sunday, Jeremy Hunt (pictured) called on social media websites to restrict usage for vulnerable youngsters if their mental health was considered to be at risk
Figures show that in the past year almost a fifth of 12 to 15-year-olds have seen 'worrying' or 'nasty' material on the internet, amid fears social media may be fuelling child mental health problems and a sharp rise in self-harm among teenage girls.
Asked whether the Government should be tougher on social media firms, Mr Hunt told ITV's Peston on Sunday: 'We know there is a correlation between people who have mental health issues and people who spend a very long time online and it's perfectly possible for a social media platform to monitor if a young person is spending hours and hours online.'
On the responsibility of tech firms, added: 'There are different things they can do but we want to hear from them.
'On my iPhone, for example, there is a new feature which actually stops it sending messages to me when it thinks I'm driving, and if you try and get a message in your car you have to say, 'I'm not driving'.'
The Health Secretary met with social media firms in October and is set to do so again early in the new year.
The Health Secretary (pictured) said sites such as Facebook and Twitter are able to monitor whether young people are risking their mental health by spending hours online
Last month Ofcom reported that one in ten children aged between 12 and 15 have shared live videos of themselves, raising concerns over platforms allowing them to share this footage with strangers.
Mr Hunt said: 'We were very clear with them that if they don't do more to deal with the issue of people lying about their age and then signing up to a Facebook account when they're too young then we would take action, but we want to give them a chance.'
The Government will today set out in a green paper its plan to bring counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy into the classroom.
Every school will have a mental health 'lead', plus support teams working with school nurses and psychologists.
It is hoped this will encourage children battling anxiety and depression to seek help, as they can talk to professionals in the familiar surroundings of their school rather than an NHS clinic.
But the initiative will reach only a quarter of the country by the end of the current Parliament in 2022.
The Government is also piloting a four-week maximum waiting time for children and young people's mental health services.
He suggested mobile phone technology that blocks messages from arriving when people are driving could be a potential solution
But this will have been rolled out across only a fifth of the country by 2022-23.
Mr Hunt added: 'We have lots of fantastic mental health provision in the NHS but one of the areas we don't do as well as we should is getting help to youngsters, teenagers in particular, who need help urgently and we know that about half of mental health conditions become established before the age of 14.
'If you have a daughter who has anorexia a son who has OCD [obsessive compulsive disorder], these are horrific conditions and typically you would have to wait six months before getting proper NHS care. That's not good enough.'
Dr Bernadka Dubicka, of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: 'One of the biggest problems we see is that children who don't meet thresholds for mental health treatment often fall through the gaps.
It follows reports that nearly half of 11 and 12-year-olds have accounts on social media, despite a supposed ban on those under 13. Figures also show that in the past year almost a fifth of 12 to 15-year-olds have seen 'worrying' or 'nasty' material on the internet. File image used
'It is really promising to see the Government looking to tackle this. But it is crucial that there is enough resource available for the quality of care to remain consistently high.'
An NSPCC spokesman said: 'We have long called for social media companies to better protect all children using their platforms, and there are a number of ways they can do that, such as default privacy settings, content filters and grooming and bullying alerts.
'These should all be enforced by an independent regulator put in place by Government.
'But we must remember the internet can be a lifeline to children Many young people who contact Childline about anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide do so via our online channels.'
A hardline Muslim sheikh from western Sydney has declared married women must be banned from socialising with men.
Sunni fundamentalist Mohamad Doar, who preaches Sharia law, told his followers husbands had to 'protect' their wives from 'evil'.
'A loving and understanding husband is not one who allows his wife to free mix with the opposite sex and show off her adornments in public,' he said on Facebook.
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Hardline Sunni sheikh Mohamad Doar says married women should not ever mix with men
The Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah Association urges Muslims to reject Western social values
'Rather the loving and understanding husband is the one who protects his wife from all evil, encourages her to obey her Lord and advises her.'
The sheikh is associated with Roselands Mosque and the Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah Association, which has urged Muslims to reject the western definition of marriage, where there is an implied equality between men and women.
'Islam's definition of a loving and understanding husband is much different to that of the west, let us not be deceived,' he said.
In April Sheikh Doar, who also goes by the name Abu Rashied, told teenage girls at a youth night in Punchbowl they would go to hell if they befriended non-Muslims.
The Salafist Muslim group in western Sydney says married women can't socialise with men
'The reality is, my sisters, any friendship that is not built on the fear of Allah is only going to lead to hell fire so you need to be cautious,' he said.
'With your actions, you distance yourself from the corrupted people.'
He also warned them against plucking their eyebrows.
'You are not allowed the remove the hair of the eyebrow, it's a major sin,' he said.
'The lady who plucks her eyebrows and the one who gets them plucked, they're both cursed by Allah.'
Mohamad Doar, also known as Abu Rashied, urges girls to avoid having non-Muslims friends
He was referring to the hadith, describing the actions of the Prophet Mohammad, as part of a question and answer session organised by Muslim charity Sisters United.
The ASWJ is a fundamentalist group which preaches a Salafist ideology imported from Saudi Arabia.
Its preachers include Nassim Abdi, who has urged Muslims to refrain from listening to music and called on women to cover up their ears in public.
The group also urges Muslims to refrain from participating in non-Muslim events like the Royal Sydney Easter Show and New Year's Eve.
The retired detective who leaked sensitive private information from the Damian Green inquiry could face prosecution, it emerged last night
The retired detective who leaked sensitive private information from the Damian Green inquiry could face prosecution, it emerged last night.
Neil Lewis, 48, is at the centre of an urgent Scotland Yard anti-corruption probe after accusing Theresa Mays deputy of lying.
Mr Lewis sparked a storm of controversy last week after disclosing confidential information gathered during an investigation nine years ago into Mr Green.
He said he found thousands of thumbnail pornographic images on computers in Mr Greens Commons office in 2008 and accused him of being responsible for downloading them, which the First Secretary of State strongly denies.
The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has repeatedly said police officers and staff must never abuse their access to highly sensitive personal information.
Last night, one legal expert said she would be very surprised if a criminal case cannot be brought against Mr Lewis, adding that he may have committed offences under data protection, computer misuse and even theft legislation.
And police watchdog Sir Tom Winsor, Her Majestys Chief Inspector of Constabulary, has accused Mr Lewis of actions which flagrantly violate the trust ordinary people put in officers investigating sensitive crimes.
Sir Tom said the public must be reassured that when sensitive information comes into police hands its private nature will be respected in perpetuity.
He said that if trust between police and public is damaged it may lead to great harm to public safety and justice.
Neil Lewis (pictured), 48, is at the centre of an urgent Scotland Yard anti-corruption probe after accusing Theresa Mays deputy of lying
That trust requires every police officer to respect and keep confidential information which they obtain in the course of their duties and which is irrelevant to their inquiries and discloses no criminal conduct, he said.
If a police officer broke that trust whilst serving as a police officer, he or she would face disciplinary action and could be dismissed. In certain circumstances, such action could also constitute a criminal offence.
The obligation of confidentiality, and the duty not to break trust, is an enduring one. It does not end when a police officer retires.
He added: Almost all police officers serving and retired would deprecate actions which flagrantly violate the trust which every citizen should have in the police.
Dozens of police officers have been prosecuted in recent years for breaching the Data Protection Act and other offences by illicitly accessing private information.
Mr Lewis levelled a series of allegations at Mr Green during an extended interview with the BBC.
Police watchdog Sir Tom Winsor, Her Majestys Chief Inspector of Constabulary, has accused Mr Lewis of actions which flagrantly violate the trust ordinary people put in officers
The former detective constable was responsible for seizing and analysing the then shadow immigration ministers computers during a 2008 inquiry which culminated in a raid on his Parliamentary office.
Mr Lewis admitted it was impossible to say who was sitting at the computer as it was used. And he did not bother reporting his concerns to senior officers at the time as they were irrelevant to the wider inquiry into Home Office leaks.
He also confessed to holding on to his police notebook and evidence bags from the inquiry, despite the fact they remained police property.
And he confirmed that he retained a cloned copy of Mr Greens computer hard drive knowing that the pornography data could be recovered, despite being ordered to destroy it. His actions sent shockwaves through policing amid fears they could undermine the publics confidence in police.
Yesterday former Home Secretary Lord Howard said he supported others who have condemned the leaking of information.
Bob Quick is the former senior officer who oversaw the ill-fated 2008 leak inquiry. Mr Quick is accused of harbouring a grudge against Mr Green and other senior Conservatives
I think that is a very serious matter indeed, he told the BBCs Sunday Politics show. Policing in this country is based on trust between the police and the public.
If we have retired police officers leaking confidential information of this kind it will be very damaging to that trust.
Tory MP Dominic Grieve, a former attorney general, lashed out at Mr Lewis and Bob Quick, the former senior officer who oversaw the ill-fated 2008 leak inquiry. Mr Quick is accused of harbouring a grudge against Mr Green and other senior Conservatives.
Mr Grieve said if either man believed they had relevant information they should have gone to Scotland Yard or the Cabinet Office.
Retired top officer Tim Brain, a former Gloucestershire chief constable, said he had no problem with Mr Lewiss actions and he too had retained police paperwork.
The Data Protection Act makes it an offence, punishable by an unlimited fine, to improperly disclose personal information held on police systems.
Last night, the Information Commissioners Office said its officials are ready to advise colleagues at the Metropolitan Police as their inquiry progresses. He said: We are not currently looking into this matter but will consider any complaint or referral if we receive one.
A security flaw in parliament could have allowed pornography to be placed on Damian Greens computer without his involvement, John Bercows deputy has warned.
Eleanor Laing, deputy speaker of the Commons, has revealed that her office assistant found pornographic images had been put on her computer without her knowledge every day when working in parliament before 2010.
The source of the images was never found. But allies of Mr Green believe lax cyber-security at the Commons a decade ago could explain police claims that they found thousands of pornographic pictures on his computer during a botched raid on his office in 2008.
Eleanor Laing has revealed that her office assistant found pornographic images had been put on her computer without her knowledge every day when working in parliament before 2010
Damian Green is battling to save his career after police claimed that they found thousands of pornographic pictures on his computer during a botched raid on his office in 2008
In a letter to Mr Green, a copy of which has been seen by the Daily Mail, Mrs Laing says it was clearly possible at the time for pornography to find its way onto parliamentary computers without the knowledge of the user. She said this appeared to be relevant to Mr Greens case.
In the letter, dated November 14, which has been passed to the Cabinet Office investigation into Mr Greens conduct, she states: A member of my parliamentary staff has told me that, several years ago, before we had effective screening of our parliamentary computers, she used to find pornographic images on her computer every morning when she switched it on.
She was certainly not accessing pornographic sites deliberately or even accidentally. The material was just there on her computer every day. She simply deleted it. This happened before 2010.
Thus, it would appear that material found in the parliamentary computer system can be proved to have been put there by some other means than by the deliberate actions of the person operating the computer.
Mrs Laings intervention came as Cabinet splits emerged over how Theresa May should respond to claims about Mr Greens conduct.
Education Secretary Justine Greening yesterday suggested he should be sacked if a Cabinet Office inquiry concludes that pornography was found on his computer.
Asked whether it was okay for people to view pornography at work, she said: I dont think thats acceptable
Former detective Neil Lewis (pictured), 48, is at the centre of an urgent Scotland Yard anti-corruption probe after accusing Theresa Mays deputy of lying
She declined to comment directly on the investigation into Mr Green, but added: I think it is important that we have high standards in public life.
Mrs Mays influential chief-of-staff, Gavin Barwell, is also said to be urging Mr Green to resign rather than cause any more embarrassment for the government. But other senior Tories weighed in behind Mr Green as he battles to save his career.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said he had no doubt Mr Green was telling the truth. Referring to a previous inquiry into his own conduct, he told ITV: I do have confidence in Damian Green and I have actually been in the situation Damian Green was in, where everyone thinks youve done an absolutely terrible thing and what I learnt from that is that you have to wait until an investigation is completed.
The pornography claims were first made last month by former police chief Bob Quick, who ordered the controversial raid on Mr Greens Commons office in 2008
And I was vindicated at the end of that process in my own case I know Damian Green as a colleague and I trust him absolutely and thats why I believe what he says, but there is an investigation and I think we should wait.
Brexit Secretary David Davis has also warned Mrs May not to sack Mr Green and suggested he could even resign himself if his colleague is ousted as a result of a vendetta by former police officers.
Mr Green has been under investigation for a month over disputed claims that he made unwanted advances towards Tory activist Kate Maltby, who is 30 years his junior.
But Sue Gray, director of ethics and propriety at the Cabinet Office, has also questioned him over the claims about pornography, which he denies.
The claims were first made last month by former police chief Bob Quick, who ordered the controversial raid on Mr Greens Commons office in 2008.
He was backed up on Friday by another former Scotland Yard detective Neil Lewis, who said he had no doubt that Mr Green himself had downloaded the pornography, which he said ran to thousands of images.
Mr Green responded: I have maintained all along and I still maintain it is the truth that I did not download or look at pornography on my computer, but obviously while the investigation is going on I cant say any more.
Miss Gray has interviewed a string of staff who have worked with Mr Green during his five years as a minister. This process is not thought to have thrown up any further allegations of impropriety. Her report is due to go to Mrs May for a decision in the coming days.
A 'uniquely vulnerable' network of underwater cables leave the UK security and economy at risk of an 'existential' attack by terrorists, a report says.
The report, written by Conservative MP Rishi Sunak for Policy Exchange think-tank, said that while 97% of global communications were transmitted through fibre-optic carrying cables they remained 'uniquely vulnerable' to sabotage.
Despite their importance, the report said they were often poorly protected, their locations publicly known, with the cables coming ashore at just a few remote 'landing sites' in the UK making them a tempting target for terrorists.
A 'uniquely vulnerable' network of underwater cables leave the UK security and economy at risk of an 'existential' attack by terrorists, a report says (file image)
'Whether from terrorist activity or an increasingly bellicose Russian naval presence, the threat of these vulnerabilities being exploited is growing,' the report said.
'A successful attack would deal a crippling blow to Britain's security and prosperity. The threat is nothing short of existential.
'The result would be to damage commerce and disrupt government-to-government communications, potentially leading to economic turmoil and civil disorder.'
At sea, while the greatest threat was from submarine warfare, a successful attack could be carried out by a fishing trawler equipped with deep-sea grappling hooks.
The report was written by Conservative MP Rishi Sunak for Policy Exchange think-tank
The report highlighted the way that during the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Russians 'easily' cut all digital communications from the peninsula.
It said that the Government's next Strategic Defence and Security Review should specifically address threats to Britain's security from attacks on the undersea cable infrastructure.
A Government spokesman said that any threat to Britain's infrastructure was taken 'extremely seriously'.
'We are continuously working with industry to ensure our sub-sea cable network is secure and have a variety of tools to monitor potentially-hostile maritime activity,' the spokesman said.
A tearful openly gay politician has proposed to his partner from the chamber of parliament during the debate on same-sex marriage.
Liberal MP Tim Wilson, 37, was emotional as he spoke during the debate on Monday, as he stood and thanked his long-term partner, primary school teacher Ryan Bolger, 33, for supporting him.
You have had to tolerate more than most because you had to put up with me trust me, he said between tears.
Liberal MP Tim Wilson has proposed to his partner Ryan Bolger during a debate on same-sex marriage
Mr Wilson, 37, became emotional as he addressed his partner before proposing
This debate has been the soundtrack to our relationship. We both know this issue isnt the reason we got involved in politics but in my first speech, I defined our bond by the ring that sits on both of our left hands and they are the answer to the questions we cannot ask.
Mr Wilson then addressed his partner and popped the question.
So theres only one thing left to do. Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?
Mr Bolger answered yes, to strong applause.
Mr Wilson was congratulated by other politicians after Mr Bolger accepted his proposal
Deputy speaker Rob Mitchell said the 'resounding yes' should be recorded in the notes, before offering his congratulations to Mr Wilson.
'Well done mate,' Mr Mitchell said.
In his maiden speech to parliament, Mr Wilson became emotional when speaking about Mr Bolger.
'For seven years, a ring has sat on both of our left hands, and they are the answer to a question we still cannot ask,' he said at the time.
Brexit voters may struggle to get their heads around the idea of a female star of Doctor Who, the BBC shows writer has suggested.
In a barbed comment about the millions who voted for Britain to leave the EU, Steven Moffat hinted that liberal Remainers were more comfortable with an actress playing the Doctor.
The 56-year-old suggested that Brexit-voting viewers might be harder to keep on board after Jodie Whittaker takes the role later this month because they do not have progressive views.
Brexit voters may struggle to get their heads around the idea of a female star of Doctor Who, the BBC shows writer Stephen Moffat has suggested
Moffat said that the writers had to worry about these viewers saying: Thats not the same person.
He added: This isnt a show exclusively for progressive liberals, this is also for people who voted Brexit.
Thats not me politically at all, but we have to keep everyone on board.
The writer, who has worked on Doctor Who since 2005, said now was the right time to give the shows lead role to a woman.
Broadchurch actress Miss Whittaker, 35, will take over from Peter Capaldi in the new series. Moffat, who also created the BBCs Sherlock, told the Radio Times: If wed replaced David Tennant with a woman it wouldnt have worked.
It was too early. We could have replaced Matt Smith with a woman, given that his Doctor was more sexless and less of a lad, but then I got obsessed with seeing Peter in the Tardis.
Moffat hinted that liberal Remainers were more comfortable with an actress playing the Doctor. Jodie Whittaker takes the role later this month
Then I turned [villain] the Master into Missy and no one had any problem with that being the same character.
Capaldi, 59, will leave his role as the Doctor after four years during this years Christmas Day special.
It will also be Moffats final episode, with Broadchurch writer Chris Chibnall to take over as head writer. Radio 2s Jo Whiley, who saw some of the special being filmed, said: There was a scene that they had to film and everyone was in tears.
Because of the poignancy of the scene that they were filming, which had less to do with the Doctor himself and more to do with the storyline.
And everyone was in pieces. And when you watch the Christmas Day episode, youll understand. Its really very, very clever, and very laced with emotion.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will have a wedding cake made of bananas when they tie the knot in May, a source has claimed
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will have a wedding cake made of bananas when they tie the knot in May, it has been claimed.
Harry, 33, and Miss Markle are said to have chosen the fruit for their ceremonial showpiece because the Prince loves 'anything with banana'.
Suits star Miss Markle, 36, set tongues wagging when she posted a picture on Instagram of two bananas spooning, with the caption 'sleep tight xx', 13 months ago.
Many interpreted the cryptic post as a symbol of the high profile couple's long distance relationship.
Now it appears the fruit may have a further role to play in their romance.
The couple will marry at St George's Chapel in the grounds of Windsor Castle because it is a place 'close to the couple's hearts', it was revealed last week.
But after the ceremony, the wedding party and guests may end up tucking into more than just the traditional fruit bake.
'This will be the first royal wedding cake made from bananas', a source told the Telegraph.
Darren Grady, former royal chef to Prince Harry and the Duke of Cambridge when they were were children, told Hello! magazine the brothers 'loved banana flan, anything with banana really, banana ice cream.'
The Prince and Miss Markle's unconventional cake will follow the trend set by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at their wedding in 2011.
Suits star Miss Markle, 36, set tongues wagging when she posted a picture on Instagram of two bananas spooning, with the caption 'sleep tight', 13 months ago
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's chocolate biscuit wedding cake, made by McVities from a Royal Family recipe
The royal couple requested a chocolate biscuit creation along with their eight-tiered traditional centrepiece.
The cake was made by McVities, from a Royal Family recipe, and was specially requested by Prince William.
The Prince and Miss Markle have not given an exact date for their 'fun and joyful' wedding yet, but it is likely to be on TV.
The couple have shunned a larger wedding at Westminster Abbey or St Paul's for a more intimate church service at St George's, where Harry's father Charles had a blessing after marrying Camilla in the nearby Guildhall in 2005.
The royal family will pay for the event, the music, the flowers and the reception.
A newly-constructed missile North Korean officials said could reach the 'whole US mainland' failed during testing this week.
The presumed powerful Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) broke apart in the air Wednesday as it re-entered into the Earth's atmosphere, a US official told Fox News.
Eugene Lee, a South Korean spokesperson of the Ministry of Unification, who deals with North Korean affairs, said the Seoul government believes the 'North hasn't crossed the 'red line' in weapons development yet because it hasn't perfected its ICBMs,' according to the report.
North Korea's Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile (pictured above during launch) broke apart in the air during testing Wednesday
The 'powerful' missile was predicted to reach across the 'whole US mainland,' officials said
The missile flew 950 kilometers (600 miles) before it splashed down in waters near Japan
Back in July, North Korea also launched its Hwasong-14, which successfully flew 580 miles before it crashed into the Sea of Japan.
Officials confirmed the Hwasong-15 missile was 'significantly more' powerful than the Hwasong-14.
South Korea's military said the latest missile flew 950 kilometers (600 miles) before splashing down in waters near Japan.
South Korean President Moon Jae-In speaks with US President Donald Trump at the presidential Blue House in Seoul on November 29, 2017 following the new North Korean missile test
This Nov. 29, 2017, image shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, third from left, and what the North Korean government calls the Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, in North Korea
The new Hwasong-15 missile (shown) was said to be 'significantly more' powerful than the Hwasong-14 which launched in July
It is potentially capable of striking targets as far as 13,000 kilometers (8,100 miles), which would put Washington within reach.
Despite the break, the launch of the new ICBM was celebrated Friday with a massive public rally and fireworks in capital Pyongyang.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un also thanked workers during a visit to a factory that built the tires for a huge vehicle used to transport the ICBM.
Kim Jong-Un is shown visiting the Amnokgang Tire Factory in the Chagang province this week
Kim thanked workers at a factory that built the tires for a huge vehicle used to transport a new intercontinental ballistic missile that was test-launched this week
Kim complimented workers for manufacturing the large-size tires for the 9-axle missile truck without relying on imported equipment.
The leader called for efforts to raise production to 'satisfy the daily-increasing needs in developing the country's economy and beefing up national defense capabilities,' the North's official Korean Central News Agency said Saturday.
Kim in September tasked the Amnokgang Tire Factory to make the tires for the 'great event in November,' the agency reported.
As the Government edges closer to agreeing a 50 billion divorce from the EU, the Northern Ireland border issue may yet prove even more troublesome.
But Ive discovered another potential source of conflict. What is going to happen to the Government art collection which is on show in the European Parliament buildings?
Baroness Rawlings, when she was a Tory MEP between 1989 and 1994, chaired a committee which spent 80,000 on 12 paintings to exhibit in Brussels.
By even the most conservative estimate, the collection is now worth at least 15 million and probably far more.
The pictures include works by the Scottish artist Peter Doig, whose magical landscape paintings have earned millions. In 2015, Doigs Swamped, pictured, a painting of a moonlit white canoe, sold at auction for nearly 20m
Given that an obscure work by Leonardo da Vinci recently sold for 340million, the skys the limit!
The pictures include works by the Scottish artist Peter Doig, whose magical landscape paintings have earned millions.
In 2015, Doigs Swamped, a painting of a moonlit white canoe, sold at auction for nearly 20m.
There are also works by Sir Michael Craig-Martin, who was knighted last year for services to art. He has exhibited all over the world and among his former students is the British artist Damien Hirst.
Lady Rawlings has tabled a question in the Lords saying: Will the British art collection in the European Parliament be repatriated when the UK leaves the EU?
Lord Ashton of Hyde, a Tory culture minister, replied: The Government has not yet made a decision.
However, it will consider these matters carefully in the context of preparations and negotiations for the UKs exit from the EU.
What a typically woolly reply from the Government. Get those paintings back!
Benn and the hush-hush horses
Hilary Benn, chairman of the Brexit select committee, worked himself into a real lather over the Government redacting sensitive facts from papers assessing the impact of Brexit.
But Benn has a short memory. When he was Environment Secretary, he relied on similar exemptions to conceal information from Freedom of Information requests on far more trivial issues.
Such as which zoos giant pandas lived in, the sites in England licensed to hold Welsh Catfish, and a report on the recognition of the United Knabstrupper Association (the Knabstrupper is a horse breed from Denmark known for its eccentric coat).
Hardly subjects that warranted any secrecy at all.
Kezia still lost in the jungle
A classic exchange in Im A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! Stanley Johnson, father of Foreign Secretary Boris, said to Kezia Dugdale, the former leader of Scottish Labour: We must sit down and discuss Labours position on Brexit, to which Dugdale replied: Oh good. Can you explain it to me?
No wonder she jumped ship from her Scottish job if even she doesnt understand it.
Former Tory chairman Baroness Warsi was hosted by Primrose Hill Bookshop in leafy North London to try to shift copies of her book, The Enemy Within: A Tale Of Muslim Britain.
How did she thank her host? At the end of the presentation, she said: And by the way, if you go on Amazon, you can get my book a lot cheaper.
What a way to repay the shops generosity, which had to endure muddy feet and crisps trampled into the carpets.
Former Tory party chairman Baroness Warsi, pictured, was hosted by Primrose Hill Bookshop in leafy North London to try to shift copies of her book
Jeremy doesnt do dinners, explained shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, of the Labour leaders reluctance to break bread with Jewish organisations.
Thats why his deputy is called Tom Two Dinners Watson, joked a Labour MP, of Corbyns rotund No.2.
How Ukip is missing Nigel Farage. Current party leader Henry Bolton reveals: On taking office, I looked in the money bucket and found it entirely empty.
'In fact, it was worse than empty, it had a big hole in the bottom. There is no money: in fact for a year we have been running on an entirely unsustainable monthly deficit.
'The party has very few resources and I have inherited no office and no equipment or staff.
Or support in the polls, which has slumped below 5 per cent.
British smugglers are charging up to 5,000 to help illegal immigrants sneak into the UK from Belgium, according to reports.
Police in the European country say there has been a surge in the number of culprits from the UK at the port of Zeebrugge - with offenders risking jail terms.
One couple from Liverpool were caught with six Africans in their caravan, according to The Sun.
They claimed to police that they were unaware of how the migrants sneaked in at the port, which is just 70 miles from Calais where the Jungle camp housed thousands of refugees attempting to reach Britain.
But detectives discovered they had been given 5,000 to park in a remote area with the caravan door left open.
The port is just 70 miles from Calais (pictured) where the Jungle camp housed thousands of refugees attempting to reach Britain
A Belgian police insider told the newspaper: 'We are seeing an increase in the number of British people held at Zeebrugge. It appears many are on benefits and being tempted by the money on offer.
'They can make 5,000 by leaving the door of their caravan or mobile home open.
'We have seen several cases and are catching around 250 illegal immigrants a month.'
In October last year it emerged that people smugglers were risking the lives of desperate migrants by hiding them on top of the engines of cars and lorries.
Criminal gangs use the 'extremely dangerous' method to sneak people across borders unconcerned whether or not their victims died.
Criminal gangs use the 'extremely dangerous' method to sneak people across borders unconcerned whether or not their victims died. Pictured is the port of Calais in France which has been a flashpoint for the migrant crisis
Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, said at the time that traffickers were 'taking advantage of the space available between the engine and the bonnet' to conceal their human cargo.
It said the ruse was 'potentially life-endangering' as it warned that migrant smuggling was now a major business for criminals across Europe.
Asylum seekers were being charged as much as 6,200 each to be crammed by a vehicle's engine in the hope of evading border guards despite the risk of death.
An anti-Semitic man barged into a Jewish nursing home Saturday night and threatened to rob and kill an elderly man, police said.
Alen Califano, from Yonkers, broke into University Avenue Assisted Living in the Bronx around 5.30pm Saturday, police told the New York Daily News.
The 41-year-old allegedly asked a security guard to use the bathroom in the home, but immediately started entering different apartments and destroying property.
He eventually ran up to the fourth floor, lit a joint, and entered an 84-year-old Jewish man's apartment, according to police.
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Alen Califano, from Yonkers, broke into University Avenue Assisted Living in the Bronx around 5.30pm Saturday, police told the New York Daily News
He is accused of running up to the fourth floor, lighting a joint, and entering an 84-year-old Jewish man's apartment where he told the victim to give him his money and then assaulted him
Police told the Daily News Califano ordered the victim to give him his money.
When the victim refused, Califano allegedly said 'I will kill you, you f***ing Jew.'
He then is said to have hit the elderly victim with a cardboard tube, cutting his mouth and forehead - and then allegedly picked up a fire extinguisher and threw it at the man, who blocked it.
Police were called and met Califano as he tried to flee the nursing home.
He was handcuffed and arrested and charged with attempted robbery, assault as a hate crime, burglary, criminal possession of a weapon and criminal possession of marijuana, police told the Daily News.
Califano has had 10 prior arrests for crimes such as assault, menacing and criminal mischief.
Friends of the victim told NBC 4 that he is in high spirits despite the attack, and even went out for his birthday on Sunday with family members.
A security guard has been fired for allowing him to enter the nursing home and reach the fourth floor, one of the home's owners said.
'This isolated incident is the result of an unacceptable breach of protocol committed by a guard employed by the private firm contracted to provide security at this assisted-living facility,' the home's director Leslie Hoot told the Daily News.
'The guard was fired immediately. We are relieved that are resident - a wonderful, kind and gentle man - did not sustain serious injury.
'We are providing him with comfort, counseling, and excellent quality care.'
The founder of Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery and Grill is said to have feared federal agents would investigate him for evading millions in tax dollars, resulting in him killing himself.
Lowell Hawthorne was 'acting funny' and 'talking to himself' right before killing himself on Saturday night, according to family member's telling to detective reported by the New York Post.
There is surveillance footage showing the beef patty businessman shooting himself in the head at the warehouse located in the Bronx, claimed the source.
Lowell Hawthorne, 57, shot himself inside the Morrisania, The Bronx factory of his Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery and Grill on Saturday night
According to a source who told police, the businessman had been 'acting funny' and 'talking to himself' right before shooting
Prior to the shooting, Hawthorne could be seen allegedly talking with two workers who left the room.
He was said to have been worried that federal agents were going to investigate him for evading millions in tax dollars
The source said that the owner let a letter of apology to his family, dozens of which were employed at the company.
His younger brother, Milton, 55, met police around 5.15pm at the Golden Krust plant. He was responding to a call to police about an emotionally disturbed person armed with a gun.
The father-of-four was found with a single bullet wound in his head and gun nearby.
Lowell, 57, shot himself inside the Morrisania, The Bronx factory of his Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery and Grill on Saturday night, the New York Daily News reported.
Former employees of his told the Daily News that he was 'humble and 'good' and were 'shocked' at hearing he had likely committed suicide.
Hawthorne died inside the Morrisania, The Bronx factory of Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery and Grill, of which he served as founder and CEO
Employees said they saw his car - a Tesla 85D - parked between two lanes.
Hawthorne emigrated to the United States from Jamaica and opened his first Golden Krust operation in 1989.
He and his family pooled money to open the modest store.
The operation sold Jamaican beef patties and it gradually evolved into a small fast-food empire.
Hawthorne started Golden Krust in 1989 and today there are more than 100 locations across the United States
There are now more than 100 Golden Krust establishments across the United States selling patties and other foodstuffs such as jerk chicken and plantains.
Golden Krust also produces tens of millions frozen patties to be sold in retail.
It is not clear who will take over the operation of Golden Krust.
For confidential support call the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255.
A horrified homeowner has found eight deadly redback spiders on their windowsill following heavy rains in Victoria over the weekend.
The picture, uploaded to Reddit, shows the dead spiders curled up after they couldn't escape from the wild weather.
The picture was uploaded with the caption: 'When you live in Victoria and the first day of summer brings rain. All these red backs on one windowsill. Make sure your windows are all closed!'
A horrified homeowner has found eight deadly redback spiders on their windowsill following heavy rains in Victoria over the weekend
Spiders are with us all year round, but as the weather gets warmer, they are entering our houses in higher numbers than usual, looking to get out of the hot sun or away from heavy rain.
Head of Spiders at the Australian Reptile Park Kane Christensen said the redback spiders were likely looking for dryer conditions inside the home.
'Spiders like redbacks, white tails and huntsmen prefer dry conditions over moist,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
'They don't want their burrows or webs to get wet.
'You'll find a redback in every house in Australia because of dry conditions.'
Mr Christensen said once the spiders set up residence there they reproduce quickly.
'There could be hundreds of eggs in an egg sack,' he said.
Mr Christensen said of all the spiders Australia might see this summer, only two were very dangerous. But do you know what they are?
As the weather gets warmer, spiders are increasingly gravitating inside. Can you pick the spiders that are worth getting frightened about? (Pictured: Daddy Long Legs - very safe)
SYDNEY FUNNEL-WEB
Of all the spiders in Australia, Mr Christensen says the Sydney funnel-web is the most dangerous. It is aggressive and its venom, especially coming from a male, can be deadly.
The spider lives mostly underground, but comes out to search for a female mate when the weather gets warmer.
'Funnel-webs like warm weather, rainy afternoons - when the humidity is up, they can travel longer distances,' Mr Christensen said.
The Sydney Funnel Web spider is one of the world's most dangerous spiders due to its poisonous venom. There has not been a recorded death since 1981 when the antivenom was produced
The arachnid expert said the spiders were coming out earlier this year because of the unusually warm weather, but their numbers would peak around January.
To keep safe from a nasty bite, Mr Christensen says floors should be cleared and shoes and towels left outside should be shaken before use.
Another danger area for the Sydney funnel-web is the backyard swimming pool.
The spider can often fall into swimming pools and will become stuck, as it is unable to climb smooth surfaces or jump.
A funnel-web can survive up to 30 hours in the water, so don't assume the arachnid is dead if you come across it.
Funnel-webs can be identified by their glossy and hairless fronts, and males have a large mating spur coming from the middle of their second pair of legs.
To keep safe from a nasty bite, Mr Christensen says floors should be cleared and shoes and towels left outside should be shaken before use
WOLF SPIDER
The wolf spider can grow up to eight centimetres, and is found widely across Australia.
When it is young, the spider is carried on its mother's back until they are ready to disperse by ballooning away using its web, or on the ground.
Wolf spiders are often found in backyards, and Mr Christensen says a hole in the ground with webbing in it will be the entrance to the burrow of a wolf or trapdoor spider.
The Wolf spider is often found burrowed underground in a back yard, and is common around Australia
The arachnid will rarely set up a web to catch food, and will instead chase down its prey on the ground.
Mr Christensen says the bite of a wolf spider will have no major effect on humans, but if the spider is large, it will hurt.
Wolf spiders can be defined by their drab colouring, with most having multi-coloured patterns on their exterior, in brown and yellow, grey, black and white.
Mr Christensen says the bite of a wolf spider will have no major effect on humans, but if the spider is large, it will hurt
MOUSE SPIDER
The Mouse spider looks similar to the funnel-web and can also be quite dangerous to humans.
This arachnid is usually slower to move than the others, and can be identified by its red-tinged body, or if it's a female, jaws.
Mouse spiders look similar to funnel-web spiders and their bite can be quite dangerous
Mouse spider bites can be 'medically significant' to humans, Mr Christensen said, though a fatality has never been recorded.
Victims of the creepy crawly have previously been administered funnel-web anti-venom and it has been effective in treating the bite.
The mouse spider is most active during the day time, as opposed to many other arachnids which are night-time creatures.
The spiders are most active during the day - as opposed to many other arachnids which are night-time creatures
RED BACK SPIDER
The redback spider's venomous bite can also be deadly to humans, with 16 recorded deaths.
Mr Christensen said people are 'more likely to be bitten by a redback than any other Australian animal'.
The female is typically more aggressive than the male and the arachnid prefers to be in dry and dark conditions - making them very fond of houses.
'A redback hangs a line of web down to the ground, so they're often found underneath things,' he said.
'When you pick something up from the ground, that's how you get bitten.'
Female redbacks are black, with a clear red stripe along their upper abdomen.
The male is a light brown colour and has subtle white marks on its upper abdomen.
Mr Christensen says Redbacks are often under things and the easiest way to get bitten is to grab something off the ground without looking
WHITE TAIL SPIDER
Contrary to popular belief, a white tail spider bite will not result in gaping holes in a person's flesh.
The white tail spider has very powerful fangs, and Mr Christensen explained: 'it's not something you could sleep through'.
He said he knew of 132 confirmed cases of a white tail spider bite, all of which caused pain and swelling, none of which resulted in missing flesh.
Contrary to popular belief, a White Tail spider bite will not result in gaping holes in a person's flesh
'People who had the missing flesh ended up having diabetic ulcers, misdiagnosed skin cancers, or another medical condition,' he said.
Summer and Autumn are the most likely seasons to find a white tail spider inside, but the arachnid is there to eat other spiders.
The creature can be identified by a distinctive white marking on the tip of the abdomen, and two pairs of dots on the abdomen, which fade as the arachnid ages.
HUNTSMAN SPIDER
The huntsman spider's size often leaves humans cowering in fear, but Mr Christensen says there is little to worry about.
'The huntsman is a venomous spider, but it's not dangerously venomous,' he said.
'Their venom in us is localised pain and swelling, and it will hurt - but the huntsman is usually reluctant to bite unless it is defending its eggs.'
Huntsmen are often found in cars as well as houses, particularly behind sun visors, as well as hiding in rock walls or behind dead bark.
They are identified by their flattened bodies, designed for living in crevices or behind dead bark.
The huntsman spider may appear intimidating to humans, but its venom is not dangerous
Huntsmen are often found hiding inside cars, behind the sun visor, but are also a fairly common sight inside houses
Police were on alert Sunday afternoon after a small group of self-proclaimed 'alt-right' protesters led by white nationalist Richard Spencer gathered in front of the White House.
The group was met by a group of counter protesters and a heavy police presence.
A video posted by Spencer showed a small number of protesters chanting 'Build Kate's Wall,' a reference to a jury acquitting an undocumented Mexican migrant in the shooting death of Kate Steinle last week.
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White nationalist Richard Spencer, center, marches on a street near the White House with supporters during an anti-immigration in Washington, DC
Tony Hovater, Richard Spencer and white nationalist demonstrators protest
Spencer and alt-right supporters gathered to protest against the verdict in Kate Steinle's case - a woman shot by an undocumented Mexican migrant
White nationalist demonstrators protest in front of the White House in Washington
Counter-protesters were separated from Spencer's rally by police
Police escort White nationalists marching on a street near the White House during an anti-immigration rally in Washington
White nationalists hold placards supporting the building of a wall along the US-Mexico border
A phalanx of Metropolitan Police Department officers escort white nationalists and neo-Nazis as they march away from the White House
White nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party founder Matthew Heinbach (right, in black cap) is pictured as they were marched away from the White House December 3
The facists held an anti-immigration rally in response to this week's acquittal of an undocumented Mexican immigrant in the 2015 shooting death of Kate Steinle in San Francisco
Police presence picked up briefly at the White House on Sunday afternoon as Richard Spencer and other alt-right supporters gathered to protest against the verdict in Kate Steinle's case
Steinle's death ended up becoming a major talking point for President Donald Trump's campaign during the 2016 election and Trump blasted the verdict on Twitter.
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, Steinle's accused killer, was found not guilty. Steinle was shot on a San Francisco pier as she was taking a walk with her father.
In Washington, city cops, many in body armor, created a physical barrier between alt-right activists and members of the left wing group 'antifa,' which is short for 'anti-fascist.'
Spencer led alt-right activists as they chanted 'Crush all commies.'
Spencer, who has become the face of the 'alt right' movement, is the president of the National Policy Institute, a think-tank.
White nationalist Richard Spencer (dark glasses) speaks while taunting counter-protesters during a anti-immigration rally in front of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in DC
The group was met by a group of counter protesters and a heavy police presence
D.C. police said that, to their knowledge, there were no arrests and both groups dispersed rather quickly
The dueling demonstrations appeared to be mostly peaceful
Eventually, Spencer's group was escorted by police to hold their rally at a different location
There were only around 20 white nationalist protesters in total
Counter-protesters shout slogans at white nationalists holding an anti-immigration rally in front of the White House
According to eyewitness accounts on social media, counter-protesters could be heard chanting, 'no Nazis, no KKK, no fascist USA'
Anti-fascist counter-protesters chant 'Nazi scum off our streets!' in response to white nationalists and neo-Nazis that were trying to rally outside the White House
Before he departed, Spencer yelled, 'Build the wall today. We'll be back'
The alt-right are a loosely affiliated collection of groups and individuals characterized by a rejection of mainstream politics that includes neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites.
Washington D.C. police said there were no arrests and both groups dispersed quickly.
Counter-protesters were separated from Spencer's rally by police.
According to eyewitness accounts on social media, counter-protesters could be heard chanting, 'no Nazis, no KKK, no fascist USA.'
Fearing violence after showdowns between the two extremist groups in Charlottesville, Virginia and Florida earlier this year, police escorted Spencer's group away and walked with them for several block until they reached a subway station.
A phalanx of Metropolitan Police Department officers escort white nationalists and neo-Nazis, including white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party founder Matthew Heinbach (C), as they march away from the White House
Tony Hovater and white nationalist demonstrators ride the escalator down to the Washington Metro after protesting in front of the White House
'Business is completely dead,' said Bali shopkeeper Monique Ancora, originally from Melbourne
An Australian shop owner in Bali has slammed Indonesian authorities and says 'over the top' warnings about Mount Agung have left her business 'completely dead'.
Melbourne woman Monique Ancora, 29, packed her bags a year ago and headed to Seminyak to open her shop, The Happiness Journey Leather.
Ms Ancora said advice about the erupting volcano had 'absolutely destroyed tourism' in Bali and urged travellers that most of the holiday island 'is still safe'.
'The businesses over here are really suffering and we all have absolutely no idea what is going on,' Ms Ancora told Yahoo7 News.
'I understand that you can't plan for a volcano but the reality is unless you're in that 10 kilometre danger zone, Bali is still safe.'
Ms Ancora said businesses had suffered ever since the mountain began rumbling in September.
'Literally yesterday from when I opened the store at 3pm until I closed at 9pm, I didn't have a single person enter it's just not Bali,' she said.
She stressed that shops in areas such as Seminyak, on the Island's south and around 75km from the mountain, remain open.
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'It's just not Bali,' said Ms Ancora. 'Literally yesterday ... I didn't have a single person enter'
Ms Ancora said businesses had suffered ever since the mountain began rumbling in September. The volcano is seen erupting last week
Meanwhile, Qantas and Jetstar resumed flights to and from Bali on Monday, as the lingering ash cloud caused by the erupting mountain begins to clear.
Virgin said it would fly out of the Indonesian holiday hot spot, but are still not flying into the island.
Thousands of holidaymakers remained stranded in Bali as visibility conditions deteriorated on Saturday, nearly a week since the volcano's eruption.
Jetstar cancelled all of its Sunday flights departing before 4pm and Qantas cancelled it's Sunday night flight from Denpasar to Sydney.
Thousands of holidaymakers remained stranded in Bali as visibility conditions deteriorated on Saturday. These tourists are pictured at the airport last week
Qantas and Jetstar will resume flights to and from Bali on Monday. Tourists are seen waiting at Denpasar Airport last week amid its closure
While five Jetstar flights were able to depart on Saturday morning, several evening flights were cancelled.
Virgin was forced to cancel its three scheduled recovery flights on Saturday after conditions 'significantly deteriorated,' a spokeswoman told AAP.
All of the airlines continue to monitor the situation and advise travellers flights may be cancelled if conditions worsen again.
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Breathtaking photographs captured in brightened night skies across the world showed the first of three consecutive supermoons to occur this winter - and the only one this year.
Nasa described the incredible lunar sighting the first in a 'supermoon trilogy' over the next two months, with others to come on 1 January and 31 January
Last night's moon, dubbed the 'full cold moon', glowed behind historic national monuments and landmarks all over the world such as London's Shard and the Statue of Liberty in New York.
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A supermoon was seen in front of a replica of the Statue of Liberty sitting atop the Liberty Building in downtown Buffalo, New York last night. Two more supermoons are expected to grace skies across the world again on 1 January and 31 January
The supermoon was seen shining brightly behind the Shard building in London this morning. Last night's moon appeared 14 per cent larger and 30 per cent brighter than usual as it lit up the sky
The vibrant supermoon was seen shining behind the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Nasa says the December sighting will be the third part of a trilogy this winter
The supermoon, dubbed the 'full cold moon', rose over the University of Notre Dame's main building yesterday evening in South Bend, Indiana
A plane was seen crossing in front of the so-called supermoon in Avondale Estates, Georgia. A supermoon describes a moon that is at its closest distance to the Earth with the moon appearing larger than usual
The 'supermoon trilogy' is shown in this graphic. For skygazers who missed last night's supermoon, they'll have two more chances to see them in January next year
The Cold Moon appeared 14 per cent larger and 30 per cent brighter than usual across the planet.
'Supermoons are a great opportunity for people to start looking at the moon, not just that once but every chance they have!' research scientist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, Noah Petro said.
The supermoon made its spectacular appearance over Britain, giving skygazers a treat as it moves closer to Earth.
Tom Kerss, an astronomer at Royal Observatory Greenwich, said the exact moment of full moon - when the moon sits opposite the sun in the sky, which was 3.47pm (10.47am ET) today in the United Kingdom.
He added: 'This year's Cold Moon is closer to us than the average full moon this year; close enough to qualify as a supermoon, according to the widely accepted definition.
The supermoon was seen shining brightly behind the Shard building in London this morning. This full moon was 222,761 miles from Earth, closer than its average 238,900 miles
December's full moon is traditionally known as the cold moon. It is pictured here behind the Shard in London during the early hours of this morning
The 'supermoon' was captured behind the US Capitol and the Jefferson Memorial on 3 December. The most recent supermoon was around a year ago on November 14, 2016
The moon, pictured here behind the US Capitol in Washington DC, was 222,761 miles (358,500km) from Earth, closer than the average distance of 238,900 miles (384,500km)
December's full moon - traditionally known as the Cold Moon - appeared 14 per cent larger and 30 per cent brighter than usual. It is seen over Whitby Abbey in Yorkshire
A supermoon was pictured in front of a replica of the Statue of Liberty in downtown Buffalo New York. The phenomenon happens when the moon reaches its closest point to Earth, known as a perigee Moon, and is also a full moon
Tom Kerss, an astronomer at Royal Observatory Greenwich, said the exact moment of full moon is when the moon sits opposite the sun in the sky. It is pictured over the Penshaw Monument near Sunderland yesterday evening
Astronomer Tom Kerss said: 'This year's Cold Moon is closer to us than the average full moon this year; close enough to qualify as a supermoon, according to the widely accepted definition'. Shown here is the supermoon in Warwickshire
The moon is seen behind the Uppatasanti Pagoda seen from Naypyitaw in Myanmar in Southeast Asia
The red-tinted moon appeared to sit on top of the Uppatasanti Pagoda yesterday
The moon is the first of three consecutive supermoons. It reached its peak brightness and size on Monday morning
A statue of The Buddha watches on as the supermoon rose above Yangon, in Myanmar, which is the largest city in the country
The moon was spotted behind a commuter train in Avondale Estates, Georgia. At some points it is about 5 per cent closer to Earth than average, known as perigee, and at others it is 5 per cent further away, known as apogee
For those wanting to see the Earth's natural satellite in greater detail, Mr Kerss advised using binoculars or a telescope and observing the dark maria - large, dark basaltic plains on the surface of the moon. Pictured is the moon next to the Shard
The moon is seen as it rises on December 3, 2017 in Washington. Nasa has called the sighting the first in a 'supermoon trilogy' over the next two months
An aircraft took off from Ronald Reagan National Airport and is seen passing in front of the moon as it rises in Washington yesterday
Although the moon is the biggest and closest it can be to us experts warn supermoons can often be underwhelming. The moon is pictured risingabove a suspension bridge in Yangon, Myanmar
The moon has a slightly elliptical orbit - it does not move round the Earth in a perfect circle.
At some points it is about 5 per cent closer to Earth than average, known as perigee, and at others it is 5 per cent further away, known as apogee.
The full moon will be 222,761 miles (358,500km) from Earth, closer than its average 238,900 miles (384,500km).
The supermoon is pictured setting over the church of Nuestra Senora de la Encarnacion at dawn in Olvera, near Cadiz, southern Spain
A person is seen walking along the 'Puente Nuevo' (New Bridge) as it is silhouetted against the supermoon in Ronda, southern Spain on 3 December
During the moon's closest pass by Earth, the moon was just 225,744 miles (36,3299 kilometres) away. The phenomenon is pictured rising above Naypyitaw, Myanmar yesterday
Traffic buzzes along a busy highway in Naypyitaw, the capitals of Myanmar, as the supermoon rose above the city yesterday
WHAT IS A SUPERMOON? Today, the moon will appear 14 per cent larger and 30 per cent brighter than normal, as it is at its closest point to Earth As the moon orbits the Earth every month, there is a point in every cycle where the moon is closest (perigee) and a point where it's farthest away (apogee). There is also a monthly lunar cycle where we can see varying amounts of the moon depending on it's position relative to Earth and the Sun. For a supermoon to happen, these need to line up. The celestial body became totally full at 3.47pm in the UK and reached its peak brightness this morning. The moon was visible from Earth with the naked eye, just as it always is. Although the moon is the biggest and closest it can be to us, experts warn that supermoons can sometimes be disappointing. Lyle Tavernier, an expert at Nasa, said: 'Keep in mind that a 14 per cent increase in the apparent size of something that can be covered with a fingernail on an outstretched arm won't seem significantly bigger. The moon will be visible from Earth with the naked eye, just as it always is. But although the moon is the biggest and closest it can be to us, don't expect too much 'Comparing a supermoon with a typical full moon from memory is very difficult.' With the moon being as close to Earth as it is, there is a significant impact on the tides. When the moon is closest, the tide will be at its highest, and the same happens with a new or full moon. This happens on a monthly basis, but occasionally the point of perigee aligns with a new or full moon and results in a 'perigean spring tide'. These are particularly high tides that can influence the oceans and raise sea level by a number of inches. Advertisement
An orange-tinted supermoon beamed above in the skies of Yangon, Myanmar. Orange and red tints that the Sun and Moon sometimes take on are caused by the particles in the Earth's atmosphere
The supermoon is seen over a highway near Yangon yesterday. The lunar phenomenon occurs when a full moon is at its closest point to Earth
Fair-goers enjoyed a supermoon-lit Ferris wheel ride in Tokyo Japan. The moon has a slightly elliptical orbit - it does not move round the Earth in a perfect circle
A young child is seen looking out of the Ferris Wheel carriage at the huge-looking supermoon at a fairground yesterday in Tokyo, Japan
A supermoon 'Full Cold Moon' is pictured rising over downtown Los Angeles. The moon was visible from Earth with the naked eye, just as it always is
A supermoon is seen in Singapore. Lyle Tavernier, an expert at Nasa, said: 'Keep in mind that a 14 per cent increase in the apparent size of something that can be covered with a fingernail on an outstretched arm won't seem significantly bigger'
The supermoon was seen next to electric lines near Yangon. 'Comparing a supermoon with a typical full moon from memory is very difficult', said Dr Tavernier
The full moon is pictured behind Christmas lights in Marseille. As the moon orbits the Earth every month, there is a point in every cycle where the moon is closest (perigee) and a point where it's farthest away (apogee)
There is also a monthly lunar cycle where we can see varying amounts of the moon depending on it's position relative to Earth and the Sun. Pictured is the so-called supermoon behind a church steeple in Avondale Estates, US
The supermoon is seen behind plants on a balcony of a residential block in Hong Kong
Mr Kerss said: 'During moonrise and moonset, you might think the moon looks unusually large, but this is an illusion created in the mind when it appears close to the horizon.
'In fact, the change in the moon's apparent size throughout its orbit is imperceptible to the unaided eye.
'Nevertheless, the 'moon illusion' can be a dramatic effect, and with the moon rising so early, there will be ample opportunities to see its apparently huge face juxtaposed with the eastern skyline.'
With the moon being as close to Earth as it is, there is a significant impact on the tides.
When the moon is closest, the tide will be at its highest, and the same happens with a new or full moon.
This happens on a monthly basis, but occasionally the point of perigee aligns with a new or full moon and results in a 'perigean spring tide'.
These are particularly high tides that can influence the oceans and raise sea level by a number of inches.
The supermoon was seen shining brightly behind the Shard building in London this morning. With the moon being as close to Earth as it is, there is a significant impact on the tides
A picture of the supermoon taken in Thorpe Bay, Essex. When the moon is closest, the tide will be at its highest, and the same happens with a new or full moon
High tide happens on a monthly basis, but occasionally the point of perigee aligns with a new or full moon and results in a 'perigean spring tide'. A supermoon brightened the night sky over the southeastern city of Busan, South Korea
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TV journalist Ben McCormack has reported to police for bail for the final time before he is sentenced over his child sex fantasy messages.
The former A Current Affair reporter, 43, pleaded guilty to two counts of using a carriage service to transmit, publish or promote child pornography in September.
McCormack will be sentenced by District Court Judge Paul Conlon on Wednesday morning. The offence carries a maximum punishment of 15 years jail time.
The charges relate to how - using the nom de guerre oz4skinboi - the media personality sent a series of instant messages over Skype to another man where he called himself a 'proud Ped'and described his 'love' for 'young bs'.
McCormack ducked into a Sydney police station in a hoodie on Monday, as family and friends keenly anticipated the imminent end of his long legal nightmare.
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Former TV journalist Ben McCormack reported to police for bail for the final time on Monday morning
McCormack, 43, pleaded guilty to two charges of using a carriage service to transmit, publish or promote child pornography
A recent hearing heard evidence McCormack had typically 'self-medicated' with alcohol when he was writing his sordid correspondence
A recent sentencing hearing heard evidence McCormack had 'self-medicated' with alcohol when he was writing his sordid correspondence and knew what he was doing was 'wrong'.
His lawyer Sam Macedone submitted psychiatric reports to the court which showed McCormack had struggled with alcohol use disorder, depression and paedophilic thoughts.
'The material seems to indicate he had struggled significantly with where he was in his life in that state of depression which he was diagnosed with,' Judge Conlon said.
'Whenever he self-medicated, that is with alcohol, that was when he was most prone to engaging in this sort of behaviour.'
A Crown prosecutor, who declined to be named to media, told the court McCormack should serve a custodial sentence. But the prosecutor said that 'doesn't mean we are saying full-time custody'.
Speaking of his prospects for rehabilitation, the judge said he had 'never seen' someone seeking treatment for their problem before being arrested for the type of charge McCormack was facing.
'This is the first time I have ever seen a case involving this type of charge (where) the offender himself, well before he was arrested .... was seeking professional assistance for what he knew was wrong.'
'He had been seeking that assistance for some years', he said, before asking: 'Am I incorrect in coming to the conclusion that his offending must be viewed down towards the lowest end of the scale?'
The prosecutor told the court a 'potentially negative' factor could be that McCormack had not stopped sending the messages even while he was being treated.
A prominent journalist, McCormack is pictured in an exclusive A Current Affair story
McCormack, his family and friends are awaiting the imminent end of his long, legal nightmare
The court heard evidence McCormack was 'self-loathing' over the behaviour and had twice attempted suicide
During the November hearing, Mr Macedone told the court the former journalist had tried to kill himself twice in the days that followed his April 10, 2017 arrest.
'When it exploded in his mind, he came to realise his worst thoughts had materialized,' Mr Macedone told the court.
'His main concern isn't so much what he has to go through but what he is putting his family through'.
After describing one incident, Mr Macedone told the court: 'I did what I could to satisfy him all would be OK.
'Thankfully he's here today.'
McCormack was well known as the journalist who famously tracked down Hey Dad! paedophile Robert Hughes in Singapore a few years ago.
A man has been arrested and charged after approaching and allegedly attempting to abduct three different children in one afternoon.
The accused man, 41, was allegedly seen watching a small child while at the busy Paddy's Markets in Sydney on Sunday afternoon.
He then made towards a second child, aged 18 months, before the parents intervened and picked up the toddler, police said.
The predator, 41, was seen watching a small child while at the busy Paddy's Markets (pictured) in Sydney on Sunday afternoon, police said
He then allegedly made towards a second child, aged 18 months, before the parents intervened and picked up the toddler (Stock image)
On his third attempt the man was allegedly seen trying to usher a third child, aged four, out onto the street.
Witnesses noticed the man try to lure the toddler away from the marketplace before stepping in and calling security to detain him.
Police from Sydney's local area command were called to the scene and arrested the man on the spot.
Witnesses allegedly noticed the man try to lure the toddler away from the marketplace (pictured) before stepping in and calling security to detain him
Police from Sydney's local area command were called to the scene and arrested the man on the spot
He was taken to Day Street Police Station where he was charged with offensive conduct and breach bail.
He was refused bail to appear at Central Local Court on Monday.
Police are now appealing for the parent of the third child approached to come forward to assist in the investigation.
A spokesperson for Paddy's Markets released a statement to Daily Mail Australia, which read: 'The security team at Paddy's Markets responded to this incident within three minutes and were able to ensure that the offender was appropriately dealt with by police.'
He crashed into Bae Karl-Perry, 26, who was a passenger in her partner's car
David Anthony Kay lost control of his car and drove on the wrong side of the road
A 24-year-old meth driver has been jailed for more than two years after he got behind the wheel of a car and killed a young mother.
David Anthony Kay was driving his mother to work on June 21 last year, when he lost control and slid onto the wrong side of the road in Chain of Ponds, north west of Adelaide, reports The Advertiser.
Bae Karl-Perry, 26, was a passenger in her partner Alex Vickers' car and died at the scene of head injuries.
Bae Karl-Perry had just dropped off her eldest child (pictured with all three) before she died
Ms Karl-Perry (pictured) was killed by the drug driver in a crash at Chain of Ponds in June 2016
Ms Karl-Perry and Mr Vickers had just dropped over their eldest child Lucas, four, at child care.
Their two other children Bailey, three, and 16-month-old Julian were also in the back of the car at the time of the crash.
On Monday, District Court Judge Liesl Chapman sentenced Kay, 24, to two years and eight months jail with a non-parole period of 21 months.
She refused to suspend the sentence or place Kay on home detention, and said driving under the influence of methamphetamine was a serious offence.
'Your consumption of methamphetamine had adversely affected your driving at the time of the collision,' she said during sentencing.
'Fatigue from lack of sleep combined with the rebound affects from your use of methamphetamine did, in fact, affect you at the time.
'The community has zero tolerance for drug drivers and, here, the consequences of your drug taking have been the death of one person and the injury of another.
'People who choose to use methamphetamine need to understand not only that the drug has direct affects which occur at the time of its use but also that it has rebound affects which continue for a long period of time after consumption.
'The consequences of your offending have been devastating.
Four victim impact statements were read to the court.
'She was herself a young person, she had a partner, three children all under the age of five years and had finished her course and got her diploma in advertising.
Mr Vickers described how he has lost the love of his life and his children have lost their mother.
'Their grief and their loss is profound,' District Court Judge Liesl Chapman said.
The 26-year-old mother of three (pictured) was a passenger in the car and died of head injuries
The week after the crash, Ms Karl-Perry's parents Monica Karl and James Perry spoke to the publication about the loss of their beloved daughter and revealed that just two days before the crash, she had completed a business diploma.
'It was the new her she hadn't reinvented herself but decided she wanted something for when her children were a bit older,' Monica Karl said.
'She was so glad she got her diploma.
'They live day-to-day but the kids have never gone without she was very dedicated to her motherhood.
'Bae lived for her kids, they were her life and she's left a beautiful legacy,' she added.
Labor frontbencher Katy Gallagher could be referred to the High Court after revealing British authorities did not confirm renunciation of her UK ties until two months after nominations closed for the 2016 election.
Senator Gallagher lodged paperwork, in line with a new parliamentary register of citizenship, on Monday confirming she completed a British citizenship renunciation form, with payment, on April 20, 2016.
But the UK Home Office wrote back on July 1, almost a month after election nominations closed, requesting original copies of her birth certificate and parents' marriage certificate.
Labor frontbencher Katy Gallagher could be referred to the High Court
Senator Gallagher did not receive the formal renunciation document until August 16.
Her father was born in the UK in 1939.
In the mid-1990s she investigated the option of moving to the UK to work.
When she made inquiries at the time, British authorities told her she would need to go through a formal application process and if she did so it was likely she would be granted citizenship although it was not automatic.
The ACT senator told parliament in September that during the 2016 pre-election candidate vetting process Labor officials had advised her 'out of an abundance of caution' she should fill out a form renouncing her British citizenship.
Her disclosure had all of the information available to her over her eligibility, Senator Gallagher said in a statement.
'Legal advice was provided to me by Dr Matthew Collins QC and an expert in British Nationality Law Mr Adrian Berry,' she said.
'Mr Berry finds that '.... Senator Gallagher had, prior to the date for nominations for the 2016 election, taken all of the steps that were required to be taken by her (not just the reasonable steps required) under British law in order to renounce her British citizenship'.'
Australian Conservatives leader Cory Bernardi revealed he held Irish citizenship but had lodged a form renouncing it in 2006, before he filled a Liberal Party casual vacancy in South Australia
Senator Gallagher said based on her legal advice she did not believe she should refer herself to the High Court.
'However ultimately that will be a matter for the Senate to determine.'
Constitutional expert George Williams said there was no categorical answer to whether Senator Gallagher was ineligible.
'Whenever renunciation is received after the close of nomination there is always the question have reasonable steps been taken, for which the High Court has not yet provided any guidance,' Professor Williams told AAP.
Australian Conservatives leader Cory Bernardi revealed he held Irish citizenship but had lodged a form renouncing it in 2006, before he filled a Liberal Party casual vacancy in South Australia.
But he did not provide the Irish government's formal reply to his renunciation.
Prof Williams said Senator Bernardi could fall into the same trap as former One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts, who tried to renounce his British citizenship via email to the wrong address, but did not receive the formal renunciation notification until too late.
This comes as Labor senator Doug Cameron revealed he was potentially eligible for Lithuanian citizenship
'It's obviously not enough just to send information in - you need to be diligent in following it up as well,' Prof William said.
The larger problem with the declaration process was no independent person had been put in place to scrutinise the information and determine what should be taken forward to court.
'It's a really deficient process because who goes to the High Court will largely be determined by political factors and political self-interest ... it's hardly a process to give the community confidence.'
This comes as Labor senator Doug Cameron revealed he was potentially eligible for Lithuanian citizenship, ABC News reported.
He was born in Scotland but renounced his British citizen sip before nominating for parliament.
His citizenship forms revealed his grandparents left Lithuania in 1915.
Lithuania last year changed its law so descendants of citizens that left the country before 1940 could apply for dual citizenship.
Cameron said he would have to formally apply for dual citizenship, which he had not done.
A serial rapist has blamed one of his victims for provoking his attack on a street in Adelaide's CBD in 2012.
Patrick Mark Perkins allegedly told a woman she 'should have known better' than to be walking home alone on the night he raped her, The Advertiser reports.
The 57-year-old left his victim permanently emotionally scarred after telling her she was a 'bad girl' while 'horrendously' raping her, The District Court heard on Monday.
Grim details of the night of the attack along with the devastating toll it has taken on the woman's life were revealed in her victim impact statement.
'(Perkins) kept referring to me as a 'good girl', that I 'should have known better', that 'good girls don't walk home alone at night',' she said.
Patrick Mark Perkins (pictured) allegedly told a woman she 'should have known better' than to be walking home alone on the night he raped her in 2012
'Now I can't make any decision without wondering what a good girl would do...I hear his voice in my head, I don't want to make any decisions because I don't want to hear his voice.
'But I don't want to make a bad decision again and be punished so brutally...I don't want to be a bad girl.'
The woman said she'd lost her soul along with her innocence as a result of being raped, and now welcomed the prospect of death.
Her victim impact statement stated: 'I go from nothing to feeling extreme emotion at once...if I had a soul, I would care and I would love,' she said.
Grim details of the night of the attack along with the devastating toll it has taken on the woman's life were revealed in her victim impact statement
'I've stopped wanting to share with people out of fear I will break them...I just avoid life, I feel like I'm the walking dead and I act like it.
'I'm indifferent to death, it doesn't scare me, I have seen it before...I felt so close to death that it will be like a reunion for me.'
A second victim appeared in court Monday, but chose not to give a statement.
Perkins' QC Mark Griffin offered his client's apology to both women and asked the court to consider the man's guilty plea and lack of prior criminal history.
Mark Norman SC, prosecuting, said a long jail term was an 'inevitable' punishment for the 'extremely disturbing' crimes that 'ruined' two lives.
Judge Julie McIntyre remanded Perkins in custody for sentencing in two weeks.
Uber has accused 13CABS of lying in its campaign against the ride sharing service.
An Uber receipt was posted to the 13CABS Facebook page on Friday, allegedly showing how a user had been charged $350 for a ride between Tullamarine Airport and the Melbourne CBD during the storm which lashed Victoria a trip that usually costs about $75.
'We want to gift them a $400 13CABS voucher to make up for being surged nearly four times this morning for a trip from the CBD to the airport by a certain 'ride share' company,' the post read.
An Uber receipt was posted to the 13CABS Facebook page on Friday, allegedly showing how a user had been charged $350 for a ride between Tullamarine Airport and the Melbourne CBD
The post was criticised by Facebook users once it was posted, with some claiming the receipt was edited.
In response to those claims, 13CABS posted they believed it was authentic 'to the best of our knowledge'.
'To be 100 per cent honest our small team felt your exact same disbelief that this must be fake, but we've verified the sources and this is in fact correct.
An Uber spokesman told Daily Mail Australia they had investigated the receipt and believe that it was actually from a couple of weeks before Friday's storm.
The spokesman said the receipt is also for a trip using Uber's 'XL' service which offers rides for larger groups.
In response to the claims, 13CABS posted they believed it was authentic 'to the best of our knowledge'
An Uber spokesman told Daily Mail Australia they had investigated the receipt and believe that it was actually from a couple of weeks before Friday's storm
Daily Mail Australia has contacted 13CABS for comment.
A 13CABS spokesperson told Mumbrella the receipt was a genuine document from a ride on Friday.
'The receipt shows what the driver earned, and demonstrated the price surge was 3.9 times the basic fare. We have no reason to believe the receipt is anything but authentic.'
Darnell R. Scott, 37, reportedly stabbed his unnamed relative, 50, as many as 25 times before he partially disemboweled his body
A man was left in critical condition after his brother-in-law brutally assaulted him on a bus ride.
The attacker, Darnell R. Scott, 37, stabbed his unnamed relative, 50, as many as 25 times before he partially disemboweled the man's body during a traffic stop Thursday near the 300 block of West 63rd Street in Chicago, Illinois, police say.
The horrific incident ignited after the 'unfriendly' relatives randomly bumped into one another on the bus.
According to the Chicago Tribune, it seems Scott walked past his brother-in-law on the bus without acknowledging him, when the elder relative approached him about the awkward encounter.
'The men do not share a friendly relationship and hadn't spoken for some time,' Assistant State's Attorney Craig Taczy said in court, as Scott was charged with aggravated battery and great bodily harm.
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The bloody incident took place during a traffic stop near the 300 block of West 63rd Street Thursday
'The men do not share a friendly relationship and hadn't spoken for some time,' Assistant State's Attorney Craig Taczy said of the fight
Witnesses inside the bus filmed the fight on their cell phones. The fight happened near the scene shown above in Chicago, Illinois
During the confrontation, the elder was punched, hit and stabbed multiple times after he asked Scott whether he sent a gang of people to 'jump him' a time prior, the newspaper reported.
Footage of the bloody fight was captured on cell phone video by riders who witnessed the brawl go down.
When the individuals took the tussle to the floor, Scott took out his pocket knife and began stabbing - which he admitted to police during questioning.
It seems Scott walked past his brother-in-law on the bus without acknowledging him
That's when the elder relative approached him about the awkward encounter and Scott initiated the physical violence
The victim was transported to the Stroger Hospital in critical condition, while Scott was also hospitalized with injuries.
He is seen in his mugshot bloodied with what appears to be bruised eyes.
Details on the reasoning behind the brother-in-laws' rocky relationship is not known at this time.
Scott has been jailed. He was denied bail by prosecutors.
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Hundreds of aircrafts including two dozen stealth jets began training Monday as the United States and South Korea launched their biggest-ever combined air force exercise.
The war games come a week after North Korea test-fired its most powerful missile ever, an ICBM that may be able to target the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The five-day drill, which is called Vigilant Ace, is meant to improve the allies' wartime capabilities, South Korea's defense ministry said.
The U.S. Seventh Air Force sent major strategic military assets that include six F-22 and 18 F-35 stealth fighter jets for the annual training exercise in the Korean Peninsula. About 12,000 U.S. military personnel are participating.
A U.S. Air Force U-2s spy plane prepares to land at the Osan U.S. Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea on Monday
Hundreds of aircrafts including two dozen stealth jets began training Monday as the United States and South Korea launched their biggest-ever combined air force exercise
The United States and South Korea have launched their biggest-ever combined air force exercise. Pictured is a US Air Force f-22 Raptor stealth jet on December 4
Some local media report that B-1B bombers will also join aerial drills, but officials could not confirm the reports.
North Korea's state media said the joint drill pushes the Korean Peninsula 'to the brink of nuclear war' and is proof that the U.S. is 'begging' for a nuclear conflict.
'Should the Korean peninsula and the world be embroiled in the crucible of nuclear war because of the reckless nuclear war mania of the U.S., the U.S. will have to accept full responsibility for it,' North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency said Saturday, citing a statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Such language is typical in North Korean propaganda because the country sees U.S.-South Korean drills, which are held regularly, as preparation for invasion.
Still, always bad tensions are at a particularly dangerous point as North Korea edges toward its goal of a viable arsenal of nuclear-tipped long-range missiles, and President Donald Trump uses aggressive rhetoric toward the North, threatening, for instance, 'fire and fury' toward the country.
US Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons and F-35A Lightning (R) IIs assigned to the 34th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron Hill Air Force Base, Utah, taxi toward the end of the runway during the biannual Air Component Exercise (Vigilant ACE) at Gunsan Air Base, South Korea
A handout photo made available by the US 7th Air Force, Korea shows US Air Force F-35A Lightning II's from the 34th Fighter Squadron, Hill Air Force Base, Utah, taxi down the runway during Vigilant ACE at Gunsan Air Base,
A U.S. Air Force EA-18G Growler fighter jet prepares to land at the Osan U.S. Air Base in Pyeongtaek
The five-day drill is called Vigilant Ace and about 12,000 US military personnel are participating. Pictured is a South Korean f-15K fighter jet on December 4
A US Air Force F-22 Raptor stealth jet flies over a South Korean air base in Gwangju on day one of the exercise
The show of force, North Korea has said, pushes the Korean peninsula 'to the brink of nuclear war'. Pictured is a US stealth fighter jet f-22 Raptor on December 4
Pyongyang will 'seriously consider' countermeasures against the drill, and the U.S. and South Korea will 'pay dearly for their provocations,' the Korean Central News Agency said on Sunday before the start of the exercises.
While many South Koreans typically ignore North Korea's rhetoric, some senior American officials have expressed worry following the ICBM test, North Korea's third.
On Sunday, Lindsey Graham, a U.S. senator from the state of South Carolina, said he believes that it's time for U.S. military families in South Korea to leave the country because conflict with North Korea is getting close.
The U.S. government has not announced a formal decision to evacuate U.S. citizens from South Korea, and there were no such signs in the diplomatic community in Seoul.
Other side: North Koreans attend one of the civilian-army joint meetings, which were held across South Phyongan, Hwanghae and Hamgyong provinces, to celebrate North Korea's nuclear progress
The meetings were held across the country, reportedly towards the end of last week, following the nuclear test
Seen are North Korean Army personnel applauding during one of the meetings where the test launch was celebrated
The news comes a week after North Korean media broadcast video of the most powerful missile North Korea has ever launched (pictured)
An evacuation of dependents by Seoul's closest ally and major military defender could prompt a panicked reaction by other countries, and among South Koreans.
In addition to American diplomats and other embassy workers, about 28,500 U.S. troops operate in South Korea, and many come to their posts with their families, who often live on huge, well-guarded military bases.
Also on Sunday, the White House national security adviser said that Trump will take care of North Korean threats by 'doing more ourselves.'
'The priorities that the president's given us to move as quickly as we can to resolve this crisis with North Korea,' General H.R. McMaster told Fox News in an interview.
'If necessary, the president and the United States will have to take care of it, because he has said he's not going to allow this murderous, rogue regime to threaten the United States.'
MSNBC host Joy Reid issued an apology on Sunday for blog posts that she wrote a decade ago that resurfaced when a user claimed the pieces were 'anti-gay.'
After a user tweeted a series of posts citing 'homophobic' work authored by the MSNBC host about former Florida governor Charlie Crist from 2007 to 2009, Reid shared her apology.
'This note is my apology to all who are disappointed by the content of blogs I wrote a decade ago, for which my choice of words and tone have legitimately been criticized,' Reid said in a Facebook statement shared with NBC News.
After a user Tweeted a series of posts citing 'homophobic' work that the MSNBC host Joy Reid (right) wrote about former Florida governor Charlie Crist (left) from 2007 to 2009, Reid shared an apology on social media
'This note is my apology to all who are disappointed by the content of blogs I wrote a decade ago, for which my choice of words and tone have legitimately been criticized,' Reid said in a Facebook statement shared with NBC News
On Thursday a Twitter user shared the blog post and offered a scathing critique on the dated pieces that were about Republican Charlie Crist.
'From 2007 to 2009 @joyannreid authored a dozen homophobic posts not only attempting to out Charlie Crist as gay, she attacked & mocked him for being so,' @Jamie_Maz said in the first of nine post.
'She repeatedly referred to him as 'Miss Charlie' and tagged posts about him under 'gay politicians.''
On Thursday a Twitter user shared the blog post and offered a scathing critique on the dated pieces that were about Republican Charlie Crist
'From 2007 to 2009 @joyannreid authored a dozen homophobic posts not only attempting to out Charlie Crist as gay, she attacked & mocked him for being so,' @Jamie_Maz said in the first of nine posts
The user underlines portions they think are problematic, citing here a joke regarding John McCain and claims about male waiters on Crist's honeymoon
Reid would continue her apology by mentioning that she prided herself on the 'facility with language' and admitting that was not always the case, especially highlighting the time she worked in Florida covering politics up until 2011.
She added: 'Among the frequent subjects of my posts was then-governor Charlie Crist, at the time a conservative Republican, whose positions on issues like gay marriage and adoption by same-sex couples in Florida shared headlines with widely rumored reports that he was hiding his sexual orientation.'
And the host pointed out that while folks within the LGBTQ community, conservative blogs and even South Park made reference to Crist, it was now her words that were being observed and gave her new light to reflect on.
They even point to a comparison Reid made of Crist and Will from Will and Grace
Reid often referred to the congressman as 'Miss Charlie'
Reid was criticized on her perceived notion on what it means to be a closeted gay man and marry a straight woman
'Let me be clear: at no time have I intentionally sought to demean or harm the LGBT community, which includes people whom I deeply love,' she said.
'My goal, in my ham-handed way, was to call out potential hypocrisy.'
Reid continued by saying that she regretted the way she addressed the issue and felt the 'mocking tone and sarcasm' used were 'insensitive, tone deaf and dumb.'
She added: 'There is no excusing it - not based on the taste-skewing mores of talk radio or the then-blogosphere, and not based on my intentions.'
In relation to Crist, Reid allegedly asserted that the move by the congressman to marry his wife was a 'veep marketing strategy' to possibly run for Vice President
The user highlighted each section that they believed showed insinuations by Reid that Crist was covering up being gay
'More garbage from Joy,' the user said in a post and then shared a link of the entire blog post
The mother-of-three apologized to coworkers, viewers and Congressman Crist 'who was the target of my thoughtfulness.'
'In the years since I went from blogger to opinion journalist, I have also learned, through brilliant friends and allies in the LGBT activist community, how to better frame my critiques of those who challenge people's right to love who they want, marry them, and walk in the world as fully free people,' Reid said
'In the years since I went from blogger to opinion journalist, I have also learned, through brilliant friends and allies in the LGBT activist community, how to better frame my critiques of those who challenge people's right to love who they want, marry them, and walk in the world as fully free people,' Reid said.
'Re-reading those old blog posts, I am disappointed in myself. I apologize to those who also are disappointed in me. Life can be humbling. It often is. But I hope that you know where my heart is, and that I will always strive to use my words for good. I know better and I will do better.'
Christopher Crist was Florida's governor from 2007 to 2011. He was infamously known for having supported a state constitutional amendment ban on same-sex marriage in 2008.
But in a 2013 interview with Watermark Online, an online LGBT publication in Orlando, he said: "Im sorry I did that. It was a mistake. I was wrong. Please forgive me."
When asked why he did it, the former governor claimed that he was trying to be a 'good Republican' until it became harder for him to 'toe the Republican party line' since his views on social issues differed from the norm.
Christopher Crist was Florida's governor from 2007 to 2011. He was infamously known for having supported a state constitutional amendment ban on same-sex marriage in 2008 that he later apologized for in 2013
And when Reid shared the tweet of her apology, with no mention of the former governor, Crist responded and accepted her apology
'Long forgotten, but thank you, Joy. I appreciate you,' he said on Sunday night
Reid added: 'Thank you congressman. Truly. And here's wishing you a wonderful holiday season'
And when Reid shared the tweet of her apology, Crist responded and accepted her apology.
'Long forgotten, but thank you, Joy. I appreciate you,' he said on Sunday night.
Reid added: 'Thank you congressman. Truly. And here's wishing you a wonderful holiday season.'
And people on Twitter seemed pleased that the two were able to have such a discourse that is quite uncommon in today's political climate.
'I just want to say thanks to both of you for acting like adults; it's too rare in the Trump era,' said blogger Charles Johnson.
'I just want to say thanks to both of you for acting like adults; it's too rare in the Trump era,' said blogger Charles Johnson
It was a sentiment shared by another user who added: 'Love you both. Forgiveness. Redemption. Progress. How we move forward together'
It was a sentiment shared by another user who added: 'Love you both. Forgiveness. Redemption. Progress. How we move forward together.'
'Another example of why @JoyAnnReid should be protected at all costs. And kudos to the Congressman for humbly accepting,' said another user.
'As a gay man, apology accepted. Mistakes happen, times were different & it takes a big person to apologize,' said user Jarrod Haggenman.
'Another example of why @JoyAnnReid should be protected at all costs. And kudos to the Congressman for humbly accepting,' said another user
The younger sister of Salim Mehajer is dating a senior member of the Nomads bikie gang who is a decade older than her and was previously convicted of manslaughter.
Sanaa Mehajer is understood to have been in a relationship with Mouhamed 'Moudi' Tajjour, the ex-vice president of the notorious motorcycle club, since late November.
The 23-year-old has been regularly pictured alongside the Nomads enforcer online in recent weeks, with the pair boasting of finding love on both their Instagram pages.
Tajjour and his brother Sleiman Simon Tajjour were convicted of the manslaughter of Robin Nassour in 2006. They are the cousins of Kings Cross identity John Ibrahim.
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Sanaa Mehajer (left), 23, the younger sister of Salim, is dating Mouhamed 'Moudi' Tajjour (right), 33, a senior member of the Nomads bikie gang
Tajjour, the ex-vice president of Nomads (left), is understood to have been dating Ms Mehajer (right) since late November
Just two days ago Ms Mehajer and Tajjour posted a photo together, with the enforcer openly declaring his love for his younger girlfriend.
'When you find that one person that makes you genuinely happy, hold onto them with both arms,' he captioned the image.
A day later the bikie seemingly introduced Ms Mehajer to his Nomads colleagues as they stood arm-in-arm in front of a row of motorcycles.
'My Queen learning the ropes. She steals half my clothes,' Tajjour captioned the shot.
It's believed the pair may have first met just weeks ago at the high-profile wedding of Ms Mehajer's older sister Aisha and Tajjour's cousin Sam.
Tajjour was photographed stepping out of a luxurious blue Audi at the front of the house belonging to John Ibrahim's mother.
The 23-year-old (pictured) has been regularly pictured alongside the Nomads enforcer online in recent weeks, with the pair boasting of finding love on both their Instagram pages
Tajjour (front) and his brother Sleiman Simon Tajjour (back) were both convicted of the manslaughter of Robin Nassour in 2006
'When you find that one person that makes you genuinely happy': Tajjour captioned an image of the pair on his Instagram in recent weeks
Ms Mehajer is believed to be the second youngest of Salim's six sisters. The property developer's other siblings are Kat, Aisha, Mary, Zena and Fatima.
Tajjour, a former vice-president of the motorcycle club, is now a life member having first joined in 1999.
He has been on the radar of the NSW Gangs Squad and earlier this year reportedly led a social media attack on top cop Deb Wallace, according to The Daily Telegraph.
It is claimed he took to social media and posted a photo of Ms Wallace, saying they could 'go on a date, but (she) needs to lose weight first'.
In response the commander of Strike Force Raptor sent a team of officers to Tajjour's house, admitting they 'targetted' him.
Tajjour (left) is the cousin of Kings Cross identity and nightclub owner John Ibrahim (right)
Moudi Tajjour (left) arrives at the wedding of Sanaa's sister Aisha and John Ibrahim's nephew Sam in mid-November
Sanaa (pictured with Tajjour) is believed to have studied beauty and formerly run a beauty salon
Like Salim's ex-wife Aysha, Sanaa is believed to be keen on beauty and have formerly run a beauty salon.
It is understood she has now returned to her studies and is currently a law student at University of Sydney.
Tajjour and his brother both pleaded not-guilty to the murder of Nassour, the brother of Fat Pizza actor George Nassour.
They spent four years in jail over the ambush attack, before being released in March 2010.
Little more than a year after being released their Merrylands home was targetted in a drive by shooting. Weeks later, so was the home of their cousin John Ibrahim.
Sleiman Tajjour is currently the national president of the Nomads.
Dozens of dead sharks have washed up on a North Queensland beach, with mystery surrounding how the animals died.
Concerned resident Lance Payne made the grisly discovery last month while scouring Louisa Creek Beach, south of Mackay.
The 54-year-old said he found an 'alarming number' of carcasses during his first visit, with at least eight more, including juveniles, unearthed on Sunday.
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Dozens of dead sharks have washed up on a North Queensland beach, with mystery surrounding how the animals died
Mr Payne first first came across the dead beasts in early November, while searching the beach for coal.
Taking to Facebook, he stated that there appeared to be only one species that had washed up on the shore.
'The sharks seamed in quite good health with no evident cause of death (and) the corpses had not been predated on by other fish,' he wrote.
Two weeks later he returned to the beach and found more carcasses, which included a 'mixed bag of species and even some poor hammer heads'.
Concerned resident Lance Payne made the grisly discovery last month while scouring Louisa Creek Beach, south of Mackay, finding another eight sharks killed when he returned Sunday
Mr Payne first first came across the dead animals in early November, while searching the beach for coal clumps
Two weeks later he returned to the beach and found more carcasses, which included a 'mixed bag of species and even some poor hammer heads'
'I was so disappointed to see it killed at such a young age,' Mr Payne told Yahoo 7.
His initial suspicious were that the sharks had been killed to be used in the Chinese delicacy shark fin soup.
However, other theories Mr Payne suggested included commercial fishing, as well as a lack of oxygen in the water due to a nearby coal mining facility.
Mr Payne told Daily Mail Australia he had reported the matter to the Pollution Hotline, with it referred on to the Mackay Regional Council for investigation.
Officers from the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection were sent to respond to reports of several small dead sharks washed up on Louisa Creek Beach near Mackay.
'The officers attended the scene Tuesday and did not find any evidence of a pollution event,' a spokesperson said.
'Due to the condition of the sharks an autopsy was unable to be carried out.'
His initial suspicious were that the sharks had been killed to be used in the Chinese delicacy shark fin soup
Rosalie Avila's parents took her off life support on Friday, three days after finding her hanged in her bedroom at their home in Yucapia, California
A 13-year-old girl committed suicide on Tuesday after being bullied about her looks for years.
Rosalie Avila's parents took her off life support on Friday, three days after finding her hanging in her bedroom at their home in Yucapia, California.
'My daughter had the whole world,' her father Freddie Avila told NBC 7 San Diego, choking back tears.
'Now, I just have to think about what she could have done or what she could have become, now it's just a memory.'
Rosalie was in the eighth grade at Mesa View Middle School - and her father described her as a loving and warm individual who wanted to be a lawyer one day so she could make the world a better place.
He said she got good grades and was a great artist and loved singing.
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Mr Avila said that although his daughter's smile could light up a room, he noticed something was off in the recent months. He said he found that she was carrying a journal around with her that had names in it of all of the people who used to bully her. He told ABC 7 that Rosalie would often cut her wrists. She is pictured far left with two other family members
Mr Avila said he found his daughter in the middle of the night when he woke up because he heard screaming.
'I had to find my daughter hanging in her room,' he told the outlet.
Rosalie left behind a letter apologizing, and wrote in it that she did it because she was 'ugly' and a 'loser'.
Her parents rushed her to Loma Linda Children's Hospital, where she was in critical condition for days before being declared brain dead and taken off of life support.
Mr Avila said that although his daughter's smile could light up a room, he noticed something was off in the recent months.
He said he found that she was carrying a journal around with her that had names in it of all of the people who used to bully her.
He told ABC 7 that Rosalie would often cut her wrists.
'I remember a couple nights she'd come home, telling me that the kids are calling her names about her teeth,' he said.
'I go, "You have braces, honey, don't worry. The braces are going to come off," and she said, "Yeah, but my teeth are straight and they're still making fun of me.'"
Mr Avila said that although his daughter's smile could light up a room, he noticed something was off in the recent months. He said he found that she was carrying a journal around with her that had names in it of all of the people who used to bully her
Mesa View Middle School (pictured) was aware Rosalie was being bullied, and she was in counseling. The school released a statement saying that crisis counselors and intervention teams will be available
The middle school was aware she was being bullied and she was in counseling, her aunt said.
'No one can fathom the heartbreak and confusion that we are certain many of our students and families are feeling right now,' the school said in a statement, according to NBC.
'Crisis counselors and intervention teams will be available and supporting our students throughout the district in the coming days.'
Rosalie's aunt Sarah Zebaneh said the family wants to get out the message about how much harm bullying can have.
'It's not right to bully other kids,' Zebaneh told NBC.
'It's not right to call them names, not right to make fun of what they are wearing. It's horrible. Please stop the bullying.'
Her family is now raising money for her funeral expenses with GoFundMe.
For confidential support call the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255
Officer Miosotis Familia was killed by Alexander Bonds in July 2017. Her three children are due to receive a debt-free three-bedroom home later this month
The children of the New York Police Department officer who was slain by an emotionally disturbed man have spoken out five months after her tragic death.
They spoke at a press conference attended by the New York Daily News during which it was formally announced that the three children of Officer Miosotis Familia, a single mother, were going to receive a three-bedroom home through donations galvanized by the Daily News, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation and the Skyview Apartments LLC.
The donations totaled $818,000. The family will live in The Bronx. They will be able to move in before the Christmas holiday.
A trust fund for Familia's three children will pay for maintenance fees and property taxes.
Genesis Villella, 20, and twins Delilah and Peter Vega, both 12, lost their 48-year-old mother this past summer.
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Familia's children (left to right) Genesis Villella, 20, and twins Peter and Delilah Vega, will receive the home due to a donation effort galvanized by the New York Daily News, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation and the Skyview Apartments LLC. Donations totaled $818,000
The children are pictured speaking at Familia's funeral on July 11. Genesis said at the recent conference: 'I owe it to my mom to make sure that the three of us will be taken care of... in a loving and healthy environment'
Genesis said at the conference: 'I owe it to my mom to make sure that the three of us will be taken care of... in a loving and healthy environment.'
She added, per a report from ABC New York: 'She was the one who kept us afloat.
'She used to tell us that because she was a single parent, that we shouldn't feel less fortunate, or that we couldn't live the life that we wanted.'
Officer Familia was sitting in her marked vehicle this past July when 34-year-old Alexander Bonds shot at her through the passenger side window near the intersection of 183rd Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx.
Alexander Bonds was shot dead by police after he killed Familia, the first female NYPD officer to die in the line of duty since the September 11 attacks
Officers caught up with Bonds about a block away and killed him in a hail of about 20 bullets when he pulled a stolen revolver, police said.
Only a few hours earlier, his girlfriend called 911 to report that she was worried about his unstable behavior, police said.
Familia had served in the force for 12 years. Previously, she had worked at New York University Hospital and the American Red Cross.
Friends said she became an officer to help her community, and her family was heartbroken.
Familia was the first female NYPD officer to die in the line of duty since the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Bruno Langley (pictured outside court) was given a 12-month community order for sexually molesting women in a club
A teenager claims shamed Coronation Street actor Bruno Langley attempted to pursue her on social media.
The actor was last week given a 12-month community order for sexually molesting women in a Manchester club while drunk.
Now the youngster has come forward claiming Langley approached her in a gym in 2015, when she was 15, before allegedly asking her on Twitter if she was 'single'.
The girl told The Sun: 'He asked my age. It creeped me out. I walked away but he kept following.'
She alleges he wrote on Twitter: 'You're absolutely beautiful. Are you single?'
Langley told The Sun: 'Over the years as an actor I have had hundreds of people that approach me and want to speak to me, and I also get many messages through social media.
'I have no recollection of an exchange that The Sun state happened over two years ago.
'I would not have conversed with a girl in the manner The Sun alleges, if I knew she was under the age of 16.
'I have never been contacted by any authority about an allegation of this nature.'
The actor molested four women at a Manchester music venue last month, but was only charged with sexually assaulting two of them.
Langley - who played gay character Todd Grimshaw in the soap - wept in the dock last week as he avoided jail after admitting both offences.
His lawyer told the hearing: 'Something happened that night, most possibly in relation to the character he was playing.'
The actor (pictured leaving Manchester Magistrates' Court), molested four women at a Manchester music venue, but was only charged with sexually assaulting two of them
It is understood his comments refer to the stress Langley felt being a straight man playing a gay character.
Langley was in the Band on the Wall club in the early hours of October 1 when he touched the two women.
Instead of a jail term, the 34-year-old was ordered to complete a 12-month community order and submit to a curfew.
He was also ordered to pay 250 to each of his two victims. He must also sign the sex offenders' register for the next five years.
Langley, who is split from the ex-girlfriend with whom he has a son, apologised to his victims after the case and revealed he was getting help for a drinking problem
Langley, who is split from the ex-girlfriend with whom he has a son, apologised to his victims after the case and revealed he was getting help for a drinking problem.
MailOnline has contacted representatives for Mr Langley for comment.
Greater Manchester Police declined to comment.
This is the horrifying moment a New York City driver struck six people, leaving one dead and the remaining five injured in a targeted attack.
A male suspect was taken into custody after he targeted the victims in Queens following a dispute over a parking spot.
He barreled through them with his car around 4.45am Sunday, video footage from the scene shows.
The incident occurred outside a hookah bar on 129th St. and Liberty Ave in South Ozone Park.
Ricardo Chatergoon, 23, was found unconscious following the violent incident and later died from his injuries at the hospital.
Police say the driver targeted the victims in Queens following a dispute over a parking spot
The incident occurred outside a hookah bar on 129th St. and Liberty Ave in South Ozone Park
Police say that they found Ricardo Chatergoon, 23, pictured, unconscious following the violent incident and he later died from his injuries
The injured people were taken to Jamaica Hospital where one is in a critical condition, according to police.
Police also said that two stabbing victims who arrived at the hospital were connected with the dispute.
The male suspect is seen in a white Hyundai Sonata and racing down a sidewalk after jumping the curb and heading towards pedestrians outside the bar at the time.
Seconds later, a silver Nissan SUV appears to be chasing after the first car down the same sidewalk.
Horror: A man who identified himself as the father of Ricardo Chatergoon who was killed stands at the crime scene
An eyewitness said that he drove by the fracas as it erupted and saw a woman trying to hold back one of the brawlers involved in the fight.
'The girl is yelling "Stop, stop. No, no," when this car just comes from nowhere and hits the whole group,' the eyewitness told The New York Daily News.
'The bodies went flying. The car was going really fast, at least 50 mph on the sidewalk.'
'At this point one individual, believed to be the occupant of the white Hyundai sedan is in custody. The vehicle has been recovered in another area of Queens,' Assistant Police Chief David Barrere said.
'Detectives are conducting crime scene examination, interviewing victims and witnesses, and searching for video evidence. Further information will be provided as it becomes available.'
'At this time it appears that this incident originated from a parking dispute which escalated resulting in the death and several serious injuries,' Barrere added.
A Milo Yiannopoulos superfan is getting his upper-lip tattooed with the right-wing firebrand's signature.
In a video posted to his Instagram, the self-described 'troll' and 'provocateur' can be seen scrawling his first name in big letters across the man's upper-lip.
Mr Yiannopoulos proudly posted the video to his 300 thousand Instagram followers on Sunday, day four of his Australian speaking circuit The Troll Academy Tour.
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In a video posted to his Instagram, the self-described 'troll' and 'provocateur' can be seen scrawling his first name in big letters across the man's upper-lip
The ultra-conservative commentator touched down in Melbourne on Monday, where it's believed he met the superfan willing to offer his face for the inking.
Dressed in his signature gold-studded jacket, Mr Yiannopoulos could be heard telling the man to 'hold super still' as he approached with a permanent marker pen.
After Mr Yiannopoulos scribbled the letters MILO, his recipient could be heard gushing his thanks.
'Awesome, thank you so much, Milo,' he said.
The MILO signature appeared to be the most recent in a string of tattoos decorating the man's face, including the Eye of Horus, an ancient Egyptian symbol for protection, and a dream catcher on his forehead.
The superfan already sported an array of face tattoos including a parrot and the word 'loser' brandished across his forehead
Mr Yiannopoulos proudly posted the video to his 300 thousand Instagram followers on Sunday, day four of his Australian speaking circuit The Troll Academy Tour
Dressed in his signature gold-studded jacket, Mr Yiannopoulos could be heard telling the man to 'hold super still' as he approached with a permanent marker pen
Mr Yiannopoulos's fans reacted with a mixture of support and criticism, with one man calling out the fan for his choice in tattoos.
'I'm going to take a wild guess and say he is neither Egyptian, African, nor Native American. Identity crisis much?' he said in response to the man's various cultural tattoos.
'Australians are embarrassing.'
Others blasted both the superfan and Mr Yiannopoulos, saying: 'How lovely, a redneck getting tatted by a hypocritical bigot'.
Just days into Mr Yiannopoulas' Australian tour, the details of his ultra-extravagant life-style and upbringing surfaced.
The MILO signature appeared to be the most recent in a string of tattoos decorating the man's face, including the Eye of Horus, an ancient Egyptian symbol for protection, and a dream catcher on his forehead
Right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos has been pictured wearing a thick fur coat in 34C heat as he heads out shopping in Perth
Mr Yiannopoulos insisted he was a self made man, despite growing up with a 'mafioso' father and living between houses all around the world.
He was born Milo Hanrahan and raised in Kent, England to Greek and Jewish parents.
His family had a chalet in the Austrian Alps and for his fifth birthday he got a pony. It was a lifestyle any child would be in envy of - but that's nothing compared to today.
Now known as Milo Yiannopoulos, the controversy king wears labels like Versace and Gucci, has houses around the world, stays in fancy hotels and only drinks expensive champagne. Put simply, he's living life like a rockstar.
And after flaunting the best of his expensive wardrobe during his visit to Sydney this week, Yiannopoulos told Daily Mail Australia he was offended by estimates he's worth just AUD$5.3 million.
Stepping out in a thick fur jacket on Sunday, Mr Yiannopoulas appeared not bothered he might offend animal rights activists
Taking to his Facebook on Sunday, Mr Yiannopoulas told his two and a half million followers he was 'keeping it low-key'
'Growing up we had a chalet in Australia, a couple of different house and my dad had a few Porsches,' Yiannopoulos recalled.
'I got a pony for my fifth birthday, I could never work out why we lived in nice houses. I didn't know what my dad did but essentially I was your typical Greek Mafioso child.
'But professionally speaking I'm pretty much self-made. My career in London took off pretty quick and I've always had a taste for nice things, so I knew I had to work hard.'
Starting as the tech writer for the Telegraph, he went on to create his own magazine The Kernel and spent time at Breitbart News, before his role as right-wing firebrand.
Mr Yiannopoulos pictured stepping out of Tiffany & Co in Perth this weekend
Mr Yiannopoulos is pictured with Gucci and Tiffany & Co shopping bags in Perth
Milo Yiannopoulos has revealed that an outfit (pictured) he wore in Australia this week is worth close to $150,000
The right-wing firebrand told of his lavish lifestyle to Daily Mail Australia, including his million dollar wardbrobe, designer jewellery collection and his husband's bespoke $300,000 Tesla
Yiannopoulos owns multiple houses in the United States, two in London and bought husband John a $330,000 gold plated Tesla (pictured) this year
While on the surface he seems to be permanently stirring the pot, behind the scenes he lives the high life.
Last year he married his partner John at the Four Seasons in Hawaii in an extravagant wedding ceremony that he for the first time revealed cost AUD$460,000.
There's multiple houses in the United States and two in London, AUD$330,000 cars and a wardrobe supermodels would be jealous of.
And most of it was on show this week during his trip to Australia, as Yiannopoulos hit out at Muslims and 'lefties' while wearing his designer clothes and bespoke jewellery.
Online estimates list Yiannopoulos' worth as being close to AUD$5.3 million, claims he says are 'insulting'
Starting as the tech writer for the Telegraph, he went on to create his own magazine The Kernel and spent time at Breitbart News, before moving on to becoming a right-wing firebrand
'I was wearing a Dolce and Gabbana jacket, the sunglasses are Louis Vuitton, custom made 50 karat gold jewellery from New York, jeans from Balmain and Tiffany earrings worth AUD$40,000,' he said.
'I guess at any time I'm probably wearing AUD$200,000 of stuff - if people came and cut off my hands they'd be able to buy a house.'
Online estimates list Yiannopoulos' worth as being close to AUD$5.3 million, claims he says are 'insulting'.
'I got a AUD$1.3 million signing bonus from Apple last year and my first purchase was a gold chrome Tesla for my husband which cost AUD$330,000,' he revealed.
'It's the only gold chrome model in the world. They didn't even have gold on the drop down box to choose from.
'I'm basically like a cross between a Russian oligarch's wife and a Chinese tourist, lots of gold and plenty of Louis Vuitton.
'I guess at any time I'm probably wearing AUD$200,000 of stuff - if people came and cut off my hands they'd be able to buy a house,' he told Daily Mail Australia
Yiannopoulos has multiple houses across the United States, as well as two homes in London
'A couple of generations back my family had nothing, as often happens with people who come into money, now we're showing off heavily.'
But while wasn't afraid to splurge on a vehicle for his now husband John, he claimed it has been close to a decade since he himself has got behind the wheel.
'I haven't driven for 10 years, there's normally an Escalade waiting out the front I'm a bit like Hilary Clinton I guess,' Yiannopoulos said with a laugh.
Creating headlines since the moment he stepped out of business class and onto the tarmac, the full-time mischief maker said his tour of Australia had been a success.
Just minutes after chatting with Daily Mail Australia on Friday he was back in the air, jetting off to the first leg of his speaking tour in Adelaide.
'I'm basically like a cross between a Russian oligarch's wife and a Chinese tourist, lots of gold and plenty of Louis Vuitton,' he said
Yiannopoulos began working as a tech correspondent for the Telegraph, before later going to work at Breitbart news
The 33-year-old also revealed that growing up his family had a chalet in the Austrian Alps (like pictured) and that for his fifth birthday he was gifted a pony
So far he's sold out shows in Adelaide, Melbourne and two in Sydney, with a third to be added in the Harbour City next Wednesday, November 6.
Some 12,000 people are expected to watch him in action on his Australian tour, with Yiannopoulos saying he's been left nothing short of chuffed.
'Australia I always knew was going to be a key market for me, people want to see me live and want to read my stuff,'
'What it has proved to me is the lefties and feminists in Australia better get to used to me, because I'm going to be over here causing mayhem every year.'
North Korea's missile tests are an 'imminent threat' to Japan, the Japanese parliament declared on Monday, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said talking to the reclusive state was meaningless.
The upper house unanimously adopted a resolution protesting against the North's firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile that dropped into the sea inside Japan's exclusive economic zone last week.
The launch showed Pyongyang was determined to continue its nuclear and missile programs and constituted 'an unprecedented, significant and imminent threat against the safety of the region, including Japan'.
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said that talking with North Korea following their most recent missile test is 'meaningless'. Pictured above, Abe during the plenary session of the upper house of parliament in Tokyo on Monday
Japan's upper house of parliament unanimously adopted a resolution protesting against the North's firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile that dropped into the sea inside Japan's exclusive economic zone last week
'This is a frontal challenge against the international community that must not be tolerated,' added the resolution.
Tensions on the Korean peninsula are high after last Wednesday's missile launch.
On Monday the United States and South Korea began their largest-ever joint air exercise, described by Pyongyang as an 'all-out provocation'.
China and Russia had proposed that the United States and South Korea stop major military exercises in exchange for North Korea halting its weapons programs. Beijing formally calls the idea the "dual suspension" proposal.
The annual US-South Korean drill, called Vigilant Ace, will run until Friday, with six F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to be deployed among the more than 230 aircraft taking part.
Abe vowed to put pressure on North Korea until it changes its ways and gives up its missile and nuclear technology in a 'verifiable' and 'irreversible' fashion.
Tensions on the Korean peninsula are high after last Wednesday's missile launch. On Monday the United States and South Korea began their largest-ever joint air exercise, described by Pyongyang as an 'all-out provocation'
Global anxiety about North Korea has steadily risen this year, and Washington last week called on other UN members to cut ties with it in order to squeeze the secretive regime. Pictured above, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watching the launch of a ICMB on Wednesday
'In order to press North Korea into changing its policies, we shall take a resolute attitude in our diplomacy,' he told the upper house.
'Dialogue for the sake of dialogue is meaningless,' Abe said.
Global anxiety about North Korea has steadily risen this year, and Washington last week called on other UN members to cut ties with it in order to squeeze the secretive regime.
The call, however, has fallen short of persuading key North Korean backers - China and Russia - to take steps to isolate the regime.
The North's KCNA state news agency, citing a foreign ministry spokesman, said on Saturday the Trump administration was "begging for nuclear war by staging an extremely dangerous nuclear gamble on the Korean peninsula".
North Korea regularly uses its state media to threaten the United States and its allies.
North Korea has tested dozens of ballistic missiles and conducted its sixth and largest nuclear bomb test in September, in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
It has said its weapons programs are a necessary defence against U.S. plans to invade. The United States, which has 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, denies any such intention.
North Korea's latest missile test was witnessed by crew on a passenger plane travelling from San Francisco to Hong Kong.
Staff on the Cathay Pacific flight witnessed the suspected re-entry of last week's missile test while flying over Japan, the BBC reports.
The airline has since warned staff travelling across the North Pacific to keep an eye out when flying in the area.
Spotter: Crew on a Cathay Pacific flight flying over Japan en-route to Hong Kong from San Francisco witnessed the North Korean missile re-enter earth's atmosphere
The November 29 nuclear rocket test proved to have been North Korea's most powerful so far, an ICBM that may be able to target the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The missile did not travel far in terms of distance and landed off the coast of Japan, but officials said it reached an altitude of more than 1, 740miles.
It was reportedly spotted by crew on the Cathay Pacific flight as well as two Korean Air planes flying a similar route.
Pilots on two separate Korean Air flights heading to Seoul reported seeing a flash of light crossing the Sea of Japan.
Cathay Pacific's general manager of operations Mark Hoey later told staff 'today the crew of CX893 reported, "Be advised, we witnessed the DPRK missile blow up and fall apart near our current location",' the BBC reports.
New test: A view of the newly developed intercontinental ballistic rocket Hwasong-15's test seen in this photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency
It comes as the U.S. and South Korea launches their biggest-ever combined air force exercise, a five-day drill is meant to improve the allies wartime capabilities, South Koreas defence ministry said.
The US Seventh Air Force sent major strategic military assets that include six F-22 and 18 F-35 stealth fighter jets for the annual training exercise in the Korean Peninsula and about 12,000 US military personnel are participating.
North Koreas state media said the joint drill, named Vigilant Ace, pushes the Korean Peninsula 'to the brink of nuclear war'.
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Britain is braced for an 'arctic plunge' this week as forecasters predict high winds and snow showers for much of the country, with temperatures dropping as low as -8C (18F).
While many people enjoyed a relatively mild weekend, with highs of 12.4C (54F) in South Wales yesterday, the weather will become far more wintry by Wednesday.
The Met Office predicts the balmy weather will be replaced by rain and winds of up to 70mph - then temperatures will really plunge and much of the country will see snow on Friday.
The sun begins to rise this morning over Tynemouth Longsands in South Shields, Tyne and Wear
A steam engine powers along the North York Moors Railway where snow covers the ground near Goathland yesterday
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Today, there will still be the odd spot of light rain or drizzle affecting western regions, but elsewhere it will be largely dry - despite being cloudy with some clearer spells for a time, more so in the South and East.
Met Office meteorologist Charles Powell warned temperatures could drop even lower than the -6C (42.8F) recorded last week, as northerly gales blast the UK.
He said: 'It's quite quiet as we start the week, but on Tuesday we will see a small change that will paint a picture, as slightly wet and windy weather develops across north west Scotland.
'On Wednesday there will be gales across the UK with a band of rain working its way across the west.
'By Thursday morning the rain starts to clear and opens the door for some really cold weather, especially across the northern half of the UK. Temperatures will struggle to get much above 5C or 6C (41F to 43F).'
By Friday, the cold is expected to be felt across most of Britain, with hail, sleet and snow all forecast. The showers will spread across most parts of the country, with snow possible in many places even at sea level.
The coldest temperature last week was -6C (42.8F) in Pershore, Worcestershire, on Thursday. The coldest night of autumn, which ended last week, was Saturday, November 25 when Topcliffe in North Yorkshire fell to -6.3C (20.6F).
The coldest night of 2017 so far was January 30 when Braemar, Aberdeenshire, fell as low as -10.1C (13.8F).
Jodie Broad, 30, (pictured) claimed she was a single parent when in fact she was living with her husband in Hyde, Greater Manchester
A charity worker who scrounged over 30,000 in benefits while helping the homeless wept as she walked free from court.
Mother-of-three Jodie Broad, 30, claimed she was a single parent when in fact she was happily married and living with her husband Barry.
Over a three-year period the nursery helper pocketed child tax credits, income support and housing benefit - despite having a joint income with Mr Broad, also 30.
The claim had initially been legitimate as the couple had temporarily split up, but she carried on claiming to be single after the pair got back together in 2012.
Broad, who volunteered with the homelessness charity Shelter, claimed 32,425 in benefits from July 2012 to November 2015 before she was found out.
She later claimed she had financial problems and had 'buried her head in the sand', Minshull Street Crown Court heard.
But inquiries revealed she made fresh claims for benefits when they moved house and she maintained she was single when questioned by welfare officials.
Broad, of Hyde in Greater Manchester, pleaded guilty to three charges of fraud and brought an overnight bag with her in preparation for going to jail.
But Judge John Potter told her: 'The money you pocketed is money you stole from your community, it was money that could have been used in the community.
'But it is clear from the references that you do a lot with the community and not only do you do it you do it in an exemplary fashion.
'You will know the harm taking the money can have on the community, 30,000 could have been used to support people in the community.
Over a three-year period, the nursery helper pocketed child tax credits, income support and housing benefit - despite having a joint income with Mr Broad (pictured together)
'You had financial difficulties and I accept that affected your life. This is an unusual case because you are somebody who committed this fraud for a significant period of time while doing a lot of good work in the community.
'I must juggle those points with a lack of previous convictions, and I am satisfied that I do not have to impose an immediate sentence of imprisonment.'
Earlier Prosecuting Amanda Johnson said: 'The nature of the dishonesty is that she failed to disclose that she in fact was married to Barry Broad and living with him and their children.
'The defendant was interviewed in December 2015 and confirmed that she did not disclose her change in circumstances.
Broad later claimed she had financial problem and had 'buried her head in the sand', Minshull Street Crown Court heard
'She said she had some time separated from her husband and agreed the they had moved back in to the family home together in October 2012.
'They lived together as a family and they shared a joint income. Over the years she was sent a number of claim forms by Tameside Borough Council which gave the defendant the opportunity to explain her change of circumstances but she did not.
'In fact she moved a number of times during the relevant period and fresh claims were made to say that she had no other source of income. She is a defendant of previous good character.'
She was given 12 months jail suspended for two years and was ordered to complete 100 hours of unpaid work. She will face a Proceeds of Crime hearing later.
Donald Trump's defence secretary landed in Pakistan today as the US attempts to pressure its ally crack down on terrorist safe havens - just days after Pakistani authorities released one of the alleged masterminds behind the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.
US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis arrived at an air force base in the city of Rawalpindi, which borders the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, before heading to the US embassy.
Mattis is set to hold talks with prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and the powerful military chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa during his brief stop over.
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Mattis says he's ready to listen during his trip to Pakistan
It is the 67-year-old's first visit to the country as defence secretary and comes amid fraying tensions between the US and Pakistan. America has urged its longtime ally to do more in the battle to stop insurgents allegedly using bases in Pakistan's tribal belt to target NATO troops in Afghanistan.
Relations suffered a further blow when a Pakistani court released the firebrand cleric Hafiz Saeed, who is alleged to have been one of the masterminds of the Mumbai attack which killed 164 people and six US citizens.
The internationally recognised terrorist helped co-found the Jamaat-ud-Dawa group and has a $10 million bounty on his head - yet he was released from his house arrest after a court said there was no evidence of Saeed's role in the deadly Indian massacre.
It comes at the same time that the military has been accused of helping to broker a deal which is said to pander to a small group of Islamist hardliners - which proves that little is being done to stop extremists, critics claim.
Trump launched a scathing attack on Pakistan earlier this year, claiming that the government was harbouring 'agents of chaos' during a speech in August.
This forced a number of high profile diplomatic meetings between the two nations, yet it appears that Washington has been left frustrated by the progress of the talks.
US General John Nicholson said Islamabad had not carried out the 'clear' demands made by Washington, but Mattis said he would be willing to do 'some listening' when meeting with his counterparts.
When quizzed on if he would 'prod' Islamabad to take more action, he said: 'That's not the way I deal with issues. I believe that we work hard on finding the common ground, and then we work together, so that's the approach I want to take.'
Kuwaiti Army Chief of Staff General Lieutenant Mohammad al-Khodhr (C-R) receiving US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis
Scotland Yard chief Cressida Dick today joined condemnation of police hounding of Damian Green.
The Met commissioner said former officers were 'wrong' to be using confidential material from a controversial 2008 raid on the deputy PM's office to try and oust him.
She also confirmed that her force was looking into whether any of the actions could have broken the law.
The damning assessment from the country's most senior police officer came with the verdict of a sleaze inquiry into Mr Green expected within days.
Damian Green (pictured leaving his London home today) flatly denies viewing any pornography on his office computer
Met commissioner Cressida Dick said former officers were 'wrong' to be using confidential material from a controversial 2008 raid on the deputy PM's office to try and oust him
The Tory MP is being probed over allegations pornography was found on his Commons computer in 2008, as well as claims he made a clumsy pass at a Conservative activist while offering her a job.
The raid was highly controversial at the time, as Mr Green - then shadow immigration minister - had been embarrassing the police with a series of leaks.
But the allegations about what was found on his computer were only levelled by former officers after the standards investigation was launched. Mr Green has flatly denied viewing pornography at work, while allies said he was 'gobsmacked' that police were being allowed to make 'outlandish smears' against him.
In a round of interviews this morning, Ms Dick - who was the Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner in 2008 - charge of protection and security in Londosaid she 'condemned' the use of confidential information to put pressure on Mr Green.
GREEN WOULD BE 'TOILETS MINISTER' AND WOULDN'T BE MISSED, EX TORY MP CLAIMS Damian Green would have been 'toilets minister' under Margaret Thatcher and would not be missed if he resigns today, an ex-Tory minister said today. David Mellor said Mr Green - Theresa May's effective deputy - would not be missed if he bows to pressure and quits. Mr Green is the subject of sleaze and porn allegations and is at the centre of a Cabinet Office inquiry that has now been running for a month. The First Secretary of State has denied all wrongdoing and refused to stand aside while he is investigated. But Mr Mellor told GMB today: 'Damian Green should have said, ''I will resign to clear my name'' and he would have had lots of sympathy. 'Damian Green is the sort of guy who under Mrs Thatcher would have been the minister of state for latrines and would have lived in total obscurity. 'Instead of which he becomes Deputy Prime Minister, he rises without trace. 'He would not be missed for a millisecond if he left government. It would be better if he did.' Advertisement
'Police officers have a duty of confidentiality. We come into contact with personal information very regularly, sometimes extremely sensitive,' she told LBC Radio.
'It endures after you leave the service, so I believe that what this officer and, indeed, other retired officers, appears to have done is wrong and my professional standards department will be reviewing what has happened in relation to how information has been handled and if any offences are disclosed, we will investigate them.'
Ms Dick told BBC London: 'It is my view that what they have done, based on my understanding of what they are saying, what they have done is wrong. And I condemn it.'
In a boost for Mr Green, he has also been backed by a Labour frontbencher.
International Trade Secretary Barry Gardiner said former officers had acted 'disgracefully' and he did not believe the Cabinet Office investigation into Mr Green would be able to reach a conclusion on the issue of inappropriate material on computers from his office.
'I think the police officers who seem to have blown the gaff on this have behaved disgracefully,' Mr Gardiner told the BBC's Westminster Hour.
'They should not have broken what are clearly the police rules.' Gardiner added the Cabinet Office inquiry will be unlikely to reach a clear conclusion on the matter as Green was not a minister at the time, and so could not have broken the ministerial code.
'The key issue that arises is if he has misused parliamentary computers, like in any job of work, and if he has subsequently lied to the prime minister about whether he did or not.'
Meanwhile, John Bercow's deputy has warned that a security flaw in parliament could have allowed pornography to be placed on Mr Green's computer without his involvement.
Neil Lewis (pictured left), former Scotland Yard detective who examined Damian Green's work PC in 2008, said it contained thousands of pornographic images and says there is 'no doubt whatsoever' it was his. Former Met assistant commissioner Bob Quick (right) was in charge of the leak inquiry that triggered the raid
Mr Lewis' notebook shows how pornography had been found on the computer - he also says there was more on the work laptop
Eleanor Laing, deputy speaker of the Commons, has revealed that her office assistant found pornographic images had been put on her computer without her knowledge 'every day' when working in parliament before 2010.
The source of the images was never found. But allies of Mr Green believe lax cyber-security at the Commons a decade ago could explain police claims that they found 'thousands' of pornographic pictures on his computer during a botched raid on his office in 2008.
Experts suggested today that retired detective Neil Lewis, who claimed last week that he found pornography on Mr Green's computer, could face prosecution.
Mr Lewis, 48, is at the centre of an urgent Scotland Yard anti-corruption probe after accusing Mr Green of lying.
NINE-YEAR GRUDGE MATCH BETWEEN QUICK AND GREEN The Tories put out footage of the 2008 raid on Damian Green's office Damian Green and Bob Quick crossed swords in 2008 when the Met assistant commissioner took dramatic action in an inquiry into leaks from the force. Mr Quick decided to arrest then then shadow immigration minister. The Tory MP was held for nine hours while his Commons office, two homes and constituency office, were searched and computers removed by counter-terrorism officers. The episode sparked a huge inquest at the Commons into whether parliamentary privilege should have protected the material held by an MP. In the ensuing political storm, it emerged Mr Quick's wife was running a car hire firm from their home and details of their address were published on a website. The officer then accused the Tories of being 'wholly corrupt' in leaking the story to intimidate him and his investigation. But he was forced to apologise after then party leader David Cameron said the claim 'Tory machinery' was mobilised against his investigation was 'completely baseless'. Mr Green was later cleared of any wrongdoing. Mr Quick complained bitterly that the investigation cost him his career. He quit in April 2009 after being photographed arriving at Downing Street with documents detailing a counter-terror operation clearly visible. He later claimed he might have survived the gaffe if it had not been for the Green affair. Advertisement
The ex-police officer said he had 'no doubt' the MP was personally responsible for downloading them, which the First Secretary of State strongly denies, and cited his own notes from the time.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has repeatedly said police officers and staff must never abuse their access to highly sensitive personal information.
A legal expert told the Daily Mail said she would be very surprised if a criminal case cannot be brought against Mr Lewis, adding that he may have committed offences under data protection, computer misuse and even theft legislation.
And police watchdog Sir Tom Winsor, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, has accused Mr Lewis of actions which 'flagrantly violate' the trust ordinary people put in officers investigating sensitive crimes.
Sir Tom said the public must be reassured that when sensitive information comes into police hands its 'private nature will be respected in perpetuity'.
He said that if trust between police and public is damaged it may lead to 'great harm' to 'public safety and justice'.
Mr Lewis, who worked as a lead in digital crime after being a leading counter-terrorism officer, was working on Operation Miser in 2008.
This was an investigation into Home Office leaks that led to Mr Green's Commons office being searched by police and his computers being analysed.
The raid sparked an outcry that targeting Mr Green - shadow immigration minister at the time - was a flagrant breach of parliamentary privilege rules.
The leak inquiry was being led by Met assistant commissioner Bob Quick, who has also raised allegations about the pornography find.
The claims have dramatically widened the Cabinet Office inquiry, which was originally looking at accusations Mr Green made a clumsy pass at a Tory activist.
US comedy show Saturday Night Live gave 'Theresa May' a platform to carry on her war of words with Donald Trump this weekend.
The late night comedy show poked fun at the exchanges between the British Prime Minister and the US President, after Mrs May said that Trump was 'wrong' to have retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda from the far-right hate group Britain First.
Saturday Night Live capitalised on the awkward back-and-forth between the two world leaders, with cast member Kate McKinnon performing her best dead-pan 'Maybot' impression.
During a mock interview with fellow SNL star Colin Jost, 'Theresa May' said: 'I saw Trump's offensive retweets and I've put that man on blast.
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SNL cast member Kate McKinnon (left) did her best Theresa May impression with fellow SNL cast member Colin Jost (right)
'Listen to this epic take down: "It is wrong for the president to have done this".
'Savage. Flaming emoji. I am practically a troll now.'
Colin Jost replied: 'Right, but Donald Trump tweeted back at you and told you to back off?'
'May' retorts: 'Yes, but the b**** tagged the wrong Theresa May. It's internet 101, baby. Oh, its thrilling to engage in a flame war. To dunk on the thirsty b****. It's electric, I am hard, I am actually hard.'
She adds that she is 'not afraid of a little social media fisticuffs' and fired warning shots at Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin.
The SNL sketch comes after the US President retweeted three videos from Britain First deputy leader Jayda Fransen, which has sparked outrage on both sides of the Atlantic.
Piers Morgan, who is one of just 45 people who Trump follows, urged Trump to delete the retweets and apologise.
'Theresa May' also unleashed a brutal attack on Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin
Fransen's anti-Muslim posts were retweeted by Mr Trump although it has since emerged that the attacker in this video is neither a Muslim nor a migrant
The Good Morning Britain host tweeted: 'Good morning, Mr President @realDonaldTrump - what the hell are you doing retweeting a bunch of unverified videos by Britain First, a bunch of disgustingly racist far-right extremists?
'Please STOP this madness & undo your retweets.'
Fransen, 31, is currently facing prosecution for religiously aggravated harassment and a separate trial for using threatening and abusive language.
Donald Trump attacked Theresa May over Twitter after she condemned his retweets of far-right hate group Britain First
Donald Trump's personal lawyer has admitted that he wrote the controversial tweet that suggested the President knew Michael Flynn lied to the FBI.
The post, which appeared on the Commander-in-Chief's Twitter page on Saturday, claimed the former national security adviser was dismissed in February because he had deceived authorities over his conversations with the Russian Ambassador to the US.
It has led to speculation that the President could be prosecuted for obstruction of justice, as he reportedly told former FBI director James Comey to stop investigating Flynn after firing him.
Trump's personal lawyer, John Doyd, pictured, has admitted that he crafted a controversial tweet that appeared on the President's personal account on Saturday
This tweet by Donald Trump led to accusations that the president had obstructed justice after allegedly telling James Comey to back off Michael Flynn while also knowing that Flynn lied to the FBI. But now the White House says his personal lawyer made the tweet
But now Trump's attorney, John Dowd, has claimed that he was the one who crafted the tweet, which has been described as 'sloppy'.
Speaking to ABC News, the lawyer said the social media post was 'my mistake' and that he had not intended 'to break news' in writing it.
Mr Dowd's admission did not clarify if Trump actually knew about Flynn's deception when he dismissed him in February or whether the President knew the tweet had been published on Saturday.
It follows earlier reports that he was responsible for the post, which read: 'I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI.
'He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!'
It was sent while Trump's motorcade was stuck in traffic as it left a Republican fundraising event in New York City.
It appeared to be an attempt by the President to defend Flynn and disprove suspicion that there was any collusion between his aides and the Kremlin.
The tweet was posted while Trump was stuck in traffic in a motorcade in New York City, leading to critics accusing him of committing a crime
Instead, it placed scrutiny back on him and fueled talk of a different offense entirely.
Democrats were quick to jump on it, saying that if - as claimed - Trump allegedly asked then-FBI head James Comey to 'go easy' on Flynn after his firing, he had obstructed justice.
The White House, which has said that Trump's tweets should be taken as official statements, has not yet commented on the matter.
Flynn was fired on February 13. At the time, the President said the decision was based on him misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his interaction with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 22.
On Friday Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the conversation and is now said to be cooperating in special counsel Robert Muellers sweeping Russia probe.
A man accused of murdering a woman in her Melbourne home allegedly tried to coax his ex-girlfriend into providing a false alibi, court documents reveal.
Kylie Blackwood, 42, was found bleeding to death in August 2013 by her 11-year-old twin daughters following what may have been a violent murder-robbery.
Police claim Scott Alan Murdoch, 40, approached the mother of his two children for an alibi shortly after he was interviewed by homicide detectives, but he was knocked back.
'I need to ask you something but you can't go blabbering around with your big mouth,' he allegedly said.
His ex-partner then allegedly asked him if he murdered Ms Blackwell.
'No, but I need you to be an alibi for that day ... because I was doing armed burgs and I want you to say I had the kids that day and I met you at 4 o'clock to give the kids back.'
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Kylie Blackwood (pictured), 42, was found bleeding to death in August 2013 by her 11-year-old twin daughters following what may have been a violent murder-robbery
Police claim Scott Alan Murdoch (pictured), 40, approached the mother of his two children for an alibi shortly after he was interviewed by homicide detectives, but he was knocked back
Roof tiler Peter Pratt told Melbourne Magistrates Court on Monday he was working in Ms Blackwood's street on the day of her death, and noticed a 'suss-looking' man.
He later provided police with a description of the man he said he saw 'casing' Ms Blackwood's home.
According to court documents, a neighbour said she heard Ms Blackwood screaming inside her home.
Police also claim that following the alleged murder, Murdoch attempted to use Ms Blackwood's bank card at a Pakenham ATM, entering an incorrect PIN three times.
It is alleged he then drove to another bank and deposited money using cash believed to be from Ms Blackwood's purse.
Mrs Blackwood's two young daughters found their mother unresponsive on a couch following the attack
Murdoch (right) was finally arrested on April 2016 after his DNA came up as a possible match to swabs taken from Ms Blackwood's jeans
Later that day, Ms Blackwood's two daughters walked home from school after she failed to collect them.
Walking into the house, the two girls found their mother lying unresponsive on a couch.
A few days later the police appealed for public assistance, with one of Murdoch's ex-girlfriends coming forward.
Police claim that after they interviewed Murdoch, he visited the mother of his children.
However, his suspicious former partner refused to mislead police.
Murdoch was finally arrested on April 2016 after his DNA came up as a possible match to swabs taken from Ms Blackwood's jeans.
However on Monday, forensic officer Erin Pirie told the court it was uncertain whether some DNA samples taken from items of Ms Blackwood's clothing belonged to Murdoch.
His pre-trial committal hearing is expected to continue until Thursday.
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Theresa May's attempt to strike a Brexit deal today was de-railed by a phone call with DUP leader Arlene Foster.
Irish Prime Minster Leo Varadkar last night said Britain had been poised to sign an agreement that was acceptable to him and other EU states at lunchtime today.
But as details of a major concession that critics say would leave Northern Ireland effectively still bound by EU rules leaked, Mrs Foster went on TV to denounce any settlement that split the province from the rest of Britain.
The Prime Minister then spoke to Mrs Foster by telephone during a break in marathon talks in Brussels. After the call, she was no longer able to sign up to language promising 'regulatory alignment' between the Republic and Northern Ireland.
After the breakdown, Mrs May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker appeared in front of the cameras to admit there would not be a deal today. They said talks would resume later in the week - potentially as soon as Wednesday.
Following his own meeting with Mrs May, EU Council President Donald Tusk then said a deal to allow the start of trade talks was still possible before a crucial summit on December 14 but that time was 'tight'.
Mr Varadkar said he had been ready to sign up to what was on the table but that he was told by Brussels Britain was backing off.
At a press conference in Dublin he said he was 'surprised and disappointed' Britain could not sign up to what 'was agreed earlier'. Mr Varadkar stopped short of directly blaming the DUP but said he could comment on UK party politics.
The EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker praised Theresa May as a 'tough negotiator' and both politicians signalled that there would be more talks later this week
The Prime Minister and Mr Juncker left immediately after making their statements, without taking any questions from the press pack
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar (pictured at a press conference in Dublin tonight) said he had been ready to sign up to what was on the table but that he was told by Brussels Britain was backing off
EU Council President Donald Tusk (pictured tonight with Theresa May) said a deal was still possible before the summit on December 14 but that time was 'tight'
Donald Tusk tonight said he had hoped to present his draft guidelines for trade talks tomorrow but that there was a further delay
The Prime Minister had to break off from lunch with European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker to field the call from Arlene Foster.
Before the lunch, EU diplomats and journalists had been told to expect a 15-page document outlining details of a deal that would clear the way for trade talks to begin this month.
A senior Tory said the DUP had gone ballistic over a proposed compromise which they feared would result in regulatory divergence from the rest of the UK and an effective border in the Irish Sea. The party even threatened to pull out of a deal to prop up the Government at Westminster. They are seething, the source said.
DUP MP Sammy Wilson described the proposals as a unionist nightmare which could lead to the break-up of the UK.
But the British proposals are understood to be more subtle. Mrs May is thought to be proposing an arrangement which would require the whole UK to retain regulatory alignment with the EU on a narrow range of issues that affect the Irish border. These include energy, agriculture and transport.
The UK would commit to the same regulatory outcomes in these areas as the EU, but would be free to achieve them by different routes. Crucially, the UK would be free to diverge from EU rules in all other areas.
The proposed compromise would allow Northern Ireland to retain the same rules as the Republic in critical areas without splitting from the rest of the UK.
But it will prove highly controversial with some Tory MPs.
TICK TOCK: HOW THE COLLAPSE UNFOLDED 10.27am: Jean-Claude Juncker meets with his chief negotiator Michel Barnier and EU Parliament representative Guy Verhofstadt. He says they are working for a 'fair deal'. 11.10am: David Davis says today's talks are the culmination of seven months work by both sides and that Britain hopes to get agreement on 'sufficient progress' on divorce issues at the meeting. 11.16am: Irish broadcaster RTE reports on a leak of the draft agreement suggesting the UK will agree there will be no 'regulatory divergence' between the Republic and Northern Ireland. 12.09pm: European Commission confirms the plan for the May-Juncker lunch is to get 'as close as possible' to a deal. 12.40pm: May arrives at the talks and poses for pictures with Juncker ahead of lunch. 12.44pm: EU Council President Donald Tusk tweets 'Tell me why I like Mondays' and says he was encouraged about the prospects for a deal following talks with Irish premier Leo Varadkar. 12.45pm: DUP MP Sammy Wilson accuses the Irish government of leaking claims about regulatory divergence and claims the UK government will not sign up to them. 1.30pm: Nicola Sturgeon seizes on the leaks to demand Scotland gets access to the same terms as Northern Ireland. 2pm: Arlene Foster appears in front of cameras at Stormont to denounce any deal that 'separates Northern Ireland economically or politically' from the UK. 2.30pm: Varadkar postpones a statement in Dublin on Ireland's position in the talks. 3.12pm: Reports emerge Foster and May have spoken by telephone during a break in the May-Juncker lunch. 3.57pm: Juncker appears alongside May to confirm there would be no deal today but that he remains confident. 3.59pm: May insists she is 'confident we will conclude this positively' but announces talks will reconvene later in the week. 4.15pm: DUP MP Sammy Wilson appears on TV again to brand the deal a 'unionist nightmare'. 5.10pm: Tusk tweets a picture of himself and May, warning time is 'tight' but agreement is 'still possible'. 5.20pm: Varadkar finally makes his appearance in Dublin, confirming Britain was ready to sign up to an agreement. He said Ireland was ready to sign and was 'surprised and disappointed' Britain could no longer sign up. Advertisement
Earlier, Ms Foster told journalists at Stormont: 'We have been very clear that Northern Ireland must leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the UK, and we will not accept any form of regulatory divergence that separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the UK.'
East Antrim MP Sammy Wilson went further by warning that his party had 'leverage', adding that the proposals for regulatory alignment were a 'unionist nightmare'.
'If she gives in on special demands for Northern Ireland then she will be giving in on special demands for Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom,' he said.
Former Ulster Unionist leader Lord Trimble said: 'I think this is a very bad idea.'
Allies of the PM said that, unlike David Cameron, she had not accepted the first deal offered by Brussels. One said Dublin and Brussels had tried to bounce her into a deal by briefing broadcast media that it was all but done.
He added: We need to maintain the integrity of our red lines and not be like a former prime minister who did take exactly what he was given first time round.
The talks foundered after sources in Dublin and Brussels leaked draft versions of a text they hoped to agree with Mrs May on the status of the Irish border.
The leaks suggested the PM was willing to sign a deal that would allow Northern Ireland no regulatory divergence from Dublin, effectively tying it to the EUs customs union. A later leak said the UK had agreed Northern Ireland would remain in regulatory alignment with the EU in some key areas.
Last night Conservative Eurosceptics warned Mrs May against further compromise over the Irish border and the role of the European Court of Justice in policing EU citizens rights after Brexit.
Tory ex-leader Iain Duncan Smith said: We have to be very careful. Northern Ireland cannot see any regulatory divergence from the UK. And we cannot get into a position where EU citizens have more rights than British citizens.
Jacob Rees-Mogg accused Dublin of spreading propaganda, adding: You cannot align the regulation of one part of the UK with the EU. And if we align the whole of the UK with the regulation of the EU, we havent left the EU.
Pro-Remain Tory Anna Soubry said it was untenable to have one part of the UK diverging from the rest but said the solution was to keep the whole country in the single market.
Following a meeting of Tory MPs in Westminster tonight a senior Brexiteer said many Conservatives shared DUP concerns about any solution which left Northern Ireland working to different rules than mainland Britain.
The MP said it would 'completely intolerable' and accused the Irish government of leaking 'propaganda' to undermine the talks.
Standing alongside Mr Juncker in Brussels tonight, Mrs May said: 'We have been negotiating hard. And a lot of progress has been made. And on many of the issues there is a common understanding.
'It is clear, crucially, that we want to move forward together.
'But on a couple of issues some differences do remain which require further negotiation and consultation.
'And those will continue, but we will reconvene before the end of the week and I am also confident that we will conclude this positively.'
In an apparent attempt to bolster her position, Mr Juncker praised her as a 'tough negotiator' and both politicians signalled that there would be more talks later this week.
'I have to say that she's a tough negotiator, and not an easy one, and she's defending the point of view of Britain with all the energy we know she has, and this is the same on the side of the European Union,' he said.
'Despite our best efforts and significant progress we and our teams have made over the past days on the three main withdrawal issues, it was not possible to reach a complete agreement today.'
After their statements the leaders left without taking questions from journalists, as Mrs May headed to another meeting with EU council chief Donald Tusk.
After those talks, Mr Tusk said: 'Met with PM Theresa May. I was ready to present draft EU27 guidelines tomorrow for Brexit talks on transition and future.
'But UK and Commission asked for more time.
'It is now getting very tight but agreement at December EU Council is still possible.'
EU leaders will convene in Brussels on December 14 but realistically an agreed deal must be largely in place in advance.
The dangers of the concession on Northern Ireland had been laid bare by responses from Nicola Sturgeon and London Mayor Sadiq Kha, who seized on the news to argue that Scotland and London respectively should be given similar leeway to 'stay in the single market'.
Downing Street played down the claims and insisted the 'territorial and economic integrity of the UK will be protected'.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn slammed the failure to strike a deal today.
He said: 'The real reason for today's failure is the grubby deal the Government did with the DUP after the election.
'It is disappointing that there has not been progress in the Brexit negotiations after months of delays and grandstanding.'
DUP leader Arlene Foster said the party would 'not not accept any form of regulatory divergence that separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the UK'
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson (right) and his deputy Sir Alan Duncan (left) emerged to receive a Christmas tree at the Foreign Office today amid the high stakes diplomacy
Sir Alan appeared in high spirits in the chilly London weather this afternoon while the Prime Minister was battling for a Brexit deal in Brussels
STURGEON DEMANDS SPECIAL DEAL FOR SCOTLAND Nicola Sturgeon claimed today that any deal that effectively keeps Northern Ireland in the single European market should also apply to Scotland. Leaked parts of a deal on the Brexit divorce have suggested arrangements which could effectively allow Northern Ireland to match rules in the single market to prevent the return of a 'hard border' on the island of Ireland. Ms Sturgeon said on Twitter: 'If one part of UK can retain regulatory alignment with EU and effectively stay in the single market (which is the right solution for Northern Ireland) there is surely no good practical reason why others can't.' Both Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain part of the EU in the referendum which was held in June 2016. The SNP leader stated: 'Right now, Ireland is powerfully demonstrating the importance of being independent when it comes to defending your vital national interests.' The question of how to maintain a soft Irish border had emerged as the key sticking point to getting agreement from the EU to move on to phase two in the Brexit negotiations. Advertisement
The British side was said to have signed up to enough 'continued regulatory alignment' between Northern Ireland and the Republic to 'support North South cooperation and the protection of the Good Friday agreement'.
That left considerably more wriggle room than the initial wording of 'no regulatory divergence'.
Mr Tusk hinted that the move would be enough to secure a deal, tweeting: 'Tell me why I like Mondays! Encouraged after my phone call with Taoiseach @campaignforleo on progress on issue of Ireland.
'Getting closer to sufficient progress at December.'
In his much delayed appearance in Dublin, Mr Varadkar said that he had confirmed Ireland's agreement to the text to both Mr Juncker and European Council president Donald Tusk.
'I am surprised and disappointed that the British Government now appears not to be in a position to conclude what was agreed earlier today,' he said.
'I accept that the Prime Minister has asked for more time, and I know that she faces many challenges and I acknowledge that she is negotiating in good faith.
'But my position and that of the Irish Government is unequivocal and is supported by all the parties in Dail Eirann and I believe the majority of people on these islands.
'Ireland wants to proceed to phase two - It's very much in our interests to do so. However we cannot agree to do this unless we have firm guarantees that there will not be a hard border in Ireland under any circumstances.'
Since the break-up of talks, Mr Juncker had confirmed that 'Ireland's position remains Europe's position', said Mr Varadkar.
He added: 'I still hope this matter can be concluded in the coming days, as was agreed.'
Earlier in the day, European council president Donald Tusk appeared to hint that a deal was now effectively in place
PM Theresa May arrived in Brussels today for talks with jean-Claude Juncker, who welcomed her warmly
Mrs May, pictured with Mr Juncker in Brussels today, is said to have signed up to enough 'continued regulatory alignment' between Northern Ireland and the Republic to 'support North South cooperation and the protection of the Good Friday agreement'
WHAT ARE THE EU RULES THAT APPLY IN IRELAND? Regulatory convergence between Northern Ireland and the Republic after Brexit could cover a whole gamut of different rules. As members of the single market, Ireland accepts the free movement of goods, services, capital and people. Financial services companies have the ability to work freely across the continent without jumping through additional bureaucratic hoops. They also have standardised EU rules in areas such as safety, quality standards, and working hours. Ireland's membership of the EU customs union, meanwhile, means there are no tariffs on goods traded within the bloc. And the same tariffs are applied to goods from outside the union. As a result of being in the customs union, Ireland cannot negotiate its own free trade deals with other countries. Advertisement
Striking a jubilant tone, Irish deputy PM Simon Coveney told reporters earlier this afternoon: 'We have now a language that gives us the safeguards we need; that there is reassurance for people there is not going to be a re-emergence of a border.
'Irish concerns are going to be addressed fully.'
Scottish First Minister Ms Sturgeon tweeted: 'If one part of UK can retain regulatory alignment with EU and effectively stay in the single market (which is the right solution for Northern Ireland) there is surely no good practical reason why others can't.'
Meanwhile, Mr Khan said: 'Huge ramifications for London if Theresa May has conceded that it's possible for part of the UK to remain within the single market & customs union after Brexit.
'Londoners overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and a similar deal here could protect tens of thousands of jobs.'
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones then joined in to insist: 'We cannot allow different parts of the UK to be more favourably treated than others.
'If one part of the UK is granted continued participation in the Single Market and Customs Union, then we fully expect to be made the same offer.'
Regulatory alignment between Northern Ireland and the Republic would likely mean both sides following the same rules governing trade, to ensure that goods can continue to move freely across a 'soft' border with no checks.
But there are fears among some unionists in Northern Ireland that it could lead to the effective drawing of a new border in the Irish Sea between the province and the rest of the UK, if the Westminster Government decides it wants to diverge from EU rules.
Nicola Sturgeon seized on the news to argue that Scotland should be given similar leeway to 'stay in the single market'.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan leapt on the bandwagon to demand a special deal for London
Ex-Ukip leader NIgel Farage condemned the apparent concession, tweeting that it would damage the integrity of the UK
DEVOLVED POWERS COULD SOLVE IRISH IMPASSE One of the proposed solutions for the Irish border issue is for the Northern Ireland Executive to be handed sweeping new powers. Fresh devolution would hand authority to keep laws in the province close to the EU single market rules and different from the rest of the UK. The set up would allow Northern Ireland to leave the customs union with the rest of Britain but still operate different rules on cross-border trade to the mainland UK. But the details are still hotly disputed and would eventually rely on the restoration of devolution to Belfast - despite the institutions being on ice since January. Advertisement
The dramatic political moves today appear to have been carefully choreographed, and Tory and DUP sources stressed they have been in close contact throughout the process.
Although Ms Foster's words seemed designed to reassure supporters in Northern Ireland, she notably stopped short of condemning it outright.
She insisted Mrs May 'understands the position of this party', adding: 'The prime minister has told the House of Commons that there will be no border in the Irish Sea.
'And the Prime Minister has been clear that the UK is leaving the European Union as a whole, that the territorial and economic integrity of the United Kingdom will be protected.'
Ms Foster said the DUP wanted to see a 'sensible Brexit, a Brexit where the common travel area is continued'.
She added: 'The Republic of Ireland government for their part claim to be guarantors of the Belfast agreement but they are clearly seeking to unilaterally change that Belfast agreement without out input or our consent.
'And of course we will not stand for that.'
Sources in the party initially suggested that the text of the border proposal was being selectively leaked and misinterpreted.
But opinion appeared to slip against Mrs May at the last moment, as the shape became clearer
Michel Barnier (second from left) and Jean-Claude Juncker (second from right) held talks with a European parliament team led by Guy Verhofstadt (right) ahead of the meeting with Mrs May
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (pictured arriving at work in Dublin today ahead of a Cabinet meeting) has thrown fresh doubt on Brexit talks after objecting to Irish border proposals
Ex-Ukip leader NIgel Farage had condemned the concession, tweeting: 'This UK Government's bitter betrayal of 17.4 million people today is a concession too far, for it will lead to endless problems in Scotland and it damages the integrity of the United Kingdom.'
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF BORDER? Hard Border: This would include customs and security checks, border controls, posts and guards to monitor who and what is travelling over from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland, and vice versa. The UK, EU and the Republic of Ireland have all agreed there can be no return to the hard border of the past, fearing this could reignite the sectarian violence of The Troubles. Soft Border: A soft border would mean no security or border checks between the two territories - essentially maintaining the status quo. Under this plan goods and people will be free to cross from one side to the other without any checks or documentation. Third Way: It has been proposed that an 'invisible border' can be erected via a new high-tech system. Under this plan, number plate recognition technology and spot vehicle checks could be used to carry out customs checks. While it has been suggested that Northern Ireland and the Republic both create squads of flying border guards to police potential smuggling routes from the skies. Advertisement
The EU has insisted this week is the last opportunity to reach an agreement that means starting trade talks can be signed off at the bloc's summit in 10 days' time. The next gathering is not until well into next year.
But Downing Street sources have played down the idea that today represents a hard deadline.
Speaking on his way to join the talks today, Mr Davis said: 'We've put seven months of work, both sides, into getting to this point and we are hoping that Mr Juncker today will give us sufficient progress so that we can move on to the trade talks.
'The decision, of course, won't be taken until 15 December but that's what we are hoping for, because trade talks are of enormous importance to the United Kingdom and to Europe.'
Mrs May had hoped to secure agreement on moving on to trade talks after persuading her cabinet to back an improved divorce payment worth up to 40billion to the EU.
In return, she is demanding assurances that Brussels will agree a comprehensive trade deal.
But, despite round-the-clock talks this weekend, key differences remained as of this morning between the two sides, particularly over the Irish border.
Asked about the claims that the UK was committing to 'no regulatory divergence' on the Island of Ireland, the PM's spokesman said: 'The PM has been clear that the UK is leaving the EU as a whole, and the territorial and economic integrity of the UK will be protected.'
Ministers have been alarmed by the lack of a breakthrough. Some, including the Brexit Secretary David Davis, are warning privately that Mrs May will have to walk away if there is no agreement at next week's EU summit.
One source familiar with the talks said: 'If we don't make sufficient progress at this stage then the process is over.'
Ahead of his lunch with Mrs May, Mr Juncker was pictured meeting EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier and the European Parliament's Brexit team, led by Guy Verhofstadt.
Mr Juncker's chief spokesman Margaritis Schinas said they were 'working for a fair deal'.
A union flag was raised alongside EU counterparts in Brussels today ahead of the meetings
David Davis was seen leaving Whitehall on his way to the meetings in Brussels today
Senior German MEP Manfred Weber - a close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel - said problems remained on citizens' rights and the Irish border.
The leader of the European Parliament's centre-right EPP Group tweeted: 'In Brexit negotiations, money is one of the problems, but it is not the biggest one.
'We are much more concerned about the fact that negotiations are stalled on the protection of EU citizens' rights & on the Irish case.
'We will not change our red lines. The lives of millions of families are at stake. If no clear commitment is made, the @EPPGroup will not be ready to assess the progress made as sufficient to enter a 2nd phase of negotiations.'
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt yesterday warned Eurosceptic MPs not to limit Mrs May's room for manoeuvre. 'The choice we face is not between this Brexit or that Brexit,' he said.
'If we don't back Theresa May we will have no Brexit, and she is doing an unbelievably challenging job amazingly well.'
Mr Hunt's intervention came as 30 Eurosceptics set down seven 'red lines' over Brexit.
The Leave Means Leave group said Mrs May should not make any payment to Brussels unless she received clear pledges in return, including a free trade deal and agreement that the UK would not have to accept any new EU regulations or European court rulings during a two-year transition period.
Signatories of the letter include former cabinet ministers Lord Lawson, John Redwood and Owen Paterson. They urge Mrs May to abandon the talks completely and go for a no-deal Brexit if Brussels refuses to agree terms next week.
But Mr Paterson dismissed the prospect of Eurosceptics voting against the government. 'The fact is we have incredibly close relations with the Republic of Ireland, this trade is generally small, as I have just said it's regular, and it can be handled with modern communication techniques, electronic invoicing etc.'
Today's talks are designed to determine whether 'sufficient progress' has been made on three key issues to persuade the EU to move on to trade talks.
The PM was expected to telephone Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (pictured), but the call did not happen and No10 insisted it had not been firmly scheduled
The Prime Minister will travel to Belgium this morning ahead of a lunch with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured right) and chief EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. She will then hold further talks with EU Council president Donald Tusk
The issues at the centre of the row are the size of the divorce bill, the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and the status of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
The divorce bill is now seen as the most straightforward issue, with EU sources indicating Brussels is ready to accept Mrs May's revised offer.
But differences remain on citizens' rights and Northern Ireland.
The Prime Minister had hoped to offer a 'compromise' on citizens' rights, which would give the European Court of Justice a minor, indirect role. But she has not yet persuaded her cabinet to sign it off.
The deal would allow the UK's Supreme Court to ask the ECJ for guidance in cases brought by EU citizens where there is no existing case law. EU citizens would lose the right to appeal directly to the ECJ a key Brussels demand.
Nigel Farage was dragged into the divorce bill row yesterday because his 73,000-a-year MEP's pension will be part-funded by Britain's proposed 40billion payment.
The UKIP leader rejected calls to give up the money, saying: 'Why should my family suffer?'
This is the shocking moment when a father is brutally slapping and stamping on a toddler girl at a bus station in northern China.
Mobile phone footage emerged showing the girl being pressed on the kerb dangerously while onlookers watch from aside.
The man was detained by the police for investigation and the girl was being taken care by her grandmother.
Mobile phone footage shows a father hitting a young girl at a bus station in north China (left). Onlookers are shocked to see him slapping on the girl's face numerous times (right)
According to The Paper, the beating was seen in Langfang, Hebei Province on December 2.
A 39-year-old man, surnamed Zhang, can be seen having a lit cigarette in one hand whilst stamping one foot on a toddler girl's back fiercely.
Zhang then picked the girl up and slapped her face several times.
Onlookers suggested the toddler was under two years old.
He told an onlooker that 'nothing's going on' when being asked for the reasons of beating.
He then stamps onto the girl's back as she dangerously lying on the kerb at the bus stop (left). Onlookers suggested the girl was about two years old (right)
Anci police issued a statement on December 3 that they had successfully identified Zhang and confirmed that the toddler girl's his biological daughter.
The girl was sent to a local hospital for check-up and found to have no injuries.
She is now being looked after by her grandmother.
Anci police will later announce if there will be any penalty for Zhang abusing his daughter in public.
A Texas sheriff has vowed not to hug anyone outside of his family and close friends in order to guard against allegations of sexual assault.
Jim Kaelin, sheriff for Nueces County, 140 miles south of San Antonio, told people to expect a handshake or a fist-bump in a Facebook post uploaded last week.
Kaelin said he was 'sad' about the situation 'but you just don't know when this hug might come back and bite you'.
Sheriff Jim Kaelin, from Texas, has vowed to only give out handshakes or fist bumps to people he meets to protect himself against sex assault allegations
Sheriff Kaelin made the announcement on Facebook on the same day Matt Lauer was fired from Today amid claims he was inappropriate with female members of staff
He penned the note on the same day Matt Lauer was fired from Today amid a flurry of sexual assault complaints from female members of staff.
Kaelin wrote: 'To my Facebook friends let me say this to you, my hugging days (outside family and or close friends) are over.
'Sad, but you just don't know when this hug might come back and bite you.
'The workplace, for one, can become hostile if an employee 'feels' threatened by your hugs...SO IT'S OVER.
'In the future I will offer a hand shake, or knuckle bump, but NO MORE HUGS. It might offend you that I will no longer participate in hugging you, but I have decided to discontinue receiving/giving hugs from anyone outside of my family and close friends. I hope you understand.
Mr Kaelin said 'my hugging days outside friends and family are over' because of fears the intimate gesture could be used against him in future
From now on, hugs will be reserved only for close friends and family members, he said (pictured here with wife Sharon)
'Thanks. I'm from the old school but the time has come for me. No more hugs.'
Sheriff Kaelin seems to have been following the wave of sex assault stories closely as his Facebook page features an image of Democrat senator Al Franken.
Franken has been accused of groping by several women, including one which dates from a time when he was in office, but has refused to resign his post.
Kaelin's profile also includes a picture of Wilson, the volleyball best-friend of Tom Hanks from the movie Castaway, with the caption: 'Tom Hanks touched me.'
Lauer became the latest big name to fall on Wednesday last week when he was sacked by NBC over sex assault allegations centered around the Sochi Winter Olympics.
The avalanche started with dozens of allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein but has since snowballed to include actors, musicians, politicians and other public figures.
Charlie Rose was another high-profile journalist pushed from his perch at 60 Minutes after claims emerged about his allegedly inappropriate behavior.
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An incredible festive exhibit of a tractor covered in more than 11,000 lights has kicked off the Christmas display season in style.
Andrew Wilkinson spent four months building the metal frame and another week setting up two miles worth of wiring for the extravagant spectacle.
The 32-year-old has turned the heads of thousands of passing motorists and pedestrians in Hayton, East Yorkshire, with the display, which includes a Union flag and Santa's plough.
Mr Wilkinson built the tractor display as a tribute to his father David, who worked as a farmer until he died after a cancer battle 11 years ago.
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An incredible festive exhibit of a tractor covered in more than 11,000 lights has kicked off the Christmas display season in style
Andrew Wilkinson (pictured with his partner Emma Lycett) spent four months building the metal frame and another week setting up two miles worth of wiring for the extravagant spectacle
The spirit of Christmas has also made its way to some of the country's most prominent buildings, even those usually associated with high art such as the Tate Britain (pictured)
Tate Britain is covering its facade with off-the-shelf decorations and Santa Stop Here signs for Christmas. The famous London gallery usually commissions artists to design a Christmas tree for the festive season
He told the Hull Daily Mail: 'I built it all completely from scratch. There were no tractor parts involved or anything, I just slowly built up a metal frame for the lights and went from there really.
'It's fairly complex in places but the basics is that it is a metal frame with wire mesh which then has the wire, and the 11,000 LED lights attached to it.
'The reception has been phenomenal,' he said. 'It's visible on the main road from York to Hull so we get a lot of people who talk to us after spotting us from the road.'
Meanwhile, a festive cul-de-sac in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset has burst into colour after the homeowners switched on their lights to mark the count-down to Christmas.
In the now annual tradition, families living in the road lit up their homes and lawns to celebrate the start of the festive period.
The decorative display helps raise money for local cancer charities and thousands of people are expected to visit the street this month.
This neighbourhood in Burnham-On-Sea, Somerset has been dubbed 'Britain's most festive street' as the cul-de-sac twinkles with 100,000 light bulbs
Six festive homes on the street have draped more than 100,000 fairy lights across their roofs, garages and garden fences
Last year the display raised more than 13,329 for a good cause and this year the collection will go towards two local charities
The tradition in Trinity Close started more than a decade ago by Nick Gardner, his wife Hazel and their neighbours Chris Woodberry and his late wife Christine.
The spirit of Christmas has also made its way to some of the country's most prominent buildings, even those usually associated with high art.
Tate Britain is covering its facade with off-the-shelf decorations and Santa Stop Here signs for Christmas. The famous London gallery usually commissions artists to design a Christmas tree for the festive season.
But this year, it has announced that it has taken a break from tradition and imitated the look of homes 'up and down the country'.
The 'show-stopping arrangement' includes LED Santas, reindeer, snowmen and Christmas trees, along with Merry Christmas and Santa Stop Here signs.
Thousands of visitors flock from around the country to view the spectacular display, helping the residents raise thousands of pounds for grateful charities every year
The display will adorn the Victorian porticoed entrance and neo-classical facade, which was created by Sidney RJ Smith 120 years ago.
The arrangement is the creation of Alan Kane, an artist whose previous projects include a series of televised nude life drawing classes and a travelling exhibition of contemporary folk art featuring traditional wrestling costumes, and a 6ft walking mechanical elephant.
Alex Farquharson, Tate Britain director, said: 'We're excited to be giving Tate Britain a whole new face this Christmas with Alan Kane's light commission.
'After 25 years of commissioning artists to design our Christmas tree, we thought we'd give an artist the facade of the building to play with.
'Alan's ultra-festive response is sure to turn heads - of those both young and old. We look forward to unveiling other surprising festive artist commissions in the years to come.'
France has offered to lend Britain its amphibious landing craft if the UK scraps the Royal Navy's own ships as part of sweeping defence cuts.
Britain is considering axing HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark - assault vessels which allow the UK to attack enemy-held beaches - under cost-cutting plans.
And it has emerged France has put forward proposals to let the UK's elite commando unit train and run joint deployments from their three amphibious landing ships.
But Tory MPs warned it would be a 'national embarrassment' if the UK had to go 'begging' to its neighbours for its defence.
Tory MP Andrew Bowie, who served in the Royal Navy before being elected to Parliament, told Mail Online: 'The British and French navies, as close allies have cooperated for many years and I'm sure their offer comes in good faith.
'But it really does stick in the craw.
'To see the Royal Navy, once the most powerful and feared navy in the word, begging and borrowing from our neighbours across the Channel would be a national embarrassment and would demean us in the eyes of our allies and partners.
'I hope the Government can put this to bed once and for all and guarantee the future of our amphibious capability, independent of other nations.'
HMS Bulwark (pictured) and HMS Albion - assault vessels which allow the UK to attack enemy-held beaches - could be ditched under defence cost-cutting plans
Proposals to axe Britain's two amphibious craft are among the proposals for cuts being considered by the Government in the strategic defence review.
Ministers are also considering getting rid of 1,000 Marines under sweeping cost-cutting plans.
Defence chiefs have warned that any move to strip the Royal Navy of its ability to attack enemy-held beaches would harm Britain's defence.
And Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson face a brewing Tory backbench rebellion over the possible looming cuts.
The proposal is still in its early stages and has not been put to British commanders yet, according to a report in the Financial Times.
British and French naval chiefs are reportedly due to meet in the coming weeks to talk about closer cooperation ahead of a joint summit early next year.
Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, pictured visiting RAF Coninsgby, Lincolnshire, last Thursday, is facing a brewing backbench rebellion over proposals to axe Britain's amphibious landing vessels. HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion could be ditched under cost-cutting plans
Tory MPs Julian Lewis and Andrew Bowie hit out at any move which would leave Britain reliant on its neighbours for its defence capabilities
A French official told the newspaper: 'We have three very capable ships.
'The idea is that in the case of one of the two countries having to reduce certain capabilities because of budgetary constraints we could mitigate the consequences by standing shoulder to shoulder.'
Julian Lewis, Tory MP and chairman of the defence select committee, said that while the offer might be helpful he warned it could be part of a wider push from Paris to build a European defence force.
He said: 'It's fine we should align our sea-based forces.
'It's another matter to abandon our own ability to send land forces from the sea. The idea the UK should lose that capability is totally unacceptable.
The Ministry of Defence said no decisions had been made yet.
A spokesman said: 'In the face of intensifying threats we are contributing to the cross-government review of national security capabilities and looking at how we best spend our rising defence budget.'
A grieving mother who faced jail after her son missed school 20 times in two months was cleared of wrongdoing after it emerged severe asthma attacks caused the absences.
Nicola Newns, who lost her 12-year-old son Ben to brittle asthma, feared for her other son Jacob, 16, when the same condition caused repeated collapses.
As the 39-year-old sat in an ambulance rushing Jacob to intensive care, Salford City Council education officials called her demanding to know why he was not in school.
She said rushing around with medication and oxygen for her son had stopped her reporting the absence.
Jacob, left, was hit by a string of asthma attacks as he suffered through the same condition that killed his brother, Ben, who is pictured, right, in hospital weeks before his death in 2014
Mrs Newns was hit with a 60 fixed penalty notice after the authority said 'no acceptable reason' has been given for Jacobs 'unsatisfactory' attendance at Buile Hill Visual Arts College between January and March this year.
After refusing to pay, Mrs Newns faced up to three months in prison when she appeared at Manchester & Salford Magistrates' Court accused of an offence under the 1996 Education Act.
Her case was thrown out by a district judge when it transpired he was in hospital on all 20 occasions.
Mrs Newns had failed to respond to calls from education officials investigating Jacob's absences, according to an email presented in court.
'We rang her again after half term and when she finally answered she was in an ambulance with Jacob on the way to hospital as hed had an asthma attack,' it said.
'Weve left two voicemails this week and mum hasnt returned our calls as yet.
'In short Jacob hasnt accessed any education with us yet.'
Nicola News was handed a 60 fine after she says she was too terrified to leave her son's side to notify officials in case he died while she was gone
LAW ON TRUANCY Headteachers have been able to fine parents of regular truants under laws introduced by Labour in 2003. The Government axed their discretionary power to allow children up to 10 days off during term time. Now, many schools are targeting children who regularly miss registration. As there is no clarification in the law, schools are able to mark anyone, who is not at registration in time, as absent. In 2015, some schools in England began to fine parents 60 for lateness. The penalty can be doubled if it is not paid within 21 days, and parents who refuse to pay could be prosecuted and even jailed. Advertisement
Mrs Newns, from Salford, said she was too terrified to leave Jacob's side even to call the school after she lost Ben.
Ben - who also attended Buile Hill - was taken ill in March 2014 after he woke up struggling to breathe at 2am.
His mother grabbed his inhaler but he collapsed and died despite paramedics' efforts.
'I am over-protective of Jacob but can anyone blame me after what happened with Ben?' she said.
'The school were fantastic with us when Ben died - but now they seem to forget he died.
'Jacob was really affected by what happened to his brother and was crying and asking if it would be him next.
'He has had anxiety attacks and panic attacks and we have been worried it might a similar attack which killed Ben in 2014.
'I just feel bullied by the school, continually asking me when hes going to be back in school, how long he will be away for.
Ben, right, died in 2014, leaving Jacob, left, who suffers with the same condition, asking his mother if he'd be next during attacks this year. The brothers are pictured in 2003
'I may not have contacted them as soon as I should have done but I wasnt going to leave my sons bedside if he might die.
'Ive sat there with both of my boys wishing them to breathe. Its not like they dont know or understand the situation.
'He has been on life support three or four times this year and Im afraid my child is my main concern - after Ben of course I am more scared.
'I felt as though the school were blaming me, or saying that Im lying. In their documents when it said I "finally" answered it was if i was about to jet off for a holiday to Disneyland rather me taking my son to hospital with a potentially life-threatening asthma attack.'
Her worry for Jacob was worsened by the fact that his attacks had always appeared worse before Ben's death.
'Ben had never had as severe attacks as Jacob, and I always feared something might happen to Jacob - but then Ben passed away,' she said.
'After Ben, I take him worrying about his chest more seriously. If he wakes up and his chest is bad I will keep him off because I know that he can deteriorate quickly and it's a big risk if hes at school.
'One night Jacob had been up multiple times wheezing and unable to breathe and when failed to improve later that morning and his condition deteriorated we called an ambulance - the fact is he couldnt breathe, he was having an attack.
'As I was trying to get his oxygen and his medication my phone just kept going. I was rushing around trying to make sure my boy was okay.
'It was ringing and I had texts saying "your son is not in school". As we got him into the back of the ambulance my phone was still going off, so I felt like I had to answer it and let them know what was going on.
Mrs Newns says despite the school's support when Ben, pictured, died in 2014, she received no support during the attacks that forced Jacob to miss lessons
'I told the school that Jacob had had a bad attack, and I was in the ambulance and he was going to hospital but for me, there was no compassion or empathy. They just said: Well when will he be back in? We need to know when he will be back in.
She says the doctors didn't know when Jacob would be fit for school, meaning she was unable to tell the officials and claims she even missed calls from her mother because she needed to be with Jacob.
'I needed to be with him and make sure he was okay,' she said.
Charlotte Ramsden Strategic Director of Childrens Services at Salford Council wrote to Mrs Newns in February, warning her 60 fine would increase to 120 if it was not paid within 21 days. She was told failure to pay within 28 days would result in a court appearance.
Mrs Newns said the school had not offered 'any support' for Jacob while he was in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
'When Jacob was in ICU, the school were calling and calling but didnt ask how he was doing,' she said.
'When he was sick and in hospital I did ask for homework for him so he could keep up but they never sent it.
Nicola Newns was cleared of wrongdoing after she refused to pay a fine for her son missing school when he was struck by the same condition that killed his brother
'Because he has been so ill hes got behind and they didnt try to help him catch up.
'He said to me that he didnt understand anything in lessons and no one had tried to explain to him or give him one to one help.
'He has a genuine, chronic, life-threatening illness and the school know about this because of his brother.
'If I had sent Jacob to school when he was complaining about his chest and something had happened I would never forgive myself.'
A spokesman for the school said: To get any case to court, schools have to go through rigorous systems of checks and consultations which involve multiple agencies and of course, the family.
'It would be inappropriate for us to comment on the range of intervention we adopted with Jacob and his family other than to say that it was extensive.
'Throughout this process the school have put Jacobs safety, welfare and education at the centre of all the decision making. Jacob is a lovely young man who has huge potential, really bright prospects and as a school, we have always endeavoured to support him with all of our available resources.'
Daphne Caruana Galizia, Malta's best-known investigative journalist, was killed on Monday when a powerful bomb blew up her car
Ten suspects have been arrested in the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said that the suspects, all Maltese citizens, were arrested Monday morning due to a 'reasonable suspicion' of their involvement in Panama Papers writer Caruana Galizia's slaying in a car bomb attack.
The arrests, made in an operation coordinated among the Police Corps, the Armed Forces of Malta and the Security Services, were the first break in the murder on October 16 that has drawn widespread outrage and condemnation.
Investigators have 48 hours to question the suspects to decide whether to seek charges, in accordance with Maltese law.
Muscat provided no other concrete information about the arrests or suspects, citing concerns that anything he says could derail any prosecution.
Caruana Galizia, whose reporting focused heavily on corruption on the EU island nation, was killed when a bomb destroyed her car as she was driving near her home.
Europol, the European Union's police agency, sent a team of organized crime experts to help Maltese police investigate the assassination, joining the FBI and Dutch forensic experts.
Just before her death, Caruana Galizia, 53, had posted on her closely followed blog, Running Commentary, that there were 'crooks everywhere' in Malta.
The island nation has a reputation as a tax haven in the European Union and has attracted companies and money from outside Europe.
The journalist focused her reporting for years on investigating political corruption and scandals, and reported on Maltese mobsters and drug trafficking.
She also wrote about Maltese links to the so-called Panama Papers leaks about offshore financial havens.
Caruana Galizia, whose reporting focused heavily on corruption on the EU island nation, was killed when a bomb destroyed her car as she was driving near her home
The blackened tarmac shows where the explosion happened and the car's path can be seen heading from the road into the field
Caruana Galizia, 53, ran a hugely popular blog in which she relentlessly highlighted cases of alleged corruption, often involving politicians from the Mediterranean island of Malta.
She was killed as she was driving near the village of Bidnija in northern Malta.
Pictures showed the burnt-out wreck of her car lying in a field metres from the road.
Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who faced accusations of wrong-doing by Caruana Galizia earlier this year, denounced her killing, calling it a 'barbaric attack on press freedom'.
'I will not rest until I see justice done in this case. Our country deserves justice,' he said in a televised statement at the time, in which he called for national unity.
Malta has a population of 400,000 and is the European Union's smallest state.
'Everyone knows Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine, both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way,' Muscat said.
'The only remedy for anyone who felt slandered was through the courts.'
Muscat called early elections in June seeking a vote of confidence to counter Caruana Galizia's allegations of corruption.
She said documents in a small Malta-based bank showed that Muscat's wife was the beneficial owner of a company in Panama, and that large sums of money had been moved between the company and bank accounts in Azerbaijan.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese investigative journalist who exposed her island nation's links with the Panama Papers
Forensic experts walk in a field after a powerful bomb blew up a car (foreground) and killed investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in Bidnija, Malta
An ambulance is parked along the road where a car bomb exploded killing the journalist
Police and forensics experts stand behind a road block after a powerful bomb blew up the car
Police said she was killed as she was driving near the village of Bidnija in northern Malta
An ambulance and police vehicles are parked along the road where a car bomb exploded killing investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, in the town of Mosta, Malta. The car can be seen in the field and the blackened tarmac where the explosion appeared to have happened is seen leading to the vehicle
Graffiti on the wall next to a main road. It reads, 'We will not be silenced. RIP Daphne'
Both Muscat and his wife denied the accusation and sued Caruana Galizia for defamation. Muscat easily won reelection.
Recently, Caruana Galizia's outspoken blog had turned its fire on opposition politicians.
'There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate,' she wrote in the last blog published on her site days before she was killed.
In another entry last year, she wrote: 'Malta's public life is afflicted with dangerously unstable men with no principles or scruples.'
Television reported that Caruana Galizia had filed a complaint to the police two weeks ago to say she had received threats. It gave no further information.
More than seven million customers could lose out on the Government's energy price cap because it does not cover green tariffs, it has emerged.
Theresa May announced a cap on bad value tariffs earlier this year saying it will save around 17 million households in Britain up to 100 on their annual bills.
But the Government's proposed legislation states that 'green' tariffs will be exempt - meaning suppliers could remove millions of people from the cap.
Bulb, a green energy supplier who carried out the research, has written to MPs on the energy select committee calling for the loophole to be closed and for all customers to be eligible for the cap.
Some seven million customers could lose out on the Government's energy price cap because it does not cover green tariffs,according to new research (file pic)
Co-founder Hayden Wood said: 'Bulb supports the price cap, but we're disappointed this loophole means companies could continue to overcharge customers.
'This needs to be fixed immediately. We believe a price cap would help customers and the industry, but it must apply to everyone and not allow for spurious exemption claims.
'The argument some make that renewable tariffs must cost more has been thoroughly disproved by Bulb, which offers one of the lowest tariffs in the UK, whilst supplying 100 per cent renewable electricity.'
John Penrose, Tory MP for Weston-super-Mare, said: 'Green tariffs mustn't become a loophole for big six lobbyists to keep on ripping off people who've forgotten to switch when their existing deal comes to an end.
'The advantage of a relative cap is that it's much simpler, and harder to manipulate. It would protect everyone on default tariffs, no matter what kind they are.
'And it would stop the environment being misused for profit by people who want to game the system.'
Bulb said their analysis raises questions a but whether the cap will deliver on the Prime Minister's pledge to help 17 million households.
Announcing her cap earlier this year, Mrs May said the it will protect around 17 million families 'on standard variable tariffs from being exploited with sudden and unjustified increases in bills'.
Theresa May, pictured at church yesterday with her husband Philip, said the energy price cap would ve around 17 million households up to 100 a year
The draft legislation allows for a price cap, but also provides an 'exemption for prepayment meters and tariffs with environmental claims'.
An estimated 7.1 million households could potentially be affected by an exploitation of this loophole - meaning they could overpay by as much as 700 million a year.
The business, energy and industrial strategy select committee is scrutinising the legislation and Bulb is calling for MPs who sit on it to close the loophole.
The cap comes after growing anger at rip-off energy companies which let their customers languish on poor value contracts.
A BEIS spokesman said: 'The Tariff Cap Bill is designed to ensure that a cap applies where a household is on a standard variable or default tariff.
'This will protect millions of consumers from paying too much for their energy due to unfair market practices.
'Signing up to a Green Tariff is a proactive choice. There are rules as to what constitutes a green tariff which all suppliers must abide by, and any attempts to undermine this cap will be dealt with by Ofgem in its role as regulator.'
Sixteen members of the same family are part of a group of 100 holidaymakers suing a tour company after being struck down by illness at a five-star resort.
The family all stayed at the luxurious Jaz Makadi Aquaviva Resort in Egypt but their trip ended up being a holiday from hell after they contracted E.coli and salmonella.
Richard Hornsby, 38, and his wife Natasha, 29, from Hemel Hempstead, have now instructed personal injury lawyers to investigate the outbreak.
They had booked their trip through tour operator TUI UK Limited, trading as First Choice, and arrived in Africa in July.
Richard Hornsby, 38, and his wife Natasha, 29, were pictured at the resort with their children Finley (left) and Jessica (right)
Jake (pictured leftin a British hospital) fell ill just two days before the family was due to fly home and had to undergo several courses of antibiotics. The youngsters (pictured left to right, Finley, Jessica, Jake) were also on the trip
But children as young as three and seven-months-old were among those in the family to suffer severe diarrhoea and sickness during their stay.
Mr and Mrs Hornsby jetted off for their two-week stay at the resort on July 3, with children Jake, then seven months, Jessica, aged nine and three-year-old Finley.
The couple said they both fell ill as did their children and they had to seek medical treatment on their return to the UK.
Mr and Mrs Hornsby took Jake, who was born with one kidney, to their GP after he fell ill two days before the family was due to fly home and had to undergo several courses of antibiotics and had various medical tests.
He was admitted to hospital upon returning home for overnight treatment after he was diagnosed with E.coli - a bacterial infection and more severe cases can lead to serious complications including bloody urine, dehydration and kidney failure.
Mrs Hornsby said she is still continuing to suffer with diarrhoea.
Nichola Blackburn, an International Personal Injury specialist for Irwin Mitchell, is now representing more than 100 holidaymakers in a group action against TUI UK Ltd.
She said: 'Illnesses such as gastroenteritis, to include those caused by E.coli and salmonella can have serious, long-term health implications for those who are struck down.
'We have received and worryingly continue to receive many similar reports that people have fallen ill while staying at the Jaz Makadi Aquaviva Resort over this summer.
'Concerns include instances of poor food hygiene and incidents of faeces in the swimming pool, which some of our clients witnessed and believe were not dealt with swiftly.
'Irwin Mitchell is now representing over 100 people who were affected by illness at the Jaz Makadi Aquaviva Resort.
Ashley Coughtrey, 28, had travelled to the Jaz Makadi Aquaviva Resort with his wife Joanne (pictured with their son Zack) to celebrate their first wedding anniversary.
'We would encourage anyone who stayed at the Jaz Makadi Aquaviva Resort this year and has since experienced gastric symptoms, to see their GP at the earliest available opportunity.
'We would also like to speak with them as they may be able to help with our investigations.
'TUI UK Ltd, trading as First Choice, has responded in relation to a number of our clients' claims confirming that they are denying any liability.
'We have urged them to reconsider their stance in light of the vast number of people who have fallen ill during their stay at the Jaz Makadi Aquaviva Resort and the serious cases of illness that have been reported.'
Jake (pictured) was admitted to hospital upon returning home for overnight treatment after he was diagnosed with E.coli
Her brother Ashley Coughtrey, 28, had travelled to the Jaz Makadi Aquaviva Resort with his wife Joanne to celebrate their first wedding anniversary.
Mr Coughtrey, also from Hemel Hempstead, fell ill on July 6. Tests showed he had contracted salmonella. He is still suffering ongoing symptoms, including gastric related symptoms and groin pains.
His three-year-old son Zack also suffered sickness and diarrhoea as did his wife Joanne.
Both Natasha and Ashley have told their legal team at Irwin Mitchell that on occasions they saw food left uncovered, they witnessed on occasions raw meat placed next to cooked meat.
They also claim they saw chefs sometimes not changing gloves or washing their hands after handling raw meat and that dishes were a number of times served lukewarm.
The family also said that they witnessed instances of faeces in the swimming pool.
Their grandparents, Joan, 78, and Bob Britton, 73, were initially unable to leave their room much due to suffering with severe diarrhoea.
Natasha said: 'I felt so guilty when the doctor told me Jake's illness had probably been caused by him going abroad.
'To see Jake in the pain he was experiencing was terrible. I felt so helpless and with Jake's past medical history his illness was even more frightening.
'As soon as I was told he had contracted E.coli I blamed myself. To think that Jake could have potentially died because of his illness is gut wrenching.
The family all stayed at the luxurious five-star Jaz Makadi Aquaviva Resort in Egypt (pictured)
'We as a family just want to warn people of the consequences of contracting such illness.'
Her brother Ashley said: 'With my grandparents growing older this was meant to be a dream holiday where all the family would go away for one last time and me and Joanne could celebrate our first anniversary.
'We had been saving for months to afford it, however, what should have been a holiday from which we all went home with lasting memories, turned into a nightmare.
'We are not surprised that other people have been unfortunate and fallen ill at the hotel. We now want to know what caused our illnesses.'
TUI UK Limited told MailOnline: 'We're sorry to hear these customers were unhappy with their holiday experience.
'As these cases are now subject to legal proceedings, it would be inappropriate to comment further.
'We'd like to remind customers that we regularly audit the accommodations we feature in respect of health and safety, including hygiene.'
An Indian soldier who left a woman blind and scarred for life after throwing acid on her in revenge for rejecting his advances has finally been arrested eight years after the attack.
Pramodini Roul, then just 15 years old, was subjected to a vicious acid attack by Santosh Bedanta, 35, as she was walking home from school in Odisha state in 2009.
Ms Roul, now 23 spent four months in ICU after the attack and has since undergone several series of reconstructive surgeries, including one to save a small amount of vision in her left eye.
Scarred for life: Pramodini Roul, then just 15 years old, was subjected to a vicious acid attack by Santosh Bedanta, 35, a man whose marriage proposal she had rejected
Ms Roul, known as Rani or Queen, had lost hope after the case was closed in 2012, but after an order by the chief minister of Odisha state, local police reopened the case in August this year.
Last week, Bedanta, a soldier in Indian army, was arrested along with his friend Anil Biswajit Dalasiharaya who rode the motorbike used in the attack.
A special team of police on November 26 conducted a raid at Santosh's uncle's house in Kolkata where he was hiding.
He was produced in court and was taken into police custody. The motorcycle used in the attack was also seized by the cops.
Bal Ram Nayak, investigating officer in the case said: 'The accused Satosh Vedanta, who was a solider on General Duty, was arrested in Kolkata at around 2am on 26th of November.
Arrests: Santosh Bedanta, 35, right, a soldier in Indian army was arrested along with his friend Anil Biswajit Dalasiharaya who helped him during the attack
Admitting guilt: Bedanta, pictured while serving in the army, has admitted to carrying out the attack that left Ms Roul blind and scarred for life
'We had first arrested Anil Biswajit Dalasiharaya, who had accompanied him for the attack from his house and during interrogation he revealed that Santosh might be hiding in neighbouring Kolkata.
'We conducted raids and found him hiding at his uncle Yoshobanta Behara's house.
'Santosh has confessed of throwing acid upon the victim and confessed that it was a matter pertaining to one sided love and that he will soon be produced for identification parade before the victim.
'The two police officers Inspector Dallai and RK Jaina, involved in the case previously were suspended because of shoddy investigation.'
Santosh remains in custody and police are waiting to record Pramodini's statement in front of the judicial magistrate to make the investigation more concrete.
Jay Narayan Prakash, Superintendent of Police at Jagatisinghpur Police Station said: 'We are waiting to record Pramodini's statement after identification at judicial magistrate.
'We want to be sure about our investigation so he can be convicted.
'Once the statement is recorded we will make sure to file the chargesheet within two months. We will not delay it more than that at any cost.'
Attacked: Ms Roul is pictured before the horrific acid attack in 2009
Bedanta's arrest has given Ms Roul and her family a sense of hope for justice. She is hoping for capital punishment or lifetime imprisonment for Santosh for inflicting torture and pain on her that will also warn future assailants of the fate.
Ms Roul said: 'We feel a sense of victory already now that the case has been reopened and Santosh has been arrested. The arrest has given me hopes for justice.'
'We are happy and pray that he be awarded with either capital punishment or lifetime imprisonment and no less.
'He deserves stringent punishment, however, we believe that justice will be done to us by the court.'
The horrific incident happened when Ms Roul, then a 10th grade student was returning from taking an exam with her cousin.
She had been proposed to several times by Bedanta for marriage but each time, she had turned it down and she wanted to complete her studies first.
Furious with the repeated rejections, the spurned lover allegedly doused her with acid with the threat that 'she will never be anyone else's if she will not be his'.
Ms Roul has had to undergo a long recovery process, but opened up about finding love on the way earlier this year.
Her partner Saroj, who she met while undergoing treatment for infections on her legs in hospital in 2014, proposed last year.
Saroj was the friend of Ms Roul's nurse and had been visiting patients voluntary when he became friends with her and eventually fell for her charms.
The couple now live together in New Delhi, and are contemplating getting married in two years as they are waiting to get further reconstructive surgeries before they take the plunge.
Finding happy: Ms Roul with her fiancee Saroj who she hopes to marry once she has had further reconstructive surgery
Ms Roul's neck is bent as the skin on her back completely melted. She still requires further surgeries on her eyes as she is only able to see a little and needs plastic surgeries on her head as a major portion of skin is missing.
Ms Roul says: 'Saroj really treats me like a princess. He loves me like the way I am. He always encourages me to live life happily.
'I feel very lucky to have him. He is very understanding and is always there for me.
'We met in March 2014 when he had come with his friends to visit the hospital. Initially we didn't speak to each other, even though he had seen me.
'However, after around 15 days he started to speak to me. He would often visit the hospital.
'I believe he saw my mother and observed her and then slowly started extending helping hands. She would always come alone for my physiotherapy.
'One day he heard my mother ask about my improvement and how long would it take for me to recover as my lower body had by then deteriorated. I was not even moving without help, let alone standing on my feet.
'The reply wasn't very positive as the doctors said that it would take at least four years for me to be able to walk. My mother naturally broke down when she heard that. That is when Saroj consoled her and assured her that he would do everything possible to get me walking.'
She said: 'I am hoping to get further surgeries as soon as possible. Doctors say I need at least four more surgeries.'
The surgeries are extremely expensive. Ms Roul's mother has exhausted all her savings on the previous procedures but has no resources to foot the bill for further operations.
She now works with Chhanv Foundation, a support care for acid attack survivors that helps in arranging funds for their surgeries and rehabilitation.
She said: 'I am happy that I am able to restart my life again but it would be wonderful if I can get all the reconstructive surgeries soon.'
A man has miraculously walked away relatively unscathed after his car hit a power pole and flipped onto its roof.
The driver was heading towards Sydney's CBD through Concord when he collided with the pole, causing his ute to roll.
Shocked onlookers rushed to free him from the car and called emergency services, and he was transported to hospital with only cuts to his face.
A man has miraculously walked away relatively unscathed after his car hit a power pole and flipped onto its roof
The driver was heading towards Sydney's CBD through Concord when he collided with the pole, causing his ute to roll
The incident occurred early on Monday morning on Parramatta Road.
The man collided with the power pole at such a speed his Holden ute was flipped upside-down.
Several cars stopped to rush to the aid of the man and help free him from the vehicle.
Two city-bound lanes were closed as debris from the smashed car covered the road.
There were also damaged portions of the ute across the footpath, while firefighters attended the scene to remove leaked oil and petrol.
He was transported to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital to be treated.
Michael Love, pictured, has been jailed for 80 years for attempted murder
A gunman, who ambushed his ex-girlfriend and her brother while dressed as an elderly woman, has been jailed for 80 years.
Michael Love donned a wig, mask and dress before shooting Sultana Reed and Zach Guyton as they loaded children into an SUV to take them to daycare in Indianapolis, Indiana.
The assailant, said to be in his 50s, struck his former partner three times before shooting her brother in the face. None of the children were harmed and both victims survived the attack in July 2015.
He was sentenced on Friday after being convicted of two counts of attempted murder on November 1.
Witnesses reported seeing Love, who was subject to a court order banning him from contacting his ex-girlfriend at the time of the attack, wearing a brown dress and stockings knotted at the knee as he ran at his victims.
He then pulled out a gun from a plastic grocery bag before firing at Ms Reed and Mr Guyton.
Marion County Prosecutor Terry Curry told Fox 59: 'We are grateful that the two victims survived this dangerous attack and that the children who were present were not injured.
'We commend the work of the investigators, cooperation of witnesses, and most importantly the courage of the victims who were essential in securing a significant sentence for this violent offender.'
An eight-month pregnant woman is in critical condition after she was hit by a 16-ton lorry while parked at a service station in Johannesburg, South Africa.
CCTV footage from the incident shows the horrified petrol pump assistant running for his life when the out-of-control lorry heads straight for him at over 50mph.
The lorry ploughs across the pavement and into the side of the garage, slamming into the pregnant woman's Mercedes, injuring her and her four passengers.
Shocking: CCTV footage from the incident in Johannesburg, South Africa, shows the moment the 16-ton lorry smashes straight into a parked Mercedes at over 50mph
The driver of the lorry later claimed he was not behind the wheel and was 'teaching a friend how to drive'.
The CCTV footage shows the lorry smashing several petrol pumps clear out of the ground, and pushing the Mercedes some 20 yards into the garage brick wall.
The worker who ran for cover is believed to have been injured by flying debris and a driver in a second badly damaged car escaped injury altogether.
Emergency services were quickly on site along with fire crews who said that it was a miracle that the whole petrol station did not explode in flames.
Med Help EMS spokesman Chris Christodolides said: 'The lorry came around a corner fast and across an island and was totally out of control and destroyed the garage.
Shocking: Emergency service personnel fight to free the pregnant driver and the four others trapped inside the car hit by the lorry
Excuses: The driver of the lorry later claimed he was not behind the wheel and was 'teaching a friend how to drive'
Devastation: Several petrol pumps were ripped out of the ground as the lorry plouged through the petrol station in Johannesburg
'A worker had just finished filling the car with petrol and saw the lorry and just ran for it and was actually clipped by flying debris but escaped serious injury.
'The five in the car were not so lucky as they had nowhere to run as the lorry just smashed into them.
'The driver was an eight-month pregnant mother-to-be and she had four passengers. It took between 40 and 60 minutes to get them out thanks to the jaws of life.
'They are a mechanical cutting device and we took all five to hospital with the passengers seriously injured. The pregnant woman was in a critical condition' he said.
The horrific accident happened in Johannesburg on Saturday night at 11pm.
A South African Police Service spokesman said an investigation is underway.
Zelda de Groen has won an employment tribunal over a grilling she was given by bosses at an orthodox Jewish nursery
A teacher at an orthodox Jewish nursery who was sacked for 'living in sin' with her boyfriend has won her case of religious and sexual discrimination.
Zelda de Groen, 24, said she was subjected to a 'humiliating' interview by bosses at Gan Menachem nursery in Hendon, north London.
She said they probed her private life and told her that, at 23, she should be married and that having kids outside of marriage would 'not be tolerated'.
The tribunal heard she was hauled out of classes for the 'chat' after some parents at the Gan Menachem nursery complained about her living with her boyfriend Oz Waknin.
When she asked for an apology over the hour-long dressing down she had received, she was disciplined and sacked.
Ms de Groen, now 24 and married to Mr Waknin, successfully sued the nursery for direct and indirect religious discrimination, direct sex discrimination and harassment.
In their ruling, the tribunal panel said: 'She was dealing with senior managers who were behaving rather like an overbearing mother and elder sister.
'The effect was undoubtedly humiliating, degrading and offensive. The claimant was distraught during and after the meeting and reasonably so.
'She was being probed about her private life in ways which suggested that she was behaving badly and foolishly.
'The conduct of the [nursery] after that meeting was equally offensive and hurtful to the claimant and continued her humiliation and degradation.'
A tribunal heard parents of children complained after discovering during a nursery barbecue that Ms de Groen was living with a man she wasn't married to
She attended a private barbecue with her boyfriend Oz Waknin on May 26 last year where parents and teachers, and the nursery's founder Mendy Freundlich, chatted, and heard they were living together.
After the barbecue, up to five parents spoke to the nursery about the couple living together out of wedlock, the tribunal heard.
One parent suggested they might not allow their child to return to the over-subscribed nursery the next year if they were to be taught by her.
A month after the barbecue she was taken out of her class for an interview with headteacher Miriam Lieberman and nursery manager Dina Toron.
Miss de Groen said they made 'a continuous personal attack on my life choices', particularly her decision to live with her partner. She described their tone as 'threatening' and added: 'They told me it is not allowed to live with another person prior to marriage and that to do so is against what people in our workplace should do.
She has since married partner Oz Waknin
'I was told that having kids outside of marriage is wrong and will not be tolerated. Their comments, and the personal nature of the meeting, were humiliating.'
Following a disciplinary procedure she was sacked about a month later for bringing the nursery into disrepute, Watford Employment Tribunal heard.
Ms de Groen was brought up in an orthodox Jewish household until she was 16 when she moved to Israel.
She returned three years later but rejected ultra-orthodoxy and was trying to find a way to live as a Jew that suited her beliefs.
She had worked at the nursery for four years, rising to the position of team leader and although the nursery was run on ultra-orthodox lines many of the parents whose children went there held different beliefs within the Jewish spectrum.
During her employment Ms de Groen knew she had to comply with the 'nursery's ultra-orthodox teaching and rules while at work', the hearing was told.
Some of her colleagues and parents knew the couple were living together, but did not express concern or disapproval.
The nursery denied any discrimination and that they acted on the recommendation of their HR company.
Employment Judge Andrew Clarke QC said the couple 'made no secret of their living together' and said she was asked to lie about it.
Bosses at Gan Menachem nursery in north London could be forced to pay compensation
The panel wrote: 'We consider that Mrs Toron and Mrs Lieberman did deliberately indicate at the meeting that this might provide an acceptable solution to the problem.
'However, the claimant failed to understand that this is what the respondent wanted because lying is contrary to Orthodox Jewish beliefs (and her own beliefs) and she simply did not expect either of those two ladies to be asking her to lie. The fact remains that they were.
He added: 'It is repugnant to generally accepted standards of morality to require someone to lie, especially about matters so concerned with their protected human rights.'
The tribunal concluded that a male teacher would not have been treated in such a way and that the root of the problem was interpretation of their religion.
The panel wrote: 'The claimant can properly be said to subscribe to the Jewish faith whilst holding different particular religious beliefs from some other Jewish believers.
'The claimant was dismissed because she had co-habited, something contrary to the beliefs of some (at least) of those responsible for the management of the respondent and because she would not (untruthfully) say that she was no longer co-habiting.'
After her victory in the employment tribunal, a remedy hearing will take place at a later date where compensation will be considered.
A Labour council has been warned to invest some its pension fund offshore to protect against the risks of a Jeremy Corbyn government.
Camden Council, led by Georgia Gould, was advised by fund manager London CIV that moving cash overseas would shield the authority against 'political risks'.
It highlighted Brexit and a change in Government as particular threats to the pension fund.
The report warned Mr Corbyn taking power could mean a 'sharp repricing of assets due to concerns over renationalisation'.
Camden Council, led by Georgia Gould, was advised by fund manager London CIV that moving cash overseas would shield the authority against 'political risks'
A report warned councillors that Mr Corbyn taking power could mean a 'sharp repricing of assets due to concerns over renationalisation'
London CIV is chaired by Bob Kerslake, the former head of the civil service, and was set up to manage 5.6billion of pension funds across the capital.
A spokesman for London CIV told the Guardian, which revealed the report: 'London CIV is responsible for investing significant sums on behalf of the boroughs and therefore has a duty to consider all potential risks.
'In carrying out this duty, we are in discussions with all boroughs as to consider all risks which might potentially impact on infrastructure.
'These discussions are ongoing and the London CIV is continuing to debate with its members the shape of its infrastructure strategy. No decisions on this strategy have been made.'
The advice to Camden Council comes after businesses were told Theresa May is 'hanging by a thread' and they should prepared for a Corbyn Government.
The advice was issued by an influential city trading firm that warned Labour taking power would be a 'nightmare scenario' for the pound.
London CIV is chaired by Bob Kerslake, the former head of the civil service, and was set up to manage 5.6billion of pension funds across the capital
CME Group, an American financial market company with a major office in the City of London, issued the warnings in a briefing last month at the height of the harassment scandal sweeping Westminster.
In the CME paper, Erik Norland, the group's executive director and a senior economist, describes how the Government was 'taking the brunt' of 'allegations of inappropriate conduct within Parliament'.
'Since losing its parliamentary majority in June 2017, British Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservative Party has been hanging by a thread, propped up by coalition partner, the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland,' he said.
'Given the fragility of the current government, markets should probably be thinking carefully about the next Prime Minister and the potential impact on the UK economy and currency.
'The Labour Party has moved into a small but consistent polling lead since the June election.
'When new elections take place, they could easily produce a Labour majority or a hung parliament.'
Former President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been killed in fighting with the Iran-aligned Houthi militia raging in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
The 75-year-old was killed outside the capital Sanaa, along with the assistant secretary-general of his General People's Congress party (GPC), party officials confirmed.
Sources in the Houthi group said fighters stopped Saleh's armoured vehicle with a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher as he was fleeing the capital, and then shot him dead.
Killed: Houthi rebels reportedly stopped Former President Ali Abdullah Saleh's armoured vehicle with a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher, and then shot him dead near Sanaa
Footage has emerged on social media showing armed militiamen unfurling a blanket containing the dead body of the former president, while shouting, 'Praise God!'
Saleh ruled Yemen for more than three decades until he was forced to resign following an Arab Spring uprising in 2011, but remained as a key player in national politics and the subsequent civil war.
In 2014, his forces allied with the Houthis - despite the fact that as president he had gone to war with them on more than one occasion - to fight the internationally recognised government which has the support of a Saudi-led coalition.
This rebel alliance splintered last week, setting off heavy clashes between the Houthis and Saleh's forces.
After his assassination today, the leader of the Houthis accused Saleh of having joined their opponents, saying he had been killed for his 'treason'.
Civil war: Houthi fighters ride a vehicle amid clashes between the Houthis and forces loyal to ex-president Saleh, in Sanaa on Monday
Abdul-Malek al-Houthi described Saleh's killing by Houthi forces as a 'historic defeat to the forces of the coalition,' referring to the Saudi-led alliance.
Without mentioning Saleh by name, he said that he knew about the ex-President's communication with the Saudis and his efforts to turn against the Houthis. He added that he had sent several warnings to Saleh.
Earlier on Monday, Houthi forces blew up Saleh's house in Sanaa and came under aerial attack by Saudi-led coalition warplanes for a second day, residents said.
The Saudi-led air campaign, backed by U.S. and other Western arms and intelligence, has killed hundreds of civilians but has failed to secure the coalition any major gains in the nearly three-year-old campaign to restore Yemen's internationally recognised president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, to power.
Saleh's loyalists have lost ground on the sixth day of heavy urban warfare with the Houthis during which the death toll has jumped to at least 125 with 238 wounded, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The United Nations called for a humanitarian pause in Sanaa between the hours of 10 am and 4pm to allow civilians to leave their homes, aid workers to reach them, and the wounded to get medical care.
Houthi rebel fighters are seen riding a tank outside of the residence of Yemen's former President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa on Monday
Jamie McGoldrick, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, said in a statement that the streets of Sanaa had become 'battlegrounds' and that aid workers 'remain in lockdown'.
McGoldrick warned the warring parties that any deliberate attacks on civilians and against civilian and medical infrastructure are 'clear violations of international humanitarian law and may constitute war crimes'.
Sanaa residents reported intense fighting overnight and into the morning with families cowering in their homes as explosions rocked the city. Coalition air strikes hammered Houthi positions in an apparent bid to shore up Saleh's forces, witnesses said.
The realignment of Saleh's forces with the Saudis would mark a significant turn in a war that is part of a wider struggle between regional powers Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Yemen's protracted bloodshed has compounded the woes of one of the Arab world's poorest countries and left at least 10,000 dead as hunger and disease have spread.
Tribesmen loyal to Houthi rebels chant slogans during a gathering aimed at mobilizing more fighters into battlefronts to fight pro-government forces, in Sanaa
At the United Nations, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the warring parties to stop all ground and air assaults. He also called for the resumption of all commercial imports into Yemen, saying millions of children, women and men were at risk of mass hunger, disease and death.
However, in a speech late on Sunday, the day before his assasination, Saleh formally annulled his alliance with the Houthis and pledged to step up his fight.
Saleh and the Shi'ite Muslim Houthis had made common cause against Hadi loyalists.
But they vied for supremacy over the territory they ran together, including Sanaa, which the Houthis seized in September 2014, and their feud burst into open combat on Wednesday.
Residents said the warring sides traded heavy automatic and artillery fire as the Houthis advanced in the central Political District on Monday.
'We lived through days of terror. Houthi tanks have been firing and the shells were falling on our neighbourhood,' said Mohammed al-Madhaji, who lives in the Political District.
'The fighting has been so violent we feel we could die at any moment. We can't get out of our homes.'
Suleyman Yalcin was hit and killed by a police van answering a 999 call
A pedestrian was hit and killed by a police van answering a 999 call.
Suleyman Yalcin, 44, got off a bus in Tottenham, north London, to have a family meal at his brother's house when he was knocked down while crossing Seven Sisters Road.
Mr Yalcin, who was originally from Turkey and lived in the Wood Green area, was hit by a marked police van in the incident at 6.45pm yesterday.
Police and paramedics from the London Ambulance Service tried to save him at the roadside, but Mr Yalcin died shortly after.
His brother Sinasi, 37, a graphic designer, said the family were 'devastated' and demanded answers from the authorities.
He told the Evening Standard: 'He was on his way to eat with us. When he didn't arrive we kept trying his phone. Then we discovered there had been in a fatal accident involving the police, we are heartbroken.
'We understand he had just got off the bus. How could this have happened? We want answers - the police have told us nothing yet.'
'He was a lovely, kind and gentle person. We can't believe he has gone.'
The Independent Police Complaints Commission has been informed and has launched an investigation.
Mr Yalcin, who lived in the Wood Green area, was hit by a marked police van in the incident at 6.45pm yesterday
Police and paramedics from the London Ambulance Service tried to save him at the roadside, but Mr Yalcin died shortly after
A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said: 'Officers in a marked police vehicle were en route to an emergency call when their vehicle was involved in a collision with a pedestrian in Haringey.
'The collision happened at approximately 6.45pm on Seven Sisters Road close to the junction with Elizabeth Road.
'Officers immediately provided first aid. The London Ambulance Service and London's Air Ambulance attended.
'The pedestrian was pronounced dead at the scene at 7.20pm.
'The Met's Directorate of Professional Standards and the Independent Police Complaints Commission have been informed.'
This is the horrifying moment a machete-wielding gang on mopeds stole thousands of pounds worth of watches as they raided a luxury store today.
The gang used a moped to smash through the glass front door of the Chronext store on Fleet Street in the City of London at about 11am.
Shocking footage shows one member of the gang waving a huge samurai sword while two others brandish a knife and iron bars.
Shocking footage shows one member of the gang waving a huge samurai sword (right)
Two of the gang members could be seen brandishing a knife and iron bars during the raid
Further thieves were said to have been inside the store smashing the cabinets and grabbing lots of watches and stuffing them into bags.
Witnesses claimed the criminals jumped on their scooters and punched the air in victory before driving off towards the law courts nearby.
One witness told the London Evening Standard: 'There was a Vespa inside the shop because they drove it through the front door.
'I saw about five mopeds parked up on the pavement and the street outside and there were three guys walking up and down.'
Another said: 'They came outside with bags. Then they made off towards the Royal Courts of Justice, pumping their fists in the air like some kind of victory.
'There are about 40 people here in my office. It was very frightening people were crying in the office. It was like something you see on Netflix or in the movies.'
The machete-wielding gang on mopeds stole thousands of pounds worth of watches today
One of the gang can be seen driving off from the Chronext store on Fleet Street in London
Witnesses claimed the criminals jumped on their scooters and drove off towards the law courts
Police are currently battling an epidemic of moped-related crime in the capital
A police spokesman said: 'City of London Police were called at 10.52am on Monday 4 December to reports of suspects on mopeds entering a jewellers on Fleet Street.
'The suspects smashed their way into the jewellers brandishing weapons, including knives, before making off on mopeds. Officers are on scene. No one was injured.'
No one has been arrested following the incident. Police are currently battling an epidemic of moped-related crime in the capital.
More than 8,000 offences were carried out by criminals on mopeds in London last year. The figure is 16 times what is was five years before ago.
Thugs favour the bikes because they are easy to get away on and, if they remove their helmets, police can be reluctant to chase them in case the criminals are hurt.
A 13-year-old girl was found safe in Mexico Sunday night, after running away from home on Friday to meet a 29-year-old man she had been talking to online.
Ashlee Hattermann of Katy, Texas was located with the help of Mexican authorities, though it's unclear where exactly in the country she was found - or how.
Her parents Keith and Tiffany Hattermann said their daughter left behind a note, indicating she was on her way to meet a man she had been speaking to online for the past year.
'We found a note in her room,' Keith Hattermann told KHOU. 'She calls the guy "daddy" and herself "baby girl." (The note read) "Daddy owns my body and my soul," over and over and over again down this sheet of paper.'
Ashlee Hatermann, 13 (pictured), has been found safe after crossing the Mexican border to meet a 29-year-old man she had been talking to online
Surveillance photo showed the teen on Friday, after skipping class to take a bus to Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border
Her parents took away her phone and limited her internet access in May, after discovering that she was sending graphic texts to the man on social media and covert messaging apps. They say they turned her phone over to the Harris County Sheriff Office's Cyber Crimes Division, but nothing ever came of the investigation.
'There's been an ongoing case since May of last school year when she was talking online with a sexual predator,' her mother told the Houston Chronicle. 'It was investigated by the Harris County Sheriff's Office and unfortunately they never followed up with it.'
A sheriff's office spokesman denied this and said the case was very much still open.
After Ashlee went missing on Friday, one of her friends came forward and said she had continued to text with the man at school on another iPhone. Her parents have no idea where she got the second iPhone.
Sunday night, local authorities in Katy, Texas announced that Ashlee had been found alive and well in Mexico
The teen's mother was the last to see the eighth grader, after dropping her off Friday morning at Thornton Middle School.
'There was nothing wrong when I dropped her off at school,' Tiffany Hattermann said. 'The only thing that threw me off was she told me she loved me when she got out of the car.'
Ashlee attended just one class before skipping school and heading to a greyhound station, where she convinced a stranger to buy a bus ticket for her to Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border.
Surveillance footage shows her at the bus station, while the woman bought her ticket.
The woman who bought the bus ticket called police Saturday morning, when she saw news reports of the missing girl and realized she had been duped into helping her out.
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told KHOU that Ashlee told her she was trying to get back to her family in Laredo after spending the week with her boyfriend in Katy.
In addition to buying her the bus ticket, the stranger said she also bought the girl lunch.
'I asked her how old she was; she said 18,' the woman said. 'She told me she was here all week, visiting her boyfriend. She told me that [her parents] lived in Laredo and that she had been up here to visit her boyfriend and she was trying to get back to her family.'
Police released a physical description of Ashlee over the weekend and called for the public's help in locating the teen.
Late Sunday night, they got a call from Mexican authorities saying they had spotted the teen and were taking her to her father, who had flown down to Mexico City to find his daughter.
Experts have said that it appears Ashlee was being groomed for sex trafficking.
'Immediately, it had signs of trafficking 101,' Debi Tengler, chief relations officer with Arrow Child & Family ministries, told KHOU. 'Often times it can be a Romeo relationship or a daddy relationship, where they become the caretaker or protector, the one who values and appreciates that child, building a sense of security in them and often times brainwashing them against their healthy, biological family.'
The devastated family of a 15-year-old boy who was killed in a horrific jet ski incident has remembered him as a 'loveable larrikin'.
Luke Powell was killed when he was thrown from an inflatable tube being towed behind a jet ski on the Ross River in Townsville on Sunday afternoon.
Luke's mother Shelly was reportedly driving the jet ski when he was flung off the tube and onto rocks on the riverbank.
Luke's mother Shelly was reportedly driving the jet ski when he was flung off the tube and onto rocks on the riverbank
'He loved riding his motorbike, tubing, knee boarding and anything on the water,' Luke's family said
Luke suffered severe head injuries upon impact and could not be revived.
The Tec-NQ high-school student was remembered fondly by his family who struggled to come to terms with the tragedy.
'Luke was a loveable larrikin and a beautiful young man,' his family said in a statement released to the Townsville Bulletin on Sunday.
'Our family is devastated by his loss and are still trying to come to terms with the tragedy.'
Luke's family said he had a passion for sports, particularly water sports.
'He loved riding his motorbike, tubing, knee boarding and anything on the water,' they said.
According to initial reports, Luke's mother Shelly was driving the jet ski when Luke was killed.
Luke's mother Shelly was reportedly driving the jet ski when he was flung off the tube and onto rocks on the riverbank
Luke Powell was killed when he was thrown from an inflatable tube being towed behind a jet ski (pictured) on the Ross River near Loam Island in Townsville on Sunday afternoon
Inspector Mark Jackson said police investigations were underway, with the help of the Townsville Water Police and the Townsville Forensic Crash Unit.
Insp Jackson said Luke was flipped and thrown from an inflatable tube onto the riverbank when the jet ski he was towed behind attempted to execute a turn.
'As I understand it his mother was driving the jet ski so our thoughts and wishes are with her at the moment,' he said.
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From the prestigious corridors of Eton and Cambridge University to the harsh conditions of Canada's wilderness, these images tell the story of a group eccentric Britons who were among the first Europeans to explore the fabled North-West passage overland to reach the west coast of Canada.
These historic sketches and pictures help tell the story of how explorers Lord William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Viscount Milton, and Walter Butler Cheadle paved the way across parts of Canada previously untouched by their fellow countrymen more than 100 years ago.
Among some of the pictures includes a portrait of a Sioux Chief with teepees in the background, while another image shows the moment a chief is shot by a former Etonian adventurer Charles Alston Messiter, who had his arm broken by a chief.
Other pictures show the contrast between the end of the trail in 1860s and what it looks like today, while other show the trials and tribulations of the explorers who made their way across the country.
The end of the north west trail which led to the west side of Canada in the 1860s. Lord William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Viscount Milton, and Walter Butler Cheadle crossed parts of Canada previously unseen by European adventurers
Milton, Cheadle and The Boy holding weapons come across the headless Native during their search across Canada during the 1860s
The photos have been published in a book titled The Northwest Passage Overland by Ernest Coleman, who served in the Royal Navy for 36 years.
Speaking of the book, which is published by Amberley Publishing, Coleman said: 'Anyone seeking a pair of archetypal Englishmen from the middle of Queen Victoria's reign would be hard pressed to find better examples than Lord William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Viscount Milton, and Walter Butler Cheadle.
'Milton, the eldest son of Earl Fitzwilliam, was aged 23 and of slight build. Educated at Eton and Cambridge University, he was egocentric, delicate in health, temperamental, petulant, indolent, and easily offended.
'At the same time, however, had circumstances so provided, Milton was the type of young aristocrat who have been in the forefront of the Charge of the Light Brigade, or leading his men over the top from the trenches on the Somme or at Passchendaele.'
Milton and Dr Walter Butler Cheadle arrived in Quebec City in July 1862 and hiked up the Athabasca River. A year later, the pair were the first 'tourists' to travel through the mountainous Yellowhead Pass.
Coleman added: 'Cheadle, on the other hand, was no aristocrat, coming instead from the gentle confines of the rectory.
Milton and Dr Walter Butler Cheadle arrived in Quebec City in July 1862 and hiked up the Athabasca River. A year later, the pair were the first 'tourists' to travel through the mountainous Yellowhead Pass
An image of the Athabasca River and Valley as it stands today, around 150 years after the trio of British explorers managed to make the journey
Among some of the pictures includes a portrait of a Sioux Chief in traditional clothing with teepees in the background (left) and a photograph taken in San Francisco of Milton and Cheadle with their lawyer friend, George Walkem (right)
This image shows the adventurers wade their way across a river on horse back. Ernest Coleman, who served in the Royal Navy for 36 years, helped publish the book late last month
Barkerville in the 1860's, and the path to Richfield can be seen in the bottom left of the image. Speaking about the book, Coleman said: 'Anyone seeking a pair of archetypal Englishmen from the middle of Queen Victoria's reign would be hard pressed to find better examples than Lord William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Viscount Milton, and Walter Butler Cheadle'
'Neither man had experienced the rigours of a long overland journey. Milton had paid a short visit to the Canadian Red River settlement (now, Winnipeg, Manitoba), but the trials of an extended - and possibly hazardous - passage through barely explored territory lay beyond both men's experiences.
'Undeterred by this, and adopting the English practice of doing as little preparation as possible (a method that prevailed until after Captain Scott's assault on the South Pole), they set off to find an overland route to the Cariboo goldfields of British Columbia.'
The Northwest Passage Overland was published by Amberley Publishing and is available here.
The chief, who has just broken Etonian adventurer Charles Alston Messiter's arm with a club, is shot in the chest
A British police force says it has no record of a mysterious call allegedly made to a local newspaper just minutes before US President John F Kennedy was assassinated.
Official FBI documents claimed a senior reporter at the Cambridge News received an anonymous tip-off less than half an hour before the assassination on November 22, 1963.
The caller is said to have told the journalist to call the American Embassy in London for 'some big news'.
Police say they have no record of a call alleged made to a British local newspaper befores US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated
A memo, which was declassified on October 26, said the reporter informed the police about the call, and they in turn informed MI5.
But Cambridge Constabulary has today said it has no record of the call after being sent a Freedom of Information request to check its records.
The BBC asked about the call from a newspaper reporter, and any subsequent calls made by police to MI5, but the force could find nothing.
A spokesman for Cambridgeshire Police said: 'Searches were conducted at Cambridgeshire Constabulary for information relating to your request.
'These searches failed to locate any records or documents relevant to the request.'
The force concluded it '[does] not hold the information'.
President Kennedy was shot by Communist sympathiser Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor window of a book depository in Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
Documents declassified by the FBI in October revealed a call had been made to the paper
Kennedy was riding in a presidential motorcade at the time of the attack at 12:30 Central Standard Time, which is six hours behind Greenwich Mean Time.
The declassified document linking the incident with Cambridge said the British Security Service had reported a call was made to the senior reporter of the newspaper.
It read: 'The important point is that the call was made, according to MI5 calculations, about 25 minutes before the President was shot.
'The Cambridge reporter had never received a call of this kind before, and MI5 state that he is known to them as a sound and loyal person with no security record.'
Experts on the assassination said Albert Osborne, a suspected Soviet agent and Baptist preacher from Grimsby, was on a bus with Lee Harvey Oswald from Texas to Mexico City in the weeks before JFK was shot dead in Dallas.
Osborne was said to have been in Lincolnshire with his sister when JFK died and researcher Dick Russell said in his book The Man Who Knew Too Much that the Cambridge News call was made 'a short distance from Grimsby'.
It has been suggested Albert Osborne, a suspected Soviet agent from Grimsby, could have made the call. He is said to have been with Lee Harvey Oswald before the killing
But a reporter who worked at the Cambridge News in 1963 previously said the JFK claims were false.
Rodney Tibbs, 83, who was working as a reporter at the time, said the call 'could never have happened'.
A freedom of information request was made to Cambridgeshire police over the call
'The proof is that no story of that nature was ever published at the time,' he said.
'No such call was received as far as I'm concerned. You wouldn't just sit on a story like that.
'If we were onto something it would have been a front page lead. You would have got yourself the best trump page lead you were ever going to get.'
Mr Tibbs said the newspaper received a call a couple of years after the event asking whether they had received a tip-off, but they could 'never stand it up'.
'We asked around the newsroom but no one knew anything about it,' he said.
'It would have been all over the office if something like that had ever happened.'
The boss of T in the Park has hinted the major music festival might not return after three people died at the event last year.
Geoff Ellis has dropped the strongest hint yet that it could be all over for the highlight of Scotland's music calendar.
The DF Concerts boss, who launched the iconic event in 1994, said any replacement camping event would be 'very different'.
It comes after the festival was forced to move out of its traditional home at Balado, near Kinross, amid health and safety fears about a pipeline running underneath the site.
The boss of the T in the Park festival in Scotland (pictured) has hinted that the event might not return
The popular festival attracts thousands of fans and some of the world's most successful artists (Calvin Harris performing on the main stage in 2016)
Thousands of young music fans braved the wet conditions and made their way to the festival's main stage
And in 2016, the body of a father of three was found after he left the festival and two teenagers died. A teenage girl was also raped last year.
James Richardson, 29, from Wishaw, Lanarkshire, was found dead and pathologists judged he had almost certainly taken drugs.
The discovery in July last year came after Megan Bell, 17, and Peter MacCallum, 17, died in separate incidents at the festival. It is believed the deaths were all drug-related.
Hours earlier, an 18-year-old girl was raped following a night in the festival's Slam Tent.
And speaking to Events Base magazine, Mr Ellis said it could at least two years before any decision is made on a new show, which would be aimed at an older audience.
On Friday, his Glasgow-based TRNSMT festival - held on the traditional T in the Park weekend in July - was named best new event at the UK Festival Awards in London.
Last month, it was announced that TRNSMT will return in 2018, spread across two weekends.
However, DF Concerts has so far kept tight-lipped about T in the Park's future.
The long-running festival was shelved after two problematic years at its new home in Strathallan Castle.
Mr Ellis said: 'I think what we come back with will be something very different.
'If you take two years out of the market and you go back in, you probably want to refresh everything.
'That's not to say we won't be back with a camping festival - at some point we will be back with a camping festival - but we're not jumping up and down to do it in 2018.'
He added: 'Whatever we do in the future, I think we will probably aim it at an older market as well.
'With the last three or four years of T in the Park, we were seeing people not coming back year-on-year, whereas people did the surveys and said: 'Yeah I had a great time, I can't wait to be back next year.'
The DF Concerts boss, who launched the iconic event in 1994, said any replacement camping event would be 'very different'
Musicians Alex Turner (left) and Miles Kane of The Last Shadow Puppets performed on the main stage in 2016
DJ Norman Cook, known as Fatboy Slim, was seen performing to thousands of fans in 2015
'It's not because they didn't have a good time, but because they've done it, they've ticked the box and they want to go somewhere else.'
Mr Ellis added: 'As a festival organiser, that's something you've got to learn quickly because it used to be about making sure people had a good time and wanted to come back next year. Now it's about getting a whole new audience (each time).'
But the flit to Strathallan Castle was plagued by traffic and antisocial behaviour problems, as well as the cost of protecting nesting ospreys.
'It's been the most trying time of my professional life,' said Mr Ellis. 'I think that's true of everybody in the company.
'The risk is infinitesimal that the pipeline could blow up. An independent report concluded that there was a likelihood of failure at one-in-four-and-a-half million years, so you are as likely to be eaten by a dinosaur.'
A new music event is being planned for Scone Palace in May 2018.
Organisers Festival Republic, which ran Glastonbury for 10 years, are keeping details of the show under wraps.
The body of a missing four-year-old girl has been found in a pond near her home, police have said.
Chelsea Noel, who had autism, sparked a huge search when she was reported missing after leaving her home in Port St. Lucie, Florida, on Saturday night.
Authorities believe the youngster drowned after becoming disorientated and running straight into the pond.
The body of four-year-old Chelsea Noel has been recovered from a lake near her home
'It is a tremendous tragedy,' Port St. Lucie Police Chief John Bolduc said last night. 'The family is very distraught...It is the biggest tragedy I can think of.
'It looks like the child got out of the house and went right to this lake.'
Chelsea's father Remy called police at around 9:50pm on Saturday after discovering she was no longer at their home.
Dozens of officers, sniffer dogs and a helicopter were involved in the search for the girl, who was described as a non-verbal special needs child.
Her body was recovered from the pond just three blocks from her home by divers, who were called after she was spotted by a US Marshall in a kayak at around 11pm last night.
Divers were called to recover the body after it was spotted by a US Marshall on a kayak
Authorities look for Chelsea's body in the pond. Dozens of officers were involved in the search operation which began on Saturday night
Chief Bolduc told reporters that although investigations were ongoing, Chelsea's death was not being treated as suspicious.
He thanked officers and volunteers who aided the search.
'I can't say enough about the cooperation of the community and law enforcement,' he said.
Arkansas parents are set to be charged after they enlisted the help of their three children to steal jewelry from a store northwest of Little Rock Wednesday.
Authorities reveal at least $30,000 worth of jewelry was stolen from Bella Jeweler's in Rogers.
The couple were caught on a surveillance video urging their young children to break into a case at the shop.
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Arkansas parents (mother pictured here) are set to be charged after they enlisted the help of their three children to steal jewelry from a store northwest of Little Rock
The director of Bella Jewelers was devastated at the situation saying 'it's a real tragedy that they would use their kids to commit this crime,' according to Fox.
'For us, that's the most heartbreaking part,' she continued.
In the video, that the store has released, the woman is seen pointing at items in the display case that her young son allegedly steals from later on.
Authorities reveal at least $30,000 worth of jewelry was stolen from Bella Jeweler's in Rogers, (pictured here) the father is seen here walking away from the store
'The woman kind of kept a look out while her youngest son went around to steal the jewelry,' Martinez said.
'As she realized that nobody was there, and she got more confident, she started directing him to go back multiple times, and steal more and more jewelry.'
The identity of the parents is currently unknown, but authorities say that when they are caught, there will be charges.
Officer Keith Foster said the charge includes contributing to delinquency of a minor and a court will determine the fate of the children.
The mother allegedly checked the coast was clear before urging her son (pictured here) to steal from the jewelry store
'The juvenile system tries to figure out now what's gonna be in the best interest of the kids, how can we help them make sure this type of stuff doesn't happen again, and whatever the adult system decides for the parents,' he stated.
The store asked for help on their official Facebook page: 'REWARD: $1000 for information leading to the arrest of suspects: Man, dark skin, believed to be the father, Woman, light skinned with baby in arms and two young boys.'
'The woman used her young children to steal jewelry from us. Help us identify them or find them and put an end to this child abuse. You will be rewarded,' it said.
Despite the incident Martinez is hopeful: 'We have a lot of pride in our stores, and what we do. So yes, it is a minor setback, but it's a challenge we know we'll overcome,' she said.
Sir David Attenborough has urged Donald Trump not to pull out of the Paris Climate deal because of the devastating effect man is having on the planet.
Sir David, 91, pleaded with the US president, after calling for action to save 'the future of humanity'.
In an episode of Blue Planet II - which came to an end last night - he opened up about the destructive influence of mankind on the natural world.
He described an albatross as it lay dying after its mother accidentally fed it a plastic toothpick.
Sir David Attenborough urged the US president not to pull out of the Paris Climate deal because of the devastating effect plastic is having on the ocean
Referring to the Paris Climate Agreement, the US president said at the time: 'This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States'. The president is pictured yesterday speaking with reporters at the White House
Sir David said: 'Let us hope that Trump will eventually recognise that the Paris Agreement was not about Pittsburgh, or even Paris, but the entire planet.'
He added: 'Never before have we been so aware of what we are doing to our planet - and never before have we had such power to do something about it.
'Surely we have a responsibility to care for the planet on which we live? The future of humanity, and indeed of all life on Earth, now depends on us doing so.
There are concerns that more than a million birds and 100,000 sea mammals and turtles die every year from eating and getting tangled in plastic waste
Sir David described the moment a baby albatross died after eating a plastic toothpick. Pictured: Scientists have discovered the birds are inadvertently feeding their chicks plastic
The Blue Plant crew recreated a scene where 7,000 plastic toys ended up in the water after falling from a ship during a storm in 1992
'Plastic is now found everywhere in the ocean, from its surface to its greatest depths.
'There are fragments of nets so big they entangle the heads of fish, birds and turtles, and slowly strangle them.
'Other pieces of plastic are so small that they are mistaken for food and eaten, accumulating in fishes' stomachs, leaving them undernourished.'
There are concerns that more than a million birds and 100,000 sea mammals and turtles die every year from eating and getting tangled in plastic waste.
KEY GOALS OR THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT A long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels The Paris Agreement on Climate Change has four main goals with regards to reducing emissions: 1) A long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels 2) To aim to limit the increase to 1.5C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change 3) Goverments agreed on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognising that this will take longer for developing countries 4) To undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with the best available science Advertisement
One of the key goals of the Paris Agreement is to limit the increase in global temperatures to 1.5C.
But Trump, who has expressed doubts that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are the prime cause of global warming, announced in June that he intended to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement and instead promote U.S. coal and oil industries.
He said at the time: 'This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States.'
And last month it was revealed that the US president was not invited to the Climate Summit next week.
Over a hundred countries, as well as non governmental organizations, have been invited for the December 12 summit.
Sir David added: 'Our wellbeing is inextricably bound up with the health of the oceans.'
He said 'all is not yet lost' and told people to 'reduce the amount of plastic that we use in our everyday lives'.
Sir David praised countries for coming together in 2015 to sign the Paris Agreement, but added: 'It is true that since then the United States has threatened to withdraw from that decision.'
Polish-born Britain First supporter Marek Zakrocki drove at a curry house owner after saying he wanted to 'kill a Muslim'
A Britain First supporter drove his van at a curry house boss hours after telling police: 'I'm going to kill a Muslim, I'm doing this for Britain.'
Marek Zakrocki, 48, aimed his white work van at Kamal Ahmed outside Spicy Nights restaurant in Harrow, north London in June.
The attack came just four days after a suspected terror attack near the Finsbury Park Mosque left a Muslim worshipper dead - and on the anniversary of the Brexit vote.
CCTV cameras filmed Zakrocki making nazi salutes and shouting about 'white power' before he missed Mr Ahmed and crashed into the window of the Tandoori just after 8.30pm on 23 June.
Zakrocki, who had earlier assaulted his wife Ewa Zakrocka at their Harrow home, told a police officer at the scene: 'I'm going to kill a Muslim, I'm doing this for Britain.
'This is the way I will help the country, you people can't do anything.'
Officers later found a Nazi coin and two Britain First magazines at Zakrocki's home.
The incident happened outside this Indian restaurant in Harrow, north London in June
The window fitter admitted donating money to the anti-Muslim group, the group which was thrust into the international spotlight by tweets by US President Donald Trump last week.
Mr Ahmed's brother Taj confronted Zakrocki when he blocked the road outside Spicy Nights with his van and started shouting at a Somalian woman at around 8.30pm.
Prosecutor Denis Barrie told the Old Bailey: 'The defendant went into the van. He then started the engine and mounted the pavement, twice making contact with the front of the restaurant. It's clear he wasn't driving all that fast.
'The prosecution case that is supported by everything else Mr Zakrocki had done during the course of the day is that he wasn't only aiming at the restaurant, he was aiming at Mr Ahmed.'
Mr Barrie said: 'Because of the time that all this took place, the police took what had happened particularly seriously and there was a hard stop by armed police officers.'
He told the court that Britain First, formed by former members of the BNP, was anti-Muslim and held views that were regarded by most people as 'very extreme indeed'.
Police investigating the attack found Britain First literature at Zakrocki's house. The prosecutor told the court the group were considered 'very extreme' by most people. File photo
Zakrocki, of Harrow, admitted one count of battery against Mrs Zakrocka and one of dangerous driving.
Other charges including attempted murder, which he denied, were earlier dropped. He is due to be sentenced later today.
Donald Trump triggered a global backlash last week when he retweeted unverified videos posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of British First.
Catalonia's pro-independence parties will lose their parliamentary majority in the regional election on December 21, an official poll showed on Monday.
In 2015, the independence parties won 47.8 percent of the vote, which allowed them to form the largest bloc in the region's parliament.
And the latest polls show support for secessionists hovering well below 50 percent, potentially putting another majority out of reach.
It comes as uncertainty surrounds many of the key players in the vote, with leaders incarcerated or abroad.
People attend a concert organised by the pro-independence Catalan National Assembly (ANC) to demand the release of jailed Catalan cabinet members currently in custody, at Plaza Espanya square in Barcelona, Spain, December 3, 2017
Jordi Turull, Oriol Junqueras, Carles Puigdemont, (left to right) are seen during the minute of silence, while a man raising in the air a Catalonia scarf. Both Junqueras and Puigdemont are currently incarcerated
Pro-indepence party Junts per Catalunya was predicted to take 25 to 26 seats, ERC another 32 seats and extreme-left party CUP 9 seats, according to the poll carried out by Sociological Research Centre (CIS).
That would give the pro-independence camp just 67 seats in the 135-seat regional parliament, or 48 percent, stripping them of the previous slim majority.
The government's People's Party (PP) would win just 7 seats while the Socialists would take 21 and the market friendly Ciudadanos 31 or 32 seats, the poll showed.
CatComu-Podem, the Catalan arm of the anti-austerity Podemos party, could win 9 seats, according to the survey.
Unlike 2015, pro-independence parties are running on separate lists.
Catalonia's sacked vice president Oriol Junqueras and three other separatist leaders will remain in prison pending a probe over their role in the region's independence drive, a Spanish judge decided Monday, as the critical Catalan elections approach.
A week before the elections, a Belgian judge will decide whether to grant a European arrest warrant and send axed Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont (pictured) back to Spain on sedition charges
Six other former ministers who were also remanded in custody last month will be released on bail of 100,000 each as an investigation into charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds continues, the Madrid court said in a statement.
Junqueras hopes to lead his ERC party, which is ahead in the polls, to victory on December 21.
A week before the elections, a Belgian judge will decide whether to grant a European arrest warrant and send axed Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont back to Spain on sedition charges, lawyers said on Monday.
Lawyers for Puigdemont and four of his former ministers, who all fled to Belgium in October despite a summons to appear in court in Spain, argued in a Brussels court that they would not get a fair trial.
Puigdemont launched his campaign last month from Brussels with a flurry of high-profile media appearances and a demand that he be returned as the 'legitimate' president of Catalonia.
His lawyer said at the weekend he will remain in Belgium until after the Catalan elections, which indicates he will campaign from there.
'No matter what, they will be (in Brussels) till at least December 21 and according to my calculations this could go on till mid-January,' lawyer Jaume Alonso Cuevillas told Catalan radio Rac1.
'I am convinced that no matter what happens they will have recourse to an appeal.'
Spain is seeking to have Puigdemont and four of his former ministers who also fled with him sent back to face charges over their role in the independence drive.
People attend a concert organised by the pro-independence Catalan National Assembly (ANC) to demand the release of jailed Catalan cabinet members currently in custody
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy (pictured) and fellow opponents of Catalan independence have hitched their hopes on a record turnout on December 21 to return a legislature in favour of unity with Spain
The news sparked outrage among independence supporters.
'We want you back home,' tweeted Catalan parliament speaker Carme Forcadell, who is also under investigation over her role in Catalonia's secession drive.
'We will turn sadness into energy and we won't stop until you are free.'
Madrid wants the elections to 'restore normality' to the wealthy northeastern region, which declared independence unilaterally following a referendum that went ahead on October 1 despite a court ban.
Puigdemont, Junqueras and other former ministers are candidates for the elections.
This means the campaign will take an unprecedented turn, with candidates both 'in exile' and in prison.
Separatist parties have repeatedly accused Madrid of taking 'political prisoners' and 'repression' after their independence declaration fell flat, and the decision to keep some Catalan leaders in jail is likely to magnify those claims.
But generally, Catalans remain deeply split on independence, and several polls suggest pro-secession parties might struggle to win enough seats to form a new regional government.
'From now until December 21, the dispute in the pro-independence camp is going to get worse and they will exchange blows,' said Oriol Bartomeus, a political science professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
'They could open up a rift that prevents them returning an overall majority.'
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and fellow opponents of Catalan independence have hitched their hopes on a record turnout on December 21 to return a legislature in favour of unity with Spain.
Barack Obama has called for more female politicians to be elected to office 'because men seem to be having some problems these days'.
The former US president made the comment while talking to media leaders, financiers and academics at a private event in Paris on Saturday.
He appeared to be referring to a recent wave of sexual allegations that have been made against high-profile men in both the politics and showbusiness worlds.
Barack Obama speaks at the private event, organized by Les Napoleons, in Paris on Saturday
'Not to generalize but women seem to have a better capacity than men do, partly because of their socialization,' Mr Obama said at the event, organized by a group called Les Napoleons.
The former Commander-in-Chief also took a shot at his successor Donald Trump's stance on climate change, commenting that there is currently 'a temporary absence of American leadership in the area'.
His remark comes after Mr Trump announced he was pulling the US out of the Paris Climate accord earlier this year.
Mr Obama also criticized the European Union during his speech arguing that the bloc had a tendency to micro-manage.
He said: 'The European Union needs to recognise that micro-managing every single aspect of life within Europe gets people frustrated.
The former US president called for more women to be elected to office 'because men seem to be having some problems these days'
'So there are ways of streamlining and improving the functioning of the European Union, but the European project itself, the Union itself is something that is worth preserving.'
Before speaking at the invitation-only event, Mr Obama had a private lunch with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace.
Last week the former president was in India, where he met the Dalai Lama to discuss 'compassion and altruism'.
President Donald Trump rushed to Michael Flynn's defense on Monday morning, accusing the feds of destroying his former national security adviser's life.
Trump told reporters he feels 'very badly' for Flynn, a retired general who served in his White House for a brief period after the inauguration.
The president compared Flynn to Hillary Clinton, his former opponent for president and a former secretary of state, claiming that 'she lied many times, nothing happened to her.'
'Flynn lied, and it's like they ruined his life. It was very unfair,' he said.
The ex-White House official pleaded guilty last week to lying to the FBI and agreed to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the election.
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President Donald Trump rushed to Michael Flynn's defense on Monday morning, accusing the feds of destroying his former national security adviser's life
'Flynn lied, and it's like they ruined his life. It was very unfair,' Trump said on Monday. Flynn is seen on Friday in Washington leaving his plea deal hearing
The ex-White House official pleaded guilty last week to lying to the FBI and agreed to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the election
The plea deal for one count of lying suggests that Mueller believes substantive information on Trump's inner circle can be gleaned from Flynn.
Trump said this weekend in a tweet that he fired Flynn in February because the official lied to Vice President and the FBI. The statement that the White House now claims was the work of Trump's personal lawyer, John Down, offered new insight into Flynn's departure.
Trump compared Flynn to Hillary Clinton , his former opponent for president, claiming that 'she lied many times, nothing happened to her'
Previously, the president argued that Flynn was dismissed for misleading Pence about talks with the Russian government about the easing of sanctions. He did not claim then that Flynn, a director of national intelligence in the Obama administration, was being excised for lying to the FBI, which is a federal crime.
Flynn was known to have had a conversation with the FBI on his way out that raised red flags within the bureau and led acting Department of Justice head Sally Yates to contact the White House's Office of Legal Counsel.
The investigation into payments he received for lobbying work that he did not disclose to the federal government and his conversations during the transition with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak were not publicly reported until later.
Former FBI Director James Comey claims that Trump requested that he drop the inquiry into Flynn just after the retired general's resignation. Trump said this past weekend in tweets that the conversation never happened.
'I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!' Trump said on Sunday.
He said in a Dec. 2 tweet: 'I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!'
Trump said earlier this year that he did not tell Flynn to discuss sanctions with the Russian government but would have told him to engage because that was his national security adviser's job.
'No, I didn't direct him, but I would have directed him if he didn't do it,' he said in his first solo White House press conference on Feb. 16.
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowksi, who was kicked off the team before Flynn was brought in but remains close to the president, told NBC on Monday just before the president's statement to the press that he does not believe the directive to talk about sanctions came from the top.
'I don't think so, and Mike has never said that that's been the case, either,' he said.
ABC News reported last week that Trump personally told Flynn to contact the Russians during the transition, and he was prepared to say so in testimony. The spotty reporting, based on a single source, has since been called into question and the journalist involved has been suspended for erroneously claiming that Trump was a candidate when he gave the order.
Court documents from Flynn's plea deal indicate that a 'very senior member' of the transition was involved in the conversations, however, and they included a plot to undermine the foreign policy of Barack Obama.
Flynn spoke to Kislyak about a United Nations resolution the Israelis wanted to kill, a potential violation of the Logan Act, as Trump was not yet the United States president.
It is a crime under the Logan Act for private citizens to negotiate with foreign governments without U.S. permission.
This tweet by Donald Trump led to accusations that the president had obstructed justice after allegedly telling James Comey to back off Michael Flynn while also knowing that Flynn lied to the FBI. But now the White House says his personal lawyer made the tweet
Trump insisted in weekend tweets that it's Clinton the Department of Justice should be chasing, reigniting a rivalry between himself and the Democrat who challenged him last year for president.
He said a lead agent on the case had 'tainted' the previous probe and was 'very dishonest' as he accused another FBI official's wife of taking cash for a failed bid for elected office from Clinton.
'After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness,' Trump stated.
The tirade came after Mueller dismissed deputy head of counterintelligence, Peter Strzok, from his investigation for sending anti-Trump messages. Strozk had also played a lead role in the Clinton email case.
Trump is on his way to Utah for an event today. He stopped to talk to press this morning on the South Lawn of the White House over the roar of Marine One.
Asked about Flynn as he walked away, Trump stopped to say: 'I feel badly for General Flynn. I feel very badly. He's led a very strong life, and I feel very badly.
'I will say this: Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI and nothing happened to her. Flynn lied and they destroyed his life. I think it's a shame.'
Trump said this weekend in a tweet that he fired Flynn in February because the official lied to Vice President and the FBI. The statement that the White House now claims was the work of Trump's personal lawyer, John Dowd, offered new insight into Flynn's departure
Trump wondered at the fact that Clinton was allowed to give testimony in her email case to the FBI in the summer of 2016 when she was not under oath. He accused her of lying to federal agents and getting away with it.
'It was the most incredible thing anyone has ever seen,' Trump said. 'She lied many times. Nothing happened to her. Flynn lied, and it's like they ruined his life. It's very unfair.'
Clinton was never charged with a crime, despite a finding that she had been reckless with sensitive material. Trump supporters' belief that it was a miscarriage of justice gave way to the rallying cry, 'Lock her up!'
Flynn memorably led the chanting at last year's Republican National Convention - an irony that has not been lost on Democrats in light of his current situation.
Trump fired former FBI chief Comey in May, supposedly on the advice of his deputy attorney general, for bungling Clinton's email case a year prior.
Comey gave Clinton a pass for her unauthorized home-brewed server and private email account, even though he accused her in a July presser of being 'extremely careless' with classified information.
He reopened the case into Clinton days before the election only to slam it shut again, angering voters and politicians on both sides of the political spectrum.
The fired law enforcement official has been a key target of Trump's ire as the federal investigation into election meddling plods on. Trump has repeatedly that no one on his campaign colluded with the Russian government.
Trump said he had Russia on his mind when he fired Comey in May but it was the Clinton investigation that led to the law enforcement official's demise.
The canning of Comey instigated the special counsel probe that's hounding Trump's administration now. Trump faces possible charges of obstruction of justice if it is found that he fired Comey for reasons other than a lack of competency.
Communications director Hope Hicks is the latest aide to Trump to be drawn into the special counsel operation that has Flynn and three other former campaign officials, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, in its cross-hairs. She's believed to have interviewed with Mueller's team sometime before Dec 1.
Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, has also spoken to federal investigators.
Reince Priebus, the former former White House chief of staff, and Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, have been probed for information, as well.
A 29-year-old teacher was arrested after she allegedly had sex with a 16-year-old student in a park this past spring.
Alyssia Marie Reddy was arrested Friday for institutional sexual assault, unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communication facility and corruption of a minor by Pennsylvania police.
Reddy was an English teacher at the Pennington School in Pennington, New Jersey, an elite school serving grades six through 12, which charges $38,100 per year for tuition.
She and the student allegedly crossed the Delaware River to have sex in a park along Route 32 in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania, in the spring of 2017.
A 29-year-old teacher was arrested after she allegedly had sex with a 16-year-old student in a park this past spring. Alyssia Marie Reddy (left and right) was arrested Friday for institutional sexual assault, unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communication facility and corruption of a minor by Pennsylvania police
According to police records, Reddy gave the student at the Pennington School in Pennington, New Jersey (pictured), her cell phone number and then added him on Snapchat in December 2016. The student said that he received messages from Reddy in February 2017 saying: 'I want your hands on me'
According to police records, Reddy gave the student her cell phone number and then added him on Snapchat in December 2016, reported NBC10.
The student said that he received messages from Reddy in February 2017 saying: 'I want your hands on me.'
About three weeks after that, Reddy picked up the student from a friend's house in Solebury, Pennsylvania, drove him to a nearby park and had sex with him, according to the police report.
A report was filed with police on November 20 of this year and authorities conducted an investigation that determined the teacher had sex with the minor.
Reddy, who currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland, is being held there while waiting to be extradited to Pennsylvania, police say.
About three weeks after that, Reddy picked up the student from a friend's house in Solebury, Pennsylvania, drove him to a nearby park and had sex with him, according to the police report (Pictured, the Pennington School)
A report was filed with police on November 20 of this year and authorities conducted an investigation that determined the teacher had sex with the minor. Reddy, who was working as a history teacher at St Paul's School for Girls in Maryland (pictured), has been fired and banned from campus
The Pennington School said in a letter to parents that it had been 'recently made aware of an alleged inappropriate relationship involving a former Upper School teacher of The Pennington School in the 2016-17 school year,' the Trentonian reported.
The school said that 'the matter was promptly reported to the Mercer County Prosecutor's office.'
Reddy, who was working as a history teacher at St Paul's School for Girls in Maryland, has been fired and banned from campus, Fox 43 reported.
According to the Trentonian, on Reddy's Facebook page, she appeared to post many pictures of who appears to be her husband and her two young children.
If you drive in London, you're at more risk of a parking fine than anywhere else in the UK, with the capital raking in more than 24million from fines in just three months.
Across 10 of its 32 boroughs, 549,009 Parking Charge Notices were issued from July to September this year, with traffic wardens pouncing as quickly as 12 minutes after tickets ran out.
Almost a quarter - 23 per cent - of the fines were slapped on cars parked near West End theatres in Shaftesbury Avenue and Great Windmill Street.
Edinburgh was the second-most likely place for motorists to be fined over parking, with the city's 58,994 penalties accounting for 65 per cent of all those issued in Scotland.
Third was Glasgow, where 33,693 were meted out over the three months as revealed in an interactive map - which can be viewed here - created by insurance comparison site comparethemarket.com
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Their list was compiled after the company submitted Freedom of Information requests to every council in the UK.
The top 10 riskiest areas also included Birmingham, where 32,991 penalties were imposed and drivers were hit as quickly as 21 minutes after tickets expired.
But drivers had up to four hours' leeway in Liverpool, which came eighth in the list despite traffic wardens' comparatively relaxed approach.
Leeds, where 23,734 drivers were fined, also made the list along with Wolverhampton, and Newcastle upon Tyne.
Between them the councils issued 707,000 tickets, with the average fine set at 70.
The interactive map also pinpoints the streets or car parks where the most fines were issued.
Simon McCulloch, Director at comparethemarket.com said: 'Our parking fines hotspots research has revealed that motorists need to be extra vigilant when it comes to something as simple as parking their vehicle correctly, if they want to avoid a hefty fine.
'With Christmas on the horizon, a 70 parking fine would be a very unwelcome present.
'Penalty Charge Notices can be issued for several reasons. It could be for parking somewhere you shouldnt, failing to show a valid parking ticket, or displaying an expired ticket.
'Other offences include breaking traffic rules, such as going against a "no right turn" sign, or driving in a bus lane. With the cost of driving getting more and more expensive, unexpected cost like a parking fine can be difficult to swallow.
'As we embark on the festive period and face unfamiliar roads to visit friends and family, we need to pay extra close attention street signs can often be discreet and easy to miss, but the information should be clearly stated, and parking payment meters never too far away.
'If you do find yourself with a PCN, its worth checking your ticket, as you can often reduce the fee by half, simply by paying it within seven or 14 days, depending on your local council. You should also consider appealing against the PCN, but only if you feel that you have been unfairly ticketed.'
Former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn's guilty plea Friday the second among Trump insiders is leading to heightened concern among White House staff that their own conversations could get recorded by other cooperators.
Flynn struck a plea deal with prosecutors and was charged with a single count of lying to the FBI on Friday.
The plea agreement released by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office states that Flynn could get reduced jail time for 'participating in covert law enforcement activities' raising the possibility that he already has been assisting authorities in getting former colleagues to talk.
A prior guilty plea, by former campaign foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos, was only reveaeled to the public in October. He had been cooperating with authorities for months, and gave numerous interviews to prosecutors after it was revealed that he had lied to the FBI about his interactions with a professor with Kremlin contacts.
Mike Flynn's guilty plea has rasied concerns among current White House staff who might have been caught up on a wire, after a plea deal where he promised 'full cooperation'
'Everyone is paranoid,' a person close to the White House told Politico. 'Everyone thinks they're being recorded.'
Lawyers representing current and former White House staff told the publication they contacted their clients after the Flynn and Papadopoulos plea deals to ask if they had any conversations with their ex-colleagues that could have been taped.
Providing a measure of reassurance is a prohibition on wiretapping someone being represented by a lawyer on the matter being recorded.
Flynn could get a reduced sentence for ''participating in covert law enforcement activities'
Many of Trump's most trusted aides have lawyered up in connection with Mueller's Russia probe.
White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who has made optimistic predictions about when the probe would end, told the publication he wasn't concerned about Papadopoulos or Flynn being used to tape other officials.
'Mueller is too good a professional and too good a prosecutor to tape represented individuals and he doesn't want his office or his important mission to be tainted,' Cobb said, noting the legal and ethical constraints.
Flynn will provide 'full cooperation' to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his Russia probe after his stunning guilty plea in federal court Friday morning.
Guilty: Criminal liar Mike Flynn arrives at court in Washington D.C. to plead guilty to lying to the FBI, an offense carrying up to five years in prison
'My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the special counsels office reflect a decision I made in the best interest of my family and of our country. I accept full responsibility for my actions,' Flynn said in a statement.
Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., in the latest bombshell development in the Russia investigation that has ensnared leading advisors of President Donald Trump.
Although he pleaded guilty to just a single count, it is what Flynn was prepared to tell investigators that immediately exploded across the political landscape.
Flynn said in his statement Friday he was 'working to set things right.'
'After over thirty-three years of military service to our country including five years in combat away from my family and then my decision to continue to serve the United States, it has been extraordinarily painful to endure these many months of false accusations of treason and other outrageous acts,' Flynn said.
'Such false accusations are contrary to everything Ive ever done and stood for,' Flynn said.
'But I recognize that the actions I acknowledged in court today were wrong. Through my faith in God I am working to set things right. My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the special counsels office reflect a decision I made in the best interest of my family and of our country. I accept full responsibility for my actions,' he continued.
Aisha Francis, 19, pictured at Aylesbury Crown Court today, received an eight-month prison sentence, suspended for 18 months
A 19-year-old infatuated young offenders' prison guard who wrote secret love letters and made phone calls to an inmate was spared jail today.
Aisha Francis worked as an operational support guard at Aylesbury Young Offenders' Institution in Buckinghamshire when she began a relationship with inmate Gino Sawyer.
An illegal mobile phone was removed from the 22-year-old's cell and records later revealed the extent of his contact with Francis, of Hillingdon, West London.
But Francis, who admitted misconduct in a public office, received an eight-month jail sentence, suspended for 18 months, after a court heard she was 'gullible'.
Angus Robertson, prosecuting, said love letters were also found in Francis' home and in Sawyer's cell, which the former signed off in Spanish as 'Senorita'.
Between November 10, 2016 and March 31 this year, the pair had exchanged 472 text messages and 197 phone calls - some more than an hour long.
Francis, who was sentenced at Aylesbury Crown Court today, was dismissed from her job in the Prison Service as soon as her love affair came to light.
Sawyer, who began his sentence at the institution on July 14, 2015, had his sentence extended when he admitted possessing the prohibited mobile phone.
Francis (left) wrote secret love letters and made phone calls to an inmate - but was spared jail
Mr Robertson said Francis's role did not generally require face-to-face contact with inmates but she sometimes responded to lags ringing their buzzers late at night at the closed prison, which houses about 450 men aged between 18 and 22 years.
Francis was also ordered to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work and pay costs of 200, plus a 140 victim surcharge.
She started working at the prison on June 16 last year, having embarked on a gap year on leaving school, as she tried to decide upon a future career.
Mr Robertson explained that the incriminating phone was found in Sawyer's cell during a routine search, which was seized and further examinations carried out on it.
Two saved text messages were initially found saved on Sawyer's Sim card - one which said 'My bad ex' and another saying 'That was a long time ago' - both to a number which turned out to belong to Francis.
Francis was arrested on March 31 as police seized her phone and searched her home, where they found two love letters written by Sawyer.
'A further search of Mr Sawyer's cell revealed two letters written to Mr Sawyer and signed off in Spanish, which translated to 'I love you, love Senorita',' said Mr Robertson.
Francis was dismissed from her job in the Prison Service as soon as her love affair came to light
He told the judge that the letter found in Francis' room was also signed off in Spanish, reading 'My angel, love GI [sic].'
Revealing the phone evidence he continued: 'In summary it shows that the defendant had 669 contacts with Mr Sawyer, the majority of those contacts were text messages.
'There were 197 phone calls made from the defendant to Mr Sawyer, some of those exceeded an hour in length.
'It appears most of those calls were made by Ms Francis when she was not in work. In summary the total hours in terms of phones were in November (2016), just under eight hours, in December four and a half hours and in January (this year) about six hours.
'Those are the calls that Ms Francis makes to Mr Sawyer. His phone shows that in November he spoke to her for four hours 41 minutes, December four and a half hours. This is a relationship case, a communications case.'
There was no suggestion that Francis smuggled Mr Sawyer's phone into the prison or brought him any prohibited items, other than the letters.
Nathan Alleyne-Brown, defending, told the court that Francis had got a job as an office administrator since her dismissal from the prison service.
Francis worked as an operational support guard at Aylesbury Young Offenders' Institution (file)
'She was immature and gullible to believe that her actions could be involved with a prisoner,' he said.
'She was clearly young for her age and clearly she accepts that she undertook the actions in a way she should not have, in a way of course contrary to the rules she had signed up to, by virtue of her employment.'
Sentencing, Judge Catherine Tulk said: 'It is clear within a relatively short period of time some form of infatuation had developed between the two of you.
'It is accepted that the offence of misconduct in public office involving inappropriate communications by prison officers is so serious that only a prison sentence will do. It undermines the whole prison system.
'I don't know if you are aware but Aylesbury Young Offenders' Institution has one of the highest levels of violence between prisoners and prison staff in the country although I am not suggesting that you are responsible for any of that.
'But anything which undermines the intrinsic discipline which is needed to keep an institution like Aylesbury Young Offenders' in order, is going to pose a danger to everybody in there.'
Speaking outside the court, Francis said: 'I'm glad it's all over. I want to draw a line under it and move on.'
A Chinese couple had waited over 20 years and finally reunited with their daughter in east China.
The couple had left a note on their daughter, Jingzhi, to meet up at the famous Broken Bridge in Hangzhou, after 10 and 20 years of their daughter's birth.
With the help of local media, the family finally met on the Chinese Valentine's Day after two decades in early August.
Xu Lida and his wife walked to the Broken Bridge in Hanzhou along with their daughter, Jingzhi
According to Zhejiang Television, Xu Lida and his wife, Qian Fenxiang, sent Jingzhi to Suzhou community centre just five days after she was born in 1995.
They left a note stating that they hope to meet their daughter at the Qixi Festival 10 years or 20 years later on the Broken Bridge in Hanzhou.
In 2005, the Xu couple kept their promise and waited for their daughter to show up at the bridge.
They were spotted by a broadcasting crew from Zhejiang Television and were told that a woman was holding a promise letter from the other side of the bridge.
The family is interviewed by a television host at the Broken Bridge in Hanzhou, east China
Mother Qian Fenxiang is happy to see her daughter Jingzhi after 22 years of separation
From then, the couple had learnt that their daughter was adopted by an American family and had a name known as Catherine Su Pohler, or Kati.
According to Zhejiang Television, the woman was a friend of the Pohler family to help Kati look for her biological parents.
Both parties attempted to re-schedule for a second meeting in 2015, but Jinzhi couldn't make it and agreed to meet two years later in 2017.
The family finally reunited on August 28, the Chinese Valentine's Day, as they walked to the Broken Bridge together, video shows.
Jingzhi's parents take their American-raised daughter to Starbucks for breakfast
Jingzhi will stay with her parents in Hanzhou for two days before setting off to America
It's the happiest moment for Xu and his wife, to be able to see their long-lost daughter, Jingzhi.
Being raised in an American family, Jingzhi did not speak any Chinese, but her parents can be seen trying to communicate with her and buying her breakfast from Starbucks.
The television host asked if Jingzhi will call them father and mother, she replied: 'I don't know. I will think about it.'
Xu explained they abandoned Jingzhi due to the one-child policy and they were struggling to raise two children at the same time.
Jingzhi stayed with her parents for a short two days before going back to America.
She told the reporter that she would like to keep in touch with them and meet up more to know more of her Chinese root.
JD Wetherspoon's will today roll out 500,000 beer mats in support of Britain's post-Brexit fishing industry today, accusing leading business and economic experts of misleading the British public about the impact of Brexit.
The beer mats will be rolled out across 893 pubs up and down the country, and states 'big business' has tried to dupe Britons by claiming food prices will rise if a deal between Westminster and Brussels is not struck.
The mat claims the statement is not true and that the EU imposes high tariffs on non-EU food imports, which in turn bumps up the price.
Wetherspoon's owner Tim Martin has been a vocal supporter of Brexit in the past and has now thrown his support behind Fishing For Leave's campaign
The mat claims the statement is not true and that the EU imposes high tariffs on non-EU food imports, which in turn bumps up the price
Wetherspoon's has also urged MPs to eliminate tariffs and reduce food prices by leaving the EU on March 2019 to help the UK save an additional 200 million a week in EU contributions.
Among the top business leaders named-and-shamed on the beer mat include Sainsbury's chairman David Tyler, Whitbreak chairman Richard Baker and CBI director general Carolyn Fairbairn.
The beer mat will also highlight its support for Fishing For Leave, which backs Britain reclaiming control of its fishing waters. It states that in March 2019, parliament can reclaim rights to the UK's historic fishing grounds, ending EU policies which have devastated many coastal communities.
JD Wetherspoon's owner Tim Martin said: 'Brexit is the single biggest issue for the UK and we believe the beer mats are a great way of getting our message over to our customers.
'The "thundering herd" of the CBI, big business and most economists got it wrong over the exchange rate mechanism, the euro and the effect of a leave vote.
'Their latest red herring is that we need a "deal" to avoid a "cliff edge", which will dramatically put up food prices.
'This is untrue parliament can eliminate food tariffs and reduce prices by about 3.5 pence per meal if the UK avoids a deal and reverts to World Trade Organisation rules. 'Big business should be ashamed of its unscrupulous attempt to mislead the public.'
The beer mats were put in Wetherspoon's on Monday 4 December
The beer mat pledges support for Fishing For Leave's campaign to leave the EU in March 2019
The beer mat also takes aim at three leading 'big business' leaders who have claimed food prices will rise if we leave the EU without a deal
Alan Hastings, from Fishing for Leave, added: 'Fishing for Leave are delighted to have such a major name and institution in public life as Wetherspoons back the campaign to "take back control" of our nations fishing waters.
'A huge thanks must go to Tim Martin and his team for doing so. Fishing is one of our nation's finest natural resources that was sold out to EU control with such devastating consequences for towns synonymous with fishing.
'Brexit gives us a chance to right that wrong and automatically regain national control of all UK waters and resources under international law on 29th March 2019 to be like Norway, Faroe and Iceland.
Brexit gives us a chance to right that wrong and automatically regain national control of all UK waters
'This would see the UK regain the 60 per cent of our fish the EU catches in our waters and see coastal communities rejuvenated by a potential 6.3bn windfall.
'The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) has been an environmental and social disaster. The government must scrap the CFP and replacing it with UK policy that works for all fishermen large business or small.
'Most importantly it must end the crazy discards policy of catching and dumping more fish than necessary to match what a quota says you can keep.
'The government must not sell coastal communities short by adopting or continuing the CFP with a transition period - continuing to obey EU laws after Brexit Day in 2019 would be a betrayal of not just fishing but this country as a whole.'
It's not surprising that President Trump would choose to travel to Utah Monday alongside Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican who's represented the state in the Senate for the last 40 years.
But Trump has broader intentions than just taking Hatch for a ride aboard Air Force One and championing one of the senator's causes: shrinking the national monuments of Bears Ears and Grand-Staircase Escalante.
The president wants to keep former GOP nominee Mitt Romney out of the U.S. Senate.
President Trump stopped to speak to reporters as he left the White House Monday for Utah. He's taking Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch with him on board Air Force One, signaling he'd rather see Hatch seek re-election than Mitt Romney run for Hatch's seat
Former GOP nominee Mitt Romney (left) is mulling a Senate run if Sen. Orrin Hatch (right) retires. However, it looks like President Trump is trying to keep Hatch in the upper chamber so he doesn't have a nemesis Republican in that seat
Romney, a Mormon with roots in the state who previously served as the governor of Massachusetts, has been mulling a run for Hatch's seat, if Hatch indeed announces his retirement.
However, Hatch hasn't committed either way, a move that is angering Romney's people, according to Politico.
They believe it's Trump's doing and they may be right, as Trump has told friends he wasn't into the idea of a Sen. Romney, the publication reported.
If Hatch stays in the Senate, he'll likely continue to be a strong ally for the president.
Even though Romney is a Republican, he's probably act more like Sen. Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who is leaving the Senate after next year, and has sworn to spend his remaining time in the upper chamber calling a certain president of the United States out.
Romney displayed that kind of behavior during last year's presidential campaign.
Mitt Romney (right) famously got dinner at Jean Georges restaurant in New York with President-elect Donald Trump (left) as Trump was considering Romney to be his secretary of state
On March 3, 2016, the ex-GOP nominee appeared at the University of Utah and labeled then-candidate Trump a 'fraud.'
'He's playing the American public for suckers: he gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat,' Romney said.
The former nominee didn't endorse one of the remaining GOP candidates Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. John Kasich but suggested to Republican voters that they vote in their state for who would do the most damage to thwart Trump's march to the nomination.
It didn't work.
Fast-forward to the aftermath of Trump's electoral win and the Romney-Trump relationship was back in the news as the president-elect seemed to be courting him to be secretary of state.
The question was whether Trump's overtures were serious or if the president-elect was making Romney dance to simply, eventually embarrass him.
After highly-publicized meetings at Bedminster and then in New York, Trump called Romney to tell him he'd decided to go with ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson instead.
Since then, Romney has contemplated ways to get back in the political game, including testing the waters for this Senate seat.
Meanwhile, President Trump's former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has been threatening to take out incumbent Republican senators in an effort, he says, to get the body to better cooperate with the president's agenda.
While previously eyeing Hatch as a senator who needed to be replaced, according to the Washington Examiner, Bannon is now contemplating endorsing Hatch so that Romney stays out.
'If Steve had a choice between Orrin Hatch and Mitt Romney, he would pick Hatch 10 times out of 10,' a Bannon insider told the Examiner's David Drucker.
Trump is seemingly following suit by taking Hatch to Utah Monday.
The president has invited the Utah senator to take Air Force One to and from Salt Lake City.
The two men will disembark from Air Force One side-by-side and then travel to the Utah state capitol where the president will sign the executive order shrinking Bears Ears and Grand-Staircase Escalante.
'It will be one of the great, really, events in this country in a long time. So important for states' rights and so important for the people of Utah,' Trump pledged as he left the White House Monday.
President Donald Trump unveiled a plan Monday in Utah to dramatically scale back two national monuments calling it an important move for 'states' rights.'
'Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They're wrong,' he said in the cavernous Utah Capitol Rotunda in Salt Lake City.
'The families and communities of Utah know and love this land the best. And you know the best how to take care of your land. You know how to protect it, and you know best how to conserve this land for many, many generations to come,' he said.
'Your timeless bond with the outdoors should not be replaced with the whims of regulators thousands and thousands of miles away. They don't know your land, and truly they don't care for your land like you do.'
The Bears Ears and the Grand-Staircase Escalante national monuments span millions of acres in Utah and are among 27 national monuments that Trump ordered his Interior Secretary to review earlier this year.
The result, he said, is that 'public lands will once again be for public use.'
As Trump signed a proclamation rolling back the Obama- and Clinton-era national monument designations, his audience briefly broke into a chant of 'Four more years!'
President Donald Trump announced plans Monday in Utah to shrink two sprawling Utah national monuments by nearly two-thirds after Barack Obama and Bill Clinton expanded them
'Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They're wrong,' Trump said
Trump's audience broke out into a brief chant of 'Four more years!' after he signed the national monument proclamation
'Your timeless bond with the outdoors should not be replaced with the whims of regulators thousands and thousands of miles away,' Trump said in the Utah state capitol's rotunda
Bears Ears, a more than 1.3 million-acre site in southeastern Utah that features thousands of Native American artifacts, including ancient cliff dwellings and petroglyphs, is to be slashed by 85 per cent
The 'House on Fire" ruins in Mule Canyonare part of Bears Ears National Monument, near Blanding, Utah
'We're going to be doing something that the state of Utah and others have wanted to be done for many, many years,' the president said as he left the White House.
'It will be one of the great, really, events in this country in a long time. So important for states' rights and so important for the people of Utah.'
Trump commented Monday as he left the White House for a trip to Salt Lake City.
Trump previously had condemned the act of creating the Utah monuments as a 'massive federal land grab.'
Utah Republican leaders had complained that the monuments locked up too much federal land.
And Trump said 'this tragic federal overreach' had resulted in 'harmful restrictions on hunting, ranching and responsible economic development.'
The Natural Resources Defense Council, a moneyed liberal advocacy group, promised: 'We'll see Trump in court.'
'We'll stand up for the public lands and waters set aside as a public trust, in the public interest. And we'll stand up for the rule of law.'
The NRDC argued that the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that allows presidents to wall off millions of acres at a time from development, doesn't permit Oval Office occupants to roll those protections back.
President Trump arrived in Utah on Monday, greeting well-wishers ahead of a speech where he will declare a rollback of multimillion-acre plots of federally protected lands
Trump said Monday on his way to Utah that dramatically scaling back the size of two national monuments would be a win for 'state's rights'
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told a crowd in the Utah Capitol Rotunda that the Antiquities Act, an obscure law that Barack Obama used to broaden federal monuments in Utah, 'was never meant to prevent. It was meant to protect.'
'Our public land is for the public to use,' Zinke said.
During his short Utah visit, the president also met with leaders from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and toured the Mormon 'Welfare Square,' a facility that provides aid and jobs to poor families.
He complimented the LDS leaders for 'the respect you have all over the world' for taking care of people.
But outside, riot police had to disperse a crowd of people jeering the president with shouts of 'Shame on you!'
Other protesters outside the state capitol yelled 'F**k you Trump!' as the president's motorcade sped by
Trump traveled to Utah with Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utahan who has been in office since 1977 and faces a decision soon about whether to run for an eighth term.
Asked Monday if he was encouraging Hatch to run again, Trump gave reporters a clear 'yes.'
Trump pushed a shopping cart through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' food distribution center at LDS Welfare Square in Salt Lake City on Monday, accompanied by LDS President Henry B. Eyring (left)
Trump He joked during his speech an hour later in the state capitol rotunda that 'I went around the store. I wanted a nice can of tuna fish and they had plenty!'
Protesters yelled 'Shame on You!' and 'F**k you Trump!' on Monday in front of the Utah state capitol; a different group of activists were dispersed by riot police outside the LDS Welfare Square facility
That's seen as a move to block Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee who has been openly hostile to Trump from running.
WHAT'S ALL THE FUSS ABOUT? When Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante were designated national monuments, most public use of the millions of acres other than hiking was prohibited. That included hunting and fishing, and allowed the Interior Department to issue only a limited number of livestock grazing permits. It also prohibited Americans from building bathrooms and fire pits. More consequentially, it put most of those lands off-limits for mining, oil and gas drilling, and logging. And most motorized vehicles, including trucks, ATVs and motorbikes were shut out. Returning most of those acres to local control will reverse what oil and gas companies call a federal land grab. National monuments are somewhat like national parks: lands that are protected by law from most development. While Congress creates national parks, howveer, national monuments are created by presidents under the 1906 Antiquities Act, a law that allows the White House to unilaterally mark millions of acres off-limits. The Antiquities Act requires presidents to limit their national monument designations to the 'the smallest area compatible' with the care of the land. Advertisement
Asked if he was sending a message to Romney, Trump would only say: 'He's a good man. Mitt's a good man.'
Hatch introduced Trump on Monday, saying he had the 'redundant task' of introducing the most famous man in the world.
Trump's move to shrink the sprawling Utah national monuments by nearly two-thirds overall has drawn howls from environmentalists and some tribal leaders, who call the move illegal and another affront to Native Americans.
San Juan County, Utah Commissioner Rebecca Benally, a Navajo native, spoke Monday before Trump and said she was outraged by the establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument 'in our own backyard.'
Benally, a Democrat, said her people had been denied access to 'an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware' where they had harvested medicinal plants and harvested wood for centuries.
She cast the battle over Bears Ears as a struggle between natives who want to stay connected to their ancestral lands and bureaucrats who want to control them.
Trump shrunk Bears Ears by nearly 85 percent and reduce Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by almost half.
The plan would cut the total amount of land in the state's red rock country protected under monument status from more than 3.2 million acres (5,000 square miles) to about 1.2 million acres (1,875 square miles).
Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, said after Trump's speech that his decision 'tears at the heart of America's conservation legacy and is a direct assault on sacred lands and tribal sovereignty.'
Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch traveled with Trump aboard Air Force One to Salt Lake City
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke rode in the Bears Ears National Monument in Blanding, Utah earlier this year while plans were being drawn up to shrink their scale
'President Trump has denied future generations the opportunity to learn about the past and explore the remote mesas and canyons that have inspired visitors and inhabitants, dating back thousands of years,' he claimed.
'I'm confident that this shameful action will rightly face the same types of legal challenges as others pushed through by a White House hell-bent on appeasing a few extreme interests at the expense of the interests and values of the American people,' Heinrich added.
The proposals prompted an outcry from environmental groups, tribal leaders and others who say Trump's actions threaten important archaeological and cultural resources, especially Bears Ears, a more than 1.3 million-acre site in southeastern Utah that features thousands of Native American artifacts, including ancient cliff dwellings and petroglyphs.
Trump has told Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and other Utah officials that he will follow the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to shrink both monuments, but the White House and Zinke's office have not offered details about how they'd redraw the monument boundaries.
How it's expected to happen: The reduced scale of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was revealed in leaked documents
Little left: One leaked document showed how the scale of the Bears Ears National Monument could be reduced
The proposed changes would be the most significant reductions by any president to monument designations made under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president wide authority to protect federal sites considered historic or geographically or culturally significant.
Trump ordered Zinke to review 27 monuments created in the past two decades, with Bears Ears the top priority. Trump called some monument designations by his Democratic predecessors a 'massive federal land grab' that 'should never have happened.'
President Barack Obama created the Bears Ears monument last year after tribal leaders and environmental groups clamored for protection of land considered sacred by Native Americans.
Grand Staircase-Escalante was created by President Bill Clinton in 1996.
Supporters of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments gathered during a rally on Saturday in Salt Lake City
A spokeswoman for the Interior Department said the newspaper 'has very old, outdated and inaccurate information.'
The spokeswoman, Heather Swift, declined to offer any other details.
But the NRDC called it 'an unprecedented attack on our nation's most cherished public lands.'
'This is unprecedented and its illegal,' the group's president Rhea Suh said.
'Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are iconic American lands. In stripping out their needed protections, Trump swept aside the voices of the American people, nearly three million of whom filed formal comments calling for him to leave the monuments alone. Trump is breaking the promise weve made, as a nation to future Americans and to all Americans to forever protect these lands,' the group said.
Utah's Republican leaders, including Hatch, have said the monuments declared by Obama and Clinton unnecessarily locked up too much land and asked Trump to shrink or rescind them.
Hatch said in a statement Thursday that 'details of the president's announcement are his and his alone to share,' but added: 'I appreciate his willingness to listen to my advice and even more importantly, to give the people of Utah a voice in this process.'
Trump's action, 'following Secretary Zinke's fair, thorough and inclusive review, will represent a balanced solution and a win for everyone on all sides of this issue,' Hatch said.
Natalie Landreth, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, said her group has already drafted a lawsuit to challenge Trump's action, which she called unprecedented and illegal.
'He will not be able to bask in one day of applause at the Salt Lake City airport' before being sued, she said.
Randi Spivak, public lands program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, called Trump's actions a disgrace. 'He wants to turn public lands over to corporations to mine, frack, bulldoze and clear-cut until there's nothing left,' she said.
TV star Ferne McCann's ex had been cleared of a second nightclub attack weeks after he was convicted to throwing acid at a venue
The ex-boyfriend of Towie star Ferne McCann was cleared of punching a bouncer in the face at celebrity haunt Chinawhite today as he awaits sentence for throwing acid over 14 clubbers.
Arthur Collins, 25, was said to have thumped doorman Ebrima Sanneh in the mouth outside the exclusive nightclub in Fitzrovia on 3 July last year.
He and a group of five friend were denied VIP entry after failing to book a table and began verbally abusing the security staff when asked to join the general queue, it was said.
The group then allegedly rushed the doormen who struggled to hold them back.
Collins was accused of launching a violent assault against Mr Sanneh, punching him in the jaw before he was restrained by Mr Sanneh's colleagues.
Two of Collins' friends distracted the bouncers allowing him to escape running off down the road, prosecutors claimed.
Mr Sanneh was taken to hospital and left with a permanent scar following the incident.
The court's ruling came on the same day Collins' ex McCann showed off their baby on TV
Collins was charged after a melee outside celebrity venue Chinawhite in July last year
Collins was due to stand trial for assault occasioning actual bodily harm at Southwark Crown Court today but prosecutors offered no evidence against him.
He said that the charge was being dropped 'on the basis that it is no longer in the public interest to continue with this prosecution'.
Judge Joanna Korner lamented 'the amount of time, not to mention public money' that is 'wasted' bringing cases to court and allowing them to progress before offering no evidence on the eve of the trial.
She ordered a not guilty verdict to be recorded against Collins, who was not in court.
Collins was cleared on the same day as Ferne McCann showed off her and his baby in the TV interview on ITV's This Morning.
The reality star discussed how her pregnancy proved to be the distraction she needed as she came to grips with Collins' acid attack.
Collins is awaiting sentence for a nightclub acid attack which left clubbers with terrible burns
She said: 'For me, there was always light at the end of the tunnel. It has been a turbulent seven months for me but I had something to look forward to. That was my focus.
'I needed to focus on keeping healthy, on not being stressed, and by doing that I was surrounding myself with friends and family, being busy, I kept on working.'
Last month Collins was convicted of five counts of GBH with intent and nine of causing actual bodily harm against 14 clubbers.
He faces years behind bars when he is sentenced on December 19 at Wood Green Crown Court after Judge Noel Lucas QC warned him: 'There's no sentence to be passed except for a very significant one.'
Chinawhite, synonymous with celebs such as Kate Moss and Leonardo Di Caprio moved from its original Soho home to Fitzrovia in 2009.
Since the move it has hosted many celebrities including Prince Harry, Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise, Niall Horan, Usain Bolt, Lindsay Rihanna, Kendall Jenner, Lewis Hamilton, Gigi and Bella Hadid and Justin Bieber.
An Indian beer tycoon dubbed The King Of Good Times claimed billions in loans that he could never repay to try and save his failing airline, a court heard today.
Vijay Mallya, 61, said his struggling airline would be profitable by 2011 and now faces fraud charges in India after the firm collapsed with an estimated $1.3billion of debts.
Mallya came to Britain in March 2016 after Kingfisher Airlines failed due to enormous unpaid loans, bills and wages five years ago, it is said.
The flamboyant magnate defaulted on huge loans from a state-run bank in India and allegedly misused the funds by rerouting them through the Force India F1 team, which he has a stake in.
Vijay Mallya, 61, (pictured outside Westminster Magistrates' Court on Monday) has a stake in the Force India F1 team
Mallya (pictured) is known for his lavish lifestyle and has been compared to Virgin billionaire Richard Branson
Mallya appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court today wearing a dark pinstripe suit, rings on his fingers, hair worn in a mullet and chain-smoking cigars.
The tycoon, who is known for his lavish lifestyle, has a stake in India's only Formula One team, Force India, and has been compared to Virgin billionaire Richard Branson.
Mark Summers, prosecuting, told Mallya's extradition hearing: 'This airline was in trouble at this stage which is why it was seeking financial help from a large number of banks for a large amount of money.
'It was claiming that it would emerge profitable in the near future.'
There were two loans from IDBI - a five-year loan for 9.5billion made on October 1, 2009 and a six-month loan for 1.5 billion on October 7, 2009.
Mr Summers said the loans were sanctioned 'on the basis that this is an airline that is going to turn profitable in its business plan by 2011, despite the fact that it had not been profitable at any point.
'That is what emerges from their prognosis as being given to the bank and the bank is then able to sanction these loans - this was just wrong.
'It is no coincidence that the repayment plan was set to begin in February 2011.'
Guarantees were based on the power of the Kingfisher brand as a brewing and spirits mainstay, aircrafts and on the word of Mallya himself, the court heard.
Mallya (right) appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court today wearing a dark pinstripe suit, rings on his fingers, hair worn in a mullet and chain-smoking cigars (left)
He told reporters outside court that doubters in the Force India F1 team would have to 'eat their words.'
Mallya, who is known as the King of Good Times, faces conspiracy to commit fraud charges in relation to the hefty loans.
He allegedly laundered money through a variety of banks across Europe and diverted funds to tax havens.
A Mumbai court issued a warrant for his arrest and sent Metropolitan Police an extradition request in February.
The businessman was arrested in April and paid a 650,000 security to secure his release on conditional bail.
Mallya, of Tewin, Herfordshire, earlier dismissed the allegations on his @TheVijayMallya Twitter account, saying they are 'media hype'.
He added: 'I did not flee from India and neither am I an absconder.'
The businessman was arrested in April and paid a 650,000 security to secure his release on conditional bail
Indian authorities claim that between December 31 2008 and November 28 2009 he conspired together with A.Raghunathan, Yogesh Agarwal and B.K.Batra to defraud IDBI Bank by dishonestly causing or permitting IDBA Bank to loan 9,000million (104million) Rupees to Kingfisher Airlines Limited.
He is further charged with money laundering. The extradition hearing is expected to last for a fortnight.
Mark Summers, for the Indian government, told the hearing: 'The government says that there are three reasons why the court could conclude that this was a loan that the defendant never intended to repay.
'His company was in intensive care, the market was in intensive care, it was heading only in one direction.
'As it went down it was going to sustain large losses and the defendant had a choice - either take these losses yourself and impose on your own lavish lifestyle or try and palm them off to the bank.'
The hearing continues.
President Donald Trump's lawyer has rolled out a new defense that his client couldn't have committed obstruction of justice because he's the president.
The legal argument by Trump lawyer John Dowd comes amid an ongoing probe of Russian election interference where possible obstruction could feature prominently.
The president 'cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution's Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case,' Trump's lawyer, John Dowd, told Axios.
Dowd's claim follows a Trump tweet on Saturday about former national security advisor Mike Flynn, using language that some legal observers say amounted to an acknowledgement that he committed obstruction.
The tweet which Dowd on Sunday says he wrote contained language saying Trump knew Flynn had lied to the FBI when he fired him in February.
Trump's personal lawyer, John Dowd has admitted that he crafted a controversial tweet that appeared on the President's personal account on Saturday. He said the president 'cannot obstruct justice'
In another key event in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe, former FBI Director James Comey testified that Trump pressured him to back off a probe of Flynn, asking him to 'see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.' Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI.
Dowd's statement immediately brought comparisons to Watergate, where Nixon was in fact facing an article of impeachment based on obstruction.
Trump tweeted on Saturday: 'I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!' Trump wrote.
After the tweet drew immediate controversy, Dowd said it was in fact he who composed it.
MY LAWYER WROTE THIS: This tweet by Donald Trump led to accusations that the president had obstructed justice after allegedly telling James Comey to back off Michael Flynn while also knowing that Flynn lied to the FBI. But now the White House says his personal lawyer made the tweet
Dowd argued that the president cannot commit obstruction because he is the nation's chief law enforcement officer under the Constitution
John Dowd is part of President Trump's legal team, and says he wrote the president's recent tweet about Mike Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI
Speaking to ABC News, the lawyer said the social media post was 'my mistake' and that he had not intended 'to break news' in writing it. He said he used 'sloppy' language.
Dowd's admission did not clarify if Trump actually knew about Flynn's deception when he dismissed him in February or whether the President knew the tweet had been published on Saturday.
He hadn't meant to say Trump had advance knowledge of Flynn lying to the FBI, but had only learned of it recently.
The claim brought comparisons to President Richard Nixon's claim that 'when the president does it, that means it is not illegal'
'The tweet did not admit obstruction. That is an ignorant and arrogant assertion,' Dowd told Axios.
The tweet got sent while Trump's motorcade was stuck in traffic as it left a Republican fundraising event in New York City.
Flynn was fired on February 13. At the time, the President said the decision was based on him misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his interaction with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 22, 2016.
Former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer told Axios: 'It is certainly possible for a president to obstruct justice. The case for immunity has its adherents, but they based their position largely on the consideration that a president subject to prosecution would be unable to perform the duties of the office, a result that they see as constitutionally intolerable.'
Dowd's statement evoked claims by President Nixon about presidential prerogatives following his decision to resign while facing possible impeachment including on an obstruction charge.
'Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal,' he told David Frost in one their one-on-one interviews.
Scotland, Wales and even London rushed to demand their own special Brexit deal today after it appeared Theresa May was about to agree to special conditions in Northern Ireland.
Leaks from tense talks in Brussels signalled that Northern Ireland would be allowed to maintain 'regulatory alignment' with the rest of the EU.
The intention is to avoid a hard border between the UK and Ireland by ensuring the rules on both sides of the border remain similar after Brexit.
But the idea was seized upon as a way for other parts of Britain which voted Remain to maintain close ties with the EU - and even to effectively stay in the single market.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (pictured last week at Edinburgh Castle) said Scotland should be allowed the same rights to stay close to the EU as apparently proposed for Northern Ireland
London Mayor Sadiq Khan (pictured today in Mumbai) said a separate deal for politicians in Belfast should be matched for London
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones (file image) said he expected Wales to be offered the same chances as other parts of the UK
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was first with her demand, tweeting: 'If one part of UK can retain regulatory alignment with EU and effectively stay in the single market (which is the right solution for Northern Ireland) there is surely no good practical reason why others cant.'
Amid discussion over whether the agreement for Belfast amounted to either Britain adopting a Norway-style Brexit that stays close to the EU or a special deal for Northern Ireland, Ms Sturgeon intervened again.
She said: 'If its not some kind of Norway status for whole UK, it must mean some kind of special deal for NI. Has to be one or the other.
'And if latter, why not also for Scotland, London and Wales (if it wants it)?'
London Mayor Sadiq Khan - who is on a visit to India this week - was next to intervene.
He went even further, suggesting the deal would leave Northern Ireland in the single market.
He said: 'Huge ramifications for London if Theresa May has conceded that it's possible for part of the UK to remain within the single market and customs union after Brexit.
'Londoners overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and a similar deal here could protect tens of thousands of jobs.'
Ms Sturgeon said there was no reason for one part of the UK to keep regulatory alignment and not another
Mr Khan said the prospect of agreement on Northern Ireland had 'huge ramifications' for London, which was one of the few parts of Britain to vote Remain
Welsh first minister Mr Jones followed his devolved colleagues and said he expected Wales to be made the 'same offer'
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones then joined in to insist: 'We cannot allow different parts of the UK to be more favourably treated than others.
'If one part of the UK is granted continued participation in the Single Market and Customs Union, then we fully expect to be made the same offer.'
The British side is said to have signed up to enough 'continued regulatory alignment' between Northern Ireland and the Republic to 'support North South cooperation and the protection of the Good Friday agreement'.
That leaves considerably more wriggle room than the initial wording of 'no regulatory divergence'.
European council president Donald Tusk, who will meet the PM later, hinted that a deal was now effectively in place, tweeting: 'Tell me why I like Mondays! Encouraged after my phone call with Taoiseach @campaignforleo on progress on issue of Ireland.
'Getting closer to sufficient progress at December.'
Last month, like every year, Christy Adams baked a cake for her son Jesses birthday. She gathered up his favorite toys and thought about her dearest memories from his childhood; then she drove to the cemetery, which she has visited every November 5 since 2012.
This is where Jesse now rests; he would have been nine this year. He was stolen from Christy on a horrific night of violence, when her husband fatally shot three-year-old Jesse and then himself all while she listened on the phone during a desperate drive to reach them.
Hes present every day in everything that we do, says Christy, now 30, who is also mother to Jesses older siblings Christopher, 10, and Faith, 13. She admits, sadly, that she still sometimes sets a place absentmindedly for her youngest child.
I dont know why I do it; it just happens, she tells DailyMail.com. Ill take out the extra plate and fork for him like hes here, and hes not.
The holidays are a particularly difficult time for Christy, who keenly feels Jesses absence, though they do offer an opportunity to fondly remember him.
Theyre hard for me, says Christy, who lives in Oak City, North Carolina. I dont push it on my children; if they want to talk to me about it, they know that they can and they do, from time to time. I have Jesses pictures and the items that he loved sitting all over the house, so hes here, but hes not here, I guess is the easiest way to explain it.
Christy Adams, 30, and her son, Christopher, fondly remember her younger son, Jesse - who was fatally shot by his father, CJ, while Christy was on the other end of the phone call
Christy gave birth to Jesse in 2008; he would have turned nine on November 5 - when she visited his grave, as she does every year
Christy keeps Jesse's toy truck and other favorite items in the household; she say she sometimes absentmindedly still sets a place for him at the dinner table
Christy's husband, Carey 'CJ' Adams, was a family friend she had always had a crush on; they got together when she was pregnant with her older son, Christopher - and she said she initially had 'not even the slightest idea' of his dark side
On Christmas, we each give like a memory gift; my mom will give me a memory gift, Ill give my mom one, as far as something that pertains to Jesse or we would think that he would be into this year.
As far as me and Christopher and Faith, we have special ornaments that we put on the Christmas tree every year, Christy says. A couple of them have his name on them; one he got when he finished potty training.
And while its often hard to talk about the loss of Jesse, Christy feels she has a mission to share her familys tragic story and educate others about domestic violence especially around the holidays.
You have families that are home together more often than not and thats actually when violence of any sort picks up, she tells DailyMail.com.
I hope that my story, Jesses story, our story does help people, she says. I hope that they see the timeline, they see everything that I went through, that my children went through, and they know at that point, once Im done with my story, that there is help. There are people that are standing behind them that will support them in any way, shape or form.
Christys tragic story began in July 2007, when she was heavily pregnant with Christopher. She was at her stepfathers birthday party, and the single mother wasnt looking for love but she reconnected with a family friend, CJ Adams. Shed always had a crush on him, and he convinced her to go on a date. So started a whirlwind romance; he was present for Christophers birth in September and they got married in November; by February, she was pregnant with their son, Jesse.
Looking back, Christy now realizes that the pace of their relationship should have been an early red flag.
It was extremely quick and that is one major warning sign: fast-paced, everything moving quickly, she says. Alcohol was involved; he was kind of agitated all the time to begin with hot-headed, if you want to say. And I didnt think anything of it thats obviously a warning sign, being angry about little things.
The change in CJs behavior began right before the wedding, she says; before that, she had not even the slightest idea.
He seemed like a nice, normal person, she says.
The emotional and verbal abuse started right before we got married, she says. We got into this huge argument the night before our wedding day, and then it just gradually increased from there. He never really physically abused me, [except] the one time; most of his abuse was emotional and verbal.
The one incident to which she refers which prompted her to take her children and leave CJ occurred in January 2010. CJ, a neat freak, got upset that Christy had left a pile of books on the table. Even though she was holding her two sons in her arms, he threw her onto the floor. She hit her head on the air-conditioning unit, and then he smacked her head on the microwave.
Terrified, Christy ran upstairs with the kids and locked them all in a bedroom.
The next morning he acted as if nothing had happened, Christy says. I went to the police and I filed a restraining order against him, then I took the boys to live with my mother Tammy.
I stayed with mom and CJ was devastated. He bombarded me with calls, promised to change, told me it would never happen again So a few months later, I took him back in because I could see the man I had fallen in love with.
They moved into a home next to CJs mother, and everything seemed relatively fine for about a year until CJ, who worked as an electrician and did landscaping, lost his job. His drinking picked up and Christy, who was studying for her associate degree in healthcare management, worked two jobs to support the family.
I could see things deteriorating at that point, she says. I was working on saving up money to actually leave.
CJ, she says, was depressed; he was always ill and ornery. He was always drinking. He would definitely yell; he wouldnt get violent unless something upset him but it was also very easy to upset him when he was drinking. If you looked at him wrong, thatd upset him When he was in a bad mood, he was going to make sure everyone else around him was in a bad mood.
When she eventually had a weekend off, she took her children to visit her father and CJ started a massive argument over the phone. So she decided enough was enough and didnt return to their shared home; instead, she got started on filing legal paperwork in June 2012. She arranged joint custody of Jesse with CJ.
I never thought he would hurt Jesse, and thats why I was okay with joint custody, she says.
During the last family holiday before the deaths, Christy, right, and CJ, center, took their children to visit the set of a televisions how called Lizard Lick about towing and recovery
Jesse was Christy's third child and her only with CJ, whom she married after only four months of dating; she became pregnant with Jesse three months later
Christopher, right, and Jesse were only 14 months apart; the older brother underwent four years of counseling following Jesse's murder and has 'separation issues,' his mother says
Christy also says she has difficulty trusting following the murder-suicide; she says she's very careful about whose care she leaves her surviving children in
The following month, however, she would be faced with unspeakable tragedy after CJ unraveled. Jesse was staying with his dad and Christopher had been scheduled to be there, too, but he was with Christys mother instead.
I called CJ to say goodnight to Jesse but he was in an argumentative mood, Christy says. He called me a stupid bitch and he was angry that I wouldnt take him back again.
I told him that I wasnt going to talk to him like that and that I would call the next morning, so I hung up. I had two cell phones at the time and my mom called me a few minutes later.
CJ had called Christys mother and threatened to kill himself and Jesse so Christy jumped in the car and drove furiously to the home they used to share. On the way, she called the police but then CJ called her back on the other phone.
He told me that if I didnt take him back within a week he was going to kill himself and Jesse. I begged him not to harm our son, Christy says.
Suddenly, Jesse was on the phone. Mommy, Im going to die tonight, he said, and I started screaming down the phone. Jesse, I love you, it will be okay.
Suddenly, there was a loud popping sound and then CJ got on the phone. Ive just killed Jesse and its your fault, he said and I lost it. I was hysterical, screaming for Jesse.
CJ told me that he was on the bed bleeding to death. He was so calm.
She was in disbelief that CJ had actually harmed Jesse, hoping that the noise shed heard was just her husband dropping the phone and the authorities had warned her not to approach the house when she pulled up.
She heard another loud pop, which she later found out was the gunshot CJ inflicted on himself.
He told me on the phone when he saw the sheriff that he wasnt going to jail as a babykiller, and he shot himself, she says. After that I was just sitting on the side of the road waiting for the deputy to come and get me or bring my child out to me.
When she was approached by an officer, however, he told her to get in his car and rushed her to the hospital.
He told me he was going to try to get me there to say my final goodbyes to my son, she says. I got to the hospital and I was five minutes late. He had already passed.
She says: I remember I sat with him on my lap in the rocking chair, not wanting to let him go. I kept whispering to him how much I loved him and how sorry I was that this had happened to him.
As the sun came up, I went home. All I had of my treasured little boy was his blue teddy bear that the police had given me.
She tells DailyMail.com: After Jesse passed and we were outside the hospital, I promised him that I was not going to let his name die in vain and thats one of the reasons that I do the work that I do as far as telling my story.
Christy, who has since earned her bachelors degree in healthcare administration, has also learned a huge amount about domestic violence and is determined to use her story and her loss to help other families from experiencing the same pain.
Christopher, left, still has a box of Jesses clothes in his wardrobe that he gets out every now and then and he still sleeps with his younger brother's pillow
Christy says that she never imagined that her husband CJ would ever Jesse, center
Christy says that she and Christopher, right, talk about Jesse 'all the time and we can smile now. Christopher wonders what Jesse would be like now, what he would be into, and it breaks my heart to think hes gone forever
Christy initially hoped that a loud sound she heard while on the phone with her husband simply meant that he had dropped the phone; she did not immediately believe that he had shot Jesse
Christy says that many domestic abuse victims hide the violence or feel ashamed - but reminds them they have done nothing wrong and should seek help
Its not easy to get out of a violent situation on your own and the main thing is for people to know that there are people behind them that are here to help them in any way that they can, says Christy. Ive actually offered a few ladies my home a few times.
At the same time, in most cases, the person doesnt see that theyre in a violent situation or doesnt want to see it. The biggest thing that people do and they dont realize theyre doing it until after the fact is they hide the violence. They hide the issues. People are ashamed of it. I was ashamed of it, too, but its okay to be ashamed of it; I mean, theres nothing really to be ashamed of.
Thats the main thing people dont understand that you have no reason to be ashamed. Youve done nothing wrong.
She says: About two weeks ago, I had a friend of mine contact me. She has a friend that was in a violent situation, but she doesnt see it so she wanted me to go and talk to this friend and try to get her to see it. And thats, unfortunately, thats really all you can do, is wait for that person thats in that situation to see that they are in it because you cant help someone that doesnt want help.
As horrible as her story is, she reiterates that there is hope and there is help. Its been difficult for her and her children; Christopher lives with Christy and her new boyfriend, while Faith lives with her biological father but spends every other weekend with the family.
He went through about four years of counseling to help him get through it, she says of Christopher. So he talked with his therapist a lot more about it than he did me, for the simple fact that I was also healing. So every time I talked about it, I would get upset and he didnt like to upset me. But now me and him talk about it when he wants to talk about it.
While the 30-year-old mother has found a new relationship, she says her history of abuse and the loss of Jesse makes it hard for her to trust.
Its an everyday struggle, she says. Ill put it to you this way: I dont leave my children with anyone at all unless [its] my mom, his grandma on his dads side because Im very cautious about who my children are around at this point.
Christopher, she says, has separation issues.
He worries that if I leave him anywhere, I wont pick him up, Christy says. He thinks that I will leave him, just like Jesse did.
He has a box of Jesses clothes in his wardrobe that he gets out every now and then and he still sleeps with Jesses pillow.
We talk him about all the time and we can smile now. Christopher wonders what Jesse would be like now, what he would be into, and it breaks my heart to think hes gone forever.
Matt Lauer has been spotted still wearing his wedding ring as he finally ventured out of his Hamptons compound to do the school run on Monday.
The disgraced former talk show host has been staying at his private Sag Harbor home, in Long Island, since he was fired from the Today show last week over sexual misconduct claims.
On Monday, he was seen behind the wheel of his gray Jeep Wrangler, taking his 11-year-old son, Thijs, to school. Page Six reports that Lauer illegally spoke on his cellphone while his son was in the car.
The married 59-year-old stopped off at a gated property in nearby North Haven to pick up a friend of his son's and as he reached out to press the intercom, he flashed his gold wedding band. Lauer later dropped them off at Sag Harbor Elementary School.
He may still be wearing his ring, but sources say his marriage to Annette Roque has been on the rocks for years and they have even been living separately.
The Dutch-born former model is reported to have fled their Hamptons home on Wednesday, just 24 hours after Lauer was fired, and flown to see her family in her native Amsterdam, a source told Page Six.
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Matt Lauer has been spotted still wearing his wedding ring as he finally ventured out of his Long Island compound to do the school run on Monday
The married 59-year-old stopped off at a property just five minutes away from his home to pick up a friend of his son's
He was spotted using the intercom to get into his friends gated home, where he flashed his wedding ring (pictured)
Lauer was fired last Tuesday as host of NBC's flagship morning show after over 20 years as co-anchor. The dismissal came as a result of sexual harassment complaints from an NBC employee.
Last week, his former co-hosts were forced to break the news of his dismissal on the show. However, this morning's Today show made no mention was made of the scandal.
Since news of Lauer's firing, at least seven other women have come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct.
While much of the country was shocked by the news given Lauer's squeaky clean image as a wholesome good guy, those who knew the couple say that he was a bad husband.
Lauer's alleged history of infidelity reportedly forced his wife to keep close tabs on him when he took trips abroad because she didn't trust him.
When Roque sought to divorce Lauer years ago, Lauer reportedly offered her $5million in cash to remain in the marriage.
Matt Lauer was later seen driving with his daughter Romy in the same car
Romy appeared to be on her phone as her dad drove to an East Hampton parking lot
The disgraced former talk show host has been staying at his private Sag Harbor home since he was fired from the Today show last week over sexual misconduct claims but was spotted out on Monday during the school run
As he reached out to press the intercom to enter their gated home, he flashed his gold wedding band. Lauer later dropped his son and his friend off at school
The image-conscious Lauer made the cash offer because he was reportedly so concerned about how a divorce might be perceived by his audience.
Lauer and Roque met on a blind date in 1997, the same year he took over as co-anchor of Today in place of the departing Bryant Gumbel.
While Lauer rose to television stardom with his Today show gig, Roque has been featured in Victoria's Secret catalogs as well as in advertisements for J. Crew.
According to Page Six, Lauer, who had a reputation as a philanderer, was urged to settle down and get married by NBC executives who were concerned that his playboy image would hurt the Today show given its heavily female viewership.
Lauer and Roque were married less than a year after they met, but it was reportedly a tumultuous union.
Three years after the birth of their first child, Jack, in 2003, Lauer and Roque separated after the newsman returned from covering the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.
Lauer was wearing dark shades while he got behind the wheel of his dark gray Jeep during the school run on Long Island
It is one of the first times he's been spotted since he was fired from the Today show over the sexual misconduct claim
Rumors swirled that Lauer was having an affair with Natalie Moralies, who was then a correspondent for the Today show. Both have vehemently denied the rumors.
Nonetheless, Roque, who was seven months pregnant at the time, filed for divorce from Lauer, whom she accused of 'cruel and inhumane' treatment and 'extremely controlling' behavior.
'Defendant has continuously and repeatedly given higher priority to personal interests than his family obligations to plaintiff, causing plaintiff to feel abandoned, isolated and alone in raising the parties' children,' according to court papers, which were leaked in 2014.
Roque would eventually withdraw her petition for divorce three weeks before giving birth to the couple's second child, Thijs.
There was no explanation given for why Roque had second thoughts about the divorce, though it was reported that Lauer offered her $5million to remain in the marriage.
'Matt needed to stay in the marriage to keep his reputation as America's nicest dad,' according to a source quoted by Page Six.
He may still be wearing his ring, but sources say his marriage to Annette Roque has been on the rocks for years and they have even been living separately, it was reported on Saturday. The couple is seen above in Bridgehampton, New York on September 1, 2013
Lauer's alleged history of infidelity reportedly forced his wife to keep close tabs on him when he took trips abroad because she didn't trust him. When Roque sought to divorce Lauer years ago, Lauer reportedly offered her $5million in cash to remain in the marriage. The couple is seen in Bridgehampton, New York on August 31, 2014
'He is in fact a very doting dad to his kids, but he is also a terrible husband.'
Things appeared to be fine until Lauer returned from covering the Olympics in Vancouver in early 2010.
After news reports emerged suggesting that Lauer partied hard in Canada, Roque reportedly was so angry that she and her husband began living separately.
Since 2011, Roque and her three children were reportedly living in their home in Sag Harbor, while Lauer stayed in Manhattan during the week.
The Upper East Side apartment at 133 East 64th Street was also the address of Bernie Madoff, the infamous Ponzi schemer.
On weekends, Lauer would reportedly make the trip to Long Island to join them.
'They play happy families at their Hamptons home on weekends, and then she lets him run off to New York to do "Today" - and goodness knows what else,' RadarOnline quoted one source as saying.
Lauer's Sag Harbor estate is one of a number of swanky Long Island properties that the former Today co-host owns
There is an 8,000-square-foot home built in 2001 along with a tennis court and multiple secret gardens on the Sag Harbor estate
Despite her celebrity status, Roque is rarely seen in public.
When she does appear, it is usually to attend the Hampton Classic horse show. Roque and her daughter are avid equestrians.
In 2012, Lauer purchased a 40-acre property near their Long Island home and converted it into a horse farm with stables for 36 animals, 16 paddocks, two outdoor riding rings, cross-country trails, and a climate-controlled indoor ring.
Lauer even owns five horses himself, but it was been widely rumored that the horses were a gift to his wife whenever she caught him cheating.
Locals who see Lauer near his Manhattan apartment say that they cannot recall ever seeing him and his wife together dining.
Lauer is known to be a frequent customer at Donahue's Steak House, a whiskey bar across the street from his apartment.
Neighbors told Page Six they see Lauer there at least three nights a week but he's on his own.
The family of a Minnesota teen who died after a routine wisdom tooth surgery has reached a $2million legal settlement.
Sydney Galleger, 17, went into cardiac arrest after her blood pressure shot up during the June 2015 procedure and she later died in the hospital.
Sydney's family had filed a wrongful death suit against her dentist, Dr Paul Tompach, alleging that his 'negligent and dangerous' actions during the routine surgery led to the teen's death.
Dr Tompach, who temporarily had his right to practice suspended by a state licensing board, and the family of Sydney had been scheduled to go to trial in May 2018, reported The Star Tribune.
The family of a Minnesota teen who died after a routine wisdom tooth surgery has reached a $2million legal settlement. Sydney Galleger, 17 (pictured, right, with her mother), went into cardiac arrest after her blood pressure shot up during the June 2015 procedure and she later died in the hospital
Galleger's family had filed a wrongful death suit against her dentist, Dr Paul Tompach (pictured), alleging that his 'negligent and dangerous' actions during the routine surgery led to the teen's death. His license was temporarily suspended
Dr Tompachs license to practice was suspended in January 2016 after the death of 17-year-old who was a junior at Eden Prairie High School, a diver on the high school swim team and an Alpine skier.
It was resumed under restrictions put in place about six weeks later by the state Board of Dentistry. The restrictions were lifted in late June of this year.
An investigation revealed that Dr Tompach allowed an uncertified dental assistant to monitor Sydney after administering anesthesia, and failed to respond appropriately when the emergency transpired.
The suit that was filed this past January saw Sydney's family seeking more than $500,000 in damages, according to The Star Tribune.
It's estimated that her death cost the family $200,000 in funeral and medical expenses.
Under terms of the publicly disclosed settlement, parents Diane and Steven Galleger will receive $1,279,600, the law firm representing them $740,000 and the familys health insurer $40,400 for medical expenses related to the death.
The suit that was filed this past January saw Sydney's (pictured left and right) family seeking more than $500,000 in damages, according to The Star Tribune. It's estimated that her death cost the family $200,000 in funeral and medical expenses
The Galleger family originally said they did not foresee taking legal action in Sydney's death, so the legal action represented a change in mindset.
They were left further devastated in September 2016 when a definitive cause of death was not found by the autopsy.
Sydney's mother Diane Galleger told The Star Tribune at the time that she was unsure whether there would be further tests to determine the cause of death.
'We were just hoping for an answer,' she said. 'Could she have had a slight reaction to the medications causing everything to misfire? Unlikely, but we will never know. We just wanted God to give us something, give us an answer why our healthy, happy daughter is no longer with us.'
Medical examiners noted that they were unable to rule out the 'potential contributing role' in her death of a medication that Galleger was receiving during the oral surgery.
Diane said she doesn't foresee a lawsuit against the oral surgeon or his practice.
During the June 9 extraction, Sydney's blood pressure suddenly shot up, her pulse dropped and she went into a cardiac arrest.
The oral surgeon frantically started performing CPR on the teen as emergency crews rushed to the scene.
Sydney was then transported to the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children's Hospital, where she was placed on a ventilator to help with her breathing.
In subsequent days, she suffered numerous seizures and underwent surgery to fit a drain in her skull to relieve the swelling of her brain. However, her brain continued to swell, cutting off the drain.
During the June 9 extraction, Sydney's blood pressure suddenly shot up, her pulse dropped and she went into a cardiac arrest. In subsequent days, she (pictured with her parents) suffered numerous seizures and underwent surgery to fit a drain in her skull to relieve the swelling of her brain. However, her brain continued to swell, cutting off the drain
In the early hours of June 12, doctors informed Diane and Steve and the teen's younger brother, Jack, that there was nothing more they could do.
'As you can imagine, that was the most devastating news we have ever received,' Diane wrote on the CaringBridge page, where she and her relatives had been providing updates on Sydney.
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The sunken city of the Caesars, lost for 1,700 years beneath waves off of Italy's west coast, has been revealed in stunning new photographs taken by divers who were allowed to explore the area.
Baiae was the Las Vegas for the super-rich of the 1st Century's ancient Rome, covered in sprawling mansions and synonymous with luxury and wickedness, historians claim.
But as time passed, much of it was lost to the sea as volcanic activity caused the coastline to retreat 400metres inland, forcing the entire city underwater into what is now the Gulf of Naples in modern-day Italy.
Baiae was the Las Vegas for the super-rich of the ancient Rome, covered in sprawling mansions and synonymous with luxury and wickedness, historians claim. The 1st Century city has been revealed in stunning new photographs taken by divers who were allowed to explore the area
Much of the city was lost to the sea as volcanic activity caused the coastline to retreat 400metres inland, forcing it underwater into what is now the Gulf of Naples in modern-day Italy
Incredibly, parts of the city are still in-tact 1,700 years later. Pictured above, a diver shows off a tiled floor that was discovered in a search of the city
Antonio Busiello, who lives in Naples, photographed the site and found that roads, walls, mosaics and even statues had survived the ravages of time
Busiello said that the statues and mosaics that are still standing show the opulence that filled the city when it was still livable
In an artist's recreation of what Baiae would have looked 2,000 years ago before it was lost beneath the waves, there are sprawling mansions and squares located right on the water
The site has since been re-discovered, 1,700 years after disappearing beneath the waves on the west coast of Italy.
Divers were allowed to explore the site recently and snapped photos of the treasures that can still be found at the underwater city.
Antonio Busiello, who lives in Naples, photographed the site and found that roads, walls, mosaics and even statues had survived the ravages of time.
The 45-year-old said: 'The beautiful mosaics, and the villas and temples that have reemerged or are still underwater show the opulence and wealth of this area.
'It was considered one of the most important Roman cities for centuries. Pliny the Younger used to live here and from here, across the gulf, he witnessed and described the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum.'
In its heyday, Baiae was frequented by famous Romans including Julius Caesar, Nero, Pompey the Great, Marius, and Hadrian - who died there
Among the sights now visible are the Pisoni and Protiro villas, where intricate white mosaics as well as residential rooms can be seen
There's also the Nymphaeum of Punta Epitaffio, where divers swim among the statues of Ulysses and his helmsman Baius, for whom Baiae was named
This isn't the first time the site has been searched by divers looking for remnants of the Las Vegas-like city. A documentary released earlier this year, titled Rome's Sunken Secrets, followed a series of dives led by underwater archaeologist Dr Barbara Davidde and involving historians and scientists from across the world
Vast villas, priceless statues and breathtaking mosaics, as well as heated spas, cobbled streets and even a nymphaeum a grotto of pleasure have all been found in the city beneath the sea
The city sits under water in the Gulf of Naples off of Italy's west coast. It is 150 miles south of Rome and 50 north of Pompeii
One significant find was a section of lead water pipe just a few inches in diameter inscribed 'L Pisonis' (not pictured). This pinpoints the exact location where one of the greatest scandals in Roman history unfolded
Many of the statues that are still in tact are covered in sea creatures who have made the rock figurines their homes after water over took them
He added: 'Diving here is like a dive into history, looking at ancient Roman ruins underwater is something hard to describe, a beautiful experience indeed.'
In its heyday, Baiae was frequented by famous Romans including Julius Caesar, Nero, Pompey the Great, Marius, and Hadrian - who died there.
Among the sights now visible are the Pisoni and Protiro villas, where intricate white mosaics as well as residential rooms can be seen.
There's also the Nymphaeum of Punta Epitaffio, where divers swim among the statues of Ulysses and his helmsman Baius, for whom Baiae was named.
A documentary released earlier this year, titled Rome's Sunken Secrets, followed a series of dives led by underwater archaeologist Dr Barbara Davidde and involving historians and scientists from across the world.
They revealed vast villas, priceless statues and breathtaking mosaics, as well as heated spas, cobbled streets and even a nymphaeum a grotto of pleasure in the city that lies 150 miles south of Rome and 50 north of Pompeii.
When the city was in-tact, the famed Piso family had a villa featuring its own jetty and two huge bath complexes. Divers have since found other estates in the sunken city that feature even more opulence
Divers search through what appear to have once been walls of a potential estate or square within the sunken city of the Caesars
Walls of estates in the ancient city sit just below the water's surface off the coast of western Italy. Divers can now explore the region
Divers used flashlights to closely examine the statues like the one above, which has turned into a home for sea creatures over the years
Incredibly, the black-and-white mosaics still covered space on the sea floor. It is unclear how far the tiles go on for, as much of it has been covered by shells, sand and other sea items
In one open space in the sunken city, two large statues still stand side-by-side, with their heads and limbs still nearly fully in-tact
One significant find was a section of lead water pipe just a few inches in diameter inscribed 'L Pisonis'. This pinpoints the exact location where one of the greatest scandals in Roman history unfolded.
As classics professor Kevin Dicus explains, 'L Pisonis was the mark of the Piso family. The villa it was attached to was almost certainly the property of Gaius Calpurnius Piso, who was a close friend of the Emperor Nero.
'Ancient texts tell us that Piso plotted to murder the emperor at his holiday villa in Baiae so he could become emperor instead, but he had a change of heart at the last minute. When Nero learnt about the plan, he ordered Piso to commit suicide.
'So we now know where the assassination attempt would have taken place. For the archaeologists it was like finding the Holy Grail.'
Piso's villa had its own jetty and two huge bath complexes, but that was nothing compared to the opulence at another estate the team discovered.
Slowly revealed over many dives was a mansion so luxurious archaeologists believe it was the Imperial Villa specially built for the Emperor Claudius.
Another statue in the sunken city shows a man from the torso up, apparently lifting a huge object out of the ground below him
Several fish now call the underwater city home, as it lies just under the surface off the coast of the Gulf of Naples in Italy
Despite being eroded by sand throughout the years, one statue's details can still be seen, with creases on its layered clothing
A diver examines one statue up close with a flashlight as fish swim by in the underwater city off the western coast of Italy
A man whose wife drowned when a boat capsized during their honeymoon in Thailand has told of the horrifying moment she and 31 others were killed.
Monica O'Connor, 28, from Sale, Greater Manchester, was on the island of Koh Samui with spouse Tim O'Connor, just three weeks after their wedding, when tragedy struck.
The boat had been taken out in a monsoon despite weather warnings, an inquest at South Manchester Coroner's Court heard.
Mr O'Connor, 31, described to the coroner how the vessel was overcome by the waves during the trip in May last year, capsizing in seconds.
He managed to escape, but Monica was swept away and died.
He said: 'It happened incredibly quickly. The boat tipped onto its left side, so everyone sitting on the right fell onto the people sitting opposite them.
'Within a few seconds it tipped again. I lost my glasses, but it was so dark all you could see were people's bodies.'
Monica O'Connor, 28, from Sale, Greater Manchester, was on her honeymoon in Koh Samui with husband Tim last May
As the upturned boat quickly filled with water he managed to swim out from under it.
'It was quite chaotic,' he said. 'There were bits of the boat and life jackets floating around in the water.'
It was not until Mr O'Connor arrived at the hospital that he was told his wife had died, and he says it has never been clear whether she was found trapped under the boat or in the water.
'The events of that day were terrifying and losing Monica has been devastating,' he said.
'Nothing can bring Monica back or undo the terrible loss I feel. But I hope this inquest can provide answers on whether more could have been done to ensure customer safety on the boat trip, and ultimately save Monica's life.'
Of the 32 passengers on board, there were eight Britons, nine Germans, four Australians, four Romanians, six Chinese and two from Thailand.
The other Brit killed during the tragic incident, was Jason Parnell, 46, from Sileby, Leicestershire.
Mr Parnell was celebrating his first wedding anniversary with wife Puja, when the boat was capsized.
Jason Parnell, 46, pictured above on his wedding day with his wife Puja, 31, who escaped unhurt. They were celebrating their first wedding anniversary at the popular holiday resort
A hearing at South Manchester Coroner's Court today heard they had been among 32 tourists on the boat when it capsized after it was hit by a wave as it returned from a day-long tour
Boat captain Sanan Sridakeow was jailed for a year and operator Limited Partnership Angthong Discovery Tour was fined after admitting recklessness following the crash, in which two people of other nationalities also drowned.
The court heard the boat had been taken out despite a warning for small boats not to sail due to a monsoon.
The boat was travelling from Mu Ko Ang Thong National Park when it was struck by the wave and capsized at 5pm local time.
Some of those on board were thrown into the water and became trapped underneath the boat.
Video and pictures captured the desperate rescue operations by locals and Thai marine police who had to use a hammer to smash through the hull to rescue the trapped victims.
Four tourists from the UK, Australia, Germany and Romania were taken to hospital on the island for treatment.
A heartbreaking photograph from the O'Connors' wedding shows them holding hands underneath a cloud of pink blossom, while another shows the pair at the reception
Mrs Parnell told the court she and her husband had booked the trip before arriving in Thailand because of her husband's love of boats.
But she said when they boarded in the morning of May 26 they were forced to disembark and wait while the vessel was moved because it had become stuck.
She said: 'When we were waiting for the boat I knew something wasn't right. Jason said I was being silly so we got back on the boat.'
Mrs Parnell and Mr O'Connor both said no safety briefing was given on board and passengers were only told to wear life jackets when snorkelling or kayaking during stops on the trip.
Mrs Parnell said when the boat started to return to land after the final stop the weather had got worse.
She said: 'If I had a choice I wouldn't have got back on. Something felt really uneasy.'
She described the boat being tipped on its side and then upside down after water came rushing through when it was hit by a wave.
She said: 'I got stuck in the boat and didn't know where anybody else was.'
Boat captain Sanan Sridakeow was jailed for a year and operator Limited Partnership Angthong Discovery Tour was fined after admitting recklessness following the crash, in which two people of other nationalities also drowned
Mrs Parnell was able to get a life jacket, which had been stored under the seats, and move to an air pocket where she was pulled to safety by rescuers
Mrs Parnell was able to get a life jacket, which had been stored under the seats, and move to an air pocket where she was pulled to safety by rescuers.
She said her husband's body was not found until four days later.
Mr O'Connor told the court he and his Romanian-born wife had flown out to Thailand a few days after their wedding.
He said they had laughed with other tourists on the boat about the journey before the crash.
He said: 'We we're saying it wasn't quite what we expected, it wasn't a pleasure cruise - it was a speedboat ride.
'Everyone was laughing but you think just get on with it, I suppose because once you're that far out there's only one way to get back.'
Dozens of tourists watched the aftermath of the speedboat crash as darkness fell
Mr O'Connor said once on land he spoke to a German woman who had told him she had seen his wife.
'She said Monica's face was white in the water,' he said.
'She didn't say she was dead but I guess deep down I probably knew she was dead at that point.'
He said he went to hospital, hoping his wife had been among passengers who swam to another part of the shore, but once there was asked to identify her body.
The inquest is scheduled to last three days.
A 14-year-old girl told her mother she was scared in a chilling text sent shortly before she was raped by a man she met on Facebook, a court heard.
The girl sneaked out of her home in Stroud, Gloucestershire to meet Jordan Maxwell after he flattered her on Facebook, a jury was told.
Her mother, who was travelling home at the time, then got text messages from the girl as Maxwell drove her to a secluded spot, prosecutors said.
Maxwell denies falsely imprisoning the girl in his car and raping her in May this year and is now on trial at Gloucester Crown Court.
A girl was driven to this rural location and raped by a man she met on Facebook, a court heard
Prosecutor Ian Fenny told the jury: 'Our case is that this fourteen year old girl was not quite as grown up or resourceful as she thought she was.
'You may conclude she was flattered by the interest shown in her by an older boy who was at the time just a month short of his 20th birthday.
'She agreed to meet this man at night. He knew how old she was. She had told him.'
He continued: 'There had been a casual meeting between them a couple of weeks before this incident. There had also been Facebook exchanges between them. They began to exchange messages.
'On 21st May this year they were in contact with one another during the day... She agreed to meet him in the evening. She had at least some idea that they would be smoking cannabis.
'She wanted to bring a friend with her because she was frightened about being with him on her own. But he said "No, I want to meet you on your own because I want to get to know you".
'Between 11pm and midnight she slipped out of her home to meet him.
Describing the meeting, the prosecutor said: 'He produced a cannabis spliff and they smoked together. He then produced a second spliff and she says she felt different when she smoked it. She said it felt weird.
'He then drove so fast that it frightened her. He held her leg while he was driving.
'She sent her mum a series of texts at that stage. In the first she said "Sorry Mum, I snuck out. But I'm scared. I will be home by the time you get back but I need to chat with you. I am sorry".'
Her alleged attacker, Jordan Maxwell, is now on trial at Gloucester Crown Court (pictured)
Four minutes later she texted 'Mum, I'm scared.'
Mr Fenny said her mother picked up the messages at 1.17am and replied "Where are you?" then "I will come and get you, where are you", followed by "Answer me please" and finally "Please, we are out looking".'
The girl was forced into the back of Maxwell's car and raped, the prosecutor claimed. The Crown's case it that she was 'submissive' but did not consent.
The girl eventually got home to her mother at 1.30pm.
The prosecutor said: 'By now her mum and her partner were out trying to find her. You can only imagine what was going through mum's mind.'
The jury heard the girl's video recorded police interview in which she said she was 'petrified' as Maxwell raped her.
'He had locked the door so I couldn't get out,' she stated. 'He got me into the back. He forced himself on me. I was telling him to get off me and he wouldn't. I was pushing him and he wouldn't let me go.'
In a statement to police Maxwell said he thought the girl was 16 and she consented to sex, the court heard.
The trial continues.
Bethany Shipsey (pictured), 21, suffered from severe mental health issues after being emotionally abused
A grieving father whose daughter died after bungling medics failed to treat her as a priority has discovered more than 130 'serious incidents' at the same hospital.
Bethany Shipsey, 21, suffered from severe mental health issues after being emotionally abused, sexually assaulted and raped by her ex-boyfriend Barry Finch.
Finch, 23, was convicted of rape and jailed for six years in August last year.
Bethany - on home leave from a psychiatric ward at the time of her death - was rushed to Worcestershire Royal Hospital on February 15 after collapsing at home.
She had taken 2,4-Dinitrophenol weight loss pills, known as DNP, that she bought online from a Ukrainian supplier.
Bethany died on a hospital trolley, having been moved three times in 20 minutes after 'overwhelmed' staff failed to treat her as a priority.
Her devastated parents slammed medics, claiming her life could have been saved if she had been treated sooner.
Bethany - on home leave from a psychiatric ward at the time of her death - was rushed to Worcestershire Royal Hospital on February 15 after collapsing at home
Her devastated parents (pictured) slammed medics, claiming her life could have been saved if she had been treated sooner
Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust, which runs the hospital, had been told by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) that it needed to make 'significant improvements' days before Bethany's death.
Her father Doug, 57, has now uncovered a string of blunders at the hospital after he made a Freedom of Information request.
The hospital recorded 136 'serious incidents' there between December 1, 2016 and September 30 this year.
A 'serious incident' is one that can cause harm to a patient, including acts or omissions in care that can result in unexpected or avoidable death or serious harm.
Shockingly, as a result of these incidents, 24 patients died - including Bethany.
Mr Shipsey, who lives in Worcester, said: 'The Worcestershire Royal Hospital already has an unacceptably high mortality rate.
'The CQC's reports and warnings have cited that patients' safety is at risk, particularly in the A&E department. Another winter is almost upon us - so what has been done by the trust to remedy the situation in time for this winter?
'The new management has already had eight months to make changes, but still there is no difference. So, when will this Third World treatment of our most vulnerable citizens end?'
Speaking shortly after her death, Bethany's mum Carol, 57, a nurse with 39 years' experience, said: 'Beth looked at me and just called my name.
'That was the last time she actually spoke and she just called, "Mum, Mum, Mum".
Finch (pictured), 23, was convicted of rape and jailed for six years in August last year
'Unbeknownst to us she had obviously stored some of the pills upstairs and she went upstairs and took them.
'She alerted somebody on the internet that she took them. I'm struggling to even believe it myself that [the hospital] did nothing.
'It was inadequate care, lack of dignity. There was no communication with the parents until Beth had a cardiac arrest.
'She was not seen as a priority. We want answers for Beth.'
Dr Suneil Kapadia, chief medical officer of Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said: 'We encourage all staff to report any concerns they may have about issues affecting the quality of care we provide for our patients.
'We investigate those concerns thoroughly, and share the lessons learned widely across our trust.
'Sometimes, our investigations reveal issues that are of such concern that we report them as serious incidents.
'While some of these incidents may relate to the care of patients who subsequently die, this does not necessarily mean that their death is directly related to, or caused by, the issue that has been reported.
'We strive to review all cases where patients die while in our hospital, whether or not there have been any concerns raised about their care.
'This is one of a package of measures we have in place to help us continuously improve the quality and safety of the care we provide for our patients.'
For confidential support, call the Samaritans on 116123, visit a local Samaritans branch, or see samaritans.org for details.
A Georgia man faces animal cruelty charges after firefighters discovered dozens of dogs living in poor conditions in a home.
Approximately 85 dogs were discovered as firefighters tried to enter a house to extinguish a blaze Sunday morning.
Authorities say the home was soiled with animal feces and urine, including the outside of the house and the backyard.
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A Georgia man faces animal cruelty charges after firefighters discovered 85 dogs in a home
Firefighters were called to a house fire and found the animals in 'deplorable conditions'
Dozens dogs were discovered as firefighters tried to enter a house to extinguish a blaze Sunday morning
Several dogs were pregnant and at least one dog was dead. The dogs appear to be mixed-breed.
Fulton County Deputy Fire Chief Charles Stubbs said the situation complicated efforts to fight the fire because it was hard to get into the home.
Stubbs says the owner was breeding dogs illegally and didn't have the permit required to have more than four dogs.
The man has not currently been named.
Several dogs were pregnant and at least one dog was dead. The dogs appear to be mixed-breed
The owner was breeding dogs illegally and didn't have the permit required to have more than four dogs
The owner surrendered the dogs and the situation is still under investigation.
Authorities said the dogs would be evaluated to determine which ones can be adopted.
'The dogs are safe and will receive medical care and placement assessments over the next few days, and may go to rescue or be available for adoption based on those assessments,' Fulton County Animal Services said in a post.
The shelter is asking for supplies or donations to help with the sudden influx of animals.
The owner surrendered the dogs and the situation is still under investigation
A 22-year-old Texas woman has been arrested after prosecutors say she attempted to frame her boyfriend on trumped-up charges of domestic violence and bribery in what has been described as a 'nightmare' catfishing conspiracy.
Lisa Marie Garcia, of Baytown, was arrested on Thursday and charged with retaliation and online impersonation.
The woman is accused of creating fake Instagram accounts and using cell phone apps to make it seem as if her boyfriend, 23-year-old Brandon Berrott, was threatening her. It is reported that couple have been locked in a custody battle.
Catfishing conspiracy: Lisa Marie Garcia (left), 22, has been charged with retaliation and online impersonation after prosecutors say she attempted to frame her boyfriend, Brandon Berrott (right), on trumped-up charges of domestic violence
If convicted of the charges against her, the 22-year-old could be looking at up to 10 years in prison.
Investigators say Garcia's elaborate online scheme initially worked, leading to Berrott's first arrest in September on a charge of making terrorist threats.
When his girlfriend continued receiving menacing text messages, Berrott, who had been released on bond, was sent back to jail for violating the terms of his release, which included a prohibition against contacting Garcia.
He didn't do any of this. He was charged with eight criminal cases and is innocent of all of them, prosecutor Britni Cooper told Houston Chronicle. I'm horrified, actually, and can't imagine what this guy went through. It's a nightmare.
The mans lawyer says that Garcias scheming has cost his client his job, in addition to tens of thousands of dollars in bond payments and legal fees.
Berrott was first arrested on September 16 after his girlfriend contacted the Baytown Police Department, telling them that he threatened to kill her. The 23-year-old man has a child with Garcia, and also with another woman, reported KTRK.
According to prosecutors, after Berrott was released on bail, Garcia launched a fake Instagram account in his name and proceeded to send threatening messages to herself and her romantic rival.
She then shared the bogus threats with the Baytown Police Department and the Harris County Sheriffs Office.
Between September 16 and October 31, Berrott was arrested eight times, and each time he made bail.
Determined to keep him behind bars, according to prosecutors, Garcia would send more fake threats to herself and then complain to the police, accusing her boyfriend of violating the conditions of his release by contacting her.
Living a 'nightmare': Berrott, pictured above with his sister, was arrested eight times between mid-September and late October, charged with making terroristic threats and violating a no-contact order and eventually fired from his job
Berrott was eventually fired from his warehouse job, but Garcia did not stop there and may have overplayed her hand, eventually resulting in her own arrest.
On Thanksgiving weekend, the woman called the mayor of Baytown and claimed that Berrott's mother, who works for Harris County, had bribed District Judge Brad Hart so he would free him on bond.
Officials launched an investigation into the couple, which revealed inconsistencies in Garcias complaints about Berrott. In one instance, according to his lawyer, she claimed to have received a threat from him while he was handcuffed in the back of a police car.
The woman continued getting threatening messages from her boyfriend, even as he was cooperating with the investigation to clear his name, according to prosecutors.
Attorney Carl Moore, whom Berrott hired to try and clear his name, said he believes Garcia concocted the plot because she wanted his client to give up his parental rights, but he was determined to stay involved in his child's life.
His lawyer told the station KHOU he blames the local police department for continuing to file charge after charge against him without getting to the bottom of Garcias litany of complaints sooner.
But the department has sought to defend itself, arguing that Garcia was very convincing, and that their top priority is to protect a person whose life appears to be threatened.
Berrott is considering pursuing legal action against the police department over its handling of the case.
All charges against the man have been dismissed, and both his mother and Judge Hart have been cleared of any wrongdoing.
Berrott's former employer, the Goose Creek Independent School District, said he is welcome to reapply for his old job.
Islamic State militants are planning spectacular attacks from the desert as they morph into an insurgent force, a top US colonel claimed yesterday.
Colonel Ryan Dillon said the barbaric group no longer has an army nor the capability to launch major combat operations in Iraq and Syria following a series of devastating defeats.
But he said as a result they were moving into remote areas such as the desert where they can plot mass casualty attacks on civilians and local forces.
Colonel Ryan Dillon said ISIS no longer has the capability to launch major combat operations following devastating defeats
Despite the defeat of the Islamic State in towns and cities, including in the group's capital Raqqa (pictured), the group remains a threat, Colonel Dillon has warned
Col Dillon, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, the Western coalition against IS said: They are no longer a military threat. They no longer have an army that we saw present itself in 2014.
Speaking during a briefing at the US embassy in London, he said they no longer have the ability to fight in a major combat operations.
He said there were some 3,000 IS fighters remaining in Iraq and Syria.
But these were moving off into uninhibited areas, in areas where they are used to being familiar with, in the desert, in smaller cells, to transition back to how they began with insurgent like tactics and in efforts to conduct spectacular attacks throughout Iraq and Syria.
We are going to make sure we adjust accordingly, whether thats through training or intelligence sharing.
He warned the defeat of IS in major towns and cities did not mark the end of the campaign.
He said: It does not mark the end the end of Daesh.
We are looking at the enemy and seeing how he adapts and we will provide our partners the support that they need to deliver the lasting defeat to Daesh in Iraq and Syria.
Jane Seymour lent her voice to the #metoo movement on Monday as she once again told the story about how she was sexually assaulted by a Hollywood producer.
The British actress appeared on Megyn Kelly Today, where she told the host that after being asked to attend a screening of her film test at the home of a famed Hollywood producer she arrived to find herself alone with the man.
That is when Seymour claims he put his hand on her upper thigh 'in the wrong place' and told her she 'knew what she had to do' if she wanted the role in his film, prompting her to immediately leave his home.
She told Megyn that years later she attended a private dinner for Princess Margaret at the man's home where he offered her the role that would make her a star in Somewhere in Time after not recognizing her from their previous encounter.
That seemed to confirm it was Ray Stark, as in a past interview with Barnes and Noble about how she got the role in Somewhere In Time, Seymour said: 'I was attending a party at the home of [veteran producer] Ray Stark, where he was entertaining a member of the British royal family.'
Seymour also used the interview to reveal her own son was recently roofied by a powerful publicist following a film premiere, claiming that the unnamed man then tried to drive off with the then-20-year-old film student.
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Her too: Jane Seymour appeared on Megyn Kelly Today (above) on Monday and revealed she was sexually assaulted by a Hollywood producer when she started in Hollywood
Revelation: The actress (above in 1978) said a powerful producer put his hand on her upper thigh 'in the wrong place' and told her she 'knew what she needed to do' to get a film role
Clues: Seymour said the same man producer her film Somewhere In Time and had a dinner for Princess Margaret, seeming to confirm it was Ray Stark (above with Barbara Streisand in 1968)
'I came to Hollywood about 22 or 23 years old. I came to do a test for my first Hollywood movie and nd it was a wonderful producer, we had a great experience,' said Seymour, who would not name Stark on account of the fact that he had 'passed.'
'I did the test. And another producer called my agent and said, "I want to test Jane, as well, for another movie." It was like, wow, amazing. The second producer, the one I'm going to talk about, had gotten a copy of the first test and wanted to screen it for me so I could see it. And he told my agent and I was told to go to his house because he was having a big screening of a movie with lots of people.'
Seymour said that when she arrived at the house however, there were no other people to be found.
'And the next thing I know, he says, "you're amazing, you're fantastic. I'm so excited. I've told everyone that you're the perfect person for our movie, the director and everybody. Now, it's your turn,'" said Seymour.
'And I said, "my turn?" He said, "yeah, you know what you've got to do.."'
Seymour revealed that after replying 'give a great screen test, the director shook his head and 'put his hand on my thigh, right up close in the wrong place.'
She immediately ran off, explaining: 'He basically got furious. He called the cab. And he turned to me and he looked me in the eye and he said, "if you ever tell anyone that you were ever here, let alone what happened, you will never work again anywhere, anywhere in the world." And I was shaking.'
Seymour said she decided to tell her team that she did not attend the meeting, adding that two of the men she told this to expressed their relief about her decision to not go to the home due to rumors and stories they had heard over the years.
Stark is the man who launched Barbara Streisand's career after casting her to star in Funny Girl, the play and later film based on the life of his mother-in-law.
He had at the time just married the daughter comedic actress Fanny Brice, famed for playing the character of Baby Snooks.
Stark also produced The Way We Were, The Owl and the Pussycat, Annie, Steel Magnolias, California Suite and The Goodbye Girl, earning two Oscar nominations over the course of his career.
Shocking new claim: Later on the show, Seymour revealed her son Sean Flynn (above in 2004) was roofied by a powerful publicist after a film premiere when he was 20
The actress then found herself back at the same home years later for a dinner in honor of Princess Margaret's visit to Los Angeles.
Stark did not recognize her however, and later that night offered her the chance to audition for Somewhere In Time.
'I was invited to this mans house again. I was not going to go but I was asked because I was British and Princess Margaret was going to be there and they wanted me to be there,' said Seymour, who despite quitting acting after her first encounter with Stark returned to the business over time.
'So, I showed up and sadly being English, I was a little bit early. And there he was and he looked at me, and he said, "dont I know you?" and I am shaking and I went, "not if you dont remember me" and walked away. And he persisted three times, he kept following me, saying "do I know you? do I know you?" and I said anyway at the end of the thing he said, "Ive got a movie for you and he gives me the whole spiel."
That was not the end of Seymour's experiences of sexual assault in Hollywood however, with her son Sean Flynn suffering an even worse fate she revealed after an encounter with a publicist.
'He was 20 years old, he was at film school. He made a film called Numb, he was at a Hollywood event talking about his film, being a young filmmaker, and a publicist came up to him and said, "come with me, I can take you to some people that will be much better for your career, come with me,"' said Seymour.
'So he grabbed his friend, thank god, and they went into the car with this guy and they were in the car and all of a sudden my son was going all loopy, and he doesnt know whats happened. The guy had roofied him, whatever roofies are. And then started grabbing his private parts and started to make out with him. And his friend mercifully was completely sober and saw what was going on, when the car stopped, he grabbed my son and they ran.'
Seymour was appearing to promote her new book of inspirational stories, The Road Ahead.
A woman who once ran a religious boarding school in Florida has been charged in the 1980s death of a toddler, whom authorities say was tortured and denied food.
Anna Elizabeth Young, 75 was arrested near Atlanta on Friday, reported the Gainvesville Sun.
Young is accused of causing the late 1980s death of Emon Harper, who was two or three years old at the time.
Young, who was known as 'Mother Anna', operated the House of Prayer for All People in Micanopy from about 1985 to 1995.
Police say there may be other child victims linked to Young. In 2001, she was convicted of child abuse for bathing a 12-year-old girl in a tub full of chemicals.
Florida 'cult leader' Anna Elizabeth Young, 75 (pictured), who once ran a religious boarding school, has been charged in the 1980s death of a toddler, whom authorities say was tortured and denied food
Young, who was known as 'Mother Anna', operated the House of Prayer for All People in Micanopy (pictured) from about 1985 to 1995. Young is accused of causing the late 1980s death of Emon Harper, who was two or three years old at the time
Former attendees from the House of Prayer for All People came have come forward after many years, telling Alachua County authorities that they were tortured and abused in a religious cult atmosphere that included exorcism and chemical baths.
'Witnesses came forward from the House of Prayer alleging brutality and even some children being murdered,' Art Forgey, a spokesman with the Alachua County Sheriff's Office, told WCJB.
'It's not just one isolated incident of beatings. There were numerous children that were beaten, locked in solitary confinement, food-withheld.'
In the last year, children who stayed with Young at the House of Prayer, now in their 40s and 50s, have approached authorities with stories of torture, punishment, caging, and starvation. Those allegations led to the charges in the Harper death.
'We think there are many, many more. We can document other states and other missing children that we believe are tied into this,' Forgey told The Sun.
'They ran a religious institution - exorcising demons and other things like that. We have documentation involving her clear back the '60s.'
Young was accused of child abuse in 1992, according to court records. She fled the state and was captured eight years later in the attic of a relative's home in Illinois.
In the last year, children who stayed with Young at the House of Prayer (pictured, location), now in their 40s and 50s, have approached authorities with stories of torture, punishment, caging, and starvation. Those allegations led to the charges in the Harper death
Young was arrested without incident and will be returned to Alachua County to face charges. Authorities say that believe Young may be responsible for 'many, many more' deaths
Authorities in Cobb County, Georgia, described Young in a press release as a former 'cult leader' and said the child abuse case stemmed from Young bathing a 12-year-old girl in a steel tub with chemicals that caused severe burns.
She was sentenced to six months and 12 days in jail in 2001.
Anna and Robert Young bought the property in Micanopy in 1983. In 1985, it was transferred it to the House of Prayer for All People Selah, Inc, a nonprofit.
Officials would not say when they began taking in children and how the children came to be in their care.
Other family members were involved in the House of Prayer operation, including Young's husband, Jonah
Young was arrested without incident and will be returned to Alachua County to face charges.
A mugshot image taken during the early July arrest of Former Donald Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos speaks to the pressure brought to bear before he began cooperating with government prosecutors.
Papadopoulos can be seen looking straight at the camera in the mugshot taken in the early morning hours after he got picked up by the FBI and arrested.
The image shows a thick five-o'clock shadow on the former policy aide's face. It was taken hours before special counsel Robert Mueller's team was able to gain cooperation from the 29-year old former foreign policy aide who received offers of 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton.
Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October to lying to the FBI in a charge that had been kept under seal.
Former Donald Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos had his mugshot taken in the early morning hours after he got arrested in July.
His mugshot, taken hours after FBI agents picked him up after his Lufthansa flight landed at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, was obtained by Politico.
'He was arrested before he got to Customs and he was then held at the airport before being brought to a law enforcement office,' attorney Rob Stanley told the publication.
The surprise arrest ensured that Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with authorities, got a taste of what could await him if he ended up on the wrong end of Mueller's investigators.
Arrest records reveal that he was assigned to a cell and then checked out to federal authorities at 8:27 in the morning.
Papadopoulos' image was revealed just days after Mike Flynn, the former White House national security advisor, had to endure a perp walk at a federal courthouse in Virginia where he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents
He was arrested in July at a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia
Flynn was reportedly fingerprinted and processed at an FBI office in Washington, D.C.
'My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the special counsels office reflect a decision I made in the best interest of my family and of our country. I accept full responsibility for my actions,' Flynn said in a statement Friday.
The two guilty pleas have drawn a swirl of media attention, and reported have some White House insiders concerned some of their colleagues or former associates could be wearing a wire.
In a motion filed to seal the initial court proceedings, the government argued that 'public disclosure of the defendant's appearance' would 'significantly undermine his ability to serve as a proactive cooperator' which could indicate he wore a wire.
The mugshot image rounds out a photo record of Papadopoulos' activities. Another is from a 2016 Trump campaign national security meeting tweeted out by the president that shows him seated not far from now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions at a meeting headed by Trump.
Another picture shows him in London, where according to a government information Papadopoulos met with a professor who had Kremlin contacts, although he was not initially truthful about how the meeting came about and when it occurred.
The twin guilty pleas of Papadopoulos and Flynn reportedly has some White House staffers fretful about their past interactions with either of the two men and whether their conversations were being recorded.
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Sixteen years after Wall Street financier Ted Ammon was bludgeoned to death in his East Hampton home by his wife's lover, the couple's adopted children have sold the home.
Just two years after the crime, Ammon's wife, Generosa, died of cancer, so the house fell to their two children.
Twins Greg and Alexa Ammon, 28, recently sold their parents' 7,000-square-foot country estate for more than $8million, listing agent Judi A. Desiderio told the Wall Street Journal on Monday.
The twins put the house up for sale last year, with an asking price of $12.7milion. They later lowered the price to $10.995million before the anonymous buyer negotiated it down to 'the mid 8s'.
The Ammon twins have not lived in the home since their father's horrific murder, but have rented out the property to several families over the past 16 years.
Their mother's lover, Daniel Pelosi, is serving a 27 years to live in prison sentence for Ted Ammon's death. He is first up for parole in 2031.
A Hamptons mansion that was the scene of a grisly 2001 murder has recently sold for $8million (pictured above)
Wall Street financier Ted Ammon was bludgeoned to death in his bedroom by his wife's handyman lover Daniel Pelosi
The Hamptons murder mansion, which features a stunning, light and airey family room (pictured), was initially put on the market by the couple's adopted twins, Greg and Alexa, last year for $12.7million
The English Manor style home, on Middle Lane, boasts a spacious dining room, with high ceilings and an elaborate chandelier
Ted and Generosa Ammon, pictured with their adopted children, Greg and Alexa Ammon in an undated photo, appeared to be the perfect family. But it all fell apart as the marriage crumbled and Generosa fought for half of his $80 million fortune
When the home was first put up for sale, Desiderio said the murder - which she is required by law to disclose - scared off some potential buyers.
'Fifty percent of people would rule it out because of the history, she said, adding that some 'wouldnt even go in' after hearing about the crime.
The English Manor style home, on Middle Lane, boasts six bedrooms, six-and-a-half baths, as well as a gourmet kitchen, solarium, and library.
The mansion comes also features an exercise room and heated pool, with accompanying pool house, all nestled within 2.2 acres of land with its own pond, in East Hampton Village. The location is just a short walk from the ocean and the famous Maidstone Club, and counts the likes of Katie Couric and Jerry Seinfeld as neighbors.
The home needs a full renovation and the new home owners are still deciding whether to gut the home or tear it all down and start from scratch.
The Ammon twins have not lived in the home since their father's horrific murder, but have rented out the property to several families over the past 16 years
The property, based in East Hampton Village, has an unusual, wood-paneled gourmet kitchen
A his and hers bathroom, with separate sinks and mirrors, as well as a huge walk-in shower, is just one of the six-and-a-half baths
A nautical inspired porthole window overlooks the wooden balustrade on the property's second floor landing
The house, which counts the likes of Katie Couric and Jerry Seinfield as neighbors, has a backyard with its own grill
The multi-million dollar home overlooks its lush, green backyard - part of the 2.2 acres of land it was sold with
An established pond sits on the grounds of the Hamptons house, which was sold to an unnamed buyer recently
The six-bedroom home was once location of the infamous 2001 murder of Wall Street financier Ted Ammon, who was bludgeoned to death in his bedroom by his wife's handyman lover Daniel Pelosi.
The Ammon twins were adopted as toddlers from a Ukrainian orphanage by Ted and his wife Generosa Ammon and for a while, they had the picture perfect family.
But after 17 years of marriage, the relationship began to crumble. Following their separation, as Generosa fought for half of her husband's $80million fortune, things turned ugly.
They were just days from finalizing their divorce when, on October 22, 2001, he was found bludgeoned to death in the bedroom of his weekend Hampton's home. As they were still technically married, Generosa inherited 50 per cent of his estate, while the other 50 per cent went to Ammon's foundation - as stipulated in his will
Generosa's boyfriend Pelosi, a married electrician from Long Island, was convicted of the murder in 2004 and is imprisoned at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. He's eligible for parole in 2031. He remarried to Generosa in 2002.
An aerial view reveals the spacious home which also includes a heated pool and a pool house behind it
The listing agent says the new owners are deciding whether to do a gut renovation or the home or tear it down and start all over
The English Manor style home, on Middle Lane, boasts six bedrooms, six-and-a-half baths, as well as a gourmet kitchen, solarium, and library
The mansion also features an exercise room and heated pool, with accompanying pool house, all nestled within 2.2 acres of land with its own pond, in East Hampton Village
The location is just a short walk from the ocean and the famous Maidstone Club
The twins, who were at their father's house in Manhattan when the 52-year-old was bludgeoned to death, was initially told by their mother that he had killed himself, before they learned the truth.
The children were left without parents for a second time when Generosa was diagnosed with breast cancer and died in August 2003. The children went to live with their aunt in Alabama.
Pelosi, who had been battling for a part of the fortune left by his late wife, always maintained that Generosa hired a hit man to kill her husband. But the twins admit they were not convinced he was a killer until he was convicted.
'I still had doubts up until that point,' Alexa told Katie Couric in 2012. 'I was so convinced he was innocent. I don't know what he did to my mind. He's a psychopath.'
Both Alexa and Greg are now certain he was to blame, and say they choose to believe their mother was not a part of their father's death.
Despite enduring such tragedy before they were teenagers, the twins pulled through.
'We had each other so that was one thing,' Greg said. 'It was not easy .'
Greg founded Big Flower, a Hamptons lifestyle brand with a flagship in East Hampton. Alexa recently graduated from USC School of Cinematic Arts and is pursuing a career in film and photography.
In May 2016, Greg married Stacy Volkov, daughter of former Atlanta Hawks basketball player Alexander Volkov, in a lavish ceremony at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, built by the Vanderbilts, that was covered by Brides magazine.
Daniel Pelosi (left in 2003) a married electrician from Long Island, was convicted of Ammon's murder in 2004. His victim's adopted children, Greg and Alexa Ammon (pictured right in 2012) blame him for their father's death but say they choose to believe their mother was innocent
In May 2016, Greg Ammon (right) married wife Stacy in a lavish ceremony at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina
The twins (pictured as children with Ted Ammon) were at their father's house in Manhattan when the 52-year-old was bludgeoned to death
A dangerous fugitive who has been on the run since September has been taunting police on Facebook by posting pictures of him opening an advent calendar.
Lee Mapstone, 36, who is wanted for kidnap and robbery offences, posted a photo of himself holding up a Peppa Pig advent calendar with the first two flaps opened.
In another brazen move, he also sent officers a personalised Christmas Card as he was '100% confident' they will not arrest him.
Brazen: Lee Mapstone, 36, has taunted police with pictures of him holding an advent calendar
In the card sent to Wiltshire Police, the fugitive wrote: 'I hope you have a very merry Christmas because I certainly will be mate. Any ways got things to do.'
The outlaw signed the card 'from ya pal Lee Mapstone', and enclosed a postcard of London.
A Wiltshire Police spokesman said: 'Lee Mapstone is a convicted, violent offender who is wanted for two very serious offences of kidnap and robbery.
'We are reissuing our appeal for the publics help in locating him. We would urge anyone with information to contact us immediately.
In another brazen move, he also sent officers a personalised Christmas Card as he was '100% confident' they will not arrest him
In the card sent to an officer at Wiltshire Police, the fugitive wrote: 'I hope you have a very merry Christmas because I certainly will be mate. Any ways got things to do'
'If you see him please do not approach him but instead call 999 and give police his exact location, a description of what he is wearing and any items he may be carrying. Any other information can be given by calling 101.
'If you would prefer to give information anonymously then you can call Crimestoppers on 0800 555111.'
This comes after Mapstone goaded cops by posting 'holiday snaps' of his visits to London tourist spots while on the run.
In November, Mapstone taunted officers with photos of Buckingham Palace, The Ritz Hotel and other London tourist spots during 'day trips' on Facebook.
The criminal even took a photo outside London's Paddington Green Police Station and said: 'Was going to hand myself in but had change of heart.'
He mocked police officers by saying they were 'sh*t at hide and seek.'
His campaign continued last night as he returned to the capital after posting pictures of a flying weekend visit to his Swindon home town.
He snapped a road sign for a police station and wrote: 'Well was in Swindon yesterday with Brenden Mooney and just to let them know I done a flying visit and took these on the way back to London f*ck the police.'
At the time, Wiltshire Police admitted intelligence showed he 'may now be in London' as he remained on the run for kidnap and robbery offences since September 25.
Fugitive Lee Mapstone has posted a series of mocking pictures while on the run from police. He took a picture of a doughnut shop alongside a foul-mouthed message to officers
Mapstone, 36, has goaded officers with photos of Buckingham Palace, The Ritz Hotel and other London tourist spots during 'day trips' on Facebook
Mapstone (right) is wanted for robbery and kidnap. In November he posted a picture from his flying weekend visit to his Swindon home town (left)
He took a picture of officers in London and added a foul-mouthed caption teasing officers for not being able to catch him
He was also wanted on recall to prison for breaching his licence for grievous bodily harm and burglary two years ago.
On November 10 he posted a photo of the front of Paddington Green Police Station and said: 'Was going to hand my self in but had change of heart see u later boys'.
Five days later Mapstone shared a snap of six uniformed officers standing next to marked motorbikes saying 'all they do is eat doughnuts and drink coffee'.
Later that day he shared a picture of an armed police officer he called 'a barbie girl'.
Friends encouraged him on as he they called him 'soppy' for posting holiday snaps of Christmas lights near Oxford Street the following evening.
Brazen Mapstone posted a picture outside the Ritz in Mayfair, titled with, 'I love this place'
While on the run Mapstone has made the most of his freedom, even posting pictures from Oxford Street captioned with: 'Quite nice lol'
Mapstone took a picture of an armed officer in central London and mocked the policeman
The criminal even took a photo outside London's Paddington Green Police Station and said: 'Was going to hand myself in but had change of heart'
He has shared links to news stories about him mocking police telling his followers: 'They are sh*t at hide and seek I will keep running lol.
'It's all fun and games for me lol.'
Under a picture of China Town, he said: 'Avin a great time in London this is China town wicked place love it.
'Being on the run seeing all this safe bro.'
The fugitive later told police to 'watch this space' as he revealed plans to visit the Eiffel Tower and enjoy Christmas while on the run.
Sharing a selfie of himself in the 'can't see me pose' by WWE wrestler John Cena, he said: 'They are just a bunch of idiots.
'I could do their job ten times better than them.
'Of course I could catch someone like myself - all the information I've put on and they can't get me.
'They've only got to go to certain places in London and I'll be on my tees running from them.'
On another picture of a police officer, the fugitive captioned it: 'Thick c*** lol'
Arrogant: Mapstone has documented his journeys on Facebook and has frequently mocked police
The wanted man added: 'I say hello to them and everything and they walk past me.
'I've been telling the police I'm in London.'
On his future plans and asked if he would visit Eiffel Tower, he said: 'If I had the money I would do that.
'Me and my mates are deciding what to do next.
'I didn't know it would be growing to get this big and it's just blown up. I like it, it's big now and that's why we are doing more and more.
'It proves the police are not doing their jobs. It proves that that they are just idiots, how many chances have they had to get me.'
Mapstone claimed officers had even asked him to 'politely' hand himself in over the phone in October.
'One copper phoned me and asked me would I be prepared to hand myself in and I said not at the moment.
'And he said to me, "when are you available" and I said, "I could be after Christmas".
'He's an idiot, I don't know if he thought I was ever going to, I obviously wasn't.
'I will go finally hand myself in if they don't get me before but it's going to be on my terms.'
A single-engine airplane crashed into the deck and backyard of an Ohio house, and residents discovered the wreckage containing the deceased pilot when they returned home.
The residents weren't there when the plane, a 2017 Titan Tornado II, went down sometime Sunday near Ravenna in Shalersville Township, roughly 30 miles southeast of Cleveland, investigators said.
It wasn't clear how long the debris was in the yard on Nicodemus Road before the residents returned and spotted it Sunday evening.
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Stephen Paulus (pictured), a pilot and married dad-of-two, was flying his single-engine airplane Sunday when he crashed into the deck and backyard of an Ohio house
Paulus' 2017 Titan Tornado II plane (pictured) dropped out of the sky and destroyed the deck of a house in Shalersville Township
Crash: Paulus' aircrft came to rest in the backyard of this home on Nicodemus Road while the owners of the residence were away
State Highway Patrol Sgt. Scott Louive told WOIO-TV that evidence at the scene indicated the aircraft didn't have a sloped descent.
'From the debris we saw back there, it doesn't appear it was coming from any angle,' he said. 'It appears that it just dropped straight down.'
The cause of the crash is under investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration.
An autopsy was planned for the pilot, identified as 60-year-old Stephen Paulus, of Rootstown. He was alone in the plane, and no one else was hurt.
Authorities said Paulus may have crashed while returning to the nearby Portage County Regional Airport just down the road, where he had taken off earlier.
The Record-Courier reported that a man who identified himself as a friend of Paulus' told investigators that the pilot had planned to enjoy a brief flight in his homemade aircraft.
A neighbor who lives across the street from the airport said he was stunned to learn of the crash.
'I was home and did not hear a thing,' Dave Shanley told WJW-TV. 'It's very quiet out here.'
The 60-year-old pilot was alone in the home-built aircraft, and no one else was hurt
Twin: The Tornado II (similar to one picutred) is 19 feet long with a 23 1/2 foot wingspan, and takes approximately 150-300 hours to put together
Family members tell WKYC Paulus was a married father-of-two who worked as an electrician.
He was described as an experienced pilot who was passionate about flying.
As Cleveland.com first reported, According to Titan Tornado's website, Paulus' single-engine came from a kit.
The Tornado II is 19 feet long with a 23 1/2 foot wingspan, and takes approximately 150-300 hours to put together.
Bitcoin is a virtual currency, the first of a new form of money held only online that can be used either to spend like cash or as an investment a little like a commodity such as gold.
Bitcoin, like other similar electronic currencies that have followed (Ethereum, Litecoin, Zcash and Dash), are stored online in a digital wallet and then spent on goods and services. Alternatively, you can exchange it for a traditional currency such as sterling. This can be done using a special pre-payment card that converts the cryptocurrency when a purchase is made.
HOW DOES IT WORK AND HOW DO YOU BUY IT?
When Bitcoin was invented in 2009, it was aimed at techies who mined for it using Blockchain technology. Blockchain allows transactions to be managed cheaply, securely and anonymously in a kind of devolved online ledger with records of transactions held on thousands of computers.
To release coins a miner had to verify each transaction by solving a complex maths problem. But today, the Bitcoin revolution has extended beyond the techies and miners. Cryptocurrencies can now be purchased from specialist exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken, Bittylicious and Bitstamp.
You can usually pay for the currency by credit or debit card or bank transfer. Exchanges are likely to make a charge for each purchase of cryptocurrency. For example, Coinbase charges 3.99 per cent for card purchases.
Oliver Isaacs, a technology investor and expert in cryptocurrencies, says: You can send a currency to another persons digital wallet so a Christmas present could be on the cards.
WHY HAS BITCOINS VALUE BOOMED?
The number of Bitcoins in circulation will never exceed 21 million. About 16 million have already been mined. The limit was set by a mysterious coding genius with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. This aims to ensure it will always have scarcity value.
The recent price rise a nine-fold leap since the beginning of this year alone to $11,000 (8,000) at one point last week for a single Bitcoin is partly due to growing interest from institutional investors and hedge funds.
But it is possible to purchase as little as a one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin (0.00000001 Bitcoin) called a Satoshi.
WHERE AND HOW TO SPEND IT
A number of online and physical shops accept Bitcoin from pubs and florists to holiday booking websites and charities.
Shoppers can pay online or use an app on their phone. They need to set up a virtual wallet first to store their coins. This acts like a bank account for receiving or using virtual currency but without any consumer protection. To find shops accepting the currency visit wheretospendbitcoins.co.uk.
SHOULD YOU BUY? 'One year's winner can be next year's loser'
Warnings abound that investors heated love affair with Bitcoin can only end in tears.
The number of boasts of fortunes made from Bitcoin should ring alarm bells. Remember the rapid rise in share prices ahead of the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000?
Some experts warn of a 30 per cent correction in the Bitcoin price as soon as January. Others believe governments will clamp down because the secretive nature of these currencies makes them popular with criminals and also because they might undermine international currencies.
Justin Urquhart Stewart, of wealth manager Seven Investment Management, says: Bitcoins relentless march has the hallmarks of an investment trap. Investing in something just because it has gone up has never been sensible. One years winner can all too easily become next years loser.
But he is attracted to the technology behind the currency. He adds: Blockchain is more than a mechanism for moving money. It is about secure control of data and information. It could also be used in industries beyond financial services such as retail, healthcare and real estate.
Patrick Connolly, of financial adviser Chase de Vere, is nervous of the hype over an investment that is neither regulated nor offers consumer protection.
He says: We are not recommending any Bitcoin investments to our clients. Many people are investing without understanding the risks.
Benjamin Dives of start-up London Block Exchange says: If you are looking to invest you really need to do your homework.
Baby giant panda 'Mini Yuan Zai' was given a new name, 'Yuan Meng', as announced by French first lady Brigitte Macron today.
The four-month-old giant panda cub was seen growling at his godmother, Mrs Macron, during the naming ceremony at Beauval Zoo, south of Paris.
Yuan Meng made a jump when the French first lady put her hand over a glass wall to pet the cuddly-looking panda.
French first lady Brigitte Macron attends a naming ceremony with students in panda costumes
Yuan Meng can be seen growling at the French first lady, Brigitte Macron, during its naming ceremony (left). Mrs Macron is known as being Yuan Meng's godmother (right)
The new name, which has a meaning of 'accomplishment of a dream', was given by China as a tradition.
Baptiste Mulot, chief veterinarian at Beauval Zoo, said Yuan Meng is now moving on all fours and "he's starting to behave really like a child, so he tries to escape from where he's supposed to be.
"He tries ... to go into the corridor."
The cub was pink and hairless when born, weighing just 142 grammes (5oz), and he spent much of his first month in an incubator.
The four-month-old giant panda cub is seen being naughty during the celebration today
Yuan Meng, originally known as Mini Yuan Zai, has its name given by China as a tradition
Now, he weighs eight kilogrammes (17.6 lbs), his young fur has the black patches pandas are known for and he nurses without a feeding bottle.
Nine-year-old mother Huan Huan was artificially inseminated from partner Yuan Zi this spring.
Both are at Beauval Zoo on a 10-year loan from China, and their offspring officially belongs to the Chinese government.
Recently, adorable pictures emerged capturing the early stages of giant panda Mini Yuan Zai, the first panda to be born in France.
Yuan Meng can be seen growing from palm-size to about 65cm (26 inches) long.
The baby giant panda was looked after by mother Huan Huan carefully since birth.
Mother giant panda Huan Huan is giving her baby cub Yuan Meng a gentle bite in Beauval Zoo
Love bites! Yuan Meng is shot in a picture when mother Huan Huan just gave birth in August
Sina.com reported that the giant panda cub was enjoying the moment in front of camera as it posed and looked into the lens.
The picture collection shows Yuan Meng's growing progress at different stages.
Mother Huan Huan was often seen captured in the photos, cuddling the young cub in her arms.
Yuan Meng is the first ever giant panda born in France, by parents Huan Huan and Yuan Zai
Dr Peter Hutchinson (pictured), who lectured at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, made the comments in tutorials over a period of months in 2014 and 2015
A retired Cambridge University lecturer has apologised for making 'sexual and sexist' comments to 10 of his female students, admitting his behaviour was 'thoughtless, insensitive and offensive'.
Dr Peter Hutchinson, who lectured in the German department, made the comments in tutorials over a period of months in 2014 and 2015.
He retired in 2011, but carried on teaching in a non-stipendiary role at the university's Trinity Hall until 2015 when the comments were reported to staff.
They sparked an internal investigation, which resulted in him being banned from having any contact with undergraduate students.
In a public apology issued through the university and reported by Cambridge News he admitted his comments were 'of an inappropriate sexual and sexist nature'.
It read: 'I said from the start I was sorry for any distress I had caused. I continue to deeply regret the comments I made, and the impact they had on the students concerned. At the time I did not question the comments I made as I was not made aware of the impact they were having.
'Having had time to reflect, to step back and consider how these students said I'd made them feel, I realise these comments were thoughtless, insensitive and caused offence.'
He added that he has 'nothing but utmost respect for women' and expressed his 'deep sorrow and regret for the pain' his comments caused.
Trinity Hall is among Cambridge's most well-known colleges, with alumni including scientist Stephen Hawking, actress Rachel Weisz and journalist Andrew Marr.
Dr Hutchinson is still allowed to have an advisory role as a member of the college's financial committee but has no interaction with students.
A Trinity Hall spokesman said the college maintained a 'zero tolerance approach' to sexual harassment or sexual misconduct.
They said: 'The college welcomes the statement Dr Hutchinson has provided and endorses the outline of events and actions taken.
'he resulting action taken after the informal investigation was communicated directly to the students concerned, and was accepted and welcomed by them as a satisfactory resolution of their complaint against Dr Hutchinson.
He retired in 2011, but carried on teaching in a non-stipendiary role at the university's Trinity Hall until 2015 when comments were reported to staff. An internal investigation took place that saw Dr Hutchinson banned from having any contact with students
'There is no place for any form of harassment or sexual misconduct at Trinity Hall and we maintain a zero tolerance approach to any such incidents.
'Whenever complaints are made to the college, they will be fully investigated and action taken, if that is what the student or staff member chooses.
'Trinity Hall remains committed to keeping student choice at the heart of its complaints procedure, and works closely with students to ensure complaints are handled sensitively and in the manner they direct, whether that is informally, or formally.
'Where cases are dealt with informally, recommended actions will be taken with the agreement of all parties.
'Trinity Hall remains dedicated to maintaining a safe, welcoming and inclusive environment that allows our students to flourish.'
Dr Hutchinson's apology comes after Cambridge pledged to having a 'zero tolerance' approach to sexual harassment at the university.
On October 18 the leading higher education institution introduced a series of measures, which included training staff and hiring a dedicated sexual harassment and assault advisor.
As part of the launch, a Cambridge University Students' Union survey was released showing 77 per cent of respondents had experienced sexual harassment.
A further 30 per cent said they had experienced sexual assault, and that the majority of such assaults went unreported..
Dr Hutchinson said he endorsed the new campaign, which was devised jointly by students and academics, and has received high-profile support from actress Emma Thompson.
Dr Hutchinson added: 'I have learned from this experience and am fully supportive of efforts to ensure this kind of incident never happens again.'
A glamorous PA to one of Londons wealthiest Russian residents wished a judge a good day after she was cleared of fleecing her employer today.
Tatyana Govorov, 31, was said to have used a credit card entrusted to her by top restaurateur Arkady Novikov to rent a London flat and splash out on lavish New Years festivities at the Intercontinental Hotel.
Mr Novikov, a personal friend of Vladimir Putin, owns the famous Novikov restaurant chain, which has a Mayfair branch in Berkeley Square.
Tatyana Govorov was accused of using a card entrusted to her by top restaurateur Arkady Novikov to rent a London flat and splash out on lavish New Years party
Govorov was charged with four counts of fraud but the prosecution offered no evidence and she walked free
Govorov was entrusted with the card by Mr Novikov, 55, who owns a home in Chelsea, to pay for his household bills.
The Russian blonde was said to have spent more than 35,000 on herself and told an estate agents that Mr Novikov had agreed to act as a guarantor for her new home in Brockley, south east London.
It was claimed that in December 2015 she then used the HSBC card to fund a 28,000 New Years eve bash at the luxury Park Lane Hotel, The Intercontinental.
Govorov, who was personal assistant to the family, was given a blank credit card with an account in her name to pay household bills.
Mr Novikov has successful hospitality ventures in London and is worth over 300million. His wife is a successful businesswoman
The restaurateur owns a home in Chelsea is a friend of the Russian President Vladimir Putin
She appeared at Isleworth Crown Court for a plea, trial and preparation hearing wearing a long woolly grey coat, a black dress and a gold necklace where she confirmed her identity and address.
Govorov, of Morrison Court, Tulse Hill, south west London, denied four counts of fraud by abuse of position.
Prosecutor Mark Eldridge announced, however, that he was offering no evidence, though no reason for the charges being dropped was given in court.
Judge Robin Johnson said: Miss Govorov you are discharged - thank you.
The Russian walked out of the dock and said: Thank you very much, have a good day.
Mr Novikov has successful hospitality ventures in London and is worth over 300million.
His wife Nadezdha Advokatova is herself a successful businesswoman, having founded the Moscow florists Studio 55.
They have two daughters and the family regularly holiday to their luxury villas on Lake Como, next to Roman Abramovichs pad, and another home in Sardinia.
The man accused of hiding Mariah Woods' body in a creek in North Carolina had his bond kept at $1 million during his first court appearance.
Earl Kimrey, 32, the live-in boyfriend of Mariah's mother, Kristy Woods, appeared in court on Monday for a hearing in Jacksonville, where a judge ordered that his bond remain at $1 million.
Kimrey is charged with hiding three-year-old Mariah's body, knowing she did not die of natural causes, and obstruction of justice.
Prosecutors did not reveal any details about the case, and Kimrey's lawyer Walter Paramore said nothing in his defense.
Earl Kimrey (pictured in court on Monday), 32, the man accused of withholding information from North Carolina officers about the death of missing toddler, Mariah Woods, has his bond kept at $1 million
Kimrey, the live-in boyfriend of Mariah's mother, Kristy Woods, made his first appearance Monday at a hearing in Jacksonville, where a judge ordered his bond remain at $1 million
Mariah was reported missing on November 27. Onslow County Hans Miller said dive teams found Mariah's body around 5.30pm on Saturday
Mariah was reported missing on November 27. Onslow County Sheriff Hans Miller said dive teams found Mariah's body around 5.30pm on Saturday.
FBI spokeswoman Shelley Lynch said in a statement that the body was in Holly Shelter Creek along Shaw Highway in Pender County creek about 25 miles from the child's home in Jacksonville.
Kimrey was arrested in the early hours of Saturday morning and deputies charged him in connection to the death.
Arrest warrants said Kimrey moved Mariah's body from where she died, knowing her death was not natural.
Authorities have divulged few specifics of the case, including how the girl died.
Kimrey was brought before a magistrate to be charged with concealing a death, obstruction of justice, burglary, larceny and possession of stolen property.
'It was too late to save Mariah the moment the 911 call came in,' FBI agent Stanley Meador said of the call the girl's mother made last Monday to report her missing.
Kimrey (left) was arrested in the early hours of Saturday morning and deputies charged him in the death of Mariah (right). Arrest warrants said Kimrey moved Mariah's body from where she died, knowing her death was not natural
FBI Special Agent Stanley Meador (left) and Onslow County Sheriff Hans Miller (right) Saturday
Mariah's body was found in Holly Shelter Creek (pictured) in Pender County creek about 25 miles from the child's home
A boat is pictured at one of the search locations. Mariah's body was found by divers Saturday
Law enforcement search near the Southwest Creek Bridge for Mariah
'The arrest warrants are public record and the records speaks for themselves. We will not discuss any details related to the homicide investigation.'
One arrest warrant also charges Kimrey with larceny, breaking and entering and possession of stolen goods, according to News Channel 12.
He is accused of stealing two dressers after breaking into a home in Jacksonville between 11pm on Sunday and 3.30am on November 27.
Kimrey has a long criminal history which includes charges for larceny, assault, threats to government and being drunk and disorderly.
The charges date back to 2002. They stretch over several counties and two states.
Police and volunteers turned out in their hundreds on Friday to search for Mariah who, at that time, was still hoped to have been alive
An organizer for the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children speaks to volunteers on Friday before they went out to look for the girl
Social services would not confirm on Friday whether they had ever investigated Kimrey or the home where Mariah was living.
A spokesman refused when asked by DailyMail.com if there had ever been reported concerns about the family and said the information was confidential.
On Saturday, Meador urged people with surveillance footage near where the girl disappeared to call police and share the video as they investigate her death.
He asked businesses or residents who live on US Highway 17 or state Highway 53 in Onslow and Pender counties to call police if they have surveillance cameras.
The toddler had been missing since 6am on November 27. Kimrey and her mother Kristy Woods told police he was the last to have seen her at around midnight on Sunday.
They said he told her to go back to bed and that when they went to her bedroom the next day, she was gone.
Mariah's biological father Alex Woods said he did not believe Kimrey's story that Mariah was abducted by a stranger.
Woods, who has not seen her for a year despite claiming to have visitation rights, said he had been trying to get Mariah out of the home but that he could not afford a lawyer.
The toddler had been missing since 6am on November 27. Kimrey and her mother Kristy Woods (pictured with Mariah) told police he was the last to have seen her at around midnight on Sunday
They said he told Mariah to go back to bed and that when they went to her bedroom the next day, she was gone. Kristy Woods pictured with Kimrey
'Someone just walked right up in there, grabbed the 3-year-old out of the bed and she didn't cry, she didn't scream?
'Nobody heard anything? Four people in the house, two adults and two kids, someone just comes up and snatches the baby and walks out?' Alex Woods said.
Kristy, who last week disabled her Facebook account after posting the missing person's appeal for her daughter, claimed that Mariah was taken by a stranger.
In a tearful television appearance on November 28, she said: 'Please, bring her back.
'I love her. I'll do anything that I can, whatever you want.
'Please just bring her back safe and sound she's my baby, she's my everything.'
Suspicious: Mariah's biological father Alex, who has not seen her for more than a year, said he did not believe Kimrey's story that his daughter was abducted by a stranger. He is pictured with his wife Heather earlier this week
Kristy made a tearful appeal to her daughter's abductor earlier in the week and begged for her to be brought back
Mariah is pictured with her mother, mother's boyfriend, and her two older brothers. Her biological father says he has been trying to get sole custody of the children for years
On Friday, 700 local volunteers turned out to join in the search for Mariah. At the time, they were still hoping to find the girl alive.
'Items of interest' which the FBI sent to its lab in Quantico earlier last week have still not been revealed.
They were sent straight to the FBI's base in Virginia for testing on November 29.
Earlier that day, agents were seen searching the trailer where Mariah lived with her 29-year-old mother Kristy, her older brothers and Kimrey.
A grieving husband was wrongly labelled a cheat after a detective misunderstood his wife's suicide note to think he was having an affair.
Nicole Putney, 32, hanged herself at a Novotel in Worsley, Manchester, leaving a note which was thought to be partially directed at a lover her husband, Simon Mueller was seeing behind her back.
But in a hearing at the High Court, a senior judge today said there was no evidence her widower was unfaithful or even that she feared he had been.
The note had been misread by Detective Inspector Koran Sellars, of Greater Manchester Police, said the judge, Sir Brian Leveson.
Simon Mueller was wrongly labelled a cheat after a detective misunderstood his Nicole Putney's suicide note to think he was having an affair (pictured together)
Ms Putney died after hanging herself in her room while at a business conference in Manchester in May 2015
Mr Mueller, an internationally renowned physicist, suffered anguish when his 'infidelity' was erroneously reported following an inquest into his wife's death.
The portion of the note which the detective believed to be addressed to another woman was actually written by Miss Putney to herself, he said.
'I have no doubt whatsoever that the note does not bear the meaning that Det Insp Sellars sought to give it,' Sir Brian said in his ruling.
'Whatever other criticisms she might have been making of him, there is no basis for concluding that Ms Putney was complaining - let alone asserting - that her husband was having or may have had an affair.
'It is clear that the second part of the note was, indeed, addressed by Ms Putney to herself.'
The court heard the couple had had a difficult marriage, exacerbated by Ms Putney's long-standing mental health problems.
The portion of the note which the detective believed to be addressed to another woman was actually written by Miss Putney to herself, he said
She had attempted suicide several times and had been treated at the Nightingale Hospital, in Marylebone, London, shortly before her death
She had attempted suicide several times and had been treated at the Nightingale Hospital, in Marylebone, London, shortly before her death.
She died after hanging herself in her room while at a business conference in Manchester in May 2015.
The coroner at the inquest into her death recorded a verdict of suicide, but Mr Mueller applied for a re-run of the hearing after objecting to the way he was portrayed in the evidence.
At the High Court, Sir Brian found that Mr Mueller had valid cause for complaint about the way the note had been misinterpreted and the damage done to his reputation.
However, he decided not to order a fresh inquest, because Mr Mueller's name had been cleared by his findings in the judgment.
The court heard the couple had had a difficult marriage, exacerbated by Ms Putney's long-standing mental health problems
'There is not the slightest challenge to the verdict and neither is there any challenge to any of the evidence that was adduced at the inquest, save only for the interpretation of the note,' he said.
'There is no real risk that justice had not been done; the coroner correctly identified her, and accurately recorded when, where and how she died and as such successfully achieved justice in her name.'
He continued: 'It must be clear that I am not suggesting that Mr Mueller is not and was not entitled to be aggrieved.
'I repeat that there is nothing in the note or any of the other evidence to suggest that Mr Mueller has ever had an affair or was ever unfaithful to his wife.
Nicole Putney, 32, hanged herself at a Novotel in Worsley, Manchester (pictured)
'These facts are of critical importance.
'In the circumstances, however, having regard to what is necessary or desirable, I would not quash the inquest or order that a fresh investigation be held.
'Justice for Mr Mueller has, however, been achieved, by the unequivocal endorsement of his position which I hope will, in this public judgment, serve to repair the damage that has been done by the error made by Det Insp Sellars, repeated at the inquest and so widely published.'
A Berlin art installation dedicated to 'martyrs' has prompted outrage by including one of the Paris jihadist attackers alongside the likes of Martin Luther King and Socrates, with the French embassy calling the display 'deeply shocking'.
The so-called 'Martyr Museum' by a Danish art collective shows the portraits of 20 people throughout history who 'died for their convictions' accompanied by short biographies.
The exhibition includes an image of French jihadist Ismael Omar Mostefai, one of three gunmen and suicide bombers who stormed the Bataclan concert venue in Paris in 2015, killing 90 people.
The so-called 'Martyr Museum' by a Danish art collective shows the portraits of 20 people throughout history who 'died for their convictions' accompanied by short biographies
On display next to his portrait is an entrance ticket to the Bataclan.
Also sharing a wall with US civil rights icon King and Greek philosopher Socrates is Mohammed Atta, the pilot who slammed a passenger plane into one of New York's World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001.
The week long installation by the art group, The Other Eye of the Tiger, was inaugurated last Wednesday at the Kunstquartier Bethanien art centre.
It sparked howls of outrage in German and French media and on social networks.
The French embassy in Berlin expressed 'consternation' and said it found the decision to include the attackers 'deeply shocking'
The French embassy in Berlin expressed 'consternation' and said it found the decision to include the attackers 'deeply shocking'.
'While keeping in mind our attachment to the freedom of artistic creation, we strongly condemn the confusion here between martyrdom and terrorism,' it said in a statement.
But the art collective defended the show, saying that it condemned any kind of violence or terrorism and that it was merely taking a wide look at the usage of the term 'martyr'.
'All the martyrs in the artwork have been appointed martyr by either a state, religion or an organisation. None of the martyrs have been appointed by the artists,' it said in a statement.
Berlin city hall authorities distanced themselves from the project, saying in a statement they did 'not support it' and had not provided any financial assistance.
An earlier version of the 'Martyr Museum' in Copenhagen in 2016 also caused controversy, with critics filing a police complaint accusing the artists of 'encouraging terror'.
The Utah Court of Appeals has dismissed a lawsuit filed against a local school district by a victim of a teacher who has been convicted of having sex with three male students.
The ruling upheld a district court's decision to reject the lawsuit concerning the sexual misconduct of Brianne Altice, who worked as an English teacher at Davis high School.
Judge Ryan Harris wrote in his 21-page opinion, which was released on Friday, that under state law, the Davis County School District was immune from suit.
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The Utah Court of Appeals has dismissed a lawsuit against the Davis County School District over the sexual misconduct case of ex-English teacher Brianne Altice, pictured left in her mugshot in 2013, and right in court in January 2017
The civil suit was filed by a former student who had sex with Altice when he was 16 years old
Altice pleaded guilty in 2015 to felony forcible sexual abuse and was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison, but she could be released as early as 2020.
In January of this year, Altice, 38, made a tearful plea begging the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole to release her, but her request was denied.
Altice admitted in a plea agreement that she had touched the genitals of a 16-year-old boy and two 17-year-old from January to September 2013.
All three teens testified that they had sexual intercourse with the teacher.
Two of the victims later filed lawsuits against Altice and the Davis School District, both of which have now been dismissed.
The lawsuits claimed that Davis High School was aware of Altice's inappropriate relationships with multiple students but did not fire her and protect them.
One of the suits said that the running joke in the high school was: 'Who is Ms Altice sleeping with now?'
Altice (pictured in 2014) pleaded guilty in 2015 to felony forcible sexual abuse and was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison
Altice was first arrested in October 2013 when the 16-year-old victim reported having a relationship with her. The two additional victims then came forward.
The former teacher was defiant following her initial arrest, claiming at the time that the boy 'wore down her defenses' and 'ultimately broke down her resistance'.
Altice's victim claimed the relationship began after they exchanged numbers and flirted during class. They ultimately started kissing and having sex.
Court documents state that the students often skipped class to spend their days with Altice, and that she confided in them about her marital problems.
Altice fired back at the claims from prison with a two-page letter in which she lashed out at the parents of one of her victims, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
In the letter, Altice claimed the parents had failed to attend her parent-teacher conferences and said their son often complained about his strained relationship with them.
She also shot down claims that she wore 'risque' clothing in the classroom saying that there she had never received any complaints about her work attire.
Altice was ordered to jail at the time after it was revealed she had sex with a third victim while out on bail for her 2013 arrest.
Sentencing guidelines suggest Altice remain behind bars until January 2020, but the ultimate decision was left to the parole board.
Sentencing guidelines suggest Altice, pictured in 2015, remain behind bars until January 2020
Altice's husband divorced her following her 2013 arrest and has custody of their two children.
In his ruling last week, the appeals court judge said that the plaintiff, who was 16 years ago at the time of his tryst with Altice, argued that the District knew, or at least should have known, that Teacher had been previously terminated from former employment due to sexual misconduct.
The lawsuit accused the district of being negligent in its hiring, supervision and retention of the English teacher, especially after reprimanding Altice, according to the complaint, for engaging in inappropriate contacts with students.
The school district argued that under the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah, it was not responsible for any damages caused by Altice, and the appeals court sided with the defendant.
It might seem counterintuitive that our law provides no civil remedy against a school district that is alleged to have negligently hired and retained a teacher who has illegal sexual contact with her minor students. But this conclusion is, in our view, compelled by the Act and by Utah Supreme Court precedent, the decision states.
Democratic leaders say they have accepted an invitation from the White House to sit down with President Trump in an effort to prevent a government shutdown.
Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi announced the meeting, scheduled for Thursday, in a joint statement. The White House subsequently confirmed the dialogue would take place.
Schumer, the leading Senate Democrat, and Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House, suddenly called off a meeting with Trump last week after he derided them in a tweet.
They agreed Monday to a conversation with GOP leaders and the president on immigration reform and other thorny topics.
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Democratic leaders said Monday that they had accepted an invitation from the White House to sit down with President Trump in an effort to prevent a government shutdown. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi announced the meeting, scheduled for Thursday, in a joint statement
Federal funding dries up on Friday unless the majority is able to cobble together the votes for a short-term spending agreement. House Republicans said this afternoon that they expect to pass legislation that does just that on Wednesday.
The continuing resolution would keep the lights on through Dec. 22 - three days before the Christmas holiday.
Trump's party is likely to be at the mercy of Democrats when it comes to approving a long-term agreement.
A faction of Democratic lawmakers, and a Republican senator, are threatening to withhold their votes on an appropriations bill if it is not coupled with legislation addressing the plight of illegal immigrant children.
The Trump administration has likewise said that it will not back any immigration bill that denies the Department of Homeland Security funding for the president's border wall. Trump has also said he wants an immigration overhaul that puts a stop to what is known as chain migration because of the long-reaching familial ties that applicants are able to claim.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday on ABC that a shutdown 'was not going to happen' as he slapped down legislators' push to save the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump has moved to end via the must-pass spending bill.
'That's a ridiculous idea. There is no crisis. The president has given us until March to address the issue of undocumented children,' McConnell said. 'But there's no emergency. The president has given us to March to address it.'
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is supportive of the shutdown threat, said that 'in Congress, anything's possible.'
President Donald Trump, surrounded by empty chairs marked for U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who chose not to meet with him last week at the White House
'The end-of-the-year bill, it is a chance to really do some good for the country as a whole, starting by funding the Defense Department more adequately,' Graham told CNN a week ago. 'I'm not going to vote for a spending bill that doesn't dramatically increase defense spending.'
Graham also told CNN during the appearance, on it's flagship Sunday morning program State of the Union: 'There's a deal to be done...For the DREAM Act, I think you could get strong border security and a break in chain migration. If you can put those three things together and put it on the end-of-the-year spending bill, that would be a heck of an accomplishment for 2017.'
In a joint statement on Monday, Pelosi and Schumer said an agreement that addresses many of those issues is possible.
'We need to reach a budget agreement that equally boosts funds for our military and key priorities here at home including the opioid crisis, pension plans and rural infrastructure,' they said.
'We have to provide funding for community health centers and CHIP, as well as relief for the millions of Americans still reeling from natural disasters. And we must also come together on a bipartisan deal to pass the DREAM Act along with tough border security measures.
The duo assessed: 'There is a bipartisan path forward on all of these items.'
'As negotiations with our Republican counterparts continue, we are hopeful the President will be open to an agreement to address the urgent needs of the American people and keep government open,' the released concluded.
Trump met with McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan last week in Schumer and Pelosi's absence. When he spoke to the press afterward, the president was seated between two large, leather chairs each in front of a nameplate of the Democratic leader to signify their absence.
'We are very far apart,' he said at one point. 'So they decided not to show up. Theyve been all talk and theyve been no action ... Now its not even talk.'
Trump staged the photo-opportunity designed to embarrass the Democratic leadership after they snubbed a White House meeting where the looming government shutdown was on the table.
He said of the no-show Democrats. 'Im not really that surprised.'
'I'm not really that surprised, we have a lot of differences. They are weak on crime, they're weak on illegal immigration, they want the illegal folks to come pouring into a border and a lot of problems are being caused, although we've stopped it to a large extent without the wall, which we're going to get,' Trump said.
He repeatedly stressed national security, and brought up a Tuesday missile launch by North Korea.
'They, before this meeting and before this missile launch, have been weak on military in terms of spending. They're very hard to get for military. They want it for a lot of other things, but the military is always secondary to them,' Trump said.
'I will say this, in light of the missile launch, probably they'll be here fairly quickly, or at least discussions will start taking place fairly quickly,' Trump added, without explanation. 'We have a lot of differences. Theyre weak on crime, theyre weak on illegal immigration.'
The president, it turned out, was right about one thing - the Democratic leaders agreed 'fairly quickly' to come to the White House this week for talks at second chance. Paul and McConnell will join them in the Thursday meeting with the president.
YOU NEVER VISIT: Trump blasted the Democratic leaders for snubbing a White House meeting
IT'S NOT THE SAME WITHOUT YOU: Trump glances at an empty chair marked 'Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi'
EVERYONE ELSE CAME: The meeting included staff aides to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan
UNCOMFORTABLE: Schumer and Pelosi skipped the meeting after Trump called them 'weak on crime'
The two top Democrats in Congress abruptly canceled a planned White House meeting with Donald Trump last Tuesday in response to the president's angry tweet expressing pessimism about their willingness to cut a deal that would keep the government running.
Trump had thrown shade at Schumer and Pelosi hours earlier, calling them tax-hikers who are 'weak' on crime and favor the 'unchecked' admission of illegal immigrants into the United States.
He also wrote that he doesn't 'see a deal' in the making.
Pelosi and Schumer effectively cut the president out of the conversation late on Tuesday morning, saying in a joint statement that '[g]iven that the President doesn't see a deal between Democrats and the White House, we believe the best path forward is to continue negotiating with our Republican counterparts in Congress instead.'
'We don't have any time to waste in addressing the issues that confront us, so we're going to continue to negotiate with Republican leaders who may be interested in reaching a bipartisan agreement,' they said.
President Donald Trump, center, escorted by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, left, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., right, arrives at the Capitol to meet with GOP lawmakers about moving his agenda and passing the Republican tax bill last week
President Trump tweeted about an upcoming meeting with Sen. Charles Schumer and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi
McConnell who has also been on the receiving end of Trump twitter attacks and Ryan hit back with their own statement bashing the 'new excuses' not to meet with the administration.
'We have important work to do, and Democratic leaders have continually found new excuses not to meet with the administration to discuss these issues,' the two leaders said.
'Democrats are putting government operations, particularly resources for our men and women on the battlefield, at great risk by pulling these antics. There is a meeting at the White House this afternoon, and if Democrats want to reach an agreement, they will be there.'
On Tuesday afternoon White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement, 'It's disappointing that Senator Schumer and Leader Pelosi are refusing to come to the table and discuss urgent issues.'
'The President's invitation to the Democrat leaders still stands and he encourages them to put aside their pettiness, stop the political grandstanding, show up and get to work. These issues are too important,' Sanders said.
'The meeting will proceed as scheduled with Speaker Ryan, Leader McConnell and administration officials who are committed to getting things done,' Sanders added. 'If the Democrats believe the American people deserve action on these critical year-end issues as we do, they should attend.'
NO THANKS: Pelosi tweeted that she and Schumer plan to 'continue negotiating with our Republican counterparts in Congress'
Trump had also been on Capitol Hill to speak with the Republican Senate Caucus at lunchtime.
Republicans have unified control of government, but leaders will most likely need some Democratic votes to get a funding resolution passed.
A group of Democrats are demanding a fix to help DREAMers who came to the U.S. illegally as immigrant children. The president rescinded their status but set a six-month deadline that ends in March to find a solution.
'Meeting with 'Chuck and Nancy' today about keeping government open and working,' Trump tweeted last Tuesday am. 'Problem is they want illegal immigrants flooding into our Country unchecked, are weak on Crime and want to substantially RAISE Taxes. I don't see a deal!'
Pelosi wrote that she and Schumer will negotiate 'in good faith,' regardless of what Trump is doing
Not happening again: Pelosi sat in the Oval Office in September as the White House negotiated hurricane relief funds and a hike in the nation's borrowing limit
Typically in recent years, even as government funding deadlines approach, presidents reassure financial markets and investors that the U.S. government will ultimately remain open and running.
Rump may be trying to use the threat of a shutdown to try to gain negotiating leverage, although usually it is a minority party seeking concessions from the White House who is able to threaten to hold up government funding, rather than the head of the government.
With just a 52 seat majority, Republicans can only afford three defections from their ranks and pass a spending bill in the Senate.
Amazon's Australian arm has finally launched offering customers the chance to snap up deals just in time for Christmas.
Initially thought to be launching ahead of Black Friday, Amazon said it would start taking orders on Tuesday, ending speculation about the timing of its launch in Australia and likely dashing hopes of a holiday boost for struggling brick-and-mortar rivals.
The global retailer said it would offer free shipping nationwide for purchases over $49, with millions of products available from clothes to sporting goods to consumer electronics.
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Amazon's Australian arm has finally launched on Tuesday offering customers the chance to snap up deals just in time for Christmas.
Deals available on the website include a 32" Samsung Smart TV for $608.20 and a Kindle E-reader starting from $109.
Gamers can get their hands on a Nintendo Switch console for $399 and the new FIFA 18 game for PlayStation is available for $39.
A VS Sassoon hairdryer can be snapped up for as little as $25. A Lego BB-8 Play set is on offer fro $99.97 - cheaper than buying it from Lego's website, where it costs $159.99.
Gym bunnies can get a Fitbit Charge 2 Heart Rate + Fitness Wristband for Christmas for just $137. On Fitbit's website, the same device is now $179.95, reduced from $249.95.
However, some of the products on Amazon were found to be much cheaper at rival retailers.
Deals available on the website include a 32' Samsung Smart TV (pictured) for $608.20
Gamers can get their hands on a Nintendo Switch console (pictured above) for $399
Amazon customers can get a Kindle E-reader starting from $109 and FIFA 18 for PS4 for $39
A 65" Samsung QLED Series 7 TV was offered for $5,999 on Amazon, but on JB Hi-Fi's website, the same television is on sale for just $3,996.
Amazon are offering a Chanel perfume trio for $199, but on department store David Jones' site, the same set is offered for $139.
Lipstick lovers should head to Mecca's website to get their hands on a Bobbi Brown Art Stick where it's $46 compared to $51.40 on Amazon. On Myer, the lipsticks cost $44 to $46.
A Disney Cars gift set is priced $55 on the newly-launched Amazon Australia website
A VS Sassoon Styling Kit can be snapped up for less than $25 on Amazon Australia
Those who love to pamper themselves with skincare will have to fork out $732.95 for a 100ml jar of La Mer's The Moisturising Soft Cream from La Mer's Amazon page, but at Myer, the same product can be snapped up for $665.
Meanwhile, Amazon didn't say what time of day it would begin taking orders from its Australian warehouse, except to say it would be on December 5.
It also did not comment on any last-minute problems from an order-taking trial which began on November 23.
Under the free delivery offer, Amazon said it estimated delivery times as short as three business days in the cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra - home to half the country's population - while shipping to remote areas could take 10 days.
But shoppers could pay a fee for faster shipping times.
A 65" Samsung QLED Series 7 TV was offered for $5,999 on Amazon Australia's website
On rival retailer JB Hi-Fi's website, the same Samsung television is on sale for just $3,996
Amazon are offering a Chanel Chance Eau Tendre perfume trio for almost $200 on Tuesday
The same Chancel gift set is available from department store David Jones for just $139
Amazon said it planned to offer its rapid-shipping subscription service, Prime, in mid-2018, in a sign it is unperturbed by the geographic challenge posed by one of the world's most sparsely populated countries.
Australia is the size of the mainland United States, but with one-thirteenth its population.
The move establishes the US giant as an aggressive presence in the sluggish Australian retail sector, just as shopkeepers were hoping for a rush of sales over the important Christmas holiday season.
In a statement, Amazon's Australia country manager, Rocco Braeuniger, said the company would 'earn the trust' of Australian shoppers and, over time, create 'thousands of new jobs'.
'Are you ready to make a difference?' a sign at Amazon's fulfillment centre in Melbourne said
Australia has long been home to Amazon-registered sellers, but until Tuesday they were limited to sending goods offshore because the Seattle conglomerate did not have a warehouse in the country of 24 million people.
This also meant Australians had to wait longer times, and pay higher fees, for shipping.
The company has now set up a massive distribution warehouse on the outskirts of Melbourne city, on the country's east coast where four-fifths of the population live, and the company hopes to cut delivery time to as little as a day.
The online retailer will offer one-day delivery to customers in major Australian cities
Australian retail shares have fallen sharply since Amazon confirmed plans for the country in April.
Shares of top department store operator Myer Holdings Ltd are down 30 percent since that time.
Myer has been shutting stores and ramping up online sales, and last month it halved its three-year target for growth in sales per square metre.
Its online sales leapt 68 percent in the 13 weeks to October 28, but remained only a tiny fraction of its total revenue.
Shares of No. 1 electronics retailer Harvey Norman Holdings Ltd are down 7 percent since April, while smaller JB HiFi are off by 6 percent amid fears of competition from Amazon.
In a legal case with profound implications for LGBT rights and religion's place in public life, the opposing sides agree on this: It's not about the cake.
At its core, the case that goes before the U.S. Supreme Court for oral arguments on Tuesday is a showdown between a gay couple from Colorado and a Denver-area baker who in 2012 cited his Christian faith in refusing to make a cake for their wedding celebration.
Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, was judged through multiple phases of litigation to have violated Colorado's anti-discrimination law. Through his lawyers, he now gets to argue before the highest court in the land that he's an artist who should not be compelled to create a cake that contradicts his religious views.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear the case of Jack Phillips (pictured), the Denver-area baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple in 2012
Charlie Craig (left) and David Mullins (right) say they went to Phillips' bakery, Masterpiece Cakes, in July 2012 to get a wedding cake. He refused, citing his Christian faith. They sued and won on the grounds that he violated the state's anti-discrimination law
For Phillips' legion of supporters - including conservative politicians, advocacy groups and religious institutions - the case has ramifications for creative professionals of all kinds.
'Every American should be free to choose which art they will create and which art they won't create without fear of being unjustly punished by the government,' Phillips recently told a rally of local supporters.
For advocates of LGBT rights, the stakes are perilously high. They fear a Supreme Court ruling in Phillips' favor would open the door to discrimination by a wide range of business owners and entrepreneurs.
'Cakes can often have artistic or creative designs. So can sandwiches, legal briefs, bicycles, cars, flowers, medical care,' American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio argued in a recent blog post.
'If a baker can reject LGBTQ people because of who we are, then what about the mechanic, the florist, the doctor, the teacher?' Strangio asked. 'This is not about cake. This is not about art. This is about survival.'
The case reaches the Supreme Court at a stressful time for the LGBT rights movement.
Just two years ago, the high court delivered the movement its greatest victory - a 5-4 decision paving the way for same-sex marriage to become legal nationwide. But that achievement, coming just 11 years after Massachusetts became the first state to recognize gay marriage, has been partly offset by subsequent political developments.
Phillips has continued to fight the decision, taking it all the way to the Supreme court (pictured above at his store in September)
Phillips has argued that, as an artist, he shouldn't have to be forced to make a cake for something he doesn't believe in
The sweeping Republican election victory in November 2016 solidified social conservatives' dominance in Congress and a majority of states and set the stage for President Donald Trump's administration to roll back several LGBT-friendly initiatives undertaken during Barack Obama's two terms in office.
Protections for transgender students have been weakened, and Trump is seeking to ban transgender people from military service. In October, Attorney General Jeff Sessions - a longtime skeptic of LGBT-rights initiatives - issued 'religious exemptions' guidance that could override many anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people and others.
The net result: LGBT activists see little prospect of short-term progress at the federal level, even as they remain heartened by the ever-growing ranks of corporations and local governments that are acting to make LGBT people feel welcome and to curb discrimination against them. The local laws can be important, given that only 21 states have statewide laws barring discrimination against gays and lesbians in public accommodations.
ARGUMENTS IN THE MASTERPIECE CAKES CASE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM Baker Jack Phillips and his supporters say this case is about Phillips' freedom to decline to bake a cake that is in conflict with his religious beliefs. 'This case has always been about one thing: compelling Phillips to create custom wedding cakes,' the baker's lawyers said in their final court filing before Tuesday's argument. Mormon, Lutheran, evangelical and Jewish groups that support Phillips said that the court already has recognized the liberty of same-sex couples to marry. Those groups told the court that 'it is equally important to protect the religious liberty of these conscientious objectors.' Representing Catholic organizations, lawyer John Bursch wrote, 'American citizens should never be forced to choose between their religious faith and their right to participate in the public square.' RELIGIOUS EXEMPTION The other side says the main issue is invoking religion to seek an exemption from anti-discrimination laws. The civil rights group GLAAD says this case is about using religion to deny someone's rights. It distinguishes such claims of religious exemption from cases of religious freedom, where one person's assertion of rights does not harm anyone else. 'The exemption sought ... would expose many more LGBT people to the specter of discrimination and the attendant pressure to hide their identities and their relationships to avoid it,' wrote lawyer Mary Bonauto, who argued the high court's 2015 case that extended same-sex marriage rights nationwide. Bonauto is representing GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. If the Constitution allowed 'religiously motivated denials of service to same-sex couples,' it probably also would allow people to be refused service based on their faith, Americans United for Separation of Church and State said in a brief that also includes other rights groups. Advertisement
Lambda Legal, a prominent LGBT-rights group, was among dozens of organizations submitting briefs to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Colorado couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins.
The group argued that LGBT people, for all their recent civil rights advances, still encounter varied forms of discrimination in the public square. Among its examples: a lesbian couple denied infertility treatment in San Diego, a gay Iowa couple rebuffed in efforts to rent a wedding venue, a transgender man turned away from a New Jersey hospital where he sought a hysterectomy.
'This is why nondiscrimination laws like Colorado's are so important,' wrote Lambda's law and policy director, Jennifer Pizer. 'So that people can live their lives without fearing that, at any moment, they may be turned away or verbally abused just for who they are.'
Oral arguments for Masterpiece Cakeshop vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission will be heart on Tuesday. Above, the Supreme court on Monday
The lawyers arguing the case will be fighting over Anthony Kennedy's presumed swing vote. Kennedy, a Republican, has voted in support of LGBT issues before, but is also a firm defender of Freedom of Speech
Craig and Mullins spent only a few moments at the bakery in 2012 before Philipps' rebuff hit home.
'There was horrible pregnant pause,' Mullins recalls. 'It was publicly humiliating and it was painful.'
This will be the first major case dealing with LGBT rights for new Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative
'Never in a million years did we think that five years later we'd be going to the Supreme Court,' he said. 'It's been emotionally trying. You sort of have to relive that pain again and again.'
For opponents of same-sex marriage, religious liberty and religious freedom have become watchwords for a broad campaign to carve out more public space for their viewpoints.
There have been defeats. Earlier this year, Washington state's Supreme Court ruled unanimously that florist Barronelle Stutzman broke the state's anti-discrimination law by refusing to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding. In October, two women who specialize in hand-lettering and calligraphy for weddings lost the latest round of their challenge of a Phoenix ordinance requiring them to provide their services for same-sex weddings.
There have been some victories as well.
In Michigan, a federal judge recently ordered the city of East Lansing to make room for a farmer who was barred from selling apples at a seasonal market because he doesn't let gay couples get married at his orchard, which is a popular wedding spot. A panel of U.S. appellate judges has allowed a sweeping Mississippi law to take effect that lets government workers and business owners cite religious beliefs to deny services to LGBT people. The law, now the subject of an appeal to the Supreme Court, protects three beliefs: that marriage is only between a man and a woman, that gender cannot be changed and that sex outside of marriage is wrong.
TIMELINE OF THE MASTERPIECE CAKES CASE July 19, 2012: Engaged couple Charlie Craig and David Mullins visit Masterpiece Cakes to buy a wedding cake. Once owner Jack Phillips hears they are gay, he says he won't make them one because of his Christian beliefs May 2013: Craig and Mullins file a complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, saying they believe the state's Anti-Discrimination Act was violated by Phillips. May 2014: The couple's complaint becomes a lawsiut, Craig v. Masterpiece Cakeshop, which is decided in favor of the couple. Phillips is ordered to provide cakes to same-sex couples and to 'change its company policies, provide "comprehensive staff training" regarding public accomodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports of rthe next two years regarding steps it has taken to come into compliance and whether it has turned away any prospective customers.' August 2015: Phillips appeals the decision with the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, a far-right Christian legal group. The State's decision was upheld by the Colorado Court of Appeals, which said that Phillips refusal to make a cake for a same-sex marriage was 'tantamount to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation'. December 5, 2017: Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case. Advertisement
Back in 2014, the Supreme Court declined to weigh in on a case with similarities to the Colorado dispute. The justices rebuffed a request to review a New Mexico Supreme Court decision holding that a photography studio violated the state's anti-discrimination laws by refusing to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony.
Three years later, the high court has opted to wade into the same high-voltage issues, assessing whether Phillips' right to freedom of speech outweighs Colorado's interest in protecting Mullins and Craig from discrimination. It will mark the most important LGBT-rights case for conservative Coloradan Neil Gorsuch since he joined the Supreme Court in April.
However, the outcome could turn on the vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy, as it often does in cases that otherwise break along the court's liberal-conservative divide.
Kennedy's legacy is firmly tied to his authorship of major gay rights rulings dating back to 1996, including the landmark 2015 decision making same-sex marriage legal nationwide. At the same time, Kennedy, 81, has forcefully defended free-speech rights in his nearly 30 years as a justice.
Each side has tailored its arguments to appeal to one of those two strains in hopes of attracting Kennedy's vote.
Phillips still stoutly defends his 2012 rebuff of Mullins and Craig, saying he offered to sell them virtually any of his baked goods except a custom cake for their wedding.
'I don't create custom designs for events or messages that conflict with my conscience,' he said at the recent rally of his supporters. 'I don't create cakes for Halloween, bachelor or bachelorette parties, and anti-American cakes. I've turned down a cake order for an anti-LGBT message.'
To the other side, Phillips' arguments seem like an invitation to intolerance.
'This case is not about a cake. It's not about a baker,' Craig says. 'It's about us being able to be free to be treated equally in the public realm.'
Andre Holder, 25, of Longsight, Greater Manchester, targeted his teenage victim 'over a number of months' before raping him
A teacher has been jailed after grooming a 17-year-old boy for several months, raping him and 'spinning a web of lies' to cover up his crime.
Andre Holder, 25, of Longsight, Greater Manchester, targeted his teenage victim 'over a number of months'.
A jury at the city's Minshull Street Crown Court heard he 'spun a web of lies' when the allegations against him came to light, desperate to cover them up.
He refused to admit what he had done until his trial went to court.
Speaking at the hearing, Detective Constable Sue Gallogly, of Greater Manchester Police, said: 'First of all I would like to commend the bravery of the victim.
'This has understandably been an incredibly difficult time for him.
'Andre Holder refused to admit what he had done right up until his trial, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
'Holder targeted his victim over a number of months and spun a web of lies to cover up what he was doing.
'No one could have predicted the danger the victim was in however.
'Whilst this crime does not relate to his post as a teacher, I would like to encourage anyone with any concerns to come and speak to police.
'Holder will now spend the next five years in prison contemplating the damage he has done.'
Jailing him Judge Paul Lawton said his crime was so serious he will have to sign the Sex Offenders' Register for the rest of his live.
He was sentenced to five years behind bars.
A 78-year-old woman has been viciously mauled by her three pet dingoes after she tried to stop a fatal attack on a pug in Sydney's southwest.
Paramedics described the scene as 'horrific', revealing the woman's arm had been savaged during the attack - with her skin completely torn off from her muscle.
She was taken to Liverpool Hospital in a serious condition with bite wounds to her arms, legs and back following the attack at Greendale about 5pm on Monday.
Police said the dingoes had targeted the pug, which was also owned by the woman, before turning on her.
Woman, 78, (pictured) has been viciously mauled by three dingoes as she tried to protect her pug during a fatal attack
The dingoes, believed to be the woman's pets, targeted the pug but turned on her when she tried to intervene. The skin was torn from her muscle on one of her arms during the attack
Responding paramedic Kay Armstrong told 9 News the woman suffered 'severe injuries to her arms and legs, including puncture wounds and a degloving injury.'
The three dingoes, which have been caged on the property, are due to be seized by council rangers on Tuesday.
Rangers are expected to speak to the woman before making a decision on whether to put down the three dingoes or not.
The woman's pet pug died during the attack and she remained in Liverpool Hospital in a serious condition on Tuesday morning.
The three dingoes, which have been caged on the property, are due to be seized by council rangers on Tuesday
Responding paramedic Kay Armstrong said the woman suffered puncture wounds and a degloving injury'
Donald Trump pushed his own shopping cart through a food pantry in Utah on Monday, something photographers have never witnessed from the billionaire president.
Before a speech at the state capitol in Salt Lake City, Trump toured Welfare Square, a food pantry and relief aid processing center run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
'Good stuff!' the president said as he pushed the cart.
He joked with crowd in the capitol rotunda an hour later that 'I went around the store. I wanted a nice can of tuna fish and they had plenty!'
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'Good stuff!' President Donald Trump pushed his own shopping cart through Welfare Square, a Mormon church-run food pantry, on Monday in Utah
The billionaire didn't fill the cart himself but pushed it as he toured the Salt Lake City facility with church leaders and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch
Trump He joked during his speech an hour later in the state capitol rotunda that 'I went around the store. I wanted a nice can of tuna fish and they had plenty!'
The president took a moment to inspect a can of corn while he spoke with LDS officials about Welfare Square
In addition to being a food bank for the needy, Welfare Square is a food processing and staging ground for packaging food aid destined for more than 120 missions worldwide.
LDS official Henry Eyring told the president that it is 'a place where we have food and materials that we give to the poor.'
'This is simply an example of what we do across the world, the idea being that we think we have an obligation to God to look out for the people who, without our aid, have tragedy in their lives, be it poverty or hunger,' he said.
Welfare Square is a food pantry, a thrift store, and a food processing and staging ground for packaging food aid destined for more than 120 missions worldwide.
Utah's poor and people in trouble worldwide get food, clothing and other supplies from Welfare Square
In addition to distributing food to Utah's needy, Welfare Square is a staging point for food and supplies headed for natural disaster sites and at least 120 church missions around the world
The president was in Salt Lake City to sign a proclamation reversing the expansion of two national monuments, whose nearly 3 million acres represented more land than Delaware and Rhode Island
Welfare Square was the staging ground for the LDS church's supply network that brought relief aid to New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Russell Nelson, the LDS president, said he had just returned from China where native-born Mormon converts had brought supplies from Welfare Square 'for schoolchildren who didn't have means of getting what they needed to go to school.'
But Trump stole the show, pushing a shopping cart like an ordinary guy, with Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and church leaders in tow.
LDS official Henry Eyring (right) told the president that Welfare Square is 'an example of what we do across the world, the idea being that we think we have an obligation to God to look out for the people who, without our aid, have tragedy in their lives, be it poverty or hunger'
He said in his speech that he had 'just come from touring Welfare Square with Senator Hatch and some amazing people from the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints.'
'Special. I spent a lot of time with them. ... They really help people. Incredible. After our visit I can truly say firsthand that Utah's awesome natural beauty is exceeded only by the warmth and grace and hospitality of its citizens.'
'This state has many natural treasures,' Trump said, 'but its greatest treasure by far is its people. And we will ensure the right of the people to live according to the faith in their hearts which is why we will always protect your religious liberty.'
Trump was in Utah to sign a proclamation reversing decisions of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that dramatically expanded a pair of massive national monuments that had locked up nearly 3 million acres of land from virtually any public use.
A euthanasia advocate has sparked outrage after he announced plans to launch the world's first 3D-printed suicide machine next year.
Dr Philip Nitschke, 70, recently unveiled plans for his futuristic death machine, the Sarco.
Nitschke, who has been branded 'Dr Death' following 22 years in the field of euthanasia, developed the Sarco with engineer Alexander Bannick in the Netherlands, with the aim of making it available worldwide.
His non for profit organisation, Exit International, will be placing the printing program on the internet as free open source material once they have been fully tested, which will allow the machine to be 3D-printed and assembled anywhere in the world.
Australian euthanasia advocate Dr Philip Nitschke has launched the world's first 3D-printed machine for committing suicide (pictured)
However, pro-life groups have criticized Dr Nitschke and warn his machine could lead to a huge rise in suicides across the US.
Nurse Nancy Valko, RN ALNC, of St. Louis, Missouri, is a spokesperson for the National Association of Pro-life Nurses and has worked on trauma units and burns. Her own daughter took her life, aged 30, after more than a decade of substance abuse after reading Final Exit.
She warned that any assisted suicide is open to abuse and believes that suicide should be illegal in all cases.
'As a nurse I'm just outraged,' she told DailyMail.com, adding that people have been committing suicide 'forever' but we shouldn't be making it easier.
'It's glamorizing and normalizing suicide.'
Dr Nitschke, who previously published a book which detailed methods of humane suicide, said that people who want to end their lives currently use drugs, which can be difficult to get hold of and illegal, or use other methods, such as inhaling gases in a plastic bag, but people are put off by the 'plastic bag factor.'
He says that the Sarco offers a 'peaceful and I would even say an elegant death.'
The machine - named the Sarco - contains a capsule which can then be detached from the base and used as a coffin (pictured is Dr Nitschke)
Users must complete an online mental questionnaire to establish their mental competency, in order to get a 4-digit access code for the capsule. Once inside, they can start the machine with a click of a button, voice activation or by a series of blinks for paralyzed patients.
Liquid nitrogen then fills the capsule after the user activates the machine, causing a peaceful death within minutes as oxygen drops. While the base is reusable, the pod in which the person end their life can be used as a biodegradable coffin.
'Sarco does not use any restricted drugs, or require any special expertise such as the insertion of an intravenous needle,' he said.
'Anyone who can pass the entry test, can enter the machine and legally end their life.'
He describes the experience as relatively painless, comparing it to an airplane cabin depressurizing.
Dr Nitschke told the DailyMail.com he already has an accurate model and is now working on creating a prototype which he expects to be completed in early 2018 ready for rigorous testing.
Dr Nitschke developed the Sarco (pictured) with engineer Alexander Bannick in the Netherlands, with the aim of making it available worldwide
He hopes to have the final working program available online by the end of next year.
The plans will be available to everyone which means that anyone with the funds to access a 3D printer, or purchase one themselves, will be able to print the machine.
However, he expects that euthanasia clinics, such as those in Switzerland, will be the first to take advantage of the new technology. Since he unveiled the plans at a conference in Canada in October, he told us he'd already had interest from people all over the world.
Crucially, at a time where assisted suicide is still illegal in 44 states and the majority of countries worldwide, he said it offers those wishing to end their lives as way to do so independently - without putting their loved ones at risk of arrest.
The Australian doctor, who now resides in the Netherlands where assisted suicide is legal, said the space age design of the Sarco was no accident.
'It's a vehicle to take you on a trip to the next plane of existence,' he said. 'That was incorporated in the design.'
Dr Nitschke, who said he never plans to charge for the Sarco design, said that if it came to a point in his own life when he needed to consider euthanasia, he would chose to do it in the machine.
'I'm a bit attracted to the nature of the Sarco, and making it a symbolic event,' he said.
The doctor first got involved in euthanasia in 1995 when Australia passed a law allowing a doctor to end the life of a terminally ill patient at the patient's request.
He was one of the few in the medical profession who supported the new legislation and he performed his first assisted death in 1996. Australia repealed the law shortly afterwards, in 1997.
During the brief time it was legal in Australia, Dr Nitschke created his first death machine that he called 'the Deliverance.'
It was a laptop hooked up to an IV that allowed a patient to administer the deadly drugs after answering a few questions. He said that it allowed him to take a step back from the process, so the patient died surrounded by family, not doctors.
Since then, technology has moved on and he hopes that his Sarco design will offer a more 'elegant' solution.
The doctor first got involved in euthanasia in 1995 when Australia passed a law allowing a doctor to end the life of a terminally ill patient at the patient's request
Dr Philip Nitschke is pictured in 1996 displaying his first ever 'death machine' in his home in Darwin, Australia. The machine was used by the first person in the world to die under voluntary euthanasia legislation
Assisted suicide is currently legal in the states of Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Vermont, Montana and California, as well as Washington DC, and several European countries including Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands.
Dr Nitschke said his ultimate goal is to help rational people around the globe end their lives peacefully and reliably at times of their choosing.
He insists suicide is a 'human right' and even believes that assisted suicide should not just be restricted to the terminally ill - which is a current requirement for states where it is legal - but should be available to anyone over the age of 70.
'Any rational adult should have the right to die.'
But critics believe that legalized suicide means that terminal patients, who can have a better quality of life than ever before thanks to palliative end of life care, may never even try other medical treatments and chose to take their life prematurely.
'I think it's bad medicine, ethics, and bad public policy,' Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, a Georgetown professor of biomedical ethics, told Newsweek. 'It converts killing into a form of healing and doesn't acknowledge that we can now do more for symptoms through palliative than ever before.'
He is also concerned that promoting suicide machines will see an increase in suicide.
He warned that after Derek Humphry published Final Exit, which detailed aspects of planning and carrying out suicide, the number of suicides by asphyxiation in New York City rose by 313 percent that year.
But Dr Nitschke believes the demand for suicide is only going to grow.
'(Baby) boomers want to be in control of their own deaths. They don't like the idea of someone patting them on the head and telling them what to do.'
If you or anyone you know is in need of confidential support, call the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255 or visit its website.
The Los Angeles Police Department has refused to confirm reports it is investigating new sex abuse allegations against disgraced director Roman Polanski.
According to a report, the LAPD has opened a new investigation into the director who has lived as a fugitive since fleeing the country in 1978.
'Yes there is an open investigation on Roman Polanski,' an LAPD spokesperson said, according to The Sun.
While the LAPD denied the info came from their spokespeople, the Sun stand by its claims.
The LAPD didn't deny the existence of an investigation, telling DailyMail.com the Sun report may well be accurate but the information not come from their public information office.
'We can't release any other information because it's confidential due to the type of crime it is but he is listed as a suspect in a police report and it's an open investigation,' the Sun-sourced LAPD spokesperson said.
A new report says the LAPD has opened a new investigation into disgraced director Roman Polanski (pictured)
Marianne Barnard, a California artist alleged Polanski raped her on a beach in Malibu when she was 10-years-old (pictured at 10, shortly before the alleged assault, and as an adult)
Attorney Gloria Allred (left) and her client Robin, who alleges she too was assaulted by Polanski and reported it to authorities in Los Angeles county (pictured at her press conference in August)
'Of course anyone that comes forward wanting to make a police report listing him as a suspect - it's always going to be investigated,' they added.
Several woman have come forward claiming Polanski sexually abused them.
Marianne Barnard, a California artist, previously alleged that Polanski raped her on a Malibu beach when she was 10.
And a woman who has only identified herself as Robin M previously reported to authorities in Los Angeles County that she was sexually assaulted by Polanski in 1973 when she was 16.
Back in 1977 in Los Angeles, Polanski was charged with raping 13-year-old Samantha Geimer. He fled the country in 1978 to escape prison.
And five anonymous women alleged they had been sexually abused by Polanski via Imetpolanski.com, a website set up by women's rights organisation Real Women Real Stories where victims can share their stories.
Mallory Millet who acted under the stage name of Mallory Jones (left) claims Roman Polanksi (right in the year of the alleged incident) tried to rape her in 1970 while he was high on LSD
Mallory says she met the director a second time, and he apologized, yet she claims he tried to rape her again after his apology
The women, currently named only as 'Jane Does', were aged between nine and 16 when the alleged assaults took place between 1969 and 1976.
A former actress, Mallory Millet, now 77-years-old, accused Polanksi of trying to rape her when he was high on LSD in 1970, and that he tried a second time as well.
Mallory Millet, 77, who starred in Tootsie under the stage name Mallory Jones, says she was 29 and a struggling actress when she was invited to a dinner with the director and her friends following his wife, pregnant actress Sharon Tate, being murdered by Charles Manson's followers.
'We went up to Roman's suite to have some after-dinner coffee and drinks but (friends) Michael and Minda left and I was suddenly left on my own with Roman.'
One of the women claims Polanski, 84, molested her under the dinner table during a dinner party in Gstaad in 1976 while her parents were present. Polanski is pictured in the Swiss town last month. His alleged victim says it is a 'sanctuary' for well-known pedophiles
'When I had first arrived they told me that Roman was tripping on LSD and he had started behaving quite strangely - whereas I was very sober - so I thought it was time to leave anyway.'
'But as I tried to leave he wouldn't let me and he attempted to rape me very, very forcefully.'
She said despite the alleged encounter, Polanski met up with her again and apologized for his behavior.
'I ended up alone with him, he tried to put his arms around me and hold me down and I had to flee for a second time.'
Mallory came forward through the website imetpolanski.com. Several such websites have popped up over the past two months for various powerful men who are being accused of similar alleged behavior for women to be able to come forward with their own stories.
'I don't care what age he is he needs to be punished,' Mallory adds.
'I'm very extreme about these things and I think rape - particularly of a young girl - is the same as murder and should be punished as such.'
The imetpolanski.com website has been set up by campaign group Real Women Real Stories, who have been encouraging women to come forward and share their stories of abuse by Polanski and other powerful men.
They aim to make a film about Polanski's victims in a bid to bring him to justice.
Some of the alleged attacks happened in 1969, the same year in which Polanski married Sharon Tate. She was murdered by members of the Charles Manson family later that year. It is not known if her death preceded Polanski's alleged attacks on young girls
The women who have accused Polanski described how the convicted child rapist sexually assaulted them in the late 1960s and 70s before he went on the run for the statutory rape of another underage girl.
Of the newest accusers, two say they were attacked by him in 1969, the same year in which his first wife Sharon Tate was murdered by members of the Charles Manson family.
It is not clear whether the alleged attacks happened before or after her slaying. The other alleged attack happened in 1976 when the woman was 12.
Polanski remains on the run after fleeing the US following his 1977 attack on 13-year-old Samantha Geimer.
He has been pleading for years to have the 1978 arrest warrant thrown out so that he can return to America.
He fled to France days before he was due to go to court over the attack. At the time, Polanski had reached a deal with prosecutors which meant he would serve a shorter sentence.
He got cold feet at the last minute and fled, convinced that he was being set up and that they would be tricked into a harsher prison term.
Geimer has long forgiven him for the attack and, earlier this year, she pleaded with authorities in Los Angeles to allow him back into the country. Courts in Switzerland and France have both refused to extradite him.
In Los Angeles, he is protected by California's now outdated statute of limitations which, until 2016, meant sex crimes had to be prosecuted within 10 years of them happening unless new evidence which could be tested with DNA technology emerged.
The law has since changed in rape cases but crimes which none of those allegedly committed by Polanski are recent enough to now be tried.
Polanski now lives in Paris with his 51-year-old wife Emmanuelle Seigner.
This weekend, President Trump took to Twitter and veered between various topics, potentially putting himself in more legal jeopardy over Michael Flynn.
He ended the roller-coaster of a tweetstorm Monday morning with an endorsement of Roy Moore, the Republicans' Alabama Senate hopeful accused by multiple women of preying on them as teens.
From Friday on, Trump knocked down reports he was going to fire his secretary of state, while revealing that he fired his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn because he knew he had lied to the FBI a concession his lawyer later took credit to penning.
President Trump used Twitter all weekend through Monday - potentially putting himself in more legal jeopardy - while also endorsing a child predator
Trump dredged up his favorite boogeyman Hillary Clinton again, suggesting she was let off by the FBI, as Flynn's reputation was destroyed.
The president also tried to sully Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe, by pointing to the actions of one agent who went rogue and wrote anti-Trump messages.
And, of course, Trump went after the media, pouncing on a correction ABC News had to post after Brian Ross messed up an important detail in the network's special report on the Flynn plea deal.
Here are Trump's weekend tweets by subject and the trouble they could bring him:
Michael Flynn
Throughout Saturday, President Trump griped about Michael Flynn's plea deal, suggesting it was unfair that he got caught and yet Hillary Clinton is free - despite there being no evidence that she lied to the FBI, which Flynn was charged with
It wasn't until Saturday afternoon that Trump expressed some of his thoughts on Flynn's plea deal, announced Friday.
'I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI,' Trump said. 'He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!' the president tweeted at 12:14 p.m.
This tweet was the most problematic because it calls into question what Trump knew about Flynn when he pressured now former FBI Director James Comey to go easy on him.
'I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go,' Comey said the president urged him on February 14, the day after Flynn was fired, according to testimony the ex-FBI head prepared for his June appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
On Monday, CNN reported that White House Counsel Don McGahn told Trump in January he believed Flynn had misled the FBI when he spoke to them on January 24 about his conversations with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak.
Trying to stave off the storm, Trump's personal lawyer John Dowd took credit for writing the tweet, after the Washington Post first reported he had done so.
'I'm out of the tweeting business,' Dowd told Axios Sunday. 'I did not mean to break news.'
The president, however, continued to tweet about Flynn all through the weekend.
On Saturday night he bemoaned how unfair it was for Flynn to be in legal jeopardy, while Trump's former political rival, Hillary Clinton, was home free.
'So General Flynn lies to the FBI and his life is destroyed, while Crooked Hillary Clinton, on that now famous FBI holiday "interrogation" with no swearing in and no recording, lies many times...and nothing happens to her?' Trump wrote at 9:06 p.m. 'Rigged system, or just a double standard?' he asked.
Seven minutes later, he tweeted again.
'Many people in our Country are asking what the "Justice" Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and "acid washed" 33,000 Emails?' Trump wrote. 'No justice!'
Comey testified that he had no reason to believe Clinton ever lied to the FBI.
James Comey
President Trump also used Twitter this weekend to smack one of his favorite nemeses, ex-FBI Director James Comey
As an extension to his disappointment over Flynn, President Trump used Twitter to again smack around James Comey, the FBI leader that he fired in May.
First, on Sunday morning, the president objected to what Comey told members of Congress under oath that Trump had asked him to go easy on Flynn during that Valentine's Day meeting.
'I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn,' Trump wrote at 6:15 a.m. Sunday, his first tweet of the day. 'Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!'
At 8 a.m. he blasted Comey again.
'After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History!' Trump wrote. 'But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness.'
This tweet prompted a response from Comey, who recently started using social media under his name.
The ousted FBI leader insisted the bureau 'is, and always will be, independent.'
Peter Strzok
President Trump latched onto news reports that said FBI agent Peter Strzok was pulled off the Mueller probe after anti-Trump text messages were found. Strzok was also a lead investigator on the Hillary Clinton email probe, with Trump now suggesting bias
Trump, however, latched onto reports from the Washington Post and the New York Times that said FBI agent Peter Strzok was removed from the Mueller probe after exchanging text messages with a colleague he was involved with, which were anti-Trump.
Trump wrote at 7:42 a.m. Sunday, 'Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI "agents role in Clinton probe under review." Led Clinton Email probe. @FoxandFriends Clinton money going to wife of another FBI agent in charge.'
Strzok had also been a head FBI investigator on the bureau's Clinton email probe.
He followed that up with 'Report: "ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE Now it all starts to make sense!'
The president also retweeted several tweets that indicated Strzok had been removed from the Mueller probe, in an attempt to suggest that the Russia investigation was biased.
Brian Ross
The president used Twitter Saturday and Sunday to hammer ABC News for having to issue a correction over a report by Brian Ross, who is currently suspended
And in another dent to the mainstream media, Trump commented several times on a screw-up by ABC News.
The network's Brian Ross was suspended after ABC had to correct a report in which he said Trump had instructed Flynn to reach out to the Russians during the election.
Flynn's questionable contact with the Russians occurred during the transition.
'Congratulations to @ABC News for suspending Brian Ross for his horrendously inaccurate and dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt. More Networks and papers should do the same with their Fake News!' Trump applauded Saturday night at 9:22 p.m.
He went after Ross again Sunday morning.
'People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused - many millions of dollars!' Trump wrote.
Roy Moore
Finally, on Monday morning, President Trump used Twitter to officially endorse Roy Moore, the Republican Alabama Senate hopeful accused of being a pedophile
President Trump eschewed the topics of Michael Flynn and James Comey, as Monday morning kicked off.
Instead, he endorsed an accused pedophile for the U.S. Senate.
'Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama,' Trump wrote at 6:17 a.m. 'We need hisvote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more.'
'No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!' Trump added, referencing Democratic hopeful Doug Jones and the Congressional Democratic leadership.
Trump continued to make that point in a tweet he set off at 7 a.m. on the dot.
'Putting Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders...& so much more,' he said. 'Look at your 401-ks since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back!'
Milo Yiannopoulos took aim at journalist Waleed Aly's wife, Dr Susan Carland, in an expletive-ridden rant during his three sold-out shows in Melbourne on Monday.
The right-wing commentator, who told the crowd Aly was 'dedicated to the destruction of Western civilisation', joked that Dr Carland's uncles would throw acid on her if she didn't wear her hijab, according to The Age.
'[It] would be a bad look on the red carpet at the Logies,' he said.
'She wears that hijab because she chooses to sister. Not because she is the brainwashed victim of a death cult that oppresses women and kills homosexuals,' he continued.
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Milo Yiannopoulos took aim at journalist Waleed Aly's wife, Dr Susan Carland, in an expletive-ridden rant during his three sold-out shows in Melbourne on Monday
The alt-right commentator, who told the crowd Mr Aly was 'dedicated to the destruction of Western civilisation', joked that Dr Carland's (pictured together) uncles would throw acid on her if she didn't wear her hijab
A violent brawl erupted (pictured) between protesters and Mr Yiannopoulos' supporters ahead of the 33-year-old's speech on Monday after the location of his secret show was leaked to critics
A violent brawl erupted between protesters and Mr Yiannopoulos' supporters ahead of the 33-year-old's speech on Monday after the location of his secret show was leaked to critics.
Anti-fascist and hardline right-wing groups clashed outside the Melbourne Pavilion in inner-city Kensington, with protesters brawling in the streets and wielding crude weapons.
Hundreds of protesters from left-aligned Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and two right-wing groups, Reclaim Australia and the True Blue Crew, rallied with a heavy police presence attempting to maintain order.
Protesters could be heard chanting 'Milo is a w**ker' before the clash turned physical.
Despite dozens of officers working to keep the groups separate, at least two men were pepper sprayed after they started fighting, with others joining in.
At least 10 men were pictured throwing punches, with several brandishing make-shift weapons including wooden clubs and sticks.
Two people were arrested and are expected to be charged with discharging a missile. A police officer received minor injuries, according to 9News.
Despite being slammed for a personal attack on prominent feminist writer Clementine Ford during his shows in Adelaide and Perth (pictured), Mr Yiannopoulos took aim at the 36-year-old again during the third leg of his speaking tour
Left-wing protesters were stationed in Kensington, Melbourne's north-west, on Monday afternoon ahead of the right-wing firebrand's speech
Hundreds of protesters from left-aligned Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and two right-wing groups, Reclaim Australia and the True Blue Crew, rallied with a heavy police presence attempting to maintain order
Police used capsicum spray to subdue some of the more violent demonstrators
Protesters could be heard chanting 'Milo is a w**ker' before the clash turned physical
Victoria Police officers restrained protesters in front of shocked onlookers
A protester throws a street sign towards police officers during the demonstration
Mr Yiannopoulos' first Melbourne event was due to kick off at 6.30pm, with another two scheduled the same night.
Despite being slammed for a personal attack on prominent feminist writer Clementine Ford during his shows in Adelaide and Perth, Mr Yiannopoulos took aim at the 36-year-old again during the third leg of his speaking tour.
He described Ms Ford as a 'human lump of half-melted butter' before also taking aim at Channel 10 TV presenter Jessica Rowe, according to The Age.
Ms Rowe and Mr Yiannopoulos clashed during a heated live interview in October.
Ms Rowe described herself as a proud feminist, prompting the UK-born commentator to suggest she be 'cured with chemotherapy'.
People are seen running from police officers who used pepper spray to control the demonstration
Mr Yiannopoulos' tour has proven controversial since it kicked off in Adelaide on Friday
Mr Yiannopoulos' tour has proven controversial since it kicked off in Adelaide on Friday.
The self-confessed 'troll' and 'provocateur', has offended Muslim groups and women's rights acitivists with his controversial opinions.
A video of the personality went viral last week, when he told a Muslim presenter he thought all Muslim people should be deported to the Middle East.
'Expel Islam from the West,' he told Australian-born Muslim reporter Emma Eros on Wednesday.
'Anyone who describes themselves as a Muslim, send them back to the Middle East.'
While he had his critics, Mr Yiannopoulos also attracted a cult following, with supporters praising him for his opinions.
Extra security measures are expected to be in place as he visits Parliament House in Canberra on Tuesday.
Thousands of commuters were plunged into travel chaos after a man was killed by a rush-hour train.
The victim was hit by a carriage at East Croydon, south London, at 5.57pm today as a service headed from London Bridge to Brighton.
Pictures have since emerged on social media of large crowds of stranded travellers staring at departure boards at Gatwick Airport and London Victoria.
Traveller Michael Wu tweeted this picture of passengers at Gatwick Airport this afternoon
Services have been effected for the past three hours, with reports of 30 minute delays out of East Croydon.
Southern rail, Thameslink and Gatwick Express trains are all said to have suffered disruption as a result of the incident this afternoon.
Southern said that services would be 'heavily disrupted as a result of the incident.
The train company wrote: 'Following a person hit by a train, platforms 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 at East Croydon have now reopened.
'Platform 3 is still closed while staff deal with a signal failure.
'Services will be heavily disrupted until the end of service as we work to recover the service.'
Earlier this evening, passenger Michael Wu tweeted a picture of gloomy passengers stuck at Gatwick Airport.
He wrote: 'Thousands passengers stranded at #LGW train station due to major delay between #Gatwick and #London #Victoria stn caused by a fatality at #EastCroydon station.'
Passengers travelling on the Gatwick Express train, which takes you to the airport from London Victoria in 36 minutes, have tweeted about fears of missing flights as a result of the disruption.
One traveller said: '@Ryanair due to Gatwick express delays will there be delays to the 21:30 flight to Dublin from Gatwick? Still on a train here.'
Travellers were left stranded and standing at departure boards at London Victoria
A British Transport Police said officers were yet to identify the man killed by the train.
A spokesman said: 'Medics from the London Ambulance Service also attended and a male was pronounced deceased at the scene.
'Officers are currently working to identify the person and inform his next of kin. A file will be prepared for the coroner
'The train involved was the 17.57 London Bridge to Brighton service and the line was handed back at 19.27.'
The Defence Secretary intervened yesterday to stop two Army dogs that saved thousands of lives in Afghanistan from being put down.
Gavin Williamson held urgent talks with dog handlers at the Ministry of Defence following widespread protest against plans to give them lethal injections.
It is understood he has pledged to try and find a solution that will see Belgian shepherds Kevin and Dazz rehomed instead.
Lance Corporal Kelly Wolstencroft and her dog Kevin on operations in Afghanistan
Two British Army dogs Kevin (pictured) and Dazz which helped save thousands of lives in Afghanistan, faced death by lethal injection
Kevin (pictured) and Dazz worked with troops to locate explosives in Helmand Province and retired four years ago
Former soldiers and handlers called for the decision to put the Belgian shepherds down to be reversed
The dogs sniffed out explosives on several tours of Helmand province.
They were retired from frontline service four years ago and put in the care of trainers at the Defence Animal Centre in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire.
Army chiefs had hoped the nine-year-old dogs would be rehomed.
But the centres commanding officer was leaning towards deciding to have them put down after one dog bit a civilian.
A former police hound named Driver was also due to be euthanised.
Foreign Office minister Sir Alan Duncan, who represents the constituency where the centre is based, had called for the dogs to be reprieved.
Sir Alan had written to the MoD in a bid to save the dogs. Last night he told the Mail: If we end up with good news I will be absolutely cock-a-hoop.
SAS hero Andy McNab also launched a petition to save them, which last night had attracted more than 368,000 signatures.
Dazz (pictured) and Kevin were put in the care of trainers at the Defence Animal Centre in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire
Local MP Sir Alan Duncan wrote to the Defence Animal Centre in a bid to save the pair
A petition was launched by former SAS soldier Andy McNab in a bid to stop the duo being put down, as well as a third canine, a former police dog named Driver
He praised service dogs for saving 'countless lives when I was in the Special Air Service sniffing out explosives'
Almost 400 dogs are currently working in the Army, detecting IEDs, searching buildings and vehicles, and patrolling key sites. Many have served in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo and Bosnia.
At the end of their service they are sent to highly experienced dog trainers within the Canine Training Squadron at the Defence Animal Centre. Their job is to de-train dogs to prepare them for the possibility of being rehomed into the civilian population.
They use techniques to relax the animals and make them understand that they no longer have to work. They aim to rehabilitate the dogs in a controlled and safe way, continually assessing their suitability for rehoming.
Although not all dogs are suitable, rigorous procedures are followed to find them homes where possible and there is a waiting list of applicants prepared to take them. If, at the end of de-training, dogs are considered too old, dangerous, below standard, ill or unfit, they will be put down.
An Army spokesperson said: Military Working Dogs provide an invaluable service to our troops and, wherever possible, we endeavour to rehome them at the end of their service life.
Sadly, there are some occasions where this is not possible, for example when the dog poses a risk to public safety.
White House counsel Don McGahn told President Donald Trump in January he believed then-National Security Advisor Mike Flynn had lied to the FBI, according to a report.
McGahn spoke to Trump following a conversation with then-acting attorney general Sally Yates, who has testified that she contacted McGahn to warn him on January 26 that Flynn misled the White House about his contacts with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergei Kislyak.
McGahn, who advised Trump throughout his presidential campaign, then told Trump based on his conversation with Yates that he believed Flynn had not told the truth to the FBI or Vice President Mike Pence, CNN reported.
He also recommended that the president fire Flynn.
McGahn didn't say Flynn had broken the law or was subject to a criminal investigation, according to the report.
Trump fired Flynn weeks later after Pence said the president's top security advisor had assured him he had not discussed sanctions with the Russians.
Flynn pleaded guilty in federal court Friday for having lied to the FBI about his contacts with Kislyak during the presidential transition.
White House counsel Don McGahn told President Donald Trump in January he believed then-National Security Advisor Mike Flynn had lied to the FBI. Trump subsequently fired Flynn
This tweet by Donald Trump led to accusations that the president had obstructed justice after allegedly telling James Comey to back off Michael Flynn while also knowing that Flynn lied to the FBI. But now the White House says his personal lawyer made the tweet
President Trump defended Flynn and attacked Hillary Clinton on Monday
Guilty: Criminal liar Mike Flynn arrives at court in Washington D.C. to plead guilty to lying to the FBI, an offense carrying up to five years in prison
The timeline of the report would to indicate that Trump knew about the legal jeopardy Flynn was under at the time fired FBI Director James Comey testified that Trump asked him to let an investigation of Flynn during a private conversation.
That alleged conversation could be central to any case that the president sought to obstruct justice by firing Comey.
Trump himself told NBC that the FBI's Russia investigation was on his mind at the time he decided to fire Comey.
Trump has nevertheless vigorously denied any obstruction occurred. Trump has repeatedly called Comey a liar.
President Donald Trump approaches members of the media to speak on former national security adviser Michael Flynn's lying to the FBI prior to his Marine One departure from the South Lawn of the White House December 4, 2017 in Washington
'I believe the facts exonerate the President and I'm not going to debate these important issues between the White House and the special counsel in the press," White House lawyer Ty Cobb told CNN.
Pence said Flynn told him he had not discussed sanctions with Kislyak, something that preceded Pence going on national television and denying any such conversation took place.
Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak about sanctions, which President Barack Obama had imposed in the last days of his presidency to punish Russia for interfering in the presidential elections.
Comey testified, based on his contemporaneous notes, that Trump had asked him about 'letting this go, to letting Flynn go' in February, after he would have already been briefed by McGahn about Flynn.
Trump tweeted Sunday: 'I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!'
Trump issued another tweet on Saturday that brought new discussion of obstruction:
'I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!' Trump wrote.
The tweet raised the possibility that Trump knew Flynn had lied to the FBI at the time he fired him. After the tweet drew immediate controversy, another Trump lawyer, John Dowd, said it was in fact he who composed it.
Acting attorney general Sally Yates says she warned McGahn January 26 that Flynn misled the White House about his contacts with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., and could even be susceptible to blackmail.
Speaking to ABC News, the lawyer said the social media post was 'my mistake' and that he had not intended 'to break news' in writing it. He said he used 'sloppy' language.
Dowd's admission did not clarify if Trump actually knew about Flynn's deception when he dismissed him in February or whether the President knew the tweet had been published on Saturday.
He hadn't meant to say Trump had advance knowledge of Flynn lying to the FBI, but had only learned of it recently.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory to President Donald Trump by allowing his latest travel ban targeting people from six Muslim-majority countries to go into full effect even as legal challenges continue in lower courts.
The ruling is an indication that the Trump administration's third travel ban could be able to stand.
The court, with two of the nine justices dissenting, granted his administration's request to lift two injunctions imposed by lower courts that had partially blocked the ban, which is the third version of a contentious policy that Trump first sought to implement a week after taking office in January.
The justices, with two dissenting votes, said Monday that the policy can take full effect even as legal challenges against it make their way through the courts.
Meanwhile, Trump has arrived back to Washington after a trip to Utah to announce his plan to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in the southwestern state.
Donald Trump is pictured returning to the White House late Monday night after arriving on Marine One from Utah, where he announced his plan to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments
Trump walks with Marc Short, the White House director for legislative affairs, and Republican senator Mike Lee of Utah after his return
Trump is pictured disembarking from Marine One after arriving at the White House
Victory: The Supreme Court justice handed the president a significant victory on Monday
The action suggests the high court could uphold the latest version of the ban that Trump announced in September.
The ban applies to travelers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Lower courts had said people from those nations with a claim of a "bona fide" relationship with someone in the United States could not be kept out of the country. Grandparents, cousins and other relatives were among those courts said could not be excluded.
President Donald Trump, alongside US Senator Orrin Hatch (L), Republican of Utah, meets with LDS President Henry B. Eyring (2nd R) and Russel Nelson (R), President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, both of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, at LDS Welfare Square in Salt Lake City, Utah, December 4, 2017. His administration's immigration order targets six Muslim-majority nations
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have left the lower court orders in place.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, will be holding arguments on the legality of the ban this week.
Both courts are dealing with the issue on an accelerated basis, and the Supreme Court noted it expects those courts to reach decisions "with appropriate dispatch."
Quick resolution by appellate courts would allow the Supreme Court to hear and decide the issue this term, by the end of June.
Lower courts had blocked implementation pending judicial review.
The ban blocks visitors and migrants from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea.
But the government doesn't expect to get visitors from highly secluded North Korea, the L.A. Times noted.
Under a June Supreme Court ruling, the administration was granted latitude to to deny entry to immigrants from the Muslim-majority nation, but not to those with family here or a 'credible claim of a bona fide relationship with person or entity in the United States.'
The court victory follows earlier struggles for the administration's legal team, which saw lower courts delay implementation of the second version of the ban.
The administration cited the president's broad authority to control immigration and national security.
Federal court judges in Maryland and Hawaii had blocked portions of a ban in October pending legal challenges.
An American student who has accused an Italian police officer of sexual assault is speaking out about her horrifying ordeal.
In an interview on Good Morning America, the 21-year-old student, who asked not to be named, recounted what occurred to her and her 19-year-old friend when they were approached by two cops in the early hours of the morning on September 7.
The student said she went to a night club called Flo' in Florence and that later, she and a friend tried to call a taxi to leave when two Italian police officers, whom they met outside of the club, offered to drive them home instead.
'What's more safe than getting in the back of a police car?' the woman told ABC News.
Two American students, 21 and 19, studying abroad in Italy have accused two police officers of sexually assaulting them. In an interview on Good Morning America, the 21-year-old student (pictured), who asked not to be named, recounted what occurred in the early hours of the morning on September 7
The 21-year-old said she and a friend were looking for a cab home from the night club Flo' in Florence when officers Marco Camuffo, 43 (pictured), and Pietro Costa, 31, offered to give them a ride
When they got to the apartment building Costa got in the elevator with the 19-year-old and Camuffo went up the stairs with the 21-year-old (pictured, Camuffo, right, and Costa, left, meet the girls outside of the club)
The members of Italy's Carabinieri police force, 43-year-old Marco Camuffo and 31-year-old Pietro Costa drove them to their apartment building and, when they arrived, the officers followed them to the front door.
'I didn't think it was that strange, because my friend...she couldn't really stand by herself, she needed assistance,' the student recalled. 'So the one officer was like, "Oh, we'll help you, we'll help you".'
She said because the elevator at their apartment building only fit two people, her friend and Costa took the elevator while she and Camuffo took the stairs.
When the student and Camuffo arrived on the third floor, right in front of her apartment door, she says the officer began to sexually assault her.
'He moved me over to the windowsill, and then assaulted me there. And I was terrified. I mean, he had a gun,' she said. 'He is a trained military police officer, what do you do in that moment?
'I had said 'No,' and he put me up against the wall, and he started pulling at my clothes, and I kept pulling them back up and everything,' she recalled. 'That was probably when I was, like, the most scared.'
She added that during the encounter, she couldn't even understand what Camuffo was saying.
When the student (picturdand Camuffo arrived on the third floor, right in front of her apartment door, she says the officer began to sexually assault her.
'He didn't speak any English,' she said. 'So that was even worse...I mean, "No" is universal' (Pictured, the night club Flo')
'He didn't speak any English,' she said. 'So that was even worse...I mean, "No" is universal.'
Eventually, the student said the elevator doors opened and she grabbed her friend, who she says was bloodied, and dragged her into the apartment.
The police officers have been suspended from the force. They admitted to having sex with the women but both claim that any sex that night was consensual.
Sandro Paterno, an attorney for the student, told ABC News that November testimony of the other officer, Costa, proves that the encounter between her client and Camuffo was not consensual.
Sandro Paterno, an attorney for the student, told ABC News that November testimony of the other officer, Costa, proves that the encounter between her client and Camuffo was not consensual (Pictured, Flo' night club)
The student said that despite everything that she says happened at the hands of authorities in Italy, she has faith in the judicial system (Pictured, a car of the Italian Carabinieri)
He told ABC News: 'This is from the deposition...before the public prosecutor. He says..."I saw Camufo, the other guy, that tried to lower the pants of the girl and she was...with some resistance, she said: "No, no".'
The student said that despite everything that she says happened at the hands of authorities in Italy, she has faith in the judicial system.
'I think the evidence is overwhelming,' she said. 'I think that justice is going to prevail, and they're going to go to jail.'
A police officer has been hit by a rock and two protesters have been arrested for 'discharging a missile' during violent clashes outside Milo Yiannopoulos' Melbourne event.
The mayhem unfolded outside the Melbourne Pavilion in inner-city Kensington on Monday night, with weapon-wielding protesters brawling in the streets.
Scores of protesters from left-aligned Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and two right-wing groups, Reclaim Australia and the True Blue Crew, rallied with a heavy police presence attempting to maintain order.
Convicted stalker and racial vilifier Neil Erikson and fellow right-wing activist Avi Yemeni were among the crowd.
A police officer has been hit by a rock and two protesters have been arrested for 'discharging a missile' during violent clashes outside Milo Yiannopoulos' Melbourne event. A left-wing protester is seen with facial injuries after a violent scuffle
The mayhem unfolded outside the Melbourne Pavilion in inner-city Kensington on Monday night
A protester throws a street sign towards Police officers during a demonstration outside Milo Yiannopoulos's sold out show at the Melbourne Pavilion
A Campaign Against Racism and Fascism supporter and a Yiannopoulos supporter are pepper sprayed by police
Police in riot gear were forced to subdue demonstrators during the ugly scenes on Monday
Dozens of officers worked to keep the groups separated, but still had to use pepper spray.
Protesters could be heard chanting 'Milo is a w**ker' before the clash, which lasted nearly five hours, turned physical.
Yiannopoulos spoke of the ugly scenes on Tuesday morning.
'There was a lot of kerfuffle out front,' he told Alan Jones on 2GB Radio.
'It was not as the newspapers reported ''a clash between the far left and far right'' it was the left, showing up, being violent to stop freedom of speech.
'The left really showed us who they are. They attack the police, they attacked other people, they attacked journalists - they showed us they are petulant babies.'
A Campaign Against Racism and Fascism supporter is held by police during the demonstration
Scores of protesters from left-aligned Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and two right-wing groups, Reclaim Australia and the True Blue Crew, rallied with a heavy police presence
A Campaign Against Racism and Fascism supporter receives aid after being pepper sprayed
Protesters could be heard chanting 'Milo is a w**ker' before the clash turned physical
Extra security measures are expected to be in place when Yiannopoulos visits Parliament House in Canberra
'The left really showed us who they are. They attack the police, they attacked other people, they attacked journalists - they showed us they are petulant babies,' Yiannopoulos said
Australian commentator Andrew Bolt, who was MC at the Melbourne event, described the protests as a scandal.
Extra security measures are expected to be in place when Yiannopoulos visits Parliament House in Canberra.
The self-described 'one-man wrecking crew' and 'internet supervillian' will visit the nation's capital on Tuesday at the invitation of Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm.
The Australian Greens had unsuccessfully attempted to have him banned from the building.
Senator Leyonhjelm flagged security arrangements are likely to be beefed up for the visit.
'I wouldn't call myself a disciple of him by any means,' Senator Leyonhjelm told AAP, adding he didn't agree with all his controversial views.
The Australian Greens unsuccessfully attempted to have Yiannopoulos banned from Parliament House. Protesters are pictured clashing with Victorian Police
Police arrest two protesters during a demonstration outside Milo Yiannopoulos's sold out show
Left-wing protesters were stationed in Kensington, Melbourne's north-west, on Monday afternoon ahead of the right-wing firebrand's speech
Police used capsicum spray to subdue some of the demonstrators on Monday afternoon
Protesters could be heard chanting 'Milo is a w**ker' before the clash turned physical and police used capsicum spray to subdue protesters
Police officers in riot gear are seen dragging protesters away from the scene in an effort to control the demonstration
He expects Yiannopoulos to embark on an 'outrage campaign' to stir up the politically correct.
'I'm expecting to be amused more than anything,' Senator Leyonhjelm said.
Yiannopoulos defended his right to free speech, saying his aim is to entertain, challenge and educate.
'I may not be to your taste and that's OK, don't send your kids to my shows, but I am to plenty of peoples' tastes,' he told Sky News.
A Campaign Against Racism and Fascism supporter receives aid after being pepper sprayed
Yiannopoulos has defended his right to free speech, saying his aim is to entertain, challenge and educate
Campaign Against Racism and Fascism members demonstrate outside the event on Monday
Dozens of police officers were forced to intervene and drag violent protesters away from the scene
People are seen running from police officers who used pepper spray to control the demonstration
'What they leave with... isn't ''he's so rude and tells fat jokes''... what they leave with is ''I never even considered that''.'
Yiannopoulos says he 'blows open the fire doors' in a way that is crass but gains attention.
Yiannopoulos's speeches on university campuses in the US have sparked violent protests, and he was banned from Twitter last year amid a barrage of racist abuse directed at Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones.
He has previously likened feminism to cancer, Islam to AIDS and has spoken out against gay rights and the Black Lives Matter movement - despite being openly homosexual and married to an African American man.
The British-born, US-based commentator lost a book deal after a video emerged in February in which he appeared to suggest it was OK for older men to sleep with teenage boys.
Demonstrators are seen running in the opposite direction of police officers who used pepper spray to control the violent clash
Local residents confront Protesters in Kensington, where Mr Yiannopolous was due to speak
Local residents in Kensington descended on the busy street to watch on
The north-west Melbourne street was packed, with local residents joining the crowds late on Monday
Yiannopoulos' first event was due to kick off at 6.30pm in Kensington, with another one scheduled to start immediately after
A mother and her boyfriend were hit with murder and child abuse charges on Monday, in connection to the death of the woman's three-year-old son.
In September, police found the remains of toddler Evan Brewer, inside the laundry room of his mother's Wichita, Kansas home - concealed in a slab of poured concrete.
The toddler had been missing since July 6, when his biological father was granted full custody and the couple refused to turn the boy over. The last time the boy had been seen alive was a few days earlier, after Independence Day.
Miranda Miller, left, and her boyfriend Stephen Bodine, right, were hit with murder charges on Monday in the death of her three-year-old son Evan Brewer
His mother Miranda Miller, 36, and her boyfriend Stephen Bodine, 40, were arrested a few days before the body was discovered, on other charges. They have remained behind bars since then.
Evan's remains were found inside a concrete slab inside the couple's home on September 2
On Monday, the couple were hit with new charges of felony murder and child abuse in connection to Evan's death.
Evan was the son of Kansas gubernatorial candidate Carl Brewer, who issued a statement on Monday thanking all the 'men and women who worked to investigate Evan's death'.
A family spokesman released another statement, reading: 'Our family sincerely appreciates the efforts of our Homicide Unit to piece together the difficult investigation into Evan's death ... . We also thank the Wichita community for the continued support and love ... . Please understand our silence during the remainder of this holiday season as they prepare for a funeral and a Christmas without Evan.'
Evan's body was discovered on September 2, when Miller's landlord was cleaning out her place after she was arrested.
The landlord 'alerted police to a suspicious concrete structure emitting an odor in the house'.
Evan's body was discovered on September 2, when Miller's landlord was cleaning out her place after she was arrested
'Police removed the concrete structure from the house and later found the remains of a child inside the concrete structure,' police said in a statement.
They added: 'Our thoughts and prayers continue to go out to the family and friends of the Brewer family, and those affected by this tragic case.'
A few days before her son's body was found, Miller was arrested on a charge of aggravated interference with parental custody.
Her boyfriend faced additional charges for threatening the boy's biological father with a hatchet, when the man came to the couple's rental home looking for Evan.
Both remain in jail on $25,000 bond.
Amazon's Australian customers have taken to social media to blast the online retailer's prices hours after its launch.
The retailer announced it would start taking orders on Tuesday, finally ending speculation about the timing of its launch in Australia.
But although there were some bargains to be had, many products - including a Samsung television that's available on rival retailer JB Hi-Fi's website for thousands of dollars less - were found to be cheaper elsewhere.
'Everything I've looked for on Amazon to compare prices so far is available cheaper elsewhere,' Chris Urguhart wrote on Twitter.
'You can even buy a Kindle cheaper at other stores...and Amazon are the ones that make them!'
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A 65" Samsung QLED Series 7 TV was offered for $5,999 on Amazon Australia's website
On rival retailer JB Hi-Fi's website, the same Samsung television is on sale for just $3,996
A Kindle E-reader starts from $109 on Amazon Australia's website, but can be snapped up from $99 from other online retailers.
'Amazon Australia is here!' said another Twitter user.
'And it has sweet f*** all sold by Amazon at reasonable prices complimented by a limited selection of highly overpriced marketplace options!'
Another Twitter user dubbed Amazon's launch a 'fail for pricing.'
'More expensive than eBay, longer postage times, no prime, no echos,' he added.
One woman replied to a tweet announcing the launch of Amazon.com.au saying: 'Feeling underwhelmed by your prices.'
Amazon are offering a Chancel Chance Eau Tendre perfume trio for almost $200 on Tuesday
The same Chanel gift set is available from department store David Jones for just $139
All Beats Studio Wireless Headphones are available on the Beats by Dre website for $449.95
But a matte black pair from Amazon's Beats seller will set you back an eye-watering $999
Amazon customers can pre-order the Game of Thrones complete Seasons 1-7 box set for $169, but it's $10 cheaper on Zavvi
Ahead of its launch, the global retailer said it would offer free shipping nationwide for purchases over $49, with millions of products available from clothes to sporting goods to consumer electronics.
Deals available on the website include a 32" Samsung Smart TV for $608.20, a Nintendo Switch console for $399 and the new FIFA 18 game for PlayStation is available for $39. A VS Sassoon hairdryer can be snapped up for as little as $25.
But a comparison of Amazon's prices with rival retailers revealed some of the products can be bought cheaper elsewhere.
Many took to social media on Tuesday morning to blast Amazon Australia's prices
Amazon's Australian arm has finally launched on Tuesday offering customers the chance to snap up deals just in time for Christmas.
A 65" Samsung QLED Series 7 TV was offered for $5,999 on Amazon, but on JB Hi-Fi's website, the same television is on sale for just $3,996.
All Beats Studio Wireless Headphones are available on the Beats by Dre website for $449.95, but a matte black pair from Amazon's Beats seller will set you back an eye-watering $999.
Game of Thrones fanatics can pre-order the Complete Seasons 1-7 box set on Amazon for $169, but on Zavvi, it is priced $158.38.
Amazon are offering a Chanel perfume trio for $199, but on department store David Jones' site, the same set is offered for $139.
Lipstick lovers should head to Mecca's website to get their hands on a Bobbi Brown Art Stick where it's $46 compared to $51.40 on Amazon. On Myer, the lipsticks cost $44 to $46.
Those who love to pamper themselves with skincare will have to fork out $732.95 for a 100ml jar of La Mer's The Moisturising Soft Cream from La Mer's Amazon page, but at Myer, the same product can be snapped up for $665.
Deals available on the website include a 32' Samsung Smart TV (pictured) for $608.20
Gamers can get their hands on a Nintendo Switch console (pictured above) for $399
Meanwhile, Amazon didn't say what time of day it would begin taking orders from its Australian warehouse, except to say it would be on December 5.
It also did not comment on any last-minute problems from an order-taking trial which began on November 23.
Under the free delivery offer, Amazon said it estimated delivery times as short as three business days in the cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra - home to half the country's population - while shipping to remote areas could take 10 days.
Amazon customers can get a Kindle E-reader starting from $109 and FIFA 18 for PS4 for $39
A Disney Cars gift set is priced $55 on the newly-launched Amazon Australia website
A VS Sassoon Styling Kit can be snapped up for less than $25 on Amazon Australia
But shoppers could pay a fee for faster shipping times.
Amazon said it planned to offer its rapid-shipping subscription service, Prime, in mid-2018, in a sign it is unperturbed by the geographic challenge posed by one of the world's most sparsely populated countries.
Australia is the size of the mainland United States, but with one-thirteenth its population.
The move establishes the US giant as an aggressive presence in the sluggish Australian retail sector, just as shopkeepers were hoping for a rush of sales over the important Christmas holiday season.
In a statement, Amazon's Australia country manager, Rocco Braeuniger, said the company would 'earn the trust' of Australian shoppers and, over time, create 'thousands of new jobs'.
'Are you ready to make a difference?' a sign at Amazon's fulfillment centre in Melbourne said
Australia has long been home to Amazon-registered sellers, but until Tuesday they were limited to sending goods offshore because the Seattle conglomerate did not have a warehouse in the country of 24 million people.
This also meant Australians had to wait longer times, and pay higher fees, for shipping.
The company has now set up a massive distribution warehouse on the outskirts of Melbourne city, on the country's east coast where four-fifths of the population live, and the company hopes to cut delivery time to as little as a day.
The online retailer will offer one-day delivery to customers in major Australian cities
Australian retail shares have fallen sharply since Amazon confirmed plans for the country in April.
Shares of top department store operator Myer Holdings Ltd are down 30 percent since that time.
Myer has been shutting stores and ramping up online sales, and last month it halved its three-year target for growth in sales per square metre.
Its online sales leapt 68 percent in the 13 weeks to October 28, but remained only a tiny fraction of its total revenue.
Shares of No. 1 electronics retailer Harvey Norman Holdings Ltd are down 7 percent since April, while smaller JB HiFi are off by 6 percent amid fears of competition from Amazon.
Aaron Kluger, 20, allegedly bit his parents' Shih Tzu on the head so viciously he removed her right eye
A Long Island man has been arrested after he allegedly bit his parents Shih Tzu on the head so viciously he removed her right eye.
Aaron Kluger, 20, has been charged with charged with torturing and injuring an animal, a misdemeanor offense.
The three-year-old pup named Chloe was rushed to an animal hospital for emergency treatment at around 9pm on November 6.
The hospital immediately notified Nassau County SPCA.
Gary Rogers, a spokesman for the SPCA, said on Monday morning that the veterinarian who treated Chloe is hopeful the pooch will regain her sight with proper care and treatment.
Kluger was arrested on Saturday based on information given to the SPCA detectives by a family member.
Chloe appears to be doing well and is back with her owners.
Kluger has been arrested and charged with torturing and injuring an animal after an attack on his parents' dog removed her eye
'I hate to say I've seen it all because every time I say it I see something else,' said Rogers, who visited the dog this weekend, according to the New York Daily News.
'They're friendly dogs. They're popular dogs. She was wagging her tail and licking me.'
Kluger is due back in court on December 27.
Rescue crews have failed to find the bodies of four missing fishermen who drowned when their trawler sank off the coast of Queensland in October.
The vessel 'Dianne' was salvaged by crews over the weekend but the bodies of Eli Tonks, 39, Adam Bidner, 33, Chris Sammut, 34, and Zach Feeney, were not inside the boat.
Police held slim hope of finding the men underneath the wreckage nearly two months since the Dianne sank.
The trawler sank in stormy seas off the coast of Seventy Seven on October 16, claiming the lives of six of the seven men on board.
The bodies of the four missing fishermen (clockwise from top left): Eli Tonks, 39, Zach Feeney, 28, Chris Sammut, 34 and Adam Bidner, 33
The fishing trawler Dianne (pictured) sank in stormy seas off the coast of Queensland on October 16, claiming the lives of six of the seven men on board
Crewman Ruben McDornan, 32, the sole survivor of the accident, was rescued from the wreckage 12 hours after it sank.
Mr McDornan previously said he did not see any of his crewman emerge from the trawler as he clung to the hull before his rescue.
A massive sea and air search discovered the bodies of skipper Ben Leahy, 45, and Adam Hoffman, 30, inside the vessel days after it capsized and sank.
Mr Leahy was remembered as 'our beautiful pirate' by his family and friends.
A massive sea and air search discovered the bodies of skipper Ben Leahy, 45, (left) and Adam Hoffman, 30, (right) inside the vessel days after it capsized and sank
Police held slim hope of finding the men underneath the wreckage nearly two months since the Dianne sank (pictured: Eli Tonks, 39)
The vessel 'Dianne' was salvaged by crews over the weekend but police failed to find the bodies of the missing men (pictured: Zach Feeney, 28)
Efforts to re-float the 'Dianne' have been hampered by bad weather (pictured: Chris Sammut, 34)
A memorial service for the men was held at Munro Martin Parklands in Cairns to honour the fishermen (pictured: Adam Bidner, 33)
'While his death is an immeasurable loss to us, we do feel so blessed to have had him in our lives,' a statement from his family read.
'He was one in a million with a heart of gold,' they said.
'He will forever be our beautiful pirate who went out doing what he loved.'
Mr Hoffman's family described him as a 'genuine legend'.
'To his family he was our cherished brother who was kind, thoughtful, loving and would always tell it like it is,' they said.
Mr Hoffman leaves behind his five-year-old daughter Evie, his parents and five sisters.
Sole survivor of the accident Ruben McDornan, 32, (pictured with his wife at a memorial service for his missing mates) was rescued from the wreckage 12 hours after it sank
Mr McDornan previously said he did not see any of his crewman emerge from the trawler as he clung to the hull before his rescue
A memorial service for the men was held at Munro Martin Parklands in Cairns to honour the fishermen.
Hundreds turned out to remember the men as Cairns Mayor Bob Manning addressed the community at a candle lighting ceremony.
'In times like this it's proper that the community come together and grieve with those who have lost loved ones,' he told reporters beforehand.
Efforts to re-float the 'Dianne' have been hampered by bad weather but police aim to raise and tow the vessel to a nearby marina for investigation, The Courier reports.
Police Inspector Darren Somerville said the salvage company was able to roll the Dianne on to its side on Sunday.
A Perth backpacker who vanished from a Canadian ski town was 'upset about an issue at work' the day before she disappeared, a friend has revealed.
Alison Raspa, 25, who was holidaying and working in Canada, was last seen on November 22, when she left a bar in Whistler, north of Vancouver about 11.30pm.
A friend of her mother, who asked not to be named said 'something happened at work,' the day before she went missing.
Perth woman Alison Raspa, 25, was last seen on November 22, leaving a bar in Whistler, north of Vancouver on Canada's west coast, about 11.30pm
'Police are looking through the camera footage where Alison works so they can observe her on a day-to-day basis in the days before she disappeared,' the friend told The Daily Telegraph.
'Alison's mother has been told that she was upset about something to do with work so police are looking for clues on the (CCTV) tapes.'
The Perth woman's phone was found in a small lakeside park, some five kilometres away, about 6.30am the following day.
On Friday, Staff Sergeant Paul Hayes, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Whistler, confirmed to AAP that Raspa's family had arrived from Perth.
The search for Raspa was ongoing on Friday, with fire department crews out on a lake near where Raspa's phone was found.
An earlier lake search by divers, and ground searches by police and search and rescue teams, failed to find further clues as to her whereabouts.
Alison is described as caucasian, with long brown hair and blue eyes
She was last seen leaving the Three Below Bar on Blackcomb Way at 11.30pm on November 22
A helicopter had been used in the search but poor weather, including overnight snow, was preventing its use on Friday, Hayes said.
Police are also continuing to inspect Raspa's phone for clues, he said.
Raspa's friends also launched their own search on Friday morning, walking from Whistler's gondolas near Three Below, the bar where she was last seen, to Alpha Lake in Creekside, where her phone was discovered. The walk takes about an hour.
Canadian police found Alison's mobile phone at the near-frozen Alpha Lake park at 6.30am the day after she went missing
Police do not believe Raspa walked the distance because of the late hour and the cold, with temperatures in Whistler dropping to 0C throughout the past week.
Hayes would not confirm if a driver was being sought.
He said police 'had some thoughts' as to how Raspa got to Creekside, but they were yet to confirm whether those were correct.
Hayes earlier told AAP there was no indication of foul play but added police 'have not ruled out any option in terms of what has happened or where Ms Raspa could be.'
The Senate has passed a Greens motion condemning right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos as he prepares to speak at Parliament House in Canberra.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale had wanted the British-born commentator banned from addressing MPs in the Mural Hall as a guest of libertarian Liberal Democrats senator David Leyonhjelm.
Failing that, he has succeeded in having a Senate motion passed condemning the 33-year-old gay, alt right author who denounces feminism, fundamentalist Islam and political correctness.
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Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos is due to speak at Parliament House in Canberra
Greens leader Richard Di Natale successfully moved a Senate motion condemning Milo Yiannopoulos ahead of his speaking engagement at Parliament House in Canberra
'Good on the Senate for passing the Greens motion condemning Milo Yiannopolous,' Senator Di Natale tweeted.
'His desperate attempts to seek attention through vile and hateful rhetoric has no place in the Australian Parliament.'
The motion was passed on Monday afternoon, before violent protests erupted at Kensington, in Melbourne's north-west, where Yiannopoulos was performing.
Police in riot gear wielding capsicum spray intervened when verbal clashes turned physical between left-wing protesters and supporters of the U.S.-based entertainer.
The Greens motion was passed on Monday ahead of riots in Melbourne where Milo Yiannopoulos was performing
His right-wing views had seen him banned from Twitter, Western Australian government buildings and a string of high-rating television programs.
The Australian Greens had tried to have Parliament House added to Milo Yiannopoulos' growing list of exclusion zones.
The right-wing provocateur is due to speak in Canberra on Tuesday morning, drawing the ire of the Greens who label him a 'white supremacist' and a 'paedophilia apologist'.
Senator Di Natale last week wrote to the Presiding Officers of the House of Representatives and the Senate to revoke that invitation, from Senator Leyonjhelm.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale (pictured right) has officially requested Milo Yiannopoulos (left) be banned from speaking at Parliament House
Yiannopoulos was invited to speak in Canberra as a guest of Liberal Democrats Senator David Leyonjhelm
Senator Di Natale posted the letter he wrote to the Presiding Officers of the House of Representatives and the Senate along with this caption on Twitter
Senator Di Natale wrote that Yiannopoulos is 'an individual who has become notorious for his racist, sexist and abusive behaviour'.
'I write with regards to the upcoming visit to Parliament by alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos,' the one-page letter began.
'The Australian Greens are concerned that Senator David Leyonjhelm is hosting Milo Yiannopoulos for a conversation and an audience Q&A on Tuesday December 5.
'The global reputation of our National Parliament... is at serious risk if we provide a space for those who preach hate and incite abuse and harassment of women, Jews as well as members of the LGBTIQ and multicultural communities.'
The Greens say Yiannopoulos is 'an individual who has become notorious for his racist, sexist and abusive behaviour'
The Australian Greens have officially requested that Parliament House be added to Milo Yiannopoulos' growing list of exclusion zones
'I am requesting that... you revoke permission that has for Mr Yiannopoulos to attend and speak at Parliament House.'
Mr Di Natale accompanied the letter he posted on Twitter with the caption: 'We should not be granting a forum to someone who makes a living by peddling racist, sexist and abusive views.'
The request comes after Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young emailed Senator Leyonjhelm to complain about his invitation to the right-wing firebrand.
'It astounds me that a member of our Parliament would roll out the red carpet to a white supremacist and paedophilia apologist,' she said last week in an exchange obtained by Daily Mail Australia.
'A man who travels the world spreading racist and sexist drivel, who believes there's no such thing as rape culture is not welcome in our safe and respectful house of democracy.'
Yiannoloulos' views have already seen him banned from Twitter, Western Australian government buildings and a string of high-rating television programs
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young previously said Yiannopoulos shoudn't be welcome at Parliament House in Canberra
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young emailed Senator Leyonjhelm to protest about alt-right author Milo Yiannopoulos getting a platform to speak at Parliament House in Canberra
Senator David Leyonjhelm emailed his Greens colleague to accuse her of censoring views she didn't agree with
Senator Leyonjhelm, a libertarian who lives in Sydney, told his Greens Senate colleague she had little regard for free speech.
'This highlights the difference between you and me... Milo has the same right to speak as you. It's not compulsory for you to listen or to agree. Get over it,' he replied.
The publisher of Australian Penthouse Magazine Damien Costas, who is organising Yiannopoulos' Australian tour, said Senator Hanson-Young demonstrated how the political left censored those who they disagreed with.
'No one's going to put her on a leash and drag her there like a little sun bear at a Russian circus. She doesn't have to go,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
Australian Penthouse Magazine says the political left sought to censor those it disagree with like Milo Yiannopoulos
Yiannopoulos holds a press conference down the street from the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando in 2016
Yiannopoulos has previously likened feminism to cancer, Islam to AIDS and has spoken out against gay rights and the Black Lives Matter movement
'This is the problem with the modern left: If you don't agree with them, you're either a bigot or a Nazi or a hate monger or whatever other delicious word conjured up.'
Mr Costas rejected the notion Yiannopoulos is a white supremacist.
'He's not, he's a Western supremacist,' he said. 'He's not a racist.
'The only thing he speaks out against is extreme Islam and last time I checked, Islam is not a race, it's an ideology.'
Yiannopoulos has previously likened feminism to cancer, Islam to AIDS and has spoken out against gay rights and the Black Lives Matter movement despite being openly homosexual and married to an African American.
The right-wing provocateur will start his first ever speaking tour in Australia this week
The judge adjourned Abdallah's case for two weeks, when she will be sentenced
It was revealed she lied to emergency services about tending to Suzie's wounds
37-year-old Abdallah claimed she'd acted in self-defence during a row over a car
She was found guilty of manslaughter in the Supreme Court and her bail revoked
Katherine Abdallah found guilty of fatally stabbing her cousin Suzie in May, 2013
The night before Katherine Abdallah killed her cousin at her Sydney townhouse she told police 'she's going to be in serious trouble when I get her'.
'You guys will probably be called back,' she added in what proved to be an eerily accurate prediction.
Abdallah had been involved in a violent and prolonged argument over her new $184,000 Mercedes before she armed herself with two knives and fatally stabbed 21-year-old Suzie Sarkis.
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Katherine Abdallah (right) arrives at the NSW Supreme Court with her lawyer on November 24
Abdallah (left) stabbed Suzie Sarkis (right) to death in 2013 after an argument over a new car
Justice Julia Longergan on Monday revoked Abdallah's bail following the manslaughter verdict yesterday (left)
The now 37-year-old Abdallah claimed she'd acted in self-defence when she killed her cousin at her Brighton-Le-Sands townhouse in February 2013.
However, after almost five days of deliberations, a NSW Supreme Court jury on Monday found her guilty of manslaughter, echoing the verdict at her first trial.
Abdallah originally faced a murder trial but was found guilty of manslaughter and jailed in May 2015 for at least eight years and three months.
Later that year she successfully challenged her conviction and was ordered to face a second trial. She was released on bail in February 2016.
At the retrial, crown prosecutor John Bowers contended the stabbing wasn't done in self-defence but was a continuation of violence by Abdallah after she became angry at her cousin for using her new Mercedes.
'The crown case is that Ms Abdallah stabbed Ms Sarkis as an act in a series of violent acts that were generated or triggered by ongoing hostility and aggression that Saturday because of the incident of the car,' he said.
Abdallah originally faced a murder trial in May 2015, but was found guilty of manslaughter
Christine (left) and Mary Sarkis, sister and mother of victim Suzie Sarkis, leave court in 2015
Police visited Abdallah on the night of February 8 after clocking Ms Sarkis doing 112km/h.
The younger woman had driven off after police pulled her over during which she slightly damaged the car when hitting the gutter.
Abdallah became frustrated and agitated, telling police: 'I bought that car on finance - do you know how expensive it is to replace parts?'
The next day, a Saturday, she found out her cousin had taken the Mercedes a second time, leading to them fighting in the street.
The jury saw CCTV footage, which did not record sound, from inside the townhouse showing the women verbally fighting before it got physical.
Katherine Abdallah is escorted from a prison transport vehicle into the Supreme Court of NSW
Pictured: Abdallah, 37, slapped and kicker her cousin before stabbing her with a kitchen knife
It included Abdallah slapping her cousin's face before Ms Sarkis smashed a vase onto the floor and kicked Abdallah.
Abdallah used a four-pack of drink bottles to strike Ms Sarkis, before running into the kitchen, grabbing the knives and stabbing her once in the chest.
Mr Bowers noted the lies told by Abdallah immediately after the stabbing including blaming a fat, tall Lebanese woman with a tattoo on her hand.
She also lied to a triple-zero operator saying she was applying pressure to the wound when she was in fact carefully cleaning the two knives.
Justice Julia Longergan on Monday revoked Abdallah's bail and adjourned the case for a week
Abdallah (left) initially lied and said that a Lebanese woman with a tattoo stabbed Suzie (right)
Abdallah (right) fronted NSW Supreme Court where she was found guilty of manslaughter
'The operator gave her instructions to do things for Ms Sarkis which might have made a difference if Ms Abdallah had done them,' he said.
She was not acting in a panic but in 'her own best interests as she saw them', getting rid of evidence linking her to the knives.
Justice Julia Longergan on Monday revoked Abdallah's bail and adjourned the case to December 13.
These heartbreaking images are another reminder of how plastic waste is devastating our oceans.
An albatross chick dies from eating a plastic toothpick that pierced its intestine. And a sperm whale tries to eat a blue plastic bucket confusing it for food.
The appalling footage will be shown this Sunday in the seventh and final episode of Blue Planet II on the BBC.
Seen by more than 17million Britons, and hundreds of millions of viewers around the world, the nature documentary is helping to pressure governments to tackle the plastic menace.
An albatross chick died from eating a plastic toothpick that pierced its intestine in another heartbreaking example of the devastating impact plastic waste is having on our oceans
In the final episode of Blue Planet II this Sunday, viewers will see a sperm whale try to eat a blue plastic bucket after confusing it for food
The plastic bucket had become lodged inside the mouth of the whale and could prevent it from being able to eat
During the programme, which is watched by 17million Britons every week, researches expose the shocking amount of plastic in our oceans
An earlier installment carried haunting shots of a pilot whale calf believed to have died from plastic pollution.
Lucy Quinn, of the British Antarctic Survey Team, will demonstrate on Sundays Blue Planet II how albatross chicks are suffering from eating our waste.
She will say the population of the birds in South Georgia in the South Atlantic has been falling for four decades, with some of the decline blamed on discarded plastic fishing gear and other rubbish.
Albatrosses have the ability to cough up bits of food that they cant digest, and from that we can tell what they have been eating, Dr Quinn will say.
The researchers found the birds had swallowed plastic food bags among other discarded items.
Explaining how the chick died, Dr Quinn said: Unfortunately there was a plastic toothpick that had actually gone through the stomach. Something just as small as that has managed to kill the bird. Its really sad.
Blue Planet II host Sir David Attenborough walked along a beach and collected plastic items dumped in the sand to emphasise the scale of the problem
This turtle was filmed floating near to a discarded plastic bag near to the surface of the ocean. Plastic is one of the biggest threats to marine life
Researches found that birds had swallowed plastic food bags among other discarded items
Later in the episode, a whale is seen trying to eat a large plastic bucket, which has become lodged in its mouth.
Sir David Attenborough narrates: Industrial pollution and the discarding of plastic waste must be tackled for the sake of all life in the ocean.
I'll install water fountains across the capital says Khan Water fountains should be brought back to combat the waste caused by plastic bottles, according to a report. Sadiq Khan says he intends to bring them back across London and try to encourage businesses to make their tap water available to the public, building on a scheme launched two years ago in Bristol. A spokesman for Mr Khan said: The mayor wants to see a reduction in the amount of single-use plastic bottles and cups across the capital and has asked city hall officers to examine the feasibility of a pilot community water refill scheme, or other interventions. The spokesman said the mayor had written to the Government to discuss a deposit return scheme for bottles. He added: Sadiq supports boroughs in identifying suitable locations for water fountains and bottle-refill stations during the planning process in new or redeveloped public spaces, such as town centres, shopping malls, parks and squares. More than half of the plastic bottles bought in 2016 were not collected for recycling, mainly going to landfill. The proposals in the mayors draft London plan follows comments made by Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, who has said greater access to drinking fountains across the country is being considered as a way to cut plastic waste. Advertisement
Sally Hamilton, director of Orca, which campaigns on behalf of whales and dolphins, launched a report yesterday that said threats such as plastics could put many populations of the sea creatures at serious risk of extinction.
Although it is tragic and upsetting these pieces of footage in Blue Planet II highlight the threat to our seas, she said.
The plastic carrier bag charge has had a huge and positive impact on marine pollution but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of tons of single-use plastic is finding its way into the ocean every year, killing whales and dolphins by the thousand.
Being caught as bycatch, or snagged in fishing gear, results in whales, dolphins and porpoises drowning, sometimes slowly over the course of many months.
Despite this suffering, however, a huge proportion of fishing vessels are not reporting the issue and as a result the deaths we know about may only represent a fraction of the issue.
Orcas report on the state of whales and dolphins also warns that growing pollution could soon mean Britains only pod of killer whales dies off.
Miss Hamilton said: We need a tax to arrest the addiction we have to the single-use plastics that are destroying our environment. She suggested that fishing vessels should report any whale, dolphin or porpoise caught in their nets not to punish them, but to properly assess the scale of the problem.
She added: We need government and industry to work to stop the millions of tons of toxic material still threatening the environment from causing more damage.
The Daily Mail has led the way with campaigns to banish plastic bags, introduce a plastic bottle deposit scheme and act on the mountain of non-recyclable coffee cups.
- The BBC is releasing Blue Planet II in ultra high definition format on DVD a format the corporation says is the highest quality yet seen and which can also be downloaded to be shown on compatible devices.
In devastating scenes, the Blue Planet II team encountered a sperm whale which had a plastic bucket lodged in its mouth after confusing it for food
The albatross population in South Georgia in the South Atlantic has been falling for four decades, with some of the decline blamed on discarded plastic fishing gear and other rubbish
Researches know the birds are eating plastic because they have the ability to cough up bits of food they cannot digest
The extent to which Britains fast-growing network of Bitcoin cash machines is being exploited by drug gangs can be revealed today.
Shopkeepers have described to the Mail how teenagers reeking of drugs deposit wads of 50 notes into their digital currency terminals.
Up to four in five of those using the new ATMs are suspected drug dealers, one said.
Criminals can launder money and bypass bank checks by putting high-denomination notes into the machines to convert them into Bitcoin.
It can then be transferred across borders and withdrawn in any currency, and is hard to trace.
A day after Scotland Yard called for a crackdown, warning that criminal gangs are using the machines to launder their dirty cash, a Mail investigation found:
One shop that agreed to close to allow a customer to pay in 14,000;
A gaming bar where staff say up to 60 per cent of ATM users are drug dealers;
Shopkeepers boasting the machines are easy money they get a fee of up to 1,200 a month, or commission on each deposit.
A fast-growing web of Bitcoin ATMs, owned by a range of operators, has sprung up across the UK from Penzance to Glasgow.
There are now 98, with locations including a cannabis shop in Croydon, a vaping store in Tunbridge Wells, a fish and chip shop in Brighton and a food store in Derby.
The machines, connected to a Bitcoin exchange, are also used by speculators investing in the cryptocurrency, which has increased in value more than tenfold in a year.
Mahalingam Krishna, who owns G7 newsagents in West Norwood, South London said: Its easy money for us. We get 200 a month just to have it sitting in the shop.
'We have had one since May and we get all sorts. Boys wearing hoodies, kids aged 17 or 18. They reek of drugs.
'I dont know if they are criminals, they dont like me to see what they are doing.
Staff at Loading Bar in Dalston, East London, estimate that at least 60 per cent who use its Bitcoin ATM, installed six months ago, are drug dealers.
At first it was about 80 per cent, said a male employee who did not want to be named. The guys who are druggies will bring in massive amounts, a wad of 50 notes.
At a corner shop in Derby, ATM customers yesterday included a man who had travelled from Nottingham and another, in his 20s, who bought three Bitcoin last year for around 350 they are now worth more than 24,000.
Mahalingam Krishna, who owns G7 newsagents in West Norwood, South London said: Its easy money for us. We get 200 a month just to have it sitting in the shop'
Staff said the users were mainly geeks and there are precautions to stop money laundering.
Anyone wanting to buy Bitcoin worth more than 250 in a single transaction has to register using their fingerprints and two forms of ID.
Detectives from Scotland Yards elite Organised Crime Command say Bitcoin is one of the biggest emerging obstacles to tackling major gangs.
Julian Dixon, CEO of Fortytwo Data, specialists in combating money laundering, said: The UK is several steps behind the criminals and playing catch-up. Scare stories about the use of Bitcoin on the Dark Web have been common since its inception. Why has is taken so long for the authorities to decide to act?
Bitcoin emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
It is unregulated, hard to trace and exists only in cyberspace in the form of a numerical code.
It can be exchanged anonymously with anyone in the world at the click of a mouse.
The Bitcoin craze means its value has soared from around 750 at the start of the year to more than 8,200, making the currency worth 140billion almost as much as the Coca-Cola company.
But as it is not tied to any assets in the real world and the value is driven purely by demand, experts fear the Bitcoin bubble will burst.
'It's not unusual for them to put in 10,000'
Cannabis shop manager Tom Barber is happy to close his doors when customers ask for privacy to deposit huge bundles of cash into his Bitcoin ATM.
His Skunk House store on Croydon High Street sells a range of drug paraphernalia but the most popular purchase is Bitcoin.
Its been great for business, he said. We get ten to 20 people using the ATM a day.
Its not unusual for people to put in 10,000 in a day. We have had everyone from businessmen trying to hide from the taxman, to college students, to immigrants sending money home.
Ive had to close the shop for half an hour and get the machine emptied and filled again so that one guy could deposit 14,000 in one go.
Booming trade: The Vapour Trail in Tunbridge Wells has one of the ATMs
Skunk House cannabis shop in Croydon is another location with a Bitcoin ATM
There is a 500 limit per transaction on the machine, but the number of transactions you can do a day is limitless.
You dont get to hear what the money is for, but it would not surprise me if drug dealers were using it.
There was one drug dealer I heard that was about to get caught so he put everything he had into Bitcoin. When he came out of prison, the value had gone up so much he bought a house.
He said he believed Bitcoin was used to make purchases on the Dark Web the secret part of the internet frequented by, among others, pornographers, criminals and terrorists.
Daniel Jenkinson, who owns The Vapour Trail in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, has seen more than 100,000 deposited at his vape stores Bitcoin ATM in the past three months.
He said 90 per cent of users are either business people or curious investors. His machine is provided by Alpha Vend, which pays him 30 per cent of the commission it makes on every deposit.
Mr Jenkinson, 28, insisted he had seen no evidence of criminals using his ATMs to launder money.
Never was there an upper lip stiffer than that of Field Marshal Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge and noted British war hero.
When his right knee was shot to smithereens during the very last volleys of the Battle of Waterloo, he turned calmly to his commanding officer, the Duke of Wellington: By God, Sir, Ive lost my leg! he exclaimed.
To which Wellington replied: By God, Sir, so you have!
Henry Cyril Paget, the 5th Marquess of Anglesey thoroughly deserves his reputation as one of the most eccentric aristocrats in British history
Much quoted since, this exchange typified the bravery which in July 1815, less than a month after what remained of his mangled limb was amputated, saw Paget made the 1st Marquess of Anglesey.
That elevation within the ranks of the Georgian aristocracy was an honour hard won. So heaven knows what his lordship would have made of the antics of the great-grandson who inherited his title.
As revealed in How To Win Against History a musical which opened at Londons Young Vic theatre last week Henry Cyril Paget, the 5th Marquess of Anglesey, was to flamboyance what his forebear was to stoicism.
With a penchant for dressing up as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, he was known to stroll the streets of Londons Mayfair with a snow-white poodle under his arm, its collar a pink ribbon.
The exhausts of his five cars were specially adapted to spray out perfume, and one newspaper of the day claimed that he bought diamonds in the same way other men bought cigarettes.
Neither did he stint when it came to staging the theatrical spectaculars in which he always starred. These vehicles for his talent involved treating perplexed Victorian audiences to his signature style of choreography, a snake-like writhing which led to him becoming known as The Dancing Marquess. The bejewelled costumes for just one production were said to have cost 43 million in todays money.
All in all, he thoroughly deserves his reputation as one of the most eccentric aristocrats in British history but there is some doubt as to whether he was blue-blooded at all.
At the time of his birth in London in 1875, there were rumours that his mother, Blanche, had cheated on his father, the 4th Marquess, with a French actor named Benoit-Constant Coquelin.
He was schooled at Eton College and later served as a lieutenant in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers but his unorthodox lifestyle soon came to the fore
This gossip was fuelled further when, just two years after her sons birth, Blanche committed suicide and Henry was sent to Paris, where he was cared for by Coquelins sister.
The reasons for this are unclear, but whats certain is that, at the age of eight, Henry was brought back to live at Plas Newydd, the Paget familys Gothic-style mansion in Anglesey, North Wales.
With only an elderly nanny and his pets for companions, the delicate child got little attention from his father who was, by his own admission, a difficult character.
At first, his son appeared to be following the traditional path for a privileged young man of his era schooled at Eton College and later serving as a lieutenant in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
But there were early signs of the unorthodox lifestyle to come when the family arranged for him to marry his cousin, Lily, in 1898. A beautiful young woman with green eyes and Titian hair, she looked as though she had stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting and represented everything Henry wanted to be himself. Decidedly girlish in appearance, he wore dozens of rings on his dainty fingers and used make-up to whiten his complexion.
When his father died he was left a fortune, which included the income from the family mines in the Midlands, equivalent to around 55 million a year today
Their honeymoon in Paris was unusual, to say the least. When Lily stopped to admire the gems arrayed in a jewellers window, he went inside and bought the entire display. Each night he insisted she cover her naked body with these treasures, but he made no advance, content with just sitting and staring at her. That was as far as their physical intimacy went.
Exactly what his sexual inclinations were remains unclear, but Professor Viv Gardner, a performance historian at the University of Manchester, has come up with perhaps the most convincing explanation. He was a classic narcissist, she has written.
The only person he could love and make love to was himself.
Later that year, the 4th Marquess died, leaving his 23-year-old son a fortune which included the income from the family mines in the Midlands, equivalent to around 55 million a year today.
One of his first acts as the new Marquess was to get rid of his fathers hounds and replace them with a pack of pampered toy dogs, each with a silk coat, embroidered with the family crest.
With his marriage annulled on the grounds of non-consummation two years later, he indulged his love of performing and converted the chapel at Plas Newydd into a theatre called The Gaiety. For his first production, Aladdin, he tempted professional actors away from London with inflated salaries, and lit a three-mile path of blazing torches to guide audiences from the nearest village.
He lived at Plas Newydd, the Paget familys Gothic-style mansion in Anglesey, North Wales
Tickets were free and spectacle guaranteed with a small army of dressers helping the Marquess change in and out of a succession of costumes which sparkled with real jewels. Eventually, he began touring his productions around Europe. Fifty people together and lorry-loads of luggage, costumes and props were accompanied by the Marquess in his own limousine, decked out to resemble a luxurious Pullman railway carriage.
After each performance the Marquess, who was obsessed with photography, handed out postcards which showed him stretched out on a chaise longue. Besides jewellery, he frittered away millions on horses, furs and yachts. But the spending could not continue for ever and in 1904 he went bankrupt, owing his creditors the equivalent of a quarter of a billion pounds today.
Many got their money back, thanks to an auction of the Marquesss effects, which lasted 40 days as 17,000 lots went under the hammer.
Items on sale included treasure chests of pearls, gold cigarette cases studded with rubies, as well as the worlds largest collection of walking sticks, their handles encrusted with amethysts and emeralds.
Even the Marquesss footwear proved a marvel, with hundreds of pairs of shoes in leather, crocodile-skin and suede, alongside skating boots and silk tapestry slippers.
His sexual inclinations were unclear but one expert described him as 'a classic narcissist'
Perhaps mollified by getting their share of the proceeds, his creditors left him with a sizeable annual allowance of 3,000 (100,000 today), and with this he moved to France.
It was in the suitably ritzy surroundings of Monte Carlos Hotel Royale that he died of tuberculosis the following year, aged 29, his ex-wife Lily at his side. Since they had no children, the title was inherited by his cousin, Charles Paget, who, like the rest of his family, took a dim view of his squandering their fortune.
Immediately turning The Gaiety back into a chapel, Paget destroyed what remained of its creators personal effects.
This anger was understandable. The Marquess had, after all, frittered away around half a billion pounds in todays money in just six short years.
But in one respect at least he might have won the respect of his illustrious ancestor, the 1st Marquess. No one could deny that Henry Cyril Paget had lived life exactly as he pleased. That hardly equates to losing a leg on the battlefield, but it requires courage of a sort, so perhaps the two Marquesses of Anglesey had more in common than their relatives might ever have cared to admit.
How To Win Against History, by Seiriol Davies, is on at the Young Vic, until December 30.
Matthew Leveson's parents have said they wish they could see justice served for their son, but they feel relieved after a coroner delivered an open finding in the 20-year-old's death.
Deputy State Coroner Elaine Truscott's findings on Tuesday came two years after the inquest began and more than eight years after Mr Leveson's boyfriend, Michael Atkins, was acquitted of murder.
His parents Mark and Faye Leveson had mixed feelings after a coroner said she could not make a finding as to the cause and manner of his death in Sydney on September 23, 2007.
But they have the main thing they wanted from an inquest into his death: to bring him home.
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A coroner has made an open finding as to the cause and manner of Matthew Leveson's death
Mark and Faye Leveson (above, on Tuesday) had mixed feelings after a coroner said she could not make a finding as to the cause and manner of their son's death
'There's some relief, there's some frustration, there's some anger, so there's lots of emotions going through us but relief's one of the ones right now,' Mr Leveson told reporters outside Glebe Coroners Court.
The coroner said Atkins was the only person who could provide the answers as to how Matthew died, and he'd been given the opportunity to do so during his protected evidence at the inquest last year.
'For reasons unknown to me, he did not take that opportunity,' Ms Truscott said, later adding that Atkins had not been a 'witness of truth'.
The 54-year-old this year finally led police to Matthew's remains in a south Sydney national park after striking a deal to avoid contempt and perjury charges over lies he told during his inquest evidence.
He told police he panicked and buried his boyfriend's body in bushland after finding him dead from a drug overdose.
But the Levesons don't believe Atkins' latest version of events and still allege he's responsible for their son's death.
Faye Leveson is supported by her husband Mark at the NSW Coroner's Court on Tuesday
Michael Atkins (above) told police he panicked and buried his boyfriend's body in bushland after finding him dead from a drug overdose
Matthew was last seen leaving Darlinghurst's ARQ nightclub with his older boyfriend, Michael Atkins (left), in September 2007
Although they want justice, they say they achieved their main goal from the inquest - to find Matthew and bring him home.
'Our son was the most precious thing to us and to his brothers, why would we worry about Atkins,' Mrs Leveson said on Tuesday.
'We would have loved both but we were forced in this corner, and Matty comes first every time.'
'I was hoping at that stage he might go to jail and with luck might be killed in jail,' Mark Leveson said in an interview with 60 Minutes earlier this year.
When asked whether he wants Aktins dead, he replied: 'Yes. Slowly, painfully.'
During the lengthy inquest, Atkins drew diagrams for police officers about where he buried his younger boyfriend afyer he claimed he found he had overdosed on GHB
He told them he decided to bury him in bushland after finding him dead in their bedroom
And Mrs Leveson earlier stood in court and accused Atkins of possibly smothering, drowning or burying Matthew alive.
'We will always be left worrying, did Matty suffer?' Mrs Leveson said. 'Did he die quickly or was it slow and painful? Was he terrified?'
As she spoke, her son's remains were being held in the morgue under the court.
Mrs Leveson also revealed her son would not be wearing his favourite suit when his family finally bury him. They cannot dress a skeleton, she told the court.
'We had to watch Matty be exhumed from the grave, piece by piece, bit by bit, and then rebuilt and then watched him be packed up into two cardboard boxes and some evidence bags,' she said.
Matthew's parents Mark and Faye Leveson (pictured in October) believe Atkins killed their son
Matthew Leveson was last seen leaving Darlinghurst's ARQ nightclub with Atkins in September 2007.
Atkins, who in 2009 was acquitted of murdering Mr Leveson by a Supreme Court jury, long denied any knowledge of his whereabouts.
He finally led police to his bones at a national park south of Sydney after striking a deal last year to avoid contempt and perjury charges.
Police offered the 54-year-old the deal after he admitted lying during the investigation into Mr Leveson's disappearance and while giving evidence during the inquest.
He told them he decided to bury him in bushland after finding him dead in their bedroom from an overdose of GHB.
Video shows moments after alleged attack as Franklin returned to the kitchen carrying the limp child and casually
An Oklahoma dentist accused of causing fatal skull fractures to his mistress's 19-month-old son was charged Monday in a new felony case- with conspiring to have her killed so she couldn't testify against him.
Bert Franklin, 36, was set to face trial Monday in the death of his mistress Roxanne Lewis's son, Lincoln Von Henry Lewis. Prosecutors allege Franklin caused the deadly head injuries to the child on July 16, 2016, inside the Lewis' Oklahoma City residence, according to OK News.
The trial was continued after prosecutors charged him with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, after they say he solicited fellow inmates to kill the boy's mother. She is the key witness in her son's murder case.
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Roxanne Lewis-Randall, pictured with her now deceased son Lincoln, is the key witness in her son's murder case
Oklahoma dentist Bert Franklin, 35 (left), was charged with killing his lover's 19-month-old son, Lincoln Van Henry Lewis (right), with a blow to the head- and now he's charged with plotting to kill the boy's mother from behind bars
The inmates Franklin allegedly solicited were working with law enforcement as confidential informants in unrelated cases.
He has been held without bail in the Oklahoma County jail since July 2016, as he is considered a flight risk after losing his dental practice over the toddler's murder charge according to Koco News.
In August, Franklin approached the first informant about 'the possibility of killing a witness in the murder case,' an investigator with the Oklahoma County District Attorney's Office wrote in a court affidavit.
This past week, prosecutors allege Franklin gave 'step-by-step driving instructions' to Randall's house to a second informant as well as information on her home security cameras.
Roxanne Lewis-Randall told Dr Phil through tears previously about her son's tragic death
Prosecutors allege Franklin had $300 transferred to a third inmate's account, which was to be used as 'compensation for the murder,' according to the affidavit.
His defense attorney says Franklin denies the new allegations. Franklin also has denied harming Randall's son.
Randall had been in a secret relationship with the married dentist for about a year.
CCTV footage allegedly captured him slamming her son Lincoln's head into the ground, making a kicking motion, then carrying the child while nonchalantly getting himself a piece of pizza.
'My mind knew logically that there was only one explanation,' she told Dr. Phil previously. 'I asked him, said "are you sure Lincoln didnt fall or something whenever you guys were outside or whenever you guys were downstairs" and his exact answer was "no, and I told you that noise was me throwing a ball at the wall..." and that stuck in my mind.'
In the Tulsa hospital where Lincoln was airlifted, it all came together for Randall.
Dr. Phil says: In the hospital that you realized it all came into focus for you, there were two of us there and it damn sure wasnt me.'
Randall says she wanted physically assault him.
'I just was fuming, but I needed to get him away from Lincoln because he was still there, so I went back to the room and I told him that I felt like I needed a minute alone with my son, I whispered to the nurse if she could change the visiting rules to just me. She asked if there was a specific person that I didnt want there and I told her yes, him, but I dont want him to know.'
She tells Dr. Phil what happened in harrowing detail.
'Lincoln was laying on the couch, looking up at the TV, so I went to walk around to give him his pacifier and Burt was on the other couch,' she said.
She didn't know that her child had already been fatally injured.
'He was like "no he's asleep," so I put his pacifier on the arm of the couch and went back upstairs.
'I guess that's whenever he picked up Lincoln and carried his body around. So he carried him into the kitchen, gets another piece of pizza, and eventually takes him to my room and lays him on my bed.'
Roxanne goes on to tell how when she later picked up her son's lifeless body, he was completely limp.
At that point, Lincoln was already brain dead.
Roxanne told Dr Phil when she picked up her son's lifeless body, he was completely limp. At that point, Lincoln was already brain-dead
Bert Franklin, 35, was arrested and charged in 2016 with first-degree murder in the death of 19-month-old Lincoln Van Henry Lewis.
When Roxanne realized her son was unresponsive she took him to Mercy Hospital, where he was diagnosed with skull fractures.
Surveillance video was later released which gives a clue to the horrific last moments of baby Lincoln's life.
The footage showed Franklin walking down the stairs at the home of his Ms Randall, with Lincoln in his arms.
At that point, the baby looked alert and awake.
Franklin then disappeared out of view into the living room.
It is unclear what happened next but an Oklahoma City detective told the court she believes the video showed the dentist slamming the child head first into the ground.
Franklin was then seen kicking towards something on the floor which is not visible.
When he walked back into the kitchen, in view of the camera, the child is limp in his arms. Franklin seems unaffected and casually grabbed a piece of pizza from the box on the side, Lincoln's limp legs dangling.
The boy's mother only noticed something was wrong after she tried to wake Lincoln up around 2am to feed.
At that point, she discovered her son unresponsive and rushed him to hospital.
Due to the severity of his injuries, the child was later flown to a Tulsa hospital where he passed away, according to police.
A doctor who initially treated Lincoln in Oklahoma City called police because the toddler's injuries were consistent with abuse, according to a press release cited by Tulsa World.
An autopsy that was performed in the wake of the child's death found that Lincoln had severe swelling and trauma to his brain, as well as hemorrhaging in both eyes caused by a pair of skull fractures.
Roxanne told police that on July 17, 2016, she was downstairs in her home in the 14800 block of Gravity Falls when she heard a loud 'thud' from an upstairs bedroom, where Franklin and Lincoln were alone at the time.
Franklin later told his girlfriend that the noise she heard was with from a small ball he was throwing to a puppy.
According to Roxanne, her boyfriend hated Lincoln's biological father and had threatened to kill him, 'skin him in Bricktown' and cut off his penis, Fox 25 reported.
She also claimed that Franklin recently had begun to exhibit 'controlling behavior.' Investigators stated in Franklin's arrest warrant that his wife and his mistress were not aware of one another's existence.
Detectives said when they interviewed Bert Franklin, they found his story to be inconsistent with the evidence in the case.
Franklin later surrendered and is set to stand trial for murder starting September 25, 2017.
Prosecutors told the judge at the bail hearing that F ranklin would be a flight risk because he's lost everything after the case - including his Tulsa dental practice.
His Facebook page states that Franklin works at Signature Smiles Dental Spa in Tulsa. He reportedly was with the practice for eight years.
A bio on the dental practice's website states that Franklin graduated from the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry, where he received the Dental Wellness Partner Scholarship.
He also holds an undergraduate degree in biomedical chemistry from Oral Roberts University.
The court heard evidence that one of Franklin's biological children had accused him of abuse in the past.
The judge, who also saw violent texts Franklin had sent to Lewis' biological father, was swayed by the arguments and denied him bail.
Posts and photos shared on Roxanne's Facebook account reveal that her son Lincoln was born prematurely in late December 2014 and spent nearly two months in NICU.
She was finally able to take him home in February of 2015, calling him in one status update her 'miracle babe.'
Harvey Weinstein was spotted out to lunch and away from his rehabilitation facility with an unidentified female companion on Monday.
And unlike the last few times the fallen mogul has stepped out into the public eye, this time he did it without any of his clever disguises, TMZ reported.
The 65-year-old was spotted dining in a Los Angeles Dodgers T-shirt, despite being in enemy territory at Babbo Italian Eatery in Glendale, Arizona.
The restaurant is just 40 minutes outside Phoenix where the Arizona Diamondbacks - the Dodgers rival team- plays.
His lady friend was equally casual in a fuchsia workout top and a pair of Nike joggers.
Harvey Weinstein was spotted out to lunch and away from his rehabilitation facility with an unidentified female companion on Monday
And unlike the last few times the fallen mogul has stepped out into the public eye, this time he did it without any of his clever disguises, TMZ reported
The 65-year-old was spotted dining in a Los Angeles Dodgers T-shirt, despite being in enemy territory at Babbo Italian Eatery in Glendale, Arizona (pictured)
Weinstein and the raven-haired woman had the entire restaurant to themselves, and likely dined on lasagna or a calzone, a couple of Babbo's specialties, while watching the Cardinals play the Rams.
TMZ noted that he looked slimmer than he looked before going into rehabilitation - and despite the restaurant's extensive wine list stayed away from all alcoholic beverages.
Weinstein has only been spotted a handful of time since he fled New York City the day after he was first accused of assault and harassment in a New York Times expose.
He was seen slurping on some soup at Chestnut, a farm-to-table restaurant in Phoenix in early November and then in California a week later. Throughout the mean he managed to keep a low profile despite the fact that over 100 women have now accused him of sexual harassment and/or assault.
That feat was accomplished in large part because of his disguise, with Weinstein wearing a blond wig over his bald head and orange makeup covering his face before heading out in public.
His guest also appeared to be wearing a wig, with the man keeping a hand on the side of his head during their meal.
Weinstein has only been spotted a few other times since fleeing New York City the day after he was first accused of assault and harassment, but usually wears some sort of disguise to keep people from noticing him (he is pictured in 2015)
The disgraced mogul looked shockingly calm even though an investigation into sexual assault allegations against him ramped up on Monday.
The investigation is moving forward, NYPD chief detective Robert Boyce said Monday without giving a timeline for possible charges.
TMZ noted that he looked slimmer than he looked before going into rehabilitation - and despite the restaurant's extensive wine list stayed away from all alcoholic beverages. He is pictured in 2015
'This case is going forward right now,' he told a briefing, citing regular communication with Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. though with no details on timing.
'There has been no determination on where its going to go, or what timeline has been done as to when it's going to go to a grand jury,' the New York Police Department staffer explained.
Boyce said he has sent detectives to Los Angeles on the multi-front case.
'I have two detectives in LA right now. I have sent them to Paris. I have sent them pretty much around the world ... More women coming out: its a good thing. We see a decided increase in the people coming forward and having faith,' he stressed.
This news comes almost one month after a report emerged claiming that the district attorney's office was looking to present a case the following week to the the grand jury in hopes of indicting Weinstein on a number of charges stemming from his alleged rapes of actress de la Huerta in 2010.
'We have a credible and detailed narrative, and even though the incident occurred seven years ago there has been corroboration from a number of individuals,' said Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce around that time.
He went on to reveal that investigators contacted the district attorney's office soon after they interviewed de la Huerta and 'started working the case together.'
Weinstein is accused of sexually assaulting the actress on two occasions, but has denied any and all allegations of non-consensual sex through his spokesperson.
The actress reported the incidents to authorities on October 25, and was found to be a strong and credible witness.
A Chinese zoo in southern China is forced to shut down after being slammed for putting up inflatable animal toys as real penguins.
Guishan Zoo organised a two-day event featuring wildlife animals but it failed to impress the visitors as they saw tortoise, chickens and geese when they walked in.
The incident has caused an outcry as web users and tourists being treated as 'fools' and 'idiots'.
'Penguins from the South Pole': A Chinese zoo has shocked visitors with inflatable toys
Pictured: Featuring rare wildlife animals in the zoo's posters, visitors were disappointed to see poultry such as chickens and geese
Pictures of the zoo posted by People's Daily Online since the opening on November 25, showing over 10 inflatable penguins, chickens, geese, and a tortoise with some money sprinkled on.
The zoo also featured a crocodile pond where a warning sign stood up saying the crocodile can hurt people.
However, a live tortoise can be seen living in the pond, along with a pop-up penguin.
Tourists have to pay 15 yuan (1.68) per person to visit the zoo featuring 'penguins from the South Pole' and fortune tortoise.
Located in Yulin, Guangxi Province, the zoo owner spoke to local media, 'Yulin Living' that the exhibition was held by a third party, whose the person-in-charge was known as Mr Wang.
A warning sign is placed in a pond to warn people not to touch the 'crocodile' where it lives two tortoises (left). Another tortoise is being branded as 'fortune and long-living' (right)
Angry visitors slammed the zoo for false advertising and requested a refund of the ticket
The owner, who refused to reveal her name, found it surprise to see fake penguins.
'This is not what we agreed initially, I only found out on the day the zoo opens but there were visitors coming in already, so I did not bother,' she said.
However, she claimed the poultry are not part of the attraction. The chicken and geese are to be fed to the crocodile in the zoo.
Negative reviews swarmed over the Internet since the attraction opened. Guishan zoo is forced to shut down after opening five days for this special exhibition.
Visitors were demanding a refund for being mislead by false advertisement.
The zoo owner told the reporter that she could not contact Mr Wang since the incident came into light.
'I wish he [Mr Wang] can stand up and gives the public an explanation,' she said.
Angry web users commented on Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform, that they were not a fool.
'Do we look like idiots to them? And they think people cannot distinguish a real penguin and an inflatable toy?' asked 'Nhuihaoshen'.
'This is a farm more than a zoo! There are no real animals in the zoo! This is humiliating our intelligence!' said 'Chrilllia'.
Pigeons are smarter than we thought, according to new research.
The birds judge the abstract concepts of space and time in a similar way to humans, the first time a non-primate species has been shown to do so.
Crucially, pigeons use a different region of the brain to process space and time, suggesting they evolved the ability separately to humans.
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The birds judge the abstract concepts of space and time in a similar way to humans, yet use a different region of the brain to process them, a study found. Pictured is one of the pigeons used in the new research
THE STUDY During their study, researchers showed pigeons a static, horizontal line on a computer screen. The birds had to judge the line's length or the amount of time it was visible to them. Pigeons judged longer lines to also have longer duration and judged lines longer in duration to also be longer in length. This means pigeons use a single area of the brain to judge space and time, suggesting the abstract concepts are not processed separately, experts said. Similar results have been found with humans and other primates. Advertisement
'In the same way we might need to estimate the arrival of our pizza delivery, or figure out if there is enough space for us to park our cars, it might be useful for a pigeon to estimate when it is lunchtime so it can get delicious breadcrumbs, or the size of a potential competitor,' study coauthor Dr Victor Navarro, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, told MailOnline.
The research adds to growing evidence that that lower-order animal species such as birds, reptiles, and fish are capable of high-level, abstract decision-making.
'The cognitive prowess of birds is now deemed to be ever closer to that of both human and nonhuman primates,' said study lead author Professor Edward Wasserman.
'Those avian nervous systems are capable of far greater achievements than the pejorative term "bird brain" would suggest.'
During their study, the Iowa team showed pigeons a static, horizontal line on a computer screen.
The birds had to judge the line's length or the amount of time it was visible to them.
Pigeons judged longer lines to also have longer duration and judged lines longer in duration to also be longer in length.
This means pigeons use a single area of the brain to judge space and time, suggesting the abstract concepts are not processed separately, experts said.
Similar results have been found with humans and other primates.
Humans are able to perceive space and time even without the aid of inventions such as a watch or a ruler.
The region of the brain that helps us understand those abstract concepts is the parietal cortex, part of the cerebral cortex and the outermost layer of the brain.
The research adds to growing evidence that that lower-order animal species such as birds, reptiles, and fish are capable of high-level, abstract decision-making
The cerebral cortex is linked with higher thought processes, including speech and complex decision-making.
The four lobes that make up this important region, including the parietal cortex, process different types of sensory information.
But the pigeon brain doesn't have a parietal cortex, meaning the birds must employ another area of the brain to discriminate between space and time.
To investigate this further, the Iowa researchers put pigeons through a series of tasks called the 'common magnitude' test.
Put simply, the birds were shown on a computer screen a horizontal line of varying lengths and for varying amounts of time.
If they correctly reported the length or the duration of the line by pecking one of four visual symbols, they received food.
Pigeons were found to use a single area of the brain to judge space and time, suggesting the abstract concepts are not processed separately, experts said. Humans and other primates also use a single brain region to process space and time
'The task forces pigeons to process time and space simultaneously because they cannot know on which dimension they're going to be tested,' Professor Wasserman said.
The researchers found that the length of the line affected the pigeons' guesses of line duration, and the duration of the line altered the pigeons' guesses of line length.
This interplay of space and time paralleled research done with humans and monkeys and revealed the common brain coding of these two dimensions.
Researchers previously believed that the parietal cortex was the locus of this interplay.
However, because pigeons lack an apparent parietal cortex, Professor Wasserman's findings suggest this isn't always the case.
'The cortex is not unique to judging space and time. The pigeons have other brain systems that allow them to perceive these dimensions,' said study coauthor Mr Benjamin De Corte.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has revealed that he shares China's cyberspace vision of 'developing a digital economy for openness and shared benefits.'
Speaking at a conference in China this week, Cook said that Apple was 'proud to have worked alongside many of our partners in China to help build a community that will join a common future in cyberspace.'
The news comes as Apple faces criticism from rights groups for bowing to pressure from cyber regulators after it removed hundreds of apps from its Chinese store this year.
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Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has revealed that 1.8 million developers have been using the App Store platform in China
CHINESE INTERNET CRACKDOWN While China is home to the world's largest number of internet users, a 2015 report by US think tank Freedom House found that the country had the most restrictive online use policies of 65 nations it studied, ranking below Iran and Syria. But China has maintained that its various forms of web censorship are necessary for protecting its national security. The national VPN crackdown comes after the passing of a controversial cybersecurity bill last November that tightened restrictions on online freedom of speech and imposed new rules on service providers. Since the regulation took effect this June, authorities have closed dozens of celebrity gossip blogs and issued new rules around online video content to eliminate programmes deemed offensive. Advertisement
Cook was speaking at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China this week.
According to Bloomberg, Cook said: 'The theme of this conference - developing a digital economy for openness and shared benefits - is a vision we at Apple share.
'We are proud to have worked alongside many of our partners in China to help build a community that will join a common future in cyberspace.'
Cook also revealed that 1.8 million developers have been using the App Store platform in China.
These developers have earned a total of 112 billion yuan ($16.93 billion/12.6 billion) - representing roughly a quarter of total global App Store earnings.
Earlier this year, Apple said that developers had earned roughly $70 billion (52 billion) in total revenue through the store.
Apple counts China as its third-largest region by sales but it has lost market share in recent years as high-end handsets from local rivals continue to gain traction.
The news comes as Apple faces criticism from local users and rights groups for bowing to pressure from Beijing cyber regulators after it decided to remove hundreds of apps from its Chinese store this year.
The firm is hoping to regain momentum following the release of its iPhone 8 and iPhone X models which shipped in November.
The firm said earlier it had moved its Chinese cloud data onto the servers of a local partner in the Chinese province of Guizhou.
Cook has come to China several times this year, including an October visit where he was among executives that met with President Xi Jinping, who also had prepared remarks read at the conference on Sunday.
Cook's attendance is conspicuous at the conference, marking the first high-level executive to attend in the event's four-year history.
Others included Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, who is also attending the conference for the first time.
Others included Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, who is also attending the conference for the first time
Pichai did not give a speech but appeared on a group panel alongside Xiaomi founder Lei Jun.
Like Apple, he hinted at how Google helps the economy in China.
According to the South China Morning Post, he said: 'A lot of work Google does is to help Chinese companies.
'Many small and medium-sized businesses in China take advantage of Google to get their products to many other countries outside of China.'
Also speaking at the event was Mr Wang Huning, the man known as the brain behind President Xi, who praised China's president for his 'deep understanding' of internet governence.
He said: 'Global cyberspace governance has no onlookers we are all participants,' adding that 'all parties' should have a say over how the internet is managed across the world.
A mysterious planet that lies 325 light years away from Earth has been found to have one of the most bizarre atmospheres ever observed.
The over-sized planet, called Wasp-18b, is wrapped in a smothering layer of carbon monoxide with absolutely no water - a finding that astronomers say 'defies expectations'.
This is one of the first times that such a combination has been seen, and has led some to nickname Wasp-18b the 'death planet.'
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A mysterious planet that lies 325 light years away from Earth has been found to have one of the most bizarre atmospheres ever observed. The over-sized planet, called Wasp-18b, is wrapped in a smothering layer of carbon monoxide with absolutely no water
WASP-18B'S ATMOSPHERE By analysing the light emitted by the planet's atmosphere, the researchers revealed Wasp-18b's unusual fingerprint. The analysis suggests that Wasp-18b has hot carbon monoxide in the stratosphere and cooler carbon monoxide in the layer of the atmosphere below called the troposphere. Compared to other gas giants, the researchers suggest that Wasp-18b's atmosphere would contain 300 times more 'metals' elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This very high metallicity indicates that Wasp-18b may have accumulated greater amounts of solid ices during its formation than Jupiter suggesting it may have formed in a different way to other gas giants. Advertisement
Researchers from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland used the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to analyse Wasp-18b's stratosphere.
The unusual composition of carbon monoxide with no water suggests that the formation of the planet may have been very different to that of other gas giants.
Dr Kyle Sheppard, lead author of the study, said: 'The composition of WASP-18b defies all expectations.
'We don't know of any other extrasolar planet where carbon monoxide so completely dominates the upper atmosphere.'
On Earth, ozone absorbs UV in the stratosphere, protecting our planet from a lot of the sun's harmful radiation.
And for most other exoplanets with stratospheres, this absorber is usually a molecule such as titanium oxide.
In the study, the researchers analysed data collected for Wasp-18b, including five eclipses from archived Hubble data and two from Spitzer.
By analysing the light emitted by the planet's atmosphere, the researchers revealed Wasp-18b's unusual fingerprint.
Dr Nikku Madhusadhan, co-author of the study, said: 'The only consistent explanation for the data is an overabundance of carbon monoxide and very little water vapor in the atmosphere of WASP-18b, in addition to the presence of a stratosphere.
WASP-18b is a 'hot Jupiter,' a giant exoplanet that orbits very close to its star, located about 330 light years from Earth
WASP-18B WASP-18b is a 'hot Jupiter,' a giant exoplanet that orbits very close to its star, located about 330 light years from Earth. Specifically, the mass of WASP-18b is estimated to be about ten times that of Jupiter, yet it orbits its star about once every 23 hours. By comparison, it takes Jupiter about 12 years to complete one trip around the sun from its great distance. Advertisement
'This rare combination of factors opens a new window into our understanding of physicochemical processes in exoplanetary atmospheres.'
The analysis suggests that Wasp-18b has hot carbon monoxide in the stratosphere and cooler carbon monoxide in the layer of the atmosphere below called the troposphere.
Compared to other gas giants, the researchers suggest that Wasp-18b's atmosphere would contain 300 times more 'metals' elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
This very high metallicity indicates that Wasp-18b may have accumulated greater amounts of solid ices during its formation than Jupiter suggesting it may have formed in a different way to other gas giants.
Dr Avi Mandell, another author of the study, said: 'The expected launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and other future space-based observatories will give us the opportunity to follow up with even more powerful instruments and to continue exploring the amazing array of exoplanets out there.'
Internet users have been left baffled by a silent animation that you can 'hear'.
The Gif shows a huge electricity pylon jumping over power lines like a skipping rope, causing the screen to 'shake' each time it lands.
Thousands of Twitter users, where the soundless Gif was first shared, have reported that they hear a 'thudding' noise each time the pylon lands.
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Does anyone in visual perception know why you can hear this gif? pic.twitter.com/mcT22Lzfkp Lisa DeBruine (@lisadebruine) December 2, 2017
The Gif shows an electricity pylon jumping over power lines like a skipping rope, causing the screen to 'shake' each time it lands. Many Twitter users have reported that they hear a thudding noise each time the pylon lands
WHAT CAUSES THE SOUND? The acoustic reflex is an involuntary muscle contraction in the ear when we speak or hear loud noises. Muscles pull tightly within the 'middle ear' to protect the delicate machinery of the inner ear from being damaged. The reflex is mostly used against deeper, low-frequency sounds, such as the noise from a massive object colliding with the floor. Some experts suggest the dull thud people hear when watching the Gif is the sound of this reflex closing up part of our ear as we anticipate a loud noise. Others claim the illusion is not a physical reflex, but the result of our brain tightly linking different sensory responses. Because we closely associate the 'sight' of a big collision with the sound of a loud thud, our brains generate the noise for us, an 'auditory illusion'. Advertisement
Dr Lisa DeBruine, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow, posted the animation, asking: 'Does anyone in visual perception know why you can hear this gif?'
She added a poll asking what people experienced when watching the Gif, with 75 per cent - around 15,000 people - claiming they heard 'a thudding sound'.
Fourteen per cent of respondents, just under 3,000 in total, said they heard no sound, while under a thousand of the 20,000 polled said they heard 'something else'.
The remainder of respondents, around 1,400, chose not to reveal whether they had heard anything.
In the responses to the strange post, Dr DeBruine suggested the effect is caused by the ear's 'acoustic reflex'.
Twitter user Mr Punkin wrote: 'I think you can [hear] it because the visual expresses an implied wave, which your hearing system anticipates and prepares for so the potential sound doesn't deafening you. The ear basically squints like an eye.'
Dr DeBruine tweeted in response: 'That's my perceptual experience, too. I can 'squint' my ears voluntarily and it's a similar feeling.'
The acoustic reflex is an involuntary muscle contraction in the ear when we speak or hear loud noises.
Muscles pull tightly within the 'middle ear' to protect the delicate machinery of the inner ear from being damaged.
The reflex is mostly used against deeper, low-frequency sounds, such as the noise from a massive object colliding with the floor.
A poll asking what people experienced when watching the Gif found 75 per cent - around 15,000 respondents - heard 'a thudding sound'
In the responses to the strange post, Dr DeBruine suggested the effect is caused by the ear's 'acoustic reflex', but illusion researchers have claimed the sound is caused by 'expectation'
Dr DeBruine suggests that the dull thud people hear when watching the Gif is the sound of this reflex closing up part of our ear as we anticipate a loud noise.
Other experts suggest the Gif, created by Twitter user @IAmHappyToast, generates an illusion in which our brains expect a loud sound to accompany the sight of a big collision.
Dr Gustav Khun, a psychologist and human perception expert at Goldsmiths University in London, told MailOnline: 'Perception is not an exact science and in most cases our brain makes an educated guess.
The pylon Gif is not the first animation to trick viewers into 'hearing' a sound that isn't there. The animation above has a similar effect in that our brains think that a loud noise will follow the heavy impacts seen as each elephant hits the ground
'We use past experience and expectations to estimate what the world is truly like, base on the information our senses provide.
'This illusion works, because you have learnt that when larger objects fall to the ground, they result in a thumping sound.
'Some viewers will actually hear the sound, simply because that it what they expect will happen.
It is expectation that is causing some people to hear the thuds, according to Professor Fiona Macpherson, an expert at the University of Glasgow (stock image)
Professor Fiona Macpherson, an expert at the University of Glasgow's Illusion Index, told MailOnline: 'It is expectation that is causing some people to hear the thuds.
'In the GIF of the jumping pylon, there is a cross-modal expectation (that is, involving more than one sense, such as vision and hearing) effect taking place.
'What people see is affecting what they seem to hear.'
Algorithms will be as important as ammunition in the future of warfare, according to a new report.
The US armed services invested $7.4 billion (5.5bn) in AI, big data and cloud computing last year which is set to change modern warfare, the report revealed.
Military chiefs have warned the US 'can either lead the coming revolution, or fall victim to it'.
The report comes as the Pentagon focuses on improving its algorithms amid growing concern powerful Chinese and Russian AI could be set on world domination.
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The US armed services invested $7.4 billion ($5.5bn) in AI, big data and cloud computing last year which is set to change modern warfare, the report revealed. Pictured is someone walking past a poster of Martin's F-35 stealth multirole fighter
CHINESE AND RUSSIAN CYBER THREATS A report from the Centre for a New American Security found China intends to become the 'premier global AI innovation centre' by 2030. Kari Bingen, Secretary of Defence for Intelligence (SDI) warned Chinese and Russian artificial intelligence is speeding ahead of other nations. 'It's a no-brainer, we have to be investing', said Mr Bingen in response to the report. There are currently 180,000 objects hurtling around space and not enough airmen and analysts to keep an eye on them, he told the Express. Last week Nato warned that the world is under a 'considerably' higher threat of war than four years ago, naming artificial intelligence, China's growing military strength and a resurgent Russia as some of the risk factors. Advertisement
According to a data science and analytics firm, Govini, the armed services are changing how they train and fight.
The advancements in technology are so significant they are changing warfare just like the rifle did generations ago, writes Washington Post.
Companies with large presences in Washington such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Leidos are leading the work.
'Rapid advances in AI and the vastly improved Autonomous Systems are pointing towards new and more novel warfighting applications involving human-machine collaboration and combat teaming', wrote former secretary of defence, Robert Work in the introduction to the report.
Virtual reality is being used to simulate battle conditions and complex computer systems could mimic biological systems.
In the future this could be used to create AI-human fighting machines.
'AI applications will be the primary drivers of an emerging military-technical revolution', wrote Dr Work.
'The US can either lead the coming revolution, or fall victim to it'.
A separate report from the Centre for a New American Security found China intends to become the 'premier global AI innovation centre' by 2030.
Kari Bingen, Secretary of Defence for Intelligence (SDI) warned Chinese and Russian artificial intelligence is speeding ahead of other nations.
'It's a no-brainer, we have to be investing', said Mr Bingen in response to the report.
There are currently 180,000 objects hurtling around space and not enough airmen and analysts to keep an eye on them, he told the Express.
Resurgence of Putin: Last week Nato warned that the world is under a 'considerably' higher threat of war than four years ago, naming artificial intelligence, China's growing military strength and a resurgent Russia as some of the risk factors
UK MUST BEEF UP CYBER DEFENCES Last month former CIA director General David Petraeus warned Britain must beef up its cyber defences to stop extremists acquiring virtual weapons of mass destruction. The ex-intelligence chief, one of the most senior post-9/11 US military commanders, said one day soon there would be a stake through the heart of Islamic States leader. But he warned the West could not just play whack a mole when it came to defeating the group online, as he slapped down web giants for not doing enough to stop terror. He urged the UK to step up its cyber capabilities, as well as increase its Special Forces troops and maintain its ability to send a division to war. Gen Petreaus said in a major speech in London: We will defeat the (IS) army. At some point we will put through a stake through the heart of Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State. We are not going to be able to put a stake through the heart of the virtual caliphate, this is ideology that is being propagated on the internet. Advertisement
The Pentagon is also working towards using drones to probe into enemy territory and cargo helicopters that could fly autonomously.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is one example.
It has eight million lines of code and officials consider it part flying computer and part fighter jet.
American company Lockheed Martin is manufacturing the multimillion-pound supersonic aircraft, which the UK has pledged to buy 138 of over the coming decades.
The cutting-edge F-35B warplanes will undertake missions from both Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers and bases such as RAF Marham, with nine set to arrive in Britain next year.
Andrew Linstead, director of strategic engagement at Lockheed Martin UK, said a National Audit Office report published earlier this year showed Britain had spent 3.9 billion ($5.2bn) on the F-35s since the start of the programme.
Last week Nato warned that the world is under a 'considerably' higher threat of war than four years ago, naming artificial intelligence, China's growing military strength and a resurgent Russia as some of the risk factors.
The report, completed by NATO once every four years, identifies 20 global trends that are likely to affect the alliance through 2035.
Easy access to technology and the global nature of cyberspace would make it easier for terrorist networks to expand, challenging the current near-monopoly that state actors have on high-tech weapons, the report said.
The report said defence spending had begun increasing after Russia's annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014, and projections called for further increases through 2045.
It promised to be a futuristic solution to securing your phone but Apple's Face ID is causing problems for some of its users.
Since the release of the latest version of iOS, many iPhone X customers have been unable to activate the facial recognition feature.
Affected handsets display the message 'Unable to activate Face ID on this phone', but a simple trick could help to correct the error.
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It promised to be a futuristic solution to securing your phone but Apple's Face ID is causing problems for some of its users. Affected handsets display the message 'Unable to activate Face ID on this phone', but a simple trick could help to correct the error
HOW TO FIX IT To perform a hard reset, turn off the iPhone X by holding down the side button along with either volume button. Drag the slide to power off slider to shut down the phone, and wait for the screen to go black. Hold down the side button to boot the phone up again. This should resolve the issue, but if Face ID is still not working, you will need to contact Apple Support. Advertisement
The problem emerged with iOS 11.2, itself created to fix another bug in the Apple operating system that was causing some phones to constantly crash.
For some users a 'soft' reset, turning the handset off and then on again, may resolve the issue.
However, there are reports on social media of some frustrated Apple fans who have been unsuccessful with this workaround.
Twitter user Todd Nichols said: 'Seriously @Apple !!! Face ID bug is a huge #FAIL for such an expensive phone. Grrrrr! #alreadyrebootedthephone3times.'
Anyone who is unable to resolve the glitch with a soft reset should try a 'hard' reset instead.
To perform a hard reset, turn off the iPhone X by holding down the side button along with either volume button.
Drag the slide to power off slider to shut down the phone, and wait for the screen to go black.
Hold down the side button to boot the phone up again.
This should resolve the issued, but if Face ID is still not working, you will need to contact Apple Support.
This is not the first time that Face ID has come under fire.
Since the release of the latest version of iOS, some iPhone X customers have been unable to activate the facial recognition feature (pictured)
For some users a simple 'soft' reset, turning the handset off and then on again, may resolve the issue, although a 'hard' reset may be required
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak expressed concerns about whether the Face ID feature would work just days before the smartphone's release.
Since that time, cyber-security researchers claimed in November that they fooled the face recognition technology with a mask that costs just 114 ($150) to make.
The findings suggest that face recognition is not yet mature enough to guarantee security for computers and smartphones, according to experts.
WHAT'S NEW IN IOS 11.2 iOS 11.2 introduces Apple Pay Cash to send, request, and receive money from friends and family with Apple Pay, using messages or by asking Siri. This feature is currently only available to users in the US. MailOnline has contacted Apple for more information on when it might launch globally. The update also includes a number of bug fixes and improvements, including: Adds support for faster wireless charging on iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X with compatible third-party accessories
Introduces three new Live wallpapers for iPhone X
Improves video camera stabilization
Adds support in Podcasts to automatically advance to the next episode from the same show
Adds support in HealthKit for downhill snow sports distance as a data type
Fixes an issue that could cause Mail to appear to be checking for new messages even when a download is complete
Fixes an issue that could cause cleared Mail notifications from Exchange accounts to reappear
Improves stability in Calendar
Resolves an issue where Settings could open to a blank screen
Fixes an issue that could prevent swiping to Today View or Camera from the Lock Screen
Addresses an issue that could prevent Music controls from displaying on the Lock Screen
Fixes an issue that could cause app icons to be arranged incorrectly on the Home Screen
Addresses an issue that could prevent users from deleting recent photos when iCloud storage is exceeded
Addresses an issue where Find My iPhone sometimes wouldnt display a map
Fixes an issue in Messages where the keyboard could overlap the most recent message
Fixes an issue in Calculator where typing numbers rapidly could lead to incorrect results
Addressed an issue where the keyboard could respond slowly
Adds support for real-time text phone calls for the deaf and hard of hearing
Improves VoiceOver stability in Messages, Settings, App Store, and Music
Resolves an issue that prevented VoiceOver from announcing incoming Notifications Advertisement
The mask was made just one week after the iPhone X officially went on sale, by researchers from Ha Noi-based Bkav.
The researchers set up the Face ID feature as normal with a human face, before creating a mask of that face using a 3D printer, with a nose created by an artist from silicone.
The eyes were represented with 2D images, while the 'skin was also hand-made to trick Apple's AI', according to the team.
This is not the first time that Face ID has come under fire. Cyber-security researchers claimed in November that they fooled the face recognition technology with a mask that costs just 114 ($150) to make
WHEN FACE ID FAILS According to Apple, users must enter your passcode for additional security validation when: The device has just been turned on or restarted.
The device hasn't been unlocked for more than 48 hours.
The passcode hasn't been used to unlock the device in the last six and a half days and Face ID hasn't unlocked the device in the last 4 hours.
The device has received a remote lock command.
After five unsuccessful attempts to match a face.
After initiating power off/Emergency SOS by pressing and holding either volume button and the side button simultaneously for 2 seconds. Advertisement
In a video posted to YouTube within days of the finding, Sana Sherwani from New York showed how FaceID registered both her face and that of her son Ammar, giving the youngster instant access to his mother's phone.
Face ID uses a TrueDepth front-facing camera on the iPhone X, which has multiple components.
A Dot Projector projects more than 30,000 invisible dots onto your face to map its structure.
The dot map is then read by an infrared camera and the structure of your face is relayed to the A11 Bionic chip in the iPhone X, where it is turned into a mathematical model.
The A11 chip then compares your facial structure to the facial scan stored in the iPhone X during the setup process.
Face ID uses infrared to scan your face, so it works in low lighting conditions and in the dark.
In a video posted to YouTube within days of the finding, Sana Sherwani from New York showed how FaceID registered both her face and that of her son Ammar, giving the youngster instant access to his mother's phone
It will only unlock your device when you look in the direction of the iPhone X with your eyes open.
Face ID captures both a 3D and 2D image of your face using infrared light while you're looking straight at the camera.
Five unsuccessful attempts at Face ID will force you to enter a passcode - which you'll need anyway just to set up facial recognition.
That requires you to come up with a secure string of digits - or, for extra security, a string of letters and numbers - to protect your privacy.
Face ID also adapts to changes in your appearance over time, so it will continue to recognise you as you grow a beard or grow your hair longer.
Scientists were given the VIP treatment at a star-studded awards show described as the 'Oscars of Science.'
Last night's Breakthrough Prizes saw researchers awarded a total of 16.3 million ($22 million) for their contributions to science this year.
Among the winners were was British researcher Professor Kim Nasmyth from the University of Oxford who was awarded for his work into the mechanism behind the separation of duplicated chromosomes,
British-born Professors James McKernan and Christopher Hacon also took a share o the prize money for their contributions to algebraic geometry.
Scroll down for a full list of winners
Among the winners were three British researchers - Professor Kim Nasmyth from the University of Oxford who was awarded for his work into the mechanism behind the separation of duplicated chromosomes, and Professors James McKernan (pictured left) and Christopher Hacon (pictured right) for their contributions to birational algebraic geometry
BREAKTHROUGH PRIZES The Breakthrough Prizes recognize the contributions of the world's top scientists. The Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Pony Ma, Yuri and Julia Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Anne Wojcicki. Each prize is 2.23 million ($3 million) and awarded in the fields of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics. In addition, up to three New Horizons in Physics and up to three New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes are given out to early-career researchers each year. Selection Committees composed of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates choose the winners. Advertisement
The Breakthrough Prizes were awarded at a gala ceremony in Silicon Valley, hosted by Morgan Freeman last night.
The event was sponsored by many of the biggest names in science and technology - Sergey Brin, Yuri and Julia Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Anne Wojcicki, and Pony Ma.
Seven 2.23 million ($3 million) prizes were awarded, as well as three 74,000 ($100,000) awards to early-career physicists, and three 222,000 ($300,000) to four early-career mathematicians.
Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded the awards, said: 'The Breakthrough Prize was created to celebrate the achievements of scientists, physicists, and mathematicians, whose genius help us understand our world, and whose advances shape our future.
'The world needs their inspiration, and their reminder that even though it doesn't always feel that way, we are making steady progress toward building a better future for everyone.
The Breakthrough Prizes were awarded at a gala ceremony in Silicon Valley, hosted by Morgan Freeman last night
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Laureates Kazutoshi Mori and Peter Walter accepted their awards onstage
'Priscilla and I want to congratulate all of tonight's laureates and give our deepest thanks for all that they do.'
More than 11,000 entries from 178 countries were received in the 2017 instalment of the global competition, which kicked off on September 1, 2017.
THE THREE BRITISH WINNERS Three British winners took to the stage to accept awards last night: 1) Professor Kim Nasmyth, Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford Professor Nasmyth was awarded one of the Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences for explaining the mechanism that controls the separation of duplicated chromosomes during cell division and prevents genetic diseases such as cancer. 2) Professor James McKernan, Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego (born in London) 3) Professor Christopher Hacon, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Utah (born in Manchester) Together, Professor McKernan and Professor Hacon won the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for their contributions to birational algebraic geometry. As Kerry Dolan describes it in Forbes: 'While it's almost impossible to visualize beyond even 3 dimensions, Hacon and McKernan use algebra to establish the rules for projecting objects from 1000+ dimensions onto lower-dimensional surfaces.' Advertisement
Among the winners was Professor Kim Nasmyth from the University of Oxford, for his work into the mechanism behind the separation of duplicated chromosomes. He is pictured with actress Mila Kunis and actor Ashton Kutcher
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was shared among the entire 27-member WMAP experimental team, including: Charles L. Bennett, Gary Hinshaw, Norman Jarosik, Lyman Page, Jr, David N. Spergel
2017 BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE WINNERS Prize Winner(s) Prize Money 2018 Breakthrough Prize In Life Sciences Joanne Chory
Don W. Cleveland
Kazutoshi Mori
Kim Nasmyth
Peter Walter 2.23 million ($3 million) each 2018 Breakthrough Prize In Fundamental Physics Shared among the entire 27-member WMAP experimental team, including:Charles L. Bennett, Gary Hinshaw, Norman Jarosik, Lyman Page, Jr, David N. Spergel 2.23 million ($3 million) shared 2018 Breakthrough Prize In Mathematics Shared between:Christopher Hacon and James McKernan 2.23 million ($3 million) shared 2018 New Horizons In Physics Prize Christopher Hirata
Andrea Young
Douglas Stanford 74,000 ($100,000) each 2018 New Horizons In Mathematics Prize Aaron Naber
Maryna Viazovska
Zhiwei Yun
Wei Zhang 222,000 ($300,000) each 2017 Breakthrough Junior Challenge Hillary Diane Andales 300,000 ($400,000) in educational prizes
Tech investor Yuri Milner said: 'It is always the right time to celebrate great scientists. All of our futures depend on them.'
Five of the seven 2.23 million ($3 million) prizes were awarded to scientists for contributions to research into living systems and human life.
This included Dr Don Cleveland from the University of California, San Diego, for his work into the molecular pathogenesis of a type of inherited motor neuron disease, and Dr Kim Nasmyth from the University of Oxford for his work into the separation of duplicated chromosomes.
Dr Joanne Chory was awarded for discovering the molecular mechanisms by which plants extract information from light and shade. She is pictured centre next to Kevin Systrom and Kara McCullough
Several celebrities were in attendance, including ResearchGate CEO Ijad Madisch (pictured left) and Arianna Huffington (pictured right)
Twenty-seven scientists shared the next 2.23 million ($3 million) prize in fundamental physics for their creation of detailed maps of the early universe.
And finally, two British scientists, Professor James McKernan and Professor Christopher Hacon shared the last 2.23 million ($3 million) in mathematics, for contributions to birational algebraic geometry.
One of the most highly-anticipated awards was the 2017 Breakthrough Junior Challenge, which asked applicants to submit a video to inspire creative thinking about fundamental science concepts. The prize was awarded to Hillary Diane Andales, age 18, from the Philippines
Several high profile names in the technology world were in attendance, including investor Yuri Milner (pictured left) and Google co-founder Sergey Brin (pictured right)
One of the most highly-anticipated awards was the 2017 Breakthrough Junior Challenge, which asked applicants to submit a video to inspire creative thinking about fundamental science concepts.
The prize was awarded to Hillary Diane Andales, age 18, from the Philippines.
Ms Andales' submission which saw her win 300,000 ($400,000) in educational prizes - focused on reference frames in general relativity.
From ET to Spock, we've always toyed with the idea of extra-terrestrial life - but how would humans react if it actually turned out to be true?
Psychologists believe we would be positive about finding out we were not alone, according to a study that looked at people's responses to five key 'alien' announcements since 1967 - and they appeared to be largely positive.
This is despite warnings from scientists such as Stephen Hawking who say we should 'be wary' about answering alien signals.
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Research released last week found there are dozens of likely worlds - including Pluto (pictured) and its moons - that could harbour alien life. Researchers at Arizona State University are trying to anticipate how humans would react if a discovery such as this came back positive
WILL WE FIND ALIEN LIFE? Nasa scientists have claimed alien life could be found within the next few decades. Experts say the search is heavily guided by characteristics of our own planet, helping scientists to weed out inhospitable worlds from those that may have promise for life, such as the icy moons Enceladus and Europa. Nasa scientists are looking for environments that contain both oxygen and methane. When these two gases are found in the same atmosphere, 'you've got something special,' the space agency says. 'There are ways to build up oxygen and methane in a planetary atmosphere, but the only way you could have both in the same atmosphere at the same time is if you produce them both super rapidly,' said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Advertisement
Michael Varnum, a psychologist at Arizona State University is trying to anticipate how humans would react if a discovery like this came back positive.
'One of the initial questions [of the initiative] that we're curious about is how might we respond if we discover evidence of extraterrestrial life', he told Washington Post.
Published online on a preprint server, the paper looks at the psychological reactions to extraterrestrial life in a 'systematic, careful way'.
In the first experiment Dr Varnum and his colleagues looked at five key events; the discovery of pulsars in 1967; the detection of the 'Wow!' radio signal in 1977; the announcement of fossilised microbes on a Martian meteorite in 1996; the behaviour of Tabby's Star in 2005 and the discovery of exoplanets within the Goldilocks zone in 2015.
In astronomy and astrobiology, the habitable zone is the range of orbits around a star in which a planet can support liquid water.
Since the concept was first presented in 1953, many stars have been shown to have a Goldilocks area, and some of them have one or several planets in this zone, like 'Kepler-186f', discovered in 2014.
Psychologists looked at fifteen articles using a program that scans for positive or negative words.
British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 when she spotted a radio pulsar (artist's impression) which was thought could be alien life
'The reaction seemed to be much more positive than negative,' found Dr Varnum.
Researchers also got 500 people to describe how they would feel if aliens were discovered and how they thought people more generally would react.
Participants said they themselves would feel positive but felt most people would not be so excited about the discovery.
KEY DISCOVERIES IN HUMANITY'S SEARCH FOR ALIEN LIFE Discovery of pulsars British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 when she spotted a radio pulsar. Since then other types of pulsars that emit X-rays and gamma rays have also been spotted. Pulsars are essentially rotating, highly magnetised neutron stars but when they were first discovered it was believed they could have come from aliens. 'Wow!' radio signal In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the night sky above Ohio spotted a radio signal so powerful that he excitedly wrote 'Wow!' next to his data. In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the night sky above Ohio spotted a radio signal so powerful that he excitedly wrote 'Wow!' next to his data The 72-second blast, spotted by Dr Jerry Ehman through a radio telescope, came from Sagittarius but matched no known celestial object. Conspiracy theorists have since claimed that the 'Wow! signal', which was 30 times stronger than background radiation, was a message from intelligent extraterrestrials. Fossilised Martian microbes In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs. The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike. Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike (pictured) However, the excitement did not last long. Other scientists questioned whether the meteorite samples were contaminated. They also argued that heat generated when the rock was blasted into space may have created mineral structures that could be mistaken for microfossils. Behaviour of Tabby's Star in 2005 The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astronomers since being discovered in 2015. It dims at a much faster rate than other stars, which some experts have suggested is a sign of aliens harnessing the energy of a star. The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astonomers since being discovered in 2015 (artist's impression) Recent studies have 'eliminated the possibility of an alien megastructure', and instead, suggests that a ring of dust could be causing the strange signals. Exoplanets in the Goldilocks zone in 2017 In February 2017 astronomers announced they had spotted a star system with planets that could support life just 39 light years away. Seven Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting nearby dwarf star 'Trappist-1', and all of them could have water at their surface, one of the key components of life. Three of the planets have such good conditions, that scientists say life may have already evolved on them. Researchers claim that they will know whether or not there is life on any of the planets within a decade, and said: 'This is just the beginning.' Advertisement
This could be because 'most Americans tend to think, on any desirable trait or ability, that they're better than the average person,' Dr Varnum said.
In the third part of the experiment researchers presented a 1996 article reporting bacteria on a Martian meteorite.
The consensus is now that they were just mineral deposits but those participating in the experiment were left to believe they were forms of life.
They still described their reactions positively, leading Gordon Pennycook, a Yale University psychologist who was not involved in the experiment to say he was 'pretty confident' humans would be pleased if aliens were discovered.
Dr Varnum warned these results were based on American publications and it is possible the rest of the world would respond differently.
Physicist Stephen Hawking has previously warned we we should 'be wary' about answering alien signals, and suggests an advanced civilization could attempt to colonise Earth.
Hawking said if we were to really meet an advanced civilisation, it could be similar to when the Native Americans first encountered Christopher Columbus and that didn't turn out so well.
SHOULD WE BE WARY? If there are any intelligent alien life forms out there, Stephen Hawking thinks we're playing a dangerous game by trying to contact them. The physicist believes if aliens discovered Earth, they are likely to want to conquer and colonise our planet. 'If aliens visit us, the outcome could be much like when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans,' he said in an interview. But co-founder and former director of the Seti Institute, Jill Tarter, doesn't think this will be the case. She argues any aliens who have managed to travel across the universe will be sophisticated enough to be friendly and peaceful. 'The idea of a civilisation which has managed to survive far longer than we have...and the fact that that technology remains an aggressive one, to me, doesn't make sense,' she said. Advertisement
Seven Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting nearby dwarf star 'Trappist-1', and all of them could have water at their surface, one of the key components of life (artist's impression)
Last month Nasa scientists claimed alien life could be found within the next few decades.
Experts say the search is heavily guided by characteristics of our own planet, helping scientists to weed out inhospitable worlds from those that may have promise for life, such as the icy moons Enceladus and Europa.
Nasa scientists are looking for environments that contain both oxygen and methane.
When these two gases are found in the same atmosphere, 'you've got something special,' the space agency says.
'There are ways to build up oxygen and methane in a planetary atmosphere, but the only way you could have both in the same atmosphere at the same time is if you produce them both super rapidly,' said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Under fives should be completely banning from using technology without supervision, a damning new report has claimed.
The research, from technology and child psychology experts, suggests companies and schools should be doing more to help protect young people online.
Other recommendations include giving teenagers 'reputation management' lessons, to protect their chances of future employment.
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Experts have collaborated to publish a report which aims to support children on their journey through the digital world. The report found that while there is an awareness of extreme risks like grooming and child sexual abuse, other aspects tend to be overlooked (stock image)
The Digital Childhood report, led by the University of Southampton, urges the industry to lay out 'child-centred design standards' to improve the response to reports of risk or harm online.
It recommends proper guidance for children getting a smartphone for the first time and encourages schools and colleges to offer more education in areas of technology.
The report also says lessons for teenagers in school should include how to access trusted sexual, psychological and emotional health services.
It has been compiled by a total of 11 clinical experts from institutions which also include the University of Oxford and Imperial College London.
Dr Angharad Rudkin, child clinical psychologist at the University of Southampton, who led the report, said: 'Children and young people need to be supported on their journey through the digital world and should have access to the same privileges, information and rights that they enjoy in the analogue world.
'A child's age and development stage and the impact the digital environment can have on a child's well-being need to be taken into account when we are designing new digital platforms or considering changing policy.
REPORT RECOMMENDATIONS 3-5 years 6-9 years 10-12 years 13-15 years 16-18 years All use should be adult-guided.
Should be taught social norms of interacting with both known and unknown people Children receiving a smartphone for the first time should be taught how to use age-appropriate settings Parents, teachers and adults should acknowledge this as a time of growing autonomy. Education providers should offer career advice and training in automation, the internet of things, machine learning, digital content and design Screen guidelines should be developed. Child-centred design standards should anticipate independent child use Should be taught online skills and competencies. Education should include critical thinking about online experiences and information. Learn about reputation management, use of government and commercial services and financial matters This age-group are poorly served by current provision of online sites and services. Children of this age are particularly susceptible to social pressures. Alert young people as they approach 18 to the differences in the services that will come into place when they reach adulthood. Those entering secondary school should have a year 7 'smart phone literacy reboot'. Should be informed about how to access trusted sexual, psychological and emotional health services.
The research, from leaders in the field of technology and child psychology, suggests companies and schools should be doing more to help protect young people online. Other recommendations include giving teenagers 'reputation management' lessons (stock image)
'There are so many new challenges that parents are facing today to do with the digital world that they did not experience themselves when they were growing up.
'This can make parenting, what can be an already difficult experience, even harder.
'We all need to take more responsibility - government, parents and clinicians - to ensure children and young people are more informed and supported through their digital activity and we hope this report helps to improve things.'
The report was convened by Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE, who said it is essential the government works with tech giants to create a digital environment 'fit for childhood'.
The paper, launched today at the Children's Global Media Summit in Manchester, warns 10 to 12 year olds are 'poorly served by the current provision of online sites and services'.
It adds that young teenagers are 'particularly susceptible to social pressures' online.
Baroness Kidron said: 'If we allow a digital environment that doesn't take account of the needs of childhood, we reject the hard-won privileges and protections that a century and a half of careful consideration, research and lawmaking across the globe has afforded our children.
'If we leave things as they are, we denigrate the status of children, and childhood, in the plain sight of parents, media, civil society and governments.'
The report also outlined how, while there is an awareness of extreme risks like grooming and child sexual abuse, other aspects tend to be overlooked.
ARE PARENTS IGNORANT? More than half of teenagers say they have been victims of cyber-bullying, a study found in October. But parents are ignorant about their children's online behaviour and experiences largely underestimating what they get up to while on the internet. The survey of 320 teenagers by the Sir John Cass's Foundation revealed that 53 per cent had had their picture posted online to embarrass them. However, only a fifth (22 per cent) of parents believed that their child had this experience online. Nearly one in five teens (17 per cent) reported being threatened online, whilst fewer than 10 per cent of parents believed this had happened to their child. The report, Beyond The School Gates, was put together by University of Buckingham psychologist Dr Masa Popovac and the Sir John Cass's Foundation and was based on detailed interviews with 320 teenagers aged 13-18 years and 130 of their parents. Advertisement
These include insomnia, obesity, low self-esteem and oversharing.
The experts gave the example of sleep deprivation caused by extended tech use affecting concentration, performance at school and general well being.
Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, said: 'If we're going to design an internet fit for children, then we must tailor it for their specific needs and capacities as these develop with age and experience.
'This report is a wonderful resource to help us do exactly that.'
Conspiracy theorists claim to have spotted a 'black triangle' UFO flying over Russia this week.
They claim it is the 'best evidence' for extra-terrestrials ever recorded.
A video shows the mysterious object flying through the night sky at a speed that conspiracy theorists claim is too slow to be an airplane.
But not everyone is convinced that the object is a UFO, and some suggest it is likely to simply be a drone.
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Conspiracy theorists claim to have spotted a 'black triangle' UFO flying over Russia this week. A video shows the mysterious object flying through the night sky at a speed that conspiracy theorists claim is too slow to be an airplane
BLACK TRIANGLE UFOS Black triangles are a class of UFO that are generally described as large, silent, black triangular objects hovering or slowly cruising at low altitudes over cities and highways. Sightings usually take place at night. These objects are often described as having pulsing coloured lights that appear at each corner of the triangle. Black triangle UFOs have been found to be visible to radar. Advertisement
The video, titled 'A TR-3B type UFO was filmed in Russia - Best evidence ever' was posted on YouTube by UFO Today, a Belgium-based channel that regularly posts videos of alleged sightings.
It shows an object flying through the night sky, with three lights in a triangular configuration flickering on and off, that UFO Today suggests is a TR-3B UFO.
In the video description, UFO Today wrote: 'The object is moving at a very slow pace, too slow to be a classic airplane.
'The speed at which this object was moving is physically impossible for any airplane build by mankind.'
The conspiracy theorists claim that the sighting may be a black triangle UFO a class of UFO with a distinctive triangular layout.
The video was posted on YouTube by UFO Today, a Belgium-based channel that regularly posts videos of alleged sightings. It shows an object flying through the night sky, with three lights in a triangular configuration flickering on and off
UFO Today said: 'Reports generally describe this class of UFOs as large, silent, black triangular objects hovering or slowly cruising at low altitudes over cities and highways.
'Sightings usually take place at night. These objects are often described as having pulsing coloured lights that appear at each corner of the triangle.'
But while UFO Today believes that it is a UFO, not everyone is so convinced.
In the video description, UFO Today wrote: 'The object is moving at a very slow pace, too slow to be classic airplane. The speed at which this object was moving is physically impossible for any airplane build by mankind'
UFO Today said: 'Reports generally describe this class of UFOs as large, silent, black triangular objects hovering or slowly cruising at low altitudes over cities and highways'
Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, told MailOnline: 'At night it is hard to gauge the distance and size of an object or lights, which in turn makes it difficult to judge their speed.
'As this seems to be flying slower than an aircraft I'd say it is a drone with lights on it.
'Drones can hover and move slowly, with little noise.
'So I don't regard this video as evidence for ETs visiting us.'
Black triangles are a class of UFOs that are generally described as large, silent, black triangular objects hovering or slowly cruising at low altitudes over cities and highways (artist's impression pictured)
Peregrine falcons attack their prey on the wing as if they were air-to-air guided missiles, a study has found.
Lessons from the birds' control strategy could help create the 'ultimate drone killer', according to the US Air Force who funded the study.
The research obtained a birds-eye-view of falcons in flight using miniature video cameras attached to the birds' backs.
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Peregrine falcons attack their prey on the wing as if they were air-to-air guided missiles, a study has found. For the study, researchers obtained a birds-eye-view of falcons in flight using miniature video cameras attached to the birds' backs (pictured)
HOW FALCONS ATTACK THEIR PREY The scientists were surprised to find that the peregrine falcon's 'terminal attack' trajectory followed a mathematical guidance law used to steer homing missiles to their targets. Known as 'proportional navigation' (PN), the system does not make it necessary to know a target's speed or distance. Instead it relies on what happens to the missile's line-of-sight as it chases its target. If the line-of-sight does not change direction as the range closes, it means the missile is on a good interception course. When a course correction is needed, the rate of turn is proportional to the speed at which the line-of-sight angle changes. The scientists found that peregrine falcons followed this rule, while making adjustments for their flying speed - a lot slower than that of a guided missile. Advertisement
They also analysed flight patterns using GPS tracking devices carried by the birds.
Eight falcons were tested with dummy prey thrown into the air or towed behind a remotely controlled drone.
The video recordings also showed opportunistic attacks on live targets, including five passes at a duck that was eventually forced to land.
Lead investigator Professor Graham Taylor, from Oxford University's Department of Zoology, said: 'Falcons are classic aerial predators, synonymous with agility and speed.
'Our GPS tracks and on-board videos show how peregrine falcons intercept moving targets that don't want to be caught.
'Remarkably, it turns out that they do this in a similar way to most guided missiles. Our next step is to apply this research to designing a new kind of visually guided drone, able to remove rogue drones safely from the vicinity of airports, prisons and other no-fly zones.'
The scientists were surprised to find that the peregrine falcon's 'terminal attack' trajectory followed a mathematical guidance law used to steer homing missiles to their targets.
Known as 'proportional navigation' (PN), the system does not make it necessary to know a target's speed or distance.
Instead it relies on what happens to the missile's line-of-sight as it chases its target.
If the line-of-sight does not change direction as the range closes, it means the missile is on a good interception course.
The video recordings also showed opportunistic attacks on live targets, including five passes at a duck that was eventually forced to land (pictured)
Eight falcons were tested with dummy prey thrown into the air or towed behind a remotely controlled drone (drone and dummy pictured from view of attacking falcon)
When a course correction is needed, the rate of turn is proportional to the speed at which the line-of-sight angle changes.
The scientists found that peregrine falcons followed this rule, while making adjustments for their flying speed - a lot slower than that of a guided missile.
Peregrine falcon-style PN guidance tuned to low flight speeds could be used to steer visually-guided interceptor drones, said the researchers, writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They could help tackle the growing problem of drones flying drugs and mobile phones into prisons, or posing a danger to planes around airports, the scientists claimed.
The study was conducted in the Black Mountains of south-east Wales.
The scientists were surprised to find that the peregrine falcon's 'terminal attack' trajectory followed a mathematical guidance law used to steer homing missiles to their targets. Pictured is a camera view from the back of one of the drones
Known as 'proportional navigation' (PN), the system does not make it necessary to know a target's speed or distance. Instead it relies on what happens to the missile's line-of-sight as it chases its target (stock image)
Unsightly scaffolding sheds that dominate New York City sidewalks are set to get a sleek new design.
Just outside of a 16-story building in the Flatiron District, Urban Umbrella has installed an 'elegant' new system that combines high-strength recycled steel and translucent plastic panels to protect pedestrians from construction hazards.
The white sidewalk shed is designed to be modern and harmonious, allowing natural light and city views to remain visible while the structure is up.
Just outside of a 16-story building in the Flatiron District, Urban Umbrella has installed an elegant new system that combines high-strength recycled steel and translucent plastic panels to protect pedestrians from construction hazards
URBAN UMBRELLA Urban Umbrellas sidewalk sheds are designed to be modern and harmonious. The structures are equipped with LED lighting, translucent panels, and elegant styling. The Urban Umbrella is made from ultra-rigid high-strength steel allows, made from recycled steel. The panels are made from clear polymer resin, to allow in 90% of light. This aims to keep pedestrians protected from overheard hazards without blocking the city views. The LED lights will keep the structures illuminated day and night. Advertisement
The New York installation follows trials in Toronto, where the umbrellas have been installed at two sites so far, according to Yahoo Finance.
The firm won a design competition sponsored by former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago but, apart from a two-month stint in lower Manhattan, the system was not picked up in the US.
But now, Urban Umbrellas new sleek sidewalk sheds appear to be taking off.
The project is expected to come to two more buildings in New York, along with installations in Boston, Quebec, and Vancouver, according to Yahoo.
Urban Umbrellas sidewalk sheds as the name implies use an arching design that sweeps upward and out, like an umbrella.
According to the firm, the umbrellas are made with ultra-rigid high-strength steel alloys, allowing them to achieve a slim profile over a greater distance, while remaining sturdy. The elegant sidewalk sheds are also equipped with LED lights
With translucent panels constructed from clear polymer resin, the firm claims the installations allow 90 percent of light through.
This means sweeping skyward views, incredible amounts of sunlight and an airy feeling, according to the projects website.
Designed for the most extreme environments and applications.
The elegant sidewalk sheds are also equipped with LED lights, to keep the system illuminated even at night.
The white sidewalk shed is designed to be modern and harmonious, allowing natural light and city views to remain visible while the structure is up
According to the firm, the umbrellas are made with ultra-rigid high-strength steel alloys, allowing them to achieve a slim profile over a greater distance, while remaining sturdy.
Despite winning the NYC Design contest back in 2009, the project has remained too expensive to adopt in the city.
But, those involved with the system now say its cost effective, according to Yahoo.
The firm learned lessons from the Installation in Toronto, Andres Cortes, founder of Urban Umbrella, told Yahoo Finance.
Unsightly scaffolding sheds that dominate New York City sidewalks (stock image shown left) are set to get a sleek new design. Urban Umbrella has now installed a new system in the Flatiron District, after a two-month stint in lower Manhattan in 2011 (right)
The project is expected to come to two more buildings in New York, along with installations in Boston, Quebec, and Vancouver, according to Yahoo. It could replace ugly sidewalk sheds (as seen above) with a sleeker system
And, this past January, the company raised $1.5 million in seed funding.
As construction remains an ever-present fixture of New York City streets, the team behind the project said the new design could make the streets look far more pleasant.
There is a lot of opportunity to affect the quality of peoples lives in this project, Cortes explained in the past.
On the walk to work, on coffee breaks, New Yorkers make their way through these dark ugly structures.
Third place went to Bosnian Inga Cvijanovich with an image of a flooded orthodox church in Doboj.
Mark said of the storm shot, taken near his home: 'I was south of Moose Jaw and there was a little something there that kept me chasing and a roll cloud started to develop.
'As I watched, the roll cloud turned into an incredible shelf cloud so I tried to stay ahead of it and position myself along the Trans-Canada Highway and find an anchor or foreground so I raced to a row of granaries at Pense.
'Luckily the shelf cloud was intensifying and at its peak at Pense - major energy - so I parked to use my truck to block the wind and set up my tripod and camera and shot the picture.'
Of his winning picture, he added: 'It was an unusually freezing winter and this had drawn tourists from all over.
'There was ice on everything and parking was impossible, so I walked along the main walkway above the cliff and Niagara River.
'I was trying to find a different composition and at a certain point leaned over the rail and lined-up the Under the Falls Building with the cascading falls.
'The light was soft and added to the feel of the shot.'
He is best known for playing advertising executive Don Draper in the television drama series, Mad Men.
Jon Hamm, 46, looked very smart in a cream jacket, white shirt and black bow tie for the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2017 at the Theatre Royal in London on Sunday night.
The award winning American actor - who was dressed head-to-toe in Ralph Lauren - wore his trademark clear glasses and leather black loafers for the event celebrating the capital's West-End stars.
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Dapper dude: Jon Hamm, 46, looked very smart in a Ralph Lauren Purple Label cream jacket, white shirt and black bow tie for the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2017 at the Theatre Royal in London on Sunday night
Spiderman star, 34, Andrew Garfield also cut a handsome figure, with a traditional black suit, crisp white shirt and a silky black bow tie.
The American born actor wore his usual quiff style bouffant hairstyle and a little stubble on his chiseled features.
The Surrey raised star made his feature-film debut in the 2007 drama Lions for Lamb and has been enjoying a busy film and stage career ever since.
Stud in a suit: Andrew Garfield, 34, cut a handsome figure, with a traditional black suit, crisp white shirt and a silky black bow tie to the star-studded event in the British capital
Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2017 - The Winners Best Actor in partnership with Ambassador Theatre Group Bertie Carvel - Ink, Almeida Theatre and Duke of Yorks Theatre Andrew Garfield - Angels In America, National Theatre (Lyttleton) WINNER Andrew Scott - Hamlet, Almeida Theatre and Harold Pinter Theatre Natasha Richardson Award for Best Actress in partnership with Christian Louboutin Laura Donnelly - The Ferryman, Royal Court and Gielgud Theatre Victoria Hamilton - Albion, Almeida Theatre Glenda Jackson - King Lear, Old Vic Theatre WINNER Milton Shulman Award for Best Director Dominic Cooke - Follies, National Theatre Robert Icke - Hamlet, Almeida Theatre and Harold Pinter Theatre Sam Mendes - The Ferryman, Royal Court and Gielgud Theatre WINNER Best Play In partnership with Hiscox, Official Arts Partner of the Evening Standard The Children - Lucy Kirkwood, Royal Court The Ferryman - Jez Butterworth, Royal Court and Gielgud Theatre WINNER Ink - James Graham, Almeida Theatre and Duke of Yorks Theatre Oslo - J T Rogers, National Theatre and Harold Pinter Theatre Best Design Jon Bausor - Bat Out Of Hell The Musical, Coliseum Bunny - Christie Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle, Wyndhams Theatre/The Red Barn, National Theatre/ Ink, Almeida Theatre and Duke of Yorks Theatre WINNER Soutra Gilmour - Twelfth Night, National Theatre Best Musical Performance Janie Dee - Follies, National Theatre Robert Fairchild - An American In Paris, Dominion Theatre Amber Riley - Dreamgirls, Savoy Theatre WINNER Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright Al Smith - Harrogate, High Tide Festival and Royal Court Branden Jacobs-Jenkins - An Octoroon, Orange Tree Theatre WINNER Katherine Soper - Wish List, Royal Exchange Manchester and Royal Court Emerging Talent Award Sheila Atim Girl - From The North Country, Old Vic Theatre Tom Glynn-Carney - The Ferryman, Royal Court and Gielgud Theatre WINNER Luke Thallon - Albion, Almeida Theatre Evening Standard Radio 2 Audience Award for Best Musical An American in Paris - The Dominion Theatre Bat Out of Hell - The Coliseum WINNER Dreamgirls - The Savoy Theatre Follies - Olivier Theatre, National Theatre School of Rock - New London Theatre The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 The Musical - Menier Chocolate Factory, Southwark She Loves Me - Menier Chocolate Factory, Southwark Advertisement
Other handsome actors on the red carpet included British star Dominic Cooper who chose a shiny navy blue suit with a matching tie and a contrasting white shirt.
The Mamma Mia! hunk gelled his raven hair into a spiky design with plenty of facial hair on his strong jaw.
Dominic has also enjoyed stage success, starring as John Wilmot, The Second Earl of Rochester in the Libertine.
British star: Dominic Cooper chose a shiny navy blue suit with a matching tie and a contrasting white shirt and his trademark spiky hair gelled up to perfection
Mr Darcy: Colin Firth and his wife Livia Firth looking gorgeous together at the West End bash, with his glamorous partner choosing a red satin outfit with blue accessories
Actor Colin Firth, 57, looked dapper as he sported a classic black tuxedo to the star-studded ceremony later with his stunning wife Livia Firth, 48.
The Italian beauty looked divine in a red satin dress with bold electric blue shoes and a matching blue satin bag.
The founder of Eco-Age stole the limelight off of her famous husband with her timeless beauty and effortless style.
Rising star: Freddie Fox, 28, looked his handsome self with his glamorous companion both dressed to impressed in black classic ball outfits
He made women across the country swoon as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and later as Bridget Jones' dashing suitor.
But on Sunday all eyes were on Colin Firth's stunning wife Livia as they arrived at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in London.
The 48-year-old founder of sustainability consultancy Eco Age dazzled in a high-neck red silk gown with frills on the sleeves and keyhole cut-outs which offered glimpses of her decolletage.
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Stunning: Colin Firth was outshone by his stunning wife Livia as they arrived at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in the capital
The Italian beauty kept her locks scraped back in an elegant chignon, revealing chunky silver hoops.
Livia pulled her look together with a royal blue clutch and matching high-heeled sandals.
She accentuated her pout with a slick of crimson lipstick.
The award-winning actor, 57, looked his usual dapper self in a classic black tuxedo, bow tie and black square glasses.
Lady in red: The 48-year-old founder of sustainability consultancy Eco Age dazzled in a high-neck red silk gown with keyhole cut-outs, offering glimpses of her decolletage
The couple, who have been married for two decades, were in good spirits at the star-studded event, which celebrates London's West-end talent.
There, they joined the likes of Cate Blanchett, Keira Knightley and Anna Wintour, who co-hosts this year's awards.
The actor's appearance follows his announcement earlier this year that he has applied to the Italian embassy in London for dual citizenship - reportedly in reaction to Britain voting to leave the EU.
A source told the Daily Mail's Sebastian Shakespeare: Colin was horrified by Brexit and is worried about the consequences.'
It may come as no surprise to fans however, as his wife Livia, previously Giuggioli, was born in the capital city Rome.
While the couple live in Chiswick, West London with their two sons - Luca, 16, and Matteo, thirteen - they also have a holiday home in Umbria, where they spend plenty of time as a family.
Power couple: Colin and Livia, who have been married for 20 years, were recently pictured together at the mothers2mothers Winter Fundraiser
Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2017 - The Winners Best Actor in partnership with Ambassador Theatre Group Bertie Carvel - Ink, Almeida Theatre and Duke of Yorks Theatre Andrew Garfield - Angels In America, National Theatre (Lyttleton) WINNER Andrew Scott - Hamlet, Almeida Theatre and Harold Pinter Theatre Natasha Richardson Award for Best Actress in partnership with Christian Louboutin Laura Donnelly - The Ferryman, Royal Court and Gielgud Theatre Victoria Hamilton - Albion, Almeida Theatre Glenda Jackson - King Lear, Old Vic Theatre WINNER Milton Shulman Award for Best Director Dominic Cooke - Follies, National Theatre Robert Icke - Hamlet, Almeida Theatre and Harold Pinter Theatre Sam Mendes - The Ferryman, Royal Court and Gielgud Theatre WINNER Best Play In partnership with Hiscox, Official Arts Partner of the Evening Standard The Children - Lucy Kirkwood, Royal Court The Ferryman - Jez Butterworth, Royal Court and Gielgud Theatre WINNER Ink - James Graham, Almeida Theatre and Duke of Yorks Theatre Oslo - J T Rogers, National Theatre and Harold Pinter Theatre Best Design Jon Bausor - Bat Out Of Hell The Musical, Coliseum Bunny - Christie Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle, Wyndhams Theatre/The Red Barn, National Theatre/ Ink, Almeida Theatre and Duke of Yorks Theatre WINNER Soutra Gilmour - Twelfth Night, National Theatre Best Musical Performance Janie Dee - Follies, National Theatre Robert Fairchild - An American In Paris, Dominion Theatre Amber Riley - Dreamgirls, Savoy Theatre WINNER Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright Al Smith - Harrogate, High Tide Festival and Royal Court Branden Jacobs-Jenkins - An Octoroon, Orange Tree Theatre WINNER Katherine Soper - Wish List, Royal Exchange Manchester and Royal Court Emerging Talent Award Sheila Atim Girl - From The North Country, Old Vic Theatre Tom Glynn-Carney - The Ferryman, Royal Court and Gielgud Theatre WINNER Luke Thallon - Albion, Almeida Theatre Evening Standard Radio 2 Audience Award for Best Musical An American in Paris - The Dominion Theatre Bat Out of Hell - The Coliseum WINNER Dreamgirls - The Savoy Theatre Follies - Olivier Theatre, National Theatre School of Rock - New London Theatre The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 The Musical - Menier Chocolate Factory, Southwark She Loves Me - Menier Chocolate Factory, Southwark Advertisement
Colin is also fluent in Italian, after learning the language in the early days of his relationship with Livia ahead of their wedding in 1997.
Firths spokesman confirmed to Shakespeare: Colin applied for dual citizenship (British and Italian) in order to have the same passports as his wife and children.
'His wife is also applying for British-Italian dual citizenship.'
The actor has built himself a reputation as a true Englishman, thanks to his roles in Pride and Prejudice, The King's Speech, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Importance of Being Earnest.
He was also awarded a CBE for his contributions to drama in 2011, and was made a Freeman of the City of London the following year.
Blue Planet II may be beautiful, brilliant, television but lets face it none of us are ever going snorkelling again - or even paddling after the Shallows episode.
Admittedly David Attenborough may have had a more ecological message in mind but this was the obvious moral so far.
This week it transpired even rockpooling wasnt safe.
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Another chase scene: David Attenborough presented a chase scene as incredible as the iguana vs. the racer snakes
The speed of the crabs and their agility (leaping from rock to rock like mini, free-running, Crustacean Tom Cruises) was bad enough. The creatures they were trying to escape from were the stuff of nightmares: moray eels sliding out of the water, gliding across the rock like anacondas, and even an octopus squelching on to the land like a monster from Doctor Who.
Run for your lives ! When did that start happening?!
It was hard to envisage anyone (even Attenborough himself) could ever match the nail-biting, jaw-dropping, spectacle of the famous chase in his last series: the newly hatched marine iguana being pursued by those racer snakes, descending on it like a seemingly endless, black, swarm.
Revealed: The battle of wits between the strangely named Sally Lightfoot Crab and a moray eel was close though. And not that different either...
The battle of wits between the strangely named Sally Lightfoot Crab and a moray eel was close though. And not that different either...
Like the baby marine iguana the crab could move far faster than I for one ever imagined: sprinting over the land, speeding across the surface of the water using what looked suspiciously like the butterfly stroke, and leaping from rock to rock like an action hero.
Fast moving: Like the baby marine iguana the crab could move far faster than I for one ever imagined: sprinting over the land, speeding across the surface of the water using what looked suspiciously like the butterfly stroke, and leaping from rock to rock like an action hero
Fun fact: Every day the crabs massed on the shores of Brazil waiting for the tide to go so that they could race across the shallow sea
These crabs seem afraid of the water, David Attenborough mused. And for good reason.
As usual, he wasnt wrong. The role of the villainous racer snake was played by the evil moray eel - the only creature with teeth powerful enough to grip and crush its shell.
Every day the crabs massed on the shores of Brazil waiting for the tide to go so that they could race across the shallow sea to reach their favourite feeding ground and graze on the luscious seaweed otherwise covered by water.
The aim? Crabs are racing to reach their favourite feeding ground and graze on the luscious seaweed otherwise covered by water
Attenborough narrated the chase in his trademark staccato sentences.
To feed the crab must keep going, he uttered as one male entered the fray. But nowhere is safe.
Even when the cab perched on a rock en route to his buffet the eel catapulted itself out of the sea with one flick of its huge dragon-like tail to try and snatch it.
When the crab reached the rock pool he seemed to have triumphed.
Lurking danger: The role of the villainous racer snake was played by the evil moray eel - the only creature with teeth powerful enough to grip and crush its shell
But its enemy has other ideas, stated Attenborough simply as horrifically the eel simply flopped out of water and slithered across the rocks in hot (or slippery) pursuit.
Even worse, an octopus then did the same: gliding across the rocks looking as alarming as the inside of a Dalek breaking out of its metal dustbin.
An octopus on land ?! When did that become possible, we cried?!
The crab makes a dash for it, Attenborough said and you could hardly blame it.
But the moray eel snapped its jaws and grabbed it too. But miraculously like that plucky iguana somehow the crab wriggled free.
Making a move: But its enemy has other ideas, stated Attenborough simply as horrifically the eel simply flopped out of water and slithered across the rocks in hot (or slippery) pursuit
Small victories: When the crab reached the rock pool he seemed to have triumphed
The bad news was the feeding time it had so bravely fought for would be over in two hours smothered again by the returning tide.
The crab would have to run the gauntlet another day (every day): a race against the clock and the moray eels.
With animals like the eels and the octopus coming out of the sea it was hard to take anything for granted anymore.
Rather than their bigger, more exotic, rivals fish have been the real stars of the series throughout Blue Planet II.
Queen of the sea: With animals like the eels and the octopus coming out of the sea it was hard to take anything for granted anymore
Chase: With animals like the eels and the octopus coming out of the sea it was hard to take anything for granted anymore
Fish with little feet, fish devouring birds, fish using tools to open up clams... Not only was there far more to fish than wed realised they were bending the rules of evolution.
The humble Clingfish for example had its own in-built accessory: prizing limpets off the rocks with its mouth by twisting it off like a bottle top. The Clingfish then swallows it shell and all.
Part of you wondered whether all of this was really true or whether Attenborough had started pranking us for his own amusement.
Not very likely of course but surely equally plausible as the idea of an octopus sliding cross-country or the fish that had abandoned the sea altogether.
Show time: Fish with little feet, fish devouring birds, fish using tools to open up clams... Not only was there far more to fish than wed realised they were bending the rules of evolution
The fish that was afraid of the sea and lived out of the water, well away from the waves, up a rock, sounded more like a character in a childrens story like The Gruffalo or Moomintroll books.
The Pacific Leaping Blenny Fish was eight centimetres long and the most terrestrial fish on the planet, explained Attenborough not entirely convincingly. They were such poor swimmers, he claimed, they would be easy prey in the water and so nested at the top of tiny cliff, grazing (with no competition) off algae.
Pretty smart.
It just went to show that where Blue Planet II was concerned, basically we knew nothing and nothing was sacred anymore. Not even the phrase a fish out of water.
She's normally wearing a variety of lycra-tight athleisure outfits to fit in an early morning gym session before work.
But PR maven Roxy Jacenko ditched the sneakers for a day of high class dining at Sydney's exclusive five-star hotel, The Langham.
The 37-year-old wore a navy blue Gucci mini dress with silver statement buttons to the event, which was honouring Ortenzia Borre's new book What Women Need.
Beautiful in blue! Roxy Jacenko stuns in designer mini dress and platform wedges while attending a high tea at The Langham in Sydney
Roxy paired her darling ruffled dress with statement black wedges and gold jewellery, as well as a Mrs Darcy Lifestyle clutch purse.
Her golden locks were slicked back with a middle parting and longer than usual given the hair extensions she had added for Paris Hilton's perfume launch at Birkenhead Point a few days prior.
She stood next to Channel Nine presenter Erin Molan, who has recently announced her pregnancy, Eastern Suburbs Social reporter Jo Casamento and former model Ortenzia herself.
Ladies who lunch! She stood next to Channel Nine presenter Erin Molan, who has recently announced her pregnancy, Eastern Suburbs Social reporter Jo Casamento and former model Ortenzia herself
Colour contrasting! Ortenzia and Erin enjoy some down time at the high tea
She's the jack of all trades! Ortenzia Borre is a former June Dally Watkins mentor and certainly knows how to take a photo
It has been a busy week for Roxy, whose company Sweaty Betty PR hosted the Langham event on Friday.
On Thursday she took selfies with American heiress Paris Hilton at her Rose Rush perfume launch - choosing to wear a set of bejeweled high heels to match the notorious diamond-lover.
She also managed to put up the family's Christmas tree with daughter Pixie, six, and Hunter, three, who will be enjoying their father's first holiday season at home since he was released from jail earlier this year.
It's that time of the year! She also managed to put up the family's Christmas tree with daughter Pixie, six, and Hunter, three
Not a bad day for a lunch! The brood took some much-needed time off over the weekend and attended an Indian-themed lunch dressed in traditional outfits
The brood took some much-needed time off over the weekend and attended an Indian-themed lunch dressed in traditional outfits.
One of Roxy's followers even complimented their ability to get the ensembles 'spot on.'
'You look amazing! And p.s - as an Indian, that is definitely an Indian get-up. Well done!' They wrote enthusiastically.
She is a talented actress who has been nominated for five Oscars - but Amy Adams best role seems to be one as a doting mother.
The 43-year-old actress looked happy to be spending bonding time with her seven-year-old daughter Aviana while out in LA on Sunday.
Amy hid her figure beneath a loose-fitting jersey dress and a large cardigan as she made a low-key outing with the family.
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Doting mom: Amy Adams ooked to be happy to be spending bonding time with her seven-year-old daughter Aviana while out in LA on Sunday
The two girls were not alone for the day of bonding as they were also joined by Amy's husband and Aviana's father Darren Le Gallo, 43, for the occasion.
Amy looked fantastic in her grey maxi dress, which featured two slits just above the knee to show off her legs.
She teamed the chic dress with a beige cashmere duster jacket and matching leather clogs with fur lining the heel.
Happy together: The 43-year-old actress looked fantastic in a body-hugging grey maxi dress with two slits just above the knee
Showing her style: She teamed the chic dress with a beige cashmere duster jacket and matching leather clogs with fur lining the heel
The Arrival actress accessorized with clear shades and a brown designer bag draped over her shoulder.
Amy welcomed her first child in May 2010 but since motherhood she has gone on to star in some of her biggest roles.
They announced their pregnancy in December 2009 and decided to keep the sex unknown before chose the name when the baby arrived.
Decade of genius: Since welcoming her daughter Aviana (pictured with husband Darren Le Gallo, left, in March 2010) in May 2010, Amy has been nominated for three Oscars
Since welcoming Aviana, Amy has been nominated for three Academy Awards.
In 2011 and 2013, it was Best Supporting Actress for The Fighter and The Master, and in 2014, she went up for Best Actress for her part in American Hustle.
Last month, Adams celebrated the anniversary of the release of Disney's Enchanted.
This comes shortly after she confessed on ITV's Good Morning Britain that she will be returning to the role of Giselle when the highly anticipated sequel titled Disenchanted. The film begins shooting some time in 2018.
Gorgeous: The Arrival actress accessorized with clear shades and a brown designer bag draped over her shoulder
'They are working on it, it's titled as of now Disenchanted and is set 10 years after [the original] but I don't know all the details, but I look forward to it,' she said on the show.
A couple of weeks later, she spoke to E! News about where the movie is in development.
'I don't know when it's starting, but we definitely have had conversations,' she said.
Family affair: The two girls were not alone for the day of family bonding as they were also joined by Amy's husband and Aviana's father Darren Le Gallo, 43, for the occasion
'I trust that the team they're putting together is gonna put together something that makes it timely. I think that it's a good time in our world for Disenchanted. I think a little singing and dancing, a little laughing at ourselves is good.'
Although not much else is known about the Adam Shankman-directed film, there is a summary of what we can expect to see via IMDb.
'Ten years after her happily ever after, Giselle questions her happiness, inadvertently turning the lives of those in the real world and Andalasia upside down in the process.'
She was spotted buying a Christmas tree with her ex-husband Ben Affleck just the day before.
And Jennifer Garner looked cheery as she arrived to church with her three children in Pacific Palisades, California, on Sunday.
The 45-year-old actress slipped into a charcoal-gray dress as she walked with her little ones into the service.
Hallelujah! Jennifer Garner looked cheery as she arrived to church with her three children in Pacific Palisades, California, on Sunday
Jen teamed her dress with black slip-on shoes and cat-eye frame sunglasses for the outing.
She wore her dark tresses pulled back into a bun, while sporting a fresh face with little make-up.
Jennifer is still negotiating a financial settlement with Ben, after officially filing for divorce in April, according to TMZ.
Ben usually attends church avidly with his estranged wife and kids, but this week he was nowhere to be spotted.
Have mercy: The 45-year-old actress slipped into a charcoal-gray dress as she walked with her little ones into the service
Solo: Ben usually attends church avidly with his estranged wife and kids, but this week he was nowhere to be spotted
The amicable exes spent Thanksgiving together with their children Violet, 11, Seraphina, eight, and five-year-old Samuel.
Jennifer recently said she and Ben still get along great, adding: 'We get along really well and it's not an issue. We are friends; we can manage it.'
Ben spoke about the 'special connection' he and Jennifer have while stopping by The Today Show on Monday.
'You have to be on the same page. You have to cooperate,' the actor said. 'If you recognize that you both have the best interest of the kids at heart, its quite a special connection.
'Were the only two people in the world who care this much about these three kids.'
Family outing: The amicable exes spent Thanksgiving together with their children Violet, 11, Seraphina, eight, and five-year-old Samuel
Doting mom: Jennifer recently said she and Ben still get along great, adding: 'We get along really well and it's not an issue. We are friends; we can manage it'
Jennifer recently shared a scene of her self-destructive, unhinged character cutting Spanx off herself from The Tribes of Palos Verdes, which hit theaters Friday.
'Spanx finally getting what they deserve!' the Wakefield actress - who boasts 1.6M Facebook/Instagram followers - wrote Friday.
'This is Sandy Mason...This film raises some important issues affecting so many young adults and families.'
IFC Films' coming-of-age surf drama also features Cody Fern, Justin Kirk, Maika Monroe, Alicia Silverstone, Goran Visnjic, and Joely Fisher.
She welcomed her daughter Lea De Seine with Hollywood actor Bradley Cooper back in March.
But Irina Shayk had a rare day away from her little girl on Sunday as she embarked on a travel-themed photo shoot in Miami.
The supermodel, 31, showed off her incredible post-baby body in a chic wrap dress just eight months after giving birth, as she worked the camera at Miami International Airport - while Bradley, 42, took care of Lea over in LA.
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Back to work: Irina Shayk had a rare day away from her little girl Lea on Sunday as she embarked on a travel-themed photo shoot in a stunning wrap around dress in Miami
The brunette proved her famous model credentials in the dress - which cinched in at her impressively slim waist before skimming her long legs with its billowing skirt.
The dress plunged into a deep V neckline and followed a vintage wrap-around style, which was mirrored in the retro black and white polka dot print.
She added further height to her frame with white patent heeled boots, and added dark oversized sunglasses in a glamorous finishing touch.
Leading lady: She added further height to her frame with white patent heeled boots, and added dark oversized sunglasses in a glamorous finishing touch
Vintage vibes: Attempting to convey a jet-set lifestyle for the shoot, Irina changed into a number of other ensembles - including trendy high-waisted jeans and a yellow cardigan
Showing her wild side: She later slipped into a more retro look, involving striking leopard print flares and a long-line logo vest, printed with the face of a woman on the front
Sweeping her hair into a loose bun and adding minimal glowing make-up, the Russian beauty proved her striking natural beauty and radiant complexion to all, as she embarked on another stunning shoot.
Attempting to convey a jet-set lifestyle for the shoot, Irina changed into a number of other ensembles on set - including a trendy pair of high-waisted jeans and a vintage yellow cardigan.
She later slipped into a more retro look, involving striking leopard print flares and a long-line logo vest, printed with the face of a woman on the front.
Doting dad: While Irina was back to work however, Bradley embarked on his daddy duties and stepped out with little Lea in Los Angeles
Maintaining the cool vibe throughout, Irina also slung a yellow and black satchel around her waist like a bum bag and tied the look together with white sports trainers.
While Irina was back to work however, Bradley embarked on his daddy duties and stepped out with little Lea in Los Angeles.
The 42-year-old actor cut a casual figure in a light green bomber jacket and Phlidelphia Eagles sweatpants as he carried Lea to their car.
Impress: The American Sniper alum looked every inch the movie star even though he was bundled up
With retro shades and black high tops, the Oscar nominee enjoyed the sunny day out with his newborn daughter that he shares with the supermodel.
Bradley has also been busy in recent weeks, working on his film A Star Is Born with Lady Gaga - which will mark her big screen acting debut.
Bradley will play the alcoholic movie star who helps Gaga's character find fame and fortune.
The movie, which is a remake of the 1976 Barbra Streisand classic, is also the Oscar nominee's directorial debut, and is set for release in September 2018.
Casual:With retro shades and black high tops, the Oscar nominee enjoyed the sunny day out with his newborn daughter that he shares with supermodel Irina Shayk
Meanwhile Bradley himself can next be seen in Deeper, alongside Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot.
The film follows a deep-sea dive which turns into an unexpected psychological exploration for a former astronaut who signed up for the mission.
However, amid their hectic working schedules, the pair are still doting parents to Lea, who they welcomed in March.
The couple were first linked in May 2015 when they were spotted at Broadway's Finding Neverland, after meeting at the Met Gala.
She has been caught up in a bitter split with Love Island's Jonny Mitchell.
Yet Stephanie Pratt put the explosive drama behind her when she celebrated her new found single status at the lavish Boisdale of Canary Wharf in London on Sunday.
The 31-year-old Made In Chelsea star accentuated her fabulous hourglass figure in a sexy form-fitting fishtail gown for her glamorous night out.
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No drama here! Newly-single Stephanie Pratt sparkled in sequinned fishtail gown at lavish bar in London on Sunday as the MIC star continued to move on from bitter split with Jonny Mitchell
Stunning Stephanie was a vision as the sequinned embellishments of her slinky garment dazzled in the light at the glamorous venue.
Letting her hair down, the stunner wore her golden locks tumbling down her shoulders in soft corkscrew curls.
The feisty reality personality wore heavy eye make-up to bring out her youthful features, contrasting with her soft slick of nude lipstick.
Letting her hair down: The stunner wore her golden locks tumbling down her shoulders in soft corkscrew curls
Going for an edgy vibe, The Hills star dared to opt for clashing accessories as she toted a metallic shiny satchel handbag.
Stephanie was flying solo after her short-lived love affair with Jonny came to an end after just three months, with claims of cheating and abuse surfacing.
She had accused her ex-boyfriend of being unfaithful to her in a slew of furious tweets she shared on Monday.
The reality star claimed she was forced to call the police on Sunday evening after she was said to be 'terrified' during a row with Jonny.
Stunning: Stephanie was a vision as the sequinned embellishments of her slinky garment dazzled in the light at the glamorous venue
Jonny, however, told MailOnline he was left baffled by the claims. While he has not directly addressed the cheating allegations, he did appear to hit back at claims he has been unfaithful in a recent interview where he downplayed pictures of himself with female fans that had surfaced on social media and appeared to leave Stephanie speechless.
The Love Island hunk seemingly addressed those photos, claiming they are nothing new, as he spoke about the breakdown of the couple's romance during an interview on FUBAR Radio.
He commented: 'You do find that a lot of people are out to get you. People will try and sting you - the amount of times I've had people take a selfie with me and claim they're on a night out with me.'
Going for an edgy vibe: The Hills star dared to opt for clashing accessories as she toted a metallic shiny satchel handbag
The former flames have parted ways for good following just three months in each other's charming company.
The end of their relationship came shortly after sources close to the couple divulged to MailOnline that an engagement was imminent.
At the time, an insider said: 'Jonny and Steph have become really close since they met and are living their lives as one. Close friends have said that an engagement is on the cards sooner than everyone thought!
'They are inseparable and are taking their first steps as a new couple, nobody saw it coming but an engagement is expected very soon.
'Who would have thought that from their different show backgrounds that they would meet and end up potentially being married.
'Love is the key to their successful relationship and you can see in their body language that they are just so into each other.'
Posing up a storm! The Made In Chelsea beauty made a grand entrance to the lavish Canary Wharf bar which boasts of an eatery and bar area
The lovebirds initially hit it off when Jonny left Love Island's Hidden Hills villa in Majorca.
It was a whirlwind affair with the former flames jetting off to Croatia together within just weeks of meeting each other.
It was on their sun-soaked travels they first courted attention when they were pictured smooching as they frolicked on the beach.
In September, the good-looking pair then took their love story to Bali for a 10-day trip away where they shared their intimate moments with fans on Instagram.
She welcomed Milo Yiannopoulos to Australia with a very friendly exchange at his Adelaide show on Friday.
And Tziporah Malkah (previously known as Kate Fischer) has finally broken her silence after photos of their close exchange went viral.
Taking to Instagram, James Packer's former fiancee joked that she just 'had to' 'sexually harass' Milo, who is in the country on a controversial speaking tour.
'I sexually harassed the newly-wed': Tziporah Malkah breaks her silence after THOSE photos of her with Milo Yiannopoulos emerged online
Tziporah shared a photo of her and Milo's amorous exchange to Instagram, joking about their over the top embrace.
Meeting the right wing provocateur in Adelaide, Tziporah had greeted Milo with a hug and kiss on the lips.
'I sexually harassed the newly-wed. I had to,' she captioned the photo.
Friendly: Meeting the right wing provocateur in Adelaide, Tziporah had greeted Milo with a hug
Getting close: Tziporah shared a photo of her and Milo's amorous exchange to Instagram, joking about their over the top embrace
In October, Milo married his long term partner John in a lavish beachside ceremony in Hawaii.
Meanwhile Tziporah makes no secret of her affection for the controversial commentator, who likens feminism to cancer.
Last week, she shared a selfie to Instagram as she posed with her lanyard for Milo's Adelaide show.
Selfie time: Tziporah makes no secret of her affection for the controversial commentator
Dated in the 1990s: Tziporah previously enjoyed a high profile relationship with billionaire James Packer
'I [love heart emoji] Milo,' she captioned the social media snap.
Tziporah previously enjoyed a high profile relationship with billionaire James Packer, however retreated from the spotlight after their engagement ended in 1998.
She returned to the spotlight this year with a highly-publicized stint on I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here!
She's been keeping fans guessing about the state of their relationship.
But Charlotte Crosby seemed to confirm that she is no longer together with on-off boyfriend Stephen Bear despite posting a video together.
The pair are seen larking around in the clip, which seems to have been filmed before the couple decided to call it a day on their romance.
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Out of her hair: Charlotte posted a video on her Instagram page with the caption: 'EX-boyfriend. Because blowdries really are better than boyfriends,' on Sunday evening
The tattooed hunk massages the brunette beauty in the video before attempting to clip the rollers into her long locks.
Some fans question the truthfulness of the caption with one comment saying: 'Everybody knows your back together tho?'
The couple hit a crisis after the former scaffold worker was pictured heading home from a Halloween party with a mystery brunette in tow, amid claims of a reconciliation with Charlotte.
Hairy relationship: the two reality TV stars giggle around in the video clip showcasing Mark Hill hair products for Charlotte's Instagram fans
Last week, Charlotte suggested the relationship was very much back on as the pair visited Hyde Park festive attraction Winter Wonderland.
The stop-start couple shared separate shots from the Christmas theme park, adding further fuel to claims of a romantic reconciliation.
Taking to Instagram, a chilly looking Charlotte is seen eating a hot dog while holding a beverage, her head and ears covered with a fleece hat.
Meanwhile Bear shared a snap of himself from the same venue, in which he wears an identical hat while posing for a selfie.
Charlotte hit the headlines recently after splitting with ex-boyfriend Bear following a tumultuous few months that brought their 11-month romance to and end.
Back together? Charlotte Crosby and Stephen Bear shared separate shots from the Christmas theme park, adding further fuel to claims of a romantic reconciliation
Speculation: Fans were left convinced the duo are now back together after the tattooed hunk shared a shot of himself looking out over a city's skyline from a hotel balcony while wearing a white bathrobe
But fans were left convinced the duo are now back together after the tattooed hunk shared a shot of himself looking out over a city's skyline from a hotel balcony while wearing a white bathrobe.
Their latest appearance at Winter Wonderland comes as Charlotte prepares for a reunion with ex Gaz Beadle, weeks before his current girlfriend Emma McVey gives birth to their first child.
The pair, who ended their relationship in 2015 following Charlotte's ectopic pregnancy, are poised for a face-to-face meeting when former Geordie Shore co-star Aaron Chalmers takes on his next mixed martial arts opponent.
Meanwhile: Charlotte is preparing for a reunion with ex Gaz Beadle, weeks before his current girlfriend Emma McVey gives birth to their first child
'All my Geordie Shore castmates - past and present - will be there,' Aaron told SunOnline. 'Charlotte, Gaz, Chloe, Vicky Pattison, her fiance John who I get on with, everyone.
'I always get good support from the celebrity world. When it comes to the Geordie Shore lot, theyre always there to support me.
'I class them as really good friends because I live with them six weeks at a time.'
Channel Seven has finished the year with a bang, as it's announced the network is the most watched in Australia.
And even though Nine lost out by a mere 0.1 percent for the top spot, Seven can thank shows like The Good Doctor for giving them a welcome boost.
The Sydney Morning Herald has released the top ten most watched programs for the year across all networks, with some surprising contenders.
Tim Robards in action! Australia's top ten regular programs for 2017 have been announced... but can you guess which competitive show made it to number one?
In first place was Nine's debut sport series Australian Ninja Warrior, which saw 50 contestants compete in a series of grueling physical challenges, similar to the US show, Wipeout.
More than 1.64 million Aussies tuned in for each episode, even when there was some controversy surrounding who the eventual winner would be.
At number two was The Block's Sunday night edition, with 1.474 million viewers on average.
Seafolly model Elyse Knowles and her boyfriend Josh Barker came away as the youngest ever winner's on this season, pocketing a cool $547,000 for the sale of their Elsternwick property.
Winner's are grinners! Seafolly model Elyse Knowles and her boyfriend Josh Barker came away as the youngest ever winner's on this season, pocketing a cool $547,000 for the sale of their Elsternwick property
It's top of the list! Meanwhile Seven's The Good Doctor is number three at 1.348 million
The Block's Monday show came in at number four with 1.314 million and Tuesday night was number nine at 1.232 million.
Meanwhile Seven's The Good Doctor is number three at 1.348 million.
It's an American medical-drama that follows the life of a young surgical resident with autism and savant syndrome. His unique skill set offers an almost superhuman ability to know what ailments patients are facing.
Cream of the crop! Brother and sister duo Amy and Tyson were named this year's winners pocketing a whopping $250,000 cash prize
My Kitchen Rules made the list three times: Wednesday night at 1.29 million, Monday at 1.288 million and Tuesday at 1.266 million.
Brother and sister duo Amy and Tyson were named this year's winners pocketing a whopping $250,000 cash prize.
To round out the top ten, Channel Nine's Married At First Sight appeared on Sunday with 1.267 million and Monday night at 1.232 million.
The series is due to return to screens in early 2018, with a new romantic promo already being aired.
Kate Hudson took in some air in Los Angeles this Sunday.
The 38-year-old was seen enjoying a hike that day with her musician beau Danny Fujikawa, who held her Australian shepherd Cody by a blue leash.
Later the short-haired looker revealed on Instagram that the hike marked the anniversary of their first date. In a gushy note the daughter of Goldie Hawn added the enjoy 'so much pure love.'
Sweet: Kate Hudson revealed on Instagram that the hike marked the anniversary of their first date. In a gushy note the daughter of Goldie Hawn added the enjoy 'so much pure love'
The full note had surprising details.
The Almost Famous star began: 'The first time I met Danny I was 23 and enormously pregnant with Ryder. His step sisters are my best friends @sarafoster @erinfoster and so it goes we have been in the same circle for over a decade!'
She added: 'A year ago today Danny took me on a hike and what I thought was just a hike with a family friend turned very quickly into an unexpected first date.
'No moves were made on this first date. In fact, it took months for him to make a first move! And as a kiss on this bridge would have been nice, the kiss a year later was so much sweeter.'
Fine company: Kate Hudson was seen enjoying a Los Angeles hike on Sunday with her musician beau Danny Fujikawa, who held her dog Cody by a blue leash
Hudson then remarked: 'So on our 15th year of knowing each other we were able to open our hearts to each other to feel so much pure love and its been truly incredible.! Happy first date anniversary baby. #LoveThisMan #WhatAYear.'
Kate flashed a bit of midriff beneath a slightly sheer white drop crop, sliding into powder pink leggings and wrapping an off-white sweater round her waist.
Popping on a pair of slightly faded-looking white sneakers, she shielded her eyes from the California rays with a pair of aviator sunglasses. She carried a pale blue Herschel Supply backpack.
The look: Kate flashed a bit of midriff beneath a slightly sheer white drop crop, sliding into powder pink leggings and wrapping an off-white sweater round her waist
Meanwhile, her boyfriend was wearing a sea green, pale blue, white and brown striped tank top over a midnight blue pair of Hurley shorts.
Sporting sunglasses of his own, Danny wore a casual pair of grey shoes.
Danny and Kate made their red carpet debut as a couple this April, attending the premiere of Snatched, a film co-starring Kate's mother Hawn.
At another point on Sunday, Kate was snapped holding a couple of purple beverages whilst outside a shop that sells, among other goodies, juice and smoothies.
Precautions: Popping on a pair of slightly faded-looking white sneakers, she shielded her eyes from the California rays with a pair of aviator sunglasses
Her prior romantic misadventures have given her two sons - Ryder, 13, by her ex-husband Chris Robinson and Bingham, six, by her ex-fiance Matt Bellamy.
This year, Kate's been seen in Los Angeles shooting Sister, the movie that will serve as Australian pop act Sia's feature directorial debut.
Kate's starring in this movie alongside 14-year-old Maddie Ziegler, who rose to fame via Dance Moms and has since had major parts in multiple Sia music videos.
Combo: Meanwhile, that boyfriend of hers was wearing a sea green, pale blue, white and brown striped tank top over a midnight blue pair of Hurley shorts
Hamilton star Leslie Odom, Jr., though listed only as '(rumored)' to be in the cast on the film's IMDb page, has also been spied on its set during filming.
Sia's co-written the movie's screenplay with one Dallas Clayton, and the finished product will also feature Parvesh Cheena, Eric Davis and Abhimanyu Katyal.
Back in 2015, Sia had revealed to a Manila-based broadsheet, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, that Sister will be 'about a sober drug dealer and his autistic sister.'
On the go: Sporting sunglasses of his own, Danny - whom Kate has been dating since earlier this year, wore a casual pair of grey shoes
Goldie has been with Kurt Russell since 1983, and Kurt - whom Kate refers to as 'Pa' - let slip to Harry Connick, Jr. on Harry this April that the movie would be a 'musical.'
Kurt had spilled that 'I mean, I don't know if I'm - cat out of the bag - if the deal's not made or anything, but she's, I think that she's gonna do this musical, with - that Sia is gonna direct that sounds fantastic, so I hope that happens.'
Though Kurt's the one Kate calls 'Pa,' her biological father is 71-year-old Goldie's second ex-husband Bill Hudson, whom Goldie'd been married to from 1976 to 1982.
Refreshments: At another point on Sunday, Kate was snapped holding a couple of purple beverages whilst outside a shop that sells, among other goodies, juice and smoothies
Tom Daley has opened up about his long-distance relationship with husband Dustin Lance Black, admitting it is 'far from perfect'.
Speaking to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK, the champion diver and his Oscar-winning director husband spoke about the past and future of their relationship.
The couple admitted some of the 'dramatic' changes to their relationship after struggling to cope with the distance of Black being based in LA.
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Tough: Tom Daley admitted some of the 'dramatic' changes to their relationship after struggling to cope with the distance of Dustin Lance Black being based in LA
'Our relationship is far from perfect. We have really tough times and struggles,' Daley told Attitude Magazine.
'For example we went long distance for a very, very, long time: he was in LA, I was living in London. We would spend sometimes five weeks apart.
'And it's something that was really, really tough and we've had to make massive and dramatic changes in our lives in order to be able to live together and see each other all the time. So it's not all plain sailing.'
Speaking about the first time they ever met, four years ago, Daley revealed he had to be sneaky because he had not publicly declared he was gay.
Long Distance: 'Our relationship is far from perfect. We have really tough times and struggles,' Daley told Attitude
Making it official: The couple tied the knot in a lavish wedding ceremony at Bovey Castle, near Plymouth, Devon in May this year after getting engaged in October 2015
'I kept getting caught looking at him because obviously I wasn't really out then,' he said.
'And I didn't really expect to have this moment that I did with Lance, but the way that I got around it was talking about the goings on inside the Olympic Village and how it would make a pretty cool film.
'And we traded contact details at the end of the night. I put my number in his phone with the winky face.'
The couple's 20-year age gap has been questioned in some corners, but Black says the pair have vowed to let other people's opinions get in the way of their own relationship.
He said: 'I don't care if someone says something negative about us. Why would I? That's their business. I don't think there's any one way to be is an LGBTQ person.
'I don't want to be heteronormative in every way either; gay people are unique and different. That's fabulous.
'We wanted to get married and that's who we are. But don't be like us, go do your thing, be you, be wild, be as LGBTQ with all of the diversity you can think of, do your thing. I am not about blending in. My heroes are not about blending in.'
Since Daley and Black met in 2013, there has been a secret split and cheating scandals but the couple feel like they are in a good place to move forward in their relationship.
They tied the knot in a lavish wedding ceremony at Bovey Castle, near Plymouth, Devon in May this year after getting engaged in October 2015.
Speaking about the first time they ever met, four years ago, Daley revealed he had to be sneaky because he had not publicly declared he was gay
Troubles: Since Daley and Black met in 2013, there has been a secret split and cheating scandals but the couple feel like they are in a good place to move forward in their relationship
According to The Sun, Tom recreated the scene in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet stood on the balcony in front of guests as he professed his love to his beau.
He is said to have delivered the star-crossed lover's famous lines: 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?'
The lovebirds were happily married in the Cathedral Room at the stately home before guests enjoyed a three-course meal.
Wedding-goers then toasted to the couple's happiness with a glass of champagne.
The after party was hosted in the Dartmoor Suite ballroom where people danced the night away until the early hours of the morning.
The Attitude Heroes podcast is available to download for free from December 4
Erica Rose got married on Sunday in Texas after failing to find love on The Bachelor.
The 34-year-old Houston native and Charles Sanders tied the knot in a traditional Jewish ceremony at Congregation Emanu El in her hometown, according to a report by Us Weekly.
The couple were friends in high school and reunited when she was pregnant with her one-year-old daughter Holland.
Wed: Erica Rose got married on Sunday in Texas to Charles Sanders in a traditional Jewish ceremony at Congregation Emanu El
Erica wore a plunging lace gown, veil and tiara by Ventura Bridal.
She later changed into a custom pink blush lace dress by designer Alex Martinez for the reception.
The reception at the Majestic Metro featured a floral wall with the couple's nickname 'Cherica' spelled out in red, pink and white roses.
Stunning: The TV star was seen with her father as she held her bouquet
The newlyweds are headed to Belize for their honeymoon.
She became engaged to the Texas investor in September while celebrating her daughter's birthday.
Erica gave birth to Holland in September 2016. The father is ex-boyfriend Galen Gentry.
Erica competed for the heart of Prince Lorenzo Borghese in 2006 during season nine of The Bachelor.
Sealed with a kiss: The blonde held her new husband tight as they smooched
So much color: The beauty's wedding flowers were roses and hydrangeas
Newly married: The Bachelor veteran Rose and Sanders, shown in a recent Instagram snap
The reality star also appeared on two seasons of The Bachelor Pad in 2011 and 2012 and the VH1 show You're Cut Off!
Several members of The Bachelor franchise attended the nuptials including Vienna Girardi, AshLee Frazier Williams, Holly Julian and Sadie Murray.
Season nine star Lorenzo, 45, also was in attendance.
Reality star: Erica competed for the heart of Prince Lorenzo Borghese in 2006 during season nine of The Bachelor
In attendance: Lorenzo, shown with Erica in March 2007 in New York City, attended the wedding
Claire Foy and Matt Smith posed together at Sunday's BAFTA screening of The Crown in New York, ahead of its second season dropping on Netflix next Friday.
Claire, 33, cut a stylish figure in a white V-neck top tucked into a bright blue pair of high-waisted trousers, accessorizing with a watch.
Matt, 35, wore a charcoal suit over a dull blue Frame T-shirt he had tucked in, accessorizing with a necklace and standing for the camera with a hand shoved into his pocket.
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Aglow: Claire Foy and Matt Smith posed together at Sunday's BAFTA screening of The Crown in New York, ahead of its second season dropping on Netflix next Friday
The former Doctor Who star recently discussed objectification in the Telegraph Magazine, to which he said`: 'Thats not to say I havent been objectified before by men, because I have, just like women are objectified.'
Said he: 'It is not exclusive to them. This happens to men, too.'
Earlier, discussing the recent sexual misconduct scandals, he had insisted: 'The conversation shouldnt stop at this industry just because these are "celebrities" who we know about who are involved. It has to be broader.
'People in other industries have to have a platform to be heard as well. What happens to the cleaner or the lady who works in a clothes shop?'
Who's who: For the first two seasons of The Crown, Claire has starred as Queen Elizabeth II herself and Matt as her husband, Philip, Duke Of Edinburgh
Camera ready: The pair were later seen at The Crown preview screening hosted by the 92nd Street Y
Getting chic done: Claire swapped her teal look for a chic houndtooth blazer
For the first two seasons of The Crown, Claire has starred as Queen Elizabeth II herself and Matt as her husband, Philip, Duke Of Edinburgh.
It has been revealed that Broadchurch star Olivia Colman will take over as the Queen for the third season, though the future of Prince Philip has not been so clarified.
Season one began just before Elizabeth ascended to the throne on the death of her father George VI, and ended with Britain skidding toward the Suez Crisis.
The new season will carry viewers through 1963, per TV Guide. Which is to say, it'll cover such events as a London visit by John F. Kennedy, played by Michael C. Hall.
Stepping out: She teamed the look with a stylish black polo neck and a light wash jean
Dapper: Matt looked effortlessly dapper in his navy blue suit while signing autographs outside the Bowery Hotel
Wrapped up: He combated the chilly temperatures by wrapping a stylish Burberry scarf around his neck
Handsome: He teamed the suit with a dark brown brogue, white shirt and navy tie
President Kennedy had been accompanied to England by his famously glamorous wife Jacqueline Kennedy, who has been portrayed by Jodi Balfour.
Vanessa Kirby's Princess Margaret will be seen starting up her romance with her ex-husband-to-be, 'society photographer' Antony Armstrong-Jones (Matthew Goode).
'Tony Snowdon,' so-called by dint of his being Earl Of Snowdon, married Margaret in 1960 and notoriously philandered before their 1978 divorce.
His love life is said to have included men and women - in a memoir, decorator Nicky Haslam said he and Tony had 'a very brief romance' before the Margaret marriage.
Incoming: The pair are seen in the trailer for season two, which per TV Guide will carry viewers on through 1963
Ill-starred: Vanessa Kirby's Princess Margaret will be seen starting up her romance with her ex-husband-to-be, 'society photographer' Antony Armstrong-Jones (Matthew Goode)
Hot and heavy: 'Tony Snowdon,' so-called because he was Earl Of Snowdon, married Margaret in 1960 and notoriously philandered before their 1978 divorce
For what it's worth, according to Femail, Tony himself said of Nicky's story: 'It's not true as far as I'm concerned --and I should know.'
Going by the trailer, it appears the new season will also show the Queen's iconic 1961 visit to Ghana, which four years earlier had become independent from Britain.
According to Time, she concurred with the Cabinet's wish that she go, bombing in Accra notwithstanding, by telling her prime minister: 'I am not a film star. I am the head of the Commonwealth - and I am paid to face any risks that may be involved. Nor do I say this lightly. Do not forget that I have three children.'
Moreover, the trailer depicts simmering tension between the Queen and her consort, who fumes about being 'outranked by my eight-year-old son!' - Prince Charles.
AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones , Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State UniversityAWOL began with a series of entries under the heading AWOL on the Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog . I moved it to its own space here beginning in 2009.The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.AWOL is the successor to Abzu , a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.AWOL is syndicated to Facebook and Twitter.
She's best known for her character Pippa Fletcher on Home And Away.
But on Monday, Debra Lawrance looked almost unrecognisable as she attended the AACTA Awards in Sydney.
The 60-year-old defied her years as she graced the red carpet in an elegant black dress with sheer sleeve detailing.
My how you've changed! Former Home And Away actress Debra Lawrance looks unrecognisable from her Pippa days as she attends the AACTA Awards
She teamed her ensemble with a red clutch and simple black heels.
Debra wore her sliver locks out in a neat style and kept her makeup bold with defined lashes and a bright red lip.
The actress left Summer Bay sixteen years ago now, but has returned to The Bay in character from time-to-time - most recently in 2009, but has since admitted she has no plans to return again.
Age defying: The 60-year-old defied her years as she graced the red carpet in an elegant black dress with sheer sleeve detailing
Famous face: Debra is best known for her time in Summer Bay
Debra took on the role as foster mum Pippa from actress Vanessa Downing in 1990 and became a fixture on screens for eight years.
In that time, the actress mentored many of the young actors who came through the show and went on to become big Hollywood names including Isla Fisher, Melissa George and Heath Ledger.
However, Debra is most close to Kate Ritchie, who played her on-screen foster daughter Sally Fletcher, and still see each other on a regular basis.
Foster mum: On the Australian soap, Debra played foster mum to many of Summer Bay's biggest stars, including actress Kate Ritchie, who grew up on the screen
In an interview with TV Week she revealed that she has no plans to return to the show.
'It's a different show from when I was on,' she told the publication.
'We didn't have a lot of drugs and alcohol and riots.'
Debra joined a plethora of celebrities at the AACTAs luncheon.
Erin Holland stunned in a pretty yellow frock while Melina Vidler opted for a plunging cream number with floral detailing which accentuated her curves.
Curves ahead: Melina Vidler opted for a plunging cream number with floral detailing which accentuated her curves
Mellow yellow! Erin Holland stunned in a pretty yellow frock
Susie Porter stepped out in a navy and black dress with crochet detailing.
Isabelle Cornish opted for a white lace mini dress, which showcased her slender pins.
Demure: Susie Porter stepped out in a navy and black dress with crochet detailing
Legs for days! Isabelle Cornish opted for a white lace mini dress, which showcased her slender pins
Emma Booth went for a more casual look in dark denim skinny jeans, a floral shirt and cream faux fur jacket.
Lincoln Younes looked dapper in a dark blue suit and pale blue shirt with matching tie.
Kendall Jenner and Khloe Kardashian got serious about guns as they learned how to shoot on Sunday's episode of the family's reality show.
The sisters learned how to handle guns after Kendall, 22, told Khloe, 33, how she had to deal with a regular stalker turning up at her house.
'I literally once a week have a stalker, someone shows up at my house, they wait outside my house for me and my security won't let me leave, they're like ''These people are weird'',' she explained.
Shooting lesson: Kendall Jenner joined her sister Khloe for a shooting lesson on Sunday's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians
Kendall explained how her jewelry was robbed from her home in a break-in and Khloe told her that the family 'was now so targeted' by thieves.
'I feel like we're so targeted and people are now breaking into our homes and stalking us,' she said.
Kendall told the cameras that the whole family had to reevaluate their security in the past year.
Khloe quickly moved the conversation on by telling her sister how she had a 'bruised p**s' after taking a Soul Cycle class and had gone to the doctor thinking it was an STD.
Taking aim: Khloe took to shooting quickly and fired away at a target
Feeling targeted: Kendall talked about being robbed and stalked and was considering a firearm for self defense and personal protection
At Kourtney's house the girls played with Kim and Kourtney's new puppies.
'I finally decided to cave and got North a dog,' said Kim as she told the cameras she also bought Kourtney's daughter, Penelope, a dog as well.
'It was priceless. It made everything worth it,' said Kim of her daughter's reaction.
New puppied: Kim Kardashian got her daughter North a dog named Sushi and also bought Honey for Kourtney's daughter Penelope
Worth it: The look on North's face was worth it for Kim
Puppy love: Kim said that North loved her new dog named Sushi
Kim, 37, told Khloe that her dog Sushi had 'tricked' her as it was quiet when they got it but was now energetic and loud.
'She loves this dog,' said Kim of her daughter.
Kris then moved her mom MJ into a home she had bought for her.
New home: Kris moved her mother into MJ into a new home she bought for her
Nice digs: The home brought MJ who used to live in San Diego closer to her family
Loved it: MJ was impressed with her new surroundings
'I have been trying to convince my mom to move up here for as long as I can remember, it has been decades. I think I felt I just needed to take action and surprise her,' said Kris.
'I want it to be the perfect place that she loves, the perfect transition,' she said.
Kim during the episode titled Dog Tired said that Sushi was causing her sleepless nights.
Surprise present: Kris Jenner surprised her mother by buying her the house
'I am being so attentive and going above and beyond and she is being so happy and so loud and Kourtney's dog is as quiet as a mouse and sits there quietly like a stuffed animal. It is wild how in one day they tricked me and now have opposite personalities. Of course this is my luck,' she said.
So Kim then thought about a dog swap so she could have the quieter of the animals.
Kendall and Khloe then talked about protecting themselves and looked at handguns online.
Dog tired: Kim complained of being tired due to Sushi's constant barking
Khloe told Kim that Kendall felt unsafe at home and that she needed to protect herself, and Kim told her that was why she paid her security detail.
Khloe told Kim that in her Paris situation what would she have done if she had been armed.
'I would not have shot them, it was three against one or six or seven, there was no way I was going to get out of there, you know, I am not Lara Croft,' said Kim.
Shopping trip: Kendall told Khloe about her personal safety concerns while shopping
Gun talk: Khloe and Kendall told Kim they were thinking of purchasing guns
'I could not have got away to get the gun.'
Khloe told her she should know how to use a weapon.
'I am not comfortable with it and I don't want my kids around it. I would not want sleepovers going on here and knowing there was a gun here. I personally do not feel comfortable with it,' said Kim.
'I am not a fan of owning guns or having guns in the home. Owning guns has never been my thing and with kids in the house I just don't think it something that I am comfortable with,' she added.
Not a fan: Kim made it clear she was not a fan of either owning guns or having guns in her house
Kris then bought her mother a luxury Mixmaster mixer as she rolled her eyes and did not seem impressed.
'I don't know what is going on, she does not appreciate my vision,' complained Kris as her mother tried to organize her new home.
'Bruce Springsteen is iconic, that is not iconic,' her mother told Kris about the blender.
Deluxe mixer: Kris wanted a deluxe mixer that she got MJ out on display on the counter
Kim then planned her dognapping.
'I was kind of joking about this whole plan but the more I say it out loud and talk it through the more it sounds like a genius idea and I am going to accidentally get the wrong dog and see if anyone notices,' said Kim.
She then did a quick switch and took Honey and left Sushi with Kourtney.
Dog switch: Kim planned a dognapping to switch quiet Honey for barking Sushi
Kourtney, 38, and her ex-boyfriend Scott Disick could then not figure out why the dog was suddenly barking so much.
'This dog is a pain in the a** I have never seen her act like this,' said Scott.
Reign was the first to notice the switch as she told her mom that the dog was in fact North's.
Quickly noticed: Scott Disick noticed that 'Honey' was suddenly barking a lot
Getting suspicious: Kourtney also determined that Kim had switched dogs on her
'I don't think this is your dog,' said Scott as Kourtney agreed that they now had the wrong dog.
Kourtney tried to ring Kim, who refused to answer her phone.
'She is not answering because she stole the damn dog and she is on the run, you don't just take someone's dog,' said Scott.
Nice try: The dog switching didn't get past Kourtney who used her resources to track down Kim and get her dog back
At MJ's condo Kris and her mom continued to fight over her cluttered countertops.
The momager was not impressed to see that MJ had stored the mixer in a cupboard in the bathroom.
'This is ridiculous,' said Kris as her mum called the gift an 'eyesore.'
Mixer battle: MJ and Kris continued to argue over the merits of the mixer
Kourtney finally got hold of Kim who denied she had swapped the dogs.
'OK, whatever,' said Kim as Kourtney refused to look after Sushi for even one night.
Kendall and Khloe then took shooting lessons.
Gun range: Handguns were shown as Kendall and Khloe arrived for their lesson
Natural shooter: Khloe was comfortable firing the weapon
'I know Kim is so against us getting guns but for Kendall and I, it's something we feel that we need to do to sleep better at night and I think Kim will feel better when she sees how much work and effort we have put into this,' said Khloe.
Khloe took to the shooting and was instantly comfortable on the range, but Kendall was less certain.
'Obviously I have been to a shooting range before but it is scaring me so badly that I am literally hiding behind a wall,' she said.
Hiding out: Kendall at first was hiding out but later fired away
But Kendall soon got into the swing of it and impressed her sister.
'I am proud that we did this. I am happy that I feel comfortable around a gun,' said Khloe.
Back at the house Kourtney forced Kim to swap back the dogs, much to Kim's frustration.
Feeling comfortable: Khloe later said she was proud they got the shooting lesson
'Sushi, you bark one time and we are going to have a problem,' Kim told her dog.
MJ then rang Kourtney to talk to her about Kris and her controlling ways in her new home.
'I just want to make it my home,' complained MJ as Kourtney encouraged her to do whatever she wanted.
Keep quiet: Kim warned Sushi to stop barking
'My mom is really controlling about how she thinks a house should be and I understand where MJ is coming from as my mom has been doing this to me her whole life,' said Kourtney.
Kourtney and Kendall then told Kim about their gun course and that they had been in touch with the Everytown For Gun Safety Group who had talked to them about the dangers of guns in the home.
'It was a little overwhelming and dark to think about,' said Khloe as she said that she and Kendall had decided they did not want to add guns to their environment.
Minds changed: Khloe and Kendall after meeting with a gun safety group decided to leave the guns to their security details
Khloe told the cameras that despite their training they were aware that accidents happened.
'I would rather avoid all of this and leave the guns to our security team,' said Khloe and Kim agreed they should leave their protection up to the professionals.
Kim's dog was no quieter upon her return and she decided to seek professional help.
Accident awareness: Kendall and Khloe learned more about owning guns before making their decisions
'I am desperate at this point, I literally kidnapped a dog,' said Kim.
Kourtney then confronted her mother and told her she needed to back off MJ and let her settle down in her new home.
So Kris went to her mother's home and collected her mixer.
Back off: Kourtney confronted Kris and told her to let MJ settle down in her new home
Her way: MJ finally got to arrange the counter to her liking
'I think I got a little excited and territorial,' she told her mother as she urged her to decorate the home however she wanted.
Kim then called in dog behavior expert Cesar Milan famous for his Dog Whisperer TV series to help train Sushi.
'Yep this is pretty bad,' said Cesar, 48, as he watched Sushi steal Kim's furry slippers.
Puppy training: North held Sushi as Kim introduced her to dog behavior expert Cesar Milan
Furry slipper: Sushi had the annoying habit of chewing on Kim's slippers
The expert: Cesar gave Kim some valuable tips on how to handle Sushi
After the session Kim told Cesar that she had learned she needed to be the authority figure.
'It is really exciting that Sushi's issues are fixable and she is just a part of the family now and we just have to work on it,' said Kim.
KUWTK returns next week on the E! network.
Authority figure: The Dog Whisperer told Kim that she had to be the authority figure
Each year, Cosmopolitan releases a list of Australia's 30 most eligible bachelors.
And this year's list features actors, athletes and reality stars - including three ex-Bachelorette contestants.
Michael Turnbull, Jake Ellis, Cam Cranley and more appeared shirtless in the January issue, which hit newsstands on Monday.
Bouncing right to the top of the crop! Real-estate agent Michael, 36, described his ideal mate as someone 'who is driven, motivated and fun'
Cam, 27, who appeared as part of Georgia Love's lineup of suitors, said if he wasn't a firefighter he would be 'a good teacher as I love kids.'
Meanwhile real-estate agent Michael, 36, described his ideal mate as someone 'who is driven, motivated and fun.'
Marketing professional Jake, 31, gave a big thumbs up to sexting, saying it can keep things 'interesting and exciting.'
Buff and a bachelor! Alongside the three still very single reality TV stars is Neighbours actor Matthew Wilson, 29
Can't argue with that! Jackson O'Doherty (left) and Jace Brown (right) are among the other faces in the line up
The inclusion of so many former Bachelorette stars may have had something to do with the women who got to decide the top 30.
The judges included Jen Hawke and Simone Ormesher, who both tried their hand at love on The Bachelor.
Alongside the three still very single reality TV stars is Neighbours actor Matthew Wilson, 29.
He coyly told Cosmo he finds a woman's smile her sexiest asset and would enjoy a weekend away to 'one of the wonders of the world' with his girlfriend-to-be.
Hello there! Tim Anstee, 20, is a handsome Rugby Sevens player on the list
On a competing show, and competing for the same Bachelor title, is Orpheus Pledger, 24, who plays Mason on hit soap drama Home And Away.
The ruggedly handsome actor likened himself to American movie star Matthew McConaughey - and said 'trust, compassion and honesty' were the three most attractive qualities in a person.
Not everyone on the list was famous though, plenty of personal trainers, coal miners, project managers and chef's were included.
Voting commences today on Cosmopolitan.com.au and the winner with be announced in February 2018.
Blac Chyna cradled a tiny little dog on her Snapchat Story this Sunday.
Wearing a sweater that read: 'HUMANS BE WEIRD' and a studded pair of cat-eye shades, the 29-year-old cooed: 'Hi, baby! Awww,' at the pooch.
It is unclear whether she has herself got a new dog, or whether she was merely spending a bit of time with a friend's pet.
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Canine company: Blac Chyna cradled a tiny little dog on her Snapchat Story this Sunday
Chyna, who wore a Playboy bunny pendant, posed for a photo while holding the dog and posted the result to her Story.
Chyna has two children: five-year-old son King Cairo by the rapper Tyga, and one-year-old daughter Dream by reality star Rob Kardashian.
Having split from Tyga in 2014, Chyna had been with her Rob & Chyna co-star off and on since early 2015, and she gave birth to Dream last November.
Rob and Chyna split in December - Rob posting a Snapchat video of himself wandering miserably through their empty house - but reunited soon after.
Who's whose?: It is unclear whether she has herself got a new dog, or whether she was merely spending a bit of time with a friend's pet
This July saw their latest and most dramatic breakup, with Rob posting explicit photos of Chyna to Instagram during a rant that got his account removed.
In short order, Chyna lawyered up with Gloria Allred's daughter Lisa Bloom and won a restraining order against her former partner.
Meanwhile, Rob chose for his attorney Robert Shapiro - who with Rob's father had been a member of O.J. Simpson's defense team during O.J.'s murder trial.
The mother of Rob's child gave a press conference featuring Lisa, who has also co-starred in a press conference with Kathy Griffin, as well as one with Quantasia Sharpton, who claimed Usher exposed her to herpes.
Pals: Chyna, who wore a Playboy bunny pendant, posed for a photo while holding the dog and posted the result to her Story
Though Chyna has accused Rob of abuse, TMZ reported in September that she let that allegation drop as part of a deal that got her $20,000 in child support a month.
A day after reporting that child support figure, TMZ revealed Chyna was still gunning for a payout of at least $1 million by way of the revenge porn case.
In a bizarre twist, Tyga for some time dated Rob's now 20-year-old half-sister Kylie Jenner, who is rumored to be pregnant by her own current beau Travis Scott.
There is a rumor out there that Chyna is being courted for the inaugural season of an American edition of Celebrity Big Brother, per Us Weekly.
Young Ian was seduced by bloody Geillis Duncan on Sunday's episode of Outlander.
The episode titled The Bakra opened with Young Ian's kidnapping by pirates who brought him aboard their ship the Bruja.
He was meant for someone called 'the Bakra' with an appetite for 'young boys'.
Starz series: Young Ian was given truth serum and seduced by Geillis Duncan on Sunday's episode of Outlander
When the Bruja reached Jamaica a slave then lead Young Ian to a woman bathing in blood who identified herself as The Bakra.
The bloody woman when she spun around turned out to be Geillis who was last seen being sentenced for witchcraft in Cranesmuir.
She explained that she bathes in goat's blood to 'keep her skin young'.
Geillis encouraged Young Ian to eat and drink and he obliged while being prodded with questions.
Goat's blood: Geillis said she bathed in goat's blood to keep her skin young
Blood bath: The episode opened with Geillis in a bloody bath
Scared prisoner: Young Ian was terrified at meeting The Bakra who turned out to be Geillis
Young Ian let slip some key information and Geillis explained that the tea he was drinking was a truth serum from a witch doctor.
She then asked him about his uncle and Young Ian blurted out 'James Fraser of Broch Tuarach' and that Jamie was going to rescue him.
'Oh, I'm counting on it, lad,' Geillis said as she then seduced the boy.
Truth serum: Geillis served Ian tea that was laced with truth serum from a witch doctor
Rescue plan: Young Ian blurted out that his uncle Jamie was going to rescue him and Geillis approved of the plan
Claire and Jamie meanwhile looked for Young Ian at Port Royal in Jamaica.
They checked the slave market where Claire's 20th century sensibilities were shocked to see men, women and children caged up.
She flipped out after seeing an auctioneer grab a slave's crotch after being asked about his virility.
Slave auction: Claire was shocked to see a slave auction
For sale: An auctioneer grabbed a slave's crotch when asked about his virility
Claire smacked the auctioneer and started a small riot.
'Do something. Help him, please!,' she begged Jamie, who ended up buying the slave.
Claire was horrified at the idea of being a slave owner and they agreed to set the slave named Temeraire free once they were in a safer area for him.
Too much: Claire was outraged and hit the auctioneer triggering a small brawl
New owners: Jamie purchased the slave named Temeraire to calm things down
They explained their plan and also enlisted Temeraire to go to a ball at the governor's mansion to talk to other slaves in order to find Young Ian.
Claire wore a gorgeous yellow gown for the party and Jamie sported a blonde wig to help hide his identity.
Geillis it turned out has been trying to get the sapphire as three are needed for the prophecy about the rise of the next Scottish king.
Freedom soon: Claire explained how they planned to give Temeraire his freedom soon
Claire then felt like an outsider watching Jamie reunite with Lord John Grey who stills wears the sapphire that Jamie gave him.
Geillis was confronted by Claire and she explained how she escaped being burned for witchcraft.
Jamie also was surprised about seeing Geillis, who noticed the sapphire she's been looking for on Lord John's jacket.
Fancy party: The 20th century surgeon and her 18th century lover got dressed up for the ball
Geillis got fortune teller Margaret to read the governor with all three stones present and she went into a spell.
She predicted the new king will rise in Scotland on the death of a child that is 200 years old on the day of its birth.
Captain Leonard and his men then showed up looking for Jamie.
She's back: Geillis explained how she escaped being burned for witchcraft
Temeraire delivered his information on the location of Young Ian as Jamie was taken into custody.
He pressed the pictures of Bree and the miniature of Willie into Claire's hands.
'After all I did for you and your men?! You bloody bastard. I am the only reason any of your survived,' Claire yelled at Captain Leonard and the Brits after saving them from an outbreak on their ship.
'Go. Find Young Ian!,' Jamie told Claire as he was marched away.
Not happy: Claire yelled at the Brits who she saved for taking Jamie into custody
She's the popular actress who scooped a Logie Award for her role on Home and Away.
And Bonnie Sveen has gushed about her time filming the iconic soap, where she also found love behind the scenes.
The 29-year-old star left the show in 2016, but not before falling for Home and Away's assistant director, Nathan Gooley.
Personal and professional success: Bonnie Sveen has gushed to TV Week about her three-year tenure on Home and Away, where she fell in love with the show's assistant director Nathan Gooley
'I had my happily ever after,' Bonnie gushed to TV Week on Monday.
The beauty told the publication that she has no regrets about leaving the hit series behind.
'I really adored that time of my life,' she stated, adding that she 'gave a lot' to her character, Ricky Sharpe.
Loved-up: Bonnie and Nathan met whilst working together on the iconic soap
And Bonnie is still awed by the fact she was a part of such an influential television program.
'Home and Away is a very important part of the Australian fabric. It was an honour to be part of the show'.
Despite her departure, the actress has continued her relationship with Nathan, who is still believed to be working on the show.
Onward and upward: Bonnie won a Logie Award for her role on Home and Away, but has no regrets about leaving the series
The pair's relationship appears stronger than ever after they moved into a Sydney residence together in August.
But Bonnie recently told New Idea that babies aren't on her immediate agenda, as her professional life continues to go from strength to strength.
'Nath is a bit older. He's 34 in December, so it feels like 29 isn't too bad and we have some time,' she explained.
Bonnie now appears on another hit Channel Seven series, The Secret Daughter, which just wrapped its second season.
She recently made her return to Coronation Street screens after a brief hiatus, when character Bethany Platt took a break from Weatherfield.
And while Lucy Fallon can certainly wow in the style stakes on-screen, she can do the same off-screen as well as the star put on a busty display for her sister's hen party on Saturday.
The 22-year-old actress showed off her ample cleavage in a criss-cross strap crop top, making a statement by teaming the piece with a blue velvet suit as she partied in The Living Room in Manchester.
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Flawless: Actress Lucy Fallon, 22, showed off her incredible figure on Saturday as she rocked a blue velvet suit for her sister's hen party in Manchester
Lucy looked utterly gorgeous in the glamorous ensemble, accessorising the look with a fur chain-strap bag and silver strappy sandals.
The blonde beauty styled her platinum locks in bouncy waves, with her makeup kept simple but stand-out in a smoky eye and perfectly arched brows.
Lucy appeared to be having a fabulous evening at her sister's hen party, posing with the bride-to-be who looked equally stylish in a leopard print faux fur coat.
The Corrie recently returned to soap screens after a brief hiatus, as character Bethany Platt attempted to move on from her horrific grooming ordeal.
Ample: Lucy put on a busty display in the chic ensembe, rocking a criss-cross crop top under the two-piece suit
Fans were delighted when news broke that Bethany would find love again over the festive period, as she strikes up a romance with pal Craig Tinker.
Corrie boss Kate Oates told Radio Times: 'In news that should gladden the heart of even the most Scrooge-like curmudgeon Bethany will embark on a tentative romance with Craig. Glad tidings indeed!'
Lucy will also be back on screens this Christmas in a musical competition show on ITV, which will be hosted by Freddie Flintoff and Michael Crawford and include a slew of other stars.
Sister sister! Lucy and her sibling both appeared to be having a fabulous time at the bachelorette bash
Busty beauty: Lucy recently made a return to Coronation Street after a brief hiatus, as character Bethany Platt took a break from the street to recover from her grooming ordeal
The celebrities will perform some of the biggest hits in West End history in front of a live audience at the London Palladium, who will then choose their favourite.
Also appearing in the series are actress Sally Phillips, athlete Denise Lewis OBE and presenter Nicky Campbell.
There will even be a bit of friendly soap rivalry as Emmerdale star Michael Parr appears on the lineup.
Dramatic: Lucy was recently at the centre of a dramatic child grooming storyline, which won her several awards and praise for her performance
She recently slammed claims that she was suffering from an eating disorder, after being spotted looking skinnier than ever at an event in Los Angeles earlier this week.
But Tara Reid appeared to be happier than ever on Sunday as she headed out for a spot of lunch with beau Ted Dhanik, walking through the Los Angeles streets hand-in-hand.
The 42-year-old Sharknado star put on a loved-up display with her beau as they strolled along together, even nuzzling into his neck at one point.
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Loved-up: Tara Reid put on a romantic display with beau Ted Dhanik on Sunday as they headed out for lunch together in Los Angeles
Tara looked casual for the relaxed outing, rocking a chic peach satin jacket over a white tank top, along with distressed jeans.
Accessorising with studded trainers and a black chain strap bag, the American Pie star looked totally stylish as she enjoyed an afternoon with her beau.
The couple also brought their pet pooches along for the outing, carrying them along in a black wheely bag.
Ted was also perfectly dressed for the California weather in a pink T-shirt and grey tracksuit shorts, along with white studded plimsolls.
Happy couple: Tara put on a casual display for the outing, rocking a satin peach bomber jacket and distressed jeans, along with peach studded trainers
New man: Tara and Ted have attended several events together in recent weeks, after news broke of their relationship in September
On the up: Tara has had a career resurgence in recent months, with nine movies on the way, as she became a fan favourite again for starring in the Sharknado series
Tara recently has to slam claims that she was suffering from an eating disorder, telling Daily Mail TV that she was at a perfectly healthy weight.
She said: 'I am not anorexic. I have never been anorexic and I don't have an eating disorder.'
She added: 'I am just thin. People are overweight and we don't attack them every time they go out.
Cute companions: Tara and Ted were joined by their adorable pet dogs, who relaxed in a black wheely bag for the outing
In love: Tara recently had to slam claims that she was suffering from an eating disorder, telling Daily Mail TV she was at a perfectly healthy weight
'It's the same weight. I don't fluctuate it's just who I am. I do eat. I eat all the time. But this is just my natural weight and people need to leave me alone.'
Tara's handsome boyfriend Ted is a successful tech entrepreneur, and the pair have kept their blossoming relationship relatively low-key, claiming that they were 'casually dating' when news emerged of their romance in September.
The pair sparked romance rumours when he accompanied her to pal Christina Milian's birthday party.
Screen star: Tara first won an army of fans as one of the stars of the American Pie series, playing vivacious Victoria "Vicky" Lathum
She has become known for her naturally fashionable flair almost as much as her acting projects.
And Zendaya only upped the style stakes on Sunday night as she joined a host of stars at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.
The 21-year-old truly stole the show in a stunning pleated gown, complete with plunging neckline and thigh-high split, as she posed fiercely on the red carpet at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.
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Sensational: Zendaya only upped the style stakes on Sunday night as she joined a host of stars at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards
The actress commanded attention in the gown, which was formed of a chic velvet bodice and striking pleated skirt of grey and tan.
While the dress fell into long, billowing sleeves and a demure floor-length hem, the gown upped the sex appeal with a daring V neckline - which plunged all the way to her navel, to tease at her cleavage and flash plenty of skin underneath.
Proving her sensational figure further, the skirt then cut into a thigh-high split on one side, to give a glimpse of her long and slender legs underneath.
Effortless: The actress commanded attention in the gown, which was formed of a chic velvet bodice and striking pleated skirt of grey and tan
Saucy: While the dress fell into long, billowing sleeves and a demure floor-length hem, the gown upped the sex appeal with a daring V neckline - which plunged all the way to her navel
Keeping all eyes on her show-stopping look, Zendaya tied her look together with barely-there black sandal heels and opted to forgo jewellery.
She slicked her hair into a sophisticated up-do and accentuated her radiant complexion with a glowing make-up look and soft pink lip, in a glamorous finishing touch.
The young star exuded confidence as she posed on the red carpet, before heading inside to mingle with her fellow guests, including Glee's Amber Riley.
Pins on parade: Proving her sensational figure further, the skirt then cut into a thigh-high split on one side, to give a glimpse of her long and slender legs underneath
Radiant: She slicked her hair into a sophisticated up-do and accentuated her radiant complexion with a glowing make-up look and soft pink lip
She appeared to be in good spirits as she joked and laughed inside - despite recently admitting she is not keen on nights out like other friends her age.
She told Fashion magazine: 'For me, a Vegas version of my birthday would be like hell.
'I've always been a very old woman inside a younger person's body. Of course, I have my young-people tendencies; we all have those.
Say cheese! The young star exuded confidence as she posed on the red carpet, before heading inside to mingle with her fellow guests, including Glee's Amber Riley
Delighted: Amber (R) beamed with delight at the bash - having picked up the award for Best Musical Performance following her run as Effie White in Dreamgirls
'But at the end of the day, I've always been called a grandma. I don't like going out.'
The brunette is next set to star in the Reese Witherspoon-produced movie A White Lie, as the first black woman to graduate from the elite Vassar College.
It is based on the book The Gilded Years, which tells the true story of a light-skinned, African-American who passed as white so she could attend the college during the 1890s.
She is also preparing for the release of new musical drama The Greatest Showman, which also stars Hugh Jackman and Zac Efron, just before Christmas.
Next up: The brunette is next set to star in a Reese Witherspoon produced movie, where she will appear as the first black woman to graduate from the elite Vassar College
Her busy Our Girl filming schedule has meant she's been abroad for eight months.
And Michelle Keegan, 30, couldn't hide her delight after touching down in the UK on Monday following her laborious trip to Kuala Lumpur.
The Northern beauty - who plays beamed as she was welcomed back to London's Heathrow airport by family members, clad in a low-key ensemble for her jubilant return to home soil.
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Delighted: Michelle Keegan, 30, couldn't hide her delight after touching down in the UK on Monday following her laborious trip to Kuala Lumpur
The fresh-faced actress highlighted her slender pins in a pair of skintight black Pink Soda leggings while she pushed her luggage-stacked trolley through the international arrivals terminal.
She teamed her pin-flaunting look with a cosy khaki-coloured USAF-sloganed hoodie which swamped her petite figure.
Boasting a healthy glow, the former Coronation Street star opted to go make-up free for the long-haul flight, accentuating her flawless complexion as she touched down.
Grinning Michelle accessorised her relaxed look with a number of simple rings and bracelets while she worked her enviable brunette locks into a straight style.
Ringing it in: Michelle's engagement and wedding rings were noticeably absent from her left hand as she landed into the capital, holding onto her phone
Catching up: Michelle made a phonecall as she walked through the terminal
Happy: The Northern beauty beamed as she was welcomed back to London's Heathrow airport by family members
However, Michelle's engagement and wedding rings were noticeably absent from her left hand as she landed into the capital, holding onto her phone.
MailOnline have contacted Michelle Keegan's rep for comment.
Absent: Michelle usually sports an eye-catching diamond on her left-hand
The Stockpot stunner has previously discussed that she removes her wedding ring while filming.
In 2016, She shared on Twitter: 'No wedding ring, no wedding ring blah blah blah sooooo boring!!! Not that I have to explain but I'm SO sick of these stories
'I work on camera so I take it off and put it somewhere safe... SIMPLE. Last night I went straight out after work... Hence the NO ring!!!'.
In recent weeks, both Michelle and Mark have been gushing over one another, sharing how excited they are to reunite in the coming weeks for Christmas.
Her triumphant return comes after she shared a hilarious video of her and the cast singing on the bus as they headed to the last day on set of Our Girl.
Michelle enjoyed her last day of shooting in the Malaysian sunshine, as she shared a video of her dancing with shirtless hunks on the show on her Instagram stories.
Pin-flaunting: The fresh-faced actress highlighted her slender pins in a pair of skintight black Pink Soda leggings
Happy: She pushed her luggage-stacked trolley through the international arrivals terminal
Cosy: She teamed her pin-flaunting look with a cosy khaki-coloured USAF-sloganed hoodie which swamped her petite figure
The post came on the same day that Michelle's husband Mark Wright, 30, congratulated her for the eight months of filming, tweeting a tribute to his 'little trooper.'
Michelle shared the video of walking through the set in Malaysia, with several of her co-stars singing Spice Girls Wannabe behind her.
The actors had all removed their shirts for the appearance on set, clearly to try and keep cool in the sizzling Malaysian heat.
Hugging it out: Michelle hugged a family member after landing in the UK
All in the details: Grinning Michelle accessorised her relaxed look with a number of simple rings and bracelets while she worked her enviable brunette locks into a straight style
All smiles: Michelle couldn't contain her delight at being back in the UK
After eight months of filming Our Girl finally wrapped on Saturday, with Michelle's video showing the cast celebrating in style.
The BBC drama has already aired four of the twelve episodes, with the remaining yet to have a release date.
Michelle also posted a video of the cast singing in unison on a bus heading to the set, clearly thrilled at returning home after a long filming schedule.
Party hard! Her triumphant return comes after she shared a hilarious video of her and the cast singing on the bus as they headed to the last day on set of Our Girl
Support: The post came on the same day that Michelle's husband Mark Wright, 30, congratulated her for the eight months of filming, tweeting a tribute to his 'little trooper.'
Much love: Mark called wife Michelle his 'little trooper' in the adorable tweet, as the couple prepared to spend Christmas together
Michelle's video came as her husband Mark Wright showered the former Coronation Street star with praise for finally finishing Our Girl, after a gruelling filming schedule that saw shooting in Nepal, South Africa and Malaysia.
Tweeting a tribute to his wife, Mark said how excited he was to reunite with Michelle so they could spend Christmas together.
He said: 'Done. 8 months away from home, away from loved ones, working ridiculous hours in ridiculous conditions @michkeegan you amaze me more & more every day. Im so proud of you, words cant even explain. Its going to be the best Christmas ever !! I love you so much my little trooper x'
Mark has been working in Los Angeles as the new host of celebrity series Extra along with Mario Lopez, and it seems he will finally return to blighty to spend the festive season with his family.
Could be worse! In the video, Michelle can be seen singing and dancing to Spice Girls Wannabe with some of the shirtless cast in Malaysia
Smoking! Michelle joked around with some of the cast of the series as filming wrapped after eight months
Funny: Michelle appeared to get into the spirit as she messed around with some of the cast, ahead of reuniting with husband Mark Wright for the festive season
Energetic: The actors appeared to be enjoying the blazing Malaysian sunshine as shooting for the series came to a close
'Little trooper': Michelle's post came on the same day as husband Mark Wright tweeted a tribute to her ahead of them spending Christmas together
Michelle recently revealed that she had no idea she would be away for so long filming Our Girl, as she signed a contract for the third season before it was event commissioned.
Speaking to Radio 1 host Nick Grimshaw she said: 'I wasn't 100% there would be another series but I signed the option for there to be another. Obviously the first time it was for five episodes but this time it was for 12 so it's overly doubled.
'I didn't know that at the time either. It's been a long, long filming schedule. I was away for three months last time and this time I was in South Africa for three months and then I had three weeks off then I was in Malaysia for three months.
'So over all I was away for seven months. It was a long time being away from home. I had to do it, the contract was signed. Book me a flight!'
Reunited: Mark and Michelle have been together for five years, and tied the knot in 2015
Screen star: Michelle has been filming Our Girl's third series, with the first four episodes airing in October
She welcomed her first child Sunday Sky on November 2.
Despite bursting with love, Ferne McCann, 27, has revealed that she feared she wouldn't bond with her newborn daughter on Monday's This Morning.
Although voicing her concern, the former TOWIE star admitted her connection with Sunday was instantaneous and couldn't fathom a life without her being her mother.
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Instant: Ferne McCann, 27, has revealed that she feared she wouldn't bond with her newborn daughter on Monday's This Morning
Glowing during her appearance, she gushed: 'I felt like, imagine if my baby arrives and I dont feel that connection, because everyone speaks about this unconditional gush of love. Imagine if I didnt have that.
'I think its like a natural concern, I dont know, maybe its just me. But as soon as she arrived, and every minute that I spend with her, the love just grows so much.
Adding: 'And I think for me, this year it wasnt part of the plan to have a baby, but you cant plan life. It just happened. I wasnt the most maternal person, but now I feel so maternal. And Im just so in love with her.'
She revealed that Sunday has been a beacon of hope in the midst of a turbulent seven months following her former flame Arthur Collins' conviction while Holly Willoughby cuddled up to the newborn on the couch.
Cuddles: Show host Holly Willougby cuddled up to Ferne's little one Sunday on the couch
Bond: Although voicing her concern, the former TOWIE star admitted her connection with Sunday was instantaneous and couldn't fathom a life without her being her mother
Radiant: Glowing during her appearance, she gushed: 'I felt like, imagine if my baby arrives and I dont feel that connection, because everyone speaks about this unconditional gush of love. Imagine if I didnt have that
The arrival of her first baby on November 2 was a bittersweet moment, due to her ex partner's trial for a horrific acid attack.
The reality star discussed how her pregnancy proved to be the distraction she needed as she came to grips with her former flame Arthur Collins' part in a horrific nightclub acid attack in east London earlier this year.
She began: 'For me, there was always light at the end of the tunnel. It has been a turbulent seven months for me but I had something to look forward to. That was my focus.
'I needed to focus on keeping healthy, on not being stressed, and by doing that I was surrounding myself with friends and family, being busy, I kept on working.'
Hugs: Holly beamed as she cuddled Ferne's daughter
Cute: Both Holly and Phil cooed over the newborn as she made an appearance on Monday's show with Ferne
'Natural': She added: 'I think its like a natural concern, I dont know, maybe its just me. But as soon as she arrived, and every minute that I spend with her, the love just grows so much'
All smiles: She continued: 'And I think for me, this year it wasnt part of the plan to have a baby, but you cant plan life. It just happened. I wasnt the most maternal person, but now I feel so maternal. And Im just so in love with her'
Honest: The reality star discussed how her pregnancy proved to be the distraction she needed as she came to grips with her former flame Arthur Collins' part in a horrific nightclub acid attack in east London earlier this year
Last week, Ferne revealed that she has cried every day since her the baby's father Arthur was arrested for an acid attack in April in a teaser clip for her new reality series, First Time Mum.
Arthur was convicted of five counts of grievous bodily harm with intent and nine of actual bodily harm two weeks ago. He had committed the offence while out celebrating the news of Ferne's pregnancy.
He has been warned he could face life behind bars when he is sentenced on December 19.
According to The Sun, Ferne is understood to have told the father of her newborn daughter that she won't ever see him again after visiting him in prison.
'Focus': She began: 'For me, there was always light at the end of the tunnel. It has been a turbulent seven months for me but I had something to look forward to. That was my focus'
Busy: She added: 'I needed to focus on keeping healthy, on not being stressed, and by doing that I was surrounding myself with friends and family, being busy, I kept on working'
Upset: Last week, Ferne revealed that she has cried every day since her the baby's father Arthur was arrested for an acid attack in April in a teaser clip for her new reality series, First Time Mum
Pal: Ferne's pal Vicky Pattison appeared on Monday's show also
Chit chat: The former Queen of the Jungle was on to discuss I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!
Red alert! The Geordie Shore star looked ravishing in red on the couch
Picture perfect: The pals posed together with Sunday following her appearance
Ferne told Arthur: 'This is the last time you will see either of us' as she held their daughter, Sunday, during a visit to Category A Belmarsh prison in south London.
During the visit, the This Morning host told him: 'You have ruined our lives. This is what you have done. And this is what you are missing out on.'
Speaking about the dramatic visit, she told Sunday People: 'I went to see Arthur and I took Sunday with me. This was because I am very angry about what has happened and I needed to communicate that and wanted to hear what Arthur had to say.
Staying away: According to The Sun, Ferne is understood to have told the father of her newborn daughter that she won't ever see him again after visiting him in prison
Quirky: Now focusing on her beautiful bundle of joy, Ferne hit back at trolls who have criticised her daughter's quirky name while speaking to This Morning hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield
Name: 'Obviously whatever I was going to call her everyone would have their opinion,' she said. '(I) wasnt going to go for an original name, from the beginning I loved it'
'I strongly feel for the innocent people hurt that night and I in no way condone violence as I have already made clear. It was a difficult decision to take Sunday into that environment but I felt I needed to confront him about a number of things, which I have now done.'
Now focusing on her beautiful bundle of joy, Ferne hit back at trolls who have criticised her daughter's quirky name while speaking to This Morning hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield.
'Obviously whatever I was going to call her everyone would have their opinion,' she said. '(I) wasnt going to go for an original name, from the beginning I loved it.'
Thought process: Speaking about how she decided the unique name, the Essex beauty explained her love of actress Nicole Kidman and a face cleanser aided her thought process
Inspiration: She shared: 'There's a face cleanser with that name, know it sounds ridiculous, but I just loved the sound and the tone to it'
Speaking about how she decided the unique name, the Essex beauty explained her love of actress Nicole Kidman and a face cleanser aided her thought process.
She shared: 'There's a face cleanser with that name, know it sounds ridiculous, but I just loved the sound and the tone to it.
'(I) got obsessed with Big Little Lies with Nicole Kidman. (I) started googling her and saw she had a daughter called Sunday, and loved it. Her middle name is Sky so shes Sunday Sky.'
Their blissful five-year marriage is proof that age really is nothing but a number.
And Aaron Taylor-Johnson and his wife Sam continued to defy their age gap critics as they cosied up on the red carpet of The Trevor Project's TrevorLIVE LA Gala, sponsored by Three Olives Vodka at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday night.
Sam, 50, looked sensational in a demure green dress as she and her actor beau, 27, wrapped their arms around one another on their way into the event.
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Smitten kittens! Aaron Taylor-Johnson and his wife Sam continued to defy their age gap critics as they cosied up on the red carpet of The Trevor Project's TrevorLIVE LA Gala at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday night
The Fifty Shades director's ankle-length gown - which is by British fashion house The Vampire's Wife - made for a seriously stylish display with its shimmering fabric and ruffled hem and sleeves.
Sam oozed retro Hollywood glamour by allowing her blonde locks to cascade in elegant waves down one side of her face, before finishing the look with open-toe stilettos.
She injected a welcome pop of colour into the autumnal style with a striking red lipstick.
Fashionista: Sam, 50, looked sensational in a demure green dress as she and her actor beau, 27, wrapped their arms around one another on their way into the event
Her Godzilla star husband made for an equally suave fixture on the red carpet in a dapper grey suit that was offset with a lighter grey shirt and red tie.
The couple - who share daughters Wylda, seven, and Romy, five - appeared besotted with one another as they attended the bash, just months after Sam defended their relationship in a chat with The Hollywood Reporter.
Rightfully retaining that she doesn't care what people think or say about the situation, she said of their romance: 'If I gave a second thought to other people, I would be the unhappiest person, probably still in a miserable marriage,' she explained defiantly.
Fancy seeing you here! The couple mingle with Aaron's Nocturnal Animal's co-star Isla Fisher inside the bash
'People like to talk about it. I'm like, "Yeah, but it works better than my last marriage". It's lasted longer than a lot of my friends' marriages.'
Meanwhile, last night's event saw the couple mingle with Aaron's Nocturnal Animal's co-star Isla Fisher.
TrevorLIVE is a signature semi-annual fundraising event which offers a celebratory evening of impact and awareness for the suicide prevention resources and crisis intervention services offered by The Trevor Project.
Good cause: TrevorLIVE is a signature semi-annual fundraising event which offers a celebratory evening of impact and awareness for the suicide prevention
Joanna Krupa and Aubrey O'Day both sported large sunglasses, grey sweatshirts, and high-top sneakers as they landed at LAX Airport in Los Angeles together on Sunday.
The Polish 38-year-old opted for braids and blue skinny jeans, while the 33-year-old California native wore her extensions down along with black leggings.
The blonde duo are both single following Joanna's divorce from nightclub owner Romain Zago on August 17, and Aubrey's split from Famously Single leading man Pauly D in July.
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Twinning: Aubrey O'Day (L) and Joanna Krupa (R) both sported large sunglasses, grey sweatshirts, and high-top sneakers as they landed at LAX Airport in LA together on Sunday
Jet setters: The 33-year-old California native wore her extensions down along with black leggings, while the Polish 38-year-old opted for braids and blue skinny jeans
Krupa - who boasts 3.3M followers - tweeted an in-flight snap of their seatmates former NSYNC boybander Lance Bass with husband Michael Turchin and The Real's Adrienne Houghton with husband Israel Houghton.
O'Day was next to Shannon Bex, with whom she formed the duo Dumblonde in 2015 after they disbanded Diddy-led Danity Kane for the second time.
It's unclear precisely where the gang had jetted from, but the White Lightning songstress recently shared a snap of herself at La Cantera Resort & Spa in San Antonio.
'My love': The blonde duo are single following Joanna's divorce from nightclub owner Romain Zago on August 17, and Aubrey's split from Famously Single leading man Pauly D in July
'This is how we roll!' Krupa tweeted an in-flight snap of their seatmates former NSYNC boybander Lance Bass with husband Michael Turchin (front) and The Real's Adrienne Houghton with husband Israel Houghton (second row)
Girl group: O'Day was next to Shannon Bex (L), with whom she formed the duo Dumblonde in 2015 after they disbanded Diddy-led Danity Kane for the second time
The Celebrity Big Brother 18 contestant - who now fronts controversial 'teatox' Flat Tummy - struck a sultry pose in a red cut-out Hot Miami Styles jumpsuit and Unekform choker.
Meanwhile, the Battle of the Network Stars contestant will next play a nurse who instructs lifeguards on CPR called Stacy in Jeffery Patterson's 2018 family flick Another Day in Paradise alongside Frankie Muniz and Brendan Robinson.
The Hollywood Medium guest star - who's defended accused sexual harasser Jeremy Piven - also recently opened a beauty retreat The Secret Avenue in Gdansk.
'Waiting for my uber like': It's unclear precisely where the gang had jetted from, but the White Lightning songstress shared a snap of herself at La Cantera Resort & Spa in San Antonio
'Swimin in milk n honey': The Celebrity Big Brother 18 contestant struck a sultry pose in a red cut-out Hot Miami Styles jumpsuit and Unekform choker
They jetted out of Los Angeles for a sun-soaked trip to the Mexican resort of Cabo San Lucas on Saturday.
But it seems it was more than just a romantic getaway for Channing Tatum and his beautiful wife Jenna Dewan-Tatum.
She celebrated her 37th birthday on Sunday and the hunky Magic Mike star took to Twitter and Instagram to send her all his love on her special day.
'Happy life day, my love': Channing Tatum wished his wife Jenna Tatum-Dewan a happy 37th birthday in a touching caption to this beautiful snap he posted on Sunday
He posted a beautiful black and white snap of her captioned: 'This creature is 1 more year beautiful.
'The transformation she invoked this year has been something they only write about in books of fairytale & magic. Your strength & grace ever evolving.
'You make everything around you grow. So grateful for your lessons. Happy life day my love.'
Life's a beach: Tatum took Jenna to the Mexican resort of Cabo San Lucas for her birthday and she woke up on Sunday to see this message in the sand that she posted on social media
Jetting out: They looked relaxed when they arrived at LAX for their flight to Mexico on Saturday
And the actress thanked her husband, also 37, and all her fans for their messages in a snap she posted of herself on the beach with the words Happy Birthday Jenna written in the sand.
She captioned it: 'This year has been 1 ill never forget. Challenging, beautiful & wonderfully expansive all at the same time.
'But I know that every experience you have is here for your own growth. When viewed that way, the magic of life will show you the way. Thx for my birthday wishes!!'
Soaking up the sun: Jenna stripped off to a bikini top and a wrap at the beach resort
Margarita time: She posted this saucy selfie in her Instagram Story
Meanwhile, their four-year-old daughter Everly didn't appear to be on their romantic break with them.
It's 12 year since the couple sizzled in their sexy dance routines for the movie, Step Up.
They began dating shortly after filming had finished and got married on July 11, 2009, at Church Estates Vineyards in Malibu.
He is best known for playing the suited and booted Don Draper in the Emmy award-winning series Mad Men.
But Jon Hamm was worlds away from his famous alter-ego on Monday, as he jogged around Battersea Park as part of filming for new series Good Omens.
The actor, 46, slipped into a casual grey tracksuit as he sprinted around the park in his Archangel Gabriel character - who is soon disturbed by Michael Sheen's Aziraphale in the undoubtedly funny scene.
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Giving him a run for his money: Jon Hamm jogged around Battersea Park with Michael Sheen on Monday, as part of filming for new TV series Good Omens
Jon certainly looked the part in a simple grey jumper and matching tracksuit bottoms, as his character embarked on a fitness session in London.
Adding comfortable white trainers to his feet, the heartthrob was seen picking up speed in front of the cameras - before he was rudely interrupted by the angel Aziraphale, played by Michael Sheen.
As one of the most powerful characters in the TV series, the actor, 48, cut a more formal figure in a waistcoat, suit trousers and bow tie as he joined the Archangel on his run, in order to talk with him privately.
Don Draper no more: Mad Men star Jon certainly looked the part in a simple grey jumper and matching tracksuit bottoms, as his character embarked on a fitness session in London
Working up a sweat: Adding comfortable white trainers to his feet, the heartthrob was seen filming a number of shots of him running for the scene, as his Archangel Gabriel character
Distrubed: He was later interrupted by the angel Aziraphale, played by Michael Sheen (R), who cut a more formal figure in a waistcoat, suit trousers and bow tie
Unrecognisable: Michael had also dyed his hair bright white to transform him into his angel character Aziraphale
Michael had also dyed his hair bright white to transform him into his angel character, to contrast the demon Crowley, played by David Tennant.
The acting duo appeared deep in conversation and pulled a number of animate faces as they jogged around the park for the scene, set to appear in the Good Omens remake next year.
Jon was confirmed to be part of the star-studded cast on Thursday - and gave fans the first glimpse of his exciting Archangel Gabriel character.
Joining the fray: Jon was confirmed to be part of the star-studded cast on Thursday - and gave fans the first glimpse of his exciting Archangel Gabriel character
The 46-year-old heartthrob looked angelic in a pale blue coat and matching polo neck as he smoldered in front of the camera.
The American actor looked his usual dapper self, pairing his outerwear with fitted suit trousers and slung a powder blue scarf casually around his neck.
The all-blue ensemble is no doubt in keeping with his character as the lead angel, who acts as an antithesis to Michael Sheens character, Aziraphale, and David Tennants devillish Crowley.
Star-studded cast: Good Omens is based on the late fantasy author's book, which tells the story of angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley who team up to stop the birth of Satan
His coiffed locks were peppered with a touch of grey as filming got under way for the TV series.
Good Omens co-author Neil Gaman shared the snap on his Twitter page captioning it: 'So for you, for me, for all of us. FOR PEOPLE NOT YET BORN.
'This is what Jon Hamm looks like as the Angel Gabriel in the upcoming TV series of GOOD OMENS. A thing of beauty, and a joy for ever.'
Quite the transformation: From 1960s drama to an adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, Jon Hamm has made quite the transformation
Best known: He still best known as Donald Draper from the hit TV show
Hamm will join the likes of David Tennant and Jack Whitehall in a star-studded cast for the six-part series, produced for Amazon Prime.
Good Omens is based on the late fantasy author's book, which tells the story of angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley who team up to stop the birth of Satan.
Miranda Richardson and Michael McKean are also starring in the series.
The series is co-produced by BBC Two and Amazon. With filming just starting, the adaptation will not air until 2018.
Earlier this year, she was spotted locking lips with Naomi Watts as they shot passionate scenes for their Netflix show Gypsy.
But on Monday, Sophie Cookson, 27, travelled back in time as she stepped out in period costume for her titular role in the World War II-era spy drama Red Joan.
Clutching a hot water bottle to keep herself warm between scenes, the British actress covered up in a stylish long coat as she got into character on the decidedly chilly streets of Cambridge.
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Busy day at work: Sophie Cookson was spotted on the set of her upcoming film Red Joan in Cambridge on Monday
She was seen wearing a stylish outfit that included a long lilac coat, flowing grey skirt, knitted striped scarp, green gingham blouse and a burgundy beret.
In between takes - which saw her character attend a rally - she shielded her face from the notably chilly climes while walking through the streets and sitting on an outdoor bench as she read through her script.
Clad in a green coat, her co-star Tereza Srbova, 34, also appeared to be struggling with the cold, clutching a water bottle as to her chest while wrapping her body in a powder blue bathrobe and covering her head with a knitted grey beanie hat.
Staving off the chill: The actress wrapped herself up between takes in a bid to stave off the chill
Cover: As she stepped out in 1930s costume, the 27-year-old kept her nose and mouth covered
Mock: She was joined by her co-star Tereza Srbova as they did a mock run of a protest scene
Read-through: As she read through her lines, she sat beside another co-star, Tom Hughes
Warm toes: She threw on a pair of fluffy boots to keep her feet warm during the chilly shoot
Extra warmth: Despite her costume looking warm enough, Sophie threw on a thick overcoat
Friendly chat: She was seen enjoying a friendly chat with a member of the makeup crew on set
In the movie, Oxford School of Drama graduate Sophie plays the young Joan Stanley, a woman who went on to become the KGB's longest-serving British spy.
The script is an adaptation of Jennie Rooneys eponymous 2014 novel, which itself took inspiration from the true story of Melita Norwood, whose role within the Russian organisation wasn't unmasked until she was 87 years old.
Dame Judi Dench, 82, will play the elder Joan, whose peaceful life as a retired physicist is turned upside down when she receives a visit from the MI5 in 2000.
Sophie's portion of the film shows her as a student at Cambridge University, who falls in love with a communist and is later torn between her loyalty to her home country and serving the KGB as she joins Britain's secret nuclear programme.
Bottle: Tereza stepped her efforts up another notch, carrying a hot water bottle on the set
Robe: The 34-year-old actress also wrapped a thick powder blue bathrobe around her waist
Friendly face in the crowd: The Czech beauty beamed as she enjoyed a chat during downtime
Layers: Like Sophie, she also threw a padded coat on over her period costume between takes
Taking direction: The actress was seen chatting with director Trevor Nunn in between takes
While his role in the Trevor Nunn-directed film has not been officially announced, it is believed that Victoria heartthrob Tom Hughes, 31, portrays Joan's love interest.
Despite her busy roster of screen projects - and winning acclaim in her psychological thriller Gypsy - Sussex and Suffolk-raised Sophie recently revealed that she holds a strong desire to tread the boards of London's West End.
'In the next five years, Id absolutely love to do theatre,' she told Interview magazine for its June issue. 'I went to drama school and thats where the focus lies. Id definitely like to do that before the fear sets in.
'We studied so much Shakespeare in drama school and Id like to go back to that. Id really throw myself into something that would probably petrify me. Tennessee Williams. Something juicy.'
Rally: During the shoot, Tom Hughes was seen leading a rally as a crew captured the action
Snap: A touch of modern life crept in on the set when he took some time out to pose for a selfie
Plot: In the movie, Oxford School of Drama graduate Sophie plays the young Joan Stanley, a woman who went on to become the KGB's longest-serving British spy
True story: The script is an adaptation of Jennie Rooneys eponymous 2014 novel, which itself took inspiration from the true story of Melita Norwood
Late unmasking: It tells the story of an elderly woman whose role within the Russian organisation KGB wasn't unmasked until she was 87 years old
She is four months pregnant with her first child - and announced the exciting news just a matter of weeks ago.
And Casey Batchelor looked positively radiant as she flaunted her burgeoning bump at the Quaill pushchair launch in London on Monday.
The 33-year-old nailed maternity chic in a figure-hugging crimson midi-dress, in which she showed off her pregnancy curves.
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Glamorous: Casey Batchelor looked positively radiant as she showed off her burgeoning baby bump in a crimson bodycon dress in London on Monday
The former Celebrity Big Brother star looked every inch of the yummy mummy-to-be as she cradled her bump in the rouge dress, which fell just below the knee, showing off a glimpse of her tanned legs.
She added a boost to her height with a pair of patent black heeled boots and accessorised her glamorous outfit with a cascading gold necklace.
Casey styled her raven black tresses in loose waves and opted for fluttery eyelashes and a nude lip at the pushchair launch.
Maternity chic: The Celebrity Big Brother star looked every inch of the yummy mummy-to-be as she cradled her bump in the rouge dress, which showed off a glimpse of her tanned legs
Braving the November chill, the former glamour model wrapped up in a chic nude coat and completed the look with a Louis Vuitton tote bag.
Casey, who is expecting her first child with boyfriend Dane Goodman, looked like she couldn't wait to be a mum as she searched for the perfect pram.
The reality star recently admitted she didn't know she was pregnant at first.
Speaking to Closer magazine, the former CBB starlet admitted: 'We'd only started trying. I thought I was bloated and I'd been to the doctors for some tests - I cried because I thought something was wrong with me!'
Stylish: Braving the November chill, the former glamour model wrapped up in a chic nude coat and completed the look with a Louis Vuitton tote bag
Blossoming bump: She added a boost to her height with a pair of patent black heeled boots and accessorized her glamorous outfit with a cascading gold necklace
First-time mum: Casey, who is expecting her first child with boyfriend Dane Goodman, searched for the perfect pram for her baby
The busty brunette, who had a breast reduction in 2014 to bring her 32GG bust down to a 32EE, also admitted her 'boobs are out of control' now that she's pregnant as they've been growing at a rapid rate.
Casey, who has kept her romance with her beau tightly under wraps for 18 months, finally believes she has 'found her prince'.
An insider divulged to The Sun that Casey was 'overjoyed' at the prospect of becoming a mum revealing she had previously considered freezing her eggs as she thought her 'happy ending would never come'.
Of the pregnancy news, a source told the publication: 'Its been a long time coming for Casey whos had such bad luck with guys she was considering freezing her eggs because she thought her happy ending would never happen.
'But it really was love at first sight for her and Dane and a year and a half on they are overjoyed about becoming parents. She really believes shes finally found her prince and loves hes someone completely separate from the industry.'
Surprise: The reality star recently admitted she didn't know she was pregnant at first
Meek Mill will remain in jail after being denied bail by a Philadelphia judge Friday.
The Philly-bred rapper's bid for freedom was refused after judge Genece Brinkley determined the RICO hitmaker a 'flight risk' and 'a danger to the community.'
Mill's attorney says they plan to appeal her ruling, saying it continues a 'long pattern of unfair treatment.'
A legal setback: Meek Mill will remain in jail after being denied bail by a Philadelphia judge Friday (above November 4) who said the rapper 'a danger to the community' and a flight risk
The Whatever You Need rhymer and lawyers are currently trying to overturn the celeb's - real name Robert Rihmeek Williams - two to four year prison sentence for violating his probation.
Fighting back: The rapper is trying to overturn the celeb's 2 to 4 year sentence violating his probation. His mugshot is above
The chart-topping rapper's probation officer and a prosecutor had recommended he not be jailed.
But during the hearing judge Brinkley also suggested that Meek's clean drug test was suspect, explaining the 30-year-old could have had help from a 'detox' product known as 'fast flush.'
Her decision comes after the state Superior Court last week told her to act 'without further delay' on a two-week-old request to free the rapper.
Mill was sentenced last month for violating probation initially stemming from a 2008 drug and gun conviction, for which he served eight months and was put on five-year probation.
Mill breached the terms of this probation in 2015 by booking an out of state concert without getting the court's permission and not giving his probation officer his correct phone number. As a result he was jailed for five months and his probation was extended for five more years.
However this past year he was arrested twice - for allegedly assaulting an airport employee, and reckless endangerment after he was filmed speeding and doing stunts on a motorcycle on a New York street.
Despite both cases being dropped in court, they were taken as evidence of probation violation by the judge.
Even playing field? Mill's attorneys (Brian McMonagle seen with the star above on November 4) say they plan to appeal her ruling, saying it continues a 'long pattern of unfair treatment'
Against recommendations: Though the star's probation officer and the prosecuting attorney had recommended he not be jailed, judge Genece Brinkley denied the rapper's (performing in September above) request for bail
Mill's imprisonment sparked backlash in opinion pieces, rallies, billboards and bus ads.
Many fellow celebs have taken up his cause.
After receiving what many thought to be a wildly unfair sentence on November 4, Jay Z used his 20million follower Facebook page to speak out.
'The sentence handed down by the Judge -- against the recommendation of the Assistant District Attorney and Probation Officer -- is unjust and heavy handed,' he wrote.
'We will always stand by and support Meek Mill, both as he attempts to right this wrongful sentence and then in returning to his musical career,' the message concluded.
Speaking out against injustice: After receiving what many thought to be a wildly unfair sentence on November 4, Jay Z (seen with the rapper in a Monday Instagram) used his 20million follower Facebook page to speak out
#FreeMeekMill: The Black Album rhymer wrote 'We will always stand by and support Meek Mill, both as he attempts to right this wrongful sentence and then in returning to his musical career' in the stirring post
Comedian Kevin Hart was also among the first to send Meek support.
'Praying for my brother @meekmill right now. God sometimes puts the toughest battles on his strongest soldiers. I'm here for you man!!!! My brother for life...Always here for you man!!! This storm will pass...Stay strong & keep your head up,' he wrote on Instagram.
Rapper Nipsey Hussle, Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Torrey Smith, and DJ Envy also spoke out in support of Meek.
The All Eyes On You rapper famously dated rap royalty Nikki Minaj, briefly igniting a high-profiled feud with Canadian superstar Drake which was ostensibly about the Pink Print princess.
She's spent much of the year travelling around Europe and the Middle East.
But Lindsay Lohan touched back down on American soil on Monday, as she landed in NYC from Dubai.
The 31-year-old actress was casually chic in skinny jeans and leather boots as she made her way through the arrivals terminal at JFK Airport.
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She's back! Lindsay Lohan was spotted at JFK airport in New York on Monday after jetting in from Dubai
Lindsay slipped her slim frame into cuffed jeans, which she teamed with a classic padded jacket and sleek leather ankle boots.
The Mean Girls star wrapped up warm with a black scarf, but still donned a pair of large dark sunglasses in a typically glamorous touch.
She wore her long blonde tresses in a low ponytail and opted for minimal make-up to prove her clear complexion to all as she made her way through the terminal with her suitcase.
Jet setter: The 31-year-old actress looked stylish in dark layers, teaming a padded jacket with cuffed jeans and black booties
In the hood: The Mean Girls star donned large dark sunglasses and wore her long blonde tresses in a low ponytail
In an Instagram posted last month, Lindsay revealed that she will be spending Christmas in Thailand.
The blonde beauty posed in a plunging floral swimsuit beside a swimming pool and wrote: 'Such a beautiful experience here in #Phuket excited for Christmas at my favourite resort!!'
Meanwhile, Lindsay recently claimed 'no-one' cared when she accused her former fiance Egor Tarabasov of abusing her.
Brace yourself! New York is considerably colder than Dubai this time of year
Wanderlust: Lindsay has spent much of the year gallivanting around Europe and The Middle East
The Parent Trap star previously alleged that her former partner - whom she split with in 2016 - had hit her, and accused him of attacking her during a vacation on a Greek island, which he later denied.
The star has since slammed Hollywood for turning a blind eye to her allegations, despite actors and actresses banding together to condemn disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, after it was alleged he sexually harassed a number of women over a 30-year period.
Lindsay - who was recently criticised for standing up for 65-year-old Harvey - posted a screenshot of herself from the 1998 movie The Parent Trap on Instagram and wrote 'Whatever anyone says, I am FOR #womenempowerment as if most women in America cared how I was abused by my ex-fiancewhen not one person stood up for me while he was abusing me (sic)'
Just before leaving Dubai Lindsay shared this snap writing 'Happy 46th National Day UAE'
Heading back east: In this Instagram she posted last month, Lindsay revealed that she will be spending Christmas in Thailand
Lindsay has since amended the caption and removed all mentions of abuse allegations, so it now reads: Whatever anyone says, I am FOR #womenempowerment#strongwoman #BESTRONG #karma will always takes its toll #womensrights (sic)'
The star's comments come after she defended Weinstein in a series of now-deleted posts on her Instagram story, in which she blasted his wife Georgina Chapman for announcing she has left him in the wake of the allegations against him.
Lindsay said: 'Hi, this is Lindsay Lohan. I'm in Dubai, I'm home, and I feel very bad for Harvey Weinstein right now, I don't think it's right what's going on.
'I think Georgina needs to take a stand and be there for her husband.
'And he's never harmed me or did anything wrong to me. We've done several movies together, and so I think everyone needs to stop. I think it's wrong. So stand up.'
Ever since she was queened Miss Chelyabinsk 2004 at age 18, Irina Shayk has dreamed of landing her first Italian Vogue cover, which will finally hit newsstands this Tuesday.
'I am beyond excited to reveal our cover!' the Russian 31-year-old - who boasts 17.3M social media followers - wrote.
'[I'm] so [grateful] to everyone who believed in me on this journey, and to the incredibly talented @mertalas & @macpiggott for always bringing out the absolute best in me. Lastly to my agent @alikavoussi for always believing in me no matter what. I love you guys!'
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Table top: Ever since she was queened Miss Chelyabinsk 2004 at age 18, Irina Shayk has dreamed of landing her first Italian Vogue cover, which will finally hit newsstands this Tuesday
The 5ft10in catwalker had her hair coiffed by Odile Gilbert and her make-up applied by Lisa Eldridge for the Mert and Marcus-shot spread.
The Celebration Issue has two alternative covers featuring Irina's Russian rival Natalia Vodianova as well as the fierce foursome - Joan Smalls, Anja Rubik, Cat Mcneil, and Jamie Bochert.
Shayk (born Shaykhlislamova) and four-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper will reportedly 'try for a sibling' for their nine-month-old daughter Lea De Seine 'next year.'
'Both her and Bradley want another baby. They will be trying next year. Irina loves being a mother,' a source told E! News on November 9.
The Russian 31-year-old wrote: 'I am beyond excited to reveal our cover! '[I'm] so [grateful] to everyone who believed in me on this journey' (pictured October 18)
Which one is best? The Celebration Issue has two alternative covers featuring Irina's Russian rival Natalia Vodianova (L); as well as (R) Joan Smalls, Anja Rubik, Cat Mcneil, and Jamie Bochert
'Irina's mother and Bradley's mother spend a lot of time with them and they help out [with Lea] when Irina and Bradley are busy with work.'
The Philadelphia-born 42-year-old will next reprise his role as Guardians of the Galaxy's genetically-modified raccoon Rocket in Avengers: Infinity War, which hits UK theaters April 27 and US theaters May 4.
Meanwhile, the brunette bombshell has been this week busy modeling for an unknown clothing company in Miami.
'Both her and Bradley want another baby': Shayk (born Shaykhlislamova) and four-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper will reportedly 'try for a sibling' for their nine-month-old daughter Lea De Seine 'next year' (pictured July 10)
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The fate of Netflix hit House Of Cards became uncertain after sexual abuse allegation against lead actor Kevin Spacey caused producers to put shooting of the show on an indefinite hiatus.
But series fans can now rejoice, as production on the sixth season of the political drama is set to start shooting in early 2018 without the 58-year-old star.
The happy HoC news was confirmed by Netflix exec Ted Sarandos Monday at a media conference in NYC.
The final eight-episode season will focus on Robin Wrights character Claire Underwood, according to Variety.
Home sweet home! House Of Cards will begin shooting without star Kevin Spacey in early 2018. The show's return comes after an emergency hiatus put in place after sexual assault allegations against the actor (above with co-star Robin Wright) emerged in late October
The Chief Content Officer for the movie streaming service said that the eight-episode arc will 'bring closure' for fans of the shrewd political series.
Season six will be a bit briefer than its predecessors.
The show's five previous outings were 13 episodes a piece.
Originally producers hoped that shooting of the Emmy winning show would be back in action post-Thanksgiving but it looks like that cameras won't start rolling until the start of 2018.
Pressing pause: The fate of Netflix hit House Of Cards became uncertain after sexual abuse allegation against lead actor Kevin Spacey (above October 27) caused producers to put shooting of the show on an indefinite hiatus
It takes a village! Sarandos (above in October) also explained that it was important for the the show to continue so the some-2000 Baltimore-area workers and artisans who make HoC happen could return to work
While the series is one of Netflix's flagship productions, Sarandos also explained that it was important for the the show to continue so the some-2000 Baltimore-area workers and artisans who make House Of Cards happen could return to their jobs.
House Of Cards is hoping to move on without the shadow cast by the sexual assault scandals surrounding lead Kevin Spacey.
The star, who plays president Frank Underwood in the show, came under scrutiny after a late October expose accused him of forcing himself upon actor Anthony Rapp when he was only 14 years old.
Production on House Of Cards was subsequently paused October 31 following the story, published by Buzzfeed.
A scandal exposed: Spacey came under scrutiny after a late October expose accused him of forcing himself upon actor Anthony Rapp (above October 7) when he was only 14 years old
After the story broke MRC Studios, the company who oversees the show, promptly suspended Spacey.
Netflix followed suit, stating it would 'not be involved with any further production of House Of Cards that includes Kevin Spacey.'
Cards made history back in 2013 when it was the first web-only series to earn an Emmy nod.
Since then the drama has taken home seven statues, including Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series and several categories from the Creative Arts ceremony.
She is the daughter of legendary supermodel Cindy Crawford, and one of the rising stars of the high-fashion world.
And Kaia Gerber dazzled as she made an uber-stylish appearance at the British Fashion Awards 2017 at the Royal Albert Hall in London on Monday.
The catwalk sensation, 16, made a stylish sartorial statement in a powder blue halterneck two-piece which featured dazzling pearl and silver embellishments.
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Model behaviour: Kaia Gerber dazzled as she made an uber-stylish appearance at the British Fashion Awards 2017 at the Royal Albert Hall in London on Monday
The IMG model wowed in the couture outfit, which featured statement flared sleeves on the cold-shoulder top paired with an elegant tiered skirt
She accentuated her height in powder blue pumps with a diamante heel.
Looking the spitting image of her supermodel mother Cindy, Kaia looked fresh-faced with a faint rose blush, a glossy nude lip and lashings of mascara.
She finished her sartorially savvy outfit with oversized stud earrings by Messika jewellery with her brunette mane styled into a deep side parting with subtly curled ends.
Teen catwalk qyeen: The catwalk sensation, 16, made a stylish sartorial statement in a powder blue halterneck two-piece which featured dazzling pearl and silver embellishments
Dazzling display:Looking the spitting image of her supermodel mother Cindy, Kaia looked fresh-faced with a faint rose blush, a glossy nude lip and lashings of mascara
Show-stopper: She finished her dazzling outfit with oversized studs as her brunette mane was styled into a deep side parting with subtly curled ends
Matching the glamour with her fellow attendees, Kaia was joined by pop sensation Selena Gomez, television presenter Caroline Flack and model Poppy Delevingne.
In partnership with Swarovski, the star-studded event centres on the creativity expressed in fashion within the past year.
The fashionable appearance at the awards followed her low-key display at LAX airport on Friday, as she paired cropped bottoms with a plaid jacket and fitted beanie.
Fashion Awards 2017 - The Winners Outstanding Contribution to British Fashion Award Christopher Bailey British Designer of the Year - Menswear Craig Green for Craig Green British Designer of the Year - Womenswear Jonathan Anderson for JW Anderson Accessories Designer of the Year - Jonathan Anderson for Loewe Swarovski Award For Positive Change - Maria Grazia Chiuri Urban Luxe Brand - Off-White Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator - Pat McGrath British Emerging Talent - Womenswear Michael Halpern for Halpern British Emerging Talent - Menswear Charles Jeffrey for Charles Jeffrey Loverboy Business Leader - Marco Bizzarri for Gucci Special Recognition Award For Innovation - Stella McCartney Style Icon - Donatella Versace Designer of the Year - Raf Simons Model of the Year - Adwoa Aboah Advertisement
Fresh-faced: Kaia, who made her fashion week debut this year, posed with aplomb
Statement style: Kaia flashed a delighted smile as she posed on the red carpet in glittering heels
Fashion favourites : Kaia posed with glamorous Victoria's Secret Angel Stella Maxwell
Everywhere's a catwalk: Kaia looked relaxed and happy as she left the star-studded event
Glitter: The stunning pearl embellishments on Kaia's dress caught the light as she waited for a ride home
Jet set style: Kaia was spotted in casual wear while arriving at LAX on Friday
The teenager chose classic black bottoms as she layered a white T-shirt with a monochromatic plaid flannel.
Kaia made her way inside the airport while rocking black and white sneakers, as she covered her dark brown tresses in a 'I Love New York' emblazoned beanie.
She added a touch of glam with a black and silver Alexander Wang bag.
Last week, Kaia shared a radiant selfie to her Instagram page, much to the delight of her 2.4 million Instagram followers.
The star also recently shared a gorgeous photo of herself with her supermodel mom Cindy.
She's making the airport her runway: The 16-year-old model paired cropped bottoms with a plaid top and beanie for her flight
Wow factor: Last week, Kaia shared a stunning selfie to her Instagram page, much to the delight of her 2.4 million Instagram followers
Cindy told The Cut in a recent story that her daughter is a fan of her beauty regime.
Adding: 'The good thing is that shes grown up with seeing how I take care of myself, so I dont really have to say that much to her.'
'Shes seen me going to bed early if I have an early call the next day or waking up early to squeeze in a workout,' the 51-year-old legend said.
Cindy concluded: 'Maybe its just my kids, but they act like theyre not listening to what you say, so I have to live by example.'
He looked like he'd been mugged as he walked across a parking lot in Los Angeles with blood pouring from his forehead.
But no need to worry about Chris Pine.
The actor was filming TNT's new six-part drama One Day She'll Darken, based on the real-life of Fauna Hodel.
Great act: Chris Pine looked like he'd been mugged as he walked across a parking lot in Los Angeles with blood pouring from his forehead and splattered all over his white coat
The 33-year-old plays Jay Singletary, a former Marine-turned-hack reporter probing the case of Fauna Hodel, who was given away by her white teenage mother to a black restroom attendant in a Nevada casino in 1949.
The sinister trail leads him to infamous Hollywood gynecologist, Dr. George Hodel, a suspect in the infamous Black Dahlia murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947.
Chris, wearing a blood-spattered blue shirt and black pants with his tie loosened around his neck, shrugged off an equally gory white hospital coat as he walked back to his car.
All fake: The 33-year-old is filming TNT mini-series One Day She'll Darken about the mysterious early life of Fauna Hodel
More gore: Blood seemed to be streaming from his forehead and both his eyes looked as if they had been beaten shut as he stripped off what appeared to be a hospital coat
Tough case: The actor is playing a Marine-turned-reporter probing the story of Fauna Hodel, who was given away by her white teen mom to a black restroom attendant in a casino in 1949
The Star Trek star is also a producer on the bio series, based on Fauna's bestseller of the same name, due to air next year.
Meanwhile, Chris will next be seen on the big screen in magical mystery A Wrinkle In Time, with Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling, due out on February 3.
He recently wrapped filming on Netflix's Outlaw King, in which he plays the great 14th century Scottish leader Robert The Bruce who fought the English monarchy, which has yet to set a release date.
On the trail: His probe leads him to infamous Hollywood gynecologist, Dr. George Hodel, a suspect in the infamous Black Dahlia murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947
Time to change: Chris carried his messed up coat back across the parking lot
Chris has thriller All The Old Knives in preproduction in which he stars opposite Michelle Williams as CIA operatives, and former lovers.
They reunite at Carmel-by-the-Sea in California to re-examine an old mission where a fellow agent might have been compromised.
And, of course, he's set to go boldly back into space as Captain James T. Kirk in the as-yet-unnamed third sequel of the rebooted Star Trek film franchise.
Boldly going: Chris is signed up to reprise his role as Captain James T. Kirk in the upcoming Star Trek movie. Here he's seen in 2016's Star Trek: Beyond with the late Anton Yelchin
New movie: The actor will next be seen on the big screen in magical mystery A Wrinkle In Time, with Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling, due out on February 3
She's the stunning model known for her rocking body.
But Natalie Roser has admitted that she has suffered body confidence issues in the past.
Appearing on the January cover of Women's Health magazine, the 27-year-old admitted that she has 'always had doubts' about her physique.
'There have always been doubts': Natalie Roser admits she's had body confidence issues as she stuns on the cover of Women's Health magazine
'My body confidence is good now, but there have always been doubts if you don't get a job, you think, 'Is it because my measurements are bigger than the girl who did?' Natalie told the publication.
'Little things play on your mind. But I learnt pretty quickly that it's not necessarily me; it's about what the client is looking for to represent their brand.
'Once I realised that perhaps I just didn't fit the bikinis or clothes the way they wanted, I relaxed and started to take care of myself for me,' she continued.
Doubts: 'My body confidence is good now, but there have always been doubts if you don't get a job, you think, 'Is it because my measurements are bigger than the girl who did?' Natalie told the publication
Not that the model has issues anymore, while holidaying in the Philippines recently Natalie ditched half of her skimpy outfit in favour of her own hands.
The topless picture, which was uploaded to Natalie's Instagram, shows the blonde beauty standing knee-deep in crystal clear water and looking downward seductively.
Suns out, tops off! Natalie recently posted this raunchy snap on her Instagram page
Her washboard abs were on full display with a pair of polka-dot bikini bottoms the only fabric to be seen.
The stunner has been uploading a series of bikini and lingerie images from her latest campaigns in recent days, giving her 880,000 followers something to talk about.
Meanwhile, Natalie recently revealed the secrets behind her incredible figure.
Can't get enough! The stunner has been uploading a series of bikini and lingerie images from her latest campaigns in recent days
She reportedly has had an alkaline cleanse and success in kicking an 'eating and sugar addiction' to thank for her glowing summer-ready body.
Natalie moved to Melbourne earlier this year to spend more time with her Neighbours star beau, Harley Bonner, who often features in her pictures.
The couple confirmed their romance in February and have appeared inseparable ever since.
The Academy put their most embarrassing, awkward mistake from last year's awards at the center of the first preview for the 90th annual ceremony airing March 4 on ABC.
'There's only one season that's better - Oscar season,' the commercial announced.
'We do it better. Better skills. Better thrills. Better chills. The best glamour, movies, sizzle. Bigger moments. Better surprises. The biggest honor.'
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Owning it: The Academy put their most embarrassing, awkward mistake from last year's awards at the center of the first preview for the 90th annual ceremony airing March 4 on ABC
Global accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers took the blame for giving Bonnie and Clyde co-stars Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway the best actress envelope rather than best picture backstage.
When La La Land was mistakenly announced the winner instead of Moonlight, the resulting scramble onstage the Dolby Theatre of the live telecast was arguably more shocking than hilarious.
Oscar envelope guardians Martha Ruiz and Brian Cullinan were not fired, but Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs added a third balloting partner and banned distracting cellphones backstage - according to The Guardian.
The commercial announced: 'There's only one season that's better - Oscar season. We do it better. Better skills. Better thrills. Better chills. The best glamour, movies, sizzle. Bigger moments. Better surprises. The biggest honor'
'Warren, what did you do?' Global accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers took the blame for giving Bonnie and Clyde co-stars Faye Dunaway (L) and Warren Beatty (R) the best actress envelope rather than best picture backstage
Not that funny: When La La Land was mistakenly announced the winner instead of Moonlight, the resulting scramble onstage the Dolby Theatre of the live telecast was arguably more shocking than hilarious
Back for more: Oscar envelope guardians Martha Ruiz (L) and Brian Cullinan (R) were not fired, but Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs added a third balloting partner and banned distracting cellphones backstage
Early contenders earning Oscar buzz includes Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, Steven Spielberg's The Post, Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, and Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name.
And Jordan Peele can expect some love for his critically-lauded directorial debut - the racially-charged horror gem, Get Out.
Best actress frontrunner Frances McDormand will likely receive a nod as grieving divorced mother Mildred Hayes in Martin McDonagh's black dramedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Early contenders: Oscar buzz surrounds Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, Steven Spielberg's The Post, Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, and Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name (pictured)
Rare bid in the horror genre: And Jordan Peele can expect some love for his critically-lauded directorial debut - the racially-charged horror gem, Get Out
Best actress frontrunner: Frances McDormand (R) will likely receive a nod as grieving divorced mother Mildred Hayes in Martin McDonagh's black dramedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best actor frontrunner: Gary Oldman has his make-up/hair team to thank - David Malinowski, Lucy Sibbick, and Kazuhiro Tsuji - if he wins as Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Joe Wright's WWII drama Darkest Hour
And best actor frontman Gary Oldman has his make-up/hair team to thank - David Malinowski, Lucy Sibbick, and Kazuhiro Tsuji - if he wins as Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Joe Wright's WWII drama Darkest Hour.
Nominations will be announced January 23 for the Academy Awards, which brings back last year's host Jimmy Kimmel only at an earlier time slot (5PM PST).
In the iconic 1990 movie, Macaulay Culkin's onscreen parents famously forgot to take him along on their family trip to Paris.
But the former child star was anything but Home Alone as he lived it up with his new girlfriend Brenda Song and his goddaughter Paris Jackson in the City Of Lights.
The foodie pals hit some of the city's most well regarded restaurants, including the fancy Joel Robuchon restaurant L'Atelier, which has two Michelin stars.
PICTURE EXCLUSIVE! Far from Home Alone! Macaulay Culkin and girlfriend Brenda Song live it up with Paris Jackson in the City Of Love
The pair were joined by Culkin's close friends Paris Jackson, who is also his goddaughter, and Seth Green, who brought along wife Clare Grant
The restaurant is one of 13 in the celebrity chef's international portfolio.
The other 12 are in Bangkok, Thailand; New York and Las Vegas, United States; London, United Kingdom; Hong Kong, Shanghai and Macao, China; Monaco; Montreal, Canada; Singapore; Taipei, Taiwan and Tokyo, Japan.
The ritzy restaurant in the French capital's Saint-Germain neighborhood and features an open kitchen at which lucky diners can gawk at the chefs' culinary skills.
The restaurant's chef's tasting menu will set one back a cool 189 and features avant-garde combinations such as gazpacho and gyoza dumplings.
It also has a regular menu featuring nouveau spins on traditional French classics for those not willing to fork over such a large sum.
Reservations are recommended but not required at the celebrity magnet establishment.
Culkin has only been dating Brenda for four months, but he's clearly smitten with her. And her effect on him is obvious.
Since their relationship took off the once shabby actor has ditched the long hair and unkempt beard, for a far smarter appearance - even wearing a suit for his Parisian night out.
And the fine dining is paying off, with the once gaunt star looking well fed and healthy on his night out with Brenda and Paris.
Suits you: The former child star has smartened up his look since he started dating Brenda
As he was: Culkin at his lowest point, in 2012, left when pictures of him looking gaunt set the tabloids alight with rumors of drug abuse, which he denied; he is also pictured in May this year, before he began dating Brenda
Back in 2012 it was a different story - with pictures of Culkin looking skinny and haggard setting the tabloids aflame with rumors of drug abuse, something he has denied.
Culkin, since starring in the iconic Home Alone films, has portrayed legendary New York City 'club kid' Michael Alig (Party Monster) and has a starring role in his friend Seth Green's upcoming film Changeland.
After filling their stomachs at the destination spot, the friends were pictured walking off their meal with a late night stroll along the Seine river on the Pont des Arts.
The group was completed by former child star Seth Green - who introduced his old friend Culkin to Brenda - and his wife Clare Grant.
Post meal smoke: The pals made the most of their time in Paris, dining at the fancy Joel Robuchon restaurant L'Atelier, which has two Michelin stars
Paris in Paris: The young model looked at home as she waited for her friends outside
Now that's a bad habit! Paris and Macaulay shared a cigarette together
During their Parisian getaway - which took place over Thanksgiving - Culkin and Brenda were also spotted enjoying some couple time.
The two were seen splashing the cash on a shopping trip at the Monoprix retail store, where Culkin bought his love a large stuffed teddy bear.
Of course, the actor is no stranger to Paris - he bought a house there in 2013 following his split from Jordan Lane Price.
Paris and pals! Michael's girl chats to her friends outside the two-Michelin starred restaurant
New romance: Macaulay and Brenda struck up their relationship earlier this year
Big year: The two were introduced to one another while shooting Seth's directorial debut, Changeland in Thailand
Macaulay and Brenda struck up their relationship earlier this year when they were introduced to one another while shooting former Austin Paris star Seth's directorial debut, Changeland, in Thailand.
The 29-year-old actress said previously: 'It's been incredible. We spent five weeks in Thailand shooting this.
'Seth directed and wrote and starred in it, and this has been in the making for the last seven years, so he made it happen, it was incredible - it was like, Changeland for me.'
So in love: During their Parisian getaway - which took place over Thanksgiving - the two were also spotted splashing the cash on a shopping trip at the Monoprix retail store, where Macaulay bought his love a large stuffed teddy bear
Family ties: Paris, left, is Macaulay's goddaughter
Matchmaker: Seth, second from left, who found fame as a child star in the Austin Powers movies, cast both Macaulay and Brenda in his directorial debut, Changeland
Matchy matchy: Culkin and his love both wore black rimmed glasses
And she admitted: 'That sounds super cheesy but I came back like a different person.'
Song is a somewhat prolific actress who jump-started her career as a Disney child star.
She was the female lead in both 'The Suite Life of Zack and Cody' and 'The Suite Life on Deck'.
She has since appeared in the Facebook origin story 'The Social Network' and as Raven-Symone's character's best friend in 'College Road Trip'.
Macaulay was previously married to actress Rachel Miner, who he tied the knot with in 1998, but the pair separated in 2000 and divorced two years later.
Brenda, on the other hand, was engaged to Miley Cyrus' brother Trace but called off the engagement in 2012.
She is hot off the Shanghai runway for the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in November.
And Stella Maxwell made a devilishly sexy arrival at The Fashion Awards 2017 at the Royal Albert Hall, London on Monday.
The Victoria's Secret Angel, 27, put on a lavish spectacle in her Swarovski jewel embellished thigh-high boots, drawing attention to her impressive legs.
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The (Victoria's Secret) Angel has landed! Stella Maxwell looked devilishly sexy in Swarovski embellished thigh-high boots and cold shoulder dress at The Fashion Awards 2017 on Monday
Owning the catwalk, the blonde bombshell grabbed attention with the brightly coloured jewels which adorned the boots.
The model put on a busty display in her cold shoulder dress, featuring a low-cut neckline adorned with the very same jewel embellishments to catch the eye.
Wearing her trademark golden locks in a choppy layered style, Stella's locks framed her angelic face which was accentuated with a light dusting of pink make-up.
These boots are made for walking: The blonde bombshell grabbed attention with the brightly coloured jewels which adorned the boots
The lingerie model was every inch the social butterfly when she joined Hailey Baldwin inside the glamorous venue in Kensington.
Stella wowed as she mingled with the great and the good of the showbiz world at the fashion extravaganza.
She was reunited with Victoria's Secret Angel Karlie Kloss at the bash, following their trip to Shanghai, China where they put on a show-stopping parade for the show.
Blonde bombshell: Stella Maxwell also graced the celebrities with her presence in thigh-high stiletto boots which made her legs seem endless
Fashion Awards 2017 - The Winners Outstanding Contribution to British Fashion Award Christopher Bailey British Designer of the Year - Menswear Craig Green for Craig Green British Designer of the Year - Womenswear Jonathan Anderson for JW Anderson Accessories Designer of the Year - Jonathan Anderson for Loewe Swarovski Award For Positive Change - Maria Grazia Chiuri Urban Luxe Brand - Off-White Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator - Pat McGrath British Emerging Talent - Womenswear Michael Halpern for Halpern British Emerging Talent - Menswear Charles Jeffrey for Charles Jeffrey Loverboy Business Leader - Marco Bizzarri for Gucci Special Recognition Award For Innovation - Stella McCartney Style Icon - Donatella Versace Designer of the Year - Raf Simons Model of the Year - Adwoa Aboah Advertisement
Bella Hadid and Elsa Hosk also stormed the runway while Lais Ribeiro was the chosen model to wear this year's coveted Fantasy Bra down the runway.
As for her romance, Stella has been dating Twilight saga star Kristen Stewart.
Kristen and Stella have gone from strength to strength since rumours first surfaced they were an item back in 2016.
Pin-credible: The model put on a busty display in her cold shoulder dress, featuring a low-cut neckline adorned with the very same jewel embellishments to catch the eye
Their relationship status was finally sealed with a kiss when they were spotted smooching in the back of a taxi in Milan at the beginning of this year.
The Hollywood beauty revealed that she keeps her relationships under wraps because she treasures them.
Kristen's relationship with the Victoria's Secret Angel model came after the breakdown of her romance with Robert Pattinson.
The Twilight co-stars' love affair lasted almost four years from 2008 until 2012.
Great pals: The lingerie model was every inch the social butterfly when she joined Hailey Baldwin inside the glamorous venue in Kensington
Incredibly close: Stella wowed as she mingled with the great and the good of the showbiz world at the fashion extravaganza
It came to a dramatic end soon after she was pictured kissing Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders.
In March 2017, Kristen told The Sunday Times: 'When I was dating Rob, the public were the enemyand that is no way to live.
'I didn't talk about my first relationships that went public because I wanted things that are mine to be mine.
'I would have kept my life private for ever. But then I can't walk outside holding somebody's hand, as I'm followed everywhere.'
They're two of Hollywood's hottest young properties following the success of Stranger Things season two.
And show stars Charlie Heaton and Natalia Dyer looked to be enjoying their moment as they walked the red carpet outside of the Fashion Awards 2017 in London.
The pair, who have been official for some time, chose the Royal Albert Hall to make their first red carpet appearance together on.
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All smiles: Stranger Things stars Charlie Heaton and Natalia Dyer looked loved up as they walked the red carpet outside of the Fashion Awards 2017 in London.
The couple, who met on the set of the Netflix smash hit, play Jonathan and Nancy, who form an unlikely bond as the plot progresses.
Charlie cut a dapper figure in an orange Coach 1941 x Keith Haring souvenir varsity jacket and leather belt, paired with a skinny black shirt, and black trousers.
The 23-year-old actor sported his hair high and to the side in a trendy quiff - highlighting his enviably pronounced cheekbones.
80s chic: Charlie cut a dapper figure in an orange Coach x Keith Haring souvenir varsity jacket and leather belt, paired with a skinny black shirt, and black trousers
Meanwhile 20-year-old Natalia wore the Coach 1941 star print tie neck dress, paired with link sandals and carried the Rogue 25 bag from the brand.
Fastened at the neck, the effortlessly elegant number hinted at Natalia's slender figure and enviably long legs.
Letting her blonde hair fall past her shoulders, the star wore a smattering of light makeup to highlight her natural good looks.
Dapper: The 23-year-old actor sported his hair high and to the side in a trendy quiff, highlighting his enviably pronounced cheekbones
Looking relaxed and happy in each other's company, Charlie seemed to have put his airport turbulence from last month behind him.
Charlie was involved in a situation last month where cocaine was detected on him as he made his way through LAX.
The refusal to enter the States caused Charlie to miss the eagerly-anticipated premiere for the second season of Netflix 's breakout hit Stranger Things.
With series three of the show being confirmed, it is unclear whether Charlie will be allowed to return to the States for future filming endeavours.
Stunning: Meanwhile 20-year-old Natalia wore the Coach 1941 star print tie neck dress, paired with link sandals and carried the Rogue 25 bag from the brand
Fashion Awards 2017 - The Winners Outstanding Contribution to British Fashion Award Christopher Bailey British Designer of the Year - Menswear Craig Green for Craig Green British Designer of the Year - Womenswear Jonathan Anderson for JW Anderson Accessories Designer of the Year - Jonathan Anderson for Loewe Swarovski Award For Positive Change - Maria Grazia Chiuri Urban Luxe Brand - Off-White Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator - Pat McGrath British Emerging Talent - Womenswear Michael Halpern for Halpern British Emerging Talent - Menswear Charles Jeffrey for Charles Jeffrey Loverboy Business Leader - Marco Bizzarri for Gucci Special Recognition Award For Innovation - Stella McCartney Style Icon - Donatella Versace Designer of the Year - Raf Simons Model of the Year - Adwoa Aboah Advertisement
Controversy: Charlie has seen some troubles recently, which involved his situation at the airport last month, where cocaine was detected on him
Feeling good: The pair appeared to be in good spirits as they headed to the event's after-party later on
MailOnline has contacted representatives for Charlie for further comment.
In a carefully worded statement, Heaton said he was working to 'rectify' the situation, which is said to have occurred after sniffer dogs detected the cocaine on his person.
'My planned travel to the U.S. last week was affected by an issue at U.S. immigration, and I am working to rectify it as soon as possible,' the 23-year-old told People magazine.
'I do want to clarify that I was not arrested or charged with a crime, and cooperated fully with the U.S. officials at LAX.'
Following the drug's detection, Charlie was questioned before being sent back to England on a return flight, and was unable to attend the premiere for the second season of Stranger Things.
Catching up: Charlie chatted to Chris Boustead (L) at the event's after party, held at RUIN on The Strand later on
It's a rare sight to see mum and daughter together.
But supermodel Naomi Campbell, 47, brought her mum Valerie Morris, 66, as her date to the ever-glamorous Fashion Awards.
Proving the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, Naomi complemented her mother's sophisticated midnight attire with her own black ensemble.
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Mum's the word: Naomi Campbell, 47, brought her mum Valerie Morris, 66, as her date to the ever-glamorous Fashion Awards
Stylish: Proving the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, Naomi complemented her mother's sophisticated midnight attire with her own black ensemble
The modelling heavyweight stunned in a black velvet bodice fitted perfectly to her statuesque frame, allowing the white and black lace skirt to drop gracefully to the floor.
Belted to show her slim waist, Naomi continued to prove that age is just a number as she beamed on the red carpet.
In true Naomi form, the star let her straight raven hair fall over her shoulders, and accented the dark ensemble with a silver statement ring, pendant earrings glittering silver cuff bracelet.
Appearing fresh faced, the Streatham-born model paired her make-up look perfectly, choosing a berry lip and dark smokey eyes.
Mum Valerie also dazzled in black, this time opting for a sharply cut midnight suit with a silk collared shirt.
Classic: The modelling heavyweight stunned in a black velvet bodice fitted perfectly to her statuesque frame, allowing the white and black lace skirt to drop gracefully to the floor
Fashion Awards 2017 - The Winners Outstanding Contribution to British Fashion Award Christopher Bailey British Designer of the Year - Menswear Craig Green for Craig Green British Designer of the Year - Womenswear Jonathan Anderson for JW Anderson Accessories Designer of the Year - Jonathan Anderson for Loewe Swarovski Award For Positive Change - Maria Grazia Chiuri Urban Luxe Brand - Off-White Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator - Pat McGrath British Emerging Talent - Womenswear Michael Halpern for Halpern British Emerging Talent - Menswear Charles Jeffrey for Charles Jeffrey Loverboy Business Leader - Marco Bizzarri for Gucci Special Recognition Award For Innovation - Stella McCartney Style Icon - Donatella Versace Designer of the Year - Raf Simons Model of the Year - Adwoa Aboah Advertisement
Back to blakc: Belted to show her slim waist, Naomi continued to prove that age is just a number as she beamed on the red carpet
Stunning: In true Naomi form, the star let her straight raven hair fall over her shoulders, and accented the dark ensemble with a silver statement ring, pendant earrings glittering silver cuff bracelet
Keeping the cold at bay, Valerie, who also models, made sure to carry a black fur shawl and matching diamante-detailed clutch bag.
Contrasting the dark look, Valerie added a serious touch of glamour by adding a jeweled snake necklace for extra impact.
Mum-of-two Valerie kept her light brunette tresses long and sulty, adding texture with light waves running through.
The one thing not coordinated with daughter Naomi was the make-up, as Valerie added a deep red lip as a pop of colour.
Glowing: Appearing fresh faced, the Streatham-born model paired her make-up look perfectly, choosing a berry lip and dark smokey eyes.
Shine bright: Contrasting the dark look, Valerie added a serious touch of glamour by adding a jeweled snake necklace for extra impact
Radiant: Naomi proved her glowing and youthful complexion as she posed on the red carpet
What a stud! Naomi maintained her chic look by adding a studded cape atop her look, as she made her way home from the event later on
Recently, Naomi paid tribute to her late friend, fashion designer Azzedine Alaia's, who died at the age of 77.
An emotional Naomi was seen paying her respects to the fashion designer, as she attended his funeral at the Sidi Bou Said cemetery in Tunis,Tunisia in November.
Fellow model Bella Hadid shared a photo of Naomi and the designer, expressing her devastation of the news.
She's the personal trainer and psychology graduate who shot to fame after winning the Miss Universe Australia pageant in 2008.
And Laura Dundovic, 30, can now add 'thespian' to her long list of career roles thanks to her new role in upcoming romantic comedy, A Long Night.
While the blonde beauty has remained tight-lipped on the nature of her role, she couldn't help but gush about the project when chatting to The Daily Telegraph this week.
Is there anything she can't do? Laura Dundovic, 30, can now add 'thespian' to her long list of career roles thanks to her new role in upcoming romantic comedy, A Long Night
'It comes out in 2018 so it'll be interesting to see where everything goes from there,' she said.
Laura will star opposite Hey Dad's Rachael Beck and Catching Milat's Mal Kennard in the highly-anticipated project.
She will also be joined by controversial songstress Chantelle Barry, who was famously booted from girl-band Bardot after being accused of theft by fellow band-mates.
Catwalk queen! The personal trainer and psychology graduate shot to fame after winning the Miss Universe Australia pageant in 2008
Star-studded cast: Laura will star alongside Chantelle Barry (pictured), who was famously booted from girl-band Bardot after being accused of theft by fellow band-mates
While A Long Night will see Laura take on her biggest role to date, it's not the first time she has tried her hand at acting.
The leggy glamazon made her acting debut at age 15 on the hit Channel Seven soap Home And Away.
In 2010, Laura returned to the small screen by nabbing a hosting role on Foxtel's short-lived reality show Dating In The Dark.
Woman of many talents: While A Long Night will see Laura take on her biggest role to date, it's not the first time she has tried her hand at acting
She went on to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Art before landing a role in an independent Australian film Ruben Guthrie in 2015.
Early in 2015, she took part in the first season of I'm A Celebrity...Get me Out Of Here, lasting 17 days in the South African jungle.
Her foray into reality television proved fruitful for her love life, with the pageant princess striking up romance with fellow contestant Quade Cooper.
Rise to fame: She studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Art before landing a role in an independent Australian film Ruben Guthrie in 2015
She's the six-year-old Sydney school girl who boasts a wardrobe most fully-fledged fashionistas can only dream.
And like any fashion fanatic would, Roxy Jacenko's daughter Pixie Curtis already has her holiday look sorted, sharing a photo of a $189 Oleg Cassini dress to Instagram on Monday.
The upmarket Christmas Eve look is just the latest addition to Pixie's extensive wardrobe, which includes designers Dolce & Gabbana and Marco Jacobs, as well as a host of popular Australian brands thrown in for good measure.
Is this the most extravagant six-year-old's wardrobe ever? Inside Pixie Curtis' designer wardrobe as Roxy Jacenko shows off her daughter's lavish Christmas outfit
On Monday, Roxy shared a photo of Pixie's designer dress to the youngster's Instagram account.
Followers of Pixie were quick to comment on the extravagant purchase, gushing that the dress was 'beautiful' and made her look like a 'snow princess'.
Other photos posted to Pixie's account show her wearing a personalised The Daily Edited backpack worth $129.95 and popular Australian brands Peter Alexander and Speedo.
'Snow princess': Followers of Pixie were quick to comment on the extravagant purchase, gushing that the dress was 'beautiful'
Expensive: Other photos posted to Pixie's account show her wearing a personalised The Daily Edited backpack worth $129.95
Stylish: Roxy shared a photo of Pixie clad in activewear from Bec Judd's label Jaggad worth $120
Last month, Roxy shared a photo of Pixie clad in activewear from Bec Judd's label Jaggad worth $120.
Pixie's impressive 109, 000 Instagram followers check in daily to see what the well-known toddler is sporting.
Her designer looks are usually teamed with one of the tot's signature headpieces from Pixie's Bows, which is regularly tagged in social media posts.
Her best ambassador! Her designer looks are usually teamed with one of the tot's signature headpieces from Pixie's Bows , which is regularly tagged in social media posts
The hair accessories are a favourite of celebrity kids, including Tom Cruise's daughter Suri.
During a holiday to Hawaii in January, Pixie wore a $435 Dolce & Gabbana frock, a $107 Marc Jacobs oversized shirt and a $887 Missoni sundress.
Silver sandals by Fussy Feet Children's Shoes, at $125 a pop, finished off the night-wear ensemble.
Stylish tot: In an Instagram post shared during her Hawaiian holiday in January, Pixie was seen sporting a Dolce & Gabbana rose-printed frock, worth approximately $435 AUD
Effortless style: A more casual ensemble for a walk along popular tourist destination Waikiki Beach, saw Pixie in a blue, red and grey oversized Marc Jacobs shirt, priced at $107 AUD
Too cute: Trawling through the picturesque gardens at The Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach, calls for an effortless yet on-trend look. A nautical inspired shirt dress by LM Bambini at $71 AUD is key
For Pixie and Curtis, fashion is in their genes.
Roxy told OK! magazine in April last year, that fashion is 'in our blood' as both her parents Doreen and Nick Jacenko, started out as clothing manufacturers.
The entrepreneur described Pixie as a 'girly girl' who loves to dress in very feminine pieces.
Late 2015, Roxy created an Instagram page titled Pixie Curtis Sale, where people could select some of the tot's second-hand clothes.
The range included top brands such as Burberry, Stella McCartney, Kenzo and Ralph Lauren.
His wife Chezzi revealed to her blog last week, that she's to undergo surgery, just weeks before Christmas, for debilitating migraines.
And following the news, Grant Denyer was pictured looking downcast on a stroll in Queensland's the Gold Coast.
The 40-year-old Family Feud host in a smart ensemble, kept his head bowed for most of the sighting.
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Sighting: Grant Denyer, 40, looked downcast on a stroll in Queensland last week, as wife Chezzi reveals she's to undergo surgery for a debilitating condition just weeks before Christmas
Grant walked along the side of the road, holding onto a large umbrella in one hand.
The Channel Seven personality sported a crisp white dress shirt, tucked into a pair of slim-fitting tan trousers.
Grant accessorised with tan leather dress shoes, a navy suit jacket, a silver statement watch, a pocket square and sunglasses hooked onto the neckline of his shirt.
On the go: The Channel Seven personality walked along the side of the road, holding onto a large umbrella in one hand
Smart: Grant sported a crisp white dress shirt, tucked into a pair of slim-fitting tan trousers, accessorised with a navy suit jacket
Coordinating style: The presenter accessorised with tan leather dress shoes, a navy suit jacket, a silver statement watch, a pocket square and sunglasses hooked onto the neckline of his shirt
Not his usual energetic self, the presenter looked to have a lot on his mind and kept his head bowed.
The sighting comes as wife Chezzi revealed to her blog last week, that she's to undergo surgery, just weeks before Christmas, for debilitating migraines.
'I am left really struggling to just get through my everyday life,' the 38-year-old candidly shared with her online fans.
Low-key: Not his usual energetic self, Grant looked to have a lot on his mind
Distracted: At one stage, the former weatherman looked out into the distance
Family man: Grant's wedding ring was visible as held onto the umbrella
Chezzi began: 'The week of my birthday earlier this month (November), I was sent to hospital with a severe migraine pain in my left hand side of my head. I've not experienced anything like it and thought it was caused by me detoxing?'
With her surgery scheduled for December 6, the media personality went on to describe the debilitating condition.
'In the interim, I am left really struggling to just get through my everyday life. Some days are worse than others. Some days I have such severe vertigo that I nearly fall over if I get up too quickly or if I move my head in a certain way.'
'I'm struggling to get through everyday life': Grant's wife Chezzi, 38, revealed via a blog post last week, that she's to undergo surgery for a debilitating condition just weeks before Christmas
Debilitating: Severe migraines have left the media personality struggling daily, and is scheduled to go into surgery on December 6
Chezzi is relying on the support of her beloved husband Grant, to get her through such challenging times.
'My beautiful and loving husband is my tower of strength and I've been depending on him so much lately.'
Chezzi, a Jeans for Genes ambassador, married Grant, 40, in 2010, and the couple share two daughters, Sailor, six, and Scout, two.
Support network: Chezzi is relying on the support of her beloved husband Grant, to get her through such challenging times
Family: 'My beautiful and loving husband is my tower of strength and I've been depending on him so much lately,' the mother-of-two wrote to her blog last week
Living on a 27 acre farm just outside of Bathurst, the family could welcome another child in the near future.
Speaking to TV WEEK magazine in September, Chezzi revealed that Grant would love a son.
'He'd love a little boy running around the house. Grant's an amazing dad, and we've spoken about it, so who knows.'
Paris Hilton is a busy girl that spends a lot of time on airplanes heading to new and exciting destinations.
After spending a few days in Australia to celebrate the launch of her newest perfume Rose Rush, she's already landed in Miami where she will take over turntables for one night only.
The socialite and beauty entrepreneur will perform at the popular Wall Lounge on December 9.
Mirror, mirror: Paris Hilton has landed in Miami for Art Basel this week
How do I look?: The former reality star shared looks with her fans on social media
The former reality, star who alongside Nicole Richie starred in The Simple Life, has been a staple at the yearly Art Basel events held in the Magic City.
It is the 36-year-old's sixth year attending the event, where she has performed every year.
The international art fair showcases contemporary artwork from both new and established artists.
It's also a magnet for big celebrity talent including Gerard Butler, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Alicia Keys, Katie Holmes and Rosario Dawson.
On the road again: Hilton shared this photo from her car as she headed to Florida
Party over here: The socialite celebrated Art Basel in 2011
'[It's] the best time to be in Miami,' Hilton told W Magazine in 2015. I love seeing the art and you can't beat these parties!
It's so fun to have all these amazing people in the same room!'
Although she's there to spin, do not think the New York-born star will be all work and no play.
Baseling: It is the 36-year-old's sixth year attending the event, where she has performed every year.
She will be the guest of honor at Ocean Drives and MSC Cruises Art of the Party red carpet event, according to Miami.com. There's no doubt the publication will use the occasion to fete their December cover girl by unveiling the issue.
In the cover story, Hilton shares that she reconnected with current beau Chris Zylka at Art Basel in 2015 when the actor and artist showed her some of her work.
'We were friends for years, and then it was actually Art Basel in Miami Beach two years ago, and he was showing his artwork there,' she told Ocean Drive in her cover story.
True blue: Paris looks beautiful next to boyfriend Chris Zylk; seen in Sydney in November
And my brother said, Oh, Chris Zylkas here. Hes texting me. And Im like, Oh my God! Invite him right now. So he invited him over.
We hung out and then just kept talking and talking, and then had a date in L.A., and ever since that night, we never left each others side.
It all really sparked with Art Basel.
The heiress recently launched her first skincare product named Paris Hilton's Unicorn Mist. The limited edition bottle of rose water facial spray is set to launch in early 2018.
'I am so excited to be able to bring such an amazing product to the market,' Hilton said in a statement. "I have always had a passion for taking care of my skin and I only use products that actually work without harmful chemicals that are only a temporary fix.'
'With this new company I can stand behind my own products and promote a brand that is focused on making products that truly work and can help everyone look and feel their best.'
LafargeHolcim chairman Beat Hess told French daily Le Figaro that the group was going through 'a difficult phase'
The Swiss-French cement company LafargeHolcim should have stopped its operations in war-torn Syria before it did, its chairman said in an interview published Sunday, after three executives were charged with indirectly financing jihadists.
Beat Hess told French daily Le Figaro that the group was going through "a difficult phase" that was "a problem for the company's reputation".
Lafarge is accused of paying the Islamic State group and other militants through a middleman in order to allow the company's factory in Jalabiya, northern Syria, to continue to operate.
It is also suspected of using fake consulting contracts to buy fuel from the Islamic State group, which took control of most of Syria's strategic oil reserves in June 2013.
"Unacceptable errors were made which the company regrets and condemns," Hess said, adding that Lafarge "probably pulled out of Syria too late".
Frederic Jolibois, who took over as manager of the Syria factory in 2014, has been charged with financing terrorism and violating an EU embargo on Syrian oil.
Bruno Pescheux, Jolibois' predecessor as factory chief between 2008 and 2014, and Lafarge security boss Jean-Claude Veillard were also charged with financing terrorism as well as "endangering others' lives".
Hess, who became chairman of the company in May 2016, said that he had "full confidence" in the French legal system, and that "if we can help, we will do so".
An image grab obtained from a handout video provided by the aide of former Egyptian premier Ahmed Shafiq on November 29, 2017, shows him speaking to the camera from the United Arab Emirates
Former Egyptian premier and presidential hopeful Ahmed Shafiq said on Sunday he was reconsidering his intention to run in the 2018 presidential elections, after relatives said his whereabouts were unknown for around 24 hours.
Shafiq had not been seen since an airport official said he landed in Cairo on Saturday evening after aides claimed the Emirati authorities deported him.
The former army general was forced to leave the Gulf country, where he had been living in exile since 2012, after he announced his intention to run in next year's election, lawyer Dina Adly had said in a statement on her Facebook page earlier Sunday.
"I said my intention was based on the information and the general idea I had about the current situation," Shafiq told talk show host Wael El Ebrashy by phone in his first comments since Saturday evening's reported deportation.
But following his return to Egypt, he needs to "look into the situation and check it thoroughly, now I will go out and see the situation on the ground", he told Ebrashy from a Cairo hotel.
"Now I think there is a chance that compels me to verify accurately what exactly is needed," Shafiq said.
Shafiq, appointed premier by Hosni Mubarak shortly before his overthrow in 2011, is seen as a main challenger for Sisi, who is expected to dominate the 2018 vote despite not yet officially announcing his candidacy.
Shafiq had announced his intention to run in the elections in a video sent by an aide on Wednesday, where he stated the country may need "new blood" to face its current "many problems in all aspects of life".
- Feeling better-
Shafiq said he was received well by officials in Cairo and was then taken to a hotel.
"I was surprised truthfully when I was in the car that I was being driven to one of the most distinguished hotels in the area where I live," he said.
"Here I am talking to you and not kidnapped or anything," he told Ebrashy by phone, insisting he was planning to stay at a hotel anyway as his home needed maintenance.
A relative of Shafiq said on Sunday he spoke to his daughter for "a minute", the first time he has called either of his two daughters since leaving the UAE.
Still, "we have no information at all on whether he has freedom of movement," the relative said.
His lawyer Adly said in a statement on her Facebook page that she met her client later on Sunday after appealing to the authorities to allow her to see him.
The two met at a hotel in New Cairo where he "confirmed he is in good health and did not undergo any investigation", Adly said.
Shafiq had angered his Emirati hosts by claiming in a video Al Jazeera initially aired on Wednesday that he was being prevented from leaving the country.
On Sunday, he denied he sent them that video, and declined to specify whether he was deported, saying instead that the Emirati authorities treated him well.
Shafiq narrowly lost out on the presidency in 2012 to Islamist president Mohammed Morsi.
After the polls he was tried in absentia on corruption charges, but eventually acquitted.
Sisi, a former army chief, was elected president in 2014, a year after leading the military's ouster of Morsi from power.
Debora Oquendo, 43, prepares breakfast for her and her 10-month-old daughter at the Orlando hotel they have been staying at since arriving from Puerto Rico
Cristina Sanchez is one of thousands of Puerto Ricans fleeing their hurricane-ravaged island for Florida, a mass migration set to shape the southern US state as much as migrants from communist Cuba in the late 20th century.
Sanchez left the island with three suitcases, her small dog -- and no plans to return.
As her flight departed the capital San Juan, she glanced out the window at what she was leaving behind: a sun-drenched Caribbean island turned into a hellhole by Hurricane Maria.
On September 20, powerful Maria tore across Puerto Rico, destroying homes, shattering the island's rickety power grid and phone network, and leaving its 3.4 million residents in the dark and incommunicado. Many remain so today.
"It's a relief to be off the island and to be away from where everything is so difficult," said Sanchez, a 43 year-old bilingual school teacher.
Chico, her Shih Tzu, was given a sedative and slept at her feet during the flight.
After the hurricane, Sanchez's home was left without running water or electricity. A diabetic, she could not keep her life-saving insulin refrigerated without power.
"I'm literally fleeing to get away from it, from everything that's going on there," she told AFP.
"It takes its toll emotionally and mentally."
The official hurricane death toll in Puerto Rico stands at 58, though large areas were isolated for weeks after the storm -- and news reports now place the toll as high as 500.
Since Puerto Rico is a US possession, its residents -- known as 'boricuas' -- are US citizens and have no immigration obstacles.
- Destination: Orlando -
Sanchez headed to Orlando, a central Florida city best known for its amusement parks, including Disney World and Universal Studios.
Central Florida, especially the Orlando area, has long attracted Puerto Rican immigrants fleeing the island's economic woes.
Since the hurricane struck, at least 212,000 people have traveled from Puerto Rico to Florida -- mainly central Florida, according to figures from the State Emergency Response Team (SERT).
Hurricane Maria left Cristina Sanchez's home without running water or electricity -- but as a diabetic, she needs power to refrigerate life-saving insulin
Around one million Puerto Ricans now live in Florida, mostly in the central Tampa-Orlando corridor.
At Orlando's airport Sanchez went straight to one of three special "Welcome Centers" set up by the state government for Puerto Rican immigrants.
There she received information on how to start her new life, how to get a temporary Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) housing subsidy, and how to get a job.
Sanchez was optimistic that she'd be able to find a fresh start before the FEMA hotel subsidy ends in January.
- 'Lost their homes' -
However Debora Oquendo, another 43 year-old Puerto Rican refugee, is anything but optimistic.
"I hope to have work by January," she said, speaking in a listless tone.
Oquendo said she doesn't know what will happen then, when her federal housing subsidy runs out. With a 10-month old baby she can't go to job interviews, let alone work.
Maritza Sanz, president of Latino Leadership, a group that helps Puerto Rican immigrants, worries about the future once FEMA housing subsidies expire.
The first and biggest challenge is to find housing for the new arrivals.
Maritza Sanz, president of immigrant support group Latino Leadership, worries about the future once FEMA housing subsidies expire
"Employment will be the second one. And schools and resources for the family," she said.
"We have been serving families that have been living in the car with the kids," she said.
What makes this wave of migrants unique is that they are fleeing a disaster zone, often bringing little beyond what they can carry, said Luis Martinez-Fernandez at the University of Central Florida.
There is a sense of desperation among these migrants, who have "lost their homes, with no possibilities of rebuilding anytime soon. They've lost their jobs overnight as well," he told AFP.
Also, he noted, there is "an over-representation of elderly people from the island, people who need medical attention."
This is likely to put a strain on services for the elderly in Florida, already a popular destination for US retirees.
- 'Puerto Ricanization' -
"The so-called 'Puerto Ricanization' of Orlando and even Florida could have a larger impact than that of the Cuban immigrants to Miami since '59," said anthropologist Jorge Duany, referencing the year that Cubans began arriving in Florida in droves as they fled the island's communist regime.
The heavy flow of Cuban migrants, mainly to south Florida, lasted into the 1980s. Since then, Cubans have continued to trickle in but migrants from places like Haiti and South America have diversified Miami.
That diversification, however, "is not taking place in Orlando," said Duany, a Florida International University specialist on Puerto Rican migration.
"The growing presence of Puerto Ricans in central Florida is redefining the culture of the area, which used to be mostly Anglo-American," he said.
There is also a political aspect, which could have tremendous national consequences: as US citizens, Puerto Ricans can vote.
Florida is a delegate-rich swing state in US electoral politics, a state that can hold the key to who wins the White House or which party controls Congress.
And Puerto Ricans are overwhelmingly Democrats.
Jorge and Teresa Ramirez hold a portrait of their son, Jorge Ramirez, a former amateur boxing champion killed by police
James de la Rosa was unarmed when four police officers in the rural Californian town of Bakersfield ended his life in a hail of bullets by the roadside.
At the age of 22, he had never picked up a single conviction, but initial police reports justified the killing by saying he had reached into his waistband after being chased by police and crashing.
"I'm broken", sobs his mother Leticia as she visits his grave in a local cemetery three years after the killing, cradling a picture of her beaming son in happier times.
"No money, nothing in this world, will bring me back my son. I think of James everyday. I live in the house he was living in. He was a good kid, he had a bright future."
A family lawsuit alleged that De la Rosa had his hands in the air when an officer first tried to taser him and then other officers opened fire, shooting him five times in the head, groin and other areas.
The family settled on a $400,000 compensation deal after it emerged that an officer had "tickled" De la Rosa's dead body -- but many other victims' families feel they have never seen justice.
Far from the media spotlight on flashpoints like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, at least 29 people have been shot by police in Kern County, where the oil production hub of Bakersfield is located, since 2013.
"In recent years, Kern County Sheriff's deputies shot and killed considerably more people than law enforcement agencies in areas of equivalent population sizes," the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a recent report.
"And the Bakersfield Police Department had the highest rate of police homicides per capita of the country's 60 largest police departments."
- Shootings, beatings, dog attacks -
The report described "a disturbing pattern of shootings, beatings and canine attacks" by police and sheriff's deputies, especially targeting unarmed suspects.
Families of the dead say the real toll over the period covered by the report is 38 -- and more than one a month in 2015 -- although Mark Nations, a lawyer for the the sheriff's office, told AFP that year was an anomaly.
"We have not had an in-custody death since then. I can tell you there was a spike in incidents in the sense that there was not much going on before that and not much after that," he told AFP.
The Bakersfield Police Department, involved in at least four deaths since 2016, refused to comment, citing an ongoing investigation by California's public prosecutor.
The ACLU says the level of lethal violence directed at Hispanics and African Americans in Bakersfield by the predominently white police force is out of proportion with the level of local crime.
Peter Bibring, the group's director of police practices for California, has noted that a small number of officers in Bakersfield have been involved in two deaths or more.
Leticia De la Rosa places a rose on the grave of her son James, who was killed in 2014 by police in Bakersfield, California
One officer was present during the deaths of De La Rosa and two other victims -- Jorge Ramirez and Jason Alderman.
Alderman, a 29-year-old father of two, met his end after being caught leaving a fast food joint he had just burglarized, in August 2015.
He was about to escape, having found nothing worth stealing, when he was gunned down by police who later said he had raised his car jack, which they thought was a rifle.
- 'Wild West' -
A surveillance video showed he had been crouching to get through a window when he was propelled back by the gunfire.
Ramirez, a 34-year-old father of five, was on probation when he agreed four years ago to lead officers to a suspect. But the operation ended in a bloodbath on a parking lot and he was riddled with police bullets.
"He was expecting the police to take care of him instead of killing him," his father, Jorge Ramirez Sr, told AFP, adding that he was haunted by the image of his son's death.
Academics and campaigners describe Kern County as poverty-stricken and blighted by drug abuse, more the cultural twin of rural Texas than liberal Hollywood or high-tech Silicon Valley.
Oil producers and farm owners, say locals, have disproportiate influence with police, who have a historal culture of impunity.
"It's very Old Wild West here," said Josth Stenner, an activist with civil rights group "Faith in the Valley."
Police in Kern County and Bakersfield have said they are prepared to implement any reforms suggested by the California prosecutor.
But De la Rosa's brother Joe Arambulo says public trust will not be restored until police can prove they are equipped to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.
"They don't give these guys the right training. It's a lot of broken families, mothers' lost sons, sons' lost fathers," he told AFP.
"When I see an officer, I worry about my kids."
Pyongyang has called the joint air exercise by the US and South Korea an 'all-out provocation'
An airplane crew flying over Japan saw North Korea's missile as it plunged back through the atmosphere last week, their airline said Monday, as South Korea and the US kicked off their largest ever joint air exercise.
Hong Kong carrier Cathay Pacific released a statement saying the crew of flight CX893 spotted "what is suspected to be the re-entry" of the missile as they flew from San Francisco to the southern Chinese city.
In a separate message to staff, Cathay general manager Mark Hoey said the crew described seeing the missile "blow up and fall apart", the South China Morning Post reported.
Pyongyang sent tensions soaring on the Korean Peninsula five days ago when it announced it had successfully test fired a new ICBM, which it says brings the whole of the continental United States within range.
Analysts say it is unclear whether the missile survived re-entry into the earth's atmosphere or could successfully deliver a warhead to its target -- key technological hurdles for Pyongyang.
The isolated and impoverished North has staged six increasingly powerful atomic tests since 2006 -- most recently in September -- which have rattled Washington and its key regional allies South Korea and Japan.
On Monday the US and South Korea started their largest ever joint air exercise, an operation Pyongyang has labelled an "all-out provocation".
The five-day Vigilant Ace drill involves 230 aircraft, including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and tens of thousands of troops, Seoul's air force said.
Pyongyang over the weekend blasted the drill, accusing US President Donald Trump's administration of "begging for nuclear war".
As tensions surged, US Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican and foreign policy hawk, warned that the US was moving closer to "preemptive war" with the North.
"If there's an underground nuclear test (by the North), then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States," Graham told the CBS show "Face the Nation".
North Korea has called the US-South Korean exercises an "all-out provocation"
In recent years Pyongyang has accelerated its drive to develop nuclear and missile technology capable of threatening the US, which it accuses of hostility.
"The preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures," Graham said.
His remarks echoed those of Trump's National Security Adviser HR McMaster, who told a security forum on Saturday that the potential for war with the North "is increasing every day".
As well as featuring the latest generation of stealth fighters, this year's wargames involve simulated precision attacks on the North's military installations, including its missile launch sites and artillery units, Yonhap news agency said, citing unnamed Seoul sources.
- Risks of war -
The North has boasted that the Hwasong 15 ICBM tested on Wednesday is capable of delivering a "super-large" nuclear warhead anywhere in the US mainland.
Analysts agree the latest test showed a big improvement in potential range, but say it was likely achieved using a dummy warhead that would have been quite light.
They say a missile carrying a much heavier nuclear warhead would struggle to travel as far.
They are also sceptical that Pyongyang has mastered the sophisticated technology required to protect such a warhead from the extreme temperatures and stresses encountered as the missile hurtles back to Earth.
The latest launch, which saw the missile drop into Japan's economic waters, was condemned by Tokyo's parliament Monday, which slammed the North's rogue weapons programme as an "imminent threat".
Washington has called on China, the North's major ally, to do more to rein in Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
On Monday China's foreign ministry on Monday warned that the Korean peninsula remained "highly sensitive" and called on all sides to "do more things to ease the tension and avoid provoking each other".
The North's leader Kim Jong-Un has presided over significant progress in the country's widely-condemned nuclear and missile programmes since taking power in 2011.
A nuclear standoff between Kim and Trump in recent months has seen the pair trade personal insults.
The tensions have fuelled concerns of another conflict, more than six decades after the 1950-53 Korean War that left much of the peninsula in ruins.
But even some Trump advisers say US military options are limited when Pyongyang could launch an artillery barrage on the South Korean capital Seoul -- only around 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the heavily-fortified border and home to 10 million people.
Estimates on the potential casualties from another war vary widely.
The North has thousands of conventional artillery units along the border with the South that analysts say could kill tens of thousands.
In one of the latest estimates, Scott Sagan, senior fellow at the Centre for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, said the toll could be as high as one million people from just the first day of a conflict.
The term 'Kwaussie' was first used in 2002 to describe actor Russell Crowe
Inspired by a dual citizenship crisis plaguing politics in Australia, the term "Kwaussie" -- a mix of Kiwi and Aussie -- was Monday picked as word of the year.
It had been used sparingly in the past to describe a dual citizen of Australia and New Zealand, but took on a new lease of life when Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce found out he also had Kiwi citizenship in August.
He was the highest profile scalp of a constitutional provision barring dual citizens from serving in federal parliament, with eight lawmakers forced to resign so far.
"In a time of covfefe, fake news, and tweetstorms, the Australian National Dictionary Centre has looked for a word of the year that is both lexically interesting and Australian," the centre's director Amanda Laugesen said in a statement.
Laugesen said "Kwaussie" was first used in 2002 to describe actor Russell Crowe.
"He was described as a Kwaussie -- what you get when you cross a Kiwi who can't decide whether they're a Kiwi or an Aussie," she said.
"Subsequent evidence suggests its use is predominantly Australian, found chiefly in social media, and also found with spelling variants including Kwozzie and Kwozzy.
"Thanks to the two Kwaussies identified as ineligible to sit in parliament -- Barnaby Joyce and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam -- the term is now becoming better known."
Joyce automatically acquired New Zealand citizenship through his father, and was forced to contest a by-election at the weekend, which he won comfortably.
The citizenship crisis has engulfed a number of MPs who claim to have unknowingly held dual citizenship, and threatens more with politicians given a deadline of this week to come clean about their status.
The Australian National Dictionary Centre is a major centre for lexicographical research, conducting research into Australian English and editing dictionaries.
Eighty-one-year-old Anthony Kennedy, who was appointed by Republican president Ronald Reagan in 1987 and is the court's longest serving judge, is widely expected to provide the decisive vote in the so-called "gay wedding cake" case
As the US Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments Tuesday in the highly anticipated "gay wedding cake" case, all eyes are once again on Justice Anthony Kennedy, the fulcrum upon which the bench has turned for a decade.
The case, which pits Christian conservatives against progressives and the LGBT community, concerns a Colorado baker who, due to his religious beliefs, refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.
The court will have to decide between three constitutional rights -- sexual equality, freedom of religion and freedom of expression.
The stakes are high, and could open the door for conservative businesses to spurn gay couples.
Eighty-one-year-old Kennedy, who was appointed by Republican president Ronald Reagan in 1987 and is the court's longest serving judge, is widely expected to provide the decisive vote.
Kennedy is to the Supreme Court what swing states are to elections.
Conservative on firearms and election financing, he can be more progressive on issues such as abortion and affirmative action.
On a bench comprising four progressive and four conservative judges, his view often tips the balance.
An example of this came in 2015, when, thanks to him, same-sex marriage was legalized across the United States.
The judge, of Irish origin, then drafted the landmark ruling -- just as he drafted the decision in "Lawrence v Texas" in 2003, which declared a state law forbidding sodomy illegal.
- 'A clash of interests' -
But will the elderly judge, a practicing Catholic, vote in favor of the LGBT community in this latest case? It's a question currently frustrating experts.
The Trump administration, around twenty American states, dozens of members of Congress and countless Christian and conservative pressure groups have backed Jack Phillips, the baker.
These supporters have sent the Supreme Court many arguments, which seem to directly address Kennedy.
Steven Schwinn, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, told AFP he believes the judge will "struggle" with the decision.
"I think he'll see this case as a clash of interests: the dignity and equality interest of the same-sex couple, on the one hand, and the religious freedom and free-speech interests of the cake-baker, on the other," he said.
"I imagine that he'll probably struggle with how to balance these."
"I think he's going to be torn," was the view of Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"He's distracted by the deep faith of Jack Phillips. Jack Phillips is a person of faith and runs his bakery consistent with his faith, he has a small family business. We know that Justice Kennedy will care about that, there is no question," she said.
"On the other hand, Justice Kennedy cares deeply about the LGBT community," Melling added.
- Moral rigor -
Another question is how Kennedy can vote in Phillips' favor, without opening "the floodgates for discrimination against gays and lesbians in marriage services and beyond," says Schwinn.
"I do not think he wants to open that door," Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of Berkeley Law and constitutional law expert, told AFP.
During the hearing on Tuesday, every word uttered by Anthony Kennedy will be under scrutiny -- with supporters from both sides searching for signs of his position.
Reassuring Christian conservatives will be the Harvard Law School graduate's days as a choir boy in California -- not to mention his marriage of over half a century to the same woman, with whom he has three children.
Indeed, Kennedy has a reputation for moral rigor sometimes regarded as prudishness.
While he was a university student, he traveled Europe in a red Volkswagen.
His father offered him a bottle of whiskey for the trip -- but he did not drink it, instead using it only to gargle when he had a sore throat.
When Heather Hyden learned that she was pregnant, she was overjoyed. Hyden wanted to have a child with her partner, Jimmy Earley, and the pair was thrilled to bring a new person into their community in Lexington, Kentucky.
But on December 5, 2016, when Hyden was about nine weeks pregnant, the couple learned that there were complications. During their first ultrasound, they found that their baby had a full body edema: fluid surrounding the entire fetus. The doctor said they could do tests in the coming weeks to find out more.
"The doctor came in and barely explained anything," Hyden said. "I was devastated. I just felt like everything was falling in on us."
Every few weeks brought more tests that gave them some new information but often left the couple feeling like they had even more questions.
At 11 weeks pregnant, the couple learned that their baby had a cystic hygroma, a cyst or large pocket of fluid surrounding its head and back. In early January, at 14 weeks pregnant, they learned that the fluid had moved inside the fetus and was surrounding the heart and lungs. This condition is known as hydrops fetalis, which is a buildup of fluid in two or more areas of the fetus. Hyden said she was told her unborn baby was effectively experiencing heart failure.
From the first indication of complications, the couple wasn't sure whether the baby would make it. Still, they kept testing and hoping for the best. But at the 14-week point, in early January, it became clear that the baby most likely would not survive.
Hyden's doctor presented her with a few options, both of them uncomfortable. She could wait a few weeks to see whether she would have a miscarriage, which would not require an expensive medical procedure and would happen naturally. Or she could have an abortion.
But another unexpected obstacle presented itself: Just as they learned about the hydrops fetalis, Hyden and Earley found that lawmakers in Kentucky had introduced new legislation about abortion. Because Hyden was uncertain of her baby's condition, she began to pay attention.
One piece of legislation, Senate Bill 5, banned abortions at or after 20 weeks and included exemptions only in situations in which the mother's life is at stake. Even in those cases, it required that the doctor providing care consult with two other doctors unrelated to the patient's care before they can move forward with the procedure. It did not include exceptions for cases in which the fetus' life is at stake or cases of rape or incest.
Within days, the bill had passed and was signed into law.
As her pregnancy ticked closer to 20 weeks, Hyden wasn't sure whether she would need an abortion. There were medical costs to consider: Hyden's insurance does not cover abortion procedures, and there's only one open abortion clinic in Kentucky. It's located in Louisville, about 80 miles from where Hyden, 30, and Earley, 43, live.
There were still tests underway too, and the quiet hope that their baby's condition would turn around.
What she did know: If there wasn't a resolution, they would have only weeks to make a decision for themselves.
State senator: 20-week ban 'seems very humane'
Kentucky isn't the first state to pass a law prohibiting abortions at or after a woman is 20 weeks pregnant. Nebraska passed similar legislation in 2010, and 12 states have followed suit over the past six years, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America.
In October, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would criminalize abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy across the country. The House passed similar bills in 2013 and 2015, but they didn't become law. This time around, it has the support of the White House.
The House bill includes some exceptions, such as if the mother's life is at risk or in cases of rape or incest. Still, it would prevent most women from getting abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Legislators behind these bills and anti-abortion advocates argue that 20 weeks, about halfway through the second trimester of a pregnancy, is when a fetus starts feeling pain. The Kentucky legislation noted that "the unborn child is incapable of experiencing pain until a point later in pregnancy than 20 weeks after fertilization."
Kentucky state Sen. Joe Bowen, one of Senate Bill 5's sponsors, found its 20-week limit reasonable.
"The 20-week abortion ban seems very humane to me," he said. "At that stage, you know, from the information that I have, that's when a baby starts to have senses. ... If they could potentially sense pain, at that juncture in a pregnancy, that even compounds my strong feelings of why we would need to do something like this."
Major medical studies largely disprove the claim that fetuses start to feel pain when the mother is 20 weeks pregnant. A 2005 analysis published in the medical journal JAMA concluded that fetal pain before the third trimester, which starts at 28 weeks, was unlikely. A 2010 review by a panel at Britain's Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists stated that most neuroscientists believe the cortex, an area of the brain, is necessary for a fetus to feel pain; the brain is not formed until 24 weeks.
"The problem is that, number one, we don't have any proof that babies feel pain at 20 weeks, and number two, we aren't taking into consideration the mother's pain," Dr. Elizabeth Case, an OB-GYN who works and lives in Kentucky and testified at hearings for the bills, told CNN.
"Termination of pregnancy is not a black-and-white affair. There are a lot of gray areas, and this law seemed to be very black and white."
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1.3% of women who had abortions in the United States in 2013 did so at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy. The women who have abortions after 20 weeks are often those who have pregnancy or health complications, partially because most don't get their first ultrasound until around then, according to Case.
"We routinely don't do our ultrasounds until 20 weeks, and that's going to leave women no option for how to proceed if they have a baby that's not going to survive," Case said.
Kentucky women who find out about complications after 20 weeks may have to carry the baby until it dies in the uterus or deliver a baby who's expected to die after birth, Case said. They can also go out of state to have the procedure in a place where it's still legal.
When Hyden found out that these bills were being introduced and knew that they could directly impact her pregnancy, she wanted to get involved. She testified against Senate Bill 5 at two state Senate committee hearings, explaining how it impacted women like her.
"I thought that if we could explain what we were going through personally, then it could change minds," Hyden said. "You think this is out of context and this is about your religious views or your values, but at the end of the day, it affects people who are struggling on the ground to make these decisions."
Still, less than a week after it was introduced in the Kentucky Legislature, Senate Bill 5 passed, banning abortions 20 weeks after fertilization. Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin signed it into law January 8 with an emergency provision making it effective immediately.
Hyden was anxious and heartbroken, still deciding the future for her family.
"We know that the only thing that was an exception was the medical emergency. I wasn't a medical emergency," Hyden said.
'This was the only choice'
When she was 18 weeks pregnant, Hyden's doctor told her that she would probably miscarry in the next couple of weeks. Her doctor also said that the longer she waited to miscarry, the more likely it was that complications from the pregnancy could impact Hyden's health. But, for fear that she would not miscarry before the 20-week deadline, Hyden and Earley made an appointment at Kentucky's only abortion clinic.
"I was just starting to have an emotional and psychological breakdown about all of this," Hyden said. "We were going up against three weeks since the doctor had told us that our child was not going to make it, and we were just sitting, waiting."
At 19 weeks pregnant, Hyden found another option: She could have an early induction procedure at a hospital instead of having an abortion procedure at a clinic. The early induction would cause Hyden to go into labor and deliver her baby, even though she knew that the baby would not survive past birth.
Hyden was concerned about having the abortion procedure in an clinic separate from a hospital out of concern that something would go wrong in an already complex situation. She got approval from her insurance company for the early induction procedure at the hospital and scheduled an appointment all within one week.
The early induction option is available to other Kentucky women at some hospitals. Hyden was unaware of it earlier in her pregnancy because she was seeing a doctor at a Catholic hospital, which would not allow the procedure unless doctors could no longer detect a heartbeat in the fetus, Hyden said.
At 20 weeks pregnant, Hyden was induced and labored for 12 hours before giving birth to a stillborn girl, River Lee, on February 19. She was able to have the procedure past 20 weeks because of a technicality in how doctors measure pregnancy.
"For us, that was the choice that we wanted to make based on all of the unknown that we had with her diagnosis," Hyden said. "It's part of bringing purpose to her life, even though it was really short."
During the final weeks of Hyden's pregnancy, she worked with an abortion doula to find the doctor who did her final procedure. The doula also helped the couple go through the process of having a stillbirth. These doulas work with women who are experiencing any kind of complication in their pregnancy, including miscarriages, stillbirths and abortions.
Now, Hyden and Earley are working to improve access to these doulas in Kentucky.
"We're focused on the comprehensive health care aspect of this," Hyden said. "We feel like the more restrictive our state legislation is related to abortion care, the more fear there is in prenatal health environments. ... We're trying to increase the full spectrum of care offered to women with any type of pregnancy."
Though Hyden and Earley ultimately found a doctor who would care for them and a procedure that met their needs, Case worries that other women may rush into abortions sooner than they may need as a result of this law.
"I fear that some women are going to choose to terminate the pregnancy before they have all the information they need because of this ban because it's putting a rush on you," Case said. "You have to make a decision by 20 weeks, and maybe you don't have enough information to make an informed decision by 20 weeks."
A new pregnancy, 'a nervous wreck'
Less than eight months after Hyden's stillbirth, she learned that she was pregnant again. She and Earley are excited, but Hyden is feeling a host of other emotions too as she heads further into her pregnancy.
"I'm a nervous wreck, honestly," Hyden said. "I'm just really scared, because it feels like my body is kind of being held hostage, and I know that it's not just my biophysical processes that have control over me right now, but it's also all of the other systems, hospital system and policies."
Hyden is seeing a high-risk OB-GYN for this pregnancy. She is in the second trimester, but has been cautious since the beginning. She's also been open with those around her about how she's feeling.
"I feel like there needs to be more open discussion about ... the fear of miscarriages and the anxiety after you've lost a baby," she said. "I've been very open that I'm scared and going through a lot of different emotions right now."
Hyden and Earley are still processing their past pregnancy experience as they prepare again to bring a baby into the world. Hyden is still working with the doula who helped her through the end of her previous pregnancy.
Though her procedure wasn't in an abortion clinic, Hyden classifies what they went through as a "therapeutic abortion" or "early induction for medical reasons." She believes the issue is more complex than what's now the law in her state -- and what could become the law of the land.
"We can't have blanket judgments on an issue anymore," she said. "You can't. Abortion can be beautiful, I guess. I know that that might sound wild, and I never thought I would say anything like that, but for us, this was the only, this is the only choice, and women need more choices."
A mound of unsold North Korean coal at Rajin harbour in the Rason Special Economic Zone
A three-metre-high metal fence topped with razor wire in a North Korean port marks the front line of the United Nations' ban on coal exports by Pyongyang.
A mountain of North Korean coal -- which would once have been bound for China -- is piled up on one side of the barrier in Rajin harbour, stranded by the interdiction.
On the very next dock, around two million tonnes of Russian coal has come in by train and been shipped on to China this year by Russian port operator RasonConTrans.
Its activities are specifically excluded from the UN Security Council's sanctions resolutions -- but attempts have been made to use it as a way to bypass the restrictions.
"They asked but we said no, we dont do it," said RasonConTrans' deputy director Roman Minkevich.
RasonConTrans deputy director Roman Minkevich in his office which sports a picture of Vladimir Putin and late North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il shaking hands
The black mounds on the neighbouring wharf were evidence his firm was complying with the rules, he added.
"Behind the fence it's Korean coal, it's under sanctions now so it's still here," he told AFP.
He declined to elaborate on the source of the requests. "People," he said. "Different people."
The UN Panel of Experts on North Korea said in its midyear report that Pyongyang has been "deliberately using indirect channels to export prohibited commodities".
For years the coal trade was a lucrative earner for Pyongyang -- its main ally and key economic partner China imported 22 million tonnes worth nearly $1.2 billion in 2016.
But while Beijing says North Korean imports have come to a halt, RasonConTrans' business is booming.
Until sanctions, coal exports were a major earner for North Korea, worth some $1.2 billion in 2016
Since starting operations in 2015 its volumes have doubled each year, and Minkevich is targeting three million tonnes next year, with a goal of five million in future.
It has between three and six ship movements a month at its pier -- number 3 in the port, which can take vessels up to 180 metres (600 feet) long -- loading 50,000 tonnes of coal on each, most of them heading for Shanghai.
- Women crane operators -
Over a hill at the back of Rajin town stands a sprawling disused oil refinery, originally built to process crude from the Soviet Union, in the days of Communist brotherhood provided Pyongyang with cheap or free materials.
Locals blame sanctions for the closure but it has been inactive for years, its throttled chimneys standing sentinel over an unfulfilled economic dream.
Two large bronze statues of the North Korea's founder Kim Il-Sung and his son and successor Kim Jong-Il look out over Rajin.
A Russian worker walking before cranes at Rajin's RasonConTrans coal port in North Korea
Despite the looser economic rules applying in the area, the town is bedecked with propaganda slogans seen throughout the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the country is officially known.
Using North Korean labour -- North Korean women are particularly skilled crane operators, Minkevich notes, probably due to their care in performing repetitive tasks -- costs at Rajin are 30 to 40 percent cheaper than at Russian ports.
Those competitors on the Russian Pacific coast are also close to capacity, he says, as China and the energy-hungry but resource-poor economies of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan suck coal from Russia's vast reserves.
Moscow and Pyongyang have long had fraternal relations, and a picture of North Korea's late leader Kim Jong-Il meeting Vladimir Putin in the Russian capital in 2001 hangs in a RasonConTrans office.
The public square in the North Korean city of Rason, a key trading hub with nearby Russia and China
The company is 70 percent Russian-owned, with 30 percent held by the port of Rajin.
It is the third-biggest taxpayer in the Rason Special Economic Zone, set up by Pyongyang to try to attract trade and businesses to the area where North Korea, China and Russia meet.
North Koreans need special permits to enter the SEZ, and a large checkpoint at its southern entrance enforces the rules.
RasonConTrans has around 300 North Korean personnel and 110 Russian staff, and brings in much of its needs, such as diesel for its generators, directly from Russia.
It is almost entirely independent of the rickety local electricity supply, which Minkevich said was offline around 30 percent of the time.
Some aspects of the North reminded him of the former Soviet Union, said the Muscovite, but working under the sanctions regime was a "unique experience".
There were difficulties importing parts and building supplies, he said, and "much more paperwork".
"It's interesting but it's hard."
Australia is to introduce new laws targeting foreign interference, with concern heightened by ongoing revelations of Russian meddling in the US political system
Foreign interference in Australian politics has become a "serious problem", a top official said Monday, with tougher laws on espionage and overseas donations to be introduced to parliament.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ordered an inquiry in June after media revelations that the nation's spy agency had warned the country's political elite two years ago about taking donations from two billionaires with links to the Chinese Communist Party.
The probe, by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Fairfax Media, said that despite being cautioned, both the Liberals and Labor continued accepting substantial sums of cash.
It said intelligence agencies had major concerns that China was interfering in Australian institutions and using the political donations system to gain access. Beijing denied the allegations as "totally groundless".
Since then concern over foreign interference has gathered momentum, heightened by ongoing revelations of Russian meddling in the American political system.
"The issue of foreign interference in our politics is an extremely serious problem," Attorney-General George Brandis told parliament on Monday.
"So I can tell the Senate that later this week, the government will introduce a milestone legislative package to reform Australia's espionage and foreign interference legislation."
He said the new laws would strengthen and modernise a range of offences "for the purposes of investigating, disrupting and prosecuting acts of espionage and covert interference in the Australian political process".
There would be a new transparency scheme, providing "visibility of the nature and extent of influence over Australia's government and political processes by foreign interests".
"It will introduce new offences targeting foreign interference and economic espionage, including offences that criminalise covert and deceptive activities that support the intelligence activities of foreign actors," he added.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said in response on Monday that Beijing "always stays committed to following the principle of mutual respect for sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs" of other countries.
"At the same time we urge the relevant people on the Australian side to abandon prejudices," Geng Shuang told a regular press briefing.
Last week, a key Australian Labor MP, Sam Dastyari, was forced to resign as deputy opposition whip after reports that he told a Chinese businessman his phone was likely being tapped by intelligence agencies.
The man, Huang Xiangmo, is a prominent Chinese political donor.
Anti-Kabila protests last December were quelled by the authorities -- Human Rights Watch says a notorious militia group helped carry out the crackdown
Former rebels were recruited by Democratic Republic of Congo authorities for a crackdown on protests against the president that left dozens of people dead last year, a rights group stated Monday in a claim denied by the government.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said President Joseph Kabila's regime had drafted in fighters previously active in the M23 rebel group from neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda to help suppress the December 2016 demonstrations, which erupted when he refused to step down at the end of his constitutional mandate.
The allegations coincide with a flare-up of violence after Kabila pushed back a much-delayed new vote until December 2018, with the opposition demanding that the veteran leader resign before then after 16 years in power.
President Joseph Kabila took office after his father Laurent was assassinated in 2001
"Senior security force officers in the Democratic Republic of Congo mobilised over 200 former M23 rebel fighters from neighboring countries to quash protests against President Joseph Kabila in December 2016," HRW said in a report.
It said Congolese security forces acting with M23 fighters killed at least 62 people and arrested hundreds more as the protests swept through the vast African country between December 19 and 22 last year.
M23, a mostly ethnic Tutsi rebel group, was defeated in November 2013 by Congolese forces and troops of a large UN peacekeeping mission in the country. Hundreds of fighters fled the country but officials and residents in the eastern region of Kivu said they had seen militants return.
Once transferred to DR Congo from military and refugee camps across the border, the M23 fighters were deployed to the capital, Kinshasa, and to Goma and Lubumbashi, where they were integrated into the security forces, including the presidential guard, HRW said in the 69-page report.
"To protect the president and quash protests, the M23 fighters were given explicit orders to use lethal force, including at 'point-blank range' if necessary," the report said.
It cited an M23 fighter who said the ex-rebels were instructed "to shoot immediately at the slightest provocation by civilians."
- 'Chase HRW out of DR Congo' -
Congo's resource-rich eastern provinces have suffered years of brutal conflict, with bordering states backing rebel groups in a war against Kinshasa's authority, and roaming armed militia triggering the mass flight of terrorised civilians.
"These accusations are fantasy to undermine the credibility of the FARDC (the regular army)," Defence Minister Crispin Atama Thabe told AFP in response to the report.
"To repel attacks by these former M23 rebels, we lost officers, helicopters. How can we recruit those who fight us?" he added.
The minister declared that "HRW should no longer operate in DRC.
"I'm going to get involved to see that they are chased off the national territory."
HRW said its findings were based on more than 120 interviews and that during the protests, "M23 fighters patrolled the streets of Congo's main cities, firing on or arresting protesters or anyone else deemed to be a threat to the president."
"Covert operations to recruit fighters from an abusive armed group to suppress any resistance show how far President Kabila and his coterie are willing to go to stay in power," said Ida Sawyer, the organisation's Central Africa director.
"Congolese officials should end all unlawful use of force against protesters and allow peaceful political activities by activists and the political opposition."
M23 leader Bertrand Bisimwa said via Twitter that the DRC government had recruited "deserters and undisciplined men" sacked from the movement and based them in the eastern towns of Kisangani and Goma."
Political opposition forces are demanding that Kabila -- who took office after his father Laurent-Desire was assassinated in 2001 -- step down on December 31, but authorities made several arrests ahead of an opposition march earlier this month.
Huthi fighters sit in the back of a pick-up truck in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on December 2, 2017, during clashes with supporters of Yemeni ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh
A wave of air raids rattled Yemen's crisis-hit capital Monday, witnesses said, as clashes between rebels and supporters of ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh also spread beyond Sanaa.
The strikes appeared to hit targets near Sanaa International Airport and the interior ministry, both under the control of the Iran-backed Huthi rebels, according to residents and a source inside the airport.
A military coalition led by Saudi Arabia, Iran's regional arch-rival, is the only party in the Yemen war known to conduct air strikes on Sanaa.
A spokesman for the coalition did not respond to requests for confirmation of the raids on Monday.
Residents near the airport said multiple air raids had shaken their homes late Sunday night and in the early hours of Monday.
An airport source said rebel bases near the location appeared to have been targeted but the airport itself had not been bombed.
Residents also reported that the fighting, which erupted Wednesday night between armed Saleh supporters and Huthi fighters, had spread outside the capital.
Tribal sources in Saleh's hometown Sanhan, south of Sanaa, on Monday reported intense overnight fighting between the Huthis and Saleh loyalists.
The clashes in the capital had killed some 60 people as of Sunday. There was no immediate information available on fresh casualties.
Yemeni territory is split between the forces and government of Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi in the south, backed by Saudi Arabia and recognised by the international community, the northern Huthi rebels and forces loyal to strongman Saleh.
Since 2014, Sanaa has been ruled under an agreement between Saleh and the Huthis, who drove the Hadi government out of the capital, set up their own government and for two years together fought the Saudi-led coalition.
Saleh on Saturday announced he was open to talks with Saudi Arabia and its allies on condition they ended their crippling blockade on Yemen's ports and airports -- dealing a serious blow to his already fragile alliance with rebel chief Abdul Malik al-Huthi.
The Saleh-Huthi split has sparked fears of a new front in the Yemen war, which has already claimed more than 8,750 lives since the Saudi-led coalition joined the war to support the Hadi government.
The conflict has pushed Yemen to the brink of mass starvation and triggered what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
mou-jj-pho-ny/mm
Bahraini demonstrators protest against the revocation of the citizenship of top Shiite cleric Sheikh Isa Qassim (portrait), near Qassim's house near Manama on June 20, 2016
Bahrain's leading Shiite cleric Sheikh Isa Qassim, a central opposition figure, has been admitted to hospital in critical condition, his family and a rights group said Monday.
Sheikh Qassim, in his late 70s, is a spearhead of Bahrain's opposition movement demanding an elected government in the Shiite-majority kingdom, which has been ruled for more than two centuries by the Sunni Al-Khalifa dynasty.
Qassim was stripped of his citizenship in 2016 on charges that include "serving foreign interests", an allusion to Shiite-ruled Iran. He has been under de facto house arrest ever since.
Nedal al-Salman, acting president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, and a relative of Qassim who requested anonymity both confirmed Qassim was in critical condition.
Authorities allowed his family to transport him to a hospital of their choosing after they declined state-sanctioned medical care.
The cleric's ailing health has for weeks been a point of contention between authorities and the Qassim family, who had refused the government's offer to transfer him to hospital over fears he may be detained and deported should he leave his residence.
While his family has not made public the details of his condition, rights groups say he has high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease.
Located between regional arch-rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia, Sunni-ruled Bahrain is home to a Shiite majority that has long complained of political marginalisation.
Protests demanding an elected government have rocked the archipelago since 2011, sparking a state crackdown on political dissent.
Authorities have jailed dozens of high-profile activists and disbanded both religious and secular opposition groups.
They have also stripped hundreds of their citizenship, making many stateless, according to Amnesty International.
The Bahrain government accuses Iran of backing the protests and attempting to overthrow the government. Tehran denies any involvement.
Su-Peing Ng, global medical head for Sanofi Pasteur, addresses a press conference in Manila on the dengue vaccination programme
A world-first dengue vaccination programme in the Philippines that was suspended over safety concerns will not cause anyone who was immunised to die, drug manufacturer Sanofi and local authorities said on Monday.
The Philippines on Friday suspended the programme, after more than 733,000 people had been immunised, in response to a statement from Sanofi that its vaccine could cause "more cases of severe disease" for people who had not previously had the mosquito-borne ailment.
After news outlets and some politicians in the Philippines expressed concern about the welfare of those immunised, the French pharaceutical giant held a press conference in Manila to state the potential cases of "severe dengue" would not be fatal.
"What is this severe (dengue)? When people think of 'severe', this already includes dengue shock that could lead to death, but no," Sanofi Pasteur regional head for dengue Joselito Sta. Ana told reporters.
Sta. Ana said Sanofi's definition of "severe dengue" merely referred to symptoms including two days of fever, a lower platelet count and bruising.
Philippine presidential spokesman Harry Roque also sought to allay fears, stating there was "no danger" with the Dengvaxia vaccine.
"The worst that can happen is for those who have not had dengue before -- which is one out of 10 (Filipinos) -- they may get infected with dengue but falling under our previous classification of 'mild', having fever and bruises," Roque said.
Nevertheless, the justice department announced Monday that the National Bureau of Investigation would investigate the vaccination programme "over the alleged danger to public health". It warned in a statement that charges could follow.
The previous administration of president Benigno Aquino launched the vaccination programme last year, making the Philippines the first nation to use Dengvaxia on a mass scale.
Although the Philippine programme has been suspended, Dengvaxia remains available on an individual basis in consultation with doctors, the health department said.
A consortium led by France-US petroleum services group TechnipFMC has secured a $4.2 billion (3.5 billion euro) contract to extend capacity at Bahrain's Sitra refinery, the company said Monday.
The contract, awarded by Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco), will extend production capacity at the site on Sitra island in the Gulf of Bahrain from a current 267,000 to 360,000 barrels per day, TechnipFMC said.
The refinery exports some 95 percent of its current production, mainly to India and the Far East.
The consortium includes South Korea's refinery and electrical plants designer Samsung Engineering as well as Spanish petroleum engineering firm Tecnicas Reunidas, TechnipFMC said, adding construction should be completed by 2022.
Nello Uccelletti, head of Onshore Offshore activity at TechnipFMC, hailed the "prestigious" contract as being a "testimonial of the long-term partnership with Bapco and strengthen(ing) our leadership in the refining sector."
Bahrain was the first Arab Gulf state to produce oil, in 1932, but its reserves have all but dried up and the Sunni Muslim kingdom depends primarily on the Abu Safa field it shares with Saudi Arabia for its own supplies which are pumped via a 230,000 bpd capacity subsea pipeline.
Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche said the US Food and Drug Administration has given the green light for its FoundationOne CDx personalised diagnostic cancer test
The US Food and Drug Administration has given the green light to Roche for its FoundationOne CDx personalised diagnostic cancer test, the Swiss group said Monday.
Roche said the FDA had approved the test helping doctors understand the genetic profile of patients' tumors to enable better-targeted therapies and clinical tests.
"The approval of FoundationOne CDx represents a major advance in the personalisation of cancer care, facilitating access for patients in the US to a comprehensive pan-tumour companion diagnostic that will help identify approved treatment options based on the molecular footprint of each individuals cancer," said Roche's Chief Medical Officer Sandra Horning, also the firm's head of global product development.
"Our belief is that profiling will increasingly become routine in clinical practice, so we have worked closely with Foundation Medicine to develop an extensive clinically and analytically validated platform that can support both existing and future companion diagnostic needs," Horning said in a statement.
Pharmaceutical companies see development of personally tailored treatment as the way ahead to tackle cancer.
Sri Lanka batsman Angelo Mathews plays a shot during the third day of the third Test match against India in New Delhi on December 4, 2017
Skipper Dinesh Chandimal and Angelo Mathews hit defiant centuries in soaring Delhi pollution before Indian bowlers struck back late on day three of the third Test on Monday.
The visitors were 356 for nine when bad light stopped play with Chandimal, on 147, and Lakshan Sandakan on 0, at the crease. They trail by 180 runs in their first innings.
Off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin took three wickets while Mohammed Shami, Ishant Sharma and left-arm spinner Ravindra Jadeja picked two each.
Sri Lanka flourished on the back of a 181-run fourth-wicket stand between Mathews (111) and Chandimal after they resumed the day on 131-3 in hazy conditions at the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium.
The duo braved the toxic smog for over three sessions after getting together on a dramatic Sunday when Sri Lankan players wearing face masks halted play for about 20 minutes, complaining of foul air.
Mathews, who survived three dropped catches, ended his two-year century drought with a boundary off paceman Ishant Sharma. His last ton had also come against India at Galle.
The former captain played positive cricket during his 268-ball stay that was laced with 11 fours and two sixes. He fell to Ashwin's off-spin a little ahead of tea.
Sadeera Samarawickrama, who came down the order after taking a hit on his helmet on day one, put up some resistance with a 33-run knock before being caught behind off Ishant Sharma.
Ashwin soon combined with the fast bowlers to tear into the Sri Lankan lower-order in the final session after sending back debutant Roshen Silva and Niroshan Dickwella for zero.
Chandimal, who seemed a little uneasy in the morning while calling for his trainer, frustrated the Indian bowlers and helped his team avoid a follow-on situation.
Pollution levels worsened Monday, with concentration of the smallest and most harmful airborne pollutants 18 times the World Health Organization's safe level, just before the players took lunch.
On Sunday it was 15 times the WHO limit, according to the US embassy website.
Sri Lanka, who trail 1-0 in the three-match series after their thrashing in the second game, need a win to draw the series against top-ranked India.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- On December 2nd, SAIC Maxus released the latest sales data. In November the sales were 8,121 new vehicles, an increase of 57% year on year, refreshing the monthly sales record again. During January to November, the cumulative sales were 61,677 vehicles, up 46% year on year.
Through an expansive product layout, which covers light passenger cars, MPV, SUV, pickup trucks, limo and new energy vehicles, SAIC MAXUS further expands the overseas market coverage and makes perfect performance this year.
In terms of specific models, Datong G10 secures the position in this market segment and achieves the sales of 2,735 units in November, an increase of 26%. In the SUV market, Datong D90 has delivered a total of 3,278 vehicles in November, surging 121% from a year earlier. In addition, light passenger car V80 and pickup model T60 sold 2,644 units and 1,039 units respectively.
The overseas market of SAIC Maxus also maintains a strong growth. During the first 11 months of this year, the overseas sales have reached 7,446 units, up 20% year on year. SAIC Maxus has become one of the top Chinese automobile brands in sales and market shares of Australia and New Zealand.
Lan Qingsong, vice president of SAIC MAXUS, says the target for 2018 is to exceed 100 thousand units. At that time, the annual growth rate of SAIC Maxus will reach more than 45%.
Whats more, Maxuss future products will be fully electric vehicles. Electrification is the development trend of automobile market, which SAIC Maxus actively promotes. Last month, at the Auto Guangzhou 2017, SAIC MAXUS launched its first fuel cell wide light passenger car FCV80. Lan Qingsong said, "In pure electric vehicles (EV), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCV) and plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHV), SAIC MAXUS has made great efforts in research and development. In the future, all products will be electric."
Syrians make their way through debris following a reported air strike in the rebel-held town of Beit Sawa, in the Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of Damascus
Three weeks of ferocious bombardment of Syria's Eastern Ghouta have crushed illusions of a lasting truce in the rebel enclave which Damascus appears determined to recapture at all costs.
A blistering air campaign has reduced a "de-escalation" deal in Eastern Ghouta to tatters, just as regime and opposition representatives struggle to progress at sputtering peace talks in Geneva.
At least 193 civilians, including 44 children, have been killed in three weeks of Syrian government raids and artillery fire on the area, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Rebels based in the area have also ramped up rocket fire onto Damascus, killing 29 civilians and wounding more than 200 in the capital.
Eastern Ghouta, the last opposition stronghold near Syria's capital, was one of four "de-escalation zones" agreed in May by powerbrokers Russia, Iran and Turkey.
The deal aimed to pave the way for a nationwide ceasefire and political settlement that would finally put an end to the conflict that has killed 340,000 since 2011.
A reduction in violence has more or less held in the other three zones in Syria's northwest, centre and south.
In mid-November, a relative calm that had prevailed over the Eastern Ghouta area ended with an explosive bombing campaign by regime forces.
"Eastern Ghouta is suffering the fiercest bombing and worst situation since the war began," said Thomas Pierret, a Syria specialist at the University of Edinburgh.
"We're really very far away from a reduction in violence," said Pierret, adding that the de-escalation zone had been reduced to "a big joke".
- 'Half my house standing' -
Eastern Ghouta is home to an estimated 400,000 people struggling to survive under a devastating four-year government siege that has made food and medicine unavailable or too expensive.
The United Nations has warned that 500 of them, mainly women and children, are at risk of dying without immediate medical care.
On November 28, Damascus nominally accepted a new Russian-proposed truce in Eastern Ghouta, to coincide with the resumption of UN-led peace talks in Geneva.
A Syrian man carries the body of a child who was killed in a reported air strike in the rebel-controlled town of Hamouria, in the Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of Damascus
But it has since ratcheted up its bombing.
Maysoun, a nurse living in the large Eastern Ghouta town of Douma, says she can vividly remember the day air strikes picked up again.
"I came back from the market to find half my house was left standing," said the 30-year-old, who has since been staying with a friend.
"I hadn't expected that much destruction. Usually, it's just the doors and windows that are affected," she said.
Rajaa, a mother of four now pregnant with her fifth child, lives in Hammuriyeh -- one of the most heavily-bombed towns in recent weeks.
"When they hear the planes, the children cry and don't want to stay at home anymore. They're traumatised," she told AFP.
- 'On the capital's doorstep' -
President Bashar al-Assad has repeatedly pledged his forces would retake all of Syria, and observers point to several reasons he appears to have doubled down on Eastern Ghouta now.
French cartographer and analyst Fabrice Balanche said the de-escalation deal had served as a "temporary" arrangement to allow the regime to redeploy troops elsewhere.
With key battlefronts against rebels frozen, Russian-backed government forces could focus on ousting the Islamic State group from Syria's centre and east, Balanche said.
Now, with IS territory reduced to a tiny sliver, Assad could comfortably resume the push for Eastern Ghouta.
"The regime needs to get rid of this pocket," used by opposition factions to lob rockets on Damascus and launch offensives on nearby troops, Balanche said.
"There's no question for the regime about allowing rebels to constitute little republics in these territories," he said.
For Sam Heller, an expert at The Century Foundation, Eastern Ghouta's location "on the doorstep of the capital" has kept it a priority for Assad.
The Syrian government has worked at "digesting it over time, through a combination of siege (and) periodic military pressure", said Heller.
- Other zones next? -
The other three de-escalation areas -- the south, Homs in central Syria, and northwest Idlib -- are lower on Assad's list and have so far remained relatively quiet.
"The zones' success rate ranges from 20 percent in Eastern Ghouta to 80 percent in the other regions," said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.
The southern zone borders Israel, making a government push sensitive. The "status quo" would likely prevail there, according to Balanche.
Rebel enclaves in Homs province are smaller and less threatening -- but Idlib presents a major challenge, with most of the province held by jihadists once loyal to Al-Qaeda.
Tens of thousands of rebels who were bussed out of opposition zones under local truce deals were dumped in Idlib, along with thousands of civilians.
An assault to take it would take much preparation, said Balanche. "There are many rebels, battle-hardened men ready for suicide."
Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and China's Premier Li Keqiang at the signing ceremony
Visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang signed three trade agreements on Monday as Ottawa tries to diversify commercial ties amid tough NAFTA negotiations with Washington.
At a ceremony in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, the two leaders signed an action plan on energy cooperation as well as two memoranda of understanding on food products and a "Canada learning initiative."
The details of the agreements are unclear.
The two sides also agreed that Canadian beef and pork will have greater access to the Chinese market and will continue to work on new standards for Canadian exports of canola to China.
"Canada is and always has been a trading nation, but the landscape of trade is shifting and we need to adjust," Trudeau told reporters after the signing ceremony.
"China will soon be the largest market in the world. It's home to one billion potential customers for the high-quality goods and services that Canadians deliver every day."
Li told Trudeau it was rare for China to have such a "close, intimate relationship" with another nation.
"China and Canada are entering ... a golden age in our relationship. We have a lot to offer each other. We are ready for closer cooperation," Li told reporters.
The premier visited Ottawa in September last year, when the two sides agreed to double bilateral commerce by 2025.
During his December 3-7 official visit, Trudeau will meet government and business leaders as part of Canada's push to diversify its trade, the bulk of which is currently with the United States.
Trudeau has said he also plans full and frank discussions on "issues like good governance, human rights, and the rule of law".
The visit to China is Trudeau's second since he came to power two years ago, and comes as trilateral talks with the United States and Mexico to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement appear to be headed towards deadlock.
Canada and Mexico staunchly oppose US proposals for a NAFTA sunset clause, minimum US content in car parts and nixing of the pact's trade dispute mechanism.
The US has adopted a more protectionist tone under President Donald Trump and his "America First" policy.
Beijing, meanwhile, has openly courted increased trade with Canada. Li said the two countries would continue exploratory talks and feasibility studies on a free trade agreement.
China is currently Canada's second-largest trading partner, far behind the United States, with annual bilateral trade worth more than Can$85 billion ($67 billion).
During the visit to Beijing and Guangzhou, Trudeau will also meet President Xi Jinping and Zhang Dejiang, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, or legislature.
The prime minister is popular in China, where citizens have affectionately nicknamed him "Little potato", as his surname sounds similar to the word "potato" in Mandarin.
His father, who established diplomatic ties with China in 1970, was named "senior potato".
Internet users on domestic social media platforms focused on Trudeau's appearance, with one commentator hailing him as "the most handsome foreign leader".
The fall of Iraq's Mosul, pictured here on July 9, 2017, marked a key stage in the collapse of the Islamic State group's so-called "caliphate" before a fall in the country's monthly death toll
The death toll from violence in Iraq has fallen to its lowest monthly level in five years following the Islamic State group's military collapse, the United Nations said Monday.
The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq said new lows were recorded in October and November.
In November, a total of 117 civilians and police were killed and 264 wounded in acts of terrorism, violence and armed conflict, UNAMI said.
The highest death tolls by province were recorded in Baghdad, at 51, and Salaheddin, with 24 deaths.
"Two bombings in Tuz Khurmatu, Salahaddin governorate, and in Baghdad governorate in November, which caused numerous casualties among civilians, are a horrible reminder that the terrorists can still inflict blows at peaceful citizens," said UN envoy Jan Kubis.
"All measures need to be taken by the authorities to protect civilians against the barbarism of the terrorists."
The UN mission said violence in Iraq cost 114 lives in October and that the total since the start of the year had reached 3,229 dead.
But the figures for October and November were the two lowest monthly death tolls since November 2012.
The highest toll, of 1,775 dead, came in June 2014 as IS jihadists swept across swathes of Iraq and neighbouring Syria.
The group has since suffered major military defeats and seen its self-declared "caliphate" collapse.
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US President Donald Trump (L) walks alongside Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before giving a speech at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on May 23, 2017
US President Donald Trump faces a Monday deadline to decide whether to move the US embassy in Israel to the disputed city of Jerusalem.
Israelis and Palestinians are eagerly watching to see whether he again renews a waiver delaying the move, as his predecessors have done.
There are suggestions he will sign the waiver and decline to move the embassy for now, but later this week declare Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
Here are five questions and answers explaining the issue:
- What is the dispute? -
Israel seized control of Palestinian east Jerusalem from Jordan during a 1967 war and later annexed it. The move was never recognised by the international community but Israel declared the city its undivided capital.
The Palestinians see east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
No countries have accepted Israeli sovereignty and have their embassies in the commercial capital Tel Aviv instead.
Moving the embassy would be seen as the United States endorsing Israel's claim to the city and rejecting the Palestinian one.
- What is the waiver? -
In 1995, the US Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act calling on the country to move its embassy to the Holy City.
"Since 1950, the city of Jerusalem has been the capital of the state of Israel," it said, demanding the government move the embassy.
The act is binding but there was a clause that presidents could delay it for six months at a time to protect "national security interests".
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama signed these waivers routinely every six months.
Trump reluctantly signed the first waiver that came due during his presidency on June 1. He now faces a second deadline.
- Will Trump sign? -
During the election campaign, Trump promised multiple times to move the embassy, and his ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is a strong advocate of the shift.
However, Trump appeared to back away from the idea during his first months in office under pressure from the Palestinians and other Arab leaders.
As he seeks ways to inject new life into moribund peace talks, there have been warnings that such a move would infuriate the Arab world.
But Trump is also faced with trying to keep his campaign promise and pleasing his right-wing base, which wants to see the embassy moved.
There have been suggestions he will not move the embassy now, but instead recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital later this week.
Dan Shapiro, US ambassador to Israel under Obama, told AFP that such a move in practice would not "have a significant effect, but it will be a signal of future intent to follow through on the presidents commitment to actually move the embassy".
"It would be new language for the United States to formally describe Jerusalem as Israels capital. That has not been the traditional US language."
- What happens if he doesn't? -
If Trump chooses not to sign the waiver, the embassy wouldn't move immediately, but there are rapid repercussions.
Under the 1995 act, the US State Department would see a 50-percent cut in all its future budgets for "acquisition and maintenance of buildings abroad" until the new embassy opens.
In 2016, $968 million was spent on embassy security, construction and maintenance, according to State Department figures.
- What would be the impact of the move? -
Alan Baker, a former Israeli ambassador to Canada, said recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital without moving the embassy would amount to a "sort of legal acrobatics -- trying to please both sides and not annoy either".
But Baker said "anything is better than now, where Jerusalem is not recognised by Israel's best friend and supporter".
Palestinians see the issue starkly differently.
Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, said Sunday that such recognition would "promote international anarchy and disrespect for global institutions and law".
The United States would "be disqualifying itself to play any role in any initiative towards achieving a just and lasting peace", he said.
The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, called Saturday for a new "intifada" if Washington recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or moves its embassy to the disputed city.
Macau's youngest pro-democracy legislator has been suspended
Macau's youngest-ever lawmaker, a leading pro-democracy advocate, has been suspended from the city's legislature in an echo of the disqualification of rebel Hong Kong legislators as China's pressure on political opponents grows.
The government of the semi-autonomous southern Chinese gambling enclave is largely pro-establishment but Sulu Sou, 26, was voted into the legislature in public elections in September.
His party, the New Macau Association, advocates universal suffrage for the territory's parliament, where more than half the representatives are selected by special interest groups or by the pro-Beijing city leader.
The opposition won five of 14 directly elected seats in the 33-strong legislature in September.
Sou's suspension comes as China has spoken up against any challenges to its sovereignty across its territories.
A statement from Macau's parliament said 28 lawmakers had voted to suspend him, with four voting against.
Local media said it meant he could now be investigated on a charge of "aggravated disobedience" over a protest last year. Serving lawmakers are immune from prosecution.
Sou said the move was politically motivated when he addressed a rally before the vote.
"Promise me: don't give up, keep moving forward!" he posted on Facebook after his suspension.
The pro-democracy movement in Macau is far smaller than in nearby Hong Kong, where massive rallies brought several major roads to a standstill in 2014.
But there have been outbursts of frustration against the government.
Sou was among the leaders of one of Macau's largest anti-government protests in 2014, when 20,000 people demonstrated against generous retirement packages for outgoing officials.
Two pro-independence and four pro-democracy lawmakers have been disqualified from Hong Kong's parliament following a special ruling from Beijing last year.
They were ejected for inserting protests into their oaths of office and accused authorities of a political witch-hunt.
Sou's election victory in September was seen as a slap in the face to local officials over Typhoon Hato, which devastated Macau less than two weeks before the vote.
Authorities stood accused of failing to alert the public before the storm, which caused widespread destruction.
Some said the government had hesitated to issue a severe storm alert for fear of affecting the casino business.
Roy Moore, a 70-year-old Christian conservative with a history of controversy stemming from his tenure on Alamaba's supreme court, had been a strong favorite to win the rightwing state's special election on December 12 before the allegations broke
US President Donald Trump on Monday officially endorsed the candidacy of embattled Republican Senate hopeful Roy Moore, who has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women including one who was 14 at the time.
Trump had previously characterized the allegations against Moore as "very troubling" before changing tack and warning voters in Moore's home state of Alabama that a victory for his Democratic rival Doug Jones "would be a disaster!"
On Monday he telephoned the 70-year-old Christian conservative to offer his formal backing ahead of the December 12 special election in the right-leaning southern state, the White House said.
"The president had a positive call with Judge Roy Moore during which they discussed the state of the Alabama Senate race and the president endorsed Judge Moore's campaign," said principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah.
In spite of a history of controversy stemming from his tenure on Alabama's supreme court, Moore had been a strong favorite to win election before the allegations against him were first reported by The Washington Post.
Most of the reported allegations relate to when Moore was a prosecutor in his mid-30s and sought to pursue relationships with teens.
The Alabama race, which is being held to replace Jeff Sessions who was named US attorney general, has national repercussions because Republicans hold only a slim 52-to-48 majority in the Senate.
Earlier Monday, Trump had cited Democrats' opposition to his legislative agenda -- and Moore's potentially decisive Senate vote on everything from immigration to abortion -- as reasons to support him.
"Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama," Trump tweeted. "We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!"
"Look at your 401-k's since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back!" he added, referring to an employer-sponsored retirement savings plan.
- Moore 'Honored' -
In a statement Monday, Moore's campaign said he was "honored" to have received the president's endorsement, in a call placed from on board Air Force One.
"President Trump knows that the future of his conservative agenda in Congress hinges on this election," Moore was quoted as saying.
"I look forward to fighting alongside the president to strengthen our military, secure our border, protect our gun rights, defend the sanctity of life, and confirm conservative judges to courts around this nation."
Moore has denied the allegations against him, and said they are politically motivated.
One of his accusers, Leigh Corfman, now 53, said that when she was 14 Moore took her into his house in the woods near Gadsden, Alabama, removed her shirt and pants, and fondled her over her bra and underpants.
Allegations of sexual harassment have plagued both of America's main political parties in recent weeks.
Democrat John Conyers, a celebrated civil rights activist who is the longest-serving member of Congress, announced he was stepping down from a leadership position last month as he battles harassment claims from members of his staff.
Trump himself has been accused of misconduct by several women, ranging from groping to unwanted advances and kissing, though these did not prevent his election last year.
Trump has publicly criticised Tillerson, saying he was "wasting his time" pursuing contacts with North Korea
The head of NATO on Monday praised embattled US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for his "key role" in the North Korea crisis as rumours swirl that his position is under threat.
Jens Stoltenberg insisted that a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels this week would not be distracted by doubts over Tillerson's future.
Anonymous White House leaks have suggested Tillerson could be out of a job within weeks and even while denying this on Friday, President Donald Trump reminded him: "I call the final shots."
Stoltenberg gave his backing to Tillerson's efforts in tackling the crisis surrounding Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile tests.
"Secretary Tillerson has played a key role, both in sending the message of deterrence, the unity and the resolve of the whole alliance, but also when it comes to the need for continuing to work for a peaceful solution," Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.
Trump has publicly criticised his top diplomat on the issue, saying Tillerson was "wasting his time" pursuing contacts with North Korea.
Tillerson has dismissed reports that Trump aides want him to resign as "laughable", but rumours are set to dog his diplomatic tour of Europe, which also includes visits to Paris and Vienna.
North Korea will be high on the agenda at the NATO meeting after Pyongyang last week tested its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, which it says brings the whole of the continental United States within range.
- 'No change whatsoever' -
Questions have been raised about whether the reported rift with Trump undermines Tillerson's ability to negotiate with allies, but Stoltenberg said he had no concerns.
"We have seen again and again that NATO and NATO ministers are able to focus on the core task, on the job we have to do, despite any speculations and rumours, and I am absolutely certain that this will be the case also now," Stoltenberg said.
"I am absolutely certain that all ministers -- including secretary Tillerson -- will focus on that task and be able to make important decisions."
Rumours about Trump and Tillerson's fractious relationship came to a head on Thursday when several US media outlets -- citing White House sources -- predicted Tillerson's resignation and replacement by CIA chief Mike Pompeo.
Trump rejected the reports as "FAKE NEWS" in a tweet, but acknowledged the pair had policy differences.
The US Ambassador to NATO, Kay Baley Hutchison, also insisted Tillerson still spoke for the president.
"We have been working with Secretary Tillerson and his staff on this meeting for several weeks and there has been no change whatsoever," she told reporters in Brussels on Monday.
The North has staged six increasingly powerful atomic tests since 2006 -- most recently in September -- which have rattled Washington and its key regional allies South Korea and Japan.
The status of Jerusalem is one of the most contentious issues of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict
A senior Turkish government official on Monday warned of a "major catastrophe" if the United States recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital despite a flood of warnings from the Arab world.
"If the (current) status of Jerusalem is changed and another step is taken ... that would be a major catastrophe," Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said during a televised press conference.
"It would completely destroy the fragile peace process in the region, and lead to new conflicts, new disputes and new unrest."
The status of Jerusalem is one of the most contentious issues of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
President Donald Trump faces a key decision this week on whether to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital, potentially reversing years of United States policy and drawing a furious response from the Palestinian leadership and the Arab world.
Most of the international community, including the US as well as Turkey, does not formally recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital, insisting the issue can only be resolved through final status negotiations.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a champion of the Palestinian cause, often criticises Israel over its actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite a 2016 reconciliation deal after years of severed ties following Israel's deadly raid on a Gaza-bound ship.
Bozdag, also government spokesman, on Monday said a US step to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital would benefit "neither Israel ... nor the region."
"It would not benefit anything. Rather than open new doors, it would drag the region into a new disaster."
US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House before heading to Utah
US President Donald Trump said Monday he "feels badly" for his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty last week to lying to the FBI, and lamented that his former rival Hillary Clinton "lied many times" and nothing happened.
Trump's comments to reporters were the latest in a series of outbursts over the FBI's sprawling Russia probe after Flynn's guilty plea on Friday and his admission he is cooperating with investigators.
"I feel badly for general Flynn. I feel very badly," Trump said before heading off on a trip to Utah. "He's led a very strong life, and I feel badly about it."
"I will say this -- Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI. Nothing. Flynn lied, and they destroyed his life. I think it's a shame," he said, calling Flynn's treatment "unfair."
Flynn, Trump's first national security advisor, has pledged to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into whether members of Trump's team colluded with covert Russian efforts to sway the 2016 US election in the Republican's favor.
As part of the deal, the retired three-star general pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russia's ambassador to Washington during the presidential transition.
Trump lashed out at the FBI over the weekend, accusing it of bias in favor of Clinton during its election-year probe of the former secretary of state's use of a private server for classified email. The FBI declined to bring charges in that case.
Yemen's ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh addressing loyalists in Sanaa on March 10, 2011
Yemen's ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was killed on Monday, ruled the Arabian Peninsula country for more than three decades, remaining a key player long after his 2012 resignation.
Adept at navigating Yemen's complex politics, he survived civil war, rebellion in the north, an Al-Qaeda insurgency in the south and a June 2011 bomb attack on his palace that wounded him badly.
In 2014 he allied with his former enemies, Huthi Shiite rebels from Yemen's north, to seek revenge against those who forced him from power.
But the collapse of their alliance was the beginning of the end for the wily leader.
A stocky man with piercing eyes and a moustache, Saleh was for decades Yemen's most powerful man.
In 2015, a UN panel of experts accused him of corruption, saying he may have amassed up to $60 billion the country descended into poverty during his 33 years in power.
A picture from June 1, 2000 shows Ali Abdullah Saleh diving during free time at his private presidential club
Hailing from the same Zaidi minority as the Huthis, Saleh joined the army aged 20 and took part in the 1962 coup against Yemen's Zaidi imamate.
The ensuing six-year civil war ended in victory for Egyptian-backed nationalists who in 1968 formed the Yemen Arab Republic, also known as North Yemen.
A few months earlier, an independent South Yemen had been formed following the British withdrawal. It would eventually become the Communist-ruled People's Democratic Republic of Yemen.
- Reunification -
Saleh showed his leadership skills at an early age and swiftly climbed North Yemen's military and political ladder.
Following the June 1978 assassination of president Ahmad al-Ghashmi, a constituent assembly elected Saleh -- by then a colonel -- president of North Yemen.
He immediately surrounded himself with close aides, notably his brothers, appointing them to key military and security posts.
Saleh deftly steered the country towards reunification in 1990 and four years later crushed a southern secession bid.
Ali Abdullah Saleh addressing parliament in Sanaa in October 2001
He became Yemen's first directly elected president in 1999, winning more than 96 percent of the vote, but elections during his tenure were widely criticised and he was accused of stifling dissent.
Saleh became a US ally in the fight against Al-Qaeda, allowing drone strikes on Yemeni territory, the first of which in 2002 killed the group's Yemen chief, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harithi.
Between 2004 and 2010, Saleh fought several wars against the Huthis, who had long complained of marginalisation.
In the late 2000s he also grappled with growing pro-independence demonstrations in the south.
But the first real challenge to his rule came with the eruption in 2011 of Arab Spring-inspired protests that brought thousands of people onto the streets.
Saleh clung to power amid a deadly crackdown on demonstrators demanding an end to his regime.
He left Yemen for Saudi Arabia in June 2011 to receive medical treatment after being burned in a bomb attack on his presidential compound, but returned less than four months later.
He eventually ceded power in February 2012 under a Gulf-brokered deal that granted him immunity from prosecution.
- 'Dancing on snakes' -
Vice President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi took power after Saleh's resignation but struggled to assert his authority.
The ex-president remained behind the scenes, refusing to go into exile and remaining head of his General People's Congress party.
The Huthis' seizure of Sanaa in September 2014 would have been impossible without support from Saleh loyalists, analysts said.
An expert report to the UN Security Council alleged Saleh provided "direct support" to the Huthis through funding and the backing of elite forces still under his influence.
Hadi in February 2015 fled to the southern city of Aden after escaping house arrest in Sanaa, then to Saudi Arabia as the rebels advanced south.
Yassin Makkawi, an adviser to Hadi, in 2015 described the ex-president as a "tyrant", saying "the Huthis are puppets in the hands of Saleh".
A coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which feared the Huthis would help its arch-rival Iran spread its influence in Yemen, launched air strikes and sent ground troops to Yemen in support of Hadi.
That escalation has since killed more than 8,750 people and dragged Yemen towards what the UN calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
The intervention helped loyalists win back control of large parts of the south but they were unable to dislodge the Huthis from Sanaa and other key strongholds.
Saleh was reported to have remained in the capital and boasted: "I will never leave Sanaa."
But in mid-2017, his alliance with the Huthis began to collapse amid simmering resentment over money, power-sharing and suspected backdoor dealings.
When Saleh reached out to the Saudi-led coalition last week, the Huthis accused him of "great treason" and staging a "coup" against "an alliance he never believed in".
A smart tactician who had portrayed himself as a "saviour" after his resignation, Saleh once compared ruling Yemen to "dancing on the heads of snakes".
But Saleh's gamble in quitting his alliance with the Huthis proved to be a fatal step.
As gun battles rocked the capital on Monday, the Huthis announced that Saleh had been killed, and a video supplied to AFP by the rebels showed what appeared to be his corpse.
Hours later, his party confirmed the news.
At the age of 75, the man who had shaped much of Yemen's post-independence history was dead.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Chinas automaker Lifan expressed its interest in producing new energy products in Uruguay at the 11th China-Latin America and the Caribbean (China-LAC) Business Summit.
On November 3, Chinese reporters gained news from the company that at Uruguay governments invitation, the company decided to introduce new energy products into the Latin American country and promote the localization of its electronic control and battery technology. Whats more, Lifan also plans to launch ride-sharing and taxi services of new energy vehicles in Uruguay and then expand the services to other Latin America countries.
Uruguay President Tabare Vazquez, revealed that the presidential palace will take lead in setting up a work team to support Lifan to carry out new energy projects. The government hopes Lifan to expand local production capacity and build new energy vehicle production lines in Uruguay.
Ever since Lifan started to build engine companies and vehicle assembly plants in Uruguay in 2012, the company managed to sell vehicles in many Latin countries while its motorbikes reached throughout the Latin America.
Mou Gang, president of Lifan Group, said that new energy products and globalization matter much to the company. In product, the company sticks to the combination of charging and swapping battery techonology. Currently, the company is researching how to commercialize autonomous technology to solve the problem of last kilometer.
A Syrian man accused of taking part in a 2016 suicide bombing that killed seven Jordanian soldiers awaits sentencing at a Jordan court on December 4, 2017
A Jordanian court on Monday sentenced a Syrian man to death by hanging for carrying out a "terrorist" attack in 2016 that killed seven soldiers near a border crossing.
Three other Syrians initially given the death penalty were jailed for life and a fifth received a two-year sentence, said an AFP reporter who attended the hearing at the state security court.
All five were arrested and put on trial in March after a June 2016 suicide bombing killed seven soldiers and wounded 13 in no-man's land near the Rukban border crossing with Syria.
Soon after the attack, the army declared Jordan's vast desert regions stretching northeast to Syria and east to Iraq "closed military zones".
The move stranded tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in the area and sparked calls by international relief agencies for Jordan to ease the measure.
The military court sentenced Najm al-Umur, 21, to death by hanging after he was convicted of "terrorist activity leading to the death of individuals".
Umur, considered to be the mastermind behind the attack, was described in the charge sheet as a member of the Islamic State group.
Three other defendants, all in their 20s, were also sentenced to hang but had their sentences commuted to life in prison after the court took into consideration a number of reasons, including that their role had been only to provide support.
The fifth defendant was sentenced to two years in prison for entering Jordan illegally.
The charge sheet said he was sent to the country to plan the attack and had recruited the others.
Jordan is a member of the US-led coalition fighting IS.
Indian Congress Party Vice President Rahul Gandhi (L) walks with party leader Motilal Vora as he arrives to file his nomination papers for the post of party president
He has never held public office, once likened power to "poison", and saw his politician father and grandmother assassinated. Now Rahul Gandhi is poised to take over as leader of the party that has ruled India for much of its history.
The 46-year-old's expected nomination as president of the Congress Party follows years of speculation that he would succeed his mother in the role he has been prepared for since birth.
The son, grandson and great-grandson of prime ministers, Rahul has carried the burden of expectation since his father Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991.
His reputation as a reluctant leader and his lacklustre performance in the 2014 general election campaign, which he fronted, had cast doubt over his suitability for the role.
But analysts say the Gandhi family's tight grip on the party leadership -- dating back to India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru -- made his ascension almost inevitable.
His mother Sonia has led the party for 19 years and has worked tirelessly to ensure her son's eventual succession.
But he faces an immense battle to revive the ailing centre-left party ahead of the next national polls due in 2019.
A Financial Times editorial last month called Rahul an "amiable and pleasant fellow who lacks the will to win power or the killer instinct necessary for the cut and thrust of political battle in India".
Just 58 percent of Indians view him positively, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center earlier this year that put Prime Minister Narendra Modi 30 points ahead of him in the popularity stakes.
- Life of privilege -
"He will be always seen as a dynast. But much will depend on how he delivers results for the party," said Gurpreet Mahajan, political studies professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
"His only shield to criticism will be performance."
Rahul's supporters argue that he has landed some punches in recent months after a lengthy post-election period during which Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appeared unassailable.
Others, however, say a dip in the BJP's popularity has has more to do with a slowing in growth under Modi, the son of a tea-seller who has repeatedly riled Rahul as a "shehzada" or prince.
Rahul was born into a life of privilege, but his younger years were cloaked in tragedy.
He was 14 when his grandmother, prime minister Indira Gandhi, was slain by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 as revenge for the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Just six years later his father Rajiv was killed by a suicide bomber when campaigning for re-election.
"In my life I have seen my grandmother die, I have seen my father die, I have seen my grandmother go to jail and I have actually been through a tremendous amount of pain as a child," he once said in a TV interview.
"When these things happen to you, what I had to be scared of I lost. There is absolutely nothing I am scared of."
Rahul was educated in India and at Harvard and Cambridge, and first worked in business management in London before winning the family constituency seat of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh state in 2004.
After a stint as head of its youth wing, his profile rose further when he became Congress vice president in January 2013.
But he has struggled to carve out a reputation as a politician in his own right, not helped by the fact his younger sister Priyanka brims with the charisma he is accused of lacking.
He rejected offers to enter the last Congress government, instead promoting causes such as right-to-information legislation he regards as key to curbing rampant corruption and a food security bill that critics say India can ill afford.
He has been at his most impassioned defending the secular tradition personified by his great-grandfather Jawaharal Nehru, India's first prime minister, whose socialist model framed the post-independence economy.
The unelectrified single-line track to Ivory Coast 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
Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso on Monday began work to overhaul and expand a single-track rail line connecting Abidjan to the Burkinabe capital that is a vital link between the Sahel and Atlantic coast.
Renovating the 1,260-kilometre (782-mile) track -- which had first been announced in 2015 with no work being started -- is expected to take eight years.
All parties involved hope the project will improve traffic and trade between the two West African neighbours.
"Investment for the work, totalling 396 million euros ($470 million)... is the responsibility of the operator," Ivorian Transport Minister Amadou Kone said at the launch ceremony, referring to the giant French transportation company Bollore.
Burkinabe Transport Minister Souleymane Soulama said the project would make the current trains running at 40 kilometres (25 miles) per hour "a distant memory" and that speed and comfort would be the new standards.
Two new passenger trains and a locomotive will be added, 853 kms of track will be relaid, and 31 stations are to be refurbished.
"At the end of the work, Sitarail will be able to transport five million tonnes each year, including two million tonnes of general freight and three million tonnes of ore, and 800,000 passengers," said Eric Melet, chief executive for development at Bollore Transport and Logistics.
This is the third time in two years that the countries have announced these renovations.
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 numerous interruptions, the line opened in 1954. After an economic crisis in the 1990s, management of the railways was handed over to Sitarail.
The line plays a key role for landlocked Burkina Faso in transporting cotton and manganese to the coast, and in importing oil, cement and fertiliser, but it suffers from poor tracks and ageing rolling stock, which limits train speed.
In September 2016, all traffic was stopped for two weeks after a bridge on the Ivorian side collapsed as a goods train was passed by, although no one was injured.
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.
More than two-thirds of people around the world infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa -- children and teenage girls are bearing the brunt of the continent's epidemic
The head of the UN's AIDS agency on Monday urged African countries to protect young women and children who are bearing the brunt of the continent's AIDS epidemic.
A sharp rise of people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has now slowed, "but now is not the time to drop our guard," Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, told the start of a six-day conference on HIV/AIDS and sexually-transmitted diseases in Africa.
"The many changes under way in our world should not threaten the sustainability of our great achievements in the AIDS response," he warned.
"We cannot afford to lose our gains. If we want to end this epidemic, we must act now and act differently."
About 36.7 million people in the world lived with HIV in 2016, compared with 36.1 million in 2015 and 35.5 million in 2014, according to UNAIDS figures.
AIDS-related deaths have declined by almost 50 percent since a peak of 1.9 million in 2005, to one million last year, helped by the rollout of HIV drugs, which repress the virus but do not eliminate it.
However more than two-thirds of those infected -- 25.2 million -- live south of the Sahara.
And, among the 1.16 million new infections in Africa last year, more than one in 10 occurred among children aged under 14.
For this highly vulnerable group, "prevention efforts must be stepped up," said Sidibe.
In some parts of east Africa, he said, girls aged 15-19 account for 74 percent of new teenage infections -- a figure that rises to more than 90 percent in southern Africa, he said.
Researchers have pointed the finger in particular at cases in which young girls are married to older, infected men.
The consequences of child marriages are "tragic," said Sidibe. In this group, the infection rate is 50 percent higher than among young girls who are not married.
- 'Fight to live' -
Assita Ouedraogo, who was born with the HIV virus, called on Africa's young people to "fight to live" in the face of AIDS
Around 10,000 people are attending the conference, known by its initials as ICASA, in Ivory Coast's capital Abidjan.
The event, held every two years, was launched to a powerful speech by 20-year-old Asseta Ouedraogo, infected at birth through her mother, who died in 2003.
Ouedraogo called on Africa's young people to "fight to live" in the face of AIDS, telling them that treatment and prevention could help them live a normal life and realise their dreams.
"Our generation must commit itself to being the last to be affected by HIV," she said, to rousing applause.
Ouedraogo, speaking to AFP, said she was training to be a pastry chef as she had no money to take up university studies.
"Until now, my friends didn't know that I had HIV, but I wanted to speak, to get this message across, to persuade those who have the virus to take their treatment," Ouedraogo said.
"You must not give up, there is hope, we have a life expectancy, we can have children and work," she said.
Accusations of 2016 election collusion with Russia and possible obstruction of justice continue to swirl around President Donald Trump
As special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation gains momentum, two major questions loom over the White House:
- Did members of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign collude with Russia to get him elected?
- And did Trump, as president, engage in obstruction of justice?
Here is a look at the two questions:
- Election collusion -
Trump has denied -- repeatedly and heatedly -- that there was any collusion between members of his 2016 presidential election campaign and Russia.
"There's been absolutely no collusion," Trump said over the weekend of a probe he has denounced on multiple occasions as a "political witch hunt."
US intelligence agencies determined with "high confidence" in a report issued in January that Russia had sought to influence the 2016 race in Trump's favor.
But the report by the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency and Director of National Intelligence stopped short of stating that Trump's election campaign had colluded with Russian efforts to get him elected.
That was left to Mueller, a highly respected former director of the FBI, to resolve.
Mueller was named in May by acting attorney general Rod Rosenstein to look into whether there had been "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump."
So far, Mueller's team has charged four people but none of them has been accused of directly colluding with Moscow to get Trump into the White House.
Retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, Trump's former National Security Adviser, pleaded guilty on Friday of lying to the FBI over his contacts with Russia's ambassador to Washington.
But those conversations occurred in December, after Trump was elected, and do not directly support the charge of collusion with Russia to swing the vote.
In exchange for a single charge and a potentially light sentence, Flynn did agree, however, to fully cooperate with Mueller's team.
This has led to speculation that Flynn may have more information to provide to investigators about any contacts between Trump's campaign and Russia.
"If there was coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians I can't think of a person who would know more about that than Flynn," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told CBS News.
"So it won't be long before we understand, one way or the other, whether Trump people colluded with Russia because I can't imagine it happening and Flynn not know about it," added the senator from South Carolina.
Also charged with lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts -- and also cooperating with Mueller -- is George Papadopoulos, a low-level foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign.
Papadopoulos cultivated Russian contacts during the campaign and tried to arrange a Trump trip to Russia or a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He also told his supervisors that he had been offered "dirt" on Trump's rival, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and son-in-law Jared Kushner are also believed to be on Mueller's radar because of their contacts with Russians.
But they have not been charged with anything so far and nothing has emerged yet linking Trump himself directly to the Russians.
- Obstruction of justice -
Trump's firing of FBI director James Comey in May is at the heart of the accusations that the president may have engaged in obstruction of justice.
Comey had been conducting an FBI investigation into the allegations of Russian meddling in the election when he was abruptly dismissed by Trump.
The FBI director had also been looking into Flynn, who had been fired as national security adviser in February for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
According to Comey, Trump urged him at a meeting in the Oval Office in February to halt an investigation into Flynn.
Such a request to an FBI director has been described as obstruction of justice by some legal scholars.
But Trump has denied making such a demand of Comey and engaged in a campaign to disparage the former FBI director since dismissing him in May.
"I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn," Trump tweeted on Sunday. "Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!"
That tweet, however, followed one on Saturday which suggested Trump already knew Flynn had lied to the FBI when he asked Comey to drop the investigation.
"I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI," Trump tweeted. "He has pled guilty to those lies."
In an attempt to back away from the tweet, a Trump attorney, John Dowd, told the website Axios that he had drafted the tweet, not the president himself.
Dowd also reportedly claimed that a president cannot be guilty of obstruction of justice "because he is the chief law enforcement officer under (the Constitution) and has every right to express his view of any case."
That assertion may be on shaky legal ground.
As part of their impeachment proceedings, former presidents Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon were both accused of obstruction of justice and other offenses.
Data from Sierra Leoneans reporting incidents of corruption found the police force to be the country's most graft-riddled institution
Sierra Leone's opposition on Monday said it welcomed the replacement of the country's police chief following his sacking amid accusations of institutional political bias and endemic corruption.
Former Inspector General of Police Francis Munu was reassigned to an ambassadorial post in neighbouring Liberia after being removed from duty last week, and replaced with Richard Moigbe, his deputy.
The decision by President Ernest Bai Koroma -- who has not commented on the matter -- came after pressure by the opposition Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) over the arrest of their party spokesman Lahai Lawrence Leema and the detention of several more supporters.
"We are satisfied with the decision to relieve the former police boss who was unprofessional in handling political matters," SLPP chairman Prince Alex Harding told AFP.
Harding alleged that Munu gave orders to police officers to fire tear gas at their party office last month, causing injuries and leading to multiple arrests.
The decision comes with tensions over demonstrations and political activity spiking in the lead-up to March 2018 presidential elections, when Koroma will step down from office.
Data from Sierra Leoneans reporting incidents of corruption to a British-backed anti-bribery platform via mobile phone found the police force to be the country's most graft-riddled institution.
Beyond corruption, the force is also dogged by accusations of using excessive force.
The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone revealed in a report that police used live ammunition in an August 2016 protest in the town of Kabala, killing two people and wounding several more.
Meanwhile the majority of the police detention facilities in Sierra Leone are overcrowded and have deplorable sanitation, increasing the risk of diseases spreading among inmates.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un -- shown here in an undated picture released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on December 3, 2017 -- has sparked international fury with his dogged pursuit of a weapons program
A top UN official will travel to North Korea this week for talks with officials there, a UN spokesman said Monday, amid heightened tensions over Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
The unusual visit by Jeffrey Feltman, which begins Tuesday and runs to Friday, comes less than a week after North Korea test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile believed capable of reaching the United States.
On Monday, the United States and South Korea launched their biggest ever joint air exercise amid warnings by US officials of a growing risk of war in the Korean peninsula.
Feltman, who is the UN under-secretary-general for political affairs, will discuss "issues of mutual interest and concern" with North Korean officials, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
The spokesman was unable to say whether Feltman will meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
The UN official will also visit China during his trip to the region, Dujarric said.
He said Feltman's trip was in response to an invitation extended by the North Koreans during the UN General Assembly in September.
Asked whether Feltman would be preparing for a follow-on visit to Pyongyang by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Dujarric would only say that Guterres has always been ready to undertake a "good offices" mission if necessary.
A Patriot Advanced Capability 3 (PAC-3) interceptor missile being launched during a test in the Pacific in 2012
When Shiite rebels blasted a ballistic missile from Yemen toward the Saudi capital last month, Riyadh officials said they had intercepted and destroyed the incoming rocket.
But in an analysis published Monday by the New York Times, an arms expert and a research team examined photo and video evidence and found that Saudi Arabia may actually have missed the missile with interceptors from a US-made Patriot defense system.
The November 4 attack was the first missile Shiite rebels had aimed at the heart of the Saudi capital, underscoring the growing threat posed by the raging conflict in Yemen.
As the missile flew over Riyadh, Patriot interceptors blasted into the sky toward the rocket.
Soon after, large parts of the missile fell to the ground, and officials said this was evidence of a successful shootdown.
But around the same time, a large explosion was felt near the Riyadh airport, which was the intended target of the strike.
The Times and researchers, mainly from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, said the bits of missile Saudi officials collected and put on display were all from the back end of the rocket, believed to be a Scud variant, raising the question that the Patriot system may not have worked.
According to the Times, the Scud was "almost certainly" designed to split into two pieces as it neared the end of its 600-mile (965-kilometer) journey from Yemen.
The missile engine and tube are designed to carry the warhead for most of the flight, allowing the smaller and harder to hit warhead to complete the journey to its target.
The Times said evidence suggests either the Patriot missiles missed their target or only hit the back end of the Yemeni missile after the warhead was unleashed.
"Governments lie about the effectiveness of these systems. Or they're misinformed," Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst who led the research team, told the Times.
"And that should worry the hell out of us."
The Pentagon referred questions to Saudi Arabia, which declined to comment to the Times.
The question of missile defenses and their effectiveness has taken on renewed urgency after North Korea tested a missile with the potential ability to strike anywhere in the United States.
The Pentagon says it is confident it could stop such a missile with a "layered" missile defense system, but the system is not infallible and critics fear it would fail in a real-world setting.
President Donald Trump is to meet Democratic lawmakers to discuss averting a possible government shutdown
Democratic leaders of the House and Senate agreed on Monday to meet with US President Donald Trump later in the week to discuss pressing issues and avert a potential government shutdown.
"We are hopeful the President will be open to an agreement to address the urgent needs of the American people and keep government open," Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said in a joint statement.
The White House meeting is scheduled for Thursday and comes just one day ahead of the deadline for Congress to vote funding to keep the government functioning.
House and Senate Republicans are proposing a two-week stopgap spending bill.
Senate Democrats have threatened to block the move unless they can win concessions from Republicans on a number of issues, notably the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who came to the United States as children.
Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, protected the so-called "Dreamers" from expulsion through an executive order.
Trump rescinded that order, but then told Congress to craft a legal solution within the next six months.
Trump had been scheduled to meet Schumer and Pelosi last week but they skipped the talks after the president tweeted preemptively that he did not expect them to come to an agreement.
"We're glad the White House has reached out and asked for a second meeting," Schumer and Pelosi said. "We hope the President will go into this meeting with an open mind, rather than deciding that an agreement can't be reached beforehand."
The Democratic leaders said a number of subjects should be on the table at the meeting, which would include the Republican leaders of the House and Senate, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
"We need to reach a budget agreement that equally boosts funds for our military and key priorities here at home including the opioid crisis, pension plans and rural infrastructure," they said.
"We have to provide funding for community health centers and (the Children's Health Insurance Program), as well as relief for the millions of Americans still reeling from natural disasters," they added.
"There is a bipartisan path forward on all of these items," Schumer and Pelosi said.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un -- shown here in an undated picture released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on December 3, 2017 -- has sparked international fury with his dogged pursuit of a weapons program
A senior United Nations envoy arrived at Beijing's airport on Tuesday on his way to North Korea for a rare visit aimed at defusing soaring tensions over Pyongyang's intercontinental ballistic missile launch.
The unusual trip by Jeffrey Feltman, which runs to Friday, comes less than a week after North Korea said it test-fired a new ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States.
AFP journalists saw Feltman arrive in a UN-flagged car at the Chinese capital's international airport in the morning. North Korea's Air Koryo airline has a 0455 GMT flight to Pyongyang on Tuesday.
His trip comes a day after the United States and South Korea launched their biggest-ever joint air exercise -- manoeuvres slammed by Pyongyang as an "all-out provocation".
The five-day Vigilant Ace drill involves 230 aircraft, including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and tens of thousands of troops, Seoul's air force said.
Nuclear warheads
Feltman arrived in China on Monday as Beijing is one of the few transit points to North Korea in the world.
China is Pyongyang's sole major diplomatic and military ally, and its main trade partner.
Once in the North, Feltman will discuss "issues of mutual interest and concern" with officials, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, adding he was unable to say whether Feltman will meet with the reclusive state's leader Kim Jong-Un.
It will be Feltman's first visit to North Korea since he took office five years ago, and the first by a UN under-secretary-general in more than seven years.
The UN envoy is also planning to see foreign diplomats and UN workers in the North on humanitarian missions, Dujarric said.
- 'Vigilant Ace' -
The UN Security Council has hit the isolated and impoverished North with a package of sanctions over its increasingly powerful missile and nuclear tests, which have rattled Washington and its regional allies South Korea and Japan.
US President Donald Trump has leaned heavily on China's President Xi Jinping (L) to do more to rein in North Korea
Pyongyang ramped up already high tensions on the Korean Peninsula five days ago when it announced it had successfully test-fired a new ICBM, which it says brings the whole of the continental United States within range.
Analysts say it is unclear whether the missile survived re-entry into the earth's atmosphere or could successfully deliver a warhead to its target -- key technological hurdles for Pyongyang.
A Cathay Pacific crew spotted what was "suspected to be the re-entry" of the missile as they flew from San Francisco to Hong Kong, the airline said.
In a separate message to staff, Cathay general manager Mark Hoey said the crew described seeing the missile "blow up and fall apart," The South China Morning Post reported.
- 'Begging for nuclear war'? -
In recent years, Pyongyang has accelerated its drive to bring together nuclear and missile technology capable of threatening the US, which it accuses of hostility.
US President Donald Trump has engaged in months of tit-for-tat rhetoric with Kim, pejoratively dubbing him "Little Rocket Man" and a "sick puppy".
North Korean state media has hit back with a flurry of its own colourful insults, calling Trump a "dotard", a "frightened dog" and a "gangster."
Over the weekend, Pyongyang countered that Washington was "begging for nuclear war" as the North blasted the joint US-South Korean drills.
As well as featuring the latest generation of stealth fighters, this year's war games involve simulated precision attacks on the North's military installations, including its missile launch sites and artillery units, Yonhap news agency said, citing unnamed Seoul sources.
The five-day Vigilant Ace drill -- involving 230 aircraft and tens of thousands of troops -- began Monday morning, Seoul's air force said
As tensions surged, US Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican and foreign policy hawk, warned that the US was moving closer to "preemptive war" if the North continued its nuclear tests.
His remarks echoed those of Trump's National Security Adviser HR McMaster, who told a security forum on Saturday that the potential for war with the North "is increasing every day."
But some Trump advisers say US military options are limited when Pyongyang could launch an artillery barrage on the South Korean capital -- only around 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the heavily-fortified border and home to 10 million people.
Tokyo's parliament on Monday slammed the North's weapons programme as an "imminent threat". Last week's missile landed in Japan's economic waters.
China's foreign ministry warned that the situation on the Korean peninsula remained "highly sensitive" and called on all sides to "do more things to ease the tension and avoid provoking each other."
The North has boasted that the Hwasong 15 ICBM tested on Wednesday is capable of delivering a "super-large" nuclear warhead anywhere in the US mainland.
While analysts agree the latest test showed a big improvement in potential range, they say the North may not have yet mastered all the technology required to successfully hit the US with a nuclear warhead.
burs-bar-lth/jta
US President Donald Trump, seen here visiting the Western Wall, has pledged he will recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital
President Donald Trump on Tuesday slapped down warnings of widespread Middle East unrest as he told anxious Arab leaders he still intends to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, on the eve of a much-anticipated policy speech.
Amid a frantic round of telephone diplomacy, Trump told Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas and Jordan's King Abdullah that the deeply controversial move was coming, but crucially did not give a timeframe.
Trump "informed the president (Abbas) on his intention to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem," the Palestinian leader's office said in a statement that was echoed from Amman.
Trump missed a Monday deadline to decide whether to keep the embassy in Tel Aviv or fulfill a campaign promise and move it to Jerusalem -- de facto recognizing Israel's claim on the disputed city.
Such a move would delight both Trump's donors and the conservative and evangelical base that is so vital for the embattled president's survival.
But it could also extinguish Trump's much-vaunted efforts to broker Middle East peace and ignite the flames of conflict in a region already reeling from crises in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Qatar.
The 71-year-old president will give a speech on his decision Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.
Anticipating widespread demonstrations, US government officials have already been ordered to avoid Jerusalem's Old City and the West Bank.
- 'Threading the needle'? -
US officials talk of "threading the needle" -- fulfilling Trump's pledge, while keeping the peace process on the rails -- but critics say Trump's approach is more like "splitting the baby."
Officials say he will hold off on moving the embassy right away, largely for logistical reasons, but may present a timetable for that to go ahead on Wednesday.
Equally controversially, he is also expected to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, while leaving open questions about control of the predominantly Palestinian eastern part of the city.
The White House argues that such a move would not prejudge final talks and would represent the reality that west Jerusalem is and will continue to be part of Israel under any settlement.
All foreign embassies in Israel, including that of the United States, are currently located in Tel Aviv although most countries have consular representation in Jerusalem
But it could upend a decades-old western policy -- observed by both Republican and Democratic presidents -- that stated Jerusalem's status can only be decided by negotiation.
Saudi Arabia's King Salman warned his close ally that moving the US embassy was a "dangerous step" that could rile Muslims around the world.
"Mr Trump! Jerusalem is a red line for Muslims," Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a raucous televised speech, echoing alarm expressed by Palestinian and Arab leaders.
In his address, Erdogan warned that any move to back Israel's claim to the city would mobilize "the entire Islamic world" and even prompt Ankara to sever its recently renewed diplomatic ties with the Jewish state.
Israel's government has largely been silent. It earlier left the Trump administration with the impression that moving the embassy was a "no go," leading to Trump signing the waiver the first time around.
The armed Islamist Hamas movement has threatened to launch a new "intifada" or uprising.
Most of the international community, including the United States, does not formally recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
- 'A way must be found' -
Jerusalem is home to sites that are holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians
Following talks in Brussels with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, top EU diplomat Federica Mogherini warned that any move which risked undermining efforts to jumpstart moribund peace talks "must absolutely be avoided."
"A way must be found through negotiations to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of both states, so that the aspiration of both parties can be fulfilled," she said.
In Cairo, Arab League chief Ahmed Abul Gheit warned it would be viewed as an act of "clear aggression" against the Arab and Muslim world.
The Palestinians said it would shatter any illusion about Trump's ability to fairly mediate in any talks.
"That totally destroys any chance that he will play a role as an honest broker," said Nabil Shaath, an adviser to Abbas.
- The Jerusalem Embassy Act -
In Israel, however, hardline Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman hailed the moment as a "historic opportunity" for Trump, expressing hope he would see the US embassy in Jerusalem "next week or next month."
Israel seized the largely-Arab eastern sector of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, claiming the entire city as its "eternal and undivided capital," but the Palestinians want the eastern sector as capital of a Palestinian state
The US Congress has already made its aim clear in the so-called Jerusalem Embassy Act, which was passed in 1995 and which stated that the city "should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel" and that the US embassy should be moved there.
But an inbuilt waiver, which allows the president to temporarily postpone the move on grounds of "national security," has been repeatedly invoked by successive US presidents, meaning the law has never taken effect.
Israel seized the largely-Arab eastern sector of Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it, claiming both sides of the city as its "eternal and undivided capital."
But the Palestinians want the eastern sector as the capital of their future state and fiercely oppose any Israeli attempt to extend sovereignty there.
Several peace plans have unravelled over the issue of how to divide sovereignty or oversee sites in the city that are holy for Christians, Jews and Muslims.
burs-arb/sst
The US Supreme Court says the Trump administration can implement its revised ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority countries while the policy is challenged in appeals courts
The US Supreme Court said Monday that the government could fully enforce a revised ban on travelers from six mainly Muslim countries pending appeal, backing President Donald Trump in the year-long battle over the controversial measure.
The court stayed October rulings from two lower courts that had blocked implementation of the open-ended ban on visitors from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen while legal challenges to it continued.
The third version of Trump's travel ban, unveiled in September, drew immediate challenges in federal appeals courts in Richmond, Virginia and San Francisco, California.
Plaintiffs argued that the measure targets Muslims in violation of the US Constitution and did not advance security goals as the government claimed.
The challengers convinced the lower courts to put implementation on hold while they and government lawyers fight out the case.
But the Trump administration, which says the ban is crucial to protect US national security and deter terror attacks, secured strong support from the Supreme Court in a 7-2 vote by justices to let the government move ahead while the appeals continue.
The justices said they expect the lower appeals courts to expedite their decisions, leaving open the possibility that the policy itself could return to the Supreme Court in yet another legal challenge to the White House.
The Richmond court is expected to hear the case on Friday.
The ban also covers people from North Korea and a selection of high officials from Venezuela, but its main focus is travelers from the six countries.
A huge so-called 'peace diamond' sold by the government of Sierra Leone to discourage crime-tainted 'blood diamonds' was sold for 4.9 million ($6.5 million) on Monday.
The 709-carat stone, which was unearthed in March, is the largest discovered in Sierra Leone in almost a half-century.
The diamond is said to be the 14th-largest ever discovered, according to the Rapaport Group, which auctioned the stone in New York on behalf of Sierra Leone's government.
Found by a company led by evangelical Pastor Momoh, the diamond was given to the government in the hopes it would handle the sale in a way that leaves more profits and development potential in Sierra Leone.
Named the Peace Diamond, 2.8 million ($3.8 million) of the proceeds will directly benefit 250,000 inhabitants of a Sierra Leone region with no school, hospital, clean water or roads
British jewelers Laurence Graff purchased the stone, according to Martin Rapaport, whose group hosted the auction. The government was expecting about 5.25 million ($7 million).
'Perhaps we're dealing with the price of transparency,' Rapaport said.
Illegal mining and sales of so-called blood diamonds have been a major source of strife in many African countries including Sierra Leone. That was the goal of the auction approach of President Ernest Bai Koroma.
Expectations at home were high, yet the price may have seemed a disappointment.
Gibril Sesay, a market seller, said he wanted the government to provide 'water, electricity and good roads for the people' with the proceeds of the gem following the sale.
But Beatrice Cole, a civil servant, told AFP 'the money paid for the diamond was far below what we expected' after watching the auction live on TV in Freetown.
BALTIMORE (AP) - Akai Alston was 13 when he was shot for the first time. It was during a robbery in East Baltimore, in broad daylight.
As he lay in his hospital bed, shaken and frightened, he knew he had a choice to make.
"I put it in my head that I'd rather be a suspect than a victim," he said.
In this March 3, 2017 photo, community outreach worker Kelvin Parker poses for a portrait while walking in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore. Parker is one of three outreach workers at U-TURNS, a fledgling initiative with an ambitious goal: to reach teenagers and young adults in west Baltimore and provide an alternative to the streets. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Ten years later, Alston faced another grim decision. He was dealing crack and hooked on prescription pills. He'd squeezed triggers, and seen friends and family members lose their lives to gunshots. After his last conviction, for accessory to murder, he knew was on the path to die in jail or die in the streets. This time, he rejected both.
Now Alston is a community outreach coordinator for U-TURNS, a project that tries to give Baltimore teenagers and young adults an alternative to the streets. They can find a safe space, food, job training, holistic health practices such as yoga and acupuncture, mental health services and - most important - mentorship.
The initiative's been in operation less than a year and couldn't come at a more pressing time. As of Dec. 3, Baltimore has seen 321 homicides this year, surpassing the 2016 total of 318. At least ninety-eight victims were no older than 25. Gun Violence Archive data show that from January 2014 to June 2016, roughly 7.2 teenagers of every 10,000 were shot. The figure, based on an analysis of news articles and police data, is likely an undercount.
This year, Police Commissioner Kevin Davis announced that he'd dedicate additional officers to street patrol. Two years ago, Davis launched a multiagency initiative called the "war room" to try and map the web of relationships among victims and perpetrators.
Still, the violence continues.
Alston and Kelvin Parker, 34, are both former drug dealers - and both victims and perpetrators of gun violence as teens. Now, in the early afternoons, they head to the same West Baltimore street corners where they used to deal. They try to persuade the corner boys to leave their posts. For about three hours daily, they walk through the Gilmor Homes projects and past blocks of vacant rowhouses in Sandtown, the neighborhood where the 2015 death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray prompted protests and rioting. They wear black jackets with "Outreach" emblazoned in white on the back.
Building trust in a community where it's in short supply is one of their main goals.
One 17-year-old who started dealing at 14 comes to U-TURNS almost daily. Dealing was his only option, he said, after losing his mother at 3.
"The only way I knew that I could be somebody or have money in my pockets or accomplish anything was by turning over to the drug life," he said.
At 15, he was stabbed in the stomach. When he recovered, he decided he needed a change.
Now he's in therapy and helps care for children at Kids Safe Zone, an afterschool center that houses U-TURNS.
"I've learned that not everything revolves around violence, that not everything revolves around you," he said.
Alston and Parker, he said, are "my role models. They've been through what I've been through."
Parker grew up in Sandtown with his grandmother and a dozen others in a two-bedroom apartment. At 7, a gun was pulled on him for the first time, and he saw two men beat another unconscious with a 2-by-4. With his father in jail and mother too busy to raise him, Parker looked up to an older cousin, a notorious dealer.
"Guns on the table, guns in the cabinet, guns in the bathroom - that was my normal," he said. "Coming up in a place where no one else values life, where no one else really cares, it's hard not to become what you're around."
By 12, he'd started selling drugs. The lifestyle had a price - jail time.
"I didn't see a whole year on the street until I was 21," he said.
Alston also grew up fast. Born in 1991, at the height of the crack epidemic, his mother was addicted, leaving him and his sister to fend for themselves.
"I didn't have little army men," he said. "I had colored vials."
Alston said he spent most of his childhood bouncing from one house to another. Although he didn't start selling drugs until after he was shot, he admired neighborhood dealers for their clothes and cars, and ability to provide.
Alston fired his first gun at 14, in retaliation for a punch in the jaw so forceful it made his ear ring.
Parker had never fired a gun before he was struck. After he was shot, he knew he'd have to.
"Retaliation was a must," he said. "It made me feel like a man, or what I thought a man was."
Parker said he didn't realize until he started training as an outreach worker how much of what he endured as a child influenced him. He only recently came to understand trauma, he said, and is working to move past his own.
In group therapy sessions, Alston and Parker use an approach to processing trauma that focuses on safety, emotions, loss and the future. One afternoon, they gathered a half-dozen teens, all boys but one, and screened a "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" clip in which Will Smith's character discusses growing up without a father. Alston and Parker asked the teens to share an experience; almost all said they came from broken homes, with drugs and violence commonplace.
At another session, Alston led a discussion with a dozen teens about fear and danger, and explained how trauma can manifest in the body and mind.
Keeshanna Mobley, 17, bounced her baby nephew on her knee. She'd been coming to U-TURNS for a few months, since an arrest for fighting. She's on probation, and feels safer now that she spends time at the center instead of the streets, she said.
"There was a lot of stuff I was getting into before this, trouble, getting locked up, getting myself into the wrong situation at the wrong time," she said. "Since I joined U-TURNS, it's been a lot less, because I'm here."
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Follow Juliet Linderman at https://twitter.com/JulietLinderman
In this March 2, 2017 photo, Akai Alston, bottom, a community outreach worker at U-TURNS, prepares to lead a group therapy session with young people in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore. Alston is one of three outreach workers at U-Turns, a fledgling initiative with the goal of providing an alternative to the streets to teenagers and young adults in west Baltimore. "When we were coming up we didn't have role models," Alston said. "That's the different between us and them: We're giving them options." (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
In this March 2, 2017 photo, boys participate in a group therapy session led by community outreach workers at U-TURNS in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore. U-TURNS offers teens and young adults in west Baltimore a safe space, food, job training, holistic health practices like yoga and acupuncture, mental health services and most importantly, mentorship. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
In this March 2, 2017 photo, a photo from a Baltimore protest march hangs behind Kelvin Parker, a community outreach worker at U-TURNS, at a community center in Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. Parker and his colleagues hope that by engaging with young people early on and giving them mentors who can relate to their own struggles, they can instill hope that even in Sandtown, not all decisions have to involve drugs, guns and violence. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
In this March 3, 2017 photo, Kelvin Parker, a community outreach worker at U-TURNS, walks past a blighted storefront in west Baltimore. Parker and his colleagues spend part of their shifts walking through a public housing project and past blocks of vacant buildings the same neighborhood where the death of Freddie Gray prompted civil unrest in 2015. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
KODAK, Tenn. (AP) - Authorities say police officers in Tennessee have shot a man during a confrontation at a home.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says in a news release that Sevier County sheriff's deputies shot 41-year-old Timothy McGill on Sunday at the home in Kodak in eastern Tennessee.
The statement says a woman at the home indicated her husband was threatening to harm himself. Upon arriving, a confrontation ensued with McGill that ended with deputies shooting him.
The statement didn't give additional details of the confrontation, identify the deputies or specify McGill's injuries. He was being treated at the University of Tennessee Medical Center.
The TBI says witnesses are being interviewed and evidence is being collected in the investigation. No charges were immediately filed.
Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about Monday:
1. WHO INSISTS FBI IS 'IN TATTERS'
President Trump attacks the bureau's credibility, following revelations an FBI agent who sent anti-Trump text messages was removed from the team investigating Russian election meddling.
In this March 2, 2017 photo, Akai Alston, bottom, a community outreach worker at U-TURNS, prepares to lead a group therapy session with young people in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore. Alston is one of three outreach workers at U-Turns, a fledgling initiative with the goal of providing an alternative to the streets to teenagers and young adults in west Baltimore. "When we were coming up we didn't have role models," Alston said. "That's the different between us and them: We're giving them options." (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
2. WHY CVS WANTS TO GET INTO INSURANCE BUSINESS
CVS plans to buy insurance giant Aetna in a roughly $69 billion deal that could help the drugstore chain become a one-stop-shop for health care.
3. SENATE DEMOCRATS UNITE TO OPPOSE TAX BILL
Democrats unanimously reject the GOP president's nearly $1.5 trillion revamp of the tax code.
4. WHAT THERAPISTS SAY ABOUT SEX ADDICTION
It's not an officially recognized psychiatric diagnosis, but even mental health professionals who harbor some doubts on compulsive sexual behavior acknowledge it can harm lives.
5. 'I'VE LEARNED THAT NOT EVERYTHING REVOLVES AROUND VIOLENCE'
A social outreach program called U-TURNS helps give Baltimore teens and young adults an alternative to the city's deadly streets.
6. SILVERDOME STILL STANDING AFTER FAILED IMPLOSION
After some explosive charges misfired, the Detroit Lions' former stadium remains upright and will have to be demolished by heavy equipment.
7. ROY MOORE'S SENATE RUN BECOMES DEMOLITION DERBY
The former judge's campaign loses traction after he's hit with decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct.
8. TRUMP MAY ANNOUNCE PLANS TO REDUCE 2 NATIONAL MONUMENTS
Conservationists and outdoor groups intend to file lawsuits if the president seeks to cut down Utah's Grand Staircase and Bears Ears monuments.
9. LL COOL J IS YOUNGEST KENNEDY CENTER HONOREE
The 49-year-old rapper, and TV producer Norman Lear, are among this year's recipients.
10. COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFFS ARE SET
Alabama will join Clemson, Oklahoma and Georgia in postseason, Ohio State falls short.
Customers leave a CVS Pharmacy, Sunday, Dec. 3, 2017 in the Brooklyn borough of New York. CVS will buy insurance giant Aetna in a roughly $69 billion deal that will help the drugstore chain reach deeper into customer health care and protect a key client, a person with knowledge of the matter said Sunday. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
BEIJING (AP) - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau began a visit to China focused on trade Monday with a stop at a Chinese social media giant where he talked up the advantages of travel to his homeland.
Accompanied by four Cabinet ministers, Trudeau also met with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the Great Hall of the People.
"It's rare to have such a close, intimate relationship where we have mutual exchanges of visits along with such dialogues," Li told Trudeau in remarks at the start of their meeting. "China-Canada relations are indeed headed toward a golden stage."
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, poses for photos with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during a welcome ceremony held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Trudeau responded that the opportunities for deepening ties between the countries' economies and people are "tremendous."
"Canada is deeply interested in further engagement and trade across the Pacific and I know we're going to continue to have wonderful and fruitful discussions now and in the future as well," Trudeau said.
The two leaders oversaw the signing of three documents related to trade in food products, energy cooperation and education, though no details were provided.
Trudeau is to meet with President Xi Jinping on Tuesday.
At Sina, owner of the popular Twitter-like Weibo microblogging service, Trudeau took part in a panel discussion that touched on Canadian tourism draws, as well as the nation's beer and wine, according to Chinese and Canadian reports.
Next year marks the China-Canada year of tourism and Canada is hoping to double the number of Chinese tourist arrivals.
China and Canada are also in exploratory talks on a framework for a trade agreement, although reports say Ottawa has been pushing for provisions on the environment, governance, labor and gender issues.
Beijing generally seeks to avoid references that might highlight the one-party authoritarian state's human rights record.
China has positioned itself as a leading advocate of free trade, particularly since President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pan-Pacific trade deal. Yet foreign businesses often complain that China closes many key areas to foreign investment, and Xi is known to favor a centralized economic model with special support for state-owned industries.
Canada has remained part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. During recent talks in Danang, Vietnam, Trudeau lobbied for strong provisions for environmental protection, labor rights, and gender issues, and the name of the initiative was altered to be the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
China largely imports wood and agricultural products, ore, fuels and seafood from Canada, while Canada imports machinery, furniture and sporting goods and textiles from China. The trade imbalance has narrowed, but China still ran a surplus of about $17 billion with Canada during the first half of this year, according to the Canadian government.
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This story has been corrected to show that Trudeau met with Li on Monday and will meet with Xi on Tuesday.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, right, walks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during a welcome ceremony held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes part in an event at Sina Weibo headquarters in Beijing, China, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, to promote Canada-China tourism. Trudeau was joined by young professional Chinese who have visited Canada, in order to share their experiences. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) - The shifting explanations for why President Donald Trump fired national security adviser Michael Flynn have revived questions about whether the president may have obstructed an ongoing investigation of potential contacts between his campaign and Russia.
Pressure on the administration has mounted since Flynn last week pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, with prosecutors revealing that he is now cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. And a muddled White House response, including a problematic presidential tweet, has left some Trump confidants worried that the president is not being well-served by his legal team and believing his lawyers have painted a too-rosy picture of the president's potential plight.
The president's aides and legal advisers have scrambled for 48 hours to explain a presidential tweet that raised the specter of obstruction. It read: "I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pleaded guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, before heading to Utah. Trump will be announcing plans to scale back two sprawling national monuments in Utah, responding to what he has condemned as a "massive federal land grab" by the government. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
That tweet appeared to indicate a change in the White House explanation for Flynn's firing, suggesting Trump was aware when the White House dismissed Flynn on Feb. 13 that the national security adviser had lied to the FBI, whose agents had interviewed him weeks earlier. Former FBI Director James Comey has said Trump the following day brought up the Flynn investigation in private at the White House and told him he hoped he could "let this go," raising the possibility he knew Flynn had lied and was looking to cover up the offense.
With questions raised by the tweet, Trump associates tried to put distance between the president and the potentially incriminating message.
One of Trump's attorneys, John Dowd, told CNN on Sunday that he was responsible for crafting the tweet.
Dowd declined to comment to the AP but replied with a Fox News story Monday quoting prominent lawyer Alan Dershowitz as saying Trump couldn't have committed obstruction of justice by urging Comey to drop the FBI investigation of Flynn.
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, backed up Dowd's claim that he wrote the tweet, saying "the lawyers are the ones that understand how to put those tweets together."
"I was with the president on Saturday all day, frankly, and I know that what he said is correct," Conway continued, referring to Dowd. "What he says is that he put it together and sent it to our director of social media."
A White House spokesman declined to answer whether Dowd dictated the tweet word-for-word to the White House director of social media, Dan Scavino, or whether Scavino, who has access to the @RealDonaldTrump account and its 44 million followers, put the sentiment into something resembling Trump's own voice.
The president angrily scolded aides for the tweet over the weekend, according to a person familiar with private conversations but not authorized to discuss them publicly. The White House is considering reviewing how some tweets, particularly related to the Russia probe, get posted.
The episode has rattled some of Trump's outside advisers, who have pressed upon Trump since Flynn's guilty plea that he needs to change legal strategy. White House lawyer Ty Cobb has repeatedly offered public assurances that the investigation into the administration would soon be over, with the president exonerated.
Trump has taken that counsel to heart, telling two close allies over the weekend that he believed he was in the clear and that Mueller's team wouldn't unveil any further charges, according to the advisers who discussed the private conversations under the conditions of anonymity. Both of the confidants said they disputed that assessment and urged Trump to go on the offensive, perhaps by firing his current lawyers or triggering a series of events that could lead to Mueller's dismissal.
Trump did not suggest he was considering that approach. And one of the advisers, who speaks to Trump regularly, said the president had not discussed with him the possibility of issuing any pardons.
The president did lob new criticism at the special counsel investigation Monday, saying he feels "very badly" for Flynn.
"I think it's a shame," Trump said of Flynn's situation, adding that it's "very unfair" and that Flynn had "led a very strong life."
In the wake of the controversial tweet, Trump launched a fresh denial that he had pressured the former FBI director, tweeting Sunday that "I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!"
Trump fired Comey in May, leading to Mueller's appointment.
Any proof that Trump knew before he spoke with Comey in February that Flynn had lied to the FBI could bolster obstruction of justice allegations against the president and raise the prospect that he was trying to protect a key member of his inner circle from probable prosecution, said Jimmy Gurule, a Notre Dame criminal law professor and former federal prosecutor.
Though the president has previously said he was thinking of "this Russia thing" when he fired Comey, Gurule said it was reasonable to infer from the weekend tweet that the dismissal of Comey was done in the hope of terminating the FBI investigation.
"If you have knowledge of a crime, a reasonable person would disclose that information to law enforcement. The president did not," Gurule said.
But David Rivkin Jr., a Washington lawyer specializing in constitutional law who worked in the Justice Department under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said that even if the president knew that Flynn had lied to the FBI, "his authority as the chief executive is perfectly sufficient and appropriate to decide that this matter should not be investigated any further."
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Lemire reported from New York.
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Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire and Tucker at http://twitter.com/@etuckerAP
WASHINGTON (AP) - Bill Clinton once wanted to punch a newspaper columnist in the nose for calling Hillary Clinton a "congenital liar." Ronald Reagan complained about the "bum rap" Nancy Reagan got for buying White House china. George H.W. Bush defended Barbara Bush after female students objected to her as their commencement speaker because she dropped out of college to get married.
There's a long tradition of presidents defending their first ladies, and it's now President Donald Trump's turn.
Trump pushed back recently after Vanity Fair magazine, citing an anonymous source, reported that Melania Trump didn't want to become first lady "come hell or high water" and didn't think it would happen. Trump also took offense at the report's assertion that he also never thought he'd be elected.
FILE - In this Nov. 8, 2017, file photo, President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump board Air Force One at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. There's a long tradition of presidents defending their first ladies, and it's now Trump's turn. Trump pushed back recently after Vanity Fair magazine, citing an anonymous source, reported that Melania Trump didn't want to become first lady "come hell or high water" and didn't think it would happen. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
Not known to back away when he feels that he or a loved one has been slighted, the president rose to his wife's defense hours after she pulled off one of the most high-profile first lady projects: decorating the White House for Christmas.
"Melania, our great and very hard working First Lady, who truly loves what she is doing, always thought that 'if you run, you will win,' Trump tweeted Tuesday. "She would tell everyone that, 'no doubt, he will win.' I also felt I would win (or I would not have run) - and Country is doing great!"
It wasn't the first time Trump felt compelled to stand up for his former fashion model spouse.
He complained in an October television interview about the "tremendous abuse" she took for leaving the White House in her signature stilettos as she joined him to survey hurricane damage in Texas. Sharp critiques about her footwear lit up social media as soon as departure photos of the Trumps were posted. Mrs. Trump changed into white sneakers during the flight.
"She's taken tremendous abuse," Trump said in the interview with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Trinity Broadcasting Network. "She wants to look, out of respect for the White House, wants to look good leaving the front entrance to the White House. So she dresses up and she puts on formal shoes, high heels, and she leaves the White House going to Texas."
Trump said his wife is a private person and "she doesn't need this," meaning the criticism. "But she does like to help people. She sees how important it is."
Katherine Jellison, an Ohio University history professor who studies first ladies, said other presidents' wives had experience in the political spotlight where everything is dissected, unlike Melania Trump, whose professional experience before the White House largely consisted of fashion runways, red carpets and motherhood.
"This kind of scrutiny that Melania Trump is encountering as first lady and follows every first lady is a new experience for her," Jellison said. "And another difference is she's married to a man who is quick to respond to anything he sees as a slight or a criticism. I guess that includes comments regarding his wife."
The first lady is no pushover. Like her husband, Mrs. Trump will fight back and recently did so - albeit through her spokeswoman - after the president's first wife, Ivana, referred to herself as "first lady" while promoting her memoir. Ivana Trump also said she speaks with the president about every two weeks and has a direct line to the White House.
The first lady's spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, blasted Ivana Trump's statement as "attention-seeking and self-serving noise."
Presidents are spouses, too, and some have reacted as any husband would if he thinks his wife is being unfairly criticized, Jellison said.
Reagan complained at a 1981 news conference about the "bum rap" his wife was getting over the purchase of new china settings at the same time the administration was cutting school lunches. Reagan said the White House hadn't had a complete set of china since Harry Truman, some three decades earlier, and that a full table for a state dinner couldn't be set without mixing existing china patterns.
Nancy Reagan had ordered a Lenox service for 220 people, each setting containing 19 pieces, "at cost" or $209,000. Reagan said it was a private gift at no expense to taxpayers.
George H.W. Bush defended Barbara Bush's role as a wife and mother after Wellesley College's invitation for her to speak at commencement in 1990 irritated some members of the all-female student body. The first lady had dropped out of Smith College after two years to get married.
Asked about the dustup, the president joked at a news conference that he wouldn't argue with the students' view that his wife's accomplishments were largely derived from marriage to him. He added that "these young women can have a lot to learn from Barbara Bush and from her unselfishness and from her advocacy of literacy and of being a good mother and a lot of other things."
Clinton had a more forceful reaction in 1996 after New York Times columnist William Safire called Hillary Clinton a "congenital liar" following revelations about her involvement in an Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater, and her role in a controversy involving dismissals at the White House travel office.
Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman, said that Clinton, "if he were not the president, would have delivered a more forceful response to that on the bridge of Mr. Safire's nose."
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Associated Press News Researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
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Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap
In this Nov. 30, 2017, photo, President Donald Trump holds first lady Melania Trump's hand as they walk back to the stage during the lighting ceremony for the 2017 National Christmas Tree on the Ellipse near the White House in Washington. There's a long tradition of presidents defending their first ladies, and it's now Trump's turn. Trump pushed back recently after Vanity Fair magazine, citing an anonymous source, reported that Melania Trump didn't want to become first lady "come hell or high water" and didn't think it would happen. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
FILE - In this Nov. 7, 2017, file photo, President Donald Trump, center left, kisses first lady Melania Trump as they arrive at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. There's a long tradition of presidents defending their first ladies, and it's now Trump's turn. Trump pushed back recently after Vanity Fair magazine, citing an anonymous source, reported that Melania Trump didn't want to become first lady "come hell or high water" and didn't think it would happen. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File)
MOSUL, Iraq (AP) - Soon after she turned 14, Ferah built her own world in her bedroom. A world of paper butterflies, of lights draped in strings from corner to corner, of inspirational messages taped on the wall above her bed.
It had to be special because the Iraqi teen intended to stay there to escape the horror outside in her home city of Mosul. Just a few months earlier, in the summer of 2014, it had been taken over by the Islamic State group, the fanatics that everyone sneeringly referred to by their acronym in Arabic, Daesh.
Her room became her sanctuary for nearly three years, where she wrote a Facebook journal, expressing her fears and hopes.
Ferah studies for an exam in Irbil, Iraq, in this photo taken Nov. 11, 2017. Before the Islamic State group took over her home city of Mosul in 2014, Ferah had just started at a new private school that she loved, with all new friends. After the takeover, she stopped going to school, her friends fled, and the teenager fell deeper into isolation and despair. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
"What is the problem?" she wrote in an imagined dialogue.
"The future is gone. It came crashing down."
"How can I understand your feelings?"
"Be among Daesh. ... Try being a dreamer while sitting among Daesh."
Ferah's story and writings offer a glimpse of the day-to-day struggle to survive under IS. The group's takeover of Mosul plunged her into isolation. Her friends fled the city, as did her two eldest sisters, who were married and had their own families. Ferah stopped going to school, afraid of the girls in her class who identified with Daesh.
Outside was dangerous. IS religious police hunted for the slightest sign of "sin." Outside Ferah's uncle's house, they dragged away a girl when her robes swished open and they spotted something red underneath, a forbidden dash of color in the required all-black garb hiding her entire body and face.
In a nearby neighborhood, a young girl, around 12, went on her roof to catch a breeze in the summer heat. A boy next door was on his roof at the same time. They were seen. Suspicions were raised.
Daesh arrested and killed them both. The girl was stoned to death in front of her house, the punishment for adultery. Everyone in the neighborhood said when the girl's body was taken away, the warm smell of musk lingered, one of the aromas of Paradise, proof she was innocent and God had taken her in.
Ferah, her parents and an older sister stayed inside as much as possible.
"Isn't there a right to the freedom to dream, the freedom to have the best years of my life?" Ferah wrote. "I'd just like to know when I will really live."
She escaped onto the internet, staying online late into the night. Her Facebook postings garnered more than 6,000 followers, who encouraged her, gave her hope and became her friends.
Across Mosul, society rolled up behind closed doors, everyone living nocturnal, virtual lives.
With their kids stuck at home, some parents married them off just to give them something to do. It was ridiculous, Ferah scoffed - girls around her age marrying guys in their early 20s they barely knew. The girls were so excited, in makeup and elaborate dresses, as if it were a real marriage that would last, she thought.
She preferred her own world.
As months dragged on, she decorated her room with paper cutouts of butterflies and flowers. She hung strings of lights. From Instagram and Tumblr, she printed inspirational messages and taped them above her bed. One poster showed a girl wearing fairy wings. "What if I fall?" the picture asked - and then replied, "Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?"
Her "little works," as she called them, gave her solace.
She improved her English watching YouTube videos. She downloaded Arabic translations of self-help books. Twice, she read "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens."
Habit #1: "Be proactive." Tell yourself "I am the captain of my life. I can choose my attitude."
She tried to do positive things. She learned to sew clothes and make gifts out of colored paper and gave them to friends. In times like this, simple things brought people joy. For a time, she and her sister went to a woman's house for lessons in memorizing the Quran. But by the time Ferah learned a third of the holy book, IS decreed that only its clerics could teach the Quran, so the woman stopped the lessons, fearing reprisals.
On her 16th birthday, in July 2016, Daesh organized a bitter surprise: They shut down the internet across Mosul.
Ferah was cut off. So she wrote for herself now - and defied her despair.
"No one can stop you when trust in what's inside you, when survival is in your heart even as your body is drowning, when light is inside you even as darkness is around you," she wrote. "Even when difficulties grow, I will not break. Go on, war, get worse."
It did get worse, even as liberation came in January 2017.
As Iraqi forces battling into Mosul neared Ferah's neighborhood, IS fighters seized her family's home to use as a sniper's post.
Ferah's family took refuge with a neighbor. Huddling in a single room, they heard the battle outside, the rocket fire, the guns hammering. Then a giant blast shook them. The room went black.
The battle ended. The militants fled, and Iraqi troops took control of the district.
As they retreated, the IS fighters had set off explosives in Ferah's home. She watched the flames consume her room. Her little works - the butterflies, the lights, the clothes - were all reduced to ash.
"I saw my dreams ... as they turned to nothing," she wrote. "My trust in tomorrow slipped away ... My heart has burned up."
But it was not the end.
Her family rebuilt their home. Ferah found the confidence to endure.
Now 17, back at school and able to dream of a future again, she looks back at one of her favorite texts. It's a love song to herself, written amid her hopelessness to praise the good she had discovered.
"Good morning to everyone who feels the beauty within - no matter who it angers," she reads. "Glory to the fading light of endings and the burst of new beginnings. Everything else won't last long."
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Ferah and her family spoke to The Associated Press on condition that their full names not be used and that some identifying details not be mentioned out of fear for their safety. Keath reported from Cairo.
Ferah poses for a photo in her home in Mosul, Iraq, in this photo taken Saturday, Nov. 4, 2017. Ferah was just turning 14 and starting to look to the future when the Islamic State group took over Mosul in 2014, throwing her world into darkness. Afraid to leave the house, the teenager had to find some way to endure. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
"No matter how hard you summon your strength ... you won't be able to get over it. You'll feel how horrible it is to have your hands chained and be unable to picture your future." Ferah, posing for a picture in her home in Mosul, Iraq in this Nov. 4, 2014 photo, found an outlet in writing, keeping a Facebook journal during the rule of the Islamic State group over Mosul. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
Iraqi teen Ferah, shown studying for an exam in Irbil, Iraq, in this Nov. 11, 2017 photo, says writing helped her endure during the rule of the Islamic State group over her home city of Mosul, giving her an outlet to explore her fears and hopes. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
BRUSSELS (AP) - The European Union and Britain ended a flurry of top-level diplomacy on Monday without a deal on the terms of their divorce, as agreement on how to maintain an open Irish border after Brexit slipped out of the negotiators' grasp.
But the two sides said they were within striking distance of consensus, setting up a hectic negotiating rush ahead of an EU summit next week. Member countries must decide whether to broaden the talks to the topic of future relations.
British Prime Minister Theresa May went to Brussels for a long negotiating lunch with EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. After a day that see-sawed between hope and disappointment, the leaders failed to make what the EU considers "sufficient progress" on three issues: Britain's exit bill, the rights of citizens affected by Brexit and the status of the currently invisible Irish border.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, right, greets British Prime Minister Theresa May prior to a meeting at EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. British Prime Minister Theresa May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker will hold a power lunch on Monday, seeking a breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations ahead of a key EU summit the week after. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
The border issue remained the main sticking point.
"We had an agreement this morning," Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said, expressing disappointment at the last-minute glitch.
EU leaders want a deal on the breakup terms in time for them to agree at the Dec. 14-15 summit whether to move the negotiations on to the next stage of talks, including trade. The lack of progress so far has raised concerns that Britain may not have a deal by the time it officially leaves on March 29, 2019.
"Despite our best efforts and the significant process we and our teams have made over the past days on the remaining withdrawal issues, it was not possible to reach an agreement," EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said.
"This is not a failure," Juncker added after a long negotiating lunch with British Prime Minister Theresa May.
May said that "on a couple of issues some differences do remain which require further negotiation and consultation." But she said talks would reconvene later this week "and I am also confident we will conclude this positively."
The EU and the U.K. are nearing agreement on some divorce terms, including the size of the bill that Britain must pay as it leaves and the rights of citizens affected by Brexit. But the border issue has proved more intractable.
After Britain leaves the bloc, the currently invisible 310-mile (500-kilometer) frontier will be the U.K.'s only land border with an EU country.
Britain says it wants to maintain a "frictionless" flow of people and goods with no border posts. But Ireland and the other EU nations are demanding to know how that will work if Britain is outside the EU's borderless single market and its tariff-free customs union, a looser trading bloc that includes non-EU states like Turkey.
Negotiators were discussing an agreement that would commit Britain to maintaining "regulatory alignment" between Northern Ireland and Ireland after Brexit. Both sides would promise to maintain compatible trading rules, keeping the border transparent for trade.
Irish and EU officials indicated that agreement was close. But then Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party, which props up May's minority government, announced it wouldn't support any deal that made special rules for Northern Ireland. The pro-British Unionist party opposes any special status that could take Northern Ireland further from Britain and closer to the Republic of Ireland.
The DUP has only 10 seats out of 650 in Britain's House of Commons, but without their support May's government would fall.
"We will not accept any form of regulatory divergence which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the U.K.," DUP leader Arlene Foster said. "The economic and constitutional integrity of the U.K. must not be compromised in any way."
Varadkar said he was "surprised and disappointed that the British government now appears not to be in a position to conclude what was agreed earlier today."
"I still hope this matter can be concluded in the coming days," he said.
Chief European Parliament Brexit official Guy Verhofstadt, who had put the odds of agreement Monday at "50/50," warned that unless all issues are solved "there will be no green light in October 2018."
A decision on any new deals with Britain would have to be reached by the fall of next year to give individual member states enough time to approve all the measures in their parliaments before the final date on March 2019.
European Council President Donald Tusk cautioned that time was running short.
"It is now getting very tight but agreement at December (summit) is still possible," he tweeted.
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Jill Lawless reported from London.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, right, greets British Prime Minister Theresa May prior to a meeting at EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. British Prime Minister Theresa May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker will hold a power lunch on Monday, seeking a breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations ahead of a key EU summit the week after. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
A member of protocol puts up the British flag outside EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. British Prime Minister Theresa May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker will hold a power lunch on Monday, seeking a breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations ahead of a key EU summit the week after. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, right, and British Prime Minister Theresa May address a media conference at EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. British Prime Minister Theresa May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker held a power lunch on Monday, seeking a breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations ahead of a key EU summit the week after. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
British Prime Minister Theresa May, left, shakes hands with European Council President Donald Tusk at the Europa building in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. British Prime Minister Theresa May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker held a power lunch on Monday before meeting European Council President Donald Tusk, seeking a breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations ahead of a key EU summit the week after. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
British Prime Minister Theresa May, left, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker address a media conference at EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. British Prime Minister Theresa May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker held a power lunch on Monday, seeking a breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations ahead of a key EU summit the week after. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, right, walks with British Prime Minister Theresa May, center, prior to a meeting at EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. British Prime Minister Theresa May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker will hold a power lunch on Monday, seeking a breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations ahead of a key EU summit the week after. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) - A federal judge on Monday sentenced former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown to five years in prison on fraud and other charges related to a purported charity for poor students that she used as a personal slush fund.
Brown, 71, was ordered to turn herself in to authorities no earlier than Jan. 8. She represented a Florida district that included Jacksonville during her nearly 25-year career.
Brown, a Democrat who was one of the first three African-Americans to be elected to Congress from Florida since Reconstruction, was convicted by a federal jury in May on 18 of the 22 charges against her, which included fraud, lying on her tax returns and on her congressional financial disclosures.
FILE - In this May 5, 2017, file photo, former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown walks to the federal courthouse in Jacksonville, Fla., where she is expected to retake the stand in her trial on federal fraud and tax charges. A federal judge is expected to sentence Brown on Monday, Dec. 4, for fraud and other charges related to a purported charity for poor students that she used as a personal slush fund. (Bob Self/The Florida Times-Union via AP, File)
Prosecutors outlined a pattern of fraud by Brown and her top aide that included using hundreds of thousands of dollars from the One Door for Education Foundation for lavish parties, trips and shopping excursions.
Brown's former chief of staff, Elias "Ronnie" Simmons, and One Door's executive director Carla Wiley had accepted plea deals and testified against Brown. They were also sentenced Monday. Simmons was sentenced to four years in prison, followed by three years of probation, and Wiley received a one-year sentence following by three years of probation. They too were ordered to turn themselves in no earlier than Jan. 8.
Federal prosecutors said the three used One Door to bring in more than $800,000 between 2012 and 2016, including a high-profile golf tournament at TPC Sawgrass. The Virginia-based One Door only gave out one scholarship for $1,200 to an unidentified person in Florida, according to court documents.
Simmons told jurors that his boss ordered him to take cash and checks from One Door's account on dozens of occasions and deposit the money into Brown's personal account.
Brown testified in her own defense, saying she was left in the dark about the details of One Door's money, and blamed the theft on Simmons.
Her attorneys argued for leniency at a hearing last month, saying Brown's community work should mitigate her crimes.
VALLETTA, Malta (AP) - Ten suspects were arrested Monday for the car bomb slaying of a prominent Maltese journalist who covered corruption, the prime minister and other authorities said.
The arrests came seven weeks to the day after the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. They were the first known break in a crime that shocked Malta and motivated European Union officials to look into the EU island nation's laws and government.
Caruana Galizia, 53, was killed Oct. 16 when a bomb destroyed her car as she was driving near her home. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who was among the subjects of the late reporter's investigations, declined to say who the suspects were or why they were arrested.
FILE - This Oct. 16, 2017 file photo shows the wreckage of the car of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia after a car bomb which killed her, next to a road in the town of Mosta, Malta. On Monday, Dec. 4, 2017 Malta's prime minister Joseph Muscat announced the arrest of eight suspects, all Maltese citizens, in the murder of the journalist. (AP Photo/Rene Rossignaud, file)
Eight Maltese citizens were arrested because of "reasonable suspicion" for their involvement in Caruana Galizia's killing, Muscat told reporters at a news conference.
A little while later, Muscat tweeted that two others had been arrested. They also are Maltese, Home Minister Michael Farrugia said. Authorities did not release the names of any of the 10 suspects.
Explaining the reason for staying tight-lipped, Muscat cited concerns that divulging information could compromise the prosecutions. Farrugia said he wouldn't disclose anything because "I have been already threatened by legal action by the Caruana Galizia family."
The journalist's family alleged last month that Farrugia had put the investigation at risk by sharing confidential information with lawmakers. The minister brushed off the allegation, but the family said it was prepared to take legal action to prevent the government from sabotaging the case.
Caruana Galizia's family reacted angrily to how the arrests were announced on Monday, saying police should have informed them before the prime minister. They reiterated their skepticism that justice would be carried out, despite Muscat's public insistence that all would be done to find and punish the killers.
Muscat "appears to view the investigation into Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination as a marketing exercise for his government and not as a contract killing, which has left surviving family members wondering what happened and how justice can be truly served," the family said in a statement.
They said they had already written to the police commission about "the constant stream of leaks which prejudice the integrity of the investigation," but never received a response.
The family contended the police had leaked information about the identities of seven suspects.
"It is important to ask whether they are not also leaking information to other suspects, some of whom could be in or close to government," the statement continued.
"The blurring of boundaries with the executive - and this in a case which has political implications - is disturbing," the family statement said. "When the handling of an investigation is not sound, it is difficult to have faith in its outcome."
The arrests coordinated among the Police Corps, the Armed Forces of Malta and the Security Services. The investigation appeared to be continuing Monday as police and military members cordoned off an area in Marsa, a small port town close to Valletta, the capital of Malta. Marsa is where most of the arrests were made.
Video released later by Maltese police showed officers and members of the security service and armed forces making some of the arrests. Some officers arrived in Marsa by boat and apprehended suspects in waterfront warehouses.
Maltese media, citing unidentified police sources, said two brothers were among the suspects. One of them was acquitted of a 2015 armed robbery charge for lack of sufficient evidence. The other has been charged with possession of unlicensed weapons and tools used to pick locks.
Investigators have 48 hours to question the suspects to decide whether to seek charges, in accordance with Maltese law.
A court hearing was set for Tuesday, when the police can officially file charges. The suspects then can either plead innocent or guilty. The magistrate will decide whether to set bail or remand them in custody.
Europol, the European Union's police agency, has sent a team of organized crime experts to help Maltese police investigate the assassination, joining the FBI and Dutch forensic experts.
Muscat told reporters Monday that when the evidence is compiled, during court proceedings "all the relevant information will be made public," including input from the FBI and European investigators, including from Finland's National Bureau of Investigation, as well as Maltese investigators.
Just before her death, Caruana Galizia, 53, had posted on her closely followed blog, Running Commentary, that there were "crooks everywhere" in Malta.
Malta has a reputation as a tax haven in the European Union and has attracted companies and money from outside Europe as well.
Last week, a visiting delegation of European Parliament lawmakers left the island expressing concerns over the rule of law in the country and issued a warning that the "perception of impunity in Malta cannot continue."
Low tax rates and a popular government program that allows wealthy foreigners to buy Maltese citizenship have made the country an attractive place for investment, financial and other companies. Authorities, including anti-Mafia investigators in nearby Italy, worry that Malta is eyed by criminals on the lookout for money-laundering schemes.
Caruana Galizia focused her reporting for years on investigating political corruption and scandals, and reported on Maltese mobsters and drug trafficking. She also wrote about Maltese links to the so-called Panama Papers leaks about offshore financial havens.
Many top officials had sued her over her reporting. Caruana Galizia made plain she didn't trust the island's police or judiciary to adequately investigate many of the wrongdoings she alleged.
Muscat said Monday of the slaying: "As I stated as soon as I learned about this barbaric act, we will leave no stone unturned to get this case solved."
FILE -- This April 4, 2016 file photo shows Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed by a car bomb in Malta on Oct. 16. On Monday, Dec. 4, 2017 Malta's prime minister Joseph Muscat announced the arrest of eight suspects, all Maltese citizens, in the murder of the journalist. (AP Photo/Jon Borg, files)
Malta's Prime Minister Joseph Muscat gives a statement announcing the arrest of eight suspects in the Oct. 16 murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, in Valletta, Malta, Monday Dec.4, 2017. Muscat said the suspects, all Maltese citizens, were arrested Monday morning in an operation coordinated among the Police Corps, the Armed Forces of Malta and the Security Services. (AP Photo)
KUWAIT CITY (AP) - Qatar's ruling emir will attend a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council this week in Kuwait, his government said Monday, a summit coming amid a boycott of the energy-rich country by three of the council's members.
The ongoing dispute has threatened to tear apart the six-member GCC, all U.S. allies who serve in part as a Gulf Arab counterbalance to Shiite power Iran. Already, the island nation of Bahrain had threatened that it wouldn't take part in any meeting that Qatar attends.
Qatar's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani would fly to Kuwait City for the two-day meeting scheduled to begin Tuesday. It quoted Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani as confirming the emir's attendance and saying he hoped "all parties involved do not need a Western party to intervene."
The seal of the Gulf Cooperation Council and an announcement of its meeting this week is on display in Kuwait City, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Qatar's ruling emir will attend the meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council this week in Kuwait, his government said Monday, a summit coming amid a boycott of the energy-rich country by three of the council's members. (AP Photo/Jon Gambrell)
Later Monday, Kuwait announced Sheikh Tamim had sent a letter to Kuwait's 88-year-old ruler, Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah, without elaborating.
GCC members Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have cut off Doha over allegations that Qatar supports extremists and has too-friendly relations with Iran. Qatar long has denied supporting extremists, while it shares a massive offshore natural gas field with Iran.
On Monday, both Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash and Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir attended a ministerial meeting in Kuwait City ahead of the summit. Bahrain said it sent Assistant Foreign Minister Abdulla bin Faisal al-Doseri to that meeting that the Qatari foreign minister also attended.
Kuwait has been trying to mediate an end to the crisis that began in June. Sheikh Sabah has flown between Gulf capitals carrying messages. Oman, another neutral party, has acknowledged receiving an invitation for the summit for its ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, though a deputy prime minister will attend in his place.
At Sheikh Sabah's ceremonial Bayan Palace, soldiers in machine-gun-mounted SUVs stood guard as the ministerial meeting took place there. Flags of the six GCC nations flew along the road running past it all the way to the airport, with giant billboards also welcoming the GCC countries.
A similar dispute involving Qatar erupted in 2014. But this time positions have hardened against Qatar, whose support for Islamist opposition groups has angered those now boycotting it. The UAE in particular views Islamists as a threat to hereditary rule in its federation of seven sheikhdoms. Egypt, long angered by Qatar's support for the Muslim Brotherhood, is also boycotting Doha.
The U.S., which has some 10,000 troops stationed at Qatar's sprawling al-Udeid Air Base as part of its campaign against the Islamic State group and the war in Afghanistan, also has sought to end the crisis. However, President Donald Trump has made comments seemingly supporting the Arab nations' efforts at isolating Qatar, complicating those efforts.
A Trump-prompted Sept. 9 call between Qatar's Sheikh Tamim and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that offered a chance at negotiations also broke down in mutual recriminations.
Stratfor, a U.S.-based private intelligence firm, said in an analysis Monday that even holding the meeting may signal that the GCC is trying to "sweep its dispute with Qatar under the rug" after rumors circulated for weeks the summit wouldn't be held.
"Holding the GCC summit in any capacity means that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are trying to improve relations with Qatar, or at least keep the dispute behind closed doors," Stratfor said. "Division within the GCC distracts the bloc from its initial role as a security alliance against Iran. As Saudi Arabia ratchets up regional pressure against Iran, Riyadh would prefer to keep the GCC alliance intact."
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Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellap . His work can be found at http://apne.ws/2galNpz .
MOSCOW (AP) - Two-time defending world figure skating champion Evgenia Medvedeva will address the International Olympic Committee board on Tuesday ahead of a vote on whether to ban Russia from the upcoming Pyeongchang Games.
The 18-year-old Russian is unbeaten in two years and a gold medal favorite for the Olympics in February.
No Russian figure skaters are among the 25 athletes that have been banned so far for doping offenses during the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Medvedeva was 14 at the time and competing at the junior level.
FILE - In this Saturday, Oct. 21, 2017 file photo, Evgenia Medvedeva of Russia skates her free program at the Rostelekom Cup ISU Grand Prix figure skating event in Moscow, Russia. Two-time defending world figure skating champion Evgenia Medvedeva will address the International Olympic Committee board on Tuesday Dec. 5, 2017 ahead of a vote on whether to ban Russia from the upcoming Pyeongchang Games. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev, file)
Medvedeva will travel to Lausanne, Switzerland, for the meeting despite a fracture in her foot which caused her to pull out of this week's Grand Prix Final in Japan.
The Russian Olympic Committee said Monday that Medvedeva will address the IOC board as part of a delegation along with ROC president Alexander Zhukov and Vitaly Smirnov, the head of an anti-doping commission set up by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
BRUSSELS (AP) - Portuguese Finance Minister Mario Centeno has won the race to be the next voice of the 19-country eurozone, a victory that marks a move away from the austerity mantra that has marked the recent crisis-ridden years in the single currency bloc.
Centeno, the overwhelming favorite, came out on top after two rounds of voting among his peers and will officially succeed Dutchman Jeroen Dijsselbloem on Jan. 13. His term as eurogroup president will last for two and a half years.
Following his victory, Centeno said he hoped to promote "inclusive" growth policies that will help "put an end to a period that was very difficult for Europe." Other priorities include bolstering the resilience of the eurozone, he said.
Portugal's Finance Minister Mario Centeno, left, shakes hands with president of the eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem during a media conference after a meeting of eurozone finance ministers at the Europa building in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. The Eurogroup on Monday elected Portugal's Finance Minister Mario Centeno as the new president of the Eurogroup. (AP Photo/Olivier Matthys)
"We have a very unique time window to further prepare our economies and our societies better," Centeno said after seeing off the challenge from Luxembourg's Pierre Gramegna, Slovakia's Peter Kazimir and Latvia's Dana Reizniece-Ozola.
Centeno will take the helm at an opportune time. Whereas Dijsselbloem's five years in the post were marked by crises largely centered on cash-strapped Greece, Centeno's tenure starts off in relatively benign conditions. The eurozone economy is growing strongly, while worries over Greece's future in the bloc have subsided with the country poised to exit its bailout era next summer.
"We are facing different challenges today from the ones we faced a couple of years ago," he said.
Centeno's victory has the potential to symbolize a new era for the eurozone, all the more so as he comes from less-wealthy southern Europe. While eurozone governments still insist that countries must keep their public finances in shape, there's a greater acknowledgement that the austerity of the past few years has taken a heavy toll on people, particularly in countries like Portugal and Greece.
"We are confident this will represent a turning point for the future development of the eurozone and for the whole of Europe," said Gianni Pittella, leader of the S&D Group in the European Parliament. "We are finally overcoming the era of blind and stupid austerity that has left behind even more poor and divided societies across Europe."
One of those societies is Portugal. The country was one of four eurozone countries, along with Greece, Ireland and Cyprus, that had to be bailed out during the region's debt crisis. In 2011, Portugal required a 78-billion-euro ($93 billion) rescue after its budget deficit grew too large and international investors asked for hefty premiums to lend to the government.
In return for the financial lifeline offered by its partners in the eurozone and by the International Monetary Fund, the then center-right Portuguese government had to enact a series of spending cuts and economic reforms. Portugal exited its bailout program in 2014.
While the austerity strategy had the desired effect of putting Portugal's annual budget into better shape, the austerity demanded by creditors accentuated a deep recession and sharply raised unemployment. Following a backlash against austerity, the Socialist Party came to power in late 2015, with Centeno, a former Bank of Portugal analyst, taking the post of finance minister.
Centeno, who has eased up on austerity in Portugal by pushing more growth-oriented policies, said his aim would be to "generate consensus" among eurozone countries in the "challenging" period ahead.
As well as overseeing the end of Greece's bailout era, Centeno's agenda is likely to be taken up improving the eurozone's architecture. The debt crisis of the past few years clearly exposed the failings of the euro's construct.
Though a series of reforms, such as stricter controls on budgets, have made the eurozone more viable, there is a widespread belief that more needs to be done to prevent a repeat of the recent debt crisis. Achieving a consensus on how to do that is likely to be a key part of Centeno's work.
"This is the only way Europe has advanced in the past," Centeno said.
Achieving consensus isn't easy given that the governments of the eurozone come from a variety of political traditions with differing mandates and economic agendas.
Dijsselbloem, whose Labor Party fared poorly in Dutch elections this year and is no longer part of the coalition government in the Netherlands, was considered a skilled operator in bridging differences and maintaining a consensus, particularly over austerity.
That was especially the case during the Greek crisis of 2015, which saw the country nearly crash out of the euro before the newly elected left-led government in Athens agreed to a last-minute international bailout.
Dijsselbloem's advice to his successor was to keep the eurogroup "together and united" and to urge countries that use the euro to be wary of complacency in light of the recent economic upturn, which is expected to see the region grow at a decade-high rate.
"Particularly in this time, it's very easy to lean back and relax," he said.
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Pylas reported from London.
Latvia's Finance Minister Dana Reizniece-Ozola, 2nd right, Slovakia's Finance Minister Peter Kazimir, left, Luxembourg's Finance Minister Pierre Gramegna, 2nd left, and Portugal's Finance Minister Mario Centeno pose for photographers as they arrive for a meeting of eurozone finance ministers at the Europa building in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Eurozone finance ministers meet Monday to elect a new president for the club of 19 nations that share the euro currency. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
The Chair of the Eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem, right, talks with Latvia's Finance Minister Dana Reizniece-Ozola prior to a meeting of eurozone finance ministers at the Europa building in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Eurozone finance ministers meet Monday to elect a new president for the club of 19 nations that share the euro currency. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
Slovakia's Finance Minister Peter Kazimir, right, greets Portugal's Finance Minister Mario Centeno as they arrive for a meeting of eurozone finance ministers at the Europa building in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Eurozone finance ministers meet Monday to elect a new president for the club of 19 nations that share the euro currency. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
Latvia's Finance Minister Dana Reizniece-Ozola, 2nd right, talks with Slovakia's Finance Minister Peter Kazimir, left, Luxembourg's Finance Minister Pierre Gramegna, 2nd left, and Portugal's Finance Minister Mario Centeno as they arrive for a meeting of eurozone finance ministers at the Europa building in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Eurozone finance ministers meet Monday to elect a new president for the club of 19 nations that share the euro currency. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
Luxembourg's Finance Minister Pierre Gramegna, left, talks with Slovakia's Finance Minister Peter Kazimir as they arrive for a meeting of eurozone finance ministers at the Europa building in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Eurozone finance ministers meet Monday to elect a new president for the club of 19 nations that share the euro currency. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
European Council President Donald Tusk, right, shakes hands with the chair of the Eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem ahead of a meeting of eurozone finance ministers at the Europa building in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Eurozone finance ministers meet Monday to elect a new president for the club of 19 nations that share the euro currency. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
European Council President Donald Tusk, right, shakes hands with the chair of the Eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem ahead of a meeting of eurozone finance ministers at the Europa building in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Eurozone finance ministers meet Monday to elect a new president for the club of 19 nations that share the euro currency. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
BRUSSELS (AP) - NATO's chief says he's looking forward to talks with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and that the military alliance is too focused on security issues to be distracted by rumors about Tillerson's future.
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday that the alliance "and NATO ministers are able to focus on the core tasks of the job we have to do despite any speculation and rumors."
Stoltenberg praised Tillerson's "strong personal commitment to the trans-Atlantic bond and to NATO."
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks during a media opportunity with Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj at the State Department in Washington, Friday, Dec. 1, 2017. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
President Donald Trump denied Friday that he wants to oust Tillerson, calling reports to that effect "fake news."
U.S. envoy to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison said that "there has been no change whatsoever" in planning for two days of talks between Tillerson and his NATO counterparts starting Tuesday.
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - A woman who says she fell asleep while driving crashed into a Florida home.
Florida Highway Patrol spokeswoman Kim Montes says 60-year-old Ana Perez was cited for careless driving on Monday morning.
She told troopers that she fell asleep while driving her 2009 Infiniti. She went off the road and hit a mailbox before crashing into the garage of a home near Orlando.
No one inside the house injured. Montes said the driver was not injured but her passenger was taken to the hospital with minor injuries.
No further details were immediately available.
MASERU, Lesotho (AP) - A brigadier and four other soldiers in Lesotho have been charged with attempted murder for the 2016 shooting of an editor whose newspaper was seen as critical of the military commander at the time.
The five suspects were charged last week and are due in court again on Dec. 13 for the attack on Lesotho Times editor Lloyd Mutungamiri, whose jaw was shattered in the shooting and required reconstructive surgery.
The case reflects efforts by the government of Prime Minister Thomas Thabane to investigate unresolved crimes in the southern African country, which has a history of political turmoil.
Tlali Kamoli, who was military commander at the time of Mutungamiri's shooting, has been charged with crimes including the murder of a police official during an alleged coup attempt in 2014.
JUBA, South Sudan (AP) - The leaders of South Sudan's Roman Catholic Church are calling on the pope to visit this war-torn nation.
"We know his heart is in South Sudan," Samuel Abe, secretary general for the archdiocese of Juba told the Associated Press on Monday. "My wish is if he comes he can be a voice for the voiceless."
Pope Francis had planned to visit to this country in October, but cancelled citing security concerns caused by the country's civil war.
He has donated 25,000 euros ($30,000) to help feed the country's most vulnerable citizens ahead of the upcoming dry season. The money was given to the United Nations' agricultural arm, to alleviate a period of "grave food insecurity and major displacement," said the Vatican in a statement obtained by The Associated Press.
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This story was corrected to show that the pope donated 25,000 euros, not 25 million euros.
The Question is why Jonathan Arkush tolerates Hoffman, the friend of neo-Nazis as a member of the Board of Deputies
Liar, liar former Zionist Vice-Chair Jonathan Hoffman tweets whenever I point to his links with his fascist friends Paul Besser included. Now it seems that Besser is involved in Pegida UK, which Tommy Robinson helped found. One wonders whether that is more kosher than Britain 1st? What is clear is that whatever his fascist links, they are still current and active. The fact that Hoffman and his merry band of Zionists, who go around London trying to disrupt Palestinian events, work with an assortment of fascists throws new light on their claim to oppose anti-Semitism.
One such fascist is Dr.Brian of London who supports the EDL. Dr Brian hosted Tommy Robinson on his trip to Israel last year, as did KAY WILSON who is also on the far-right. Wilson was the main speaker with the President of the Board of Deputies Jonathan Arkush at the Boards and Zionist Federations Al Quds Day counter-demo in July this year.
what is that on the bottom right if not an anti-semitic cartoon from Dr Brian of London
Another Zionist fascist is Simon Harris who attended the LAST DAY OF SILENCE RALLY of UK Pegida on 23 Sept. 2017 in Whitehall.
Ann Marie Waters
Pic showa Waters speaking with Besser on far left. Also in pic Hoffman crony
Ambrosine Shitrit looking at camers.
SIMON HARRIS who runs EDL -EEUROPEAN DEFENCE LEAGUE. Here is a Anne Marie Waters was the main speaker at the rally. Waters was a founder of PEGIDA-UK with Tommy Robinson in early 2017. Robinson apologised for his absence from the rally but he had to attend a wedding. Pegida-UK use "front"names for their demos. The other main speaker was Zionistwho runs EDL -EEUROPEAN DEFENCE LEAGUE. Here is a bit more about Harris. Also in the frame is Hoffman crony Ambrosine Shitrit looking at camera.
Besser with Simon Harris at PEGIDA-UK front rally 23 Sept.2017
Ms Waters seems to have had quite a chequered political career. She stood for Labour in a Lambeth borough council election in 2010 and in 2013 she was shortlisted as a Labour candidate in Brighton Pavilion! She was recently the runner up in the UKIP leadership election. Indeed she was tipped to win the election until Farrage, Banks and others threatened to resign. She has now set up a far-Right party For Britain , which has the support of Tommy Robinson.
Tommy Robinson on tank
in Israel-
You can hear Simon Harris and "Dr. Brian of London" - in their Here is Brian of London hosting Tommy RobinsonIsrael-You can hear Simon Harris and "Dr. Brian of London" - in their own words
Bessser with assorted fascists at their tiny demo on 23rd Sept - Simon Harris is sitting down besides him. Thanks to the owner of the drone!
In this picture Besser is at top left of the picture with Simon Harris sitting down behind him. In got this picture through the use of a surveillance drone. Unfortunately it was not possible to purchase one with hell fire missiles!
"admitted" he is no longer with Britain First. However before Asa published his excellent Besser is apparently crowing that Asa Winstanleyhe is no longer with Britain First. However before Asa published his excellent article which I am copying below, Asa asked Besser and BF to comment on his relationship to Britain First but they did not respond. It seems though that Besser has gone from the Jayda Fransen/Paul Golding frying pan to Pegida and the Anne Marie Waters fire.
Besser professes his Jewishness in touching tones:
i am Jewish, born a Jew and brought up within the Jewish faith and i have never stepped away from my Jewish faith. Everything i have ever seen or researched leads me to one inevitable fact that the region now named the State of Israel, is the Jewish homeland.
Here we see the BF 'Intelligdence' Officer Besser on the far right in the second row marching behind a large cross - very Jewish!
Leaving aside the small fact that Israel is not a region it is noticeable that this doesnt however stop him and Paul Golding from signing off to each other with OCS Onward Christian Soldiers! Britain First are a fascist group that hark back to the golden days of Christian anti-Semitism. As you will see in the pictures, both Fransen and Golding march with a large cross.
In Europe there were a number of regimes and groups, especially in Eastern Europe whose anti-Semitism was clothed in a Christian guise.
I am bemused that Besser signs off OCS - Onwards Christian Soldiers - that was the slogan that the Crusaders used when they slaughtered 1.5 million Jews before setting off in the 12th century
In Slovakia the Nazi puppet state from 1939-45 was led by a Catholic priest, Father Tiso. Likewise the Ustashi in Croatia where there was the only extermination camp, Jasenovac not run by the Nazis. In Romania the main fascist group the Archangel of St Michael or the Iron Guard was a viciously anti-Semitic group and the Arrow Cross in Hungary, which had the blood of at least 50,000 Jews on their hands was also Christian. For Besser to ally with this group demonstrates the extent of his Jewishness. And for Hoffman to keep company with this neo-Nazi demonstrates exactly what the extent of his opposition to anti-Semitism amounts to.
Besser doesnt seem to have enjoyed all the free publicity I have given him. In Timothy Horgan The Jew Stalkerand the left wing Nazi propaganda machine he bemoans the
goons from the political anti-Israel left wing, (who) have led a coordinated smear campaign about myself. First of all, i am new to this but after certain events have unfolded i feel that i have had to give a written response. Never Again UK has allowed me a platform in which i can tell part of my story, so please do excuse the fact if this blog is not grammatically perfect. (who)
Of course we forgive his lack of good grammar but that is the only thing we forgive this most unintelligent former Intelligence Officer.
It's difficult to get to sleep knowing that Besser is threatening me with a libel suit
I have to say that I am most disappointed that Besser has resorted to personal attacks on me and my friends. I really did think that he was better than that. He writes:
Being politically active and sharing my love and support for the State of Israel, this is where people such as Timothy Horgan, Jacqueline Walker, Tony Greenstein, Asa Winstanley, etc. have decided to co ordinate an attack on my character and demonise me in order to hurt my fellow Jewish advocates for the State Of Israel.
The Labour Party's attempts to expel me for 'anti-Semitism are approved by fascists and holocaust deniers!
Apart from the lack of, well, good grammar it would appear that he doesnt appreciate my associating him with Jonathan Hoffman. Or is it the other way around? Who is the bigger liability these days?
It would seem that Besser is gathering evidence for a libel action against me. Although I dont usually provide free legal advice to fascists, on this occasion I will make an exception. If you go to the libel courts you have to have a character to defend. Bessers is beyond repair. It is noteworthy though that this fascist goon has picked up on my threatened expulsion from the Labour Party. Its a sad state of affairs when fascists and anti-Semites crow about the right-wings expulsion of socialists for anti-Semitism. But maybe I should not be too surprised. Besser signs off Am Yisrael Chai, Long live Israel, the chant of the Israeli settlers and also Tom Watson at the last Labour Friends of Israel reception.
Tony Greenstein
Virulently anti-Muslim Britain First, retweeted by Trump, also backs Israel
Jayda Fransen, deputy leader of Britain First, in a still from one of the anti-Muslim hate groups Christian Patrol videos. Behind her is Paul Besser, an anti-Palestinian activist who was Britain Firsts intelligence officer.
The Dutch embassy in Washington responded to the tweet, pointing out that the perpetrator of the violent act in this video was born and raised in the Netherlands and had served a sentence under Dutch law.
Platform for hate
Brian of London, (center) with the Israeli army spokesperson Barak Raz (right) and the Jewish Agencys Avi Mayer. (Source)
I am pissed off that hes being arrested by soldiers in the middle of the night for the umpteenth time. Because he should have been shot and killed already.
This incitement to murder Muhammad Abu Hashem, a 17-year-old from the occupied West Bank village of Beit Ommar , appeared today on a prominent blog which has close ties to the Israeli army and functions as an outlet for its anti-Palestinian propaganda.
The village of Beit Ommar and its people especially children are under constant violent assault from the Israeli army and settlers, as Mousa Abu Maria of the Palestine Solidarity Project told The Electronic Intifada in April
This kind of writing, humanising these damn savages with their rock throwing as if its some kind of noble endeavour, sickens me. The only reason they do this with rocks is they know wed shoot them if they had guns. Yet, Brian of London, who also uses the alias Brian John Thomas, added,
Ties to Israeli army and security establishment
Brian of London wrote his demand that indigenous children living under occupation be killed in cold blood for the benefit of illegal colonial settlers on the blog Israellycool, whose publisher David Lange is invited to special briefings with Israeli security sources.
This appears to be more than just a fleeting meeting, as Mayer, himself a former Israeli army spokesperson, had tweeted about meeting with Brian of London in February as well.
Times of Israel profile, Brian of London became a settler from the UK in 2009, and as recently as today, According to hisprofile, Brian of London became a settler from the UK in 2009, and as recently as today, according to a check-in , traveled to the colony of Alon Shvut in the occupied West Bank.
With thanks to Benjamin Doherty and Andrew Kadi for additional research.
President Donald Trump shared three tweets Wednesday from a far-right anti-Muslim party with ties to the UKs Zionist movement Trumps account retweeted deputy leader of Britain First Jayda Fransen, sharing three anti-Muslim videos she had posted.Fransen responded by tweeting , an acronym for Onward Christian Soldiers.She also boasted that Trumps tweets had led to new interviews with mainstream media outlets.Fransen claimed in one of the tweets shared by Trump that a video portrayed a attacking a disabled Dutch boy.Abhorrent and dangerousPrime Minister Theresa May said Trump was Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn urged the government to condemn Trumps reposting of the tweets, calling them Britain Firsts aims include a total ban on Islam. The group was founded in 2011 by former British National Party activists.In a BBC documentary in 2015, leader Paul Golding warned of and against Muslims.One opposition Labour lawmaker has called for Britain First to be banned, after fellow MP Jo Cox was murdered by neo-Nazi Thomas Mair last year Although Britain First is thought to have only a small number of active members, and its performance at the ballot box has been dismal, its Facebook page now has 1.9 million likes.This gives it a large platform to spread its often factually questionable and stridently anti-Muslim message.As previously reported by The Electronic Intifada, Britain First is pro-Israel and has links to the UKs Zionist movement.In July, Fransen appeared to endorse Israels violent suppression of what she labeled The video she posted appears to show Israeli occupation forces firing tear gas at Palestinian civilians.Fransen has frequently posted tweets in support of Israels violent tactics against Palestinians. She has also called Palestinians imbeciles for protesting Trump.Paul Besser, once a leading Britain First activist and the groups intelligence officer, is a frequent part of Londons anti-Palestinian scene.Although both he and the Zionist Federation did not reply to requests for comment at the time, months after The Electronic Intifada report on him was published Besser claimed to have left the group In a blog post earlier this month, he said that Britain First videos some racking up millions of views often revolve around violent anti-Muslim provocations, such as the groups Christian patrols and invasions of mosques and halal slaughterhouses A Britain First video from last year shows Besser was present at a provocative Christian patrol led by Fransen in Luton.Such invasions are usually led by Fransen and leader Golding, and have often landed them in legal trouble.Just days ago, Fransen was arrested and charged with allegedly using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior at a Belfast rally in August.In October, Fransen was arrested for allegedly breaching bail conditions. She also reportedly gave an interview to a neo-Nazi radio station during a tour of Europe.In November 2016, Fransen was fined $2,500 for religiously aggravated harassment of a Muslim woman.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - Prosecutors say a prominent Florida eye doctor accused of bribing U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey should get a 30-year sentence for Medicare fraud.
A three-day sentencing hearing for Dr. Salomon Melgen is scheduled to begin Tuesday in West Palm Beach on 67 counts. Prosecutors say the 63-year-old doctor stole more than $100 million from the federal government. He was convicted in April after a 2 1/2- month trial.
U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra could give the doctor a life sentence. Melgen's attorneys are arguing for a sentence of less than 10 years.
FILE- In this April 28, 2017 file photo, Dr. Salomon Melgen arrives at the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach, Fla. Prosecutors say Melgen, a prominent Florida eye doctor who was accused of bribing New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, should get a 30-year sentence for Medicare fraud. A three-day sentencing hearing for Melgen is scheduled to begin Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2017, in West Palm Beach on 67 counts. Prosecutors say the 63-year-old doctor stole more than $100 million from the federal government. He was convicted in April after a 2 1/2- month trial.(Lannis Water/Palm Beach Post via AP, File)
Melgen and the Democratic senator were tried together on bribery charges in New Jersey, where a federal jury failed to reach a verdict last month. Prosecutors have not said whether they will retry them.
RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) - An American couple have returned the cremated remains of a British woman to her relatives in England, nearly 40 years after the woman was killed in South Dakota.
Lena White Hat was attacked and strangled in 1977 in Rapid Valley, but she had no family in the U.S. other than her American husband, who died two years later. Her niece, Sharon Papen, learned about her aunt's ashes while researching her family history.
She claimed the ashes earlier this year but lacked the money to fly them back to England.
Bob and Vikki French, who live in Rapid City, a city about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from Rapid Valley, learned about Papen's plight and volunteered to deliver the ashes during a planned trip to England, the Rapid City Journal reported . The couple returned the ashes to Papen in an airport terminal last month.
Vikki French said the delivery was far more celebratory than she imagined.
"I think that was because of the closure," French said.
Papen said she's grateful to those who helped coordinate the safe return of her aunt's ashes.
"Without you wonderful people, this would not have happened due to my circumstances," Papen told the newspaper. "It's not often you find such good people. You have helped me close this chapter in this book."
Papen said her family may bury the ashes near the graves of White Hat's relatives.
John Thomas Martin was convicted in White Hat's death. Court records show Martin had been under psychiatric care before he attacked White Hat with a rolling pin and a pickax, and strangled her with a belt in his home. Martin is serving a life prison sentence in South Dakota.
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Information from: Rapid City Journal, http://www.rapidcityjournal.com
Interpreter Derlyn Roberts, 53, has a prior fraud conviction. Her signs were gibberish
An American Sign Language interpreter has baffled the hearing impaired by delivering gibberish gestures during a crucial police press conference in the Tampa serial killer case.
As Tampa police Chief Brian Dugan announced the arrest of Howell Donaldson Wednesday night, interpreter Derlyn Roberts was there beside him, making signs that made no sense.
State records reviewed by DailyMail.com show that 53-year-old Roberts, who also goes by the name Derlyn Glover, served a five-year prison sentence on a felony fraud conviction and was released in April of 2016. She also has prior convictions for grand theft and burglary.
'She sat up there and waved her arms like she was singing Jingle Bells,' Rachell Settambrino, who is deaf and teaches American Sign Language at the University of South Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times through an interpreter.
Interpreter Derlyn Roberts (left) made no sense to hearing-impaired viewers during a crucial police press conference on Wednesday, where charges were announced in a serial killer case
Among the things Roberts signed, according to Settambrino, was the following: 'Fifty-one hours ago, zero 12 22 (indecipherable) murder three minutes in 14 weeks ago in old (indecipherable) murder four five 55,000 plea 10 arrest murder bush (indecipherable) three age 24.'
Howell Donaldson, 24, was charged in the four fatal shootings that have rocked Tampa
In fact, the chief was providing a timeline of the four shootings, and describing how his agency had received some 5,000 tips before arresting the 24-year-old suspect.
'I was disappointed, confused, upset and really want to know why the city of Tampa's chief of police, who is responsible for my safety ... did not check her out,' Settambrino said.
The city was just as confused.
Tampa Police Department spokeswoman Janelle McGregor told the Tampa Bay Times officials are conducting a review because they didn't even request an interpreter for the Nov. 28 news conference.
At the next day's follow-up news conference, a different interpreter, Ben Zapata, was beside the chief.
It is the most recent example of an apparently unqualified signer appearing at news conferences.
In September, as Hurricane Irma approached Florida and officials announced a mandatory evacuation, an interpreter in nearby Manatee County began signing words like 'pizza', ''monster' and 'bear', along with other gibberish.
Police say they did not request an interpreter for the press conference, and are baffled as to why Roberts (circled) was there signing gibberish
Manatee County officials later said they were in a pinch and called on a county employee who had an understanding of sign language because he communicates with his deaf brother.
However, it quickly became apparent he was in over his head. The deaf community demanded an apology and the video of the news conference went viral.
In 2013 in South Africa, a fake interpreter appeared beside former President Barak Obama and other world leaders during a memorial service for Nelson Mandela, apparently signing gibberish.
He later said he is schizophrenic and had seen angels descending in the stadium where the event took place.
Settambrino said Florida, unlike some other states, does not require ASL interpreters to be certified through the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, a national nonprofit that 'seeks to uphold standards, ethics, and professionalism' for the field, according to its website.
Florida says only that ASL interpreters have to be 'qualified,' Settambrino said. 'But what is that definition of qualified?'
MADRID (AP) - Lawyers say a former Salvadoran colonel has denied being involved in the massacre of five Spanish priests in El Salvador 28 years ago.
Two lawyers familiar with the proceedings said Inocente Orlando Montano told a Spanish National Court judge Monday that no mention of plans to assassinate the priests was made during a Nov. 15, 1989 meeting he attended.
Father Ignacio Ellacuria and five other Jesuit priests were killed the next day along with their housekeeper and her daughter. Ellacuria was mediating talks at the time to end the Salvadoran civil war.
FILE - In this Aug. 22, 2013, file photo, former El Salvadoran military Col. Inocente Orlando Montano departs federal court in Boston. Spanish authorities said Montano was extradited to Spain on Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2017, to face charges that he helped plot the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests and two others in El Salvador. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)
The lawyers spoke anonymously in line with court rules.
The United States extradited Montano to Spain last week to face charges in the deaths of the five priests who were Spanish citizens.
He was El Salvador's vice minister for public security during the 1980s.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) - More than a dozen states banded together Monday to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to block a California law requiring any eggs sold there to come from hens that have space to stretch out in their cages.
In a lawsuit filed directly to the high court, the states allege that California's law has cost consumers nationwide up to $350 million annually because of higher egg prices since it took effect in 2015. The lawsuit argues that California's requirements violate the U.S. Constitution's interstate commerce clause and are pre-empted by federal law.
A federal appeals court panel rejected similar claims last year in a separate case brought by six states, ruling that they failed to show California's law would affect more than just individual farmers. The latest lawsuit seeks to address that by citing an economic analysis of the California law. It also asks the Supreme Court to take up the case directly instead of requiring that it first move through the lower courts.
Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, a Republican who is running for U.S. Senate in 2018, is leading the lawsuit. Other plaintiff states are Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. All have Republican attorneys general except Iowa, which has a Democrat.
The California attorney general's office said Monday that it was reviewing the lawsuit.
California produced about 5 billion eggs and imported an additional 4 billion from other states in 2012, according to the lawsuit. Thirty percent of those out-of-state eggs came from Iowa, the nation's top egg producer. About 13 percent of California's egg imports came from Missouri, the second highest percentage cited in the lawsuit.
The number of eggs produced in California dropped to 3.5 billion last year despite rising nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Missouri's egg production was up 60 percent since 2012 to 3.2 billion last year.
Hawley asserted in a statement that California's egg law is "a clear attempt by big-government proponents to impose job-killing regulations" on other states.
California voters approved a ballot initiative in 2008 that requires that hens in cages spend most of their day in spaces large enough that they can lie down, stand up, turn around and fully extend their limbs. The measure gave farmers until 2015 to comply.
After California egg farmers raised concerns that they would be put a competitive disadvantage with those elsewhere, state legislators in 2010 expanded the law to bar the sale of eggs from any hens that weren't raised in compliance with California's standards requiring at least 116 square inches of floor space per chicken. The industry standard had been 67 square inches.
The California law cites concerns about protecting people from salmonella and other illnesses. But the suing states say such health concerns are unmerited and merely a pretext for protecting California's agriculture industry.
The lawsuit cites a study from a University of Missouri economist who concluded that the national price of a dozen eggs has increased between 1.8 percent and 5.1 percent since January 2015 because of the California cage requirements. The study said the price increase has added thousands of dollars annually to states' costs for supplying eggs to prisoners.
The study also estimated that California's egg regulations have cost U.S. households up to $350 million annually, including about $97 million for those whose incomes are in the lowest one-fifth nationally.
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Follow David A. Lieb at: http://twitter.com/DavidALieb
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - Convicted of murder in the deadliest attack of the civil rights era, the one-time Ku Klux Klansman glowered when the judge asked if he had anything to say before going to prison for the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls. Bobby Frank Cherry pointed at a prosecution table that included Doug Jones.
"This whole bunch lied all the way through this thing," Cherry said in a deep Southern drawl. "I told the truth. I don't know why I'm going to jail for nothing."
Fifteen years after Cherry snarled at Jones, the bombing is echoing in Alabama's fractious Senate race. Now the Democratic nominee, Jones is touting a record that includes the prosecutions of Cherry and another one-time Klansman, Thomas Blanton Jr., as he asks voters in Republican-run Alabama to turn on GOP nominee Roy Moore and give him a try.
FILE - In this May 6, 2002 file photo, defendant Bobby Frank Cherry exits the rear door of the Jefferson County Criminal Justice Center during a lunch break in his trial. Convicted of murder in the deadliest attack of the civil rights era, the old Ku Klux Klansman didn't hesitate when the judge asked if he had anything to say before going to prison for a church bombing which killed four black girls in 1963. On cue, Bobby Frank Cherry pointed at a prosecution table that included Doug Jones. Fifteen years after Cherry snarled at Jones across a courtroom, the bombing is echoing in Alabama's fractious Senate race. (AP Photo/Dave Martin, File)
"I still believe that those cases were on the right side of history," he told reporters after a stop in Montgomery. "I believe that this campaign is on the right side of history, and that people are ready to move forward rather than backward."
Moore and his supporters are depicting Jones as an out-of-touch, Obama-loving liberal who is soft on issues including crime. The tactic could work based on the state's history: Conservative white Republicans dominate the electorate in Alabama, no Democrat holds statewide office and President Donald Trump carried more than 60 percent of the state vote last year.
The president offered up his unwavering support of Moore in a tweet Monday, despite the sexual assault allegations that have rocked Moore's campaign.
Jones touts his leading role in closing the books on an act so cruel it helped open the nation's eyes to the depth of racial hatred in the Jim Crow South. While Jones is appealing to voters on what he calls "kitchen table issues" including health care, jobs and education, the church bombing prosecution is always in the background.
Jones supporter Michelle Summers-Hines said she learned about the Birmingham church bombing growing up in Chicago, so the black woman was all the more inclined to back the one-time U.S. attorney for Senate.
"When I came here I knew about the four little girls," said Summer-Hines, 47, of Montgomery.
The bombing happened during a year when deeply segregated Birmingham was the epicenter of the campaign to end racial segregation across the South.
Months after protests in which police and firefighters used dogs and fire hoses to turn back black demonstrators trying to march on downtown streets, KKK members under cover of darkness planted a bomb outside the thick, brick wall of the 16th Street Baptist Church, a leading black congregation in a deeply segregated city.
The bomb went off on the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, a Sunday, and blasted a huge hole in the church at almost the exact spot five young women were in a restroom getting ready for worship. The explosion killed 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Morris, also known as Cynthia Wesley. Collins' sister, Sarah Collins Rudolph, was seriously injured.
Investigators soon had a list of Klan suspects that included Cherry and Blanton, plus Robert Chambliss and Herman Frank Cash. All were active in a Klan group with a reputation for violence, and Chambliss had a nickname to match - "Dynamite Bob."
The investigation went cold for years until then-Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the probe and led the prosecution of Chambliss, who was convicted in 1977 and died in prison in 1985.
The case went dormant again, and the fact that other known suspects were never prosecuted became an increasingly sore point within Birmingham's black community. Then-FBI agent Robert Langford heard complaints during a meeting with black pastors in 1993, and a renewed investigation was underway by the time then-President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as U.S. attorney in Birmingham in 1997.
Blanton and Cherry, who had moved to Texas from Alabama, were indicted on state murder charges in 2000, and Jones received a special appointment to oversee the prosecution. He led a team of federal and state attorneys during trials that resulted in the convictions of Blanton in 2001 and Cherry the following year.
Prosecutors used both of the men's own words to convict them. Cherry had talked about the bombing through the years, evidence showed, and secretly recorded FBI tapes from decades earlier captured Blanton talking about the bombing with his then-wife and a Klan buddy who turned informant.
Cherry denied that he participated in the bombing. He died in prison within three years of being convicted. Blanton remains behind bars - Alabama's parole board refused to release him in August 2016 after a hearing that included Jones advocating for Blanton to remain incarcerated. Cash died in 1994. He was never charged.
That "fifth little girl" who survived the bombing, Sarah Rudolph, is now among Jones' most ardent supporters, and so is her husband.
"We're going to vote for him. Absolutely. He convicted the church bombers," said George Rudolph.
In this May 30, 2000 photo, Thomas Blanton, left, a suspect in the 1963 bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham Ala., is released on bond from the Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham Ala. Now the Democratic nominee, Doug Jones is touting a record that includes the prosecutions of Bobby Frank Cherry and another one-time Klansman, Blanton, as he asks voters in Republican-run Alabama to turn on GOP nominee Roy Moore and give him a try. ( Charles Nesbitt/The Birmingham News via AP)
FILE - In this Nov. 28, 2017, file photo, Alabama U.S. Senatorial candidate Doug Jones talks with the media after touring the Northport Medical Center, in Northport, Ala. Jones is the democratic candidate facing republican Roy Moore for Alabama's U.S. Senate seat in the Dec. 12 special election. (Vasha Hunt/AL.com via AP, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Federal Reserve's Richmond regional bank is announcing that Thomas Barkin, a senior executive at global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., will be the bank's next president.
He will succeed Jeffrey Lacker, who resigned as the bank's president in April after revealing his involvement in a leak of confidential information in 2012 that had triggered congressional and FBI investigations.
Barkin, 56, who will take over at the Richmond bank on Jan. 1, will be a voting member next year of the Federal Open Market Committee, the panel of Fed board members and regional bank presidents, who set interest-rate policies for the central bank.
Barkins' appointment was announced Monday by Margaret Lewis, who headed the bank's search committee. Barken is currently the chief risk officer at McKinsey & Co.
The Screen Actors Guild Awards will have a host for the first time next year.
Executive producer Kathy Connell said Monday that actress Kristen Bell will preside over the 24th annual ceremony in January.
Bell said in a statement that she's 'a little nervous' about being the show's first host but glad she'll be in the company of her acting colleagues.
First time's a charm! Kristen Bell to be Screen Actors Guild Awards first host ever in ceremony's 24 year history
'I am honored to be part of the SAG Awards, and am a little nervous about being its first-ever host,' Bell said.
'Im so glad that Ill be in the company of my fellow actors, many of whom Ive worked with before, so I know theyll be warm and supportive.'
Bell said in a statement that she's 'a little nervous' about being the show's first host but glad she'll be in the company of her acting colleagues
'Its going to be an amazing night,' she added.
The SAG Awards recognize outstanding performances in TV and film as chosen by members of the actors' union.
Connell said the awards committee wanted to 'capture the cultural mood' of change by breaking with its own tradition and having a host for its gala show.
The 24th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards will be held January 21, 2018, and broadcast live on TBS and TNT.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - President Donald Trump earlier this year ordered U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to conduct an unprecedented review of 27 monuments established by former presidents over more than two decades on lands and waters revered for their natural beauty and historical significance.
Trump announced Monday that he will shrink two Utah monuments, but he has not revealed his decision on the others yet. He launched the review after calling the land protections by Democratic former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton federal overreach.
Zinke recommended reducing four large monuments in the U.S. West and modifying rules at six others, according to a memo leaked this fall. He also has said he's recommending the creation of three new monuments.
FILE - This July 15, 2016, file photo, shows the "Moonhouse" in McLoyd Canyon which is part of Bears Ears National Monument, near Blanding, Utah. President Donald Trump is expected to announce plans to shrink Bears Ears National Monument as well as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah that were created by past Democratic presidents. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)
He didn't suggest eliminating any monuments, despite urging by some Republicans in Utah and elsewhere.
Here's a breakdown of Zinke's recommendations:
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MONUMENTS TO BE DOWNSIZED
Trump said he will shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments spanning millions of acres in Utah in line with Zinke's recommendation.
Zinke also advised trimming Gold Butte in Nevada and Cascade Siskiyou in Oregon, but the president didn't announce a final decision on those monuments Monday.
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NO DOWNSIZING, BUT RULE CHANGES
Zinke proposed more access for people and industry and other changes at six monuments:
- Katahdin Woods and Waters, Maine: Allow trees to be cut on parts of the monument and ensure that "traditional uses" like snowmobiling and hunting are taken into account in a management plan.
- Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, Maine: Allow commercial fishing in the first marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean.
- Pacific Remote Islands, Pacific Ocean: Allow commercial fishing within the marine monument that covers nearly 87,000 square miles (225,330 square kilometers) near Hawaii.
- Rose Atoll, Pacific Ocean: Allow commercial fishing in the 13,500-square-mile (34,965-square-kilometer) marine monument around the Rose Atoll in American Samoa, a U.S territory.
- Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, New Mexico: Conduct assessment of border-safety risks, prioritize public access and request congressional authority to give tribes co-management.
- Rio Grande Del Norte, New Mexico: - Prioritize public access, request congressional authority to give tribes co-management, and get more funding to protect cultural and historical objects.
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STAYING INTACT
During his travels to visit some of the monuments under review, Zinke said these six monuments would remain untouched: Upper Missouri River Breaks in Montana; Sand to Snow in California; Grand Canyon-Parashant in Arizona; Craters of the Moon in Idaho; Hanford Reach in Washington; and Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado.
Zinke has been silent on the other 11 monuments under review, from Giant Sequoia in California to the Marianas Trench southwest of Guam, but they are presumed to remain intact.
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NEW MONUMENTS
Zinke also recommended Trump create three monuments, including one in his home state of Montana:
- Badger-Two Medicine in an area within the Lewis and Clark National Forest in northwest Montana.
- Medgar Evers' home in Jackson, Mississippi, where the first field secretary for the NAACP was assassinated on June 12, 1963. Evers organized boycotts over segregation during the civil rights movement.
- Camp Nelson near Nicholasville, Kentucky, which was established in 1863 as a 700-bed Union Army hospital, supply depot and recruiting center for African-American troops in the state.
FILE - In this undated file photo, the Upper Gulch section of the Escalante Canyons within Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument features sheer sandstone walls, broken occasionally by tributary canyons. Utah has long stood out for going far beyond other Western states in trying to get back control of its federally protected lands. When President Donald Trump on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, announces he's going to shrink two national monuments in the state, his warm welcome will stand out in a region that is normally protective of its parks and monuments. (AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac, File)
President Donald Trump speaks at the Utah State Capitol Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, in Salt Lake City. Trump traveled to Salt Lake City to announce plans to shrink two sprawling national monuments in Utah in a move that will delight the state's GOP politicians and many rural residents who see the lands as prime examples of federal overreach, but will enrage tribes and environmentalist groups who vow to immediately sue to preserve the monuments. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
WASHINGTON (AP) There was no violence in the midterm elections last week, and many election deniers lost and quietly conceded. Few listened when former President Donald Trump tried to stoke baseless allegations of electoral fraud. For a moment, at least, a familiar sense of normalcy fell over a nation on edge as the extremism that consumed U.S. politics for much of the last two years was replaced by democratic order. The post-election narrative has instead been focused on each partys electoral fate. Republicans are disappointed that a red wave did not materialize, while Democrats are bracing for the likelihood of a House Republican takeover. At least for now, the serious threats that loomed over democracy heading into Election Day have not materialized.
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BATH, Maine (AP) - The second in the U.S. Navy stealthy Zumwalt class of destroyers headed out to sea for the first time on Monday, departing from Navy shipbuilder Bath Iron Works for builder trials.
The future USS Michael Monsoor carefully navigated the winding Kennebec River before reaching the North Atlantic. It'll be at sea for several days before returning to Bath Iron Works for tweaks and adjustments.
Part of the 610-foot-long (186-meter-long) ship's crew posed for photos at Fort Popham, in Phippsburg, as the ship cruised past.
The future USS Michael Monsoor passes Fort Popham travels down the Kennebec River as it heads out to sea for trials, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, in Phippsburg, Maine. The ship is the second in the stealthy Zumwalt class of destroyers. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
The Monsoor is the second in a class of three futuristic-looking ships that feature electric-drive propulsion, new radar and sonar, powerful guns and missiles and a stealthy shape.
The first, the USS Zumwalt, has been commissioned into service and is based in San Diego. The third will be the Lyndon B. Johnson, which is under construction.
The Monsoor is named for a Navy SEAL, Michael Monsoor, who died in Iraq in 2006 when he threw himself on an insurgent's grenade to protect his comrades. Monsoor, a 25-year-old California native, was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.
The three warships are the largest and most technologically sophisticated destroyers built for the Navy. They're also the most expensive, with an estimated cost of $12.9 billion for all three, according to Navy budget estimates.
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This story has been corrected to show the second destroyer is named the Michael Monsoor, not the Lyndon B. Johnson.
Sailors that are part of the crew of the future USS Michael Monsoor pose for a photo as the ship passes Fort Popham while heading out to sea for trials, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, in Phippsburg, Maine. The ship is the second in the stealthy Zumwalt class of destroyers. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
The future USS Michael Monsoor passes homes on the east side of the Kennebec River as it heads out to sea for trials, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, in Phippsburg, Maine. The ship is the second in the stealthy Zumwalt class of destroyers. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
The future USS Michael Monsoor heads out to sea for trials, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, in Phippsburg, Maine. The ship is the second in the stealthy Zumwalt class of destroyers. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - It was a scenario that emergency room doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital had discussed but never seen in person - an unconscious patient with a tattoo across his chest that read "Do Not Resuscitate."
The 70-year-old man at the Miami hospital posed a vexing ethical dilemma and a decision needed to be made fast. His blood pressure was dropping and he wasn't breathing well. He had a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes and he had a high blood alcohol level.
"If we didn't do something soon we were going to lose him," said Dr. Gregory Holt, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Miami who worked on the case this summer.
In the end, the doctors followed the directions of the tattoo but not before some hand-wringing and a quick referral to the hospital's ethics team.
Doctors immediately had two questions about the tattoo.
"First, is it legal and second is it truly the man's wishes," Holt recalled Friday during a telephone interview with The Associated Press. He also helped write a case study that was published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Typically when faced with ethical conundrums, doctors don't want to choose an irreversible path. In this case, they tried to wake him, but he was in a delirious state and unable to respond.
Doctors had previously heard of cases of similar DNR tattoos. Some were just a joke. This one didn't seem to be, Holt said. It was written on his chest with what appeared to be his signature tattooed underneath. The word "not" was underlined.
Still, doctors had questions. He came into the hospital without ID or family and they couldn't reach next of kin, further complicating the matter.
"We did enough to keep him alive while we talked to ethics team," said Holt, who said the patient was pumped with antibiotics and IV fluids, along with other measures.
Often in these cases, the patient has a piece of paper at home somewhere also stating their wish not to be resuscitated, but there wasn't time to look.
The ethical team eventually ruled that the tattoo expressed his wishes and told doctors to follow his orders.
"He underlined the word 'not'. He signed it. We think he probably had some medical knowledge. He placed it on his chest where someone would have to do chest compressions ... so we felt like this was a real accurate statement reflecting his wishes," Holt said.
The man's status deteriorated throughout the night and he died without intervention.
The man's written DNR request was later found at his home but doctors wrote in the case study that the tattoo "produced more confusion than clarity, given concerns about its legality and likely unfounded beliefs that tattoos might represent permanent reminders of regretted decisions made while the person was intoxicated."
PONTIAC, Mich. (AP) - The second time was the charm for a partial implosion of the Pontiac Silverdome - the former home of the Detroit Lions.
Demolition company Adamo brought down the upper section of the Silverdome on Monday, one day after some explosive charges failed to detonate. Company officials said wiring issues were the culprit of Sunday's failed attempt, which disappointed thousands of onlookers who'd braved cold temperatures in hopes of seeing a dramatic collapse.
The Lions played at the suburban Detroit facility from 1975 through 2001. The Silverdome also was the home of the NBA's Detroit Pistons and hosted the Super Bowl in 1982.
During its lifetime, the indoor, 80,000-plus seat stadium also hosted Super Bowl XVI, Wrestlemania III, a visit by Pope John Paul II and various motorsport events.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - A female lobbyist said Monday that Assemblyman Matt Dababneh sexually assaulted her in a bathroom - an allegation the Los Angeles Democrat denied and said came "apparently for her own self-promotion."
In the latest development in a burgeoning sex scandal in California's Legislature, Pamela Lopez held a news conference at the office of her lobbying firm, K Street Consulting, to publicly name Dababneh as the perpetrator of an assault she had described to reporters and lawmakers for weeks without attaching a name.
She accused him of following her into a single-stall bathroom during a January 2016 Las Vegas hotel party for mutual friends, slamming the door and masturbating in front of her while asking him to touch her. She also outlined the alleged incident in a letter to the Assembly committee tasked with handling misconduct complaints.
Lobbyist Pamela Lopez makes a public allegation of lewd behavior by Assemblyman Matt Dababneh, D-Encino, during a news conference Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. Lopez alleges that Debabneh followed her into bar bathroom and performed a lewd act in front of her in 2016. Debabneh denies the accusation. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
"I'm choosing to have hope that that process will work," Lopez said. "I am putting this in the hands of the lawmakers who have told me they will act to protect me."
Dababneh, a former aide to U.S. Rep Brad Sherman who was elected to the Assembly in 2013, issued a statement through a public relations firm saying he looks forward clearing his name.
"I affirmatively deny that this event ever happened - at any time," he said. "I am saddened by this lobbyist's effort to create this falsehood and make these inflammatory statements, apparently for her own self-promotion and without regard to the reputation of others."
Dababneh, 36 and not married, has stepped aside as chairman of the Assembly's Banking and Finance Committee while the allegation is under investigation.
He is the third sitting lawmaker to be investigated by the Legislature over sexual misconduct allegations since nearly 150 women at the Capitol came forward in October to allege pervasive harassment in state government. Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra of Los Angeles resigned last week while Sen. Tony Mendoza of Artesia denies wrongdoing. Both are Democrats.
Lopez is the only woman to make a formal claim against Dababneh as a lawmaker, but others allege inappropriate conduct while he worked for Sherman from 2005-2013, including as the district chief of staff.
Jessica Yas Barker joined Lopez at the news conference to allege frequent inappropriate comments by Dababneh when they worked together. Dababneh frequently spoke about sex and his sexual exploits and showed her condoms in his desk drawer, she said.
"It was pretty much an open secret in the San Fernando Valley that this is how Matt behaved," said Barker, who now works for the television network Ovation.
Jonathan Bash, a former president of the college Democrats at the University of California, Los Angeles, said his organization advised its women members not to intern in Sherman's office while Debabneh worked there because he was known for making sexual comments and offering alcohol to underage women. Several other former members of the organization offered similar accounts on social media.
Bash told the AP he did not formally report Dababneh's behavior because he felt it was up to the people who had worked for him to make that choice.
Sherman issued a statement saying he had no knowledge of inappropriate behavior by Dababneh and that he was "surprised and saddened" to hear that Barker felt uncomfortable while working in the office.
"I had never seen or been told of, any inappropriate behavior by Assemblyman Dababneh, or any disparagement of women," Sherman said.
He also noted Dababneh "has been in several contentious political races" and that in none "did his political opponents, some of whom had professional opposition researchers, allege anything regarding sexual harassment in their mailings, handouts, or advertisements."
No one witnessed the alleged assault in Las Vegas but Lopez's lobbying partner, Afrack Vargas, said Lopez told him about what happened when she returned from the weekend in Las Vegas.
Lopez said she never reported the incident or publicly named Dababneh because she feared retribution. She changed her mind after testifying last week before an Assembly committee tasked with fixing the chamber's policies for handling misconduct reports.
"I can't have it on my conscience that this may happen again," she said.
Ken Maxey, a friend of Dababneh's, told the Los Angeles Times he was at the same party and doesn't believe Lopez's allegations are credible given the timeline and setup of the event. Dababneh's attorney organized the interview with Maxey, the Times reported.
He said Dababneh was there for about 90 minutes and he was with him most of the time and does not remember him using the bathroom. The party was held in a room at the Las Vegas hotel where it would have been difficult for both to enter the single-stall bathroom without someone seeing, he said.
Patricia Glaser, an attorney for Dababneh, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Lopez on Friday and threatened to seek damages if she went public with her allegations. Glaser also represents disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, who faces dozens of sexual abuse allegations.
Jessica Yas Barker, right, makes a public allegation of inappropriate behavior by Assemblyman Matt Dababneh, D-Encino, during a news conference Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. Dababneh denies the allegations. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
FILE - In this May 15, 2017 file photo, assemblyman Matt Dababneh, D-Encino speaks at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif. Lobbyist Pamela Lopez alleges that Debabneh followed her into bar bathroom and performed a lewd act in front of her in 2016. Debabneh denies the accusation. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)
A reporter questions Jessica Yas Baker, second from left, and Pamela Lopez, third from left, about their allocations of inappropriate behavior by Assemblyman Matt Dababneh, D-Encino during a news conference, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. Dababneh denies the allegations. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Jessica Yas Barker, center, makes a public allegation of inappropriate behavior by Assemblyman Matt Dababneh, D-Encino, during a news conference Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. Dababneh denies the allegations. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - U.S and Russian ships carrying remotely operated vehicles capable of deep seafloor searches are joining other vessels hunting for an Argentine submarine that went missing in the South Atlantic 19 days ago, the navy said Monday.
An explosion occurred near the time and place where the ARA San Juan disappeared Nov. 15. The navy says it is no longer looking for survivors although a multinational operation continues to search for the vessel, which had a crew of 44.
Navy spokesman Enrique Balbi said Russia's Yantar oceanographic research ship would arrive in the search area Tuesday. The U.S. Atlantis research vessel is expected to arrive Saturday. They are equipped with deep submergence vehicles that allow them to examine undersea areas nearly 20,000 feet deep (6,000 meters).
FILE - In this undated file photo provided by the Argentina Navy shows an ARA San Juan, a German-built diesel-electric vessel, near Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Navy's spokesman said Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, that U.S and Russian ships carrying remotely operated vehicles capable of deep seafloor searches are joining other vessels hunting for an Argentine submarine that went missing in the South Atlantic 19 days ago. (Argentina Navy via AP File)
The ships will join five vessels from Argentina and a Chilean ship combing an area of some 1,500 square miles (4,000 square kilometers), where sonar detected three unidentified objects on the sea floor to see if they belong to the missing sub.
The San Juan disappeared as it was sailing from the southernmost port of Ushuaia to the coastal city of Mar del Plata after a patrol.
The navy has said the vessel's captain reported that water entered the snorkel and caused one of the submarine's batteries to short circuit. The captain later communicated by satellite phone that the problem had been contained, the navy says.
Some hours later, an explosion was detected near the time and place where the San Juan was last heard from. Balbi has said the blast could have been triggered by a "concentration of hydrogen" caused by the battery problem reported by the captain.
The German-built TR-1700 class submarine was commissioned in the 1980s and was most recently refitted between 2008 and 2014. It was built by a subsidiary of Germany's ThyssenKrupp that is no longer operational.
Balbi said a group of navy officials who traveled to Germany last week to obtain more information about the design of the submarine had returned to Argentina. He said they will submit all documents to a local judge investigating the sub's disappearance.
The spokesman said the information gathered in Germany as well as information from an Argentine submarine from the same model that is under repair at a state-owned shipyard could help provide evidence to find out what happened to the San Juan.
When asked if the refit of the submarine had been certified, Balbi said there are some processes that the Germany company might have been involved in and others where it was not.
"But of those things that it certified, surely there must be a record. Everything was duly registered and I imagine that all these reports made on the activation of batteries and repairs will be subject to investigation," he said, without providing more details.
In a statement, the German company told The Associated Press that that "Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems employees haven't been in operational contact with the Argentinian submarine fleet for more than two decades."
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Associated Press writer Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP) - In an attempt to burnish his public image and leave no fingerprints behind, Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort recently enlisted a longtime colleague "assessed to have ties" to Russian intelligence to help him ghostwrite an op-ed, prosecutors said Monday.
Prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller say in court papers that they believe the opinion piece - written while Manafort is on house arrest facing several felonies - would have violated a judge's order that bars him from trying his case in the press.
They are now pushing for Manafort to remain confined to his home on GPS monitoring for the time being.
FILE - In this Nov. 2, 2017, file photo, Paul Manafort accompanied by his lawyers, arrives at U.S. Federal Court, in Washington. Prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller say Manafort has been working on an op-ed with a longtime colleague "assessed to have ties" to a Russian intelligence service. Court papers say that Manafort and the colleague sought to publish the op-ed under someone else's name and intended it to influence public opinion about his work in Ukraine. ( AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
According to the court papers , Manafort and the colleague sought to publish the op-ed to influence public opinion about his political consulting in Ukraine, work at the heart of the criminal case against him. The op-ed was being drafted as late as last week.
Prosecutors did not name Manafort's colleague, who is currently based in Russia, or provide details of how they determined the person had ties to a spy agency. Reached Monday, a spokesman for Manafort declined comment.
Manafort is currently facing several felony charges involving allegations of money laundering and other financial crimes related to his political consulting work in Ukraine. Manafort has denied any wrongdoing. A trial is scheduled for next year.
In the court filing, prosecutors say the op-ed appeared to violate an admonishment from the judge last month to refrain from public statements. An op-ed is an opinion essay written to be published in some form, usually on a website or in a newspaper or magazine. It is usually marked as representing the views of the writer and separated from news content.
"Even if the ghostwritten op-ed were entirely accurate, fair, and balanced, it would be a violation of this Court's November 8 Order if it had been published," the prosecutors wrote. "The editorial clearly was undertaken to influence the public's opinion of defendant Manafort, or else there would be no reason to seek its publication (much less for Manafort and his long-time associate to ghostwrite it in another's name)."
They added, "It compounds the problem that the proposed piece is not a dispassionate recitation of the facts."
Prosecutors said they discovered the efforts to publish the op-ed last Thursday and alerted Manafort's attorney, who assured prosecutors that "steps would be taken to make sure it was no longer going to be published."
At the time, Manafort was working to secure his release from home confinement by posting more than $10 million in bond, and according to court papers, he had reached a tentative agreement with the government. But after discovering the op-ed, Mueller's team is now opposing Manafort's proposed bond agreement.
Prosecutors did not disclose the op-ed in court papers so as to prevent it from becoming public. They also did not disclose what name the ghostwritten op-ed would have been published under.
Manafort and his longtime business associate, Rick Gates, were indicted in October by a grand jury in Washington. They were among the first people to face charges brought by the special counsel's office.
Manafort led the Trump campaign for several months, including during the Republican National Convention. Gates also worked in a senior role on the campaign.
Mueller has been leading a wide-ranging investigation into Russia's election interference and any coordination with Trump associates.
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Follow Chad Day and Eric Tucker on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/ChadSDay and https://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP
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Read the court filing: http://apne.ws/JtXbTI7
A politician proposed to his partner during a debate on a bill which could soon legalise same-sex marriage in Australia.
The countrys House of Representatives resumed on Monday for its final two-week session of the year, which is giving priority to achieving same-sex marriage reform.
The major parties want the legislation passed this week after a majority of Australians endorsed reform in a postal ballot last month.
Tim Wilson, right, proposes to his partner Ryan Patrick Bolger, who was sitting in the public gallery, at Parliament in Canberra
Last week the Senate approved the bill and rejected all proposed amendments that would have increased legal protections for those who would discriminate against gay couples on religious grounds.
But several politicians, including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, intend to persist with amendments rejected by the Senate.
Mr Turnbull, a gay marriage supporter, says he wants wedding celebrants, not just those affiliated with churches, to have the right to refuse to officiate at same-sex marriages.
Mr Turnbull later told Parliament that nothing in the bill threatened religious freedoms.
Australians overwhelming said YES to marriage equality and now we're making it a reality. Watch my speech in Parliament LIVE. Posted by Malcolm Turnbull on Sunday, December 3, 2017
We must not fail to recognise that there is sincere, heartfelt anxiety about the bills impact on religious freedom, he said.
That is why I will support several amendments to the bill which will provide that additional reassurance in respect of their fundamental rights and freedoms, he added.
If the House of Representatives supported such an amendment, then the altered bill would have to return to the Senate for ratification, delaying the reform.
Tim Wilson, who is part of the conservative coalition, was among the first politicians to join the debate and used his speech to propose to his partner Ryan Bolger, who was watching from the public gallery.
In my first speech I defined our bond by the ring that sits on both of our left hands, Mr Wilson said. Theres only one thing left to do: Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?
The 33-year-old primary school teacher responded: yes, which was recorded in the official parliamentary record.
Update: We've dug through Hansard and @timwilsoncomau appears to be the first ever Member to propose on the floor of the House. pic.twitter.com/NLGLxpYIrm Australian House of Representatives (@AboutTheHouse) December 4, 2017
Warren Entsch, a long-term advocate of marriage equality within the conservative government, helped draft the bill and was the first to speak for it in the House on Monday.
The bill which the Senate passed is a robust bill, a whole range of religious protections are already in place, Mr Entsch said as he introduced the bill.
We have made sure that we have removed any element of discrimination in this bill while ensuring that religious freedoms are protected.
Mr Entsch said related amendments to bolster freedoms of speech and education rights could be debated in a separate bill next year and should not be used to delay the reform.
Australians are sick of excuses and theyre sick of delays, Mr Entsch said.
A nonbinding postal survey found that 62% of Australian respondents wanted reform.
Almost 80% of Australias registered voters took part in the two-month survey. While marriage equality could become law this week, state marriage registries say they would not have the paperwork to proceed with weddings until January.
Airlines Jetstar and Virgin Australia have resumed flights in and out of Bali as gushing ash from Mount Agung has dissipated into a plume of steam.
Indonesias disaster mitigation agency said the volcano remains at its highest alert level but most of Bali is safe for tourists.
The exclusion zone around the volcano still extends six miles (10 kilometres) from the crater in some directions and more than 55,000 people are living in shelters.
[Travel update] We have resumed scheduled services between Bali and Australia today, with flying conditions around Denpasar Airport expected to remain clear for the next 24 hours: https://t.co/ipKqIRVLSf #MountAgung #Agung #volcano Jetstar Airways (@JetstarAirways) December 4, 2017
BALI UPDATE: Our team of safety experts have deemed it safe to continue operations so we plan to operate today's scheduled services from Bali. If conditions remain favourable we also aim to resume normal operations between Australia and Bali from tomorrow. https://t.co/LD8rC5LZdZ Virgin Australia (@VirginAustralia) December 4, 2017
The two airlines, which cancelled flights over the weekend even as the ash cloud shrank dramatically, said they were resuming services on Monday.
The regions volcanic ash monitoring center in Darwin, Australia, has stopped issuing advisories for Agung, reflecting that it is currently posing no threat to aircraft.
It would resume advisories if there is another eruption.
Ash clouds rise from Mount Agung in Bali
Tens of thousands of tourists were stranded when ash closed Balis international airport for nearly three days last week.
Indonesian government volcanologists say Agungs crater is about one-third filled by lava and there is still a high risk of more eruptions.
The volcanos last major eruptions in 1963 killed more than 1,100 people and it was active for more than a year.
David Boutelier, a geologist at the University of Newcastle in Australia, said the chance of a violent explosion is still very high but possibly not as high as several weeks ago because pressure is being released.
Two teenagers will go on trial next year accused of plotting a Columbine School-style attack.
The boys, aged 14 and 15, from Northallerton, North Yorkshire, appeared for a hearing at Leeds Crown Court, accused of conspiracy to murder.
The older youth is also charged with unlawful wounding and aggravated burglary.
Leeds Crown Court
Neither teenager entered any pleas.
They stood in the dock of the packed court with two security officers as they each told the clerk their names, dates of birth and their nationalities.
The 15-year-old wore a jumper and buttoned-up shirt while the younger defendant was dressed in a suit.
The Recorder of Leeds, Judge Peter Collier QC, ordered that the boys will go on trial in Leeds on May 3 next year.
Judge Collier said they will appear in court again on February 12.
Both boys, who cannot be named, were remanded in custody. There was no application for bail.
The crew of a Cathay Pacific flight saw what it believes was North Koreas latest missile test last week.
Hong Kongs carrier thus becomes the second airline to report sighting it.
Cathay said on Monday that the flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong reported witnessing the apparent re-entry of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that North Korea launched before dawn on Wednesday.
The missile was far from the plane, and operation was unaffected, Cathay said, adding that it had informed other carriers and relevant authorities.
At the moment, no-one is changing any routes or operating parameters, the Hong Kong-based airline said in a statement.
We remain alert and (will) review the situation as it evolves.
The North Korean missile was fired very high up, reaching an altitude of 2,780 miles before falling back into the Sea of Japan about 600 miles from where it was launched.
It was in the air for 53 minutes.
The Hwasong-15 ICBM demonstrated a greater range than other missiles North Korea has tested.
One expert estimated its range at more than 8,100 miles if launched on a standard trajectory, which would put Washington, DC, within reach.
Korean Air pilots on two different planes also reported seeing flashes of light believed to be the North Korean missile when they were flying over Japan, airline spokesman Cho Hyun-mook said.
An activist investor has claimed shareholders have lost faith in London Stock Exchange (LSE) chairman Donald Brydon as it released a damning dossier ahead of a crunch vote on his future.
Christopher Hohns Childrens Investment Fund Management (TCI) is pressing for the immediate removal of Mr Brydon, who it accuses of pushing out chief executive Xavier Rolet.
TCI, which owns more than 5% of the LSE, has secured a shareholder vote to decide on Mr Brydons fate, but its bid to retain Mr Rolet until 2021 was ended when the Frenchman stood down last week.
Mr Rolet left after more than eight years in the role amid an increasingly bitter dispute that has dogged the exchange operator.
On Monday, TCIs meeting document said Mr Brydon has run a poor process with regards to CEO succession and shareholder engagement, as well as accusing the LSE of dismissing a world class CEO without providing any good reasons.
TCI also said that Mr Brydon has a long track record of dismissing chief executives and it would be difficult to find someone of Mr Rolets calibre to serve under him.
Pre-empting the December 19 shareholder vote on whether to ditch the chairman, TCI added that LSE should begin the succession process immediately for Mr Brydon and named three non-executive directors who would be capable to take up the role on an interim basis.
They are David Nish, Stephen OConnor and Mary Shapiro.
Donald Brydons continuation as chairman until 2019 will be damaging, TCI said.
In the firing line: LSE chairman Donald Brydon (PA)
The LSE confirmed last week that Mr Brydon will not stand for re-election in 2019, but this stopped short of meeting the TCIs demands for his immediate removal.
The raging controversy at the LSE has even drawn comment from the Bank of England, with Governor Mark Carney earlier this week saying he was mystified by the tussle.
Mr Rolets departure comes after more than eight years in the top job, during which time the LSE has seen its stock market value soar from 800 million to nearly 14 billion.
His tenure has seen LSE seal a string of acquisitions, although it was marred by the recent failed attempt at a 21 billion merger with German rival Deutsche Borse after it was blocked by the European Commission in March.
Theresa May pulled out at the last minute from a deal to break the Brexit logjam after meeting fierce resistance from the Democratic Unionist Party, Irelands prime minister has claimed.
Crunch talks between Mrs May and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker ended in Brussels without a deal after the DUP which props up the minority Conservative Government in Westminster made clear it would not accept any arrangement which saw Northern Ireland treated differently from the rest of the UK.
Irish Taioseach Leo Varadkar said he was surprised and disappointed by the break-up of talks just hours after all sides confirmed they were satisfied with a text which would guarantee regulatory alignment between Northern Ireland and the Republic in order to prevent the imposition of a hard border.
Jean-Claude Juncker, right, greets Theresa May in Brussels (Virginia Mayo/AP)
Downing Street made no response to Mr Varadkars claim.
But it is understood that, as well as the impasse over Ireland, disagreement remains over the role of the European Court of Justice in overseeing EU citizens rights in the UK after Brexit.
Both Mrs May and Mr Juncker said they were confident of reaching agreement in time for a key summit of the European Council on December 14, when it is hoped that leaders of the remaining 27 EU states will give the green light for the start of trade talks.
"I am still confident that we can reach sufficient progress before the #EUCO on 15 December." @JunckerEU #Brexit pic.twitter.com/ugToC5z4Bm European Commission (@EU_Commission) December 4, 2017
The Prime Minister is expected back in Brussels for further talks before the end of the week, though sources declined to confirm reports that she would meet Mr Juncker and chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier on Wednesday.
European Council president Donald Tusk later disclosed that he had been preparing to move negotiations on to the second phase dealing with trade and the transition to the post-Brexit EU/UK relationship until the last-minute call for more time.
Met with PM @theresa_may. I was ready to present draft EU27 guidelines tomorrow for #Brexit talks on transition and future. But UK and Commission asked for more time. It is now getting very tight but agreement at December #EUCO is still possible. pic.twitter.com/oLQQHs9F8q Charles Michel (@eucopresident) December 4, 2017
Mrs May arrived for her lunchtime talks with Mr Juncker with expectations high for a breakthrough on remaining divorce issues which might allow Brexit negotiations to move on to their second phase by Christmas, easing the pressure on businesses to activate contingency plans to move staff and activities outside the UK.
But Irish pronouncements over an imminent deal on the border sparked a firm response from the DUP, which has previously warned it could withdraw its support for Tories in Westminster if a deal is proposed which threatens the integrity of the United Kingdom by effectively establishing a customs border in the Irish Sea.
Speaking at Stormont, DUP leader Arlene Foster said: We have been very clear. Northern Ireland must leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the United Kingdom. We will not accept any form of regulatory divergence which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom.
We will not accept any form of regulatory divergence which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom. pic.twitter.com/uCBVdfVQTJ Arlene Foster DBE PC #ProudofNI. (@ArleneFosterUK) December 4, 2017
Her comments were swiftly followed by statements from the leaders of devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and London, making clear that any special status for Northern Ireland would prompt demands from other parts of the UK for their own tailor-made Brexit.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said that if one part of the UK could stay in the single market, there was no good practical reason why others cannot do the same.
If one part of UK can retain regulatory alignment with EU and effectively stay in the single market (which is the right solution for Northern Ireland) there is surely no good practical reason why others cant. Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) December 4, 2017
Allowing Northern Ireland alone to retain regulatory alignment with the EU would put Scotland at a double disadvantage when it comes to jobs and investment, she said.
Wales would fully expect to be offered the same deal as Northern Ireland to stay in the single market and customs union, said First Minister Carwyn Jones, while Londons Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan said a similar deal could help preserve tens of thousands of jobs in the capital, which voted overwhelmingly to Remain in the EU.
Mrs May broke off from talks with Mr Juncker to speak by phone with Mrs Foster, and it was shortly afterwards confirmed that talks were ending without a deal.
The Prime Minister said a lot of progress had been made, with a common understanding on many of the divorce issues.
But she added: On a couple of issues some differences do remain which require further negotiation and consultation.
Mr Juncker said that the EU and UK were narrowing our positions to a huge extent, but that two or three issues remained open for discussion.
In a press conference in Dublin, Mr Varadkar said that representatives of the UK Government and Mr Barniers team informed Irish negotiators early in the day that a form of words had been found which might satisfy the Republics demand for a cast-iron guarantee of no hard border after Brexit.
The Irish negotiating team received confirmation from the British Government and the Barnier taskforce that the United Kingdom had agreed a text on the border that met our concerns, said Mr Varadkar, adding that he confirmed Irelands support for the text to Mr Juncker and Mr Tusk.
Addressing the media this evening on progress to date on Phase 1 of the #Brexit negotiations with Tanaiste @simoncoveney and Minister @HMcEntee pic.twitter.com/NAB6QB7T8P Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) December 4, 2017
I am surprised and disappointed that the British Government now appears not to be in a position to conclude what was agreed earlier today, he said.
I accept that the Prime Minister has asked for more time, and I know that she faces many challenges and I acknowledge that she is negotiating in good faith.
Ireland wants to proceed to phase two its very much in our interests to do so. However we cannot agree to do this unless we have firm guarantees that there will not be a hard border in Ireland under any circumstances.
The reason for todays failure in the Brexit talks is the grubby deal the Tories did with the DUP after the election. Each passing day provides further evidence that @Theresa_Mays Government is completely ill-equipped to negotiate a successful deal for our country. Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 4, 2017
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the failure of talks showed Mrs Mays Government was completely ill-equipped to negotiate a successful Brexit deal for our country, while former Ukip leader Nigel Farage said she should leave office now.
But Tory MPs and peers who attended a briefing at Westminster from the PMs chief of staff Gavin Barwell and Brexit minister Steve Baker voiced satisfaction that divisions between Northern Ireland and the mainland had been avoided.
Manchester United close out the group stage of their Champions League campaign at home to CSKA Moscow on Tuesday night.
Here, Press Association Sport looks at the key issues around the match.
Will United release the handbrake?
Jose Mourinho had his game face on in the pre-match press conference, suggesting there was everything to play for with neither qualification nor top spot in the group secured. That is a mathematical concern rather than a realistic one though, with Uniteds place in the next stage only vulnerable to an extreme and unlikely sequence of results and victory margins. In fact, this should be seen as a chance to round out phase one in style and lay down a marker for Sundays Manchester derby. The Red Devils will need to be at their best to see off their rivals and this should represent an opportunity to tune up.
Home comforts
.@VLindelof: "We're all professionals and we're focused on tomorrow. We want to have a good game and get the win." #MUFC Manchester United (@ManUtd) December 4, 2017
Win or draw and United will equal a club record of 40 successive home games without defeat, the kind of statistic Mourinho would love to add to his collection. Defender Victor Lindelof thanked the Old Trafford faithful for their role in the unbeaten streak, saying: When you are playing at home, we always have confidence. We have our fans behind us. Weve been performing very well at home and we feel confident there.
A Shaw thing
Will Jose Mourinho start Luke Shaw against CSKA Moscow? (Martin Rickett/PA)
Luke Shaws presence, or otherwise, could shed new light on whether the England left-back has any future at Old Trafford. He has been promised a spot in the 18, but with just two substitute appearance in the Carabao Cup to his name this term, Mourinho needs to show Shaw he is a serious member of the first-team squad. Another cursory outing off the bench would instead offer encouragement to any clubs who are eyeing a January move for the 22-year-old.
Three and easy
Mourinho has fielded a three-man defence with wing-backs in the past two matches, securing away wins at Watford and Arsenal in the process. It is unclear whether he is a committed convert to the Premier Leagues de rigeur tactic or if it is an insurance policy of sorts to paper over the absence of first-choice centre-halves Eric Bailly and Phil Jones. Either way it has allowed Lindelof and Marcos Rojo to be reintegrated into the XI without major drama and the added freedom for Ashley Young and Antonio Valencia on the flanks has paid dividends. Will the three-man unit get a third outing against CSKA?
Pogbas winter break
No comment #millyrock @manchesterunited #mufc A post shared by Paul Labile Pogba (@paulpogba) on Dec 2, 2017 at 5:30pm PST
Paul Pogba will be the fulcrum of the United cause in a game he might otherwise have expected to sit out ahead of the derby. His red card against Arsenal, and the absence of an appeal by the club, means the French midfielder will get the kind of festive feet up most English-based players can only dream of. He will sit out games against City, Bournemouth and West Brom and should be well rested to lead the charge while others are wilting for the spell of three games in a week between December 23-30.
Theresa Mays efforts to secure Brexit progress were labelled a shambles in the Commons as John Bercow sought to avoid a spat between MPs.
Labours Peter Kyle criticised the Prime Minister for returning empty-handed following the conclusion of lunchtime talks in Brussels between her and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.
But Conservative David Davies, MP for Monmouth, dismissed this assessment and insisted the Europeans would be empty-handed if they dont get their hands off our 50 billion.
Theresa May has been criticised in the Commons following the latest Brexit talks (Jonathan Brady/PA)
Speaker Mr Bercow urged MPs to remain patient and noted a Commons statement on the latest talks was expected from the Government on Tuesday, as he warned against the exchanges turning into a spat.
Speaker says "very much my expectation" PM will make a statement tomorrow PARLY (@PARLYapp) December 4, 2017
Raising a point of order, Mr Kyle said of the latest talks: This is a shambles that puts into perspective the constitutional settlement for our country here.
Can we expect her (Mrs May) to make a statement tomorrow?
Mr Bercow replied: It had been very much my expectation in any event that there would be a statement to this House this week.
Though I cannot predict with certainty, I had anticipated and been given reason to believe that it would likely be tomorrow.
After days of upbeat briefing the PM comes home pathetically empty handed.
Surreally theres differences on a "couple of issues"...but theyve only been discussing *three* issues since negotiations started!!! Peter Kyle MP (@peterkyle) December 4, 2017
Mr Davies, in a further point of order, added: The news is actually that Juncker is confident there will be a deal next week.
Is it not wrong to say shes coming back empty-handed when theres almost certainly going to be a deal?
Is it not the Europeans who are going to be empty-handed if they dont get their hands off our 50 billion?
Mr Bercow replied: I understand the impatience of (Mr Davies) but we mustnt allow this to become a spat between people who want to say all is well and those who want to say all is ill.
A Spanish judge has ordered that four prominent members of the Catalan independence movement should remain in custody, including the vice-president of the ousted regional government.
He will now campaign in a polarised regional election from a jail near Madrid.
The judge set 100,000-euro bail for the six other Catalan politicians who had been jailed in early November, and ordered their passports to be confiscated.
The six were expected to leave jails near Madrid later in the day.
Meanwhile, Catalan ex-president Carles Puigdemont and four of his separatist allies heard that they will be judged on whether they can be extradited from Belgium to Spain on December 14, exactly one week before the election.
Fired Catalan Cabinet member Raul Romeva, centre, is greeted by supporters and friends as he leaves the Estremera jail, south-east of Madrid, Spain
The group is refusing to return to Spain to face rebellion, sedition and embezzlement charges that can be punished with decades in prison under the countrys criminal laws.
Mr Puigdemonts defence lawyer, Paul Bekaert, insisted that the Spanish charges were not punishable in Belgium and thus there were no grounds for extradition.
We also highlighted the danger for the impediment of their human rights in Spain, he said.
Whatever decision is made on December 14, two appeals will be possible and a final ruling could well come only after the December 21 election called by Spains central authorities, in which Mr Puigdemont is leading his pro-independence partys campaign.
Mariano Rajoys conservative Spanish government disbanded Mr Puigdemonts Cabinet when it took control of Catalonia shortly after separatist regional politicians passed a declaration of independence in late October.
The early election is an attempt to find a democratic way out of the nations worst crisis in nearly four decades.
But the vote is shaping up as a plebiscite between those for and against independence, with polls predicting a close race between the two camps.
Adding to the uncertainty, a Supreme Court judge decided on Monday to uphold the preventive jailing of ousted Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras, who tops the list for the left-republican ERC party.
Catalonia
ERC was part of the former Catalan ruling coalition with Mr Puigdemonts conservative party and is leading the polls before the new election.
Campaigning officially begins at midnight on Monday, and in the hours before that moment Catalan pro-independence groups hope to stage protests in front of town halls across the region against the Supreme Courts decision on the detained separatists.
Mr Junqueras and the other jailed politicians pledged last week to give up on efforts to seek unilateral independence for the wealthy northeastern region, in the hope of being freed.
But judge Pablo Llarena said in his decision on Monday that it remains to be seen if Mr Junqueras pledge to abide by Spanish law is truthful and real.
ERC spokeswoman Marta Rovira described the jailing as a covert attempt by Spains central authorities in Madrid to get ERC out of the picture.
This is a very clear attempt to win these elections without political adversaries, she said.
Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido was unmoved by the arguments of Mr Junqueras supporters.
Those who commit criminal acts must place themselves at the mercy of legal rulings, Mr Zoido said.
The magistrate also upheld custody orders without bail for the former regional interior minister, Joaquim Forn, and the leaders of Assemblea Nacional Catalan and Omnium Cultural, the two Catalan grassroots groups that have been the main drivers of the separatist bid in Catalonia.
A government-run poll published on Monday indicated that pro-independence parties would lose their slim majority in the Catalan regional parliament.
It gave ERC, Mr Puigdemonts Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia) and the far-left anti-establishment CUP party 66 or 67 seats out of the parliamentary 135 seats.
The election could be a close race between the left republican ERC party and the opposition business-friendly Ciutadans (Citizens), with 21 and 22.5% share of votes respectively, the CIS survey suggested.
By Manolo Serapio Jr and Neil Jerome Morales
MANILA, Dec 4 (Reuters) - The Philippines ordered a probe on Monday into the immunisation of more than 730,000 children with a dengue vaccine that has since been suspended, while French drug company Sanofi said no deaths had been reported as a result of the programme.
"As far as we know, as far as we are made aware, there are no reported deaths that are related to dengue vaccination," Ruby Dizon, medical director at Sanofi Pasteur Philippines, told a news conference in Manila.
"Of course, rest assured, monitoring is continuing, we are working with the Department of Health (DOH), in collaboration, to make sure this is maintained."
Last week, the Philippines' Department of Health halted the use of the Dengvaxia vaccine after Sanofi said it must be strictly limited due to evidence it can worsen the disease in people not previously exposed to the infection.
More than 730,000 children aged 9 and over in the Philippines have received one dose of the vaccine as part of a programme that cost 3.5 billion pesos ($69.54 million).
The Department of Justice on Monday ordered the National Bureau of Investigation to look into "the alleged danger to public health ... and if evidence so warrants, to file appropriate charges thereon."
A spokesman for President Rodrigo Duterte said on Sunday the government would hold accountable those responsible for a programme that had placed thousands of lives at risk.
"We will leave no stone unturned in making those responsible for this shameless public health scam which puts hundreds of thousands of young lives at risk accountable," spokesman Harry Roque said in a statement.
Dengue is a mosquito-borne tropical disease. Although it is not as serious as malaria, it is spreading rapidly in many parts of the world, killing about 20,000 people a year and infecting hundreds of millions.
Besides the Philippines, Dengvaxia has also been approved in Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Guatemala, Peru, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore, Sanofi said last year.
While Sanofi's Dengvaxia is the first-ever approved vaccine for dengue, scientists already recognised it was not perfect and did not protect equally against the four different types of the virus in clinical tests.
A new analysis from six years of clinical data showed that Dengvaxia vaccine provides persistent protective benefit against dengue fever in those who had prior infection.
But for those not previously infected by the virus, more cases of severe disease could occur in the long term following vaccination upon a subsequent dengue infection, Sanofi said.
Singapore's Health Sciences Authority said last week it had flagged risks when the vaccine was approved in October last year, and that it was working with Sanofi to strengthen warnings in the packaging of the drug of an increased risk to vaccinated individuals not previously infected by dengue.
Roque, the Philippines spokesman, said there had been no reported case of "severe dengue infection" since the vaccine was administered and called on the public "not to spread information that may cause undue alarm." (Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
ALMATY, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Kazakh upstream company KazMunaigas Exploration Production (KMG EP) plans to launch a tender offer to repurchase all of its outstanding global depositary receipts (GDRs) at $14.00 per GDR, it said on Monday.
If the offer succeeds, KMG EP plans to buy out other outstanding common shares and delist from the London Stock Exchange as well as the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange, it said in a statement.
The move could pave way for the listing of the company's biggest shareholder, state-owned National Company KazMunayGaz (NC KMG).
Kazakhstan plans to privatise NC KMG within the next few years, but it cannot be listed on a major stock exchange alongside its main upstream subsidiary. Previous attempts to restore full control over KMG EP have failed.
Minority shareholders of KMG EP last year rejected NC KMG's proposal to give the parent company more control over its subsidiary and the option to sell their shares to NC KMG.
NC KMG has a 58 percent stake in KMG EP, which currently sits on a $4 billion cash pile. Minority shareholders include Chinese sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation, and funds overseen by Western managers such as BlackRock.
The price of the offer represents a premium of 23.7 percent to the 30-day volume-weighted average GDR price of $11.32 at Dec. 1, KMG EP said. The GDR last closed at $11.80. (Reporting by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Stephen Coates and Gopakumar Warrier)
SOFIA, Dec 4 (Reuters) - These are some of the main stories in Bulgarian newspapers on Monday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
-- The leaders of Western Balkan countries will meet in Sofia at a World Bank Forum to discuss infrastructure and other projects in the region. (Trud, Standart)
-- Bulgarian electricity trader Future Energy which is vying to acquire the Bulgarian assets of Czech utility CEZ together with an Indian investor, has asked the electricity grid operator to remove it from the electricity trades in the country due to impossibility to provide power. (24 Chasa, Capital Daily)
-- Police officers and special services said they have uncovered a scam for exports of life-saving medicines and arrested seven people. (Trud, Standart, Telegraph, Sega, Monitor, 24 Chasa)
By Idrees Ali
ISLAMABAD, Dec 4 (Reuters) - U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis arrived in Islamabad on Monday to ask Pakistan's civilian and military leadership to do more to rein in militants accused of using the country as a base to carry out attacks in neighbouring Afghanistan.
More than 100 days since President Donald Trump announced his South Asia strategy, however, U.S. officials and analysts say there has been only limited success and it is not clear how progress will be made.
U.S. officials have long been frustrated by what they see as Pakistans reluctance to act against groups such as the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network that they believe exploit safe haven on Pakistani soil to launch attacks in Afghanistan.
"We have heard from Pakistani leaders that they do not support terrorism ... we expect them to act in their own best interest, and in support of peace and regional stability," Mattis said told reporters travelling with him this week.
Mattis, who is visiting Pakistan for the first time as defence secretary, said the goal for his trip would be to find "common ground" and work together.
In August, Trump outlined a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, chastising Pakistan over its alleged support for Afghan militants. But beyond that, the Trump administration has done little to articulate its strategy, experts say.
Senior U.S. officials say they have not seen a change in Pakistan's support for militants, despite visits by senior U.S. officials, including one by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently.
"We have been very direct and very clear with the Pakistanis ... we have not seen those changes implemented yet," General John Nicholson, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, said this week.
Pakistan says it has done a great deal to help the United States in tracking down militants and Pakistani officials have pushed back on the U.S. claims.
LIMITED LEVERAGE
U.S. official expressed hope that relations between the two countries could improve after a kidnapped U.S.-Canadian couple and their three children were freed in Pakistan in October, after the couple was abducted in Afghanistan.
However, while the Trump administration has used tougher words with Pakistan, it is has yet to change Islamabad's calculus and if the United States is seen as bullying, it is unlikely to succeed, experts say.
While Mattis travelled to the region earlier this year, he did not make a stop in Pakistan, although he did visit its arch rival, India, a relationship that has grown under the Trump administration.
"There is not an effective stick anymore because Pakistan doesn't really care about U.S aid, it has been dwindling anyway and it is getting the money it needs elsewhere ... treat it with respect and actually reward it when it does do something good," Madiha Afzal, with the Brookings Institution, said.
Mattis' brief visit to Islamabad comes a week after a hardline Pakistani Islamist group called off nationwide protests after the government met its demand that a minister accused of blasphemy resign.
Separately, a Pakistani Islamist accused of masterminding a bloody 2008 assault in the Indian city of Mumbai was freed from house arrest. The White House said the release could have repercussions for relations between Washington and Islamabad.
"I think for Pakistan, the timing in very bad. There is talk about progress being made against extremists and here you have a situation where religious hardliners have basically been handed everything they wanted on a silver platter," said Michael Kugelman, with the Woodrow Wilson think-tank in Washington.
Kugelman said that rather than pushing Pakistan, Mattis should explain that not dealing with militants on its border could see those same militants turning on Islamabad. (Editing by Robert Birsel)
SHANGHAI, Dec 4 (Reuters) - China's aviation authority has suspended all flights from the Indonesian holiday island of Bali to Chinese cities until the threat of volcanic ash clears, the state-run People's Daily newspaper reported on Monday.
Clouds of volcanic ash from Bali's erupting Mount Agung volcano disrupted flights to and from the island's airport last week, stranding many thousands of tourists.
Flights began resuming when the airport reopened on Wednesday, after the wind changed and blew the ash away from flight paths. Individual airlines make their own decisions on whether to operate.
Australia's Jetstar resumed flying tourists in to Bali on Monday, while Virgin Australia Holdings Ltd said it planned to do so on Tuesday.
Despite the resumption of some services, China's aviation authority was stopping any more flights after the return on Monday of the last charter flight, bringing to 15,237 the number of stranded Chinese tourists brought home, the People's Daily newspaper said on its Twitter page.
"China's aviation authority has suspended all flights from Bali to Chinese cities until volcanic ash threat clears," it said.
China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines, which stopped flying new tourists into Bali last week, told Reuters that any resumption of flights would depend on the situation.
They declined to comment on the reported directive from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).
The CAAC did not respond to Reuters' request for comment.
China Southern, which flies to Bali from the cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou, said in an email that "due to volcanic activity in the area, the local airport and associated routes are not airworthy so flights on these two routes have been cancelled in the near term".
China has overtaken Australia this year as the biggest source of international visitors to Bali, representing about a quarter of the 4.9 million arrivals from January to September, according to industry statistics.
Airlines avoid flying through volcanic ash as it can damage aircraft engines, clogging fuel and cooling systems, hampering pilot visibility and even causing engine failure.
Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for Indonesia's disaster mitigation agency, said on Twitter that Mount Agung was no longer spewing ash but just white smoke that reached a height of 1,000 metres early on Monday. (Reporting by Brenda Goh; Additional reporting by Jamie Freed in SINGAPORE and Jessica Damiana in JAKARTA; Editing by Robert Birsel)
JUBA, Dec 4 (Reuters) - South Sudan launched a closed-circuit television (CCTV) and drone security system on Monday that officials said would help improve safety in the capital Juba where violent crime has spiked on the back of an insurgency.
Kfir Shilder, project manager at Global Group, the Israeli company behind the project, said the surveillance system had 11 cameras installed in Juba and two drones. It would eventually be rolled out across the town.
"It will be safe for everybody residing in Juba," President Salva Kiir said at the system's launch. "Those who snatch things...in the streets can now be traced, they cannot get away from their crime."
Africa's youngest nation has been gripped by a four-year civil war pitting forces loyal to Kiir and his former vice president Riek Machar. Fighting has killed thousands, displaced hundreds of thousands and battered the economy.
In recent months scores of people have been killed in Juba as robbers, sometimes wearing security uniforms, rampage through the town, snatching valuables and attacking homes at night.
Some Juba residents have collected cash to pay police unofficially to patrol their neighbourhoods.
Major General Edward Dimitri Lokak, director of the government's Emergency Call Centre & CCTV, said the system would help "improve our work to detect crimes and especially the crimes committed by those criminals using weapons." (Reporting by Denis Dumo; Writing by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by Peter Graff)
DAKAR, Dec 4 (Reuters) - A consortium of the Societe Miniere de Boke (SMB) and Singapore's Winning Shipping plans to build Guinea's first alumina refinery in a $3 billion effort to develop the West African country's bauxite industry, it said on Monday.
Guinea has about a third of the world's bauxite reserves and expects to produce over 30 million tonnes in 2017. However, it has no facilities to transform those reserves into higher-grade alumina, which can fetch higher prices on world markets.
The project will include a 120 km (75 mile) railway connecting SMB's bauxite mines in Boke to the refinery in Dapilon, which will process the raw material for export as alumina, mainly to China, SMB managing director Frederic Bouzigues told Reuters.
Construction of the 1 million tonne per year refinery is due to start in 2019 after the completion of environmental impact and feasibility studies. It is expected to be completed in 2022, Bouzigues said.
"The local processing of raw materials is one of the biggest challenges for a more inclusive growth in Africa because it creates more value locally while leading to economic diversification," said Bouzigues.
The bauxite industry has taken on greater significance for the economy in Guinea, where the development of huge iron ore deposits in its forested interior stalled due to a slump in global commodities prices in 2014.
This year, output has been dented by riots in the mining town of Boke over a perceived failure of the mining industry to raise living standards. At least two people were killed in September as protesters blocked trucks from leaving mine sites.
SMB is owned by Winning Shipping and China's Shandong Weiqiao, along with UMS International Ltd and the Guinean state. (Reporting by Edward McAllister; Editing by Aaron Ross and Mark Potter)
DAKAR, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Christian militiamen killed a Mauritanian U.N. peacekeeper in an attack on a camp for displaced people in a Central African Republic diamond-mining town on Monday, the United Nations mission there said.
Fighters armed with AK-47s and makeshift weapons also wounded one Zambian and two Mauritanian peacekeepers during the 90-minute gunfight at the police checkpoint in the town of Bria, the U.N. added.
The country has been riven by sectarian conflict since 2013 when Muslim Seleka rebels ousted President Francois Bozize. That triggered a backlash by Christian anti-balaka fighters.
As many as 100 people died in Bria in June during a day of clashes between rival factions. The area is coveted by militia for its surrounding diamond mines. It also hosts tens of thousands of people displaced by the conflict.
Even with 13,000 troops, the U.N. mission has struggled to restore order to a country the size of France and has lost 14 peacekeepers in attacks this year alone. (Reporting By Aaron Ross; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
By Kit Rees and Julien Ponthus
LONDON, Dec 4 (Reuters) - The UK's top share index rose from a two-month low on Monday but lagged behing European peers in a broader rally sparked by progress in U.S. tax reforms, as Britain and the EU failed to strike a deal on an initial Brexit divorce package.
The blue chip FTSE 100 index was up 0.55 percent at 7,340.91 points, a modest performance in comparison with France's CAC 40 and Germany's DAX, which were up 1.3 percent and 1.5 percent respectively.
"The late afternoon news about no deal meant that sterling surrendered most of its gains, but there was little help for the FTSE 100," said Chris Beauchamp, Chief market analyst at IG.
British Prime Minister Theresa May failed to strike a Brexit divorce deal with EU negotiators in Brussels despite earlier reports of a breakthrough agreement that would have kept British-ruled Northern Ireland aligned with EU regulations.
Last week's strength in sterling on the back of optimism over Brexit talks weighed on the FTSE 100, which ended the week with a 1.5 percent loss. The index fell to a two-month low as its predominantly dollar-earning constituents were hit by a rise in the currency.
"We are more negative on the UK, we think it will continue to lag. It's felt as if the excitement is elsewhere and we don't see that changing overnight," said Kevin Gardiner, global investment strategist at Rothschild Wealth Management.
Financials across Europe were the biggest boost to gains after U.S. efforts to slash corporate tax rates cleared a major hurdle.
In Britain, shares in Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS rose between 0.4 percent and 2.6 percent.
"For all the other indices around the world, the tax reform is something everyone's been keeping an eye on, so that's definitely the main driver in the U.S. and I think that's trickling over to Europe as well. We're see a bit of a relief rally," John Moore, trader at Berkeley Capital, said.
Banks are seen as the biggest beneficiaries of a cut in the corporate tax rate in the United States, and their shares also tend to see the biggest reactions when investors buy into risky assets.
Conversely, shares in more defensive stocks, such as precious metals miners Fresnillo and Randgold Resources , were among the worst performers, both down 2.7 percent and 1.2 percent respectively.
UK housebuilders got a boost from favourable data showing a a recovery in Britain's construction industry last month.
Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey and Barrat Developments rose between 0.5 percent and 1 percent.
(Additional reporting by Helen Reid; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)
By Daniel Ramos
LA PAZ, Dec 4 (Reuters) - More than half the ballots cast in Bolivia's judicial elections on Sunday were spoiled, or nullified, by voters, a sign that the opposition said showed dwindling support for President Evo Morales.
Tensions are high in Bolivia after the Constitutional Court last week gave Morales the green light to run for a fourth straight term in 2019. Morales' opponents encouraged voters to spoil their ballots in protest of the ruling.
Morales, a former coca farmer in power since 2006, had previously accepted the results of a referendum in 2016, when 51 percent of voters rejected his proposal to end term limits.
"The citizens have defeated Evo Morales, a leader who is trying to impose re-election on Bolivia, along with corruption and the manipulation of the justice system," businessman and former presidential candidate Samuel Doria Medina Tweeted.
The 26 judges elected on Sunday will be seated in January.
Morales said in a news conference on Monday that the high number of spoiled ballots should not be seen as a protest against him, but as an attempt by the opposition to block his plan for a judiciary with elected rather than appointed judges.
"The unpatriotic right wing wanted the election of an organic judiciary to fail, but the people have elected their authorities; judges who answer to the people, not to politicians," Morales said.
The 96 candidates on the ballot were preselected by Congress, where Morales has a majority. Opposition leaders said the vote was a ploy to give Morales supporters control over the electoral court.
Ballots were spoiled by marking more than one candidate, scratching or ripping the papers or doodling on them.
A preliminary report by Bolivia's elections authority said 78 percent of the country's 6.4 million eligible voters participated in the election and that more than 50 percent of the ballots cast were spoiled. (Writing by Hugh Bronstein; Editing by Dan Grebler)
By Tuomas Forsell and Jussi Rosendahl
HELSINKI, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Finland should remain militarily neutral because it helps ensure security in the Baltic Sea region, Prime Minister Juha Sipila said in an interview ahead of celebrations of the country's 100 years of independence.
The EU member state was part of the Russian Empire and won independence during the 1917 Russian revolution but it nearly lost it fighting the Soviet Union in World War Two.
The centre-right government retains the option of seeking NATO membership but remaining non-aligned and increasing defence cooperation with Sweden and the EU was Finland's way, Sipila said.
"At the moment, to have Finland and Sweden forming this militarily non-aligned zone, I think that increases the security and stability in the Baltic Sea region ... I see no reason to change this," Sipila told Reuters by phone.
Finland has stepped up military cooperation with Sweden and forged closer ties with NATO because it is concerned about Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and heightened East-West tensions in the Baltic Sea.
However, the government has opted to stay out of NATO in line with its tradition of avoiding confrontation with Russia.
A report commissioned by the government said last year that if Finland joined NATO it would lead to a crisis with Russia, which is also a major trade partner for Finland.
Moscow has hinted that it could move troops closer to the Finnish-Russian border if Finland joins NATO.
"It is clear that Finland is part of the West and the western community. That is our place," Sipila said.
"We want to be ... at the core of the European Union, influencing EU's future. But the main difference between us and the majority of EU states is our military non-alignment."
Polls show that only 22 percent of Finns support NATO membership, while 62 percent are opposed. Sipila, who leads Finland's Centre party, said any move to join would need public approval via a referendum.
Finance Minister Petteri Orpo from Finland's poll-leading National Coalition party told Reuters last week he believed that joining NATO would improve Finland's security. (Reporting by Tuomas Forsell and Jussi Rosendahl; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)
By Amina Ismail and Ahmed Tolba
CAIRO, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Former Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Shafik, who returned home from the United Arab Emirates in mysterious circumstances after announcing his bid for Egypt's presidency, told Reuters on Monday he was "fine" but was prevented from saying much more.
A Reuters reporter approached Shafik at a Marriott Hotel in a Cairo suburb, where he was accompanied by men in civilian clothes who refused to let him talk and quickly sent the reporter away.
"I'm fine, thanks to God," he replied when asked how he was, before three men shouted at the reporter to stop talking to him. "It is okay, leave it at that," Shafik told the reporter.
Reuters was unable to establish the identity of the three men.
The former air force chief and government minister told a private Cairo television station on Sunday that he was still considering contesting next year's election, although Shafik was less categorical than his previous declaration of intent.
"Today, I am here in the country, so I think I'm free to deliberate further on the issue," he told TV channel Dream. "There's a chance now to investigate and see exactly what is needed ... to feel out if this is the logical choice."
Some of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's critics consider 76-year-old Shafik to be the strongest potential challenger to the incumbent, who is widely expected to run for a second term next year.
On Saturday, Shafik's family said he had been taken from their home in the Emirates and deported back to Egypt, where they said they had lost contact with him until late on Sunday.
In Sunday's interview, he dismissed reports that he had been kidnapped.
"I hadn't had a chance to prepare the house myself, so all I thought was I'd go to one of the hotels. I was surprised - suddenly I'm in the car and it's taking me to one of the nicest hotels in my area," he said.
"Here I am talking to you and I am not kidnapped. What are the requirements for being kidnapped?"
Shafik's lawyer met him on Sunday at the hotel, saying only that he was in good health, but not whether he was able to leave the hotel or not.
A source at the hotel said Shafik's reservation had been made by Egypt's armed forces, when asked for his room number to contact him.
"NOT ENTIRELY FREE"
After announcing his intention to run for president, the former aviation minister under ousted president Hosni Mubarak and later prime minister during Egypt's 2011 revolt, began receiving indications of support from some on Cairo's streets.
Pro-state media quickly painted him as a corrupt old regime hand with ties to the banned Muslim Brotherhood.
An interior ministry official said there were no criminal charges pending against Shafik and there had been no order to deport him from the UAE or detain him in Cairo upon his arrival.
But a general intelligence official and a national security official at the hotel said Shafik was "not entirely free", without giving details or further explanation.
A Reuters witness and airport sources said Shafik had been accompanied in a convoy by Egyptian authorities after his arrival in Cairo.
Sisi is an ally of UAE and Saudi Arabia and his supporters say he is key to Egypt's stability. Critics say he has eroded freedoms gained after a 2011 uprising that toppled Mubarak and jailed hundreds of dissidents.
Sisi has won backing from Gulf states and has presented himself as a bulwark against Islamist militants since, as army commander, he led the overthrow in 2013 of former president Mohamed Mursi of the now banned Muslim Brotherhood.
After four decades in the military, Shafik touted his military experience as one of his strengths in a 2012 election, which he narrowly lost to Mursi.
Shafik fled to UAE to escape corruption charges in June 2012. He dismissed the charges as politically motivated and was taken off airport watchlists last year.
Sisi has yet to announce his own intentions for the election. His supporters dismiss criticism over rights abuses and say any measures are needed for security in the face of an Islamist insurgency that has killed hundreds of police and soldiers.
His government is struggling to crush the insurgency in the North Sinai region and has enacted painful austerity reforms over the last year which critics say have eroded his popularity. (Additional reporting by Eric Knecht and Mostafa Hashem in Cairo and Aziz El Yaakoubi in Dubai; Writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)
From left - Brigadier Rajitha Ampemohotti, Immediate Past President, National Paralympic Committee; Mr. U. R. Rodrigo, President, National Paralympic Committee; Mrs. Surekha Alles, Managing Director, Allianz Insurance Lanka and Mr. Dennis Hewagama, General Manager, Allianz Insurance Lanka Ltd
Allianz Lanka has extended its support to the Sri Lankan Paralympic team by another two years. Allianz, which has been a partner of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) since 2006 and became its first International Partner in 2011, has supported the Sri Lankan team since 2013. The new sponsorship agreement was signed at Allianz Insurance Lanka Ltd, Head Office, Colombo by Mrs. Surekha Alles, Managing Director, Allianz Insurance Lanka and Mr. U.R. Rodrigo, President, National Paralympic Committee.
Commenting on this strong partnership, Mrs. Surekha Alles, Managing Director, Allianz Insurance Lanka said, Allianz is committed to promoting inclusion, diversity, and excellence, both in the workplace and in the world of competitive sports. And through this partnership, we support the athletes passion for what they do, their ambitions to achieve their goals and their remarkable ability to believe in themselves, which mirror Allianzs own values.
At the 2012 summer Paralympics in London Sri Lanka won their first medal when Pradeep Sanjaya placed third in the mens 400m T46 to clinch the bronze. The Rio 2016 summer Paralympics saw Sri Lanka take home their second medal when Dinesh PriyanthaHerath placed third in the mens javelin throw F46.
We are happy to have the continued financial and technical support of Allianz Lanka. Their active promotion of Paralympics and their shared commitment to the core values of the Paralympics courage, determination, inspiration, and equality have brought greater prominence to the event and its athletes in Sri Lanka, said Mr. U.R. Rodrigo, President, National Paralympic Committee.
Allianz Insurance Lanka Ltd. and Allianz Life Insurance Lanka Ltd., known together as Allianz Lanka, are fully-owned subsidiaries of Allianz SE, Germany, a world leader in integrated financial services. Having started out as a Greenfield operation in 2005, it has emerged as one of the fastest growing insurance service providers in Sri Lanka. The company prides on supporting its clients business strategy by understanding their risk profile and needs, and providing individual solutions from its world class portfolio of products and services. Around the world, over 140,000 Allianz employees serve some 86.3 million retail and corporate customers in 70 countries, who place their trust on the knowledge, global presence, financial strength and solidity of Allianz to support them in their moment of truth.
Ascot Holdings PLC closed its mandatory offer with the acquirers upping their stake to 67.18 percent from the 45.16 percent they held prior to the offer announcement.
A consortium of local and foreign shareholders on October 24 bought 44.98 percent stake in the property and hospitality group for Rs.241.6 million, giving the firm a valuation of Rs.42.50 a share.
It later transpired that the two leading shareholders Rohan Iriyagolle and Pasan Madanayake who together held 43.16 percent stake in the group via their investment vehicles Axis Investments Private Limited and St. Louis Capital (Pvt) Limited on margin provided by a private commercial bank, were the
major sellers.
As the share sale crossed 30 percent stake, it triggered the Securities and Exchange Commissions Company Takeovers and Mergers Code and the consortium of buyers offered to purchase the balance shares of the company from the minority shareholders at Rs.42.50.
The offer was made by Eighth Wonder, a Mauritius-based company and Ian Joseph McVeigh, one of the UK-based individuals to the initial purchase, who held 24.52 percent and 11.63 percent stakes among them.
The other two individuals who participated in the October 24 deal were Archie James Buckland Warman, a UK-based investor with a 3.30 percent stake and Mohamed Hisham Jamaldeen with a 5.51 percent stake.
According to the disclosure to the Colombo Stock Exchange, when the mandatory offer expired on November 29, the holders of approximately 22.02 percent shares had accepted the offer made by the controlling shareholder consortium bringing up their total holding in the group to 67.18 percent.
As of September 30, high net worth investor Nimal Perera held 11.13 percent stake in Ascot Holdings under margin provided by Seylan Bank PLC, but it is still not known whether Perera was among the sellers during the offer period.
An independent advisors report released soon after the mandatory offer was announced on November 7 advised the minority shareholders with short-term investment horizon to take up the offer as the offer price offered a significant premium to industry specific multiples as well as the cash flow based valuation of the company.
It should be noted that the Ascot share is not highly liquid and that disposing of large quantities later-on with the intention that the share price will appreciate in value will be challenging, the independent advisors report said. The valuation report showed that the offer price of Rs.42.50 is a 19 percent discount to the net asset value of the firm but the industry is such that the general trading patterns indicate a trading price that is lower than the net asset value of the firm is a common occurrence.
Ascot Holdings history of dealings is marred by large scale corporate malfeasants and the firm was at the forefront of a suspected pump-and-dump share trading scheme during the market bull run during the 2010-2012 period.
A day prior to the mandatory offer closure announcement, the company disclaimed the liability for a secondary mortgage bond given on its property at T.B. Jayah Mawatha at Colombo 10 for Rs.350 million to a private commercial bank. The Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe making a special statement in parliament last week said investigations into the bond sales between 2008 and 2014 as well as the share market manipulation during the same period, which saw some worthless stocks dumped on the Employees Provident Fund would begin soon after the current probe into the bond scam is completed.
SIMI VALLEY REUTERS Dec 2 - U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo said on Saturday he sent a letter to Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani and Iranian leaders expressing concern regarding Irans increasingly threatening behaviour in Iraq. Speaking during a panel at the annual Reagan National Defence Forum in Southern California, Pompeo said he sent the letter after the senior Iranian military commander had indicated that forces under his control might attack U.S. forces in Iraq. He did not specify the date.
Iranian media earlier quoted Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani, a senior aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as saying an unnamed CIA contact had tried to give a letter to Soleimani when he was in the Syrian town of Albu Kamal in November during the fighting against Islamic State.
I will not take your letter nor read it and I have nothing to say to these people, Golpayegani quoted Soleimani as saying, according to the semi-official news agency Fars.
Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.
Ive been a life-long naturalist. And for a naturalist Sri Lanka is a wonderful place to come to for your coasts, hills, plains, mud-flats and seas.
For your wildlife: your animals, birds, butterflies and sea creatures. For your plants: your flowers and trees. You have 30 species of endemic birds, birds that are only found here and in no other country in the world, 50 endemic snakes, and lots and lots of endemic plants. You wont need me to persuade you that Sri Lanka is a country blessed by nature. And this plays an important part in many tourists decisions to visit.
All these things are precious, and they need protecting. That important part of Sri Lankas wildlife is under threat, and a number of its national parks under unsustainable pressures, is not in doubt. The illegal trade in wildlife is flourishing. In the past few days weve seen reports of hundreds of kilos of pangolin scales being captured by the police, and of tourists stopped at the airport trying to leave with protected plants and animals. We read about illegal logging in Wilpattu, encroachment on the Sinharaja forest, and unauthorised building in park buffer zones. Many of us will have been at Yala National Park when the gates open in the morning and jeeps race in by the hundred. We have all seen the rubbish that collects in drifts on Sri Lankas beautiful beaches. The latest tourism strategic plan candidly admits that the countrys international image is suffering because of this.
Tourism vision
The government recently launched its Tourism Vision 2025, to provide strategic direction to the tourism sector. It envisions Sri Lanka recognised as the worlds finest island for memorable, authentic and diverse experiences. Central to the vision lie concepts of sustainability. At its core is a tourism philosophy that celebrates Sri Lankan heritage, environment, values and people, one that is socially inclusive and environmentally responsible and provides economic benefits to communities and the country.
As I look at Sri Lanka and reflect on your countrys tourism potential and future needs, this emphasis on the environment and on first-class management of your great cultural and natural sites makes good sense and is much needed. It needs to be about more than just the great sites, of course its how things are all around the island thats as important, to attract foreign visitors yes and, more than this, for the people of Sri Lanka themselves.
When I was at university I spent two of my summers working with a team of scientists producing a sustainable management plan for a cloud forest high in the Andes Mountains in Ecuador. Since then Ive talked with governments about environmental issues and taken an interest in conservation regimes in countries around the world. Some work well; some, though intentions are good, dont. Here are three of my own reflections about how things are going in Sri Lanka.
Rules not enforced
The first is that I see that often the rules are good but they arent being or cant be enforced. Politicians dont always help. Indeed too often they are part of the problem, with self-interest getting in the way of conservation measures that are needed. Nor do businesses always play the part they need to play.
Take the problems being faced by Bolgoda Lake and the surrounding wetlands. Planning laws are sometimes ignored or over-ridden, chemicals and effluent flow in from industry and hotels. There comes a point when ecosystems, even strong ecosystems, break. Rules need to be enforced.
Everyone can support the goals of the parks authorities, the Forest Department and conservation NGOs
Penalties insufficient
My second reflection is that sometimes the rules are good, but the penalties for breaking them insufficient. Take the worrying number of visitors from China who are leaving or trying to leave the country with endangered animals and plants. Recent press reports mention small fines being levied at Bandaranaike International Airport when people are stopped. Penalties that really deter are needed to slow this flourishing trade.
Visitor and vehicle control needed
And my third reflection, that controls on visitor and vehicle numbers in some national parks are much needed and should be an easy win. There are plenty of good examples from around the world of how to make restrictions on numbers work. Controlling vehicle behaviour and enforcing road and other park disciplines need to be priorities too.
Everyone can help by speaking up for good and sustainable conservation practices. The tourism industry, communities that benefit from tourism and the general public all have important parts to play in the conservation effort. Everyone can help to encourage (and sometimes push) central and local government and authorities, and national and local politicians. Everyone can support the goals of the parks authorities, the Forest Department and conservation NGOs.
Sri Lanka is a land of great beauty, extraordinary variety and winning smiles. The greater the number of people who are speaking up today for the conservation practices Sri Lanka needs to have in place, the more confident we can all be that future generations will still be able to enjoy the remarkable beauty and variety that make this island such a special place.
In the past few days weve seen reports of hundreds of kilos of pangolin scales being captured by the police, and of tourists stopped at the airport trying to leave with protected plants and animals
(The writer is the British High Commissioner in Sri Lanka)
The low pressure area South-East of the Bay of Bengal was located nearly 1300km from Sri Lanka by this evening.
The Meteorology Department warns of showers exceeding 75 mm particularly in the Northern, North-Central and Eastern and Uva Provinces and thundershowers in other areas with winds of up to 60 kmph particularly in the Northern and Southern and Eastern Provinces from tomorrow to Friday.
It said winds of up to 80 kmph could be expected over the sea areas off the Island while the districts of Mullaitivu, Kilinochchi, Jaffna, Vavuniya, Batticaloa and Trincomallee and Sabaragamuwa and the Western Provinces could also expect windy conditions during the next few days.
The Met Department said it was likely to move towards Tamil Nadu and south of Andra Pradesh across the Central Bay of Bengal close to the country tomorrow and day after. People living in the Northern and Eastern coastal areas are advised to be vigilant and to be watchful of falling trees because of the heavy winds.
It advised people to trim tree branches and listen to the warnings issued by the Met Department and the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) for the latest updates on the situation through the media and the hot-lines provided.
The Met Department also issued a special warning to those on multi-day trawlers already in the seas in the Bay of Bengal area to travel towards Bangladesh for the protection.
Disaster Management Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa warned the fishing out at sea to return to the shore as soon as possible while those engaging in naval and fishing activities in the Central Bay of Bengal have been asked to stay on shore until Friday because of the possibility of heavy winds up to 100 kmph over Bay of Bengal.
Steps have been taken to warn the navy and fishing communities out at sea to move to safer locations in case of an emergency.
The minister said the violation of maritime boundaries should be disregarded in case of an emergency in conformity with understanding among the SAARC countries.
Meanwhile, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said today the low pressure area was very likely to become a depression over the southeast Bay of Bengal and the neighbourhood during the next 24 hours and a severe depression during the subsequent 48 hours. It is very likely to move towards north Tamil Nadu.
It said the cyclonic circulation over southwest Bay of Bengal off Tamil Nadu Sri Lanka coasts extending up to 3.1 km above mean sea level is still persisting. (Thilanka Kanakarathna)
Joint opposition MP Dinesh Gunawardane today asked in parliament why the government had ignored the international warning about the recent tropical storm issued three days ahead of the impending disaster.
He said the government agencies had only issued an advisory to the fishing community.
"This has not only dealt a severe blow to the people and the economy but had also tarnished the country's reputation among the tourist industry and the industrial and commercial sectors," the MP said.
He said the tropical storm had resulted in 14 people killed and several houses and power lines damaged or destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced or homeless.
The MP said the government had not carried out its duty properly in this crisis situation and asked why the people were left in the dark about the impending disaster.
He asked what action the government would take to face future storms.
House Leader and Minister, Lakshman Kiriella said international agencies had not warned of stormy weather between of November 28 and 30 and had predicted that the atmospheric disturbance would result in a storm which was some 400 miles away from Sri Lanka towards West.
He said Meteorology Department had issued weather warnings to naval and fishing communities at the proper time which had prevented a huge disaster.
"We would have had to face a huge disaster if the fishing community was not informed about the strong winds and rough seas," the minister said. (Ajith Siriwardana and Yohan Perera)
Leading non-bank lender LB Finance PLC yesterday said it raised Rs.3 billion by way of a debenture issue.
The offer, which saw the issuance of 20 million debentures with an option to issue up to a further 10 million debentures in the event of an oversubscription of the initial issue, at an issue price of Rs.100 a share, was snapped up on the opening day.
Therefore the said issue will close at 4.30 p.m. today as per the prospects the registrars to the issue PW Corporate Secretarial Pvt. Ltd said in a stock market filing yesterday.
The Colombo Stock Exchange has given its preliminary approval to LB Finance to list the debentures.
Capital Alliance functioned as the mangers to the issue. LB Finance is also a leader in the countrys micro-finance sphere. The company recently announced plans to enter into the micro-finance space in Myanmar.
Straws in the wind suggest
Blanket permission was given to the Tamils to observe Great Heroes Day in the manner the Northern Tamils wanted
The students of Jaffna University were the first to show restiveness
But the Tamils reacted in a calm and understanding manner
The Great Heroes Day (MaaverarNaal) observances this year in the Northern Province was notable, and perhaps path breaking too, in two ways: Firstly, a record number of people participated in the various events in public places including Hindu temples and churches. Secondly, the Government allowed the observances to take place, though the State Minister of Defence Ruwan Wijewardene subsequently stated that participants would be arrested and prosecuted because they had memorialized terrorists belonging to the banned Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Opinion is divided on what these might mean. Those of the nationalist bent of mind, mostly in the majority Sinhala community, fear that these might rekindle the fires of militant, armed separatism thought to have been doused by the annihilation of the LTTEs military machine. And they might stymie efforts to bring about Tamil-Sinhalese integration. But others see it as a welcome development because mass public grieving helps bring out suppressed emotions in a non-violent manner which tend to get expended over a period of time. Or it could take up a routinized and therefore harmless form over time.
Cruel to deny opportunity to remember
Such observances held in the open, calm the mind and given time, prepare it to accept the adversary in a new light without anger and vengeance.
The most fundamental thing about tragic events like death and bloody conflict is that their memory cant be erased, as historical experience shows. As the Roman orator Cicero said: The life of the dead consists in being present in the minds of the living.This is why loved ones, famous statesmen, wars and massacres have been memorialized down the ages. It would be cruel to deny a person or a people the right to remember and grieve.
As Radhika Hettiarachchi put it in her monograph: Memorialization and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka, public memorialization acknowledges the sufferers or the victims personal loss. It assuages them by building a connection between people through empathy and fellowship.
However, Hettiarachchi adds that memorialization cant be an end in itself. It has to be part of a multi-pronged and prolonged process aimed at reconciliation between adversaries involving deliverance of justice, psycho-social healing, reparations, and rehabilitation. She very correctly points out out that memory is subjective and fluid. It examines, reinterprets, and addresses the issues of the past, thereby helping the formation of new identities. Therefore, with the passage of time, the Great Heroes Day observances may acquire new meanings especially if accompanied by a multi-dimensional reconciliation process.
Basic demands of Tamils
Something like this may be happening in Sri Lanka with the establishment of the Good Governance regime of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in 2015. Admittedly, the two leaders have been consistently saying that war heroes would never be allowed to be haulled before international tribunals for alleged war crimes (rejecting the Tamils demand that they should be). And the Tamils basic demands are yet to be addressed. But this regime has undeniably been kind in its approach to the Tamils and other minorities.
One of the signs of this was the blanket permission given to the Tamils to observe Great Heroes Day in the manner the Northern Tamils wanted.
This was not the case between 2009 and 2014 during the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime. After the war ended with the annihilation of the LTTEs military machine and the North and the East of Sri Lanka in May 2009, observances of the MaaverarNaal, begun by the LTTE in 1989, ceased, because the Government wouldnt countenance them.
The Government razed the LTTEs memorials, monuments, offices and graveyards to the ground. Prabhakarans underground house, which became a tourist attraction for a while, was dynamited. The State didnt want any symbolic rallying point for a revival of the Tiger cult.
The most fundamental thing about tragic events like death and bloody conflict is that their memory cant be erased
A psychological variant of the systematic destruction of the vestiges of the separatist armed struggle was the rehabilitation of 12,000 captured or surrendered LTTE cadres. The year-long rehabilitation process was meant to cleanse the minds of the cadres of all anti-Sri Lankan and anti-Sinhalese thoughts instilled by the LTTE.
On Great Heroes Day this year, the Sri Lankan Army remained confined to barracks and the police controlled traffic instead of preventing people from indulging in public grieving. They looked on as propaganda songs of the LLTE-era were brazenly played over loudspeakers and posters bearing pictures of the LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran were put up in some places. Red and White coloured flags of the Tamils, popularized by the LTTE, were hoisted everywhere. Churches and Hindu temples performed memorial rites without let or hindrance.
Northern Chief Minister C.V.Wigneswaran put it in his message on this years MaaveerarNaal, the Tamil people were getting increasingly restive and itching to show commitment to their cause and also their collective power.
Mother of a dead LTTE cadre lights the memorial torch on Great Heroes Day, May 27, 2017.Photo. Tamil Guardian
Warning
They also wanted to warn Tamil politicians in parliament that they shouldnt abandon the cause of provincial autonomy and meekly accept the crumbs thrown to them by the powers-that-be in Colombo.
The Great Heroes Day observances this year were part of a new series of agitations to press the Government to meet its election promises to the Tamils who had supported the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe combine in the 2015 elections.
The students of Jaffna University were the first to show restiveness. The Tamil Peoples Council (TPC) headed by Chief Minister Wigneswaran held ElugaTamil (Tamils Arise) rallies on the lines of the PonguTamil (Effervescent Tamils) of the LTTE. The large scale observance of MaaveerarNaal followed logically
True, Minister of Defence Ruwan Wijewardene warned of punitive action. But the Tamils reacted in a calm and understanding manner instead of getting provoked. The Chief Minister of the Northern Province, C.V.Wigneswaran, lost no time in allaying fears of arrest with a statement saying that a Government which had permitted the observances wouldnt arrest participants.
The Great Heroes Day observances this year were part of a new series of agitations
He appealed to the Tamils to understand that Minister Wijewardene had to threaten participants with arrest in order to placate the Sinhalese majority in South Sri Lanka, the political constituency all Sinhalese leaders have to address.
Wigneswaran then went on to cite another example of how Sinhalese politicians, who are friendly with Tamils, have made similar statements only to smother criticism in their principal constituency, the Sinhalese majority. President Maithripala Sirisena, he said, is a good and well-meaning Sinhalese leader wanting to address the grievances of the Tamils. But he too had to repeatedly and publicly assure the majority Sinhalese that he wouldnt allow Sri Lankan soldiers (war heroes in the eyes of the majority community) to be haulled up before an international court for war crimes allegedly committed against the Tamils. But being a Good Governance Government Sirisena had allowed observance MaaveerarNaal this year, Wigneswaran said.
Indications are that the MaaveerarNaal would be allowed in the coming years too. The rituals and other observances, conducted peacefully like this year, might get routinized and lose their cutting edge over time. The Sinhalese majority could get used to it and take it in their stride as another Tamil ritual. And when it does become routinized and gets generally accepted, MaaveerarNaal could pave the way to ethnic reconciliation.
Highlighting the poor turnout of heads of Sri Lankan media organizations at today's UNESCO Regional Conference to End Impunity of Crimes against Journalists in Colombo, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe questioned whether the media organizations are really interested in media rights.
The event inaugurated by the Premier was held parallel to the 2017 International Day to End Impunity of Crimes against Journalists with a theme of Reinforcing regional cooperation to promote freedom of expression and the rule of law in Asia through ending impunity for crimes against Journalists.
The event was organised by the UNESCO and the Ministry of Finance and Mass Media.
Now when you look at this audience, in a country where there have been impunity for crimes against journalists, where you expect a high attendance of all heads of media organizations, there are only two heads of organizations here. They are the people who should be fighting and saying there should be no impunity for crimes against journalists. They should be attacking us and saying we are not looking into the cases and have not prosecuted the offenders. Why arent they here today? Why only politicians and civil society are here? It is because some of them did not stand up or fight for the rights of journalists, Wickremesinghe said.
He further added that some heads of media organizations who didnt attend the event yesterday were more interested in keeping the Rajapaksa regime going and even today they would do anything to topple the current government with the purpose of bringing the Rajapaksa regime back, ensuring they make profits.
He claimed that Sri Lanka was a peculiar country where the government has ensured to end impunity for crimes against journalists, while the editors and owners of media organizations want the Rajapaksa regime back so that there will be impunity for crimes against journalists.
Meanwhile, the Premier said no one questioned him on what happened with the murder of the Former Sunday Leader Editor Lasantha Wickremetunga.
This is the truth. We are making an effort to protect journalists. Do the heads of media organizations make such effort? Previously they used to do business with the blessings of Rajapaksa regime. Now they attack me because we have ensured freedom of expression and democracy. It is apparent that they are fed up with democracy and they want their old business back on track, he said.
He vowed to end impunity for crimes against journalists and expedite investigations into the killings and disappearances of journalists.
Crime against the media is a crime against democracy. As a promise to the media, we will investigate and bring to justice those who have ended the lives of our journalists. I would like to send a very clear message that this government will protect journalists by all measures and I hope this commitment is sufficient to get the heads of media organizations and editors bring all together with us to carry on a fight for the rights of journalists, he said.
Recalling that many journalists were attacked, murdered, and harassed during the previous regime, he said after the establishment of the current government, there is no place for such crimes in todays democracy.
I am proud to say that we have achieved great global recognition for the steps we have taken in only two years. We will continue to strengthen the democracy in Sri Lanka and we will ensure the UN Plan of Actions on Safety smooth implementation," he added. (Piyumi Fonseka)
President Maithripala Sirisena today shot down the budgetary proposal to reduce the tax on beer, saying it was contrary to the policy of his government. However, he hailed the overall budget saying it was developmentoriented.
He said no one could agree with the granting of tax concessions to beer.
"No one can agree with the granting of tax concessions to any type of liquor because the policy of this government is to minimise the consumption of liquor and minimise the smoking habit," the President said at the committee stage debate on the budget.
He said foreign cigarettes could not be permitted into the country. No other country in the world allows it," the President said but however, lauded the budget proposals as a whole saying they are development-oriented. Enhancing and enriching spiritual values of the people is as important as as improving economic indicators such as the per capita income. Similarly maintaining the free health and free education system is important. The Buddha said this when he preached that health is the most valuable resource one could possess. Therefore it is important that we continue with the welfare facilities essentially for the poor."
He stressed the need to allow the ministers to work independently. "I have allowed the Health Minister to work independently as I think it is important. I recall how I suffered mentally during my tenure as the minister of health. I had to face several obstacles when I made an effort to introduce a national health policy," the President said.
He pledged to enhance the facilities provided to kidney patients as pledged during the presidential election. I pledged to use the funds allocated for my posters for a fund for kidney patients and that was done. It is now converted into a national fund for kidney patients. We will open the first kidney hospital in Pollonaruwa shortly. This has been constructed with a US$12 billion grant from the Chinese government," the President said. (Yohan Perera and Ajith Siriwardana)
Alleged Bond Scam:
The alleged Treasury Bond scam is probably the largest financial scam to affect this country in its post-independence history. For sheer impunity and involvement of a wide spectrum of politicians in collusion with a section of the corporate sector and regulatory authorities it is hard to beat. The muted response of the opposition exemplifies the rot in the governance of this country. It is unforgivable it took place under a so-called Yahapalanaya Government which was elected with much hope under trying circumstances to usher in good governance after the traumatic Rajapaksa years.
The expectations included holding those concerned under the Rajapakse regime accountable for alleged (i) egregious corruption (ii) abuse of power (iii) violence to dissenters (iv) undermining democratic governance. Not only has the Yahapalanaya Government blatantly reneged on these undertakings - but worse is its own contribution to alleged corruption and abuse of power which in terms of sheer speed exceeds the Rajapaksa regime! For example, after being elected in January 2015 the first alleged bond scam took place February 2015.
This has given a shot in the arm for a Mahinda Rajapaksa led comeback. A Deputy Minister in a KEY ministry, held by the PM, who while in the opposition was arguably the most virulent critic of alleged wrongdoing under the Rajapaksa presidency, has suddenly after almost 3 years found merit in Gotabaya Rajapaksas efforts in beautifying the City of Colombo! Is this a sign of coming colours?
(http://www.dailymirror.lk/141426/Harsha-praises-Gota-for-beautifying-Colombo)
However, one notable gain under Yahapalanaya must be flagged its relative openness. This most likely isnt due to altruistic reasons, but compulsions of Realpolitik in the hodgepodge arrangement that passes for governance. If it was genuine, why is their lack of transparency in most things the alleged bond scam being a prime example?
Popular Imagination
The alleged Bond Scam has caught the popular imagination unlike no other scam in this country and who knows there have been other egregious scams over the years. Even those who havent heard of Bonds let alone Treasury Bonds sense there has been TERRIBLE CORRUPTION involving the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. This is the reality which doesnt portend well not only for the Yahapalanaya Government, but also for the country at large. As a consequence, if the already PERCEIVED notion of a MEGA COVER-UP is CONFIRMED where its KINGPINS are shielded and only some who have FACILITATED it are exposed, it will create widespread disenchantment like no other and will further undermine the rule of law which already is in a pathetic state. Let us face it, when people get further confirmation that daylight looting of the public purse by high ups in the political, bureaucratic and corporate sectors is tolerated with such brazen impunity, is it reasonable for the masses to have respect for the rule of law? This may well be the tipping point. It is obvious that without the rule of law there can never be any meaningful socio-economic development.
It must be flagged that the rule of law is also undermined if there is no social stability as witnessed on a regular basis due to our collective inability to ensure social justice and ethnic and religious peace in the context of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual country. In its absence it exacerbates intolerance as witnessed recently in Gintota and earlier in Aluthgama and the harassment meted out to the already traumatized Rohingya refugees who were in Sri Lanka merely on transit.
Core of the Alleged Bond Scam
At the CORE of the alleged Bond Scam is:
1) The Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), the issuing agency for Treasury Bonds which normally falls under the Ministry of Finance was brought under the purview of the Prime Minister.
2) CONFLICT OF INTEREST arising from then Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendrans son-in-law, Arjun Aloysius - owning/controlling PTL (Perpetual Treasuries Limited) - a Primary Dealer.
3) Arjuna Mahendran - a foreign national was HANDPICKED for the position of Governor, CBSL by the Prime Minister although he was aware of the Conflict of interest. The PM himself CONFIRMED this in his affidavit and while testifying before the Bond Commission (PCoI).
4) The PM continued to have Mahendran as CBSL Governor although he was aware that Mahendran had RENEGED on his assurance to him that his son-in-law (Arjun Aloysius) will sever all links with PTL PRIOR to his appointment as CBSL Governor.
5) The PM robustly defended and endorsed Mahendran for a second term despite the widespread perception of Mahendrans role in the alleged Bond Scam.
6) Sadly, the PMs affirmation in his affidavit to the PCoI: Upon the formation of the new Government in January 2015 there was a general consensus within the Government that Mr Mahendran should be appointed to the post of Governor of CBSL. was NOT PURSUED by the PCoI.
7) Unlike in the case of the other witnesses, the PM was given questions in ADVANCE by the PCoI to enable him to provide answers by way of affidavit.
When people get further confirmation of looting of the public purse by high ups is it reasonable for the masses to respect law?
witnesses, the PCoI decided to invite the AG himself who wasnt involved in the investigation up to that point to personally lead evidence for the FIRST TIME. Up to this time, Messrs. Dappula de Livera and Yasantha Kodagoda - Senior Additional Solicitor General and Additional Solicitor General respectively lead evidence.
9) Unlike in the case of the other witnesses who included former Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake who were GRILLED by Messrs. Dappula de Livera and Yasantha Kodagoda, limited questions were posed to the PM. The PM was at the PCoI reportedly for less than an hour to clarify matters arising from his affidavit
To adapt what Lady Macbeth said: All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten these immutable FACTS.
Incidental Issues
Crucial issues of governance INCIDENTAL to the alleged bond scam thrown up by witnesses at the Bond Commission and not even on the radar include:
Tax Evasion/Money Laundering?
PTL
A Senior Dealer of the Arjun Aloysius owned PTL (Perpetual Treasuries Limited) disclosed at the Bond Commission that millions encashed by him were several times left on PTL CEO Kasun Palisenas chair.
Nuwan Salgado, Chief Dealer of PTL disclosed to the PCoI that on the instructions of PTL CEO Kasun Palisena he maintained a record of payments to informants code named as
GTLPL
B.R. Sinniah, Chief Financial Officer of GTLPL (Global Transportation and Logistics Pvt Ltd) said to be controlled by former Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayakes family in his testimony to PCoI reportedly disclosed:
The Rs.145 million used in making the initial payment of Rs.16.5 million and thereafter to pay the monthly loan installment of Rs.11 million for the purchase of the Monarch Residency Penthouse in Colombo by a company owned by Minister Ravi Karunanayakes family has no origin nor has it been accounted for
The question arises of the rationale to obtain a loan from Seylan Bank in circumstances where cash was readily available?
Sinniah also reportedly told the Bond Commission:
Chairman Lakshmi Kanthan who resides in Britain had arrived at the Company on two occasions in February 2016 and 2017 and dumped cash amounting to Rs.145 million in the Chairmans safe
it had not been supported by any documentation or receipt issued to Mr. Kanthan neither were there any entries in the GTLPL accounts books regarding these two cash inflows
Should these not concern the Central Bank and the Inland Revenue Department? If not why?
Bank Malpractice?
PABC Bank
It was revealed at the PCoI that PABC (Pan Asia Bank) was an intermediary in secondary market transaction between EPF and PTL
R. A. Benedict Dias, Deputy General Manager of PABC disclosed to the Bond Commission that on the instructions of the former chairman of PABC, Nimal Perera, the decision to act as an intermediary was made
It was also revealed at the PCoI that Saman Kumara, the then dealer for the EPF at the CBSL had allegedly received a personal loan of Rs. 25 million from PABC when Nimal Perera was Chairman. It is relevant to ascertain whether this loan and its settlement (if any) took place in the ordinary course of banking practice or whether any special privileges were afforded.
Should these not be of interest to the Central Banks Bank Supervision Department?
PEPs as Bank Directors?
Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) are at the centre of the worldwide efforts for the prevention of money laundering,
It was revealed at the Bond Commission that B.R. Sinniah, Chief Financial Officer of GTLPL (Global Transportation and Logistics Pvt Ltd) said to be controlled by former Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayakes family was appointed to the Board of Directors of the BoC in 2015 by the then Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake for a period of one year.
Ravi Karunanayake being a PEP is a no-brainer. B.R. Sinniah too is clearly a PEP consistent with Sri Lankas definition of a PEP which conforms to the FATF definition:
Sri Lanka is a member of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) which is an Associate Member of The Financial Action Task Force (FATF)
In the context of the Central Bank itself postulating that even the mere Opening of accounts for politically exposed persons (PEP) should have authorization of senior management. how could a PEP be a bank director?
Under no circumstances is it suggested that B.R. Sinniah is engaged in any criminal activities. It must be appreciated that not all PEPs are involved in criminal activities.
The point being made is that laws and guidelines are there for a purpose and must be adhered to. There are also other clear instances of PEPs being directors of banks in Sri Lanka which is not the focus of this article.
Our Central Bank is evidently turning a blind eye to these transgressions.
There are also other clear instances of PEPs being directors of banks in Sri Lanka which is not the focus of this article
Conclusion
Things are so bad in Sri Lanka that the rule of law was SELECTIVELY applied NOT TO COMPEL Arjun Aloysius owner of PTL to give evidence before the Bond Commission on the basis it would incriminate him since apparently in his own mind there was a high probability he would be prosecuted. The same rule of law was MUTE in taking the next steps that could have been taken INDEPENDENT of the report of the Bond Commission in the context of the damning evidence produced at the PCoI. It also indicates that the relevant regulatory and law enforcement agencies were on SLEEP MODE until the bond commission was appointed. This tardiness in taking necessary legal action has resulted in a situation where as disclosed by the Prime Minister during his testimony at the Bond Commission, Aloysius was even able to be present at one or two parties where he was in a position to converse with the PM himself!
As I see it, the alleged Bond Scam had the MASTERMINDS and the FACILITATORS. I trust those concerned will not miss the wood for the trees! Of course, the facilitators too must be held accountable. What we have still not convincingly seen is the QUANTIFYING of the looted monies which must be RETURNED to the exchequer.
The diplomats and news agencies in Colombo are no doubt taking note of the ground reality in Sri Lanka. Is it any surprise that with the exception of the controversial Chinese investments which are largely driven by geo-political considerations, ethical FDIs are few and far between?
Over the years, I have heard many books touted as the successor to Hunger Games, but Scythe is the first one that I would really, truly stand behind. -
Walker Books Australia is excited to announce the Australia and New Zealand release of Scythe by National Book Award winning author
Neal
Shusterman. Scythe is the first book in Shustermans fantastic new dystopian series the Arc of a Scythe and has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 11 Weeks. Scythe will be published in Australia and New Zealand in February 2018 and the sequel,
Thunderhead,
Sydney: Chinas two biggest banks said they do not plan to finance a controversial Australian coal mine, in the latest blow to Indian conglomerate Adani Enterprises long delayed project.
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and China Construction Bank said in separate statements they were not working on the project, after media recently reported that Chinese banks may get involved.
Adani is seeking A$2 billion ($1.5 billion) in financing by March 2018 for the A$4 billion first stage of its proposed Carmichael coal mine in the state of Queensland, a project that has been shrunk from a A$16.5 billion plan to make it more viable.
Adani declined to comment on its financing plans on Monday or the statements from the Chinese banks.
Australian and overseas banks have balked at granting loans for the project, which environmentalists oppose due to climate change and the potential for damage to the Great Barrier Reef.
ICBC has not been, and does not intend to be, engaged in arranging financing for this project, ICBC, Chinas biggest listed lender by assets, said in a statement on its Australian website.
ICBC attaches great importance to its social responsibilities and keenly promotes green financing ... This statement is made without any view on or prejudice towards the Carmichael mine project.
The mines location 400 kms (250 miles) from a Pacific Ocean shipping terminal means financing infrastructure costs has been at the forefront of debate over the projects economic viability.
China Construction Bank is not involved with, nor considering involvement with, the Adani Carmichael Mine project, an external spokesperson for China Construction Bank in Australia said in an emailed statement on Monday.
CCB in China was not immediately available for comment.
Reuters has previously reported that Adani was in talks with China Machinery Engineering Corp (CMEC) for a loan, which could have involved China Construction Bank or China Export Import Bank.
China Export Import Bank was not immediately available for comment.
Carmichael has been delayed by court challenges from environmentalists and indigenous groups concerned about climate change and the impact on native land and water supply, but those challenges have been rejected.
Adani hopes to start shipping coal from Carmichael by March 2020 in the first stage of the project, which it bought amid a coal boom in 2010.
ONGC, officials said, has maintained production levels despite most of its prime fields being in production for decades and natural decline setting. (Representational Image)
New Delhi: The government should privatise ONGC rather than give away its prime producing oil and gas fields to private companies for a song and bleed the PSU to death, say company executives. Selling just 18 per cent out of the governments 68.07 per cent shareholding in ONGC will fetch over Rs 41,000 crore at current market price, many times more than the investment commitment it may get from giving away 60 per cent in 11 identified oil and gas fields of the company, they said.
Speaking to PTI on the condition of anonymity, a cross-section of ONGC employees, officials and executives expressed dismay at the move by Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) to handover 11 of the companys fields including Kalok, Ankleshwar, Gandhar and Santhal the big four oilfields in Gujarat, to private sector on grounds of raising output.
If they think ONGC is inefficient, the company should be privatised. The proposed approach will only drive the company, which is Indias most profitable PSU, the Air India way, one of them said. Cutting the government stake to just one share less than 50 per cent would give the government enough revenues to meet its disinvestment target as well as bring in an efficient private sector management, he said.
India has 0.3 per cent of worlds oil and gas reserves but produces 0.6 per cent of global output, with ONGC accounting for the bulk of it, another official said. He sought to debunk the theory that since the recovery at the state-owned firms fields is low, it warrants involvement of private sector in raising production.
ONGC, officials said, has maintained production levels despite most of its prime fields being in production for decades and natural decline setting. Petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan has been touting at public forums ONGCs stagnant production being on the rise, one of them said.
Another official said that if drop in production is a criterion for getting so-called experts for raising production, eastern offshore KG-D6 gas fields in Bay of Bengal and Barmer oilfields in Rajasthan are the fit case. These fields are just 8-10 years old but have seen considerable drop in production, he added.
An IOC spokesman confirmed this is the first long-term VLCC tender the company has issued.
New Delhi: Two of Indias state-owned oil refiners have issued tenders seeking to charter tankers for at least five years while giving preference to Indian companies, tender documents reviewed by Reuters showed, which would boost domestic shipping firms battered by slumping tanker rates.
Indias Ministry of Shipping asked the refiners to issue long-term crude import tenders on a pilot basis and include a right of first refusal for Indian shipping lines, a government source familiar with the matter said on Monday.
The shift to the five-year contracts would give millions of dollars in tanker contracts to the Indian carriers, the source said.
This would help companies like Shipping Corp of India (SCI), Mercator Ltd, Great Eastern Shipping Co and Essar Shipping. The global tanker industry is grappling with an oversupply of ships that has depressed rates, with the benchmark Middle East to Japan route for Very Large crude carriers dropping 43 per cent since the start of the year.
According to the tender documents sent out by Bharat Petroleum Corp, they are only seeking bids from Indian-flagged Suezmax tankers capable of carrying up to 1 million barrels of oil for a five-year period.
Indian Oil Corps (IOC) tender document includes similar language but is seeking global bids for VLCCs capable of carrying Iraqi Basra Light crude for five years and grants Indian shippers the right of first refusal.
An IOC spokesman confirmed this is the first long-term VLCC tender the company has issued. There was no immediate response from BPCL.
India has in the past two years overtaken Japan to become the worlds third-biggest oil consumer.
The countrys shippers are pleased with the move.
Granting five year shipping tenders to Indian companies will help the growth of Indias fleet.. It will help us in arranging funds for acquisition of new vessels, said Capt. Anoop Kumar Sharma, chairman of Indias top shipper SCI.
However, the companies may struggle to meet the tender requirements which stipulate that the vessels be no more than 10 years old at the time of charter.
SCI only has two VLCCs that are less than a decade old, the Desh Viraat and Desh Vishal, which were built in 2008 and 2009, respectively, according to fleet data on its website.
Great Eastern Shipping does not have any VLCCs in its fleet, according to its website, and Essar Shipping only has one VLCC, which is 12 years old.
The extra-ordinary general meeting (EGM) of shareholders of the bank was held on Monday.
New Delhi: Punjab National Bank (PNB) said on Monday that it has got shareholders' approval for raising Rs 5,000 crore either through Qualified Institutional Placement (QIP) or rights issue.
The extra-ordinary general meeting (EGM) of shareholders of the bank was held on Monday, PNB said in a regulatory filing to the stock exchanges.
The shareholders approved raising of common equity Tier I capital of the bank by up to Rs 5,000 crore, including premium by way of follow-on public offer (FPO), QIP, rights issue or Employees Stock Option Plan or any other mode decided by the board, PNB said.
The bank has already appointed merchant bankers for the QIP and is expected to hit the market in the next few days.
Berlin: Volkswagen AG (VW) executive Oliver Schmidt, who is due to be sentenced this week in connection with the emissions scandal, has written to the judge to say he feels misused by the company, a newspaper reported on Sunday. Mr Schmidt pleaded guilty in August in the US District Court in Detroit to wrongdoing connected to a massive diesel emissions scandal that has cost VW as much as $30 billion. He is due to be sentenced on December 6.
I must say that I feel misused by my own company in the diesel scandal or Dieselgate, Mr Schmidt wrote to US judge Sean Cox, according to a letter filed in federal court. The letter was originally published by Bild am Sonntag newspaper. A VW spokesman declined to comment, citing the ongoing proceedings.
Under a plea agreement, Mr Schmidt faces up to seven years in prison and a fine of between $40,000 and $400,000 after admitting to conspiring to mislead the US regulators and violating clean air laws. In March, VW pleaded guilty to three felony counts under a plea agreement to resolve US charges it installed secret software in vehicles to evade emissions tests. US prosecutors have charged eight current and former VW executives.
Mr Schmidt was in charge of the companys environmental and engineering office in Auburn Hills, Michigan, until February 2015, where he oversaw emissions issues. In the letter to the judge, he said he had agreed to follow a script, or talking points, agreed by the VW management and a high-ranking lawyer, at a meeting with Alberto Ayala, a California Air Resources Board executive. In hindsight, I should never have agreed to meet with Dr Ayala on that day, he wrote.
Hyderabad: The Tax Bill passed by the US Senate on Saturday will affect the savings of Indian students studying in US universities. While the Bill is good news for independent students, it will have a serious impact on students studying on scholarships or who get their tuition fees waived by working for the university. Graduate students who study abroad have the option of working as classroom teachers or laboratory researchers for which the university provides a tuition waiver. The waiver was not taxed, but under the new tax bill, the waived fees will be treated as income.
Chartered accountant Vishnu Venugopal said that according to the Indian Income Tax Act, a scholarship granted to meet the cost of education is not included in ones total income.
Generally, scholarships or waived tuition fees, which are considered as monetary help for students, are not taxed as it is purely for a student to continue his/her education. Increasing a students taxable income by including the benefits they receive is placing an additional burden on them, he said.
An official from the US consulate in Hyderabad said, We get a lot of applications from students to study in America and the number increases every year. Hopefully, taxing students on assumed income will not lead to a decline in the numbers.
New Delhi: Consumers will soon be able to change their power suppliers just like telecom services, after proposed amendment to the existing Electricity Act is approved, union minister R.K. Singh said. The power ministry will push Electricity Amendment Bill in forthcoming Budget session, which provides for segregating the distribution network business and the electricity supply business.
We are bringing a lot of amendment in the Electricity Act. It also provides for separation of carriage and content business. The draft would come to me in another week or so. We will try to push it for passage in Budget session of Parliament, the power and new & renewable energy minister told in an interview.
The separation will pave the way for introducing a new system where consumers will have an option to choose from multiple electricity service providers in their areas, similar to that of telecom services. Elaborating further Mr Singh said, Once the Act is amended, we would prepare a roadmap in consultation with states to prepare a roadmap to segregate distribution and supply wings of the discoms. After that monopoly will be eliminated in supply wing by giving franchise to more than one players in an electricity supply area.
He also told that the amendments would also provide for stricter enforcement of Renewable Purchase Obligation (RPO). Besides, the bill will also provide for making tariff policy mandatory to keep cross subsidy below 20 per cent. It means that difference between highest and lowest tariff rates should not be more than 20 per cent.
The minister said that it will help to make industrial tariff reasonable which is unsustainable at present. The bill would also provide direct benefit transfer of subsidy to farmers to improve efficiency in power consumption. It also seeks service obligation on part discoms to ensure reliable power supply service by March, 2019.
Power demand growth rate will be good because of two reason. Firstly, we are adding 40 million more consumer under Saubhagya Scheme by December 2018. Besides, industrial growth would create more demand for power consumption, Mr Singh said. The minister was of the view that per capital consumption in the country will also increase in future. It is 1,075 units in India as against 5,000-6,000 units in Europe and around 1,1000 units in the US.
Future increase in energy consumption is going to happen here in India and electricity will be leading it because of change in energy mix. I see that electricity is edging out the fossil fuel. It is easier to transport. Mobility and cooking would become electrical, he said. On village electrification he said that it is snowing in some areas in Jammu & Kashmir, so the work in those areas will start in March or April. And in Arunachal Pradesh, it will be completed by January or February next year, excluding areas affected due to snow fall.
Rise in IPOs presents a good picture for businesses and corporates as it represents a better options to raise money.
Mumbai: A rise in the number of companies using the initial public offering (IPO) route to raise capital so far in this fiscal is likely to spur credit growth in some of the sectors, says a report.
In the current fiscal, domestic companies have raised Rs 49,175 crore between April and October, which is more than the amount raised between FY12-FY16 put together.
"Though there is no direct relation between credit growth and equity raising through IPOs, the years witnessing higher IPOs in general have shown a modest pick-up in credit growth,"
A SBI research report Ecowrap said. After the muted performance till FY15, domestic IPO market picked up with 70 and 106 companies listed in the last two fiscals. It gained further momentum in the current fiscal with 112 companies hitting the IPO market till October 2017.
Notably, the insurance sector has come to the market this fiscal with four companies alone raising Rs 31,320 crore.
"If sector-wise IPOs in various years, and bank credit in those sectors are compared, the results are asymmetric e.g. a positive relation between credit off-take and IPO is visible for some sectors with credit off-take picking-up after IPOs in those sectors," the report noted.
The power sector, which raised huge amount from the equity market in FY10 and FY11 witnessed significant credit growth during this period. Similarly mining and quarrying, metals and minerals went to the IPO market in FY10, FY11 and those years witnessed higher credit disbursement in these sectors, the report said.
However, advances to computer software declined in the FY17 when 8 medium and small software companies raised Rs 2,103 crore through IPO.
"This could be due to such sectors being more determined by global factors rather than domestic and hence a possible pick up in global growth could push domestic credit growth in these sectors with a concomitant lag," the report said.
Even credit in the food processing industry has lower correlation with IPO. One possibility could be that India has a young population, and consumption growth is mostly invariant with the expansionary or recessionary trends in business cycle, it said.
Rise in IPOs presents a good picture for businesses and corporates as it represents a better options to raise money, especially in the current context, the report said.
The current upsurge will last as long as the upswing in market continues. Also, the performance of the companies which got listed in recent years will determine the future course for the IPO market.
Mumbai: Veteran actor Shashi Kapoor breathed his last today. The 79-year-old actor is being remembered by all celebs. Amongst these celebs was filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar, who spoke to a leading news channel. The news channel claimed that Madhur said Shashi Tharoor is one producer who got parallel cinema on the front.
This made everybody scratch their heads, and of course, it led to immense trolling of the news channel.
And then finally Shashi also mentioned on Twitter that he has been getting condolence calls and that it was premature of the news channel to tweet so.
We're getting condolence calls in the office! Reports of my demise are, if not exaggerated, at least premature. @TimesNow #ShashiKapoor https://t.co/nbtZGcdQTa Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017
In fact even Omar Abdullah gave a witty reply for the same. Heres what he wrote:
As much as some of these channels dislike me theyve never killed me off. You have a unique distinction here Shashi Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) December 4, 2017
Shashi, however, also offered his heartfelt condolences.
Vidya in a still from from 'Tumhari Sulu'.
Mumbai: Vidya Balans Tumhari Sulu had met with widespread critical acclaim upon release, also coughing up above average box-office numbers.
However, into its third week, the film seems to be facing a fresh hiccup.
If the latest reports are to be believed, Vidya Balan and the makers of the film could be facing legal action for endorsing a cough syrup. The films production house, T-Series and north India based pharmaceutical company, Torque maybe at the receiving end for not adding an advisory before endorsing.
In an advertisement, Vidya can be seen saying, Sulu ke har safar mein uska saathi, Torex cough syrup ho, toh alvida khasi (Torex cough syrup supports Sulu through every journey of hers, so goodbye to coughs).
FDA commissioner Pallavi Darade said the ad violated basic norm of advisory caution, reported Indian Express.
Helmed by Suresh Triveni, the film also starred Manav Kaul and Neha Dhupia.
Mumbai: Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif are reuniting on the screen after five years, and the superstar says he is happy to romance the actor in their upcoming film 'Tiger Zinda Hai'.
The duo, who has previously worked in movies such as 'Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya?' and 'Partner', will reprise their roles in the soon-to-be-released sequel to 'Ek Tha Tiger' (2012).
When asked how it was to romance Katrina after a long time, Salman told reporters, "It is good. It is always good to romance. As there's no fight, so it's good to romance."
The actor was speaking on the sidelines of Star Screen Awards here on Sunday night.
Katrina recently appeared on 'Bigg Boss', which is hosted by Salman, to launch the film's second song 'Dil Diyaan Gallan'.
The 51-year-old star is happy that both the songs of the movie have been well received by the audience.
"Katrina was with me on 'Bigg Boss' when she gave me this information that 'Swag Se Swagat' has earned some 50 million likes. Now, we have launched a romantic song. Let's see how it is received...
"Both the songs are nice, and people are loving them. So, let's see what happens on December 22, and what's the destiny of the film," he said.
The 'Dabangg' star also performed some of his biggest dance numbers at the award ceremony.
Actor Sathyaraj, who is producing his son Sibirajs movie Sathya, which is a remake of Tollywood hit Kshanam, says that it was Prabhas, who gave him the confidence to go ahead with it, while they were shooting together for Baahubali.
First things first, I am extremely happy to share that I got back whatever I have invested for Sathya. When Sibiraj told me about Kshanam, I was shooting with Prabhas for Baahubali in Hyderabad. When I asked him about the film, he said that Kshanam broke the myth that hit films should have only big heroes. It proved that content is the king and his words gave me more confidence to remake the film. I didnt watch the film even after buying the rights. One of the biggest highlights in Sathya is the selection of actors and they have done a brilliant job. I watched the film and I am gratified that the film has lived up to the expectations of the blockbuster title Sathya, given magnanimously by Kamal sir.
Directed by Pradeep Krishnamoorthy, the film has Remya Nambeesan, Varalaxmi, Satish and Anandaraj, among the others in the cast. Sibi, on his part, said, After buying the remake rights of Kshanam, I announced that on my Twitter account. Seeing this, Vijay Antony sir, who was working with Pradeep in Saithaan, suggested his name. Thats how he was brought on board. And as promised, he has shown me in a different dimension.
We hear you refused doing onscreen lip locks with Remya. Yes it is true! The reason being my little son Dheeran! He sees me as a role model and copies whatever I do. Imagine if he sees one of my lip locks and repeats it at his school (laughs), Sibi responded light-heartedly.
There were rumors that actress Oviya, who shot to fame through Bigg Boss show, walked out of Lawrence's horror-thriller sequel, Muni 3 Kanchana 4.
The makers deny any such thing and released a picture, where Oviya and Lawrence were seen in a romantic mood, which has also gone viral.
Reportedly, 50 per cent of the shoot is completed and Oviyas portions will get over in a couple of weeks.
Vedhika, who was last seen in national award-winning film Kaaviya Thalaivan, is back to Tamil, with the lead role in the Kanchana franchisee.
Meanwhile, Lawrence also clarified that he is not contesting in RK Nagar by-elections as speculated by many. I have nothing to do with politics and I am a person inclined towards service and spiritualism, he clarified.
Washington: A study has recently suggested that doctors and nurses may not be able to reliably tell whether babies being treated in hospital are in pain merely by observing how they behave.
In stressed newborn babies, behaviour alone is not a reliable way of assessing pain, according to new UCL and UCLH research. According to University College London researchers, the hospitalised newborns, who are already stressed by their environment have a much larger pain response in their brain following a routine clinical skin lance than non-stressed babies.
This disconnect between the behaviour of newborn babies under stress and their brain activity in response to pain has not been shown before and suggests that stress is an important factor in influencing how babies perceive and react to pain. Lead author Dr Laura Jones said, "We know that repeated painful and stressful experiences in early life can negatively impact on the development of the central nervous system and our results suggest that controlling the stress levels of hospitalised infants may not only reduce their pain but also contribute to their healthy development."
The team simultaneously measured the behaviour and brain activity of 56 newborn babies before and after a clinically necessary heel prick in their first days of life, while also monitoring their stress. In the babies with the lowest stress levels, brain activity and behaviour were associated with each other in that greater brain activity corresponded to a longer period of crying and/or grimacing.
In the babies with the highest stress levels this association was broken: greater brain activity was not necessarily matched by a more marked behavioural response. "Behaviour such as crying or facial responses is widely used as a measurement of a baby's pain experience. Pain scores used for babies are based on these observations, because babies can't speak. While these methods are very useful, our findings suggest that they may not be appropriate for babies who are already stressed.
We need to explore better ways to monitor pain, reduce stress and tailor our interventions accordingly," added co-author, Dr Judith Meek (University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust).
The researchers measured the background level of stress in the babies using two approaches - heart rate variability and the level of cortisol in saliva.
Each baby had a different level of stress due to natural variability in the population and their environments prior to the test.
The results show that the amplitude of the pain evoked brain waves was greater in babies with high stress compared to those with low stress.
The research appears in journal of Current Biology.
ATHENS: Mortar under a slab at the heart of Jerusalems Church of the Holy Sepulchre dates to the era of Roman Emperor Constantine, confirming historical accounts of the discovery of the place where Christians believe Jesus was entombed, researchers say.
According to historical accounts, Constantine - who was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity - discovered the rocky tomb with assistance from his mother Helena between 325 and 326 AD, buried beneath a temple to the Roman goddess Venus. Today it is visited regularly by millions of pilgrims and tended by priests from several Christian denominations under strict rules still in place from the Ottoman era.
Virtually razed to the ground in 1009, the Holy Sepulchre complex was rebuilt over the centuries by various Christian groups, including the Byzantines and the Crusaders from the 12th century onwards. But a team of scientists and restorers who completed almost nine months of work on the tomb last March said they were able to determine that a slab at the heart of the compound dated from Constantines time.
That was a great moment to validate, said Professor Antonia Moropoulou, Chief Scientific Supervisor from the National Technical University of Athens who directed the restoration project.
The researchers restored a structure inside the church called the Edicule, which is believed to house the tomb itself. Their work included removing a marble slab which covers a ledge where Christ, according to Christian scriptures, was lain after crucifixion and resurrected on the third day. A second fractured slab was found beneath the top slab, attached to the bedrock and engraved with a cross. Analysing gypsum mortar connecting that slab to the bedrock allowed them to determine its age, dating it to 335-345 AD.
When we opened the tomb and saw this broken grey slab with an engraved cross we didnt know from which era it was, Moropoulou told Reuters. We concluded, according to concrete results, that the slab which was adjoined to the bedrock of the tomb of Christ was of the Constantinean era.
Moropoulou said she herself had half expected to find that the slab, like the church around it, dated from a later era. She felt great. Very happy indeed. I did not expect it...but the monument talks, and it says its history.
Mohammed Masihuddin alias Musa had allegedly planned to target foreign nationals at Mother House, the Missionaries of Charity headquarters in Kolkata. (Photo: DC)
Kolkata: Arrested ISIS suspect Mohammed Masihuddin alias Musa, who had allegedly planned to target foreign nationals at Mother House, the Missionaries of Charity headquarters in Kolkata, allegedly tried to kill a prison official at Alipore Central Jail on Sunday morning.
The injured Gokul Chandra Dey is a jail warder in his fifties.
The incident took place when Dey went to take Musa out of his cell as part of 'Lock Out,' a routine session that allows the prisoners to go out in a compound on the prison premises after the day starts, said director general of police (correctional services) Arun Kumar Gupta.
"As the jail warder asked Musa to come out around 8 am, Musa started making Jehadi comments towards his fellow prisoners. As the jail warder intervened, he pushed him off to the ground and hit him with a piece of stone. He slashed his throat with a small but sharp iron rod used in PWD works in prison," Gupta said.
Dey was rescued by his colleagues and was rushed to SSKM Hospital from where he was later shifted to Calcutta Medical Research Institute.
"His condition is stable now. A case under section 307 (attempt to murder) of the Indian Penal Code has been initiated against Musa. An investigation is underway," Gupta said.
Dey has been posted on the job for the past two years, according to sources.
Originally from Labhpur in Birbhum, the 25-year-old terror suspect was arrested by the criminal investigation department from the Burdwan railway station in July 2016 on charges of radicalising youths to join ISIS. He also reportedly had links to Jamaat-Ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), whose leader Abu Suleiman had met Musa at the latters sisters wedding in March 2015.
Later, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) took him in its custody to unearth ISIS network and its plots in the state. Musa was questioned by the Rapid Action Batallion of Bangladesh and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Musa has been lodged at the high security prison for over a year now.
In December last year, the NIA in a chargesheet accused Musa of plotting an attack on the Mother House to kill the American, British and Russian citizens who visit the place on AJC Bose Road in south Kolkata to pay homage to its founder, Mother Teresa. The attack was planned to retaliate to the offensive against ISIS in the Middle East.
Musa came under the scanner of Indian security agencies after his e-mails and calls were traced to Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Syria. According to the NIA, he had been in touch with several ISIS operatives, including leader Shafi Arman, in Syria through Facebook and Twitter. He was entrusted with building an ISIS module and recruitment base in West Bengal.
Chennai: As the efforts to rescue the fishermen is apace, BJP leaders rushed to the cyclone-hit Kanyakumari district to oversee the rescue and relief operations, putting the R. K. Nagar by-poll on the back burner for now.
Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman who rushed to the Ockhi-ravaged coastal district in the south on Sunday evening was joined by BJP state president Dr. Tamilisai Soundararajan. The Minister, who reviewed the relief measures, visited Suchindram, Thirupathisaram and Kanyakumari and heard the grievances of the affected people.
According to sources in the BJP here a group of fishermen from neighbouring Tuticorin district who set out to petition the Minister about eight fishermen who went missing from their fishing town, were pleasantly surprised when they were told that the eight missing men were traced in Maldives by the Indian Coast Guard (ICG).
They were told that efforts were on to bring them to Tuticorin they came to petition the Minister but the occasion turned into a thanks giving meeting. They thanked the Minister and also the defence forces and left for home happily, a BJP senior told this correspondent.
Following the calamitous conditions, the Sangh Parivar swung into action, organising themselves in teams, and distributed food, medicines and clothing to the displaced.
The RSS Swayamsevaks too involved in the massive relief operation both in Kanyakumari and Kerala, and the messures would continue for some more days, the leader said.
Meanwhile, with Monday being the last day for filing of nomination for the by-election, BJP candidate Karu Nagarajan will submit his papers in the afternoon.
He would begin his poll campaign from Tuesday. Asserting that the party was doing everything to trace the missing fishermen and also to rehabilitate the cyclone affected people, party senior M. Chakravarthy says, we will have to focus our attention on the by-polls too. We have sizable vote bank in the constituency and we hope to make a mark.
Hyderabad: Rumours of a bomb threat led to widespread panic on the newly launched Metro Rail on Sunday afternoon. A picture taken at Ameerpet Interchange Station, of a police sniffer dog along with a bomb squad, went viral on social media, adding more to the rumours.
The police dressed in black were seen checking bags and inspecting corners at the station, forcing people to believe that there was some sort of threat. However, this did not seem to deter commuters. Trains ran full capacity and the number of commuters at Ameerpet, Miyapur and Nagole was high.
The police, however, dismissed the rumours and said that the bomb squad was performing a routine check.
A senior police official in-charge of Metro Rail security said that a bomb-detection squad would conduct regular checks at the stations.
It is a routine check that will be carried out every day by the local police. Reports of a bomb being found are completely baseless, he said.
Elaborate security arra-ngements were witnessed at all stations on the first Sunday after the launch of commercial operations of the Metro Rail.
N.V.S Reddy, managing director of Hyderabad Metro Rail Limited, said, There was no bomb threat. These are just rumours. A bag was left behind by a passenger and security cameras picked it up. The security staff identified its owner and handed it over to him. The owner of the bag had been looking for it and had approached officials at the ticket counter seeking their help.
Two police officers have been placed at every level of stations to ensure that there is no trouble or breach of rules, such as people going to the far-end of the station to click selfies or performing stunts on the tracks.
Metro stations can be used as FOBs
Pedestrians can use the first floor of the Hyderabad Metro Rail (HMR) stations as a foot-over-bridge to cross over to the other side, HMR managing director N.V. S. Reddy said.
Medians have been built between the Metro Rail pillars and there is no gap for pedestrians to cross over. Most of them are seen standing at the edge or sides of the roads.
Mr Reddy said, We want people to know that they can use the escalators and the unpaid area to cross the roads. They will not be charged.
He said L&T Metro Rail Hyderabad Limited had been told that pedestrians must be allowed to use this facility. People can easily move around in the unpaid area and no one will stop them. The staircases, lifts and escalators are considered as the unpaid area.
Kanyakumari: PMK MP Anbumani Ramadoss on Sunday urged the Union government to declare the damage due to Cyclone Ockhi that left a trail of devastation in Kanyakumari, Tirunelveli and Thoothukudi districts of Tamil Nadu as a national disaster and speed up relief and rehabilitation works.
Speaking to reporters after visiting the cyclone-ravaged parts of Kanyakumari district, Anbumani also asked the Tamil Nadu Government to immediately cancel all MGR Centenary celebrations and spend all its energy on getting back normal life in these three districts.
The Dharmapuri MP and former Union Health Minister also warned the state government that there were chances of communicable diseases spreading in several areas in these districts since many areas are still inundated in rainwater.
Steps should be taken to ensure that electricity is restored immediately and rain water is pumped out using machines and motors from low-lying areas. The Centre should announce the damages caused due to Cyclone Ockhi as a national disaster and immediately sanction funds, the PMK leader said.
Visiting the affected people lodged in camps and distributing food and relief materials to them, Anbumani also told the state government that the Rs 25 crore sanctioned by it for relief works in Kanyakumari district was not enough.
He also demanded that Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami immediately visit the affected areas and assess the damage caused due to the cyclone.
The government should stop holding MGR Centenary events and instead concentrate their energy on relief and rehabilitation in these areas, he said.
Students were allegedly threatened with deducting marks or withholding admit cards, in exchange for silence, the post mentions. In picture: Parents of the G D Birla school students protest outside campus. (Photo: PTI)
Kolkata: A Facebook post by a former student of South Kolkatas GD Birla has gone viral detailing so-called abusive behaviour of the schools management following the molestation of a four-year-old girl allegedly by two school teachers on campus last Thursday, November 30.
Ex-student Rupkatha Basu now studying Psychology in Toronto mentions in the post - originally shared by her friend Abhishek Mukherjee on her behalf - the harassment and exploitation of students and staff alike, perpetrated by the management of the school.
She has brought up how a similar incident had happened three years ago on the same campus, that made students feel unsafe but they were not allowed to protest or speak up against it.
The student, in her post, has said, "The management of GD Birla is an administrative body that believes that stopping the graduating batch from creating customized batch t-shirts is a more pressing issue than installing CCTVs in classrooms, or proper locks in all the washroom cubicles."
Incidentally, according to West Bengal Commission for the Protection of Child Rights, Chairperson, Ananya Chakraborty, CCTVs were supposed to be installed three years back.
On being questioned about the same after the recent one, the Principal said it would be done in December.
The ex-student's post also states that ailing or sick students were not given any care, but forced to attend classes. However, the school administration was not bothered by the fact that there were not enough classrooms, she says.
Students were allegedly threatened to "silence by things like your marks will be cut, your admit card will be withheld, You will be taken to Manjushree maam, in case they protested when they were abused, insulted or their character was questioned.
"When I was in class 12, my batchmates and I were screamed at, chased, and threatened with physical assault with a metre ruler, all because we wanted to celebrate the last day of school in the field by making a formation of our school acronym. The stick was swung at the faces of begging, crying and unarmed students, who were, as usual, threatened with dire consequences," the post read.
The ex-student has accused the GD Birla authorities to be 'wealthy, powerful' people, who will blackmail and bribe their way out of the chaos, "just like they always have."
Rupkatha also mentioned in her post that in her fourteen years at the school, she has seen some of the best teachers forced to leave the institution because of mistreatment by the school administration.
Rupkatha has also accused the school administration of being a body that "that recruits vice principals who will point out the colour of your bra in front of a bunch of older boys."
The same concern has been voiced by another ex-student, who when contacted over phone, said that character assassination of the students was extremely regular, in addition to counsellor-client privacy violation, as students' personal problems were made topics of tiffin-break conversation'.
G D Birla spokesperson Subhash Mohanty said authorities were grief-stricken at the unfortunate incident and have not had a chance to go through Rupkatha's post. He also said such incidents of abuse are the latest trend, especially against very young children.
Mohanty, however, added that students making claims on Facebook should complain formally to school authorities, for them to take any action.
As for the incident, Mohanty said that if the crime was proven, the accused would be punished. But keeping in mind the safety of 4000 students, the school will no longer hire external Physical Training teachers.
When contacted, Rupkatha said while the anguish of the parents is understandable, 'our innocent senior teachers are being harassed for no reason and it is extremely unfair. People need to protest where the fault lies.'
Two teachers of the school have recently been accused of sexually abusing a four years old student.
The school authorities had earlier denied all allegations, terming the incident 'a small mischief'.
The concerned teachers were sacked on Sunday, according to a statement from the school.
Here is the full post:
Police disperse unruly mob at Bababudangiri near Chikkamagaluru on Sunday. (Right) devotees near Dattatreya Swami Dargah. (Photo: DC)
Chikkamagaluru: Tension prevailed at Dattatreya Swami Dargah premises on Sunday after a few Hindu activists hoisted Bhagavadwaja (saffron flag) at the disputed site, prompting police to resort to a lathicharge to disperse the group from the disputed site at Bababudangiri Hills in Chikkamagaluru.
Hundreds of Hindu activists from various parts of the state had congregated at Bababudangiri Hills for the three-day Datta Jayanti starting from Friday organized by Bajrang Dal and other Hindu outfits and police had made elaborate security arrangements to see that the celebrations went off smoothly.
After the activists were caned by the police, the situation was brought under control. Superintendent of Police K Annamalai is supervising the situation.
Around 2,000 policemen have been deployed for security.
Owing to the heavy influx of devotees, the road leading to Datta Peeta witnessed traffic snarls and vehicular movement was held up for hours. Vehicular movement was affected from Datta Peeta to Attigundi.
Meanwhile, miscreants stoned a private bus at Uppali in Chikkamagaluru town and sensing trouble, commercial establishments in the town downed shutters leading to an undeclared bandh.
It is said that two-bikers were assaulted in the town leading to a tense atmosphere. Mr Annamalai said security has been tightened in sensitive areas as a precautionary measure.
The student was found hanging to the ceiling of a bathroom in Maneur Hostel on Sunday evening resulting in protest. (Photo: DC)
Hyderabad: In a late night operation, the Hyderabad police shifted the body of Osmania University student E Murali, who allegedly committed suicide on the campus on Sunday, to a mortuary.
An autopsy was later performed and the 21-year-old MSc (physics) students body was shifted to his home in Jagdevpur mandal in Siddipet district of Telangana before Monday dawn.
A scuffle ensued between the police and students when the former tried to shift Murali's body out of the campus late Sunday night. The police used mild force to disperse the students, who in retaliation pelted stones at them. Two police officials and a few students were injured in the clash.
We had detained about 50 people, including leaders of political parties apart from other organisations. The body was sent to the native place of the student for final rites, said Hyderabad Commissioner (in-charge) VV Srinivasa Rao.
Murali was found hanging to the ceiling of a bathroom in Maneur Hostel on Sunday evening, triggering protest by the students.
The students' unions and Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC) chairman M Kondanda Ram said that Murali, who had completed his BSc and BEd degree, was keen on getting a government job. However, he could not secure one.
The TJAC is holding a Kovula Koi Kotlata meeting on Monday to highlight the unemployment issue in Telangana.
Meanwhile, the Telangana JAC and various students organisations have given a call for bandh on Monday. The police have made elaborate arrangements in and around the Osmania University campus.
Children with disabilities play at the Marina beach on account of celebrations of International Day of disabled persons on Sunday. Greater Chennai Corporation along with various NGOs laid down ramps till the beachside, installed mobile toilets and resting areas to facilitate people with disabilities to be able to access beaches at Marina Beach on the occassion. (Photo: DC)
Chennai: Their child being denied admission yet again was heartbreaking for Radhika and Aman Awasthi, parents of three year-old Akash. Akash was not as fast a learner as other children of his age and his speech was not well developed. It was the fourth time a school had denied him admission and recommended that Akash be admitted to a special school instead of a general school.
Dharinis two twins were diagnosed with autism at the age of three and like any other parent she wanted her children to study in the best schools in the city. It was a huge disappointment when schools refused to admit autistic children.
In another instance, Vignesh, father of 4-year-old Raghul, who was suffering from dyslexia had to admit his son to a small school quite far from his residence as schools in the neighbourhood denied him admission owing to his disability.
Though the government has various provisions for ensuring that children with disabilities are integrated into mainstream schools, parents have to struggle, running from pillar to post to be able to provide the primary need of education to these children.
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act provides for enhancing the educational infrastructure to provide comprehensive education to one and all irrespective of their disabilities. It should be a choice for disabled children to get educated in special schools or mainstream schools. Schools need to facilitate teaching for such students by providing them special training, said Vaishnavi Jayakumar, member,
Disability Rights Alliance: While activists emphasise that educational institutions should adopt a universal infrastructure and provide inclusive education, school authorities say that some parents object to their children being taught alongside those with disabilities. Parents do not like their children to talk or interact with children having physical and mental disabilities. We have to act as per the convenience of the majority of the students, said a school principal.
However, psychologists say that students with disabilities can benefit from mainstream schools in many ways. For children with mild disabilities like dyslexia, locomotor disabilities and autism, their social behaviour and basic life skills improve when they study in the same environment as other children. However, children with severe mental retardation that needs special attention can be sent to special schools so that they do not lag behind in learning, said Dr Vivian Kapil, psychiatrist, SIMS hospital. While the law allows children with disabilities in mainstream schools, it is high time government and school authorities acted to ensure equal opportunity.
BENGALURU: Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Sunday criticized Mysuru-Kodagu MP Pratap Simha for barging into a police barricade in Mysuru on Sunday and said his behaviour does not suit his status.
The Chief Minister told reporters here on Sunday, "Being a Lok Sabha member, he should have respect for the law of the land. Neither the state government nor the state police banned Hanuma Jayanti, but the state police had asked the procession organizers to take a detour, which should have been respected by him. Instead he chose to drive rashly and barged into police barricades. It speaks volumes about his culture."
An angry Siddaramaiah remarked whether the state BJP President, B. S. Yeddyurappa, will approve of such a behavior from a public representative? "If public representative does not respect law of the land, who will have respect for it?," he added.
"We too celebrate Rama Navami or Hanuma Jayanti, but not by disturbing communal harmony. It seems that the BJP and its leaders seem to have made up their mind to unleash communal disturbances at various levels in the state, ahead of Assembly elections in 2018. We (Congress) will not allow them to succeed in their machinations."
The marriage of the couple was annulled by the Kerala High Court last December after her father alleged that his daughter was being indoctrinated and may be taken ISIS territories in Iraq and Syria by extremist Islamic outfits. (Photo: File)
Kochi: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Monday questioned Shafin Jehan, days after the Supreme Court gave its nod to it to continue its probe into his marriage with Hadiya, a Kerala woman at the centre of an alleged love-jihad case.
Jehan was questioned a week after the Apex Court gave its nod to carry on investigation into the conversion of Hadiya and her marriage with him.
NIA sources said the probe team "re-examined" Jehan on Monday for clarifying certain facts from his earlier statement.
They, however, did not elaborate as the matter is sub-judice.
The NIA had earlier investigated Jahan and submitted its statement before the Supreme Court.
The marriage of the couple was annulled by the Kerala High Court last December after her father alleged that his daughter was being indoctrinated and may be taken ISIS territories in Iraq and Syria by extremist Islamic outfits.
"We make it clear that the NIA investigation shall continue in accordance with law," the Supreme Court had said last week while allowing the 24-year-old woman to resume her studies at the homoeopathic college in Tamil Nadu's Salem.
She was placed under her parents' custody since her marriage was annulled by the Kerala High Court.
The bill will now be sent to the President for his assent after which it will become a law, state Home Minister Bhupendra Singh told reporters outside the Assembly. (Representational image/File)
Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Monday unanimously passed a bill awarding death to those found guilty of raping girls aged 12 and below.
With the passage of the bill, Madhya Pradesh becomes the first state in the country where those convicted of such rapes will face the gallows.
Introduced in the House by Law and Legislative Affairs Minister Rampal Singh, the bill was discussed in detail and then passed by all parties, including the ruling BJP and opposition Congress.
The bill will now be sent to the President for his assent after which it will become a law, state Home Minister Bhupendra Singh told reporters outside the Assembly.
"It was a historic day for Madhya Pradesh as the state Assembly, as per the wish of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, passed a bill making a provision to award capital punishment to those indulging in such crimes (raping girls aged 12 or younger)," Singh said.
Capital punishment will be awarded to convicts under section 376 (A), which is related to rape, and section 376 (D, A), pertaining to gang rape.
Welcoming the bill, Chief Minister Chouhan said, "There are people in society who can be set right only by severe punishments. It (the legislation) will deal with them. We will also raise awareness in society against such crimes.
In what seems to be a masterstroke by Janata Dal (Secular) patriarch Mr H.D. Deve Gowda, he has appointed his grandson Mr Prajwal Revanna as party general secretary, paving way for his daughter-in-law Mrs Anitha Kumaraswamy to contest from Chennapatna. This raises the question whether the 27-year-old rising star of the Gowda clan is happy with this decision. Going by his reactions in an interview with Deccan Chronicle, Prajwal seem unfazed and says he has his task cut- infuse young blood in the party. He feels the JD(S) has failed to market itself, though the party had done good work in the past. Compared to the two national parties Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress, JD(S) has struck a proper balance between rural and urban needs. However, the national parties scored by branding themselves as champions of development. Here are excerpts from the interview.
Becoming General Secretary of a party at 27 is a big responsibility. How do you plan to handle this responsibility?
It is a big responsibility but I have my task cut out. I have to infuse a lot of young blood into the party organisation.I want to discuss this with MLA, Mr Madhu Bangarappa. Today, in every political party, we see a lot of mature and older politicians in the forefront. Most youngsters take a back seat and probably work on social media. They are not told that they too have their say in politics. I want to convince them that they matter a lot and they would be given due importance. Apart from being on social media, they also have to work in the field and make their presence felt. Then, seniors will start taking them seriously. I am working towards this objective. With election is round the corner, along with drawing youth, we have to engage in other organisational work. I feel, this particular period will be challenging.
You have reservations about the role of social media? You want youth not to rely too much on it.
Social media is an important tool to reach people. We are using it and we will continue to upgrade the technology to cater to the changing environment. But, we cannot just depend on it. Personal interaction is more important in politics. We will use social media to the fullest extent but I will encourage youth to show their faces to people and reach out personally, which will yield better results in electoral politics.
The JD(S) is known to be a party of farmers with a tilt towards particular communities. How are you planning to shed this image?
According to me, JD(S) has been able to strike a perfect balance of the urban and rural, representing all communities and people from all walks of life. However, we have failed to brand it like the Congress or BJP. For the last one decade, FDI has been the mantra for development. If you recall, it was Mr Deve Gowda, as Chief Minister who went to Davos and attracted FDI. He framed policies conducive for investment, triggering the development of Bengaluru. If you consider the Electronics City flyover or other infrastructure projects in the city, they were initiated when Mr Kumaraswamy was Chief Minister. What about the confession by none other than Mr Narayanamurthy of Infosys that Bengaluru received uninterrupted power supply during the coalition era (of JD(S) and BJP)? At that time, Mr Revanna( Prajwals father) was the power minister. Even the Namma Metro project was initiated when Mr Deve Gowda was Prime Minister. He declared five cities as cosmopolitan and sanctioned the Metro service. No one took it forward and Mr Kumaraswamy had to take the initiative again. We have a large number of people living in rural areas, depending on farming. This cuts across caste and community lines. Since Mr Deve Gowda comes from that background, our party gives a lot of importance to them too. I feel, no other party in the state has this kind of balance. Though their contribution to the states development is not great, the Congress and BJP succeeded in branding themselves. They lured peo ple with colourful promises. This is where my role gains importance. I have to put our party achievements together and present it in a proper perspective.
So, you will give the party a brand image?
See, we have to set our priorities right. This cannot be done overnight. We are fighting the elections in six months. So, we have a short term and long term plan for that. First, we have to package what is important for the elections. Later, we have to continue with our long term strategies. The present task is to mobilise youth and put forth our party agenda before the people.
You wanted to contest the elections but you have been assigned party work. Are you unhappy? Did the ' internal bickering in the family force you out of the electoral fray?
To be honest, I am very happy that Mr Deve Gowda has given me such a huge responsibility at this young age. Running a party is no joke and I will be working with very senior leaders. I will be learning a lot of things. When you speak about internal bickering, I have no clue what people are talking about. Most media reports quote sources. I have never spoken to any source. There are a lot of things about my family, which people are ignorant about. Among my generation in the family, I was the first to say I wanted to pursue a political career. I was given the freedom to express it. If my grandfather had no faith in me, would he appoint me general secretary? Secondly, they say I have differences with my uncle Mr Kumaraswamy. If I need to succeed in politics, I need his support. He is the party president and I will be working under him.
It is said that Nikhil Kumaraswamy is waiting in the shadows to enter politics later?
We cousins maintain a very close relationship. I and Nikhil meet up for lunch or dinner. He has never told me that he wants to enter politics and usually advises me to go slow in politics. His reasoning is sensible. He talks more about his movie career. Even if he decides to enter politics, there is space. While I carve out a niche for myself, Nikhil can also create a niche. I don't think it is something anyone should be upset about. We have a long time ahead of us.
As many as 17,812 teachers From Telangana registered for the course, from Karnataka 5,175, Andhra Pradesh 5,022 and Kerala 705.
Chennai: As many as one in seven teachers working in private nursery, primary and matriculation schools in Tamil Nadu are unqualified. This fact is made evident by the statistics on admission to the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), which has started a diploma programme for untrained elementary teachers.
As per the direction from Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD), NIOS is conducting a two-year diploma programme for untrained teachers working in primary and upper primary schools in the country.
The last date for applying for the course was in November. Totally 25,929 teachers working in private schools have applied for the course, which is highest among the southern states. Roughly around 1.75 lakh teachers are working in all private schools in the state.
As many as 17,812 teachers From Telangana registered for the course, from Karnataka 5,175, Andhra Pradesh 5,022 and Kerala 705.
Among the districts, Chennai has 3,696 registrations for the course highest in the state. From Coimbatore 3,441 teachers registered and Thiruvallur district had 2,804 registrations.
"Right to Education Act mandates diploma in elementary education for teaching the primary classes. Due to the huge number of untrained teachers working in the schools, the HRD ministry has decided to give them a chance to get trained and introduced specifically designed diploma programme for in-service teachers," said P. Ravi, regional director, NIOS, Chennai.
As per the HRD ministry's announcement, teachers without the diploma in elementary education will not be allowed to work in primary and nursery schools after March 31, 2019.
Teachers have to study the entire course online and appear for the written test to qualify for the diploma. The candidates have to register themselves at the Swayam portal for accessing video lectures.
"They will study five papers in the first year and four papers in the second year. They will understand important aspects of elementary education such as child psychology, children growth and development and learning disorders like dyslexia," he said.
"Working teachers have the distinct advantage as they can practice in classrooms what they learnt in their lessons," he added. Though the course is conducted online, the students have to write a paper, pen test to get the diploma.
From all over the country, 14,02,962 teachers have registered for the course.
Bihar with 2.82 lakh teachers has the highest registration among the states followed by 1.82 lakhs from Uttar Pradesh and 1.77 lakh from West Bengal.
NIOS also has come up with six-month bridge course for B.Ed graduates who teach in primary classes 1 to 5.
Following the circular from the HRD ministry, the state government has made this course mandatory for BEd graduates employed in primary and nursery schools and for those who take classes for primary students in matriculation schools.
This order has stirred up a controversy among the private school managements who claimed that it has added the burden for private schools and teachers.
"The course fee is Rs.5,000 and a majority of teachers earning less than Rs.10,000 in private schools. We feel that this bridge course is unnecessary and the government should revoke the order," said K.R. Nandakumar, general secretary, Tamil Nadu Nursery, Primary, Matriculation and Higher Secondary Schools Association.
"B.Ed. graduates are only qualified to teach secondary and higher secondary classes. Teaching and understanding elementary students are completely different as they have to teach the language and subjects in a unique way," Mr Ravi said.
The teachers would be taught about pedagogy, learning process and challenges in elementary education in the bridge course. When enquired, officials from school education department said as per the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) guidelines, the elementary teachers should possess a diploma in elementary education. "B.Ed. teachers should use this one time opportunity and enrol themselves in the bridge course as it's only a six months course," an official said. The last date for applying for the course has been extended up to December 15.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi being greeted by former president Pranab Mukherjee before he filed his nomination papers for party presidents post, in New Delhi on Monday. (Photo: PTI)
New Delhi: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi filed his nomination papers for the post of Congress president in New Delhi on Monday, setting off the countdown to his unopposed elevation to the partys top post.
Monday was the last date of filing nominations and the last date for withdrawal of names is December 11.
Mr Gandhi, 47, will take over the partys mantle from his mother, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, who has been the longest serving Congress president.
Before filing his nomination papers, Mr Gandhi went to meet former President Pranab Mukherjee and former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.
The former Prime Minister, who accompanied Mr Gandhi to 24, Akbar Road, the partys headquarters, said, Rahulji has been the darling of the Congress. Our president Mrs Sonia Gandhi has served the party and, through the Congress Party, the country for the last 19 years. This is yet another step forward in that direction. Rahul Gandhi will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party.
Hyderabad: The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) has called for a state-wide bandh on Tuesday to protest the police lathi-charge at the Osmania University (OU) campus, and to demand that the government immediately fill up the over 1 lakh vacancies in government departments.
L. Ayyappa, the state secretary of the ABVP, urged all educational institutions to extend their support to the bandh by declaring a holiday on Tuesday. He said that ABVP activists had already visited educational institutions in the city, met with their management departments, and requested them to participate in the bandh.
Mr Ayyappa alleged that the suicide of OU student E. Murali was a consequence of the government's failure to release job notifications for the over 1 lakh existing vacancies to be filled. He said that the police had manipulated the suicide note to cover up this fact and try to portray that Murali had ended his life due to academic pressure. He demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident.
ABVP has asked the government to issue an annual recruitment calendar, similar to that issued by the UPSC, and to strictly adhere to that calendar. Mr Ayyappa said that students and the unemployed youth were ready to teach the TRS government a lesson ahead of the 2019 elections.
Mysuru: A war of words has broken out between the Mysuru district administration and BJP leaders with sources in the administration asserting that there was no ban on Hanuma Jayanti procession taken out in Hunsur on Sunday, on the route declared by the administration.
Sources revealed that Deputy Commissioner D Randeep had issued an order declaring the procession route for both Eid Milad and Hanuma Jayanti processions in Hunsur, on November 5 itself. The organiser of Hunuma Jayanti had gone on appeal against the procession route announced by the DC but the home department had rejected the appeal saying it could be reviewed next year.
There was a deliber ate attempt by MP Pratap Simha to violate law and order on the procession route and so he was arrested as a preventive measure, the sources claimed. The arrest of Mr Simha has also been communicated to the Lok Sabha Speaker, they said. The sources asserted that with the gathering getting bigger and sensing that the situation was getting out of control, the administration had to disperse the crowd. The situation in Hunsur is peaceful now, Southern range IGP Mr Vipul Kumar said. Mr Simha, however, tweeted, protecting my religion and my tradition is much more important than my political future.
Speaking to the electronic media, he claimed that the Hanuma Jayanti procession was not permitted and this had happened for the first time in 25 years.
Mr Simha also claimed that he did not make any attempt to hit the barricades as claimed by the police.
Rushing to his defence, BJP leader and MP Shobha Karandlaje alleged that CM Siddaramaiah had misused his power in his hometown. As many as 58 devotees of Lord Hanuman have been arrested, and some were students who had come for darshan, she claimed.
Union Minister Mr Ananth Kumar who held a press meet in Mysuru, said, The district administration which had permitted Eid Milad procession, banned Hanuma Jayanti procession, and thus discriminated between the two communities. We will take up the issue in Parliament, he said. Mr Simha was released on Sunday night.
Meanwhile, 58 devotees of lord Hanuma who were arrested in Hunsur as a preventive measure were released from Mysuru Central Jail with Mr Pratap Simha receiving them. He said he was confident of getting permission for the Hanuma Jayanthi procession as per tradition, in Hunsur in future.
Hyderabad: Loud cries of Police down down and Khabardaar KCR were heard on Monday morning as students of Osmania University gathered at the Arts College entrance and staged a protest, alleging that the government was responsible for the suicide of student E. Murali.
Though Muralis suicide note said he was doing it because he was afraid he would fail his exams, students have alleged that he was depressed because the government had not issued recruitment orders. They want the government to pay Rs 50 lakh to Muralis family and give his younger brother a job. Police had to be deployed with several patrol vans and trucks with special officers to control the crowd.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi with former PM Manmohan Singh in New Delhi on Monday. (Photo: PTI)
New Delhi: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi filed his nomination papers for the post of Congress president in New Delhi on Monday, setting off the countdown to his unopposed elevation to the partys top post.
Mullapally Ramachandran, chairman of the Congress central election authority, told reporters that till Sunday no other nomination had been filed.
Several leaders as well as young turks of the party had accompanied Mr Gandhi for the filing of nomination papers.
Mr Gandhi will be the sixth leader from the Nehru-Gandhi family to occupy the Congress Partys top post. His appointment is being seen as a generational shift that holds hope for the Congress which has been reduced to 46 seats in the 542-member Lok Sabha.
Though Mr Gandhis political engagement and involvement in party work increased tremendously since the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, insiders indicate that there will be two advisors who will be directly reporting to the new Congress president.
On several occasions Mr Gandhi has indicated that there will be a judicious mix of young and experienced leaders in the party and nobody will be left out. Mr Gandhi, who began his political career by winning the 2004 Lok Sabha election from the family bastion of Amethi, has already seen several ups and downs.
In 2006, Mr Gandhi became the general secretary of the party in-charge of frontal organisations, including the Indian Youth Congress, and was criticised for introducing internal elections as it encouraged blatant use of money power to bag tickets. The practice has since been discontinued.
Mr Gandhi also wanted to introduce primaries, like in the USA, for contesting Lok Sabha elections, a move that was heavily contested by party leaders.
Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Monday unanimously passed a historic Bill awarding death to the rapists of girls aged 12 or below.
Madhya Pradesh is the first state in the country to make legislation to send to gallows those convicted of raping girls of 12 years or below.
Those who indulge in such heinous crimes are not human beings but devils. They have no right to live. I hope human rights activists will not raise a hue and cry over the provisions in the Bill seeking death penalty to those convicted of rape of children aged 12 or below, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, said to be the architect of the Bill, told reporters here. He hoped that the harsh punishments in the Bill would act as a deterrent to curb crimes against women.
Chennai: As many as 2,604 fishermen, including 220 of them from cyclone Ockhi-hit Kanniyakumari district, who went missing in the last few days, have been rescued and efforts to locate the remaining 260 members of the community is on full swing with help from the Union government, Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami said on Monday.
Chairing a high-level meeting with Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam, electricity minister P Thangamani and fisheries minister D. Jayakumar, the Chief Minister also said he has instructed a high-level team led by additional chief secretary Hans Raj Verma to rush to Kanyakumari district to assess the damages caused by the cyclone and submit a detailed report by December 11.
Listing the relief and rehabilitation work carried out by the Tamil Nadu Government, Palaniswami said in a statement after the meeting that 9,252 trees out of 15,000 uprooted due to Cyclone Ockhi have been removed and efforts to clear traffic and repair parts of national highways, state highways and urban roads at the earliest have been fast-tracked.
In all, 220 fishermen of 294 from Kanyakumari district who ventured into the sea have been rescued. With the help of Indian Air Force, Coast Guard and Indian Navy, 2,384 out of 2,570 fishermen from other areas of Tamil Nadu who went to the sea for fishing have also been rescued. Efforts are on to locate the remaining fishermen, Palaniswami said in the statement here.
He also said only 891 people are at relief centres in Kanyakumari district and that he has instructed officials to ensure that people who had lost their huts be immediately given relief.
The meeting was also told that electricity would be restored in the whole of Kanyakumari district in the next 48 hours and that additional personnel have been roped into repair lamp post and transformers that were affected. The statement said fishermen who have lost their fishing boats would be identified and relief would be disbursed to them immediately. "The Chief Minister also instructed officials to repair damage school buildings on war-footing and re-issue identity cards to people who lost their identity cards due to the cyclone," the statement said.
Hyderabad: Loud cries of Police down down and Khabardaar KCR were heard on Monday morning as students of OU gathered at the Arts College entrance and staged a protest, alleging that the government was responsible for the suicide of student E. Murali.
The students shouted slogans demanding justice, burnt effigies of Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao and pelted stones at the police. Some of them were taken away in two trucks.
Minister T. Harish Rao had called Muralis mother, Laxmi around midnight on Sunday and told her that the government will provide Rs 5 lakh for the family, said Shiva, a student from OU.
We refused the offered amount and demanded `50 lakh instead and a job for his younger brother. We refused to give the body to the cops, who were convincing the parents to accept the amount. It was then the police did a lathi-charge and stones were pelted, said Shiva.
At 10 am on Monday, a small group gathered at the Physics College demanding the release of students who were detained by the police on Sunday night after they refused to let the police take charge of the body.
The group raised slogans of 'We want justice' and 'Police go back'. Soon a group of students emerged from the Maneru hostel and joined them and together they confronted the police and told them to leave..
"They did not let us near them and started shouting 'Police go back' whenever we tried to approach them. We gave them permission to give condolences to the 21 year old student and not to make a fuss. However, they started marching forward and started pelting stones at us," said the Assistant Commissioner of Police J. Narsaiah.
Some of the stone pelters were loaded into the police vans, but "as per their request, we let them walk till the Arts College" the ACP said.
The by now large gathering before the Arts College started shouting their demands. When they got more aggressive and started pelting stones again, the police moved in, in order to get the situation under control, a cop said..
"We arrested 22 students under several sections of the IPC, including damaging government property," said Police Inspector of Osmania University, Ashok Reddy.
The protesters fled when the police advanced against them. They later burnt an effigy of the Chief Minister in front of Krishnaveni hostel. But the situation was brought under control and the protest stopped.
HYDERABAD: The two-bedroom housing scheme in Old Maredpally is leading to a political slugfest between TRS and Congress parties in Cantonment.
There was mild tension that was created at the area when Congress delegation that went to the site to take stock of the housing scheme was resisted by rival party members and few locals.
Congress leader Krishank Manne, who levelled charges of irregularities in identification of beneficiaries, stated that they went to see extent of land claimed by TRS leader P.L. Nagesh. According to Congress, Nageshs family was allotted three 2BHK houses in beneficiary list prepared by authorities.
The TRS leader claimed that his family owns 200 sq.yards of land. From what we observed it is less than that. Also, it is a housing board land that is being claimed wrongly as private land. We are going to show all documents to court, he said.
Meanwhile, Congress party stated that they are fully supporting the housing scheme, but only want the beneficiary list to be reworked so that only poorer sections get benefited.
Since daughter Ivanka Trump was here, father Donald cant be far behind. Questions about the ethics of Ivankas salesmanship were brushed aside. For all India cares, unpaid convicts in concentration camps can be compelled to keep the Ivanka Trump brand going. India loves celebrities. Remember the mad scramble by parliamentarians to pump presidential flesh in 2000 that left TV viewers around the world agape? A Bihar legislator vowed not to wash for three months the hand that Bill Clinton had shaken. Should Mr Trump, whom a columnist in Britains Guardian newspaper called a racist misogynist megalomaniac, be welcomed to India? Its not easy to be didactic about this. A good painter can be a bad man. A nations interests are eternal and perpetual and governments must follow them. Mr Trump recently enjoyed what were reckoned successful tours of China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines. He got on particularly well with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, whom thousands of Filipino human rights advocates, youth groups, and religious communities condemn for mass killings. Mr Duterte himself confesses to stabbing someone to death when he was only 16. Jail? he said once. Jeez. When I was a teenager, I was in and out of jail! He claims he is fighting a war on drugs.
Each country Mr Trump visited had its own reasons for lionising him. Some regard the US, irrespective of its leader, as vital to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organisation and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations whose deliberations he attended. Vietnam wants trade, the Philippines military backing. Like Japan and South Korea, both seek support against China. North Koreas nuclear programme makes it the regional bogey. For Mr Trump, North Korea is a global menace. The Chinese do not agree, but they want closer understanding with an America they regard as the only global power that is Chinas economic and military equal. Indias reasons for currying favour are less obvious. India needs trade and investment, seeks support against Pakistan (or Pakistani-backed terrorists) and, at one remove, against China. As George W. Bushs historic decision on Indias nuclear programme confirmed, these are also in the American interest. But the talks between Mr Trump and Mr Modi on the sidelines of the Asean summit in Manila, following discussions among Indian, US, Japanese and Australian officials, seem designed to take the relationship farther.
A reiteration of the comprehensive strategic partnership raises echoes of the long-discussed Quadrilateral alliance of four democracies, ostensibly to keep what is now called the Indo-Pacific region free and open but in fact to rein in China. The headlines screamed of rank militarism. According to White House briefings, Mr Trump and Mr Modi pledged to enhance their cooperation as major defence partners, resolving that two of the worlds great democracies should also have the worlds greatest militaries. This is where doubt creeps in. Heavy injections of US weapons did not turn Syngman Rhees South Korea, Reza Shahs Iran, Ferdinand Marcos Philippines or Ayub Khans Pakistan into stable democracies. Will possessing one of the worlds greatest militaries solve Indias problems of poverty and disease, illiteracy and unemployment? Will it provide our towns with dependable urban transport? Will it make a ramshackle rail network safer and comfortable? Will it ease the creaking judiciarys backlog of 27 million cases? Will a powerful military save New Delhi from being the most polluted city on earth? Or revive a moribund postal system that has gone from bad to worse so that it can take a month or more for a letter to travel between Delhi and Kolkata? Visiting India long before he became President, Richard Nixon commented that the wonder was not that India was badly governed, but that it was governed at all. It isnt any longer, unless an intrusive system of controls and surveillance passes for governance.
Mr Trump isnt interested in such essentials. A Trump Tower in Kolkata proclaims his commercial enterprise. Gratified that India bought more than 10 million barrels of US oil in recent months, and plans to spend $2 billion on American crude in the next 12 months, he expects to sell more. No wonder Ivanka Trump laid it on with a trowel in Hyderabad. What you are achieving here is truly extraordinary, she burbled to Mr Modi. From your childhood selling tea to your election as Indias Prime Minister, youve proven that transformational change is possible. Mr Modi gave her dinner at the Falaknuma Palace, whose fountains once splashed champagne for King George V while pins-and-needles showers sprayed Queen Mary with French perfume. Much can be justified on bilateral grounds but there are also domestic and international dimensions to the Trump presidency. The positions occupied by his daughter and son-in-law are hardly readily compatible with Abraham Lincolns dream of government of the people, by the people, for the people.
The FBI inquiry into the Russian connection is unearthing what looks like a can of worms. By withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, undermining the Iran nuclear deal, rejecting scope for a settlement with North Korea, and urging Japan and South Korea (perhaps also India) to greater militarism, Mr Trump may be increasing the threats to world peace. Faced with this situation and the prospect of disruptive street protests against the Trump state visit that Theresa May impetuously proposed, a British Labour Party politician said the other day that 91-year-old Queen Elizabeth II has a busy year ahead with another great-grandchild expected and Prince Harrys wedding with Meghan Markle. Dont those facts alone justify the government announcing a postponement of the state visit by at least, say, three years? he asked. Meanwhile, theres nothing to stop Mr Trump slipping into Britain on business trips. India can take note.
It is an interesting coincidence that the governments approval to a Bill that will enable banks to use the money deposited by citizens to save a bank on the verge of collapse and the news that PSU banks have written off loans worth Rs 55,356 crore in six months have come out almost simultaneously. These items expose the bitter truth of the possibility of an organised loot of the depositors hard-earned money and this will hopefully not go unnoticed by the depositors organisations. Bank deposits are to be used for productive purposes and not to bail out defaulters. This decision comes close on the heels of demonetisation which former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called organised loot.
When this latest permitted loot comes into force through the Resolution Corporation, it will surely be challenged in the courts but before that it is hoped that the government shows good sense and withdraws this bill. Most of the major defaulters are big corporates and it is a traversty of justice that the ordinary depositor should pay up for their defaults, even if they are genuine. There are hardly any cases wherein the properties of the defaulters have been taken over and moneys recovered through a quick sale of the same. In many cases the defaulters can afford to pay but dont and this was pointed out by former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan who said these defaulters throw lavish parties and buy lavish yachts but dont repay their loans. In the case of defaulters who are poor, particularly in rural areas, their cattle and utensils etc are taken over ruthlessly.
Additionally bank officials in charge of sanctioning loans are rarely taken to task even if they indulged in deliberate mismanagement. Many a times banks get calls from politicians to oblige their friends, and when these loans go bad, it is unfair that the common man should be made to pay. Surely there are several other ways in which banks can be bailed out without picking the money in the bank accounts of trusting depositors. In India, it is a well-known fact that a majority of people trust the government and prefer to put their money in nationalised banks rather than in risky assets like shares. If this Bill goes through, it would be a criminal betrayal of the trust of the depositors. The government has already infused nearly Rs 1 lakh crore of the peoples money in the banks over the last few years and has infused over Rs 25,000 crore this year as a first instalment. There is a grave need for the government to take this issue of bad loans seriously and bring in reforms that could eliminate, to a large extent, the issue of loans going sour. Any solution should be through the use of some separate fund. If loans have gone bad because of a government decision for instance, then the government should be made to pay for this and if it is the bank managers then they should be held accountable.
Dr. V. Sridhar, a professor at the Centre for IT and Public Policy at International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, has authored two books on telecom. He has been a member of Government of India committees on spectrum allocation and pricing. Dr Sridhar, an authority on Net neutrality, spoke to Mini Tejaswi on the recent controversy around the topic. Excerpts:
What are the key issues involved in the Net neutrality (NN) debate?
In its simplest form, Net neutrality means that the Internet Service Provider (ISP) has to treat all data bits in the same manner, irrespective of their source, destination and application that generated it. There should not be any discrimination of such data bits in terms of price or priority. While the opponent camp includes telcos and ISPs, the proponents are the Content Providers (CPs). While the opponents say that strict enforcement of NN reduces their incentives to improve the underlying telecom and Internet infrastructure due to limited monetising opportunities, the proponents indicate that without NN, the small CPs will not be able to compete against larger ones thus killing innovation and business prospects of small entrepreneurs.
How will Net neutrality impact netizens and enterprises in India?
Net neutrality will provide a level-playing field for smaller as well as larger CPs and hence will provide an opportunity for the Indian start-ups in the Internet content and application space to compete with global giants such as Google and Facebook. For netizens, it can have mixed results. For example, programmes such as Free Basics of Facebook could possibly provide netizens free access to the content and applications.However, it will not provide them access to Internet in its entirety.
TRAI has recently spoken about forming a regulatory body to monitor and deal with any violation of Net neutrality. What should be the broader objective of such a body?
Though TRAI has come with detailed recommendations on NN recently, monitoring and enforcement are big challenges. We need to have large amount of granular data on access speed, pricing plans, across both access and backhaul networks, plus a detailed analysis of the same before any violation of NN is detected.
In 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in favour of Net neutrality in the US but the new regime has a change of mind and plans to repeal the existing rules. What do you think is the reason for this change and what could be the impact?
As mentioned earlier, monitoring and enforcement of NN is a big challenge for regulators. The argument of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is that NN amounts to micromanaging the operations and business models of the ISPs. It also curtails the ISPs in terms of monetisation of their assets such as radio spectrum and infrastructure and hence provides a barrier for further investment. This could potentially impact quality of service delivery. Under the Obama administration, the Title II provisions of the Communications Act of 1934 reclassifies Internet service offerings as telecommunication service (as opposed to information service as stated earlier) and empower the regulatory authority to scrutinise the conduct of broadband service providers and take penal actions if violations are found. Mr Pai is also against this provision as he says it will lead to over-regulation of the ISPs.
Are service providers in India following Net neutrality guidelines in true sense?
After TRAI notified Prohib-ition of discriminatory tariffs for data services regulation in February 2016 principally against zero rating (free data) of Free Basics programme offered by Facebook, the ISPs have been cautious about discriminatory pricing. While it is easy to notice any form of discriminatory pricing, prioritisation is difficult to observe. That is whether ISPs have been accelerating one application/content (e.g. Hike Messa-ging) compared to others (e.g. WhatsApp) is difficult to monitor and regulate.
TRAI in its recent recommendations has focussed only on ISPs. I and Prof. Rohit Prasad at Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, have always argued and submitted our response to TRAI consultation process that NN advocates must examine its applicability not only to ISPs but also to CPs and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) who are the intermediaries between ISPs and CPs. The recent TRAI recommendation clearly has absolved CDNs and not even mentioned CPs under NN regulation. Hence, any vertical integration between CPs, CDNs and ISPs might escape the scrutiny of the NN regulation.
Is Internet functioning with-out prejudice or preferential treatment to any particular sites or services or do you see compromises happening?
We need to understand that ISPs are just one part of the Net neutrality puzzle. While the focus has been traditionally on ISPs discriminatory practices, no one talks about Googles sponsored search or Facebooks advertisements which are also one form of discrimination. While it is difficult to detect and enforce such discrimination, we need to be conscious of the fact that some of the CPs with valuations which are multiple times that of the ISPs could discriminate and distort the equity of the Internet. Hence, apart from the ISPs, Content Providers also need to be brought under close watch!
Researchers think up to 300 eggs may be present, some buried under the exposed fossils.
A dazzling discovery in northwestern China of hundreds of fossilized pterosaur eggs is providing a fresh understanding of these flying reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs including evidence that their babies were born flightless and needed parental care.
Scientists said on Thursday they unearthed 215 eggs of the fish-eating Hamipterus tianshanensis a species whose adults had a crest atop an elongated skull, pointy teeth and a wingspan of more than 11 feet (3.5 meters) including 16 eggs containing partial embryonic remains.
Fossils of hundreds of male and female adult Hamipterus individuals were found alongside juveniles and eggs at the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region site, making this Cretaceous Period species that lived 120 million years ago perhaps the best understood of all pterosaurs.
We want to call this region Pterosaur Eden,' said palaeontologist Shunxing Jiang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. Pterosaurs were Earths first flying vertebrates. Birds and bats appeared later.
Until now, no pterosaur eggs had been found with embryos preserved in three dimensions. Researchers think up to 300 eggs may be present, some buried under the exposed fossils. The embryonic bones indicated the hind legs of a baby Hamipterus developed more rapidly than crucial wing elements like the humerus bone, said palaeontologist Alexander Kellner of Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.
Some birds can fly on the same day they break out from the egg, while some others will need a long period of parental care. Our conclusion is that a baby Hamipterus can walk but cant fly, Jiang said an unexpected finding.
The researchers believe these pterosaurs lived in a bustling colony near a large freshwater lake. Kellner cited evidence that females gathered together to lay eggs in nesting colonies and returned over the years to the same nesting site. They suspect the eggs and some juvenile and adult individuals were washed away from a nesting site in a storm and into the lake, where they were preserved and later fossilized.
The oblong eggs, up to about 3 inches (7.2 cm) long, were pliable with a thin, hard outer layer marked by cracking and crazing covering a thick membrane inner layer, resembling soft eggs of some modern snakes and lizards. There had been a paucity of pterosaur eggs and embryos in the paleontological record because it is difficult for soft-shelled eggs to fossilize. The research was published in the journal Science.
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Terrorist attacks, targeting police and military personnel, have increased following the ouster of former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by the military. (Photo:PTI/ File)
Cairo: Five terrorists were killed Monday in exchange of fire with security forces in Sharqeya governorate, security sources said. They said that terrorists clashed with security forces during a raid on Belbeis-10th of Ramadan road in Sharqeya.
The raid came over a week after a terrorist attack on a mosque in North Sinai in which more than 300 people were killed.
Terrorist attacks, targeting police and military personnel, have increased following the ouster of former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by the military, following massive protests against his rule. Hundreds of police and army personnel have been killed since then.
The military has launched security campaigns in Egypts restive North Sinai province, arrested suspects and demolished houses that belong to terrorists, including those facilitating tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip.
In the lawsuit, the National Venture Capital Association argued that the Trump administration bypassed proper procedures when it delayed the International Entrepreneur Rule. (Photo: File/ Representational)
Washington: A federal judge on Friday ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to rescind its delay of a rule that allows some foreign entrepreneurs to stay in the United States to grow their companies, court documents show.
Judge James Boasberg of US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in favour of a lawsuit filed by a US venture capitalist group in September challenging a delay by DHS of the International Entrepreneur Rule.
In the lawsuit, the National Venture Capital Association argued that the Trump administration bypassed proper procedures when it delayed the International Entrepreneur Rule, which had been due to go into effect in July 2017.
The trade group was later joined by several tech start-ups active in the United States that were founded by foreign entrepreneurs who wanted to stay in the country and work with their businesses through the entrepreneur rule but are now unable to.
The rule, proposed by the administration of President Barack Obama, would allow some foreign start-up founders to stay in the United States for up to five years to develop their businesses.
Instead, in July the administration of President Donald Trump pushed back implementation to March 2018, and said it was "highly likely" to ultimately rescind the rule.
Boasberg, in his ruling issued on Friday, agreed with the lawsuit's claim that the government's actions violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires advance notice of new rules.
"This decision is an important reminder that this administration must comply with the law and allow the public to have a voice during the agency rule-making process," Leslie Dellon, an attorney at the American Immigration Council, said in a statement.
Mr Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the FBI about a discussion with the former Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, in late December 2016 regarding sanctions. (Photo: AP)
Washington: Backers of a US-Russian plan to build nuclear reactors across the Middle East bragged after the US election they had backing from Donald Trump's national security adviser Michael Flynn for a project that required lifting sanctions on Russia, documents reviewed by Reuters show.
The documents, which have not previously been made public, reveal new aspects of the plan, including the proposed involvement of a Russian company currently under US sanctions to manufacture nuclear equipment. That company, major engineering and construction firm OMZ OAO, declined to comment.
The documents do not show whether Mr Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, took concrete steps to push the proposal with Mr Trump and his aides.
But they do show that Washington-based nuclear power consultancy ACU Strategic Partners believed that both Mr Flynn, who had worked as an adviser to the firm as late as mid 2016, and Mr Trump were firmly in its corner.
"Donald Trump's election as president is a game changer because Trump's highest foreign policy priority is to stabilize US relations with Russia which are now at a historical low-point," ACU's managing director, Alex Copson, wrote in a November 16, 2016 email to potential business partners, eight days after the election.
White House officials did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. ACU declined comment and also declined to make Mr Copson available for an interview. Previously they told a congressional committee that they had not had any dealings with Flynn since May 2016, before Mr Trump became the Republican Party's presidential candidate.
Mr Flynn's lawyer, Robert Kelner, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the FBI about a discussion with the former Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, in late December 2016 regarding sanctions.
The documents also show that ACU proposed ending Ukraine's opposition to lifting sanctions on Russia by giving a Ukrainian company a USD billion contract to provide turbine generators for reactors to be built in Saudi Arabia and other Mideast nations.
The contract to state-owned Turboatom, and loans to Ukraine from Gulf Arab states, would "require Ukraine to support lifting US and EU sanctions on Russia," Copson wrote in the November 16 email.
A Turboatom spokeswoman said she did not have an immediate comment on the matter.
The email was titled "TRUMP/PUTIN ME Marshall plan CONCEPT." ME stands for Middle East. The title, evoking the post-World War Two plan to rebuild Western European economies, reflected the hopes of the plan's backers that Mr Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin could cooperate on a project that would boost Middle East economies.
The email can be seen here.
The ACU documents reviewed by Reuters include emails, business presentations and financial estimates and date from late autumn 2016.
Ready to go
As part of their investigation into the Trump election campaign's ties to Russia, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Democrats on the House of Representatives' Oversight Committee are probing whether Mr Flynn promoted the Middle East nuclear power project as national security adviser in Mr Trump's White House.
Mr Flynn resigned after just 24 days as national security adviser after it became known he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence by telling him he had not discussed US sanctions on Russia with Kislyak in late December.
Read: Former Trump adviser Flynn pleads guilty to lying to FBI in Russia probe
In response to questions about the emails and documents, ACU referred Reuters to letters written in June and September by ACU scientist Thomas Cochran to the House Oversight Committee.
In those letters, Cochran had laid out the project's strategy, describing a "ready-to-go" consortium that included French, Russian, Israeli and Ukrainian interests, without naming specific companies.
Representative Elijah Cummings, the committee's top Democrat, said the panel's Republican chairman, Trey Gowdy, has for months rejected Democrats' requests to ask the White House for documents pertaining to the ACU proposal.
Mr Gowdy "has blocked all efforts to allow committee members to vote on issuing subpoenas," Cummings said.
Mr Gowdy did not respond to requests for comment.
The ACU's nuclear reactor plan aimed to provide Washington's Middle East allies with nuclear power in a way that didn't risk nuclear weapons proliferation and also helped counter Iranian influence, improve dismal US-Russian relations, and revive the moribund US nuclear industry, according to the documents.
The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post reported this week that Mr Flynn pushed a version of the nuclear project within the White House by instructing his staff to rework a memo written by a former business associate into policy for Mr Trump to sign.
Two US officials familiar with the issue said the policy document Flynn prepared for Mr Trump's approval proposed working with Russia on a nuclear reactor project but did not specifically mention ACU. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they did not know if Mr Trump had read the memo or acted upon it.
This was a big win
On November 18, 2016, 10 days after Mr Trump won the presidential election, ACU's Copson received an email from nuclear non-proliferation expert Reuben Sorensen saying that he had updated Flynn on the nuclear project's status. Sorensen's role in the project was not clear from the emails.
"Flynn is getting closer to (being named) National Security Advisor. Expect an announcement soon. This is a big win for the ACU project," Sorensen wrote.
"Spoke with him via backchannels earlier this week. He has always believed in the vision of the ACU effort ... We need to let him get settled into the new position, but update him shortly thereafter," Sorensen added.
The email can be seen here.
Reuters could not independently confirm a briefing took place. Sorensen did not reply to an email seeking comment.
On November 30, 2016, Copson briefed US Representative Ed Royce, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on the nuclear project, an email shows.
Copson was joined by Jim Hamel, a senior official from Curtiss-Wright Corp., which has a nuclear division based in Royce's California district and was eager for a role in the multi-billion dollar project.
In a follow-up email on December 5 to a Royce aide, Mr Hamel wrote, "We hope that the Chairman will follow-up on Alex's suggestion to reach out to General Flynn" to discuss the project.
Royce's spokesman, Cory Fritz, confirmed the briefing to Reuters. "No action was ever taken by the chairman or the committee," he said in an email.
Mr Hamel and Curtiss-Wright declined to comment.
Mr Flynn was an adviser to ACU from April 2015 to June 2016, according to amended financial disclosure forms he filed in August 2017 to the Office of Government Ethics.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee say that when Mr Flynn applied last year to renew his government security clearance, he failed to disclose a June 2015 trip he made to Egypt and Israel to promote the reactor project. Mr Flynn has not commented on the trips.
Mohammad Suleiman was born with Down Syndrome and he has intellectual difficulties, according to his father. (Photo: AFP/Representational)
Houston: A six-year-old Muslim boy with Down syndrome was feared as a terrorist by his teacher in a school in the United States after he kept repeating "Allah" and "boom" in his classroom, a media report said on Sunday.
Mohammad Suleiman was born with Down Syndrome and he has intellectual difficulties, according to his father.
He said his son's regular teacher in an elementary school had left and a substitute teacher called police in Pearland, around 20 miles south of Houston, in Texas, about his son.
The teacher also said the school told the officer that Mohammad could talk.
Disgusted by the allegations, Mohammad's father said his son did not speak at all and had the mental capacity of a one-year-old, The Independent reported.
"They claim that he's a terrorist. This is so stupid, this is discrimination actually. It's not implied discrimination, its a hundred per cent discrimination," the father said.
The Pearland Police Department said it has concluded its investigation and found no further action was needed.
However, the region's Child Protective Services department said its investigation was ongoing.
Mattis is the first top US official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the new South Asia Strategy that was announced by President Donald Trump on August 21. (Photo: PTI/ File)
Washington: US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has said that he intends to work hard to find common ground with Pakistan in the fight against terrorism, which is necessary to restore the level of stability in South Asia to allow economic development.
Ahead of his visit to Islamabad, Mattis said he wants to work with Pakistan, listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective, and to address the problems.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Pakistan, since taking over the charge of the Pentagon. Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
Saeed is still roaming free, despite vigourous warning from the Trump Administration. "The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," Mattis told reporters travelling with him on his way to Pakistan from Egypt.
Mattis is the first top US official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the new South Asia Strategy that was announced by President Donald Trump on August 21.
"We know we have some common ground. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their innocent people and troops murdered and wounded by terrorists, so we know that there is a common ground," said Mattis.
Similarly, he said, there is common ground between Afghanistan and Pakistan, because there are terrorist groups that try to move back and forth in order to live in one and attack in the other.
"Now it is about how much more common grounds can we find by listening to one another without being combative with one another and listening to others perspective," Mattis added.
"But at the same time, as the (Pakistan Army Chief) General (Qamar Javed Bajwa) has said, he wants no havens for terrorists anywhere, so we will work together and we'll find that common ground, if we have the will to, he said.
"And then we'll work on how we address the problems where we can work together," the Defense Secretary said. Responding to a question, he said he would not characterize everything, over the past 16 years, as failures.
"There is clearly an abundance of areas where we have to double down, and I am optimistic at this point that because of what our adversaries, our mutual enemies are doing, that we can find ways to work together," he said.
Mattis said both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistan military, the NATO-led militaries of 39 nations have all been in fights in Washington.
"We've got to find a way to work together". He said there is "always an urgency to something" when 39 nations plus Afghanistan have their troops in the midst of a long war, where causalities are being taken.
"These are 39 of the most economically powerful, generally speaking, most long-term democratic institutions in the world. These are powerful nations morally, economically and diplomatically, and certainly militarily," he added.
Mattis said that it was essential in South Asia that all work together to restore the level of stability that allows for the economy to build.
"I mean, can you imagine a border between Pakistan and India where economic trade is not ongoing to the benefit of people on both sides of that border. We cannot only imagine it; it's a reality right now," Mattis said.
So, the US Defence Secretary said that we have got to work together on this, and there's a sense of urgency about that.
"There are people who are living below the poverty line in both those countries. So as you look at this problem, if you'll expand the problem you can understand the sense of urgency to move beyond violence and get back to the normal order of things," he said. Mattis is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and General Bajwa.
"General Bajwa is a mature officer with a deep background in not just military matters, but South Asia security issues, and we have got to find a way to move beyond this constant fighting that's characterized the area," he said.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding. (Photo: AP)
Washington: US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said he intends to work hard to find common ground with Pakistan in the fight against terrorism, which is necessary to restore the level of stability in South Asia to allow economic development.
Ahead of his visit to Islamabad, Mattis said he wants to work with Pakistan, listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective, to address the problems.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait and Pakistan, since taking over the charge of the Pentagon.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
Saeed is still roaming free, despite tough warning from the Trump Administration.
"The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," Mattis told reporters travelling with him on his way to Pakistan from Egypt.
Mattis is the first top US official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the new South Asia Strategy that was announced by President Donald Trump on August 21.
"We know we have some common ground. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their troops killed and wounded by terrorists. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their innocent people murdered and wounded by terrorists, so we know that there is common ground".
Similarly, he said, there is common ground between Afghanistan and Pakistan, because there are terrorist groups that try to move back and forth, that do move back and forth in order to live in one and attack in the other, that sort of thing.
"So we know there's common ground; it's how much more common ground can we find by listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective," Mattis said.
"But at the same time, as the (Pakistan Army Chief) General (Qamar Javed Bajwa) has said, he wants no havens for terrorists anywhere, so we will work together and we'll find that common ground, if we have the will to.
Read: Act against terrorist safe havens or we will: CIA warns Pak
"And then we'll work on how we address the problems where we can work together," the Defense Secretary said.
Responding to a question, he said he would not characterise everything over the past 16 years as failures.
"There is clearly an abundance of areas where we have to double down, and I am optimistic at this point that because of what our adversaries, our mutual enemies are doing, that we can find ways to work together," he said.
Mattis said both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistan military, the NATO-led militaries of 39 nations have all been in fights here. "We've got to find a way to work together".
He said there is "always an urgency to something" when 39 nations plus Afghanistan have their troops in the midst of a long war, where causalities are being taken.
"These are 39 of the most economically powerful, generally speaking, most long-term democratic institutions in the world. These are powerful nations morally, economically and diplomatically, and certainly militarily," he said.
Mattis said that it was essential in South Asia that all work together to restore the level of stability that allows for the economy to build.
"I mean, can you imagine a border between Pakistan and India where economic trade is not ongoing to the benefit of people on both sides of that border. We can not only imagine it; it's a reality right now," Mattis said.
So, the US Defence Secretary said that we have got to work together on this, and there's a sense of urgency about that.
"There's people who are living below the poverty line in both those countries. So as you look at this problem, if you'll expand the problem you can understand the sense of urgency to move beyond violence and get back to the normal order of things," he said.
Mattis is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and General Bajwa.
"General Bajwa is a mature officer with a deep background in not just military matters, but South Asia security issues, and we have got to find a way to move beyond this constant fighting that's characterised the area," he said.
Tourists gather to watch Mount Agung at Amed beach in Karangasem on Indonesias resort island of Bali last week. (Photo: AFP/ File)
Bali: Gushing ash from Balis Mount Agung volcano has dissipated into a wispy plume of steam, and Australian airlines that cancelled some flights to the Indonesian resort island on the weekend have returned to near-normal schedules.
Indonesias disaster mitigation agency said on Monday, the volcano remains at its highest alert level but most of Bali is safe for tourists.
The exclusion zone around the volcano still extends 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the crater in some directions. More than 55,000 people are living in shelters.
Read: Bali airport re-opens as volcanic ash shifts direction
Airlines Jetstar and Virgin Australia, which cancelled flights over the weekend even as the ash cloud shrank dramatically, said they were resuming services from Monday.
The regions volcanic ash monitoring centre in Darwin, Australia, has stopped issuing advisories for Agung, reflecting that its currently posing no threat to aircraft. It would resume advisories if theres another eruption.
Tens of thousands of tourists were stranded when ash closed Balis international airport for nearly three days last week.
Indonesian government volcanologists say Agungs crater is about one-third filled by lava and there is still a high risk of more eruptions.
The volcanos last major eruptions in 1963 killed more than 1,100 people and it was active for more than a year.
David Boutelier, a geologist at the University of Newcastle in Australia, said the chance of a violent explosion is still very high but possibly not as high as several weeks ago because pressure is being released.
Islamabad: Jamaatud Dawa chief Hafiz Mohammed Saeed has said that he will contest the general elections 2018.
Speaking to reporters in Lahore, Saeed said he would contest on the National Assembly seat from the platform of the Milli Muslim League (MML).
Earlier in August this year, the JuD had launched the launched the MML. Religious scholar and longtime office bearer of the group Saifullah Khalid is the president of MML. The party had claimed to work to make Pakistan a real Islamic and welfare state.
Saeed, the alleged mastermind of 2008 Mumbai attacks, said that the decision to field his party though placed on an anti-terror watch list in February in the political arena was aimed at helping to highlight the Kashmir cause internationally.
I strongly believe that after winning elections, the MML will be able to work decisively for the Kashmir cause this is why I support it, said Saeed.
Blaming the government for adopting a soft stance over the issue, he said Pakistans incumbent government had bowed down to appease New Delhi.
However, he said that he would underscore the struggle of Kashmiris by holding conferences, seminars and public meetings. No matter what, we will not abandon the Kashmir cause. The government has failed to achieve any breakthrough or help the Kashmiris through its back channel diplomacy, the JuD chief.
Saeed termed it a good sign that Pakistans flags were being hoisted in various parts of India, and Indian Muslims distributed sweets after his release.
Beijing: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau began a visit to China focused on trade Monday with a stop at social media giant Sina, where he talked up the advantages of travel to his homeland.
Accompanied by four Cabinet ministers, Trudeau is due to hold talks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang later on Tuesday before meeting President Xi Jinping the following day.
At Sina, owner of the phenomenally popular Twitter-like Weibo microblogging service, Trudeau took part in a panel discussion that touched on Canadian tourism draws, as well as the nation's beer and wine, according to Chinese and Canadian reports.
2018 marks the China-Canada year of tourism and Canada is hoping to double the number of Chinese tourist arrivals. China and Canada are also in exploratory talks on a framework for a trade agreement, although reports say Ottawa has been pushing for provisions on the environment, governance, labour and gender issues.
Beijing generally seeks to avoid references that might highlight the one-party authoritarian state's human rights record. China has positioned itself as a leading advocate of free trade, particularly since President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Yet foreign businesses complain often that China closes many key areas to foreign investment, while Xi is known to favour a centralized economic model with special support for state-owned industries.
Canada has remained part of a pan-Pacific trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, even after President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the agreement.
During recent talks in Danang, Vietnam, Trudeau lobbied for strong provisions for environmental protection, labour rights, and gender issues and the name of the initiative was altered to be the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
China largely imports wood and agricultural products, ore, fuels and seafood from Canada, while Canada imports machinery, furniture and sporting goods and textiles from
China. The trade imbalance has narrowed, but China still ran a surplus of about USD 17 billion with Canada during the first half of this year, according to the Canadian government.
The annual exercise comes five days after the nuclear- armed North test-fired a new ICBM, which it says brings the whole of the United States within range. (Photo: File/ Representational)
Seoul: The US and South Korea Monday kicked off their largest ever joint air exercise, an operation North Korea has labelled an "all-out provocation", days after Pyongyang fired its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile.
The five-day Vigilant Ace drill - involving 230 aircraft, including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and tens of thousands of troops - began Monday morning, Seoul's air force said.
Pyongyang over the weekend blasted the drill, accusing US President Donald's Trump's administration of "begging for nuclear war".
The annual exercise comes five days after the nuclear- armed North test-fired a new ICBM, which it says brings the whole of the United States within range.
As tensions surged, US Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican and foreign policy hawk, warned that the US was moving closer to "preemptive war" with the North.
Read: Preemptive war with North Korea more likely, warns US lawmaker
"If there's an underground nuclear test (by the North), then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States," Graham told the CBS show "Face the Nation".
The isolated and impoverished North has staged six increasingly powerful atomic tests since 2006 - most recently in September.
"The preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures. Every missile test, every underground test of a nuclear weapon, means the marriage is more likely," he said.
Graham's remarks echoed those of Trump's National Security Adviser HR McMaster, who told a security forum on Saturday that the potential for war with the North "is increasing every day."
The North has boasted that the Hwasong 15 ICBM tested on Wednesday is capable of delivering a "super-large" nuclear warhead anywhere in the US mainland.
Analysts agree that the latest test showed a big improvement in potential range, but say it was likely achieved using a dummy warhead that would have been quite light.
They say a missile carrying a much heavier nuclear warhead would struggle to travel as far.
They are also sceptical that Pyongyang has mastered the sophisticated technology required to protect such a warhead from the extreme temperatures and stresses encountered as the missile hurtles back to Earth.
The North's widely-condemned nuclear and missile programmes have made significant progress under leader Kim Jong-Un, who has overseen four nuclear tests and dozens of missile launches since taking power in 2011.
The months-long nuclear standoff between Kim and Trump - as well as their trading of personal insults - has fuelled concerns of another conflict, more than six decades after 1950-53 Korean War that left much of the peninsula in ruins.
But even some Trump advisers say US military options are limited when Pyongyang could launch an artillery barrage on the South Korean capital Seoul - only around 50 kilometres from the heavily-fortified border and home to 10 million people.
The girl was in the McDonalds outlet on Seven Sisters road in Holloway when a guard asked her to take off the hijab if she wanted to queue up for ordering food, The Independent reported. (Photo: Representational Image)
A 19-year-old Muslim student with hijab was stopped from placing an order in a McDonalds restaurant in north London, according to a media report.The girl was in the McDonalds outlet on Seven Sisters road in Holloway when a guard asked her to take off the hijab if she wanted to queue up for ordering food, The Independent reported. Its just a matter of taking it (hijab) off, the guard told the girl. She responded: Its not just a matter of taking it off. I wear this for religious reasons and Im not ashamed of it, and I will stand in line and I will get the food I want, because this isnt okay.
Another customer intervened to defend the girl, a British Muslim of Middle Eastern descent, but was told by the guard, Its none of your business.The restaurant later issued an apology and said it has suspended the security guard involved in the incident. In a statement, McDonalds said it has no policy which restricts or prevents anyone wearing a hijab, or any other religious attire, from entering our restaurants.
The Bible will be on show with the St Cuthbert Gospel, the earliest intact European book, which was also made at Wearmouth-Jarrow and was acquired by the British Library in 2012.
The worlds oldest complete Latin Bible in existence is set to return to the UK after over 1,300 years for display in an exhibition by the British Library next year.The one-foot thick Codex Amiatinus, one of the three great single-volume Bibles which was made at the monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow, is returning to England for the first time in 1,300 years, after it was taken to Italy as a gift for the Pope in 716, the British Library said.
It is now held in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence which is generously loaning the manuscript next year, the library said in a blog post on November 30. The Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition will be open at the British Library from October 19, 2018 to February 19, 2019. The Bible will be on show with the St Cuthbert Gospel, the earliest intact European book, which was also made at Wearmouth-Jarrow and was acquired by the British Library in 2012.
The two books are very different: while the St Cuthbert Gospel, which contains only the Gospel of John, can be held in one hand, the spine of Codex Amiatinus, containing the whole Bible, is nearly a foot thick. These two books will be exhibited alongside the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of Britains greatest artistic treasures, and other illuminated manuscripts of international significance made in the late 7th and 8th centuries, it said. Ranging from the 5th to the 11th Centuries, the exhibition will explore this long, dynamic period when the English language was used and written down for the first time and a kingdom of England was first created. The library said a key theme in the exhibition will be the development of the English language and the emergence of English literature.
Pope Francis has said he wept hearing the plight first-hand of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, adding that this meeting was a condition set for his trip to Myanmar and Bangladesh. The Rohingya meet was a highly symbolic gesture of solidarity with the Muslim minority fleeing violence in Myanmar, and the Pontiff said on his plane flying back to Rome that the refugees wept as well. I knew that I was going to meet the Rohingyas but I did not know where and how; for me it was one of the conditions of the trip, the Vicar of Christ said.
The first phase of the Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman coast was inaugurated Sunday by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. (Photo: AFP)
Beijing: China Monday hoped that the launch of the strategic Chabahar port in Iran which enables India to directly trade with Afghanistan besides rivalling Pakistan's Gwadar port is conducive to regional peace and stability.
The first phase of the Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman coast was inaugurated Sunday by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, opening a new strategic route connecting Iran, India and Afghanistan while bypassing Pakistan, and reflecting growing convergence of interests among the three countries.
Read: China invites more countries to take part in CPEC projects
The port in Iran's Sistan-Balochistan province on the energy-rich nation's southern coast is easily accessible from India's western coast and is increasingly seen as a counter to Pakistan's Gwadar port, which is being developed with Chinese investment and is located around 80 kms from Chabahar.
Asked how China views the launch of the project, considering that China is investing heavily in Gwadar as part of the USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang declined to comment on it directly.
"As for the (Chabahar) port, I want to give you a principled answer. We welcome the development of friendly relations between the regional countries and conduct mutually beneficial cooperation," he said.
"We hope the relevant cooperation can be conducive to maintaining regional peace and promoting regional stability and prosperity," he said.
The Chabahar port is being considered a gateway to golden opportunities for trade by India, Iran and Afghanistan with central Asian countries besides ramping up trade among the three countries in the wake of Pakistan denying transit access to New Delhi.
She said the period of Ansari's detention before conviction may be counted as sentence served, that he may he be released on humanitarian grounds, and that he may be allowed to talk to his family on the phone. (Photo: File/ Representational)
Lahore: The mother of an Indian engineer, who was sentenced after he sneaked into Pakistan from Afghanistan to meet a girl he had befriended on the internet, has appealed to President Mamnoon Hussain to remit the remaining period of her son's prison term.
In a letter to Hussain, the mother of Hamid Ansari said: "Mohtaram Sadar - your government has shown clemency to foreign nationals who have committed far graver offences than Hamid Ansari.
"The country's credit for listening to humanitarian calls will go up and the chances of relief for Pakistani citizens in Indian prisons might improve if you could remit the remaining period of Hamids prison term."
She said the period of Ansari's detention (three years) before conviction may be counted as sentence served, that he may he be released on humanitarian grounds, and that he may be allowed to talk to his family on the phone.
The Indian national was tried in a military court and was awarded three years' vigorous imprisonment that started from December 15, 2015 and will end on December 14 2018.
Ansari, a Mumbai resident, suffered injuries after he was attacked by inmates in the Peshawar Central prison in 2016.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Ansari, an assistant professor at an Indian management institute, became friendly with a girl belonging to Kohat (in Kyber Pakhtaunkhawa province of Pakistan) through Facebook.
"When she feared the denial of her rights, he decided to come to her rescue. He could not get a Pakistan visa but was able to fly to Afghanistan and enter Pakistan, though without valid papers. He was arrested from a hotel in Kohat on November 14, 2012.
"Thus, for five years he has been in the custody of the Pakistani authorities. Charged with espionage and not with illegal entry into Pakistan, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment by a military court," says known rights activist I A Rehman.
"There is no doubt that Hamid Ansari committed an offence but his motives, love or a desire to help a woman in distress, are strong mitigating circumstances. He has already suffered enough for his naivete," he said and demanded his immediate release.
On the other hand, a Pakistani woman journalist who was allegedly kidnapped while pursuing the case of Ansari two years ago, has gone missing again two months after her return.
Read: Pak journalist abducted for helping Indian national returns after 2 yrs
President of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances Justice (retd.) Javed Iqbal had said Shahzadi had been recovered from an area on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on Thursday night.
"Non-state actors and anti-state agencies had abducted her and she has been recovered from their custody," Iqbal said.
Rehman said Shahzadi has gone missing again. "Missing of Shahzadi two months after her return from two-year captivity is alarming."
He says Shahzadi, a young and poor journalist without any clout, had dreams of helping her fellow human beings.
"When she learnt that an Indian named Hamid Ansari was in trouble for trying to help a Pakistani girl, she thought this was a case that could help her establish herself as a bold human rights defender and a skilful journalist.
"She persuaded Ansaris mother to grant her authority/permission to pursue the matter before the Peshawar High Court. She also met the Indian high commissioner at a public meeting, probably to seek his help in the case," he said.
The 26-year-old local reporter of Daily Nai Khaber and Metro News TV channel had gone missing on August 19, 2015, when some unknown men allegedly kidnapped her while she was en route to her office in an auto-rickshaw from her home in a populated locality of Lahore.
On her return in this October she was not allowed to speak to anyone. Later, her family reported she has gone missing again.
The three references against the Sharif family are related to the Al-Azizia Company and Hill Metal Establishment, Flagship Investment Ltd and the Avenfield properties. (Photo: File)
Islamabad: Pakistan's accountability court adjourned till afternoon the hearing on three corruption references against ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif after his lawyer informed that the high court was to give its verdict on a plea of clubbing of graft cases Monday.
The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had in September registered cases against Sharif, his family in the Islamabad Accountability Court, following a Supreme Court verdict.
Sharif, along with his daughter Maryam and son-in-law Muhammad Safdar, appeared before the accountability court here Monday, amid tight security.
His lawyer Khawaja Harris requested Judge Mohammad Bashir to suspend proceedings and wait for the Islamabad High Court's (IHC) decision on a petition by Sharif to club his three graft cases into one, as all were related to his alleged making of assets beyond the known sources of means.
The IHC had completed the hearing and reserved its judgement on November 23. Sunday, the court announced that it will give its verdict around midday Monday.
The accountability court after hearing the argument from the NAB prosecutor postponed hearing till 1 pm (local time) and allowed Sharif to go home but ordered him to remain present when the hearing begins again.
The court had on November 8 rejected a plea by Sharif to club his cases following which he challenged the decision in the Islamabad High Court.
The three references against the Sharif family are related to the Al-Azizia Company and Hill Metal Establishment, Flagship Investment Ltd and the Avenfield (London) properties.
Sharif and his sons, Hassan and Hussain, have been named in all three NAB references, while Maryam and her husband Safdar named only in the Avenfield reference.
Maryam on November 23 requested exemption from personal appearance between December 5, 2017 and January 5, 2018, while Sharif sought exemption between December 5 and 12.
The court is expected to give its decision on the two pleas Monday.
November, Sharif was indicted in all three cases while his daughter Maryam and her husband Muhammad Safdar, co-accused with Sharif in only one case, were also indicted along with Sharif.
Sharif's sons Hassan and Hussian have failed to appear in the court despite repeated summons, which prompted it to separate their case.
Ahead of the verdict, hundreds of security personnel have been deployed around the court premises to deal with any situation.
The cases are based on July 28 verdict by the Supreme Court which disqualified Sharif and ordered to launch three corruption cases against him and his family, and one case against finance minister Ishaq Dar.
Saeed, who continues to be an influential person in Pakistan's certain religious groups despite being an internationally designated terrorist, announced on Saturday that he would contest the general election in 2018. (Photos: AP)
Islamabad: Former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, who earlier came in support of the terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), has now said that he would welcome an alliance with global terrorist and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed for the general election in 2018.
Responding to a question about having an alliance with JuD chief Saeed, Musharraf in an interview to Pakistan based Aaj News channel said, "so far, there has be no talks with them but if they want to be part of the alliance, I would welcome them,"
The former military ruler had in November announced the formation of a grand political alliance after a consultative meeting between representatives of around two dozen political parties, including the Sunni Tehreek, Majlis-i-Wahdatul Muslimeen, Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) and Mr Musharraf's own All Pakistan Muslim League (APML).
However, several parties dissociated themselves from Musharraf's Awami Ittehad alliance after he announced the formation of a "grand alliance" of 23 parties.
According to media reports, two major partners of the alliance - the Pakistan Awami Tehrik and the Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen - denied being part of the coalition headed by Musharraf.
Saeed, who continues to be an influential person in Pakistan's certain religious groups despite being an internationally designated terrorist, announced on Saturday that he would contest the general election in 2018.
The announcement comes days after the Lahore High Court ordered his release from the house arrest.
However, the JuD chief did not disclose anything about the constituency he would like to contest from.
Though, the JuD formed Milli Muslim League (MML) in August when Saeed was detained in Lahore, the party yet to be recognised by the Election Commission of Pakistan.
Saeed is a wanted terrorist by India and the United States for his alleged role in masterminding the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai that claimed 166 lives.
He even carries a bounty of 10 million USD (approx. Rs 66 crore) on his head for his role in the attack.
Musharraf had recently called himself as the "biggest supporter" of the LeT and its founder Hafiz Saeed.
Speaking on Pakistan's ARY News, Musharraf said, "I am the biggest supporter of the LeT and I know they like me and the JuD also likes me."
The former president added that he was always in favour of terrorist action in Kashmir, and the LeT and the JuD were the biggest forces to take on the Indian Army in the state.
He was a member of the Rohingya student union in college, taught at a public high school and even won a parliamentary seat in Myanmar's thwarted elections in 1990. But according to the government of Myanmar, Kyaw Min's fellow Rohingya do not exist.
A long-persecuted Muslim minority concentrated in Myanmar's western state of Rakhine, the Rohingya have been deemed dangerous interlopers from neighbouring Bangladesh. Today, they are mostly stateless, their very identity denied by the Buddhist-majority Myanmar state.
"There is no such thing as Rohingya," said Kyaw San Hla, an officer in Rakhine's state security ministry. "It is fake news." Such denials bewilder Kyaw Min. He has lived in Myanmar all of his 72 years, and the history of the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group in Myanmar stretches back for generations before.
Now, human rights watchdogs warn that much of the evidence of the Rohingya's history in Myanmar is in danger of being eradicated by a military campaign the United States has declared to be ethnic cleansing.
Since late August, more than 6,20,000 Rohingya Muslims, about two-thirds of the population that lived in Myanmar in 2016, have fled to Bangladesh, driven out by the military's systematic campaign of massacre, rape and arson in Rakhine.
In a report released in October, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said Myanmar's security forces had worked to "effectively erase all signs of memorable landmarks in the geography of the Rohingya landscape and memory in such a way that a return to their lands would yield nothing but a desolate and unrecognisable terrain."
"The Rohingya are finished in our country," said Kyaw Min, who lives in Yangon, the commercial capital of Myanmar. "Soon we will all be dead or gone."
The UN report also said the crackdown in Rakhine had "targeted teachers, the cultural and religious leadership, and other people of influence in the Rohingya community in an effort to diminish Rohingya history, culture and knowledge."
"We are people with our own history and traditions," said Kyaw Hla Aung, a Rohingya lawyer and former political prisoner, whose father served as a court clerk in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine. "How can they pretend we are nothing?" he asked.
Speaking over the phone, Kyaw Hla Aung, who has been jailed repeatedly for his activism and is now interned in a Sittwe camp, said his family did not have enough food because officials have prevented full distribution of international aid.
Myanmar's sudden amnesia about the Rohingya is as bold as it is systematic. Five years ago, Sittwe, nestled in an estuary in the Bay of Bengal, was a mixed city, divided between an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist majority and the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Walking Sittwe's crowded bazaar in 2009, I saw Rohingya fishermen selling seafood to Rakhine women. Rohingya professionals practiced law and medicine. The main street in town was dominated by the Jama mosque, an Arabesque confection built in the mid-19th century. The imam spoke proudly of Sittwe's multicultural heritage.
But since sectarian riots in 2012, which resulted in a disproportionate number of Rohingya casualties, the city has been mostly cleared of Muslims.
Across central Rakhine, about 1,20,000 Rohingya, even those who had citizenship, have been interned in camps, stripped of their livelihoods and prevented from accessing proper schools or health care.
They cannot leave the ghettos without official authorisation. In July, a Rohingya man who was allowed out for a court appearance in Sittwe was lynched by an ethnic Rakhine mob.
The Jama mosque now stands disused and moldering, behind barbed wire. Its 89-year-old imam is interned. "We have no rights as human beings," he said, asking not to use his name because of safety concerns. "This is state-run ethnic cleansing and nothing else."
Sittwe's psyche has adapted to the new circumstances. In the bazaar recently, every Rakhine resident I talked to claimed, falsely, that no Muslims had ever owned shops there.
Sittwe University, which used to enroll hundreds of Muslim students, now teaches only around 30 Rohingya, all of whom are in a distance-learning programme. "We don't have restrictions on any religion," said Shwe Khaing Kyaw, the university's registrar, "but they just don't come."
Rohingya Muslims have lived in Rakhine for generations, their Bengali dialect and South Asian features often distinguishing them from Rakhine Buddhists. During the colonial era, the British encouraged South Asian rice farmers, merchants and civil servants to migrate to what was then known as Burma.
Some of these new arrivals mixed with the Rohingya, then known more commonly as Arakanese Indians or Arakanese Muslims. Others spread out across Burma. By the 1930s, South Asians, both Muslim and Hindu, comprised the largest population in Yangon.
Fleeing xenophobia
The demographic shift left some Buddhists feeling besieged. During the xenophobic leadership of General Ne Win, who ushered in nearly half a century of military rule, hundreds of thousands of South Asians fled Burma for India.
Today, far more Rohingya live outside of Myanmar - mostly in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia - than remain in what they consider their homeland.
Yet in the early decades of Burma's independence, a Rohingya elite thrived. Rangoon University, the country's top institution, had enough Rohingya students to form their own union. One of the Cabinets of Nu, the country's first post-independence leader, included a health minister who identified himself as Arakanese Muslim.
Even under Ne Win, the general, Burmese national radio aired broadcasts in the Rohingya language. Rohingya, women among them, were represented in parliament.
Shwe Maung, a Rohingya from Buthidaung Township in northern Rakhine, served in parliament between 2011 and 2015, as a member of the military's proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party. In the 2015 elections, however, he was barred from running.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were disenfranchised in those polls. Shwe Maung's electoral district, which had been 90% Rohingya, is now represented by a Rakhine Buddhist.
In September, a local police officer filed a counterterrorism suit accusing Shwe Maung of instigating violence through Facebook posts that called for an end to the security offensive in Rakhine. (The military operation began after Rohingya militants besieged government security posts in late August.)
Shwe Maung, the son of a police officer himself, is in exile in the United States and denies the charges. "They want every Rohingya to be considered a terrorist or an illegal immigrant," he said. "We are much more than that."
Gavin Aung Than is not your struggling cartoonist, beckoning your generosity for a quick roadside caricature. Well, not exactly. But this Melbourne-based ex-graphic designer would have ended up that way if that creative spark hadn't hit him, turning him into a global star with 'Zen Pencils' online.
The power of his cartoons based on inspirational quotes from Gandhi to Kalam, Einstein to Van Gogh, was in full flow at the Bengaluru Comic-Con.
On Sunday, as his avid fans queued up for his autographed books, Gavin reminisced about those dull, boring days as a corporate designer, a day job that had his creativity chained. He had dared to quit that job, sell his house and dive deep into online comics. In quick time, he produced 300 comics. But success eluded him. It was then this thought struck him: Why not turn inspirational quotes from historical figures to tell compelling stories through cartoons.
In one of those cartoon strips, he had an overweight man decide to take control of his life and start running. Gavin's lines did the trick. "People loved such life-changing ideas illustrated through cartoons. They would connect with me through social media, even urge me to illustrate quotes of their choice," he told DH.
As Gavin's works grabbed global attention featuring in The Washington Post, Slate and more, an American publisher offered to publish the cartoons in three books. He put out those inspirational works on mugs, T-shirts and posters. Gavin was now getting known to fan clubs across the world.
So, how does his creative process unfold? "I start with rough pencil sketches before inking. They are then scanned, coloured and processed with Photoshop or other software. Once the work is uploaded onto my site, I take the social media route to promote them. I prefer the e-commerce route to sell my merchandise," Gavin explains.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday quoted senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar to compare democracy within the party to the Mughal rule, especially on the issue of transfer of power.
Speaking at a rally at Dharampur in south Gujarat, Modi said: "A senior Congress leader, Mani Shankar Aiyar, who had a lot of things to say to me in the past said, 'Were elections held when Shahjahan replaced Jehangir or Aurangzeb replaced Shahjahan? It is understood that the son will take over the reins.' Now even the Congress leaders accept that the Congress is a family and not a party. Let them have this kind of Aurangzeb rule."
"One who is facing corruption charges and is out on bail is being propped up as president of the party. This is the kind of culture they have. It shows that the Congress is doomed," Modi said.
Speaking on Rahul's temple-hopping spree, Modi said that there was a time when people competed to prove their "secular" credentials but not anymore.
"Over the years they alleged that the BJP was anti-Muslim. This time, not once have they said anything like that. It shows that even the Congress has accepted that they used to propagate such information to polarise minority votes. Even Muslims have seen through their true nature," he added.
The prime minister, who is on the final day of his two-day visit to Gujarat, will address four rallies, at Jamnagar, Junagadh, Bhavnagar and Dharampur.
Polling will be held in the first phase on December 9 in these places.
Modi will again visit the state for three days on December 6, 8 and 9, covering south and central Gujarat, as well as Saurashtra.
Rahul will be in the state on December 5 and 6.
The Kalaburagi police have arrested nine hardcore criminals, including two associates of the dreaded killer of Bheema basin Chandappa Harijan, and have recovered 20 country-made pistols and 54 bullets from them.
Inspector General of Police (North-East Range) Alok Kumar briefing reporters here on Monday, said, "Two of the arrested - Mallikarjun and Arjun - were associates of Chandappa Harijan. The arrested were involved in criminal activities in Afzalpur."
"The illegal country-made firearms from Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are being smuggled into the district. Huge cache of illegal firearms are being smuggled into the region from Madhya Pradesh, in particular, where illegal firearm industry thrives. A team led by Kalaburagi SP N Shashikumar will be sent to Madhya Pradesh to probe into the nexus of firearm dealers and the local criminals and take measures to prevent the smuggling," Alok Kumar said.
IGP (North-East Range) felicitated the police team with cash reward of Rs 1 lakh for arresting the dreaded criminals.
Alok Kumar said that he would recommend Additional SP Lokesh's name for Chief Minister's Medal.
Hundreds of farmers took to the streets against the construction of illegal shops in K R Market by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) on Monday.
About 500 farmers gathered near K R Market and marched till the BBMP head office.
Chairman of Karnataka State Farmer's Association and Hasiru Sene, Kodihalli Chandrashekar, said, "The farmers wake up in the middle of the night and get flowers to sell here until 8 am. But four shops have come up in this place overnight. This has been done though BBMP Commissioner N Manjunath Prasad had issued a notice to remove illegal encroachments."
He also said that there are goons who extort money from vendors every day.
Prasad said that the BBMP had issued notices to remove the shops.
"It is illegal to construct shops in open spaces. We will ask the K R Market police to remove the shops," said Prasad.
Union Minister of State for Skill Development Anantkumar Hegde, on Sunday said, the Union government is keen to establish Indian Institute of Skills (IIS) in the state.
Addressing reporters in a press conference, here, the minister said, "The Union government is ready to establish IIS in the state if the state government provides the land required for the same. The government has already established a IISaat Kanpuraand planning to establish in other states too," he informed.
Hegde said, "International Skill Centers have been set up at various parts of the country to impart skills among the youths. The government planned to open such centers at all the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies across the country. Already a total of 285 are functioning. All the centers will start activities by the end of 2018," he said.
Hegde said, the Ministry has urged the state governments to conduct a survey to analyse skill gap. According to the minister, the employment sector will witness drastic change in next two decade. "As per the survey, about 67% of employment sector will undergo change in next 20 years and thus we need to identify the changes, which may take place, to impart training to the youth accordingly," he said.
The Union government has launched 'Skill Acquisition and Knowledge Awareness for Livelihood Promotion' (SANKALP). Under the scheme, ITIaand Polytechnic courses will be upgraded, he informed.
Hegde said the Ministry has been concentrating more on ITatraining in Karnataka as there is good opportunity in the sector. Short-term courses have been introduced in Karnataka too, he added.
Earlier in the day, the minister interacted with the youths, ideapreneurs and budding entrepreneurs about the skill development and the various schemes launched by the Ministry.
Skill on Wheels
Aaprogramme 'Skill on Wheels', to create awareness about the skill development, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, various schemes, will begin in Mysuru from Monday.
The teams will approach the students and new entrepreneurs to provide them information about the skill development.
The programme has been planned to create awareness about skill development among the people.
Hegde said, the programme will be conduced in 100 different places in the state. The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, which came into existence in 2014, has trained 1.5 crore youths, he informed.
Union Minister Anantkumar Hegde, on Sunday, took a dig at the state government terming it as 'Hitler government'.
Speaking to media persons on the sidelines of an interactive session, here, the minister alleged, the arrest of BJPaleaders and workers, including MPaPratap Simha, at Hunsur during a procession organised as part of Hanuma jayanti was a murder of democracy by the state government.
The government has been playing the people's sentiments, he said.
On Chief Minister Siddaramaiah's statement that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is afraid of his political strength and defeat, Hegde said, "Let Siddaramaiah win in his own constituency, first."
Hegde said that BJPawill record comprehensive victory in Gujarat elections. Like Uttar Pradesh, BJPawave will continue in Karnataka and Gujarat too, he added.
When asked about All India Congress Committee (AICC) vice-president Rahul Gandhi, who is likely to file nomination for AICCapresident post, the minister said, "Iadon't want to speak about 'Pappus'.
Speaking about BJP's Parivarthana Yatra in the state, Hegde said, the yatra has been receiving overwhelming response across the state. BJP will form government in Karnataka and state unit president BaSaYeddyurappa will be the next chief minister, he said.
Who is secularist?
Anantkumar Hegde said that secularist is a person who does not have any identity.
Speaking on the sidelines of a religious function here, Hegde said, "Iarespect those who identify themselves as a Muslim, Christian or a Hindu. But, who are these secularists. What does secularist mean?" he asked.
Hegde said, "We should not allow to build a mosque at the place where a temple should be constructed."
He called Hindus of all castes to stay united to protect the country.
Industrialist Vijay Mallya arrived at the Westminster Magistrates' Court on Monday for the opening day of his extradition trial.
The 61-year-old tycoon looked relaxed as he was greeted by a swarm of cameras and reporters when he entered the court to stand trial on charges of fraud and money laundering related to his erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines owing several Indian banks around Rs 9,000 crore.
"Please hear the proceedings," Mallya told reporters outside the courtroom.
However, the trial opening was delayed as the courtroom had to be evacuated due to a fire alarm going off.
Mallya, who has been out on bail since Scotland Yard executed an extradition warrant in April, will be in the dock for the duration of the trial scheduled to end on December 14.
A judgement in the case, being presided over by Judge Emma Louise Arbuthnot, is unlikely until early next year.
Mallya's defence team is led by barrister Clare Montgomery, known as an expert in criminal and fraud law with the UK's Matrix Chambers.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will be arguing on behalf of the Indian government, led by barrister Mark Summers.
The CPS will need to demonstrate a prima facie case by producing evidence to show that the criminal charges against Mallya are justified and that he should be extradited to face the Indian courts.
Prison conditions in India are expected to be at the forefront during the hearing, with the Indian government providing assurances of protection of Mallya's human rights.
The tycoon has been on a self-imposed exile in the UK since he left India on March 2, 2016.
While on strict bail conditions, which include providing a bail bond worth 6,50,000 pounds, surrender of his passport and a ban on possessing any travel documents, the former Rajya Sabha member has been based at his Hertfordshire estate Ladywalk in the village of Tewin, around 30 miles from London.
Veteran journalist A Surya Prakash today took charge as the chairman of the Prasar Bharati board for a second consecutive term.
On December 1, Prakash was appointed the chief of the public broadcasting board for a second term till February 8, 2020, when he would turn 70, according to an order issued by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry.
"Prasar Bharati welcomes Dr A Surya Prakash @mediasurya as he takes charge as the chairman," Prasar Bharati said in a tweet.
Speaking to PTI after his appointment, Prakash had said that his core preoccupation would remain professionalising Prasar Bharati, creating content in sync with the New India vision, and digitisation which would be the key driver for a new age public broadcaster.
The effort would be to make Prasar Bharati the most favoured destination for all kinds of content made available in all possible formats for varying consumption classes, he had said.
Prasar Bharati Chief Executive Officer Shashi S Vempati also welcomed Prakash as he took the charge today.
"Welcome back @mediasurya @prasarbharati," Vempati tweeted.
The senior journalist was appointed as the chairman after his name was approved by a three-member committee headed by Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu.
Prakash's earlier three-year term as the chairman had ended in October this year.
According to the Prasar Bharati Act, the chairman holds the office for a term of three years or until the person attains the age of 70 years, whichever is earlier.
Prasar Bharati oversees the functioning of Doordarshan and All India Radio (AIR).
Exactly a year after chief minister J Jayalalithaa's demise, the fragile situation in the ruling AIADMK in Tamil Nadu still persists with the K Palaniswami government having a wafer-thin margin in the Assembly.
During the year, the state saw two chief ministers and a deputy chief minister.
In addition, there was also confusion in the government as there was a faction fight in the ruling party.
The first and the most important event to note after the death of Jayalalithaa was cyclone Vardah that devastated the Chennai.
Tamil Nadu also witnessed many protests, including the pro-Jallikattu stir by youths.
Another major development was witnessed when O Panneerselvam turned rebel, Palaniswami took over as chief minister with the support of Jayalalithaa's close aide V K Sasikala, who later went to jail.
Prior to the change, MLAs supporting Palaniswami were forced to stay in a resort in Koovathur.
The Palaniswami-led government was subjected to a floor test in the Assembly, which it won convincingly with 122 votes. The Panneerselvam faction had only 11 supporters.
After the Supreme Court upheld the trial court order against Sasikala and others in the disproportionate assets case, her nephew T T V Dhinakaran was given the plum post of AIADMK deputy general secretary.
However, Dhinakaran did not last long as he was expelled by a united AIADMK led by Palaniswami and Panneerselvam.
A few legislators supporting Dhinakaran submitted separate letters to the governor withdrawing their support to the chief minister.
These legislators were first kept at a resort in Puducherry and from there to Kodagu. These legislators were disqualified by Speaker P Dhanapal under the anti-defection law.
In terms of the relationship between the Centre and the state, there has been a lot of difference when compared to Jayalalithaa's rule.
The present government supported and implemented few of the policies, including Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (Uday), Goods and Services Tax (GST), Food Safety Modernisation Act and National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET).
On the other hand, the 'Amma' branded government schemes gradually started fading. The government found it tough to meet the expenses of Amma Unavagam (canteen).
Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao, who was given additional charge of the state, was relieved of his duties after Banwarilal Purohit was appointed.
Jayalalithaa passed away on December 5, 2016, after 75 days of hospitalisation.
The Karnataka Power Corporation (KPC) is planning to undertake a 2,000-MW Rs 5,000-crore underground hydroelectricity project near the Sharavathi wildlife sanctuary in the taluk.
But environmentalists have strongly opposed the plan, saying it is coming up in an ecologically sensitive region. They have planned to move the court against the project.
The plan involves supplying water from the Gerusoppa reservoir in Uttara Kannada district by means of pipelines through underground tunnels to Talakalele reservoir, which is at a height of 480 metres. The water will be made to flow down in the reverse direction to generate electricity.
The union ministry of forests and environment gave its approval for pre-project works on August 9, much to the chagrin of the environmentalists.
Two tunnels, 3.8-km-long, will be dug at a depth of 312 metres. A 52-metre-tall, 22-metre-wide and 300-metre-long power station will also be constructed underground.
Greens have expressed concern that that 371 acres of protected forest in the Jog, Linganamakki and Aghanashini limits of the Western Ghats will be under threat.
Also, the project area is just 3.5 km away from the Sharavathi wildlife sanctuary and is an environmentally sensitive area. No new project can be taken up in such areas as per the recommendations of the Kasturirangan report.
The project site is part of evergreen forests, rich in biodiversity and home to priceless medicinal plants, besides animals like tiger, deer, leopard, bison and king cobra. The forest is also home to the lion-tailed macaque.
Environmentalists point out that explosives will have to be used for the tunnel work. This may kill many creatures in the forests, they say. The greens feel that the KPC should have consulted local residents and organisations before going ahead with the project.
They say a lot of electricity has to be spent for pumping water from Gerusoppa reservoir to Talakalele reservoir. They question whether the same is worth it and wonder whether the target power production can be achieved.
They say much harm has already been caused due to existing hydel projects in the Sharavathi command area and people there reel under the effects of ecological imbalance. Environmentalists say all pros and cons should be looked into before going ahead with the new project in the Western Ghats. They want the project proponents to reconsider it.
Taking a jibe at Rahul Gandhi hours after he filed his nomination papers for the Congress president's post, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath today said the party had become a "burden" which would disappear on its own after the elevation.
The chief minister also said the move in the Congress would have no impact on Assembly elections in Gujarat.
"Hamey lagta hai ki Congress party ek bojh ban chuki hai. Rahul Gandhi ke (adhyaksh) banney se yeh bojh apney aap samapt ho jayega ... (I feel the Congress party has become a burden. After Rahul Gandhi's elevation, this burden will end on its own)," Adityanath told reporters here.
The elevation would not affect the BJP in the ongoing Gujarat polls, he stressed.
"It will have no impact on the BJP's poll prospects in Gujarat, where there is no doubt about our victory," he said.
Gandhi, accompanied by a host of senior party leaders, including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, filed his papers for the party president's post earlier today.
The 47-year-old Gandhi scion is likely to emerge as the lone candidate in the fray, clearing the decks for his elevation and succeeding his mother, who held the post for 19 successive years.
"Rahulji has been the darling of the Congress...," Manmohan Singh told reporters at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters in New Delhi.
The last date for withdrawal of candidature is December 11. Polling, if needed, will be held on December 16. PTI ABN SMI BDS
Irked by his wife questioning him over buying a costly mobile phone, a farmer killed her at their house on the city's outskirts, police said. Balamurugan (38), a habitual drinker, had bought the Rs 9,000 phone and showed it to his wife Muthulakshmi at their house in Kinathukadavu late last night, they added.
When she questioned why he had bought such a costly phone as they were facing financial problems, Balamurugan in a fit of rage hit her on the head with a pickaxe, killing her on the spot, police said. The farmer was arrested after police rushed to the spot on receiving information about the incident.
Amid protests in coastal hamlets against Kerala authorities' reported failure in warning fishermen ahead of the cyclonic storm Ockhi, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman sought calm and made an assurance that rescue operations would continue till all the untraced fishermen were brought back.
Nirmala visited Vizhinjam and Poonthura on Monday and told the fisher-folk and their families that it was not a time for protests.
Fishermen protested at Poonthura where Tourism Minister Kadakampally Surendran and Fisheries Minister J Mercykutty Amma accompanied Nirmala on her visit to the affected areas.
Speaking in Tamil, she said alerts regarding the deep depression and the cyclone were sounded with the best available weather-warning systems.
"This is a time to learn new lessons. Let's not argue and play the blame game at this time of distress," she said.
The minister said the scale of the ongoing rescue operation was bigger than what was launched after the Tsunami.
"I assure you that the search and rescue operations won't stop till the last untraced fisherman is brought back," she said.
Later, she met Chief Minister Vijayan and senior government officials.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's late Sunday visit to the coastal village of Vizhinjam was also marked by angry protests.
CM not spared
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's late Sunday visit to the coastal village of Vizhinjam was also marked by angry protests.
In five days since the cyclonic storm formed off the Kerala coast, 25 deaths have been reported.
85 fishermen who left the shores before the cyclone are still untraced.
The Kerala State Disaster Management Authority is in the line of fire following reports that it acted late on alerts from central agencies on possibilities of the deep depression turning into a cyclone.
The state government is facing criticism over a reported lack of coordination in the search and rescue operations.
The CPM-led government has maintained that the cyclone alert was received only on November 30 and all contingency measures were initiated.
The 22nd edition of the International Film Festival of Kerala will open here on Friday without the inaugural ceremony and cultural programmes, in view of the disaster.
Google's India-born CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday made a strong case for the search giant's return to China, saying it is already helping Chinese companies gain global access.
Google was shut down in China in 2010, following a showdown with the government over censor policies. Since then, Google, Gmail, Youtube and its other products are banned in the world's second largest economy.
"A lot of work Google does is to help Chinese companies", the 45-year-old Google CEO, who has a BTech degree from IIT Kharagpur, said at a state-run global internet conference at the Chinese city of Wuzhen.
The conference was also addressed by Apple CEO Tim Cook and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
"Many small and medium-sized businesses in China take advantage of Google to get their products to many other countries outside of China," Pichai told the meeting, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.
After the ban, Google subsequently shifted its operations to Hong Kong.
In its absence, Chinese firms like Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and JD.com emerged most powerful players in China and abroad.
Google and its products can be accessed in China through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) over which, Beijing has stepped up a crackdown in recent times.
Apple this year agreed to the Chinese government's requests to remove dozens of VPN app services that allow Chinese users to access blocked websites from its local App Store.
Pichai's attendance at the state sponsored internet meeting came after China recently lifted the ban on Google translation services.
Besides Google, a number of global social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter remain banned in China over fears that their presence would open-up to millions of China's social media users marginalising the official media.
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on Monday filed his nomination for the post of party president in the presence of leaders spanning generations and amid mounting criticism by the BJP over dynastic politics.
As was expected, Rahul's was the only application received for the post of the Congress president that was supported by incumbent Sonia Gandhi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, members of the Working Committee, chief ministers, state unit presidents who filed 89 sets of nomination papers.
The 47-year-old Rahul is expected to be declared elected as president on Monday next to succeed his mother Sonia, who holds the record for the longest tenure of 19 years in the 132 year-old history of the Congress.
Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, Motilal Vora, Mohsina Kidwai and Shivraj Patil to young turks such as Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, Sushmita Dev, Gaurav Gogoi, Suraj Hegde were present at the AICC headquarters that wore a festive look.
"We have received 89 sets of nomination papers from senior Congress leaders, state units of the party," Mullapally Ramachandran, Chairman of the Central Election Authority told a press conference here.
He said the CEA will scrutinise the nomination forms publish the names of the eligible candidates on Tuesday.
A formal announcement of Rahul's election is expected on Monday next on the last date of withdrawal of nomination papers.
"It is a great day. Rahul has been the darling of Congress and this is yet another step in his devotion to the Congress party and country," Manmohan Singh, said, when asked about Rahul Gandhi's takeover.
Rahul stayed away from media persons and spent the day meeting Congress leaders who had come from across the country.
Rahul began his day with a visit to Raj Ghat to offer tributes to Mahatma Gandhi. He later visited former president Pranab Mukherjee and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to seek their blessings before filing the nominations.
Mukherjee applied the traditional red 'tilak' on Rahul's forehead and wished him good luck for the future.
Madhya Pradesh may soon become the first state in the country where raping a girl aged 12 years or less could invite death penalty, with the state Assembly on Monday passing a bill to this effect.
The landmark legislation, passed unanimously by the House, also provides for tougher punishment for stalking a woman and some other offences against them.
The Penal Law (Madhya Pradesh Amendment) Bill-2017, introduced by Minister for Law and Legislative Affairs Rampal Singh, was passed after a debate during which some Congress members voiced apprehension over tougher sentence for stalking, insisting cases may be registered against innocent people to settle personal scores.
The bill introduced a section--376 (A) (A)--to the Indian Penal Code (IPC) under which a person convicted of raping a girl aged 12 years or below may be awarded death penalty, life imprisonment or a minimum imprisonment of 14 years with a fine.
Similarly, section 376 (D) (A) was introduced for gang-rape with girls up to 12 years of age. The convict under this section may be awarded capital punishment, life imprisonment or a minimum of 20 years in jail, besides a fine.
Under both the sections, the convict awarded life sentence will have to remain in jail till death.
The bill also amended the IPC section 493 (A) (cohabitation caused by a man deceitfully inducing a belief of lawful marriage), under which a person could be jailed up to three years for establishing sexual relations with a woman on the pretext of marrying her.
The legislation provides for a minimum imprisonment of 3 years that may be extended up to 7 years for people caught stalking a woman or a girl for a second time and convicted for committing the offence. The amendment to section (354 D) relating to stalking says those convicted will also have to pay a minimum fine of Rs 1 lakh. The first time offender will face jail term up to 3 years in addition to fine.
Similarly, the second time offender in cases under section 354 (B) (assault or use of criminal force to woman with intent to disrobe) of the IPC would face a minimum punishment of 7 years in jail which may extend up to 10 years, besides a minimum fine of Rs 1 lakh.
For the first time offender, the punishment is between 3 and 7 years of imprisonment in addition to fine.
Except for the first time offence under section 354(D), all offences would be cognisable and non-bailable.
During the debate, some Congress MLAs, including Ramnivas Rawat and Govind Singh, voiced apprehension about possible misuse of some of the provisions. They said some women may file a stalking case to settle a personal score.
They said the perpetrators may kill the victim after raping her in an attempt to destroy evidence out of fear of severe punishment.
Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan assured the members that the government would take appropriate measures if these provisions were misused.
Chouhan said smartphones and Internet are spreading vulgarity among children.
The chief minister said girls are vulnerable to sexual assault from people known to them, with acquaintances and family members being involved in 98 per cent of the rape cases.
The bill was later passed unanimously.
It will now be sent to the President for his assent before it become a law.
"It was a historic day for Madhya Pradesh as the state Assembly, as per the wish of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, passed a bill making a provision to award capital punishment to those indulging in such crimes (raping girls aged 12 or below)," Singh said.
Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Monday rejected Pradesh Congress Committee president G Parameshwara's suggestion for adopting the one-family-one-ticket norm to check the clamour among family members of party leaders to get picked for the coming Assembly elections.
Siddaramaiah said it was "impractical" to enforce or implement such a norm for selecting candidates.
"The suggestion may look good. But it is impractical and not possible to implement in political parties. We have already given tickets to two members of the same family in the last Assembly elections. If the one-family-one-ticket rule is applied, can we deny tickets to sitting MLAs?" Siddaramaiah wondered.
"We have the case of senior leader Mallikarjun Kharge whose son is an MLA and a minister," he told reporters here.
Mallikarjun Kharge is an MP from Gulbarga Lok Sabha constituency and his son Priyank Kharge is an MLA from Chittapur and also a state minister.
Similarly, Housing Minister M Krishnappa is an MLA from Vijayanagar while his son Priya Krishna too is a legislator from Govindarajnagar. "Is it possible to apply the one-family-one-ticket rule to them?" the chief minister asked.
Siddaramaiah said primacy should be given to the "winnability factor" in deciding the candidates as there could be a tough challenge for the ruling party in the polls.
"Winnability of candidates is our top criteria and nothing else," the chief minister said when asked about the norms for selecting candidates.
"Let Parameshwara place his suggestion before the party high command. They will take a final call on this issue," the chief minister said. "Before giving tickets," he insisted, "we will take views from the party workers and local leaders."
The chief minister, who is keen to field his doctor son Yathindra from Varuna constituency, said he would shift from Varuna (of which he is a sitting member) to Chamundeshwari seat in the coming polls.
Earlier, the chief minister said his son has expressed his willingness to contest from Varuna and has hit the ground already in the run-up to the polls.
The chief minister's statement expressing his disagreement with the state unit president comes when the party is preparing to announce the first list of candidates in a month or so.
Parameshwara had stated that the state unit would suggest to the party top brass to follow the one-family-one-ticket norm to prevent any powerful political family from "cornering" tickets. His suggestion was essentially seen a move to block the ticket to the chief minister's son.
However, this is not the first time the chief minister has openly differed with the PCC president who once served as the home minister in his Cabinet.
Earlier when Siddaramaiah favoured senior Lingayat leader S R Patil as the PCC chief, Parameshawara found suppport from other senior leaders in prevailing upon the party high command to retain him as the state unit chief for a second consecutive term.
Siddaramaiah said he has started touring the state to launch development projects covering 100 Assembly segments in one month. The PCC chief will also tour the state and hold meetings with party workers in another 100 Assembly constituencies in one month.
From March first week, the chief minister, party president and other leaders will hold joint rallies across the state, he said.
Governor Vajubhai R Vala has shot off a stinker to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah complaining about a Cabinet minister for publicly criticising the Raj Bhavan, it is learnt.
Apparently, this is the third time Vala has complained against the minister. However, the Governor has not named the minister in his letter.
"A minister in your Cabinet is publicly chiding the Raj Bhavan. Either you tell him to stop, or I will do so in my own way," the Governor is learnt to have stated in the letter, according to sources.
It is said that Vala was referring to Higher Education Minister Basavaraj Rayareddi, who has publicly lamented the delay in the appointment of vice-chancellors to Bangalore and Mysore universities. As Governor, Vala is also the chancellor of universities who appoints vice-chancellors.
MP Pratap Simha, took to social media to express his displeasure over the Mysuru district police and district administration, after his release from the police custody.
The MP, who was released on Sunday late night, has tweeted that the district administration and the police had ensured smooth celebration of Tipu Jayanti and Eid Milad procession at the same place. "But we can't take out Hanuma Jayanti procession."
The MP also tweeted that "Dear @SPmysuru you are NOT able to arrest the murders of Periyapatna Ravi since 13 months. But successfully scuttling Hanuma Jayanti procession from last 2 years at the behest of state govt! Ask your predecessor, SP Abhinav Khare, how he facilitated Hanuma Jayanti till 2015?!"
The Centre has deployed ten ships each of the Navy and the Coast Guard, besides six aircraft and as many helicopters for rescue operations off the coasts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which were battered by severe cyclonic storm "Ockhi."
A total of 243 fishermen in Tamil Nadu, 250 in Kerala and 1,047 people in Lakshadweep have been rescued so far. Relief material is also being provided to inmates in relief camps set up by the government agencies. Around 100 are still missing.
The National Crisis Management Committee (NCMC), chaired by Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha, reviewed the situation.
NCMC took note of another depression forming in the South East Bay of Bengal adjoining South Andaman sea and reviewed the state of preparedness by Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Advisories issued
"Necessary advisories have been issued to fishermen and others. The Chief Secretaries of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Andaman & Nicobar Islands have taken necessary steps to deal with any eventualities occurring in their respective States," an official statement said.
The Cabinet Secretary held a video conference with the Chief Secretaries and the senior officers of the affected States and UTs.
The very severe cyclonic storm "Ockhi" over east central Arabian Sea moved further northwards with a speed of 13 kmph early Monday. It was likely to move North-North Eastward and weaken gradually.
It will then cross coasts of south Gujarat and adjoining North Maharashtra near Surat as a deep depression by midnight of December 5, the statement said.
It also took stock of the state of preparedness in Maharashtra and Gujarat which are likely to be impacted by "Ockhi."
Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman visited Kerala, which bore the brunt of the cyclone over the week-end and assured Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan of all help. The rescue operations, she said, will continue till every missing fishermen has been brought back safely.
The fishermen's demand for including some of their men in the rescue team had been accepted and already 11 of them have joined the Navy boats and helicopters engaged in the operations, Sitharaman said.
Eight juvenile delinquents escaped from the state-run home for boys in Madiwala, South Bengaluru, on Sunday. One of them returned along with his parents hours later.
The boys, aged between 16 and 18, cut the iron grille and broke a windowpane in a toilet next to their classroom to sneak out between 2.45 pm and 3 pm, a staff member told DH. The boys were part of a group that was watching television in the classroom, the staffer said. After lunch, the boys are supposed to attend a class on non-formal education.
Five of the runaway boys had committed crimes registered at HSR Layout, Tilak Nagar and RT Nagar police stations while three were from Hebbagodi and Thirumalashettyhalli police stations. Four of them already had a criminal record when they were brought to the remand home, the staffer added.
"We have informed the police stations concerned as well as the boys' parents so that they can keep tabs on them," Vasanthi, the superintendent of the observation home, told this newspaper.
Just two weeks ago, six boys had escaped from the remand home but five of them returned later. The boys had cut a roof grille that led to an open area. They did that from a room near the kitchen, according to the staffer.
Vasanthi said it was difficult for the short-staffed remand home to keep watch on 40-50 boys. The boys keep roaming the large campus of the observation home, she added.
For the third time in a week, police shot at a history-sheeter who was fleeing after robbing a man in North Bengaluru in the early hours of Monday. He was injured in the leg.
Ashwath (22) waylaid one Anniyappa at Mariyappa Palya in Rajagopala Nagar, stealing his scooter, mobile phone and a300 in cash. Anniyappa complained to the jurisdictional RMC Yard police. The cops set up bandobast in the area.
Around 2.30 am, a police team spotted Ashwath on ESI Hospital Main Road. When Akash, a constable, tried to catch him, Ashwath purportedly attacked him with a lethal weapon. Mohammad Mukarram, the police inspector, intervened and shot Ashwath in the leg.
The suspect was later admitted to Victoria Hospital while Akash is being treated at KC General Hospital.
"Ashwath didn't surrender despite a warning by the inspector and attacked the constable. The inspector was forced to shoot him in the leg," said Chethan Singh Rathor, Deputy Commissioner of Police (North).
Ashwath is accused of four robberies or thefts and was released on bail just a month ago.
A 64-year-old woman immolated her mentally retarded daughter before setting herself afire on Magadi Road, West Bengaluru, police said.
Rangamma poured kerosene on her daughter, Thimmamma (34), and set her afire around 10.30 am on Sunday. Moments later, she immolated herself in the same manner. Neighbours rushed to the house hearing the women's screams and took them to Victoria Hospital. Both of them had, however, 90% burns and died on Sunday night.
Rangamma's husband Huchaiah had died earlier. She was living in a house belonging to her brother, Rangaswamy, and worked hard to take care of her daughter. Fearing that no one would take care of her daughter after her death, Rangamma decided to take the extreme step, police said.
Credit: FBI(ONSLOW COUNTY, N.C.) -- Earl Kimrey, the man charged with withholding information from North Carolina investigators who were searching for 3-year-old Mariah Woods, appeared before a North Carolina judge on Monday. Mariah was found dead over the weekend in a creek after an extensive search that included FBI officials.
Kimrey, the 32-year-old live-in boyfriend of Mariah's mother, Kristy Woods, answered all of the judge's questions and was held in the Onslow County Detention Center on $1 million bail. His next court appearance is Dec. 18.
He was arrested two days after Kristy Woods made an emotional plea for the safe return of her missing daughter.
"Please, bring her back ... she's my baby, she's my everything," she said in a press conference. "[I] just to be able to touch her and hold her and not let her go again. I'd give anything."
Kimrey is accused of "removing Mariah Woods' body from the scene of her death" and withholding information on Mariah's death, law enforcement said.
The prosecutor has charged him with concealing of death, obstruction of justice, second-degree burglary, felon larceny and possession of stolen property.
ABC News attempts to reach Kimreys attorney were unsuccessful.
Mariah was reported missing on Nov. 27, authorities said.
Officials said a dive team member found the little girl's body around 5:30 p.m. on Saturday in waters in a remote part of Pender County.
Copyright 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
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North Korea said on Sunday that the joint military drill by the US and South Korea that started today could trigger a nuclear war. In comment's that appeared in state-run newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, North Korea's foreign ministry said the five-day military drill was "all out provocation against" the country, and it may lead to nuclear war "at any moment". It accused the Donald Trump administration of "begging for nuclear war by staging an extremely dangerous nuclear gamble on the Korean peninsula". Pyongyang will ''seriously consider'' countermeasures against the drill, and the US and South Korea will ''pay dearly for their provocations,'' the Korean Central News Agency said on Sunday before the start of the exercises. The drill took off today just days after North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile that landed in the Sea of Japan in the middle of night. North Korea's missile tests are an "imminent threat" to Japan, the Japanese parliament declared today, while Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said talking to the reclusive state was meaningless. The upper house unanimously adopted a resolution protesting against the North's firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile that dropped into the sea inside Japan's exclusive economic zone. Hundreds of aircraft including two dozen stealth jets began training today as the United States and South Korea launched their biggest-ever combined air force exercise. The five-day drill, which is called Vigilant Ace, is meant to improve the allies wartime capabilities, South Korea's defence ministry said. The US Seventh Air Force sent major strategic military assets that include six F-22 and 18 F-35 stealth fighter jets for the annual training exercise in the Korean Peninsula, which this year is bigger than ever. About 12,000 US military personnel are participating. Some local media reported that B-1B bombers will also join aerial drills. Tensions are at a particularly dangerous point as North Korea edges toward its goal of a viable arsenal of nuclear-tipped long-range missiles, and President Donald Trump uses aggressive rhetoric toward the North, threatening, for instance, ''fire and fury'' toward the country. While many South Koreans typically ignore North Korea's rhetoric, some senior American officials have expressed worry following the ICBM test, North Korea's third. On Sunday, Lindsey Graham, a US senator from the state of South Carolina, said he believes that it's time for US military families in South Korea to leave the country because conflict with North Korea is getting close. The US government has not announced a formal decision to evacuate US citizens from South Korea, and there were no such signs in the diplomatic community in Seoul. In addition to American diplomats and other embassy workers, about 28,500 US troops operate in South Korea, and many come to their posts with their families, who often live on huge, well-guarded military bases. Also on Sunday, the White House national security adviser said that Trump will take care of North Korean threats by ''doing more ourselves.'' ''The priorities that the president has given us are to move as quickly as we can to resolve this crisis with North Korea,'' General H R McMaster told Fox News in an interview. ''If necessary, the president and the United States will have to take care of it, because he has said he's not going to allow this murderous rogue regime to threaten the United States.''
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Sunday inaugurated the first phase of the Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman, opening a new strategic route connecting Iran, India and Afghanistan bypassing Pakistan.
The port in the Sistan-Balochistan province on Iran's southern coast, is easily accessible from India's western coast and is located around 80 km from Pakistan's Gwadar port, which is being developed with Chinese investment.
India's minister of state for shipping Pon Radhakrishnan represented India at the inauguration ceremony of Phase 1 of the Shahid Beheshti Port at Chabahar, which was also attended by ambassadors and senior officials of the region.
At an India-Iran-Afghanistan ministerial-level trilateral meeting held on the sidelines of the inaugural function on Sunday the three countries resolved to work towards integrated development of connectivity infrastructure, including ports, road and rail networks to open up greater opportunities for regional market access and integration of their economies.
India has contracted to equip and operate two berths in Chabahar Port Phase-I with capital investment of $85.21 million and annual revenue expenditure of $22.95 million on a 10-year lease.
The port will give Iran the closest link to the Indian Ocean and more than triple the country's shipping capacity and pose a challenge to Pakistan's Gwadar Port, which is some 80 km away.
The $340-million project was constructed by Khatam al-Anbia, a company affiliated to the Revolutionary Guard and the largest contractor of government construction projects.
It brings the capacity of the port to 8.5 million tonnes of cargo annually, from the previous 2.5 million tonnes.
The port facilities now include five new piers, two of them allowing docking of container vessels with up to 100,000 tonnes captaincy.
Rouhani, in his inauguration speech and said the port will bring ''more engagement and unity'' among regional countries. ''We should go after positive competition,'' he said. ''We welcome other ports in the region, we welcome Gwadar's development.''
Iranian state TV said the inauguration was attended by dignitaries from India, Qatar, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries.
For India, which has committed $500 million for the development of the Chabahar port along with associated roads and rail lines, the investment is important since the port will open a trade route for land-locked Central Asian countries bypassing Pakistan.
Last month India shipped the first consignment of a planned 1300,000 tonne wheat supply to Afghanistan through the Chabahar port.
Chabahar also has an international airport and Iran's Navy and Air Force have bases in the city, adding to the port's value.
At this busy seasonal time, An Garda Siochana wishes to advise of the continuing existence of Invoice Redirect Fraud and urges businesses to remind employees to treat any request to change supplier bank account details with extreme caution. Losses amounting to over 700,000 have been reported to Gardai in the last month.
Invoice Redirect Fraud is a crime targeting businesses working with suppliers and businesses that regularly perform online financial transactions.
In the last month alone there have been numerous attempts in relation to this type of fraud in excess of 1.3 million with actual losses amounting to over 700,000. An Garda Siochana works very closely with the Financial Institution in this regard who have intercepted many transactions of this nature however it can be difficult to recover funds once they have left the jurisdiction so prompt reporting is critical.
In crimes of this nature, criminals send emails to businesses purporting to be one of their legitimate suppliers. These emails contain an instruction to change the bank account details that the business has for a legitimate supplier, to bank account details that ultimately benefit the criminals. These requests can also come by way of letter or phone call so caution should attach to any request of this nature.
The criminal intention is that when the legitimate supplier next sends an invoice to the company seeking payment for services rendered or goods supplied, the victim business acts on the new banking instructions and sends the payment to the criminals bank account where the funds are quickly transferred or withdrawn. In many instances the business does not know it is a victim of this crime until sometime later when the legitimate supplier sends a reminder invoice for payment.
Robust policies
Businesses must ensure that they have robust policies and procedures in place to deal with requests of this nature including escalating the decision making function to supervisory positions and making direct contact with a trusted known person in the suppliers organisation. In this context it is imperative that a suitable known contact person is identified before a business relationship commences with the supplier.
If a business relationship has already commenced and no such checks are in place and a request of this nature is received; independent contact should be made with the supplier to verify the contents of the email. Under no circumstances should contact details contained in the email or attachments be relied upon to verify the request whether these consist of a physical address, an email address or a phone number. In that context, all existing business relationships should be reviewed without delay and defensive policies and procedures put in place.
It is important to note that victims of Invoice Redirect Fraud range from very small businesses to large corporations and the consequences of falling for a scam of this nature can be catastrophic and can result in the closure of businesses and redundancies so all employees should receive training in relation to avoiding this type of scam.
Ibec, the group that represents Irish business, has welcomed the announcement that work is to begin on the first phase of the A5 upgrade, from Newbuildings to Strabane.
Ibec North West Regional Director Terry MacNamara stated: The advancement of the A5 is of great strategic importance to the North West. Infrastructure is the backbone of everyday life, underpinning all economic activity. The upgrade of the A5 will be a vital boost to the North West's economy and a crucial step forward in connecting the North West to Dublin. Ibec has actively lobbied for ambitious proposals to upgrade the all-island transport network. The A5 is a crucial artery of this network and is currently unfit for purpose.
Land purchases are also set to begin in early 2018 for the new Lifford to Letterkenny N14 road. The road will connect to the new A5. This is a welcome development as improved cross border connectivity will support economic growth, help create jobs and promote investment in the North West. It is vital for the continued economic recovery of the region.
Funding
It is essential that funding is now agreed for the remaining two phases of the A5 upgrade as well as the upgrade of the A6. Enhanced connectivity is particularly important given current uncertainties and challenges created by Brexit.
Ibec North West has raised serious concerns for the future growth of the region and calls on Government to address the long-standing issue of lack of prioritisation of the region in the soon to be finalised National Planning Framework (NPF) and National Investment Plan (NIP). Investment in the N4 Sligo-Dublin and the Atlantic corridor routes are vital in countering the challenges of peripherality and perceived remoteness of the North West.
The NPF must prioritise the two regional urban centres of Sligo and Letterkenny-Derry. Channelling growth to these two important urban centres would support targeted population growth and help achieve wider regional and national planning objectives.
The task now is to ensure the North West region is not deprived but instead is given an opportunity to capitalise on the many advantages it has to offer as a place to live, do business, create jobs and invest. The NPF and the NIP will both be central to this.
A Donegal woman who scooped prizes to the value of 27,000 on the National Lottery Winning Streak gameshow on RTE ONE last Saturday said her appearance on the programme was down to her late husband, Seamus.
Emily Lynch, from Lifford, revealed that her house was full of relatives and close friends who had attended her late husbands anniversary Mass when her name was pulled out of the drum to appear on the show.
Emily said her good luck was sent as a gift from Seamus, who passed away two years ago, and came at the end of what has been a tough couple of years.
She said the whole house went bananas and there was uproar when her name was called out and there was a great night of celebrations.
Emily had no shortage of support on the show on Saturday as she has nine siblings five brothers and five sisters - who all travelled to RTE. Also accompanying her were her children Michael, Seamus and Lisa and grandchildren Daisy, Travis, Millie, Cara and Junior. Her mother, Frances who is 87 years old, was delighted to be in the audience for the show after being a fan of the show for many years.
Emily scooped a holiday to Venice, Italy worth 3,000 and bagged herself a tidy 24,000 - plenty of spending money for her travels. With her winnings, Emily wants to do some home improvements and said some will go towards helping out her son Seamus, who will marry his partner Sheena next April.
The winning ticket was bought from Statoil, Letterkenny Road, Lifford.
Letterkenny University Hospital had the fifth highest number of patients on trolleys for the month of November. INMO trolley/ward figures for November show that there were 502 patients on trolleys in Letterkenny.
The hospitals with the highest number of patients on trolleys, in November were:
University Hospital Limerick: 878
University Hospital Cork: 651
University Hospital Waterford: 624
University Hospital Galway: 539
Nationally the latest Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) Trolley/Ward Watch figures confirm the number of admitted patients (91,147), on trolleys or overcrowded wards, continues at record levels in the first eleven months of this year (tables attached). This is a 6% increase, on the first eleven month of 2016, and a 95% increase on the first eleven months of 2007.
However the latest figures, for the month of November, confirm a 7% reduction when compared to November 2016. This is broken down as follows:
6,212 admitted patients, on trolleys, in Emergency Departments and 2,476 admitted patients, on trolleys/extra beds on inpatient wards.
This gives a total of 8,688 admitted patients, without a proper inpatient bed, in November 2017.
The ED Taskforce meets this Thursday, 7th of December at which the INMO will again be seeking confirmation that all hospitals are allowed/resourced to do the following:
Open all available beds;
Introduce incentivised recruitment/retention packages to ensure additional nursing staff are employed to deal with this continuing demand;
Ensure senior clinical decision makers are available, between 8am and 10pm, over the seven day cycle; and
Ensure all available resources are provided for community beds/home care packages and community nursing requirements leading to no waiting lists for same.
Speaking this morning, INMO General Secretary, Liam Doran said: The latest November figures confirm a welcome 7% reduction in the number of admitted patients, without a bed, in November, compared to November 2016. The reduction, in the numbers on trolleys in Emergency Departments, is particularly welcome. However, the very significant increase in additional patients on inpatient wards, on trolleys or additional beds is most disturbing and suggests hospital management are increasingly repeating the mistakes of the past. Overcrowding wards has never solved the problem, of hospital overcrowding, and this will only be done through additional acute beds.
Mr. Doran concluded: The INMO will be raising these latest figures, at the ED Taskforce meeting on Thursday. We will be seeking clarity on what further measures are planned, in addition to the four demands outlined above, to address the continuing overcrowding crisis.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear the appeal of a local man convicted of killing another man in 1992 in what became known locally as the Waller Store murder.
Christopher Floyd, convicted in 2005 of the 1992 murder of Waylon Crawford, argued that prosecutors struck blacks from serving on the jury solely because of race. Floyds appeals were eventually denied at the state level and attorneys appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to consider the case Monday.
Although both defendant and victim are white, a recent Supreme Court ruling concluded minorities cant be excluded from a jury on race alone, regardless of the races involved in the case.
Floyd claimed on appeal that the prosecution used more than half of its peremptory strikes to exclude 10 of the 11 remaining African-Americans from the jury pool during jury selection. Local prosecutors claimed legitimate reasons for striking the jurors, ranging from prior criminal convictions to personal opposition to the death penalty to simply being non-responsive during screening questions from the prosecutors.
On an earlier appeal to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, the court sent the case back to Houston County, ordering the local court to hold a hearing in which prosecutors were required to give a non-racial reason for striking each of the black jurors.
According to reports, Floyd killed Crawford during a robbery at the convenience store where Crawford worked. The case had grown cold until new information allowed authorities to make an arrest in 2005. Floyd was sentenced to death.
Local restaurant China Town, Main Street, Castlebellingham has been served with a closure order for breaches of food safety legislation during the last month, according to the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI).
The order was served on December 1st.
Under the FSAI Act, 1998, a Closure Order is served where it is deemed that there is or there is likely to be a grave and immediate danger to public health at or in the premises; or where an Improvement Order is not complied with.
Closure Orders can refer to the immediate closure of all or part of the food premises, or all or some of its activities.
Under the EC (Official Control of Foodstuffs) Regulations, 2010, Closure Orders and Prohibition Orders are served where there is a non-compliance with food legislation
Closure and Improvement Orders will remain in the reports for a period of three months from the date the order was lifted. Prohibition Orders will remain in the reports for a period of one month from the date the order was lifted.
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Pupils from St Francis National School, Blackrock, took part in the Team Hope Christmas shoebox appeal and made up over 200 shoeboxes filled with gifts for vulnerable children in countries throughout the world, through the Team Hope partnership network.
The shoeboxes were recently collected from the school by the area coordinator, but not before a group photograph was taken.
"Since the school was established ten years ago, pupils have taken part in the shoebox appeal", said school principal, Oreena Lawless.
"It's therefore a cause that our pupils and their families are familiar with and the support and generosity of parents is simply overwhelming. The shoebox appeal is a fun and easy way to get the message to pupils that Christmas is about giving.
Team Hope collects shoe boxes which have been filled with gifts, and send them all over the world, giving to children who normally receive nothing for Christmas. This small and generous gesture means so much to the children who receive theses boxes.
You can find out more about Team Hope by visiting http://www.teamhope.ie
A 21-year-old student from Dundalk has been announced as a runner-up in the A&L Goodbody Bold Ideas Student Innovation Award.
Dylan Markey, a Law & Business degree student at Maynooth University, was commended for his proposal to establish a crowdsourcing business called ' Soncom '. The overall winner was Conor Leavy from DCU.
The local student's idea aims to help Irish businesses ahead of the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) next year.
Soncom is billed as an intermediary for businesses in the IT and legal sectors whose primary purpose would be to provide services for companies that allow them to comply with new GDPR protection legislation.
The A&L Goodbody has held the Bold Ideas competition saw over 1,200 members of the public cast their vote on Facebook for their favourite submissions. The winner and runners-up were selected by a panel of three expert judges, in what marked the sixth year of the competition.
John Whelan, Partner and Head of A&L Goodbody's Commercial and Technology Group said: "Bold Ideas inspires creativity and bold thinking among students and this year it gave students the opportunity to showcase great ideas to enhance Ireland as a global centre for data when the EU GDPR is introduced next year. Dylan's idea impressed the judges as an innovative and unique way to encourage businesses to establish here."
Dylan and fellow runner-up Aine McCarthy from Trinity College Dublin both received iPad minis for their innovative ideas. As a first prize winner, Conor Leavy received 4,000 in cash and an internship in A&L Goodbodys Head Office in Dublin.The firm will also make a donation to a charity of his/her choice.
A plan for the future of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument includes the National Park Services preference for building a new 10,600-square-foot visitor center on the footprint of the current center and bringing back some if not all of the tens of thousands of battlefield artifacts now being stored for safekeeping in Tucson, Arizona.
Park officials are accepting comments on the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument General Management Plan Amendment and Environmental Assessment through Jan. 4, 2018. The only scheduled meeting on the EA will be held via a conference call from 2 p.m. through 4 p.m. Dec. 14. Phone 866-714-0783 and use participant code 4244998#.
Right now we are in the information-gathering stage. We want to hear anything we may or may not be aware of, said Wayne Challoner, superintendent at the Little Bighorn Battlefield monument for the past month. We are trying to see if we can go in and rebuild in the same footprint with a new and better-designed facility. Getting those artifacts back has always been the goal.
Theres no construction timetable in the plan, and theres no guarantee that funding will be available.
"We want to make sure the public buys in on what we are trying to do," Challoner said.
According to the plan, the decision to move artifacts to the park services Western Archaeological and Conservation Center in Tucson was strongly opposed by tribal members who felt the move would disconnect their attachment to items of cultural importance associated with the battlefield site. Restoring the trust relationship is essential to future park management and cooperation and consultation with the tribes and other stakeholders.
The NPS says its committed to returning the collections to the monument and providing secure on-site curatorial storage.
The preferred alternative would bring an end to the current summertime practice of up to 200 visitors at a time squeezing together to hear a ranger deliver a talk beneath a partial overhang outside the visitor center.
Rebuilding in the footprint of the existing visitor center would give visitors an entry experience, which includes seeing key elements of the battlefield from the visitor centers windows and patios and creating a place-based context for their visit," the plan states.
Before the visitor center is demolished and rebuilt, an interim remodel of the current visitor center would provide for updated interim exhibits, including the removal and relocation of existing objects and new exhibit construction and installation.
The plan states its possible that a 7,000-square-foot collections facility will be built near the existing administration building.
Five alternatives were considered and then dismissed:
Leasing a new visitor center and museum storage facility in the Garryowen area. The plan calls this alternative unreasonably expensive.
Leasing facilities in the Reno Creek Road area. These modifications would present the history of the battle chronologically but would be costly, the plan states.
Building facilities on Custer Battlefield Preservation Committee land. The 11 percent grades on the site far exceed the normal construction threshold of 5 percent.
Locating administrative offices outside the park. Plan writers eliminated this alternative because of technical and economic infeasibility.
Leasing facilities as part of the proposed Montana Department of Transportation Battlefield Rest Area. The rest area is conceptual until MDT and the Crow Tribe sign a lease agreement. The park has a compelling need to move forward to address its issues, and this alternative may or may not proceed in the near future, the document states.
Visitation at Little Bighorn has been up in recent years from about 278,000 in 2013 to more than 332,000 in 2016, an increase of almost 20 percent.
A man has pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide after striking and killing a motorcyclist last year while having nearly four times the legal amount of THC in his blood.
Kent Roderick Jensen, 21, made the change of plea Monday before Judge Gregory Todd in Yellowstone County District Court.
The state will recommend a sentence of 20 years in prison, according to a plea agreement. The maximum penalty for the charge is 30 years in prison.
On March 7, 2016, Jensen, 21, struck and killed Jashua James Fry, 31, of Billings. Fry was riding a Kawasaki motorcycle eastbound on South Frontage Road when he was hit by a car that had turned west off Wise Lane, according to the Montana Highway Patrol.
The crash was reported at about 6:40 p.m., and Fry was declared dead at the scene.
Jensen stayed at the scene until law enforcement arrived and consented to a blood draw. The draw showed he had 19 nanograms per milliliter of THC in his system. Under Montana law, 5 ng/mL of THC constitutes a DUI.
According to charging documents, Jensen told deputies he was driving to a Subway restaurant from a friends house when the crash occurred. The friend told deputies he and Jensen had smoked marijuana for most of the day.
Jensen will remain out on release before sentencing. A sentencing date has not yet been set.
Jensen retains the right to appeal the judges ruling on his constitutional challenge. In July, Todd denied Jensens request to challenge the THC threshold laid out in Montanas DUI law, arguing it is not scientifically based.
In his arguments, public defender Gregory Paskell cited a 2016 report from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety that cast doubt on a specific level of THC impairment, because tolerance varies considerably between people. He called on a chemist from a Colorado pharmaceutical testing lab, who testified that he agreed with those claims.
Todd said that while the science may not be precise on impairment, the goal of the law was to reduce impaired driving.
"Currently there may be no method for precisely measuring the distracting effects of THC on a person," Todd wrote in his order. "But it is scientifically proven that THC had major psychoactive effects on people, and driving while under its effects poses a major risk to the driver and the public."
A man whose headless body was found in a transient camp in mid-November told casino staff as he left one night that if anything happened to him, Donald Cherry and Jeffrey Haverty would be responsible.
The information was included in charging documents filed against Cherry, 31, and Haverty, 33, on Monday.
Both men face a charge of deliberate homicide, which is punishable by life imprisonment, or by 10 to 100 years in prison, plus a consecutive two to 10 years for use of a dangerous weapon. The men made their initial appearances in Yellowstone County Justice Court on Monday.
Justice of the Peace David Carter set bond for both men at $500,000 and required GPS monitoring should either be released. Cherry and Haverty will appear next in front of Judge Mary Jane Knisely on Dec. 21.
The body of Myron Wesley Knight, 41, of Billings, was found in a transient camp near 32nd Street West and Gabel Road on Nov. 15. Two people walking on a dirt trail near the canal west of Billings Collision Repair discovered the body, according to the Billings Police Department.
But he likely was killed weeks earlier, according to charges.
Haverty, Cherry and Knight had been together at Montana Lils Casino, 2850 King Ave. W., on the night of Oct. 26. Knight asked a casino employee to hold his $120 in winnings for the night in case Haverty and Cherry wanted to rob him, the employee told police.
Knight also told the employee that if he did not come back, that Haverty and Cherry would be responsible. He was going to check out Havertys tent that was set up nearby, he said.
All three were regular customers at the casino and known to staff.
The three left the casino together at 10 p.m. Knight had wanted to see the campsite, Haverty later told investigators. Haverty and Cherry had been camping in a wooded area near 32nd Street West and Gabel Road.
Cherrys girlfriend, identified in the charges only as Z.W., told police she had stayed at the transient camp with Haverty and Cherry, and was there on the night of Knights death.
On the night of Oct. 26, the three men arrived at the campsite, Z.W. left to go to a gas station nearby and returned 15 to 20 minutes later. At that time, Knights body was lying on the ground and there was blood on his neck, she told police. She said it looked like he wasnt breathing, she said.
Z.W. watched Haverty begin cutting Knights head off, she said. He stopped when it became difficult, and Cherry took over. Knights head was found about 30 feet away from the body, wrapped in a towel and covered with leaves.
The decapitation, she told police, was part of the men's plan to dispose of the body. But they never burned Knight's remains in a fire pit as they planned, she said.
Knight had just $6 on him when he was killed, Z.W. said, and Haverty was angry because he expected him to have much more.
Z.W. said she went gambling at the Magic Diamond Casino, 3150 King Ave. W., with Haverty and Cherry after they killed Knight.
In separate statements to police, Haverty and Cherry said they didnt know how Knight died and were not involved.
Knight likely was still alive when his killers began cutting off his head, said Dr. Robert Kurtzman, state medical examiner, who assessed bruising around the neck wounds.
The autopsy also showed multiple blunt force traumas, indicating Knight had been beaten.
Haverty had lost his job, been kicked out of his apartment in late August, and had had his truck stolen, he said in statements to casino staff and to police. Cherry, his friend, had told him about the campsite near 32nd Street West and Gabel Road.
On Halloween, a man entered Montana Lils Casino with a bleeding head wound, asking to use the phone. He did not say what happened to him, but a couple of days later Haverty was at the casino and told staff he had hit the man with his hatchet while they were smoking.
Casino staff also told police about a separate incident in which Haverty came into the casino and was flailing his hatchet around, saying a man outside had tried to shoot him. The last time the casino staff reported seeing Haverty was on Nov. 3, when he said he planned to move to Arizona.
U.S. Marshals Service deputies with the Montana Violent Offender Task Force found and arrested Haverty at a friends house on the West End on Nov. 18. The friend later told police Haverty had asked her how to wash blood out of clothing, charges state.
Haverty has a criminal history.
He had been serving probation on a suspended sentence for criminal endangerment out of Wheatland County from April.
Charging documents state that in July 2016, Haverty rubbed his own feces in his partners face and assaulted her and their 1-year-old child.
Haverty was also convicted of partner or family member assault in Harlowton in 2014.
He also faces a felony drug possession charge from the Nov. 18 arrest because he was found with meth residue on a pipe in his pocket, charges state.
Recently we flew to Bohol on-board an AirAsia flight and in there two World Vision celebrity ambassador spoke in-flight to tell passengers about how flying with AirAsia help World Vision kids #SeetheWorld.
See the World is a fund raising initiative that aims to raise one million pesos (Php1M) to provide sponsorship program for many children as direct recipients across the country. The initiatibe sets that for everh AirAsia seats booked or sold in the Philippines from December 1 to 31 2017 , five pesos (Php5) will be automatically donated tl World Vision Child Sponsorship program.
Tippy Dos Santos and Gretchen Ho were the celebrity ambassadors on our flight who told passengers about this info. They also were on that flight to Bohol to see some of the beneficiary children of World Vision program.
I was with them when they met some kids in Barangay Oy, Loboc, Bohol to give inspiration to the kids to oursue their education and secure a better future.
It was such a heartwarming trip as kids were very enthusiastic and thankful for the gift of education World Vision has provided them. They promised to be good in school so as the sponsorship will not be put to waste.
AirAsia Regional Chief Operating Officer Pete ChReonwongski said the collaboration between AirAsia and World Vision is part of their Christmas program which also represents another step forward in the companys commitment to the philosophy that no corporation can live apart from the community it serves.
World Vision Philippines National Director Rommel Fuerte was very grateful of the initiative as this can ensure that every peso that will be donated to World Vision will help a lot of underprivileged Filipino children strain their dreams of a better life.
Aside from. The fund raising efforts #SeetheWorld will feature inspiring stories of children from impoverished communities around the country whose lives have changed and caused other children and community aspire for better living conditions.
AirAsia will run a web series online available in AirAsiaPhilippines facebook.
Keep updated with the initiative by searching for the #SeetheWorld hastag and #AirAsiaWorldVision.
Electoral choices are increasingly made without due regard for the consequences.
Some of our friends tell us that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. This is not really correct. Only bits and pieces of the world are being carried to hell or some place near it, with each in a handbasket of its own. Other bits and pieces duly replace what is carried away. We can observe three particular handbaskets on their way to some place that is not hell, but near enough in their discomfort. One is Catalonian secession, another is Brexit, and the third is America First. These are noted in increasing order of importance.
Independence for Catalonia is perhaps best understood by thinking of a teacher in a Catalonian village who is a poet writing verse in Catalan in his spare time. He thinks his poetry is very good but not appreciated. He is dreaming of the post of cultural attache in London or Rome once Catalan gets an independent diplomatic service. There may be many hundreds of Catalonian teacher-poets who hope to become diplomats in a fashionable capital, but the low probabilities of prestigious appointments for a new Catalan embassy will not deter him from becoming a fighter for Catalonia independence. The fight will have an outcome that Catalans and Spaniards will both regard as a regrettable modus vivendi, one in which the European Union is further weakened. Both the Catalans and the remainder of Spain will be a little weaker and poorer than if the independence movement had not taken place at all, and where our teacher poet does not become a cultural attache. The rule of one man, one vote will in any case have done its work.
An ever closer union could be a one-line explanation for why the British people in 2016 decided by referendum to leave the European Union. And now Frances ambitious young president, Emmanuel Macron, is doing what he believes to be the natural role of France, that is to lead the union towards an ever closer union; and there is some temptation by Poland and Hungary to escape the ever closer union by referendums of their own, should the union get ever closer. There might be many more opportunities for one man, one vote in the foreseeable future.
It is easy to see why universal suffrage and one man, one vote are particularly vulnerable to fact twisting and downright lies.
A referendum attempts to decide a single question. The question can either be to decide what a majority wants as a matter of taste or as a matter of interest. Like a person who prefers blue to green, his decision for one over the other is nothing one can meaningfully argue about. The British public has apparently decided that certain decisions of national significance should be decided in Westminster rather than Brussels or Luxembourg, and in doing so, they reverted to the ancient tradition by which Britons want to govern themselves. The referendum at the same time chose certain other alternatives, mainly of an economic nature, which were not matters of taste, preference, or tradition, but calculations about greater or lesser prosperity. This type of question, unlike the question of liking blue over green is a legitimate question for fact-finding and argument. Unfortunately, there can also be matters of twisted facts or lies. It is easy to see why universal suffrage and one man, one vote are particularly vulnerable to fact twisting and downright lies. Their vulnerability must be weighed against the possible merits that democracy might also have.
Perhaps because it was a decision that brought out many passions, the British referendum of 2016 has proved very vulnerable to fact twisting and lies. An exquisite lie about Brexit was that it would make the National Health Service rich. The British government was paying 350 million per week to Brussels. The British electorate was asked by the partisans of Brexit whether they would like to continue paying this sum to Brussels or to the services of the NHS. It was a matter of a primitive psychological trick to name the sum in terms of weeks and millions rather than years and billions, a much vaster sum, which the average voter could barely envisage. The UK Statistics Authority has explained that in terms of a rebate granted by the Brussels authority, the sum that Britain owed was only 276 million, of which 161 million was spent in Britain itself, with the remainder being spent on EU-wide community services like research, in which the United Kingdom was one of the beneficiaries. With all the adjustments duly made, the residual that might be devoted to the NHS is only pocket money.
Overall, the 350 million to be found is perhaps the simplest instance where the people who have the votes have been misled into using them. There are still other cases where the referendum has led to future outcomes that entail use risks. British foreign trade, for example, would have to compensate for the part lost from Brexit with gains from outside the European Union. They may not succeed fully or indeed at all. For the compensation, or the part (lost) in future trade will depend largely on how the people are using their votes. This is a risk that the exercise of one man, one vote ought not to be entrusted with.
It is strange but true that China is now a champion of an open world economy and the United States a defender of closed fences. Since starting another five year term at the head of the Chinese state apparatus, Mr. Xi Jinping has made a very clear and solemn declaration in favour of globalisation and free trade, being the leader of the only communist party in history which is both capitalist in its economic policy and apparently successful in suppressing any opposition. Donald Trump, at about the same time and indeed at all times when he is commenting his own greatness, will only accept globalisation and free trade when they are subordinate to America First.
Being the President of a country in which the Congress has the last word about taxes and expenditures, Donald Trump has only limited power over the economy of what is still the most important capitalist country of the world. Much of his discretionary power is over relations with other countries, where he can menace the post-World War II western civilisation, both in terms of military security (he does not want to tolerate the free-riding of his allies on US armed forces) as well as in international trade, where he thinks that existing arrangements are not good enough for America.
A trade agreement can be conceived as both a trade creation and a trade replacement. In the North American Free Trade Agreement inherited from the Obama administration, America and Mexico jointly created additional flows of automobiles, with some of the manufacturing of automobile part relocated to Mexico. The two partners have benefited from more automobiles, and Mexico has additionally benefited from more automobile parts. Of the two partners, Mexico may have benefited more, although both partners became better off. In what looks like the spirit of America First, this agreement is now to be renegotiated. In the background of this renegotiation, America wants the trade balance between the two partners, at present favourable to Mexico, to be redressed in favour of America. The dream of nine feet of concrete wall on the Mexican border paid for by Mexico, promised in Trumps election campaign, has apparently been forgotten.
Another trade agreement, which was stillborn because President Trump and his advisers judged it not favourable enough, was the Trans Pacific Partnership. It included twelve countries in Southeast Asia and South America. The United States was merely one out of twelve partners, which was judged unacceptable by the White House. President Trump dislikes multi-lateral agreements where the United States is only one out of many, and must bargain as only one out of many. The remaining eleven members of the agreement are now trying to revive it; if they succeed, the eleven-member agreement would bring important developments in trade and regulation, and will no doubt be something that China will influence instead of the United States, as was originally intended. However, it will not be the first and only failure of American diplomacy and American goodwill that the Trump administration will have suffered.
Donald Trump can be proud of a highly successful career in financing building and letting high-rise buildings. Industry circles and a mainly hostile press reproach him for his methods, which have been controversial. The first year of his presidency has not been heroic because none of his major promises have been completed or are even likely to be realised. His most friendly critics think that he is just not presidential, while his harshest critics call him simply grotesque.
It may be that Donald Trump, a property speculator all his life, does not really deserve the criticism that he receives as President. The really blameworthy criticism should go to one half of the American men and women who have used their precious vote for electing the President of the most powerful nation (at least for the time being the most powerful) of which they have the great good fortune to be citizens.
(Photo: Wikipedia)Jim Wallis at the World Economic Forum
Two evangelical Christian leaders, Jim Wallis and Hershael York, have told National Public Radio that there is a crisis of spirituality in the current political climate of the United States under the presidency of Donald Trump.
NPR host Michael Martin noted in the interview he surmised from Wallis's writing that he believes that Christians' support for Donald Trump is something of an ethical challenge for Christians.
Political activist and writer Rev. Wallis replied, "I think these issues are much deeper than politics. Many of us feel politically homeless these days, But the racial divide is of deep concern to me.
"So, when white evangelicals say to black evangelicals, I didn't vote for Donald Trump because of his racial bigotry but because of other issues like the ones you mentioned, the response often back from black evangelicals is, so his racial bigotry wasn't a deal breaker for you, I guess? And we're really having to repair that divide."
Martin asked York, if he agreed there is a crisis among American Christians, and he believes that plays some role in that?
"Yes. I think we are in danger of, as evangelicals, losing influence for the gospel's sake really for a generation because of this uneasy alliance," he replied.
York, a professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and senior pastor at Buck Run Baptist Church in Frankfort, Kentucky said there are two different narratives from the Bible,
"And we want to be faithful even though we're serving someone who is not in agreement with us. But the other narrative we can put on it are the Pharisees conniving with Pontius Pilate.
"The question is, is it collusion, complicity, connivance, or is it capitalization on a unique moment in history to shape the future through judicial appointments? It's a really difficult moment for evangelicals."
EVANGELICAL SUPPORT FOR TRUMP AND MOORE
York was asked why he thinks that so many white Christian evangelicals supported Donald Trump and Roy Moore who is standing as a Republic Party candidate in a Senate election contest in Alabama.
This is despite calls from his GOP (Grand Old Party) office bearers for accused child molester Moore to stand down and his refusal to so while he is now getting full backing from accused molester of women, Trump.
"Well, I think that in their minds, they've made a - basically a prioritization of issues. And for a lot of evangelicals, the abortion issue is the number-one issue.
"And so, they are willing to make peace with any flawed politician who will fight abortion and stand for other things.
"I think the rapid change on the gay-marriage issue and a lot of evangelicals felt like there was really an undue pressure to go beyond simply understanding that this is now in society to having to accommodate it and - against one's own personal convictions."
When Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine, was asked why he thinks so many evangelicals, particularly white evangelicals, are supporting Donald Trump.
He replied that the polling he had seen shows something different," that most white evangelicals are supporting Donald Trump because of immigration.
"They're angry toward immigrants or guns or, as evangelical pastors often tell me, I've got them for three hours - two hours a week and Fox News has them every day. It's that agenda. It's a political agenda."
Wallis added, however that Pastor York is right, that they care about things like abortion and marriage and family, "but even there, to have Donald Trump as a champion for those things is rather incredible.
"This man as a defender of marriage is quite ridiculous. And, in fact, this president-supported-and-Republican-passed tax bill just now will hurt poor families, taking away food and education and health care. And the abortion rates will go up. I believe in a consistent ethic of life."
By LA Times , Dec 01 , 2017
For decades, millions of Mexicans crossed into the U.S. in one of the largest mass migrations in modern history. But stricter immigration enforcement and new opportunities in Mexico have reversed the trend. Now, many are returning to towns like Malinalco, a rural community southwest of Mexico City. But coming home, it turns out, can be complicated.
As the cell door slammed behind him at an immigrant detention center in Detroit, Jose Roberto Tetatzin knew his life as an American was about to come to an abrupt end.
He thought about all the things he had acquired over 10 years of hard work in Michigan: the apartment full of furniture, the cool clothes, the cars.
In the next week or so, Washington regulators will rule on a major utility rate case affecting 1.6 million customers in their state and coal-fired plants in Colstrip.
Colstrip supplies 20 percent of the power distributed by Puget Sound Energy, which owns 50 percent of Colstrip Units 1 and 2 and about 25 percent of Units 3 and 4. Together, the four units and the coal mine that fuels them provide most of the jobs and nearly 80 percent of the tax base for the town of 2,300 Montanans.
Two points in this case before the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission directly affect Colstrip. A settlement agreement signed in September by PSE, Montana Attorney General Tim Fox, the Sierra Club, National Resource Defense Council, Northwest Energy Coalition, Renewable Northwest and Natural Resources Defense Council proposes that:
PSE will pay $10 million to help the community of Colstrip transition with the closure of Units 1 and 2 by the middle of 2022. Details of how that money will be paid have not been set, but PSE has said it should include worker retraining.
PSE will accelerate payoff of its share of debt on Units 3 and 4, so it is completely paid off in 2027. This would require an increase in PSE customers rates. Units 3 and 4 wouldnt necessarily close in 2027.
The WUTC is deciding whether to accept the proposed settlement. All parties signed it, except for the Washington state consumer advocate.
Talen, the company that owns the other 50 percent of Units 1 and 2, isnt a regulated utility; it markets power to utilities and other customers. Talen hasnt agreed to payments to assist the Colstrip community, but it will be legally responsible for a share of the cleanup costs that are still being calculated by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.
As a net energy exporter, Montana is largely at the mercy of distant markets and forces beyond our control. Montana law and leaders must hold energy producers accountable for the impacts they incur in our state.
Colstrip 1 and 2 will require decades of cleanup with costs running over $100 million, according to Steve Secrist, PSE senior vice president and general counsel. Secrist, who helped negotiate the proposed rate case settlement, said the cleanup will create nearly 100 jobs, approximately as many as would be lost at the plants with the closure.
The need for people to help with remediation is such that no people will be out of work with the step down from 1 and 2, Secrist said on a recent visit to Montana.
State Sen. Duane Ankney, R-Colstrip, is skeptical. There will be loss of jobs, he told The Gazette, noting that coal miners will no longer be mining to supply the two closed units.
Secrist said remediation will create family wage jobs. We want to get solutions, retrain employees, certify them to give certainty to families that they will have work for the next 20 years, Secrist said.
If they assimilate the plant workers, what about the miners? Colstrip Mayor John Williams asked when The Gazette called for his opinion on the proposed $10 million transition fund. I dont know how the $10 million will come, if and when that occurs.
We suggest that PSE representatives meet with the Colstrip city council to discuss the impending shutdown and how that $10 million fund should work.
Regardless of the WUTC decision, Units 1 and 2 are scheduled to close by July 2022, under a court-ordered clean air settlement. Out-of-state customers for the plants power are demanding cleaner energy sources, which also are less expensive.
Change is coming to Colstrip. Coal-fired plants will still produce power for years to come, perhaps many years. The community deserves help in developing new industries.
Last spring, Ankney sponsored Senate Bill 338 that would have held PSE and Talen responsible for transition costs such as loss of local residential and commercial real estate value, outstanding government bond debt that was issued with the expectation of repayment with plant tax revenues and money for transitioning and retraining workers. The Gazette editorialized in support of SB338, which sailed through the Senate, but was killed in House energy committee where lobbyist argued the bill was bad for business. In March, a Gazette opinion said that legislation would be an important start on helping Colstrip.
Now the PSE rate case settlement is an important step in keeping a community that has always depended on coal viable in a changing energy market.
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Each time I come to the defense of public lands, I feel an attack on our state by people that are tasked with doing what constituents explain time and time again that they want: public lands access and respect for the last vestiges of wild places that are the very essence of our state.
We do not want legislation that releases 500,000 acres of Montana's Wilderness Study Areas as a ransom for protecting the Paradise Valley and Yellowstone from people that want to extract wealth, lock the public out and make our state a private playground for the wealthy. Wilderness Study Areas should be resolved through collaborative processes and not this top-down approach to managing our public lands.
Outdoor recreation generates $7.1 billion in consumer spending and supports 71,000 direct jobs in our state. It is essential to Montanas economy, and essential to our way of life.
Why does Sen. Steve Daines want to undermine years of locally driven, collaborative efforts? Montanans are working together to resolve their differences and chart a path forward. Collaboratives are the best way to resolve the status of WSAs.
More than anyone, Daines should understand how much these places mean to Montanans. He must get mountains of correspondence telling you how much public lands mean to people, and how they want this legacy passed to their children. Take the time to read the passion of your constituents. Learn what the collaboratives are doing. Learn the facts about WSAs, and what experts have to say.
I myself cherish these places because they are my peace and comfort, my history and my granddaughters' future.
Frances Galvin
Anaconda
YPG is grateful to US and Russia for the support
The YPG militia said that it had fully captured Deir al-Zors eastern countryside from Islamic State with the help of both the US-led coalition and Russia.
YPG and its allies had been shot by the missiles thrown by Russian warships and submarines. They now control around a quarter of Syria, the largest part outside government control, after seizing vast land from Islamic State.
YPG WAS PLACED INTO THE ZONE
YPG had been girded by the Iran-Russia forces on both sides because of the danger of the oil pool could have been seized by YPG. But today, signs argue against it.
YPG militias said that that it had fully captured Deir al-Zors eastern countryside from DEAS with the help of both the US-led coalition and Russia.
YPG THANKED TO US
It was announced that the area was purified from the DEAS by the help of US military forces.. Spokesman for the YPG, praised US and Russian air and logistical support as well as ground operations coordination. He said his forces are ready to form joint operation rooms with the different partners to complete the fight against DEAS.
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said this week that as the battle against Islamic State entered its final stages, he expected the focus to move towards holding territory instead of arming Syrian Kurdish fighters. Mattis said "The YPG is armed and as the coalition stops operations, then obviously you don't need that, you need security forces, you need police forces. That's local forces, that's people who make certain that DAES doesn't come back."
Turkey, which considers YPG in the force an extension of its own insurgent group, has protested Washingtons reliance on the YPG, as well as the provision of heavy weaponry to its fighters, in the fight against DEAS.
Disney has decided to remove Olaf's Frozen Adventure from Coco. The 22-minute Frozen short has been playing before Coco screenings since the latter premiered last month.
Starting Dec. 8, Olaf's Frozen Adventure will no longer air alongside Coco, and the freed up time will be used to provide more screenings of the animated film in various theaters.
It is not new for Pixar to unveil a completely unrelated short film alongside their main animated projects, but the shorts are called as such for a reason. Normally, the special films would only last for 10 minutes.
Disney Removes 'Olaf's Frozen Adventure' From Theaters
The special story, which centered on Olaf, lasted for a good 21 minutes, and fans were reportedly not happy to stay inside the movie house for a much longer period of time.
As of late, Disney has not released an official statement regarding the removal of Olaf's Frozen Adventure. However, someone who claimed to work for a movie theater released a note that allegedly came from Disney.
"Please note that the run of Olaf's Frozen Adventure playing before Coco will end after 12/7. Starting on Friday 12/8 no more Olaf shorts should be up on screen. With the extra 22 minutes of running time back, we would appreciate if you could get in an extra show if possible," read the note.
However, it is unclear whether or Olaf's Frozen Adventure will also be removed from the theaters outside of the United States.
Meanwhile, Coco has become a massive hit among both kids and adults. The animation earned $69 million last weekend alone and has already grossed $280 million.
These figures are expected to improve in the coming days because Coco has not yet been released in Australia, Japan, Italy, Korea, Brazil, and the United Kingdom.
'Coco' Synopsis
Coco centered on a young boy named Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez), who had a passion for music. However, his parents didn't want him to pursue the craft because of the bad memories they had of his great grandfather, Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal).
After borrowing Ernesto de la Cruz's (Benjamin Bratt), Miguel became transported into the Land of the Dead. While there, he went in search for his grandfather who he initially thought was Ernesto. Later on, Miguel found out that his real grandfather was Hector.
After exposing Ernesto's bad deeds, Miguel returned home. He made his grandmother, Coco (Ana Ofelia Murguia), remember her dad, Hector, so that he could cross over the bridge.
Coco remembered Hector at the last minute, which made it possible for him to be reunited with all of his deceased family members in the alternate world.
On December 2nd, news broke that Golden Krust CEO, Lowell Hawthorne committed suicide at his companys factory in the Bronx. Hawthorne, a Jamaican immigrant founded the restaurant franchise in 1989 alongside his wife and siblings. By 2017, the company grew to have 120 locations in nine states.
What Employees Said About Hawthorne
Employees of Hawthorne, 57, paid their respects by visiting the location where he killed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot. They said the news of their boss' sudden death was shocking because they never saw him angry. We saw him every day. He talks to everyone. He was always in a good mood, Hanaku Oxori, who has been working at the factory for 17 years expressed to the New York Post. Many employees of the brand, like Oxori, revealed they remained employed at the company for nearly 20 years because Hawthorne was a great boss to work for. Fans of the Golden Krust business grew to love Hawthorne, especially when he appeared on the hit reality show Undercover Boss. On social media, they conveyed that they didnt believe the news of his death and suspected foul play.
The Surprising Tax Debt
However, a family member of Hawthorne told detectives that the mogul had mounting tax debt. The same relative also disclosed to law enforcement that Hawthorne was acting funny and talking to himself in the hours leading up to his death. Police say surveillance tapes show Hawthorne shooting himself inside his office thats located in the Bronx factory. Four days before ending his life, Hawthorne wrote on Facebook about the struggles he faced as a Caribbean immigrant and how he hoped his story inspires others to go after their dreams.
Hawthorne's Legacy
I was always in search of the next honest means to make a dollar. Like many transplanted Caribbean nationals, I struggled to work and raise a family. I can only thank God for everything I have achieved. If my story here can inspire others to rise up and give it a go, I would have accomplished something meaningful, he wrote on the social media platform. Aside from the 120 store locations, Golden Krust sold its popular pastry to 20,000 supermarkets, the United States military, correctional and city educational systems. According to its official website, it was the first Caribbean-owned business to be given a franchise license in the United States and will eventually launch locations in Canada.
Steven Clarke, Hawthorne's nephew and franchise's spokesman said at a news conference the family is arranging Hawthorne's funeral but is unsure if it will be open to the public. He revealed the family is still processing "this tragic loss."
PAPER Magazine has given fans another reason to fall in love with DJ Khaleds son, Asahd. The celebrity baby, who has made countless appearances on social media since he was born, has snagged the cover of the popular magazine.
Asahd Khaled Shows Off His Modeling Skills
Baby Asahd broke the internet in a different type of way when he appeared on the cover of the Winter 2017 issue as the fresh prince of hip-hop. He posed with a luxury car just right for his size. In another photo, he rocked a pair of Air Jordans with a silver tracksuit. His look was made complete with a silver chain. He was all-smiles in a more casual snapshot as he wore a blue dotted outfit as he sat on a silky blue fabric in front of a matching backdrop. He got dressed up and snazzy as he stuck with the blew in an adorable tuxedo. He got behind the wheel of the luxury car in another photo.
Asahd Khaled's Biggest Moments
Asahd has certainly been making his rounds as his level of fame seems to heighten with every Instagram post. He has more than 1.7 million followers on the social media site. The tot could be the youngest to ever grace the red carpet at the Grammy Awards as he accompanied his mega-producer father to the even earlier this year. DJ Khaled amped up Asahds appearance status and brought him on stage with him as DJ Khaled brought his only child on stage with him to present an award this past March.
Asahd has also been spotted at the 2017 Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards in March and VH1s Dear Mama event special in May.
DJ Khaled is without a question setting up his son for success as Asahd was listed as the Executive Producer of DJ Khaleds tenth studio album, Grateful, that was released this summer. The single Im The One debuted at the number 1 spot on Billboards coveted Hot 100 list when Asahd was only six months.
And of course, we couldnt forget about his jungle-themed first birthday party in October. Celebrities such as P. Diddy and Fat Joe made appearances at the Liv nightclub turned childs playground in Miami. Kids enjoyed fun-sized versions of luxury cars and tiger cubs at the special event that was fit for a king. Baby Asahd was seen sitting on his mini golden throne.
Be sure to keep up with Enstarz for the latest in celebrity news!
This is in response to Phoebe Tollefsons Oct. 15 article All or nothing mental health care is filling the Montana state hospital, critics say. The problem is that Warm Springs is not treating patients to their full ability and releases many of them after only a short stay, even though the involuntary commitment order is typically for up to 90 days.
In addition, the facilitators have, in the court order, the permission to force patients to take the medication to help them, but that doesn't always happen either. (Many mentally ill patients don't understand that the medication will help their brain illness, hence the court gets involved). Often the medications prescribed to help patients achieve "recovery" take weeks to actually take effect in the body; therefore, a longer stay is necessary to monitor them and to keep the patient on the medication.
Yes, my family has direct experience of this. Earlier this year, a loved one was released after only two weeks of the 90-days and this person was not impelled to take the prescribed medication. And so, we have to start over to help a loved one get treatment ... again. And we'll try as many times as it takes for Warm Springs to follow the court order. But the system shouldnt have to be this way.
Patricia Madsen
Billings
Archenemies of liberty Soros, Steyer, Bezos and Bloomberg
By Mark Alexander
Last Monday, one of our political editors, Thomas Gallatin, wrote about a legal restraining order filed on behalf of a Barack Obama deep-state leftover. Richard Cordray, former director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, attempted to name his deputy, Leandra English, as his successor clearly an end-run around the executive branch.
What's the CFPB, you ask? It's a behemoth unconstitutional regulatory bureaucracy created by the ill-conceived Dodd-Frank legislation. As Gallatin noted, it's "a rogue agency answerable to almost no one and Corday's selection of English was a deliberate attempt to keep it that way."
Donald Trump ignored Cordray and English and tapped his current Office of Management and Budget director, Mick Mulvaney, a CFPB critic, to serve as interim director. Mulvaney arrived at CFPB Monday (with donuts!) and advised all employees to "disregard any instructions you receive from Ms. English in her presumed capacity as acting director."
The Trump administration received a temporary reprieve Tuesday when U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly dismissed the restraining order, noting, "Denying the president's authority to appoint Mr. Mulvaney raises significant constitutional questions." But it won't end there...
While this high-profile legal dispute for control of their out-of-control statist bureaucracy is a high priority for Democrats, as spun by their MSM propaganda machine, there is something revealing about this case that they don't want you to know.
The attorney leading the suit, Deepak Gupta, was asked during an interview who is funding his lawsuit. "Well, uh, it's, it's not, um, Miss, um English, um, ah."
Pressed for an answer, Gupta was asked if his firm was providing its service pro bono. He replied, "No. We're not." He did say that the dismissal of his suit was not "the final stop for this case."
So, who is funding this suit and many others to stop the Trump administration from reversing Obama's statist polices?
Former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova warns that reliance on "anonymous donors" for such a lawsuit exposes "the dangers of not having full accountability for the expenditure of funds for this type of litigation." He added, "The usual suspects like [Tom] Steyer and [George] Soros could well be funding this. From a government accountability point, this is 'Bad Government 101.'"
George Soros
And that brings me to Soros, Steyer and their fellow billionaire socialists, Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos.
While "billionaire socialists" seems oxymoronic, it's not. The fact is, politically and financially, Soros, Steyer, Bezos and Bloomberg the big four archenemies of Liberty share an insatiable narcissistic quest for power, including centralized government power.
Notably, Steyer, whose super PAC donated $100 million to Democrats in 2016, has now committed $20 million for a national "Impeach Trump" ad campaign.
Let me be clear: The CFPB lawsuit is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg created by this billionaire club of socialists in their quest to sink Rule of Law and replace it with the rule of statist bureaucrats.
If this warning seems too strident, consider that a week ago, a gaggle of these rich socialists gathered for a three-day secret confab, the Democracy Alliance, at the posh La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, California.
The gathering of tyrannical wannabes, "Beyond #Resistance: Reclaiming our Progressive Future," featured presentations by Soros and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and had an admission price of at least $200,000, though the big four are devoting billions toward their quest for statist power. Recall that just last month Soros transferred $18 billion "the bulk of his wealth" into his so-called Open Society Foundation. He may get a tax deduction for the transfer, but there's nothing charitable about his abject assault on Liberty.
The gathering described itself as a "safe place" for donors and activists, which means it was a dangerous place for the future of Liberty.
One of the key organizing groups at the La Costa confab was the grotesquely misnamed "Patriotic Millionaires," which claims membership of more than 200 uber-wealthy leftists, distributed literature to attendees indicating the desire to "fundamentally reset" our nation's political, economic and cultural course.
The group's Dear Leader, Morris Pearl, former manager of one of the planet's largest investment firms, says, "We hope to facilitate a wholesale rejection of modern conservatism, exposing the dogma of 'free enterprise, limited government, and traditional family values' for what it truly is: a thin veil concealing rapacious capitalism, social Darwinism, and a profound misunderstanding of and disinterest in the human condition."
Is that strident enough for you?
It's no small irony that Soros's socialist soiree comes during the centennial celebration of communism's worldwide reign of tyranny and terror. And like previous generations of socialists such as Stalin, Hitler and Mao, the current generation is completely indifferent to the masses for whom they, ostensibly, advocate. Indeed, why else would they seek to renew the failed Democrat policies of the past?
In any case, they're in a very good position to do so...
Fortunately, Donald Trump has largely revoked the regulatory overreach of his socialist predecessor, Barack Obama, advanced outstanding nominees, and historic tax reforms now have momentum.
Unfortunately, the greatest obstacle to his conservative policies are sometimes "establishment Republicans" in the House and Senate. Even though the ranks of genuine conservatives have grown in recent election cycles, the Republican Party is still plagued by a relatively small group of "centrists," who aren't quite sure with which political party they should caucus.
Case in point would be the current tax reform measure. There are some Republicans who want to hold it hostage to tax increase triggers to contain the deficit. How about spending decrease triggers!
The American people gave Republicans control of the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014 and the presidency in 2016, but a small group of congressional RINOs have blocked efforts to turn that mandate into action and unless things change dramatically in the coming months, Democrats, with the help of Soros, Steyer, Bezos, Bloomberg, et al., are prepared to obliterate that mandate in the 2018 midterm elections.
Let's be clear: The above-named billionaire socialists pose a far greater threat to the next election than Russian or Chinese hackers.
That notwithstanding, in the words of Founder Joseph Warren, "Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of." We never lose sight of what is "True, Noble and Just."
Mark Alexander is the executive editor of the Patriot Post
Examining the historical defence of Christendom as the conceptual template for the defence of Westernesse in J.R.R. Tolkiens The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings (Part One) By Mark Wegierski
This essay is based on a presentation co-authored with Wojciech Szymanski, M.A., which was read at the Fantastic Literature Conference 2016 (Religious Topics in Fantastic Literature) at the University of Lodz (Lodz, Poland), September 19-20, 2016. J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) is widely reputed to be the archetypal author of fantasy in the modern period, or what has come to be termed high fantasy. Some have said that Tolkien both inaugurated and closed out the high fantasy subgenre, since anything that follows him is bound inevitably to appear derivative. Over the years, there has been a wide-ranging debate on whether Tolkiens The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are more pagan or Christian in spirit. In this presentation, we will be looking mainly at J. R. R. Tolkiens The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (originally published in three volumes in 1954-55). The presence of the Elves and other fantastically imagined races, as well as the veneration of nature, are said to make these works more pagan rather than rooted in Christian monotheism. Indeed, the works seem to uphold a pluralism of different free races as opposed to a clearly univocal monotheism. The works seem to cherish the pluralism of difference in contrapuntal contrast to the stark theme of One Ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. In real life, Tolkien was a devout Catholic. There have been a number of works tracing Tolkiens Catholic inspiration for the so-called Middle Earth legendarium, or the Arda mythos (as it is sometimes called). Notable among these works is Craig Bernthals Tolkiens Sacramental Vision: Discerning the Holy in Middle Earth (Second Spring Books, 2014). Given the psychological matrix of devout Catholicism from which Tolkiens works sprang, it would hardly be surprising if his creative endeavours did not carry at least a tinge of Christian underpinnings. To quote Craig Bernthal: One of Tolkiens great appeals to readers is that he offers a world replete with meaning at every level. To read and reread Tolkien is to share his sense of wonder and holiness, to be invited into the presence of a beauty beyond the circles of the world. It is to fall in love with a universe that has a beginning and an end, where good and bad are not subjective choices, but objective realities; a created order full of grace, though damaged by sin, in which friendship is the seedbed of virtues, and where the greatest warriors finally become the greatest healers. The vision enunciated by Tolkien could be termed as pre-modern. It hearkens back to the idealized Middle Ages of Christendom, to a world as Tolkien put it -- of less noise and more green. Obviously, Tolkiens works did not arise ex nihilo. There was a societal and cultural context out of which his works sprang, these being roughly-speaking Britain/England. Tolkien was deeply shaped by pre-World War One Britain, a society where propriety and decorum and so-called civilized values were not yet out of fashion. That society was to be sorely tested by the Great War, in which Tolkien fought heroically. The original inspiration of the hobbits was said to be the ordinary British Tommies who were living in the trenches (holes in the ground) of the Great War -- and rose to great levels of heroism, despite their preference for the simple comforts of home. This elevation of hobbits representing so-called ordinary people rising to extraordinary heights of courage is one of the main themes of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. At the same time, Tolkien had a profound appreciation for the element of hereditary monarchy and aristocracy in human existence, which he saw as being increasingly under attack in Britain. The Elves were clearly natural aristocrats. Also, part of the vision of Tolkien as a Catholic living in the British Isles was a sense of tragedy. For centuries since the time of Henry VIII, Roman Catholics had faced varying degrees of persecution in the British Isles, especially so under Oliver Cromwell. The fact that the Elves are increasingly harried and diminished throughout the unfolding of the Middle-Earth legendarium may be a reflection of this sense that Roman Catholicism was increasingly attenuated in the British Isles. As well, Oliver Cromwell could be seen as a possible inspiration for the figure of Sauron. Indeed, as Lord Protector, he has been considered a precursor to twentieth century dictators. Also, part of the Roman Catholic experience in the British Isles was identified with a yearning for the restoration of the Stuart dynasty, epitomized by the Jacobite Rising of 1745, led by Bonnie Prince Charlie (Charles Edward Stuart). For these Roman Catholics, the British Isles were seen as being under the occupation of a hostile, usurping dynasty (the Hanoverians). The romantic resonance behind the historical desire for a Stuart restoration may play a part in an over-arching theme of kingship in The Lord of the Rings (the third volume being significantly titled, The Return of the King). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was very possible for a tension of sentiment and feeling to exist between the person who wanted to be a good Englishman -- and the person who wanted be a good Roman Catholic on the other. It could be argued that the dynamic arising from an attempt to effect a resolution of this tension was one of the origins of the Arda mythos. Tolkiens works did not arise without some precursors. Tolkien, for example, had read George Macdonalds and William Morriss fantasy works. Britain was also the locus for the Arthurian legends and their literary renderings. Tolkien also had high respect for Beowulf, the great Old Anglo-Saxon poem. Another influence was the epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse (1911) by G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) portraying an idealized King Alfred. Much of Tolkiens creativity was shaped by his interactions with the Inklings group, especially C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), whose own childrens fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia appeared in seven volumes between 1950-1956 beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. To be continued. Mark Wegierski is a Canadian writer and historical researcher. Home
Oh, give me a home where the good groceries roam By Michael R. Shannon
One doesnt have to be perpetually disgruntled to work in the Opposition Media, but it certainly helps. Not every Democrat operative disguised as a newsman can be assigned to the White House, but that doesnt mean those unfortunates who arent cant contribute to increasing the national vague sense of outrage. The Washington Post is filled with stories designed to do just that. Recently the Metro section introduced readers to yet another artifact of our corrupt national system: D.C.s grocery gap reflects citys income divide. Now dont make the mistake I did and assume this is another hunger story. Hunger has been vanquished more thoroughly than Al Gore! The War on Hunger is the only successful social program in the history of Democrat handouts. I defy you to visit a school, mall, theatre, bus station, airport or stadium and find undernourished people. Winning the War on Hunger was not a painless victory. There was collateral damage just like we see in kinetic conflicts. In Afghanistan collateral damage is typically confined to wedding parties, which limits the exposure of the general population. Collateral damage from the War on Hunger hit most of our population. Everything from weddings to wakes was affected. Many victims are still burrowing their way out of the adipose rubble, which tends to concentrate on the waist and behind. America is now the land of the overnourished. Even the kids were told are one English muffin from disaster and must therefore eat free breakfast and lunches in government schools are fat. Gyms do a booming business because America is fat. Try this experiment and see if you dont agree: The next time you go to a mall count the number of people you see who arent chewing. Government bureaucrats and nonprofit compassioneers have noticed this worrisome trend. The government compassion gravy train doesnt attract the type of employee who will march in a Victory over Hunger parade through the streets of New York and then go get a real job. They prefer to redefine the mission and keep the tax dollars flowing. Thats why instead of stories about hunger, we read about food anxiety. Thats a term that covers everything from genuine deprivation to worrying about a gas station burrito. The War on Food Anxiety is so nebulous its participants never have to worry about victory being defined. Traveling alongside food anxiety in the mission creep cavalcade is the concept of the food desert. This doesnt refer to a genuine desert like the Mohave where there is no food. Food deserts are a snobs wasteland, like my old home in Odessa, TX, where there are no upscale groceries and people cant pronounce quinoa. The WaPost story was something of a hybrid. The Post sniffs, In 2016, nearly 70 percent or 34 of the citys 49 supermarkets were in four wards that are predominantly white and have the Districts highest household incomes, according to the review by D.C. Hunger Solutions, a nonprofit advocacy group. This combines Bernie Bro suspicion of capitalist motives with segregated geography paranoia. In this instance call it whitebread privilege. As Beverley Wheeler, director of DC Hunger Solutions, warns, Grocery-store access is a racial equity issue that must be dealt with, and its a health issue. We can no longer pretend we dont see what we see. So what is it they are seeing? Duck hunters are notorious for going where the ducks are. Retail merchants, which includes grocers, are equally notorious for building where the money is. Its not a black thing, its a green thing. For the same reason one doesnt find many HarrisTeeters in Appalachia. And what good would it do residents of Wards 7 and 8 in DC to have a grocery store where they couldnt afford to shop? At one time I defined wealth as being able to shop at Sutton Place Gourmet without worrying about the final tab. But I didnt torture myself by walking up and down the aisles admiring groceries I couldnt afford to buy. Are there benefits to envy of which Im unaware? Companies look for average income, crime rates, transportation access and available real estate. This makes choosing the site of a grocery store is about as impersonal as statistics can make it. The decision is not based on a whim like choosing the headquarters for the corporation. Those usually land within a short drive or helicopter jaunt from the Chairmans favorite home. Frankly I dont see how convincing the people she purports to help that their grocery stores are secondclass is going to improve morale in those wards. Wheeler is quick with complaints and the Post is eager to amplify, but frankly this strikes me as a problem that wont find a solution. Michael R. Shannon is a public relations and advertising consultant with corporate, government and political experience around the globe. He is a dynamic and entertaining keynote speaker. He can be reached at mandate.mmpr (at) gmail.com. He is also the author of Conservative Christian's Guidebook for Living in Secular Times (Now with added humor!). Home
UN agency to Congress: Drop dead By Paul Driessen
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in France has received over $48 million from Americas National Institutes of Health (NIH), to determine whether various chemicals cause cancer in humans. Of more than 900 chemicals it has reviewed, only one was ever found non-carcinogenic. The latest substance to face IARC scrutiny is glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUp. Not surprisingly, the agency branded glyphosate carcinogenic. But this time evidence is surfacing of collusion with anti-chemical activist groups and class action lawyers, serious conflicts of interest involving a key IARC glyphosate reviewer, and IARC manipulation of scientific reports along with deliberate withholding of studies that concluded the chemical is safe, so that the agency could get a guilty verdict. Despite this disturbing evidence, and demonstrable proof of the chemicals safety, the European Union barely extended its authorization for glyphosate use, and then by just five years, instead of the usual 15. The House of Representatives Science Committee is deeply concerned about this corruption of science, its potential impacts on US regulatory decisions, and the use of IARC rulings by predatory lawyers who are suing glyphosate manufacturers. It sent letters to Health and Human Services Secretary Eric Hargan (who oversees the NIH and its agencies) and IARC director Chris Wild. The letters request all relevant documents and the names of IARC-affiliated people who could testify at Committee oversight hearings. Dr. Wilds artful and legalistic response emphasized scientific consensus among all review panel members; said deliberative documents would not be made available; claimed there were no conflicts of interest among any IARC reviewers; said he and his staff would not be pressured by vested interests, the media or Congress; and said congressmen can come to France if they want answers to their questions. In other words: Drop dead. Members of Congress who authorize taxpayer funding for IARC have no right to scrutinize its deliberations and decisions, to ensure sound science, transparency and accountability. Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world. It is vital to modern agriculture and one of the most extensively tested chemicals in history: some 3,300 studies over four decades attest to its safety. Indeed, virtually every reputable regulatory agency and scientific body in the world has determined that it does not cause cancer including the European Food Safety Authority, European Chemicals Agency, German Institute for Risk Assessment and US Environmental Protection Agency. Only IARC says glyphosate causes cancer. To help it reach that conclusion, the agency employed the services of Italys Ramazzini Institute, which also concocted studies claiming cell phones and artificial sweeteners cause cancer. It relies on Ramazzini even though regulatory bodies in Europe, the United States and New Zealand have investigated and criticized Ramazzinis sloppy, suspect pseudo-science. Dr. Wilds agency has also worked closely with Dr. Linda Birnbaum, director of the $690-million-a-year National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences or NIEHS (an NIH agency in the HHS). Birnbaum is also a member of the Collegium Ramazzini and has directed over $90 million of US taxpayer funds to her Ramazzini colleagues, many of whom serve on numerous IARC expert panels. Evidence is accumulating that Brinbaum has worked closely with anti-chemical pressure groups and even trial lawyers, thereby undermining the US regulatory and chemical review process and perhaps ultimately forcing glyphosate off the market. She has helped to coordinate and direct these activities, and has turned the United States into IARCs biggest donor, earmarking $4.2 million to support IARCs current effort to list more agricultural and industrial chemicals as carcinogens including artificial sweeteners. Even GMO foods are on the agencys hit list. The well-funded, carefully coordinated effort to eradicate weed-eradicating glyphosate has also involved a number of devious, secretive, deceptive actions. The 2014 advisory group that decided IARC would review glyphosate was led by activist statistician Dr. Christopher Portier, who worked for years for NIEHS and Birnbaum. In fact, investigative journalists David Zaruk (Risk-Monger) and Kate Kelland (Reuters) discovered, Portier drove the glyphosate review, while also working for the anti-pesticide Environmental Defense Fund and serving as the only invited specialist on the working group that labeled glyphosate carcinogenic. At the same time, Portier was also advising trial lawyers suing over other chemicals that IARC had found carcinogenic and shortly after serving on the advisory group signed with the same lawyers to work on their glyphsate suits, a gig for which he has so far been paid $160,000. No conflicts of interest? Even more outrageous, as Ms. Kelland explained in another article, IARC repeatedly ignored or altered studies that exonerated glyphosate. One report clearly said the researchers unanimously agreed that glyphosate had not caused abnormal growths in mice they had studied. IARC deleted the sentence. In other cases IARC panelists inserted new statistical analyses that reversed a studys original finding; quietly changed critical language exonerating the chemical; and claimed they were not able to evaluate a study because it included insufficient experimental data, while excluding another study because the amount of data in the tables was overwhelming. These machinations helped to ensure a consensus. Equally questionable, NIH Cancer Research Institute scientist Aaron Blair conducted a years-long study that also found glyphosate was not carcinogenic. But he held off on publishing his results, and did not divulge his findings, knowing IARC would leave unpublished work out of its analysis. This is not science. It is manipulation and deception supported by our tax dollars, and used to drive safe, widely used chemicals off the market. Other activists repeatedly claim endocrine disrupting chemicals which dont cause cancer or other harm in high doses somehow do so at barely detectable levels. Another clever ploy claims no actual exposure is needed; kids get cancer because their parents or grandparents were exposed to something, perhaps years ago. Its ridiculous. But convincing a jury theres no cause-effect relationship is a Sisyphean task. The end result, if not the goal, is to undermine public confidence in science-based risk assessments, lend credibility to agitator claims that countless chemicals contaminate our foods and imperil our health, endlessly frighten consumers, and set the stage for billion-dollar lawsuits to enrich class-action lawyers and organic food interests. More than 1,000 US lawsuits already claim glyphosate causes cancer, and law firms are running ads saying anyone who has cancer and was ever exposed to glyphosate in any form or amount may be entitled to millions in compensation. Other lawyers are playing the same games with manmade climate change. Ending legal predation will require major state and federal reforms. However, the American people elected this President and Congress to bring transparency and accountability back to Washington and international regulatory agencies. They need to use their oversight and funding powers to do so. Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith told me he is reviewing Mr. Wilds response. Given the serious nature of our concerns related to IARCs expenditures of taxpayer dollars, IARC should exercise due diligence and provide a complete response to my November 1 letter. The Science Committee will use all tools at our disposal to ensure the stewards of our taxpayers dollars are held accountable, Smith said. That is good news. Too many regulators and scientific panels have the attitude, We are accountable only to ourselves. We will not have any member of Congress or the Trump Administration presume to tell us how to run our business, do science or be transparent. That arrogance is intolerable. Even if Dr. Wild is beyond the reach of US law, Drs. Birnbaum, Portier, Blair, et al. are not. They should be compelled to testify under oath, and funding for their agencies and work should be made contingent on their cooperation in rooting out the apparent secrecy, corruption, conflicts of interest and junk science. Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy. Home
My Pilgrimage, Chapter Thirty-Eight: The English-Speaking Peoples Unashamed Father Figures Part Two By Michael Moriarty
The Crown is, to put it most simply and, yes, boldly, A Sacred Television Series. For me, a lapsed Catholic, attending it, watching it, hearing it is more like experiencing a TRUE Mass than anything I lived through in HIGH Mass offered by my Jesuit high school instructors. Could I borrow the Crown? offers Queen Elizabeth to one of her advisers, For a couple of days? He replies, Yes but from whom? If the Crown is not yours? Whose is it?!
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown And shes not a King! She cant possibly be a father-figure of any kind. Shes the Mother of the Commonwealth! And what used to be called The British Empire!! Meanwhile?! The infamous Edward, the Duke of Windsor? Played with the most impressively shameless style and divinely subtle panache by Alex Jennings. His equally infamous mistress/wife?!
The Bonnie and Clyde of Windsor Wallis Simpson, played by Lia Williams with a frighteningly profound lack of concern for the health of the Commonwealth. Both giving lust an almost inalterably bad name. Edward, with a most un-amorously smug smile, Shall we f**ck? Vengeance boiling within every syllable and in every narcissistic ounce of flesh within his lips. Just another of the great actors in the cast of this television triumph. Another of his perfect line-readings: This is COOKIES work! Cookie is the Queen Mother. Edwards own mother. She wants neither her American daughter-in-law, now the Duchess of Windsor, nor her son, the Duke of Windsor, to attend the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. She has sent, of all people, the Archbishop of Canterbury and his Parliamentary thugs, to deliver the profoundly unforgiving and, yes, blatantly un-Christian message. This is where Bonnie and Clyde Windsor, to my mind, become Romeo and Juliet! And Shakespeare, the Romantic Historian, begins to enter the drama. At this point, I am now on the side of the Windsors. And on the side of Edwards eloquence. To the Archbishop, Edward unloads this brief quote from his brother, the former King: My Lord Archbishop,
What a scold you are,
And when your man is down,
how very bold you are!
Of Christian charity,
How very scant you are!
You old, lame swine!
How full of cant you are! Apparently, George VI, had written that about the present Archbishops predecessor. WOW! No wonder the Archbishop storms out of the room!! Hypocrisy at its most undeniable! Not just royal hypocrisy but Holier-Than-Thou Sacred Hypocrisy. Subsequently we hear Edward narrating, referring to Queen Elizabeth as Shirley Temple. Nothing and no-one, in my experience with the England of a Monarchy, now a Matriarchy under Queen Elizabeth, has embodied so complete a picture of British Aristocracy as Alex Jennings Duke of Windsor! Neither extreme of blistering intelligence and eloquence nor cruelly narcissistic self-adulation are left out of this Duke of Windsors arsenal. The best and worst of British Aristocracy: Edward, the Duke of Windsor. Captured in the exquisitely eloquent letters he had written to his one, true and apparently ONLY love, Wallis Simpson, his companion and Duchess of Windsor. Offered up by Alex Jennings with what should have been recognized as award-winning perfection. Oh, well to quote someone or other, Life can be a bitch! Elizabeth II wants her husband Phillip to supervise her Coronation. Will he?! Or will the Queen submit to those who, as they themselves declare, know better?! NO! Phillip is now, before my eyes, supervising the entire Coronation of his wife, the Queen. However, the Establishment is upset. Winston Churchill is sent to deliver yet another negative message to the Queen. Subsequently, the Coronation happens! Not entirely as Phillip would want it to but yes according to the Queens wishes!! The cynical and bitter commentary by Edward, Duke of Windsor?! His contempt for the Magic?! One cannot resist wanting to know how such suicidal magic can persist without the entire Fall of the House of Windsor. Tune in! You wont regret it. Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@MGMoriarty. Home
Random thoughts two By Dr. Robert Owens
The Democrats havent been this angry since the Republicans ended slavery. If Islam is so wonderful why do Muslims seek refuge in Christian countries? The NRA is the only organization in America that is consistently blamed for actions its members dont commit. According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, from the 1950s through July 10th of 2016, 98.4 percent of mass shootings have occurred on gun-free zones, with just 1.6 percent occurring where citizens are allowed to have firearms with them. Why doesnt Eminem write protest songs about all the Democrat politicians who bankrupt and ruined his hometown of Detroit? Admitting that both parties routinely ignore the Constitution, reject the rule of law, and erode liberty is the first step to recovery. From the You Cant Make This Stuff Up Department: Hillary, I give 10% of my income to charity every year and Weinsteins donations will be part of that A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man which he proposes to pay off with your money. Dont worry if people dont like you. Most people struggle to like themselves. If you eat today thank a farmer. If you eat in peace thank a veteran. Five things liberals never seem to understand: Free does not actually mean free. You are not entitled to someone elses hard earned moneyever. You cannot tax a nation into prosperity. The rich are not responsible for your financial situationyou are. Socialism leads to communism always. Fifty-nine are dead in the worst mass shooting in American History. In Chicago they call that August. At Planned Parenthood they call that Tuesday. In America today every citizen is forced to buy health insurance yet everyone is not forced to prove they are a citizen. Many of those who refuse or cannot prove they are citizens receive free health insurance paid for by those forced to buy insurance because they are citizens. In America today the federal government can listen to and record everything you say without a warrant and the person who tells us about it is a traitor. Does anyone see a problem with a system that taxes you if you work and pays you if you dont? Trump says we are a nation of believers and that together we are strengthened and sustained by the power of prayer. Democrats want prayer out of the public sphere. Trump called the Las Vegas shooting a horrific mass murder and an act of pure evil. Democrats blame the guns and want to take yours away. Trump honored the heroes of Las Vegas, including the police officers and other first responders. Democrats elevate thugs and view our protectors in blue with disdain. Trump quotes scripture. Democrats ridicule those who do. Trump stresses unity. Democrats divide American society into victims and oppressors. Trump says, We love our country. Obama went on an international apology tour. Trump says, We cherish the sacred dignity of every human life. Democrats murder babies. Trump says, We believe in strong families. Democratic policies pull them apart. Trump says, We are proud of our history. Democrats tear down monuments. Trump says, We respect our great American flag. Democrats take a knee. In a DUI we blame the driver. In a bombing we blame the bomber. In a mass shooting we blame the gun. Does anyone remember that after Pearl Harbor we declared war on Japan? We didnt declare war on sneak attacks. Yet after 9-11 when fifteen of the 19 terrorists who flew planes into our buildings were citizens of Saudi Arabia associated with al-Qaeda (the others were from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon) we declared war on Terrorism. We knew the war was over when the delegates of Japan signed an unconditional surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo bay. How will we know when a war on terror is over? Stand up for whats right. Or youll fall for whats wrong. Ive been trying to figure out a way to get the gators in the swamp to at least read the Constitution and I think I have a fool-proof plan. I put the entire constitution into the body of an email. That way at least the NSA read it. Now lets hope they pass it along. Dr. Robert Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com 2017 Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens or visit Dr. Owens Amazon Page / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens Home
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Ireland will have the final say on the future of the Irish-North Irish border following the Brexit. The EU said that it would be up to the Irish government to approve whether the UKs proposals regarding the border and custom checks on the island are acceptable. Irish leaders are worried that the British divorce from the EU, slated for March 2019, will hamper Irish trade and business links and social ties that have deepened since the end of the Northern Irish conflict two decades ago.
When the UK leaves the EU in 2019, it is going to take Northern Ireland with it, which is a problem because Northern Ireland shares a border with the Republic of Ireland. I will consult the Taoiseach if the UK offer is sufficient for the Irish government, European Council President Donald Tusk said after meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in Dublin. Let me say very clearly, if the UK offer is unacceptable for Ireland, it will also be unacceptable for the EU.
Mr. Varadkar said he was hopeful of securing a firm commitment from London that its divorce from the EU would not lead to the creation of a hard border. Im also prepared to stand firm if the UK offer falls short, he warned. Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said that the UK needed to avoid regulatory divergence between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. If there is, then it is very hard to avoid a checking system, he said.
Mr. Coveney in November proposed the British government to give Northern Ireland special status based on how China dealt with Hong Kong upon its return from Britain in 1997. However, that option has been dismissed by Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist Party, which does not want the province to have closer relations with Ireland and the EU than with the UK.
There are many security divides between the European Union and the United States under Donald Trump but nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Iran. Given the harsh stance of the new US administration towards Tehran and its hostility towards the nuclear deal, this new dynamics will inevitably lead to a transatlantic clash on the issue. Brussels should get ready now to mitigate the negative consequences and preserve both EUs and US strategic interests on non-proliferation.
Donald Trump is seeking to shift US policy on Iran away from diplomacy towards containment. The nuclear deal the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the JCPOA) is going to be the primary target. The US President has called Iran a fanatical regime and rouge nation and placed extensive restrictions on Iranian nationals. His administration has also unambiguously teamed up with Irans archrival, Saudi Arabia, in addressing the many conflicts across the Middle East.
The White Houses new strategy on Iran released in October put an emphasis on neutralizing Irans destabilizing aggression in the region. President Trump also decided to decertify the JCPOA, meaning that he will not attest to Congress that Iran is abiding by its terms. In response, the leading EU economies released a joint statement expressing their concern at President Trumps policy while the overall situation around the nuclear deal has already strained transatlantic relations. As Ms. Mogherini put it: Trumps policy has reduced the credibility of the United States as the EUs future partner on Iran policy.
The current developments not only endanger European non-proliferation goals but they also heighten the risk of a nuclear arms race including a possible military escalation in Europes vicinity. Any direct or indirect confrontation of American and Iranian-backed forces would have a profound impact across the Middle East. While Brussels and Washington share many common concerns regarding Tehran, their approaches are strikingly different.
The EU consistently supports the JCPOA, warning that ditching the deal would make it much more difficult to resolve any disagreements with Iran. Moreover, there are valid fears that isolating the country further would only trigger hardline elements on the Iranian political scene and thus further fuel regional instability. As Ms. Mogherini has said, Europe feels an interest and a responsibility to engage with Iran, and an increasing number of European governments is convinced that it is a diplomatic dialogue with Iran that will ultimately reduce the violence and instability in the Middle East.
Therefore, the European governments and the EU need to safeguard the nuclear deal and plan for any contingency in their relationship with the United States. Europe should also further pursue the diplomatic route and engage in tough diplomacy with Iran on non-nuclear issues such as the freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf, reducing the violence in the conflicts currently underway in Yemen and Syria and lowering tensions in Iraqi Kurdistan. Moreover, the EU should also create a platform for regional dialogue and further nurture the channels they have developed with the Iranian leadership to help mitigate the negative effects of Donald Trumps new Iran policy.
The Coming Clash: Why Iran Will Divide Europe from the United States Policy Brief by Ellie Geranmayeh European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
(The Policy Brief can be downloaded here)
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Hi,
My husband is applying for his FLR(M) any day now but we have been waiting for a letter from his HR department re: confirming his employment etc.
He has a copy of the letter which was emailed to him, on headed paper from the national company he works for, with the information and the name and title of the person who has completed the document (Immigration & Conpliance Specialist for Recruitment Supoort Services). However, it isnt signed and this person is now on leave for two weeks.
Will this be okay or does it absolutely have to be signed??
I am a Thai National filling in the FLR(M) form (with my husbands help!). Should I sign the form with the English signature I use for my bank cards, driving licence etc. or the Thai signature used on my passport?
This must be a common issue for Asians - any advice would be welcome.
Many thanks,
Sukanda
Hi there, I sat for my exam in June and got top scores and exactly what I was aiming for except a -0.5 for the writing module. I was sure that my writing was higher than the band their ranked me and I know that my writing skill is stronger than my other skills. I read online, and heard from friends, that it's better to re-sit the exam but I didn't agree with them. So I did an EOR and two months later, my new grade was ranked higher by 0.5 exactly what I wanted. For me, it was worth the shot.
Good luck! Let us know how you get on.
After reviewing information on Express Entry, my education level should qualify as long as I find an employer who will give me an offer (I have a Bachelor of Science and Masters of Science in Animal Science from U.S. universities). I also have 5 years of experience as an agricultural extension agent at a prominent U.S. university. With my work experience, I could obtain Certified Crop Adviser certification fairly easily.
My question is whether or not there is a need for my skill set in Canada, and how likely it would be to find a Canadian employer who could demonstrate the need to hire me.
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University of Texas-Austin astronomers will be among the first in the world to use NASAs brand-new $8.8 billion telescope after it launches in 2019 a piece of technology one says will revolutionize all areas of astronomy.
The James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, has been under development for decades.
And with less than two years until its expected launch date, the Space Telescope Science Institute (the science operations center for the Hubble and Webb telescopes) in Baltimore has released the list of the first 13 projects that will test the telescope in space. UT-Austins Steve Finkelstein found himself, and his Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, on that list.
This will be the first time anyone has had access to this brand-new telescope that is in some ways 100 times better than Hubble, said Finkelstein, an associate astronomy professor at the university. This telescope will reveal enormous truths the moment we turn it on.
The CEERS will build upon Finkelsteins previous work with the Hubble telescope of examining the oldest galaxies in the universe as a way to understand how quickly stars formed into the galaxies and how they evolve over time. More than 100 astronomers from 10 countries are involved in the project, including astronomers at Texas A&M.
Finkelstein said Webb will allow astronomers to see galaxies as they existed 13.4 billion years ago. His project will take place in the telescopes first five months of science operations, likely to begin in late fall, early winter 2019.
To be among the first to use it is incredible, he said, adding that his research will take 62 hours to complete.
Other projects chosen include an examination of Jupiter and its moons and weighing supermassive black holes, according to NASA. UT-Austin researchers are involved to some degree in five of the 13 projects.
We were impressed by the high quality of the proposals received, Ken Sembach, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in a recent NASA web update. These observing programs not only will generate great science, but also will be a unique resource for demonstrating the investigative capabilities of this extraordinary observatory to the worldwide scientific community.
Projects will receive funding, but Finkelstein said they have not yet been told how much. Up to $5 million has been allotted for all 13 projects, he added.
Webb is projected to launch in spring 2019 from Kourou, French Guiana, and is expected to carry out its mission for five to 10 years. The telescope is named after James E. Webb, NASAs second administrator who lead the Apollo space missions that landed the first humans on the moon.
Unlike Hubble, which launched 27 years ago and orbits the earth, Webb will orbit the sun 1 million miles away from earth. Hubble mainly observes visible light, while Webb will operate in the infrared, enabling it to study some of the faintest, youngest galaxies.
Using Webb, we will discover the most distant galaxies ever seen galaxies that were literally invisible to Hubble, Finkelstein said.
Last month, about 100 days of cryogenic testing to ensure the telescope functions as intended in an extreme cold and airless environment was completed at Johnson Space Center.
But the telescope still must undergo more testing before it can be launched into space. It now will be transported to Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach, California, where it will be integrated with the spacecraft element, according to a Nov. 20 NASA web update.
It will then undergo even more testing, the last exposure to a simulated launch environment before flight and deployment testing on the whole observatory, the update states.
The Webb telescope is an international project lead by NASA in partnership with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
The school board that oversees North Dakota's largest school district is planning an overhaul of the rules it uses to govern.
The Bismarck School Board next year will adopt a new governing model dubbed "coherent governance" by the Colorado-based consultant group Aspen Group International LLC.
The new model differentiates between school board policies from administrative policies and gives more discretion to the superintendent. Next year, school board members will undergo a $50,000 training program in coherent governance.
The school board decided earlier this month to hire Aspen Group International LLC in a 4-1 vote. Board member Heide Delorme, the lone dissenting vote, expressed concerns due to the district's budget constraints.
"(Funding is) kind of unknown right now," Delorme said last week, referring to the state Legislature freezing K-12 funding for the next two years. "I kind of felt like it was a tight year, (and) that I didn't want to commit to those funds."
The coherent governance model divides the school board's work into four areas that include student educational outcomes and monitoring superintendent performance. School board members in favor of the new model said it will bring clarity to their job duties and the role of the superintendent.
"It clearly defines what the board's purpose is," said Karl Lembke, school board president.
The board heard about coherent governance at a National School Board Association Conference this spring, according to Lembke.
Board members said the governing change is not in response to the school board's past performance.
"I don't think we have performed poorly or negatively," said board nember Matt Sagsveen, who was first elected in 2010. "My reading of the governance model (is) it will help facilitate our ability to do a better job as board members and to better serve our community."
Delorme, who is in her sixth year on the board, said she is not against coherent governance, and said it would be good to define the superintendent's responsibilities and set clear-cut goals for the district.
The school board will undergo multiple policy training sessions next year, and then adopt the model sometime late next year, according to Lembke. Even with the school board election next year, in which three seats are up for election, Lembke said the new model will be helpful in educating incoming school board members about their duties.
"We're not just doing this for our board ... This is something for a future board," said Lembke, whose term expires next year. Lembke said he hasn't decided whether he will run for re-election.
Sagsveen, whose term also is up next year, said he plans to run again. Sagsveen agreed that coherent governance will be helpful for new school board members.
"I think if you get three new board members, they're going to have the same learning curve in our current system as they would in a new governance plan," he said.
Bismarck Public Schools Superintendent Tamara Uselman said she is in support of the coherent governance model, particularly because it discerns school board work and administrative work.
"I think its exactly what the title describes, creating a governance model thats coherent to everybody," she said. "When you think about when people run for the board, they run for any number of reasons, including the desire for public service. But that doesn't mean you automatically understand the board's role from the administrative role."
Uselman said the school board has "done its work well, historically," in the seven years she's been superintendent in Bismarck.
West Fargo School Board
The West Fargo School Board also switched to the coherent governance model in 2013.
Patti Stedman, a member of the West Fargo School board, who has been a board member for nine years, said the biggest change she's observed is in allowing the superintendent to make decisions about subjects outside the school board's expertise.
"It was a culture change, but a really good change," Stedman said. "It probably holds superintendents more accountable than they're used to."
In turn, Stedman said school board members are able to focus on student academic achievement.
There are still some challenges in adopting the new model, according to Kara Gravley-Stack, West Fargo School Board president, who was elected in 2014. Occasionally board members have to remind themselves what work is board work and what should be handled by the administration.
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AUSTIN For the first time, collectors of the official Texas Capitol ornaments this year can buy a 14-karat gold replica of the storied statehouse, from the dome to the chiseled granite facade.
An exact knockoff, right down to the large Texas flag hanging at the south entrance.
Price: $125.
Weve never offered a complete 3-D of the Capitol in an ornament, and we expect this limited edition to sell out quickly, said Erin Christensen, director of retail sales for the State Preservation Board that manages and maintains the 1888 landmark.
I think they will go fast. Its a limited-edition ornament. We only have 500 of them.
She said initial sales of the ornament, a first-ever initiative, have been brisk.
In another first for the holiday season, the regular Capitol ornament has a transportation theme: A replica of the white carriage thats delivered the official state Christmas trees to the statehouse, led by a white horse.
The Capitol got its first holiday tree in 1917, a 25-foot locally grown cedar that was placed in the Senate Chamber and decorated in Christmas Eve.
Such a wonderful Christmas tree as this glorious cedar did make! declared the Austin American, reporting that the tree was given in honor of Texas soldiers who were fighting abroad in World War I.
After the tree was decorated, visitors sang carols and donated gifts and then moved to the House Chamber for a holiday dance that, according to the article, made complete the evenings pleasure.
In the decades since, holiday trees have been displayed in the Rotunda, Governors Reception Room and both legislative chambers, as well as various spots on the lawn.
In recent years, the Capitols holiday trees now pines, delivered to the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker have been delivered in a white carriage in the week after Thanksgiving a tradition memorialized in the 2017 ornament. It sells online and at the Capitol gift shops for $20 each.
This is the second year that weve highlighted traditions at the Capitol as part of the ornament series, Christensen said. Last year, the ornament was a decorated Capitol tree, featuring ornaments from the past 20 years. This year, were honoring the tradition of the delivery of the Capitol trees.
The official Capitol ornaments have been issued since 1996, launched by Nelda Laney, wife of then-Speaker Pete Laney, D-Hale Center, as a way to raise money for maintenance of the historic landmark and fund educational programs on site for schools.
In the first two decades, ornaments mostly featured architectural features of the storied center of state government, including the Capitols distinctive dome, its chiseled entryway, ornate doors and signature brass hinges, the Lone Star designs on its ceilings and fences, and the Goddess statue at the top of the dome.
More than $18 million in ornaments have been sold since the program started, said Chris Currens, a spokesman for the State Preservation Board.
Proceeds from the ornament program have gone to pay for painting the dome, new carpet in the legislative chambers that replicates the early-day floor coverings and restoration of historic paintings in the statehouse, officials aid.
From the time the first Capitol ornament was sold 21 years ago, just as a top-to-bottom restoration and expansion of the Capitol was completed, the tree-hangers have become collectors items.
Three years ago, the 1 millionth Capitol ornament sold on eBay for $5,176 to a collector.
We have every one of them on our tree at home, part of our family tradition, said Rae Giovanni, a Dallas resident and native Houstonian who was standing in line on a recent afternoon to buy the 2017 edition as well as a limited-edition ornament.
Theyre gorgeous and they say Real Texas. What more could a Texan want at Christmas?
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Beneath the Northwest Sides tangled interchange of Interstate 10 and Loop 410, surrounded by more than a dozen frontage roads, ramps and flyovers, is an obscure patch of state land housing the regional traffic control center, TransGuide.
Inside that smart highway project of the San Antonio district of the Texas Department of Transportation, analysts sit in a high-ceilinged control center full of giant, quad-view TV screens, monitoring some 190 roadside cameras, creating electronic displays that alert motorists to construction delays and missing kids, and generating the traffic data used by TV and radio shows.
But they also do a job for which TxDOT has won national awards and become something of a model for other states. They hunt, electronically, for wrong-way drivers.
By most accounts theyve had an effect.
Since 2011, wrong-way driving has caused 27 deaths and 25 serious injuries in Bexar County, but overall reported incidents have declined, from 269 reports in 2012 to 162 for 2016, according to San Antonio Police Department and Bexar County Sheriffs Office statistics.
On San Antonios worst stretch of road for such incidents, U.S. 281 from Interstate 35 to Stone Oak, a TransGuide pilot program between July 2012 and March 2016 reduced them by some 35 percent. TxDOT largely does that with technology and vigilant operators, not a police force or drunken-driving checkpoints. Yet, two new arrests have occurred since Thanksgiving.
On Thanksgiving morning at 4:50 a.m., a TxDOT operator saw a wrong-way driver on his screen traveling east in the westbound main lanes of U.S. 90 at Military Drive. He immediately notified SAPDs DWI dispatcher who sits just a few feet away at the control center and tracked the driver with a camera posted at Leon Creek, and then one on Callaghan Road, where the driver was caught and booked on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.
Another incident happened at 2:42 a.m. Thursday when a wrong-way driver went west in the eastbound main lanes of Loop 410 at Babcock Road. TxDOT operator Ben Lopez tracked the driver on five highway cameras, while an SAPD dispatcher alerted police to each high-speed turn. Police eventually arrested the driver at Loop 410 and Texas 151.
Thursdays was the 11th save of the year for the TxDOT operators and the 66th since 2011.
Always dangerous yet hardly a well-publicized enforcement priority for most police departments, wrong-way driving was forced onto San Antonios attention in March 2011, when SAPD Officer Stephanie Brown, 27, a single mother, was hit head-on in her vehicle by a drunken driver, Christopher Baldaramos, on the downtown stretch of Interstate 35.
Both Brown and Baldaramos, whose blood alcohol content was three times the legal limit, died of their injuries. The tragedy spurred some soul-searching on the part of SAPD, which joined TxDOT, the citys public works department and the Sheriffs Office to form a task force.
Stephanies death was a huge thing, said John Gianotti, a TxDOT transportation engineer and senior member of the task force. We had all heard of officers getting hit by the side of the road, but not this. By the next month, April, we were up and running.
Wrong-way driving had been a persistent but little-known problem in Bexar County, which up to that time had more crashes on major highways than almost every other densely populated county in Texas during the previous five years. In that period, Bexar County had recorded at least 136 wrong-way accidents that injured 138 people and killed nearly 30, according to an analysis of state crash data by the San Antonio Express-News in 2012.
Not surprisingly, police blamed Bexar Countys historic problem with drunken driving as the principal cause of wrong-way driving. (In 2015, Mens Health, using statistics on DWI arrests and liver disease, among others, ranked San Antonio the nations seventh-most drunken city.) A 2012 study by the National Transportation Safety Board showed numerous states reporting that roughly 60 to 72 percent of wrong-way collisions and citations involved drivers who had been drinking or were legally impaired.
The task force sought a variety of grants to fund its work and began identifying consistent San Antonio trouble spots usually exit ramps near businesses on freeway frontage roads, especially bars, whose inebriated customers could make a wrong turn at the end of the night. San Antonio has more than 400 highway exit ramps on about 130 miles of freeways.
One of the first steps was to get SAPD to include wrong-way driving in the group of serious crimes (shootings, child abductions, officer in trouble, etc.) that merit dispatchers alerting officers with a blaring emergency tone on their radios.
Thats usually how the response now starts. A person sees a wrong-way driver and calls 911 with a location and description of the vehicle. Operators at their terminals at TransGuide look for the vehicle on their screens while simultaneously typing out a freeway warning sign: Wrong Way Driver Reported Use Extreme Caution.
Their cameras can do full 360-degree turns vertically and horizontally, but theyre only on interstates and state-maintained highways, not most downtown or residential streets.
The issue of Big Brother surveillance occasionally comes up, Gianotti said. But as many alleged drunk drivers and their attorneys will tell you, we do not store photos from these cameras and cannot make them available. An operator did, however, demonstrate to a reporter that the cameras can focus so tightly on people that they can easily provide the police a full description of them, if needed.
Sometimes the TxDOT operators find the wrong-way driver first, and sometimes the police are already in pursuit. Gianotti and TransGuide operations manager Matt Sneed agreed that under the best circumstances, it could take three to four minutes before a police vehicle is in pursuit of a driver.
At 40 mph, that could be nearly 3 miles of drunken driving against oncoming traffic. Often its longer.
Bless those officers who wait for the wrong-way drivers to come at them, Gianotti said. Theyre putting their lives on the line.
TxDOT spokesman Josh Donat said the public sometimes asks why authorities dont just install remote-activated spikes on every ramp.
Sounds good, but its a horrible idea, he said. Those are designed to work at about 5 mph, not 40. That would destroy your vehicle.
Some of the stats compiled by TxDOTs wrong-way driving program bolster the obvious link to drunken drivers. Some do not. Five years of TransGuide stats ending in 2016 show a spike in incidents at 2 a.m. bar closing times.
In 2016, the timing of 162 wrong-way driving reports to TxDOT those are SAPD citations involving injury and noninjury incidents suggests that the safest hours for avoiding wrong-way drivers would be from 8 a.m. until noon.
The most dangerous days would be Saturday and Sunday but Thursday, too. The worst months? Strangely, March led the pack in 2016, with 22 reports, while January (with its New Years revelers), May, August and September tied with 15.
bselcraig@express-news.net
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A Wimberley development firm wants to build a 12-story upscale apartment tower near Hemisfair, in another sign that demand for expensive luxury apartments downtown is strong.
Influenced by the success of the Cellars complex at the Pearl, Laney Development expects to start construction in May on the tower, named Durango Residences, at the northwest corner of Presa Street and Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard, manager Tim Proctor said. It will include 70 apartments as well as two townhomes, three live-work spaces and retail on its ground floor, he said.
The citys Historic and Design Review Commission will consider the project at its Wednesday meeting.
The downtown area needs more residential. I think the effective way to do it is great density, Proctor said.
With an average rent of slightly less than $3 a square foot, the complex would be one of the priciest in San Antonio. The cheapest unit would rent for about $1,400 a month while the penthouse would go for $5,000, Proctor said.
At one time, rents of $2 a square foot were rare in San Antonio, but developers have lately shown more comfort with charging higher rents. In May, Pearl developer Silver Ventures opened the Cellars complex with an average rent of $3.07 per square foot, and it was already 76 percent occupied by the third quarter of this year, according to analystics firm Austin Investor Interests. Local developer Keller Henderson has said he plans to charge $4 per square foot at a complex he wants to build on the River Walk downtown.
An $83 million, 21-story apartment tower planned across the street from City Hall is expected to offer an average rent of $2.75 a square foot.
Cellars has proven out the San Antonio market and served as an influence for Durango Residences, Proctor said.
Laney Development is under contract to buy the 0.48-acre site of the proposed complex, which is currently used as a parking lot, Proctor said. He declined to say what the purchase price would be. The property has been owned since 2010 by local company Fredericksburg Suites Inc., and it was assessed at $1.3 million this year by the Bexar Appraisal District, according to the districts records.
Laney is in talks with three local banks to get financing for the project, Proctor said.
He cited the propertys proximity to the San Antonio River and the King William neighborhood and its restaurant scene as reasons for building the tower there. It is in a walkable neighborhood, but Cesar E. Chavez offers easy access for vehicles, he said.
The property is also a few blocks from Hemisfair and H-E-Bs South Flores Market, and is across the street from the upscale Agave Apartments complex.
I think its a very stimulating area and a very walkable area, Proctor said. We also think that area of town is growing and will continue to grow in the near future.
A few other luxury apartment complexes are being built near the border of King William and Southtown, including a 338-unit complex by Dallas developer Encore Multi-Family and another by local development group Landbridge Partners.
Laney Development is getting a $100,000 grant from the San Antonio River Authority for including environmentally-friendly features in the building, such as greenery on the walls above its entrance, Proctor said. The company also expects to get incentives from the county and the citys Center City Housing Incentive Policy, he said.
The tower will mark the first time Laney Development has built in San Antonio, but the company plans to move its operations to the Alamo City, Proctor said. It has built multifamily, industrial, mixed-use and small office projects in the northeast U.S., he said.
rwebner@express-news.net | Twitter: @RWebner
WASHINGTON (AP) The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to fully enforce a ban on travel to the United States by residents of six mostly Muslim countries.
This is not a final ruling on the travel ban: Challenges to the policy are winding through the federal courts, and the justices themselves ultimately are expected to rule on its legality.
But the action indicates that the high court might eventually approve the latest version of the ban, announced by President Donald Trump in September. Lower courts have continued to find problems with the policy.
Opponents of this and previous versions of the ban say they show a bias against Muslims. They say that was reinforced most recently by Trump's retweets of anti-Muslim videos.
"President Trump's anti-Muslim prejudice is no secret. He has repeatedly confirmed it, including just last week on Twitter. It's unfortunate that the full ban can move forward for now, but this order does not address the merits of our claims," said Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project. The ACLU is representing some opponents of the ban.
Just two justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, noted their disagreement with court orders allowing the latest policy to take full effect.
The new policy is not expected to cause the chaos that ensued at airports when Trump rolled out his first ban without warning in January.
The ban applies to travelers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Lower courts had said people from those nations with a claim of a "bona fide" relationship with someone in the United States could not be kept out of the country. Grandparents, cousins and other relatives were among those courts said could not be excluded.
The courts were borrowing language the Supreme Court itself came up with last summer to allow partial enforcement of an earlier version of the ban.
Now, those relationships will no longer provide a blanket exemption from the ban, although visa officials can make exceptions on a case-by-case basis.
The justices offered no explanation for their order, but the administration had said that blocking the full ban was causing "irreparable harm" because the policy is based on legitimate national security and foreign policy concerns.
In lawsuits filed in Hawaii and Maryland, federal courts said the updated travel ban violated federal immigration law. The travel policy also applies to travelers from North Korea and to some Venezuelan government officials and their families, but the lawsuits did not challenge those restrictions. Also unaffected are refugees. A temporary ban on refugees expired in October.
All the rulings so far have been on a preliminary basis. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, will be holding arguments on the legality of the ban this week.
Both courts are dealing with the issue on an accelerated basis, and the Supreme Court noted it expects those courts to reach decisions "with appropriate dispatch."
Quick resolution by appellate courts would allow the Supreme Court to hear and decide the issue this term, by the end of June.
Fleischmeister Horst Schurger, who has a Masters Degree in Butchering and Smallgoods from the Master College in Monchengladbach, Germany, joined chefs, Paul McDonald and Simon Bestley, on the judging panel and described the ham as perfectly smoky and sweet, with a brilliant initial taste, true to style and with even colouring.
In what will be a major shot in the arm for the government and could restore some confidence after a grim few weeks, Mr Joyce appears to have lifted his primary vote by at least 10 points, meaning after the distribution of preferences he will have as many as seven in 10 votes in the NSW seat.
The suspension is good and itll get plenty of work around here and will probably knock out 800 hours in a year, mainly spreading lime and urea, apart from the chase work.
Primaries of WA wool technician Graeme Luff said the prices Mr Thomas received last Thursday for his prem wool from a second shearing this year, were less than 30 cents a kilogram clean below what he might have expected for full wools.
GRAND FORKS In June, more than 4,700 Grand Forks residents filtered through the Alerus Center -- and only the Alerus Center -- to vote on the future of a downtowns Arbor Park. It was another sign of the polling consolidation popping up across the state, as voting locations continue a yearslong drop.
The move was a first for the city, which had never before held its own single-site election. But in the aftermath of the vote, the debate over the park seemed settled, and Grand Forks leaders were glad to skirt the costs and logistical headache they say can come with polling sites all around town.
Then came the lawsuit.
A group of about two dozen voters sought to have the election voided, their case stated, in part because using a single-site system was an overreach of city authority. That claim was the result of months of concerns that the new system and its lower number of voting locations would reduce turnout and potentially change the elections results.
Henry Howe, the voters lawyer, later said in court that the city tried to stack the deck. The suit is pending on appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court, and the citys legal team has denied wrongdoing.
But state voting data show precincts have been falling for decades, with 1,235 precincts in the 1980 presidential election and just 432 in 2016 -- an indication that polling sites have followed suit. Those numbers are consistent with staffing, budgetary and logistical concerns expressed by election officials around North Dakota, raising questions of how the state and its voters adapt.
The trend holds up around the country. Dana Harsell, an associate professor of political science and public administration at UND, said the 2008 presidential election had 132,237 voting locations. In 2016, just 116,990.
Part of the pressure, voting experts say, has come from the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002, which added to elections cost and logistical burdens -- like technological requirements for voting machines.
Harsell added that ages of election workers are increasingly skewing older, too, which can make it harder to staff big elections every two to four years. Theres also evidence, he said, that increasing pay for election workers has made polling sites increasingly expensive in sparsely populated rural areas, forcing consolidation.
We certainly know it is a trend, and you could say its been a trend since the 1950s, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Silrum said. Because weve steadily dwindled down over the years.
Voting in Grand Forks
The same trends are affecting voting in Grand Forks. City leaders approved a seven-location plan for the 2018 elections last week in a 5-2 committee vote expected to be confirmed by the full Council Monday, Dec. 4. A separate plan for just one site has also drawn support, and City Council President Dana Sande has argued that such a plan helps voters remember where to go vote.
City Clerk Sherie Lundmark said that would be the latest in a reduction from 26 polling sites in 2004. She said much of that can be attributed to schools no longer wanting to take security risks with visitors, but she said voters sometimes express discomfort entering an unfamiliar house of worship, too. And its far easier for technicians to service machines at one site than bounce from one precinct to the next on Election Day.
Officials around the state say the same. In Minot, the 2018 primary and general elections are expected to be held at just one citywide location, and special elections have long been held in just one spot. In Fargo, polling sites have dwindled in the last decade from 39 to 16 in the most recent presidential contest. North Dakotas local officials offer a range of reasons for scaling back polling sites, but most often say its because of logistical issues.
Debra Smestad, Ward County auditor and treasurer, said schools are increasingly wary of the security risks that accompany the visiting public. Consolidation in MInot also saves the headache of finding election workers.
I can make phone calls for eight, nine weeks in advance trying to fill my precincts, and then trying to make sure I have substitutes, she said. Its a full-time job for a while, working evenings just trying to find people.
A double-edged sword
But that hasnt calmed concerns that shrinking polling sites are bad for voter access. Former City Council member and state representative Eliot Glassheim spoke before city leaders last week as they weighed their plans for 2018 elections, urging them to keep as many polling sites as possible. He predicted as many as 400 votes lost -- to car trouble, cross-town travel and the like -- if all voting was held at the Alerus Center.
"It seems to me the council's job is to make it as easy as possible for people to vote, he said. I can't prove you're going to lose 400 votes. You can't prove you're not going to lose 400 votes. But just as an older politician, that seems about right to me."
But many North Dakota officials say they arent so sure. Its easier to know where to go when there are fewer sites, Smestad said. Eschewing schools also means voters avoid an early-morning crush of student drop-offs, Silrum added.
Harsell said its true that fewer polling sites could mean curtailed voter access. But he said that, along with diminishing physical Election Day voting sites have come other methods of enfranchisement, like early voting, vote-by-mail and increased absentee ballot use.
According to state data, Harsell said, nearly 40 percent of North Dakotas votes in the 2016 presidential election were cast before Election Day -- so Its not clear if the net result has been harmful or beneficial.
The more we open up alternative methods to voting outside of the traditional polling place on Election Day, the more were going to see fewer physical locations to vote, he said. Its a double-edged sword.
Matt Smith admires Prince Philip for doing "what he wants".
Matt Smith
The 35-year-old actor plays the 96-year-old royal in Netflix series 'The Crown' - which stars Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth - and he thinks the Duke of Edinburgh is "too cool for school" after learning so much about his life.
Speaking on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!', he said: "I'd really like to meet Prince Philip. He's an enigma. He's too cool, he's too cool for school.
"I've not been asked to meet him. That's what I love about him - he's done what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, with whom he wants. He hasn't asked permission and his wife's the queen."
The second series of the popular drama will air from Friday (08.12.17), and Philip is set to be portrayed as an adulterer in the new episodes.
The show's creator Peter Morgan said: "What I have to do is write a story about people at the centre of British life who are human beings.
"If you're hoping that tries to pick holes in the royal marriage, I wouldn't dream of it. Their marriage is a triumph by any standards."
What's more, 'The Crown' - which will also star Matthew Goode as Lord Snowdon, and Dexter's Michael C. Hall as John F. Kennedy - is said to be poised to dedicate a future episode to Edward VIII and his dealings with the ruling power in Germany at the start of World War Two.
In particular, the episode will focus on his relationship with the Nazis after he abdicated the throne.
Ferne McCann didn't think she'd be able to bond with her baby.
Ferne McCann
The former 'The Only Way is Essex' star was left devastated when her now-ex-boyfriend Arthur Collins was arrested for throwing acid on revellers inside a nightclub in London just hours after she found out she was pregnant with his child earlier this year.
And considering the stress she went through while she was carrying her now-one-month-old daughter Sunday, she was concerned she wouldn't have a connection with her but she was blown away by the love she had for the tot when she finally met her.
Speaking on 'This Morning' on Monday (04.12.17), she said: "I felt like, imagine if my baby arrives and I don't feel that connection, because everyone speaks about this unconditional gush of love. Imagine if I didn't have that. I think it's like a natural concern, I don't know, maybe it's just me. But as soon as she arrived, and every minute that I spend with her, the love just grows so much. And I think for me, this year it wasn't part of the plan to have a baby, but you can't plan life. It just happened. I wasn't the most maternal person, but now I feel so maternal. And I'm just so in love with her."
And, although the pregnancy was full of ups and downs, the 27-year-old beauty's little one is actually a really "calm baby" and, that in turn, has made her chill out a bit more.
She explained: "She's really calm and she makes me really calm. She's made me so serene. Who would have thought it?"
Ferne has since moved back in with her mother so that she can help with the baby as Arthur - who she began dating at the beginning of the year - has been found guilty of the acid attack and has been told by the judge that he will spend a long time behind bars.
Rak-Su have five songs in the top 10 of the iTunes chart.
Rak-Su
After winning 'The X Factor' less than 24 hours ago, the four piece - made up of childhood friends Mustafa Rahimtulla, Ashley Fongho, Jamaal Shurland and Myles Stephenson - shot straight to number one with their original winners' charity single 'Dimelo', which features Wyclef Jean and Naughty Boy.
As of writing, the original version of the track - without the rapper and producer featured on it - is at number three below Ed Sheeran and Beyonce's 'Perfect', while their song I'm 'Feeling You' is number four, fifth is 'Mona Lisa' and 'Mamacita' made it to number six.
The boys beat off competition from Grace Davies to be crowned winner of the talent contest, however, the 20-year-old beauty's song 'Too Young' has just made it into the top 10, sat in eighth place.
It comes after the group revealed they have a catalogue of songs they've written and are ready to release.
Fans won't have to wait too long to hear some new music from them as they've revealed they've already got loads of tracks they penned before and during the competition that are ready to drop.
Speaking on 'Lorraine' on Monday (04.12.17), Ashley said: "We have a got a backlog [of songs] but we always want to better ourselves so we write every single day ...
"That's the good thing about 'X Factor' - we have to write songs every week and you write four or five and only one will get used so we've got other stuff we can go back to."
The band's mentor Simon Cowell is convinced they will become as big as One Direction - who finished third in the 2010 series of the show, and have gone on to sell more than 70 million records - and, although they were the early favourites, they never expected to win the show and were just using the competition for "exposure."
Ashley explained: "I think for us, we knew who we wanted to be and we knew who we wanted to be going onto the show and obviously we saw it as a good opportunity to get some exposure for ourselves, we didn't know it was going to go this far. I think we were just fortunate in that when we said we wanted to do our own songs, the staff were kind of like: 'OK, if it's really what you want to do, it's a risk but fine.'"
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani inaugurated the first phase of the Chabahar port, called the Shahid Beheshti port, in the Sistan-Balochistan province on December 3, paving the way for a new strategic transit route between India, Iran and Afghanistan, bypassing Pakistan. Indias minister of state for shipping Pon Radhakrishnan was present at the event.Easily accessible from Indias western coast, the port is expected to accelerate trade between India, Afghanistan and Iran as Pakistan does not allow transit access to New Delhi for trade with the other two countries.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani inaugurated the first phase of the Chabahar port, called the Shahid Beheshti port, in the Sistan-Balochistan province on December 3, paving the way for a new strategic transit route between India, Iran and Afghanistan, bypassing Pakistan. India's minister of state for shipping Pon Radhakrishnan was present at the event.#
India will equip and operate two berths in the phase-I of the Chabahar Port with a capital investment of $85.21 million and annual revenue expenditure of $22.95 million on a 10-year lease, according to Indian media reports.Indian external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj met her Iranian counterpart Javed Zarif in Tehran a day before the inauguration and discussed the implementation of the Chabahar port project along with other issues. Swaraj stopped at Tehran while returning from Sochi in Russia after attending the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.India sent its first consignment of wheat to Afghanistan by sea through the Chabahar port over a month ago, marking opening of the new route. (DS)
Fibre2Fashion News Desk India
The avalanche of sexual harassment claims, with new ones pouring forth daily, leads me to the wisdom of George Washington's observation in his farewell address in 1796:
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. ... And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be managed without religion."
You may say, "There you go again, Star. Waving your Bible."
But is there a better answer for dealing with this problem?
Society, all human life, is guided by rules. The only question before us is: What are the rules that we choose to live by?
Washington's point is crucial. In a free society, one in which we want to minimize government and political control, we must maximize self-governance. Religion, and the morality that emerges from it, provides the rules by which free men and women govern their own behavior.
I will say further that the rules that we learn from scripture provide the framework for a society based on love, respect and creativity, as opposed to power and control.
Sexuality, outside the framework of mutual love, commitment and respect between husband and wife, is transformed from a physical expression of intimacy and beauty to the gross and crass behavior of brutes.
That this appears to be so widespread in our society should trouble us all.
So what do we do?
I am a Christian, but I do not believe that our government was designed to mend men's souls. It was designed to allow citizens to live free.
We cannot force citizens to do what Washington advises -- learn and be guided by scripture.
What's the alternative?
One is to forget it and let people do what they want. Let women fend for themselves when beastly predators with money and power threaten them.
Alternatively, we can have politicians design our rules. But can this work? Without guidelines of scripture, how do we discern right and wrong, acceptable and forbidden?
This is the trend that has been going on for years. The less we self-govern through eternal Biblical truths, learned at home and at school, the more we grow government to control our lives.
In response to sexual harassment violations perpetrated by some members of congress, Rep. Barbara Comstock has introduced a congressional resolution requiring "all House Members, Officers, employees, including interns, detailees, and fellows, of the House of Representatives shall complete an anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training program during each session of Congress."
Surely, similar programs will be popping up across industry. So instead of our workforce developing new and better products, more of their time will be spent sitting in anti-harassment training sessions, learning rules designed by bureaucrats.
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University published a report last year on the costs to our economy of the vast growth in the regulatory state from 1977 to 2012. The study concludes that accumulated regulatory growth reduced the size of the American economy in 2012 by 25 percent -- $4 trillion of what it might have been.
Aside from economic costs, what are the human costs of our lives increasingly being controlled by bureaucrats?
According to research from Stanford University, 10 percent of married couples meet at work. So much for this, as men will fear giving a woman a second glance at work, let alone saying or doing anything that might hint he's attracted to her.
I see only one viable path to a healthy, free nation. Choose to heed the wisdom of our first president.
Members of the Cotton Association of India (CAI) will go on a one-day token protest on December 15 against the reverse charge mechanism (RCM) under the goods and services tax (GST) and on an indefinite strike in their respective states by closing shutters from December 22 if the RCM issue is not resolved in the next meeting of the GST Council on December 21.Under reverse charge mechanism, the recipient of the goods or services is liable to pay GST instead of the supplier.
Members of the Cotton Association of India (CAI) will go on a one-day token protest on December 15 against the reverse charge mechanism (RCM) under the goods and services tax (GST) and on an indefinite strike in their respective states by closing shutters from December 22 if the RCM issue is not resolved in the next meeting of the GST Council on December 21.#
The decision was arrived at in a recent meeting in Mumbai of CAI members from all cotton growing states, according to a press release from the association. CAI also has about 70 ginners as members.The plight of the entire cotton sector across the country and the issue of pending refunds to exporters since July 2017 when GST was rolled out were discussed at the meeting. Telangana Cotton Millers & Traders Welfare Association president Ravinder Reddy highlighted the heavy losses suffered by the farmers in his state due to the damage caused by pink bollworm and uncertain rains.Because of RCM on cotton, the relationship between spinners and ginners has soured, Manjeet Singh Chawla, president of Madhyanchal Cotton Ginners & Traders Association, said.BS Rajpal, president of Maharashtra Cotton Ginners Association said that RCM has been unjustly imposed only on cotton and not on other agricultural commodities.CAI director Manish Daga, said every day about 2,700 farmers were shifting from cotton to other competing crops. (DS)
Fibre2Fashion News Desk India
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- (Marketwired) -- 12/03/17 -- Taste Ireland, Australia's largest distributor of Irish and UK foods, will raise the freshness and availability of Ireland's iconic food brands in Australia with a new end-to-end freight solution from DHL.
The solution will see DHL Global Forwarding, the leading international provider of air, sea and road freight services, ship Taste Ireland's products -- including much-loved Irish labels like Tayto crisps and Barry's Tea -- on direct sailings to Australia, selected to minimize transit times and the risks of in-transit food expiry. To ensure freshness of the food items, DHL will utilize its reefers -- refrigerated containers -- to ship temperature-sensitive products.
Prior to shipping, DHL will consolidate and pack Taste Ireland's high volumes of orders -- from customers including major supermarket chains Coles and Woolworths as well as most Irish pubs in Australia -- to reduce container numbers and subsequently optimize transport costs and times for the distributor.
We chose to work with DHL because of their exemplary track record in handling time-sensitive food shipments with strict compliance, accuracy, and efficiency," said Eamon Eastwood, CEO, Taste Ireland. "As our business continues to grow at breakneck speed, we needed a forwarder who could not only simplify and speed up our shipping process across numerous line items, but give us full visibility of and confidence in our shipments' freshness when they arrive at each customer's door."
To further expedite the delivery process, DHL will also pre-clear Taste Ireland's shipments with Australian customs prior to their arrival, as well as offering door-to-door airfreight for more urgent shipments. Doing so ensures DHL can swiftly deliver shipments across the final mile to Taste of Ireland's warehouses for unpacking and retail distribution, supported by regular reports and status updates through all stages of each shipment's journey.
Tony Boll, CEO, DHL Global Forwarding South Pacific, said, "We're excited to be helping Taste Ireland as it makes the leap from SME to global supplier of repute, by giving them total visibility and compliance across every facet of the logistics process as well as the support of our world-class customs clearance processes."
"Outsourcing the entire supply chain to a single trusted logistics provider gives importers like Taste Ireland huge freedom to extend their horizons," said Tony Boll, CEO, DHL Global Forwarding South Pacific. "The time previously spent on in-house logistics management can now go into how Taste Ireland markets and sells Ireland's favorite foods to meet untapped and increasingly hungry demand throughout Australia and the South Pacific."
DHL - The logistics company for the world
DHL is the leading global brand in the logistics industry. Our DHL family of divisions offer an unrivalled portfolio of logistics services ranging from national and international parcel delivery, e-commerce shipping and fulfillment solutions, international express, road, air and ocean transport to industrial supply chain management. With about 350,000 employees in more than 220 countries and territories worldwide, DHL connects people and businesses securely and reliably, enabling global trade flows. With specialized solutions for growth markets and industries including technology, life sciences and healthcare, energy, automotive and retail, a proven commitment to corporate responsibility and an unrivalled presence in developing markets, DHL is decisively positioned as "The logistics company for the world."
DHL is part of Deutsche Post DHL Group. The Group generated revenues of more than 57 billion euros in 2016.
Media Contact:
DHL Asia Pacific & EEMEA
Corporate Communications and Responsibility
Belinda Tan
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LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Rio Tinto Plc. (RTPPF.PK, RIO.L, RIO, RTNTF.PK) said that it has appointed Simon Thompson as chairman. Thompson, who joined the Rio Tinto board as a non-executive director in 2014, will become chairman on 5 March 2018. He succeeds Jan du Plessis who will step down as chairman and from the Rio Tinto board on the same date after serving almost nine years as chairman.
Separately, Rio Tinto said it expects capital expenditure of less than $4.5 billion in 2017 down from prior outlook of $5 billion. It is targeting $5 billion in additional free cash flow from its five-year productivity programme from 2017-2021.
Thompson has over 20 years' experience working across five continents in the mining and metals industry. From 1995 to 2007, he worked for the Anglo American group, holding a number of senior positions, including executive director of Anglo American plc, chief executive of the Base Metals Division, chairman of the Exploration Division, and chairman of Tarmac. His experience as a non-executive director includes serving on the boards of AngloGold Ashanti, Rusal and Newmont Mining Corporation.
Mr Thompson has been chairman of 3i Group plc since 2015 and was chairman of Tullow Oil plc from 2012 to 2017. Earlier in his career, he held investment banking positions at S.G. Warburg and N M Rothschild.
Upon assuming the role of chairman, Mr Thompson will step down as chairman of the Rio Tinto remuneration committee and will also cease to be a member of the audit committee. Sam Laidlaw, who previously chaired the remuneration committee at HSBC Holdings plc, will succeed Mr Thompson as chair of the Rio Tinto remuneration committee with effect from 5 March 2018.
In a presentation to investors at a seminar in Sydney, Rio Tinto demonstrated how it leads the sector in delivering cash returns to shareholders, returning 40 per cent of cash generated to shareholders in the first half of 2017.
Rio Tinto said it reinforced its focus on delivering superior cash returns for shareholders over the short, medium and long term as it unveiled key features of its drive to generate $5 billion of additional free cash flow over the next five years.
Rio Tinto chief executive J-S Jacques said, 'Our Group target of $1.5 billion of annual additional free cash flow from 2021 will ensure we can continue to lead the pack in delivering superior cash returns to our shareholders.'
Rio Tinto is targeting $5 billion in additional free cash flow from its five-year productivity programme from 2017-2021. As part of the $5 billion target, the productivity programme will deliver additional free cash flow of ~$1.5 billion a year from 2021.
The company said it is on track to deliver additional free cash flow of $300 million from productivity improvements in 2017 (year one of the five-year programme), and a cumulative $900 million by the end of 2018.
Rio Tinto said it expects capital expenditure of less than $4.5 billion in 2017 down from prior outlook of $5 billion.
Rio maintained its capital spending forecast for 2018 at about $5.5 billion.
The company expects capital expenditure of $6 billion in both 2019 and 2020. Previously, the company expected capital expenditure of about $5.5 billion for 2019.
The company expects to ship 330 million to 340 million tonnes of iron ore from its Pilbara operations in 2018.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
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RA'ANANA, Israel and TOKYO, December 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --
Inuitive Ltd. (Inuitive) and SoftBank Corp. (SoftBank), a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. (TOKYO: 9984), today announced that they have agreed to collaborate through the development of artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning (DL) and advanced 3D sensing with computer vision capabilities for future IoT. This collaboration will draw from the expertise of both companies in AI by leveraging Inuitive's existing and future vision processors and its AI framework with SoftBank's IoT platforms, which offer advanced heterogeneous processing capabilities for embedded products. The companies expect the collaboration to drive the popularity and development of smart IoT devices and systems.
Devices such as IoT are becoming more intelligent with the proliferation of AI. Implementing AI on the device provides a number of advantages over current market implementations, enabling edge devices to provide human-like interaction while keeping consumer market price tag. Additional benefits of on-chip AI include real-time performance, privacy protection and longer operation time.
"To develop an AI framework, it takes efforts from players in multiple domains," said Mr. Shlomo Gadot, founder and chief executive officer, Inuitive. "The strategic collaboration between Inuitive and SoftBank will advance on-device intelligence by leveraging Inuitive's advanced technologies and SoftBank market proven technologies. Together we'll push the performance envelope and extend AI to places that are currently beyond reach. Our strategic collaboration will become a turning point for the whole on-chip AI industry".
"SoftBank has been conducting research in AI over a decade," said Hironobu Tamba, Vice President, Head of Smart IoT Division, SoftBank. "We look forward to the results of our collaboration with Inuitive to further accelerate new and exciting capabilities of on-chip AI for millions of devices".
Currently, SoftBank is focused on optimizing the high-end platforms to accelerate AI products use cases in the areas of computer vision and neural networks and is researching broader executions in the areas of Objects recognition, Scene reconstruction, SLAM and power management. Inuitive is a leading company in vision processing and its applications. It plays an important role in deep learning algorithm innovation. The company's leading technology in deep learning makes it possible to innovate and develop a variety of algorithms with low cost and fast response time. Inuitive has also made breakthroughs in sensing technologies. Its strategic collaboration with SoftBank is expected to drastically improve the speed and efficiency of combining system with chipset, making Inuitive's AI technology more pervasive.
About Inuitive
INUITIVE (http://www.inuitive-tech.com) Inuitive is the leading fabless semiconductor company in the area of 3D imaging. With the NU4000, a superior multi-core vision processor that supports 3D Imaging, it optimizes consumer experiences and enhances competitive advantages in the areas of Robots, Drones, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality to name just a few. INUITIVEintelligentofferingcombines algorithms, ASIC and System solution to realize the AI practice, enabling devices to acquire more human capabilities.With AI at its core,The INUITIVE platform also includes a3D Depth Sensing Computer Vision processor and powerful deep learning capabilities to enable smart devices to become even smarter.
About SoftBank
SoftBank Corp., a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. (TOKYO: 9984), provides mobile communication, fixed-line communication and Internet connection services to customers in Japan. Leveraging synergies with other companies in the SoftBank Group, SoftBank Corp. aims to transform lifestyles through ICT and expand into other business areas including IoT, robotics and energy. To learn more, please visit http://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/group/sbm/
Contact:
Oriane Morley
Inuitive
+972-54-261-4671
oriane@innovationhall.org.il
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC (ERM.L), a business information and events group, announced Monday that it has acquired Seven Site Media Limited, trading as TowerXchange. The company did not reveal the financial terms of the deal. TowerXchange is a fast-growing information and events business. It is a major source of information on the tower market, the infrastructure supporting the growth of the mobile telecoms market. According to Euromoney, the acquisition of TowerXchange is part of its telecoms strategy to facilitate industry collaboration and trading in areas ranging from pricing to standards across the telecoms ecosystem. Rosalind Irving, Euromoney Divisional Director responsible for its telecoms businesses, said, 'TowerXchange is an excellent business which serves an increasingly important part of telecoms infrastructure. It is strategic for Euromoney because it is highly complementary to the markets served by TelCap, BroadGroup (in which we invested in March) and Layer123 (acquired in April).' 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.
Fujitsu Limited Public and Investor Relations Tel: +81-3-6252-2176 URL: www.fujitsu.com/global/news/contacts/
TOKYO, Dec 4, 2017 - (JCN Newswire) - Fujitsu today announced that Japan's Ministry of the Environment has honored the company's multi-node Fujitsu Server PRIMERGY CX600 M1 with the Environment Minister's Award for Global Warming Prevention Activity in the Technological Development and Commercialization category. This award is in recognition of the fact that the "hot water cooling" technology available on the PRIMERGY CX600 M1 reduces TCO(1) and power consumption throughout the system, contributing to a reduction in CO2 emissions.Fujitsu will continue to develop highly energy-efficient products, contributing its efforts to alleviate climate change through its business activities.About the Environment Minister's Award for Global Warming Prevention ActivityThe Environment Minister's Award for Global Warming Prevention Activity has been bestowed by the Ministry of the Environment since 1998, as part of its efforts to promote global warming countermeasures, recognizing organizations and individuals which have made a notable contribution to the prevention of global warming.About PRIMERGY CX600 M1The PRIMERGY CX600 M1 water-cooled model employs a "hot water cooling" technology that relies on external air to lower the temperature of the coolant water circulated within the server. This model cools CPUs by using a water cooling pump inside the server, which can cut the number of fan rotations needed for cooling, reducing server power consumption. In addition, the heat removed from the server along with the coolant water is exchanged in a cooling distribution unit (CDU)(2) connected to the rack holding the servers, and cooling towers installed outside the facility enable cooling with less air conditioning equipment. This reduces TCO and power consumption by the system as a whole, contributing to lower CO2 emissions.Installation Diagramhttp://www.acnnewswire.com/topimg/Low_FujitsuPRIMERGYCX600M1.jpg(1) TCOTotal cost of ownership. Includes not just the cost to install the system, but also the cost to operate and maintain it.(2) CDUCooling distribution unit. This unit circulates the coolant water from the water cooling pumps within the servers to the cooling towers, while also conducting heat exchange within the CDU itself.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.
WAYNE, New Jersey, Dec. 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --Toys"R"Us, Inc. (the "Company") today announced that, as part of the Company's ongoing financial restructuring efforts, the Company's UK operation ("Toys"R"Us UK") has initiated a process by which it is seeking creditor approval to reposition its real estate portfolio for future growth and profitability.
The UK Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) process will not impact any Toys"R"Us entities or stakeholders outside the UK, including employees, vendors and customers. The Company's approximately 1,600 Toys"R"Us and Babies"R"Us stores around the world, including all stores in the UK, are currently open for business and continuing to operate as usual. Customers can also continue to shop for the toy and baby products they are looking for onlineat the Company's www.toysrus.com and www.babiesrus.com web stores.
Dave Brandon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, "As we continued to work through the financial restructuring process, we made the decision to take action to put our UK operation on stronger financial footing. Through the CVA process, we hope to receive authorization to restructure our UK lease obligations so that we will be better able to invest in our UK business and further improve the customer experience. Importantly, our stores and operations in our other global markets will not be impacted by this process."
Mr. Brandon continued, "We are confident that we are taking the right steps to ensure that the iconic Toys"R"Us and Babies"R"Us brands live on for many generations in the UK and around the world. We remain committed to championing play for kids and serving as a trusted resource and friend for parents around the world. Today's proactive measure better positions us to achieve these goals and ensures customers can continue to shop us with confidence over the Holiday season and beyond."
Under the UK's CVA process, Toys"R"Us UK has submitted a restructuring plan to its creditors and will solicit their approval of this plan over the next 14 days. If approved by 75 percent of the creditors and then declared effective, the CVA plan would allow the UK entity to move forward with a more cost efficient store base and footprint better suited to meet the needs of today's consumer.
Additional information can be found by visiting the Company's restructuring website atwww.toysrusinc.com/cvaprocess or calling the Company's Information Hotline, toll-free, at the following numbers internationally:
US and Canada : 844-794-3476
: 844-794-3476 UK Toll Free: 800: 0-800-014-8914
Germany : 0800-182-9016
: 0800-182-9016 Spain Mobile Enabled: 900-984918
Portugal Mobile Enabled: 800-180-778
France : 805: 0805-080337
: 805: 0805-080337 Poland : 0-0-800-141-0322
: 0-0-800-141-0322 Australia 1300: 1-300-009-390
1300: 1-300-009-390 Austria Mobile Enabled: 0800-802290
Switzerland Mobile Enabled: 0800-562-556
China : 400-120-4011
About Toys"R"Us, Inc.
Toys"R"Us, Inc. is the world's leading dedicated toy and baby products retailer, offering a differentiated shopping experience through its family of brands. Merchandise is sold in 885 Toys"R"Us and Babies"R"Us stores in the United States, Puerto Rico and Guam, and in more than 810 international stores and over 255 licensed stores in 38 countries and jurisdictions. With its strong portfolio of e-commerce sites including Toysrus.com and Babiesrus.com, the company provides shoppers with a broad online selection of distinctive toy and baby products. Toys"R"Us, Inc. is headquartered in Wayne, NJ, and has nearly 65,000 employees worldwide. The company is committed to serving its communities as a caring and reputable neighbor through programs dedicated to keeping kids safe and helping them in times of need. Over the past three decades, the Company has given more than $100 million in product donations to children's charities. Since 1992, the Toys"R"Us Children's Fund, a public charity affiliated with Toys"R"Us, Inc., has also donated more than $130 million in grants. For more information, visit Toysrusinc.com or follow @ToysRUsNews on Twitter.
For more information please contact:
Lenders and Note Investors:
Matthew Finigan, Vice President, Treasurer at 973-617-5808 or Matthew.Finigan@toysrus.com
Media:
Amy von Walter, Executive Vice President, Global Communications & Customer Care at 201-815-9512 or Amy.vonWalter@toysrus.com
press@toysrus.com
973-617-5900
Michael Freitag / Meaghan Repko
Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher
Tel: (212) 355-4449
SAN FRANCISCO, December 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --
The globalsmart manufacturing marketsize is estimated to reach USD 395.2 billion by 2025, according to a new study by Grand View Research, Inc. The growing emphasis on increasing production efficiency and gaining visibility across the entire value chain are the two major factors driving market growth. In addition, the availability of advanced technologies such as 3D printing, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), and plant asset management solutions to small and medium enterprises is further accelerating the industry growth.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160524/371361LOGO )
The positive impact of government initiatives and investments to promote smart manufacturing adoption has been one of the most influential factors driving market growth. The fact that both industrialized countries and developing economies are aggressively pursuing this avenue is expected to further drive growth. For example, China is reportedly investing over USD 3 billion for advanced manufacturing under the Made in China 2025 program.
Automotive and aerospace & defense industries are the leading growth avenues for smart manufacturing solution providers with industries such as oil and gas and industrial equipment manufacturing rapidly scaling their digitalization efforts. With the proliferation of 3D printing, simulation, and modeling in manufacturing and design, these industries are expected to continue to maintain a significant growth rate over the forecast period. Though numerous solutions are available in the market, digital twin and real-time analytics are anticipated to spearhead the penetration of digitalization in these industries.
Browse full research report with TOC on "Smart Manufacturing Market Analysis By Component, By Technology, By End-use (Automotive, Aerospace, Chemicals, Healthcare, Electronics, Agriculture, Oil & Gas), By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2014 - 2025"at: http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/smart-manufacturing-market
Further key findings from the report suggest:
Enterprise control, asset performance management, and augmentation are expected to lead the smart manufacturing solutions landscapes with many instances of these technologies overlapping with each other.
Collaborative robots and additive manufacturing are also playing a pivotal role in the industry's growth. However, some manufacturing sectors are still looking for efficient ways to capitalize on them.
While Industrial Internet of Things and control systems have been highly touted for their benefits, cybersecurity and security standards are expected to gain renewed interest in the industry.
Major companies such as John Deere, Harley Davidson , and General Motors have successfully implemented smart manufacturing in a bid to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness Smart manufacturing is supported by various organizations and consortiums including Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition (SMLC), Industrie 4.0, and MESA International, among others.
Browse related reports by Grand View Research:
Smartphone Applications Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/smartphone-applications-market
Rolling Stock Market- http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/rolling-stock-market
Microdisplays Market- http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/microdisplays-market
Hyperscale Data Center Market- http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/hyperscale-data-center-market
Grand View Research has segmented the global smart manufacturing market based on components, technologies, end uses, and regions.
Smart Manufacturing Component Scope (Revenue, USD Billion;2014 - 2025) Hardware Software Services
Smart Manufacturing Technology Scope (Revenue, USD Billion;2014 - 2025) Machine Execution Systems Programmable Logic Controller Enterprise Resource Planning SCADA Discrete Control Systems Human Machine Interface Machine Vision 3D Printing Product Lifecycle Management Plant Asset Management
Smart Manufacturing End-use Scope (Revenue, USD Billion;2014 - 2025) Automotive Aerospace & Defense Chemicals & Materials Healthcare Industrial Equipment Electronics Food & Agriculture Oil & Gas Others
Smart Manufacturing Regional Scope (Revenue, USD Billion;2014 - 2025) North America U.S. Canada Europe UK Germany Asia Pacific China India Japan Latin America Brazil Mexico MEA
Read Our Blog By Grand View Research: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/blogs/technology
About Grand View Research
Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. Thecompany provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.
Contact:
Sherry James
Corporate Sales Specialist, USA
Grand View Research, Inc
Phone: +1-415-349-0058
Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519
Email: sales@grandviewresearch.com
Web: www.grandviewresearch.com
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to host live, 24-hour broadcast on climate change; Intelsat provides global contribution and distribution services
Intelsat S.A. (NYSE: I), operator of the world's first Globalized Network and leader in integrated satellite communications is providing global communications services for The Climate Reality Project's "24 Hours of Reality: Be the Voice of Reality" live broadcast. Intelsat's contribution services will be used to uplink video featuring performances and leaders from around the world. Intelsat's distribution services will be used to reach millions of people globally via the Intelsat 19, Intelsat 20, Intelsat 34, Intelsat 905 and Galaxy 17 satellites.
The live event, hosted by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, will begin today, Dec. 4 at 6 p.m. EST. During each hour of the program, regional climate experts will highlight stories of climate activism in six regions, including North America, Oceania, the Middle East and Africa, Europe, and Central and South America. The event will also feature conversations with political leaders, thought leaders, climate scientists and cultural icons, as well as musical performances and short films.
In its seventh year of supporting The Climate Reality Project, Intelsat will use its Globalized Network, which includes its satellite network and IntelsatOne terrestrial services. Intelsat will contribute video from multiple locations worldwide, and support the broadcast of the event to more than 100 countries via traditional platforms such as Telemundo, France 24, SKY, PhoenixTV, and iHeartRadio.
"Climate Reality is grateful for Intelsat's support for this year's 24 Hours of Reality broadcast," said Stacie Paxton Cobos, Climate Reality's Senior Vice President of Communications and Marketing. "24 Hours of Reality: Be the Voice of Reality will showcase activism around the globe with the goal of inspiring millions to take action to solve the climate crisis. We are thrilled to partner with Intelsat once again to reach a truly global audience, and mobilize citizens around the world to stand up for the health of our planet."
"A global organization like The Climate Reality Project requires a globalized network to ensure its message reaches people all around the world," said Kurt Riegelman, Intelsat's Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing. "Intelsat's expansive network and video neighborhoods are proven platforms for reaching the largest international audiences and are ideal for collecting video from multiple locations. We have supported The Climate Reality Project and the work of Vice President Al Gore on climate change since the groundbreaking Live Earth broadcast in 2007. Our long history working together is a testament to the breadth of Intelsat's globalized network and the strength and reliability of our satellite-based contribution and distribution services."
Supporting Resources:
Intelsat Media Services: http://www.intelsat.com/solutions/media
About Intelsat
Intelsat S.A. (NYSE: I) operates the world's first Globalized Network, delivering high-quality, cost-effective video and broadband services anywhere in the world. Intelsat's Globalized Network combines the world's largest satellite backbone with terrestrial infrastructure, managed services and an open, interoperable architecture to enable customers to drive revenue and reach through a new generation of network services. Thousands of organizations serving billions of people worldwide rely on Intelsat to provide ubiquitous broadband connectivity, multi-format video broadcasting, secure satellite communications and seamless mobility services. The end result is an entirely new world, one that allows us to envision the impossible, connect without boundaries and transform the ways in which we live. For more information, visit www.intelsat.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171204005541/en/
Contacts:
Intelsat
Shannon Booker, +1 703-559-7536
Corporate Communications Manager
shannon.booker@intelsat.com
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2017) - Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc. (CSE: LDS) (OTCQB: LDSYF) (FSE: LD6) (WKN: A14XHT) ("LDS" or the "Company") announces that the City of Adelanto confirmed the issuance to CSPA Group, Inc. of a Volatile Extraction Permit and Business License along with a Certificate of Occupancy signed by the San Bernardino County Fire Department, and that all are in good standing for the manufacturing facility. The Mayor of Adelanto Richard Kerr said, "The CSPA Group's Volatile Extraction Permit, Conditional Use Permit (CUP), Business License, and Certificate of Occupancy (COO) are all in good standing." The Mayor continued stating, "CSPA Group, Inc. was operating within the approved parameters of the City's Volatile Extraction Ordinance." The State of California began accepting applications for State Manufacturing Licenses on December 1, 2017, and the attorneys for the CSPA Group, Inc. submitted the California State application for a state manufacturing license on December 1, 2017.
Brad Eckenweiler, CEO of LDS, stated, "There is a significant amount of misinformation being disseminated on the internet and even with some news agencies. It would be impossible to address all of the negative hypothetical speculation. I would like to thank the overwhelming support from the Cannabis Industry, the City of Adelanto and Mayor Kerr. Simply put, we believe that CSPA Group, Inc. acted within the parameters of its permits and licenses. It's our hope that all parties concerned will continue to work together to a mutually satisfactory conclusion." Until further regulatory clarity can be determined regarding manufacturing, CSPA Group, Inc. will continue its operations with CO2 extracted material.
About Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc.
The Company's technology produces infused strips (similar to breath strips) that are not only a safer, healthier option to smoking, but also a new way to accurately meter the dosage and assure the purity of the product. In addition, with the entering into its management services agreements with NHMC, Inc. and CSPA Group, Inc., the Company has begun its direct involvement in the growing of medicinal ingredients for, and the manufacturing of, its products. From seed to sale, the Company's products and ingredients will be tested for quality and composition throughout the formulation and production processes, resulting in a delivery system that is safe, consistent and effective.
On behalf of the board of directors of Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc.
Brad Eckenweiler, CEO & Director
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
investor.relations@lifestyledeliverysystems.com
1-866-347-5058
Cautionary Disclaimer Statement:
The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release.
Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. The Company cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to the Company's limited operating history and the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations. In particular, there is significant regulatory uncertainty with respect to the production and sale of medicinal and recreational marijuana in the United States of America. In particular, marijuana remains a Schedule I drug under the United States Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Although Congress has prohibited the US Justice Department from spending federal funds to interfere with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws, this prohibition must be renewed each year to remain in effect and is subject to change at any time. In addition, although the State of California has adopted laws permitting the commercial cultivation, extraction and manufacturing of medicinal marijuana, final regulations with respect to the implementation of these laws have yet to be adopted. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.
GENEVA, December 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --
Exceptional Employee Offerings Acknowledged for the fourth consecutive year
JTI (Japan Tobacco International) has once again been recognized with the prestigious Top Employer certification in the Asia Pacific region for the fourth consecutive year. Along with the regional award, nine JTI offices and factories in eight countries - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore and Thailand - also received the national Top Employer certification.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130528/617491 )
"Our continued success as a Top Employer in the region is a recognition of the high standards we set ourselves," says Mike Griffiths, JTI's Human Resources Vice President for Asia Pacific. "Investing in our people is the cornerstone of our HR strategy in order to enable our employees to develop a fulfilling career within JTI, and to grow into future leaders. A good example is our recent pan-regional Asia Pacific Management Trainee Programme 'Explore' that builds functional expertise and a broad business perspective with multicultural awareness, through rotational assignments across the region."
David Plink, CEO at the Top Employers Institute, confirms: "Our extensive research concluded that JTI forms part of a select group of employers that advance employee conditions worldwide. Their people are well taken care of. Having reconfirmed their outstanding HR practices again this year in the Asia-Pacific region, they can truly consider themselves at the top of an exclusive group of the world's best employers."
The annual international research undertaken by the Top Employers Institute recognises leading employers around the world: those that provide excellent employee conditions, nurture and develop talent throughout all levels of the organization, and which strive to continuously optimize employment practices. JTI's employee offerings were assessed on the following criteria: Talent Strategy, Workforce Planning, On-boarding, Learning & Development, Performance Management, Leadership Development, Career & Succession Management, Compensation & Benefits, and Culture.
For JTI, the renewed regional Top Employer 2018 certification in Asia Pacific is the latest addition to a list of awards recognizing its HR excellence across the globe: JTI is currently Number One Global Top Employer and holds regional Top Employer certifications in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
About JTI
JTI is a leading international tobacco company with operations in more than 120 countries. It is the global owner of both Winston, the number two cigarette brand in the world, and Camel outside the USA and has the largest share in sales for both brands. Other global brands include Mevius, LD and Natural American Spirit. With its internationally recognised brand Logic, JTI is also a major player in the e-cigarette market and has, since 2011, been present in the heated tobacco category with Ploom. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, JTI employs around 27,000 people and was awarded Global Top Employer for three consecutive years. JTI is a member of the Japan Tobacco Group of Companies. For more information, visit http://www.jti.com.
About the Top Employers Institute
The Top Employers Institute is the global Human Capital Management research and Certification company, identifying and celebrating excellence in HR practices and employee conditions in companies around the world. Organisations which also achieve its International Standard in HR best-practice receive the coveted, and well-deserved, Top Employer Brand Certification: a globally recognised validation of their commitment to HR excellence and advancing employee conditions, and powerful differentiator for business performance.Certified Top Employers are the world's premium employers. To learn more about the Top Employers Institute and the Top Employers certification visit:http://www.top-employers.com.
ALBANY, New York, December 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --
As competition soars, companies such as Smith & Nephew plc, Zimmer Biomet, Lohmann & Rauscher International DeRoyal Industries, Inc., BSN Medical, Misonix, Soring GmbH, Arobella Medical, LLC, and Derma Sciences Inc., among others are toying with various idea to buoy growth. Strategic collaborations for instance have proven a popular tactic among companies to gain competitive edge. With mergers and acquisitions, the market players can expect foraying in unexplored regions, in turn expanding their footprint as well as product portfolio. Some of the leading companies are also investing in research and development for robust product launches. Such strategies adopted by the market players are likely to influence the global wound debridement market significantly, finds Transparency Market Research (TMR) in a new study.
According to TMR, the global wound debridement market was valued at US$1,750 mn in 2016. Exhibiting a CAGR of 6.4% between 2017 and 2025, the market is expected to reach US$3,044.8 mn by the end of 2025. Based on type of wound, the chronic wounds segment exhibited high demand in the global market in 2025. By the end of 2017, the market is likely to witness North America emerge dominant. However, during the course of the forecast period, Asia Pacific is expected to showcase strong growth.
View Report at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/wound-debridement-market.html
Despite Several Positive Impacts Stringent Approval Norms May Threaten Market
The global wound debridement market is expected to grow at a steady pace on account of the increasing prevalence of infectious diseases. Besides this, growing investment by the prominent market players and improving healthcare infrastructure worldwide, especially in developed nations will pave the way for the market's steady growth in the coming years. This holds true in case of growth scenario offered by nations across the Middle East and Africa and Latin America. Conversely, stringent norms of approval implemented by Ministry of Public Health, besides numerous registration regulations to get commercialization objectives a nod are key challenges witnessed by the market at present.
Request to View Sample Copy of Report - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=35036
In response to the rising geriatric population and the increasing incidence of chronic ailments, which may affect skin integrity leading to peripheral vascular diseases, the demand for preventive therapeutics is sure to rise. In addition, the rising incidence of diabetes is also factored in by experts analyzing the market's future. As skin breakdown is a frequent consequence of these diseases leading to chronic wound or formation of ulcers, the usability of wound debridement is expected to rise even further in the coming years. "Against this backdrop, experts foresee a considerable rise in the demand for wound debridement," said a lead TMR analyst.
Request Wound Debridement Market Report Brochure @ https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=35036
Rising Demand from Emerging Nations to Aid Growth
The expanding demographics and developing economies of India and China and several other emerging nations have created an environment conducive to the market's growth. In addition, the surging demand for apt wound bed preparation, advancements in debridement products, rising awareness, and the increasing popularity of wound care at home have enabled growth in the global wound debridement market. Also the increasing demand for preventing long stays at hospitals will have a positive influence in the overall wound debridement market.
Global Wound Debridement Market Report is available @ US$ 5795
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.
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NANAIMO, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 12/04/17 -- ATLAS ENGINEERED PRODUCTS LTD. (the "Company" or "Atlas") (TSX VENTURE: AEP), a leading supplier of trusses and engineered wood products, is pleased to announce that it has entered into a letter of intent with Clinton Roof Truss Ltd. ("Clinton") whereby the Company has agreed to acquire all of the issued and outstanding shares of Clinton (the "Transaction").
Guy Champagne, President of Atlas, commented, "The acquisition of Clinton represents a major milestone of our acquisition program to significantly broaden our geographic reach. We are extremely pleased to be acquiring Clinton as it is highly accretive and provides us with a strategic base from which to expand in Ontario."
The purchase includes 31,000 square feet of plant, warehouse and office space on a 5-acre site strategically located to provide access to the growing Ontario communities west of Mississauga. Clinton is growing and has over $3 million in annual sales, strong profitability, and very capable operational leadership.
Terms of Transaction with Clinton
Under the binding letter of intent, the Company and Clinton have agreed to negotiate a definitive agreement (the "Definitive Agreement") whereby the Company will acquire all of the issued and outstanding shares of Clinton for $2,100,000 cash and issue $140,000 in common shares of the Company on closing of the Transaction. The shares will be issued on the closing price immediately preceding the date of this news release. As additional consideration, the shareholders of Clinton will receive an additional $360,000, which will be paid $10,000 per month for the 36 months following closing of the Transaction. A significant portion of the cash required to complete the transaction will be provided by mortgage financing and a term loan.
The current owners of Clinton will be pursuing retirement while remaining available to the Company and the general manager of Clinton will enter into a three-year management contract. All agreements will include non-solicitation and non-competition clauses.
The Company will be entitled to carry out due diligence until January 6, 2018. Upon completion of due diligence, the parties will enter into the Definitive Agreement setting forth the terms and conditions of the Transaction by January 15, 2018. Completion of any transaction with Clinton is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to, completion of due diligence, negotiation of definitive agreements in respect of such a transaction and receipt of any required regulatory approvals. A transaction cannot be completed until these conditions are satisfied, and there can be no assurance that a transaction will be completed at all.
About Atlas Engineered Products Ltd.
Atlas Engineered Products is one of British Columbia's leading suppliers of trusses and engineered wood products. The company was formed over 18 years ago and operates manufacturing and distribution facilities in Nanaimo to meet the needs of residential and commercial builders. Atlas has expert design and engineering teams, a multiple-shift state-of-the-art truss manufacturing operation, and large inventories of engineered beam and flooring components. Atlas aims to grow its base of business across Canada by pursuing an aggressive acquisition and consolidation strategy, and will continue to bring its construction industry partners unparalleled excellence in service, product, and support.
Forward Looking Information
Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations; they are not guarantees of future performance. The Company cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to the Company including those to be described in the Filing Statement filed by the Company on www.sedar.com. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.
NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.
Contacts:
Atlas Engineered Products Ltd.
1-250-754-1400
2005 Boxwood Rd.
Nanaimo, BC V9S 5X9
www.atlasengineeredproducts.com
Rob Gamley
1-604-689-7422
rob@contactfinancial.com
Contact Financial Corp.
810 - 609 Granville St.
Vancouver, BC V7Y 1G5
Baker Hughes, a GE company (NYSE:BHGE) ("BHGE"), announced today the commencement of tender offers by its subsidiary, Baker Hughes, a GE company, LLC ("BHGE LLC"), for debt securities of BHGE LLC or its subsidiaries. The tender offers consist of offers to purchase for cash:
1) any and all (the "Any and All Tender Offers") of the outstanding (i) 7.500% Senior Notes due 2018 (the "7.500% 2018 Notes") and (ii) 6.000% Senior Notes due 2018 (the "6.000% 2018 Notes" and, together with the 7.50% 2018 Notes, the "Any and All Notes"); and
2) up to $175 million (the "Aggregate Maximum Purchase Price") in aggregate purchase price (the "Maximum Tender Offers" and, together with the Any and All Tender Offers, the "Tender Offers") of the outstanding (i) 8.550% Debentures due 2024 (the "2024 Notes") and (ii) 6.875% Notes due 2029 (the "2029 Notes" and, together with the 2024 Notes, the "Maximum Tender Offer Notes," and, together with the Any and All Notes, the "Securities").
The Tender Offers are summarized in the tables below and are being made pursuant to an Offer to Purchase, dated December 4, 2017 (the "Offer to Purchase"), which sets forth a more detailed description of the Tender Offers. Copies of the Offer to Purchase and the form of notice of guaranteed delivery with respect to the Any and All Notes are available at www.dfking.com/bhge.
Any and All of the Principal Amount Outstanding of the Securities Listed Below:
Reference U.S. Bloomberg Principal Amount Treasury Reference Title of Security CUSIP Number Outstanding Security Page Fixed Spread 6.000% Senior 055482 AJ2 $196,873,000 0.875% UST due FIT3 40 bps Notes 05/31/2018 due 2018(1) 7.500% Senior 057224 AY3 $525,378,000 1.250% UST due FIT4* 50 bps Notes 11/15/2018 due 2018(2)
(1) The 6.000% 2018 Notes were issued by BJ Services Company and subsequently assumed by its successor Western Atlas Inc., a subsidiary of BHGE LLC. On July 3, 2017, BHGE LLC, Baker Hughes Co-Obligor, Inc. (the "Co-Obligor"), Baker Hughes Oilfield Operations, LLC and Baker Hughes International Branches, LLC became co-obligors of the 6.000% 2018 Notes. (2) The 7.500% 2018 Notes were issued by Baker Hughes Incorporated ("BHI"). On July 3, 2017, BHGE LLC, as successor to BHI, and the Co-Obligor became co-obligors of the 7.500% 2018 Notes. * The Bloomberg Reference Page may change to FIT3 prior to the Any and All Price Determination Date (as defined below).
The Any and All Tender Offers will expire at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on December 8, 2017, unless extended or earlier terminated by BHGE LLC (the "Any and All Tender Expiration Date"). Holders of the Any and All Notes must validly tender and not validly withdraw their Any and All Notes prior to or at the Any and All Tender Expiration Date to be eligible to receive the Total Consideration for such Any and All Notes.
Up to $175,000,000 in Aggregate Maximum Purchase Price(1) of the Outstanding Securities Listed Below:
Early Tender Payment (per Fixed Principal Acceptance Reference Bloomberg $1,000 Spread CUSIP Amount Priority U.S. Treasury Reference principal (basis Title of Security Number Outstanding Level Security Page amount)(4) points) 8.550% 957674 2.250% UST Debentures AD6 $112,944,000 1 due FIT1 $50.00 40 bps due 2024(2) 11/15/2027 6.875% Notes due 057224 2.250% UST 2029(3) AK3 $305,788,000 2 due FIT1 $50.00 80 bps 11/15/2027
(1) The Aggregate Maximum Purchase Price for the Maximum Tender Offer Notes includes the Total Consideration (as defined below) and excludes Accrued Interest (as defined below) and fees and expenses related to the Tender Offers. (2) The 2024 Notes were issued by Western Atlas Inc. On July 3, 2017, BHGE LLC, the Co-Obligor, Baker Hughes Oilfield Operations, LLC and Baker Hughes International Branches, LLC became co-obligors of the 2024 Notes. The interest payment payable on December 15, 2017 with respect to the 2024 Notes will be paid to record holders of the 2024 Notes as of December 1, 2017 and will thus not be included in the calculation of Accrued Interest payable on the 2024 Notes purchased in the Maximum Tender Offers. (3) The 2029 Notes were issued by BHI. On July 3, 2017, BHGE LLC, as successor to BHI, and the Co-Obligor became co-obligors of the 2029 Notes. The interest payment payable on January 15, 2018 with respect to the 2029 Notes will be paid to record holders of the 2029 Notes as of January 1, 2018 and will thus not be included in the calculation of Accrued Interest payable on the 2029 Notes purchased in the Maximum Tender Offers at the Maximum Tender Final Settlement Date (as defined below), if any. (4) The Total Consideration for Maximum Tender Offer Notes validly tendered prior to or at the Early Tender Date (as defined below) and accepted for purchase is calculated using the applicable Fixed Spread (as defined below) and is inclusive of the Early Tender Payment (as defined below). The Total Consideration is subject to the Aggregate Maximum Purchase Price and proration in accordance with the Acceptance Priority Levels, as more fully set forth in the Offer to Purchase.
The Maximum Tender Offers will expire at 12:00 midnight, New York City time, on January 2, 2018 (one minute after 11:59 p.m., New York City time, on January 2, 2018), unless extended or earlier terminated by BHGE LLC (the "Maximum Tender Expiration Date"). Holders of the Maximum Tender Offer Notes must validly tender and not validly withdraw their Maximum Tender Offer Notes prior to or at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on December 15, 2017, unless extended (the "Early Tender Date"), to be eligible to receive the Total Consideration for such Maximum Tender Offer Notes, which is inclusive of an amount in cash equal to the applicable amount set forth in the table above under the heading Early Tender Payment (the "Early Tender Payment"). Holders of the Maximum Tender Offer Notes who validly tender their Maximum Tender Offer Notes after the Early Tender Date but prior to the Maximum Tender Expiration Date will be eligible to receive the Total Consideration for such Maximum Tender Offer Notes less the amount of the Early Tender Payment. The amount of each of the Maximum Tender Offer Notes that are purchased will be determined in accordance with the acceptance priority levels noted in the table above (the "Acceptance Priority Level"), with 1 being the highest Acceptance Priority Level.
The applicable consideration (the "Total Consideration") payable for each $1,000 principal amount of Securities of each series validly tendered and accepted for payment pursuant to the applicable Tender Offer will be determined in the manner described in the Offer to Purchase by reference to the applicable fixed spread for such Security (the "Fixed Spread") specified in the tables above plus the applicable yield to maturity based on the bid-side price of the applicable U.S. Treasury Security specified in the applicable table above. The Total Consideration will be calculated as of 11:00 a.m., New York City time, on December 8, 2017, in the case of the Any and All Tender Offers (the "Any and All Price Determination Date"), and at 11:00 a.m., New York City time, on December 18, 2017, in the case of the Maximum Tender Offers, in each case unless extended by BHGE LLC. In addition to the Total Consideration, payment for the Securities purchased will include accrued and unpaid interest from and including the last interest payment date applicable to the relevant series of Securities up to, but not including, the applicable settlement date for such Securities accepted for purchase ("Accrued Interest").
The settlement date for the Any and All Tender Offers is expected to be promptly after the expiration of the Any and All Tender Offers, which is expected to be December 11, 2017, the first business day after the Any and All Tender Expiration Date. The settlement date for the Maximum Tender Offer Notes validly tendered and accepted for payment on the Early Tender Date is expected to be promptly after the Early Tender Date, which is expected to be December 19, 2017, the second business day after the Early Tender Date (the "Maximum Tender Early Settlement Date"). The settlement date for the Maximum Tender Offer Notes validly tendered and accepted for payment after the Early Tender Date but on or prior to the Maximum Tender Expiration Date is expected to be January 4, 2018, the second business day after the Maximum Tender Expiration Date (the "Maximum Tender Final Settlement Date"), assuming the Aggregate Maximum Purchase Price is not purchased on the Maximum Tender Early Settlement Date.
The Any and All Notes may be validly withdrawn at any time prior to or at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on December 8, 2017, unless such date and time is extended by BHGE LLC, but not thereafter. The Maximum Tender Offer Notes may be validly withdrawn at any time prior to or at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on December 15, 2017, unless such date and time is extended by BHGE LLC, but not thereafter.
The obligation of BHGE LLC to accept for purchase and to pay the Total Consideration and the Accrued Interest on Securities purchased pursuant to the Tender Offers is not subject to any minimum tender condition, but is subject to satisfaction or waiver of certain other conditions described in the Offer to Purchase. These conditions include BHGE LLC having closed, on terms and conditions satisfactory to BHGE LLC, one or more offerings of senior notes resulting in net proceeds to BHGE LLC in an amount not less than the amount required, upon the terms and subject to the conditions of the applicable Tender Offer, to purchase all the Securities validly tendered and accepted for purchase in the Tender Offers and to pay Accrued Interest thereon and fees and expenses associated therewith. BHGE LLC is commencing such an offering concurrently with the Tender Offers. BHGE LLC also reserves the right, subject to applicable law, to: (i) waive any and all conditions to the Tender Offers; (ii) extend or terminate any of the Tender Offers; (iii) increase or decrease the Aggregate Maximum Purchase Price; or (iv) otherwise amend any of the Tender Offers in any respect.
BHGE LLC has retained Morgan Stanley Co. LLC and Barclay Capital Inc. to serve as dealer managers for the Tender Offers. D.F. King Co., Inc. has been retained to serve as the tender and information agent for the Tender Offers.
Holders of the Securities are urged to carefully read the Offer to Purchase before making any decision with respect to the Tender Offers.
Questions regarding the Tender Offers may be directed to: Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC at (800) 624-1808 (toll free) or (212) 761-1057 or Barclays Capital Inc. at (800) 438-3242 (toll free) or (212) 528-7581. The Offer to Purchase and, in connection with the Any and All Notes, the notice of guaranteed delivery may be accessed at the following link: http://www.dfking.com/bhge or obtained from D.F. King Co., Inc., free of charge, by calling toll-free at (866) 796-7179 (bankers and brokers can call collect at 212-269-5550) or by e-mail at bhge@dfking.com.
This news release shall not be construed as an offer to purchase or sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase or sell any of the Securities or any other securities. BHGE LLC, subject to applicable law, may amend, extend or terminate the Tender Offers and may postpone the acceptance for purchase of, and payment for, the Securities so tendered. The Tender Offers are not being made in any jurisdiction in which the making or acceptance thereof would not be in compliance with the securities, blue sky or other laws of such jurisdiction. None of BHGE, BHGE LLC, the dealer managers, the information agent or the depositary makes any recommendations as to whether holders of the Securities should tender their Securities pursuant to the Tender Offers.
Forward-Looking Statements
This news release may contain forward-looking statements (each a "forward-looking statement"). The words "anticipate," "believe," "ensure," "expect," "if," "intend," "estimate," "project," "foresee," "forecasts," "predict," "outlook," "aim," "will," "could," "should," "potential," "would," "may," "probable," "likely," and similar expressions, and the negative thereof, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. There are many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are also affected by the risk factors described in BHGE's Registration Statement on Form S-4 (File No. 333-216991), filed by BHGE with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") and declared effective on May 30, 2017; BHGE's subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for the quarterly periods ended June 30, 2017 and September 30, 2017; BHGE LLC's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended September 30, 2017; and those set forth from time to time in other filings with the SEC by BHGE and BHGE LLC. The documents are available through BHGE's website or through the SEC's Electronic Data Gathering and Analysis Retrieval ("EDGAR") system at: www.sec.gov. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement.
About Baker Hughes, a GE company
Baker Hughes, a GE company (NYSE: BHGE) is a fullstream provider of integrated oilfield products, services and digital solutions. We deploy minds and machines to enhance customer productivity, safety and environmental stewardship, while minimizing costs and risks at every step of the energy value chain. With operations in over 120 countries, we infuse over a century of experience with the spirit of a startup inventing smarter ways to bring energy to the world.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171204005552/en/
Contacts:
Baker Hughes, a GE company
Investor Relations:
Philipp Mueller, +1 281-809-9088
investor.relations@bhge.com
Media Relations:
Stephanie Cathcart, +1 202-549-6462
stephanie.cathcart@bhge.com
or
Melanie Kania, +1 713-439-8303
melanie.kania@bhge.com
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, December 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --
Elsevier, the information analytics business specializing in science and health, and its imprint Cell Press, home of the flagship journals Cell, Chem, and Joule, today announced a new addition for basic and applied research across life, physical, and earth science. iScience(@iScience_CP), an interdisciplinary, open-access, peer-reviewed journal, will publish on a continuous basis starting early 2018. The journal promises fast and fair decisions and will promote rigorous research that advances a field and reporting with transparent methods, replication studies, and negative results. Articles can now be submitted at www.cell.com/iscience/. Sign up for alerts at info.cell.com/iscience-registration .
"My main hope for iScience is that it will coalesce around a community of like-minded scientists who deeply value research that builds bridges and stimulates interdisciplinary thinking," says Lead Editor Stefano Tonzani, who holds a PhD in physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder and has helped launch several open-access titles. "What the scientific world needs isn't for scientists to dig deeper in their burrows, but to go out and cross-pollinate ideas. Our grand societal challenges can be solved only if chemists are collaborating with economists, biologists are speaking to nanofabrication engineers, and so on."
With more than 40 years of experience publishing high-quality, high-impact journals, Cell Press's launch of iScience marks the brand's ongoing expansion into disciplines beyond the life sciences that began with Chem in 2016, followed by the energy journal Joule earlier this year. As with any other respected and recognized Cell Press publication, iScience will have a team of in-house professional editors giving each paper their personal attention and platforms that get articles to relevant audiences.
"This is an exciting new chapter for Cell Press," says CEO Emilie Marcus. "As science itself evolves, so too does the need for new ways to communicate it. With iScience, we can cater to more researchers in more disciplines and work with them to get the experience of Cell Press, which prides itself on author hospitality, large readerships, ethics, and research integrity."
iScience's editorial board harnesses experts across many different fields, a majority of whom are dynamic, early-career researchers. Current members include:
Emanuele Biondi , CNRS-Marseille, cell biology and bacteriology
, CNRS-Marseille, cell biology and bacteriology Pedro Camargo , University of Sao Paulo , materials science
, University of , materials science Stuart Casson , University of Sheffield , plant biology
, University of , plant biology Wenlong Cheng , Monash University, chemical engineering
, Monash University, chemical engineering Heather Christofk , University of California, Los Angeles , metabolism
, , metabolism Elisabetta Collini , University of Padova, chemistry
, University of Padova, chemistry Corinna Dawid , TU Munich, plant and fungal metabolism
, TU Munich, plant and fungal metabolism Suzanne Devkota , University of California, Los Angeles , gastroenterology and immunobiology
, , gastroenterology and immunobiology Paula Diaconescu , University of California, Los Angeles , chemistry
, , chemistry Kathryn Ferguson , Yale University , biophysics and structural biology
, , biophysics and structural biology Luisa Figueiredo , IMM, parasitology
, IMM, parasitology Lorenzo Galluzzi , Cornell University , cell biology
, , cell biology Bonnie Hurwitz , University of Arizona , biosystems engineering
, , biosystems engineering Dooseok Jeong , KIST, materials science
, KIST, materials science Hawoong Jeong, KAIST , statistical physics
, statistical physics Ahmad Khalil , Boston University , synthetic biology
, , synthetic biology Hyun Wook Lee, UNIST, energy storage and electron microscopy
Chaoyang Lu , University of Science and Technology of China , quantum physics
, University of Science and Technology of , quantum physics Emma Lundberg , KTH Stockholm, bioimaging and proteomics
, KTH Stockholm, bioimaging and proteomics Arianna Maffei , Stony Brook University, neurobiology and behavior
, Stony Brook University, neurobiology and behavior Bettina Malnic , University of Sao Paulo , biochemistry
, University of , biochemistry Qixi Mi, Shanghai Tech, materials science and renewable energy
Tudor Moldoveanu, St. Jude's Hospital, structural biology
Ki- Tae Nam , Seoul National University , materials science and engineering
, Seoul , materials science and engineering James Olzmann , University of California, Berkeley , nutritional sciences and toxicology
, , nutritional sciences and toxicology Satish Patil , Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore , organic electronics
, Indian Institute of Science, , organic electronics Sai Reddy, ETH Zurich, biomolecular engineering
Paola Scaffidi , The Francis Crick Institute, cancer epigenetics
, The Francis Crick Institute, cancer epigenetics Jaswinder Sethi , University of Southampton, immunometabolism
, University of Southampton, immunometabolism Savas Tasoglu, University of Connecticut , materials science
, materials science Hiroki Ueda , Riken, synthetic biology
, Riken, synthetic biology Miriam Unterlass, University of Vienna , polymer science
, polymer science Ophelia Venturelli , University of Wisconsin , biochemistry
, , biochemistry Zuankai Wang, City University of Hong Kong , biomedical engineering
, biomedical engineering Xi Wang , Beijing Jiaotong University, materials science
, Beijing Jiaotong University, materials science Wilson Wong , Boston University , biomedical engineering
, , biomedical engineering Fei Xu , ShanghaiTech University, developmental biology
, ShanghaiTech University, developmental biology Kwang Wei (Joel) Yang , Singapore University of Technology & Design, optics, photonics, and electrical engineering
, of Technology & Design, optics, photonics, and electrical engineering Li Yang , Chinese Academy of Sciences, computational biology
, Chinese Academy of Sciences, computational biology Hyun Youk , Delft University of Technology, physics of cellular systems
, Delft University of Technology, physics of cellular systems Hani Zaher, Washington University St. Louis, molecular cell biology
St. Louis, molecular cell biology Jinxing Zhang , Beijing Normal University, condensed matter physics
, Beijing Normal University, condensed matter physics Wenjun Zhang , University of California Berkeley , chemical and biomolecular engineering
About Cell Press
Cell Press (@CellPressNews), an imprint of Elsevier, is a leading publisher of scientific research and reviews. We drive science forward and promote cross-pollination of ideas with our passion for excellence and commitment to innovation. Our aim is to engage the scientific community by communicating important, exciting discoveries made today that will impact the future of research. www.cell.com
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a global information analytics business that helps institutions and professionals progress science, advance healthcare and improve performance for the benefit of humanity. Elsevier provides digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support, and professional education; including ScienceDirect, Scopus, Scival, ClinicalKey and Sherpath. Elsevier publishes over 2,500 digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell, more than 35,000 e-book titles and many iconic reference works, including Gray's Anatomy. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a global provider of information and analytics for professionals and business customers across industries.www.elsevier.com
Media contact
Joseph Caputo
Cell Press
+1-617-397-2802
jcaputo@cell.com | press@cell.com
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - President Donald Trump has fully endorsed the Republican candidate for Alabama Senate Seat Roy Moore, who is accused of preying on teenagers. Trump threw his support behind the controversial GOP nominee in a detailed Twitter post Monday morning. 'Democrats' refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet.' He termed Moore's rival candidate, the Democratic nominee Doug Jones, a 'Liberal Puppet' of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and senior Senator Chuck Schumer. Electing him would 'hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders...& so much more,' according to Trump. 'Look at your 401-k's since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back.' he tweeted. Five women have accused Moore of making romantic or sexual advances on them when they were teenagers, in the 1970s. He, however, denied the allegations. Last month, the president had said he doubted the stories presented by Moore's accusers and questioned why things said to have happened 40 years ago were emerging now, just weeks before the election. The president breaks with other Republican leaders, who said the 70-year-old former state Supreme Court chief justice should be expelled from the Senate if he wins the election, which is scheduled for December 12. Opinion polls show Moore was trailing the Democrat candidate in the run up to the Special election. 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.
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 (dpa-AFX) - Winklevos Twins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, have become the first investors to become billionaires from investing in Bitocoin, after the cryptocurrency hit a new high of $11,826.76 a coin on Sunday. Winklevoss twins, known for suing Mark Zuckerberg, had revealed in 2013 that they owned $11 million worth of bitcoin. Since then the digital currency has gained over 1,000%. The brothers made the investment on Bitcoins using the $65 million settlement won in a lawsuit against Facebook in 2011. The brothers had alleged that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had stolen their idea for a social network while all three were undergraduate students at Harvard. Earlier this year, Winklevos brothers had tried to create an ETF for Bitcoin, however, their plan did not materialize after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rejected the application, due to potential of being fraud. 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.
Regulatory News:
SoLocal Group (Paris:LOCAL), leader in local online communication, announces the finalization of the sale of its online real estate classifieds business, avendrealouer.fr, to leboncoin Group, in accordance with the announcement made on 27 October 2017. This transaction has been made on the basis of a sale price of 19.8 million as of 30 November 2017, this amount being subject to evolution post-transfer, on the basis of adjustment criteria agreed between the parties.
Acquired in 2011 from PriceMinister, A Vendre A Louer benefited from the support of SoLocal Group, which allowed it to become a reference in its sector by strengthening its assets with 6 million visits month and a turnover of 10 million in 2016, thanks to recognized expertise and talents in the field of marketing in the online real estate classifieds market. A Vendre A Louer joins leboncoin Group today, with all its employees.
This sale operation, which reflects positively this value creation generated by SoLocal Group and comes at a favourable moment of main market players consolidation, confirms the continuation of non-strategic activities divestment for SoLocal in favor of priority and structuring investments on high-potential markets, around the Local Search (e.g. referencing on the Group's media such as pagesjaunes.fr and mappy.com and those of partners with Bing, Google, Apple, etc.) and Digital Marketing (e.g.: content creation including 4 million reviews on professionals, transactional services with ClicRDV online appointments, design management of websites for professionals, data-programmatic, etc.), in order to find some leeway to invest and innovate.
"We are proud to have supported the development of A Vendre A Louer for the past six years. The strength of SoLocal 's salesforce spread throughout France, closer to real estate agencies, and the complementarity of our digital expertise have been outstanding assets to enhance the attractiveness of A Vendre A Louer. We wish the teams all the best for the future. This disposal allows to create value for our shareholders and no longer to focuse on the classifieds market but on local digital communication advice for real estate professionals (website creation, SEO offers, etc.). The challenge is to refocus priorities on our high-growth strategic digital activities: Local Search and Digital Marketing. Indeed, our ambition is to make SoLocal a recognized digital leader in France to provide growth to small and medium businesses and network companies. We already have outstanding assets: we are working to make them more effective and to complete them, and we are therefore confident in our ability to succeed ! says Pascal Garcia, Secretary General and Strategy Director of SoLocal Group.
Key dates and figures on A Vendre A Louer Company founded in 1986
65 employees
employees 1.6 million unique visitors in May 2017, growing at +23% versus May 2016 (source: Mediametrie) Key dates and figures on SoLocal(source: SoLocal, 2016) 812 million revenues of which 80% is digital
500,000 clients, SMEs and network groups
SMEs and network groups Powerful parterships with Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo!
with Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo! 2.4 billion visits/year on Group's websites
Morgan Lewis Bockius and Clairfield International acted as advisors in this sale operation.
About SoLocal Group
SoLocal Group, European leader in local online communication, reveals local know-how, and boosts local revenues of businesses. The Internet activities of the Group are structured around two business lines: Local Search and Marketing Digital. With Local Search, the Group offers Internet services and solutions to clients which enable them to enhance their visibility and develop their local contacts. Thanks to its expertise, SoLocal Group earned the trust of some 490,000 clients of those services and over 2.4 billions of visits via its 4 flagship brands (PagesJaunes, Mappy, Ooreka and A Vendre A Louer) but also through its partnerships. With Marketing Digital, SoLocal Group creates and provides the best local and customised content about professionals. With over 4,400 employees, including a new orders force of 1,900 local communication advisors specialised in five verticals (Home, Services, Retail, Health Public, BtoB) and Internationally (France, Spain, Austria, United Kingdom), the Group generated in 2016 revenues of 812 millions euros, of which 80% on Internet and ranks amongst the first European players in terms of Internet advertising revenues. SoLocal Group is listed on Euronext Paris (LOCAL). More information may be obtained at www.solocalgroup.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171204005836/en/
Contacts:
SoLocal Group
Press
Delphine Penalva, +33 (0)1 46 23 35 31
dpenalva@solocal.com
or
Edwige Druon, +33 (0)1 46 23 37 56
edruon@solocal.com
or
Alexandra Kunysz, +33 (0)1 46 23 47 45
akunysz@solocal.com
or
Investors
Emmanuelle Vinel, +33 (0)1 46 99 41 80
evinel@solocal.com
or
Sebastien Nony, +33 (0) 1 46 23 49 03
snony@solocal.com
MONTREAL, QUEBEC and TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 12/04/17 -- The Cogeco Program Development Fund (CPDF), the Independent Production Fund (IPF) and Cogeco Communications Inc. ("Cogeco") announced today that they have concluded an agreement with a view to ensuring the sustainability of the CPDF's Canadian television production funding activities. This new agreement will become effective on January 1, 2018.
The CPDF and the IPF had been cooperating with each other since 1992 by sharing resources for the processing of funding applications and the administration of the CPDF's program funding activities, which are supported financially by the annual contributions of Cogeco's regulated broadcasting distribution undertakings to independent production funds and the returns from an initial capital endowment of Cogeco following the creation of the CPDF.
The annual contributions from Cogeco have been under pressure lately as a result of lower revenues from traditional broadcasting distribution activities. Given this trend, the directors of the CPDF concluded earlier this year that a new arrangement and a restructuring of the CPDF were necessary.
The new agreement between the CPDF, the IPF and Cogeco provides for the transfer of all the existing program funding activities and commitments of the CPDF to the IPF and the redirection of the totality of the annual contribution of Cogeco for independent production funds to the IPF, effective on January 1, 2018. This transfer will ensure that Canadian television program producers will still be able to apply for dramatic television series program funding in 2018 and thereafter from the proceeds of Cogeco Communications' annual financial contribution directly through the IPF offices in Toronto and Montreal and under the sole responsibility and guidance of the IPF, its staff and its Board of Directors.
The CPDF has invested in total $55M in Canada's program industry for the production and development of nearly 1000 television productions and feature films since 1992, as well as sponsoring key industry events over the years. Projects funded were in English and in French and represented productions from across Canada.
Effective January 1, 2018, the CPDF will be streamlined and known simply as the Cogeco Fund, with a more narrow mandate to support Canadian television industry events through sponsorships or grants from the proceeds of its remaining capital endowment and will continue to be a not-for-profit Canadian corporation.
Also effective January 1, 2018, the IPF will operate two distinct program streams: the Web Series Program with funding for the production of scripted digital-first web series, and the Cogeco Television Production Program for the funding of the production of television series and mini-series. This streamlining of decision-making and funding processes will rely on the expertise of the IPF Board of Directors and reduce administrative overhead expenses.
The IPF remains a Certified Independent Production Fund (CIPF) under the regulations and policies established by the CRTC, and it will receive BDU contributions annually from Cogeco for the television funding program to be known as the Cogeco TV Production Program. In addition, the IPF will continue to use the annual interest from its $36M endowment for its Web Series Program. Recoupment from investments in each Program will be allocated for reinvestment in projects to be funded by the respective Programs of the IPF.
There will be annual deadlines for applications to each of these programs in 2018 - March 1 for the Web Series Program and April 2 for the Cogeco TV Production Program.
The Independent Production Fund has invested $13M in the production of 114 web drama series in the past 7 years, as well as $47M in 251 television drama productions from 1991-2010. It is incorporated as a charitable foundation with an endowment valued at $36M. Its Board of Directors makes all final funding decisions.
ABOUT COGECO INC.
Cogeco Inc. is a diversified holding corporation which operates in the communications and media sectors. Through its Cogeco Communications Inc. subsidiary, Cogeco provides its residential and business customers with Internet, video and telephony services through its two-way broadband fibre networks. Cogeco Communications Inc. operates in Canada under the Cogeco Connexion name in Quebec and Ontario, and in the United States under the Atlantic Broadband name in western Pennsylvania, south Florida, Maryland/Delaware, South Carolina and eastern Connecticut. Through Cogeco Peer 1, Cogeco Communications Inc. provides its business customers with a suite of information technology services (colocation, network connectivity, hosting, cloud and managed services), through its 16 data centres, extensive FastFiber Network and more than 50 points of presence in North America and Europe. Through its subsidiary Cogeco Media, Cogeco owns and operates 13 radio stations across most of Quebec with complementary radio formats serving a wide range of audiences as well as Cogeco News, its news agency. Cogeco's subordinate voting shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: CGO). The subordinate voting shares of Cogeco Communications Inc. are also listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: CCA).
Contacts:
Cogeco Inc.
Nancy Bouffard
Director, Corporate Communications
(514) 764-4613
nancy.bouffard@cogeco.com
Independent Production Fund
Montreal: fipinfo@ipf.ca
Toronto: info@ipf.ca
Healthcare facilities the world over face a daily challenge to prevent the spread of infections and, with increasing concern about antibiotic resistance, South African healthcare group Netcare is teaming up with Germ-Zapping Robots that seek and destroy viruses and bacteria within minutes.
"Our new 'allies' in infection prevention and control have shown such impressive results internationally and during pilot trials at two of our hospitals, that Netcare recently ordered a second consignment of these highly advanced robots, manufactured by Xenex, to further bolster our comprehensive existing disinfection measures," says Jacques du Plessis, managing director of Netcare's hospital division.
Senior clinical advisor at Netcare, Dr. Caroline Maslo, explains that the Xenex LightStrike pulsed xenon ultraviolet (UV) disinfection robots were recently made available in Africa for the first time, but are becoming an established line of defence against bacteria, viruses and fungi in healthcare facilities across Europe and the United States.
"We initially tested the LightStrike pulsed xenon UV disinfection robots at Netcare Blaauwberg Hospital and Netcare Pretoria East Hospital, where we found that they quickly and efficiently disinfected the areas where they were deployed. Having tested the robots in different settings in the two facilities in separate provinces, we found that the results lived up to the independent international studies endorsing this method of disinfection," Dr. Maslo observes.
"What we found particularly impressive is the fact that the high-intensity pulsed xenon UV light used by the robots is not only highly effective in destroying viruses, bacteria and fungal spores, but is also able to achieve thorough disinfection far more quickly than the other traditional methods, which we continued to use alongside the robots. In addition, the robots can be used 24 hours a day. This means that we are able to continually move the robots around within our facilities to apply this rigorous disinfection within minutes, with minimal disruption to busy hospital areas. We have also enlisted the robots for disinfecting Netcare 911 ambulances to excellent effect," continued Dr. Maslo.
The LightStrike robots emit blasts of UV-C Full Spectrum light, which destroys the DNA of bacteria, viruses and fungi to neutralise them and prevent them from replicating. The portable disinfection robots are effective against the most common as well as the most dangerous pathogens, including Clostridium difficile (C.diff), norovirus, influenza, Ebola, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA. The technology is non-toxic, although the area must be vacated during the robot's disinfection cycle, as human eyes are sensitive to the UV light.
"This form of disinfection is particularly useful against antibiotic resistant bacteria, commonly referred to as 'superbugs,' and has the added benefit that it is non-toxic. It is environmentally friendly in that it requires no water during operation, thus rendering it optimally water-wise when compared with other forms of intensive disinfection. It furthermore uses minimal electricity," Dr. Maslo says.
Another important benefit is that the robots' UV light does not result in any residue or potentially harmful by-products, which means it is totally safe for use in even the most sensitive environments, such as neonatal intensive care units where premature and other compromised babies are cared for.
"The robots are proving effective and efficient, while being tough on germs yet gentle on the environment. This new technology does not replace the infection risk management protocols and procedures we already have in place, but are certainly complementing them as an additional weapon in our arsenal against potentially harmful germs," Dr. Maslo says.
"Another benefit brought about by the arrival of the robots is that the cleaning staff responsible for operating this technology are acquiring new sets of skills. This is not a case of robots replacing human labour, but rather of robots empowering their human operators," Dr. Maslo says.
Du Plessis concludes, "Introducing this new disinfection technology in Netcare hospitals is a significant step forward and is keeping our facilities abreast of the latest advances in the global fight against microbe resistance in healthcare facilities. We are very encouraged to see the results the robots have shown in Netcare hospitals."
The Xenex pulsed xenon UV disinfection system has been credited by numerous healthcare facilities for helping them reduce their infection rates significantly. Several U.S. hospitals have published their C.diff, MRSA and Surgical Site infection rate reduction studies in peer-reviewed journals. More than 400 hospitals, Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense facilities in the U.S., Canada, Africa, UK, Japan and Europe are using LightStrike robots, which are also in use in skilled nursing facilities, ambulatory surgery centers and long term acute care facilities.
Kiara Health is the Authorised Reseller of Xenex LightStrike Germ-Zapping Robots in Africa.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171204005970/en/
Contacts:
Martina Nicholson Associates (MNA) on behalf of Netcare Hospital Division
Martina Nicholson, (011) 469 3016
martina@mnapr.co.za
or
Xenex Disinfection Services
Melinda Hart, 210-240-4669
melinda.hart@xenex.com
DUBLIN, December 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --
The "Global Packaging Market 2017-2021" report has been added to Research and Markets' offering.
The global packaging market to grow at a CAGR of 5.76% during the period 2017-2021.
Global Packaging 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. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the sales of packaging.
The latest trend gaining momentum in the market is Focus on sustainable packaging solutions. Consumer product manufacturers prefer various types of eco-friendly packaging designs and materials for supporting sustainable business operations. For instance, paper can be recycled up to seven times, thereby giving corrugated packaging vendors an advantage over other types of packaging product vendors. Thus, packaging vendors are focusing on the production of the packaging solutions, such as corrugated boxes, which are 100% recyclable.
According to the report, one of the major drivers for this market is Growth of the global e-commerce market. The global e-commerce market, which includes online retail shopping, has witnessed a substantial growth during the period 2014-2017, and it is further expected to witness a high growth rate during the forecast period. The growth in the online retail sales has boosted the demand for packaging products for the safe shipment of products. The ease of online shopping due to the increase in penetration of the Internet in the emerging countries, such as India, China, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa, has encouraged many customers to switch from the traditional shopping method to online shopping.
Further, the report states that one of the major factors hindering the growth of this market is Volatility in raw material prices. Various types of raw materials used in the packaging industry are plastic, wood, glass, and corrugated paper. The cost of the raw material is one of the vital factors in determining the end-products cost. Thus, the fluctuation in raw material prices is a major challenge faced by vendors operating in the global packaging market. The widening of the gap in the demand-supply in the last few years has led to a considerable increase in the price of raw materials.
Market Trends
Focus on sustainable packaging solutions
Growing popularity of lightweight packaging
Growing market consolidation in the packaging market
Increased focus on smart packaging solutions
Key vendors
Amcor
Ball
Bemis Company
Berry Global
DS Smith
International Paper
Mondi
Owens- Illinois
Sealed Air
Smurfit Kappa
Sonoco
Other prominent vendors
Allied Glass
AptarGroup
Ardagh Group
Can Pack Group
CCL
CKS Packaging
DuPont
Evergreen Packaging
Excel Packaging
Genpak
Gerresheimer
Stora Enso
Westkey Graphics
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 Sizing
Part 07: Five Forces Analysis
Part 08: Market Segmentation By Packaging Type
Part 09: Customer Landscape
Part 10: Market Segmentation By End-User
Part 11: Regional Landscape
Part 12: Decision Framework
Part 13: Drivers And Challenges
Part 14: Market Trends
Part 15: Vendor Landscape
For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/vv9ss4/global_packaging
Media Contact:
Research and Markets
Laura Wood, Senior Manager
press@researchandmarkets.com
For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470
For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630
For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900
U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907
Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716
Chelmsford, Massachusetts--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2017) - The highest priority for Hawkins Point is to help businesses ensure their success through the best talent, technology, and processes. For this reason, Hawkins Point proudly welcomed Joe Robichaud last month as their new Vice President of Business Development. They are extremely excited about his contribution to the company and its solutions.
Joe Robichaud and the executives of Hawkins Point view his new role as two-pronged. With a passion for building relationships, Joe's first priority will be to build and manage relationships with businesses that partner with Hawkins Point. He aims to anticipate the needs of each one, prioritizing their goals as his own. The second prong of this role will be to guide the leadership and delivery teams, studying industry and market trends, to define the best strategies Hawkins Point will bring to the Greater Boston market.
Hawkins Point believes Joe Robichaud is the perfect fit for this role. He has over 20 years of experience in business consulting, and 11 years of experience in business development. He not only possesses an innate sales ability -which he prefers to view as relationship-building- but has in-depth experience in the delivery-side of business consulting through his previous roles as a business analyst and project manager.
So, he has a unique advantage of understanding the services and solutions he will promote. This gives him an authoritative voice to speak about the talent and approach that Hawkins Point dictates in areas such as project management, process reengineering, and software implementations. He can bridge the gap between sales and delivery. "People don't want to just be sold to. They want to trust that their consultant understands them and can fully recommend the best solution." Joe shared.
He has a like-mindedness with the leaders of the company. And he's appreciated their receptivity to his style. "I feel I will be a great fit with a company that already has a sterling reputation." Joe carries the same strong work ethic and business integrity he's witnessed in the Hawkins Point culture. He's been known to say that a person should live like their actions will be printed on the front page of the Boston Globe.
Joe believes in Hawkins Point's mature, battle-tested consultative approach, too. He is most excited to support the company to position it even more as a thought leader and one of the top trusted solution providers in the area. "Coming to Hawkins Point has unleashed a level of creativity I didn't know existed in myself. They've given me the license to think creatively and act creatively and do it in a way that's strategic," Joe said.
Joe Robichaud and Hawkins Point believe that the current market craves thought leadership and trusted partnerships. They're also seeing that businesses they hope to reach, such as companies in the BioTech industry, are looking for a local firm that is relationship-driven and able to bring top talent to help solve their business problems. Hawkins Point believes they've put the right people in place to be the high-value consulting partner these companies desire.
For Hawkins Point, their clients are top of mind with every decision. That's why they are excited to share their news of their new executive. They believe their clients and peers will greatly benefit from a relationship with Joe Robichaud.
About Hawkins Point
Hawkins Point Partners is a technology consulting organization that offers delivery management, process engineering, and security services. They have become a trusted partner for companies of all sizes seeking to maximize the return on their technology investment, fueling 3-year revenue growth of 1,112%.
Contact:
Steve Mersky
Hawkins Point Partners
978-455-4110
smersky@hawkinspointpartners.com
Regulatory News:
Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (NA:PSH) today announces that it has purchased, through PSH's agent, Jefferies International Limited ("Jefferies"), the following number of PSH's ordinary shares of no par value (ISIN Code: GG00BPFJTF46) (the "Shares"):
Trading Venue: London Stock Exchange Date of purchase: 4 December 2017 Number of Shares purchased: 11,856 Shares Highest price paid per Share: 1,033 pence 13.92 USD Lowest price paid per Share: 1,022 pence 13.77 USD Average price paid per Share: 1,027.67 pence 13.85 USD
Trading Venue: Euronext Amsterdam Date of purchase: 4 December 2017 Number of Shares purchased: 34,569 Shares Highest price paid per Share: 13.94 USD Lowest price paid per Share: 13.77 USD Average price paid per Share: 13.85 USD
PSH intends to cancel these Shares. The net asset value per Share related to this Share buyback is USD 17.66 GBP 13.06 which was calculated as of 30 November 2017. After giving effect to the above Share buyback, PSH has outstanding 235,958,028 Shares. The prices per share in USD were calculated by Jefferies.
The number of PSH Management Shares and the 1 special voting share (held by PS Holdings Independent Voting Company Limited) has not been affected.
About Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd.:
Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (NA:PSH) is an investment holding company structured as a closed-ended fund that makes concentrated investments principally in North American companies.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171204006053/en/
Contacts:
Media Contact:
Maitland
James Devas, +44 20 7379 5151
Media-pershingsquareholdings1@maitland.co.uk
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA and WATERLOO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 12/04/17 -- BlackBerry Limited (NYSE: BB)(TSX: BB) today announced that QIC has deployed BlackBerry Workspaces, a secure collaboration solution that enables companies and their clients to safely share, protect and track sensitive information within mobile and cloud environments.
With billions of dollars under management, QIC ensures that it operates in a strictly secure and confidential environment. As QIC expanded internationally, the company adopted a cloud-first digital strategy to enable its staff, clients and partners around the world to exchange information and documents safely from any location.
Grant Slender, Information Technology, Security and Risk Leader at QIC, said, "Trust is a top priority in investment management and for QIC. We take all necessary steps to prevent even the slightest security breach to protect our clients and our firm. A key component of that effort is our adoption of BlackBerry Workspaces, which allows our employees to share, edit and control sensitive files securely and seamlessly, both inside and outside QIC, in a mobile and cloud-based environment including Microsoft 365, OneDrive and SharePoint."
Alex Manea, Chief Security Officer, BlackBerry, explained, "In today's digital and mobile age, companies in any industry need to enable staff, clients and suppliers to be productive and collaborative. The challenge lies in adopting flexible next-generation technologies such as cloud, without hindering data security. At BlackBerry, we are helping governments and private companies to navigate these security challenges, as well as manage very complex regulatory requirements."
BlackBerry Workspaces' file sync and sharing functionalities are fully integrated into the new Microsoft Office 365 framework, enabling QIC to maintain the highest level of security required to safeguard client information. BlackBerry Workspaces is also used to power advanced collaboration, such as digital "'deal rooms"' for investment negotiations. Using these secure and confidential 'deal rooms' is transforming how QIC does business with its clients and partners, making it easier and more secure than ever before to discuss and make strategic investment decisions.
BlackBerry Workspaces gives QIC an independent and auditable way to manage the collaboration of documents and information with third parties, as the IT department has complete control over all files, and total visibility into how, where and when those files are accessed or modified. Additional tools also enable staff and IT to easily trace and protect attachments in outgoing emails, and transfer data while maintaining security and control.
Alex Manea added, "With European GDPR and Australian Data Breach Notification laws going live in early 2018, many Australian organizations must comply with these strict security and confidentiality requirements, or face serious consequences. The time is now for forward-thinking companies like QIC to take action to address cloud security and compliance challenges and become BlackBerry Secure."
Grant Slender concluded, "In our business, it is vital that we minimize migration risks, which is challenging as many next-generation business collaboration apps are still interdependent with legacy systems. BlackBerry Workspaces and Microsoft 365 integrate smoothly, and the transition has been seamless. Our clients and partners can draw confidence from the fact that we have clear, demonstrable file security in place, which is essential to maintaining trusted relationships."
BlackBerry recently announced that the company received the highest score in two use cases in Gartner's Critical Capabilities for Content Collaboration Platforms report(1). BlackBerry received the highest scores in Workforce Productivity and Centralized Content Protection for its BlackBerry Workspaces solution.
To learn more about how QIC used BlackBerry Workspaces, click here. To download a complimentary copy of the Gartner 2017 Critical Capabilities for Content Collaboration Platforms Report, click here. To find information about BlackBerry Workspaces, click here.
1 Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Content Collaboration Platforms, by Karen A. Hobert, Monica Basso, Michael Woodbridge, September 12, 2017
Gartner Disclaimer
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About QIC:
QIC is a global diversified alternative investment firm offering infrastructure, real estate, private equity, liquid strategies and multi-asset investments. It is one of the largest institutional investment managers in Australia, with A$82.9 billion (US$65.0/GBP 46.6 billion)(1) in funds under management, offering infrastructure, real estate, private capital, liquid strategies and multi-asset investment services. QIC has over 800 employees and serves more than 110 clients including governments, pension plans, sovereign wealth funds and insurers, spanning Australia, Europe, Asia, Middle East and the US. Headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, QIC also has offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, London, Sydney, and Melbourne. For more information about QIC, our approach, clients and regulatory framework, please refer to our website www.qic.com or contact us directly.
About BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a cybersecurity software and services company dedicated to securing the Enterprise of Things. Based in Waterloo, Ontario, the company was founded in 1984 and operates in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Middle East, Latin America and Africa. The Company trades under the ticker symbol "BB" on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange. For more information, visit www.BlackBerry.com.
Contacts:
For QIC media queries, please contact:
USA:
Caroline Gentile
CNG Consulting LLC
+1 917 692 5730
caroline.gentile@comcast.net
Australia:
Samantha Pankovas
BlueChip Communication
+61 9018 8602 / +61 424 790 205
samantha@bluechipcommunication.com.au
BlackBerry Media Contact
N2N for BlackBerry
blackberry@n2n.com.au
Patrice Calopedos
+61 (0) 0404 950 634
BlackBerry Media Relations
(519) 597-7273
mediarelations@BlackBerry.com
SUDBURY, ON / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2017 / Frontier Lithium Inc. (TSX-V: FL) (OTC PINK: HLKMF) (FRA: HL2) (the "Company") announces the closing of a non-brokered private placement offering for a total of 2,267,950 units ("Units") of the Company priced at $0.40 per Unit, for total gross proceeds of $907,180.00. The private placement was oversubscribed from the initial offering of up to 1,250,000 common shares of the Company.
The Common Shares to be issued under a unit offering of 2,267,950 units ("Units") at a subscription price of $0.40 per Unit. Each Unit shall consist of one (1) Common Share of the Company and one (1) share purchase warrant (the "Warrant"). Each full Warrant shall entitle the holder thereof to purchase one additional common share of Frontier Lithium at an exercise price of $0.64 for an 18 month period from the closing (the "Offering").
In connection with the CDN $907,180.00 Offering, the Company issued finder's fees of CDN $10,669.98 (2% of the gross proceeds of the Offering) and 24,441 finder warrants (1% of the total number of Units sold under the Offering). Each finder option will be exercisable at a price of $0.64 into one common share for a period of eighteen (18) months from the date of issuance.
All of the Shares and Warrants issued pursuant to the private placement are subject to a minimum 4-month hold period. Proceeds from the financing will be used to advance exploration of Frontier's 100% owned and optioned PAK Lithium Project located in northwestern Ontario.
About Frontier Lithium Inc.
Frontier's goal is to become a low-cost, fully integrated lithium and tantalum producer through development of the PAK lithium deposit in Ontario, Canada. Frontier maintains a tight share structure with management ownership exceeding 30% of the Company. CAD $7 million of exploration work has been conducted from 2013 to 2017 on the deposit which boasts its lithium in a rare, high-purity, low-iron spodumene. The initial target market is the glass-ceramic industry which consumes roughly one-third of global lithium supply and is currently faced with monopolistic conditions, coupled with major lithium producers increasingly directing output toward supporting battery manufacture.
Ceramic/glass customers prefer to source technical-grade (low-iron) spodumene concentrate in excess of 7% lithium oxide (Li2O), if available, to avoid lower grade petalite concentrates, or paying much higher prices for battery grade lithium compounds. The Company's October 2017 Metallurgical Study returned favourable results by producing lithium concentrate with a grade of 7.13% lithium oxide (Li2O) with a corresponding Li2O recovery of 79.4% which satisfies the preference from technical-grade consumers.
The PAK lithium deposit remains open in all directions and Company Management is working towards developing a viable operation. The Company is currently conducting a pre-feasibility study to assess the economic viability and technical feasibility of producing lithium concentrates. Frontier's goal is to first establish a viable technical grade spodumene concentrate operation. A possible second stage of investment and longer term prospect is to further process some of PAK's output to produce the higher purity lithium compounds required for lithium battery technologies used in the electrification of transportation and electric grid storage applications.
About the PAK Lithium Project
The PAK Lithium Project lies close to the boundary between two geological sub-provinces of the western Superior geologic province in northwestern Ontario and hosts a rare metals pegmatite deposit. The deposit is an LCT (lithium- cesium- tantalum) type pegmatite. These types of pegmatites have been the principal source of hard rock lithium, tantalum, rubidium and cesium ores mined in the world but there are comparatively few commercially-viable deposits.
Frontier is actively exploring its 100% owned project which contains the Pakeagama Lake pegmatite. The PAK deposit has a current Measured and Indicated Resource of 7.89 million tonnes of 1.73% Li2O equivalent (eq.) or 1.58% Li20 and 104 ppm Ta2O5 and an Inferred Resource of 295,600 tonnes of 1.35% Li2O eq. or 1.20% Li2O and 103 ppm Ta2O5 which has a technical/ceramic grade spodumene with low inherent iron (below 0.1% Fe2O3). The deposit has adjacent zones that are enriched in tantalum and rubidium.
The deposit now has a known 500m strike length with an estimated true width varying from 10m to 125m with a sub-vertical orientation. The resource remains open to depth and along strike to the northwest and southeast.
Company Contact Information
Trevor R. Walker
President & CEO
2736 Belisle Drive Val Caron, ON. P3N 1B3 CANADA
T. +001 705.897.7622
F. +001 705.897.7618
Media Requests
Joseph Mansourian
Manager, Investor Relations
2736 Belisle Drive Val Caron, ON. P3N 1B3 CANADA
T. +001 705.618.0070
F. +001 705.897.7618
Additional information regarding Frontier Lithium is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com under the Company's profile and on its website at www.frontierlithium.com, including various pictures of ongoing work at the project.
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
SOURCE: Frontier Lithium Inc.
LONS-LE-SAUNIER, FRANCE / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2017 / ARK Ecosystem is now incorporated in France as a cooperative society (SCIC), registered under n 833 439 300, with a structure matching our open source blockchain organization. It is the first of its kind in the crypto world, and one of the first blockchain projects to incorporate in the European Union.
SCIC is the French acronym for 'General Interest Co-operatives.' It is a new private, common interest co-operative which allows anyone - employees, users, volunteers, public bodies, companies, associations - to act together in a legal framework to govern an entity.
All SCIC members are shareholders and will belong to one of the statutory categories: Founders, Advisers, or Employees.
The vote principle is 1 shareholder = 1 vote.
The ARK crew, being initial shareholders, will choose the executive board of the legal entity, which permits ARK to continue the current board structure.
A Long Process
ARK decided on the SCIC after working with their legal team and evaluating different options for creating a legal entity. After deciding that incorporating through the Swiss Foundation - a popular option for blockchain projects - was not the best choice for ARK, the team turned to France.
There, they found the SCIC incorporation process. According to the team, that option had almost everything they had been looking for in terms of incorporation.
As an SCIC, ARK will be able to structure corporate governance based on a board of directors and input from the ARK community. Additionally, SCIC incorporation allows ARK to establish a well-defined structure without legal ambiguities related to capital gains and taxation.
Through its SCIC status, the ARK board of directors - except for founders and employees - can name additional shareholders. These new shareholders can also be appointed to the supervisory board, as provided for in the charter. The charter may be amended as often as necessary.
In French Law, the SCIC format also allows public institutions to become shareholders if seen fit by the board.
As a common interest benefit company, an SCIC must keep at least 52.5 percent of the company's profits as legal reserves. In the case of Ark, there is no plan to do any distribution of profits to shareholders. Therefore, it will hold 100 percent of any profits for use in development, marketing, and operations.
An Exciting Road Ahead
This establishment of ARK's SCIC in France is not only the first of its kind, but it will also bolster the credibility of cryptocurrency in France, the European Union, and the rest of the world.
The prospect of ARK and its SCIC formation has attracted the interest and enthusiasm of some regulatory institutions. During this process, ARK was invited by the Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF) - the French regulatory body for financial markets - and the Banque de France (National Bank of France) to present the ARK Project and explain the conditions of the ARK TEC. The discussion was in-depth and encouraging. Conversing with the AMF on how to best comply with French laws resulted in a positive two-way conversation with the French government.
The team at ARK is proud to play a part in France becoming a crypto-friendly environment and proud to be the leaders in this huge step forward in cryptocurrency adoption. And now that the SCIC is finalized, the team will be able to expand and advance the ARK blockchain technology, which will provide more opportunities for all.
Website: http://ark.io
Blog: https://blog.ark.io
Team: https://ark.io/team
Media Contact
Contact Name: Travis Walker
Email: pr@ark.io
ARK Ecosystem is the source of this content. Virtual currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and accounts and value balances are not subject to consumer protections. This press release is for informational purposes only. The information does not constitute investment advice or an offer to invest.
Additional Links
ARK Ecosystem
Bitcoin PR Buzz
SOURCE: ARK Ecosystem
HOUSTON, TEXAS -- (Marketwired) -- 12/04/17 -- Greenfields Petroleum Corporation ("Greenfields" or the "Company"; TSX VENTURE:GNF) is pleased to announce that on November 27, 2017 Bahar Energy Operating Company Limited ("BEOC"), a wholly owned subsidiary of Greenfields, executed an exclusive memorandum of understanding (the "MOU") with SOCAR Complex Drilling Works Trust ("SDT"), a subsidiary of the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), to formalize a partnership for the drilling of deep gas wells in the Bahar gas field offshore Azerbaijan.
BEOC has identified locations to potentially reestablish gas production from the deep NKP reservoir of the Bahar gas field. Prior to 1988, twelve wells were drilled to the NKP reservoir of the Bahar gas field and produced a total of 113 Bcf of natural gas and average aggregate production of 12 MMcf/d before being abandoned to uphole zones. None of these wells are available today to reestablish production and therefore BEOC is developing a partnership with SDT to drill new wells. BEOC estimates the NKP reservoir contains over 200 Bcf of remaining gas.
SDT has been very successful in drilling deep gas wells in the Bulla Deniz offshore gas field in Azerbaijan, most recently with Well No. 78, which was drilled and completed in 2017 producing at initial rates of approximately 17 MMcf/d of gas and almost 1,000 bbl/d of condensate.
Pursuant to the MOU, BEOC and SDT will be jointly inspecting the refurbished offshore BH 196 platform to ensure that safe drilling operations can be carried out to international standards. SDT will prepare the design and drilling plan for the deep wells and the parties will select drilling locations for deep wells of up to 18,000 feet of true vertical depth. Production facilities and flowlines are already in place to handle the additional gas production and BEOC has procured some of the drilling tangibles for the initial wells, including casing, tubing and wellheads. The parties expect to propose final plans early in 2018 to support the development drilling in Bahar later in the year.
John W. Harkins, CEO of Greenfields, stated: "This is an excellent opportunity for cooperation with SDT to drill new gas wells from the deeper reservoirs in the Bahar gas field and re-establish significant gas production for Azerbaijan."
About Greenfields Petroleum Corporation
Greenfields is a junior oil and natural gas corporation focused on the development and production of proven oil and gas reserves principally in the Republic of Azerbaijan. The Company plans to expand its oil and gas assets through further farm-ins and acquisitions of Production Sharing Agreements from foreign governments containing previously discovered but under-developed international oil and gas fields, also known as "greenfields". More information about the Company may be obtained on the Greenfields website at www.greenfields-petroleum.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. More particularly and without limitation, this press release includes statements concerning: the MOU; a future partnership between BOEC and SDT and expectations in relation thereto; and drilling plans in the NKP reservoir including the timing thereof. In addition, the use of the words "propose", "will", "plan", "expect", "estimate", and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements contained herein are based on certain key expectations and assumptions made by the Company, including, but not limited to, expectations and assumptions concerning the success of optimization and efficiency improvement projects, the availability of capital, current legislation, receipt of required regulatory approval, the success of future drilling and development activities, the performance of existing wells, the performance of new wells, general economic conditions, availability of required equipment and services, weather conditions and prevailing commodity prices. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct.
Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties most of which are beyond the control of Greenfields. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking information prove incorrect, actual results, performance or achievements could vary materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. These risks include, but are not limited to, risks associated with the oil and gas industry in general (e.g., operational risks in development, exploration and production; delays or changes in plans with respect to exploration or development projects or capital expenditures; the uncertainty of reserve estimates; the uncertainty of estimates and projections relating to production, costs and expenses, and health, safety, political and environmental risks), commodity price and exchange rate fluctuations, changes in legislation affecting the oil and gas industry and uncertainties resulting from potential delays or changes in plans with respect to exploration or development projects or capital expenditures. Additional risk factors can be found under the heading "Risk Factors" in Greenfields' Annual Information Form and similar headings in Greenfields' Management's Discussion & Analysis which may be viewed on www.sedar.com.
The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date hereof and Greenfields undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless so required by applicable securities laws. The Company's forward-looking information is expressly qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement.
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Abbreviations
bbl/d barrels per day MMcf/d million cubic feet per day Bcf billion cubic feet
Contacts:
Greenfields Petroleum Corporation
info@greenfieldspetroleum.com
John W Harkins, Chief Executive Officer
(832) 234-0836
Jose Perez-Bello, Chief Financial Officer
(832) 234-0831
Yellow Jersey (Media Relations)
greenfields@yellowjerseypr.com
Charles Goodwin, +44 7747 788 221
Harriet Jackson, +44 7544 275 882
Sophia Macleod, +44 7966 935 994
Simplus, a Salt Lake City, UT-based Salesforce partner and Quote-to-Cash implementation solutions provider, closed $17.8m funding.
The funding includes a Series B round of $9.3m and an additional $8.5m in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. The equity round was led by Epic Ventures with participation from existing investor Salesforce Ventures, newcomer Cross Creek Advisors, and others.
The company also acquired consulting firm CRM Manager, which follows the purchase of BaldPeak, Basati and EDL Consulting, earlier this year.
Founded in 2005, CRM Manager is a Salesforce implementation, integration, and consulting partner with offices in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and New York City. CRM Manager became a Salesforce Ventures Portfolio Company in 2010. The Salesforce-certified consulting team focuses on delivering Salesforce, Insidesales.com and AppExchange solutions.
Led by Ryan Westwood, CEO, Simplus is a Platinum Salesforce Partner and the industry leader in Quote-to-Cash implementations. The company provides enterprise-wide digital transformation across the entire Salesforce ecosystem through advisory, implementation, change management, custom configuration and managed services. It has more than 1000 clients.
Simplus recently created 100 new jobs in the U.S. and overseas to address its growth and, in the past few months, recruited new Managing Director Suman Konidana and new V.P. of Western Sales Pete Shelton.
FinSMEs
04/12/2017
United Ventures, a Milan, Italy-based venture capital firm, has launched its second fund, holding the first closing at 75m.
UV2, which aims to raise up to 120m during 2018, UV2 has Fondo Italiano dInvestimento, the European Investment Fund, Banca Mediolanum, Banca Sella Holding and Fondazione di Sardegna among its its anchor investors.
The fund will continue to make early stage and Series A round investments in innovative companies in the business and consumer software and digital technologies sectors.
In particular, UV2 will focus on enabling technologies that will speed up the innovation of sectors that are not yet digitized, thus increasing their productivity.
Founded in 2013 by Massimiliano Magrini and Paolo Gesess, United Ventures invested over 50m through its first fund, UV1, over 5 years. The firms portfolio includes 13 early stage tech companies, including Moneyfarm, Cloud4WI, Musixmatch, Faceit, Loop AI and Mainstreaming.
FinSMEs
04/12/2017
As supporters of economic freedom, we frequently find ourselves in vigorous defense of personal choice, whether in business, trade, consumer goods, education, or otherwise.
But while the elevation of economic choice is based on plenty of principle, not to mention historical and empirical analysis, we ought to be careful that our views about freedom arent confused or conflated in the process. Given our cultural appetite for turning choice into an idol above all else, its a risk wed do well to confront and diffuse.
Readers of this blog will no doubt be reminded of Lord Actons popular refrain: Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought. Or the variation from Pope John Paul II: Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.
This basic contrast between what we might call Christian freedom and secular or modern notions of the same is crucial for navigating these debates, with an embrace of the former stretching well before and beyond whatever advocacy we ought to indulge as it relates to individual choice.
Over at First Things, Dan Hitchens offered some insights along these same lines:
The Christian idea [of freedom] is a broader one. For Christians, freedom consists not in how many choices you have but in whether you can choose the right thing, the good thing. If Fred is keeping his options open about whether to join the Ku Klux Klan, and Ben has decided he will never do so, Fred is not freer; quite the opposite. When Einstein discovered special relativity, he did not become less free because he was now unable to believe a dozen alternative theories. When Mozart decided how the Jupiter Symphony had to end, he did not lose freedom merely because of all the other possibilities he was compelled to give up. The model of a free human being, then, is not the person who has so much money, time, and imagination that he can do whatever comes into his head, but someone who will choose the good: who knows just how to make a friend happy, or who, offered the chance to become wealthy through committing fraud, can turn it down without a second thought. As the Catechism says, The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes.
Hitchens is responding to some specific squabbles over a particular social issue, an area of tension which often determines the dividing line between conservative and libertarian. But regardless of where we fall on all that, we ought not ignore that such a distinction bears similar weight when it comes to economics, regardless of the effect (or lack of effect) on the specifics of public policy.
Again, the policy merits of promoting economic choice have plenty of sound backing. Indeed, choosing the good does, of course, require the ability or capacity or freedom to choose the good. But we neednt take for granted that the moral fabric necessary for all this actually exists between the individual and the State.
True freedom isnt a given or guarantee, no matter how much economic choice our government grants us.
The question, then, for the Christian supporter of economic freedom, is whether were also willing to uphold virtue, constraint, and spiritual obedience as key ingredients to that bigger picture, stewarding our choice with wisdom and grace. This may not lead to significant changes in policy, but it will surely lead to a new vocabulary and a renewed focus on the power of spiritual and moral transformation at the other levels and layers of culture.
In a society with economic freedom, we have so much more than terrific consumer choices, wild paths to entrepreneurship, and an abundance of time and treasure. We also have tremendous capacity to choose the good to align our lives and actions to Gods call over our lives, thus aligning our hands and hearts to the needs of others. But if we forget that basic purpose, we risk a failure to connect the dots, confusing a policy that maximizes choice with a life (and society) of true freedom lived in Christ.
Photo: Lyza, The New Fred Meyer on Interstate on Lombard (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The Centre on Thursday informed the Supreme Court that it was willing to extend till 31 March next year the deadline fixed for mandatory linking of Aadhaar for availing of various services and welfare schemes.
The Supreme Court will be setting up a five-judge Constitution Bench next week to hear several pleas seeking an interim stay on the Centres decision of mandatory linking of Aadhaar.
A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra was informed by Attorney General K K Venugopal that the Centre was willing to extend the deadline of 31 December to 31 March next year for linking of Aadhaar with various services and schemes.
The Attorney General, however, made it clear that February 6 next year would remain the deadline for linking Aadhaar for availing of uninterrupted mobile services as it had been mandated by the apex court.
Senior advocate Shyam Divan, appearing for those who are opposed to the Aadhaar scheme told the bench, also comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, that the Centre should give an undertaking that no coercive steps would be taken against those who fail to link their Aadhaar with various services.
Plea against Aadhaar linking
Last month, the government had told the court, which is hearing petitions against making Aadhaar linking to bank accounts, mobile phone numbers and others mandatory, that it is willing to extend the deadline to 31 March, 2018.
This year, the government made the quoting of Aadhaar mandatory for filing income tax returns (ITRs) as well as obtaining a new PAN.
The duplicate PAN cards are the ones which are creating a major danger to the economy. They are the ones who are using this duplicate PAN for opening bank accounts and then they are transacting and they are not filing returns. So we need to worry about them, the official said.
Section 139 AA (2) of the Income Tax Act says that every person having PAN as on July 1, 2017 and eligible to obtain Aadhaar, must intimate his Aadhaar number to the tax authorities. The government had in August extended by four months the deadline for linking PAN with Aadhaar till 31 December, pending the Supreme Court verdict.
As the case is pending in the Supreme Court, the government is not enforcing the provision, the official said.
There will be a time when, once Supreme Court clears it, we would like to give a date by which all have to link with Aadhaar and remaining will be cancelled.
We will give a 3-6 month window... But after that the PAN, if it is not linked, will be cancelled. Our purpose is, all duplicate PANs should be eliminated which are not linked to Aadhaar card. So, all the Benami transactions will go, the official said.
The Supreme Court is hearing petitions challenging the governments decision on Aadhaar and has said it may consider setting up a constitution bench to hear pleas challenging the Centres move to make Aadhaar card mandatory for availing various services and benefits of welfare schemes.
However, if you have already got your Aadhaar card and are planning to link them here are five simple steps to do it:
Step 1: Keep your Aadhaar and PAN numbers handy.
Step 2: Register on the Income tax e-Filing portal if you already havent yet. If you are already registered at the income tax departments e-Filing portal, log in using your ID, password and date of birth.
Step 3: A pop up window will appear, prompting you to link your PAN card with Aadhaar card. If you have a pop up blocker active, you will have to go on the Profile Setting on the dashboards menu bar to click on Link Aadhar option.
Step 4: You will have to add the necessary details like name your Date of Birth as per the PAN details as well as your gender. If you data is different that whats mentioned on your PAN, the Aadhaar will not be linked to your PAN. Next thing to do is, to enter your 12 digit Aadhaar card number, then verify captcha and then click on Link Aadhaar button. Once your validation is successful, your Aadhaar will be successfully linked to your PAN.
Step 5: The last step is when a popup message is displayed stating that your Aadhaar card has been successfully linked to your PAN card.
Keep in mind, that once the Aadhaar-PAN linking is done, you can e-Verify your IT returns using Aadhaar if your mobile is registered with Aadhaar. By linking the two cards you will no longer have to submit your Income Tax acknowledgement to the IT department.
(With inputs from PTI)
Salil S Parekh, the former executive of Capgemini who will take over as the new chief executive officer at Infosys, has an unenviable task at hand. From addressing the stake holder concerns to managing investor expectations to taking the company through a big transformation, Parekh has a work which is truly herculian. Above all, his relationship with both the founders and the board will be closely watched.
Parekh, 53, will take charge from 2 January 2018, Infosys said in a press release over the weekend. He reportedly beat a number of internal candidates and former executives to get the top job at Infosys, the second largest software exporter in India. He comes after the exit of Vishal Sikka, who had an acrimonious war of words with the company's co-founder NR Narayana Murthy.
Analysts and sector experts say Parekh's first task will be to boost the sentiment of all the stakeholders the board, employees and the market. That will be the defining role of his job and that should be his focus, suggests Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst, founder and CEO of Greyhound Research. That is the first of the 'mool' mantras that Parekh will have to chant.
He says that unless Parekh gets this one right, the others like ensuring market performance by aiming for growth or building future leadership to ensure stability won't fall in place. The crux for Parekh is to manage stakeholders sentiment and that has to be done overnight, says Gogia.
Concurring with his view, Manoj Kumar, visiting fellow at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), says that Parekhs challenge will be to put a transparent structure in place and also have set a norm to avoid a repeat of the past discords. One of the ways to do that would be to have a strong rung of leadership in the firm, he feels.
Advantage, Parekh
The mails in the public space, the war of words between Murthy and Sikka and a few members of the board have all led to an erosion of the image of Infosys. Parekh now has the tall order of building on what Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder who was brought back as non-executive chairman to set the house in order, has done so far since Sikka quit. However, he has to be careful to not change the status quo too much.
Sikka, a Punjabi, was perceived as aggressive, while Parekh is not viewed as aggressive. He should be able to carry on the board and stakeholders, besides employees with him, said an analyst, requesting anonymity, hastening to add that the changes Sikka proposed were good. The analyst, however, feels it was a case of too-much-too-soon for the tradition-bound company which is loathe to make quick reflexes.
Another advantage seen for Parekh is that he wont be operating from the US like Sikka, another grouse against the latter's style of functioning. Unlike Sikka, Parekh has a pulse on the Indian IT services context. He is definitely a kingmaker, for sure. He was pivotal in making Capgemini what it is today, said Gogia
Transformation challenge
The IT industry is undergoing a technological transformation locally and globally. Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, robotics and automation are taking the sector by storm. The change is impacting the Indian IT sector. Unlike its earlier strength in the 1990s in outsourcing, Infosys and its peers now have to look at other facets to build their portfolio.
When you look at new IT firms, they do multiple things together to make money. There are technologies that they focus on like cloud, or lead on Big Data, and voice-assisted services like Googles Siri or Amazons Alexa and none of them are offering platforms but they are all making money, said Arvind Singhal, chairman and managing director of Technopak Advisors.
Transitions can cost a lot, which the tradition-bound Infosys may be loathe to take. Singhal suggests that since Infosys is rich in market cap and has had good results, it can now look at acquisitions. He reasons that it has to realise that though it cannot develop everything in-house, it needs to have a really strong presence in the Silicon Valley not in terms of customer services but new age technology beyond being just a software tech firm.
Parekh will have to morph Infosys culture gradually. The new CEO will have to gradually take the company away from traditional services and make it more professional, says Gogia. Many sector specialists say that itself is going to be a major hurdle for Parekh.
Sikka had come with ideas which were considered drastic by many, said an analyst. Unless the company comes out with new ideas which are drastic, it cannot go to the next level. However, the system could not accept Sikkas ideas as it was not only different but was also risky. Doing anything different comes with risk, be it financial or failure, says Singhal.
Sikka's Vision 2020 envisaged a $20-billion revenue target by 2020. It will now be Parekh's turn to figure out how to shape that vision and grow, says Harish HV, partner, India Leadership Team, Grant Thornton India LLP. Nandan Nilekani has done his review and Parekh will have to leverage on what he has done, he said. If Infosys has to grow, and grow rapidly, Parekh will have to get the confidence of senior management and the top team, besides the co-founders who will be watching every move of his. He will also have to ensure that there is no major exit after he takes over, said Harish.
The expectations from shareholders will be very high in view of the loss of market cap following the events leading to exit of Sikka, said Kumar of ORF.
The Murthy factor
The big question for many is what will Murthy do now? Many have blamed Murthy's outbursts on Infosys functioning for Sikka's exit. They even feel Murthy was unnecessarily meddling in the company though he is not an office-bearer now. Gogia says that Parekh has come on board with Nandan as its non-executive chief. Parekh will have Nandan to take care of that, says Gogia. Another industry expert said that till date he has been unable to understand what was Murthys problem with Sikka. "What was the issue?" he asks. However, many feel the biggest burden for Parekh will be this legacy of the company.
New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is likely to present Indias first post- goods and services tax (GST) and the current governments last full Budget on 1 February next year. The Budget session of Parliament may begin on 30 January with President Ram Nath Kovind addressing the Joint Session of both the Houses of Parliament, a senior government official said.
The Economic Survey, detailing the state of the economy, is likely to be tabled on 31 January and the Union Budget may be presented the following day, he said. Scrapping the colonial-era tradition of presenting the Budget at the end of February, Jaitley had for the first time presented the annual accounts on 1 February this year.
The Budget presentation was advanced by a month to ensure that proposals take effect from 1 April, the beginning of the new financial year. Also, the nearly century old tradition of having a separate budget for the railways was scrapped and merged with the general budget. The tentative schedule being drawn up for the Budget Session means that there would be less than a months gap between two sessions of Parliament.
The Winter Session, which begins on 15 December, will end on 5 January. The official said that at least on one occasion in the pastin 1976, when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister, had the winter session spilled into January. But in those days, the Budget was presented on the last day of February and so there was one-month gap between the two sessions.
The Union Budget 2018-19 would be the last full Budget of the BJP-led NDA government before the 2019 general elections. As per the practice, a vote-on-account or approval for essential government spending for a limited period is taken in the election year and a full-fledged budget presented by the new government.
While P Chidambaram had presented the previous UPA governments vote-on-account in February 2014, Jaitley had presented a full budget in July that year. The official said this will be the first budget post implementation of the GST regime. Even though independent Indias biggest tax reform of GST was implemented from 1 July, the Budget for 2017-18 (April- March), had followed the practice of tax revenue projections under the heads of customs duty, central excise and service tax alongside direct tax numbers.
With excise duty and service tax being subsumed in the GST, the classifications in the forthcoming budget may undergo change, he said. While a new classification for revenues to be accrued from GST will be included in the Budget for next fiscal, for the current year two sets of accounting may be presented one for actual accruals during April-June for excise, customs and service tax, and the other for July-March period for GST and customs duty.
The official said that since the GST rates are decided by a GST Council, headed by finance minister and comprising of representatives of all states, the Budget for 2018-19 may not have any tax proposals concerning excise and service tax levies. Only proposals for changes in direct taxes, both personal income tax and corporate tax, besides customs duty, are likely to be presented in the Budget along with new schemes and programmes of the government.
This will be Jaitleys fifth Budget in a row. With the preponement of Budget, ministries are now allocated their budgeted funds from the start of the financial year beginning April. This gives government departments more leeway to spend as well as allow companies time to adapt to business and taxation plans.
Previously, when the Budget was presented at the end of February, the three-stage Parliament approval process used to get completed some time in mid-May, weeks ahead of onset of monsoon rains. This meant government departments would start spending on projects only from August-end or September, after the monsoon season ended. Besides advancing the presentation date, the Budget scrapped the Plan and non-Plan distinction as well.
For full coverage of Union Budget 2018, click here.
You could consider it a lucky moment for Nandan Nilekani, executive chairman of Infosys in his second coming at the company. In Salil Satish Parekh's being bypassed for the CEO's post at global technology consulting giant Capgemini, the co-founder of the Bangalore-based IT services leader has found a near-perfect match for its own CEO slot, given its predicament following the uneasy resignation of former SAP whizkid Vishal Sikka last August.
From all indications, Nilekani may want to keep his intent of stabilising the leadership and moving out as soon as possible -- and 53-year-old Parekh seems just the man for that. With his roots at IIT Mumbai (Nilekani's alma mater as well), his long years at consulting firm Ernst & Young and later as an outsourcing expert with a strong India as well as global footprint at Capgemini, Parekh is very much the suitable boy for the top spot at Infosys. His strong track record in services is a substantial asset for Infosys.
But deep questions remain on both his future and that of Infosys, especially on the long-term strategy going forward. The biggest of them all: Does Infosys need a thorough makeover to face a new age in technology, or is a calibrated mix of continuity and change enough?
For close observers, there are lingering questions on why Sikka was made to leave under pressure from co-founders led by N R Narayana Murthy. After much noise and innuendos about corporate governance lapses in severance pay for former chief financial officer Rajiv Bansal, there seems to have been some kind of an honourable silence in favour of Sikka -- as if to suggest that what the co-founders wanted was his resignation, and not much else.
Murthy has not been effusive in his early welcome for Parekh. His terse 'best wishes' welcome suggests he may be once bitten, twice shy. For Parekh, this might contain a watch-your-step message. Murthy may be a minority shareholder, but is an activist board member who commands respect from tens of thousands of Infosys employees and the general public. His vigilant eyes are certain to follow the new CEO who has to try and avoid a Sikka moment.
As for Sikka, in hindsight, his sin seems to have been a bit of extravagance or generosity that did not sit easy with Murthy's austere, penny-wise style. Parekh has been credited with swinging in acquisitions to help Capgemini, and he would have to watch his shopping bills, given the great amount of reluctance displayed by Infosys during the Murthy-Nilekani years in going for buyouts.
The looming question is: Will Sikka's technological vision be integrated into a new-look Infosys or given a slow burial? This is an important question as the information technology industry worldwide goes through upheavals caused by software automation, artificial intelligence and cloud computing. These three things have made it difficult for the old formula pursued by Infosys -- of blending cost-effective software programming with some consulting to serve large clients and get steady streams of high-margin revenues.
Sikka had taken a sharp turn towards product innovation at Infosys, given his own experience as a high-end product/platform architect at SAP. He tried to blend in services within and around that. Now, his handpicked executives have left Infosys, but the product vision and some of the innovations he introduced are still around, best exemplified by the artificial intelligence platform, Nia. As of last month, Infosys was sticking to Nia and eyeing big-ticket partnerships in data analytics and business intelligence.
Given cloud-era platforms such as IBM's supercomputer Watson and SAP's HANA, Infosys can simply adjust itself around these cutting-edge behemoths much the way it adjusted to SAP's old enterprise software in the early days of network computers. However, that does not seem easy. These new platforms are positioned for easier direct use by business clients. Picture them like do-it-yourself kits.
This is somewhat akin to what Sweden's IKEA did to furniture. Why do you need to hire a carpenter at home when you can assemble the furniture yourself? And why would a Fortune 500 client need a major deal with a large IT service company like Infosys if smaller partners working with in-house teams can leverage large cloud platforms?
The situation may be more complex than that, but it is pretty certain that a new IT ecosystem is emerging that calls for large-scale reinvention at Infosys for it to be able to grow on a scale similar to what it has done in the past.
To craft a new, viable strategy, Parekh needs to bring in his global experience, look at the co-founders and their austere values and then eye a disrupted technological environment that involves the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and software automation. Given that he has been given a five-year contract, one would hope he would get sufficient elbow room and encouragement if he is to walk a tightrope between old-fashioned continuity and phenomenal change.
(The author is a senior journalist. He tweets as @madversity)
New Delhi: State Bank of India will "redesign" its envelopes used to dispatch tax refund cheques of customers to cover their PAN and contact numbers, after an activist raised that the crucial personal information was visible to anyone which may result in misuse, the bank said.
The move comes nearly 16 months after activist Commodore (retd) Lokesh Batra raised the issue that the window envelopes used by SBI make it easy for someone to glance through permanent account number (PAN) and contact number of the tax payee and misuse it.
Batra wrote to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Urjit Patel, alleging that SBI was violating its directions on 'protection of customer's information' by sending crucial information about customers in "unsecured envelopes".
"...this systemic failures by banks must be breaching the personal information of very large numbers of People. I had reported this matter at the highest level in SBI..., but as of now no one has even blinked...and breaching of people's personal information is continuing," he wrote to the RBI Governor on November 28.
He said he had been "pleading" with SBI at the highest level for the past 16 months to ensure compliance with RBI directions, but nothing has changed.
After the RBI referred the matter to SBI, the bank responded by saying that "the envelops (window envelops) in which income tax refund orders are being dispatched to various assesses will be redesigned, so that the PAN number is not visible to anyone".
A meeting of the National Capital Regional Planning Board (NCRPB) is scheduled today in which the Haryana government will again try and scuttle the exception clauses to allow construction licenses in Natural Conservation Zone (NCZ) earmarked Aravallis.
The National Green Tribunal recently has directed the Haryana government to submit revenue records of the land in Faridabad where it has sanctioned felling of trees for construction of a real estate project by Bharti Land Limited in the eco-sensitive Aravalli hills, PTI reported.
Let us look at some of the issues:
What are Aravallis?
Can you believe in June 2016 at the the NCRPB Meet, the government of Haryana said it did not know the meaning of the term Aravalli. A series of meetings followed between the Ministry of Urban Development, Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change (MOEFCC) and the government of Haryana, to narrow down and identify a definition of the Aravallis. It was agreed that revenue land categories (primarily gair mumkin pahar) identified as Aravallis in a Ministry of Environment & Forest (MOEF) notification dating back to 1992 which was applicable to Gurgaon district of Haryana, would be applicable across the National Capital Region. A special meeting of the board on 20 December, 2016, recorded that the issue of definition of Aravallis was now resolved.
The Regional Plan 2021 for the Delhi NCR region had already zoned all Aravalli areas (forests, waterbodies, rivers, groundwater recharge areas) as Natural Conservation Zone or NCZ.
The importance of the Natural Conservation Zone (NCZ) is that it is earmarked for conservation, rather than real estate. Accordingly, construction is allowed only for 0.5 percent ( or 1/200), and that too for regional recreational activities like regional parks and sanctuaries. This strictly precludes construction for commercial, residential, tourism, and other real estate purposes.
But the issue is far from resolved. Haryana has been constantly trying to remove the cap on construction of 0.5 percent. In January 2017, Manohar Lal Khattar, the Chief Minister of Haryana himself wrote to Venkaiah Naidu, the then Minister of Urban Development saying that Aravallis could not be put in NCZ across the state. This was followed by a 15 June, 2017 letter which implied that there were no Aravallis in Haryana except in Gurgaon district, and even there, the 0.5 percent cap should not be operative.
The state of Haryana today has less than 3.7 percent forest cover, mostly in the hilly Aravallis (and Shivaliks). The Aravallis are the main wildlife habitat in a rapidly urbanizing area and play an important role in groundwater recharge, moderating desertification and air pollution. In short, they are a key element of the ecological infrastructure that underpins our cities and villages of the NCR. Delhi and Rajasthan had put the majority of their Aravalli hills in official notified forests, as well as sanctuaries. Currently Haryana has no sanctuary in the Aravallis, and hardly any reserved and protected forests. It is time Haryana protected the Aravallis, and rolled back the privatization and licencing of real estate across the Aravalli hills in Gurgaon and Faridabad areas.
A CSE or Centre of Science & Environment report has raised worrying red flags on Gurgaons depleting and near extinction groundwater and unbreathable air.
Where are the battle lines drawn?
On 15 June 2017, Haryana wrote to the NCR Planning Board in effect saying that there are no Aravalli hills in Haryana outside Gurgaon district, for the purposes of inclusion in Natural Conservation Zones. Suddenly, over 17,000 acres of Aravallis in Faridabad seemed to have evaporated from Haryana's maps and records. As also in other districts of Rewari, Mahindergarh, etc. This incredible claim communicated by the Director of Town and Country Planning TL Satyaprakash has been preceded by a history of delay in operationalising the NCZ by successive state governments.
Not just that, in 2013, the government of Haryana proposed that the 0.5 percent cap on construction be removed which was was accepted by the NCRPB without demur. It took huge media outpour for the cap of 0.5 percent to be restored, but again there was an exception clause slipped in allowing construction for tourism. The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) had to intervene for the exception clause and tourism as a purpose, to be junked.
But the fight is far from over. The government of Haryana is constantly raising new and novel arguments on What is Aravalli and What is forest to gut the NCZ category in Haryana.
Today the NCR Planning Board Meet will see another round of similar attempts. It is for citizens and civil society to raise their collective voices to ensure the remaining lungs of the State of Haryana are not sacrificed at the altar of mindless construction.
The audio launch of Sivakarthikeyan's Velaikkaran directed by Mohan Raja was held on 3 December at Chennai's hotel ITC Grand Chola in a grand manner. Although the entire supporting cast and crew were in full attendance, Nayanthara and Fahadh Faasil, who play significant roles in the film, were conspicuous by their absence. Composer Anirudh Ravichander performed two hit songs from the album Karuthavanlaam Galeejaam and Iraivaa.
In a befitting gesture, the makers honoured some hardly-known, under-appreciated workers from various walks of life such as Traffic Police Kumar, Auto Annadurai, Moar Thaatha, Sundari Akka, Birdman Joseph Sekar for their relentless dedication and hard work. Another highlight of the event was the screening of the making video of a sprawling, realistic slum set constructed by art director Muthuraj for the film.
I promise not to endorse any brands in my career henceforth, says Sivakarthikeyan
In a breaking statement, Sivakarthikeyan, the fast-rising star in Tamil cinema, took an oath to say no to advertisements in his career. I know Ive done a commercial before. But now, I have decided that I wont endorse any brands and act in advertisements henceforth in my career. The reason behind my decision is a crucial scene in the film, which I cant reveal it now. A real-life doctor has also performed in the sequence, which left the entire team in tears. I dont want to convey a wrong message to anyone. I would like to be a responsible person and dont want people to be misguided through my ads, said Sivakarthikeyan.
Velaikkaran has given me great hope and changed me a lot as a person. Im sure the impact of the film will continue to change me personally. Ive come out of my comfort zone for the first time. Going forward, if I do nine movies to entertain audiences, I will do at least one film like Velaikkaran to educate viewers and connect with them emotionally, he said.
No one could have done justice to 'Arivu' character except Sivakarthikeyan, says director Mohan Raja
Director Mohan Raja said the lead character Arivu played by Sivakarthikeyan would be one of the memorable roles in the history of Tamil cinema.
Ordinary people who have no financial background rely only on their hard work. What happens when their hard work too fails them? Velaikkaran will be the answer to that question. I was aware of the hard work the film will need. When my sister and her family watched the film, they were all praise for Sivakarthikeyan. They were pretty sure that he is going to make me win again. No one could have done justice to Arivu as Siva did. And it will be a memorable role. I will definitely do another film with him soon because I have never felt so comfortable with an actor before. Of course, it's a different level of comfort while working with my brother (Jayam Ravi).
I realised the strength of our youngsters and their social responsibility during Chennai floods and the Jallikattu protest. That's what I have portrayed in this film - the spirit of the public, Raja added.
I felt like a better human being after listening to Velaikkaran script, says Anirudh Ravichander
Composer Anirudh Ravichander said he has associated with Sivakarthikeyan for one-third of his career. After Mohan Raja sir narrated the script, I told him that I feel like a better human being. That was a special day. Given the areas he has touched and the content dealt with the story, Velaikkaran will be a hard-hitting film. It will be a proud project for producer RD Raja, who has an uncanny knack for delivering quality cinema to the audience.
Talking about his relationship with Sivakarthikeyan, Anirudh said, I first met him at an event that happened in Coimbatore. It's been quite a journey from that day to what we are now. Everyone tells me that I give my best for Sivakarthikeyan's film. It's not exactly like that. When his face flashes as I sit to compose, some great music happens. After Velaikkaran, he can take up any role and cakewalk it. What matters the most is that Ive earned a good person like him in my life.
Produced by RD Raja under the banner 24AM Studios, Velaikkaran features an extensive support cast including Sneha, Prakash Raj, RJ Balaji, Robo Shankar, Sathish, Vijay Vasanth, Thambi Ramaiah, Rohini, and Charlie. The film is slated to hit screens on December 22nd for the Christmas weekend. The trailer for the movie will be released in the upcoming days.
Almost everyone from the film industry has put forth their opinions on the Padmavati row, and the latest member to join the lot is none other than veteran actor Manoj Kumar. In a recent media interaction Manoj highlighted on how the Padmavati controversy could be nipped in the bud, and why he thinks the whole chapter is unnecessary, terming it 'washing dirty linen in public'.
The actor called the drama over the content of the film, 'nonsense' and also claimed that both the protestors and the filmmaker is at fault here.
With chief ministers of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Gujarat calling for a ban on the film, the political-religious fringes have been vying an all India ban on the film.
During the interaction, Kumar told PTI I will blame both the sides. This is nonsense. If the Rajputs feel something is wrong, they should have written to the makers. The producers should have written to them after their objection, to come and see the film and finish the matter in one hour. This is [like] washing dirty linen in public. To some extent, even the media is to be blamed.
The major allegation against Bhansali and team remained that they have distorted history by showing a romantic angle between Rani Padmavati and Alauddin Khilji. Though the makers have sternly maintained that there's no distortion of history in the movie, the protests seem to get more intense with every passing day.
"When I started to make films, I started writing about Bhagat Singh in my earlier days. There were some incidents which I had to conceive within the framework. Every film made later on Bhagat Singh featured the scenes which I had conceived. You have to imagine some linking sequences within the framework," he said.
Several years back, similar to Padmavati, Manoj Kumar's Kalyug Aur Ramayan also faced displeasure from the censor board.
"There was a song in the film Kalyug Ki Sita Milne Judge Ko Chali/Sau Chuhe Khake Billi Haj Ko Chali... I was not talking about Ram-Sita here. It was a novel subject to me but there was a huge uproar by some groups back then and they created ruckus at the censor board," he said recalling the incident.
Padmavati which was slated to release on December 1, has now been deferred indefinitely by the makers of the film.
Israeli Peace Offers Go Missing in Politico | Main | Palestinian Textbooks Are Significantly More Radical Than Before
December 04, 2017
Fatah Official: Iran is Hindering Palestinian Reconciliation
The man tasked with leading efforts to reconcile Fatah and Hamas has accused the Islamic Republic of Iran of working to prevent reconciliation between the two Palestinian groups, which rule the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Gaza Strip, respectively.
Fatah and Hamas are rivals for power. They engaged in a brief and bloody civil war in the summer of 2007, after Fatah lost elections in 2006. That conflict ended with Hamas seizing control of the Gaza Strip, which had previously been run by Fatah, the movement that dominates both the U.S.-supported Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
As CAMERA has noted, Hamas and Fatah have been in reconciliation talks for nearly four months ("The Washington Post Belatedly Covers Hamas-Fatah Talks," Oct. 6, 2017).
On Nov. 27, 2017, a senior Fatah official named Azzam al-Ahmad told al-Arabiya, a Saudi Arabian outlet, that, Iran is the number one sponsor of the divisionthe number one financier.? The Times of Israels Dov Lieber noted the significance of al-Ahamds comments, calling them rare? and full-throated (Senior Fatah Official: Iran the key source of Palestinian division,? November 28).?
Tehran is a chief supporter of Hamas and other groups that rival Fatah, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
Both Hamas and PIJ challenged Fatahs support for diplomatic engagement with Israel during the 1990s Oslo process that created the PA. Both groups, as well as Fatah elements like Tanzimwhich was supported by then-Fatah and PLO-head Yasser Arafatperpetrated terrorist attacks against Israelis.
Irans support for Hamas dried up as a result of a disagreement over Tehrans involvement in the Syrian civil war. However, Iran recently renewed its support of the U.S.-designated terrorist group and, in a widely underreported move, senior Hamas operative Saleh al-Arouri visited Iran in late October 2017 (Wheres the Coverage? Hamas Visits Iran,? CAMERA, Oct. 27, 2017).
Indeed, in an August 2017 interview, Hamas Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, admitted that Iran is now the largest backer financially and militarily? of the terror group.
In his interview with al-Arabiya, Al-Ahmad stated, It seems that one of the conditions for the return of Iranian support [to Hamas] is the continuation of the division.? As part of the ongoing talks, PA President Mahmoud Abbas has insisted that the authority be in sole control of all weapons and security in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has refused to give up its arsenal.
Azzam al-Ahmads remarks were widely ignored by major U.S. news outlets, including The Washington Post, USA Today, The Washington Times, and others. By contrast, The Times of Israel provided a detailed report, complete with essential background and context.
A Palestinian official highlighted Irans efforts to thwart a unity deal? between two rival and warring factions and many in the media were nowhere to be found.
Posted by SD at December 4, 2017 11:02 AM
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As the future of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmavati remains uncertain, the latest actor to have spoken about the controversy is Shahid Kapoor. Kapoor, who plays the role of Raja Rawal Ratan Singh in the film, tells Deccan Chronicle, "No one wants to make a film to hurt sentiments because its for as many people as possible to see."
Padmavati has come under fire from several Hindu groups who allege the film distorts history and shows the Rajput community in a poor light. However, Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh and now Kapoor, have shown faith in their director and have said that they believe in the film. Kapoor also says that it is unfortunate that someone of such fine repute is being subject to unwarranted criticism.
The film has so far been banned in three states Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Gujarat. Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani said the film was banned in his state due to the way it represents women. The political leader also said that"such issues spoil the environment" and could wreak havoc during elections, if not handled properly, as reported by Business Standard.
Several petitions seeking a ban on the film have been filed and duly rejected in the court. The film was originally supposed to release on 1 December but stands deferred.
Veteran actor-producer Shashi Kapoor passed away on 4 December in Kokilaben Hospital in Mumbai at the age of 79. The romantic screen icon of the 70s and early 80s Shashi was hospitalised and breathed his last at 5:20 pm today, after having battled a prolonged illness.
Shashi Kapoor was a member of the famous Kapoor clan of Bollywood. Born in Kolkata, Shashi was the third and the youngest son of late Prithviraj Kapoor and brother of late Raj Kapoor and Shammi Kapoor. Shashi, his father and his brothers were all equally celebrated in the world of Hindi cinema.
Shashi began his acting career in the 1940s where he first appeared on screen as a child artiste. Some of his most famous roles were the 1975 and 1982 movies Deewar and Namak Halal respectively. Shashi was a major contributor to Hindi cinema, much like his father and brothers. He was also touted as one of the first actors to venture into foreign films, with films like The Householder and Shakespeare Wallah under his belt.
His death has left the entire Hindi film industry shaken and in mourning. Several prominent personalities took to Twitter to express their grief and condolences for the Kapoor family.
Here are a few of the heartfelt messages:
Shashi Kapoor's versatility could be seen in his movies as well as in theatre, which he promoted with great passion. His brilliant acting will be remembered for generations to come. Saddened by his demise. Condolences to his family and admirers. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) December 4, 2017
Sorry to hear of the demise of Shashi Kapoor, well-known actor, with a repertoire of Indian and international films. His support for meaningful cinema as a producer and pivotal role in the theatre movement in India too are cherished. Condolences to his family #PresidentKovind President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) December 4, 2017
A legend has passed away. Shashi Kapoor will remain in our hearts forever. My condolences to his loved ones and all his fans. pic.twitter.com/OmLvtvYZtb Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) December 4, 2017
Innumerable Bollywood dreams came to life watching your iconic dialogue, "Mere paas maa hai." Your tremendous contribution to cinema will always be remembered. RIP #ShashiKapoor ji Akshay Kumar (@akshaykumar) December 4, 2017
You won't be forgotten. Rest in peace #ShashiKapoor ji. Ajay Devgn (@ajaydevgn) December 4, 2017
His contribution to this industry will be remembered. May his soul rest in peace. Shashi Kapoor ji you will be missed always. Sanjay Dutt (@duttsanjay) December 4, 2017
One of my favourites passed away today. A handsome charming gentleman who entertained us for 40+ years. His endearing smile will be embedded in my memories. RIP #ShashiKapoor pic.twitter.com/wXM0YSoQ45 Jaaved Jaaferi (@jaavedjaaferi) December 4, 2017
RIP Sir. You will be deeply missed by all #ShashiKapoor pic.twitter.com/Bkr48vvtKp Bipasha Basu (@bipsluvurself) December 4, 2017
I feel a part of me is gone. A great actor, smart, cosmopolitan, impossibly handsome & w/a name that was often confused w/mine. (My office got two calls from journalists today about my reportedly serious ill-health!) I will miss #ShashiKapoor. Condolences2his family&all his fans pic.twitter.com/fSz3jafPZJ Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017
One of the most iconic dialogues ever, #ShashiKapoor . You will continue to inspire future generation of actors. Condolences to family and friends. pic.twitter.com/QBoLf7IlPb Virender Sehwag (@virendersehwag) December 4, 2017
Saddened by the demise of legendary actor Shashi Kapoor ji. His contribution to Indian Cinema is monumental. Shashi jis passing away marks the end of an era. My deepest condolences to his loved ones, colleagues and fans. May his soul rest in peace. Om Shanti! Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) December 4, 2017
Saddened at his passing away. Shashi Kapoor a legend and actor will be remembered for generations for his great work in cinema Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) December 4, 2017
#ShashiKapoor had so much grace, vision & beauty. I will never forget the humanity he brought to Vijay Khanna in Kabhi Kabhie and the intensity of Javed Khan in Junoon. RIP Anupama Chopra (@anupamachopra) December 4, 2017
TV actress Aashka Goradia, of Kkusum fame, got hitched to her longtime boyfriend Brent Goble in Ahmedabad on Sunday. The couple first tied the knot as per Christian rituals on Friday and then followed the traditional Indian marriage rituals on Sunday in presence of family and friends, reported Hindustan times.
A report by Indian Express also claimed that the families of the couple arranged a mehendi and sangeet ceremony for the duo, which took place in Ahmedabad itself, being Aashka's hometown. The couple's first public appearance was in the celebrity dance reality show Nach Baliye where they received much support from their fans.
The actress remained quite active on her social media accounts, posting photos from all the events. She also wrote a thank you post on Instagram, which read, Love is not something you do! Love is the way you are, Love is the way I am: Sadhguru. And today our love has led to this beautiful union as we are now officially husband and wife! Thank you @knottingbells for the lovely picture and @mapxencarsofficial for helping me with this gown, which belongs to my mother in law! @orrajewellery this special day and this bridal look would have been incomplete without your beautiful jewelery #MrAndMrs #breshka #breshweds #brentauraashukishaadi #IndiaMeetsAmerica
On choosing Ahmedabad as her wedding destination, Aashka had earlier elaborated in an India.com report, saying, Brent wanted a wedding replete with all the rituals, which seemed possible only in my hometown. Another reason is that I have so many memories associated with the city. I have spent 16 years of my life in Ahmedabad and Gujarat is extremely rich, culturally. I am sure my in-laws will enjoy the traditional garba, Gujarati delicacies and the hospitality in my hometown.
Aashka's friends from the industry, Karanvir Bohra with wife Teejay Sidhu and daughters Vienna and Bella, Mouni Roy, Sana Khan and Adaa Khan were spotted at the wedding as well.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday admitted for hearing an appeal by Jammu and Kashmir government against a high court order for payment of compensation to the victims of 1991 Kunan Poshpora mass rape incident allegedly by army personnel.
The top court directed expeditious hearing of the appeals filed by the state government against various orders of the high court.
A bench of Justice J Chelameswar and Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul granted leave on the appeal of state government and said all the interim orders will continue.
In 2013, a writ petition was filed in Jammu and Kashmir high court alleging that army personnel belonging to the Rajputana Rifles and 68 Mountain Brigade had raided the remote villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Kupwara district and had committed mass-scale rapes and torture of villagers.
The charges have not been proved so far as there has been no progress in trial.
It was alleged that on the intervening night of 23 and 24 February, 1991, separate teams of armymen had entered several houses in the villages, removed men of all ages into makeshift interrogation centres and tortured them. The plea alleged that over 30 women of the villages were raped by these personnel.
An SIT probe was sought in the plea for carrying out comprehensive investigation, besides seeking compensation and relief for the victims.
Standing counsel Shoeb Alam, appearing for the state government, said the compensation cannot be given as directed by the high court under provisions of Section 545(a) of the CrPC, which was introduced on 24 April, 2012 and notified on 23 April, 2013.
He said such a direction to pay compensation under a provision which did not exist at the time of the incident was contrary to law.
The state government also claimed that since the allegation was against army personnel, a direction to the state government for payment of compensation to the victims was without any legal backing.
Navy Day is observed annually on 4 December to celebrate the Indian Navy's achievements and commemorate the sacrifices made by its personnel. But the specificity of the date holds an underlying story of the force's valour, that brought victory for India in the 1971 war against Pakistan.
The date commemorates the launch of Operation Trident, a devastating attack on the Pakistan Naval Headquarters of Karachi during the 1971 war. During the attack, three Vidyut-class missile boats, two anti-submarine vehicles and a tanker of the Indian Navy successfully sank the enemy's minesweeper, a destroyer and an ammunition supply ship.
The attack was carried out at night as intelligence confirmed that Pakistan did not have aircrafts that could carry out bombings at night. The operation was deemed a big success as zero casualties were incurred on the Indian side while five Pakistani sailors and over 700 men were injured in the attack.
But the Indian Navy's military contributions go beyond its significant role in the 1971 war and the liberation of Bangladesh, there are several interesting aspects to the navy's campaign.
Versatile capabilities
Not only did it fight on two fronts but almost the entire gamut of naval operations came to play in the 1971 war. This included aircraft carrier operations in support of the land offensive, anti-submarine operations that led to neutralising of the Pakistan submarine Ghazi, offensive attack by missile boats and blockade of then East Pakistan coast.
More recently, during the Kargil conflict in 1999 and later during Operation Parakram, the Indian Navy by its offensive posturing bottled the Pakistani ships inside their harbours and effectively kept the war localised and the situation on an even keel. Similarly, Indian Navy's role in Operation Pawan, India's prolonged engagement in Sri Lanka, has not got the attention it, arguably, deserved.
Spread over three years, the navy was involved in support of the army, transportation of troops and material, amphibious operations, seaward cordon militaire, shore bombardment, special operations and airborne surveillance.
Most remarkably, several smaller ships based in Visakhapatnam and Chennai excelled at giving a good account of themselves in hostile conditions.
Today, it operates in all three dimensions: On, above and below water; most of its ships are indigenously built and it is among the few navies to build and operate an array of platforms from aircraft carriers to nuclear submarines.
But numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Of particular significance is the fact that the navy has built excellent capacities both human and material in several disciplines such as hydrography, special operations, integration engineering, doctrine writing, underwater medicine and disaster relief, to name a few.
These capacities have been particularly useful when the Indian Navy's achievements in different domains are analysed. If one were to evaluate in terms of roles that navies classically play military, constabulary (policing), diplomatic and benign (including humanitarian assistance) the Indian Navy can be said to have ticked all boxes with high scores.
A self-reliant force
Navy Day is a good occasion to reflect on its journey and evaluate its progress over the last 70 years. The Indian Navy was an exceedingly small force at the dawn of Independence and, while being a product of both its British inheritance and the maritime DNA of our forebears, is largely a post-independence construct.
Despite the many problems that besieged the newly independent country and by extension, its navy such as low industrial base, problems on our land borders made it imperative to focus on the army and the air force. But the navy was not short on vision.
As early as 1948, it drew up ambitious plans for a balanced navy that would consist of light aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, cruisers, auxiliaries and associated training and maintenance infrastructure.
Seen against this backdrop, the Indian Navy has grown quietly but steadily. From a force of less than half a dozen sloops to one that has 135 ships and 235 aircraft, most state-of-the-art, is indeed an impressive story.
The notable point is that it's a self-reliant force. The Indian Navy was a pioneer of 'Make in India' which was an article of faith for it. Compared to the army and the air force, the navy is way ahead in the indigenous content of its combat units.
Though it has a long way to go, every ship that gets constructed has more indigenous content than its predecessor and is an improvement over the previous one.
Award-winning innovations
On Monday, award-winning innovations by the force will be on display at the 'Innovation Pavilion' put up at the Navy House in New Delhi, PTI reported.
These include the innovations by Indian Naval Ships 'Kuthar' and 'Vikramaditya', which have been selected as the winner and runner-up respectively in the 'Operational Units' category.
The innovations by the Weapons Electronic Systems Engineering Establishment (WESEE) and Naval Aircraft Yard, Kochi were selected as the winner and runner-up respectively in the 'Shore Establishments' category.
As a run-up to the Navy Day, 20 innovations were shortlisted from those submitted by units and establishments across the navy for central evaluation, a defence ministry statement said.
They range from innovative repairs to complex system modules to development of new techniques that would save money, time and manpower, it added.
A boost to foreign policy
The increased mettle and muscle of our navy provides much more traction to our foreign policy initiatives, be it in enhancing cooperation with big powers or in providing a palpable physical dimension to the Act East Policy. Further, the Indian Navy's own international initiatives are wide and encompass several arenas.
They include multilateral forums such as Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) and the MILAN meetings, joint exercises with several nations, assistance in capacity building to nations in the Indian Ocean neighbourhood, hydrographic surveys, providing training to many foreign navy personnel and hosting events like the International Fleet Review in February 2016 or more recently the Goa Maritime Conclave last month.
The disaster situations could be natural, such as the Tsunami of 2004 or cyclonic storms that recur with great regularity in the Bay of Bengal, or they could be caused by human intervention such as what occurred in Lebanon in 2006, Libya in 2011 or Yemen in 2015. The latter cases are often messy and often also involve evacuation of non-combatants and deployment in conflict zones.
There will indeed be some areas that provide scope for improvement. Further indigenisation of weapons, ordnance and systems and gaps in inventory are issues that are attracting the attention of decision makers. There is also need for the development of expertise, among its personnel, in a range of subjects such as foreign languages, international law, energy security, area studies and economics.
But, overall, it would be fair to say that the 'Silent Service' of the Indian Navy at 70 is a success story.
With inputs from IANS
New Delhi: The Delhi High Court said the issue of marital rape, an act in which a spouse indulges in sexual intercourse without the other's consent, was of huge ramifications and tremendous importance.
The high court fixed 2 January next year to continue hearing arguments in the matter in which some NGOs, espousing the cause of women, have raised the issue of sexual violence in marriage in India.
The matter was listed before a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar which during the brief hearing noted the concern raised by the NGOs, RIT Foundation and the All India Democratic Women's Association.
The court asked senior advocate Raju Ramachandran, who is assisting it as an amicus curiae, to freely express his views on the issue in which the Centre has maintained that marital rape cannot be made a criminal offence as it could become a phenomenon which may destabilise the institution of marriage and become an easy tool to harass the husbands.
Ramachandran told the bench that he will come up with his views after hearing the submissions of the Centre and the NGOs.
Advocate Karuna Nandy, appearing for the two NGOs, tried to impress the bench by citing few studies and research to press for the prayer to declare forcible sexual intercourse between married couple as an offence.
She elaborated by referring to the 2005 data of National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) about the gravity of the situation. However, without going any further, the bench deferred the hearing with the observation that "the issue has huge ramifications. It is of tremendous importance."
In a related development, the Supreme Court in its historic verdict in October this year, has held that sexual intercourse with a girl below 18 years of age, even by the husband, would amount to rape. It has criminalised sex with a wife who is not a major.
The apex court read down a provision in the Indian Penal Code of 1860 exempting males from being tried for rape if the wives were between the age of 15 and 18 years. The top court's verdict will have ramification in the petition pending before the high court.
In the original petition before the high court, the petitioners had highlighted that the provision under the IPC did not consider non-consensual sexual intercourse with a wife, above 15 years of age, as rape.
The petitioners submitted that there was a need to strike down the exception clause under Section 375 of IPC that says that sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape.
The court is also hearing two intervention applications, one in support of pleas to make marital rape an offence and the other opposing it. The Centre had advocated retaining the exception clause in Section 375 saying child marriages were taking place in India and the decision to retain a girl's minimum age as 15 years to marry was taken under the amended rape law to protect a couple against criminalisation of their sexual activity.
The NGOs' counsel had said that they have challenged the constitutionality of section 375 (rape) of the IPC on the ground that it discriminated against married women being sexually assaulted by their husbands.
Ranchi: A school principal has been arrested on the charge of raping a six-year-old girl student in Jharkhand's Koderma district, police said on Friday.
According to police, S Xavier, principal of Tilaiya Public School, was arrested after the girl's father filed a complaint against him at the Tilaiya police station. The principal allegedly raped the girl in the school's washroom on 29 November 29. When she cried out for help, he offered her a chocolate.
The girl informed her mother after reaching home.
Xavier, a resident of Kolkata, has been charged under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. The principal told reporters that he had not committed "any big crime". He said he did it out of tension, and termed the act as "accidental".
"I was not sleeping for the last few days ... but I was not involved in any intercourse," said the principal defending himself before the media. He, however, admitted to undressing the girl.
Xavier was produced in court and sent to judicial custody. The medical test of the girl will be done on Saturday.
New Delhi: A preliminary study has found that the water of the Siang river, which originates in southern Tibet and becomes the Brahmaputra upon entering Assam through Arunachal Pradesh, is turning black due to a recent earthquake in the region, Union minister Arjun Ram Meghwal has said.
"We have been getting reports of pollution in the river and its water turning black. The Central Water Commission (CWC) has started looking into the matter recently and people have been sent to the internal areas," the Union minister of state for water resources said in New Delhi on Sunday.
He added that according to the preliminary findings, the path of the river was temporarily obstructed after an earthquake in Tibet on 17 November.
"There is a strong possibility that the colour (of the river's water) has changed due to natural reasons," the minister said.
Congress MP Ninong Ering, representing the Arunachal East constituency in Parliament, had recently written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in this regard, noting that the water of the river changing its colour was an unusual phenomenon in the winter months.
In his letter, Ering had also pointed out that there were reports of China constructing a 600-km tunnel in its Yunnan province to divert the Siang water to the Taklamakan desert through the Xinjiang province, even though the neighbouriong country had denied any such development.
He had mentioned in the letter that the reports of the Tsangpo (Siang or Brahmaputra) being diverted had appeared a few months back.
Although China had denied it, the matter remained an area of concern for India, the Congress MP had mentioned in his letter to the prime minister.
"After these reports appeared, the water of the river Siang has turned muddy and slushy. It has been two months since the Siang turned black and contaminated. It is an unusual phenomenon.
"The reason for the river getting dirty is unknown. I have already put up questions for discussions in Parliament under rule 377. But since the House is not in session, I am requesting you to use your good office to seek the reason for the river turning muddy in this season, when the water is usually crystal clear," Ering had written in his letter to Modi.
He had also pointed out that there could be no reason for the river getting contaminated in the month of November other than a possible heavy land excavation on the Chinese side, adding that it had to be verified by an international team.
Certain reports claim that the water of the river have become unusable and that a number of fish had died in the river in the recent past.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday directed the special investigation team (SIT), constituted by it to probe allegations against former CBI Director Ranjit Sinha in coal scam cases, to submit a status report before it.
A three-judge bench headed by Justice MB Lokur asked the SIT to file before it in a sealed cover within four weeks the status report with regard to the investigation conducted by it in the matter.
The bench, also comprising Justice Kurian Joseph and Justice AK Sikri, directed this after advocate Prashant Bhushan said that several months have gone by since the SIT was formed and it should be asked to submit a report of its investigation.
The Supreme Court had on 23 January constituted the SIT headed by the CBI director to look into the prima facie allegations against the former CBI chief of trying to influence the probe in coal scam cases.
During the hearing, senior advocate RS Cheema, who has been appointed as the special public prosecutor in coal scam cases by the apex court, told the bench that eight CBI cases related to the scam were pending consideration before the highest authority of the agency.
The top court directed the CBI director to finalise the eight pending cases on or before 15 January, 2018.
The apex court was earlier told that a panel headed by former CBI special director ML Sharma held that Sinha's alleged meetings with some high-profile accused in the coal scam, prima facie indicated that there was an attempt to influence the investigation. The apex court-appointed panel was probing the alleged scuttling of probe into coal block allocation scam cases by Sinha, whose meetings with the accused persons were held as "completely inappropriate".
On 7 December, 2015, the court had ordered handing over the original visitors' diary of the official residence of the former CBI director to the Sharma-led panel.
Kochi: The Indian Navy on Sunday said 10 of its ships and eight aircraft were involved in the continuing search and rescue operations in the southeast Arabian Sea and Lakshadweep and Minicoy islands following Cyclone Ockhi.
The vessels included capital ships such as Chennai and Kolkata which were carrying relief materials, a defence ministry statement said late on Sunday.
In addition, eight aircraft, including long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft P8I, were deployed throughout the day.
"A total of 55 people were rescued on Sunday taking the total to 145. The weather conditions are still adverse at the L&M Islands," the release read.
Naval ships Chennai, Trikand and Kolkata were stationed around the Lakshadweep islands with relief materials.
The ships were equipped with desalination plants and will be able to provide the islands fresh water as and when required.
The total relief material carried would sustain approximately 5,000 people for over seven days.
Additionally, all naval units in the vicinity of the Lakshadweep and Minicoy islands had been directed to provide fresh water in consultation with the local administration. Additional units will also be deployed to augment water supply, the release said.
The other ships were continuing the search and rescue operations along the Kerala coast and around the L&M Islands in a systematic and planned manner to provide immediate aid to any person, vessel/boat in distress.
"The Indian Navy is relentless in shouldering the responsibility of providing relief from this natural disaster impacting the southeast Arabian Sea and adjoining Lakshadweep islands," it said.
Coimbatore: Tamil Nadu chief minister K Palaniswamy on Sunday assured that all fishermen stranded at sea following Cyclone Ochki would be rescued and said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised necessary help from the Centre in this regard.
Five aircraft, four helicopters and 15 Coast Guard ships were trying to locate and rescue the missing fishermen, he told a public meeting in Coimbatore.
Palaniswamy said he had spoken to the prime minister and Home Minister Rajnath Singh and they promised all help to rescue the fishermen.
"All steps are being taken expeditiously and the Amma's (Jayalalithaa's) government will rescue all the (stranded) fishermen safely," he said adding that there was no need for any apprehension and the government was a friend of the fishermen.
He was addressing the the centenary celebrations of late AIADMK founder and chief minister MG Ramachandran in Coimbatore on Sunday evening.
Hitting out at DMK working chief MK Stalin for "deliberately spreading lies" on the rescue operations, he alleged the main opposition party was falsely claiming that "fishermen are not rescued...it is a false information."
Deputy Chief Minister O Paneerselvam was leading a team of ministers to take stock of the damage caused by the cyclone and also monitor rescue operations, he said.
On getting the 'two leaves' symbol, he said "If we stand united as a party, then not just the RK Nagar bypoll, but we can win all elections in Tamil Nadu."
"Amma's soul has already punished TTV Dhinakaran (also spelled as Dinakaran) by the EC verdict and the people of RK Nagar will also punish him in the bypoll," he claimed, referring to the sidelined party leader.
He reiterated that the recent death of software engineer Raghupathy in Coimbatore was not caused by an arch put up for Sunday's function but claimed it was due to a lorry.
Raghupathy had died on 25 November after falling off his bike after allegedly hitting a wooden structure erected for the MGR centenary and run over by a heavy vehicle.
Criticising erection of arches and banners for the MGR centenary, Stalin had said the state government should take responsibility for the accident.
Seeking to turn the tables on Stalin, Palanisamy referred to the decorations made for Tamil 'Semmozhi' conference held in Coimbatore during the DMK regime in 2010.
A few photographs of the arches and cutouts allegedly put up then were shown on a digital screen on the stage.
"When we put up banners they cannot digest, but we have to tolerate, if they do it," he claimed.
Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan was in the state capital when family members of fishermen hit by Cyclone Ockhi spent day and night in the battered coast just 10-15 kilometres away, waiting and praying for the return of their kith and kin.
But he stepped out of his air-conditioned office only on the fourth day, that too after the Bharatiya Janata Party played their cards deftly and brought defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Minister of State for Tourism Alphons Kannanthanam to the state to take stock of the situation.
The fisherfolk, who were waiting for him for three days to know the steps taken by the state government to save their kith and kin, battling high waves in the sea, gave vent to their anger and anguish at him when he finally visited Vizhinjam, one of the worst-hit areas, on Sunday.
Pinarayi beat a hasty retreat when the agitated residents mobbed his car and blocked him from moving ahead for nearly five minutes. He abandoned his official car and further visits to the other areas and left the place in the car of one of his ministerial colleagues.
State tourism and cooperation minister Kadakampally Surendran, who is in-charge of the capital district, and fisheries minister Mercykutty Amma were the only two ministers to visit the affected areas till then. Both of them also faced the fury of the fisherfolk.
While the tourism minister faced flak for his aerial surveillance of the havoc from a helicopter and then posting a selfie on his Facebook page, the fisheries minister invited the wrath of the fisherfolk for undermining their protests.
Revenue minister and state disaster management authority (SDMA) vice-chairman E Chandrashekharan, who is supposed to coordinate the rescue and relief efforts, was seen nowhere in the picture even when the storm battered the coast and displaced hundreds of fishing families and destroyed their houses.
Though he accompanied the chief minister on Sunday, the district collector and the members of the SDMA, who come under him, have remained elusive.
The chief minister and his colleagues have been claiming that the government was doing everything possible to save the fishermen stranded in the sea. But the hapless fisherfolk did not believe them. They have enough reasons not to trust the state government, which let down the fishermen by not acting on the weather alerts that they received from the meteorological department and other agencies.
"We are ready to forgive the government authorities for their initial lapse. But we cannot let them off the hook for their failure to make effective use of the official machinery in rescuing the fishermen who ventured into the sea without knowing what awaited them," said Poonthura St Thomas Church vicar Fr Justin Judin, who is coordinating the local relief efforts.
He told Firstpost that lives of many who perished in the sea could have been saved if the navy, air force and the coast guard were pressed into action immediately after the state government realised that the storm that lashed the coasts was, in fact, a cyclone. Though the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) had issued three alerts from 29 November, the government took cognisance of only the third alert at 12 noon on 30 November.
Even after the confirmation, the authorities wasted considerable time in putting their acts together. While the state government was caught in a blame game with the IMD over the delay in cyclone warning, the central agencies groped in the dark in the absence of proper directions. The coast guard, a multi-mission organisation tasked with round-the-year real-life operations at sea, remained frightened by the turbulent sea.
They launched the rescue operation the next day when Ockhi started moving towards Lakshadweep islands. But precious time was lost by then. The fishermen who had gone to sea prior to the storm on 29 November and before that had exhausted fuel, food and water. Many of them could not be located by the time the ships and aircraft were deployed.
"The fishermen who returned from the sea knew the location and they came forward to help the agencies, the government refused to involve them in the operation. A decision to take the fishermen along with the government search teams was finally taken only in the afternoon on 3 December," said Fr Justin.
But before that, fishermen themselves ventured into the sea in search of their colleagues. Fifty-five boats equipped with fuel, food, GPS, life jackets and other gadgets have left the coast at Vizhinjam and Poonthura. The priest said that the government had not given any assistance to the fishermen, who dared to confront the turbulent sea.
"According to our information, 96 fishermen are still trapped at sea. We are not sure whether our search team will be able to bring them alive. It will be a big consolation even if they bring the dead bodies of the fishermen," he added.
Thrissur district Congress committee chief TN Prathapan, who was one of the first to visit the affected areas, said that he had informed the government about the gravity of the situation and pleaded before them to act immediately. However, the government woke up to the situation only the next day. He told Firstpost that even the response was half-hearted.
"When a tsunami hit Kerala in 2006, the then chief minister Oommen Chandy and many of his cabinet colleagues rushed to the affected areas and camped there till relief operations were completed. The cabinet had also held a special meeting there and took on-the-spot decisions to provide relief to the victims. In the present case, not even a minister was deployed to coordinate the search and rescue operations," he said.
"The government could at least post a senior officer for the coordination. Only two sub-collectors and a tehsildar were posted to deal with the situation. Many of the decisions they took in consultation with the local residents could not be implemented," Prathapan added.
He said there was absolutely no system to inform the families of the fishermen about the search and rescue operations. A control room was set up at Thiruvananthapuram only on the fourth day. But it had no reliable data about the missing fishermen and those who were rescued.
Though many fishermen from the state had landed in Maharashtra, Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu and Lakshadweep, none of them have been identified so far, let alone making arrangements for bringing them back to the state. A team to be sent to Maharashtra was constituted only on Sunday.
BJP Thiruvananthapuram district president advocate S Suresh said that the government had also failed in providing adequate food to hundreds of people shifted to relief camps. Though the SDMA is flush with funds, the government could provide only bread and plantain fruit to the people in the relief camp.
The government, which is pressing the Centre to declare Cyclone Ockhi as a national disaster, should first declare the SDMA as a disaster and disband it, the BJP leader said.
Washington: Amid a rush of weekend tweets taking aim at targets old and new, President Donald Trump criticised the FBI and raised questions about the special prosecutor's investigation into Russian election meddling and possible ties to his campaign.
The Twitter storm more than a dozen tweets through Saturday and Sunday came after his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
In one message, Trump denied that he directed FBI director James Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
Trump questioned the direction of the federal law enforcement agency and wrote that after Comey, who Trump fired in May, the FBI's reputation is "in tatters worst in history". He vowed to "bring it back to greatness". The president also retweeted a post saying new FBI director Chris Wray "needs to clean house".
After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Former attorney general Eric Holder tweeted in response, "Nope. Not letting this go. The FBI's reputation is not in 'tatters'. It's composed of the same dedicated men and women who have always worked there and who do a great, apolitical job. You'll find integrity and honesty at FBI headquarters and not at 1600 Penn Ave right now."
Trump seized on reports that a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent was removed from special prosecutor Robert Mueller's team last summer after the discovery of an exchange of text messages that were viewed as potentially anti-Trump.
The agent, Peter Strzok, had also worked on the investigation of Democrat Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, said Strzok was removed from the team "immediately upon learning of the allegations".
He would not elaborate on the nature of the accusations. The person who discussed the matter with The Associated Press was not authorised to speak about it by name and spoke on condition of anonymity. Trump tweeted on Sunday, "Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI 'agent's role in Clinton probe under review.' Led Clinton Email probe."
Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI agents role in Clinton probe under review. Led Clinton Email probe. @foxandfriends Clinton money going to wife of another FBI agent in charge. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
In a separate tweet, he wrote:
Report: ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE Now it all starts to make sense! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Strzok's removal almost certainly reflected a desire to insulate the investigators from any claims of political bias or favoritism. Trump and many of his supporters have at times sought to discredit the integrity of the investigation, in part by claiming a close relationship between Mueller and Comey and by pointing to political contributions to Democrats made by some lawyers on the team.
Following the tweets, Senator Lindsey Graham warned the president to tread cautiously. "You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril. I'd be careful if I were you, Mr President. I'd watch this," Graham said.
On Saturday, Trump tweeted that he "had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the vice-president and the FBI". He has pleaded guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2017
The tweet suggested that Trump was aware when the White House dismissed Flynn on 13 February that he had lied to the FBI, which had interviewed him weeks earlier. Comey has said Trump the following day brought up the Flynn investigation in private at the White House and told him he hoped he could "let this go".
With questions raised by the tweet, Trump associates tried to put distance on Saturday evening between the president himself and the tweet. Trump's personal lawyer John Dowd told ABC News that he drafted the tweet and gave it to the president's social media director Dan Scavino.
Dowd had declined to comment when reached by the AP on Saturday night.
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the panel is beginning to see "the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice" against Trump.
"I think we see this in indictments... and some of the comments that are being made. I see this in the hyperfrenetic attitude of the White House, the comments every day, the continual tweets," Feinstein said. "And I see it most importantly in what happened with the firing of Director Comey, and it is my belief that that is directly because he did not agree to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation. That's obstruction of justice."
Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said given that Mueller could have charged Flynn with more crimes but instead limited it to just one offence. "Bob Mueller must have concluded that he was getting a lot of value in terms of Gen. Flynn's cooperation," he said.
"I do believe he will incriminate others in the administration. Otherwise, there was no reason for Bob Mueller to give Mike Flynn this kind of deal," Schiff said, adding, "Whether that will ultimately lead to the president, I simply don't know."
Feinstein spoke on NBC's Meet the Press, Graham spoke on CBS Face the Nation, and Schiff spoke on ABC's This Week.
Lawngtlai: In a contradiction of its own policy, the Indian government has allowed over 1,300 tribal Buddhist refugees from Myanmar's Rakhine region to enter Mizoram. The refugees left their homeland because of the ongoing war between the Myanmarese Army and the Arakan Army, made up of Buddhist insurgents.
This comes nearly a month after the Union Home Ministry had directed the northeastern states to take strict measures to prevent Rohingyas who are Muslims from entering Indian territory despite persecution by the Myanmar regime.
The new group of refugees, belonging to the Chin and few other communities of Myanmar, have come to four villages in Lawngtlai district.
According to sources in the Mizoram government, the administration is struggling hard to bring down the rising tensions among the refugees and the residents of Laitlang, Dumzautlang, Hmawngbuchhuah and Zochachhuah villages.
According to the state administration, the refugees are being taken care of on humanitarian grounds as all of them came to escape clashes back home.
"It's been some six days since these refugees have arrived on Mizoram territory. They currently are in four villages of the Lawngtlai district and are put up at shelter homes, Buddhist homes, temples and many other places," T Arun, Deputy Commissioner of Lawngtlai, told IANS over the phone.
He emphasised that the security threat in such a situation cannot be denied.
"We basically have two rules one relating to national security and other related to humanitarian assistance. Under the humanitarian rules we are providing food as we do not want any starvation deaths. We also have to guard against the outbreak of diseases," said Arun.
Additional police, health workers and doctors have also been deployed not just to keep a vigil on the new arrivals but also to keep a check on their health condition.
"The problem is that the population of each of the villages is just 200-400. The arrival of such a large number of people is a matter of serious concern," said Arun.
Mizoram's police chief emphasised that though they won't immediately term the arrival of the refugees a security threat, they are waiting for the situation in Myanmar to normalise so that they could be sent back.
"We won't call it a security threat at this juncture. They were alllowed into Indian territory due to the ongoing fighting in Myanmar. We are taking care of it and police forces are there. However, we are making sure there won't be any problem for the villagers due to the refugees. They have been confined to the four villages," Director General of Police Thianghlima Pachuau told IANS over the phone.
The current crisis in Myanmar comes nearly two months after the Myanmar Army had launched operations against the Rohingyas in Rakhine province. While the conflict led to more than 6,00,000 Rohingyas fleeing to Bangladesh, the United Nations Human Rights Commission called the strike by the Myanmar Army "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing".
The Indian government has taken measures, including asking the states in the region to seal their borders with Mayanmar, to prevent Rohingya refugees from entering the country.
Myanmar, the only Southeast Asian country which shares a 1,600-mile-long border with India, serves as its gateway to the other member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Four northeastern states Arunachal Pradesh (520 km), Manipur (398 km), Nagaland (215 km) and Mizoram (510 km) have an unfenced border with Myanmar.
Experts on Indo-Myanmar relations see the current influx as a temporary matter that is different from the Rohingyas issue.
"This is an issue that has emerged in the last few months. The arrival of Buddhist refugees is certainly a matter of concern as it affects people on the Indian side as well. However, this is different from Rohingyas," Khriezo Yhome, senior Research fellow at Observer Research Foundation and an expert on Indo-Myanmar affairs, told IANS.
According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees there are around 21,500 Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers in India. The central government, though, has sent a clear message that it would not be willing to accept them "because of security concerns".
The Supreme Court on 13 October asked the Centre to strike a balance between national security, economic interests and humanitarian considerations with regard to Rohingya women, children, old, sick and infirm
Srinagar: Militants attacked an army convoy in Qazigund area of Anantnag district in Jammu and Kashmir, leaving one soldier injured, ANI reported.
#Visuals from #JammuAndKashmir: One Army Jawan injured as encounter continues between terrorists and Army in Qazigund (visuals deferred by unspecified time) pic.twitter.com/7C4mFtKW0N ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2017
However, The Hindu reported that two soldiers were injured in the attack.
A police official said security forces have cordoned off the area and launched a hunt for the militants.
Further details are awaited.
The incident comes a month after a similar attack was carried out in south Kashmir's Pulwama district, when one policeman was killed after militants attacked a patrol party.
The deceased was among two personnel who sustained injuries during the attack.
The injured constables Abdul Salam and Munir Ahmad were rushed to a hospital for treatment and their condition was stated to be stable.
However, one of them died later.
With inputs from PTI
Jammu/New Delhi: On 10 September, as the police lined up 10 Muslim Rohingya refugees in a police station on the outskirts of Jammu and lashed them with a stick and a belt, they had only one question: "Who killed the cow?" multiple refugees, including a minor boy who was detained, told IANS.
"We were crying and told the police that we did not do it, but they kept beating us for about 15 minutes," Hamid Hussain, 29, recalled about his second day in police detention.
Twelve Rohingya refugees -- including two women with breastfeeding infants - were detained in Channi Himmat Police Station in south Jammu, for durations ranging from four to 11 days, and the men were allegedly beaten up by police.
A cow's carcass had been found in an empty parcel of land near the Rohingya refugees settlement in Channi Rama in south Jammu. BJP members protested against the killing of the cow.
The detention and brutality that followed were confirmed to IANS by three persons detained by the police, community leaders, neighbours, and family members of two out of three refugees currently in jail for allegedly killing the cow.
"On the second day, police made us sit on the floor and stretch our legs. Then they hit us on our legs, back and hands with a stick and a belt," a scraggy-bearded Hussain said. "They tortured us a lot."
The refugees, who were let off by the police after periods ranging allegedly from "96 to 264 hours", said that they were "never produced in a court". A person cannot be detained for more than 24 hours and must be produced before a magistrate, according to the Code of Criminal Procedure.
"The infants were crying a lot in the police station," said 16-year-old Sayed Noor, who claimed to have been detained for eight days. "One was only four days old."
Vimla, 35, a Hindu woman, who stays in the same plot from where the Rohingya refugees were arrested, said the police asked her to come to the police station. "But we said that we are Hindu, how can we come? The police then told us to go back to sleep and left," Vimla said outside her shack. "I never went to the police station."
Rohingya refugees, termed as one of the "world's most persecuted minorities", have been facing military brutality in Myanmar, with the UN urging the government to end the "cruel military operation".
More than 8,00,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar in the last five years as a result of violence, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and there are around 21,500 Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers in India.
Jammu, with a large refugee population, has been witnessing protests by the BJP and the Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party (JKNPP) to "identify and deport Rohingya refugees".
Noor Hussain is one of the boys who, with others, was taken into custody by policemen as they stepped outside their mosque -- without any explanation. "Before I reached the jeep, an officer slapped me on the cheek," Noor said, adding "he appeared drunk."
The 16-year-old said that at night "they put us in the lock-up and bolted it from outside".
Stuck on the white wall of Channi Himmat Police Station is a list of rules. One of them reads: "Do not take a child/juvenile into police custody or keep them in police station at night."
Hamida Begum, 30, said she and another woman were detained for four days. "I had my seven-month-old son and the other woman had her new born baby girl with her," she said.
Kushnama, 20, wife of Noorullah, 22, one of the three Rohingya refugees currently in jail, said: "I do not have money to get him out (on bail) or to even visit him in the jail."
Mustaq Ahmad, 51, a Muslim from the Gujjar community, whose cow was found dead on September 9, said that within hours, a crowd, including hundreds of members of the "Shiva Sena and BJP", blocked the nearby highway blaming Rohingya refugees for "killing the cow".
When asked whether he saw any refugee killing his cow, Ahmed said "No", adding: "Who else would do it? It happened right next to where they live."
BJP's Jammu legal cell member, Hunar Gupta, also confirmed to IANS that "local BJP leaders had blocked the highway" in protest. In February, Gupta had filed a PIL for deportation of Rohingya refugees from Jammu.
The SHO of the Channi Himmat Police Station, Sajjad Mir, confirmed that many people were called in for questioning, but claimed that "they were sent back and not detained".
"If I get a chance, I want to ask the police: Why did you take him?" Kushnama said in her weak voice from under her burqa. "Every day I think he will come back today."
Thiruvananthpuram: Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Sunday faced a protest from a group of fishermen when he visited nearby Vizhinjam to express solidarity with the community affected by Cyclone Ockhi.
As Vijayan came out of a local church to board his car, a group of men tried to block his way.
Some of them raised slogans protesting alleged government apathy toward their ordeals in the wake of the cyclone, which has claimed 19 lives in rain-related incidents in the state and left several fishermen stranded at sea.
Several of the missing fishermen hailed from Vizhinjam.
Police had a tough time removing the protesters. Vijayan later left the place along with Tourism Minister Kadakampally Surendran.
Earlier, while interacting with fishermen at another place in Vizhinjam, the chief minister said the government shared the concern of the fishing community.
"We can expect good tidings. Our effort is to locate the remaining missing fishermen," he said.
Protests were witnessed elsewhere in some coastal areas including Alappuzha and Chellanam in Ernakulam district over the alleged delay in rescuing the fishermen.
Some of the protesters squatted on rail tracks and were removed by police.
Srinagar: Relatives of Kashmiri prisoners who were allegedly beaten up in New Delhi's Tihar Jail protested on Sunday, seeking Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti's intervention to immediately shift those inmates to the prisons in the state.
The protest was held at the press enclave in Srinagar. Family members of the Tihar inmates, who hail from the Valley, claimed they were assaulted by personnel of the Tamil Nadu special force on 21 November in the prison.
The protesters said their jailed kin should have access to the rights detailed in the jail manuals till they are shifted to the state. They appealed to the chief minister to visit the jail and ensure the safety and welfare of their kin.
JKLF chairman Mohammad Yasin Malik, who joined the protesters, appealed to international human rights bodies to intervene.
The union home ministry has sought a report from the director general of the Tihar jail in the wake of reports that a scuffle involving Kashmiri prisoners took place in the prison, leading to injuries.
Mufti had on 28 November spoken to union home secretary Rajiv Gauba and asked him to intervene in the matter. The Union home secretary had assured the chief minister of a thorough probe into the incident and punishing the culprits for having violated the jail manual
Kolkata: Three days after a minor girl was allegedly sexually abused inside a south Kolkata school by two physical training (PT) teachers, parents and guardians of students on Sunday held a sit-in protest demanding their children's security and arrest of the school's principal.
The agitating parents first blocked the road near the school premises in south Kolkata's Ranikuthi and then marched to Tollygunj where they held the sit in. The protesters were joined by several parents of students from other prominent schools in the city.
The four-year-old girl was allegedly sexually assaulted by two PT teachers inside a washroom in in the high-profile GD Birla Centre For Education on Thursday. Both the accused have already been arrested under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act and sent to two days of police custody till Monday.
On Sunday afternoon, the father of the victim lodged a police complaint against the school's principal, claiming that she tried to cover up the issue and indirectly supported the crime.
"We have lodged a police complaint against the principal. This is not the first time that such an incident has taken place in her school, it has happened before as well. In spite of knowing the incident, the principal initially did not take any steps against the criminals," said the lawyer appointed by the victim's family.
"The principal should be arrested because she supported the crime instead of reporting it to police. She tried to cover up the issue. So she has a part in the crime," she added.
Amid demands from the guardians to remove all the male teachers and teaching staff from school, education minister Partha Chatterjee said it is better not to have male teachers in girls' schools.
"Be it any school, I feel it is better not to have male teachers in girl's school. There are many school buses for girls which do not have any female attendants. This should not happen," he said.
The agitating parents carried banners and placards condemning the assault on the minor girl. They created a massive road graffiti of a child student asking for her security, as a symbolic protest to the incident of sexual assault.
"The schools would have to ensure their children's security and make sure no such untoward incident takes place in the future," one of the parents demanded.
They also warned that the school would not be allowed to operate till the principal resigned, taking responsibility for the incident.
Police appealed to the agitators to remove the blockade and suggested they hold a meeting with the school's management committee to resolve the disputes.
"We have proposed to the guardians and the representatives of the students' forum to sit in a meeting with the management and other stakeholders and place their demands there. That would help resolve the disputes," said Rupesh Kumar, deputy commissioner of Kolkata police's south suburban division.
Meanwhile the school issued a notice saying the junior as well as the senior sections will remain closed from Monday. The notice also said the school has removed the two arrested physical training teachers from duty.
Guwahati: Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu on Sunday said the media was supposed to avoid sensationalism, report news without colouring with views and appealed them to create awareness about the challenges confronting the nation.
The media must always be free, fair and objective to champion the cause of the underdogs, he said while addressing the gathering after giving away Pratidin Achievers Awards 2017 in Guwahati.
"Unfortunately, there is an increasing tendency in the newsrooms of the print and electronic media to sensationalise isolated incidents while relegating real hard news to the background. In the long run, this will not only cause damage to the credibility of media but will harm democracy itself as media will not be able to perform its role of an independent watchdog," he said, according to an official statement.
While appreciating Pratidin Group for recognising excellence in different fields, he made an appeal that "such media houses to conduct campaigns and competitions on issues such as Swachh Bharat to promote awareness on cleanliness and sanitation".
"Maybe, its TV channel must encourage the cleanest mohalla or locality by giving wide coverage. Such promotional coverage will not only help in creating awareness but also inspire others to follow suit," he said.
The vice president also said that awareness should also be created on fighting various challenges confronting the nation such as growing atrocities on women, dangers of drug and alcohol addiction, casteism, religious fundamentalism, corruption, illiteracy and terrorism.
"Increasing depiction of violence, vulgarity and obscenity in cinema is another area of concern which needs to be highlighted by the media," he said.
Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh Assembly unanimously passed a bill awarding death to those found guilty of raping girls aged 12 and below.
With the passage of the bill, Madhya Pradesh becomes the first state in the country where those convicted of such rapes will face the gallows.
Introduced in the House by Law and Legislative Affairs Minister Rampal Singh, the bill was discussed in detail and then passed by all parties, including the ruling BJP and Opposition Congress.
The bill will now be sent to the president for his assent after which it will become a law, state Home Minister Bhupendra Singh told reporters outside the Assembly.
"It was a historic day for Madhya Pradesh as the state Assembly, as per the wish of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, passed a bill making a provision to award capital punishment to those indulging in such crimes (raping girls aged 12 or younger)," Singh said.
Capital punishment will be awarded to convicts under section 376 (A), which is related to rape, and section 376 (D, A), pertaining to gang rape.
Welcoming the bill, Chouhan said, "There are people in society who can be set right only by severe punishments. It (the legislation) will deal with them. We will also raise awareness in society against such crimes."
Aizawl: The administration of southern Mizoram's Lawngtlai district has started the process to register the over 1,600 Myanmarese nationals who had taken refuge in four remote villages in the district, an official said on Monday.
After the refugees are registered with the district administration, they would be given temporary ration cards for food distribution among them, the official said.
More than 300 quintals of rice had already arrived in the four villages, situated along the Mizoram-Myanmar border to be distributed among the refugees, he said.
Makeshift relief camps in the villages were being constructed for the refugees.
The official said that the refugees who took shelter in the four villages Hmawngbuchhuah, Zochachhuah, Laitlang and Dumzautlang belonged to Khumi and Rakhine province of Myanmar, known to the local populace inside Mizoram as 'Zakhai', tribes.
Central committee of the Young Lai Association (YLA), the apex body of the Lai tribe in Lawngtlai district had distributed blankets and garments to the displaced people on Friday.
Mizoram Thalai Kristian Pawl (MTKP) the youth wing of the Baptist Church of Mizoram also handed over Rs 50,000 to the central committee of the YLA for the purchase of relief items.
The exodus of civilians from Myanmar to Lawngtlai district began on 25 November last after armed clashes between the Myanmar Army and the Arakan militants.
Mumbai: The Mumbai police has decided to set up a dedicated cyber cell at each of its police stations to curb rising technology-related cases in the city, a senior police official said on Monday.
Akbar Pathan, deputy commissioner of police, cyber crime cell, said that the cells will be fully functional at all police stations from 9 December.
All the cyber related cases, except the complicated ones which need technical expertise, will be dealt by the police station cells, Pathan said. The cell will comprise a police inspector, two sub-inspectors and two to three constables, he added.
The victim can lodge his or her case at the cyber cell of the police station concerned instead of approaching the cyber police station at Bandra, the official said.
Police said that a five day-long training programme commenced today to make the personnel who will be part of the dictated cell adept in dealing with such crimes. "Besides theoretical knowledge, the training will emphasise on providing practical knowledge. From making post-investigation seizures to which sections of the IT Act to be applied, they will be imparted training on a wide range of aspects," Pathan said.
Cyber Cell expert, Vijay Mukhi, termed the move as a positive one and said that it will help in dealing with basic crimes related to information technology.
The recently-released National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report titled "Crime in India 2016" had put Mumbai first among 19 big cities nationwide in the number of cyber crime case registered. Mumbai saw 4,172 cases reported for the year 2016 followed by Bengaluru with 762 cases and Jaipur with 532 cases.
The National Crime Records Bureau's (NCRB) recently-released 'Crime in India' report for 2016 has been followed by a flurry of news articles shedding light on various dimensions of it. Several of the news reports have given places monikers such as 'rape capital,' 'crime capital' (Delhi) and 'hotbed of criminals' (Kerala) based on registration of crimes. But although such phrases can make for eye-catching headlines, they tend to mislead more than inform.
Of course, there is no doubt that data on registration of crimes serves an important purpose to get a sense of the extent of criminal activity (or allegations of criminal activity) in a particular jurisdiction. But data is prone to varying interpretations, and statements based on data often ignore how the numbers are arrived at.
For instance, if we go by registration of crimes by law enforcement authorities, Sweden recorded as many as thirty times the number of offences as India, as pointed out by this BBC report. Further, Sweden and New Zealand have among the highest rates of rape cases in the world, as per an analysis by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). While Sweden recorded 40.6 incidents of rape per 1,00,000 population, India reported 1.7 incidents per 1,00,000 population. Can this data be cited to claim that India is less prone to crime and safer for women than Sweden? That would be quite a stretch.
The above argument was an extreme one meant to highlight the broader point. But there are similar, less dramatic examples closer home. For instance, in 2007, actor Amitabh Bachchan had been the subject of much criticism after he appeared in an advertisement for the Uttar Pradesh government proclaiming 'UP mein hai dum, kyunki jurm yahan hai kam.' That advertisement was based on data by the NCRB. Again, Uttar Pradesh is not exactly known for being an exemplar of law and order, but statistics may not necessarily reflect this.
At an international level, these statistics can be further complicated because legal positions on what constitutes a crime differ widely between countries. For instance, cow slaughter is legal in many countries in the world, but is illegal in most of India. On the other hand, marital rape is a crime in many countries, but is not defined as such in India. But even within the country, different legal positions can affect statistics. For example, Maharashtra invokes the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) against sand miners, while Tamil Nadu files cases under the Mines and Minerals Act for the same act.
However, the problem is not just one involving statistics and questionable advertisements. Depending on how the figures are interpreted, the police can be motivated to either register or not register criminal cases when victims approach them with a complaint. As it is, the police force in India is severely understaffed. India's ratio of police personnel to public is a mere 138 per one lakh population, the fifth lowest among 71 countries surveyed by the UNODC, as reported by the Economic Times. This acts as a huge motivator for the police to register fewer cases, in order to keep its own workload relatively manageable. Over and above that, if cities or states are labelled as 'crime capital' or 'unsafe' based on the number of FIRs, then it only has the effect of accentuating the pressure on the law enforcement agencies.
A major success of the civil society agitation after the Delhi gangrape of 16 December, 2012 was the emphasis laid on the police registering cases and not turning away victims who come to them with a complaint. From 2011 to 2012, there was a 3 percent increase in reported cases of rape in India, as per an analysis by Factly. However, from 2012 to 2013, the corresponding figure was 35 percent. It would be difficult not to attribute this increase at least partly to increased public awareness and increased alacrity on the part of the police towards responding to sexual crimes.
So, while we go about mining data for trends on crime in the country, we would do ourselves and law enforcement agencies a favour if we steer clear of misleading labels for cities and states.
ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (Reuters) - Pope Francis on Saturday defended his strategy of avoiding the term Rohingya in Myanmar, saying he believed he got his message across to both the civilian and military leadership without shutting down dialogue. Speaking to reporters aboard the plane returning to Rome from Bangladesh, the pontiff also indicated that he had been firm with Myanmars military leaders in private meetings about the need for them to respect the rights of Rohingya refugees. He also disclosed that he cried when he met a group of Rohingya refugees on Friday in Bangladesh, where he defended their rights by name in an emotional meeting. For me, the most important thing is that message gets through, to try to say things one step at a time and listen to the responses, he said. I knew that if in the official speeches I would have used that word, they would have closed the door in our faces. But (in public) I described situations, rights, said that no one should be excluded, (the right to) citizenship, in order to allow myself to go further in the private meetings, he said. Francis did not use the word Rohingya in public while on the first leg of the trip in Myanmar. Predominantly Buddhist Myanmar does not recognise the mostly Muslim Rohingya as an ethnic group with its own identity but as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Local Roman Catholic Church authorities had advised him not to say it because it could spark a backlash against Christians and other minority groups. The pope met Myanmars military leaders privately on Monday, shortly after his arrival in the nations biggest city, Yangon. The meeting had been scheduled for Thursday morning but the military pointedly asked at the last minute that it be pushed forward. The result was they saw the pope before the civilian leaders instead of the other way around, as had been planned. NON-NEGOTIABLE TRUTHS It was a good conversation and the truth was non-negotiable, he said of his meeting with the military leaders. Pope Francis waves from his vehicle as he travels to the airport in Yangon, Myanmar November 30, 2017. REUTERS/Jorge SilvaThe latest exodus from Myanmar to Bangladesh of about 625,000 people followed a Myanmar military crackdown in response to Rohingya militant attacks on an army base and police posts on Aug. 25. Refugees have said scores of Rohingya villages were burnt to the ground, people were killed and women were raped. The military have denied accusations of ethnic cleansing by the United States and United Nations. Asked if he used the word Rohingya during the private meeting with the military chiefs, the pope said: I used words in order to arrive at the message and when I saw that the message had arrived, I dared to say everything that I wanted say. Slideshow (2 Images)He then gave a reporter a mischievous grin and ended his answer with the Latin phrase Intelligenti Pauca, which means Few words are enough for those who understand, strongly hinting that he had used the word the military detests while in their presence. Human rights groups have criticised the countrys de facto civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was under house arrest for a total of 15 years before the 2015 elections, for not taking a stand against the generals. But Francis, who met with her privately on Tuesday, appeared to give her the benefit of the doubt because of her delicate relationship with the generals who were once her jailers. Myanmar is a nation that is growing politically, in transition, Francis said in response to a question about Suu Kyi and budding democracy in Myanmar. So things have to be viewed through this lens. Myanmar has to be able to look forward to the building of the country. On Friday in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, Francis held an emotional encounter with Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and then used the word Rohingya for the first time on the trip, although he had defended them by name twice from the Vatican earlier this year. He told the crowd where the Rohingya were that Gods presence was within them and they should be respected. I was crying and tried to hide it, Francis said on the plane, recounting how moved he felt when the refugees recounted their ordeals to him.
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
The father of the Ryan International School student who was murdered in his school on 8 September, has moved the Supreme Court seeking measures to improve the safety of school students in the country, news reports said.
Barun Chandra Thakur, the father of the schoolboy, has filed a petition in the apex court asking it to direct authorities to frame guidelines to ensure the safety of school students, DNA reported. Along with Thakur, lawyer Abha Singh and other lawyers have also filed petitions in the Supreme Court, according to Dainik Jagran.
Meanwhile, Supreme Court judge Justice AM Khanwilkar has recused himself from hearing the matter of framing the guidelines, ANI reported. Earlier, Justice UU Lalit had recused himself from hearing an appeal filed by Varun Thakur seeking cancellation of anticipatory bail granted to three trustees of the Ryan International group.
The murder of the seven-year-old in Gurugram had caused nationwide outrage and brought the spotlight on the safety of school students in the country.
After the murder, school bus conductor Ashok Kumar was initially arrested by the Haryana Police in connection with the crime. However, subsequent investigations revealed the possible involvement of a juvenile in the murder. After the juvenile a ClassXI was apprehended on 8 November, he reportedly admitted to his involvement in the crime. However, only days later, he retracted his confession. saying that he was beaten him and forced him to confess. He also claimed that investigators recorded the confession in their own words.
On 1 December, the father of the juvenile had filed plea in court against the three-day custody of his son given to the Central Bureau of Investigation by the Juvenile Justice Board. The father had contended that the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 states that a minor cannot be put in jail under any circumstances. However, the child's father said he will challenge the petition in court.
The murder has also led to a political war of words in Haryana. Praduyman's father had alleged Haryana minister Rao Narbir Singh asked him not to insist on a CBI probe in the case. The minister, however, dismissed the claim as "baseless".
Later, former Haryana chief minister and Congress leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda said the state government should have handed over the probe to the CBI immediately. Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala also hit out at the Haryana government, saying its role in the case stood "exposed".
With inputs from PTI
A 20-year-old student of Hyderabad's Osmania University allegedly committed suicide on Saturday by hanging himself, triggering protests on campus.
E Murali, a first-year student of MSc Physics at the university, was found hanging in the washroom of one of the hostels on the campus on Saturday evening, a senior police official said.
A suicide note was found from the scene, purportedly written by Murali, stating that he did not want to fail in his exams, police said.
"I am unable to continue my studies. The exams are around the corner and I am scared that I will fail. I never wanted to fail in exams. Therefore, I have decided to end my life," Murali wrote in his suicide note, according to The Times of India report.
Police added that the student appeared to be depressed over the matter, and said further investigations were on.
After learning about Murali's death, a large number of students gathered near the hostel. The Times of India report added that unemployement was cited as a reason for the suicide by the student leaders.
The university students, according to Hindustan Times, suspected that the suicide note was fake, since the handwriting in the note did not match with Murali's.
"He was depressed as there was unusual delay in the issuance of job notifications by the Telangana government. The K Chandrasekhara Rao government should be held responsible for his death," K Manavatha Rai, president of the Unemployed Youth Association, was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times.
Rai told ANI that the state government was responsible for Murali's suicide. He said the government should give Rs 50 lakh as compensation to Murali's family or else the student organisation would not allow the police to shift his body from the hostel.
On Sunday, when university vice-chancellor S Ramchandram arrived outside Murali's hostel room, students started demanding justice for the 20-year-old boy, and chanted slogans like "KCR, down down", said Deccan Chronicle report.
Students also reportedly alleged that the state government hadn't heeded their repeated pleas to provide employment.
With inputs from PTI
New Delhi: The influx of Rohingya and Bangladeshis and cross-border smuggling of fake currencies and drugs would top the agenda at a meeting of chief ministers of eastern states called by home minister Rajnath Singh on 7 December in Kolkata.
The chief ministers and home ministers of West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram will huddle for the day-long meeting where the influx of Rohingya and Bangladeshi immigrants and how to check it would be discussed threadbare, a home ministry official said.
These states share their borders with Bangladesh. This would be the fourth meeting of the chief ministers of states, which share international borders, called by the home minister. Three separate meetings of chief ministers of states, sharing borders with Pakistan, China and Myanmar, was held earlier.
The meeting in Kolkata on 7 December is expected to chalk out plans on how to check the cross-border smuggling of fake Indian currency notes, narcotics and other illegal activities, the official said.
India shares a 4,096 kilometre long border with Bangladesh of which 2,217 kilometre falls in West Bengal, 262 kilometre in Assam, 443 kilometre in Meghalaya, 856 kilometre in Tripura and 180 kilometre in Mizoram.
As per the official estimate, around 36,000 Rohingyas are currently living in various parts of India.
Director General of BSF KK Sharma had last week said his troops apprehended 87 Rohingya Muslims along the Indo-Bangla border from the beginning of this year till 31 October, and 76 were sent back to Bangladesh.
As per latest estimates, 9-10 lakh Rohingya Muslims have migrated to Bangladesh from Myanmar and the possibility of a spillover to India cannot be ruled out, he had said.
Illegal immigration from Bangladesh has also been a big concern for the north-eastern states and West Bengal for many years now, another home ministry official said.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the execution of death sentence of 1993 Mumbai bomb blast convict Taher Mohammed Merchant who was found guilty on different counts including hatching conspiracy and waging war against the nation.
Merchant, along with Feroze Abdul Rashid Khan, was given the death sentence after being convicted along with underworld don Abu Salem. However, the latter escaped the capital punishment because of conditions surrounding his extradition from Portugal.
"There shall be stay of the execution of death sentence," said a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice Ashok Bhushan and Justice Mohan M Shantanagoudar, directing the supply of the order's copy to the Central Bureau of Investigation and listing the matter for hearing on 14 March next year.
The court also directed its registry to call for the lower court records and ordered Maharashtra to "compile the evidence in entirety and file the compilation in convenient volumes" and also serve a copy thereof to Merchant's counsel.
On 7 September this year, a special Terrorist and Disruptive Activity (TADA) court had sentenced Merchant and Feroze Abdul Rashid Khan to death.
Besides Abu Salem, the TADA court had sent Karimullah Khan to jail for life and Riyaz Siddiqui to 10 years rigorous imprisonment.
The court had found them guilty on various counts including murder, hatching a criminal conspiracy to carry out the blasts, waging a war against the nation, supplying arms and ammunition, and other serious offences.
The capital punishments were given in the second part of the Mumbai blasts trial. The earlier part of the trial, completed in 2007, saw 100 people being convicted which included Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt and prime accused Tiger Memon.
Dutt, who was convicted for illegal possession of arms but acquitted of the other serious charges, has since completed his six-year sentence while Memon is absconding.
As news of actor Shashi Kapoor's death was shared by several on micro-blogging site Twitter, news channel Times Now became the butt of all jokes when they tweeted out this:
"Filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar remembering Shashi Tharoor on his sad demise said he is one producer who got parallel cinema on the front."
The goof didn't go unnoticed as soon the channel was trolled for mistakenly saying 'Tharoor' instead of Kapoor.
ANI journalist Nishant Singh noticed this error and promptly tweeted a screenshot to the Congress leader. To make matters worse for Times Now, Tharoor tweeted at Singh and assured the denizens of Twitter that he was still alive. "We're getting condolence calls in the office! Reports of my demise are, if not exaggerated, at least premature," he quipped.
We're getting condolence calls in the office! Reports of my demise are, if not exaggerated, at least premature. @TimesNow #ShashiKapoor https://t.co/nbtZGcdQTa Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017
The erroneous tweet in question was meant to report the demise of veteran actor Shashi Kapoor. The actor breathed his last in Mumbai after battling a prolonged illness.
In fact, Tharoor had tweeted his condolences minutes before the erroneous Times Now tweet. In that tweet as well, he joked that his office got two calls from journalists about his reportedly serious ill-health.
I feel a part of me is gone. A great actor, smart, cosmopolitan, impossibly handsome & w/a name that was often confused w/mine. (My office got two calls from journalists today about my reportedly serious ill-health!) I will miss #ShashiKapoor. Condolences2his family&all his fans pic.twitter.com/fSz3jafPZJ Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017
Times Now apologised for the error, wishing good health to Shashi Tharoor.
Ghazipur : Police have arrested three people in connection with the killing of RSS worker and journalist Rajesh Mishra in Brahmanpura village in Ghazipur, a senior police official said on Monday.
However, gang leader Raju Yadav is still absconding and will be arrested soon, Superintendent of Police Somen Verma said.
"A number of police teams were involved to search the killers. Acting on a tip-off, six miscreants were travelling in two motorcycles on Sunday, police intensified checking," the SP said.
"When the police signalled the bikers to stop, they turned away their motorcycle and started firing. However, one motorcycle lost its balance and the bikers fell and were arrested," he said.
They have been identified as Ajit Yadav and Jhanku Yadav (both residents of Bhabhua district in Bihar) and Sunil Yadav of Chandauli, the SP said. Those who managed to escape are Raju Yadav, Govardhan Yadav and Pawan Yadav, he said.
"Rajesh Mishra used to publish news against Raju Yadav and his gang members, who were involved in illegal mining. On 21 October, Mishra was shot dead by three motorcycle-borne assailants, who also wounded his brother," Verma said.
The assailants, who came brandishing firearms, shot at Mishra, 40, when he and his brother Amitesh were at their shop in Brahmanpura Chatti area in Ghazipur where they sold building material.
Mishra, who was shot in the head, was declared brought dead at the Ghazipur district hospital.
His brother, who was shot in the abdomen, has been referred to a Varanasi hospital for further treatment.
Agartala/New Delhi: A nine-member delegation of Tripura journalists met Union Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office Jitendra Singh on Monday to demand a CBI probe into the murder of two journalists from the state.
The team also plans to hold a demonstration in Delhi on Tuesday in front of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) office, Forum for Protection of Journalists (FFPJ) Convener Pranab Sarkar told IANS over phone from Delhi.
The FFPJ delegation led by veteran editor Subal Kumar Dey would also try to meet President Ram Nath Kovind, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Press Council of India Chairman Justice Chandramauli Kumar Prasad to press for their demand.
"After a series of agitations in Tripura we came to the national capital to press for our demand to protect the media persons in Tripura," Sarkar added.
A local newspaper journalist Sudip Dutta Bhowmik, 50, was shot dead inside the Tripura State Rifles (TSR) 2nd battalion headquarters at Ramchandra Nagar in West Tripura district on 21 November.
Young television journalist Santanu Bhowmik, 28, was hacked to death while he was covering protests of a tribal based political party at Mandai, 25 km from Agartala, on 20 September.
PCI chairman, who is likely to visit the state to study both the incidents, took suo-moto cognizance of the journalists murder cases.
To probe the sensational killings, the state government had earlier constituted two separate Special Investigation Teams (SIT) headed by Deputy Inspector General of Police Arindam Nath and Inspector General of Police (IGP) GS Rao.
The SIT, led by Nath, has so far arrested four TSR personnel, including TSR second battalion Commandant Tapan Debbarma, who is a senior Tripura Police Service (TPS) officer (1998 batch) and waiting for IPS nomination.
In the Bhowmik murder case too, the SIT led by IGP Rao also arrested four youths.
The Congress has demanded a high-level inquiry into the murder. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has demanded a CBI probe and resignation of Chief Minister Manik Sarkar, who also holds the Home portfolio.
Both parties observed a state-wide shutdown on 23 November to protest the killings.
The ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) has criticised the BJP for politicising the journalist's killing.
"State government is on the right track in probing the unfortunate killings," CPM central committee member Gautam Das told the media.
Ayodhya: A Ram temple in Ayodhya will fulfil the dreams of "temple warriors" who had devoted their life to the cause, says a Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader ahead of the 25th anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
The VHP, which is celebrating the demolition anniversary on 6 December as 'Shaurya Diwas', has several special events lined up in Ayodhya and the Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow.
As the group prepares for the day, Ambuj Ojha, co-media in-charge of VHP's Awadh region, said the group's chief Ashok Singhal, Mahant Awaidhyanath, the former chief priest of Gorakhnath Temple in Gorakhpur, Mahant Sri Ramchandra Das Paramhans, former head of the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas in Ayodhya, and kar sevaks had sacrificed their lives for the cause.
"A Ram temple in Ayodhya will undoubtedly fulfil their dreams," Ojha told PTI.
On December 6, 1992, a large number of 'kar sevaks' religious volunteers had gathered in the temple town and demolished the 16th-century Babri Masjid, triggering widespread violence in the state and the country.
Though the VHP has been celebrating Shaurya Diwas on 6 December since 1992 every year, Ojha said the commitment to a temple -- on what they believe to be the birthplace of Ram -- would be strengthened this coming year.
"In Lucknow, a Shaurya Sankalp Sabha will be held at Madhav Sabhagar of Saraswati Shishu Mandi Nirala Nagar.
"A large number of seers are likely to reach Karsewakpuram and hold a meeting there from 1.00 pm to 4.00 pm," he said.
Preparations are on in full swing at the VHP office here.
There's 20-year-old Rohit Pandey, who is busy narrating the history of Ayodhya and the demolition to curious visitors. And also Hanuman Yadav, who is in his 50s, discussing the various books, pamphlets and posters related to Ayodhya and Ram temple movement with visitors.
"Four other guides and I brief visitors coming here to know the history of Ayodhya and that of Ram temple movement," said Pandey, who was not born when the demolition took place.
On 28 November, Uttar Pradesh deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya told PTI in an interview that it was the wish of every Ram devotee to see their god in "thaat" (grandeur) rather in a 'thaat' (tent house accommodation).
"...Lord Ram is still in the same shape, as he was before the dispute structure fell...Everyday he is worshipped as per the tradition and rituals. But he is being worshipped under a 'thaat'... he should live in thaat, and a grand Ram temple must be built," he said.
New Delhi: Former finance minister and Congress leader P Chidambaram on Monday slammed the BJP for terming PAAS leader Hardik Patel, OBC leader Alpesh Thakore and SC/ST leader Jignesh Mevani as 'HAJ', and accused the saffron party of playing the "communal card" and "divisive politics".
"Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakor and Jignesh Mevani are sons of the soil in Gujarat. To call them 'HAJ' is playing the communal card and divisive politics," Chidambaram said.
"Patel, Thakore and Mevani are articulating the demands of Gujarati youth for jobs and development. Their campaign should not be trivialised," he said.
Chidambaram's remarks came after a poster was released on the social media showing upcoming Gujarat elections as a face-off between 'HAJ' and 'RAM', which stands for (Gujarat chief minister Vijay) Rupani, BJP chief Amit (Shah) and (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi.
Both terms are acronyms coined by the political parties.
Patel, Thakore and Mevani have joined hands with the Congress to uproot the Bharatiya Janata Party from the state, which has been in power for 22 years.
Two-phase Assembly elections for the 182-seat Gujarat Assembly are due on 9 December and 14 December. The counting of votes will take place on 18 December.
New Delhi/Ahmedabad: Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar on Monday stoked a controversy when he invoked the rulers of the Mughal dynasty in the election of Rahul Gandhi as party president, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi latched on to quickly to call it "Aurangzeb Raj".
"When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any election happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go to the heir," Aiyar said, retorting to the "dynasty" jibes of the BJP on Rahul Gandhi's election.
"But in a democracy elections are held. I openly invite Poonawala to file the nomination and contest," Aiyar said, adding has anyone heard of Shehzad Poonawala.
He was replying to a question about BJP's criticism following Maharashtra Congress leader Poonawala calling Rahul Gandhi's election as party chief rigged.
Modi was quick to pounce on Aiyar's remarks. Addressing a public meeting in Dharampur constituency in Gujarat, Modi said: "Mani Shankar Aiyar, who never shies away from showing loyalty to one family, proudly said - When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any elections happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the the throne of the king will automatically go the son," Modi said.
"I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the wellbeing of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command," he said.
He also said that the Congress leaders admit that it is not a party but a kunba (family).
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New Delhi: Congress leaders, both young and old, were jubilant on Monday after Rahul Gandhi filed his nomination papers for the party president's post and said his ascent to the top will help it regain the lost glory after a string of electoral reverses.
The leaders also returned the BJP's "mockery of democratic traditions and farcical election process" barb, asking the ruling party at the Centre not to preach lessons as they cited the grand old party's "long-proven democratic" track-record.
"Rahul ji has been the darling of the Congress...," former prime minister Manmohan Singh told reporters at the Congress headquarters here after Gandhi filed his nomination.
"Congress president Sonia Gandhi has served the Congress party and, through the Congress party, the country for the last 19 years... Rahul Gandhi will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party," Singh added.
Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad, hit out at the BJP for questioning Congress' organisational election process. He said it was the saffron party, which does not follow democracy within its fold.
"...those who have trust in machines to win votes, are preaching us on democracy," Azad said, reiterating his party's "EVM tampering" charge against the BJP.
Terming Gandhi as a "capable" leader, Azad exuded confidence the former will turn out to be a "very successful" leader. "And under his leadership, the Congress will regain power," Azad added.
Former Union minister and party leader P Chidambaram took to Twitter to wish Gandhi "very best" as the latter threw his hat in the ring for the top job in the party.
As Mr Rahul Gandhi files his nomination, I wish him the very best as Congress President. #IndiaWithRahulGandhi P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) December 4, 2017
Senior Congress leader Anand Sharma stressed that all leaders and workers were in unison when they backed Gandhi. He said it was a "conscious and considered" decision of the party delegates to nominate Gandhi for president's post.
Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu, who joined the Congress ahead of the state elections in Punjab earlier this year, hailed Gandhi as a "special leader with character" who, he added, has come to the forefront during hours of crisis.
"He has become matured, showed his character. The general is standing at the forefront alone and on the other hand there is this entire government. This is the sign of a leader," Sidhu told reporters here.
Party MP from Guna, Jyotiraditya Scindia, dubbed Gandhi's imminent elevation to the top post as a "new wave of hope".
Another party leader, Kapil Sibal, congratulated Gandhi on Twitter as he filed the nomination with "full support" from the party and called it a "historic moment".
Yet another historic moment as Rahul Gandhi files his nomination to guide the party with our full support. Congratulations. Kapil Sibal (@KapilSibal) December 4, 2017
All India Mahila Congress president Sushmita Dev dubbed Gandhi a "symbol of strength, compassion and integrity" and said it was an honour to be led by him.
According to Congress' central election authority chairman Mullappally Ramachandran, Gandhi is the sole leader in the fray for the party president's post, paving way for the latter's elevation.
Gandhi has been Congress' vice-president since January 2013.
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The Congress vice president is likely to reach the party headquarters around 10.30 am to file his nomination. He will sign sets of nomination papers to be filed before the Returning Officer.
A host of party heavyweights will be present when Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi files his nomination for the party chief's post at its headquarters in New Delhi on Monday, with over 90 sets of nomination papers likely to be filed to support his candidature.
Speaking to ANI, Congress leader Dr. Karan Singh said, "Soniaji took Congress to new heights. We won many elections under her leadership and now it is time for Rahul Gandhi to take the party forward."
Speaking to ANI, Congress leader Dr. Karan Singh said, "Soniaji took Congress to new heights. We won many elections under her leadership and now it is time for Rahul Gandhi to take the party forward."
Speaking to ANI, Congress leader Kamal Nath said, "Do BJP presidents get elected? Did Nitin Gadkari get elected through a ballot process? Let them answer that first."
Rahul Gandhi, accompanied by Ahmed Patel and Jithin Das, arrives at the Congress headquarters to file his nomination papers.
"Sonia Gandhi has been party president for 19 years. This (Rahul Gandhi's nomination) is yet another step in that direction. Rahul Gandhi will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party," said the former prime minister Manmohan Singh.
Manmohan Singh says Rahul Gandhi will carry on the great traditions of Congress
When he made his electoral debut in 2004 Lok Sabha election, the family's traditional constituency Amethi which had been represented by Sanjay, Rajiv, and Sonia Gandhi in the past embraced him warmly. Within the party, his entry in politics was hailed as "Congress' Obama moment", NDTV reported at the time.
Rahul, unlike many other grassroots leaders who later shot to fame, never had to fight for recognition. He was representing the fourth generation of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and was perhaps destined to enter politics, the moment his mother accepted the role of Congress president, reluctantly in 1998.
Just like Rajiv, Rahul's complete disregard for his security, as he mingled with cheering crowds, or when he rode pillion on a motorbike to reach agitating farmers in Bhatta Parsaul, were a reminder of his father's ways of politics.
Rahul's personal charisma, and ability to strike a chord with the people, urged many to compare him to his father and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
"Mere sources mujhe bata rahe hain ki darbariyon mein baat chal rahi hai ki ek dummy candidate utara jaye taake ye election lage, lekin ab logon ki aankhon mein dhool nahi jhonk sakte (My sources have told me that the discussion among the "courtiers" is that they will appoint a dummy candidate so that this sham looks like an election. But they can't fool people for too long.)"
Shehzad Poonawalla says Congress appointing dummy candidate so that this sham looks like an election
"If anyone wants to participate in elections he or she is free to do so,its going on in democratic manner. Prime Minister has no business to comment on Congress's internal matter," Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah said on Rahul Gandhi filing nomination for party president.
Take a look at all past Congress presidents since the party's inception
"Congress party leaders themselves agree that it isn't a party, rather a clan. Congress can't either tolerate or accept leaders from Gujarat. They have always defamed Gujarat. They put (former Prime Minister) Morarji Desai in jail."
"I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj'. For us, the well-being of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command."
Prime Minister Modi is addressing a rally in Gujarat's Dharampur where he has raked up Mani Shankar Aiyar's reported statement on Rahul Gandhi's elevation. "Mani Shankar Aiyar says its like Aurangzeb taking over from Shah Jahan," says Modi.
"Mani Shankar Aiyar said that 'did elections happen during Mughal rule? After Jehangir, Shahjahan came, was any election held? After Shahjahan it was understood Aurangzeb will be the leader'. So Congress accepts its a family party? We don't want this Aurangzeb rule," says Narendra Modi in Gujarat's Dharmapur.
"Earlier, Congress would go out of the way to show their secularism but now we are all seeing what they are doing in this election, where they are going. Unfortunately for them, Muslims know their real nature," says Narendra Modi.
'Earlier, Congress would go out of the way to show their secularism but now we are all seeing what they are doing'
"On 9 December, you have to decide the destiny of Gujarat.. The vote is against those who hate Guajrati people, Gujarat state, its name itself. 9 December is the date when you can teach a lesson these people who are defaming Gujarat."
The Congress leader's quote has already been picked up by Narendra Modi who is addressing several rallies in poll-bound Gujarat today.
BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya on Monday tweeted out Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar's quotes to a TV channel where the party veteran compared the Congress to Mughal era. "Was their an election process to chose Shah Jahan after Jehangir? Or was their a poll to elect Aurangzeb after Shah Jahan?"
"Don't compare both, during Mughal rule it was understood that after Jehangir, Shahjahan will be the leader but here anyone is free to contest against Rahul Gandhi, its a totally democratic process," says Mani Shankar Aiyar.
"Congress has become a burden on this nation, now would be good if after Rahul ji's elevation once and for all this burden is removed," says Chief Minister Adityanath.
Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir National Conference leader Omar Abdullah wished Rahul Gandhi and tweeted, "As Rahul Gandhi files his nomination to take over the Grand Old Party of India (Congress) I wish him all the very best going ahead. Expectations are high, challenges are numerous & I pray for his success."
Wish Rahul all the very best going ahead: Omar Abdullah
"But in a democracy elections are held. I openly invite Poonawala to file the nomination and contest," Aiyar said, adding has anyone heard of Shehzad Poonawala.
Replying to a question about BJP's criticism following Maharashtra Congress leader Shehzad Poonawalla calling Rahul Gandhi's election as party chief rigged, Mani Shankar Aiyar said, "When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any election happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go to the heir." Aiyar's comments came as a retort to the "dynasty" jibes of the BJP on Rahul Gandhi's election.
In no organisation is a member promoted for repeatedly failing to perform, he said after the Gandhi scion filed his nomination papers to succeed his mother Sonia Gandhi as Congress president. "Pidhikaran of the Congress is now complete. Neither the old generation (PEEDI), nor the new generation matters. Only Pidhi matters," Rao said.
The BJP on Monday played on the words "Pidi" and "peedi" while dismissing the process for generational change in the Congress leadership as "Pidhikaran", a reference to Rahul Gandhi's dog . Neither the old "peedi" nor the new "peedi" matter in the opposition party, BJP spokesperson G V L Narasimha Rao said, using the Hindi word for generation to take a swipe at the process to elevate Rahul Gandhi from vice president to president of the Congress.
According to party sources, there were apprehensions among the party leaders earlier over the incumbent president being among the proposers to Rahul Gandhi's candidature.
Accompanied by her mother Sonia Gandhi, Singh and other senior Congress leaders, Rahul Gandhi will file his nomination papers for the election to the top Congress post tomorrow(Monday), the last date for filing of nominations.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi and former prime minister Manmohan Singh will be among proposers for the candidature of Rahul Gandhi for the party chief's post.
Over 90 sets of nominations are expected to be filed supporting Gandhi whose election is a mere formality now, as there is no other candidate for the party's top post.
"So it will be yet another chapter for the party and Rahul Gandhi will carry on the great traditions of taking the party forward," Singh added .
"It's a great day. Rahul has been the darling of the Congress men and Congress women and this is yet another step in his devotion to the Congress party and country," Manmohan Singh, said, when asked about Rahul Gandhi's takeover.
Manmohan Singh heaps praise on Rahul on coronation day, says Gandhi scion is a darling of Congress
"This is a good sign that the young brigade is stepping forward. I hope he takes India to great heights where everyone lives with harmony. The post of PM lies in distant future, for now he must work hard to unite India and bring everyone together," Farooq Abdullah said on Rahul Gandhi filing his nominations for election of Congress President.
"But will Modiji tell when he will answer the questions of his own senior party leaders like Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha?" he asked.
He also said that Modi's "love for Shehzad (Poonawalla), Shahzada (BJP chief Amit Shah's son Jai Shah) and Shourya (National Security Advisor Ajit Doval's son)" is well known to the world.
"Why is the Prime Minister suffering from Rahul Gandhi phobia? Why is he so much stressed?" Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala told reporters here ahead of party vice president Rahul Gandhi's filing of nomination for its presidential post.
However, whatever he did on his international vacation, it has certainly paid off for Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party. He has returned energised; his speeches today have the spark, while he's already becoming a darling of the social media. His elevation to Congress party president, which would have polarised opinions until last year, are even being seen in a positive light today.
In June, to mark his 47th birthday, the Congress scion had gone for an international vacation. At the time, following a series of electoral debacles, and key events like the GST roll-out and the presidential elections coming up shortly, the Congress vice-president's travel was criticised roundly.
If one must pin-point the exact time when Rahul Gandhi's transformation began from a bumbling, confused, novice politician who was still learning the ropes and finding himself the butt of all jokes from seasoned Opposition leaders to a witty politician capable of giving it back as good as it came it must be following his international trip in the summer this year.
Its a transfer of responsibilities and challenges, and Rahul will succeed in it: Sharad Yadav
So, at one level we have Ashok Gehlot chaperoning him on the campaign trail with a smile permanently pasted on his face. Then there is the trusted Estate Manager, or the 10 Janpath equivalent of the Lord Chamberlain as it were, Ahmed Patel, who has been entrusted by the Queen Mother to install the crown Prince on the throne. Operating from the wings is the benign and brainy uncle, Sam Pitroda, who has taken it upon himself to ensure the succession of his departed friends lineage.
Gujarat Assembly elections will be the first formal litmus test for Rahul Gandhi, within days of him taking over as Congress President. It is interesting to observe and analyse the ecosystem that is working to make Rahul tick. It is as if the constituents around Rahul have realised that their own survival depends on his success.
Lutyens' ecosystem around Rahul Gandhi is working overtime to help him succeed in Gujarat
"Its a black day as a person who lacks merit and has been a perpetual underperformer has been promoted for every failure of his at the behest of a dynastic system led by his mother," Shehzad Poonawalla told News18.
Gandhi's biggest success and we are not talking about electoral gains, they are still in the realm of future has been his ability to 'humanise' himself. Slowly and steadily, he has given us a glimpse of Gandhi as a person, a walking, breathing entity, instead of the abstract concept he once was.
His one-liners are finding traction. Images of his extra-curricular activities are going viral. His election rallies are drawing crowds and applause. And young girls are clicking selfies with him. As the inimitable Richie Benaud would have said, it is all happening here, in our lifetimes.
After several years, brand Rahul Gandhi is in demand again. Every morning these days, we wake up to find Gandhi either trending on Twitter or dominating headlines on Google, both considered indicators of popular interest.
As many as 89 sets of nominations have been filed today for the Congress president elections today.
According to The Indian Express , Congress election authority chairman Mullappally Ramachandran said that it will scrutinise the nomination papers and publish the list of candidates tomorrow.
Congress election authority to scrutinise the nomination papers and publish the list of candidates tomorrow
As the country is divided over the way the Congress president election process is being held, News 18 looked at possible Congressmen who could be inducted into his close circle.
The second challenge would be overhauling the party cadre through internal restructuring. Third, Rahul's equations with the old guard of the Congress and how efficiently he deals with them will be watched closely. Fourth, regaining the trust of party workers across the country will be crucial.
When he takes over, dealing with alliances will be a major challenge. Especially given the fact that the NCP just snapped ties with the Congress in Gujarat. A rift has also emerged between the Patidars and Congress.
On the other hand, he has failed during the Assembly elections, be it allying with the Left in West Bengal or in Uttar Pradesh. Many times, Rahul has been accused of being an absentee politician.
Once Rahul takes over as Congress chief, hes expected to face a tough challenge from Modi and BJP president Amit Shah, who are known for their connection to the grass roots and drawing up electoral strategies with surgical precision.
Industrialist and Rahul Gandhi's brother-in-law, Robert Vadra took to Facebook to congratulate Rahul as he is set to take over the party's reins.
Its a transfer of responsibilities and challenges, and Rahul will succeed in it: Sharad Yadav
So, at one level we have Ashok Gehlot chaperoning him on the campaign trail with a smile permanently pasted on his face. Then there is the trusted Estate Manager, or the 10 Janpath equivalent of the Lord Chamberlain as it were, Ahmed Patel, who has been entrusted by the Queen Mother to install the crown Prince on the throne. Operating from the wings is the benign and brainy uncle, Sam Pitroda, who has taken it upon himself to ensure the succession of his departed friends lineage.
Gujarat Assembly elections will be the first formal litmus test for Rahul Gandhi, within days of him taking over as Congress President. It is interesting to observe and analyse the ecosystem that is working to make Rahul tick. It is as if the constituents around Rahul have realised that their own survival depends on his success.
Lutyens' ecosystem around Rahul Gandhi is working overtime to help him succeed in Gujarat
Rahul Gandhi is not president of Congress but has been anointed like a Mughal king in line of dynastic hereditary succession: Shehzad Poonawalla pic.twitter.com/3IxaiA1pC5
"Its a black day as a person who lacks merit and has been a perpetual underperformer has been promoted for every failure of his at the behest of a dynastic system led by his mother," Shehzad Poonawalla told News18.
Gandhi's biggest success and we are not talking about electoral gains, they are still in the realm of future has been his ability to 'humanise' himself. Slowly and steadily, he has given us a glimpse of Gandhi as a person, a walking, breathing entity, instead of the abstract concept he once was.
His one-liners are finding traction. Images of his extra-curricular activities are going viral. His election rallies are drawing crowds and applause. And young girls are clicking selfies with him. As the inimitable Richie Benaud would have said, it is all happening here, in our lifetimes.
After several years, brand Rahul Gandhi is in demand again. Every morning these days, we wake up to find Gandhi either trending on Twitter or dominating headlines on Google, both considered indicators of popular interest.
As many as 89 sets of nominations have been filed today for the Congress president elections today.
According to The Indian Express , Congress election authority chairman Mullappally Ramachandran said that it will scrutinise the nomination papers and publish the list of candidates tomorrow.
Congress election authority to scrutinise the nomination papers and publish the list of candidates tomorrow
As the country is divided over the way the Congress president election process is being held, News 18 looked at possible Congressmen who could be inducted into his close circle.
The second challenge would be overhauling the party cadre through internal restructuring. Third, Rahul's equations with the old guard of the Congress and how efficiently he deals with them will be watched closely. Fourth, regaining the trust of party workers across the country will be crucial.
When he takes over, dealing with alliances will be a major challenge. Especially given the fact that the NCP just snapped ties with the Congress in Gujarat. A rift has also emerged between the Patidars and Congress.
On the other hand, he has failed during the Assembly elections, be it allying with the Left in West Bengal or in Uttar Pradesh. Many times, Rahul has been accused of being an absentee politician.
Once Rahul takes over as Congress chief, hes expected to face a tough challenge from Modi and BJP president Amit Shah, who are known for their connection to the grass roots and drawing up electoral strategies with surgical precision.
Industrialist and Rahul Gandhi's brother-in-law, Robert Vadra took to Facebook to congratulate Rahul as he is set to take over the party's reins.
A host of party heavyweights will be present when Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi files his nomination for the party chief's post at its headquarters in New Delhi on Monday, with over 90 sets of nomination papers likely to be filed to support his candidature.
Six chief ministers Punjab's Amarinder Singh, Karnataka's Siddaramaiah, Himachal Pradesh's Virbhadra Singh, Puducherry's V Narayanasamy, Meghalaya's Mukul Sangma and Mizoram's Lal Thanhawla are expected to be present when over 90 sets of nomination papers are likely to be filed by various leaders to extend support to Rahul Gandhi's candidature.
Congress state unit chiefs, senior leaders and Pradesh Congress Committee delegates will be present at the party's central office to express support to Rahul Gandhi ahead of his much-awaited elevation.
The Congress vice president is likely to reach the party headquarters around 10.30 am to file his nomination. He will sign sets of nomination papers to be filed before the Returning Officer.
Mullappally Ramachandran, the Returning Officer for the organisational election, told IANS that 90 nomination forms were taken by different states though not one has been submitted so far.
The process of nominations started on Friday. The last date for filing nominations is 4 December.
Reacting to criticism over the election process, Congress spokesperson Sushmita Dev told the media: "All I want to say is that it is happening under Election Commission supervision. When we talk about electoral democracy, I wish to say, we conduct (internal) elections while adhering to Election Commission rules. It is being done with full transparency. We have not violated any rules."
She said if someone was raising questions, what was the basis on which they were doing so. "I won't be able to comment about it. Only those who have raised the issue can explain."
On Sunday, many senior Congress leaders, its members of Parliament and PCC chiefs arrived at the party headquarters to sign the papers, including Sachin Pilot, Kapil Sibal, Rajeev Shukla, PC Chacko, Shobha Oza, Hamdulla Sayeed and others.
Apart from states and union territories, senior leaders on the Congress Working Committee (CWC), including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, AK Antony, Ahmed Patel and Ghulam Nabi Azad are likely to submit different sets of nomination papers.
The elevation of Rahul Gandhi, who is presently spearheading the Congress campaign ahead of the 9 and 14 December Gujarat Assembly polls, has been much talked about in party circles for around two years.
With Rahul Gandhi in all likelihood to be the only candidate in the fray, he could be declared the next Congress chief on 5 December after scrutiny of nominations.
He will succeed his mother Sonia Gandhi, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998.
Rahul Gandhi became the Congress vice president in January 2013.
With inputs from IANS
New Delhi: The Congress wondered why Prime Minister Narendra Modi was "suffering from Rahul Gandhi-phobia" and reminded him that he was still to answer questions raised by senior leaders of his own party.
"Why is the prime minister suffering from Rahul Gandhi phobia? Why is he so much stressed?" Congress communications incharge Randeep Surjewala said before Gandhi filed his nomination papers for the party's presidential post. "Why is the prime minister getting so anxious and tense about the election of Rahul Gandhi? This day marks the amalgamation of old and new aspirations and Rahul Gandhi who has the backing of all Indians," Surjewala said.
"Will Modi ji tell when he will answer the questions of his own senior party leaders like Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha," he said. The Congress leader said his party will never "fall to the level" that the prime minister was indulging in attacking Gandhi.
Slamming Modi, he sought to ask him about the "conspiracies being played against LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Keshubhai Patel, Kashiram Rana, Hiren Pandya, and Sanjay Joshi, who have since been made a part of the party's "history".
Kochi: BJP in Kerala on Sunday accused the CPM-led LDF government of failure to protect the lives of people from cyclone Ockhi which battered the southern coastal areas of the state despite timely alert.
"There was a criminal negligence on the part of the state government in dealing with the crisis," party state president Kummanam Rajasekheran told reporters in Kochi.
He alleged that the state government failed to act promptly even after getting a cyclone alert from the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services on 28 November.
"The state government did not take it seriously. This gross negligence from the Kerala government authorities paved way for one of the biggest tragedies in the state," Rajendran alleged.
He said cases should be registered against those responsible for the negligence.
Nine persons died in rain-related incidents in the state due to the impact of Ochki, which brought heavy rains accompanied by strong wind besides leaving hundreds of fishermen stranded in sea.
New Delhi: The Election Commission on Monday issued directions that no newspaper advertisement be published on 8 and 9 December in poll-bound Gujarat without its prior clearance, a policy the poll panel adopted after controversial ads were issued by the BJP during the 2015 Bihar elections.
The first phase of Gujarat election would be held on 9 December for 89 assembly seats.
In a direction to the chief electoral officer of Gujarat, the commission said that instances of "advertisements of offending and misleading nature" were brought to its notice in the past.
"Such advertisements in the last stage of election vitiate the election. The affected candidates and parties will not have any opportunity of providing clarification or rebuttal in such cases," the poll watchdog said.
It said to ensure that no such instance is repeated and no untoward incident takes place because of any "inflammatory, misleading or hate advertisements", no political party, candidate, organisation or person will bring out ads in the print media on December 8 and 9 unless the contents are pre-certified by Media Certification and Monitoring Committee at the district or state level.
The newspapers, the commission said, should also be informed against bringing out advertisements which were not cleared by the committee.
During Bihar polls, the commission had clamped a ban on publication of two controversial advertisements printed by the BJP in the state.
One of the advertisements alleged that RJD supremo Lalu Prasad and JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar were "snatching the plate of Dalits" by planning to transfer the quota meant for Dalits and EBCs to minorities.
Another advertisement dealt with "vote ki kheti" or vote-bank politics. It claimed that the RJD, the JDU and the Congress leaders were "giving sanctuary" to terrorists to appease a particular community for votes.
Lucknow: The BJP is all set to encash its Uttar Pradesh civic poll performance in Gujarat by utilising newly elected mayors for campaigning in the poll-bound state.
The BJP has won 14 out of 16 mayoral seats in civic polls in Uttar Pradesh and all the newly elected leaders will be meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday to seek his blessings.
Thereafter, they will proceed to Gujarat for campaigning for the Assembly elections there on 9 and 14 December.
"The newly elected mayors will meet the prime minister over tea tomorrow in Delhi. They are all devoted party workers and will be used where ever the party needs them," BJP state general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak told PTI.
Amethi Nagar Panchyat Chairperson Chandrama Devi and Jais Nagar Palika Parishad Mahesh Pratap will be among those who will be meeting Modi.
Though Congress did not field any candidate in Amethi, the victory of a BJP candidate there is still considered a major blow to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as it is his parliamentary constituency and considered a Congress bastion.
The Congress lost in Jais and Gauriganj where Nagar Palika polls were held. In Amethi and Musafirkhana, where Nagar Panchayat polls were held, the party had not fielded anyone.
With the BJP's extensive campaign in the local polls in Uttar Pradesh paying off, the sweeping win is considered as a boost to the saffron party in the midst of the high-decibel campaign for the Gujarat elections.
Counting of votes in Gujarat will be taken up on 18 December.
The Uttar Pradesh civic elections were touted as the first litmus test of Yogi Adityanath after the BJP stormed to power in March.
The saffron surge routed the Samajwadi Party and the Congress, both of which drew a blank in mayoral polls.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who has been drafted as the key campaigner in Gujarat and went on a nearly 90-day whirlwind tour of the state, described it as a "historic win".
He attributed the victory to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision and BJP chief Amit Shah's able guidance and added that the BJP will now look forward to achieving the goal of one hundred per cent success in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
"The victory of party has sent positive message among the people who are already admirers of Narendra Modiji. There is a significant population of people from east Uttar Pradesh in Gujarat," said BJP leader and state spokesman Shalabh Mani Tripathi, who is campaigning in Gujarat for the past one month.
"Yogiji is already a star campaigner and our newly elected mayors with their success stories will add to our ongoing campaigning here," Tripathi said.
Can you find liquor in Gujarat?
Everyone in the state will answer this question in the affirmative. However, they will be reluctant to tell you where exactly it can be found in the state. They will try and gauge your personality first. Once they think you can be trusted, they will gradually start talking.
Some locals agreed to talk about the liquor situation on the condition that their names are not revealed. Shyam Rajput (name changed) from Ahmedabad said, "Liquor is banned in Gujarat for the sake of saying. But, you can find it everywhere provided you know a way of buying it."
He also said that the figures of alcohol sale in the state are not official. "If they are made official, Gujarat will be counted among the states with maximum consumption of liquor."
Liquor business runs discreetly
The liquor industry in Gujarat is working discreetly. It works in a way similar to actor Anil Kapoor in the famous bollywood movie 'Mr India'. The liquor industry is running in the state but is not visible on ground.
Shyam even offered to direct me to a place where liquor is available abundantly. He also said that regular customers can even get alcohol delivered to their homes. He directed me to Chharanagar, which is one of the most notorious streets of Gujarat.
As soon as you enter Chharanagar, you will feel a part of the movie 'Raees'. There are houses on either side of the narrow street. The space is so narrow that only a two-wheeler can pass through.
I met Shyam's friend Bhawari Desai, who agreed to accompany me. However, she said that it was important to show that we are tourists and just want to party.
We met a woman and told her that we need some alcohol for a party. She demanded Rs 400 for one bottle of beer. While she claimed to get it from a nearby house, it was very clear to us that she had brought the bottle from her house only.
Desai said that the people here have become a little more cautious because of the election season. On regular days, people in Chharanagar can be seen sitting outside sipping alcohol, she added. We saw another man who was carrying a blue bottle in a plastic bag. It seemed like oil at first glance. However, Desai said that he was carrying country liquor.
Every sort of alcohol is available in this area. In Chharanagar, more women than men are involved in the liquor business. About 100 metres from Chharanagar is the Naroda Patiya police station but they never dare come here. Desai said, "the police sometimes comes here but they are beaten and sent away." The police, when contacted, refused to comment and only said that that is not the situation.
Click here for detailed coverage of Gujarat Assembly Election 2017
Amreli: The Patidar-dominated Amreli is gearing up for a fight between two strong Patel candidates in the Assembly segment, where farm issues are dominating the campaign discourse.
Sitting Congress MLA Paresh Dhanani is pitted against BJP heavyweight Bavkubhai Undhad, the legislator from the nearby Lathi seat who has been fielded from Amreli this time.
There is a talk in political circles that Dhanani could emerge as a strong contender for the chief minister's post if he retains his seat and the Congress dislodges the BJP from power in Gandhinagar.
Dhanani (41) is considered close to Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and had accompanied the latter during his campaign tours.
In the 2012 Assembly elections, Dhanani had registered a resounding victory - he won by a margin of more than 18 percent votes over his nearest rival Dilip Sanghavi, a senior BJP leader and prominent cooperative leader.
The most important issue in this agriculture-dominated constituency, known for cotton cultivation, is farm distress, and the Congress seems to be cashing in on this.
The Patidars form 60 percent of the population in the Amreli assembly segment followed by Kolis at 15 percent.
Besides farm matters, issues like the impact of the Centre's demonetisation move and effects of GST on the diamond polishing industry are being raised aggressively by the candidates.
A section of farmers believes that the promises made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi regarding minimum support price (MSP) for farm produce and tackling issues related to agriculture have not been fulfilled.
"Modiji had promised us (MSP of) Rs 2,000 per 20 kg on cotton against Rs 1,500 given by the UPA government. But we are getting Rs 800-900, which is causing us a huge loss. Many of us have not got crop insurance money," said a cotton farmer, Pankaj Chavda.
Chavda added that the prime minister's pre-Lok Sabha election promise of giving farmers a support price that is 50 percent more than production cost of a crop, too, remains a pipe dream.
In Amreli, where farmers mainly grow cotton, the crop has seen a sharp decline in prices this year, fuelling anger against the state government.
Amreli district Congress president Pankaj Kanabar said Chief Minister Vijay Rupani recently announced his government would purchase cotton at Rs 100 per 20 kg over and above the MSP. However, Kanabar alleged only the farmers who were close to the BJP were getting this benefit. "It is a scam in which BJP's commission agents have made a lot of money while genuine farmers have been left out," he said.
The BJP candidate Undhad is trying to douse the anger of the Patidars against the ruling party by listing the efforts made by the Rupani government to address the grievances of the community.
Patidar quota stir spearhead Hardik Patel is expected to address an election rally in Amreli on 6 December.
Undhad is battling the image of a politician who has switched sides. He started out as a BJP leader and later joined the Congress and became its MLA from Lathi in 2012.
He came back to the BJP fold in 2014 and was made a minister.
The BJP said it is on a strong wicket in Amreli as its candidate has developed strong links with the constituency, while the sitting MLA is hardly seen.
"The BJP is strong because Bavkubhai lives here most of the time, while Congress candidate Paresh Dhanani mostly remains outside the constituency and is rarely seen here," said district BJP president Hiren Hilpara.
"As far as farmer issues are concerned, we are making sure all farmers get higher rate than MSP for their produce. The government is making purchases of groundnut and cotton which will continue till March next year," he said.
Voting in Amreli will take place on 9 December. There are a total of nine candidates in the fray, including four independents, but the fight is likely to be between Dhanani and Undhad. The NCP and the BSP have also fielded their nominees.
Click here for detailed coverage of Gujarat Assembly Election 2017
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But harsh words will never harm me.
Come 9 December, Gujarat will show the rest of the country if the slanging match between the Congress wearing the colours of Rahul Gandhi and the BJP in the right corner wearing the colours of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has had any effect on the voters.
With the media sitting in the front row and fanning the flames, we have been witness to several weeks of verbal battering ensuring that more than any major issues, personal insult and insinuation have been the tactics adopted by both combatants. These actions are more in keeping with the conduct of wrestlers in the WWE rather than an honourable battle.
Rahul perhaps started it all when he used the Berkeley campus to attack Modi by painting India as a nation where violence, anger and the politics of polarisation have raised their ugly head". He later followed that up with a harsh indictment on social media:
"Expensive gas, expensive ration, stop making hollow speeches! Control prices, give jobs else quit the throne," he tweeted. When brother-in-law Robert Vadra was accused of links with an arms dealer, the Congress hit back at Modi, demanding to know who paid for over 100 trips he made by chartered planes across India and abroad during his tenure as Gujarat chief minister. Even the Rafale jet deal was not spared and suspicion was whipped up over whether Modi upped the payment for 36 initial deliveries to please a specific industrialist. The most tragic part is that not a shred of evidence is needed to utter these slurs against character. In recent days, the level of discourse has deteriorated even further. Rahul hit out with schoolboy angst over the release of Hafiz Saeed, tweeting:
Narendrabhai, . Terror mastermind is free. President Trump just delinked Pak military funding from LeT. Hugplomacy fail. More hugs urgently needed.https://t.co/U8Bg2vlZqw Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) November 25, 2017
Not to be outdone, the BJP struck back in an equal measure with the accusation that Rahul was a Saeed sympathiser. Modi also slammed Rahul with a clever one-liner that may have been a catch-line if it wasnt part of this tacky package. He said: "I sold tea not the nation."
Congress leaders then joined the fray and pointed a flinty finger at Modi saying he was conducting a campaign to vilify Sonia Gandhi, her son and the larger family.
Modi recently upped the ante by placing on record his disdain: "Congress has no reason to escape now They don't understand what to do now. In Uttar Pradesh, where they used to win every time. It is a state which is the karmabhoomi of Nehru-Gandhi family. What happened in results?" Modi said while referring to the civic poll debacle. He added, "They know to change their colours. They divide brothers, divide communities."
He then went for another sledgehammer: "Congress is unhappy about demonetisation. They keep attacking me but I want to tell themI have grown up in the same land as Sardar Patel. I will ensure that the poor get their due. We will not allow this nation to be looted."
No subject has been left out of the abuse fest: Demonetisation, Goods and Services Tax (GST), terrorism, military hardware shopping, surgical strikes, Modis hugs, Rahuls religion, even poor little rich Ivanka Trump.
And while the nation watches this daily name-calling with curiosity and dismay, seeing there is one unanswered question: Where is the voter in all this? Whats in it for the voter?
Read complete coverage of Gujarat Elections 2017 here
Read complete coverage of our Congress president election here
Editor's note: The following is the first part of a series relating to reservations across the country ahead of the crucial Gujarat Assembly election.
Here is a fictional example of Lallu and Mohan, which the Mandal Commission, in the report it submitted in 1980, reeled off to say why Other Backward Classes (OBCs) must have reservations:
Lallu is a poor village boy who comes from an illiterate family belonging to a backward class. He studies at the village school where standards are pathetic. On the other hand, Mohan belongs to an educated, well-off family. Studying at a city public school, Mohan gets help at home and can use television, radio and the magazines to acquire knowledge. Although both boys possess the same level of intelligence, Lallu can never compete with Mohan in any open competition because of the environmental disadvantages he suffers. So boys like Lallu must have reservations.
Mandal was neither the first nor the last to bandy about examples like these to argue in favour of reservations and debunk those who say merit should be the sole criterion in jobs and academic admissions.
And Gujarats quota warrior Hardik Patel would like us to believe that his land-owning Patidar community is packed with helpless boys like Lallus and that reservations must protect them against usurpers like Mohans. It is hardly of any concern to Hardik that extending reservations to Patidars means crossing the 50 percent ceiling recommended by Supreme Court for caste quotas (total for Scheduled Castes/Tribes and OBCs).
And its also hardly of any bother to the Congress that has promised reservations for Hardiks caste in return for backing from his Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (Paas) in this months Assembly election in Gujarat. Desperate to defeat Prime Minister Narendra Modis BJP in his home state, Congress has apparently told Patel that, if it won Gujarat, it would ensure reservations for Patidars in a way it wouldnt fall afoul of Supreme Court.
Past verdicts of the Supreme Court as well as various high courts, however, make it evident that the Congress is fooling Hardik. Or possibly, Hardik, too naive to understand the legal hassles of raising reservation levels, is fooling himself. Or he is fooling his community.
Even as Congress leaders and Hardik live in a fools paradise, beating tambourines and singing paeans to each other, their so-called deal is getting the adrenaline of backward class reservations going in other states.
The latest state to join the mad race for placating OBCs is Andhra Pradesh, where Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu on Saturday extended five percent reservations to the Kapu community, taking the total of caste quotas in his state to 55 per cent, which is above the SC ceiling.
In recent weeks, reservation fever gripped the Karnataka and Telangana chief ministers as well. And the Chief Ministers of Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Haryana too have reasons to watch keenly whats going on between the Congress and Hardik. In all these states, the governments want to expand reservations beyond the SCs top limit and get away with it. They think that if Gujarat can swing it somehow, they can too.
The farcical nature of the Gujarat deal is not stopping other chief ministers from dreaming their own pipe dreams.
Gamble by Naidu, KCR and Siddaramaiah
In Andhra Pradesh, where elections to the Assembly are slated for 2019, Naidus Telugu Desam government will send the new bill to extend reservations for Kapus to the state governor who, in turn, will send it to the Centre. Then you could depend on Naidu an ally of the BJP to begin putting pressure on the Centre to place the new law in the Constitutions Ninth Schedule to save it from the wrath, if any, of the Supreme Court.
Laws in the Ninth Schedule are supposedly beyond judicial review.
And with elections to the Karnataka Assembly only five months away, Siddaramaiah says he too will raise the total reservations to 70 percent so that more sub-castes of SCs, STs and OBCs could benefit. Having first spoken about it last year, he now repeats it with new vigour.
And in Telangana, Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao wants to hike reservations from 50 percent to 60 percent to help SCs, STs and backward Muslims. Siddaramaiah and Rao too can do with the legal immunity that they believe the Ninth Schedule immunity will offer to their respective moves.
Mahrashtras move to give 16 percent reservation for Marathas in 2014 and Haryanas law to give Jats (and five other castes) a 10-percent quota in 2016 were stayed by their high courts and the issue in both states is before their respective backward classes commissions. Attempts by Rajasthan to extend reservations to Gujjars failed thrice the latest being only last month when the Supreme Court ruled that total reservations must not cross 50 per cent.
If these three states have their own way, the reservations will have gone up to 73 percent in Maharashtra (along with five percent for some Muslim sub-castes) 67 percent in Haryana and 54 percent in Rajasthan.
Why the Gujarat deal is a chimera
While legal luminary and Congress leader Kapil Sibal, who brokered the deal with Hardik, did not disclose its details, the 24-year-old Patidar leader claimed that it would be carried out under Articles 31B and 46 of the Constitution.
Taking recourse to Article 31B means passing a law to raise reservation level to include Patidars and then parking that legislation in the Constitutions Ninth Schedule where it is presumed to be safe from judicial hurdles. In theory this can happen, but there are three big Ifs:
It can only happen
1) if the Congress wins Gujarat elections to pass a bill that will bless Patidars with reservations;
2) if the Modi government then agrees to keep that law in the Ninth Schedule and
3) if the Supreme Court agrees that such a law in Ninth Schedule is really beyond a judicial review.
A tall order indeed.
And using Article 46, which is part of the directive principles of the Constitution, is no less risky legally. Court verdicts in the past frowned on the misuse of this article to extend reservations (more on this in the second part of the series).
Whichever constitutional provision is used, the total percentage of reservation is bound to cross the SCs upper limit. Thats because states are bent upon expanding the quota levels instead of letting new communities share the existing concessions and ruffle those already enjoying the benefits. At least two verdicts of the SC in the past said the 50 percent ceiling could be breached in extraordinary circumstances to extend reservations to a communities that are abysmally backward. But beginning with Gujarats Patidars, most of the castes that the states want to placate fail to qualify for the SCs exceptional circumstances.
So its just not enough to say that a caste is packed with Mandals Lallus to milk the reservation cow. Congress knows. Hardik pretends he doesnt.
Read Part II of the series here: States challenging SC's 50% reservation ceiling will turn the Ninth Schedule into a 'constitutional dustbin'
The author tweets @sprasadindia
Follow all the latest updates ahead of the Gujarat polls here
Rajkot: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday mocked Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi over the allegation that he gave an "enormous piece" of land to an industrialist.
Modi also said 125 crore people of this country were his "God" and he was their priest.
"The Congress is being rejected from every corner of the country. They need to introspect," Modi said at a rally in Rajkot.
Making a veiled reference to Gandhi, he said, "One leader during his speech said Modi gave 48,000 crore acres of land to an industrialist. The area he is talking about is three times the size of land available on the earth. I don't know what to do... to laugh or cry."
The prime minister said, "What can you expect from the Congress, when the person expected to lead the party cannot understand such basic things," said Modi.
Gandhi had during one of his rallies in Gujarat alleged that Modi had given a vast tract of land to an industrialist in Mundra of Kutch district.
The video of his speech had gone viral on social media.
Referring to the meme tweeted by the Youth Congress, Modi said the Congress was using abusive language against him.
"It is their 'sanskar' (values). I have not studied in an English medium school but in a government school where they taught me how to lead life," Modi said in Surendranagar.
"From those lessons, I have learnt that 125 crore people of the country are my God and I am their priest. I will continue to work for 'sabka sath, sabka vikas'," the prime minister said.
He also accused the Congress of spreading poison of casteism to win elections in the state.
"They know that they have no chance, so they are spreading the poison of casteism to win in the state. They have done it earlier. Now they are doing it again," Modi said.
Click here for detailed coverage of Gujarat Assembly Election 2017
Over a month ago, close to 150 women did a rasta roko, merely 30 kilometers from Rajkot, the capital of Gujarat's Saurashtra region. The Punit Nagar area in the town of Gondal, where the agitation had transpired, had not received water for about 20 days, including over the festive Diwali period.
"We eventually lost patience," Kanchan Ramani, a participant, said. "We needed to clean up the house during Diwali, prepare delicacies, and have our traditional early morning bath. How are we supposed to do that? A pipeline was damaged during road construction, but how long can one tolerate?"
After the agitation, water supply was restored. That is once every four days for half an hour. "In summers, it's once every eight days," said Hansa Vora, another participant at the agitation. "This in a year when the monsoon was satisfactory and the dams are full. When the rain gods desert Saurashtra, as they often do, the situation is unimaginable."
In rural Gondal, farmers shared a similar story regarding irrigation water. Shambhu Lonagariya and his wife Jaya in PatKhilori village say their dependence on rainwater has resulted in an unpredictable cotton produce on their 20-acre farm. "Cotton is an eight-month crop. It requires water consistently. My entire crop died in 2016 because of the drought. The uncertainty of something you cannot control is stressful," Shambhu said.
There are a few small dams around Gondal, providing drinking water to the town. But most of them are decades old, built for the population of the time. When the dams dry up in summers, the Narmada pipeline is channelled. Gondal does not benefit from the Bhadar dam nearby, because that's linked to provide water to Rajkot city, where the then chief minister Narendra Modi had launched a grand scheme in 2012 to permanently end Saurashtra's dire water deficit.
Saurashtra Narmada Avtaran Irrigation (SAUNI) Yojana aims to fill 115 dams in Saurashtra through a network of pipelines that would channelise floodwater from the Sardar Sarovar Dam. The project is a work in progress and the deadline is reportedly end of 2019. The network of pipelines includes four links, one of which originates from Dholi Dhaja Dam in Surendranagar and ends at Venu I dam in Upleta taluka of Rajkot district, pumping water in 28 dams along its length of 245 kilometres.
While the benefits of SAUNI have reached Rajkot city, where the water has been pumped into Aji dam, it would take a year or two for the pipeline to reach Gondal. Residents said that the water from Bhadar dam should now be diverted to Gondal, with Aji dam fulfilling the needs of Rajkot city, which now gets water 20 minutes every day. Until three or four years ago, it was three times a week, for 20 minutes each.
The Congress party has been cashing in on this. In one of the chowks, BJP installed a poster with Modi on it, saying Narmada water has been brought to Aji dam. Congress installed a poster right alongside it, pointing out that the state has had three chief ministers in 22 years, but Rajkot still doesn't get water for over 20 minutes a day.
Senior journalist Sunil Joshi said people in well-off areas buy tankers when their handpumps dry out. "The poor areas are the worst sufferers," he says.
In Raiya Dhar area of Rajkot, residents have to wait for a water tanker to arrive from the corporation. "I have been living here for the past 21 years. The corporation tankers started 10 years ago. Before that, we would go on our bicycles to fetch water," said daily-wage labourer Ajit Mokashi.
In Raiya Dhar, a tanker brings water twice a week, which is hardly enough, forcing the residents to spend from their own pocket on water tankers. When tankers arrive, fights often break out between women who queue up to fill water. "I get Rs 300 a day. Even if I work 20-25 days a month, my monthly earning fluctuates between Rs 6,000 to Rs 7,500. On water alone, I spend Rs 1,200, double of that in summers. How do I educate my kids?" Mokashi asked.
All these different constituencies, unable to solve their water woes in 22 years, are expressing their anger against the ruling BJP, and most are expected to take it to the voting booth.
A lot is at stake here. There are thousands of traders, and a substantial Patidar population in Rajkot. It's Chief Minister Vijay Rupani's constituency and he is skating on thin ice. He did a lukewarm roadshow on 2 December, which did not seem like the one by a sitting chief minister. An auto driver said Rupani is highly unimpressive. "Anandiben was better," he said. "Rupani does not inspire us to vote for him. He is Amit Shah's puppet."
A few days ago, Hardik Patel's huge rally in Rajkot sent a message, especially since Rupani's Patidar meet a day before did not attract more than a thousand people.
The BJP responded with a resounding Modi rally on 3 December, but it's betraying its nervousness as well. Rupani's opponent Indranil Rajguru's brother got into a scuffle with BJP cadres, after which Indranil, along with the party cadres, protested at the chief minister's residence where the Gujarat Police detained him. When Maharashtra MP and AICC secretary Rajeev Satav went to meet him on the night of 2 December, the police did not let him in. Satav refused to go without meeting his candidate. At which point, the police took Satav and his colleagues in, beat them up, before releasing them at 5 am. Satav said this goes against the policy of free and fair elections.
Nonetheless, the biggest thing that stands as Congress' impediment is the Gujarati asmita. Considering the provincial pride, a sizable chunk could fall for the emotional card in spite of the disquiet against the establishment. Rahul Gandhi and Congress are still seen as outsiders, while Modi is the son of the soil.
Chirag Parmar, 30, said he does not like most of the BJP leaders, but would not want to see Modi being humiliated on his home turf. "Kaam toh Modiji theek thaak kiye hai," he said. "Lekin woh humare hai. Vote toh BJP ko denge."
Read complete coverage of Gujarat Elections 2017 here
Sanand: Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday said that the BJP formed government at the Centre because of the Gujarat model of development and that the people of the country had already answered the questions of Rahul Gandhi by giving it a mandate in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
Hitting out at Gandhi over his "a question a day" social media campaign, Singh said he should first tell why India remained poor despite the Congress ruling it for 50-55 years.
At a public rally in Sanand, Singh said, "The Congress leader (Rahul) asks what did the BJP government do in 22 years of its rule? What the BJP government has done in 22 years has been answered by the people of India during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections."
"If development has gone mad here, then why the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation appreciated the Gujarat government in 2012. It was the Gujarat model because of which the BJP formed government at the Centre.
"A single party ruled for 50-55 years... what is the reason India is still counted among poor countries in the world?" Rajnath asked.
The home minister also suggested the three young leaders in the state who have supported the Congress Alpesh Thakor, Hardik Patel and Jignesh Mevani to stay away from Gandhi.
"I would like to send a message to them that Rahul Gandhi will take them along when he sinks," he said, citing the example of Uttar Pradesh where the Samajawadi Party, which stitched a pre-poll alliance with the Congress, was defeated.
Singh praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying that because of him India had found a place of respect in the world community and that his government was committed to making it the most powerful country in the world.
He said his government was committed to increasing farmers' income by 2022 and that the concerns of peasants in Sanand will be resolved as soon as the BJP returns to power in Gujarat.
He also suggested the opposition to restrain itself while speaking about the prime minister.
New Delhi: The Congress on Sunday alleged that BJP was indulging in violence against its candidates in Gujarat and urged the Election Commission to initiate an action against Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani.
"Our leaders Indranil Rajyaguru, Mitul Donga and MP Rajeev Satav, who are fighting the 'Shah-kaal' of fear and corruption in Gujarat, were attacked by the Gujarat Police yesterday," said Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Twitter.
"Violence is a result of fear. Rupani ji fears losing the election and he is taking support of lathis. But Gujarat is not frightened," he added.
Congress said that its candidate Indranil Rajyaguru, who is contesting Rupani from Rajkot West, its Rajkot East nominee Mitul Donga and MP Rajeet Satav have been arrested by the Rajkot Police.
Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said: "People of Gujarat and Rajkot will teach a befitting lesson for such brutalities through the 'power of ballot'."
Another Congress spokesperson Sushmita Dev said Rupani was "puzzled" as he was "losing" and was thus resorting to violence against Congress leaders.
"I have heard the chief minister's audio in which he said that the BJP was in a bad shape'," Dev told reporters.
"When Rajyaguru, who is also an MLA, was campaigning last night (Saturday), he was attacked by some BJP goons. Instead of arresting them, police arrested our candidate," she added.
She further alleged, "The police also arrested Rajeev Satav, who had gone there to enquire about the Congress candidate."
Dev asked the Election Commission to take action against Rupani, and police officials concerned.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday will hold four rallies in Gujarat's Dharampur, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar, where polling is scheduled in the first phase on 9 December.
"Will continue the campaign across Gujarat. Looking forward to addressing rallies in Dharampur, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar," Modi said in a tweet.
Will continue the campaign across Gujarat. Looking forward to addressing rallies in Dharampur, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) December 4, 2017
The second-phase of polling for the 182-seats-Gujarat assembly will be on 14 December. The counting of votes will take place on 18 December.
Negative politics of the Congress isn't cutting ice with the people of Gujarat. People are fully aware of the divisive tactics of Congress and have terrible memories of Congress rule, which was characterised by misgovernance and lawlessness. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) December 3, 2017
On Sunday, Modi was in Bharuch where he addressed a rally and took a jibe at the Congress for opposing the bullet train project.
Continuing his two-day visit to the state, on Monday, he will visit Dharmapur in Valsad district and then he will be in Saurashtra's Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar.
Gujarat has been under the Bharatiya Janata Party-rule for the last 22 years.
Click here for LIVE coverage of Modi's campaign on Monday
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I read a column by Steve Banker, a fine analyst and advisor in the Supply Chain, What Was Hot in Supply Chain Technology In 2017.
Steve listed 3D Printing of Spare Parts, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Supply Chain Applications, Autonomous Mobile Robots for the Warehouse, Autonomous Trucks, SNEW data social media, news, event, and weather data and the Uberization of Freight.
Its a good list.
What I find interesting is what happens when you overlay that list against the Federal Government. There are few touch points.
The military is taking autonomous trucks and robots seriously, as well as 3D printing of spare parts, for obvious reasons. I sure hope some of the folks in the Three Letter Agencies (CIA, NSA, etc.) are doing something with Artificial Intelligence. I keep hoping that NASA will do something spectacular like they did in the sixties, but they remain starved for funds.
This is not a long list. Where are the other overlaps between innovation and the Federal Government? It shouldnt be a hard question.
During World War II, a phrase entered common usage. Seventy-five years ago, "good enough for Government work" meant it could meet the most rigorous of standards. Thats not what people mean when they use that phrase today, and that should make all of us sad.
Once upon a time the Federal Government was known for innovation, including achievements in the supply chain. These are the people who gave us the Post Office, the most formidable last mile delivery capability on the planet. The Feds figured out how to mobilize the supply chain to win World War II on the other side of the Atlantic, and even more impressively on the other side of the Pacific. They conceived of and created the interstate highway system; where would we be today without that coast-to-coast network? ARPA, now DARPA, played a pivotal role in the creation of the internet.
The list could go on, but I dont really see much that is meaningful and recent. Why cant federal government agencies keep pace with the private sector anymore? I once had a boss who liked to ask, What have you done for me lately? As a Taxpayer and a Supply Chain Professional, I find myself wanting to ask that same question of the Federal Government.
Can anybody tell me who I should call?
New Delhi: Hitting out at his detractors within the AAP, its founder-member Kumar Vishwas on Sunday said the party needed an anti-virus system to get rid of "viruses that have been destroying it".
"Anti-virus system will be set up in the party and that will include party workers," Vishwas told the media in New Delhi.
He also talked of bringing into the party fold those who had left the AAP, which is in power in Delhi.
Asked about which virus he was referring to, he only said that Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP), support had gone down from five lakh persons who Assembly at Ramlila Maidan at one point of time to 5,000 at present and it was only due to the viruses.
He expressed displeasure over the AAP's functioning and said the party needs to go back to the basics.
Vishwas reiterated that the AAP had deviated from the path from where it started five years ago.
He said party workers were in talks with many of their colleagues who had since left the AAP, including Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, and apologised for any wrongs done by the party.
In the AAP's National Council meeting in November, Vishwas' name was not included in the list of speakers.
In October, the AAP had revoked the suspension of AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan, who had accused Vishwas of being a traitor. Khan was suspended in May, days after he made the remark.
New Delhi: Former prime minister Manmohan Singh on Monday said that Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi is the "darling" of the party and will carry forward the "great traditions" of the Congress.
"Rahul Gandhi is a darling of the Congress and he will carry forward the great traditions of the party," the former prime minister said after Rahul Gandhi filed his nomination papers for the party's top post.
He also said that Congress president Sonia Gandhi has served the party for over 19 years.
"So it will be yet another chapter for the party and Rahul Gandhi will carry on the great traditions of taking the party forward," Singh added.
Over 90 sets of nominations are expected to be filed supporting Gandhi whose election is a mere formality now, as there is no other candidate for the party's top post.
Gandhi will succeed his mother Sonia Gandhi, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998.
Rahul Gandhi became the Congress vice president in January 2013.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his election rally in Valsad's Dharampur, slammed the Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi's expected elevation as party chief, terming the party's election process as 'Aurangzeb Raj', according to media reports.
"Mani Shankar Aiyar said, 'did elections happen during Mughal rule? After Jehangir, Shahjahan came, was any election held? After Shahjahan it was understood Aurangzeb will be the leader'. So Congress accepts it is a family party? We don't want this Aurangzeb rule," the prime minister said, according to ANI.
I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the well being of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command: PM Modi pic.twitter.com/GSobcJT20X ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2017
The prime minister also attacked the Congress by saying the party cannot tolerate or accept leaders from Gujarat. He went on to question Rahul Gandhi's several visits to temples in the Congress campaigns.
Earlier, Congress would go out of the way to show their secularism but now we are all seeing what they are doing in this election, where they are going. Unfortunately for them, Muslims know their real nature: PM Modi #GujaratElection2017 pic.twitter.com/vredOl0z6a ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2017
On Monday, Modi is scheduled to hold four rallies in Gujarat's Dharampur, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar, where polling is scheduled in the first phase on 9 December.
The second-phase of polling for the 182-seats-Gujarat assembly will be on 14 December. The counting of votes will take place on 18 December.
Click here for LIVE coverage of Modi's campaign on Monday
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The inevitable has finally happened in the Congress party. Rahul Gandhi is going to be the sixth member of the Nehru-Gandhi family from the fifth generation to be Congress president.
This kind of ascendency to power and privilege in a leading national party is perhaps unparalleled in the world, in the countries which practice democracy. While taking the all-important step of filing the nomination papers for the Congress presidents post, the mother and son have scripted a fresh chapter in Congresss history, even by their own dynastic family standards. This means a smooth formal transfer of power from Sonia Gandhi, who has been holding the top post for the last 19 years, to Rahul Gandhi, who currently holds charge as the vice-president of the party.
Neither the Congress nor Rahul had any qualms of about the First Family's virtually divine right to rule the party. In fact, during Rahul's recent tour to America, he had countered the failed dynast charge against him by arguing that that (dynasty) is how India runs.
Meanwhile, senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar stepped into a controversy after a comment made by him was picked up by the BJP. Aiyar speaking to a TV channel, said, "When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any election happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go to the heir." The comment was quickly picked up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was campaigning in Gujarat.
Less than 45-minutes after Mani Shankar Aiyar made the comparison, Modi, who was addressing a public rally at Dharampur in Gujarat, mocked Aiyar and the Congress. He said, "Mani Shankar Aiyar proudly asked whether an election took place when Shahjahan succeeded Jehangir as emperor. When Aurangzeb succeeded Shahjahan, did an election take place? It was known to one and all that the emperors throne would go to his son.
Mani Shankar Aiyar, who never shies away from showing loyalty to one family, proudly said- , election ? , election ? , : PM narendramodi_in (@narendramodi_in) December 4, 2017
This means that senior leaders in the Congress believe that the Congress is not a party but a kunba (family holding) and the son of the emperor would acquire the throne. I congratulate Congress on Aurangzeb Raj," Modi added.
The usage of the term 'Aurangzeb raj' for the Congress has loaded connotations at a time when campaigning for the Gujarat election is at its peak and Rahul is going to various Hindu temples. For many in India, Aurangzeb remains a hated Mughal emperor. The Modi governments position, without saying so in as many words, is the same. It recently changed the name of a road named after Aurangzeb in Lutyen's Delhi to APJ Abdul Kalam Road.
This new-found tag (Aurangzeb) by Modi to describe dynastic rule in the Congress would come in handy for several BJP leaders and workers to unleash a fresh bout of attacks on the Congress.
Note Modis other charge against the Congress
Why has the Congress stopped saying BJP is anti-Muslim? Earlier, they would go out of the way to show their secularism but now we are all seeing what they are doing in this election, where they are going. Unfortunately for them, Muslims know their real nature: PM narendramodi_in (@narendramodi_in) December 4, 2017
While the merits of Modis Aurangzeb raj barb against Rahul and the Congress will be debated for long, the fact remains that in less than an hour or 45 minutes, Modi turned the news headlines as he had so wished. It became the biggest talking point of the day, although from the Congress' perspective, the media should have been discussing Sonia Gandhis 19 years of stewardship and the challenges that Rahul will have to brave in the days and months to come.
The other connotation of the 'Aurangzeb raj barb could be the contention that after Rahul's reign, the Congress will completely disintegrate. Though Aurangzeb ruled India for close to 50 years in the seventeenth century, by the time he left the throne, the Mughal empire had begun disintegrating.
Congress spokesperson Rajiv Tyagi had recently said that Rahul is not becoming the president for a term but for the next 50 years. Unfortunately for Rahul, at the time when he is officially taking over the reign of the Congress party, its disintegration is already at an advanced stage. It has 44 seats in the Lok Sabha and is losing one state after another. It has only one big state, Karnatakawhich is going to the polls in the next six monthsin its kitty. Senior leaders from across the country are quitting the party. The party recently won in Punjab, but the credit for that went to local strongman Captain Amarinder Singh, not to Rahul.
What made Modis charge stick on the Congress is the fact that despite warnings of an existential crisis by leaders like Jairam Ramesh, the party went into denial mode over Rahuls failures. In an interview to PTI, Jairam Ramesh, former union minister and one-time close confidante of Rahul had said The sultanate has gone, but we behave as if we are sultans still. We have to completely redo the way of thinking, the way of acting, the way of projecting, the way of communicating. I think there is a lot of goodwill for the Congress, a lot of support for the Congress but the people want to see a new Congress. They don't want to see old mantras and old slogans. We must recognise this is a big challenge."
Rahul's elevation as the Congress chief gave the BJP enough ammo to attack the party on its "dynastic" ways of functioning. If things continue in the same manner, Rahul might become BJP's biggest asset ahead of the Gujarat Assembly election. The state goes to polls on 9 and 14 December. The BJP seems to be enjoying Rahuls elevation, after all.
Click here for detailed coverage of Gujarat Assembly Election 2017
Vadodara: Senior NCP leader Praful Patel on Monday attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the comments he had made on the forthcoming election of the Congress president while addressing a poll rally in Gujarat on Sunday.
"Narendra Modi commented on infighting in the Congress, which was unwarranted. He had termed the election (of Congress president) as a tussle between 'shezad' and 'Shahzada'," Patel told reporters.
Addressing a rally, Modi had said that if one doesn't have democracy in his home (party), how can the person practice it in the country.
Modi also said that the outcome of the election to the top post in the Congress is a foregone conclusion.
"A youth called Shezad (Poonawala), who is a (Congress) party worker has raised questions over the process of the election and alleged that it is being rigged," the prime minister had said.
Patel said the Sharad Pawar-led party is contesting 58 out of the total 182 seats in Gujarat elections, to be held in two phases on 9 and 14 December.
The senior leader said had the Congress sealed a pre-poll alliance with the NCP in Gujarat, the chances of the BJP's victory would have become remote.
The NCP and the Congress had fought state assembly polls in an alliance in 2002 and 2007.
The tie-up couldn't materialise this time as the Congress was livid with the NCP over its two MLAs in Gujarat purportedly voting for a BJP candidate against Ahmed Patel in Rajya Sabha election this year.
Patel said the BJP was losing the ground in Gujarat since the emergence of Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakor and Jignesh Mevani, who represent Patidars, OBCs and Dalits, respectively.
"After Modi's ascension to Delhi in 2014, the BJP failed to retain power in most of district and tehsil panchayats that went to polls, which reflected resentment against the saffron party," Patel said.
Attacking the prime minister, Patel said Modi was "maintaining silence" on the matters concerning the common people while raking up the "son-of-the-soil" issue in Gujarat.
Patel was referring to Modi's emotional appeals to the people of the state during canvassing.
"Modi should have talked about issues like farmer distress, atrocities on Dalits, discrimination against minorities, plight of small and medium scale industries, adverse impact of GST and demonetisation etc," the NCP leader said.
Taking a jibe at the BJP for drafting in senior Union ministers for the poll campaign, Patel said this reflects "nervousness" in the saffron party and that the "parivartan" (transformation) is imminent in Gujarat.
Patna: Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar came out in support of the demand for a constitutional amendment that could pave way for introducing reservations in job promotions.
"We have always been for reservations in promotions. We had introduced this provision for the SCs and STs in Bihar. Our decision was challenged and struck down by the high court. The matter is now pending before the Supreme Court," he told reporters on the sidelines of his weekly Lok-Samvad programme.
The chief minister was responding to a query on a statement by Union minister and Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) chief Ram Vilas Paswan that his party was planning to write to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for bringing in a constitutional amendment which could facilitate reservations in promotions, while taking into account the conditions laid down by the Supreme Court in this regard.
"If Paswan wants to take an initiative in this direction, we welcome it. The issue of reservation in promotions is a long-standing one and it needs to be debated in Parliament," Kumar said.
Rubbishing the speculation that such a move could lead to a compromise as far as merit was concerned, the chief minister said there was nothing wrong in supporting a community which was grossly under-represented in a certain service at a certain rank.
The JD(U) chief also reiterated that he was in favour of reservations in the private sector, "which is providing more jobs nowadays than the public sector", and that "the basis for introducing quotas cannot be economic backwardness, but social and educational backwardness, as has been elucidated in the Constitution".
About the poor among the upper castes, the chief minister said, "They can be supported through measures like scholarships. We are doing that in Bihar. But it must be understood that reservation is meant for the limited, though important, purpose of enabling the deprived sections of the society to avail of equal opportunities. The sole objective of the quota system is to create a condition, wherein every segment of the society will become a part of the social mainstream."
Jammu: Opposition National Conference chief Farooq Abdullah on Sunday said "politics of hate" is the biggest threat to the unity of the nation, and asked its propagators to stay away from Jammu and Kashmir.
He also cautioned people against "communal polarisation" ahead of panchayat elections in the state.
"There is no threat to any religion. If there is a danger at all, it is 'politics of hate', which has been serving as a shield to communal elements," Abdullah said at a meeting of senior party leaders at NC headquarters in Jammu.
He asked the believers of hate politics to keep off from Jammu and Kashmir, a state he said was a "shining example of amity and communal harmony".
Seeking mass participation in the upcoming panchayat elections, the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir cautioned against "machinations of divisive forces which may try to vitiate the atmosphere by engineering communal divide".
Terming the panchayat polls as crucial for strengthening democracy at grass-root level in the state, Abdullah exhorted the party cadre to gear up for the "big challenge".
"Notwithstanding the spirit of Panchayati Raj system having been trampled by the PDP-BJP dispensation by amending the Panchayat Raj Act, 1989, the National Conference believes panchayats as engines of political empowerment of people," he said.
He referred to the amendment in the Panchayati Raj Act, 1989, with regard to indirect election of sarpanch, claiming that it would weaken the system and give rise to manipulations.
It was a formality that the Congress rank and file were waiting for quite some time. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Monday filed his nomination for election to the post of the party president. According to sources, since Rahul is the only one filing his nomination, his election is a foregone conclusion. The formal announcement, however, is likely to be done later.
And so, finally, the next generation of the Gandhi family is set to helm an organisation which began as a party of the common, educated Indians in 1885 but has undergone several transformations since then to reach its present avatar of a family party. It's a party which has been famously headed by members of his family and Rahul takes over from his mother, Sonia Gandhi, the incumbent party president.
The atmosphere outside the 24 Akbar Road, the Congress headquarters in New Delhi, was euphoric when Rahul arrived to file his nomination on Monday. Party workers were rejoicing over the impending election of their 'president-in-waiting,' almost in a scene that could be straight out of a fairy tale: Subjects rejoicing for their crown prince, hoping he will resuscitate a party that badly needs an injection after the rout it suffered in the 2014 general elections and in subsequent state Assembly elections.
From morning, hundreds of Congress workers from across the country gathered outside AICC headquarters. The moment the Congress vice-president filed his nomination, there was an outpouring of emotion and celebrations. Slogans, fireworks, beating of drums and distribution of sweets marked the day.
Its almost after three years that Congress headquarters saw the presence of veteran Congress leaders who used to be a part of former prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhis core teams: Motilal Vohra, Ahmed Patel, Ambika Soni, Kamal Nath, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Manmohan Singh, Ashok Gehlot, Sheila Dikshit, to name a few.
Its a historical day; a day of celebration and utsav for Congress workers. A new chapter is being added to history with Rahul as president. Thousands and thousands of Congress workers have been waiting for this day as he will lead the party with a new energy, said Randeep Singh Surjewala, in-charge, Communication, AICC, immediately after the nomination was filed.
Rahul has had a tough life as a Gandhi scion. After all, he belongs to one of the world's most powerful political families. With Jawahar Lal Nehru for a grandfather, Indira for a grandmother and Rajiv for a father, Rahul has been carrying a heavy burden of expectations on his shoulder. The nation has not been very kind in assessing him vis-a-vis his predecessors.
While Nehru led the party in the first years after Independence with almost unanimous support of the majority of the masses, Indira had a turbulent relationship with the people. Yet, she steered the party into becoming the family-centric, omnipotent political entity that it became, investing the family with unprecedented powers. Rahul's father, Rajiv, an accidental prime minister, continues to hold the record of leading his party to a sweeping majority that will be hard for anybody to replicate. In the 1984 Lok Sabha election, held after Indira's assassination, Rajiv led his party to 404 out of 533 seats.
As if coming into this legacy is not enough, Rahul has the serious challenge of rebuilding a party that has, in the past few years, reached its nadir. His task is compounded by the fact that the field is not easy. He faces the biggest political juggernaut of our time: Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Anything thats stagnant cant progress. The Congress is over 100 years old. Rahul, as the new leader, will bring a new blood and vigour into the organisation. Leadership is all about how one takes people forward, how one leads the team. And, he will prove it, said senior Congress leader Ambika Soni.
Immediate challenges
The immediate challenge before Rahul is to continue leading the Congress from front in the Gujarat Assembly elections. When he eventually takes over as Congress president, alliances will be a major challenge. Overhauling the party cadre through internal restructuring, strengthening and restructuring the Congress units at the state level and how efficiently he deals with the old guard of the party are some immediate and long-term challenges.
The immediate challenge or task before Rahul ji is Gujarat election, where hes leading from front. Instead of making personal attacks like Modi, hes taking up issues," Sharmistha Mukherjee, Delhi Congress spokesperson and daughter of Pranab Mukherjee told Firstpost. "For example, he questioned why Gujarat ranks so low in Human Development Index. Unlike the BJP, where veterans are pushed into Margdarshak Mandal, senior leaders in Congress are actively involved in policy making. Today, before filing nomination, Rahul ji met former president Pranab Mukherjee and former prime minister Manmohan Singh to seek their blessings. This is good sanskar."
Prior to visiting AICC headquarters, Rahul met Mukherjee, who blessed him with flowers and put a tilak on his forehead.
Sharmistha added, Congress is a party with continuity, change and evolution. Were rooted in our traditions and no drastic change will occur. Rahul ji may make his team, but seniors will play an important role. It will be a good team of young leaders and a combination of young blood and experiences of old generation.
Enthusiasm among youth
It wasnt just the senior leaders and Congress workers who gathered at the headquarters to celebrate Rahuls nomination: There were also members from Sewa Dal, Youth Congress (YC) and students wing National Students Union of India (NSUI).
Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh aptly described Rahuls elevation as euphoric and said, Its a dawn of young India. Hell make a good prime minister.
The younger generation in Congress party as well as in its affiliated bodies feels that barring Rahul, no other leader at present has a pan-India appeal. Referring to Rahuls tenure as Congress general secretary, the national media in-charge of NSUI, Neeraj Mishra said, First thing he did after becoming the general secretary was democratise NSUI and YC. His vision helped identify leadership in NSUI. Earlier, office bearers were appointed directly. This system gave opportunity to many of us whore not from any political background, but proved ourselves by working in our respective areas, to be a part of Congress and work further. Rahul jis vision and leadership will further strengthen the party. He told us last month that whether one holds a post or not, should strive to carry forward India's constitutional values.
Political analyst Neerja Chowdhury summed it up: Much will depend on how Rahul brings generational change at all levels; how he projects young leaders in the party as faces during the forthcoming elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh in 2018. Working in tandem with fresh young faces and the experiences of old guard will be a challenge.
Read complete coverage of Gujarat Elections 2017 here
It was instructive to watch Rahul Gandhi file his nomination papers at the party headquarters on Monday with a large tilak on his forehead and the frame of Mahatma Gandhi hanging from a wall behind him.
Delhi: Rahul Gandhi at AICC HQ,files nomination for Congress President pic.twitter.com/QUHFFtHNXb ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2017
The Gandhi dynast, who could take over as Congress president the by the end of day if no one else steps up to challenge his nomination, recently responded to controversy around his religion by declaring: "Our faith is our personal matter. We are not required to show a certificate to anybody in this regard. We do not want to trade on this issue. 'Hum is cheez ki dalali nahi karna chahte' (we are not brokers of religion). We do not want to use it politically."
So Rahul tells voters that he is disinterested in doing "dalali" over religion. Rahul takes the moral high ground in claiming that he doesn't want to make a public spectacle of his faith or indulge in politics over it. And then Rahul steps into the AICC headquarters at 24 Akbar Road sporting a huge tilak on his forehead, knowing well that the cameras would be panned on him as Gujarat election dates draw near.
Also, let us not forget that Rahul's solemn declarations on keeping politics and religion "separate" emerged after he embarked on an extended temple run, visiting well over 20 shrines as part of his poll campaign. This dichotomy isn't just opportunism ahead of an Assembly election. These mixed messages reflect a cognitive dissonance that defines the very nature of Rahul's Congress. They speak of an ideological and structural failure that the grand old party has steadfastly refused to address.
Let us first take a look at Congress's ideological confusion. The Congress accuses the BJP of indulging in strident 'Hindutva' politics. It doesn't matter whether the charge carries any truth, or not. The point is that critics and political rivals identify BJP with a certain kind of ideology. The BJP, for better or for worse, has consciously occupied an ideological space. BJP leaders, workers, supporters, the larger electorate, media, critics and political rivals are aware of that positioning, and accordingly modify their behaviour.
As Rahul takes the reins, is he clear about the direction in which he wants to steer the party? What does the Congress stand for? Do the Congress cadres have a clear idea about the party ideology? Can its leaders deliver a consistent, coherent message? Do the voters have a clear understanding of Congress' political positioning? There are no clear answers to each of these questions.
As a fourth-generation dynast, Rahul has had some unparalleled advantages. He grew up in a family that defined the nation's power structure for the better part of India's journey post-Independence. He was assured of party presidentship virtually at birth, and has had the space and time (perhaps too much time) to get groomed for the role. One would imagine that by now he has a very clear idea about the role that is demanded of him.
If he does, the dynast has been very careful not to let it show. Given his family lineage, the Gandhi scion had a marvelous chance to position himself as the face of a syncretic India but he incredibly stumbled on a sacred thread to expose himself as a casteist and Brahmin supremacist, all the while trying to stitch up a rainbow coalition in Gujarat with leaders of a Dalit movement and upper-caste agitators.
This ideological confusion within Congress ranks rises ultimately from a paucity of leadership and bankruptcy of ideas. Directionless Rahul doesn't know whether he should align with the subaltern movement, back a constitutionally untenable upper-caste quota demand, canvass for minority votes or visit temples to show that he is a greater Hindu than Narendra Modi. In his dearth of ideas, the Congress boss has decided to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.
He is a Dalit leader one day, Patidar leader the next; critic of BJP's 'Hindutva' politics one day, ardent temple visitor the next. It is evident that Rahul lacks the spunk, skill and vision to lead India's oldest political party in the world's largest democracy but he must manfully accept the job because he was to the manor born, and Congress won't allow a more meritorious leader to replace a Gandhi at the helm. It wasn't by accident that Mahatma Gandhi was adorning the wall behind the dynasts' back when he was filing his papers. It was specifically designed to portray Rahul as a torchbearer of the Mahatma legacy, not as a fourth-generation dynast. The placement of the picture was an admission that the party remains deeply troubled by charges that Congress has been reduced to a family vessel: An issue that Shezad Poonawalla, the high-profile rebel, has been quite vocal about of late.
Party insider tells me dynasty advisors are considering fielding a "Dummy Candidate" against Shehzada !! Really, why this farce?? The well wisher also adds "Shehzad dont become a second Safdar Hashmi by reaching INC office today!" What a Black Day in the history of my party! pic.twitter.com/t1Sk59x6tg Shehzad Jai Hind (@Shehzad_Ind) December 4, 2017
#RaGaSelected a fact accepted by no less than Anand Sharma...everything was fixed 4 years ago I told u many sympathised with me but forced to be with the King Wait for more.. some going to ECI & some to court I am told https://t.co/EDESwAk6lM Shehzad Jai Hind (@Shehzad_Ind) December 4, 2017
It was also instructive to witness senior Congress leaders, one after the other, swear by Rahul and insist that winning elections isnt the true measure of leadership. The Congress might dress up its compulsion as a choice, but it would do well to remember that voters are under no such obligation.
Read complete coverage of Gujarat Elections 2017 here
Read complete coverage of our Congress president election here
The much talked about change of guard in India's oldest political party is now happening. As Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi filed his nomination for the post of party president on Monday, heralding a generational shift in the leadership of party, the day also marked the beginning of the end of Congress' longest-serving high command's tenure, which has steered the party for 19 years, including the 10 when it led the UPA government. The official handover, however, is yet to occur.
The election process
According to the election process laid out in the party's constitution, the Congress' Central Working Committee (CWC) meets and decides to elect its chief. Once the notification is published, interested candidates are then required to file their nominations before the party's Central Election Committee within a given deadline, which ended on Monday at 3 pm. Party units and members of the CWC then file nominations, espousing the candidate of their choice. The committee then scrutinises the nominations, this time on 5 December.
The same day, a list of valid nominations will be published. The election process also has a window for withdrawal of candidature until 11 December. Later that day, the final list of candidates contesting the election will be published, and if necessary, the casting of votes will be held on 16 December. The votes will be counted and result will be declared on 19 December
Sources say Rahul only candidate in fray
The grand old party seeking a revival in its electoral fortunes is all set to elect Rahul to take over the party's reins from his mother Sonia Gandhi, as he remains the sole candidate in the fray. The election for choosing a new Congress president saw 89 sets of nominations being filed on Monday: All likely in support of Rahul as the new party chief.
Talking to the media after the process for filing nominations ended, Mullappally Ramachandran, returning officer for the election, said "89 nominations had been filed on Monday, the last day." He did not give further details and said these will be given after the scrutiny of nominations is done on Tuesday.
However, sources said all the nominations were for "one candidate", IANS reported.
The office for conducting the party's presidential election had distributed a total of 90 nominations. Sources said that one form was not filed apparently because it did not have signatures of the stipulated 10 delegates.
Ramachandran said the nomination forms had been signed by 890 delegates. The 47-year-old, who will be the sixth Nehru-Gandhi scion to helm the party, filed papers at the Congress headquarters amid cheers and celebrations by party leaders and workers. His mother and incumbent party president Sonia signed the first nomination paper for Rahul's election. The maximum number of nominations were from Uttar Pradesh, the country's most populous state.
Rahulwho was appointed Congress vice-president in January 2013was accompanied by a host of senior party leaders, including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, who called Rahul the "darling" of the party. Party leaders exuded confidence that he will carry forward the party's traditions and lead it to victory in the next general elections in 2019.
"Rahul ji has been the darling of the Congress...Rahul will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party," the normally taciturn Singh told reporters at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters after Rahul filed his papers.
While there were several nomination forms filed on behalf of Rahul, the Congress vice-president personally filed two sets. The first nomination form was filed by him and proposed by Sonia, Motilal Vora, Ahmed Patel, Mohsina Kidwai, Kamal Nath, Sheila Dikshit, Ashok Gehlot, Mukul Wasnik, Tarun Gogoi and V Narayanasamy. All leaders except Sonia were present.
The second nomination form was proposed by Manmohan, Siddaramaiah, Oscar Fernandes, P Chidambaram, Sushilkumar Shinde, Jyotiraditya Scindia, T Subbarami Reddy, Jaipal Reddy, Mukul Sangma and Anand Sharma.
Three more forms were filed on behalf of Rahul by other senior leaders. These included Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mallikarjun Kharge, Ambika Soni, Amarinder Singh, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, CP Joshi, Selja, KC Venugopal and Salman Khurshid, besides Janardan Dwivedi, Shivraj Patil, Meira Kumar, Harish Rawat, Avinash Pande and BK Hariprasad.
Rahul arrived at the Congress headquarters around 10.30 am and filed his papers around 11 am. "We are very happy that Rahul ji has filed his nomination... I am confident that Rahul will turn out a very successful leader. And under his leadership, the Congress will regain power," Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said.
Before filing his nomination, Rahul sought the blessings of former president Pranab Mukherjee, Manmohan Singh and his mother.
Controversy over Mani Shankar Aiyar's remark
The filing of nomination was not without controversy. Senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar invoked the Mughal dynasty in the Congress presidential election and Prime Minister Narendra Modi latched on, calling it "Aurangzeb Raj".
"When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any election happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go to the heir," Aiyar said, retorting to the 'dynasty' jibes of the BJP on Rahul's election.
"But in a democracy elections are held. I openly invite (Shehzad) Poonawalla to file the nomination and contest," Aiyar said, adding that nobody would have heard of Poonawalla earlier.
Aiyar was replying to a question about BJP's criticism following Maharashtra Congress leader Poonawalla alleging that election for Congress president was a sham and Rahul Gandhi's elevation was rigged.
Modi was quick to pounce on Aiyar's remarks. Addressing an election rally in Gujarat, Modi said: "Aiyar, who never shies away from showing loyalty to one family, proudly said: When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any elections happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go the son. I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the well-being of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command," he said.
The prime minister also said that the Congress leaders admit that it is not a party but a "kunba" (family).
Congress' defence on BJP's 'dynastic politics' barb
Congress leaders hailed the day as "historic", while the BJP took jibes on the 'farcical election procedure' noting that there were no other claimants to the post to challenge Rahul.
The Congress, however, defended itself against the BJP's attacks.
Taking a swipe at the BJP, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said several parties, including the ruling party which has no history of uniting the country, had issues with the nomination.
"There cannot be a bigger joke than the current ruling party talking about democracy. Those who dont believe in democracy, in people, those who have to trust in machines to win votes are preaching to us on democracy," he said.
Anand Sharma described it as a "historic moment" and said there are challenges before the country as the government had failed to deliver. "Rahul will accept the responsibility in continuity with the established traditions of the Congress. We want to make this absolutely clear that it is a conscious and considered decision of the Congress party," he said.
Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said Modi was "suffering from Rahul Gandhi phobia".
Surjewala also said that Modi's "love for Shehzad, Shahzada (BJP chief Amit Shah's son Jai Shah) and Shourya (National Security Advisor Ajit Doval's son)" is well known to the world.
"But will Modi ji tell when he will answer the questions of his own senior party leaders like Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha?" he asked.
Rahul's much awaited appointment also comes just ahead of the elections in Gujarat, which goes to the polls on 9 and 14 December. According to this Firstpost article, the Assembly elections, will be seen as a tough testing ground for Rahul, who has suffered blame for previous electoral routes.
In 2014, the Congress was reduced to its lowest-ever tally of 44 seats in the Lok Sabha and has since suffered a series of electoral defeats at the state level.
With inputs from agencies
School choice got a boost when the Senate passed its tax reform bill early on Saturday morning. But what else went down thats connected to K-12?
Weve already gone over the key features of the tax legislation when it comes to education. Among other things, the Senate wants to double to $500 the deduction teachers can take for money they pay out of their own pockets for classroom supplies. And the deductions taxpayers can take for state income taxes would go away, a potential game-changer for education funding because it could put pressure on states to reduce their tax burden, and therefore the amount of money they can use to fund schools.
Lawmakers still need to go to conference to hash out the differences between the House and Senate tax bills before voting on that final versions on their respective chambers. We identified some key differences between the two bills last week, although overall the number of key differences between the two bills on K-12 has shrunk as the process has moved ahead. The GOP is hoping to have a tax bill signed by President Donald Trump by the end of the year.
There were a few interesting moments from that very long overnight debate you may have missed. Lets review them.
The Ephemeral Amendment Favoring Religious Instruction
On Friday, an amendment from Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was attached to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This amendment would have allowed those paying tuition at qualified organizations providing religious instruction to treat 25 percent of that cost as a charitable donation, and therefore a deduction on their taxes.
By Saturday morning when the bill passed 51-49, however, that amendment was excluded from the bill. In fact, it was literally crossed out by lawmakers as they feverishly worked to finish the legislation:
At least 30 percent of the instructional time at those organizations would have had to have been devoted to religious teaching in order for parents paying the tuition to claim the benefit. In essence, it would have treated tuition payments to such organization as a tax-advantaged cost for some families, at least partially.
Hatch had offered an similar amendment earlier in the Senates consideration of the bill, but it took several days for that amendment to be included (and then taken out of) the tax bill. Sens. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., and Tim Scott, R-S.C., also proposed amendments to boost school choice in some form. Both of them were unsuccessful.
529 Plan Change
Late Friday night, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, proposed a successful amendment to the tax bill that would change 529 college savings plans. Cruzs amendment would allow up to $10,000 annually in 529 plans to be used for K-12 expenses, including for private school tuition.
Today the Senate voted to adopt my amendment which will expand the popular 529 college savings plans so that parents can save for K-12 elementary and secondary school tuition, including educational expenses for homeschool students. -> https://t.co/piKvARkAGz pic.twitter.com/oSSeqhpoeM Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) December 2, 2017
The House had already approved the same provision in its tax bill. So as GOP lawmakers in the two chambers get together and hash out a final bill, it looks all but certain that this change will be included in any tax bill lawmakers send to President Donald Trump.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and other school choice supporters have applauded the move by creating a new form of tax-advantaged money parents can spend at the schools of their choice. But some are critical that using 529 plans to boost K-12 choice wont do much to help low-income families.
The Link to DeVos
Speaking of DeVos, she didnt have a vote on the GOP tax plan. But she came up during the final debate because of a private college in Michigan.
Hillsdale is a prominent institution of higher education among political conservatives , and has been for some time. DeVos brother, Erik Prince, attended Hillsdale, and the DeVos family foundation has provided financial support for Hillsdale.
A proposed amendment from Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., would have exempted Hillsdale College from the bills tax on college and university endowments. Toomey argued on the Senate floor that because Hillsdale does not accept federally backed student financial aid, it should be rewarded by not getting taxed.
However, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, successfully proposed an amendment to strip out the tax break for Hillsdale. Merkeley used the DeVos familys financial support for the school as a way to attack Toomeys proposal.
The Senate just passed my amendment keeping Devos-funded Hillsdale College from getting a special break in the #TaxScamBill . The only bright spot in an otherwise infuriating night. Jeff Merkley (@JeffMerkley) December 2, 2017
Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
Rahul Gandhi is being repackaged. This should happen soon, if reports are to be believed.
Like any smart company that is passionate about its pet, but so-far-failed, product by giving it a new appeal, the Congress is also making a last-ditch effort to salvage the Gandhi brand that has held the party together since its infancy. But make no mistake, there may be very few who expect a miracle for the Congress with Rahul's elevation. Congress' allies and party sympathisers are on wait-and-watch mode before expressing confidence (or discarding) the Gandhi factor.
"In his recent campaign in Gujarat, he showed tenacity contacting people at the grassroots, but his commitment will only be demonstrated when he is in a position of responsibility," said CPM leader Sitaram Yechury last month.
Even all those years in his capacity as Congress vice-president and while working under mother Sonia Gandhi, who has been Congress president, Rahul had all the powers he needed to govern the party's affairs, whether questioning senior leaders or even the Prime Minister's Office.
Rahul took charge of the party's poll campaigns way back in 2012. But his progress card shows that he hasn't won any elections for the party, nor has he made a mark among his political allies. He was born with the guaranteed position of a future Congress chief and prime ministerial candidate, as was given to the family's three previous generations before him. That is what has taken him so far in the power corridors of his party.
Rahul's key errors in judgement
In Gujarat, where Assembly elections are imminent, Rahul made the tactical mistake of affiliating himself to what many call a "soft Hinduvta" stand visiting temples. It contradicted starkly with his party's secular image. Rahul walked right into the trap set by his political opponents and proclaimed himself as a sacred thread-wearing Hindu and a Shiva follower, at a time when BJP cornered him using a goof-up at Somnath Temple questioning his religious identity.
He should not have taken the bait, and should have discarded the question as a politically motivated gimmick. He said exactly what his opponents wanted.
Rahul's second mistake was that he is yet to break free from the image that has imprisoned the party for long the image of a corruption-prone, policy-paralysed and family-centered party that has nothing new to offer to the country. He hasn't yet learned from the reasons behind the party's past defeats and hasn't managed to offer a convincing alternative.
Beyond his new-found popularity on social media, with his wit and unrelenting focus on the man he's pitted against, Narendra Modi, there is no clear strategy that Gandhi can boast of to counter the government's economic or political policies. This is critical when he faces the informed voter who may have lost faith in personality politics.
Gandhi's strategies are more or less the same as what the Congress party has preached for decades. He still talks of loan waivers and freebies, and portrays corporations as enemies of the poor without understanding that unless big industries come up, there isn't much the poor can hope for in an agriculture-dominated Indian economy. The Congress' populist card worked in the past, but won't work in the changed socio-political circumstances.
In the 2014 Union elections and thereafter, the Congress failed to win the people's mandate on account of its past image. Under Rahul's active leadership in polls since 2012, he hasn't shown either the political courage to admit his party's wrongdoings or promise a change.
He has fought tooth and nail against Modi's controversial economic policies such as demonetisation and a flawed roll-out of Goods and Services Tax (GST). But beyond criticising the actions, Gandhi hasn't yet offered credible alternatives to where the Modi-government may have gone wrong on fighting black money or how to implement a better GST structure. Even Congress party intellectuals would not disagree that these are key issues, but a solution is missing.
Similarly, as pointed out in an earlier article, one of the charges Rahul raised against the Modi government was its failure to generate enough jobs, which again is a serious issue. Job creation has been at its lowest in the three-and-a-half years of Modi's rule. Rahul is right in pointing out the problem. But what would Rahul Gandhi, as prime minister, do to generate enough jobs? Is there a well thought out, credible alternative plan to accommodate the millions of workers entering the job market every month?
Rahul also lacks the aggression, the fighter instinct, to take on a powerful orator and master tactician that Modi embodies. His friendly and approachable appeal would make him the darling of social media but will hardly win him votes.
Nevertheless, being the topmost leader of the only national political party that has the potential to at least challenge the BJP and the indomitable Modi-factor in 2019, or at least create a unified Opposition voice, the repackaged version of Gandhi offers some promise in the democracy.
New Delhi: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi's long-delayed elevation as party chief is eventually taking place at a time when Congress faces an "existential crisis", as a party leader put it, and has huge electoral challenges in the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
Rahul, 47, will be the sixth member of Nehru-Gandhi family to take the top position of the 132-year old party.
The change at the top is coming on the eve of assembly polls in Gujarat and the outcome there would be interpreted in terms of Rahul's ability as a campaigner and vote getter.
But the next round of assembly polls in 2018 first in Karnataka and later in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh will be absolutely crucial for Rahul Rahul for building the momentum to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha polls. The state elections, with Bharatiya Janata Party as the key rival, will also be first major polls directly under Rahul Gandhi's charge as party chief. Assembly polls will also be held early next year in Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura.
The challenges for Rahul include fostering a new energy and enthusiasm in the Congress and evolving a new strategy to galvanise the party after a string of electoral losses since the 2014 Lok Sabha debacle. The Congress has to work hard at the grassroots to take on the relentless election machine of BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the party chief Amit Shah.
Rahul has to take a call on forging a larger opposition alliance for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls under a "collective leadership" or projecting himself as the alternative against Modi with support of different parties. He was the face of Congress in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
Rahul has been perceived as a reluctant politician due to some of his longish trips abroad, the delay in stepping up to the role of party chief, his not taking up a ministerial responsibility in two UPA governments and not properly following through some of the issues he raised.
Of late, he has been able to counter the perception with his sharp and aggressive attacks on Modi and the BJP. A trip to the United States where he had had interactions with think tanks appeared to have done a sea change to the image about him.
In Gujarat, where success will be a big morale-booster for the Congress, Rahul has sought to create a broad social coalition and has forced Modi to react.
Congress' only major success since its debacle in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls has been Punjab while the BJP, in comparison, has tremendously expanded its footprint by winning states it had never done in the past. The BJP is making efforts to expand its base in states it has been weak including West Bengal, Kerala, Odisha and Tamil Nadu.
Another major challenge for Rahul is to revive Congress in Uttar Pradesh, the state that sends the largest contingent of 80 MPs to parliament. Rahul has twice led the party's campaign in the assembly polls but had come a cropper.
The results of the recent local body polls in Amethi and Rae Bareli, the Lok Sabha constituencies of Rahul and his mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, have not been flattering for his image.
Congress has shrunk electorally, being now the fourth player in states such as Bihar, third in states such as West Bengal, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu as also Delhi. In the polls held to various assemblies since 2014, it has largely finished third or fourth. Sections, which were strongly with the party including Dalits, have drifted away.
Rahul had been projected as a young leader who understands the language and idiom of the youth but Modi has been more successful in weaning away the section that has large electoral presence. The Congress also has to devise ways to woo the large middle class.
Rahul, who is stepping into shoes of his mother Sonia who helmed Congress for 19 years including 10 as the chief of the party heading the ruling coalition at the Centre, will need to be dexterous in his dealings with allies as also other opposition parties such as the CPI-M.
The crumbling of the ruling alliance in Bihar has been a setback for the party.
Senior leaders like Mamata Banerjee and Lalu Prasad have a comfort level with Sonia and it remains to be seen how Rahul fits into the role.
Within the party, Rahul has to take several decisions including whether to project chief ministerial candidates in Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Rajasthan and who they will be.
Bringing about unity in faction-ridden state units and making the balance between the "old guard" and the younger aspirants will be other challenges.
Congress had to project nonagenarian Virbhadra Singh as chief ministerial candidate in Himachal Pradesh in the absence of a younger acceptable option.
Congress is now ruling only five states and a union territory and if it loses Gujarat and Karanataka next year, its chances of staging a comeback in 2019 will be further squeezed.
Though Rahul's experiments to democratise the party's youth organisations have not entirely succeeded, he has had some political successes, including forcing the Modi government to go back on its proposed changes in the land acquisition Act.
The concerted opposition attack on the "flawed" implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) as also perception of unease among traders in poll-bound Gujarat has apparently forced the government to extend several concessions.
But the Congress or other opposition parties could not reap political dividends on demonetisation though it caused a lot inconvenience to people.
Though Rahul had promised to "involve people in ways you cannot even imagine now" after the party lost in Delhi in 2013 assembly polls, the party fared far worse in the next polls.
Rahul, who is into his third term as Lok Sabha MP, was made party vice-president in 2013 as a stepping stone to his eventual elevation.
Jaipur: The much-hyped and controversial Criminal Law (Rajasthan Amendment) Ordinance 2017 which promulgated to protect public servants against probe into on-duty actions and "gagged" the media, triggering national uproar met a silent death on Monday.
Senior Cabinet Minister Gulab Chand Kataria confirmed that legally, the ordinance has lapsed. Now its fate will be decided on 27 December when a committee meets to discuss it.
Drafted by the state government on 6 September, the ordinance was introduced in the Rajasthan assembly on 23 October.
As per the rule book, an ordinance is valid for 42 days after it gets tabled in the assembly, after which it lapses automatically. Going by this, the gag ordinance lapsed on 4 December.
"Now, the ball is in the select committee's court. If the committee stops it, it will be dropped, and if the committee considers it to be ok, it will be reintroduced," said Kataria, who heads the select committee.
This committee is expected to submit its report in the first week of the next assembly session.
The announcement for the select committee was made on 27 November and its next meeting is scheduled for 27 December.
The ordinance was meant to protect public servants from prosecution for on-duty actions.
The Rajasthan government, via this ordinance, made it a must for judicial magistrates to seek government approval before taking cognizance against former and sitting judges and public servants on complaints filed under CrPC Section 156(3).
Even media was not spared under this ordinance and there were provisions of jail term of up to two years for journalists publishing or broadcasting such complaints which have not been approved by the government.
However, the government, in its defence, said that the gag ordinance aimed at curbing the misuse of CrPC Section 156(3).
As it was protested against from all corners of the country, the state government had to refer it to the select committee, thereby leading to the silent gagging of the "gag bill".
Delivering scathing attacks against Congress and soon-to-be party chief Rahul Gandhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is in Gujarat to campaign for the upcoming election, said that the grand old party always had an animosity for Gujarat and that Gujaratis must decide the destiny of the state by voting on 9 December.
Modi calls Rahul Gandhi's elevation as party president 'Aurangzebi raj'
On the second-day of his two-day visit to poll-bound state, Modi addressed a rally at Malanpada in Dharampur, a Congress bastion. Addressing the gathering, Modi slammed Rahul Gandhi's expected elevation as Congress president, dubbing it as "Aurangzebi raj".
Modi's Aurangzeb jibe came after BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya tweeted out senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar's quote to a TV channel.
Mani Shankar Aiyar does it, again! Compares Congress rule with Mughal Raj! pic.twitter.com/irijmGjWbY Amit Malviya (@malviyamit) December 4, 2017
The party veteran compared the Congress to Mughal era and about Rahul's elevation said, "Was their an election process to chose Shah Jahan after Jehangir? Or was their a poll to elect Aurangzeb after Shah Jahan?" Within 42 minutes of airing these quotes, Modi and the BJP caught on to the faux pas and attacked the Congress election process as a sham. At his rally, the prime minister also attacked the Congress for its dynastic politics.
Modi said, "Mani Shanker Aiyar, who was a minister in the Congress government said 'did elections happen during Mughal rule? After Jahangir, Shahjahan came, was any election held? After Shahjahan it was understood that Aurangzeb would be the leader'. Does the Congress accept that it is a one family party? We don't want this Aurangzebi Raaj (Aurangzeb's rule)....For us, country comes first, 125 crore people of this country are our high-command."
Rahul Gandhi is all set to take over as the Congress president next week and he has filed his nomination papers on Monday for the post amid opposition jibes over dynasty politics, in a contest with no one else in the fray.
At a campaign in Valsad, without directly referring to the National Herald case, in which Rahul Gandhi got bail, Modi said, "Congress has gone bankrupt, as it is going to make a person who is out on bail in corruption case its president."
"You (the UPA government) could not even handle Kashmir. But Sardar did yeomen service by unifying all rajas in India. Morarji fought for Prime Ministership. But he was jailed and thrown out like dirt," Modi said while slamming dynasty politics in Congress.
Modi reminds Congress of Uttar civic polls defeat
Attacking Congress over the poll rout that the party faced in recently-concluded Uttar Pradesh civic election, Modi said that the Congress has been wiped out in the state. "The people of Uttar Pradesh have now recognised the Congress and have wiped out them out, who ruled the state through five dynasties. Now, the Congress has accepted that they cannot harm Modi in 2019 and now they don't have anywhere to go," the prime minister said in Dharampur.
"So, their target is to malign Gujarat. The Congress has always made people fight against people, tribal against tribal, educated against uneducated, communities and so on. But the people of Gujarat have rejected such a disruptive party," Modi said at the rally.
'Congress against the people of Gujarat'
Raking up corruption in the Congres, Modi asked the crowd whether they were angry because of demonetisation. The crowd shouted 'no'.
"It is only Congress which is angry due to the note ban as they have lost their opportunity to loot the poor in India. They cry because I have acted against them. I am here for the poor. Every money in India is for the poor, adivasis, Dalits, farmers and workers."
Referring to the temple visits of the Gandhi scion in Gujarat, Modi said, "Look at the strength of the land of Sardar and Mahatma Gandhi, that after 70 years they have started visiting places like Somnath mandir. But people won't be fooled by that. There is a conspiracy to insult Gujarat and Gujarat won't tolerate."
"The Congress dynasty which has reigned in Uttar Pradesh for the past five decades, but have we ever maligned them, insulted them? Insulted other states? But not a single day passes when every Congress leader curses Gujarat. What is our fault? They cursed Sardar Patel. What was his fault? That he worked for the good of the country?"
"Do these people defame Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and West Benagl? But Congress used to defame and insult Gujarat. Every Congress leader usued to at least insult Gujarat once a day," Modi said in the Dharmapur rally.
Continuing in the same vein, Modi said, "Indira Gandhi had our Morarji Desai jailed for months. Why such animosity for Gujarat? Gujarat should teach them a lesson that they stop insulting Gujarat. Gujarat has never been on anybody's mercy."
Congress is anti-OBC: Modi
Alleging the Congress of not doing anything for the Other Backward Castes (OBC), the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST), Modi said, "All the previous governments did not do anything for these communities. As soon as our government was formed, we granted constitutional status to the OBC commission. Congress had halted that bill in the Rajya Sabha. I don't have to go and learn what backward living is."
"These people talk a lot of OBCs.. but I want to tell the OBCs of south Gujarat that Congress is lying and renegading on promises. Our MP met Manmohan Singh on giving constitutional status to OBC commission but nothing came out of it," Modi said in Dharmapur. The prime minister further added, "Why did the Congress not give Constitutional Status to the OBC Commission? We got a bill but when we did so, they stalled it in the Rajya Sabha. This anti-OBC Congress should be severely punished by the people."
"Not only did the Congress ignore the healthcare infrastructure in tribal areas, there was no arrangements for ambulances. We changed both these things- today there are better healthcare services and the 108 ambulance service is active," said the prime minister.
"Why has the Congress stopped saying BJP is anti-Muslim? Earlier, they would go out of the way to show their secularism but now we are all seeing what they are doing in this election, where they are going. Unfortunately for them, Muslims know their real nature," Modi said in Dharampur.
You decide Gujarat's destiny on 9 December: Modi
"On 9 December, you have to decide the destiny of Gujarat. The vote is against those who hate Gujarati people, Gujarat state, its name itself. 9 December is the date when you can teach a lesson to these people who are defaming Gujarat," Modi added, referring to the first phase of voting for the Gujarat Assembly elections.
Attacking the party over several corruption cases, Modi said, "Have you ever read in newspapers that Modi took away so much money for himself? For his brother, for his relatives? Whereas what was on the other side scams of loot in coal deal, helicopter deal, why? Since Modi is in Delhi, he has stopped all such loot. Instead, now people ask what did Modi bring in," Modi asserted.
He also slammed the Congress for opposing demonetisation, "It has been 12 months since note ban, why are Congress party's tears not drying?" he asked at a rally in Bhavnagar. "Congress is angry with me for demonetisation. Tell me are you angry with me for demonetisation?" Without waiting for the crowd's response, Modi went to say, "The Congressmen are worried that their scam money, corrupt money has gone. They are angry that Modi looted us. But remember all the looters of the country, Modi will extract every penny out from you and use it for the common man of the country. The money belongs to the country."
Modi also added the Congress learnt disruptive politics from the British colonials. "Congress is trying to create fights between brothers, between cities and villages, between religions and castes, whatever chasms that they could create, Congress party has learned this sin from the British Raj rather well."
The prime minister said even the Congress has accepted that the BJP is not an anti-Muslim party, as unlike in the past elections, it is not branding BJP leaders communal this time.
"If you remember 2002, 2007, 2012 (polls), all Congress leaders would brand us as communal and anti-Muslim. But before the 2017 polls, no leader is saying that BJP is communal. This means the Congress has also accepted that the abuse they were hurling against the BJP was false and was meant for vote bank politics," he said.
Urging the gathered crowd to vote for BJP, Modi said, "I can see the target of achieving 150 seats for the BJP being fulfilled right in front of my eyes. You will be deciding the fate of Gujarat on the 9th and you will have to punish the people who have disliked Gujarat."
Polling for the two-phase elections in the state, which has a total of 182 seats, will take place on 9 and 14 December. The votes for Gujarat Assembly elections will be counted on 18 December. Eighty-nine seats of Saurashtra and south Gujarat region are going to polls in the first phase, while the remaining 93 seats in the central and northern region would vote in the second phase.
With inputs from agencies
Click here for detailed coverage of Gujarat Assembly Election 2017
Vadodara: Rajya Sabha MP Sharad Yadav said on Monday that leaders of the opposition parties would be meeting in the next two days to discuss a strategy to prevent the tampering of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in the forthcoming Gujarat elections.
Talking to the newsmen in Vadodara late Monday evening, Yadav said that it follows the outcome of civic polls held in Uttar Pradesh where the ruling BJP bagged 14 of the 16 mayoral seats as well as a sizeable chunk of the Nagar Palika and Panchayat posts.
To support his claim, Yadav circulated a statement giving details of the BJP's performance in the 16 municipal corporations where EVMs were used and the Nagar Parishad and Panchayat seats where ballot papers were used.
"There has been huge noise around the wave of Modi and Yogi being the cause of the BJP's victory in Uttar Pradesh civic polls. Fact is that wherever voting was done through EVMs, BJP has won and wherever ballot papers were used, the BJP has lost," said Yadav.
He criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for comparing the elevation of Rahul Gandhi as Congress president to the rule of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.
Yadav said that Gandhi did not run after power. "He could have become PM in 2004 and 2009 if he wanted to. I was witness to it," Yadav said.
He slammed the prime minister for not being able to provide jobs to seven crore youths as he had promised.
"Three and a half years have passed and only seven lakh jobs have been created. The PM has not provided 150 percent more than the Minimum Support Prices (MSP) to farmers nor has he provided a home to a single tribal in the tribal-dominated areas of Gujarat," said Yadav.
He also alleged that tribals were being subjected to police atrocities and cases being registered against them on the eve of the assembly polls.
Meanwhile, Congress leaders from Gujarat met Chief Election Commissiner (CEC) AK Joti in Ahmedabad two days ago and urged him to deploy adequate security personnel in the sensitive constituencies in the state.
The Congress has also demanded that jammers should be installed at strong-rooms where EVMs will be stored after the polling.
New Delhi: Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Monday hit back at the BJP for its dynasty taunt at Rahul Gandhi, saying they should "first look at their own internal party democracy".
"BJP should first look at their own internal party democracy...It is a classic case of people living in glass houses (throwing stones at others)," he said.
The Lok Sabha member said this in response to questions from the media on the allegation levelled by the BJP on the imminent elevation of Rahul Gandhi to the Congress president post, on a day when he filed his nomination for it.
"Democracy doesn't mean that there necessarily has to be more than one candidate. It means the process should be followed, and at present, it seems there is no opposition to his (Rahul Gandhi's) nomination. And, if there is an opposition, there will be a vote," Tharoor told reporters on the sidelines of an event.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday likened the imminent elevation of Rahul Gandhi to dynastic succession of Mughal rulers, while BJP spokesperson GVL Narasimha Rao said "Pidhikaran of the Congress is now complete. Neither the old generation, nor the new generation matters." He termed the entire election process a "mockery of democratic traditions".
Without naming anyone, Tharoor, also obliquely referred to the detractors within the BJP, to make his point.
At the beginning of the press conference, the Lok Sabha member said it was an important day for the Congress, and "it is a beginning of handing over of the torch to a new generation of leadership" in the party.
Earlier in a video message posted on his Twitter handle, he said, "It is in Rahulji, we have exactly the kind of young, dynamic visionary, leader that the nation as a whole needs."
The Congress vice president filed his nomination for the post of party president, heralding a generational shift in the leadership of the grand old party seeking a revival in its electoral fortunes.
The 47-year-old Gandhi scion is set take over the party's reins from Sonia Gandhi, who has steered the party for 19 years, including the 10, when it led the UPA government. Accompanied by a host of senior party leaders, including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi filed his papers before the party's Central Election Committee.
New Delhi: Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah said his government will not allow communal violence in the state even if the BJP tried hard for the same ahead of the assembly polls.
His comments come in the wake of the arrest of BJP MP Pratap Simha near Mysuru, ahead of a Hamnuman Jayanti procession on Sunday. Simha is out on station bail.
"We will not allow any communal violence in our state, however much the BJP tries, ahead of the (assembly) polls. We will deal it with iron hands," Siddaramaiah told reporters here.
The senior Congress leader condemned the behaviour of Simha for allegedly taking the driver's seat and knocking down barricades, causing injury to some police personnel.
Simha and others were taken into preventive custody and later arrested after he along with the organisers allegedly insisted on making changes in the specified route for the Hanuman Jayanti procession, ignoring the advice of the administration.
On being stopped by the police for his preventive arrest yesterday, Simha allegedly took the driver's seat of the vehicle he was travelling in and tried to drive off by knocking down barricades in the area.
Karnataka BJP chief BS Yeddyurappa, however, accused the chief minister of indulging in vendetta politics.
Siddaramaiah said ensuring law and order was the responsibility of the government.
"Therefore, two different routes were chalked out for smooth conduct of Eid Milad and Hanuma Jayanti processions," he said.
The Karnataka chief minister was in the national capital for showing his solidarity with Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, who filed his nomination for the party president's post.
Siddaramaiah later made a courtesy visit to Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu and Union commerce minister Suresh Prabhu.
Exhuding confidence of winning the forthcoming 2018 assembly polls, the Congress leader said the party tickets would be given to those with a high potential to win.
"We will discuss with party workers and decide about ticket distribution. The candidates with winning prospects will be given the priority," he said.
Asked if the BJP's massive victory in Uttar Pradesh civic polls would have an impact on Karnataka, Siddaramaiah said, "The election of local bodies is different from assembly polls. There will not be any impact. We are confident of winning with majority seats".
Siddaramaiah also made it clear that he will contest from the Chamundeshwari Assembly constituency next year.
Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath has asked BJP's newly elected mayors of the
different municipal corporations of the state to work with full commitment to fulfil promises made to the people.
BJP had earlier swept the mayoral polls winning 14 of the 16 seats on offer.
The newly elected mayors met Adityanath and state BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey at the party office on Sunday in Lucknow.
Speaking on the occasion Adityanath expressed satisfaction over the results and said, "It is indeed a moment of happiness for all of us that the party emerged victorious in the four newly-created municipal corporations."
He told the newly-elected mayors to implement the promises made in the Sankalp Patra (manifesto) "with full commitment", the statement issued by the UP BJP.
Lucknow: The 14 newly elected mayors of Uttar Pradesh's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will call on Prime Mminister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Tuesday, said a party leader.
According to state leaders, BJP's state Organisation Secretary Sunil Bansal would be part of the delegation.
While the meeting is being termed a courtesy call, the prime minister is expected to share with the new mayors, his vision of development of cities.
A source told IANS that Modi will also seek and exchange ideas on how to improve the lot of the cities, improve garbage disposal system, and create more awareness about cleanliness.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and state BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey had met these newly elected mayors in Lucknow on Sunday.
Out of the 16 municipal corporations in Uttar Pradesh that went to polls late in November, the BJP candidates won the mayoral seats in 14, including in Lucknow, Agra, Varanasi, Moradabad, Kanpur and Allahabad.
Lucknow: The state election commission in Uttar Pradesh on Monday strongly refuted an independent candidate's accusations about rigged EVMs used in the just concluded civic body polls.
Independent candidate from Saharanpur, Shabana, who triggered a storm by claiming that she got zero vote despite casting a vote for herself, has been slammed by the poll panel for alleging that the electronic voting machines (EVMs) were "manipulated".
An official of the poll panel on Monday said that the charge was "not only baseless but also mischievous as records show clearly that Shabana polled 87 votes".
Claims by Shabana had gone viral on the social media and were tweeted by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) as proof to back their claims that EVMs had been "tampered with" to help the ruling BJP in the civic polls.
Shabana's husband, Ikram, had initially claimed that there were 11 booths and that the family had voted in booth 388. But the family alleged that there were no votes for her when votes were counted.
Shabana contested from ward no 54 and told the media that EVM tampering had been proved by the fact that she herself did not get her own vote.
In the polls where the Bharatiya Janata Party captured power in 14 of the 16 municipal corporations, the opposition parties have been alleging that the official machinery was misused and the EVMs tampered with to favour the ruling party.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and social activist Prashant Bhushan had cited the case of Shabana in their tweets questioning the electoral process in the urban body polls.
UPDATED The national high school graduation rate has risen to a new all-time high: 84 percent, the fifth straight year of increases, according to data published by the federal government today.
The graduation rate for the high school class of 2015-16 is nearly a whole point higher than the one for the previous years class, which was 83.2 percent , according to the new data from the National Center for Education Statistics . The rate measures the proportion of each freshman class that earns a diploma four years later.
All groups of students showed improvements, a notable feat. The graduation rates for black students and for students who are learning English each rose 1.8 percentage points in one year. The rates for low-income students and Hispanic students each rose 1.5 points since the previous year. Students with disabilities saw a gain of nearly a full percentage point.
This shows we are still heading in the right direction, said Phillip Lovell, the vice president for policy and advocacy at the Alliance for Excellent Education, which works on high school policy issues. You can argue that the pace of improvement is slower than wed like it to be, but there are more graduates this year than last. Thats a good thing.
The fact that all subgroups of students showed gains is super important, Lovell said. We dont want to increase the national grad rate and leave behind kids who are struggling to be served.
Despite the gains, however, there is still cause for concern. Some groups of students are still graduating at far better rates than their peers; there is a gap of more than 14 percentage points between Asian and African-American students, for instance. Low-income students lag behind their overall class by more than six points.
High school students show that they have a long way to go to be ready to succeed in college, too. Every year, large proportions of students fall below the college-readiness benchmark scores on the SAT and ACT. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, known as the nations report card, has shown little progress for high school students .
Just because students are graduating from high school doesnt mean theyre ready for college, Lovell said. So our celebration must be muted. We are clearly doing something right when it comes to getting kids across the line, but were not quite there when it comes to ensuring students are ready for the next step.
What Does a Diploma Mean?
Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who has focused on high school graduation and early signs of dropout risk, said that the new rates show real progress for the groups that need progress the most"low-income and minority students, students with disabilities and those learning English. He called the graduation-rate improvements evidence that people are taking this issue seriously, learning what works, and trying to do a good work.
But he said its important that educators and policymakers keep their eye on a key issue: the rigor of the work students are asked to do for their diplomas.
We can devalue anything if we give it away, Balfanz said. We need to be sure these kids are earning honest diplomas.
John Bridgeland, the chief executive officer at Civic Enterprises, which works with several other groups to monitor and report on the high school graduation rate in its annual Building a Grad Nation report, said the new high point is a result of a sustained and aggressive focus on the issue in the last decade. Federal requirements that schools report graduation rates by student subgroup helped shine a spotlight on work that needed to be done, and lead schools to set goals for improvement, he said.
But good national or state graduation rates can also camouflage wide variations among schools. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, a school is considered a low graduation rate school if it fails to graduate two-thirds of its students within four years. The distribution of those schools varies widely from state to state. In 2015, 12 percent of all U.S. high schools were low-graduation rate schools, according to GradNation.
How Real Are the Gains?
Skeptics have raised questions about the national graduation rate, wondering whether a variety of short cuts by high schools might artificially inflate it. One practice some have criticized is credit-recoveryself-paced, often computer-based programs that let lagging students catch up quickly.
News media investigations have found that some schools improve their graduation numbers by not counting some low-performing students in their graduating classes. Others try to get rid of students who are at risk of dropping out by encouraging them to transfer to alternative schools or to be home-schooled. One recent investigation found that a school in Washington D.C. graduated half of its students last year even though they had missed three months of school , too much to have earned diplomas.
The most recent Building a Grad Nation report took on the question of rate inflation, and concluded that its unlikely that the national graduation rate is inflated . But it did find evidence that shortcuts could have pushed the numbers up in six unnamed states.
UPDATED Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which studies academic standards and accountability, said that the improvements in student achievement that began to emerge a dozen years ago, with the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, appear to be affecting graduation rates now.
There is a plausible case to be made that the education system is doing a better job for more of these kids, especially for disadvantaged subgroups, he said.
But there is reason to be nervous about the rapid progress in the graduation rate, since requirements for diplomas can be squishy and some high schools decide to make themselves look good by lowering standards, Petrilli said.
At a time when districts and schools are held accountable for raising graduation rates, they have a strong motive to make those standards lower, he said.
Lovell, of the Alliance for Excellent Education, disagreed that accountability is responsible for schools fudging their results.
We should always keep our eye on unintended consequences, he said, but blaming accountability is like blaming the speed limit for a traffic ticket. The purpose of accountability is to identify where we need to be making improvements. Schools shouldnt be taking shortcuts.
The Education Week Research Center contributed to this report.
AP
A former National Security Agency employee pleaded guilty Friday to keeping top-secret US defence material at his home the latest in a series of breaches involving workers at the nation's largest spy shop.
Nghia Hoang Pho, 67, of Ellicott City, Md., pleaded guilty to willful retention of national defence information, according to federal law enforcement officials.
The guilty plea said that between 2010 and March 2015, Pho removed and retained at his home paper and digital copies of US government documents and writings containing national defence information.
Starting in April 2006, he worked as a developer in the National Security Agency's Tailored Access Operations unit, which is involved in cyber operations.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, but prosecutors are recommending he serve eight years, according to his attorney, Robert Bonsib.
Pho, who was born in Vietnam and is a naturalised US citizen, is free pending his sentencing, which is set for 6 April, Bonsib said. He declined to give further details about the case.
The New York Times quoted unnamed government officials as saying Pho took the classified material home to assist him in reworking his resume. The officials told the newspaper that Pho's home computer was using antivirus software made by Kaspersky Lab, a top Russian software company and that Russian hackers are thought to have exploited the software to steal the documents.
Bonsib declined to answer questions about Kaspersky.
The guilty plea was announced by Stephen Schenning, acting US attorney for the District of Maryland; Dana Boente, acting assistant attorney general for national security; and Gordon Johnson, special agent in charge of the FBI's Baltimore Field Office.
NSA has suffered a series of setbacks in recent years. Most notably, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed a cache of classified material in 2013 exposing US government surveillance programs.
In August 2016, Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, of Glen Burnie, Md., was arrested by the FBI after federal prosecutors said the former NSA contractor illegally removed highly classified information and stored the material in his home and car.
Reality Winner, 25, a former Air Force linguist who worked as an NSA contractor at a facility in Augusta, Ga., was charged in June with copying a classified US report and mailing it to a news organisation.
IANS
Hinting at a possible resumption of a harmonious relationship with China, Google's India-born Chief Executive Sundar Pichai on Sunday said that a lot of the tech giant's work actually helps Chinese companies.
Attending the fourth edition of the Chinese state-run "World Internet Conference" in Wuzhen, near Shanghai, Pichai said that many small and medium-sized businesses in China take advantage of Google to get their products to many other countries outside of China, the South China Morning Post reported.
The Google website and most of the company's products including YouTube are banned in mainland China.
Google shut down its Chinese search engine seven years ago after a direct confrontation over Beijing's censorship policies.
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook and Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins also attended the event.
The previous three conferences in 2014, 2015 and 2016 were not attended by such heavyweight US tech executives as Cook or Pichai.
Cook told the event that "the theme of this conference - developing a digital economy for openness and shared benefits - is a vision we at Apple share".
He said that Apple "is proud to have worked alongside" many of its partners in China to help build a community that will join a common future in cyberspace.
Apple this year agreed to Chinese government requests to remove dozens of virtual private network (VPN) apps - services that allow Chinese users to access blocked websites - from its local App Store.
Skype, the calling app, was removed from its mainland App Store this autumn.
PTI
A research by IIT Kharagpur faculty in collaboration with the University of Rochester and ICTS, Bengaluru have paved way for futuristic technology development.
Calling it a path-breaking research, an IIT Kharagpur statement had said that it has opened up possibilities for the development of quantum devices.
Prof Sajal Dhara who joined the Department of Physics at IITKGP in 2016, has discovered along with his collaborators negative mass particles of polaritons which are composed of half-light and half-matter.
Mass of such polaritons thus created is lighter than the mass of an electron by a factor of 0.00001, the statement said.
Prof Dhara and his collaborators at University of Rochester and ICTS (International Centre for Theoretical Sciences) have discovered new insights on the mass of such particles which will lead to a giant leap towards futuristic technology development, the statement said.
The research has been featured in the esteemed Nature Physics journal in their October 2017 issue.
The collaborators involved in this work are Dr. C Chakraborty, Dr. K M Goodfellow, Dr. L Qiu, Dr. T A O Loughlin, Prof G W Wicks, Prof A N Vamivakas, all from University of Rochester and Prof Subhro Bhattacharjee from ICTS which is a centre of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).
Elaborating on the research, the statement said, scientists can artificially create a combined particle state that is made of half-light and half-matter, known as polaritons.
Light is an electromagnetic wave but it also shows particle properties with zero mass. On the other hand, matters are made of atoms with a certain mass, the statement said.
"The area of research is itself a promising field for the development of a future generation of technologies at room temperature," he said.
The aim is to look for a particle other than an electron to build advanced devices. This will witness a giant leap from smart electronic to smart polaritonic devices promising to increase manifold the speed and storage capacity at which tomorrows devices like laptops and smartphones work.
Polaritonics is an intermediate regime between photonics and sub-microwave electronics.
Dhara has received substantial funding from MHRD, ISIRD (International Society of Invertebrate Reproduction and Development) and the SERB (Science & Engineering Research Board) Ramanujan Fellowship research grant for developing his lab facilities at IIT Kharagpur.
One of the long-term goals of his Nanoscale Optoelectronics lab (set up for understanding the optical, electronic, and quantum properties of novel solid-state nano-structures by nanoscale device design) would be to investigate the light-matter interaction for the development of futuristic technologies and basic science.
PTI
Domestic handset maker Micromax said it expects to clock sales of 6 million units for its Bharat range of affordable smartphones by March next year. The series, which was launched in May this year, comprises six devices. The company has unveiled its latest Bharat 5 and will add one more device in the next few days.
We launched our Bharat range in May and we have sold 3 million handsets under the series. With todays launch and one more device coming in the next few days, we aim to sell 6 million Bharat phones by March 2018, Micromax chief marketing and chief commercial officer Shubhodip Pal told reporters.
The Bharat 5, which was unveiled on 1 December, features 5.2 inch-HD display, 1 GB RAM, 16 GB internal memory (expandable up to 64 GB), 5 MP front and rear cameras, and 5,000 mAh battery. Priced at Rs 5,555, the handset will be available at retail stores from next week.
Data affordability, connectivity and ease of using technology are the three barriers for the users to get a connected experience. We want to connect more Indians to the internet and Bharat series addresses all these three issues at an affordable price, Pal said.
tech2 News Staff
Barely two weeks after the launch of company's flagship, the OnePlus 5T, the Chinese smartphone brand is set to launch the Star Wars Limited Edition variant of the phone in India. The new variant which was announced on Saturday at Comic-Con Bangalore finally has a sale date.
Similar to the launch of the OnePlus 5T, the company has arranged for a screening of the launch event set for 7 pm on 14 December at IMAX Wadala, Mumbai. The Star Wars Limited Edition variant has been arranged courtesy of the brand's association with the franchise's awaited 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' movie. OnePlus in a statement said that fans may begin buying tickets for the launch event exclusively on Paytm beginning 7 December for Rs 999.
As per the OnePlus statement, sales for the OnePlus 5T Star Wars Limited Edition will begin on 15 December across all of OnePlus' channels which include Amazon India website and well the company's e-commerce website oneplusstore.in. The company will also allow sales at the company's experience zones in Noida and Bangalore.
Going by the teasers of the new variant, the Star Wars Limited Edition of the phone features a white back with the Star Wars text graphic placed towards the bottom. The lock button wears a red finish which contrasts against the white back. The volume keys also have a black paint finish which makes the variant look distinct from the base variant of the OnePlus 5T.
In terms of specifications, the OnePlus 5T features a 6.0-inch FHD+ Optic AMOLED display panel with 18:9 aspect ratio and 1,080 x 2,160 resolution updating the screen to match the near bezel-less design that has gripped the smartphone industry in 2017. The display will be protected by Corning's Gorilla Glass 5. Similar to the OnePlus 5, the company has packed a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset with an octa-core processor clocked at up to 2.45 GHz along with Adreno 540 GPU to handle graphics-intensive tasks. OnePlus 5T will come in two variants, the first one with 6 GB RAM and 64 GB storage while the second variant will come with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB internal storage.
The OnePlus 5T retails at Rs 32,999 for the 6 GB RAM and 64 GB storage variant and at Rs 38,999 for the 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage variant. There are no indications about the pricing of the Star Wars Limited Edition phones though. We will find out soon.
IANS
Samsung has refuted reports that a "Microsoft Edition" of its flagship devices Galaxy S8 or Galaxy S8+ exists somewhere on this planet.
"Samsung Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+, and Galaxy Note 8 are available in the Microsoft online and retail stores with a unique Microsoft experience which ensures their customers a best-in-class productivity experience. There is not a 'Microsoft Edition' brand of any Samsung Galaxy products," Windows Central reported, quoting a Samsung representative.
It has now turned out that the reports were part of a promotional campaign to get people to visit Microsoft stores.
The reports of the launch of a special "Microsoft Edition" Galaxy S8 surfaced for several days following their commercial debut.
In November, Microsoft started selling Samsung Galaxy Note 8 from its online store that comes packed with pre-installed apps like virtual assistant Cortana, Word, Excel, OneNote and Outlook.
Notably, Galaxy S8 and S8+ have been immensely successful in rebuilding Samsung's image as a smartphone manufacturer after the Note 7 debacle.
Driven by Galaxy S8 and S8+ sales, Samsung pipped Apple to grab the top spot in the global smartphone sales to end users (by vendor) in the third quarter of 2017, market research firm Gartner said last week.
tech2 News Staff
For those of us who were born in the 1980s, Computer Science as a subject may have sounded exciting when we were first introduced to the machines. But that excitement somehow drowned out because even in the early 90s computer monitors at least here in India were still monochrome, expensive and added little value to our daily lives, not enough for us to even call them practical in any way imagined.
But as with everything else and the dawn of the internet, things have changed quite a bit. Computers have now become smaller and personal and are even palm-sized in the form of smartphones with their own operating systems. So where do we go from here?
Well, todays Google Doodle is a good reminder of how the past is not exactly the past and how we need to change the way we learn to prepare for the future. Code is all around us and its high time we started educating kids about the same.
With that todays Google Doodle is all about helping kids learn to code, by breaking it down in the simplest way possible, using carrots and a furry (not to mention) hungry little rabbit.
Googles first coding doodle ever, is fairly simple for an adult to understand, but also makes sense to kids to help them build the foundations of what they will learn in the near future.
Everyone knows that rabbits love carrots. So it easy to guess that your objective is to create an action using a code, one that can be easily completed by filling in the missing blocks to complete the action.
The doodle is a part of Computer Science Education Week where three teams have come together to create a Doodle thats not only fun but helps kids learn to code as well.
Googles Doodle team tied up with Google Blocky team and even some researchers from MIT Scratch to come up with this fun doodle.
Champika Fernando one of the MIT projects collaborators explains why they did it:
My first experience with coding was in a free after-school program back in the eighties when I was nine years old. We programmed a little green turtle to move around and draw lines on a black screen."
That programming language was called Logo.
In the 1960s, long before personal computers, Seymour Papert and researchers at MIT developed Logo the first coding language designed for kids. With Logo, children could program the movements of a turtle, giving them the opportunity to explore ideas in math and science. Papert and his colleagues envisioned that computers could eventually be used by all children as a powerful tool for learning. They saw coding as a way for kids to develop confidence and fluency with a piece of powerful, modern, and one-day ubiquitous technology.
With todays Doodle the first coding Doodle ever we celebrate fifty years of coding languages for kids by Coding for Carrots. In the interactive Doodle, you program and help a furry friend across 6 levels in a quest to gather its favourite food by snapping together coding blocks based on the Scratch programming language for kids.
As Fernando explains, Scratch (the programming language) too was developed at MIT and comes from Seymour Paperts ideas about kids and computers. It certainly does not appear as boring (it may have been exciting for those born in the 80's but not today) as Logo (which was perceived about 50 years ago) so it will be better at teaching kids how to code.
The director of communications at Scratch Team also said that computers are used in every aspect of our lives, This week, millions of people around the world can and will have their first experience with coding. It makes me happy to think of all of the nine-year-olds who will get their first coding experience playing with todays Doodle. My hope is that people will find this first experience appealing and engaging, and theyll be encouraged to go further. In some ways, its very different from my first coding experience many years ago, but I hope it will be just as inspiring and influential for them.
For kids today, the new Google Doodle and Scratch sure seems like a win-win.
Asheeta Regidi
This article is Part 4 of a multi-part series explaining the recently issued white paper on data protection in India. The responses to the white paper will help in the formulation of Indias future data protection laws. You can read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Any right, even a fundamental right, is subject to restrictions. These are set out to balance two competing needs the rights of the individuals and the rights and interests of others, such as that of the state. Even the right to privacy is, without doubt, subject to reasonable restrictions. While the Puttaswamy judgment outlined some of these, the data protection law which will embody the main restrictions. These will result in the exemption of certain activities from the ambit of the new law.
Common exemptions
Exemptions from a data protection law will not imply a complete exemption from the protection it offers. Instead, it normally involves a partial waiver of the obligations, with the extent of the waiver to be determined on a case by case basis. The most common exemptions are for data that is already in the public domain, anonymous data and data on deceased persons. Another common exemption is to data with small businesses.
In the internet and technology age, even these traditional notions have to be challenged, in view of the increasing uses and disclosure of data. Apart from these, the White Paper discusses the following specific types of exemptions.
Personal or household purpose
The first exemption often found in various jurisdictions is the processing for personal or household purposes. This may be an individuals personal diary or blog post, which lists information on his friends or relatives. It may be an individuals address book. It may also include data collected through the installation of CCTV cameras in private residences.
An important point raised by the White Paper is the change in obligations involved even with such uses, in view of the tremendous publishing power in the hands of people these days. Consider contact lists on your cell phone, data which is collected by several apps. An app like TrueCaller uses these contact lists to prepare global phone directories, and you have your and your friends data on this public space for anyone to access.
Similarly, consider private collections of data, such as matrimonial lists, which are prepared for circulation among private members, say of a particular society. Such lists could involve details of names, parents names, date of birth, contact details and other details specific to a matrimonial list. So long as the circulation of such lists is limited to the private members, it may fall under this exemption. But if the society decides to publish this data online, say through a blog post, then it is putting highly sensitive data out in the public domain, for anyone to access. This would be a privacy violation.
Journalistic / Artistic / Literary purpose
This exemption is crucial to maintaining a balance between the right to privacy and right to freedom of speech. Journalists often turn to methods which may be legal or covert to obtain data, and this is often justified in the name of protecting the public interest. Journalists gain access to, retain and have the power to disclose huge amounts of data in this process.
Such activities, even covert investigations, are often protected under this head, even in foreign data protection laws. The important aspect is to ensure that the public interest in the issue is justified, and the degree of intrusion is necessary. Consider newspapers which routinely acquire and publish personal data on public figures. Journalists are thus required to be fair and cautious of the information that they actually put out in the public domain through the media, in order to stay within the law.
A new issue in this field is the number of non-media journalists and even citizen journalists, who are officially not the press. Even such activities may be protected under this head if the public interest in the matter is established.
Similar exemptions also apply in the name of art and literature.
Research / Historical / Statistical purpose
The right to privacy should not be such that it impedes innovation and research. Thus, activities like academic research, collecting and recording data are exempted from certain obligations.
An example of this is the census. Under the law, people are obligated to hand over their data to officials collecting, recording and analysing this data. However, the same issue with the publishing power available to people today applies to this exemption as well. Publication of census data is fine, so long as it only involves anonymous, aggregated data, or the results of the analysis of this data. For example, it is fine to know that there are so many males, females and children living in a particular area.
However, a publication of the personal data collected on these people, revealing their names and addresses and other details, becomes a problem. Such census databases have been found online in the past, much like the Aadhaar databases disclosed by government websites. Care thus needs to be taken to ensure that the data in the possession of such authorities is adequately protected.
Investigation and detection of crime
Several laws in India such as the CrPC and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act give the State the power to conduct search and seizure operations for the purpose of investigations. This includes the authority to demand the production of a document by the individual.
Under a data protection law, any collection, use or sharing of data will require the consent of the individual in order to be legitimate. On the face of it, fulfilling obligations like acquiring the consent of an individual before conducting an investigation against him seems to defeat the very purpose of the investigation. Even acts like the right to information (RTI) contain exceptions for providing information which can hamper an ongoing investigation. However, when considering the details of conducting an investigation, this is less obvious.
Consider a police request for CCTV footage from a residence to investigate a crime. Next, consider requests from a tax official to an employer to disclose an employees details for investigating a suspected tax evasion. The general view in other jurisdictions is that the first example is valid under data protection laws, but the second may not. It will be valid only if a sufficient link can be established between the data sought, the investigation required, and the authority of the person seeking the data.
Another consideration to be had is with the databases created to aid such investigations. For example, consider the DNA databank proposed to be created in India, which is to store data from a crime scene, suspects or undertrials, offenders, missing persons and unknown deceased persons. While the DNA bill itself does contain some provisions to ensure privacy, the creation of such databases and safeguarding the data in them is an issue that should be addressed in a data protection law.
National security or security of the state
Exemption of activities by the state includes reasons like national security, security of the state, upholding the sovereignty, maintaining public order, etc. The White Paper does not specifically discuss the SCs clause of preventing dissipation of social welfare benefits, a new clause added to the typical list of state-related exemptions listed above, purportedly introduced to protect state activities like the use of Aadhaar.
Consider the large-scale surveillance being conducted by state agencies like the NSA. Though this activity is in the name of prevention of terrorist activities and crime detection, it is a major invasion of privacy.
Another issue that arises in this respect is with border searches and the data collected at that point. Increasingly invasive border searches are seeing seizure of phones and other devices, copying of all data on them, demanding and storing social media and other passwords, all under the pretext of permitting entry into the nation. When the device of a NASA scientist or a journalist is seized, it brings the amount of sensitive data at risk at such points into focus.
Previously, the exercise of such powers required following a number of legally determined procedures and safeguards. Examples of these are the Supreme Court rules in the telephone tapping case and the rules for interception and monitoring under Section 69 of the IT Act, 2000. Such safeguards are essential to prevent privacy violations such as conducting large-scale surveillance on people and the warrantless seizure of devices at the borders.
Key questions raised in the White Paper
Such new uses of and risks with data need to be taken into consideration while determining the contours of these exemptions.
In view of these issues, the White Paper has sought comments on the following key questions w.r.t exemptions:
What exemptions must be included in the new law? What are the basic safeguards which should apply to these?
What are your views on the specific exemptions discussed here and what should their scope be?
How should terms like journalist, art and literature be defined?
How much protection should be offered to non-media persons?
Is prior judicial approval required before exercising investigative powers? Should there be a subsequent review of such acts?
What are the obligations on law enforcement agencies to protect personal data in their possession? How can it be ensured that such data is only used for bona fide purposes?
Should there be a separate exemption for the assessment and collection of tax?
Any other views?
Part I of the series explores the definitions of personal data and sensitive personal data, Part II of the series examines the jurisdiction and territorial scope of data protection laws and Part III of the series explores cross-border data flows and data localisation.
The author is a lawyer and author specialising in technology laws. She is also a certified information privacy professional.
Reuters
Volkswagen AG executive Oliver Schmidt, who is due to be sentenced this week in connection with the carmakers emissions scandal, has written to the judge to say he feels misused by the German company.
Schmidt pleaded guilty in August in the US District Court in Detroit to wrongdoing connected to a massive diesel emissions scandal that has cost Volkswagen as much as $30 billion. He is due to be sentenced on Dec. 6.
I must say that I feel misused by my own company in the diesel scandal or Dieselgate, Schmidt wrote to US judge Sean Cox, according to a letter filed in federal court.
The letter was originally published by Germanys Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
A Volkswagen spokesman declined to comment, citing the ongoing proceedings.
Under a plea agreement, Schmidt faces up to seven years in prison and a fine of between $40,000 and $400,000 after admitting to conspiring to mislead US regulators and violating clean air laws.
In March, Volkswagen pleaded guilty to three felony counts under a plea agreement to resolve US charges it installed secret software in vehicles to evade emissions tests.
US prosecutors have charged eight current and former Volkswagen executives.
Schmidt was in charge of the companys environmental and engineering office in Auburn Hills, Michigan, until February 2015, where he oversaw emissions issues.
In the letter to the judge, he said he had agreed to follow a script, or talking points, agreed by Volkswagen management and a high-ranking lawyer, at a meeting with Alberto Ayala, a California Air Resources Board executive.
In hindsight, I should never have agreed to meet with Dr Ayala on that day, he wrote.
Or better yet, I should have gone to that meeting and ignored the instructions given to me and told Dr Ayala that there is a defeat device in the VW diesel engine vehicles and that VW had been cheating for almost a decade. I did not do that and that is why I find myself here today.
After being informed of the existence of the emissions software in the summer of 2015, according to his guilty plea, Schmidt conspired with other executives to avoid disclosing intentional cheating by the automaker in a bid to seek regulatory approval for its model 2016 VW 2 liter diesels.
Hammuriyeh: A wave of Syrian air strikes today killed at least 25 civilians and wounded dozens across the besieged rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta near Damascus, a monitor said.
The deadliest raids hit the town of Hammuriyeh, killing 17 civilians including six children, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Other air strikes on the towns of Arbeen, Beit Sawa, Harasta and Misraba killed eight civilians.
The Observatory said at least 75 people were wounded and the death toll was likely to rise given the critical wounds suffered by dozens of people.
In Hammuriyeh, an AFP photographer saw men carrying the body of a victim wrapped in a blue blanket across a rubble-littered street, a shoeless foot sticking out.
The strikes appeared to hit a modest residential neighbourhood, smashing a small convenience store and caking a vegetable stand in a layer of dust.
Victims were taken to a nearby clinic where doctors could be seen treating a man wincing from a gash above his knee.
In another room, the lifeless soot-covered body of a boy lay in a pool of blood.
Eastern Ghouta, one of the last remaining rebel strongholds in Syria, has been under a heavy government siege since 2013 that has caused drastic food and medical shortages.
An estimated 4,00,000 people still live in the enclave, and the United Nations has warned that hundreds are at risk of death if they are not evacuated for urgent medical treatment.
The area is one of four "de-escalation zones" agreed earlier this year by regime allies Russia and Iran and rebel backer Turkey aimed at curbing violence across war-ravaged Syria.
Syria's government agreed last week to a ceasefire in the region to coincide with the resumption of UN-led peace talks in Geneva.
But heavy bombardment of the opposition enclave near the capital has resumed, with another 11 civilians killed on Sunday.
The Observatory said today's deaths took the number of civilians killed in regime bombardment of Eastern Ghouta to at least 191, including 43 children, in nearly three weeks.
More than 3,40,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with anti-government protests.
A growing number of charter school teachers have begun to start seeing unionizing as an option , as weve written.
Among the most recent charters to organize is Chavez Prep Middle School in Washington, part of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter School network. Teachers there voted in June to form a collective-bargaining unit affiliated with the 1.6-million-member American Federation of Teachers.
And now those teachers are saying the charter schools administration isnt negotiating with them as is legally required.
By law after our vote, any changes to our working conditions have to be negotiated with us, said Christian Herr, a science teacher who headed the organizing effort. Our board continues to make significant changesadding job duties without additional compensation, things like thatwithout bargaining with us.
About 25 teachersnearly the whole teaching staffwalked down the street with protest signs during their lunch break on Friday. The union filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board over the summer, but claims the employer continues to make employment decisions without collectively bargaining.
The schools principal, Kourtney Miller disputes all of these charges. These are entirely their accusations, they havent been validated by the NLRB, and we disagree with their complaints, she wrote in an email.
The administrators and union have been meeting regularly, both sides say. But the union claims the decisions were made outside those discussions.
All were asking for is that they talk to us, said Herr. We believe it makes the school better when teachers have a voice in the building.
Charter schools often pride themselves on having close-knit communities, and the dispute illustrates how complicated the relationships can become when single schools organize. After picketing, staff members headed back inside for a chili cookoff and staff meeting, Miller said.
Karangasem: Gushing ash from Bali's Mount Agung volcano has dissipated into a wispy plume of steam, and Australian airlines that canceled some flights to the Indonesian resort island on the weekend have returned to near-normal schedules.
Indonesia's disaster mitigation agency said Monday the volcano remains at its highest alert level but most of Bali is safe for tourists.
The exclusion zone around the volcano still extends 10 kilometers from the crater in some directions. More than 55,000 people are living in shelters.
Airlines Jetstar and Virgin Australia, which canceled flights over the weekend even as the ash cloud shrank dramatically, said they were resuming services on Monday.
The region's volcanic ash monitoring center in Darwin, Australia, has stopped issuing advisories for Agung, reflecting that it's currently posing no threat to aircraft. It would resume advisories if there's another eruption.
Tens of thousands of tourists were stranded when ash closed Bali's international airport for nearly three days last week.
Indonesian government volcanologists say Agung's crater is about one-third filled by lava and there is still a high risk of more eruptions.
The volcano's last major eruptions in 1963 killed more than 1,100 people and it was active for more than a year.
David Boutelier, a geologist at the University of Newcastle in Australia, said the chance of a violent explosion is still "very high" but possibly not as high as several weeks ago because pressure is being released.
Sydney: A lawmaker from Australia's conservative ruling party proposed to his gay partner in parliament on Monday just moments after a bill paving the way for same-sex marriage was introduced.
Tim Wilson, who has reportedly been engaged to Ryan Bolger for nine years, fought back tears as he thanked his fiance for enduring a marriage debate that "has been the soundtrack to our relationship".
"In my first speech I defined our bond by the ring that sits on both of our left hands that they are the answer to the questions we cannot ask," said the 37-year-old.
"So there is only one thing left to do: Ryan Patrick Bolger will you marry me?"
Bolger, who was sitting in the public gallery, quickly responded "yes" as the floor erupted in applause.
"That was a 'yes', a resounding 'yes'," house speaker Rob Mitchell noted for the record. "Congratulations."
The same-sex marriage bill being debated is expected to comfortably pass through the House of Representatives before Christmas after the upper house Senate last week overwhelmingly voted in its favour.
After more than a decade of debate, Australians emphatically endorsed gay marriage in a recent nationwide postal vote, with some 62 percent of the 12.7 million who took part voting "yes" in November.
"This is a historic moment of inclusion, of recognition, of respect," Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said shortly after the bill was introduced for debate in the lower house on Monday.
"This is a day to be especially proud that all of our friends, our colleagues, our neighbours, our brothers, our sisters, can marry the people they love."
Former conservative prime minister Tony Abbott, a leading voice in the 'no' campaign, said he would now back the bill.
"I certainly don't pretend to be an overnight convert to support same-sex marriage but I am pledged to respect and to facilitate the verdict of the Australian people," he said.
"Same-sex marriage should now be recognised. It will now be recognised."
Abbott moved an amendment he said protected discrimination against anyone over their "conscientious view about the nature of marriage", before saying he planned to attend his gay sister's wedding in 2018.
"I am looking forward to attending the marriage of my sister, Christine, to her partner Virginia some time early in the new year."
Phnom Penh: Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Monday called for Cambodia's support in developing a sustainable solution to the Rohingya crisis and the minority's persecution in Myanmar's Rakhine state.
Hasina made the remarks during a discussion with her Cambodian counterpart Hun Sen in Phnom Penh on Monday, bdnews24.com reported.
"We have discussed some of the emerging security challenges facing our region and expressed our common resolve to fight terrorism and extremism," Hasina said during a joint statement.
"We have also discussed the Rohingya crisis that threatens the peace and stability of our region. Bangladesh continues to shelter more than 1 million Rohingyas, among them around 6,30,000 who fled atrocities in Myanmar and took shelter in Bangladesh recently."
Hasina asked for Hun Sen's support for a durable solution as Bangladesh continued bilateral talks to return Rohingyas safely to their homeland.
"We highly appreciate Bangladesh (for giving shelter to the Rohingya refugees)... even though it has a population of over 160 million, it took the issues of refugees on its shoulder," said the Cambodian leader.
Bangladesh let in a wave of Rohingya refugees since late August, when the Myanmar military launched a crackdown in Rakhine state over insurgent attacks.
The refugees in Cox's Bazar said the military and locals shot and killed people indiscriminately, raped women, looted and set fire to Rohingya homes.
Bangladesh and Myanmar signed an agreement on 23 Novemberon the repatriation of recent refugees to their homeland. The agreement specified the formation of a joint working group to begin the repatriation process within two months.
The Bangladesh government also attempted to enlist international support for the Rohingya crisis. The UN, EU, US, UK and other parties expressed their appreciation for Bangladesh's efforts on the Rohingya crisis.
Washington: President Donald Trump endorsed embattled Republican Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race on Monday, looking past sexual misconduct allegations against the GOP candidate to argue that his vote is needed in Congress.
Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2017
It was Trump's strongest show of support for Moore since allegations surfaced that the candidate had sexually assaulted teenage girls decades ago, including one who said he molested her when she was 14 and he was in his 30s. Many national Republicans have called on Moore to step aside in the wake of multiple sexual assault and harassment allegations.
Trump also assailed Moore's Democratic rival Doug Jones, tweeting that "Putting a Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders...& so much more."
Trump for weeks was silent after the allegations against Moore surfaced, and the White House has said he had no plans to make campaign appearances before the 12 December election. But Trump in recent days has raised doubts about the allegations against Moore, and he has agreed to headline a campaign-style rally in Pensacola, Florida less than 20 miles from the Alabama border just four days before the Alabama election.
And Trump tweeted of Moore on Monday: "We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!"
White House legislative director Marc Short told CNN that Trump was "making the case to the people of Alabama that it's a factor to consider that not one Democrat has been able to find time to say they support" the GOP tax plan.
Short said Trump's point is that "when allegations arise 38 years later, when Roy Moore has been a very public figure for those 38 years, he's run multiple times statewide in Alabama, the people in Alabama have an opportunity to choose and make some decisions about Roy Moore's character. Putting all that together, he's encouraging the people of Alabama to make the right decision."
Cairo: Five terrorists were killed in exchange of fire with security forces in Sharqeya governorate, security sources said.
They said that terrorists clashed with security forces during a raid on Belbeis-10th of Ramadan road in Sharqeya.
The raid came over a week after a terrorist attack on a mosque in North Sinai in which more than 300 people were killed.
Terrorist attacks, targeting police and military personnel, have increased following the ouster of former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by the military, following massive protests against his rule.
Hundreds of police and army personnel have been killed since then.
The military has launched security campaigns in Egypt's restive North Sinai province, arrested suspects and demolished houses that belong to terrorists, including those facilitating tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department has certified that the Honduran government has been fighting corruption and supporting human rights, clearing the way for Honduras to receive millions of dollars in U.S. aid, a document seen by Reuters showed. A woman and a man walk past a giant Honduran flag in Tegucigalpa September 28, 2012. REUTERS/Jorge Cabrera The document, dated Nov. 28, which was seen by Reuters on Monday, showed that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson certified Honduras for the assistance, two days after a controversial presidential election that has been claimed by an ally of Washington. Honduras has faced violent protests over the disputed results of the election, which has still not produced a clear winner over a week after the vote ended. The decision to issue the certification prompted concern from some congressional Democrats that Republican President Donald Trumps administration could be seen to be taking sides. What kind of message does that send? one congressional aide asked. State Department officials did not have an immediate response when questioned about the timing of the certification. Honduras is required to fulfil about a dozen requirements in order to receive its share of $644 million appropriated by the U.S. Congress under a programme to assist Central American governments. Among those requirements are combating corruption - including investigating and prosecuting current and former government officials alleged to be corrupt - and protecting the rights of political opposition parties. Honduras struggles with violent drug gangs, one of the worlds highest murder rates and endemic poverty. In recent years, many Hondurans - including children - have attempted to migrate to the United States. In hopes of stemming this migration, former President Barack Obamas administration in 2015 came up with a plan that included sending hundreds of millions of dollars in additional aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Congress agreed to provide the money, if the governments were found to be taking steps to fight crime and corruption. A preliminary ballot count in Honduras on Monday pointed to a narrow victory for President Juan Orlando Hernandez over opposition challenger Salvador Nasralla, although the electoral tribunal has not declared a winner. Early last week, Nasralla, a former sportscaster and game show host, appeared set for an upset victory over Hernandez. The counting process suddenly halted for more than a day and began leaning in favour of Hernandez after resuming. Opposition leaders said they wanted a recount and have accused the government of stealing the election. Hernandez, 49, implemented a military-led crackdown on gang violence after taking office in 2014. He has been supported by Trumps chief of staff, John Kelly. Nasralla, 64, is one of Honduras best-known faces and is backed by former President Manuel Zelaya, a leftist ousted in a coup in 2009.
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BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Dozens of relatives of the 44 crew members of an Argentine submarine that went missing on November 15 marched from a naval base on Sunday, demanding to know what happened and criticizing the governments response to the tragedy. Relatives and friends of Alejandro Damian Tagliapietra, one of the 44 crew members of the missing at sea ARA San Juan submarine, react outside an Argentine naval base in Mar del Plata, Argentina November 24, 2017. The banner reads "Camarades, be strong". REUTERS/Marcos BrindicciHolding posters with photos of the crew and chanting Search and Rescue! the family members walked away from a naval base in Mar del Plata, following a press conference during which the navy said the submarine had still not been located. The disaster has spurred soul searching over the state of the military in Argentina, which now has one of Latin Americas smallest defense budgets in relation to economic size after a series of financial crises. Our disagreement is with the government, not with the navy, said Marcela Moyano, wife of crew member Hernan Rodriguez, during the protest. Whoever is responsible needs to be held responsible. Spokesman Enrique Balbi said on Thursday the navy had abandoned hope of rescuing the crew alive, noting the ARA San Juan had air supplies for a week while 15 days had passed since it last reported its position. The Argentine military submarine ARA San Juan and crew are seen as they leave the port of Buenos Aires, Argentina June 2, 2014. Picture taken on June 2, 2014. Argentine Navy/Handout via REUTERSSome family members complained they were not advised before the general public of the end of the rescue mission and have also demanded more contact with President Mauricio Macri in Mar del Plata, where the San Juan was scheduled to end its journey. While local media have speculated Macri will soon declare a period of national mourning for the submarine crew, he has been silent in recent days. He (Macri) needs to be here because this is the priority, there are 44 families behind this situation and someone has to be in charge, said Marcela Fernandez, wife of Alberto Sanchez. Macris defense minister met with families in Mar del Plata on Friday. Balbi said on Saturday an object that was being reviewed by a Russian unmanned remotely operated vehicle in the South Atlantic had turned out not to be the submarine. The government has pledged to continue the search with foreign assistance. The navy said on Nov. 27 that water that entered the submarines snorkel caused its battery to short-circuit before it went missing. The navy had previously said international organizations detected a noise that could have been the submarines implosion the same day contact was lost.
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Beirut: France should know that Irans missile programme is not an issue that can be negotiated, Irans foreign ministry spokesman, Bahram Qassemi, said in an interview with state media on Monday.
"French official, other officials, who want to speak about Irans affairs need to pay attention to the deep developments that have come to pass in the region in past decades and the big changes between the current situation and the past," Qassemi said on Monday, according to state media.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran will definitely not negotiate on defence and missile issues."
Tension between Iran and France increased last month when French president Emmanuel Macron said that Iran should be less aggressive in the region and should clarify its ballistic missile programme.
His foreign minister also denounced, during a visit to Saudi Arabia, Irans "hegemonic temptations".
France could play a productive role in West Asia by taking a "realistic and impartial approach", Iranian president Hassan Rouhani told Macron in a telephone call two weeks ago, according to Iranian state media.
Iranian state media said Rouhani told Macron that the Islamic Republic was ready to develop its relations with France on all bilateral, regional and international issues based on mutual respect and shared goals.
Washington: As the US Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments Tuesday in the highly anticipated "gay wedding cake" case, all eyes are once again on Justice Anthony Kennedy, the fulcrum upon which the bench has turned for a decade.
The case, which pits Christian conservatives against progressives and the LGBT community, concerns a Colorado baker who, due to his religious beliefs, refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.
The court will have to decide between three constitutional rights sexual equality, freedom of religion and freedom of expression. The stakes are high, and could open the door for conservative businesses to spurn gay couples.
Eighty-one-year-old Kennedy, who was appointed by Republican president Ronald Reagan in 1987 and is the court's longest serving judge, is widely expected to provide the decisive vote.
Kennedy is to the Supreme Court what swing states are to elections. Conservative on firearms and election financing, he can be more progressive on issues such as abortion and affirmative action. On a bench comprising four progressive and four conservative judges, his view often tips the balance.
An example of this came in 2015, when, thanks to him, same-sex marriage was legalised across the United States. The judge, of Irish origin, then drafted the landmark ruling just as he drafted the decision in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, which declared a state law forbidding sodomy illegal.
'A clash of interests'
But will the elderly judge, a practising Catholic, vote in favour of the LGBT community in this latest case? It's a question currently frustrating experts.
The Trump administration, around twenty American states, dozens of members of Congress and countless Christian and conservative pressure groups have backed Jack Phillips, the baker. These supporters have sent the Supreme Court many arguments, which seem to directly address Kennedy.
Steven Schwinn, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, told AFP he believes the judge will "struggle" with the decision. "I think he'll see this case as a clash of interests: the dignity and equality interest of the same-sex couple, on the one hand, and the religious freedom and free-speech interests of the cake-baker, on the other," he said. "I imagine that he'll probably struggle with how to balance these."
"I think he's going to be torn," was the view of Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "He's distracted by the deep faith of Jack Phillips. Jack Phillips is a person of faith and runs his bakery consistent with his faith, he has a small family business. We know that Justice Kennedy will care about that, there is no question," she said.
"On the other hand, Justice Kennedy cares deeply about the LGBT community," Melling added.
Moral rigor
Another question is how Kennedy can vote in Phillips' favour, without opening "the floodgates for discrimination against gays and lesbians in marriage services and beyond," says Schwinn.
"I do not think he wants to open that door," Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of Berkeley Law and constitutional law expert, told AFP.
During the hearing on Tuesday, every word uttered by Anthony Kennedy will be under scrutiny with supporters from both sides searching for signs of his position.
Reassuring Christian conservatives will be the Harvard Law School graduate's days as a choir boy in California not to mention his marriage of over half a century to the same woman, with whom he has three children.
Indeed, Kennedy has a reputation for moral rigour sometimes regarded as prudishness. While he was a university student, he travelled Europe in a red Volkswagen. His father offered him a bottle of whiskey for the trip but he did not drink it, instead using it only to gargle when he had a sore throat.
BERLIN/MUNICH (Reuters) - The leader of Germanys Social Democrats (SPD) said on Monday he would launch talks with Chancellor Angela Merkels conservatives on forming a government next week if members of his centre-left party gave him the green light at a congress this weekend. Chancellor Angela Merkel leaves after a joint meeting with Horst Seehofer, the head of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) and the leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) Martin Schulz, hosted by the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in Schloss Bellevue in Berlin, Germany, November 30, 2017. REUTERS/Axel SchmidtThe remarks by Martin Schulz raised hopes that the two parties that suffered losses to the far right in an election in September could renew an alliance that has ruled Germany since 2013 and end the political deadlock in Europes largest economy. Merkel turned to the SPD after failing to form a three-way alliance with the left-leaning Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats, plunging Germany into a political impasse and raising doubt about her future after 12 years in power. Well explore whether and how the formation of a government is possible in Germany, Schulz told journalists. The SPD party board leadership had earlier set down its key demands for coalition talks with the conservatives. On the divisive issue of immigration, one of the main reasons for the collapse of Merkels first effort, the SPD said it opposed a conservative plan to extend a ban on the right to family reunions for some asylum seekers. Family reunions and family cohabitation lead to good integration, the SPD document said. Thats why we are against extending the suspension of family reunions. CONSERVATIVE TROUBLES Merkel could also face complications from her own camp. Her arch-conservative CSU allies in Bavaria on Monday named right-winger Markus Soeder to be their candidate for the state premiership in a regional election next autumn, potentially weakening her hand as she negotiates with the SPD. Merkels Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) bled support to the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Septembers federal election because of anger at the chancellors decision in 2015 to open Germanys door to more than a million asylum seekers. The CSU now fears losing more votes at regional level. The future of current Bavarian premier Horst Seehofer had been in question since the election. After the losses, Merkel reluctantly accepted a CSU demand to put a limit on the number of asylum seekers Germany will accept each year. Asked why he was clearing the stage for Soeder to lead the CSU in next years vote in Bavaria, Seehofer said: The past doesnt win you any elections. Soeder, who has accused Merkel of pulling the conservatives to the left and took a hard line on Greece during the euro zone crisis, is likely to be a bigger thorn in Merkels side than Seehofer, who is expected to remain party leader. SPD RELUCTANCE For its part, the SPD, which has governed in coalition under Merkel since 2013, suffered its worst election result in postwar history in September, and had been reluctant to join another grand coalition. It dropped its pledge to go into opposition only after Merkel failed to form a government, bowing to pressure from President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to ease the deadlock. The SPD will hold a party congress in Berlin this weekend, where it is expected to debate its position on coalition talks. Kevin Kuehnert, the head of the SPDs youth wing - which opposes another grand coalition - told Die Welt newspaper that the outgoing CDU-CSU-SPD government had been characterised by cheap and often quite bad compromises, such as on urgently needed investment in education and infrastructure. The SPD did not stake out a position on the conservatives upper limit on refugees in its policy document. But it did say Germany should work with French President Emmanuel Macron on strengthening the European project through policies geared to fight high youth unemployment. It did not mention key proposals by Macron that the euro zone should have its own budget and finance minister, but it did refer to his plan for closer defence cooperation. On the economy, the SPDs proposals for more rights for workers and employee-friendly regulation of the large temporary work sector could draw fire from the CSU. The long political impasse is starting to worry investors. An investor sentiment survey tracking Germany fell in December. The research group Sentix said investors wanted to know how expensive a tie-up with the SPD would be.
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TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - A preliminary ballot count in Honduras disputed presidential race pointed on Monday to a second term for incumbent Juan Orlando Hernandez, while his opponent accused the government of stealing the election and called for protests. Supporters of Salvador Nasralla, presidential candidate for the Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship, sing the national anthem during a curfew while the country is still mired in chaos over a contested presidential election in Tegucigalpa, Honduras December 3, 2017. REUTERS/Edgard GarridoU.S.-backed Hernandez had 42.98 percent of the vote, compared with opposition challenger Salvador Nasrallas 41.39 percent, based on 99.96 percent of ballots tallied after a partial recount of more than 1,000 polling stations. David Matamoros, who heads the electoral tribunal and is a member of Hernandezs party, refused to declare a winner. Parties can still file legal challenges, and a wider recount is possible, he told reporters, adding that there would be further announcements on Monday. Early last week, Nasralla, a former sportscaster and game show host, appeared set for an upset victory over Hernandez, gaining a five-point lead with more than half of the ballots tallied. The counting process suddenly halted for more than a day and began leaning in favor of Hernandez after resuming. Opposition leaders said on Sunday they wanted a recount of all the polling stations that were entered into the system after the delay. Protesters flooded streets across the country on Sunday to decry what they called a dictatorship. As night fell, the sounds of plastic horns, honking cars, fireworks and beaten saucepans echoed over the Tegucigalpa capital, challenging a military curfew imposed to clamp down on protests that have spread since last week. Nasralla, addressing a giant rally in the capital earlier in the day, told the armed forces not to enforce the curfew and encouraged supporters to walk out on a national strike starting on Monday. I call on all members of the armed forces to rebel against your bosses, Nasralla told a cheering throng of supporters who booed nearby troops. You all over there, you shouldnt be there; you should be part of the people. People are seen next to barricades along a street at a protest during curfew while the country is still mired in chaos over a contested presidential election in Tegucigalpa, Honduras December 3, 2017. REUTERS/Henry RomeroTV images showed similar protests in other major cities. While there were no reports of violence on Sunday, hundreds have been arrested and at least three people were killed in recent days. The government imposed a military-enforced curfew on Friday that expanded powers for the army and police to detain people and break up blockades of roads, bridges and public buildings. The tribunal began the partial recount on Sunday. Supporters of Salvador Nasralla, presidential candidate for the Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship, hold a flag in front of a barricade during a curfew while the country is still mired in chaos over a contested presidential election in Tegucigalpa, Honduras December 3, 2017. REUTERS/Edgard GarridoThe Organization of American States said on Sunday that Nasrallas demands to recount more than 5,000 polling stations were doable, and it urged the tribunal to make further checks. Also on Sunday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accused the United States of backing vote fraud in Honduras, while the top official at the U.S. embassy praised the peaceful protests and the orderly final count then under way. Honduras struggles with violent drug gangs, one of worlds highest murder rates and endemic poverty, driving a tide of its people to migrate to the United States. Hernandez, 49, implemented a military-led crackdown on gang violence after taking office in 2014. He has been supported by U.S. President Donald Trumps chief of staff, John Kelly. Nasralla, 64, is one of Honduras best-known faces and is backed by former President Manuel Zelaya, a leftist ousted in a coup in 2009. Since late last week, three people have been killed as soldiers broke up protesters blockades of rubble and burning tires. There were also reports that four or five more had been shot dead in the north of the country on Friday.
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New Delhi: Russia is and will remain India's key foreign policy priority, and the challenge before the two countries would be to nurture and foster the close ties amid fast unfolding global changes, a senior diplomat in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said on Monday.
Vijay Gokhale, Secretary (Economic Relations) in the MEA, said past relationship between the two countries should not transmute into a "passive" present partnership, insisting there was no room for complacency in India-Russia ties.
He was speaking at the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), a leading think-tank.
Observing that the past few years have witnessed unprecedented changes in the world, Gokhale said Indo-Russia ties cannot remain isolated from global changes.
"Therefore, the challenge before all of us, whether in the government or outside, would be how to nurture and foster our 'Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership' amidst these fast unfolding global changes," he said.
The MEA official's comments came amid apparent unease in Moscow over India's growing ties with the United States.
Gokhale said there was a need to expand bilateral engagement between the two countries beyond the traditional fields of energy and defence.
Talking about connectivity projects, he said India supports such regional and international initiatives, but at the same time asserted that due sensitivity in respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity of states was essential, in an apparent reference to China's Belt and Road initiative (BRI).
India has expressed strong reservations over BRI as the USD 50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). CPEC is part of the BRI.
Referring to the Chabahar port project, Gokhale said it was the first step to build a sea-land link with Central Asia and Russia, that is both secure and sustainable.
"We appreciate the encouragement given by Russia to the Chabahar project," he said, a day after the first phase of the Chabahar port was inaugurated.
On regional issues, Gokhale said India and Russia have shared interest in peace, security and prosperity in Indo-Pacific, Eurasia and the world at large.
"Whenever we have divergences, these should be bridged in an appropriate way through discussion and better understanding," he noted.
On defence cooperation, Gokhale said India believes it was the opportune time to move from a buyer-seller format to joint production and investments, in order to bring a new dynamism to military co-operation.
"We invite the Russian defence industry to look at our new policies in this regard and to partner us, as India begins its journey to become a defence manufacturer," he said.
On economic cooperation, the MEA (Economic Relations) secretary said the current trade figures do not reflect the real potential.
"Russia could look at new opportunities to invest in India, for instance in infrastructure and logistics sectors. All our economic indicators suggest that ours is a market with long-term potential and stability," he added.
There is no mistaking the fact that with the inauguration of work on the first phase of Chabahar port in Iran on Sunday, India has sought to neutralise some of the strategic advantages that China had gained in the tug of war with New Delhi for control of the sea lanes. The Gwadar port in Pakistan, which is barely 80 kilometres from Chabahar, was designed to give Beijing and Islamabad that strategic edge after India's access to Gwadar was denied by design.
If the Chinese in collusion with Pakistan thought that they could choke a vital Indian access to the sea, thereby jeopardising Indian trade especially with Central Asia, the opening of a new strategic transit route to Iran and Afghanistan, bypassing Pakistan, would be an effective counter to it.
However, while Iran's interests have been well catered to by India's finance for the Chabahar project and the setting up of ancillary industries in and around it, the China-Pakistan link would predictably leave no stone unturned to woo as well as browbeat the Iranians to re-think about the India connection as they have been doing.
Indeed, the Narendra Modi government has committed $500 million to the Chabahar port along with associated roads and rail lines that will crack open a trade and transport route to landlocked Afghanistan, as well as the resource-rich countries of central Asia.
While Chabahar is expected to be fully operational by the end of next year, in what can be compared to a full dress rehearsal, India plans to send seven shipments of wheat to Afghanistan through Chabahar by the end of January. The wheat will be trucked from Chabahar to western Afghanistan. The shipments will put to test the route's viability and the plan is to broaden the cargo flow before the port is fully operational.
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said at Sunday's inauguration that Iran also plans to link the port to the country's railroad network to facilitate the transit of goods to neighbouring landlocked Central Asian countries, as well as open a route to eastern and northern Europe through Russia. That would suit India well. Significantly, he downplayed the rivalry with Pakistan in his inauguration speech and said the port will bring "more engagement and unity" among regional countries. That is a facade that has to be maintained.
"We should go after a positive competition," he said. "We welcome other ports in the region, we welcome Gwadar's development."
That the opening of the first phase of Chabahar represents a personal triumph for Modi was clear from his visit to Iran in May 2016, to give a fillip to the project after it was steeped in uncertainty following Chinese moves to scuttle it.
To leave nothing to chance, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj made an unscheduled stopover in Tehran recently on the eve of the port inauguration at which she broke bread with her Iranian counterpart Dr Javad Zarif.
India's state-run railway body IRCON International will set up a railway line at Chabahar to move goods right up to Afghanistan. The 500-kilometre rail link between Chabahar and Zahedan will link India to the rest of Iran's railway network.
To make it adequately attractive for the Iranians, part of the agreement is a free trade zone where a total investment of Rs one lakh crore is envisaged. Indian companies would set up a range of industries from aluminium smelter to urea plants in the region. State-owned NALCO will set up an aluminium smelter while private and co-operative fertiliser firms are keen to build urea plants.
India will also supply $400 million of steel rails to Tehran. There are plans of a fertiliser plant through a joint venture with the Iran government. Securing hydrocarbon sources is a priority for India as New Delhi and Tehran would look to expand the basket in the coming years.
This will also give momentum to the International North-South Transport Corridor of which both India and Iran are initial signatories along with Russia. Iran is the key gateway in this project. It entails the ship, rail, and road routes for moving freight between India, Russia, Iran, Europe and Central Asia. The route primarily involves moving freight from India, Iran, Azerbaijan and Russia. The objective of the corridor is to increase trade connectivity between major cities such as Mumbai, Moscow, Tehran, Baku and Astrakhan.
All in all, with Chinese hegemony getting a big boost as a result of the upcoming China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the Chinese assiduously wooing greater trade link-ups with countries in Asia, Africa and Europe, Chabahar offers India a silver lining.
But if those dead set against Chinese control of sea lanes principally India, Japan, the US and Australia are to effectively counter the Chinese thrust, it is vital that the US plays a more pro-active role. India will indeed be called upon to play a key role to get the US on board.
Islamabad: US Defence Secretary James Mattis will arrive in Pakistan on Monday to hold talks with the civilian and military leadership on bilateral and regional issues, officials in Islamabad said.
Mattis, ahead of his first visit to Pakistan as US defence secretary, said on Saturday that the US wants Pakistan to act in "its best interest" and take action against terror safe havens.
Relations between the US and Pakistan plummeted after President Donald Trump announced his new south Asia policy in August and directly blamed Islamabad for supporting the Taliban in war-torn Afghanistan.
Officials in Islamabad said on Sunday that Mattis is visiting Pakistan in a bid to rebuild the frayed ties and seek cooperation against the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.
Signs of recovery have been witnessed in US-Pakistan ties after the successful raid by Pakistani security forces to release a kidnapped Canadian man and his American wife.
Trump and top US officials praised the effort and hoped for more cooperation.
Mattis will meet the civilian and military leaders and discuss various bilateral and regional issues, said diplomatic sources privy to the developments.
According to sources, "All issues of bilateral and regional interests would be discussed in the meetings".
Local media reports, however, suggest that Mattis faces a difficult task as Pakistan is not happy over the repeated US allegations about safe havens for the Taliban.
The Express Tribune reported that the civilian-military leadership will adopt a "clear cut decisive" stance during the visit of Mattis that "only cooperation will get cooperation".
Quoting sources, it reported that if the US adopts parity, Pakistan will also cooperate in a balanced way, but if it continues its policy of demanding to "do-more", then Islamabad will reply "no-do-more and no cooperation".
The report further said that no pressure and demand to do more without any proof or information will be accepted.
Pakistan will clarify that there are no militant safe havens or terrorist network on its soil as security institutions have purged the land of terrorists, it said.
Pakistan will not conduct any joint operation with any other country on its soil but will take action against militants including the Haqqanis on the basis of intelligence-based information, it said.
Pakistan will also respond positively to any US requests for cooperation to establish peace in Afghanistan but would stress for reconciliation in the trouble-torn country, the report said.
It would also demand that the US and Afghan governments expedite actions against terror groups that are hatching conspiracies using Afghan soil to destabilise Pakistan, it said.
Authorities will inform Mattis about its reservations over the pro-India policy of the Trump administration and any demand in support of India will be rejected, the report added.
Mattis embarked on a four-nation tour on Friday which will take him to Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and Kuwait.
During the tour, he will re-affirm the US' enduring commitment to partnerships in the Middle East, West Africa and South Asia.
Washington: US defense secretary Jim Mattis has said he intends to work hard to find common ground with Pakistan in the fight against terrorism, which is necessary to restore the level of stability in South Asia to allow economic development.
Ahead of his visit to Islamabad, Mattis said he wants to work with Pakistan, listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective, to address the problems.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait and Pakistan, since taking over the charge of the Pentagon.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
Saeed is still roaming free, despite tough warning from the Trump Administration.
"The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," Mattis told reporters travelling with him on his way to Pakistan from Egypt.
Mattis is the first top US official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the new South Asia Strategy that was announced by President Donald Trump on 21 August.
"We know we have some common ground. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their troops killed and wounded by terrorists. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their innocent people murdered and wounded by terrorists, so we know that there is common ground".
Similarly, he said, there is common ground between Afghanistan and Pakistan, because there are terrorist groups that try to move back and forth, that do move back and forth in order to live in one and attack in the other, that sort of thing.
"So we know there's common ground; it's how much more common ground can we find by listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective," Mattis said.
"But at the same time, as the (Pakistan Army Chief) General (Qamar Javed Bajwa) has said, he wants no havens for terrorists anywhere, so we will work together and we'll find that common ground, if we have the will to.
"And then we'll work on how we address the problems where we can work together," the Defense Secretary said.
Responding to a question, he said he would not characterise everything over the past 16 years as failures.
"There is clearly an abundance of areas where we have to double down, and I am optimistic at this point that because of what our adversaries, our mutual enemies are doing, that we can find ways to work together," he said.
Mattis said both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistan military, the NATO-led militaries of 39 nations have all been in fights here. "We've got to find a way to work together".
He said there is "always an urgency to something" when 39 nations plus Afghanistan have their troops in the midst of a long war, where causalities are being taken.
"These are 39 of the most economically powerful, generally speaking, most long-term democratic institutions in the world. These are powerful nations morally, economically and diplomatically, and certainly militarily," he said.
Mattis said that it was essential in South Asia that all work together to restore the level of stability that allows for the economy to build.
"I mean, can you imagine a border between Pakistan and India where economic trade is not ongoing to the benefit of people on both sides of that border. We can not only imagine it; it's a reality right now," Mattis said.
So, the US Defence Secretary said that we have got to work together on this, and there's a sense of urgency about that.
"There's people who are living below the poverty line in both those countries. So as you look at this problem, if you'll expand the problem you can understand the sense of urgency to move beyond violence and get back to the normal order of things," he said.
Mattis is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and General Bajwa.
"General Bajwa is a mature officer with a deep background in not just military matters, but South Asia security issues, and we have got to find a way to move beyond this constant fighting that's characterised the area," he said.
DUBAI (Reuters) - Yemens steely former president of 33 years, Ali Abdullah Saleh, made his last political gamble and lost on Monday, meeting his death at the hands of the Houthi movement, his erstwhile allies in the countrys multi-sided civil war. FILE PHOTO: Yemen's then President Ali Abdullah Saleh gestures during a gathering of supporters in Sanaa February 20, 2011. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah/File PhotoOfficials in his General Peoples Congress party (GPC) confirmed to Reuters that the 75-year-old Saleh had been killed outside the capital Sanaa in what Houthi sources said was an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) and gun attack. A master of weaving alliances and advancing his personal and family interests in Yemens heavily armed and deeply fractious tribal society, Saleh unified his country by force, but he also helped guide it toward collapse in its latest war. The Middle Easts arch-survivor once compared running Yemen to dancing on the heads of snakes, ruling with expertly balanced doses of largesse and force. He outlived other Arab leaders who were left dead or deposed by uprisings and civil wars since 2011. Cornered by pro-democracy Arab Spring protests, Saleh wore a cryptic smile when signing his resignation in a televised ceremony in 2012. Saleh waged six wars against the Houthis from 2002 to 2009 before he made an impromptu alliance with the group that seized the capital Sanaa in 2014 and eventually turned on him. The two sides feuded for years for supremacy over territory they ran together. The Houthis probably never forgave his forces for killing their founder and father of the current leader. Fearing the Houthis are a proxy for their arch-foe Iran, the mostly Gulf Arab alliance sought to help the internationally recognised Yemeni government win the conflict. Salehs army loyalists and Houthi fighters together weathered thousands of air strikes by a Saudi-led military coalition in almost three years of war. As the conflict wrought a humanitarian crisis, mutual sniping about responsibility for economic woes in northern Yemeni lands that they together rule peaked on Wednesday when the capital erupted in gunbattles between their partisans. ARCH-SURVIVOR Saleh had seemed unshakeable in one of the worlds poorest and unstable countries. He managed to play his enemies off against each other as tribal warfare, separatist movements and Islamist militants destabilised Yemen. He survived a bomb attack in his palace mosque in 2011 which killed senior aides and disfigured him. As other leaders were toppled by the Arab Spring uprisings, he found a way to retire peacefully to his villa in the capital and plot a comeback. Despite being forced to step down in 2012 under a Gulf-brokered transition plan following protests against his rule, Saleh won immunity in the deal and remained a powerful political player. The ever-nimble Saleh was a pivotal figure in the war, which has killed at least 10,000 people, displaced 2 million from their homes, led to widespread hunger and a cholera epidemic. Saleh became the ruler of North Yemen in 1978 at a time when the south was a separate, communist state, and led the unified country after the two states merged in 1990. Opponents often complained that Yemen under Saleh failed to meet the basic needs of the countrys people, where two of every three live on less than $2 per day. Saleh managed to keep Western and Arab powers on his side, styling himself as a key ally of the United States in its war on terrorism. He received tens of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid for units commanded by his relatives. After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against U.S. cities, Yemen came onto Washingtons radar as a source of foot soldiers for Osama bin Ladens al Qaeda network. Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia though his family came from Yemens Hadramaut region. Saleh cooperated with U.S. authorities as the CIA stepped up a campaign of drone strikes against key al Qaeda figures, which also led to scores of civilian deaths. Born in 1942 near Sanaa, he received only limited education before joining the military as a non-commissioned officer. His first break came when President Ahmed al-Ghashmi, who came from the same Hashed tribe as Saleh, appointed him military governor of Taiz, North Yemens second city. When Ghashmi was killed by a bomb in 1978, Saleh replaced him. In 1990, the collapse of the Soviet Union helped propel North Yemen under Saleh and the socialist South Yemen state into a unification. Saleh angered Gulf Arab allies by staying close to Saddam Hussein during the 1990-91 Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, leading to the expulsion of up to 1 million Yemenis from Saudi Arabia. But he then won plaudits from Western powers for carrying out economic reforms drawn up by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and made efforts to attract foreign investors. He swept to victory when southerners tried to secede from united Yemen in 1994 and drew closer to Saudi Arabia, which he allowed to spread its radical Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam. Salehs son, Ahmed Ali, lives under house arrest in the United Arab Emirates, where he once served as ambassador before it joined ally Saudi Arabia to make war on the Houthi-Saleh alliance. Ahmed Ali, a powerful former military commander whom his father appeared to be grooming to succeed him, may the familys last chance to win back influence.
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Brussels: Axed Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont arrived on Monday for an extradition hearing in Belgium as Spain seeks to have him sent back to face sedition charges over his region's independence drive.
A judge sitting behind closed doors in Brussels will hear from lawyers for Puigdemont and four of his former ministers, who all fled to Belgium in October despite a summons to appear in court in Spain, claiming they would not get a fair trial.
Prosecutors last month asked the judge to approve the European arrest warrant issued by Madrid for the five in the opening round of what could become a protracted courtroom battle.
A police source said Puigdemont and the others had arrived for the hearing, which comes on the eve of the official start of campaigning for 21 December elections in Catalonia.
Madrid wants the polls to "restore normality" to the wealthy northeastern region, which declared independence unilaterally following a hotly disputed 1 October referendum.
Puigdemont's lawyer said at the weekend he will remain in Belgium until after the elections.
"No matter what, they will be (in Brussels) till at least 21 December and according to my calculations this could go on till mid-January," lawyer Jaume Alonso Cuevillas told Catalan radio Rac1, referring to Puigdemont and the four former ministers.
"I am convinced that no matter what happens they will have recourse to an appeal," the lawyer said.
Legal tangle?
Spanish prosecutors want to prosecute Puigdemont and his former ministers for rebellion which carries a maximum 30-year jail sentence and sedition for their role in the independence drive, as well as for misusing public funds.
Meanwhile a Spanish Supreme Court judge is set to decide whether or not to free 10 other separatist leaders who were jailed pending a probe into their role in the Catalan independence drive.
Any release on bail would mark a turn in the election campaign, particularly for separatist parties who have repeatedly accused Madrid of taking "political prisoners" and "repression" after their attempt to declare unilateral independence fell flat.
Puigdemont and his cadres say the charges against them are politically motivated and as both sides are likely to appeal if the judge rules against them in the extradition hearing, the case could drag on for months, according to the Belgian justice minister.
Christophe Marchand, lawyer for two of Puigdemont's ex-ministers, told AFP that "the facts as written in the arrest warrant are not punishable under Belgian law", saying the case was an attempt to punish a "political process that passed off peacefully".
After Monday's hearing the court is expected to make its ruling in eight to 10 days, according to the Brussels prosecutor's office.
A spokesman for Puigdemont said Friday he would "respect the schedule" of the Belgian legal process.
Islamabad: The Islamabad High Court on Monday dismissed ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's plea to club three corruption cases against him.
A two-member bench issued a short order turning down his appeal and said that a detailed judgment would be issued later.
The cases were registered by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) on 8 September against Sharif, his family in the Accountability Court, Islamabad, following a verdict by Supreme Court in the Panama Papers case. The accountability court in Islamabad had on 8 November rejected a plea by 67-year-old Sharif to club his cases, which he challenged in the Islamabad High Court.
The high court had completed the hearing and reserved the judgment on 23 November, which it announced on Monday.
The three cases against the Sharif family are related to the Al-Azizia Company and Hill Metal Establishment, Flagship Investment Ltd and the Avenfield (London) properties.
Earlier, the accountability court postponed hearing of graft cases against Sharif until Monday afternoon due to the expected verdict of the high court. Sharif along with his daughter Maryam and son-in-law Muhammad Safdar appeared in the court.
His lawyer Khawaja Harris requested Judge Mohammad Bashir to suspend proceedings and wait for the Islamabad High Court's decision on a petition by Sharif to club his three graft cases into one, as all were related to his alleged amassing of assets beyond the known sources of income.
The court after hearing the argument from the NAB prosecutor postponed hearing till 1 pm and allowed Sharif to go home but ordered him to be present when the hearing would restart. Sharif and his sons, Hassan and Hussain, have been named in all the three NAB cases, while Maryam and her husband Safdar have been named only in the Avenfield case. Maryam on 23 November had requested exemption from personal appearance from 5 December, 2017 to 5 January, 2018, while Sharif sought exemption from 5-12 December.
In November, Sharif was indicted in all three cases while his daughter Maryam and her husband Safdar, co-accused with Sharif in only one case, were also indicted along with Sharif. Sharif's sons Hassan and Hussain have failed to appear in the court despite repeated summons which prompted the court to separate their cases.
Heavy security arrangements were made and hundreds of security personnel deployed around the court premises.
The cases are based on 28 July verdict by the Supreme Court which disqualified Sharif and ordered to launch three corruption cases against him and his family, and one case against finance minister Ishaq Dar in the Panama Papers case.
Dar had been relieved of his duties after the ailing politician, who was declared a proclaimed absconder by a court in the case, requested leave for three months.
Pope Francis on Saturday defended his strategy of avoiding the term Rohingya in Myanmar, saying he believed he got his message across to both the civilian and military leaderships without shutting down dialogue.
Speaking to reporters aboard the plane returning to Rome from Bangladesh, the pontiff also indicated that he had been firm with Myanmar's military leaders in private meetings about the need for them to respect the rights of Rohingya refugees.
He also disclosed that he cried when he met a group of Rohingya refugees on Friday in Bangladesh, where he defended their rights by name in an emotional meeting.
"For me, the most important thing is that message gets through, to try to say things one step at a time and listen to the responses," he said. "I knew that if in the official speeches I would have used that word, they would have closed the door in our faces. But (in public) I described situations, rights, said that no one should be excluded, (the right to) citizenship, in order to allow myself to go further in the private meetings," he said.
Francis did not use the word 'Rohingya' in public while on the first leg of the trip in Myanmar. Predominantly Buddhist Myanmar does not recognise the mostly Muslim Rohingya as an ethnic group with its own identity but as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
Local Roman Catholic Church authorities had advised him not to say it because it could spark a backlash against Christians and other minority groups.
The Pope met Myanmar's military leaders privately on Monday, shortly after his arrival in the nation's biggest city, Yangon.
The meeting had been scheduled for Thursday morning but the military pointedly asked at the last minute that it be pushed forward. The result was they saw the Pope before the civilian leaders instead of the other way around, as had been planned. "It was a good conversation and the truth was non-negotiable," he said of his meeting with the military leaders.
The latest exodus from Myanmar to Bangladesh of about 6,25,000 people followed a Myanmar military crackdown in response to Rohingya militant attacks on an army base and police posts on 25 August.
Refugees have said scores of Rohingya villages were burnt to the ground, people were killed and women were raped. The military has denied accusations of ethnic cleansing.
Asked if he used the word Rohingya during the private meeting with the military chiefs, the Pope said, "I used words in order to arrive at the message and when I saw that the message had arrived, I dared to say everything that I wanted say."
He then gave a reporter a mischievous grin and ended his answer with the Latin phrase 'Intelligenti Pauca', which means "Few words are enough for those who understand," strongly hinting that he had used the word the military detests while in their presence.
Human rights groups have criticised the country's de facto civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was under house arrest for a total of 15 years before the 2015 elections, for not taking a stand against the generals.
But Francis, who met with her privately on Tuesday, appeared to give her the benefit of the doubt because of her delicate relationship with the generals who were once her jailers.
"Myanmar is a nation that is growing politically, in transition," Francis said in response to a question about Suu Kyi and the budding democracy in Myanmar.
Tokyo: North Korea's missile tests are an "imminent threat" to Japan, the Japanese parliament declared on Monday, as prime minister Shinzo Abe said talking to the reclusive state was meaningless.
The upper house unanimously adopted a resolution protesting against the North's firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile that dropped into the sea inside Japan's exclusive economic zone last week.
The launch showed Pyongyang was determined to continue its nuclear and missile programmes and constituted "an unprecedented, significant and imminent threat against the safety of the region, including Japan."
"This is a frontal challenge against the international community that must not be tolerated," added the resolution.
Tensions on the Korean peninsula are high after last Wednesday's missile launch. On Monday the US and South Korea began their largest-ever joint air exercise, described by Pyongyang as an "all-out provocation".
Abe vowed to put pressure on North Korea until it changes its ways and gives up its missile and nuclear technology in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" fashion.
"In order to press North Korea into changing its policies, we shall take a resolute attitude in our diplomacy," he told the upper house. "Dialogue for the sake of dialogue is meaningless," Abe said.
Doha: Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani will attend a crucial summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council this coming week, Doha's foreign minister said on Sunday.
Speaking at a forum, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani said Qatar's leader had accepted the invitation to attend, amid the region's worst political crisis in years.
"I will attend the ministerial council tomorrow (Monday) and the emir will attend the summit," said the minister.
He added that Qatar had not yet seen the summit agenda, but the current crisis would be discussed at the meeting.
"It is important that the GCC system remains alive," said the minister.
The emir received an invitation from Kuwait at the end of last month to attend the GCC summit.
It was the first such invitation during the ongoing and increasingly bitter Saudi-led diplomatic boycott of Doha.
The summit will start on 5 December, the six-month anniversary of the start of the crisis.
It was unclear who would represent the other members of the GCC at the gathering.
On 5 June, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt abruptly cut all ties with Qatar over accusations Doha supported extremism and was close to Shiite Iran. Qatar denies the allegations.
Since the beginning of the crisis, all diplomatic communication between Qatar and the boycotting countries has been stopped.
Founded in 1981, the GCC is a political and economic union that includes Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, as well as Oman and Kuwait.
Kuwait and Oman have not taken part in the boycott of the tiny gas-rich emirate, and Kuwait's Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad Al-Sabah has acted as a mediator in the crisis.
Buenos Aires: The search for the ARA San Juan, the Argentine navy submarine that disappeared 18 days ago, was now focusing on an area where the ocean floor is 950 metres deep, as complaints by the family members of the vessel's 44 crew-members mount.
At his Sunday press briefing, navy spokesman Enrique Balbi said that Russia's remote-controlled submersible Pantera Plus will try to descend to the ocean bottom at a spot where a "contact" that is, a possible metallic object has been detected, reports Efe news.
The Russian undersea vehicle, which is being transported on board the Argentine vessel Islas Malvinas, on Saturday had descended to 477 and 700 meters at two other locations, but neither target proved to be the missing sub.
The ARA San Juan was sailing northwards some 432 kilometres off Argentina's Atlantic coast when it went missing on 15 November after reporting a battery short-circuit caused by water entering the vessel via the snorkel.
Some three hours after the last communication, a sound consistent with an explosion was detected 27 kilometres from the submarine's reported position, and the huge international search has focused in that region, with six vessels still at sea continuing with that effort.
At Balbi's daily update, the father of one of the missing sailors claimed that the navy had not provided him with any information about his son.
"You said that (the navy) informed the relatives but (I've received) nothing. I haven't received a single call," said Luis Antonio Niz, the father of one of the sub's officers, Luis Alberto Niz.
Balbi offered an immediate apology for the apparent oversight and took Niz's contact information, saying that the navy is not "infallible" and can make "mistakes".
On Sunday, most of the crewmembers' relatives left the Mar del Plata base en masse carrying Argentine flags and photos of their missing loved ones, stopping to speak with reporters and announcing that they were marching to the city's central square to call upon Argentine President Mauricio Macri to order a resumption of the "rescue" phase of the operation.
The rescue operations were discontinued on 30 November since calculations are that, even if the crew members were alive in a sunken vessel, they would have exhausted their available oxygen by then.
On Sunday, London mayor Sadiq Khan arrived in Mumbai, to hold a series of meetings with business leaders and politicians.
As part of his maiden official trip to India, Khan will also visit Amritsar and New Delhi apart from Mumbai. He will then fly out to Pakistan, where he will visit three more cities Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi before wrapping up his six-day South Asia visit.
As part of the Indian leg of the trade mission aimed at promoting new business links between India and London, the London mayor has a series of meetings planned with senior politicians, business leaders, regional leaders as well as Bollywood personalities.
His central message in these meetings will be that the British capital remains open to Indians post-Brexit. "Following last year's EU referendum, it is far more important to get the message of 'London is open' out far and wide and I will be taking that message to India and Pakistan," he had said on the eve of his departure.
British prime minister Theresa May is meeting the top brass of the European Union on Monday, dubbed the "absolute deadline day" for progress on the Brexit separation issues. Khan's visit to the subcontinent acquires significance with Britain appearing keen on pushing Brexit to the wire. The scheduled date for Britain's separation from the EU is March 2019.
According to a report on The Times of India, he began his trip by saying it was a "mistake" to tighten visa regulations, which had made it tougher for Indian students to visit the British capital. "London is the student capital of the world and students are a big asset. It was a big mistake to withdraw post-study work visa and to treat students as immigrants, which has benefitted Canada and Australia. It's in London's interest to change visa rules," he said.
It's not only Indian students that they want, but also the film industry, Khan said. "London is open. This is not just a phrase, but a frame of mind. We want Bollywood to not only shoot films in London, as they have done in the past, but also take up post-production work here. Even Hollywood is coming to Bollywood because of its brilliant post-production work," he said.
The 'London is Open' slogan has long been Khan's pet project, and the mayor is keen on capitalising on this further. As per a report on LBC, Britain was the second largest destination for Indian investment, and 44 percent of the fastest growing Indian companies now have a base in London.
Contrary to popular opinion, he said, Brexit will actually make visa norms easier. A report on The Hindu quoted Khan as saying on Sunday: "One of the justifications that some ministers in the government give to leave the EU is to have better trade relations with many countries like India. One of the best ways to encourage trade with India is to invite talent to London and UK."
Now that he is here, however, it's not all business on his mind. Maybe he will do a spot of acting as well, the report added. "Maybe I can act as well," Khan, whose parents were born in India, quipped. "I believe culture is the glue that binds the two cities together."
New Delhi: Notwithstanding its apology, the Supreme Court on Monday criticised the CBI for the manner in which it "treated" a sitting Orissa High Court judge during its attempted raid at his residence in connection with a case of alleged bribery in the name of judges.
The apex court made strong observations after the CBI said the agency has apologised to the Chief Justice of the high court as well as the concerned judge for the "mistake" and both have accepted the apology tendered by the agency. "The only problem is the way the sitting judge was treated," a bench comprising Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan said, adding "such mistakes are not expected from an agency like the CBI".
At the outset, Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Tushar Mehta, representing the CBI, said the agency had sought appointment from the chief justice and the concerned judge of the Orissa High Court and tendered apology for the incident.
"It was a mistake," Mehta said and added that the apology was accepted by both the judges. He said this matter should be rested in a dignified manner as senior officials of CBI had explained to the Chief Justice the circumstances under which the incident took place.
The issue had arisen after a CBI team had allegedly attempted to raid the official residence of the sitting judge in Cuttack on 19-20 September night in 2017. A team of CBI officials had come looking for the house of a former judge of the high court. The sitting judge of the Orissa High Court had shifted at the former judge's residence. Mehta, however, maintained that the probe team had not entered the house of the judge and CBI's superintendent of police had also met the concerned judge and expressed regrets for the inconvenience caused to him.
The bench sought to know from the ASG how the chief justice and the concerned judge had accepted CBI's apology. "You have explained your position, that is one thing. Whether they have accepted it or not?," the bench asked, adding, "where is the acceptance of apology?"
Mehta told the bench that this could be verified and said he would file an affidavit giving all the details. The bench also observed that the CBI officials, who had gone to conduct the raid, should have seen the name-plate of judge at his residence before going ahead with the raid. When one of the counsel appearing for the respondents said that the apex court has to protect the institution, the bench observed, "we are concerned with the entire judiciary".
Mehta also told the bench that an FIR against the CBI officers, lodged on a complaint by a security guard posted at the judge's residence, should be quashed. The top court said it would consider this aspect later and asked the agency to file its affidavit. It posted the matter for hearing on 5 January.
The CBI has approached the apex court seeking transfer of the matter pending before the Orissa high court.
The High Court had issued notices to the CBI and the state police on a plea seeking a judicial probe into the incident. The high court had sought responses on the plea filed by the bar association.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May failed to strike a Brexit divorce deal with EU negotiators in Brussels on Monday despite earlier reports of a breakthrough agreement that would have kept British-ruled Northern Ireland aligned with EU regulations. Both sides said they should unlock talks on future trade relations in the coming days. We will reconvene before the end of the week and I am also confident that we will conclude this positively, May said after a lunch with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who also voiced confidence in overcoming outstanding obstacles. He insisted the meeting, after days of intensive talks behind the scenes, was not a failure and, well aware the EU does not want to humiliate May as she accepts many of its terms for withdrawal, credited the prime minister with hanging tough. They spoke after government sources in Dublin said London had agreed to keep Northern Ireland aligned to EU regulations to avoid a hard border with the Irish Republic. Word of that sent the pound higher on hopes of rapid trade talks but also provoked an angry response from Mays allies in Northern Ireland, demanding equal treatment with the rest of the United Kingdom. Underlining the conundrums of Brexit, the idea of Northern Ireland remaining closely linked to the EU single market prompted speculation that, to avoid new barriers between Belfast and London, the British mainland would have to follow suit. The leaders of Scotland and London, which voted against Brexit, demanded they be allowed the same EU relationship as Northern Ireland. Yet May has ruled out such differentiated treatment or staying in a customs union or the single market. She is a tough negotiator, and not an easy one, Juncker said in remarks reflecting concern in Brussels that concessions by May could fuel a disruptive push in London to unseat her. She is defending the point of view of Britain with all the energy we know she has, the EU chief executive told reporters. Despite our best efforts and the significant progress we and our teams have made over the past days on the remaining issues, it was not possible to reach a complete agreement. Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May is welcomed by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at the EC headquarters in Brussels, Belgium December 4, 2017. REUTERS/Yves HermanREGULATORY ALIGNMENT The sudden announcement that no deal had been reached swiftly squelched optimism that had spread earlier on Monday. Irish government sources had said agreement had been reached on an overall deal for the Irish issues. Slideshow (5 Images)The key phrase is a clear commitment to maintaining regulatory alignment in relation to the rules of the customs union and internal market which are required to support the Good Friday Agreement, the all-island economy and the border, one of the Irish government sources said. The Irish border, which is now completely unguarded and barely even marked, would not change its physical appearance after Britain leaves the EU, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said. Fears that a hard border could disrupt the peace deal in the north had driven both sides to find solutions. Juncker spoke to Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar by phone. EU lawmaker Philippe Lamberts, who met Juncker, said the draft text on Ireland committed Britain to full alignment on rules. Donald Tusk, the EU summit chair, tweeted ebulliently after speaking to Varadkar that there was good progress on the Irish issue to unblock UK-EU trade talks: Tell me why I like Mondays! the former Polish premier wrote. Getting closer to sufficient progress at December (EU summit). This is code for Britain complying with a set of conditions the EU wants met on divorce terms before leaders will agree to launch talks on a future trade deal at a summit next week. Tusk, who had cancelled a trip to Jerusalem and Ramallah because of apparent progress on Brexit, met May after her talks with Juncker. Officials had earlier said he was preparing to call round EU leaders to get agreement on trade negotiations. National envoys handling Brexit were also summoned urgently to a meeting in Brussels later on Monday. London has broadly agreed to many of the EUs divorce terms, including paying out something like 50 billion euros. But the issues of the rights of expatriate citizens and the UK-EU border on the island of Ireland have defied a deal. Elmar Brok, another member of the European Parliament who met Juncker and his Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, before they met May, said just a few words separated the sides.
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DUBLIN/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Britain agreed on Monday to keep Northern Ireland in regulatory alignment with the European Union after Brexit, Irish government sources said, raising hopes Prime Minister Theresa May can strike a deal in Brussels to start free trade talks. After intensive negotiations in recent days, Britain made what the Irish sources called a clear commitment to keep economic rules on both sides of the new UK-EU land border across the island of Ireland similar enough to allow no frontier -- and so ease fears of stirring up conflict again in Northern Ireland. News of a deal, by raising the prospect of starting trade negotiations in the coming weeks, lifted sterling. It triggered speculation that it could result in the whole of the United Kingdom effectively remaining in a customs union, or even the EU single market, despite Mays insistence that it would not do so. The pro-British Northern Irish party on which May relies for support in parliament immediately insisted rules on the British mainland must not deviate from those in Northern Ireland, a position May herself supports. As a result, it is hard to see that Britain could itself stray far from EU regulations. That idea was immediately embraced by the leaders of London and Scotland, two major British regions where voters strongly opposed Brexit in last years referendum. Scotlands first minister and the mayor of London both repeated their wish to stay in a customs union or, better, the EU single market. That is a position Mays hardline pro-Brexit supporters would not countenance, underlining the conundrums that the Irish border and other complex issues have raised over Britains ability to make a clean break after 44 years of EU membership. REGULATORY ALIGNMENT Agreement has been reached on an overall deal for the Irish issues, one of the Irish government sources said. The key phrase is a clear commitment to maintaining regulatory alignment in relation to the rules of the customs union and internal market which are required to support the Good Friday Agreement, the all-island economy and the border. Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said he hoped to make a positive statement shortly, adding that British-EU negotiations on post-Brexit trade would start. The Irish border, which is now completely unguarded and barely even marked, would not change its physical appearance after Britain leaves the EU, he said. Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May is welcomed by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at the EC headquarters in Brussels, Belgium December 4, 2017. REUTERS/Yves HermanEuropean Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker spoke to Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar by phone. EU lawmaker Philippe Lamberts, who met Juncker earlier on Monday, said the draft text on Ireland would commit Britain to full alignment on rules. Donald Tusk, the EU summit chair, tweeted ebulliently after speaking to Varadkar that there was good progress on the Irish issue to unblock UK-EU trade talks: Tell me why I like Mondays! the former Polish premier wrote. Getting closer to sufficient progress at December (EU summit). This is code for Britain complying with a set of conditions the EU wants met on divorce terms before leaders will agree to launch talks on a future trade deal at a summit next week. Slideshow (5 Images)May and Juncker made no comment to reporters when they met at the EU executives Berlaymont headquarters for a lunch that diplomats and officials hope can seal a breakthrough that would open the way to negotiations on future trade relations. Tusk cancelled a trip to Jerusalem and Ramallah and hastily scheduled his own meeting with May for after lunch. Officials said he was preparing to call round EU leaders to get agreement on trade negotiations. National envoys handling Brexit were also summoned urgently to a meeting in Brussels later on Monday. London has broadly agreed to many of the EUs divorce terms, including paying out something like 50 billion euros. But the issues of the rights of expatriate citizens and the UK-EU border on the island of Ireland defied a deal until the last minute. Elmar Brok, another member of the European Parliament who met Juncker and his Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, before they met May, said just a few words separated the sides. In London, Mays spokesman said: Progress is being made. Theres more still to agree upon. Dublin, backed by the rest of the EU, wants strong assurances that London will commit to keeping business regulations in Northern Ireland the same as in the EU. Britain is seeking to keep its options open, having rejected a commitment to leave Northern Ireland in a full customs union with the EU or to keep the whole United Kingdom in one. Juncker and Barnier met the European Parliaments Brexit team to brief them on progress. The legislature, which must approve any withdrawal treaty if a disruptive Brexit is to be avoided in March 2019, has demanded that EU courts have the final say in guaranteeing rights for 3 million EU citizens in Britain. Britain insists that it will no longer accept the supervision of the European Court of Justice.
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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis on Monday met Pakistans civilian and military leaders and urged them redouble their efforts to rein in militants accused of using the country as a base to carry out attacks in neighbouring Afghanistan. U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis arrives in Islamabad, Pakistan December 4, 2017. U.S. Embassy/Handout via REUTERS Mattis, on a one-day visit to Pakistan, said the South Asian nation had made progress in the fight against militancy inside its borders but needed to make more. More than 100 days since President Donald Trump announced a South Asia strategy that calls for a firmer line towards Islamabad, U.S. officials and analysts say there has been only limited success and it is not clear how progress will be made. U.S. officials have long been frustrated by what they see as Pakistans reluctance to act against groups such as the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network that they believe exploit safe haven on Pakistani soil to launch attacks in Afghanistan. The Secretary reiterated that Pakistan must redouble its efforts to confront militants and terrorists operating within the country, the Pentagon said in a statement. Mattis, who visited Pakistan for the first time as defence secretary, said before the trip that the goal for his meetings with Pakistani officials would be to find common ground. In his discussion with Mattis, Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi said the two allies shared objectives. Were committed (to) the war against terror, he said. Nobody wants peace in Afghanistan more than Pakistan. Mattis also met with high-ranking officials from Pakistans powerful military, including army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and Lieutenant-General Naveed Mukhtar, the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency that U.S. officials say has links with Haqqani and Taliban militants. In August, Trump outlined a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, chastising Pakistan over its alleged support for Afghan militants. But beyond that, the Trump administration has done little to articulate its strategy, experts say. U.S. officials say they have not seen a change in Pakistans support for militants, despite visits by senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis arrives in Islamabad, Pakistan December 4, 2017. U.S. Embassy Handout via Reuters We have been very direct and very clear with the Pakistanis ... we have not seen those changes implemented yet, General John Nicholson, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, said this week. Pakistani officials have pushed back on the U.S. accusations and say they have done a great deal to help the United States in tracking down militants. U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis addresses a news conference during a NATO defence ministers meeting at the Alliance headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, February 16, 2017. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir/Files LIMITED LEVERAGE U.S. official expressed hope relations could improve after a U.S.-Canadian couple kidnapped in Afghanistan were freed in Pakistan in October with their three children. However, while the Trump administration has used tougher words with Pakistan, it is has yet to change Islamabads calculus. Some experts say the United States loses clout in Pakistan when it is seen as bullying. While Mattis travelled to the region earlier this year, he did not stop in Pakistan, but visited its arch rival, India, a relationship that has grown under the Trump administration. There is not an effective stick anymore because Pakistan doesnt really care about U.S aid, it has been dwindling anyway and it is getting the money it needs elsewhere ... treat it with respect and actually reward it when it does do something good, said Madiha Afzal, with the Brookings Institution. Mattiss brief visit to Islamabad comes a week after a hardline Pakistani Islamist group called off nationwide protests after the government met its demand that a minister accused of blasphemy resign. Separately, a Pakistani Islamist accused of masterminding a bloody 2008 assault in the Indian city of Mumbai was freed from house arrest. The White House said the release could have repercussions for U.S.-Pakistan relations. I think for Pakistan, the timing is very bad. There is talk about progress being made against extremists and here you have a situation where religious hardliners have basically been handed everything they wanted on a silver platter, said Michael Kugelman, with the Woodrow Wilson think-tank in Washington.
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Ramallah: The Palestinian president has warned that American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital would jeopardize the White House's nascent West Asia peace efforts.
President Mahmoud Abbas' comments came amid a diplomatic push by the Palestinian leader to rally international support against the possible American move later this week.
"Any American step related to the recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel, or moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, represents a threat to the future of the peace process and is unacceptable for the Palestinians, Arabs and internationally," Abbas told a group of visiting Arab lawmakers from Israel, according to the official Wafa news agency.
American officials have said President Donald Trump may recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital this week as a way to offset his likely decision to delay his campaign promise of moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
Israel regards Jerusalem as its capital, with most government functions, including the prime minister's office, Supreme Court and parliament, located in the holy city.
But the international community says the city's status should be determined through peace talks. The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as their capital.
Abbas' spokesman, Nabil Abu Rdeneh, said late Saturday that the president has been in touch with Arab and world leaders to rally opposition against any American move on Jerusalem.
He said Abbas had been in contact with leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and France. "We believe that such an American step, if it takes place, will enter the region in a new course, and a dangerous phase whose results cannot be controlled," he said.
The White House, led by Trump's adviser and son in law, Jared Kushner, has held months of meetings with leaders across the region ahead of an expected peace initiative.
While the proposal is expected to be regional in scope, little is known about the details, including whether Trump will continue the policies of recent predecessors in supporting the notion of an independent Palestinian State.
Kushner said on Sunday that Trump has not yet decided whether to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital or whether to proceed immediately in moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city. "He is still looking at a lot of different facts," Kushner said at the Saban Forum, an annual Mideast policy conference in Washington.
Ahead of Kushner's comments, the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, urged the US not to move forward with any change on Jerusalem's status.
Doing so, he said, "is not only going to promote international anarchy and disrespect for global institutions and law, but it will also be disqualifying itself to play any role in any initiative toward achieving a just and lasting peace."
Seoul: The US and South Korea on Monday kicked off their largest ever joint air exercise, an operation North Korea has labelled an "all-out provocation", days after Pyongyang fired its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile.
The five-day Vigilant Ace drill involving 230 aircraft, including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and tens of thousands of troops began Monday morning, Seoul's air force said.
Pyongyang over the weekend blasted the drill, accusing US president Donald Trump's administration of "begging for nuclear war".
The annual exercise comes five days after the nuclear-armed North test-fired a new ICBM, which it says brings the whole of the United States within range.
As tensions surged, US Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican and foreign policy hawk, warned that the US was moving closer to "preemptive war" with the North.
"If there's an underground nuclear test (by the North), then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States," Graham told the CBS show Face the Nation.
The isolated and impoverished North has staged six increasingly powerful atomic tests since 2006 - most recently in September.
"The preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures. Every missile test, every underground test of a nuclear weapon, means the marriage is more likely," he said.
Graham's remarks echoed those of Trump's National Security Adviser HR McMaster, who told a security forum on Saturday that the potential for war with the North "is increasing every day."
The North has boasted that the Hwasong 15 ICBM tested on Wednesday is capable of delivering a "super-large" nuclear warhead anywhere in the US mainland.
Analysts agree that the latest test showed a big improvement in potential range, but say it was likely achieved using a dummy warhead that would have been quite light.
They say a missile carrying a much heavier nuclear warhead would struggle to travel as far.
They are also sceptical that Pyongyang has mastered the sophisticated technology required to protect such a warhead from the extreme temperatures and stresses encountered as the missile hurtles back to Earth.
The North's widely-condemned nuclear and missile programmes have made significant progress under leader Kim Jong-Un, who has overseen four nuclear tests and dozens of missile launches since taking power in 2011.
The months-long nuclear standoff between Kim and Trump as well as their trading of personal insults has fuelled concerns of another conflict, more than six decades after 1950-53 Korean War that left much of the peninsula in ruins.
But even some Trump advisers say US military options are limited when Pyongyang could launch an artillery barrage on the South Korean capital Seoul - only around 50 kilometres from the heavily-fortified border and home to 10 million people.
PARIS/ALGIERS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron is likely to use a visit to Algeria on Wednesday to look to the future and turn the page on the colonial past, but stop short of apologising for his countrys actions as some demand. French President Emmanuel Macron attends a press conference at the Elysee Palace following a meeting in Paris, France, December 2017. REUTERS/Etienne Laurent/PoolThe trauma of the 1954-1962 independence war, in which hundreds of thousands of Algerians were killed and tortured was used on both sides, has left deep scars. Former French leader Francois Hollande sought a more conciliatory tone describing his countrys colonization of Algeria as brutal and unfair and Macron is unlikely to go further. With President Abdelaziz Bouteflika rarely seen in public since a 2013 stroke, Macron will focus on the generational shift and importance of enhanced economic and security within that context. On a visit to Algeria in February as a candidate, Macron, 39, already shocked many at home when he said Frances 132-year colonial rule was a crime against humanity. The president had strong words. It was appreciated by Algerians, but today the idea is to turn the page and build a new relationship with Algeria, a French presidential source said, adding that youth was his key message. During a three-day tour in Africa last week Macron again addressed the colonial past. While recognising the crimes of the European colonisers, he also pointed to the positives of the era and made clear that his generation should not be blamed. Facing high unemployment, low oil prices, austerity and political uncertainty, Algerias youth is likely to warm to Macrons call to look to the future more than the war veterans. Its very difficult to have a relationship between one partner (Macron) that is young, vibrant and wants renewal and the other partner (Bouteflika) who represents such a severe contrast, said Pierre Vermeren, a North Africa specialist at the Paris Sorbonne university. Economic ties between the two countries have marginally progressed since 2012 and France is now behind China as the main partner. Annual trade stands at about 8 billion euros compared with 6.36 billion five years ago. More than 400,000 Algerians are given visas for France annually, almost twice as many as in 2012. If Macron makes it easier to get a visa, that will be great for me. As for the history stuff I really dont care, said Slimane Khalifa, 25 who is an engineer at a state firm. POST-BOUTEFLIKA TEST Political jostling around Bouteflika has intensified as his health has waned, fuelling questions about the transition if he steps down before his term ends in 2019. With more than 4 million people of Algerian origin in France, all with ties to the North African state, any upheaval across the Mediterranean would have a serious impact on Paris. Macrons biggest foreign policy test could be Algeria because the state of Bouteflikas health is a worry and potentially what happens after could have huge ramifications on us, said a French diplomat. Macrons friendship visit, downgraded from an official visit, is also an opportunity to appease some anger in Algiers after he travelled first to arch-rival Morocco earlier this year, a taboo for previous French leaders. Many hope Macron will go one step further when it comes to the past. France should not only apologise, but also pay for its crimes during occupation, Lakhdar Brahimi, retired diplomat and close friend of the 80-year-old Bouteflika said last week. Brahimi, like Bouteflika, belongs to the war veterans who fought against French occupation and among that generation Macron is seen as his last chance for history to remember Bouteflika as the man who obtained an official apology. However, it remains a sensitive issue across France and Macrons comments in February led to a drop in poll ratings and uproar across various strands of society forcing him to clarify his stance. With the generational change yet to take place, Macron for now needs Algeria to help resolve the crisis in neighbouring Libya and to prevent Islamist militants from stoking problems in the Sahel region, where some 4,000 French troops, roam close to the Algerian border. All the Algerians want is for France and the Barkhane force to get out of Mali and away from its border, said a senior French diplomat.
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United Nations: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for a ceasefire in Yemen in light of an ongoing humanitarian crisis, his spokesman said.
Guterres "calls on all parties to the conflict to cease all air and ground assaults" and is "deeply concerned about the sharp escalation of armed clashes" over the past several days, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
"Ambulances and medical teams cannot access the injured and people cannot go outside to buy food and other necessities. Aid workers are unable to travel and implement critical life-saving programmes at a time when millions of Yemenis rely on assistance to survive," he continued, reiterating calls for the Saudi-led alliance to end their blockade of the country.
Three years after Huthi rebels captured the Yemeni capital Sanaa with the help of forces loyal to ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh their alliance appears to be collapsing.
The two sides have fought deadly street battles this past week in Sanaa, in clashes the security sources say killed around 60 people.
The war in Yemen has claimed more than 8,750 lives since an intervention by Riyadh and its allies in March 2015 in support of a rebel government in the south of the country.
SANAA/DUBAI (Reuters) - Veteran former president Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed in a shooting on Monday after switching sides in Yemens civil war, abandoning his Iran-aligned Houthi allies in favour of a Saudi-led coalition, foes and supporters said. Yemen's former President Ali Abdullah Saleh (in red neck tie) is surrounded by guards as he attends a rally held to mark the 35th anniversary of the establishment of his General People's Congress party in Sanaa, Yemen August 24, 2017. Picture taken August 24, 2017. REUTERS/Khaled AbdullahSources in the Houthi militia said its fighters stopped Salehs armoured vehicle with an RPG rocket outside the embattled capital Sanaa and then shot him dead. Sources in Salehs party confirmed he died in an attack on his convoy. Unverified footage of his bloodied body lolling in a blanket circulated just days after he tore up his alliance with the Houthis following nearly three years in which they had jointly battled the Saudi-led coalition that intervened to try to reinstate Yemens internationally recognised government. In a televised speech on Monday, Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi congratulated the Yemeni people for what he described as a victory against a conspiracy of treason engineered by the groups Gulf Arab enemies. He did not mention Salehs death. Saleh, 75, had said in a speech on Saturday that he was ready for a new page in ties with the coalition and called the Houthis a coup militia, leading them to accuse him of betrayal. Warfare between the former allies has torn densely populated Sanaa for days as Houthi fighters seized control of much of the capital and on Monday blew up Salehs house while coalition jets bombed their own positions. The end of their alliance had seemed poised to transform the fortunes of war after two years of attrition along mostly static front lines, which gave the Saudi-led coalition a new advantage over the Houthis. Stalemate in Yemen has contributed to a human catastrophe as a Saudi-led blockade and internal fighting has thrust millions to the brink of famine and accelerated the spread of deadly epidemics. Eyes will now turn to Salehs political allies and military commanders, whom analysts credited with aiding the Houthi march southwards in 2014 to dominate swathes of western Yemen. What happens now and whether his family and political allies fight on is not yet clear, said Adam Baron, a Yemen expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His people will be angry, and many will certainly be out for blood, but there are many in the middle especially among the tribes who will fall with whoever appears stronger, he said. The (Saudi-led) coalition may have put a lot of their eggs in Salehs basket only for it to fall over now. They appeared to strongly support his attempt to confront the Houthis and now that bid may have failed. HEADS OF SNAKES Saleh once compared his 33-year rule over Yemen to dancing on the heads of snakes, a period that included unification of conservative north and Marxist south Yemen, civil war, uprisings, Islamist militant campaigns and tribal feuds. But he was forced from power in 2012 following an Arab Spring uprising that left him wounded by an attempted assassination, leading to a Saudi-brokered political transition. He fled to his one-time ally Saudi Arabia for treatment of his injuries and the princes in Riyadh allowed him to return to Yemen months later - something they came to bitterly regret as he undermined the transition plan and later joined the Houthis. That set the stage for his final role - that of ally to the Houthi movement which he had previously fought six times during his own presidency, and to Iran, the Houthis political backer. But they vied for supremacy over the territory they ran together, including Sanaa, which the Houthis seized in September 2014, and their feud burst into open combat on Nov. 29. The manoeuvring ended on Monday, as footage circulating on social media appeared to show his corpse, a deep wound in the side of its head, wrapped in a red blanket and being loaded onto a pick-up truck as tribal fighters waved their weapons. Praise God! and Hey Ali Affash! (another name for Saleh) they were shouting. Officials in his own General Peoples Congress party said Saleh was killed outside Sanaa in an RPG and gun attack on his convoy along with the GPCs assistant secretary general, Yasser al-Awadi. His death was confirmed by Salehs nephew and former chief of Yemens security forces, Yahya Mohammed Abdullah Saleh, who hailed him as a martyr on his official Facebook page. STREET BATTLES EASE IN SANAA Residents reported that the situation in Sanaa had calmed. Most people were indoors, and streets were deserted amid a state of fear as the Houthis asserted full control. Saudi-led aircraft continued to fly overhead. Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam claimed significant gains in the battle for Sanaa on Monday. With the aid and approval of God, the security forces backed up by wide popular support were able last night to cleanse the areas in which the militias of treason and betrayal were deployed, he said in a statement. The Houthi movements TV channel al-Masirah and witnesses said Houthi fighters had seized the downtown home of Salehs nephew Tareq, an army general. Residents said the warring sides traded heavy automatic and artillery fire as the Houthis advanced in the central Political District, which is a redoubt of Saleh and his family. We lived through days of terror. Houthi tanks have been firing and the shells were falling on our neighbourhood, said Mohammed al-Madhaji, who lives in the frontline district. The fighting has been so violent we feel we could die at any moment. We cant get out of our homes. Houthi media and political sources also reported that the Houthis also advanced toward Salehs birthplace in a village outside Sanaa where he maintained a fortified palace.
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Harare: Zimbabwe's new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, called for public unity to revive the country's sickly economy as his new cabinet took office on Monday.
"I have sworn in a new cabinet just to finish the term of the former president, which is a period of six to seven months," Mnangagwa said after the new ministers took the oath of office at state house.
"I believe with my team we will stand up to the challenge."
"I want them (Zimbabweans) to be united, we must grow our economy," he added.
Mnangagwa was seen as favourite to succeed long-time ruler Robert Mugabe but then fell out with his boss.
Mugabe dismissed him after the then first lady, Grace Mugabe, accused him of plotting to topple her husband.
He briefly went into exile, returning after the army stepped in and the ruling party expelled Mugabe and a coterie of allies. The veteran ruler resigned on 21 November after 37 years in power.
Mnangagwa, chosen by the ruling party to replace Mugabe, appointed a new cabinet on Thursday.
He drew criticism for retaining the majority of ministers who served under 93-year-old Mugabe and appointing officers from the military which played a key role in the events leading to his ascent to power.
The 22-member cabinet includes Air Marshal Perrance Shiri, who was appointed agriculture and lands minister, and Major General Sibusiso Moyo, who is now in charge of foreign affairs.
Both officials had to relinquish their army positions, as they are not permitted to hold two posts.
"When I was in the military I was under (the) ministry of defence, which is part of government and who says military should never be politicians," Shiri told reporters after he was sworn-in.
"I am Zimbabwean, I have got every right to participate in the country's politics," he said.
The new president also reinstated prosecutor general, Ray Goba, who was named under Mugabe in September but whose appointment was rescinded the following month.
Mnangagwa has issued a three-month ultimatum for the return of funds siphoned out of the country by individuals and corporates.
IFF aims to take ground meat burgers to the next level with its latest ingredient, a plant-based protein based on soy called SUPRO TEX, which is poised to accelerate... Read More
Billionaire Bill Gates reads about 50 books each year, which he says has been critical to his success, his reign as the worlds richest man, and his overall wellbeing.
Over the last several years, it has become a tradition for the Microsoft co-founder (NASDAQ:MSFT) to release his top five books of the year on his blog, GateNotes.
Although Im lucky that I get to meet with a lot of interesting people and visit fascinating places through my work, I still think books are the best way to explore new topics that interest you, Gates wrote Monday.
Here are Bill Gates favorite books this year and why.
1) The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui. Gates Review: This gorgeous graphic novel is a deeply personal memoir that explores what it means to be a parent and a refugee. The authors family fled Vietnam in 1978. After giving birth to her own child, she decides to learn more about her parents experiences growing up in a country torn apart by foreign occupiers.
2) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. Gates Review: If you want a good understanding of how the issues that cause poverty are intertwined, you should read this book about the eviction crisis in Milwaukee. Desmond has written a brilliant portrait of Americans living in poverty. He gave me a better sense of what it is like to be poor in this country than anything else I have read.
3) Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, by Eddie Izzard.
Gates Review: Izzards personal story is fascinating: he survived a difficult childhood and worked relentlessly to overcome his lack of natural talent and become an international star. If youre a huge fan of him like I am, youll love this book. His written voice is very similar to his stage voice, and I found myself laughing out loud several times while reading it.
4) The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Gates Review: Most of the books Ive read and movies Ive seen about the Vietnam War focused on the American perspective. Nguyens award-winning novel offers much-needed insight into what it was like to be Vietnamese and caught between both sides. Despite how dark it is, The Sympathizer is a gripping story about a double agent and the trouble he gets himself into.
5) Energy and Civilization: A History, by Vaclav Smil. Gates Review: Smil is one of my favorite authors, and this is his masterpiece. He lays out how our need for energy has shaped human historyfrom the era of donkey-powered mills to todays quest for renewable energy. Its not the easiest book to read, but at the end youll feel smarter and better informed about how energy innovation alters the course of civilizations.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory to President Donald Trump by allowing his latest travel ban targeting people from six Muslim-majority countries to go into full effect even as legal challenges continue in lower courts.
The court, with two of the nine justices dissenting, granted his administration's request to lift two injunctions imposed by lower courts that had partially blocked the ban, which is the third version of a contentious policy that Trump first sought to implement a week after taking office in January.
The high court's action means that the ban will now go fully into effect for people seeking to enter the United States from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Chad. Lower courts had previously limited the scope of the ban to people without certain family or other connections to the United States.
Trump's ban also covers people from North Korea and certain government officials from Venezuela, but lower courts had already allowed those provisions to go into effect.
The nine-member high court said in two similar one-page orders on Monday that lower court rulings that partly blocked the latest ban should be put on hold while appeals courts in San Francisco and Richmond, Virginia weigh the cases. Both courts are due to hear arguments in those cases this week.
Two of court's liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, said they would have denied the administration's request.
The ban was challenged in separate lawsuits by the state of Hawaii and the American Civil Liberties Union. Both sets of challengers said the latest ban, like the earlier ones, discriminates against Muslims in violation of the U.S. Constitution and is not permissible under immigration laws.
Trump issued his first travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries in January, then issued a revised one in March after the first was blocked by federal courts. The second one expired in September after a long court fight and was replaced with the present version.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)
LONDON, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Oil fell on Monday after U.S. shale drillers added more rigs last week, though prices remained in sight of their recent two-year highs thanks to last week's decision by OPEC and other producers to extend output cuts.
Drillers in the United States added two oil rigs in the week to Dec. 1, bringing the total count to 749, the highest since September, energy services company Baker Hughes said in its closely followed report late on Friday.
February Brent crude futures fell 75 cents on the day to $62.98 a barrel by 1423 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures were down 67 cents at $57.69.
The Brent price hit a two-year high of $64.65 a month ago and has since attracted record investment by fund managers.
The U.S. rig count, an early indicator of future output, has risen sharply from 477 active rigs a year ago after energy companies boosted spending plans for 2017.
U.S. producers were encouraged during 2017 to increase activity as crude prices started recovering from a multi-year price slump after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and some non-OPEC producers, including Russia, agreed to production cuts a year ago.
"So long as speculative financial investors do not lose heart, oil prices are likely to maintain their high level," said Commerzbank analyst Carsten Fritsch.
"Even higher prices are likely to be precluded by news from the U.S., where drilling activity is being stepped up."
Last week the producers agreed to extend those cuts of 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) until the end of next year.
"Market reaction has been positive so far. There are only two worrying aspects ... One is that Iraqs indiscipline has not been discussed, at least not publicly," PVM Oil Associates strategist Tamas Varga said, referring to Baghdad's compliance with output cuts.
"The second is OPECs own forecast for next year. They are by far the most bullish on 2018, with the annual call on their oil at 33.42 million bpd," he said.
The forecast is much higher than those of the U.S. government at 32.70 million bpd and the International Energy Agency's prediction of 32.38 million bpd.
The latest agreement allows for producers to exit the deal early if the market overheats. Russian officials had expressed concern that extending the cuts might encourage U.S. shale oilcompanies, which have been a thorn in OPEC's side, to pump more crude.
U.S. output rose in September to 9.5 million bpd, the highest monthly output since 9.6 million bpd in April 2015, government data shows. On an annual basis, U.S. output peaked at 9.6 million bpd in 1970.
(Additional reporting by Aaron Sheldrick in TOKYO and Emily Chow in KUALA LUMPUR; Editing by David Goodman)
In this segment from the Rule Breaker Investing podcast, David Gardner dips into the mailbag and finds a question he doesn't feel he has a good answer for: Beginning investor Dylan recently took a sum of money he'd had in savings bonds and put it into four Stock Advisor recommendations, and wants to start bolstering his portfolio with more stocks over time. The question: What strategies should a young professional -- drawing a young professional's salary -- use to expand his holdings?
A full transcript follows the video.
10 stocks we like better than Wal-MartWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, the Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*
David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Wal-Mart wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.
Click here to learn about these picks!
*Stock Advisor returns as of November 6, 2017The author(s) may have a position in any stocks mentioned.
This video was recorded on Aug. 30, 2017.
David Gardner: This comes from another Minnesotan. In fact, [Dylan Dimkey], you come from beautiful, as you write, Brainerd, Minnesota. You're 25 years old. You're going to ask a question that I'm not going to have a good answer to, but I am going to say something toward it. So here's what you wrote.
"I'm very new to stocks and investing. I've just found it to be absolutely fascinating. I joined Stock Advisor about a month ago. I've been catching up on your Rule Breakers podcasts as well as a few others that The Fool offers. I want to say thank you for all you do for young investors like me. You and your team at Fool HQ do a wonderful job." I'm not going to read all this, but thank you very much.
You go on to say, "I recently cashed out all of my EE savings bonds that had been given to me each birthday" -- I'm sure others of us have had this experience as kids -- "since I was born", [Dylan] writes. He says that's not a huge sum of cash, but it is substantial at this point in his life at the age of 25.
And he used the money to purchase, you said, "three of my favorite stocks off the Starter Stocks list of Stock Advisor," and you go ahead and say that they're Apple, Nike, and PayPal. You now are a part owner of those companies. Congratulations, Dylan! As well as another Stock Advisor stock. That would be Activision Blizzard to begin, you say, building your investing foundation.
You go on, "I buy in completely with the strategy of purchasing great companies for the long haul, so I'm doing my best not to pay attention to the daily fluctuations in their stock price. I'd also like to take your advice and purchase 15 different companies as soon as possible.
"However, I don't have a lot of expendable cash at the moment to continue investing. I do dedicate 5% of my salary matched 40% by my employer to a Roth 401(k) or maybe IRA, but I feel like I'm missing out on a golden opportunity to get into some more great companies at an early age and allowing the wonder of time to work its magic. Do you have any strategies for a young investor to continue adding to his portfolio while bringing in a young professional's salary? An anxious Fool, [Dylan Dimkey]."
Well Dylan, first of all, good on you, because it is outstanding to hear from a 25-year-old who's already putting away 5% of his salary. Yes, we'd love to see that at 10% if you can squeeze it, so that's my first bit of advice. Squeeze that belt. Can you do 6%? Can you do 7.5%? 10% is really where we'd love it if each of us could get there, and in the end, it's just about controlling your own spending or being utterly disciplined or more cognizant of what you're doing, and that's the best, first answer I have for you.
You're getting an employer match. Excellent. Anybody who's getting an employer match from any employer should max out that match because, as the old saw goes, it is truly free money. You're being given free money to add to your investment nest egg. So good on yah, again.
Really what I want to say, here, is that I'm not a specialist at budgeting or helping people think about how to save more money. We have a lot of resources here at The Motley Fool. When I think about a Motley Fool podcast, like Motley Fool Answers, it sometimes answers personal financial questions about how to save better. How to save smarter.
We also have a discussion board on our free side at Fool.com called Living below Your Means. It is one of our longest running, most prolifically posted to discussion board in Fool history. There are a lot of people helping each other figure out how to live below our means.
You know, I did tweet out just on my own, here, in the last week or two [that] a lot of people talk about the sustainability of our environment or our world, today, and I think that those are great things. I'm glad there's more conversation about that than ever before.
I also want anybody who cares about sustainability to think about personal sustainability, specifically your own financial sustainability. You want the best for your environment. I do, too. I want the best for you, and the best way to be financially sustainable is to live below your means. To have capital that you then go on to invest.
So, [Dylan], what I'm here to say is I'm not great at this. There are a lot of online sites you can probably google. Sites like Mint with a lot of people who do budgeting and share ideas with each other. But really what I want to point out is the beauty of the cycle that you've set up, because not only have you gotten started investing early at a young age, but it has whetted your appetite to have more to invest, and that's one of the most positive dynamics that I see in the financial world today.
When people truly take control of their own destiny via their own finances and they start to save, and then they invest and, yup, the stock market, as it turns out, more often than not goes up; they watch their money do that work for them without them doing any work. You buy those shares of Apple or Netflix. Sometimes you have some tough years, but they go up over time and you know what it makes you want to do? It makes you want to save more.
It makes you realize the beauty of it, and that's what I want for every young person in this world, especially, is to recognize the ownership culture and the beauty of owning companies and letting them grow in value. You benefit from that, and that is maybe the best way to inspire people to save that I know of, and the people who have started it, like you [Dylan], start to ask that positive question, "How do I save even more?" I wish you the best.
David Gardner owns shares of Activision Blizzard, Apple, and Netflix. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Activision Blizzard, Apple, Netflix, Nike, and PayPal Holdings. The Motley Fool has the following options: long January 2020 $150 calls on Apple and short January 2020 $155 calls on Apple. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
LONDON, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Bitcoin dipped back under $11,000 on Monday, coming off a record high just shy of $11,800 it hit on Sunday after a surge from less than $1,000 at the start of the year.
The cryptocurrency, which trades 24 hours a day and seven days a week, climbed as high as $11,799.99 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange at around 2100 GMT on Sunday.
It was not clear what caused the move higher over the weekend other than new investors joining the upstart market, with so-called wallet-providers reporting record numbers of sign-ups over the past week.
Analysts said Friday's announcement by the main U.S. derivatives regulator that it would allow CME Group Inc and CBOE Global Markets to list bitcoin futures contracts had turned sentiment positive after a choppy week.
"The price rises are triggered by continued media interest driven by the expectation of futures trading on CME," Charles Hayter, founder of data analysis website Cryptocompare, said.
By 1310 GMT on Monday, bitcoin had slipped back to around $10,919, down 2 percent on the day but still up more than 100 percent over the past three weeks. Sunday's high marked a 1,121 percent increase since the start of the year.
Think Markets analyst Naeem Aslam said reports Britain wants to increase regulation of bitcoin and other digital currencies by expanding the reach of European Union anti-money-laundering rules that force traders to disclose their identities and report suspicious activity, had knocked bitcoin off its highs.
But others said greater regulatory scrutiny would help.
"If anything, regulation will only increase bitcoin's rate of growth as regulation lends credibility and engenders trust," Nicholas Gregory, CEO of London-based cryptocurrency firm CommerceBlock, said.
Sunday's record high for bitcoin came as Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced the launch of the "petro," which he said would be a cryptocurrency backed by oil reserves, to shore up a collapsed economy.
Opposition leaders said the digital currency would need congressional approval and some cast doubt on whether it would ever see the light of day in the midst of turmoil.
(Reporting by Jemima Kelly; editing by Alexander Smith)
HELSINKI/TORONTO (Reuters) - An arbitration court ordered smartphone pioneer BlackBerry Ltd to pay $137 million to Nokia to settle a payment dispute and the Canadian company said it would pursue a separate patent infringement case against the Finnish firm.
The International Court of Arbitration ruled earlier this week that BlackBerry had failed to make certain payments to Nokia under a patent licence contract, BlackBerry said on Friday.
The ruling, in a previously undisclosed disagreement over a smartphone technology licensing deal signed in 2012, highlights the financial risks technology companies face from disputes over intellectual property, which are sometimes resolved through confidential arbitration processes unknown to investors.
BlackBerry won a $940 million payout from chipmaker Qualcomm Inc earlier this year in a similar case of disputed payments.
BlackBerry has previously said it is looking to generate more revenue from its portfolio of some 40,000 patents by licensing them to other technology companies, and in November said that U.S.-based Marconi Group would help it license out a broad range of its patents.
It is often difficult for investors to value a company's patent portfolio given the opaque nature of licensing deals and disputes.
"Patent issues are going to come up from time to time and as one-offs," said Todd Coupland, an analyst at CIBC World Markets. "Getting in front of them, unless there is some detail, is going to be tough."
BlackBerry shares were down 1.9 percent in midday Toronto trading, Nokia closed 2 percent lower in Helsinki.
BlackBerry disclosed in February that it had filed separate patent infringement complaints against Nokia, alleging that several of the Finnish network equipment maker's base stations and related software infringed on 11 of its patents.
Nokia, which sells these products to telecom operators, said in a statement on Friday that it believes those infringement claims "are without merit."
BlackBerry said it would take a GAAP charge on its results, but did not say when the ruling would hit its financials.
Nokia said a significant portion of the amount awarded had already been recognised in its financials.
Nokia sold its once-dominant phone business in 2014, sticking to its network equipment business and broad patent portfolio. It has licensed technology to smartphone makers Samsung Electronics, Apple, Xiaomi Technology and LG Electronics.
(Reporting by Alastair Sharp in Toronto and Jussi Rosendahl in Helsinki; Additional reporting by Ahmed Farhatha in Bengaluru; Editing by Jim Finkle and Grant McCool)
Eurozone finance ministers on Monday backed a plan for Greece to secure upcoming bailout loans, with the end of the country's massive rescue program now just eight months away.
Bailout negotiators reached the provisional agreement in Athens on Saturday, and officials in Brussels said finance ministers from countries using the euro planned to finalize the deal in late January.
"This is very good news. It's been hard work and it shows a commitment from all sides," said Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the outgoing head of the eurozone finance meetings.
He said there was no discussion Monday on the size and payout schedule of the next disbursements.
Greece has relied on bailout loans since 2010 and is set to exit its latest rescue program in August.
Under the agreement reached Saturday, the government committed to expand the privatization of a state power company and help speed up efforts to clear a huge backlog of banks' soured loans measures that are both politically unpopular.
Athens has already agreed to continue austerity measures for at least another two years, hoping that public hardship will be eased by a return to growth.
The country's economy grew by an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the previous quarter, an independent national statistics agency reported Monday, short of the ambitious expectations of the government and European Union.
Without a revision, the July-September preliminary growth figure suggests that Greece could miss its target of annual growth of 1.6 percent.
The end of bailout programs means Greece will need to return to regular market financing next year. In preparation, Greece launched a bond exchange with private holders last month. Ratings agency Fitch described the process "as another step toward the resumption of regular bond issuance."
On Monday, the government defended its growth target, arguing that all major sectors of the economy were now improving.
"The goal of 1.6 percent is attainable," Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, a minister of economy and development, told a business conference in Athens.
"The Greek economy is back on a path of recovery, powered by fiscal adjustment, reforms agreed with our partners, and the gradual but substantive return of trust of our creditors, the markets, and investors."
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Gatopoulos reported from Athens, Greece.
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Follow Gatopoulos at http://www.twitter.com/dgatopoulos and Casert at http://www.twitter.com/rcasert
The Latest on the election of the next president of the eurogroup (all times local):
5:05 p.m.
Portuguese Finance Minister Mario Centeno has been elected the new head of the so-called eurogroup, the body made up of the single currency bloc's finance ministers.
In a tweet following the election, the European Union said he had been elected as the eurogroup's new president and that he will take up his post on Jan. 13.
Centeno had been overwhelming favorite to win the race to succeed Dutchman Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who has been at the helm for nearly five crisis-ridden years. He defeated Luxembourg's Pierre Gramegna, Slovakia's Peter Kazimir and Latvia's Dana Reizniece-Ozola.
Centeno will take the helm at a time when the eurozone is in far better shape than the one that existed during Dijsselbloem's tenure.
The economy is growing strongly, while worries over Greece's future in the bloc have subsided and the country is poised to exit its bailout era next summer.
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12:45 p.m.
The finance ministers from the 19 countries that use the euro are deciding who should lead their regular meetings, with Portugal's Mario Centeno widely tipped to take the helm of a group that has been at the forefront of the single currency bloc's crisis-fighting efforts.
The decision of who will succeed Dutchman Jeroen Dijsselbloem as president of the so-called eurogroup is expected later Monday. Dijsselbloem, who has held the post for nearly five years, has been one of the most high-profile European politicians during a period that saw a number of countries, notably Greece, teeter on the edge of bankruptcy and the euro currency itself come under threat.
Three other candidates are in the frame, too: Luxembourg's Pierre Gramegna, Slovakia's Peter Kazimir and Latvia's Dana Reizniece-Ozola.
Whoever gets the presidency will inherit a eurozone in far better shape than the one that existed during Dijsselbloem's tenure. The economy is growing strongly, while worries over Greece's future in the bloc have subsided and the country is poised to exit its bailout era next summer.
News / Local
by Stephen Jakes
An MDC-T Councillor for ward 10 Mpopoma, Charles Moyo has revealed that assaulted by Zanu PF youths who were extorting money from vendors in the city forcing them to attend a party meeting last week.Moyo said he was assaulted while doing his work by the young guy Magura Charumbira and police did not act which he described as sad news indeed."Zimbabwe is a peaceful country and there is no room for fake War Lords . Allocating vending bays to people is Council s roll through its workers. The council must act very swiftly to avoid this embarrassing unfortunate situation going out of hand," said former depute Mayor Alderman Amen Mpofu who said Moyo told him of the assault."This is our City. We don't have another one, hence our plea for order and total peace .Youth must not allow themselves to be misled .their future is more important and must not appreciate a person holding ice block because in the end he will realise that he was holding nothing and will be to late."
What happened
Shares of General Cable Corporation (NYSE: BGC) jumped as much as 35.2% in trading on Monday after the company accepted a $3 billion buyout offer from Prysmian Group. Shares traded in a tight range during the day, and at 1:30 p.m. EST shares were up 35.1%.
So what
Prysmian agreed to pay $30 per share in cash, an 81% premium to July 14, 2017 when the company announced it was undertaking a strategic review. The deal has already been approved by both companies' boards of directors, and Italian company Prysmian has proposed financing some of the transaction through an equity offering.
The acquisition isn't expected to close until the third quarter of 2018, but shares are already trading near the offer price, so the market thinks it's highly likely to close.
Now what
Given the massive premium being paid, I think it's probably wise to take some gains off the table. There's still a possibility that the acquisition won't close -- and if that happens, shares could give back today's gains.
What we do know is that General Cable's strategic review led to a big buyout offer, which drove shares higher today.
10 stocks we like better than General CableWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*
David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now... and General Cable wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.
Click here to learn about these picks!
*Stock Advisor returns as of December 4, 2017
Travis Hoium has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
In December 2014, I detailed why the iShares MSCI Japan ETF (NYSEMKT: EWJ), a proxy for participating in Japanese equities, was a timely purchase for investors. In the roughly three years since, although the stock endured a volatile period between mid-2015 and mid-2016, the fund's shares have posted a cumulative total return of roughly 33%. Twenty-three of those percentage points were notched year to date, a period in which the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX (Tokyo Stock Price index) averages have been among the best-performing major stock indices worldwide.
Let's review a few performance factors fueling the rise of Japanese stocks, and examine why their streak may continue for a few years yet.
A governmental jump start
In my initial overview of the Japanese market, I discussed three potential impacts from Abenomics, the broad set of measures instituted by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government to pull the world's third-largest economy out of its low-growth, deflationary conditions:
A then-new mandate compelled Japan's "Government Pension Investment Fund," or GPIF, to allocate half of its holdings in equities, split equally between the Japanese equity market and foreign stock markets; this buying program from the world's largest pension fund would provide support to domestic equity prices.
A weak Japanese yen, supported by Abe's government's policy, would favor export-heavy ETFs like the iShares MSCI Japan fund.
A sharper focus by Japanese companies on corporate governance and investor-friendly metrics like return on equity (ROE) would increase corporate profits.
In the intervening years, Abe's government has pumped money into the economy, and the consistent stimulus has kept the yen relatively weak, boosting the fortunes of large capitalization exporters like Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM), which not only influence the iShares MSCI Japan ETF, but also set the direction for the Japanese market in general.
The GPIF has indeed reallocated its holdings, and steady buying of Japanese equities has pushed domestic stocks to 24.4% of the total GPIF portfolio, essentially achieving the target goal of 25%. The GPIF's total value as of its last reporting period is 156.8 trillion yen, or a mammoth $1.4 trillion at current exchange rates.
If anything, government participation in Japan's stock market is rising. The Bank of Japan, which has separately purchased Japan-centric ETFs since 2010, almost doubled its yearly purchase amount last July, from 3.3 trillion yen to 6 trillion yen (nearly $54 billion).
By the way, so much central bank and public pension money flowing into public markets throws into relief the still relatively meager participation by retail investors, who own less than 20% of outstanding common Japanese shares. Japanese investors, especially those who witnessed the collapse of the asset bubble in the early 1990s, have been frequent sellers into periodic rallies like the current market climb.
Finally, it also appears that zeroing in on corporate behavior has benefited stock valuations. The Japanese government introduced a corporate governance code in 2015, and it hasn't been subtle in pressuring corporations to avoid stockpiling cash (an ingrained habit of Japanese management teams), to increase economic and shareholder returns, and to become more transparent in reporting. In its buying program, GPIF openly favors corporations which put cash to constructive use, and which demonstrate rising annual ROE.
Of course, many other important factors I didn't grasp or foresee also influenced the markets. For one, the rise of Asia-Pacific economies has expanded export opportunities for goods and services by "Japan, Inc.," which had historically leaned on Europe and the U.S. for growth abroad.
While the United States is still Japan's biggest export market, at 22% of total exports, the next 40% of Japan's annual exports are consumed by Asian economies: China at 19%, followed by South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Singapore (here's a nicely illustrative heat map). The cachet of the "Made in Japan" label, especially among Chinese consumers, is providing new growth opportunities for non-industrial manufacturers of a wide range of goods, from packaged foods to cosmetics.
Why Japanese equities will continue to run
While Japan's GDP (gross domestic product) growth is still quite modest, the country has recorded seven straight quarters of expansion as of the government's most recent report. In real, as opposed to nominal, terms, Japan's last five years have seen 1.2% annualized improvement in GDP:
National GDP is shaking out of its lethargy as long-held specializations of the Japanese economy find new demand in global trade. Robotics companies and components suppliers are prospering as the developed world increasingly turns to automation to reduce labor costs. Companies like Yaskawa Electric Corp. and Denso Corp. -- large-capitalization automation leaders on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, but hardly household names in the U.S. -- are poised to benefit greatly from current trends. According to the International Federation of Robotics, Japan dominates robot manufacturing, delivering 52% of the global supply of industrial robots.
Tightening labor conditions also support rising GDP. Japanese employment recently dropped to its lowest level in 22 years, in part due to rising labor-force participation among women and the elderly. Much has been made of Japan's demographic time bomb, which will have to be addressed with a more relaxed immigration policy and incentives for both highly skilled and low-skilled foreign workers to enter Japan's notoriously hermetic workforce and society.
Yet Abe's efforts to catalyze lagging female participation are already paying off, especially in the youngest cohort of workers. In the chart below, which tracks labor participation of girls and women between the ages of 15 and 24, note the slight but important trend reversal after 2012:
Despite gains, the Japanese market isn't overvalued
The Nikkei 225, the most broadly cited measure of Japanese stocks, has gained more than 140% over the last five years, and currently trades around 22,700. But as the index has bounced between 10,000 and 20,000 for most of this century, the latest upswing, though stronger than previous surges, doesn't indicate an overly expensive market.
Recently, German equity analysis firm StarCapital Research ranked Japan the 24th most attractive market out of 40 major global markets, based on an assortment of commonly used equity-valuation metrics. Incidentally, in 38th place, the U.S. won distinction as one of the least attractive markets at present.
Like the U.S., Japan has one of the highest cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratios (CAPE ratios) in the world. According to StarCapital, Japan's CAPE as of Sept. 30 stood at 27, versus the U.S. market's reading of 29. But Japanese companies traditionally have been extremely stingy dividend payers, and low aggregate payout ratios are often correlated with a higher CAPE result; a paper accompanying StarCapital's report makes this point, although not specifically in regard to the Japanese market.
For a more balanced view, it's important to note that Japanese firms trade on average at a price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) of 16.4, versus the average U.S. P/E of 22.4. And Japanese equities look much cheaper on a book-value basis, carrying an aggregate price-to-book ratio of 1.4, less than half the current U.S. price-to-book ratio of 3.1. Moreover, U.S. stocks have coasted to all-time highs since the Great Recession in an enduring bull market. In contrast, Japanese shares, slower to catch fire, still have room to play catch-up.
Below, a final chart to ponder, of the historical movement of the Nikkei 225 index:
I'm not sure how relevant the Nikkei's all-time high is today. The surge in the late 1980s was, after all, driven by one of the greatest asset bubbles of the 20th century. Yet, contextually, investors can glean from the above chart that a march toward at least the 30,000 level isn't out of the question.
The path to that next milestone won't necessarily be smooth, as risk factors remain. The low participation rate of Japanese retail investors remains worrisome. And the fact that the Japanese government is such a forceful driver of the stock market, as well as an increasingly significant equity owner, invites potential volatility once GPIF and the Bank of Japan begin to curtail their purchasing.
Yet I believe that enough true economic value is being created by Japanese corporations to offset effects of future diminishment in government buying programs. Given a closer corporate focus on shareholder returns, and the global demand for the outputs of Japan's advanced, high-tech economy, Japanese markets should provide domestic retail investors and foreign buyers alike with ample rewards for their patient capital.
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Sen. David Perdue on Sunday praised the Senate tax bill, and said the recently-passed legislation could be just more than a week away from moving to the Oval Office.
This is going to be so stimulative for our economy. Our workers are going to become competitive again Capital formation is going to come out of the woodwork to support this economy We could have this on the presidents desk within 10 days, Perdue, R-Ga., told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures.
The Senate passed the sweeping tax reform legislation in a 51-49 voteSen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., being the only Republican to vote noin the early morning hours on Saturday. Since lawmakers in the House voted last month to approve their own version of a tax plan, both chambers of Congress will next have a conference committee meet to iron out any differences between the bills.
I dont anticipate many changes, Perdue said. We moved in the SALT areathe state and local tax we gave relief to some of the high-cost states. But also, I believe that we have taken out a lot of the differences. So I think this is going to move very quickly.
Perdue said the Senates plan will benefit more than just corporations68% of tax cuts in the bill going toward individual Americans. A family of four a couple with two childrenmaking a median income of $73,000 would see a 60% tax cut, while a single-mom making $41,000 will receive a 75% tax cut, according to Perdue.
The issue of state and local tax (SALT) deductions for high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California has become somewhat of a focal point for some legislators. While the original Senate bill called for a full repeal of SALT, the legislation that passed Saturday mimicked the Houses plankeeping a deduction for property taxes up to $10,000. However, the senator believes most Americans are tired of subsidizing the nations high-tax states.
Why should a couple with two children making an income exactly the same for the same couple with the same [number of] kids in Californiawhy should the couple in Iowa pay more federal income tax? he asked.
The Senates bill also preserves the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which some say would benefit wealthy Americans, though the Georgia Republican disagrees.
We put this back in there primarily to pay for an enrichment of cuts on the individual side So when you look at the math, there is absolutely no support that this is just for the rich, Perdue said.
ABC News reporter Brian Ross was suspended for a serious error.
Ross initially reported that President Donald Trump asked former national security advisor Michael Flynn to contact Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign, but later clarified the comment reporting the Trump-Flynn interaction took place after the election. In a tweet Sunday, Trump suggested investors should consider suing ABC over the markets drop Friday after the report.
Counselor to President Trump, Kellyanne Conway, weighed in on the report, telling the FOX Business Networks Stuart Varney, Well if Brian Ross worked for me, and I was a private employer for many years, it would not be four weeks unpaid suspension for a guy making seven figures to lie on the air, it would be complete termination.
Conway says the incident highlights the mainstream medias eagerness to jump on negative stories about the president.
The other thing is it really shows, it brings into sharp relief the presumptive negativity and the hunger to get rid of this president and talk about Russia collusion, Russia, Russia, Russia for this entire calendar year by the entire mainstream media, nonstop, Stuart.
People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused - many millions of dollars! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
According to Conway, those in the media only trust one another now.
The media just trusts the media now. They dont independently source things, they see a tweet, they hear a report and, if its negative about the president, they go right for it, they like it, they retweet it, they resay it.
Chelsea Handlers Netflix series is going out with a bang as the comedian-turned-activist took some brutal shots at White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders over the weekend.
On Fridays episode, Handler conducted an interview in which she interrupted her guest to slam Sanders, calling her a "harlot," trollop and wh---."
That Harlot that theyre dressing up and trolloping out every day? she asked when Sanders name came up. I mean, one day she has no makeup on at all, the next she has six foot long eyelashes, shes got cleavage and summer wh--- lipstick all over her face. Can you believe what they turned her into? A proper trollop.
While Handler is known for her off-color political humor, many fans were quick to jump on her recent characterization of Sanders as being both too harsh and anti-feminist.
Showing your true colors of lifting up women, one user wrote. Huckabee-Sanders is more of a lady than you can ever fathom being.
The user then posted an old quote from Handler about how women should respect women with open arms.
Another user noted that Handler practices many of the beauty tactics that shes chastising Sanders for saying, before you call Sarah Huckabee Sanders a wh--- maybe you should check some of the stuff you have posted on instagram.
Another mocked the double standard that Handler appears to enjoy on social media saying, Just an FYI to everyone APPARENTLY Chelsea Handler can call Sarah Huckabee Sanders a W--- and keep tweeting, but if you return the favor to her, you are suspended.
As previously reported, it was recently announced that Netflix would end its run of Chelsea after the completion of Season 2. The star claimed in a statement that the decision to end the show was her own so that she could focus on political activism in the future. Handler has made a name for herself as a prominent critic of the Trump administration. Her comments against Sanders are just the latest in a long line of jabs at the White House.
Chelseas comments against Sanders come about 28 minutes into the latest episode of Chelsea, titled Dinner Party: Scandalous.
The View host Joy Behar had to eat some crow on Monday after celebrating a story on air that turned out to be inaccurate.
On Fridays broadcast, the longtime host, 75, was handed a card with breaking news. She read from ABC News' exclusive report from Brian Ross that stated: Michael Flynn promised full cooperation to the Mueller team and is prepared to testify that, as a candidate, Donald Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians.
Hours later, ABC News was forced to correct that report from Ross, noting that the alleged directive came after Donald Trump had already been elected president, not when he was a candidate. Because of the error, ABC News suspended Ross for four weeks without pay.
Behar read the false report on air, prompting her audience to break into uproarious applause, which co-host Meghan McCain compared to Oprahs now famous car giveaway. On Monday, Behar tried to make light of the error.
On Fridays show, apparently I was guilty of premature evaluation. I hear they have a pill for that, she said.
In a statement read on The View Monday, ABC News said the report had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process.
It is vital we get the story right and retain the trust we have built with our audience, the statement continued. These are our core principles. We fell far short of that yesterday.
People are slamming this as fake news, I think its a mistake, Behar said, throwing the topic to the panel.
I will say that fake news and what we did on Friday, thats what I was being accused of being a part of. I dont want to sit on a show where I feel like were giving fake news or acting irresponsibly, McCain said.
However, the panel, which included Behar, McCain, Sara Haines, Ana Navarro and Sunny Hostin, seemed to unanimously agree that Ross suspension was warranted, but called it an error instead of deliberate, misleading fake news.
He clearly made a mistake, hes paying the consequences for that mistake, and I think its a good standard, Navarro said. Now, its the same standard Id like to hold the president of the United States to.
The sensual coming-of-age tale "Call Me By Your Name" was voted the best film of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
The critics announced their awards Sunday on Twitter.
Luca Guadagnino's film about a 17-year-old's first love in northern Italy also scored breakout star Timothee Chalamet best actor. Guadagnino shared the award for best director with Guillermo del Toro for "The Shape of Water." Del Toro's Cold War-era fairytale also came away with three awards, including best actress for Sally Hawkins.
The wins further solidified "Call Me By Your Name" as an Oscar favorite. The Sony Pictures Classics release, which last week set the year's box-office record for best screen-average in its limited-release debut, also won best feature at last week's Gotham Awards. Chalamet, though just 21, has won three awards just in the past week, besting veteran names like Gary Oldman ("Darkest Hour") and Tom Hanks ("The Post").
While some critics are continuing to praise the film, others feel the depiction of a sexual relationship between an underage teenager and an adult is sending the wrong message.
Writer Chad Felix Greene said the film sends a "cultural message to teenagers to seek out adult partners and romanticize relationships they are not yet able to manage."
The film first came under scrunity when actor James Woods tweeted about it in September.
"As they quietly chip away the last barriers of decency. #NAMBLA," Woods tweeted.
The film's star Hammer tweeted back, "Didn't you date a 19 year old when you were 60.......?"
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Former Today show co-host Meredith Vieira joked about the time she went into Matt Lauers office and found a huge bag of sex toys in a resurfaced video from 2016 and now a therapist is claiming she was the one who gave him the goods.
Dr. Laura Berman, who was a regular guest on the Today show, told Inside Edition Friday she reportedly gave the fallen TV journalist sex toys to help him spice up his troubled 19-year marriage with his wife, former model Annette Roque.
She claimed the 59-year-old sought advice when cameras werent rolling.
We were in the makeup room and he sort of asked the makeup artist to leave, said Dr. Berman. He asked me about sexual aids and devices. He confided in me about some of the struggles he was having in his married relationship.
Dr. Berman insisted Lauer didnt want to be outed buying sex toys in a store. The therapist also added she is able to speak about Lauer because he is not a patient of hers.
I brought him a shopping bag filled with toys from my line that were designed for couples, spicing things up, she claimed.
According to Dr. Bermans site, shes a sex and relationship educator and therapist who has helped countless couples build stronger relationships, improve their sex lives, and achieve a heightened level of intimacy through her TV and radio shows, books, columns and website, along with her private practice based in Chicago.
She has also written several books on sexual health and pleasure.
In May 2016, Lauer appeared on The Meredith Vieira Show with his then-co-host Savannah Guthrie, and Vieira recalled the time she went snooping in his office and discovered the bag of sex toys.
You had a huge bag of sex toys, yes you did, in your closet, Matt, Vieira told her studio audience.
Lauer then attempted to explain the explicit toys.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute, he responded. We had a guest on the show who was a sex therapist. I think you (Vieira) did the segment, actually.
Vieira, looking confused, said she did not do the segment.
Lauer continued that the sex therapist gave each of us a shopping bag of stuff.
Vieira replied she did not receive anything.
A flustered Lauer then said he did not know what to do with the sex toys and left them in his closet.
Lauer was fired last week after he was found to have carried on inappropriate sexual behavior with a female colleague. A shocking report in Variety detailed multiple claims of crude behavior by the morning show star.
Among the allegations: that Lauer once gave a colleague a sex toy with an explicit note about how he wanted to use it on her; that he exposed himself to another female co-worker; that he would question female producers about their sex lives; and that he would talk about which co-hosts he would like to sleep with.
Variety also reported Lauer had a secret button under his desk that allowed him to lock his office door remotely, affording him privacy for his sexual conquests.
The New York Times later reported that Lauer allegedly summoned a married co-worker to his office for sex in 2001 and had sex intensely with her over the back of his chair until she fainted and had to be taken to a nurse.
Roque has since reportedly left their New York home and jetted off to her native country the Netherlands to escape public scrutiny after the bombshell accounts.
Lauer and Roques marriage has been reportedly rocky since 2006. Roque filed for divorce in 2006 but did not follow through, People reported. He allegedly offered his estranged wife $5 million to stay in the marriage. However, the celebrity magazine added it was no secret that Lauer regularly cheated on his wife.
Dr. Berman was shocked by the allegations.
Im sort of crestfallen if any of those toys were used to harass any colleagues or any women, she said.
NBC News two top executives are resisting calls for an outside investigation into who knew about and didnt report -- sexual misconduct by Matt Lauer, opting instead for an internal review that would likely spare the bosses from meaningful scrutiny.
Andy Lack and Noah Oppenheim, who have deep ties to Lauer from their many years at NBC, have insisted they had no idea the disgraced Today co-host was behaving inappropriately. This has raised eyebrows within NBC, and numerous media outlets have reported that everybody knew about Lauers proclivities.
A team of the most experienced NBCUniversal Legal and Human Resources leaders have begun a thorough and timely review of what happened, Lack told NBC employees on Friday in an e-mail that was obtained by Variety.
That won't cut it, according to attorney Gloria Allred.
NBC should hire an outside law firm to investigate what knowledge the network had, or should have had, about Matt Lauers alleged sexual harassment of female employees at NBC," Allred told Fox News. "An outside law firm hired to do an independent investigation is more likely than HR to be impartial and not subject to internal pressures and potential conflicts of interest."
The New York Post reported that on Friday, Oppenheim told staff from NBCs prestigious Nightly News program, I can tell you, on a personal level, that if there is anyone who works here, who still works here, who knew about this and didnt report it, this is going to be dealt with in the most severe way possible. And that is why we are conducting this review."
Lack had announced on Friday that NBC will investigate internally, with Legal and Human Resources leaders leading the charge. He labeled it a timely review of what happened, but experts dont think NBC Universal employees should be responsible for the inquiry.
Boston University professor and corporate ethics guru Susan Samuelson co-authored Business Law and the Legal Environment, which details how people should behave when faced with an ethical dilemma. The book explains that we cannot be objective about ourselves, a rule Samuelson said applies directly to the situation surrounding NBCs decision to use internal employees to investigate.
No matter how hard they try, people cant be objective about the organization they work for, Samuelson told Fox News. Thats why people get outside investigators.
Samuelson said that research has shown that using internal Human Resources will be a huge trap for NBC because that practice prevents people from doing the right thing.
HR is first place people go, but clearly that process didnt work at NBC, she said. You might argue that the step has failed. The second step would be to go outside, which theyre not doing.
NBC staff are expressing great skepticism at Lacks and Oppenheims review.
The most charitable way you can look at the situation is that Andy encouraged an environment where Matt got everything he wanted, said one NBC insider. Matt was king.
Other NBC staff confirmed that under Lack, who is described as a largely disengaged manager, Lauer held absolute sway at NBC. And Oppenheim repeatedly told colleagues he had no say over talent issues, according to multiple NBC insiders.
Oppenheim has also told colleagues in recent months he is bored in his job and thinking about returning to the west coast, where hes worked as a screenwriter of films such as Allegiant and Maze Runner.
Lack and Oppenheim have both declined repeated requests for comment.
Northwestern University Professor of Communication Studies Irving Rein is considered an expert in crisis management. He told Fox News that NBC should absolutely use an independent investigator if it wants to maintain credibility as a legitimate news organization -- because a third party wouldn't be beholden to Lack and Oppenheim.
Their history of looking into this matter was really ambiguous, ambivalent and confusing, Rein said. Given the ambiguity and the issues, I dont think they really have much of a choice. If they try to do it internally, theyve already demonstrated that they dont have the ability to do so.
Lack and Oppenheim have faced two serious scandals in the last year which could both be linked to Lauer. The network has yet to give a clear explanation of why it sat on the explosive Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump making lewd comments about women, which was leaked to the Washington Post in October, 2016, just weeks before the presidential election. And NBC has also not been transparent about why it spiked Ronan Farrows bombshell expose on Harvey Weinstein. Farrow published his finding in The New Yorker, helping to spark a national debate on the treatment of women in the workplace.
In recent days, observers have asked if NBCs reticence to expose other big stars bad behavior was linked to a glass houses problem.
Its curious why NBC has now botched the handling of three separate stories that all involve some sort of sexual harassment angle, said University of North Carolina journalism professor and media ethics expert Lois Boynton, adding that there is a concern about a conflict of interest since the two execs are friends with Lauer.
Typically, scandals of the magnitude NBC is facing lead to an independent investigation that answers to the corporate level of the parent company. This weekend, New Yorks prestigious Metropolitan Opera announced that it would launch an investigation with an outside law firm into allegations against star conductor James Levine, who was recently accused of sexual misconduct.
Similarly, banking giant Wells Fargo recently used an independent investigator and an outside law firm to look into its scandalized sales practices.
During Rathergate in 2004, CBS hired former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh to investigate. And back in 1998, CNN launched an independent investigation led by legendary media attorney Floyd Abrams when the network botched a report on the Vietnam War's Operation Tailwind. Abrams decline comment when asked if NBC should take a similar approach because of personal interests with the company.
21st Century Fox hired an outside law firm in 2016 to investigate allegations of sexual harassment within Fox News. The investigators reported up to 21st Century Fox, which is Fox News parent company.
Walter Scott, clinical professor of strategy at Northwesterns Kellogg School of Management, told Fox News that having NBC News staffers do the investigation is a major issue because they have a vested interest in the results.
There is a problem in terms of having HR do the investigation. The reputation of the company is very essential, Scott said before adding that NBCs parent company, Comcast, should want to stay on top of what is happening.
Lack and Oppenheim have already come under fire for the way they handled the situation, initially claiming there was only one complaint about Lauer in 20 years before backtracking and clarifying that only current management was in the dark. Even the second statement has raised eyebrows and the Variety reporters who broke the Lauer bombshell, Elizabeth Wagmeister and Ramin Setoodeh, have questioned the claim that current NBC staffers were unaware of Lauers misconduct.
University of Maryland broadcast journalism professor Mark Feldstein, who has worked at NBC, CNN and ABC, is working on a book exploring various media scandals and journalistic malpractice. Hes spent months studying a how news organizations have handled misconduct over the past generation.
It varies widely. Some appoint outside independent blue-ribbon commissions to investigate and issue a public report, others investigate internally with or without a public report and some clam up entirely, Feldstein told Fox News.
A big reason Lack and Oppenheim have come under particular scrutiny is the executives close ties to Lauer. Lack is widely known to be personal friends with Lauer. According to Vanity Fair, the two men have vacationed together. It was Lack who promoted Lauer to Today co-host in 1994 and the two men remained close friends when Lack left NBC for several years. Oppenheim has spent most of his career at NBC, including a multi-year tour of duty as a senior producer on Today when he worked closely with Lauer. Prior to his promotion to NBC News president, he was the executive overseeing Today.
The New York Post reported late Friday that NBC News insiders say they believe NBC News boss Lack is trying to blame his second in command Oppenheim, along with previous execs at the news network. Its like theyre turning on each other, when it was Matt who destroyed a lot of people.
NBC News and Comcast did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Ruby Rose fired back at reports addressing her seemingly frail appearance at the Pitch Perfect 3 premiere in Australia last week.
The Australian actress/model also took to social media Monday to address her adult acne, claiming she broke out because of hotel pillow cases and frequent phone interviews with reporters to promote the film.
This acne belongs to me, not them, and you are welcome to it, the 31-year-old wrote. I never thought Id see the day Id leave my beautiful country balling my eyes outwhen I was so excited to come home. I mean it sucksfor me, I dont see how its bothering so many others? but Im a human. It happens..one side of my face is clear and the other is a mess.
FOR MORE PHOTOS OF RUBY ROSE, VISIT HOLLYWOODLIFE.COM
The Orange is The New Black star then discussed how several tabloids have focused on her photos from the premiere. According to Rose, Britains Daily Mail, in particular, highlighted her thin arms and the visible outline of her spine, hinting she may be suffering from an eating disorder.
This is always my back..I have a tilted posterior (its why I have abs but no butt) and spinal curvature from a bad car accident, wrote Rose.
Its very important to know what an eating is, to know how to speak about it properly when you have such a platform such as a national newspaper, she added. From the bottom of my heart I am sorry if those stories triggered anything in anyone. This is the problem with believing tabloids or any news without research.
In the past, Rose has credited being a vegetarian for helping her maintain a healthy lifestyle.
News / National
by Staff reporter
A VISUALLY impaired prosecutor who was denied full access to the courts since 2006 because of his condition has been finally granted permission to prosecute after the Prosecutor-General Advocate Ray Goba granted him his long-denied rights.Mr Mehluli Ndlovu joined the Public Service Commission 11 years ago but was confined to set down offices as his superiors said he would not be able "to see" the credibility of witnesses.He received a letter from the Prosecutor General's last week granting him permission to prosecute as provided by the Constitution of Zimbabwe.Mr Ndlovu's lawyer Mr Costar Dube of Mcijo Dube and Partners confirmed that his client got the letter. "I Advocate Ray Goba, the Prosecutor-General of Zimbabwe, do hereby nominate and appoint Mehluli Ndlovu to appear before the Magistrates' Court and Supreme Court of Zimbabwe, for me, and in my name, to prosecute all cases as shall be therein pending," reads the letter."I find that the applicant is unnecessarily being discriminated and thereby order that the Attorney General, Public Service Commission and the Director of Public Prosecutors through any of its subordinates and functionaries officials desist from subjecting Mr Ndlovu to any restrictions in the performance of his duties. They should but render him with all necessary support and assistance to fully and effectively perform his duties without any differentiation with his other colleagues in prosecution." Mr Ndlovu's plight started in 2006 when he left private practice to join the then Public Service Commission as a prosecutor at Bulawayo Magistrates Court housed at Tredgold Building when Mr Johannes Tomana was still the Attorney-General.Until now, he was not allowed to present cases in court with authorities arguing his assistant is not a civil servant and has not taken an oath to keep State secrets. For the past 11 years, Mr Ndlovu has been confined to the set down offices where he received new cases and decides whether there is enough evidence to prosecute.Frustrated by his former boss, Mr Tomana, Mr Ndlovu approached the Labour Court seeking an order to be allowed to prosecute in court.Labour Court President Justice Mercy Moya-Matshanga ruled in his favour and ordered Mr Tomana to allow him to prosecute, but the court order was violated.
When Kensington Palace announced Meghan Markle was engaged to Prince Harry, many wondered if the American actress will eventually follow in his mothers philanthropic footsteps.
The late Princess Diana, crowned as the peoples princess, dedicated much of her life to helping those in need, raising awareness on the AIDS crisis, leprosy, the danger of land mines and feeding the hungry. She died in 1997 at age 36 after a car crash in Paris.
As Markle prepares for her May 2018 wedding, a rep for Prince Harry told Fox News the star has experience being an activist and will take on new causes after she marries the royal.
Ms. Markle has previously served as an Ambassador for World Vision Canada and UN Women roles that have introduced her to a number of grassroots projects around the world, wrote the rep. She is incredibly grateful for the experiences she has had with both organizations, but has told them she will have to end her Ambassador roles as she embarks on the next stage in her life.
"She is focusing on traveling around the UK in the months ahead and will join The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry as a Patron of The Royal Foundation after the wedding.
Markle, who is best recognized by fans as Rachel Zane from USA Networks Suits, was passionate about her charity work long before she met her prince.
The 36-year-old served an ambassador for World Vision in February 2016, and she traveled to Rwanda to see how a local school was impacted by having access to clean water thanks to a pipe built by the global relief charity within the community.
Meghan is a true humanitarian, wrote Lara Dewar, chief marketing and developing officer, to Fox News. Were deeply grateful for her contribution as a global ambassador for World Vision over the past two years and for helping to raise awareness for the worlds most vulnerable children."
During her visit, Markle taught students to paint, and she helped drill a borehole to provide fresh water.
"I personally witnessed Meghans passion to improve the lives of children and, know her heart to advocate for the rights of girls to her and amplify their important voices," Dewar said. "She will undoubtedly bring vast energy to her charity work as a member of the Royal Family. We cant wait to see what the future holds for her and Prince Harry a couple who clearly have a heart for social justice.
Africa also has a special place in Prince Harrys heart. BBC.com reported the 33-year-old helped create Sentebale in 2006, an organization that aims to work with young people affected by HIV/AIDS. It was set up in honor of Princess Diana. Since then, Prince Harry has made numerous trips to check on the charitys work, as well as arrange fundraising events to support it.
Markle has a similar passion for raising awareness.
We are grateful to Meghan, who has been a World Vision ambassador for the past two years and has helped us support the worlds most vulnerable children," a rep for World Vision International wrote to Fox News. "Her humanitarian work has taken her to Rwanda and India where she has inspired and transformed the lives of many children. We wish the couple every happiness together.
The Royal Foundation, which is recognized as the main vehicle for Prince Harrys philanthropic work, as well as Prince William and his wife, Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton, focuses on cyber bullying, mental health, preventing youth violence and providing education in Uganda, just to name a few.
Its unknown which cause Markle will take on as a royal but she could soon return to Africa to continue helping those in need there.
I have this love of Africa that will never disappear, Prince Harry told ITV in 2016 about his work with Sentebale. And I hope it carries on with my children as well.
MSNBC declined to comment on Monday regarding whether embattled host Joy Reid will be disciplined for her homophobic remarks and anti-gay jokes that were unearthed over the weekend.
Reid wrote a dozen blog posts from 2007-2009 containing remarks that are highly offensive to the LGBTQ community. MSNBC prides itself on being progressive, and Reids decade-old comments directly contradict the networks typical direction.
The old blog posts unearthed by a Twitter user and reported by Mediaite targeted former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who Reid mocked as Miss Charlie, for being gay and closeted, even though there was never any proof that he was. The posts fanned rumors of Crists sexual orientation and his political opponents tried to tar him with the gossip during his governorship when he was a Republican.
Rachel Maddow, MSNBCs most-watched host and cash cow, is openly gay. Reid apologized once her homophobic past was exposed and Crist who is now a Democrat took to Twitter to accept her apology. However, MSNBC presumably is considering some sort of discipline for Reid, or else the networks spokesperson would have likely shot down questions about punishment for the homophobic slurs.
Conservative blogger Wayne Dupree, who was named to the 2017 Newsmaxs 50 Most Influential African-American Republicans, doesnt think anything will happen to Reid despite the nasty rhetoric.
When we look at this from a common sense perspective, we will see that nothing will probably happen to Reid because she is completely insulated from any repercussions that would be called for in todays politically sensitive climate, he wrote. Why do I say this: shes a liberal, black woman, and those two cards will save her from just about anything but we will always know.
Mediaite reported it was able to retrieve the posts from Reids blog, which no longer exists, through an online archiving service.
Miss Charlie, Miss Charlie, Stop pretending, brother, Reid wrote in a 2007 post, according to the media outlet. Its okay that you dont go for the ladies.
In another, the AM Joy host wrote, Now that hes married to a girl, Charlie Crist is being sought out for all KINDS of good stuff [The GOP] are wooing Miss Charlie to run.
In a Dec. 12, 2008, post, Reid belittled Crist as dreading physical relations with his wife on their honeymoon.
I can just see poor Charlie on the honeymoon, ogling the male waiters and thinking to himself, god, do I actually have to see her naked? she wrote.
The same blog post included a joke about Crist having sex with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Mediaite reported. Get your mind out of the gutter, she joked.
Reid commented in the blog that Crist got married to a woman in the first place to help him become McCains 2008 running mate. Mediaite counted 17 times Reid derisively referred to Crist as Miss Charlie, and the subject led her to opine on why gay men stay in the closet.
When a gay politician gets married, it usually indicates that he is highly ambitious, and desires to put himself in a position to move up the power ladder, she wrote.
She further mocked Crist with tags gay politicians and not gay politicians.
Reid said her blog posts were written at the time when Crist was a conservative Republican. Back in 2012, Crist joined the Democratic Party and endorsed Barack Obama for re-election.
Hundreds of thousands of children in the Philippines have been given a dengue vaccine which may worsen the outbreak, officials warned, as they halted the program late last week.
The vaccine, Dengvaxia, has been administered to more than 730,000 public school children aged 9 and older in three endemic regions of the Philippines.
France-based manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur said that an analysis of the drug based on six years of clinal data showed that in the longer term, more cases of severe dengue could occur in those who have been vaccinated with the drug among people who have not previously been infected with dengue.
Sanofi said it would ask health officials to update information provided to physicians and patients.
WHY MOSQUITOES ARE CONSIDERED A WORLDWIDE THREAT
Dengue, according to the World Health Organization, is a mosquito-borne pandemic-prone viral disease which causes severe flu-like symptoms. In severe cases, dengue can cause breathing problems, hemorrhaging and organ failure.
About half the world's population is at risk of dengue and, according to WHO, about 96 million people are sickened by the viral infection every year.
The Philippines Department of Health launched the $69.5 million public dengue immunization drive last year the worlds first such program.
Sanofi had previously referred to the drug as critical in the fight against dengue, Sky News reported.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said further information would be released on Dec. 12 or 13 by the WHO advisory body, Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization.
US-MADE DENGUE VACCINE 100 PERCENT EFFECTIVE IN SMALL STUDY
The secretary said there havent been any reports of severe dengue infection among those vaccinated, and he noted that the government would profile all those who received the vaccination and heighten its surveillance mechanisms. That would include mandatory reporting of all hospitalized vaccine recipients, regardless of symptoms, and five years of post-vaccination surveillance.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A police officer is being called a guardian angel after responding to reports of a robbery ended up with him agreeing to adopt a homeless pregnant womans baby.
Albuquerque police officer Ryan Holets was investigating a convenience store robbery when he walked behind the building and found a woman getting ready to inject heroin.
Holets turned on his bodycam and confronted the 35-year-old Crystal Champ and her companion before realizing the woman was pregnant.
Youre going to kill your baby, Holets is heard on the bodycam chastising Champ, who revealed she was seven or eight months pregnant.
Holets, who appears to be writing a citation for the couple in the beginning of the video, begins talking to Champ about her situation.
Its not every day I see a sight like that, Holets said in an interview with CNN. It just made me really sad.
OFFICER TAKES CHILD TO MCDONALD'S AFTER NOT BEING PICKED UP FROM SCHOOL ON BIRTHDAY
It was in that life-changing moment that Holets decided to intervene.
"I just felt God telling me, 'Tell her that you will do it because you can, Holets said to CNN.
That it was the father of four telling Champ he would like to adopt her baby.
Champ, who lives in a tent among the brush beside a highway in New Mexico, has battled addition to heroin and crystal meth for most of her life.
I know how bad my situation is, she told CNN. I know what a horrible person I am.
Champ had also desperately wanted someone to adopt her baby, Holets said and he wanted to be the one.
I got so tired of seeing so many situations that I want to help, but cant. But in that moment I realized I had a chance to help, Holets continued.
After the conversation with Champ, Holets got in his squad car and drove immediately to his wife with whom he had not yet discussed the magnanimous decision he made.
The police officer went right up to his wife and told her the whole story.
He already knew my heart on the issue, and he knew that I would be totally onboard with it, Holets wife, Rebecca, told CNN.
The couple had discussed adopting before, Yahoo reports, but wanted to wait until their youngest, who is 10 months old, was a little older.
The couple had no time to spare, though. Three weeks later, Champ gave birth to a baby girl, Hope. However, because of Champs drug use, Hope was born addicted to opioids, called neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). The syndrome can cause a lot of problems for growing infants like increased irritability, autonomic overreactivity and gastrointestinal tract dysfunction, as well as developmental disorders later in life.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a child with NAS is born every 25 minutes in the U.S.
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The Holetses have said when the time is right, they will tell Hope about the circumstances of her adoption, Yahoo reported.
I just want her to be safe and secure and be in a family and be loved and have a chance, Champ said.
After giving birth, with the Holetses at the hospital, she gave the couple Hope and said goodbye. She turns to me and says, Take care of her for me. And I said, I will take good care of her, and you take good care of yourself. It was super emotional, said Rebecca.
I am so thankful and blessed and humbled that we are allowed to be Hope in our family, Holets said.
A pair of childhood friends are on their way toward completing a bucket list full of good deeds as one of them faces a devastating cancer prognosis. Chris Betancourt, 20, was given about one year to live after the leukemia he faced as a child returned in September.
Betancourts best friend, Dillon Hill, was there for him the first time he was diagnosed with chronic mylogenous leukemia, and the pair bonded over their love of video games. Tragedy struck for them a second time when Betancourts sister, who Hill was dating, committed suicide while they were in high school.
In support of his friends recent diagnosis, Hill is planning to postpone his studies at UC Davis for the upcoming semester while helping Betancourt complete his 79-item list.
MOM OF 2 DIES DAY AFTER FLU DIAGNOSIS
Over Thanksgiving break, the duo got started on the list near their hometown in Sacramento, California, and managed to tick off two tasks by ordering 100 items from a fast-food place and delivering it to the homeless. Video of their good deed went viral.
I didnt think wed get any news coverage, anything of the sortmaybe a few people on YouTube might be like, Alright, good job guys, Betancourt told ABC 10. But to see other people, like, get it on it, was nice.
3-D PRINTED MASK HELPS PUP HEAL FROM BITE WOUNDS
Other items on the list include meeting celebrities, falling in love, seeing Yosemite, road tripping and helping to demolish a house. Theyre hoping to raise enough funds to embark on their road trip that would help tick off several items along the way.
Currently, Bentancourts best hope for treatment is a bone marrow transplant that will require three months of hospital stays, but must be from a donor of Puerto Rican decent. The pair are keeping supporters updated on their list and Bentancourts health through the MyBestFriendsList.com website, as well as several social media channels.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, thy leaves are so unchanging. Or so the lyrics of the popular Christmas carol go. But Christmas trees around the world are no longer traditional evergreen firs. Instead, theyve taken on unique and diverse forms, with variation in color, size and shape.
Some arent even trees at all.
The Christmas tradition of decorating a tree is believed to have its roots in pagan and Christian winter celebrations, where fir tree branches were used to decorate homes to remind people of spring, or as a symbol of everlasting life.
While there were a number of forms of early Christmas trees, the first recorded appearance of a Christmas tree in a town square is said to date back to 15th or 16th century Latvia. Townsfolk are said to have danced around the trees before setting them on fire.
SINGLE DAUGHTERS HILARIOUS CHRISTMAS CARD GOES VIRAL
Now, Christmas trees are commonplace in town centers, with cities around the world keen to put on a show with their impressive trees and this year is no exception. From Moscow to Madrid to Melbourne, here are some of the worlds most spectacular Christmas trees.
The tree in Puerta del Sol in the Spanish capital of Madrid stands brightly, the blue and green neon lights illuminating the city plaza. Meanwhile, a tree in Moscow can be seen reflected in a nearby stainless steel sculpture by artist Gregory Orekhov.
Dortmund, in Germany, claims to have the worlds largest Christmas tree. The 147-foot-tall tree is covered in some 48,000 lights.
MASSACHUSETTS POLICE STOP CAR WITH MASSIVE CHRISTMAS TREE ON TOP
The tree in Strasbourg is a feature of the citys Christmas market, which is said to be one of the largest and one of the oldest Christmas markets in France.
Christmas comes to Washington D.C., with snow-dusted trees inside the White House, and a massive tree erected outside the Capitol building.
Everyone from royalty to celebrities seem to get in on the act. The Queen of England has a lavishly decorated 20-foot tree put up in Windsor Castle, while queen of pop Gwen Stefani was caught striking a pose in front of the Empire State Buildings annual tree.
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Paris went with a statement all-white tree this year at the Place de la Concorde. The City of Lights lived up to its name with this illuminated tree, as well as many other decorative Christmas lights throughout the city.
A 118-foot Giant Redwood tree stands over Wakehurst Place in Haywards Heath, England. The tree was decorated with 1800 low-energy lamps, so its no surprise the tree can be seen by pilots as they fly overhead towards Gatwick Airport.
A more abstract form of Christmas tree is that which appears in front of the V & A Museum in London. Composed of a cloud of floating words," the tree forms part a month-long festive music-themed program at the museum.
This article originally appeared on News.com.au
This friendship between a young local rapper and an elderly Florida woman is melting hearts all over the country.
On Friday, the 22-year-old Spencer Sleyon who, according to XXL, raps under the name Half Empty flew 1,000 miles to West Palm Beach to meet 81-year-old Rosalind Roz Guttman. The two had been playing the online game Words with Friends together for over a year.
We played [300-plus] games together, and [Roz] actually ended up becoming a good friend of mine, Tweeted Sleyon. The tweet, along with the photos of the two hugging each other, has been liked one million times.
The trip was arranged by Amy Butler, a pastor at Manhattans Riverside Church, who flew to Florida with the rapper.
Sleyon told The Root that Roz was his best friend.
Sometimes wed speak about personal things, but nothing extra personal, he said. Politics, the election, hurricanes.
Added the rapper: Whatever people want to take from this story and however it makes them feel, Im just glad and Rosalind and I can bring that to people.
This article originally appeared on the New York Post
For those Americans who care about the future of elephants on the African continent, the decision to allow the importation of elephant trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is the right one. Although the controversy surrounding this decision has clouded the truth and it may seem counterintuitive to some, allowing these imports is the very best thing we can do to save elephants.
Africa is an amazing place, and all those who visit the continent come away truly inspired by its endless beauty, its diverse people, and the remarkable wildlife that inhabit the landscape. For more than a century, Americans have traveled on safari to witness Africas wonders, including the apex of African wildlife, the elephant.
In some areas of the continent, however, the African elephant is in trouble. Driven largely by Chinas illicit ivory trade, illegal poaching has decimated the population in some countries, especially those where well-regulated hunting has not been embraced. In other countries, where hunting has provided the incentive for protecting the herd, the population is healthy.
In Zimbabwe and Zambia, for example, government wildlife biologists have determined that hunting is a necessary component of their overall management plan, and have successfully implemented such programs to maintain a healthy population.
In the years preceding the ban on trophy imports into the U.S., the Dande Anti Poaching Unit succeeded in reducing elephant poaching by 90 percent. Following the ban, poaching increased five-fold.
Weve seen such successes here in the United States, where the Theodore Roosevelt model of wildlife conservation has been in place for almost a century. Hunters have always been part of this equation including President Roosevelt himself and provide the finances through excise taxes and license fees by which all wildlife and their habitats thrive. Since the late 1930s, hunters have provided over $7 billion from excise taxes on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment alone. This investment has resulted in the return of healthy and abundant wildlife populations all across the country.
The difference in Africa is that elephants do not exist in the same highly structured and regulated system continent-wide. In addition to illegal poaching, elephants are seen by many residents as a nuisance to crops and livestock, a source of sustenance when other sources of food are not available, and in some cases, a dangerous threat to individuals and their families. These are the challenges elephants face every day.
These challenges dont disappear when the FWS bans trophy imports into the U.S. Illegal poaching continues and the data from Zimbabwe are clear on this point. In the years preceding the ban on trophy imports into the U.S., the Dande Anti Poaching Unit, covering an area of approximately 500,000 acres, succeeded in reducing elephant poaching by 90 percent. Following the ban, poaching increased five-fold.
In fact, when one understands how hunting contributes to conservation, just the reverse is true: Allowing trophy imports actually protects elephants.
Hunting provides the financial resources that allow game managers in Africa to implement anti-poaching programs, including the hiring of game wardens and rangers to protect elephant herds. Hunting dollars also provide a clear incentive for local residents to embrace elephant conservation, instead of viewing them as direct competitors or a nuisance. Having local residents on board is critical to elephant protection, and it is only with local help that poaching rings can be uncovered and destroyed. In short, when hunting is embraced, the full protection of elephants is possible.
Our wildlife successes here in America provide an example to the entire world on how best to manage wildlife and their habitats. White-tail deer, Canada geese, and wild turkeys were once largely gone from the landscape here in America, but through regulated hunting and habitat programs paid for by hunter dollars, these species are now thriving.
We can do our part to ensure the same wildlife successes in Africa, including for the elephant. But to do so, we have to drop our preconceived notions and embrace a counterintuitive truth that well-regulated hunting provides the best avenue to the overall health and abundance of this majestic species and its future. All of us who care about elephants should applaud the FWS and its decision to embrace elephant protection in Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Not many years ago, an ad for a newspaper warned that, If you miss a day, you miss a lot.
Now you dont need a day to miss a lot. Mere seconds of inattention can get you behind the curve. What, you didnt hear about the latest predator to fall on his sword?
The gusher of startling events puts us neck deep in the curse of interesting times. We are in the midst of cultural reckoning over sex, could be on the brink of nuclear war with North Korea and may experience an economic boom as Congress moves closer to historic tax reform.
Then theres the White House, where the dynamics of upheaval are entering a crucial phase. Although many deplorables believe they finally have a government looking out for them, much of Washington and the American left are preparing to dance on the grave of Donald Trumps presidency.
Their celebration got an early start Friday with the guilty plea of Gen. Michael Flynn and his pledge to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller. The news persuaded James Comey, the insufferably self-righteous former FBI boss, and the Democratic media that the clock is ticking on Trumps time in the Oval Office.
That is one way to look at Flynn if you assume he has beans to spill. He was close to Trump but its worth noting that Flynn pled guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI, including about a phone conversation he had with a Russian official last Dec. 29 seven weeks after the election.
Thats the same call that got Flynn fired after less than a month as Trumps national security adviser because he lied to the vice president about whether the conversation covered sanctions.
So its clear that Flynn is a serial liar, but decidedly unclear whether he knows anything that would put Trump in jeopardy. Its important that the content of his conversations with Russians are not the basis of his admitted crime and do not appear to be illegal.
No collusion, Trump said Saturday. There was absolutely no collusion. So we are very happy.
Happy seems a stretch, but it is a fact that the probe into whether Trumps campaign worked with Russia to alter the election has found zero evidence so far. Four Trump associates have been charged, but no count relates directly to the probes original purpose.
Keep reading Michael Goodwin's colulmn in the New York Post
President Trumps decision to reduce the size of the Bears Ears and Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, announced Monday on his visit to the state, is a good one and an example of his policies that will benefit every American who enjoys national parks and monuments.
We should all thank the president for his administrations efforts to look at the facts, listen to the people, and act to roll back restrictive and unnecessary national monument designations that provide few advantages to the American people.
While such designations may sound good on the surface, in reality they have strained land management budgets and limited public access to beautiful places.
The Trump administration has been on the ground listening to those who bear the burden of these decisions unlike the Clinton and Obama administrations, which showed little interest in talking to local people before locking up millions of acres of land around them.
The Trump administration has seen firsthand what I saw when I represented some of these areas in Congress that the consequences of locking down the West have been severe.
Overly expansive monument designations like the two multimillion-acre monuments in Utah could have been spent on existing park treasures.
I applaud the president for having the courtesy to do what his predecessors never did visiting Utah personally to deliver the news that will positively impact those who love and care for these lands. His attention is a far cry from President Clinton making his Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument announcement from another state and President Obama issuing a press release with the wrong photo of Bears Ears.
The notion that our only option for managing public land is a restrictive monument designation is false. In truth, we can build bathrooms and fire pits, and accommodate hunting, fishing, grazing, and permit accessibility without destroying the land. In places where restrictive conservation rules are less justified, we can even authorize responsible resource extraction.
Each time the federal government levies new land designations, that new designation and management plan competes with existing parks and monuments for funding.
The National Park Service suffers from a $12 billion maintenance backlog meaning crumbling buildings, roads, and bridges cannot be repaired or replaced. Overly expansive monument designations like the two multimillion-acre monuments in Utah could have been spent on existing park treasures.
In the case of Bears Ears National Monument, all of that land was already federal land mostly managed for conservation use. With President Obamas monument designation, the maintenance fell to the already-strapped National Park Service. Many of these lands were once managed successfully by other agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service and can be again.
But freeing up more money for national parks isnt the only advantage of Mondays decision. Access to these places will be expanded, not restricted, as required in large-scale national monuments.
By lifting restrictions on motorized access, President Trump makes these lands available to more than just the able-bodied. With expanded access, the elderly, disabled and even wounded veterans can utilize bikes or off-highway vehicles to access spectacular places.
Furthermore, those who wish to use the land for other purposes such as hunting, fishing, camping, and outdoor recreation will now also have access.
For Utah Native Americans, this improved access is important. For centuries, they have used the land around the Bears Ears National Monument to hunt, gather, and worship. Many would come on foot while others would utilize off-highway vehicles to collect firewood, gather medicinal herbs or meet in specific locations for religious ceremonies.
The federal government could preclude these uses under a restrictive monument designation as it has in Arizonas Canyon de Chelly, Wupatki and even Utah's Natural Bridges.
Monument designations particularly the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument have been routinely abused in an effort to lock down resource-rich areas that do not meet objective criteria for preservation.
By unlocking these otherwise unremarkable areas, President Trump enables high-paying resource extraction jobs to return to rural communities a process that not only helps local economic development, but reduces U.S. dependence on foreign imports.
Protecting our most beautiful places is important. But we dont have to lock people out to do it. We dont have to put further strain on federal land management budgets. We certainly dont need to decimate rural economies. President Trump has done the right thing. All of us will be the beneficiaries of this decision.
News / National
by Staff reporter
A MAN from Inyathi who fatally stabbed his 17 year-old neighbour for spurning his love proposal on Christmas Day has been sentenced to an effective 40 years in jail.Structor Khumalo (25) of Lupote village was convicted of murder with actual intent by Bulawayo High Court judge Justice Maxwell Takuva in connection with the death of Ms Sicelo Moyo last year.In passing the sentence, Justice Takuva said Khumalo committed a heinous crime by viciously murdering a young and defenceless girl."However, what is aggravatory is that the accused person brutally murdered a young and defenceless girl who had not wronged him in any way except that she exercised her freedom to choose who to love and who not to love," he said.Justice Takuva said the courts have a duty to protect the sanctity of human life through passing deterrent sentences."The accused's brutal conduct led to the needless loss of a precious life. It is the duty of this court to uphold the sanctity of life. It is clear from the provisions of the law that life imprisonment is a competent sentence in casu. However, having balanced the mitigating features against aggravating circumstances, we are of the view that 40 years imprisonment is the most appropriate sentence," ruled the judge.Prosecuting, Ms Namatai Ngwasha said on December 25 last year, Khumalo met Sicelo at Masuku Store in Inyathi Business Centre and she was in the company of her two cousins, Mercy Madedele and Progress Madedele. The three cousins were having drinks.The court heard that Khumalo who was carrying an axe proposed love to the deceased and one of her cousins and they did not respond."Accused proposed love to the deceased and Mercy and they did not answer him. He again proposed love to the two girls and they told him not to come close to them as he was holding an axe," said Ms Ngwasha.The court heard that as the three girls left the business centre, Khumalo grabbed an umbrella from Mercy and tore it into pieces using a sharp object.The three cousins took to their heels but Khumalo managed to catch up with Sicelo.When Mercy and Progress later realised that Sicelo was missing they became suspicious and asked two local men to accompany them back to the shops to look for their cousin."On arrival at the shops they found Sicelo lying dead on the ground in a pool of blood and she had a stab wound on her left breast," said Ms Ngwasha.A report was made to the police leading to the arrest of Khumalo the following day.In his defence through lawyer, Mr Njabulo Ndlovu of Ndove, Museta and Partners, Khumalo said he was wrongfully identified as the accused person on the basis that he had behaved violently on the day in question.According to the postmortem results the cause of Sicelo's death was due to cardiac block, cardiac damage and stabbing injury.
Tax reform should reward individual risk-taking and initiative. The investor who puts the fruits of her labor on the line should not be straitjacketed by accounting rules that are better suited for measuring the value of corporate inventory, or sticking a price tag on a pile of widgets. Yet, this is exactly where one provision of the Senate version of tax reform is headed.
In the course of giving many taxpaying Americans a rate cut in one hand, the Senate proposes to punish them with the other. As things stand now, the Senates version of tax reform would impose rigid accounting standards on the sales of securities by individuals, which rules would effectively deprive small investors and American workers of their well-deserved profits. Specifically, under the Senate bill, individual stock sellers would be forced to use what accountants call the first-in-first-out or FIFO method of pricing stock when calculating what they owe to Uncle Sam.
Obviously, when an investor holds a single position in a stock that is not a problem. But when investors sell off securities in which they hold more than one position in the same investment, the FIFO rule is more than just a headache. Rather, it is unfair and unreasonable.
Unfair and unreasonable? Yes, on both counts.
The Senates bill would dictate how individual investors are required to account their stock sales, but would grant professional fund managers broad latitude in electing the accounting method of their choice. Right off the bat, this would skew the playing field. Individual investors would be left to absorb an even greater degree of risk, all for the sake of $2.4 billion in added tax revenue over a decade. In the world of federal budgets, thats chump change.
Unlike sophisticated investors with their battery of tax lawyers and experts, Middle America lacks the time and wherewithal to continuously structure their investments with an unblinking eye focused on the tax code.
But beyond favoring professional managers over individual investors, this ill-conceived legislation would actually amount to a tax hike. Let me explain.
Right now, the Tax Code grants individual investors the right to choose how they wish to account for their disposition of their securities. But if the Senate provision becomes law, individual investors would be compelled to sell off the first-purchased block of stocks regardless of costs and economic realities.
And the reality is this -- over the past eight years, since the stock market hit its Great Recession lows in 2009, stock prices have more than quadrupled. Significantly, this growth in stock price has real tax consequences under the proposed law.
For example, an American worker who invested in his employer through automatic payroll deductions would likely face a heftier tax bite if he were compelled to first pay taxes on stock gains arising from his 2009 stock purchases than if he were permitted to attribute his gains to securities purchased at a later date. Against this backdrop, the Senate bills FIFO methodology can only be viewed seen as a disguised tax.
Indeed, the contemplated FIFO rule would unduly impact middle-income Americans and recent retirees. Unlike sophisticated investors with their battery of tax lawyers and experts, Middle America lacks the time and wherewithal to continuously structure their investments with an unblinking eye focused on the tax code. For them, investment is less about profiting from slight upticks in the market, and more about a commitment to a disciplined and reasoned reward. A nondiscretionary FIFO regime for individual investors would jeopardize those hard-earned expectations.
To drive the point home, gains from real estate, private equity investments and art are not slated to be subject to this proposed change in the law. In plain English that translates into one rule for the rich, and another for the working stiff. Economically, that route is unjustifiable; politically it borders on the senseless if not the suicidal. Individual investors should not be driven away from the market for the sake of plugging a budgetary rounding error. Equity demands fairness.
At a time when economic growth is experienced unevenly, the tax laws should be a vehicle for rewarding risk, as opposed to punishing thrift and savings. If America is to robustly compete, we need tax laws that encourage savings. Right now, China is out-saving us by more than five-to-one, with a savings rate of nearly 30 percent. Its time for America to get smart and say no to mandating FIFO.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder and ex-FBI Director James Comey fired back Sunday at President Trump, who claimed the FBIs reputation is in tatters after its handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
Nope. Not letting this go. The FBIs reputation is not in 'tatters,' Holder, who served as attorney general under President Obama, tweeted. Its composed of the same dedicated men and women who have always worked there and who do a great, apolitical job.
Holder added, Youll find integrity and honesty at FBI headquarters and not at 1600 Penn Ave right now, referring to the White House.
Trump earlier Sunday said that after years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters worst in history! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness.
The presidents tweet followed news that FBI agent Peter Strzok was removed from special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia because of anti-Trump text messages he may have sent.
Meanwhile, Comey tweeted what seemed to be a response of his own, quoting a statement he gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee last June: I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is, and always will be, independent.
The FBI Agents Association also chimed in. FBIAA President Thomas OConnor said: Every day, FBI Special Agents put their lives on the line to protect the American public from national security and criminal threats. Agents perform these duties with unwavering integrity and professionalism and a focus on complying with the law and the Constitution.
OConnor continued, This is why the FBI continues to be the premier law enforcement agency in the world. FBI Agents are dedicated to their mission; suggesting otherwise is simply false.
Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who was fired by Trump after she sent a memo instructing Justice Department attorneys not to defend the administration's refugee ban, tweeted Sunday night: "The FBI is in 'tatters?' No. The only thing in tatters is the Presidents respect for the rule of law. The dedicated men and women of the FBI deserve better."
TRUMP RELOADS ON FBI'S CLINTON EMAIL PROBE, AFTER REPORTS OF 'TAINTED' ANTI-TRUMP AGENT
Trump frequently has asked why the FBI and the Justice Department havent filed criminal charges against Clinton.
Later Sunday, he tweeted, Now it all starts to make sense! in response to word that the Justice Departments Office of the Inspector General is reviewing the role Strzok played in the Clinton email investigation.
A Republican congressman plans to introduce a bill Monday that would threaten huge fines and prison time for elected officials accused of sheltering illegal immigrant criminals from deportation, in the wake of the not-guilty verdict in the Kate Steinle murder trial.
Indiana Rep. Todd Rokitas bill is one of the most aggressive pieces of legislation to date aimed at sanctuary city policies, going beyond the Justice Departments threat to cut off grants to those jurisdictions.
Politicians dont get to pick and choose what laws to comply with, Rokita told Fox News. Americans are dying because politicians sworn to uphold the law refuse to do so.
His Stopping Lawless Actions of Politicians (SLAP) Act would hold state and local lawmakers criminally responsible for refusing to comply with federal immigration enforcement efforts. The Republicans bill would subject violators to a $1 million fine and up to five years in prison if they are convicted.
Its time the federal government gets serious about enforcing immigration laws and holding politicians accountable who conspire to break them, said Rokita.
Rokita also supported Kates Law legislation that would boost penalties for illegal immigrants who were previously deported and that was named after Steinle.
On Thursday, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an illegal immigrant who already had been deported back to Mexico five times, was acquitted in the 2015 murder of Steinle on a San Francisco pier.
Zarates attorneys argued Zarate had found a gun that accidentally discharged, and the bullet ricocheted off the ground before hitting Steinle. Prosecutors argued Zarate intentionally shot 32-year-old Steinle.
The killing revived a national debate over sanctuary city policies, as some lawmakers as well as Steinles family faulted San Francisco for releasing the suspect from a local jail without notifying federal immigration officials.
President Trump, who frequently cited Steinles case on the campaign trail, called the not-guilty verdict disgraceful and a complete travesty of justice.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions took direct aim at the city, saying San Franciscos decision to protect criminal aliens led to the preventable and heartbreaking death of Kate Steinle.
In an interview prior to Thursdays verdict, Steinles family said they wanted the case out of the national spotlight. We just want to get this over with and move on with our lives, and think about Kate on our terms, Jim Steinle, Kates father, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Following the verdict, he said his family was shocked Zarate was convicted only of firearm possession.
On Friday, the DOJ released an amended arrest warrant for Zarate for a supervised release violation.
Rokitas bill follows a similar attempt in Texas to punish local officials who ignore federal requests to hold and then potentially turn over suspects for possible deportation. That law is the subject of a federal court challenge.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle on Sunday warned President Trump to use caution before tweeting about the ongoing investigation into contacts between his campaign and Russia.
Sen. Lindsey Graham told CBS Face the Nation that the president could be wading into peril by tweeting on the Russia probe.
I would just say this with the president: Theres an ongoing criminal investigation. You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril, he said.
Trump has long maintained that his use of social media gives him the opportunity to bypass the media and speak directly to the country. He credits Twitter for -- at least in part -- helping him defeat Hillary Clinton.
Trump is focusing renewed attacks on the FBI, and on the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, two days after his former national security adviser Michael Flynn agreed to cooperate with the probe as part of a plea agreement.
But recent posts have raised eyebrows, namely the tweet that claimed that he never asked then-FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating Flynn. A position that Reuters pointed out is at odds with Comeys account.
Trump tweeted Saturday that he fired Flynn because he lied to the Vice President (Mike Pence) and the FBI.
The timing of when Trump learned of Flynn lying to the FBI is important in the investigation. Legal experts told Reuters that if Trump called off Comeys investigation after learning about Flynn's action, it could support an obstruction of justice charge for Trump.
John Dowd, Trumps attorney, told Reuters that the first time Trump learned that Flynn lied to the FBI was when Flynn was charged.
Dowd said he crafted wording in the tweet and it was botched. Dowd said it was the first and last time he would craft a tweet for Trump and said sorry for misleading people.
The mistake was I should have put the lying to the FBI in a separate line referencing his plea, he told Reuters. Instead, I put it together and it made all you guys go crazy. A tweet is shorthand.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told NBCs Meet the Press that evidence is coming partly from "the continual tweets" from the White House.
Feinstein said she believes Trump's firing of Comey came "directly because he did not agree to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation." She said, "That's obstruction of justice."
Gun-rights supporters are eyeing a big win this week as a bill that would make concealed-carry permits valid across state lines heads to the House floor -- though it faces long odds in the Senate amid deep-pocketed opposition from gun-control advocates.
This is just simple, common-sense legislation that says if youre a law-abiding citizen were not going to turn you into a criminal just for crossing an invisible state line, bill sponsor Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., told Fox News @ Night.
Hudson says the bill simply attempts to clarify the patchwork of state laws that confuse citizens who can unwittingly get arrested when traveling from state to state.
All Im saying is, when I cross the state line, I dont want to automatically become a criminal, he said.
The three-term congressman also is quick to point out the measure does not attempt to usurp state and local authority with federal law, nor does it ease background checks on gun purchases.
The bill has 213 cosponsors, including three Democrats, and backing from 24 state attorneys general.
Hudson has tried for several years to get his Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act passed and scored a victory several days ago when it got through the House Judiciary Committee.
The full House is set to vote on Wednesday.
The bill also has support from Second Amendment advocacy groups like the powerful National Rifle Association.
However, Hudson acknowledges the bill has an uphill challenge in the Senate, considering opposition from Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Michael Bloomberg, the wealthy ex-New York mayor who purportedly is giving $25 million to the fight.
Schumer, in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre in October, slammed such reciprocity legislation and the NRAs support.
Under this law, if Wyoming or Alabama said any person could carry a concealed gun, they could come to Times Square, Penn Station carrying that gun -- concealed, he said. The chaos that would result would be utterly amazing.
Hudson argues his bill says law-abiding citizens with concealed-carry permits must follow that law of the state they are in.
When I go to New York, I have to follow New Yorks laws, he said.
Bloomberg founded and bankrolls the Everytown for Gun Safety group, which advocates for gun control and efforts to stop gun violence.
The group did not respond to a request Monday to confirm that Bloomberg had indeed put $25 million into the reciprocity fight, which has become a top priority for the nonprofit.
The American people are sick of the liberal elites in New York and San Francisco trying to tell us that we dont have the right to defend ourselves, Hudson also said.
In one such reciprocity case, a Philadelphia mother faced gun charges in New Jersey after being caught during a traffic stop with a firearm she carries legally in her home state. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie later pardoned her.
The Senate companion bill to Hudson's measure is sponsored by Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn and is now in the chambers Judiciary Committee.
In 2013, Cornyn got support for his bill from 13 Democrats, including seven who are still in the Senate. He would need their support and more to pass the measure with a 60-vote majority, considering Republicans have 52 senators in the chamber.
I think the votes are there, Hudson said. Well see.
A federal judge ruled Thursday that Michael Slager, the former South Carolina police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black man, committed second-degree murder.
He was sentenced to 20 years in jail without a fine. Slager will also receive mental health counseling until he is released from prison.
The ruling comes after Slager, 36, pleaded guilty in May to violating Walter Scotts civil rights. He had said he shot Scott multiple times in self-defense, alleging Scott had attempted to grab his Taser. Cell phone video captured at the scene, however, showed Slager shooting Scott in the back as Scott tried to run away.
Federal officials recommended 10 to 13 years in prison, but Slager's attorneys argued he should face far less time.
Slager first began his sentencing hearing Monday. In light of the ruling, here's what you need to know about Slager's case.
What did Michael Slager do?
Slager, a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., encountered Scott on April 4, 2015, after he stopped him for a non-functioning taillight.
The altercation between Slager and Scott has been heavily debated and scrutinized, according to the Charleston Post and Courier. Prosecutors alleged that during a struggle between the two men on the ground, Slager remained in control of his Taser. They said he threw the device to the ground at one point in order to grab his firearm.
Cell phone video taken by a bystander showed Scott attempting to run away after the stop. Slager then fired his gun eight times at the fleeing man, hitting him five times.
After he shot Scott, Slager dropped the Taser near Scott's unmoving body, according to the Post and Courier. Later, as seen in the video, Slager picked up the Taser and returned it to his belt, the newspaper reported.
Slager argued that he fired his weapon as self-defense, even as Scott ran away. His attorneys had also argued that the use of force was rooted in Scotts misconduct, according to the Post and Courier.
The Scott family previously reached a $6.5 million settlement with the city of North Charleston.
What already happened in court?
A grand jury indicted Slager in 2015, but a judge ultimately declared a mistrial in December 2016 after a jury remained deadlocked. The panel was made up of 11 white jurors and one black juror.
While that case was ongoing, federal authorities pursued a parallel investigation against Slager on civil rights charges. Solicitor Scarlett Wilson had planned to bring a second case against Slager later this year, but those charges were dropped as part of his federal plea deal.
Slager pleaded guilty in May to violating Scotts civil rights.
A probation officer recommended a prison term between 10 and nearly 13 years, the Post and Courier reported.
He was sentenced Thursday to 20 years in prison with no fine.
Fox News' Kaitlyn Schallhorn, Madeline Farber and Terace Garnier contributed to this report. The Associated Press also contributed to this report.
Although specifics werent provided, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un joined his counterpart to the south in promising to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons.
The vow to create a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula through complete denuclearization came during the Koreas historic summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in in late April, and just before a much-anticipated meeting between Kim and U.S. President Trump.
I feel like Im firing a flare at the starting line in the moment of (the two Koreas) writing a new history in North-South relations, peace and prosperity, Kim told Moon.
Kim is the first known member of his familys dynasty to set foot on South Korean soil since 1953. There, at least in front of cameras, his rhetoric drastically changed since he engaged in a war of words with Trump throughout the first year of the U.S. presidents time in the White House. (Kim called Trump a dotard; Trump called the North Korean leader short and fat.)
Since Kim took over North Korea in 2011, the regime rapidly expanded and tested its missile arsenal with weapons capable of striking the U.S. mainland. His end goal, he once said, was to "establish the equilibrium of real force with the U.S. and make the U.S. rulers dare not talk about military options for the North.
Read on for a brief look at how North Koreas nuclear weapons program has grown throughout the regimes in the past century.
Kim Il Sung, leader from 1948-1994
Kim Il Sung can be credited with founding North Korea and propelling the nations nuclear program forward but he did not live to see his country conduct its first nuclear test.
It was under the first Kim that North Korea began to build up its nuclear reactors. And it was under his leadership that the nation began the Korean War surely a catalyst that led the leader to believe his nation needed nuclear weapons, Dr. Sung-Yoon Lee, the Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, told Fox News in an interview.
TRUMPS COMMENTS ON NORTH KOREA, FROM FIRE AND FURY TO BLAMING CHINA
The seeds of nuclear aspirations were sown in the Korean War, Lee said.
The Korean War pitted North Korea and its ally China two nations that did not have nuclear capabilities at the time against a nuclear-armed U.S., making it clear to the first Kim that nuclear weapons are very powerful, a powerful deterrent, Lee said.
Kim Jong Il, leader from 1994-2011
When the second leader of the Kim dynasty died in 2011, Kim Jong Il was remembered as the dictator who turned North Korea into a nuclear state, in his New York Times obituary.
And its Kim Jong Il that really gets the credit of taking the country down the nuclear path," Lee said.
In the beginning of his reign he was North Koreas supreme leader from 1994 to 2011 North Korea denied that it had a nuclear weapons program.
TIMELINE OF NORTH KOREAN MISSILE LAUNCHES IN 2017
However, in 2003, Pyongyang announced that North Korea was withdrawing from the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which barred the nation from making nuclear weapons.
By 2005, North Korea confirmed that it had its own nuclear weapons. It tested its first nuclear device in 2006.
Kim Jong Un, leader from 2011-present
Kim Jong Un is credited with accelerating North Koreas push for nuclear weapons, and under the Obama administration, many of the worlds attitudes toward the East Asian nations nuclear capabilities became less blase than in the past, Lee said.
Kim Jong Un also crossed a major threshold for his country in the summer of 2017 the ability to credibly threaten the U.S. with an intercontinental ballistic missile.
In 2017, North Korea successfully tested its longest-ever flight of a ballistic missile. The intermediate-range weapon traveled 3,700 miles and passed over Japan before it landed in the Pacific. The country also tested its most powerful nuclear test to date this year.
After the missile test, Kim Jong Un said North Korea is nearing equilibrium with the U.S. in terms of its military force.
The increasingly frequent and aggressive tests added to outside fears that North Korea is closer than ever to building a military arsenal that could viably target the mainland of the U.S. or its allies in Asia.
Calling Kim Jong Un Rocket Man, Trump said in 2017 the dictator is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.
The United States has great strength and patience, Trump said. But if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.
But 2018 brought a dramatic turn of events after he declared in a stark New Years address that a nuclear launch button is always on my table. Kim Jong Un offered to meet with Trump and became the first known member of his familys dynasty to set foot in South Korea since 1953. At the historic summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, both leaders pushed for peace and would work toward a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
However, neither leader provided any specific measures or seemed to forge a potential breakthrough on the issue that has captivated and terrified many, especially since last year.
Before Trump canceled a much-anticipated meeting with Kim Jong Un, North Korea said it demolished what it claimed to be its nuclear test site, setting off several explosions over the course of a few hours in the presence of foreign journalists.
The planned closing of the Punggye-ri site was previously announced, but it's unclear if another facility could be used to continue the country's nuclear weapons program. Yongbyon nuclear complex, located about 64 miles north of Pyongyang, has a new reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. Pyongyang insists is being used to produce electricity for its citizens.
Trump ultimately rejected Kim Jong Un's invitation to a June meeting in Singapore, citing North Korea's "open hostility."
Fox News Edmund DeMarche, Ryan Gaydos and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is out as the nation's top diplomat.
President Trump announced the news in a tweet on the morning of March 13. Mike Pompeo, the current director of the CIA, will take Tillerson's place as secretary of state, he said. Gina Haspel, the current CIA deputy director, will then take over Pompeo's role at the intelligence agency.
"Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!" Trump tweeted.
The news broke amid Tillersons contentious relationship with President Trump. In October 2017, NBC News reported that Tillerson allegedly called Trump a "moron," and considered resigning from his position during the summer amid disputes with the White House. And sources told Fox News late last year that Tillerson planned to step down from his position in January 2018, though he did not.
Heres what you need to know about Tillerson's career as secretary of state.
March 22, 2018 -- In a farewell speech to State Department employees, Tillerson highlighted values such as integrity, honesty, respect and accountability. Tillerson, who did not mention President Trump in his speech, also said that Washington, D.C. can be a very mean spirited town.
But you don't have to choose to participate in that, he added. Each of us get to choose the person we want to be, and the way we want to be treated, and the way we will treat others.
March 15, 2018 -- Fox News learned that Tillersons plan, as of now, is to stay at the department until March 22 and then return to Texas. He officially remains secretary of state through the 31st.
March 13, 2018 -- In a tweet, Trump announced that Tillerson was out as secretary of state. He will be replaced by Pompeo, the current director of the CIA, Trump said.
Dec. 4 - Dec. 8, 2017 -- Tillerson embarked on a trip to Europe, which included a number of activities, among them the NATO Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Ministerial Council in Vienna and meeting "senior French leaders" in Paris, the State Department said.
Dec. 3, 2017 -- In an interview broadcast on "Fox News Sunday," national security adviser H.R. McMaster said he's "not aware of any plan at all" to replace Tillerson.
"What I'm aware of is that the secretary of state is traveling today to advance and protect our interests, as is our secretary of defense," McMaster said.
Dec. 1, 2017 -- Tillerson attended two meetings at the White House with Trump one with Libya's visiting prime minister and then a lunch with the president and Defense Secretary James Mattis.
Before those meetings, Tillerson told reporters at the State Department that speculation he was on his way out was "laughable."
"The media has been speculating that I fired Rex Tillerson or that he would be leaving soon - FAKE NEWS!" Trump tweeted that day. "Hes not leaving and while we disagree on certain subjects, (I call the final shots) we work well together and America is highly respected again!"
Nov. 30, 2017 -- Reports said that Tillerson was expected to step down in January.
While meeting with the Crown Prince of Bahrain in the Oval Office Thursday, Trump was asked if he wants Tillerson "on the job."
"He's here," Trump told reporters. "Rex is here."
Nov. 4 - Nov. 16, 2017 -- Tillerson joined the president during his five-nation tour of Asia that included stops in Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines, the State Department said. Tillerson later visited Burma during his travels.
Oct. 20 - 26, 2017 -- Tillerson took part in the first Coordination Council meeting with the Saudi and Iraqi governments in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the State Department said. His trip also included stops in Qatar, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, India and Switzerland.
Oct. 4, 2017 -- It's reported that Tillerson allegedly called Trump a moron after a meeting with cabinet officials on July 20. The comments came after President Trump gave a controversial speech to the Boy Scouts of America in July. Tillerson, who served as the president of the organization from 2010-2012, was reportedly upset over the content of the speech and allegedly threatened to quit.
Trump later labeled the report fake news.
Later that day, Tillerson called a press conference to address the reports, but sidestepped questions about his moron comment.
"I'm not gonna deal with petty stuff like that," Tillerson said at the time. "The places I come from, we don't deal with that kind of petty nonsense. It is intended to do nothing but divide people and I'm not gonna be part of this effort to divide this administration."
He did reaffirm that he was not planning to resign, however.
TILLERSON BLASTS REPORT OF RIFT WITH TRUMP
Oct. 2, 2017 -- Trump appeared to publicly chide Tillerson on his handling of North Korea. At the time, the president said Tillerson was wasting his time trying to negotiate with the rogue country over its missile and nuclear programs.
Sep. 28 - Oct. 1, 2017 -- Tillerson visited China and spoke about topics like trade and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, according to the State Department.
Sep. 19 - 22, 2017 -- Tillerson had meetings and events in New York.
On the margins of the UN General Assembly, Secretary Tillerson met with a number of his counterparts to discuss a range of bilateral and global issues, the State Department said.
Sep. 13 - 14, 2017 -- Tillerson went to London for meetings on North Korea and Libya that were hosted by the United Kingdom, the State Department said.
Aug. 5 - 9, 2017 -- Tillerson went to several events including the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit Ministerial, in Manila, the State Department said. Tillerson later visited Thailand and Kuala Lumpur.
July 5 - 13, 2017 - Tillerson accompanied Trump to Hamburg, Germany, before going to Ukraine and meeting President Petro Porosheno, the State Department said. Tillerson later made stops in Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, meeting officials in those countries.
While in Germany, Tillerson was at Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G-20.
The President opened the meeting with President Putin by raising the concerns of the American people regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election, Tillerson later told reporters.
They had a very robust and lengthy exchange on the subject. The President pressed President Putin on more than one occasion regarding Russian involvement. President Putin denied such involvement, as I think he has in the past.
Tillerson said that Trump and Putin agreed, though, that this is a substantial hindrance in the ability of us to move the Russian-U.S. relationship forward.
June 5 - 6, 2017 -- Tillerson visited Sydney, Australia and Wellington, New Zealand.
May 19 - 25, 2017 -- Tillerson accompanied Trump on his trip to Riyadh, Jerusalem, Rome and Brussels.
May 10 - 11, 2017 -- Tillerson traveled to Fairbanks, Alaska where he attended the 10th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting, an intergovernmental forum designed to address issues related to the Arctic region. Tillerson attended along with representatives from the eight Arctic States.
April 28, 2017 -- Tillerson visited New York City to chair a special ministerial meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
April 9 - 12, 2017 -- Tillerson traveled to Italy and Russia. In Lucca, Italy, he attended the G-7 Foreign Ministers Meeting. Later in Moscow, Tillerson met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other Russian officials to discuss Ukraine, counterterrorism efforts and bilateral relations, among other things.
WHO IS REX TILLERSON?
March 30 - 31, 2017 -- Tillerson traveled to Belgium and Turkey. He visited NATO in Brussels after meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials about how to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
March 15 - 19, 2017 -- The secretary of state traveled to Japan, China and the Republic of Korea. In each country, he met with senior officials to discuss the nuclear and missile threat from North Korea.
He also reaffirmed the United States commitment to further broaden and enhance U.S. economic and security interests in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the State Department.
Feb. 22 - 23, 2017 -- Tillerson traveled to Mexico City to talk border security, law enforcement cooperation and trade with the President of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto and other Mexican officials, according to the State Department. He was joined by John Kelly, who was then the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security.
Feb. 15 - 17, 2017 -- Tillerson traveled to Bonn, Germany to attend the G-20 Foreign Ministers Meeting, marking his first trip as secretary of state.
Feb. 1, 2017 -- The Senate confirmed Tillersons role in a 56-43 vote. A swearing-in ceremony was held in the Oval Office.
This is where you were meant to be, right here, today, at this crossroads in history, Trump told Tillerson.
Jan. 11, 2017 -- During a Senate confirmation hearing, the former Exxon Mobil CEO was grilled mainly by Democrats on everything from climate change, to his business interests, to his stance on Russia and China.
Dec. 13, 2016 -- Trump said he planned to nominate Tillerson for secretary of state, calling him one of the truly great business leaders of the world.
Dec. 6, 2016 -- Tillerson met the president-elect, before meeting him again Dec. 10, the Washington Post reported.
Fox News' Brooke Singman, Rich Edson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
One of the women who accused U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of having a relationship with her when she was 17 revealed what she called new evidence of her connection to the embattled Republican, according to a report Monday.
Debbie Wesson Gibson, who claimed she had a relationship with Moore when he was 34 years old, told The Washington Post she discovered a card in her attic that Moore gave her for her high school graduation.
Happy graduation Debbie, the card read. I wanted to give you this card myself. I know that youll be a success in anything you do. Roy.
The cards handwriting looked similar to the writing found in the yearbook of another Moore accuser, Beverly Young Nelson.
Nelson claimed in a news conference last month that Moore groped her and tried to push her head toward his crotch when she was 16. The yearbook signature, which she claimed Moore wrote, said: To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say 'Merry Christmas' Christmas 1977 Love, Roy Moore D.A.
Gibson was one of the first accusers to speak out when she talked to The Washington Post in November.
Gibson said that in 1981, Moore, then an assistant district attorney, had spoken to her high school civics class and asked her out on the first of several dates that did not progress beyond kissing.
The woman reportedly said she and Moore dated for two to three months. She added in The Posts latest report that she campaigned for Moore when he was running for circuit court judge in 1982 and exchanged Christmas cards with him over the years.
Moore has repeatedly denied allegations that he initiated sexual contact with teenage women decades ago.
When asked on Fox News host Sean Hannitys radio show for more details on the allegations from Gibson, Moore said: I know her but I dont remember going out on dates. I knew her as a friend.
Alabamas special election to fill the Senate seat of Attorney General Jeff Sessions is on Dec. 12. President Trump on Monday endorsed Moore for the position.
When previously asked about his stance on Moore following the allegations against him, Trump said: Roy Moore says he didnt do it.
News / National
by Staff reporter
Former Finance minister, Ignatius Chombo, wished President Mnangagwa well in his new roles and responsibilities.Chombo wrote to President Emmerson Mnangagwa two days after he had been sworn into office offering to work for him in any capacity.In a passionate congratulatory message to Mnangagwa, Chombo wrote from his hospital bed pledging he would be unwaveringly loyal to Mnangagwa in the same way he was to former president, Robert Mugabe, who was deposed last month."I saw your inauguration as the second executive President of the Republic of Zimbabwe with pride and contentment, especially after the goings on in the party and government during the last six weeks. I wish I could attend but I couldn't because I am in hospital for some health problems that doctors are attending to. I missed all recently held meetings because I was away, learning some hard lessons," Chombo wrote."I wish to heartily congratulate you for your elevation to the position of president of the Republic of Zimbabwe as well as first secretary of our beloved party Zanu-PF. May God give you strength and guidance as you lead us into the future."You have all my full support and loyalty in equal measure as I served the formerPresident R.G. Mugabe during his tenure in office."I am available to serve in any capacity that you deem fit. Once again, I wish you all the greatest good and may God bless you ever more," he wrote.
Many national Republican leaders pulled their support for Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate, in the wake of allegations claiming he had inappropriate sexual contact with teenage girls.
The Washington Post reported that four women accused Moore of initiating sexual contact with them in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was an assistant district attorney in his early 30s. One of the women, Leigh Corfman, told the newspaper that Moore had sexual contact with her when she was 14. The age of consent in Alabama is 16.
Several additional women have since come forward to accuse Moore of sexually inappropriate behavior.
Moore denied the allegations, saying in a statement obtained by Fox News that the allegations are "based on a lie supported by innuendo."
"It seems that in the political arena, to say that something is not true is simply not good enough. So let me be clear. I have never provided alcohol to minors, and I have never engaged in sexual misconduct," he said.
Multiple Republican lawmakers called on Moore to step aside from the Dec. 12 special election. However, President Trump offered his endorsement for the embattled politician, and the Republican National Committee began supporting Moore after having previously cut its fundraising ties to him.
The White House
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president had no plans for an in-person appearance on Moore's behalf.
In addition, the president previously signed off on a decision by the Republican National Committee to cut off support for Moore's campaign.
But publicly, Trump unleashed his criticism on Democratic candidate Doug Jones instead of Moore.
The last thing we need in Alabama and the U.S. Senate is a Schumer/Pelosi puppet who is weak on crime, weak on the border, bad for our military and our great vets, bad for our 2nd Amendment, and wants to [raise] taxes to the sky. Jones would be a disaster, Trump tweeted on Nov. 26.
And just over one week before the election, Trump said he needed Moores vote in the Senate when it comes to certain issues, such as immigration, gun rights and judicial appointments.
Trump also encouraged his Twitter followers to vote for Moore on the morning of the election as he contended that Moore "will always vote with us."
Vice President Mike Pence found the allegations in the story disturbing and believes, if true, this would disqualify anyone from serving in office, his press secretary, Alyssa Farah, has told reporters.
Sen. Mitch McConnell
While speaking to reporters, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he believes the women quoted in the Washington Post story. He urged Moore to step aside in light of the allegations.
Previously, McConnell said Moore should step aside if "these allegations are true."
Sen. Cory Gardner
Cory Gardner, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, said he believes the women who have alleged Moore's misconduct. In a statement, he encouraged the Senate to "vote to expel" Moore should he win the election next month.
"He does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate," Gardner, R-Colo., said.
Sen. Mike Lee
A former backer of Moore, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, pulled his endorsement from Moore after the allegations came to light.
"Having read the detailed description of the incidents, as well as the response from Judge Moore and his campaign, I can no longer endorse his candidacy for the US Senate," Lee said in a tweet.
He had also requested that Moore's campaign no longer use his image.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski
Im horrified and if its true, he should step down immediately, Murkowski told reporters.
She reportedly also urged Sen. Luther Strange, who was appointed to fill Jeff Sessions seat when he was tapped to become attorney general, to launch a write-in campaign. The deadline to take Moore off the ballot has passed.
Sen. Mike Rounds
If they are true, then he should seriously think about stepping aside," Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said.
Sen. John Cornyn
I find it deeply distrusting and troubling. Its up to the governor and the folks of Alabama to make that decision as far as what the next steps are," Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, said. He later withdrew his endorsement of Moore.
Sen. Tim Scott
If theyre accurate, he absolutely should [step aside]," Tim Scott, of South Carolina, said.
Sen. Susan Collins
In a tweet, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, called for Moore to "withdraw from the Senate race in Alabama."
Collins wrote that she listened to Moore deny the allegations in a recent radio interview, but "did not find his denials to be convincing."
Collins' most recent statement comes after she previously tweeted: "If there is any truth at all to these horrific allegations, Roy Moore should immediately step aside as Senate candidate."
Sen. Steve Daines
"I am pulling my endorsement and support for Roy Moore for U.S. Senate," said Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont.
Sen. John McCain
"The allegations against Roy Moore are deeply disturbing and disqualifying. He should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of," Arizona Sen. John McCain said.
Sen. Richard Shelby
Its a devastating nasty story, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby told reporters. If its true, I dont believe thered be a place for him in the U.S. Senate.
He said that he did not vote for Moore when he sent in his absentee ballot but voted instead for a "distinguished Republican write-in."
Sen. Jeff Flake
Like other Republicans, Flake called on Moore to step aside from the election.
"Just to be clear. If the choice is between Roy Moore and a Democrat, I would run to the polling place to vote for the Democrat," Flake tweeted.
Hes said that Republicans to support Roy Moore over Doug Jones is political tribalism at its worst.
Flake also tweeted a photo of a check made out to Jones for $100 with "Country over Party" written in the memo line.
Sen. Luther Strange
Alabama Sen. Luther Strange, who lost the special election primary to Roy Moore, called the allegations disturbing.
It is too late to take Moore off the ballot, but Strange has been encouraged to launch a write-in campaign.
Sen. Rob Portman
I think if what we read is true, and people are on the record so I assume it is, then he should step aside, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman said.
Sen. Ben Sasse
Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., called the Washington Posts story "heartbreaking."
Sasse also slammed the Republican National Committee for providing funds to Moores race.
This is a bad decision and very sad day. I believe the women and the RNC previously did too. Whats changed? Or is the party just indifferent? Sasse said on Twitter. This sends a terrible message to victims its not that the party wont believe you if you come forward. It might. But just doesnt care.
The senator than warned that if the National Republican Senatorial Committee decided to contribute to Moore, he would no longer be a donor to or fund-raiser for it.
Sen. Ted Cruz
"These are serious and troubling allegations," Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who previously endorsed Moore, said in a statement. "If they are true, Judge Moore should immediately withdraw. However, we need to know the truth, and Judge Moore has the right to respond to these accusations."
Sen. Bill Cassidy
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., officially withdrew his support from the candidate.
"Based on the allegations against Roy Moore, his response and what is known, I withdraw support," he said.
Sen. Orrin Hatch
"I stand with the Majority Leader on this. These are serious and disturbing accusations, and while the decision is now in the hands of the people of Alabama, I believe Luther Strange is an excellent alternative," Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, tweeted.
But a week before the election, Hatch said Trump didnt have another choice but to endorse Moore, Bloomberg reported. He also said that many of the things he allegedly did are decades ago. So its hard to thats a decision that has to be made by the people in that state.
If they make that decision, who are we to question them? Hatch said.
Sen. Pat Toomey
We'll probably never know for sure exactly what happened," Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"But I think the accusations have more credibility than the denial. I think it would be best if Roy would just step aside.
Sen. Lindsey Graham
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham took to Twitter to say Moore should step aside in the Alabama Senate race.
"In light of the most recent allegations and the cumulative effect of others, I believe [Moore] would be doing himself, the state, the GOP, and the country a service by stepping aside," Graham said. "If he continues this will not end well for Mr. Moore."
He has also bemoaned Trumps attempt to throw a lifeline to Moore.
Rep. Paul Ryan
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said if the allegations are true, they would disqualify Moore from the special election.
These allegations are disqualifying if true. Anyone who would do this to a child has no place in public office, let alone the United States Senate, Ryan said in a statement.
Rep. Peter King
"I would say unless he can prove his innocence, the burden is now on him within the next day or so, I believe he has to step down. He owes it to himself, he owes it to the state and and he owes it to the U.S. Senate," New York Rep. Peter King said after the allegations came out.
Rep. Lee Zeldin
In a tweet, Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., called for that "creepy Roy Moore dude" to step aside from the campaign.
"It's about that time for that creepy Roy Moore dude to exit stage left. He should step aside & let someone take his spot on the ballot who doesn't prey upon young teenage girls as a grown man," he said.
Gov. John Kasich
Ohio Gov. John Kasich said on Twitter that hes long opposed Moore and called on him to step aside from the race as well.
Ive long opposed Roy Moore [and] his divisive viewpoints. The actions described make him unfit for office. The GOP must not support him. He should step aside, Kasich said.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, slammed Moore on Twitter.
Innocent until proven guilty is for criminal convictions, not elections. I believe Leigh Corfman, the former governor said. Her account is too serous to ignore. Moore is unfit for office and should step aside.
"Roy Moore in the US Senate would be a stain on the GOP and on the nation. Leigh Corfman and other victims are courageous heroes. No vote, no majority is worth losing our honor, our integrity," Romney said in another tweet on Dec. 4.
Former Gov. Jeb Bush
Former Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Moore should step down in light of the allegations.
"This is not a question of innocence or guilt like in a criminal proceeding; this is a question of whats right and whats wrong. Acknowledging that youre dating teenagers when youre 32 years old as assistant state attorney is wrong. Its just plain wrong," he told CNBC, adding that he agreed with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said earlier Monday that Moore should "step aside."
"We need to stand for basic principles, and decency has to be one of those," Bush added. "In the really poisonous political environment we have right now, one of the rules I think has to apply is that when you attack somebody on the other party, and the other team for doing something wrong, when it happens on your team, you have an obligation I think to speak out as well."
Ivanka Trump
The president's daughter had some harsh words for Moore.
"There's a special place in hell for people who prey on children. I've yet to see a valid explanation, and I have no reason to doubt the victims' accounts," Ivanka Trump told the Associated Press.
Condoleezza Rice
While she didnt name Moore, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who is from Alabama encouraged voters to take a stand for our core principles and for what is right.
These critical times require us to come together to reject bigotry, sexism and intolerance, Rice said in a statement to AL.com.
"It is imperative for Americans to remain focused on our priorities and not give way to side shows and antics. I know that Alabamans need an independent voice in Washington. But we must also insist that our representatives are dignified, decent, and respectful of the values we hold dear, she said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Arizona residents may want to put their costumes away until Halloween.
A new bill, recently introduced by state GOP Rep. Jay Lawrence, would make it a felony offense to wear a disguise, whether partial or complete to evade or escape discovery, recognition or identification during protests and other public events.
Offenders could face up to a year in prison, while anyone caught wearing a mask when committing property destruction could face up to five years.
It's just the latest state-based effort to crack down on wearing masks in certain circumstances. Lawrence first announced his plans to introduce the bill back in August, citing concerns about mask-wearing rioters.
While the right to anonymity is sometimes desirable in healthy political discourse (think of letters to the editor, etc), too many who wish to act violently hide behind hoods or masks in an effort to intimidate or conceal their identity from law enforcement, Lawrence said in a Facebook post at the time.
The bill does make exemptions for disguises worn for business-related purpose or for places where a mask is generally viewed as part of acceptable attire, but critics say that is too vague and could lead to the arrests of people wearing costumes for more innocent purposes.
Lawrence says the bill is not intended to target those types of costumes, but is meant for people who are intentionally trying to evade recognition.
That type of disguise would not be the same as Antifa and others who wear masks and hoods to hide their identity, Lawrence told Capitol Media Services in Arizona.
The proposal will likely be considered during Arizonas next legislative session which begins in January.
Arizona is the latest in a string of states to push for anti-mask legislation, coming after a wave of violence and property destruction at protests across the country carried out by hooded or masked demonstrators.
5 ASSAULTED AT BERKELEY PROTESTS AS BLACK-CLAD ANARCHISTS STORM RIGHTWING RALLY
Earlier this year, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum signed a bill into law which makes it illegal to wear masks or other face coverings when committing a criminal offense, in response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in the state.
Washington state Sen. Jim Honeyford introduced a bill in May that would make it illegal to wear a mask on public property, with exceptions made for religious dress and other factors. The bill was aimed at a small but dangerous group of individuals who conceal their identities while committing illegal acts under the guise of political protest.
Opponents of anti-mask legislation say it violates protesters First Amendment rights.
The First Amendment actually protects peoples right to wear a mask in public, Elisabeth Smith of the ACLU Washington told the Seattle Times. Its clear that the impetus is to criminalize protest behavior.
Several states already have anti-disguise laws in the books, many of which date back to the early 20th century and came as a response to the hooded members of Klu Klux Klan.
Alabamas law outlaws disguises with exceptions for events like Mardi Gras and Halloween. In Ohio, it is illegal for two or more people to wear a disguise while committing a misdemeanor.
Handing the White House a huge judicial victory, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of President Trumps travel ban affecting residents of six majority-Muslim countries.
The justices said the policy can take full effect despite multiple legal challenges against it that havent yet made their way through the legal system.
The ban applies to people from Syria, Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.
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.
The nine-member high court said in two one-page orders late Monday afternoon that lower court rulings that partly blocked the ban should be put on hold while appeals courts in Richmond, Va., and San Francisco take up the case.
Liberal-leaning Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have left the lower court orders in place.
The justices offered no explanation for their order, but the administration had said that blocking the full ban was causing "irreparable harm" because the policy is based on legitimate national security and foreign policy concerns.
Both courts are scheduled to hear arguments in those cases this week.
Both courts are also dealing with the issue on an accelerated basis, and the Supreme Court noted it expects those courts to reach decisions "with appropriate dispatch."
Quick resolution by appellate courts would allow the Supreme Court to hear and decide the issue this term, by the end of June.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley called the ban lawful and essential to protecting our homeland.
Gidley added in a written statement, We look forward to presenting a fuller defense of the proclamation as the pending cases work their way through the courts.
We are pleased that the Supreme Court has agreed to allow us to fulfill this most vital mission performed by any sovereign nation. DHS will continue to fully implement the Presidents robust and Constitutional counterterrorism agenda in accordance with the law, the Department of Homeland Security's acting press secretary, Tyler Q. Houlton, said.
Trumps travel ban has been challenged in separate lawsuits by Hawaii and the American Civil Liberties Union. Both have argued the ban discriminates against Muslims and should not go into effect under immigration laws.
"President Trumps anti-Muslim prejudice is no secret he has repeatedly confirmed it, including just last week on Twitter," Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, said in a statement. "It's unfortunate that the full ban can move forward for now, but this order does not address the merits of our claims. We continue to stand for freedom, equality, and for those who are unfairly being separated from their loved ones. We will be arguing Friday in the Fourth Circuit that the ban should ultimately be struck down."
Trump issued his first travel ban within days of being sworn in as president. That version tightened the countrys refugee and visa policies and suspended almost all refugee admissions for four months.
Trump issued a revised version in March after the first was blocked by federal courts. The second one expired in September after a lengthy court fight and was replaced with the current version.
Fox News' Jake Gibson, Bill Mears and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
President Trump on Monday endorsed Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore, telling voters "we need" him to tackle illegal immigration, tax reform and more -- after weeks of holding back his full support for the embattled candidate.
The White House made it official in a statement confirming Trump personally backed Moore during a phone call.
"The President had a positive call with Judge Roy Moore during which they discussed the state of the Alabama Senate race and the President endorsed Judge Moore's campaign," Principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said.
Moments earlier, Moore tweeted that Trump had given his support and told him: "Go get 'em, Roy!"
His wife Kayla Moore also revealed the phone call on Facebook.
With just one week left before voters head to the polls next Tuesday, the president made clear early Monday morning he was throwing his weight behind the Republican nominee, while slamming Democratic rival Doug Jones as a puppet for congressional Democratic leaders.
Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama, Trump tweeted. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges, 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/ Schumer Puppet!
Until now, Trump has kept a certain distance from Moore while making clear he opposes Jones -- and refraining from condemning Moore in the same way some Senate Republicans have. Those GOP lawmakers have sought to ostracize Moore over explosive allegations he initiated sexual contact with teenage women decades ago, when he was an assistant district attorney in his early 30s. One of the women, Leigh Corfman, alleged Moore had sexual contact with her when she was just 14. The age of consent in Alabama is 16.
Moore has repeatedly denied the allegations.
Trump has been relatively mum on the allegations facing Moore, with White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders saying it's a decision for Alabama voters.
Trump, though, ramped up his defense of Moore during a session with reporters last month.
Roy Moore says he didnt do it, Trump said on his way to Marine One.
Trumps endorsement of Moore on Monday seems to be driven by legislative items and his desire to keep the majority in the Senate.
Minutes after his tweet supporting Moore, Trump elaborated on the threat Jones would pose to the GOP agenda.
Putting Pelosi/ Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders& so much more, Trump tweeted. Look at your 401-ks since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back!
The Senate passed the Republican tax plan late Friday night, with a 51-vote majority. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., was the lone Republican to vote against the bill, joining the 48 Senate Democrats who voted nay.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been tough on Moore, saying last month he's "not fit" to be in the Senate and claiming party leaders were looking at ways to "prevent that from happening."
But McConnell has seemingly softened his tone.
Im going to let the people of Alabama make the call, McConnell, R-Ky., said Sunday on ABCs This Week, in an apparent shift from his earlier comments.
Moore, on the other hand, continues to bash McConnell and the Republican establishment.
The special election to fill the Senate seat of Trumps Attorney General Jeff Sessions is Dec. 12.
Moore thanked Trump for his support.
"Thankful for President Trump's support. The America First agenda will #MAGA. Can't wait to help him #DrainTheSwamp," Moore tweeted Monday morning.
President Trump on Monday called the criminal case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn very unfair, claiming he and Hillary Clinton both lied to the FBI but only Flynn faced consequences.
The presidents comments, made to reporters as he left Washington for a policy announcement in Utah, saw Trump wading deeper into the Flynn investigation even after a weekend tweet landed the White House in hot water.
On Monday, Trump said he feels badly for Flynn, who pleaded guilty on Friday to giving false statements to the FBI about his Russia contacts.
Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI, nothing happened to her. Flynn lied and they destroyed his life, Trump said. The president, without offering specifics, said his 2016 Democratic rival lied many times during her FBI interview in early July.
Nothing happened to her. Flynn lied and its like they ruined his life. Very unfair, Trump said, echoing a weekend tweet in which he asked whether a double standard was at play.
MUELLER'S RUSSIA PROBE: WHAT TO KNOW
Clinton was interviewed by FBI agents as part of the investigation into her exclusive use of a private email system while secretary of state. After that interview, then-FBI Director James Comey called her actions extremely careless without recommending criminal charges.
Trump also noted over the weekend that Clinton was not recorded or under oath during that interview.
On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., suggested Trump might want to think twice before tweeting and commenting on the Russia case. You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril, he said on CBS Face the Nation.
This was after Trumps account tweeted Saturday: I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!
That tweet immediately caused problems for the White House, as some legal experts said it potentially exposed the president to obstruction of justice allegations since, according to the tweet, he would have known Flynn lied to agents when he allegedly asked Comey to lay off the Flynn investigation and later fired Comey. Trump said earlier this year that he fired Flynn only for lying to Vice President Pence about the issue.
Trumps personal lawyer John Dowd later said he was the one who wrote that tweet, saying he did not mean to break news.
Dowd attempted to explain Sunday that the tweet was referring to then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates telling White House Counsel Don McGahn in January that Flynn had given the agents the same story he gave the vice president.
He also said the agents seemed to think Flynn was confused. All the president knew was that the department was not accusing him of lying, Dowd said.
Trump over the weekend denied that he asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on NBCs Meet the Press on Sunday that the panel has begun to see "the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice" against Trump.
Flynn is now cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigators in the Russia meddling case, though its unclear what exactly he might reveal about Trump and his associates.
Fox News' Joseph Weber and Jennifer Bowman contributed to this report.
Capping months of speculation, President Trump on Monday signed a pair of executive orders to significantly shrink two of Utahs national monuments Bears Ears and the Grand Staircase-Escalante that were created by his Democratic predecessors.
The controversial move was pitched by Trump as a win for states' rights and follows an April review conducted by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on the boundaries of large national monuments. The review initially looked at more than two dozen sites designated by presidential decree since the 1990s.
I know you love this land the best and you know how to protect it and you know how to conserve this land for many, many generations to come, Trump told a group of people at Utahs Capitol in Salt Lake City. They dont know your land. They dont care for your land like you do.
Trumps presidential proclamations cut Bears Ears by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante in half. The action is also likely to trigger a legal battle that could alter the governments approach to conservation.
Utahs congressional and state leaders lobbied the president to reduce the size of the monuments so the state would have more control on what can be done on the land.
Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah praised the announcement and said Trump was giving the people of Utah a voice in the process.
Zinke maintained Monday that the move should be seen as correcting an overreach by the federal government.
Were not taking one square inch of federal land and transferring it or selling it. It is still federal land, with all the protections of federal land, Zinke said, adding that the biggest change is that the government is allowing greater use on the areas that were previously in the monument.
Opponents, however, see it as the latest example of the government breaking promises to Native American tribes and eroding protections for public land.
In 2016, former President Barack Obama proclaimed Bears Ears a national monument dedicated to Native American culture.
Former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who was instrumental in designating Bears Ears monument, tweeted Trumps actions will make him the most anti-conservation president in our history. He will be challenged by tribes and thoughtful citizens that recognize that some places are too special to develop.
Former President Bill Clinton designated the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument.
About 2,000 people lined up near Utahs capitol on Monday, holding signs like Keep your tiny hands off our public lands and chanting lock him up! at Trump.
There were also protests held over the weekend at Utahs snowy capital.
I think its important to have natural places that are untouched and not modified, demonstrator Valerie Huitzul told Fox News.
Huitzul was among the 5,000 protesters who showed up over the weekend.
The decision to shrink the states sprawling wilderness shrines has prompted fierce backlash by environmental groups as well.
Ahead of Mondays visit, 146 scientists, researchers and academic organizations from 19 states sent a letter to the Trump administration calling the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument an important living laboratory to scientific research.
The Center for Western Priorities described Mondays event as the largest rollback of protections for lands and wildlife in U.S. history.
Arnold Miller, president of the Paleontological Society and Senior Associate Dean and Professor of Geology at the University of Cincinnati, said the Grand Staircase-Escalante contains a trove of scientifically-valuable fossils and strata from boundary to boundary, and the excising of portions of this national monument for mining or other commercial activities will tragically compromise its integrity.
Trump said Monday while leaving the White House that the monument announcement is "something that the state of Utah and others have wanted to be done for many, many years." He said it is "so important for states' rights and so important for the people of Utah."
In December, shortly before leaving office, Obama irritated Utah Republicans by creating the Bears Ears National Monument on land sacred to Native Americans.
Trump signed an executive order in April directing Zinke to review the protections. Trump is able to upend the protections under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president broad authority to declare federal lands as monuments and restrict their use.
Trump said at the time that he had spoken to state and local leaders "who are gravely concerned about this massive federal land grab. And it's gotten worse and worse and worse, and now we're going to free it up, which is what should have happened in the first place. This should never have happened."
The move marks the first time in a half century that a president has undone these types of land protections. And it could be the first of many changes to come.
Zinke has also recommended that Nevada's Gold Butte and Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou monuments be reduced in size, though details remain unclear. The former Montana congressman's plan would allow logging at a newly designated monument in Maine and more grazing, hunting and fishing at two sites in New Mexico.
Fox News' Dan Springer and 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.
From his handling of a probe into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to his investigation into Russian meddling in the election, former FBI Director James Comey has long been a punching bag for President Trump.
After Comey left the FBI, Trump accused him of leaving the agency in "tatters." And as Comey released his explosive tell-all book, Trump called for the former FBI boss to be "prosecuted" for allegedly leaking information and lying under oath to Congress.
"He is a weak and untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI," Trump said in April. "It was my great honor to fire James Comey!"
But while Trump has publicly hit the nations former chief investigator hard, his public opinion throughout his presidency and campaign hasn't been all bad.
Criticism
On Comey's Capitol Hill testimony
On Dec. 7, Comey testified behind closed doors, despite previously seeking an open hearing. He was expected to answer a variety of questions from his decision not to recommend any criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her private server scandal in 2016 to the FBI's investigation into potential Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Comey tweeted days before his testimony that it was "hard to protect [his] rights without being in contempt," so he agreed to "sit in the dark." House Republicans apparently weren't satisfied at the conclusion of Comey's questioning and indicated they may want to bring Comey back, according to reports.
Trump, too, was clearly frustrated.
"It is being reported that Leakin' James Comey was told by Department of Justice attorneys not to answer the most important questions," Trump tweeted afterward. "Total bias and corruption at the highest levels of previous Administration. Force him to answer the questions under oath!"
On Clintons emails
Trump has often tweeted about Comeys involvement in the FBIs investigation into Clintons use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state, saying his handling of the probe has left the FBI in tatters.
Hillary and the Dems loved and praised FBI Director Comey just a few days ago. Original evidence was overwhelming, should not have delayed! Trump tweeted in October 2016.
Before Comey was officially sacked, Trump said Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Clinton because he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds.
After the FBI confirmed Comey had drafted a statement about Clinton before the investigation was completed, Trump took to Twitter to lambast the former FBI chief even more.
Wow, FBI confirms report that James Comey drafted letter exonerating Crooked Hillary Clinton long before investigation was complete. Many people not interviewed, including Clinton herself, Trump tweeted. Comey stated under oath that he didnt do this obviously a fix? Where is Justice Dept? Trump tweeted.
As it turned out, James Comey lied and leaked and totally protected Hillary Clinton. He was the best thing that ever happened to her! he said.
He's also said Comey, along with others, have "committed many crimes."
On Comeys firing
Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017 and sent his FBI chief a short, impersonal letter to make him aware of his termination.
Trump predictably took to Twitter to defend the firing.
James Comey will be replaced by someone who will do a far better job, bringing back the spirit and prestige of the FBI," Trump said the morning after the firing.
Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. When things calm down, they will be thanking me! Trump added.
On the Russia investigation
Comey told Trump that he was not under investigation by the FBI, Trump said in a May 2017 interview with NBC News.
I said, if its possible would you let me know, am I under investigation? He said, You are not under investigation, Trump said.
When asked if he was angry with Comey over his investigation into Russias meddling in the presidential election, Trump just said he want[s] somebody thats competent to lead the FBI. He added that he is a big fan of the FBI.
Trump reportedly called Comey crazy and a nut job during a conversation with Russian officials in the Oval Office the day after Comeys firing, according to The New York Times.
I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job, Trump said according to a document of the meeting obtained by the Times. I faced great pressure because of Russia. Thats taken off.
And when it comes to his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump has denied asking Comey to stop his investigation into potential wrongdoing.
I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie! Trump tweeted on Dec. 3.
On Comey's memo
As Comey has promoted his new memoir, titled "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership," Trump called the former FBI head a "slimeball" and dubbed him "Slippery James Comey."
"Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!" Trump said on social media.
He also criticized the book for not answering certain questions, such as: "how come he gave up Classified Information (jail), why did he lie to Congress (jail), why did the DNC refuse to give [Clinton's email server] to the FBI (why didn't they TAKE it), why the phony memos," among other things.
Trump has also denied asking Comey for his loyalty, something Comey detailed in his memoir.
On stopping government leaks
Trump has several times expressed his disappointment with Comey and the FBI not being able to stop national security leakers and even accused the former FBI boss of leaking as well.
The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security leakers that have permeated our government for a long time. They can't even find the leakers within the FBI itself. Classified information is being given to media that could have a devastating effect on U.S. Trump tweeted in February 2017.
Trump also threatened Comey against leaking, himself, information to the media.
James Comey better hope that there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press, Trump tweeted.
His tweet came after The New York Times reported Trump asked for Comeys loyalty during a private dinner, which Comey declined to give. The New York Times cited sources who said they knew about the details of the dinner through Comey.
Later, after Comey told Fox News the memos he shared with his legal team did not constitute a leak of classified information, Trump took to social media to call him "either very sick or very dumb."
Is everybody believing what is going on. James Comey cant define what a leak is. He illegally leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION but doesnt understand what he did or how serious it is. He lied all over the place to cover it up. Hes either very sick or very dumb, he wrote.
Praise
On Clintons emails
While the president eventually castigated Comeys handling of the probe into Clintons private email server, Trump initially praised him for investigating Clinton at all.
It took a lot of guts, Trump said in October 2017 of Comeys decision to reopen the Clinton investigation.
I have to give the FBI credit. That was so bad what happened originally, Trump said after the FBI did not recommend charges be brought against Clinton by the Justice Department.
It took guts for Director Comey to make the move that he made in light of the kind of opposition he had where theyre trying to protect her from criminal prosecution, Trump said.
I was not his fan, but Ill tell you what what he did, he brought back his reputation, Trump continued.
He also encouraged Comey then to hang tough.
On the Russia investigation
In prepared remarks released ahead of Comeys testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017, Comey confirmed reports that Trump asked the FBI to lay off his former national security adviser as the department investigated Russias influence on the 2016 presidential election. But Comey also confirmed that he did reassure the president that Trump was not under investigation.
Trump was pleased by Comeys admission.
The president is pleased that Mr. Comey has finally publicly confirmed his private reports that the President was not under investigation in any Russian probe, Trumps lawyer said in a statement. The President feels completely and totally vindicated. He is eager to continue to move forward with his agenda.
Rex Tillerson is out as secretary of state, the White House announced on March 13 as he came back to the U.S. from a trip to Africa.
Tillerson will be replaced as the nations top diplomat by CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Rumors that Tillerson would be out as secretary of state have been circling for quite some time, and he was expected to step down from the position in January.
Tillerson told reporters that his last day will be March 31. Until then, he will delegate all of his responsibilities to the deputy secretary of state.
In leaving, Tillerson lamented that Washington, D.C., can be a "very mean-spirited town." He told the State Department employees that "personal integrity" is the "most valuable asset you posses."
Heres a look at who Tillerson is and what he did before joining the ever-evolving Trump administration.
Who is Rex Tillerson?
Tillerson, 65, grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering.
Tillerson is also known for his involvement with the Boy Scouts of America. He served as the organization's national president from 2010 to 2012.
Following the oft-criticized speech Trump gave to the Boy Scouts in 2017, Tillerson reportedly threatened to resign from the State Department.
What about his resume?
Prior to becoming secretary of state, Tillerson did not have any experience in the public sector.
Tillerson was the chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil until 2016. He served in that role starting in 2006, but he actually joined the company in 1975 as a production engineer, according to an archived version of his Exxon biography.
What has he done as secretary of state?
Tillersons tenure as secretary of state was fairly contentious with Trump. He reportedly called Trump a moron in front of other Cabinet officials in July 2017. Following reports of the remark, Tillerson gave an unusual personal address and reassured people he was not quitting.
As secretary of state, Tillerson traveled extensively visiting Australia, Europe, Mexico and Africa, among other places. He assumed the position of secretary of state on Feb. 1.
Tillersons ties to Russia have also been scrutinized a criticism that has plagued many Trump administration officials as investigators continue to look into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Tillerson was named vice president of Exxon Ventures (CIS) Inc., and president of Exxon Neftegas Limited in 1998. In those roles, Tillerson was tasked with overseeing Exxons holdings in Russia and the Caspian Sea, his Exxon biography stated. He met with Russian President Vladimir Putin multiple times before becoming secretary of state.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
News / National
by Staff reporter
Newly appointed Cabinet ministers will take their oath of office before President Emmerson Mnangagwa at State House in Harare today.President Mnangagwa last week announced a 22-member Cabinet to run Government business until harmonised elections next year.In a statement on Saturday, Chief Secretary to the President and Cabinet, Dr Misheck Sibanda said the swearing-in ceremony starts at 9AM."Cabinet ministers are invited to State House for the swearing-in ceremony scheduled for 0900hrs, 4th December, 2017," reads the statement.The invitation was also extended to Ministers of State for Provincial Affairs and Deputy Ministers.However, there have been adjustments to the original list of Cabinet ministers that was announced on Thursday last week in order "to ensure compliance with the Constitution and considerations of gender, demography and special needs".Lazarus Dokora, who was appointed Minister of Primary and Secondary Education, was dropped and replaced by his former deputy, Professor Paul Mavima.Goromonzi West legislator Mrs Petronella Kagonye becomes the new Minister of Labour and Social Welfare, taking over from Professor Clever Nyathi, who becomes Special Advisor on National Peace and Reconciliation.Mrs Kagonye was formerly the Deputy Minister of Transport and Infrastructural Development before she was fired in December 2014.President Mnangagwa also brought in two other special advisors to the President Christopher Mutsvangwa and Joshua Teke Malinga (Disability Issues).Victor Matemadanda, who was initially designated as Deputy Minister for Defence, Security and War Veterans, has been reassigned to lead the Zanu-PF commissariat.He replaces the sacked Mr Saviour Kasukuwere.Similarly, Pupurai Togarepi will no longer be taking up the post of Deputy Minister for Women and Youth Affairs but will concentrate on his role as Zanu-PF Secretary for Youth Affairs, a position that was previously held by the embattled Kudzanayi Chipanga.Some of the ministers-designate did not represent parliamentary constituencies as required under Section 104(3) of the Constitution.These are Air Marshal Perrance Shiri, July Moyo, Major-General Sibusiso Moyo, Ambassador Mutsvangwa, Prof Amon Murwira, Mr Winston Chitando, Matemadanda, Professor Clever Nyathi and Pupurai Togarepi.Presidential spokesperson Mr George Charamba highlighted last week that President Mnangagwa was alive to the constitutional requirement for him to appoint only up to five Cabinet ministers from outside Parliament.The new team will have its work cut out as it needs to deal with the current economic challenges.The 2018 National Budget, which is expected to be presented by Finance and Economic Planning Minister Mr Patrick Chinamasa, is tentatively scheduled for Thursday.In his inauguration speech on November 24, President Mnangagwa said the country's economic recovery would be predicated on agricultural performance."Our economic policy will be predicated on agriculture, which is the mainstay, and on creating conditions for an investment-led economic recovery that puts a premium on job creation."Key choices will have to be made to attract foreign direct investment to tackle high levels of unemployment while transforming our economy towards the tertiary," he said.Already, Government has given an ultimatum to individuals and corporates who externalised money and other assets to bring them back.The amnesty will run until February 28.
A supermoon was visible across much of the planet on Sunday evening for the one and only time in 2017.
The supermoon, given its name by Astrologer Richard Nolle, is a new or full moon that appears bigger to the human eye because its the closest distance it could get to Earth during a given orbit.
The supermoons are a great opportunity for people to start looking at the moon, not just that once but every chance they have! said Dr. Noah Petro, a research scientist from NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center.
Supermoons typically appear 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than the average moon seen in the sky each night, Petro told Fox News.
SLIDESHOW: PHOTOS OF THE SUPERMOON FROM AROUND THE WORLD
While it may seem bigger, its simply close to the horizon, according to Space.com. The effect is called a moon illusion, which scientists believe may be the human brain comparing the moon to other objects nearby.
Or it could be that the human brain is just wired to process things on the horizon as bigger than things in the sky.
This particular moon, according to NASA, has been given the Indian names of Frost Moon or the Moon Before Yule, because its the last full moon of the fall season.
The moon, which also has been dubbed a full cold moon, is one part of what NASA is calling a super moon trilogy.
The next supermoon will be on Jan. 1, 2018, with the third taking place on Jan. 31 which NASA says will be extra special, considering it will feature a total lunar eclipse.
Fox News' Zoe Szathmary contributed to this report.
Biblical scholars have discovered the first-known original Greek copy of an ancient forbidden Christian text that purportedly describes Jesus secret teachings to his brother James, an early leader of the Church.
Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau, religious studies scholars at The University of Texas at Austin, located the rare text in Oxford University archives earlier this year. The experts found several fifth- or sixth-century A.D. Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James, one of the books from an ancient collection known as the Nag Hammadi library. Previously, the text was thought to be preserved only via translations in the Egyptian Coptic language.
Only a small number of texts from the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of 13 Coptic Gnostic books discovered in Egypt in 1945, have been found in Greek, their original language of composition. Also known as the Gnostic Gospels, the books are seen as key documents for understanding Gnosticism, an ancient belief system.
NEW EVIDENCE DATES CHRISTS TOMB TO ROMAN ERA, MATCHING HISTORICAL RECORDS
The First Apocalypse of James, like the other books in the Nag Hammadi library, was deemed heretical or forbidden by the church because it fell outside of the fourth-century religious boundaries that defined the 27-book New Testament.
Experts were thrilled by the discovery of the ancient fragments, which are owned by the Egypt Exploration Society.
To say that we were excited once we realized what wed found is an understatement, said Smith, an assistant professor of religious studies, in a statement. We never suspected that Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James survived from antiquity. But there they were, right in front of us.
INCREDIBLE 1,500-YEAR-OLD CHRISTIAN MOSAIC UNCOVERED IN ISRAEL
The document is said to describe Jesus secret teachings to his brother James. Details of the heavenly realm and future events, such as James inevitable death, are revealed, according to The University of Texas at Austin.
The text supplements the biblical account of Jesus life and ministry, Smith added.
There are a number of interpretations of references to Jesus' siblings in biblical texts. The Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark, for example, refer to Jesus' brothers, including James.
ANCIENT ROMAN SHIPWRECKS, STUNNING ARTIFACTS, DISCOVERED NEAR EGYPTIAN PORT
James, also known as "James the Just" was a leader of the early church - one interpretation of brother may thus be a close spiritual relationship as opposed to a fraternal biological link. The First Apocalypse of James describes James as not Jesus brother materially.
Other interpretations describe James as Jesus' step-brother or cousin.
The manuscript, which uses neat, uniform handwriting and words separated into syllables, was probably a teachers model used to help students read and write, according to the experts. The scribe has divided most of the text into syllables by using mid-dots. Such divisions are very uncommon in ancient manuscripts, but they do show up frequently in manuscripts that were used in educational contexts, said Landau, a lecturer in the UT Austin Department of Religious Studies, in the statement.
Landau notes that the teacher who produced the manuscript likely had a particular affinity for the text. The document, he explains, appears to be a complete copy of the forbidden ancient text.
This story has been updated with information from the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.
Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
NASA's far-flung Voyager 1 spacecraft has taken its backup thrusters out of mothballs.
Voyager 1 hadn't used its four "trajectory correction maneuver" (TCM) thrusters since November 1980, during the spacecraft's last planetary flyby an epic encounter with Saturn. But mission team members fired them up again Tuesday (Nov. 28), to see whether the TCM thrusters were still ready for primetime.
The little engines passed the test with flying colors, NASA officials said. [Voyager 1's Road to Interstellar Space: A Photo Timeline]
"The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test," Todd Barber, a propulsion engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all."
As Barber's words suggest, the mission team didnt do this out of idle curiosity. Voyager 1 which in August 2012 became the first human-made object ever to enter interstellar space has long been using its standard attitude-control thrusters to orient itself into the proper position to communicate with Earth. But the performance of these thrusters has been flagging for at least three years, so mission team members wanted to find an alternative option.
A successful test was far from guaranteed. Not only was the long layoff a potential issue, but the TCM thrusters were designed to burn continuously for relatively long stretches; they had never been fired in the very short bursts employed for attitude control, NASA officials said.
"The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters," Chris Jones, chief engineer at JPL, said in the same statement.
The plan is now to press the TCM engines into service in the attitude-control role, beginning in January. This should make a big difference for the mission, team members said.
"With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years," Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd, also of JPL, said in the same statement.
But the four TCM thrusters will likely be retired again at some point in the future. Each one requires a heater to operate, which in turn uses power. When Voyager 1's power supply gets too low, the probe's handlers will switch back to the attitude-control thrusters, NASA officials said. (Voyager 1 is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG. RTGs convert to electricity the heat generated by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238.)
Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, launched a few weeks apart in 1977 to conduct an unprecedented "grand tour" of the solar system's giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The spacecraft accomplished this goal, and then kept on flying. Voyager 2 is expected to join its sibling in interstellar space in the next few years, NASA officials said.
The mission team will probably do a similar TCM test on Voyager 2 at some point, but that spacecraft's attitude-control thrusters are in better shape than those of Voyager 1, NASA officials said.
Originally published on Space.com.
Facebook is using artificial intelligence to help with a number of different issues, the latest being spotting posts of people who may be suicidal in an effort to prevent them from harming themselves.
The company is also using machine learning and other automated techniques to help spot and delete terrorist-related content from ISIS and Al Qaeda, with the company claiming 99 percent of content it removes is detected before it is spotted by users.
"We do this primarily through the use of automated systems like photo and video matching and text-based machine learning," wrote Monika Bickert, Facebook's Head of Global Policy Management, and Brian Fishman, head of counterterrorism policy, in a post.
FACEBOOK, YOUTUBE, TWITTER AND MICROSOFT JOIN UP TO BATTLE TERRORIST CONTENT
Al Qaeda and ISIS have been a priority for the social networking giant because of the way it is focusing its techniques.
"A system designed to find content from one terrorist group may not work for another because of language and stylistic differences in their propaganda," Bickert and Fishman wrote. "Because of these limitations, we focus our most innovative techniques on the terrorist groups that pose the biggest threat globally, in the real-world and online. ISIS and Al Qaeda meet this definition most directly, so we prioritize our tools to counter these organizations and their affiliates."
As soon as content is flagged for potentially being terror-related, Facebook said 83 percent of that content is ultimately removed and any copies of that content are removed within an hour of the time they are posted.
Facebook also noted that there have been instances where the content was removed "before it goes live on the site," thanks to systems like photo and video matching and text-based machine learning.
Not working alone
Facebook has acknowledged that it cannot combat terrorist content by itself and has teamed up with experts from around the globe.
Over the summer, Facebook partnered with Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube to form the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) in an effort to battle terrorist content on their respective platforms.
The company also said it has expanded its partnerships with several anti-terrorism and cyber intelligence organizations around the world, including Flashpoint, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the SITE Intelligence Group and the University of Alabama at Birminghams Computer Forensics Research Lab in an effort to "flag Pages, profiles and groups on Facebook potentially associated with terrorist groups for us to review."
SOCIAL MEDIA FUELED THE RISE OF 'FAKE NEWS'
More work to be done
Still, the company has more work to do and noted that deploying artificial intelligence in this matter is "not as simple as flipping a switch." Bickert and Fishman wrote that, depending upon the technique used, databases have to be carefully curated or humans have to code the data in order to train the machine.
Global Intellectual Property Enforcement Center (GIPEC), a software company that monitors illegal activity and terror-related social media accounts, found at least one pro-ISIS Facebook account that has not been removed, providing screenshots of the account to Fox News.
For its part, Facebook has acknowledged that it can and will do more. "As we deepen our commitment to combating terrorism by using AI, leveraging human expertise and strengthening collaboration, we recognize that we can always do more, Bickert and Fishman added.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also talked about Facebook's strategy for using AI, saying in February it would take "many years" for the system to be fully developed.
Follow Chris Ciaccia on Twitter @Chris_Ciaccia
The crew of a Cathay Pacific flight over Japan saw a North Korean ballistic missile test last week, the airline said.
The airline told the BBC that the crew flying from San Francisco to Hong Kong saw what is suspected to be the re-entry" of a North Korean nuclear missile during a test.
Last week, the North Korean regime tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) the first such test in over two months that could potentially reach any city within the U.S. The regime praised the missiles as its most powerful.
The details of the test remain unclear, with a U.S. official saying the missile did not manage to make a re-entry into the earth atmosphere the key problem of the rogue communist countrys nuclear program.
Without perfecting the re-entry technology, such missiles pose little danger as they fall apart before re-entering the Earth.
The continued nuclear weapon tests and hostile rhetoric have increased tensions in the region, with key U.S. allies preparing for the possibility of all-out war.
The U.S. and South Korea began Monday a massive combined air force exercise in the wake of the threats from the North. A five-day drill called Vigilant Ace involves hundreds of aircraft and two dozen stealth jets.
South Koreas defense ministry said the practice is aimed to improve the allies wartime capabilities and preparedness.
North Korean state media condemned the exercise, saying the U.S. was begging for nuclear war and will push the region to the brink of nuclear war, the BBC reported. It also said it will seriously consider a counter-response to the military drill.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
If you like vacationing near the ocean, but would rather stay by the pool, Los Cabos is your place.
Located on the southern tip of Mexicos Baja California peninsula, this beautiful land full of contrast from desert to ocean and breathtaking mountains offers enough attractions to keep even the most demanding travelers busy.
Los Cabos is usually thought of as one destination, but it is actually two and both are very different from one another.
TOKYO OFFERS TRAVELERS A FASCINATING, UNEXPECTED EXPERIENCE
Just 20 miles from the Cabo San Lucas that gained celebrity status for its gorgeous topography is the quieter San Jose del Cabo, a quaint little village where the downtown streets are filled by local artisans selling their pottery, paintings, textiles and all kind of handicraft alongside a great variety of food.
San Jose is the ideal destination for travelers who want a quiet vacation away from the noisy nights of Cabo San Lucas.
The town offers a wide variety of accommodations, from motels to all-inclusive hotels located right on the beach. Barcelo Gran Faro, for example, is a great option, with up to 85 percent of its rooms boasting an ocean view. It also has a wide selection of food, great service, and the drinks are just wonderful.
The temperature of the ocean is generally warm and its color a deep blue that hypnotizes you but thats about all you'll get to know about it: Dont even think of going for a swim. Most beaches are black-flagged due to the strong currents created where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Cortes.
Cabo San Lucas, on the other hand, is more of a party town, like Cancun or Puerto Vallarta, and mostly packed with tourists. It offers more places and things to do than San Jose del Cabo, from restaurants, tours, luxurious malls, tons of pharmacies and, yes, a wild nightlife.
Cabo San Lucas also has better beaches. With a little more color to them and the water is clearer. Both are because the currents are much less severe in Cabo San Lucas, which is a big plus for some travelers. After all, swimmable beaches make a big difference for those who don't want to be stuck by the pool.
THE ENTIRE COUNTRY OF NEW ZEALAND IS PLANNING A HOLIDAY GIFT EXCHANGE
The Cabos area is also unique when it comes the culinary options, since its cuisine doesnt provide a wide array of dishes.
In the mid-18th century, the arrival of Jesuits added more flavors to the basically bland variety of foods cooked and served in Cabos. They brought ingredients that considerably expanded the locals' menu, although their presence did not last. The Jesuits were expelled, and with them some of their gastronomic contributions.
Some of the dishes that survived include Almejas Chocolatas Tatemadas, or grilled clams cooked on beach stones; Machaca de Pescado, a stingray dish seasoned with chili and native spices), Tamales Fajados, which are steam-cooked corn-based doughs filled with chicken; and the so-called ''Comida de Pobres'' (food of the poor), which is a seafood soup with rice, vegetables and beans.
FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS
Either San Jose del Cabo or Cabo San Lucas are great destinations with good weather all year round, save for a few showers and a bit of serious heat in the months of July and August. Youll enjoy good food, incredible scenery and the always-welcoming charm of the Mexican people and depending on where you hit the beach, a nice swim in the ocean.
A 28-year-old teacher has been arrested after she allegedly had sex with a 16-year-old student in a park this past spring, police in Solebury Township, Pa., said.
Former Pennington School teacher Alyssia Marie Reddy was arrested on Friday, authorities say. The school is located in Pennington, New Jersey.
Solebury Township police said that last month they got a report of an alleged spring 2017 sexual assault, which took place in a park. The investigation determined that Reddy allegedly had sexual intercourse with the student.
COURT THROWS OUT LAWSUIT OVER TEACHER MOM, 38, JAILED FOR UP TO 30 YEARS FOR SEX AFFAIRS WITH THREE TEEN BOYS
Reddy is living in the Baltimore area.
She was arrested Friday for institutional sexual assault, unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communication facility and corruption of a minor, the Solebury Township police department release said.
Shes being held in Baltimore City, while waiting to be extradited to Pennsylvania, police say.
The Pennington School said in a letter to parents that it had been recently made aware of an alleged inappropriate relationship involving a former Upper School teacher of The Pennington School in the 2016-17 school year, the Trentonian reported.
FEMALE TEACHERS CHARGED OR CONVICTED OF HAVING SEX WITH STUDENTS
The school said that the matter was promptly reported to the Mercer County Prosecutors office.
Reddy also has been fired from her job at St. Pauls School for Girls in Maryland, Fox 43 reports.
We have just learned that one of our Upper School teachers, Alyssia Reddy, who joined our faculty this year, has been charged with a felony involving sexual assault of a minor, head of school Penny B. Evans said in a letter obtained by the station. The alleged events took place in Pennsylvania this past school year with a male high school student before she came to St. Pauls School for Girls.
She said that Reddy has been fired from the school and banned from the campus.
Before today, we had no information suggesting any prior improper conduct by Mrs. Reddy, she said.
A Texas woman was arrested after she claimed her boyfriend was threatening her life on social media but was actually writing those threatening posts herself, according to police.
Lisa Garcia, 22, was arrested Thursday after cops said she falsely accused her boyfriend, Brandon Berrott, 23, of threatening her, leading police to toss him in jail multiple times, KTRK reported.
Garcia claimed her boyfriend threatened her life on social media and through text messages, the Baytown Police Department told Fox News.
POLICE: TEEN ADMITS TO MOLESTING 50 CHILDREN IN CALIFORNIA
Garcia allegedly set up accounts on Instagram pretending to be Berrott, according to the Houston Chronicle. Garcia also sent threatening messages to herself and Berrotts other girlfriend and reported them to the police department and the Harris County Sheriffs Office, investigators said.
Berrott reportedly has children with Garcia and the other woman.
Berrott was charged with eight different crimes, according to Fox 26. The charges were filed within 10 days in October, and he was jailed at least three times for Garcias threats, the Chronicle reported. It also cost him his job, prosecutors said.
As Berrott was cooperating with police, Garcia was making threats to herself under his name, according to KTRK. Investigators reportedly found that it wasnt possible for Berrott to have sent one of the threats because he was in custody at the time.
He didnt do any of this. He was charged with eight criminal cases and is innocent of all of them, prosecutor Britni Cooper told the Chronicle. Im horrified, actually, and cant imagine what this guy went through. Its a nightmare.
COURT THROWS OUT LAWSUIT OVER TEACHER MOM, 38, JAILED FOR UP TO 30 YEARS FOR SEX AFFAIRS WITH 3 TEEN BOYS
Berrotts defense attorney, Carl Moore, said he has never felt so confident that my client was innocent, and believes Garcia did this because of a custody battle between the two regarding their child.
She wanted him to revoke his parental rights, and he said, No, I want to be in my childs life, Moore said. When you read the messages, I believe you could tell that they were written by a female that was scorned.
He told KHOU that he blames the police department as much as anyone for continuing to accept these charges without doing the proper investigation.
During the course of the investigation, Garcia claimed Berrotts mother, an employee of Harris County, bribed a state district judge to allow her son to make bail.
Garcia was taken into custody Thursday on charges of retaliation and online impersonation. Bond was set at $10,000.
Three teenage boys were charged as adults Monday after they allegedly beat a homeless man in Philadelphia, robbed him and left him for dead, police said.
Brandon Conrad, 14, and Malik Page, 16, were charged with murder, criminal conspiracy, robbery and other related offenses, FOX29 Philadelphia reported. Emmanual Harris, 17, was charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, robbery and other offenses.
Kevin Cullen was in the Philadelphias Holmesburg neighborhood on Nov. 26 when the teenage boys allegedly beat and robbed him, Philly.com reported. Police found Cullen unconscious with his pockets emptied out. He was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead the next day.
Cullens family thanked nearby residents in the neighborhood for attempting to help the 57-year-old man after the beating. Tom Cullen, his brother, specifically thanked a woman named Donna who sat with Kevin Cullen, according to FOX29.
"Especially, the woman, Donna, who sat with him when he was dying. Glad somebody was there to show him compassion when he was dying, Tom said.
News / National
by Staff reporter
A Gwanda man (29) has been arrested for allegedly fatally assaulting his 17-year-old younger sister's 30-year-old boyfriend with an iron bar after he found him in the middle of the night fondling the juvenile at their home.David Mukondole of C4 Blanket Mine rushed to his young sister's bedroom when the teenager screamed after her boyfriend Knowledge Moyo of D22 Blanket Mine budged into her room unannounced.Matabeleland South provincial police spokesperson Inspector Philani Ndebele confirmed the incident.He said Moyo died on Wednesday while admitted at the United Bulawayo Hospitals after he was attacked on Monday at around 12 midnight. "I can confirm that we arrested a man who allegedly beat up the now deceased with an iron bar after he invaded their homestead in the middle of the night. Knowledge Moyo sustained injuries as a result of the attack and was referred to the United Bulawayo Hospitals. He died after he had been admitted for two days," he said.Insp Ndebele expressed concern on the increase in cases of murder and assault in the province. He said people must desist from taking matters into their own hands."We continue to urge people to desist from resorting to violence in order to solve issues. We also urge people to stop taking the law into their own hands. When a suspect has been apprehended by community members they should hand him or her over to the police as taking matters into their own hands will only lead them to jail," he said."In this case this man realised that there was an intruder in their house. Instead of attacking him he should have apprehended him and taken him to the police. People should allow justice to take its course."A source who preferred anonymity said the juvenile screamed for help after her boyfriend gained entry into their house and proceeded to her bedroom and started fondling her in the middle of the night. He said Mukondole retrieved an iron bar and proceeded to the juvenile's bedroom but Moyo fled upon seeing him."Mukondole pursued Moyo and caught up with him a few metres from the house. He struck him on the head with an iron bar and Moyo fell down.Mukondole left Moyo who was bleeding profusely lying on the ground."After some time Mukondele's wife urged him to check on Moyo. Mukondole found Moyo lying on the same spot and he alerted the mine security officer. Moyo was ferried to Gwanda Provincial Hospital where he was later transferred to UBH and later died," said the source.
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Developing now, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017:
President Trump in war of words over the FBI and its handling of the Clinton email probe
New questions about possible Trump obstruction in Russia investigation after questionable tweet
Fox News Exclusive: In wake of the Kate Steinle verdict, GOP lawmaker to introduce bill that would threaten prison time for elected officials accused of sheltering illegal immigrant criminals
CVS Health to acquire AETNA for $69 billion in year's largest acquisition
"Supermoon" dazzles stargazers across the world in its only appearance this year
THE LEAD STORY: President Trump is in a war of words with James Comey and Eric Holder over the FBI and its integrity after new details suggested the handling and closure of the Clinton email probe without criminal charges was reportedly driven by partisan politics ... Trump suggested Sunday that news reports about an anti-Trump FBI agent on the agencys Hillary Clinton email investigation explains why the Clinton case was closed without criminal charges. Report: ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE Now it all starts to make sense! Trump said in one tweet. The office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller confirmed with Fox News exclusively that agent Peter Strzok had been removed from Muellers investigation into Russia collusion after the Justice Departments inspector general started examining Strzok's electronic messages with a colleague, which reportedly included ones that were anti-Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton. Strzok had worked on the Clinton email probe last year.
Former Attorney General Holder and former FBI Director Comey both responded to Trump, who had added the FBI's reputation was in "tatters" because of its handling of the Clinton email investigation. Nope. Not letting this go. The FBIs reputation is not in 'tatters,' tweeted Holder, who served as attorney general under President Obama. "It's composed of the same dedicated men and women who have always worked there and who do a great, apolitical job. Comey tweeted what seemed to be a response of his own, quoting a statement he gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee last June: I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is, and always will be, independent.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton: New documents reveal FBI's Clinton cover-up
DEMS EYE POSSIBLE TRUMP OBSTRUCTION AFTER TWEET MISFIRE: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the panel has started to see "the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice" against President Trump ... Feinstein told NBCs Meet the Press that her analysis is based on Special Counsel Robert Muellers Russia collusion probe that has recently resulted in indictments against former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and guilty pleas by former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. She also pointed to "the continual tweets" from the White House on the matter. Among those tweets was controversial message from Trump's official Twitter account on Saturday that said, "I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies."
The tweet Saturday suggested to some observers that Trump had obstructed justice because he would have known Flynn lied to federal agents when he purportedly asked then-FBI Director James Comey in February to ease up on investigating Flynn. John Dowd, President Trumps personal attorney, has taken responsibility this Trump tweet on Flynn, saying that he had sloppily drafted the passage and given it to White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino.
FOX NEWS EXCLUSIVE: In wake of the not guilty verdict in the Kate Steinle murder trial, a Republican congressman plans to introduce a bill today that would threaten huge fines and prison time for elected officials accused of sheltering illegal immigrant criminals from deportation ... Indiana Rep. Todd Rokita's bill is one of the most aggressive pieces of legislation to date aimed at sanctuary city policies, going beyond the Justice Departments threat to cut off grants to those jurisdictions. His "Stopping Lawless Actions of Politicians (SLAP) Act" would hold state and local lawmakers criminally responsible for refusing to comply with federal immigration enforcement efforts. The Republicans bill would subject violators to a $1 million fine and up to five years in prison if convicted.
HEALTH INDUSTRY SHAKE-UP: Drugstore chain operator CVS Health Corp. has agreed to acquire health insurer Aetna Inc. for $69 billion, seeking to tackle soaring health care spending through lower-cost medical services in pharmacies ... This year's largest corporate acquisition will combine one of the nation's largest pharmacy benefits managers and pharmacy operators with one of its oldest health insurers, whose national business ranges from employer healthcare to government plans.
LOOK, UP IN THE SKY ... IT'S THE "SUPERMOON": A "supermoon" was visible across much of the planet on Sunday evening for the one and only time in 2017, wowing observers ... The supermoon, given its name by Astrologer Richard Nolle, is a new or full moon that appears bigger to the human eye because its the closest distance it could get to Earth during a given orbit. Supermoons typically appear 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than the average moon seen in the sky each night. CLICK HERE to look at a Fox News Digital slideshow of the supermoon from around the world
AS SEEN ON FOX NEWS WEEKEND
A CALL FOR AN 'INVESTIGATION OF THE INVESTIGATION': "This whole investigation stinks worse than cabbage cooking in a small, unventilated kitchen - with sardines on the side." Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, on "Fox & Friends Weekend," sounding off on the removal of FBI counterintelligence division agent Peter Strzok from Robert Mueller's special investigation into President Trump and possible Russian collusion because of anti-Trump texts. WATCH
TRUMP AND THE LOOMING DANGER FROM NORTH KOREA: "There's a real grave danger to China, to Russia, to all nations, by -- you know, from a North Korea that's armed with nuclear weapons. And of course, you have that direct threat, but you also have the threat of -- the potential of Japan, South Korea, others, arming themselves, possibly even with nuclear weapons. That is not in China's interest; it's not in Russia's interest. And so, what the president's saying is, we all need to take care of it. If necessary, the president and the United States will have to take care of it, because he has said he's not going to allow this murderous, rogue regime to threaten the United States with the most destructive weapons on the planet." National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, in an exclusive interview on "Fox News Sunday," on how President Trump will handle the increasing nuclear threat from North Korea. WATCH
ACROSS THE NATION
McConnell eases stance on Moore, says voters should 'make the call.'
After victorious Senate vote, GOP leaders confident about tax reform, avoiding shutdown.
Grassley criticized for comments on taxpayers who waste money on 'booze,' 'women.'
MINDING YOUR BUSINESS
"Sunday Morning Futures" interview - Senate tax bill could reach Trump's desk in 10 days: Sen. Perdue.
U.S. equity index futures open higher after Senate passes tax bill.
Average U.S. gas price drops 7 cents to $2.54 for regular.
NEW IN FOX NEWS OPINION
Why Masterpiece Cakeshop case could bring a major Supreme Court ruling on free expression.
Michael Goodwin: The left (and much of Washington) are preparing to dance on the grave of Trump's presidency.
Todd Starnes: Pro-life teenager punched outside Planned Parenthood clinic.
HOLLYWOOD SQUARED
Billy Bush slams Trump for questioning authenticity of Access Hollywood tape.
MSNBC host Joy Reid targets Crist with anti-gay comments in old blog posts.
James Levine suspended by Met Opera after sexual abuse accusations.
DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS?
Coco screenings remove aggravating Frozen short from the film.
This Star Wars coat costs $1,300.
Sphinx from set of 1923 film The Ten Commandments unearthed in California.
STAY TUNED
On Fox News:
Fox & Friends, 6 a.m. ET: We'll look at how the tax reform bill could impact the health care system; House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy weighs in on the GOP chances of passing tax reform by Christmas; legal scholar Alan Dershowitz on whether President Trump could face obstruction charges in the Russia investigation; Counselor to President Trump Kellyanne Conway takes on the latest developments in the Russian collusion and Clinton email scandals; and we celebrate veteran-owned businesses, starting with Bottle Breacher.
The Story with Martha MacCallum, 7 p.m. ET: The six officers acquitted in the Freddie Gray case are back at work. The father of one of the officers speaks exclusively to Martha.
Hannity, 9 p.m. ET: Newt Gingrich sounds off on an apparently pro-Hillary FBI investigator's role in the Clinton email investigation and dismissal from the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia collusion probe.
On Fox Business:
Mornings with Maria, 6 a.m. ET: Kiron Skinner, Fox News foreign policy analyst, on the next step for the Trump administration in handling North Korea; Rep. Peter King, Congressman on the impact of the tax reform bill; and former Whitewater Independent Counsel Robert Ray on what Michael Flynn's plea deal means for the Trump administration and the Russian collusion case.
Varney & Co., 9 a.m. ET: Rep. Steve King on the future of "Kate's Law" following the not guilty verdict in the Kate Steinle murder trial.
After the Bell, 4 p.m. ET: Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform president, on what lawmakers need to do to pass the landmark legislation.
On Fox News Radio:
The Fox News Rundown podcast: Fox News Radio has launched the Fox News Rundown! This long-form podcast features insights from top newsmakers, along with reporters and contributors from across all Fox News Channel platforms. All episodes of this podcast can be found at: www.foxnewsrundown.com. Want it sent straight to your mobile device? Subscribe through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher.
The Brian Kilmeade Show, 9 am to Noon ET: Columnist Andrew McCarthy on Michael Flynn's plea deal; Rep. Rod Blum talks tax reform; Amb. John Bolton on what's next in handling North Korea.
#OnThisDay
1991: Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, the longest held of the Western hostages in Lebanon, is released after nearly seven years in captivity.
1956: Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins gather for the first and only time for a jam session at Sun Records in Memphis.
1945: The Senate approves U.S. participation in the United Nations by a vote of 65-7.
Thank you for joining us on Fox News First! Enjoy your day and we'll see you in your inbox first thing Tuesday morning.
Oregon cops are hunting for a female inmate who fled from her work crew in a brazen escape early Monday, officials said.
Lorrie Marie Hocker, 42, was riding with other minimum-custody inmates to a job in Salem from the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility when she opened a door and fled, the Oregon Department of Corrections said in a news release.
Hocker was admitted to the facility on Sept. 12 on counts of coercion and felony assault, the agency said.
Hocker, who has blue eyes and brown hair, was last seen wearing blue jeans with the word "inmate" stenciled on the knee in orange, a blue T-shirt, sweatshirt and a coat similarly stenciled with "inmate." She is is 5-foot-3 and weighs 145 pounds, according to officials.
She also has several tattoos on her wrist and chest.
Oregon DOC spokeswoman Betty Bernt told the Oregonian guards did not attempt to stop Hocker.
"If there are other inmates in the vehicle they wouldn't pursue that individual automatically," Bernt told the newspaper.
Hocker has a prior criminal record, serving 48 months in prison in Montana for exploitation of an older person, according to prison records.
U.S. immigration authorities detained last week an illegal Mexican immigrant after he was featured in newspapers following his girlfriends immigration arrest in June.
Baltazar "Rosas" Aburto Gutierrez, who has lived in the country for 18 years, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last Monday after he talked about his girlfriends arrest with the local Chinook Observer and The Seattle Times.
The girlfriend, who is also his childrens mother, was detained when she took their children to meet someone interested in the ad about a homemade pinata she was selling. The meeting turned out to be a sting by immigration authorities and she was arrested.
Guttierez said the authorities walked her home so she can drop off the kids with him before taking her away. He claims to have told the ICE agents Why you don't take us all?" as he was illegally in the U.S. as well. The woman has since been deported and lives in Mexico with their children.
Their story was featured prominently in multiple newspapers, portraying the increased deportation efforts under the Trump administration and a crackdown on illegal immigrants who have not committed other crimes.
Speaking from the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Gutierrez told the Times that he was arrested last week in Ocean Shores, where he lives and works as clamdigger. My supervisor asked me to come find you because of what appeared in the newspaper, he said an ICE agent told him.
ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley said the agency does not retaliate, but declined to comment on Gutierrez's case.
"ICE conducts targeted immigration enforcement in compliance with federal law and agency policy, and at times, exercises prosecutorial discretion when the circumstances of a particular case have extenuating factors like the care of minor children or an alien's medical condition," the statement read, adding that "This does not mean an alien is exempt from future immigration enforcement.
Legal advisors for immigrants said Gutierrez could potentially argue that ICE violated his free speech rights because he was arrested after speaking out. "It certainly is troubling," Northwest Immigrant Rights Project legal director Matt Adams told the Times.
Gutierrez said he cannot afford the $25,000 bond and has not yet been given a court date. His girlfriend, speaking from Mexico, said the arrest is putting the family in jeopardy as he was sending his earnings to them.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The family of Kate Steinle reportedly asked San Francisco to remove a small memorial that was set up Friday at Pier 14 in memory of their daughter after its ties to a self-proclaimed alt-right group were discovered.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the makeshift memorialwhich was located where Steinle was shot-- consisted of about 50 candles and flowers. The family had expressed concerns that her death was being politicized, The San Francisco Examiner reported.
The Steinle family placed a request with the Mayors Office for the bench to remain as it was intended a simple memorial in recognition of Kate and her spirit, Deirdre Hussey, a mayoral spokeswoman, said in a statement to The Examiner. However, we do have a city policy in place in regards to active memorials that Public Works enforced.
The memorial started to grow after a San Francisco jury acquitted Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, who has been deported five times and was wanted for a sixth deportation when Steinle was shot.
Before the shooting, he had finished a federal prison sentence for illegal re-entry to the United States and had been transferred to San Francisco's jail in March 2015 to face a 20-year-old charge for selling marijuana.
The sheriff's department released him a few days after prosecutors dropped the marijuana charge, despite a request from federal officials to detain him for deportation.
The story dominated conservative talk radio, but also had Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, saying San Francisco was wrong to let Garcia Zarate go free.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump repeatedly referenced the Steinle shooting and vowed to crack down on sanctuary cities. His administration has moved to restrict funding from such cities, but judges have blocked those attempts.
Supporters of sanctuary policies say they improve public safety by allowing immigrants to cooperate with police without fear. They also say detaining people without a warrant just so immigration officials can pick them up is unconstitutional.
Whoever put that up didnt influence what we did, we just followed our procedure, Rachel Gordon, a Department of Public Works spokeswoman, told The Examiner.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
The Latest on President Donald Trump's plan to scale back national monuments (all times local):
5:55 p.m.
Environmental groups are suing to block President Donald Trump's decision to scale back a national monument in Utah just hours after the decision was announced.
The lawsuit filed Monday by Earthjustice on behalf of several groups challenges the reduction of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which has been a source of Republican frustration since it was created by Bill Clinton in 1996.
The monument near the Arizona border contains a rich cache of dinosaur fossils and vast coal reserves.
Trump said in Salt Lake City that Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument will be reduced by half, from nearly 3,000 square miles (7,770 square kilometers) to 1,569 square miles (4,064 square kilometers).
He also reduced Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. A coalition of American Indian tribes plans to sue over that decision.
___
4:20 p.m.
Native American leaders say President Donald Trump's move to shrink Utah's Bears Ears National Monument is another insult, one they're vowing to fight in court.
Navajo Nation Vice President Jonathan Nez noted Monday that Trump's move comes a week after he referred to a Democratic senator he doesn't like as "Pocahontas." He says the administration doesn't respect indigenous people.
Trump said in a speech Monday that many native people support the move. Nez called that event "a circus."
Representatives from the five tribes who advocated for creation of the monument said Trump decided to reduce it without meeting with them, despite multiple requests.
Zuni councilman Carleton Bowekaty called the move an illegal and shameful attack on tribes.
Shaun Chapoose with the Ute Tribe says Trump's decision benefits "a few powerful Utah politicians."
___
3:30 p.m.
The Republican chairman of House Natural Resources Committee is applauding President Donald Trump for reversing what he called "abuses" of the Antiquities Act by former Democratic presidents.
Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah says proclamations that Trump signed Monday shrinking Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments "are a first step toward protecting identified antiquities without disenfranchising the local people who work and manage these areas.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats says Trump is undermining "the preservation of some of this country's most important national monuments" by removing protections for more than 2 million acres (3,125 square miles) of public lands.
The lawmakers say the lands "will now be put at risk of desecration and looting."
___
3:25 p.m.
Demonstrators are blocking traffic on a major Salt Lake City street during a visit by President Donald Trump as they protest reductions to two national monuments in Utah.
The largely peaceful crowd that lined up near the state Capitol for hours in the snow Monday morning started marching downtown as Trump finished announcing the cuts to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
The crowd of about 3,000 protesters carried signs saying "Protect Utah's Wild Lands" and chanting "Lock him up." They took to the streets after some took a knee, thumped their chests in unison and turned their backs.
Riot police earlier cleared protesters from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Welfare Square.
Meanwhile, Mayor Jackie Biskupski tweeted a list of things Trump should target instead, including carbon emissions.
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2:45 p.m.
President Donald Trump has signed proclamations to formally scale back two sprawling national monuments in Utah: Bears Ears and Grand-Staircase Escalante.
Trump traveled to Salt Lake City to make the announcement and sign the declarations. The move is supported by Utah's top Republican officials but opposed by tribes and environmental groups.
Trump said in a speech Monday at the Utah State Capitol that past presidential administrations had "severely abused" the purpose and spirt of a federal law that allows them to protect public lands by turning them into national monuments.
Trump says his action means that "public lands will once again be for public use."
__
2:30 p.m.
Roughly 2,000 demonstrators are lined up near the Utah State Capitol protesting President Donald Trump's announcement reducing two national monuments in Utah.
The vocal group gathered in wintry weather Monday morning held signs like "Keep your tiny hands off our public lands" and chanted "Lock him up."
Navajo protester and University of Utah student Shaniah Chee says wood-gathering in the area is essential to her tribe's traditions. She calls the reduction a major loss.
A handful of counter-protesters also gathered to support Trump and the decision to scale back the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalate national monuments. Jason Lutu of Lehi works in construction and says he's in favor of potential drilling or mining that could create jobs.
__
2:15 p.m.
President Donald Trump says he's encouraging 83-year-old Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah to run for re-election.
Hatch joined Trump on a visit Monday to Salt Lake City. When Trump was asked if he wants Hatch to run for an eighth term in 2018, he replied, "Yes."
Trump made the comments while touring a food distribution center run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Hatch has not publicly declared his plans.
___
1:55 p.m.
President Donald Trump is meeting with Mormon leaders during a trip to Utah to announce he's scaling back two sprawling national monuments.
Trump on Monday visited Welfare Square, a complex in Salt Lake City run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that provides aid to the poor.
Trump spoke briefly and publicly praised the church for the way it takes care of people.
The Republican president traveled west to announce his intention to shrink the Bears Ears and the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments spanning millions of acres in Utah. He has condemned the act of creating the Utah monuments as a "massive federal land grab."
The move is welcomed by the state's top Republicans but opposed by Native American tribes and environmental groups.
___
1:05 p.m.
President Donald Trump has arrived in Utah to announce that he is scaling back two sprawling national monuments in a move welcomed by the state's top Republicans but opposed by Native American tribes and environmental groups.
Trump landed in Salt Lake City late Monday morning. He was accompanied on Air Force One by Utah Republican senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
The president traveled west to announce his intention to shrink the Bears Ears and the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments spanning millions of acres in Utah. The two monuments were among 27 that Trump ordered Zinke to review earlier this year.
Trump will also meet with leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints while he is in Utah.
___
9:45 a.m.
President Donald Trump says his plan to scale back two national monuments in Utah is an important move for "state's rights" as well as for the people of Utah.
Trump commented Monday as he left the White House for a trip to Salt Lake City, where he was outlining his intention to shrink the Bears Ears and the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. Both monuments span millions of acres in Utah and are among 27 national monuments that Trump ordered his Interior Secretary to review earlier this year.
Trump previously had condemned the act of creating the Utah monuments as a "massive federal land grab."
Utah Republican leaders had complained that the monuments locked up too much federal land.
Both monuments were created by Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
___
1:20 a.m.
President Donald Trump is outlining his plans to scale back two sprawling national monuments in Utah, responding to what he has condemned as a "massive federal land grab" by the government.
Trump is traveling to Salt Lake City on Monday to announce his intention to shrink the Bears Ears and the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments spanning millions of acres in Utah. The two national monuments are among 27 that Trump ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review earlier this year.
Utah's Republican leaders pressed Trump to launch the review, saying the monuments declared by Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton locked up too much federal land.
The planned changes have angered tribes and environmentalist groups who have vowed to sue to preserve the monuments.
A married high school teacher in Maine pleaded not guilty Monday to sex charges after she was accused of sleeping with a 17-year-old student.
Jill Lamontagne, 29, of Kennebunk, pleaded not guilty to 14 charges, including six counts of gross sexual assault, two counts of unlawful sexual contact and six counts of sexual abuse of a minor, according to The Portland Press Herald.
Lamontagne was indicted in October and turned herself into authorities. The teacher allegedly had a relationship with a male student who was in her health class at Kennebunk High School at the time of their sexual contact.
MARRIED MAINE TEACHER INDICTED FOR MULTIPLE SEX ROMPS WITH STUDENT WHO TRIED TO COMMIT SUICIDE
Mrs. Lamontagne categorically denies the charges, Lamontagnes lawyer, Scott Gardner, said following the indictment, Seacoast Online reported. These allegations arise from a high school rumor which consisted of the fantasies of an emotionally troubled senior at Kennebunk High School. None of this is true.
The alleged relationship between Lamontagne and the student was revealed when the student was hospitalized following a suspected suicide attempt.
The student reportedly ingested a concoction of ibuprofen, Tylenol, cold medicine and blood thinner Warfarin.
The boy confessed to the relationship to his aunt a day after his hospitalization. The student and his teacher had sexual contact numerous times, in the classroom, at her house, in her car, the students mother wrote. The student said Lamontagne performed oral sex on him, adding that other stuff happened.
The student reportedly told his mother and a nurse at the hospital that he loved Lamontagne and took the mixture of medicines to attempt suicide.
The teacher was placed on administrative leave in June and later resigned in September.
PREP SCHOOL TEACHER, 28, HAD 'SEX IN THE PARK' WITH 16-YEAR-OLD BOY STUDENT, POLICE SAY
According to the Press Herald, its a class-C felony under state law for teachers or adults to have sexual contact with someone they have supervisory authority over.
Class-C crimes reportedly carry a maximum prison sentence of five years and/or a $5,000 fine.
Lamontagne is scheduled to appear in court on March 8 for a dispositional conference.
A New York man was arrested Saturday after he allegedly bit the eye out of his family's Shih Tzu, officials announced Monday.
The Nassau County SPCA said in a news release 20-year-old Aaron Kluger of Port Washington, on Long Island, was arrested after an investigation by detectives.
Officials said the incident happened on Nov. 6, when the 3-year-old dog named Chloe was taken to an animal hospital with a "serious eye injury."
After Chloe was examined by a veterinarian, it was determined the dog's right eye was bitten out and the SPCA was notified.
The dog later received surgery to reattach her right eye.
"At this time, with proper care and treatment, the veterinarian is hopeful her eye will be saved," the SPCA said.
An SPCA spokesperson told Newsday the 20-year-old was arrested based on information given to the animal hospital by a family member who brought the dog in.
Kluger is due in court again on Dec. 27 to appear on a misdemeanor charge, according to the SPCA.
As authorities in Tampa announced the arrest of a suspected serial killer last week, hearing-impaired people tuning into the news conference got quite a different message from an American Sign Language interpreter.
Instead of getting a rundown from Tampa Police Chief Brian Dugan on the timeline of the four shootings and what led up to the arrest of 24-year-old Howell Emanuel Donaldson III, interpreter Derlyn Roberts made signs that were gibberish, according to those who watched in confusion.
"She sat up there and waved her arms like she was singing Jingle Bells," Rachell Settambrino, who is deaf and teaches American Sign Language at the University of South Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times through an interpreter.
Among the things Roberts signed, according to Settambrino, were the following: "Fifty-one hours ago, zero 12 22 (indecipherable) murder three minutes in 14 weeks ago in old (indecipherable) murder four five 55,000 plea 10 arrest murder bush (indecipherable) three age 24."
But Dugan was instead describing how his agency received around 5,000 tips before the 24-year-old's arrest.
"I was disappointed, confused, upset and really want to know why the city of Tampas chief of police who is responsible for my safety and the safety of the entire community did not check her out," Settambrino told the newspaper.
City officials were just as puzzled by the interpreter.
TAMPA SERIAL KILLER SUSPECT USED SAME GUN IN 4 KILLINGS, POLICE SAY
Tampa Police Department spokeswoman Janelle McGregor told FOX13 Tampa in a statement officials are conducting an internal review because they didn't request an interpreter for the Nov. 28 news conference, and are trying to figure out "if someone requested that she attend or exactly who sent her to provide services."
Settambrino said Florida, unlike some other states, does not require ASL interpreters to be certified through the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, a national nonprofit that "seeks to uphold standards, ethics, and professionalism" for the field, according to its website.
Florida law says only that ASL interpreters have to be "qualified,"
The incident is the latest example of an apparently unqualified signer appearing at news conferences. In September, as Hurricane Irma approached Florida and officials announced a mandatory evacuation, an interpreter in nearby Manatee County began signing words like "pizza," ''monster" and "bear," along with other gibberish.
Manatee County officials later said they were in a pinch and called on a county employee who had an understanding of sign language because he communicates with his deaf brother. However, it quickly became apparent he was in over his head. The deaf community demanded an apology and the video of the news conference went viral.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who declined to make a wedding cake for a same-sex ceremony.
The case Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission asked the high court to balance the religious rights of the baker against the couples right to equal treatment under the law. Similar disputes have popped up across the U.S.
The decision to take on the case reflected renewed energy among the court's conservative justices, whose ranks have recently been bolstered by the addition of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the high court.
Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., declined to make a cake for the wedding celebration of two gay men in 2012. Phillips told the couple that he would make a birthday cake but could not make a cake that would promote same-sex marriage due to his religious beliefs.
July 2012
Shopping for a cake for their upcoming wedding and celebration, couple David Mullins and Charlie Craig stopped into Masterpiece Cakeshop.
Jack Phillips, the bakerys owner, informed the couple that he did not provide cakes for same-sex weddings and celebrations due to his religious beliefs.
What should have been a joyous occasion had turned into a humiliating occasion, Deborah Munn, the mother of Craig, wrote in a blog post for the American Civil Liberties Union about the experience.
The ACLU of Colorado represented the same-sex couple in their complaint against Phillips.
December 2013
Judge Robert Spencer of the Colorado Office of Administrative Courts decided in line with the Colorado Civil Rights Division (CCRD) that the bakeshop had violated a Colorado law which prohibits businesses from refusing service due to a persons sexual orientation.
Masterpiece Cakeshop appealed the decision.
May 2014
The Colorado Civil Rights Commission decided at a public hearing that Masterpiece had violated Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act, or CADA.
COLORADO BAKER RECEIVES DEATH THREATS AND HATE FOR REFUSING TO MAKE GAY WEDDING CAKE
Phillips was ordered to change its company policies as well as offer comprehensive staff training to employees. The cake shop was also required to provide quarterly reports about how it handled prospective customers.
August 2015
The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Phillips cannot cite his religious beliefs in his refusal to provide a service to same-sex couples.
With the ruling, Phillips could face a penalty if he continues to deny wedding cakes to same-sex couples.
April 2016
The Colorado Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal from Phillips.
July 2016
On behalf of Phillips, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal nonprofit, petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case.
SUPREME COURT IS IN SESSION WITH GORSUCH ON BOARD, GAY WEDDING CAKE CASE ON DECK
We are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to ensure that government understands that its duty is to protect the peoples freedom to follow their beliefs personally and professionally, not force them to violate those beliefs as the price of earning a living, ADF senior counsel Jeremy Tedesco said in a statement at the time.
June 2017
The Supreme Court agreed to consider the case during its next term, which began in the fall.
June 2018
The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop.
"The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect gay persons and gay couples in the exercise of their civil rights, but religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression," the Court said in its decision. "While it is unexceptional that Colorado law can protect gay persons in acquiring products and services on the same terms and conditions as are offered to other members of the public, the law must be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion."
Justice Anthony Kennedy said when the Colorado Civil Rights Commission made its decision "it did not do so with the religious neutrality that the Constitution requires." The opinion says the Commission "violated the Free Exercise Clause, and its order must be set aside."
In its decision, the Supreme Court did not decide whether a business has the right to refuse to serve gay and lesbian people outright.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, two of the Court's more liberal justices, dissented.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
In a year when even the pews of a church proved to be no sanctuary from a killer's aim, an Indiana congregation is planning a special training session Monday that organizers hope will protect people across the region in the event of another mass shooting.
The First Bible Apostolic Church in Indianapolis will host be hosting pastors from around the state, as well as from Ohio, with the goal of learning what to do if an active shooter decides to target their places of worship.
Weve got to be prepared for every situation, Ben Smith, an assistant pastor at the church and the events organizer, told FOX59. We dont know whats going to happen.
The session comes a month after 26 people were shot and killed in Texas when a gunman opened fire inside the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs.
TEXAS MASSACRE: CAN CHURCHES BE PROTECTED FROM MASS SHOOTERS?
Smith said as recently as five years ago, no one would have ever thought of having a seminar like this for a church.
Im looking to get out of it something that we havent thought of before, he said. some type of training that maybe they can give.
Officers from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department will conduct the training, which Smith hopes will include guidance on everything from securing doors to carrying firearms.
I want our folks and folks who come to visit here to feel safe, to know theres something in place and you can come here and worship and you can also be safe while youre here, he told FOX59.
News / National
by Staff reporter
African Union Ambassador to the United States, Dr. Arikana Chihombori Quao, says there was no coup in Zimbabwe as the military used a provision of the nation's constitution to avert a political crisis.Dr. Chihombori Quao, who made these remarks at a townhall meeting titled 'Zimbabwe: The Way Forward' convened by VOA Studio 7 in Washington DC last Thursday, said the Zimbabwe Defence Forces did not violate the constitution when they forced the removal of former President Robert Mugabe."They acted within the constitution to do that. So, there was no coup but there was a provision within the constitution for the army to do that because of the conditions on the ground at that time and they moved in swiftly according to the constitution and address the issue," she said.Dr. Chihombori Quao stressed that the Africa Union is proud of Zimbabweans, who ensured that there was peace while power was being transferred from Mugabe to current president Emmerson Mnangagwa, who fled to South Africa after he was sacked by the then president for alleged disloyalty."We are so glad that Zimbabwe has set an example for Africa how we don't kill each other. There was no looting, there was no killing. It was a peaceful transition and it's a good day, it's a new day in Zimbabwe From the African Union side we are very proud and pleased that Africa in general and Zimbabwe is leading the way that we have matured as communities from a political point of view. So, yes Zimbabwe is a success story and I reiterate there was no coup."Her views were echoed by Zanu PF activist, Dr. Frenk Guni, who said his party is pleased that President Mnangagwa is the new leader of the party following serious internal divisions pitting the so-called Generation 40, which wanted former First Lady Grace Mugabe to succeed her husband and another one said to be led by the current president.Dr. Guni, who was a panelist together with Dr. Chihombori Quao, Den Moyo of the Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai and Rutendo Mudzamiri of Women to Watch Network, said the military acted diligently in averting a national crisis."There were some people who were supporting Grace Mugabe and when we realized that the people in the G40 led by Dr. Grace Mugabe were diverting from the fundamental principles of our party we took corrective measures and that has been addressed. It's going to be a thing of the past. We are democratizing our party (and) even people who were in the G40 they are being welcomed back into the party provided they are willing to tow the party line."Some G40 members, including former Finance Minister Ignatius Chombo, Zanu PF Youth League secretary Kudzanyi Chipanga and several others are appearing in court facing various charges ranging from corruption to undermining the authority of General Constantino Chiwenga, who masterminded the military intervention.Others like former Higher Education Minister Professor Jonathan Moyo and former Local Government Minister Saviour Kasukuwere, who are said to be architects of the G40 succession plan, are in exile.The Zimbabwe Defence Force cited Section 211 of the country's constitution for interfering in the political processes of the ruling Zanu PF party, which it claimed were likely to spark public discontent.Section 211 stipulates that "the function of the Defence Forces is to protect Zimbabwe, its people, its national security and interests and its territorial integrity and to uphold this Constitution.""You can see the change as it happening right now. The way forward for Zimbabwe from a Zanu PF perspective is number one economic recovery, addressing our economic fundamentals to ensure that we put in place sound economic policies that attract investment and ensuring that things like property rights are protected and investors are welcome in Zimbabwe to do business Improve the issue of doing business with Zimbabwe."The second thing that the new government and the new Zanu PF is going to do is to ensure that there is affordable access to health care for all Zimbabweans. We are no longer going to see a situation where Zimbabweans have to go to board planes and cross borders to look for health care."But Moyo immediately shot back saying Zanu PF is always fond of making such statements, which were not beneficial to Zimbabweans."We have held these conferences over and over for a very long time and every time the Zanu PF people come here and say 'we will do this, we will do that' and then drink tea and walk away and nothing happens, it's always been the same. When are we going as Zimbabwean as a people going to accept that this is not working. We cannot continue doing the same thing all the time over and over and expect a different result. Einstein called that insanity."Mudzamiri chided both MDC-T and Zanu PF for not fully engaging youth in Zimbabwe saying young people want to participate in political processes without coercion."We need to know the power of our voice and we need to be willing not to be all talk but to be open to what MDC has to offer, to what Zanu PF has to offer and take everything with a pinch of salt At least take everything with an open mind so that we are not just going to say 'yes' to everything because we have seen and attended Africa Union meetings, we have seen what SADC (Southern African Development Community) can do, we have seen what the United Nations can do but as young people are we willing to be that change that we want to see and not take everything at face value because it's not going to be enough for us to take what unfortunately I see as a sided view where African Union is concerned. It's true that there have more factual things Arikana is saying but it's also not true to push propaganda because for so many years that what we have received as young people."She said young people should be respected if Zimbabwe, other nations and the African Union have to work hand in hand with them."I am saying we are tired, we are frustrated, we are angry and we don't want to be taking that (propaganda) All talk no action, everything good on paper As young people we just need a progressive administration whether it's Grace Mugabe, President Mnangagwa, whether it's Zanu PF, whether it's MDC or anybody. We just need progressive administrations. Why do I say so? We need respect where rule of law is concerned, we need respect where human rights are concerned, we need free and fair elections, we need to make sure there is freedom of the press. Our platform as young people is social media. Are we having that freedom?"Several people took turns at the townhall meeting to question the panel with some expressing reservations over the current government led by Mnangagwa, saying it looks like an appendage of the Mugabe regime, which has been blamed for ruining a once vibrant economy.Mugabe always blamed the West for the southern nation's economic downturn claiming that sanctions imposed on him and his inner circle were to blame for the serious social, economic and political problems in Zimbabwe.
The United States and South Korea have started their biggest-ever joint air force exercise with hundreds of aircrafts including two dozen stealth jets.
South Korea's defense ministry said Monday the five-day drill called Vigilant Ace will improve their capabilities in wartime.
The U.S. 7th Air Force deployed major strategic military assets including six F-22 and 18 F-35 stealth fighter jets for the regular exercise in the Korean Peninsula. About 12,000 U.S. military personnel are participating.
It takes places a week after North Korea test-launched its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile that puts most of the U.S. within range.
On Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham said it is time for U.S. military families in South Korea to leave the country because the conflict with North Korea is getting close.
France's first baby panda has a name at last, bestowed by Chinese dignitaries and French first lady Brigitte Macron.
The 4-month-old male cub is called Yuan Meng, which means "the realization of a wish" or "accomplishment of a dream."
Monday's naming ceremony at the Beauval Zoo south of Paris was an important diplomatic moment, involving Chinese officials who flew in from Beijing for the event. The cub's parents are on loan to Beauval from China, and the cub will be sent to a Chinese panda reserve when it is weaned.
Tradition holds that panda cubs born in captivity are named by China. Brigitte Macron considered the panda's "godmother" officially announced the name.
There are only about 1,800 pandas in the wild in China and about 400 in captivity worldwide.
U.S. opposition to an independence referendum by Iraqi Kurds will not break a long-standing alliance between the stateless community and the United States, the Kurdish prime minister says.
While Washington opposed the September 2017 referendum for independence, Kurdish Prime Minister Nechiravan Barzani insisted that the people of Kurdistan still see America as their No. 1 partner and have hope the U.S. will come to endorse their ongoing dream of independence.
There was disappointment among the Kurdish people; the people of Kurdistan have had high expectations from the United States and they believe that the values the U.S. cherishes, we also cherish, Barzani told Fox News in an exclusive interview last week in his office.
But the people of Kurdistan, they still love the United States, he said. Kurds consider themselves a friend and partner to the United States. We want this to continue long term.
The U.S., joined by most of the international community, backed the Baghdad Central Government in opposing the referendum over fears the push toward independence would have potentially catastrophic consequences on the fight against ISIS and on the region as a whole, given that neighbors Iran and Turkey worry that their own significant Kurdish populations would attempt to carve out land for themselves.
Barzani noted that his peoples disappointment stemmed not only from the U.S. policy to oppose their freedom quest, but what happened next.
After the Kurds refused Baghdads insistence that the vote be canceled as unconstitutional and an antagonizing act aimed at weakening the Iraqi government, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered the army to retake disputed territories -- which the Kurdish Peshmerga had been guarding since the ISIS invasion. Iran-backed fighters known as the Popular Mobilization Units assisted the effort.
Most notably, violent tensions arose around the strategic oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Several casualties were reported on both the Peshmerga and Iraqi sides as a result of the Oct. 16 clashes, which ended when the Peshmerga withdrew.
Over 1,846 Peshmerga soldiers have sacrificed their lives and more than 10,000 were wounded fighting ISIS, Barzani said. ISIS was a threat not only to Kurdistan, but to Europe, the U.S., to humanity. Therefore, the Kurdish people were expecting that when a threat comes in, the U.S. would stand by them. They were not expecting that American tanks given to the Iraq government would be used against them by the Popular Mobilization Units.
Iraqi officials have denied that the Iranian-backed forces have possession over any U.S.-issued tanks or weaponry or that they were used against the Kurds.
Barzani also contended that it was never his governments intention to control or grab Kirkuk or the disputed territories from the Iraqi government. He said the Peshmerga forces went there in 2014 as the ISIS threat loomed at the behest of Abadis predecessor, Nouri al-Malaki.
The fact is neither Baghdad nor Erbil had full control over these areas, Barzani said, stressing that the issues should have been addressed in accordance with the constitution and not by military pressure.
ISIS CURSED, MOCKED IN MOSUL, WHERE OLD CITY REMAINS A HAUNTED WASTELAND
ISIS SEXUAL VIOLENCE VICTIMS: MINORITIES TARGETED MORE THAN DOCUMENTED, FACE HONOR KILLINGS IF RETURNED
LOVE, AMERICAN STYLE: IRAQ'S KURDS FANS OF ALL THINGS US, BUSH
The prime minister said Iraqs military action in response to the referendum, which included shutting down the regions two international airports, was never anticipated.
What we saw was a very peaceful experience of people to express their right to self-determination by putting their finger in the ink and voting, while the reaction from Baghdad was to use force, Barzani said. We have made it clear we want to address all these issues through dialogue with Baghdad, but they have not yet shown their readiness for this.
Barzani who is currently at the helm of the autonomous region after his uncle Masoud Barzani stepped down as president in the weeks after the referendum welcomed a deeper involvement by the U.S. to resolve the issue, but maintained that they have no regrets about holding the referendum.
I dont believe anyone here, any political party, thinks they made a mistake or they did something wrong. What we have seen was a democratic process, he said. It was an expression of will, not less, not more.
The long-awaited Sept. 25 vote of which more than 92 percent of some 8 million Iraqi Kurds voted yes to part ways with the Baghdad government was non-binding in that unilateral succession would not immediately take place. Iraqi Kurds hoped it would prompt negotiations for eventual separation.
While it remains to be seen when and how Kurdish aspirations for an independent state will now move forward some analysts suggest it is in tatters and U.S. officials have doubled down on the long-held policy to support a federal, prosperous, unified and democratic Iraq Barzani said they remain committed to the process and are still hopeful for American backing.
We have to look at Iraq very realistically, he said. For those who talk about a strong, centralized Iraq we have seen that doesnt work. The most important point for Iraq and what the international community wants to see in Iraq is stability, which means we should find a model that all communities in Iraq can agree upon and can be sustained.
He added, Our position after the referendum is to address our problems with Baghdad on the basis of the constitution. But our right to self-determination will remain as it is. This is a new era and we hope the American people will come to support our cause.
Kosovo's government has decided to reopen a parliamentary debate on a border demarcation deal with Montenegro.
A government statement issued on Monday said the Cabinet decided to seek ratification of the border deal in Parliament, where it lacked sufficient support for approval earlier this year and led to a no-confidence vote for the coalition leading the country at the time.
The opposition, of which Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj's party was a member, claimed the deal signed in 2015 would cost Kosovo territory. The previous Cabinet, international experts and Western backers of the agreement disputed the claim.
The European Union insists Kosovo must approve the border demarcation deal before its citizens enjoy visa-free travel within the Schengen zone.
Montenegro recognizes Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia, which Serbia vehemently opposes.
The Latest on tensions over North Korea's nuclear and missile programs (all times local):
9 p.m.
NATO's chief is warning that war on the Korean Peninsula would be catastrophic and says the military alliance has the means to respond to missile and nuclear strikes if they are launched.
North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile last week that some observers say would be able to strike the United States.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday that "war in that region would be catastrophic and it would have global consequences."
He said the 29-country alliance "is strong, and united, and NATO is able to respond to any attack, including ballistic and nuclear attacks."
Stoltenberg added that NATO "will continue to put maximum pressure on North Korea. We will continue to deliver credible deterrence and ... work with our partners in the region."
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11 a.m.
Hundreds of aircraft including two dozen stealth jets began training Monday as the United States and South Korea launched a massive combined air force exercise. The war games come a week after North Korea test-fired its most powerful missile ever, an ICBM that may be able to target the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The five-day drill, which is called Vigilant Ace, is meant to improve the allies' wartime capabilities and preparedness, South Korea's defense ministry said.
The U.S. Seventh Air Force sent major strategic military assets, including an unusually large number of the latest generations of stealth fighter jets, for the annual training in the Korean Peninsula. In total, 230 aircraft will be flying at eight U.S. and South Korean military installations in the South.
Ten people were arrested in connection with the car bombing of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, Malta's prime minister announced Monday.
Joseph Muscat said eight Maltese citizens were arrested on Monday morning, given a "reasonable suspicion" of their involvement in Caruana Galizia's Oct. 16 slaying. Later, he tweeted two others had been arrested, but didn't cite their nationality.
Police sources said the other two are also Maltese.
Overall, Muscat gave almost no details, citing concerns any information could compromise prospects to prosecute the case.
The investigation appeared to be continuing, as police had cordoned off an area in Marsa, a small town close to Valletta, the capital.
The arrests, made in an operation coordinated among the Police Corps, the Armed Forces of Malta and the Security Services, were the first known break in the investigation of the murder that's drawn widespread outrage and condemnation.
FOREIGN EXPERTS TO HELP MALTA PROBE CAR BOMBING OF REPORTER
Investigators have 48 hours to question the suspects to decide whether to seek charges, in accordance with Maltese law.
Galizia, whose reporting focused heavily on corruption on the EU island nation, was killed when a bomb destroyed her car as she was driving near her home.
Just before her death, Galizia, 53, had posted on her closely followed blog, Running Commentary, there were "crooks everywhere" in Malta.
In addition, the Guardian reported Galizias family had taken legal action against the Maltese police force and asked for the chief police investigator in the case, Silvio Valletta, to be removed from the investigation because he is married to a top government minister. Both were subjects of Caruana Galizias critical reporting. The police have not responded to the legal claim.
The journalist focused her reporting for years on investigating political corruption and scandals, and reported on Maltese mobsters and drug trafficking. She also wrote about Maltese links to the so-called Panama Papers leaks about offshore financial havens.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis arrived in Pakistan Monday to meet with top leaders and seek common ground on the counterterrorism fight, amid Trump administration calls for Islamabad to more aggressively go after the insurgents moving back and forth across the border with Afghanistan.
Mattis said he wants to work with Pakistan to address the problems, adding that the U.S. is committed to a pragmatic relationship that expands cooperation while also "reinforcing President Trump's call for action against terrorist safe havens."
"We have heard from Pakistan leaders that they do not support terrorism. So I expect to see that sort of action reflected in their policies," Mattis told reporters traveling with him in the Middle East before his trip to Islamabad.
Mattis is expected to meet with Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, as well as the U.S. embassy team. He was greeted at the airport by U.S. Ambassador David Hale and senior Pakistani military leaders.
Asked if he was going to press the Pakistani leaders to take more action against the insurgents, Mattis said: "That's not the way I deal with issues. I believe that we work hard on finding the common ground and then we work together."
Mattis' optimism, however, comes despite persistent U.S. assertions that Islamabad is still not doing enough to battle the Taliban and allied Haqqani network insurgents within its borders.
Since the start of the war in Afghanistan, militants in Pakistan have crossed the mountainous and ill-defined border to wage attacks against U.S., Afghan and allied forces. They then would return to their safe havens in Pakistan, where they have had a long-standing relationship with the ISI, Islamabad's intelligence agency.
In a blunt assessment early last week, Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said there have been no changes in Pakistan's support for militant networks.
He said Pakistani leaders went to Kabul and met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
"They identified certain steps that they were going to take. We've not yet seen those steps play out," Nicholson told reporters in a recent briefing.
The U.S., he said, has been very direct about what it expects Pakistan to do in the fight against the Taliban.
"We're hoping to see those changes," he said. "We're hoping to work together with the Pakistanis going forward to eliminate terrorists who are crossing" between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The White House, meanwhile, condemned Pakistan's release late last month of a U.S.-wanted militant as a "step in the wrong direction" and warned that it could harm Islamabad's relations with the U.S. and its reputation around the world.
In August, the United States said it would hold up $255 million in military assistance for Pakistan until it cracks down on extremists threatening Afghanistan.
President Donald Trump's tough words about Pakistan as he unveiled the updated U.S. strategy for the war in Afghanistan, infuriated Islamabad and triggered anti-U.S. protests there that Pakistani police had to use tear gas to disperse
Pakistani Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif said during a visit to Washington in October that Pakistan was willing to cooperate fully with the Trump administration. He said Pakistan had wiped out militant hideouts with little help from the U.S.
Mattis' trip to Pakistan comes at the end of a short trip to the region, including stops in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait.
Argentina's navy says that U.S and Russian ships carrying remotely operated vehicles capable of deep seafloor searches are joining other vessels hunting for an Argentine submarine that went missing in the South Atlantic 19 days ago.
Navy spokesman Enrique Balbi said Monday that Russia's Yantar oceanographic research ship will arrive to the search area Tuesday. The U.S. Atlantis research vessel is expected to arrive Saturday.
They will join five vessels from Argentina and a Chilean ship combing the area of some 1,500 square miles (4,000 square kilometers).
An explosion occurred near the time and place where the ARA San Juan sub went missing with 44 crew members on Nov. 15. The navy says it is no longer looking for survivors although a multinational operation continues to search for the vessel.
The advanced intercontinental ballistic missile unveiled by North Korea last week is capable of reaching any major U.S. city -- and may be able to disguise itself en route to its final destination.
The Hwasong-15 rocket could be equipped to carry decoys in a bid to evade U.S. missile interceptors such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, Michael Elleman, the senior fellow for missile defense at International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Fox News.
One of the unfortunate implication of the recent test, because it is so much larger in size, it also has the capacity to carry decoys that would further confuse our missile defense. It increases the probability that it could evade THAAD, Elleman said. Whether if North Korea has tested decoys or countermeasures [is unclear] but it has throw-weight to carry simple decoys."
The decoys could be as simple as Mylar balloons that could trick the systems radars as the ICBM flies straight toward the U.S., Kingston Reif, from the Arms Control Association, told NPR.
The Hermit Kingdom released photos of the Hwasong-15, which it dubbed the greatest ICBM, a day after Wednesdays stunning middle-of-the-night launch. Photos revealed the rocket was a significant improvement from its predecessor, the Hwasong-14, launched in July.
The photographs from North Korea tells a number of things. First and foremost, it informs us that this wasnt a modified version of the Hwasong-14. It's a completely new missile, Elleman said.
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF NORTH KOREA FIRES A MISSILE AT THE US
He added the photos revealed a new mechanism for steering the missile's first stage, which could be a significant innovation.
In short, it eliminates the amount of things that could go wrong, Elleman said. It assures greater reliability.
Meanwhile, the missiles size gives it twice the thrust capability and allows it to carry a payload a warhead or any system strapped on a missile weighing at least 2,204 pounds, according to Elleman.
North Korea can certainly make a warhead small enough to fall [between 1,543 pounds and 2,204 pounds], he said. This missile has the capability to hit anywhere in the U.S. in principle.
FLIGHT CREW WITNESSED NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR MISSILE TEST, AIRLINE SAYS
North Koreas claim it now has the capability of placing a super-large nuclear warhead on an ICBM thats capable of reaching American soil has reportedly prompted the U.S. to deploy THAAD anti-ballistic missile systems along the West Coast, Reuters reported Saturday, citing congressmen Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Adam Smith, D-Wash.
The Pentagon told Fox News in a Monday statement: We have no additional information to provide.
Though it appears Kims rocket scientists have made huge strides in the regimes missile program, there are still likely more tests coming in the near future. Wednesdays launch did not survive re-entry into the Earths atmosphere a feat North Korea is working to perfect, a U.S. official told Fox News.
As for when the next missile launch will take place, it could be weeks or months, Elleman said, depending on if Kim wants to instigate the U.S. or collect data.
The fact that this was successful means that they can do a test on a normal trajectory sooner. They can do it in a matter of weeks or they can wait a certain amount of timebased on how much data they need, Elleman said.
Fox News Lucas Tomlinson contributed to this report.
Its being called a five-day show of power.
The U.S. on Monday kicked off one of the largest live fire military drills ever held in South Korea, called Vigilant Ace. It was highlighted by more than 230 aircraft including an unusually large number of the latest-generation stealth fighters, six F-22s and 18 F-35s.
In Washington D.C., the Trump administration warned the U.S. would go against North Korea alone if other nations don't step up.
"If necessary, the president and the U.S. will have to take care of it, because he has said he's not going to allow this murderous rogue regime to threaten the U.S., National Security Advisor HR McMaster told Fox News Sunday.
NATO: NORTH KOREA WAR WOULD BE CATASTROPHIC
But the Hermit Kingdom continues to deliver threats. On Sunday, North Korea called President Trump insane, adding that the latest military drills show the U.S. was begging for nuclear war.
Ceaseless large-scale war games [by the US and South Korea], North Korea state media said, [is] creating a situation that a nuclear war may break out any moment."
China is also calling on the U.S. to stop the drills, saying they won't bring North Korea back to the bargaining table.
The U.S. says these military drills, which involve a staggering 12,000 U.S. Service members, were planned in advance but the timing is certainly appropriate.
FLIGHT CREW WITNESSED NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR MISSILE TEST, AIRLINE SAYS
This past weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said it is time for U.S. military families in South Korea to leave because, in his words, conflict with North Korea could be imminent.
"We're getting close to a military conflict because North Korea's marching toward marrying up the technology of an ICBM with a nuclear weapon on top that cannot only get to America but deliver the weapon, Graham told CBS News. We're running out of time."
News / National
by Staff reporter
The quote below from @Welshman_Ncube in the @thestandardzim yesterday speaks for itself. The Coup D'etat wasn't an overnight 15 Nov affair triggered by former First Lady or propelled by the 18 Nov demos. No. It was a long planned & very sinister ZDF power grab waiting to happen! pic.twitter.com/59Y9IVQJv0 Prof Jonathan Moyo (@ProfJNMoyo) December 4, 2017
Former Higher and Tertiary Education minister Jonathan Moyo says the Zimbabwe coup d'etat was not an overnight 15 Nov affair triggered by former First Lady, Grace Mugabe, or propelled by the 18 November demonstration.Moyo wrote, "The quote below from @Welshman_Ncube in the @thestandardzim yesterday speaks for itself. The Coup D'etat wasn't an overnight 15 Nov affair triggered by former First Lady or propelled by the 18 Nov demos. No. It was a long planned & very sinister ZDF power grab waiting to happen!"Former Industry minister Welshman Ncube said Mugabe and Grace were so naive to the extent that they failed to read the signs that the security forces were being pushed to the edge."The G40 cabal saw the coup coming including Grace, the military themselves always warned, you recall General Chiwenga actually at one point, three or so months ago claimed that the gun always leads politics and Mugabe replied that politics has always led the gun in Zanu PF," the MDC leader said."You will also recall Jonathan Moyo's presentation to the politburo about state capture, that all state institutions and most state institutions, including the military had been captured to overthrow Mugabe."We just didn't believe it, but, clearly given the manner in which the coup was executed there can be no doubt that it was planned a long time ago."If you go back and read Moyo's presentation and you read President's Emerson Mnangagwa's rebuttal, you will see that everything Moyo said was correct and if you today read what President Mnangagwa said in rebuttal [it has] turned out to be false."So it's not just that Grace said it, the whole of G40 saw it, not actually did they see it, but the army itself didn't hide its determination to intervene in this thing. So it was always out there."Ncube said Mugabe may have failed to forestall the coup because he strongly believed that the military would never turn against him."Personally, I think 37 years in power and being a strong man and your word being literally the word, you tend not to believe anyone would dare," he added."I think that it was his undoing. he just thought they wouldn't dare and after the coup, he still didn't think that they would disobey him when he said, 'fine, let's go to the Zanu PF congress and do this', up to the very last minute he still thought that he had authority."University of Zimbabwe (UZ) political science lecturer Eldred Masunungure said although Mugabe was a shrewd politician, he did not foresee a military takeover."I have always referred to him as a Machiavellian political operator, who understands the logic of power and I think power tends to intoxicate its holder," he said.
A 13-year-old Texas girl who went missing late last week and was believed to have been lured from her home by an online predator was found in Mexico on Sunday, police said.
Ashlee Hattermann, of Katy, was discovered in Mexico City with help from authorities in Mexico and the FBI, the Harris County Sheriffs Office tweeted Monday.
Hattermann was reported missing on Friday after her parents found out she only attended one class at school that day, the Houston Chronicle reported.
"The last thing we heard is that she crossed the border into Mexico," Tiffany Hattermann, Ashlees mother, told the Chronicle. "We got a tip from somebody in Laredo."
Hattermann was last seen on surveillance footage with a woman at a Greyhound bus station, KHOU reported. Hattermans parents said they believed their daughter was planning to meet an older man with whom she spoke online.
The other woman Hattermann was spotted with told KHOU she was duped into purchasing a bus ticket for Hattermann, who told her she was 18 years old and visiting her boyfriend in town, and was trying to get home to her family.
We found a note in her room, Hattermans father told KHOU of the man she was suspected of meeting. She calls the guy daddy and herself baby girl. [The note read] Daddy owns my body and my soul,' over and over and over again down this sheet of paper.
The teens parents said Hattermann admitted to talking to a 29-year-old man living in Mexico. The parents said they discovered their daughter had exchanged graphic sexual images and messages through her phone by using the covert messaging apps, according to KHOU.
The Sheriffs Office, along with FBI Agents in San Antonio and Laredo, were investigating the girls disappearance during the weekend which they were treating as a runaway situation, Sheriffs Office spokesman Thomas Gilliland told the Houston Chronicle.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with Homeland Security, also joined in the search for Hattermann.
The Sheriffs Office tweeted just before 11:30 p.m. on Sunday night that Hattermann had been located in Mexico.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Sunday said a preemptive war with North Korea is becoming more likely as the rogue country continues to develop its missile technology while increasing the threat for the West.
Graham warned that North Korea is getting closer to striking the U.S.
Were running out of time, he said.
Graham, who appeared on CBS News Face the Nation, said the Trump administrations policy on North Korea is not simply to contain the situation but rather to deny the North the capability to strike the U.S. Graham, meanwhile said the Pentagon should pull the families of American military personnel from South Korea.
"It's crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea, he said. South Korea should be an unaccompanied tour. So, I want them to stop sending dependents, and I think it's now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea."
There are roughly 28,500 American troops stationed in South Korea.
Grahams comments come just as North Korea successfully launched a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile last week, which they say has the ability to strike the whole mainland of the U.S. The jump in missile capability was backed up by outside governments and analysts.
Graham commended the Trump administration in its readiness to handle the situation should it escalate any further.
"He's got the best national security team of anybody I have seen since I have been in Washington," he said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and South Korean militaries have also begun their largest joint air force exercise on Monday. According to South Koreas defense ministry, the drill called the Vigilant Ace will improve the two countries capabilities in wartime.
The exercise is set to last five days and will include about 12,000 U.S. military personal.
The Associate Press contributed to this report.
The German government is welcoming a Turkish decision to end the solitary confinement of a German newspaper correspondent detained for months and accused of espionage. But it's underlining its demand that he and others, held on what Berlin considers political grounds, be released.
Government spokesman Steffen Seibert said Monday the improvement in Deniz Yucel's detention conditions is "a small step." But he added: "it doesn't change the German government's demand that German citizens jailed on incomprehensible grounds in Turkey be released."
Yucel, a German-Turkish journalist for the daily Die Welt, was arrested Feb. 14. Turkish authorities accuse him of disseminating terrorist propaganda and inciting hatred, as well as espionage. Yucel denies the allegations.
He's one of nine Germans the Foreign Ministry says are being held in Turkey over "political accusations."
The United States and South Korea kicked off a massive military drill Monday with hundreds of aircraft -- including two dozen stealth fighter jets -- despite North Koreas claim the exercise brings the Korean Peninsula to the brink of nuclear war.
The drills also come less than a week after Kim Jong Un ordered North Korean officials to fire the rogue regime's most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile yet, and boasted how the rocket could carry a super-large heavy nuclear warhead that could strike the entire U.S. mainland.
The five-day U.S.-South Korea drill, called Vigilant Ace, will include the latest generations of six F-22 Raptors and 18 F-35 stealth fighter jets, the first time such a large number will partake the regular joint exercise between the two allies, Yonhap News Agency reported. In total, 230 aircraft will be flying at eight U.S. and South Korean military installations in the South with six EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets and dozens of F-15C and F-16 fighter jets also participating.
Some Marine F-35Bs, stationed in Japan, are also expected join the training, according to Yonhap.
About 12,000 U.S. military personnel are participating. The drills will also include simulating precision strikes that target mock nuclear weapons and missiles fired by North Korea.
The training is held each year in the late fall and was planned before Wednesdays North Korean missile test, the U.S. Seventh Air Force said in a statement. South Koreas defense ministry said the drills are meant to improve their wartime capabilities and preparedness.
The exercise was earlier reported to be the biggest ever conducted, but a South Korean Defense Ministry official has corrected his earlier statement.
Despite launching its greatest ICBM, called the Hwasong-15, last week, the Hermit Kingdom blasted the U.S. and South Korea on Sunday and claimed the joint exercise was pushing the Korean Peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war, according to a statement released by its state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun.
It is an open, all-out provocation against the DPRK, which may lead to a nuclear war any moment, the statement said.
North Korea took particular notice of the large number of stealth fighters, saying: The U.S. and the South Korean puppet forces are so foolish as to run amok with such stealth fighters.
It added: The stealth fighters, which the enemies boast so much of, will not escape the fate of a tiger moth.
In a separate Korean News Agency statement, North Korea threatened to seriously consider the taking of a highest-level hard-line countermeasures in history to cope with the U.S. and its vassal forces reckless moves against the regime.
Though many South Koreans usually take North Koreas bombastic rhetoric with a grain of salt, some senior American officials, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., believe U.S. military families should return to America amid the growing crisis.
Were running out of time, Graham said.
He added: "It's crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea. South Korea should be an unaccompanied tour. So, I want them to stop sending dependents, and I think it's now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said Sunday his country would create a cryptocurrency called the petro as it faces a financial blockade in the midst of crippling U.S. sanctions.
Maduro announced in a televised address the currency will be backed by oil, gas and diamond reserves, declaring to cheers the 21st century has arrived! in the struggling socialist state, Reuters reported.
Without offering specifics as to how or when the currency would launch, Maduro added it would help Venezuela advance in issues of monetary sovereignty, to make financial transactions and overcome the financial blockade.
Opposition leaders blasted the announcement, saying it needed congressional approval, while others doubted it will ever see the light of day in an economy with a dim outlook on its horizon, Reuters reported.
The Trump administration has levied sanctions against Venezuelan government officials, state oil executives and its debt issuance, hurting Venezuelas ability to move money around as it faces a heavy debt burden, according to the news agency.
Everyday Venezuelans have to face long lines at cash machines to withdraw the countrys currency, the bolivar, which is in short supply, the New York Times reported. It also said a survey conducted by a group of national universities found around 80 percent of Venezuelans were living in poverty in 2016.
Excessive money printing and state currency controls have contributed to a 57 percent depreciation of the bolivar against the American dollar in the last month in black markets, according to Reuters.
In August, the bolivar was worth even less than fictional gold in the popular World of Warcraft computer game.
Iran-allied Houthi forces claimed to have killed Yemen's powerful ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh on Monday, while Saudi-led fighter jets pounded areas of the country's capital in the intensifying and bloody battle for control of the city.
The Houthi-run Masirah TV announced the death of the "leader of the traitors," referring to Saleh, who ruled the country for more than three decades, and up until last week was in a fragile alliance with the rebels.
A senior official with Yemen's internationally-recognized government confirmed to The Associated Press that Saleh had been killed, sending video purportedly showing Saleh's body being carried away by a group of armed men chanting, "Allahu akbar."
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to the press. It was not immediately possible to confirm the authenticity of the video, which was circulating widely on social media.
Residents in Sanaa told Reuters that Houthi fighters blew up Salehs house in the center of the city.
Iran's FARS News Agency reported Saleh was killed while trying to escape from Sanaa on an armed vehicle, which was hit and destroyed, though that could not be immediately confirmed.
Saleh's reported killing comes as a climax to the fighting erupted between the Iranian-allied Shiite rebels and forces loyal to Saleh last week. The breakdown of the fragile alliance has caused the Saudi-led coalition to step up its bombing of Houthi positions, in support of Saleh's forces, leaving the rebels increasingly isolated after three years of war.
The fighting in the capital of Sanaa caused residents to cower in their homes as explosions rocked the city overnight. Residents and medics told Reuters at least 125 were killed in the fighting on Monday, according to Reuters.
Suze van Meegen, Sanaa-based protection and advocacy adviser for the Norwegian Refugee Council, told the AP the violence left aid workers trapped inside their homes and was "completely paralyzing humanitarian operations."
"No one is safe in Sana'a at the moment. I can hear heavy shelling outside now and know it is too imprecise and too pervasive to guarantee that any of us are safe," she said.
The Houthis and forces allied to Saleh swept into the capital, Sanaa, in 2014. The Houthis dominate the northern part of the city, while Saleh's forces hold the southern part, with much of the current fighting concentrated around the Political District, home to ministries and foreign embassies. The Houthis appeared to be targeting the homes of Saleh's family, political allies and commanders in this most recent round of fighting.
The Saudi-led coalition launched an air campaign against the rebels in March 2015 and later expanded into ground operations. Saudi Arabia views the Houthis as an Iranian proxy on its doorstep, and the rivalry between the two regional powers has amplified the conflict. Iran supports the Houthis but denies arming them.
The stalemated war has killed more than 10,000 civilians and displaced 3 million.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
News / National
by Staff reporter
University of Zimbabwe (UZ) political science lecturer Eldred Masunungure said although former President Robert Mugabe was a shrewd politician, he did not foresee a military takeover."I have always referred to him as a Machiavellian political operator, who understands the logic of power and I think power tends to intoxicate its holder," he said."I think he had become so arrogant that he did not appreciate that the pillar of the military also has its sensitivity and interests that were being harmed by the manner in which it was being ridiculed in public by the former first lady."Masunungure said Grace pushed the generals to the edge with her abrasive approach to politics and her unbridled ambition.The former typist enjoyed the backing of a Zanu-PF faction known as G40 and towards her last days the group was pushing for the annihilation of the Lacoste faction linked to Mnangagwa."I think the former first lady was not very diplomatic in the manner in which she articulated her interests and ambitions," Masunungure added."It is her intemperate language and gestures of not being sensitive to the nature of the security forces and their interests, and that the military, is particularly a sensitive institution."It is a pillar of support anywhere else but here it was particularly in respect of the Mugabe regime and what she was doing was to erode the confidence of the military and within it, the army."Mugabe had always relied on the military for political survival, but the arrival of his 52-year-old wife on the political scene in 2014 changed the dynamics.Grace appeared to be determined to succeed her husband but the push was bound to rub Mugabe's backers in the military the wrong way.Masunungure said it was possible that the generals reached out to Mugabe to rein in his wife, but the veteran ruler could not do anything because of his advanced age."As I understand it, the security forces did express their anxiety about the manner in which the former first lady was addressing the military and the security chiefs, particularly those in the army and within it, General Constantino Chiwenga," the academic said."She could have expressed her concerns, if she had any, to her husband who was the president but she managed to alienate a critical cog of the Mugabe regime and when you do that the wheels tend to come off as they did in mid-November this year."Mugabe could have also seen that a coup was imminent but was still not able to tame his wife, Masunungure said."You should also appreciate and acknowledge that the former president is of an advanced age and advanced fragility health-wise so his mental and physical stamina are increasingly diminished and as a result he may not have had enough control as he previously had even within his own household, including controlling his wife," he said."He failed to rein in his wife to ensure that she did not act beyond the constitutional and legal confines of her role."She did not have any constitutionally defined roles except that on the title first lady' and beyond that, she had no official government or constitutional role to play in the governmental affairs of this country."Masunungure said Grace had also alienated influential people in Zanu-PF, creating a fertile ground for a popular uprising against the world's then oldest leader."She alienated many, not just in the military but in the party. The manner in which she ridiculed, humiliated and embarrassed many of the seniors in the party, including some old enough to be her father or grandfather.""I think she did things in the wrong way. She was not as political as she ought to be."
Getting let go from the courier business hed been running for a childhood friend left Jayson Silvera in a fog. Hed been earning a six-figure salary and was raising a family in Stafford County.
Overnight, all of that [income] went away, said Silvera, who lost his house and car during the six months he was unemployed. I wasnt really sure how to pick myself back up.
Silvera, 45, considered going back to school, but realized that what he knew best was the courier business. Hed started out as a driver, and noticed many were poorly trained. As hed worked his way up to office manager, hed figured out which systems and processes worked well and which did not. He decided to go into business for himself using the best practices hed learned, and opened DDR courier service in the Four Mile Fork area. DDR stands for Deliveries Done Right.
That was nearly two years ago.
Silveras company now handles deliveries in the Fredericksburg, Richmond and metro Washington areas, and just expanded into the Tidewater area. It specializes in same-day delivery of anything from a single envelope to shipments that fill one of DDRs 26-foot box trucks.
Im pretty proud of what Ive done, he said.
That success hasnt come easily. It was four or five months before DDR started getting calls for its services, which include scheduled and routed deliveries and delivery of medical materials by HIPAA-trained couriers.
There were a few times when I wanted to give up, said Silvera. It took a lot of resolve to keep going.
He credits contacts made through the Fredericksburg Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Stafford Regional Black Chamber of Commerce with helping him get his business up and running. An introduction to Howard Owen, owner of Stafford Printing, at a chamber function, lead to DDR being hired to deliver that companys time-critical orders to customers.
Hes done a wonderful job for us, Owen said. Its like having a logistics person off site. Its like hes an employee of Stafford Printing.
Other chamber contacts led to DDR being hired to provide courier services for such local businesses as Virginia Partners Bank.
Its a big relief to know that other folks are marketing for you because of the relationships you form in the community, Silvera said. Im doing the same. Im looking for different office space in Fredericksburg, so Im calling Realtors Ive met through the chamber.
He hasnt relied on local contacts alone. He drove to LabCorps office in Richmond to explain his companys services, for instance, and offered to shadow their route drivers for free. The idea was to learn the health care diagnostic companys policies and procedures so DDR couriers could fill in if LabCorp drivers called in sick or were on vacation.
Who passes up something for free? Silvera said. They wound up needing us.
DDRs medical couriers are trained to know at what temperature to keep a specimen as well as how to use a spill kit to clean themselves and their vehicle so germs dont spread. One of their more unique duties is to transport organs such as hearts and livers to patients awaiting transplants.
Somebody is looking for that. Somebody is being given a chance at life, Silvera said. Thats a tremendous responsibility.
He said his goal is to become a national courier company, and surpass the company he used to work for. He said his old boss, whom he declined to name, has asked him to come back to work for him at a higher salary.
That former boss, he said, had been paranoid that Silvera would leave to start his own courier company.
His fear has come back to bite him, Silvera said. I had to start my own company because this is all I knew.
Rebecca Church was pregnant with her son, Benjamin, when she and her husband were trying to decide which franchise they wanted to own and operate.
Her father, franchise expert Ben Litalien, had given them a list with thousands of possibilities, but didnt single out any one in particular.
We wanted something that would be meaningful and something that my husband Patrick could be passionate about as he would be the sole provider for the family as far as being at the business every day, Rebecca Church said.
The Churches, who live in Spotsylvania County, were impressed by Malawis PizzaPizza with a Purpose, the Utah-based fast-casual pizza chain established in 2010. For every meal purchased at one of its restaurants, it donates a meal to a child in Malawi, an impoverished country in southeastern Africa.
They decided to look into Malawi further, and then fate intervened. Rebecca Church went into labor five weeks early while her parents were in Utah where Malawi has its flagship location.
My mom flew home, and when she walked into labor and delivery room she said, I hope my grandson is worth it because I did not get my berries and cream [dessert pizza] at Malawi, she said. So at that point my husband Patrick and I said, OK, We gotta check this place out.
Two weeks later Patrick Church flew to Malawis headquarters in Utah where he got to taste various menu items and learn about the concept. When he came home, he told his wife that they were going to become Malawi franchisees.
The couple held the grand opening of their first Malawis PizzaPizza with a Purpose, on June 23 in The Village at Towne Centre in Spotsylvania. The restaurant served 1,000 meals that day, and averages selling 20,000 a month.
Recently, the small chainit has only three restaurants so farmet its goal of delivering 1 million meals to children in Malawi in partnership with Feed the Children, and plans to expand nationally in order to deliver a million more meals, according to a news release.
Any menu item, unless its one of the restaurants signature zebra bread sticks, counts as a meal in the Meal-for-Meal Exchange Program, Rebecca Church said. The companys foundation then buys maize in Malawi that is then blended with vitamins and nutrients and delivered to schools and villages throughout the country.
Utah businessman Blake Roney came up with the concept after he returned from a humanitarian trip to Malawi, where some 6.5 million people grapple with hunger. He realized that they needed food on a regular, sustained basis, and teamed up with Kent Andersen, a French-trained chef, to found Malawis Pizza. Besides the location in Spotsylvania, there is now one in Texas and another is slated to open in the Lone Star state soon. The Churches franchise deal calls for them to open five locations in 10 years, and they plan to open the next one in Stafford County.
Rebecca Church said that she and her husband have watched a company video that included a letter from a 6-year-old in Malawi whod received meals through the companys program. He said that he wouldnt have made his sixth birthday without them.
The couple said they havent visited the poverty-stricken country yet, but plan to when once Benjamin, now 2, is older.
Rebecca Church said that she and her husband credit their fathers with helping them get started as franchise owners. Her father helped Malawis founders fine-tune their franchise program, and owns a local carpet-cleaning franchise called Zerorez in addition to teaching at Georgetown University. Patrick Church, whose background is working in restaurants, took Litaliens class to learn more about franchises. His father, Robert Church, owned Advanced Pneumatics.
Malawis specializes in made-to-order gourmet, thin-crust pizzas baked in a brick oven, as well as a variety of pastas, salads and dessert pizzas. Customers pay at the counter and help themselves to drinks, but meals are served on china plates and the napkins are linen. Wine, craft beer and hard cider are available.
The restaurants diverse menu and fast-casual concept appeals mainly to families, large groups and University of Mary Washington students, Patrick Church said. Its philanthropic mission is also a draw, but he and his wife dont stop there. They also give back to the local community in a number of ways, including accepting non-perishable food items for the Fredericksburg Regional Food Bank before Thanksgiving.
Wed like to sponsor a team in the CANstruction event at the mall next year, Rebecca Church said.
When robbing a bank, one's choice of stationery for the demand note is of utmost importance. Does it convey a tone of seriousness? Will it retain fingerprints or other latent evidence? The prudent bank robber sometimes retrieves his note after passing it, in the interests of discretion and eluding prosecution.
Rashad Harris did, in fact, retrieve two of his demand notes during a series of holdups in the Hampton Roads area of southeast Virginia earlier this year. And he often requested no exploding dye packs be placed with his cash, the sign of an experienced stick-up man. But in his holdup of a Wells Fargo Bank branch in Chesapeake, Virginia, he wrote his demand note on a blank starter check actually issued by Wells Fargo, court records show. A bank employee ran the account number through the Wells Fargo database, found the customer's name, and then looked him up on Facebook. There was Rashad Harris, the man with the gun, the note and $2,701 of Wells Fargo's money.
Harris, 26, was arrested. He admitted committing five robberies and one aborted robbery, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced last week in federal court in Norfolk, Virginia, to 15 years in prison. The case was first reported by the Virginian-Pilot.
And while using a blank starter check as a holdup note may be comical, federal prosecutors would remind us that having a gun pointed at you during a robbery is not.
The branch manager of the Wells Fargo bank was eight months pregnant when Harris walked in that day last January, which not only ruined the baby shower planned for later that day, but caused her such anxiety that she took off the last three weeks of work prior to giving birth, prosecutors wrote in a court brief. "The stress of coming to work," the woman told prosecutors, "and being afraid to stand in my lobby or with my tellers without having a panic attack became unbearable."
Harris could not be reached for comment. His lawyer, assistant federal public defender Rodolfo Cejas II, did not return a message seeking comment. But in a memorandum to the court, Cejas said Harris was "very sorry" for his criminal conduct and was "eager to prove to the Court, and to himself, that he can turn his life around."
Prosecutors noted that Harris had a lengthy criminal history beginning at age 16 with a robbery, followed in adulthood by grand larceny, burglary, and attempted carjacking. This perhaps contributed to U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson's decision not to reduce Harris's potential sentence, but to impose eight years for conspiracy and robbery, and seven years for using a gun in said crimes.
Harris's robbery rampage lasted less than two weeks. On Jan. 2, court records show, he and a friend entered a Title Max store in Portsmouth, Virginia, where both brandished guns and escaped with $7,200. Two days later, they entered another Title Max in Portsmouth, handed over an unspecified demand note, and escaped with $2,200. And two days after that, a woman walked into a third Title Max in Portsmouth, pretended to be interested in obtaining a title loan, then handed a title to an employee which had a note taped to it reading, "Don't push the panic button and don't call the police." Harris admitted to being the getaway driver, and that robbery netted only $100.
One week later, on Jan. 13, Harris walked into a cash advance store in Portsmouth and handed over a note which stated, "Stay calm don't hit the panic button and give me the $$." The employee handed over money to Harris but said she needed to keep his paperwork. Harris pulled out a gun and "demanded his paperwork back," the court records state. His note was returned to him and Harris fled with $240.
The next day, Harris moved up from title companies to banks. At 10:40 a.m., he went into a BB&T Bank branch in Chesapeake, Va., and passed a note on a blank check which read, "Stay calm do not hit any alarms gimme all the $$ no one gets hurt and everyone goes home and no dye packs." But before Harris could get the money, he spotted a police car outside so he scooped up his demand note and walked out without any cash, an FBI affidavit stated.
But less than two hours later, Harris entered the Wells Fargo branch on Portsmouth Boulevard in Chesapeake and handed the teller his ill-fated note on the starter check:
"Stay calm don't hit no alarm gimme the $$ no dye packs no one gets hurt everybody goes home."
Demanding yet reassuring, slightly amended from the note earlier in the morning. Or, more likely, the exact same note Harris had passed and withdrawn from the earlier robbery, with the earlier teller's memory of the wording just slightly off. The Wells Fargo teller complied, and Harris escaped with the aforementioned $2,701, and no messy dye pack.
However, this time he left the note behind. A sharp-eyed employee recognized the starter check from their bank, and the dominoes soon fell.
Harris was arrested in Portsmouth three days later, with a .40-caliber pistol in his car. He confessed to the robberies, and told police that the gun was the one he'd used in the crimes.
Willis Leslie Broadus passed away on November 28, 2017 at Culpeper Health & Rehabilitation Center. Les was born October 1, 1923, and he is survived by his wife Gladys; two daughters: Anise Broadus and Alfreda Edmonds. Funeral services will be held on Saturday, December 9, 2017 at 2 p.m. at Found and Sons Funeral Chapel, 850 Sperryville Pike, Culpeper, VA. Viewing will be one hour before the service. Interment will follow on Monday, December 11, 2017 at 10 a.m. at Culpeper National Cemetery with military honors provided by Culpeper VFW Post 2524. Found and Sons Funeral Chapel of Culpeper is serving the family.
How cancer cells find direction
Intrigued by the direct interactions between the two cell types, the researchers then adapted a method previously used to study how tumor cells interact with each other to ask whether macrophages and tumor cells were sharing their cellular contents during their close encounters.
The technique engineers each cell type to produce one new gene: The macrophages produce a trigger protein, and the tumor cells are engineered to make a red fluorescent protein that changes to green only if the trigger protein is transferred from the macrophage to the cancer cell. Applying this technique in the zebrafish, Roh-Johnson and her colleagues found thats indeed what happens the trigger protein passed from macrophages to tumor cells, and their color switched from red to green.
In a separate experiment, they showed that direct contact between the two cell types is needed for that cellular transfer, because when the two cell types are put together in a petri dish but separated by a tiny screen so they cant touch, the color switch doesnt happen as frequently.
In videos made by their collaborator and co-author Dr. Melissa Wong, a stem cell biologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, the researchers watched cells in petri dishes to see how the melanoma cells behavior changed after being contacted by macrophages and gaining some of their contents.
When you track the tumor cell location over time, if you were to look at it before transfer, you would see it sort of meandering along, Roh-Johnson said, tracing small circles in front of her to indicate a directionless tumor cell.
After the transfer, she said, the cells become what cell biologists term directionally persistent, which means that once it went along a path, it just kept going. The speed of migration didnt actually change, but the way it migrates changed.
In the context of a tumor, cancer cells may be spurred by these contacts to migrate more effectively, Moens said, which would increase the likelihood of eventually hitting a blood vessel and getting into circulation. And those cells may be the ones that seed new tumors.
Transferred molecules remain mysterious
While the researchers dont know if these same events take place in people with cancer, they did repeat some of their experiments in a mouse model of melanoma and saw that mouse macrophages also transfer some of their contents to cancer cells and that the transfer hastens metastasis. And they dont yet know if this type of exchange happens in other cancer types besides melanoma, although there have been previous studies showing that macrophages are important for metastasis in a number of different types of solid tumors.
Roh-Johnsons next goal once she establishes the laboratory team she will lead at the University of Utah early next year is to uncover the identity of the molecules being passed from immune cell to tumor. Because macrophages are so good at migrating, their innards are likely full of motility-promoting factors, she said.
If researchers can understand what those factors are and why they promote metastasis, there could be downstream possibilities to use those molecules as markers of macrophages-gone-bad, or even as targets for new therapies to stem some of cancers dangerous spread.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Fred Hutch Cooperative Center for Excellence in Hematology, the American Heart Association, the Fondation ARC pour la Recherche sur le Cancer, the European Commission, an OHSU Center for Womens Health Circle of Giving Grant, the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America and the Prospect Creek Foundation.
News / National
by Stephen Jakes
A political analysts Doctor Philip Zamchiya has written a letter to Defence Forces Commador Constantino Chiwenga reminding him that he previously declared that he will never meet with the MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai.Chiwenga as quoted by Zamchiya said "I and fellow ZDF generals are not missionaries and will never meet with Tsvangirai.""On a Sunday like this let me remind you that in May 2013, the Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, General Constantine Chiwenga, expressed his disposition towards the opposition and Zimbabwe's most popular politician Morgan Tsvangirai in the most horrifying and uncivil terms. In response to news that he had met Tsvangirai and his team, the General said," wrote Zamchiya.He wrote that Chiwenga said "We have no time to meet sell-outs,mapuruvheyaclearly Tsvangirai is a psychiatric patient who needs a competent psychiatrist. There is nothing like that, we never met Tsvangirai, Giles Mutsekwa or anyone from the MDC-T. Why would we do that? We have no time for sell-outs. It's a figment of his imagination that he met us. I think he was dreaming and that dream should remain a dream and never be reality because we have better things to do than to meet with sell-outs. It's just not possible for me to entertain the MDC-T leader, we are different.""Just like oil and water, we cannot mix. As the defence forces we will not respect or entertain people who do not value the ideals of the liberation struggle. Meeting such people will be a mockery to the thousands of people who sacrificed their lives fighting for the country's independence. Who the hell does Tsvangirai think he is? No one can make us turn our back on the ideals of the liberation struggle. Thousands of people died for this country and you cannot change that nor wish it away. This country was liberated courtesy of a protracted struggle, some of us we carry severe scars from that struggle and its unimaginable of us to spit on that struggle through meeting sell outs. Its either you say yes or no, I do not have time to talk to Tsvangirai who seems to be suffering from hallucinations. I and fellow ZDF generals are not missionaries and will never meet with Tsvangirai," Chiwenga added.Zamchiya said this shows that the military elites especially of ZANLA and partly ZIPRA origin have been ideologically drilled to believe the opposition is an extension of the neo-colonial and neo-imperial agenda of the British and Americans."The General's evident ideology of exclusive nationalism creates outsiders and insiders yet we are all citizens. The outsiders' are denigrated as sell-outs, traitors and stooges of western imperialism and neo-colonialism and therefore any forceful or illegal action against them is justified. In military language a sell-out deserves death. The ideology is also used to justify the exclusion of opposition supporters and leaders in gaining access to state power," said Zamchiya."It seeks to legitimise the entitlement mentality that Zimbabwe belongs to the ZANLA/ZIPRA command element for the period that they are alive! The institutional legacy of military involvement in politics from the days of the liberation struggle does not augur well for electoral democracy in Zimbabwe. Such history predisposes the military elite to intervene politically in ways that undermine democracy."He said even beyond the ideological and historical inclination, the army, especially the ZANLA element, is likely to cling to Emmerson Mnangagwa, to swim or sink with him in the 2018 general elections."Hence the military is likely to step in during the electoral cycle. Interventions will be at voter registration, actual electoral campaigns in the villages, management of election results and in the event of Mnangagwa losing the first round of elections. In case of the later they will execute another coup d'etat, where they will clandestinely urge Mnangagwa to hold onto state power to maintain a civilian leader as they did. Examples include Algeria, where the army stopped a second round of national elections after an electoral victory by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in December 1991. We have learnt that the military elite can act independently of civilian control but never actually seizing state power yet determining the course of political events," said Zamchiya."I therefore insist that the military elite are likely to support Mnangagwa to tenaciously cling on to power in the event of an electoral defeat. Why? Zimbabwe's military elite fear prosecution having amassed businesses and prebends through state patronage since 1980. Second, some of the military elites face serious allegations of human rights abuses and mass murders of civilians. Third, stultified by decades of obeisance to the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), in Zimbabwe's neo-patrimonial context, they can hardly imagine a change of context. Fourth, they believe their prebends are best defended by Mnangagwa and prospects of upward accumulation are also served best by the incumbent. Some rightly argue that the army is not a homogeneous unit but the top brass is united by fear of collective punishment, shared memory, business interests and other factors I mentioned above."He said what about the enthusiastic junior army officers they saw on the streets during the execution of the ruthless coup?"Yes they are disgruntled and not recipients of the largesse and some think corruption by the senior officials is worsening their livelihoods but they have little room to manoeuvre between now and 2018. First, the military has a hierarchical command structure. Second, the military intelligence has an effective surveillance system. Third, dissent can be punished by death even of loved ones. Fourth, SADC and international community is not paying much attention to victims of the current coup," he said."The non-partisan conduct of the military is an important ingredient for electoral democracy. The military is the ultimate support of Mnangagwa's governmentif they withdraw their support, if they carry out a coup against his government, or if they refuse to use manipulation and force against those who threaten to democratically change the government, ED falls. There is need for an urgent triple alliance of opposition, civil society and citizens to ensure the military becomes non-partisan ahead of the 2018 general elections. One key demand across is for all the military generals involved in the coup to be negotiated out of their positions before the general election. There is need for a regional and or international partner to demilitarise the space and the mind for 2018 general elections to advance democracy."He said a sustainable strategy to apply diplomatic pressure on the military elite is a must because Zimbabwe on its own faces a herculean task."It is unfortunate the general elections are going ahead next year. Otherwise Zimbabwe could have pondered more and refined Dr Ibbo Mandaza propositions of a transitional authority. A survey of political action across Africa indicates that in fragile transitions, interventions of the military (covert or overt) should be expected to play a major role in enabling or blocking electoral democracy. They constitute a wild card and Zimbabwe is no longer an exception," he said.
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News / National
by Staff reporter
Why has noone attempted to test allegations from @ProfJNMoyo's blue ocean strategy presentation against the events of the the last couple of weeks? Seems he was right all along? Might we not get more from it in terms of where we are headed then? Munya Mugadza (@munyamugadza) December 4, 2017
The Blue Ocean document has been a source of much contention in Zanu-PF and is said to have been authored by members of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association who had selected Emmerson Mnangagwa to succeed Robert Mugabe as the leader of Zanu-PF. The war vets came out to air their demand to the public telling President Robert Mugabe to step down.Chairman Christopher Mutsvangwa, secretary general Victor Matemedanda and spokesperson Douglas Mahiya were allegedly in support of having Mnangagwa succeed Mugabe and are believed to be fighting against G40.Why has no one attempted to test allegations from @ProfJNMoyo's blue ocean strategy presentation against the events of the last couple of weeks? Seems he was right all along? Might we not get more from it in terms of where we are headed then?This presentation below was made by Professor Jonathan Moyo recently at a cabinet meeting chaired by President Mugabe, as he sought to counter Mnangagwa's threats against himself and Savior Kasukuwere to oust them from Zanu-PF. The document by Mnangagwa allies alleges that Moyo and his Local Government counterpart Kasukuwere who are being identified as G40 kingpins are using the First Lady Grace Mugabe to achieve their ambitions of ruling Zimbabwe.
A farmer from Cornwall came to the rescue of a motorist who got stuck on a popular beach in Newquay at the weekend, giving yet another reason to thank a farmer.
The elderly driver managed to beach his white Seat Ibiza car in the sand as he attempted to turn around and a local farmer was called on to pull the car from the rapidly advancing tide with a New Holland tractor.
A Newquay Coastguard spokesperson said: The team was paged at 2.22pm on Saturday, 2 December, to a report of a vehicle stuck in the sand at Great Western Beach in Newquay.
See also: 6 alternative bedding options to straw compared
On arrival the team made sure everyone was safe and conveyed the drivers elderly passengers, who were cold and had medical conditions, to a local hotel where they were safe and warm.
The driver was put in touch with a local farmer and arrangements were made to tow his car out. The farmer arrived in the nick of time.
The coastguard spokesperson added that people should not drive on to beaches unless they are in a suitable vehicle and know it is safe to do so.
Watch the video below of the rescue taking place.
The UKs departure from the European Union will have a lasting impact on farm profitability in Northern Ireland and Ireland, a senior Brussels adviser has warned.
Whatever the eventual agreement on the Irish border, Brexit has major implications for the substantial trade in agricultural products between Ireland and the UK, said Tom Tynan.
See also: No winners from Brexit, warns EU farm commissioner
Mr Tynan is an Irish national who worked in the agri-food industry for nearly 20 years before being appointed a key adviser to EU farm commissioner Phil Hogan in 2014.
We should never forget how things were in Northern Ireland and acknowledge the role that an invisible customs-free land border has had in the development of businesses on both sides of the border, he said.
With 800m litres of milk crossing the Irish border annually, agriculture was arguably more inter-woven between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic than between any other EU countries.
Mr Tynan was speaking at a debate organised by the British Guild of Agricultural Journalists, supported by Massey Ferguson, at Harper Adams University, Shropshire, on Friday (1 December).
Customs declarations
Even an agreement that involved no physical border would still probably result in the need for customs declarations, he told Farmers Weekly.
That would add enormous complexity and costs to businesses that would impact on farming profitability, said Mr Tynan.
Take a Northern Ireland meat company that sends six loads across the border a day, six days a week. At the moment they have to declare 486 loads in one go at the end of the quarter.
Even under a duty-free customs agreement they would have to declare each load which would be 1,872 declarations a year.
If you estimate that each declaration costs 70, then that would add 130,000 to the cost of doing business every year.
Young farmers
Also speaking at the debate was Alan Jagoe a dairy and beef farmer from County Cork and past president of CEJA, the European council of young farmers.
Brexit dominates everything at the moment 40% of all we produce goes across the border into the UK, said Mr Jagoe.
While British farmers have benefitted from the 25% weakening of the pound against the euro over the past two years, it has hit Irish farmers hard.
Individual farmers felt they could do little about Brexit, said Mr Jagoe.
But by investing in education, exploring innovation and focusing on efficiency, they would be in a better position to manage any risks and opportunities that would arise.
News / National
by Staff reporter
The Commander Zimbabwe National Army Lieutenant General Phillip Valerio Sibanda has called on the national army to be disciplined and to desist from harassing citizens.Lieutenant General Sibanda was addressing a pass out parade of 590 recruits at Battlefields in Mhondoro Ngezi.Discipline and patriotism are very essential in the military because of the extreme duties that the armed forces carry out.Lieutenant General Sibanda implored army graduands to be disciplined and to desist from harassing fellow citizens.He said soldiers are important members of society who should instead strive to work towards the betterment and well-being of communities they operate in.He expressed gratitude to traditional leaders who graced the occasion and to the Kwekwe business community and individuals who provided resources and facilities during the training programme.The General Duty Soldiers Course Number 33b 2017 covered subjects such as foot and arms drill, map reading and navigation, civic military education and weapon training, among other subjects.
A Pinch of Salt: The election is over, I think, so what now?
The Corvallis Public Schools Foundation is seeking the oldest living Corvallis School District support staff member to honor at a foundation event in February.
The search follows an effort to find the oldest living Corvallis teacher in the 2016-17 school year and an effort to find the oldest living graduate the year before that.
To be eligible, candidates must reside locally and have worked for the Corvallis School District for a decade or more. Candidates for the oldest support staff honor are asked to send letters to the foundation at 1555 SW 35th St., Corvallis, OR 97333. Alternatively, they can email Liv Gifford, the foundations director, at liv.gifford@corvallis.k12.or.us.
The person selected for the honor will be invited to the foundations Hands Across Corvallis breakfast February 2.
The foundation funds district programs that support students in poverty and enhance school enrichment activities. In the fall of this year alone it has provided $72,000 to the district for college readiness programs and science, technology, engineering, art, and math programs.
For more information about the foundation, visit cpsfoundation.org.
One of the most gratifying aspects of the effort underway at Oregon State University to reassess the names of some campus buildings has been the spotlight it's cast on how professional historians approach their work.
Regardless of what you think about the OSU effort, which hit a milestone last week when President Ed Ray announced his decision to rename Benton Hall, Benton Annex and Avery Lodge but to retain the names of Arnold Dining Hall and Gill Coliseum, the historical reports that were researched and written on each building provided not just illumination into the past but a vivid example of how historians approach their work.
Just as intriguing, the rigorously researched and well-written reports also show the limits of what historians can know for sure.
It's a message that Stacey Smith, the associate professor of history at OSU who led the effort to compile the reports, frequently tells her students: "Ninety-eight percent of the past is irretrievable," she said. "We can't recover it. We're left just trying to put together these tiny fragments to put together a portrait of these people."
And that's work, Smith told me in an interview last week, that seeks to "complicate and contextualize" the lives led by the namesakes of the buildings under review. People don't lead lives that are black or white; we all live, to some extent, in shades of gray. And we are, of course, shaped by the times in which we live. The trick in delving into these lives is to research primary sources, gauge the reliability of those sources (everybody has an ax to grind, and those axes must be taken into account) and to offer fair interpretation of what those sources, limited as they may be, can tell us. "History is intrinsically an interpretative discipline," she said.
At OSU, the process of identifying campus buildings named after people who might have held racist beliefs had been percolating for the last couple of years and predated this year's campus protests. But Smith said the effort had reached the point where there was "so much information and misinformation circulating" that it became apparent that it was necessary to bring in professionals to sort through the history. "They needed well-trained professional historians to give a neutral and nuanced" accounting of the lives under review, she said.
At that point, OSU administrators climbed to the roof of the Kerr Administration Building and fired up the spotlight to summon the History Squad.
Alas, no: As rewarding as I find that image, it did not happen that way. But it did make sense to reach out to Smith, considering her expertise in the history of the North American West and her research into race relations, labor and politics during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
Smith, who declined an honorarium for the work, assembled the team that prepared the reports into the buildings. And she spent a month researching and writing the report on Joseph Avery and the naming of Avery Lodge, a potentially controversial case in that Avery also is a founder of Corvallis. Her overall conclusion: Although there's evidence that Avery did not personally hold proslavery views, it's likely that he condoned those views in the pages of the newspaper he controlled. In Smith's words, "he was willing to disseminate proslavery arguments for his political or economic gain." (Copies of the Avery report and the other three reports are attached to the online version of this column.)
Smith and her team knew that their work had the potential to stir up controversy. But, she said, "we made the concerted decision not to take a position in any of the debates," she said. "We tried to call it like we saw it."
And the assembled historians understood the opportunity that the renaming spotlight afforded: "All of us understood this to be a very important teachable moment," she said. "And an important moment for the community."
As debates over these issues get heated, she said, they tend to paint their subjects as either "good people or bad people," Smith noted. But people don't fit neatly into one of those buckets. History offers a richer, fuller portrait of those subjects and their times. And not just that: Smith and her team have shown again how history, properly done, also casts light onto the times in which we live. (mm)
Holiday music
I'm still seeking nominations for the Think Too Much Holiday Music Hall of Fame. Many excellent nominations already have come in, but if you have a particular performance of a holiday tune you think is definitive, let me know about it. Send your nominations to mike.mcinally@lee.net. I'll announce this year's inductees in the Dec. 24 column. (mm)
News / National
by Staff reporter
If there was someone queer enough to apply to Guinness Book of World Records to have the title "shortest lived government ministers" added to their database, the category will certainly not be short of takers.Among the frontrunners would be South Africa's former Finance minister Des van Rooyen who was reshuffled after three days by President Jacob Zuma following widespread criticism of his appointment.That race would also include Messaoud Benagoun who was Algeria's Tourism minister for three days and Trinidad and Tobago's Public Utilities minister Marlene McDonald who was fired after two days on the job.Somewhere down the pecking order will be three faces that momentarily made it into President Emmerson Mnangagwa's Cabinet last week only for their excitement to be quashed while they were in the midst of popping champagne bottles.Clever Nyati, Lazarus Dokora and Christopher Mutsvangwa had made it into Cabinet on Thursday evening only for the appointments to be rescinded two days later.A day before they could be sworn in, Mnangagwa quickly moved to drop them from his Cabinet upon realising that he had overlooked the number of non-constituency legislators he could appoint to be ministers.Before the news could reach him, Mutsvangwa, who had been made Information, Media and Broadcasting Services minister, had already "hit the ground running".He gave an interview to VOA, assuring Zimbabwean journalists that he will be bringing a new approach to their work, including revising controversial laws such as the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act and the Public Order and Security Act, which have stifled the country's media environment."I will look at the Constitution, pick out some parts and throw them out of the window," Mutsvangwa was quoted saying, as he castigated former Information minister Jonathan Moyo, who crafted the laws."The madness of Jonathan (Moyo) to think that he can think for the whole country of 14-million, I don't like that."Mnangagwa's revocation of the three appointments came as another crop of ex-ministers are still trying to come to terms with their short-lived tenure in former president Robert Mugabe's last Cabinet.In October, Mugabe had made significant changes to his Cabinet by introducing new faces as he sought to do away with the Team Lacoste cabal that had been campaigning for Mnangagwa to succeed him.The life of that Cabinet was cut short by the unexpected resignation of Mugabe, a man many had gambled would die in office.For decades Happyton Bonyongwe was the head of Mugabe's secret service and he was subsequently appointed to Mugabe's Cabinet on October 9 as the head of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, replacing Mnangagwa who had been performing the dual roles of vice president and Justice minister since December 2015.During his swearing-in ceremony, Bonyongwe said he was relishing the opportunity of serving in his new post."It is my hope that I will be able to make some positive contributions to my country. That is something that has always motivated me. I view it as a deployment by my leadership and therefore, I look at it from that context and I will go there and do my best," he said then.Well, as for doing his best, that chance never came during a stint that did not last long.His fate was intertwined with former minister of State for Masvingo Province Paul Chimedza, Tourism and Hospitality Industry minister Edgar Mbwembwe, Foreign Affairs minister Walter Mzembi and Finance minister Ignatius Chombo.Before they had moved into their offices, their portfolios were disbanded by a military intervention that led to the resignation of Mugabe on November 21.The over a month long stay in Cabinet may well be the record for the shortest ministerial appointment ever held in Zimbabwe.That script rang true for the Zanu PF central committee where one Johnson Madhuku's venture as a Zanu PF central committee member only lasted for a week.Madhuku is famed for turning around the fortunes of Reformed Church-run Pamushana High School where he is headmaster, to a school that has become a sporting powerhouse and talent conveyer belt of repute.But his ascend to that position through loyalty to former First Lady Grace Mugabe counted for nothing as he was among those purged by the military recently.Madhuku along with Jeffreys Murire, Veronica Dzika and Watson Maguraumwe faced the chop. They had been elected into the Zanu PF central committee for Bikita before the elections were annulled as a faction rallying behind Mnangagwa went on a purge of members aligned to G40.Ironically, their election had come after the purging of Zanu PF members aligned to Mnangagwa who was at that time fighting for his political life after he was fired by then president Mugabe.The cleansing of G40 loyalists in Zanu PF central committee structures also saw the axe fall on Chimedza and former provincial Governor Willard Chiwewe whose election to the Zanu PF central committee, a week earlier, was nullified by the Zanu PF Masvingo provincial executive.The supposedly sham elections also saw Gutu West legislator Tongai Muzenda, Retired Colonel Mutero Masanganise and Patricia Gama being chopped, after a week on the job.It will definitely be a hard record to break for a somewhat reformed Zanu PF which is trying to pick up the pieces after the dismissal of Mugabe.
Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN! Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2021.
A new home for the visionary : Bonns August Macke House re-opens
Bonn The extension to the August Macke museum in Bonns Nordstadt has officially opened. On the one hand, the artists house is a biography of Mackes life and works and on the other a location for temporary exhibitions and events.
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Outside, driving snow and grey skies. Inside, melancholy folk songs by Brahms with the devastating message: The sun no longer shines. And all this to honour a painter who bathed the world in fantastic colours and about whom, after he tragically fell at the age of 27 in the first weeks of World War I, his friend Franz Marc wrote in his obituary: Of all of us, he gave colour the brightest and clearest tone, as clear and bright as his whole being.
August Macke, to whom these lines refer, loved Brahms. And so it was almost obligatory that the celebration for the opening of the new August Macke Museum started with emotional Brahms songs. And so colour was brought to this miserable Sunday in December. According to Gunter Winands, head of the Federal Office for Culture and Media, this followed a certain meteorological logic: both the first ground-breaking ceremony in June 2015, as well as the topping out ceremony for the Macke extension project a year later, took place in bad weather.
Winands referred to the strong support by the Federal Government for Bonn with around 3.5 million Euros, it financed around half of the building of the extension and artists house. Bonn now has a unique feature with three authentic artists houses for Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann and the Visionary Macke. The art centre in Bonns Nordstadt is complete, he said.
The director of the museum, Klara Drenker-Nagels, looked back but then also talked about the concept of the new museum, which provides a biography of Mackes life and work in the artists house on one side as well as a spacious ensemble for the other museum areas: space for temporary exhibitions, offices, storage, museum education, gastronomy and events. In a short preview of the programme, she also announced that the museum wanted to increasingly be a bridge to contemporary art.
Lord Mayor, Ashok Sridharan, celebrated: At least, August Macke has the representation in Bonn that he has long deserved.
The museum is open to the public from 5 December.
Parcel bomb in Potsdam : Deutsche Post warns customers to beware of unfamiliar packages
Potsdam The Potsdam bomb alert was a blackmail attempt against DHL. The police are advising people to exercise caution and not to open suspicious packages.
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Following the discovery of a parcel bomb in Potsdam, police are advising caution when accepting packages from unknown senders in the lead up to Christmas. If something seems strange to people, the police should definitely be called, a police spokesman told the German Press Agency (DPA) on Sunday night. This is the case, for example, when the sender cannot be clearly identified or is missing completely. Investigators believe the dangerous package sent on Friday to a pharmacy at the Potsdam Christmas Market was intended to blackmail the DHL parcel service.
There were no further clues as to the perpetrator or perpetrators during the night. However, the spokesman said they were investigating round the clock. According to interior minister Karl-Heinz Schroter (SPD), investigators in Brandenburg have been in the closest contact with DHL since the blackmail was first uncovered. In the next hours and days they will work very closely together, explained Schroter in the news programme RBB-Aktuell on Sunday evening. DHL will also conduct internal investigations. The company itself did not want to comment on Sunday.
Brandenburg authorities are working on the basis of a perpetrator or perpetrator group from the region. However, Schroter said this had not been proven one hundred per cent. However, queries to all state criminal investigation offices in Germany had shown that no other state was affected. The packages had also been sent in Brandenburg and delivered to addresses in Brandenburg.
On Friday, a suspect package was delivered to a pharmacy, whose premises are directly on the Potsdam Christmas Market. There were hundreds of nails and a type of firework that is illegal in Germany because of safety deficiencies. Police said a similar packet was sent to an online retailer in Frankfurt (Oder) at the start of November. This caught fire when it was opened.
Security authorities think further shipments are possible or even likely. Police president Hans-Jurgen Morke said on Sunday that the Potsdam shipment contained a message. This was encrypted in a so-called QR-Code on the internet.
So far, small businesses have been affected. However, shipments to private persons could not be ruled out. If you receive a suspect package, do not open it, as this could trigger it, warned interior minster Schroter. Clues are, for example, spelling mistakes or wires sticking out of the package, explained police, who have also set up a telephone hotline.
Police have set up an investigation group called Luise, after the pharmacy where the package was sent, to carry out the search. Around 25 criminal police are working in the group. The public prosecutors office said they were investigating attempts to bring about an explosion and attempted serious extortion.
Fire in apartment building : Fire brigade rescues 18 residents
Limperich 18 residents were trapped by thick smoke after a fire broke out in their apartment building in the early hours of Saturday.
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There were dramatic scenes early on Saturday morning during a fire at an apartment building in Limperich. As the fire started in the cellar of the four storey building and thick smoke filled the entire stairwell within a short time, residents were trapped and had to be rescued using ladders on the outside of the building.
The fire at the apartment building on Konigswinterer Strae was reported to the control centre of the fire brigade in Bonn at 3.47am. When a large team of firemen arrived at the scene of the fire, thick, dark smoke was already coming out of the cellar windows and the entrance door. The residents were standing at the windows on the street front and at other windows at the rear of the four storey building, in which they were trapped. Dangerous smoke was blocking their escape.
As the cellar doors were not closed, the dense smoke could spread through the stairwell and also entered some of the apartments on the various floors. Only two people were able to escape in time through the door. For the firemen, rescuing people was the highest priority. According to the fire brigade, the 18 residents who were still in the building were first taken from the four storey building by rescue services using turntable ladders or portable ladders. They were looked after by rescue services. Two residents were slightly injured and taken to hospital for examination.
News / National
by Staff reporter
On January 17, 2014, a bizarre story was reported by Zimbabweans news websites.The story read: a Bindura businesswoman is reported to have died on Tuesday night moments after an alleged sexual encounter with a top High Court judge.Although the independent Daily News newspaper who broke the story withheld the name of the judge, Nehanda Radio understands its Justice Charles Hungwe.According to the paper, Gladys Farai Mangwiro (55) had been having an affair with Justice Hungwe for "quite a span" and the judge was at the woman's home when she died.Police sources in Bindura told the paper that the woman became unresponsive after the two engaged in a sex-act. The judge then rushed to make a police report.This version of events has been corroborated by members of the family and also employees of Mayfair Lodge which is owned by the late businesswoman.The businesswoman was later pronounced dead at a Bindura hospital.According to Mangwiro's first born daughter, Cheryl-Jane Kujenga, her mother had been in the company of a "male friend" moments before she met her death."She developed sudden respiratory complications on Tuesday the 14th just before midnight. Attempts to resuscitate her were fruitless. She had been in the company of a male friend who had visited but it is not necessary to reveal the name," she said.Justice Hungwe spent the greater part of last year being victimized by the Mugabe after he ordered the release of human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa and granted a search warrant to the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission to search the offices of three Zanu PF cabinet ministers.
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Protecting the worlds oceans an important goal of Germanys climate diplomacy
The worlds oceans are vital to our survival. They regulate the global climate and are a source of food and income for billions of people. Only a very small part of the seas enjoys legal protection, however. Our diplomats are working in New York right now to change this state of affairs.
News / National
by Staff reporter
Former liberation war fighters have a well-calculated strategy to set up First Lady Grace Mugabe and her backers for failure as they push for Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa to take over from her husband President Robert Mugabe, an alleged secret document that has revived factionalism in Zanu PF claims.A fortnight ago Mugabe reacted angrily to the details in a document titled, Blue Ocean -Taking Back Zanu PF, labelling the former fighters coalescing behind Mnangagwa dissidents.The 92-year-old leader threatened to deal with the former fighters the same way he crushed bandits in the early 80s in a campaign that left over 20 000 civilians dead in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces.Crestfallen leaders of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA) have disassociated themselves from the document that has been leaked to The Standard, but War Veterans minister Tshinga Dube said State security agents were investigating the matter.According to the document, there is increasing discontent in Zanu PF over Mugabe's reluctance to put Mnangagwa on a pedestal to succeed him and Grace's manoeuvres to seize control of the fractured ruling party.The document alleges Higher Education minister Jonathan Moyo and his Local Government counterpart Saviour Kasukuwere were using Grace to achieve their ambitions of ruling Zimbabwe.Moyo and Kasukuwere are identified as the G40 kingpins. Zanu PF is on the verge of an internal war that could dwarf the 2014 infighting that culminated in the ouster of then vice-president Joice Mujuru, the document says.The document says Zanu PF had three options with Mnangagwa representing path 1 (where the party and government must go), Mugabe (path 2 - where the president wants the party to go) and Grace (path 3 - the path to self-destruction)."While 2014 represented a considerable Rubicon in its own right, it is not watershed as the times that are upon," the document reads."It is the outcome of this phase of political gamesmanship that will shape the future of Zanu PF and determine whether or not it will continue to dominate the political landscape of Zimbabwe."It adds: "Current machinations by G40 are aimed at converging path 2 and 3 through the manipulation of the First Lady."The means to an end being their capacity to leverage on her influence on the president."The G40 cabal has coerced the First Lady into a spirited campaign against VP Mnangagwa and the real Zanu PF cadres who have a clear understanding of path 1."This has resulted in several high profile casualties in all organs of the party."Currently, the First Lady has been around the country on nationwide rallies that are eerily similar to those that culminated in the demise of the Mujuru cabal."Moyo is accused of holding a grudge against Mnangagwa for the failed Tsholotsho Declaration in 2004.The document says the Zanu PF strategist was not happy that Mnangagwa did not protect his backers after the plot was exposed, hence his alleged crusade to force the party's old guard out of politics."The thrust is to promote their ambition whilst forcing out the old guard through political euthanasia [committing suicide to ease pain]," the authors of the document say."That is the basis of G40's current war. Cde Kasukuwere and Cde Patrick Zhuwao are tail hangers to Mnangagwa's grand strategies and their only relevance is on providing resources so they won't be able to handle."The document goes on to lay out several strategies to contain Grace and G40 while keeping Mnangagwa in the race.Some of the plans include the creation of "dummy corporates" and non-governmental organisations as well as identifying people who will work to expand the VP's network.The media would be used to manage the Zanu PF Midlands godfather's image.A deliberate effort would also be made to plant Mnangagwa's sympathisers in institutions such as the ZNLWVA, Judicial Services Commission and Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission.Dossiers against known members of the G40 faction would also be compiled with a view to use them on the eve of the 2018 elections, the authors say."Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission must accumulate dossiers on Dr (Ignatius Chombo), Prof Moyo and Cde Kasukuwere), The dossiers must be leaked strategically in 2017 while the cantankerous Cde [Patrick] Zhuwao will have to be kept busy with the Telecel scandals and his glaring incompetence as a government minister must be exaggerated," added the report.The document also alleged there was a dossier incriminating Grace in a scandal involving $2 million, which was referred to as the Zinaragate."The aim is to make it toxic for anyone to be associated with the G40 group," the authors say.Other strategies include subjecting G40 leaders to brutal character assassination, infiltrating and fomenting fights and chaos amongst the faction's kingpins."Seeds of distrust must be sown in that alliance with the First Lady with immediate effect," the document reads."A potent way is to attack the glue that binds them, play on the First Lady's interests and begin a spirited campaign for the removal of sanctions and foreign restrictions on Zimbabwe's president and First Lady."A Godsend is setting China or Russia to make noise over this through Brics [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa]."High level Chinese or Russian 'business people' or envoys will then approach the First Lady and offer her a new value proposition that not only protects her interests but goes on to guarantee her influential government position."She must be given strong impression that to 'their countries' this carries more plausibility if she partners with VP Mnangagwa than the G40 mavericks," reads the report.Minutes of recent war veterans meetings, which have also been disowned by the ZNLWVA leadership, showed that the former fighters believe Mnangagwa is favoured by China and Russia to take over from Mugabe.The Blue Ocean strategy also alleged that Mugabe was the real force behind G40, adding that there was bad blood between the veteran ruler and Mnangagwa.The authors alleged Mugabe felt "threatened by VP Mnangagwa and the prospect of his presidency being outshined by that of his protege.""The feigned love for VP Mnangagwa has at times come out of the mask in certain statements and manoeuvres and the unflinching composure by VP Mnangagwa has not made matters easier."President Mugabe keeps bringing in upstarts e.g Joice Mujuru and now the G40 cabal in a bid to derail Mnangagwa," read the report.The report queries why Mugabe has not endorsed his deputy for the presidency if he did not have anything against him. "Why Mugabe has let children mess up with impunity among others," it said.The report also alleged that G40 was planning to make Mnangagwa a lame duck and erode his support base.A strategy is then laid out on how Grace would be misled to believe that she has the VP's backing only to be disappointed when it matters the most.To achieve that, a recording of youth league members discussing how Mnangagwa believes in the First Lady and secretly attacking Mutsvangwa and Oppah Muchinguri would be leaked to media outlets."In it, it must be alleged that Cde Chris Mutsvangwa and Cde Oppah Muchinguri were failing to read the new brand of politics being pedalled by the First Lady with reference being the fight for the Zapu ticket while also throwing Cde Kasukuwere into a dogfight with Dr Chombo, Cde (Innocent) Tizora (Principal in the Office of the President and Cabinet)and possibly Cde (Sidney) Sekeremayi for the Zanu PF ticket," the document added."Preconditions for this to happen include little or no open resistance from VP Mnangagwa to all the G40 shenanigans being fronted by the First Lady."All sympathisers will have to be ordered to stand down and not interfere. The fighting must continue unabated.The nine-page document's conclusion says "While this is work in progress, it provides a baseline from where to work from."However, it is imperative that action be taken now to prevent any further damage to the presidential ambitions of VP Mnangagwa."A meeting of minds must meet to interrogate this stratagem at soonest possible convenience."The document claims Chombo and Tizora were Mugabe's preferred candidates for the vice-presidency ahead of Mnangagwa when the Justice minister was elevated in 2014.It says this shows Mnangagwa could also be sidelined in the race to succeed Mugabe.
Photo Of Nigerian Man Brutally Stabbed To Death Over House Rent Argument In South Africa
kacylee at 4-12-2017 08:56 AM (4 years ago) (f)
A 26-year-old Nigerian, Chidiebere Nwaojiekwu, from Unubi, Anambra state, was on the 1st of December, 2017, stabbed to death at Galeshewe, Kimberly town in Northern Cape, according to journalist Peter Agba Kalu .
A 26-year-old Nigerian, Chidiebere Nwaojiekwu, from Unubi, Anambra state, was on the 1st of December, 2017, stabbed to death at Galeshewe, Kimberly town in Northern Cape, according to journalist Peter Agba Kalu .
The murder was reportedly committed by his landlord, after an argument about rent degenerated into a fight. The landlord was said to have called his boys and they started stabbing the deceased. .
It was gathered that Chidiebere ran out of the house and they chased after him and kept stabbing him till he slumped and died. Nigerians in the neighborhood were informed and the cops came to secure the area and start investigation. .
The deceased body has been taken to the mortuary and a case has been opened with a case number GALESHEWE CASE : 05/12/2017 Murder. Three of the suspects have already been arrested. Chidiebere was single and was a businessman selling earpiece and accessories.
The murder was reportedly committed by his landlord, after an argument about rent degenerated into a fight. The landlord was said to have called his boys and they started stabbing the deceased. .It was gathered that Chidiebere ran out of the house and they chased after him and kept stabbing him till he slumped and died. Nigerians in the neighborhood were informed and the cops came to secure the area and start investigation. .The deceased body has been taken to the mortuary and a case has been opened with a case number GALESHEWE CASE : 05/12/2017 Murder. Three of the suspects have already been arrested. Chidiebere was single and was a businessman selling earpiece and accessories.
Post Reply I have been reporting for several years now and I am very interested in visual news reportage with strong inclusion of photos and video multimedia. Posted: at 4-12-2017 08:56 AM (4 years ago) | Addicted Hero
ruthie at 4-12-2017 09:08 AM (4 years ago)
(f) JUST TOO BAD Posted: at 4-12-2017 09:08 AM (4 years ago) | Hero JUST TOO BAD Reply
victorstic1 at 4-12-2017 09:16 AM (4 years ago)
(m) OMG WHAT A WASTE RIP Posted: at 4-12-2017 09:16 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac OMG WHAT A WASTE RIP Reply
Haso112 at 4-12-2017 09:33 AM (4 years ago)
(m) Quote from: ruthie on 4-12-2017 09:08 AM JUST TOO BAD
MADAM... I DON DEY OBSERVE YOU... WHERE YOU DEY ALWAYS GO FOR WEEKENDS? OYA START CONFESSING BEFORE I SEND SARS MAKE DEM HELP ME FIND YOU GET THE INFO...
Posted: at 4-12-2017 09:33 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac MADAM... I DON DEY OBSERVE YOU... WHERE YOU DEY ALWAYS GO FOR WEEKENDS? OYA START CONFESSING BEFORE I SEND SARS MAKE DEM HELP ME FIND YOU GET THE INFO... Reply
fineboy77 at 4-12-2017 09:34 AM (4 years ago)
(m) If our people can just leave south Africa,just if. What is the color beneath your skin? Posted: at 4-12-2017 09:34 AM (4 years ago) | Hero If our people can just leave south Africa,just if. Reply
fineboy77 at 4-12-2017 09:36 AM (4 years ago)
(m) Quote from: Haso112 on 4-12-2017 09:33 AM
MADAM... I DON DEY OBSERVE YOU... WHERE YOU DEY ALWAYS GO FOR WEEKENDS? OYA START CONFESSING BEFORE I SEND SARS MAKE DEM HELP ME FIND YOU GET THE INFO... What is the color beneath your skin? Posted: at 4-12-2017 09:36 AM (4 years ago) | Hero whats ur own sef?,u wan use style get my address abi? Reply
Haso112 at 4-12-2017 09:37 AM (4 years ago)
(m) NA WA OOO... ON TOP HOW MUCH BE THE RENT SEF... WE NIGERIANS TOO, MOST OF US DON'T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE THINGS DIPLOMATICALLY, WE'LL JUST START MAKING NOISE AND GETTING HYPER AT ANY LITTLE THING, SOMETHING THAT COULD BE RESOLVED PEACEFULLY & THE MATTER COOLS & LIFE GOES ON... TOO BAD, REST IN PEACE BROTHER... Posted: at 4-12-2017 09:37 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac NA WA OOO... ON TOP HOW MUCH BE THE RENT SEF... WE NIGERIANS TOO, MOST OF US DON'T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE THINGS DIPLOMATICALLY, WE'LL JUST START MAKING NOISE AND GETTING HYPER AT ANY LITTLE THING, SOMETHING THAT COULD BE RESOLVED PEACEFULLY & THE MATTER COOLS & LIFE GOES ON... TOO BAD, REST IN PEACE BROTHER... Reply
Haso112 at 4-12-2017 09:38 AM (4 years ago)
(m) Quote from: fineboy77 on 4-12-2017 09:36 AM whats ur own sef?,u wan use style get my address abi?
AH...! BROS, WETIN CONCERN ICE WATER SELLER WITH BOTTLE? NA WA FOR U OOO, SO U DEY TRY TELL SAY..... HMMMM, MAKE I NEVER TALK AM, I WAIT FOR RUTHIE TO ANSWER ME FIRST.... RUTHIE, IS IT WHAT I'M THINKING? HMMMMM Posted: at 4-12-2017 09:38 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac AH...! BROS, WETIN CONCERN ICE WATER SELLER WITH BOTTLE? NA WA FOR U OOO, SO U DEY TRY TELL SAY..... HMMMM, MAKE I NEVER TALK AM, I WAIT FOR RUTHIE TO ANSWER ME FIRST.... RUTHIE, IS IT WHAT I'M THINKING? HMMMMM Reply
ruthie at 4-12-2017 10:34 AM (4 years ago)
(f) Quote from: Haso112 on 4-12-2017 09:33 AM
MADAM... I DON DEY OBSERVE YOU... WHERE YOU DEY ALWAYS GO FOR WEEKENDS? OYA START CONFESSING BEFORE I SEND SARS MAKE DEM HELP ME FIND YOU GET THE INFO... Posted: at 4-12-2017 10:34 AM (4 years ago) | Hero This is a very good observation.....you r right! weekends are for rest.....i start the usual on monday! Reply
Haso112 at 4-12-2017 10:43 AM (4 years ago)
(m) Quote from: ruthie on 4-12-2017 10:34 AM This is a very good observation.....you r right! weekends are for rest.....i start the usual on monday!
OKAY OOO... BUT @FINEBOY77 DEY TRY TELL ME SAY NA HIM END U DEY HIBERNATE FOR WEEKEND..... CHALE, U BERRA DEBUNK D STORY OO, B4 WE START WW3 FOR HIA... Posted: at 4-12-2017 10:43 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac OKAY OOO... BUT @FINEBOY77 DEY TRY TELL ME SAY NA HIM END U DEY HIBERNATE FOR WEEKEND..... CHALE, U BERRA DEBUNK D STORY OO, B4 WE START WW3 FOR HIA... Reply
Libya Slave Trade: Charlyboy Group Storms Foreign Affairs In Chains & Handcuffs
clarajancita at 4-12-2017 02:50 PM (4 years ago) (f)
There was mild drama as the group of good governance protesters led by veteran musician, Charles Oputa, also known as Charly Boy, stormed the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Abuja to demand proactive and reactive steps from the federal government over the plight of Nigerians sold as slaves in Libya.
There was mild drama as the group of good governance protesters led by veteran musician, Charles Oputa, also known as Charly Boy, stormed the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Abuja to demand proactive and reactive steps from the federal government over the plight of Nigerians sold as slaves in Libya.
The group carried out the protest strapped in chains, handcuffs and sealed mouth to drive home their points.
This comes as the Nigerian Charge DAffaire to Libya, Ambassador Iliya Danladi Fachano, addressed the media on reports of auctioning of Nigerian migrants and kidnapping for ransom in the country.
Details later.
The group carried out the protest strapped in chains, handcuffs and sealed mouth to drive home their points.This comes as the Nigerian Charge DAffaire to Libya, Ambassador Iliya Danladi Fachano, addressed the media on reports of auctioning of Nigerian migrants and kidnapping for ransom in the country.Details later.
Post Reply I am a metro reporter on Gistmania, I have been publishing news materials for over 5 years Posted: at 4-12-2017 02:50 PM (4 years ago) | Hero
euwilliams at 4-12-2017 03:11 PM (4 years ago)
(f) Leg chained too Posted: at 4-12-2017 03:11 PM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Leg chained too Reply
euwilliams at 4-12-2017 03:12 PM (4 years ago)
(f) Leg chained too Posted: at 4-12-2017 03:12 PM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Leg chained too Reply
ruthie at 4-12-2017 03:58 PM (4 years ago)
(f) THIS GRANDPA DON COME AGAIN O! Posted: at 4-12-2017 03:58 PM (4 years ago) | Hero THIS GRANDPA DON COME AGAIN O! Reply
gogoman at 4-12-2017 05:59 PM (4 years ago)
(m) SO MAKE BUHARI COME SEND JET GO LIBYA ABI GO BOMB DEM Posted: at 4-12-2017 05:59 PM (4 years ago) | Grande Master SO MAKE BUHARI COME SEND JET GO LIBYA ABI GO BOMB DEM Reply
kacylee at 4-12-2017 06:07 PM (4 years ago)
(f) this people concept dey baffle me ooo, why the chain nah I have been reporting for several years now and I am very interested in visual news reportage with strong inclusion of photos and video multimedia. Posted: at 4-12-2017 06:07 PM (4 years ago) | Addicted Hero this people concept dey baffle me ooo, why the chain nah Reply
crocatum at 4-12-2017 06:33 PM (4 years ago)
(m) Slave trade cannot be stopped, due to the economic situation, and this can be a strong psychological weapon, if we move past the concept of acquiring wealth to show off to acquiring wealth to change our world, if we focus on changing our world rather than showing off, everyone would gain and the unborn. Posted: at 4-12-2017 06:33 PM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Slave trade cannot be stopped, due to the economic situation, and this can be a strong psychological weapon, if we move past the concept of acquiring wealth to show off to acquiring wealth to change our world, if we focus on changing our world rather than showing off, everyone would gain and the unborn. Reply
REALTRUTH at 4-12-2017 09:50 PM (4 years ago)
(m) THIS IS A VERY GOOD MESSAGE TO THE LIBYA GOVERNMENT Posted: at 4-12-2017 09:50 PM (4 years ago) | Newbie THIS IS A VERY GOOD MESSAGE TO THE LIBYA GOVERNMENT Reply
ficull at 5-12-2017 12:26 AM (4 years ago)
(m) What is our government doing for this matter sef Posted: at 5-12-2017 12:26 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac What is our government doing for this matter sef Reply
Upbendel at 5-12-2017 01:51 AM (4 years ago)
(m) Quote from: kacylee on 4-12-2017 06:07 PM this people concept dey baffle me ooo, why the chain nah
Read your primary six history text book about slavery!!! Posted: at 5-12-2017 01:51 AM (4 years ago) | Upcoming Read your primary six history text book about slavery!!! Reply
WhaleDog at 5-12-2017 01:56 AM (4 years ago)
(m) Quote from: REALTRUTH on 4-12-2017 09:50 PM THIS IS A VERY GOOD MESSAGE TO THE LIBYA GOVERNMENT
Well ! Thats is if theres a government in charge of the nation affairs ,but in the case of Libya ,theres no functioning central government.The country is divided under different sectional group leadership .In some quarters you have the millitant totally in control of resources control and daily affairs of state matters ,and while in Tripoli u have a kitchen cabinet paying millitant a chunky bulky amount for security .So,in contrast theres simply no functioning government in place in Libya as at now to follow up our complaint,or to take a swift action to stem this atrocious crime.Libya as at now can be regarded as banana fall on me or free for all Spare me Posted: at 5-12-2017 01:56 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Well ! Thats is if theres a government in charge of the nation affairs ,but in the case of Libya ,theres no functioning central government.The country is divided under different sectional group leadership .In some quarters you have the millitant totally in control of resources control and daily affairs of state matters ,and while in Tripoli u have a kitchen cabinet paying millitant a chunky bulky amount for security .So,in contrast theres simply no functioning government in place in Libya as at now to follow up our complaint,or to take a swift action to stem this atrocious crime.Libya as at now can be regarded as banana fall on me or free for all Reply
Haso112 at 5-12-2017 07:19 AM (4 years ago)
(m) ABEG OOO, JUST AN OBSERVATION NI OOO, MAKE NOBODY TAKE AM P OOO.... I JUST WAN ASK, OGA CHARLEY NA PROTESTING BE HIM NEW CAREER? Posted: at 5-12-2017 07:19 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac ABEG OOO, JUST AN OBSERVATION NI OOO, MAKE NOBODY TAKE AM P OOO.... I JUST WAN ASK, OGA CHARLEY NA PROTESTING BE HIM NEW CAREER? Reply
Almere, The Netherlands
December 04, 2017
ASM International N.V. (Euronext Amsterdam: ASM) reports the following transactions, conducted under ASMI's current share buyback program.
Date Repurchased shares Average price Repurchased value November 27, 2017 34,388 60.60 2,083,916 November 28, 2017 34,132 60.60 2,068,256 November 29, 2017 41,132 59.43 2,444,586 November 30, 2017 38,340 57.92 2,220,561 December 1, 2017 38,349 57.28 2,196,673 Total 186,341 59.11 11,013,992
These repurchases were made as part of the 250 million share buyback program announced on September 22, 2017. Of the total program, 41.4% has been repurchased. For further details including individual transaction information please visit:
www.asm.com/investors/share-information/share-buyback.
About ASM International
ASM International NV, headquartered in Almere, the Netherlands, its subsidiaries and participations design and manufacture equipment and materials used to produce semiconductor devices. ASM International, its subsidiaries and participations provide production solutions for wafer processing (Front-end segment) as well as for assembly & packaging and surface mount technology (Back-end segment) through facilities in the United States, Europe, Japan and Asia. ASM International's common stock trades on the Euronext Amsterdam Stock Exchange (symbol ASM). For more information, visit ASMI's website at www.asm.com .
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: All matters discussed in this press release, except for any historical data, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These include, but are not limited to, economic conditions and trends in the semiconductor industry generally and the timing of the industry cycles specifically, currency fluctuations, corporate transactions, financing and liquidity matters, the success of restructurings, the timing of significant orders, market acceptance of new products, competitive factors, litigation involving intellectual property, shareholders or other issues, commercial and economic disruption due to natural disasters, terrorist activity, armed conflict or political instability, epidemics and other risks indicated in the Company's reports and financial statements. The Company assumes no obligation nor intends to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect future developments or circumstances.
CONTACT
Investor contact:
Victor Bareno
T: +31 88 100 8500
E: victor.bareno@asm.com
Media contact:
Ian Bickerton
T: +31 625 018 512
CALGARY, Alberta, Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canacol Energy Ltd. ("Canacol" or the "Corporation") (TSX:CNE) (OTCQX:CNNEF) (BVC:CNEC) is pleased to announce that the Canadonga-1 exploration well has encountered 32 feet true vertical depth (ft tvd) of net gas pay within the Cienaga de Oro (CDO) primary reservoir target on its 100% working interest Esperanza block. Canadonga-1 is the Corporations tenth consecutive natural gas exploration discovery on its 1.1 million net acre exploration position located in the Lower Magdalena Basin of Colombia. The Corporation is also pleased to announce that the Pandereta-1 discovery well tested 29 million standard cubic feet per day (MMscfpd) of gas from the CDO sandstone reservoir. The gas bearing fractured basement encountered within the Pandereta-1 well tested very small amounts of gas. The Corporation has also spud the Pandereta-2 well and expects flow testing resulting in approximately five weeks.
Canadonga-1 Gas Discovery
Esperanza Exploration and Exploitation Contract
CNE Oil and Gas S.A.S, 100% Operated Working Interest
The Canandonga-1 exploration well is located 6 kilometers (kms) northeast of the Nelson gas field on the Esperanza contract. Using the Tuscany 109 drilling rig, Canandonga-1 was spud on November 4, 2017, and reached a total depth of 9,300 feet measured depth (ft md) within the primary CDO sandstone reservoir on November 15, 2017. Due to drilling related problems the Canadonga-1 well penetrated only the upper 713 feet of the CDO sandstone reservoir section before drilling operations were suspended, having penetrated approximately 1/3 of the anticipated section of CDO sandstone reservoir. The well encountered 32 ft tvd of gas pay with an average porosity of 18 %. The Corporation is currently mobilizing the drilling rig to the Gaitero-1 exploration well location located on its 100% working interest VIM 5 block. The Corporation plans to mobilize a workover rig to complete and test the Canadonga-1 discovery well in early 2018.
Pandereta-1 Gas Discovery
VIM 5 Exploration and Exploitation (E&E) Contract
CNE Oil and Gas S.A.S, 100% Operated Working Interest
The Pandereta-1 exploration well is located approximately 10 kms to the northeast of the Clarinete and Oboe gas fields on the VIM 5 contract. Using the Pioneer 302 drilling rig, Pandereta-1 was spud on October 25, 2017 and reached a total depth of 9,347 ft md in 15 days. The well encountered 64 ft tvd of net gas pay with average porosity of 20.5% within the primary CDO sandstone reservoir target. In the secondary and shallower Lower Tubara reservoir target, 34 ft tvd of net gas pay with average porosity of 15% was encountered in the well.
The CDO sandstone reservoir was perforated between 7,7427,778 and 7,8107,830 ft md within the CDO reservoir and flowed at a final stable rate of 29 MMscfpd and no water with a 44/64 inch choke and a flowing tubing head pressure of 2,136 pounds per square inch over a test period of 32.5 hours. The fractured basement was perforated over a small interval and flowed very low volumes of gas. The subsurface technical team is analyzing these latter results to determine the viability of this new fractured basement gas play.
The Corporation spud the Pandereta-2 well on December 2, 2017. This well is targeting gas bearing reservoirs of the CDO sandstone approximately 1 km to the west of the Pandereta-1 bottom hole location. The well is anticipated to take 5 weeks to drill and flow test.
The Corporation shall provide results concerning the above mentioned wells as they become available.
Canacol is an exploration and production company with operations focused in Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. The Corporation's common stock trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the OTCQX in the United States of America, and the Colombia Stock Exchange under ticker symbol CNE, CNNEF, and CNE.C, respectively.
This press release contains certain forwardlooking statements within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forwardlooking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur, including without limitation statements relating to estimated production rates from the Corporation's properties and intended work programs and associated timelines. Forwardlooking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forwardlooking statements. The Corporation cannot assure that actual results will be consistent with these forward looking statements. They are made as of the date hereof and are subject to change and the Corporation assumes no obligation to revise or update them to reflect new circumstances, except as required by law. Prospective investors should not place undue reliance on forward looking statements. These factors include the inherent risks involved in the exploration for and development of crude oil and natural gas properties, the uncertainties involved in interpreting drilling results and other geological and geophysical data, fluctuating energy prices, the possibility of cost overruns or unanticipated costs or delays and other uncertainties associated with the oil and gas industry. Other risk factors could include risks associated with negotiating with foreign governments as well as country risk associated with conducting international activities, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Corporation.
Kim Hassmer doesnt know what she and her family would have done without FAMIS.
When the Sandston family lost their employer-based coverage for four months earlier this year, she and her husband, David, fell back on Family Access to Medical Insurance Security, a Virginia Medicaid program that acts as a safety net for families who lose coverage, or low-income families who cannot afford insurance.
Though the Hassmers children were only enrolled in the program from March to June, coverage couldnt have come a moment too soon. Just after he was enrolled, their oldest son, 7-year-old Wesley, fell off a fence and severely broke two bones in his arm. Six hours in the emergency room at VCU Medical Center, medication, countless doctors visits and weekly X-rays followed.
If we did not have FAMIS for him, we would still be paying thousands and thousands worth of medical bills, Kim Hassmer said. And I can tell you, were doing OK, but Christmas is going to be tight. We are still paying off student loans, we have a mortgage to pay, and food for three children is not cheap.
By Hassmers estimates, the family could be paying up to $20,000 in medical bills had it not been for the program.
That would have been difficult for our family, she said.
If their gap in coverage and Wesleys broken arm had come a year later, the family might have been out of luck, and thousands of dollars in debt.
Because Congress has yet to re-fund the Childrens Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, which funds FAMIS, the future of the program is uncertain. If federal lawmakers fail to act soon, Virginias program will end and 68,000 children and more than 1,000 pregnant women will lose coverage.
That number has increased since initial reports on CHIP funding as more children have been enrolled in Virginias program.
Without CHIP funding, Virginia will run out of funds for its program by the end of January.
That reality is so unbelievable to officials with the Department of Medical Assistance Services, though, that theyre grasping at hope and are avoiding sending families letters warning them about the end of their childrens coverage, which were initially supposed to be sent out Friday in order to give them 60 days notice.
The new hope is that Congress will fund CHIP by Friday, the deadline to pass a continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown. That may be a vehicle by which Congress could slip CHIP funding through.
If Congress fails to meet even that deadline, though, letters will almost certainly be sent out Friday, or shortly thereafter.
We dont want to send a letter Dec. 1 and then Congress act by Dec. 8, said Linda Nablo, deputy director of DMAS, which runs Medicaid in Virginia. At this point, its going to be a week-by-week, day-by-day judgment call, still knowing we need to give families a lot of notice because we are still saying we cant cover any services after Jan. 31.
But Nablo also wants to avoid unnecessarily scaring or confusing families. If a letter goes out too late, it could arrive around the holidays and be lost or ignored. If it goes out too soon and Congress does act within the next few weeks, families may get the first letter saying the program is ending, but not the second saying it is continuing.
And what does that do in terms of shaking their confidence in this program and government in general? Nablo said. Its an ugly scenario. Its an unnecessarily complicated, depressing scenario for families and quite honestly for state workers as well.
So now the state is balancing trying to avoid those scenarios, while also keeping in mind that families need enough time to act.
Margaret Nimmo Holland, executive director of the advocacy group Voices for Virginias Children, said confusion will almost certainly abound if the state has to send out multiple letters to families.
If they got the first letter but not the second letter, it could lead them to not seek out needed health care for their kids, she said.
CHIP has existed for 20 years and historically enjoyed bipartisan support. Each state uses its CHIP funding differently. Virginia uses some for FAMIS, and some for children covered through Medicaid, but the state will have to continue paying for the latter group regardless of whether or not it gets CHIP funding.
Unfortunately, I think this is an indication of where things are in this country, that were so polarized that we could let something like childrens health insurance get held up, something that both sides of the aisle agree on, Nimmo Holland said. One thing that it tells us is that you cant take anything for granted.
The best possible scenario, Nablo said, is for Congress to just re-fund CHIP so her department can avoid sending letters at all.
Federal lawmakers first deadline to re-authorize funds for the program was Sept. 30. Then the rumor was that Congress would do something in October, then after Thanksgiving.
Despite all those missed deadlines, though, the state and advocates still hope, perhaps with increasing desperation, that Congress will do something if only because the alternative is too distressing.
This shouldnt be happening, Nablo said. Every single senator Ive met, and every single representative in Congress will tell you they support CHIP. Theyll even quote the numbers of how many kids in their states are covered. And here we sit, almost 60 days past the deadline.
There are days when my concern and worry turn into anger.
If Congress fails yet again, thousands of Virginia families will receive letters just before the holidays telling them that the new year will bring with it an end to their childrens health insurance coverage and a beginning to a slew of worries worries the Hassmer family narrowly avoided earlier this year.
The Hassmers are a pretty typical American family. They rely solely on David Hassmers income because their 5-year-old son, Blake, was born with so many medical complications that Kim Hassmer stays home with him.
During their gap in coverage, they needed insurance for just Wesley and their 1-year-old daughter, Molly. Blake already had a Medicaid waiver, so they didnt have to worry about him going without coverage.
Its a huge deal to say, FAMIS is going away, Kim Hassmer said. Its another thing to say, this is my son, Wesley, he has a broken arm and if you take FAMIS away, his arm is going to be crooked.
Its just very sad, she continued. I wish it was easier. I wish it was easier for families to get the care they need.
News / National
by Staff reporter
A FORMER congregant with the Johanne Masowe weChishanu Nyenyedzi Nomwe has been reported to police after allegedly pointing a gun at the sect members at a shrine in Budiriro 4.Innocent Muguvhe and Owen Nhedziwe lodged a complaint with the police against Clifford Chimusoro, Muchineripi Utete and Taurai Munyika at Budiriro police station under RRB3393/179.Muguvhe and Nhedziwe told police that Chimusoro is the one who pointed the gun at them while the other two accomplices were threatening to beat them if they did not comply with their orders.Chimusoro is believed to have approached the duo ordering them to vacate the land they are using for prayer citing that the land is meant for residential stands."I told Chimusoro to approach Harare City Council because we got that land as land for the church and not for residential stands. I do not know what got into his mind because he has been our member for a long time."He tried to kidnap us because he was forcefully ordering us to get in the car but we refused," said Nhedziwe.The church leader, Hebert Senda, known as Madzibaba Enock condemned what he termed "an act of terror on holy ground"."This is an act of terror on holy ground. We go to church to pray and not to point guns at congregants because it is not a war zone."It will not bear fruit for people to employ such tactics when there are people seeking the face of the Lord at the shrine. There should be other alternatives people should use when they have grievances not to employ terror," said Madzibaba Enock.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2017) - Bayhorse Silver Inc. (TSXV: BHS) ("Bayhorse" or the "Company") is pleased to report that on November 30, 2017, Steinert US commissioning personnel handed over the KSS100 X-Ray Transmissive "Ore-Sorter" to Bayhorse CEO, Graeme O'Neill, in a fully operational state at the Bayhorse Silver Mine, Oregon, USA.
Before handing over the Ore-Sorter to Bayhorse, Steinert US personnel conducted their standard "on-site" comprehensive pre-commissioning tests. The final step was installing the three ore-sorting algorithms that were developed from Bayhorse mineralized material shipped to the Steinert US test facility at Walton, Kentucky, USA in May of this year. (See NR BHS2017-14)
Figure 1: Bayhorse Ore-Sorter and Steinert US technical commissioning personnel with Bayhorse CEO Graeme O'Neill and Mine operating personnel.
To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:
http://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5015/30969_a1512361746245_74.jpg
Bayhorse CEO Graeme O'Neill comments "Commissioning the KSS 100 Ore-Sorter, with state- of- the -art sensing and sorting technology, concludes a major milestone by installing cutting-edge technology to separate mineralized from non-mineralized material at the Bayhorse Silver Mine." "The Ore-Sorter is completely automatic, with sorting operations and performance monitored remotely by both Steinert and the Company. Steinert can change the operational characteristics and sorting algorithms of the Ore-Sorter at their US operations center, without ever needing to do a site visit."
Levi Duncan, Bayhorse Operations Manager, along with his two highly experienced mining teams from Idaho's Silver Valley, led by Bayhorse Mine Supervisors, Josh Haynes and Jon Farrell, played a significant role in achieving this momentous occasion.
Upgrading the 1,300 tonnes of stockpiled silver mineralized oxide and sulphide material, from underground development conducted concurrent with the Ore-Sorter installation, will continue through to January, 2018. The Bayhorse Silver Mine operates on a 7 day and week schedule.
The first mineralized material to be processed through the Ore-Sorter is from the Sunshine Zone in the upper level, where grab samples from blasted mined rounds assayed as shown in the following table: (previously disclosed in the Company's news release BHS2017-17).
Sample Type
Au Oz/t
Ag Oz/t
Ag g/t Grab, blasted round <.001 0.80 24.88 Grab blasted round 0.001 2.70 83.98 Grab blasted round 0.005 62.50 1,943.96 Grab blasted round <.001 0.50 15.55 Grab blasted round 0.006 69.60 2,164.80 Grab blasted round 0.001 14.75 458.78 Grab blasted round 0.001 17.90 556.75 Grab blasted round 0.004 52.78 1,641.64 Select blasted rock 0.003 68.76 2,138.67 Select blasted rock <.001 4.33 134.68 Grab, 46' into drift 0.001 23.55 732.49 Grab, 52' into drift 0.002 61.12 1,901.04 Grab, 61' into drift 0.002 35.56 1,106.04 Grab 68' into drift <.001 5.72 177.91 Chip 76'- 18" across vein 0.003 49.58 1,542.11 Chip 80' - 18" across vein 0.001 2.70 83.98 Chip 85' - 24" across vein 0.004 83.50 2,597.13 Select - Big Dog Zone 0.005 111.85 3,478.92
Grab/select samples are selected samples and are not representative of the mineralization hosted on the property.
Dr. Bill Willoughby, the Company's mining engineer, supervised the underground development, including 530 feet of new workings into unexplored areas of the Mine, that intersected new mineralized zones. A stockpile of 1,300 tonnes of mineralized oxide and sulphide development material, both of which the Ore-Sorter readily sorts, was derived from both the upper level workings and the two new mineralized zones in the intermediate level.
The Company advises it is not basing any decision to produce on a feasibility study of mineral reserves demonstrating economic and technical viability and also advises there is increased uncertainty and specific economic and technical risks of failure associated with any production decision.
This News Release has been prepared on behalf of the Bayhorse Silver Inc. Board of Directors, which accepts full responsibility for its contents. Dr. Clay Conway, P.Geol., a Qualified Person and Director of Bayhorse has prepared, supervised the preparation of, or approved the technical content of this press release.
On Behalf of the Board.
Graeme O'Neill, CEO
604-684-3394
Bayhorse Silver Inc. has earned an 80% interest in the historic Bayhorse Silver Mine, Oregon, USA, through current underground development , and construction of concentrating facilities.
Bayhorse is also earning a 75% interest in the Bridging the Gap Project, consisting of past producing historic Crown Point, Silver King, Ranger, Wyoming, Curlew, and Blackhawk silver/lead/zinc mines of ASARCO in Idaho's Silver Valley.
The Company has an experienced management and technical team with extensive exploration and mining expertise.
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Prior to last months elections, no polling had been done on Maines first-of-its-kind ballot initiative to expand Medicaid. Considering how controversial the health-care debate in Congress has been all year and the fact that the state elected a Republican governor, health policy experts were expecting a nailbiter.But to their pleasant surprise, the vote was quickly called in their favor. Sixty percent of Maine voters chose to expand Medicaid, which is one of the key provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare. That means more low-income people in Maine should soon be eligible for Medicaid, the government-run health insurance program. (The governor, however, has vowed to implement it only under certain conditions.)The victory in Maine has re-energized Obamacare advocates hoping to replicate that success in other states.A 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling made Medicaid expansion optional for states. Since then, 33 have expanded. The holdout states are largely run by Republicans. In many cases, GOP governors support Medicaid expansion but can't convince their GOP legislatures to approve it.In Maine's case, though, it was just the opposite: Gov. Paul LePage vetoed five expansion bills passed by the legislature over the course of five years.In Nebraska, state Sen. Adam Morfeld, a Democrat, said he plans on pushing a Medicaid expansion bill that didnt get a vote this year again in 2018."[Maine's vote] reshapes the debate. My district is one of the top five in the state where people fall in that coverage gap, so Im constantly hearing about the need for more affordable health care, says Morfeld.Morfeld said he's noticed his Republican colleagues warming to the idea, but even if the legislature were to pass something, the challenge would be getting GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts to sign off on it. Ricketts is opposed to Medicaid expansion , calling it a risky proposition for taxpayers ... because we cannot trust the federal governments long-term financial commitment to state programs.Under the ACA, the federal government pays 100 percent of the costs of expanding Medicaid and then gradually drops its contribution to 90 percent over the course of several years. The state then picks up the rest of the tab. In several of the bills introduced in Congress to repeal and replace Obamacare this year, though, that funding provision was removed or drastically reduced.Regardless, if Ricketts vetoes a Medicaid expansion bill, Morfeld says he will follow in Maine's steps and take the issue to the ballot box.At least three other states have ongoing attempts to place Medicaid expansion on the ballot.In Idaho, advocates filed paperwork in October to let voters weigh in on Medicaid expansion in November 2018. Idaho Attorney General Scott Keim says he has concerns about the language of the measure, primarily around costs to the state if the federal government stops paying for the program. If the AG allows the proposal to proceed, they'll need 48,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot.Advocates in Utah are also waiting on a decision from their state about whether they can start collecting signatures for a Medicaid expansion initiative. The federal government approved a waiver in November for Utah to expand Medicaid to 6,000 people who are either chronically homeless, in the criminal justice system or in need of substance abuse treatment. But state Sen. Brian Shiozawa, a Republican sponsoring the initiative, says it's time for the state to fully embrace Medicaid expansion."The ACA is the law of the land, whether we like it or not. If our tax dollars are going to D.C. anyway, let's get some of it back to help out the taxpayers," Shiozawa says. "I'm an emergency room doctor, so I know we have very real need."In Missouri, the fight to expand Medicaid is largely up to one man, and it's an uphill battle. Gary Peterson, a 76-year-old former truck driver, has to collect 100,000 signatures for his initiative to make the ballot. But even the state's Democratic Party hasn't taken a position on Peterson's efforts.Another state has a shot of expanding Medicaid soon -- but not through the popular vote.In Virginia, outgoing Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe tried to expand Medicaid for most of his four-year term. Standing in his way was the GOP-led legislature. But in the elections last month, Democrats gained more seats in the state House than they have in any single cycle since the 19th century. Depending on the final election results ( which have yet to be certified ), Democrats may flip control of the chamber over to them. Either way, Democrat Ralph Northam was elected governor and is committed to pushing Medicaid expansion.Back in Maine, the matter is being complicated by Gov. LePage, who has a history of not enacting voters' ballot decisions on issues ranging from marijuana to the minimum wage The ballot initiative was given a cut-and-dry timeline: The approved measure becomes law 45 days after the legislature reconvenes on Jan. 3. After that, the state Department of Health then has to file a plan with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services within 90 days and officially expand services in 180 days.But within days of the vote, LePage said he wouldn't implement Medicaid expansion unless the state legislature maps out how it will fund it. The state's Department of Health and Human Services estimates that expansion would cost the state $63 million for fiscal year 2019. To put that into perspective, total government spending in Maine totaled $8 billion in 2016.Medicaid expansion will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to give free health care to working-age, able-bodied adults, most of whom do not have dependents," says LePage Though LePage will likely try to stop or at least slow expansion, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle don't think he has the authority to do so."The results of [the] election are clear. It is now the job of the legislature to once again find a path forward," Maine Senate President Michael Thibodeau, a Republican who is also running for governor, told It remains to be seen if the legislature will follow LePage's request to show how they'll fund it when they reconvene for regular session in January.LePage is also in his final year in office, limiting the amount of time he has to win a legal fight. Still, advocates of Medicaid expansion are prepared for one. David Farmer, spokesperson for Mainers for Health Care, which supported the ballot measure, says his organization will take LePage to court if he halts the implementation process."What the governor says he will do and what he can actually do are two different things," he says.
Nevada will receive $5.7 million in unspent funds for federal health care for low-income children, but the states entire congressional delegation urged House and Senate leaders Friday to quickly reauthorize the program that expired two months ago.The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services notified the state that it would receive the redistribution of unspent funds, which should allow Nevada to provide Childrens Health Insurance Program services through January.Nevada was expected to run out of CHIP funds around Dec. 15, prompting Gov. Brian Sandoval and the states bipartisan congressional delegation to urge quick action to reauthorize the program.In a joint letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Nevadas U.S. Sens. Dean Heller, a Republican, and Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, urged quick renewal of CHIP to provide children and families in Nevada the certainty they deserve.
All Kinds
Research Needed
CARRBORO, N.C. On a sunny November afternoon in this quiet college community, a steady stream of customers walks through the doors of a local cafe called Oasis for a cup of an increasingly popular herbal beverage. The menu offers coffee, black tea, beer, wine and pastries, but nearly everyone opts for a $5 mug of kratom (pronounced KRAY-dum).A powder ground from the leaves of an indigenous Southeast Asian tree related to the coffee plant, kratom (Mitragyna speciosa) offers pain relief and mood enhancement, similar to prescription painkillers.Advocates say the substance, which does not depress the respiratory system and therefore presents little to no overdose risk, could help reduce the nations reliance on highly addictive and often deadly prescription painkillers. Some addiction experts also argue the plant could be used as an alternative to methadone, buprenorphine and Vivitrol in medication-assisted therapy for opioid addiction.Used for centuries to fight fatigue, pain and anxiety in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea and Thailand, kratom was rarely taken in the United States until recently.Now, with growing concerns about the dangers of prescription painkillers, an estimated 3 million to 5 million people are using kratom and reporting positive results, based on information from retailers. But worries that the unregulated plant product could be abused for its mild euphoric qualities and users could become addicted are spurring federal officials to issue public health warnings and a handful of states and cities to impose bans.Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Tennessee, Vermont, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia have banned kratom, along with at least three cities Denver, San Diego and Sarasota, Florida. Legislation was considered last year in at least six other states Florida, Kentucky, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and North Carolina.Animal studies have shown that kratom use may lead to addiction. But user surveys indicate that although the herb can be habit-forming, withdrawal symptoms are no worse than those encountered when quitting coffee, sugar or certain herbal supplements. Withdrawal symptoms, which typically last three to four days, include muscle aches, cravings, a runny nose, restlessness and mood swings.The Drug Enforcement Administration last year said it intended to classify the herbal supplement as an illegal Schedule 1 drug, along with heroin, LSD and marijuana. But after public demonstrations, letters from Congress and a petition with more than 142,000 signatures, the agency put the proposal on hold.Last month, Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb issued a public health warning, citing 36 deaths in which kratom was present, but not necessarily the cause. About 50,000 Americans die of drug overdoses each year. In addition, the FDA, which has been seizing imports of kratom at U.S. ports since 2013, stepped up import enforcement.The agency also cited a 10-fold increase in kratom-related calls to poison centers between 2010 and 2015 from 26 calls to 263, out of roughly 2.2 million calls a year. And Gottlieb warned about the unknown risks of using kratom to treat opioid addiction, saying he fears some kratom may have been laced with opioids, and that the FDA needs to conduct more study on the plants potential benefits.In response, the American Kratom Association, a Colorado-based advocacy and lobbying organization, issued its own analysis of FDA data on adverse drug events, calling the kratom numbers incredibly insignificant in the broader context of drug-related deaths and adverse reactions.At Oasis, no one seems concerned about the hubbub in Washington. Owner Robert Roskind says the controversy has only improved business by focusing attention on what he says is still a little-known plant with huge benefits and few drawbacks. Except for the rare upset stomach or lightheadedness, it has helped nearly everyone, he said. And its cheap. I have about 300 customers and most come here several times a week. Some buy take-home packages.With subdued lighting, soft music and mystical artwork, Oasis has a peaceful vibe. Customers are happy to talk about their reasons for taking kratom, and they vary widely.A group of University of North Carolina students from nearby Chapel Hill sit on floor pillows in a corner, reading and working on laptops. Kratom sharpens their focus when they need to study for an exam, one student said. Its like coffee without the jitters.A 27-year-old tattooed chef from Brooklyn said he started drinking kratom to relieve withdrawal symptoms after he decided to quit heroin on his own three months ago. A conservatively dressed 22-year-old fraternity brother said kratom has helped him stop binge drinking.A woman in her 40s, recovering from brain cancer therapy, says it relieves her anxiety and improves her sense of well-being. Two women who work with preschoolers say it lowers their stress level. And a 29-year-old construction worker says it keeps his fibromyalgia symptoms, including pain and fatigue, at bay so he can get up and work every day.Even among the diverse crowd here at Oasis, Bob Whyte, a well-dressed 80-year-old businessman from Chapel Hill stands out. A self-described straight-laced boy scout, he said hes been drinking kratom three times a day to relieve severe back pain from failed surgery.Id been taking tramadol and hydrocodone consistently for two years when I found out about kratom, he said. Whyte said his doctors didnt want him to keep taking the highly addictive prescription painkillers, and they had no objections when he told them he was switching to kratom.At first, Whyte said he was a little fearful about trying the plant-based medicine. Roskind gave him a kratom brownie and suggested he eat half of it at home.I picked a day when I wouldnt be driving and sat on the front porch and had half a brownie. I waited a half-hour and felt fine, so I had the other half. Thats when I had a little happy moment there on the porch, he said sheepishly.Since that July morning, Whyte said hes figured out what dose is best for him enough to bring his pain down to a tolerable level without feeling drowsy. Now he says hes telling everyone he knows about kratom.Despite rave reviews from kratom users, most physicians and researchers argue that research using human clinical trials is needed to accurately determine the leaf powders potential harms and benefits. They also insist that oversight of commercial sales of the plant is needed to ensure consumers are getting high-quality, uncontaminated products.But scientists and other stakeholders differ about whether sales of the plant should be curtailed in the meantime.The American Society of Addiction Medicine argued in comments to the DEA last year that the whole botanical product, like the powder sold at Oasis, should be made illegal to prevent people with addictions from trying to use it to recover. Since three FDA-approved medications exist that have proven safe and effective, using kratom to treat opioid addiction presents an unnecessary risk for people with addictions, the group said.At the same time, they recommended that what appears to be the plants primary active ingredients, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, should remain legal so they can be researched for their pain relief and addiction treatment potential.Oliver Grundmann, an associate professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, has surveyed kratom users and found that very few report becoming addicted and most use it to treat chronic pain, mental health conditions and drug addiction.Im questioning whether we are doing any good by banning kratom, Grundmann said. If states and the federal government make kratom illegal, he said, it would not only slow the progress of research, but it would also leave many kratom users no choice but to switch back to painkillers or heroin.
News / National
by Staff reporter
PROPHETIC Healing and Deliverance ministries founder, Dr Prophet Walter Magaya was offered pieces of land to construct churches by the Angolan army general.Angola National Army Zi-Grante general Armando Jose received Prophet Magaya upon his arrival at Aeroporto Internacional 4 De Fevereiro Partidas and took him to a hotel where he thanked the man of cloth for changing lives of Angolan people fellowshipping with him.There was a stampede at the airport as people wrestled with Angolan police and army officers to touch Prophet Magaya's feet as a sign of receiving his blessing."We say Bem Vindo' Prophet Magaya for stepping your feet here in Angola may the showers of blessings be upon our people," said General Jose.The army general assigned Brigadier Jorge Mayer Faria to fly Prophet Magaya and his team to Huambo province in a military jet where he was shown 7000 hectares to construct church and 50 000 hectares for an agro-city where he can build a hospital, school and farm.Dr Prophet Magaya and his team experienced military touch reception with army officials that they jetted to the capital Kuito of Bie province.Prophet Magaya thanked Angola National Army for the reception they gave him and pronounced a blessing to PHD members urging them to be careful with people abusing social media to settle their personal vendetta.(image) "I thank Angola National Army for according me military status, we experienced the life of soldiers of Christ and police motorcade took us to the capital Luanda streets until we return," said Dr Prophet Magaya."Thank you Angola PHD members who attend our conferences and seminars in Harare, your welcome was great and I feel comforted."Remain blessed and focused and do be careful with those people who are after settling their personal vendetta by abusing social media."To our prayer partners, Yadah Connect and PHD members out there continue preaching peace and receive your healing," said Prophet Magaya.Among his missionary team who witnessed how Angolan army respected Prophet Magaya were his legal advisor Everson Chatambudza, local PHD coordinators and Yadah Connect team.Prophet Magaya recently received an honorary doctorate degree in entrepreneurship from a South Africa University, Unisa, and back home he was voted the most influential person Under 40.
Notices will be sent out later this month to the parents of 17,000 Connecticut children and teens covered by the federal Children's Health Insurance Program, warning them their coverage could end early next year if Congress doesn't act soon."Given the uncertainty of congressional action to extend the program, it is incumbent upon the state to warn those who could be potentially affected before they lose coverage," Gov. Dannel P. Malloy wrote in a letter to legislative leaders Friday.The program covers children from low- and moderate-income families who make too much money to qualify for Medicaid. A family of four in Connecticut can earn up to $79,458 and qualify for a version of CHIP with maximum monthly premiums of $50. Funding for CHIP expired on Sept. 30.Malloy said the Department of Social Services will send notices by mid-December warning parents that their HUSKY B coverage, as CHIP is referred to in Connecticut, may end on Jan. 31 if Congress does not vote to reauthorize funding.A second notice will be sent in late December or early January to let parents know if their children may qualify for Medicaid or a plan purchased through Access Health CT, the state's health insurance exchange."This will undoubtedly be disruptive and alarming to those receiving notices -- and then possibly losing coverage -- and we should all be prepared for the fallout," Malloy wrote.The state stands to lose $37 million in annual CHIP funding and an additional $40 million in extra federal funding for certain children covered under Medicaid if the program is not reauthorized.Other states have already notified parents that their coverage may be terminated and some states have had to request additional federal funding to keep their CHIP programs going.Republicans and Democrats in Congress both say they want to extend funding for CHIP, but the issue has gotten pushed aside by debates over health care and tax reform. A funding bill passed the House but was not taken up by the Senate.It's possible CHIP reauthorization could be included in an appropriations bill that Congress must pass soon to fund the government into 2018.
Governors
Statewide Elected Officials
State Legislators
Mayors and County Officials
When a Republican and Democrat from Washington state recently announced a new group called Washington Independents, they did something that in today's aggressively partisan age is positively radical: They seized the political center.The new group, former Democratic U.S. Rep. Brian Baird said, is "looking for candidates who will listen, have the courage and integrity to solve the tough issues, and who will put principle over party or special interests and people over partisanship."Baird and Chris Vance, a former head of the state's Republican Party, are far from alone.According to dozens of political observers across the country, there are a handful of moderates at all levels of government who aren't just quietly pursing moderate policies but who actually wear the title proudly.Before we meet these moderates, it's important to note that we're only including politicians holding or seeking office and who are rising stars rather than long-entrenched incumbents. That's because it's too easy to eschew partisanship when you're not facing an imminent party primary, and for this discussion to be valid, it's important to demonstrate that their brand of politics has a future.Being a governor offers a better opportunity for pursuing a centrist approach than most elected positions. After all, governors have to run statewide and a hardline partisan approach often won't win over enough urban, suburban or rural voters.Governors also have to work with the opposite party in the state legislature to pass laws and in cities and counties on economic development. In many cases, this fosters moderate policies.Unsurprisingly, today's moderate governors can be found in states that generally lean toward the opposite party of their executive leader. In the blue states of Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont, voters have, respectively, elected RepublicansandCharlie Baker, for example, signed bills in November that require insurers to offer free birth control and ban bump stocks , which increase weapons' rate of fire. Hogan, meanwhile, signed a fracking ban and has pursued sick-leave legislation, though he vetoed a Democratic version he considered too far-reaching.Red states, meanwhile, have elected several Democratic governors, includingin Montana,in North Carolina andin Louisiana. Cooper's highest-profile accomplishment -- overturning the H.B. 2 "bathroom bill" -- ended up irritating both the left and the right."I happen to believe that Democrats in a large part of the country, but particularly across the South, would do much better if we fielded more candidates who were pro-Second Amendment and pro-life such as myself," Edwards told in September. "I happen to believe we have a superior message in many regards that will resonate with people across this region, but they won't hear it if you don't check a couple of boxes first. They won't hear the rest of your message."And almost by definition, the nation's sole independent governor, Alaska's, qualifies as a centrist.It's worth noting, however, that none of these politicians are necessarily a good fit for the term rising star. Few elected positions rank higher than governor, and the ones that do are difficult for moderates to attain.Winning a U.S. Senate election as a member of the state's minority party is a much heavier lift than winning the governorship. And running as a moderate in a party's primary for president? Fuhgeddaboutit.If governorships are the ideal place for moderates, then it should come as no surprise that several are running for the office.Take Kansas. Following a divisive two terms under Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, moderates in the state are flexing their muscles. The widespread unpopularity of Brownback's budget-busting tax cuts has shifted the power in the Republican Party ever so slightly back toward the center, as Democrats and moderate Republicans have sought with some success to stymie Brownback's initiatives.The GOP has three relatively moderate candidates in their large field for 2018: former legislatorsand, and state Rep.. If any of them manages to survive the primary, says Burdett Loomis, a University of Kansas political scientist, they would likely fare well in the general election.Democrats, for their part, have always had to be more moderate to win in the state. If a conservative wins the GOP primary, the Democrats should be able to make the race competitive with one of their candidates -- House Minority Leader, former Wichita Mayor, and former legislator and agriculture secretaryAnother state where moderates may be ascendant in 2018 is Colorado. There, independent voters will have their first chance ever to vote in partisan primaries, potentially pushing both parties toward the center.Floyd Ciruli, a Denver-based pollster, pointed to several moderate politicians running for governor next year who could benefit, including Democratic Lt. Gov.and Republican Attorney GeneralLynne, who has served as president of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Colorado, called herself the most "pragmatic" candidate in the race, "with more experience than any other candidate in managing millions of dollars of budgets, large organizations,"Coffman has a moderate record on social issues and has attended an LGBTQ pride event.Other candidates with moderate profiles who are expected to run for governor next year include Afghanistan War veteran and Democratic state Rep.in South Carolina, former Democratic U.S. Rep.in Florida, Republican surgeonin Oregon and former Tennessee economic development chiefIf a couple of these moderate gubernatorial candidates begin to gain traction during the 2018 election cycle, it may be a sign that centrism is demonstrating a surge in popular appeal.It's increasingly rare for members of one party to win statewide office in states dominated by the opposite party. Nevertheless, there's Mississippi Attorney GeneralThe Democrat withstood a tough Republican challenge in 2015 and may run for governor in 2019. If he does so, he would be the only Democrat with a prayer of winning.In Missouri -- a state that has turned heavily Republican in a relatively short period of time -- Democratwas appointed to the position of state auditor and plans to run for the office on her own in 2018. Despite Missouri's political drift, observers say she's taken a relatively nonpartisan approach and has a good shot at winning next year.The position is a bit of a launching pad: Three recent U.S. senators from Missouri previously held the state auditorship -- Claire McCaskill, John Ashcroft and Christopher Bond.On the Republican side, Utah Lt. Gov.has made headlines for criticizing President Trump, reaching out to gays and leading a bipartisan effort to address Utah's homelessness and opioid challenges. He is expected to run for governor in 2020.Given the hyperpartisan nature of state legislatures these days, it's tough to be a moderate. Still, there are a few in the most unlikely of places.In Texas, Republican state Rep.is "the most visible and vocal unabashed Republican moderate," says Rice University political scientist Mark P. Jones. She's the only abortion rights Republican in the Texas Legislature, and she's been endorsed by the state's leading LGBTQ advocacy group, Equality Texas."Unlike some of her moderate colleagues who are moderates in Austin but present themselves as hard-line conservatives back in their district, Davis both walks the moderate walk in Austin and talks the moderate talk when back home in Houston," Jones says.In California, Assemblymanis a leader among moderate, pro-business Democrats in the legislature. Previously, Daly served as mayor of Anaheim."To be effective at any level of government, you have to be able to work with people who are not going to agree with you on every issue," Daly told thein 2013.And in New Mexico, Democrat, a state representative, is one of a handful of moderates who are gaining influence in the legislature. A Democrat from the conservative eastern portion of New Mexico, Dodge served in the Navy and has been a teacher, principal and business owner. He has risen quickly in the chamber to become vice chairman of the influential House Appropriations Committee.Since cities and suburban counties have become increasingly Democratic, mayoral offices and county executive positions offer Republicans some of the best opportunities for pursuing centrist political careers. In other words, they can offer agendas that are pro-business but socially moderate.In deep red Oklahoma, Oklahoma City Mayoris considered relatively moderate."By Oklahoma standards, his views on issues like LGBTQ rights [have become] more progressive during his years as mayor," wrote Arnold Hamilton, editor of theCornett is widely considered a strong general election candidate as he runs for governor in 2018, but Hamilton noted that the last Oklahoma City mayor to run statewide didn't survive the 2004 GOP primary.In New York's Dutchess County, which narrowly supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016, voters have elected Republican, a former village mayor and former Assemblyman, as their county executive.Molinaro is "very steeped in how government works and is committed to good government while pursuing fiscally conservative and socially moderate policies," says Gerald Benjamin, a political scientist at SUNY-New Paltz.In staunchly Republican Utah, Salt Lake County Mayor, a Democrat, has branded himself as a moderate -- a necessity as he seeks to oust Republican U.S. Rep. Mia Love.While McAdams had backed a broad expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, he told that he collaborated with Republican state House Speaker Greg Hughes on a more politically manageable approach.Meanwhile, in Alabama,has been elected mayor of Tuscaloosa four times as a Democrat, focusing on economic development and the city's recovery from tornado devastation. He's running for governor in 2018.One of the surprise hotbeds of moderate Republican and Democratic mayors is Indiana. The highest-profile example is South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg , who ran unsuccessfully to lead the Democratic National Committee, billing himself as a fresh, midwestern voice. He's gay and a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan.The bench of moderate Indiana mayors is even deeper on the GOP side.is the mayor of Carmel, an Indianapolis suburb with a population of 86,000. He's pushed for green and pedestrian-oriented development. Another Republican mayor isof the neighboring and similarly sized suburb of Fishers; he's considered a pragmatic Republican. Elsewhere in the state, Republicanserves as mayor of Evansville and has taken a moderate approach.
Asked what advice he would give to Jeff Colyer when he takes over as governor of Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback answered with one word:"Pray."After a lengthy pause, he elaborated."The motto of the country is 'in God we trust,' right?" Brownback said. "Do we believe it, or not? I think leaders need to be people who pray and really do seek wisdom from above. And I just think that's a very important thing, to seek that and have the humility to do that."Brownback is awaiting Senate confirmation for his new role in government as the nation's international ambassador for religious freedom, a post he helped create as a U.S. senator and to which he's been nominated by President Trump.In a farewell address to Republican supporters at the Wichita Pachyderm Club, laced together with frequent religious references, Brownback announced that one of his last acts before he leaves office as governor will be to declare a statewide day of prayer and fasting for Kansas."You look at our great leaders of our nation, George Washington, Lincoln, my goodness, these guys were on their knees all the time," he said. And he hailed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, "a man of the cloth," for the religious underpinnings of the nation's civil rights movement."They started these rallies from the church," he said. "They were singing hymns before they'd go out and face the police and the dogs. Where does your strength come from? It comes from God."Brownback also praised Republicans in general and the Pachyderms in particular for making Kansas "the leading pro-life state" in the country.He likened the movement that began at the Summer of Mercy protests in Wichita to the anti-slavery activism in Kansas that was a key factor in launching the Civil War.He said the nation basically tolerated slavery until "people came out here and said 'I am not willing to tolerate it.'"Brownback said he has signed 19 bills restricting abortion and the movement has spread from Kansas across the country."We are a pro-life state and we are not going back," Brownback said. "You changed the nation by changing thoughts in people."Brownback declined to give specifics about what he plans to do as an ambassador, but did say he thinks the position will be "one of the most important portfolios around" because of the intersection between religious extremism and international terrorism and security."This issue hasn't been trending the right way" in the past 20 years, he said. "It's been trending the wrong way."Brownback said the message he hopes to convey to other countries is "If you want your country to grow and prosper, you need to protect your religious minorities."In terms of state politics, Brownback said he thinks Colyer, the lieutenant governor, will do "an outstanding job" when he takes over. But he also praised the numerous other candidates who will run against Colyer next year and gave a quick shout-out to candidate Wink Hartman, a Wichita businessman who was in the audience."I'll be really disappointed if you don't elect a pro-life governor," Brownback said.Although Brownback won't be in Kansas to see it through, he urged Wichitans to keep pushing for his proposal to start an independent private-sector medical school to train doctors of osteopathic medicine.Brownback said it's important not just to Wichita, but to the rural parts of the state. In contrast with the medical doctors trained at the University of Kansas, osteopathic physicians are more likely to go into general practice and become family physicians serving small towns."We've been chronically short of medical people practicing in rural areas since I've been in public life," Brownback said.While other Kansas communities are also competing to be the site for the osteopathic medical school, "I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be here," Brownback said.
The Texas House Administration Committee unanimously approved an updated sexual harassment policy Friday that gives examples of such harassment, offers guidance for internal and external complaint processes and lays out counseling information.The policy also requires sexual harassment training for all House members, employees and interns, though it's not enforceable for legislators.The move comes following media reports of sexual misconduct at the Capitol.The old policy stated that victims or witnesses could confront the offender and ask the person to stop. The new policy says that that isn't required, but it could stop future offensive behavior."If you do not want to confront the offender directly, or if you have talked with the offender and the behavior has not stopped, or if you believe your complaint has resulted in retaliation, you may pursue a sexual harassment complaint as described below," the policy states.The new policy offers multiple ways to report a complaint, including to the manager of the House Payroll/Personnel Department, the Civil Rights Division of the Texas Workforce Commission or the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.The updated policy also states that confidentiality will be upheld for victims and that witnesses and others working on the House side who learn of a victim's identity are expected to maintain that confidentiality. The policy also offers information on how to get counseling and explicitly prohibits retaliation for reporting someone accused of harassment. Acts of retaliation could be a violation of state or federal law, the policy states.The Daily Beast and The Texas Tribune last month detailed claims of sexual harassment and assault by male lawmakers and others at the Capitol. The reports mostly relied on anonymous sources.At the beginning of the panel's meeting Friday, House Administration Committee Chairman Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, called the updated policy "a major improvement."Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, said she hopes the updated policy makes it easier for victims to report their attackers. Howard said she has found that, as with sexual assaults on college campuses, "a lot of people do not report these incidents ... because they do not have confidence in the system."Geren said he will ask House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, to appoint a working group that would offer additional recommendations to further improve the guidelines before the 2019 legislative session.Straus thanked the committee and other House members who offered input on the policy change."This new policy provides a much clearer statement that sexual harassment will not be tolerated in the Texas House," he said in a statement to the American-Statesman. "It provides more specific guidance and protection for victims, it requires training of all members and employees, and it makes clear that any report of sexual harassment will be taken seriously. There is more work to do, and we will do it, but this is an important step."Employees can be fired for their offenses, and lawmakers could face sanctions by the full House, including expulsion, he said. Geren said he "absolutely" would not have a problem pursuing a fellow lawmaker accused of wrongdoing."None of us are above the law on this and shouldn't be," Geren said.Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, has asked that chamber's Administration Committee Chairwoman Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, to review sexual harassment policies.
Some see a renewed relationship between the states and the federal government. Some see Cabinet members who are engaged and willing to work with the states.Others aren't nearly as optimistic. And don't get them started on those tweets.With President Donald Trump now 11 months in office, we asked some Western governors to assess how he's doing so far _ the good and not-so-good.The 10 governors had come to Phoenix for a two-day meeting of the Western Governors Association. Dealing with wildfires and other disasters was a major focus, and the governors and their representatives shared ideas on how to prevent and combat wildfires. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, said of wildfires: "This is an ongoing tragedy that affects us all. ... It shows no partisan slant."As for Trump, the reviews, as expected, were mixed.We talked to seven of the 10 Western governors and asked them to share their biggest concern about the president, as well as what makes them optimistic. (California Gov. Jerry Brown did not attend the conference , but he's fiercely criticized Trump on health care, immigration and climate change, among other issues.)Here's what the governors had to say. The interviews have been edited for length and clarity:The use of social media by the administration and the difficulty that presents in knowing whether that is an indicator of policy positions or simply an indicator of an attitude at a given moment in time.The seemingly pretty wide-spread attitude among the Cabinet that they welcome and initiate communication on policy matters that affect us in the states.That is a hard question because you're asking me to prioritize a list. ... My biggest, probably largest concern, is the tweets, and you know the amount of energy and distraction that comes out of those tweets. I think it could dilute the authority of the office.I don't agree with all of his appointments, but he has hired a lot of talented people and I think our job as governors is to work with the Cabinet assembled and try and move this country forward. ... Almost all of the Cabinet he has picked are constructive.I think a kind of an isolationist beginning. Like, the whole "let's not do international trade and stay home." I think we actually need to increase international trade. It's a global economy, and we need to be interfacing with other countries around the world. It brings friendlier relationships and leads to peace.The fact there seems to be accessibility from the states and the roles that states play as equal partners with the federal government. ... I very much appreciate the fact that this administration seems to recognize and wants to hear from the states on whatever the issue might be. They say, "Let's see what the states have to say," before making a decision. I'm very encouraged about that. Part of that is because we have a vice president who is a former governor.Not much is getting done. There are a lot of pressing issues and not much is getting done. I'm not sure the dialogue we always hear is that helpful, either.That part is still to be written. We have not seen a lot coming out of Washington that's positive.Not knowing what kind of access we will have to his administration. That was a big question.I've been pleased with access we've had so far to the Cabinet. They've reached out to us and we've been very pleased with that.I would say the sustainability of momentum _ we get little spurts of momentum. We got taxes done. There's these fits and starts and stops with things. The administration needs to keep getting momentum.We at the state-level depend a lot on the stability of the stock market, the growth in the stock market ... we've seen that. I'm optimistic and pleased about that. I think there's also been a renewed Federalism. We're getting answers back out of Washington, D.C. ... we're not in suspense. We're hearing from them.We continue to look at the partnership between federal government and states and you know there are a lot of co-dependences for very important programs. ... So we look forward to working with the administration so we can serve the public.I think that we see movement in working together. For us, in Hawaii, the biggest public works project in the state is our public transit system and so certainly we look forward to working with the administration to complete that project.
Description
GIS - 04 December, 2017: Government is striving for an equitable society that promotes the inclusion of people with disabilities in society; gender equality and the rights of elders and the development of children. Our citizens must fight against indifference and discrimination so as to foster a culture of unity, fraternity and harmony that will in turn contribute to the stability and progress of the country. We must ensure that people with disabilities should always be given due attention and respect so that they fully participate in the society.
This statement was made yesterday by the Prime Minister, Minister of Home Affairs, External Communications and National Development Unit, and Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr. Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Moka.
He was speaking on the occasion of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, commemorated on 01 December, in the presence of the Minister of Social Security, National Solidarity, and Environment and Sustainable Development, Mr Etienne Sinatambou and several Ministers as well as other eminent personalities.
The Prime Minister reiterated that Government is committed to provide adequate measures and facilities to enhance the quality of life of people with disabilities. He spoke of the Building Control (Accessibility and Gender Compliance in Buildings) Regulations. The proposal of the Disability Bill, aiming to protect the rights of persons with disabilities as well as eliminating discrimination against them is yet another measure that Government is working upon, added the Prime Minister.
As regards the promotion of equity in the education system, the Prime Minister highlighted the various scholarships that are being provided to encourage learners with disabilities to achieve higher education aspirations. He underscored that the increase in the grant-in-aid to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) running Special Education Needs schools and the coming up of a Special Education Needs Authority are also measures put in place to that effect.
Prime Minister Jugnauth lauded the talents and perseverance of persons with disabilities as well as the key role of NGOs in providing the necessary support to them. The achievements of Mauritians with disabilities, he underlined, have been remarkable in various fields even at international level. The Prime Minister referred to the examples of Jane Constance and Yaseen Edoo who have made Mauritius proud at national and international level. Mr Reynolds Permal is yet another source of inspiration for all people with disabilities to strive for excellence, he added.
For his part, the Minister of Social Security, National Solidarity, and Environment and Sustainable Development, Mr Etienne Sinatambou, called upon a change in attitudes and mentality vis a vis people with disabilities so that they are valorised and their status is recognised and acknowledged in the society.
On this occasion, a National Disability Skills Award Ceremony, rewarding the best employees with disability and the best recruiting employers was also held.
International Day of Disabled Persons
The International Day of Disabled Persons was proclaimed in 1992, by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 47/3 . It aims to promote the rights and well-being of persons with disabilities in all spheres of society and development, and to increase awareness of the situation of persons with disabilities in every aspect of political, social, economic and cultural life.
The theme for this year is Transformation towards sustainable and resilient society for all.
Description
GIS 01 December, 2017: The Public Service Excellence Award (PSEA) 2016 has exceptionally two grand winners, namely: Sir Leckraz Teelock State Secondary School and La Tour Koenig Police station. Both institutions received a cash prize of Rs100 000 and a souvenir trophy at an award ceremony held yesterday at the Intercontinental Mauritius Resort in Balaclava.
In his speech, the Minister of Civil Service and Administrative Reforms, Mr Eddy Boissezon, pointed out that the PSEA is an important platform to steer the Civil service as a dynamic, customer-centric and performing institutions to reach excellence and new heights. It helps to instill a culture of excellence and innovation among Civil servants in the discharge of their duties by promoting a performance-based, responsive, customer-focused and accountable public service, he said.
He underscored the importance of uplifting the quality of public service in addition to developing a modern and sustainable Civil service, which according to him will act as an enabler and facilitator to spearhead the countrys development, in line with Government Vision 2030.
The Minister recalled that countries like Singapore have achieved new heights of success by attaining excellence in the public service and hence, the need for excellence should dictate all endeavours of public officers. He congratulated the participants for their laudable attempt to rise to the challenge, and termed them as figures of motivation and inspiration to other Civil servants.
For his part the Secretary for Public Service, Mr S.Kandasamy Pather, stated that the PSEA constitutes a platform where public bodies can rethink the way they engage in service-delivery by being more responsive to their customers, make optimum use of resources and come up with novel approaches.
He said that Civil servants should work with a robust sense of urgency and purpose and work to the expectations of the public.
The Public Service Excellence Award
The Public Service Excellence Award aims at recognising organisational excellence and reward Ministries/Departments or Divisions/Units that have adopted innovative and environmentally-friendly means to deal with daily challenges. The theme for this tenth edition was Excellence-Doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
Fifty-eight entries across various departments and ministries were recorded for the year 2016.
Participants were evaluated by a panel of jury on the basis of five criteria, namely: strategic planning and objectives; customer centred delivery; leadership and team spirit; efficiency and effectiveness, and innovation and improvement.
PSEA Sub-Category Award
Runner-ups of the following sub-categories were each awarded a cash prize of Rs 50 000 and a trophy:
Customer-Centred Delivery Award - Civil Status Division
Leadership and Team Spirit Award- Flacq Haemodialysis Unit
Efficiency and Effectiveness Award- Main Control Room, Mauritius Fire and Rescue Service
Innovation and Improvement Award- Gastroenterology Department, SSRN Hospital
Uber has a documented habit of surveilling people it deems to be a potential threat, including employees, competitors, and its opponents in court. Sullivan was the one to order underlings to dig up dirt on the conservationist Stephen Meyer, who sued Uber for price fixing.
Sullivan operated autonomously and secretly. Sources also told Bloomberg that Sullivan had made himself more nimble by becoming Ubers deputy general counsel, which let him assert attorney-client privilege on his communications with colleagues and make his e-mails more difficult for a prosecutor to subpoena. Bloomberg wrote in October that Sullivans work is largely a mystery to the companys board.
Sullivan was in charge of a team formerly known as Competitive Intelligence or COIN, according to Bloomberg, which oversaw projects like Hell, which spied on Lyft drivers. Sullivan shut down Hell but kept other programs like it, and COIN was renamed to Marketplace Analytics and then again to Marketplace Integrity. The 57 million-person hack came to light because Ubers board hired a law firm to investigate Sullivans teams, including COIN.
On Tuesday, a former Uber employee alleged that Sullivan encouraged his teams to use ephemeral messaging apps in order to make sure we didnt create a paper trail that would come back to haunt the company in any potential criminal or civil litigation.
The first lesson is that the cover-up is always worse than the crime.
The second lesson is that data breaches are no longer a matter of if, but when.
The third lesson is that an independent perspective is essential.
A 'simple' hack strikes again
Uber failed its 'social responsibility' "Organisations like Uber have a social responsibility not only to do their best to protect the data they control, but to be transparent with their users about the risks to their identity," says Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy at SentinelOne. "How an organisation responds to a breach is what really separates the good from the bad."
Review the security of your cloud deployments.
Regarding disclosure: Honesty and forthrightness are key.
Your security and your brand are inextricably linked.
Customer Perception Will Impact Your Business.
Security Awareness Is Everyones Job.
Prompt Detection and Response Are Critical
Know applicable data breach notification laws in your jurisdiction. Have a plan in place to respond and recover from cyberincidents that ensures compliance with the law.
Dont Cover Up Data Breaches. The ramifications of a cover-up can be worse than the actual breach. This may seem like an obvious lesson, but the Uber case is full of twists and turns that should serve as warning signs to public- and private-sector executives. There is no doubt that using the word incident makes sense at first, and there are many incidents that are not breaches.
Ensure the appropriate ethical rules and guidelines are well-understood and communicated to all employees, including actions taken surrounding incidents including senior management. Make sure all necessary employees are engaged in ongoing cybertraining. Also ensure that table-top exercise based are planned regularly, based upon on these policies and procedures.
What could be worse than a major data breach involving millions of records that occurs at a well-known global company affecting millions of personal records?Answer: a cover-up of the entire incident. Add in a payment to hackers to try to have the stolen data deleted, and call those payments a bug bounty . Add in delays in reporting the data breach to the appropriate authorities, and the scope of Ubers troubles becomes scary.On Nov. 29, Uber disclosed that 2.7 million people in the UK were affected by the security breach. The Guardian (UK) reported TheOutline.com reported more details of what was going on behind the scenes at Uber with their company leadership.The list of public- and private-sector organizations that are suing Uber is growing by the day. Dark Reading reported The Seattle Times reported that:While these investigations and lawsuits will likely take years to resolve, security industry experts have been quick to offer lessons learned from this situation. Here are a few of the more notable articles that I have seen on this Uber data breach topicwith the details available at the linked articles:Another good set of points comes from the Financial Times"But this latest scandal is not just bad for Uber. By handing those in favour of stricter privacy regulation a new stick with which to beat the tech companies, Ubers behaviour will have a negative impact on all digital service providers. Rightly so, some will argue. The distinction between the Silicon Valley tech companies and traditional industries has become increasingly blurred. ..."However, this article from law.com suggests that data breach cover-ups may be more common than many people think. Although there are data breach notification laws on the books in 48 U.S. states requiring companies to inform consumers about potential exposures of their personal information, companies dont exactly have great incentives to disclose a potential data breach. Disclosing data breaches tends to invite scrutiny from investors, open the door to litigation, and may not play well for a companys reputation.No company or government is exempt from the ramification of poor ethical behavior. The Uber name and brand reputation are suffering more because of the actions taken after the breach. Well-prepared companies and governments can avoid this extra brand damage.There is little doubt that this Uber data breach is one of the top cybersecurity stories in 2017. No, it doesnt rise to the level of the Equifax data breach, nor does it have nearly the same level of impacts to the global financial system or customers.Nevertheless, the Uber brand name has already been badly tarnished, and the long-term viability of the company is even being questioned by some. At a minimum, the fallout of this Uber data breach will be felt for years. These developments at such an innovative company are amazing, given that "ubering" has becoming a verb (like googling), which includes dramatically changing a business process using data and digital transformation Meanwhile, for the rest of us who are watching events unfold, a key question is whether Uber riders and drivers will lose trust in the company. Other lawsuits were revealed in the past week which allege that Uber used covert tactics to steal rival secrets No doubt, Uber should (and will) get a chance to tell their side to these stories in court, but customer trust is the ultimate key. As Uber plans to build out its "new transportation world" with a future that includes autonomous cars that can pick up and drop off our children virtually anywhere, will we trust them with our data?That is the (multi) billion-dollar question. And everyone is watching and taking detailed notes.
News / National
by Staff reporter
MYSTERY surrounds the circumstances leading to the fatal accident that claimed the life of prominent Harare lawyer, Edmore Jori in the early hours of Saturday.The accident is understood to have taken place near the Women's University in Mt Pleasant as he drove towards Greencroft.It is not clear whether Jori lost control of his ML and hit another car, crashed against a pole or he fell asleep under the influence of alcohol and lost control of the vehicle as the police report on the accident was not immediately available.All things being equal, Jori will be laid to rest in his rural home of Buhera today.He is survived by his wife and three children.At the time of his death, Jori was with Wintertons Legal Practitioners in the capital having joined them in 2002. He had been a partner since 2005 and headed law firm's Energy, Infrastructure and Natural Resources Department.Profiling Jori, Wintertons said he had:"developed a niche market, having handled numerous Power Generation, Transmission and related transactions in this increasingly competitive sector since the Government adopted the deliberate policy of opening up space for private players."His areas of specialisation included transactions relating to Mining, Infrastructure Development, Public-Private Sector Partnerships, Information, Communication and Technology, Corporate Mergers & Acquisitions, Banking, Bilateral and Syndicated Finance, together with Property transactions and complex commercial litigation.But while the legal fraternity, family and friends were plunged into mourning, the intrusive social media was awash with theories on what might have led to the fatal accident.All the theories featured Jori's lover and trendy Harare businesswoman, Michelle Kawome.H-Metro could not get hold of Michelle to give her side of her story as her phone was under the care of a close friend, Chipo.People who knew Jori as Michelle's lover were visiting her home to convey their condolence messages and offer moral support while the bulk of mourners were at his Greystone Park home from where his body left for Buhera.Understandably, Chipo said Michelle was not in a good place to do an interview as she was still grieving."I am sorry Michelle cannot talk to you about that issue. She is still grieving, Eddie is not even buried yet and makutoda kunyora nezvazvo."I know you are doing a job but don't you have heart to do a story whilst she is still grieving?"You can write whatever you want from social media, I don't think she will be able to talk to you," said Chipo.It also emerged that Michelle had been forced to deactivate her Facebook account on Saturday as people started posting messages incriminating her.THE THEORIES***What is agreed is that the two were at Pariah State before moving to Pabloz where award-winning South African house wheel-spinner, DJ Shimza was performing.***What is also agreed is that Michelle and Jori were using different cars.***What is also agreed is that as they left Pabloz, Michelle drove in front.THE POPULAR THEORYThis unconfirmed theory is popular on social media where everyone claims to have inside information even when overseas.It is said they had a misunderstanding in the nightclub and Michelle stormed out of the bar while Eddie followed her and this developed into a car chase leading to the fatal crash. Under this theory, Michelle was to blame for the tragic accident.SECOND THEORYJori and Michelle's relationship had become solid and he was providing funding for her clothing business and this enabled her to travel to places like China for stock. Jori took Michelle from dealer, Roland Muchegwa, who is popularly known in social circles as Uncle Roland. Michelle and Uncle Roland have two children together.This resulted in numerous clashes between Uncle Roland and Jori. At one stage, Jori was attacked with an empty beer bottle at a nightspot while the other clash ended up at Rotten Row courts. In between the clashes between the men, Uncle Roland would brutally attack Michelle over her move. Even at the time of Jori's death, Uncle Roland was still bitter, FOUR years after Michelle left him.It is understood that Uncle Roland's desire to ruin Michelle's love life actually solidified her affair with Jori who then did all he could to ensure that she was comfortable. The theory even claims that Jori's wife had accepted Michelle's presence in their life and as such, their man would even spend nights at Michelle's home.Consistent with this theory, it is claimed that Michelle and Jori were in good books as they left Borrowdale and had agreed to use their separate cars to her home. Michelle would use the rear-view mirror to see if Jori was following. She however, lost him near the Women University and made a U-turn only to be met by the tragic crash. Michelle was among the first people at the scene of the accident. This theory clears Michelle of causing the accident.THIRD THEORYWith Uncle Roland having been in Harare last week, there were those that wanted to implicate him in the accident suggesting that he had followed Jori. However, H-Metro can confirm that Uncle Roland is in South Africa where he went last week on Wednesday. He is now based there although he comes to Harare often.
It is not yet clear if Alfa Romeo's legendary 'four leaf clover' will be on the Sauber livery in 2018.
The Swiss team's sponsorship by the Italian luxury car brand was launched at the weekend, at an event attended by Chase Carey and Jean Todt.
Team owner Pascal Picci said fans can expect Sauber to do better next year.
"Definitely. Now we have everything together to be successful again."
However, when speaking with the Swiss newspaper Blick, he denied that the Alfa Romeo deal is similar to Sauber's former alliance with BMW.
"It's something entirely different," Picci insisted.
"At that time, BMW had the whole team. While Alfa is our title sponsor, the team remains independent."
He said Sauber was never offered for sale to Ferrari.
"Absolutely. We did not take over the team to get rid of it immediately," said Picci.
"After putting Sauber on a solid footing, the second step follows. We were looking for a partner interested in a long-term solution and an exciting history.
"Now we want to prove to the world that Sauber is back."
He said the deal was prompted by Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne.
"It is no secret that Mr Marchionne had this idea, and we really clicked after the first meeting."
But as the 2018 Sauber may not be a genuine Alfa Romeo, it is not decided if the car will feature the legendary four leaf clover logo.
"What you see on the car was in the hands of our new title sponsor," Picci said at the launch event.
"Mr Marchionne says that he is still undecided if it will be on the Sauber."
(GMM)
Sebastian Vettel has admitted he is not sure what to think about Robert Kubica's F1 comeback.
It is believed the Pole is now on the cusp of securing his return to the sport with Williams, seven years after almost severing his arm in a rallying crash.
"I think it's very tragic what happened back then," German Vettel told Sonntagsblick newspaper.
"He was regarded as a future champion. But I do not understand why he is pushing for a comeback now," he added.
"Why did he not do this before?" the Ferrari driver added.
"For him it would be a nice story, but on the other hand it would be unfortunate for younger drivers who would also like that cockpit," Vettel said.
Nico Hulkenberg agrees that Kubica's return would be a "huge story" for F1.
"In testing you can see that the pace is there," he told Sport1.
"But you cannot simulate the racing action of the first lap in Monaco or Singapore," Hulkenberg said.
"I hope he is able to race at the highest level, but we will only see that when he's in the car next year. I estimate the chances of his comeback at 50-50," the Renault driver added.
(GMM)
News / Press Release
by PDP
The decision by the current administration to deploy soldiers on vendors and commuters is a bad development which must not only be condemned but must stop forthwith.The past few weeks have been peaceful with no cat and mouse games being played in town owing to the suspension of high police presence.The people of Zimbabwe who marched on the 18th of November 2017, wished to have the absence of a police state as a permanent feature of our society, this is what opening a new chapter entails.In his speech at the Gathering of the Daily Maverick in South Africa delivered on the 23rd of November 2017, President Biti said "I hope ZANUPF does not misinterpret what happened on the historic march."In less than a fortnight the new administration has misinterpreted the dislike of a police state for a desire for a military state.They have misinterpreted the dislike for police brutality as a desire for military brutality.We stated then as we do now that after the resignation of Mugabe those who took over had two choices.The first choice is to maintain the status quo with those coming in just doing so for the purposes of filling the big shoes that have been left by President Mugabe.The deployment of soldiers on the vendors coupled with the appointment of questionable characters back in cabinet is a sign of the new administration's choice.The choice to maintain coercion, corruption and capture.That the status quo must continue with the same livers of power that have dominated our society for the past 37 years.The second option is to use the opportunity of the coup to lay a foundation of an irrevocable path to sustainability, of a stable, just, inclusive and democratic Zimbabwe in which all are free to pursue happiness. For the majority of Zimbabweans including vendors who marched against President Mugabe, this is the option they marched for.Zimbabweans who flanked the soldiers and their tanks during the march were expressing their search for a new contract with those in power and with power itself.Sadly the deployment of soldiers against the vendors today is a betrayal of that narrative.Power in democratic societies is based on persuasion as an instrument to rally the citizen behind you.The past 37 years have been dominated by tear gas, guns and baton sticks as instruments of persuasion. Sadly those who took over from President Mugabe today displayed that they are unwilling to change.Reality is that they even want to make it even scarier replacing crowd management responsibility from the police to the soldiers.It is a reproduction of the old order with different names, characters and form. The new administration has thrown away a window of opportunity too early into their tenure.They have thrown away a window of opportunity to restart, rethink and reconfigure, they have betrayed the goodwill expressed by Zimbabweans who felt that they deserve a chance.When the vendors marched against Mugabe they were giving an opportunity to whoever would succeed him the opportunity to create jobs and create a better working environment for small businesses to operate.It is a fundamental issue, vendors are not in the streets by choice anyone who has the people at heart must address the foundation not the symptoms.Everyone is agreed to the idea that the current vending arrangement is an eyesore but there are ways to reorganise.The government is full of people who are on foreign trips lessons could be learnt from other places as well.By the way President Mnangagwa there is a little town called Rosaria in Argentina with ten times the number of vendors than those in Harare you can send one of yours to get lessons from there, the PDP did so in March of 2017.The individual we sent is available to advise the government on how to organise vending in town, he will do this for free.If you do not change from the use of force, Zimbabweans will have no choice but to regroup, pick up the pieces and continue with the fight.Together Another Zimbabwe is PossiblePDP Communications
Tri Delta Transit in California has switched its entire fleet of transit buses from operating on petroleum diesel to using only Neste MY Renewable Diesel. Neste MY Renewable Diesel is a low-carbon fuel, produced from 100% renewable and sustainable raw materials. This drop-in fuel cuts greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80% and significantly reduces tailpipe emissions, all while enhancing fleet performance.
The company reports that complaints about engine smoke have been eliminated even from the older vehicles in the fleet.
Since changing fuels, we have received zero complaints from drivers regarding vehicle power and reliability, and there has been no change to routine maintenance. Kevin Moody, maintenance director at Tri Delta Transit
Moody added that none of the drivers were told of the switch to renewable diesel and none of them noticed any difference at all.
Tri Delta Transit provides more than 3,000,000 trips each year to a population of more than 250,000 residents in the 225 square miles of Eastern Contra Costa County, California. Tri Delta operates 14 local bus routes Monday Friday, four local bus routes on weekends, door-to-door bus service for senior citizens and people with disabilities, and shuttle services to community events.
The WVU-led team will combine the capabilities of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and prior work with the University of Pittsburghs catalysis expertise and Shells industrial experience and success to advance the technology resulting in an integrated pilot test. Shell is providing a $1-million match for the scale-up activity.
Researchers at West Virginia University will lead a team that will investigate ways to convert stranded gas resources into value-added liquid products that could reduce the United States demand for crude oil by up to 20%.
The technologies developed in this project will utilize shale gas as feedstock to produce aromatics, C 2 -C 4 olefins and hydrogen, which are key chemical intermediates for polymers and specialty chemicals. The technologies for shale gas conversion are more cost effective and environmentally benign than those used in commercial processes based on petroleum or other conventional gas-to-liquid technologies.
The University of Pittsburgh will develop catalytic materials that will be integrated into the microwave reactor that is being designed and built by WVU and NETL. Shell will bring process and reactor modeling capability, engineering scale-up and commercial demonstration expertise to the project. John Hu, Statler Chair in Engineering for Natural Gas Utilization at WVU
Through the use of microwave plasma catalysis, which enables long-term energy storage and long-distance renewable energy delivery from remote, isolated and stranded locations, initial projections by Hu and his team shows that the potential impact of the technology could improve energy efficiency by about 63%, reduce capital expenditures by 51 percent and increase energy productivity.
Current indirect natural gas conversion to chemicals approaches using traditional product refining is capital intensive and less energy efficient compared the potential use of microwave catalysis that can increase product yields.
NETLs Dushyant Shekhawat, who helped develop the microwave approach, said that researchers are optimistic that in addition to on-site conversion, the process could also be applied to traditional large-scale natural gas conversion plants and eliminate some unit operations currently required to accomplish the same results. He noted that microwave upgrading of fossil fuels has been an active research area at NETL.
Shekhawat, along with NETL colleague, Dave Berry, will be responsible for process and microwave reactor scale-up. Joining Hu as co-principal investigators on the project are Debangsu Bhattacharyya and Hanjing Tian with the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering.
WVU has had a long and successful working relationship with the National Energy Technology Laboratory. With a four-year award from the Rapid Advancement in Process Intensification Deployment Manufacturing Institute (RAPID), that relationship will continue.
Late last year, WVU became a partner in RAPID, which focuses on using advanced manufacturing to develop breakthrough technologies to boost the productivity and efficiency of some of industrial processes by 20% in the next five years. The effort is overseen by the US Department of Energy in conjunction with the American Institute for Chemical Engineering.
A few weeks later, WVU was awarded a $1.25-million grant from the DOEs Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy to develop technologies for converting electrical energy from renewable resources into energy-dense carbon-neutral liquid fuelsthat is, fuels that do not increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. NETL is a partner on that award as well.
Opinion / Columnist
In his classical tale Animal Farm, George Orwell has the witty and sharp shooter, the pig Squealer, telling the other animals black is white today and the exact opposite tomorrow and the latter believe him. Orwell had modelled his book on real life under a totalitarian dictatorship. Zimbabwe is a totalitarian dictatorship, two weeks ago one dictator was forced to resign and a new one was sworn in a week later. President Mnangagwa has his own witty sharp-shooter in the name of Christopher Mutsvangwa, he has certain hit the ground running."We cannot have a country of people without any purpose because the economy is not providing them with opportunities which they want. The focus of the President, immediately, is how to revive this economy. That is where his attention is focused on," he told a Zanu PF Mashonaland West provincial coordinating committee meeting, according to State media.No doubt the State Media now have several teams follow Mutsvangwa everywhere he goes and give everything he says or does prime-time coverage. (I have send a copy of this article to both the Herald and Chronicle, knowing fully well the email will be deleted on receipt and trash emptied. The place is crawling with CIOs masquerading as journalists and they all live in constant fear of their colleagues telling the powers-that-be that they were working for regime change a crime worse than high treason.)"The route which we have taken is the route of wealth, the route of money, prosperity and building a model African country, which no other African has ever done. The route of having an economy that grows at a rate of 10, 15, 20 per cent per annum for the next 10 to 20 years," said Mutsvangwa.This is just a repeat of what the deposed President Robert Mugabe and the rest of the Zanu PF leadership including Mutsvangwa and Mnangagwa had said soon after independence. "Gutsa ruzhinji!" (Mass prosperity!) the nation was told then. Today Zimbabwe is the poorest nation on earth with unemployment soaring to the nauseating height of 90%. 72.3% of our people are living on US$ 1.00 or less a day.So, instead of mass prosperity the nation got mass poverty.It is not that the people of Zimbabwe did not know the root cause of the country's economic decline, we did. It was the gross mismanagement and the rampant corruption brought about by the Zanu PF political patronage system spawned by Mugabe and the Zanu PF dictatorship. The political patronage system's primary task was to help Mugabe establish and retain the de facto one-party dictatorship at all cost. The economic decline was one of the costs but well worth the price, as far as Mugabe and his cronies were concerned.Zimbabwe's economic decline was caused by the gross mismanagement and rampant corruption in the first instance but these have been allowed to grow and spread to the life-threatening cancerous tumours they are total because for 37 years the nation could not do anything to end the mismanagement and corruption. Zanu PF rigged elections to stay in power and as long as the party remained in office the regime stop the dismantling of the patronage system that helped it to remain in power.For the last 20 years, the nation has turned its attention from dealing with the economic problems to address the political problem of the dictatorship itself. Until we found ways to stop Zanu PF rigging elections, there was no hope of the regime dismantling the system it has created to keep it in power. Implementing democratic reforms to ensure free, fair and credible elections has become the clarion call."Leave our President alone. Give him a chance. He means well for Zimbabwe and the people of Zimbabwe are solidly behind him. Please do not try him before he has even started. Don't condemn him before he has even started," pleaded the passionate Mutsvangwa."I am saying this because all the papers have started attacking the new President. He is being judged in 37 hours more than someone who has been in power for 37 years."If the truth be told Special Advisor Mutsvangwa, President Mnangagwa and 99.99% of his administration have been in the Zanu PF government and/or dictatorship for donkey years. Mnangagwa himself has been Mugabe's right hand man and chief enforcer for 37 years and it is therefore a nonsense this Mnangagwa administration to pretend it had nothing to do with the disastrous failures of the last 37 years. Worse still, this administration cannot disown the Zanu PF dictatorship but only as a cover for doing nothing to dismantle it.As Mutsvangwa himself readily admitted President Mnangagwa is focusing all his time and energy on the economy and has never ever said anything about implementing the democratic reforms necessary for free, fair and credible elections. Just supposing Mnangagwa fails to deliver on his promise of "a model African country" just as Mugabe before him failed to deliver "gutsa ruzhinji"; with no guaranteed free, fair and credible elections; we will be stuck with him until another putsch force him at gun point to resign.President Mnangagwa can continue in his efforts to revive the economy, we all welcome that. But there is no excuse why he cannot implement the democratic reforms necessary for free and fair elections. We insist on that!Indeed, the economic measure to end mismanagement and corruption are best done by a regime with popular electoral mandate of the people and not by a regime whose political base is totally dependent on the men and women behind the mismanagement and corruption."Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall be added unto you," said Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first post independence president.What Nkrumah meant was simple and clear enough; only when the people have a meaningful political say can they force those in power to share out the economic wealth fairly. Before independence Mugabe and his cronies sort to wrestle political power from the white. But as soon as they were in power they have systematically usurped the ordinary people's political power to hold the regime to account.Zimbabweans are poor and back to where we started before independence fighting for a meaningful say in the governance of the country as the first step to securing our other political freedoms human and economic rights.Comrade Mutsvangwa, Mnangagwa and the rest in the Zanu PF dictatorship are doing their best to trick us into believing we do not need free and fair elections and that they have our best economic interests at heart. We should just accept their word for it and not demand to have a meaningful political say. After 37 years of ruinous misrule, we would be very foolish to fall for that nonsense ever again.We must seek political reforms, free and fair elections and the economic prosperity will follow.We demand the implementation of all the democratic reforms to ensure next year's elections are free and fair; this is not negotiable!
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley perfectly summed up Republican sentiment about giving big tax breaks to the wealthy in an interview with the Des Moines Register last week.
The paper reported:
"Grassley was adamant about the need for change, even if farmers and small business owners represent a tiny minority of estate tax payers. The reason, he said, is as much philosophical as practical.
"An estate tax effectively and unfairly taxes a persons earnings twice, he argued: first when they earn it and again when they die. And, he added, it penalizes savers without touching spenders.
'I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,' Grassley said, 'as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether its on booze or women or movies.'
I'll admit it. He's got me pegged.
I've been known to spend money at the ABC store, although not my last dollar. Sometimes, but not often enough, I buy my wife a gift. And I've gone to the movies, if not this year than probably last year. That's not cheap anymore, especially since North Carolina Republican put a tax on it to make up for giving breaks to corporations and the wealthy.
So, yes, I spend just about all my income and should not be rewarded with a tax cut.
The favors Grassley prefers should by all rights go to people like ... Grassley.
The Register story continued:
"The seven-term senator runs an operation in Butler County with his son and grandson and frequently describes himself as a farmer. When asked if his own family farm would be subject to the estate tax, Grassley initially said it would not.
"Then, after mulling it over a moment, he backtracked, noting that if he and his wife died on the same day the estate would be subject to the $5.5 million exemption rather than the $11 million exemption and likely would have to file an estate tax return."
Of course the tax bill is structured to give the greatest benefits to people exactly like those who wrote and voted for it: President Trump, millionaires and billionaires, big corporations and the special-interest groups whose lobbyists apparently were in on the drafting process and whose campaign donations help elect the compliant lawmakers.
It's only fair, because those who ought to get a tax cut are those who know how to spend and invest their money wisely not on booze, women or movies like the rest of us.
The proposed grad student tax in the House version of the new tax bill has garnered a lot of headlines and for good reason: If a tax on grad student tuition waivers becomes law, a lot of people could wind up paying tax on what amounts to phantom income. And if grad students can't afford to attend college, universities say that will have devastating effects on their graduate programs.
Tuition waivers aren't currently taxed, and wouldn't be under the Senate version of the bill. Tuition waivers also aren't income like a paycheck. Instead, its an expense that a student doesnt have to pay. A Ph.D. student from Illinois likened it to "taxing a coupon."
Here are some other things to consider about this plan:
A tuition waiver tax would hit grad students at expensive private universities harder than it will at state universities. Thats because private universities like Duke and Wake Forest charge higher tuition, which means the waivers are bigger $40,000 or more in some cases.
Best I can tell, the UNC schools typically (but not always) use tuition waivers to cover the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition. At UNCG, that spread is close to $14,000 per year; at UNC-Chapel Hill, it's a little over $17,000. The schools encourage grad students to qualify for N.C. residency so they don't need that waiver. If in-state tuition is waived as well, that's another $4,000 and $10,000 a year, depending on the school.
In the UNC system, a tax on grad student tuition waivers would have a much bigger impact on the larger institutions. UNC-Chapel Hill (11,000) and N.C. State (9,000) have graduate student populations that are as large as some UNC schools. UNCG (3,500) and N.C. A&T (1,500) have smaller, but still significant, numbers of grad students.
Grad students already are taxed on the below-cost-of-living stipends (usually in the $20,000 neighborhood) they get for teaching and doing research. (As one Ph.D. candidate noted in this Washington Post piece, universities use tuition waivers to blur the line between student and employee, an issue at the heart of the battle over unionizing grad students.) Most grad schools prohibit their students from holding a second job.
A waiver tax wouldnt affect most grad students. According to the Council of Graduate Students, about a fourth of U.S. doctoral students and about 6 percent of masters students get tuition waivers.
One part of the tuition waiver equation that doesn't get much attention is this one: Universities often let employees take classes for free, and some offer tuition breaks for employees' children. Under the House version of the tax bill, this perk would be taxable, too.
Have something to say about something you just read? Email me at john.newsom@greensboro.com.
Opinion / Columnist
Tinashe Eric Muzamhindo writes in his personal capacity as the Head of Southern Institute of Policy Analysis and Research SIPAR TRUST, which is responsible for policy Analysis and Research. He is also an academic and researcher. He holds a BA, M.A from Solusi University, and he also holds a Masters of Development Studies from University of Lusaka, Zambia. He is currently enrolled at University of Kwazulu Natal University in South Africa (PHD in Development Studies). He can be contacted at southerninstitutepar@gmail.com
One thing I like about the new President is that he listened to the public outcry so people like us will continue providing checks and balance to the current affairs of this country.It is important for the civic society to play such a critical role on matters of arise. I think it is not good to criticize the President left, right and center we also need to look into things why he has done so.Let's give him 100 days in office then we can begin to talk. It's ideal for him to reshuffle his advisory council, if he wants to last with the POVO mentality I for see him having head on with people.My suggestion is let us give him time to work and we see progress as time goes on. We need to consider that he has not been a President before and I think he has simply started the journey to State House, so we expect maturity. I'm happy that on Saturday morning the President made some adjustments prior to his appointments.If you look at Youth ministry I think HE also should look into that, there is a serious outcry because Sithembiso Nyoni is over 70 years and what can she really address on our current generation? Even the women part, ED was supposed to have appointed someone who is more relevant to women and young people.If you check my previous articles you would find that the President is currently addressing some of the things I raised earlier on.What people want Mr President is a person who accommodates other people's views and be able to have a considerable plan, and give room for criticism. I think there are critical areas that need to be addressed urgently.We have to look into the youth ministry I would suggest that it is never late to give it to WadyaJena or Temba Mliswa both are members of the august house they can help on that one. I see Mayor Wadyajena to be a more relevant guy who can bring input to the new ministry which has been merged with women affairs.Sithembiso is old and she has some challenges and why would the President consider such a person on that big portfolio? Remember youths and women play a critical role in economic development.I guess the information ministry needs a more diplomatic person and a person who can be easily approached so that we can have sufficient relations with the international community.Our relations with the outside world during Mugabe's era of politics was hostile so it is high time the President should consider someone who can be more diplomatic, who understand the nature of our politics and be able to give good advice to the President.I don't think Mutsvangwa should get this one, this post can be given to George Charamba or Supa Mandiwanzira who did some bit of Journalism or even Mzembi with his experience in the tourism sector, and he can do better.We need people who can deliver, and who can market our country.I suggest Mzembi can go to information then Mutsvangwa can be moved to foreign Affairs or WAR Vets because there it is ideal for him.I think the President should also re-look into his advisory team we can also recommend who can come on board if he is comfortable; we also need young people who can play significant role in national building.There is too much old age in that cabinet.I think it was a positive move to make the cabinet more sound and leaner but I suggest HE can also trim the cabinet to 15 people to cut expenditure which is burdening the fiscus.We have external debts that need to be worked on, we have internal projects that have been stopped due to lack of funding, we have civil servants who are expecting bonuses by mid-December, and we also have new ministers who are expecting perks such as 3 vehicles, allowances, houses and VIP security facilities.My question is where we can get the money to fund such things when we have critical areas such as tourism, mining, agriculture and infrastructure development.We have the Harare- Chirundu road which was estimated at 1.2 billion and I think HE can review that project I don't think it is worthy that amount.We have Mupfumira who has just been appointed as the Minister of Tourism, my question is this is the same woman who was moved from different ministries because of under-performance, and do you expect her to do a better job? I suggest that the President should introduce the quarter system appraisal reporting for ministers, and all those ministers who fail to meet the requirements should be send packing.We need performance based ministers who should work on targets and whop can deliver best results.In the previous arrangement ministers used to sleep in parliament, and they used to withdraw excessive allowances and they used to get a lot of perks when majority are languishing in poverty.Unverified reports say that HE ED has reduced perks from 3 vehicles to 2 vehicles, whether this is true or not we applaud such a move to cut expenditure and promote re-direction of expenditure.
Dec. 4, 2016
Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, of Salisbury, N.C., fired several shots from a rifle inside Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, as he attempted to investigate an online conspiracy theory that prominent Democrats were harboring child sex slaves at the restaurant. No one was hurt, and Welch surrendered to police. He later was sentenced to four years in prison. In what became known as Pizzagate, Welch said he was trying to self-investigate a conspiracy in a fake-news story that Hillary Clintons presidential campaign operated a sex ring out of the sites basement. He walked into the front door and pointed an assault rifle in the direction of a restaurant employee. The employee escaped, but Welch fired the rifle. He was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon.
GREENSBORO A Chapel Hill man has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison for defrauding the UNC Newman Center Catholic Student Parish.
Brian Lee Cansler, 27, was ordered in late November by U.S. District Court Judge Catherine C. Eagles to pay more than $171,000 in restitution, according to a news release from Acting U.S. Attorney Sandra J. Hairston, Middle District of North Carolina.
Cansler worked in various roles at the parish before becoming financial director there from September 2014 until his termination, according to the release. The parish ministers to both the student body and the town's community.
Hairston said Cansler used his position to defraud the parish. On two instances, he forged the signature of the serving pastor on checks made out to Cansler from the parish, according to the release. In addition, he fraudulently misused credit cards issued to the parish for official use. Cansler was authorized to use the cards for parish expenses, such as liturgical and office supplies.
From October 2014 to July 2016, Cansler made more than $146,000 in unauthorized purchases,the release said. These purchases included fine dining, clothing, computer products and travel.
Cansler also used the parish's credit cards for trips to London, Brussels, Disney World, and to Las Vegas for a Celine Dion concert.
In addition to the 57-month prison term and restitution, Cansler was sentenced to five years of supervised release.
As Republicans continue to sell the details of their tax bill, some are reaching for more colorful language to liven up complex policies that tend to put the average voter to sleep.
Case in point: over the weekend Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, hashed over the plan with his home state's Des Moines Register. Turning to the party's idea to do away with the estate tax, Grassley framed the current law as a hindrance to responsible saving.
"I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing," Grassley told the Register. "As opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it's on booze or women or movies."
The estate tax, often described by Republicans as the "death tax," is levied only on the very rich, individuals who pass on assets of more than $5.5 million, $11 million for married couples.
Grassley, a member of Senate Finance Committee responsible for writing the tax proposal, immediately was hit with criticism online over the comments.
The suggestion - that anyone not socking away their savings in the bank or investments must be profligately throwing their money away - played directly into the critique that Republicans are disconnected from the majority of working Americans.
"Darn straight, Sen. Grassley," former Hillary Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson wrote on Twitter. "[I]f we gave that money in middle class tax cuts, they'd just waste it on hookers and blow. right?"
The current tax on estates is 40 percent on an individual's wealth when they die, applying to assets valued above $5.5 million for an individual, $11 million for a couple. Republicans have long criticized the provision, referring to it as a "death tax."
Under the Senate tax planned passed early Saturday morning along partisan lines, the exemptions are both raised to $11 million per individual and $22 million per couple. The House version of the bill does the same but also axes the tax completely in 2024.
In Grassley's home state of Iowa, the estate tax has been particularly fraught with controversy. Republicans have often argued the 40 percent government tax creates a cost prohibitive situation for farmers hoping to pass their farms on to heirs.
"Death should not be a taxable event and families should not have to fear the Internal Revenue Service and more taxes making it more difficult and costly to pass on the farm or family business to the next generation," Rep. David Young, a Des Moines-area congressman, wrote on Friday in a newsletter to constituents.
But, according to the Des Moines Register, the actual numbers do not support that narrative. Citing 2016 data from the Internal Revenue Service, the paper determined 5,219 tax returns were impacted by the current estate tax. Only 682, or 13 percent, of the tax filers owned farm assets.
The paper also referenced a 2015 report from the Congressional Research Service noting only 65 farm estates in the U.S. annually are touched by the estate tax.
Grassley and other congressional Republicans have long maintained that even if farmers are not impacted by the tax directly, the planning involved is an additional strain.
"[M]any are forced into spending large sums of their hard-earned dollars on lawyers and accountants to avoid its impact instead of reinvesting in their business," he told the Register. "This means that while many don't end up paying the tax, it still has a negative effect on the economy."
Washington Post News Service (DC)
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Opinion / Columnist
As confirmed by the International Association of Genocide scholars, the 5th Brigade of the Zimbabwean National Army murdered some 20 000 Ndebele speaking people in Matabeleland and Midlands between 1983 and 1984 . Many innocent women and children , noncombatants and old people who had nothing to do with political views or may have been critics of ZANU PF were incinerated .Those massacres cast long shadows over our contemporary politics and will undoubtedly continue to unless and until something is done by a transformational administration managed by and through a combination of Political, Civil and Church Organizations.ZANU PF has never fully accepted responsibility for the unspeakable atrocities that they perpetrated against helpless innocent civilians. At their best, they could only call it " Moments of madness" . Whether it is the Former President R.G Mugabe, the present President E.D Mnangagwa, the late Cde E. Nkala or and any of their allies , too many to mention, the one thing that sticks out like a swollen thumb is that the last man standing should apologize to the affected region(s) . As if not enough, the new regime has granted the architect or the would have been orchestrator immunity from prosecution undoubtedly as a fig leaf . Apparently ,no one can stonewall that, It is a threadbare.That rapid depopulation of a sovereign state can not be looked at over a shoulder given its extreme degree. Indeed, moral and ethical considerations should always be taken into account. There are other factors that may make the cost of the apology prohibitive, for instance, compensation policies ,commemoration policies, and the generality of the official historical narrative of the country. However, the sitting President should still apologize for the psyche of the country going-forward. There is seemingly no better time for President Mnangagwa to polish his shoes off the historical tragedy . Procrastination and sheer hard -headedness will lead Zimbabwe nowhere .The cost of ignoring the damages will continue to sky-rocket. From a physiological perspective , people become persuaded by what they hear. Costs and benefits can not only be measured in Zimbabwean bond dollars , they can moreover be measured in moral and emotional terms . If the Government fully comprehends the depths of depravity to which some of the families gave into during the time then apologizing would be as easy as cutting butter with a hot knife.Until ZANU PF or its government , categorically and collectively takes responsibility for its abominable acts in 1983/84 and apologize as a Party or on behalf of , for their misdeeds ,the people of Matabeleland and Midlands will never forgive ZANU PF leadership for the past or let alone trust them in the future. Without a clear and unequivocal apology, there will be no forgiveness and trust . The President thus should humble himself and kneel down before the victims' families and apologize , unless if he thinks they never committed a humanity crime, then in that case he surely has the memory span of a fly . It's about time that ZANU PF admitted on a government and national level the terrible torture and abuse meted out to Matabeleland / Midlands .In my opinion, the longer they take to apologize will be a great exhibition of that they are not sorry . How can victims forgive if the perpetrators have shown no true remorse . Until the President finds it in himself to apologize, the whole regime change frenzy is a stillbirth . The ball is on the state house side of the court . His Excellency has the "carte blanche " .There is a saying that goes, " The Sins of the father, Son must pay" . I strongly believe Mnangagwa is no exception in as far as his involvement in the Gukurahundi is concerned . As a Zimbabwean, I feel the excruciating pain of Mothers, Sisters , Uncles ,Fathers and Grandparents that were routinely targeted during the Gukurahundi era. The majority of younger Zimbabweans further afield do not even know what atrocities were committed against fellow Zimbabweans as the history books are doctored to show a different story. The younger generation must be shown what their elders have gone through before forgiving can start.Nevertheless, until President Mnangagwa issues a formal apology and formally educates the Citizens in Matabeleland and Midlands on his role in the atrocities and not merely meaningless diplomatic words of sympathy and regret, the wounds can not begin to heal . Until then the people of Matabeleland / Midlands will continue to turn their backs on him .Matthew Dube ( Zimbabwean Citizen )
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It was a footnote likely soon forgotten in the storied lore of the YMCA, after a pair of men were caught in early November trespassing in the former Norwalk YMCA building downtown as they told it to police, pursuing a hobby photographing abandoned buildings.
If the picture has been slow to develop on the West Avenue buildings second life, it may come into better focus in short order as business booms in South Norwalk and downtown.
Five years ago last week, the Norwalk YMCA shut its doors at 370 West Ave., with revenue from some 3,000 members unable to support the cost of running the 58,000-square-foot edifice that this year marked 90 years since the laying of its cornerstone. The Norwalk YMCA organization now shares a main facility with the Wilton YMCA on Danbury Road in Wilton, while continuing to offer some programs in Norwalk including in a leased gymnastics space on Main Avenue.
If not abandoning its mission, the Norwalk YMCA left behind its historic, four-story West Avenue home which remains empty to this day, on a plot totaling less than 2 acres. After Norwalk Hospital spent $4.6 million in March 2013 to acquire the main YMCA building along with smaller outbuildings, the hospital has yet to put the property to use.
The Norwalk YMCA building has idled even as West Avenue has blossomed with the construction of Belpointe Capitals Waypointe development, which to date has comprised four mammoth residential buildings with site preparation under way for a fifth dubbed The Pinnacle.
And going vertical just a few blocks south is the SoNo Collection mall, which when opening in the fall of 2019 is expected to serve as a magnet for shoppers from throughout the region, with many local establishments expected to benefit from the influx of visitors.
Focal point
Is there any better-situated piece of unused commercial real estate in Norwalk today than the Norwalk YMCA building? Located just off the South Norwalk exit of Interstate 95 southbound, the building is across the street from the Stepping Stones Museum for Children and Lockwood Mathews Mansion Museum.
If the block has refreshed appeal entering 2018 given all the nearby activity, its locale has value as well for Norwalk Hospitals central mission of providing patient care, with its main campus just opposite the elevated Route 7 connector. The past few years under its Danbury-based parent Western Connecticut Health Network, Norwalk Hospital has been working to expand the services of its physician affiliates to other commercial office properties in Norwalk and surrounding towns.
WCHN did not provide an immediate update on whether it plans to push ahead with a conversion of the Norwalk YMCA property for medical use, and whether it has contemplated cashing out of the property in favor of continuing to use other nearby commercial space for its needs.
The city of Norwalk lists any replacement cost of the building at $6 million, with the land holding additional intrinsic value. On the LoopNet commercial real estate website, only one other property is listed for sale with value as a development parcel in an automotive center adjacent to Waypointe.
I am aware that the hospital has undertaken some preliminary planning work regarding the reuse of the former YMCA site, but no development plans have been formally filed with (the city of Norwalk) for approval, said Tim Sheehan, executive director of the Norwalk Redevelopment Authority, in an email response to a Hearst Connecticut Media query. There remains significant private development interest in that property and others in close proximity to either the Waypointe (project) or the SoNo Collection.
Precedent
Commercial developers in southwestern Connecticut have a history of snapping up YMCA facilities that have outlived the economic circumstances under which they were built. In Stamford, RMS Construction transformed a former YMCA into Hotel Zero Degrees, later expanding the concept to Norwalk and Danbury.
And in Westport, where the towns former downtown YMCA held a comparatively dominant real estate parcel, principals with David Adam Realty and Charter Realty & Development did not hesitate to acquire the hybrid structure, creating Bedford Square with Anthropologie & Co. occupying a Tudor-design historic building shell. Williams-Sonoma and other retailers were quick to to snap up available space in new storefronts.
Now the biggest retail development of them all is under way in South Norwalk, with Sheehan expecting all property owners to benefit. The question is how many will capitalize on any escalating values for their land.
The SoNo Collection as a fully built, sizable, high-end retail development should positively impact the surrounding property valuations, beyond the vacant raw land that the project is now being built on, Sheehan said.
Robert Koch contributed to this report. Includes prior reporting by Leslie Lake.
Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
CVS Health wants to do much more than fill your prescription or jab your arm with an annual flu shot.
The drugstore chain is buying Hartford-based Aetna, the nations third-largest health insurer in order to push much deeper into customer care. The evolution wont happen overnight, but in time, shoppers may find more clinics in CVS stores and more health care they can receive through the network of nearly 10,000 locations the company has built.
The $69 billion deal was announced Sunday evening.
Aetna has between 5,500 and 6,000 employees in Connecticut, almost all connected with the head office in Hartford, though many of those people work from home. The total number has drifted down from about 7,000 in 2010, even as Aetnas national employment has gone up because of acquisitions.
CVS, with more than 10,000 pharmacy locations in the United States, has more than 50 pharmacies in southwestern Connecticut. A merger might be unlikely to affect those numbers since Aetna does not have retail locations and a main goal of the merger would be to connect health coverage to the public where the public shops.
It remains unclear how and whether Aetnas local employment will change if the merger happens as the companies propose. The announcement Sunday night did not give details or even substantial hints at that question and an Aetna spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment about it.
The administration will continue to monitor this merger as it develops and as details emerge to ensure that the best interests of consumers and Connecticut are protected, Kelly Donnelly, a spokeswoman for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, said in a written statement.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said he believes the merger gives Hartford a chance to participate rather than see a shrunken Aetna presence and he said hes had some encouragement along those lines from the company.
I congratulate both Aetna and CVS Health, and look forward to working with the leadership of both companies as this merger moves forward, Bronin said in a written release. I think this deal could present an important opportunity for Hartford and for Connecticut to build a partnership with what would be the nations leading healthcare company, rooted right here in New England.
Bronin said he has been in touch with Aetna and has reached out to CVS in Rhode Island. We need to seize that opportunity, and that means working with tremendous urgency to offer a fiscally-stable, business friendly environment with strong, vibrant cities and high quality of life in all of our communities.
The mayor added Aetna executives whom he declined to name have assured me that the companys commitment to being part of a comprehensive, sustainable solution to Hartfords longstanding fiscal challenges remains in place.
Thats a reference to the capital citys brush with bankruptcy, which appears to have been averted at least for the time being through a state package that would include refinancing of the citys debt and additional state aid. As a taxpayer, Aetna could see relief through any form of municipal reorganization, in or out of bankruptcy.
Aetna joined with The Hartford and Travelers in pledging a $50 million fund over five years to help stabilize Hartford but only as part of a comprehensive plan. The city is expected to draw on that as the state aid and refinancing unfold.
Connecticut, along with Wall Street, will closely watch statements by the companies Monday and beyond when they roll out details on possible savings. And Connecticut will pay close attention to the comments by Aetna CEO Mark T. Bertolini who is known to not favor the companys home state.
In the July, 2015 Aetna-Humana deal, Bertolini pointedly assured Louisville, in person, that city, the home of Humana, would keep its local workforce of 12,000 intact. Bertolini made no such assurances in Connecticut, and hinted at possible workforce declines in the event of that merger which was shot down by a federal judge who agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice in an antitrust case.
Two big differences this time around: First, the companies will plead with regulators that they have relatively little overlap, which could mean less savings wrung out of Aetnas Hartford base. And second, Bertolini is less in charge, as chief of the acquired company.
The corporate headquarters can be expected to see declines, but Aetna planned to move its headquarters to New York before the CVS deal happened. Regardless, the global headquarters functions in Hartford amount to a small number of people, as Aetna has top corporate executives around the nation.
Its unclear how much Aetna pays in state corporate earnings and computer services taxes an issue the company raised with ire in June, 2015, along with General Electric, after the General Assembly raised business taxes. In increase in the state computing tax, Aetnas main objection, ended up not happening in part because of the companys lobbying.
But whatever Aetna pays directly in taxes, by the larger effect of a merger could be on the economy of metro Hartford overall, and on tax collections through personal taxes the Aetna employees pay.
The deal will push the drugstore chain more forcefully in a direction it has been heading for years, according to analysts on Wall Street. It already has about 1,100 clinics in its store network, and it has methodically expanded what they do. The clinics started off as a place to treat basic health care needs like sinus infections or strep throat.
Gradually, the company has added services like blood draws or monitoring of chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes. Expect that trend to continue, as the drugstore switches more from selling products in its stores to services that cant be bought online, where retailers face formidable competition from the likes of Amazon.
I think over time youre going to see less of that front-store retail and more health care services in their stores, said Jeff Jonas, a portfolio manager for Gabelli Funds who follows drugstores.
The mammoth acquisition pairs a company that runs more than 9,700 drugstores and 1,100 walk-in clinics with an insurer covering around 22 million people. CVS Health Corp. is also one of the nations biggest pharmacy benefit managers, processing more than a billion prescriptions a year for insurance companies, including Aetna.
Analysts say the combined company could add more clinics and expand in-store services to include eye care or maybe centers for hearing aids. That could gradually turn CVS Health a one-stop-shop for health care, a place where patients can get a hearing aid checked, then see a nurse practitioner and pick up prescriptions.
If you think about it, we actually dont have anything like that, Jefferies analyst Brian Tanquilut said recently.
Analysts say clinics arent especially profitable, but they are important because they draw people into the stores and help build deeper customer relationships. Thats crucial because drugstores are learning customers have less loyalty to them than was previously thought, Tanquilut said. He noted customers will fill their prescriptions wherever their coverage tells them to visit.
Im not going to leave my job just because they took CVS out of my network, he said.
The clinics have become an attractive option for customers in need of basic health care because they are usually open longer than the family physician, and a clinic visit can be $30 cheaper or more for someone who doesnt have insurance. But they have drawbacks. Family doctors say they know their patients better and can check on a patients broader health when she comes in for a visit, rather than dealing with just the one thing that brought that person in.
CVS isnt the only health care giant delving into clinical care. The deal will help it compete with others like UnitedHealth Group Inc. The nations largest health insurer also runs clinics and doctors offices. Like CVS, it also has one of the nations largest pharmacy benefit management businesses. PBMs manage prescription drug plans for insurers like Aetna and also large employers, among other clients.
CVS also is on the defensive with this deal. Locking up Aetna helps secure a large client that can send millions of customers to its stores. It also keeps Aetna from turning to Amazon, if the retail giant decides to expand into prescription drugs.
Investors have been worried about that prospect since reports about the possibility first appeared earlier this year. Amazon has not commented on the possibility.
Amazon is already hurting drugstores in some markets with a same-day delivery service that competes with the products stores like CVS sell in the front part of their stores, outside their pharmacies. CVS actually is starting its own same-day delivery service this month in New York.
CVS Health Corp. will pay about $207 in cash and stock for each share of Aetna Inc., a person with knowledge of the matter said Sunday. That represents a 29 percent premium to the price of Aetna shares on Oct. 25, the day before The Wall Street Journal first reported about the possibility of a deal.
The source said the boards of both companies have approved the deal.
But antitrust regulators still need to approve the deal, and that is not guaranteed.
The Justice Department said last month it is suing AT&T to stop its $85 billion purchase of Time Warner. Regulators also sued to stop the Aetnas approximately $34 billion purchase of rival Humana Inc. a deal that fell apart earlier this year.
Aetna and Woonsocket, R.I.-based CVS both manage Medicare prescription drug coverage. Some of that business may have to be sold to address antitrust concerns. But otherwise, Leerink analyst David Larsen thinks a CVS-Aetna combination has decent odds of getting past regulators, in part because the businesses have little overlap.
We also believe that the Trump administration is more business-friendly, and regulators may view a CVS/(Aetna) combination as a way to continue to put pressure on manufacturers and drug prices, he said in a recent research note.
Associate Editor Dan Haar and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
The pizza may be gone, but the emphasis on Italian food and wine remains. Photo: Melissa Hom
Restaurateur-sommelier Joe Campanale and chef Erin Shambura, both late of LArtusi, had been searching earlier this year for the perfect Brooklyn location to open their own place. Then came the call from Francine Stephens, with the shocker that she and her husband, Andrew Feinberg, would be closing local landmark Frannys, and did they want the space?
Being longtime Frannys regulars and fans, they did, to put it mildly. And after hiring HOME Studios to redesign the premises with Venetian-plastered walls, a travertine-and-marble bar, and terrazzo-inlaid tables, they have transformed it into Fausto, a restaurant that celebrates (mostly) Italian wine and regional Italian food made with local, seasonal ingredients.
If that sounds familiar, bear in mind theres no pizza; instead, Shambura has put the wood-burning ovens to use for entrees like black sea bass with tomato-braised Tuscan kale. Pastas are housemade, seafood is East Coast and wild, and a new standing bar accommodates drinkers snacking on the kind of cicchetti Shambura savored in the bacari of the Veneto.
On the wine side, Campanale favors the organic, biodynamic, and light-to-medium-bodied, and has borrowed smart ideas from lists he admires: Most bottles are available by the half, too (extraction by Coravin helps with preservation), and markups on Champagnes and other big-ticket bottles will be modest enough to encourage regular consumption.
Heres a look at a few of Shamburas dishes and the refurbished space, which is slated to open this weekend.
Little Gem salad with Marcona almonds and sheeps-milk feta. Photo: Melissa Hom
Red-snapper ceviche with winter citrus and fennel. Photo: Melissa Hom
Arancini with quadrello di bufala, a water-buffalo cheese from Lombardy. Photo: Melissa Hom
Whole-wheat bigoli with duck ragu. Photo: Melissa Hom
Tortelloni with sweet potato and parsnip. Photo: Melissa Hom
Braised pork shank with white beans and gremolata. Photo: Melissa Hom
Black sea bass with tomato-braised Tuscan kale. Photo: Melissa Hom
Lemon ricotta cake. Photo: Melissa Hom
Postwar Italy was an inspiration for the swanky design. Photo: Melissa Hom
348 Flatbush Ave., nr. Eighth Ave., Park Slope; 917-909-1427
*A version of this article appears in the December 11, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.
The Aviarys Bloody Mary. Photo: Miachel Breton
Dont worry, most people abandon it halfway through, the impeccably mannered waitperson said with a practiced little bow. My guests and I were peering at Grant Achatzs towering Giant Crispy Pork Skin, a creation that, like the Redwoods or the Taj Mahal, still manages to look impressive in real life, no matter how many times youve scrolled absently past it on your Instagram feed. The great pork flap is pulled and twisted into giant rippling shapes during the deep-frying process at Achatzs new bar-restaurant the Aviary and then propped, like a great decorative palm frond, in a square glass vase. Its served with a cool, creamy mix of corn pudding spiced with chile oil and coriander, and although it tastes good, the real fun, aside from mindlessly filling your own Instagram feed, and the snapping, tree-bark sound the pork makes when you break it off, is the spectacle of the thing.
Achatz has long been famous for dreaming up these kinds of edible (and drinkable) conjuring tricks, of course, at his Chicago flagship, Alinea, and its sister operations Next, the Aviary, and the Office. But like a traveling carnival, or a slow-moving Old Masters art show, the new Aviary production, which opened not long ago in the skyscraper lobby of the Mandarin Oriental hotel above Columbus Circle, represents the first time jaded New Yorkers get to experience his particular vision for themselves. Like the original Aviary, this one is billed as a bar, although there are plenty of snacks to graze on besides Goliath-size pork rinds, and the only bar in sight is the one at the back of the room where troupes of mixologists, herbalogists, and ice aficionados concoct antically named libations (Wake and Bake, Heart of Stone), many of which are served bubbling in strange, medicinal glassware, billowing clouds of frozen liquid smoke.
The Aviary NYC. Photo: Jemma Hinkly/New York Magazine
New Yorkers pride themselves on being immune to this kind of trickery, of course, and the dreaded term molecular gastronomy has been out of fashion in this expedient, meat-and-potatoes town for years, if it was ever fashionable at all. So it pains me a little to admit that, after what remained of our mega-chicharron was whisked away, I enjoyed sipping the strange, mango-colored margarita creation paired with it, which featured two rust-colored ice cubes that released the essence of blood orange and poblano peppers into the drink as they melted. Another grizzled boozer at the table ordered the house version of that Mexican libation the michelada, which was touched, weirdly but not unpleasantly, with coriander, a smoky Japanese whiskey, and hints of soy. Whos pouring this kind of thing down at your local bar? he asked as he took one happy sip, then another. The answer is nobody.
Certainly nobody around town serves treacle-sweet rye-coffee-and-orange-vermouth concoctions hoisted to the table in an inflated plastic pillow filled with a smoky, everything-bagel perfume. Nobody serves gin-and-tonics reimagined to look like the contents of a gently defrosting green lava lamp (I have dim memories of enjoying mine), or deconstructed $38 Bloody Marys, the contents of which are laid out on a round glass tray (the highlight being a curled tapioca crisp flavored with Worcestershire). I like the novelty of this, but my critical faculties are now somewhat impaired, declared one of my addled guests, as our little magic show concluded with an homage to New Years in New York, called In the Rocks, which involved a tot of Champagne, followed by the breaking of a booze-filled ball of ice (containing a Scotch-and-green-Sichuan-pepper-spiked Old Fashioned) into the bottom of a frosty glass.
Chip and dip: This morsel of pig skin is no reflection of the actual serving size. Photo: Miachel Breton
These entertaining creations tend to be uniformly sweet, and they have a way of blending into each other, especially if you click one of the more pricey ticket options (eight courses for $215 being the priciest) on the online ticket site Tock. The bar-snack options follow an equally haphazard progression, although there were many things Id be happy to order again, including a kind of supercharged (and also weirdly sweet) version of the Japanese octopus street snack takoyaki and a single shrimp, seized in a delicately crunchy tempura batter, which we dipped into an aioli whipped with spicy togarashi powder. The lustrous, flower-decked pork-belly curry is a good match for the many fruity drinks on the list, and if you want a taste of what the shouting has been about at Alinea all these years, call for the famous soup-dumpling-style Black Truffle Explosion, which packs a layered, umami punch far beyond its delicate tablespoon size.
Black Truffle Explosion: umami by the spoonful. Photo: Miachel Breton
Not that this is the same thing as drinking (and dining) back in Achatzs Chicago headquarters, of course. The view from the top of the Mandarin has its pleasures, but the limitations in lighting, noise, and traffic flow make it feel a lot like youre experiencing these elaborate culinary tricks in, well, a hotel lobby. Regular guests of the hotel may also end up wishing that in terms of space and everyday access, the New York branch of Achatzs speakeasy bar the Office, which opened months ago in a much smaller, darkened space next door, was flipped with this endlessly running performance, especially if theyre looking for a place to relax over a beer, say, and a helping of Buffalo wings. For New Yorkers, however, its worth getting a ticket, even if the prices are a little extreme, and, like most magic shows, the tricks work best if you see them just once.
Rating: 2 stars
The Aviary NYC
80 Columbus Cr., at 60th St.; theaviarynyc.tocktix.com
Open: Lunch, dinner, and drinks daily.
Prices: Drinks, $12 to $38; small plates, $11 to $29.
Ideal Meal: Giant Crispy Pork Skin, tempura Hawaiian shrimp and/or pork-belly curry, Black Truffle Explosion. Instead of dessert, save your calories (and cash) for drinks like the Bloody Mary, Margarita-ish, and Heart of Stone.
Note: As always at the Mandarin, tables by the window are best. The Aviary will soon be open for breakfast.
Scratchpad: One star each for the best of the inventive food and drink and another for the Office next door. Minus a star for the prices and the space.
*This article appears in the December 11, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.
Opinion / Columnist
Clive Chiridza is a motivational speaker and social commentator who writes here in his personal capacity. He can be reached on chiridzac@gmail.com
Dear young women and men of Zimbabwe, I feel the urgency to communicate to you on this day, and through this letter on three things; the state of our country, the prospects for the future, and what each one of us must do today to better our destiny.Firstly, I commend all of you for the zeal you show each day for a better country. Every day, wherever I go, whenever I read your social media engagements, whenever I tune into the radio and TV- I see a generation which is passionate about their country! I also see young men and women who are tired and fed up of a country which does not work for them and a system which is disconnected from their daily realties.The statistics are clear and are on our side! The median age of Zimbabwe is 20. More than 60% of the people are below 30 years of age, and over 65% below 35 years of age. The average age of our newly appointed cabinet ministers is about 65 and the young people continue to be side-lined.Out of the many intelligent, young Zimbabweans with great potential, it is just one or two if any, who get appointed to become ministers- to represent this generation. Rather than demand for and take our place in shaping our country, the majority of us continue to beg for hand-outs from the minority- turning ourselves into subjects of patronage.This is a serious cause of concern but surprisingly many young people continue to live in some bit of comfort which has made them complacent. Some are luckier than the majority in this country as there are employed and often feel comfortable just because they can afford some basics of life, and have totally become depoliticized. The temporary comfort has blinded them to the bigger picture and to the problems of our country.In 1980 the colonialists handed over this country to our grandparents. As we are told, a working country was handed over to us. Newspapers of the time paint a picture of some kind of tropical paradise, of course with the nickname Bread basket of Africa'. One could travel from Harare Street to Fourth Street in a few minutes straight without meeting a pothole, and all traffic lights in cities were functional.Therefore, when our forefathers agitated for independence before and in 1980, their problem was not poor service delivery or a failed system. They were simply agitating for self-governance. They wanted to free themselves and their children from the indignity of being ruled over by the white man.'They understood that having good infrastructure, excellent service delivery and a functioning healthcare without political freedom and direct participation meant nothing. To them, it was important to have both economic development while at the same time exercising their God-given right to self-determination! They wanted a black man or woman on the steering wheel of the country because they thought our own shall not betray us, our own shall not enslave us and our own shall be accountable to us, therefore Independence Day was celebrated with pomp and flair.Youths! Our silence in the face of injustice is loud, our inaction is costly and many of us do not even vote! By so doing we do not only betray our generation and country, but the effects of a badly run country will soon catch up with us.We are that generation, the grandchildren of the independence generation and the grandparents of the future generations, we must within ourselves find solutions, since our leaders don't seem to care for the next generation but instead care for the next general-election. We are the country, we are the future, we are the change we badly need, we are the youngest population in the world, we stand a chance, we are the leaders of the future and the future is today and if we only come together we can change our destiny.Young people ended apartheid, young people marched against slavery, and yes, young people fought for Africa's independence. Therefore the struggle for a better country must involve all of us- men and women, young and old, from rural and urban areas, educated and not educated, all of us.We must build a country which works for everyone where all young persons are proud to be called Zimbabweans and are not politically marginalized in their own land. We should always remember that there are some generations in this country which have been bypassed- which have not put any meaningfull contribution to the development of this country.
Haiti - France : 2nd Edition of the Assises of the Franco-Haitian Municipal Cooperation
Organized by the National Federation of Mayors of Haiti (FENAMH) and Cites Unies France, the Federation of French territorial authorities engaged in decentralized cooperation, with the support of the Ministry of the Interior and Territorial Communities (MICT), the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE) and the French Embassy in Haiti, the 2nd Edition of the Assises of Decentralized Franco-Haitian Cooperation will be held on 5 and 6 December 2017 in Port-au-Prince.
These Assises will bring together the mayors of Haiti, representatives of the Government and its main national and international partners and over a hundred members of the French communities of Metropolitan France and the Americas.
Space for dialogue and exchange on the main themes of cooperation between Haitian and French communities, these Assises will offer conferences, round tables and workshops on key topics of territorial development such as: education, regional planning, the environment and rural development, water and waste management, intercommunality, local taxation, participatory democracy, tourism and heritage, and cooperation and regional integration.
These Assises will also give rise to several field visits by the delegations of French communities to the territories of the Haitian communes with which they cooperate.
Download the Assizes Program : https://www.haitilibre.com/docs/programme_detaille.pdf
HL/ HaitiLibre
Haiti - Education : Towards a solution to the crisis at EFACAP of Petit-Goave ?
Friday, concerned about the resumption of classes at the School of Basic Education and Pedagogical Support Center (EFACAP) of Petit-Goave paralyzed for 3 months by the teachers' strike, a delegation of the Ministry of Education led by Pierrin Cherlvil, Deputy Director of the Department of the West, spoke for several hours with the teachers and members of the EFACAP Directorate.
During the meeting, many parents angry and hostile to some executives of the Direction were massed on the yard of the establishment by launching insults.
Concerned about the resumption of the courses, the Director Pierrin solicited from the teachers present, a truce until the Ministry of National Education, already touched by their file, brings a definitive solution to the problem of the arrears of salary and the regularization of the situation of some teachers. In addition, he wished that the courses are resumed from Monday, December 4.
The teachers intend to present themselves in the classrooms, however they pose certain conditions related to their demands... A break which could be of short duration...
See also :
https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22429-haiti-petit-goave-deprived-of-class-students-demonstrate.html
https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22840-haiti-petit-goave-act-of-vandalism-at-efacap.html
HL/ HaitiLibre / Guyto Mathieu (Correspondant Petit-Goave)
Haiti - Economy : Comparison of Price at the pump Haiti versus DR
The Ministry of Economy and Finance informs that for the period from 18 to 24 November 2017 the Fuel Prices are always cheaper in Haiti than in the neighboring Republic, if the price difference between the two countries is reduced for the gasoline and kerosene, rising respectively from 71.83 gourdes and 31.78 gourdes (period from 11 to 17 November 2017) to 67.12 gourdes and 31.23 gourdes (period from 17 to 24 November 2017). On the other hand, the difference increased slightly for diesel because of the increase of the price of this product on the Dominican market; from 37.83 gourdes to 38.86 gourdes.
It should be noted the appreciation of the gourde in relation to the Dominican peso: 1.3006 gourdes for 1 pesos (period from 18 to 24 November) against 1.3102 gourdes for 1 pesos (period from 11 to 17 November).
Haiti - Dominican Republic (DR) Fuel Price Difference, period from 18 to 24 Nov 2017 :
Gazoline: 224.00 (HT) versus 291.12 in DR, 67.12 Gdes cheaper in Haiti
Diesel: 179.00 (HT) versus 218.86 in DR, 38.86 Gdes cheaper in Haiti
Kerosene: 173.00 (HT) versus 204.23 in DR, 31.23 Gdes cheaper in Haiti
https://www.haitilibre.com/docs/comparaison-produits-petroliers-18-24-novembre-2017.pdf
Obviously this kind of information that aims to demonstrate, that despite increases in fuel prices in Haiti, they remain lower than our neighbors, remains convincing. Indeed, the ministry forgets to specify that the increases in fuel prices in Haiti weigh much more heavily on the budget of Haitian citizens whose average income "per capita" is 5 times lower than that of the Dominicans...
HL/ TB/ HaitiLibre
Haiti - Justice : The mayors of the Nippes engage in the fight against corruption
The ULCC determined to move forward in the fight against corruption and in its fight for the moralization of life and public action realized in the city of Miragoane the third exit of the training seminar and information executed for the benefit of mayors of the department of Nippes, around the theme "Towards the involvement of local elected representatives in the fight against corruption".
During these two days of symposium, various topics were discussed. The first day focused on the declaration of assets, prescribed legal which is, according to the remarks of Major David Basile, Director General of the Unit against the Corruption (ULCC), the first act of transparency of an elected. This intervention was followed by a workshop around the asset declaration form itself, including how to fill it out. He recalled that the ULCC had already organized a training for the benefit of two executives of the National Federation of Mayors of Haiti (FENAMH) to support mayors who wish it. The second day tackled the issues related to the legal and regulatory framework of local authorities as well as the local budget implementation modalities. The two speakers of the second day reviewed the law of 12 March 2014 in its preventive and repressive aspects.
Speaking at the closing ceremony on behalf of the Director General of the ULCC, his chief of staff, Major Francois-Marie Sandry Charles-Pierre, emphasized on the moral fundamentals that should guide mayors in the exercise of their responsibilities "You are the ones who, in your areas of expertise, are in a position to change things or make them change, in the right way, for trust, respect, esteem, prestige, honor. We are all people of honor. Be models of virtue in your respective communities, and say well, that all that you will do well in your communes, will be for the benefit of the realization of the general interest."
The President of AmaNippes, Mr. Wilnor Pierre, Mayor of Petit-Trou de Nippes, who spoke on behalf of his colleagues, invited them to work toward a common goal : the eradication of corruption in the communes. At the end of this seminar, the mayors of the Nippes, like their peers in the West and Artibonite, signed an ethical act against corruption. This document, conceived by the ULCC, is a personal commitment to the fight against corruption and a bias towards the moralization of life and public action. Through this act, drafted in 11 resolutions, the mayors of the Nippes made various resolutions consisting, among other things, of preventing and repressing corruption in their local administrations, rationalizing the management of local public resources and restoring the confidence of their communities in their respective administrations.
HL/ HaitiLibre
Opinion / Columnist
Most people have left their motherland with the hope of staying only for six months and then go back home. Those who travelled first never told other's the truth. They make every one believe that staying abroad is a bed of rose petals. at least if they say bed of roses you cannot blame them because roses prick, but the petals are soft. it is only when you arrive in the foreign land that you will realise that Home is best. A number of people have stayed on because they are ashamed to come back home without anything. The need to prove a point makes one stay longer but at a high price. A few days ago, ten years have passed since I started living in London, says Zebron Phiri a Zimbabwean migrant in the UK. The first time, a couple of years ago, I was here for a few hours as a tourist. The second time I came I was so sure I will never last six months, guess what I am here. I do not regret the move but the first years were tough and I lived like a slave a willing slave.Even before my Bachelors graduation in Zimbabwe I was searching for institutions in London in which I could do my masters and empower myself. I was not poor and was not an economic refugee. I came to better myself and enhance my capacity to compete in the global village. In general that was however more or less an excuse in order to be able to leave Zimbabwe maybe permanently. Zimbabwe was still good but the signs of economic meltdown were showing. Knowing that something out there was waiting for me, having found an institution for my internship, I couldn't just cancel everything. Apart from that, having committed to something like this can be very helpful in terms of one's mental state of mind if you are coming to a foreign country planning to go back home later.. If from the moment of your arrival you know that in a few days you will have to go to work, you have a mental safety net in comparison to just packing your things and leaving and then being in state of insecurity, where you have to fill your days and hours with time consuming and compulsory procedures and necessities such as like the search for an apartment, the registration at the local authorities, the job applications and so on.it turned out to be different but I thank God I have achieved a lot. In this country UK the sky is the limit. I have known many who have been in the UK for the past twenty years and they have achieved NVQ 1 which is equivalent to first aid course. this is mainly because some are myopic and only want to eat now no worries about tomorrow. The challenge comes when your child asks you dad what do you do.?At the same time my escape abroad was a result of my wish for postgraduate studies outside of the Zimbabwean frames or reference. From the beginning of my studies I was convinced that my Masters programme should be abroad. Being a student and afterwards a graduate I always regarded the experience that one can get living abroad as of great importance, even if the final destination is Zimbabwe.. The number of things that you can learn from a year's stay abroad amount to more than ten years in any country you've been born in. And all these things follow you afterwards in your life and they change you for the better as a person. Having lived abroad you experience, see, hear, and get to know things that are not part of your country's reality: how the country, the cities, and the public transport are structured, how people interact with one another, what kind of habits they have, how they entertain themselves, how they think and other innumerable small information and details, which whether you want it or not force you in comparing them with what you've taken for granted so far. This is by no means a bad comparison, as it makes you reflect and think outside of what you've learnt your whole life.Saviour Shava said," I graduated with an engineering degree from Zimbabwe did further studies in Engineering in the UK but the situation taught me to be humble, I now drive a lorry with all my degrees. if only our friends in Zimbabwe are to know that education is not only the key but it is indeed a humbling process our country will be miles away from what it is.For me, my immigration abroad was always a matter of belonging. In Zimbabwe since I was young, even more after I started studying, I had a constant feeling of intolerance and 'must' surround me. I grew up calling our neighbours names, we had five Mozambicans working in our fields and two maids from Malawi. A foreigner had a name. Education was a class above classes; UK was a sobering situation said Gilbert Dumbura now working as a nurse. You must act like a man, because this is what you are, you must not cry, you must love your country man even though you don't share a word with them, you have to be social, you must be human, you must, must, must. And if you don't fit into the box they moulded for you and you can't adjust to it, then there is no room for existence in the UK. You will die of stress and surely you will be stressed if you think high of yourself.I remember my friend a medical doctor arrived from Zimbabwe full of pride in two weeks he was sorting letters at a local post office being supervised by his former maid who arrived in the UK early, what a humiliating but humbling situation. UK teaches you to love and be a better Christian.John Dziva said that he was shocked with the selfishness he found back home in Zimbabwe when he went for holiday. Despite the fact that he was buying food fuelling cars giving people pocket money he was accosted for five dollars he asked from his brother who he gave six hundred dollars just for his own use. "I was depressed and deeply drained when I realised that people at home are more like animals than family,""With the love we fly around people in Diaspora amount of money we send home even to cousins, I was shocked when I went to burry my mother when I was given a bill of the money used to feed the mourners in my absence." mourned Rufaro a nurse in the UK. Despite the fact that Zimbabwe is home our brothers no longer look after each other."Later as the crisis intensified and became more visible and was felt more than ever, diaspora took on a more financial aspect. "As a graduate even if I had a Master's and a PhD degree I knew that in .Zimbabwe the chances of finding work in the field I am interested in are minimal, In UK I can have my own room and at the same time the state can on the one hand partially support me during my studies financially, and for that I decided to stay permanently. After all those I left home never care about me, if I go home sick they will throw me under a bus" Nigel Matura said.Obviously immigrating is not something easy and in no case is it a treachery or a convenience against those who stayed (since we left for a richer country) as some believe and report in the public sphere. To leave the place where you were born and grew up in for something unknown and uncertain isn't that simple and for sure it needs much more strength and decisiveness than staying in your country, even if this country is crisis-stricken. You might not be able to find a job, you might hardly make ends meet or you might not be able to do otherwise but to stay with your parents, but you are never ever a stranger. The language that you speak is your language, you own and possess it and it expresses you. You can explain everything and saying do you know what I mean?' is to be heard only sometimes, when you really lack the words for that. . Do you know what I mean?' is not your daily life however, as when you are struggling with a language that is not yours, a language that is not a second nature. A language that in order for you to comprehend you have to constantly be alert and in order for you to learn it, you've spent money and time, since you didn't learn it like your mother tongue, as a child, naturally and self-evidently.Diaspora at the very end is not just a matter of money It much more means education, awakening, reflecting, self-improvement, love. Because all these that you will experience abroad, you haven't experienced in your whole life. In no other way do your horizons expand, as with leaving your country.Living abroad is not a shame, nor an act of treachery or a convenience. Nor is it full of misery or is it a compromise contributing to another (preferably western) country's wealth. Living abroad means becoming a better, open-minded person. At the bottom line, living abroad means to blossom and indeed live for others, for you children and for your family. living abroad must not turn you into money machine where any broke uncle rings you for money and never for your health. Most of them never say thank you after they have received the money you send, the next call is to ask for more.VAZET2000@YAHOO.CO.UK
Published on 2017/12/03 | Source
Lotte Group on Thursday donated W1 billion to the Community Chest of Korea to help victims of the recent earthquake in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province (US$1=W1,089).
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"We hope our donation will help speed up recovery efforts after the disaster", a Lotte spokesman said.
Lotte's subsidiaries were already engaged in various relief efforts in the southern city.
Lotte Confectionery sent snacks worth W80 million, while Lotte Mart provided food and W30 million. Convenience store franchise 7-Eleven also donated about 10,000 daily necessities including bottled water, toilet paper, and toothpastes to emergency shelters there.
Published on 2017/12/03 | Source
The Education Ministry wants to reduce the university entrance quota by 20,000 by 2021, it said Thursday.
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After being evaluated based on various factors, universities will be divided by region and classified into three tiers. The top 60 percent will not have to reduce their freshmen intake, but lower-ranking universities will have to reflect the dwindling number of school-leavers.
"We will minimize government intervention and reflect market logic", the ministry said.
The remaining 40 percent will go through another assessment process and will be advised to reduce their budgets or risk losing state support for student loans and national scholarships.
The ministry hopes that this will bring down freshmen numbers by 20,000 students from 2019 to 2021.
"The number of students applying for college admissions in 2021 is already expected to decline by 34,000 compared to 2018", said Lee Hae-sook at the ministry. "But only 20,000 of them will be reduced through government inspections and the rest left to schools so that non-competitive ones are weeded out by market forces".
The law prevents the government from closing down universities simply because they underperform. Instead, the ministry selects the worst-performing universities with irregularities in management and unstable financial situations. They will be given an opportunity to clean up their act or face closure.
Successive governments have tried to deal with the problem of private "Mickey Mouse" universities that suck up public subsidies but exist purely for profit or the greater glory of their proprietors, but with little success so far.
Opinion / Columnist
"The Commander Zimbabwe National Army Lieutenant General Phillip Valerio Sibanda has called on the national army to be disciplined and to desist from harassing citizens," reported Bulawayo24. "Lieutenant General Sibanda was addressing a pass out parade of 590 recruits at Battlefields in Mhondoro Ngezi. "Discipline and patriotism are very essential in the military because of the extreme duties that the armed forces carry out, he told the recruits."The sheer hypocrisy of it all is astonishing! So, the General was aware that the Army has been harassing citizens. Of course, he was aware of the harassment and worse; after all he played his part in devious plans and in their ruthless execution!General Valerio Sibanda is a senior member of the Joint Operation Command (JOC), the shadowy Junta cum Mafia cum Freemason that has ruled Zimbabwe with an iron fist all these last 37 years. He knows the small details of the 2008 Operation "Mavhotera papi" (Whom did you vote for), for example, in which the Army played a pivotal role in not just the harassment of civilians but in the beating, raping and murder of innocent people to force them to vote for Mugabe in the presidential run-off.The now deposed Robert Mugabe publicly acknowledge and thank the war veterans and the security services top brass for the role they all played in restoring him back into State House when he had in fact lost the popular vote.The full details of what role the top brass in the Army, Police, CIO and other organs of State are still to be properly investigated and documented but there can be no doubt that General Sibanda play a role. It is rich therefore for him to now be talking of discipline and patriotism when the red alert of the military coup he was involved is still bright red!There is talk that General Sibanda will be appointed one of the two VPs, his reward for carrying out his fair share of the Junta's mindless barbarism, debauchery and betrayal of the people and the ZDF uniform. Even if he does not get the VP post he is certainly one of the Zanu PF ruling elite, by virtue of his position in the Junta, who have profited from the wholesale looting by the Zanu PF dictatorship.The Zanu PF dictatorship was thrilled and relieved to see the hundreds of thousands of ordinary civilians come out in the street in support of the military coup. The Mnangagwa faction's worst fear was that the people should see the coup was just an internal matter in Zanu PF that does not resolve their real demand for meaningful democratic reforms to end the dictatorship itself.Indeed, most people are only now coming round to realising that supporting the coup was but a foolish thing to do because President Mnangagwa and his gang have taken the support to mean the people are happy with the removal of Mugabe and that is all they have ever wanted.General Sibanda's hand of friendship to the citizens of Zimbabwe is just part of the charm-offensive by this Mnangagwa administration to get the people to forget that the cabal now in government is the same dictatorship, except for the removal of Mugabe to replace him with Mnangagwa, that has looted, rigged elections and ruthlessly oppressed them.The country's political temperature is already hotting up and as the people's good will after the coup is freckle, it is starts to wear-off already. Zanu PF's prospect of winning next year's election may be looking good now, hence the regime's charm offensive, but in three or four months' times things will be very different. Will General Sibanda still be calling for the Army not to harass the citizens and allow the country to finally have its first free, fair and credible elections? Knowing fully well that should Zanu PF be booted out of office, he too will lose his share of the loot from Marange and, worse, have his dark past uncovered for all to see!The Zanu PF dictatorship is the same corrupt, incompetent, vote rigging and ruthlessly oppressive juggernaut the people of Zimbabwe have known these last 37 years. The change of from one dictator, Mugabe, for another, Mnangagwa, has not change the dictatorship itself. The removal of Mugabe has, at best, allowed key players in the Zanu PF dictatorship to mount a charm-offensive to fool the naive and gullible into believing the ruthless Zanu PF dictatorship of Mugabe days died with the demise of the old tyrant.The Zanu PF charm-offensive has successfully dressed the Zanu PF iron fist in a velvet glove. With not even one democratic reform in place, the iron fist is still there, as those foolish enough to expect next year's election will be free, fair and credible, will soon learn. When Zanu PF's hold on power is under serious threat General Sibanda may still continue to publicly call for the Army not to harass civilians but in private order the soldiers to show no mercy to all those threatening regime change. An iron fist in a velvet glove is just as deadly as a bare-knuckle iron fist; the glove is a disguise and not a cushion the blow!
SONNING Common Parish Council is gearing up for a legal battle with a developer.
Gallagher Estates has appealed after its plans for 95 homes off Kennylands Road were refused planning permission by South Oxfordshire District Council.
The company wants to develop 6.15 hectares of land which has been earmarked for 26 homes in the villages neighbourhood plan.
The parish council argues that the plans go against its neighbourhood plan and the development would have a negative impact on the countryside and surrounding area and would increased traffic and cause disturbance to residents. It has budgeted more than 10,000 to employ Emily Temple, a planning consultant, to prepare its case and a barrister to represent it at a planning appeal hearing next spring.
Councillor Tom Fort, who is managing the appeal for the council, said: Emily Temple has extensive experience and I am in contact with her about the way ahead.
As we are a main party we get more than 10 minutes to make our case. Unfortunately, to put our case successfully we require a barrister.
Emily has made contact with the district council appeals officers and says they will be able to work together. We come at it from different angles.
Deputy parish clerk Ros Varnes said: The district council has to stick to defending its decision based on the grounds for refusal. The parish council can be much more broad on the reasons for refusing the application. The neighbourhood plan is an extremely good starting point.
Cllr Fort said he felt that money spent on the appeal was worth it, adding: If we lose this, everything we put into our neighbourhood plan will be lost and it will not be an effective plan anymore.
The council has emailed and sent flyers to residents encouraging them to contact the Planning Inspectorate expressing concerns about the proposed development.
It also plans to launch a crowdfunding appeal in the New Year led by David Winchester, of Kennylands Road.
Councillor Leigh Rawlins said the significance of the case for neighbourhood planning could bring it to national attention.
He said: By making it a test case you may get more people to contribute a fiver. The small amounts can be quite significant collectively.
The appeal hearing has been scheduled for April 10 and is expected to take four days. It will probably be held at Henley town hall.
PARENTS say they are happy to pay towards basics at their childrens schools.
The governors of Robert Piggott junior and infant schools have asked parents for a donation of 1 a day towards stationery and books, the equivalent of 190 per child over the school year.
They blame changes to schools funding and say the extra money will allow them to maintain small classes and provide the best quality teaching.
Lucinda Bryers, chairwoman of the schools parents association, said: The association and the school share the view that we should attempt to maintain the current standard of schooling in what are increasingly difficult financial times in the education sector.
This is not the first school nationally or in the local area to reach the same conclusion.
The voluntary donations only help the school to meet current expenditure levels.
The association continues to run a calendar of fund-raising and community events.
Over the course of the year the money raised from these is used to enhance the education of the children, such as with the iPads funded last year. Education of the children, both in the curriculum and as individuals, continues to be the focus of the school.
It is hoped that until the national funding position improves this focus can be achieved to the same high standard through the support of the parents and wider community.
In a statement, the schools governing body said: Like many schools, we are experiencing rising costs in the face of reduced funding.
We have had to make tough choices over the last few years to ensure we continue to provide the same high-quality education for our children and still balance our budgets.
Following consultation, some parents requested guidance on making voluntary contributions.
While committed to the principle of state-funded education, we have now reached the stage where, like many other schools in the country, we need to ask parents and the community to consider making voluntary donations to help meet the predicted shortfall in funding.
This decision has not been taken lightly and our financial situation will continue to be carefully monitored by the governing body.
The request for money was made in a letter to parents by Caroline Meader, who chairs the governing body.
She wrote: We have been working with parent volunteers, governors and the teaching staff to develop a funding strategy and implementation plan.
One of the elements of this plan was to ask parents and the community to consider making donations to help meet the predicted shortfall in funding.
She said the voluntary contributions would go towards:
Consumables such as glue, pens, pencils, exercise books, paper, tape and paint.
Curriculum resources, such as maths text books, reading books, tools, software, science equipment and musical instruments.
Maintaining current levels of support staff, for example, teaching assistants.
Parents can make their donation as a one-off payment of 190, three payments of 64 for each term or a monthly payment of 16 by direct debit.
Mrs Meader said: We would like to suggest that parents donate 1 per school day for each child to help the schools through this funding crisis.
All donations, however large or small, will be gratefully received and will help us to continue to maintain the current provision and excellent standard of education for every child.
The schools say they have suffered a decrease in government funding over recent years at the same time as the cost of staff has risen.
They have already cut back on expenditure by renegotiating contracts with service providers and reducing staff training and outlay on supplies as well as sharing staff.
The schools have also attempted to bring in more money by renting out areas of the schools for external events.
The school is in the Maidenhead constituency of Prime Minster Theresa May, who pledged during the election campaign last year that all children would have the support they need.
Minister for school standards Nick Gibb has said that the new national schools funding formula will end disparities.
But shadow education minister Angela Rayner said: While I welcome any money going into schools, it doesnt even paper over the cracks.
CHANCELLOR Philip Hammonds decision to abolish stamp duty for first-time buyers up to a value of 300,000 has this week been welcomed by mortgage lenders the Halifax.
The stamp duty cut in last weeks autumn budget also applies to the first 300,000 of homes worth half a million in order to get more people on the first rung of the housing ladder.
Mr Hammond said: With effect from today for all first-time buyer purchases up to 300,000, I am abolishing stamp duty altogether.
Jasjyot Singh, mortgages director at the Halifax, said The changes to stamp duty are a real boost for those hoping to take their first step on the property ladder.
Todays first-time buyers need to find an average deposit of 32,899 if they do manage to purchase their first home, they are on average 651 a year better off owning versus renting.
The number of first-time buyers getting on the housing ladder has now exceeded 150,000 for the third time in four years a level of momentum not seen since before the financial crisis.
We will be lending over 10 billion in 2017 to help people own their first home.
Mr Singhs comments were echoed by Ollie Purdue, the 24-year-old CEO and founder of Loot, a digital current account specifically aimed at millennials.
He said: Todays budget outlined by the chancellor was particularly welcome news for younger generations specifically for those with a dream of one day owning their own house.
Shockingly, home ownership for those aged between 25 and 34 years old stands at just 39 per cent, and real solutions that young people actually felt the impact of are long overdue.
The biggest financial worry for those under 35 is affordable housing in particular raising a sizeable enough deposit to get on the housing ladder. The abolition of stamp duty for first time buyers purchasing a property of up to 300,000, or the first 300,000 of properties up to 500,000, is welcome news for all those dreaming of owning their own home one day.
Its particularly positive for those in London, where the average stamp duty for a first-time buyer sits at over 10,000. This change will save 80 per cent of first-time buyers from having to pay any stamp duty at all.
Itll take a significant number of other changes to really turn around the housing market for young buyers, but this is certainly a step in the right direction and will allow people to get on the housing ladder quicker.
In a further boost for younger homebuyers, this week has seen claims that first-time buyer developments could spring up around the country if a new scheme to relax planning laws goes ahead.
This would see councils having to offer homes for sale or rent in first-time buyer led developments.
Homes for younger buyers could be built in hubs designated by councils for affordable first-time properties. However, land in the green belt would not be included in the scheme.
Opinion / Columnist
At this time last month, under the Dictatorship of former President Mugabe and his Crooked Finance Minister Chombo, at least I could sit on my computer and transfer my hard-earned cash to a needy relative in Zimbabwe from my Bank. Today, I am proudly boasting with a new President assumedly one who has the people at heart. Yesterday I got a call from a close relative in Chiredzi whose four-year-old son has been diagnosed with Non Hodgkin's Lympoma. This is a type of a cancer and the little boy has a badly swollen neck needing urgent attention at Parerenyatwa.As my new President still can't believe how lucky he is, he is being introduced to all the free services he is entitled to, I am sure his poisoning bill has been paid by the State in South Africa. All his money problems of last month are over. And yet we, the recipients of a new Service from a new President, are getting new challenges instead of envisaged solutions.This morning, I immediately jumped on my computer to transfer money from my Zimbabwean Bank Account trying to help a relative at this urgent hour of need. I was shocked to find out that, for the first time, I couldn't make that transfer. The Bank says I must not EXCEED my DAILY LIMIT of ZERO dollars. It clearly shows how much money there is, but I am NOT allowed to transfer my own money to pay for an urgent cancer treatment at Parerenyatwa.This is the time that President CoupSolution is edging people to bring back externalised money into the Banks. That money will suddenly turn into Zero Daily Limit of Transfer. In the first place, what made people externalise their money is because NO ONE TRUSTS MONETORY SYSTEMS UNDER A ZANU GOVERNMENT. The Finance Ministry would have worked better under Biti. Investors would trust Biti better than people with a written philosophy that the Zanu Government CAN seize your property. They can turn your life servings into a clean ZERO as they did in 2008. Not even the Government themselves trust custodianship of funds under themselves. Chinamasa's own left hand does not trust the conspiratous dealings of his right hand. Not only is Chinamasa, Chombo still wants to come and fetch more cheap waters. Gono wouldn't hesitate either. One common thing about them is that they are Zanu. They have no conventional monitory ethics. Many Zanu Ministers Bank in Zuma's South African Banks where a Black Government operates better than a Zimbabwean Black Zanu Government.Anyone who says we must be patient and wait for this slow and old President to start acting, is himself slow and old and is being paid new wages by the new but old and slow President.In the case of a cancer emergency, should I wait for the President to take time to fix my money problem which was not a problem just last month under thieving Chombo? Did it really show any proactivity and innovation, on the part of the Government, by putting Chinamasa as Finance Minister. Is it not a known gerontological fact that old people are slow in doing things? How can Chinamasa beat gerontological erosion? How can he make Zimbabwe move fast when he cant even breathe fast himself? When is slowness going to end? Slow bank queues, slow problem detection, slow solutions, slow thinking, slow to understand problems, slow to communicate, slow to ask, slow to plot solutions while the rest of the World is moving fast.Is it not a fact that Mnangagwa himself is too old to learn new ways of doing modern business? Is Mnangagwa not as slow as the Mugabe of 1997? Was it not in 1997 when Mugabe's brain begun to die and he begun to print money for War Vets? Can we trust that Mnangagwa will do better at 75 years of age while Mugabe begun to fail at 75?Those who have not experienced the pinch yet, I say to you wait a few days. Not weeks, It's only days away. Anyone complaining about money is a barking inconvenience who is not patriotic enough to celebrate the "new agile" President. "Vanongo Vukura vachivukura , VaPresident vachingotonga"The little boy is a desperate this evening at Parerenyatwa, testing the smooth flowing of the New Era. But, unfortunately, his much needed money is sanctioned by the Cool-Coup Regime. Across the road from his hospital bed, President Mnangagwa is still learning how to prepare his body for an hourly state-paid body massaging.
BRISTOL, Tenn. -- Director of Emergency Management for Sullivan County Jim Bean said at 9 p.m. that his team is opening up Interstate 81 North.
The Emergency Management Team has been on the scene of wreck that slowed traffic on the interstate since 10:40 this morning.
A truck carrying over 9,000 gallons of propane rolled down a hill after blowing a tire on I-81 near mile marker 74, close to The Pinnacle retail development.
BRISTOL, Tenn. -- A truck carrying over 9,000 gallons of propane rolled down a hill after blowing a tire on I-81 this morning. The accident took place around 10:40 a.m., near mile marker 74, close to The Pinnacle retail development.
The driver, who had just began a trip from Greeneville to Marion, Va., was shielded under a white sheet as Sullivan County firefighters worked to remove him from the overturned vehicle. After cutting away the roof and using a pulley to move the steering wheel, the driver was pulled out on a stretcher and transported to a nearby hospital. His identity has not yet been released.
A Sullivan County firefighter and Tennessee State Trooper Ryan Curd confirmed he is not in critical condition. He was alert the whole time, Curd said.
Danny Roberts, a truck driver who was behind the accident, was one of the first people to the scene. He said the driver began talking as soon as he arrived and was coherent.
Once the truck went over the edge of the pavement it was just a slow-motion roll to the right, he said. It looked like he did a couple of rolls down to the bottom.
Curd believes the truck rolled completely once. But tire marks nearby indicate it rolled again before tipping back to the position pictured.
Jim Bean, Director of Emergency Management for Sullivan County, said there is no danger from the propane tank and that removal of the vehicle should not take long. Were very confident that its a real sturdy tank, he said
The Tennessee Highway Patrol is investigating the incident, according to Bean.
Traffic was backed up at least five miles from the accident. Initially, the roadway was completed shut off. A slowly moving lane then opened. Around 1 p.m., Curd said he expected that flow of traffic to continue for two or three more hours.
First responders were relieved the driver was okay, especially after a crash on I-81 northbound earlier this week left one man dead and another with severe head trauma.
It could have been a lot worse, Curd said.
He was pinned in pretty good, Roberts added. It made my Christmas to hear his voice.
BRISTOL, Tenn. -- A crash involving a propane truck is slowing down traffic along Interstate 81 in Sullivan County, according to the Tennessee Department of Transportation.
One northbound lane is currently closed near mile marker 73, which is not far from The Pinnacle retail development and Bristol Regional Medical Center.
It's not clear how long the road will remain closed or if anyone has been hurt.
The Bristol Herald Courier has a crew on scene and will bring you the latest details as they become available
will end at John A. Patten Recreation Center followed by an open house at the recreation center.
line up is at 10:30 a.m. a
Thiswill take place fromalong Browns Ferry Road and Cummings Highway. The
parade, now in its 27th year,
:
St. Elmo Ave. will be closed from Tennessee Avenue to W. 38th St. In addition, runners will be in the road on St. Elmo Ave. from W. 38th Street to Middle Street. Closures will be from 8 a.m. until 11 a.m.
The annual event is A Christmas themed 5K and 1 mile Mutt Strut benefiting the Humane Educational Society. Visit
www.heschatt.org
for more information.
The third annual Holiday Market in Miller Plaza hosted by River City Company will be Wednesday, Dec. 13, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in Miller Plaza at 850 Market St. This shopping event will feature a variety of local retailers and perks, officials said.
Vendors include Good Fortune Soap & Spa, Tangerinas, Locals Only Gifts, elea blake Cosmetic Studio, Lost Art Design, alkohaulers, Nooga Paws, Best Sesh Board Company and Center MedSpa.
Musical performances will begin with the Center for Creative Arts Jazz Ensemble from 5:30-6 p.m. and will wrap up with the Chattanooga School for the Arts & Sciences middle school choirs from 6:10-7 p.m. These performers will be accompanied by a piano thanks to Summitt Pianos.
The Daily Ration will also be on hand to serve wine and beer along with Peets Coffee and Tea serving up hot beverages like coffee and cocoa.
Amy Donahue, director of marketing and communication for River City Company, said, Whether youre buying a spa gift card for your mom, a Chattanooga themed gift box for a friend far away, need to snag some wrapping paper or buy a treat for your favorite four-legged family member, the Holiday Market in Miller Plaza has it all in one spot and from local vendors.
"If youre too busy this holiday season to go from store to store to shop but still want to support local small businesses, this is your perfect opportunity to do so all in one place. Plus, theres wine, cocoa and live music to make your shopping experience a little more enjoyable.
The Holiday Market in Miller Plaza is free and open to the public. There are no more vendor spaces available for this retail event.
11/16/2022
Vince Butler of the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center spoke at a recent Friends of Hixson Coffee Meeting. The Friends of Hixsons Community Coffee Meetings are on the third Wednesday ... more
On September 27, 1989, Buta Singh, at the time Union home minister, landed in Lucknow on a secret mission.
He drove straight to the chief ministers residence to meet a high-profile delegation of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) headed by the late Ashok Singhal.
The closed-door meeting concluded with the Congress government in Uttar Pradesh and the VHP signing an agreement that gave a fillip to the temple movement, which culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992.
The VHP leaders beamed as the state government granted permission for shilanyas (foundation-laying ceremony) of the proposed Ram temple at the undisputed site, close to the disputed structure. In return, the VHP agreed to abide by the directives of the Allahabad high court.
It was election time. Communal passions ran high as the VHP moved truckloads of sanctified shilas(stones) to Ayodhya for the temples foundation on November 9, 1989. Shila pujan, aimed at mobilising public support, ended with the foundation laid about 200 feet from the disputed complex.
As the Sangh Parivar stepped up its temple campaign, the Congress realised its blunder, but it was too late. It lost power in Indias most populous state and has never won it back since. The Janata Dal formed governments in Delhi under VP Singh and, in UP, under Mulayam Singh Yadav.
In 1990, BJP leader LK Advani embarked on his Somnath-to-Ayodhya rath yatra. He was arrested in Samastipur on the orders of the then Bihar CM Lalu Prasad in October. Emphasising the security of the disputed structure, Mulayam said, Parinda bhi par nahi maar sakega (not a soul will be able to reach there), which incensed the kar sewaks. On October 30, sewaks hoisted the saffron flag atop the heavily barricaded disputed structure. More than two dozen people were killed in police firing and Mulayam was derided as maulana(Islamic cleric) by some.
The Janata Dal governments fell, first at the Centre, and then in the state. The BJP won UP in 1991 polls and the Congress returned to power at the Centre under PV Narasimha Rao. The government of Kalyan Singh, UPs first BJP chief minister, moved in tandem with the VHP, to clear the hurdles for the Ram temple.
Young and old thronged Ayodhya as the undisputed land, acquired adjacent to the disputed complex by the Congress government, was leased to the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas. Several temples were demolished to level the ground for kar sewa in the garb of promoting tourism.
Opposition leaders made a beeline for Ayodhya but were stopped midway. The late PM VP Singh staged a dharna in the middle of the national highway.
The biggest congregation was planned for December 6, 1992. All entries to the temple town were sealed, but temple enthusiasts reached days before for symbolic kar sewa. Kalyan Singh submitted an affidavit in the Supreme Court that Babri Masjid will be protected. He also said his government will not fire at kar sewaks.
On December 6, a huge and restless mob started assembling around the disputed structure. Senior VHP-BJP leaders addressed the kar sewaks from a makeshift dais. The CRPF waited in Faizabad, 10km away, even as the SC-appointed observer sent his reports to the court.
Soon, the mob went berserk and the first dome collapsed. Some pulled down the iron barricade and used sticks, along with axes and shovels, to demolish the other two. The VHP-BJP leaders embraced each other as slogans like Ek dhakka aur do (Give it another shove) rent the air.
A makeshift temple was raised on the debris of the disputed structure. The idols were reinstalled. The incident triggered rioting and arson that left 2,000 dead across the country. Rao dismissed the Kalyan Singh government, promised reconstruction of the mosque and slapped cases against senior BJP-VHP leaders.
Despite the VHPs sporadic campaigns, the issue lost mass appeal soon. The BJP was defeated in subsequent elections and has ruled the state only twice since first as part of a coalition, and again from March 2017 onwards with a majority.
Chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a strong votary of the Ram temple, appears to have quietly stepped into Kalyans shoes, reiterating his commitment to Ram Rajya (Rams empire). In over eight months, he visited Ayodhya five times.
The BJPs former district president Dr Banke Bihari Tripathi recalls, Kalyan Singh had released funds for civic infrastructure, research centre and beautification of Saryu ghat. However, he could not deliver as his government was dismissed in 18 months. CM Yogi has taken up the development of Ayodhya on the same lines. His ascent has raised hopes of temple construction.
There is expectation in the air that he will complete the task by removing the last hurdle.
In 1986, when the gates of the disputed structure were thrown open, I, too, was oblivious of the history that was in the making. As it turned out, I was witness to the creation of history.
The resignation of Pakistans law minister was the final act in the three-week long drama of a determined and religiously charged agitation in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The demand of the protesters was that the law minister resign for an act that had eroded the truth of the finality of the Prophet. The government, embattled and weakened since Nawaz Sharifs removal, repeatedly apologised for what it said was a clerical error. Prodded by the Supreme Court, an attempt was made to clear the demonstration that had paralysed the capital. The attempt failed and the protest showed signs of spreading to other parts of Pakistan. Instructions to the army that it step in to aid the civilian authority to restore order was responded to by a demurral from the chief of army staff that efforts be made to resolve the situation peacefully. The resignation of the law minister was the final act of capitulation by the government.
Multiple readings of this narrative are possible. The most benign is of a government and military paralysed by images of almost exactly a decade ago; when the Army stormed the Lal Masjid in Islamabad and the blow back that unleashed the furies of hell on Pakistan. Yet there are other readings. The government did not act and let the protest build up because it was unwilling to risk alienating its popular base on the right wing that is made up of religious groups involved in the protest or similar to them. The military, on the other hand, chose not to act in what it saw was a cat and mouse game orchestrated by the former prime minister and designed to earn it public ignominy which clearing the protest would have led to. Other theories will emerge in due course.
All these explanations have some substance to them; and the civil military equation corrodes all aspects of public life in Pakistan today. The protests in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, however, also have a broader context symptomatic of a deeper churning in Pakistan. From the 1980s Islamic radicalism and mobilisation has been the hall mark of the Wahabis, Deobandis and the Jamaat- i-Islami. Each of these developed strong links with the military and Pakistans political class; and many had their own favourite extremist militant outfit loosely attached.
The groups that led the recent protests and whose followers demonstrated considerable staying power come from a different persuasion the Barelvis; so named because the movement originated in Bareilly in the mid 19th century. Their hall mark is popular sufism, a cult of shrines and a deep veneration of the Prophet. They are therefore in contrast to the austere and literalist Wahabis. The Barelvis are generally regarded as pluralistic and adherents of a softer, more moderate approach; although this image is gradually changing much like everything else in Pakistan. For the past decade or so there have been many signs of ferment among them. The Canadian Pakistani preacher Tahir ul Qadri is of this persuasion and in 2014, mobilised a large number of his followers to join Imran Khans agitation. He thus demonstrated a street power in Lahore and Islamabad which rivals that of the Jammat-i-Islami. The assassination of the Punjab Governor Salman Taseer in 2011 saw a cult following developing around his killer Mumtaz Qadri whose grave now is a Barelvi shrine in its own right. Two other related sets of activities often very violent exemplify this activism amongst many Barelvis: A zeal to act against real or imagined blasphemy and a fresh intensity to older prejudices against Ahmadis for disputing the finality of the Prophet.
What explains the larger churning among the Barelvis? Since the 1980s they have felt excluded and disempowered, despite being numerically preponderant, from the attention and funds the Deobandis and Wahabis have received and as the militant and terrorist groups associated acquired a swagger under the benign care of their handlers in the Pakistani intelligence agencies. Barelvi shrines were often the target also of these militants and perhaps this too contributes to the need to forge a broader and more powerful grouping. Many also point to the role of the Pakistan military establishment in explaining this Barelvi resurgence. As it battled the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and sectarian outfits, there was a need to create new countervailing forces and the hitherto ignored Barelvis seemed the best bet. In any event something new has stirred in Pakistan and this humiliation of the government and the standing aside of the army is an event of some importance in marking the movement of the Barelvis out of the shadows and acquiring political muscle of some magnitude.
TCA Raghavan is a former high commissioner to Pakistan
The views expressed are personal
The Congress promised a stipend to jobless young people, reservation in jobs and education to Patidars, and to reduce petrol and diesel prices in its Gujarat assembly elections manifesto, which was released on Monday.
The party, if voted to power, pledged an unemployment allowance of up to Rs 4,000 a month for each jobless youth in the state. The Congress has been highlighting what it alleged rising unemployment and shrinking job opportunities in BJP-ruled Gujarat and the country in general.
The manifesto, made public by state Congress chief Bharatsinh Solanki, makes another concession as it promises reservation in jobs and education to Patidars under a special category.
We will consult all stakeholders on reservation to Patidars and a commission will be constituted for this purpose, Solanki said. Thereafter, a bill will be introduced in the state assembly, he added.
The Congress has been trying to woo the Patidars, who have been traditional BJP supporters, but many of them are loggerheads with Gujarats ruling party over its demand for reservation.
The Patidar vote could become a deciding factor this election. The BJP is unsure about the unflinching support of Patidars that can influence results in more than 60 of 182 assembly constituencies.
Gujarat was on the edge in August 2015 as Patidars, led by a young and fiery Hardik Patel, held a huge rally in Ahmedabad demanding reservation. The event triggered widespread violence in which 10 people were killed and public property worth crores of rupees was damaged across the state.
Gujarat, where the Congress is out of power for 22 years, goes to the polls on December 9 and 14. Results will be declared on December 18.
The party pledges social sector benefits for other backward classes (OBCs) and weaker sections of society. The Congress is trying win over the OBCs, who comprise 146 castes and make up around 40% of the states about 60-million people. Alpesh Thakore, a Dalit leader, joined the party in the run-up to the elections.
Another promise, apparently directed towards traders, transporters and the middle class, the Congress said it would reduce the price of petrol and diesel by up to Rs 10 in the state if it gains power. Besides, the party vows to regulate cooking gas prices to make the commodity affordable.
The manifesto promises a Sardar Patel Universal Health Card to provide subsidised healthcare, minimum support price for the states main crops, cotton and groundnut, assured electricity for 16 hours a day and up to 200 units of power for Rs 2 a unit.
The party also vowed fast-track courts to deal with crime against women, an electorate that no party can afford to ignore.
The percentage of woman voters is increasing every election. More than 20 million women are likely to vote this assembly election in Gujarat, compared to 1.8 million in 2012.
Actor Rishi Kapoor, who was shooting for Rajma Chawal in the national capital, has rushed back to Mumbai to be with his family after the demise of veteran actor-producer and his uncle Shashi Kapoor.
Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the 1970s and early 1980s, died on Monday at a hospital in Mumbai. He was 79.
We are the airport looking at the flight schedule, and want to reach Mumbai at the earliest. We might go tonight or tomorrow morning, Shanti Malik, who works closely with the Kapoor family, told IANS on Monday evening.
Malik also said that he doesnt know the cause of Shashi Kapoors death, and would be in position to give out details on Tuesday morning.
The younger brother of late Raj and Shammi Kapoor, who were both actors par excellence, Shashi Kapoor started his tryst with acting at the age of four, with plays directed and produced by his father Prithviraj Kapoor.
He started acting in films as a child in the late 1940s. His best known performances as child artist were in Aag (1948) and Awaara (1951), where he played the younger version of the character played by his elder brother Raj.
When he grew up, he made his debut as a leading man in the 1961 film Dharmputra, and went on to appear in more than 150 Hindi films.
Shashi Kapoor, whose nuanced acts in memorable films like Deewar, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Trishul and Kabhi Kabhie captivated Hindi film buffs, was married to English theatre actor Jennifer Kendal.
He had three children -- Kunal, Karan and Sanjana Kapoor.
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In Jennifer Kendal Kapoors life, the domestic, at least for a while, superseded all else. Even as Shashi got increasingly busy with his career as an actorproducer, Jennifer abandoned her vocation as an actress to keep home and raise her three children.
Perhaps, abandoned is a poor choice of word, since, in an interview, Jennifer says that there was never a point when she wasnt committed to the life of a theatre actor:
I never quit theatre as such. Had I known then that I was going to be away from the stage for so long, I wouldve reacted very badly. I wouldve been very disturbed. Ive still got my hand towel, in which we used to have liquid paraffin to wipe off our make-up. Its still in my make-up case. Its just as I left it after the last show I did. Ive always had this superstition: I felt that if I washed it, I would never act again.
It was Jennifers love for theatre that propelled her to start Prithvi and look into its day-to-day management and functioning. And it was her love for acting that drew her back to cinema after a long break with 36 Chowringhee Lane. Following the critical acclaim the film received, Jennifer was suddenly in the limelight, her career as an actress resurrected. Offers began pouring in, and soon, she found herself playing Mrs Saundersthat cheerless woman in perpetual fear of being molested by an Indian servant in Heat and Dust. But now, when she had the time to act, her health refused to support her.
It was 1983. Cannes. Jenniferwho, until then, was thought to be suffering from amoebic dysenterywas diagnosed with cancer. Geoffrey Kendal writes in his autobiography that when he learnt of his daughters malady, he could not utter the word cancer for the longest time; he called it the illness or this thing.
In the meantime, Jennifer, in her own way, slowly came to terms with the diagnosis, and began informing those close to her, including friends like Anil Dharker. She started telling me about how they had tried to brighten up a room with wallpaper at the Tata Memorial Hospital in Bombay, Anil says. And I asked, well, why did you go there? And she replied, Anil, dont you see? Ive got the Big C. That was it. That was how I came to know.
Cover of the book Shashi Kapoor: The Household, the Star.
After her diagnosis, Jennifer had surgery in India and seemed to be recovering. But later, during a trip to London and after more check-ups, it appeared that the cancer had spread. Jennifer spent her last months in the British capital in the hospital and at her parents home.
Geoffrey was devastated when she died. Jennifer was his firstborn, his favourite, his almost-all. A grieving Geoffrey mentions: The appalling loss is something I cannot talk or write about. It seemed as if the whole Land of Promise had frozen.
Along with him, his wife, Laura Liddell Kendal, suffered. Felicity Kendal says, My mother was never quite the same afterwards. She was very religious before, but lost her faith. The light went out a bit. The family, as a whole, found itself teetering, without a mainstay. My parents used to spend half the year in India with my sister, Felicity states, but when she died, they felt going back was too painful, so they lost their home as well as Jennifer.
Felicity, in the meanwhilewho says, towards the end, Jennifers only concern was for her childrenrecalls being overwhelmed with grief; in a newspaper interview, she says of her sister: Our closeness came because we were nomads growing up, so didnt really have local friends. When [Jennifer] died, it wasnt just the tragedy of her death, it was also that selfish thing of, Who am I going to say this to? I couldnt make any decisions.
And then, there was Shashi. After Jennifers demise, Dev Benegal says that he met Kunal Kapoor at a memorial at Prithvi Theatre: The family had just come back from Goa and Kunal said to me, Dad took this boat out in the middle of the sea. When he got there, that was the first time he cried. Really, he wept. Like Dev, Im stunned by the rawness of that momentof Shashi, alone in the vast open seas, sorrowing. He was really shaken by her death.
Condolences poured in and there were press reports about Jennifer, the fine actress and grand woman. But few had seen what we had seen or had our memories, Geoffrey writes. Peoples memories are over such a short period, and no one seems to imagine that anything really happens before their own time.
Shashi Kapoor continued to work after Jennifer Kendal Kapoors passing, and some of his best work emerged during a time of loss. But something inside him did break. I think the death of Jennifer was a big blow to him, Hanif Kureishi says, who worked with Shashi on Sammy and Rosie Get Laid two years after his wifes demise. It really destroyed him.
Jennifer had been the love of Shashis life, his true anchor. With her death, he became rudderless. Simi Garewal tells me, Jennifer occupiedor Shashi surrendered to hera large part of his personality. And they merged. With Jennifer gone, Shashi struggled, but couldnt find himself. That vast area of his personality that was Jennifernow it lay empty. A void. I met him in London over dinner with Ismail Merchant and could see that he was floundering. He was differentnot himself.
Anil Dharker, always a friend, bore witness to Shashis emotional collapse. Sometimes, the actor would depend on himthe way he must have, once, on Jenniferto help him muddle through awkward social situationssuch as, when the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting would request him to invite a foreign dignitary to dinner. And then he would ring me up, Anil says, and implore: Look, I have this very boring dinner guest, do you mind keeping me company? And I would do that. But when the dignitary would leave, Shashi would actually push me out.
Then, Anil, and those close to Shashi, bore witness to the actors physical breakdown. Without the strict discipline Jennifer imposed on his existence, the star began indulging in his two chief weaknessesfood and drink. Anil remembers dropping by for lunch on occasion, and asking for a glass of beer, only to learn that Shashi had been drinking vodka since the morning. His domestic staff would bring refills as soon as his glass emptied out, Anil says. He wouldnt even have to ask. They knew exactly how long it took him to finish his drink and they would be ready with the next. By the end of lunch, he would be quite sozzled.
I tried, quite often, to talk him out of it, Anil continues. In fact, Sanjna and Kunal would say, Come on, do something, he listens to you! And I would respond, This is one area where he doesnt listen to me at all. Then, they would say, Visit more often because when you are here, at least he walks around. Otherwise, he just sits. So I did.
As Shashi found himself caught in a loop of grief and consumption, he fell victim to that infamous Kapoor syndrome of putting on too much weight, too soon. His health rapidly deteriorated. He was forced to leave Atlas Apartments and moved to Juhu, where he could be looked after by his son, Kunal. With that, his whole life changed, Madhu Jain tells me. He was a South Bombay person, and the move, she claims, added to the stars loneliness, his growing depression. I went to Juhu a few times, Anil adds, but really, he stopped saying very much. Simi, with characteristic insight, tells me, Its as though Shashi had given up the inner struggle. He almost became a recluse.
Then came the year 2005. Ismail Merchant was dead; he was only sixty-eight. Ismail was just one of those characters who was supposed to live forever, Sanjna says of the man who had become part of her family. He was not meant to die. It was just wrong. I am glad that I was physically with my dad when he heard the news.
Shashi, when he found out about his beloved producers demise, was shaken; his grief became even more profound, loss piling on loss. When James Ivory came to India a year later, paid his respects at Ismails grave, and then visited Shashithe first leading man of the MerchantIvory bannerhe saw he was no longer the star he had known, but a ghost of a former self, emotionally withdrawn. I cant tell if it was a form of ongoing grieving about Jennifer, James says. But Shashis youth had dimmed, he was beginning to be an old man. We just didnt connect.
Later, Simi saw Shashi at an award function at the Yash Raj Films Studios the star, wheelchair-bound, his daughter by his side. As Simi approached her one-time co-star, Sanjna Kapoor cautioned her. She said to me, Hes had a stroke, so one side is paralyzed. He has also had a heart attack and lots of other problems. He doesnt remember people. So dont be upset. Im just warning you. Simi recalls.
Then she adds, To me, it didnt matter if Shashi remembered me, or if he didnt. I still had to go to him. I bent low, looked into his tired face. His eyes lifted slowly and focussed on me. He said, Hello, Simi! I felt like laughingand crying. Then, I just wanted to hug him.
As Simi speaks, its as though I can hear echoes from Shashis penultimate film,the poetry of Hafeez Jalandhari:
Tarab-fizaa, alam-rubaa, asar sadaa-e-saaz kaa, Jigar mein aag de lagaa. Har ik lab pe ho sadaa, na haath rok saaqiyaa; Pilaaye jaa, pilaaye jaa, pilaaye jaa Abhi to main jawaan hoon. (Maker of song, sing through the night, Kindle that fire in my life. Maker of wine, ah, dont take flight; Pour on, pour on, pour on For Im still young tonight.
Excerpted with permission from Rupa Publications India.
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Indias anti-trust regulator has fined Monsanto Co 15 million rupees ($233,000) for being too slow in replying to questions in a competition probe into the U.S. seeds company.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) last year ordered an investigation into whether Monsanto had abused its dominant position as a supplier of genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds.
The CCI, which is yet to complete its investigation, fined Monsanto for delays in filing replies, according to official documents reviewed by Reuters.
Monsanto responded to CCIs queries in August, but only after eight reminders issued between April 2016 and May this year, the watchdogs November order showed.
The commission hopes and trusts that full cooperation shall now be provided, the CCI said in its order dated Nov. 14.
A Monsanto India spokesman said: Monsanto continues to extensively cooperate with the CCI in the investigation and has been providing information in response to requests received.
This order is related to a procedural matter and is subject to further orders from the Delhi High Court, he added.
Challenging the role of CCI and the nature of its probe, Monsanto has filed two separate cases with the Delhi High Court.
Monsanto is locked in a battle with Indian seed maker, Nuziveedu Seeds Ltd, one of the complainants at the CCI.
That battle sparked a series of government moves that prompted the worlds biggest seed company to withdraw from some businesses in India, one of the worlds most important seed markets, Reuters reported earlier this year. (
In April this year at Infosys Ltds Palo Alto office, when Vishal Sikka was starting to get disillusioned about his future at Infosys, another top executive stationed on the other side of the globeroughly 8,400 miles awayat a rival, global information technology (IT) services firm was starting to feel equally uneasy about his own future at his company.
This executive, who had long harboured ambitions of landing the role of global chief executive at his firm, had just learnt that his company was planning to pick two other executives for the role of joint chief operating officers later during the yeara development that would deal a severe blow to his own ambitions.
Fortuitously for that executive, while one door of opportunity had shut firmly in his face, another door opened a few months later.
On Saturday, that executive, Salil Satish Parekh, 53, was named CEO of Infosysa development made all the more gratifying owing to the fact that he had lost out on that job to Sikka in 2014.
For Parekh, this weekends appointment also marked the culmination of eight months of constant back-and-forth with multiple companies, including Infosys and International Business Machines (IBM), among othersa process that proved to be frustrating at times for him, with plenty of hand-wringing, before he finally landed his latest gig at Infosys.
These accounts of the past eight months have been obtained after Mint spoke to at least half a dozen executives and other people directly familiar with Infosyss CEO search process. All these executives requested anonymity in order to speak more freely about the search process.
Sikka & Parekh: a tale of two CEOs
Back in April, the seeds of Parekhs eventual coronation at Infosys were sown when Sikka was growing increasingly frustrated with what he viewed as the efforts of the Infosys board to rein him in and oversee his performance, amid a bitter, public fight with founder NR Narayana Murthy, who was repeatedly questioning decisions made by the Infosys board.
On 15 April, Infosys named Ravi Venkatesan as co-chairman and then appointed a three-member panel to support and advise Sikka in executing strategy.
As Mint reported on 21 August, Sikka was deeply unhappy with Venkatesans appointment, even telling some executives close to him that he wanted to leave, given that he and Venkatesan had a tough working relationship on the board.
Around the same time, Mumbai-based Parekh learned Capgemini was planning to elevate two other executives to roles of joint chief operating officers later during the yeara development that effectively snuffed out his chances of being elevated to the role of global CEO of the Paris-based IT giant.
Over the next few weeks, Parekh privately made up his mind to move on from Capgemini and seek opportunities elsewhere.
Calls, emails and texts to Parekh over the weekend went unanswered.
One door of opportunity would open up at IBM in June, when CEO Ginni Rometty was looking to hire a top executive to lead the companys multi-billion dollar IT infrastructure business. While accepting the role would mean a step-up for Parekh, it did not quite fit the stature of his own ambitions. Parekh would eventually pass on the job and IBM would pick former Wipro joint-CEO Suresh Vaswani for that role.
Next, around September, came an offer from US-based DXC Technology, which was formed earlier this year after the merger of Computer Sciences Corp. and Hewlett-Packards (HP) enterprise services business.
A spokesperson for DXC Technology said the company had no comment to offer while an email sent to IBM seeking comment went unanswered.
According to two of the people mentioned above, Mike Lawrie, CEO of DXC, made an offer to Parekh to take over the $7-billion Americas business of the company. The offer was generous. If Parekh had taken up the role, he would stand to make at least $5 million in annual compensation, which is a significant jump from the estimated two-and-a-half million he made at Capgemini.
Parekh, however, had his sights on Infosys at the time, with the CEO position lying vacant at the company after Sikkas acrimonious ouster.
According to two other executives directly familiar with his thinking, Parekh asked for an introduction to the board of Infosys less than a week after Sikka stepped down in a huff on 18 August.
However, it was a while before the Infosys board itself reached out to Parekh.
A shortlist of CEOs
On 25 August, Infosys named co-founder Nandan Nilekani as chairman. Nilekani would soon depart for the US for a long-planned trip. Infosys director and head of the boards nominations committee Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who also made a trip to the US around the same time, and Nilekani stayed in constant touch during that time and coordinated with each other on the search.
Over the next few weeks, the board started creating a firm list of potential candidates, with the help of search firm Egon Zehnder. That list contained 10 names, including that of Parekh, according to a fifth and sixth executive directly familiar with the search process that was being firmly spearheaded by Mazumdar-Shaw.
The board of Infosys had three clear mandates this time, unlike back in 2014. Firstly, they wanted a leader who was a reputed sales guy with a strong grounding in the IT outsourcing industrytraits that Sikka did not possess.
Secondly, the new CEO had to be based out of Bengaluru. No two ways about it.
The overseas experiment (with Sikka) proved to be a disaster for Infosys. The new CEO could not be based anywhere outside Bangalore. Period, said the fifth person.
And, finally, Infosys wanted to play it safe and opted to take a conventional and conservative route, said this person.
When Sikka came into Infosys in 2014, he had the reputation of being a maverick change agent. That didnt work out so well, and Infosys learnt its lessons. They chose stability this time around, he said.
Parekh and Infosys: a marriage of convenience
Mazumdar-Shaw and Nilekani further whittled down that list of names over the next few weeks. Parekh was on the final shortlist that the board began to consider seriously in early October.
The pool of IT services executives with global experience has shrunk and become smaller and smaller over the years. You just dont have any global leaders based out of India anymoreSalil was probably the only exception. And it has become impossible for companies like Infosys to get global leaders to relocate to Indiaa case in point being Abid (Ali Neemuchwala) at Wipro and Sikka at Infosys, said the sixth person.
With Parekh, all three criteria were met. Parekh, a Gujarati from Mumbai, possesses three decades of global experience in the world of IT services, having sat across the table with CEOs of Fortune 500 firms and having negotiated complex multi-year, multi-million dollar outsourcing deals over the years.
And more importantly for Infosys, Parekh, a father of three young boys, was more than happy to relocate to Bengaluru from Mumbai.
After the initial set of conversations, Nilekani, Mazumdar-Shaw and the board of Infosys decided to meet Parekh. In October-November, Parekh would travel to Bengaluru a number of times and meet the board at plush, five-star hotels in the city.
By the second week of November, the board made up its mindas had Parekh.
However, so closely guarded was the search that many were still unsure as to who Infosys would finally zero in on.
One such person was Ray Wang of Constellation Research, who has worked with Parekh both at Ernst and Young (now EY) and Capgemini, and who had met Parekh in November. When Mint asked Wang on 29 November if hell be surprised if Parekh will get the job, Wang laughed it off, saying he had heard the rumours in the past, too.
Just two days earlier (on 27 November), this paper had reached out to Parekh, asking if he indeed had accepted Infosyss offer. Mints query went unanswered and by the time Mint could independently confirm the development, Infosyss board had met on Saturday afternoon, fulfilling Parekhs ambition of becoming the boss of the high-profile IT firm.
How would you react if told that more arms were seized in the largely peaceful Uttarakhand than in the strife torn Jammu & Kashmir? In fact, more than three times the number of deadly weapons that the police found on criminals or seized in different operations in the Valley?
Sounds ironic, but it is true.
Uttarakhand witnessed a sharp jump of around 96% in the number of arms seized in the state last year compared to the 2015, as per the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2016 report.
The hill state -- which reported total 621 arms seizure in 2016, up from the 2015s figure of 317 -- also recorded the highest number of arms seizures among the Himalayan states.
Jammu & Kashmir (185) reported the second highest number of arms seizures among the mountain states, while Sikkim, with just a single seizure, was at the last spot. Uttarakhands neighbour Himachal Pradesh reported only 20 such cases last year.
Incidentally, the state had also recorded the highest number of crimes against children and cases of economic offences among the Himalayan states last year.
When it comes to confiscation of arms, Uttarakhand was way ahead of even bigger states such as Gujarat (502), Tamil Nadu (252), Kerala (196), Odisha (413) Karnataka (22) and Andhra Pradesh (36). Nationally, Uttar Pradesh reported the highest number of arm seizures (27,189), raising concerns about the growing activities of interstate gangs and criminals here.
Ashok Kumar, additional director general of police (law and order), however, said that the rise in arms seizure in Uttarakhand indicated how the police was working actively to crack down upon anti-social elements in the state.
We are continuously working to strengthen our intelligence network and based on specific inputs from them, conduct seizure of illegal arms from time to time, Kumar told HT.
It may be recalled that the number of seizures under the Arms Act had witnessed a decline in the state in 2015, as compared to 636 arms seized in Uttarakhand in 2014.
HT had recently highlighted how crime graph in the mountain state, especially in Haridwar district, known for its pilgrimage importance, has shot up mostly because of criminals and gangs from Western Uttar Pradesh making a base here.
Haridwar is close to west UPs crime-sensitive districts of Muzaffarnagar, Bijnore and Saharanpur.
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The rise in smuggling of contrabands from Nepal has become a headache for Indian security agencies along the India-Nepal border in Uttarakhand, officials said.
Earlier this week, the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB)--that mans the India-Nepal border--seized smuggled jackets from Nepal worth 8 lakh at Tanakpur in Champawat district along the international border.
Prior to this, the SSB seized smuggled cosmetics worth 1 crore from the same border.
Smuggling is rampant cross the India-Nepal border as smugglers rake in huge profits by evading customs duty and other taxes. Four months back, a central GST team arrested a man and a woman in Haldwani for smuggling 12 kg of gold across the international border.
Ram Chandra Rajguru, Champawat superintendent of police said they were coordinating with the SSB at Banbasa and Khatima border posts to curb smuggling.
There is multi-level checking at Tanakpur and Banbasa border check-posts in the district where the first checking is carried out by the customs and then by the police, he said.
Intensive patrolling was being undertaken at the places that had no check posts.
There could be points of entry that are unguarded as there are instances of goods being smuggled into India from Nepal by using the river route, the SP said.
The Sadra River demarcates the international border along the Champawat district.
Our focus is to catch these people at the points further away from the international border where they come with their goods to board buses or pass through the authorized check-posts.
Udham Singh Nagar senior superintendent of police Sadanand Date said there were indications that Rudrapur was emerging as a transit point for goods smuggled from Nepal, but police have stepped up vigil.
We are constantly monitoring hotels, bus stations and modes of transport that are taken by the smugglers to reach here from the border and the results have been encouraging as we have been able to crack down on cases of human trafficking too, he said.
The North Delhi Municipal Corporation is all set to present its annual budget on Tuesday, with a number of project announcements made in the last few years likely to be repeated. The financial budget for different projects of the civic agency will be tabled by the north corporations commissioner.
HT takes a look at some of the projects forgotten and delayed over the years.
Sanitation and landfill at Bhalsawa
In last years budget, improving sanitation conditions and management of Bhalswa landfill were among the prominent projects. In the budget, North Corporation had proposed to place 10,000 litter bins in their areas but they have managed to place less than 5,000. The agency had also proposed to buy eight mechanical sweepers, but till now only 4 mechanical sweepers .
By this month we are going to purchase four more mechanical sweepers, said an official.
In last years budget, Rs 5 crore was allocated for management and beautification of Bhalswa landfill. Officials said that Rs 1 crore was spent on hiring a consultant to chart out the road map for its beautification but the consultant left within a few months. We have now invited global tenders, an official said.
Rani Jhansi flyover
In 2008, the then MCD budget had a proposal to construct the 1.6km flyover, which would ease traffic in central Delhi. It was to be completed in 18 months. In the last 9 years, while the flyover awaits completion, it finds a mention in every budget. MCD officials said at least 82% of the work is complete and they expect to complete the project by March 2018.
Preety Agarwal, mayor of north corporation said that acquiring land and court cases had delayed the project. In case of Rani Jhasi Flyover, after fighting a lot of court cases and acquiring land, work moved at a fast pace. The lackadaisical attitude of the municipal corporations administrative wing can also be held responsible behind the delay, Agarwal said.
In September, after Delhi L-G Anil Baijal visited the construction site, the corporation had announced a deadline to complete the project in November. A north corporation official said that the project is delayed because some shopkeepers on the stretch ,where the flyover is to be built, have managed to get a a stay order against demolition orders from the Supreme Court.
Redevelopment of municipal properties
In 2014, the then budget included the construction of a multi-level parking in at least three places. It was to be completed within 2 years. The construction has not even begun.
Five-time Congress councillor Mukesh Goel, who was also a leader of Opposition, told HT that projects take a back seat because development is sidelined in the quest to make money. In my 21 years of career as councillor I have not seen the situation this bad, said Goel.
What to expect
Facing severe financial crisis, instead of new projects the agency will focus on projects that generate revenue to improve its financial health. The agency is at present running under the deficit of Rs 3,000 crore and has not been able to implement any new project this year. Among the revenue generating projects is construction of parking projects, auctioning of 22 shops at Asaf Ali Parking and other 24 properties in its jurisdiction.
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The Tri-Octaves held a two-day fundraising concert for the Bethlehem Center on Friday and Saturday.
The Christmas concert featured classic Christmas songs mixed with rhythms from well known love songs including the Supremes Stop in the Name of Love, Stevie Wonders I Just Called to Say I Love You, and Mark Ronsons Uptown Funk featuring Bruno Mars.
This Christmas concert is one of a kind, said Gloria Dubose, projects and marketing manager for the Bethlehem Center. I have never heard anyone put together two contrasting sounds in a way that makes everyone young and old feel nostalgic and get up to dance.
The Bethlehem Center thank the Tri-Octaves, Christ United Methodist Church, attendees, local media, and everyone who made the Tri-Octave Christmas concert possible. Proceeds will benefit the Bethlehem Centers Read to Lead Academy.
The concentration of poisonous gases such as nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide rose up to seven times their safe limit in November, when Delhi was covered by a choking haze for several days.
Since pollution control agencies were busy with the exceptionally high levels of particulate matter PM2.5 and PM10, the most dominant pollutants in Delhis air, these gases escaped scrutiny.
The Supreme Court-appointed Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority considers the part matter levels to enforce the Graded Response Action Plan, which was for the first time this year. The EPCA is planning to take into account other pollutants from next year.
Read: Delhi air pollution interrupts play in India vs Sri Lanka Test, visitors wear masks on field
Levels of ozone and ammonia also fluctuated drastically.
While SO2 and carbon monoxide can linger in the air from 10 days to a month, prolonged exposure to high levels of these gases could trigger a range of respiratory and cardiac diseases.
SO2, NO2 and volatile organic carbon can also trigger the formation of secondary pollutants such PM2.5 ultra fine particles that can go deep inside the lungs.
Nitrogen Dioxide
High level of NO2 in the air has become a concern for experts and scientists. Data from air monitoring stations show that NO2 levels shot up by more than seven times above the safe standards in areas such as Punjabi Bagh over the last four November days. It had shot up to 588ug/m3 on November 28.
NO2 is primarily the result of burning diesel. It cant be said for certain why it increased to such levels in Punjabi Bagh without a detailed analysis, but it could be because of the high density of vehicular population, said Anumita Roychowdhury executive director at Centre for Science and Environment.
Sulphur Dioxide
The gas, one of the key elements of smog, has dropped well below the safe standards in Delhi primarily because of use of cleaner fuels. Though it did not breach the safe standards for a single day, in NCR cities such as Ghaziabad and Bhiwadi, it increased beyond the safe standard.
Monitoring SO2 is important because it triggers the formation of secondary pollutants. SO2 often condense and convert into other pollutants, reflecting a reduction in its own level, said SN Tripthi head of the Centre for Environmental Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur.
Ozone
Ozone is a threat to asthma patients and can cause premature death, if it is high even for a short duration during the day. It forms primarily when nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide (CO) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), react in the atmosphere in the presence of sunlight.
The level of O3 shot up above the safe standards on some days at places such as Anand Vihar, Delhi University North campus and Lodhi Road. The maximum level was recorded at DU where it had shot up to 143 above the permissible limit of 100.
Carbon Monoxide
On Lodhi Road, it had shot up at least three times above the safe standards on certain days. Once in the air, this gas can linger for more than a month and its presence affects concentrations of other greenhouse gases, including methane, ozone and carbon dioxide.
Carbon monoxide is usually emitted during burning of garbage or incomplete combustion, said Dilip Ganguly assistant professor at Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at IIT Delhi.
Other gases: Other pollutants such as Benzene and Ammonia have also spiked sometimes in Delhis air in certain places. But on most of the days they found to be under safe limits.
Benzene, which is usually found in emissions, also escapes into the atmosphere when petroleum products are transported or handled. A fuel station (petrol pump) in the vicinity of an air monitoring station could push up levels of this gas. Its level often shot up in places such as Shadipur, Punjabi Bagh and Anand Vihar.
Levels of Ammonia also shot up in Delhi on some days but have never crossed the safe standards.
Some pollutants may spike momentarily at some stations for various reasons but their overall levels are under control. This time, we experienced a far better November as far as pollution levels are concerned. Efforts like GRAP has started to show its effects and despite unfavourable weather conditions, pollution is still in very poor category, said D Saha, head of the air quality laboratory at CPCB.
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Estranged AAP leaders, Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan, on Monday dismissed the possibility of returning to the party saying it has betrayed all ideals of the anti-corruption movement.
AAP leader Kumar Vishwas had on Sunday called for working towards a version 2 of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) by facilitating return of ousted leaders, including Yadav and Bhushan.
No formal or informal conversation of any such a move has happened. And I dont see that happening. We (Swaraj India) are on to a different path. AAP is pursuing standard politics of any other party like Lalu Prasad runs in Bihar and we have chosen a difficult path of alternative politics by raising farmers issues, Yogendra Yadav told Hindustan Times.
Yadav and Bhushan, founder members of AAP, were sacked in April 2015 for their alleged anti-party activities after they questioned party chief Arvind Kejriwals style of functioning. The two founded Swaraj India, a political outfit, soon after.
They would claim it (AAP) is a shade better than others, but I am not into disputing or giving into those claims, Yadav said.
Poet-politician Vishwas, who has been at loggerheads with the partys top leadership, said on Sunday that he would travel across the country to revamp the party that should be based on the core principles set five years ago.
Bhushan termed the announcement absurd.
There are no talks or possibility of our return to AAP which has betrayed all the ideals of the anti-corruption movement, he tweeted on Monday.
An absurd report. There are no talks or possibility of our returning to AAP which has betrayed all the ideals of the Anti Corruption movement https://t.co/dFWxdAYU7v Prashant Bhushan (@pbhushan1) December 4, 2017
Yadav, now president of Swaraj India, said the liberating idea of the movement had been let down ever since it transformed into a political party five years ago.
I really do not know where this is coming from. The moment anyone in AAP remembers morality, they remember Prashant and me. There must be a serious deficit, he said.
Vishwas, AAPs Rajasthan in-charge, has been at odds with the top leadership after suspended MLA Amanatullah Khan was reinstated in the party in October this year. Okhla MLA Khan was suspended over his tirade against Vishwas in May this year.
Speaking at the partys fifth anniversary on November 26, Vishwas said that AAP has drifted away from its core principles. He had called Sunday meeting with volunteers at the partys Delhi office. No other senior leader attended the event, even as there was no rebuttal from the party.
Its good for the party to have a meeting with volunteers, said AAP spokesperson, Saurabh Bharadwaj.
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A sub-committee set up by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) has pitched for aligning school calendar and timings to the climatic and cultural requirements of the children.
CABE is the governments highest advisory body for policymaking in the field of education.
The sub-committee was formed to find ways to re-engage children who have dropped out of schools. Officials said the scope also involved looking at improving the quality of education so that kids do not drop out.
School calendar and timings should be aligned to the climatic and cultural requirements of the children. To accommodate their diverse needs, it is important to have flexibility in school calendar and school timings. Delegate the necessary powers, the subcommittee headed by minister of state for human resource development Upendra Kushwaha has recommended .
According to the officials, this recommendation was approved at a recent meeting that was chaired by Khushwaha and attended by education ministers of Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Tripura besides other nominated members of CABE. Sources said the recommendation would now be sent to CABE and education ministers across the country will deliberate on it at the next CABE meeting.
The committee learnt from the states that in hilly areas, reaching schools very early (in the morning) is a difficult task. Similarly, many areas remain under snow and this should be taken into account. Even in urban areas we see students out of their homes as early as 6am. Many are not able to concentrate in the classes. It would be better if schools timings can be pushed ahead a little bit, said a source.
While private ones are more flexible, government-run schools like Kendriya Vidyalayas, with over 11 lakh students, are not so. Our schools generally start around 7.30am. But we allow schools the flexibility of starting it 30 minutes earlier or later. Until 2000, our schools followed the 9am to 3pm timing. But as several of them run in two shifts, we had to push it earlier, said a senior KV official.
The sub-committee has also suggested that schools should have vocational education in their curriculum, and has recommended pre-primary education at all government-run schools to prepare the children for further education.
The CABE meetings in the past have undertaken several important issues related to school education. For instance, it is at one of these meetings that the HRD ministry had asked all the states to decide on the contentious no-detention policy.
Earlier, the Central Board of Secondary Education had suggested advancing the board exams from 2018 but several schools, especially in hill states, opposed it, citing climate woes.
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New Delhi
The Jawaharlal Nehru University may soon start offering courses in engineering and management with its academic council (AC) giving approval to setting up a school of engineering. The council also approved upgrading the special centre for Sanskrit studies into a school.
The vice-chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar had said earlier this year, in an interview with HT, that the university was planning to start these two courses.
We will start a school of management and entrepreneurship to focus on informal innovation. We will also start an engineering school which will offer integrated five-year degree, he had said.
The council members confirmed that a proposal to set up a school of engineering was approved on Friday along with the change of the special centre for Sanskrit studies into a School for Sanskrit and Indic Studies. The changes now need to be approved by the executive council before implementation.
JNU teachers association (JNUTA) said their demands on a discussion on how the school of engineering programmes would be different from Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) were not answered.
It also alleged that no actual proposal was circulated on the issue of upgrading the Sanskrit studies centre.
The chair announced that he has been promised Rs 180 crore by the UGC for this (Engineering) School and full support in terms of faculty positions. A decision to run the entrance exam, rather than through the IIT-JEE system was also announced. Along with engineering, the programme in management was also deemed to be passed, even though not one comment regarding this was placed as part of the agenda for discussion, a statement from JNUTA said.
If approved, the university will take students for these subjects for 2019 -2020 academic session. The vice-chancellor, registrar, and rector-I did not respond to calls and text messages seeking their comments on the issue.
JNU, established in 1969, is known for its arts and humanities subjects. JNU officials had submitted a proposal and made a presentation to the university regulator University Grants Commission.
A 21-year-old youth has been arrested in Murshidabad district of West Bengal on charges of raping a four-year-old girl after luring her with chocolates.
Murshed Sheikh, the accused, lived close to the victims house in Malipara village and used to frequently visit them, and so, the child did not hesitate to go with him on Saturday evening.
When she returned home, she complained of severe lower abdominal pain. When we asked her, she narrated the brutal torture on her, said the victims father, a carpenter.
The girl had suffered severe injuries to her private parts and was taken to a local hospital, but as her condition deteriorated, she was referred to Murshidabad Medical College and Hospital (MMCH), where she is currently undergoing treatment.
Police said Sheikh had confessed to the crime. He has been charged with rape under section 376 (rape) of IPC and sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO).
During primary interrogation, Sheikh confessed. We have got him in our custody for three days, said a senior officer at Raninagar police station.
The childs father also said that some locals had offered money to suppress the matter, but we have lodged a complaint against Sheikh.
More than two months after an unprecedented students protest against sexual violence shook the century-old Banaras Hindu University (BHU), a security overdrive meant to ensure the safety of female students is instead making them feel claustrophobic.
Founded in 1916, BHU was considered to be one of the safest campuses for girls. That seems to be history now.
Old-timers say harassment of girls on campus was unheard of.
BHU was completely safe for girls till 2000. Even after that, incidents of boys passing comments at girls occurred once or twice in a year, said Sudama Tiwari, a former BHU student and a poet who has been watching BHU closely since the early 1960s.
Tiwari, who is in his late 70s, couldnt recall any incident of sexual harassment or violence before 2000.
The situation has recently gone from bad to worse. I think the cultural transformation has led to these unsavoury incidents, he said.
Prof Chandrakala Tripathi, who studied at BHU in the early 1970s and joined the Hindi department as a professor in 1978, said she never felt unsafe during her student days.
I was a student in the 70s and joined BHU as a faculty in 1978. As a student, I often used to go to the library. I never felt the lack of security and safety on campus, she said. The incidents that have occurred in the recent past were beyond imagination in those days. Whatever happened in the recent past was a result of a clash of ideologies.
But she insists the university is still a safe place for women. So far as girls security is concerned, BHU is a safe place. The picture is not as bleak as painted by a section of media, she said.
Sukhdev Prasad Mishra, a violinist who studied at BHU till 2004, said even before 2000, there were sufficient numbers of girls at the university but they never had security concerns.
Deterioration started in 2000 and the situation completely changed after 2005. Incidents of clashes between student groups were reported on the campus, Mishra said.
The September Assault
The assault in September by two motorcycle-borne on a girl returning to her hostel sparked off a protest demanding action against the accused.
The protesters, mostly girls, were caned by male police personnel on September 23, which sparked nationwide outrage and put the spotlight on the lack of security for women at BHU.
The two men are yet to be arrested.
Investigation is on and we are trying to identify the accused. They will be arrested soon, said station officer, Lanka, Sanjiv Mishra.
The slow pace of the investigation has earned the police the girls derision. The accused should have been behind bars by now. It has been two months and they have not been identified yet. This exposes the sluggish pace of investigation, Shivani Chaubey, a student, said.
Two incidents of sexual harassment and an assault on a girl by a male student have taken place in the span of a year. While the accused in the assault case were arrested, the perpetrators of sexual harassment are still at large.
On October 5, a student of public administration, Sheetala Sharan Gond, allegedly dragged a woman student by her hair, slapped her and smashed her mobile phone after she refused to talk to him. He was arrested within a few hours of the incident and was suspended by university authorities.
On October 25, a girl alleged that a third-year student of Bachelor in Ayurvedic Medicines and Surgery (BAMS), Kali Charan, indulged in obscene discussions and activities with her when she went to the outdoor patient unit of the Ayurveda department at Sir Sundar Lal Hospital, BHU.
She lodged a complaint with chief proctor, Professor Royna Singh, who immediately referred the matter to police who arrested the accused.
Enhanced security or stifling rules?
Following the condemnation of the police crackdown on protesters, the BHU administration decided to bolster campus security.
The administration installed 70 surveillance cameras, halogen lamps at 15 locations on roads leading to the girls hostels, and constituted an all-woman security squad.
In a first, the university also appointed Prof Royana Singh as the first woman chief proctor of BHU.
But the girls are not impressed. They claim the university is imposing stifling rules and restrictions on them in the name of security.
What is being portrayed outside and what is actually done are two different things. The desired relaxation in curfew timings (the duration when girls are not allowed to venture out of hostels) is yet to be enforced. We demanded relaxation till 10pm but the university administration extended it till 9pm. The deadline is 10pm only for the inmates of Triveni Hostel, a student said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Girls have been pitching for the constitution of a gender sensitisation committee against sexual harassment (GS-CASH). A group of girls, led by student Mineshi Mishra, recently submitted a memorandum signed by 400 students to the chief proctor to press for the constitution of GS-CASH.
After the September 23 incident, the university authorities have become very strict with girls. They are imposing new restrictions on us in the name of security, Mishra said.
They dont allow relatives, male students and acquaintances to sit even for a while in the visiting area of hostels. Will the university administration decide whom should we meet? she asked.
No curfew
Prof Singh rubbished the girls allegations of curfew as baseless and insisted that the universitys gates were closed at 10pm for security reasons and to keep external elements away from the campus during the night.
There is no curfew but all girls are supposed to return to their hostels by 8pm. In case any girl wants to go out after 8pm, she needs to seek permission from the hostel warden and give a reason. Permission is immediately granted if the reason is genuine, Prof Singh said, adding that the timings had been relaxed by an hour to 9pm.
The university has found some support on security steps from a former employee.
This is a matter of great concern. These external elements should be dealt with sternly, said Vishwanath Pandey, former public relations officer of BHU. Prof Singh added she would speak to BHU registrar Neeraj Tripathi (who holds the additional charge of vice-chancellor) to ensure formation of university-level GS-CASH.
Campus secure, says BHU
The chief proctor says the security has been tightened to ensure the girls safety.
Three quick response teams (QRTs) have been formed and patrolling has been intensified, which is monitored round-the-clock through a central monitoring system, she said.
QRTs promptly respond to the incident and reach the spot within five minutes. Surprise checking is carried out during the night and strict action is taken if any outsider is caught on the campus.
In the last year, the womens grievance cell (WGC), BHU, received about 26 complaints related to lewd remarks, taunting, humiliating comments and intentional targeting between November 2016 and November 2017, a well-placed source told HT.
As soon as a complaint is lodged, we ensure the probe is completed within four days. The complainant and the accused are summoned and the matter is heard. Appropriate action is taken after the probe, said Prof Singh, who also heads the WGC.
We do not hesitate in referring a matter to police if the situation warrants. Action was taken on all 26 complaints, she said.
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Senior Congress leaders on Monday hailed Rahul Gandhi, saying the partys future will be bright under his stewardship as party chief and attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP for ridiculing the Congresss presidential election. (Live updates)
Rahul Gandhi is a darling of the Congress and he will carry forward the great traditions of the party, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said after Rahul filed his nomination papers for the partys top post.
Over 90 sets of nominations are expected to be filed supporting Gandhi whose election is a mere formality now, as there is no other candidate for the partys top post.
Another senior Congress leader Dr. Karan Singh said time has come for vice-president Rahul Gandhi to take over the commands of the party from his mother, Sonia Gandhi.
Sonia ji took Congress to new heights. She brought the party to Centre twice, we won many elections under her leadership and now it is time for Rahul Gandhi to take the party forward, Singh told reporters outside the AICC headquarters.
A young generation is taking over, the future of Congress is bright, he said.
Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying he is suffering from a Rahul Gandhi-phobia and asked why he was silent on questions being raised by his own senior party leaders.
Why is the Prime Minister suffering from Rahul Gandhi phobia? Why is he so much stressed? Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala told reporters here ahead of party Vice President Rahul Gandhis filing of nomination for its presidential post.
He also said that Modis love for Shehzad (Poonawalla), Shahzada (BJP chief Amit Shahs son Jai Shah) and Shourya (National Security Advisor Ajit Dovals son) is well known to the world.
But will Modiji tell when he will answer the questions of his own senior party leaders like Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha? he asked.
Slamming the Prime Minister and BJP president Amit Shah, Surjewala said: Modiji should also tell about his and Amit Shahs conspiracies against L.K. Advani, Keshubhai Patel, Kashiram Rana, Hiren Pandya, Murali Manohar Joshi and Sanjay Joshi, those who have been made a part of the partys history.
Former Union minister Kamal Nath also attacked the BJP for not having democracy in the party.
Do BJP Presidents get elected? Did Nitin Gadkari get elected through a ballot process? Let them answer that first, Kamal Nath told reporters.
Incumbent BJP chief Amit Shah was elected unopposed for a second term on January 24, 2016.
Kashmiri and Rohingyas Muslims found a prominent mention in a new audio file released by the media wing of the Al-Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), an Islamist militant organisation, asking south Asias Muslim community to help the oppressed.
In the audio released last week, AQIS lauds the efforts of Bangladesh in supporting Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar and praised the Kashmiri community for raising their voice despite being in suffering themselves.
The Islamist outfit reiterated the call for Jihad against India and other nations including US, Russia and Israel, saying that these countries were in alliance when it came to fight Islam and were happy till the time Islam is in mosques. The moment Islam pours out into society and the legal system, they do not tolerate that, he added.
The voice in the 12-minute audio address was identified as that of AQIS spokesperson Ustadh Usama Mahmood.
He said there were two categories of help by which subcontinents Muslims could assist the oppressed one of which was by providing financial and other assistance to Rohingyas. The second way, said Mahmood, was to stop the hand of the cruel.
Intelligence agency officials told HT, The said audio has come to our notice. Investigative agencies are ascertaining whether the audio poses a concrete threat . Till now we have no reason to believe that it does.
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Shortly after Rahul Gandhi filed his nomination for the Congress president post on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi compared the opposition leaders expected elevation to the Aurangzeb Raj. (Live Updates)
Amid criticism of the election process that has even drawn flak from a Maharashtra Congress leader, Mani Shankar Aiyar rushed to the 47-year-old Gandhi scions defence even as the BJP targeted the opposition party over dynasty politics.
When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any election happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go to the heir.
The Congress veteran was replying to a question about the BJPs criticism following Maharashtra leader Shehzad Poonawallas charge that the process of electing the partys president was rigged.
Poonawalla alleged that partys spokesperson Manish Tewari had told him during a conversation that the Congress was a proprietorship like every other political party in India. He also said he had information that the delegates, who were going to vote for the election, were fixed.
But in a democracy elections are held. I openly invite Poonawalla to file the nomination and contest, Aiyar said and asked if anyone has heard of Poonawala.
The Congress presidents post is currently held by Rahuls mother Sonia Gandhi, who has been at the helm of the party since 1998.
Modi was quick to respond to the remarks made by Aiyar, who he said never shies away from showing loyalty to one family. He also said that the Congress leaders admit that it is not a party but a kunba or a clan.
I congratulate the Congress on their Aurangzeb Raj. For us, the wellbeing of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command, Modi said while addressing a public meeting in Dharampur constituency in Gujarat.
Congress has gone bankrupt as it is going to make a person who is out on bail in corruption case its president, Modi, said without referring to the National Herald case, in which Rahul has got a bail.
Does the Congress accept that it is a family party? We dont want this Aurangzeb rule, Modi said.
The ruling BJP has, time and again, attacked the Congress party, accusing it of following dynastic politics and feudalism.
The Prime Minister also accused the Congress party of defaming the BJP by propagating it is against Muslims.
Disinformation like BJP does this and that against Muslims has been spread. This family party made it their main agenda to spread disinformation about the BJP. But Gujarat people are not so naive, they have now become sensitive and aware to disinformation, he said.
He alleged that the Congress party has been indulging in divisive politics in a bid to win the upcoming Gujarat assembly elections.
Earlier, Congress would go out of the way to show their secularism but now we are all seeing what they are doing in this election, where they are going. Unfortunately for them, Muslims know their real nature, Modi said, adding that Congress has always defamed Gujarat and that it can neither tolerate nor accept leaders from the state.
The two-phase Gujarat polls will be held on December 9 and 14.
Just a day ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition in Ayodhya on December 1992, the Supreme Court of India is set to begin final hearing in the politically controversial Babri Masjid-Ram temple dispute case.
A special bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice Ashok Bhushan and Justice S Abdul Nazeer will assemble at 2pm on December 5, Tuesday, to begin hearing a total of 13 appeals filed against the 2010 judgement of the Allahabad high court in four civil suits.
The high court had then ruled a three-way division of the disputed 2.77 acre area at Ayodhya among the parties the Sunni Waqf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and the deity Ram Lalla (Ram as an infant).
Contesting parties, including the Uttar Pradesh government, are likely to make their opening statements on Tuesday.
A sect of Muslims, under the banner of Shia Central Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh, had earlier approached the court offering a solution that a mosque could be built in a Muslim- dominated area at a reasonable distance from the disputed site in Ayodhya. The Shia board was not a party in the case originally.
However, its intervention was opposed by the Sunni board which had claimed that judicial adjudication between the two sects had already been done in 1946 by declaring the mosque, which was demolished on December 6, 1992, as one which belongs to the Sunnis.
The Sunni board also challenged the judgment, saying the verdict was based on faith rather than documentary evidence.
It also said the verdict violates Articles 25-26 of the Constitution, which grants equal rights to all faith. The appeal has the endorsement of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, one of the original litigants.
Tuesdays hearing comes in the backdrop of a failed suggestion by the SC in March this year, when it had suggested an out-of-court settlement. None of the parties were keen on it.
Recently a group of civil rights activists also moved the apex court seeking intervention in the Ayodhya dispute and urged it to consider the issue saying it is not just a dispute over property but has several aspects that would have far-reaching effects on the secular fabric of the country.
Since September 2010, over 20 appeals and cross-appeals have been filed in the SC without making any significant headway.
In pursuance to the SCs earlier direction, the Yogi Adityanath government has submitted English translation of exhibits and documents likely to be relied upon, as these were in eight different languages.
The SC on August 11 asked the UP government to complete within 10 weeks the translation of the evidence recorded for adjudication of the title dispute in the HC. It had said it would not allow the matter to take any shape other than the civil appeals and would adopt the same procedure as was done by the high court.
(With PTI inputs)
Buzzing like a mammoth insect, the four-prop drone lifts off the ground, rising straight up. Once it reaches about four feet, it hovers for a bit, then slowly settles back to the ground.
It doesnt seem like much of a flight until you understand how it happened.
No handheld controls, no tether, no nothing.
Just brain waves.
Tony Ferguson sits about 12 feet away at a laptop. As he works in what has been dubbed the Unmanned Systems Lab, on top of his head is a lattice of white plastic dotted with blue electrodes about the size of a thumb. The electrodes, which register brainwave activity, can be tightened to firmly hold the entire device in place.
Unfortunately, at the skull-touching end, the electrodes have a circle of tiny pointslittle needles, basicallyand they tend to dig into the flesh. Not enough to draw blood, but enough to make anyone wearing the headgear want to take it off as quickly as possible.
These things are pretty uncomfortable; they stick and they arent fun. About an hour is all I can take, Mr. Ferguson says, several small, reddish circles indented in the skin of his forehead just short of the hairline.
But the pain is worth it, he says, because his goal is to develop technology that will allow control all aspects of the drone simply through thought. Want it to move right? Think about it. Want it to take a photo with its camera? Imagine it.
Visualization in the brain would control the drone, says Mr. Ferguson, an electrical engineering major.
Future uses
Dr. Zach Ruble, a researcher in the Departments of Engineering and Electrical Engineering and director of the drone project, pictures a future in which one person can control multiple drones by thought. A separate research project that uses infrared light to control a swarm of dronesled by electrical engineering student Artem Malashiyis taking place alongside the project on brain-wave control.
Ultimately, we want to detect patterns in the brainwaves such that we can give abstract commands to multiple drones, Dr. Ruble says. So instead of giving a basic command such as take off or land, we can send out an abstract command such as search and rescue.
After receiving the command, the swarm of drones will determine what needs to be done in order to carry out that command and execute the mission autonomously.
A smaller, more comfortable headset should be possible as the technology develops, Mr. Ferguson says.
It could have military applications, search-and-rescue applications, etc. Obviously, prosthetics has a huge, huge application here, says Mr. Ferguson, a former Marine who served spent time under fire in Iraqs war-torn Fallujah.
In the current setup, his brainwaves are fed into his laptop, which sends a Wi-Fi signal to a second computer that, in turn, sends a wireless signal to the drone. The second computer, manned by Ed Steele, a graduate student in electrical engineering, contains the software that actually controls the drone. Mr. Steele developed the software and, without his work, the project would not be possible, Mr. Ferguson says.
He did all the groundwork, all the legwork, to fly the drone, he says.
Both spent several months just getting the drone to move up and down, and both say the work took longer than they wanted, but now they want more. Much more.
Following footsteps
Using brainwaves to control robotics limbs is nothing new, but those rely on implants in the brain that fire nerves and send electric impulses to microprocessors in the limbs. What Mr. Ferguson and other members of the project team have plans that are difficult to create but will ultimately make things easier.
Im following in the footsteps of stuff thats gone before, but the thought avenue is what Im focusing on, to be able to control things just by thinking, says Mr. Ferguson, who adds that, until he joined the drone project in January, had no idea that this type of technology was even available much less usable.
Hes in the process of creating a wide vocabulary for drone control and says he hopes to have that done by the end of December. Creating a wider command list is another step to increase the drones capabilities, Dr. Ruble says.
For example, if we can detect a pattern in the EEG signals that differentiates a person moving his left arm versus moving his right arm, we can generate two different commands based off which arm the person is moving.
Mr. Ferguson says hes trying to get gesture control, the brainwave response for this he moves his right arm up and downto fly the drone left or right, I will move on to purely thought, he explains.
Ive done it a little bit; its kind of hard to do.
Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav has accused the BJP of spreading lies, saying while the party was patting its back for doing well in Uttar Pradeshs mayoral elections, it was silent about its defeat in the nagar palika and nagar panchayat polls.
The BJP is a jhoot parosne wali party (a party which indulges in serving lies). It won 14 out of the 16 mayoral seats in Uttar Pradesh due to the electronic voting machines (EVMs). But it is not discussing its defeats in the nagar palika and nagar parishad polls, he said Sunday.
Akhilesh, who was in Etah to attend a wedding, said, If countries more developed than India can use ballot papers in elections, what is the problem here? The Election Commission must clarify on how could it repair a faulty EVM. When a faulty EVM can be repaired, a properly functioning EVM can also be tampered with.
Opposition parties, including the SP, Congress, AAP, have repeatedly accused the BJP of tampering with the EVMs and rooted for an alternative way of casting votes.
Cyclone Ockhi, which left behind a trail of destruction in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Lakshadweep, is expected to make landfall in Gujarat on Tuesday night which may cause heavy rains in the state and adjoining Maharashtra.
An India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast said, The severe cyclonic storm Ockhi is now laid centred about 850 km south-southwest of Surat and is likely to cross south Gujarat and adjoining North Maharashtra coasts near Surat as a deep depression by mid-night of December 5.
We have issued heavy rainfall warnings for Gujarat, while light to moderate rain is expected in isolated areas in north Konkan, including Mumbai, on Tuesday, IMDs director general KJ Ramesh said.
Schools and colleges in Mumbai and adjoining districts have been asked to remain closed on Tuesday due to serious weather predictions, Maharashtras school education minister Vinod Tawde said
The impact of the cyclone will be seen in Palghar, Thane, Raigarh, and Greater Mumbai districts of Maharashtra and Valsad, Surat, Navsari, Bharuch, Dang, Tapi, Amreli, Gir- Somnath and Bhavnagar districts of Gujarat.
Union Territories Daman, Diu and Dadra, Nagar Haveli will also be affected.
The scale of the cyclone was reduced from very severe on Sunday to severe, the weather department said.
It has warned fisherman along the Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka coastline not to venture into the sea from Monday to Wednesday.
The high winds and persistent rains hit the southern districts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu last week and caused loss to life and property.
The death toll climbed to 28 in Kerala after a rescue team recovered two more bodies on Monday and officials said at least 90 people were still missing in the state.
The Tamil Nadu government on Monday said a total of 2,604 fishermen out of the 2,864 caught in the cyclone Ockhi have been rescued and search for the remaining 260 is on.
Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday that representatives of fishermen will also be included in the ongoing search operation to rescue the missing in Kerala.
The joint operation of the Indian Navy, Indian Air Force and Coast Guard will continue till the last man is saved from the sea, the minister said after visiting the two worst-hit fishing hamlets of Vizhinjam and Poonthura in Thiruvananthapuram district.
People of the coast are in deep distress. The government will do everything to alleviate their suffering. I will inform the Prime Minister and home minister what I have seen, she said in Poonthura.
We have even deployed warships. The rescue operation this time is more intense than the one during the tsunami in 2004. We are committed to saving the last man marooned in the sea, she said.
Sitharaman later chaired a meeting with Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan and reviewed the situation.
Tempers ran high on the coast when Sitharaman arrived and the angry relatives of the missing fishermen took exception to the presence of two state ministers in the team. Sitharaman had a tough time pacifying them.
On Sunday, chief minister Vijayan was heckled by an angry crowd and he had to leave without his official car. The crowd shouted at him, accusing him of not visiting them immediately after the tragedy.
The affected people have said the government did not give them the warning about the cyclone on time and that its response to the situation was delayed. They also blocked roads at several places.
On Sunday, the families of the missing fishermen defied the warning of the met office and government and ventured into to look for them.
A naval ship on Monday located a fishing boat with nine crew members, reportedly missing from Kochi since the last 15 days, off Lakshadweep, a defence spokesperson said.
All of them are safe. They are coming on their own their boat to Kochi, he said.
The boat, Island Queen, was located by INS Kolkata 132 nautical miles north of Kavaratti in Lakshadweep, he said. The local administration had requested the navy to search for it, he added.
The spokesperson added that the naval ship continued with them for some time before going for another rescue operation.
Sitharaman, who was in Kanyakumari on Sunday to take stock of the situation in the wake of the cyclonic storm, said 357 fishermen, including 71 from Tamil Nadu, have been rescued so far.
(With agency inputs)
National Conference president Farooq Abdullah on Monday met governor N N Vohra and batted strongly for holding clean panchayat elections, which were long overdue, an official spokesperson said.
Abdullah met the governor at the Raj Bhavan here and informed him that his party was looking forward to the panchayat polls, a Raj Bhavan spokesperson said.
The dates for the panchayat elections have not been announced.
The former chief minister complained that the indirect elections of the sarpanch shall vitiate the essence of the Panchayati Raj institutional framework.
He also demanded that full details of the delimitation of the panchayats recently done by the state government should be placed in the public domain.
Abdullah stressed the need for all the candidates being provided effective security and the sanctity of gram sabhas being strictly maintained till the elections were concluded.
He expressed serious concern and warned about the lack of required action to prevent the rapid pace at which drug smuggling and trafficking were spreading in the state.
Abdullah also complained about the virtual stoppage of registration of residents under the Aadhaar card scheme and complained that those who are without such identity cards are facing serious problems in carrying out their day to day work.
At around 4 pm on 30 November, at Vizhinjam Coast Guard base in Kerala, orders went out to all routine patrol boats of the Indian Coast Guard to return to shore, as a storm was coming. The Coast Guard wanted to protect its men and machinery.
Then, an SOS arrived from the district administration of Thiruvananthapuram many fishermen were stuck at sea and unable to return due to strong winds raging at over 130 kilometres an hour and a rough sea. The Coast Guard sent out two interceptor boats, two offshore vessels and a Dornier aircraft to rescue the stranded fishermen.
A capsized boat with people in mid sea. (Handout by Defence ministry)
But what began with the Coast Guard turned into a rescue operation of massive scale also involving the Indian Coast Guard and Navy.
They realised that the storm was too powerful for these few ships and one aircraft to handle, said a senior Coast Guard officer at the Vizhinjam base on condition of anonymity. The Coast Guard is generally the first responder in case of any crises at sea, for search and rescue operations. But we realised very quickly that we were not equipped to handle this by ourselves. So, we sent out a call to the Coast Guard Headquarters in Kochi and also informed the Indian Navy, asking for help. We informed the state government too who, in turn, approached the Navy and Air Force for help, he said.
A Coast Guard ship towing a fishing boat to shore. (Handout by Defence ministry)
Once we got the call from the state government, we activated all our ships in the Western Command and pressed them into search and rescue operations, said Commander Sreedhar E Warrier of the Indian Navy who is in the Kochi Naval Base. On the first day, 6 ships, 2 aircraft and 2 choppers of the Navy headed out. Apart from these, 9 ships, 2 Dornier aircraft and 1 helicopter belonging to the Coast Guard were also deployed. One more ship went towards the Lakshadweep Islands.
By the end of the same day, the Indian Air Force had jumped in as well with one aircraft and two choppers. The nodal point of contact for all of these agencies was the Kochi Naval Base.
As Twilight Fell
Cyclone Ockhi picked up in fury and an unknown number of fishermen who were closer to shore were quickly picked up and rescued by all three agencies. But night began to fall and finding survivors became tougher.
The Dorniers flying range is very less and it has no special features for night searches, so we pressed the Boeing P8i aircraft of the Navy into action, said Warrier.
This craft is Indias latest pride. Manufactured by American firm Boeing, the first P8i Poseidon 8 India arrived at the INS Rajali Naval Base in Arakkonam, Tamil Nadu in 2013. Following flight trials, in 2015, then Union Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar dedicated these aircraft to the nation.
The P8i has state of the art sensors and radar that can detect very small objects in the sea as well as submarines over a wide area of the sea. Infrared cameras, magnetic anomaly detection and other surveillance cameras ensure that even at night, Navy officers have eyes.
The first P8i took off from INS Rajali on the night of 30 November. With this, 250 nautical miles off the Kerala coast was scanned and stranded boats and fishermen were identified. GPS co-ordinates of these were sent to ships out on sea.
Image from P8i of capsized boats (Handout by Defence ministry)
We formed a joint action team of the Navy, Coast Guard and the Air Force and started rescue operations in full swing, Rear Admiral Alok Bhatnagar, Flag Officer of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry Naval Area told HT. Though it was difficult at night to conduct rescues, our Advanced Lightweight Helicopters (ALH) were deployed to winch up those fishermen who had fallen into the sea and needed immediate rescue. These were fishermen who were hanging on to capsized boats. There were our first targets for rescue, he said. It was easier said than done. The strong winds made it almost impossible for the aircraft to get close to where the fishermen were floating.
Coast Guard ships are the ones which are designed for search and rescue, more than the Navy. So, we made use of our aircraft more to gather details and location of the stranded fishermen and passed it on to the Coast Guard ships, he added.
For search and rescue operations, ships and aircraft are given specific co-ordinates in squares for operations.
Search and rescue by Indian forces done in squares. (Handout by Defence ministry)
Smaller aircraft such as the Dornier and ALH are generally given smaller squares for their ops. The P8i is usually deployed over the high seas to sweep 250 nautical miles in its search. Once the P8i finds survivors, information and GPS co-ordinates are passed on to the nearest ship, which then sends its onboard helicopter for rescue. Offshore Dorniers also provide information to these ships for rescue operations. These are smaller aircraft which cannot access the high seas and scan the waters closer to land.
INS Jamuna, INS Sagardhwani and INS Nireekshak were some of the Navy-owned ships sent to conduct rescues along the Kerala coast. INS Shardul and INS Sharda headed to Lakshadweep. Even destroyers vessels meant for attack like the INS Kolkata, INS Chennai and INS Trikand were deployed for search and rescue operations!
Search and rescue by Indian forces done in squares. (Handout by Defence ministry)
Coast Guard ships are designed to be able to get close enough to stranded fishing boats to throw a line and tow them back to shore. But larger ships, like the ones in the Navy, cannot get close to small fishing boats as they would end up damaging the boats. For larger ships to conduct rescues, the Navy had to shoot a rope into the boat and drag it in its wake at a distance.
A Coast Guard ship towing a fishing boat. (Handout by Defence ministry)
In fact, the INS Shardul and Sharda are such ships ill equipped for search and rescue operations. A boat from Tuticorin district in Tamil Nadu, with 9 fishermen on board was rescued in such a fashion by INS Sharda about 50 nautical miles off Kavaratti island in the Lakshadweep Islands. Here is the video of that rescue recorded via infrared camera of a P8i aircraft.
Local fishermen in Kerala attempted to brave the fury of the storm on their own but found that they could not even enter the sea in their little boats.
The Coast Guards Ops
On the night of 1 December, the Sea King helicopter of the Indian Coast Guard switched on its lights and flew over the rough seas in high winds to search for survivors in its last flight of the night. It was about to turn back, when a small green object was sighted in the sea, 30 nautical miles from the Trivandrum coast. It was a lone survivor, hanging on for life to his boat. It was a truly satisfying experience to have picked up this fisherman, said the pilot of the Sea King when he came back to Vizhinjam base. The fisherman, who was from Kerala, was very weak and in bad condition when he came in, said the senior Coast Guard officer at Vizhinjam.
Air force personnel bring in survivors for treatment. (Handout by Defence ministry)
That same night, an ALH diver VK Verma, who jumped into the seas to rescue fishermen to safety, injured his hand on the winch wire. However, he heroically continued to assist the fishermen to be rescued before himself being winched up. He was thereafter admitted to a Thiruvanthapuram hospital, said the senior official of the Coast Guard.
As survivors began streaming in, many were in shock and in poor health. We provided first aid in the Naval clinic at the Trivandrum Naval Base to the survivors and also conducted medical examinations. Those who were very weak were sent to the Trivandrum Medical College and Hospital, said Commander Sreedhar Warrier of the Indian Navy in Kochi.
Survivors being treated at Trivandrum Medical College and Hospital. (Handout by Defence ministry)
Fishermen in Tamil Nadu and Kerala had begun protests, stating that many more were missing. Data from the P8i too showed that rescue ops were far from over. By 2 December, deployment of ships and aircraft was further increased. 20 ships from the Coast Guard and the Indian Navy, 6 aircraft belonging to the Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force as well as 7 helicopters intensified search operations.
By the end of 2 December, the Coast Guard alone had rescued 87 survivors belonging to Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The Indian Navy picked up 65 more and 9 others were rescued by the Air Force. Merchant vessels, belonging to private companies too chipped in, picking up any survivors they spotted they managed to save 28.
We found that 172 fishermen had safely reached the shores of Lakshadweep. We arranged for shelter and food for them there itself. Once the weather cleared, we brought them back, said Commander Warrier of the Navy. Another 1000 fishermen were sent to Goa, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala and given shelter there.
By 3 December, the storm had moved on towards the Gujarat coast. As of this morning, a total of 89 boats comprising 1,154 fishermen from several states mainly from Kerala and Tamil Nadu have taken shelter in various ports of Karnataka, Maharashtra, Goa & Lakshadweep, tweeted the Defence Ministry.
As search and rescue enters the final stage, survivors are fewer. As on 10 am on 3 December, 357 survivors have been rescued from sea. But there is no estimate yet as to how many fishermen have died in the fury of Cyclone Ockhi.
(In arrangement with GRIST MEDIA)
With heavy rainfall warning issued by India Meteorological Department (IMD) in many parts of Odisha, the state government asked farmers on Monday to shift their harvested paddy from the fields to safe places to avoid loss or damage.
Rain is likely to lash Odisha for at least three days from December 7 due to a well marked low pressure that lies over southeast Bay of Bengal and adjoining south Andaman Sea Monday, the Meteorological Centre here said.
It is very likely to become a depression over southeast Bay of Bengal during next 24 hours and further intensify into a deep depression during subsequent 48 hours. It is likely to move west-northwestwards towards north Tamil Nadu south Andhra Pradesh coasts next three days, it said.
While weather is expected to remain dry over Odisha during next 72 hours, rainfall is likely to occur in several parts of the state by December 7 under its impact, said director of the local Met Centre, Sarat Chandra Sahu.
Low intensity rainfall is likely to occur in districts like Koraput, Malkangiri, Gajapati and Ganjam on December 7, while rainfall of higher intensity is expected to pound coastal and adjoining districts on December 8 and 9, he said.
Preliminary reports indicate that around 18 districts of the state are likely to face heavy rainfall due to the system, the MeT office said.
In view of the emerging weather conditions, the Revenue and Disaster Management department has advised the farmers of the districts likely to be affected to shift their harvested paddy to safe places and keep it properly stacked under suitable cover so as to avoid any loss or damage.
Where paddy crops are ready for harvest, the farmers should take steps to harvest the same and store safely to avoid damage due to rains, a senior official said adding necessary measures should also be taken to protect the paddy in mandies, if any, from rain.
Farmers in most parts of the state have already suffered a lot due to crop loss caused by unseasonal rains last month.
In a contradiction of its own policy, the Indian government has allowed over 1,300 tribal Buddhist refugees from Myanmars Rakhine region to enter Mizoram. The refugees left their homeland because of the ongoing war between the Myanmarese Army and the Arakan Army, made up of Buddhist insurgents.
This comes nearly a month after the Union Home Ministry had directed the northeastern states to take strict measures to prevent Rohingyas -- who are Muslims -- from entering Indian territory despite persecution by the Myanmar regime.
The new group of refugees, belonging to the Chin and few other communities of Myanmar, have come to four villages in Lawngtlai district.
According to sources in the Mizoram government, the administration is struggling hard to bring down the rising tensions among the refugees and the residents of Laitlang, Dumzautlang, Hmawngbuchhuah and Zochachhuah villages.
According to the state administration, the refugees are being taken care of on humanitarian grounds as all of them came to escape clashes back home.
Its been some six days since these refugees have arrived on Mizoram territory. They currently are in four villages of the Lawngtlai district and are put up at shelter homes, Buddhist homes, temples and many other places, T. Arun, Deputy Commissioner of Lawngtlai, told IANS over the phone.
He emphasised that the security threat in such a situation cannot be denied.
We basically have two rules -- one relating to national security and other related to humanitarian assistance. Under the humanitarian rules we are providing food as we do not want any starvation deaths. We also have to guard against the outbreak of diseases, said Arun.
Additional police, health workers and doctors have also been deployed not just to keep a vigil on the new arrivals but also to keep a check on their health condition.
The problem is that the population of each of the villages is just 200-400. The arrival of such a large number of people is a matter of serious concern, said Arun.
Mizorams police chief emphasised that though they wont immediately term the arrival of the refugees a security threat, they are waiting for the situation in Myanmar to normalise so that they could be sent back.
We wont call it a security threat at this juncture. They were alllowed into Indian territory due to the ongoing fighting in Myanmar. We are taking care of it and police forces are there. However, we are making sure there wont be any problem for the villagers due to the refugees. They have been confined to the four villages, Director General of Police Thianghlima Pachuau told IANS over the phone.
The current crisis in Myanmar comes nearly two months after the Myanmar Army had launched operations against the Rohingyas in Rakhine province. While the conflict led to more than 600,000 Rohingyas fleeing to Bangladesh, the United Nations Human Rights Commission called the strike by the Myanmar Army a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.
The Indian government has taken measures, including asking the states in the region to seal their borders with Mayanmar, to prevent Rohingya refugees from entering the country.
Myanmar, the only Southeast Asian country which shares a 1,600-mile-long border with India, serves as its gateway to the other member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Four northeastern states -- Arunachal Pradesh (520 km), Manipur (398 km), Nagaland (215 km) and Mizoram (510 km) -- have an unfenced border with Myanmar.
Experts on Indo-Myanmar relations see the current influx as a temporary matter that is different from the Rohingyas issue.
This is an issue that has emerged in the last few months. The arrival of Buddhist refugees is certainly a matter of concern as it affects people on the Indian side as well. However, this is different from Rohingyas, Khriezo Yhome, senior Research fellow at Observer Research Foundation and an expert on Indo-Myanmar affairs, told IANS.
According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees there are around 21,500 Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers in India. The central government, though, has sent a clear message that it would not be willing to accept them because of security concerns.
The Supreme Court on October 13 asked the Centre to strike a balance between national security, economic interests and humanitarian considerations with regard to Rohingya women, children, old, sick and infirm
A suspected Islamic State terrorist lodged in a Kolkata jail on Sunday tried to slit the throat of the warder after hitting him with a brick, grievously injuring 45-year-old Gobinda Chandra Dey, police said.
Mohammad Masiruddin alias Musa shouted Hail Islamic State as he attacked Dey, a jail official said on Monday of the assault that raises questions over jail security. The 27-year-old Musa is among the most guarded prisoners in the state.
Musa first hit Dey with a brick on his head. Then he suddenly brought out a sharp steel weapon and tried to slit his throat, the official said. A prisoner, Mohammad Sohail alias Pintu, managed to overpower Musa and save Deys life, the official said.
The 45-year-old warder was rushed to the state-run SSKM Hospital but was shifted to a private hospital as his injuries were serious.
Musa first hit Dey with a brick on his head. Then he suddenly brought out a sharp steel weapon and tried to slit his throat -- A jail official
A resident of Birbhum in West Bengal, Musa was in December last questioned by a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) team a few months after he was arrested for his alleged links to Islamic State and trying to radicalise young men.
It appeared that Musa, brought to the Alipore jail on October 31, 2016, laid his hands on a piece of metal and had sharpened it over a long time, another jail official said.
An FIR had been registered against Musa and a probe was underway, Bengal correctional services minister Ujjwal Biswas said, adding security was being beefed up in prisons across the state.
Usually, such prisoners are kept in cells where it is easier to keep a close watch on them, a correctional department official said, admitting to lapses in the monitoring process that allowed Musa to hide the metal strip.
A team of government railway police arrested Musa from the Burdwan train station in July 2016 after being tipped off by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
The FBI team questioned him over his alleged links to an Islamic State leader based in Syria, sources said.
Musa planned attacks against the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata and foreign tourists, the NIA had told media after his questioning.
Begging in public places is an eyesore that is difficult to eradicate and the authorities in Telangana are realising it the hard way. Weeks after they rounded up and removed hundreds of beggars from the streets in the run up to Ivanka Trumps visit to the state capital, people seeking alms are back in business.
Police in Hyderabad had last month proclaimed begging as an offence and banned people from seeking alms ahead of the November 28-29 visit to the city by the daughter of the US president Donald Trump. But after a month, the government-run shelters where the beggars were lodged on being removed from the streets are mostly empty with the inmates going back to where they came from.
Now, only 10 female beggars are left with us in the Cherlapalli shelter. In the Chanchalguda shelter, only 30 beggars are left. All the remaining left the within no time, K Arjun Rao, superintendent of the Cherlapalli open air jail and in-charge of the Anand Ashram shelters that housed the beggars within the Cherlapalli and Chanchalguda jail premises ahead of Trumps visit, said.
The police order banning begging in public places was to be in force until January 7.
Most of the beggars left with their relatives after giving an undertaking that they would not beg again.
Rao said if the same beggars were caught again in the act, they would be handed over to the police and prosecuted.
Beggars at a temporary rehabilitation centre, where they were shifted after the Hyderabad police issued an order banning begging. (AFP File)
Meanwhile, Hyderabad police are planning to launch a fresh drive against begging from December 25. A jail official said the director general of police (prisons) VK Singh has ordered that anyone who helped in identifying beggars would get a cash award of Rs 500 per culprit caught. In fact, rehabilitation of beggars in special beggar homes is a continuous process and is part of initiatives taken up by the prisons department, the official added.
Rao said the beggars rounded up would be provided with counselling during their stay in the shelters and advised not to take up begging again. If necessary, we would also offer employment opportunities to eligible persons among them in petrol bunks and other stores run by the department, he said.
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The Madhya Pradesh state assembly on Monday unanimously passed a bill aimed at amending the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to impose the death penalty on those found guilty of raping girls aged 12 and below.
The bill, tabled by the state government in accordance with announcements made by chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, recommends life term as the minimum punishment for people convicted of raping girls in this age group.
Under life imprisonment, the convict is expected to spend his entire life in jail.
The legislation also prescribes severe punishment for other sexual offences, including stalking and molestation. According to the bill, a person found guilty of stalking a girl (irrespective of her age) is to be punished with imprisonment of up to three years and a fine. A subsequent crime of this nature will entail imprisonment of anywhere from three to seven years and a fine of Rs 1 lakh. Those found guilty of having sexual intercourse with a woman under fraudulent promises of marriage will face imprisonment of up to three years.
Madhya Pradesh has created history by becoming the first state to take such a step. It will trigger a debate on womens safety across the country, the chief minister said.
The bill will be sent to the state governor, who will then forward it to the President for his assent.
Chouhan claimed that rapists were worse than animals, and can only be termed as Narpishach (demons from hell). The Internet is being misused to dish out vulgarity to children. (Drug and alcohol) Addiction is another major factor that contributes to this problem. We have to check this simultaneously, he said, adding that relatives and acquaintances are responsible for as much as 98% of all rapes.
Protecting our sisters is our duty. We can further explore ways to amend the IPC, so as to award severe punishment to those guilty of raping girls over 12 years of age, Chouhan said.
Though Opposition MLAs including Govind Singh, Ramnivas Rawat and Sunderlal Tiwari also gave their nod to the bill, they said steps should be taken to ensure that the provision of harsher punishment was not misused to target innocent people.
Singh said that fear of the death penalty could also spur rapists to kill their victims in an attempt to destroy evidence. Rawat, for his part, demanded stringent measures to check the illegal sale of alcohol in villages.
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Dillon Martin was in New York, meeting and greeting big-time movers and shakers in the world of finance. There were people from Barclays, from the New York Stock Exchange, from TD Ameritrade.
It was somewhat daunting to talk shop with titans of the financial industry, he admits, but he also came away with something valuable:
I knew that there wasnt magic to it.
We know the same things they know, says Mr. Martin 16, who now works full-time at Merrill Lynch in Chattanooga. We can understand it just as well as anybody else. It instilled a whole lot of confidence and it took away a whole lot of anxiety. Once you take away that worry, it levels out the playing field.
While classroom lessons are essential, he says, much of his ability to navigate the nerve-wracking world of investments without going gray can be traced to a program he was involved in while a finance student at UTC: the SMILE Fund.
Created in 2015 with a $250,000 endowment from the UC Foundation, the fundSMILE stands for Student Managed Investment Learning Experienceallows students to invest in the stock market. Real money. Real wins and losses. Real world. No Monopoly money here.
Essentially, they are financial advisors with the UC Foundation as their client. They must research various stocks, make the carefully-considered but ultimately gut-level judgments on which ones to buy and which to sell, when to buy and when to sell.
We have a saying, Its better to be wrong for the right reasons than to be right for the wrong reasons, says Dr. Hunter Holzhauer, UC Foundation assistant professor of finance and faculty advisor to SMILE.
Although final decisions are OKd by higher-ups, students whove been part of SMILE say its a rare moment when theyre overruled.
You gain experience that you just cant get in a classroom at all, says Hunter Carroll, current president of the fund. You hear it in class and you know that its important, but it gives you the experience to see what youre learning in class applies to the real world.
In conversation, SMILE students use terms like financial modeling, quantitative and qualitative research, derivatives, equities, algorithms and commoditiesand actually know what they mean. They come off so knowledgeable and self-assured, youre tempted to reach into your pocket, pull out whatever money you have there and give it to them, saying Invest this for me.
I dont want this to sound braggy, Mr. Carroll says, but I think that being in the SMILE Fund, especially if you take it seriously I think you really do leave college with the mindset of a late 20-year-old in the investment world.
Instantly Employed
For many SMILE students, jobs are waiting for them before they even graduate. Mr. Martins job as a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch was waiting for him; Isabella Loza-Ortiz 16 had her name on an investment analyst position at Unum before she picked up her diploma. Carroll, who graduates in May, doesnt have a fulltime job yet, but hes hardly worried.
I have countless business cards in my apartment from people Ive met through the SMILE Fund. One of my drawers at home is dedicated to throwing business cards in, he says.
At this point, the fund has about $285,000, according to Dr. Holzhauer. While the fund has had its dips, it has spent almost all of its two years on the positive side of the ledger, he says. SMILE uses the S&P 500 as its benchmark, trying to maintain its growthor lossesat the same level as the index and overall its growth rate has been better.
At eight months into this year, were about 1.5 percent above the S&P, he says. If youre beating your benchmark by 1 or 2 percent every year, you cant ask for more than that.
Over the summer, two high school students called Dr. Holzhauer, asking specifically about the SMILE Fund and whether freshmen can be part of it. Yes, they can, Dr. Holzhauer told them.
The University of Tennessee was also on their radar, he says, but they wanted to come to UTC and getting in the SMILE Fund was a high priority.
If they decide to come to UTC, however, they must realize that theres no slacking in the fund. Dont do the job? Youll be fired, just like you would in real life.
I hire and I fire and I fire a lot, Dr. Holzhauer says. Its usually pretty shocking to the students, but its good. I think it sends a message: This is real.
Exciting
Ashley Nichols 07, an investment officer at Unum, has been part of the funds professional advisory board since Day One. And yes, she sees the financial professionalism exhibited by SMILE students, but another talent stands out even more.
To me, its aboutNo. 1learning to communicate ideas verbally, to get up in a room full of peers and professionals who give you feedback.
Giving presentations in a boardroom-like setting is a frequent task when youre dealing with financial and investment issues, she says, and its a unique situation for SMILE students to do the same thing. In those situations, they must learn how to be confident and knowledgeableand non-sweatingwhen theyre peppered with questions and have others pick apart their thinking.
Theyve been up there and they can take it, she says.
Ms. Loza-Ortiz joined the SMILE Fund in January 2015, six months before the endowmenti.e., the cashwas officially handed over. Students and faculty used the time to iron out some of the kinks in their systems, making sure everyone knew their jobs and how to do them.
The idea that they were handling $250,000 wasnt so scary as much as exciting, says Ms. Loza-Ortiz, who graduated with a degree in finance. It meant you cared about it a little bit more; you were more interested in the whole process, more accountable.
She has no hesitation about SMILEs influence in her life.
I would say that it changed my career.
Special abilities
Paul Payne, senior financial advisor at Merrill Lynch, hired Dillon Martin to be on his four-person team in part because of what the student had learned while working at the SMILE Fund. Mr. Martin was blessed with a magnetic personality that draws people to him and convinces them to trust his abilities, Mr. Payne says, but the lessons he learned at the SMILE Fund raised him to a higher level.
Mr. Payne points to a statement from the book Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to Gods Work: We are most fulfilled when our passion and competency intersect at our highest point.
What I saw in Dillon was he was someone who had passion about what he did and yet exuded a great sense of competency, he says.
Mr. Martin is not hesitant to credit SMILE with the certainty he has in his abilities. Such confidence may not be something that other finance undergraduates feel when they leave school, he believes.
The SMILE Fund allows us operate from a position of strength when we come out of undergrad. Most students, when they come out of undergrad, I dont think are in that position of strength. Theyre coming out in a position of kind of begging, Please give me this job as opposed to Why I think I fit here.
I think SMILE Fund students go into interviewsif theyve done it the right wayand know that there are very few candidates better than them.
Two militants and a soldier were killed in a gunfight that raged in south Kashmir on Monday afternoon after militants attacked an army convoy on national highway in Qazigund.
Two dead bodies of terrorists recovered. Search still on, director general of police (DGP), Shesh Paul Vaid tweeted.
(An) army convoy on its way to Srinagar fired at by terrorists near Qazigund area at 1240 hrs. One soldier on Road Opening Party (ROP) duty injured, an army spokesperson said.
Local reports said the security forces blasted the house in which the militants were hiding.
The encounter which continued till late in the evening also disrupted traffic on the highway.
The place lies right on the highway so we had to divert the traffic, said deputy inspector general of police, South Kashmir, SP Pani.
Director general of Jammu and Kashmir police SP Vaid told HT that the fire had come from a house near Qazigund and the area has been cordoned off. An exchange of fire is on.
According to sources, army convoys are easy targets for militants.
In June last year, eight CRPF personnel were killed and 20 injured in an ambush on a convoy in Pampore on the outskirts of Srinagar. In December, three soldiers were killed when motorcycle-borne militants fired on an army bus in south Kashmir.
The mother of an Indian engineer, who was sentenced after he sneaked into Pakistan from Afghanistan to meet a girl he had befriended on the internet, has appealed to President Mamnoon Hussain to remit the remaining period of her sons prison term.
In a letter to Hussain, the mother of Hamid Ansari said: Mohtaram Sadar - your government has shown clemency to foreign nationals who have committed far graver offences than Hamid Ansari.
The countrys credit for listening to humanitarian calls will go up and the chances of relief for Pakistani citizens in Indian prisons might improve if you could remit the remaining period of Hamids prison term.
She said the period of Ansaris detention (three years) before conviction may be counted as sentence served, that he may he be released on humanitarian grounds, and that he and that he may be allowed to talk to his family on the phone.
The Indian national was tried in a military court and was awarded three years vigorous imprisonment that started from December 15, 2015 and will end on December 14 next year.
Ansari, a Mumbai resident, suffered injuries after he was attacked by inmates in the Peshawar Central prison last year.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Ansari, an assistant professor at an Indian management institute, became friendly with a girl belonging to Kohat (in Kyber Pakhtaunkhawa province of Pakistan) through Facebook.
When she feared the denial of her rights, he decided to come to her rescue. He could not get a Pakistan visa but was able to fly to Afghanistan and enter Pakistan, though without valid papers. He was arrested from a hotel in Kohat on November 14, 2012.
Thus, for five years he has been in the custody of the Pakistani authorities. Charged with espionage and not with illegal entry into Pakistan, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment by a military court, says known rights activist I A Rehman.
There is no doubt that Hamid Ansari committed an offence but his motives, love or a desire to help a woman in distress, are strong mitigating circumstances. He has already suffered enough for his naivete, he said and demanded his immediate release.
On the other hand, a Pakistani woman journalist who was allegedly kidnapped while pursuing the case of Ansari two years ago, has gone missing again two months after her return.
President of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances Justice (retd.) Javed Iqbal had said Shahzadi had been recovered from an area on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on Thursday night.
Non-state actors and anti-state agencies had abducted her and she has been recovered from their custody, Iqbal said.
Rehman said Shahzadi has gone missing again. Missing of Shahzadi two months after her return from two-year captivity is alarming.
He says Shahzadi, a young and poor journalist without any clout, had dreams of helping her fellow human beings.
When she learnt that an Indian named Hamid Ansari was in trouble for trying to help a Pakistani girl, she thought this was a case that could help her establish herself as a bold human rights defender and a skilful journalist.
She persuaded Ansaris mother to grant her authority/ permission to pursue the matter before the Peshawar High Court. She also met the Indian high commissioner at a public meeting, probably to seek his help in the case, he said.
The 26-year-old local reporter of Daily Nai Khaber and Metro News TV channel had gone missing on August 19, 2015, when some unknown men allegedly kidnapped her while she was en route to her office in an auto-rickshaw from her home in a populated locality of Lahore.
On her return in this October she was not allowed to speak to anyone. Later, her family reported she has gone missing again.
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)leader Praful Patel questioned the Narendra Modi government on Monday as to why the Vadodara airport was not being named after Vadodaras erstwhile ruler late Sayajirao Gaekwad.
Patel said the erstwhile ruler had established the world famous Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and the Bank of Baroda in 1908.
He added that the ruler had also given an educational scholarship to Dalit icon BR Ambedkar.
The NCP leader said as civil aviation minister in the previous UPA government, he had introduced a bill to rename the airport after Sayajirao Gaekwad.
He claimed that the demand was close to the heart of the people of Vadodara.
Patel added that NCP chief Sharad Pawar would visit Gujarat on December 6 to campaign for party candidates.
A 35-year-old pregnant woman died after she jumped off a moving van to escape molestation by the driver and cleaner of the vehicle in Telanganas Medak district, police said on Monday.
The incident happened on the Hyderabad-Nagpur National Highway 44 at Ravelli village of Toopran block late on Saturday night and the womans relatives lodged a complaint with the police on Sunday afternoon.
Police said Ude Kalavathi, a seven-month pregnant woman who sold old clothes, was returning to her village from Kompalli on the outskirts of Hyderabad along with her seven-year-old daughter Sirisha on Saturday night in a van after she missed the state-run RTC bus.
The driver asked Kalavathi to pay the toll fee at the Toopran toll plaza. The driver and cleaner attempted to rape her after travelling for a kilometre and she jumped off the moving van. The driver and the cleaner immediately forced her daughter to get down and fled the spot.
Local villagers reached the spot and realised that Kalavathi was dead. They immediately alerted the police, who informed her husband Regonda and other relatives at Potharajpalli village nearby.
The daughter was not in a position to tell exactly what had happened inside the vehicle. Going by the closed circuit footage images, she first threw her bag of clothes out before jumping from the vehicle. The driver appeared to have applied the break and then moved again, Toopran circle inspector Lingeshwar Rao told the Hindustan Times.
Unless we apprehend the driver and the cleaner, we cannot tell what had happened in the vehicle, he added.
Sirisha reportedly told her father that she had seen Kalavathi fighting with the driver and cleaner in the vehicle before jumping off.
Based on the complaint by her relatives, we booked a case of suspicious death. If it is proved that she was molested during the investigation, we will add other sections of the IPC (Indian Penal Code) as well, the inspector said.
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A suspect who allegedly supplied arms for the killing of an RSS leader in Punjab managed to flee from a Ghaziabad village after locals fired upon a raiding team of National Investigation agency (NIA) and Uttar Pradesh police early on Sunday.
The joint team was following a lead in connection with the killing of religious leaders in Punjab over the last years.
During the raid, a large crowd of men and women tried to obstruct the local police and the NIA team. Some people in the mob started firing at the (police and NIA) parties. The firing was followed by stone pelting, the NIA said in a statement.
The mob also blocked roads at many locations. The UP Police and NIA personnel fired in the air in self defence.
A UP police constable Tahjib Khan suffered injury in his leg whereas an official vehicle was damaged in the incident.
The NIA has been entrusted with probe into the killing of RSS leader Ravinder Gosain in Punjabs Ludhiana in October.
Punjab police had arrested two accused Ramandeep Singh of Ludhiana and Hardeep Singh of Italy (his parents live in Amloh of Fatehgarh Sahib) for their involvement in the killing.
NIA, which took over the case and their custody later, had earlier said that the two were allegedly involved in eight previous incidents of murder or attempted murder in Punjab since January 2016, targets of which were religious leaders, primarily of the RSS or Hindu organisations.
The NIA had claimed that the murders were a larger conspiracy to destabilise Punjab and it was hatched by Sikh extremist elements based in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, United Arab Emirates and Pakistan.
During interrogation of the Punjab-based accused, names of some suspects from western Uttar Pradesh emerged for allegedly supplying arms.
The agency has been raiding various places in neighbouring Meerut district since Saturday night.
On getting more leads, a raid was conducted at the residence of suspect Malook (resident of Nahali village in Ghaziabad) on Sunday morning, when the locals fired upon them and pelted stones, NIA spokesman said.
He added that efforts were on to trace Malook, and two suspects are being questioned in this regard.
Rahul Gandhi is set to become the president of the Indian National Congress , taking over the mantle from his mother Sonia.
Gandhi , who was Congress vice president for the past five years, filed his nomination papers at the partys 24 Akbar Road headquarters in New Delhi on Monday. The Congress selects its president through an election, but it is not expected that anyone will challenge Gandhis nomination or file papers.
As Rahul comes of age in Indian politics, heres a look at his political journey so far:
Rahul was born in 1970, the first child of Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia and the grandson of Indira Gandhi. He and sister Priyanka have lived their entire lives under the spotlight. Rahul Gandhi was just shy of his 21st birthday when his father Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu in 1991.
Rahul attended The Doon School in Dehradun, Uttarakhand from 1981 and then joined St Stephens College in Delhi, before moving to the United States and then the United Kingdom for further education.
Politics wasnt Rahuls first calling. After he finished his M.Phil from Cambridge Universitys Trinity College in 1995, he worked at a management consulting firm in London for three years. When he returned to India, he started running his own strategy consultancy in Mumbai.
Indira Gandhi, with grandchildren Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi, paying homage to Jawaharlal Nehru at Shantivan on 27 May, 1981. (Virendra Prabhakar/HT archives)
Rahuls first foray into active politics was in 2004, when he contested the Lok Sabha elections from his fathers former constituency Amethi. He won his first election by over one lakh votes. Ever since his entry into politics, Rahul has had to contend with labels such as prince and political rivals have focussed on his dynasty to attack him.
In 2007, he was appointed the Congress general secretary. He also took charge of Indian Youth Congress and the National Students Union of India.
In this May 21, 2011 file photo, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi talks to son Rahul Gandhi during a memorial ceremony for husband Rajiv Gandhi on the former prime minister's 20th death anniversary in New Delhi. (HT Archives)
The first test of Rahuls political mettle came in 2009, when he campaigned for the Congress during Uttar Pradesh elections. The Congress, which had been struggling in the state, won 22 out of 80 seats, its best show in years.
But this victory was short-lived. Rahuls extensive tour of Bihar could not land Congress a victory in the state in the 2010 state elections, and the party managed a measly 4 out of 243 assembly seats.
In 2011, Rahul made national headlines when he took on the Mayawati government during the anti-land acquisition protests by farmers in Bhatta Parsaul. Gandhi dodged the police to enter the village, riding pillion on a farmers motorbike, and was arrested by the administration.
While Rahul wasnt officially helming the party, it was his strategies that the Congress followed in the 2012 Uttar Pradesh elections. But Gandhis high-profile campaign and tours of the state resulted in naught. The Congress suffered a crushing defeat.
A 2011 photo of Rahul Gandhi meeting with villagers in Chill village, Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. (HT Archives)
Gandhi studiously refused any cabinet position under both the terms of the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government. In 2013, Gandhi was appointed as the Congress Vice-President at a party conclave in Jaipur.
The 2014 general elections were Gandhis litmus test, but the incumbent Congress government faced a humiliating defeat as the BJP-led NDA claimed a landslide victory, winning 336 seats. The BJP won 282 seats by itself, the first time that a non-Congress party won a simple majority on its own.
The run-up to the elections were marked by a fierce contest. The BJPs party machinery painted Rahul as the shehzada, who was out of touch with reality, while Gandhi was bested by Narendra Modi when it came to communication skills. The Congress hesitation in making Rahul Gandhi the sole face of its campaign was seen as the partys reluctance to lay the blame of defeat squarely on his shoulders.
On February 23, 2015, the Gandhi scion took an impromptu 56-day break from politics, prompting missing posters with his face and name in Amethi. It also prompted a slew of political commentaries that saw Gandhi as a reluctant politician.
In April 2015, Rahul Gandhi addressed the Parliament on the issue of farmer crisis,calling the NDA a suit-boot ki sarkaar. In May the same year, Gandhis office opened a Twitter account, which now has a following of 4.68 million.
Rahul Gandhi delivered a speech at the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, California. (PTI)
The Congress vice-president has become more active of late. His speech at University of California, Berkeley, earlier this year garnered praise for Gandhis frankness in answering questions on dynasty and the BJPs economic policies. Gandhis astute use of his Twitter account , laced with humour and sarcasm,challenged Modi governments policies such as demonetisation and GST and increased the Gandhi scions social media following.
Rahuls elevation to the post of Congress president will mark his coming into his own. It seems that he is ready to emerge out of his mothers shadow, an allegation levelled at him by political opponents.
Rahul Gandhi, who is set to take over as the Congress president, faces the challenge of reviving and rebuilding the party ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
To execute his long-term plan, the 47-year-old Rahuls first task will be a revamp of the party. Congress leaders suggest he would go for an overhaul, completing a generational shift in the 131-year-old party brought about by his elevation.
His mother, Sonia Gandhi, who took over the reins of the party in March 1998, has served as the Congress chief for record 19 years.
He will have to ensure that the transition is smooth by striking a right balance between young leaders and the old guard, which in the past had some reservations about his style of functioning.
In his nearly five years as the Congress vice-president, Rahul had tried to open the party to end the heirloom politics but didnt make much headway.
As party chief, the Amethi MP would have the authority to bring about the changes. His training in Aikido Gandhi has a black belt in the Japanese martial art that lays emphasis on harmony will come in handy.
He also has to lead from the front to galvanise an otherwise demoralised Congress cadre struggling to recover after a series of electoral setbacks.
Though the change of guard is happening after two decades, Rahul is confronted with a situation almost similar to what his mother had faced when she took over in 1998.
Apart from internal dissensions, the party then was ruling just four states of Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Mizoram and Nagaland.
But in six years, Sonia brought the Congress back to the centre-stage of countrys polity and was instrumental in the partys victories in 2004 and 2009. At one point of time in her career, the Congress was in power in 15 states.
Nearly two decades later as the 70-year-old Sonia hands over the baton to Rahul, the Congress is again going through difficult times. Not only does it have the lowest ever representation in the Lok Sabha, the party is also ruling just six states Karnataka, Punjab, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Himachal Pradesh and Puducherry.
Rahul has long had the reputation of a reluctant leader, though some analysts say he has displayed greater political acumen since the 2014 election defeat.
A good show in Gujarat, where he is leading an aggressive campaign and has attempted a broad coalition of disparate caste groups, will not only give him a good start but also silence his detractors within the party.
Prime Minister Narendra Modis home state votes on December 9 and 14.
Next year, too, will test him. Retaining Karnataka and dethroning the BJP in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan will be a daunting task for him and the party before the big one the 2019 general elections.
The Congress national fortunes hinge on its revival in states but intense infighting coupled with indecisiveness to address the leadership issues is coming in the way of the revival push.
The party desperately needs to get its house in order in key states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and West Bengal, where it has ceded political space to rivals.
Reconnecting with the middle class, youth and common people who over the years have grown distant from the Congress has been on Gandhis agenda for a long time.
He has less than two years to make the Congress fighting fit to corner the BJP-led NDA government on critical issues and present it as in effective alternative.
With around 16 months left for the next Lok Sabha election, he will have to decide on alliances partners to prevent a division of the opposition vote that could help the BJP.
Stitching up alliances perhaps is his second biggest challenge after reviving the party.
Sonia, who turns 71 on December 9, enjoys a good rapport with other opposition parties. Crediting her with bringing together the United Progressive Alliance, CPM leader Sitaram Yechury described Sonia as the glue that bound the Congress as well as secular allies.
Rahul will have to be the Congress president, the glue and more.
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A PIL highlighting the violation of fundamental rights of leprosy-affected persons due to existence of archaic central and state laws prompted the Supreme Court to ask the Centre on Monday whether such provisions need to continue in statute books.
Filed by Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy (VCLP), the petition listed 119 laws that discriminate against leprosy patients and stigmatise them.
Such outdated provisions deny them access to public services, impose disqualifications on them under personal laws and prohibited them from occupying or standing for public posts or office, the plea said.
The seminal issue highlighted in the petition is in the third decade of 21st century. There is no justification to treat a person suffering from leprosy as a man to be kept away from the mainstream and suffer from ignominy that the disease is infectious or something to do with genetics.
With the discovery of modern medicine, the disease is curable, a bench led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra said, giving eight weeks notice to the Centre for placing its response.
VCLP supported its case by citing several provisions from various laws. One such is Section 13 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 that allows dissolution of marriage if one of the partners has been suffering from a virulent and incurable form of leprosy.
Similarly, Section 2 of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriage Act 1939 and Section 27 of the Special Marriage Act 1954, Section 18 of the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act 1956; Section 18 of the Jammu And Kashmir Hindu Adoptions And Maintenance Act 1960; Section 13 of the Jammu And Kashmir Hindu Marriage Act 1980 and Section 2 of the Jammu And Kashmir Dissolution Of Muslim Marriages Act 1999 perpetuate the stigmatization of those affected by leprosy.
The Orissa Municipal Corporation Act, 2003 disqualifies a leprosy patient from contesting the civil polls. Even the Rajasthan Panchayati Raj Act, 1994, has a provision that bars someone infected with the disease from fighting the elections for the post of a panch or any other member of the institution.
Section 35(2) of the Karnataka Rajya Dr. Gangubai Hangal Sangeetha Mattu Pradarshaka Kalegala Vishwavidyalaya Act, 2009, empowers the Syndicate of the University to remove those persons from membership of any authority of the University who suffers from leprosy. One of the objects of this law it to prevent transmission of the disease.
Some of the impugned provisions VCLP has quoted violate the right to move freely throughout the territory of India and the right to practise any profession.
Such restrictions, VCLP contended, are not reasonable restrictions in the interests of the general public, in the light of medical advancements in the treatment of leprosy that render the disease non-infectious.
Senior advocate Raju Ramchandran cited the Law Commissions 256th report that recommended the elimination of discrimination against persons affected by leprosy.
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A joint team of the CBI and ED was in London for the extradition hearing on Monday in a London court of beleaguered liquor tycoon Vijay Mallya, who is wanted in India over non-payment of bank loans and a case of fraud and money laundering.
Here are highlights:
5.25pm: Prosecution lawyer Mark Summers presents details of bank loans sought by Vijay Mallya from SBI, IDBI totalling Rs 2,000 crore. Internal appraisal notes of banks quoted.
4.55pm: Mark Summers, the lawyer for Crown Prosecution Service, begins to outline case against Vijay Mallya, alleges he misled banks in India.
4.40pm: Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot enters court, Mark Summers, lawyer for Crown Prosecution Service (for India), informs her of details about papers containing index and responses to witness statements.
4.25pm: Vijay Mallya enters court and sits in the dock. His legal team brings boxes of papers. Trial yet to begin; Mallyas bail ends today; magistrate Emma Arbuthnot expected to extend it.
4pm: Fire drill at Westminster magistrates court ends. Court to assemble soon.
3.40pm: Fire drill delays start of trial. Westminster magistrates court evacuated. Mallya, others wait outside.
3.23pm: Please listen to the proceedings before the court. I have nothing more to say, Mallya tells TV channels before the hearing
3.20pm: I have said repeatedly that these (allegations of fraud) are false, fabricated and baseless charges and that is my stand: Mallya
3.15pm: When asked why he went to the UK and did not stand trial in India, Mallya tells television channels outside the court: I have been living in England since 1992.
3pm: Vijay Mallya arrives in court.
2.50pm: According to a CBI official, the agency has submitted a 2,000-page dossier on Mallya, detailing how he cheated Indian public sector banks and diverted the loans taken for Kingfisher Airlines over the years.
2.24pm: Mallyas lawyer Clare Montgomery arrives at the court with documents. The trial will begin soon.
Vijay Mallyas lawyer waits outside the Westminster Magistrates Court on Monday. (Prasun Sonwalkar/HT Photo)
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Nearly a month after farmers in Jaipurs Ninder village buried themselves neck-deep in pits to protest acquisition of land for a housing project, farmers in Jhunjhunus Derwala village, have followed suit.
The district administration, however, has termed the protest as misplaced and politically motivated.
Fifty-one people from Derwala village, about 170km from the state capital, sat in 2ft deep pits for three hours on Sunday as a token protest against the municipal councils plan of setting up a biomedical and solid waste treatment plant in the village.
Its a religious spot. We have temples of Gogamedi and Balaji. Every year a religious fair is also organised here. Now waste from three districtsJhunjhunu, Sikar and Churuwill come here. Is it fair? asks Dinesh Sunda, president of Derwala Pahadi Sangharsh Samiti (DPSS), adding that there was a 200-year-old pond right next to the proposed site for the plant.
The three-hour protest was a saanketik Samadhi (token burial) and villagers, threatened bury themselves permanently if the government does not withdraw its orders.
Well go to any extent to oppose the orders, said Mahesh Kumar, a member of DPSS.
Well die but wont let the plant be set up here. People of thirty nearby villages are with us in the protest, he said.
More than 12 hectare of land was allocated by the district administration to the municipal council in April this year and the village panchayat objected, Kumar said.
The protesting farmers also carried out a mock death procession of the municipal council last week and are observing a 12-day shok sabha (mourning).
On December 8, the day on which the ruling BJP won the elections in the state four years back, villagers will carry out a narayan bali of the civic body and observe black day, Sunda said.
Municipal council chairperson Sudhesh Ahlawat, however, said the land belonged to the government and was not even acquired from the farmers.
Some people are stoking the protest for political reasons, he said.
The plant is situated 2 km from the village and will be a fully covered one, built with the latest technology at a cost of 20 crore, Ahlawat said, adding that villagers will get manure and electricity from the plant.
District collector Dinesh Kumar Yadav said the Supreme Court has issued directions for constructing waste treatment plants.
Where will the waste then go? Its in the greater interest (of villagers) but they are adamant, he said.
We are also willing to take them to a similar plant and dispel their apprehensions that it produces any kind of stench.
Tim Hinck will perform an Intimate Concert on the Solstice on Thursday, Dec. 21, at 7:30 p.m.
"The Winter Solstice is always an important time for me to refocus and recalibrate my mind and spirit," said Mr. Hinck. "It also seems that there is special power in the music of J.S. Bach for such a focused meditation."
There will also be white tea provided to enhance this meditation.
The concert will be at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, 848 Ashland Terr. Tickets are $5-$15 and available here.
A woman dentist in Rajasthans Kota called off her wedding after the man, also a doctor, who she was to marry demanded a dowry of 1 crore hours before the marriage was to be solemnized.
The father of the woman, Dr. Anil Saxena, a senior faculty member at the Kota Government Medical College and Hospital, said family members decided to call off the wedding late on Sunday.
Since guests, who were to attend the wedding ceremony, had arrived, the wedding feast was served. Once the guests finished dinner, we told them about the cancellation of the wedding, Saxena said.
The bridegroom and his family members from Uttar Pradeshs Moradabad, however, did not attend the wedding feast as they were earlier intimated of the wedding being called off, he said.
During the tilak or engagement ceremony on December 1, the girls family members had given jewellery worth 34 lakh and 21 lakh in cash to the bridegrooms family, which they refused to give back, sources in the womans family, said.
Saxena, family members said, requested the bridegrooms family members to return the jewellery and cash given during the tilak ceremony in a dignified manner but mans family members allegedly misbehaved and left the wedding venue in a huff.
Asked about calling off the wedding, Saxena said: The bridegrooms family members demanded for a huge dowry hours before the wedding on Sunday after which his daughter refused marry the man and the family members decided to call off wedding.
It is good that the wedding was not solemnized, he said.
God saved us as if the wedding would have been solemnized then the things could have been worse.
Saxena, however, rubbished offering cash worth 21 lakh during the engagement ceremony to the bridegrooms family members besides confirming the exact figure of the dowry demand made by the bridegrooms family members, saying it was huge dowry demand.
The brides father, late on Monday, lodged a police complaint against bridegrooms family members at Kotas Nayapura police station of Kota.
Confirming the lodging of the complaint, circle inspector of Nayapura police station Harish Bharti said police are probing into the complaint.
Doctors of Kota and other guests, who attended the wedding feast, appreciated the decision of the bride and her family members.
Former superintendent of government-run Kotas Maharao Bhim Singh Hospital Dr Vijay Sardana, a guest at the ceremony, said, It was a very bold move for any woman to take and which will certainly inspire society against dowry.
A recent report of the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) puts Rajasthan at number two position in the wildlife crimes, raising concern of the wildlife experts.
Of the 852 cases registered in the country under the Wildlife Protection Act in 2016, 190 cases were registered in Rajasthan alone. Uttar Pradesh (UP) topped the list with 302 cases. At least 1,722 people involved in the wildlife crimes were arrested last year in Rajasthan. While 214 of them were convicted, 110 acquitted. Others were let off after being fined.
The worrying factor, the wildlife experts said, was that several hunting cases go unreported. Though, they added that awareness about Scheduled Wildlife Species has increased in recent years, leading to higher registration of wildlife crimes in the state.
People have certainly become aware about wildlife protection and rise in registration of these (wildlife crime) cases has been noted in recent years, but several cases go unreported, said NS Rathore, former joint director of the Desert Regional Centre in Jodhpur, which works under the Zoological Survey of India.
Lalit Bora, the then forest officer who lodged the first information report (FIR) against actor Salman Khan in the blackbuck and chinkara hunting case, said that people have become more aware about the Wildlife Protection Act after cases were lodged against celebrities, which has led to the rise in registration of hunting cases.
The first message conveyed to the public after the registration of case against celebrities was that a stern punishment can be delivered under the Wildlife Protection Act, he said.
He said western Rajasthan, where majority of chinkara hunting cases take place, leads in registration of the wildlife crimes. People of the Vishnoi community, known for wildlife protection, lodge most of the cases.
Rathore, however, said that most of the hunting cases registered in western Rajasthan involve the hunting of chinkara, but there are some other wild species that are disappearing constantly.
There has been a considerable drop in population of species such as desert fox and desert monitor lizard, he said, adding that, Earlier these species were easily visible in the desert.
He said the registration of hunting cases in south-eastern part of Rajasthan is very low despite the fact that some particular communities in the area tend to hunt wildlife of scheduled species.
The West Bengal government has made insurance cover mandatory for all fair price shops in the public distribution system (PDS), popularly known as ration shops.
On November 21, the principal secretary of the state food & supplies department and the state food commissioner, Manoj Kumar Agarwal issued the order.
Read: Rajasthan govt partners with Future Group to manage PDS shops
West Bengal government is the first state government in India to make insurance coverage mandatory for all the fair price shops affiliated to it, state food & supplies minister, Jyotipriyo Mullick claimed.
There are 20,268 fair price shops throughout the state.
This year several dealers faced loss of stocks because of the floods. Mandatory insurance coverage will relieve the financial burden of the state government that is faced with the demands of compensating the dealers, said Mullick. However, he could not say the quantum of compensation that the government has to pay.
The rule will be applicable for both existing dealers as well as for future applicants for ration card license. For new applicants the clause for mandatory insurance coverage will be included in the application form. For existing dealers, the government will either cancel, or not renew, the license if they do not get insurance coverage policies within a specific period of time, Mullick said.
Read: Get Darjeeling tea, edibles from Jharkhand PDS stores soon
In the present system, the government has to compensate the dealers for the loss. Once the insurance coverage is obtained, the dealers can seek compensation directly from the service provider, the minister said.
Food department officials told HT that the dealers will have the liberty of choosing the insurance service provider. The premium has to be paid by the dealer, Mullick added.
Officials said the premium will be based on the estimated food items that the ration dealers will stock in a year.
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Two buffaloes belonging to former union minister of state for home affairs, Ram Lal Rahi and father of sitting BJP MLA, Suresh Rahi, were stolen from his farmhouse in Sitapur district, nearly 80 km from Lucknow on Friday-Saturday intervening night.
FIR LODGED Ram Lal Rahi is associated with the BJP and his son is MLA from the same party from Hargaon constituency. He was a minister during the Narasimha Rao government and remained MP from Mishrikh Lok Sabha constituency of Sitapur four times in the past. The veteran leader lodged an FIR of theft under IPC Section 379 with Sitapur city kotwali on Saturday and asked the police to find the stolen buffaloes.
Ram Lal Rahi is associated with the BJP and his son is MLA from the same party from Hargaon constituency. He was a minister during the Narasimha Rao government and remained MP from Mishrikh Lok Sabha constituency of Sitapur four times in the past.
The veteran leader lodged an FIR of theft under IPC Section 379 with Sitapur city kotwali on Saturday and asked the police to find the stolen buffaloes.
Inspector of Sitapur city kotwali, Dharmendra Singh Raghuvanshi said the complainant mentioned in the complaint that the two buffaloes worth Rs 1 lakh were stolen from his farmhouse in Hajipur locality behind Sitapur district jail. He said the complainant alleged that unidentified thieves stole the buffaloes after trespassing the farmhouse around 12 am on Friday-Saturday night.
Singh said initial investigation hinted at the involvement of someone familiar in the theft. He said the farmhouse workers were being questioned and efforts were on to crack the case.
In a similar incident on January 31, 2014, seven buffaloes belonging to the then minister of Samajwadi Party government, Azam Khan were stolen from his farmhouse in Rampur district. After the theft, three police personnel were suspended for dereliction in duty and the entire police force of Rampur was deployed for the recovery of buffaloes. The police had recovered the buffaloes within 36 hours while three persons involved in the crime were arrested after 18 months.
However, Ram Lal Rahi got annoyed when some news channel compared the two buffalo theft incidents. He even issued a press communique, raising objection over the comparison. He said the name of his MLA son was unnecessarily being dragged into controversy when he had lodged FIR in the matter.
A Samajwadi Party leader from Rasheed Nagar in Meerut was allegedly poisoned on Saturday night, when he went to meet voters after his wifes victory in the recent civic body polls.
Superintendent of police (city) Maan Singh Chauhan said Haji Shahid Abbasi was admitted to a nearby hospital in a critical condition. After his wifes electoral victory, Abbasi and his supporters visited the area to thank voters. That was when somebody offered him sweets laced with poison. He was admitted to the hospital, where he began vomiting blood, Abbasis brother Abid stated in his complaint filed at the Lisari Gate police station.
Abbasi was elected as the corporator of Rasheed Nagar on three previous occasions. The Samajwadi Party fielded his wife, Nazreen, after the seat was reserved for women candidates this time round.
The political leader had earlier created a controversy by protesting against the recital of Vande Mataram at nagar nigam house meetings. He was even accused of slapping a BJP corporator in the midst of a heated discussion, causing a commotion.
Lucknow: To give rural children a basic exposure to agriculture education, scientists of the Central Institute for Subtropical Horticulture (CISH) and several progressive farmers and teachers organised a sensitisation programme at the Golden Jubilee School in Lucknow on Sunday. Students of Nabi Panah village of Malihabad benefited through the initiative.
A team of scientists from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research-CISH and the locals attended the programme, which was organised to celebrate the Agricultural Education Day. The day is observed in the memory of Dr Rajendra Prasad who was the countrys first agriculture minister as well as the first president of independent India.
The students were informed about the various opportunities they could utilise by getting some fundamental level knowledge of the Indian agricultural system. They were also told about the different agricultural fields and organic farming methods.
Shailendra Rajan, director CISH, stressed on the importance of agriculture education in improving the health and the wealth of the nation.
Linking rural colleges with agriculture education is important for improving the influx of rural youths in agriculture colleges and universities. The field is gradually becoming attractive because of increasing job avenues, said a scientist.
Speakers also lauded the scheme Student READY (Rural Entrepreneurship Awareness Development Yojana) for providing undergraduate students practical experience in rural agriculture and knowledge about farming and allied sciences. Initiative like this help build the confidence and skills of students. They also help pass-outs become ready for self-employment. Besides, they give them opportunities to acquire hands-on experience and entrepreneurial skills, said a scientist.
The scientists said that armed with agricultural education and technical know-how, rural students could set up their own ventures in villages, which could be commercialised.
Opportunities for girl students were also discussed, as in many of agriculture universities, girls outnumber boys.
The participants were told that knowledge of farming could help them prepare for careers not only in agriculture departments, state agriculture universities, ICAR, but also in banks and various private companies.
The speakers also said that rural youths had an edge over their urban counterparts when it came to agriculture studies, as they were already familiar with the socio-economic conditions of farmers and their problems.
NGOs Awadh Aam Utpadak Bagwani Samiti and the Society for Conservation of Mango Diversity also participated in the event.
ICAR considers exposure to rural environment an important component of its bachelor programme, and rural agricultural work experience (RAWE) is a compulsory part of the course.
All the newly elected mayors of Bharatiya Janata Party will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Tuesday. This year, the party has won 14 out of 16 mayoral seats in Uttar Pradesh, while two have gone to the Bahujan Samaj Party.
The Prime Ministers meeting with the newly elected mayors is scheduled at 10.30 am. According to sources in the Bharatiya Janata Party, this meeting is significant because the Prime Minister wants to establish direct communication with the public representatives.
Mayor of Lucknow Sanyukta Bhatia has already met home minister Rajnath Singh, chief minister Yogi Adityanath, deputy chief minister Dinesh Sharma and deputy chief minister Keshav Maurya in the past two days.
Bhatia said she was excited at the prospect of meeting the Prime Minister and seeking his guidance to work for the development of the city. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been an inspiration for everyone who wants to work for the downtrodden. One can learn so much from his working style.He always keeps on working for the masses. All the mayors of the BJP will seek his blessings before assuming office, Bhatia said .
She said during her meeting with the home minister and chief minister, she had been assured about implementation of the 74th amendment to increase the powers of mayors .
Its a new responsibility for me but I can assure one thing: my doors are open for anyone who is facing any civic problem and I will respect every public representative who has been elected by the people, cutting across party lines, she said.
At a time when both rural and urban consumers are feeling the pinch of power tariff hike, the decision of Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited to give subsidy on 30,000 units to new upcoming airports in the state has come under fire from Uttar Pradesh Rajya Vidyut Upbhokta Parishad.
Chairman of the Parishad Avadhesh Kumar Varma said, The government has brought down subsidised power for rural areas from 150 units to just 100 units and reduced the subsidy from Rs 4 to Rs 3 per unit. But for new upcoming airports built for rich people, the government has decided to give subsidy of Rs 4 per unit on 30,000 units of power. This cannot be tolerated.
He said, Either the chief minister was not taken into confidence before taking this anti -farmer decision or he has been misguided on the issue of power tariff.
Varma said at a time when UP Power Corporation was recommending lesser use of geysers, heaters, coolers and air conditioners and was reducing limit of subsidy to just 100 unit for the poor, it was ready to give 30,00 units of subsidised power to the rich.
He said the Rajya Upbhokta Paarishad would not sit silent over the issue. It would take up the matter with appropriate authorities and meet the chief minister too.
However, a higher official of the UPPCL said, It is a policy decision to promote domestic connectivity in the country and for promotion of air traffic between smaller cities.
A priest at a prominent temple in Uttar Pradeshs Mirzapur district approached the state finance minister Rajesh Agarwal a few months ago with an unusual problem.
His bank was refusing to accept the coins, which the temple received as offerings from the devotees, without citing any plausible reason.
The minister directed the officer concerned to look into the issue and the problem was solved to the priests satisfaction.
But not everyone is as lucky as the priest.
Small traders, retailers and vendors throughout Uttar Pradesh are helplessly watching their stock of coins swelling as banks both public and private are turning them away.
Banks have imposed an undeclared ban on deposit of coins which has left small businessmen in a fix.
Traders are making representations and holding protests in various parts of the state while in some districts it has become a law and order issue.
Many vendors and auto-drivers are not accepting coins as they consider it illegal tenders.
We are facing problems as banks are not accepting coins. Our money has been blocked which is affecting trade, said president of UP Adarsh Udyog Vyapar Mandal Sanjaya Gupta.
He has earlier staged a demonstration at the Lucknow Collectorate and has also threatened to lay siege to the regional branch of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) if banks did not deposit coins of retailers.
Who will clear the air?
As confusion over the fate of coins continues, neither the Reserve Bank of India nor the government is doing anything to allay the concerns of traders.
Officials at RBIs regional branch in Kanpur refuse to speak anything on the record.
Do you know how many have lost their jobs for speaking to the media? RBIs Kanpur office is doing its bit. We have sternly asked the banks to accept coins. It they are not accepting coins, how can we force them? said an official on condition of anonymity.
He said only the main office in Mumbai was authorised to speak to the media.
When the HT mailed queries to the RBIs Mumbai office, the banks spokesperson Ajit Prasad sent a one-line reply saying Rs 10 coins were legal tenders across the country.
He did not reply to the query regarding the status of coins of other denominations and also why banks are not accepting Rs 10 and other coins if they are legal tenders.
Prasad also remained silent on the question if the RBI had issued any advisory to banks in this regard or proposed to take action against errant banks.
It is interesting to note that during demonetisation, the same banks had been forcing customers to take bags of coins when they went to exchange their old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes.
State general secretary of Laghu Udyog Bharti Ravindra Singh said he met RBI officials a number of times but they pleaded helplessness saying the central bank was a mere facilitator to the government of India that issued the coins.
Small businesses go for a toss
A number of products like toffees, match box, pencil, eraser and balloon cost less than Rs 5. Producers and traders who deal in such items receive a lot of coins every day.
More than 150 bread manufacturing units in Uttar Pradesh have big collection of coins because of which their working capital remains blocked.
Members of the UP Bread Manufacturers Association (UPBMA) recently came up with a list of more than 50 specific complaints with the name of firms that went to deposit coins and the branches of banks that did not entertain them.
However, no action was taken on any complaint.
In a desperate attempt to get their voices heard, a few traders triggered a controversy that grabbed media attention. (HT Photo)
Most of the banks are accepting coins worth Rs 1,000 only in a week, that too in current accounts. This has become a major problem for traders, said president of Akhil Bharatiya Udyog Vyapar Mandal Sandeep Bansal.
The market is flooded with coins. Where should we deposit coins? asked Suresh Chablani of Lucknow Udyog Vyapar Mandal.
Why were the coins issued in such a huge quantity if banks couldnt take it back? People think we are harassing them but think of the agony of traders. We cannot refuse coins from customers and banks are not accepting it, he said.
In Allahabad too, traders have accumulated several lakhs of rupees in coins and are finding it hard to deposit in banks or store it safely.
I have coins worth over Rs 1 lakh. I tried to deposit it in my bank account but the employees refused to accept it. Customers take some coins as change but other traders do not take it in bulk, said Sachin Jaiswal, a spice trader in Allahabads Mutthiganj area.
Matter of facts Kanpur being an industrial centre is the worst hit by the coin crisis in UP. Coins worth Rs 200 crore were pumped in by the RBI in Kanpur after demonetisation. Coins worth Rs 100 crore poured in through business from other states. On an average, every trader has coins worth Rs 6 lakh. Even beggars are requesting for currency notes as shopkeepers are not accepting coins from them. Currency notes of Rs 50 and Rs 200 denomination not in circulation as yet.
I get coins from customers but distributors and dealers want payments in currency notes of Rs 100 or above. Many people are also refusing to accept Rs 10 coins which do not have a Rupee symbol on it. There is a rumour that such coins are fake, said Ashish Gupta, who owns a paan kiosk in Civil Lines area.
A traders leader in Kanpur Gyanesh Mishra said: This currency is dumped with the people. I know many people who have coins worth Rs 10 lakh. No one knows what to do with it.
The RBI has issued instructions to banks to accept Rs 1,000 in coins every day against one current account. However, banks have created their own rules.
In Kanpur, when traders try to deposit coins, they are asked to go back and get them weighed as counting of coins is a tedious job.
The amount of Rs 1,000 in Rs 10 coins weighs 770 grams and traders have to give an undertaking that they would be responsible if the coins weigh less.
No bank has weighing machines. We get the coins weighed and then put a slip and give an undertaking, said Parikshit Mehrotra, a businessman on Mall Road.
Do we mint coins? Banks have thousands of reasons not to accept coins, said Yogesh Gupta, who runs a confectionary business.
In Kanpur, the RBI circulated coins worth Rs 200 crore post-demonetisation.
Law and order issue
The crisis has also led to a law and order problem.
Last week, two men were brought to Kanpurs Barra police station who threw blows at each other even as the policemen held them by their collars to control them.
One of them was left with a broken nose while the other had bruises all over his neck.
At the heart of their battle was a coin of Rs 10.
Krishna Kumar Singh, an employee with a private firm, bought paan masala from a betel shop owner Lalmani Nanku and gave him Rs 10 coin but he refused to take it and demanded a banknote instead.
After two hours, they had a patch-up and returned home. This was the third such incident in a week where people fought over refusal to accept coins, said station officer, Barra, Bhaskar Mishra.
The Kanpur police have attended to 25 cases of fight over coins.
As coins make regular transactions difficult, traders are holding protests on a regular basis. They have organised more than 40 demonstrations and have met all the authorities with no success.
In a desperate attempt to get their voices heard, a few traders triggered a controversy that grabbed media attention.
The wholesale traders of small items put up hoardings and posters likening Prime Minister Narendra Modi with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to highlight the deluge of coins affecting their businesses.
The posters came up on October 12, the day when chief minister Yogi Adityanath was in Kanpur to attend the state executive meeting of the BJP.
We wanted to draw the attention of the CM and others to our problems. We needed help, said Raju Khanna, the trader who put up the posters.
Khanna, along with 21 others, is underground as the police have suo motu registered a case against them.
A police sub-inspector Rajesh Awasthi lodged the FIR under sections 505 (conducing public mischief with statements), 153 (provocating with intent to cause riot) and 32 (3) of the UP Special Powers Act.
Superintendent of police, South, Ashok Verma said investigations were on in the case.
We have been agitating for eight months. It is hurting us badly now. If no solution is found out, we will stage a sit-in on the RBIs premises, said secretary Kirana Vyapar Mandal, Gopal Sardana.
Authorities take note, finally
The state government and legislators have finally taken note of the problem.
We have taken up the issue with the State-level Bankers Committee (SLBC) asking them to take action against the banks if there are specific complaints that they are not accepting coins, director, institutional finance, Shiv Singh Yadav said.
RBI guidelines clearly instruct banks to take coins from customers. (HT Photo)
He said coins were the currency of the government of India and nobody could refuse it.
Bharatiya Janata Party MLA from Chayal constituency in Kaushambi district Sanjay Gupta has also come forward to help traders in depositing coins in banks.
He announced a reward of Rs 5,000 to a person who shoots the video of bank employees refusing to accept coins as deposits. He has also promised strict action would be ensured against such employees.
Gupta himself visited several branches of various banks in his constituency and got the coins deposited in his presence.
RBI guidelines clearly instruct banks to take coins from customers. I have announced a cash reward if somebody shoots the video of bank officials refusing to accept coins. I will write to the RBI against such employees and lodge FIRs against them, he said.
--Inputs from Kenneth John, Brajendra K Parashar and Anupam Srivastava
Worli to Versova in 12 minutes? It may be possible soon.
The Maharashtra government on Monday gave the final nod to the proposed Versova-Bandra sea link (VBSL) project.
The final nod comes after the cabinet sub-committee on infrastructure, headed by chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, gave its go-ahead to the project in June.
The sea link is a crucial component of the coastal road project, which envisages connecting south Mumbai and the western suburbs by a series of reclaimed roads, tunnels and a sea links.
The proposed sea link will continue north-wards, from the Bandra-end of the 5.6-km Bandra-Worli sea link (BWSL).
The VBSL will also have a 30-m long cable-stayed section, similar to the BWSL. The sea link will have three connectors-- one at Otters Club, Bandra; second at Juhu Koliwada and the third at Nana Nani Park at Versova.
With this go ahead, the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC)-- the nodal agency for the project -- will commence the process to invite bids (request for proposal) for the construction of the sea link that is estimated to cost Rs7,502 crore.
The state-run MSRDC has already selected five qualified bidders -- Reliance-CGCD JV, Hyundai-ITD Cementation JV, CHEC-Soma JV, HCC-SKEC JV and L&T-Daewoo JV. We have shortlisted five consortia for the construction of VBSL. These processes were going on simultaneously while we were awaiting a go-ahead from the state government. The construction is expected to start by March 2018 and we expect it to be complete by 2020-end, said a senior MSRDC official.
Meanwhile, the state government also extended the concession period of the two sea links till 2052, which means motorists will now have to pay the toll on sea links till March 31, 2052. The MSRDC had sought to extend the toll collection period on BWSL, which was earlier till 2039, to raise funds for other projects including the VBSL. The MSRDC is going to raise funds for the sea link through domestic market. We have roped in SBI Caps to raise funds for the project. We had started the process much in advance so when the nod from the government comes, we are ready with our plan. The response from lenders is good, as we have a great track record, a senior official added requesting anonymity.
The MSRDC, however, is yet to get clearance from the forest department for the mangroves that need to be removed at the sites, where the three connectors are proposed. We are in advanced stages of discussion with the forest department. We will secure a clearance in a month, the MSRDC official said.
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The Chattanooga Department of Transportation (CDOT) is studying the possibility of converting downtown one-way streets back to two-way streets, and invites the public to a kickoff meeting on Thursday to learn more about the two-way conversion study, what streets are being studied, and how to be involved.
The meeting will be held at 5:30 p.m.
CDOT is exploring this possibility in response to citizen recommendations from downtown planning sessions including the Chattanooga Forward Downtown Task Force and the City Center Plan.
How does one convert conventional power utilities to digital ones? How does one improve the sanitation system? How can one create a sustainable agriculture model? These are some of the problems that students participating in Ideate, a competition that is part of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombays (IIT-B) annual technological extravaganza TechFest, are tasked with solving.
Ideate seeks to address some of the pertinent issues in society from a technological point of view. Students are required to come up with innovative and implementable solutions to these problems. The competition places students in real-life situations, said Anirudh Poddar, media manager, TechFest.
In keeping with the theme, the competition has been divided in three parts: digitalisation, biotechnology and sustainability. These are important sectors that are all facing very real problems in India, Poddar said.
In the first part, students are tasked with solving pressing problems in the health care, education, agriculture, and energy sectors through computerisation. This requires them to create prototypes of their idea. In the second part, participants have to harness biotechnology to achieve goals such as environmental conservation and sanitation.
In the final part, they find ways to lower costs and increase productivity in rural trades, including agriculture, using renewable energy sources.
Festival organisers said most of the problem statements presented to students are open-ended, allowing students to identify the problems themselves, and then seek solutions.
Participants can seek advice and guidance from lecturers at IIT-B as well as other colleges, and are also allowed to use the institutes laboratories to develop their prototypes. The mentors will check the abstracts submitted by students and guide them, Poddar said.
This year, the TechFest will be held from December 29 to 31. Students have already sent in their entries. After declaration of finalists, participants will get a chance to improve upon the prototype of their project by December 15. The teams will have to bring their prototypes to be judged and showcased at the event from December 29 and 31. Three participants from each of the three themes will be declared winners, who will be awarded prizes worth Rs3.2 lakh. IIT-B has received 284 entries this year, including participants from Iran and Bangladesh.
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The city recorded its highest 24-hour December rain in a decade after unseasonal showers lashed Mumbai on Monday, as a result of Cyclone Ockhi in the Arabian Sea.
The city recorded rainfall in December for the first time since 2014.
Between 5.30pm and 8.30pm, the Santacruz weather station, representative of Mumbai as a whole and suburbs, recorded 7mm rain, while Colaba, representative of south Mumbai, recorded 11.4mm.
While 1.5mm rain was recorded on December 13, 2014, traces of rain were recorded on December 20, 2009 and December 21, 2008. The all-time high rainfall for December was recorded on December 12, 1967 was 31.4mm.
The weather bureau has for Tuesday issued a heavy rainfall warning for Mumbai, Thane, Palghar and Raigad districts in north Konkan, Nandurbar, Dhule, Nasik and Jalgaon districts in north Madhya Maharashtra.
Mumbai witnessed a cloudy sky from Monday afternoon onwards. Light drizzles were reported in different parts of the city in the evening.
Under the weather departments classification, 15.6mm to 64.4mm of rain is considered moderate, 64.5mm to 115.5mm is heavy, 115.6mm to 204.4mm is very heavy and more than 204.5mm is extreme.
The cyclone is expected to weaken into a deep depression over south Gujarat and north Maharashtra coast, read a special weather forecast bulletin issued by the Mumbai weather department on Monday.
Cyclone Ockhi, which left behind a trail of destruction in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Lakshadweep Islands, is currently located over east central Arabian Sea, around 540km southwest of Mumbai and 720km south-southwest of Surat, Gujarat, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Monday.
The intensity of the cyclone is expected reduce from severe to deep depression to a depression as it moves northeastwards from its original location (at the same latitude of Goa over the Arabian Sea). Our prediction models indicate this depression or low pressure will bring heavy rain over the north Konkan coast and rain with higher intensity over the Gujarat region, said KS Hosalikar, deputy director general, western region, IMD. Rumours of a cyclone hitting Mumbai are absolutely incorrect and such false messages will only increase panic.
He added that the Mumbai coastline can expect high speed winds from Monday night onwards to Wednesday morning with speeds reaching 50-60 kmph gusting to 70 kmph. Strong surface winds reaching 25-35 kmph gusting to 45 kmph are likely over inland areas of north Konkan and north Madhya Maharashtra, said Hosalikar.
Meanwhile, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) issued a separate warning for the city from Monday to Thursday (December 4-7) wherein an alert was raised for people living close to the sea, specifically Shivaji Park, Dadar areas and Cadell Road, Mahim. Owing to the warnings related to cyclone Ockhi, there will be increased wave action in these regions and water might come onto the promenade areas and onto the road. On December 6, Ambedkar Jayanti, a huge crowd is expected at Shivaji Park, Dadar. They will need to take precautions and avoid going close to the sea, read the BMC warning issued on Monday.
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The Shiv Sena released its election manifesto for the Gujarat Assembly polls on Sunday evening in Ahmedabad, highlighting its agenda, Hindutva is nationalism and criticising the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Gujarat.
The Sena projected itself as an alternative to the BJP, with whom it shares power in Maharashtra and at the Centre.
Promising 24x7 electricity and water supply in each district, as well as better roads and employment, the Sena manifesto attacked the Gujarat government saying that it has done nothing for the poor as it has been busy helping select rich people. The current government had promised to fulfil peoples basic needs, but their priorities have changed. It has abandoned the poor and is busy giving to a few rich ones, the manifesto, which is printed in Gujarati, read.
The Sena is contesting 65 seats in the two-phase polls, scheduled for December 9 and December 14. With ties between the saffron parties having soured in the past few years, the Senas decision to contest these polls is being looked upon as a strategy to hurt the BJPs chances. Having ruled the state for 22 years, the BJP is already dealing with anti-incumbency.
On Sunday, the Sena also attacked the BJP over the Centres Swachh Bharat programme. The BJP has made Swachh Bharat Abhiyan its priority and has spent huge sums for its advertisements. However, the ground reality is different. Look at the state of the villages in the state. Instead, the government has levied cess for the cleanliness programme. The Shiv Sena is the only alternative to change this situation, the party declared in its manifesto.
Apart from the Hindutva agenda, the Sena focused on rural Gujarat, alleging that the state government has failed to make villages self-sufficient, or provide proper amenities. The condition of hospitals in Gujarat is poor and they lack adequate staff, including doctors, the manifesto claimed. Shiv Sena will change the face of rural Gujarat. It has always fulfilled its promise, and has always stood by the people, it said.
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The state government has tied up with the United Nations (UN) to launch the Human Development Mission (HDM) in 25 tehsils in 12 districts with the lowest human development index.
Besides expertise in agribusiness, data analysis, value chain and marketing, the UN is also expected to fund the poverty alleviation programme in these tehsils.
The planning department of the state government will launch the HDM in Armori, Dharni, Patur, Nagbhid, Tusmar and other tehsils of backward districts including Chandrapur, Amravati, Akola, Gadchiroli, Jalna, Nandurbar, in the upcoming weeks.
The monthly per capita expenditure of the households in these tehsils ranges between Rs1,121 and Rs2,307. The programme will be spread across 125 tehsils next year and will cover all 358 tehsils in three years.
In addition to the budgetary allocation of Rs75 crore made for the HDM in July this year, the state government approached the UN for its assistance in achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs). After sharing data on poverty, agriculture and monitoring through its dash board, the UN recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the government.
From improving medical facilities and ensuring quality of education to doubling farmers income by 2020, the government has identified the areas to tap under SDGs. We expect 22 UN organisations to help us with their expertise in upgradation of the primary health centres, Industrial Training Institutes and establishing marketing linkage. The UN experts will be camped in the war room set up in the new administrative building, said an official from the planning department.
The planning department has roped in four UN experts to work with three interns from the chief ministers office with expertise in marketing, market analytics and IT.
According to officials, besides Maharashtra, the UN is also expected to include Manipur and Rajasthan in its funding for the livelihood programme next year.
The state government has also tied up with the Mysore-based Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI) for sharing 400 technologies in food processing, agricultural produce packaging. After studying the cropping pattern and horticulture data, the CFTRI has assured it will set up 75 common facility centres in the 25 tehsils.
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The Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) will soon arrive at your doorstep to know your commute patterns as it aims to improve the transport system.
To update its comprehensive transportation study (CTS), the MMRDA has appointed consultants LEA Associates South Asia Pvt Ltd and Krish Enterprises to interview 5,000 families living in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR).
People will be asked about their socio-economic condition, commute patterns, household size, location of work or study and daily trips.
A senior official from MMRDA said, The success of the study depends on the qualitative of the data. Therefore, we appeal to citizens to co-operate with the survey.
The CTS was last undertaken between 2005 and 2008. The MMRDA needs to update the study every 10 years to initiate infrastructure projects as per the growing needs of the MMR. Satellite cities such as Navi Mumbai, Thane, Virar, Vasai and Bhiwandi are likely to be the focus of the study this time with a growing population migrating there.
The 2005-2008 CTS had suggested major projects such as the passenger water transport system, the Mumbai Trans Harbour link (MTHL) from Sewri to Nhava-Sheva, southward connectivity up to Colaba using Bandra-Worli Sea link, the eastern freeway, improvement to Thane-Ghodbunder Road, and capacity addition to Metro, suburban railways system and highways in a phase-wise manner.
It had proposed to build 435 km of Metro network, 1,740 km of highway network and 248 km of the suburban railway by 2031 in a planned and phased manner.
However, various agencies are lagging behind in implementing these suggestions.
The water transport system, MTHL and extension of the sea link are yet to take off.
The current CTS will also focus on short, medium and long-term goals.
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In an attempt to prevent floating trash from Mumbais polluted rivers from entering the sea, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is planning to install river debris booms in four rivers in the city. Officials said it would be a pilot programme to determine the effectiveness of the booms.
Built for use in both moving and still waters, floating booms help contain floating materials that have to be cleared during river clean-up jobs. These booms are typically placed above the river and go one metre under the sea.
These booms will prevent materials such as bottles and plastic bags from entering the sea. Workers will be deployed where the booms are placed to clear the floating debris that the booms collect , a senior civic official, who did not wish to be named, told HT.
These booms will be placed at the very polluted Oshiwara, Mithi, Dahisar and Poisar rivers. The placement of the booms will depend on the exact location where the river debris tends to accumulate, the official said. The floating barriers may include different components to suit the requirements of still and moving water.
Speaking to HT, Vijay Singhal, additional municipal commissioner, said: This is in the planning stage, and once we prepare a concrete plan, it will likely be executed.
Another official said the BMC will also deploy a machine that will remove pollutants from the river directly, and will be used at places where the rivers meet the sea.
Noise levels during this years Mahim Fair (Mahim Dargah Urus) on Sunday were as loud as a thunderclap at 122.5 decibels (dB), making it the loudest festival this year and the loudest Mahim Fair in five years, said anti-noise activists.
Police said they booked a group of Dharavi residents as they were violating noise norms.
On receiving complaints, we filed an FIR against the group that had come from Dharavi, issued them a notice, and confiscated their instruments. We will now submit these details in court, said Milind Idekar, senior police inspector, Mahim police station.
The 10-day annual festivals inaugural procession begins at Mahim police station, with officers carrying an offering of sandalwood paste, perfume, flowers, silver utensils and a silk chaddar honouring Sufi saint Makhdoom Ali Mahimi at his dargah.
NGO Awaaz Foundation filed complaints at the Mahim police station after members of a procession staged around 4.15pm at Cadell Road used loudspeakers and drums. While decibel levels were high, the noise was stopped within 10 minutes of my complaint. It was unclear whose procession it was, said Sumaira Abdulali, convener, Awaaz Foundation. I recorded noise levels at the same road around 7pm and there were no loudspeakers or drums audible, she added.
Mahim residents said a police procession kept making loud noise till 9pm on Sunday. After Abdulalis complaint, the noise stopped between 6am and 7am. From 7am onwards, the police, and a few others staging a procession, used loudspeakers, drums, and banjos for a long time, said Zafar Khan, Mahim resident.
The police, however, said they did not use loudspeakers or any musical instruments and were only singing.We warned two other processions, which stopped playing music immediately, said Idekar.
A week before the fair, we told police to take precautionary measures to ensure noise levels were not breached. However, noise levels were still above 120dB, said Farooque Dhala, a resident.
Last year, the Mahim Fair registered 117.3 dB from a police procession close to the police station. On May 24, ruling that no breach of noise pollution norms in the city will be tolerated, no matter what the occasion, the Bombay high court issued show-cause notices of contempt against the senior inspector of the Mahim police station, and assistant commissioner of police (ACP) Mahim division, for using loudspeakers inside the police station compound during the fair.
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When Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL) security officer Akshay Gaikar, 24, told Sahar police he had found a threatening letter from ISIS in a toilet at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport last week, they swung into action immediately. On Sunday, they found that it was Gaikar himself who had planted the note and arrested him.
Sahar police said Gaikar is a resident of Bhandup (East). He was hired through a private security agency. He got the idea for his plan after he saw a video of someone pulling the same stunt.
An airport official, who did not wish to be identified, told HT that Gaikar had issues with his seniors.
He wanted to ensure an increased police presence at the airport and so planted the note, the official added.
On Wednesday evening, he used gum to stick the threatening note on the toilet seat. The note, written in marker, said ISIS would attack the airport anytime on January 26, 2018.
After leaving the note, Gaikar alerted officials and so was thus made the complainant in the polices case.
A short while later, security forces visited the spot. The cargo was cleared and a Bomb Detection & Disposal Squad searched the airport, but did not find anything suspicious.
Police examined CCTV camera footage and saw Gaikar leaving the security control room with a marker and a piece of paper. He was produced before a magistrate court on Sunday and remanded in judicial custody. His bail application will be heard on Monday. He will spend the night in Arthur road jail, said officials.
Police registered a case against him under section 506 (2) for criminal intimidation and 505 (b) (statements conducing to public mischief with intent to cause, or which is likely to cause, fear or alarm to the public, or to any section of the public whereby any person may be induced to commit an offence against the state or against the public tranquillity) of the Indian Penal Code.
Shiv Sena leader and minister of state for dairy development Arjun Khotkar will not be eligible to vote in the state council by-election, to be held on Thursday.
Election officials said he would not be able to vote as 10 days ago, the Bombay high court ruled that Khotkars election as a member of legislative assembly (MLA) from Jalna was null and void.
Khotkars election was annulled by the Aurangabad bench of the high court for having filed his nomination after the deadline was over for the 2014 elections, after Congress candidate Kailash Gorantyal challenged his election.
Khotkar has already moved Supreme Court in appeal, but he has not yet got a stay on the order.
As there is no order by the apex court, we will abide by the high court order that says that Khotkar is no longer an MLA. He, therefore, will not be allowed to cast his vote on Thursday, said an official from state legislature, who did not wish to be named.
Anant Kalse, principal secretary, state legislature, said the case has been referred to the Election Commission of India for more clarity.
Khotkar said he is aware that he cannot vote in the council by-election. The petition filed in the SC is up for hearing on December 8, a day after the election. As the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena candidate Prasad Lad is in a strong position, I have not insisted on getting permission to vote, he told HT.
Two NCP leaders unlikely to vote
Meanwhile, two Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MLAs, Chhagan Bhujbal and Ramesh Kadam, who are in prison on charges of corruption, are also unlikely to cast their votes.
Bhujbals bail plea will be up for hearing on Tuesday, and if approved, he is likely to be free to vote. Kadam has not sought permission from court, said an NCP leader, requesting anonymity.
Both Bhujbal and Kadam had voted in the presidential election held five months ago, with permission from court.
The Noida, Greater Noida and Yamuna Expressway industrial development authorities have assured the three-member ministerial committee delivery of 32,525 flats to homebuyers by end of this month.
On Monday, top officials from the authorities apprised the three-member ministerial committee, looking into homebuyers issues, on Monday at a meeting held to review the progress on delivery of flats in stuck housing projects. The two-hour meeting was held at the India International Center in New Delhi.
The December-end deadline was set by Uttar Pradesh chief minister after he constituted the ministerial panel to look into homebuyers issues and revive stuck housing projects after homebuyers had complained of non-delivery of flats despite several years of delay.
The committee, which comprises of state industries minister Satish Mahana, urban housing minister Suresh Khanna and minister of state for industry and sugar mills Suresh Rana, had earlier warned builders that they will either deliver flats by December-end or go to jail.
Atal Kumar Rai, additional CEO of the Noida authority, said, Officials from the three authorities explained to the committee how flats will be delivered to homebuyers. The three authorities gave a detailed report about the status of flats and their delivery to the committee.
The Noida authority assured the committee that different builders are scheduled to deliver 11,000 flats; the Greater Noida authority promised to deliver 14,000 flats in various housing projects under its jurisdiction; the Yamuna Expressway industrial development authority told the committee that it will deliver 7525 flats by December end.
Arun Vir Singh, chief executive officer of the YEIDA, said, We are set to deliver 2,827 flats in different schemes launched by the authority in 2012. Some 4,698 flats will be delivered by builders who have projects along the Yamuna Expressway in urban areas developed by us.
However, Mondays update not only left the ministers miffed, but also angered citizens, who complained that these flats are not even in the critically stuck housing projects that were supposed to be revived.
Homebuyers said that these figures are of those builders whose projects were nearing completion.
The committee and officials talk of flat delivery in housing projects that were not stuck. The ministers committee has failed to revive projects that have remained in the deep for years and because of which thousands of homebuyers have been losing sleep, a homebuyer, Rajiv Singh, said.
Builders claim they have failed to complete some projects because of financial crisis, accentuated by the dip in realty sector. Homebuyers, however, allege that the fund shortage was created because builders diverted funds collected from them against flats.
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British climber James Pearson has made the first ascent of the "bold and difficult" Power Ranger at Sunset Rock, planetmountain.com reported.
Mr. Pearson has been traveling around the world for over a decade tacking the most difficult climbs.
The quest has led "initially from his home in the gritstone outcrops in the Peak District to the rest of the British Isles, then to France, Italy and as far as Chad, Japan and South Africa," the article says.
The 32-year-old has just returned from what he described as the "quite simply awesome" Power Ranger ascent.
The article says, "The route owes its uniques to its physical and psychological difficulties - run-out 5.14 R / 8c trad routes are still extremely rare - but also to the innate beauty of the actual climbing.
A bold but relatively easy lower wall leads to a good rest, before launching into the headwall with its intense and unforgiving moves. Long powerful reaches lead into an intricate and delicate crux, and then past a run-out power endurance sequence to the top."
It says Mr. Pearson "first tried the line last February and immediately became obsessed with this 'beautiful flowing sequence' " so he returned this fall with his wife Caroline Ciavaldini for the free ascent.
He commented, This route is beautiful - a single line of holds up an otherwise blank wall. No way around, no way to cheat, you get only what nature has given. The moves are powerful, yet delicate, with an obvious crux but also the chance to fall on any move. The gear is good, the run-out quite big, and provided you fall in a controlled way you should be ok, yet the climbing is awkward, the rope runs behind your legs, and falling off the upper moves would send you exactly in the direction you dont want to be! I never fell off the last few moves so I cant say for sure. Perhaps it is safe, perhaps not only time will tell.
A 53-year-old businessman was killed and his friend and business aide was critically injured when armed assailants shot at the duo in Sector 71 on Saturday night. The two were attacked when they resisted the assailants attempt to rob them.
The deceased was identified as Shri Niwas and his friend was identified as Vicky Gupta, both residents of Sadarpur Village in Sector 45.
The duo would supply polythene carry bags to vendors in the market and collect money in the evening.
On Saturday, Niwas and Gupta were on their way home after collecting cash for the days supply when they were attacked. They were on a motorcycle, with Gupta riding the bike and Shri Niwas on pillions seat, police said, adding that they were carrying the cash in a bag.
Soon, four men started following them on two motorbikes. They intercepted the duo in a service lane behind Metro apartments in Sector 71, police said.
The assailants told Gupta and Niwas to hand the bag over, but the duo refused and confronted the men. Soon, a heated argument ensued and the assailants shot at Gupta, who suffered a bullet injury on his right arm and fell off the bike. Shri Niwas jumped off the bike and ran with the bag of cash, police said.
Niwas was chased by the unidentified assailants for around 300 metres when they opened fire at him. He was shot in back and died on the spot, police said, adding that the assailants fled with the bag of cash.
The incident came to light when Gupta managed to call his family members, who then called the police.
A police team rushed to the spot and took Gupta to Om Hospital in Sector 66.
Following the incident, family members, relatives and villagers of Gupta and Niwas staged protested outside the mortuary in Sector 94. They raised slogans against the police, protesting the alleged delay in response time. The protest continued for half an hour; the group said they would take to the streets if the case is not promptly solved.
A case of murder and robbery was registered at Phase-3 police station against unknown men.
Refuting allegations of late response, Akhilesh Pradhan, SHO, Phase-3, said, We immediately rushed the duo to hospital after receiving information. It was important for us.
Pradhan said, The injured man could not tell us about the direction in which the criminals fled or how much money they had kept in the bag. We recovered 70,000 from the deceased and 10,000 from the injured. The matter is being investigated. As of now, there is no clue about the suspects.
Robbery turns to murder:
Sept 30:A 22-year-old man was shot at after he resisted robbery by two armed men in Sarfabad village of Noida.
Sept 16: A businessman was shot dead in broad daylight by two persons on a bike on Taksal Road in Noidas Sector 78. The duo attempted to snatch the mans bag and opened fire when he resisted.
Sept 6: A 45-year-old security guard was shot dead when he tried to stop armed robbers from entering a bungalow in Sector 44.
Aug 13: A 22-year-old civil services aspirant died after he was shot at by motorcycle-borne assailants in Greater Noida. The assailants were trying to steal his car.
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This Christmas Eve, it will be known as to who succeeds J Jayalalithaa as member of the Tamil Nadu Assembly from the Dr Radhakrishnan Nagar constituency. But the void her death, on December 5, 2016, has created in the states political arena will persist and the future of All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the party she spearheaded for close to three decades and led it to victory in four assembly elections, continues to hang in balance.
Although Jayalalithaa left the AIADMK not just as the ruling party in the state but as the third-biggest party in Lok Sabha with 37 members and the fourth in Rajya Sabha with 13 members, its inheritors have been caught floundering in asserting the states rights and standing up to the Centre a trait of Jayalalithaa that had endeared her to the masses.
So when the state government meekly gave up on the fight against NEET (National Eligibility Entrance Test) for medical college admission, ignoring popular sentiment, and when it led to the suicide of medical aspirant Anita, the people missed Jayalalithaa, recalling how she had opposed the Centres bid to impose its modes of admission in the state. Of course, her loss was felt much earlier. First when the Marina was under siege over Jallikattu and then when the protest was brought to a cruel closure. The popular perception was that Jayalalithaa would not have allowed an uprising like that to fester and prolong for such a long time and then she would definitely not have let loose the police on young people so brutally.
Even when the Centre brought in the Goods and Services Tax (GST), amidst the widespread resentment, there was a reminder of Jayalalithaas opposition to it. In fact, social activists, who probably were not on the same page as her when she ruled the state, lament the passing of a plethora of central legislation that Jayalalithaa had opposed with the AIADMK giving its nod after her hospitalisation in September 2016. They squarely blame it on the inefficacy of the team that has inherited Jayalalithaas mantle.
The present leadership of the party, after the farcical display of unity by the Edapadi Palaniswami faction and the O Panneerselvam faction, and the subsequent dismissal of the Sasikala-Dinakaran group, inspires little confidence. The absence of Jayalalithaa is constantly evident in the clueless statements by the ministers, and in dim-witted ideas like covering a reservoir with thermocol to prevent water from evaporating. Instances of the governor meddling with administrative matters with impunity led to speculation of the Centres role in state matters. All these were reminders of Jayalalithaas absence.
Perhaps her loss would have been compensated if her political bete noire, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagams M Karunanidhi, had been active, at least if his wit and sarcasm was sharp. His absence due to illness accentuated the sense of emptinessa void which suddenly caught the attention of many, especially the stars from filmdom. Of course the stars, mainly Rajnikanth and Kamal Haasan, linger around with hope and expectation, though the popular perception is that they are mere pretenders to the throne. Also, none of these stars appear interested in cultivating a political base from the grassroots; they aim for the throne at Fort St George.
The most recent from Kollywood to move in this direction is actor Vishal, the president of the general secretary of the actors federation and president of Tamil Film Producers Council. His foray into the RK Nagar electoral arena is a response to a perceived popular disillusionment over the lack of a powerful icon helming the states politics. It is a different matter that Vishal, or for the matter his seniors Rajnikant and Haasan, will not be able to fill the political vacuum caused by Jayalalithaas demise.
The BJP, too, is not a worthy contender at the moment. Apart from its local leaders regularly failing to gauge public sentiments, it is difficult for them to overcome the wave of antipathy in the state that has not collectively come out of the Dravidian ideological grip completely. The AIADMK, by letting itself to be seen as a stooge of the BJP, has shot itself in the foot, giving the DMK a leg up.
So really, all eyes are on the developments that will unfold later this month.
G Babu Jayakumar is a Chennai-based senior journalist
The views expressed are personal
Police in Bhabua town in southwest Bihar are on high alert after an objectionable WhatsApp message sparked communal tension on the eve of Babri Masjid demolition anniversary.
Prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), that bans assembly of more than four people, has been imposed in the town till further orders by the Kaimur district administration as a precautionary measure.
The trouble started when a group of people, hurt by the WhatsApp message, blocked the main road at Ekta Chowk and attacked a house at Purana Chowk in the town on Monday.
The mob forcibly entered the house of Shambhu Halwai, allegedly assaulted men and women, damaged utensils, furniture and belongings and looted valuables. Family members said a boy of the family was married on the Sunday night and the newlywed bride had just arrived at the house with gifts and valuables when the attackers ransacked the house.
READ| Internet services suspended after tension grips Bihars Nawada
A police team, led by superintendent of police (SP) Harpreet Kaur, rushed to the locality and dispersed the mob after using mild force. Kaur later visited Halwais attacked house, met the family and assured them security and action against attackers.
Five alleged attackers had been arrested and the minor boy, who allegedly posted the objectionable matter, detained for interrogation, Kaur said, adding that the arrested men were being sent to jail.
Police had been deployed at all sensitive places and the situation was under control, Kaur said.
READ| Tension in Madhubani village over Shivling dispute, 1 killed
The police were examining the video footage to identify the other attackers, the SP said. Those found guilty of creating trouble would not be spared, she added.
Bhabua, the headquarters of Kaimur district, 197 km southwest of state capital Patna, has no history of any major communal strife in the past.
Over a month after Punjab government withdrew the essentiality certificate from the Chintpurni Medical College, Pathankot, owned by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Swaran Salaria, on November 3, students are yet to be shifted to other government medical colleges as promised.
To take up the issue, over 90 students and their parents protested outside the headquarters of the Medical Council of India (MCI) in New Delhi on Monday, demanding early shifting of students to other colleges.
Members of their delegation also met officials of the health ministry, the MC and the oversight committee that the Supreme Court has formed in the case. The Punjab government says it has sent a proposal for approval to the MCI to shift all 249 students that took admission over various years. Sources said the Punjab government had also sent a reminder to the MCI.
What is the issue?
The college started admissions in 2011, in spite of the fact that the medical education regulator, the Medical Council of India (MCI), did not grant it the mandatory approvals. The 2011 batch of 150 students had earlier moved the Punjab and Haryana high court and have since been shifted to other colleges, students of 2014 and 2016 batches face a bleak future. On April 26, 2016, these students moved the high court seeking to shift to other colleges in the state claiming that their institute is short of infrastructure
On September 8 this year, the Punjab and Haryana high court had directed the state government to shift all students of 2014 batch of Chintpurni Medical College to other medical colleges across the state within two months.
File is now with the oversight committee
Even as state government sources had claimed, in the first week of November, that the process of shifting of students would be completed within a fortnight, nothing has moved since. After the essentiality certificate of the college was withdrawn, students have been sitting at home since November 1. Their pre-final exams are pending, said Dr Sushil Garg, member of Parents Welfare Association of the college, formed to take up the students cause.
He added, We want that the oversight committee must consider our case on priority and give its approval order to the state government and the MCI for early shifting of students.
MCI secretary Dr Reena Nayyar said, We considered the proposal of the Punjab government in our executive committee and sent it to the oversight committee. As soon as we receive comments from the oversight committee, the matter will be communicated to the health ministry. Dr Sanjay Srivastav, secretary, oversight committee, said, We have received the reports on Friday and will consider it in the coming days.
It is an irony that creations of a man as self-effacing as Pierre Jeanneret are now being appropriated by celebrities who love the limelight. From the pages of Vogue to the houses of French designers and Hollywood stars, the name Pierre Jeanneret is associated with furniture as classy as it is functional.
The V-legged chairs, ubiquitous in government offices of Chandigarh, now find a pride of place in the dining room of reality star Kourtney Kardashian. The celebrated French architect, Joseph Dirand, a favourite with fashion houses, goes into raptures as he describes the chair, Its so simple, so minimal, so strong. Put one in a room, and it becomes a sculpture.
Fifty years after his death, Jeanneret, the first chief architect of Chandigarh, is finally coming out of the shadows of his cousin Le Corbusier, and getting the tributes he deserved even then, way back in the 1950s, when he so painstakingly built Chandigarh.
OBSCURITY TO FAME
His journey from obscurity to fame began with some French art collectors, who descended on the city in the 1990s and found his chairs heaped in junkyards across Panjab University and the Secretariat. Later, the scrap they acquired for a song, was auctioned for crores across Europe.
Earlier this year, a set of six armchairs designed for Tagore Theatre fetched Rs 41.83 lakh at an auction in London, while an office teak table meant for the Secretariat went for Rs 24.97 lakh.
In 2013, Amie Siegel, a film director, made a film, Provenance, describing the journey of Jeannerets furniture from its rejection in the city of its birth the film shows heaps of chairs lying discarded to its resurgence in Europe.
Jasbir Singh, an engineer and interior designer, says Swedish giant Ikea was among the first to take inspiration from Jeanneret. His furniture was ahead of its time. He followed the principles of ergonomics when few had heard of them. His furniture is simple yet stylish and comfortable. See how easy the chairs are on your back, says Singh.
Jeanneret worked on the principle that furniture lives with us and grows old with us. He realised that a wrong piece of furniture could give you a wrong posture. Thats why his V-legged office chair has an upright back unlike the lounge chair shaped like a kangaroo, which allows you to relax while supporting your spine.
MASTER IMPROVISER
Sangeeta Bagga, principal of Chandigarh College of Architecture, says with an eye on government servants with transferable jobs, Jeanneret made furniture that could easily be dismantled. He was also a master at improvising with local material. He made a table of bricks with a wooden slab on top. He would invert a tasla (a labourers wok) and use it as a table lamp, she says.
The foot architect of Chandigarh also kept the local weather in mind. While Indians were happy to embrace the stuffy, upholstered sofas that the British brought with them from their cold climes, Jeanneret introduced them to airy furniture made of humidity and bug-resistant teak with cane weave.
Its a testimony to the great artist that while fashions come and go, his furniture has not only endured but has also become more stylish with time.
Sivakarthikeyans speech at the audio launch of Velaikkaran, directed by Mohan Raja, was one of the major highlights of the event, which was organized on a lavish scale in Chennai on Sunday evening. Speaking on the occasion, Siva recalled how the project materialized in the first place. Ive never approached any director for an opportunity. For the first time in my career, I went to a director (Mohan Raja) and expressed my interest to collaborate because of the impact Thani Oruvan had on me. People see Mohan sir as someone most suitable for doing remakes, but not many know the challenges associated with a remake. I might have turned ten remake offers because I knew I cant do justice to the original.
The film, gearing up for release later this month, is produced by RD Raja of 24 AM Studios. Heaping praise on his producer, Sivakarthikeyan said: Velaikkaran is the brainchild of Raja sir and the entire team worked having placed full faith in him and the content. Raja sir deserves all the appreciation I get for my performance and character. Velaikkaran marks the Tamil debut of Malayalam actor Fahadh Faasil. Talking about the association of working with Fahadh, a proud Siva said: Hes an international actor and I can openly admit this anywhere. To share screen space alongside him helped me perform even more effectively. Weve become good friends and I continue to learn from him. Itll be a special role and special film for him.
On pairing up with Nayanthara for the first time, Siva said that he met her for the first time on the sets of Ajiths Aegan. Arunraja and I were supposed to play small roles in Aegan, and its on the sets of this film we saw Nayanthara. She then made a brief appearance in a song in my film Ethir Neechal. The next time I saw her was only on the sets of Velaikkaran. One thing that hasnt changed about her in all these years is her punctuality. This is precisely why she has established a market for herself, he added.
The film has music by Anirudh Ravichander and it marks his fifth collaboration with Sivakarthikeyan. Without mincing words, Sivakarthikeyan said: When I read memes that theres no Sivakarthikeyan without Anirudh I cant be happier. He has supported me so much through his music and has played a pivotal role in my growth.
At the event, Siva caught the audience off guard when he made a breaking statement. He said he wont endorse any brand or be part of any advertisement in the future. Velaikkaran has changed me a lot as a person. So much so that, I have decided to not have any brand association or be part of any advertisement. Its not that Im against them but its just that I dont want to send out wrong message people. The experience of working in Velaikkaran has been an eye-opener, and it has made me realize that Im responsible for my actions. I have done one advertisement in the past and thatll be the first and the last.
Talking on the occasion, director Mohan Raja said the film will be a tribute to the working class. Velaikkaran is about the workers around us. Audiences wont hate this film. Thats where I believe Ive already won in this process, he said, adding that only Sivakarthikeyan could do justice to the character he essays in the film. His character will be remembered for a long time, he added.
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A gay Australian lawmaker popped the question in parliament on Monday, proposing to his partner moments after a bill paving the way for same-sex marriage was introduced.
Tim Wilson, who has reportedly been engaged to Ryan Bolger for nine years, fought back tears as he thanked his fiance for enduring a marriage debate that has been the soundtrack to our relationship.
In my first speech I defined our bond by the ring that sits on both of our left hands--that they are the answer to the questions we cannot ask, the 37-year-old lawmaker from the ruling conservative party said.
So there is only one thing left to do: Ryan Patrick Bolger will you marry me?
Bolger, who was sitting in the public gallery, quickly responded yes as the floor erupted in applause.
That was a yes, a resounding yes, house speaker Rob Mitchell noted for the record. Congratulations, well done mate.
Wilson earlier emotionally recalled the uneasiness he experienced with some friends when he and Bolger were first engaged.
Australian lawmaker Tim Wilson, right, proposes to his gay partner Ryan Patrick Bolger, who was sitting in the public gallery, at Parliament in Canberra. (AP)
Many simply didnt know how to react. Many SMS went unresponded. In conversations some people politely changed the topic, or fell silent entirely, he said.
His partner had pushed him to have an engagement party.
On informing one person of our news, they responded: Why bother?
At the time I fell silent and I have never had an answer to that question. But the Australian people have now answered that for me.
The same-sex marriage bill being debated is expected to comfortably pass through the House of Representatives before Christmas after the upper house Senate last week overwhelmingly voted in its favour.
After more than a decade of debate, Australians emphatically endorsed gay marriage in a recent nationwide postal vote, with some 62 percent of the 12.7 million who took part voting yes last month.
This is a historic moment of inclusion, of recognition, of respect, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said shortly after the bill was introduced for debate in the lower house Monday.
This is a day to be especially proud that all of our friends, our colleagues, our neighbours, our brothers, our sisters, can marry the people they love.
Former conservative prime minister Tony Abbott, a leading voice in the no campaign, said he would now back the bill.
I certainly dont pretend to be an overnight convert to support same-sex marriage but I am pledged to respect and to facilitate the verdict of the Australian people, he said.
Same-sex marriage should now be recognised. It will now be recognised.
Abbott moved an amendment he said protected discrimination against anyone over their conscientious view about the nature of marriage, before saying he planned to attend his gay sisters wedding next year.
I am looking forward to attending the marriage of my sister, Christine, to her partner Virginia some time early in the new year.
The apparent haste with which the Maldives vetted its free trade agreement (FTA) with China last week could have come as a surprise to India, but the agreement between the two countries is part of Beijings steady efforts to strengthen economic ties with South Asian nations, including via proposed trade agreements.
For China, it is the second FTA with a South Asian country after Pakistan.
Beijings recent efforts to sign FTAs with several countries is now part of its broad plans to enter trade agreements with countries along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the multi-billion dollar connectivity project which plans to link China with the rest of Asia, Africa and Europe. China has FTAs or is in talks to sign FTAs with as many as 25 countries and regions along the BRI, state media has reported.
At present, Beijing is at discussion stage to sign an FTA with Sri Lanka, with six rounds of talks already held. It also plans to upgrade the one with Pakistan. Feasibility studies for FTA have also been initiated with Nepal, Bangladesh and Mauritius.
The ministry of commerce had made progress in eight FTA talks, as well as launched feasibility studies and negotiations with another eight countries and regions in 2016, Zhang Shaogang, director-general of the department of international trade and economic affairs at the ministry told the state-controlled China Daily newspaper.
Even if China does strengthen its economic ties with South Asian countries via FTAs, the arrangements are not targeted against India, state media reported on Monday.
It needs to be noted that economic cooperation between China and the Maldives does not target any third party, India included. The expeditious signing of the trade pact only signifies that the two countries urgently hope to tap the potential for cooperation due to their economic complementarity, the nationalistic tabloid Global Times said in a comment piece.
But expect economic ties between China and South Asian countries to become stronger, the article said.
To take the example of Sri Lanka, it is because of finance and industrial complementation that the two countries have increased cooperation in infrastructure construction and the pursuit of free trade. Political relationships are sometimes a barometer of economic ties.
It wont be easy for India to maintain its political influence in South Asia if its own economic presence is weakening. If India thinks its position is threatened, it should consider how it can give more benefits to its neighbours through win-win economic cooperation, the article said.
Its time to submit a National Cornbread Cook-off recipe. Lodge Cast Iron and Martha White are searching the nation for the best original main dish cornbread recipes in the 22nd Annual Lodge National Cornbread Cook-Off.
Now through Jan. 15, 2018, Cook-Off applicants can submit an original main dish/entree recipe prepared with at least one package of Martha White Cornbread Mix and prepared in Lodge Cast Iron cookware. Ten finalists will be selected to compete during the National Cornbread Festival on April 28, 2018, in South Pittsburg.
Cooks across the country continue to impress me with their creative twists on classic recipes and trendy dishes reinvented with cornbread, said Martha White baking expert, Linda Carman. Past cook-off contestants have stretched beyond Southern cuisine, preparing Caribbean, Tex-Mex and Mediterranean-style recipes.
Main Dish recipes are entree, or main course, recipes. Cook-Off competitive ranges are provided by FiveStar Professional Cooking Equipment.
Recipes must be a finalists original creation, may not have won previous awards, may not have been published previously, and must not infringe on upon any other persons rights.
Cook-Off competitors cannot be graduates of a culinary institute or be paid as an executive chef. Bloggers are encouraged to submit their recipes.
Along with the coveted cast iron skillet crown, the Cook-Off champion will receive $5,000 and a 30-inch stainless steel gas range (a $3,250 value) from FiveStar Professional Cooking Equipment, a division of Brown Stove Works, Inc.
The second prize winner will receive $1,500, and the third prize winner will receive $1,000. The remaining seven finalists will walk away with $150, and all finalists will receive a $500 travel reimbursement and a gift basket courtesy of Lodge and Martha White.
South Pittsburg hosts the National Cornbread Festival the last full weekend of April. The 2018 event is set for April 28-29
CIA director Mike Pompeo has issued a stern warning to Pakistan that if it did not act against the alleged terrorist safe havens inside the country then the United States would be forced to destroy them on its own.
The warning comes as Defence Secretary Jim Mattis is scheduled to arrive in Islamabad on Monday and hold talks with Pakistan to seek their support to the new US strategy for Afghanistan.
The CIA director gave this warning at the Reagan National Defence Forum in California on Saturday, when he was asked about what Trump administration was doing to make Pakistan participate in its new Afghan strategy.
(Secretary Mattis) will make clear the presidents intent. (He) will deliver the message that we would love you to do that. And that the safe haven inside of Pakistan has worked to the detriment of our capacity to do what we needed to do in Afghanistan, the Dawn quoted Pompeo as saying.
And in case things go south, he added, In the absence of the Pakistanis achieving that, we are going to do everything we can to make sure that safe haven no longer exists.
Iran-allied Houthi forces blew up the house of ex-Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa on Monday as fighting between the erstwhile allies intensified in the capital with at least 125 killed, residents and medics said.
Saudi-led coalition warplanes bombed Houthi positions in for a second day in support of Saleh, a former Houthi ally who has now renounced his alliance with the heavily armed militia in the multi-sided war shattering the Arabian Peninsula country.
The Saudi-led air campaign, backed by U.S. and other Western arms and intelligence, has killed hundreds of civilians but has failed to secure the coalition any major gains in the nearly three-year-old campaign to restore Yemens internationally recognised president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, to power.
Sanaa residents said Houthi fighters blew up Salehs house in the centre of the city. His whereabouts remain unknown.
Salehs loyalists have lost ground on the sixth day of heavy urban combat with the Houthis, with three hospitals reporting a toll of at least 125 killed and 238 wounded over six days, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.
We are supporting the main hospitals in Sanaa who urgently need war-wounded kits, ICRC spokeswoman Iolanda Jaquemet said in Geneva. We are also looking at donating dead body bags to hospitals which are actually asking for them and hope to donate fuel to the main hospitals because they depend on generators.
The ICRC have relocated 13 international staff to Djibouti from Sanaa on Monday, she said.
Sanaa residents reported intense fighting overnight and into the morning with families cowering in their homes as explosions rocked the city. Coalition air strikes hammered Houthi positions in an apparent bid to shore up Salehs forces, witnesses said.
PROXY CONFLICT BETWEEN IRAN AND SAUDI ARABIA
The re-alignment of Salehs forces with the Saudis would mark a significant turn in a war that is part of a wider struggle between regional powers Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The bloodshed has compounded the woes of one of the Arab worlds poorest countries and left at least 10,000 dead as hunger and disease have spread.
At the United Nations, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the warring parties to stop all ground and air assaults. He also called for the resumption of all commercial imports into Yemen, saying millions of children, women and men were at risk of mass hunger, disease and death.
However, in a speech late on Sunday, Saleh formally annulled his alliance with the Houthis and pledged to step up his fight.
Saleh, who dominated Yemens heavily armed tribal society for 33 years before quitting in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, and the Shiite Muslim Houthis had made common cause against Hadi loyalists.
But they vied for supremacy over the territory they ran together, including Sanaa, which the Houthis seized in September 2014, and their feud burst into open combat on Wednesday.
Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam claimed significant gains in the battle for Sanaa on Monday.
With the aid and approval of God, the security forces backed up by wide popular support were able last night to cleanse the areas in which the militias of treason and betrayal were deployed, he said in a statement.
The Houthi movements TV channel al-Masirah and witnesses said Houthir fighters had seized the downtown home of Salehs nephew Tareq, an army general.
Residents said the warring sides traded heavy automatic and artillery fire as the Houthis advanced in the central Political District, which is a redoubt of Saleh and his family.
We lived through days of terror. Houthi tanks have been firing and the shells were falling on our neighbourhood, said Mohammed al-Madhaji, who lives in the frontline district.
The fighting has been so violent we feel we could die at any moment. We cant get out of our homes.
Houthi media and political sources also reported that the Houthis also advanced toward Salehs birthplace in a village outside Sanaa where he maintains a fortified palace.
Gushing ash from Balis Mount Agung volcano has dissipated into a wispy plume of steam, and Australian airlines that cancelled some flights to the Indonesian resort island on the weekend have returned to near-normal schedules.
Indonesias disaster mitigation agency said Monday the volcano remains at its highest alert level but most of Bali is safe for tourists.
The exclusion zone around the volcano still extends 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the crater in some directions. More than 55,000 people are living in shelters.
Airlines Jetstar and Virgin Australia, which cancelled flights over the weekend even as the ash cloud shrank dramatically, said they were resuming services Monday.
The full-moon is seen along with Mount Agung volcano in Bali on Monday. (Reuters Photo)
The regions volcanic ash monitoring center in Darwin, Australia, has stopped issuing advisories for Agung, reflecting that its currently posing no threat to aircraft. It would resume advisories if theres another eruption.
Tens of thousands of tourists were stranded when ash closed Balis international airport for nearly three days last week.
Indonesian government volcanologists say Agungs crater is about one-third filled by lava and there is still a high risk of more eruptions.
The volcanos last major eruptions in 1963 killed more than 1,100 people and it was active for more than a year.
David Boutelier, a geologist at the University of Newcastle in Australia, said the chance of a violent explosion is still very high but possibly not as high as several weeks ago because pressure is being released.
Indo-Canadian comic Russell Peters is among the worlds most popular stand-up acts but now, as he makes his debut as the lead in a scripted television series, he appears to have made the transition to the small screen as smoothly as that between the setup and punchline of one of his gags.
The show actually has India as the backdrop, as it is mostly set in Mumbai and is about a Toronto police constable who is suspended for messing up a case and finds himself doing some sleuthing while visiting his father in India.
Called simply The Indian Detective, the four-part series has already premiered in Canada, where it attracted 1.6 million viewers for the first episode, making it the biggest bow for a Canadian show in the country in two years. On December 19, it will be available to a larger audience, including viewers in India, when it is released globally by Netflix.
In an interview with Hindustan Times, Peters expressed satisfaction with the reception so far: Im very happy with the show, and the people that tuned in to watch it seem to be very happy with it as well.
Peters plays Constable Doug DMello, who finds himself elevated to the status of detective by his father, Stanley (Anupam Kher), while he is in India and gets involved with the investigation of the murder of a swami.
His character is one that takes the thriller genre and puts the sitcom sensibility into it, as Peters said, I think they based it around me being a wisecracking guy from Toronto, which kind of made sense. It was a much easier thing for me to do.
While he has often appeared on TV, on comedy specials and as the host for major awards ceremonies, now he gets to head a cast. This is the first time Ive played the actual lead and buoyed down the entire show based on my name, he said.
The shows writer, The X-Files veteran Frank Spotnitz, at first asked Peters whether he should write the jokes for the detectives dialogue.
I said, Dont write jokes, Frank, thats not what your forte is. Your forte is storytelling and writing dramatic sequences, so you focus on the stories and all the intricacies of that and Ill read your script in my voice and add funny where I feel necessary, Peters said.
The cast is boosted by the presence of Canadian actor William Shatner (Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek), as billionaire property developer David Marlowe. Peters, like many others, was a fan of Shatner while growing up.
Russell Peters as the cop Doug DMello with William Shatner, who plays a billionaire property developer, in the new serial The Indian Detective.
The guys such a legend that the first day we were shooting together, I was watching him as opposed to acting with him. I would be staring at him like a fan. Then he stops his lines and looks at me and Im like, Oh my God, whatre you looking at? and I realise I had lines Id forgotten to say because I was just staring at him all the time, he recalled.
While Mumbai is the setting, much of the show was filmed in South Africa, with desi-origin actors from that country playing Mumbaikars.
The director (Sandy Johnson) is Scottish so he didnt know whether they were sounding proper or not. So, I would have to pull him aside and say, Hey, that doesnt sound Indian at all. He said, Ah, nobody is going to notice. I said, Yes! A billion people will actually notice.
While Peters now divides his time between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the shows success does not mean he will shift showbiz priorities, as he said: Stand-up is what I make my living at and stand-ups what Ive been doing for the past 28 years. And thats what puts me in this position.
Peters was listed among Forbes top 10 grossing US comics last year and was featured among Rolling Stones 50 Best Comics of All Time.
So, as The Indian Detective streams on to devices worldwide, Peters will start his next stand-up world tour in early 2018, which is also likely to include an India stop in the fall. That is called the Deported world tour.
The names very appropriate especially given the times weve living in, Peters said.
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A 49-year-old Indian-origin woman equity manager based in New York was killed last week by a tiger shark while scuba diving on a remote Costa Rican island, according to media reports..
Rohina Bhandari, 49, a Wall Street private equity manager from New York City, suffered fatal bites to both her legs during the shark attack last Thursday while she was diving with a group near Cocos Island, a national park about 300 miles off the Costa Rican mainland, New York Post reported on Sunday.
Bhandari, a Wall Street private equity manager, was hauled out of the water after sustaining severe bites to her legs, Costa Ricas environment ministry said.
Authorities said two park rangers and several doctors who were part of the diving tourism group of 18 people on the island trip organised by the Undersea Hunter Group, offered first aid in a desperate bid to save her.
But Bhandari, a senior director at WL Ross & Co. LL, a firm founded by commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, could not be saved, the reports said.
Her 26-year-old diving instructor was also badly injured. The male instructor, who was conscious and in relatively stable condition, told officials that the shark attacked when his group was surfacing at the tail end of the dive in the waters.
According to the Costa Rican newspaper La Nacion, the guide noticed the shark approaching his group underwater and tried to scare it away. But as they surfaced, the shark went for Bhandari, tearing at her legs. The guide, too, suffered leg injuries.
Friends paid tribute to the Manhattan resident on Facebook. Unbelievably sad and heartbreaking news that Rohina has died, wrote Julie Walker. She was such a wonderful person who loved life. I will always remember her kindness, friendship and our adventures together.
Another friend wrote: Your kindness and genuine warmth to those of us lucky enough to call you friend was a blessing to behold.
Tiger sharks are predators often found around Pacific islands.
One of the largest sharks in the world, Tiger sharks are known for their powerful jaws and voracious appetites
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation on Monday called for a summit of Muslim nations if the United States takes the controversial decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israels capital.
President Donald Trump faces a key decision this week over Jerusalems status, potentially reversing years of US policy and prompting a furious response from the Palestinians and the Arab world.
The 57-member OIC sought to amplify concern over the possible move in an emergency meeting on Monday in the Saudi Red Sea city of Jeddah.
If the United States takes the step of recognising Jerusalem as the so-called capital of Israel, we unanimously recommend holding a meeting at the level of council of foreign ministers followed by an Islamic summit as soon as possible, the pan-Islamic body said in a statement.
The OIC also warned that recognising Jerusalem or establishing any diplomatic mission in the disputed city would be seen as a blatant attack on the Arab and Islamic nations.
The status of Jerusalem is one of the most contentious issues of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Most of the international community, including the United States, does not formally recognise Jerusalem as Israels capital, insisting the issue can only be resolved through final-status negotiations.
Central to the issue of recognition is the question of whether Trump decides to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
All foreign embassies are located in Tel Aviv with consular representation in Jerusalem.
Israelis and Palestinians are eagerly watching to see whether he again renews a waiver delaying the move, as his predecessors have done.
There are suggestions that Trump will sign the waiver and decline to move the embassy for now, but later this week declare Jerusalem as Israels capital.
Israel, which seized the largely Arab eastern sector of Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it, claims both halves of the city as its eternal and undivided capital.
But the Palestinians want the eastern sector as capital of their promised state and fiercely oppose any Israeli attempt to extend sovereignty there.
Several peace plans have come unstuck over debates on whether, and how, to divide sovereignty or oversee the citys sites holy to Christians, Jews and Muslims.
Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has come under racist attacks for his plan to roll-back Obama-era regulation of Internet called net neutrality, and a lot of it from fellow Indian-Americans who have unleashed a string of barbs tied to his Indian origins.
Ajit Pai is the type of Indian guy who eats dosa with a fork, wrote Hari Kondabolu, an Indian-American comedian, on Twitter just days after Pai announced his plan.
Similar tweets by others called Pai the type of Indian who calls chai chai tea, who thinks Lassi is a dog (from Lassie the female star dog of a novel and a TV series), who says Naan bread, and whose favorite Amitabh Bachchan movie is the Great Gatsby (in which the Bollywood superstar had a short role).
On Sunday, after Indiaspora, an organisation of Indian Americans condemned the slight campaign led by an Indian American comedian, Kondabolu retaliated with another tweet. Dear @AjayPaiFCC , I apologize for my tweets questioning your Brown-ness. You are not a disappointment to Indian Americans...but to all Americans. You can eat a pakora while destroying #NetNeutrality. You can wear a kurta while catering to corporate interests, #AjitPaiSucks
Dear @AjitPaiFCC, I apologize for my tweets questioning your "Brown-ness." You are not a disappointment to Indian Americans...but to all Americans. You can eat a pakora while destroying #NetNeutrality. You can wear a kurta while catering to corporate interests. #AjitPaiSucks Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) December 3, 2017
Net neutrality, as enforced by an introductory law passed in 2015 by the Federal Communications Commission under the Obama administration, prevents internet service providers (ISPs) from slowing down, blocking or speeding up net connection; every website enjoys equal access and speed. Undoing it, critics argue, will allow ISPs to regulate net access, speed things up for those who pay and slow down those who dont.
Pai has argued that is an irrational fear, which will be taken care of by free trade regulators who monitor market competition and will be monitoring ISPs, to catch those manipulating net access. And that freeing bandwidth from the control of bureaucrats would encourage private investments. His plan comes up for a vote at the commission on December 14, and is likely to go through given the 3-2 Republican majority there.
Pais hasnt spoken about the attack from his community, but he did address those that came from net neutrality activists who showed up outside his home in Virginia state. They left behind signs naming his children and, one that said, They (the children) will come to know the truth. Dad murdered democracy in cold blood.
Read more: Net Neutrality: US FCC head Ajit Pai slams Hollywood, tech companies
It was a little nerve-racking, especially for my wife, Pai said on Fox News, and added in a statement later, Internet regulation activists have crossed the line by threatening and harassing my family. They should leave my family out of this and focus on debating the merits of the issue.
But the attacks from the Indian community were troubling enough for some, such as Indiaspora, which said in a statement it was saddened by the personal and baseless attacks on Chairman Pai in which his Indian heritage is questioned. And they reached out to other members and leaders of the community.
Shekar Narasimhan, a top Democratic strategist, weighed in as well in Pais defence.
Irrespective of your political leanings, behavior and threats against individuals for their actions are unacceptable. We should have zero tolerance for hate and xenophobia whether its directed from the left or right, Narasimhan said in a statement.
Expressing love for the word Hindustan, a Pakistani youth was arrested by police in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
Seeing Hindustan Zindabad written on the wall of a house in the Nara Amazai area of Haripur infuriated the local community, the daily Express news reported on Monday.
According to police, Sajid Shah had been booked for treason under section 505 of the Pakistani Penal Code. A police officer said that Shah had written Hindustan Zindabad on the outer wall of his home in Nara Amazi.
People told him to remove the slogan as it hurt their national pride, the SHO said. Some people took pictures of the wall and emailed them to senior police officials.
We have booked the young man on orders from the high-ups, he said, refusing to comment further.
Hindustan -- the Persian name for South Asia -- now commonly being referred as India after partition in 1947.
The Palestinian president has warned that American recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital would jeopardize the White Houses nascent Mideast peace efforts.
President Mahmoud Abbas comments came amid a diplomatic push by the Palestinian leader to rally international support against the possible American move later this week.
Any American step related to the recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel, or moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, represents a threat to the future of the peace process and is unacceptable for the Palestinians, Arabs and internationally, Abbas told a group of visiting Arab lawmakers from Israel, according to the official Wafa news agency.
American officials have said President Donald Trump may recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital this week as a way to offset his likely decision to delay his campaign promise of moving the US Embassy there.
Israel regards Jerusalem as its capital, with most government functions, including the prime ministers office, Supreme Court and parliament, located in the holy city.
But the international community says the citys status should be determined through peace talks. The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as their capital.
Abbas spokesman, Nabil Abu Rdeneh, said late Saturday that the president has been in touch with Arab and world leaders to rally opposition against any American move on Jerusalem.
He said Abbas had been in contact with leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and France. We believe that such an American step, if it takes place, will enter the region in a new course, and a dangerous phase whose results cannot be controlled, he said.
The White House, led by Trumps adviser and son in law, Jared Kushner, has held months of meetings with leaders across the region ahead of an expected peace initiative.
While the proposal is expected to be regional in scope, little is known about the details, including whether Trump will continue the policies of recent predecessors in supporting the notion of an independent Palestinian state.
Kushner said on Sunday that Trump has not yet decided whether to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital or whether to proceed immediately in moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city. He is still looking at a lot of different facts, Kushner said at the Saban Forum, an annual Mideast policy conference in Washington.
Ahead of Kushners comments, the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, urged the US not to move forward with any change on Jerusalems status.
Doing so, he said, Is not only going to promote international anarchy and disrespect for global institutions and law, but it will also be disqualifying itself to play any role in any initiative toward achieving a just and lasting peace.
Arab League chief warns Trump
The Arab League chief has said a decision by US President Donald Trump to recognise Jerusalem as Israels capital would boost fanaticism and violence, and not serve the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
It is unfortunate that some are insisting on carrying out this step without any regard to the dangers it carries to the stability of the Middle East and the whole world, Ahmed Abul Gheit, head of the Arab League, told reporters in Cairo.
US President Donald Trump is closely monitoring the progress in his new South Asia Strategy, which gives a major role to India, and is very much engaged in its implementation, a senior administration official has said.
Trump had sought a major role for India in bringing peace in Afghanistan and ruled out a hasty withdrawal of troops from the war-torn nation while announcing his new Afghanistan and South Asia policy in August.
The president has been very closely monitoring the progress of the South Asia strategy. Hes very interested in any progress that has been made, a senior administration official told PTI.
Trump had a meeting with his Defense Secretary Jim Mattis before he left on his visit to Pakistan. The defense Secretary is again likely to brief the president on his return.
On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly Session in New York in September, Trump met the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
That was a good opportunity to hear from President Ghani on how the strategy was being received in Afghanistan, the official said.
Observing that Trump has been getting updates from his national security team on whats happening in Afghanistan, the official said the president is very much engaged and interested in how this strategy is progressing.
Asserting that the things are signs of encouragement in the implementation of the South Asia strategy, the official said it is moving in the right direction.
We need to give more time for the strategy to take root, the official said.
Its a multifaceted strategy. Were using all the tools that the US has its disposal military, economic, diplomatic. All these parts of the strategy are important. They all need to work in tandem together. The president is very interested in keeping track of how the strategy is going. And he is receiving regular updates, the senior administration official said.
In his August 21 speech, Trump had said that terrorists who slaughter innocent people will find no glory in this life or the next.
They are nothing but thugs, and criminals, and predators, and -- thats right -- losers. Working alongside our allies, we will break their will, dry up their recruitment, keep them from crossing our borders, and yes, we will defeat them, and we will defeat them handily, he had said.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, Americas interests are clear: We must stop the resurgence of safe havens that enable terrorists to threaten America, and we must prevent nuclear weapons and materials from coming into the hands of terrorists and being used against us, or anywhere in the world for that matter, Trump said.
Announcing his strategy, Trump said a core pillar of his new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions.
Another fundamental pillar of our new strategy is the integration of all instruments of American power -- diplomatic, economic, and military -- toward a successful outcome, he said.
Describing Pakistan as an important part of his strategy, Trump had said the US can no longer be silent about Pakistans safe havens for terrorist organisations, the Taliban, and other groups that pose a threat to the region and beyond.
Pakistan has much to gain from partnering with our effort in Afghanistan. It has much to lose by continuing to harbor criminals and terrorists, he had said.
Forty-three students from Tyner Academy and Central High School participate in a facility tour at Roadtec Tim Lewis explains the manufacturing process for an asphalt paving machine Students enjoy the animated welding simulation experience during their recent facility tour of Roadtec Seventeen junior and high school students from Brainerd High School tour EPB Brainerd High School students speak with EPB employees to gain insight on potential career opportunities and training within the company Previous Next
A new program launched this year by the Education and Workforce Development division of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce seeks to highlight industry opportunities to local high school juniors and seniors by providing facility tours of companies and organizations in Hamilton County. Students were able to tour and speak with employees at two local companies: Roadtec and EPB.
Area employers look at these tours as an opportunity to impact students and their future career paths in a meaningful way, while educating the students of work that can be done right in their backyards.
One of the most important decisions we make at Roadtec is hiring," said Tim Lewis, director of operations for Roadtec. "It can be challenging to find the right candidate with the right qualifications for the job. Opening up our plant to these students begins to address our future workforce needs by giving them insight into what we are looking for in our facility. Our hope is that a few of these students might be led to a career path here at Roadtec.
Mr. Lewis guided the students through the offices and plant at Roadtecs Chattanooga plant. The students received first-hand information on the work being done, the careers available at the facility, and the credentials and/or certifications needed to obtain those positions.
Ken Jones, manager of Fiber Designs at EPB, notes the impact of these tours not just for the students but for businesses, as well.
These type of activities allow companies to meet and work with some of the brightest and most intelligent young talent within our community," said Mr. Jones. "We have to find creative ways to inspire entrepreneurial thinking, promote the quality of our companies, and recruit and retain our communitys top talent to build a better Chattanooga.
I view this as more of a job shadowing opportunity. We arent showing off the buildings, we are providing kids with an opportunity to see people in their everyday work life.
The Chattanooga 2.0 movement, which has been making waves in education reform in Hamilton County, released a report last fall focusing on strategies to support a cradle to career pipeline in our community. The report highlighted the benefits of creating seamless pathways between high school and postsecondary that support students learning earlier about career opportunities in the community and the credentialing path to a job in their desired field.
We are focused on supporting quality education to all students in Hamilton County and providing each student a pipeline to college and career," said Jared Bigham, executive director of Chattanooga 2.0. "The Chambers new facility tour program is another step forward in creating these pathways, ensuring that students have the vision, support, and resources to pursue degrees and certifications, which can connect them with good jobs and a meaningful career. For our community, this is a great tool for industry recruitment and economic development. By preparing our students, we support our local industry with the highest caliber workforce to help build the smartest community in the South.
The Chamber hopes to expand this program into other industries and facilities and continue to provide more students the opportunity to match with potential career paths in the community.
Britain agreed on Monday to keep Northern Ireland in regulatory alignment with the European Union after Brexit, Irish government sources said, raising hopes Prime Minister Theresa May can strike a deal in Brussels to start free trade talks.
After intensive negotiations in recent days, Britain made what the Irish sources called a clear commitment to keep economic rules on both sides of the new UK-EU land border across the island of Ireland similar enough to allow no frontier -- and so ease fears of stirring up conflict again in Northern Ireland.
News of a deal, by raising the prospect of starting trade negotiations in the coming weeks, triggered speculation that it could result in the whole of the United Kingdom effectively remaining in a customs union, or even the EU single market, despite Mays insistence that it would not do so.
The pro-British Northern Irish party on which May relies for support in parliament immediately insisted rules on the British mainland must not deviate from those in Northern Ireland, a position May herself supports. As a result, it is hard to see that Britain could itself stray far from EU regulations.
That idea was immediately embraced by the leaders of London and Scotland, two major British regions where voters strongly opposed Brexit in last years referendum. Scotlands first minister and the mayor of London both repeated their wish to stay in a customs union or, better, the EU single market.
That is a position Mays hardline pro-Brexit supporters would not countenance, underlining the conundrums that the Irish border and other complex issues have raised over Britains ability to make a clean break after 44 years of EU membership.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker spoke to Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar by phone. EU lawmaker Philippe Lamberts, who met Juncker earlier on Monday, said the draft text on Ireland would commit Britain to full alignment on rules.
Donald Tusk, the EU summit chair, tweeted ebulliently after speaking to Varadkar that there was good progress on the Irish issue to unblock UK-EU trade talks: Tell me why I like Mondays! the former Polish premier wrote. Getting closer to sufficient progress at December (EU summit).
This is code for Britain complying with a set of conditions the EU wants met on divorce terms before leaders will agree to launch talks on a future trade deal at a summit next week.
May and Juncker made no comment to reporters when they met at the EU executives Berlaymont headquarters for a lunch that diplomats and officials hope can seal a breakthrough that would open the way to negotiations on future trade relations.
Tusk cancelled a trip to Jerusalem and Ramallah and hastily scheduled his own meeting with May for after lunch. Officials said he was preparing to call round EU leaders to get agreement on trade negotiations. National envoys handling Brexit were also summoned urgently to a meeting in Brussels later on Monday.
London has broadly agreed to many of the EUs divorce terms, including paying out something like 50 billion. But the issues of the rights of expatriate citizens and the UK-EU border on the island of Ireland defied a deal until the last minute.
Elmar Brok, another member of the European Parliament who met Juncker and his Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, before they met May, said just a few words separated the sides.
In London, Mays spokesman said: Progress is being made. Theres more still to agree upon.
US defence secretary James Mattis on Monday urged Pakistans civilian and military leaders to redouble their efforts to rein in militants accused of using the country as a base to carry out attacks in Afghanistan.
Mattis, on a one-day visit to Pakistan, said the country had made progress in the fight against militancy inside its borders but needed to do more. His trip comes two weeks after a Pakistani court released Mumbai terror attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed from house arrest, prompting a furious response from the White House.
The secretary reiterated that Pakistan must redouble its efforts to confront militants and terrorists operating within the country, the Pentagon said in a statement.
In his discussion with Mattis, Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi said the two nations shared objectives.Were committed (to) the war against terror, he said. Nobody wants peace in Afghanistan more than Pakistan.
Mattis also met top military officials, including army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa and ISI chief Lt Gen Naveed Mukhtar the spy agency that US officials say has links with Haqqani network and Taliban militants.
Mattis earlier told reporters he wants to work with Pakistan to address the problems, adding the US is committed to a pragmatic relationship that expands cooperation while also reinforcing President Trumps call for action against terrorist safe havens.
We have heard from Pakistan leaders that they do not support terrorism. So I expect to see that sort of action reflected in their policies, Mattis said.
Asked if he was going to press the Pakistani leaders to take more action against the insurgents, Mattis said: I believe that we work hard on finding the common ground and then we work together.
US officials have long been frustrated by what they see as Pakistans reluctance to act against groups such as the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network that they believe exploit safe havens on Pakistani soil to launch attacks in Afghanistan.
Gen John Nicholson, the top US general in Afghanistan, said last week: We have been very direct and very clear with the Pakistanis...we have not seen those changes implemented yet.
The winners of the annual Poetry Aloud competition, which is organised by the National Library of Ireland (NLI) and Poetry Ireland, have just been announced.
Poetry Aloud is an annual poetry speaking competition for post-primary school students across the island of Ireland. It has grown from just a few hundred entries since its launch in 2007 to 1,700 entries in 2017, with 143 schools nationwide participating.
The competition has three categories: junior, intermediate and senior. The prescribed poems for this year were Little Skellig by Moya Cannon (junior); Lullaby by Francis Ledwidge (intermediate) and State Funeral by Thomas McCarthy (senior).
Speaking at the final, Brid OSullivan of the NLIs Learning and Outreach Department said: Encouraging young people to engage with poetry, and nurturing the art of poetry speaking have been long term commitments of the National Library of Ireland. Were proud to host Poetry Aloud in partnership with Poetry Ireland, and it is heartening to see it continue to grow on year.
The competition presents a wonderful opportunity to welcome students from across the country through our doors, and we hope it is the start of a long-lasting relationship with the Library and with poetry speaking. Congratulations to all involved.
National Winners of 2017 Poetry Aloud
The Poetry Aloud competition comprises three stages: the regionals; the semi-finals; and the final. A national winner is chosen from each category by a panel of esteemed judges and receives a prize of 300. The 2017 judging panel comprised of actor and overall winner of Poetry Aloud 2008, Sam McGovern; Librarian at University College Cork, John FitzGerald and Director of Poetry Ireland, Maureen Kennelly.
The 2017 Poetry Aloud national winners are:
Junior category: Brendan Mac Domhnaill, Colaiste Oiriall, Co. Monaghan.
Intermediate category: Holly Micklem, Wesley College, Ballinteer, Dublin.
Senior category: Liam Rush, St.Kevins CC, Dunlavin, Co.Wicklow.
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From the three national category winners, Brendan Mac Domhnaill was chosen as overall winner and awarded the Seamus Heaney Poetry Aloud Award. The perpetual trophy is designed by Meath-based sculptor Fiona Smith-Darragh. The overall winner receives an additional 200.
The late Seamus Heaney was a significant supporter of Poetry Aloud. In 2009, he was presented by the British Library with the David Cohen Prize for Literature. In addition to the main award, the winner each year nominates the recipient of a subsidiary prize. In nominating Poetry Aloud for the award, Seamus Heaney cited the extraordinary way in which the competition seeks to celebrate the joy of speaking and listening to poetry as well as the fact that there is a strong North-South dimension to the competition.
After two sold out gigs there last year, it was announced today that Picture This will return to play two more Cork dates on June 19 & 20.
Just before their RDS gig this June , the band will play Live at the Marquee Cork.
After the success of their debut album, Picture This have released Picture This Deluxe Edition which includes two brand new tracks and the festive favourite This Christmas.
Released at the end of August, the self-titled debut from the Athy natives, stormed into the charts at #1 with the highest charting entry for a debut artist this year.
The band have just come off the back of a sold out UK and Ireland tour, including two dates at the 3Arena.
The band's successes began back in 2015 when Take My Hand went international with over 4 million cumulative plays.
After recording their debut at the world-renowned Blackbird Studios in Nashville, the Kildare natives went on to release hit singles Never Change, Addicted To You, 95 and Saviour,
Tickets go on sale this Saturday 9th December at 9am from Ticketmaster.
Bradley Countys annual Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day will take place Thursday, the 76th anniversary of the attack in Hawaii that led to the U.S. entry into World War II.
The ceremony will take place at the Elks Lodge downtown at 235 Second Street N.E. at 10 a.m. The program, organized by the Colonel Benjamin Cleveland Chapter, Sons of the American Revolution, will last about one hour.
State Rep. Kevin Brooks, who represents the 24th District in the Tennessee House Of Representatives, will be the guest speaker.
George Allen, a Pearl Harbor survivor, will light a memorial candle to honor the victims of the attack and fellow American veterans who took part in the war.
SAR members will present a memorial wreath to honor those who fought in the war.
Bradley Central High Schools JROTC will post the national colors to begin the ceremony.
Cleveland Mayor Tom Rowland will lead the invocation and benediction prayers.
The Bradley County Veterans Funeral Honor Guard will fire the traditional 21 gun salute on the lawn at the Elks Lodge.
Buglers from the Cleveland High School Band will close the program with taps.
Bradley County Mayor D. Gary Davis and other city and county officials will be attending the ceremony. Area veterans groups and the public are invited to attend the program that has become a Cleveland December tradition.
The citys Pearl Harbor Remembrance Ceremony was first organized over a dozen years ago by Bill Norwood, a Korean War POW, and other veterans. Mr. Norwood asked the SAR to adopt the program last year.
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As Hurricane Harvey moved inland, rising floodwaters chased KHOU reporter Brandi Smith and photographer Mario Sandoval from one location to another. They ended up reporting live from the Beltway 8 overpass near the Imperial exit Aug. 27, two days after they left the station to provide on-the-scene coverage.
They had just switched from the west to the east side of the overpass when Sandoval spotted a semi paralyzed on the feeder road. Its engine compartment was submerged.
The truck's lights and windshield wipers were on, and movement could be seen inside the cabin, where driver Robert Roberson was trapped.
Their response to this unfolding drama would become one of the most notable acts of heroism during Hurricane Harvey - earning widespread media attention and even an invitation to "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."
Smith and Sandoval did not have the equipment necessary to perform a rescue on their own, but they knew inaction was not an option.
In what Smith describes as a perfect moment, a Harris County Sheriff's Office truck drove by with an airboat and two deputies inside. She flagged them down, and the deputies were able to extract Roberson, saving his life.
To Smith, the situation felt surreal - serendipitous.
She began her journalism career at KPIC, a local news station in Roseburg, Ore., when she was 19.
Sixteen years later, she found herself reporting on an unprecedented flood, as the KHOU station itself was taking on water, and helping to save a man's life.
"I would love to say there was a lot of thought process put into it, but there wasn't. I was just being human, I guess - still trying to hold onto the reporter part of it - but holding onto the two while everything seemed to be falling apart," Smith said.
Smith and Sandoval weren't aware of KHOU's evacuation until after they interviewed Roberson post-rescue. They had been knocked off the air after Smith flagged down the deputies but before they reached Roberson.
In the next 10 minutes, Smith was barraged by people asking the same question: "Is the driver OK?" So, they dumped the raw footage onto Facebook.
Shortly thereafter, articles about the rescue started popping up online. Smith's social media followers surged by about 10,000, she said.
While Smith and Sandoval were stranded overnight on the overpass, an email from "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" popped into Smith's inbox.
"It was just such a contrast," Smith said. "I associate Ellen with happy, bubbly, light, uplifting - and we were in the most miserable of circumstances."
Smith appeared as a guest on show, which aired Sept. 27. Roberson and his wife, Virginia, surprised Smith when they, too, appeared on the show for a heartfelt reunion.
"Then she gave them $10,000, which will have a huge, huge impact," Smith said. "Robert has to have surgery on his back. He'll be out of work for a bit. So, that will help offset that, and they also want to take a vacation."
Despite the attention Smith and Sandoval received for their roles in Roberson's rescue, Smith insisted the Harris County deputies deserve the credit.
She also admires Roberson's graciousness throughout the experience. The two have kept in frequent contact - a trend Roberson intends to continue for years to come.
"No doubt about that - can't lose contact," Roberson said. "That's something special coming to your life. That's something very special."
Courtesy EMI Films
John Cleese is close to wrapping up his current "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" Tour. Here are dates: If you're in Salt Lake City, you're in luck. If you're in Ft. Lauderdale, you are not. The comedian will continue the tour next year, and among the dates is an April 5 stop at the Smart Financial Centre in Sugar Land.
The format for the show is pretty simple. "Holy Grail" will screen in all its armor-clad, bloodthirsty rabbit glory. Then Cleese ambles out for a Q&A session with the gathered devoted.
It was a whirlwind weekend for President Donald Trump's legal team, from Michael Flynn's guilty plea to Trump's problematic tweet to new reports that fill out the picture of a broadening Russia investigation. And it concluded Monday morning with Trump's personal lawyer making a bold claim: Regardless of all of it, John Dowd says, a president can't even technically obstruct justice.
Here's the money quote Dowd gave to Axios: The "president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution's Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case."
To be clear, this is a Trump lawyer effectively trying to knock down one of two major pillars of the Russia investigation - to exempt his client completely from being held liable for his actions in (roughly) half the investigation. That investigation began by looking at possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and, thanks to Trump's own actions, has also come to key on Trump's possible obstruction of justice. Dowd argues the latter is a mythical crime even if it is proven that Trump intervened in the investigation to save himself or others.
This theory is clearly a hugely convenient one for the White House; that much is clear. But does it actually hold water, legally speaking?
Experts are dubious, but they are dubious to varying degrees. Constitutional experts Jonathan Turley of George Washington University and Daniel P. Franklin of Georgia State University both said Dowd's argument isn't completely without merit.
"The president's lawyer is overstating his case, but he has a point," Franklin said. "The words of a president, not expressed under oath and not in the service of obstruction (for example, ordering subordinates to commit obstruction), are just words and not actions and, therefore, are not a crime."
Franklin said he believes the argument that Trump obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey is "thin" and said he doesn't believe Trump can obstruct justice when he is acting within his authority as chief executive. But, he said, the president can obstruct justice when not acting in that capacity.
"To the point that the president can't engage in obstruction because he is the chief executive," Franklin said of Dowd's argument, "that is engaging in sophistry."
Turley said he disagrees with Dowd but that it is a "perfectly reasonable argument." He agrees that it's more difficult to prove obstruction when a president is acting as chief executive, but unlike Franklin, he said even those actions could theoretically be criminal.
"[Trump] has the power to fire an attorney general, but he can commit a crime if he does so to block an investigation into alleged crimes," Turley said.
Meena Bose, an expert on executive authority for Hostra University, noted that the ultimate arbiter would be Congress, which has the power to impeach and convict. And she noted that previous presidents who faced impeachment were confronted with obstruction charges - both explicit and implicit.
"The articles of impeachment against Nixon mention obstruction of justice. The articles against Clinton, who was impeached, did so as well," Bose said. "The articles of impeachment against Andrew Johnson, who also was impeached, discussed alleged high crimes and misdemeanors that today might be construed as obstruction of justice."
Others were blunter, arguing that Dowd's case is bogus and entirely self-serving. Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina called it "absurd."
"The president is obliged to faithfully execute the law, and that includes in circumstances where he or his friends are involved," Gerhardt said. "He must also comply like every citizen is obliged to follow the laws in everything else he does - ranging from filing his taxes properly to driving to avoiding sexual harassment in the workplace."
Of course, no president has actually been removed from office via impeachment, so this is still a legal question that is unresolved. That means whatever the answer, Trump could be the one to answer it thanks to his own missteps.
"For years, professors have engaged in a type of professorial parlor game of unanswered questions ranging from the definition of 'emoluments' to prosecuting a president in office to charging a president with obstruction," Turley said.
He added: "To its great peril, the Trump administration seems intent on answering each of these questions."
In a democracy, we get the leaders we deserve, right?
That's what I remind myself as I watch the dismantling of this country's institutions, civility and integrity and when I see our president offending our friends and courting our enemies,when I see the indictments and last week's guilty plea by a former national security adviser for lying to the FBI about Russia, and when I see a tax proposal that favors the rich and is predicted to drive up the deficit by $1 trillion over a decade.
These consequences were earned. They weren't imposed on us by some foreign power or some military dictator installed by a coup. We, the people - the American electorate as represented by the Electoral College - we did this.
And sometimes, in my radical moments, I think maybe we needed this as some kind of reset, or reality check, some kind of proof that being informed and involved matter, and that using votes as bumper stickers - to cleverly flip off the status quo - has consequences.
But even if we, the American people, deserve this, the same cannot be said for American kids.
They didn't have a vote. They didn't have a say. And now, through no fault of their own, 9 million of them across the nation stand to lose their health insurance because of Congress' failure to fund the Children's Health Insurance Program, a federal-state program known as CHIP.
Here in Texas, if a last-minute plea by Gov. Greg Abbott's administration to the federal government for $90 million in stop-gap funding falls through, then money will run out at the end of January, and the program will shut down, The Dallas Morning News first reported. By law, parents would need to be notified in advance.
Imagine: Days before Christmas, the parents of 400,000 young Texans enrolled in CHIP could get letters telling them their son or daughter won't have coverage to see a doctor or a dentist starting in February.
In addition to kids, about 36,000 women getting prenatal and postpartum care through the program could lose it, even more concerning when you consider Texas' high rate of maternal deaths.
Not so confident
Cancellation letters have already begun in other states set to run out of CHIP funding sooner.
Texas officials who administer CHIP seem to have confidence that the $90 million will come in time to keep the program going, but even so, it's temporary. Some congressional leaders have expressed confidence that funding can be restored in December as part of a larger spending package.
But given the worth of words in Washington today, we shouldn't hold our breath.
"It's hard to feel confident that Congress will meet any deadlines these days," said Anne Dunkelberg, a health policy expert and associate director at the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin.
She and other health advocates have expressed shock and concern that Congress has let the limbo go on for so long.
So what's the problem here? What led Congress to allow CHIP funding to expire in September and fail to renew it ever since? Is it an actual substantial disagreement over some wasteful welfare program that only a liberal could love?
No.
Bipartisan program
CHIP has enjoyed bipartisan support since its inception 20 years ago. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, has portrayed it as a model for other programs because of the flexibility allowed to states administering it.
The federal-state program was created for children in low-income families whose parents can't afford private health insurance but make just enough not to qualify for Medicaid.
Liberals like CHIP because it provides families with health care designed for kids, without giant deductibles or out-of-pocket costs, and because it's simple to apply and renew coverage. Conservatives like the fact that it requires families to share in costs, which they say increases accountability among consumers.
In truth, there's no good reason why the program hasn't been funded. Initially, there was a disagreement about whether the renewed funding should be tethered to cuts, including some in Medicare.
Tax breaks before kids
But lately, the problem seems to be one of priorities, despite pleas from a list of groups representing children, doctors, hospitals and others.
The Senate has been laser-focused on President Donald Trump's top goal. Hint: It ain't the kids.
It's a tax overhaul, House and Senate versions of which are expected to provide only modest tax cuts for middle-income families and huge windfalls for wealthy Americans, including the president himself.
The message is unmistakable: In America today, unnecessary benefits to the rich come before, quite literally, the vital health benefits of 9 million children.
Maybe the American people deserve these leaders, but our kids don't.
If you still prioritize the health and well-being of America's children - America's future - let your representatives in Congress know. Tell them to get their priorities straight and fund CHIP now.
A college student from Spring pleaded guilty on Monday to plotting to join ISIS in Syria, a joint plan that resulted in the death of a Klein Oak high school classmate he helped recruit to the jihadist insurgency.
U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes questioned Asher Abid Khan, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Houston, about whether he knew he was supporting a terrorist organization that produced and posted violent videos of executions. Khan, who was accompanied in court by his parents, admitted he knew what ISIS was doing and "stupidly bought into their propaganda."
Khan, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen, ditched his plan in Turkey as he was on his way to joining jihadist forces, but he continued to talk of becoming a martyr after he returned home. A co-defendant Khan knew from high school and their mosque is believed to have died fighting in Syria, a fact federal prosecutors said was critical to his culpability.
"Khan provided ISIS a battlefield soldier to further the terrorist organization's violent agenda," Acting U.S. Attorney Abe Martinez said in a statement. The plea, Martinez said, demonstrated the Justice Department's commitment to pursuing justice for "those who would give aid and comfort to terrorists operating in the United States and abroad."
A third defendant, accused of facilitating the trips to join ISIS, is still at large and thought to be living in Turkey or Syria.
In exchange for Khan's plea, prosecutors agreed to withdraw additional charges. He faces up to 15 years in prison and a maximum of life on supervised release at his sentencing on March 5. He remains free on bond.
Khan is the sixth person in Texas to plead guilty to attempting to provide support for ISIS, according to the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. A seventh man is awaiting trial in Dallas.
In an unrelated local case before the same federal judge, Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, 25, is due for sentencing in Dec. 18 after pleading guilty to an ISIS bomb plot in the Houston area.
In all, 147 people have been charged in the U.S. with involvement in ISIS and 89 have pleaded guilty or been convicted, the GWU researchers found. The vast majority are U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the GWU program and an expert on homegrown terrorism, said Khan is relatively typical of the people who have tried to join ISIS.
"He's a bit aimless but he's looking for some sort of meaning," director Hughes said. He said Khan was likely motivated to join by news coverage of barrel bombs and other atrocities perpetrated by the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He had a circle of friends who were encouraging him, telling him this was a good idea and feeding off each other, he said.
Now Playing: Michelle Bandur reports. Video: KETV
Khan stood at a podium in a suit and tie Monday afternoon, his hands interlaced, answering the judge's broad ranging questions about the history of Islamic state, his news consumption and what prompted him to join ISIS.
"You knew what ISIS was doing? What were they doing?" Judge Hughes asked.
"They were trying to take over or dismantle the regime in Syria and at same time they had ambition to restart a caliphate," Khan replied.
The judge then asked Khan about the last time there was a caliphate. About 100 years ago, during the Ottoman Empire, Khan said.
It was earlier, the judge rebutted.
"You wanted to re-establish the Ottoman Empire?" the judge asked.
"No, sir," Khan said.
"The Ottoman Empire had it's faults, but it was tolerant," the judge added.
Hughes asked Khan how this informal group was trying to re-establish the caliphate.
"I thought they were trying to win over people's hearts and now I realize it was completely false propaganda," Khan said.
What about the 2014 videos on YouTube where they were shooting people on the spot? the judge wondered.
"I was very close minded then," Khan said, adding he only believed the explanations of ISIS sympathizers of what took place in the gruesome videos of slayings.
"I knew what they were doing and at the time I stupidly bought into the propaganda," Khan said. He said he now completely disagrees with all they stand for and hope to achieve.
Facebook plot
Khan was living in Australia and Sixto Ramiro Garcia, his Klein Oak High School friend, was in South Texas when the two began hatching a plan via Facebook to travel to Turkey and then slip into Syria to fight for ISIS. They chatted online about their shared faith in the Islamic caliphate and their desire to dedicate their lives to something bigger than themselves.
According to court documents Khan reached out to Mohamed Zuhbi, a facilitator in Turkey for foreigners who wanted to fight for ISIS.
On Feb. 24, 2014, Khan traveled to Istanbul with plans to continue on to Syria and enlist with ISIS. According to court documents, Khan traveled to Turkey, but he changed his mind after a call home in which relatives lied and said his mother was ill and was in the intensive care unit.
Khan also offered his friend Garcia money and helped getting connected with ISIS, according to court documents. By August 2014, Garcia made it to ISIS boot camp in Syria. On Dec. 25, 2014, Garcia's mother a notice on Facebook that her son had died fighting for the cause.
FBI agents learned of Khan's involvement from these Facebook messages.
Gabrielle Banks covers federal court for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and send news tips at gabrielle.banks@chron.com.
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First-time expectant mother Lauren Lococo came to Memorial Hermann's hospital in The Woodlands open to any procedure that would ensure a healthy baby and pleasant birthing experience but hoping she wouldn't need an epidural.
She was already in labor when nurses suggested an alternative for her pain management: laughing gas.
The idea wasn't new to Lococo, who'd read about the practice in Europe during her pregnancy and childbirth research. She jumped at the idea.
"It turned out to be the perfect option," said Lococo, 26, a Spring proprietor of an online health and fitness business. "I felt like I was rocking on a hammock on a sunny day relaxed, aware of my surroundings, not loopy or out of it."
Lococo, who delivered a healthy 7-pound boy that June day, became Memorial Herman's first patient to get the gas as part of a pilot program now being offered at The Woodlands hospital. The program, thought to be the first in Texas, is one of many increasingly being offered in hospitals and birthing centers around the nation.
Memorial Hermann expects to extend the program throughout the system in mid-2018, officials said.
More Information The lowdown on laughing gas As a pain management tool for women in labor, the Memorial Hermann Health System has begun offering laughing gas at its hospital in The Woodlands and expects to extend it to all its hospitals in mid-2018. The first such availability in Texas, it's part of a national trend. - Despite the nickname, inhaling nitrous oxide doesn't make women in labor laugh. Rather, it decreases anxiety and puts the patient at ease. - Laughing gas used in labor is a 50/50 mix of nitrous oxide and oxygen; the concentration used in dentist offices is typically 70/30. - The patient isn't able to raise the mask to her face once she's had sufficient nitrous oxide, a safety feature. No one is allow to hold the mask for her. Source: Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses See More Collapse
It's all about giving women in labor another option, say program leaders at Memorial Hermann and other hospitals.
The gas, known as nitrous oxide, is the same that's used in dental offices but of a milder concentration. The woman in labor herself administers it through a mask.
It can be used during labor, delivery and even immediate postpartum procedures and is safe for the mother and baby, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. That's because the gas is dissipated through the lungs within a breath or two of the mask being removed. It doesn't reach the placenta.
"This won't replace existing methods of pain relief, but it's good to be able to offer another choice," said Dr. Gregory Eads, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands. "For patients who want to be in control and make their own decisions, nitrous oxide has its advantages."
In style, out of style
Nitrous oxide was first used for pain relief in childbirth in 1881 and became more common in the 1930s and 1940s, though it never really caught on in the United States. It has been widely used for decades in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, but any use in the U.S. was supplanted by the arrival of powerful anesthetics such as the epidural, an injection near the spinal cord that blocks feeling below the waist. By the 1980s, nitrous oxide for childbirth had completely disappeared from American hospitals.
Today's growing popularity is being driven by midwives, who stress a natural, unmedicated approach to labor. In a 2010 statement, the American College of Nurse-Midwives called nitrous oxide an inexpensive, simple, reasonably safe and effective analgesic and urged it be offered to more mothers.
In the years since, laughing gas has gone from being offered in a handful of maternity wards to more than 400 hospitals and 100 birthing centers, according to Michelle Collins, a Vanderbilt professor of nursing and expert on the subject. The movement, started at Vanderbilt and the University of California San Francisco, spread gradually around the country.
Still, Eads notes that Memorial Hermann is having to educate patients that nitrous oxide is an option for childbirth.
"The reality is that unless Hollywood stars promote a new medical procedure on Facebook, most people aren't aware of it," Eads said. "It's not easy getting the word out."
A lack of demand was one reason cited by Texas Children's Hospital and The Woman's Hospital of Texas for why they don't offer the option. The other primary reason: questions about its effectiveness as a pain management tool.
"The reason there was an evolution away from nitrous oxide is because epidurals are superior for pain relief," said Dr. Wycke Baker, chief of anesthesiology at Texas Children's. "Even in places that have rolled nitrous oxide out as option, the epidural is still the gold standard."
But epidurals aren't without downsides. Lococo said she wasn't crazy about the immobility they cause and wanted the freedom to move around in her room. She also feared one would prolong the pushing stage of labor, long thought to be a side effect, now a matter of debate among researchers.
Epidurals do require an IV, frequent blood pressure monitoring and continuous fetal monitoring.
A calming effect
Dr. McCallum Hoyt, chair of the American Society of Anesthesiologists's Committee on Obstetric Anesthesia, said that early research confirms Baker's contention, that the rate of epidural use appears unchanged even at hospitals that offer laughing gas. She said so far laughing gas tends to be used most as a precursor to an epidural, early in labor; and by women already committed to not having an epidural.
Hoyt, an anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said the consensus among patients there who use nitrous oxide is that it doesn't provide great pain relief but helps tremendously with anxiety, that it exerts a great calming effect.
That likely explains its popularity in other countries, Hoyt said. It is used by 60 percent of women in the United Kingdom and 50 percent in both Canada and Australia, she said.
So far, about 50 Memorial Hermann The Woodlands patients have used the nitrous oxide during labor, none with any regrets, said program leaders. The vast majority switched to an epidural at some point during the procedure.
Lococo was among such patients, mostly because of first-time labor fears that the pain would escalate during the pushing stage. She used the nitrous oxide for the first hour of labor, putting the mask on as each contraction came and taking it off as each contraction weakened.
"I wasn't pain free, but the pain wasn't the first thing on my mind," said Lococo. "I felt instant relaxation and loved being in control. Next time around I'll expect I'll just use the nitrous oxide."
The Chamber Choir and Vocal Rhapsody Ensemble of Cleveland State Community College will present a concert celebrating the holiday season on Friday at 7 p.m. in the George R. Johnson Cultural Heritage Center.
The celebration will include many different styles and types of music from classic choral arrangements such as Still, Still, March of the Kings and Angels We Have Heard on High to playful novelty songs like Text Me Merry Christmas and The 12 Days AFTER Christmas and several non-seasonal selections both the Chamber Choir and Vocal Rhapsody has studied over the course of the semester including He Never Failed Me Yet, Lean on Me, The Boy from New York City and many more. There will also be a set of music dedicated to veterans which will include a Patriotic Medley and The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy.
Both choirs are under the direction of Karen Dale, associate professor of music. According to Ms. Dale, The students are excited about sharing their music with family, friends and the community. The concert is free, and we hope that everyone will come and help us celebrate the conclusion of a successful semester of study.
WASHINGTON Texas U.S. Rep. Blake Farenthold, who used $84,000 in taxpayer dollars to settle with a former aide who sued him for sexual harassment in 2014, says he's going to pay back the money.
Farenthold told a Corpus Christi television station Monday that he plans to take out a personal loan to repay the government, a move that would be unprecedented under the 1995 Congressional Accountability Act that governs workplace disputes against lawmakers and their staffs.
The four-term Congressmen, who has long denied any wrongdoing, said he will offer a check to House Speaker Paul Ryan or other congressional leaders this week.
Farenthold also got an endorsement Monday from a past spokeswoman, Elizabeth Peace, who told the Chronicle that while Farenthold was always respectful, the atmosphere for women in much of the rest of Congress can be "toxic," requiring mandatory sexual harassment training.
READ ALSO: Congressman, hit with 'sexting' revelation, bows out of 2018 race
Now Playing: FOX 26 News reporter Natasha Geigel and The News Edge anchor Kaitlin Monte Video: Fox 26 Houston
Farenthold, for his part, told KRISTV, that the losers in his case, which was eventually settled out of court, were the taxpayers who are required by law to underwrite settlements and awards against members of Congress.
"I want to be clear that I didn't do anything wrong," he said, "but I also don't want the taxpayers to be on the hook for this."
In an interview witth "6 Investigates" in Corpus Christi, Farenthold said he was not given a choice about using his own money in the 2015 confidential settlement with his former spokeswoman, Lauren Greene.
Under the 1995 law, awards and settlements are paid from an account of the U.S. Treasury.
The scion of a wealthy and politically-connected family, Farenthold's net worth was estimated in 2015 at more than $5.7 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which ranked him the 72nd wealthiest lawmaker in the House.
Farenthold, 55, is the first member of Congress now known to have benefited from a little-known Treasury Department fund created to cover workplace settlements involving lawmakers.
READ ALSO: Congressman Al Green addresses past 'romantic encounter'
The congressional Office of Compliance (OOC) disclosed Friday that the fund paid for only one sexual harassment settlement involving a House lawmaker's office in the past five years, but did not name Farenthold.
In a statement Friday, Farenthold declined to confirm or deny that the claim had involved him. But he confirmed the payment in his interview Monday.
"I wish I could have said something Friday," he told the television station. "I went to the House lawyer and said, 'What can I say?, and they said 'Nothing ... Here's the statement that you can make.'"
Farenthold's account, however, differs from documents provided by the Office of Compliance, which state that the terms of settlement agreements, including any provisions governing disclosure, "are solely determined by the parties and their representatives."
Greene, then 27, alleged in a 2014 federal lawsuit that Farenthold made sexually suggestive remarks and, along with top staff members, created a hostile work environment. She also alleged that he retaliated against her when she complained. She did not allege any inappropriate sexual contact.
In his response to Greene's complaint, Farenthold alleged that she was fired for "poor performance."
The out-of-court settlement came after the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent watchdog agency, cleared Farenthold, concluding that there was no "substantial reason" to believe the allegations against the Corpus Christi Republican.
Greene did not return several calls in the last week requesting comment. Her Washington attorney, Leslie Alderman, also did not return calls Monday.
Until now the details of the settlement, including the $84,000 payout, remained under wraps, apparently by agreement of the parties. At the time, Farenthold was represented by lawyers for the House Employment Counsel.
Though Farenthold was cleared in 2015, the House Ethics Committee indicated Friday that it will review all formal claims of sexual harassment and other misconduct involving members and employees of the House.
He said he hired his own attorney at personal expense over the weekend to review the 2015 settlement, and was advised that he can talk about the "process."
Peace, who served as the congressman's spokeswoman for two years after Greene left, said that while Farenthold always treated her with respect, the same is not true elsewhere in Congress, which she called a "toxic environment."
"My two years with Congressman Farenthold were incredibly valuable," Peace said in an email. "I had an extensive and great career prior to working for the House but I learned so much during my time there. Congressman Farenthold was always very respectful to me and very considerate of my family - as in flexible with my schedule when necessary for the needs of my children as my husband was deployed overseas for the majority of the time I worked there.
"Sadly," she added, "I'm not surprised by the news coming out lately about sexual harassment in Congress as a whole because of other things I witnessed and things that occurred during my time there. It can be a very toxic work environment as a whole but once the Congressman became aware of those issues, he immediately took action on behalf of his staff and did his best to always do the right thing.
"While I don't want to discuss the particulars of that, I am very empathetic to the stories of other women coming forward in recent weeks. I would urge Congress to immediately pass mandatory sexual harassment training for all staffers as I believe it's greatly needed.
The Congressional Accountability Act was created in 1995 to give Congressional employees a way to pursue harassment claims and secure awards for settlements. In all, it has paid out more than $17 million over the past two decades for 264 settlement cases, including sexual harassment cases.
Farenthold criticized the agency for silencing accusers and lawmakers while forcing taxpayers to pay the costs.
"The process is broken," he said, on tape to KRISTV.com.
He said he will now push for more transparency.
A spokeswoman for Ryan did not respond to a request for comment on Farenthold's offer to repay the government.
Farenthold's is by no means the only office to have used public funds to pay for a harassment claim. Detroit Michigan John Conyers Jr. has faced multiple allegations of harassment in recent weeks, and in at least one case is reported to have used his office budgets to settle a complaint in an apparent effort to hide it from public view.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a Texas Supreme Court ruling allowing a challenge by conservatives to Houstons extension of employment benefits to the legal spouses of gay city employees to proceed.
The state courts June decision in Pidgeon v. Parker said same-sex couples are not necessarily entitled to government employment benefits, though the ruling does not prevent the city of Houston from continuing to offer such benefits to employees' same-sex spouses.
The city will continue to do so, Mayor Sylvester Turners office has said, while the case returns to trial court for a ruling on the merits. The mayor is on a trade mission to China, but his office reiterated that point in a statement Monday.
"The United States Supreme Court's decision means that further proceedings will likely be required. In the meantime, the City of Houston's policy to provide benefits remains in effect," Turner spokeswoman Tanya Makany-Rivera said.
The state courts June ruling asserted that the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 2015 decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized marriage rights among gay couples, did not determine whether same-sex couples have spousal benefits.
The city in September asked the high court to review that decision, arguing that the Obergefell decision found that benefits that a state attaches to marriage must be provided equally to all married couples, including those of the same sex.
Jonathan Saenz, president of the conservative nonprofit Texas Values and an attorney for the two plaintiffs in the case, called the U.S. Supreme Courts decision not to review the state courts decision a major victory for Texas Values and Houston taxpayers.
This is an incredible early Christmas present from the U. S. Supreme Court for taxpayers, Saenz said. Were grateful that the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed our lawsuit to go forward.
Houston began providing benefits in 2013, after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
Plaintiffs Jack Pidgeon and Larry Hicks quickly sued, alleging the payments were an illegal use of taxpayer money.
A year later, a trial court temporarily blocked the city from providing same-sex benefits, a ruling that held until July 2015, after the Obergefell ruling.
The state Supreme Court's June ruling essentially wipes that slate clean and instructs the trial court to reconsider the case.
Just when you think our do next-to-nothing Congress has set a new low bar for inaction, along comes a failure that's putting the health of about 400,000 Texas children at risk.
Alas, Congress has dropped the ball on funding the Children's Health Insurance Program, better known as CHIP. This routine legislation, which generally enjoys bipartisan support, provides health insurance for about nine million American children.
At least, that's what it's supposed to do. But Congress missed a Sept. 30 funding deadline, and Texas is one of at least five states in which millions of families have faced the prospect of losing childrens' health insurance right before Christmas. With so much at stake for Texans, our state's congressional delegation needs to do whatever it takes to get CHIP reauthorized. Now.
CHIP covers uninsured children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but too little to pay for private insurance. When Hurricane Harvey hit in August, data from the Center for Public Policy indicated more than 77,000 children depended upon CHIP in Harris County alone. That's in addition to roughly 10,000 pregnant women who counted on this coverage for everything from prenatal to postpartum care.
Underwriting children's health insurance doesn't just save kids' lives, it also makes hard economic sense. CHIP pays for childrens' check-ups and preventive care, which is way cheaper than ultimately treating illnesses that could have been avoided.
After Congress let CHIP funding lapse, state governments have kept their kids insured by draining down dwindling dollars left over from the last year. For Texas, that money runs out at the end of January. State law requires cancellation notices sent out 30 days before coverage ends, so the state's Health and Human Services Division reluctantly drew up plans to drop those notices like lumps of coal into parents' mailboxes during Christmas week.
Gov. Greg Abbott's administration knows this would be a disaster for Texas families, so it has asked the feds for $90 million to temporarily keep CHIP in business. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reportedly signaled this week that it will give Texas enough money to fund CHIP at least through February, so it appears the crisis has been pushed back for another month. But this stop gap measure is nowhere near enough. Keeping millions of families in limbo about their health insurance during the holiday season is needlessly cruel. Congress needs to reauthorize CHIP and prove it can still perform the basic task of taking care of America's children.
On Thursday morning, The New York Times revealed that Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, has been lying for months about Republican tax plans. Mnuchin has repeatedly claimed the existence of a Treasury report that - unlike every independent, nonpartisan assessment - found that these plans would pay for themselves, increasing growth and hence revenues so much that the deficit wouldn't rise. But there is no such report, and never has been; Treasury staffers weren't even asked to study the issue.
Also on Thursday, John McCain - who has delivered sanctimonious lectures on the importance of "regular order" in the Senate - declared his support for the GOP tax bill. Remember, Senate leaders rushed this bill to the floor without holding any hearings or soliciting expert testimony (and tax policy is an area where you really, really need to hear from experts, lawyers and accountants even more than economists). In fact, at the time McCain declared his support, some key provisions were still secret, so they could be presented for a vote with no time for debate.
McCain declared that he had made his decision after "careful consideration." Careful consideration of what? He didn't even wait for an analysis of the bill's economic impact by the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress' own scorekeeper - the only official assessment, since the Trump administration was, as I said, lying when it claimed to have its own analysis.
Later that day the joint committee delivered its predictable verdict: Like all other reasonable studies, its review found that the Senate bill would do little for U.S. economic growth, while directly hurting tens of millions of middle-class Americans, blowing up the deficit, lavishing benefits on the wealthy and opening up new frontiers for tax avoidance. But thanks to the moral collapse of McCain and other supposedly principled Republicans, at the time this column was filed the bill nonetheless seemed on track to clear the Senate.
But aren't politicians always cynical? Not to this degree.
For one thing, there's no precedent for this frantic rush to pass major legislation before anyone can figure out what's in it or what it does. By way of comparison, the Affordable Care Act went through months of hearings before it was brought to the Senate floor; the full Senate then debated the bill for 25 straight days.
And there's a world of difference between normal political spin - yes, all politicians try to emphasize the good aspects of their policies - and the outright lies that have marked every aspect of the selling of this thing.
Mnuchin said his department had a study showing great effects on growth; that was a lie. Donald Trump says the bill is "not good for me"; that's a lie. Sen. John Cornyn said, "This is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses"; that was a lie. Sen. Bob Corker said he wouldn't support a plan "adding one penny to the deficit"; that was a lie.
In other words, this whole process involves a level of bad faith we haven't seen in U.S. politics since the days when defenders of slavery physically assaulted their political foes on the Senate floor.
There are two further things worth pointing out about this moral rot.
First, it is not, at a fundamental level, a story about Donald Trump, bad as he is: The rot pervades the whole Republican Party. Some details of the legislation do look custom-designed to benefit the Trump family, but both the broad outlines and the fraudulence of the sales effort would have been pretty much the same under any Republican president.
Second, the rot is wide as well as deep.
I'm not just talking about Republican politicians, although the tax debate should dispel any remaining illusions about their motives: Just about every GOP member of Congress, including the sainted John McCain, is willing to put partisan loyalty above principle, voting for what they have to know is terrible and irresponsible legislation. The point, however, is that the epidemic of bad faith extends well beyond elected or appointed officials.
It was remarkable, for example, to see a group of Republican-leaning economists with serious professional credentials put out an open letter clearly intended to lend aid and comfort to Mnuchinesque promises of miraculous growth. True, they didn't explicitly claim that tax cuts would pay for themselves. But they didn't clearly state that they wouldn't, either, leaving Mnuchin free to claim - as they have to have known he would - that the letter vindicated his position.
And weasel-wording aside, it turns out that the letter misrepresented the research on which it was supposedly based. In other words, the rot of bad faith that has spread through the GOP has also infected many intellectuals affiliated with the party. Not all: Some anti-Trump conservatives have stood by their principles. But so far they have had little influence.
So what will it take to clean out the rot? The answer, basically, is overwhelming electoral defeat. Until or unless that happens, there's no telling how low the GOP will sink.
Krugman is a New York Times columnist.
The following are excerpts from reports generated by the Texas County Sheriffs Department:
At about 5 p.m. Dec. 3, a deputy initiated a traffic stop on U.S. 63 near Cabool of a vehicle traveling well below the speed limit that had a temporary license that was difficult to read.
The officer made contact with a man and woman in the vehicle and the man, 74, turned out to be listed as a missing person in Christian County. The woman stated the man had a medical issue and was taken to a hospital for several days. She said she was unable to contact him during that time and had reported him as missing, and had then forgotten to advise Christian County when he was located.
A Summersville man called Nov. 24 to report a big rig trailer had been swiped from his King Drive residence. When an investigating officer arrived, the man stated another driver from his company had taken it.
A deputy was dispatched at about 9:40 a.m. Nov. 25 regarding a report of a suspicious vehicle at a Mount Zion Road residence at Cabool.
A 50-year-old man who lives there showed the officer a gray Chevrolet pickup that had run through a fence into a wooded area. The officer determined the truck was reported stolen from Mountain View.
It was towed, and the man who owned it was advised of its location.
A deputy spoke with a Lebanon Police Department officer on Nov. 29 in reference to a stolen black 2006 Pontiac Grand Prix.
The Lebanon officer said a 31-year-old man took it for a test drive and failed to return it. The officer said the suspect was a sex offender who had previously registered at a Lone Pine Road residence at Mountain Grove.
The deputy went to residence, but didnt see the car and was unable to make contact with the suspect. Investigation continues.
A deputy on Nov. 29 investigated a report of a suspicious vehicle at Jacks Fork Bridge on Highway 137.
Upon arrival, the officer observed a silver Ford car that was registered to an El Dorado Springs man. There were no wants or warrants associated with it.
Texas County 911 called Nov. 30 to report a hang-up call from a Grandview Road residence at Houston.
An investigating officer made contact with a 35-year-old man there who said a 36-year-old woman had been kicked by a donkey and had been taken by her mother to see a doctor.
An anonymous person reported on Nov. 30 that there were a bunch of dead cows at a Decker Road property at Licking. An investigating officer didnt observe any.
A deputy responded Nov. 30 to a request to assist an ambulance crew at a Highway AW residence at Plato where a 63-year-old man had fallen off a piece of farm machinery and been hurt. An ambulance took the man to the hospital at Fort Leonard Wood.
A deputy was dispatched at about 10:30 p.m. regarding a report of a vehicle theft at the Crow Creek Bar and Grill on Highway CC north of Licking.
The officer made contact with a 45-year-old Licking man there who said his 1999 Jeep Wrangler valued at $20,000 had been swiped, along with a Glock pistol valued at $500 that was inside. The man said he had gone inside the bar at about 9:20 p.m. and when he came out the Jeep was gone.
The officer reviewed surveillance video and observed a white Chevrolet pickup drive through the parking lot, and a man in a brown coat and blue jeans walking around about 10 minutes later. The officer saw the man walk toward the Jeep, look inside on the passengers side, and then walk to the other side, climb in and drive away.
The Jeep reportedly went east on Highway CC, in the same direction as the white truck. There are no suspects and investigation continues.
A deputy was dispatched Nov. 6 to Summersville High School regarding a report of a student making threats against the school.
The officer made contact with the school principal, who showed the officer a threatening picture posted by the student a 15-year-old boy on Snapchat. The deputy spoke with the boy and his mother, and the boy said he wasnt threatening the school, but rather another boy who had been bullying him.
The principal stated the school would be handling the issue.
A 57-year-old Licking woman reported on Nov. 6 that the garage at her Highway AT residence had been broken into and several items with a total value of $475 had been stolen out of her car that was parked inside. The officer reported that he believed a local man was a suspect.
A 30-year-old Cabool man reported on Nov. 24 that his silver Dodge Ram pickup (of unreported year and value) had been stolen from his Highway AV residence. Investigation continues.
Pulaski County 911 called Nov. 24 to report that a woman had called and stated that a 50-year-old man had shot his 28-year-old son at their Evening Shade Road residence at Plato. Several deputies responded to the location and determined the shooting had not actually taken place.
They attempted to make contact with the son with regard to a report of a domestic disturbance, but without success.
A deputy on Nov. 25 investigated a report of gunshots and a loud vehicle in the area of Douglas Road and Lundy Road at Houston. The officer and multiple Missouri State Highway Patrol troopers searched the area and didnt find the loud vehicle.
A deputy was dispatched at about 12:15 a.m. Nov. 27 regarding a request to assist an ambulance crew at a Highway P residence at Licking.
The officer made contact with a 58-year-old woman there who stated there was a stranger in her bed and wolves were all over her apartment and attacking her and chewing on her foot. She said she had locked herself in the bathroom, but one of the wolves had gotten in and attacked here there.
When the ambulance crew arrived, the woman refused medical attention.
Texas County Jail admissions
Nov. 27
Michael P. Deardorf West Plains PD hold
Gaige C. Watts tampering with motor vehicle, resisting arrest
Nov. 28
Cody Westmoreland writ
Cody J. Stafford writ
Nov. 29
Amanda M. Layton writ
Randall C. Redding writ
Nov. 30
Joshua W. Steffens non-support
Jamie A. Cooper possession of controlled substance
Elizabeth A. Knopfel stealing
Brett E. Hall probation violation
Dustin W. Hewett Phelps County hold
Ivan A. Gale parole warrant
Sherri L. Long-Bucchi transport to MDOC
Dec. 1
Roy Kramer possession of controlled substance
Joshua D. Eisenhauer 48-hour commitment
Jamie A. Bolden warrant
Chance A. Hebblethwaite DWI, driving while revoked, possession of marijuana
Dec. 2
Elizabeth A. Knopfel Rolla PD hold
Chance I. Gale 48-hour commitment
Macie O. Hayes-Mitchell driving while revoked, stealing
Dec. 3
Alexander B. Hall parole violation
Megan L. Neal Houston PD warrant
Reducing medication errors has been a top priority over the past month at Texas County Memorial Hospital, board members heard at last weeks monthly meeting.
Wes Murray, TCMH chief executive officer, detailed efforts by hospital staff to make improvements to the medical reconciliation process for patients seeking treatment at TCMH.
A significant portion of our patient demographic uses multiple medications, Murray said.
Murray described patients showing up at the emergency department with bags of medications or medication lists that were incomplete or wrong. The patients may or may not take the medications they have in their possession, and the patients may not take those medications correctly.
Hospital visits are compounded by medication history that is contained in a patients electronic medical record. The electronic record may also be out of date.
Medication reconciliation has always been a cumbersome process, and electronic medical records hasnt made the process easier, Murray said.
The TCMH medical staff expressed concern about medication errors due to the electronic charting. Doretta Todd-Willis, TCMH chief nursing officer, put together a team of nurse managers, physicians and information technology staff to address and correct issues.
Todd-Willis said changes have already been made in the way staff process medication brought in by patients. Old medication lists are deleted from the patients electronic record and new medication lists are started with each patient hospital visit.
The patient, physician, pharmacy and sometimes the nursing home or family caregivers have to be active participants in the process, Todd-Willis said.
Dr. Jonathan Beers, TCMH chief of staff, said many times a primary care provider may not know about medications prescribed by a specialist to a patient.
Patient use of multiple pharmacies can also make it difficult for the patient and the patients healthcare providers to keep track of medications.
Many times a patient doesnt even know why they are on certain medications, Todd-Willis said.
Beers said large hospitals have staff tasked entirely with medication reconciliation for hospital patients. At TCMH, those providing the patient care are responsible for the medication reconciliation efforts.
There are countless ways that medication errors can occur, and we are focusing on this issue so that nothing serious occurs, Murray said.
This is an ongoing process that will continually need to be looked at and worked on, Beers said.
FUNDS OWED BY THE STATE
TCMH has requested help from the Missouri Hospital Association (MHA) to collect $1.2 million from the state of Missouri. The funds are owed to the hospital following Medicaid cost settlements completed for fiscal years 2012, 2013, and 2014.
Historically, the state has paid the funds when we request them after the cost settlements are complete, said Linda Pamperien, TCMH chief financial officer.
According Pamperien, the funds that would typically be paid by the state have been frozen by the governors office.
The funds being held are for services provided by TCMH to Missouri Medicaid patients. The funds are not dispersed by the state until final cost reports are completed for each fiscal year.
We arent the only hospital waiting to be paid, Pamperien said.
There is no timeline for when the funds might be paid. MHA is working on behalf of multiple Missouri hospitals to get the funds owed to them.
TCMH is also collecting information regarding medical reimbursement denials for patients with Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance.
Anthem has been denying claims for services provided in the emergency room as non-emergent, Murray said. This puts the burden on TCMH to collect payment from the individuals rather than their insurance company.
Murray provided two examples of Anthem insurance refusing to cover emergency room service for insured patients: one was hit by a car and one had a stroke. Murray said both would be considered emergency healthcare needs.
These are not examples from our hospital, but they could have easily happened to insured patients in Texas County, too, Murray said.
Murray said MHA is seeking information from member hospitals and from patients insured by Anthem that have received denials of coverage for emergency room services.
QUALITY REPORT
Turpin, TCMH quality management director, reported TCMH met all five first year milestones set by the Hospital Improvement and Innovation Network (HIIN), a two-year program sponsored by Centers for Medicare Services (CMS).
We saw either an improvement or no decline in the areas we were measuring monthly, Turpin said.
The overall goals of the project are a reduction in all causes of patient harm and a reduction in readmission of hospital inpatients less than 30 days since the first admission. Other key areas of the program include antibiotic stewardship, hospital acquired infections, workplace violence, physician leadership, patient engagement and healthcare disparities.
TCMH is one of more than 100 hospitals in the state participating in the program. The MHA collects and compiles data from TCMH and other hospitals in the state. The state data is then collected and compiled into national data by the American Hospital Association Health Research and Educational Trust. The program is planned to last two years with the possibility of a third year.
Participating in this program is helping us prepare for new CMS guidelines that we will have to follow, Turpin said.
SURGERY WING
An $89,000 Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) grant request for a new generator to power the surgery department under construction at TCMH has gone to the second round of consideration. Board members unanimously passed a resolution to agree to cover $23,000 of the new generator cost if FEMA approves the request.
Funding for the grant will not be known until next summer.
Construction on the new department, slated for completion in 2018, is located between the Jayson Gentry Community Safe Room and the east wing of the hospital, will have two operating rooms, an endoscopy suite and seven private pre-surgical and post-surgical rooms for patients. The area is 6,091 square feet in size.
FINANCIAL REPORT
Pamperien said inpatient revenues were below budgeted expectations, but outpatient revenues exceeded budgeted expectations for the month. Expenses were also down for October. TCMH finished the month with a positive bottom line of $103,247 and a negative year-to-date balance of $581,880.
Present at the meeting were: Murray; Beers; Todd-Willis; Pamperien; Turpin; Joleen Senter Durham, director of public relations; John Hammons, TCMH legal counsel; Texas County Commissioner John Casey and County Clerk Laura Crowley; and board members Dr. Jim Perry, OD, Omanez Fockler, Janet Wiseman and Jay Loveland. TCMH board member Mark Hampton was absent.
The county officials met with the board to discuss outstanding medical costs related to inmate care at the Texas County Jail.
Due to the Christmas holiday, the next meeting of the TCMH board of trustees is Dec. 19.
Houston police were called early Saturday to a fight on a business parking lot.
Chance H. Hunter, 18, of 402 Forrest Drive in Houston, was issued citations for minor in possession of alcohol by consumption and peace disturbance by fighting after an incident at Caseys General Store on U.S. 63 just after midnight Dec. 2.
An officer was dispatched to the store regarding a fight in progress. Upon arrival, the officer observed Hunter and another male facing one another in a fighting stance in the parking lot and separated them. After investigation and speaking to an employee who witnessed the fight, Hunter was cited for fighting. While the officer was speaking to Hunter inside the patrol car, the officer smelled a strong odor of alcohol and Hunter admitted to drinking several beers earlier that night.
A senior Houthi official confirmed to Xinhua on Monday that former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, his nephew, relatives and the general secretary of Saleh's party were killed.
Former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh speaks during a ceremony to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Popular Conference Party, in Sanaa, Yemen. [File Photo: AP]
"Saleh and his party's Assistant General Secretary Yasser al-Awadhi were killed on Monday morning while they were trying to escape through Khawlan district on the southeastern outskirts of Sanaa on their way to escape to Saudi-backed government-controlled Marib province, " the official confirmed to Xinhua.
"Saleh's nephew Tarek was killed also early Monday morning in his home in Haddah quarter in the capital Sanaa," the official said.
"Saleh's party's General Secretary Arif al-Zuka was also killed in Sanaa," the official added.
The security situation and clashes in the capital Sanaa and surrounding provinces have eased.
Meanwhile, Saudi-led coalition warplanes were still hovering over the capital.
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employee who borrowed money from his boss and failed to return it has been awarded more than $10,000 after the Employment Relations Authority said the misstep did not warrant dismissal.Finance and insurance broker David Boone was at the Hawkes Bay races with colleagues from Car Finance 2U when he realised he was $35 short of making a bet.Boone asked company director Matthew Hodges to loan him the money and Hodges agreed on the condition the money was paid back as soon as possible.The issue was raised during a taxi trip back to their hotel that evening, then two days later when both were back at the companys offices.Two days after that, Hodges requested the money once again, this time in front of other staff. On this occasion, Boone asked to talk to Hodges but the director shouted for him to go and get the money immediately.Boone claims he went to get the money from an ATM but felt unwell and under pressure so decided to work from home. Hodges then called Boone and requested he return to work Boone said he would if the pair could have a civilised conversation.Later that day, Boone who was in New Zealand on a work visa and was in the process of obtaining residency received a text message informing him of his dismissal.Boone soon filed a claim with the ERA which was heard by authority member Nicola Craig.In her determination, Craig noted that Finance 2U did not follow correct procedure when dismissing Boone something the companys directors also acknowledged.She suggested that, instead of an immediate dismissal, the company could have started a disciplinary process for non-payment of the loan.Ultimately, Craig ordered Finance 2U to pay Boone three months pay with a 30 per cent reduction, noting that that Boones behaviour did contribute to his dismissal.She also ordered the firm to pay $7,000 for humiliation, loss of dignity and injury to feelings, as well as $1,983 reimbursement of immigration expenses and $881 in expenses.
It failed to investigate the allegation of poor work performance;
It failed to give Stojanovich a reasonable chance to respond to the allegation; and
It failed to consider any explanation that Stojanovich provided.
hristchurch funeral parlour has been ordered to pay $21,000 to a former employee after the Employment Relations Authority ruled the woman had been unjustifiably dismissed.Angela Stojanovich, of Poppy Funerals, was fired by company shareholder and director Jasmin Teague in February of this year.According to the recent ERA decision, Teague dismissed Stojanovich after making "some vague references to [her] being better suited to a larger funeral business where she may be able to learn embalming."There was also said to be a misunderstanding between Stojanovich and Teague's mother, who was also working at Poppy Funerals at the time.Stojanovich's advocate submitted that any dismissal could not have been justified as she signed her employment agreement after she had commenced work, meaning the 90-day trial period was not valid.The ERA agreed and said the company had not followed a fair process because:The ERA awarded Stojanovich $15,000 compensation for hurt, humiliation and loss of dignity, $2,076 in wages she would have otherwise earned, and $727 in lost wages.The agency also ordered to the funeral parlour to pay Stojanovich $3,500 as contribution to her costs and $72 for the filing fee on her claim.Stojanovich said that she became angry and upset and felt betrayed as a result of her dismissal. She also said she was stressed for several weeks; she became tearful, emotional and depressed.The ERA acknowledged this: I accept that Ms Stojanovich was only employed for a short period of time and was able to find new employment relatively quickly but the evidence of the impact on her was clear, credible and compelling," the decision read.
When Is The Best Time To Release An Album In 2018?
As with every other aspect of marketing yourself in the music industry, when you choose to release your music can make all the difference. In this article we break down the best months in which to drop your new record as well as those months which will ensure a flop.
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Guest post by Janelle Rogers of Symphonic Blog
Over the past few years, Ive put together a month-by-month guide with the best time to release your album. Its patently simple: which months would maximize your release and which would destroy it?
This year, Im taking it a up a notch and giving you additional ideas of how you can maximize your release in a specific month or how to schedule based on your albums specific subject matter or genre. There is one rule that stays the same: start planning your album release and reach out to media three months in advance. You should also release your album on Friday, which is the official release day of the week that was set by the industry in 2015.
As for when to release based on competition, I saw two major shifts in 2017. Typically, I avoid March because of SXSW and October because of CMJ. This past year, I saw little impact with SXSW in regards to securing press coverage for our clients. October, which is usually a looming black hole, turned into our best month for coverage. In fact, it was coming in so fast and so abundantly that we were struggling to keep up with it (a very good problem to have).
Like last year, Im beginning the calendar with March to maximize your lead time for an effective album release. If you want to know what Id suggest for January and February of 2018,you can review my forecast from 2017.
March
As mentioned above, in years past, I recommended avoiding releasing an album in March simply because SXSW takes over the minds and hearts of media. We didnt see that this year. Although we still recommend avoiding releasing an album during the conference (March 9-16), the rest of month shouldnt matter as much. Just make sure youre getting started on your promotion well before the end of 2017.
How to maximize your album release
SXSW is still a major music industry event, so a great way to maximize the release is to actually be in Austin during the festival . Look at former showcases and party lists to see if there are any that could be a good fit for your band. Reach out to the people in charge! If you secure a showcase, make sure you promote it while youre promoting your album release. If youre not able to make headway on live performances, still try to make it down there to network. Contact bands or industry people you respect, and find out how you can support their efforts at the conference.
Spring is in the air, and people are ready to shake out the frigid winter blues. Media knows this, which is why this is the time they put together playlists that are spring friendly . If you have songs that create a spring feel or have a spring like title, this could be a great time to release them.
Spring break! Whats spring break without a great spring break playlist? If you have a song that fits the party theme, now may be time to let it out.
April
Typically, my advice is to wait until the middle of the month to release an album because of SXSW. In 2018, Im declaring April wide open.
How to maximize your album release
The dreaded April 15 tax deadline looms in the US. Do you have songs about money, taxes, or tunes that could just help relieve the stress of filing to Uncle Sam?
Continue the spring theme if you have any songs that are a fit.
May
This is a great month to release albums. Its your last chance to release your album before the summer festival season hits.
How to maximize your album release:
Mothers Day presents a time to give that great, big ode to mom. Do you have an album or song that honors your mom (and all the other amazing moms out there)? Make this known, and also look outside traditional music sources when pitching press. Pitch the mom blogs and magazines so they can see just how much theyre appreciated!
June
Music-festival season is here, so unless you plan to work the festival circuit or you have great seasonal tie-ins, I recommend waiting to release your album until the fall.
How to maximize your album release
Indie pop bands unite! This season is made for you with all those upbeat summer songs that make us dream of lazy days at the beach. If you have a summer anthem, this is the time to release it.
Journalists spend a great deal of time trying to keep their head above water during festival season. If music festivals are a cornerstone of your band and also your greatest asset, this is absolutely the best time to release your album.
We honored mom, now its time to honor dad on Fathers Day . Have a song or album about your dad or fathers in general? Nows a great time to release it.
If you have songs that have a coming of age theme or could fit the graduation theme, this could be a great opportunity to release them.
July
Just like June, the same rules apply for festival season.
How to maximize your album release:
In the US, theres the Fourth of July . I dont expect the civil discourse were seeing in America to dissipate, so if you have something political to say on your album, this is the time to say it.
Summer songs are still a major factor.
August
The festival season is starting to wind down toward the end of the month. The standard rules apply for August that applied for the rest of the summer.
How to maximize your album release
Media is trying to soak in the last sun of summer, so you have another chance for coverage if your songs are summer friendly .
If you have any songs that could be great for back to school or have a coming-of-age theme for those entering college, this month would be a good time for them.
September
Alas, festival season is over, and the opportunities are starting to open up with media. This is a great time to release an album if youre an emerging artist.
How to maximize your album release
If youre waiting until September to release a song or album with a back-to-school theme, its best to do it at the beginning of the month .
Were hitting that cozy, crisp time of year where we long for songs of comfort. If youre an Americana or folk type of band, this could be the right time for you to release your album.
October
In 2017, this was our best month for press coverage, so we highly recommend an October release.
How to maximize your album release
Like September, this is a good time to release music with a fall theme.
If you have songs that fit a haunting, spooky, or straight-up Halloween theme, now is the time to release them. Some of the outlets who are focused on pop-culture themes could be particularly interested.
November
As I write this section, its now only the tail end of October, so theres a bit of guess work on what will happen next year. Mid-term elections could be a major focus considering the political climate. Its also safe to assume that best-of-year lists will stay play a major factor.
How to maximize your album release
As we transition into winter, songs about comfort, coziness and the first signs of winter could be of significance.
If youre writing songs with an air of civic mindedness or political themes, use them this month as your rallying call.
December
We expect best of lists will still be on the radar. It can sometimes be a great time to release an album, however, because theres little competition in the indie world. If you decide to release in December, do it with caution, and also do it before December 15 when media starts to shut down for the end of the year holidays.
How to maximize your album release
Do you have songs that connect with the winter season? Give them a push.
If you have any holiday-related songs, this is a great way to grab attention, even while outlets are starting to shut down. Keep in mind that not everyone loves a good holiday song, so make sure you do your due diligence in finding the ones that do.
January
Mid-to-late January can be a good time to release an album since the competition for new releases isnt there yet. We wouldnt recommend releasing it any sooner than that, because, for the most part, media is still getting back in the swing of things after the holiday season and needs time to catch up.
How to maximize your album release
Keep those winter songs coming.
If you have songs with a positive twist, this could be a great time for a release. Think about the people who want to start off the year with a fresh start. How can you appeal to them?
Songs that contribute to a great exercise playlist are always in vogue, but those January resolutions help take it to the next level.
February
February is also a great time to release an album due to relatively light competition from outside forces.
How to maximize your album release
Love and anti-love songs could get an extra push this month because of Valentines Day. If your album is rich in relationship content, look at this month as your guide.
Folk Alliance occurs in mid-February. If youre a folk band playing the festival, definitely look at releasing an album around this time. Many of the same rules apply as I mentioned with SXSW. If you have an opportunity to be there and network, do it.
Workout songs are still in play this month.
As you can see, there are a lot of angles you can use to maximize your album release and schedule it for the best chance for success. The tips mentioned above are some of the more obvious in our forte of indie rock and folk. If you have songs or an album based on certain themes, a quick Google search can help you discover additional ideas to enhance your release.
\\ Via Sonic Bids //
Janelle Rogers began her 20-year music industry career working for SXSW Music and Media Conference. She then went on to work for BMG Distribution for 10 years in the alternative music department where she championed bands like Kings of Leon, Ray LaMontagne, The Strokes, Belle & Sebastian, and The White Stripes. In 2002 she launched Green Light Go Music PR as a haven of honesty, integrity, and passion for underrepresented artists and labels. She has since been named Mentor of the Year by the University of Michigan, Dearborn, appeared as a panelist at NXNE, and been an official SXSW mentor.
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Why Mexico City Us A Top Market For Many Musicians
While places like Los Angeles, New York, or London are likely to jump out as 'music cities', one which doesn't always leap to mind is Mexico City. While off the radar, however, Mexico's capital is becoming the number one market for a number of high profile artists, particularly where streaming is concerned.
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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0
Whenever we think of the top music market for an artist, the major city centers of New York, Los Angeles or London immediately come to mind. One thats been off the radar but is coming fast is Mexico City, and its already the #1 market for a diverse number of artists like Diplo, Adele, Dua Lipa, Radiohead, Shania Twain, Harry Styles and Metallica, at least as far as Spotify is concerned as outlined in this Billboard post.
In fact, Spotify has 64% of Mexicos streaming market, which dwarfs Google Play (12%), Apple Music (8%) and Tidal (2%), according to 2016 data from the Competitive Intelligence Unit. One of the reasons why Spotify dominates comes thanks to its cell phone bundle deals with Virgin Mobile and Movistar, which is happening in other huge markets like China and India as well.
While this might be a surprise to many, the reason behind Mexico Citys rise is due to the fact that its metro area population now stands at more than 21 million, which is far more than any other North American market.
Another reason is the cost of a Spotify paid subscription, which now costs 99 pesos (or around $5.23USD). Thanks to the low cost, its virtually eliminated physical piracy, which ran rampant in the country prior to streaming. A typical pirated CD goes for around 250 pesos ($13.20USD) on the street. Whats more, Mexico has now become Spotifys 3rd highest volume for streams, just after the U.S. and the U.K., meaning that its users there do actually take full advantage of the service.
While physical piracy is becoming less of a factor, Mexico City does seem to be center for purchased fake Likes and streams. Electronic artists like Avicii, Skrillex, David Guetta and Steve Aoki have been accused of purchasing Facebook Likes in the past, since it became obvious when so many originated from that city. That said, Facebook has made a concerted effort to crack down on these accounts.
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Bob Dylan was right.
The times do change.
Its hard to think of a more hidebound institution than the British monarchy horses, carriages, tall guys in great big furry hats. Royalty seemed as changeless as the queens hairstyle until it was announced that the House of Windsor will be importing its next princess from the erstwhile colonies.
Thus far the Brits appear to find this a jolly good idea and already have started turning out tea towels tatted up with images of Meghan Markle and her young prince a fellow only five dead relatives away from becoming Henry IX.
It has to have his great-grand uncle Ed spinning in his grave and his grand aunt Meg making a few rotations of her own.
So heres the 30-second history lesson. Uncle Ed is more formally known as Edward VIII, King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Empire, and Emperor of India, Jan. 20, 1936, until his abdication less than 11 months later signing off to his subjects with a farewell message: I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.
That woman was Wallis Simpson, an American, barred by the Church of England from marriage to the king because she was divorced.
Aunt Margaret Queen Elizabeths sister found herself in much the same situation, only it was a divorced man to whom she was forbidden to pledge her troth.
Meghan will also be leaving an ex behind when she settles in with Prince Harry, but with the blessing of Old Queen Bess and the Archbishop of Canterbury to boot.
Oh, and Megs mom is black you have to wonder how that would have sat with all those Brits who set out to the colonies bound to take up the white mans burden, as their poet laureate so delicately put it.
Yeah, the times do change.
Especially when it comes to men and women.
And what goes on between us.
A divorced woman is longer a threat to the British throne, but an offended woman has become threat to a Senate seat.
Theres some symbolism lurking somewhere in the fact that Hugh Hefner was barely cold in his grave when Harvey Weinsteins reputation was popped like an infected pimple, and what goes on between guys and gals will likely never be the same again.
Over the past couple of months theres been an avalanche of accusations sweeping all sorts of dirty old and not so old men into sudden, unanticipated retirement as titillating, tawdry tales took over the headlines and what we used to call frat boy behavior suddenly took on a more felonious cast.
The times change sometimes overnight.
But the past doesnt change. What was was. What happened happened.
In 1936, an American divorcee nearly toppled the British throne. Eighty-one years later, another promises to infuse new life into that aging institution.
On a trip to Australia, Edward described a group of aborigines as the most revolting form of living creatures Ive ever seen! One must wonder what he would think of Meghans family background.
Times change attitudes with them.
What was accepted, isnt. What was ordinary, isnt.
A nation of ex-smokers will attest to that.
So will the Queen of England.
And Al Franken.
Clarksburg eighth-graders are using art and poetry in their Holocaust studies presentations. PreviousNext
Clarksburg Elementary Holocaust Exhibit Runs Wednesday
Inge Auerbacher, seen here in 2013, is returning to Clarksburg School on Wednesday to talk about her experience in the Holocaust.
CLARKSBURG, Mass. Clarksburg School eighth-graders will host the school's 14th annual Holocaust Exhibit with Terezin survivor Inge Auerbacher on Wednesday night.
English teacher and exhibit organizer Michael Little said this year's exhibit will be different and instead of exploring the Holocaust purely academically, students will create a "poetic puzzle" based on Auerbacher's book "I Am A Star" and the book "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" which is a collection of poetry and art from children that were in Terezin.
"Invention can be a little scarce sometimes especially with such a complex subject, but we find a way to do it every year and we have done it we have to reinvent," Little said. "We are making boards that are radically different in their approach this year."
Little said Auerbacher spoke at the school some five years ago, so past students have already created the standard academic exhibit boards. This year, students will use the knowledge they have gained from various trips to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and juxtapose the academic boards with new boards displaying poetry and art.
"So we thought let's use the stuff we learned at Mass MoCA. The idea of abstraction an metaphor and lest see what we can come up with," Little said. "We wanted to do something abstract that would really jar the audience."
The boards use poetry from "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," quotes from "I Am a Star," and pictures to tell Auerbacher's story.
Each board is artfully adorned with artwork reflective of the often-dark subjects of the poetry that include charcoal smudges and handprints, drawn barbed wire and treated paper made to look aged.
"Nothing is pretty on these boards and we want to express those inner fears. We want it to hit people," Little said. "We matched quotes with the poetry and it allowed us to tell a story in a completely different way. A subconscious way."
Little said although the boards are often grim, the way the poetry and art are laid out conveys hope.
"The poems are matched up in certain ways and they are matched up in a way that will balance the darkness of the board," he said. "Even in the midst of all of the darkness people find hope."
Little noted that this year's exhibit comes earlier than it typically does because Auerbacher could only attend a fall presentation. Normally the class holds its presentations with a speaker near the end of the course in the spring.
"If I didn't book her, I probably would not be able to get a survivor and this group would be left out," he said. "I did not have the confidence that I could find another survivor that could make the journey here."
Little said every year it becomes harder to find survivors. Most survivors now were children during World War II; those that are left are elderly, and some are unable to travel great distances. Auerbacher, for example, was 7 when she entered Terezin, a concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic, 75 years ago.
Little urged people to attend the exhibit, that will be held Dec. 6 at 6 p.m. at the school, because the day will come when there will be no more survivors.
"I think we are coming to the end of when you can't have a living survivor and I am grateful for all of these years because having a living survivor in the classroom is a gift and a blessing," Little said. "But for sure there is a near future where there won't be survivors ... down the road, the program will have to exist in another way."
Little said Rabbi Robert Sternberg will speak at 6:15 and Auerbacher will speak at 7:15.
"Inge will deliver a message and she wants people to understand that we need to reach out to each other and we need to understand each other and have compassion," Little said. "We need to learn to accept each other and I am hoping that the kids learn that in the context of the world we can do good for each other. We can work out our differences instead of destroying the world."
Little said the event would not be possible without the help and donations from Robert and Elaine Baum, McLain Electric, Midtown Tax and Bookkeeping Company, Christo's Famous Pizza and Wise Guy Snacks.
Pittsfield Police Department Implements 'Park and Walk' Initiative
PITTSFIELD, Mass. It's been a month since on-duty Pittsfield police officers have incorporated a change in their daily routine: for 15 minutes each shift, officers leave their vehicles and walk a selected portion of their beat.
Known as the "park and walk" initiative, officers on the day, evening, and midnight shifts are all expected to attempt one 15-minute walk, said Police Chief Michael Wynn. As of Nov. 26, officers registered a total of 293 park and walk details throughout the city.
"The officers can call in anywhere in their sector. If they're off sector, they can stop anywhere downtown," he said. "The expectation is that it should be done once per shift."
Mayor Linda Tyer said the exercise serves to enhance the relationships that officers have with community members.
"Pittsfield has officers who are committed and dedicated to their profession. We have seen in their interactions ranging with that of our youth to senior citizens that they truly care about the community they serve. I know that this will be one more opportunity to demonstrate that same care and concern."
The concept isn't a new one for Pittsfield. In the 1990s, officers regularly engaged in foot patrol, said Wynn. However, the total elimination of funding for community policing in 2007 put a halt to this kind of patrol.
In recent years, there have been continuous conversations on community policing in Pittsfield and requests for officers to be assigned to walk patrol a move that Wynn notes requires added manpower due to the necessary replacement to fulfill the loss of a vehicle patrol.
However, the 15-minute park and walk is feasible for a department which at 87 officers is still understaffed and the plan doesn't require additional funding.
"Because we're not taking that resource from the entire shift, everybody can participate to the best of their ability. If they need to revert to their cruiser to address a situation, they can," Wynn said. "Also, the nice part is we are able to operationalize this exercise with zero impact on the budget."
Wynn says the initiative has been welcomed by officers. "The reception has been positive," he said.
Lt. Matthew Kirchner agrees.
"I like interacting with the public, from business owners to pedestrians. We get to talk to people and listen to their concerns," he said. "I think it's proven to be valuable, given the personnel constraints that we have. We're doing a work-around to make it work for the community."
For now, Wynn said the park and walk initiative will continue to be a part of the department's engagement strategy and will be continuously monitored.
Recipients of the Scholarship must agree to take a full course load (12 or more credits), including the college's BUS-139 Personal Finance course, a course that is supported by Guardian Life Insurance Company of America and is free to students.
Biz Briefs: BCC Offers Micro-Grants to Help Students Get Out of Debt
Helping hand
Berkshire Community College, with sponsorship from Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, is offering select students micro-grants to help them pay their past-due debts and stay on track to graduate. The program is called the "Guardian Value Scholarship," which identifies students who are in good academic standing but unable to re-enroll due to college debt.
The scholarship can help reduce or remove a student's debt to the college which in turn allows them to register for upcoming spring 2018 classes at BCC. The maximum value of the scholarship is $1,500. If a student owes more than $1,500, they are expected to pay down the remaining balance of their debt before they can register.
Recipients of the Scholarship must agree to take a full course load (12 or more credits), including the college's BUS-139 Personal Finance course, a course that is supported by Guardian Life Insurance Company of America and is free to students. In the fall 2017 semester, 39 students took the free personal finance course, which aims to help them learn to be more financially savvy. For more information about Guardian Value Scholarships, contact Anne Moore in the Financial Aid office at 413-236-1641.
Doing Rite
The Price Rite Marketplace store in Pittsfield has joined other locations in its annual Check-Out Hunger fundraising campaign, which raises funds to benefit local food banks in communities served by Price Rite stores. Through December 30, 64 Price Rite stores throughout Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia will raise funds by collecting donations of $1, $3 or $5 from shoppers at checkout.
In support of the fight against hunger, 100 percent of the funds raised will be donated to local hunger-fighting charities and organizations. The supermarket chain contributes approximately $500,000 annually to local food banks and food pantries to benefit local families in need within the communities it serves. In Pittsfield, the money will be given to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts.
Know your rights
Kimball Farms Life Care in Lenox will host a drop-in clinic with attorney Kate Alexander from the Berkshire Consumer Services Office on Friday, Dec. 8, at 2 p.m. Attorney Alexander can discuss such issues as filing a credit freeze, consumer fraud, scams and other consumer information. Visitors are invited to drop by and ask questions beginning at 2 p.m.
Get moving
Jacob's Pillow has been awarded $300,000 from the Ford Foundation as a strand of Challenging Inequality through Creativity and Free Expression to support the recently imagined Pittsfield Moves! program. Pittsfield Moves! was conceived by Jacob's Pillow in collaboration with lead partner The Berkshire Bridges Working Cities Pittsfield Initiative to help local stakeholders within educational, social, and economic justice organizations develop a practice of storytelling and relationship building through movement. The Ford Foundation is one the world's largest philanthropic foundations focused on global social change.
After key Community Conversations held in Pittsfield, choreographer Paloma McGregor, director of Angelas Pulse, has been selected as lead artist for this year-long project. This selection process was implemented in a way that enabled community members to have direct agency in the project from its conception.
Pittsfield Moves! will work to create community performance through multi-tiered partnerships over the course of the year. The project will present its first iteration at Jacob's Pillow as part of the Inside/Out Performance Series during Festival 2018 and will culminate in a performance in Pittsfield in the Fall of 2018. In the Spring of 2019, the Pillow will host a major international summit on dance and social change where Pittsfield Moves! will be presented as a case study alongside other projects from across the country and the world.
iciHaiti - Economy : Haiti eligible for concessional loans from the World Bank
An information session on the operating procedures of the World Bank was held last week for managers, technicians and heads of autonomous agencies under the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
Anabela Abreu, the representative of the World Bank in Haiti took the opportunity to confirm that Haiti in regard of the criteria of the WB for the 82 member countries of the consortium, is eligible for concessional loans (loan at low rates see 0% interest with often the beginning of deferred repayment).
IH/ iciHaiti
Imperial Valley News Center
Canadian Hacker Who Conspired With And Aided Russian FSB Officers Pleads Guilty
San Francisco, California - Karim Baratov, a/k/a Kay, a/k/a/Karim Taloverov, a/k/a Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov, pled guilty Tuesday to charges returned by a grand jury in the Northern District of California in February 2017. The guilty plea was announced by U.S. Attorney Brian J. Stretch; Acting Assistant Attorney General Dana J. Boente of the U.S. Justice Departments National Security Division; Executive Assistant Director Paul Abbate of the Federal Bureau of Investigations Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch; and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent in Charge John F. Bennett.
Baratov, 22, a Canadian national and resident, and three other defendants, including two officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Russias domestic law enforcement and intelligence service, were charged with computer hacking and other criminal offenses in connection with a conspiracy to access Yahoos network and the contents of webmail accounts that began in January 2014. Baratovs co-defendants, all of whom remain at large in Russia, all are Russian nationals and residents: Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev, 33; Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, 43; and Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan, a/k/a Magg, 29.
According to his plea agreement, Baratovs role in the charged conspiracy was to hack webmail accounts of individuals of interest to the FSB and send those accounts passwords to Dokuchaev for money. As alleged in the indictment, Dokuchaev, Sushchin, and Belan compromised Yahoos network and gained the ability to access Yahoo accounts. When they desired access to individual webmail accounts at a number of other internet service providers, such as Google and Yandex (based in Russia), Dokuchaev tasked Baratov to compromise such accounts.
The illegal hacking of private communications is a global problem that transcends political boundaries. Cybercrime is not only a grave threat to personal privacy and security, but causes great financial harm to individuals who are hacked and costs the world economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year. These threats are even more insidious when cyber criminals such as Baratov are employed by foreign government agencies acting outside the rule of law, said U.S. Attorney Stretch. With the assistance of our law enforcement partners in Canada, we were able to track down and apprehend a prolific criminal hacker who had sold his services to Russian government agents. This prosecution again illustrates that we will identify and pursue charges against hackers who compromise our countrys computer infrastructure.
Where a foreign law enforcement or intelligence agency recruits, tasks, or protects criminals targeting the United States and its companies or citizens, instead of taking steps to disrupt them and hold them accountable, the United States will leverage all of its available tools to expose that agencys conduct and arrest those responsible, said Acting Assistant Attorney General Boente. Todays plea exemplifies the Departments commitment to pursuing, arresting, and bringing to justice even those hackers who work for a foreign law enforcement or intelligence organization. We wish to thank the Canadian authorities for their skillful assistance in the investigation and arrest of Baratov and to acknowledge the contributions of the other nations and law enforcement services that provided invaluable assistance.
This case is a prime example of the hybrid cyber threat were facing, in which nation states work with criminal hackers to carry out malicious activities, said Executive Assistant Director Paul Abbate of the FBIs Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch. Todays guilty plea illustrates how the FBI continues to work relentlessly with our private sector, law enforcement, and international partners to identify and hold accountable those who conduct cyber attacks against our nation, no matter who theyre working with or where they attempt to hide.
Today's guilty plea is a testament to the FBI's tireless commitment to tracking down cyber-criminals who think they can anonymously attack our country's cyber infrastructure, said FBI Special Agent In Charge Bennett. The FBI is determined to find, unmask, and identify criminals who steal the information of our citizens. With the help of our law enforcement partners around the world, we were able to expose this type of criminal behavior and bring them to justice.
As part of his plea agreement, Baratov not only admitted to agreeing and attempting to hack at least 80 webmail accounts on behalf of one of his FSB co-conspirators, but also to hacking more than 11,000 webmail accounts in total from in or around 2010 until his March 2017 arrest by Canadian authorities. Baratov advertised his services through a network of primarily Russian-language hacker-for-hire web pages hosted on servers around the world. He admitted that he generally spearphished his victims, sending them emails from accounts he established to appear to belong to the webmail provider at which the victims account was hosted (such as Google or Yandex). Baratovs spearphishing emails tricked victims into (i) visiting web pages he constructed to appear legitimate, as though they belonged to the victims webmail providers, and (ii) entering their account credentials into those web pages. Once Baratov collected the victims account credentials, he sent his customers screen shots of the victims account contents to prove that he had obtained access and, upon receipt of payment, provided his customers the victims log-in credentials.
Baratov pleaded guilty to Count One and Counts Forty through Forty-Seven of the Indictment. Count One charged Baratov, Dokuchaev, Sushchin, and Belan with conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by stealing information from protected computers in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2) and causing damage to protected computers in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(5)(A). Counts Forty through Forty-Seven charged Baratov and Dokuchaev with aggravated identity theft in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1028A. As part of the plea agreement, in addition to any prison sentence, Baratov agreed to pay restitution to his victims, and to pay a fine up to $2,250,000 (at $250,000 per count) with any assets he has remaining after satisfying a restitution award.
Baratov waived extradition from Canada and is being detained in California without bail.
Baratovs sentencing hearing is scheduled for February 20, 2018, at 3:00 p.m., before the Honorable Vincent Chhabria, U.S. District Court Judge, in San Francisco. The maximum statutory penalty for each count in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(b) is 10 years and a fine of $250,000, plus restitution, if appropriate. The maximum statutory penalty for each count in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1028A is two years (mandatory consecutive) and a fine of $250,000, plus restitution, if appropriate. However, any sentence, including restitution and fine, if any, will be imposed by the court only after consideration of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and the federal statute governing the imposition of a sentence, 18 U.S.C. 3553.
The FBIs San Francisco Field Office led the investigation that resulted in the charges announced today. The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of California and the U.S. Department of Justice National Security Divisions Counterintelligence and Export Control Section with support of the Justice Departments Office of International Affairs.
Former Employees of Southern California Ambulance Company and Dialysis Center Plead Guilty to Medicare Fraud
Los Angeles, California - A former employee of a Southern California ambulance company and a former employee of a Los Angeles dialysis treatment center both pleaded guilty Tuesday to fraud charges for their roles in a fraud scheme that resulted in more than $6.6 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare. Three other individuals charged in the case previously pleaded guilty.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco of the Justice Departments Criminal Division, Acting U.S. Attorney Sandra R. Brown of the Central District of California, Special Agent in Charge Christian J. Schrank of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector Generals (HHS-OIG) Los Angeles Region and Acting Assistant Director in Charge Danny Kennedy of the FBIs Los Angeles Division made the announcement.
Aharon Aron Krkasharyan, 53, of Los Angeles, California, pleaded guilty in federal court in Los Angeles to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud. Maria Espinoza, 47, also of Los Angeles, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to pay and receive kickbacks for health care referrals. U.S. District Judge George H. Wu of the Central District of California accepted the guilty pleas. Krkasharyan is scheduled to be sentenced on March 29, 2018, and Espinoza is scheduled to be sentenced on April 2, 2018.
Krkasharyan was employed as the Quality Improvement Coordinator for Mauran Ambulance Inc., an ambulance transportation company operating in the greater Los Angeles area that provided non-emergency services to Medicare beneficiaries, many of whom were dialysis patients. According to admissions made in connection with his plea, between June 2011 and April 2012, Krkasharyan conspired with other Mauran employees to submit claims to Medicare for ambulance transportation services for individuals who did not need such services. Krkasharyan also admitted that he and his co-conspirators instructed Mauran emergency medical technicians to conceal the patients true medical conditions by altering paperwork and creating fraudulent reasons to justify the ambulance services.
Espinoza was an administrative assistant at DaVita Doctors Dialysis of East Los Angeles. As part of her guilty plea, Espinoza admitted that she conspired with an employee of Mauran to receive cash kickbacks in return for referrals of dialysis patients to Mauran for whom Mauran submitted claims to Medicare for non-emergency ambulance transportation services.
Earlier this month, Toros Onik Yeranosian, 55, the former owner of Mauran, and Oxana Loutseiko 57, the former general manager of Mauran, each pleaded guilty before Judge Wu to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud for their roles in the fraud scheme. The former Dispatch Supervisor at Mauran, Christian Hernandez, 36, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud in December 2015.
In connection with his guilty plea, Yeranosian admitted that during the course of the conspiracy, Mauran submitted to Medicare at least $6.6 million in false and fraudulent claims for medically unnecessary transportation services, of which Medicare paid at least $3.1 million. As part of their plea agreements, all five defendants agreed to pay restitution to Medicare.
The case was investigated by the FBI and HHS-OIG, and was brought as part of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, supervised by the Criminal Divisions Fraud Section and the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Central District of California. Trial Attorneys Alexis D. Gregorian and Jeremy R. Sanders of the Fraud Section are prosecuting the case.
The Fraud Section leads the Medicare Fraud Strike Force. Since its inception in March 2007, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, now operating in nine cities across the country, has charged nearly 3,500 defendants who have collectively billed the Medicare program for more than $12.5 billion. In addition, the HHS Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with HHS-OIG, are taking steps to increase accountability and decrease the presence of fraudulent providers.
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The subject of the upcoming film All the Money in the World might just be as controversial as the production itself.
It originally starred Kevin Spacey; however, the Hollywood actor was recently cut from the project after allegations against him emerged surrounding sexual assault.
Christopher Plummer steps in to replace Spacey in the lead role of J.Paul Getty, the American billionaire who famously refused to pay $17m (12.5m) for the release of his kidnapped teenage grandson.
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The movie tells the true story of how Gettys resistance to pay his grandsons abductors a dime led him to overdosing on drugs at the age of 25.
It was in 1973 that the then 16-year-old John Paul Getty was kidnapped in Rome.
Knowing all about his familys wealthy legacy which had its roots in the oil industry his kidnappers demanded $17m from J. Paul Getty, who was the wealthiest man in the world at the time.
Known to his contemporaries as Old John, Getty had five wives during his lifetime in addition to a string of mistresses whom he spoke to via a personal payphone which was installed at his 75-acre Surrey estate.
Getty did not meet his kidnapped grandson, who was known to friends and family as Paul, until he was 11-years-old and when they met again four years later when he was 15-years-old, Getty was reportedly unimpressed by his bohemian lifestyle.
At the time of the abduction Paul had been living in Rome where he had worked as painter.
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Aware of his family legacy, his identity was well known by the local media and he was subsequently scrutinised by them and dubbed the Golden Hippie.
Paul was purchasing a comic book at a newsstand when he was abducted by three men who knocked him out by hitting him with a gun.
The men drove him to a cave in the southern part of the country and tied him up while they probed the Getty family for the hefty ransom.
Initially, they suspected it was a hoax that Paul had contrived in order to ascertain more money from his family.
At the time, Old John told the media that he didnt believe in paying kidnappers.
I have 14 other grandchildren and if I pay one penny now, then Ill have 14 kidnapped grandchildren, he said.
After three months of silence from the Gettys, the kidnappers took action by cutting off the wealthy teenagers right ear with a razor and sending it in a bag to a newspaper in Rome.
After close inspection, Pauls mother, Gail, recognised that this was her sons ear from his freckles and began trying to raise funds to pay the ransom money that Old John had refused to pay.
The family were ultimately able to negotiate the ransom down to $2.2m (1.6m) and Paul was released five months after hed been taken.
Nine years later, an overdose on methadone and valium left Paul quadriplegic and he died in 2011 at the age of 54.
Today, Forbes estimates that the Getty family who remain prominent figures in the US and the UK boast a net worth of $5.4bn.
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Veteran Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor has died aged 79.
Star of huge hits like Deewar, In Custody, and Junoon, the actor was a member of the Kapoor dynasty, which has been a dominating force in the Hindi film industry for decades. The youngest son of Prithviraj, a pioneer in film and theatre, both he and his brothers Raj and Shammi Kapoor became renowned as actors.
Shashi Kapoor made a name for himself both on stage and on film, starting his career as a child and eventually starring in more than 150 films; he won several national film awards and was awarded the Padma Bhushan civilian honour by the Indian government in 2011.
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He also appeared in several English-language films, including several Merchant Ivory productions, such as The Householder, Shakespeare Wallah, Bombay Talkie, and Heat and Dust.
Kapoor passed away in hospital after prolonged illness. His nephew, actor Randhir Kapoor, told news agency PTI that Kapoor had been suffering from kidney problems and had been undergoing dialysis. "Yes, he has passed away. He had kidney problems since several years. He was on dialysis for several years," Randhir said.
The actor was married to actress Jennifer Kendal, who died in 1984, and is survived by his sons Karan and Kunal, alongside daughter Sanjana.
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Apple boss Tim Cook has spoken out about the importance of children learning to code.
The CEO has frequently said that teaching children to program computers is one of the most important skills they can have. That same mission has been taken up by Apple, which encourages kids to take part in sessions in schools and at its own stores.
Now Mr Cook has repeated his support for the "Hour Of Code" programme, which aims to teach every child at least some basic programming tools.
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
To make clear that support, the Apple boss has headed to China and sat in on a session at a school for the deaf there, in which students learnt some programming skills.
"Coding is the language of the future, giving people of all ages and backgrounds the chance to create something new," Mr Cook wrote on Twitter. "Thanks to Shanghai No. 4 School for the Deaf for letting me join your #HourOfCode session!"
Companies across the tech industry have given their support to such schemes. Google, for instance, is currently running its first ever programming Doodle which allows children to play through a game and learn basic coding as they go.
Apple has a similar piece of software, called Swift Playgrounds. That also encourages children to learn how to code by guiding a character through a maze, using the logical and practical skills required to become good at programming.
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The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S9 will be available in four colour schemes, according to a new leak.
The handset, which is expected to launch early next year, will reportedly come in black, blue, gold and purple colour options.
It would be a slight change in direction from the S8, which you can buy in black, grey, blue and silver.
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
Samsung recently unveiled a burgundy version of the S8 too, but that doesnt appear to be on the cards for the S9, reports SamMobile.
Several recent leaks suggest the S9 will look very similar to its predecessor, which is still one of the most attractive on the market.
However, the introduction of attractive new colours could still tempt consumers into upgrading.
A Samsung Galaxy S9 case render based on reports (BGR)
Reports claim the S9 could be unveiled as early as January, but not at a full-blown launch event.
That is said to be taking place around a month later, possibly at the Mobile World Congress technology conference in Barcelona.
If the phone does make a public appearance before then, it will likely be brief.
The rumoured 5.8-inch S9 looks set to launch alongside a larger, 6.2-inch S9+. Both phones are expected to have 64GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot and a headphone jack.
Though theyre expected to look very similar to their predecessors, Samsung is reportedly making at least one major design change.
Instead of lying right next to the camera sensor, as it does on the S8 and S8+, the fingerprint sensor on the S9 and S9+ will instead sit beneath it, which should make it much easier to feel out with your finger.
Jayson Smith has been involved in many pivotal moments in Chippewa Falls history, but perhaps one of his longest projects is the park crowning the citys downtown.
Theyre buttoning things up for this construction year, Smith said, gesturing in the direction of Riverfront Park. Currently, the project is in Phase II of its development, with footpaths twining through a large, grassy area and lights lining a stroll down to the riverbank, but more work is still to come.
Smith, Chippewa Falls city planner and transit manager, has been with the city since 1981, a total of 36 years.
Though not a native of Wisconsin, he has a background in the Chippewa Valley. He graduated from Michigan State University with a bachelors degree in urban planning, and in 1981, started working at the West Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission in Eau Claire the very commission that will be taking over the citys transit program next year.
They had a contract with the city to provide a half-time planner for (Chippewa Falls), Smith said. The job went full-time in 1988. ... I started out pretty green right out of college, and as always, you get mentored and learn as you go.
36 years later, Smith is wrapping up loose ends: updating his job description as the city searches for a new planner. The job has really ... morphed into a significant amount of economic development, Smith said. Im pretty sure theres going to be some local folks interested in the job, but my primary recommendation ... is to hire a person with a planning background.
Finding a candidate who has experience with TIF districts tax increment financing districts is also essential, Smith said. He calls the districts the most powerful economic development tools in the municipalities of Wisconsin, and Chippewa Falls has nine such districts active.
Smith has worked with the citys TIFs throughout his tenure, and has had a fingerprint on many of their benefits: a new Leinie Lodge, the current Chamber of Commerce and SEH buildings on Bridge Street and the reinvigorated strip mall on the citys south side one that now houses a movie theater and several restaurants have all benefited from TIF financing.
Those projects were administered through his office in City Hall, and future projects will do the same, Smith said.
The city has accepted a proposal from the West Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission to administer the citys transit program, but Smith says that may be temporary, until a new planner settles into the position.
The (Planning Commission) will have a little bit of a learning curve ... but theyve done it before, he said.
Looking back on his career, Smith emphasizes the importance of transparency: Solid plans that are done openly and supported by the public will help the citys governing body make the right calls, he said.
Hell spend time with family members, but still live in Chippewa Falls after retiring from his desk on the first floor of City Hall: Im not going anywhere. ... I told them, anytime they have a question, Im more than happy to answer the phone. He taps his head. Theres a lot of history here.
Smiths last day with the city will be Jan. 8.
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A woman who has struggled to come to terms with her alopecia since she was a teenager is now working as a model.
Therese Hansson, 26, from Malmo, Sweden, first started losing her hair when she was just 14-years-old but unaware of the symptoms of alopecia, she was mostly concerned about having cancer, the Daily Mail reports.
I first noticed it when I was standing in the mirror trying to put up my hair in a ponytail and saw a small patch with no hair close to my forehead, she said.
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I was young at the time so I was mostly worried that it was cancer since that's normally the first thing you think of when you see hair loss, but little did I know that this hair loss only happens after chemotherapy.
After her diagnosis, only Hanssons closest friends and family knew about her condition as she tried to keep it a secret and admits thats she became good at hiding it.
However, as she got older Hansson learned to embrace her aesthetic and says that she is now confident going out in public without wearing a wig.
So much so in fact, that she has even pursued a career in modelling and, since being signed by agency GC Management, now works for brands like lingerie specialist Curvy Kate.
Now I feel like I can be myself and that I don't need to hide it anymore, she explains.
While Hansson admits that she regrets not embracing her alopecia sooner she says that she is now happy doing what she loves and urges other sufferers to do the same.
Don't hide, she said.
It will only make you feel worse. A big stone of relief will leave your body if you can just be yourself.
Anyone that won't accept it is not someone you need in your life anyway.
Sign up to our free Brexit and beyond email for the latest headlines on what Brexit is meaning for the UK Sign up to our Brexit email for the latest insight Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the
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Theresa Mays week ended with the mass walk out of her social mobility commission, and started with the official wine supplier to No 10 warning that her country faces starvation if the door is closed to foreign fruit pickers after Brexit. Its a tough job being PM.
Does Chapel Down Winery, the Kent producer of sprightly Sauvignon Blanc-style Bacchus and fizz that has gone toe to toe with Champagne in blind tastings, have a point?
The biggest potential impact of Brexit is on agricultural labour, CEO Frazer Thompson opined. Kent has had eastern Europeans picking fruit in recent years, but well all starve if the labour issue is not sorted after Brexit.
It isnt hard to predict the response of the Brexit crew to this. Hyperbole, is what theyll say. Well get it sorted! All it needs is for Brexiteer ministers to follow the path mapped out by their colleague Andrea Leadsom a few months ago by telling entitled millennials to get off their backsides and into the fields.
If a few newspaper columnists will kindly join in by lecturing them on how lazy they are, theyll rush out in patriotic fervour to do their bit so we can toast each other with a spot of that fizz at the next Downing Street reception.
No we arent living in a Philip K Dick novel (although sometimes I wonder); this has genuinely been put forward by some as the answer to the problem Mr Thompson raises, as if berating people and calling them idle and entitled is just the ticket for producing a turnaround in their thinking.
Unlike most of the people doing that shouting, Ive actually engaged in agricultural labour albeit many years ago and at a time when I was able-bodied. It was hard, painful and sometimes dangerous work. One of the fingers Im typing this with has a discoloured spot at the tip as a result of my cutting a chunk of it off with a pair of secateurs while pruning fruit trees in the autumn.
I also, at various points in time, pushed supermarket trolleys, hauled stock around in a warehouse, and delivered newspapers. All of those jobs were preferable to picking fruit on a seasonal basis.
Why make that point? Simple. The Brits, whom Ms Leadsom and friends fondly imagine will pick up the slack when Mr Thompsons eastern Europeans are gone, cant be forced to do so. With the Labour market currently experiencing shortages in a number of sectors, there are plenty of alternatives available to them.
They might not be well paid. They might not be a lot of fun. But they still might be seen as preferable to the fields.
In stark contrast to the nativist propaganda currently doing the rounds, the eastern Europeans who have been coming here arent stealing anyones jobs. They are doing work that others dont want to do.
The answer to the problem Mr Thompson raises is actually fairly simple: regardless of how the Brexit process proceeds, we need put out the welcome mat. Want to come here to work at Chapel Down, or at places like it? Have at it. Well buy you a drink in the pub afterwards too. Well tell all those who would moan about it to belt up, and well put the really nasty racists in jail.
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.
Whats that? You want to use the NHS if you cut the top of your finger off because youll be paying taxes and such? No trouble. Well let you do that too. Its only right.
Unfortunately, for Mr Thompson in particular, while we might not starve, we probably will have to endure a period of ugly economic disruption, and very much more expensive fresh food, before the sense in taking that stance filters through to the brains of some of our more lumpen-headed politicians.
Id advise stocking up on a few cases of Chapel Down in the meantime. Itll be a lot easier to see out the disruption half-cut.
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Australias competition regulator said on Monday it would investigate whether US online giants Facebook and Alphabets Google has disrupted the news media market to the detriment of publishers and consumers.
Like their rivals globally, Australias traditional media companies have been squeezed by online rivals, as advertising dollars have followed eyeballs to digital distributors such as Google, Facebook and Netflix.
The government ordered the probe as part of wider media reforms, amid growing concern for the future of journalism and the quality of news following years of declining profits and newsroom job cuts and the rise of fake news.
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We will examine whether platforms are exercising market power in commercial dealings to the detriment of consumers, media content creators and advertisers, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Chairman Rod Sims said in a statement.
The inquiry also would study how Facebook and Google operated to fully understand their influence in Australia, he added.
A Google spokesman said, We look forward to engaging with this process as relevant.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The idea for an ACCC investigation was hatched during media reform negotiations in parliament earlier this year, which resulted in a relaxation of ownership laws to allow the countrys big players to boost their market share to better compete against online disruptors.
Independent media analyst Peter Cox told Reuters it was unclear what measures the competition regulator could recommend to the government even if it found the countrys media sector was increasingly anti-competitive.
You could see this as a stepping stone towards another type of reform, such as tax, said Mr Cox.
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.
Jurisdictions around the world, including the European Union, are grappling with how to tax technology giants with global operations.
Currently corporate taxes are paid where firms have a physical presence, which allows digital multinationals to book most of their profits where they have set up headquarters as opposed to where they make their money.
The Australian probe will have power to demand information from businesses and hold hearings. It is due to make its final report in 18 months.
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MPs are calling on the competition watchdog to launch an investigation into a proposed merger of the UK retail operations of energy companies SSE and Npower, warning a deal could reduce competition and be a bad deal for consumers.
SSE and rival Npower, which is owned by Germanys Innogy, announced that they intend to merge their British retail energy businesses last month, reducing the Big Six down to five.
MP Rachel Reeves, who chairs the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee, wrote in a letter to the Competition and Markets Authority that the deal was concerning for the competitiveness of the energy market.
The energy market isnt working for consumers, she said.
The proposed merger between SSE and Npower risks damaging the development of a more competitive energy market, reducing consumer choice, and threatening to be a bad deal for energy consumers, she added.
The CMA needs to look at the potential impacts of this merger and launch a full investigation if there is any risk to competition within the energy market.
The deal would give the combined new company a customer base of around 11.5 million, making it the countrys second largest energy provider after Centricas British Gas.
The select committee said the move would result in almost half of the domestic energy share being held by British Gas and the new business.
A spokesperson for SSE defended the deal, saying: The merger will improve competition by offering customers a completely new model combining the resources of established players with the agility and innovation of an independent supplier turning 60 competitors into 59, not five, and ultimately offering better value for customers.
This is, naturally, subject to the appropriate regulatory approvals and we will engage openly with the CMA, the BEIS Select Committee and any other interested parties as the process goes on, the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for Innogy said: The transaction will create a new, strong and independent British retail energy supplier, which will provide a better deal for consumers and help deliver the Governments plans for more competition in the market.
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The UK Government is looking to step up regulation of bitcoin amid concerns criminals are using cryptocurrencies to launder money and avoid taxes.
The Treasury wants to regulate bitcoin under European Union anti-money laundering rules, forcing traders in the cryptocurrency to disclose their identities and any suspicious activity.
It expects changes to new EU-wide rules to come into effect by the end of December or early next year.
Bitcoin currently works by anonymous trading, which has fuelled fears that it could be an attractive way of funding illegal activity.
A rise of 1,000 per cent in value this year has worried MPs and banks alike.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Treasury Select Committee member John Mann said he expects the Government to carry out an inquiry over regulating digital currencies.
These new forms of exchange are expanding rapidly and weve got to make sure we dont get left behind thats particularly important in terms of money-laundering, terrorism or pure theft, he said.
"It would be timely to have a proper look at what this means. It may be that we want to speed up our use of these kinds of thing in this country, but that makes it all the more important that we don't have a regulatory lag."
A Treasury spokesperson said: "We are working to address concerns about the use of cryptocurrencies, by negotiating to bring virtual currency exchange platforms and some wallet providers within Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing regulation".
Bitcoin hit record highs of $11,879 (8,842) on Sunday night, before dropping to $11,253 on Morning morning, according to online cryptocurrency trading platform Coin Exchange.
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Massive tax cuts for working families across America, was how Donald Trump described the tax bill, which passed the Senate on Saturday, in the first legislative success of his Presidency.
Trump also approvingly re-tweeted a group of economists at the weekend who claimed that: The enactment of a comprehensive overhaul - complete with a lower corporate tax rate - will ignite our economy with levels of growth not seen in generations.
But are these claims true? Will this tax package really benefit ordinary working American families?
And will it boost US growth?
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From Launch Complex 17 here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, many of Nasas robotic planetary missions blasted off. Soon, the two massive towers that once cradled Delta 2 rockets will be torn down. A new tenant Moon Express, a tiny company with far-out ambitions is moving in.
Next year, the company, with just 30 employees, aims to be the first private entity to put a small robotic lander on the moon and perhaps win $20m (14.8m) in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. It is investing at least $1.85m to renovate decades-old buildings here. The company is transforming a parking lot into a miniature moonscape, and will also set up an engineering laboratory, a mission operations room and a test stand for spacecraft engine firings.
Moon Express would not need all of these facilities if its only goal were to win the Lunar X Prize. Its second spacecraft aims to land in 2019 near the moons south pole. A third, larger spacecraft in 2020 is to gather samples and then bring them back to Earth, the first haul of moon rocks since a Soviet robotic probes return in 1976.
But these plans almost came to a halt a couple of years ago not because of technological challenges or financial shortfalls, but because of an international agreement known as the Outer Space Treaty, which is marking its 50th anniversary this year.
The treaty spells out what countries are and are not allowed to do in space. Its crowning achievement was stopping the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union from expanding into space. But the agreement may now be getting in the way of entrepreneurs with plans to push farther and faster into space than national agencies like Nasa.
Before it was something really, really hypothetical, said Fabio Tronchetti, a law professor at Harbin Institute of Technology in China. But now there are groups that are really serious. It changes everything.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida (Reuters)
Robert D Richards, Moon Expresss chief executive whose business plan is to expand Earths economic sphere to the moon and beyond is far from the only entrepreneur looking for business opportunities beyond our planet.
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, boldly proclaims that his company will begin sending colonists to Mars in a decade. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is using part of his fortune to finance his rocket company Blue Origin, and predicts millions of people will be living and working in space.
As these companies go where no businesses have gone before, they raise questions only fuzzily addressed by the Outer Space Treaty: what are private companies allowed to do in space? Can a company mine the moon or an asteroid and then sell what it has pulled out? How are countries to regulate these businesses?
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Internationally, countries have been discussing how to answer these questions. In the United States, Congress has begun tackling regulatory issues. Some warn that if the United States does not set up business-friendly policies, then the startups could move elsewhere including such seemingly unlikely places as Luxembourg.
A quick fix before launch
The Outer Space Treaty officially it is the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space declares that the moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all states parties to the treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The treaty also prohibited nations from making any claim of sovereignty over any part of the rest of the solar system.
Moon Express ran into a bureaucratic wall because the treaty declares that activities of nongovernmental entities a classification that includes commercial companies require authorisation and continuing supervision of the government. (The United States had insisted on the clause, rejecting the Soviet view that space exploration should be limited to governments.)
We had a mission planned, we had investors invested, but didnt have a way forward at the end of 2015, Richards testified during a Senate committee hearing in May. There wasnt anybody that didnt want to say yes. There was just no mechanism to do so.
The Federal Aviation Administration licenses rocket launches and re-entry of commercial spacecraft from orbit in order to ensure the safety of people on the ground. The Federal Communications Commission regulates communications satellites, and the Department of Commerce regulates commercial remote sensing satellites. But the US does not as yet have a process for authorising or supervising novel endeavours such as a private company landing on the moon.
Moon Express spent about a year working with the FAA, the State Department and other agencies to jury-rig what Richards called a temporary patch, using the FAAs existing authority to review rocket payloads in order to gain the approval Moon Express was seeking. In announcing the decision, however, the FAA said the approval applied only to this one Moon Express launch, and that not even Moon Express could count on a favourable outcome in the future.
Moon Express has begun discussions with the FAA for the second trip to the lunar south pole, and Richards is confident that the company could successfully pull off its first three flights via the current regulatory patchwork. But if Congress and the President do not come up with a better solution, Moon Express, SpaceX, Blue Origin and the rest of the emerging industry could run into more bureaucratic walls, and companies might start looking for other places to set up shop.
Richards remains optimistic. Each company is moving forward with some assumption of risk but a presumption of the US government coming through with frameworks that allow that to happen, he said in October during a visit at his companys Florida headquarters.
Smoothing a path to space rocks
Another space upstart is Planetary Resources, a small company located in an unremarkable office park outside Seattle. Its early investors included Larry Page, co-founder of Google, and Charles Simonyi, a former chief software architect at Microsoft. The company is also taking advantage of an investment from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
Planetary Resourcess goal is to mine the solar systems asteroids. Luxembourg, a tiny nation with a long history in mining, has bet 200m (176m) on this industry that does not exist. That includes 23m invested in Planetary Resources. In return, Luxembourg owns a 10 per cent share of the company, said Etienne Schneider, the countrys deputy prime minister.
In April, Luxembourgs crown prince, his wife and government officials paid a visit to Planetary Resources, putting on white gowns, gloves, wispy caps and baby blue bootees a distinctly unroyal outfit sometimes called a bunny suit to take a close look at where the company is assembling small satellites.
Robert D Richards, chief executive of Moon Express, whose business plan is to expand Earths economic sphere to the moon and beyond
In June, Schneider returned to the United States to host a symposium with a roomful of bankers and venture capitalists, a vivid demonstration that private space investment has reached a tipping point of credibility.
A Goldman Sachs report about innovative space businesses that came out in the spring seemed to agree. Space mining could be more realistic than perceived, the report said. While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower.
At the Manhattan presentation, Schneider acknowledged that the notion of asteroid mining sounds like science fiction and that he often gets quizzical questions about why Luxembourg is spending money chasing this.
Schneider recalled that during a visit to Silicon Valley in 2012, he met S Pete Worden, then the director of the Nasa Ames Research Centre in Mountain View, California, who suggested that Luxembourg look into asteroid mining. At the time, I listened to him and wondered what this guy might have smoked, Schneider said. But more discussions and research convinced Schneider this was a promising possibility.
For Planetary Resources, the first wave of development is to culminate in a doughnut-shape spacecraft heading on a prospecting mission to a near-Earth asteroid in 2020.
Sometime after that, the company hopes to mine in earnest for seemingly mundane water ice. But water, in addition to potentially providing something to drink for astronauts, can be split into hydrogen and oxygen. Both can be used as rocket propellent; the oxygen, of course, also can provide air to breathe.
As a business, Planetary Resources is betting that by the time it extracts water from an asteroid there will be a customer such as Nasa interested in buying water, hydrogen and oxygen.
Eventually, the company aims to extract platinum, currently worth more than $900 an ounce, and other precious metals.
To make these pursuits easier, Luxembourg passed a space law that took effect this summer. Planetary Resources has set up its European office there. Moves like this one are in part motivating policymakers in the US to devote more attention to domestic laws that govern commercial space activities.
Revising space law
Ambiguities in the Outer Space Treaty currently create uncertainty over whether anyone can profit from such business ventures. Article 2 in particular states: Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
If the United States is prohibited from appropriating a celestial body, is a private company allowed to appropriate a mineral mined out of a celestial body? The Moon Treaty, finalised in 1979, declared that any resources from space should be shared among all nations, but most countries, including the United States, never signed or ratified it.
Two years ago, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed a law that said private companies can own and sell what they extract, although, abiding by the language of the Outer Space Treaty, the companies cannot claim ownership of the celestial body itself.
This year, Congress is revisiting the Outer Space Treaty again, hoping to boost nascent space companies looking to push outward into the solar system.
The Outer Space Treaty declares that the moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all states parties to the treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes (Reuters)
Republicans in Congress have said they want the new space ventures to thrive in permissionless innovation, similar to the ethos that nourished new enterprises on the internet. This spring, the House science committee packed those ideas into a bill that has been sent to the full House.
It would put the regulatory power in an Office of Space Commerce, which would have 60 days to decide whether to approve or deny a companys application. The full House has not yet taken up the bill, and the Senate is still working on its version.
Officials at Moon Express and Planetary Resources say they do not want unfettered freedom in space, nor do they seek withdrawal from the Outer Space Treaty. Our goal is to have a space environment that is populated by people acting responsibly, says Peter Marquez, vice president for global engagement at Planetary Resources. If there arent any adults in the room, it concerns me. If it turns into the wild, wild West of just do whatever you want, then that kind of runs against concepts and precepts of Outer Space Treaty.
These companies do want the regulations to be light-touch and hope that the default inclination of the US government will be to say yes.
Once the price of transportation comes down, more business opportunities will open up, Richards says.
The moon, peppered with the impacts of asteroids over the aeons, should also possess dollops of platinum and other precious metals. Helium-3, embedded in the lunar crust by the solar wind, could be fuel for future fusion power plants.
Moon Expresss family of spacecraft could be a boon to scientists, sending low-cost probes not just to the moon but to other planets.
Its second spacecraft is to carry a shoebox-size experimental telescope for the International Lunar Observatory Association. Some locations near the lunar south pole, offering a continuous view of the universe, could be ideal for an astronomical observatory.
Patches of eternal sunshine on the moon could be limited, valuable resources that nations and companies will someday squabble over.
Richards compares this moment he sees coming to the 19th century California Gold Rush, when gold diggers jousted over the most lucrative places to sift ore. But he is confident that the new competitors would reach compromises.
I dont think theres going to be bad players per se, but there could be arguments over areas of operation overlap, he says. But those are problems for the future, and thatll be a great problem to have.
New York Times
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A teenager was placed in a headlock and forced to apologise for being gay during a homophobic attack on a London Underground train, police have said.
British Transport Police are appealing for information about the two men who allegedly attacked a 19-year-old who was travelling on a westbound Jubilee line train between West Ham and North Greenwich.
The teenager and his friends were wearing fancy dress for an event they were going to during the attack at around 11:10pm on 21 October.
The police said the two men boarded the train at West Ham and began verbally abusing the victim and his friend, using homophobic language.
When they were challenged, the BTP said they became more aggressive and one of the men pulled the victim into a headlock, throttled him.
The second man then allegedly took the the victims phone and threatened to stab him.
The pair allegedly demanded the victim apologise for being gay which he was forced to do as he was struggling to breathe in the headlock.
When they let him go and handed back his phone a fight ensued between the victims friends and the two men.
One of the victims friends, a 25-year-old woman, was punched and pushed to the ground. She was bruised but the original victim did not sustain any injuries.
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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
The alleged abusers left the train at North Greenwich.
A spokesman for the BTP said: Officers would like to speak to the people shown in the images as they may have information which could help the investigation.
Hate crime will not be tolerated by British Transport Police. We believe that everyone has the right to travel safety.
We wont tolerate behaviour where someone is targeted because they are perceived to be different, or made to feel uncomfortable on their journey.
Anyone with information has been asked to contact the BTP on 0800 40 50 40 or text 61016, quoting reference number 273 of 1/12.
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Organisers of an anti-Donald Trump protest group are hoping to gather a million people to demonstrate against the president after details of his working visit to the UK were reported.
More than 3,800 people have committed to a planned protest against the president on Facebook, with another 10,000 marked as interested in the event, just hours since it was set up. Organised by journalist Owen Jones and the Stop Trump protest group, the protest is planned for 26 and 27 February at the US Embassy and 10 Downing Street.
The event follows reports that the president could visit the UK early next year as part of a working visit to attend the opening of the new US Embassy in London. The Sunday Times reported that a date has been pencilled in for February, despite Theresa Mays condemnation of the presidents decision to share a series of Islamophobic posts by far-right group Britain First on Twitter.
Stand Up To Racism protests against Donald Trump's Britain First retweets
The Protest Trumps visit event on Facebook states: Put the date in your diaries. If Donald Trump attempts to sneak into the UK to open the US Embassy on 26/27 February 2018 and also pop in to see Theresa May at Downing Street he will be met by a million of us attempting a citizens arrest of him for incitement of racial hatred.
Mr Jones tweeted about the event on Sunday with the message: Stop what youre doing: Donald Trump is set to come to Britain on *26/27 February*. Lets make this the biggest demonstration in British history, sharing a link to the protest.
The Stop Trump campaigns organisers said last week they believed more than a million people would take to the streets in demonstration against the president if his trip went ahead.
Weve had a huge response to our campaign over the past 24 hours, particularly on social media, a spokesperson told the Evening Standard.
The British government know that the protests against a Trump visit could be the biggest weve ever seen in the country. Upwards of a million people could take to the streets, the spokesperson said, adding: We could mobilise hundreds of thousands at a days notice.
An estimated 30,000 people marched on Downing Street earlier this year in protest against Mr Trumps proposed travel ban against seven majority-Muslim countries.
The 2003 Stop the War protest against Britain's involvement in Iraq remains probably the largest protest in UK history, with police estimating 750,000 attended. Organisers said at the time that there were 2 million marchers, although that was based on an extrapolation from an ICM poll of those who said they attended.
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An award-winning resort has been left deeply offended after unwittingly hiring out a meeting room to far-right group Britain First.
The Wyboston Lakes resort in Bedfordshire said the controversial organisation booked the 2,250 room under a different name for its conference.
Pictures posted online by the fringe political group's leader Paul Golding appeared to show dozens of people sitting in a small room decked with banners declaring Taking Our Country Back!
The resort faced criticism online when news of the conference, the location of which had not been made public by the group, became clear.
The meeting was booked at short notice under the name Patriot Merchandise, a resort spokesman said, and did not appear to have any obvious connections to Britain First.
Patriot Merchandise is listed at Companies House as a private limited company based in Belfast.
No staff entered the meeting room during the event and the banners were erected only in the closed off conference room, the spokesman said.
The hire cost of the five-hour event on Saturday will now be donated to an as-yet undecided charity.
In a statement released on Sunday evening the resort spokesman said: For the sake of clarity, had we known the nature of the event being held by Britain First, we would not have taken the booking, as the values of our organisation conflicts with theirs in totality.
Wyboston Lakes, which was ranked at 28 in this year's Sunday Times best 100 companies to work for list, said it embraces diversity.
The spokesman added: We can fully understand the concerns expressed, but we can only refer to our company values and principles, our standing as an award-winning employer and assure everyone that we are deeply offended by their presence on our property.
Britain First's conference came days after Donald Trump retweeted three anti-Muslim videos posted by the group's deputy leader Jayda Fransen.
Two featured violent scenes, including someone being pushed off a roof and another person being assaulted.
The group has since boasted they received hundreds of new membership applications and said its Facebook posts were reaching hundreds of thousands more users.
UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA 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
Fransen, 31, from Penge, south east London, is on bail facing trial over four charges of causing religiously aggravated harassment as part of a Kent Police investigation into the distribution of leaflets and the posting of online videos during a trial held at Canterbury Crown Court in May.
She will go on trial at Folkestone Magistrates' Court on 29 January alongside Golding who faces three similar charges.
Fransen will also appear in court in Northern Ireland in December charged with using threatening and abusive language in connection with a speech she made at an anti-terrorism demonstration in Belfast on 6 August.
PA
Gov. Scott Walkers administration has finalized a rule that would require able-bodied adult recipients of food stamps to be screened and possibly tested for drugs.
The move is the latest step in the ongoing battle over whether such testing is legal under federal law.
Walker has framed the issue as addressing the states worker shortage and as a continuation of the states landmark welfare reform efforts begun in the 1990s under Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.
Employers have jobs available, but they need skilled workers who can pass a drug test, Walker said in a statement. This rule change means people battling substance use disorders will be able to get the help they need to get healthy, and get back into the workforce.
Walker and the Legislature included the requirement in the 2015-17 budget and the state preemptively sued the federal government in 2015 for the right to implement the new program.
A federal judge tossed out that lawsuit last fall because the state hadnt implemented the plan yet, so it wasnt ready to be litigated. The state argued President Barack Obamas administration had advised that federal law doesnt allow food stamp recipients to be drug-tested, but that another section of federal law allows such testing.
President Donald Trumps administration has indicated, throughout the administration, interest in working with states to provide flexibility, Wisconsin Department of Health Services spokeswoman Julie Lund said. But there hasnt been a direct communication from the Trump administration green-lighting the program.
The rule requires able-bodied adults receiving food stamps to fill out a questionnaire and, based on the answers, requires a drug test. Those who test positive for drugs must undergo treatment.
Under the plan, childless FoodShare participants who fail a drug test would be eligible for state-funded rehabilitation treatment if they dont have any other way to pay for it.
The state estimates out of 66,200 individuals who would fill out the questionnaire, 2,000 would be required to take a drug test. Of that amount, 220 are expected to test positive for drugs and require treatment.
Lund said the questionnaire will be similar to a 10-question Drug Abuse Screening Test used by treatment clinics that asks about illegal drug-related behavior over the past 12 months.
The Legislature has up to 120 days to review the administrative rule, after which it will be published and take effect sometime next spring.
Walker has already implemented worker training requirements for FoodShare program participants. Since April 2015, able-bodied adults ages 18-49 have been required to participate in a worker training program or work at least 80 hours per month to maintain eligibility for Foodshare. Some 20,000 participants have gone through the program, Walkers office said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Women in prison in England and Wales are often victims of much more serious offences than the ones they have been convicted of, a charity has warned.
A report published today shows 57 per cent of female inmates have been victims of domestic violence, while 53 per cent have experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse as a child.
The figures do not tell the whole story, according to by Prison Reform Trust.
Both figures, taken from Ministry of Justice data, are likely to be an underestimate because many women fear disclosing abuse
Previous research by charity Women in Prison shows 79 per cent of the women who use their services have experienced domestic violence or sexual abuse.
After conducting focus groups with women about their experience of committing offences in response to coercive and controlling behaviour from a partner, researchers identified strong links between womens experience of domestic and sexual abuse and coercive relationships and their offending.
They warned that this can trap women in a vicious cycle of victimisation and criminal activity, often exacerbated by poverty, substance dependency or poor mental health, and having a severely detrimental impact on any dependent children.
Several women said that they had committed offences on many occasions and over prolonged periods of time in order to support a partners drug use including by shoplifting, by selling drugs and by committing other undisclosed offences saying they felt trapped in these unhealthy relationships.
The female inmates told researchers they felt the police were rarely sympathetic or helpful to them as victims of domestic abuse, and said they did not have confidence in the police to identify the primary aggressor and provide protection. A number reported having been repeatedly arrested by the police in incidents of domestic violence where they had not been the primary aggressor.
Previous research shows womens offending is more likely than mens to be prompted by their relationships or by financial concerns. Nearly half of women prisoners (48 per cent) questioned for the Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction (SPCR) longitudinal survey reported having committed offences to support someone elses drug use, compared with 22 per cent of male prisoners.
Jenny Earle, director of the Prison Reform Trusts programme to reduce womens imprisonment, urged that it was time for concerted action to help break the cycle of victimisation and offending.
Our recommendations have been developed in consultation with women who have been personally driven to commit crimes by violent partners, and the services that support them, she said.
If implemented we would see both a reduction in the incidence of domestic abuse and fewer women unnecessarily imprisoned.
The Prison Reform Trust insists specific guidance is required in order to ensure that criminal justice agencies, as well as police officers, respond appropriately to women offenders who are themselves victims or survivors of domestic abuse.
The charity adds that there is a lack of explicit guidance within the legal system on the appropriate response to women suspected of committing a range of offences who are victims themselves.
While new legislation recognises coercion as a mitigating factor for some offences, the charity says that the sentencing process needs to be better informed about domestic and sexual abuse as significant drivers to womens offending.
It emerged last month that the law against coercive and controlling behaviour has led to no more than 20 charges by half of Englands police forces in the two years since it was enacted.
The report concludes: The Home Office and Ministry of Justice should work closely together, and in consultation with the Welsh government, to ensure that the forthcoming women offenders strategy addresses the extent to which domestic and sexual violence and abuse underpin the life experience of many women offenders, and include clear expectations on criminal justice agencies to improve their responses to women.
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 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA
Police, prosecuting authorities, probation services and the courts should adopt the practice of appropriate, routine inquiry into womens histories of domestic and sexual violence at each stage of the criminal justice process to ensure informed decision-making and proportionate responses.
Dawn Butler MP, Labours Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, responded to the report saying: As a magistrate I saw first-hand just how brave women had to be to engage in the criminal justice system. I was frustrated at the lack of support we could offer and as the probation service was stripped back that support became almost non-existent for female focused services. To break the cycle of abuse and offending takes emotional intelligence and a commitment from the Government.
A Government spokesperson said: We are committed to doing all we can to address issues around female offending so we can deliver more effective rehabilitation and better respond to the complex needs of offenders who have been victims of domestic abuse.
We will shortly be setting out our strategy for female offenders, to improve outcomes for women in the community and custody. Amongst other things, this important piece of work will look at how we can improve the services that are available in the community so we can cut crime.
Tackling domestic abuse is key priority for this Government and we will also be publishing a landmark draft Domestic Violence and Abuse Bill to protect and support victims, recognise the life-long impact these crimes have on children, and ensure agencies respond effectively.
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An Indian business tycoon due to face extradition proceedings has insisted fraud allegations against him are unfounded - after an evacuation of the court building brought him face to face with journalists.
Entrepreneur Vijay Mallya, chairman of the UB Group and co-owner of Silverstone-based Sahara Force India F1 team, is wanted in his home country and was due before Westminster Magistrates' Court on Monday.
But a fire alarm forced him instead to walk into the glare of the media spotlight outside the central London building.
Reporters from across the globe had gathered to see the drinks and aviation magnate arrive and quickly seized the opportunity to question him.
TV crews from India pursued Mr Mallya haphazardly around the pavement as he tried to avoid being cornered.
He told reporters the accusations against him were unfounded, while angrily telling one broadcaster he would not stand for trial by media.
Mr Mallya was arrested in April by the Metropolitan Police's extradition unit on behalf of authorities in India, where he is wanted in connection with money laundering and high value bank demands.
UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA 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
India's Enforcement Directorate has been gathering evidence as part of its investigation into the tycoon's debts, totalling 977 million, linked to Mr Mallya's now-defunct airline Kingfisher.
PA
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Theresa May has a 50-50 chance of coming home from Brussels with a deal on sufficient progress today, the European Parliament's chief negotiator has said.
The Prime Minister is in the EU capital to break a deadlock in Article 50 talks over the Northern Ireland border, divorce bill, and citizens' rights which she needs to secure with the EU before trade talks can begin.
Guy Verhofstadt, the EP's Brexit lead, met with EU president Jean-Claude Juncker and chief negotiator Michel Barnier this morning ahead of their Mr Juncker's with Ms May later in the day.
He made the comments speaking to reporters outside the meeting.
He added: "During my meeting with Juncker EU, I reiterated that EU citizens in the UK should not have to go through an unclear, costly and burdensome procedure.
"Their rights must be guaranteed. They came to the UK in good faith and must be treated with the respect they deserve."
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Ireland is surprised and disappointed that the UK was unable to agree a Brexit deal, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has said, after an acceptable outcome for the text was agreed earlier with the EU.
His comments came shortly after Theresa May and the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told a press conference in Brussels that while progress had been made, they had failed to reach an overall agreement.
But Mr Varadkar said in Dublin that the Irish Government received confirmation earlier on Monday from both Downing Street and EU officials that a text on the contentious issue of the Irish border had been agreed, and met the concerns of the Irish Republic.
The text, the Irish PM hoped, would have formed part of the broader UK-EU agreement on phase one of the negotiations and would allow us all to move onto phase two.
He continued: I am surprised and disappointed that the British Government now appears not to be in a position that was agreed earlier today.
I accept that the Prime Minister has asked for more time and I know that she faces many challenges and I acknowledge that she is negotiating in good faith. But my position and that of the Irish Government is unequivocal.
Recommended No Brexit deal in Brussels after May and Juncker meet
Ireland wants to proceed to phase two its very much in our interests to do so. However, we cannot agree to do this unless we have firm guarantees there will not be any hard border in Ireland.
I have spoken to President Juncker again in the last hour and he has confirmed to me that our position remains Europes position and I still hope this matter can be concluded in the coming days as was agreed.
Leo Varadkar arrives at Government Buildings in Dublin to attend an emergency cabinet meeting on Brexit (PA)
A breakthrough on the issue appeared on the cards on Monday but hopes were dashed by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), who Ms May currently relies on to prop up her fragile Government in Westminster.
After reports emerged that the UK Government was considering a deal on the border that would have effectively provided Northern Ireland with a special status over the rest of the UK, the DUP reacted furiously. They said the party would stop any efforts which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom.
Speaking at a brief press conference in the European Commission building after a three-hour working lunch with the PM, Mr Juncker said: Despite our best efforts and the significant progress we and our teams have made over the past days on these main withdrawal issues it was not possibly to reach a complete agreement today.
Brexit: the deciders Show all 8 1 /8 Brexit: the deciders Brexit: the deciders European Union's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier Getty Brexit: the deciders French President Emmanuel Macron Getty Brexit: the deciders German Chancellor Angela Merkel Reuters Brexit: the deciders Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker EPA Brexit: the deciders The European Parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt Getty Brexit: the deciders Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May Getty Images Brexit: the deciders Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond PA Brexit: the deciders After the first and second appointed Brexit secretaries resigned (David Davis and Dominic Raab respectively), Stephen Barclay is currently heading up the position PA
Despite the setback Mr Juncker said he was still confident of reaching sufficient progress before next week and said the UK and EU would meet again for more discussions before the European Council summit on 14 and 15 December. He said Ms May was a tough negotiator and not an easy one and was defending the point of view of Britain with all the energy we know she has.
The Prime Minister echoed his sentiments. We have had a constructive meeting today, both sides have been working hard in good faith, weve been negotiating hard and a lot of progress has been made. But one a lot of the issues there is a common understanding and its clear, crucially, that we want to move forward together, she said.
On a couple of issues some differences do remain which require further negotiation and consultation and those will continue.
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British and Irish officials have tentatively agreed to keep Northern Irelands regulations in line with those of the EU after Brexit, a leaked draft agreement on the issue of the Irish border suggests.
The draft deal text, obtained by Irish public broadcaster RTE, would effectively keep Northern Ireland in the single market and customs union after Brexit by keeping EU regulations in place, unlike the rest of the UK.
Sources in Brussels however told The Independent that though officials on both sides were in broad agreement over the solution to the problem, Downing Street has so far felt unable to sign off on it.
Recommended Theresa May meets EU presidents in Brussels to break Brexit deadlock
One difficulty for Theresa May is that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) who she relies on for a majority in the House of Commons, has said that it would veto any bid to move Northern Ireland closer to the Republic potentially explaining Downing Streets reticence to sign off the leaked draft agreement.
RTE says the draft deal said: In the absence of agreed solutions the UK will ensure that there continues to be no divergence from those rules of the internal market and the customs union which, now or in the future, support North South cooperation and the protection of the Good Friday Agreement.
It adds that this paragraph was later amended to say there would be continued regulatory alignment on the island of Ireland.
Speaking to a briefing of journalists in Westminster, Downing Street rubbished the draft leak.
"The PM has been clear that the UK is leaving the European Union as a whole and the territorial and economic integrity of the United Kingdom will be protected," the Prime Minister's spokesperson said.
EU will refuse UK's Brexit demands if Ireland is not happy with plans
Rubbishing the Irish public broadcaster, he added: "RTE also reported this morning we were holding a Cabinet meeting and I missed that if it occurred."
Despite Downing Street's public dismissal of the plan, Sky News reports that the UK Government is "confident" it can get the DUP to agree to a deal by the end of today.
Theresa May has travelled to Brussels on Monday morning to meet EU presidents Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk for face-to-face talks in the hope of breaking the deadlock.
Whether the results of the meetings will be made public today is currently uncertain, with the EU's college of commissioners set to meet on Wednesday to formally discuss progress.
Close Theresa May arrives at the European Commission for talks on Ireland border and trade negotiations
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Theresa May has failed to strike a deal with Brussels that would allow Britain to unlock Brexit trade talks with the EU.
The Prime Minister had hoped to convince European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker that enough progress had been made to move on from the first phase of talks, which hinged on progress on issues including citizens rights, the so-called divorce bill and the Irish border
In a joint press conference after their lunch meeting, Mr Juncker said it was "not possible to reach a complete agreement today" but acknowledged that "significant progress" had been made.
Both leaders declared they were "confident" that a solution could be found in time for a crunch European Council summit on December 14.
But Ms May faces trouble ahead, as a leaked document outlining plans to keep Northern Ireland in the customs union to prevent a hard border prompted outrage among her allies in the Democratic Unionist Party.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called for Scotland to have remain in the single market, if Northern Ireland was permitted to do so, while Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones and London mayor Sadiq Khan also piled in to demand bespoke deals.
Also today, Brexit Secretary David Davis leads a committee stage debate on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill which would transfer EU law onto British statute books.
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What caused todays Brexit crisis?
The Democratic Unionist Party said it will not accept a deal on the Irish border question brokered by Theresa May which treats Northern Ireland differently to the rest of the UK, throwing the already difficult talks into chaos.
The DUP is effectively propping up Ms Mays minority Government, giving the group of just 10 Irish MPs a significant influence on UK politics.
DUP leader Arlene Foster said: We have been very clear. Northern Ireland must leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the United Kingdom, she said, speaking at Stormont.
What was supposed to happen?
Theresa May met Jean Claude Junker, the President of the European Commission, in Brussels for the latest round of Brexit negotiations.
A deal on the Irish border question has to be reached as a matter of urgency, as when the UK leaves the EU in March 2019, the Republic of Ireland will remain a member while Northern Ireland, as part of the UK, will be outside of it an unprecedented situation because the Irish Republic and the UK joined the union at the same time in 1973.
The hope was that a draft proposal would have been agreed allowing Northern Ireland to maintain regulatory alignment with the EU, preventing a hard border with the Irish Republic.
What was the sticking point?
Ms Foster gave a fiery press conference, declaring any such deal had not been approved by her party regarded as hardline unionists.
She said: The Republic of Ireland government is trying to unilaterally change the Belfast agreement without our impact and without our consent.
Of course we will not stand for that.
Within 20 minutes of this conference, Ms May is understood to have halted the talks to make an emergency call to Ms Foster.
After a three and a half hour working lunch, the Prime Minister and Mr Juncker emerged to admit in a slightly awkward press conference they had reached a stalemate in the talks.
What does regulatory alignment actually mean?
Regulatory alignment could mean both Ireland and Northern Ireland following the same rules governing trade, to ensure that goods can continue to move freely across a soft border with no customs checks.
But critics say this would effectively move the customs border between the UK and the Republic into the Irish Sea. This alarms the Unionists as they say it would mean Northern Ireland being treated as though it is part of a united Ireland instead as part of the UK.
The border between the North and the Republic of Ireland has never been a hard one, but the proposal to keep things as they are in terms of free movement of both goods and people would create a backdoor between the EU and the UK for immigrants as well as goods.
What other implications would regulatory alignment have for a post-Brexit UK?
Leaders of the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales as well as London Mayor Sadiq Khan seized upon the possibility of separate trading arrangements for different areas of the UK.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, a strident Brexit opponent, said: If one part of the UK can retain regulatory alignment with the EU and effectively stay in the single market which is the right solution for Northern Ireland there is surely no good practical reason why others cant.
Brexit: the deciders Show all 8 1 /8 Brexit: the deciders Brexit: the deciders European Union's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier Getty Brexit: the deciders French President Emmanuel Macron Getty Brexit: the deciders German Chancellor Angela Merkel Reuters Brexit: the deciders Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker EPA Brexit: the deciders The European Parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt Getty Brexit: the deciders Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May Getty Images Brexit: the deciders Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond PA Brexit: the deciders After the first and second appointed Brexit secretaries resigned (David Davis and Dominic Raab respectively), Stephen Barclay is currently heading up the position PA
And Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones said: We cannot allow different parts of the UK to be more favourably treated than others.
"If one part of the UK is granted continued participation in the single market and customs union, then we fully expect to be made the same offer."
Mr Khan said the deal being discussed in Brussels would have "huge ramifications for London", which voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU.
"If Theresa May has conceded that it's possible for part of the UK to remain within the single market and customs union after Brexit and a similar deal here could protect tens of thousands of jobs."
What will happen next?
Pro-remain MPs, who now favour a soft Brexit, have seized on the sticking point over the Irish border question to say the simplest solution would be for the UK to remain in the single market and customs union which would entail paying into the EU budget and accepting continued freedom of movement an absolute red line for most Brexit supporters.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has said he is prepared to give Ms May more time to reach an agreement.
Speaking in Dublin, he said the British and Irish governments had agreed the draft wording of a deal on the Irish border on Monday morning, and that he was "surprised and disappointed" it had been pulled from the table at the eleventh hour.
Ms May said the UK and the EU would "reconvene before the end of the week".
Is the peace process under threat?
While there is no immediate threat of a return to the troubles, the political situation in Northern Ireland remains delicate. Leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg accused Dublin of promoting the creation of a united Ireland by trying to force Britains hand on the border issue.
Mr Juncker insisted there was a common understanding on most relative issues, while Ms May said the meeting had been constructive.
Mr Varadkar said that while it is important to listen to the views of the DUP, it is also crucial to bear in mind the position of the other northern Irish parties.
Irish nationalist parties, including the SDLP, favour the whole of the UK remaining in the customs union and the single market.
Mr Varadkar insisted there is no hidden agenda, and said the soft border solution complies fully with the terms of the Good Friday agreement, which sealed the peace process in 1998.
Could this mean the beginning of the end of Theresa Mays premiership?
Pundits have been predicting Ms May will not last the course of the Brexit negotiations ever since she lost her majority at the June general election, having to rely on a 1bn agreement with the DUP to cling onto power.
This tenuous confidence and supply arrangement means the unionist party votes with the Government on all crucial matters of budget and finance, allowing the Prime Minister a slim working majority to get bills passed through the House of Commons.
The deal brokered between the Conservatives and the DUP was much criticised by opposition parties at the time, with pundits predicting there would be trouble ahead.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said after the breakdown: The real reason for todays failure is the grubby deal the Government did with the DUP after the election."
Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader, said: The DUP must not be allowed to dictate the UKs Brexit negotiations. This again shows the Conservatives are in office but not in power.
Should the DUP decide to break the agreement and turn its back on the Conservatives, Ms May would be left in an all but impossible position, unable to get any legislation through, undone by the coming together of the separate historical controversies of the Irish question and Europe, and with another general election on the cards.
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The Democratic Unionist Party has said it will not accept a deal on the Irish border being brokered by Theresa May, threatening her with a fresh crisis.
Staging an emergency press conference in Belfast, Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, ruled out accepting any move which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom.
The warning comes as a deal appeared close in Brussels under which the UK would allow Northern Ireland to maintain regulatory alignment with the EU.
Ms Foster did not directly repeat the DUPs threat last week to pull the plug on the deal that props up the Prime Minister in No 10.
Instead, she described the Irish Governments suggestions that the UK was poised to bow to its concerns over the post-Brexit border speculation.
But she added: We have been very clear. Northern Ireland must leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the United Kingdom.
We will not accept any form of regulatory divergence which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom.
The economic and constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom will not be compromised in any way.
Ms Foster said No 10 should be in no doubt about its stance, adding: Her Majestys Government understands the DUP position.
Ms May did not comment on the reports as she arrived for a key working lunch with Jean-Claude Juncker, which will be followed by talks with European Council president Donald Tusk.
Preventing the return of a hard land border in Ireland has emerged as the key hurdle to getting agreement from the EU to move the Brexit negotiations on to future trade.
Regulatory alignment could see both Ireland and Northern Ireland following the same rules governing trade, to ensure that goods can continue to move freely across a soft border with no checks.
But a deal could put the Prime Ministers domestic position in peril, because she depends on the votes of the 10 DUP MPs in order to pass a Budget and Brexit legislation.
Earlier, Ms May's official spokesman insisted any agreement on the Irish border would protect the "territorial and economic integrity" of the UK.
Ahead of the meetings in Brussels, he told a regular Westminster briefing: "The PM has been clear that the UK is leaving the European Union as a whole and the territorial and economic integrity of the United Kingdom will be protected."
Responding directly to questions about the report of agreement on regulatory alignment by Irish broadcaster RTE, he said: "RTE also reported this morning we were holding a Cabinet meeting and I missed that if it occurred."
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Britain has agreed a deal with the EU on the issue of the Northern Ireland border that would effectively keep the province in the single market and customs union, EU chiefs have told members of the European Parliament.
The Independent understands that a joint text on Northern Ireland drawn up by UK and EU officials was read out at a meeting between the Parliaments Brexit taskforce with Michel Barnier and Jean-Claude Juncker today.
MEPs were told that Theresa May, who is visiting Brussels later today to have meetings with Mr Juncker and Donald Tusk, the European Council president, was onboard with the agreement.
Recommended Theresa May meets EU presidents in Brussels to break Brexit deadlock
Following the meeting, Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts, a member of the Brexit taskforce who was in the room, also told Sky News that the UK Government had agreed to a special situation for Northern Ireland.
I think the discussions that weve seen in the last few months have allowed the British government to realise the implications of the Good Friday agreement, he said.
Basically, the British government would commit to maintain the full alignment of single market and customs union legislation that might potentially create a border.
Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts: 'The British government would commit to maintain the full alignment of single market and customs union legislation'
Asked whether there would be a wider deal on sufficient progress today, Mr Lamberts said: I would put my money on it. Pending the goodwill of the Prime Ministers of Ireland and the United Kingdom we can get a deal today.
A leak of a draft text obtained by Irish public broadcaster RTE pledged to ensure there would be continued regulatory alignment on the island of Ireland.
In the absence of agreed solutions the UK will ensure that there continues to be no divergence from those rules of the internal market and the customs union which, now or in the future, support North South cooperation and the protection of the Good Friday Agreement, the original draft said.
One difficulty for Theresa May is that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) who she relies on for a majority in the House of Commons, has said that it would veto any bid to move Northern Ireland closer to the Republic.
Brexit: the deciders Show all 8 1 /8 Brexit: the deciders Brexit: the deciders European Union's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier Getty Brexit: the deciders French President Emmanuel Macron Getty Brexit: the deciders German Chancellor Angela Merkel Reuters Brexit: the deciders Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker EPA Brexit: the deciders The European Parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt Getty Brexit: the deciders Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May Getty Images Brexit: the deciders Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond PA Brexit: the deciders After the first and second appointed Brexit secretaries resigned (David Davis and Dominic Raab respectively), Stephen Barclay is currently heading up the position PA
There are also outstanding issues on the issue of citizens rights, such as the cost and complexity of the application process for EU citizens wanting to stay in the UK to gain settled status.
The UK is understood to be proposing the creation of an ombudsman to oversee the implementation of the withdrawal agreement with regards to citizens' rights. This body could then refer cases to UK courts, with judges then being able to voluntarily refer cases on in turn to the European Court of Justice.
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Theresa Mays Brexit strategy is in disarray after the Irish Prime Minister dramatically accused her of reneging on an agreement that would have ended the deadlock in the talks.
On a day of drama, the Prime Minister pulled the plug on a deal on the Irish border after it was rejected by the Democratic Unionist Party which props her up in power triggering claims she is being held to ransom.
The embarrassment left Ms May scrambling to arrange crisis talks with the DUP before she heads back to Brussels later this week, with the clock ticking on the negotiations.
EU leaders have demanded she guarantee there will no hard land border in Ireland before a summit next week, if the talks are to move on to discussing future trade and a transitional deal.
The unravelling of the deal also left many Conservatives questioning Ms Mays handling of the talks, amid disbelief that the DUP had not been squared off in advance.
The talks broke down after Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, ruled out any move which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom.
We have been very clear. Northern Ireland must leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the United Kingdom, she said, speaking at Stormont.
The party despite being the Tories partner in government appeared to be blindsided by the UKs apparent concession of regulatory alignment on both sides of the border, to avoid checks.
Within 20 minutes, Ms May interrupted her talks with Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU Commission President, to telephone Ms Foster. When she went back to the lunch, the deal was off.
Later, Leo Varadkar, the Irish Prime Minister, went on the attack, accusing Ms May of reneging on a firm agreement to solve the border controversy and kick-start the talks.
The responsibility of any prime minister is to ensure that they can follow through on agreements that they make and we are surprised and disappointed that they havent been able to, he told a Dublin press conference.
The UK government and EU leaders had agreed a text earlier in the day that gave us the assurance we needed only for Ms May to ask for more time, he said.
At Westminster, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats seized on the role of the DUP. Jeremy Corbyn said: The real reason for todays failure is the grubby deal the Government did with the DUP after the election.
Theresa May relies on Arlene Fosters DUP for her commons majority after losing it at the general election she called (PA Wire/PA Images) (PA)
Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader, said: The DUP must not be allowed to dictate the UKs Brexit negotiations. This again shows the Conservatives are in office but not in power.
And Ben Bradshaw, the former Labour minister, tweeted: Britain is being held to ransom by a party thats propping up the Tory Government and represents minority opinion in Northern Ireland.
In Brussels, Ms May put a brave face on the disappointment, saying the two sides would reconvene before the end of the week for further negotiations.
On many of the issues there is a common understanding. And it is clear, crucially, that we want to move forward together, she said
The Irish PM said the UK and Ireland had reached an agreement (BBC)
But on a couple of issues some differences do remain which require further negotiation and consultation and those will continue.
Later, Donald Tusk made clear how close the EU believed it had been to a deal, tweeting: I was ready to present draft EU27 guidelines tomorrow for #Brexit talks on transition and future.
The European Council President argued an agreement at next weeks EU summit was still possible, but warned: It is now getting very tight.
In Dublin, Mr Varadkar said he was happy to give Ms May more time, saying: I do trust her and I believe she is negotiating in good faith.
But he rejected claims that regulatory alignment for Northern Ireland was a weakening of Dublins earlier demand for no regulatory divergence, insisting they meant the same thing.
If so, that adds weight to the argument that such a deal would see Northern Ireland effectively remain inside both the EU single market and customs union.
A draft of the agreement, obtained by the Irish public broadcaster RTE, read: In the absence of agreed solutions the UK will ensure that there continues to be no divergence from those rules of the internal market and the customs union which, now or in the future, support North South cooperation and the protection of the Good Friday Agreement.
Nicola Sturgeon was fast out of the blocks, insisting that if Northern Ireland was to be allowed to effectively stay in the single market then so should Scotland.
The First Ministers call was quickly echoed by Carwyn Jones, her counterpart in Wales, and London mayor Sadiq Khan, who both demanded bespoke Brexit deals.
Intensive talks will now take place between the Government and the DUP over the next few days and the Cabinet is expected to discuss the continued deadlock on Tuesday.
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove may seek answers on suggestions that the Prime Minister is willing to accept regulatory alignment for the whole of the UK, if necessary.
Pursuing that course would almost certainly trigger resignations by Brexiteers, who are determined that Britain has complete freedom to pursue trade deals with different regulations.
The Prime Ministers spokesman refused to discuss that claim, saying: This is an ongoing negotiation. Im not going to comment on that.
Brexit: the deciders Show all 8 1 /8 Brexit: the deciders Brexit: the deciders European Union's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier Getty Brexit: the deciders French President Emmanuel Macron Getty Brexit: the deciders German Chancellor Angela Merkel Reuters Brexit: the deciders Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker EPA Brexit: the deciders The European Parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt Getty Brexit: the deciders Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May Getty Images Brexit: the deciders Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond PA Brexit: the deciders After the first and second appointed Brexit secretaries resigned (David Davis and Dominic Raab respectively), Stephen Barclay is currently heading up the position PA
Anti-Brexit campaigners also hit out at the DUPs role in the affair.
It seems clear that Arlene Foster and the DUP are calling the shots and now are running the Government. Labour and Conservative remain minded MPs outnumber this sad little rump by more than ten to one. It is time for these people to stand up and make themselves heard, said Eloise Todd, chief executive of Best For Britain.
While DUP MPs might have cost Theresa May more than Pogba, it is the British public who are paying the price for their intransigence.
What galls me most is hearing the DUP saying that they want the same rules as the rest of the UK if they believed, that they would have acted on same sex marriage and abortion but yet, they wont. Maybe more public cash will now be sent across the Irish Sea to keep the DUP happy.
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Conservative MP Nadine Dorries has been forced to defend her approach to cyber-security after she revealed she routinely shares her login passwords with all her staff, including interns.
The backbencher took to Twitter to defend her colleague Damien Green, who has been accused of having pornography on his Commons computer.
She said a retired police officers claim that Mr Green must have been responsible for material found on his machine, was utterly preposterous.
My staff log onto my computer on my desk with my login everyday. Including interns on exchange programmes, she said.
She faced a backlash from Twitter users, with users accusing her of being cavalier or careless, and one asking: Does anyone know whos supposed to be in charge of data security for the UK Parliament? Because they have some explaining to do.
Data protection officer Carl Gottlieb told Sky News: Sharing access to confidential systems should always be minimised, especially in Government where security and audit trails are paramount. MPs and the civil service have a track record of lax practices around sharing passwords and this needs to change.
MPs, like many senior managers, have team around them that act as a bubble of trust. Interns are trusted to handle their email and social media accounts on a daily basis.
UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA 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 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The Mid Bedfordshire MP hit back, saying that she does not have access to sensitive government documents because she is not a minister.
She said: Im a backbench MP with four staff working on two computers. I dont get top secret emails from government.
A Cabinet Office Inquiry is examining the claims from two retired detectives that a vast quantity of extreme pornography was found on Mr Greens parliamentary computer in 2008.
Mr Green, who as first secretary of state is effectively Theresa Mays deputy, has also been accused of behaving inappropriately towards a young Conservative activist, Kate Maltby, which he denies.
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Support for the Conservatives among ethnic minority voters is at its lowest level for sixteen years, with the partys stance on immigration to blame, according to internal party memos.
New 10 Downing Street Chief of Staff Gavin Barwell has been giving presentations to MPs over the past two weeks, detailing its standing with BME communities.
One MP told The Times the presentations had been really gloomy.
Recommended Theresa May meets EU presidents in Brussels to break Brexit deadlock
Another said: We made big strides under Cameron. For reasons of image, not policy, it seems to have gone backwards.
One party figure said: Weve been told that BME support is down to 2001 levels, when Iain Duncan Smith was leader. Its that bad
The private polling showed that BME voters identified with Conservative values such as freedom and choice and caring for future generations, but would not vote Tory.
BME voters are much more likely to vote for Labour, with data from the 2017 election showing that the Conservatives only achieved 17 per cent of the ethnic minority vote, which is down from 21 per cent in 2015.
In her speech on becoming Prime Minister, Theresa May vowed to tackle "burning injustices" such as racial inequality. Standing outside 10 Downing Street she said: "If youre black, youre treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if youre white," and promised to take action.
But, in her conference speech several months later she memorably said: "If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don't understand what citizenship means. These appeared to be specifically aimed at tax avoiding billionaires but have still since come to haunt her.
The Prime Minister also remains dogged by controversial decisions during her six year spell at the Home Office. The department paid for billboard vans encouraging illegal immigrants to go home to be driven around ethnically sensitive areas. She also pledged to cut immigration to the tens of thousands, and has refused to remove students from the overall immigration figures.
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The Government has suspended a foreign aid scheme after an investigation claimed that taxpayers' money was being used by extremists in Syria.
Officers from the Free Syrian Police (FSP), the civilian police force backed by Britain, have also been working with courts accused of torture and summary executions, BBC One's Panorama alleged.
According to documents seen by the programme, police officers in Aleppo province were forced to hand over funds to the extremist group in control of the area, Nour al-Din al-Zinki.
Evidence also showed that the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, had handpicked police officers for two stations in Idlib province, it said.
Britain is one of six countries funding the FSP, which was set up after the Syrian uprising.
Adam Smith International (ASI), the British company that runs the project, said it had managed taxpayers' money effectively to confront terrorism.
The programme 'Jihadis You Pay For', which will air on Monday evening, claims the documents also showed that dead and fictitious people were on the FSP's payroll.
When the company visited one police station, supposedly the base for 57 police officers, they could not find a single officer, the investigation found.
ASI said it accounted for the officers on subsequent visits and that it had found very few instances of dead officers remaining on the salary list in Syria.
It said it used cash because there was no practical alternative and that officers imposed by Jabhat al-Nusra were detected within two months.
Payments to the stations funding the extremist group Nour al-Din al-Zinki were stopped in August 2016, it added.
ASI said: ASI has managed the project successfully alongside our partner in an extremely challenging, high-risk environment under the close supervision of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and five other governments.
Kate Osamor, Labour's shadow secretary of state for international development, said that if the allegations were true, British taxpayers would be rightly outraged.
She said: We need to understand how the Foreign and Commonwealth Office allowed this to happen, and why their mechanisms for properly managing aid projects failed.
The opaque Conflict, Stability and Security Fund that financed this project also operates in 70 other countries - many with questionable human rights records.
This investigation is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg: the Government must now open up its books so the public can understand the true extent of the problem.
Syrian Democratic Forces take Raqqa from Isis in pictures Show all 8 1 /8 Syrian Democratic Forces take Raqqa from Isis in pictures Syrian Democratic Forces take Raqqa from Isis in pictures Syrian Democratic Forces fighters celebrate victory in Raqqa atop of military vehicles REUTERS Syrian Democratic Forces take Raqqa from Isis in pictures Fighters of Syrian Democratic Forces march past destroyed buildings as they celebrate victory REUTERS Syrian Democratic Forces take Raqqa from Isis in pictures Fighters of Syrian Democratic Forces gesture the "V" sign in Raqqa REUTERS Syrian Democratic Forces take Raqqa from Isis in pictures Fighters of Syrian Democratic Forces evacuate a civilian from the stadium REUTERS Syrian Democratic Forces take Raqqa from Isis in pictures A civilian prays after she was rescued by fighters of Syrian Democratic Forces from the stadium REUTERS Syrian Democratic Forces take Raqqa from Isis in pictures Syrian Democratic Forces fighters ride atop of military vehicles as they celebrate victory in Raqqa REUTERS Syrian Democratic Forces take Raqqa from Isis in pictures Syrian Democratic Forces fighters celebrate victory in Raqqa REUTERS Syrian Democratic Forces take Raqqa from Isis in pictures A fighter of Syrian Democratic Forces celebrates in Raqqa Reuters
An FCO spokesman said: We take any allegations of co-operation with terrorist groups and of human rights abuses extremely seriously and the Foreign Office has suspended this programme while we investigate these allegations.
We believe that such work in Syria is important to protect our national security interest but of course we reach this judgement carefully given that in such a challenging environment no activity is without risk. That is why all our programmes are designed carefully and subject to robust monitoring.
PA
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The Labour Party will seek to force the Government to publish its own reports into the rollout of its Universal Credit, in a move that could embarrass the Government further over its flagship benefits scheme.
In a debate in the House of Commons, in which the Conservatives are expected to abstain, the party will use the same arcane parliamentary procedure as it used several weeks ago to compel the Government to publish its Brexit impact assessments.
The reports, known as Project Assessment Reviews, are detailed assessments of the implementation of Universal Credit, which has come under criticism for driving debt, arrears and even evictions.
The independent Information Commissioner, has determined that five of the reports, drafted between 2012 2015, are in the public interest and called on the Government to release them. So far it has not done so.
Debbie Abrahams MP, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, said: These reports could further expose the implementation flaws, design failures and the impacts of major cuts to Universal Credit, which is pushing people into poverty, debt and arrears. Labour has long called for a pause and fix of this programme, but the Chancellor failed to act in the Budget, meaning thousands of families will face a miserable Christmas.
The Government should have abided by the Information Commissioner and released five of these reports into the public domain. Having already ignored Parliaments unanimous approval of Labours motion to pause Universal Credit, the Government is now once again riding roughshod over the democratic process.
Labour is calling for the release of this catalogue of failures on Universal Credit, to ensure that the lessons are learned from this Governments mismanagement.
Labour is committed to transforming Universal Credit, so that it meets its original ambitions of simplifying social security, reducing child poverty and making work pay.
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A well-known campaigner against vaginal mesh procedures has died from sepsis, it has been reported.
Christina Brajcic, 42, of Ontario, Canada, is believed to be the first woman to die in what has become known as the vaginal mesh scandal, which Conservative MP Alec Shelbrooke called the new thalidomide.
Her death comes just a week after the UK-based National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended banning vaginal mesh as a routine treatment for prolapse.
Professor Carl Heneghan, an expert in medical device regulation, says this essentially amounts to a backdoor-ban but that it had come too late to help the thousands of women whose lives have been irreparably damaged.
The insertion of a plastic mesh device to treat hernia, prolapse and incontinence in particular, the transvaginal mesh procedure, used on around 10,000 UK women a year has come under increasing public scrutiny as reports have emerged of high rates of complication and inadequate medical trialling.
Women have been left unable to work, walk or even sit down after complications, including chronic pain, organ erosion and perforations, nerve damage and loss of sexual function. Some have reported feeling suicidal all as a result of a treatment often performed for minor incontinence.
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After her second son was born four years ago, interior designer Ms Brajcic was implanted with a polypropylene mesh TVT (tension-free vaginal tape), the most commonly prescribed in the UK, to treat mild incontinence: a gold standard, minimally invasive procedure.
But just a few hours after her surgery, she explained to CTV W5, The pain got worse, and worse, and worse, and finally it was like my insides were ripping out.
The surgery left her bedridden, suffering nerve damage and constant pain. A year later, she received a five-hour operation to remove the mesh device which, as they are designed to be permanent, had to be extracted piece by piece. Afterwards, she was treated in hospital at least once a month for related urinary tract infections, and eventually became resistant to the antibiotics she was receiving.
By the end of October, Ms Brajcic was readmitted to hospital suffering from sepsis, a life-threatening bodily response to infection that can end in organ failure.
On 15 November, she posted on Facebook: Funny how after going septic and almost dying now Im getting respect and being treated well by doctors. All it took was dying to get better care and better pain management. I will take it...its better then fighting for my care.
On Wednesday, according to her husband Tony, her heart stopped. The family await the results from a toxicology exam, but believe that her death can be linked directly related to her mesh.
Ms Brajcic had already launched a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, the company that made her device, joining thousands of Canadian and American women and 800 in the UK who are already involved in litigation against various mesh providers.
She also campaigned relentlessly against mesh procedures, selling T-shirts and ribbons to raise awareness and funds for sufferers.
In October, Labour MP Emma Hardy brought the issue to Parliament, with a cross-party group demanding a suspension pending full investigation into the scandal. However, minister for care and mental health, Jackie Doyle-Price, ruled out a public inquiry or a suspension.
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The week Ms Brajcic died, Australias medical regulatory body, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), banned mesh as a treatment for POP (pelvic organ prolapse), saying in a statement that the benefits of using transvaginal mesh products do not outweigh the risks to the patient.
Former Scottish health secretary Alex Neil recently described the issue as a global catastrophe and is calling for an international summit. Back in 2014, officials in Scotland called for all mesh devices to be banned, including those used to treat hernias.
Kath Sansom, founder of Sling the Mesh, a prominent campaign group fighting the treatment in the UK, told The Independent: Chrissy must not die in vain. Her death has shocked and upset women around the world. She only had a mild stress incontinence problem from childbirth and physio probably could have fixed it. Now she has lost her life. This is wrong in every way. This is shocking.
Sansom, who has launched a Just Giving page to raise money for Ms Brajcics children, added: Many women in groups globally are close to being antibiotic-resistant and then what? Benefits do not outweigh the risks of this operation. Its time to say enough is enough.
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A Brazilian mayor who governed her town via WhatsApp has been jailed for at least 14 years for embezzling millions from its education budget.
Lidiane Leite went on the run in August 2015 when she was accused of taking the money form the town of Bom Jardim in Brazils north-west.
The 27-year-old directed local officials using WhatsApp while she lived a life of luxury in Sao Luiz, the state capital of Maranhao, around 180 miles away.
She eventually gave herself up after 39 days on the run.
Following a two-and-a-half year legal battle, Leite was sentenced to 14 years and one month in prison followed by six years of house arrest after she was found guilty of taking R$20m (4.5m) from an education fund.
She is still able to appeal the decision, the TNH1 news channel reported.
The saga began in 2012 after her former boyfriend, Humberto Dantas dos Santos, who was also known as Beto Rocha, was banned from serving as mayor of the town in 2012 due to corruption allegations.
Shortly afterwards, Leite ran in his place and appointed the 44-year-old as her chief advisor. He was responsible for most of the towns day-to-day management.
Meanwhile Leite lived a lifestyle full of expensive champagne and fast cars in Sao Luiz as she communicated with her deputies via a special Task Force WhatsApp group.
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. 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Dos Santos is still on the run but was also sentenced to 17 years and nine months in prison followed by seven years and four months of house arrest in absentia.
At the start of 2015 the couple broke up and Dos Santos resigned. This is when the corruption scheme started to unravel
Bom Jardim is a poor town of around 40,000 people in one of the countrys poorest states.
Many families rely on the local school to give their children at least one decent meal a day. Locals told the BBC that during Leites tenure they never had food at the school which first prompted the investigation into the mayor and her associates.
The authorities began to look at Leites social media feeds where she repeatedly bragged about her glamorous life of luxury.
One post on Instagram wrote: Before I became mayor, I was poor. I had a Land Rover, now I drive a [Toyota] SW4. Maybe I should buy a more luxurious car, because thank you God I have enough money to do it.
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I can buy whatever I want. Im going to spend money on what I want and I dont care what people say about me.
Once Brazilian authorities announced her arrest she went on the run all the while sending WhatsApp messages to her deputies insisting she was still the mayor and forbidding them from talking to prosecutors.
Fabio Santos de Oliveira said she and around 10 others had pilfered millions from the state coffers especially the health and education budgets.
He said: In one case, she contracted fake companies to rebuild three schools in Bom Jardim, that way she could steal money from the budget.
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A former Stanford University swimmer who was found guilty of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman outside a campus fraternity party, is to appeal his conviction.
Brock Turner's case made headlines around the world, when the former Olympic hopeful was sentenced to just six months in prison despite a powerful written statement delivered by his victim in which which she outlined the impact the attack had on her.
Judge Aaron Persky said a longer sentence would have a damaging effect on his life, even though he was found guilty of three separate counts of sexual assault for the 2015 attack. He served just three months after being released early for good behaviour.
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Lawyers for Turner, now 22, filed an appeal for the Ohio native, arguing his trial in March 2016 heard a detailed and lengthy set of lies. They hope to overturn the requirement for Turner to be on the register of sex offenders for life.
The details of the case sparked outrage after two Stanford graduate students testified they had spotted Turner thrusting himself into his unconscious victim. Both he and the woman had drunk heavily at a student party at the elite institution.
Turner maintained the woman was not unconscious but the victim said she had woken up hours after the attack with blood on her hands and no memory of meeting Turner or being taken to hospital.
His legal adviser John Tompkins said what happened was not a crime and the facts do not reflect the verdict.
Is Helen Mirren right about date rape? Show all 2 1 /2 Is Helen Mirren right about date rape? Is Helen Mirren right about date rape? 50182.bin AP Is Helen Mirren right about date rape? 50149.bin alamy
After the first case, Turner's victim waived her right to anonymity in the US and allowed her victims impact statement going viral after the conclusion of the case.
Writing for Glamour magazine after the case, the young woman who chose to be identified by the name Emily Doe said that after the sentnence she "felt embarrassed for trying, for being led to believe I had any influence."
She added: "The violation of my body and my being added up to a few months out of his summer. I began to panic; I thought, this cant be the best case scenario. If this case was meant to set the bar, the bar had been set on the floor.
Turner served his sentence at the Santa Clara County jail and is currently on probation.
He dropped out of university after his arrest. His father then caused further outrage when he said his son had paid a steep price for 20 minutes of action.
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President Donald Trump's push for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians stems from a belief that his broader goals of stopping Iranian aggression and Islamic extremism will not be possible without it, presidential adviser Jared Kushner said in a rare public appearance on Sunday.
If we're going to try to create more stability in the region as a whole, you have to solve this issue, Kushner told Middle East experts gathered at the Brookings Institution's Saban Forum. Trump, he said, sees this as something that has to be solved.
But nearly a year after Trump named Kushner, his son-in-law and senior White House aide, as point person for what he called the ultimate deal, there has been no public indication of where the initiative is heading.
Presumed participants in the plan - described by officials as a comprehensive package including Israel, the Palestinians, Arab governments and international backers - have been kept similarly in the dark, leading to widespread speculation and anxiety.
If two states are in there, a major part of the [Israeli] coalition will object, a senior Israeli official said last week. Any attempt to establish a Palestinian state in any form, the official said, could bring down the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
There are just rumours, but we hear there are moves to bring the Arabs on board and provide Israel with rewards and give the Palestinians pressure and threats and extortion, said Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
Reports that Trump plans this week to declare US recognition of Jerusalem as the undisputed capital of Israel have elevated anxiety to panic in some quarters.
This move will promote international anarchy and disrespect for global institutions and law, PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat said in a statement on Sunday. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as their capital. By taking sides on an issue long considered part of final status negotiations, he said, the United States will also be disqualifying itself to play any role in an initiative towards achieving a just and lasting peace.
Jordan's King Abdullah II, whom Kushner's team considers a key regional partner, warned last week that a US decision to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv must come within a comprehensive solution that leads to the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, living side by side with Israel.
Any move at this point, said Abdullah, who was in Washington to consult with Congress, could be potentially exploited by terrorists to stoke anger, frustration and desperation in order to spread their ideologies.
Monday is a deadline for Trump to either announce the embassy move - as required by 1995 legislation - or issue the same six-month waiver that he signed last summer, as has every president before him over the past two decades. Administration officials have indicated that Trump will again sign the waiver, but he will make a midweek speech recognising Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.
Kushner declined to comment on the embassy issue, saying that Trump was still looking at a lot of different facts.
The president is going to make his decision... He'll be one who will want to tell you, not me, he said. Haim Saban, the Israeli American media billionaire who heads the forum, an annual dialogue between US and Israeli leaders, said he would call Kushner for the answer on Thursday - the day after Trump is expected to speak on the issue. Perfect, Kushner replied.
Kushner has stayed away from public view in recent months, as Special Counsel Robert Mueller has investigated ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. The format of Kushner's Sunday appearance was an on-stage interview with Saban, a major donor to the Democratic Party, who said the two had established a relationship in discussions about the Middle East. But Saban made little headway in excavating details of the peace plan.
After Kushner explained that Iran, with their nuclear ambitions and their expansive regional mischief, along with the threat from the Isis and extremist ideology could best be addressed after the distraction of the Israeli-Palestinian issue was resolved, Saban responded with the question many experts on the region have posed.
I understand that. But to achieve that, Saban said, the team has in it an entrepreneurial real estate lawyer, a bankruptcy lawyer - I don't know how you've lasted eight months in this lineup... It's impressive that it's still going. There's not a Mideast 'macher' in this group. Macher is a Yiddish word for a mover and shaker.
How do you operate with, with all due respect, a bunch of Orthodox Jews who have no idea about anything? he asked. What are you guys doing? Seriously, I don't understand this.
Amid audience laughter, Kushner responded: I'll definitely say its not a conventional team... It's a perfectly qualified team. How is that?
Three members of Kushner's team, including him, are Orthodox Jews. Jason Greenblatt, the White House special representative for international negotiations, came to the administration after serving as executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organisation. David Friedman, Trump's bankruptcy lawyer and, like Kushner, a financial contributor to the Israeli settlement movement in the past, now is the administration's ambassador to Israel.
The fourth team member is Dina Powell, deputy national security adviser and an Egyptian American who is a Coptic Christian. The State Department, which led decades of failed Middle East peace efforts under previous administrations, has been kept largely out of the Trump initiative.
According to administration officials willing to discuss the process but not the contents of the peace package, the plan is to release a comprehensive, final document covering all aspects of a deal. Rather than previous attempts to move from one issue to another in search of compromises between Israel and the Palestinians, the hope is that each party will find enough it likes in the overall document that it will be more amenable to those aspects it might previously have rejected.
One administration analogy for both the process and its final presentation is to a dinner party in which the host, rather than asking guests what each would like to eat when they sit down at the table, has already prepared a several course, take-it-or-leave-it meal.
In order to reach a bottom line, Kushner and his team have met repeatedly with leaders and negotiators in countries throughout the region. We've tried very hard to do a lot of listening, he said, to learn what their red lines are... to find areas of mutual agreement, to find reasons to do things rather than not do things.
He brushed off publicly expressed Israeli and Palestinian concerns, and insistence that there is no wiggle room on what he acknowledged were the elephants among the issues that have dogged previous efforts, including establishment of a Palestinian state and its borders, Israeli settlements, and Jerusalem.
We've solicited a lot of ideas from a lot of places, Kushner said. There is obviously a lot of speculation... 'There is a plan, what is it? Are these four points in or out?'
We all kind of laugh and say, OK, we're just not going to play the guessing game... We know what's in the plan. The Palestinians know what discussions we've had with them, the Israelis know.
None of the parties has been told what the others have discussed, according to administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity about the undertaking that, as Kushner noted, has had no leaks.
Underlying all of Kushner's calculations are what he called the regional dynamics, which the administration believes have brought the Saudis and other countries influential with the Palestinians to find common cause with Israel - and the administration - against Iran and extremism. The region, he said, is unifying against Iran's aggression.
Officials insisted that while Arab partners - including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates - have a role to play, the main focus of the plan is on Israel and the Palestinians.
But Kushner sidestepped questions about the administration's especially close ties with Saudi Arabia, and his own tight relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely known as MBS.
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
Some experts attribute what appears to be a delay in release of the administration's plan, initially believed set for the end of this year, to overreaching by MBS, who in recent weeks has arrested more than 200 members of the Saudi royal family and leading business persons, stepped into domestic politics in Lebanon and has been held responsible internationally for a humanitarian disaster in Yemen.
Kushner insisted that there was no delay, because there had never been a deadline.
We're businesspeople, we're not politicians, he said. We've been very deliberate about not setting time frames. We're not trying to do this the way it's been done before.
The Washington Post
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Antifa outnumbered white supremacists during a protest in front of the White House which saw the two rival groups hurl slogans at each other before being escorted away by the police.
Neo-Nazis and members of the far right gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue carrying American flags and chanting build the wall to show their opposition to the verdict in the Kate Steinle trial.
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, was found not guilty of murder last week in the killing of a woman on a San Francisco pier that sparked a national immigration debate two years ago. The jury found him guilty of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Around 25 white nationalists, including far right poster boy Richard Spencer, were confronted by approximately 50 Antifa protesters yelling Nazi scum off our streets! and clutching placards with slogans such as Stop Racial Scapegoating.
Antifa, shorthand for anti-fascist protesters, refers to a loose decentralised coalition of groups who oppose fascism via popular grassroots action rather than relying on the police or the state.
(AFP/Getty Images (AFP/Getty Images)
The white nationalists rally, which called for more stringent laws on immigration, lasted 20 minutes before police on bikes and horseback succeeded in separating the opposing groups before clashes broke out. Police managed to escort far right demonstrators away from the scene.
Spencer, who is credited with coining the term alt-right, urged people to join him for the protest on Twitter, saying: Join me on Sunday at 2pm in Lafayette Square to demand Trump build #KatesWall.
Spencer helped organise the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville which saw neo-Nazis, KKK members and alt-right supporters descend on the ordinarily quiet university town. Tensions between fascists and counter protestors turned deadly after a 20-year-old man, who officials say had Nazi sympathies, deliberately ploughed his car into the crowd of peaceful anti-fascist demonstrators and killed a female civil rights activist.
Violence on the streets of Charlottesville Show all 9 1 /9 Violence on the streets of Charlottesville Violence on the streets of Charlottesville Protesters clash and several are injured White nationalist demonstrators clash with counter demonstrators at the entrance to Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. A state of emergency is declared, August 12 2017 Violence on the streets of Charlottesville Trump supporters at the protest A white nationalist demonstrator walks into Lee Park in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017. Hundreds of people chanted, threw punches, hurled water bottles and unleashed chemical sprays on each other Saturday after violence erupted at a white nationalist rally in Virginia. AP Photo Violence on the streets of Charlottesville State police stand ready in riot gear Virginia State Police cordon off an area around the site where a car ran into a group of protesters after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia AP Photo Violence on the streets of Charlottesville Militia armed with assault rifles White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' with body armor and combat weapons evacuate comrades who were pepper sprayed after the 'Unite the Right' rally was declared a unlawful gathering by Virginia State Police. Militia members marched through the city earlier in the day, armed with assault rifles. Getty Images Violence on the streets of Charlottesville Statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee stands behind a crowd of hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' during the 'Unite the Right' rally 12 August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. They are protesting the removal of the statue from Emancipation Park in the city. Getty Images Violence on the streets of Charlottesville Racial tensions sparked the violence White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' exchange insults with counter-protesters as they attempt to guard the entrance to Lee Park during the 'Unite the Right' rally Getty Violence on the streets of Charlottesville A car plows through protesters A vehicle drives into a group of protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The incident resulted in multiple injuries, some life-threatening, and one death. AP Photo Violence on the streets of Charlottesville Rescue personnel help injured people after a car ran into a large group of protesters after an white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia AP Photo Violence on the streets of Charlottesville President Donald Trump speaks about the ongoing situation in Charlottesville, Virginia from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. He spoke about "loyalty" and "healing wounds" left by decades of racism.
Spencer addressed US President Donald Trump directly through his microphone at the recent White House demonstration, saying: Kate could have been your daughter too.
He shouted: Kate Steinles death has touched everyone thats here. She represented everything that is white and wonderful about this country.
President Trump has condemned the acquittal of Mr Zarate and used the case to launch an attack on illegal immigration.
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A disgraceful verdict in the Kate Steinle case! No wonder the people of our Country are so angry with Illegal Immigration, he tweeted last week before claiming it was a total miscarriage of Justice on Sunday.
Mr Zarate, who had been deported five times and served time in federal prison for illegally re-entering the US, was found not guilty of first or second-degree murder or assault with a firearm.
Mr Zarates lawyer for the case released a statement last week urging President Trump to reflect on his own presumption of innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation before deciding to comment on the Steinle case.
The Steinle case became a flashpoint over debates on immigration policy and Mr Trump regularly used the case to call for stricter immigration policies during the 2016 presidential election.
Immigration officials said they will try to deport Mr Zarate again following his acquittal on the murder charges.
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!
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The CEO of Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery & Grill who was hailed as the archetypal American success story has killed himself in his Bronx factory.
Lowell Hawthorn, who created a Caribbean empire which popularised the beef patty across the US, fatally shot himself on Saturday, according to the police.
The police said the 57-year-old was found dead just after 10pm on Saturday in his office at the company factory in the Claremont neighbourhood.
While preliminary indications suggest Mr Hawthorne took his own life police are continuing to look into the circumstances leading up to his death.
Capitalising on recipes from his native Jamaica, he opened the first Golden Krust store in the Bronx back in 1989 when he was just 21. He went on to carve out a fast food empire and expanded to more than 120 franchises in nine states.
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The magnates death shocked New Yorks Caribbean community because Mr Hawthorn, who was president and chief executive of Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery & Grill for almost three decades, was routinely lauded as an immigrant success story.
The Bronx-based company where he worked with his wife and four children thanked his supporters and said arrangements for his funeral would be announced at a later date.
Our hearts are broken, and we are struggling to process our grief over this tremendous loss, the Golden Krust company said in a statement on Sunday. Lowell was a visionary, entrepreneur, community champion, and above all a committed father, family man, friend and man of faith.
Ruben Diaz Jr, the Bronx borough president, expressed his sadness at the news on Twitter. Lowell Hawthorne was a good friend, and was always ready to help my office whenever we needed him, he said.
He will be sorely missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, friends and employees during this difficult time.
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
Andrew Holness, the prime minister of Jamaica, said: My condolences to the friends, family and employees of Jamaica-born Lowell Hawthorne, CEO of Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery & Grill. He headed the largest Caribbean franchise chain in the US, with more than 120 stores.
Mr Hawthorne wrote a memoir titled The Bakers Son back in 2013 in which he cast his mind back to his childhood in Jamaica, where he was raising rabbits, chicken and guinea pigs at the age of just 10.
He started the wildly successful Caribbean fast food chain in 1989 by selling selling beef patties and jerk chicken under the maxim We take the taste of the Caribbean to the world.
The majority of the restaurants, which serve up mildly spicy and hot Jamaican patties, jerk chicken, jerk fish, dumplings, steamed yams, callaloo, ackee, and curried meat dishes, are situated in New York.
Barbadian pop superstar Rihanna visits the Caribbean fast food spot whose shops are adorned with cheerfully bright yellow and orange tiles.
For confidential support on mental health call the Samaritans on 116 123, email jo@samaritans.org or attend a local Samaritans branch.
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When you ask Marie Newman why she is running for office against another Democrat, she responds simply: Im not.
The former marketing consultant and anti-bullying expert is mounting a primary challenge to Illinois third district Representative Dan Lipinski a seven-term Democrat who has voted against abortion access, spoken out against LGBT rights, and refused to back Barack Obama for president.
Ms Newman is part of a growing group of progressives who want to take on Republicans and Donald Trump by challenging their fellow Democrats to be better.
Being progressive is about moving forward, Ms Newman told The Independent. I think that there are some folks in the Democratic party for whom maybe thats uncomfortable. Dan Lipinski is one of them.
Mr Lipinski is not an easy first target for a revolution. The 51-year-old sits comfortably in his decidedly blue district, which elected Democrats to Congress in 24 of the last 25 elections. Since he took office in 2004, Mr Lipinski has faced few competitive primary opponents. In 2016, he faced no challengers in the primary or the general races.
Dan Lipinski is the incumbent Representative for the third district (Facebook/Congressman Dan Lipinski)
From this place of relative security, Mr Lipinski has become one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress. He is an abortion rights foe who has voted several time to defund Planned Parenthood. He is one of only three Democrats still in the House to vote against Obamacare in 2010. He voted to impose mandatory minimum sentences on immigrants who enter the country illegally. The Human Rights Campaign gives him the lowest ranking for LGBT support of any Democrat in Congress.
Ms Newman, meanwhile, is a decidedly Bernie Sanders-styled progressive. If elected to Congress, she says she would be a worker bee for Medicare for All a Sanders-backed proposal for universal healthcare coverage. She would also advocate for a higher minimum wage $15 per hour, at least and affordable childcare. She would lobby for holistic jobs bills, including things like paid benefits for workers.
While these values put Ms Newman to the left of much of her party, she maintains that her opponent is the truly radical one.
He is a radically conservative extremist who is not representing the district correctly, she said. Ive observed that for many years.
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
Mr Lipinski would contest this, of course. He declined multiple interview requests from The Independent, but told The Hill that his voting record is very much in line with his district.
You can never please everybody, he said. ...I think that the support Ive received throughout my career in the Democratic primary shows that Im really in line with a large portion of my district.
But Ms Newman isnt convinced. She believes the district was galvanised by the election of Mr Trump and by Republicans attempts to roll back Obamacare. She plans to ride that wave of political mobilisation all the way to the ballot box.
The district has finally uncovered how radical [Mr Lipinski] is, and how inappropriate he is for the district, she said. I mean, the phrase Got woke is the epitome of what happened in my district.
Ms Newman celebrates on the campaign trail (Courtesy Marie Newman) (Courtsey Marie Newman)
Ms Newman is not the only one hoping to capitalise on this historic moment. Across the country, young progressives are springing up to push their Democratic peers to the left.
In Florida, Air Force veteran Chardo Richardson is challenging fellow Democrat Stephanie Murphy, a US Representative, hoping to outflank her from the left. In Rhode Island, the Democratic lieutenant governor is facing a primary challenge from Democrat Aaron Regunberg a state representative who volunteered for the Sanders campaign and promises to ensure "the 1 per cent pays their fair share. Even the Governor of New York, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, may be facing a progressive challenger in state Senator Terry Gipson.
For many Democrats, the thought of pitting progressives against more moderate incumbents conjures up nightmarish visions of 2016. The bitter presidential primary between the progressive Mr Sanders and the moderate Hillary Clinton left a bad taste in the mouth of many Democrats, who would rather join ranks to defeat Mr Trump than criticise one of their own.
But Ms Newman says fears of the Sanders-Clinton divide fracturing the party are overblown. In fact, she thinks these divisions are necessary to bring in fresh ideas and perspectives.
I think there are far more divisions than the Bernie wing and the non-Bernie wing, she said. There are probably ten different flavours out here, and that will always be the case. And I will always be excited that thats the case, because then we keep bringing new ideas all the time.
She added: Im probably a wing. Im probably a new wing. That crazy lady from the southwest suburbs that has the audacity to think she can actually represent her district in a proper way.
Ms Newman previously worked as an anti-bullying expert (Courtesy Marie Newman) (Courtsey Marie Newman)
But challenging Mr Lipinski will not be easy. The Representative has served his district for more than a decade, with little conflict. He beat his last primary challenger Farah Baqai, in 2012 by more than 85 per cent of the vote.
Thats likely because Mr Lipinski is popular with the trade unions and the more socially conservative voters in the area. While the district is decidedly Democratic, it leans more conservative than many around it. In 1980, for example, the district was one of only two in Chicago to go for Ronald Reagan. In 2004, George W Bush scored 41 per cent of the districts vote almost double what he received in the other four southside districts.
Mr Lipinski is also well-connected. In fact, he essentially inherited his seat from his father, Bill Lipinski, who represented the district for more than 10 years before him. The elder Mr Lipinski announced his retirement in 2004, shortly after winning the Democratic primary. The move allowed the younger Mr Lipinski to take his place in the general election, bypassing the primaries entirely and sailing to victory over his Republican opponent.
Ms Newman says she works on the campaign 19 hours a day (Courtesy Marie Newman) (Courtsey Marie Newman)
The Lipinski family is also close to Mike Madigan, the speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. In 2011, at the same time another Democrat was preparing a primary challenge to Mr Lipinski, Democratic map-makers were redrawing several districts in Illinois. By many accounts, Mr Madigan had a strong hand in designing the maps and a conversation with Mr Lipinski about how they should look. In the end, Mr Lipinskis challenger was drawn out of his district.
Ms Newman, meanwhile, has never held a political office. She has worked at various advertising agencies, and started her own consulting firm in 2005. She became interested in anti-bullying campaigns after her daughter, who is transgender, started being picked on at school. She eventually founded her own anti-bullying non-profit, and signed on to lead a coalition of 70 anti-bullying groups working nationwide. Her aspirations have taken her into business, advocacy, and non-profits but never into office.
There is also the issue of funding. As a matter of policy, the Democratic party will not fund primary challengers when there is a Democratic incumbent. Ms Newman shut down her business and quit her job to campaign full-time, but fundraising is still a struggle. Her campaign ended the third quarter with $98,000 on hand; Mr Lipinksi had $1.5m.
Ms Newman attends a Pride parade (Courtesy Marie Newman) (Courtsey Marie Newman)
Still, there are signs that this crazy lady from the southwest suburbs could actually pull it off. She has raked in a striking number of endorsements in recent weeks, including from Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. She has also been endorsed by five major progressive organisations, including LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign and pro-choice organisation NARAL.
In a statement announcing their endorsement, the liberal group MoveOn.org pushed Democrats to seek more candidates like Ms Newman candidates who act like Democrats, not Donald Trump Republicans.
The progressive news site Daily Kos also endorsed Ms Newman, again emphasising her differences with Mr Trump. According to Carolyn Fiddler, the sites political editor, this contrast could be what propels the candidate to victory.
If theres one thing voters have made clear in 2017s elections, its that they want their representatives to stand up to Donald Trump something Lipinski has refused to do, Ms Fiddler told The Independent. Trump is our nations bully-in-chief while Newman is a dedicated advocate against bullying, making her the perfect counter to Lipinski and his Trump-enabling ways.
Talking with Ms Newman, its clear that shes excited by the rising tide of progressivism, and the national backlash against Mr Trump. For the time being, however, she is focused on just one man: Mr Lipinski.
There is a movement that is occurring, and its not just a womens movement its the movement to protect and advance rights on every corner, she said. So if I can help support that movement, I am thrilled.
But, she added, My priority is to get this guy out of office.
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Donald Trump has given his explicit backing for Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race because he says he needs Moores vote.
Mr Trump called the Senate candidate, with the White House saying that the two discussed the state of the Alabama Senate race and that the president "endorsed Judge Moore's campaign".
That call followed a morning tweet by the president that Mr Trump tweeted: Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!
Recommended Trump lashes out as Mueller investigation heats up
Mr Trump reinforced that attack on the Democrat candidate Doug Jones in a subsequent tweet: Putting Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders...& so much more. Look at your 401-ks since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back! The tweets refer to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the Democrat leaders in the House and the Senate respectively.
A White House official told Associated Press last week that Mr Trump would not campaign for Mr Moore in person.
Mr Moore has been accused by multiple women of pursuing them when they were teenagers and he was in his thirties. One woman said she was only 14 years old when he initiated sexual contact with her. He has denied the accusations and blamed them on socialists and LGBT people.
At a campaign rally at Magnolia Springs Baptist Church in Alabama last week, Mr Moore boasted he was still leading in the race, despite the fact that they had pulled out all the stops to thwart him.
When I say they, who are they? he asked the congregation. Theyre liberals. They dont hold conservative values. They are the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender who want to change our culture. They are socialists who want to change our way of life and put man above God, and the government is our God.
Shortly after Mr Trump's tweet on Monday morning, Mr Moore responded with his own tweet: Thankful for President Trump's support. The America First agenda will #MAGA. Can't wait to help him #DrainTheSwamp.
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
Mr Trump had previously addressed the accusations against Mr Moore saying, He totally denies it, he said then, telling reporters: You have to listen to him, also.
The President is due to hold a campaign-style rally in Pensacola, Florida, four days before the vote which takes place on 12 December. Pensacola is less than 20 miles over the border from Alabama.
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Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general, has fired back at Donald Trump for his tweets about the FBI.
The US President began lashing out at his critics days after his former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, plead guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
He attacked the FBI and its former director, James Comey, saying in a tweet: "After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness."
He also retweeted a post saying new the FBI Director, Chris Wray, "needs to clean house."
Ms Yates, who was sacked by Mr Trump, tweeted: "The FBI is in 'tatters'? No. The only thing in tatters is the Presidents respect for the rule of law. The dedicated men and women of the FBI deserve better."
Eric Holder, the former Attorney General, also tweeted in response: "Nope. Not letting this go. The FBI's reputation is not in 'tatters'.
"It's composed of the same dedicated men and women who have always worked there and who do a great, apolitical job. You'll find integrity and honesty at FBI headquarters and not at 1600 Penn Ave right now."
Donald Trump insists 'no collusion' after Michael Flynn admits lying to FBI
Mr Trump seized on reports a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent was removed from special prosecutor Robert Mueller's team last summer after the discovery of an exchange of text messages which were viewed as potentially anti-Trump.
The agent, Peter Strzok, had also worked on the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mr Mueller, said he removed Mr Strzok from the team "immediately upon learning of the allegations."
The removal almost certainly reflected a desire to insulate the investigators from any claims of political bias or favouritism.
Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Show all 30 1 /30 Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Threatening to shut down Twitter after being fact-checked After the president tweeted that voting by post would be "substantially fraudulent", Twitter attached a warning label to his tweet and referred readers to a site which explained how the claim was "unsubstantiated". Trump then said Twitter was "stifling free speech" and that he may have to shut it down, something which he would not have the power to do AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Flippantly dismissing a serious allegation of sexual assault When author E Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her, the president responded: Number one, shes not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?" AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Insulting the Mayor of London as he landed in London Just before touching down at Stansted Airport for his state visit, Trump took time out to @ the London mayor Sadiq Khan on twitter. He said that Khan has done a "terrible job"as mayor and that he is a "stone cold loser" Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Taking plenty of "Executive Time" The president's official schedule sets aside the hours from 8 to 11am daily for "Executive Time". Further intermittent periods of "Executive Time" are scheduled throughout any given day, ranging from 15 minutes to 3 hours. His duties in these hours have not been officially disclosed, though Axios reports that he spends them watching TV, reading the newspapers and tweeting Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Shutdown the government for over a month in an effort to secure funding for his wall With Mexico declining to pay for the wall, the president has faced difficulty in raising the required $5bn at home. Due to his demand that the money for the wall be included in the budget, and Congress's refusal, the government partially shut down on 22 December 2018. It remained shut for over a month, the longest period in history Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Joking about the Nazi occupation of France to President Macron In this tweet from 13 November 2018, the president mocks Emmanuel Macron's suggestion of a "true, European army" by invoking the conflict between France and Germany in the world wars Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Railing against the Mueller investigation The president has repeatedly claimed that the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, is a "rigged witch hunt" Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Contradicting a US intelligence report on Russian meddling in the presence of Vladimir Putin In the press conference that followed his landmark meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump stated that he saw no reason why Russia would have meddled in the 2016 US election. This contradicted a 2017 report by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence that found evidence of Russian interference in favour of Trump Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Contradicting his contradiction of a US intelligence report on Russian meddling Following furious backlash in the US, the president claimed that he meant to say that he saw no reason why it would not have been Russia who meddled in the 2016 US election. As to why he would have intended to use such bizarre phrasing, he did not comment Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Colouring in the US flag wrong The president coloured in the US flag wrongly during a visit to a children's hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He added a blue stripe where in tradition, and statute, there have been only white and red stripes AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Firing a Secretary of State over Twitter The president announced on Twitter that he was appointing Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, much to the surprise of then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Quoting a catchphrase from a reality TV show when discussing police brutality While addressing the issue of black athletes not standing for the national anthem in protest of police brutality, the president made reference to his catchphrase from reality TV show "The Apprentice": you're fired! Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Calling African nations "S***hole Countries" Ever one for diplomacy, the president reportedly referred to African nations as "s***hole countries". Asked to confirm this when meeting with Nigeria's President Buhari, Trump stated that there are "some countries that are in very bad shape". Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Defending Russian President Vladimir Putin Trump appeared to equate US foreign actions to those of Russian president Vladimir Putin, saying: There are a lot of killers. You think our countrys so innocent? Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Asking for people to 'pray' for Arnold Schwarzenegger At the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump couldnt help but to ask for prayers for the ratings on Arnold Schwarzeneggers show to be good. Schwarzenegger took over as host of The Apprentice which buoyed Trumps celebrity status years ago Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Hanging up on Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull Early in his presidency, Trump reportedly hung up the phone on Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull after the foreign leader angered him over refugee plans. Mr Trump later said that it was the worst call he had had so far Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... The 'Muslim ban' Perhaps one of his most controversial policies while acting as president, Trumps travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim countries has bought him a lot of criticism. The bans were immediately protested, and judges initially blocked their implementation. The Supreme Court later sided with the administrations argument that the ban was developed out of concern for US security Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Praising crowd size while touring Hurricane Harvey damage After Hurricane Harvey ravaged southeastern Texas, Trump paid the area a visit. While his response to the disaster in Houston was generally applauded, the president picked up some flack when he gave a speech outside Houston (he reportedly did not visit disaster zones), and praised the size of the crowds there AP Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... 'Little Rocket Man' During his first-ever speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump tried out a new nickname for North Korea leader Kim Jong-un: Rocket Man. He later tweaked it to be little Rocket Man as the two feuded, and threatened each other with nuclear war. During that speech, he also threatened to totally annihilate North Korea Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Attacking Sadiq Khan following London Bridge terror attack After the attack on the London Bridge, Trump lashed out at London Mayor Sadiq Khan, criticising Khan for saying there was no reason to be alarmed after the attack. Trump was taking the comments out of context, as Khan was simply saying that the police had everything under control Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming presenter Mika Brezinkski was 'bleeding from the face' Never one not to mock his enemies, Trump mocked MSNBCs Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, saying that she and co-host Joe Scarborough had approached him before his inauguration asking to join him. He noted that she was bleeding badly from a face-lift at the time, and that he said no MSNBC Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming the blame for Charlottesville was on 'both sides' Trump refused to condemn far-right extremists involved in violence at 'the march for the right' protests in Charlottesville, even after the murder of counter protester Heather Heyer AP Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Retweeting cartoon of CNN being hit by a 'Trump train' Trump retweeted a cartoon showing a Trump-branded train running over a person whose body and head were replaced by a CNN avatar. He later deleted the retweet Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Tweeting about 'slamming' CNN Trump caught some flack when he tweeted a video showing him wrestling down an individual whose head had been replaced by a CNN avatar. Trump has singled CNN out in particular with his chants of fake news Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... 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Accusing Obama of wiretapping him Trump accused former president Barack Obama of wire tapping him on twitter. The Justice Department later clarified: Obama had not, in fact, done so Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming there had been 3 million 'illegal votes' Trump was never very happy about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million ballots. So, he and White House voter-fraud commissioner Kris Kobach have claimed that anywhere between three and five million people voted illegally during the 2016 election. Conveniently, he says that all of those illegal votes went to Clinton. (There is no evidence to support that level of widespread voter fraud.) Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... 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On Saturday, Mr Trump tweeted to say he "had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
The tweet suggested the President was aware Mr Flynn had lied to the FBI when the White House dismissed him on 13 February
Mr Comey has said the following day, Mr Trump brought up the investigation into Mr Flynn in private at the White House and told him he hoped he could "let this go."
With questions raised by the tweet, associates of Mr Trump tried to put distance between the President himself and the tweet.
Mr Trump's personal lawyer, John Dowd, told ABC News he drafted the tweet and gave it to the President's social media director, Dan Scavino.
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As President Donald Trump edges toward the controversial decision of recognising Jerusalem as Israels capital, unease is growing in the region over a move that will likely spark waves of protests with Turkey the latest nation to suggest the change would bring catastrophe.
As has become usual for his administration, Mr Trump has so far refused to give a definitive answer about what he will do. As well as the decision over the capital, a decision about whether to sign a six-month waiver for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has been delayed - despite a deadline for doing so having passed. An announcement on the decision would be made "in coming days," the White House said.
Mr Trump is expected to announce that Jerusalem is the Israeli capital during a speech this week, as well as eventually sign the waiver pushing back a decision on moving the embassy. But White House adviser Jared Kushner and National Security Adviser HR McMaster have both made it clear in recent days that that they are unsure about what Mr Trump will do.
That lack of firm direction has stoked tensions in the region. Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said that Jerusalems status has been enshrined in a number of international declarations.
The status of Jerusalem and Temple Mount have been determined by international agreements. It is important to preserve Jerusalems status for the sake of protecting peace in the region, Mr Bozdag told reporters.
If another step is taken and this step is lifted, this will be a major catastrophe, he added.
The diplomatic status of Jerusalem is one of the worlds thorniest issues, and any change could have vast repercussions across the Middle East. The citys holy sites are sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims, with both Israel and the Palestinians claiming it as their capital. The Palestinians want a number of areas of the city as part of any future state.
Israel occupied the area in the 1967 Middle East war and regards the entire city as its indivisible capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem. According to the 1993 Israel-Palestinian peace accord, the citys final status is meant to be discussed in later peace talks.
Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem has never been recognised internationally. But this is expected to change this week with Mr Trumps announcement.
France President Emmanuel Macron expressed "concern" over the potential move to recognise Jerusalem on a call with Mr Trump on Monday,
Meanwhile Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to the US, Prince Khalid bin Salman, said: Any US announcement on the status of Jerusalem prior to a final settlement would have a detrimental impact on the peace process and would heighten tensions in the region.
In a phone call over the weekend, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are said to have discussed the status of Jerusalem.
According to reports, Mr Erdogan told Mr Abbas that preserving the status of Jerusalem was important for all Muslim countries, adding that international laws and United Nations decisions should be followed on the issue.
Over the weekend, Mr Abbas warned that American recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital would jeopardize the White Houses Middle East peace efforts.
Any American step related to the recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel, or moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, represents a threat to the future of the peace process and is unacceptable for the Palestinians, Arabs and internationally, Mr Abbas told a group of Arab legislators from Israel, according to the official Wafa news agency.
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
Any move by the US to recognise Jerusalem as Israels capital would lead to violence, Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said.
We say very clearly that taking such action is not justified ... It will not serve peace or stability, but will fuel extremism and result to violence, Mr Gheit said in a statement.
Jordans Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, said he had raised the matter with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Such a decision would trigger anger across Arab Muslim worlds... and jeopardise peace efforts, he wrote on Twitter.
Jordan has begun consultations on convening an emergency meeting of the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation ahead of the move by Mr Trump
Jordan, the current president of the Arab summit, would invite members of the two bodies to convene if the recognition is extended, to discuss ways of dealing with the consequences of such a decision that raised alarm and concern, one diplomatic source told Reuters.
But while Mr Trump is anticipated to make the move anyway, he will likely hold back on announcing his plans on another controversial issue his campaign promise to transfer the US embassy to Jerusalem.
He is not expected to relocate the US embassy just yet a deferment that has been viewed as an attempt by his administration to avoid completely derailing the Presidents peace initiative in the region.
All countries currently maintain their embassies in Tel Aviv, Israels commercial capital. And each American president since 1995 has signed a national security waiver every six months to keep the US embassy in Tel Aviv.
Mr Trump under pressure from Arab leaders also deferred a decision to move it to Jerusalem, even though he said during the campaign that it would be one of his first acts as president.
That action came as leaders warned that the change would spark protests, and advisers including his son-in-law Jared Kushner were reported to be concerned that it could complicate the administrations efforts to foster peace talks.
Mr Kushner is now said to be counting on his relationship with Saudi Arabias Crown Prince, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to be the key to brokering a Middle East peace agreement. Mr Trumps son-in-law also hopes this connection could mitigate any Arab uprising that could result from the Presidents upcoming announcements.
Mr Tillerson who would normally be the official figuring out the USs Middle East strategy reportedly disagrees with Mr Kushners approach. Mr Tillerson is said to be worried that Prince Mohammed is attempting to use Saudi Arabias cooperation and economic support for the peace process as a way to receive funding from the White House to confront Iran, according to US media reports.
The president is going to make his decision, Mr Kushner said of the Israel decision, in a rare public appearance at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank on Sunday. He is still looking at a lot of different facts.
Im not sure what decision hell make. Weve given him options, Mr McMaster told Fox News. He added that the Presidents advisers have discussed a number of options, and that each of these options will allow the United States to take action concerning Jerusalem in a manner that would gain momentum toward a peace agreement and solution that works both for Israelis and for Palestinians.
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Crew members aboard a passenger jet have claimed they saw a North Korean ballistic missile re-entering Earths atmosphere during the repressive states latest test firing.
Staff on a Cathay Pacific flight said they observed what is suspected to be the re-entry of the projectile over Japan last Wednesday.
The Hong Kong carrier said the flight was far from the event location, however, and it was not planning to change its routes.
Recommended US seeking new missile defence sites as North Korea nuclear fears grow
In a statement to The Independent, it added: We have been in contact with relevant authorities and industry bodies as well as with other carriers.
At the moment, no one is changing any routes or operating parameters.
We remain alert and review the situation as it evolves.
Pyongyang was believed to have tested a new, more advanced intercontinental ballistic missile in last weeks launch, the Hwasong-15.
North Korea announces test of new long-range missile
Its lofted trajectory took it up to 2,800 miles into space, 10 times further from Earth than the International Space Station.
Following the launch, South Korea and the United States launched large-scale joint aerial drills on Monday.
The annual Vigilant Ace exercise will run all week and will include F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters.
It has been condemned as provocative by the North, which views such drills as practice for war.
North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Show all 13 1 /13 North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Pyongyang residents react after the news of the successful launch of the new intercontinental ballistic missile AFP/Getty Images North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un signing an order to test-fire the newly developed inter-continental ballistic missile KRT via AP Video North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch A news broadcast displays Kim Jong Un's signed document AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch People cheer as they watch the news broadcast announcing Kim Jong Un's order to test-fire the new inter-continental ballistic missile AFP/Getty Images North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Residents react after the document signing AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Pyongyang residents celebrate Kim Jong Un's announcement AFP/Getty North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Cheering Pyongyang residents react AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch To counter North Korea's missile test, South Korea fired missiles into the East Sea The Defence Ministry/Yonhap via REUTERS North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The Hyunmu-2 missiles firing during the drill South Korean Defense Ministry vi North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The exercise was carried out in an attempt to counter Kim Jong Un's order South Korea Defense Ministry via AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The South Korean army continue to carry out military exercises AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Where K-9 self-propelled howitzers were taking part in a drill Rex Features North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch US soldiers are also present in the border city of Paju AFP/Getty Images
The reported sighting of the Hwasong re-entry vehicle by staff on board flight CX893 from San Francisco to Hong Kong would not be the first observation of a space launch from a commercial airliner.
Last year Ryan Kennedy tweeted an image of a rocket launch while flying over Florida, and in 2011 Stefanie Gordon captured the Space Shuttle Endeavour streaking above the clouds on its way to orbit.
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Two doctors have been fired and a police investigation launched after a baby who was declared dead at a New Delhi hospital woke up on the way to his own funeral.
The baby boy and his twin sister were born prematurely at just 22 weeks, according to local media and NDTV, with the girl stillborn and the boy in critical condition.
Doctors at Max hospital declared the boy dead soon after and he was returned to the family wrapped like a courier package from the back door, according to NDTV.
Some six hours later and on the way to perform funeral rites, however, the parents reportedly noticed movement inside the polythene bag and discovered he was breathing.
When we opened the bag, we found the boy breathing. I was shocked. I couldnt believe my eyes, the babys grandfather, Praveen Malik, told CNN.
The family then rushed the baby to another hospital where, according to Indian TV, they were told it would cost 100,000 rupees (1,150) for three days treatment in an intensive care unit.
He is on life support, the boys uncle Deepak told The Hindu. The doctors at the [new hospital] told us that the boy has several infections because he was exposed to the environment and had been wrapped in plastic. They havent told us whether hell survive.
The incident at one of the capitals most upmarket hospitals has provoked a national debate about the state of Indian private healthcare, which can be prohibitively expensive.
Following the news of the incident, state health minister Satyendar Jain said on Twitter he had ordered an inquiry, and Indias federal health minister JP Nadda called it heartbreaking.
The two doctors who were fired may also be subject to police charges. Their dismissal was strict action... taken on the basis of our initial discussions with experts, a statement from Max hospital read.
While the inquiry by the expert group which includes external experts from Indian Medical Association (IMA) is still in process, we have decided to terminate the services of the two treating doctors.
The hospital said the IMA investigation was expected to be concluded on Tuesday. If the states own probe finds the hospital guilty of medical negligence, it could have its licence revoked.
There have been a number of reports in recent months of alleged negligence in Indian hospitals. According to the BBC, last month a girl died of dengue fever at another private hospital, with the parents alleging that they were overcharged for her treatment.
And in August, more than 60 children died at a hospital in Gorakhpur after the facilitys oxygen supply ran out amid a financial dispute with suppliers.
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A motorcyclist had a miraculous recovery after he fell off his bike and was impaled on a metal rod - through his neck and mouth.
The rider, named only as Suresh, 35, was trying to avoid a head on collision with an oncoming three-wheeler, when he lost control of his bike and veered off the road.
He rammed his bike into a pile of construction materials and got impaled by the rod which pierced through the back of his neck - and emerged through his mouth.
Unsurprisingly he immediately passed out - but thankfully he was discovered by passing motorists who took him to hospital.
Miraculously surgeons removed the rod - and Suresh, who works as a farmer, is now recovering at home in Andhra Pradesh's East Godavari district in India.
He said: "After the accident, I fell unconscious and had no idea how I landed in the hospital.
Suresh was found by passers-by on the roadside SWNS (SWNS)
"My relatives told me that some good samaritans brought me to the hospital. I want to thank them for saving my life.
"Doctors told me that I was brought in within the golden hour and that's why they could save my life."
Surgeons were able to remove the rod from his neck and mouth (SWNS)
The accident took place on 18 November on National Highway 216 and passers-by rushed him to the state-run Kakinada Hospital, 20 miles away.
The materials which he fell on were made to expand roads (SWNS)
A police spokesperson said: "Suresh was trying to avoid hitting an auto-rickshaw. He fell on a pile of iron rods lying by the National Highway 216.
"The construction materials were meant to be used to widen roads.
South West News Service
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North Korean defectors have claimed they are suffering from the effects of exposure to radiation during time spent living near the countrys nuclear test sites.
Lee Jeong-hwa said she had tried to flee North Korea for seven years until finally succeeding in 2010.
During those years Kim Jong-il detonated two nuclear devices at the Punggye-ri test site, which sits within Ms Lees home county of Kilju.
So many people died we began calling it ghost disease', she told NBC News. We thought we were dying because we were poor and we ate badly. Now we know it was the radiation.
However, speaking in South Korea, Ms Lee told the broadcaster she had undergone radiation tests that had come back negative.
And Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a scientist at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in California, told NBC that radiation leaks would have been detected by sensors in the region.
The claims of defectors are notoriously difficult to verify due to the repressive nature of the North Korean regime and the potential propaganda value of their life stories.
Earlier this month, defectors from Kilju made similar claims in interviews with South Korean media.
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US Senator Lindsey Graham has said that he believes it's time to start moving the families of American military personnel out of South Korea as North Korea pushes the US closer to a military conflict.
Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he will also urge the Pentagon not to send any more dependents to South Korea.
It's crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea. South Korea should be an unaccompanied tour, the South Carolina Republican said on CBS's Face the Nation. ''So, I want them to stop sending dependents, and I think it's now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea.
Recommended US and South Korea embark on massive aerial drills over peninsula
About 28,500 US troops are stationed in South Korea to deter potential aggression from the North.
Last week, North Korea shattered two months of relative quiet by firing off an intercontinental ballistic missile that some observers say showed the reclusive country's ability to strike the US East Coast. It was North Korea's most powerful weapons test yet.
The launch was a message of defiance to President Donald Trump's administration, which a week earlier had restored North Korea to a US list of terror sponsors. It also hurt nascent diplomatic efforts and raised fears of a pre-emptive U.S. strike. Threats traded by Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have further stoked fears of war.
Graham expressed confidence in the Trump administration's ability to manage the growing conflict with North Korea.
He's got the best national security team of anybody I have seen since I have been in Washington, said Graham, who has served in Congress since 1995.
The Trump administration has vowed to deny North Korea the capability of striking the US homeland with a nuclear-tipped missile.
Denial means pre-emptive war as a last resort. The pre-emption is becoming more likely as their technology matures, Graham told CBS. I think we're really running out of time. The Chinese are trying, but ineffectively. If there's an underground nuclear test, then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States.
North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Show all 13 1 /13 North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Pyongyang residents react after the news of the successful launch of the new intercontinental ballistic missile AFP/Getty Images North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un signing an order to test-fire the newly developed inter-continental ballistic missile KRT via AP Video North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch A news broadcast displays Kim Jong Un's signed document AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch People cheer as they watch the news broadcast announcing Kim Jong Un's order to test-fire the new inter-continental ballistic missile AFP/Getty Images North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Residents react after the document signing AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Pyongyang residents celebrate Kim Jong Un's announcement AFP/Getty North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Cheering Pyongyang residents react AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch To counter North Korea's missile test, South Korea fired missiles into the East Sea The Defence Ministry/Yonhap via REUTERS North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The Hyunmu-2 missiles firing during the drill South Korean Defense Ministry vi North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The exercise was carried out in an attempt to counter Kim Jong Un's order South Korea Defense Ministry via AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The South Korean army continue to carry out military exercises AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Where K-9 self-propelled howitzers were taking part in a drill Rex Features North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch US soldiers are also present in the border city of Paju AFP/Getty Images
Trump has said he spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping about Pyongyang's provocative actions, and he vowed that additional major sanctions will be imposed on North Korea. China is North Korea's only significant ally, but it has grown increasingly frustrated over the North's nuclear and missile tests that have brought a threat of war and chaos to China's northeastern border.
AP
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North Korea's latest intercontinental ballistic missile, which it said could reach the "whole mainland" of the United States, broke up as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, a US official has said.
South Korea's military believes the Hwasong-15 missile, which flew 950km (600 miles) before splashing down in waters near Japan, is potentially capable of striking targets as far as 13,000km (8,100 miles), which would put Washington within reach.
But a US official told CNN "the North Koreans had problems with re-entry."
While North Korea's latest missile test puts Washington within range, Pyongyang still needs to prove it has mastered critical missile technology, such as re-entry, terminal stage guidance and warhead activation, South Korea said last week.
After North Korea released video footage and photographs of Hwasong-15, US based experts said it appeared North Korea was indeed capable of delivering a nuclear weapon anywhere in the US and could only be two or three tests away from being combat ready.
Yeo Suk-joo, South Korea's deputy minister of defence policy, told the South Korean parliament North Korea still needed to prove some technologies, like re-entry, terminal stage guidance and warhead activation.
North Korea announces test of new long-range missile
Mr Yeo said the first stage engine of the missile featured a clustering of two engines from a smaller Hwasong-14 ICBM test-launched in July.
North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Show all 13 1 /13 North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Pyongyang residents react after the news of the successful launch of the new intercontinental ballistic missile AFP/Getty Images North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un signing an order to test-fire the newly developed inter-continental ballistic missile KRT via AP Video North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch A news broadcast displays Kim Jong Un's signed document AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch People cheer as they watch the news broadcast announcing Kim Jong Un's order to test-fire the new inter-continental ballistic missile AFP/Getty Images North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Residents react after the document signing AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Pyongyang residents celebrate Kim Jong Un's announcement AFP/Getty North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Cheering Pyongyang residents react AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch To counter North Korea's missile test, South Korea fired missiles into the East Sea The Defence Ministry/Yonhap via REUTERS North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The Hyunmu-2 missiles firing during the drill South Korean Defense Ministry vi North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The exercise was carried out in an attempt to counter Kim Jong Un's order South Korea Defense Ministry via AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The South Korean army continue to carry out military exercises AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Where K-9 self-propelled howitzers were taking part in a drill Rex Features North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch US soldiers are also present in the border city of Paju AFP/Getty Images
South Korea's Defence Minister, Song Young-moo, told parliament he expected North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to use his New Year's Address to declare North Korea had completed its weapons programme.
The dictator visited a factory which built the tires for a huge vehicle used to transport the new intercontinental ballistic missile to thank its workers.
At the factory, Kim complimented workers for manufacturing the large-size tires for the 9-axle missile truck without relying on imported equipment and called for efforts to raise production to "satisfy the daily-increasing needs in developing the country's economy and beefing up national defence capabilities," the North's official Korean Central News Agency said Saturday.
In September Kim tasked the Amnokgang Tire Factory to make the tires for the "great event in November," the agency reported.
Additional reporting by agencies
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He was a member of the Rohingya student union in college, taught at a public high school and even won a parliamentary seat in Burma's thwarted elections in 1990.
But according to the government of Burma, Kyaw Mins fellow Rohingya do not exist.
A long-persecuted Muslim minority concentrated in Burma's Rakhine state, the Rohingya have been deemed dangerous interlopers from neighbouring Bangladesh. Today, they are mostly stateless, their very identity denied by Buddhist-majority Burma.
There is no such thing as Rohingya, said Kyaw San Hla, an officer in Rakhines state security ministry. It is fake news.
Such denials bewilder Kyaw Min. He has lived in Burma all of his 72 years, and the history of the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group in Burma stretches back for generations before.
Now, human rights watchdogs warn that much of the evidence of the Rohingyas history in Burma is in danger of being eradicated by a military campaign the United States has called ethnic cleansing.
Since late August, more than 620,000 Rohingya Muslims, about two-thirds of the population that lived in Burma in 2016, have fled to Bangladesh, driven out by the militarys campaign of massacre, rape and arson in Rakhine.
In a report released in October, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said Burma's security forces had worked to effectively erase all signs of memorable landmarks in the geography of the Rohingya landscape and memory in such a way that a return to their lands would yield nothing but a desolate and unrecognisable terrain.
The UN report also said the crackdown in Rakhine had targeted teachers, the cultural and religious leadership, and other people of influence in the Rohingya community in an effort to diminish Rohingya history, culture and knowledge.
We are people with our own history and traditions, said Kyaw Hla Aung, a Rohingya lawyer and former political prisoner.
How can they pretend we are nothing? he asked.
Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Show all 10 1 /10 Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Rohingya refugee Mohamed Jabair, 21, reveals the burns on his bod, which he said he sustained when his house was set on fire in Myanmar REUTERS/Jorge Silva Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Refugee Momtaz Begum, 30, at Balukhali refugee camp. Begum told how soldiers came to her village demanding valuables.After beating her, they locked her inside her house and set the roof on fire. She escaped to find her three sons dead and her daughter beaten and bleeding REUTERS/Jorge Silva Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Imam Hossain, 42, sleeps at Kutupalang refugee camp, near Cox's Bazar. Hossain said he was returning home after teaching at a madrassa in his village when three men attacked him with knives REUTERS/Jorge Silva Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Rohingya refugee Setara Begum, 12, at Nayapara refugee camp. The home of Begum and her siblings was hit by a rocket. The young girl received no treatment for the severe burns to her feet. Her feet healed but she has no toes. Her mother said: 'She has been mute from that day, and doesn't speak to anyone. She only cries silently' REUTERS/Jorge Silva Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Mohamed Heron, 6, and his brother Mohamed Akter, 4, show the burns on their bodies at Kutupalong refugee camp. The boys' uncle said the burns resulted from Myanmar's armed forces firing rockets at their village Reuters Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Kalabarow, 50, at Leda refugee camp, in Bangladesh. Kalabarow said her husband, daughter and son were killed when soldiers fired on her village in Maungdaw. She was hit and lay on the floor pretending to be dead for several hours before a grandson found her. During their journey to Bangladesh, a village doctor amputated her REUTERS/Jorge Silva Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Ansar Allah, 11, at Leda refugee camp in Bangladesh. Allah showed a large scar the result of a gunshot wound. His mother Samara said: 'They sprayed us with bullets, as our house was burning' REUTERS/Jorge Silva Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Anwara Begum, 36, at Kutupalang refugee camp, near Cox's Bazar. Begum said she woke to find her home in Maungdaw township in flames REUTERS/Jorge Silva Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Abdu Rahaman, 73, at Leda refugee camp in Bangladesh. Rahaman, a merchant from Maungdaw, was ambushed while walking on a mountain path with other refugees. A machete thrown at his feet severed three toes REUTERS/Jorge Silva Bullets and burns: injured Rohingya refugees Nur Kamal, 17, described how soldiers assaulted him after they found him hiding in his home in Maungdaw. His uncle found him unconscious in a pool of blood. It took them two weeks to get to Bangladesh. Kamal said: 'We want the international community to help us obtain justice' REUTERS
Five years ago, Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine, was a mixed city, divided between an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist majority and the Rohingya Muslim minority.
But since sectarian riots in 2012, the city has been mostly cleared of Muslims. Across central Rakhine, about 120,000 Rohingya, even those who had citizenship, have been interned in camps, stripped of their livelihoods and prevented from accessing proper schools or health care.
The New York Times
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Catalonia's removed Vice President has been refused bail following a hearing by a Spanish judge.
Oriol Junqueras was ordered to be kept in jail following charges of sedition, but six other former Catalan ministers were freed on bail by the court.
Along with Mr Junqueras, deposed Catalan interior minister Joaquim Forn and the leads of two civic groups ANC and Omnium Cultural, were also kept in prison.
Spanish authorities levels charges of rebellion, sedition, and the misuse of public funds against ministers of the Catalan government after they called an independence referendum on 1 October.
The referendum was declared illegal by Spain's constitutional court in Madrid and national police used force to try and stop it, including the confiscation of ballot boxes and documented physical attacks on people going to vote and protesting. The Madrid central government then removed Catalonia's regional autonomy, imposed direct rule, and called new elections.
Mr Junqueras will now have to campaign ahead of those elections, called for 21 December, from a jail near Madrid.
The judge set 100,000 bail for the six other Catalan politicians who had been jailed in early November, and ordered their passports to be confiscated.
The six were expected to leave jails near Madrid later in the day.
World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty
Meanwhile, Catalan ex-president Carles Puigdemont and four of his separatist allies heard that they will be judged on whether they can be extradited from Belgium to Spain on 14 December, exactly one week before the election.
The group is refusing to return to Spain to face rebellion, sedition and embezzlement charges that can be punished with decades in prison under the country's criminal laws.
Mr Puigdemont's defence lawyer, Paul Bekaert, insisted that the Spanish charges were not punishable in Belgium and thus there were no grounds for extradition.
"We also highlighted the danger for the impediment of their human rights in Spain," he said.
Whatever decision is made on 14 December, two appeals will be possible and a final ruling will likely come after the election called by Spain's central authorities, in which Mr Puigdemont is leading his pro-independence party's campaign.
Additional reporting by agencies
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Maltese police have arrested 10 suspects in the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has announced, almost two months after her car was blown up in an apparently targeted assassination.
All of those arrested are Maltese nationals and most have a criminal record, the Prime Minister said at a press conference on Monday morning. The police have 48 hours to question the suspects, arraign them or release them.
Eight of the arrests arrests were initially announced by the Prime Minister at the press conference, with a further two coming shortly afterwards.
As I stated as soon as I learnt about this barbaric act, we will leave no stone unturned to get this case solved. I am committed to doing so more than ever, the Prime Minister said.
Home minister Michael Farrugia confirmed the nationalities of the latter two arrests but said he would not go into any more detail because, he said, I have been already threatened by legal action by the Caruana Galizia family.
53-year-old Caruana Galizia was murdered on 16 October. Her popular blog had relentlessly highlighted cases of alleged high-level corruption targeting politicians from across party lines, including around the Panama Papers tax scandal.
Her killing has sparked protests on the island, with thousands marching against what some called the Mafia state.
The sons of murdered journalist carry their mothers coffin out of the church in Mosta (Getty)
Her family made it known that they did not want the countrys Prime Minister or President targets of her journalism to attend her funeral.
And they alleged that the minister, Mr Farrugia, had divulged confidential information that could hamper the investigation into her death. The minister has dismissed the allegation.
The spate of arrests comes just days after a European Parliament delegation from Brussels visited the island EU member state and warned that rule of law was failing there, with authorities showing a high degree of unwillingness to investigate.
They are the first known breakthrough in a Maltese police operation coordinated between the Police Corps, the Armed Forces of Malta and the Security Services. Europol, the EUs police agency, has also sent a team of organised crime experts to help Maltese police investigate the assassination, joining the FBI and Dutch forensic experts.
A court hearing was set for Tuesday, at which point police can officially file charges and the suspects asked for a plea.
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
Last week, a cross-party delegation of MEPs travelled to Malta to assess whether the countrys law enforcement system had been compromised. The European Parliament had previously backed a motion expressing concern about the countrys legal and justice system.
Green MEP Sven Giegold said the group had came away from the meetings even more concerned over the rule of law now than before the visit, and we must follow up on what we found.
But the delegation was criticised by the Maltese Prime Minister, who said it chose to meet with a disproportionate number of government critics and that its conclusions were misguided.
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The German government is considering legal changes that would oblige operators of car and house alarm systems to help police and security services in their efforts to spy on potential terrorists or criminals, a spokesman for the interior ministry said.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, a conservative, plans to discuss the issue with officials in a bid to remove what he sees as hurdles to better surveillance, the spokesman said.
But those plans have already sparked criticism from the Social Democrats (SPD), who are partners in the current German caretaker government and are under pressure to renew the grand coalition that has ruled Germany for the past four years.
Surveillance is a sensitive issue in Germany given its legacy of spying by East Germanys Stasi secret police and the Nazi era Gestapo.
Boris Pistorius, an SPD member and interior minister of the state of Lower Saxony, said Mr de Maizieres plans were premature and panicked, and called for a more measured approach.
2017 is not Orwells 1984, he told the Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung in an interview. We need sound judgment and not exaggeration.
In the past, security officials have run into difficulty installing secret listening devices in cars and apartments because individuals were tipped off by security systems in electronic gadgets connected to the internet, or received text messages when their cars were opened.
Officials were now exploring legal changes that would require alarm system operators to provide law enforcement with specific tools that would enable them to secretly open and circumvent alarm systems in cases involving suspected terrorist activity or organised crime, the spokesman said.
He said authorities were not seeking access to suspects computers, smart phones or other electronic devices.
Reuters
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Anu Partanen left her home country of Finland seven years ago, and she'd like to set one thing straight.
Contrary to the popular belief that Nordic countries make the list of happiest countries year after year because they are unified utopias where everyone looks out for each other, the truth is that northern Europeans are just as selfish as Americans.
In fact, maybe even more so.
Partanen recently explained this misconception in a piece for The Atlantic entitled What Americans Don't Get About Nordic Countries.
The central argument is this: All the socialized programs that make Nordic countries different from the US - centralised health care, free higher education, mandatory paid parental leave - are done to help people individually, not collectively, as many Americans assume.
Nordic nations offer their citizens - all of their citizens, but especially the middle class - high-quality services that save people a lot of money, time, and trouble, Partanen writes. This is what Americans fail to understand: My taxes in Finland were used to pay for top-notch services for me.
Partanen goes on to say that this view isn't a niche opinion; it's the prevailing mindset. Nordic citizens may pay higher tax rates so there's a larger pot of money to give out to everyone, but that doesn't mean people necessarily care that others are getting off easier.
For Partanen, the important thing is that she benefits from the system.
Nordics are not only just as selfish as everyone else on this earth but they can - and do - dislike many of their fellow citizens just as much as people with different political views dislike each other in other countries, she writes.
The happy byproduct of this, which Partanen doesn't address in her piece, is that Nordic citizens feel more secure, which means there is less crime. That breeds more trust between ordinary people and between those people and their government, which helps legitimize the system.
Not so in the US.
Gummi Oddsson, an Icelandic sociologist from Michigan State University, says that a lack of trust is ultimately what produces the kind of gun violence epidemic that's taking place in the US, but has failed to reach northern Europe. Instead, people in Nordic countries have their basic needs met, which means they aren't forced to resort to illegal strategies, like theft and drug-dealing, to get by.
And that's important, because even if Americans understand that social welfare programs work without them having to give up being selfish, the reality is still bleak. Massive change still needs to come from the top to convince people the government won't mismanage the extra money it'll take in taxes.
But Partanen's argument is a good start for changing American opinions of the Nordic model.
It's a lot easier to consider a new way of living if you don't have to give up caring about your own needs.
Elon Musk doesn't have a desk at the office and has slept on the floor
19 highly successful people who changed careers after age 30
26 European cities where you can live on less than 600 a month
Read the original article on Business Insider UK. 2016. Follow Business Insider UK on Twitter.
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An Egyptian lawyer has been sentenced to three years in prison for declaring women who wear ripped jeans should be raped as a national duty.
Nabih al-Wahsh, a prominent conservative who has previously stoked controversy, was also fined 20,000 Egyptian pounds (839).
The lawyer sparked outrage for making the controversial comments during a TV panel show discussion in October debating a draft law on prostitution.
"Are you happy when you see a girl walking down the street with half of her behind showing?" he said on Al-Assema.
He added: I say that when a girl walks about like that, it is a patriotic duty to sexually harass her and a national duty to rape her.
Mr al-Wahsh said women who wore revealing clothing were "inviting men to harass them" and said "protecting morals is more important than protecting borders".
The lawyers remarks sparked fury across the country and Egypts National Council for Women announced it would be filing a complaint against the TV channel. It issued a plea for media outlets to refrain from providing a platform for individuals who make incendiary comments that incite violence against women.
The National Council said the remarks were a "flagrant call" for rape and in violation of "everything in the Egyptian constitution". Maya Morsi, head of the council, argued his remarks constituted an actual violation of the Egyptian constitution that makes explicit efforts to safeguard womens rights.
World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty
The prosecutor brought charges against Mr al-Wahsh in the wake of the public uproar.
The council has now filed a complaint about the statement to the Supreme Council for Media Regulation about the broadcast which was shown on 19 October.
In October, the Egyptian capital of Cairo was branded the most dangerous megacity for women in the first international poll which looked at how women fare in cities with over ten million people. Women's rights campaigners in the city say this is the result of deeply entrenched centuries-old traditions of discrimination there and women having limited access to good healthcare, education, and finance.
A 2008 study found that 83 per cent of Egyptian women said they had been sexually harassed and 53 per cent of men blamed women for bringing it on themselves.
Mr al-Wahsh has previously prompted controversy for branding the Holocaust "imaginary" and labelling himself a proud anti-Semite.
Recommended Egypt launches largest LGBT crackdown in more than a decade
"If I see any Israeli, I will kill him," he said during a separate TV panel show.
Mr al-Wahsh made headlines in October last year after his debate with a liberal cleric descended into chaos and chairs and shoes flew around the TV studio.
The fiercely heated discussion spiralled out of control after Sheikh Rashad, who is famed for his permissive interpretation of Islam, argued women should not necessarily be required to cover their hair with a headscarf.
Mr al-Wahsh has previously stated his opposition to women serving as judges. He argued if women become judges they could also become muftis, a Muslim legal expert who has the power to give rulings on religious issues, and would issue fatwas - a ruling on a point of Islamic law given by a recognised authority - while they are on their periods.
He said: If we let a woman become a judge, why shouldn't she become Sheik of Al-Azhar? Why shouldn't she become the Mufti? Why don't we all just go to Hell?! Will she issue me a fatwa while she is menstruating?!
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Israel is about to commit a war crime and leave 50 Palestinian children homeless in freezing winter conditions by demolishing a large chunk of their West Bank village, it has been claimed.
The Village Council of Susiya in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has now written an open letter pleading for the international community to exert pressure to stop the demolition, which is now thought to be just days away.
The villagers say the demolition of 20 buildings, one fifth of the village, will violate the fundamental human rights of 100 people, half of them children, and leave them exposed to freezing rain and harsh winds.
Claiming the plan to demolish Susiya is part of a wider extensive campaign of [Israeli] demolitions in the West Bank, the villagers letter concludes: The Israeli government has repeatedly violated its obligations to us as protected persons living under occupation.
It will be a war crime if the Israeli government forcefully displaces our village.
The Israeli authorities have long viewed Susiya as an illegal encampment but the demolition order, announced by the Israeli State Attorneys Office on 22 November, has also been condemned by a group of US Senators including Bernie Sanders, and by EU diplomats.
On 24 November the EU Representative and the EU Heads of Mission in Jerusalem and Ramallah issued a joint statement citing Israels humanitarian legal obligations as an occupying power and demanding the demolition be halted.
Declaring themselves deeply concerned about the Susiya demolition plan, the diplomats said: The EU calls upon the Israeli authorities to halt demolitions of Palestinian houses and property, in accordance with its obligations as an occupying power under international humanitarian law, and to cease the policy of settlement construction and expansion, of designating land for exclusive Israeli use and of denying Palestinian development.
Susiya is located in the South Hebron Hills within Area C of the West Bank, where all civil and security affairs are run by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) through its Civil Administration, as set out in the 1993 Oslo peace accords.
It has been a source of growing tension since 1986 when the site of the original village was declared a national park because of its archaeological heritage, which included an ancient synagogue that was later converted into a mosque.
Supporters of the villagers say at that point they were expelled from their original homes and took to living on their adjacent agricultural lands.
Throughout the Nineties, the IDF carried out small-scale demolitions of homes at the new site of Susiya, claiming they had been built illegally.
In July 2001, according to The Times of Israel, the entire village was destroyed a day after the murder of Yair Har Sinai, a shepherd from the nearby Jewish settlement, which is also called Susiya.
The Palestinians later rebuilt. The villagers submitted a development plan for Susiya in 2012, but in October 2013 this was rejected by the Civil Administrations Subcommittee for Planning and Licensing.
The committee was said to have ruled that the rural residences built by the Palestinians did not provide them with proper chances for social advancement, job opportunities or educational empowerment. The committee also argued that the Palestinian Authority and the nearby town of Yatta were unable to provide proper educational, welfare and health services to Susiya.
It allegedly claimed the plan submitted by the villagers would keep Susiyas 350-strong population in poverty and ignorance, and suggested that they integrate into the urban fabric of Yatta instead.
Susiya residents claim they have been left no choice but to remain on our land living in tents, under very difficult conditions, forbidden from building or repairing anything (Dina Rickman) (Dina Durnan)
The ruling was condemned by the organisation Rabbis for Human Rights as especially cynical considering the regime authorities placed obstacles in the way of building a school [and] left it for decades without infrastructure for electricity, water, sewage, and roads.
In their letter, the villagers say the 2013 rejection of their plan left them no choice but to remain on our land living in tents, under very difficult conditions, forbidden from building or repairing anything, in order to protect our land from the threat of annexation by the surrounding [Jewish] settlements.
Then in 2014 Regavim, which calls itself a legal advocacy NGO but is characterised by opponents as a right-wing pro-Jewish settler group, began lobbying the Israeli High Court to demolish Susiya.
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. 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Regavim argued that Susiya was an illegal Palestinian outpost and referred to its residents as squatters with an agenda intended to obliterate the fact that an ancient Jewish community, including a magnificent ancient synagogue, thrived in this area before Islam even existed.
The group argued that the idea of an ancient Arab village called Susiya was an invention, citing Israels High Court rulings that found such assertions were demonstrably false, based on comprehensive objective historical and geographical accounts.
Regavim director Ari Briggs asserted that in the past the area occupied by the squatters had just been temporary grazing land used by Arab shepherds for between two weeks and a month every year.
As Regavim appeared to have won a decision in favour of demolition in 2015, it was backed by Israels deputy defence minister Eli Ben Dahan, of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party.
He told the Knesset: There has never been an Arab village called Susiya, adding that claims of its historical existence were a ploy by leftist organisations to take over Area C [of the West Bank].
Four days later, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the villagers had in their possession an authentic land-ownership document dating back to 1881.
The demolition plans were condemned by the US State Department of President Barack Obama, and by EU diplomats including Alistair McPhail, Britains consul general in Jerusalem.
The situation appeared to have become so sensitive that the demolition was repeatedly postponed.
Now, however, the demolition of Susiya appears imminent, at a time when many commentators think the Israeli government has been emboldened by a Trump administration seeming far more reluctant than Obamas to criticise Israel.
The villagers letter states On 22 November 2017 the Israeli State Attorneys Office announced that within 15 days they plan to demolish 20 buildings, [that] are our homes and also provide shelter for our animals.
The timing of the demolition in the middle of winter could not be more devastating. It will leave us vulnerable and exposed to freezing rain and harsh winds.
Our health clinic which provides health services for around 500 people from our own and surrounding communities, is among the buildings they plan to demolish. The Israeli authorities also want to demolish our village council which provides services for 350 local residents.
So far 30 British politicians including MPs and members of the Scottish Parliament have signalled their support for the villagers, along with dozens of academics and activists.
In the November 29 letter initiated by US Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein and Bernie Sanders, a total of 10 US senators, four of them Jewish, told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: We urge your government not to demolish the Palestinian village of Susiya and the Bedouin community of Khan al-Ahmar.
The displacement of entire communities would be an irreversible step away from a two-state solution, and we urge your government to abandon its efforts to destroy these villages.
Instead of forcibly evicting these communities, we encourage your government to fairly re-evaluate Susiyas professionally developed master plan.
Your governments threats to demolish these communities are particularly distressing in light of the Israeli Civil Administrations efforts to dramatically expand settlements throughout the West Bank.
Israeli Embassy spokespeople were not immediately available for comment.
Israel has always stressed its claim to be the only democracy in the Middle East and fiercely denied claims that it has ever been guilty of war crimes.
A spokesman for Mr Netanyahu has previously stated Israel is a country with a fiercely independent judiciary Everything done by the military in Israel is open to judicial review by the independent judiciary.
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Antonio Guterres, the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General has called for an immediate ceasefire in Yemen and the resumption of all commercial imports to combat the growing humanitarian crisis in the country.
The warring parties to stop all ground and air assaults because millions of children, women and men risk mass hunger, disease and death, he said.
It comes after five days of street fighting in the capital Sanaa between the forces of Yemen's former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the Iran-backed Shia rebels known as Houthis.
The two sides originally joined together three years ago and swept across Sanaa, forcing the country's internationally recognised president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, to flee the country and seek military intervention led by Saudi Arabia.
The oil rich Middle Eastern kingdom and a coalition of other powers then began a brutal aerial bombing campaign which the UN estimates to have killed more than 10,000 people and displaced more than three million.
The number of people killed in a cholera outbreak alone reached over 2,000 in September, according to Oxfam.
After months of political and military stalemate, the street battles have marked a turning point in the conflict.
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
Clashes between fighters loyal to Mr Saleh and the Houthis first erupted last week when he accused the rebels of storming his giant mosque in Sanaa and attacking his nephew, the powerful commander of the special forces, Tarek Saleh.
Both sides have set up checkpoints, placed snipers on rooftops and sealed off entrances to the city. Bombings and sporadic gunfire rocked the southern part of Sanaa over the weekend, when Houthi militants stormed Mr Saleh's Yemen Today TV network, beat up its director, and held over 40 journalists and crew members inside the building, Yemen's Press Syndicate said.
Many state institutions including the airport, state TV headquarters and the official news agency remained under the control of the Houthis, despite earlier reports that Mr Saleh's forces had taken them over.
In Mehwat, a province in northern Yemen, sporadic fighting also broke out between Mr Saleh's supporters and the Houthis, while heavy fighting rocked the western district of Gidr in Sanaa province, where tribesmen took over military camps briefly before surrendering them to the Houthis.
Medical officials in Sanaa said nearly 75 people from both sides were killed and wounded in clashes there. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to brief media, did not provide a breakdown of the casualties.
Meanwhile, Mr Hadi, who is in Saudi Arabia in self-imposed exile, appeared to extend an offer of reconciliation to Mr Saleh.
In a statement from the country's capital Riyadh, Mr Hadi said his side would support "any party confronting Houthi terrorist gangs."
Additional reporting by agencies
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The radio station of Yemen's Houthi-run interior ministry said on Monday the militia's former war ally turned adversary, ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, had been killed as fighting racked the capital Sanaa though there was no independent confirmation.
Unverified footage circulated by Yemeni social media users appeared to a show corpse resembling Saleh. Armed militiamen unfurled a blanket containing the corpse and shouted, "praised God!" and "hey Ali Affash!", another last name for Saleh.
The radio station said the official Houthi TV station would soon broadcast footage of Saleh's dead body.
Saleh's party denied to Reuters that their leader had been killed and said he was still leading forces in heavy fighting in Sanaa that has killed at least 125 people and wounded 238 in six days, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Houthi fighters ride a vehicle amid clashes between the Houthis and forces loyal to Yemen's ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, in Sanaa (EPA)
His whereabouts were unknown and he has made no public appearances since the reports of his death surfaced.
Earlier on Monday, Houthi forces blew up Saleh's house in Sanaa and came under aerial attack by Saudi-led coalition warplanes for a second day, residents said.
The Saudi-led air campaign, backed by U.S. and other Western arms and intelligence, has killed hundreds of civilians but has failed to secure the coalition any major gains in the nearly three-year-old campaign to restore Yemen's internationally recognised president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, to power.
Houthi-controlled TV station reports former Yemen president has been killed
Saleh's loyalists have lost ground on the sixth day of heavy urban warfare with the Iran-allied Houthi militia during which the casualty toll has rapidly mounted in Sanaa.
Recommended Red Cross forced to buy own fuel in Yemen because of Saudi blockade
"We are supporting the main hospitals in Sanaa who urgently need war-wounded kits," ICRC spokeswoman Iolanda Jaquemet said in Geneva. "We are also looking at donating dead body bags to hospitals which are actually asking for them and hope to donate fuel to the main hospitals because they depend on generators."
The ICRC have "relocated" 13 international staff to Djibouti from Sanaa on Monday, she said.
Sanaa residents reported intense fighting overnight and into the morning with families cowering in their homes as explosions rocked the city. Coalition air strikes hammered Houthi positions in an apparent bid to shore up Saleh's forces, witnesses said.
The re-alignment of Saleh's forces with the Saudis would mark a significant turn in a war that is part of a wider struggle between regional powers Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The bloodshed has compounded the woes of one of the Arab world's poorest countries and left at least 10,000 dead as hunger and disease have spread.
At the United Nations, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the warring parties to stop all ground and air assaults. He also called for the resumption of all commercial imports into Yemen, saying millions of children, women and men were at risk of mass hunger, disease and death.
However, in a speech late on Sunday, Saleh formally annulled his alliance with the Houthis and pledged to step up his fight.
Saleh, who dominated Yemen's heavily armed tribal society for 33 years before quitting in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, and the Shi'ite Muslim Houthis had made common cause against Hadi loyalists.
But they vied for supremacy over the territory they ran together, including Sanaa, which the Houthis seized in September 2014, and their feud burst into open combat on Wednesday.
Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam claimed significant gains in the battle for Sanaa on Monday.
"With the aid and approval of God, the security forces backed up by wide popular support were able last night to cleanse the areas in which the militias of treason and betrayal were deployed," he said in a statement.
The Houthi movement's TV channel al-Masirah and witnesses said Houthir fighters had seized the downtown home of Saleh's nephew Tareq, an army general.
Residents said the warring sides traded heavy automatic and artillery fire as the Houthis advanced in the central Political District, which is a redoubt of Saleh and his family.
"We lived through days of terror. Houthi tanks have been firing and the shells were falling on our neighbourhood," said Mohammed al-Madhaji, who lives in the frontline district.
"The fighting has been so violent we feel we could die at any moment. We can't get out of our homes."
Houthi media and political sources also reported that the Houthis also advanced toward Saleh's birthplace in a village outside Sanaa where he maintains a fortified palace.
Reuters
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The Made in Taiwan moniker hardly does Taiwan any favours as it belies the islands hot-spring bubbling mountains, scrumptious street food, and a sassy capital. But last weeks launch of China Airliness first direct flight from the UK (from Gatwick to Taipei) will make it easier for travellers to discover the real Taiwan. Here are 10 things to do in Taipei City.
See Chinese treasures
Chinese politician Chiang Kai-sheks nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949 under Maos Communist onslaught, bringing with them one of the greatest collections of Chinese art purloined from the Forbidden Palace in Beijing. These imperial treasures of calligraphy, bronzes, and jades are on display at the National Palace Museum.
Avoid crowded weekends to be able to absorb the harmonious pricelessness of objects like the 11th-century Mao Gong Ding cauldron inscribed with 500 Chinese characters. Entry 6.50.
Follow the locals to eat street food at Taipeis markets (Mark Stratton)
Eat stinky tofu
Could you eat something reeking of unwashed feet? Stinky tofu is just one exotic aroma from night markets offering some of Asias best street food. Avoid the touristy Shilin night market for a far more authentic experience at a local favourite like Ningxia, and graze as you walk. Cheap eats include squid soup, sticky rice in bamboo, and that stinky tofu which tastes better than you could have imagined when its fried and served with a healthy dollop of chilli. With dishes from 1-6, its easy to see why the Taiwanese dine out most evenings.
Sleep in a palace
Neo-Brutalist latitude gets an imperial palace makeover at the extraordinary Grand Hotel. Even if you dont stay at this 14-floor colossus, pay it a visit to gawp at the lacquered pillars propping up a golden double-eave roof, as red-uniformed bellhops skate around polished marble floors. For an option closer to the shopping and nightlife of Xinyi district, Home Hotel is a more 21st-century offering hosting a grainy whisky and jazz bar.
Dont just eat dumplings learn to make them (Mark Stratton)
Cook potsticker dumplings
Salivating over Taipeis foodie onslaught may kindle a desire for a cooking class. Trade secrets, such as how to crisp up potsticker dumplings and how white pepper, not chilli, puts the bite into hot-and-sour soup, can be unlocked during a three-hour class with private chef, Wayne Lin. Book it through My Taiwan Tour - it costs from 75 per person, depending on group size.
Learn to brew oolong
Understand your oolongs and the art of brewing them at Ten Shangs Tea Company near Xingtian Temple MRT. Amid fragrant sacks of tea leaves, Mr and Mrs Chang treat visitors to tastings from their own plantations and explain the variations of high mountain green oolongs and black lowland teas. For the connoisseur, a fine 150g packet of mountain Li Shan oolong costs 42.
The Taipei 101 tower was the tallest building in the world until 2010 (Wikimedia Commons)
Head into the clouds
Given Taiwans vulnerability to earthquakes and typhoons, it took some bravery to construct the 509m-high Taipei 101, the worlds tallest building between 2004-2010. Swaggering over Xinyi in the design of a bamboo stem, the engineering is impressive as ear-popping elevators rise 89 floors in 36 seconds. The 360-degree views of the city ensure this is 15 well spent.
Eat Taipeis best xiaolongbao
Wrapped in silky casings, xiaolongbao soup dumplings contain a gelatinised broth that liquefies upon steaming. Theyre best eaten off a spoon to avoid jets of the soupy interior squirting out if you puncture them with chopsticks. The spiritual home of xiaolongbao is Din Tai Fung, where queues routinely stretch for 90 minutes. Five crab roe and pork xiaolongbao cost 3.75.
Soak up the onsen culture at Beitou (Lim Ashley)
Soak in sulphur
Japans ruthless colonisation of Taiwan between 1895-1945 isnt fondly recalled but they did bequeath an onsen culture. Head to the suburbs of Beitou to find accessible outdoors public hot-spring baths, but dont forget your swimwear naked onsen etiquette does not apply as the pools are mixed gender. It costs 1 to soak for two hours in a tiered cascade of acidic mineral pools bubbling away at 45C.
Longshan Temple is a must-see in Taipei (Wikimedia Commons)
Pray for favours
Taiwans cocktail of Buddhist and Tao spirituality has more than an essence of expediency as worshippers pray for good health and fortune at intoxicatingly ornate temples. Enjoy the carnival-like spectacle at Longshan Temple, where devotees of this 18th-century temple light incense sticks and cast wooden jiaobei diving stones.
Venture beyond the city
Taipei is the gateway to explore an island of great natural beauty. From Tamsui MRT Station the superb Golden Riverside Path cycleway makes a flat 10-mile loop via mangroves and the 17th-century Spanish-built Fort San Domingo. Cycle hire costs 4.50 for four hours from the station. Hikers meanwhile will love the well marked mountainous trails of Yangmingshan National Park just outside Taipei City.
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New Zealand, famous for its jaw droppingly lovely landscapes, has been likened to a beautiful person with cancer by British environmentalist Sir Tim Smit.
The co-founder of the Eden Project said that NZ has many environmental problems, largely caused by the dairy industry, when giving the keynote speech at CLAs Rural Business Conference in London on 28 November.
The original Eden Project is in Cornwall, but there is also a similar project being run out of Avonside in Christchurch on the east coast of New Zealands South Island, entitled Eden NZ: Mountains to the Sea.
"We are working in the red zone, in Christchurch," said Sir Tim, reports the NZ Herald.
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"You know, what is the brand New Zealand guys? You know, it's the oldest advertising thing for a place in the whole of the world Pure New Zealand.
"It's so pure that the people of Christchurch won't even swim in the River Avon."
Sir Tim said many of the lakes and rivers there are blighted by algae, which he attributed to a dairy industry that is out of control.
"It is like a beautiful person with cancer," he said. "The only strategy was to satisfy consumers in China with a dairy product, which is ironic for a lactose-intolerant people.
"So, with global warming, more rain, but focused in a short period of time, loads of nitrates to make the grass grow faster, because cattle need it faster than sheep, and all of the nitrates go in the river."
The dairy industry hit back, with DairyNZ strategy leader Bruce Thorrold saying the industry group was "extremely disappointed" at the comments.
He said New Zealand was "still very much a beautiful person and proud of it."
"We acknowledge that not all of our waterways are pristine but compared to the rest of the world, New Zealand's waterways are in good condition, and our farmers and communities are working hard to be even better," said Thorold.
"And dairy is just one sector that has had an important role to play. The Avon River, which Sir Tim references, is the river that flows through Christchurch City and isn't anywhere near dairy farms."
He extended an invitation for Sir Tim to return to New Zealand for a swim. "We invite Tim to revisit our beautiful country, and his facts, so he can see first-hand the state of our rivers and lakes, and perhaps even take a dip."
However, other experts have backed up Sir Tims assertions. NZ Environment Minister David Parker told the NZ Herald: "We agree New Zealand's got a real issue with water quality we campaigned on it, and we are going to do something about it."
A recent Government report found that nitrogen levels were rising at 55 per cent of monitored river sites, while decreasing at 28 per cent of sites. Phosphorus levels were decreasing at 42 per cent of sites while rising at 25 per cent of sites.
Too much nitrogen and phosphorus in the water causes algae to grow faster than ecosystems can handle. Significant increases in algae harm water quality, food resources and habitats, and decrease the oxygen that fish and other aquatic life need to survive.
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Residents of a Swiss village voted to offer a settlement grant to people willing to move there.
The vote on 30 November was passed by 71 votes in favour to 29 against, reports ATS.
Its a clear result and Im very happy about it, said mayor Beat Jost.
It means that, for those who are eligible, moving to the village of Albinen in the Valais region will mean a payout of CHF25,000 (15,000) per adult and CHF10,000 (7,500) per child.
The village currently has 240 inhabitants; the new scheme was proposed in response to a group of young residents request that something be done to bolster Albinens decreasing population.
A dedicated fund of CHF100,000 (75,000) per year will be allotted to the project.
But getting the settlement grant isnt as straightforward as packing your bags and showing up in Switzerland. To be eligible, new residents must be under 45 years old, sign up to live in Albinen for a minimum of 10 years, buy or build a property there with a minimum value of CHF200,000 (150,000), and be a Swiss citizen or have a valid Swiss C permit. Their house there must be a primary residence, rather than a second home.
The local newsletter called the move an investment in the villages future.
However, Albinen authorities are keen to stress that the scheme is not aimed at everyone after some media coverage suggested that anyone would be eligible, reports the Local.
A statement released by authorities said that the news caused a worldwide sensation and was responsible for misleading thousands.
Of the many expressions of interest Albinen has received since the story initially broke, one in a hundred could realistically be considered due to the strict stipulations, the statement said.
Authorities say they expect that at most five to 10 young families will end up taking part in the scheme.
It's not the first place to entice new residents with a cash bonus. In October The Independent reported that an Italian town was offering to pay people up to 2,000 (1,800) to move there.
Nicola Gatta, mayor of Candela, a small town in Puglia, made the offer in the hope of reversing the towns declining population.
Gatta said he wants to bring numbers back up to the 8,000 of the 1990s, when the town was known as Little Naples. Today, there are just 2,700 residents.
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Theresa May has spent the last year or so learning how to put a brave face on the most calamitous events in recent British political history some her fault, some not.
Today, in the convivial company of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, the brave face was on display once again, the Prime Minster sounding as upbeat as she could be about the failure there is no other word for it of the latest round of talks. In this she was abetted by the silken rhetoric of Mr Juncker, something of a charmer over the lunch table by all accounts, but, if anything, Mr Juncker only made matters worse when he let slip that there were two or three issues still open for further negotiation and consultation which is one or two more than might have been assumed. In other words the latest iteration of the historic Irish question is not the only sticking point, as appeared from some of the more positive mood music emanating from Brussels and London in recent days.
Some of this, in fairness, is not Ms Mays fault, and not simply because she was once, in a lost world far away, a Remainer, albeit a highly reluctant one during the EU referendum. It is simply that, after around 18 months of wrangling, the finest diplomatic, political and economic minds in Europe have not been able to solve the insoluble how Northern Ireland can be outside the EUs single market and customs union, but have no economic border with the Republic of Ireland.
In a thoughtful and creative position paper in the summer the British Government attempted to solve the problem by suggesting that new technologies could be used to remove most of the difficulties. Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern suggested a blind eye could be turned to small-scale movements of goods and people strictly outside of the letter of Brexit. The Irish government suggested, successively, an economic border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and thus the EU). A new wheeze, of regulatory convergence between Ireland and the EU on the one side, and Northern Ireland on the other, was swiftly agreed by the British Government, and just as rapidly spat out by Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionists.
So this failure to settle the economic status of Northern Ireland by giving it special treatment suggests that the problem is so intractable as to represent a significant obstacle to Brexit in its own right along with still unresolved issues about the rights of EU citizens in the UK and the divorce bill. To put it colloquially, the British people may soon wonder whether the as yet undefined and uncertain benefits of Brexit many of which have evaporated on the journey from the side of the Brexit bus to reality are worth all of the hassle. At the very least they would be forgiven for asking for another referendum vote on how things seem to be shaping up for a deal.
Theresa May cannot be blamed for failing to make two plus two make five, and neither can anybody else. There is genuine goodwill about the problem, and about the determination to keep the UK-Ireland common travel area that has lasted since partition in 1922 (and of course for centuries before), and avoid hard borders. If goodwill and a sense of partnership was sufficient to solve the Irish border question it would have been sorted long ago. That it has not is extremely ominous, ether for peace in the province or for the prospects for a meaningful Brexit.
Where Ms May plainly didnt do her homework was in squaring the political party she relies on for her survival at Westminster the Democratic Unionists. It seems as though Ms May might have been under the misconception that the Unionists could be bounced into going along with special status for Northern Ireland. The Prime Minister, in a very tight corner and desperate to move to the next stage of trade talks, might have risked the support of the DUP to seal this first phase of the Brexit deal. The cynical calculation usually is that the DUP would be unwilling to overthrow Ms May if it meant the arrival of the IRA-sympathising (in their view) Jeremy Corbyn into No 10.
If so she made a fundamental mistake. First, Ms May has underestimated the confidence and belligerence of the DUP, whose constituency could never accept different economic arrangements in Ulster to those in the rest of the UK, for political and for financial reasons. Moreover, there principle is that Northern Ireland leaves the EU on the same terms as the rest of the UK and terms themselves appear secondary. Thus, if Jeremy Corbyn wants a soft Brexit where the whole of the UK stays in the single market and some version of the custom union, then that would be a more unionist policy than that of Ms May, who is proposing to erect a border between Northern Ireland and the UK, with customs checks on the ferries and at the airports.
This is not what Ms Foster and her friends came into politics to deliver. In their 2017 election manifesto the DUP stated they wished to see a comprehensive free trade and customs agreement with the European Union; ease of trade with the Irish Republic and throughout the European Union; particular circumstances of Northern Ireland with a land border with the EU fully reflected; and frictionless border with the Irish Republic assisting those working or travelling in the other jurisdiction. Mr Corbyns policies are presently closer to those commitments than are Ms Mays which might mean Northern Irish citizens having to present a passport to enter the rest of their own country.
Brexit, then, is throwing up some strange and unexpected contortions in the British body politic. At the moment, those contortions make the medium-term survival of the Prime Minister even less likely than a few weeks ago.
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Anything Tony Blair cant do, Jared Kushner probably cant do better. Then again, when it comes to solving the Palestinian-Israeli conundrum, a 36-year-old real estate investor possibly has as good a shot as anyone else.
Back in January, Kushner was appointed Senior Advisor to his father-in-law, the President of the USA, Donald Trump a reward for his loyal support and guidance during the presidential campaign. To almost universal surprise he was immediately charged with brokering peace in the Middle East in what seemed like a super-charged task from The Apprentice.
Nearly a year on and we have finally had a sighter of Kushners progress, which seems slight to say the least. At a closely-observed talk at the Saban Forum in Washington on Sunday, there was little detail as to how Kushner and his President actually plan to close what would surely be the deal of the century. Instead, a confident demeanour allied itself to platitudes about how solving the long standing Palestinian-Israeli puzzle was necessary to create more stability in the region. Bravo indeed!
Trump: 'Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI. Nothing happened to her. Flynn lied and they destroyed his life.'
As to why Trump and Kushner might be able to succeed where Blair (in his Middle East envoy role) and myriad others have failed, the young man insisted that the Presidents track record was sufficient to offer grounds for optimism. In essence, if Trump can pull off a successful run for the White House, he and his team can achieve anything. It was the kind of thing that would come from the Donald himself plenty of belief and bluster but little real information.
Ironically, Kushners first public speech on the issue came at the beginning of a week in which his wifes dad has to decide whether to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem or whether to postpone the switch once again, as he and his successors have been doing every six months for over two decades.
Despite being approved by Congress in 1995, US presidents have perennially declined to initiate the transfer from Tel Aviv for the fairly obvious reason that formally to recognise Jerusalem as Israels capital may not go down well with the Palestinians. Until a peace deal is struck, any move has the potential to inflame tensions, rather than temper them.
Trump, however, may have come up with a cunning plan, if press briefings emanating from advisors are to be believed. It is suggested that he will shortly sign another postponement but then later in the week give a speech in which he will offer some sort of Presidential endorsement of Israels claim to Jerusalem as its capital city. Indeed, this plan is so crafty in its having and eating of cake, it might have been developed by Boris Johnson.
Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Show all 30 1 /30 Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Threatening to shut down Twitter after being fact-checked After the president tweeted that voting by post would be "substantially fraudulent", Twitter attached a warning label to his tweet and referred readers to a site which explained how the claim was "unsubstantiated". Trump then said Twitter was "stifling free speech" and that he may have to shut it down, something which he would not have the power to do AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Flippantly dismissing a serious allegation of sexual assault When author E Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her, the president responded: Number one, shes not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?" AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Insulting the Mayor of London as he landed in London Just before touching down at Stansted Airport for his state visit, Trump took time out to @ the London mayor Sadiq Khan on twitter. He said that Khan has done a "terrible job"as mayor and that he is a "stone cold loser" Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Taking plenty of "Executive Time" The president's official schedule sets aside the hours from 8 to 11am daily for "Executive Time". Further intermittent periods of "Executive Time" are scheduled throughout any given day, ranging from 15 minutes to 3 hours. His duties in these hours have not been officially disclosed, though Axios reports that he spends them watching TV, reading the newspapers and tweeting Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Shutdown the government for over a month in an effort to secure funding for his wall With Mexico declining to pay for the wall, the president has faced difficulty in raising the required $5bn at home. Due to his demand that the money for the wall be included in the budget, and Congress's refusal, the government partially shut down on 22 December 2018. It remained shut for over a month, the longest period in history Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Joking about the Nazi occupation of France to President Macron In this tweet from 13 November 2018, the president mocks Emmanuel Macron's suggestion of a "true, European army" by invoking the conflict between France and Germany in the world wars Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Railing against the Mueller investigation The president has repeatedly claimed that the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, is a "rigged witch hunt" Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Contradicting a US intelligence report on Russian meddling in the presence of Vladimir Putin In the press conference that followed his landmark meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump stated that he saw no reason why Russia would have meddled in the 2016 US election. This contradicted a 2017 report by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence that found evidence of Russian interference in favour of Trump Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Contradicting his contradiction of a US intelligence report on Russian meddling Following furious backlash in the US, the president claimed that he meant to say that he saw no reason why it would not have been Russia who meddled in the 2016 US election. As to why he would have intended to use such bizarre phrasing, he did not comment Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Colouring in the US flag wrong The president coloured in the US flag wrongly during a visit to a children's hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He added a blue stripe where in tradition, and statute, there have been only white and red stripes AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Firing a Secretary of State over Twitter The president announced on Twitter that he was appointing Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, much to the surprise of then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Quoting a catchphrase from a reality TV show when discussing police brutality While addressing the issue of black athletes not standing for the national anthem in protest of police brutality, the president made reference to his catchphrase from reality TV show "The Apprentice": you're fired! Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Calling African nations "S***hole Countries" Ever one for diplomacy, the president reportedly referred to African nations as "s***hole countries". Asked to confirm this when meeting with Nigeria's President Buhari, Trump stated that there are "some countries that are in very bad shape". Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Defending Russian President Vladimir Putin Trump appeared to equate US foreign actions to those of Russian president Vladimir Putin, saying: There are a lot of killers. You think our countrys so innocent? Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Asking for people to 'pray' for Arnold Schwarzenegger At the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump couldnt help but to ask for prayers for the ratings on Arnold Schwarzeneggers show to be good. Schwarzenegger took over as host of The Apprentice which buoyed Trumps celebrity status years ago Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Hanging up on Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull Early in his presidency, Trump reportedly hung up the phone on Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull after the foreign leader angered him over refugee plans. Mr Trump later said that it was the worst call he had had so far Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... The 'Muslim ban' Perhaps one of his most controversial policies while acting as president, Trumps travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim countries has bought him a lot of criticism. The bans were immediately protested, and judges initially blocked their implementation. The Supreme Court later sided with the administrations argument that the ban was developed out of concern for US security Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Praising crowd size while touring Hurricane Harvey damage After Hurricane Harvey ravaged southeastern Texas, Trump paid the area a visit. While his response to the disaster in Houston was generally applauded, the president picked up some flack when he gave a speech outside Houston (he reportedly did not visit disaster zones), and praised the size of the crowds there AP Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... 'Little Rocket Man' During his first-ever speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump tried out a new nickname for North Korea leader Kim Jong-un: Rocket Man. He later tweaked it to be little Rocket Man as the two feuded, and threatened each other with nuclear war. During that speech, he also threatened to totally annihilate North Korea Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Attacking Sadiq Khan following London Bridge terror attack After the attack on the London Bridge, Trump lashed out at London Mayor Sadiq Khan, criticising Khan for saying there was no reason to be alarmed after the attack. Trump was taking the comments out of context, as Khan was simply saying that the police had everything under control Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming presenter Mika Brezinkski was 'bleeding from the face' Never one not to mock his enemies, Trump mocked MSNBCs Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, saying that she and co-host Joe Scarborough had approached him before his inauguration asking to join him. He noted that she was bleeding badly from a face-lift at the time, and that he said no MSNBC Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... 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Accusing Obama of wiretapping him Trump accused former president Barack Obama of wire tapping him on twitter. The Justice Department later clarified: Obama had not, in fact, done so Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming there had been 3 million 'illegal votes' Trump was never very happy about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million ballots. So, he and White House voter-fraud commissioner Kris Kobach have claimed that anywhere between three and five million people voted illegally during the 2016 election. Conveniently, he says that all of those illegal votes went to Clinton. (There is no evidence to support that level of widespread voter fraud.) Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Leaving Jews out of the Holocaust memorial statement Just days after taking office, Trumps White House issued a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but didnt mention jews or even the word jewish in the written statement Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Anger over Inauguration crowd size Trumps inauguration crowd was visibly, and noticeably, smaller than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama. But, he really wanted to have had the largest crowd on record. So, he praised it as the biggest crowd ever. Relatedly, Trump also claimed that it stopped raining in Washington at the moment he was inaugurated. It didnt, the day was very dreary Reuters
Longstanding Middle-East watchers are unconvinced by this masterstroke of diplomacy, however, and it is certainly hard to see how such a manoeuvre is likely to aid Kushners endeavours.
But then, such is the revolving nature of the staff door at the White House, that one wonders whether there should be any reason to think Kushner will be any better at hanging around than others. Indeed, rumours have swirled on and off for months that a distance has opened up between the President and his son-in-law. The suggestion that Michael Flynn might implicate Kushner in his evidence to the Mueller inquiry (by fingering him as the man who allegedly told Flynn to contact the Russians last December) has only served to fuel talk of a possible breach.
Kushner, it must be said, denies any collusion with Russia. Yet if Trump wanted a convenient way to put talk of a renewed Middle East peace process on the back-burner and thus have an excuse to ditch Kushner, wouldn't a rumpus over Jerusalems capital status be handy?
In the end, much may depend on the degree to which Trump decides that blood is thicker than water, and his view on which camp Kushner falls into. He is, after all not a Trump himself.
Still, he gained the Presidents ear by marrying into the dynasty and has effectively been given a job on the basis of nepotism, not of experience or qualifications. His rise is emblematic of the way Trump works on the combined basis of instinct and ego: he may have a gut feeling that Kushner could succeed in bringing peace to the Middle East, but if he does the glory will reflect not only on the Presidency but also on the wider dynastic ambition which Trump seems to hold dear. The problem for Kushner, is that any failing must not be allowed to drag the Trump name through the mud.
In the end, whether Kushner achieves the unexpected or whether he does not, he must know it will be the patriarch of the family who either takes the credit or deflects the blame. Parents eh?
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These days, uprisings should be studied with a cold eye and theres a fine little exhibition on in Paris about the 1917 Russian revolution which casts a dark reflection on the Arab awakening weve all been observing in the Middle East. Its an extraordinary display from the revolution which changed the world, including posters, photographs and amazingly some documents which show just how much the Mencheviks (and the Russian Provisional Government) and then the Bolsheviks tried to enlist the Muslim world and the Armenians in their destruction of the Romanov dynasty.
I suppose the overthrow of Mubarak (the Tsar) and then the brief 11-month tenure of Mohamed Morsi (representing the temporary Mensheviks comes to mind; but Field Marshal-President al-Sissi of Egypt hardly counts as a Lenin (or a Stalin) and the war which the Egyptian government is now fighting in Sinai bears no relation to the Whites versus the Reds yet. On balance, the end of King Farouq of Egypt, the temporary leadership of General Neguib (the Mensheviks) and then the takeover by Nasser would be much closer to the mark.
But Syria is a worrying parallel since it demonstrates just how easily revolution can turn into civil war. The casualty figures dont come anywhere close to the millions of Russians who were killed in the conflict after 1917, but there are some disturbing features which both conflicts share. The Syrians could scarcely have known how swiftly their war would come upon them. Nor did the Russians in 1917. And the interference of foreign nations Russia on the side of the Syrian government, America and Britain on the side of the rebels (the Whites, until they turned out to be Muslim Greens), inserting their troops into Syria with minimum losses since they would let others do the dying is a painful reminder of what happens when overseas powers decide that they will decide who wins the war.
World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty
The British landed at Murmansk to support the White Russians, and its intriguing to see how the Whites set up their own mini-capitals wherever they went just as Isis set up its capitals in Raqqa and in Mosul in Iraq. The parallels are not exact, of course, but the Bolshevik demonisation of the White Russians in the ferocious anti-religious, anti-capitalist posters on display in Paris at the Musee de lArmee (the exhibition is called Et 1917 devient Revolution) are not dissimilar to the war against terror which Bashar al-Assad and the Russians (and the Hezbollah, and the Iranians) think they are fighting in Syria today. There are terrifying cartoons of mass killings, naked men beaten with whips and women led away for rape. Pretty much standard Isis fare.
There are, too, ten-ruble banknotes from the short-lived commisariat of Transcaucasia, printed in Russian on one side and in the Armenian, Georgian, and Azeri languages on the reverse. Azeri was in those days written in Arabic script and so it appears on the note. More interesting is a large poster in the Tartar language (printed in 1919 in both Arabic script and in Cyrillic) depicting a horsemen leading a band of warriors and holding a red flag bearing a half moon and a star. To Muslim comrades, it announces, the enemies of the working people are crushing your freedom and you alone can defend your lands, only Soviet power will give you your mountains Join the Muslim cavalry regimentsAll under the red star.
Im not sure what the Tartar Muslims thought of their half-moon under the Red Star of Bolshevism but there are photographs of soldiers in a Muslim village in eastern Anatolia paying homage to the earlier 1905 Russian revolution and a bright snapshot of Red Cross nurse Nino Djordjadze mounted on a camel. Her name is Georgian but she was born in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) in Georgia.
For the Muslim republics of the future Soviet Union and for the short-lived Armenian republic there would, of course, be no freedom and Soviet power brought them the same purges and executions as the rest of the USSR which inherited the Russian empire. The Communists tended to feel more at home with the Christian than the Muslim religion, because so an ex-Soviet citizen told me Jesus was the son of a working class carpenter while the Prophet Mohamed was a bourgeois businessman. Nowadays, Russia has been busy killing Muslim fighters (terrorists) in Syria, some of them descendants, no doubt, of the Tartar horseman supposedly carrying that red flag 98 years ago.
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Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp, but what he never told anyone is he planned on replacing it with a cesspool. This morning, the President of the United States officially endorsed accused child molester Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama. Meanwhile, European allies are saying Secretary of State Rex Tillerson cant be taken seriously due to the rumours hes about to be sacked leaked from Trumps own White House. And last Friday, under the cloak of darkness and with handwritten notes senators didnt even have time to read, the GOP-controlled Senate passed a tax bill which will redistribute wealth to the one percent whilst hurting the very people who put Trump in office and adding trillions to the deficit.
Im old enough to remember when Republicans touted themselves as the grownups in the room on family values, foreign policy, and the economy. No more. Donald Trumps Republican Party has shown it has no principles, no morality, and no shame. As the events of the past 72 hours show, they are rewriting the rules of American democracy and diplomacy and we are all suffering as a result.
To begin with, Roy Moore, I cant believe I have to say you shouldnt support accused child molesters, but here I am, having to say that you shouldnt support accused child molesters. All I know is I never want to hear a Republican talk about how LGBT people are a threat to children ever again. There are no words to describe how disgusting it is that anyone would support this man, let alone the President. Trump is so infantile (perhaps not the best choice of word given these circumstances, but honestly) that hed rather win than stand against an accused child molester. Yet here we are. Never take another lecture from family values from a Republican. Not when the Republican President supports an accused child molester for the US senate.
Trump praises 'tremendous reform' after tax bill passes giving cuts to America's richest
Meanwhile someone Trump isnt supporting is Rex Tillerson. The Secretary of State has embarked on a long-anticipated trip to Europe, but our allies are balking at the idea that his words hold any gravity. He has no mandate, one EU official told Reuters. Its easy to see why, considering the lukewarm support he clearly has from President Trump and the persistent rumours hes on his way out of Soggy Bottom.
That our allies feel his visit is basically a waste of time should startle every American. The Secretary of State is responsible for American foreign policy, yet Trump and the Republicans who continue to enable him have basically undermined any credibility Tillerson may have. Im the only one that matters, Trump said of the State Department last month. But thats never been how American foreign policy works. The president cant be everywhere and do everything, so he delegates. Thats even more important considering how volatile and inexperienced the current President is.
Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Show all 30 1 /30 Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Threatening to shut down Twitter after being fact-checked After the president tweeted that voting by post would be "substantially fraudulent", Twitter attached a warning label to his tweet and referred readers to a site which explained how the claim was "unsubstantiated". Trump then said Twitter was "stifling free speech" and that he may have to shut it down, something which he would not have the power to do AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Flippantly dismissing a serious allegation of sexual assault When author E Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her, the president responded: Number one, shes not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?" AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Insulting the Mayor of London as he landed in London Just before touching down at Stansted Airport for his state visit, Trump took time out to @ the London mayor Sadiq Khan on twitter. He said that Khan has done a "terrible job"as mayor and that he is a "stone cold loser" Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Taking plenty of "Executive Time" The president's official schedule sets aside the hours from 8 to 11am daily for "Executive Time". Further intermittent periods of "Executive Time" are scheduled throughout any given day, ranging from 15 minutes to 3 hours. His duties in these hours have not been officially disclosed, though Axios reports that he spends them watching TV, reading the newspapers and tweeting Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Shutdown the government for over a month in an effort to secure funding for his wall With Mexico declining to pay for the wall, the president has faced difficulty in raising the required $5bn at home. Due to his demand that the money for the wall be included in the budget, and Congress's refusal, the government partially shut down on 22 December 2018. It remained shut for over a month, the longest period in history Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Joking about the Nazi occupation of France to President Macron In this tweet from 13 November 2018, the president mocks Emmanuel Macron's suggestion of a "true, European army" by invoking the conflict between France and Germany in the world wars Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Railing against the Mueller investigation The president has repeatedly claimed that the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, is a "rigged witch hunt" Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Contradicting a US intelligence report on Russian meddling in the presence of Vladimir Putin In the press conference that followed his landmark meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump stated that he saw no reason why Russia would have meddled in the 2016 US election. This contradicted a 2017 report by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence that found evidence of Russian interference in favour of Trump Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Contradicting his contradiction of a US intelligence report on Russian meddling Following furious backlash in the US, the president claimed that he meant to say that he saw no reason why it would not have been Russia who meddled in the 2016 US election. As to why he would have intended to use such bizarre phrasing, he did not comment Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Colouring in the US flag wrong The president coloured in the US flag wrongly during a visit to a children's hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He added a blue stripe where in tradition, and statute, there have been only white and red stripes AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Firing a Secretary of State over Twitter The president announced on Twitter that he was appointing Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, much to the surprise of then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Quoting a catchphrase from a reality TV show when discussing police brutality While addressing the issue of black athletes not standing for the national anthem in protest of police brutality, the president made reference to his catchphrase from reality TV show "The Apprentice": you're fired! Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Calling African nations "S***hole Countries" Ever one for diplomacy, the president reportedly referred to African nations as "s***hole countries". Asked to confirm this when meeting with Nigeria's President Buhari, Trump stated that there are "some countries that are in very bad shape". Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Defending Russian President Vladimir Putin Trump appeared to equate US foreign actions to those of Russian president Vladimir Putin, saying: There are a lot of killers. You think our countrys so innocent? Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Asking for people to 'pray' for Arnold Schwarzenegger At the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump couldnt help but to ask for prayers for the ratings on Arnold Schwarzeneggers show to be good. Schwarzenegger took over as host of The Apprentice which buoyed Trumps celebrity status years ago Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Hanging up on Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull Early in his presidency, Trump reportedly hung up the phone on Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull after the foreign leader angered him over refugee plans. Mr Trump later said that it was the worst call he had had so far Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... The 'Muslim ban' Perhaps one of his most controversial policies while acting as president, Trumps travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim countries has bought him a lot of criticism. The bans were immediately protested, and judges initially blocked their implementation. The Supreme Court later sided with the administrations argument that the ban was developed out of concern for US security Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Praising crowd size while touring Hurricane Harvey damage After Hurricane Harvey ravaged southeastern Texas, Trump paid the area a visit. While his response to the disaster in Houston was generally applauded, the president picked up some flack when he gave a speech outside Houston (he reportedly did not visit disaster zones), and praised the size of the crowds there AP Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... 'Little Rocket Man' During his first-ever speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump tried out a new nickname for North Korea leader Kim Jong-un: Rocket Man. He later tweaked it to be little Rocket Man as the two feuded, and threatened each other with nuclear war. During that speech, he also threatened to totally annihilate North Korea Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Attacking Sadiq Khan following London Bridge terror attack After the attack on the London Bridge, Trump lashed out at London Mayor Sadiq Khan, criticising Khan for saying there was no reason to be alarmed after the attack. Trump was taking the comments out of context, as Khan was simply saying that the police had everything under control Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming presenter Mika Brezinkski was 'bleeding from the face' Never one not to mock his enemies, Trump mocked MSNBCs Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, saying that she and co-host Joe Scarborough had approached him before his inauguration asking to join him. He noted that she was bleeding badly from a face-lift at the time, and that he said no MSNBC Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming the blame for Charlottesville was on 'both sides' Trump refused to condemn far-right extremists involved in violence at 'the march for the right' protests in Charlottesville, even after the murder of counter protester Heather Heyer AP Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Retweeting cartoon of CNN being hit by a 'Trump train' Trump retweeted a cartoon showing a Trump-branded train running over a person whose body and head were replaced by a CNN avatar. He later deleted the retweet Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Tweeting about 'slamming' CNN Trump caught some flack when he tweeted a video showing him wrestling down an individual whose head had been replaced by a CNN avatar. Trump has singled CNN out in particular with his chants of fake news Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Firing head of the FBI, James Comey Trumps firing of former FBI Director James Comey landed him with a federal investigation into Russias meddling in the 2016 election that has caused many a headache for the White House. The White House initially said that the decision was made after consultation from the Justice Department. Then Mr Trump himself said that he had decided to fire him in part because he wanted the Russia investigation Mr Comey was conducting to stop Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Not realising being president would be 'hard' Just three months into his presidency, Trump admitted that being president is harder than he thought it would be. Though Trump insisted on the 2016 campaign trail that doing the job would be easy for him, he admitted in an interview that living in the White House is harder than running a business empire Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Accusing Obama of wiretapping him Trump accused former president Barack Obama of wire tapping him on twitter. The Justice Department later clarified: Obama had not, in fact, done so Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming there had been 3 million 'illegal votes' Trump was never very happy about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million ballots. So, he and White House voter-fraud commissioner Kris Kobach have claimed that anywhere between three and five million people voted illegally during the 2016 election. Conveniently, he says that all of those illegal votes went to Clinton. (There is no evidence to support that level of widespread voter fraud.) Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Leaving Jews out of the Holocaust memorial statement Just days after taking office, Trumps White House issued a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but didnt mention jews or even the word jewish in the written statement Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Anger over Inauguration crowd size Trumps inauguration crowd was visibly, and noticeably, smaller than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama. But, he really wanted to have had the largest crowd on record. So, he praised it as the biggest crowd ever. Relatedly, Trump also claimed that it stopped raining in Washington at the moment he was inaugurated. It didnt, the day was very dreary Reuters
Rex Tillerson was an unconventional pick for Secretary of State (he had zero foreign policy experience), but hes proven to be one of the few level heads and reasonable voices to emerge from this administration. That Trump has ruined his credibility on the international stage is deeply concerning. Besides that, if the world doesnt think the Secretary of State speaks for America, who does?
Back on home turf, Republicans have resorted to taxation without representation. Thats all you can call it when senators are on national television complaining that they dont even know whats in the bill theyre voting on and asking their Twitter followers if they can read the scribbled notes in the margins.
In the course of 72 hours, the Republican Party was able to shake the foundations of American democracy and completely ruin its brand. The Republican Party can no longer claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility, strong foreign policy, or family values. Going into 2018 and the midterm elections, every American should remember this weekend the weekend the Republican Party and Donald Trump finally replaced the swamp with a sewer.
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Former President Ali Abdullah Saleh once said that governing Yemen was like dancing on the heads of snakes.
But the image of his country as a vipers nest was always self-serving and self-fulfilling: through three decades of divide and rule, deceit and violence, Saleh played on every cynical short-term interest from those of presidents in Washington to jihadis in hillside caves to shore up his power.
By Monday, the old master had run out of tricks; captured and killed by militants of the rebel movement known as the Houthis, with whom he built an alliance of convenience between 2014 and last week, when he finally turned on them too.
Saleh, who became president in 1978, was overthrown in 2011 after troops loyal to him fired on protests against his rule. The administration which followed rapidly lost legitimacy, and by 2014 Saleh saw an opening. He formed an alliance with the Houthis, and instructed troops still loyal to abandon their positions and allow the Houthis to take the capital and, later, much of the rest of the country.
But the Houthis would not let Saleh rule. And so, reputedly, he was plotting to reach a deal with Saudi Arabia and its allies to oust the Houthis and make a separate peace. The tensions that plotting provoked erupted into last weeks fighting.
As he lay dead in the back of a pickup truck, wrapped in a blanket, the state which he had built lay in ruins, the country which he had united in 1990 was once again divided, and his final play, to secure the future influence of his family in Yemeni politics, appeared to have failed.
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
Yet his death leaves a chasm in the midst of power in his country. As news of his death filtered out, the guns that rattled the air of the capital, Sanaa for days, fell quiet.
Every Yemeni, from those emerging from basements and backrooms to count the dead, to the Saudi-backed government in exile in Riyadh, to disenfranchised Southerners and feuding militants of every side, were forced to reckon with the casting aside of old hopes and certainties.
The Houthi movement, a minority religious order which before 2014 had no national political profile, will now discover if it has the political and military wherewithal to hold together the patchwork alliance which has held off several regional powers and their Yemeni allies for more than two and a half years with little loss of territory.
Yemen's ousted president 'killed by rival rebel group', video suggests
Saleh was sometimes said to have brought to the alliance not so much military strength the Houthis often complained that he held his troops back from the front lines than a deep network of tribal relationships, crucial to the informal power base of the country, and the ability to project a more inclusive image than the Houthis of Yemeni identity. His followers brought a measure of bureaucratic sophistication to a hardscrabble militant movement.
The resilience of that movement will now be tested against the vigour of their enemies. Forces loyal to the Riyadh-based government are reported to be preparing for a push toward the capital through the mountains to its east in an attempt to take advantage of the confusion and division which the rebellion has caused.
At the nearest point, the anti-Houthi fighters are perhaps 30 miles away, but they have hardly advanced in the past year. It is unknown how much their prospects have changed particularly since the Houthis seem largely to have quelled the rebellion behind their lines.
If the Houthi alliance survives, and if the expected offensive fails, the Saudi-led coalition and the impetuous prince at its head, Mohammed bin Salman will be compelled to starkly confront their options. If they cannot defeat the Houthis through subversion, nor through pitched battle, nor through the humanitarian crisis which their blockade on the north has caused, what options remain?
Their alliance, too, is fraying: there were two gun battles in Aden this week between parties to the coalition, and several anonymous shootings. Little in the coalitions recent behaviour gives hope that they would choose compromise rather than a further, damaging escalation on one front or another, of what is already the worlds gravest humanitarian crisis.
And that is why even millions of Yemenis who hated Saleh will not rejoice at his passing. Throughout his political life, he made himself the lynchpin of alliances. Even in death, he was seeking to position himself as the only available interlocutor in the north for the Saudi coalition, and thus the necessary gatekeeper for an end to the war in which everyone could save a little face.
In truth, the truculence of the Houthis and the insistence of Saudi Arabia on the utter humiliation of its enemies, would always have called into question his ability to affect that deal. But nonetheless, that is what many seem to have hoped: that perhaps Salehs last manipulation might have inadvertently saved Yemen at the same time as himself.
But it was not to be.
Now, no one really knows what will happen next. Saleh built a state upon fear and a society upon uncertainty. That his death has caused, itself, so much worry and so much confusion is perhaps his fitting epitaph.
Saleh wasnt the dancer. He was the viper and all Yemen danced to his tune. That era is over.
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Nine Turkish nationals, all ethnic Kurds, arrested last week in raids on three central Athens apartments, and charged with various terrorism-related offenses, were ordered held on remand after their statements on Monday to an investigating magistrate.
Nollywood actor Michael Okon has been accused of stealing from a sugar mummy in America According to social media user and blogger, Stella Dimokokorkus the actor made away with her friends credit card and money Michael was reportedly in America for a movie premier but allegedly eloped with a sugar mummy and stole from her Theres trouble in paradise for Nollywood actor, Michael Okon who is reportedly currently in America hiding from his sugar mummy who he stole from. Social media user and blogger, Stella Dimokokorkus exposed the actor on her social media page accusing him of theft and being unprofessional.
In a recent post shared on Instagram, Stella mentioned the actor and narrated details of his actions against his sugar mummy who happens to be the bloggers friend. According to Dimokokorkus, Okon was taken to America for a movie premier but eloped with an older lover instead. As the two had a nice time together, Michael reportedly stole her money and credit card and is hiding somewhere in America.
In an attempt to expose and threaten him, Stella wrote: @mikijay_okon Michael Okon alleged Nollywood actor you took my friends credit cards and stole her money after everything she did for you? You were taken to America for a movie premiere but eloped with a sugar mummy instead. You are a shameless piece of sh*t and Karma has your number. May your dead career never resurrect and May that your colorless preek that you use to deceive your victims put you in hot soup. Fraudster. Watch out for karma as you decide to stay on in America with the money you stole. You will be served Cold!!! Bloody crazy thief.
source: Naij.com
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakars final return to the PDP has raised concerns among Nigerians with Aisha Yusufu reacting on social media.
Aisha Yesufu, the convener of Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) campaign, has lashed out at former vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, over his presidential ambitions.
Atiku on Sunday confirmed that he was returning to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), after he resigned from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
Aisha, writing on her Twitter page, questioned the former vice-presidents integrity and character and claimed he was going back to his vomit.
She tweeted: Haba @atiku is it by force? Dont integrity and character mean anything to you?
How can you vomit and and go back to lick it?
Is it by force to serve Nigerians?
Anyway its your right to do what you want to and our right to do what we want to.
Time for a Macron in Nigeria.
Source Tori
The former vice-president said the APC-led administration of President Buhari had disappointed Nigerians, particularly youths of the country.
He added, Creating jobs is something I know about as I have created over 50,000 direct jobs and 250,000 indirect jobs in my home state of Adamawa and I also know how the government can create opportunities for jobs.
In the last two years, almost three million Nigerians have lost their jobs and today we have a record 25 per cent of people within the age of 18 and 25 years unemployed. I can see how difficult it is for people to get jobs.
The key to creating jobs is a strong economy and that is what we lack presently. Today, I want to let you know that I am returning home to the PDP as the issues that made me leave it have been resolved and it is clear that the APC has let the people, especially youths, down.
But rather than giving a long political speech on this matter, I thought it would be more helpful to invite you to ask me questions and share with you my answers.
Chude Jideonwo and Adebola Williams, StateCraft Inc. co-founders and authors of the new book How to Win Elections in Africa: Parallels with Donald Trump, continued their tour around the United States of America with stops at the Harvard University, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and in Atlanta, Georgia on the 25, 28, and 29 November respectively.
With the book already becoming a resource material on issues connected with democracy, elections and campaigns globally, the authors shared their thoughts about the parallels between America, American events and the rest of the world, especially in the context of development.
Speaking in Boston, Chude described it as essentially about all the things that make elections happen globally and the order in which they matter or otherwise in sub-Saharan African contexts, as seen through our experience in four national elections in three countries.
Joining the hosts of the AfroBuzz podcast, Bebe, Nunoo and James, Remi Makanjuola, and Toks Ogun for a chat, Chude also shared the unique experiences of StateCraft Inc. and its work on elections in Africa, the business of nation-building, and the urgency for a newer generation of Africans who are directly involved in the politics of the continent in their respective countries.
To determine the future of this wonderful continent, it is important to get involved. This is not just about Africans living in Africa. There are strong voices and minds in diaspora driving change for Africa, so the battle does not only exist in Africa, he said.
The interview preceded two further discussions, with the first at the University of Massachusetts Center for Peace, Democracy and Development at the UMass Boston Campus Center in Boston and another at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession where Jideonwo was interviewed by Kenneth Ononeze Okwor for the Harvard African Policy Journal.
How to Win Elections in Africa: Parallels with Donald Trump United States of America book tour will continue in the coming days with book discussions in Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. on Monday, 4 and Tuesday, 5 December, 2017.
The discussion in Pennsylvania will be about governance and politics in the context of building businesses and creating value in and for Africa at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania while the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies will host the discussion in Washington D.C.
Following kidnap complaint made by one Ibrahim Nasir about his 18-year-old wife, Mrs. Fatima Muhammed, operatives of Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Nasarawa State Command stormed the alleged kidnappers den to rescue the lady alongside 15-year-old Hafsat Adamu.
According to the state commandant of NSCDC, Mr. Mamud Gidado-Fari, the victims who have been locked up for over a week by the yet to be identified suspect, were rescued last Friday at Line Supper Cinema in the Lafia LGA of the state.
We forced our way into the room and found the woman alongside a 15-year-old girl, Hasat Adamu, he said. The motive of the abductor had yet to be determined. . The nature of the case is what we are trying to investigate because as it is, we dont know whether the motive of the abductor was ransom or for ritual.
Punch reports that the rescued housewife who spoke to newsmen, however claimed that she was at her lovers place when some NSCDC operatives broke into the room and whisked her away.
Vice president of Catalonia, Oriol Junqueras and three other separatist leaders will remain in prison pending a probe over their role in the regions independence drive, a judge decided Monday, just as Catalan elections approach.
Six other former ministers who were also remanded in custody last month will be released on bail of 100,000 euros ($120,000) each as an investigation into charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds continues, the Madrid court said in a statement.
The decision comes as axed Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont faces an extradition hearing in Belgium, where he escaped to after his regions parliament declared independence on October 27, claiming he would not get a fair trial back home.
Spain is seeking to have Puigdemont and four of his former ministers who also fled with him sent back to face charges over their role in the independence drive.
News that Junqueras, Joaquim Forn, who used to be in charge of interior matters in Catalonia, and the leaders of two pro-independence associations will stay in prison comes as the official campaign for Catalan elections on December 21 kicks off at midnight.
Madrid called the polls after the independence declaration, sacked Catalonias government and suspended the regions autonomy.
Supreme Court Judge Pablo Llarena decided there was a risk that Junqueras and the three others would repeat their alleged offences if he released them.
Source: ( AFP )
The Federal High Court in Lagos on Monday issue a bench warrant against a former governor of Enugu State, Chimaroke Nnamani, who was charged with an alleged fraud of N5.3bn.
Justice Chuka Obiozor issued bench warrant against the ex-governor for failing to appear in court on Monday for his scheduled re-arraignment.
The judge held that Nnamanis counsel failed to give a tenable reason why his client was absent from court.
Source: ( Punch Newspaper )
The comedian on his IG page, penned down an open letter to former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, who yesterday returned to PDP as he plans to contest for presidency in 2019. Atiku in a live video on Facebook, berated the APC for ignoring the youths of Nigeria. Read what I Go Dye wrote below
Dont use sentimental empathy on the youths to express your political ambitions.
Sir, you are one of those that have immensely benefited from Nigeria since your birth in 1946.
Having worked for 20years with the Nigeria Customs where you retired at the age of 43 in 1989 as Deputy Director, your bucket list sure looks good because you were obviously employed at youth 23.
In 1999 you became governor of Adamawa and ultimately the Vice President, all of these you achieved at 53. What did you do during your time in that exalted position? When will the youths like in your time get a chance? am motivated to speak, based on your statement : A party that does not take the youths into account is a dying party.The future belong to young.Please which of the future?
Remarkably, between 1999 and 2007 that you were the Vice president of Nigeria, it is recorded that tertiary institutions witnessed several strikes that wasted seventeen months ,three weeks and three days.Within this period, what did you do?
If social support were given to youths then,their children will be between 18 and 20years during the 2019 elections,obviously they would have willingly voted for you or anyone that you endorse in 2019.This is the essence of making sacrifices for the future generation.
You cannot be credited to have been a philanthropic to the youths.
The recent revocation of the NPA contract with Intel,your company,is the major issue.
As a company either, the people in the region you operated cannot accredit Intel to have provided credible support for the youths or built skills acquisition centers to curb unproductivity as part of its cooperate social responsibility , which has resulted to many youths embarking on the sub- sahara deserts route treking to Europe,which has claimed many lives.
Your excellency,sir Atiku Abubakar, please dont use sentimental empathy on the youths to express your political ambitions,because by 2019 the youths are preparing to substantiate the real economical,political and progressive change.
I kindly recommend that you should advocate for process that will afford us
the opportunity of a youthful leadership in the 2019 election.Thanks Amb Francis
Prominent politician in Kaduna, Alhaji Yaro Makama Rigachikun has revealed that he made a grave mistake taking membership with the APC in 2015.
Former Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Kaduna State, Alhaji Yaro Makama Rigachikun, who decamped to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2015, has dumped the party. Rigachikun returned to the PDP, along with his followers at the weekend in Kaduna.
He was received back to the party at a ceremony attended by top leaders of the PDP, including the interim National Chairman of the party, Senator Ahmed Makarfi and the Chairman, Board of Trustees (BoT), Senator Walid Jibrin, among several others.
Speaking during the occasion, Rigachikun said he made a grave mistake by joining the APC in 2015. Speaking in Hausa language, he said the APC has failed Nigerians, declaring that the time had come to change the change.
He said he joined the party, thinking it would address the numerous problems confronting Nigerians, regretting that over two years since its assumption of power, Nigerians were plunged into untold hardship. He condemned the sacking of teachers and local government workers in Kaduna State, alleging that Governor Nasir el-Rufai was implementing anti-people programmes.
He said the governor should start packing his belongings from the Government House, as the people will not vote him again in 2019. The APC has brought much suffering to Nigerians, in Kaduna State, the teachers are crying, local government workers are suffering and traditional institutions are ridiculed.
The school feeding program is in comatose, in fact, nothing is working in the state, so we must change the change he said. Hundreds of the defecting members burnt their brooms, the APC symbol.
Rigachikun, who is said to be a closed political ally of Makarfi, was the chairman of PDP in Kaduna State for eight years when Makarfi was governor.
The leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB , Nnamdi Kanu, claims that he is been owed $800m by the Federal Government for his alleged unlawful arrest and detention in 2015.
Nnamdi was granted bail by the Federal High Court in Abuja where he is being prosecuted alongside others on charges of treasonable felony.
This is contained in his response to the motion filed by the Federal Government asking the Community Court of the Economic Community of West African States sitting in Abuja to dismiss a fundamental human rights enforcement suit filed by the IPOB leader.
Kanu had filed the suit on March 3, 2016 demanding $800m as compensation from the Federal Government for his alleged unlawful arrest in 2015 and detention.
But the Federal Government, through its lawyer, Mrs. Maimuna Shiru, filed its motion on November 13, stating that Kanu having been granted bail by the Federal High Court in Abuja on April 25, 2017, and allegedly jumped bail, the judgment of the ECOWAS Court on the suit would serve no purpose.
But Kanu, through his lawyer, Mr. Ifeanyi Ejiofor, objected to the Federal Governments motion contending that granting bail to the IPOB leader was just a partial satisfaction of prayers sought in the suit.
He maintained that the ECOWAS Court had the power to grant his client the $800m compensation sought since the IPOB leaders rights had been violated.
Ejiofor stated in his written address, We submit therefore that the court has powers to order for payment of compensatory damages when found that the plaintiffs right has been violated.
Source: ( Punch Newspaper )
Former Yemeni President, Ali Abdullah Saleh has been killed amid fighting between his supporters and their former allies, the Houthi rebel movement.
Yemens ex-president, Ali Abdullah Saleh has been killed by Houthi rebels near the capital, Sanaa, a development expected to have major implications for the war in the Arab worlds poorest country.
The death was first announced on Monday by the Sanaa-based interior ministry, controlled by Salehs allies-turned-foes, the Houthi rebel movement.
His killing was later confirmed to Al Jazeera by Salehs political party, the General Peoples Congress (GPC).
Footage circulating on social media appeared to display a body resembling Saleh, with one video showing how armed militiamen used a blanket to move the corpse into the back of a pick-up truck.
There were earlier reports that the Houthis blew up one of Salehs houses, after storming the property. Houthi sources said Saleh was killed by the rebels in a rocket-propelled grenade and shooting attack on his car at a checkpoint outside Sanaa.
Yasser al-Awadi, the GPCs assistant secretary-general, was also killed.
In a statement read out on a Houthi television network, the interior ministry announced the killing of Saleh and his supporters.
This is after he and his men blockaded the roads and killed civilians in a clear collaboration with the enemy countries of the coalition, the statement said.
The ministry also said its forces had taken over all the positions and strongholds of the treacherous militia in the capital, Sanna, and the surrounding areas, as well as other provinces in order to impose security.
Sources close to Saleh told Al Jazeera that the head of the former presidents security detail, Hussein al-Hamidi, was also killed, but did not provide further details.
An Australian lawmaker popped the question to his gay partner in parliament on Monday, with the first ever proposal in the chamber coming shortly after a bill paving the way for same-sex marriage was introduced.
Tim Wilson, who has reportedly been engaged to Ryan Bolger for nine years, fought back tears as he thanked his fiance for enduring a marriage debate that has been the soundtrack to our relationship.
In my first speech, I defined our bond by the ring that sits on both of our left hands that they are the answer to the questions we cannot ask, the 37-year-old lawmaker from the ruling conservative party said.
So, there is only one thing left to do: Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?
Bolger, who was sitting in the public gallery, quickly responded yes as the floor erupted in applause.
That was a yes, a resounding yes, House Speaker Rob Mitchell noted for the record. Congratulations, well done mate.
The Australian House of Representatives official twitter account confirmed later that after reviewing past records, Wilsons proposal was likely the first ever in that chamber of Parliament.
Update: Weve dug through Hansard and @timwilsoncomau appears to be the first ever Member to propose on the floor of the House, it tweeted.
Wilson earlier emotionally recalled the uneasiness he experienced with some friends when he and Bolger were first engaged.
Many simply didnt know how to react. Many SMS went unresponded. In conversations, some people politely changed the topic, or fell silent entirely, he said.
His partner had pushed him to have an engagement party.
On informing one person of our news, they responded: Why bother?
At the time, I fell silent and I have never had an answer to that question. But the Australian people have now answered that for me.
The same-sex marriage bill being debated is expected to comfortably pass through the House of Representatives before Christmas after the upper house Senate last week overwhelmingly voted in its favour.
After more than a decade of debate, Australians emphatically endorsed gay marriage in a recent nationwide postal vote, with some 62 percent of the 12.7 million who took part voting yes last month.
This is a historic moment of inclusion, of recognition, of respect, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said shortly after the bill was introduced for debate in the lower house Monday.
This is a day to be especially proud that all of our friends, our colleagues, our neighbours, our brothers, our sisters, can marry the people they love.
Former conservative prime minister Tony Abbott, a leading voice in the no campaign, said he would now back the bill.
I certainly dont pretend to be an overnight convert to support same-sex marriage but I am pledged to respect and to facilitate the verdict of the Australian people, he said.
Same-sex marriage should now be recognised. It will now be recognised.
Abbott moved an amendment he said protected discrimination against anyone over their conscientious view about the nature of marriage, before saying he planned to attend his gay sisters wedding next year.
I am looking forward to attending the marriage of my sister, Christine, to her partner Virginia some time early in the new year.
Source: (AFP)
Following viral social media rape posts against Francis Nwaze, Technical Assistant to Governor Dave Umahi of Ebonyi State on New Media, he has reportedly been arrested.
It was gathered that the rape victim, Esther Odinakachi, an undergraduate student of Ebonyi State University led men of the Special Anti Robbery Squad from the Ebonyi police command who arrested Nwaze and remanded him in police custody for interrogation.
Punch reports that Odinakachi said;
He lied to you that he didnt touch me. If he never touched me, how did I know his house? Even though the incident happened late in the night and I was helpless because of the reckless way he drove, I was able to identify the location. But I dont know the address. He was arrested around 10pm. When he was arrested, he started making calls to the state governor to intimidate me. He thought he could take advantage of me because I am a student. His family members have been begging me, but I have refused to back down. I have a lot of evidence against him.
It was also gathered that medical test conducted on her showed there was forceful penetration, even though the governors aide denied the allegation saying he had nothing to do with Odinakachi.
Reacting to the allegation, the Chief Press Secretary to the Governor Umahi, Emmanuel Uzor said:
There was no report of such an incident to the government or the security agencies. We read about it on Facebook and then The PUNCH. It was your paper that informed us. I am not aware that he was arrested by the police. I spoke with him yesterday (Saturday). This is a government that believes in human rights. If this (rape) truly happened, she should have explored the option of the office of Her Excellency, the wife of the state governor, to tell her story. The wife of the governor has been an advocate of such cases, whether sexual or otherwise. We also have the Ministry of Women Affairs and Youth Development. Personally, I believe if such a thing happened, the victim should have come to the government to let us know about it. As it stands now, I dont have any case of rape. Whatever is happening in that case is shrouded in mystery. There is no proper channel to link the government with what is happening. When I first read it on Facebook, I called Nwaze to know what really happened. From what he said, it is a case of blackmail because of the way it is being celebrated. It is being celebrated by the opposition. So, I see it as one of the efforts to silence a voice that has been terrorising them. If he was arrested, I am not aware. If he raped anybody, I am not aware. And that is the position of the governor.
However as at 8:55pm on Saturday, December 2, 2017, Nwaze was still functioning in his capacity as the governors media aide as he posted some of the governors activities on his Facebook page.
A married woman has cried out bitterly, telling of how her own husband left her alone after only one month into their marriage.
Halima Salihu, an Abuja-based businesswoman, has approached a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) sitting at Maitama, Abuja, seeking the dissolution of her marriage to her husband, John Nouhayin, on the grounds of desertion.
According to Nigerian Tribune, the petitioner informed the court, presided over by Justice Peter Affen, that she got married to the respondent on June 16, 2014 at the Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC) marriage registry and were issued with a marriage certificate.
According to her, her husband left their Kubwa, Abuja residence on July 27, 2014 without telling her anything, only for her to later discover that some of his belongings were no longer in the house.
My Lord, we got married on the 16th of June, 2014 at AMAC marriage registry. We were given a marriage certificate that day. We moved in together as husband and wife after the marriage.
On the 27th of July, 2014, he left the house at Kubwa without saying anything to me. I waited throughout that day. His line (telephone) was not going through.
I later found out that some of his belongings were no longer in the house, the petitioner told the court.
She informed that she contacted her husbands family to tell them the issue on ground but the response they gave was unsatisfactory.
The petitioner added that it was then she contacted her uncle and told him what was happening.
My uncle met with his family who told him that he had travelled out of the country and that he was no longer interested in the marriage. I still waited hoping that he would change his mind and come back.
But up till now, he has not come back. That is why I brought the matter before my Lord, the petitioner told the court.
She, therefore, pleaded with the court to dissolve the marriage.
Counsel for the husband, Abubakar Muhammed, told the court that he did not want to cross-examine the plaintiff.
He stated that based on the instruction of his client, all the wife said in her petition before the court was true.
According to the counsel, based on the instruction of my client, the respondent confirmed that all she claimed in her petition is true and he has no objection to the petition.
Muhammed then urged the court to grant the relief sought by the petitioner.
Meanwhile, Justice Affen has directed parties in the matter to file their written addresses within seven days from Wednesday, November 29.
He, therefore, adjourned the case till December 5 for adoption of final addresses.
The Peoples Democratic Party, Lagos State, has endorsed Chief Olabode George as their preferred candidate for the National Chairmanship position during the forthcoming December 9 National Convention of the party.
The State Chairman of PDP, Dr Moshood Salvador, gave the certification at a feedback meeting between George and members of the party, held at the partys secretariat in GRA, Ikeja.
George had been on a campaign in the Southern states of the country to seek support for votes ahead of the National Convention.
There are about eight aspirants jostling for the National chairmanship seat of the party from the south.
They include the former Governor of Ogun State, Chief Gbenga Daniel; former Minister of Education, Prof. Tunde Adeniran; former Minister of Youth Development, Prof. Taoheed Adedoja; and former Lagos State PDP governorship candidate, Mr Jimi Agbaje.
Others are Prince Uche Secondus, a former acting National Chairman of PDP, and Chief Raymond Dokpesi.
Salvador said, On behalf of Lagos PDP, we must vote for Chief Bode George come Dec. 9; the Southwest is the rightful region to have the chairman of our great party.
In the last dispensation, Ekiti produced the Vice- Chairman while Osun and Oyo states took the highest office. It is only Lagos that is left and what we want is the chairman.
The South-east and the South-south have produced a chairman before that is why it is our turn to have the chairman of PDP.
Earlier, George assured members that if given the opportunity to serve, he would re-establish the culture and tradition put in place by the founding fathers of the PDP.
If I am given the opportunity, I will not be new to the management of this party because the partys constitution is not going to be new to me; I know its provisions as I know the back of my hand.
We grew up with the party and the founding fathers handed over the culture of the party to us and that is what we would re-establish.
Just check out, from the end of our convention to the national election is a very short time, it is not a time where you can do experimentation, it is not a time you can bring a greenhorn to be the chairman of the party.
If you are desirous that you want to win that election, on that day before you cast your votes search your consciences and think very carefully.
Secondly, it is not a matter of life and death, if I dont believe that I have anything to offer, I will not be here.
I will not compromise on things that are not right and are not in the constitution.
I will do things the way they should be done and everybody will be happy. That was how our founding fathers were moving the party forward, George said.
Source: ( Punch Newspaper)
Legendary Indian actor and veteran Bollywood star, Shiashi Kapoor, passed away Monday, at the age of 79, family members said.
The actor was admitted to the Kokilaben hospital in Mumbai.
He was administered several rounds of dialysis at the hospital and today evening he breathed his last, a family member told media.
Born on March 18, 1938 in Kolkata city in Indias eastern state of West Bengal, Kapoor made his debut in 1961, as the lead actor, in the Hindi film Dharamputra.
Prior to it, he began his acting career as a child artiste in the 1940s.
Reports said he acted in more than 175 films mainly in mainstream Bollywood and art films. Kapoor has worked in English films too.
The actors performance has been widely acknowledged and has been felicitated with several awards.
Kapoors death has been widely condoled in India.
A number of people took to social networking websites to express condolences and recalled their association with the deceased.
Kapoor earned acclaim for his performance in notable Hindi films which include Deewaar, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Junoon, Shaan, Namak Halaal and others.
He had been suffering from ailments for the past few years.
Local media reports said Kapoor will be cremated on Tuesday.
Source: (dpa/NAN)
#OurMumuDonDo activists led by Charly Boy held a dramatic protest at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs today, asking the Nigerian government to stop the slavery in Libya.
They used masking tapes to cover their mouths and iron chains to cuff themselves as they protested. More photos below
The Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, ( NSCDC) Nasarawa State Chapter , rescued a housewife,identified as Mrs. Fatima Muhammed, 18, and Hafsat Adamu, 15, who were allegedly abducted by a yet-to-be-identified criminal.
The state commandant of the NSCDC, Mr. Mamud Gidado-Fari, who disclosed this in an interview with Northern City News on Sunday, said the victims were rescued last Friday at Line Supper Cinema in the Lafia Local Government Area of the state.
According to him, one Ibrahim Nasir reported to the command that his wife had been kidnapped by certain unknown person.
Gidado-Fari said security operatives swung into action, rescued the housewife and handed her over to her husband.
Gidado-Fari explained that the housewife was found at the kidnappers hideout, where she had been locked up for a week by the suspect.
We forced our way into the room and found the woman alongside a 15-year-old girl, Hasat Adamu, he said.
He said the teenager had also been handed over to her parents, noting that the motive of the abductor had yet to be determined.
The commandant said, The nature of the case is what we are trying to investigate because as it is, we dont know whether the motive of the abductor was ransom or for ritual. The suspect is at large, but by the time we get him, we shall investigate his motive.
But Fatima said she was not abducted, saying she was at her lovers place when some NSCDC operatives broke into the room and whisked her away.
She said, I was with my sick mother from morning till evening and when it was time for me to go home I decided to see my old boyfriend at the Tudun kwari area of Lafia Local Government Area of Nasarawa State, because I didnt have money for transport.
I had to stay till the following day because it was late and before I knew what was happening, I saw NSCDC (operatives) breaking into my boyfriends room and that was how I was arrested.
She stated that she left her matrimonial home because she had been having issues with her husband since they got married.
I am a married woman, but I left my matrimonial home because I have been having quarrels with my husband ever since we got married. My husband had told me not to go anywhere there is crisis and there was never a day I disobeyed him, Fatima stated.
Meanwhile, Gidado-Fari told Nothern City News that the Nasarawa NSCDC command had arrested over 15 suspected criminals within two weeks, noting that they were apprehended for various offences bordering on theft, kidnapping, rape and armed robbery.
Gidado-Fari explained that seven of the suspects had been charged to court while the remaining suspects would be arraigned this week.
Source: ( Northern City News )
The head office of Saclux Nigeria Limited, the manufacturer of Saclux Paint, was on Sunday gutted by fire in Umuahia, Abia State.
Southern City News learnt that the inferno, which started at about 1.30pm, consumed properties worth millions of naira.
Although the cause of the fire could not be immediately ascertained, men of the Abia State Fire Service were seen battling to contain the fire when our correspondent visited the scene.
An eyewitness, who identified herself only as Ada, said the residents living around the industry got to know of the inferno when they sighted thick smoke emanating from the industry.
She said they had to join hands with some workers in the company to stop the fire from spreading to nearby buildings before the men of the fire service arrived.
Nobody knew what caused the fire incident. We only got to know that the company premises was on fire when we saw the thick black smoke from one of the buildings. We joined hands with others to ensure that the fire did not spread beyond the company premises before the fire fighters came, she said.
One of the firemen, who craved anonymity, said the fire service hurried to scene immediately it received a distress call from a worker in the company.
He urged Abia residents to be careful about the way they handle inflammable materials, adding that they should always contact the fire service on time in the event of any fire outbreak.
Source: ( Southern City News )
The Adamawa Command of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, NSCDC, has confirmed the arrest of five suspects who allegedly specialise in luring and raping teenagers in Mubi town of Adamawa.
The Commands Public Relations Officer, Suleiman Baba, confirmed the arrest of the suspects to the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, on Monday in Yola.
Mr. Baba said that the suspects were apprehended following a tip-off that led to the arrest of one of them whose confession and that of their four victims ranging between the ages of 12 and 10 were used to fish out the rest.
Mr. Baba said medical reports confirmed that the minors had been violated.
We are taking the suspects to court and they will be charged with rape, criminal force and assault on minors, Baba said.
While nothing that the victims were girl hawkers, Mr. Baba cautioned parents on sending their little children to hawk instead of school.
Parents need to be vigilant on the movement of their wards if we must tackle this problem, Mr. Baba said.
He gave the names of the suspects as: Abdullahi Ibrahim (32), Musa Mohammed (31), Bakura Mohammed (39), Joseph John (29), and Mohammed Musa (42).
Also speaking, a resident of Mubi town, Danladi Chamber, who lauded the development said residents would be mobilised to support NSCDC to expose more suspects.
We are working on a theory that those rapists of minors are syndicate; we need to work and expose those dangerous people, Mr. Chamber said.
Source: (NAN)
The Caretaker Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) , Senator Ahmed Makarfi, has said he could still contest the partys presidential ticket despite Atikus defection.
Makarfi stated this in an interview published in the current edition of The Interview magazine, noting that Atiku had earlier left the PDP and had come back.
When asked about his interest to run , Makarfi said, By the time I leave as a caretaker committee chairman on December 9 or 10, there will still be 10 months to the party primaries. By any law or the partys guidelines, Im not excluded.
Makarfi also said in the interview that Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayoses declaration of interest in the partys presidential ticket, is uncalled for and unhealthy.
We are expecting a harvest of defections from the APC. Wait a bit and you will see the influx of people into the PDP, he added.
The HIV and AIDS Specialist, UNICEF, Kaduna, Dr Idris Baba, has raised alarm over the increasing number of people who do not know their HIV status.
The United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) said on Monday that less than 10 per cent of young people in Kaduna State knew their HIV status.
The HIV and AIDS Specialist, UNICEF, Kaduna, Dr Idris Baba, made this known in Kaduna at the 2017 World AIDS Day, organised by the Kaduna State Agency for the Control of AIDS (KADSACA).
The activity began with a rally from the Ministry of Health to KADSACA office along Katuru Road, Malali.
Baba said the figure, based on the 2017 data of the United Nations Programm on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS), also showed that about 160,000 people died as a result of AIDS-related illness in Nigeria in 2016.
He further said that 15 per cent of Nigerian youths of less than 15 years engaged in sexual debut, adding that the development had increased HIV vulnerability among young people.
Baba SAID there was also very low HIV testing rates with only 17 per cent of young people knowing their HIV status in the country, adding that of the figure, less than 10 per cent was recorded in Kaduna State as at 2016.
The specialist also said for various reasons, ranging from gender, biological to socio-economy; young women had a higher HIV prevalence and were infected earlier in life than men of the same age group.
He said that UNICEF had committed significant resources in supporting Adolescent and Young Persons (AYPs) HIV interventions in the state.
The intervention is ongoing in Igabi, Birnin Gwari, Lere, kagarko, Chikun, Jaba and Jemaa Local Government Areas of the state.
This is part of our goals of ensuring that 90 per cent HIV positive AYPs know their status, 90 per cent HIV positive placed on treatment.
According to him, UNICEF will also ensure that 90 per cent of those on treatment achieve viral suppression by 2020.
UNICEF has also committed to supporting Kaduna State achieve elimination of Mother-to-Child-Transmission (PMTCT) of HIV by saturating the identified 14 high burden LGAs with PMTCT services.
The LGAs include: Chikun, Igabi, Jaba, Jemaa, Kachia, Kaduna North, Kagarko, Kauru, Lere, Sanga, Soba, Zangon Kataf, Sabon Gari, and Kaduna South.
Baba commended the state government for the successes so far recorded in HIV response in the state, stressing that the state recorded HIV 5.6 per cent prevalence in the state 2001 while the figure increased to 7 per cent in 2007.
He, however, said that following sustained coordinated prevention, the prevalence had consistently declined to 2.2 per in 2014.
Also speaking, the Commissioner for Health and Human Services, Dr Paul Dogo, said that the states HIV/AIDS response would remain strong and resilient.
Dogo also said the state could do better by further reducing the burden of HIV, especially among the AYPs population in the state.
Dr Mark Anthony, the Executive Secretary, KADSACA, thanked UNICEF, UNFPA, Society for Family Health, and other development partners for supporting the states HIV response in no small measure.
On his part, the Coordinator of People Living with HIV/AIDS in the state, Bala Sumaila, urged the state government and other stakeholders to carry members of the organisation along in HIV and AIDS response to ensure success.
The officials of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Nasarawa State Command, says it has rescued a housewife who was abducted, while she insists she wasnt kidnapped.
An 18-year-old housewife, Mrs. Fatima Muhammed, and 15-year-old Hafsat Adamu, who were allegedly abducted by a yet-to-be-identified criminal, have been rescued by operatives of Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Nasarawa State Command.
While speaking in an interview with Northern City News on Sunday, the state commandant of the NSCDC, Mamud Gidado-Fari, disclosed that the victims were rescued last Friday at Line Supper Cinema in the Lafia Local Government Area of the state.
According to him, one Ibrahim Nasir reported to the command that his wife had been kidnapped by certain unknown person.
Gidado-Fari said security operatives swung into action, rescued the housewife and handed her over to her husband, adding that the housewife was found at the kidnappers hideout, where she had been locked up for a week by the suspect.
We forced our way into the room and found the woman alongside a 15-year-old girl, Hasat Adamu, he said, adding that the teenager had also been handed over to her parents, noting that the motive of the abductor had yet to be determined.
The commandant said, The nature of the case is what we are trying to investigate because as it is, we dont know whether the motive of the abductor was ransom or for ritual. The suspect is at large, but by the time we get him, we shall investigate his motive.
But Fatima said she was not abducted, saying she was at her lovers place when some NSCDC operatives broke into the room and whisked her away.
She said, I was with my sick mother from morning till evening and when it was time for me to go home I decided to see my old boyfriend at the Tudun kwari area of Lafia Local Government Area of Nasarawa State, because I didnt have money for transport.
I had to stay till the following day because it was late and before I knew what was happening, I saw NSCDC (operatives) breaking into my boyfriends room and that was how I was arrested.
She stated that she left her matrimonial home because she had been having issues with her husband since they got married.
I am a married woman, but I left my matrimonial home because I have been having quarrels with my husband ever since we got married. My husband had told me not to go anywhere there is crisis and there was never a day I disobeyed him, Fatima stated.
A Honda Civic and a white Nissan Cabstar were both involved in an accident at Olorunsogo village along the Abeokuta-Sagamu Expressway, leaving three persons dead.
The Public Relations Officer, Traffic Compliance and Enforcement Corps (TRACE), Mr. Babatunde Akinbiyi, who confirmed the incident to the News Agency of Nigeria on Sunday, said the accident happened on Saturday.
Akinbiyi said the driver of the Nissan Cabstar, with number plate, KSF 906 XR, was speeding when he lost control.
He said the car left its lane for another lane, which led to a head-on collision with the Honda with number plate, GBE 495 AA.
The driver of the Nissan Cabstar was on top speed when he lost control and crossed to the opposite lane. He then hit the oncoming vehicle.
The accident involved eight people: six males and two females. Three males died in the accident, while two people sustained various degrees of injury, Akinbiyi said.
The TRACE spokesman said the corpses of the victims were taken to the Federal Medical Centre mortuary in Abeokuta, and the injured persons were admitted to the same hospital.
The Sector Commander, Federal Road Safety Corps, Ogun State, Mr Clement Oladele, also confirmed the incident.
Source: ( Punch Newspaper )
Some village heads have reportedly been brutally killed in some communities in Plateau State after Fulani herdsmen attacked the place.
According to a report by Daily Sun, unconfirmed sources, on Monday, revealed that the village heads of Dong and Lawaru, Dabang Kayako and Ferdinand Boro, respectively have both been killed in the herdsmen militia attacks that occurred in the communities early in the day.
Locals said a military aircraft is currently hovering over the area apparently to nip the crisis in the bud.
Some members of staff of the University of Lagos, Akoka have staged a protest in the school to drive home their demands.
Non-academic staff at the University of Lagos on Monday protest what they termed the Federal Governments unequal distribution of allowance.
The protesters shut the institutions gate.
When a Punch correspondent got to the scene of the protest at 11.48am, there was heavy traffic along major roads leading to the university gate as a result of the protest.
The workers, who held leaves, were also chanting anti-oppression songs.
They accused the Federal Government of downgrading their importance in the nations education system.
A cancer centre championed by the former Nigerian First Lady, Turai YarAdua, has been revealed to currently lie abandoned.
The many residents of the city o Abuja have called for a revamp of the cancer centre project that was championed by former President Umaru YarAduas wife Turai for health delivery to the vulnerable in the country, The Nation reports.
On July 18, 2009, she assembled the Nigerian rich and government contractors to a fundraising in Abuja, which was also attended by her usually taciturn husband, who was battling some complicated diseases at the time.
Financial pledges made by the galaxy of guests to actualise her dream amounted to N6.8 billion.
The International Cancer Centre, (ICC) Abuja was born.
But since then, apart from the imposing structure on the Umaru YarAdua Express Road, the project is now virtually abandoned, according to a report by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).
One of the security guards at the ICC, who simply identified himself as Garba confirmed the abandonment.
He said there had been no activities to actualise the centre, as envisioned by Turai YarAdua.
According to him, Turai came two times in 2016 to the site. She had not been seen around the area since then.
We have not seen her this year, but some people often come around to see the progress of the place, he said.
Garba said some bandits invaded the ICC last year to disposess them of their valuables, adding that few items belonging to the centre were also stolen..
He added that some policemen from the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) had since been deployed to secure the ICC against further attacks.
Six of us were employed to secure this place and we do alternate, but because the bandits were fully armed, they overpowered us and beat the security guards.
The desolate centre was more palpable at a park for scores of tricycles meant to be conveying patients. Weeds have swamped the tricycles.
Worried by the delay in completing the ICC, one the residents of Abuja, Mr. Gabriel Oluwabunmi, berated those responsible for the abandoned project, adding that such noble idea that could bring relief to the masses, should have been completed without the usual hiccup.
He called on the authorities to ensure that the project was resuscitated, adding that such cancer centre would help bring succour to those ravaged by the disease and especially those who could not afford to be flown abroad.
Miss Ngozi Chukwuma, whose relative is suffering from the cancer, called on the Federal Government to ensure the completion of the centre to enable Nigerians who could not afford overseas treatment to patronise it.
She said such project would go a long way in assuaging the feeling of Nigerians who could not afford the treatment as a result of heavy monetary demand.
Mrs. Yaradua had in her speech during the launch of the centre said the whole idea of establishing the cancer centre was conceived out of her desire to contribute her quota to achieving standard healthcare delivery for the vulnerable.
According to her, the centre would specifically render services to women and children, especially the rural and urban poor.
When NAN visited the National Hospital Abuja, which is offering an alternative treatment to cancer patients, the staff appeared so overwhelmed with the huge number of cancer patients.
A cancer patient who craved anonymity called on the Federal Government to assist in revamping the centre, adding that this would go a long way in decongesting the national hospital from cancer patients with special attention.
Mr. Mohammed Lawal, an Abuja based businessman, called on the government not to abandon the centre, adding that though it was a private initiative; the government could also intervene to revamp it.
The ICC, according to its promoter, was meant to focus on four types of cancer that account for most deaths in Nigeria: cervical cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer and throat cancer.
Crawford & Company (Canada) Inc. today announced that is honoured to have won the Insurance Business Canada, Outstanding Claims Service Award. This award recognizes organizations that have a proven track record for providing best-in-class claims management service. Crawford is grateful for the ongoing support and recognition of our clients and the marketplace.As an organization, fostering a positive corporate culture that supports the growth and development of our people and focuses on enhancing the overall claims experience through exceptional service, is central to what we are all about, said Pat Van Bakel, president and chief executive officer, Crawford & Company (Canada) Inc. Everyone at Crawford has worked so hard over the last year to offer customized service solutions to our clients while delivering superior service. I am proud of our achievement and grateful to our clients for their continued support.Crawfords commitment to enhancing the claims experience through digital innovation, new product development and enhanced service offering is reflected in many of the initiatives that have been launched throughout 2017. From Crawford 360 to Crawford Compliance and WeGoLook , Crawford has grown and evolved as an organization.Our commitment to enhancing the claims experience to address the evolving needs of our clients has never been stronger, and we look forward to sharing new products and solutions with our customers in the New Year, states Pat Van Bakel.
Arthur J. Gallagher has announced the acquisition of Illinois-based Weiss Insurance Agencies. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Weiss Insurance Agencies was founded in 1905. The company provides a full range of employee benefits, property-casualty, financial and retirement products, as well as human-resources consulting services. John Weiss, James Parilli Jr. and Arthur Pizzello will continue to operate the company from its current locations in Wayne, Ill., and Carmel, Ind. They will report to John Neumaier, head of Gallaghers Great Lakes employee-benefits consulting and brokerage operations, and Patrick M. Gallagher, who heads the companys Midwest retail property-casualty brokerage operations.
Weiss Insurance Agencies offers deep client expertise, an entrepreneurial spirit and a responsive, client-focused culture that complements our own, said J. Patrick Gallagher Jr., president, chairman and CEO of Gallagher.
I am delighted to welcome John, James, Arthur and their associates to our growing Gallagher family of professionals.
It was less than a week ago that we revealed Wells Fargos plans to exit the insurance business following allegations of a sales scandal and today we can announce that a deal has been done for the firms insurance arm.USI Insurance Services has closed its acquisition of Wells Fargo Insurance Services USA, formerly part of the Wells Fargo Company in a deal that encompasses the insurance brokerage, consulting, employee benefits and property and casualty national practices. It also takes into account its safehold special risk, student insurance, individual health and private risk management insurance lines and small business insurance.With the combined strength of our two market leading companies, USI is one of the largest and strongest insurance brokerage and consulting firms in the world, said Michael J. Sicard, chairman and CEO, USI Insurance Services. We serve large risk management clients, middle market companies, smaller firms, and individuals with a full range of property & casualty, employee benefits, personal risk, program and retirement solutions. We are thrilled to join together with the tremendous professionals of Wells Fargo Insurance Services.USI is one of the largest insurance brokerage and consulting firms in the world, offering property and casualty, employee benefits, personal risk, program and retirement solutions to large risk management clients, middle market companies, smaller firms and individuals. Its headquarters are in New York and it has over 150 offices with 6,000 industry professionals on board making it the right fit according to Perry Pelos, head of Wells Fargo Wholesale Banking.This strategic transaction is the result of hard work from the outstanding teams of both companies, he said. I also want to recognize the extremely talented team of professionals who are leaving Wells Fargo to join USI. Im confident they will continue to be successful as they serve clients insurance needs as part of this strong industry leader.Terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.
Banks across America have moved forward with an initiative meant to help shield financial companies from industry-crippling cyberattacks.Dubbed Sheltered Harbor, the project involves the participation of various banks and credit unions that have about 400 million accounts in the US. Members of the Sheltered Harbor project are required to individually back up data so that it can be used by other member firms to serve customers in the event of a debilitating data breach.Banks can pay fees between $250 and $25,000 a year to participate in the national data backup initiative, depending on their size. Members must also follow guidelines on formatting their backup data, creating the backup vault, and submitting to audits. The data submitted must be able to cover an affected banks customers within 48 hours of a data breach.The concept for Sheltered Harbor was conceived last year by the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center and its trade group members.Sheltered Harbors 34-member board is composed of representatives from all walks of the financial sector including executives from big banks, financial groups, trade associations, clearinghouses, and broker-dealers.The projects development comes after credit bureau Equifax had revealed in September that its data had been breached, exposing the personal information of as many as 145.5 million consumers.Similar cyberattacks could be staged on banking companies, crippling their ability to operate. Experts project that when data breaches disable banks and prevent customers from accessing their accounts, it could cause a disastrous domino effect panicking customers with unaffected banks to withdraw their funds en-masse, potentially sparking a run on the wider banking system.So far, most people think about cyber in terms of having a credit card stolen, MIT Sloan School of Management information technologies professor Stuart Madnick explained to Wall Street Journal. What youre talking about now is a nuclear attack: If you cant get to the ATM and get it to work.Although the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) have measures in place to help the financial industry recover in the event of emergencies such as the Reserves discount window that allows banks to borrow and the FDICs deposit insurance guarantees such measures were designed to counter bank failures related to a firms solvency or liquidity.
On October 3, 2017, two major Left political parties, the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified, Marxist and Leninist (CPN-UML), and the Nepal Communist Party-Maoist (CPN-M), along with a new fraction of the Maoists, the Naya Shakti Party, formed an alliance for the upcoming election for seven provincial legislatures and the federal parliament to be held on November 26 and December 7. However, the Naya Shakti party, days after the alliance formation, exited from it as the party was sidelined in choice-based seat sharing, and aligned instead with the Nepali Congress party.
At the national level, this announcement surprised political observers since the Maoists remain in the government in coalition with the Nepali Congress. This is not the first time that the Maoists and the UML have come together. Prior to the present Nepali Congress-led government, the UML had formed the government with the support of the Maoists under the leadership of KP Oli in 2015. The Maoists had blamed Oli for not respecting the terms of the power-sharing agreement and in May 2016, Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda withdrew support from the coalition and formed the government with the support of the Nepali Congress party. The Maoists also continued their alliance with the Nepali Congress in the recently-concluded local body elections where they came in third with the Nepali Congress securing second place.
Similarly, the news injected a wave of mixed opinions in the international fora, especially in India and China. The alliance defied the calculations of the South Block in New Delhi. New Delhi had lately been lobbying with the top brass of the Nepali Congress in anticipation that the Maoists would realign with the former for the upcoming elections, assuring a reachable political space in Nepal, but the long-secret talks between the UML and Maoists have foiled these hopes. Notably, Nepals transition from a feudal monarchy to constitutional democracy in last decade has tested Indias Nepal policy, precisely in terms of approach and functionalities. Critics argue that Indias party-centric approach, rather than maintaining a reliable and balanced relationship with Nepal, has failed to provide the desired results to India.
On the other hand, China has called this a fruitful development towards a stable Nepal. For a long time, China has maintained a policy of not commenting on the internal developments of Nepal on public platforms. However, China remains one of the influential actors in the Nepalese polity. Professor Dai Yonghong of the China Center for South Asia Studies at Sichuan University sees the Left Alliance as a great opportunity for the long-awaited political stability in Nepal. He also commented that China looks forward to friendly and peaceful cooperation with Nepal, and that by joining the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in May 2017, the government of Nepal, irrespective of the leadership, has affirmed its commitment for the sustainable development of Nepal.
Following the constitutional promulgation on September 20, 2015, an earthquake-stricken Nepal suffered a four-month-long blockade at a major trade route at the India-Nepal border, allegedly imposed by India. As a result, Nepal utilized the opportunity to reach out to China for the supply of necessary utility items. Also, just two days before the inaugural BRI Forum in China, Nepal signed to become part of the ambitious project. It was one of the major departures of Nepal from its reliance on India towards balanced cooperation with China. As the BRI took a leap forward with its clear future course in Chinese President Xi Jinpings three-and-a-half hour speech at the nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017, it was apparent from Xis speech that the global outreach of China will be conducted under the BRI umbrella, and the record seven-times mention of the BRI in his speech makes a strong case in this regard. This provides reassurance of the commitment of China to Nepal of its continued cooperation in the several sectors of development.
In contrast, Indias outreach in the region has fallen prey to a long-standing bilateral issue with neighbouring countries India-Pakistan tensions. As a result, platforms like the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) are deficient in acceptable and visionary regional leadership. The alternative arrangement deployed by India to save the regional bargain runs on a snail shell syndrome. In this situation, Nepals rising trade deficit with India, changing public perceptions after the blockade, and deadlocks on several development projects to be developed by India, show the dire need for confidence-building measures.
The vague ideological foundations of UML and the Maoists offer the least of socialism, and a future authoritarian government cannot be overruled.
This will be the third time that Nepalese will participate in parliamentary elections, the first being in 2008 and the second in 2012. This is timely for Nepal as the new constitution promulgated in 2015 provides a clear face for its legislative, executive and judicial branches. This comes following the delay caused by the political impasse over the constitutional promulgation, which will become a reality after the elections.
Observers in India see the ongoing developments in Nepal as a forward-looking solution to the prolonged political instability in Nepal. The upcoming elections will be held as per the provision in the new constitution, and this will further strengthen the constitution. Nonetheless, the constitutional amendments concerning the rights of the people belonging to Terai (southern part of Nepal) remain unresolved to date. It will be interesting to see the crucial role of the two major Terai-based regional parties, the Rashtriya Janata Party-Nepal (RJP-N) and the Sanghiya Samajbadi Forum-Nepal.
Further, Nepals leadership crisis has intensified in the last six years. By resigning from the post of the Prime Minister nine months after he assumed power in May 2017, Prachanda paved the way for the present Prime Minister Deuba to lead the coalition government until the new Parliament becomes functional. Although this had provided hopes for long-lasting political stability, the Left Alliance faces tangible challenges.
First, UML, being the largest party in the alliance, and its satisfactory performance in the recently-concluded local body elections, challenges the ideality and existence of the Maoist party even as they align with them. Second, the impending issues of constitutional amendments, the peace process, and the slow pace of relief works following the 2015 earthquake, will create a further political vacuum. Third, an ideological unity and merger of UML and the Maoists in the post-election phase seem utopian precisely because of the existing rift within the UML leadership. It was clearly seen during the seat allotment process for the upcoming elections and indicates a more uncertain political agenda of the two parties. Notably, the Nepali communist movement has witnessed a series of splits and disintegrations since its inception some 68 years ago. Even though by aligning with his staunch longtime critic, KP Oli, Prachanda has secured his political relevance, the vote share will still be crucial in deciding the future course of the Left Alliance.
Fourth, on the foreign policy front, the patriotic UML remains China-friendly whereas the Maoists will have a puzzling time balancing their equation with India. The recent cancellation of the Budhi Gandaki project, a 1200-MW hydropower project that had been awarded to the Chinese firm Gejuwa, on transparency grounds by the Nepali Congress party-led government, is seen as part of a political vendetta. Oli has left no stone unturned in raising this issue at several election rallies and his promise to overturn the governments decision in case the Left Alliance forms the next government will have serious implications for Nepals relationship with India. A Left Alliance victory in the forthcoming provincial and federal elections will push India to rethink its policy grounds to move from the established structure of a unilateral party/individual to a more multilateral shareholder based interaction with Nepal.
To conclude, as UML chairman KP Oli calls for establishing a communist form of governance after the elections, an intense debate on its nature has begun to surface. The vague ideological foundations of UML and the Maoists offer the least of socialism, and a future authoritarian government cannot be overruled. Yet, the elections will provide a clear map to a new order of relationship between the provinces and the federation, helping the country achieve a new transparency in its development.
A West Cork firm making perfumes with only organic materials is thinking global, writes Trish Dromey
Following in the footsteps of Irish producers who have blazed a trail with organic foodstuffs internationally, West Cork company Waters + Wild is now working on making a name for organic Irish perfume.
Director Joan Woods believes that as the only Irish perfume company with organic certification, and one of only a small number in the world, Waters + Wild is well placed to sell to countries such as Germany, the US, and Japan, where there is a growing demand for organic, chemical-free perfume.
Although its a small, one person operation with part-time staff, Waters + Wild has already developed sales to high end retailers around Ireland and is selling to an online retailer in France and an organic shop in Austria.
In recent months, the company also signed an agreement with a distributor supplying high-end organic perfume stores and pharmacies in Germany.
With some assistance from the Local Enterprise Office in West Cork, Ms Woods has now opened an organic shop in Glandore and is aiming to increase perfume production, rebrand, and develop exports in 2018. Her new year plans include taking on a full-time employee.
A commerce graduate, Ms Woods worked for Vichy Ireland in the 1990s and set up two fashion stores in Dublin before settling in West Cork to raise a family, in 2004.
Looking for business ideas she hit on perfume and decided that scenic West Cork was perfect for this type of venture. Although she went to France to learn perfumery at Grasse, she decided that conventional methods werent for her.
They told me it would be impossible to make perfume without chemicals, but I decided to prove them wrong, said Ms Woods.
Working from a stone barn near Union Hall, she and her business partner, who has since left the company, experimented with various ingredients, importing a variety of them from around the world and researching combinations.
Ms Woods says that the decision to go organic was important: There are quite a number of natural products on the market now but an organic certification says more; it says no chemicals.
Applying to the Irish Organic Farmers and Growers Association the company secured the certification in 2015.
In early 2016, Waters + Wild had three perfumes which sell for 120 for 50ml and 45 per 10ml.
The ingredients for organic perfumes are difficult to find and very expensive they include oils and roses from France and Madagascar as well as herbs and seaweed from West Cork, she says.
Ms Woods designed the logo and the packaging herself and has been doing all the blending, bottling, packaging, and selling.
I started out by travelling around Ireland with the perfume taking it to high-end retailers, she says, adding that customers include the Kilkenny Shop and Shannon Duty Free.
Recognising that opportunities to sell high-end organic perfume in the Irish market were limited, the company immediately began looking at export prospects and secured help in identifying them from both the Local Enterprise Office in West Cork and Enterprise Ireland.
In 2016, the company participated in Going for Growth, a programme for women entrepreneurs, and attended a French trade fair in 2016 where it launched Waters + Wilds fourth fragrance.
This year we were the only certified organic perfume company at Pitti Fragranze, a niche perfume trade show in Italy, says Ms Woods.
Opening an organic shop in Glandore in time for Christmas, Ms Woods says shes had a high level of interest from distributors in Germany, Japan, and the UK.
At her new shop in Glandore, she says she will have space to expand production to develop exports in 2018.
Assistance from the Local Enterprise office will allow her to take on a staff member to help with the workload and also provide her with the services of marketing graduate.
Options currently under consideration include attending a trade show in the US where she sees good potential for sales.
Shes also thinking about looking for investment to grow the business.
GSK in Dungarvan produces more than six billion tablets for the global market every year. Country manager of GSK Consumer Healthcare Ireland, Dave Barrett tells Padraig Hoare why its Irish plants are key
In an era where big pharma is viewed with as much scepticism in the media as the political establishment or the banking sector, GSK Consumer Healthcare Ireland believes boosting its 1,800 staff in Dungarvan, Sligo, Cork and Dublin is a way to heighten public trust.
More than six billion Panadol tablets are made in Dungarvan, Co Waterford, annually, exporting to 70 countries around the world, emphasising the town as the global home of the over-the-counter painkiller is a worthwhile campaign, said GSK Consumer Healthcare Ireland country manager Dave Barrett.
Mr Barrett said its recent PR campaign to focus on those employees was a way for the public - and by extension, its consumers to identify with them.
The Cork site produces active ingredients for a range of medicines for diseases such as childhood cancer, depression, diabetes, HIV, Parkinsons disease and arthritis.
Sligo produces around 30m skin medicines and products every year, including Oilatum and Physiogel, exporting to over 65 countries.
The Dublin offices are home to its pharmaceuticals and consumer healthcare businesses.
Some 10% of the population is employed directly in Dungarvan. If you live in Dungarvan, you will be related to or know somebody who works on the site. That is powerful. The work ethic of the people on the site led us to think that we had a story to tell. When you consider Dungarvan is down the road and all the statistics of what is produced, then you have our campaign, he said.
Mr Barrett said GSK wanted Panadol and its other products to become as synonymous with Ireland as Tayto or other easily recognisable brands.
The Irishness part is important. When you think of traditional Irish brands like Tayto or Kerrygold, the Irishness is very important to consumers when they are making that choice on the shelf. Sligo is the home of our skincare there are 30m skincare products made in Sligo. Thats something we should be very proud of and we should be telling consumers that.
Like other pharmaceutical giants, the UK-headquartered GSK has had its controversies worldwide.
A $3bn (2.5bn) fine by US authorities in 2012 for promoting Paxil with false claims was among the most high profile. Mr Barrett insisted GSK Consumer Healthcare in Ireland was above reproach.
Its important we deliver our business in absolutely the right way. I have never come across a situation personally where I have ever been challenged around values.
At the heart of our business, all decisions taken are with the best interests of the patient in mind. Yes, the shareholders are there to be satisfied but decisions are made on what is right for the consumer and the patient.
Im proud we are a transparent organisation. Things like transparency are important so patients and consumers know what we are doing. There is this legacy of big bad pharma but there is a lot of good stuff also. Weve got to work hard to amplify some of the good stuff we are doing, he said.
The emphasis on its employees and how Irish operations were performing in the regional economy are key to enhancing the public image of GSK, he said.
When you look at the sites in Ireland, to say they are jewels in the crown of manufacturing community would probably be a fair comment. The investment has been there. Dungarvan and Sligo really are that good. GSKs commitment to Ireland is steadfast and rock solid.
The importance of employees is paramount. Are we listening to what teams are telling us? That goes across all the sites and the commercial businesses. The engagement for me means they are clear on what their role is, how it adds value to the strategy of the business. They leave the days job feeling they have contributed and they have had a chance to have their voice heard. Im not concerned that we are not hearing our employees.
said Mr Barrett.
With the threat of Brexit looming, firms big and small have got to prepare accordingly.
That means planning for something that may never happen but such an approach is prudent, said Mr Barrett.
There is uncertainty there but I am reasonably sure that the uncertainty will be less and less as we go on. That will take time. Were trying to be really proactive at the moment in trying to understand where the pressure points are, where the risk could be scenario planning. Some of it may never happen but Id rather be prepared and on the front foot.
The most important thing around Brexit is that we ensure customer and consumers are not affected at the end of this, and that we have a product on the shelf with full availability as we have now.
There is a lot to play out but we are getting great support to scenario plan and mitigate risk, but we are trying to plan for something that may never happen.
he said.
By Ann O'Loughlin
A building company has sued for more than 2m damages over allegedly defective insulation boards which, it claims, caused floors in houses built by it to sink.
Tallaght-based Kelland Homes says extensive remedial works were required to about 58 houses at a development at Elder Heath, Kiltipper, Tallaght, because the insulation boards shrank, causing floors in the houses to sink.
It says it has suffered a loss of some 2m as a result of the remedial works and having to pay compensation to, and provide alternative accommodation for, affected homeowners.
It claims the boards were used in construction of houses at Elder Heath in 2015 and 2016 and were used under ground floor slabs.
It claims a component supplied by a Dutch company, which included the chemical PIR 3009, was used in the manufacture of the boards and that component contributed to the failure of the product.
It claims it became aware about September 2016 of settlement/sinking of ground floor slabs in houses at Elder Heath.
The floors had sunk "significantly" below the height of the skirting boards and its investigations established the sinking was a result of the insulation boards shrinking, causing voids to form beneath the floor slabs, the firm claims. The boards at issue were installed in 58 hours at Elder Heath, it claims.
It has sued Ballytherm Ltd, with registered offices at Ballyconnell, Co Cavan, as manufacturer and supplier of the boards; Clondalkin Builders Providers Ltd, Clondalkin, Dublin, and James McMahon (Dublin) Ltd, with registered offices at Dock Road, Limerick, who sold the insulation boards to Kelland; and a Dutch company, Covestro B.V, whose allegedly defective product was used in the manufacture of the boards.
Kelland claims Ballytherm initially agreed last March to fund remedial works and had made a part payment of some 150,000 under that agreement, but in August 2017 purported to resile from that agreement. Ballytherm had identified the alleged defect in the insulation product as having been caused by a wrong on the part of the Dutch company and Ballytherm has taken proceedings in that regard against four entities, Kelland claims.
When the proceedings came before Mr Justice Brian McGovern at the Commercial Court today he agreed to fast-track them.
The judge was told the first three defendants were consenting to the case being fast-tracked, but Covestro may raise a jurisdictional issue. He adjourned the matter for two weeks to allow Covestro consider whether to bring an application contesting jursdiction.
A report into a fatal plane crash in Co Waterford in March of this year has found that the probable cause was a collision with a tree during an attempted forced landing following an engine stoppage in flight.
The 84-year-old pilot was killed in the crash.
On March 27, a pilot in a 10-year-old amateur-built Rutan Long-EZ plane was on a short local flight, intending to return to Waterford Airport for circuit work.
But about 18 minutes after take-off, at an altitude of 2,000 ft, the 84-year-old declared an emergency and told Waterford Air Traffic Control that his engine had stopped.
He gave his approximate position as near Dungarvan and said he had selected a field for landing.
However, the aircraft struck trees as it attempted to land.
Scene of light aircraft crash outside of Dungarvan pic.twitter.com/PbF0PvlETT Damien Tiernan (@damienwlr) March 27, 2017
The Irish Coast Guard helicopter was on the scene within minutes but the pilot had sustained fatal injuries.
The report found no evidence that the pilot suffered incapacitation or impairment during the forced landing.
It concluded, however, that the safety harness did not continue to restrain the Pilot following impact.
It identified the probable cause as the collision with a tree during an attempted forced landing following an engine stoppage in flight.
It also stated that the high probability of serious induction icing at any engine power setting was a contributory factor.
By Louise Roseingrave
The coroner at the inquest into the death of six year old Tristan Neiland has returned a narrative verdict.
The child from Cabinteely, Dublin 18, had a number of health issues and was in weekend respite care when he was found unresponsive by staff.
Speaking after the inquest, Tristans mother Angela Neiland welcomed the verdict.
We note that Tristanss death and the circumstances surrounding it has resulted in changes being made in the Carmona Respite Services. In that context Tristans death has not been in vain, she said.
I miss him. Every single day, Mrs Neiland said.
Tristan, who suffered from epilepsy, asthma and global development delay was attending Carmona Special National School in Dun Laoghaire, which is a day school for pupils with special needs and funded by the Department of Education & Skills.
On the night he passed away Tristan was staying at the St. John of God Carmona Respite Service, a separate service to the school.
His mother told Dublin Coroners Court that her son suffered from seizures, mostly at night and in the early morning. Mrs Neiland said her son could not breathe during a seizure and needed oxygen at the onset, she said.
Mrs Neiland said she understood her son would be constantly monitored using a sats monitor, which measures oxygen saturation levels. She brought the sats monitor to the Carmona centre and left clear instructions for its use. Mrs Neiland told staff the sats monitor should only be attached once her son was deeply asleep as it could otherwise disturb him.
My understanding was he would be constantly monitored. His seizures generally last from three to five minutes. If any longer than seven minutes it becomes a medical emergency and an ambulance must be called, Mrs Neiland said.
Angela and Andrew Neiland at the Coroners court inquest into the death of tristan Neiland at Store Street, Dublin. Picture: Gareth Chaney Collins
Staff at the facility put Tristan to bed at 8.30pm on January 5th 2013. He was due to be checked every 15 minutes. Tristan was checked approximately five times between 9pm and approximately 11pm. There was a baby monitor in his room and the door was left slightly open. There was no sats monitor attached to him because staff were of the opinion Tristan was not deeply asleep, the inquest heard.
When a staff member checked on Tristan shortly before 11pm he was found unresponsive.
A nurse immediately began cardio-pulmonary resuscitation and an ambulance was called.
Tristan was rushed Our Ladys Childrens Hospital in Crumlin where he was pronounced dead the following day, January 6 2013.
Pathologist Dr Maureen OSullivan gave the cause of death as sudden, unexplained death in epilepsy.
St John of God community services apologised to the Neiland family for the shortcomings in Tristans care and outlined a number of changes made at the facility since the childs death.
Following a full systems review, the centre no longer accepts children with high medical needs and individual care plans with risk assessments for each child are now conducted, along with more stringent staff training.
Returning a narrative verdict, Coroner Dr Myra Cullinane endorsed the changes that have been implemented at the Carmona centre since Tristans death.
* This story was subject to a clarification highlighting the fact that while Tristan attended Carmona Special National School in Dun Laoghaire, which is a day school for pupils with special needs and funded by the Department of Education & Skills he had been attending the St. John of God Carmona Respite Service, a separate service to the school, for overnight stays and it was while Tristan was in respite on the night of 5th January 2013 that he unfortunately passed away.
Three recent medical inquiries involving obstetricians have highlighted variations in the quality of Irelands maternity services, particularly in areas outside Dublin, writes Liz Farsaci.
OVER the past year, three medical inquiries involving obstetricians have highlighted the variations in quality in the States maternity services, particularly in areas outside of Dublin.
This inequality can be seen in the lack of routine scans for fatal foetal abnormalities, and for families whose babies are born with life-threatening conditions.
Tipperary mother Laura Esmonde told a Medical Council inquiry late last year of the eerie moment she realised a consultant may have wrongly diagnosed an ectopic pregnancy, having advised medication that would terminate the pregnancy.
A few months later, an obstetric registrar came under review for the care she provided to six mothers in Sligo. After performing a Caesarean section on one of these mothers, the doctor left the lower half of the mothers uterus in the breeze after suturing the top half to her abdominal wall.
Then, in June, the longest-running Medical Council inquiry, which investigated the care provided to three Cavan mothers during the births of their children, concluded. One of these babies died two days after his birth, one was stillborn, and one born in very poor condition.
In September 2016, Laura Esmonde, 39, of Tipperary, told a Medical Council fitness to practice inquiry that she attended the A&E at South Tipperary General Hospital on January 6, 2013, with a swollen leg.
A routine urine test revealed she was pregnant, which she had not known.
I was shocked it was a lot to take in, but I was happy to be pregnant, said Ms Esmonde during her evidence on September 12, 2016.
On January 7, 2013, an ultrasound of her leg showed she had a clot. Ms Esmonde also asked for an ultrasound of her pelvis, because she wanted to see the baby. Her husband was due into the hospital shortly and she wanted to tell him the good news in person.
The stenographer said she couldnt see anything, and called in a consultant radiologist. He also performed a scan, and Ms Esmonde said he told her there was a possibility that she had an ectopic pregnancy.
On January 8, the consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist under review referred to as Dr A throughout the inquiry performed a transvaginal scan. According to Ms Esmonde, he told her she had an ectopic pregnancy of unknown location.
He told me my uterus was empty, she added.
Dr A advised that she take methotrexate, a medication that stops cells from growing and can be used to terminate ectopic pregnancies. On the evening of January 8, 2013, Ms Esmonde took her first dose, and her second on January 18.
On January 26, Ms Esmond was transferred to Cork University Hospital for treatment of the clot in her leg, but a scan that day indicated her pregnancy was not ectopic.
A further scan showed an intrauterine gestational sac, but the pregnancy was no longer viable. The possibility of doing a D&C procedure later in the week to remove products from the uterus was discussed.
After that conversation with doctors, Ms Esmonde then returned to the ward.
I was very upset. It was the eeriest of things. It was very distressing, she said.
On January 29, a consultant came in to discuss the possibility of holding off on the D&C, and perhaps putting her on folic acid.
For one split second, I thought maybe everything was going to be okay but immediately, I thought about the two doses of methotrexate and the damage that had been done to the baby, said Ms Esmonde. I was very upset. I was hobbling around the place, distressed.
I was so angry. I said I can cope with things that happen to me but if anyone has hurt my baby, I was going to kill him.
Ms Esmonde was successfully treated for the clot in her leg, and discharged from CUH on January 31. She then returned on February 2, suffering from abdominal cramping and bleeding.
A nurse did a scan and then an internal exam, and the pregnancy came out in the nurses hand so I saw the sac in her hand, said Ms Esmonde.
Dr Keelin ODonoghue of Cork University Maternity Hospital told the inquiry that she found evidence of an intrauterine gestational sac when she performed a scan on Ms Esmonde on January 27, 2013. Dr ODonoghue, the lead clinician for obstetric ultrasound and foetal medicine at CUMH, said she saw no mass signifying an ectopic pregnancy.
She did not see anything clearly within the sac, such as an embryo but, for me, it looked like an intrauterine pregnancy, said Dr ODonoghue.
She added that three of her colleagues also saw evidence of an intrauterine gestational sac.
At the conclusion of the inquiry on December 12, 2016, Dr A was exonerated, and found not guilty of poor professional performance on seven counts.
I cut in the wrong place
In December 2016, an obstetrician who made a number of clinical errors while treating six mothers was found guilty of poor professional performance on 17 counts.
Dr Andrea Hermann: Told a patient I cut you in the wrong place. Picture: Courts/Collins
Dr Andrea Hermann, who worked as an obstetrics and gynaecology registrar at Sligo General Hospital in 2013 and 2014, was also found guilty of professional misconduct on three counts.
In relation to one mother, referred to as Patient A, the inquiry found Dr Hermann failed to perform an elective Caesarean section with due skill, making an abnormal wound incision on the mother.
During her evidence, Patient A said Dr Hermann told her she cut her in the wrong place during an elective Caesarean section on December 4, 2013.
The mother-of-two told the inquiry that she suspected something was not right when she was still in hospital four days after giving birth, with a scar down the side of her abdomen, instead of across it.
She said that just as she was leaving the hospital, Dr Hermann brought her into a room and said: I cut you in the wrong place.
Patient A said Dr Hermann said by way of explanation that they were using new drapes a large piece of fabric placed over the patient with a slit for the incision during the surgery.
At this point I didnt know what to think, Patient A told the inquiry. I was very shocked. I was quite upset leaving the hospital.
I was devastated, she continued. I couldnt get my head around how she had made a mistake doing a planned section. Its been very hard over the past three years, she added.
Dr Hermann failed to obtain informed consent from Patient B prior to carrying out a membrane sweep during an antenatal visit on August 15, 2013.
Patient B, a mother-of-three from Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim, said she was shocked after Dr Hermann performed the membrane sweep an intervention used to induce labour on her without her knowledge or consent.
Dr Hermann failed to establish whether Patient C still had a Mirena coil in place during a follow-up appointment. This patient later conceived and miscarried, the inquiry heard, although Patient C chose to give her evidence in private.
Dr Hermann also gave a blood-thinning drug, Innohep to a mother referred to as Patient D who was already at risk of heavy bleeding, as Patient D laboured with her sixth child on August 12, 2013.
Fortunately, the mother later gave birth without any complications.
On February 19, 2014, Dr Hermann performed a speculum examination on a pregnant Patient E, without first establishing the absence of placenta praevia.
Uterus in the breeze
Dr Hermann also failed to display adequate surgical skill in respect of the closure of a uterotomy on January 22, 2014, while performing a Caesarean section on Patient F. During her evidence, Dr Hermanns former supervisor said Dr Hermann made an astonishing mistake while performing the section on Patient F.
Dr Hermann left the lower half of a mothers uterus in the breeze after failing to suture the section properly, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Heather Langan, from Sligo General Hospital, said.
Dr Langan spoke of the chaotic scene in the operating theatre on January 22, 2014, while Dr Hermann was performing an elective Caesarean section on Patient F. Dr Langan, who was in the theatre observing Dr Hermann, said the baby was delivered swiftly.
But Dr Langan then saw that the baby had a serious laceration on her head so she ran next door to get the general surgeon, in case they needed help with suturing the babys cut.
Upon her return, she found Patient Fs husband collapsed on the floor, having fainted, and staff were attending to him.
Dr Langan then turned her attention to the mother, and she remembered that Dr Hermann told her that she couldnt see the ovaries.
Dr Langan became concerned when she looked at the mother, as she couldnt see the bladder, and asked Dr Hermann to stop.
What I found was that she had managed to suture the abdominal wall to the uterus, and had left the lower part of the uterus in the breeze, effectively, said Dr Langan. My concern was that what she had done in surgical terms made absolutely no sense. To miss the entire lower part of the uterus and not suture it Id never seen anyone do that. Its an astonishing mistake.
Dr Langan, who completed the surgery, said she was concerned the mother would bleed heavily if she had not intervened.
Dr Hermann was also the subject of a previous inquiry at the Medical Council, in 2009 and 2010. Before this, she worked in The Galway Clinic. She was suspended from June 2010 to June 2011.
On the first day of the inquiry, Dr Hermanns solicitor, Gerard ODonnell, of ODonnell Waters solicitors in Galway, read out a statement on her behalf, before going off record.
Mr ODonnell who previously represented Savita Halappanavars husband, Praveen said Dr Hermann admitted to the clinical allegations against her.Addressing the Medical Council in her statement, she said: It feels to me you are disappointed that Im still alive.
Longest-running inquiry
Dr Salah Aziz Ahmed: Inquiry relating to three births at Cavan General Hospital. Picture: Collins
November 2016 saw the start of the longest-running Medical Council inquiry to date the case of consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Salah Aziz Ahmed, of Cavan General Hospital.
The inquiry investigated the care Dr Aziz provided to three mothers at Cavan General Hospital between 2012 and 2014.
Evidence at times heart-breaking, at times tediously technical was given by two of the three patients, a number of Cavan staff members, several expert witnesses and Dr Aziz himself. The inquiry heard details of Patient A, now 38, whose baby boy passed away 32 hours after he was born.
The baby was born by emergency Caesarean section on November 22, 2012, in very poor condition. He died on November 24, and a coroners court later found the cause of death to be extensive meconium aspiration as a result of hypoxic brain injury.
Eileen Barrington, BL, legal counsel for Dr Aziz, pointed out during the first day of the inquiry that it was not claimed that any of Dr Azizs actions caused the death of Patient As baby.
Patient A chose not to give evidence, and did not attend the hearing.
The inquiry, held in the unusual venue of Finnstown Castle Hotel in Lucan, Co Dublin, heard evidence from the second mother, Deirdre Clarke, who waived her right to anonymity.
Ms Clarke, 38, who was admitted to Cavan for an induction on June 5, 2013, was hoping to achieve a vaginal birth after a previous Caesarean section (VBAC).
She was given Syntocinon, a drug used to progress labour, but one that can lead to hyper-stimulation of the uterus and very strong contractions, which can distress the baby and increase the risk of uterine rupture.
That night, Ms Clarke required an emergency Caesarean section, after her uterus ruptured. She suffered a post-partum haemorrhage and her baby boy, Roland, was born in a very poor condition, requiring resuscitation.
After the surgery, Ms Clarke was transferred to a recovery room. I didnt know what way the baby was, whether it was a boy or a girl, she said.
At some point, I heard it was a boy, and that he had gone to the SCBU, the special care baby unit. Roland was then transferred to the Rotunda, where they were very concerned about him, and they didnt know what the outcome would be, said Ms Clarke.
Initial tests on Roland proved positive and he is now aged four and a perfect little boy, said Ms Clarke.
By the time Dr Aziz gave evidence in relation to Ms Clarke, the inquiry had moved to the normal venue of the Medical Council headquarters in Dublin City.
Dr Aziz defended his antenatal care of Ms Clarke, but began his evidence with an apology to her.
I want to acknowledge the suffering and trauma Mrs Clarke went through, Dr Aziz said. I appreciate shes been through a lot. I hope this process will bring closure to her.
I didnt expect him to die
The inquiry sat in January, and then in March, when the mother referred to as Patient C whose baby died inside her gave her powerful and heart-breaking evidence.
Patient Cs baby boy was delivered stillborn after an emergency Caesarean section on April 26, 2014.
Baby C was his mothers seventh pregnancy, as she had suffered three previous miscarriages in 2007, given birth to a stillborn baby girl in 2009, and then given birth to two live baby girls in 2010 and 2011.
In 2009, Patient C was diagnosed with a genetic blood-clotting disorder, and suffered two placental abruptions, or separation of the placenta from the uterus, prior to her pregnancy with Baby C.
Patient C told the inquiry that on the evening of April 25, 2014, when she was 32 weeks pregnant, she began to feel very unwell. The following morning she went to hospital, arriving at 12.40.
At 4.45pm, Patient C met with Dr Aziz, the consultant on call that day. She told him about her poor obstetric history, and he examined her. He said he would return at 7pm to perform a Caesarean section.
But shortly after 6pm all hell broke loose, said Patient C, after a midwife could not find the babys heartbeat. Patient C was rushed to theatre and given a general anaesthetic. When I woke up, I knew something terrible had happened because [the nurse] was crying, she said.
After initially meeting my son, I was taken to the recovery room. I met my husband. We didnt know what to say to each other.
I didnt expect him to die. All that I wanted that day, to come out of that, is my little man to be delivered.
During his evidence on March 28, Dr Aziz said he should have performed the section at 4.45pm, when he first met with Patient C.
In hindsight, I regret not doing the section at that time, Dr Aziz said. Doing the section could have given the baby some chance of survival. On May 18 this year, the inquiry committee which rules on the case found seven of the 14 allegations against Dr Aziz to be proven as to fact. On June 6, Dr Aziz was found not guilty of poor professional performance on six out of the seven counts. He was found guilty of poor professional performance on just one count, which related to the fact that he failed to decide that immediate delivery of Patient Cs baby by emergency section was required.
Dr Aziz was also cleared of professional misconduct on two counts.
More patient awareness
Brigid Doherty, CEO of national advocacy group Patient Focus, said patients are becoming more aware of their right to complain, due to recent investigations and inquiries highlighted in the media, and the increased visibility of Patient Focus and other advocacy and support groups.
But patients should receive explanations about their care long before any verdict in a Medical Council inquiry, Ms Doherty argued.
Patients expect that if there is poor performance on the part of a doctor, it would be examined by the hospital and a decision made whether the practitioner is reported to the regulatory body.
But we would hope that any unexpected outcomes or deficits in care would be acknowledged, and explanations given in a timely manner. Parents should not be forced to make complaints to get answers due to lack of local information, she said.
It is unlikely the volatile US president would limit his power to press a nuclear button, so cabinet members should be authorised to oversee first-strike orders, says John Mecklin
From the beginnings of the 2016 US general election campaign, through the presidential debates and on to Donald Trumps fire and fury comments on North Korea this summer, the prospect of a president as impulsive as him in command of nuclear weapons has raised global worries.
North Koreas test last week of a missile that might be able to reach the US mainland with a nuclear warhead and Trumps initial response that we will take care of it wont diminish the anxiety.
The simmering concern was already a medium boil last week, when the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard testimony on the presidents authority to order a nuclear attack.
The Senate hearing was at the behest of committee chairman, Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee, who, since announcing he would not run for re-election next year, has publicly fretted that Trumps intemperate tweets, and other public pronouncements, risk putting the United States on the path to World War III.
A Democratic member of the committee, Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, echoed those concerns during the hearing, saying the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear weapons strike that is wildly out of step with US national security interests.
But as the Senate hearing and subsequent commentary made clear, concern about Trumps authority to launch an unwarranted first-strike nuclear attack is one thing; circumscribing that authority is quite another.
The president holds the constitutional position of commander-in-chief and is obligated to protect the United States from foreign threats. The US Constitution does grant to Congress the power to declare war, but it is unclear whether a law that significantly constrained the presidents nuclear command authority particularly when the United States, or its allies are under attack or in imminent danger of attack would be constitutional.
Also, as former National Security Council staffer and Duke political science professor, Peter Feaver, noted in his Senate testimony, legislation that attempts to alter the nuclear chain of command could have unintended and dangerous consequences, perhaps leading adversaries and allies to question the United States ability to respond quickly during a crisis.
There are ways out of this constitutional and legislative dilemma, at least as regards a first nuclear strike by US forces. The difficulty is that they require the participation of Trump.
In recent months, a bill proposed by Senator Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, and Representative Ted Lieu, of California the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017 has gained support from experts and activists concerned by Trumps control of US nuclear-weapon use.
The bill would prohibit the president from conducting a first-use nuclear strike, unless such strike is conducted pursuant to a congressional declaration of war expressly authorising such strike.
But the Lieu-Markey bill in my opinion an admirable effort to create a check against wanton nuclear war-making is sponsored by two liberal Democrats and has zero chance of passing the current, Republican-controlled Congress. If effective congressional action is unlikely in the short-term, what might reassure government officials of both parties and the citizens they represent? The president could circumscribe his own authority to launch a nuclear first strike.
There is nothing to stop US presidents from reining in their own nuclear command authority. When the US is not under (or at imminent threat of) nuclear attack, the nuclear command-and-control system already contains some restraints on presidential authority, including military commanders trained to make sure that a nuclear launch order is legal. As Feaver told me after his Senate testimony, the president could order additional controls on nuclear decision-making.
I dont think that you could impose, over a determinately hostile executive branch, a legislative fix that actually would work, he said.
But [Congress] could cooperate with the executive branch on legislative fixes, and, better yet, it could, through oversight and review, make recommendations that the executive branch would adopt on its own, recognising that theyre worth doing.
Just as the Barack Obama administration laid out strict guidelines for authorising drone attacks on terrorist targets, Feaver said, the Trump administration could adopt a policy that, for example, required certain cabinet members to determine whether a presidents first-strike nuclear order is legal, and complies with US treaty obligations, before it can be acted on.
An executive order formally requiring that , for example, the secretaries of defence and state sign off on any presidential order of a first nuclear strike, before it is sent to military commanders, would go a great way toward assuaging concerns about presidential impulsiveness particularly at a time when the North Korea confrontation looms large. Such a three-key reform could be of enormous political benefit to Trump, reassuring both domestic audiences and allied countries that he will not explode early some morning and, after an angry tweet or two, order up an attack on Pyongyang that triggers doomsday.
To have credibility, any such reforms would need to be vetted by congressional and military experts. They would have to ensure that while the presidential power to initiate first-strike attacks could be curbed, presidents could still respond immediately when the US is under attack, or when an attack is impending. In matters pertaining to the continued existence of humanity, details matter.
Because they would be enacted by executive order, the reforms would not necessarily outlive the Trump administration; a future president could undo them by fiat. But if they were wisely crafted, procedural safeguards against a presidents unilateral misuse of his authority to order a first nuclear strike would likely be welcomed by people in America and around the world, and those safeguards might serve as a powerful precedent.
Beyond the political benefits these reforms would provide Trump today, they could serve as a long-term legacy for a president who has struggled to get major legislation passed.
Its highly unlikely that Trump would agree to limit his own powers, but its time to start thinking about how to persuade his successor to think differently about control of the nuclear button.
John Mecklin is the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. @meckdevil
Eight suspects have been arrested over the October 16 murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, Maltas prime minister has said.
Joseph Muscat said in a statement that the suspects, all Maltese citizens, were arrested on Monday morning in an operation coordinated among the Police Corps, the Armed Forces of Malta and the Security Services.
He said the arrests resulted from the inquiry over recent weeks and that investigators have 48 hours to question the suspects to decide whether to seek charges.
He provided no other concrete information about the arrests or suspects, citing concerns that anything he says could derail any prosecution.
Ms Caruana Galizia, whose reporting focused heavily on corruption on the EU island nation, was killed when a bomb destroyed her car as she was driving near her home.
Europol, the European Unions police agency, sent a team of organised crime experts to help Maltese police investigate the assassination, joining the FBI and Dutch forensic experts.
Just before her death, Ms Caruana Galizia, 53, had posted on her closely followed blog, Running Commentary, that there were "crooks everywhere" in Malta.
The island nation has a reputation as a tax haven in the European Union and has attracted companies and money from outside Europe.
The journalist focused her reporting for years on investigating political corruption and scandals, and reported on Maltese mobsters and drug trafficking.
She also wrote about Maltese links to the so-called Panama Papers leaks about offshore financial havens.
AP
A Spanish judge has ordered the release of six Catalan politicians but upheld the jailing of two separatist activists and two other prominent members of the regional government ousted more than a month ago amid an unprecedented independence bid.
Magistrate Pablo Llarena, at the Supreme Court in Madrid, ordered ousted Catalan vice president Oriol Junqueras, former regional interior minister Joaquim Forn and the leaders of two Catalan grassroots separatist groups to remain in jail without bail.
The judge considers that it remains to be seen if their pledges to abide by Spanish law and renounce unilateral independence for Catalonia is "truthful and real", according to a statement by the court.
Judge Llarena set bail at 100,000 for the six other Catalan politicians who were jailed in November on preliminary charges of rebellion and other offences.
Meanwhile, ousted Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and four close separatist allies are to appear in court in Belgium for extradition hearings and a possible decision whether they will have to be sent back to Spain.
Mondays court hearing in Brussels for the five Catalans is the latest step in their flight from Spain and their refusal to return to face rebellion and sedition charges.
Mr Puigdemont plans to lead his partys campaign for the December 21 regional election called by Spains government in an attempt to find a democratic solution to the nations worst institutional crisis in nearly four decades.
Whatever decision is made on Monday, two appeals will be possible and a final ruling could well only come only after the vote.
AP
A pedestrian has died after being struck by a marked police car that was responding to an emergency call, the Metropolitan Police said.
The incident happened at around 6.45pm on December 3 on Seven Sisters Road close to the junction with Elizabeth Road in Haringey, north London, the force said.
A spokesman for the Met said: "Officers immediately provided first aid. The London Ambulance Service and Londons Air Ambulance attended.
"The pedestrian, a man believed to be aged in his 40s, was pronounced dead at the scene at 7.20pm."
The Mets Directorate of Professional Standards and the Independent Police Complaints Commision (IPCC) have been informed, the spokesman added.
The IPCC confirmed independent investigators have been deployed to the scene to gather evidence, and that an inquiry into the incident is now under way.
One of the most high-profile victims of a collision involving the police was broadcaster Sheena McDonald, who was suffered massive head injuries when she was knocked down by a police van in Islington, north London, in 1999.
She was in a coma for 72 hours after the accident, spent two months in hospital and suffered post-traumatic amnesia. Ms McDonald had to rebuild her life and was able to return to work less than a year after the accident.
The officer driving the vehicle, which was on the wrong side of the road, was responding to a 999 call and was later acquitted of driving without due care and attention.
Bonus points may be introduced at Leaving Certificate for foreign languages, if the students apply for higher education courses in language-related areas.
Strategy for Foreign Languages in Education 2017 2026, which will be formally launched by Education Minister Richard Bruton later today, contains many of the measures flagged by him in the spring.
The strategy aims for, amongst other things:
A 25% increase in the number of post-primary schools offering two or more foreign languages;
A 20% increase in the number of students in higher education studying a foreign language as part of their course;
A 50% increase in the number of participants in Erasmus.
Mandarin Chinese will be introduced as a Leaving Certificate subject, as will curricular specifications for heritage speakers for Polish, Lithuanian and Portuguese; and a range of short courses in languages will be developed for the Junior Cycle.
The minister has also asked that a number of other options be considered to incentivise students to undertake the two-year postgraduate course in education. These incentives will include financial supports.
The strategy follows a lengthy consultation. This showed a lack of awareness of the opportunities that foreign languages offer in careers; the perceived difficulty of learning languages; and a limited choice of foreign languages available in schools.
There were also concerns about a shortage of qualified teachers of foreign languages and the traditional dominance of French in the system.
The lack of adequate support for immigrant languages was also raised.
To address the shortage of teachers, the strategy aims to double the number of them participating in teacher-mobility programmes and to double the number of foreign-language assistants in schools.
English may be a global lingua franca, but, in the world of international business, knowledge of English is increasingly taken for granted, according to the strategy. It is companies with additional language capabilities and an understanding of local cultures that will enjoy competitive advantage in new, but also in existing, markets.
It also says new Irish learners will be encouraged to enhance their proficiency in their own languages, as well as their proficiency in Irish and English.
The availability of this extended range of foreign languages provides Ireland with a very valuable resource, the strategy said.
Richard Bruton said the country needs to change its mindset around language-learning.
There is a significant opportunity for Ireland to excel on the global stage, he said. Our education providers and employers must work together to increase awareness of the importance of gaining proficiency in foreign languages. Parents must act as advocates and motivate their children to learn foreign languages.
One in two, or 70,500 of those workers in temporary employment last year, said they were in the roles because they could not find permanent work a 179% increase on 2008.
The ICTU report, to be published later today, also shows a 34% rise in the category of part-time, self-employed without employees, since 2008, a rise which, it says, is indicative of significant growth in bogus or false self-employment.
Ava, who is from Aghabullogue, Co Cork, travelled to Holland last summer with her family to receive medicinal cannabis for a catastrophic form of epilepsy called Dravets Syndrome.
After two years of campaigning, her parents Vera and Paul this week received the news of the granting of the medicinal cannabis licence for Ava.
Paul Barry said it was great to be finally home.
We are delighted. We are going to have a normal boring Christmas. We are going to bring the kids to Santa, eat plenty of turkey and fall asleep in front of the TV. Twas a long road to get to here but it is worth it. But you have to ask where the compassion was?
Supporters, friends, and family turned out at Cork Airport to greet Ava as she was reunited with her brothers and sisters Sophia, Michael, and Elvera Mae.
Vera Twomey says that she is relieved that the familys nightmare is finally over.
We have had no ordinary life whatsoever. As for Christmas we will just have a few people around. But its going to be great to be home for it. I cant believe it has finally happened.
Ava is all smiles with her parents after meeting Santa Claus in the VIP lounge at Cork Airport.
Vera says that Ava has her freedom back now that she has a prescription for medicinal cannabis.
It is freedom for us. We have a medicine that works. We can speak openly and honestly about Ava having the THC form of cannabis. We dont have to hide in the shadows.
We know that CBD oil and THC work. Ava has got better and better every day. She is seizure free. THC has saved Avas life and changed her life and is the most humane form of medication. Now she is just dealing with ordinary childhood illnesses like bugs rather than multiple seizures a night.
Ms Twomey has branded the delay in obtaining a licence a disgrace.
The professionals in Ireland are looking at their professional equivalents in Holland and they want the training. It is a disgrace.
The consultants here are trained [on medicinal cannabis] and the education is provided by the equivalent of their department of health.
We felt such helplessness and powerlessness in Ireland. We landed on our feet here. The paediatric neurologists are extraordinary.
The mother-of-four said she feels a personal responsibility to help other people in similar situations.
It doesnt matter if you are the first, second or 23rd person to get medicinal cannabis. It is your duty to share some of your success and how it is achieved. I feel so sorry for people dealing with things like Lyme disease.
Ms Twomey thanked her supporters for their fundraising which enabled the family to move to Holland to obtain legal medicinal cannabis for Ava. She also paid tribute to friends, relatives and the wider community for contacting TDs and councillors urging them to fight for the family.
It has been going on for so long and I really appreciate what people have done for us. People have been amazing.
Over the course of her long campaign, Vera walked from Cork to Dublin in order to highlight the plight of her daughter. She incurred a knee injury on the trek to Dublin and was pushed in a wheelchair for the last few miles of her journey. She also travelled to Spain to get a prescription for medicinal cannabis only to have the drug confiscated at Dublin Airport.
Prior to using medicinal cannabis, Ava suffered up to 23 seizures a day. Her parents feared that she would lose her life during the course of her seizures and were living through a total nightmare.
Leo Varadkar called the cabinet meeting for 9am today after officials from both governments were locked in negotiations late last night.
The Irish Examiner understands that despite days of talks between Irish officials and their British counterparts, Mr Varadkar was not in a position to hold direct phone call talks with British prime minister Theresa May to sign off on the deal by 10pm last night.
And while a deal was expected by this morning, the last-minute negotiations are likely to lead to fresh Brexit talks concerns with a key Brussels deadline looming this afternoon.
It is understood the late night talks centred around Irish questions over whether the UK can satisfy all four of the areas needed to allow wider EU-UK Brexit negotiations to move onto the next phase of negotiations focussed on trade deals.
These are a Brexit transition period, the continuation of the common travel area between both nations, the protection of the Good Friday Agreement, and crucially a credible way to avoid a hard Irish border if Britain leaves the customs union.
European Council president Donald Tusk last Friday said Ireland will effectively decide on behalf of the EU if sufficient progress has been reached.
A Government spokesperson said last night talks may well continue to late in the night and there has been no resolution yet .
The senior Government spokesperson said there must be clarity on the need to avoid regulatory divergence [caused by Britain leaving the customs union] which would risk the re-emergence of the border.
The l talks came just hours before Ms May is due to travel to Brussels to hold talks on the deal with European Commission president Jean Claude Juncker, EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and Mr Tusk after holding her own emergency cabinet meeting.
Provided Ireland has signed off on the border deal, these Brussels discussions will form the basis of whether the British plan on how to address the Irish border issue can be discussed by EU member states and the EU college of commissioners tomorrow.
Under the negotiations framework, agreement must be reached on the divorce deal between Britain and the EU, citizens rights and the border before talks can enter their second stage on trade.
However, if the plans on how to address the border are not deemed acceptable this week, they are unlikely to be passed by European heads of state at a meeting on December 14-15, potentially derailing the Brexit process.
Speaking on BBC1 yesterday, Tanaiste and Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney said Ireland doe not want to be vetoing anything and that a border plan setting out parameters and a framework may be acceptable rather than exact details at this stage.
However, he later told RTE Ireland cannot be jumping into the dark here hoping we land in the right place and that a credible plan is needed.
The situation has been complicated by the fact DUP leader Arlene Foster, whose party provides crucial support to Ms Mays Conservatives government, has warned it may pull down the coalition if a deal treats Northern Ireland differently to the rest of Britain.
Separately, hard-line Brexiteers yesterday warned Ms May in an open letter not to back down on key issues to help cut a border deal.
Dublin City Councils monthly meeting faces two decisions, because the leader of Myanmar has refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in the west of the country.
Rock star and human rights campaigner, Bob Geldof, last month publicly handed back his own freedom-of-the-city scroll and asked that his name be taken off the register of recipients, in protest at Ms Suu Kyis continued inclusion.
No precedent for such a request exists and councillors will tonight debate how to handle it. But they will also discuss the wider issue of Ms Suu Kyis status as freeman and whether it should be rescinded.
While a number of councillors have called for her removal from the register of freemen, the majority have been quiet on the subject and some are understood to feel unfairly forced into action by Mr Geldolfs self-acknowledged publicity stunt.
The small Rohingya community in Ireland, who came here as refugees in 2009, wrote a lengthy plea to the city council ahead of tonights debate, asking them to take back the freedom award, saying it was at odds with Irelands and Dublins reputation as a refuge for the persecuted.
Ms Suu Kyi was awarded the freedom of Dublin in her absence in 2000, while she was the international face of the Burmese freedom and democracy movement and was one of the worlds best-known political prisoners.
She was already a Nobel peace prize winner at that time, and has gathered countless other awards from international bodies and institutions, including Irish universities. She picked up her freedom award in person in Dublin in 2012, when she was feted by stars, including Bono and Geldof.
Since being released, she has failed to exert control over the Myanmar military, which has been responsible for decades of atrocities against the Rohingya people, but she has come under increasing criticism for refusing even to acknowledge any wrongdoing against them.
After years of controversy over the issue which included a split statutory report which was ultimately shelved, a government- ordered review and threats of legal action it is understood that a compromise boundary extension has now been agreed.
Details of the new boundary line, which will result in the citys population increasing by almost 100,000 to about 220,000, and which will shape development of the city for the next half century, is set to be unveiled to both city and county councillors today.
A source described today as a make it or break it point in the long boundary extension process.
It is understood the compromise extension proposes that Ballincollig, Blarney, Glanmire and Cork Airport become part of the city, as proposed by the Mackinnon review group.
However, the commercial rates-rich area of Little Island and Carrigtwohill, east of Dunkettle, which were part of the Mackinnon report, are expected to remain part of the county under the compromise deal.
It follows weeks of intense negotiation between senior city and county council officials, overseen by an implementation oversight group which was set up to implement the boundary extension as recommended by the Mackinnon review group.
Mackinnon was set up to review the shelved 2015 Smiddy report which recommended the effective merger of the city and county councils and the creation of a super-council.
However, Mackinnon recommended the retention of the two local authorities and a significant city boundary extension.
The chiefs executive of both city and county councils will be briefed on the proposed boundary during what could be the final meeting of the Mackinnon implementation oversight group this morning.
Both chiefs executive will then update their councillors on the outcome of the oversight group process at special local authority meetings which have been called for this afternoon.
Councillors will be asked to endorse the proposed boundary extension which the oversight group proposes to submit to the Local Government Minister Eoghan Murphy.
Last week, Tanaiste Simon Coveney had warned both local authorities to agree an extension or face the prospect of government imposing an extension.
The citys boundary was last extended in 1965.
Cork City Council has been arguing for an extension for the last 20-years to give it enough land and population to grow, and act as a development counterweight to Dublin.
Cork County Council has argued that a significant boundary extension will result in a significant loss of its rates income and affect its ability to deliver services.
Details of a compensation package which will see the city paying the county for any loss in rates income arising from an extension are also expected to be part of the extension proposal.
Operation Hurdle, which is now in its sixth year, will see an increased garda presence between now and Christmas in Co Wicklow, which has the highest concentration of Christmas tree farms in the country.
Regular air patrols in the run-up to Christmas will also enable gardai to keep an eye on any suspicious activity around the more remote plantations across the county.
Supt Paul Hogan, who set up the initiative back in 2012 after a delegation of concerned farmers approached him following a spate of thefts, said the threat growers used to face from criminal gangs has since reduced dramatically.
Weve only just officially launched this years Operation Hurdle, but weve been running it for the past few weeks.
Our focus is primarily on prevention, because the criminals and gangs out there know were keeping a very close eye on things. The Christmas tree farms are our main focus since we set it up at the instigation of the growers, but were also looking out for poachers and that kind of activity, which tends to increase towards Christmas.
We also have the help of the air corps unit, which can cover large tracts of land and quickly spot anything suspicious.
Padraig Sugrue harvesting a tree on his Christmas tree farm at Drumavalla, Tralee, Co Kerry. Picture: Dan Linehan
Supt Hogan, whos based at Wicklow town garda station, set up Operation Hurdle following an incident in 2011 when a grower in Roundwood was tied up and robbed.
Up to then criminal gangs had successfully plundered many farms, stealing over 2,000 festive firs a year and costing growers as much as 100,000.
But an increased garda presence, plus investment from the growers themselves in security measures such as employing security guards and setting up CCTV cameras and motion detectors around their plantations has helped them win the war on Christmas tree crime.
Grower Christy Kavanagh, who expects to supply around 10,000 trees in total from his isolated farm in Newtownmountkennedy, Co Wicklow, to both the Irish and export market this year, described Operation Hurdle as a wonderful success.
There has hardly been any theft at all since it was set up and it has a ripple effect across the communities around here, because levels of poaching are kept right down and older people and those who live on their own feel a lot safer at night, because theres a bigger garda presence around.
Christy, whos a multi-award winning grower and vice-president of the Irish Christmas Trees Growers Association, also said many Irish farmers can look forward to a bumper harvest following a very good growing season.
The total value of the Christmas tree market to the Irish economy is estimated to be about 21m.
The Nordmann Fir accounts for 75% of trees grown in this country, with another 15% made up by the Noble Fir and the remaining 10% by several other varieties.
Denmark is the largest producer of Christmas trees in Europe, but the high-quality crop produced in this country has made Ireland the biggest exporter of festive trees, first to the UK, with strong demand also from France, Germany, Belgium and Holland.
An Bord Pleanala had said they would announce on December 5 their ruling on a proposal by Indaver Ireland Ltd to to build a 160m, 240,000-tonnes-per-annum waste-to-energy facility at Ringaskiddy, in Co Cork.
However, that date has now been pushed out to December 19, a year-and-a-half after the original deadline.
The planning authoritys own guidelines state there is a duty on the board to make its decision as expeditiously as is consistent with proper planning and sustainable development, and to avoid delays.
There is also a statutory objective to make decisions within 18 weeks, beginning on the last day for making submissions or observations by the public, following the applicants newspaper notice of intention to apply for permission. This means a decision in relation to the Indaver case should have been reached mid-July, 2016.
An Bord Pleanala has previously told the Irish Examiner that the Indaver case is unusual in its sheer super-complexity, as well as in the number of new issues raised since an oral hearing took place in April/May of 2016.
CHASE, the environmental lobby group opposed to the incinerator, said a number of significant changes had taken place in relation to the proposed incinerator site, between the time of the statutory, mid-July 2016 deadline, up to the present day.
Spokesperson Linda Fitzpatrick said the site had been rezoned for education purposes by Cork County Councillors in the Local Area Plan (July, 2017).
Moreover, there were strong commitments by Europe to circular economies and renewable energy, while strict limitations on energy produced from unsorted waste place incineration firmly towards the bottom of the waste management hierarchy.
She said there had also been an increase in extreme weather events, which was causing visible and ongoing erosion of the site and that the tourism value of the area around the site has been affirmed, with Spike Island named Europes leading tourism attraction in September, 2017.
Ms Fitzpatrick also questioned the fairness of potentially deciding on such a big project just days before Christmas. If the decision was in favour of incineration, CHASE members would have to spend the holiday period gearing up for a legal challenge.
She said she couldnt understand why the planning authority posted decision-due dates on its website which it repeatedly failed to meet.
Are they pulling dates out of a hat? she asked.
A decision from the planning board, in relation to the 180m, M28 motorway, linking Cork city to Ringaskiddy, is also due Christmas week. The project would mean an upgrade of the existing primary route, the N28, along which Indaver trucks would travel to reach the incinerator.
Its the third time since 2001 that Indaver has applied to build an incinerator in Ringaskiddy.
Security expert Dr Tom Clonan said every other country in Europe has beefed up its special forces to react to terrorist attacks and its absolutely essential that the same is done with the Army Ranger Wing (ARW).
In August 2015, then minister for defence, Simon Coveney, announced that the Government would double the size of the elite force.
He said bolstering it was a key plank in the States counter-terrorism measures and this policy was enshrined in a White Paper on defence.
However, the Irish Examiner can reveal there has been little or no expansion in the specialist unit since Mr Coveney made the promise.
In fact, the ARW is far smaller than it was during the height of the Troubles.
Dr Clonan said that international terrorists are constantly looking for weakness and that is why every other country in Europe is beefing up its counter-terrorism forces.
He said he was very disappointed to learn that no progress had been made.
Its an absolute must have. Its absolutely essential in the evolving picture of terrorism. To be operationally ready on a 24/7 basis they need increased numbers, he said.
Dr Clonan said the Department of Justice has increased Garda armed units and identified the threat.
But its quite different from the Garda response units can do compared to the ARW. Theyre an iron fist in a velvet glove, he said.
Dr Clonan said that ARW could be tasked to deal with hijackings on aircraft or ferries.
Thats the kind of intervention the gardai cant do, he said.
In May last year, the Defence Forces released a video of the ARW carrying out an exercise in the Irish Sea where they simulated a response to a terrorist takeover of a passenger ferry.
The ARW assaulted the ship both from the air and sea.
The elite unit has also carried out similar anti-terrorist exercises on gas rigs and other important installations.
The ARW is mainly based in The Curragh and has its own purpose built tactical training facilities, including shooting ranges and various urban and rural settings where soldiers can act out different operational scenarios.
The Department of Defence admitted that it was the intention of the 2015 White Paper on Defence to ensure measures were taken to further enhance the capabilities of the ARW, with the aim of increasing its strength considerably.
In a statement is said work to identify a range of options is ongoing with a military/civilian team currently actively working on the project.
It added that Minister with responsibility for Defence, Paul Kehoe, was committed to ensuring this happens, but was unable to provide a timeframe.
Business group, Retail Ireland, predicts that spending will grow to 4.5bn an average of 2,654 per household and a 2.6% increase on the same period last year.
The positive forecast is based on stronger spending this year, higher employment, competitive prices, and growing consumer confidence. It is also backed by successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions, for which some retailers reported record sales.
Retail Ireland director, Thomas Burke, said: Retailers are approaching Christmas, 2017 with an air of confidence not seen in many years.
However, the surge will not necessarily translate into a Christmas bonus for all, as consumers are increasingly buying online, from overseas retailers. Almost 75% of the goods bought online now come from overseas stores.
Mr Burke said online sales were likely to top 16bn in 2017, an increase of 50% in just two years. This is one of the greatest challenges facing the trade, this Christmas season, as, unfortunately, Irish retailers have thus far been unable to stem the flow of online consumer spending currently leaving these shores.
Given that growth in the e-commerce world is running at six times that of traditional bricks-and-mortar outlets, the opportunity for sales uplift is clear. Those who can crack the online world stand to benefit greatly.
Traditional main street retailers are holding their own, however, and 90% of all sales still take place across the counter.
Mr Burke urged retailers to make the most of the Irish shoppers loyalty and give them the best in-store experience possible.
The value of retail sales, to October this year, was 3.7% up on the same period last year, while the volume of sales was up 6.8%, indicating lower prices. It is the highest year-on-year boost in sale values since 2007.
But another challenge facing retailers is cross-border shopping. Sales slowed in recent months and, according to Retail Ireland: It is likely that cross-border trade in cars and other goods, accompanied by strong growth in cross-border online shopping, has driven this phenomenon.
Different sectors in the retail industry are gearing up for the last three weeks of Christmas shopping in different ways. Supermarkets expect their surge in shoppers in the week beginning December 18 and Retail Ireland says while there is great value for shoppers, competitive discounting will put pressure on the stores.
Department stores are expecting a nail-biter, banking on last-minute shopping to boost their tills. Computer and electronics stores are anticipating continued strong demand for TVs, tablets, and gaming systems, despite prices returning to normal after Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The Leave Means Leave campaign made the claim, despite health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, insisting that removing Ms May from office could stop Brexit from happening at all, as it could lead to an election that Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, would win.
In an open letter to Ms May, on Sunday, the Leave Means Leave campaign which includes Conservatives MP, Jacob Reec-Mogg, and former cabinet members, John Redwood, Owen Patterson and David Jones said the prime minister must not back down on key issues at todays Brexit talks.
Leave Means Leave which is also backed by a number of business groups, and has the informal support of former Conservatives leader, Michael Howard said no deal should be agreed with the EU until there is:
a reciprocal free trade deal without tariffs
the end of the European Court of Justices jurisdiction over Britain
the end of free movement of citizens by March 30, 2019
and that there will simply be a good faith agreement to continue working on resolving the Irish border stand-off
The letter which came as DUP leader, Arlene Foster, separately warned, last night, against moving the border to the Irish sea, and as both former British court of appeal judge, Sir Richard Aitkens, and former Conservative cabinet member, Iain Duncan Smith, warned against allowing the European Court of Justice to continue its role post-Brexit has complicated Ms Mays negotiating position even further. This is because her strained government is dependent on support from both the DUP and hard-line Brexiteers, meaning the prime minister who campaigned during last years referendum for a Remain vote has been forced to take a tough stance in office.
However, in a bid to calm the situation last night, Hunt warned hard-line Brexiteers that any move to remove Ms May for compromising could derail Brexit itself.
He said this is because Corbyn could win an election in such a situation, stressing: If we dont back Theresa May, we will have no Brexit. The British Labour party said it has not made a decision on whether there should be a second Brexit referendum.
The partys international trade secretary, Barry Gardiner, said it was not Labour policy to have a second vote, but did not rule out the possibility.
He stressed that stating support for another referendum would encourage the EU to give Britain the worst possible deal. Lets be absolutely upfront about this: the idea that you would have a second referendum would encourage the EU to give you the worst possible deal that there was, he said.
Further west, Dingle, which is within the boundaries of the west Kerry Gaeltacht, has already been selected as a Gaeltacht service town. That has to be seen as a tacit admission that there isnt as much Irish in use in Dingle as might be expected. In fact, Dingle is classed as category C for Irish language use.
The strongest class, category A, is now confined to the westernmost sea coast stretch around Dun Chaoin, Baile nan Gall, and Baile an Fheirtearaigh.
Even Ventry, and places closer to Dingle town, have declined to a category B.
The Gaeltacht Act promotes the use of Irish in towns that are outside the Gaeltacht, but which are used by Irish speakers.
A lead organisation/committee will be selected in each service town to put together a language plan. Funding of 20,000 is available to draw up a plan over two years.
Roibeard O hEartain, Irish officer with Kerry County Council, said: People dont look for services in Irish, because they know they are not available.
It is one thing to train people to speak Irish, but they must be given an opportunity to speak it, he added.
Udaras na Gaeltactha member and West Kerry councillor, Seamus Cosai Fitzgerald, said this is a bottom-up approach to the language by Udaras, which is implementing the programme: It will, it is hoped, deepen the use of Irish in Dingle town, as well as in areas close to Dingle.
There is extreme concern that even in west Kerry Irish is not as prevalent as it was two decades ago.
West Kerry Irish speakers have noted that they need to be assured that if they attend hospitals in Tralee, or have dealings with the gardai, or call into Bus Eireann, they will not be embarrassed to speak in Irish. And it is hoped that even festivals like the Rose of Tralee will have an Irish language element.
PIONEERING ceramic artist David Seeger is celebrating his 80th birthday with an exhibition at Uilinn: West Cork Arts Centre.
The Yorkshire-born artist, who moved to the Baltimore area in West Cork in 1990, says he influenced by everything he sees.
There are colours that come into my work that just happen to fit the landscape around me. Its coincidental with the kind of glazes I use and the preferences that I have. It wasnt anything intentional. I would say the influences are subliminal rather than anything conscious.
The constantly curious and evolving Seeger, who went to school in Bradford with the renowned British artist, David Hockney, has been making mostly one-off ceramic pieces for over 50 years.
Interested in philosophy, quantum physics and Jungian psychology, Seegers pieces often carry some thought or intention of what, for example, a pot actually is.
His Black Hole series play with the fact that pots have a hole. His Twirling the Edge pieces explore the ambiguity of where and what the line may be between the inside and the outside of an object. And his Touching the Void series discovers how the hole may be seen as a black three dimensional form (for example, a cube). The only way to tell whether its real or an illusion is to touch it, which the artist encourages.
Visual art, says Seeger, is all about showing without words. In my case, the answer to the question, How do you make an inside-out teapot? is to make one. There is one in the show. There are many ideas like that in the show that answer simple ordinary kinds of questions.
Seeger says his work is a kind of performance. He gives an example of a piece of sculpture that has two faces. When you walk around it, the whole thing changes. Its like watching a video. It changes shape as you look at it. There is no medium other than video that can get anywhere near that experience. Everything in my show is of that order. Ive used mirrors at the back of quite a lot of the exhibition of pottery so that you can see both sides, the back and the front, from one view point.
Seeger says he was privileged to be one of the early guinea pigs of a revolutionary teacher, Harry Thubron, at Leeds College of Art.
Thubron revolted against the old-fashioned early Impressionist and English tradition of composition with figures. In some ways, he was misunderstood. But he was credited with what he called the Basic Course. That was a set of exercises we did in the first term using geometry and shapes, fairly simple abstract design.
But essentially, Thubron was more of a spontaneous kind of Zen artist with subliminal influences. He was interested in getting drawings from a moving model, maybe like Marcel Duchamps painting, A Nude Descending a Staircase. Theres a kind of time lapse there. We did a lot of that kind of work. Thubron put a lot of emphasis on drawing and life drawing.
Seeger taught art for many years, including at Leeds College of Art which later became part of Leeds Polytechnic. At the moment, he and some of his contemporaries from art college are putting things on the record. My show and the book I published to go with it, are very much of that order. The bedrock of it all is the ethic we set out with, given to us by Harry Thubron.
He based his work on the work of Sir Herbert Read, author of The Meaning of Art. Read avowed that art is as essential to a healthy person as food is.
Its an idea Seeger has been lived by ever since he first encountered it.
Behind the scenes in Santas Workshop, there are a lot more power tools than you might expect. At the studios of Dowtcha Puppets, the street theatre company behind this years Glow Christmas experience in Bishop Lucey Park in Cork city, its all go.
About 230m of painted fencing, six life-size elf puppets, Santas sleigh, and a specially constructed postbox for children to post their letters to the man in red are amongst the props getting the finishing touches in preparation for transport to the park, where the work of assembling the magic of Christmas is about to get under way.
Some of the people working on the props and painting are also amongst the 10 performers, clowns and puppeteers that will bring the Glow experience to life, and are busily working away as real-life elves, but Dowtcha director Cliff Dolliver is a little too busy to be amused by this example of life imitating art.
The theme for this years Cork Christmas Celebration is Santas Cork Workshop: a walk-through experience in the park that captures the magical tingle of anticipation that children feel in the lead-up to the big day.
Families who take a walk in the park will be treated to the sight of behind-the-scenes preparations at Santas Cork HQ: elves packing presents and performing quality control on toys, reindeer being taken through some final training, and of course Santa himself.
With the count-down on to Fridays grand opening, Cliff is working hard, but the end goal is always in sight. At this stage, Im really looking forward to getting the public into it, he says.
Because I know theyre going to love it. People will walk away with life-long memories, and pictures of their kids with silly reindeer and Giant Santa. This year is going to be very special.
Cassandra Davis and one of Dowtchas elf puppets at Glow. Pictures: Larry Cummins
He points out a scale model of the park, describing the various surprises in store for visitors.
The aesthetic is what Im calling Cork and Western: its a kind of cartoony, classic Hanna Barbera look, he says. The first thing families will see when they come in is the sleigh being loaded up, and the bags of toys all have the names of areas of Cork painted on them, so parents can point out a bag for their area to children. I think thatll be really exciting for younger kids.
The last time Dowtcha won the commission to present Cork City Councils Christmas park walk-through was in 2014. Cliff worked on a Celtic-themed Christmas called Tir na Nollaig, with specially commissioned traditional music, lush costumes and 17 live actors.
A Tasmanian who has developed an abiding love for Irish culture in his two decades in Ireland, he was keen to inject a little more cultural relevance into his production than the bland, commercial, TV-inspired fare often on offer at such events.
But despite an attendance of over 80,000 visitors to Tir na Nollaig, some punters did say that the experience wasnt Christmassy enough: where was Santa, where were the reindeer?
This year, Cliff feels hes met a happy medium, a production that can deliver all of the visual palette expected at Christmas, but blended with touches that instil pride in a uniquely Irish, and Corkonian, heritage.
Were picking up from where we left off the last time in 2014 because we did really like that presentation, but were making it more Christmassy and traditional, he says. Its also a longer and more interesting route this year.
Dowtchas 10 live performers are a very talented bunch, including Italian clown Elisa Gallo Rosso, Cork stage actress Rosie ORegan and Belgian puppeteer and performer Serge Vandenberg, who also frequently works behind the scenes with Dowtcha, constructing their set pieces.
For an acting CV you have to start somewhere, Serge jokes, as he paints a set of weighing scales for the elves present-packing station, which will be just one of the areas where families can observe and interact with the performers.
Cliff is full of praise for the talents of the cast. I really think thats something that makes a huge difference in what a child will experience, so were incredibly lucky to have this bunch on board.
Its been really easy to bring this together, because theyre a competent, dedicated, talented team. And its the effort of the team that will really bring the spirit of Christmas to this, at the end of the day.
In another room in Dowtcha HQ, hilarious reindeer puppets are in the final stages of completion; in a reindeer paddock at the end of the park, children will be able to watch Rudolphs brethren undergoing special training for their Christmas delivery run.
A unique sensory addition to Santas Cork Workshop is a Bell Tree: a huge construction bedecked with 1,500 bells, to add a magical jingle to the atmosphere in the park, which will also be heightened by Cork City Councils lighting scheme and the musical arrangement by sound designer Cormac OConnor.
This year, queuing on the winding route inside the park will be kept to a minimum by ensuring that photo-opportunities are accessible from many different angles at once, although due to the perennial popularity of the free city centre amusement, there will still need to be a queuing system in place outside for access to the park.
Then therell be elf stations for wrapping, sorting and quality control, Cliff says, And of course, right at the end, Santa Claus himself, who is a really beautiful giant puppet.
As a puppetry company, its a natural addition for Dowtcha to mix puppets in with the live performance at Santas Cork Workshop and to give puppeteers the chance to show off their skills, but its a physically demanding job for performers.
There are lots of little challenges to figure out, he says.
The big puppets are quite heavy, and difficult to operate for four hours at a stretch. But were busy devising a clever, theatrical way to work in a shift change so puppeteers can swap roles while staying in character.
There was one other major nail-biting factor for the Dowtcha team as the opening night approached: facing into 12 nights of an outdoor show in December, the weather is one of the only factors that leaves the production completely in the hands of fate.
Does it make Cliff nervous? He shudders for effect, but laughs: I think at this stage Cork City Council think were jinxed with the weather, because theres always something. All I know so far is that I think theres a cold snap forecast? That wouldnt be so bad. The elves can have gloves.
All practicalities aside, its still an exciting job, Cliff says.
It can be quite humdrum when youre putting props together and worrying about ordering enough paint, but the reward is that first time you see a really small child walk in and look around and grab their parents hand tighter: you can see their imagination light up and start working in front of you.
No matter what Christmas means to you, thats a gift.
Crocheting was just a hobby for Ann Cooke until she went out shopping one day and bumped in to her former SNA workmate, Linda Burgess, who told her that she had had a bilateral mastectomy.
Linda mentioned how uncomfortable her prostheses were and an idea was sparked in Anns head. She had come across knitted knockers online and knew that it was possible to make handmade breast prostheses.
Ann, who is based in Dublin, made up a pair of the knockers for Linda and they were both surprised at the result. They are about one sixth the weight of a regular prosthesis. Regular prostheses are very heavy and hot and uncomfortable and people say they are dying to take them out when they get home. But they feel when they are out that they are taking away their femininity. So they end up leaving them in.
Ann says people who wear prostheses often dont want to even open the door to guests without them. However, they can feel heavy and wearers often say they feel weighed down by them both literally and emotionally.
What people say when they have the knitted knockers is that you dont have the physical weight beating down. And that weight is a constant reminder of what has happened.
After successfully knitting the knockers for Linda the pair decided to set an Irish branch of the American organisation Knitted Knockers. The knockers are a soft, lightweight alternative to the standard gel filled prosthesis and can fit into an ordinary bra where they take on the shape of a real breast. Volunteers knit or crochet them and they are free to breast cancer patients.
Knitted Knockers Ireland was set up in 2015 when Ann contacted the American branch of the organisation and was told that there was no Irish chapter in place.
For the first six months I was doing all the craft work myself and then in January 2016 I put out a call for volunteers. We meet once a month in Donaghmede library. Sometimes we meet every two weeks depending on demand. There has been a huge response from volunteers. Sometimes we have to ask people to stop knitting so we can catch up with the process of sending them out.
Ann has been hugely heartened by the donations she has received which have covered materials and postage.
The mail bags we send them out in are donated. There is a company called Royal Upholstery, a family run business in Kilbarrack, and they donate the polyfibre. I thought it would be a once off but when they heard what it was for they decided to do it all the time. A woman held a raffle to pay for the stamps forpostage. I am always happy to get donations of stamps.
Ann sends out the pair of prostheses complete with a personal note, ribbons and two crochet hearts to symbolise from one woman to another. She says women are often very moved that a stranger has come to their assistance in this way.
A lot of elderly ladies arent entitled to free prostheses and they are delighted to get the knitted knockers. People are thrilled that someone they didnt know went to the trouble of making the prostheses for them. People phone us all the time to say thanks, particularly old people. I had one woman in her 90s who rang to say she was delighted that they were so comfortable. If I get a call about a woman in her nineties she goes to the top of the list. And there are women in that age group.
Ms Cooke says she was looking to do voluntary work and that the Knitted Knockers has opened up a whole new world to her, enriching her life in numerous ways.
We get cards from people and we put them on Facebook. It is lovely for people to see the cards and to see the level of appreciation. Everybody knows somebody with cancer. And we all feel that there is not a lot you can do for someone in the midst of it. But this is something you do. I never realised I would have so many bags of prostheses in my house but I love it! My children are all grown up and I really enjoy this.
Knitted Knockers Ireland provides hundreds of free knockers every month to women across the country. They also provide swimming knockers which are filled with the mesh from a net shower puff, because it keeps its shape without absorbing the water.
More information on Knitted Knockers (Irish branch) is available at facebook.com/KnittedKnockersIreland. Email knittedknockersireland@gmail.com or call Ann and Linda on 087 1673220.
Knitted Knockers patterns at knittedknockersireland.wordpress.com
Politicians who favoured an easy approach to one-off houses are now confronted by people in the same rural communities who strongly object to plans for windfarms near their homes. The proliferation of one-off houses is also coming in the way of much-needed road projects and tourism developments like greenways being built through the countryside.
The EPA has confirmed greenhouse gas emissions have gone up here by more than 7% in two years. The Government has given a commitment internationally to reduce emissions by 20% by 2020, but there isnt a hope of reaching that target, as were clearly going in the opposite direction.
Government policy encourages renewable energy. However, policy is playing against a metaphorical gale in many areas, including counties Cork and Waterford and, especially, Kerry where there are claims the county already has more than its fair share of turbines.
There are calls from some councillors often the same politicians who lobbied in favour of one-off rural houses for a lengthy setback of wind turbines from peoples homes. They seek a distance of 1,000m, or more, but, in reality, such would rule out many windfarms because houses are everywhere.
The draft National Planning Framework (NPF) aims to identify the best way to accommodate 1m more people in Ireland by 2040, as well as catering for the existing ageing population in a world facing increased climate change impact and nature loss.
A key message from the framework is that choices have to be made about where people live. Were told it is most efficient to service compact settlements of more than 10,000 inhabitants, with a focus on developing towns and villages. Planning authorities have been thinking that way for some time and are now far more reluctant to allow one-off houses.
An Taisce says scattering people across the country causes many problems, such as social isolation, difficulty in finding sites for renewable energy projects, and the loss of an opportunity to develop strong villages and towns.
We only need to see many small towns failing and main streets half closed to recognise that they lack the population within easy reach that they need to survive. Rather than being a crazy attack on rural Ireland, as portrayed in the local press, this is rural Irelands only hope for survival, it states.
The decline that has occurred in many towns has been caused in part by the building of one-off houses in the open countryside.
IF you happen to be one of the benighted few who has yet to encounter Jack Reacher, you should know that hes six-and-a-half feet tall at least and has hands the size of hams, which is why us fans refused to go to the movie where Tiny Tom (Cruise) played him.
Once you get to know Reacher, you know nobody other than a young Liam Neeson could play him.
The two downsides to Reacher which you also need to know before you identify with him are, first of all, that he has damn all sense of humour.
He has been known to crack a smile, but thats about the height of it. The second downside is that Reacher doesnt stay. Anywhere. Its not that hes a freeborn man of the travelling people.
Its just that when he left the US military, wherein he was a military policeman who attained the rank of major, he decided he was never going to settle.
He has no home. He has no property. Well, OK, unlike most of his compatriots, he has a passport, but youd expect that of a man whose mother was French and who travelled the world as an army brat.
He has a passport and a capacity to magic money out of an account somewhere. Other than those two items, zilch.
He travels by Greyhound bus, washes himself a lot but tosses his cheapo clothes into a bin after a couple of days, having picked up more from a Goodwill store. He does not have a phone. Imagine.
What he does have, in every book, is a willing woman all of them intelligent, brave, beautiful and reasonably happy to bonk and then let him fly free, untrammeled by fidelity. Oh, and a cause. Reacher always has a cause.
An adventitious righter of wrongs, he arrives in a town and straightaway a cause presents itself to him, requiring his always principled and inevitably violent response.
His latest outing, entitled The Midnight Line, is set nowhere in particular in Wyoming, a state which, lets face it, is big enough to contain a whole load of nowhere in particular.
The novel ticks all of the boxes that have made this big bad multiple killer beloved of peaceable little old lady readers and others. But this time, it does more. It gives a painful insight into Americas opiate epidemic.
Millions of Americans are now hooked on drugs they or somebody close to them had prescribed for pain.
Top of the list, one called Oxycontin. The medication was developed to help patients cope with major post-operative and other pain, and the hope, when they first came out, was that they were non-addictive.
Indeed, they were marketed as precisely that. They were so incredibly effective that a new breed of clinic began popping up all over the US: the Chronic Pain clinic, which offered physio, meditation, living in the moment, and, if all of these failed, Oxy.
Everybody was happy. Good folk who had suffered genuine pain for years now had something that would kill off the misery and raise them to a new plane of light, happiness and peace.
When it was suggested that patients on time-release Oxy seemed to get pretty desperate for the next dose two hours before it was due, the makers, Purdue, came up with a rationale that talked of pseudo-dependency.
Of course the patients suffering this new syndrome were not addicts. They simply needed their next fix. Oops, sorry, we meant their next dose.
It was a whole new kind of addict: Hard-working, respectable, decent folk, some of them veterans grievously injured in the course of their duty and whose consequent pain was beautifully managed by Oxy. Wars are the best stimulant for the addiction business.
They deliver pain-wracked men and women with money and a long life ahead of them, that life bearable only through the use of laudanum (that would be after Americas Civil War) or morphine (the first and second world wars).
But the great thing, let us remind ourselves, the great thing about Oxy was that, unlike heroin and alcohol, which constituted the main ingredients in laudanum, or morphine, it was not addictive, the claim went, if used properly.
So while Oxy, used properly, was managing pain for hundreds of thousands of patients, Oxy, used improperly, was changing Appalachian life for the worst.
Given the level of backwoods deprivation that characterises that area of the US, its difficult to imagine any factor making life there much worse, but you have to hand it to Oxy, it managed it.
Young relatives of older patients discovered that a tablet crushed and snorted delivered the most fantastic high, which in time and it didnt take much time turned Oxy into an equal generational addiction.
Grandpa took it, Mom took it and young Wilbur took it, albeit in different forms. Since they had only one prescription serving the three of them, they had to engage in a new sport that took over the Appalachians doctor shopping.
It would take a while and a lot of petrol, but eventually, a determined enough Oxy addict would get enough prescriptions to keep them going and allow a few business deals on the side.
Eventually, the family firm that makes the drug came under pressure because of the deaths their medication was causing. Hundreds of thousands, some authorities suggest. Hundreds of thousands of OD deaths. So the family firm that makes the drug took action.
They reformulated the pills in a way that made them impossible to crush and snort. You can tell this family, the Sacklers, are good at heart, even if you didnt know about their philanthropic donations to museums like the Louvre.
The only problem was that the consumers who had, over time, become addicted to snorted Oxy and who discovered the new version wouldnt play for them quickly became so desperate that they abandoned the pharmacy where theyd purchased Oxy and went out on the street to buy anything that would deliver the same hit.
They found it. Good old reliable heroin would do it. Right there and then. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Thats why authorities find it difficult to nail down precisely how many deaths can be laid at the door of Oxycontin: because many of those who have died since it was reformulated actually died of heroin, for which Oxy was the gateway drug.
WHAT Lee Childs new novel does is change many popular notions of drug addiction. The product is not processed in dubious jungle laboratories owned by killer cartels, but in government inspected pharmaceutical plants.
The peddlers are not scabby locals, but white-coated doctors. The people behind the whole operation are not Netflix villains, but a family of generous philanthropists.
Donald Trump says hes going to tackle the opiate epidemic. He could do with a non-fiction Jack Reacher to help him. Because a legally prescribed drug has destroyed a region and more than one generation of Americans.
The Midnight Line by Lee Child is published by Bantam Press
COLUMBUS Columbus Police arrested a male juvenile for an armed robbery just before 6 a.m. Sunday at Casey's General Store at the corner of 33rd Avenue and 27th Street.
According to police, the suspect was taken into custody after officers executed a search warrant and most of the stolen items were recovered.
Police said the suspect, who was armed with a knife, is not being named because of his age.
Hillary Clintons favorite Central American was back in the news this week, as Honduras painstakingly counted ballots in front of international observers and tried to discern, with utmost transparency, the winner of the Nov. 26 presidential election.
Amid the tension, left-wing candidate Salvador Nasralla cried fraud and called for an uprising. Soon, like a bad centavo , pro-Chavez Honduran former President Manuel Zelaya turned up in the midst of one angry mob.
Recall that in 2009 Mr. Zelaya was kicked out of the country, with the support of his own party, for violating the constitution. Mrs. Clinton, who was then secretary of state, tried and failed to force Honduras to take Mr. Zelaya back. Last week he was seen again, wearing his signature cowboy hat and leading a bunch of hooligans trying to break into the warehouse where the electoral authorities had stored ballots and tally sheets from around the country for counting. The raid did not succeed, but the incident captured the spirit of Zelaya-Nasralla politics.
Mr. Nasralla, a former game-show host, ran against incumbent center-right President Juan Orlando Hernandez. By Friday it looked like Mr. Hernandez had narrowly won. Mr. Nasralla seemed sure of it too. Thats when he announced that his supporters would stay in the streets for years in protest unless he was declared the winner. With no concession, the uncertainty dragged on.
Mr. Nasralla insists he was robbed. Never mind that this election had greater scrutiny by international observers than any contest in the region in recent memory. Or that Mr. Nasrallas Alliance of Opposition had equal access to the tallying process. The Zelaya-Nasralla movement is using its phony cheating claim to justify a torrent of violence.
Welcome to Central America, where even after Venezuela has succumbed to famine, the left remains committed to the tactics that brought the country to misery. The process is simple: win one election, then consolidate power and never leave. The strategy has been successful in Nicaragua, where Sandinista Daniel Ortega has been in power since 2007. He is as corrupt as any caudillo and has handily put an end to political pluralism, competitive elections, transparency and institutional independence.
El Salvador may soon suffer the same fate. Former leftist guerrillas of the FMLN party, who are also allies of Venezuela, have governed since 2009. The party moderated its image to get to power, but last week the party secretary announced that its goal is to end capitalismincluding the right of private property.
In Guatemala a United Nations prosecutor, who is in the country ostensibly to root out corruption, has teamed up with the local leftists to try to unseat a center-right president. The prosecutor has so far been unsuccessful, but he has generated dangerous instability. In Honduras, socialist hopes were on Mr. Nasralla, which is why his followers are taking his loss so badly.
Polls had widely anticipated that Mr. Hernandez would win re-election, as the Economist wrote on Nov. 25. Yet the earliest returns, released on Nov. 27, showed Mr. Nasralla in the lead. Officials cautioned that with less than 60% of the vote counted it was too soon to declare a winner.
When the electoral tribunal did not give the victory to Mr. Nasralla immediately, he called for rebellion. His supporters have blocked highways with burning piles of debris, destroyed cars, trashed storefronts, set highway tollbooths ablaze, and rampaged through the residential neighborhoods where electoral authorities live. On Friday a nighttime curfew was imposed for 10 days. Mr. Nasrallas supporters flouted it.
The violence is well-organized, raising suspicions of outside help. Exiled Venezuelan political science professor Jose Vicente Carrasquero warned in a video of Venezuelan elements seeking to undermine the integrity of Honduran institutions.
That Mr. Hernandez was behind in the early count was surprising but explainable. In the capital there were reports that thugs instructed neighbors not to vote. Most of his backing came from outside the big cities. Both sides had agreed before the election that the physical tally sheets had to be reviewed in Tegucigalpa. It took longer to get them from rural areas.
Another charge is that Mr. Hernandez is an ally of the U.S. and has been allowed to steal the election. But that doesnt add up either.
Observer teams from the Organization of American States and the European Union played a key oversight role. On Tuesday the European mission criticized the tribunals failure to communicate at regular intervals with the public. Yet it also noted that all parties had representatives on hand to monitor the process.
Midweek, the two candidates came together to sign a document pledging that they would each respect the final outcome. Within hours Mr. Nasralla backtracked, alleging that he had been tricked. Hondurans speculated that the reversal came about because Mr. Zelaya did not approve. In other words, Hillarys old friend is the one calling the shots.
AN estimated 63,000 people on the Isle of Wight are suffering due to changes in benefits and allowances, according to a charity.
Ray Harrington-Vail, from Island-based charity The Footprint Trust, is backing National Energy Action's (NEA) Warm Home Campaign.
New research by NEA revealed over one million fuel-poor families in England - over 169, 237 in the South East alone - will not have the cash to meet basic living expenses as winter begins to bite.
Families in fuel poverty are facing an income shortfall of up to 9,331 per year (778 per month) to cover basic essentials, including energy, the charity said.
Peter Smith, director of policy and research, said: "Our new report highlights the scale of the impossible choices that over 169, 237 families in the South East, 63,595 households on the Isle of Wight, will be making this winter.
"The report illustrates the catastrophic impact Universal Credit could have on these families who have no savings to insulate them from falling into debt, going hungry and not heating their homes over the current six-week waiting period.
"We aren't talking about needing to cut down on a few luxuries; we're seeing people switch off the heating for the whole winter and kids only eating one meal a day. We know others are adopting unsafe behaviours in an attempt to keep warm, withdrawing entirely from society or building up bigger and bigger debt problems.''
Page Content
Lombardy reflects on Europe
European Union after Brexit and the implications on Lombard territory and citizens
Strengthening the voice of Lombardy in Europe
An open debate will take place in Milan on 15 December 2017, a "Reflecting on Europe debate" jointly supported by the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) and the Regional Council of Lombardy in the context of the CoR campaign "Reflecting on Europe".
The event takes the cue from a policy paper commissioned by the Regional Council of Lombardy to its own research institute Eupolis Lombardia, about post Brexit effects on EU members and in particular on the Lombardy region. During the meeting there will be an open dialogue between students and companies, representing Lombardy, starting from the topic of the policy paper. Finally several representatives of regional, national and international institutions will give their contribute to the debate. The aim of the event is giving an opportunity to students and companies to show their hopes and concerns about the future of Europe to the institutions, in order to reduce the distance between institutions and citizens as much as possible.
The event is made in cooperation with the Representation of the European Commission and the office of the European Parliament in Italy- offices in Milan and the Europe Direct information centre.
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"Reflecting on Europe" is an initiative launched by the European Committee of the Regions to offer a space for citizens to present their ideas, thoughts and opinions on what the European Union should be. In this context, regional and local authorities are asked to engage in a dialogue with their citizens and to collect feedback on the future of the EU.
To this end, all the participants are invited to take part in the online survey "Have your say on Europe". The CoR is committed to take into account the results of the survey in view of the approval of its opinion on the Future of Europe in October 2018. 11.000 replies in 20 European countries have been already collected.
Join the debate!
The survey is available online and as "Have your say on Europe" mobile app for :
Apple iOS / Google Android
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Contact: Regional Council of Lombardy
E-mail: uffrel.istituzionali@consiglio.regione.lombardia.it
Charlottesville authorities failed to protect public safety and free speech during the August white supremacist rally that turned deadly, according to an independent report [text, PDF] by US Attorney Timothy Heaphy [profile] found that , citing breakdowns in planning and coordination.
Heaphy revealed that Virginia state police and police chief Al Thomas refused to make commanders available for interviews following the rally, made officers wary of retaliation for speaking with investigators, and that Thomas deleted text messages relevant to the investigation. Murphy disclosed that Thomas stated when the violence first broke out, Let them fight, it will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly. Thomass lawyer denied texts were deleted and that he made those remarks. Heaphy concluded that:
the City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety on August 12. The City was unable to protect the right of free expression and facilitate the permit holders offensive speech. This represents a failure of one of the governments core functionsthe protection of fundamental rights. Law enforcement also failed to maintain order and protect citizens from harm, injury, and death. Charlottesville preserved neither of those principles on August 12, which has led to deep distrust of government within this community.
Heaphy interviewed 150 people and he said that no police officer with whom he spoke felt good about what happened on August 12.
The violence in Charlottesville occurred on August 12 when a Unite the Right rally took place to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from the recently renamed Emancipation Park. The rally drew members of white nationalist groups who marched through the streets of Charlottesville the night before carrying torches and chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans. Counter-protesters clashed with these groups during the protest, and 34 were injured. In addition, two state troopers were killed on the same day when the helicopter they were using to monitor the protests crashed. The week after the rally, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a federal civil rights investigation [JURIST report] into the violence.
Judge Pablo Llarena of the Supreme Court of Spain [official website, in Spanish] on Monday ordered the continued detention [press release, in Spanish] of four members of the Catalan National Assembly [official website, in Spanish] while allowing six other members freed on bail.
The four men held in detention are former vice-president of Catalonia Oriol Junqueras, former interior contractor Joaquim Forn, and leaders of Catalan National Assembly and Omnium Cultural, Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart. The judge had considered that there was no risk of escape for these men, instead choosing to keep them confined over a risk of criminal reiteration.
Llarena had stated their contributions are directly linked to a violent explosion that, to reiterate, leaves no room for correction or satisfaction to those who see yourself reached by it. The judge would only be willing to allow the four men to be set free requires to verify that the possibility of new attacks has effectively disappeared.
All of these arrests occurred after members of the Catalan National Assembly announced the regions Independence from Spain. However in November Spains Constitutional Court declared [JURIST report] the Catalan independence declaration to be unconstitutional.
Bosnian police on Monday arrested 13 Muslim citizens suspected of war crimes against ethnic Serbs in the south of the Balkan country during the 1992-1995 civil war, authorities said.
"These are former officials of the Bosnian army, territorial defence (forces) and the interior ministry, suspected of war crimes committed against several dozen Serbs" in the Konjic region, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
The 13 are suspected of "murders, torture, rapes, persecutions and expulsions" of civilians, the statement said.
Police said they had arrested the suspects in Konjic and the capital Sarajevo.
Last month Edhem Zilic, a former member of Bosnian Muslim forces who served as an official at a detention camp for Serbs in Konjic during the war, was sentenced to nine years in prison by a Sarajevo court.
Bosnia's inter-ethnic war claimed 100,000 lives, while 2.2 million people were displaced.
Hanoi is Vietnams capital city, located in northern Vietnam. Hanoi is frenetic and has a reputation for its crazy traffic, mostly made up of motorbikes. Its also known for its French architecture and mouthwatering variety of Vietnamese street food. On our Magnificent Mekong tour with Viking R iver Cruises, we had 48 hours in Vietnam. Even with that short amount of time, we were able to fit in a lot of the best things to do in Hanoi, including viewing Ho Chi Minh, visiting Hoa Lo Prison and a few temples, and eating a lot of delicious food, all while successfully dodging motorbikes, or riding on the back of one.
Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum
We could have visited Ho Chi Minhs palace area and mausoleum with the Viking River Cruises included tour. However, they were visiting in the afternoon, after the mausoleum closes. While that does mean it was far less crowded when our fellow passengers visited, I really wanted to go inside Ho Chi Minhs mausoleum, so we had to visit on our own.
The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum reminded me a lot of the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in Beijing, China . Ho Chi Minh actually asked to be cremated, but this much-revered leader of communist Vietnam was embalmed and put on display in a colossal marble mausoleum.
There is a huge line, but it goes pretty fast. In fact, we visited the mausoleum and the rest of the presidential palace area in two hours and 45 minutes. When in line, be sure to hold on to your place; pushy tourists will try to cut in front of you if youre not paying attention. No cameras or large bags are allowed in the mausoleum, so we had to leave ours at the stand on one side, and they were available at the other side when we emerged.
Inside the mausoleum, four guards stand in a sunken well around Ho Chi Minh, who lays frail, pale, and waxy.
Since we were leaving Hanoi with our Viking River Cruises tour at noon, we had to make sure we made the most of our time. We took a taxi from the hotel, which was a good call because the taxi took us directly to where we needed to get in line, and told us exactly where to go. The complex is huge and, looking at the map, where he took us was nowhere near where I thought we would need to go.
Ho Chi Minhs Vestige in the Presidential Palace Area
Located in the same complex that holds the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum is Ho Chi Minhs Vestige in the Presidential Palace Area. The most imposing structure in this area is the large yellow Presidential Palace, which is not open to the public.
Other places of interest in the presidential palace area include the flower trellis where Ho Chi Minh received guests, the meeting room where Ho Chi Minh chaired meetings and received guests, a garage of cars used to serve Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minhs humble stilt house in which he lived occasionally from 1958 to 1969, the one pillar pagoda built by Emperor Ly Thai Tong in the 2nd century, and Ho Chi Minh Museum which showcases his life with photos and official documents.
Hoa Lo Prison
The Hoa Lo Prison Historical Relic is what remains of the Hoa Lo Prison, built by the French Colonialists in 1896 to imprison Vietnamese revolutionary fighters. Most of the exhibits of the prison are dedicated to this time in history, showing the inhumane conditions in which prisoners were held, shackled to cement floors, beaten, and tortured.
However, most travelers know the Hoa Lo Prison by a different name, the Hanoi Hilton. This name comes from the time the prison was used to hold American pilots who had been shot down during a bombing raid of North Vietnam. Perhaps the most well-known of these prisoners of war is Senator John McCain.
The name Hanoi Hilton came about because it was said the prisoners of war were treated as if they were staying in a resort. While we know that isnt quite true, it is an idea that still seems to be sold to visitors.
Street Market Near the Temple of Literature
While we were walking from our hotel to the Temple of Literature, we stumbled upon an outdoor market. The benefits of walking through the market were twofold as we were able to avoid some of the crazy Hanoi traffic by walking through this mostly pedestrian section and also because we got to look at some of the local fruits, vegetables, and flowers.
Temple of Literature
The Temple of Literature is over 1,000 years old and is dedicated to Confucian scholars and sages and was used as a university. In addition to temples, there are statues of turtles with tablets standing on their backs listing names of doctors. There are statues of birds on turtle backs and Buddha figures. Exhibits portray the history of Confucian education in Vietnam. It is a place of peace and quiet in the middle of bustling city.
Bach Ma Temple
Bach Ma Temple is a small temple in the heart of the Old Quarter and is said to be the oldest temple in Hanoi. Its small size means it is crammed with statues, ornamentation, flowers, offerings of fruit and beer, and, when we were there, a white cat.
Traditional House at 87 Ma May
Another interesting site in Hanois Old Quarter is the Traditional House (also called Memorial House and Ancient House), which is a traditional merchants house built at the end of the 19th century. The house is filled with traditional furniture and has rooms situated around two inner courtyards.
The type of architecture is sometimes referred to as a tube-house because of its narrow facade and succession of courtyards and buildings. The courtyards allow for good ventilation and natural light. The house was the first to be so well restored in the Old Quarter and was recognized as a Vietnamese National Heritage in 2004.
Food Tours
One of our favorite things to do when we travel is experience as much local food as possible. We worried we might not have many chances to do so while traveling with Viking River Cruises (though we ended up having more chances than we imagined) so we booked not just one, but two food tours with Hanoi Street Food Tours . Through these two tours, we not only had some of the best Vietnamese food of all our time in Vietnam, we also received quite an education in traditional Vietnamese foods and got a little sightseeing in as well.
The first food tour we took was the Seafood Tour by Night. I didnt realize before we started researching food tours that seafood is such a big deal in Vietnam. On this tour we stopped at one place for a non-seafood appetizer then went to a seafood restaurant where we sat on short stools at tables on the sidewalk and had our fill of crabs, shrimp, clams, and cockles. We topped off the evening with a sweet treat, egg coffee.
The second food tour with Duc Ivan of Hanoi Street Food Tours was the Hanoi Street Food Tour, which combined stops at multiple hole-in-the-wall restaurants around the Old Quarter, each specializing in one regional dish, with visits to a handful of historical sites and a walking tour of the Old Quarter.
Hoan Kiem Lake at Night
There are a few bodies of water in Hanoi. One of those, Hoan Kiem Lake (Ho Hoan Kiem), separates the French Quarter from the Old Quarter. The English meaning of the lakes name is Lake of the Restored Sword. The legend is that the blade of a sword was fished out of water and made its way to Emperor Le Loi. Le Loi found the sword hilt separately. With the two combined, he was victorious in many battles. Later on, after the Chinese accepted Vietnam as independent, Le Loi was approached by a great turtle while boating on the lake in Hanoi. The turtle asked him to return the sword to the Dragon King. Le Loi immediately dropped the sword into the water and the turtle descended into the deep with the sword in his mouth.
In the lake is an island with a temple, the Temple of Jade Mountain, which is connected to the shore by a red bridge, Huc Bridge. Also in the middle of the lake is Turtle Tower. At night, all of these structures are lit and the lake is surrounded by the lights of Hanoi.
Temple of Jade Mountain
During the day you can cross the Huc Bridge onto Hoan Kiem Lakes island and visit the Temple of Jade Mountain.
St. Josephs Cathedral
St. Josephs Cathedral is the oldest Roman Catholic Church in Hanoi. The church is located in Hanois Old Quarter and was built in 1886 in a style to resemble Notre Dame in Paris. At night the area in front of the church is a gathering place for young people. The church is also a favorite spot for wedding photos for couples of all faiths. The cathedral is especially pretty during the Christmas season when it is decorated to the hilt.
Ride on the Back of a Motorbike
Riding on the back of a motorbike was not an adventure we had planned. In fact, I purposefully avoided planning such a thing. However, when Duc Ivan, our food tour guide, asked on our second tour with him if we would like to ride on the back of his motorbike and get a real taste of Hanoi life, we couldnt pass up the opportunity. So off we went, three adults on one motorbike, no helmets, weaving our way through Hanois crazy traffic. It was thrilling and one of my favorite memories.
Another way to have the motorbike experience is to use the Uber of Vietnam, Grab . With the assistance of an app, the company provides GrabTaxi, GrabCar, GrabBike, and GrabExpress. We saw the green-jacketed GrabBike guys all over Hanoi waiting to give someone a lift on the back of their motorbike.
ong Xuan Market
If you love shopping, a trip to ong Xuan Market is an absolute must. This market was originally built by the French in 1889, but was renovated in the 1990s after a fire almost destroyed the market.
Inside the market is multiple floors of wholesale goods for sale. You can pretty much by anything at ong Xuan Market including clothing, purses, dishes, luggage, shoes, dried goods, seafood and anything else your heart might desire.
History Tour at the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi
Every day at 5:00 p.m., the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi provides a Path of History tour of the old wing of the hotel. The highlight of the tour is the hotels bunker/bomb shelter. But there is more to the tour than that.
Life magazine with a photo on the cover that was the first photo to come out of north Vietnam by a foreign journalist. The photo shows the small bomb shelters that lined the sidewalk outside of the hotel. While the hotel has a bunker many feet below the grounds surface where VIPs would be sheltered, the hotel staff and the common people did not have that luxury. Along the sidewalk were little more than manholes just deep enough for a person to crouch inside and block the top with a cover. It didnt seem possible that these close to the surface, tiny, cramped spaces would provide any real protection. They still exist, but now there are trees planted in them. The tour starts with a little history of the century-old hotel and a look at some of the old china and silverware used. There is also an old issue ofmagazine with a photo on the cover that was the first photo to come out of north Vietnam by a foreign journalist. The photo shows the small bomb shelters that lined the sidewalk outside of the hotel. While the hotel has a bunker many feet below the grounds surface where VIPs would be sheltered, the hotel staff and the common people did not have that luxury. Along the sidewalk were little more than manholes just deep enough for a person to crouch inside and block the top with a cover. It didnt seem possible that these close to the surface, tiny, cramped spaces would provide any real protection. They still exist, but now there are trees planted in them.
Where is My Son, highlighting the pain and sorrow the citizens of Hanoi experienced during the war. Jane Fonda, also known as Hanoi Jane, was in the hotels bomb shelter during a raid and spoke out against the war. We didnt hear any animosity towards Americans for their involvement in the war. Rather, we heard how people who fought in the war, like John McCain, have come back to Hanoi recently to visit and express their goodwill. When we later visited the south of Vietnam, we also felt no animosity, but there it seemed more like the people were grateful America had joined them in the war, but perhaps a little wistful for what might have been if America had not withdrawn so early, as some believe the south would have won if America had stayed in the war a little longer. The tour then continues down the hallway where there are a number of photographs of important and famous people that have stayed at the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi. While hearing the stories of the various VIP guests, it was interesting to get a glimpse into how the people of Vietnam view Americas involvement in the war. In Hanoi, which was part of North Vietnam fighting for communism, against South Vietnam with whom America fought to achieve democracy, celebrities like Joan Baez and Jane Fonda are thought of well. Joan Baez stayed at the hotel and wrote a song while there,, highlighting the pain and sorrow the citizens of Hanoi experienced during the war. Jane Fonda, also known as Hanoi Jane, was in the hotels bomb shelter during a raid and spoke out against the war. We didnt hear any animosity towards Americans for their involvement in the war. Rather, we heard how people who fought in the war, like John McCain, have come back to Hanoi recently to visit and express their goodwill. When we later visited the south of Vietnam, we also felt no animosity, but there it seemed more like the people were grateful America had joined them in the war, but perhaps a little wistful for what might have been if America had not withdrawn so early, as some believe the south would have won if America had stayed in the war a little longer.
Where is My Son. We ascended the stairs and were provided with a warm, spiced hibiscus beverage at the conclusion of the tour. Our final stop on the tour was the bunker, where we descended the steep staircase and donned hard hats to protect us from the low cement ceilings. Rather than being one big room, the bunker is divided into many small, narrow rooms. This provided extra stability and support, as well as the hope that if one room failed, the others might still stand. In the final room we visited in the bunker, we listened to Joan Baez sing. We ascended the stairs and were provided with a warm, spiced hibiscus beverage at the conclusion of the tour.
This tour is exclusively for guests. If you cant join the tour, you can still walk around the lobby and ground floor hallway of the original wing to view the old photos and other items on display. Then head outside to the front left corner of the outdoor Bamboo Bar where you will see a stairway leading below ground. If the gate is unlocked, you may be able to go downstairs and view the bunker on your own.
Other Points of Interest
Information for Viking River Cruises Guests
While in Hanoi, we explored the city on our own. While Viking puts together phenomenal tours that hit most of the points of interests that travelers will want to see, plus provides historical information that you may not learn otherwise, when we are in a big city, we prefer to see it on our own. Also, we were most interested in starting our time in Vietnam with an education on traditional Vietnamese food, which conflicted with the Viking tour schedule, and we preferred to see Hanoi by walking and the occasional taxi and motorbike ride, rather than getting from place to place by tour bus.
However, if you are traveling with Viking and want to join the tours, they see many of the places we describe above with a couple exceptions and a couple extras. The Viking tours of Hanoi include the Museum of Ethnology, Temple of Literature, Ho Chi Minh Palace Complex, Hoa Lo Prison, and an electric car tour of the Old Quarter. All of these tours are guided, meaning you will get more information about each site than if you visit on your own. Also, if joining the tour, all entrance fees are covered, while if you visit sites on your own, you will have to pay your own entrance. Entrance fees are usually only a dollar or two. As mentioned above, the Viking tour does miss entering the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum as their visit to the Ho Chi Minh complex is in the afternoon, after the mausoleum has closed, when it is far less crowded.
Where to Stay in Hanoi
One of the best hotels in Hanoi is the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi , a 5-star hotel with a long history. We were traveling with Viking River Cruises and this was the hotel we all stayed in. Since we did the Ha Long Bay extension, we stayed at the Sofitel Legend Metropole for a total of three nights, one night before heading to Ha Long Bay and two nights afterward, when we explored Hanoi.
The Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi is located in Hanois French Quarter close to the Opera House. Its architecture is distinctly French Colonial and the hotel has been around for over 100 years, having been built in 1901. It has always been THE place to stay in Hanoi, having had countless dignitaries and celebrities as guests like Joan Baez, Jane Fonda, and Bill Clinton, just to name a few. It is one of the top three hotels in Southeast Asia.
There are two parts to the hotel, the original hotel and the newer opera wing, which is where we slept. The two wings surround a courtyard which holds the pool and the outdoor Bamboo Bar.
While all of the hotels in which we stayed during our Viking Mekong trip were excellent, this was probably my favorite one of the bunch. Perhaps it was because the big spacious room with its comfy bed and its spectacular view of the courtyard, decorated with a huge Christmas tree made entirely of non la (the traditional Vietnamese conical hat), all of which greeted us at 2:00 in the morning after two flights had been delayed, one of which we caught only because of a Christmas miracle, negating what had seemed to be the inevitable overnight in the Seoul airport. Or maybe it was the amazing breakfast buffet which allowed us to start our trip immediately with Vietnamese food, a breakfast of pho, banh cuon, and tropical fruit (Western options were also available).
Hanoi Tip How to Cross the Street
The most valuable lesson one must learn if exploring Hanoi by foot is how to cross the street. Because practically everyone drives a motorbike and hardly anyone drives a car, there are myriads of motorbikes everywhere.
Not only are the streets filled with motorbikes, the sidewalks are filled with them. Sidewalks are first and foremost for parking motorbikes. Sidewalks are also for driving motorbikes more frequently than youd imagine. Sidewalks are also for serving food and selling goods. Sidewalks are even for playing badminton. Sidewalks are also for walking, but thats more of an afterthought. So, when youre walking on the sidewalk, always be on the lookout for a motorbike coming from in front of you, from behind you, from an alley, or even from a doorway.
Getting back to crossing the street, the street is a sea of motorbikes. Traffic lights are a mere suggestion, as are traffic directions. Therefore, even if you are crossing a street at an intersection with a green light, that is no guarantee there will not be a hundred motorbikes coming at you. They will still be turning right without stopping. They will be turning left without stopping. They may be coming straight through their red light without stopping.
The key to crossing the street in Hanoi without getting maimed or killed is to commit, go slow, and go at one speed without stopping. Actions that will get you hit are running and stopping. Motorbike drivers see you crossing the street. They are actually very skilled in watching everything going on around them as they are also contending with motorbikes driving in front of them, behind them, and around them. When they see you walking, they gage your speed and calculate whether to drive in front of or behind you. Therefore, if they calculate that they can drive behind you and you stop, you will get hit. If they calculate that they can drive in front of you and you speed up or start running, you will get hit. Crossing the street in Hanoi is quite an art and very interesting to watch.
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images(DETROIT) -- A group of Michigan lawmakers and activists will hold a rally in support of Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, on Monday as the veteran congressman faces multiple sexual harassment allegations.
The coalition will consist of dozens of city leaders, ministers and activists -- most based in Conyers 13th District -- who said they plan to stand with Conyers amid growing calls on Capitol Hill for him to resign.
Michigan Rep. Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, one of the events organizers, defended Conyers in a Facebook post Sunday. She argued that he should be given "due process" before choosing to resign.
"We know the balance of the work and contributions that Rep John Conyers has made. He's certainly someone who has championed civil rights and he deserves due process," Gay-Dagnogo wrote. We always see a difference when the leader is a person of color. There's a rush to judgment."
"It tells us that African Americans are disposable and that's why people are not engaged in the political process. We're just used to help carry the vote and we're not going to accept that anymore," she added.
At least 12 House Democrats have called on Conyers to step down as Congress investigates sexual misconduct claims against him. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, has said he should resign, calling the allegations against him "serious, disappointing, and very credible."
Conyers was the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee before stepping aside last week.
Several members of the Congressional Black Caucus have reportedly encouraged him to resign as well, sources told ABC News.
Rep. Cedric Richmond, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, called the allegations against 88-year-old Conyers serious" and "disturbing" if true. Conyers, first elected to the House in 1964, is a founding member of the CBC.
The House Ethics Committee announced this month that it was looking into claims of sexual harassment and age discrimination involving Conyers' staff. Conyers, who has denied those allegations, said he will fully cooperate with the investigation.
His decision came after BuzzFeed News reported last month that Conyers office paid a female aide over $27,000 to quietly settle a wrongful dismissal complaint.
Last week, Deanna Maher, who served as Conyers deputy chief of staff from 1997 to 2005, accused him of making unwanted sexual advances toward her in the 1990s.
Maher, 77, said he touched her inappropriately on at least three occasions, including once in 1999 when he allegedly placed his hands underneath her dress.
Separately, Melanie Sloan, a lawyer who worked with Conyers on the Judiciary Committee, accused him of being increasingly abusive to her, behavior she said wasnt sexual harassment but sexual discrimination.
Another accuser, Marion Brown, alleged that Conyers propositioned her for sex multiple times over more than a decade, according to The Associated Press. Brown settled a complaint in 2015 with Conyers over the allegations, according to her attorney, the AP reported.
Conyers has acknowledged that his office settled a harassment complaint involving a former staffer but denies the allegations against him.
His attorney, Arnold Reed, called Mahers allegations uncorroborated and said his client denies any wrongdoing. Conyers is still in the hospital recuperating from a stress-related illness and is expected to decide his next steps in coming days, his lawyer said.
Copyright 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
The Kimball County Sheriff's Department has released details about the arrest of a man wanted out of Laramie County, Wyoming, on murder charges.
In a press release, the sheriff's department confirmed the arrest of Armando Ramirez-Serna, of Cheyenne. Ramirez-Serna is wanted on warrant on charges of first-degree murder out of Laramie County.
Ramirez-Serna is sought in the shooting death of another man, Justin Robinson, 19, in November. His body was located at a Cheyenne reservoir on Nov. 26. A burned out vehicle was also located.
Kimball County Sheriff Harry Gillway told the Star-Herald that Laramie County Sherriff's investigators contacted his department Saturday, saying they had received a report that the Ramirez-Serna may be in Kimball. Gillway said authorities attempted to locate the man at a Kimball residence, but he was not located. Authorities developed information that he was at another location, the First Interstate Inn, a hotel near Interstate 80. They were able to obtain a room number and did surveillance until additional agencies were able to respond and assist.
At about 5 p.m., Gillway said, a call was placed to Ramirez-Serna to call him out of the hotel room, where the man, who had been reported by authorities to be armed and dangerous, was arrested without incident. The Nebraska State Patrol and its SWAT unit, the Kimball Police Department and Laramie County Sheriff's Office assisted in the arrest.
During a search of the room, Gillway said, authorities located quantities of marijuana. Ramirez-Serna has also been charged with other drug charges. He also reported additional evidence in the homicide case was also located.
Ramirez-Serna's girlfriend, Rachel Rodriquez, was also arrested on drug charges, Gillway said.
Gillway praised the work of one of his deputies, Inv. Anthony Osborn, in the arrest. "He worked very hard on this and was instrumental in getting (Ramirez-Serna) arrested without incident."
I arrived to Lincoln in the summer of 2012. I had lived in Madrid for two years, and I decided to start a Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln after knowing that I had been accepted.
The economic crisis was at its peak in Spain, and even though I didnt know anybody in Nebraska, I decided to move here. The university had made an offer I couldnt refuse: I would have a tuition waiver, and I would get a monthly stipend for teaching two classes during the duration of my Ph.D. That kind of agreement between a university and a student doesnt exist in my home country, Colombia, or in Spain.
I graduated with a Ph.D. in Spanish literature in May 2016. My salary, $1,200 a month, was just enough for me to pay for a small apartment, buy groceries and save $900 for fees I had to pay at UNL every semester. I paid taxes from day one, and I didnt work anywhere else since my student visa only allowed me to work as a teaching assistant at the university where I was studying. I was in charge of at least 15 Spanish classes during those four years. I was not assisting a teacher, I was the teacher, and that helped me develop my teaching skills and address a group of students in a bilingual setting. If I had received $200 less, I would have probably dropped out of the program, since banks dont authorize loans to international students.
I write in first person to give a closer look to what the proposed graduate student tuition waiver tax would do to doctoral students. I saw how much my taxes would have increased if that law had passed when I was a student.
An online tool allowed me to see that, in my case, my taxes would have gone from $135 to $2,256 a year. I would have had a salary of around $9,800 a year. As an international student with a visa, I wasnt authorized to look for a second job to make ends meet, so I would have probably quit my doctoral studies and flown back to Bogota, wondering where did America, that land of opportunities, go.
In a country where public education is already too expensive to many potential students local and international hurting the tuition waiver agreement would be devastating for scientific, artistic and technological development. Doctoral students would go away or they would just give up and rejoin the workforce, and only the wealthy ones would remain.
My husband, who was raised in the United States, is finishing his Ph.D., and he refuses to calculate how much more he would pay in taxes if the graduate student tuition waiver tax was approved. It would be devastating.
We cant forget that America is great not because of its wealth, but because of its leaders in every area of knowledge at a doctoral level and for its unbeatable universities.
When other countries look at the United States, they dont see the owner of Ford or Budweiser, they see Dr. Isaac Asimov, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Paul Krugman and Dr. Condoleezza Rice.
Making education a privilege again is a terrible mistake that slowly separates this country from the progressive ones and drags it closer to unequal nations such as my own where education is not a right but a privilege. Is that really what we want?
Since 1790 the federal government has conducted the census every 10 years. Originally established as a mere head count of residents of each of the states for the purpose of apportioning members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the census has grown into a comprehensive effort that collects data on a number of characteristics of Americans. That information influences distribution of federal funds based on population as well as serves as the major federal data set for policy analysis during the next 10 years.
In the year following each census, states use the population information to evaluate the population residing in different electoral districts to determine if they contain relatively equal numbers. These include Nebraskas three members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and more significantly, legislative districts for representation in state government, along with University of Nebraska Board of Regents, Public Service Commission, and State Board of Education. As shifts in population occur, apportioning equal numbers of voters into each district may require redrawing district boundaries. This process is known as redistricting.
Residents of District 38 are familiar with the consequences of redistricting. In 2011, LB703 created new boundaries for the district following the 2010 census. Kearney County was moved into the district and Harlan County was moved into District 44. Clay County has also moved among different legislative districts through different iterations of legislative redistricting.
With the shift in population to Douglas, Sarpy, and Lancaster counties, the redistricting process will continue to have significant implications for representation of rural Nebraska. In 2011, the movement of District 49 from western Nebraska to Gretna created an important change in the Legislature. Of the 49 seats, 25 are now held by representatives of the Omaha and Lincoln urban areas. Current population projections would indicate two additional seats will be shifted away from rural Nebraska to the Omaha/Lincoln area. That magnifies the urban dominance from a simple majority to a 27-22 split.
While most rural states also face this population shift, the impact on the representation of rural areas in state government is not as extreme. In a two-house state legislature, the population shifts impact rural representation in the state House of Representatives, while geographic representation remains in the Senate. As the only unicameral in the nation, the loss of legislative seats in the single legislative chamber means a direct loss of representation in state government.
The consequences of this political shift can be enormous for rural Nebraskans. There is no better example than the dysfunctional school funding system that has left rural districts paying for public education almost exclusively with local property taxes, while urban districts consume almost $1 billion of state equalization aid. Appeals to fairness by rural senators and rural citizen groups have fallen on deaf ears of urban senators, whose support is required to restore equity to the system. The problem has been recognized for almost a decade, with little action to resolve it.
Rural Nebraskans should carefully watch and evaluate the redistricting process that will be taking shape in the coming years. To date the focus has been on concerns of political parties, not on the impact of the accelerating shift of representation to urban areas. Voters of District 38 should get engaged. The very nature of your representation in state government rests with the outcome.
Sen. John Kuehn of Heartwell represents District 38 in the Nebraska Legislature. The district encompasses southwest Buffalo County and all of Clay, Franklin, Kearney, Nuckolls, Phelps and Webster counties.
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The tugboat Nathan E. Stewart is seen in the waters of the Seaforth Channel near Bella Bella, B.C., in an October 23, 2016, handout photo. The National Transportation Safety Board says the second mate of a tugboat fell asleep before it ran aground off the coast of British Columbia last year and spilled thousands of litres of fuel.THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Heiltsuk First Nation, April Bencze, *MANDATORY CREDIT*
Liberal MP Sherry Romanado leaves a committee meeting, in Ottawa on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Romanado rose earlier in the House of Commons and claimed that Conservative MP James Bezan had made comments towards her that were "humiliating" and "sexual in nature." THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
FILE - This Oct. 16, 2017 file photo shows the wreckage of the car of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia after a car bomb which killed her, next to a road in the town of Mosta, Malta. On Monday, Dec. 4, 2017 Malta's prime minister Joseph Muscat announced the arrest of eight suspects, all Maltese citizens, in the murder of the journalist. (AP Photo/Rene Rossignaud, file)
Editors note: Each Monday, the Kenosha News takes a look at the life of a Kenosha County resident who recently died. We share with you, through the memories of family and friends, a life remembered.
If youre a fan of UW-Parksides foreign films, then Don Kummings is one of the people to thank.
Thirty-five years ago, he, along with Norm Cloutier, rolled out the first season of hand-picked foreign films, which became an immediate hit with the community.
Others are grateful to Kummings for his influence on their academic growth at Parkside. He taught for more than 43 years, 36 of those in the English department at Parkside.
He was known for being a kind and patient professor, for giving students detailed feedback and challenging them to be better writers.
His love of English was infectious, wrote former student Benjy Bar-Lev.
It was because of Don Kummings that I became an English major, said another former student, Michael Rohl.
I respected him immensely, said Mary Lenard, a former colleague. He was one of the English departments strongest scholars, but he also had a passionate commitment to undergraduate education.
Donald D. Kummings, 77, died at home on Nov. 10. He is survived by his wife, Pat; his brother, John; his son, Jeremy and daughter-in-law, Jill (Murray); three grandsons; his stepchildren, Laura (Keith) Stummer, Wanda (Todd) Stingley, Eric Larson and Diana (Saunders) Kohn; and six stepgrandchildren.
He was born July 28, 1940, to Herman and Estelle Kummings in Lafayette, Ind. He earned his bachelors and masters degrees from Purdue University in Lafayette and a doctorate in English and American studies from Indiana University.
In 1963, he married Gayle Savage. They had two children, Kevin Scott and Jeremy William. The couple divorced in 1980.
He taught at Purdue, Adrian College in Michigan and Indiana University at Bloomington before coming to Parkside in 1970, when the university was just 2 years old.
Committed to Parkside
Although he didnt anticipate staying at Parkside, he did so until his retirement.
He taught American literature and American poetry, freshman writing, literary analysis and creative writing.
Over the course of his Parkside career, Kummings earned the universitys Triple Crown of faculty awards: for teaching, service and research/creative activity.
In 1997, he was named Wisconsin Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
His forte was Walt Whitman. He wrote three books on the poet and often gave readings and lectures of Whitmans works.
In 1990, Kummings published an anthology of his own, The Open Road Trip: Poems.
Uber editor
When it came to grading papers and offering his opinions, Kummings was an uber editor, recalled Lenard and Cloutier.
At first, I wasnt sure if I should interpret these bold (editorial) red comments as anger, but it quickly became apparent that these were simply physical manifestations of Dons full commitment to his craft thoughtful, thorough and deliberate, Cloutier said.
Foreign films
A great fan of foreign films, Kummings teamed up with Cloutier in 1982 to create Parksides Foreign Film Series.
When I proposed the idea for the Foreign Film Series, Don was one of the few (faculty members) to offer kind encouragement and volunteered to help organize the series, Cloutier wrote.
Kummings did much of the research for each seasons list, Cloutier said.
I think its fair to say that over the years Dons selections tended to be more serious films; he did not look favorably on fluffy, feel-good filmmaking.
As a filmgoer, Don had a reviewers eye, his wife said. He was very aware of lighting, plot and characters.
Though he retired in 2006, Kummings stayed on the Foreign Film Series committee.
A new partner
In the late 1980s, Don met Patricia Finnelly Larson, then an English teacher at Central High School.
Our paths crossed a few times, then after two dates, we decided, Thats it and got married, she said. They married on March 20, 1987.
The next 30 years were filled with plays, operas and world travel. Pat said Don enjoyed planning every detail of their trips to the Middle East, Japan and Africa.
They also shared lively conversation on subjects ranging from English literature to films, Pat said.
Unless we were doing schoolwork, it never happened that we didnt talk. We had a tremendous amount of fun, she said.
I will miss his counsel, his friendship, hearing about his recent international travel exploits with Pat, and Ill miss those heavy-handed, bold red, editorial comments, Cloutier said.
Itll look like a giant pinto bean when its done.
But in theory, this transportation pod being developed by a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison students, some of them from Kenosha, will be able to reach speeds of up to 350 mph through a three-quarter-mile vacuum chamber Hyperloop test track in Hawthorne, Calif., where billionaire inventor Elon Musks SpaceX company is headquartered.
The students are members of Badgerloop, a 60-member team, many of whom have been competing in Musks Hyperloop Pod Competition since its inception in 2015.
Musks Hyperloop envisions a fifth mode of major transportation the other four being planes, trains, automobiles and boats that delivers passengers to their destinations while riding in pressurized pods inside a vacuum tube.
When successfully applied, the technology could make for a 45-minute one-way trip from Chicago to Minneapolis, for instance.
Musk, the inventor of the Tesla car, launched the Hyperloop competition to encourage student innovation with the hope of accelerating the development of a pod protoype.
The team from Madison is on its third prototype. Members hope to submit their plans by the end of the month and possibly advance to the building stage next summer.
Badgerloop won innovation awards at the first two pod competitions at Space X headquarters, according to Ryan Castle, a Bradford High School graduate who is electrical director for the team.
Castle said he and the team are excited to be a part of a new technology and frontier for transportation.
Theres definitely debate over whether Hyperloop is the way to go, but were happy to have the opportunity to provide input and to say, Heres what weve come up with to shape that conversation, he said.
First pod
Badgerloops first pod encountered technical difficulties and didnt make it to the tube track.
However, its use of Halbach wheels, which were designed to levitate the pod while inside the Hyperloop tube, made an impression on the SpaceX engineers.
The Halbach wheel was developed at UW-Madison in late 2000 and was originally intended for propulsion, Castle said.
We basically took that design and innovated it for use on a vehicle, he said.
The pod was the first that could comfortably house a person with Musk testing it. According to the competition requirements, pods must be at least 5 feet long, but no more than 24 feet in length and are limited to 3,300 pounds.
The first pod could fit a full sized, six-foot person, which happened to be the height of Elon Musk, Castle said. So he ended up taking a seat.
Second chance
For its second pod, the team employed cold gas thrusters, or jet propulsion technology, to propel the pod.
Clayton Fellman, 22, of Kenosha, another Bradford graduate studying mechanical engineering at UW-Madison, was in charge of the second pods propulsion team.
A cold gas thruster is the most simple form of jet propulsion, he said.
Badgerloops second pod qualified for the full vacuum tube demonstration. The team was unable to demonstrate the pods capabilities, however, because it ran out of time.
Third try
Fellman said the team is ready for its third go-round.
Castle and Fellman said the third pod will use a different source to propel it: electricity.
Were using an electric motor and drive wheel on a non-levitating pod, Castle said.
While SpaceX judges lauded the teams use of jet propulsion, the team chose electricity due to safety and efficiency.
We have a completely re-designed pod, and I have a lot of faith this time well do well, Castle said. A lot of the success I envision is not the engineering expertise we all know what are the important parameters we need to work out but that we really know what the problems are and what we need to address.
For many students, pursuing their passions can mean opening them up to new opportunities.
For Hayden Qualls, a senior at Harrisburg Academy, pursuing his passion for the environment has given him the opportunity to travel to new lands.
In July, Qualls traveled to Peru on scholarship to, among other things, help build greenhouses for the local community.
(Im probably most proud of) the service part of my Peru trip, he said. I know it had such an impact on those peoples lives. Theyll be able to use those greenhouses, theyll be able to earn money ... through their crop growths, and theyll just be able to better their lives so much. Its just something that I feel has had the biggest impact [on] people.
Despite his love of nature, Qualls said he is not sure he would define himself as an environmentalist.
Im not sure how I would define myself, he said. Id just say Im someone whos interested in the environment and protecting it. I dont know what that would fall under.
Qualls said hes grown up around nature and has always been an outdoorsy person, even from a young age.
Ive always just really liked being outside, and Ive gone hiking with my dad when I was little, he said. I guess at camp just spending time with friends outside, its always just been a big part of my life. I want to keep it healthy so other people can continue to enjoy it.
He said his trip to Peru, which included hiking through the Andes Mountains, has helped instill in him his desire to study environmental engineering in college and pursue a career in the field.
Qualls carries a 4.01 GPA while taking advanced-level and college preparatory classes.
He is the son of Karl Qualls, a history professor at Dickinson College, and Gretchen Qualls, a teacher at Harrisburg Academy.
The fact that both of his parents work in education has instilled in Qualls a desire to push himself academically and has given him an appreciation for learning, he said.
They are not demanding, but they have high expectations, Qualls said of his parents. It keeps me on track to maintain and meet those expectations.
Beyond school work, Qualls is a youth swim instructor at HACC, a member of the National Honor Society and is a member of the Harrisburg Academy swim, Brain Busters and Quiz Bowl teams.
Outside of the environment, Qualls said participating in Brain Busters and Quiz Bowl, where he is the schools co-captain, are his greatest passions.
Everyone (except some Alabama Republicans) seem to believe sexual contact between a man in his 30s and a 14-year-old is illegal and reprehensible.
Most everyone believes the women who say Republican Senate Candidate Roy Moore hit on them while they were teenagers and he was in his 30s, including the woman who says he did so when she was 14, younger than the age of consent, even in Alabama.
Most everyone.
John Skipper, a former chairman of the Mobile County Republican Party, calls the accusations, Total contrived media garbage.
Alabamas state auditor, Jim Ziegler, told The Washington Examiner, that the womens claims were much ado about nothing and said that Mr. Moore had done nothing immoral or illegal.
Note: Alabama law states in no uncertain terms that someone 19 or older having sexual contact with someone between the ages of 12 and 16 is guilty of second-degree sex abuse.
It was Mr. Ziegler who made the unholy comparison to Joseph, Mary and Jesus, saying its okay because the Virgin Mother was a teenager when Joseph married her.
Alabama Marion County GOP chair David Hall defied logic and disgraces his party saying, It was 40 years ago. I really dont see the relevance of it. He was 32. She was supposedly 14. Shes not saying that anything happened other than they kissed.
I wonder how that argument would go over with an angry Republican Alabama father of such a 14-year-old wielding a shotgun at Halls door.
Ed Henry, a state representative, told The Cullman Times that the women who came forward should be subject to legal action.
If they believe this man is predatory, they are guilty of allowing him to exist for 40 years, he said. I think someone should prosecute and go after them. You cant be a victim 40 years later, in my opinion.
Henry knows nothing of sexual abuse survivors.
Meanwhile, National Republicans say Moore is unfit to be a candidate, or he should step aside if the accusations are true.
Only President Trump has said that people should also listen to the accused, Roy Moore, who has a right to a defense.
This brings us directly to Nancy Pelosi.
When well-pressed by Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, Pelosi called Moore a child molester while crying for Democrats John Conyers and Al Franken to be given due process for their charges of sexual abuse.
Pelosi desperately tried to pin all of the sexual abuse cases on Trump: ...the election of President Trump evoked what happened to Harvey (Weinstein). And now everybody is served notice.
Neither Todd nor anyone else of sound mind believes Trumps election gave women strength in numbers to go public with sexual abuse by Hollywood mogul and Hillary Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein.
Thats a deplorable Pelosi spin.
But then Pelosi goes all Alabama Republican, stuttering, we must move forward and there must be due process and Al Frankens sexual abuse of women cant be compared to Roy Moore, the child molester.
First of all, as credible as Moores accusers are, Pelosi does not have the authority to adjudicate the case, which she tries in the media.
Second, why is the Democratic Party Leader so insistent that Democratic Senator Al Franken forcefully pushing his tongue into the mouth of at least one unwilling victim, being photographed fondling the breasts of a sleeping female employee and being accused of groping even more women, has to be compared to anyone else?
Pelosi might as well have said, Well, Al Franken isnt as bad as Charles Manson.
Does she need some metric for condemnation of Democrat perverts that exceeds photos and Democratic Rep. John Conyers $27,000 paper trail?
He did step down as chair of the Judiciary Committee, which was especially ironic.
Conyers denies everything and Franken-the-creep says hes sorry and now must get back to work.
Pelosi is circling her wagons around Democrats like Alabama Republicans around Roy Moore.
Which brings to mind the message for Pelosis voters:
Democrats Conyers and Franken are still in power and pose serious threats to female aides, employees and interns.
This is on you.
Construction of a new source for renewable energy is underway in one Parkland community.
The groundbreaking for the solar farm on property in the southern part of Farmington was held in October. Since that time, crews working for MC Power are busy installing around 9,000 panels on the 15 to 20 acres located off Korber Road.
The farm will generate about 3 megawatts against a peak load of about 50 megawatts for the city and will be 100 percent solar during a solar generating period meaning when skies are not cloudy or at night.
Ewell Lawson, vice president of government affairs, communications and member relations for MPUA, explained the role of MPUA at the ground breaking.
(MPUA) is an umbrella name for an organization that represents a number of entities and alliance of entities relating to municipal utilities, he said. One part of that leg of that stool isMJMEUC the Missouri Joint Municipal Electrical Utility Commission.
Within MJMEUC are three power pools with Farmington belonging to the oldest pool of the three.
The city of Farmington purchases energy through the MoPEP Energy Pool, which is a group of municipal electric utilities purchasing power collectively through their participation in the Missouri Joint Municipal Electric Utility Commission (MJMEUC), a non-profit commission established in 1979.
There are 35 member cities in the MoPEP energy pool which began operations in 2000 and includes the following communities: Albany, Ava, Bethany, Butler, Carrollton, Chillicothe, El Dorado Springs, Farmington, Fayette, Fredericktown, Gallatin, Harrisonville, Hermann, Higginsville, Jackson, La Plata, Lamar, Lebanon, Macon, Marshall, Memphis, Monroe City, Odessa, Palmyra, Rock Port, Rolla, St. James, Salisbury, Shelbina, Stanberry, Thayer, Trenton, Unionville, Vandalia, and Waynesville.
During the groundbreaking, Lawson said solar farms bring a diversive portfolio to the table - providing strength to the pool, stability to their rates and bolstering long-term price stability.
And, having a diversified portfolio with predictable costs and production protection for decades in the future is good for Farmington and every other city in the power pool, Lawson said in October.
MoPEP agreed to purchase 16 megawatts of electricity from MC Power Company. And, the only way to get that power is to put these systems in communities that are MoPEP communities, Farmington City Administrator Greg Beavers explained earlier this week during a tour of the solar farm.
Farmington is the last of six solar farms in Missouri being completed, he said. As a part of the pool, the city has already paid for the solar power from the other solar farms.
Beavers gave an analogy of how the pool works.
What happens isall the energy bought by MoPEP energy pool is I use the term, socialized all that cost is socialized, he said. We pay MoPEP energy pool for our prorated share of the energy we use.
So, while we say the energy were reserving on the market by paying for it at the wholesale level and putting it on the grid is our energywe dont know where its coming from.
Beavers further explained the process by giving the example of a farmer harvesting corn and a grain elevator to show the energy is distributed through the pool.
When the farmer gets ready to sell the corn, its not necessarily his corn he takes out of the elevator and sellshe put corn in, he said. The electric market is the same way. You put (electric energy) on the supply system.
The solar farm is a little different, in that even though the cost of the electricity is billed to Missouri Public Energy Pool and then, in turned, billed to all the member cities, the city will actually be taking the energy off of the farm here in Farmington.
To a lot of people (the solar farm) communicates or demonstrates a commitment to renewable energy (and) shows that were trying to be out front, he said.
A new development by Engler Park will be the first stop for energy generated from the solar farm due to the location near the connect line therefore, noting 100 percent of that energy for the development is from a renewable source.
The current plan is to commission the facility on, or about, Dec. 20 for testing.
The system will not be fully commercial until we have installed the system protections required by AmerenUE to ensure that energy from the solar system does not feed back onto the AUE transmission system, Beavers said. The system analysis was completed by AUE and submitted to the City last week, which provided us with the requirements for the interconnect protection. We have forwarded that report to our engineering consultant to finalize the interconnect design, which will be sent back to AUE for review.
Upon completion of their review, and availability of the required equipment, we will complete the interconnect and the solar system will be in full commercial operation. The best schedule anticipated for completion of those tasks is mid- to late-February 2018.
By Sumeet Gaikwad
Dec 4 (Reuters) - Australian shares were steady on Monday, as gains in materials stocks on strong commodity prices were offset by declines in the financial sector.
The S&P/ASX 200 index rose 0.01 percent or 0.344 points to 5990.1 by 0104 GMT. The benchmark fell 0.3 percent on Friday.
Materials stocks led the gains on the benchmark with the mining index gaining more than 1 percent when Shanghai steel futures traded near their strongest level since mid-September, along with lead and zinc touching multi-week highs amid supply concerns. Mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto climbed 1.7 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively.
Rio Tinto, after months of speculation, appointed Simon Thompson as its next chairman to succeed Jan Du Plessis.
Thompson, who is currently chairman of Rio's remuneration committe, take over the chairmanship on March 5 next year. The financial index was down 0.6 percent with the 'Big Four' banks sliding between 0.5 percent and 1.1 percent.
"The banks are still reacting to the news from last week. So they are likely to underperform. And I would say given the uncertainty, the banking enquiry is going to yield," said Ben Le Brun, an analyst at Charles Schwab Australia.
The Australian government last week said it will hold a wide-ranging inquiry into a scandal-hit finance sector, arguing one was needed to restore public confidence as it reversed its long-held opposition amid mounting political pressure. Deutche Bank in a research note said they expect the Royal Commission to be disruptive for the banks, and a distraction for management. The financial services company also said the inquiry could impose new constraints on the banks' operations.
In other sectors,the energy index gained 0.7 percent as Brent crude rose as high as $64.32 a barrel, a day after OPEC and other crude producers agreed to extend output cuts until the end of 2018 to tighten global supplies and support prices Oil and gas company Woodside Petroleum gained 0.5 percent while Origin Energy climbed 0.7 percent.
Meanwhile, child care centre operator G8 Education was the biggest loser on the benchmark, falling more than 20 percent, after the company reduced its profit forecast from the previous quarter stating it expects market conditions to remain challenging for the next 6-9 months. In New Zealand, the benchmark S&P/NZX 50 index fell 0.1 percent or 7.4 points to 8181.43, after gaining for three consecutive sessions.
The consumer sector was the biggest drag on the index with milk companies a2 Milk falling 2 percent and Synlait Milk shedding 2.2 percent.
Healthcare and real estate stocks also weighed on the index with Ryman Healthcare and Kiwi Property Group falling 2 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively.
Utilities sector helped recoup losses on the benchmark with electricity supplier Contact Energy climbing 0.6 percent.
(Reporting by Sumeet Gaikwad in Bengaluru; Editing by Eric Meijer)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Sunday that he is optimistic the Senate and House of Representatives will reach a conference agreement on tax legislation that can be signed into law by President Donald Trump. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) walks to the Senate floor as debate wraps up over the Republican tax reform plan in Washington, U.S., December 1, 2017. REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan
Well be able to get to an agreement in the conference. Im very optimistic about it, the Kentucky Republican told ABCs This Week program. Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Lisa Shumaker
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.
(Reuters) - Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto Ltd (RIO.AX) said on Monday it now expects capital expenditure of less than $4.5 billion in 2017 down from an earlier forecast of $5 billion.
The company also said that it will deliver additional free cash flow of $1.5 billion a year from 2021, following on from its drive to boost free cash flow by $5 billion over 2017 to 2021.
Our Group target of $1.5 billion of annual additional free cash flow from 2021 will ensure we can continue to lead the pack in delivering superior cash returns to our shareholders, Chief Executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques told an investment seminar.
Reporting By Shashwat Pradhan in Bengaluru; editing by Richard Pullin
Roberta Rampton
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A series of tweets by U.S. President Donald Trump about the investigation into contacts between his 2016 campaign and Russia prompted concerns on Sunday among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham saying Trump could be wading into peril by commenting on the probe.
I would just say this with the president: Theres an ongoing criminal investigation, Graham said on the CBS program Face the Nation.
You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril, he added.
On Sunday morning, Trump wrote on Twitter that he never asked former FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn, the presidents former national security adviser - a statement at odds with an account Comey himself has given.
That tweet followed one on Saturday in which Trump said he had fired Flynn because the former national security adviser had lied to the FBI.
Trumps attorney, John Dowd, said in an interview with Reuters that he had drafted the tweet and said putting it together had been a mistake.
Ill take responsibility, Dowd said.
The series of tweets came after a dramatic turn of events on Friday in which Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors delving into contacts between Trumps inner circle and Russia before he took office.
Legal experts and some Democratic lawmakers said if Trump knew Flynn lied to the FBI and then pressured Comey not to investigate him, that could bolster a charge of obstruction of justice.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said she believed the indictments in the investigation so far and Trumps continual tweets point toward an obstruction of justice case.
I see it most importantly in what happened with the firing of Director Comey. And it is my belief that that is directly because he did not agree to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation. Thats obstruction of justice, Feinstein said on NBCs Meet the Press.
The president knew he (Flynn) had lied to the FBI, which means that when he talked to the FBI director and asked him effectively drop this case, he knew that Flynn had committed a federal crime, Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told the ABC program This Week.
The Russia matter has dogged Trumps first year in office, and this weekend overshadowed his first big legislative win when the Senate approved a tax cuts bill.
Flynn was the first member of Trumps administration to plead guilty to a crime uncovered by special counsel Robert Muellers wide-ranging investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. election and potential collusion by Trump aides.
Russia has denied meddling in the election and Trump has said there was no collusion.
Comey, who had been investigating the Russia allegations, was fired by Trump in May. He told the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in June he believed his dismissal was related to the Russia probe, and said Trump asked him to end the investigation of Flynn.
I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie! Trump said on Twitter on Sunday.
On CBS, Graham criticized Comey, saying he believes the former FBI director made some very, very wrong decisions during his tenure as FBI director. But Graham also said Trump should be careful about his tweets.
Id be careful if I were you, Mr. President. Id watch this, Graham said.
Reporting by David Morgan, Susan Cornwell in Washington and Karen Freifeld in New York; Writing by Roberta Rampton and Caren Bohan; Editing by Mary Milliken
SINGAPORE, Dec 4 (IFR) - Asian credit was generally tighter on low volumes after the US Senate approved a draft tax bill, bringing corporate tax reforms a step closer.
That news over the weekend was not the driving force in the Asian trading session on Monday, though.
"The main factor today is the Indonesia new issue," said a credit trader. "Everyone is trying to figure out where it is going to price."
As Indonesia came out with a primary offering of 5s, 10s and 30s, its 3.85% 2027 bonds widened 2bp to Treasuries plus 117bp, and its 4.75% 2047s widened 3bp to Treasuries plus 164bp.
The Asia ex-Japan iTraxx investment grade CDS index tightened 1.6bp to 72.125bp/72.875bp.
Alibaba's bonds have outperformed since pricing last week, with 10bp tightening in the 5.5-year, 30-year and 40-year tranches since then, and 4bp tightening in the 10-year.
The 5.5-year notes were bid at Treasuries plus 63bp, the 10-year at 104bp, the 30-year at 128bp, and the 40-year notes at 147bp.
China high-yield property bonds were little changed, with trading activity finally slowing down, said another trader.
Many analysts viewed Adani Abbot Point Terminal's 2022 bonds as generously priced, given the low Triple B rating, but the bonds have actually widened to Treasuries plus 249bp, according to Tradeweb, since pricing at 245bp over on Thursday.
(Reporting by Daniel Stanton; Editing by Vincent Baby)
Keywords: MARKETS ASIA DEBT/
Dec 4 (Reuters) - Vietnamese shares reached decade-highs and topped Asia-Pacific with the highest price gains in November, bolstered by rising foreign interest during the month.
Foreigners were net buyers of about $500 million of shares in the country's stock market in November, the highest monthly purchases in at least seven years.
Singapore-listed Jardine Cycle & Carriage Ltd's purchases of about $900 million in Vinamilk's shares was seen as a positive for Vietnamese markets, with government aiming to trim its stakes in more state-owned firms.
Vietnam will also kick off the sale of a majority stake in Sabeco , the country's biggest brewer, in December.
The Vietnam index rose more than 13 percent in November.
Hong Kong and Japanese shares rose more than 3 percent each in November.
Sri Lankan stocks led the losers with a fall of 3.11 percent, followed by China and Taiwan shares with declines of more than 2 percent.
South Korean, Malaysian, Thai, Philippine and Indian equities fell between 1 to 2 percent.
Asia-Pacific markets performance Nov 2017: Asia-Pacific markets performance 2017: Asia-Pacific equities valuations: Asia-Pacific equities analyst revisions score: <^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Asia-Pacific markets performance Nov 2017 Asia-Pacific markets performance 2017 Asia-Pacific equities valuations Asia-Pacific equities analyst revisions score ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^> (Reporting by Gaurav Dogra and Patturaja Murugaboopathy; Editing by Richard Borsuk)
BEIJING, Dec 4 (Reuters) - China will encourage private funds to invest in defence firms to promote reform in the industry, China's cabinet said on Monday. China will encourage defence firms to list on the stock market or invest in listed companies, the State Council said in guidelines issued to further open up the military industry.
(Reporting by Beijing Monitoring Desk; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.
(Corrects time of trade resumption in last paragraph)
By Nichola Saminather
TORONTO, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Canadian marijuana producer Aphria Inc. said on Monday it had entered into an agreement to sell medical cannabis to Loblaw Companies' pharmacy chain Shoppers Drug Mart.
Aphria will supply Shoppers with medical cannabis products to be sold online, the company said in a statement. The agreement is subject to government approval of Shoppers' application to be a licensed producer, Aphria said.
Aphria inc shares were halted from trading ahead of the announcement and will resume trading at 4:30 p.m. EST in Toronto (2130 GMT).
(Reporting By Nichola Saminather; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
DEAR HARRIETTE: My husband's ankles swell sometimes -- really, kind of a lot. Whenever I bring this up to him, he shrugs it off.
My husband is big on health food and vitamins that he reads about on the internet, but he is horrible about going to the doctor. I think it has been five years since he had a physical.
I am so worried. My brother-in-law died of colon cancer. His father died of a heart attack. I'm not trying to wish anything bad on him, but I do think there is value in getting an annual checkup. How can I get him to go? -- Against the Doctor, Seattle
DEAR AGAINST THE DOCTOR: Start by doing some research. There are many reasons why a person's feet and ankles swell, and most of them are signs of poor health. Among the causes are congestive heart failure, kidney disease, cirrhosis of the liver, hypertensive heart disease and more. In other words, there are serious health concerns that could be the reason why his ankles swell. For more details, go to: healthline.com/symptom/swollen-ankle.
Point out to your husband that it is worth it to find out if he has a serious ailment that needs treatment, or if it is a less serious situation like a fracture. Remind your husband of how much you love him and want him to be healthy. Tell him you are scheduling a doctor's appointment for him, and urge him to go.
DEAR HARRIETTE: My kids spent the weekend with good friends from school while my husband and I took a much-needed mini-vacation. When we picked them up, all they could talk about was how much fun they had playing with their friends' dog. They have talked nonstop about wanting to have their own dog, which is not in the cards for us. For one, I am allergic, but even if we got a hypoallergenic dog, I don't have the time or the inclination to walk or tend to a dog, and I know my children ultimately won't do it. My husband won't either.
How can I break it to my kids that I'm really not going to give in to their endless begging for a dog? -- No Furry Friends, Boston
DEAR NO FURRY FRIENDS: Stay firm in your convictions. You have to be clear about what you can manage for your family. You can also get creative about how your children can experience more doggy time in their lives. Perhaps they can visit friends who have dogs with more regularity. You can also check in with the local ASPCA to see if your children can volunteer there to help support their work on rescuing and re-homing animals. Your need to not have a dog at home does not mean that your children cannot get to know dogs.
I am similar to you; what I did was talk to a local pet grooming shop to see if my daughter could volunteer there. They happily agreed, and she goes in from time to time to learn about how these people groom dogs. Occasionally she gets to play with the dogs, too.
DEAR HARRIETTE: The girl I've been calling my best friend for years has just done the worst possible thing. She made up a story about me that was horrible and then told it to everybody in our grade. We are in middle school. I am so upset.
My mother told me to get over it, but how do I do that? I have to go to school with all these kids who now think I am a terrible person. I tried to talk to my friend about it, but now all of a sudden she doesn't want to talk to me. I can't imagine what I did to make her act like this. I know my mom reads your column, so I was wondering what you think I should do? -- Mean Girl Drama, Cleveland
DEAR MEAN GIRL DRAMA: When your friends choose to hurt you, it can be devastating. To lie about you with the intention of turning people against you is cruel. You should go to your teacher and principal to report what you believe your friend did. Be as precise as possible and bring any backup information that can prove what you are suggesting she did. If you have emails or social media postings that point to the story, bring those. If other students have told you that your friend shared the lie with them, give their names to the teacher and principal. As scary as it may seem to report this behavior, it is important. People should not get away with slandering someone's name. This is a form of bullying. By standing up for yourself, you create space for support.
You also should open your eyes to other students. It is time to make new friends. I know that isn't easy to do, especially when you are feeling sad and hurt, but this girl is no friend of yours if she is intentionally trying to hurt you.
DEAR HARRIETTE: I have been on a weight-loss plan for a few months now. What is working for me is eating cottage cheese and fruit in the morning. I sometimes bring it with me to work and eat it at my desk. The people sitting nearby often eat bagels or muffins, and it has been fine.
All of a sudden one woman who sits near me has started to talk about my food. She calls my cottage cheese "grandma food" and finds ways to poke fun at me whenever I am eating. She even went so far as to say she thinks it's a waste of time to eat such nasty food only to lose a couple of pounds. I was furious. I'm doing my thing, minding my business. How can I get her to back off? -- Healthy Living, Miami
DEAR HEALTHY LIVING: Congratulations on your weight-loss program. It's not easy to stick to a consistent path of wellness. It takes time to develop discipline. Good for you that you are doing it.
You have a couple of options with this woman. You can ignore her. Eventually she will stop if you don't react. Or you can offer to share some of Grandma's food with her! Don't let her see she is upsetting you. That will only exacerbate the situation.
Harriette Cole is a lifestylist and founder of DREAMLEAPERS, an initiative to help people access and activate their dreams. You can send questions to askharriette@harriettecole.com or c/o Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106
(Corrects $100 million to $100 billion in paragraph 4 of Sunday's story)
RIYADH, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Top Hong Kong officials met Saudi Arabian King Salman in Riyadh on Sunday, Saudi state news agency reported, as the world's leading stock exchanges compete to list oil giant Saudi Aramco .
Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam and financial secretary James Lau were joined by the chairman and the chief executive of HongKong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx), CK Chow and Charles Li.
The officials discussed "areas of cooperation and means of developing them in various fields" along with Saudi ministers of energy, finance and interior, the news agency said.
Li told Reuters last week a Hong Kong listing would help secure huge Chinese demand for Aramco's partial share sale, which Riyadh hopes will raise some $100 billion. Saudi Aramco said in October that exchanges such as New York, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong have all been looked at for the Aramco float.
(Reporting By Stephen Kalin; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)
* Biogas could provide 30 pct of French consumption by 2030
* Engie has 70 biogas projects in France and abroad
* Hydrogen could decarbonise heat, cooling, transport
* Solar plants could produce renewable hydrogen
By Geert De Clercq
PARIS, Dec 4 (Reuters) - French utility Engie plans to switch all of its gas operations to biogas and renewable hydrogen by 2050, making it 100 percent green, its chief executive said on Monday.
The power and gas group has some 70 biogas projects worldwide, including 40 in France, and says that if all its projects get approval its annual investment in biogas could soar tenfold to hundreds of millions of euros per year.
Engie, which has sold its fossil gas activities as part of a broader restructuring, is also looking to invest in industrial-scale hydrogen production by electrolysing water in places where solar energy is cheap.
"We will progressively make our gas greener so that by 2050 it can be 100 percent green," Chief Executive Isabelle Kocher told reporters on Monday.
In May, Engie agreed to sell its oil and gas exploration business for $3.9 billion and last month sold its gas liquefaction, shipping and trading business to Total for $1.5 billion. The sale included a deal to make Engie Total's preferred supplier of biogas and renewable hydrogen.
Kocher said the world was focused on decarbonising electricity via renewable energy, but that electricity only accounts for a minor part of total energy demand.
"Most of the energy consumed is for heating, cooling and transport," she said. "By massively deploying green gas we could decarbonise all that."
Engie estimates that biogas from agricultural and other waste - but not using food crops - has the potential to grow from about one percent of gas consumption in France to 10 percent by 2025, 30 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050.
France has around 400 biogas projects, but it takes too long to get them approved, usually up to two years, compared to six months in neighbouring countries, according to Engie's head of grids, Didier Holleaux.
Engie wants to produce hydrogen gas with solar energy by electrolysing water at a price that would make it more competitive with steam reforming of hydrocarbons, which accounts for 95 percent of hydrogen produced today and costs about 2 euros per kilo, compared to 6 euros/kilo for electrolysis.
The company is looking abroad for gigawatts of solar capacity to produce hydrogen, investments that would likely require billions of euros, Holleaux said.
"In places like Chile's Atacama desert we could produce hydrogen on industrial scale and hopefully ship it abroad at a competitive price, transport included," said Kocher. She also said the company was looking to acquire start-ups in hydrogen technology, especially electrolysis.
Engie already has a significant presence in Chile, where it operates power grids, LNG facilities and renewable energy assets.
(Reporting by Geert De Clercq. Editing by Jane Merriman)
DUBAI, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Hope for a resolution to Qatar's diplomatic dispute with four other Arab countries may buoy Gulf stock markets on Monday, while Saudi Arabia may also stay firm because of its technical breakout on Sunday.
Qatar's foreign minister said late on Sunday that Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani was expected to attend the annual summit of Gulf Arab heads of state in Kuwait on Dec. 5 and 6. There was no immediate comment from other Gulf nations on the Qatari announcement, and events at the summit are difficult to predict. Nevertheless, some investors hope Sheikh Tamim's attendance could be a step towards renewed dialogue with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt.
On Saturday, former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh signalled he was abandoning his support of the Iran-aligned Houthis - a shift that could pave the way to end three years of war in Yemen. So the Gulf may have a chance of easing two geopolitical crises that have weighed on markets in recent months. The Saudi stock index rose for an eighth straight day on Sunday, gaining 1.2 percent to 7,089 points and climbing above technical resistance around 7,000 points, which has capped the market since mid-October and roughly coincides with the 200-day average at 7,014 points.
A clean break of the resistance - two straight daily closes - would point up to around 7,250 points, according to the height of the former downtrend channel dating back to mid-October.
In the United Arab Emirates, where markets reopen on Monday after a long weekend, Dubai Investments announced it had raised its foreign ownership limit to 49 percent from 35 percent. But since the current actual ownership of all foreign investors is under 17 percent, there is no reason to expect any immediate impact on the stock.
The global market environment is mixed, with MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan up 0.4 percent and Brent oil slipping 35 U.S. cents to $63.38 a barrel, drifting away from a near 2-1/2 year peak of $64.65 touched last month.
(Reporting by Andrew Torchia)
DUBAI, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Qatar's stock market rose sharply in early trade on Monday because of hopes that Doha can resolve its diplomatic dispute with four other Arab countries, while the rest of the region was mixed.
Qatar's foreign minister said late on Sunday that Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani was expected to attend the annual summit of Gulf Arab heads of state in Kuwait on Tuesday and Wednesday. There was no immediate comment from other Gulf nations on the Qatari announcement, and events at the summit are difficult to predict. Nevertheless, some investors hope Sheikh Tamim's attendance could be a step towards renewed dialogue with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt.
Qatar's stock index was up 1.3 percent after two hours of trade, although trading volume was moderate. Drilling rig provider Gulf International Services jumped 9.1 percent.
Real estate firm Ezdan Holding , which has been hit hard by a downturn in the Qatari property market that was worsened by the diplomatic crisis, soared its 10 percent daily limit.
Qatar Insurance , which has operations in the UAE, surged 5.2 percent. Banks, which have suffered from outflows of Gulf deposits due to the crisis, were also strong with Qatar International Islamic Bank up 4.0 percent.
United Arab Emirates markets, reopening after a long weekend, also climbed. Dubai added 0.5 percent as blue chip Emaar Properties DU>, which has been pulled down in recent months by the slump in Dubai's real estate market, rebounded 3.1 percent and was the biggest gainer.
Saudi Arabia , which had risen for eight straight days and broke above its 200-day average on Sunday, edged down 0.1 percent as some short-term investors took profits.
But cement stocks were strong for a second straight day, partly because of hopes for an end to the conflict in Yemen, where former president Ali Abdullah Saleh signalled on Saturday that he was abandoning his support of the Iran-aligned Houthis - a shift that could pave the way to end three years of war. Reconstruction in Yemen could fuel regional demand for cement. Najran Cement climbed 8.0 percent in its heaviest trade since February, while Southern Province Cement added 4.4 percent.
(Reporting by Andrew Torchia; Editing by Alison Williams)
COLOMBO, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Sri Lankan shares fell slightly on Monday, hovering near a more than two-month closing low hit early last week, with telecom stocks leading the decline.
The Colombo Stock Index ended down 0.09 percent at 6,405.91, hovering near its lowest close since Sept. 15 hit on Tuesday. It fell 0.03 percent last week, recording its fourth straight weekly drop, but has gained about 3 percent so far this year.
Worries over a delay in local council polls and a lack of clarity over the budget and two other key policy measures weighed on sentiment, said analysts.
Meanwhile, the Election Commission said on Monday that the council polls would be held before Feb. 17.
Investors are concerned about political stability as coalition partners in President Maithripala Sirisena government had decided to contest separately in the council polls.
Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera imposed new taxes on motor vehicles, telecoms, banks and liquor in the 2018 budget presented last month, with a final budget vote scheduled for Dec. 9. Analysts said market participants were seeking more clarity on those taxes and that there could be some amendments before the final vote.
The government also released gazette notifications on the Inland Revenue Act and the Exchange Control Act, with investors waiting for clarification on the new legislation.
Shares in Hatton National Bank Plc fell 1 percent, Sri Lanka Telecom Plc dropped 2.4 percent and Overseas Realty Plc ended 3.4 percent weaker.
"We saw some foreign interest coming in to the market when the market is at very low levels," said Dimantha Mathew, head of research at First Capital Holdings.
"Local interest was not there but suddenly we saw some foreign interest coming into the market. Foreign investors are collecting at cheaper rates."
Turnover was 716.1 million rupees ($4.67 million) on Monday, less than this year's daily average of 943.3 million rupees.
Foreign investors were net buyers of equities worth 455.1 million rupees, extending the year-to-date net foreign inflow so far this year to 18.7 billion rupees worth of shares. ($1 = 153.5000 Sri Lankan rupees)
(Reporting by Ranga Sirilal and Shihar Aneez; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu)
LONDON, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Britain wants to increase regulation of Bitcoin and other digital currencies by expanding the reach of European Union anti-money-laundering rules that force traders to disclose their identities and report suspicious activity.
With demand for Bitcoin surging, fuelling a 1,000 percent rally in its value so far this year, the British finance ministry said it expected negotiations over changes to the EU rules would conclude later this year or in early 2018.
Stephen Barclay, economic secretary to Britain's Treasury, told parliament in a notice dated Nov. 3 - but only reported by media on Monday - that the amendments "bring virtual currency exchange platforms and custodian wallet providers into Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing regulation."
That would mean those companies would be overseen by national competent authorities, the statement said.
The main U.S. derivatives regulator said on Friday it would allow CME Group Inc and CBOE Global Markets Inc to list Bitcoin futures contracts, opening the door to added regulation .
Australia has also said it would strengthen its money- laundering laws by bringing Bitcoin providers under the government's financial intelligence unit .
(Writing by William Schomberg)
(Adds details, context)
ALMATY, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Kazakh upstream company KazMunaigas Exploration Production (KMG EP) plans to launch a tender offer to repurchase all of its outstanding global depositary receipts (GDRs) at $14.00 per GDR, it said on Monday.
If the offer succeeds, KMG EP plans to buy out other outstanding common shares and delist from the London Stock Exchange as well as the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange, it said in a statement.
The move could pave way for the listing of the company's biggest shareholder, state-owned National Company KazMunayGaz (NC KMG).
Kazakhstan plans to privatise NC KMG within the next few years, but it cannot be listed on a major stock exchange alongside its main upstream subsidiary. Previous attempts to restore full control over KMG EP have failed.
Minority shareholders of KMG EP last year rejected NC KMG's proposal to give the parent company more control over its subsidiary and the option to sell their shares to NC KMG.
NC KMG has a 58 percent stake in KMG EP, which currently sits on a $4 billion cash pile. Minority shareholders include Chinese sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation, and funds overseen by Western managers such as BlackRock.
The price of the offer represents a premium of 23.7 percent to the 30-day volume-weighted average GDR price of $11.32 at Dec. 1, KMG EP said. The GDR last closed at $11.80.
(Reporting by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Stephen Coates and Gopakumar Warrier)
Britain and the European Union failed to reach a highly anticipated Brexit deal on Monday despite "significant progress" on key outstanding issues, both sides announced in Brussels.
Negotiators had earlier appeared close to reaching an agreement on the Irish border, the complex and historically sensitive issue that had emerged as a final stumbling block.
But after details of a draft deal leaked, the Democratic Unionist Party, a small but hardline grouping from Northern Ireland that props up the minority government of British Prime Minister Theresa May, said they would not support it.
After talks over lunch, May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker acknowledged that some issues remained unresolved. Both said they were confident of a deal soon that would allow talks to progress to a future trading relationship.
Juncker said that it was not possible to reach deal on Monday despite "significant progress" made in recent days. "This is not a failure, this is the start of the very last round. I am very confident that we will reach agreement in the course of this week," he said.
May said meetings had been "constructive" but differences remained on a "couple of issues." May said she remained confident an agreement could be reached in the coming days.
'Critical moment' in talks
Britain has been desperate to secure an agreement from the EU that it would move on to discussions about trade.
But the EU has insisted that "sufficient progress" must first be made on three issues: that Britain pay a substantial "divorce bill," that rights of European citizens in the UK are guaranteed and that there is no reinstatement of a border infrastructure between Northern Ireland, which will leave the EU with the rest of Britain in March 2019, and the Republic of Ireland.
The dismantling of a so-called "hard border" was a key plank of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to Northern Ireland after years of sectarian conflict. The Irish government was determined to secure a cast-iron guarantee from the UK that there would be no return to border controls after Brexit.
Substantial progress on the divorce bill and on EU citizens was made last week but wrangling on the Irish border continued through Sunday night and into Monday.
It appeared on Monday morning that a deal on the Irish border was close.
Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, scrapped a scheduled trip to Israel, citing a "critical moment" in the negotiations. An EU official said the trip was abandoned so that Tusk could be available for "consultations on draft guidelines" for potential trade discussions.
Philippe Lamberts, leader of the Greens in the European Parliament, told CNN that the British government had made a key concession: Northern Ireland would continue to be aligned with EU laws and regulations that, if they diverged, would require checks at the border. The concession was first reported by the Irish public broadcaster, RTE.
After details of the draft deal leaked, DUP leader Arlene Foster gave a TV statement in which she said that her party "will not accept any form of regulatory divergence which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom."
Leo Varadkar, the Irish Prime Minister, said he was "suprised and disappointed" that an agreement was not concluded. He said that the British and Irish governments had agreed the draft wording of a deal on the Irish border on Monday morning. "That's the agreement we had, I believe it stands," Varadkar said at a news conference in Dublin, adding that he was prepared to give May more time. "I trust her," he said.
Repercussions in UK
Even if the DUP came on board with an eventual deal, there could be other consequences for May. The suggestion that Northern Ireland would enjoy a special status withing the UK has infuriated leading figures in areas of the UK that voted to remain in the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, wrote on Twitter: "If one part of the UK can retain regulatory alignment with EU and effectively stay in the single market (which is the right solution for Northern Ireland) there is surely no good practical reason why others can't."
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said there were "huge ramifications" for the city if news of the deal turned out to be accurate.
He said on Twitter: "Londoners overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and a similar deal here could protect tens of thousands of jobs."
The UK still hopes that the EU will deem sufficient progress to have been made in order to give the go-ahead for negotiations to move on to a second phase of negotiations at a summit next week. This phase would focus on a future trade relationship between the UK and EU and transitional arrangements.
CNN's Hilary McGann, Bianca Nobilo, Carol Jordan and Matt Wells contributed to this report from London.
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By Park Jae-hyuk
Koreans appear to have fewer negative feelings about enterprises than they did last year, a recent Korea Chamber of Commerce & Industry's (KCCI) survey showed Monday.
According to the survey, the corporate favorite index (CFI) was 55.8 points this year, up from 47.6 points a year earlier. If the index surpasses 50 points, it means the number with good feelings regarding companies is larger than the number of those who have bad feelings about them.
In particular, conglomerates enjoyed the steep growth in their CFI. The index made a turnaround to 52.2 points this year from 33.0 points last year.
Small- and medium-sized enterprises earned 59.4 points this year, similar to the 59.7 points they received last year.
"The largest-ever exports and the expected increase in the rate of economic growth seems to have raised the index, amid the lingering uncertainty caused by trade conflicts with large countries and a worsening youth unemployment rate," Prof. Cho Seong-hoon at Yonsei University said. He has also served as an adviser to the KCCI.
While companies got 62.8 points in their economic achievement, they marked relatively low scores in their social contributions and compliance with the law and ethical standards at 46.5 points and 44.4 points, respectively.
The result means Koreans have yet to be satisfied with the conglomerates' corporate social responsibility activities and their efforts to obey the law and to practice ethical management.
In addition, 36 percent of 1,000 respondents feel Korean businesspeople lack entrepreneurship, while 26.2 percent were positive about the entrepreneurship of Korean businesspeople. 37.8 percent said they are neither good nor bad.
Among the respondents, 38.5 percent feel the government should strengthen the social safety net to encourage entrepreneurs, while 29 percent want an atmosphere of inspiring challenges. Others want to see deregulation and better education.
By Yoon Ja-young
Over 1 percent of the land on Jeju Island belongs to foreigners, with Chinese people owning nearly half of it. Experts say that the government should attract foreign investment that seeks mutual growth with the local community while deterring real estate speculation by foreigners.
According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, foreigners owned 234 square kilometers of land as of the first half of this year, or 0.2 percent of available land in all of Korea. Foreigners here refer not only to individuals but also corporations and joint ventures set up by Koreans and foreigners.
Foreigners' ownership of land has been increasing steeply during the past few years, rising 6 percent in 2014 and 9.5 percent in 2015. Its growth slowed last year and this with a 2.3 percent and 0.3 percent increase, respectively.
Foreigners own the biggest portion of land in South Jeolla Province, with 37.86 square kilometers, followed by Gyeonggi Province at 37.59 square kilometers, and North Gyeongsang Province at 34.97 square kilometers.
The hottest region for foreigners, however, is Jeju Island, the most popular tourist destination which was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Foreigners hold 21.14 square kilometers of land on the volcanic island, up 5.7 percent from last year. Currently, 1.08 percent of Jeju land belongs to foreigners. It is especially popular among Chinese, who own 44.4 percent of land under foreign ownership.
Among land owned by foreigners, 61.9 percent is forest or farmland, followed by land for factories at 27 percent and land for leisure activities at 5.2 percent. Over half of the foreigners who own a plot in Korea are Koreans with foreign citizenship, while joint ventures set up by Koreans and foreigners make up 32.3 percent. Foreign corporations have 8.3 percent of land under foreign ownership, while individuals own 5.6 percent.
Half of the foreigners who own land in Korea are from the U.S, followed by those from Europe at 9.1 percent.
There has been an increase in Chinese people purchasing land in Korea though their ratio is still not very high at 7.3 percent. The land owned by Chinese increased by 37.9 percent in 2013. It marked double-digit growth until last year, slowing to 6.5 percent this year.
While Korea does not restrict foreigners' purchase of land, some show concern that a considerable number of the investments seems to be for speculative purposes.
According to the Korea Appraisal Board, foreigners' purchase of land notably increased in PyeongChang, Gangwon Province, where the 2018 Winter Olympics is to be held. Among the foreigners who bought land there, 76.1 percent were Chinese. They mostly bought land near PyeongChang Interchange which is expected to benefit from development projects - 92.9 percent of the Chinese who bought land in Gangwon Province don't reside there.
"While foreigners are acquiring and using Korea's real estate in diverse forms, there is concern over the outflow of national wealth," Rep. Jeon Hyun-heui of the governing Democratic Party of Korea said at a recent parliamentary hearing.
She said the government should attract foreign capital that aims at mutual growth with the local community.
Government sets up task force to regulate cryptocurrency
By Nam Hyun-woo
The Moon Jae-in administration established a task force Monday to discuss ways of regulating Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency trading, which has been causing controversies across the country.
The Ministry of Justice, which hosted the first meeting of the task force, said that the government is "aware of the seriousness of virtual currency-related problems and will collaborate to deal with the issues."
Thus far, investments in cryptocurrencies have created a craze here as its prices have shot up. But worries have surfaced that this is creating a bubble that will burst soon and cause great damages to investors.
The country's daily virtual currency trading volume averages 2 trillion won, which is the third largest in the world. On Monday, Bitcoin was nearing $12,000 in value. The leading digital currency has gained more than 60 percent over the past month alone, an annualized return of about 720 percent. Other cryptocurrencies are also on the upswing.
However, the area has not been properly regulated.
It remains to be seen how the government will regulate virtual money exchanges. But the country's financial regulator hinted at introducing a "positive system" -- exchanges are basically illegal but some will be allowed if they meet certain criteria.
"Korea plans to regard virtual currency trading as a fund-raising business without permission," Financial Services Commission (FSC) Vice Chairman Kim Yong-beom said during a recent meeting with his counterparts from Japan and China in Incheon.
Kim means that the financial regulators classify virtual currency trading as an illegal practice, which is subject to up to a five-year prison term.
In detail, the FSC plans to check which exchanges do not meet its criteria. Criteria will include prevention of money laundering, separate management of clients' money and proper explanations of the risks. This means that some exchanges which fully meet those criteria can continue their businesses. Otherwise, they will be forced to shut down.
The FSC plans to table a bill containing this measure to the National Assembly early next year.
The envisioned regulation is similar to that of Japan. The Japanese government in April allowed exchanges' trading only when their identity verification process is appropriate; they prevent money laundering; and they manage clients' money separately.
Another option that Korea could adopt is a license system -- which allows only those with a government license to start a virtual money business.
In July, Rep. Park Yong-jin of the Democratic Party of Korea proposed a bill recognizing digital tokens as financial assets. The bill includes details on requiring virtual currency issuers, brokers and exchanges to get approval from the FSC and have more than 500 million won ($459,000) in capital.
However, FSC Chairman Choi Jong-ku said Monday that the authority is not thinking of a license system.
Trauma surgeon Lee Cook-jong shows images of parasitic worms found in a wounded North Korean soldier at Ajou University Hospital in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, Nov. 15. The soldier was shot several times during his escape to the South Korean side of the Joint Security Area before undergoing emergency surgery at the hospital. / Yonhap
By Yi Whan-woo
The defection of a North Korean soldier at the Joint Security Area (JSA) in November is raising awareness of health conditions inside the impoverished regime after parasitic worms and a chronic liver infection were found in the solider.
The finding came unexpectedly after the soldier, Oh Chung-sung, 25, was shot by his comrades during his escape to the Southern side of the JSA , was brought to safety by South Korean and U.S. soldiers and underwent emergency surgery.
Doctors found and removed several types of intestinal parasitic worms, some up to 27 centimeters long, according to Lee Cook-jong, the trauma surgeon who operated on Oh at Ajou University Hospital.
Lee said that in 20 years as a surgeon he had never seen such a case except in a medical textbook.
Lee said the soldier hepatitis B as well, which was a serious risk factor for liver cancer.
Oh' s stomach also contained raw corn kernels, which came as a surprise because North Korea was believed to assign soldiers with elite backgrounds to the JSA and treat them well.
Oh's father is reportedly a high-ranking officer in the military police, according to intelligence sources.
Since the soldier's health problems were revealed, calls have been growing in Seoul to bolster medical support for Pyongyang to help improve health conditions in the rogue state.
Experts claim that such efforts will be critical in "narrowing the gap" between the two Koreas on sanitation and other public health issues and prevent diseases spreading if the Korean Peninsula is united.
During a CNN interview, Seoul National University College of Medicine professor Choi Min-ho said poor sanitary conditions and use of human waste as fertilizer on crops were responsible for parasitic cysts in North Korea.
"It is a vicious cycle that is hard to stop in North Korea," he said. "They are so desperate to make ends meet that they cannot take proper preventive measures."
A defector-turned-journalist voiced a similar view, pointing out that she and her fellow residents in a rural village in North Korea pumped up underground water and drank it, even though it was believed to be polluted by feces from public toilets.
"There was no sewage facility and the feces from the toilets went directly underground, meaning the water is getting mixed with those feces," she said.
She said the village chief had said not to worry about pollution because the water was 15 meters below the ground and therefore "self-purified."
She said a friend in the village told her recently in a secret phone call that the villagers were "still drinking that water."
The North Korean soldier who defected on Nov. 13 at the JSA waits for emergency surgery at Ajou University Hospital in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province. / Yonhap
A top Republican lawmaker warned Sunday that the United States moves closer to preemptive war with North Korea every time Pyongyang carries out a missile or nuclear test.
North Korea's test launch this week of an intercontinental ballistic missile has sent tensions soaring once again on the Korean peninsula, after a two month lull.
"If there's an underground nuclear test, then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States," Senator Lindsey Graham said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
His remarks echoed those of National Security Advisor HR McMaster, who told a security forum in Washington on Saturday that the potential for war with North Korea "is increasing every day."
The United States has demanded tougher international sanctions, including cuts in oil shipments to the isolated state, but both McMaster and Graham suggested that the risk of war is growing despite the diplomatic efforts.
"We are in a race to be able to solve this problem," said McMaster. "This would be the most destabilizing development I think in the post World War II period. It's something that places us at direct risk but places the world at risk."
Graham, a foreign policy hawk, said he has had extensive discussions with the Trump administration about the situation.
The administration's policy, he said, is "to deny North Korea the capability to hit America with a nuclear-tipped missile. Not to contain it."
"Denial means preemptive war as a last resort. That preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures. Every missile test, every underground test of a nuclear weapon, means the marriage is more likely.
"I think we're really running out of time. The Chinese are trying, but ineffectively," he said.
Beijing has backed a slew of sanctions that include bans on imports of North Korean coal, iron ore and seafood.
The UN also barred the hiring of North Korean guest workers and capped exports of refined petroleum products.
But China has refused to turn off its pipeline shipping crude to North Korea.
North Korea has boasted -- and western experts agree -- that the missile tested on Wednesday is capable of reaching the United States.
In September, it conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test. It is unclear whether it has succeeded in making nuclear warheads small enough to be put atop a missile. (AFP)
By Yi Whan-woo
Japan plans to set up an information center in Tokyo by 2019 to address history of 23 Meiji Industrial Revolution sites granted UNESCO world heritage status, according to diplomatic sources, Monday.
The measure to set up the center 1,000 kilometers from the sites, however, is virtually seen as noncompliance with UNESCO's recommendation in 2015 when the 23 sites won world heritage status despite Korea's opposition.
It is also an apparent attempt to cover up the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of Koreans at seven of the 23 sites, including Hashima Island off the coast of Nagasaki, during Japan's 1910-45 occupation of the Korean Peninsula.
In 2015, UNESCO granted world heritage status to all 23 sites under the condition Japan correctly addressed the slave labor issue of the Koreans at the seven, by measures including opening an information center. But it did not state where such an information center should be set up.
An estimated 57,000 Koreans were forcibly taken to Japan and toiled under extreme conditions at the sites to produce coal and steel and also to manufacture ships as well as other equipment for the Japanese military.
If the information center is installed in Tokyo, visitors to the seven sites will hardly learn about the conscripted labor of Koreans. The sites are located across eight prefectures but none are in Tokyo: For instance, Hashima Island is approximately 1,000 kilometers from the Japanese capital.
"It's anybody's guess whether visitors to the UNESCO heritage sites will learn about the dark history related to the Meiji Industrial Revolution, unless they spend extra time and money to come to Tokyo to only visit the information center," a Japan expert at the Sejong Institute said on condition of anonymity.
Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, which handles the information center, initially considered Kyushu Island as a candidate site for the center, according to sources.
The sources claimed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's office then insisted on opening it in Tokyo.
What information the center will provide is likely to be controversial as well, because Abe's Cabinet is focusing on promoting the 23 sites as evidence illustrating Japan's rapid industrialization -- as the first non-Western nation to do so -- rather than highlighting the conscripted workers.
The Asahi Shimbun reported last week the information center will address various historical facts, such as Korean workers on Hashima Island, but did not mention whether the information will state that they were coerced into labor.
During World War II, Korean workers at Hashima Island were isolated from the outside world and suffered frequent tunnel collapses, gas explosions, falling rocks and other harsh work conditions.
Koreans were also forced to build military supplies such as warships and torpedoes at the Nagasaki shipyard.
By Ko Dong-hwan
POSTECH President Kim Doh-yeon / Korea Times file
Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Kim Sang-kon speaks during a press briefing on a five-year plan to strengthen special needs education, at the Sejong Government Complex, Monday. Yonhap
By Kim Bo-eun
The government will set up at least 22 more special needs schools by 2022 to provide students with fair access to education, the country's top education policymaker said Monday.
The five-year plan will also add 1,250 more special needs classes at regular schools, hiring a total of 1,173 additional teachers,.
"We must ensure that students with special needs be provided their right to education, not as a benefit but as a right," Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Kim Sang-kon said in a briefing at the Sejong Government Complex.
Currently 89,353 students are receiving special needs education, which is a 25 percent increase from 2008.
However, there has been a dire lack of specialized schools, forcing many students with disabilities to commute long distances or resort to receiving education at regular schools. Data shows 71 percent of disabled students are in regular schools _ either in special needs or regular classes.
The lack of special needs schools has been attributed to local residents shunning the openings.
Last September, parents of disabled students knelt and pleaded in front of residents in Gangseo-gu, western Seoul, who opposed the opening of a special needs school in the area. This case brought to light the plight of these parents and their children, prompting action by the local and central government.
As a means to ensure these students are provided needs-based education from early childhood, the education ministry pledged to set up integrated kindergartens which run the same number of classes for regular and special needs students. At least one such kindergarten will be set up in 17 cities and provinces nationwide.
The government will also set up special needs schools affiliated with universities and hospitals.
In addition, the government will increase the number of regional support centers for specific types of disabilities from the current 42 to 50.
Moreover, the government will boost career guidance and life-long education for these students who face difficulty gaining employment.
A system which allows students to explore various career paths as part of the school curriculum will be implemented at 139 special needs schools by 2022.
Teachers providing career counseling and employment assistance will be placed at all special needs schools.
The government will have related ministries set up a system so students are able access an integrated package of education, welfare and employment.
At the same time, as a means to eliminate prejudice or prevent its rise against disabled students, the government will have students at kindergartens, elementary, middle and high schools take mandatory education sessions.
An estimated 1.67 trillion won will be needed to implement the plan. The government said it would secure the funds by working together with ministries, local governments and regional education offices.
A U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor fighter takes off from a South Korean Air Force base in Gwangju, Monday, during the allies' combined exercise, dubbed Vigilant ACE (Air Component Exercise). The five-day annual drills are taking place amid tension here following North Korea's launch of what it claimed was a new, more powerful intercontinental ballistic missile last week. / Courtesy of Republic of Korea Air Force
By Jun Ji-hye
The South Korean and U.S. Air Forces began large-scale combined exercises, Monday, mobilizing some 230 aircraft including six F-22 Raptor fighters from the U.S.
The five-day Vigilant ACE (Air Component Exercise) held over South Korean airspace comes just days after North Korea launched what it claimed was a new, more powerful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of carrying a super-large heavy warhead and striking anywhere on the U.S. mainland.
The Republic of Korea (ROK) Air Force said the allies' drills, in which 12,000 personnel from the two air forces are participating, will demonstrate their combined air power against the Kim Jong-un regime.
"Vigilant ACE is the allies' annual combined exercise designed to enhance their readiness posture and capability of carrying out missions in the event of war," the Air Force said in a press release. "The drills highlight the longstanding military partnership and enduring friendship between the two nations."
For the drills, the U.S. Air Force Raptor fighters arrived at an air base in Gwangju, Saturday.
Coast guards at a wharf near the Incheon Coast Guard Headquarters examine a fishing boat, Monday, that capsized off the coast of Incheon the day before. / Yonhap
President Moon Jae-in says gov't should take responsibility
By Jung Min-ho
The Coast Guard is investigating the cause of the boat crash that killed at least 13 people off the west coast of Incheon Sunday.
The Incheon Coast Guard said Monday it has secured surveillance cameras and GPS equipment of a 336-ton tanker, which crashed into a 9.77-ton fishing boat in West Sea waters near Yeongheung Island at around 6:09 a.m.
The smaller boat had 22 people on board. The accident has left 13 of them dead and two missing; the rest have been rescued.
"We will analyze the GPS and cameras first to find out what happened," Hwang Joon-hyun, a senior Coast Guard official, told reporters. "We will also investigate whether sailors on the tanker breached their duty of care."
Two people from the tanker a 37-year-old captain and a 46-year-old deckhand have been detained over the accident. The prosecution is soon expected to request arrest warrants for them.
The captain, surnamed Jeon, told the Coast Guard he saw the fishing boat before the crash but did not change the tanker's direction thinking the boat would shift its course.
According to the Coast Guard, the deckhand, surnamed Kim, was supposed to be on duty to navigate the ship but he was not in the wheelhouse at the time of the accident.
The Coast Guard suspects the tanker crashed into the fishing boat from behind. Coast Guard investigators have searched the tanker and questioned its 27-man crew.
"We do not make any assumptions here," Hwang said. "We will look into every possibility to get to the truth."
Meanwhile, rescue workers have been trying to find the two missing people. Following the accident, the government mobilized 30 Coast Guard boats, seven Navy vessels, one local government vessel, two Coast Guard planes and one Air Force plane for search operations. More ships and planes are expected to join.
President Moon Jae-in said the government is responsible for finding the missing people.
"Check if there are any problems in our safety system. The government should be held accountable for protecting its citizens no matter what," Moon said during a Cheong Wa Dae meeting with his secretaries.
"My heart goes out to the victims and their families. I hope the missing two will come home safely."
Maritime accidents have grown as the number of people chartering private fishing boats continues to increase.
According to data from Rep. Park Wan-joo of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, 3.4 million people used services offered by private fishing boats so far this year, a 15.9 percent increase from 2016.
The number of accidents stood at 206 in 2015 and 208 in 2016. This year, there have been 160 accidents as of August. The largest number of accidents occurred because of collisions.
Chairman of the minor opposition People's Party Ahn Cheol-soo speaks during a press conference at the National Assembly, Monday, the 100th day of his inauguration as party head. / Yonhap
By Kim Hyo-jin
People's Party Chairman Ahn Cheol-soo vowed to strengthen the party's centrist presence, Monday, reiterating his vision for a multi-party system in Korean politics that used to be dominated by ruling and main opposition parties.
Ahn underlined the need to create a political force that embraces both liberals and conservatives, renewing his determination to seek an alliance or integration with the minor conservative Bareun Party.
"Breaking down the political landscape led by the two big parties is directly related to the question of whether the People's Party can survive or not," Ahn said in a press conference that marks the 100th day of his inauguration as party head.
"By building a stable third political force, I will lay the ground for a he multi-party system."
Ahn has actively sought to join hands with reform-minded conservatives _ meaning Bareun Party members _ to strengthen the party's presence, particularly ahead of local elections slated for June next year.
The move has made little progress amid a backlash by senior members of the People's Party who follow the legacy of liberal former President Kim Dae-jung.
Ahn alluded that he will keep pushing for a merger with the Bareun Party although it will take time. He dismissed speculation that he may give up the plan due to the ongoing internal conflict.
"We are now cross-checking how similar the two parties' visions and thoughts are," he said. "Now we are at a stage of figuring out the differences between the parties and collecting the opinions of their respective members."
He laid out a reform agenda in politics, saying the existing parties should overcome regionalism and open themselves to new outside figures.
"The People's Party will create an atmosphere where new figures can easily enter politics. We will work on expanding our presence so we become a party competent enough to lead an administration," he said.
Touching upon a campaign strategy for the upcoming local elections, Ahn claimed that it should be a "three-party competition," hinting that he can join hands with other minor parties to present joint candidates to compete with rivals from the ruling Democratic Party of Korea and the main opposition Liberty Korea Party.
Ahn expressed hopes for a rebound of the party's low popularity, saying, "The support rate does not change due to a single event. It can happen at a certain time after a long-time accumulation of public trust. It's what we have witnessed over the past five years."
He criticized the Moon Jae-in government for its North Korea policy. "Moon needs to make a genuine explanation to the public on what is the actual security status or how high the chances are of military conflict with the North," he said. "He should contemplate on why people ridicule the government, saying its one and only strength is causing confusion."
When asked about whether he will run for the Seoul mayoral post in the local elections, he said he was open to all possibilities. "I will do whatever the party decides," he said.
By Choi Ha-young
More than six out of 10 Koreans are in favor of having the anti-graft law, the so-called Kim Young-ran Act, revised to ease price caps for gifts, according to an opinion survey, Monday.
The Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC) is scheduled to review the revision of the law on Dec. 11 whether to raise the price cap of gifts which public servants, journalists, private school teachers and their spouses can accept from the current 50,000 won ($46) to 100,000 won if the gifts are agricultural and marine products a measure to help the agricultural and fisheries industries which have seen large decreases in sales.
The envisioned revision also plans to reduce the amount for congratulatory and condolence money from 100,000 won to 50,000 won.
The poll conducted by Realmeter showed that 63.3 percent of the respondents support the change. Only 27.5 percent of them oppose it. The support rate was particularly high among those in the agriculture and fisheries industries, standing at 80.9 percent.
According to separate research conducted by the Korea Rural Economic Institute, the sales of agricultural produce gift sets decreased by 25.8 percent for Seollal in 2017, or the Lunar New Year holiday, compared to the 2016 holiday.
Earlier on Nov. 27, the ACRC's decision-making body rejected the revision with a slim margin. The outcome drew enormous flak from farmers and fishermen, who want changes and sales hikes for the next Seollal, which will fall in February next year.
After the decision, Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon said the government will again try to revise the law this year. "It is pointless to revise it after next year's Seollal, since many farmers and fishermen are looking forward to the change," Lee said in a debate last week.
And the ACRC will review it again Dec. 11. Even though the ACRC endorses the revision, the price cap for gifts other than agriculture, livestock and fisheries products would remain at 50,000 won.
Unlike the move by the Prime Minister, some civic groups claim to uphold the act to eradicate corruption in society. Former ACRC head Kim Young-ran, who initiated the act, spoke against the envisioned change.
"I feel for the industries suffering because of the act, but society should not revoke the original purpose of the act," he said in a radio interview Monday. "It's improper to claim, though, that easing the rule would be effective in helping the agriculture and fisheries industries."
Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon, right, and floor leaders of the ruling and opposition parties hold hands after announcing their agreement on the government's budget bill for next year at the National Assembly, Monday. From left are main opposition Liberty Korea Party floor leader Chung Woo-taik, ruling Democratic Party of Korea floor leader Woo Won-shik, opposition People's Party floor leader Kim Dong-cheol and Kim. / Yonhap
By Kim Hyo-jin
The rival political parties reached a tentative agreement over a budget bill for next year Monday, with some sticking points including the size of job creation in the public sector due to reservations from the main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP).
The revised budget bill will be put to a vote during a plenary session, Tuesday.
Floor leaders of the ruling and opposition parties announced their agreement on the 429 trillion won ($395 billion) budget for next year. This comes two days after they missed the Dec. 2 legal deadline for the government budget.
Amid growing concern about potential harm to the government's fiscal momentum, the party leaders met halfway on the budget.
But the LKP still expressed reservations on two provisions _ the increase in the number of public employees by 9,475 through 2018 alone, and the increase of the corporate tax rate to 25 percent for businesses earning over 300 billion won annually.
"We clearly stated our reservations on the two points in the agreement," LKP floor leader Chung Woo-taik told reporters.
With the deal, the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) agreed to reduce the government's original plan of creating 12,221 new positions to get an agreement with the main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP) and the minor opposition People's Party.
They claimed employment in the civil servant sector should not be increased by more than 7,000 to 9,000 jobs, expressing concerns about the fiscal burden of such jobs.
Under the tentative agreement, 2.97 trillion won ($2.75 billion) will be set aside for small businesses to cushion their labor costs increase from the latest minimum wage hike.
And the size of this fund will not be allowed to exceed amount in the 2018 budget plan from the year 2019, the floor leaders said.
The government and the ruling party originally sought to increase the corporate tax rate for businesses with taxable income of 200 billion won ($183.8 million) or more a year to 25 percent from the current 22 percent.
In a compromise the parties agreed to increase the tax rate only to businesses earning over 300 billion won annually.
They also saw eye-to-eye on extra childcare allowances, an increase in the state pension for senior citizens, and the expansion of health insurance coverage and inter-Korean cooperation funds.
Two-member families with a child up to five years old who are in the lowest 10 percent of income level will receive 100,000 won monthly beginning September next year.
The state pension for senior citizens will be increase to 250,000 won from September 2018, adding follow-up measures to counter elderly poverty will be devised.
However, the government's original scheme of allocating 120 billion won under the name of the inter-Korean cooperation fund was reduced to 40 billion won.
By Bahk Eun-ji
More than 40 percent of people with part-time jobs have been sexually harassed at work, a survey released on Monday shows.
Job search portal Alba.co.kr surveyed 2,100 part timers nationwide, with 41.8 percent of respondents saying they had been sexually harassed at work.
Of the victims, 87.1 percent were female and 12.9 percent male.
By age, 72.4 percent were in their 20s, 15.3 percent were teenagers and 9.7 percent were in their 30s.
A total of 30.8 percent said they heard comments about their appearance, 28.6 percent heard unpleasant sexual remarks, 26.7 percent experienced physical contact and 6 percent said they were forced to serve drinks.
Female part-timers said they were harassed by male employers (38.7 percent) and customers (37.4 percent), 13.3 percent by male co-workers and 6 percent by female employers.
Male part-timers said 23.3 percent of female customers placed them in an uncomfortable sexual situation, 20.2 percent of female employers did the same as did 18.4 percent of male employers and 14.1 percent of male customers.
More than 65 percent of those questioned said they just "cope with" the situation while only 1.4 percent said they filed complaints with relevant government departments.
By Heather Barr
Abortion is illegal in South Korea. But women are demanding change. More than 235,000 people signed a petition, posted on September 30 on the presidential office website, that calls for the government to legalize abortion. And that should include access to mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug available in many countries around the world.
The government allows members of the public to post a petition on its website for 30 days. In August, the new government of president Moon Jae-In pledged to formally respond within 30 days to any petition that gathers more than 200,000 signatures.
On November 26, the government responded by buying time.
In a 10-minute video, Cho Kuk , the senior presidential secretary of civil affairs, discussed the current restrictions on abortion and mentioned future legal reforms, referring to a constitutional challenge to the country's abortion laws by a doctor accused of performing illegal abortion. The case is expected to be heard in 2018.
Cho pledged that the government would develop a better sexual education program for teenagers, and provide more support for single mothers and adoptive families. But on abortion he said the government needs updated data to decide how to proceed, such as the number of abortions taking place and women's reasons for seeking abortion, he promised the government will collect new data in 2018.
He described the issue as "sensitive" saying government will use the term "interruption of pregnancy" rather than "abortion."
If euphemisms are helpful, so be it. But the call for more data smacks of delaying tactics. Some things are already perfectly clear.
Today in South Korea, women may only legally obtain an abortion in highly restricted circumstances. An abortion is possible in cases of rape or incest, if the parents cannot marry legally, if continuation of the pregnancy is likely to jeopardize the pregnant woman's health, or when the pregnant woman or her spouse has one of a limited number of designated hereditary disorders or communicable diseases.
Married women need their spouse's permission for an abortion, and any abortion, regardless of motivation or context, is prohibited after 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Current South Korean law punishes a woman who has an illegal abortion with up to one year in prison or fines up to 2 million won ($1,820). Healthcare workers who provide abortions face up to two years in prison.
Despite these restrictions, abortion is widely available in South Korea, and prosecutions for abortion are rare. But in recent years there has been growing tension over the issue, and abortion foes have pushed for tougher enforcement.
Abortion is still a sensitive issue in South Korea, which struggles with the consequences of a falling birthrate and rapidly aging population. But it is also clear that when governments restrict abortion, women still have abortions they just have more dangerous ones.
According to the U.N., in 2011 the average unsafe abortion rate was more than four times greater in countries with restrictive abortion policies than in countries with liberal abortion policies.
Measures such as enhanced access to prenatal and obstetric care, generous parental leave for both women and men, equality and lack of stigma for single and unmarried parents and their children, free or subsidized child care, and improved access to high quality free education for children could both help promote gender equality and make it easier for South Koreans to choose to become parents.
President Moon has taken several important steps to improve women's rights. He made a campaign promise to have a Cabinet that is at least 30 percent women and kept that promise.
In another positive step, the government recently pledged to strengthen its law on workplace sexual harassment. So he is off to a good start, and he should now lead a comprehensive effort to reform laws and policies to increase gender equality. There is a lot to fix.
South Korea still has serious problems with discrimination, harassment and violence against women. It was recently ranked an abysmal 116 out of 144 countries when it came to gender equality. Footage recently emerged of nurses at a hospital allegedly forced to dance in skimpy outfits for visiting officials. In a recent survey, 80 percent of South Korean men said they had physically or psychologically abused a girlfriend.
The country also has the unhappy distinction of having the third-highest proportion, at 52.5 percent, of female murder victims in the world a fact attributed to murder of women by intimate partners and the government's failures to effectively enforce laws against domestic violence.
A 2015 survey by the government found that more than 78 percent of sexual harassment victims in the workplace did not seek recourse but rather "put up with it." Many women said they did not believe they would get help if they complained.
The government's sex education guidelines have also been criticized; an indication of just how inappropriate the guidelines are is their suggestion, intended for high-school teachers, that women may risk rape if they go on dates with men who pay for an expensive meal and who may expect sex in return.
With its 235,000 signatures, the petition to legalize abortion is a key test of the depth of President Moon's commitment to women's rights. The petition places the issue squarely in his lap. Some might argue the government's willingness to discuss the issue and the pledge for future steps are positive signs.
But every day of delay is another day in which South Korean women are forced to risk their health to make reproductive choices that should be their right. Presidential secretary Cho and his government have already heard from hundreds of thousands of South Koreans who think that's the sensitive issue.
President Moon and his government should act now to introduce and pass legislation to fully decriminalize abortion. South Korea should remove all penalties for women who seek abortion, and for medical providers of abortions, and abolish the requirement that wives obtain their husband's consent before they can access abortion.
There is a long road ahead if South Korea is to treat women equally.
Heather Barr is a senior researcher in the Women's Rights division of Human Rights Watch
By Doug Bandow
On his recent trip to Asia President Donald Trump asked his South Korean hosts an impolitic question: "Do you have to reunify?" They said yes, but the right answer is no.
The head of the ruling Democratic Party observed that "people who come to South Korea almost never ask it. The fact that he posed this question, frankly speaking, gave us the opportunity to explain the need for reunification."
But there is no need. In fact, reunification is unlikely, absent a catastrophic collapse of North Korea. And no one should wish for that, given the possibility of civil war, factional conflict, loose nuclear weapons, and mass refugee flows.
After Japan's surrender in World War II the U.S. and Soviet Union divided the peninsula into two occupation zones. Korea's division was cemented after the Korean War. That left a common desire for reunification.
But the older generation is dying off. Younger South Koreans have no connection with the North. For them the appeal of reunification is purely abstract.
Moreover, German reunification caused even many fans of a united peninsula to hesitate. Germany's process cost as much as 2.5 trillion Euros, or $3 trillion. The latter is about twice the ROK's annual GDP.
Reunification was a significant burden for West Germany, which was wealthier than South Korea. And East Germany was richer than North Korea. (The per capita income ratios were 3-1 for West/East Germany, and 20 or more to 1 for the South/North Korea.)
South Koreans hoped the subsequent "Sunshine Policy," which channeled money and aid to Pyongyang, would promote more rapid economic development, encouraging economic convergence between the two Koreas before reunification.
The likely political consequences of reunification also raised concerns. Some conservative South Koreans worry about adding millions of voters raised as socialists. The latter might reject communism, but still vote left.
Moreover, it is hard to imagine how reunification could occur voluntarily. In 1972 the two Koreas agreed to principles for reunification, but, as expected, nothing came of it. Although Koreans North and South share a common heritage, their cultures, economies, and political systems differ dramatically.
Most important is the question of power. When I first visited the North 25 years ago, North Korean officials told me that they did not want to be "swallowed." They understood that in any genuine reunification the DPRK would simply disappear. And with it their privileged positions.
Indeed, most would have no useful role in a new united Korea. South Koreans would flood in with money as newly empowered North Koreans defenestrated their former overlords. The latter have no incentive to consent to their demise.
An equally important, though usually ignored, factor is China. The common assumption is that Korean reunification is inevitable. But Beijing does not want the Koreas to reunite.
The result would be a larger, stronger, more populous competitor, one offering a powerful draw to the ethnic Koreans who populate China's border provinces. A reunited Korea allied with America hosting U.S. bases and forces would be an even more undesirable development.
While Beijing would hesitate to block a voluntary reunion, that, as noted earlier, seems extremely unlikely. In contrast, if the Kim regime lost control, or if the North Korean state suffered a serious loss of authority, China might find an opportunity to intervene, perhaps on behalf of internal forces friendly to the PRC. Beijing might create an independent but more pliant neighbor, one willing to conform to China's foreign policy objectives in return for security guarantees.
This result might disappoint some South Koreans, but others might be relieved to avoid the manifold uncertainties, difficulties, and costs of reunification. Moreover, a willingness to accept Chinese intervention could be used as a bargaining chip to encourage Beijing to toughen its stance toward Pyongyang.
While the desire for Korean reunification looks Quixotic, the objective of denuclearization deserves priority. Ending or at least limiting the security crisis in Northeast Asia would open possibilities for peaceful transformation of the Korean peninsula.
President Trump asked an important question: is reunification necessary? It is not, even from South Korea's perspective.
It isn't even obviously desirable, at least absent an unlikely transformation of the North. The ROK has come far; it does not want to sacrifice its success in a vain attempt to incorporate the North.
Maybe everything will work out. But maybe not. And the allies should be prepared. They have no higher duty than maintaining the peace. Reunification would be too dearly bought if it followed another Korean War.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
By Kenneth Rogoff
CAMBRIDGE As U.S. President Donald Trump's administration throws sharp elbows in trade negotiations and systematically rescinds regulations introduced by President Barack Obama, one casualty is likely to be efforts to fight the global obesity epidemic.
Left unchecked, rapidly rising obesity rates could slow or even reverse the dramatic gains in health and life expectancy that much of the world has enjoyed over the past few decades.
And by forcing its food culture on countries like Mexico and Canada, the United States is making the problem worse. One of the paradoxes of modern global capitalism is that whereas more than 800 million people in the world do not have enough to eat, an estimated 700 million people (including 100 million children) are obese.
Of course, the two are not necessarily directly related. A considerable proportion of world hunger occurs in countries suffering from domestic strife or severe government dysfunction. The obesity epidemic, however, has a much broader footprint, affecting advanced economies and most emerging markets.
Although there is some connection between obesity and poverty within countries, it is notable that obesity rates in rich countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada are among the world's highest. Recently, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimated that a stunning 40 percent of all Americans are obese (defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher), a figure that includes 20.6 percent of adolescents (12-19 years old).
According to the CDC, the average weight of an American woman today is greater than the average weight of an American man in 1960 (166 pounds, or 75 kilos). Back in 1960, the average weight of an American woman was 140 pounds, while the average weight of an American man today is 195 pounds. (Over the same period, the average height of Americans increased by only one inch, or 2.5 centimeters.) This same dynamic is playing out worldwide, with obesity rates soaring in Europe, Latin America, and even in China.
Although it is difficult to gauge the long-run health consequences, there is abundant evidence that obesity contributes significantly to higher rates of type II diabetes, heart attacks, and certain types of cancer. The health costs are staggering, estimated to be close to $200 billion per year in the U.S. alone. And with rising childhood obesity rates worldwide portending significantly greater health problems in the future adult population, the costs are likely to rise considerably.
The causes of obesity are manifold and complex. Nevertheless, a growing body of evidence suggests that a culture emphasizing processed food and a generally sedentary lifestyle lies at the center of the problem. In emerging markets, rapid urbanization is another important factor as well as a desire to emulate Western lifestyles.
Many governments have launched initiatives to improve nutrition education. Unfortunately, industry advertising typically dwarfs these efforts, as do U.S. trade lobbyists' own efforts to push processed and fast food on the rest of the world. It is hard to ignore the fact that Mexico's adult obesity rate has soared since the adoption in 1993 of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
While there are many causes, post-NAFTA direct foreign investment in the processed food industry and a surge in advertising are important contributors. Mexican consumption of sugary beverages nearly tripled between 1993 and 2014, and a new tax on sugary drinks has muted demand only slightly since then. The other NAFTA partner, Canada, has similarly experienced a rise in obesity, partly because U.S. imports have led to a sharp decline in the price of fructose.
It is unfortunate that government regulators have been so slow to try to reverse these trends by, for example, helping to educate the public on the science of nutrition. And, for too long, most government anti-obesity education has focused on mechanically regulating calorie intake, without taking into account that different foods have dramatically different effects on appetite (as David Ludwig, a professor at Harvard Medical School, emphasizes in his excellent new book "Always Hungry").
Skeptics may point out that nutrition guidelines always seem to be morphing, with last year's sin food becoming this year's superfood, and vice versa. Though there is some truth to this, the fact is that nutrition research has made significant progress in recent decades.
The government has other tools at its disposal, besides education, for affecting people's eating habits. They can and should place greater restrictions on advertising to children, as the U.K., France, and several other countries have done; obesity in early years can lead to lifelong problems. Beyond that, Ludwig, Tufts University's Dariush Mozaffarian, and I have proposed instituting a tax on processed food, much the same way that tobacco is taxed. Proceeds from the tax could be used to subsidize healthier alternatives. It is perhaps fantasy to expect the current U.S. administration to consider any kind of antiobesity strategy while it is still busy dismantling Obama-era policies.
But that is all the more reason why countries entering new trade agreements with the U.S. (for example, the post-Brexit UK, or post-NAFTA Canada) must be wary of any provisions that tie their hands in the war against obesity.
What the National Assembly has been doing of late makes many people question whether the nation needs this kind of parliament that reminds them of such negative terms as corruption, partisan strife, absurd remarks by its members, selfish political interest and too many privileges, instead of legislation and serving as a check and balance to the administration.
The National Assembly Steering Committee once again angered the public by deciding early last month to raise lawmakers' monthly pay by 2.6 percent from 137,960.000 won (about $127,000) to 140,000,000 won ($134,321). The parliamentary action was belatedly made public last week.
A week ago, the Assembly also passed a bill to give each lawmaker one more assistant, up from the present seven, meaning an additional annual cost of 6.7 billion won ($6.164 million) for the employment of a secretary for each of the 300 lawmakers.
In comparison with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita among OECD member countries, the monthly pay of a South Korean lawmaker ranks third-highest after Japan and Italy. As for the "effectiveness of the parliament," South Korea is placed 26th among 27 countries surveyed, while Sweden employing one secretary per two lawmakers is ranked second.
It is still vivid in the people's memory that both the ruling and opposition parties competitively "promised" to cut lawmakers' monthly salary as respective election pledges last year. A candidate from the then-opposition party proposed a 30 percent reduction, while the People's Party promised a 25 percent cut. In particular, the then-ruling Saenuri Party, now the opposition Liberty Korea Party, pledged to return the annual pay of all its members if their election pledges were not kept. But after the election, nothing happened. Nobody kept their promises.
Electing the lawmakers last year, most of the voters had expected, half in doubt though, that the new four-year-term parliament would be different. Yet, "their excellencies" have already forgotten what they pledged to do to win votes. Without contradicting the people's deep-rooted negative notions, the lawmakers, irrespective of political affiliation, have once again demonstrated their trademark lust for personal and partisan political gain at the cost of the people's money. They are the very deep-rooted evils of the past President Moon Jae-in has been campaigning to annihilate in the name of national reform.
Michael Nyman created an original score for the 66-minute movie about a wash cycle. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
By Chyung Eun-ju
Samsung's 66-minute movie, "Washing Machine The Movie," will be released on Tuesday in Leicester Square, London starring Samsung's washing machine, QuickDrive with music by one of Britain's most celebrated composers.
The "slow movie" will show a full wash cycle in one continuous shot to emphasize QuickDrive's efficiency cutting the wash time in half "without compromising the cleaning performance."
The soundtrack was composed by Michael Nyman, who also wrote the soundtrack for the Oscar-winning movie "The Piano."
Trailer:
"In an audacious move, the poetic monotony of the spinning drum and sloshing water are the sole focus of 'Washing Machine' the movie," Samsung said in an online statement.
"The film chronicles the full cycle, moment by moment, of Samsung's QuickDrive washing machine, in this big screen addition to the canon of slow cinema treats. The production team captured the action with a single long shot trained on the machine to bring the full glory of the wash, rinse and spin to the screen."
The film will be released in Leicester Square, London on Tuesday. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
/ Korea Times
By Park Si-soo
There is no doubt that English is "the world language" with nearly 360 million people speaking it as their first language and many more as a second language.
French President Emmanuel Macron recently vowed to make French the most spoken language in the world.
French would "be the first langue of Africa" and "perhaps of the world," Macron told students in Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou last week.
"The radiance, the attractiveness of French does not belong just to France," he said.
French is reportedly the fifth most-spoken language, with 274 million speakers worldwide.
The French leader did not elaborate on how his mother tongue would challenge English's long-established hegemony.
British newspaper The Independent said Macron's bold pledge was based on projections of rapid growth in the population of Africa, where French is commonly spoken due to French colonialism in the 19th century.
The French investment bank Natixis forecast a few years ago that the number of people speaking French could overtake English, Mandarin, and Spanish and become the most-spoken language by 2050.
Brexit is seen as another "golden" opportunity. The newspaper said Britain's departure from the European Union (EU) would give French a chance to be designated as the bloc's benchmark legal language, something France tried to do a decade ago but failed.
Internally, France is trying to make its territory more French-friendly. The French government periodically updates a blacklist of distasteful "Anglo-Saxonisms" such as "le weekend."
The law has even been deployed to defend French. In 2006 a French subsidiary of General Electric was fined 500,000 euros for publishing a software manual in English.
I have an associate who lost his job because of thc and was under prescription.
Sooooo many people are introduced to opiates via DR. Then cut off to end up on dope.
I was just talking to a friend of mine and we both agreed that if the dope market was as tainted as it is today one or both of us would most likely be dead from fentinal poisoning.
It is the most ridiculous, government created problem.
But lets make an issue over plants.
People are stupid.
PRESS RELEASE
China and Russia Reassert Strategic Ties at Shanghai Cooperation Organizatoin Meeting
Dec. 3, 2017 (EIRNS)Xinhua reports that Chinese Premier Li Keqing held a bilateral meeting on Dec. 1 on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, noting that Li told Medvedev that
"China and Russia should continue to promote cooperation in major strategic projects, further expand cooperation in science, technology and innovation, and tap cooperation potential between the two countries small and medium-sized enterprises and at local areas."
Xinhua further reports that Li also had bilaterals on the sidelines of the SCO meeting with the Kazakh, Pakistani and Belarusian Prime Ministers, who were also among the participants.
The SCO final communique addressed the international financial situation, Xinhua reports:
"Facing the unstable financial and raw materials markets, fluctuating foreign exchange rates and rising protectionism, the SCO members need to take coordinated actions and improve international monetary and financial system, according to the communique."
It also called for jointly fighting against "three evil forces"terrorism, extremism and separatismand to "augment cooperation in drug control and fighting cross-border crimes." It also called for members to "actively tap new potentials from the accession of India and Pakistan into the organization."
PRESS RELEASE
National Security Advisor McMaster Says War Threat from North Korea Is Increasing
Dec. 3, 2017 (EIRNS)U.S. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said yesterday that the threat of war from North Korea is "increasing every day." He was responding to a question at the annual Reagan Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, about the threat "emerging" from the North Korean government.
Referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, McMaster said:
"Every time he conducts a missile launch and nuclear test, he gets better. And whether its a success or a failure isnt as important as understanding that over the years hes been learning from failures, improving and thereby increasing his threat to all of us."
McMaster stated that there are still ways to address the problem short of war, but "hes getting closer and closer and theres not much time left." Though the South Korean Defense Ministry and experts consulted by the news media concluded that the missile that North Korea tested on Nov. 28 could have a range of 8,000 miles, long enough to reach any point in the United States, an unnamed U.S. official told CNN yesterday that technical assessments of the launch are still ongoing. But, he said, "the North Koreans had problems with re-entry," implying that the dummy warhead broke up during the atmospheric re-entry phase of the flight.
Meanwhile, U.S.-South Korean military exercises are going ahead, full bore. The Korea Herald reported yesterday that six U.S. F-22 stealth fighters had arrived in South Korea for next weeks giant air exercise, which will also involve U.S. F-35s, F-16Cs, B-1B bombers and other aircraft, and F-15K, KF-16 and F-5 fighter jets from the South Korean side. The exercise will involve some 230 aircraft flying from eight airbases. A North Korea Foreign Ministry spokesman stated in response, according to Xinhua, that "The Trump team is begging for a nuclear war by staging an extremely dangerous nuclear gamble on the Korean Peninsula."
Sabcat said: Who says the leftists wont use lists against the people????
Naw...its all.for your protection.
Gotta round up all of those violent, dirty potheads.
Ya know, that stuff makes the dark skinned rape white women too... Click to expand...
"We need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized, it ought not to be minimized, that it's in fact a very real danger."
"I think one of [Obama's] great failures, it's obvious to me, is his lax treatment in comments on marijuana... It reverses 20 years almost of hostility to drugs that began really when Nancy Reagan started 'Just Say No.'"
"You can't have the President of the United States of America talking about marijuana like it is no different than taking a drink It is different It is already causing a disturbance in the states that have made it legal."
"Good people don't smoke marijuana." --- Jeff Sessions
It's ridiculous. The federal government has no constitutional right to criminalize drugs, including alcohol. The 18th Amendment proved that.But, AG Sessions must be giddy.Makes me want a shot of tequila. Alcohol, the good ol' boys drug........ B)
House of Cards will resume production in 2018 without Kevin Spacey, according to Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer of Netflix.
The sixth and final season of the popular series will feature a lead role for Robin Wright, who plays the wife of Spaceys character.
Production on the sixth season of House of Cards came to a halt Oct. 31 following bombshell sexual misconduct allegations against Spacey, who starred in the series for five seasons as politician Frank Underwood and also served as an executive producer. Spacey was officially suspended from the show early last month.
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The allegations include an accusation from actor Anthony Rapp, who claimed that Spacey made an unwanted sexual advance decades ago when Rapp was still a minor. Spacey has also been accused by eight current and former House of Cards employees of creating a toxic work environment with his behavior. The allegations include one former production assistant who said Spacey sexually assaulted him during one of the shows early seasons.
Sarandos said Monday at the UBS 45th Annual Global Media and Communications Conference that the final season of House of Cards will consist of eight episodes. Previous seasons consisted of 13 episodes each.
It remains unclear how Spaceys character will be written out of the show, which films in Maryland. Sarandos said that he was glad that Netflix was able to reach a deal for the 2,000 people in Baltimore who work on the series.
Media Rights Capital produces House of Cards and licenses the show to Netflix. The 200-member crew of the hit drama has been on a paid hiatus since early November as Netflix and Media Rights Capital tried to sort out the future of the show without its star.
House of Cards was Netflixs first hit series when it debuted in 2013. But the show is now regarded as past its prime. Creator and showrunner Beau Willimon left the series last year after four seasons.
Netflix had also worked with Spacey on a movie in which the actor stars as the late writer Gore Vidal. But the streaming service said last month after Spaceys sex scandal broke that it will no longer release the feature.
david.ng@latimes.com
Twitter: @DavidNgLAT
Former Fox News producer Rachel Witlieb Bernstein is suing Bill OReilly and Fox News for defamation and breach of contract, alleging they violated a settlement she reached with the fired cable anchor.
In a lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Bernstein said OReilly and Fox News broke their nondisclosure agreement in remarks to the New York Times. The April 1 story recounted how the anchor and network had paid $13 million in settlements over the years to her and other women who had complained that OReilly had abused or sexually harassed them during their employment.
Bernstein complained in 2002 that she was mistreated by OReilly when she worked for the network, and ultimately reached a settlement agreement with the network. Her story was among those included in the New York Times report, although her suit said she was not the source of the information.
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Her financial settlement with Fox News required both sides not to disparage the other and only say the matter had been resolved. Unlike the other settlements made by OReilly and Fox News, Bernsteins complaint did not involve sexual harassment.
Bernstein alleges that OReilly had defended the payouts in the New York Times and other publications by portraying her as a liar and politically motivated extortionist.
In the New York Times story, OReilly said he paid Bernstein and other women who complained because hes vulnerable to lawsuits from individuals who want me to pay them to avoid negative publicity. In another widely published statement he said, the worst part of my job is being a target for those who would harm me and my employer, the Fox News Channel.
OReilly was fired on April 19 from Fox News after a 20-year run at the cable network. He was the networks top rated personality for most of that time.
The suit also said that Fox News parent company 21st Century Fox falsely said in the story that there had never been any harassment complaints made against OReilly on a company hot line.
Bernstein said there was no hot line in existence at the time of her employment.
Bernstein alleges in her suit that she complained repeatedly about OReillys mistreatment of her to the companys human resources department and top Fox News executives, but nothing was done. OReilly screamed at Bernstein in front of other employees, according to the New York Times.
This cynical falsehood about a non-existent hot line was made to bolster OReillys claim that the women who received settlements must have fabricated their claims or they would have complained, said Bernsteins attorney Nancy Erika Smith, whose Montclair, N.J., law firm Smith Mullin represented Gretchen Carlson in her suit against former Fox chief executive Roger Ailes.
Fox News did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
stephen.battaglio@latimes.com
Twitter: @SteveBattaglio
Mick Mulvaney is moving quickly to put his stamp on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency he has strongly criticized, even as he continues to spar with the deputy director over who is its lawful acting chief.
Mulvaney, the White House budget director whom President Trump appointed to the post Nov. 24, said he had already started installing some of his aides into bureau positions and was reviewing ongoing legal actions against financial firms. He also expressed support for House legislation introduced last week to repeal the bureaus recent regulations cracking down on payday and other short-term loans.
The moves come despite an expectation that Deputy Director Leandra English will continue her legal battle and file for a temporary injunction that would seek to oust Mulvaney from his office and reinstate her as acting chief.
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Aside from her presence here, which is a little strange, I wont lie to you, I think things are going extraordinarily smoothly and extraordinarily well, Mulvaney said Monday of English, who he said continues to report for work.
Mulvaney, who as budget director has held regular news briefings, told reporters that he expected to be in the job for five to seven months because a permanent director still must be nominated and then confirmed by the Senate.
Among his priorities in that time, he said, was acting on an inspector generals report this year that raised concerns about the bureaus data security efforts that scares me to death.
He said he was halting the collection of all data containing personally identifiable information about consumers as part of the bureaus oversight of banks and other firms until the security issue is buttoned down.
Were not going to start collecting data under my watch until we are absolutely confident that stuff isnt going to get hacked, Mulvaney said, adding that he believed that the bureaus previous leadership team had been taking the problem seriously.
It was a rare positive comment directed toward Richard Cordray, an appointee of President Obama who was the bureaus first director and clashed often with Mulvaney and other Republicans.
The disputes continued after Cordray stepped down Nov. 24. He promoted English, his chief of staff, to deputy director and said she would serve as acting director under a provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that created the bureau.
Trump then appointed Mulvaney under a different law, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998. English sued, saying she was lawfully entitled to the position. A federal judge ruled in Mulvaneys favor last week.
Englishs attorney indicated she would seek a preliminary injunction. The injunction request had not been filed as of Monday afternoon, but a conference is scheduled Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for Englishs attorney, Deepak Gupta, and Justice Department lawyers to work out a schedule for legal arguments.
English has been at the bureaus headquarters from time to time and also has been working from another bureau office a few blocks away, Mulvaney said. He has not met with her yet and doesnt expect to do so.
Its always a challenge when youre in a workplace with somebody who is suing to sort of chat around the water cooler, so I have attempted to correspond with her via email, which I believe to be the appropriate manner, Mulvaney said.
He said hes sent English about half a dozen emails on two topics but has not received any replies.
One topic involved asking her to please cease holding yourself out as acting director, Mulvaney said. As recently as Thursday, English was sending emails through the bureau saying she was acting director and actually giving people instructions which were occasionally counter to mine, he said.
Those emails were confusing to employees and put them in a difficult situation, Mulvaney said. He also said he emailed her asking her to perform some deputy director duties.
Mulvaney said he was absolutely not considering firing English.
We need everybody doing their jobs, he said.
Gupta did not respond Monday to an email request for comment.
Mulvaney, who continues to serve as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said he was at the bureau all day Saturday even though his office was extremely hot. The thermostat only for that office was locked at 80 degrees and could not be changed without a security code that nobody had.
Mulvaney said it occurred to him that might have been a prank tied to his controversial appointment.
If it was, I appreciate that kind of deviousness, he said.
jim.puzzanghera@latimes.com
Twitter: @JimPuzzanghera
Will the Los Angeles Philharmonic be Jonathon Heywards good luck charm?
Heyward, a 25-year-old American who is part of the L.A. Phils prestigious Dudamel Fellowship Program for conductors, could follow the likes of Lionel Bringuier and Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who earned major orchestra appointments after stints with the ensemble.
For the record: An earlier version of this article implied that Jonathon Heyward was part of the L.A. Phils Dudamel Fellowship Program in years past. He is a fellow for 2017-18.
When illness forced Miguel Harth-Bedoya to withdraw this weekend from the L.A. Phils Bernstein 100" anniversary concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Heyward stepped in. This season as part of the Toyota Symphonies for Youth series, he led the orchestra in Glinkas Ruslan and Ludmila Overture and Stravinskys Firebird Suite, and both of those works substituted for Rachmaninoffs Symphony No. 3, originally on Harth-Bedoyas program.
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Jonathon Heyward conducts the L.A. Phil through Glinkas Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture at the Sunday afternoon performance at Disney Hall. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times )
More important, on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, Heyward conducted the premiere of an L.A. Phil commission, Tania Leons intimate Ser (Being), as well as Leonard Bernsteins tricky 1954 Serenade, a five-movement violin concerto inspired by Platos Symposium, featuring soloist Hilary Hahn.
With reportedly only two days to prepare for his subscription concert debut weekend, Heyward nevertheless strode to the podium with confidence, launching into Glinkas warhorse with whirlwind vitality and an exuberant boyish charm that was positively Bernsteinian. He then settled down for the Serenade, allowing Hahn, who performed the piece from memory, to conjure some of her warmest, most autumnal and, when appropriate, spikiest playing.
Throughout, Heyward and the L.A. Phil made the most of Bernsteins changing meters and jagged rhythms, capturing the bristling energy of the jazzy finale. The conductors rhythmic command provided enough contrast to keep Bernsteins intensely lyrical meditation on love from cloying. He knew when to lead and when to follow, effortlessly balancing his roles as a natural showman and sensitive collaborator in service to the music.
Hahns encore was a delightful account of the gigue from Bachs Partita No. 3.
Conductor Jonathon Heyward and violin soloist Hilary Hahn perform Serenade by composer Leonard Bernstein, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Sunday at Disney Hall. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times )
After intermission came Ser. Leons finely crafted and bird-sound-haunted piece engaged the coloristic resources of the L.A. Phil to lovely effect. Especially memorable were the chirping clarinet and fluttering flute figures, set off by zesty writing for the brasses. Heyward led the orchestra with delicacy and mature skill, lending Leons ethereal 10-minute piece a shapely character.
Leon, 74, came to New York in 1967 as a pianist from Cuba. She studied with Bernstein at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestras summer home, subsequently adding the jobs of composer and conductor to her resume. She became a founding member of the Dance Theatre of Harlem and its first music director. Though based in New York, she is no stranger to California: She conducted the premiere of her instrumental ensemble piece Palante at the 2016 Ojai Music Festival.
At a charming pre-concert talk, Leon spoke of musics power to cultivate empathy by creating a direct line to universally shared emotions another Bernstein connection. A composer is like a shoemaker, she said, demystifying the aloof artist and suggesting the composers primary role as a craftsperson who engages others.
The concert concluded with an electrifying account of The Firebird, in its 1919 orchestration. Here, Heyward forged a seamless connection among the music, the orchestra and the audience. There were no gimmicks. Heyward used the score, conducting without a baton. Flexible phrasing allowed breathing room for the Dance of the Firebird and dreamy Berceuse, and the Infernal Dance was suitably primal, sometimes brutal, in its earthiness.
Bernstein was 25 in 1943 when he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic, substituting for an ailing Bruno Walter. Although its too early to tell where Heywards career might go hes currently assistant conductor of the Halle Orchestra in Manchester, England his L.A. Phil concert augurs great things to come.
For now, hes conducting another performance of The Firebird, this time set to dance and directed and choreographed by Kitty McNamee, on Dec. 9 at Disney Hall.
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The Sundance Film Festival will add a new section, dubbed indie episodic, to the upcoming 2018 edition. The festival has also announced its short-film program and several titles in the special events section.
Other festivals, such as the Toronto International Film Festival and the South by Southwest Film Festival, already have sections dedicated to episodic content. Sundance has previously explored screening episodic content, including Jane Campions miniseries Top of the Lake in 2013 and Ezra Edelmans multi-part documentary OJ: Made In America in 2016, both in their entirety. The Sundance Institute has also been running a program for episodic projects among their talent labs for the last few years.
I think weve always prided ourselves on embracing what change is happening in these different mediums for storytellers to work in, Trevor Groth, the festivals director of programming, said in a recent interview of the festivals embrace of episodic work. We felt that a lot of the storytellers who were working in that form were Sundance artists. And so we started showing more and more.
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Among the selections for the inaugural Indie Episodic section are America to Me, directed by Steve James; Cherries, directed by Diaz Jacobs; Franchesca, executive produced by Franchesca Ramsey and directed by Kaitlin Fontana; Halfway There, directed by Rick Rosenthal; High & Mighty, directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada; Im Poppy, directed by Titanic Sinclair; Leimert Park, directed by Mel Jones; Mr. Inbetween, directed by Nash Edgerton; The Passage, directed by Kitao Sakuri; The Show About the Show (Season 2), directed by Caveh Zahedi; This Close, directed by Andrew Ahn, and Tropical Cop Tales, directed by Jim Hosking.
Thats what I love about this episodic work too, its allowing [for] all of these different voices, said Groth.
Groth said the ultimate goal of the section was trying to create a bit of a market around this work like we did for film back in the late 80s, early 90s and you saw this whole industry grow up around it. I think the same thing will happen with the episodic work. Whether its connected to the film space or becomes its own industry, we dont know, but we want to help stimulate it as much as we can.
The festival has previously screened episodic work in the special events section, where this year Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Matthew Heineman will world premiere The Trade, a docu-series exploring the opioid epidemic on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border.
Also screening as a special event will be The King, an ambitious look at American cultural, political and economic power via a 1963 Rolls-Royce once owned by Elvis Presley, directed by Eugene Jarecki and executive produced by Steven Soderbergh.
Pass Over, an adaptation of the play by Antoinette Nwandu directed by Spike Lee, will have its world premiere. As will Wild Wild Country, an examination of a utopian community in rural Oregon, directed by Chapman Way and Maclain Way.
Sundance also released the lineup of 62 short films that will play at this years festival.
Among the selection are Home Shopper, directed by Dev Patel; Maude, directed by Anna Margaret Hollyman; Painting With Joan, directed by Jack Henry Robbins; LaZercism, directed by Shaka King; War Paint, directed by Katrelle N. Kindred; Careful How You Go, directed by Emerald Fennell (and starring Fleabag lead Phoebe Waller-Bridge), and Cheer Up Baby, directed by Adinah Dancyger.
Among the animated shorts are A Brief Spark Bookended By Darkness, directed by Brent Green, The Burden, directed by Niki Lindroth von Bahr, and World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other Peoples Thoughts, directed by Don Hertzfeldt.
Mike Plante, senior programmer for the festival, said in a statement, We are always thrilled to discover new voices in filmmaking through the short-film program: they take risks in story and style you might not expect.
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Mark.Olsen@latimes.com
Follow on Twitter: @IndieFocus
ALSO
Sundance announces 2018 program as festival sits at cultural crossroads
L.A. Film Festival moves to crowded fall festival season for 2018
The page hadnt yet turned on December when Barneys New York rang in its holiday campaign in Beverly Hills on Thursday evening.
The event, at its flagship on Wilshire Boulevard, celebrated its collaboration with Simon and Nikolai Haas and the campaign Haas for the Holidays. It also marked Barneys first holiday launch event on the West Coast.
The soiree brought out a good chunk of industry movers and shakers, including Devendra Banhart, Tallulah Willis, Greg Chait, Justin Kern, Juan Carlos Obando and Sophia Amoruso to help Barneys creative director Matthew Mazzucca and the Haas brothers celebrate the holiday windows and broader campaign.
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The message is that life comes in waves, obviously, and not to fight them. Its setting a positive view and thats in line with everything else, Simon Haas said of the windows as he pointed to sayings leading up the staircase within the store, such as Love Heels All Wounds and Sun body Loves You.
The idea for the holidays, Simon continued about the work he and his brother did for the Barneys windows, was instead of being a snowy, Christmas theme is being what holidays are, which is about positivity and giving and sharing.
Haas Brothers, the Los Angeles art and design company the two started, is working on Design Miami, followed by a show at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami next year.
Barneys decked out the Beverly Hills out with different elements of the Haas Brothers campaign, from a photo booth area to an on-site screen-printing station for guests to create their own T-shirts.
So why the push now for the holidays on the West Coast?
Mazzuccas new role as creative director the windows were his first as Barneys creative director, although not his first for the retailer is a part of that answer. With Mazzucca in his new position, the goal is about making each store unique to the locale its in and, given the Haas brothers hail from L.A., doing something locally made sense, he added.
One thing that we always talked about is that theres not a really strong window culture [in Los Angeles] like there is in New York. There is a culture of windows, but you dont have pedestrian traffic like you do in New York so I looked at this as a great opportunity. Niki and Simon being from Los Angeles it makes a statement here and gives the store its own identity.
Additionally, with Barneys being a global business, doing more outside of New York makes sense, Mazzucca added.
I am adamant about doing this more. Its an international company so I really feel its superimportant to be that and not just focus on one thing, he said. So thats the plan. Its the first time Im in this leadership role to make that decision and now to be able to do that, Im really trying to push that.
Mazzucca is also thinking more about the Barneys digital component and how that can be strengthened, which he said will come through a combination of pieces including aesthetics on the site, functionality and content to give the web its own identity.
For me, I really want to focus on how do we take our digital channel and make it feel like a store. I feel like e-commerce can either be really simplified and become really very e-commerce driven or become super experiential. I think we do an excellent job, but if you could take all this energy, Mazzucca said, motioning to the festivities within the store, and put it into what the web site experience is, thats my next goal. And then also, instead of doing these one-off moments, how do we keep momentum throughout the year in different cities and really connect all the dots?
For more than a year, Uber Technologies Inc. concealed a massive hack that exposed the personal data of millions of drivers and riders, violating a California law that requires companies to promptly report such breaches, according to a lawsuit filed Monday by Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer.
In October 2016, hackers stole the names, cellphone numbers and email addresses of more than 57 million riders across the world, as well as drivers license numbers for 600,000 Uber drivers in the United States. Uber disclosed the hack last month.
Feuer filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of California residents. The case will focus on Ubers failure to disclose the data breach to Ubers California drivers, he said.
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California law requires companies to report hacks in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay when some forms of personal data, including drivers license numbers, are compromised. The law is designed to help consumers fight identity theft.
Instead, Uber paid the hackers $100,000 to destroy the data, pressured them to sign nondisclosure agreements, and portrayed the ransom as a payment to test the vulnerabilities of the companys data security systems, according to the lawsuit.
Were taking action because we believe very strongly in the importance of protecting consumers, Feuer said Monday at a news conference at Los Angeles City Hall.
The consumer protection law is commonly invoked in the lawsuits that follow data breaches. In September, San Franciscos city attorney cited the law in a suit filed against Equifax, alleging the company failed to promptly disclose a hack that affected more than 15 million California residents.
Feuer said he doesnt yet know how many drivers in California were affected in Ubers lawsuit.
The lawsuit seeks $2,500 for each violation of the law. Any payments would be shared between the city and the county of Los Angeles, and would be spent on consumer protection efforts, Feuer said.
In a statement, an Uber spokesperson said the company is happy to address regulators questions, and is committed to changing the way we do business, putting integrity at the core of every decision we make, and working hard to regain the trust of consumers.
Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi, who was hired in August to replace controversial founder Travis Kalanick, said in a blog post last month that he learned of the hack months after it occurred.
Ubers chief of security and another employee were fired for not revealing the hack, and the company has provided free credit monitoring and identity theft protection to affected drivers, Khosrowshahi said.
None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it, Khosrowshahi said. While I cant erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes.
The hack did not expose Uber riders trip histories, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, Social Security numbers or dates of birth, he said.
In January 2016, Uber paid a $20,000 fine to the New York attorney general for failing to promptly report a separate data breach in 2014. That previous disclosure, Mondays lawsuit said, makes the companys gross conduct ... even more alarming.
laura.nelson@latimes.com
Twitter: @laura_nelson
Hospital offers
nitrous oxide
during labor
Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis recently introduced a new pain management option for women in labor.
Women who deliver at the hospital have the option of using inhaled nitrous oxide during labor to help manage their pain. This option can be used instead of other pain management offered at Good Samaritan, such as intravenous pain medication or an epidural.
Nitrous oxide increases the release of hormones in the mothers brain, temporarily relieving pain. It leaves the body within a breath or two, so the gas does not accumulate in the mother or babys bodies.
There are no known effects on the baby and the most common side effects are nausea after prolonged use and unsteadiness. Anti-nausea medication is available if needed, and women using nitrous oxide are able to get out of bed with assistance five minutes after inhaling the gas.
Doctor joins
Corvallis Clinic
Marina Arbuck recently joined The Corvallis Clinics Internal Medicine Department in the Asbury Building, 3680 NW Samaritan Drive, Corvallis.
Arbuck comes to Corvallis from Advanced Family Medicine in Redmond, Washington, where she was a staff physician. She also was a staff physician at Multicare Health System in Auburn, Washington, from 2011 to 2015, and Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington, from 2008 to 2011. She was an infectious diseases consultant at Northwest Medical Specialties in Tacoma from 2004 to 2008 and at South Sound Inpatient Physicians, Auburn, from 2003 to 2004.
After leaving her native Russia with her 7-year-old son in 1995 and before passing medical boards to get into a U.S. residency program, Arbuck was a nursing assistant in a psychiatric hospital. She then did a year-long psychiatric residency.
Arbuck earned a medical degree from Yaroslavl Medical Academy, in Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1982. She completed an internal medicine residency at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis in 1999, and an infectious disease fellowship at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis in 2001.
Deputy takes
basic training
Deputy Sheriff Ethan Garrison of the Benton County Sheriffs Office graduated from the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Trainings basic training class last June 16 at the Oregon Public Safety Academy in Salem.
The DPSST provides training to more than 25,000 students each year throughout Oregon, and at the academy in Salem certifies qualified officers at various levels from basic through executive; certifies qualified instructors; and reviews and accredits training programs throughout the state based on standards established by the board.
Dermatologist
moves practice
Board-certified dermatologist and Mohs surgeon Todd L. Knapp recently moved his practice from Eugene to Albany and Corvallis.
Knapp has joined Silver Falls Dermatology and now will see patients only at Silver Falls Albany and Corvallis offices.
Knapp graduated from Brigham Young University, then attended medical school at the University of Utah. Knapp completed his dermatology residency at the Medical University of South Carolina.
Knapp was accepted to a cutaneous oncology and reconstructive surgery fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed his training in Mohs micrographic, dermatologic and laser surgery. He is board certified in dermatology and a member of the American College of Mohs Micrographic Surgery and Cutaneous Oncology.
Silver Falls Dermatology is at 2358 NW Kings Blvd., Suite 100, in Corvallis; and 1390 Waverly Drive SE in Albany. Knapps schedule is open for skin cancer appointments at both locations. Appointments can be made at 541-967-8385.
Law firm wins
leader award
The Reynolds Law Firm in Corvallis has received the 2017 Oregon Women Lawyers Workplace Leader Award.
The firm won the award due to leaderships commitment to supporting projects and policies that employees say brings them personal fulfillment. The Honorable Darleen Ortega of the Oregon Court of Appeals presented the award to the firm at a reception on Oct. 27 in Portland.
The OWLS Workplace Leader Award recognizes an Oregon legal employer making innovative and effective efforts to promote one or more of the following values: a healthy balance between work and life; acquiring and maintaining a diverse workforce with diverse leadership; and maximizing opportunities for women and minorities to succeed in the workplace and advance to positions of influence and leadership. The award is not given every year.
Under the Reynolds Law Firms Paid Pro Bono requirement, work done pro bono by attorneys counts toward billable hour requirements. That means attorneys can do meaningful work in the community without having to personally absorb the financial cost of doing so. Ten percent of their work is done pro bono.
Shashi Kapoor, a leading Bollywood actor and producer from the 1970s and 80s who went on to appear in American and British films, has died after a long illness. He was 79.
Kapoor died Monday at a Mumbai hospital, where he was being treated for a kidney ailment, said Randhir Kapoor, a family member.
Kapoor acted in more than 100 Hindi films and was also a key theater personality. He appeared as well in British and American movies produced by Merchant Ivory productions, run by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.
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His English-language movies included The Householder in 1963, Shakespeare Wallah in 1965, Bombay Talkie in 1970 and Heat and Dust, in which he co-starred with his wife, British actress Jennifer Kendal, in 1982.
Some of his popular Bollywood films were Deewar (Wall), Kabhi Kabhie (Sometimes), 'Namak Hala (Loyal Servant) and Kaala Pathar (Black Rock). He co-starred with Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan in each.
Very sad to hear the news that iconic Bollywood actor and producer Shashi Kapoor has died. His contribution to the Hindi film industry will forever be remembered across the world. pic.twitter.com/Uv22UqiP0s Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) December 4, 2017
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Kapoors versatility could be seen in his movies as well as in the theater, which he promoted with great passion. His brilliant acting will be remembered for generations to come, he said.
Kapoor was a member of a family dynasty in the Bollywood film industry. He was the youngest son of Prithviraj Kapoor, a veteran of Bollywood and the theater.
Shashi Kapoor began acting at age 4 in plays produced and directed by his father. He started in films as a child actor in the late 1940s. He made his debut as a leading actor in movies in 1961.
He is survived by two sons and a daughter. His wife Kendal died in 1984.
President Trumps removal of federal protections from huge portions of two national monuments in southern Utah on Monday threatens to undercut the wilderness-conservation legacies of his Democratic predecessors Presidents Obama and Clinton.
Whether Trump has the legal authority to withdraw 1.1 million acres of land from Bears Ears National Monument and 800,000 acres from nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante will soon be tested in court.
Supporters of the monuments, which cover vast stretches of Utahs scenic red-rock country, are preparing lawsuits to block Trump from shrinking them.
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But Trumps drive to open wilderness to oil, gas, coal and mineral extraction, among other things, is already one of his most significant environmental legacies, along with his wholesale scrapping of Obama policies to address climate change.
How can a president unilaterally shrink a national monument?
The 1906 Antiquities Act empowers the president to establish national monuments by proclamation to protect landmarks and objects of historic or scientific interest. (Creation of a national park requires congressional approval.)
The naming of national monuments has become one of the most visible ways for presidents to establish a permanent legacy. Obama created Bears Ears in December 2016, a few weeks before the end of his presidency. Clinton named Grand Staircase-Escalante as a national monument in September 1996, seven weeks before his reelection.
The Antiquities Act says nothing about whether presidents have the power to revoke national monument designations of their predecessors.
Previous presidents have reduced the size of national monuments, but never on the scale that Trump did in Utah, and courts have never ruled on the legality of those cuts.
How much land did Trump withdraw from national monuments in Utah?
Bears Ears was 1.35 million acres. Trump sliced it into two national monuments totaling just under 229,000 acres.
Grand Staircase-Escalante was 1.9 million acres. Trump split it into three national monuments totaling just over 1 million acres.
Is it just scenic lands that could now be developed?
No. Much of the mesas, canyons and mountains of Bears Ears is sacred to Native American tribes, including the Navajo, Zuni, Ute Mountain and Hopi. Its archaeological treasures include rock art, ancient cliff dwellings and ceremonial sites.
Grand Staircase-Escalante is one of the worlds premier sites for paleontological discoveries. More than two dozen new species of dinosaurs have been discovered there in the 21 years since Clinton preserved it as a national monument.
Fossils preserved from the Late Cretaceous period, from 100 million to 66 million years ago, have given scientists an unparalleled view of life on Earth in an era when the climate was hotter, the air contained a lot more carbon dioxide and the sea level was extremely high.
Do the boundary changes jeopardize any of the research?
The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a nonpartisan group of scientists, says the removal of national monument protections is a serious setback.
Trumps claim that the new boundaries protect the resources named in the original proclamations is simply untrue, said P. David Polly, an Indiana University professor who serves as the groups president.
Almost all of the Triassic period, the time when dinosaurs originated, has been purged from Grand Staircase-Escalante, as have the unique Cretaceous mammals and the amazing marine reptiles from the Tropic Shale that justified founding the monument in 1996.
The shrinking of Bears Ears will cause similar damage to paleontology, he said.
Is Trump correct that citizens of Utah opposed the national monuments?
While many residents of Utah have long opposed federal control of public lands, opinion on the national monuments is split. Both monuments are major tourist attractions, stimulating the economy of towns nearby.
But political leaders in Utah have been nearly unanimous in opposing the national monuments, and they agree with Trump that some of his predecessors have abused their powers under the Antiquities Act.
Thank you for standing with the people of Utah, Republican Sen. Mike Lee told Trump at the presidents announcement ceremony Monday in Salt Lake City.
A coal mine was going to open in Grand Staircase-Escalante when Clintons designation of the national monument put a stop to the project.
Rob Bishop, a Republican congressman from Utah, has proposed sharply curtailing the power of presidents to establish national monuments.
michael.finnegan@latimes.com
Twitter: @finneganLAT
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If youre a normal person who pays attention to politics, youd be forgiven for thinking that Washington cant decide whether deficits are bad or not. Well, I have one easy trick that will help you make sense of it all.
In Washington, when you hear people complain that this or that piece of legislation will explode the deficit, what they are really telling you is that they dont like the legislation.
Its really that simple. Good legislation, like good food, movies, novels and pretty much everything else except for dogs (theyre all good) is in the eye of the beholder. A politician or partisan who thinks a proposal is worth doing will think its worth doing even if it increases the deficit. If he thinks a proposal is bad, he might argue that its bad on the merits. But you can be sure that if it also increases the deficit, he will cite this fact as a major reason why it is bad.
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That is the role deficits and the national debt play in our politics. Anti-debt talk serves as dye-marker for some more fundamental objection.
The ultimate problem is that everyone says they care about the deficit, but few people care about it enough.
Almost everyone thinks deficits are bad in the abstract, but that their badness should only be a problem for the other side. In 2008, for example, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said that the $5 trillion in debt rung up under George W. Bush was unpatriotic. But his actual complaint wasnt about the debt but what that money was spent on the Iraq war and tax cuts.
Under Obama, the national debt soared from $11 trillion to just under $20 trillion, but that deficit spending was justifiable, according to Democrats, because it went to combating the financial crisis and paying for various other domestic programs.
The source of the apparent inconsistency isnt simply partisan hypocrisy (though thats a factor as well), but a good-faith ideological disagreement.
As a matter of economic policy, conservatives believe that the people themselves are better at spending their money than the government. Cutting taxes and regulations drives economic growth. Liberals, meanwhile, believe that the government is the prime, or at least an indispensable, driver of economic growth.
This is why liberals tend to talk about spending on everything from infrastructure to education as an investment. The Obama stimulus was sold as an investment that would pay huge dividends, thanks in part to Keynesian multipliers the idea that every dollar of government spending results in more than a dollar in economic growth. Obamacare, we were told, would reduce the deficit by cutting healthcare spending and improving economic growth.
Conservatives make similar arguments about tax cuts. Over the weekend, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News that the tax cuts would yield more than enough economic growth to make up for the deficit the bill creates on paper.
On the philosophical side, theres an even starker conflict of visions. Liberals tend to start from the assumption that the government is entitled to as much revenue as it needs, and so tax cuts amount to giving people money.
Earlier this year, Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed a budget that would add at least $21 trillion to the debt over a decade. But when the Senate passed the GOP tax bill, he tweeted, Historians will look back on Dec. 1, 2017 and conclude this was one of the great robberies in US history because Republicans are looting the Treasury. For Sanders, letting people keep more of their own money is theft because its really the governments money.
Conservatives start from the assumption, on the other hand, that money belongs to the people and businesses who earn it. Letting people and businesses keep more of their money isnt a handout or giveaway, never mind a robbery: Its fairness.
The ultimate problem is that everyone says they care about the deficit, but few people care about it enough. Democrats think spending is more important than the deficit and Republicans think cutting taxes is more important. And thats why the national debt is more than $20 trillion, and growing.
jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com
Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case of David Mullins and Charlie Craig, a couple turned away by Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., when they tried to buy a wedding cake.
The two werent turned away because they couldnt afford the cake. They werent turned away because they were rude. They were turned away because they are gay.
The Colorado courts and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission found that the bakerys actions violated the states law barring discrimination. In the high court, the bakery argues that the lower courts findings violate its rights to both religious freedom and free speech.
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Ive watched this argument tangle a lot of good people in knots. But it shouldnt.
Discrimination by a business should not be protected simply because the refusal is of a service that involves speech or expression.
The bakerys argument is among the most radical to come before the Supreme Court in recent years. When you scratch below the surface, the case poses the following question: Is there a constitutional right to discriminate?
The bakery argues that there is, and that the Constitution should exempt it from state laws requiring that businesses not discriminate when serving their customers. In an Orwellian twist, the Department of Justice the very body charged with enforcing the countrys anti-discrimination laws agreed with the bakery in a friend-of-the-court brief.
Specifically, the bakery argues that it should be allowed to refuse service to people if doing so runs contrary to the religious beliefs of its owners. That should give us pause.
In the 1960s, Piggie Park, a small chain of barbecue restaurants in South Carolina, said that its owners freedom of religion would be violated if it were held responsible for disregarding the Civil Rights Act when it refused to serve black patrons.
In 1983, Goldsboro Christian Schools of Goldsboro, N.C., argued it had a religious right to refuse black students. In the same case, Bob Jones University of Greenville, S.C., argued it had a right to deny admission to students who engaged in, or advocated for, interracial dating.
As recently as 1990, Roanoke Valley Christian Schools in Virginia argued that it had a right to pay women less because their faith taught that men should be heads of households.
The courts rejected all of those arguments. They understood that religious liberty does not translate into a right to discriminate. If the Supreme Court now accepts the cake shops religion argument, the decision would have far-reaching consequences. Religious liberty could become a way out of anti-discrimination law.
The bakery is also arguing that freedom of speech protects its refusal to serve Mullins and Craig. According to its argument, the 1st Amendment protects its discriminatory conduct because the product it sells is artistic and expressive. Any business engaged in artistic expression can refuse service, they say, not just those motivated by religious beliefs.
But Colorados anti-discrimination law pertains to the refusal of service, not the artistry of cakes. It does not tell the bakery how to design its baked goods. It does not compel the bakery or any other business that opens its doors to the public to make a particular product at all. It simply requires that, once a business open to the public chooses to offer a product or service, it cannot refuse to sell that product or service to a customer based on identity.
Consider the question from a different angle. What if, instead of turning the couple away, the bakery posted a sign that said, Wedding cakes for heterosexuals only? Those are words, as were whites only and men only need apply. Though the Constitution protects speech, it does not protect this speech, because it communicates and contains an act of discrimination.
In the bakerys argument, the cake is the expression, and the Constitution protects its refusal of service because the cake is expressive. Should that act of discrimination be protected simply because the refused service was artistic and expressive? By this logic, the Constitution could protect the right of a hairdresser who refuses to cut the hair of Muslims or a hotel that wont host an interfaith wedding.
Just as speech by a business open to the public is not protected when it communicates discrimination we dont service your kind here discrimination by a business should not be protected simply because the refusal is of a service that involves speech or expression.
If the Constitution exempts the bakery from the laws bar on discrimination either because the discrimination is motivated by religion or because it is attached to an expressive service it would mean that the Constitution protects discrimination. Period.
Today, there is no constitutional right to discriminate. Lets hope the Supreme Court keeps it that way.
Melling is a deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook
To the editor: John Dowd, President Trumps lawyer, is taking responsibility for sending a tweet that said Trump fired his former national security advisor Michael Flynn because he lied to the FBI. (Trump says there was no collusion with Russia and cites a new reason for why he fired Flynn, Dec. 2)
If Trump wrote that tweet, it would show that he knew in February that Flynn had committed a felony and that he did nothing about it.
Ordinarily, the attorney-client privilege would protect inquiries into communications between a client (Trump) and his lawyer (Dowd). But now Dowd says he sent the tweet on his own, without communicating with Trump.
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That constitutes a waiver of the attorney-client privilege under settled law. It would allow special counsel Robert Mueller to question both Dowd and Trump on their communications about the tweet.
David M. Dorsen, Washington
The writer was the assistant chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee.
..
To the editor: What will it take for Congress to come to the conclusion that Trump is a crook? He now includes Flynns lying to the FBI as a reason he fired him, yet he fired James Comey when the then-FBI director refused the presidents alleged request to [leave] Flynn [alone].
Can any right-thinking American deny that this is an attempt to obstruct justice? And can anyone believe Trump when he says it is a shame that Flynn lied because he had nothing to hide?
As a retired 36-year criminal defense attorney, I can say with confidence that nobody lies unless he has something to hide. Some very bad people throughout history have amassed power by convincing people that their illegal acts are legal and their detractors are liars.
Alan Abajian, Alta Loma
..
To the editor: Reading your reports about the content of Flynns conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States, I cant help but think this looks like much ado about nothing.
Yes, lying to FBI agents about whether the conversation took place was wrong. But what was wrong about the subject of the conversations? I dont see any harm to our country in Flynn having had discussions with the Russian ambassador.
The dislike of the present administration should not interfere with a fair investigation.
Vladimir Bogorad, Chatsworth
Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook.
The Supreme Court gave President Trump a significant victory Monday, ruling he may put his full travel ban into effect while legal appeals are being weighed in lower courts.
The decision, with only two dissents, strongly suggests the justices believe the current version of Trumps broad travel ban does not exceed his powers under the immigration laws and does not reflect unconstitutional religious discrimination against Muslims.
The justices issued an unsigned order Monday granting the administrations request for a stay that would block lower-court decisions that prevented full enforcement of the ban. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said they would deny the request but did not spell out their reasons.
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The court did not issue an opinion with the order, but usually the justices do not intervene in pending cases unless they believe the lower courts have gone wrong.
The decision vindicates a rather bold procedural move by the Justice Department and Trumps solicitor general, Noel Francisco.
In a statement, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions called the courts decision a substantial victory for the safety and security of the American people.
The Constitution gives the president the responsibility and power to protect this country from all threats foreign and domestic, and this order remains vital to accomplishing those goals, he said.
Two weeks ago, the solicitor general filed an emergency plea with the high court urging the justices to bypass two lower courts that were weighing legal challenges to the third version of Trumps travel order, which was issued on Sept. 24.
The third version of the travel ban blocks visitors and immigrants from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea. The addition of North Korea is mostly symbolic, since the government did not expect to see visitors arriving from that country. It also limits travel for some officials from Venezuela.
Administration officials described the Sept. 24 order as measured and reasonable. No existing visas will be revoked, and people currently allowed to travel to the U.S. for other reasons will not affected, they said. The court was advised the countries were put on the watch list only after the administration concluded they lacked the identity management systems that would permit U.S. officials to spot would-be travelers who presented a heightened risk.
By contrast, civil libertarians and immigrants rights advocates portrayed the third travel order as more of the same: an unwarranted ban that targeted Muslims. They said U.S. officials had ample authority to deny entry to foreigners who posed a security risk. They also pointed out the administration has had nearly a year to improve and tighten its vetting procedures.
In recent weeks, the third order had gone into partial effect based on a middle-course position the Supreme Court set out in late June. Then, ruling on an earlier version of the travel order, the justices said the administration could refuse entry for visitors and immigrants from several Muslim nations, but not to families, travelers and others who had a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with person or entity in the United States.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in California, and a federal judge in Maryland adopted that standard and applied it to Trumps latest order. They agreed the ban could go into effect in part, but not against those who had close personal or professional ties to a person or an entity in the United States. The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Va., and the 9th Circuit are scheduled to hear arguments this week on whether Trumps latest order discriminated based on nationality in violation of a 1965 law. The appeals courts are also considering claims that the ban reflected unconstitutional bias against Muslims.
Trumps lawyers were not satisfied with that partial win in the appeals courts. They filed an emergency appeal on Nov. 20 contending that allowing the ban to go into only partial effect will cause ongoing irreparable harm to the government and the public. They predicted the court would eventually uphold the order so the justices should permit the order to go into full effect without further delay.
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and the state of Hawaii filed lengthy responses urging the court to maintain the status quo while the legal claims are heard and decided.
Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLUs Immigrants Rights Project, said its unfortunate that the full ban can move forward now, but this order does not address the merits of our claims. We will be arguing Friday in the 4th Circuit that the ban should ultimately be struck down.
david.savage@latimes.com
Twitter: DavidGSavage
UPDATES:
3:45 p.m.: This article was updated with reaction from Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions and others and to add additional background.
The article was first published at 1:40 p.m.
At a crucial juncture in special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs wide-ranging Russia investigation, President Trump embarked on a risky gambit on Sunday, going on record to directly dispute his former FBI chiefs sworn contention that the president had sought to derail an investigation into fired national security advisor Michael Flynn.
The imbroglio set off, not surprisingly, by a presidential tweet comes on the heels of Flynns guilty plea to charges of having lied to the FBI in connection with conversations with Russias then-ambassador to Washington during the presidential transition.
Fridays dramatic development was met with initial silence from Trump, then with a deluge of weekend tweets in which he muddied the waters over his reasons for firing Flynn, excoriated the Justice Department and the FBI, renewed his attacks on rival Hillary Clinton and seemingly questioned the impartiality of Muellers probe. He also explicitly contested statements by James B. Comey, who was fired seven months ago, regarding events before his dismissal.
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Shortly after 6 a.m. EST Sunday, the president tweeted, I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn, adding: Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!
Sundays statement by Trump on Twitter was largely in line with his previous disparagement of Comey, whose truthfulness and even mental stability have been questioned by the president in the past.
Last month, the president told reporters traveling with him in Asia that Comey was a liar and a leaker. In May, the day after firing the FBI director an action that set in motion Muellers appointment as special counsel the president told senior Russian officials in an Oval Office meeting that Comey was a crazy a real nut job, according to news reports based on transcripts of the encounter.
But the specificity and timing of the presidents public denial of Comeys contention that Trump asked him to back off on investigating Flynn took on added significance with news that the former national security advisor is now cooperating with Muellers investigation.
Within hours of Trumps tweet, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, flatly declared: I believe FBI Director Comey.
Speaking on CNNs State of the Union, Warner said the fired FBI chief was very credible in his testimony when Comey went before the committee in June. The ex-FBI director has said he kept contemporaneous notes of an encounter in which Trump asked if he could ease off Flynn, characterizing the fired national security advisor as a good guy.
Warner said he expected that Flynn being charged with only a single count of lying suggested that the former advisor had many more stories to tell about the Trump campaign and transition.
The response to major developments in the Mueller investigation has often diverged along partisan lines. But Flynns guilty plea, which for the first time takes the inquiry inside the White House, drew cautionary language from some GOP lawmakers.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), also interviewed on CNN, said he agreed with those who said Trump should not pardon Flynn.
We have to have a way to restore confidence of the American people in their elected officials and the leaders of this country, he told journalist Jake Tapper. One way you do that is by holding those folks who are lying to the FBI, you hold those folks accountable.
Against what would otherwise have been the triumphal backdrop of Trumps first major legislative victory, Senate approval of a major GOP tax overhaul plan, the current national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, was asked whether interactions with key allies were being colored by uncertainty over the fate of Trumps presidency due to the Mueller investigation.
I dont think our allies need any reassurance, McMaster said on Fox News Sunday, adding: What were doing is continuing to work with them on all the key challenges we face today, including North Korea and the fight against Islamic State.
McMaster declined to characterize any personal feelings over his predecessor, a military man like himself, having admitted to lying to the FBI.
My thoughts are on what we have to do for the country, he said. I dont really have a lot of spare time to think about other topics, other than our greatest national security challenges.
Trumps senior aides have acknowledged their inability to rein him in on Twitter, but the presidents penchant for off-the-cuff observations could have serious implications for his own legal standing in the Mueller investigation.
On Saturday night, Trump tweeted that he had been forced to fire Flynn because the former Army lieutenant general had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, then-Russias envoy to the U.S. But Trump also blamed the firing on Flynn having lied to the FBI, which the White House had not previously acknowledged knowing at that time. One of Trumps frequent critics, former Office of Government Ethics head Walter Shaub, seized on Trumps tweet, asking in his own tweet, Are you ADMITTING you knew Flynn had lied to the FBI when you asked Comey to back off Flynn?
A number of legal experts said such an admission by Trump could expose him to accusations of obstructing justice.
Seeking to defuse the controversy, the presidents personal lawyer, John Dowd, told ABC News that he drafted the tweet on Flynns dismissal, characterizing it as sloppy.
The apparent walking back of Trumps statement did not satisfy some Democrats. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., interviewed Sunday on NBCs Meet the Press, said what were beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice in connection with the firing of Comey and other actions.
In a series of tweets Sunday, Trump also sought to cast doubt on the impartiality of Muellers investigation, citing reports that FBI agent Peter Strzok had been removed from the special counsels team after an internal investigation of text messages he reportedly wrote that were interpreted as being critical of Trump. Muellers office confirmed that he had been reassigned in late July.
Trump declared that the FBIs reputation was in Tatters, worst in History! in the wake of Comeys tenure. Fear not, he wrote. We will bring it back to greatness.
In response Sunday, Comey, who in recent days has been tweeting famous quotations about truth and justice, offered a quote from his own Senate testimony earlier this year. I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is, and always will be, independent.
The presidents tweets also included voicing approval for a decision by ABC News to suspend journalist Brian Ross for erroneously reporting that Trump directed contacts with the Russians as a candidate, not as president-elect.
Times staff writer Brian Bennett in Washington contributed to this report.
laura.king@latimes.com
Twitter: @laurakingLAT
ALSO
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UPDATES:
3:05 p.m.: This article was updated with Comeys tweet.
This article was originally published at 12:10 p.m.
President Trump on Monday fully endorsed Roy Moore, acting to back the Alabama Senate candidate after conversations with his former strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who has advocated Moores candidacy.
Trumps early morning tweets marked his first all-out endorsement of Moore, who has been accused of making unwanted sexual advances on teenage girls. They came after Republican leaders began to back away in recent days from previous threats to expel Moore if he were to win the Dec. 12 election.
Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2017
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Putting Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders...& so much more. Look at your 401-ks since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2017
Trump called Moore on Monday morning.
Go get em, Roy! Trump told Moore, according to a description of the phone call that Moore posted on Twitter.
Just got off the phone with President Trump who offered his full support and said he needs a fighter to help him in the US Senate, Moore wrote.
Trumps strong support came after a couple of polls showed Moore starting to reestablish a lead over Democrat Doug Jones, providing an argument to Moores backers that Trumps support could make the difference in the race.
A Washington Post poll released Saturday, however, showed the race near a dead heat.
Overall, polling by several organizations has shown the race close despite Alabamas heavy Republican tilt. In addition to the usual margin of error in polls, the outcome is even harder to predict because of the difficulty in knowing who will turn out to vote in a special election held a couple of weeks before Christmas that has been roiled by the accusations against Moore.
Some advisors to the president were concerned that if Trump didnt come out more forcefully in favor of Moore, the former Alabama state judge could lose, according to people familiar with the conversations who spoke anonymously to comment on the internal discussions.
The question of whether to back Moore continues to split Republicans. A few hours after Trumps tweets, Mitt Romney, the Republicans 2012 presidential candidate, repeated his opposition to the Alabamian.
Moores election would be a stain on the GOP and the nation, he wrote on Twitter. No vote, no majority is worth losing our honor, our integrity.
Romney has been pondering a possible Senate race in Utah if the states senior senator, Orrin Hatch, retires. Trump, visiting Utah on Monday, publicly asked Hatch not to retire.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) have previously called on Moore to step aside, saying they believe the allegations. Some Republican senators said last month that if Moore were to win the election, they would move to expel him.
But in a sign that the GOP is warming to the candidate, the Republican National Committee revealed Monday night that it would resume financial support of Moore.
McConnell said Sunday on ABC News that the decision, at least for now, should be left to Alabama voters. Also, in an interview on CBS, McConnell would not commit to supporting an ethics investigation into the allegations should Moore win.
We will swear in whoever is elected and see where we are at that particular point, he said.
Bannon, by contrast, has supported Moore consistently and has argued the candidate is popular with Trumps most ardent supporters. He recently talked with Trump about putting the presidents full weight behind Moore, according to a person close to the White House who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
In November, Trump pointed to Moores denials of the allegations from several decades ago and spoke against voting for Jones, but did not explicitly endorse Moore.
Trump is not campaigning for Moore directly, but is scheduled to hold a rally on Friday in the Florida Panhandle, which shares a media market with Mobile, Ala. The special election is to fill the seat of Jeff Sessions, who is now U.S. attorney general.
Moore has denied the allegations and recently denied knowing any of the women who had described Moores actions to reporters. One woman who told the Washington Post that she dated Moore when she was 17 showed the Post a handwritten note Moore had given to her at the time that she recently found in a scrapbook, according to an article published Monday.
Some Republican strategists fear that if Moore is elected, GOP candidates across the country will be saddled with his reputation. Indeed, Democrats in Pennsylvania are already bringing up Moores name in an effort to fend off a push by Republican Rep. Lou Barletta to defeat incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.
The people of Pennsylvania deserve to know if Congressman Barletta believes Moores accusers and if he wants to serve in the Senate alongside a man accused of child molestation, Pennsylvania Democratic Party spokesman Max Steele said in a statement. Silence is not an option.
On the ground in Alabama, where voters rarely see Democratic challengers pull close to Republicans, Moore called the atmosphere intense, writing in a fundraising appeal to supporters that left-wing foot soldiers aka community organizers are descending on Alabama to volunteer for Doug Jones and create chaos and trouble on the ground at my events.
Jones campaign claims to have launched the most robust get-out-the-vote program Alabama has seen in a generation with volunteers knocking on more than 100,000 doors and making some 800,000 phone calls in the last month and a half.
Trump was late to come to Moores side. During the Republican primary, the president supported Luther Strange, a former Alabama state attorney general and an early supporter of Trumps candidacy for president. Strange was also a favorite of McConnells.
But Trumps support for Big Luther, as the president called him, put him at odds with Bannon, who began actively campaigning for Moore after leaving the White House in August. Bannon, who has returned to running the conservative website Breitbart News, was drawn to Moores unapologetic conservative stances and willingness to buck the GOP establishment.
Moore defeated Strange in the primary in September, despite Trumps appearances at Stranges side, showing there was a limit to Trumps ability to influence the votes of even his most ardent supporters.
brian.bennett@latimes.com
noah.bierman@latimes.com
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UPDATES:
3:35 p.m.: This article was updated with a comment from Mitt Romney and additional details.
This article was originally published at 10:35 a.m.
Dr. Mike Huntington will speak in support of Ballot Measure 101 at the monthly general meeting of the Linn County Democrats on Thursday, Dec. 7, in the Albany Public Library Meeting Room, 2450 14th Ave. S.E.
The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. A social time with light refreshments begins at 6.
Huntington is a graduate of Oregon State University and the University of Oregon Medical School, now Oregon Health Sciences University. He was an Army flight surgeon in Vietnam in 1969.
He was a radiation oncologist for 35 years, and was medical director of the Radiation Oncology Department at Samaritan Regional Cancer Center in Corvallis from 1984-2006.
Since his retirement in 2006, he has joined with physicians and other activists in Corvallis and Oregon to engage colleagues and the public in discussions about the need for healthcare reform.
For more information, contact Linn County Democrats Co-chair Graham Kislingbury, 541-974-2075.
Residents of Echo Park, Silver Lake, Chinatown, Lincoln Heights and City Terrace will have a new Assemblymember after Tuesdays special election: Wendy Carrillo or Luis Lopez.
The two Democrats emerged from 13 candidates who sought to replace Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez in the October special election. Carrillo claimed 22.16% of the vote, and Lopez came in with 18.59% in an low-turnout affair in which just 10% of the roughly 223,000 registered voters cast ballots.
Tuesdays decision will close out the chain of special elections that was triggered when U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer announced her retirement from politics more than two years ago.
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Last fall, Kamala Harris won Boxers seat in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles Rep. Xavier Becerra was appointed fill out Harris term as state attorney general. Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez in turn won the special election for Becerras seat in Congress. Theyre all Democrats.
Carrillo and Lopez are now in the final stages of getting out the vote in Assembly District 51, hoping to boost what is expected to be another election with meager voter turnout.
Wendy Carrillo waves a flag at a 2013 May Day march in downtown Los Angeles. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times )
Since the special election, Carrillos campaign has gathered a string of new endorsements and benefited from over $500,000 in outside spending from independent expenditure committees largely funded by labor unions. She also has gotten support to the tune of $38,000 from a committee funded by charter school proponents.
Carrillo, a former local radio host and communications manager for a Service Employees International Union affiliate, also is now armed with endorsements from the state Democratic Party, Emilys List, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the Democratic Legislative Womens Caucus. Gomez endorsed Carrillo when she took the top spot in the special election.
Carrillo has been in campaign mode for about a year: She was one of a dozen women who ran to succeed Becerra but finished in fifth place. The two districts overlap.
Carrillo is counting on her personal history she was brought to the U.S. from El Salvador when she was a child, became a citizen in her early 20s then went on to graduate from Cal State L.A. and earn a masters degree at USC to resonate in the heavily Latino district.
In-the-moment updates on this race and California politics
I think my story speaks to the story of this district, she said in an interview. It is a time in which women and immigrants and the undocumented community are being attacked on a federal level. It is a perfect opportunity for this district to be a voice of progress.
Lopez, the director of government affairs for City of Hope Medical Center who has a masters degree in public policy from Harvard, is stressing his resume working in government and in neighborhood groups around the district.
He is a board member at Planned Parenthood which has endorsed his candidacy and previously served as president of the East Los Angeles Area Planning Commission. He also co-founded the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council.
L.A. City Councilman Mitch OFarrell and former Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg have endorsed Lopez, along with the Sierra Club, the California Legislative Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Caucus and various local Democratic clubs.
I have served meaningfully in my district, he said in an interview. My opponent has not.
Lopez previously ran for this Assembly seat in 2012 but lost to Gomez by about 19 percentage points. The dynamics of the two races have been somewhat similar: Gomez ran with the support of the Democratic party and labor unions.
Lopez and Carrillo are not worlds apart on most issues: Both say they want to protect Planned Parenthood, work toward providing universal healthcare and protect undocumented Angelenos.
One rift appeared late in the campaign: Members of the Los Angeles Tenants Union are putting pressure on the two candidates to sign a pledge to repeal a pair of laws that impact housing. They oppose the Ellis Act and the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.
Under the Ellis Act, landlords can eject tenants from rent-controlled apartments if they are tearing down a building or if they intend to take the housing off the rental market. The Costa-Hawkins Act bars rent caps on single-family homes and apartments built after 1995.
Carrillo told The Times she favors repealing the laws but said she had not signed the pledge because she had not seen it. Lopez said he would not legislate by signing petitions and wanted to work with stakeholders and other lawmakers before making a decision.
Over the weekend, Lopez won a late endorsement from United Teachers Los Angeles, the union that represents teachers, counselors and nurses in L.A. Unified.
In a low-turnout election between two Democrats, the largest factor can be which candidate has the official blessing of the state party.
It is one of the pieces of information that actually affects voter decisions, said Darry Sragow, a veteran campaign consultant who helped Democrats regain control of the state Assembly in 1996.
javier.panzar@latimes.com
Twitter: jpanzar
ALSO:
Rep. Jimmy Gomez endorses Wendy Carrillo as his successor in Assembly
Wendy Carrillo and Luis Lopez appear to advance in Assembly special election in Los Angeles
This is what the first month of Congress was like for Rep. Jimmy Gomez
Coverage of California politics
Wait did the president really say, Mission Accomplished? By Marc Olson Some are recalling the last time a president declared Mission accomplished, in May 2003 when George W. Bush was talking about Iraq. (Stephen Jaffe / AFP/Getty Images) President Trump on Saturday morning thanked his allies in a tweet that declared the airstrikes on Syria perfectly executed, but he might have wished hed stopped there. Instead, he ended his message with the phrase, Mission Accomplished! Thats a line that might have a previous president shaking his head. On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq under a Mission Accomplished banner aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. That war, which began in March 2003, grew into a prolonged conflict that didnt end until 2011. In 2008, the White House said it had paid a price for the backdrop. A perfectly executed strike last night. Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine Military. Could not have had a better result. Mission Accomplished! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2018 Facebook
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Auditor says Pentagon is censoring key data on the war in Afghanistan By Shashank Bengali The Pentagon is blocking the release of data showing how much of Afghanistans territory lies outside government control, censoring a key metric used to gauge progress in the 16-year war, a watchdog agency said Tuesday. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, an auditing agency established by Congress, said in its latest report that the Pentagon instructed it not to release unclassified data on how many districts and people are controlled or influenced by insurgent groups. This is the first time SIGAR has been specifically instructed not to release information marked unclassified to the American taxpayer, the head of the agency, John F. Sopko, wrote in a letter. Sopko also said the U.S.-led military coalition, for the first time since 2009, classified information about the size and attrition rates of the Afghan security forces, important indicators of progress in building up army and police forces on which the U.S. already has spent $70 billion since 2002. The decision to withhold more information from congressional oversight and the public comes amid growing violence in Afghanistan and an intensifying combat mission involving a greater number of American troops. Following a series of bombings in Kabul that left at least 136 people dead in 10 days, President Trump signaled on Monday that he was focused on trying to win the conflict militarily, saying, We dont want to talk with the Taliban. But data released by SIGAR since 2015 have shown how the insurgents have gained ground against Afghan security forces. In its previous quarterly report, the watchdog said that only 57% of Afghanistans 407 districts were under Afghan government control or influence as of August 2017, the lowest level of control since it began tracking the statistic in December 2015. The steady decline in government control should cause even more concern about its disappearance from public disclosure and discussion, Sopko wrote. The watchdog also accused the Pentagon of overstating the impact of its efforts to combat drug cultivation and trafficking, among the Talibans main sources of revenue. The Pentagon touted airstrikes that destroyed 25 drug labs in November and December, saying it eliminated nearly $100 million of Taliban revenue. The labs being destroyed are cheap and easy to replace, SIGAR said. According to some estimates, they only take three or four days to replace. Facebook
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Women journalists shunted to rear for Pences visit to Western Wall By Noga Tarnopolsky The view from the womens section. (Noga Tarnopolsky / Los Angeles Times) Vice-President Mike Pences 48-hour visit to Israel stumbled into a public storm Tuesday when female reporters covering his final stop at Jerusalems Western Wall were penned behind four rows of their male colleagues. White House officials told stunned journalists that the arrangement emanated from a request made by the Western Wall rabbi, Shmuel Rabinowitz, and followed Western Wall rules. Some women journalists said they could not recall such treatment in the past. In a statement to Israels Channel 10 news, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation said it was exactly as it was during the visit of the U.S. president to the Western Wall last May. Later in the day, in a statement to the newspaper Haaretz, the foundation blamed the United States embassy in Tel Aviv and Israeli security officials for the segregation, and announced they would reexamine the way they handle such events. Women who covered previous VIP visits said the Pence arrangements were significantly more onerous than previous visits, when male and female journalists were separated but not offered substantially different work conditions. LIVE coverage of our male colleagues granted access to cover VP at Western Wall as we are penned into #PenceFence pic.twitter.com/k3svkxfQsa Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) January 23, 2018 The arrangement reflected procedures at the Western Wall, Judaisms holiest site, where on regular days, men have access to two thirds of the area available for prayer. Tal Schneider, the diplomatic analyst for Globes, a financial newspaper, protested that the separation of men and women may be valid for the requirements of Orthodox prayer, but no one is praying here. We are here to work. I dont appreciate being restricted in my ability to work because I am a woman, she said. The discriminatory attitude towards women is infuriating and is unbefitting of a modern country. Yael Freidson, the Jerusalem affairs correspondent for Yediot Ahronot, Israels widest circulation newspaper, said she worried that her editors could choose male colleagues for the next assignment, knowing they would have better access. Before Pence arrived, journalists were herded onto a specially constructed platform in the middle of the Western Walls esplanade, with women guided to the right behind a white fence, and men, many carrying cameras, directed to the left, where they had more than double the space. Towards the end of the vice presidents 10-minute visit, male journalists were permitted into the VIP tent where he received a gift from Rabinowitz, while the women remained in their enclosure. None of the men publicly protested the treatment of their female colleagues. Israels Association of Women Journalists filed a formal complaint with Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, herself a woman. Facebook
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Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, after his pardon from Trump, says hell run for Senate in Arizona By Kurtis Lee (Mary Altaffer / Associated Press) (Mary Altaffer / Associated Press) Former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who last year was pardoned by President Trump in a case stemming from his enforcement tactics aimed at immigrants, announced Tuesday he will run for the open Senate seat in his home state. I am running for the U.S. Senate from the Great State of Arizona, for one unwavering reason: to support the agenda and policies of President Donald Trump in his mission to Make America Great Again, Arpaio, 85, said on Twitter. Hell enter a Republican primary for the seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Jeff Flake. Last summer, Trump pardoned Arpaio, who was convicted in July of criminal contempt for violating a federal court order to stop racially profiling Latinos. It was Arpaios roughly quarter-century as sheriff that gave him a national reputation for his tough treatment of people suspected of being in the country illegally. Repeated court rulings against his office for civil rights violations cost local taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. In the early 1990s, Arpaio directed construction of a tent city for immigration detainees, a measure he said was intended both to alleviate overcrowding and to underscore his aggressive enforcement measures. But it was open to the burning Arizona sun, and drew widespread criticism. After Trump entered the presidential race in July 2015, Arpaio invited him to Phoenix to talk about a crackdown on illegal immigration. He endorsed Trump just before the first votes in the Iowa caucuses in 2016 and frequently spoke out on behalf of Trumps campaign. Facebook
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President Trump ends controversial voter fraud commission By Kurtis Lee President Trump signed an executive order late Wednesday ending the voter fraud commission he launched last year as the panel faces a flurry of lawsuits and criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike. Trump signed the order disbanding the commission rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, created by executive order in May with the stated goal of restoring confidence and integrity in the electoral process, has faced a barrage of lawsuits in recent months over privacy concerns, as the commission sought personal data on voters across the country. Read More Facebook
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Congress returns to work with slimmer GOP majority to accomplish Trumps agenda By Lisa Mascaro Congress returns to work this week with unfinished business on spending, immigration and other crucial issues, but with an even narrower GOP majority that will make it tougher to move on President Trumps agenda. The House and Senate will convene Wednesday, swearing in the newly elected Democratic senator from Alabama, Doug Jones, and Minnesotas Tina Smith to replace a fellow Democrat, Sen. Al Franken, who is resigning as the latest high-profile public figure sidelined by allegations of sexual misconduct. The change gives Republicans only a one-seat margin in the Senate. Trump, fresh off passage of the GOP tax cuts bill, is pushing lawmakers to pivot quickly on his new year priorities of infrastructure investment and immigration, as well as his foreign policy agenda. But another legislative victory seems far off. Republicans have struggled to hold their majority together and Congress first must tackle critical stalled agenda items that leaders punted to 2018. Read More Facebook
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Trump threatens to cut off U.S. aid to Palestinians By Tracy Wilkinson President Trump on Tuesday angrily threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Palestinians as punishment for what he called their failure to show appreciation or respect to the United States. Writing on Twitter, the president compared the Palestinians to Pakistan, a nuclear-armed ally that abruptly drew his ire this week and a similar threat to drastically curtail aid. He accused the Palestinians of recalcitrance in what he described as their refusal to negotiate a peace deal with Israel. Palestinian officials have said they can no longer use Washington as a broker to restart peace talks with Israel following Trumps Dec. 6 decision to overturn decades of U.S. policy and recognize the disputed city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and ultimately to move the U.S. Embassy there. The Palestinians also claim part of Jerusalem as the capital of an eventual independent state. Until now, the United States and most of the world agreed the citys political status was a matter to settle in final peace talks. The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned any effort to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital, and the Palestinian leadership said it would not meet with Vice President Mike Pence, who had planned a trip to the region. That trip is on hold. [W]e pay the Palestinians HUNDRED [sic] OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect, Trump wrote on Twitter. [W]ith the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them? In response to Trumps tweet, Hanan Ashrawi, a senior Palestinian official, issued a statement saying: Palestinian rights are not for sale. By recognizing Occupied Jerusalem as Israels capital Donald Trump has not only violated international law, but he has also singlehandedly destroyed the very foundations of peace and condoned Israels illegal annexation of the city. We will not be blackmailed, she said. President Trump has sabotaged our search for peace, freedom and justice. Now he dares to blame the Palestinians for the consequences of his own irresponsible actions! The United States does not pay large amounts of money directly to the Palestinian Authority, the government that rules over parts of the Palestinian West Bank. Instead, most money goes to the U.N., refugee or aid agencies and even Israel to pay for roads, welfare, schools, security and other Palestinian projects. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, said Tuesday that the administration was planning to cut off one of those organizations, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, until the Palestinians return to the negotiating table. UNRWA, which receives around $300 million annually from the U.S., for years has been the lifeline to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It was not clear if Haley was threatening to cut all U.S. support for the agency. Special correspondent Noga Tarnopolsky in Jerusalem contributed to this report. Facebook
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The White House stops short of calling for government overthrow in Iran By Brian Bennett President Trump wants Iran to give its citizens basic human rights and stop being a state sponsor of terror, his top spokeswoman said, but the White House stopped short of calling for a change of government in Tehran. If they want to do that through current leadership, if thats possible, OK, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters. Sanders praised the organic popular uprising, which she said the widespread protests in Iran represented. The protests grew out of years of years of mismanagement, corruption, and foreign adventurism have eroded the Iranian peoples trust in their leaders, she said. Earlier Tuesday, Trump called Irans government brutal and corrupt and wrote in a tweet: The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The U.S. is watching! Trump also blamed President Obama for foolishly giving Iran money that he said went to fund terrorism. The money he referred to were funds belonging to Iran that had been frozen by the U.S. and were released as part of the deal in 2015, which blocked Irans development of nuclear weapons. The people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime. All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their pockets. The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The U.S. is watching! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018 Facebook
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Retirement of Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch clears the way for a Mitt Romney revival By David Lauter The retirement of Utahs senior senator, Orrin G. Hatch, opens the way for a widely expected Senate bid by Mitt Romney, the Republicans 2012 presidential nominee and a frequent critic of President Trump. Although Romney previously served for two terms as governor of Massachusetts (and was raised in Michigan, where his father was governor and his mother ran for the Senate), he comes from a prominent Mormon family with strong ties to Utah. He also served as chief executive of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Hes viewed as a strong candidate for the Senate seat. Romneys criticisms of Trump, however, could prompt a challenge in a Republican primary. Trump was widely reported to have tried to convince Hatch to run for a seventh term, in part to head off a Romney candidacy. Last month, Romney and Trump were on opposite sides of one of the biggest political fights of the fall the battle over the Senate seat from Alabama. The president strongly supported Roy Moore, the Republican candidate who had been accused of sexual misconduct by several women. Romney called Moore a stain on the GOP. Roy Moore in the US Senate would be a stain on the GOP and on the nation. Leigh Corfman and other victims are courageous heroes. No vote, no majority is worth losing our honor, our integrity. Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) December 4, 2017 On Tuesday, Romney tweeted praise for Hatch, but did not immediately reveal his own plans. I join the people of Utah in thanking my friend, Senator Orrin Hatch for his more than forty years of service to our great state and nation. Read my full statement: https://t.co/YwjUpjez5y Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) January 2, 2018 Facebook
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U.S. calls on Iran to unblock social media sites amid protests By The Associated Press The Trump administration is calling on Irans government to stop blocking Instagram and other popular social media sites as Iranians are demonstrating in the streets. Undersecretary of State Steve Goldstein says the U.S. wants Iran to open these sites. He says Instagram, Telegram and other platforms are legitimate avenues for communication. The United States is encouraging Iranians to use virtual private networks, known as VPNs. Those services create encrypted links between computers and can be used to access blocked websites. Goldstein says the U.S. is still communicating with Iranians in Persian through State Department accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. He says the U.S. wants to encourage the protesters to continue to fight for whats right. Goldstein says the U.S. has an obligation not to stand by. Read More Facebook
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Trump blasts Democrats in advance of immigration meeting By Brian Bennett The day before a meeting of administration officials and congressional leaders on outstanding legislative business, President Trump accused Democrats of doing nothing to hammer out an immigration deal to protect from deportation people brought to the country illegally as children. Democrats are doing nothing for DACA just interested in politics, Trump wrote in a Tweet on Tuesday morning, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program by its acronym. Democrats are doing nothing for DACA - just interested in politics. DACA activists and Hispanics will go hard against Dems, will start falling in love with Republicans and their President! We are about RESULTS. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018 House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer along with the Republican leaders, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are scheduled to meet on Wednesday at the Capitol with Trumps legislative director, Marc Short, and budget director, Mick Mulvaney. The White House on Tuesday said the meeting is to discuss separate spending caps on military and domestic programs. Yet the Democrats insist the discussion also must include a variety of legislative issues that Trump and Congress punted into the new year on immigration, the budget, healthcare and more. That stance reflects Democrats leverage: Republicans need Democratic votes to pass a government-funding bill and avert a federal shutdown when the current funding expires Jan. 19. Democrats especially want separate legislation replacing the Obama-era DACA program; Trump in September ordered a phase-out of the program, beginning March 6, and called on Congress to act before then on an alternative way to address the plight of the group. However, Trump has demanded that any alternative must be part of a package including both money for a border wall and immigration limits. Democrats are opposed. Facebook
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Pakistan hits back after Trump accuses its leaders of lies and deceit By Aoun Sahi Pakistan lashed out Monday after President Trump accused its leaders of lies and deceit and suggested the United States would withdraw financial assistance to the nuclear-armed nation it once saw as a key ally against terrorism. U.S. Ambassador David Hale was summoned to the Foreign Ministry to discuss the presidents statement, U.S. Embassy spokesman Richard Snelsire said. Pakistan lodged a strongly worded protest, according to two foreign office officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Pakistans prime minister, Shahid Abbasi, called a Cabinet meeting for Tuesday and a meeting of the National Security Committee on Wednesday to discuss Trumps New Years Day tweet. It was the presidents latest broadside against Pakistan after a speech in August in which he demanded its leaders crack down on the safe havens enjoyed by Taliban militants fighting U.S.-backed forces in neighboring Afghanistan. Read More Facebook
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Trump again cheers on Iran protests By Laura King President Trump expressed renewed support Sunday for protesters in Iran, declaring that people are finally getting wise as to how their money and wealth is being stolen and squandered on terrorism. In a tweet from his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, the president said the nationwide economic protests that began on Thursday and have taken on wider political overtones as they have grown in size --- were a signal that Iranians will not take it any longer. Big protests in Iran. The people are finally getting wise as to how their money and wealth is being stolen and squandered on terrorism. Looks like they will not take it any longer. The USA is watching very closely for human rights violations! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 31, 2017 The presidents earlier hailing of the protests drew condemnation from Irans government. A Foreign Ministry spokesman called his comments deceitful and opportunistic. Following an overnight report of the first two fatalities stemming from the protests, Trump raised some eyebrows by expressing concern over human rights violations as authorities move to crack down on the demonstrations. During his first year in office, the president has shown scant inclination to press foreign governments to respect the fundamental rights of their citizens. The USA is watching closely for human rights violations! Trump said in his tweet Sunday. Some domestic critics have pointed to the presidents inclusion of Iranian nationals in his travel ban, suggesting he was more interested in bashing the Tehran government than in supporting freedom of speech in Iran. Even some of the presidents allies said that supporting the protesters on social media did not amount to making policy. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he had urged Trump to give a national address laying out his Iran strategy. President Trump is tweeting very sympathetically to the Iranian people, Graham said on CBS Face the Nation. But you just cant tweet here. You have to lay out a plan. Facebook
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Australian diplomats tip a factor in FBIs Russia inquiry By Associated Press Australian High Commissioner Alexander Downer. (Alastair Grant / Associated Press) An Australian diplomats tip appears to have helped persuade the FBI to investigate Russian meddling in the U.S. election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign, the New York Times reported Saturday. Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos told the diplomat, Alexander Downer, during a meeting in London in May 2016 that Russia had thousands of emails that would embarrass Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, the report said. Downer, a former foreign minister, is Australias top diplomat in Britain. Australia passed the information on to the FBI after the Democratic emails were leaked, according to the Times, which cited four current and former U.S. and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians role. The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016, the newspaper said. White House lawyer Ty Cobb declined to comment, saying in a statement that the administration is continuing to cooperate with the investigation now led by special counsel Robert Mueller to help complete their inquiry expeditiously. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is a cooperating witness. Court documents unsealed two months ago show he met in April 2016 with Joseph Mifsud, a professor in London who told him about Russias cache of emails. This was before the Democratic National Committee became aware of the scope of the intrusion into its email systems by hackers later linked to the Russian government. The Times said Papadopoulos shared this information with Downer, but it was unclear whether he also shared it with anyone in the Trump campaign. Facebook
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Trump offers fresh support for protesters in Iran as demonstrations continue By Lisa Mascaro Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever, and the day will come when the Iranian people will face a choice. The world is watching! pic.twitter.com/kvv1uAqcZ9 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2017 President Trump again offered support Saturday for anti-government protesters in Iran, where a third day of demonstrations, the largest in years, spilled across the country amid fears of a crackdown. Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever, and the day will come when the Iranian people will face a choice. The world is watching! Trump wrote on Twitter. Trump took a break from playing golf near his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to tweet clips from his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September when he called for Iranian democratic reforms. Iranian authorities warned of potential violence as the street demonstrations, which began over economic conditions, swelled into frustrations with the theocratic rule of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Trump has maintained a hawkish stance toward Iran, sharply criticizing the landmark nuclear disarmament accord that Tehran reached with then-President Obama and five other nations in 2015. In October, Trump declined to certify the accord to Congress although the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency says Iran is complying with it. Several conservative GOP senators signaled their support for Trumps position and backed the protesters in Iran. Others in Congress did not immediately respond, however, amid conflicting reports over who had organized the demonstrations. Even after the billions in sanctions relief they secured through the nuclear deal, the ayatollahs still cant provide for the basic needs of their own people, said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a Trump ally and opponent of the nuclear deal. We should support the Iranian people who are willing to risk their lives to speak out against it, he added. Trump initially tweeted his support on Friday night. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement at that time as protests spread. There are many reports of peaceful protests by Iranian citizens fed up with the regimes corruption and its squandering of the nations wealth to fund terrorism abroad, Sanders said. The Iranian government should respect their peoples rights, including their right to express themselves. The world is watching. Facebook
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When it comes to U.S.-Russia relations, it takes two to tango, Kremlin says By Sabra Ayres The deteriorating relationship between the United States and Russia is one of the biggest disappointments of 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putins spokesman told reporters today. Russia would like to rebuild relations between the two adversaries, but it takes two to tango, Dmitry Peskov said today during a conference call with the press. We want and are looking for good mutually beneficial relations based on mutual respect, mutual trust with all countries, primarily with European ones, including the United States, but it is necessary to dance tango, as they say. Peskov blamed the ongoing anti-Russian Russophobia in Washington for playing a major role in blocking the two countries from moving forward in their relationship. U.S. investigations into the Trump presidential campaigns alleged collusion with the Kremlin during the 2016 U.S. election and accusations that the Kremlin tried to interfere with the electoral process continue to cast a dark shadow over the relationship, he said. Peskov told reporters that Moscow was perplexed by the investigations. The Kremlin has continued to deny having any involvement with the Trump campaign or doing anything to interfere with the American election. This is definitely a U.S. domestic affair, but in this case it naturally hurts our bilateral relations, which is regrettable, Peskov said. Relations between the U.S. and Russia have been categorized as the worst theyve been since the end of the Cold War. This year, Washington and Moscow have engaged in a diplomatic tit-for-tat in which both sides have been forced to reduce diplomatic staff, embassy properties have been repossessed by the hosting countries and visa services have been interrupted. The U.S. diplomatic mission to Russia shrank from 1,200 personnel, including some Russian local staff, to just over 450 across all its three consulates and embassy in Moscow. In the U.S., Russia was forced to vacate its San Francisco consulate. Moscow has also blamed anti-Russian sentiments on the recent decision by the International Olympic Committee to ban Russian teams from wearing their tricolor uniforms or flags during the upcoming games in South Korea. The international body accused some of the Russian national teams of doping. Facebook
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U.S. and Turkey resume reciprocal issuing of visas but frictions remain By Tracy Wilkinson The United States and Turkey began issuing reciprocal visas again on Thursday, more than two months after normal visa service was suspended in a dispute over the arrest of two U.S. diplomatic staffers in Istanbul the latest friction between the two nominal allies. The State Department said it was lifting the visa restrictions after it was assured by the Turkish government that U.S. Embassy employees would not be arrested when performing their official duties. But the Turkish Embassy in Washington denied assurances were offered concerning the ongoing judicial processes, and suggested that the arrests were legal and justified. It is inappropriate to misinform the Turkish and American public that such assurances were provided, the embassy said in a statement. The dispute has aggravated the already tense relationship between the United States and Turkey, which is a member of the NATO military alliance. The two countries have clashed over U.S. support for Kurdish rebels in Syria and over Turkeys demands that the U.S. extradite a Turkish cleric who lives in rural Pennsylvania. After a failed coup attempt killed more than 250 people in July 2016, Turkeys autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, launched a harsh crackdown on his political opponents, arresting or firing tens of thousands of teachers, police, journalists, military officers and others. Erdogan accused Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic educator and former political ally, of orchestrating the coup. Gulen, who has lived in a compound in the Pocono Mountains, has denied any involvement. The Justice Department has so far denied Turkeys repeated demands to extradite Gulen. Erdogan raised the issue again at the White House in May, but his visit ended in a public relations disaster when his security guards brutally beat peaceful protesters outside the Turkish ambassadors residence. Two Turkish employees of the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul were arrested this fall for alleged ties to the 2016 coup attempt. The U.S. responded by suspending most visa services at its missions in Turkey in October. The Turkish government reciprocated in November. State Department officials said they have repeatedly demanded more information about any formal charges against the two employees. They reiterated on Thursday that serious concerns about the allegations remained. Facebook
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Trump: China caught RED HANDED allowing oil to reach North Korea By Brian Bennett (Andrew Harnik / Associated Press) President Trump isnt taking a holiday vacation from Twitter. In one of three tweets early on Thursday from his West Palm Beach golf club, he charged that China was caught RED HANDED allowing oil shipments to reach North Korean ports. Pronouncing himself very disappointed, Trump in effect was acknowledging the failure of his months-long effort to convince China to clamp down further on energy shipments going to the isolated country, which relies heavily on Beijing, as a way to pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Caught RED HANDED - very disappointed that China is allowing oil to go into North Korea. There will never be a friendly solution to the North Korea problem if this continues to happen! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2017 Trumps tweet came after a South Korean newspaper published what it said were U.S. spy satellite images of Chinese ships selling oil to North Korean ships. The United Nations Security Council, which includes China, has voted repeatedly to restrict fuel shipments to North Korea. Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping in November to cut off North Koreas oil supply entirely, the American ambassador to the U.N., Nikki R. Haley, said at the time. It is unclear if Trumps admonishment of China was based on news reports or classified information he received from U.S. intelligence officials. There was no daily intelligence briefing on Trumps public schedule Thursday. He is expected to return to Washington next week after spending the Christmas holiday and New Years Eve at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. Facebook
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President Trump again falsely claims hes signed more bills than any president By Brian Bennett President Trump visits a firehouse in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Wednesday. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP) After another morning at his Florida golf club, President Trump visited firefighters and paramedics at a West Palm Beach firehouse and praised his own performance as president, including with a false boast. Trump touted his administrations work to roll back government regulations and cut taxes and claimed credit for the stock market hitting record highs. He also said hes signed more bills into law than any other president, which isnt true. We have signed more legislation than anybody, Trump said, standing in front of a rescue vehicle inside the fire station. We have more legislation passed, including the record was Harry Truman a long time ago, and we broke that record, so we got a lot done, Trump said. An analysis by GovTrack, a website that tracks bills in Congress, shows that Trump has signed the fewest bills into law at this point than any president in more than 60 years, back to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Facebook
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Trump administration urges Russia to reinstate monitors in Ukraine, lower violence By Tracy Wilkinson Sergei Lavrov (AFP/Getty Images) Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asked Russia on Wednesday to reinstate its military personnel at a monitoring station in eastern Ukraine intended to quell escalating bloodshed. In a telephone conversation with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, Tillerson also urged Russia to lower the level of violence and underscored the Trump administrations concern over increased fighting in Ukraine, the State Department said in a statement. Russia last week withdrew its monitors from the Joint Center on Coordination and Control, which is tasked with verifying a much-violated ceasefire between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists. Moscow cited what it called restrictions and provocations from Ukrainian authorities that made it impossible for the observers to do their jobs. Washington has accused the pro-Russia forces of being responsible for many of the truce violations. Late last week, the State Department also announced plans to provide Ukraine with lethal defensive weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, a decision that angered Moscow. The State Department statement did not say whether the weapons deal came up in Tillersons conversation with Lavrov. The two also discussed North Korea, its destabilizing nuclear program and the need for a diplomatic solution to achieve a denuclearized Korean peninsula, the statement said. Russia has offered to serve as a mediator between Washington and Pyongyang, but direct talks do not seem likely at this point. Facebook
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U.S. sanctions two more North Korean officials for ballistic missile program By Tracy Wilkinson The Trump administration announced sanctions Tuesday against two more North Korean officials for their alleged role in Pyongyangs expanding ballistic missiles program. The Treasury Department is targeting leaders of North Koreas ballistic missile programs, as part of our maximum pressure campaign to isolate [North Korea] and achieve a fully denuclearized Korean Peninsula, Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said in a statement. The nuclear-armed country tested an intercontinental ballistic missile last month that U.S. officials said appeared capable of reaching New York or Washington, a significant milestone in the countrys growing arsenal. The Treasury Department identified the two North Korean officials as Kim Jong Sik, who reportedly is a key figure in the ballistic missile program and led efforts to switch missiles from liquid to solid fuel (which makes them easier to hide before launch), and Ri Pyong Chol, who was reported to be a key official in the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The sanctions block banks, companies and individuals from doing any business with the targeted officials. It also allows the U.S. government to freeze any American assets owned by the officials. On Friday, the United Nations Security Council unanimously voted to add more sanctions on North Korea, its third round this year. The new measures order North Koreans working abroad to return home within two years, and ban nearly 90% of refined petroleum exports to the country. In a statement published Sunday by North Koreas state-run KCNA news agency, the foreign ministry denounced the new U.N. sanctions as an act of war. We define this sanctions resolution rigged up by the US and its followers as a grave infringement upon the sovereignty of our Republic, as an act of war violating peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and the region and categorically reject the resolution, it said. Facebook
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Salt Lake Tribune calls on Sen. Orrin Hatch to not seek reelection in scathing editorial Perhaps the most significant move of Hatchs career is the one that should, if there is any justice, end it. The last time the senator was up for reelection, in 2012, he promised that it would be his last campaign. That was enough for many likely successors, of both parties, to stand down, to let the elder statesman have his victory tour and to prepare to run for an open seat in 2018. Clearly, it was a lie. Read the editorial>> Facebook
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Christmas Eve, Trump on Twitter: New attacks on FBI official, decrying Fake News By Laura King President Trump launched a Christmas Eve attack on FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whom he accuses of favoritism toward his former opponent, Hillary Clinton, and also returned to a longtime favored theme, excoriating the news media for failing to sufficiently extol his accomplishments. .@FoxNews-FBIs Andrew McCabe, in addition to his wife getting all of this money from M (Clinton Puppet), he was using, allegedly, his FBI Official Email Account to promote her campaign. You obviously cannot do this. These were the people who were investigating Hillary Clinton. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2017 Thank you President TRUMP!! pic.twitter.com/LKdkT0FL99 oregon4TRUMP (@shawgerald4) December 23, 2017 The Fake News refuses to talk about how Big and how Strong our BASE is. They show Fake Polls just like they report Fake News. Despite only negative reporting, we are doing well - nobody is going to beat us. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2017 Trump, who is spending the holidays at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, also sent Christmas greetings to deployed military personnel, praising them for success in the fight against terrorism. The early-morning swipe at McCabe followed a flurry of tweets attacking the deputy FBI chief on Saturday. McCabe, who has been a lightning rod for Republican attacks on the FBI, is expected to retire early in the new year. How can FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge, along with leakin James Comey, of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails) be given $700,000 for wifes campaign by Clinton Puppets during investigation? Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2017 FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2017 Critics say the president and his allies are in the midst of a systematic campaign to denigrate the FBI and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is looking into potential collusion by the Trump campaign in Russias attempts to sway the 2016 presidential election. In a pair of statements on Twitter, Trump again expressed scorn regarding news coverage of his administration. For months, the president has been particularly critical of reports regarding the Russia investigation and more recently has repeatedly complained he does not receive enough credit for a booming stock market. In his video conference message to troops overseas, the president made apparent reference to the fight against the militants of Islamic State, who over the last year have lost most of the territory they previously controlled in Iraq and Syria, including former strongholds in Mosul and Raqqah. Were winning, Trump told military personnel deployed in Qatar, Kuwait, Guantanamo Bay and aboard the guided missile destroyer Sampson. Reporters traveling with the president heard his address, but were ushered from the room before he took questions from the troops. The president often breaks with longtime custom and makes politically charged statements at events in which he addresses military personnel. Facebook
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Trumps Wells Fargo tweet cited in court hearing as reason to remove Mulvaney as CFPB acting chief By Jim Puzzanghera A recent tweet by President Trump about possible penalties against Wells Fargo & Co. was cited during a court hearing Friday as a reason for removing White House official Mick Mulvaney as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The attorney for Leandra English the bureaus deputy director who has said she is the rightful acting head said Trumps tweet showed he was trying to exercise improper influence over the independent consumer watchdog. I think that [tweet] shows you this isnt just some hypothetical concern, the attorney, Deepak Gupta, told Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia during a nearly two-hour hearing. Read More Facebook
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Trump administration recognizes Honduran presidents reelection By Tracy Wilkinson The Trump administration on Friday formally recognized the incumbent president of Honduras, conservative Juan Orlando Hernandez, as the winner of a bitterly contested presidential election held last month. In a statement, the State Department congratulated Hernandez while also acknowledging widespread irregularities in the Nov. 26 vote and calling for a robust national dialogue to overcome political discord in the Central American country, a close ally of the administration. The Organization of American States, which monitored the election, said it was so flawed that only a new round of voting could establish a fair and transparent outcome. But the U.S. rejected that determination. Uproar over the contest led to demonstrations in Honduras that left numerous civilians dead after state security forces opened fire on the protests. Activists and others voiced criticism Friday of the administrations decision. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), a leading Democratic voice on Central American issues, said he was angry and deeply disturbed by the State Department decision. The recent elections in Honduras were deeply flawed, chaotic and marred by numerous irregularities, McGovern said. U.S.-Honduran cooperation on matters such as drug-trafficking, violence and immigration requires a credible, legitimate government that has the support of its people, in Honduras, McGovern said. Hernandezs victory also was controversial because it was the first time a sitting president was allowed to run for re-election, barred until now by the Honduran Constitution. Facebook
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Senate Leader Mitch McConnell says fixing DACA is no emergency until March By Lisa Mascaro Amanda Bayer, left with banner, and Marisol Maqueda, right, join a rally in support of so-called Dreamers outside the White House. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday hes committed to allowing a vote on a bill for so-called Dreamers in January, but sees no rush to resolve the deportation threat posed by President Trumps decision to end a program protecting immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. There isnt that much of an emergency there, he said. There is no emergency until March. Well keep talking about it. Trump called for phasing out by March the Obama-era program that allows the young immigrants, many of them longtime residents, to get two-year deferrals of any deportation threat so they can legally attend school or work. Beneficiaries must be vetted for security purposes. Trump told Congress to come up with a legislative alternative for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which President Obama created by executive order, to protect those currently eligible. A bipartisan Senate group has been working with the White House, but talks stalled this week amid administration demands for curbs on legal immigration flows in exchange for protecting the DACA recipients. Meanwhile, Dreamers and immigrant advocates stormed the Capitol in recent days pressing for the help promised by Trump and Democratic congressional leaders that failed to materialize in the years final legislation. Advocacy groups say more than 120 immigrants each day are falling out of compliance without DACA renewals, putting them at risk of deportation. The number that is projected to swell to more than 1,000 a day in March. Weve been gridlocked on this issue for years, McConnell said. We want to have a signature. We dont just want to spin our wheels and have nothing to show for it. Facebook
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President Trump signs tax bill By Noah Bierman (Alex Brandon / Associated Press) President Trump on Friday morning signed a sweeping tax-cut measure his first major legislative achievement before heading off for a Christmas vacation at his Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Fla. The president also privately signed a short-term spending bill to fund government operations through Jan. 19. Congress approved it Thursday, after Republican leaders were unable to bridge differences in their own party as well as with Democrats to get agreement on funding for the full fiscal year. The stopgap bill punts fights on immigration and other issues to January. The tax bill, approved earlier this week in Congress in largely party-line votes, slashes corporate tax rates from 35% to 21% and also includes a host of other provisions for individuals, all intended to boost the economy. Critics point to nonpartisan analyses showing that the package, including changes greatly reducing the number of estates subject to taxes, steers the bulk of tax benefits to top earners and the wealthy, including Trump, despite his repeated claims that hell take a hit. Trump signed the bill quietly Friday, but held a public ceremony with Republican lawmakers on Wednesday after the bills passage; he also tweeted about the measure extensively. He is expected to hold another public ceremony after the New Years holiday. Facebook
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Pelosi urges Ryan to prevent Republicans from curtailing Houses Russia probe By Chris Megerian House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin greets House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press) House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to Speaker Paul D. Ryan on Friday urging him to ensure the Houses investigation into Russian interference with last years presidential campaign is not cut short. The American people deserve a comprehensive and fair investigation into Russias attacks, wrote Pelosi, of San Francisco, in her letter. Political haste must not cut short valid investigatory threads. The House Intelligence Committee has been probing the issue since March 1, and Democrats have repeatedly warned that Republicans are trying to wrap up its work prematurely. Pelosi said Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, should take urgent action to ensure this investigation can continue. AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Ryan, said Pelosi simply wants to see this investigation go on forever in order to suit her political agenda. Whether it concludes next month, next year, or in three years, she will say it is too soon, Strong said in a statement. She added, The investigation will conclude when the committee has reached a conclusion. The committees work is led by Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Texas). His spokeswoman, Emily Hytha, said he remains committed to conducting this investigation as thoroughly and expeditiously as possible. With more interviews scheduled, the investigation shows signs of extending into next year, Bloomberg reported Friday. BREAKING: Steve Bannon and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski have been sent letters requesting they testify to House Intel panel in early January, per @HouseInSession Laura Litvan (@LauraLitvan) December 22, 2017 Facebook
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Congress votes to avert government shutdown, but Senate fails to pass disaster aid package By Lisa Mascaro ( (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)) Congress approved a temporary spending bill to prevent a government shutdown, but failed to complete work on an $81-billion disaster aid package to help California, Gulf Coast states and Puerto Rico recover from wildfires and hurricanes, as lawmakers scrambled Thursday to wrap up business before a Christmas break. The stopgap measure continues federal operations for a few more weeks, setting up another deadline for Jan. 19. But it left undone a long list of priorities that members of both parties had hoped to finish this year. Read More Facebook
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Wells Fargo says raises were not linked to tax bill passage then backtracks By James Rufus Koren Wells Fargo & Co.s move to raise its minimum pay to $15 an hour was part of a long-term plan and not related to the passage of the Republican tax overhaul as the company implied, said a bank spokesman, who later backtracked and stated the hikes were a result of the bills approval. The bank was among several large corporations to publicly announce pay raises or new investments immediately following the final House vote in an apparent public relations offensive to boost the popularity of the tax bill The San Francisco bank had implied the direct linkage to the tax legislation in a news release Wednesday, shortly after Congress passed the tax overhaul, which slashes the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35% starting Jan. 1. Read More Facebook
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Obamacare signups beat expectations, despite Trump administrations opposition By Noam N. Levey President Trump with Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (Evan Vucci / Associated Press) Despite Trump administration efforts to discourage people from signing up, the number of people enrolling for Affordable Care Act coverage nearly hit last years level, the government revealed Thursday. Exchange open enrollment for 2018 coverage ended w/ approx 8.8M people enrolling in coverage. Great job to the @CMSGov team for the work you did to make this the smoothest experience for consumers to date. We take pride in providing great customer service. Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) December 21, 2017 The 8.8 million people who enrolled in the 36 states that use the federal governments healthcare.gov system significantly exceeded most forecasts. The Trump administration stopped most outreach and other efforts this year aimed at getting people to sign up. The president also repeatedly said publicly that Obamacare was dead. Open enrollment continues in California and several other states that run their own healthcare marketplaces. The figures from the federal government indicate that when those states wrap up for the year, the number of people covered by Obamacare will be nearly the same as in 2017. Read More Facebook
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U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly condemns U.S. policy change on Jerusalem despite Trumps threats By Tracy Wilkinson The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly voted Thursday to condemn President Trumps decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, despite Trumps threats to punish countries that voted against the U.S. position. The resolution passed in an emergency session at U.N. headquarters in New York with 128 in favor, nine opposed and 35 abstentions. The nonbinding resolution demands that Washington rescind its declaration, which included a plan to transfer the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in coming years. The resolution value is mostly symbolic, showing how isolated the U.S. is in the move. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., warned this week that she would be taking names of countries that opposed the U.S., and Trump on Wednesday suggested he might cut U.S. aid to governments that voted in favor of the resolution. Let them vote against us, Trump said. Well save a lot. We dont care. The U.S. recognition of Jerusalem reversed decades of international consensus on the political status of the divided city. Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as their capital in a future independent state. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said the U.N. was facing an unprecedented test and that history would remember those who stand by what is right. Facebook
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Democrats defend Robert Mueller, saying Russia investigation must be allowed to continue By Chris Megerian Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) speaking during a committee hearing earlier this year. (Molly Riley / Associated Press) House Democrats said they will fight Republican attempts to discredit and undermine the work of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating whether President Trumps associates helped Russian meddling in last years election. There is an organized effort by Republicans, in concert with Fox News, to spin a false narrative and conjure up outrageous scenarios to accuse special counsel Mueller of being biased, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) said. Trump has said he has no plan to fire Mueller, but Democrats are alarmed by escalating criticism of the special counsels work. Why is the president afraid of the facts and the truth? Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) said. He added, No matter what the facts are, were satisfied if the investigation is complete. A letter of support signed by 171 Democratic members of Congress will be sent to Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller, a former FBI director, and oversees his investigation. Rosenstein has defended Mueller in the face of Republican criticisms. Facebook
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U.S. blacklists Myanmar army general who it says oversaw atrocities against Rohingya Muslims By Shashank Bengali The Trump administration on Thursday blacklisted a Myanmar army general who it said oversaw human rights abuses committed by security forces against Rohingya Muslims. Imposing economic sanctions against the general, Maung Maung Soe, was the toughest action the United States has taken in response to a brutal army offensive that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has described as ethnic cleansing. In a statement, the Treasury Department said it had examined credible evidence of Maung Maung Soes activities, including allegations against Burmese security forces of extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and arbitrary arrest as well as the widespread burning of villages. The Rohingya are an ethnic and religious minority of about 1 million people in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, also known as Burma. The United Nations says that more than 640,000 Rohingya have fled the country since August, after the army launched clearance operations in response to attacks carried out by a Rohingya insurgent group against security forces. Rohingya refugees in crowded camps in neighboring Bangladesh have described horrific violence by Myanmar forces, including mass rapes, summary executions and children being burned alive. The aid group Doctors Without Borders estimates that 6,700 people were killed in the first month of the operation. Myanmar authorities deny committing atrocities and say that only a few hundred fighters were killed. Maung Maung Soe was chief of the armys Western Command, which carried out the offensive. He was transferred from his position last month, according to news reports. He was one of 13 individuals worldwide who were blacklisted Thursday under a new U.S. law that gives the Treasury Department authority to target officials for human rights abuses and corruption. Others included former Gambian President Yahya Jammeh; Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the late Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov; and Artem Chaika, son of Russias prosecutor-general. Today, the United States is taking a strong stand against human rights abuse and corruption globally by shutting these bad actors out of the U.S. financial system, said Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin. The sanctions freeze any assets Maung Maung Soe holds in the United States and bars Americans from doing business with him. It is also a sign of how quickly U.S. relations with Myanmar have soured. Under the Obama administration, the United States forged closer ties with the former military dictatorship and eased economic and political sanctions as the country began implementing democratic reforms. But Myanmar, which does not regard the Rohingya as citizens, has lashed out at the international community over the current crisis. It has jailed journalists, blocked access to affected areas in the western state of Rakhine and this week barred a U.N. human rights investigator from entering the country. Rohingya activists said the U.S. action would not have much effect on a country that survived under economic sanctions for years. It is the whole military institution that has a policy to persecute these people, said Nay San Lwin, a Rohingya activist and blogger in Germany. According to the U.S.s own definition, the army is carrying out ethnic cleansing. They have a responsibility to protect these people. Sanctions on one person are really not enough. Facebook
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Dreamers will have to wait until next year for Congress long-promised protections By Lisa Mascaro Amanda Bayer, left with banner, and Marisol Maqueda, right, join a rally in support of so-called Dreamers outside the White House. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)) A promised year-end deal to protect the young immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation collapsed Wednesday as Republicans in Congress fresh off passage of their tax plan prepared to punt nearly all remaining must-do agenda items into the new year. Congressional leaders still hope that before leaving town this week they can pass an $81-billion disaster relief package with recovery funds for California wildfires and Gulf Coast states hit during the devastating hurricane season. But passage even of that relatively popular measure remained in doubt as conservatives balked at the price tag. Rather than finish the year wrapping up the legislative agenda, the GOP majorities in the House and Senate struggled over their next steps. Read More Facebook
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Chants of protest drown out any caroling this holiday season at the Capitol By Lisa Mascaro U.S. Capitol Police arrest a man wearing a Santa Claus hat during a protest against the Republican tax bill. (Alex Edelman / AFP/Getty Image) Outside the U.S. Capitol, the lights on a towering Christmas tree are flipped on each evening, giving the Engelmann spruce a festive twinkle; inside the marble halls, wreaths and garlands decorate doorways and alcoves ahead of the holidays. But the spirit of the season has been punctuated by other sights: a Jumbotron parked across from the Capitol reflecting pool broadcasts images of young immigrants who face deportation; Little Lobbyists, children with complex medical needs, were featured in a recent news conference; protesters filed into the visitor galleries to shout against the Republican tax plan. While its beginning to look a lot like Christmas at the Capitol, its also shaping up to be a holiday season of protest. Read More Facebook
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Tax bill simplifies filing for some but complicates it for others and dont count on that postcard By Jim Puzzanghera A priority of the Republicans tax overhaul was simplification, and they drove home the point this fall with an omnipresent prop: a red-white-and-blue postcard. Were making things so simple that you can do your taxes on a form the size of a postcard, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) said last month, pulling one from his jacket pocket as he and Republican leaders unveiled their bill. They gave a couple of the cards to President Trump at a White House meeting a few hours later and flashed them often during news conferences and TV interviews in the coming days. Read More Facebook
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Top U.N. human rights official reportedly wont seek reelection The top United Nations official for human rights, who has frequently criticized the Trump administration, has reportedly decided not to seek a second term, saying his work had become untenable. Zeid Raad Hussein, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, notified his staff in an email that was obtained by several news outlets, including Agence France-Presse. Staying when his four-year term is up for renewal at the end of August might involve bending a knee in supplication, AFP quoted Husseins email as saying. Hussein is a Jordanian prince who has criticized, among other things, President Trumps attempts to ban visitors or refugees from six predominantly Muslim countries. The news comes a day before the U.N. General Assembly is expected to vote on a nonbinding resolution condemning the Trump administrations formal declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a decision that went against international consensus. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has warned she will be taking names of those who vote against the United States on Thursday. Trump echoed that sentiment Wednesday, voiced support for Haley and implying to reporters that he would consider cutting off U.S. aid to countries that vote against the U.S. Well, were watching those votes, Trump said. Let them vote against us. Well save a lot. We dont care. On Monday, the United States lost a Security Council vote 14-1 on a binding resolution that would have required Washington to rescind its declaration. Haley then vetoed the resolution. Facebook
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Top Democrat warns Trump not to fire Mueller or interfere with his investigation By Chris Megerian Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, one of the top Democrats involved in the congressional inquiries into Russian interference in last years election, said Wednesday that any attempt by President Trump to interfere with the separate criminal investigation would be a gross abuse of power. Warner, who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, delivered his warning from the Senate floor as Republicans escalate their criticism of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents. Some Democrats believe Trump is laying the groundwork to fire Mueller even though the president has publicly denied it. Mueller was appointed in May after Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey. In the United States of America, no one, no one is above the law, not even the president, Warner said. Congress must make clear to the president that firing the special counsel or interfering with his investigation by issuing pardons of essential witnesses is unacceptable and would have immediate and significant consequences. Some Democrats say the White House may try to in effect short-circuit the Mueller investigation by replacing Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein, who is the only official empowered to fire Mueller. Rosenstein recently told Congress that the special counsel is acting appropriately and that he would not dismiss Mueller without just cause. Facebook
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We have essentially repealed Obamacare, Trump says after tax bill passes By Brian Bennett President Trump at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday at the White House. (Chris Kleponis / Getty Images) President Trump is celebrating Republicans passage of the tax overhaul bill as a two-fer: On Wednesday, in addition to tax cuts, he checked off his promise to repeal Obamacare, pointing to a provision in the bill to end the penalty on Americans who dont get health insurance. We have essentially repealed Obamacare, Trump told reporters during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Other provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act are still in place, and Trump and congressional Republicans failed completely on the replace half of their vow to repeal and replace the program. In Trumps view, however, stripping away the laws individual mandate to get insurance or else pay a tax penalty amounts to repeal of the whole law. Congressional analysts have said that millions of people would lose insurance as a result, either by choice or because they cannot afford it without subsidies, and that premiums would increase for others as younger, healthy people drop coverage. We will come up with something much better, Trump said, adding that block grants to states could be one approach. By his comments, Trump tacitly acknowledged that repeal of the mandate is likely the best he can do following Republicans failure this year to agree on a repeal-and-replace bill. Looking back on his first year, Trump also boasted of his administrations efforts against the Islamic State and increased immigration enforcement. He said he had not given up on funding a border wall or tightening immigration law to limit citizens ability to resettle foreign relatives in the country. He said he would very shortly visit the border with Mexico near San Diego to see wall prototypes that have been built. He didnt answer a reporters shouted question about how he would personally benefit from the tax bill. Facebook
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House gives final OK to GOP tax plan, sending it to Trump By Lisa Mascaro Congress gave final approval to the GOP tax plan Wednesday, 224-201, after the House took an unusual do-over vote to clear up differences with the Senate-passed bill. The $1.5-trillion package now heads to President Trump, who plans to sign it into law. The House had approved the tax bill on Tuesday but was forced to take another vote Wednesday because a couple of provisions in the version it approved were found to be in violation of Senate procedures. Those provisions were dropped before the Senate gave its approval early Wednesday. Critics complained the Republicans rushed to pass the sweeping tax plan to deliver Trump a year-end legislative victory, but supporters shrugged off the problems as minor. The tax plan dramatically cuts corporate rates and provides some individual rate reductions, overhauling the tax code for the first time in 30 years. Facebook
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Trump administration effort to block immigrant from having an abortion fails By David Savage Scott Lloyd is director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images) President Trumps lawyers rushed to the Supreme Court and U.S. appeals court in Washington on Monday evening to file emergency appeals seeking to prevent an immigrant in detention, dubbed Jane Roe in court, from having an abortion. That set the stage for a legal showdown on whether the administration can block pregnant minors in custody from choosing to have an abortion. But the legal clash, which the administration has seemed eager to have, fizzled out Tuesday when the governments lawyers admitted the 17-year-old unaccompanied minor in their custody was actually 19. They said they had obtained her birth certificate and realized she was not a minor after all. As a result, Roe, who is 10 weeks pregnant, will no longer be held in a detention center for immigrant minors, and will not be subject to an administration policy that tries to prevent minors in immigration detention from having abortions. Administration lawyers told appeals court judges Tuesday night that Roe was being sent to a facility for adults and likely would be released until her immigration status can be resolved. In a brief order, the D.C. Circuit Court agreed to put the case on hold, but told government attorneys to confirm that she will be permitted to obtain an abortion. The administration had earlier tried to delay another young woman, referred to in court as Jane Poe, from having an abortion, but officials relented on Monday because she was 22 weeks pregnant and nearing the time limit for a legal abortion. Facebook
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Senate panel rejects Trumps pick to lead Export-Import Bank, a leader in the effort to shut it down By Jim Puzzanghera A Senate committee on Tuesday rejected President Trumps nominee to lead the Export-Import Bank, extending the chaos at the embattled agency whose job is to help U.S. companies sell their goods abroad. Two Republicans joined all Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee in voting against former Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) to be the banks president. Garrett had been a vocal critic of the Ex-Im Bank and a leader of a conservative effort that shut the bank down for five months in 2015 by blocking its congressional authorization. He and other bank opponents branded the banks aid as crony capitalism. Read More Facebook
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Congress proposes $81-billion disaster aid package, including funds for California wildfires By Lisa Mascaro Congress is set to consider an $81-billion disaster aid package that includes wildfire recovery money for California and other Western states as well as hurricane relief with a price tag reflecting a year of record-setting natural calamities. The legislation, the text of which was released late Monday, would provide almost twice as much as the $44 billion the White House sought last month to cover relief efforts along the Gulf Coast and in the Caribbean. Republican congressional leaders added more money after California lawmakers objected that the administration had failed to include help for areas damaged by wildfires and Democrats protested that the overall amount President Trump asked for was insufficient. Read More Facebook
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White House blames North Korea for worldwide WannaCry cyber attack By Noah Bierman The Royal London Hospital, a victim of the unprecedented global cyberattack in May. (Niklas Hallen / AFP/Getty Images) The White House officially blamed North Korea on Tuesday for the cyberattack in May known as WannaCry that infected hundreds of thousands of computers in 150 countries, affecting healthcare, financial services and vital infrastructure. Thomas P. Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counter-terrorism, noted in a briefing with reporters that the consequences were beyond economic. He warned that North Koreas malicious behavior is growing more egregious. Bossert did not specify what evidence American officials have to blame North Korea, citing security issues, but he cited the countrys prior attacks as revealing hallmarks of how Pyongyang and its network of hackers operates. He said other allied countries had joined the United States in making the determination. The administration did not announce any penalties on the regime, which is already subject to severe sanctions over its nuclear program. They want to hold the entire world at risk, Bossert said of North Koreas rulers, referring to the nations nuclear and missile provocations as well as its alleged cyberattack. Given its isolation and international sanctions, North Korea is desperate for funds. Bossert said the country did not appear to make much money on the ransom attack, as word spread that paying a ransom did not result in getting computers unlocked. Its primary goal, he said, was spreading chaos. Bossert and Jeanette Manfra, assistant secretary of homeland security for cybersecurity and communication, said the United States, through a combination of preparation and luck, escaped the worst of the attack, as a patch to the malware was found before U.S. companies and other interests were severely crippled. However, Manfra said, We cannot be complacent. Bossert added, Next time were not going to get so lucky. Manfra praised Microsoft and Facebook for their efforts to combat WannaCry and to block more recent attempts to hack U.S. systems. She and Bossert urged more cooperation and information-sharing from American and multinational companies, arguing a united front is vital to protecting against bad actors who do not differentiate between government and business. Bossert rejected criticism that the the Trump administration has more aggressively called out North Korean cyberattacks than it has Russias meddling in the 2016 election. He said the administration has continued the national emergency initiated by President Obama. Facebook
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GOP lures some mountain bike groups in its push to roll back protections for public land By Evan Halper When their vision of creating a scenic cycling trail through a protected alpine backcountry hit a snag, San Diego area mountain bikers turned to an unlikely ally: congressional Republicans aiming to dilute conservation laws. The frustrations of the San Diego cycling group and a handful of similar organizations are providing tailwind to the GOP movement to lift restrictions on the countrys most ecologically fragile and pristine landscapes, officially designated wilderness. Resentment of these cyclists over the longstanding ban on mechanized transportation in that fraction of the nations public lands presents a political opportunity for Republicans eager to drill fissures in the broad coalition of conservation-minded groups united against the GOP environmental agenda. Read More Facebook
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Vice president postpones Israel trip a second time in case his vote is needed to pass tax cut bill By Noah Bierman (Ethan Miller / Getty Images) Vice President Mike Pence is delaying his trip to Egypt and Israel for a second time in case he is needed to break a tie in the Senate for the tax bill that is expected to pass narrowly this week. Two White House officials confirmed the changed schedule, which they say is unrelated to to protests in the region over the administrations decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital. Pence had initially been scheduled to leave last Saturday. Late last week, the White House moved the trip back a few days to Tuesday night, in case Pence was needed to break a Senate tie. But Monday, they decided to postpone the trip further, to January, given the possibility of a late Senate vote and the coming holidays. He wants to see it through the finish line, said a White House official, referring to the tax measure that is a centerpiece of the Republican legislative agenda. We dont want to leave anything to chance. The mid-January dates will allow Pence more breathing room to merge schedules with embassies and hotels, the official said. Trump still plans to address the Israeli Knesset, a high-profile venue to discuss the Jerusalem decision where it is most popular. Facebook
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Trump judicial pick who drew ridicule at hearing withdraws By Associated Press A White House official says the Trump judicial nominee whose qualifications were questioned by a Republican senator has withdrawn his nomination. Matthew Petersen, who was nominated by President Trump to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has been the subject of widespread ridicule since he was unable to define basic legal terms during his confirmation hearing Wednesday. A White House official says Petersen has withdrawn his nomination and that Trump has accepted the withdrawal. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the development publicly. Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy pressed Petersen, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, who testified he had never tried a case, on his qualifications to the bench. Facebook
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Trump says McCain will return to Washington if needed for tax vote By Laura King President Trump said Sunday that Sen. John McCain, who is battling an aggressive form of brain cancer, was returning home to Arizona for the holidays but would come back to Washington if needed to cast a vote on the Republicans tax overhaul bill. The Arizona Republicans office announced last week that McCain was receiving treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington for complications from his cancer treatment. McCains daughter Meghan tweeted earlier Sunday that her 81-year-old father would be spending Christmas in Arizona. The Senate is expected to vote early this week on the tax cut legislation, but the GOP appeared to have secured sufficient support without McCains vote. John will come back if we need his vote, Trump told reporters as he returned from a weekend at the presidential retreat at Camp David. Hes going through a very tough time. Facebook
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Putin calls Trump to thank him for U.S. help foiling terrorist strike By Laura King Vladimir Putin phoned President Trump to thank him for what the Russian president said was CIA help in foiling a terrorist attack, the Kremlin said on Sunday. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed the two leaders conversation to reporters. It was the second time that the two leaders had talked in four days; Trump called Putin on Thursday to thank the Russian leader for lauding the U.S. economy. Putin, in his annual year-end news conference, had praised Trump for a strong performance by the U.S. stock market. Perhaps ironically, given his credit to the CIAs recent help, Putin at that news event dismissed as hysteria the consensus among American intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign. In reporting Putins call to Trump on Sunday, the official Russian news agency Tass said Putin thanked his American counterpart for information shared by the US Central Intelligence Agency that had helped break up a plot to set off explosives in St. Petersburgs landmark Kazan Cathedral and elsewhere in the city, which is Russias second-largest. Russian authorities last week had credited their countrys counter-intelligence service, the FSB, for foiling the attacks. They reported that seven people affiliated with Islamic State had been detained in St. Petersburg in connection with the plot. The FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, announced Friday that the group had planned to carry out the attacks on Saturday, and that one of those in custody had confessed to the cathedral bomb plot. Facebook
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Mnuchin: Government shutdown unlikely but could happen By Laura King Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said on Sunday that a government shutdown this week was unlikely but possible. A two-week stopgap spending bill passed by Congress earlier this month provided enough funding to keep the government running through Friday. A deadlock on another temporary funding measure would open the door to a possible shutdown. I cant rule it out, but I cant imagine it occurring, Mnuchin said on Fox News Sunday, suggesting everyone had an interest in avoiding the government grinding to a halt and federal workers going unpaid, especially in the holiday season. I would expect that both the House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats, understand if they cant agree on this, they need to have another short-term extension to move this to January, the Treasury secretary said. We cant have a government shutdown in front of Christmas. In May, irate over concessions made to Democrats in hammering out a spending measure, President Trump tweeted that a good shutdown might help matters. While both parties agree that a government shutdown involves a degree of disruption that is not beneficial to either side, shutdowns in 1995-96 and in 2013 mainly caused a backlash against Republicans. The latest funding measure is to be taken up after a vote on a massive GOP tax overhaul, expected by midweek. Facebook
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Trump transition team says sensitive emails should not have been shared with Robert Mueller By Chris Megerian (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press) President Trumps transition team is crying foul over how special counsel Robert S. Mueller III obtained emails for his investigation into Russian meddling in last years campaign and possible Trump campaign complicity. Kory Langhofer, a lawyer for the transition team, sent a letter to Congress on Saturday saying there was an unauthorized disclosure of emails. While the Trump transition is long over, the transition team remains a nonprofit organization. Its emails were hosted by the General Services Administration, a federal agency. Mueller reportedly obtained the emails directly from the agency. There are attorney-client communications, Langhofer said in an interview. There are executive-privileged communications. He added, What were asking Congress to do is to take some legislative action to make sure this never happens again. Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsels office, defended the process for obtaining emails. When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owners consent or appropriate criminal process, he said. The letter was first reported by Fox News. A request for comment from the General Services Administration was not immediately answered. This story has been updated with a comment from the special counsels office. Facebook
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Virginia house arrest is ending for Paul Manafort By Chris Megerian (Mark Wilson / Getty Images) A federal judge agreed Friday to end Paul Manaforts house arrest in Virginia, allowing President Trumps former campaign manager to return to Florida while awaiting trial. The decision followed a dispute between Manaforts legal team and prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who accused Manafort of violating a court order restricting public statements about the case. Under the terms of the judges order, Manafort will be allowed to live at his home in Florida as long as he stays within Palm Beach and Broward counties and obeys a curfew from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. If he misses a court appearance, he would forfeit four properties valued at $10 million total. The deal, which includes GPS monitoring, is not as permissive as Manafort originally sought. He had asked to be able to travel freely among Florida, New York, Virginia and Washington. Manafort faces criminal charges of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. He has pleaded not guilty. Facebook
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GOP negotiators enhance child tax credit to win over Sen. Rubio By Lisa Mascaro Republican negotiators slightly increased the refundable portion of the expanded child tax credit in their tax plan, raising it to $1,400 in hopes of winning back Sen. Marco Rubios (R-Fla.) support ahead of next weeks vote. Rubio announced Thursday he was withholding support after negotiators ignored his push to make the expanded tax credit, which increases from the current $1,000 to $2,000 in the proposed bill, fully refundable for lower- and moderate-income filers. The refundable portion in the original bill was $1,100. The Florida senator argued that was not enough to help working-class Americans, many of whom already view the GOP plan as tilted toward the wealthy. Rubios office was waiting to see the final text before commenting on whether the change was enough to win him over. We have not seen the bill text, and until we see if the percentage of the refundable credit is significantly higher, then our position remains the same, Rubios spokeswoman said. Negotiators meeting Friday before unveiling the bill said they thought they had the support they needed from Rubio and other holdouts. Im confident both chambers will pass it next week, said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). Facebook
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Sen. Marco Rubio opposes GOP tax bill, depriving leaders of crucial support By Lisa Mascaro 20.94% Corp. rate to pay for tax cut for working family making $40k was anti-growth but 21% to cut tax for couples making $1million is fine? Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) December 12, 2017 Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) says he is currently opposed to the GOP tax plan because it fails to include his proposed enhancements to the child tax credit, leaving leaders without crucial support ahead of next weeks expected vote. Republicans can only lose two GOP senators from their slim 52-48 majority as they push the plan forward under special budget rules to prevent a Democratic filibuster. Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday altered his planned Israel trip so he could be on hand, if needed, to cast a tie-breaking vote. Rubio, and GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, have fought to increase the child tax credit, doubling it to $2,000 in the GOP plan, but they also want to increase its refundability. They argue it will lower taxes on middle-income families at a time when the tax plan is being criticized as tilted to the wealthy. Sen. Rubio has consistently communicated to the Senate tax negotiators that his vote on final passage would depend on whether the refundability of the Child Tax Credit was increased in a meaningful way, Rubios spokeswoman said. Lee stopped short of opposing the bill, but his spokesman said Wednesday he is undecided. GOP leaders, though, have said they believe they have the support for passage. Facebook
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White House gives Roy Moore a unsubtle shove: Time to concede By David Lauter (Alex Wong / Getty Images) The White House sent a clear signal Thursday to the defeated Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama: Its time to concede. Roy Moore refused to concede the race on Tuesday night when Doug Jones, the Democrat, was declared the winner. Election night results show Jones winning by about 1.5 percentage points, three times more than the states standard for a recount. Although a few absentee and provisional ballots remain to be counted, theres no indication they would change the result. On Wednesday, Moore notably did not call to congratulate Jones even as President Trump and other leading Republicans did. Instead, he released a video declaring the battle rages on. Asked at the daily news briefing whether the White House thinks Moore should concede today, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, It probably sounds like it maybe should have already taken place. Sanders also dismissed the idea, pushed by some Moore supporters, that Jones victory was tainted in some fashion. Asked if the Democrat had won fair and square, she said, I think the numbers reflect that. The states Republican senator, Richard Shelby, offered a similar comment in an interview with MSNBC in which he said he was willing to work with Jones. If I was 25,000 votes behind, its not going to change much, Shelby said. Facebook
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House Speaker Paul Ryan says hes not leaving anytime soon By Lisa Mascaro House Speaker Paul D. Ryan shot down suggestions Thursday that he might soon be retiring. Stories often circulate that party leaders, especially the House speaker, are stepping aside. Ryans tenure has been as rocky as that of his predecessor, Rep. John Boehner, who abruptly resigned in 2015 amid GOP infighting. Asked Thursday if he would be leaving, Ryan answered a simple no, as he left his weekly press conference in the Capitol. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who reluctantly took over the speakers gavel after Boehners departure, had just finished talking up the GOP tax plan, which leaders hope to pass next week. He also outlined his sweeping agenda for his longtime goal of entitlement reform of welfare benefits next year. Two stories published Thursday suggested Ryan may soon be out. This is pure speculation, said spokeswoman AshLee Strong. As the speaker himself said today, hes not going anywhere anytime soon. Facebook
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GOP leaders reach tax deal, cutting corporate rate to 21% and top individual rate to 37% By Lisa Mascaro Republican leaders on Wednesday agreed on a revised plan to cut taxes that would lower the corporate rate from 35% to 21% and drop the top individual rate for the richest Americans to 37%, according to GOP senators and others briefed on the deal. The tentative accord marked a significant step in the Republican push to have a tax bill on President Trumps desk by Christmas. Leaders did not release details of the compromise or the text of a final bill as negotiations continued. Its critically important for Congress to quickly pass these historic tax cuts, Trump said Wednesday, promising that Americans could begin to reap the benefits of the plan as early as February, if passed. Critics, however, said the latest changes particularly the lowering of the top individual rate from the current 39.6% only reaffirmed several independent analyses that show the bulk of the savings from the Republican plan would go to businesses and the wealthy. Read More Facebook
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Farenthold to retire from House amid harassment accusations By Associated Press Texas Republican Rep. Blake Farenthold wont seek reelection next year, two Republicans said Thursday, adding his name to the list of lawmakers leaving Congress amid sexual harassment allegations that have cost powerful men their jobs in politics, the arts and other fields. The accusations against Farenthold surfaced in 2014, when a former aide sued him alleging sexually suggestive comments and behavior and said shed been fired after she complained. The lawmaker said he engaged in no wrongdoing and the case was settled in 2015. But the House Ethics Committee said last week that it would investigate Farenthold after congressional sources said hed paid an $84,000 settlement using taxpayers money. Though Farenthold said hed reimburse the Treasury Department, such payments have drawn public criticism from people saying lawmakers should use their own money for such settlements. A House official said Farenthold spoke twice Wednesday to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), while another official said the congressman spoke once with Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio) who heads the GOPs House campaign committee. Those discussions suggested that Farenthold may have come under pressure from leaders to step aside. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Last week, three lawmakers facing accusations of sexual harassment announced their resignations. Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) have already left Congress while Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) has said he will step aside soon. Mike Bergsma, Republican county chairman in Farentholds home county of Nueces, Texas, said Fare
Question: I am returning from Mexico through Tijuana by car, and there is a choice of signed lanes, including Publico General and Ready Lanes. We have passports with us, but which lane is for us?
John Loggins
Rancho Palos Verdes
Answer: Loggins emailed his question to me as he was stuck in the traffic at the border.
For him, the answer is Publico General.
If Loggins had a U.S. passport card, not the traditional passport book or one of several other acceptable documents, the Ready Lane, which offers the promise of shorter waits, would be the answer.
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But lets back up for a minute to see how we got to this point.
What is the Ready Lane?
Returning from Mexico by car has never been a cakewalk in terms of traffic, especially on weekends or holidays.
Enter Ready Lane, which U.S. Customs and Border Protection said began as a pilot project a little more than eight years ago. The goal: Speed up the process for people who have specific kinds of Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, -enabled documents.
What documents are those?
Besides the aforementioned passport card, those documents include the new permanent resident green card; the new border crossing card; an enhanced drivers license, which California does not issue but Washington and several other Canada-proximate states do; and a Trusted Traveler card.
One such Trusted Traveler card is SENTRI, or Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection. The SENTRI lane can be used by people who often go back and forth across the border and have SENTRI documentation.
The Trusted Traveler card you are more likely to have is a Global Entry card. Thats the program that allows you to speed through customs upon return to the U.S. by air and also gives you TSA PreCheck, which includes expedited lanes for airport security. It costs $100 for five years and may be the best time- and money-saving bargain around.
Why wont a passport book work at the U.S. border?
The book and the card use different RFID technologies, the State Department said. The book is designed for borders all over the world, or, as the State Department calls it, to be globally interoperable.
The card, State said, was designed for limited use for compliance with the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, or WHTI.
What is the WHTI and why should I care?
The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative was part of the post-9/11 effort to make borders more secure.
The first wave went into effect in 2007 and mostly dealt with air travel; Part 2 went into effect in 2009 and meant that those traveling by car needed a WHTI-complaint travel document such as a valid passport, U.S. passport card and more, Customs said in its FAQ.
And, it added, Verbal claims of citizenship and identify alone are no longer sufficient to establish identify and citizenship for entry into the United States.
And why should you care about the WHTI? Because, in some cases, you need documentation you didnt need to carry before 9/11 (as in a passport or other doc to cross from Mexico into the U.S.).
And you should care because you have choices about what that documentation should be depending on how you plan to use it.
If my passport doesnt get me into the fast lanes, should I have a passport and something else?
Maybe. If youre driving back and forth across the border, consider getting a second form of compliant ID. If not, your passport is sufficient, if slower.
Do the lanes really save time?
Customs says they are about 16% faster than the general public lanes. (Thats nationwide, not just at Tijuana.)
Statistics cited by the San Diego Union-Tribune explain the clog: San Diego-Tijuana is the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere, with approximately 120,000 passenger vehicles, 63,000 pedestrians and 6,000 trucks crossing back and forth every single day.
The May opinion piece went on to say that traffic congestion and delays cost the San Diego County and Baja California economies billions of dollars, and it called for smart (or smarter) border enforcement.
Maybe I should let my passport lapse?
I wouldnt. Having a card that gets you across the border faster is nice, but its a little bit like the secondary insurance a credit card affords on a rental car: Secondary insurance cant do everything the passport book (like your auto insurance policy) can do.
One last note: If youre going to renew your passport, do so before January.
Check your passport to see whether its close to expiring, then plan accordingly. There was such a rush for passports in the months after WHTI that passport adjudication centers could not keep up.
As passports obtained during those tumultuous times near their expiration, there could be another big push for renewal.
December is one of the better months to renew maybe not from a financial standpoint but from a time standpoint. Applications drop; speed increases.
Its a good gift to give yourself.
Have a travel dilemma or question? Write to travel@latimes.com. We regret we cannot answer every inquiry.
travel@latimes.com
@latimestravel
As U.S. warplanes flew above a cluster of villages where Islamic State militants were holed up in eastern Afghanistan, 11 people piled into a truck and drove off along an empty dirt track to escape what they feared was imminent bombing.
They did not get far.
An explosion blasted the white Suzuki truck off the road, opening a large crater in the earth and flipping the vehicle on its side in a ditch. A teenage girl survived. The 10 dead included three children, one an infant in his mothers arms.
The lone survivor of the Aug. 10 blast in Nangarhar province, and Afghan officials who visited the site, said the truck was hit by an American airstrike shortly before 5 p.m. Relatives expressed horror that U.S. ground forces and surveillance aircraft could have mistaken the passengers, who included women and children riding in the open truck bed in daylight with no buildings or other vehicles around for Islamic State fighters.
How could they not see there were women and children in the truck? said Zafar Khan, 23, who lost six family members, including his mother and three siblings, in the blast.
A photo of the Aug. 10 blast site provided by a victims family, who visited the area. (Handout)
In a statement after the incident, the U.S. military acknowledged carrying out a strike but said it killed militants who were observed loading weapons into a vehicle and there was zero chance of civilian casualties.
Pockets of Nangarhar remain inaccessible to outsiders because of fighting, making it impossible to independently determine the cause of the fatal explosion. What is not in question is that in the 17th year of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, American airstrikes are escalating again, along with civilian casualties.
Operating under looser restrictions on air power that commanders hope will break a stalemate in the war, U.S. fighter planes this year dropped 3,554 explosives in Afghanistan through Oct. 31, the most since 2012.
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 Weapons released, January-October 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan Data: abcdefg hijkl mnop qrstu vwxyz 1234 56789 @latimesgraphics Source: U.S. Air Forces Central Command
American officials say the firepower has curtailed the growth of Islamic States South Asia affiliate known as ISIS-Khorasan, which they believe numbers about 900 fighters, most of them in Nangarhar and enabled struggling government forces to regain ground against Taliban insurgents in other provinces, such as Helmand, where a Marine-led task force has helped coordinate a months-long offensive.
But innocent Afghans are asking: At what cost?
The United Nations mission in Afghanistan documented 205 civilian deaths and 261 injuries from airstrikes in the first nine months this year, a 52% increase in casualties compared with the same period in 2016. Although both U.S. and Afghan forces conduct aerial attacks, preliminary data indicate that American strikes have been more lethal for civilians.
In the first six months of 2017, the U.N. said, 54 civilians died in international air operations, compared with 29 in Afghan strikes. Twelve additional deaths could not be attributed to either force, the U.N. found.
In the case of the blast in Nangarhar province in August, U.S. officials have continued to assert that the American airstrike that day struck only militants. But they have since offered an alternative explanation for the civilian deaths. Responding to questions from The Times, coalition officials said that a passenger vehicle presumably the Suzuki truck hit a roadside bomb planted by Islamic State militants slightly more than a mile from where the airstrike killed the militants. It was the roadside bomb that resulted in multiple enemy-caused civilian casualties, said Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, a spokesman for coalition forces in Kabul.
Afghans vigorously dispute that account. The district police chief, Hamidullah Sadaqat, said there was only one deadly explosion in the area that afternoon. Rozina, the 17-year-old survivor, said her memory was clear.
The plane dropped the bomb on us, said Rozina, who, like many Afghans, has only one name.
How could they not see there were women and children in the truck? Zafar Khan, who lost six family members in the Aug. 10 bombing
Zafar Khan fled Loi Papin to a rented house on the outskirts of Jalalabad. Everyone was trying to get away, Khan said. We had recently sold our sheep and half the land. It was too dangerous to be in the village. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
The bombing occurred in Haska Mina district, about three hours by road south of the provincial capital, Jalalabad. The victims were residents of Loi Papin, a village near the front line between government-controlled territory and the Islamic State-held village of Gorgoray.
Many left Loi Papin more than two years ago after militants arrived claiming allegiance to Islamic State. The extremists tortured locals and barked orders from mosque loudspeakers, demanding that families surrender adult sons to their ranks.
Khan, a slender laborer with close-set eyes, fled to a rented house on the outskirts of Jalalabad. Other family members made brief trips to Loi Papin to tend to their farm and flock of sheep, he said.
On the afternoon of Aug. 10, Khans mother, Malaika, left the village with three of her 10 children 12-year-old Bahadur Shah, 8-year-old Anisa and 1-year-old Mohammad in the Suzuki truck, driven by his cousin. His uncle was on board as well as five others, including Rozina, her father and brother, who were returning to a house they had rented in the district center, still under government control.
Everyone was trying to get away, Khan said. We had recently sold our sheep and half the land. It was too dangerous to be in the village. No one wants to be anywhere close to Daesh a colloquial term for Islamic State.
Rozina said everyone in the truck was afraid of the Americans.
Because we knew they were in the area, she said, we expected that they would bombard by the next day.
As they drove off, she recalled seeing two planes in the sky. Then the blast struck, knocking her unconscious for several minutes. When she awoke, she found that seven people were dead, including her father and brother.
Malaika and two of her children were badly wounded and yelling for help, Rozina said. But American troops in the area probably U.S. special operations forces conducting joint operations with Afghan commandos against Islamic State did not allow anyone to come to their aid for hours, she said.
They died because there was no one to help them, Rozina said. They were stuck and screaming.
From left, Lal Mohammad, 17, Roqia Khan, 10, Basina Khan, 9, Nasir Mohammad, 13, and Rishma Khan, 8, lost their father in the August bombing. U.S. officials say the deadly blast was caused by a roadside bomb, not an airstrike. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
Khan and several others set off from Jalalabad after the bombing, reaching Haska Mina in the middle of the night. They found the crumpled truck overturned in a field. Rozina was lying at a womans house with severe injuries to her face, hands and legs. Villagers had carted the bodies away in wheelbarrows and brought them to a nearby mosque.
I found a piece of a leg and a thumb next to the truck, said Mohammad Agha, 42, whose cousin, a peanut farmer also named Khan, was among the dead.
Sadaqat, the district police chief, took Agha and other family members to a former Afghan Border Police base being used by U.S. special operations troops. Speaking through an Afghan interpreter, the Americans gave the relatives until noon to bury the bodies. They worked quickly, Agha said; Islamic custom requires bodies to be interred within 24 hours, wrapped in simple shrouds.
We didnt have enough fabric to cover them all properly, he said. We had to use shawls.
An Islamic State broadcast shows Mohammad Agha, second from left, conducting a burial for the victims. (Khurasan Media)
When they were done, Agha and others went to inform the Americans, who dismissed the possibility that a U.S. plane had launched the strike.
They said maybe it was a mortar fired by Daesh, but a mortar wouldnt have created a 10-foot crater, Agha said. The Americans asked us: Which countrys plane did this? It seemed like they werent taking us seriously so we left.
When there were 100,000 American troops in the country, then-President Hamid Karzai frequently accused them of excessive force and wielded reports of dead innocents as a cudgel against the United States. Karzais bombast had an effect: Far fewer civilians died in airstrikes in 2012 and 2013, according to U.N. reports, when the U.S. averaged hundreds of airstrikes a month.
Experts said North Atlantic Treaty Organization coalition commanders took serious measures to reduce the risk of harm to civilians. They met regularly with the U.N. and nongovernmental agencies and dedicated a team of officers to investigate complaints.
As the foreign troop presence shrank and NATO shifted its focus to training Afghan forces, coalition officials released less information about operations. They also face less resistance from Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, a stronger proponent of U.S. military action.
The U.S. military is becoming less transparent, and its a pity because they had worked really hard and succeeded in reducing civilian casualties, said Kate Clark, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a Kabul-based research organization.
Dusk falls along the Kabul-Jalalabad highway in Afghanistan. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
The use of air power has surged since mid-2016, when the Obama administration approved new rules of engagement that allowed U.S. warplanes to open fire in support of Afghan operations, not just to defend coalition forces. It is expected to rise further after the Trump administration sent nearly 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan bringing the total U.S. presence to 15,000 and grants more latitude to military commanders.
U.S. planes carried out 1,570 strikes from August through October, the most in a three-month period since 2012, according to U.S. Air Force statistics.
In October, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis testified to Congress that Trump had authorized him to eliminate the requirement that U.S. forces could fire only when in proximity to hostile fighters.
In other words, wherever we find the enemy, we can put the pressure from the air support on them, Mattis said. But he added that U.S. forces would still do everything humanly possible to prevent the death or injury of innocent people.
Military officers say every report of civilian casualties is investigated. U.S. forces attempt to interview residents and local officials and use all forensic actions available, based on the security threat, said Gresback, the military spokesman.
But just as in Iraq and Syria, where the U.S.-led coalition is accused of significantly undercounting the civilian toll of its air war against Islamic State, Afghan victims believe the U.S. military isnt being thorough or transparent enough.
Mohammad Agha, left, lost his cousin, who was among the 10 people killed in the August bombing that victims families said was a U.S. airstrike. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
Rozina and relatives of other victims in Loi Papin said American officials have not contacted them. And the U.S. has often pushed back strongly against accusations that its operations are taking a greater toll on innocents.
In early November, after reports that an airstrike killed 14 civilians in the northern province of Kunduz, American officials said they found no evidence to support the claims. That prompted a rare direct challenge from the United Nations, which said in a series of tweets that interviews with multiple survivors, medics, elders & others give strong reason to believe civilians [were] among [the] victims.
U.S. forces have also suggested that Afghans in Nangarhar are lying about civilian deaths. The militarys initial statement on the Aug. 10 blast called it the second false claim of civilian casualties in the same district within the last three weeks after an incident in which Haska Mina residents told Afghan media that a U.S. strike killed mourners attending a funeral service.
Although public outrage over civilian casualties has softened, Clark said they continue to serve as a propaganda tool for extremists.
The basic parameters of the war havent changed: If youre killing civilians, its going to be problematic, Clark said. The bullish U.S. approach, taking the gloves off, thats all very well, but if there are more dead civilians youre not going to be better off politically or militarily.
Ghanis government has not drawn attention to the strike in Nangarhar, but officials visited from Kabul and gave families condolence payments of more than $1,000 each.
The money wont replace the loss of family breadwinners, or cover the mounting medical bills for Rozina. She now lives with four family members at an uncles house and walks with crutches while she awaits additional operations to her feet.
Khan said he has little sympathy for Islamic State but cannot support the way the U.S. is prosecuting the war.
The Americans say they are here to kill terrorists, but if they cant carry out a proper operation, it is better that they leave us alone, he said. At least we would not see our families destroyed.
Special correspondents Sultan Faizy and Mohammad Anwar Danishyar contributed to this report.
shashank.bengali@latimes.com
Follow @SBengali on Twitter for more news from South Asia
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The Irish border question took center stage in Britains negotiations to leave the European Union on Monday, causing a major setback for Prime Minister Theresa May, who had hoped to conclude an initial agreement but instead was forced to acknowledge talks had faltered.
Eighteen months after the country voted to leave the EU a referendum result now colloquially referred to as Brexit both May and her European counterparts had initially appeared upbeat about the prospect of concluding the first round of talks as they arrived in Brussels.
But after a day of talks in Brussels, she stood on a podium beside European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and declared that attempts at an agreement had failed, for now.
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On a couple of issues some differences do remain which require further negotiation and consultation, she acknowledged, trying to downplay the intense politicking that had unfolded throughout the day.
At stake were three key issues: How much Britain should pay the EU to sever ties, a so-called divorce bill; the status of EU citizens living in Europe as well as British citizens living in the EU; and what the border will look like between Northern Ireland, which must leave the EU along with the rest of the United Kingdom, and mainland Ireland, which is part of the European Union.
This final issue proved to be the trickiest on Monday.
Reports suggest that May and Juncker were willing to accept a deal that would in essence have seen Northern Ireland remain within the EUs single market and customs union, even though the rest of the United Kingdom is likely to lose such privileges.
Such a deal would prevent a hard border from reemerging between the two parts of Ireland and ensure that smooth trade relations could be maintained.
But statements from the Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, the group that Mays government now depends on to maintain a majority in Parliament, were quick to thwart that.
We will not accept any form of regulatory divergence which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the U.K., DUP leader Arlene Foster said in a news conference Monday afternoon.
The Republic of Ireland for their part claim to be guarantors of the Belfast Agreement, but they are clearly seeking to unilaterally change that Belfast Agreement without our input or consent, and of course we will not stand for that.
The Belfast, or Good Friday, Agreement is the deal that finally brought peace to Northern Ireland after 30 years of sectarian conflict.
A short while later, May reportedly broke off her talks with Juncker to speak by phone with Foster, and later returned to the room to say the deal was off.
Even as the DUP threw a wrench into the talks, the governments in Scotland and Wales, as well as London Mayor Sadiq Khan, were also quick to state that if Northern Ireland got preferential treatment, they expected a similar deal.
Huge ramifications for London if Theresa May has conceded that its possible for part of the UK to remain within the single market & customs union after Brexit, Khan wrote on Twitter. Londoners overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and a similar deal here could protect tens of thousands of jobs.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said he was surprised and disappointed by the days developments, which came after weeks of negotiations between the British government and the EU.
Varadkar said his government is seeking at all costs to prevent a hard border with Northern Ireland, which some analysts fear could reignite the sectarian tensions that engulfed the region for so many decades.
But the difficulties in cutting a deal on this issue are a sign of the scale of the quagmire Brexit is proving to be for May, who came to power after the referendum in which 48% of Britons voted to remain part of the EU while 52% voted to leave. Her predecessor David Cameron resigned as prime minister after staking his political career on backing the remain side, and May promised to unite the deeply divided country.
But in some ways those divisions have only intensified.
The markets responded Monday with the pound falling as soon as it became clear no deal was being reached.
Speaking alongside May at the afternoons news conference, Juncker struck a conciliatory tone and even praised Mays skills as a negotiator.
He said there had been significant progress, and a deal on the first round of negotiations was getting closer, a crucial milestone as it will enable Britain to move on to talking about trade.
This is not a failure, this is the start of the very last round, he said. Im very confident we will reach an agreement in the course of this week.
Instead of leaving Brussels with a deal under her belt on Monday, May is now expected to have to return later this week to try to seal it.
It is hoped that this will pave the way for a summit with the remaining 27 EU countries on Dec. 14, where it is hoped they will be able to give the go-ahead for future talks.
Boyle is a special correspondent.
UPDATES:
2:15 p.m.: This story was updated throughout with staff reporting.
This story was originally published at 10:40 a.m.
Nearly 200 motorcyclists gathered in the Walmart parking lot on Sunday morning, but despite the black leather and burly beards, the riders were far from menacing. After all, holiday music was playing in the background and Santa Claus was sitting in a sidecar.
We get a bad rap sometimes as troublemakers, but thats far from what weve been, at least the associations that Ive been involved with, said Larry Johnson of Albany.
Johnsons pickup was filled to the top of the canopy with hundreds of toys for the annual Rollin for the Kids Albany Toy Run. The motorcycle and classic car parade ended at the Albany Eagles Aerie, where about 150 children were each able to pick out two gifts and a stuffed animal and visit with Jolly Old Saint Nicholas.
Hallie Van Deusen, 12, and her sister Jamie Van Deusen, 10, helped load items into the back of Johnsons rig.
Theres a lot this year. Way more than I expected. We can barely shove any more in, said Hallie, a Memorial Middle School student. The sisters volunteer every year with the event, which their grandfather David Guerin helps organize.
I think its nice that kids, their families cant afford presents, they get presents so they can enjoy Christmas, said Hallie, who wants to ride an Indian motorbike when she grows up.
Here come some more toys. Get ready, toy crew, Johnson exclaimed, as riders delivered baby dolls and toy cars recently purchased from Walmart. Each motorcyclist brought at least one or two toys for the charity event.
At the Eagles Aerie, the children and their family members also were able to get a free lunch.
After the meal, Deziray Marcotte, 8, selected a toy bow and arrow and a robot cat, as well as a stuffed animal. It makes me happy, the Sunrise Elementary School third-grader said, when asked about the toy run.
This means a lot, said her mother, Cary Marcotte of Albany. We had $700 stolen from us yesterday that was our Christmas money.
Jacob Whidden of Lebanon, a member of the Christian Motorcyclists Association, said that the toy run was a great excuse to get out. I get to go for a ride, buy something that makes someone elses face smile, he said.
And motorcyclists often attend multiple toy runs during the holiday season. Lebanon has a toy run this coming weekend, Whidden added.
About 15 classic cars also showed up for the Rollin for the Kids Albany Toy Run, and owners brought hundreds of toys, as well, said Kathleen Crump-Breshears, who coordinates the event.
The Cutting Room, which Guerin owns, Above & Beyond, Pride Printing and the Christian Motorcyclists Association were sponsors for the event. Walmart pitched in by donating candy canes and other snacks for kids goodie bags handed out at the Eagles Aerie.
I love to see children happy at Christmastime. Its all about the kids and helping people, Crump-Breshears said.
And the stereotype about motorcyclists? I dont think motorcycle people are rough and tough at all. They love to give, Crump-Breshears added.
Ali Abdullah Saleh, the deposed strongman who led Yemen for more than three decades and colluded with Iran-aligned rebels to topple his successor, was killed Monday as fighting raged between his followers and their former allies, according to officials on both sides.
Salehs death removes one of the most enduring and cunning political figures in Yemen, injecting new uncertainty into a devastating civil war just days after he turned against the rebels, known as Houthis, and made overtures to the Saudi Arabia-led coalition that sided with the countrys internationally recognized government.
Even after he was swept from office five years ago in an Arab Spring uprising, Saleh remained a force in Yemen, retaining the loyalty of the Republican Guard and other elements of the security forces.
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The Houthis announced Salehs death after reports of an explosion at his familys compound, but there were conflicting accounts about the circumstances. Houthi officials said their forces ambushed Salehs convoy as he tried to flee the capital, Sana, but members of his political party, the General Peoples Congress, said a sniper shot him.
Grisly video circulating on social media purported to show gunmen loading Salehs body, wrapped in a floral blanket, onto the back of a pickup truck and shouting, God is great!
Saleh appeared to have sustained a wound to the head, and his shirt was stained with blood. The authenticity of the short clip could not be independently verified.
The Houthis leader, Abdel-Malek Houthi, hailed Salehs death as the fall of the conspiracy of cunning and betrayal, saying Saudi Arabia and its allies were dealt a resounding, historic defeat.
In a televised address from the Saudi capital, Riyadh, Yemens exiled president, Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, sought to rally Salehs forces, saying his government would support any uprising in Sana.
Houthi fighters guard a street leading to the residence of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in Sana, Yemen, on Dec. 4, 2017. (Hani Mohammed / Associated Press )
Saleh, who once compared leading Yemen to dancing on the heads of snakes, was regarded as a supreme tactician, making and breaking alliances with ruthless skill to ensure his political survival.
As president, he was an important ally to the United States in the fight against Al Qaedas affiliate in Yemen and clashed repeatedly with the Houthis. But after he was toppled, he struck a deal with the rebels.
Rogue elements of the military still loyal to Saleh provided critical support to the Houthis when they charged out of their northern strongholds and took over the capital in 2014.
The Houthis sudden advance alarmed Saudi Arabia, which views the rebels as proxies of its archrival, Iran. With backing from the United States, it formed a military alliance with the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf nations to restore Hadi to power.
When clashes erupted in the capital last week between the Houthis and Salehs forces, many here assumed the coalition had a hand in the unraveling of the rebel alliance.
In a televised address Saturday, Saleh blamed the Houthis for a crippling blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia and its allies and said he was ready for talks with the coalition.
The coalition welcomed his appeal to open a new page, raising hopes among some diplomats and analysts that it might be possible to break the deadlock that has stymied efforts to negotiate a political solution to a multi-sided war that has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced over 3 million and pushed the Arab worlds poorest nation to the brink of famine.
With Salehs death, peace in Yemen appears even further out of reach.
The road map for peace is now obsolete, said Adam Baron, a Yemen analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Its clear there will be more conflict and greater suffering for Yemenis is much more likely.
As coalition warplanes streaked over Sana late Monday, residents braced for what many feared would be a push by the coalition into the capital.
Now we dont know what will happen, said Mona Saleh (a common last name here), a 30-year-old schoolteacher who recalled a time when the former president brought a measure of stability to Yemen after previous civil wars. We have been hearing airstrikes all day, and citizens were already suffering no salaries, not enough food, and prices have increased in an unprecedented way.
The only choices left, she added, were to die by airstrikes, armed clashes or starve.
At least 125 people have been killed and more than 230 injured since the infighting began in the capital Wednesday, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Some of the fiercest clashes have occurred in the area where the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations have their compounds, impeding the delivery of desperately needed relief.
You can hear the gunshots, [rocket-propelled grenade] firing and the tanks meters away as we spend most of our day taking shelter in the basement, Johan Mooij, CARE Internationals director in Yemen, said in a statement issued with four other agencies.
Ambulances have been unable to reach the injured, and residents have been unable to buy food and other supplies, according to aid workers.
But as street fighting appeared to subside in the hours after Salehs death was announced, some saw an opportunity for countries with influence over parties to the conflict to press for a cease-fire and a return to the negotiating table.
I think the important thing now is to test the proposition that reconfiguring the players creates the possibility of finding a resolution to the conflict, said Jon Alterman, who heads the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
In his final days, Saleh appeared to offer a possible way out of the catastrophic conflict he helped foment.
The challenge now, Alterman said, is who can play that role?
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Special correspondent Ahmed reported from Sana and Times staff writer Zavis from Beirut. Special correspondents Nabih Bulos in Beirut and Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran contributed to this report.
alexandra.zavis@latimes.com
Twitter: @alexzavis
UPDATES:
6:55 p.m.: This article has been updated with details about the fighting in Sana, comment from a resident and aid workers and additional background.
12:40 p.m.: This article has been updated with reaction from the Houthi leader, analysis and additional background.
8:25 a.m.: This article has been updated throughout with staff reporting and additional background.
This article was originally posted at 6 a.m.
The first 500 arrived at sunrise. They trooped past the handful of homes on their left, up the dusty hill at the end of the street and through the single row of sparse trees to the vacant lot, plastic tarps folded under their arms and wooden posts in hand.
While some quickly mounted makeshift shacks in the calf-high grass, marking where they hoped their permanent homes would someday be built, others went in search of more families to join them more families desperate for affordable housing.
They werent hard to find. Just two months after the Homeless Workers Movement occupied the abandoned land in Sao Bernardo do Campo, an industrial town just outside the mega-city of Sao Paulo, the number of families staking a claim to a piece of it skyrocketed to 8,300.
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The group brings together urban workers struggling to find affordable housing, and the encampment was originally meant as a temporary protest.
But the startling speed with which it grew and the sense of permanence its already attained has turned it into a national symbol of the stark inequalities dividing the well-off from the poor in Brazil. Looming over the camp are rows of tall, handsome apartment buildings.
Since September, the encampment has morphed into its own self-contained city, with mandatory registration and town hall meetings. Its narrow walkways are teeming with improvised homes built just inches from one another, organized into 19 blocks, each with its own communal bathroom and kitchen. Residents show no signs of leaving.
Maria de Almeida Vieira runs the kitchen in G19, the last block to be built, the closest to the encampments entrance. It should have followed the order of the other 18 groups odd numbers on the left, even numbers on the right but the People Without Fear Occupation ran out of space and had to make do with the small piece of land still available next to G1.
Three young men sit on white plastic lawn chairs and benches made of leftover two-by-fours while on a break from repairing shelters blown over in a recent thunderstorm and delivering 20-liter water jugs to other kitchens. Its almost noon, and the shade under the overhanging tarp gives a sliver of relief from the biting sun.
Vieira calls to them from behind an open plywood door, authorized personnel only painted on it in white.
Are you boys hungry? Lunch is ready!
They all get up and stand at the wooden counter as Vieira comes through the door with three plastic plates in hand, each loaded with rice, beans, chicken and salad. Residents of the encampment contribute food when they can, but most meals come from donations from unions and other workers groups.
Thank you, Ms. Maria, says Cleiton Alves, kissing the top of her head.
Vieira leans on the counter as she watches Alves and the others eat. They laugh and tell one another stories about jobs they had before they were laid off, before they found shelter here.
I have five kids and 12 grandkids of my own, but now I have all of you too, she says, a broad smile on her face. And I love you all.
Maria de Almeida Vieira, 63, waits to serve lunch to her neighbors outside the G19 kitchen at the occupation in Sao Bernardo do Campo. (Jill Langlois / For The Times )
On the other end of the lot, G17s kitchen is quiet as Selma Pinto Alves finishes lunch. She should be at work now, but she lost her job as a factory production assistant a week earlier.
Pedro, finish your rice and beans before you go play, she says to the 6-year-old boy sitting next to her. His mom is working and his dad is trying to get some rest before his night shift, so Pinto Alves is watching Pedro until she has to pick up her 4-year-old daughter, Eloa, from day care.
Pedro scrapes his plate clean and sits on the ground with his yellow dump truck, running it over the rough surface where grass grew before the shacks were built here.
Living here is fun, he says, scooping dirt up with his hands and letting it sift through his fingers into the back of the truck. But I really want to go to Disney World. It has so many rides, and you get to meet Mickey Mouse.
Pinto Alves and the two men working in the kitchen look at one another and chuckle softly.
I remember having that dream, one of them says. But I realized a long time ago that I was never going to get there.
Across the encampment in G4, Renata Swiecik pours water into a margarine container for her puppy, Jade. Her nephew, Carlos Henrique, 13, whom she has raised since he was a baby, calls to her daughters, Gabryela, 8, and Beatryz, 6, a few shacks away.
Were going to G17, Beatryz says, referring to the block where Pedro lives. They have a hose there now to play in the water. But a swimming pool would be better.
Swiecik smiles and nods slowly, agreeing with her youngest.
Go ahead and play then, she says. But stay in G17. Dont wander off.
The kids stay with her mom during the week to be closer to school, but its a holiday, so tonight theyll sleep in the bunk beds Swiecik built. Their shack is just big enough to squeeze in another bed and love seat. Childrens books, stuffed animals and toy cars sit in a corner, and their clothes hang from the beams holding up their roof.
Swiecik watches as the girls disappear around a corner. Shes lucky to have a place here. The encampment is already at capacity, and theres a waiting list 2,000 families long.
Langlois is a special correspondent.
WASHINGTON I bumped into Bret Baier, the Fox News host, at a Washington cocktail party Wednesday night where it seemed everybody was chatting about the latest White House insanity: President Trump joking about "Pocahontas" to Native Americans, reviving the Obama "birther" allegation, suggesting the "Access Hollywood" video was fake, retweeting anti-Muslim videos made by British white supremacists.
Most assumed Trump was just being crazy, but Baier had a theory: Whenever Trump escalates such antics, he is agitated about news that is about to break. Maybe, Baier speculated, Trump knew something about the Russia probe that we didn't yet know.
Now we do. On Friday morning came former national security adviser Michael Flynn's guilty plea, the most ominous development for Trump yet in the Russia probe. Court documents show that Flynn is cooperating with special prosecutor Robert Mueller and that Flynn's Russian contacts were made under direction from higher-ups and there weren't too many higher than Flynn on the campaign other than Trump himself. The notion that Flynn has the goods on Trump would explain why Trump was reluctant to fire him, tried to get the FBI to stop probing Flynn and seemed unglued this week as the news of Flynn's cooperation was about to become public.
Though predictions are perilous in the age of Trump, this really could be the beginning of the end of the national horror his tenure has been. If Baier is correct as I believe he is that Trump gets ever more outrageous when he feels cornered, then this means the nation is entering a perilous new period. We can expect Trump to get ever more dangerous and desperate in his distractions as he hears Mueller's footsteps. Trump's erraticism is damaging in its own right, to alliances and civility, but the greatest danger is that while we chase Trump's distractions, we lose sight of real calamity.
This week was a good example. Trump raised the level of crazy. We in the media took the bait. And you, dear reader, encouraged us.
I asked my digital colleagues at The Washington Post for the top 25 pieces that appeared online in the Post this week before the Flynn news broke. Along with news stories about current intrigue the Matt Lauer firing, James O'Keefe's failed sting operation against the Post, Prince Harry's engagement the top items were dominated by Trump insanity: his Muslim-video retweets, his insult of the British prime minister, his attacks on CNN, his war on the "war on Christmas," the insults he traded with Democrats, his "unhinged" behavior and his veering past "guardrails" of what's acceptable.
But in the top 25 were only two about the monstrous tax bill as it made its way through the Senate this week. There were only two about North Korea testing a missile that could strike anywhere in America. There was only one about Trump's takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And there wasn't a single story about the sprawling Russia scandal.
In other words: We are all being played for suckers as we get exercised over Trump's diversions.
It's possible that Trump does crazy things simply because he's crazy. But the outbursts serve a real purpose. They provide cover. While the nation gapes at Trump implying Joe Scarborough's involvement in the death of a congressional aide, the administration and its allies achieve all kinds of abominations.
If this tax bill were to see more sunlight, it would never become law. It adds $1 trillion in debt, ultimately increases taxes on those making less than $75,000 a year, gives most of the breaks to the wealthiest 1 percent, is forecast to add negligible economic growth and would force massive cuts to Medicare and Obamacare. But while Trump distracted the nation, GOP leaders strong-armed holdouts all week.
Likewise, the Post published several largely unnoticed pieces this week about the failure to renew the Children's Health Insurance Program, which expired on Sept. 30. States have begun to notify beneficiaries (9 million children) that they may be cut off.
I tried to ignore the Trump shenanigans this week, instead writing about the drug-industry executive Trump tapped to oversee drug pricing and about the administration lawyer who orchestrated Trump's takeover of the CFPB after serving as lawyer for a payday lender cited by the CFPB for abuses. But such pieces generate only a fraction of the "clicks" of pieces I and others write about Trump's pyrotechnics.
Those pyrotechnics are going to increase now that Mueller has turned Flynn. Trump's distractions will be impossible to ignore. But we lawmakers, the media and the public need to keep our focus on the real damage Trump is doing.
Daniel Clary, the 22-year-old man charged in the Nov. 7 shooting of a Pennsylvania State Police corporal along Route 33 in Plainfield Township, has been moved to Lehigh County Jail.
Clary was initially housed in Northampton County Prison after he was released from Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township.
But because a "close family member" works at the prison, it's the "normal process" to move the prisoner, Corrections Director Dan Keen said.
Keen didn't identify the family member.
Clary is charged with attempted homicide and various related offenses in the shooting of Cpl. Seth Kelly. Clary is being held in lieu of $1 million bail.
Kelly was released in recent days from St. Luke's University Hospital in Fountain Hill where he was treated for gunshots wounds to neck/shoulder and leg. Trooper Ryan Sieple was also injured in the altercation that began with a traffic stop.
Clary was treated for various injuries, including a head wound, before being turned over less than a week later to the Easton prison.
He is awaiting trial on the charges.
Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A Bethlehem man who went in the woods to hunt deer was taken to the hospital after a bullet from another hunter in the field struck an object, ricocheted off it and hit the man in the face, state police said.
Pennsylvania State Police in Fogelsville identified the injured hunter as 30-year-old David Gable.
An investigating trooper said Gable was in a legal wooded area for hunting in Upper Milford Township at about 4:30 p.m. Saturday when the incident occurred. Gable was hunting in a tree stand alone, but there were two other hunters in the field, the trooper said.
One of the other hunters spotted a deer and opened fire, missing the deer with the bullet possibly ricocheting off a rock, police said. Gable was hit in the side of the face and taken to Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Salisbury Township for treatment.
Police said Gable was fortunate with injuries non-life threatening. A preliminary investigation showed the incident was accidental and police do not expect any wrongdoing, the trooper said.
No charges have been filed in the incident.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission also responded to the scene to investigate. Pennsylvania State Police in Fogelsville also continue to investigate.
Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A man reported early Monday morning that he was carjacked, according to the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission.
The incident happened off bridge commission property but the man at 4:15 a.m. walked up to the office on the Phillipsburg side of the toll bridge and told the officer in charge, spokesman Joe Donnelly said.
Phillipsburg police were dispatched and picked up the victim, Donnelly said.
It was unclear if the man was hurt.
Town police didn't return several phone calls seeking more information.
Dispatches said the man reported he was carjacked at Main and Broad streets, his knife was taken and the carjackers threatened to blow his brains out.
The man was driving a Hyundai Sonata with a Pennsylvania tag, dispatches said.
It's unclear if the car was found or if anyone was taken into custody.
Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
The boss of the State agency which brings vital overseas investment and jobs to Laois will have a lot of explaining to do when he comes to Laois in early 2017, according to Brian Stanley TD.
The IDA boss Martin Shanahan is coming to Portlaoise in January with the most senior staff in Enterprise Ireland. The Laois Sinn Fein TD said Laois is practically ignored by Mr Shanahan and his team.
"The abysmal record of the IDA in Laois has been well documented and this shows no signs of improving. Figures released this week show that the IDA paid almost 93 million in grant aid last year to support employment from foreign direct investment enterprise.
"However, Laois fared very poorly and was practically ignored with a tiny grant of just 5,000, the lowest amount of all counties which received grant aid in 2016," he said.
CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE
Dep Stanley said Laois has a rapidly growing youth population with 24.6% under the age of 14, the highest in the state. He said the county also had the fastest population growth in the country of 26.3% between 2006 and 2016 yet the participation rate for school leavers in Laois for access to 3rd level was 41% in 2014, again the lowest in the country.
LAOIS BABY BOOM
A combined group of Laois housing estates have been crowned All Ireland housing estates winners at a gala awards ceremony.
Kiln Lane Residents Association, made up of residents from Kiln Lane, Clonbarrow and An Garain estates in Mountrath, are this week celebrating their amazing win, at the IPB Pride of Place awards last Saturday night in Mount Errigal Letterkenny.
The award recognises the extraordinary community spirit and level of activity on Kiln Lane, dating back to the 1980s, currently led by committee chairperson Margaret Moore.
Along with the hard work of local volunteers grasscutting and planting, they have organised very successful estate events, including a 1916 commemorative event and family fun days, all extremely well supported locally.
Educational efforts for young and old can be seen in their horticultural projects, poly tunnel and other programmes. Their community building houses a mother and toddler group and provides a space for activities including arts and crafts and Glee club. They opened their playground and games area in 2009. Housing up to three generations in some cases, this estate displays great respect for family legacy and commitment to ensuring the estates pride, illustrated by a number of local awards.
The Judges' citation read as follows:
"On entering this winning complex, the judges were immensely impressed with the wonderful colour in the floral displays and flowerbeds, the neat and tidy grassed areas, open spaces and the absence of litter. The residents group caters for the needs of all age groups from toddlers to the elderly. It is gratifying to notice that the elderly are actively involved in all activities. The community building in the complex hosts a wide range of activities for children and young people and generally acts as a hub for all the activities in the estates. The residents association works closely with the Council and the estate is a great credit to the residents. Without doubt this winning entry is a very attractive and rewarding place to live."
Cllr James Kelly from Mountrath was at the launch, and is thrilled for his community's win.
"Kiln Lane Residence Association had a very pro active committee ably led be Margaret Moore with tremendous co operation and funding by the great staff in Laois County Council which has led to the Estate been crowned all Ireland champions 2017. This was a great night for all the voluntary work of communities all over the island of Ireland.
"The competition is based on communities demonstrating directly to the judges their pride in their place by oral presentation,exhibitions of community activities and culture and a tour of the area highlighting the aspects of which they are particularly proud. It is also important that the community demonstrates real partnership with their local council and shows that all sectors of the community are included," Cllr Kelly said.
It was the first time in several years that Laois County Council entered communities in the 32 county competition. Rathdowney Errill community also entered the competition this year.
Mountrath has received an incredible Christmas gift from the Brigidine nuns
Runners Up: Brawny Housing Estate, Athlone, Co. Westmeath and St. Patricks Villas, Castleconnell, Co. Limerick
Life of Laois toddler saved yet again last weekend by Portlaoise hospital staff
Below at the awards: Patrick Guidera, Tom Dowling Chairman Pride of Place, Noel Wrest, Stephen Moore. Front Nicola OConnor, Statia Guidera, Margaret Moore, Anne Marie Maher Laois County Council and Cllr James Kelly.
The HSE has issued no statement on the protest by thousands of patients against the proposal to downgrade of Portlaoise hospital but has issued a press release highlighting an 'excellence' award nomination for a Tullamore hospital pilot project.
The says the Trauma Assessment Clinic at Midland Regional Hospital Tullamore (MRHT) has been recognised for its excellence and innovation as part of the Health Service Excellence Awards.
Over 300 projects from all around the country entered the 2017 Health Service Excellence Awards and 11 of those projects got through to the final shortlist after a rigorous selection process. The annual awards are open to all staff working in the publicly funded health system.
Commenting on the awards, Tony OBrien, Director General of the HSE said: The Health Service Excellence Awards are designed to identify and recognise the real value we place on excellence and innovation across all of our health service.
The HSE says the Trauma Assessment Clinic has introduced a 'new care pathway' for patients to improve care in the fastest time in the most appropriate setting.
So far, the HSE says that 'pilot project' has seen a total of 1,668 patients. Of these, 30% are discharged at the initial stage, 40% are referred on to an appropriate clinic or a follow up trauma clinic, and 30% are referred onto physiotherapy services.
It says this means that 60% of patients do not need to attend the fracture clinic and can be discharged at a much earlier stage. The HSE says this has led to a big improvement from how patients were previously treated, with 100% of patients attending hospital clinics.
Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon and lead of the initiative, Dr Eoin Sheehan said staff are are delighted to be shortlisted for this award and very proud that our work will be recognised and shared as best practice across the health service.
"This process works. It reduces the amount of time a patient attends a clinic, freeing up valuable clinical time for patients with more serious injuries and making more time for the elective schedules.
"Patients with fractures who present at Tullamore Hospitals Emergency Department are initially assessed; those with the simplest injuries are provided with information on their treatment and sent home, with medical follow-up guaranteed within 24 hours," he said.
The Trauma Assessment Clinic is a new care pathway for patients at MRHT aimed at improving the patients experience of care, by ensuring they are treated in the fastest time in the most appropriate setting. I would like to acknowledge the support we have received from hospital management, the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, and the National Clinical Programme for Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery. The opportunities are endless with this model of clinical care and its simple format is easily transferable to another speciality or hospital site."
Commenting on the Trauma Assessment Clinics shortlisting for the national award, Orlagh Claffey, General Manager of MRHT said this is a great result for the team.
"We have a dedicated team of expert clinical staff who have worked hard to get this project off the ground. The results speak for themselves," she said.
While no patient survey is quoted, the manger said the project has "dramatically improved the patient experiencesomething we at Midland Regional Hospital Tullamore are always working to do".
The Trauma Assessment Clinic is run by Consultant Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgeons at MRHT with the service using a team approach which includes a consultant, a junior doctor, a clinical nurse specialist and a physiotherapist to review each patients case.
The Trauma Assessment Clinic will be represented at the Health Service Excellence Awards ceremony in Farmleigh in Dublins Phoenix Park on December 14 where the Overall Winner will be announced, along with the Popular Choice Award, the Best Team Project Award winners.
Staff across the health services also have an opportunity to vote for the Trauma Assessment Clinic in the popular choice category by clicking here. Voting closes on December 8.
The Presidents wife, Sabina Higgins was in Newbridge last weekend to support Kildares HOPE(D) December mental health awareness campaign for December.
The charity was delighted to have Mrs Higgins and RTEs Brenda Donohue on board.
The Kilkenny Shop at the Whitewater Shopping Centre in Newbridge selected local charity HOPE(D) as there preferred charity for the month of December.
Mrs Higgins arrived at 11am last Saturday to the front entrance of Whitewater to applause by members of the public, who gathered to witness her arrival.
SEE ALSO: PHOTO GALLERY: Hundreds turn out for Hope(D) Vigil March in Newbridge
Jim Brady, Chairperson of HOPE(D) and Laura Raleigh from Kilkenny Shop, greeted Mrs Higgins and escorted her into the Kilkenny Shop to meet the committee and staff of Kilkenny Group.
Mrs Higgins was delighted to be associated with this awareness campaign on Mental Health and she encouraged people to talk out and seek help if they think they need support from organisations such as HOPE(D), said Jim.
In the afternoon, Brenda Donohue of RTE arrived to support the cause and was met by well wishers young and old.
Brenda was well aware that the stresses of modern life come to bear on us all and in particular during December. Any one of us can face the challenges of life, but it is the support aid that we reach out for in crisis that will help us work through to recovery. HOPE(D) provide discreet professional Counselling with our fully qualified Therapists in our warm, welcoming surroundings, he added.
The charity recently moved to a larger premises on 2 Henry Street, Newbridge, which has allowed it to expand the range of services offered which include eight qualified counsellors and three holistic therapists; confidentiality, respect and empathy; four counselling rooms (one with wheelchair access); support group room; and holistic therapy room.
Sometimes, it just seems as if Oregon Secretary of State Dennis Richardson can't help himself: Richardson, the only Republican elected to statewide office in two decades, is determined to keep voters apprised of everything he's up to, and so a steady stream of news releases and newsletters flows from his office. There's nothing wrong with that: Every elected officeholder does the same.
But it seems to us that Richardson would have been better off holding his tongue in a newsletter he issued last week in the wake of a scathing audit of the Oregon Health Authority.
Richardson oversees these state audits, and he often issues press releases about their findings. Previous secretaries of state have done the same.
The overall findings of the audit into the Health Authority couldn't have been much of a surprise for anyone who's been following the troubled agency: The audit concluded that the Health Authority misspent millions of dollars by providing Medicaid benefits to people who were ineligible. The audit also noted that the agency's previous top officials had hampered attempts by auditors to access information. (The Health Authority now is under the leadership of a new director, Patrick Allen, and Richardson has been generous in his praise of Allen.)
So far, so good. But then Richardson pushed it too far: In his official newsletter, he summarized the results of the audit and then added a reference to the January election in which Oregon voters will decide whether to approve Measure 101, a pair of health care taxes.
Here's what Richardson wrote in the newsletter:
"In closing, todays OHA (Oregon Health Authority) Audit Report provides the best information the audit team could obtain from OHAs previous uncooperative leadership and administration. The amount of wasteful and incompetent spending at OHA has been staggering and has gone on for at least the past four years. Soon Oregon voters will be considering whether or not to approve tax increases intended to provide additional funding to the OHA. With such abysmal examples of OHA misfeasance and obfuscation, OHA faces tough questions about its credibility and its ability to appropriately spend the money it is provided."
A couple of notes are worth making here: First, of course, Richardson has a legitimate point. And that's certain to be a focal point of the campaign against the health care taxes.
But here's the second note: In including that reference to the January election, Richardson opened himself to charges of improper electioneering.
State law does allow elected officials to engage in political advocacy while on the job. But a state election law manual (produced you guessed it by the secretary of state's office) says that such political advocacy "may not be published" in a newsletter produced or distributed by public employees. The law also blocks elected officials from using public resources to promote or oppose candidates or ballot measures.
Richardson's newsletter prompted an official complaint from Jeanne Atkins, head of the state Democratic Party and the previous secretary of state. Since these complaints are investigated by election officials in (you guessed it) the secretary of state's office, Atkins asked that state Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum take the lead in this case. Richardson agreed to that request.
Richardson also called the complaint "meritless." Now, there's no doubt that the complaint is politically motivated, but it's going to be hard to make the case that the language in the newsletter isn't meant to persuade voters to oppose the health care taxes. And it's worth noting that a variety of mid-valley public officials have been nailed for electioneering violations based on much more neutral language than Richardson used.
The secretary of state can drag this fight out, but it's a losing battle. He should apologize and pay whatever fine is assessed. And he should remember this: Sometimes it's best to keep your mouth shut. (mm)
THEY SAY bad things come in threes but for the Childrens Grief Centre it has been all good news recently.
Earlier this month, the project set up by Sr Helen Culhane, Croom, was short-listed in the Community Impact Awards. Last week, they were announced as one of ten national recipients of 25,000 in the Animate Fund. It is to develop community projects promoting good health, wellbeing and inclusion.
And on December 9, Owen Gilhooly, tenor and director of the Mid-West Vocal Academy and Music School in Lisnagry, is hosting a fundraising Christmas concert in St Marys Cathedral at 8pm.
Sr Helen says every cent will go towards helping the children in their care.
Located in Westbourne, Ashbourne Avenue, SCR, the Childrens Grief Centre is a free and voluntary organisation that supports children between the ages of four and 18 where parents have separated, divorced or where there has been a bereavement. Since 2009, it has provided a space and place for children to explore their experiences of loss associated with bereavement and parental separation.
The centre was in the midst of a funding crisis at the beginning of 2017. They had 120 young persons on their waiting list and the wait to be seen was eight to nine months. Thanks to a 20,000 donation from the JP McManus Benevolent Fund the waiting list has been halved and the wait is three months now.
With the 25,000 from the Animate Fund and 30,000 from Olive Foley, from the sales of a commemorative match day programme following the death of her late and great husband Anthony Foley, Sr Helen and her team can continue their life changing good work.
A LIMERICK man disqualified from driving for failing to give a blood or urine sample to gardai, told a garda to call for backup after he surrendered his two hands during an arrest, the District Court heard.
Michael ONeill, aged 30, of Ballyvouden, Kilteely, was charged with obstruction and failing to provide a specimen, following an arrest in Garryowen on August 13, 2016.
Giving evidence last Thursday, Garda Niall Deegan, of Henry Street, said that he observed the accused driving outbound on Mulgrave Street at 3.20pm, as he was driving inbound. He the turned the patrol car around to check his documents.
As he made the turn, Mr ONeill took off at speed and turned left into Garryowen, he said.
He later observed the vehicle at Fairview Crescent and signalled the driver to stop. After he asked to see the drivers documents, he could get a smell of intoxicant from inside the vehicle.
Gda Deegan told the court that, after the accused stepped out of the vehicle, he was told You and me have a history and he started getting aggressive. After he asked him to relax and calm down, Gda Deegan was told that the only reason why I was stopping him was to make him miss his childs christening. He formed the opinion that he was under the influence of an intoxicant and that he was incapable of controlling a mechanically-propelled vehicle, he said.
When Gda Deegan attempted to handcuff ONeill, he pushed me back raising his elbow and was told: You broke my shoulder six years ago. Its not going to happen this time, buddy.
He accused ONeill of vigorously resisting arrest and he cautioned him that he was going to pepper-spray him.
At this stage, he started to make threats, saying: I will break your jaw. He called for back-up and later pepper-sprayed the accused as he was in fear for my personal safety.
When he was brought to Henry Street, the court heard, he was asked three times to give either a blood or urine sample, to which he replied You choose. He later said: I am not giving you anything.
Solicitor John Herbert argued that it was an extraordinary situation to do a u-turn on a busy street to check his documents, and that he had 30 days to do so.
He put it to Gda Deegan you do have a history with him and that he stopped his client before. He argued his client put his two hands out and said: Not behind my back because that is how you dislocated my shoulder.
He was extremely nervous and he feared for himself. Mr Herbert asked Mr ONeill what went through his head when he saw the garda make the u-turn. He said: I have to get away from him. Asked why, he replied: Why would I stop to get another broken arm? Why is it that whenever he stops me, he is on his own?
Mr ONeill denied consuming an intoxicant.
He told the court that he had asked Gda Deegan to call for back-up, and said: I am not getting into no car with you anywhere. Inspector Helen Costelloe said to Mr ONeill said that he was obliged to stop the car. He replied: I know I am obliged to stop, but am I obliged to be harassed and assaulted?
You were not assaulted; you were arrested, she said. She told the accused that the choice was yours when he was asked to provide a specimen.
Mr Herbert argued that the arrest was was not legal or lawful and that there was no basis for what Gda Deegan was doing that day. Insp Costelloe said that he was carrying out his duty. Judge Marian OLeary imposed a four-year disqualification and a 500 fine.
THE father of a Limerick teenager who was murdered near his home a decade ago is offering a reward for any information which results in a prosecution.
Alan Hannan opened a bank account in recent days after he was approached by a member of public who offered him some money following an appeal to mark the tenth anniversary of Jeffrey Hannans killing.
The father-of-two, who was aged 19, died from severe injuries after he was struck a number of times during a row with a group of young men at OMalley Park, Southill during the early hours of November 22, 2007.
While more than 20 people have been arrested and questioned by gardai about the murder, nobody has ever been charged in connection with the killing.
I want to get the message out there that there is a reward going for any information about Jeffreys murder, said Alan Hannan, who has consistently maintained his belief that there are people who have information about his sons killing who have not come forward.
In the wake of last months appeal for information a man, who wishes to remain anonymous, contacted Jeffrey and gave him a sum of money.
He just approached me and he gave me the money and anybody else who wants to make a donation can do so by making contact or by lodging money directly into the account, Alan Hannan told the Limerick Leader. Money talks up there (Southill) and hopefully it will have an effect and somebody will come forward, he added.
While not commenting officially, its understood gardai are supportive of the concept of a reward being offered.
The account in which the reward money has been lodged is located at AIB, O;Connell Street. The IBAN is 63551408847101 while the BIC is AIBJIE2D.
DISCOUNT Retailer Dealz is facing the prospect of a criminal conviction over its failure to remove large posters from the windows of its city centre store.
Limerick City and County County Council has initiated legal proceedings alleging the company failed to comply with an Enforcement Notice.
Planning Inspector Pat Campbell told Limerick District Court the prosecution against Dealz Retailing Ireland Ltd, under the provisions of the Planning and Development Act, relates to a prominent building at the junction of Bedford Row and Henry Street.
He said he inspected the store in May 2016 and that a warning letter was sent to the company in July 2016.
Judge Marian OLeary was told after an Enforcement Notice, requiring the company to remove the signage, was served on the company on October 14, 2016, an application for retention (of the signage) was lodged.
Solicitor Will Leahy, representing the local authority, said this application was subsequently refused and that an appeal to An Bord Pleanala was refused in July 2017.
In its decision, the board stated the scale, design and quantum on the building frontage would be excessive in terms of visual clutter and that retention of the signage would seriously injure the visual amenities of the area.
Mr Leahy told the court the unauthorised signage, which remains in place, is in breach of regulations which state posters should not be more than a quarter of the window size.
Having considered the matter, Judge OLeary said she was satisfied the council had proven its case.
However, noting the defendant company was not represented in court, she adjourned the matter to January indicating she will record a formal conviction once all of the proofs are in order.
If convicted, a 500 fine will apply for each day the Order is not complied with.
A WORKER at an internet cafe tried to fight off two armed robbers with an umbrella, a Limerick court has heard.
One of the culprits James Connors, aged 24, of Lord Edward Street has pleaded guilty to a charge of robbery relating to an incident at Station Internet Cafe, Davis Street on February 20, last.
Limerick Circuit Court was told Mr Connors and another man entered the premises at around 7.25pm and that one of them threatened a worker while the second went behind the counter and took cash from the register.
A struggle then ensued during which the employee produced an umbrella and confronted the culprits who escaped with around 1,200 in cash.
While gardai located the culprits nearby a short time later, the money was not recovered and compensation has not been paid.
Brian McInerney BL, representing Mr Connors, said his client cooperated with gardai and made comprehensive admissions regarding his role in the offence following his arrest.
He commented that CCTV from the internet cafe was of outstanding quality and showed the utter incompetence of this client.
He said Mr Connors was not compos mentis on the night as he was heavily intoxicated when he entered the premises.
Short of going in with a sandwich board and a flashing neon sight, he couldnt have advertised his intentions any better, he said adding that his client is lucky there is no offence in law of incompetence.
Garda Eoghan McDonagh agreed with the barrister that while in the premises the second culprit, who has not been prosecuted, appears, according to the CCTV footage, to be intent on escalating the incident while Mr Connors can be seen trying to calm him down.
Judge Tom ODonnell adjourned sentencing to early in the new year.
OVERCROWDING at University Hospital Limerick is again the worst in the country, according to new monthly figures released this week.
Statistics published by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation show that there were 878 patients being treated on emergency department trolleys and on extra trolleys or beds in the wards at UHL in November.
Though the overcrowding rate was lower than September levels 902 patients it is significantly higher than the October figures, when there were 712 patients on trolleys.
There were 227 more patients being treated on trolleys at UHL than at Cork University Hospital, the INMO figures also reveal.
And so far this year, there have been 8,116 patients being treated on trolleys at the hospital in Dooradoyle.
Condemning the findings in the monthly report, Sinn Fein Deputy Maurice Quinlivan said that he fears that the action needed to tackle the problem will only happen after a tragedy occurs due to the overcrowding levels and, by the stage, it will be too late.
The Limerick City TD tweeted: In July, Health Minister Simon Harris expressed his anger when he contacted UHL we need more than anger from the Minister we need intervention.
7% reduction nationally but 11% Increase in @ULHospitals in Limerick.
In July, Health Minister Simon Harris expressed his anger when he contacted UHL - we need more than anger from the Minister we need intervention. https://t.co/jg2AqJIoyS Maurice Quinlivan TD (@QuinlivanTD) December 4, 2017
In a statement, Deputy Quinlivan said that he was constantly raising the issues facing University Hospital Limerick in the Dail, but this government is not listening.
The huge numbers on hospital trolleys is becoming a monthly occurrence, and Minister Harris needs to take radical action, focusing on four main areas; recruitment and retention of staff, reopening closed beds, adequate step down facilities, and proper primary and community care.
Nationally, there was a 7% decrease in trolley numbers, which was welcomed by INMO general secretary, Liam Doran.
However, the very significant increase in additional patients on inpatient wards, on trolleys or additional beds is most disturbing and suggests hospital management are increasingly repeating the mistakes of the past.
"Overcrowding wards has never solved the problem, of hospital overcrowding, and this will only be done through additional acute beds, he stated.
THE Minister in charge of the delivery of flood defences to Limericks riverside communities has pledged these will be fast-tracked through the planning process.
Independent Alliance TD Kevin 'Boxer' Moran was in the city on Friday at the invite of Senator Kieran ODonnell, where he met people in Annacotty, Castleconnell, Corbally and the docklands area.
He also took a tour of the St Marys Park area, which was hit with devastating flooding in early 2014.
He reaffirmed the governments commitment to delivering 55m for flood defences, and said a Cfram report outlining what needs doing will be made available by the end of the month.
We have identified a number of schemes in and around the Limerick area, and particularly where we are in the Kings Island.. Government is fully committed to delivering this for the people of Limerick. They have listened to a great amount of talk for the last number of years. But we have 440m for five major schemes around the country, and Limerick is one of them, Mr Moran said.
The minister said as a way of getting the flood defence projects through planning quickly, some could be designated as strategic infrastructural development, which would mean they bypass local planning offices. And he pledged that even if the government were to fall, the funding is safe.
AFTER almost three months of intensive preparations, and with a cast of over 100, it is nearly show time for Limericks Castletroy College to tread the boards in the annual musical.
The impressive production, All Shook Up, is a comedy musical based on the songs of Elvis Presley.
Leah ODonnell, who is in transition year, plays the role of Natalie. Her sidekick Chad, played by sixth year student Cian Cahill is new to the stage but looking forward to performing with the rest of his classmates.
The show promises to be a smash hit spectacle with the teenagers ready and waiting to showcase their theatrical talents under the direction of teachers Anita Cunneen and Catherine Clohessy, alongside artistic director Jessica Bray and choreographer Pamela McGlynn.
Principal, Padraig Flanagan said that the show is the culmination of months of hard work done by so many in the school community. He thanked all involved, particularly the sponsors for their generous donations which has made the production possible.
Castletroy Colleges performance is being presented in association with Odeon Cinemas, Castletroy.
It all takes place in the Lime Tree Theatre on Tuesday and Wednesday, December 5 and 6 at 8pm. Tickets available from www.limetreetheatre.ie.
Depending on availability, tickets may also be purchased on the door and range from 11-16.
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Extremely high tides expected through Tuesday prompted weather forecasters Sunday to issue a flood warning for coastal regions of the Bay Area.
The dramatic tidal fluctuations known as king tides caused by the full moon being in close proximity to the Earth were expected to surge as high as 7 feet, said Steve Anderson, a National Weather Service meteorologist. Tides will reach their height in the mid- to late-morning hours of Monday and Tuesday, forecasters said.
Officials recommended caution in low-lying parking lots, coastal trails, underpasses and roadways. The Point Reyes National Seashore, southern Monterey Bay and Big Sur coast were among those expected to be inundated with high tides.
And the water might splash up onto the Embarcadero, Anderson said. Just be aware.
The warning remains in effect until Tuesday at 3 p.m.
Marina Psaros, co-founder of King Tides Project, a group that tries to raise awareness of the effects of climate change, said there wont be as much roadway flooding as on days when king tides coincide with storms.
We have this kind of nuisance flooding, or sunny-day flooding, and youll see a little bit of water on the Embarcadero, for example, at the highest point of the high tide, and all of our marshes will be flooded, and the water will look like its about to spill on Highway 37, she said. We usually dont get a bunch of wet infrastructure on sunny days its really when theres a storm that you see the flooding at the parking lots, and you see water up over the roads.
King tides are a natural phenomenon, nothing to be worried about, Psaros said. Its a really good opportunity to think about how our city and our region will be impacted by sea level rise.
San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Dianne de Guzman contributed to this story.
Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov
The driver of a rented box truck who crashed into a Bay Bridge tollbooth, killing the attendant, remained in the hospital Sunday in serious condition, authorities said.
Daniel Berk, 32, of Foster City was being treated at Highland Hospital in Oakland after ramming into a tollbooth on the north side of the plaza at 5:11 a.m. on Saturday and wasnt expected to be released for about a week, said Officer Matthew Hamer, a CHP spokesman.
A passenger in the truck, who was ejected as the vehicle split apart, and the occupants of five other cars that were hit have all been released from the hospital, Hamer added.
Berk, who is facing charges of driving under the influence and vehicular manslaughter, suffered major injuries, Hamer said.
A relative of Berks, who identified herself as his sister on Facebook, said he was in surgery shortly after the crash. His family members declined to comment.
Si Si Han, a 46-year-old Caltrans employee, was killed in the collision. She worked as a toll collector for nearly a decade, said agency spokesman Bob Haus.
Han is survived by her husband, Ryan Saw, and 10-year-old daughter, Ashly.
Gov. Jerry Brown released a statement that he and his wife, Anne Gust Brown, are deeply saddened to learn of the loss of Caltrans toll collector Si Si Han, who died (Saturday) while serving the traveling public. On behalf of all Californians, we extend our condolences to her family, co-workers and friends.
According to LinkedIn, Berk works as a stage engineer. On Facebook, he lists himself as a member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 16 in San Francisco.
A co-worker, Kenny McCain, said Berk worked in the close-knit production industry in the Bay Area. McCain heard from mutual friends that Berk had been driving between gigs at the time of the crash.
Ive never seen him drink, so that was a little strange to me, McCain said. I thought he mustve fallen asleep at the wheel. The whole thing was a shock to me.
The truck was filled with lighting and sound equipment at the time of the collision, said CHP Officer Vu Williams.
Berk was a former student at the College of San Mateo, said Richard Rojo, a college spokesman.
He took classes over the course of several years and stopped in spring 2015, Rojo added.
Berk did not earn a degree from the college.
The truck had been rented from Monarch Truck Center in San Jose, said Steve Russler, an employee with the company.
Four tollbooths and lanes 13 through 16 remained closed, posing a potential slowdown for morning commuters on Monday, Haus said.
Hans booth, from Lane 14, is completely wiped out and has to be completely rebuilt, Haus said.
There is no estimated time for reopening the lanes that lead up to the booths.
With four booths out of commission ... its going to have an adverse effect on traffic, Haus said.
No additional information on the crash, including the speed that Berk was driving and what substance he was suspected of using, was released Sunday.
Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani
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A Sacramento lobbyist broke her silence Monday, filing a formal complaint with the Assembly that names the lawmaker she said cornered her in a bathroom last year and masturbated in front of her.
Pamela Lopez accused Assemblyman Matt Dababneh, D-Encino (Los Angeles County), of pushing his way into a bathroom with her last year and trying to get her to touch his exposed genitals. Dababneh quickly denied the allegations, claiming they are false.
Lopez initially declined to name the lawmaker when she first spoke to the news media about the alleged incident in October, saying she didnt want the attention to be on one bad actor and that she feared her lobbying firm would lose business.
But on Monday, at a news conference with her lawyer, she said she decided to name the assemblyman and file a formal complaint against him after assurances from leaders in the Assembly that her allegations will be taken seriously and that she wont be retaliated against.
There is strength in numbers, and I want women to know that you can lawyer up and there are good people who will represent you and protect you, Lopez said. Im putting this in the hands of the Legislature. Matt Dababneh has abused his power.
Assemblyman Ken Cooley, D-Rancho Cordova (Sacramento County), head of the Rules Committee, which oversees human resources for the Assembly, said an outside investigator will be hired for the case and suggested Lopez file a police report because the allegation is criminal in nature.
Jean Hyams, Lopezs lawyer, said her client had not decided whether to file a complaint with police.
Dababneh issued a statement denying the allegations: I affirmatively deny that this event ever happened at any time. I am saddened by this lobbyists effort to create this falsehood and make these inflammatory statements, apparently for her own self-promotion and without regard to the reputation of others. I look forward to clearing my name.
His lawyer, Patricia Glaser, had sent Lopez a cease and desist letter on Friday, threatening legal action if she named him.
Along with Lopez, a second woman, Jessica Yas Barker, spoke at the news conference, saying she was subjected to sexual harassment by Dababneh when he was a congressional staffer for Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles County). Barker said Dababneh would routinely make inappropriate sexual comments and brag about sexual encounters with other women. She also said he would comment on her appearance, refer to her as Ellen a reference to comedian Ellen Degeneres and tell her she dressed like a lesbian.
Barker said she has already experienced retaliation from those who knew she was coming forward with allegations against Dababneh.
There have been some really nasty things put out about me that are not true, Barker said.
A third woman who was not at the news conference and who spoke to The Chronicle on condition that her name not be published said she left her job as a legislative staffer for Dababneh because the assemblyman would routinely make detailed sexual comments about other women that made her uncomfortable.
He was creepy, the woman said. Thats why I quit. I was taken aback by his behavior.
Jonathan Bash, a past president of the Bruin Democrats at UCLA from 2011 to 2012, wrote on Twitter and in a follow-up email to The Chronicle that it was common practice in the college Democratic club to warn women not to intern in Dababnehs office or go to events with him. The Bruin Democrats current president, NJ Omorogieva, declined to comment.
Debabneh is a UCLA graduate.
The allegations against Dababneh come after hundreds of women signed an open letter Oct. 17 calling for an end to pervasive sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in the state Capitol.
The Legislative Womens Caucus said in a statement Monday that an independent and thorough investigation is needed where the findings are made public.
If the investigation finds that these allegations are likely true, there must be swift and transparent consequences for this type of behavior, said caucus chair Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, D-Bell Gardens (Los Angeles County) and vice chair state Sen. Connie M. Leyva, D-Chino (San Bernardino County), in a statement.
Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra, D-San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles County), resigned from his seat amid several allegations of sexual misconduct. State Sen. Tony Mendoza, D-Artesia (Los Angeles County), was stripped of his chairmanship until an investigation into sexual misconduct is completed.
Previously, after Lopez spoke about the incident without naming the lawmaker, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount (Los Angeles County) called the allegation horrifying and noted that it is also a crime. Rendon said at the time that if the lawmaker turns out to be an assemblyman, we will contract with an outside firm so there can be an independent investigation.
If he is found to have committed this assault or any similar harassment, I will ask for his immediate resignation and move for his expulsion if he refuses to resign, Rendon said.
Rendons office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Lopez said the incident happened on Jan. 16, 2016, in Las Vegas at a party for a mutual friend who was getting married.
She said she did not have more than a brief conversation with Dababneh before he pushed his way into a bathroom with her.
She said Dababneh kept telling her to touch his genitals. She said she refused, instead pressing herself against the furthest wall in the bathroom.
Lopez said she initially indicated the incident happened in Sacramento, explaining that she worried that naming the Las Vegas location and time frame would have made it clear who the person was when she did not plan to name him.
How the Assembly responds to Ms. Lopezs report is a test of whether it is a body governed by law, or one that considers itself above the law, said Hyams.
Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez
Multiple Molotov cocktails were hurled into a store in San Franciscos Tenderloin neighborhood over the weekend, and police suspect two men who had argued earlier with a worker at the business, officials said Monday.
An employee of the store on the 300 Block of Ellis Street was working behind the counter when he got into a squabble with two men about 12:30 a.m. on Saturday. About ten minutes later, two men threw Molotov cocktails into the store, starting a fire, police said.
Local developer Steve Yndo isnt known for big, splashy projects like the new Frost Tower downtown.
But his developments over the last 20 years filling vacant properties in Southtown and near the Pearl with high-end lofts and townhomes have done as much to rehab downtown San Antonio as any other major developer.
Yndo and his partners have built seven loft and townhome projects around downtown. He developed his first one in 1999, when such projects were unheard-of in San Antonio, converting an old factory into the King William Lofts. Hes now working on building another 14 townhomes in King William and 27 on former industrial properties across the river from the Pearl.
For Yndo, working around downtown was a no-brainer. Hes had an affinity for urban areas since he was a kid growing up on the suburban North Side, he said.
More Information Quick facts about Steve Yndo What's your morning routine: I'm typically up at 6:00, 6:15. Hopefully I work out. If not, I'm checking emails and kind of getting things ready. I'm probably one of the few people who still reads the newspaper - hard copy, paper copy. Where do you and your family live in San Antonio: We are on East Guenther (in the King William District), so right across the river from Blue Star. I have been in King William since '83. ... I've been here the whole time with the exception of maybe about 10 years up in the Alamo Heights, Columbus Park area for school districts. I still think it's the best neighborhood in town. People are very nice, but you can be as social as you want to be or as much of a hermit as you want to be, and nobody will give you any grief. What was the last movie you saw: "Thor," believe it or not. It was actually pretty good. Typically, we're at the (Santikos) Bijou watching more of an indie film or international, but those have been slim pickings lately. What are your hobbies outside of work: My wife and I are very involved in the arts. We live down here in King William. So, if we wanted to we'd have something to do just about every night - art openings, some kind of art event. A lot of our friends are artists, so we're typically going out to support somebody. See More Collapse
Even when I was a kid, I always had the sense that things were depressing out in the suburbs, he said. There's a certain emptiness when you're a kid where it's just quiet, nothing going on, nothing on the streets.
Yndo wanted to join the military after graduating from Texas A&M in 1985. But a reduction in the armed forces at the time, and his diagnosis with low-frequency hearing loss, forced him to change his plans, he said.
An internship introduced him to real estate, and he started his career brokering office and industrial properties. He became a developer in the late 90s with the King William Lofts project. Along with the townhomes, Yndo operates three real estate firms: King William Realty, Yndo Urban and Yndo Commercial Real Estate.
The Express-News sat down with Yndo at the Cedar Street Townhomes project hes building in King William. Turn to Mondays Business section or click here to read an edited transcript of the interview.
rwebner@express-news.net | Twitter: @RWebner
ELKO The lack of sufficient broadband internet service in the Elko area has attracted the attention of the state, and stakeholders will meet next week to begin identifying potential solutions.
Representatives from the Governors Office of Science, Innovation and Technology are scheduled to attend the Broadband Action Committee Meeting in Elko Dec. 6-7 to visit with leaders of Elko Countys key industry sectors. Jojo Myers Campos, the state broadband development manager, is bringing a four-member team to gather input with the ultimate goal of ushering in better broadband to Elko County.
The state office whose mission is to coordinate the planning, mapping, and procurement of broadband to ensure connectivity across Nevada for schools, libraries, hospitals, clinics and communities meets national standards aims to take a whole-community approach to getting better broadband service to Elko County. The office has begun a similar process to improve broadband in White Pine County.
These rural areas need the same opportunities that some of our larger urban areas have, Myers Campos said. Better broadband means greater opportunities for Nevada. When you leverage todays internet, we have greater opportunities to connect to education [and] to healthcare such as telemedicine and telepharmacy. We have better opportunity to foster economic development, and when a community can foster economic development, they then can access new markets and even create more jobs.
The need The purpose of the meeting is to identify solutions to better broadband and work toward improvements, explained Elko City Councilman Reece Keener, who volunteered to spearhead the effort to rally representatives for the meeting after subpar internet speeds and interruptions affected his two businesses.
Our communitys internet/broadband service is at best sorely insufficient, and has a lot of room for improvement, Keener wrote in an email inviting key residents. Broadband service is no longer considered a luxury, but rather a necessity for users at all levels: schools, government, businesses and residences. Poor internet service compromises safety, hampers commerce and puts our community at a competitive disadvantage.
Spring Creek residents also have protested poor internet and phone service, and those grievances have elevated to the Attorney Generals Bureau of Consumer Protection, which received about 40 complaints by Nov. 1 regarding Frontier Communications. The BCP solicited formal feedback after a Sept. 20 general consumer session in Spring Creek that was attended by representatives from the BCP and the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada, according to Elko Daily Free Press archives.
Also this year, the Spring Creek Association board authorized SCA staff to pursue action to obtain a short-term solution with Frontier, which could include adjusting service charges or installing infrastructure, wrote SCA President Jessie Bahr in an email.
The method
The meeting will be divided into sessions that focus on broadband as it relates to Spring Creek, public safety, healthcare, business and government/education/economic development. Each group will be made up of about 15 invited individuals who represent those sectors. A few seats are still available, and Elko County or Spring Creek stakeholders can request to be part of a session by emailing Keener at reece@elkonv.com.
I want to make sure that we keep that linear focus, Myers Campos said, explaining that the meeting is by invitation only and excludes providers at this point. My whole goal is to create a strong enough foundation with these meetings that we create a next step to move forward.
Keener reminded participants that the sessions are focused on solutions, to discuss the current situation, potential solutions and providers, potential upgrades and new technology.
We really want to focus on solutions, he said. We have defined the challenges.
The future
Deploying high-quality communitywide broadband across Elko County will be a monumental task, explained Myers Campos. The effort will likely take more than one provider and will take time to implement.
It takes more work in our rural areas because we dont have the infrastructure, she said. Anything broadband is not done overnight but it will be done.
The Big Book of the Continental Op
By Dashiell Hammett. Edited by Richard Layman & Julie M. Rivett
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. 733 pp. Paperback, $25
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Have I got a treat for those who prefer to celebrate their holidays in hard-boiled, rather than Hallmark, style. It's a heavyweight of a collection called "The Big Book of The Continental Op" that gathers together the 28 short stories, two novels and one unfinished tale starring Dashiell Hammett's first series detective, known only as "The Continental Op."
For those readers who haven't yet run into him, the Op is middle-aged, overweight and nameless. His moniker derives from his job: He's an "operative" or detective, who works for the Continental Detective Agency. He's easy to underestimate, but that would be a mistake. In the Op, Hammett revolutionized the traditional figure of the detective, strong-arming him out of his Sherlockian smoking jacket and into an American-made trench coat, shoving him out of his armchair and down those dark alleys where the most realistic crimes are waiting to be solved. Hammett paid tribute to his first great literary creation by referring to him as "a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit."
Hammett wrote The Continental Op stories in the earliest years of his career, and to read them in sequence is to witness how Hammett slowly transformed the formulaic "gals, guts, and guns" action tales, the staple of pulp magazines like the Black Mask, into the stuff of literature. Even the early Op stories here give readers the chance to walk around the mythic San Francisco that Hammett created - a place of fog and furnished apartments, sinister Nob Hill mansions and Chinatown gambling dens.
This collection is edited by the distinguished Hammett scholar Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett, who is Hammett's granddaughter. In a couple of short-but-substantive opening essays, Layman sketches out the sources of the Continental Op stories in Hammett's own five-year career working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. That career was interrupted by his Army service in World War I, where he contracted tuberculosis. In 1922, Hammett (by then on disability and a married father of a young daughter) took a course at the Munson School for Private Secretaries, with a "newspaper writing objective." Layman suggests that journalistic training came in handy when Hammett began submitting stories to the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1923.
Those early stories were published under the editorial reign of George W. Sutton, a busy guy who wrote about cars and boats on the side. There's little to suggest that either Sutton or Hammett realized that the popular Op stories were also remaking the detective fiction form. The first Op story, "Arson Plus," is dated Oct. 1, 1923, and Hammett wrote it under the pseudonym, Peter Collinson, theater slang for "a phantom person." The plots of "Arson Plus" and the other Sutton-era stories are simple and their pilferings from the more genteel British mystery tradition evident. For example, in "Slippery Fingers," the Op is hired to solve the murder by penknife of a tycoon whose body is found in that mustiest of locales: the library. Hammett's rougher Pinkerton experience, however, comes through in passages like this one, from "Crooked Souls," in which the Op, who's shadowing a suspect, describes a nifty bit of multitasking: "A touring-car, large, black, powerfully engined, and with lowered curtains, came from the rear. ... Possibly a scout! I scrawled its license number down on my pad without taking my hand out of my overcoat pocket."
Also present in even the earliest Op stories are the working-class resentments and nativist politics that, like it or not, would become essential elements of the hard-boiled formula. The Op is always cleaning up messes made by the wealthy; when an heiress apparently falls afoul of kidnappers in "Crooked Souls," Hammett stokes up 1920s nativist fears by having the Op discover a ransom note threatening to sell the girl to "a Chinaman who will buy her."
When Phillip C. Cody became the editor of Black Mask in 1924, Hammett's simple tales more than doubled in length, and became more complex and nastier. The Op doesn't even carry a gun in his early outings, but, as Layman says, "Hammett's first story for Cody features six murders, three of which are committed with cause by the Op."
For those who want to delve even deeper into the pulp appearances of the Continental Op, this collection also includes the Black Mask serialized versions of "Red Harvest" (originally entitled "Poisonville") and "The Dain Curse," Hammett's creakiest novel, which he later dismissed as "a silly story." As Layman demonstrates, the language of both novels were substantially changed when they were published in book form by Knopf.
There's one striking word, however, that remains unchanged in the opening paragraph of both versions of "Red Harvest." It's a word that also appears frequently throughout the Continental Op stories: meaningless. A bit of humorous wordplay is "meaningless" in the opening of "Poisonville"; a servant's face is "meaningless" (7) in "Arson Plus"; a smile is "meaningless" in "Dead Yellow Women" and on and on, into Hammett's masterpiece, "The Maltese Falcon," where the entire quest for the falcon itself is meaningless. "Meaningless" is a word that packs an existential wallop for Hammett and his fellow modernist writers. As this magnificent collection attests, the world that the Continental Op investigates may be "meaningless," but that nameless "little man's" work - and Hammett's achievement - remain momentous.
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Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, is the book critic for the NPR program, "Fresh Air."
Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital
By Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove
North Carolina. 609 pp. $39.95
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When census experts reported in 2011 that African-Americans had lost their numerical majority in the District, commentators generally treated the event as a kind of setback for a city that prides itself as a center of black politics and culture. The response was understandable, but people needn't have worried. Washington's status as a capital of black America has never depended on having an African-American majority. Blacks have been a minority for most of the city's existence, since they labored as slaves on the tobacco plantations that dotted the land ceded by Maryland and Virginia to create the new nation's capital. Nonetheless, the District's African-Americans have consistently been leaders in the nation's unfinished efforts to tear down racial barriers to political, economic and social equality.
Before the Civil War, Washington was the only Southern city with an active abolitionist movement. In the years following the war, Howard University and other intellectual centers offered unmatched educational opportunities. The city was half a decade ahead of the rest of the South in ending legally enforced segregation. While cities such as New Orleans had a black aristocracy, Washington's African-American community boasted both an elite and a middle class, the latter supported by jobs in the federal bureaucracy.
This distinguished legacy is an integral part of "Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital," an ambitious, comprehensive chronicle of the civic experience of blacks, whites and other races over more than two centuries in Washington. The authors are Chris Myers Asch, editor of Washington History and a history teacher at Colby College, and George Derek Musgrove, a history professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. (Full disclosure: The reviewer has occasionally used Musgrove as a source.) Their work succeeds in being both scholarly and accessible to the general reader. It mixes academic analysis with lively examples of individuals who battled discrimination. They include Ann Williams, a slave whose leap from a third-story window to avoid being sold South in 1815 aroused outrage in the North, and Charles Hamilton Houston, a graduate of what is now Dunbar High School, whose work as a NAACP lawyer in the 1930s and 1940s earned him the sobriquet "the man who killed Jim Crow."
Sadly, the uplifting stories of campaigns for progress are often outweighed by wince-provoking reminders of the extent and severity of racism and discrimination. The book provides abundant evidence of its thesis that race - more than class, politics or other factors - has "proven to be the most significant explanation for social, economic and political divisions in the city."
Why did Alexandria, originally part of the District, reunite with Virginia in 1846? Because slave owners resented the accelerating, biracial agitation in the city for abolition. Why did city residents of all races lose the right to vote in local elections in the 1870s? Partly because whites preferred that nobody vote rather than that blacks - male ones, that is - exercise the suffrage they won briefly in Reconstruction.
The list goes on. In 1878, a Washington Post editorial said that the city's economy would be better off with "an immediate exodus of 15,000 or 20,000 of her negro population." As recently as the late 1940s, the Washington Real Estate Board's code of ethics stated, "No property in a white section should ever be sold, rented, advertised, or offered to colored people."
It is also sobering to learn that many of the social and economic troubles besetting the city today also afflicted it in earlier eras - an ominous sign that such problems may continue to defy solution. Shortages of affordable housing pop up repeatedly as the city's No. 1 challenge. For decades, working-class blacks lived in alley communities that "became a notorious feature of Washington's urban landscape," the authors write. The city experienced repeated waves of what we would call gentrification - and accompanying displacement - that transformed Georgetown in the 1920s, and Foggy Bottom and Capitol Hill (for the first time) in the 1950s and 1960s. A journalist who investigated D.C. schools in 1954 reached a conclusion that would apply today: People were working hard to make integration succeed, but city leaders needed to improve housing, urban development and the economy if the District hoped to avoid becoming a place "where only the very poor and the very rich continue to live in the heart of the city."
Blacks aren't the only group to have fought prejudice. The city's history includes battles for fair treatment for low-income whites - especially what was once a sizable Irish American community - as well as for Latinos and Asian Americans. But the book's main focus remains on the dynamics between whites and blacks, and on differences between elites and the lower classes within the African-American community.
The book offers a smorgasbord of historical tidbits. Segregation rules were uneven after World War I, when blacks could shop at Garfinckel's and other downtown department stores but could not try on the clothes. The civil rights movement in the 1950s got an unexpected lift by reviving enforcement of the "forgotten laws" - anti-discrimination statutes passed during Reconstruction that were ignored for decades but never actually repealed. In the destructive 1968 riots, Giant grocery stores fared better than Safeway because the latter company had a worse reputation for treating blacks.
The book feels authoritative, but one omission was surprising. It mentions only in passing the approval of the 23rd Amendment, which empowered District residents to vote in presidential elections. By contrast, the discussion of one of the city's most controversial figures - four-time mayor Marion Barry - is thorough and evenhanded. On the plus side, he and other black activists who entered District government in the late 1970s made it more representative of the city's diverse population. They redistributed wealth through public jobs and city contracts. But some of his aides and friends padded their wallets, public services deteriorated, and the city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. The authors conclude that "the man whom many District residents entrusted with their hopes ultimately let them down."
"Chocolate City" aims to be constructive rather than despairing. It says its story is "not of blame and resignation, but of action and resilience." The book seems likely to become an important reference for the city's history. At nearly 500 pages of text, it is not a quick read. But it is a well-paced narrative portraying both how the capital city exemplified the nation's racial sins and how citizens of good conscience worked to erase them.
A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial
By James Reston Jr.
Arcade. 304 pp. $24.99
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Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been so successful that one almost forgets the ugly storms of racism and misogyny with which opponents of the design fought the young architect more than 35 years ago. The contest over the memorial, which ultimately triumphed with the public, has become a convenient metaphor for healing whenever Vietnam is discussed. And Lin's success has reinforced a popular but shopworn narrative about the lonely artist with a vision fighting and prevailing over philistinism. But it's also a trope, a reflexive rhetorical off-ramp whenever the conversation about Vietnam, and the still-treacherous cultural fault lines exposed by our wars in Southeast Asia, becomes too uncomfortable. At the end of Ken Burns' Vietnam War television documentary, the director made the obligatory reference to Lin's masterpiece. Of course he did. The memorial is now connected to the war rather like "bless you" is connected to sneezing.
James Reston Jr.'s "A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial" recounts the bitter debate over Lin's design and the contest between Lin and Frederick Hart, who was commissioned to make the memorial more appealing to traditionalists with the addition of a bronze statue known as "Three Soldiers." Lin's 1981 plan for a reticent form, in which the names of the fallen were inscribed on reflective stone panels set into a V-shaped wall, was misunderstood and mischaracterized by some veterans who felt their sacrifice should be honored with a more conventional memorial. Opportunistic political figures exploited the veterans' grievance, vilified Lin in vile, racist terms, and called for scrapping her design, which had won first place in an open, anonymous and professionally administered public contest. In the end, supporters of Hart and traditionalism prevailed over good taste, and Hart's statue has permanently disfigured the memorial since it was installed in 1984.
This transpired during the early years of the Reagan administration, which was morning in America for demagogues such as Interior Secretary James Watt (who resigned after referring to the members of a departmental panel as "a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple"). Watt threw himself into the middle of the controversy, backing what would have been a ridiculous "compromise": Lin's memorial walls would frame Hart's statue, with a giant flagpole on the ground above the apex. In the end, a better but still bad solution was found. Hart, who had placed third in the initial competition, got his chance to muck up Lin's design, but the statue was placed on the periphery of the memorial, as if his three realistically rendered soldiers were encountering Lin's "rift in the earth" like an enemy squadron emerging from the forest.
Reston retells the story dramatically, dredging up material that many of the players in this drama might wish to remain forgotten. Lin's design emerged from classwork at Yale, and an early iteration included a series of large stone slabs, toppled over on one another like a line of dominoes terminating at the intersection of the two walls. Classroom critique led to the elimination of that rather clumsy element, which was, perhaps, a metaphor for the war and the "domino theory" that compelled U.S. engagement and escalation. But the professor who led Lin's class "would resent her ingratitude for all he and his class had done for her." During the contentious political process of getting the memorial approved, Lin emerges as admirably tough but sometimes her own worst enemy.
But Lin was young and new to the ways of Washington. Her sins were minor compared with the machinations and ugliness of Hart. A fast-rising artist who had been commissioned at a young age to design the tympanum over the central doors of the National Cathedral, Hart was working in a long, historical tradition of realistic representation. At a time when most of the rest of the art world considered that kind of work retardataire, Hart had built a solid reputation, good connections and formidable champions, and he was a favorite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund founder, Jan Scruggs, even before the decision to hold an open contest was made. Hart may well have felt cheated when he lost to Lin, and he certainly conducted himself like a sore loser.
"Lin's memorial is intentionally not meaningful," he said, calling it "elitist." That word in aesthetic debates is simply mudslinging. But Hart was slinging with gusto. "People say you can bring what you want to Lin's memorial. But I call that brown bag aesthetics. I mean you better bring something because there ain't nothing being served."
His allies were even more despicable. Tom Carhart, a lawyer, veteran and author, said the memorial should bear the inscription "designed by a gook." Ross Perot, who had contributed generously to the funding of the memorial, called her an "egg roll." The novelist Mark Helprin, in a letter to Hart, called Lin "that little fluffball" and said that Hart's statue had "pulled her chestnuts out of the fire and gave meaning to her otherwise cynical gravestone." The National Review deemed Lin's work "Orwellian glop."
Lin was forced to compromise, and the memorial has been weaker ever since, and will be further weakened if plans to build a superfluous high-tech visitor's center nearby proceed. Reston has no comment on that, which is unfortunate, given how destructive the new building will be to the Mall and the memorial. Still, much of Lin's vision was finally realized, a small miracle given the forces arrayed against it. When it opened, no senior member of the Reagan administration attended. When Hart's statue was installed a few years later, the president himself came and addressed the crowd. Lin received $20,000 for winning the competition; Hart demanded $330,000 for his statue.
Reston's own view of all this isn't entirely clear. He is evenhanded in laying out the history of the debate, but he also positions himself as an outsider to what he deems an insider's art discourse. He opens one chapter with what seems a snide slap at professional design review, including the respected and venerable Fine Arts Commission: "The art world was not about to lie down and accept a political invasion into its sacrosanct dominion. What did politicians and veterans know about high art anyway?" About the placement of the memorial, always a contentious decision, he writes: "The guardians of Washington's public spaces were stingy in ceding ground in central Washington." Indeed, they are. The creation of open space on the Mall, essential to the symbolism of modern Washington, cost too much pain and expense to clutter it up anytime someone proposes a new monument or memorial.
The book concludes with an extended "Author's Reflection" in which Reston tells the gripping and tragic story of a friend's death in Vietnam. The emotional power of this pendant chapter gives the book a strange hybrid character, as if it were two books in one. But it also serves as an elliptical take on the ugliness of the memorial debate. Reston concludes with a conversation he had with a prominent Vietnamese professor and former government official. The author asks why the Vietnamese today don't resent the Americans more, because they fought only to get the Americans out. "Our patriotism is like a lump of charcoal," he writes, paraphrasing his interlocutor: "If you light it, it burns very hot. ... But when it is over, it is over, and we focus on peace and development and rebuilding."
Not the Americans. We keep fighting, including bitter wars over aesthetics that are, in the end, merely proxies for the same old thing: Do white men run the world and write its history? Or can a rift in the earth open up new possibilities?
The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics
By Jim Shepard
Tin House. 272 pp. Paperback, $15.95
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Pay close attention to the subtitle of Jim Shepard's smart, stimulating new book, "The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics." In these 10 pieces, first published a decade ago in the Believer magazine, you won't find reflections on what we ordinarily think of as political movies - "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," say, or "Primary Colors." Rather, Shepard discusses films such as "Badlands," "GoodFellas" and "Lawrence of Arabia," in which few if any politicians are portrayed, but which highlight certain character traits that shape our politics. Above all, he focuses on "the power and resilience of the lies we tell ourselves as a collective."
Take, for example, "Badlands" (1973), the first feature directed by Terrence Malick, in which Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek play young killers. Based on the 1958 rampage of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, the movie is narrated by Spacek's character, Holly, who has a knack for detaching herself from the mayhem. For example, while the camera shows her companion, Kit (Sheen), brutalizing a cow, Holly savors a compliment he paid her: "He'd never met a 15-year-old girl who behaved more like a grown-up and wasn't all giggly." Kit is even more sunnily superficial, a perverse throwback to that standard Western-movie hero, "the affable man with the gun." "Think about our conception of ourselves in terms of our foreign policy," Shepard goes on. "We may screw up, we may blunder about, but we always mean well. Any harm done to others is either unforeseen or couldn't have been avoided. Our hearts are in the right place, even if we act as though they aren't."
In an essay on Italian American mob movies, Shepard prefers Martin Scorsese's "GoodFellas" to Francis Ford Coppola's vaunted "The Godfather" and "The Godfather II." Shepard finds fault with the "rosy glow [cast] backward" by the Godfather films, which evoke a kind of Thugs' Golden Age when a code of honor centered on family loyalty. In "GoodFellas," the only value is power. "If you got out of line, you got whacked," one character observes. "But sometimes, even if people didn't get out of line, they got whacked." This shrugging off of arbitrary brutality strikes Shepard as truer to the way gangsters actually behave, and he draws analogies with the politics of the day, especially the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. After citing excuses for it made by Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, Shepard singles out the revealing explanation given by an official at the American Enterprise Institute: "Every ten years or so the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
Shepard, a novelist and short-story writer who teaches creative writing and film at Williams College, keeps up his attacks on the Bush administration in a piece contrasting David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" with Werner Herzog's "Aguirre, the Wrath of God." T.E. Lawrence's unlikely career puts Shepard in mind of guess-who. "For Lawrence, as for George W. Bush," Shepard writes, "his lack of aptitude for nearly everything seemed to be part of what convinced him of his greatness: he clearly wasn't made for ordinary tasks. So perhaps he was made for (BEGIN ITAL)extraordinary(END ITAL) tasks."
By now, it probably goes without saying that if you are a conservative, this book is probably not for you. But even for unregenerate lefties, the last and longest piece in the book may come as a welcome change of pace. Paying scant attention to politics, Shepard analyzes "The Vanishing," a Dutch thriller from 1988.
"The Vanishing" gets its title from the disappearance of a young woman who is driving through France with her boyfriend. They stop at a gas station. She goes to the bathroom, he stays with the car, she never comes back. The boyfriend, Rex, is so distraught that he plasters the region with missing-person signs and keeps searching for her year after year. We soon learn part of what happened: She was abducted. The rest of the story is left for Rex - now our eyes and ears - to unearth.
Shepard emphasizes the aspect of the film that makes it more than just exciting: the profoundly creepy relationship that develops between Rex and the kidnapper. This is a fine essay about a haunting masterpiece, but I think Shepard missed a trick. The director, George Sluizer, remade "The Vanishing" a decade later in English, starring Jeff Bridges. "About that second version," Shepard writes, "the less said the better." But "The Vanishing II" (if you will) exemplifies just about everything that's wrong with the stock Hollywood approach to moviemaking - a topic Shepard might have done well to address.
As our new president continues to make fresh breakthroughs in reckless buffoonery, it can be tempting to cast "a rosy glow backward" on Bush and his policies. In this astringent and witty collection, Shepard argues convincingly that to do so would be a travesty.
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Drabelle, a former contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World, writes frequently on movies.
His Other Life: Searching for My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams
By Melanie McCabe
New Orleans. 252 pp. $19.95 paperback
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I was only 16 years old when my father died. Shortly after the funeral, I sat with my mother and peppered her with questions about this man who had been taken away from me too soon. I knew him only as Daddy, in that limited way a child knows a parent, and I longed to create a fuller picture of who he had been before I was born.
That day my mother revealed to me a secret that my father had wanted to keep hidden from my sister and me: He had been married before my mother, for 12 years. This fact was both astonishing and tantalizing. I badgered Mom for every tidbit she might share. She let the story slip out in pieces. Something had gone wrong in my dad's first marriage. The woman had died in 1951 in some mysterious way, in the company of another man. Her name had been Hazel Kramer before she became Hazel McCabe. Mom added, seemingly as an afterthought, "I know that she used to be Tennessee Williams' girlfriend."
I was thrilled at this revelation. Two years later, when Williams' "Memoirs" came out, I raced to get a copy, fascinated to find my father mentioned as the man who had stolen Hazel away, breaking young Tom Williams' heart. My dad had been a wonderful and devoted father, but the picture of him as "the other man," capable of stealing another fellow's girl, was not the image I held. The story turned him into someone far more intriguing than I had ever thought he was. I savored this tangential brush with fame, and years later, as a high school teacher, I enjoyed introducing my students to "A Streetcar Named Desire" and milking my juicy backstory for all it was worth.
For a long time, I knew nothing beyond this. Then, in 2013, a friend asked if I knew that in one of Williams' late plays, there was a character named Terrence McCabe - my father's name. Excited, I obtained a copy of "The Red Devil Battery Sign" to learn that the character McCabe is something of a villain. He becomes romantically involved with the beloved daughter of the main character, King Del Rey - a relationship that King disparages when he learns of it. King feels betrayed by his daughter and by this relationship that developed without his knowledge. The parallels between what the character McCabe does and what Williams must have perceived that my father had done by marrying Hazel were striking. Was this what had motivated Williams to name this character after Dad? Had he held onto bitter feelings about my father all those many years?
My friend's casual question launched an investigation into the past that took on for me the power of a mythic quest. Understanding what had happened between Dad, Hazel and Tom became an obsession as I researched each night into the wee hours, long past a sensible bedtime. I didn't know when I began that I would end up writing a book, "His Other Life: Searching for My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams." I only knew that at that moment in my life, during a rocky period following a broken marriage and during the terminal illness of my sister, the past and its secrets felt like safer territory to explore than the current terrain.
I delved into Ancestry.com, starting more than 40 family trees, trying to track down living children and grandchildren of long-dead people who had played a part in the story. I sought and obtained Hazel's will, which revealed additional mysteries. For one, who was this man - Russell Henderson Burke - to whom she had left a small fortune in money and jewelry? Was he her lover? Had he played a part in the breakup of Dad and Hazel's marriage? I traveled to Chicago to access two court cases Hazel had brought in a challenge to her grandmother's will. I unearthed a lengthy State Department file about her tragic death in Mexico City. Hazel died from a lethal mixture of Seconal and alcohol, but there is some dispute about whether it was an accident, suicide or even murder. The man who was with her at the time of her death was questioned by the police and ultimately released. Mexican newspaper accounts I found at the Library of Congress insinuated that the man knew more about the death than he was saying.
I combed through various Williams archives, sought out alumni offices for old records and made an exhaustive study of my father's writings. My father was an economist, but from the time I was a little girl, I remember falling asleep to the nightly clatter of his Royal typewriter as he wrote short stories, plays and two full-length books. I have wondered how much of my dad's writing pursuits were motivated by his envy of Williams' success. Sadly for Dad, his work never found publishers, though I have kept all of it that I could find. In my Google searches, I turned up a play Dad wrote that was maintained by the New York Public Library. Paying for a copy of it turned out to be a very lucky move, as the play is a barely fictionalized account of his last year with Hazel before they separated.
Scholars who have delved deeply into Williams' background seem to believe that Hazel disappeared from his life once she married my father. But this turns out to be untrue. Dad and Hazel continued to associate with Williams whenever they visited St. Louis, between 1935 and 1940, the period right before his major success with "The Glass Menagerie." Once they even gave him a ride to Illinois and spent an evening together before parting ways. In an album that belonged to Hazel, I discovered a photograph of young Tom, probably taken on that evening.
I learned that Hazel had sought Tom's help in the late 1940s when she challenged her grandmother's estate and that they met up in New York. Williams later expressed guilt that he had not provided Hazel the help she needed, as he was then involved with his longtime lover, Frank Merlo, and busy with his career. The memory of Hazel would haunt Williams for years, and, according to Lyle Leverich, in his well-respected biography of Williams called "Tom," Williams confided to his mother that the beautiful redhead had been the greatest love of his life. Characters modeled after her appeared in numerous plays and short stories, including "Battle of Angels," "Orpheus Descending," "Spring Storm," "The Accent of a Coming Foot" and "The Field of Blue Children." I even found an original typescript of one of Williams' last plays, "Something Cloudy, Something Clear," in which Hazel, appearing as herself, discusses her marriage to my father. In a conversation with the Tom character, (later renamed August in the published version of the play), Hazel reminds Tom that she once told him she had been happy with my father for only a short time. Seeing this, I was glad my father had never read this play, published as it was some 10 years after his death.
What I learned about Williams is significant, but what I discovered about Hazel and my father has had a more profound impact on me. I encountered the woman I originally pegged as a heartbreaker and came to empathize with her over the troubles of her short, tragic life. Of even greater weight is that this journey brought my father back to me - not just the Daddy I had revered and lost, but the man, with all his flaws, whom I never had a chance to know.
---
McCabe is the author of "His Other Life: Searching for My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams." She is an English teacher at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Va.
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Official sources were mum last week about a Capital One commercial filming in San Antonio but social media seemed to provide one of the answers they wouldn't: whether the stars of previous ads like Charles Barkley, Samuel L. Jackson and Spike Lee would be in town.
Downtown San Antonio became a hot spot for celebrity sightings over the weekend, with fans spotting all three.
The San Antonio Film Commission confirmed Capital One was filming in town last week, though a specific location was not disclosed and the financial corporation declined to comment.
RELATED: Capital One filming commercial in San Antonio
No one has confirmed that the stars were in town for the filming but Jackson himself provided more insight into what's going on. On Dec. 2, the actor posted a photo of The Pearl with a full moon looming over it.
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He included the hashtags "#capitalone," #3amigos" and "#roadtofinalfour" in his caption.
The three celebrities have starred in Capital One commercials in the past. The NCAA 2018 Final Four, sponsored by Capital One presumably what Jackson was referring to in his caption will begin in March.
Regardless of why the stars where in town, fans were surprised to catch them at spots around The Pearl and eating beside them at popular restaurants like Osteria Il Sogno. They were quick to share their grazes with greatness on social media.
Check out their time in the Alamo City in the gallery above.
Madalyn Mendoza is a digital reporter for MySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| mmendoza@mysa.com | Twitter: @MaddySkye
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Moxie is defined as a "force of character, determination, or nerve."
Moxie's Grill & Bar, the new restaurant that opened last week across from the Galleria, hopes to be a culinary force that strikes a chord with Houston diners.
A popular Canadian chain opened its second U.S. location (the first was in Dallas only months ago) at 5000 Westheimer in an airy two-level space that was once home to Canyon Cafe that shuttered last year.
READ ALSO: Grand opening of Canadian bar in Houston turns into hot party
While poutine, a national dish of Canada, is among the appetizers, Moxie's isn't a restaurant offering Canadian fare. "We're really a melting pot of cultures in one menu," said Brandon Thordarson, the brand's executive chef.
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For Houstonians the Moxie's menu will ring familiar with global flavors invested in dishes such as tuna poke, Korean fried cauliflower, tempura shrimp cones, spicy tuna roll, chipotle mango chicken on quinoa, red Thai curry bowl with jasmine rice, beef vindaloo with curry-buttered naan, and chicken and rigatoni tossed in a mushroom and madeira cream sauce.
There are dishes created specifically for the Houston market including guacamole and chips, blackened mahi mahi with chorizo and corn hash, a fried crispy chicken sandwich, and steak frites with chimichurri. The house prime rib also was upgraded to USDA Prime cut, a nod to Houston's discerning beef palate.
The Moxie's menu is rounded out with a selection of salads, steaks, burgers, and sandwiches.
The beverage program also has a stronger nod to Houston tastebuds as well as local ingredients, said Kim Spence, sommelier and national beverage director. The list of five signature margaritas includes Straight Outta Cozumel (made with Don Julio blanco tequila, Texas orange juice, fresh basil, pineapple simple syrup, and fresh lime juice) as well as a tableside jalapeno margarita made with Olmeca Altos Plata tequila, Texas orange juice, simple syrup, and fresh lime juice. The cocktails list also includes an avocado gimlet (rosemary- and olive-infused gin, avocado, apple-flavored liqueur, simple syrup, and fresh lime juice), a grapefruit mojito, and the Signature Caesar, billed as "Canada's best-selling cocktail," made with Tito's and clamato juice and garnished with a house-made pickled vegetables skewer.
Locally, the restaurant's managment will include Drew Smith as executive chef and Allan Hannay as general manager.
Hannay described Moxie's as a "premium casual restaurant that puts the fun back in the premium sector of dining." Part of that fun, he said, is a lively atmosphere with a DJ on the lower level and serving food at later hours from most Galleria restaurants (Sunday through Wednesday the restaurant, including the kitchen, is open until midnight; Thursday through Saturday until 2 a.m.).
Physically, the restaurant is imposing at 11,000 square feet it can accommodate up to 430 guests including patio seating. The two-level configuration includes a downstairs bar with seating and the main second-level space with a generous bar, open kitchen, main dining room, and a curved wrap-around patio.
Moxie's Grill & Bar, 5000 Westheimer, 346-571-6164; us.moxies.com
WASHINGTON The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will not issue final regulations for financial responsibility requirements for certain hardrock mining facilities, the agency announced Dec. 1.
After careful analysis of public comments, the statutory authority, and the record for this rulemaking, EPA is confident that modern industry practices, along with existing state and federal requirements address risks from operating hardrock mining facilities, said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Additional financial assurance requirements are unnecessary and would impose an undue burden on this important sector of the American economy and rural America, where most of these mining jobs are based.
EPA published proposed regulations under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA, or Superfund) on Jan. 11, and the public comment period closed on July 11.
EPA has decided not to issue final regulations because the risks associated with these facilities operations are addressed by existing federal and state programs and industry practices. EPA was under a court-ordered deadline to take final action on this rulemaking by Dec. 1. The decision not to issue final rules under CERCLA section 108(b) will be published in the Federal Register.
The success of Nevadas robust mine bonding program protects public safety and our environment and ensures our critical mining industry can operate with certainty, said Gov. Brian Sandoval in a statement. I applaud the EPA for their thoughtful approach and thorough review of the proposed rule, for seeking comments from a diverse set of stakeholders and ultimately, for making the right decision. Todays action by the Administrator recognizes the reality that the states have been capably regulating mine bonding without interference from Washington and should be allowed to continue to do so.
EPA has analyzed the need for financial responsibility requirements under CERCLA section 108(b) based on the degree and duration of risk associated with the production, transportation, treatment, storage and disposal of hazardous substances from current hardrock mining operations, as well the risk of taxpayer funded cleanups at facilities operating under modern management practices and modern environmental regulations. That risk is identified by examining: the management of hazardous substances at such facilities; federal and state regulatory controls on that management and federal and state financial responsibility requirements; and, the payment experience of the fund in responding to releases.
EPA concluded the degree and duration of risk associated with the modern production, transportation, treatment, storage or disposal of hazardous substances by the hardrock mining industry does not present a level of risk of taxpayer-funded response actions that warrant imposition of financial responsibility requirements under CERCLA for this sector. This determination reflects EPAs interpretation of the statute, EPAs evaluation of the record for the proposed rule, and the approximately 11,000 public comments received by EPA on this rulemaking.
The American Exploration & Mining Association is pleased that EPA, under Administrator Pruitt, undertook a legitimate, science and fact based analysis. EPA has finally recognized that the robust financial assurance system in place works. said Laura Skaer, AEMA executive director. No mine approved by the Bureau of Land Management or the United States Forest Service since 1990 has been placed on the Superfund list. This undeniable fact, along with robust financial assurance requirements, stringent regulatory requirements and the industrys commitment to the highest environmental standards is what made todays decision the right one.
State mining and environmental regulators, as well as other federal agencies and the regulated community and financial sectors, commented that the proposed requirements would potentially interfere with state and local mining regulations, were unnecessary, and would be difficult to implement. This decision does not in any way affect EPAs authority to take appropriate response actions under CERCLA.
The National Mining Association also welcomed the decision, saying that the proposed final rules stemmed from environmental group litigation seeking to use CERCLA to impose additional, crippling financial and regulatory burdens on the mining industry.
When litigation is used as a tool to attempt to force the government into unnecessary action against an industry, the result is bad policy, said Hal Quinn, NMA president and CEO. Todays action shows that reason can prevail. Modern, advanced mining practices coupled with existing state and federal environmental and financial assurance requirements comprehensively cover the same risks contemplated under the CERCLA program.
Great Basin Resource Watch, a nonprofit regional environmental justice organization, was one of the plaintiffs in the years-old litigation via Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm. GBRW Executive Director John Hadder said that the group hasnt yet discussed officially what will happen next but that the fight isnt over.
I guess the bottom line is that well be back in court, he said. We feel that it is needed, and well probably be back in court.
Nevada Mining Association President Dana Bennett said she appreciated the EPA not tampering with Nevadas already successful bonding program.
"If enacted, the proposed rule would have created an unnecessary and duplicative federal program in Nevada, which would have discouraged domestic mineral production, limited future mining investments, and devastated rural Nevada economies," she said in a statement. "The Silver State has long protected its public lands, in partnership with federal land management agencies, through continuous oversight of mining operations and vigorous enforcement of state and federal environmental laws. In addition, mining companies are required to bond for the reclamation and remediation of mining sites, and Nevada regulators currently hold nearly$3 billion in financial assurance bonds. The proposed CERCLA rule would have more than doubled the bonding costs for mines without adding any extra benefit to Nevadas environment."
Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., also remarked on the decision.
The Environmental Protection Agencys decision today is a win for Nevadas mining industry, which helps employ nearly 25,000 workers in our state alone, he said. The CERCLA rule would have discouraged investment, development, and job creation in the very communities that rely on this industry.
This story has been updated to include a statement from the Nevada Mining Association.
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A 13-year-old East Texas girl who ran away last week was found safe in Mexico late Sunday, according to the Harris County Sheriff's Office.
Mexican authorities and the FBI pitched in to track down Ashlee Hattermann during the two-day hunt that led officials to Laredo and eventually to Mexico City.
The teen disappeared Friday morning after her mother dropped her off at Thornton Middle School. A few of the girl's friends saw her that day, but at some point she walked off campus and went to a church, where she persuaded a good Samaritan to buy her a bus ticket.
"She convinced a woman she was trying to get back to Laredo to get to her family," said Harris County Sheriff's Office spokesman Thomas Gilliland.
The teen hopped on a Greyhound headed south to Laredo on Friday afternoon.
READ MORE: City of Laredo employee accused of using work vehicle for personal gain
The next morning, the good Samaritan saw Facebook posts about the missing girl and came to police after realizing she'd been duped.
Authorities tracked down security footage from the Katy bus station showing the girl getting ready to board a bus headed south. Initially, authorities tracked her to Laredo but couldn't confirm she'd crossed the border until mid-day Sunday.
"We are working with Mexican authorities in an effort to locate her in Mexico, but we are also seeking any information anyone in the United States may have which may help us find her," FBI spokeswoman Michelle Lee said in an email.
Although Ashlee left school early in the day, the Hattermanns didn't find out their daughter was missing till late Friday afternoon, when the school called to say she'd only attended one class that day.
"The last thing we heard is that she crossed the border into Mexico," her mother, Tiffany Hattermann said Sunday morning. "We got a tip from somebody in Laredo."
Ashlee's parents feared she was headed south to find a man she met on the internet.
"There's been an ongoing case since May of last school year when she was talking online with a sexual predator," Hattermann said. "It was investigated by the Harris County Sheriff's Office and unfortunately they never followed up with it."
Gilliland disputed that.
"It has been investigated," he said. "It wasn't just put on a shelf."
RELATED: Laredo PD looking for man seen driving stolen F-150
After finding out about the messages last spring, Ashlee's parents took away her phone and internet access. But now they think she may have managed to stay in contact with the man using a secret second phone.
The worried Katy couple had no indication there was anything amiss in recent weeks, though.
"There was nothing wrong when I dropped her off at school," her mother said. "The only thing that threw me off was she told me she loved me when she got out of the car."
Ashlee is described as 5-foot-7 and 110 pounds with brown hair and blue eyes. She may be wearing glasses. There was no Amber Alert issued, but activation requires indication of an abduction, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
"I know they're saying he's a human trafficker but we don't have anything saying that yet," Gilliland said. "Right now, we're still treating this as a runaway."
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security pitched in as officials plastered the girl's image across the internet and saturated media near the border.
Finally, around 11 p.m., authorities in Mexico spotted the teen and alerted the sheriff's office before picking her up to meet her father, who was already in Mexico City.
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Dr. Corinne Stern spoke to Commissioners Court on Monday not in her capacity as Webb County medical examiner, but as a resident of Los Botines.
For months she and many of her neighbors have been terrorized by a pack of dogs that have killed and injured a number of their livestock. Stern showed commissioners photos of several of the goats she had raised, dead, covered in blood, with bones protruding and limbs missing due to attacks from these dogs.
"My goats are vaccinated, they are de-wormed, I have a fly control program. My animals are fully vetted and very well cared for. But I still could not protect them from this," Stern said.
On Nov. 11, Stern lost six goats, three of which were pregnant, she said. Twenty-one others have been injured, and the death toll could rise.
Stern said she raises cabritos and show goats for 4H. One of the goats that was killed was a family pet, raised on a bottle.
READ MORE: City of Laredo employee accused of using work vehicle for personal gain
Brothers Mario and Jose Aguero raise livestock in Los Botines as well. They told commissioners that the dog problem has been going on for at least six months, and it's escalating on a daily basis. They asked for animal control presence in the area.
Several chapters in the Texas Health and Safety Code stipulate that this problem is the sheriff's responsibility, Stern said.
Sheriff Martin Cuellar said Stern expects his department to perform miracles. In order to fully administer animal control, the Sheriff's Office would need funding for cages, equipment and a place to take these dogs, he said.
"The only time that we take a dog in to the pound is if he bites a human. That's the way it is. That's the only time that we do that," Cuellar said.
For the last seven years, since the county terminated their contract with the city's Animal Care Services, Commissioners Court has dropped the ball, Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina said, and to point a finger at the sheriff is unfair.
RELATED: Laredo PD looking for man seen driving stolen F-150
Rhonda Tiffin, the county's planning director, said she believes there's been a misunderstanding in the Sheriff's Office. If an animal bites a human or another animal, the sheriff has a responsibility under the county's rabies prevention order to respond, she said.
"And that includes confiscating the animal, euthanizing it, and sending it off for specimen. So that does include other animals," Tiffin said. "... And we certainly should start doing that right away."
Also, landowners may not be aware that they have a legal right to protect their animals, which means anyone who witnesses an animal attacking livestock or fowl can shoot it without any responsibility, Tiffin said.
"And they don't even need to have a hunting license. They even put that in the statute," she said.
Tijerina said the the county needs to enter into talks with either the city or Laredo Animal Protective Society to re-establish animal control in these rural areas of the county. Commissioners Court could not take any action on this issue at Monday's meeting.
Julia Wallace may be reached at 956-728-2543 or jwallace@lmtonline.com
A Mexican national has pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge for his role in importing methamphetamine into the United States, Acting U.S. Attorney Abe Martinez announced Monday.
Omar Martinez-Cervantes, 34, arrived at the Lincoln-Juarez Bridge Port of Entry in Laredo on Oct. 8, driving a Chevrolet Cruze. At that time, he claimed to be driving to Houston to visit his family.
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Indivisible Houston along with Texas Organizing Project, Tax March Houston, Pantsuit Republic and Houston Handmaids, rallied outside Ted Cruz's office on Monday, Nov. 27, as part of a National Day of Action protesting the recent Senate tax bill.
Republicans revealed the $1.5 trillion plan early November, which some groups say will produce a significant tax cut for corporations.
Daniel Cohen, president of Indivisible Houston, said the organization and other supporters against the tax bill have been fighting for months.
"Once it looked certain that the House would pass the Tax Scam, there needed to be a concentrated effort to voice our opposition," Cohen said.
Cohen used the term "Tax Scam" to describe the bill that plays favor to business by providing the significant tax cut, which he added that the plan burdens students, teachers, homeowners and workers of all wages with a tax increase that are to come.
"This is a reverse Robin Hood that will steal from the poor and give to the rick," Cohen said.
He added that the organization believes this tax bill would build a bankroll for donors on the backs of poor kids and seniors.
The Senate bill would lower the current 35 percent tax rate for business down to 20 percent.
However, the "Tax Cut and Jobs Act" serves more than just a tax bill, it would also provide changes to health care and make changes to taxes at the state and local level.
Cohen said Cruz's staff allowed four of protesters to go into his office and discuss their concerns compared to John Cornyn's office, which he said allowed everyone who was out protesting the ability to sit and air their grievances.
"It's pretty ridiculous that the senator refuses to talk to us," Cohen said. "He even manipulated the facts to claim he has had town halls this year when he absolutely has not."
Organizing and consistently being present are what Cohen said hopes their effort can "kill this terrible tax plan and start over."
Cohen believes that economic growth and tax relief should be provided to the working class and middle class and not the top tenth of the top one percent of billionaires, millionaires and mega corporations.
"This plan gets rid of the mortgage deduction, the medical expense deduction, student loan interest deductions, teacher materials deductions and makes grad research stipends taxable," Cohen said.
Cohen highlighted many of the administration's policies and legislation produced since President Trump assumed his seat, but he calls this tax bill the worst that could come out of the administration.
"This White House has put forth some horrible policies, including the Muslim Ban and the attack on healthcare," Cohen said. "We're looking at a direct attack on working families, particularly seniors and kids."
President Trump ran on many platforms, one of which was promising major tax cuts, which Cohen said is what we are seeing and with this specific push to present before Christmas is what he called, "a big fat giftwrapped giveaway to corporations."
Cohen said Indivisible knows that the real impact will show come next November with constituents angry and plenty of grassroots activists putting in more work than usual, proves that many people want change.
WASHINGTON - New toll lanes kicked off Monday morning along a 10-mile stretch of a key commuting route in suburban Washington. At first blush, the rates seemed rather high at times.
The estimated toll on Interstate 66 for one-way travel from the Beltway in northern Virginia to Washington before 8 a.m. was $28.50. About 8:40 a.m., the toll was $34.50.
The rates are variable depending on traffic conditions. Officials with Virginia's Department of Transportation said the $34.50 rate was the "peak of the peak rate."
"It is a dynamic toll," said Jenny McCord, a spokeswoman for VDOT. "It will vary and fluctuate based on the demand." Other times, she noted, the toll was in the low $20s. The toll changes every six minutes.
The new toll lanes run, which Rosslyn, Virginia, to Interstate 495, are meant to help alleviate traffic along one of the most congested roadways in the region. Solo drivers can use the new high occupancy toll lanes during rush hours as long as they're willing to pay the toll.
There is no cap on the toll pricing. The price changes as congestion rises and decrease as congestion is less. The hours of the toll lanes are from 5:30 to 9:30 a.m. eastbound and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. westbound, Monday through Friday. The lanes are free to all drivers during off-peak hours and weekends.
Transportation leaders have said they expect the new tolls to encourage carpooling and to push more people to use mass transit. When tolling was talked about in 2015 and models on traffic and pricing were done, transportation officials had said that, on average, the price would average about $9 for the 10 variations of trips drivers could take on the highway.
Part of the reason toll prices can spike at any given time, Virginia officials said, is that the system bases rates on the volume and speed it is trying to maintain. On Monday, VDOT said the average speed was 57 mph, compared to 37 mph at roughly the same time a year ago.
McCord said transportation planners felt that the new toll had done its job - to help provide a more reliable trip. But at a cost.
On social media, drivr aged.
"Staff said in the hearings about I-66 toll lanes that the highest tools would be $9 from Vienna to DC? I paid $22 today. My neighbor paid $24. This is literally highway robbery," one driver noted on Twitter.
Offered another: "I-66? More like I-$66."
BEIJING - Reading headlines from the World Internet Conference in China, the casual reader might have come away a little confused. China was opening its doors to the global internet, some media outlets optimistically declared, while others said Beijing was defending its system of censorship and state control.
And perhaps most confusing of all, Apple's CEO Tim Cook stood up and celebrated China's vision of an open internet.
Say what?
China has more than 730 million internet users, boast the largest e-commerce market in the world, and consumers who enthusiastically embrace mobile digital technology. But it censors many foreign news websites and keeps most Western social media companies out.
The World Internet Conference held in the eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen is meant to promote China's vision of "cyber-sovereignty' - the idea that governments all over the world should have the right to control what appears on the internet in their countries.
In practice, in China, that amounts to the largest system of censorship and digital surveillance in the world, where criticism of the Communist Party is sharply curtailed and can even land you in jail.
But that wasn't mentioned when Cook delivered a keynote speech on the opening day of the gathering Sunday.
"The theme of this conference - developing a digital economy for openness and shared benefits - is a vision we at Apple share," Cook said, in widely reported remarks. "We are proud to have worked alongside many of our partners in China to help build a community that will join a common future in cyberspace."
Chinese media welcomed Cook's endorsement, with the nationalist Global Times declaring in a headline that "Consensus grows at internet conference."
Alongside Cook in endorsing China's digital vision were officials from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Serbia, it noted.
Free speech and human rights advocates were less impressed.
"Cook's appearance lends credibility to a state that aggressively censors the internet, throws people in jail for being critical about social ills, and is building artificial intelligence systems that monitors everyone and targets dissent," Maya Wang at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong wrote in an email.
"The version of cyberspace the Chinese government is building is a decidedly dystopian one, and I don't think anyone would want to share in this 'common future.' Apple should have spoken out against it, not endorsed it."
And it wasn't just Cook who some critics accused of indulging in a little double-speak.
China's President Xi Jinping opened the conference written remarks that led to a flurry of arguably misleading headlines.
"The development of China's cyberspace is entering a fast lane," he said, in remarks read out by an official. "China's doors will only become more and more open."
Yet the audience was soon reminded that nothing that could possibly threaten the Communist Party would be allowed through those supposedly open doors.
China has tightened censorship and controls of cyberspace under Xi, with a new cybersecurity law requiring foreign firms to store data locally and submit to domestic surveillance.
Wang Huning, who serves as a member of the Communist Party's elite standing committee and is Xi's top ideologue, defended China's system and even suggested that more controls could be in the offing.
"China stands ready to develop new rules and systems of internet governance to serve all parties and counteract current imbalances," he said to the conference, according to Reuters.
But it was Cook's words that prompted the strongest reaction, coming after Apple has also come under fire for its actions in China.
In a written response to questions from Senators Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, last month, Apple said that it had removed 674 VPN apps from its app store in China this year - tools that allow users to circumvent censorship by routing traffic abroad - to comply with local laws. Skype was also removed from Apple's China store, the New York Times reported.
In August, Cook said Apple hadn't wanted to remove the apps, but had to follow local laws wherever it does business.
"We strongly believe that participating in markets and bringing benefits to consumers is in the best interests of folks there and in other countries as well," Cook said. "We believe in engaging in governments even when we disagree."
But Greatfire.org, a group that combats Chinese censorship, argued Apple's decision to agree to censorship put pressure on other companies to follow suit, and could even mean that Chinese citizens could ultimately be subjected to Chinese censorship when they travel abroad.
"It is undeniable that Tim Cook and Xi Jinping have a shared vision of the internet. Xi wants to be able to control all information and silence those who may threaten his leadership. Cook helps him with vast, unaccountable, implementation of censorship across Apple products," it wrote to The Washington Post.
Critics saw simple business calculations in Cook's appearance in Wuzhen.
"Cook Kisses the Ring,' Bloomberg columnist Tim Culpan wrote, arguing that Cook was "desperate to hold onto any remaining scraps of the China market" in the face of stiff competition from local rivals.
The head honchos of China's main digital and internet companies, Huawei, Baidu and Tencent, "ought to have been grinning like Cheshire cats," Culpan added, since censorship has kept foreign companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter out of China and served as a "handy little tool of trade protectionism."
Nor did it matter if Cook's tongue was in his cheek, for his presence at the conference, along with Google's Sundar Pichai and CISCO Systems' Chuck Robbins, not only gave legitimacy to the authorities but also sent a signal to domestic Chinese rivals that their turf is safe, Culpan wrote.
Rights group Freedom House last month branded China the worst abuser of internet freedom among 65 countries surveyed, followed by Syria and Ethiopia.
But in Wuzhen, that report was not about to be discussed.
Instead, a top state-backed Chinese think-tank declared that the host nation ranked fifth among 38 nations globally in standards of cyber governance, as it called for a 'democratic' internet governance system to eradicate inequalities that it said had marginalized developing nations.
"We should promote the establishment of a multinational, democratic and transparent global internet governance system," the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace Studies said in a report, according to Reuters.
London and Brussels failed to clinch a long-sought breakthrough on Brexit after a series of dramatic twists that saw a tentative deal derailed by the delicate question of the Irish border.
"It was not possible to reach a complete agreement today," European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters as glum negotiators looked on. Talks will resume this week and he's confident there will be a agreement that paves the way for trade talks to begin.
May traveled to Brussels on Monday to meet Juncker for what was meant to be a key lunch to hash out the details and tie loose ends. She interrupted the lunch to speak to the leader of the Northern Irish party that props up her government -- and which opposes the EU's plan for the island after Brexit.
Shortly after that phone call, May and Juncker came out to declare no deal and left without taking questions. The pound fell. Going into the meeting, British officials had been downplaying the chances of a breakthrough and pushed back against the EU's line that Monday was a deadline.
This was not how the script was meant to play out -- with a joint declaration of success expected and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar poised to make a statement at 2:30 p.m. Earlier in the day -- as May was on her way to the lunch -- chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier told a group of European lawmakers that a breakthrough was imminent.
They then told the world -- yet U.K. officials continued to call for caution.
To get to this turning point had required many concessions from May, whose own political fortunes changed from nine months ago -- when she triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty that set the clock on Britain's exit in March 2019. An ill-advised election in June saw May lose her majority and need to form an alliance with a Northern Irish party to stay in power.
As varying reports leaked out about the terms of the agreement on the controversial matter of the Irish border, the Democratic Unionist Party that props her up in parliament made some robust comments about its Brexit red lines. In May's current circumstances, they carry a lot weight.
The thought that an exception could be made for Northern Ireland also opened another can of worms. Scotland and London piped up to say that if Northern Ireland could stay in the single market then they why not them.
As the lunch dragged on, Ireland's Varadkar postponed facing the press as he awaited word from Brussels. A lectern had already been set up for a statement that never came.
Both sides were conciliatory when they spoke to reporters. They said discussions would continue and Juncker -- normally a U.K. critic -- even paid May a compliment. She's a "tough negotiator."
Even with this setback, the hope is still for a mid-December summit of EU leaders to conclude that Britain has achieved "sufficient progress" in this first phase of talks so that trade negotiations can start and the transition arrangement that business wants can be put in place. It's 17 months since the referendum and Britain leaves the bloc in 15 months, with or without a deal.
The Irish border was always going to be an intractable challenge that would require political will on all sides. The invisible border now is only possible because both Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland are members of the EU's single market and customs union. When the U.K. leaves the EU, Northern Ireland goes with it.
Another possible sticking block was the role of the European Court of Justice. The ECJ has totemic importance for the Brexit backers in May's Conservative Party, who see it as a symbol of lost sovereignty.
On the EU side, it's a possible deal-breaker as the veto-wielding European Parliament has made clear the court must have a role in protecting the rights of EU citizens living in the U.K. after Brexit. Neither side will be drawn into the specifics of why a deal fell through.
"We've been negotiating hard and a lot of progress has been made and on many of the issues there is a common understanding. On a couple of issues some differences do remain which require further negotiation and consultation," May said.
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Bloomberg's Dara Doyle contributed.
In recent weeks, Congress has grilled Twitter, Facebook and Google about their role in allowing foreign interests to place ads and articles intended to divide the electorate and spread false information during the 2016 election.
Now a number of people in and out of government are calling for federal regulation of social media.
Lay down some rules, the thinking goes, and we would be able to prevent the infestation of bots and fake news from our news feeds and ads. Democracy would be saved or, at least, foreign interference in our elections kept in check.
However, as someone who has studied and taught the First Amendment for decades, I would argue that if such regulations were enacted, the main victims would be not the purveyors of fake news, but our freedom of expression. In my view, the result would do far more damage to our democracy than any foreign misinformation campaign ever could.
Free speech being attacked from all sides
The First Amendment is under a lot of duress.
Arguably, its been that way since the Supreme Courts clear and present danger decision in 1919, which spelled out when limits on free speech could be lawful. It not only held that the government had an obligation to stop someone from falsely shouting fire in a theater, but also opened the gates to all manner of government violations of the First Amendment injunction that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.
These range from the FCCs Fairness Doctrine, which was upheld by the Supreme Court, that required broadcasters to present controversial issues in a balanced way (in the FCCs view), to the FCCs warning to radio broadcasters in 1971 not to play songs that glorified drug use, which actually had the effect of limiting the airplay of songs that critiqued drug culture.
Indeed, with the exception of Supreme Court decisions in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 and the Communications Decency Act in 1997, the American government has systematically increased its control of media.
The situation has gotten much worse over the past year. President Trump has tweeted about withholding the licenses of NBC affiliates and lashed out at other media not to his liking.
Although Trumps bluster about limiting and punishing media may be easy enough to deride, the fact that he is in the White House and has the ability to appoint FCC commissioners means his threats must be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, a theory of philosopher Karl Popper the paradox of tolerance is being widely cited as a justification for outlawing hate speech, notwithstanding the First Amendment. From his 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies, it says that tolerance defeats itself when it permits intolerant speech.
I studied Popper extensively while researching my first book, an anthology of essays about Poppers work. There are many aspects of Poppers philosophy to admire, but I dont believe the paradox of tolerance is among them.
To ban hate speech could turn our tolerant, democratic society into precisely the kind of state that hate speech is calling for: It could open up an opportunity for all sorts of speech to be dubbed hate speech.
A slippery slope
When regulating fake news on social media sites, theres the danger of the same sort of phenomenon taking place. And its exactly why the well-meaning hue-and-cry that the government needs to intervene and forbid social media sites from disseminating fake news or allowing accounts that are actually bots is so dangerous.
Fake news is nothing new. Centuries ago, anti-Semitic publications spread rumors that Jews murdered Christian children and drank their blood on holidays.
Over the past two years, social media have increased the amplitude and reach of fake news. But theres also been the ascension of a political figure Trump who has turned the tables by labeling any unwelcome news as fake.
The latter should be more than enough reason to reject calls for government censorship of fake news. After all, whos to say a government that determines whats fake wont simply follow Trumps lead, and suppress critical and truthful content under the guise that its fake?
Instead, social media networks could develop and implement algorithms for identifying and removing fake news by marshaling the same engines that spread fake news in the first place. These algorithms would not be administered by the government; rather, Facebook and other social media would be responsible.
Twitter has already made considerable progress flagging and removing accounts that spread Islamic State propaganda. Theres no reason to think that the same process cant be applied to Russian bots seeking to inflame political discord and therein damage Americas political system.
Such self-regulation is in the best interest of these media companies. It would increase the confidence of their users in what they encounter online. It would also have the added benefit of keeping government regulators at bay.
In the end, the ultimate antidote to fake news and bots is the rationality of the human mind.
As John Milton famously urged in his Areopagitica, if you let truth and falsity fight it out in the marketplace of ideas, human rationality will most likely choose the truth. Regulating what can enter that marketplace could impair or destroy this process, by inadvertently keeping truth from public awareness.
Rational thinkings ability to identify fake news is more than a Miltonian ideal: Its been demonstrated in a carefully conducted 2015 experiment. When given a small financial incentive, the subjects were able to identify fake news as fake, even if the fake news supported the political views of the subjects.
Indeed, rationality is deeply implicit in democracy itself. You cant have the latter without the former.
The key in combating fake news and kindred attacks on our body politic is to give our rationality maximum access to all information, including the truth. And in my view, this means resisting any attempts by government to limit the information that reaches us.
BRUSSELS - British and European Union leaders said they were nearing a divorce deal even as divisions within fractious Britain kept them just short of a final bargain in negotiations Monday.
The elements of the deal - which would be the most significant step in Britain's exit from the European Union since it officially filed papers in March - appeared to signal an acknowledgment by British negotiators that they have scant leverage in the negotiation. On issues ranging from what Britain will pay before exiting to a special status for Northern Ireland, British leaders were being pushed toward Europe's demands after long vowing otherwise.
A bargain would pave the way for London to start negotiating its future trade relationship with the remaining 27 EU nations. But the emerging terms of the agreement raised questions about how British Prime Minister Theresa May would convince her own divided public about the best way forward. On Monday, she was forced to leave a day of Brussels meetings with no deal in hand following sharp objections from political forces back home. She promised consultations in London.
The defeat was a reminder that the British prime minister is not just negotiating the exit with the Europeans but within her own party, with hard and soft Brexiteering Tories, and with Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and the London mayor.
The Brexit bill of up to $65 billion will anger pro-Brexit leaders who want Britain to crash out of the bloc without paying a cent, for example. A floated pledge that Northern Ireland would be kept in regulatory "alignment" with the EU to avoid rekindling sectarian violence there raised immediate questions from pro-EU Scottish and London leaders who asked why they could not have similar deals for themselves.
"We were narrowing our positions to a huge extent today thanks to the British prime minister," said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in brief remarks following the inconclusive lunchtime bargaining session. "This is not a failure, this is the start of the very last round. I'm very confident that we will reach an agreement in the course of this week."
May also tried to put a good face on the talks, which she had to interrupt for phone calls with furious political factions in London.
"Both sides have been working hard in good faith," May said. "I am also confident that we will conclude this positively."
If Britain is to move on to negotiating its future trade deal with Europe before the end of the year, the divorce bill needs to be approved by the 27 remaining EU leaders at a summit in Brussels that begins Dec. 14.
But that first depends on May being able to sell it at home. Following an electoral wipeout in June, she leads a minority government that depends on the support of a tiny but influential Northern Ireland party that on Monday appeared to veto any possibility of a special status for Northern Ireland. Irish leaders want to avoid imposing a hard border to preserve the Good Friday Agreement that quelled decades of violence.
May's partner there, Arlene Foster, the head of the Democratic Unionist Party, offered a blunt warning: "We have been very clear. Northern Ireland must leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the United Kingdom. We will not accept any form of regulatory divergence which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom."
Still, if May gives ground, that opens the door to other regions of Britain wanting the same deal.
"If one part of UK can retain regulatory alignment with EU and effectively stay in the single market (which is the right solution for Northern Ireland) there is surely no good practical reason why others can't," wrote Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on Twitter. London and Welsh leaders asked the same question.
At the center of the negotiations to this point has been the Brexit "divorce bill," settling the tab of what Britain owes the EU before talks can begin on future trade agreements.
Europe has insisted that the U.K. honor its financial commitments for budgets and spending going forward even after it leaves the union in March 2019. As a member of the European Union, Britain made commitments both toward short-term expenses and for long-term items such as the pensions of EU bureaucrats or building projects that are funded over many years.
Europe has insisted that Britain cannot just walk away. Juncker compared it to ordering a round of drinks and then walking out of the bar.
Independent analysts have estimated that the Brexit divorce bill falls somewhere between $30 billion and $80 billion, depending on how generously one assesses the obligations.
May and her government have been loathe to name a figure, both because they are still in negotiations and because whatever the price, it won't be popular at home.
Many Brexit supporters have insisted London shouldn't pay a penny, calling the demands a form of Euro-extortion. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said this summer that Brussels can "go whistle" if it expected to see large sums of money.
But the reality is that if Britain wants a deal on trade, EU leaders say, it has to settle its affairs first.
European and British negotiators have also squabbled about the rights of the roughly 3 million EU citizens living in Britain. EU leaders want guarantees that citizens who moved to Britain will have the same rights as before the breakup - and they want the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg to have the final word to make sure Britain keeps that pledge.
The court's oversight would be a bitter pill for British anti-EU campaigners who long chafed under its jurisdiction and said it was a loss of sovereignty to hand over decisions to judges in another country.
The last of the three main issues is the question of what to do about the border between the Irish Republic in the south, an independent nation that will remain in the European Union, and Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom that will exit the European bloc along with England, Scotland and Wales.
After the Good Friday Agreements in 1998 brought a semblance of peace between unionists and republicans, the badlands between the two entities - once a perilous place of gunrunning and violence between Irish Republican Army cells and British soldiers - calmed down.
Today, the border between north and south is wide open. More than 180 formal roads cross the border - many more if you count farmers' lanes and foot trails.
Irish leaders in Dublin said they did not want to derail Brexit - but they have been insistent that the border remain relatively open and soft.
On Monday, that push appeared to break down the negotiations. Both sides said they hoped to conclude by the end of the week.
- - -
Booth reported from London.
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As Republicans continue to sell the details of their tax bill, some are reaching for more colorful language to liven up complex policies that tend to put the average voter to sleep.
Case in point: over the weekend Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, hashed over the plan with his home state's Des Moines Register. Turning to the party's idea to do away with the estate tax, Grassley framed the current law as a hindrance to responsible saving.
"I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing," Grassley told the Register. "As opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it's on booze or women or movies."
The estate tax, often described by Republicans as the "death tax," is levied only on the very rich, individuals who pass on assets of more than $5.5 million, $11 million for married couples.
Grassley, a member of Senate Finance Committee responsible for writing the tax proposal, immediately was hit with criticism online over the comments.
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The suggestion - that anyone not socking away their savings in the bank or investments must be profligately throwing their money away - played directly into the critique that Republicans are disconnected from the majority of working Americans.
"Darn straight, Sen. Grassley," former Hillary Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson wrote on Twitter. "[I]f we gave that money in middle class tax cuts, they'd just waste it on hookers and blow. right?"
The current tax on estates is 40 percent on an individual's wealth when they die, applying to assets valued above $5.5 million for an individual, $11 million for a couple. Republicans have long criticized the provision, referring to it as a "death tax."
Under the Senate tax planned passed early Saturday morning along partisan lines, the exemptions are both raised to $11 million per individual and $22 million per couple. The House version of the bill does the same but also axes the tax completely in 2024.
In Grassley's home state of Iowa, the estate tax has been particularly fraught with controversy. Republicans have often argued the 40 percent government tax creates a cost prohibitive situation for farmers hoping to pass their farms on to heirs.
"Death should not be a taxable event and families should not have to fear the Internal Revenue Service and more taxes making it more difficult and costly to pass on the farm or family business to the next generation," Rep. David Young, a Des Moines-area congressman, wrote on Friday in a newsletter to constituents.
But, according to the Des Moines Register, the actual numbers do not support that narrative. Citing 2016 data from the Internal Revenue Service, the paper determined 5,219 tax returns were impacted by the current estate tax. Only 682, or 13 percent, of the tax filers owned farm assets.
The paper also referenced a 2015 report from the Congressional Research Service noting only 65 farm estates in the U.S. annually are touched by the estate tax.
Grassley and other congressional Republicans have long maintained that even if farmers are not impacted by the tax directly, the planning involved is an additional strain.
"[M]any are forced into spending large sums of their hard-earned dollars on lawyers and accountants to avoid its impact instead of reinvesting in their business," he told the Register. "This means that while many don't end up paying the tax, it still has a negative effect on the economy."
The Pentagon is preparing to spend millions of dollars to fix up a Cold War-era air base in Iceland as Washington rushes to keep an eye on a new generation of stealthy Russian submarines slipping into the North Atlantic.
Tucked away in the 2018 defense budget sitting on President Donald Trump's desk is a provision for $14.4 million to refurbish hangars at Naval Air Station Keflavik to accommodate more U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft, a key surveillance asset for locating and tracking submarines, a defense official confirms.
The move comes as new Russian nuclear and conventional submarines have been making more frequent trips through the area known as the "GIUK gap" - an acronym for Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom - the route for the Russian Northern Fleet to enter the Atlantic Ocean.
The United States and Iceland have agreed to increase rotations of the American surveillance planes to Iceland next year, Pentagon spokesman Johnny Michael confirmed to Foreign Policy.
Inside the alliance, there is concern over NATO's ability to locate and track the new Russian submarines as they move silently into the open ocean. NATO officials have admitted that the past two decades of anti-piracy operations near Africa and support for ground operations in the Middle East have distracted from the anti-submarine mission which was at the core of the Cold War mission in the Atlantic.
After allowing its naval forces to fall into disrepair in the 1990s, Russian President Vladimir Putin set out on a major military overhaul in the 2000s, clawing back capability by designing and building new diesel- and nuclear-powered boats, making them quieter, more lethal, and longer-legged than their Soviet predecessors.
Russia's undersea fleet "is in the best state it has been in since the fall of the Soviet Union," said Michael Kofman, a Russian military expert at the Center for Naval Analyses. "A lot of effort has been spent on drilling, training, and readiness."
The Russian submarine force of about 50 hulls is a fraction of the 400 the Soviet Union floated during the Cold War, but they boast vastly improved technical capabilities that put them on par with their American rivals, experts said. "This time they're going for quality rather than quantity," added Magnus Nordenman of the Atlantic Council.
In an unclassified assessment of Russian military strength issued earlier this year, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that Moscow's new nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines are "capable of delivering nuclear warheads from thousands of kilometers away. This strategic capability puts the Russian Navy in the top tier of foreign navies."
The pride of the Russian fleet is the nuclear-powered Yasen-class guided missile submarine, which can carry 32 Kalibr cruise missiles. While the missile's range isn't known for sure, Russian subs have fired the Kalibr into Syria from about 700 miles away. Moscow has two Yasen-class subs operational, and plans to build an additional eight in coming years.
In late November the British first sea lord, Adm. Sir Philip Jones, said that the naval superiority Western navies have enjoyed in recent decades is disappearing and resurgent powers like Russia are testing the Royal Navy in home waters.
"It's now clear that the peaks of Russian submarine activity that we've seen in the North Atlantic in recent years are the new norm," he said.
France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Turkey signed a letter of intent this summer to start development of new submarine-detecting aircraft. More airborne assets are needed because the number of sub-hunting ships that can patrol the waters on the North Atlantic, Baltic, and Mediterranean is far reduced since the Cold War.
Navies generally use frigates to conduct anti-submarine warfare - known as ASW operations - and the number of frigates in use by NATO allies has fallen to about 50, down from the 100 or so in the early 1990s.
Partly to fill that gap, the U.S. Navy is working to rush a new class of 20 frigates into service beginning in 2020. Last month, the service issued a notice to the defense industry to come up with a multi-mission frigate design that could be built within the next two years capable of conducting air defense and anti-submarine operations.
Russia has traditionally been constrained in its access to the open ocean, and the loss of the Baltic states and Poland, and of Black Sea ports in Romania and Bulgaria, mean modern Russia has a harder time getting out to sea than the Soviet Union did.
In the event of conflict with the West, Moscow's Baltic and Black Sea fleets would likely be bottled up by NATO, "so that leaves the Northern Fleet as their power-projection fleet - it's how they get out into the Atlantic," the Atlantic Council's Nordenman said.
While the Northern Fleet has primarily been designed to hold NATO at a distance from Russia, or exact a cost for any push by NATO forces, the increasing ability of its stealthy submarines to slip past American surveillance and pop up off the U.S. Eastern seaboard unannounced is a major concern for policymakers. "The U.S. Navy needs to have a clear answer as to how they're going to track these submarines," said Kofman.
"Iceland is key," Nordenman added. During the Second World War, U.S. anti-submarine forces in Iceland helped hunt down German U-boat wolf packs that had enjoyed a safe haven in the middle of the ocean, a role the island seems set to reprise. "It's the unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle of the Atlantic that you can fly from," Nordenman said.
Over the past few weeks, former FBI director James Comey's Twitter feed has been filled with inspirational quotations, Bible verses and nature photographs - many of them timed around remarks made by the president who fired him.
On Nov. 11, he quoted a sermon from the late English Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon about the difference between a truth and a lie, hours after President Donald Trump called Comey a proven "liar" and "leaker." Then on Nov. 25, about a half-hour after Trump attacked CNN International, Comey tweeted a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
Described as a subtle Trump troll, most of Comey's tweets have quoted historical leaders and thinkers. But on Sunday, Comey took a different approach: quoting himself.
The move came after Trump launched into a tweetstorm early Sunday morning, slamming the FBI, calling it "Tainted (no, very dishonest?)" and saying "its reputation is in Tatters."
Hours later, Comey quoted his own words from his June 8 testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is, and always will be, independent," Comey tweeted, along with a collage of photographs of various FBI teams.
The president began his commentary on Saturday, a day after dismissed national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with a Russian official. Trump drew controversy with his tweet saying part of the rationale for firing Flynn was that he had lied to the FBI. The Post reported Saturday that Trump attorney John Dowd had drafted the president's tweet, according to two people familiar with the message. Dowd confirmed that Sunday.
Trump also latched onto news that Peter Strzok - the former top FBI official assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election - was taken off that job this summer after his bosses discovered that he and another member of Mueller's team had exchanged politically charged texts disparaging Trump and supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton.
And early Sunday, Trump reiterated his denial that he asked Comey, then-FBI Director, to halt an investigation into Flynn.
"Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI 'agent's role in Clinton probe under review.' Led Clinton Email probe. @foxandfriends Clinton money going to wife of another FBI agent in charge," Trump wrote on Twitter. He added: "After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History!" Trump tweeted. "But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness."
Former attorney general Eric Holder, former acting attorney general Sally Yates, and others jumped to the FBI's defense as well.
"The FBI is in 'tatters'? No. The only thing in tatters is the President's respect for the rule of law," said Yates, who has been a frequent recent critic of Trump on Twitter. "The dedicated men and women of the FBI deserve better."
Trump fired Yates in January for refusing to defend his ban on travel from six majority-Muslim countries. In May, Yates testified that she expected White House officials to "take action'' on her January warning that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn could be blackmailed by Russia.
Holder, who served as attorney general under the Obama administration, also fired back at Trump, saying, "You'll find integrity and honesty at FBI headquarters and not at 1600 Penn Ave right now."
The president of FBI Agents Association, an advocacy group that claims more than 14,000 active and former FBI Special Agents as members, released a statement on Twitter Sunday evening.
"Every day, FBI Special Agents put their lives on the line to protect the American public from national security and criminal threats," the group's president, Thomas O'Connor, wrote in the statement. "Agents perform these duties with unwavering integrity and professionalism and a focus on complying with the law and the Constitution."
"This is why the FBI continues to be the premier law enforcement agency in the world," the statement continued. "FBI Agents are dedicated to their mission; suggesting otherwise is simply false."
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Defense attorneys who won acquittal for a homeless undocumented immigrant on murder, manslaughter and assault charges in the shooting of Kate Steinle on a San Francisco Bay pier will seek to have the sole conviction in the case dismissed as well, they said Monday.
A jury last week found Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, 45, guilty of a lesser count of being a felon in possession of a gun in connection with Steinles death on Pier 14 in July 2015, after the defense argued at trial that the shooting was an accident that happened after the defendant found a stolen gun wrapped in a T-shirt or cloth under a bench.
Now the defense says the conviction is inconsistent with the jurys larger acquittal. If the panel believed Steinle may have been killed by an accidental discharge, lawyers assert, Garcia Zarate should not be held responsible for possessing the weapon even though he threw it in the bay as Steinle lay dying.
Matt Gonzalez of the San Francisco Public Defenders Office, the lead attorney in the case, said he will appeal the charge at some point after Garcia Zarates Dec. 14 sentencing in Superior Court. Gonzalez said his appeal will contend jurors should have been told that momentary possession of a gun is not necessarily a crime.
If you possess it just to dispose of it or abandon it, it wouldnt be a crime, he said.
San Francisco prosecutors, who declined to comment, argued at trial that Garcia Zarate fired toward Steinle intentionally, offering evidence that the pistol that killed the 32-year-old woman would discharge only with a firm pull of the trigger. The bullet bounced off the piers concrete ground before striking Steinle in the back and piercing her heart.
The defense said the gun went off in Garcia Zarates hands almost immediately after he found it, and that he flung it in the water because he was scared.
During deliberations, Gonzalez said, jurors asked Judge Samuel Feng about brief possession of the gun.
We suspect the conviction on the gun charge is based on (Garcia Zarates actions) after the gun went off and he realized it was a gun and dumped it, said Tamara Aparton, a spokeswoman for the Public Defenders Office. If its based on that, the jury did not get proper instruction on momentary possession.
Jurors did not explain their verdict publicly after handing it down, and in general they cannot be asked to explain deliberations to settle conflicts during appeals.
If an appeals court agrees with the defense argument and overturns the conviction, Garcia Zarate could be retried for that charge alone.
Showing an error was made during jury instructions isnt necessarily enough to get a new trial. On appeal, the defense additionally has to show that the error affected the outcome, said Andrea Roth, an assistant professor of the UC Berkeley School of Law and a former appellate attorney for the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C.
You have to show the error mattered that it wasnt harmless, she said.
In previous cases on appeal, Roth said, shes argued an error wasnt harmless by pointing to inconsistency in verdicts and suggesting the jury may have compromised violating their instructions.
Its unclear how the dispute could affect the fate of Garcia Zarate, who remains in San Francisco jail. He faces up to three years in state prison on the gun-possession charge, but he has likely already satisfied that term since his arrest shortly after the shooting. Federal authorities on Friday unsealed a warrant for his arrest, and they plan to deport him for a sixth time.
Garcia Zarate has pending federal charges of violating the terms of his 2015 release from prison, where he had served 46 months for felony re-entry to the United States after deportation. He will be turned over to the U.S. Marshals Service when he is eligible for release in the Pier 14 case, Sheriffs Department officials said.
The .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol that Garcia Zarate allegedly possessed had been stolen four days earlier from a U.S. Bureau of Land Management rangers car after he drove into the city and parked along the Embarcadero. No one has been arrested in the burglary.
Garcia Zarates acquittal on the most serious charges shocked many observers and was called disgraceful and a complete travesty of justice by President Trump.
Before the shooting, Garcia Zarate had been on track for deportation, but his course changed when he was transferred from federal custody to San Francisco County Jail in March 2015 on an old warrant alleging he fled marijuana charges in 1995.
When city prosecutors discharged the case, the Sheriffs Department released Garcia Zarate despite a federal request to hold him for deportation. Then-Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi cited the citys sanctuary policies, which limit local cooperation with immigration enforcement and seek to encourage undocumented people to feel comfortable having a relationship with city agencies.
Evan Sernoffsky and Bob Egelko are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com, begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky, @Egelko
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, on his first visit to Pakistan in that role, called on its top military and civilian officials Monday to "redouble" efforts to prevent Islamist militants from using the country as a refuge and a launchpad for attacks on Afghanistan and elsewhere.
But Mattis seemed to tone down the sharp language he has used in congressional hearings and other settings to accuse Pakistan of harboring Afghan Taliban fighters. Instead, he adopted a milder, more diplomatic approach aimed at finding "common ground."
Statements from the Pakistani prime minister's office and the Pentagon late Monday, after Mattis had left the country, described his interactions with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, the defense minister, and military and intelligence chiefs in positive, bland terms.
The U.S. Embassy said he praised Pakistan's "sacrifices in the war against terrorism" while insisting that it "must redouble its efforts to confront" militants within its borders.
Abbasi was even more upbeat, saying in a statement that both countries share a commitment to the war against terrorism and asserting that there are "no safe havens" for militants in Pakistan. He emphasized Mattis's comments about continuing the long-term relationship between the former Cold War allies and "deepening cooperation" for the common goal of "eliminating terrorism from the region."
There was no public mention from either side of the repeated threats by President Donald Trump and other top U.S. officials that Washington will take strong action against Pakistan if it fails to stop sheltering militants. The punitive measures could include significant cuts in military and economic aid, retracting Pakistan's status as a "major non-NATO ally," and declaring it a state sponsor of terrorism.
Pakistani army officials said they told Mattis that "Pakistan has done much more than its due share despite capacity constraints." They said Mattis told them that his aim was "not to make demands." In a statement, the officials said the U.S. defense chief expressed concern that "a few elements" use Pakistani territory to promote terrorism in Afghanistan, and they said they are "prepared to look into the possibility" that such "miscreants" may be taking cover in Afghan refugee communities.
But other U.S. officials have continued to assert that Pakistan has not taken sufficient action, despite repeated meetings with U.S. military officials and a visit from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in late October.
"We have been very direct and very clear with the Pakistanis. . . . We have not seen those changes implemented yet," Gen. John Nicholson Jr., the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said at a news conference in Kabul last week. But he, too, said the United States is "hoping to work together with the Pakistanis" to eliminate cross-border terrorism and did not mention any sanctions.
In Washington on Saturday, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said the United States will do "everything we can to ensure that safe havens no longer exist" if Pakistan does not do so. One of the measures would be an expansion of U.S. drone strikes deeper into Pakistan's heartland. Such a move would alarm the populace and provoke the government, which has quietly cooperated with U.S. drone strikes in tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.
Afghan officials have repeatedly accused Pakistan of allowing the Taliban and other militant groups, especially the Haqqani network, to take shelter and launch attacks from sanctuaries on its side of the border. They also accuse Pakistan's military and its intelligence services of orchestrating attacks in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan. Pakistan has always denied the accusations.
Despite the cordiality of the Monday meetings, the previous threats from the Trump administration were very much on the minds of Pakistani officials and analysts in the capital as Mattis arrived at midday for a brief stop before flying to Kuwait. The U.S. demands that Pakistan "do more" have angered many Pakistanis, who insist that Washington should put pressure on Afghanistan to stop sheltering militants on its side of the border.
Some commentators suggested that an enormous bomb dropped in August by U.S. warplanes just over the border in eastern Afghanistan, which had no apparent immediate purpose and fell on a deserted former militant hideout in the mountains, was actually intended as a warning to Pakistan.
Syed Talat Hussain, a longtime Pakistani media analyst, wrote Monday that the Trump administration has decided to "bring Islamabad to its knees" and is only "going through the motions of engagement" with polite visits like those by Tillerson and Mattis, who will be followed shortly by Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Public "niceties and contrived bonhomie," Hussain added, are just for show.
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DELRAY BEACH, Fla. - Debbie Wesson Gibson was in her attic hauling out boxes of Christmas decorations last week when she noticed a storage bin she said she had forgotten about. Inside was a scrapbook from her senior year of high school, and taped to a page titled "Those Who Inspire" was a graduation card.
"Happy graduation Debbie," it read in slanted cursive handwriting. "I wanted to give you this card myself. I know that you'll be a success in anything you do. Roy."
The inscription, Gibson said, was written by Roy Moore, the Alabama Republican nominee for U.S. Senate who in recent days has repeatedly denied the accounts of five women who told The Washington Post that he pursued them when they were teenagers and he was an assistant district attorney in his 30s. Since those allegations were published last month, four more women have come forward to allege that Moore made unwanted sexual advances. The accounts in The Post included those of Leigh Corfman, who said she was 14 when Moore touched her sexually, and Gibson, who said that she publicly dated Moore when she was 17 and he was 34, a relationship she said she "wore like a badge of honor" until she began reevaluating it in light of the accounts of other women, and now, Moore's own denials.
Shortly after the allegations first surfaced, Moore said in a radio interview with Sean Hannity that he did not know Corfman, but that he remembered Gibson as well as Gloria Thacker Deason, who had told The Post that she dated Moore when she was 18. He called each one "a good girl," and said that he did not remember dating them.
But at two campaign events in recent days, Moore has backtracked.
At a Nov. 27 campaign event in the north Alabama town of Henagar, Moore said, "The allegations are completely false. They are malicious. Specifically, I do not know any of these women."
At a Nov. 29 rally at a church in the south Alabama town of Theodore, Moore said, "Let me state once again: I do not know any of these women, did not date any of these women and have not engaged in any sexual misconduct with anyone."
Gibson said that after finding the scrapbook, she was not sure whether to make it public given the threats she received after publication of the original story. Then she heard what Moore said last week, she said, and contacted The Post.
"He called me a liar," said Gibson, who says she not only openly dated Moore when she was 17 but later joined him in passing out fliers during his campaign for circuit court judge in 1982 and exchanged Christmas cards with him over the years. "Roy Moore made an egregious mistake to attack that one thing - my integrity."
The Moore campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment for this story.
Two of the other women named in The Post article have also pushed back in recent days against Moore.
In an open letter to Moore published on the Alabama news site Al.com after Moore's Nov. 27 speech, Corfman wrote that "I am done being silent."
"You sent out your spokesman to call me a liar. Day after day. Finally, last night, you did the dirty work yourself . . ." she wrote. "What you did to me when I was 14-years old should be revolting to every person of good morals. But now you are attacking my honesty and integrity. Where does your immorality end?"
In a statement to The Post after Moore's Nov. 29 speech, Paula Cobia, a lawyer for Deason, recounted Deason's vivid memories of dating Moore, from specific restaurants she says they frequented, to the velvet-collared dress Deason says she wore when she says Moore took her to a social function at a Ramada Inn. Cobia said,
"No matter what lies Roy Moore may choose to tell now," Cobia said, "the truth was the first thing out of his mouth when it came to remembering Gloria."
Gibson, 54, now lives in Delray Beach, Florida, is a registered Republican, and is the founder of a company that provides sign language interpretation. Though she said the bulk of her work is in educational, medical and legal settings, her clients have included Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and Republicans such as the mayor of Miami. She said that despite requests from dozens of media outlets, she had "very carefully said absolutely nothing" after her account was first published in The Post due to a barrage of threatening hate mail she received, prompting her to notify her local police department. She and the other women have been accused by Moore's surrogates of lying, or being paid to spread false stories, or being part of a larger political conspiracy to defeat Moore.
Then she found the scrapbook and the graduation card with the slanted, cursive handwriting, which she said immediately reminded her of another woman, Beverly Young Nelson, who had come forward after the Post story was published. In an emotional news conference with the attorney Gloria Allred, Nelson accused Moore of sexually assaulting her when she was 16, and produced what she said was her high school yearbook with an inscription to her from Moore.
"I just couldn't imagine him doing something like that," Gibson said. "And then when I saw the interview from Beverly, and I saw his handwriting in her yearbook, my heart just sank. And when I saw what I knew to be Roy Moore's handwriting, I just began to sob openly."
Mark Songer, a former FBI forensic examiner now with the firm Robson Forensic, examined an image of the graduation card at The Post's request and said that it "appears to be naturally prepared." Songer also compared an image of the yearbook inscription to the image of the graduation card and said that "the style of writing, as well as certain letter features, appear to be similar." He stressed the need for a full and comprehensive handwriting examination to arrive at a final conclusion.
Gibson said she remembers Moore handing the card to her at the Etowah High School graduation ceremony in Attalla, Alabama, where Gibson grew up about 10 miles from Moore's home. She remembers reading the inscription and writing below it: "Roy Moore inspires me because he is such a successful man himself. Also, he is about the only person I know of who seriously believes in me. I appreciate that. He's got to be one of the nicest people I know."
As she flipped through the scrapbook last week, Gibson said, she realized it contained other indications of her relationship with Moore, which she says began in March 1981, after he came to speak to her high school civics class.
On a page titled "commencement," under "My own guests," she had written "Roy S. Moore," just above "mom" and "dad."
On a page titled "remembrances," she had listed her graduation gifts line by line, including "$10, card" from "Roy S. Moore," and a check mark indicating she had sent a thank-you card.
On a page titled "the best times," she had written: "Wednesday night, 3-4-81. Roy S. Moore and I went out for the first time. We went out to eat at Catfish Cabin in Albertville. I had a great time." She had underlined "great" twice.
The scrapbook also contained a photo of Gibson as a high school senior, and when she saw it, she said, she thought to herself, "That's the age I was when I dated Roy Moore, because my braces were off."
As Gibson previously told The Post, she said that she and Moore dated for a couple of months. She said he kissed her by the swimming pool concession stand at a local country club, that he played his guitar and read his own poetry to her, and that things ended when she went off to college in another part of Alabama, though they still kept in touch.
She said she helped Moore when he was campaigning for circuit court judge in 1982, and remembers tucking fliers under windshield wipers at the Kmart parking lot.
She said that when she became engaged, Moore insisted on meeting her fiance to make sure he was "good enough for me." She said when Moore was first appointed as a circuit court judge in 1992, she sent him a gavel engraved with his name and a congratulatory note, and that her family and his exchanged Christmas cards some years.
She said that she held Moore "in high esteem," despite political differences with him, until she began hearing stories from other women who alleged that Moore pursued them as teenagers. She said that at first she did not want to believe the women.
"It takes what I thought was a very lovely part of my past, and it colors it, and it changes it irrevocably," she said. "It changes it permanently."
What made her decision to share the documents easier, she said, was watching and re-watching a video she has on her cellphone of Moore speaking last week and deciding that supporting the women who have come forward was more important than staying silent.
"At 34 minutes and 56 seconds into the video, he says, unequivocally, I did not know any of them," Gibson said. "In that moment, it changed my perspective. I knew he was a liar."
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Video: Debbie Wesson Gibson, who says she dated Roy Moore in 1981, recently found a high school graduation card she says he gave her at the time and inscribed to her. When another woman who accused Moore of sexual assault showed an inscription she said that Moore had written to her, Gibson said she recognized Moore's handwriting. Moore, who is running for the U.S. Senate, said in a campaign appearance last week, "I do not know any of these women, did not date any of these women and have not engaged in any sexual misconduct with anyone."(Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)
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Tigran Yeghoyan: Currently, they sell the local meat mixed with the imported hybrid meat
Farmers are in chaotic condition. Tigran Yeghoyan, Director of "Gerastgh" farming economy, reported on this. He said that the Government, in the person of the Ministry of Agriculture and Nature Protection, was engaged in criminal activity against the village and villagers. The Yeghegis River, a part of which was engaged in farm activity, has drowned because of the 19 HPPs built on it, and the 20th HPP has recently been discovered. The Ministry of Agriculture denies the existence of so many hydropower plants, accepting the fact that there are only seven. Another issue is the Amulsar mine, from which the cyanide leaks through the snow and mixes with water resources. During today's press conference, the farmer referred to the Rural Advisory Centers (RACs) and announced that the program had "spent 500 million". The farmer said that it did not justify itself; in the field of bee-keeping it was unacceptable to feed bees with sugar, disinfection with chemicals, and so on. Tigran Yeghoyan noted that the price of meat in the market was conditioned by exporting local meat to the Iranian market. "They exported our local meat to the Iranian market and raised the price of meat. Currently, they sell the local meat mixed with the imported hybrid meat. We have studied beef and lamb meat, so, we know it for sure. I can say nothing about pork." To the question of A1+ on whether the export of local products and the import of ecologically not clean products had a special purpose, the speaker replied: "In my opinion, it is the dictation of external forces. They are credit programs that were brought to Armenia and spent, and today they leave all the debt to our generations." By the way, from the Georgian region of Marneul, where the majority of the population consists of Azerbaijani, good opportunities to engage in farming activities were offered, but on the condition to present Armenian goats to the world as a Caucasian. The offer was rejected.
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City workers have finally finished a "deep cleansing" of a homeless encampment in Midtown, an area the Houston Health Department had declared a public health nuisance for the second time in October.
What could have been a one-day project stretched into a 15-day battle of wills between the city, which was required to finish cleaning, and a lone holdout who wouldn't move his belongings.
While the city's anti-encampment ordinance remains tied up in court, just about everything at the sprawling tent city remains in limbo.
"Nothing's really changed," said Sgt. Steve Wick, who leads the Houston Police Department's homeless outreach team. "Everybody's waiting to see how the lawsuit comes out, and what happens."
The city passed an anti-encampment ordinance in May designed to prevent camps like the one beneath the Interstate 69 bridge in Midtown, but the ACLU of Texas quickly filed an emergency motion to stop it. In August, U.S. District Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt issued a temporary restraining order to block the city from enforcing the ordinance.
Now both sides are on hold, waiting on a ruling about whether that injunction will remain permanent.
A string of shootings, stabbings and other violence have turned the camp into a trouble spot in the past few months. A homeless man was shot to death in an adjacent parking lot last month.
"We're restricted right now because there's a TRO in place against the encampment ordinance," Wick said - and as long as it's in place, "police don't have the tools" to deal with the camps properly.
Meanwhile, the repeated abatement of the Midtown camp illustrates the cyclic nature of the city's stopgap solutions.
The health department first declared the camp a public health nuisance in August, and city workers cleaned it up. The trash piles and waste piles had returned by mid-October, leading the health department to require another abatement.
That cleanup started Nov. 15, when a team of city workers arrived at dawn to power-wash the area and remove piles of trash and human waste.
Most camp residents agreed to temporarily move their 100-odd tents to make way for the cleanup, but one man Trampus Edwards, 50 refused to move his property, which includes a treadmill, a rug, an office chair, a grill, a putting green and two dogs.
Just before Thanksgiving, the city filed a motion that pointed to the camp's lone holdout as the reason the health department couldn't declare the camp fully abated. But police couldn't force Edwards to move because of the restraining order.
Edwards, who held out for two weeks, has now voluntarily complied with demands, police say, and the camp has been abated completely. But that doesn't solve the neighborhood's problems.
Meanwhile, the space under the bridge has started filling with trash and excrement all over again.
Shere Dore, an advocate for the homeless who drops by the Midtown camp a few times a week, was a primary witness in the ACLU's lawsuit against the city. She says the city's hands aren't tied at all.
The restraining order on the ordinance, she said, merely dictates whether people can sleep in tents. It doesn't keep the city from dealing with crime or trash.
"A homeless person committing a crime, you've got to deal with it," she said. "Any criminal element, anybody who commits real crimes in the area, I have no problem with the cops coming in."
Until there's a ruling, Wick said, "it's going to be more of the same" in the city's homeless camps, including the one in Midtown.
"We've had a couple of murders down there, shootings, stabbings," he said. "It's not a good environment, and it's not going to get better until the issues are taken care of."
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Convicted child killer Genene Jones, a former nurse sent to prison in 1984 for killing a toddler, was moved to San Antonio on Monday to face more charges that she caused the deaths of five children in the 1980s.
Jones was a nurse at hospitals in San Antonio and Kerrville in the 1980s. Dubbed the Angel of Death, she was convicted of murder in 1984 and sentenced to 99 years in prison in the death of 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan, who died in 1982 from a fatal overdose of muscle relaxers at the hand of Jones.
Jones also was convicted in Bexar County of injury to a child/serious bodily injury and sentenced to 60 years in prison for giving an overdose to Rolando Santos, who was 4 weeks old. He survived.
Her sentences are being served at the same time at the Texas Department of Criminal Justices Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville.
She has been indicted on five more murder charges, which came this year because Jones is set to be released in March 2018 under a law designed to prevent prison crowding.
In May, Bexar County District Attorney Nicholas Nico LaHood announced a Bexar County grand jury returned a murder indictment against Jones in the death of 11-month-old Joshua Sawyer on Dec. 12, 1981.
In June, the grand jury returned three more murder indictments against Jones in the deaths of Richard Ricky Nelson, 8 months, who died July 3, 1981; Patrick Zavala, 4 months, who died Jan. 17, 1982; and Rosemary Vega, 2-years-old, who died Sept. 16, 1981.
And in October, the grand jury indicted Jones in the death of 3-month-old Paul Villarreal. She is alleged to have injected him with the drug Heparin on Sept. 24, 1981.
In each case, the grand jury set Jones bail at $1 million, according to court records.
Jones is in the Bexar County jail, awaiting a trial setting in the 399th state District Court, presided by Judge Frank Castro.
LaHood said Monday evening that Jones would remain in Bexar County until there is an adjudication on each of the five cases.
Now its going to be up to the court to give us a scheduling order, he said. It will take a little bit of time. She will be here until the cases are resolved.
Her attorney, Cornelius Cox, did not return a call seeking comment Monday.
Staff Writer Kelsey Bradshaw contributed to this report. ezavala@express-news.net | Twitter: @elizabeth2863
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EDINBURG John Feit allegedly confided that he had gotten away with murder, Dale Tacheny said Monday while on the stand in Feits murder trial.
Feit showed little remorse, Tacheny testified Monday, yet the troubled priest confessed in 1963 that he was still haunted by the sound of Irene Garzas heels, a former beauty queen he is accused of killing in 1960. Tacheny was serving as a Trappist monk at Assumption Abbey, a monastery in Ava, Missouri, when Feit was sent there.
He put the young lady in a bathtub, the 88-year-old Tacheny testified. As he was leaving, the young lady said I cannot breathe, I cannot breathe. Then he left.
Feit attacked Garza in the church rectory, fondled her, then stored her in the basement while he went next door to Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen to offer the sacrament of confession, Tacheny said.
Feit took a break to transport Garza to the pastoral house, a hotel in San Juan where he stayed, leaving her in a bathtub before returning to the church to again offer confession. When he returned the next day, Garza was dead, Feit allegedly confessed to Tacheny.
I asked him, Do you feel bad about any of these things, do you feel remorse, do you feel guilt? Tacheny said. He said No, I get anxious when I hear heels on a hard concrete, hard floor, Tacheny testified, rapping his knuckles on the witness stand for emphasis.
Tacheny said it wasnt his place in 1963 to take Feits admission to authorities. Instead, the monastery attempted to modify Feits behavior by having him imagine walking into a church, walking up to a women and not attacking her.
Feit was a 27-year-old priest April 16, 1960, preparing to offer confession, when the 25-year-old Garza knocked on the door, he told investigators.
I had never made the acquaintance of this person before, Feit told investigators at the time, and to the best of my knowledge, Id never seen her before.
Several days after Garzas body was found, Feit gave investigators a meandering alibi. On the night Garza disappeared, she had asked to make a confession in the rectory at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Feit told investigators in 1960.
Feit, now 85, gave investigators conflicting versions of what transpired.
In that original statement to authorities, Feit said that he did not take her confession, and that another priest had been present in the rectory when Garza arrived. But on June 14, 1960, the young priest contradicted his earlier statement, saying he was alone and that he had indeed taken her confession.
It makes his first statement an obvious lie, McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez testified. I believe it was deceitful.
The last Feit saw of Garza she was standing on the sidewalk in front of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, he told investigators. Her body was found in an irrigation canal five days later. She had been beaten, raped while unconscious and then asphyxiated.
Rodriguez read Feits 1960 statements while on the stand Monday in Feits trial. He first became involved with the murder investigation in 2001 when McAllen police revisited the cold case.
Back in 1960, Feit was living at the pastoral house in nearby San Juan, filling in at area parishes where he was needed.
On the night of April 16, 1960, and into the following day of Easter Sunday, Feit told investigators that he made six trips between the McAllen church and the pastoral house.
He explained that he scraped his hand while climbing to the second-story balcony of the pastoral house. Jose Garcia, 87, a classmate of Feits at Pan American College in Edinburg, testified last week that he noticed what appeared to be scratch marks on the priests hands.
Garza had been Miss All South Texas Sweetheart in 1958 and a former prom and homecoming queen at what then was Pan American College.
Contrary to Feits statement to investigators, Ana Marie Hollingsworth, 83, a friend of Garzas, testified Friday that Feit had pulled Garza out of a confessional booth at least once before to hear her confession face-to-face in the rectory, a practice that was highly unusual at the time.
Hollingsworth said her friend was disturbed by Feits behavior.
In the weeks leading up to Garzas murder Feit had threatened several women, including an attack on America Guerra at a church in Edinburg. Feit pleaded no contest to assaulting Guerra and was fined $500.
Cleotilde Tilly Sanchez, 80, a cook who worked at the rectory, testified last week that after the attack on Guerra, Feit called her at the rectory to say, Tilly, youre next, honey.
After Tacheny worked with Feit, the monastery sent Feit to Chicago and St. Louis to find out if his behavior had indeed changed.
It wasnt until years later when another priest asked Tacheny to write a book that he revisited that episode of his life and decided to contact San Antonio police where detective George Saidler took the call.
Tacheny didnt know the name of Feits alleged victim, or where the murder had taken place, only that Feit had been trained as an oblate in San Antonio. He had also given Saidler 1963 as the date for the murder.
Saidler couldnt find any unsolved murders from San Antonio, but a chance encounter with a Texas Ranger led him to the Garza cold case. In 2002, Texas Rangers, with testimony from two former priests, including Tacheny, who told investigators that Feit had confessed to the killing, reopened the case.
Feits attorney O. Rene Flores pressed Rodriguez to provide evidence of a crime scene linking his client to the murder.
You dont have any physical evidence or anything that was collected from the rectory that affirmatively links John Feit to the disappearance of Irene Garza, Flores asked.
No sir, Rodriguez said.
You dont have any evidence affirmatively linking John Feit to the disappearance of Irene Garza from what was known as the pastoral house, Flores asked.
Thats correct, Rodriguez said.
However, Rodriguez suggested that church officials had gotten rid of items belonging to Garza found in the rectory.
On the first day of trial, Darrell Davis, a TV reporter in 1960, testified Thursday that the Hidalgo County district attorney, now deceased, told him off the record that the plea in the Guerra case was part of a deal struck with the Catholic Church.
Feit would plead no contest in the Guerra case and be sent to the Trappist monastery, and the DA would stop the investigation into Feit in the Garza case.
The states prosecutor, Michael Garza questioned why Tacheny finally approached San Antonio police after keeping quiet for decades.
Tacheny paused before answering, She had parents, he said, tearing up.
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It's been a busy year at the San Antonio Zoo.
Dozens of newborns were welcomed in 2017, said Jennifer Pue, the zoo's marketing manager.
"We have had quite a bit of births at the zoo," she said.
RELATED: Video: San Antonio's young hippo takes first dip into zoo exhibit life with a splash and a smile
Here's a list of the animals born this year:
32 Texas horned lizards
56 American flamingos
2 Guam rails
2 hooded cranes
3 palm cockatoos
11 golden-crested mynahs
1 giant anteater
1 tamandua
Although he was not born at the San Antonio Zoo, a baby hippo was also delivered to the Alamo City this year. The unnamed hippo joined its grandmother Uma in September.
Click through the slideshow to see photos of animals born this year.
Kelsey Bradshaw is a digital reporter for mySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| kbradshaw@express-news.net | Twitter: @kbrad5
Two unrelated road rage incidents that occurred over the weekend have left one woman dead and several others injured, including a teenage suspect who was shot by a Bexar County sheriffs deputy whom he allegedly tried to run over.
The first incident occurred at 11:30 p.m. Saturday on the North Side at U.S. Highway 281 North and Stadium Drive.
According to a San Antonio police report, a black sedan was chasing a blue sedan on the highway. The blue sedan lost control and struck a black truck from behind, slowing down in the process.
Thats when the black sedan pulled up from behind and an unidentified individual shot at the two people in the blue sedan multiple times, hitting the 20-year-old male driver in the shoulder and the female passenger in the head.
The male driver of the blue sedan drove into the center lane and the black sedan fled the scene.
The female and themale driver were transported to University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The Bexar County Medical Examiner indentified the woman late Sunday as Ditraniq Hawkins, 21.
The male driver was treated for non-life threatening injuries.
In the second incident, which occurred at 5:39 a.m. Sunday, a BCSO deputy was flagged down by a motorist who had been involved in a road rage incident with a person in a black Dodge Charger near Loop 1604 and Marbach Road.
According to BCSO Sheriff Javier Salazar, the deputy searched for the vehicle and was able to locate it and a male driver and female passenger, both 17 years old, at a nearby dead-end. As the deputy exited his patrol car, the suspect turned his vehicle in the direction of the deputy and began to drive toward him at a high rate of speed. The suspect then allegedly struck the vehicle and the deputy.
The officer deployed his taser toward the suspect, but Salazar said it was ineffective. The deputy then fired his weapon, striking the teenager.
The suspect then fled the location, but the deputy, who had minor injuries, was unable to pursue him because his patrol car was immobilized.
According to a media release, a second patrol unit was able to locate the suspect on the access road of U.S. Highway 90 and Kriewald Road.
Salazar said at some point during this pursuit, the suspect struck another motorist head-on. The 39-year-old female driver suffered minor injuries.
The suspects car was still running, and he continued fleeing until the second deputys vehicle and the suspects vehicle collided, immobilizing both.
The suspect was transported to the hospital from the scene in critical condition with several gunshot wounds. The female passenger was transported with minor injuries.
If the suspect survives, he is facing serious felony charges, Salazar said.
We dont know if it will be handled as an attempted capital murder or aggravated assault on a public servant, Salazar said.
At this point, our homicide deputies are handling the incident, Salazar said. Internal Affairs is on scene making sure that we are handling this incident from all angles.
As of late Sunday, no one has been arrested in either incident.
nbautista@express-news.net | @aluna@express-news.net
AUSTIN -- Jeffrey Payne, a Dallas businessman, signed up Monday as a Democrat running in crowded primary field for the chance to challenge Republican incumbent Gov. Greg AbbottAbbott in a year.
Payne is the first of an expected two gay Democrats who are expected to be candidates in the primary. The second, Dallas Sheriff Lupe Valdez, has been examining a likely run but has not yet filed.
Signing paperwork and presenting a $3,500 check, Payne became the sixth Democrat to file for the state's top office. In addition to Payne, the list currently includes Houston electronics businessman Joe Mumbach, Dallas financial analyst Adrian Ocegueda, former Balch Springs Mayor Cedric Davis Sr., retired San Antonio school teacher Grady Yarbrough and San Antonio businessman Tom Wakley.
Two more, Houston entrepreneur Andrew White and Valdez, are expected to declare their candidacy before the filing period ends in a week, on Dec. 11.
"I have had great response to my campaign and, after touring the state for the past several months, I think we can win -- even though it's going to be uphill," Payne said at the Texas Democratic Party headquarters, where he filed his candidacy papers. "People want a politician who listens to them."
Payne said he thinks he will have to raise $8 million to win the March primary. He had earlier pledged to put up to $2.5 million of his own money into his campaign, but said Monday that he hasn't had to tap his accounts yet.
He also said that if Valdez runs, the campaign will mark a milestone by having two gay candidates running for governor. "That says something about where Texas is now," he said.
The openly gay Payne, a political newcomer who owns five businesses including The Dallas Eagle, a popular leather bar, has acknowledged that he knows that challenging a popular and well-funded incumbent Republican in a solidly GOP state will be a tough campaign.
A native of Maine who grew up in Louisiana, Payne has said he thinks that having a background in business will help him win. In addition to the bar, his businesses include a court reporting firm, a retail clothing outlet, a property management company and a land-holding company.
Payne relocated to Dallas from Louisiana in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.
Serzh Sargsyan inspects military exercises in Artsakh held within the framework of cooperation
On December 2, the second day of Serzh Sargsyans working visit to the Republic of Artsakh, within the framework of the ongoing cooperation between the armed forces of the two Armenian republics, Serzh Sargsyan and AR President Bako Sahakyan joined the RA and AR Defense Ministers and high-ranking army officials to inspect the military exercises conducted by the Defense Armys unified command in the southeastern section of the Republic of Artsakh. Mr. Sargsyan encouraged the most prominent servicemen with various incentives. On the same day, Serzh Sargsyan attended the commissioning of a multi-apartment residential building for servicemen, as well as the openings of a newly built canteen and barracks at one of the military units. Serzh Sargsyan handed awards and incentives to the best officers, contract and conscript soldiers for dedicated and excellent service. Strong defense calls for effort, due diligence and hard work, which can ultimately lead to high professionalism. Modern armed forces imply not only state-of-the-art armament, but also the ability to apply it at the right moment and to its full capacity. I am grateful to you for todays drills which testified to your high efficiency. Believe me, this is your response to all those who want to take away our homeland, who are trying to put on show their might and get something out of us. Peoples can protect their homeland if your type is dominant in them. We are in a position to defend our borders, and we will defend our homeland. I would like to thank your parents, your teachers, all those who have contributed to your upbringing, Serzh Sargsyan said, wishing the servicemen a dignified stance and successful service.
This is the 40th anniversary of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, which starts today at the Convention Center. As the 2017 symposium begins, we reflect on this important meetings value to patients and families everywhere.
When the symposium began in 1978, women with breast cancer faced a far bleaker outlook than today. Radical mastectomies were still routinely done, and little was known about genetic profiling of tumors. Each years symposium has provided state-of-the-art information on breast cancer research, and this years symposium will be no different.
Co-directors for 2017 are Dr. Virginia Kaklamani of the UT Health San Antonio Cancer Center, Dr. C. Kent Osborne of Baylor College of Medicine and Dr. Carlos Arteaga of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium is one of the largest breast cancer meetings in the world, with approximately half of attendees coming from more than 90 countries outside the U.S. More than 7,000 oncologists, cancer researchers and patient advocates attend annually. The first symposium, in contrast, attracted 141 physicians and surgeons from five states.
The meeting has a $19 million economic impact on San Antonio.
San Antonio was an appropriate place to launch the worlds foremost breast cancer symposium, since the city from the 1970s onward was a cradle of the highest-quality research in the field.
Dr. William L. McGuire, pioneering breast cancer researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and Dr. Charles Coltman, medical director of San Antonios Cancer Therapy & Research Center, or CTRC, planned the first symposium. Osborne, a breast cancer researcher now at Baylor College of Medicine, was instrumental in the events growth during his years with the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio and onward.
In 2005, Baylor College of Medicine became a joint sponsor with the CTRC. In 2007, it was announced that the American Association for Cancer Research, or AACR, would join the collaboration on the annual symposium.
Today the CTRC is part of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and is called the UT Health San Antonio Cancer Center. It is a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center.
Exciting times are on the horizon as the UT Health San Antonio Cancer Center is developing an affiliation with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
This will expand cancer services to the regions patients and ensure families will not be forced to go elsewhere for cancer care. Patients do better when treated near their homes.
Current investigators stand on the shoulders of the symposiums founders. We are grateful that the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium exists, because in convening the fields greatest minds, the treatments, equipment and techniques available to a medical practitioner steadily increases. Mothers, grandmothers, wives and aunts can spend more time loving their families, the way it should be.
Dr. Virginia Kaklamani is director of the breast cancer program at the UT Health San Antonio Cancer Center. Dr. Ruben Mesa is director of the UT Health San Antonio Cancer Center.
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Culture / Art Republik
Dec 04, 2017 | By Art Republik
The Parkview Museum Singapore, a private museum established by the Parkview Group, was part of a long-term endeavour by its executive chairman, the late George Wong, to share his art collection with the world. A sprawling 1,500 square metres and an impressive six metres in height, the museum has hosted three shows since its launch in March this year, including its latest exhibition, The Artists Voice.
The son of property tycoon and group founder Hwang Chou-Shiuan, Wong had inherited not just his fathers business, but also his love for art. Continuing the familys legacy of combining art with business a vision demonstrated by Hwang in his real estate model Wong established art spaces in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei, and also founded Parkview Arts Action, an arts organisation that aims to raise awareness of critical environmental issues and inspire change.
In addition to that, works from Wongs extensive art collection hang on the walls of his hotels and shopping malls, reflecting his strong belief in art as something to be shared. ART REPUBLIK had the privilege of speaking with the personable man in October. The only thing I cant share is my wife, quipped Wong. With art, you cant just keep it to yourself, or store it in a warehouse. I want everybody to have part of my collection. To that end, Parkview Museum Singapore, which hosts exhibitions with a focus on contemporary art, is open to the public free of charge.
The museums focus on contemporary art is not incidental. Wong expressed a special appreciation for the genre, and regularly interacted with and championed contemporary artists. In contemporary art, when an artist paints something, there is a language in it. Each painting has a story to tell, explained Wong. Its fascinating. Traditional art can be very beautiful, but they often hold no language of their own. Theyre just pretty.
Wongs deep belief in the language of contemporary art is demonstrated in the museums latest exhibition, The Artists Voice, which spotlights the role of the artist in a modern-day society faced with crisis, disillusionment and instability. Highlighting themes relevant to the contemporary such as existentialism, ethics and anthropology, the exhibition visualises these realities through various mediums in contemporary art.
In the same vein, the museums first exhibition, Of Sharks and Humanity, keeping in line with the goals of Parkview Arts Action, addressed issues of the contemporary while tackling the widely controversial topic of shark finning as well as the impact of human activities on the ocean. Its an interesting topic because we humans kill and eat all kinds of things, such as chickens, pigs, and cows, said Wong. But in the case of sharks, its harming the ecosystem, and us in turn. Its a topic that people need to be made aware of, and art can do that.
Wong also emphasised his belief in the relationship between art and architecture, a vision grounded in the groups foundation in real estate. I think art should be part of the landscape, part of livable space, said Wong. When we build something, were building something for the people who live and work there. It cant just be a concrete frame with a few windows and an elevator. He explained that even in his properties, he would change the artworks on display every now and then so that every piece gets its time in the limelight.
A serial collector, Wongs thirst for collecting art manifested as a love that bordered on obsession. Recounting two instances in which he sold works from his collection, Wong expressed clear regret. I ended up buying one of them back, he recalled. Every time I sell something, I regret it. So I decided that I wouldnt sell my artworks anymore. In addition to collecting art, the late billionaire also collected a multitude of other items, such as wine, watches, cigars and whiskey.
Wong revealed during the interview that there were multiple developments in progress, including a museum within a hotel in Taipei, with original art in each room, and also projects in Huizhou, Guangdong and Shanghai. Im a simple person, said Wong. I enjoy my life and I enjoy my work. I build things and if it doesnt work, I take it apart. Its a constant work in progress. Wongs legacy will live on in through his projects and his unwavering determination to share the best of art with the public.
Here are some highlights from The Artists Voice exhibition, which will be on view at The Parkview Museum Singapore from 18 November 2017 till 18 March 2018:
More information at parkviewmuseum.com.
This article was written by Nadya Wang and Ilyda Chua for Art Republik.
Ucoms mobile customers will benefit from the best internet roaming rate of 8 AMD/MB when travelling to Georgia, Egypt or the UAE
Ameriabank Launches Google Pay and Google Wallet Support for Card Users in Armenia
Karen Vardanyan donated 112 million drams for the medical equipment for National Center for Infectious Diseases.
UCOM HAS INTRODUCED FUTURE NETWORK WI-FI 6E ROUTERS
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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
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
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Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia
Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair
Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan
I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General
I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox
UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS
There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur
EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol Armenia and Azerbaijan to do so without delay
An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".
UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT
The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022
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
Military exercises in Artsakh (video)
The four-day military exercises of the Armenian and Artsakh aggregate troops were held in the southeastern part of Artsakh. The main task was to prepare and conduct an attacking operation. "The military doctrine of the armed forces is defensive, but it includes defensive, offensive and counterattack operations, as one cannot defeat the adversary with only defensive protection. Those who will try to break the borders of either the Republic of Artsakh or of the Republic of Armenia, this group is intended for them in order to attack and destroy the adversary," said Movses Hakobyan, Head of General Staff of the Republic of Armenia. These troops were formed just four months ago. The exercise was not planned. It aimed at checking whether the re-formed military units were capable of fighting, or not. "We need a well-trained individual soldier, but our ultimate goal is to have a harmonious subdivision, as no one can win separately," said Movses Hakobyan. Both the ground and air weapons were used in the exercises with a few hundred units of equipment. Thousands of soldiers from different subdivisions participated in the same tasks. According to the Commander of the Unified Forces, such a large-scale military exercise, co-operating with each other, took place for the first time. "Military art is always to be improved, military exercises should not be based on the previous war or clashes. As the army is a developing organism, it develops at all stages, and during maneuvers and daily routines," said Tigran Parvanyan, head of the united military unit. A few days ago, separate armies of Azerbaijan, including Nakhijevan, held a large-scale military exercise. The exercises were conducted under the slogan "Passing the adversary's attack and shooting back." "i should say that it is good that they conduct military exercises. When they have an army, they should exercise it. It is very important our adversary to be strong so that we win a strong adversary, and not a weak one. That is their business," said Movses hakobyan. During the conventional war, the work of media representatives was also been reorganized. "The four-day war in April showed that we, the mass media, had our gaps. It is also important that journalists also have combat readiness. Soldiers safety is the most important thing. No matter how much the media tries to cover the news first, the most important thing for me is the soldier's safety," Knar Manukyan, journalist of Zhokhovurd newspaper told A1+.
MassLive is one step closer to finding the best batch of freshly baked cookies in Massachusetts.
The initial Best Of Mass Cookies round saw nearly 40 nominations from bakeries in Springfield to New Bedford and places in between.
Now it is time to vote your favorite into the contest's Top 10.
In the poll below, you will find all of the bakeries nominated for Best Of Mass Cookies. Voting is restricted to one ballot for up to 10 bakeries, once every 24 hours per IP address. The poll will remain open until Monday, Dec. 11 at midnight.
Once the poll closes, the five most popular Western Massachusetts bakeries and the five most popular Eastern Massachusetts bakeries will make it into the Top 10.
In this month's Best Of Mass, the western half of the state is defined as towns and cities west of Worcester, while the eastern half of the state includes Worcester and towns and cities east of.
After the Top 10 is announced, our judges will visit and rank the Top 10 contenders and crown one as the best cookie bakery in Massachusetts.
Cast your votes in the poll below. Problem loading the poll? Vote directly here.
Shooting on an abbreviated final season of "House of Cards' resumes next month without its disgraced star, Kevin Spacey.
The sixth and final season of the Netflix series will consist of eight episodes, five fewer than previous years, according to Variety.
The new episodes will focus on Robin Wright's character, Claire Underwood, and Spacey will not be involved, as Netflix announced last month.
"We were really excited we could get to an agreement" to provide "closure of the show for fans," said Netfliix's Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, speaking Monday at UBS's Global Media and Communications Conference in New York.
Sarandos said he was gratified to have reached the deal for the team of 370 people who directly work on the show, as well as the 2,000 people in Baltimore, who have jobs working on the shoot in that city.
Spacey faces dozens of allegations of sexual assault or misconduct with investigations underway in London and Nantucket.
Forty years ago, this week, the FBI opened its John F. Kennedy files to the public for the first time. Those who were able to obtain "electronic-coded" passes were able to enter the FBI reading room to view some of the 40,001 pages released on a first-come basis. This batch was released due to a Freedom of Information lawsuit. The FBI insisted that the released documents would show no light on the 1963 assassination.
Ten years earlier, the first African-American U.S. astronaut was killed in a plane crash. Air Force Maj. Robert Lawrence, Jr., 31, was killed when his F104 crashed during a landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He had been selected as a "astronaut designee" in June and was to participate in a manned orbiting laboratory program known as MOL. He was the sixth astronaut to die in 1967, and the fifth to die in a plane crash that year.
From the December 9, 1967 edition of The Springfield Union
These are some of the headlines you'll see from Page 1 of The Republican and its predecessors over the past fifty years for the week of December 3 - December 9. Each week I'll put together a slideshow of Page 1 images from selected years over the course of that week. We're starting with a look back at one, five, thirty, forty and fifty years ago, with Page 1s from each day of the week for those years.
The slideshow for December 3 - December 9 is embedded at the top of this article.
We'll also find some humor printed out on page one over the years. In 1967 'Dennis The Menace' could be found on the bottom of page one six days a week.
From the December 4, 1967 edition of The Springfield Union
Other newspaper comics from the archive can be found in the Featured Collection photo galleries on MassLive.
Also back from 1967, Springfield resident SSGT. Frank Morey, Jr., was killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. Morey was a 1953 graduate of Technical High School and joined the Marines in 1954. At the time of his death, he was an aerial gunner in a helicopter near Quang Nam Province in Vietnam.
From the December 7, 1967 edition of The Springfield Union
And a year ago, officials at Hampshire College in Amherst decided to fly the American flag at the college once again. The flag had been taken down November 18th so the college could have a discussion on what the flag meant to the college community. After a series of protests by outside groups, and attacks towards students on social media, Hampshire President Jonathan Lash decided to return the flag to the campus.
As you'll find with looking through the slideshow, that while many stories come and go, many of the issues and topics that affected lives in the past, continue to have an impact on our lives today.
Copies of these and other stories can be found in the online archives. The Historic Archive includes stories from 1824 to 1989, and the Newsbank Archive covers 1988 through the present day.
An investigation is underway days after sexual abuse allegations were reported against famed Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine, who worked for seven years with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Levine, 74, stepped down as music director at the Met Opera in New York in April 2016. He led the BSO from 2004 until 2011, though he has had a working relationship with the orchestra for decades since he guest-conducted in 1972.
The Met Opera suspended any relationship with Levine on Sunday after a police report and multiple accounts, reported in the New York Post and New York Times, accuse Levine of sexual misconduct with teenagers. At least three of the accusers say they were underage when Levine made contact with them sexually.
In a statement, the BSO said there were no reports of Levine committing inappropriate behavior during his tenure in Boston.
"The BSO finds this information deeply disturbing and awaits the findings of further investigations on the matter."
The orchestra said it "adhered to a due diligence process" when hiring Levine as music director in 2004, citing a personal and professional review of his candidacy at the time.
The Met Opera used similar language, saying their organization is "deeply disturbed by the news articles" that were published.
We are deeply disturbed by the news articles that are being published online today about James Levine. We are working on an investigation w outside resources to determine whether charges of sexual misconduct in the 1980s are true, so that we can take appropriate action. Metropolitan Opera (@MetOpera) December 3, 2017
The flood of media, including the Post's article on a 2016 police report filed by one of Levine's accusers, has prompted the Met Opera to launch its own investigation "with outside resources." The Opera admits it knew of the police report since it was filed last year, but that they had not been updated by police.
Reports indicate rumors about Levine's "private life" have circulated for years, but the music leader has always denied any negative story as "a fabrication."
SPRINGFIELD -- The Springfield St. Patrick's Parade Committee revealed its 2018 Springfield parade marshal and award winners at a Sunday morning announcement party at the John Boyle O'Reilly Club.
The marshal for this year's parade is Nancy Lefebvre, a Chicopee resident who grew up in the Hungry Hill section of Springfield, where she attended Our Lady of Hope Church and graduated from Ursuline Academy.
The marshal -- a community member who's contributed greatly to the Irish community of Springfield -- will lead the Springfield contingent in the 2018 Holyoke St. Patrick's Parade on Sunday, March 18.
Lefebvre, a longtime member of the John Boyle O'Reilly Club and the Catholic Woman's Club of Springfield, has belonged to the Springfield St. Patrick's Parade Committee for over 25 years, serving as committee chairperson for six years. During her tenure, she started the very successful spaghetti supper fundraiser that's held every September.
The Springfield St. Patrick's Parade Committee also announced the following award winners:
The 2018 John & Agnes Burke Award went to Caroline Kelly, a Dublin native who moved to Springfield as a teenager. This award is presented in memory of John and Agnes Burke for outstanding service to the Irish community of the City of Springfield.
After losing family members to cancer, Kelly took action by forming a relay team of family and friends to participate in the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life. The team blossomed into a fundraising powerhouse under the leadership of Kelly, who joined the society's board and went on to become event chairperson for the Greater Springfield Relay.
In addition to her work for ACS, Kelly is the mother of three and an event coordinator for the Thomas J. O'Connor Animal Control and Adoption Center in Springfield.
The 2018 Paul G. Caron Award was given to Matt Keating, who was born and raised in Hungry Hill. The annual award is presented in memory of the founder of the Springfield Colleen Contest to a past or present parade committee member who has made an outstanding contribution to the committee.
Keating is a longtime member of the John Boyle O'Reilly Club, where he serves as manager and helps plan club events. He works very closely with the Springfield Parade Committee, scheduling their events at the club and making sure the banquet hall is arranged just right and the bartenders are ready to serve.
The 2018 Mary B. Troy Appreciation Award was granted to Rick Quackenbush and the Lower Pioneer Valley Career & Technical Center. The award is presented in memory of Mary Brigid Troy to a person or business that has given outstanding service to the committee.
Quackenbush, a facilities management teacher at Lower Pioneer Valley, is a former member of the Springfield St. Patrick's Parade Committee. For six years, he and the Lower Pioneer Valley staff and student body facilitated the building of the committee's award-winning floats. Pitching in were students from the auto shop, horticultural and graphics design classes.
Sunday's event at the Boyle was attended by the family of Tommy Sullivan, the Springfield Marine gunnery sergeant who was killed in a domestic terrorist attack in July 2015. The Sullivans joined Eric Devine, president of the Boyle, and about two dozen others for coffee, pastries and news about this year's parade honorees.
The nonprofit Sringfield St. Patrick's Parade Committee is dedicated to promoting and celebrating Irish heritage in the Greater Springfield area. The organization was founded in 1962 by a small group of Irishmen who wanted to honor Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, while also improving, developing and fostering the capabilities of people of Irish descent to help promote Irish heritage in the City of Springfield, culturally and socially, to the best of their ability.
The committee is responsible for selecting the Springfield Colleen and Court members who will represent the City of Springfield in the parade. Additionally, the Parade Committee awards annual scholarships in honor of Mossie and Kathleen Murphy. Learn more at www.springfieldstpatricksparade.org/
AMHERST -- Amherst will elect two new school committee members in the spring as two incumbents say they do not plan to seek re-election.
Nomination papers are now available for the March 27 annual town election.
Neither Vira Douangmany Cage nor Phoebe Hazzard will seek a second three-year term.
Cage said she wanted a break from campaigning. In 2016 she ran for the state representative seat vacated by Ellen Story, a seat won by Solomon Goldstein-Rose in a six-way race.
Hazzard in an email wrote that it was not "a commitment I can make for another three years."
"It's a substantial amount of time that I feel like I just can't accommodate as I work on the next steps in my life professionally, along with the many evening events and meetings, which become a lot for the family to absorb," she said.
She said she appreciates "the service of so many volunteers in our community that make up our town government. It's very important work that relies on the efforts of those willing to share their time and energy."
For Select Board, just one seat is up for election, that held by Douglas Slaughter. He has already taken out papers and is collecting signatures.
"It has been an honor and privilege to serve Amherst as a member of the Select Board over the last three years and I look forward to the opportunity to continue to serve the community," he wrote in an email. He has served one term.
Nomination papers for those seeking townwide office must be signed by at least 50 registered voters but just one signature is needed for Town Meeting member. Papers must be filed by Feb. 6.
Voters will also decide whether to adopt a change in the town's charter replacing the five-member Select Board and 240-member Town Meeting with a 13-member Town Council. The town manager's position would remain.
SPRINGFIELD -- A large monitor comes to life in a Hampden Superior Court courtroom and a defendant looks out from the screen.
The judge asks the defendant if he can hear everything. Once that is confirmed, the defendant -- from a room at the Hampden County Correctional Center in Ludlow -- listens while his lawyer argues for reduced bail.
The defendant, in this instance Javier Flores, is the only participant not in the Springfield courtroom. The judge, prosecutor, defense lawyer and probation officer are in the courtroom as usual.
The defendant sees the courtroom on his monitor in a room at the jail set aside for the video conferencing.
The video system is now being used in Hampden Superior Court for some bail reviews. Lawyers may still choose to have their clients brought to court, as has been the traditional procedure.
Regional Administrative Judge David Ricciardone, who has been presiding in the Hampden Superior Court courtroom where scheduling is done, is one proponent of the system. Some other judges won't use it.
Hampden Superior Court Clerk Laura Gentile promised during her election campaign in 2012 to get the video system into the courtrooms.
"First and foremost, it's a safety issue," Gentile said in a recent interview. "Our lockup is woefully inadequate, in my opinion. It gets overcrowded."
The daily docket is extensive and there is a shortage of court officers, she said.
"The fewer people we can bring in, the less risk," Gentile said.
The system also saves taxpayers money because fewer people are transported from the jail to court and back, she said.
Gentile said most defendants prefer not being brought into court for bail hearings. "They don't like coming into court and sitting in a lockup all day long," she said.
Lawyers Joseph Franco and Daniel D. Kelly both said the clients they have asked would rather stay at the jail than travel to court.
When defendants are brought to court for a bail review, all their possessions are packed up and sent with them in case they are able to post bail, Gentile said.
But defendants who opt not to come to court must wait until their families can travel to the jail to post bail. If a condition of release is GPS monitoring, the defendant must be brought to the courthouse anyway so the Probation Department can install the tracking device. Those are drawbacks of the video system, some lawyers said.
Gentile said some defendants prefer to come to court because they like the support of seeing their families.
"I know some of the defense attorneys don't like it," Gentile said. "They like to be able to be here with their clients. ... Anything new is met with some backlash until we become comfortable with it."
The Western Massachusetts Regional Women's Correctional Center in Chicopee houses women from all over the state. It has been using video conferencing to connect inmates with various courts since 2014.
Gentile hopes at some point the video conferencing program in Hampshire Superior Court will be expanded to include arraignments in addition to bail reviews.
Flores, the defendant who attended his bail hearing by video recently, had been held on $20,000 bail on charges related to a serious shooting incident. He has a trial date of Jan. 9.
Judge Michael K. Callan reduced Flores' bail to $10,000, the amount requested by defense lawyer Arthur J. O'Donald III. Assistant District Attorney Karen J. Bell argued against a reduction in bail, saying the victim in the shooting "quite frankly came close to dying."
O'Donald does not like bail reviews by video conference. "I think it's important for my clients to be next to me in the courtroom," he said. Bail reviews, like arraignments, are important processes and should be done in person, he said.
Family members of Flores were present in court but were only able to see him on the screen.
"Javy couldn't be here," said the defendant's mother, Victoria Moson-Flores. "He couldn't speak with his own lawyer. He can't see who's there to support him."
WESTFIELD - An unattended candle was the reported cause of a basement fire that displaced a family from a Dickinson Place home Sunday afternoon.
Police Lt. Jay Pitoniak told Western Mass News the blaze at 34 Dickinson Place was reported shortly before 2 p.m.
No injuries were reported. The Western Massachusetts Chapter of the American Red Cross is aiding those displaced.
The government also says the SCS will "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step."
Chinas government will implement a nationwide ranking system of its population by 2020. If this idea of a personal rating seems a little familiar perhaps you have seen the dystopic Netflix series, Black Mirror.
It works by giving each citizen a score based on their daily interactions and financial decisions, the score can be affected by debt, spending habits and even social interactions. Obviously, to get this kind of score that will be somewhat compared to a persons trustworthiness, there will need to be a huge amount of individual monitoring and data collection. The SCS is expected to be rolled out in 2020, but there will be a large scale trial period from now until then so the system can be at optimal functionality when it goes live on its 1.3 billion citizens.
https://interestingengineering.com/china-is-set-to-implement-a-system-of-ranking-its-citizens?_source=newsletter&_campaign=ylzXq3NnpLa22&_uid=nXe0N3Xbxr&_h=64cc3b5d9718727b8670189a16e07bec629326aa&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=mailing&utm_campaign=Newsletter-04-12-2017
A technology company based in a nondescript building west of Missoula has found itself on the forefront of a green energy future, manufacturing a line of "Power Perfect" products suited for both home and industrial settings.
Satic Technology http://saticusa.com/ , founded by BD Erickson, has also pledged an American-made approach to its product line, opting for wire harnesses made at S&K Technologies http://www.sktcorp.com/ in Ronan and junction boxes molded by Diversified Plastics http://www.diversifiedplastics.net/ in Missoula.
"Were engineers and American manufacturers of go-green energy products," Erickson said. "A lot of guys talk about American manufacturing, creating jobs, building something that serves the greater good or that can truly reduce the impact on the planet. We generally feel we deliver on that."
BY MARTIN KIDSTON
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Gender constructions of appetite
Cultural expectations surrounding female emotion and anger
'Reading' the starved body in relation to cultural prescriptions of femininity
The dynamics of 'healthy' eating/living and fitness cultures' aimed at women
Su Holmes, Ms Sarah Drake, Miss Kelsey Odgers and Dr Jonathan Wilson. 'Feminist approaches to anorexia: a qualitative study of a treatment group'. Eating Disorders (2017).
Dr Holmes said that although there is now extensive evidence on how EDs are bound up with cultural ideas surrounding gender, the contemporary focus on evidence-based treatment, and particularly the rise of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), has all but forced these issues off the agenda."If cultural elements are addressed, it is through a limited focus on 'body image' work, which often invokes the significance of the media in perpetuating unattainable images of the body".The paper said more culturally-focused perspectives on eating problems have argued that 'disordered eating may not necessarily be motivated by the drive for pursuit of thinness or any "distortion" of body image, but rather by wider experiences' of gender expectations and pressures.'Dr Holmes' previous research with people who had received treatment for an ED showed that even when a patient specifically asks to talk about questions of gender, their request may be ignored - either because such issues are seen as a low priority, or because health professionals have little training in this sphere.Dr Holmes and Ms Sarah Drake, an occupational therapist and lecturer in the School of Health and Social Care at UEA, devised and ran a new treatment intervention at an inpatient clinic that specialises in the treatment of EDs.The group, which was run over 10 weeks at Newmarket House clinic Norwich, was called 'Cultural Approaches to Eating Disorders', and included all the patients who were resident in the clinic at the time. These were all female, with a diagnosis of anorexia, and their ages ranged from 19-51.Each week, the programme examined what role culture might play in EDs, including:Media, such as television adverts, Disney films, press articles, image bank photography to social media, was used to stimulate debate about the particular issue being explored. But the media were not consistently positioned as the 'cause' of anorexia, as so often happens in suggestions of how society influences eating problems.The study found thatOne patient said that suggesting seeing "a skinny model in a magazine" influenced the development of EDs "completely trivialises" the many reasons people develop body- and eating distress.Looking at the wider contexts that shape ideas about gender in society - such as beliefs about 'appetite' - was seen as helpful by the participants. This focus took in food advertising aimed at women as well as wider ideas about 'appetite', such as the ways in which girls and women are still expected to exercise more restraint in sexual appetite than boys and men - and are sex- or slut-shamed if they don't.Participants in the group said they found it useful to situate their problem within society, thus moving away from the more individualized focus of medical perspectives that may encourage self-blame - but it also raised questions about recovery.One patient said: "But then, as the groups went on it's like OK, maybe this society's norms are quite disordered. But then it's like ... if society's norms are disordered ... then ... I don't know, how am I meant to change kind of things?"Dr Holmes said: "The medical framework may offer the patient a greater sense of personal agency when it comes to feelings of control in recovery. Given that anorexia in particular is seen to be tightly intertwined with issues of control, this is clearly worth some thought."The research shows, however, that there is room for more work and exploration in this area, and the group is now being re-run with the hope of adapting it for other services in the region.Dr Holmes said: "It is important to stress that the study does not work on the assumption that issues concerning gender identity are only relevant to the experience and treatment of eating disorders in girls and women. The focus on how eating- and body distress may be used to negotiate dominant ideas about gender and sexuality is similarly applicable to male patients, as well as gender minorities, even whilst the cultural constructions at stake may be different."Indeed, she said, given that recent research indicates how transgender individuals may be particularly at risk from developing eating problems, this arguably adds credence to the idea that EDs may be bound up with the pressures and difficulties posed by dominant gender norms.Dr Holmes said: "The bottom line is that, although eating disorders are now widely recognised as being shaped by biological, psychological and social factors, the social aspect of the equation is poorly served."Source: Medindia
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nikos Kotzias, will be in Brussels on 5 and 6 December to attend the Meeting of NATO Ministers of Foreign Affairs.
During the first day, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs will discuss issues concerning NATO-EU relations and global security challenges. This will be preceded by a working luncheon with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. At the working dinner, discussion will centre on Russia and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.
Finally, on Wednesday, 6 December, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs will focus on NATO-Georgia relations, the combating of terrorism and the Alliances open door policy.
JOURNALIST: Does President Erdogans upcoming visit to Athens the first by a Turkish head of state since 1952 mean there are hopes for substantial progress in Greek-Turkish relations?
N. KOTZIAS: A visit, however important it might be, doesnt automatically resolve all problems. But it can contribute to the enhancement of a positive outlook in the relations between our countries. I often wonder at those who confuse analysis with foreign policy. Analysis, even if it draws the most negative conclusions, is carried out to point up the difficulties, and not to make one abandon a proactive foreign policy. It is one thing to delude yourself about the difficulties in a relationship, and another to give up on pursuing the positive development of a relationship. And we want to work in this latter direction. Finally, foreign policy has to look soberly and precisely at the intentions and pursuits of each of our interlocutors. It has to rationally analyse these intentions and understand them in depth in order to influence them as far as possible.
JOURNALIST: After the long meeting you had in Crete with your Albanian counterpart, are you optimistic about a package solution to the pending bilateral issues.
N. KOTZIAS: Through the shared history of our two peoples, multiple interdependencies, lines of conflict and possibilities for friendship have been shaped. We need to resolve the problems of the past, work for the best possible present, and ensure a positive agenda for cooperation in the future. Regarding the problems and potential for joint actions, the Albanian side is more interested in some, and the Greek side is more interested in others. Dealing with all of these in tandem is what we call, in negotiation theory, a package solution, because such a solution takes into account any asymmetry of interest in various topics in the negotiations. I believe we are on the right path for reaching an agreement that is positive for both sides.
JOURNALIST: The opposition asked you to describe your negotiations with Mr. Bushati before they began. Can you comment on that?
N. KOTZIAS: I find it silly, to say the least, that certain members of the opposition want us to tell them publicly, no less what positions and proposals we are going to submit in the negotiations, the tactics we are going to employ, before a negotiation even begins. They did the same thing in our negotiations with fYROM and on the Cyprus issue. Perhaps they don't have experience of real negotiations, and thats why they ask us to reveal our negotiating strategy to third parties in advance.
JOURNALIST: Are there indications of a change in the Rama governments stance towards Athens.
N. KOTZIAS: I see that it has been understood that the countrys European course is more important than certain other issues. I also read his most recent statements, in which he talks about the development of a strategic relationship between Greece and Albania. These are positive developments. They contribute to the development of mutual trust. But, allow me to note that the opposition took an item of fake news that was based on a speech Mr. Rama made a year and a half ago in other words, a speech he made under different circumstances. They then presented it as having been made recently, taking aim at Albania and myself for holding negotiations. These are foolish tactics and are in no way helpful. Unless some people want our foreign policy to be idle and the problems to drag on forever. Personally, I refuse to exercise foreign policy with my attention on party-politics.
JOURNALIST: Is there momentum for resolving the pending fYROM name issue?
N. KOTZIAS: I think all of our interlocutors understand that all sides have to accept an honest compromise. That is, to operate based on consensus and on principled compromises. This also goes for those Europeans who, in the past, misled the leadership of our friendly country into believing that accession to the EU and other organizations can be achieved without compromises. In the case of fYROM, our neighbours believed that they could join institutions without reaching an agreement with us which is impossible while some people in Greece mistakenly believed that inertia is a foreign policy tool. It turned out that, during our inertia, other powers gained excellent access to our northern neighbours.
JOURNALIST: Is the new government in Skopje in a position to handle the reactions from extreme nationalist groups?
N. KOTZIAS: The next six months will show whether my friends in Skopje will put their hands on their hearts and decide to compromise. An honest compromise, not a rotten one. They can do it. They only need to believe in it and be supported by their friends. I also think the confidence-building measures have contributed to this end.
JOURNALIST: What is the overall assessment, so far, of the impact of the two trilateral regional cooperation schemes (Greece-Cyprus-Israel and Greece-Cyprus-Egypt) on the stability of the Eastern Mediterranean?
N. KOTZIAS: In the nearly three years I have been minister, we have developed and created a number of international institutions: Six trilateral and three quadrilateral cooperation schemes, one eight-sided and one seven-sided platforms, two international organizations and one global organization. Fourteen in all! Many countries have asked to participate in these initiatives, and a number of countries have asked to collaborate with us on creating new ones. Of all these initiatives, the ones that have gained the most depth are the trilateral configurations Greece and Cyprus have formed with Egypt and Israel. These are multi-level cooperation schemes. We are trying to do the same thing with our cooperation schemes in the Balkans, with Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon. Greeces standing has risen. These cooperation schemes have contributed to regional stability and security. As you know, within the framework of the Rhodes Conference we are preparing to create a new security and stability structure in the Eastern Mediterranean, with the participation of eight European states, twelve Arab states and two international Arab organizations.
JOURNALIST: Beyond the interest of the U.S., has the EU taken a positive view? Finally, are these two cooperation triangles compatible with open channels of communication with Moscow and Tehran?
N. KOTZIAS: The non regional players needed time to see the importance of all these initiatives we have taken. I think they understand them now, and I think the two countries you mentioned do as well. Let me also note that Iran is a very active member of the successful initiative we launched with China, at my suggestion, for forming the Ancient Civilizations Forum ancient civilizations that have influence and a presence in the contemporary world. We had a summit meeting in Athens, in April 2017. We met recently in New York, and we will meet in the spring of 2018, in Bolivia.
JOURNALIST: Does Greece support the European perspectives of Turkey and the Western Balkans?
N. KOTZIAS: If anyone has gains to make from these states accession to the EU from their democratization and Europeanization it is Greece. But for this to happen, these countries will have to satisfy the terms and conditions that have been set. Conditions that are of direct interest to Greece and in many cases are based on proposals we ourselves made.
JOURNALIST: In the midst of its own crisis, is the EU currently willing and able to support the full accession of new countries?
N. KOTZIAS: It is, but this will has to become more substantial, more democratic and with a more socially just vision. Europe has to deepen its integration processes. It has to take a resolute decision that all of the states, old and new, large and small, will be equal, and that the citizens of all these states, their societies and the social groups with the most problems today, will be the heart of a democratic, just, socially sensitive EU. So the EU has the capability, but the path to utilising these capabilities is long, difficult and full of social struggles.
JOURNALIST: The memorandum ends in mid-2018. What will the end of the programme mean for Greeces foreign policy?
N. KOTZIAS: Throughout this time, we have exercised a multidimensional proactive foreign policy. We contributed to upgrading the country, to strengthening its sovereignty and independence. By introducing the geopolitical element into the debate on the crisis, we made our countrys role easier to see, and we made it easier to find the path out of the crisis. Our countrys role, duties and capabilities on the international stage have been augmented. Globalization has also increased our duties. I hope that, now that we are emerging from the crisis, we will be able to hire personnel it has been 15 years since we last hired personnel of some categories and enhance our international presence through better finances.
JOURNALIST: It is often said that foreign policy is, by definition, a field of consensus. Nevertheless, since the beginning of your tenure as Minister of Foreign Affairs, you have been targeted by the opposition.
N. KOTZIAS: The opposition doesnt have its own foreign policy strategy. Part of the opposition actually supports the current foreign policy. Another part simply goes along with. But there are also some within the opposition that had grown accustomed to the policy of bowing down, of inertia and submissiveness. These people take issue with our every initiative. They are the voices of a new isolationism that fears any discussion with third countries and is suspicious of any negotiations. Finally, there is a category that has understood that leftist patriotic foreign policy enjoys the broad acceptance of all the genuine democratic patriotic forces, including within New Democracy itself. They are trying to confront this through insults, false accusations and personal attacks on me.
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MIDDLETOWN Each area high school that participated in a recent workshop at Middlesex Community College took home an accessory-equipped 360 camera for students which will allow them prepare a virtual reality video on their own.
More than 70 high school seniors visited the college to engage in a five-hour workshop, 360-Degree Learning: VR Video, Nov. 17. Students traveled from Nathan Hale-Ray (East Haddam), Portland, Valley Regional (Deep River), Vinal Tech (Middletown) and Westbrook high schools, according to a press release.
MxCC faculty and partners from CTGS Productions of Thomaston led three sessions at the Center for New Media classrooms. They included shooting video with 360-degree camera, video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro software, and a high-end VR experience, the release continued. Students interacted with the cameras, computers, software and VR equipment provided by MxCC during each session.
After the early morning welcome session, students divided into three groups and rotated between each 50-minute breakout session.
They will bring back their creations to the MxCC arts and media festival in May.
Its so interesting to see new technology like this. Its like youre in another world, Emily Miner, a senior from Deep River considering attending Middlesex next year, said in a prepared statement. I especially enjoyed learning about the 360 video camera, since I plan to study cinematography in college.
In the 360 camera session, Craig Ziogas, producer and partner at CTGS, introduced the Ricoh Theta, a camera that shoots everything in 360 degrees. The camera easily fits in the palm of the hand or on a tripod, according to the college. Users press a button and the device records in three dimensions as well as audio.
Smaller groups of students dispersed around campus to experiment shooting with the camera and tripod for 20 minutes before returning to the classroom. The Ricoh Theta connects to a computer and the students downloaded their video files into the Ricoh Theta software, the release continued. By dragging the files into the app on the desktop, the software converts the video segments and stitches them together.
Participants also learned how to edit video using the Adobe Premiere Pro software in a step-by-step session presented by Tim Coakley, also a partner at CTGS. Using video samples provided on Macintosh desktops, they shortened segments of a VR tour of a town in Connecticut, a popular way to use virtual reality online, according to the release.
Psychotherapists also use virtual reality to treat veterans with PTSD. By simulating and controlling elements in the patients past experience, they can relive these situations and draw back from them, Coakley said in a prepared statement. It can also be a way to overcome your fears, such as being in an airplane.
Organizations such as the Smithsonian, The New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, etc., have embraced 360 journalism, and VR is very useful in the travel industry.
Middlesex digital media professors Rick Eriksen and John Shafer explained the video assignment to the attendees before bringing them into the Center for New Media broadcast studio for the experience. Each student took turns wearing the HTC Vive headset or the Oculus Rift VR headset to view the VR world up close.
Nicole Esposito, who teaches a traditional video production course at Westbrook High School, brought 12 students to the Middlesex program. We have high-definition cameras at our school, but this is my first time experiencing 360 video equipment, she said in the release.
Hosted by Middlesex Community College, this workshop was funded by the Perkins Postsecondary Enhancement Grant.
Middletown police reported the following arrests:
POSSESSION: Debra McCain, 48, of Goodwin Street, Indian Orchard, Massachusetts, was arrested Nov. 30 and issued a misdemeanor summons for possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia. She is accused of having a glass pipe and 0.3 grams of crack cocaine in her possession. She was released on a promise to appear Dec. 5 in court.
FAILURE: Wayne Francis, 57, was arrested Nov. 29 on a warrant and charged with two counts of providing a false address with the Connecticut State Police Sex Offender Registry. He was held in lieu of $50,000 bail and issued a court date for the following day.
ASSAULT: Charles Stack, 26, of College Street, was arrested Nov. 29 on an active warrant and charged with breach of peace and assault on a police officer. He was held in lieu of $25,000 bail and issued a court date for the following day.
ASSAULT: Samuel Saez, 46, of Burgundy Hill Lane, was arrested Nov. 30 on outstanding warrant and charged with four counts of assault, three counts of reckless endangerment, two counts of threatening, strangulation and risk of injury to a minor. He was held in lieu of $5,000 bail and issued a court date for the following day.
CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: Patrick Reynolds, 47, of Plaza Drive, was arrested Nov. 30 on an active warrant and charged with operating an unregistered motor vehicle, operating with a suspended license, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and criminal mischief. He was held in lieu of $2500 bail and issued a court date for the following day.
POSSESSION: Willie Young, 57, of Westfield Street, was arrested Nov. 30 and charged with possession of narcotics and possession of drug paraphernalia. He is accused of having a crack pipe and 1.27 grams of crack cocaine in her possession. He was released on $1,500 bail and issued a court date of Dec. 15.
CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: Walter Tixi-Vazquez, 27, of Rose Circle, was arrested Dec. 3 and charged with criminal mischief and breach of peace. He was issued a court date for the following date.
FAILURE: James Salters Jr., 38, of John Street, Willimantic, was arrested Dec. 1 on an active warrant and charged with failure to appear. He was held in lieu of $25,000 bail and issued a court date for Dec. 4.
ASSAULT: Estrella Gonzalez, 29, of High Street, was arrested Dec. 1 and issued a misdemeanor summons for third-degree assault and disorderly conduct. She is accused of grabbing a man she knew by his neck and scratching him. She was released on a promise to appear Dec. 4 in court.
ASSAULT: Justin Ryals, 32, of Spring Street, was arrested Dec. 1 on an active warrant and charged with first-degree assault, violation of a protective order, risk of injury to a minor, breach of peace, home invasion and violation of probation. He was held in lieu on $150,000 bail and issued a court date for Dec. 4.
POSSESSION: Thomas Freeman Sr., 52, of Silver Street, and Stanley Scherp, 53, of High Street, were both arrested Nov. 24 and issued a misdemeanor summons for possession of narcotics. Police pulled over the vehicle and reportedly found eight wax paper folds containing heroin inside the car. Both men denied the heroin was theirs, but since it was in the reachable area of both, it was deemed in the constructive possession of Freeman and Scherp. Both were issued a court date of Dec. 8.
THREATENING: Steven Grzybowski, 51, of Union Street, was arrested Dec. 1 and charged with criminal attempt to assault a police officer, criminal attempt for first-degree assault, three counts of threatening and disorderly conducting for reportedly threatening to hurt three people and trying to assault a police officer with a hatchet. He was held in lieu of $500,000 bail and issued a court date of Dec. 4.
POSSESSION: Walter Dismuke, 31, of Rowe Avenue, Hartford, was arrested Nov. 25 and charged with possession of marijuana, possession with intent to sell, threatening and breach of peace. He is accused of threatening to a shoot a man and grabbing the man by the back of his neck. After being detained, officers reportedly found 14 wrapped baggies with marijuana in his possession, leading police to believe Dismuke was allegedly planning to sell them. He was held in lieu of $25,000 bail and issued a court date of Nov. 27.
POSSESSION: Neil Singhal, 37, of Keighley Pond Road, East Haddam, was arrested Dec. 1 and charged with possession of narcotics, possession of drug paraphernalia, interfering with an officer, operating with a suspended license and failure to display a license plate. He was held in lieu of $25,000 bail and issued a court date of the same day.
For women with uterine factor infertility who want to be mothers, the calculus has always been heartbreakingly simple: No uterus means no pregnancy.
The equation changed drastically in 2014, when Swedish doctors delivered a healthy 3.9-pound baby that was the result of a successful uterus transplant.
Now, doctors at Baylor University say a woman born without a uterus has delivered a baby after a successful transplant, the first time the surgery has worked outside of the Swedish hospital that pioneered the procedure.
The success marked another step forward for transplant surgery aimed at improving a person's life, not just saving it. Doctors have performed penis transplants for wounded troops, given a young boy two new hands and given a new nose, lips, palate, eyelids and jaw to a woman who was gruesomely disfigured after she was shot in the face.
The fact that the uterus transplant success in Sweden can be replicated is a promising sign for thousands of women who have been unable to conceive. And doctors at Baylor have sought to expand the limits of the procedure, using donated uteri that didn't come from family members and, in some cases, organs that came from cadavers.
"To make the field grow and expand and have the procedure come out to more women, it has to be reproduced," said Liza Johannesson, a uterus transplant surgeon who left the Swedish team to join Baylor's group, told the New York Times. "It was a very exciting birth. I've seen so many births and delivered so many babies, but this was a very special one."
Baylor's clinical trial was designed to include 10 women. Eight, including the new mother, have received the transplants so far. One recipient is pregnant, and two are trying to conceive. Four others had transplants that failed, and the organs had to be surgically removed.
The surgeries differ from other transplants in one major way: They're not intended to be permanent. Instead, they give a woman enough time to conceive a child. In vitro fertilized eggs are transferred to the woman's womb, and after the baby is born, the uterus is removed via surgery.
That means the patient doesn't have to spend a lifetime taking powerful drugs that suppress her immune system, which would put her at risk for dangerous long-term complications.
The university hasn't released the names of the mother or the baby, saying they chose to remain anonymous.
But according to Tech Times, the donor uterus came from Taylor Siler, a Dallas nurse who has two children. She said she wanted to offer another woman a chance to give birth.
While this most recent birth is a step forward, uterine transplantation surgery is still in its very early days, and doctors conceded that there had been setbacks, particularly with the earliest volunteers.
In February 2016, Lindsey McFarland became the first woman to receive a uterus transplant in America. The organ came from a dead donor and was implanted during a nine-hour surgery.
Her story gave a sense of just how tenuous the nascent surgery is. She had to have her transplanted uterus removed after coming down with a yeast infection.
According to Newsweek, most of the women in Baylor's trial had Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, which makes pregnancy and giving birth impossible.
And for most of their lives many had been told that they wouldn't be able to have children.
"We do transplants all day long," Giuliano Tesla, who heads the uterus transplant clinical trial at Baylor University Medical Center, told Time magazine. "This is not the same thing. I totally underestimated what this type of transplant does for these women. What I've learned emotionally, I do not have the words to describe."
The Metropolitan Opera in New York announced Sunday that it was suspending its relationship with James Levine, its music director emeritus and a monumental figure in the world of classical music, because of multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.
The New York Times reported Sunday that three more men said they had been sexually abused by Levine in a time period that encompassed the 1960s through the 1980s. "While we await the results of the investigation, based on these new news reports, the Met has made the decision to act now," Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, said in a statement.
The decision to suspend followed an announcement Saturday that the Met would start an investigation into allegations, which came in the wake of an article detailing sexual abuse allegations made by a man, now 48, to the police department in Lake Forest, Illinois - allegations that the Met had known about for at least a year.
"This first came to the Met's attention when the Illinois police investigation was opened in October, 2016," Gelb said in a statement. "At the time, Mr. Levine said that the charges were completely false, and we relied upon the further investigation of the police."
Gelb could not be reached for comment on why the Met deemed the charges worthy of investigation at this time, but not a year ago.
Levine, 74, was the music director of the Metropolitan Opera for 40 years before stepping down in 2016. He is also the former music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic and the Ravinia Festival, which is held near Chicago and is billed as the oldest outdoor music festival in the country. Levine was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient in 2003.
Levine is a beloved figure in the industry but has faced rumors of these sorts in the past - so much so that he addressed them in a 1987 interview. "I don't have the faintest idea where those rumors came from or what purpose they served," Levine told the New York Times' John Rockwell.
The alleged victim in the Illinois investigation, whose name has been withheld because The Washington Post does not identify alleged victims of sexual abuse, has approached reporters from multiple publications over the years and, more recently, posted publicly on Facebook. But the New York Post was the first to report his allegations, followed shortly by the New York Times and other publications over the weekend.
In his account to the Lake Forest Police Department, the accuser made explicit charges against Levine. The abuse, he told police, began in 1985, when he was 16. Levine, he said, used to arrange to meet him for dinner, but would instead take him to his hotel room near Ravinia, where Levine was music director from 1973 to 1993. There, according to the accuser, Levine would ask him to remove his clothes, fondle his penis and masturbate in front of him.
The man told police that this behavior continued for years. Levine, he said, also gave him financial gifts amounting to about $50,000.
The encounters left him confused and unhappy, he said, and almost drove him to suicide.
Levine has suffered from ill health for years. He was diagnosed as having Parkinson's disease in 2006, but that was publicly revealed only a decade later. Today, he is largely in a wheelchair, but he has stepped up his activity at the Met in his current role of music director emeritus, after a period of not conducting very often. The New York Post story was published shortly after he finished conducting the last of four performances of Verdi's "Requiem."
Levine's management did not respond to requests for comment.
An art performance at the event (Source: cinet.gov.vn)
The event drew the participation of five universities and academies, including the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, University of Communications and Transport, Hanoi Law University, Foreign Trade University and Hanoi University of Culture.
It was an opportunity to help Laos students meet and exchange with Vietnamese students, and help each other in studying and daily life.
Art performances by both Vietnamese and Lao students showed warm melodies and lively images about traditional culture of the two countries.
It was also a chance to popularize specific Lao cultural characteristic to Vietnamese students, promoting the solidarity and special friendship between Vietnam and Laos./.
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday granted President Donald Trump's request to fully enforce his revised order banning travel to the United States by residents of six mostly Muslim countries while legal challenges to it proceed in lower courts.
It was a victory for the White House, which has seen the courts trim back various iterations of the travel ban, and it bodes well for the administration if the Supreme Court is called upon to finally decide the merits of the president's actions.
Two lower courts had imposed restrictions on Trump's new order, exempting travelers from the six countries who had "bona fide" connections with relatives - such as grandparents, aunts or uncles - or institutions in the United States. Those exemptions to the president's order, issued in the fall, were along the lines of those imposed by the Supreme Court last summer on a previous version of the travel ban.
But in an unsigned opinion Monday that did not disclose the court's reasoning, the justices lifted the injunctions, which had been issued by federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor noted that they would not have lifted the restrictions. The new ban also bars travelers from North Korea and Venezuela, but they were not affected by the injunctions.
The justices said they expected the federal judges reviewing challenges to the order - based on what challengers say are Trump's animus toward Muslims and lack of authority under immigration laws - to handle the cases with "appropriate dispatch."
The court's move is "a substantial victory for the safety and security of the American people," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a written statement. "We are pleased to have defended this order and heartened that a clear majority Supreme Court has allowed the President's lawful proclamation protecting our country's national security to go into full effect. The Constitution gives the President the responsibility and power to protect this country from all threats foreign and domestic, and this order remains vital to accomplishing those goals."
The justices acted just after the American Civil Liberties Union, which is leading one of the lawsuits, sent a letter to the court Monday morning pointing out that Trump last week tweeted links to anti-Muslim videos.
Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, reacted to the court's order with disappointment.
"President Trump's anti-Muslim prejudice is no secret - he has repeatedly confirmed it, including just last week on Twitter," Jadwat said. "It's unfortunate that the full ban can move forward for now, but this order does not address the merits of our claims. We continue to stand for freedom, equality, and for those who are unfairly being separated from their loved ones."
The latest iteration of the travel ban, the third Trump has issued, bars various people from eight countries: Syria, Libya, Iran, Yemen, Chad, Somalia, North Korea and Venezuela. Six of the countries have Muslim-majority populations.
But federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii blocked its implementation for "foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States." They said such people include grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins of people in the United States.
The language was drawn from a Supreme Court decision in June that exempted such foreign nationals from Trump's second version of the executive order, which expired this fall.
The orders from the two district judges will be reviewed this week. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is set to consider the Hawaii case Wednesday, and the entire U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond will consider the Maryland judge's decision Friday.
Lawyers for Hawaii had told the Supreme Court that there was no reason to back away from the "equitable determination, dutifully adhered to by the court below," that it had already made. If anything, Hawaii's lawyers said, the government's case deserves even greater scrutiny than before, as compared with the earlier temporary travel bans.
The president now "has imposed an indefinite one, deepening and prolonging the harms a stay would inflict," said the brief submitted on Hawaii's behalf by Washington lawyer Neal K. Katyal.
But Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco, representing the Trump administration, argued that there was no reason for the injunctions.
The new executive order, he wrote, followed a "comprehensive, worldwide review of the information shared by foreign governments that is used to screen aliens seeking entry to the United States. Based on that review, the Proclamation adopts tailored entry restrictions to address extensive findings that a handful of particular foreign governments have deficient information-sharing and identity-management practices, or other risk factors."
The cases are Trump v. Hawaii and Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project.
It is not a bad thing for us, that the route known as the Goldene Strae or the Golden Road as we will get to know it- has escaped the attention of so many. It has been spared being overrun by hordes of tourists and as you will discover the
Conex Banninger celebrates 25 years working in Poland
Conex Banninger, leading global manufacturer and supplier of fittings, valves and accessories, is celebrating 25 years of production excellence in Poland.
Today, a world class manufacturing site and a distribution centre near the city of Poznan supports a total of around 550 jobs, fulfilling its potential as a base for thriving sales in markets across Europe and around the globe. It was spotting that opportunity for growth, firstly in Poland then internationally, that persuaded parent IBP Group to invest in what was a small factory and warehouse in Ovodrzytka in the west of the country, in 1992.
Richard Darwin, group commercial director at IBP Group, said: We were fortunate in identifying the opportunity for growth through establishing production in Poland and this has proven to be a winner, many times over. The commitment, innovation and expertise provided by all those involved has built great success for Conex Banninger over the past 25 years, and made a major contribution to the rich heritage of the IBP Group.
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As already informed, the Thirty Third Annual General Meeting of the Company is scheduled to be held on Thursday, December 28, 2017, 2.30 p.m at Grand Ball Room, Taj Krishna, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad.A copy of the Notice of the Annual General Meeting is enclosed herewith in accordance with Regulation 30(12).Source : BSE
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Australia's competition regulator said on Monday it would investigate whether U.S. online giants Facebook and Alphabet Inc's Google has disrupted the news media market to the detriment of publishers and consumers.
Like their rivals globally, Australia's traditional media companies have been squeezed by online rivals, as advertising dollars have followed eyeballs to digital distributors such as Google, Facebook and Netflix Inc.
The government ordered the probe as part of wider media reforms, amid growing concern for the future of journalism and the quality of news following years of declining profits and newsroom job cuts and the rise of fake news.
"We will examine whether platforms are exercising market power in commercial dealings to the detriment of consumers, media content creators and advertisers," Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Chairman Rod Sims said in a statement.
The inquiry also would study how Facebook and Google operated to "fully understand their influence in Australia", he added.
A Google spokesman said, "We look forward to engaging with this process as relevant."
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The idea for an ACCC investigation was hatched during media reform negotiations in parliament earlier this year, which resulted in a relaxation of ownership laws to allow the country's big players to boost their market share to better compete against online disruptors.
Independent media analyst Peter Cox told Reuters it was unclear what measures the competition regulator could recommend to the government even if it found the country's media sector was increasingly anti-competitive.
"You could see this as a stepping stone towards another type of reform, such as tax," said Cox.
Jurisdictions around the world, including the European Union, are grappling with how to tax technology giants with global operations.
Currently corporate taxes are paid where firms have a physical presence, which allows digital multinationals to book most of their profits where they have set up headquarters as opposed to where they make their money.
The Australian probe will have power to demand information from businesses and hold hearings. It is due to make its final report in 18 months.
Rajnath Singh
Home Minister Rajnath Singh today said the BJP formed government at the Centre because of the Gujarat model of development and that the people of the country had already answered the questions of Rahul Gandhi by giving it a mandate in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
Hitting out at Gandhi over his "a question a day" social media campaign, Singh said he should first tell why India remained poor despite the Congress ruling it for 50-55 years.
At a public rally here, Singh said, "The Congress leader (Rahul) asks what did the BJP government do in 22 years of its rule? What the BJP government has done in 22 years has been answered by the people of India during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections."
"If development has gone mad here, then why the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation appreciated the Gujarat government in 2012. It was the Gujarat model because of which the BJP formed government at the Centre.
"A single party ruled for 50-55 years... what is the reason India is still counted among poor countries in the world?" Rajnath asked.
The home minister also suggested the three young leaders in the state who have supported the Congress -- Alpesh Thakor, Hardik Patel and Jignesh Mevani -- to stay away from Gandhi.
"I would like to send a message to them that Rahul Gandhi will take them along when he sinks," he said, citing the example of Uttar Pradesh where the Samajawadi Party, which stitched a pre-poll alliance with the Congress, was defeated.
Singh praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying that because of him India had found a place of respect in the world community and that his government was committed to making it the most powerful country in the world.
He said his government was committed to increasing farmers' income by 2022 and that the concerns of peasants in Sanand will be resolved as soon as the BJP returns to power in Gujarat.
He also suggested the opposition to restrain itself while speaking about the prime minister.
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Infosys employees have not quite made up their minds about their new chief executive, on the first working day after Salil Parekh replaced Vishal Sikka.
This happened over the weekend and weve been trying to find out more about Salil, but he seems to be a very private person, said an employee who works at the Infosys Pune campus and did not wish to be named.
While Parekh is a well-known name in the industry, famous for his sharp focus and eye for the future, he is certainly low-key compared to his predecessor Sikka.
We were hearing of Ashok (Vemuri) and BG (Srinivasan) being in the fray for the top job for a long time, but this came as a surprise, said another employee based in Chandigarh, who did not wish to be named. He (Parekh) is very low profile, this person added.
Parekh was named the second non co-founder CEO of Infosys on December 2.
In August, Sikka stepped down following a very public battle with co-founder NR Narayana Murthy over issues of corporate governance and Sikkas lavish lifestyle.
The board blamed co-founder NR Narayana Murthy for Sikkas resignation, was supposed to find a replacement by March 31, 2018, under co-founder Nandan Nilekani as non-executive chairman of the Board.
What happened with Sikka has dented confidence among the workforce about another non co-founder CEO.
It doesnt seem like there are too many people who can step into the shoes of the Infosys CEO, said another employee based in Bengaluru. What happened with Vishal was unfortunate; now lets see how Salil works out. We do miss having Vishal around, she added.
In the time since his appointment was announced, much has been written about the Parekh experience in leading Capgeminis key businesses and also the crucial role he played in the acquisitions of his previous company Ernst & Young and the takeover of iGate by Capgemini in 2015.
"He seems to have a good track record. Let's hope he lasts longer than Vishal," added the Pune employee quoted above.
Many parallels have also been drawn between Parekh and Sikka, with analysts hoping that Parekhs decision to be based out of Bengaluru and the Boards mentorship will be a key differentiator in the new CEOs favour.
A customer walks outside an HDFC Bank branch in Mumbai July 17, 2013. India's HDFC Bank Ltd posted on Wednesday a 30 percent rise in first-quarter net profits, in line with expectations, boosted by higher fee income and credit growth. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui (INDIA - Tags: BUSINESS) - RTX11P4B
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HDFC Bank, one of most valued banks globally and the cleanest among Indian banks when it comes to non-performing assets (NPAs), has seen an unhappy secret, according to a report by Bloomberg.
While most banks are battling a high amount of bad loans from largely around 4-5 percent to as high as 25 percent, HDFC Bank, countrys second largest private lender, has maintained the gross NPA ratio at 1.26 percent of its total loan book size.
The Aditya Puri-led bank also has a price-to-book value ratio at 5.2 percent, the value it gives to its investors in the stock market.
However, despite being largely insulated from the most notorious financially-troubled infrastructure, steel, power companies and road & construction sectors, HDFC Bank was hit by the NPA "divergence" storm last month after Reserve Bank of India, in its annual risk based supervision, asked the bank to classify one account as an NPA.
RBI took this move after a reported divergence in its classification of NPAs and its provisions in comparison to the banks classification as on March 31.
The Bloomberg quoted a report by independent analyst Hemindra Hazari, who said in the his analysis, It is now clear that the unnamed and disputed corporate non-performing asset (NPA) in HDFC Bank Limited [2QFY2018 results was Jindal Steel & Power Ltd (JSPL)]A letter from the bank to JSPL makes clear, however, that the account was irregular and overdue but probably within the 90-day grace period as on end September 2017. What is even more curious is that JSPL, which was having difficulty servicing its bank debt, is now borrowing high-cost funds from a non-bank finance company (NBFC) to settle its overdue with banks."
HDFC Bank did not respond, at the time of publishing this article, to queries sent by Moneycontrol seeking clarification on the exposure to JSPL.
Jindal Steel had net debt of Rs 44,000 (USD 6.8 billion) at the end of September 2017.
According to Bloomberg, HDFC Bank should acknowledge the "divergence" between its self-reported and RBI-assessed NPAs. But doing so would also mean admitting that those soured loans, net of provisions, were 95 percent more than disclosed in the full-year accounts.
Such a divergence in asset classification of NPA accounts emerged in two other banks - Axis Bank at Rs 5,633 crore and Yes Bank at Rs 6,355 crore.
Also Read: NPA divergences point to a need for bank auditors to have a dialogue with RBI
So far, HDFC Bank has not disclosed the quantum of the exposure but stated that it has made a provision of Rs 700 crore, adequate as per the RBIs norms for NPAs.
Without mentioning the word divergence, a day after it announced the second quarter results, HDFC Bank in a statement said, With specific reference to the part pertaining to the project loan account which underwent flexible structuring as approved by the Joint Lenders Forum and for which the Bank had made contingent provisions. The Bank has received communication from the regulator advising it to classify the said account as a non-performing asset. The same has been duly complied with.
The Bloomberg report said, If the corporate account exposure exceeds Rs 8.84 billion or Rs 884 crore (i.e. 15 percent of the banks announced FY17 gross NPAs), the bank will be in the embarrassing position of having to disclose the divergence in the RBI format. Such a divergence was not expected from Indias largest bank by market capitalization, a bank that trades at 5.2x price to book value.
The Bloomberg report also acknowledges if questions would be raised about the RBI. The RBI can't arbitrarily force some lenders to appear less than truthful, while sparing others the humiliation of a mea culpa.
Earlier, speaking to Moneycontrol, former RBI deputy governor SS Mundra has said, Sometimes, it is quite possible that NPAs may be recognised in one bank and not in another. At times, when the RBI is inspecting, the availability of information is slightly better than the bank auditors and also the timeline is better.
So, there are also interpretational issues. However, this should account for a limited difference. There may be genuine reasons that some parties (banks or auditors) may not be clear. Now that two cycles are over, the bank Board, auditors must pick these up and engage into discussions with the management and RBI. I would prefer more engagement than judge that as a misconduct on the part of auditors, he added.
With the stakes this high, the RBI needs to crack the whip of asset classification with a steady hand -- one that treats creditors fairly and borrowers correctly. Meanwhile, HDFC Bank must present a more accurate picture of its soured loans. After all, bad things can happen even to great banks, the report added.
In a response to the ban notification issued by Indian intelligence agencies last week, China-based content sharing platform SHAREit on Monday said that the company adhered to high security standards and respected the privacy of its users.
"At SHAREit we strictly adhere to high security standards and respect our users privacy. SHAREit is a user friendly content sharing platform and not a malicious or a spyware application as alleged in the reports," the company said in a statement.
"We do not compromise on users security and their privacy is of utmost importance to us. We have a huge user base in India and we are committed to providing better products and service to our users with continuous technological developments," it added.
Last week, intelligence agencies listed more than 40 applications that could allegedly aid a cyber attack against the nation as they store sensitive data of people. The agencies have already issued an advisory warning to the army and paramilitary posted on border against their usage.
The company said it is investigating the advisory and is open to interacting with the government.
"We have taken this issue seriously and are investigating the advisory. We are also happy to interact with government and media representatives to give more clarity," it said.
The list has apps for both Android and iOS platforms. Besides SHAREit, the list also has names such as Truecaller, news app UC News and WeChat.
A Chennai-bound Air India flight from Dubai was diverted to the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport here today as a passenger took ill.
The male passenger (name not revealed by the airline) complained of chest pain, following which the pilot decided to divert the Airbus A321 aircraft to Mumbai, an Air India spokesperson said.
Air India flight AI 906, carrying 164 passengers, had departed from the Dubai International Airport at 1128 hours yesterday night.
On landing, the passenger was deplaned for medical examination, the AI spokesperson said, adding the flight with remaining passengers left for Chennai at 0455 hours this morning.
Doctors from Mumbai International Airport Limited conducted medical tests and declared the passenger fit for travelling. He will be flying to Chennai on another Air India flight, the official added.
Liquor baron Vijay Mallya, out on a 650,000-pound bail bond following his arrest by Scotland Yard over fraud and money laundering charges earlier this year, will return to Westminster Magistrates' Court in London on Monday as his extradition trial begins.
India's case to bring back the 61-year old businessman will be represented through the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) of the British government.
PTI quoted CBI sources as saying that a team led by Special Director Rakesh Asthana left for London on Sunday and would remain present during the trial.
Mallya, who had shifted to the UK in March 2016, is wanted in India on charges relating to his defunct Kingfisher Airlines defaulting on loans from various Indian banks amounting to Rs 9,000 crore.
The former Rajya Sabha member had told PTI during his numerous court appearances in London over the last few months that he had "done nothing wrong" and described the allegations against him as "fabricated".
Parsvnath Developers posted a rather weak set of Q2 numbers. In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Pradeep Jain, Chairman of the company discussed the Q2 performance and gave his outlook for the future.
We own commercial properties that have a size of 1.38 million square feet, said Jain.
He further said that the company will become debt free in the next two-three years.
We will monetise few assets and will use the proceeds to pare debt, he added.
Talking about projects, he said we will deliver all our projects in the next 18-24 months.
13 years after becoming a member of parliament, Rahul Gandhi is all set to take over as the President of the Congress party. He will now lead the 132-year old party as it faces a crisis to stay relevant. Is he the right man to steer the ship? And is brand Rahul Gandhi relevant today? In fact, what does Rahul Gandhi stand for? Those are the questions CNBC-TV18s Shereen Bhan is asking the eminent panelists.
In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Salman Soz, Spokesperson Congress, Santosh Desai, Columnist, Media Critic and Author of Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India, Aarthi Ramachandran, Assistant Editor, The Good State as well as the Author of 'Decoding Rahul Gandhi and AK Bhattacharya, Editorial Director, Business Standard shared their views and outlook on the same.
On Sunday, the first phase of the Chabahar port was officially inaugurated by Hassan Rouhani, the President of Iran. The strategically located port not only opens a new trade route to central Asia but also is of utmost strategic importance to India which has invested heavily in it.
From the days of Shah
Located in Irans Sistan and Baluchistan province on the Gulf of Oman region, Chabahar is the only oceanic port of the country. Consisting of two separate ports named Shahid Kalantari and Shahid Beheshti, it was in the days of the last Shah of Iran that a proposal to develop the port was first floated. The early steps in this direction were only taken in 1983 when the country started to shift its trade to the port in the wake of the war with Iraq.
Indias interest in the port dates back to 1990 when as per an IDSA report it partially built the port in order to access Afghanistan and Central Asia by bypassing Pakistan. However, the real push towards developing the port began after India signed a deal with Iran in 2016 to develop the port and region along with the trilateral transit and transport agreement that also includes Afghanistan.
How is it important for India?
Indias quest to find a direct route to Afghanistan and beyond by bypassing Pakistan seems to be answered with the identification of Chabahar as its strategic gateway. While India made a deal worth over Rs 50,000 crore last year to develop Chabahar special economic zone, it had already taken several other measures to increase cooperation with Afghanistan and Iran.
The country has already completed the Zaranj-Delaram road in Afghanistan that will enable Afghanistan to access the sea ports in Iran and end its dependence on Pakistan for sea access. India is also planning to build rail links across the region that will not only connect the port with India promoted Hajigak iron and steel mining project in central Afghanistan, but also serve as a link to the port with central Asia, Russia and Europe.
Above all this, around Rs 600 crore has been invested by India to refurbish one of the berths at Shahid Beheshti port and to reconstruct a 600-meter long container handling facility.
The strategic impact
With large investments it is obvious that India gives the port utmost priority. There are several factors behind this.
First of all, the new port will allow India to counter the blockade created by Pakistan. For years all Indian attempts to forge direct access to Afghanistan and beyond has been met with Pakistan's challenge. The new port and its related connections will bring an end to this problem.
Secondly, with Indias ever increasing demand for natural gas and crude oil, the port could be a door for the country to import both resources from Iran and Central Asia.
Thirdly, with China growing its tentacles throughout the region, particularly Pakistan, the new port could well aid India in countering the Chinese threat especially to nullify the impact of Gwadar port that it is building just across the border in Pakistan.
Fourthly, the port could pave the way in improving Indias soft power across the globe. Along with the plans to link the port with Afghanistan and central Asia, there are also plans to link it with Russia and Europe through 7,200-km-long multi-modal North-South Transport Corridor. And with India steadily improving ties with East Asian countries, this may end up becoming a new international trade route that will counter the China-led Belt and Road initiative.
Prakash Gaba of prakashgaba.com told CNBC-TV18, "Tata Coffee has been in a buy mode since the level of Rs 94, and it is still into a buy mode. However, after seeing such an up move, possibly we could see some sideways move and maybe Rs 160 or Rs 155 is possible. It is a beautiful stock to hold."
"I do not remember last time when any one of us saw rally of 30-50 percent on either Punjab National Bank (PNB) or a State Bank of India (SBI) or maybe Bank of India , or likewise even Canara Bank . SBI would be the best suitable stock in the universe," he said.
mployees walk along a corridor in the Infosys campus in Bangalore (Image: Reuters)
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Shares of Infosys rose as much as 2.9 percent in morning trade on Monday after the Board appointed Salil Parekh as its new Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director (CEO & MD) of the company effective January 2, 2018, over the weekend.
The stock, which has given a flat return in the calendar year 2017, could well scale Rs 1,100 levels in the next 12 months, experts suggest. Most analysts remain fairly optimistic about the appointment of Parekh, who is no stranger to the IT industry. The appointment of the new CEO at Infosys will remove the uncertainty and put the stock back on investors radar.
The former Capgemini executive was in the race for the top job at Infosys last time as well, when the Indian IT major decided in favour of Vishal Sikka.
The appointment of Salil Parekh as MD and CEO of Infosys is a promising choice. Salil brings tenured experience with the added advantage of working in a global firm, CLSA said in a note. This is perhaps the best of three outcomes for Infosys, said the note.
Parekh had been with Capgemini India for over a decade & a half, starting with EY in 1992 and was part of the consulting business that was acquired by Capgemini in 2000.
"The appointment of Salil Parekh comes in reasonable time after Nilekanis swift appointment to the Board. This allows Infosys to expedite away from inward focus and start to chase growth in business sooner than later," Motilal Oswal said in a report.
The domestic brokerage firm maintains a buy rating on Infosys with a target price of Rs 1,100 which translates into an upside of about 15 percent from current levels. The domestic brokerage firm is of the view that gradual recovery to normalcy will provide a further case for rerating.
Earlier in October, Infosys September performance and FY18 guidance had quelled fears of the impact on business post the leadership exit, and we note that ex-RBS, the midpoint of current guidance is close to industry.
The company has not been underperforming its peers on the front of revenue growth and profitability, but its valuation to peers remained discounted amid the ongoing search for a new leader and concerns around governance, said a report.
With the appointment of CEO, the uncertainty is over. Majority of IT shares had performed recently but Infosys was lagging behind, but now with the clarity on leadership, the stock should perform well, Jimeet Modi, Founder & CEO, Samco Securities told Moneycontrol.
P/E for IT industry is trading at 20-times trailing earnings while Infosys is trading at 15x, a deep discount, which now will get narrowed down. The appointment is positive for the stock both for the short and long-term, he said.
At 09:46 hrs, Infosys was quoting at Rs 978.70, up Rs 20.20, or 2.11 percent, on the BSE. It touched an intraday high of Rs 986.25 and an intraday low of Rs 969.65.
3:30 pm Market Check: Equity benchmarks closed flat after rangebound trade as investors await RBI policy and mid-term review of foreign trade policy.
The 30-share BSE Sensex was up 36.78 points at 32,869.72 and the 50-share NSE Nifty rose 6 points to 10,127.80.
About 1,545 shares declined against 1,178 advancing shares on the BSE.
3:10 pm Buzzing: Mirc Electronics share price fell more than 5 percent intraday after the issue of Rs 144 crore worth of shares to non-promoters, at lower than current market price.
The maker of Onida brand of consumer durable products informed exchanges that the board has approved issue of 1.92 crore equity shares and 1.92 crore warrants convertible into equity shares, on preferential basis at Rs 37.53 per share to non-promoters to augment its long term working capital and corporate requirements.
"This would result in infusion of Rs 144.12 crore worth of equity in to the company," the company said.
Every warrant is entitled to receive 1 equity share at the time of conversion within a period of 18 months from the date of issue of warrants.
2:58 pm Oil Output Cut: OPEC is expected to stick to its current policy of output cuts in the second half of 2018, but oil producers have plenty of supply with which to respond to any sudden disruptions, Saudi Arabian energy minister Khalid al-Falih told reporters.
He was speaking after meeting with US Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who said OPEC would make its own decisions and that he was comfortable the United States could work within those parameters.
2:40 pm Management Interview: Setco Automotive is in focus after posting a good set of Q2 numbers.
In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Udit Sheth, Joint MD of Setco said the company is looking at Rs 1,000 crore revenue target over next three years.
He further said that the company expects 17 percent margins by next year.
Setco has done well post disruptions like note ban and changes in emission norms, he said.
2:25 pm FTP Review: Key policymakers led by Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu will unveil the mid-term review of the foreign trade policy tomorrow, which is likely to address exporters' concerns to arrest the declining trend of shipments.
The mid-review of the much-awaited policy will be released at an event graced by Prabhu, along with top officials including the Directorate General of Foreign Trade Atul Chaturvedi, Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia and Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia.
Exporters have been voicing concerns about challenges on account of implementation of GST, even suggesting that they be kept out of the ambit of the new indirect tax regime and the drawback refund be expedited as it was blocking their working capital.
The mid-term review was earlier supposed to be released before July 1, in line with the introduction of GST. However, it was put off as the government wanted to factor in the feedback from exporters based on their experience with GST.
2:15 pm Gold Update: Gold prices tumbled by Rs 300 to Rs 30,200 per 10 grams at the bullion market today, taking cues from a weak trend overseas and slack demand from local jewellers.
Silver also fell by Rs 150 to Rs 39,000 per kg on reduced offtake by industrial units and coin makers.
Traders said that besides a weak trend in the overseas market as strength in dollar reduced appeal for the precious metal as a safe-haven, fall in demand from local jewellers and retailers at domestic spot market, weighed on the gold prices.
Globally, gold fell by 0.46 per cent to USD 1,273.70 an ounce and silver by 0.40 per cent to USD 16.36 an ounce in Singapore.
2:03 pm Market Update: Benchmark indices came off day's high in afternoon, with the Sensex rising 27.02 points to 32,859.96 and the Nifty trading 7.10 points higher at 10,128.90.
The market breadth was negative as about 1,455 shares declined against 1,075 advancing shares on the BSE.
Here are the top headlines at 2 pm from Moneycontrol News' Anchal Pathak
1:50 pm Stake Buy: Telecom major Bharti Airtel today said it has acquired a "strategic" stake in Juggernaut Books, a digital platform for amateur riters.
The investment is in line with its endeavour to build an open content ecosystem and bring world-class digital content to its customers, the company said in a statement.
Juggernaut Books allows people to discover and read high quality, affordable books and to submit amateur writing, it said.
"The investment from Airtel will enable Juggernaut to ramp up content acquisition, digital marketing and prepare for a subscription offering launch in the next few months," the statement said.
1:45 pm Europe opens: European markets were higher on Monday morning, as investors digested news that the U.S. Senate narrowly passed a major tax bill over the weekend.
The pan-European Stoxx 600 opened up 0.65 percent shortly after the opening bell, with all sectors and major bourses in positive territory.
1:21 pm IT notices: The Income Tax (I-T) department has served notices to more than 50 persons whose names were in the list of people having Swiss accounts with HSBC Geneva.
The people have been communicated their hearing dates, The Economic Times reports. The department would then be able to initiate prosecution once appeal of the people are dismissed in the initial stage of appeal.
The tax department is keen to start the process before the year-end.
While the Supreme Court had said the beneficiaries are not liable to pay tax if they haven't received any amount from the trust, an appellate tribunal last month ruled in tax department's favour.
1:10 pm Europe to open higher: European markets are expected to start off the first trading day of the week sharply higher, as investors digest news that the U.S. Senate narrowly passed a major tax bill over the weekend.
On the bourses front, the U.K.'s FTSE 100 is expected to open 59 points higher at 7,359, while the German DAX is set to skyrocket at the market open, up 176 points at 13,037 and the French CAC up 57 points at 5,372, according to IG.
12:52 pm China Growth: China's economic growth target for 2018 will reflect new changes in the economy as the government put more emphasis on higher quality development, the State Council Information Office said today.
The government will set its key targets for 2018 "after earnestly studying new performance, new situations and new problems", the office, the government's public relations arm, said in a statement in response to Reuters' requests for comment on a source-based story.
"China's economic and social development still faces many contradictions and challenges that need to be seriously resolved and dealt with," it said.
Policy sources have told Reuters that China's leaders are likely to maintain this year's growth target of "around 6.5 percent" in 2018, even as they ratchet up efforts to control systemic risks from a rapid build-up of debt in the world's second-largest economy.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and some economists have suggested that Beijing do away with growth targets to reduce the country's long reliance on debt-fuelled stimulus and encourage more productive investment.
12:37 pm Market Outlook: Ratnesh Kumar, MD & CEO, BOBCAPS does not see a big correction.
There is an element of topping out seen. Valuations are on the higher side and the numbers are not coming through in terms of earnings, he told CNBC-TV18, adding, with the year end approaching, last two-three weeks of December could see slowdown in foreign flows due to holiday season. So, there could be stagnation, but not a deep correction.
Speaking on the impact of major events, Kumar said the Street is expecting the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to hold rates in the upcoming policy meet. Meanwhile, for Gujarat elections, the market is looking at incumbents retaining the mandate. Any disappointment there could impact the market, he told the channel.
12:27 pm Market Check: Equity benchmarks continued to trade higher in afternoon, aided by Infosys (up 3.6 percent), HDFC (1.24 percent), Tata Motors (2 percent) and L&T (0.9 percent). However, Reliance Industries and select private banks capped gains.
The 30-share BSE Sensex was up 104.93 points at 32,937.87 and the 50-share NSE Nifty rose 30.40 points to 10,152.20.
TATA Projects in a joint venture with Daewoo E&C of
South Korea has announced that they have secured an USD 850 million contract (Rs. 5,612 crore) to design and build a part of India's longest sea-bridge - Mumbai Trans Harbour Link.
While the TATA JV emerged as the lowest bidder for both the Sea Packages 1 & 2, it was awarded only one of the packages (package 2) as provided in the tender conditions. The package awarded to Daewoo - TATA Projects JV involves construction of a 7.8 km long bridge section across the Mumbai Bay including Shivaji Nagar Interchange at Navi Mumbai at contract value of Rs 5,612 crore, which is a complex stretch.
12:05 pm IDFC India Strategy: Research house IDFC Securities expects Nifty earnings to register 15.1 percent CAGR over FY16-19 and set FY19 Nifty EPS target at Rs 579, implying 20.9 percent YoY growth.
Recent quarterly earnings (July-September) were stable to better-than-expected, which supported the market and gave investors a confidence to stay positive on India growth.
After earnings season, experts also lifted their earnings estimates and believe that there could be strong earnings revival from second half of FY18.
The Nifty50 rallied nearly 24 percent year-to-date, driven majorly by liquidity on hopes of earnings growth and Modi government reforms.
IDFC feels the asset-heavy and export oriented industries are expected do well as global economy is recovering. Consumption sector will find growth impetus from retail credit, it said.
Here are the top headlines at 12 pm from Moneycontrol News' Anchal Pathak
11:48 am Buzzing: Shares of Wipro declined 3.2 percent as National Grid US filed lawsuit against company in the US court.
The suit filed by National Grid against the company in the US court for the Eastern District of New York seeking damage amounting to USD 140 million plus additional cost related to the project.
National Grid has been a valued customer of Wipro in the US and UK for several years.
The company strongly believes that the allegations misstate facts and the claims are baseless. The company will vigorously contest the allegations in court.
The lawsuit is related to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation project, which began in 2009, and was undertaken by National Grid US.
11:40 am Crude Oil Update: Crude oil futures eased by Rs 26 to Rs 3,736 per barrel today as speculators reduced their positions amid a weakening trend overseas.
Profit-booking at existing levels too weighed on crude prices, analysts said.
At the Multi Commodity Exchange, crude oil for delivery in December was trading lower by Rs 26, or 0.69 percent, to Rs 3,736 per barrel in 1,902 lots.
The oil for delivery in far-month January 2018 also fell by Rs 25, or 0.66 percent, to Rs 3,749 per barrel in 43 lots.
The West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude lost 0.3 percent at USD 58.15 a barrel, while Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 0.4 percent to USD 63.51 a barrel at the New York Mercantile Exchange.
11:20 am Buzzing: Tata Motors share price rallied 3 percent intraday following strong commercial vehicle sales data reported by the company in November
"The commercial and passenger vehicles sales performance in domestic market in November 2017 was at 52,464 units, a growth of 58 percent, over last year due to growing demand across segments, introduction of new products and strong customer initiatives," the company said in its filing.
Commercial vehicle sales increased 71.9 percent year-on-year to 35,307 units in month gone by.
"The commercial sector has bounced back strongly after the initial disruption in the market, surrounding demonetization and the BS4 transition that largely affected the transport industry last year," the company said.
Tata Motors said passenger vehicle sales growth of 35 percent at 17,157 units was driven by strong growth momentum of new generation Tata cars.
11:06 am Market Check: Equity benchmarks gained strength again, backed by Infosys that extended rally to nearly 4 percent after appointment of Salil S Parekh as MD & CEO of the company.
The 30-share BSE Sensex was up 112.18 points at 32,945.12 and the 50-share NSE Nifty gained 30.70 points at 10,152.50.
About 1,223 shares advanced against 1,077 declining shares on the BSE.
10:57 am Sales Data: Steel Strips Wheels achieved total wheel rim sales of 12.92 lakh against 11.99 lakh in November 2017, representing a growth of 8 percent YoY.
The volumes of truck segment helped post highest healthy revenue growth for the company.
In terms of value, the company has achieved gross turnover of Rs 172.75 crore in November 2017 against 128.62 crore in November 2016, there by recording a growth of 34 percent and achieved net turnover of Rs 138.85 crore in November 2017 against Rs 115.25 crore in November 2016, recording a growth of 20 percent.
"The record turnover is driven by record growth in truck segment and we expect this trend to continue going ahead," Steel Strips Wheels said.
10:40 am Joint Venture: Fiem Industries informed exchanges that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Japanese firms Aisan Industry and Toyota Tsusho Corporation for establishing a joint venture company in India.
The joint venture company will manufacture fuel pump module and IC connector assembly for two-wheelers and three-wheelers.
Fuel pump module will become mandatory for two-wheelers and three-wheelers w.e.f. April, 2020 under Bharat Stage VI (BS VI) regime.
This is an advanced Emission Control System Product, which will have huge market in India under BS VI norms, Fiem Industries.
10:20 am Order Win: Shares of Transformers and Rectifiers India gained 5 percent in morning as it has received order worth Rs 127 crore.
"..... has been awarded order for 15 number of transformer amounting to Rs 127 crore from Power Grid Corporation of India."
The said order fall under the normal course of business. The company neither has any interest in the entity that awarded the order nor fall within related party transactions.
With this order, the company's order book as on stands around Rs 937 crore.
The company continuously thrives to deliver quality products and services, and over a period of time has become a leading manufacturer of transformers in the country.
10:12 am EIR from USFDA: Shares of Dr Reddy's Laboratories was up more than 2 percent intraday as it has received EIR for its Miyapur facility.
The company has received establishment inspection report (EIR) for Miyapur facility, Hyderabad, Telangana.
The audit of the said facility has been completed by USFDA in September with zero observations.
10:01 am Rupee Trade: The rupee was trading down by 3 paise at 64.49 against the US currency in early trade today at the interbank foreign exchange as the dollar strengthened in global markets after progress on the US tax-cut proposal.
Dealers also attributed the rupee's fall to increased demand for the US currency from importers but a higher opening in the domestic equity market capped the losses to some extent.
The rupee opened lower by 7 paise at 64.53 against last close of 64.46 on higher demand for the dollar. Later the rupee reverses its losses to touch a high of 64.45 in early trade.
On Thursday, the rupee had lost 15 paise to close at 64.46 a dollar on growing concerns with regard to fiscal deficit and possible extension of crude oil production curb by OPEC. Forex and money markets were closed on Friday on account of Id-E-Milad.
Here are the top headlines at 10 am from Moneycontrol News' Anchal Pathak
9:53 am Buzzing: Shares of JSW Energy rose 2.2 percent in morning as it has secured (power purchase agreements) PPAs aggregating to 208 MW.
This PPA consists 176MW PPA with Haryana Power Purchase Centre to be supplied from the Karcham Wangtoo Hydro Electric Project of Himachal Baspa Power Company, a 100 percent subsidiary of the company.
And 32MW under group captive scheme to be supplied from the Ratnagiri plant of the company.
With this, the long term PPA proportion of the company on a consolidated basis has increased from 64.6 percent at end of Q2FY18 to 69.3 percent currently.
9:43 am Adani Enterprises under pressure: Chinas two biggest banks said they do not plan to finance a controversial Australian coal mine, in the latest blow to Indian conglomerate Adani Enterprises long delayed project.
The stock fell more than 4 percent after this news, but immediately recovered to trade 0.4 percent lower.
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and China Construction Bank said in separate statements they were not working on the project, after media recently reported that Chinese banks may get involved.
Adani is seeking 2 billion Australian dollar (USD 1.5 billion) in financing by March 2018 for the 4 billion Australian dollar first stage of its proposed Carmichael coal mine in the state of Queensland, a project that has been shrunk from a 16.5 billion Australian dollar plan to make it more viable.
Adani declined to comment on its financing plans on Monday or the statements from the Chinese banks.
9:31 am Market Check: Equity benchmarks wiped out opening gains to trade flat as gains led by Infosys, Tata Motors, HDFC and Axis Bank were offset by Reliance Industries, HDFC Bank and ITC.
The 30-share BSE Sensex was down 5.47 points at 32,827.47 and the 50-share NSE Nifty fell 15.30 points to 10,106.50.
9:25 am Buzzing: Share price of Alphageo advanced more than 4 percent in the early trade on receiving award of contract from ONGC.
The company has received a notification of award of contract from ONGC, WOB, Vadodara, Gujarat for acquisition of 3D seismic data in Mehsana carpet area of Cambay basin, India for an estimated contract value of Rs 154.77 crore.
A meeting of the board of directors of the company is scheduled to be held on December 4, 2017, to consider and approve the unaudited financial results of the company for the quarter and six months ended September 30, 2017.
9:20 am Infosys in focus: Infosys' board of directors has appointed Salil S Parekh as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director (CEO & MD) of the company effective January 2, 2018.
The appointment ends a nearly four-month long search for the top job at Indias second largest IT services firm.
Parekh joins Infosys from Capgemini where he was a member of the Group Executive Board.
He has Master of Engineering degrees in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Technology degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
UB Pravin Rao will step down as the interim CEO and Managing Director effective January 2, 2018 and will continue as Chief Operating Officer and a whole-time Director of the Company.
9:15 am Market Check: Equity benchmarks started off the week on a positive note, backed by Infosys that gained 2.5 percent after the appointment of new CEO and MD.
The 30-share BSE Sensex rose 89.51 points to 32,922.45 and the 50-share NSE Nifty gained 23.60 points at 10,145.40. About 980 shares advanced against 291 declining shares on the BSE.
Infosys, Indiabulls Housing, Tata Motors, Dr Reddy's Labs, SBI, Aurobindo Pharma and ICICI Bank were early gainers while Tech Mahindra, Sun Pharma and Hero MotoCorp were early losers.
Biocon surged 10 percent as the US FDA approved Mylan and Biocon's Ogivri, the first biosimilar for Trastuzumab, for the Treatment of HER2-Positive breast and gastric cancers.
Syngene International, MT Educare, Zee Learn, Videocon Industries and Ashok Leyland gained up to 8 percent.
What we saw on Friday was breakdown on charts Nifty slipped below crucial support level. It moved below its 50-DEMA and if the index stays below this level, chances are that index could retest 10,000 levels soon.
SGX points towards a mild negative start but weak closing on Wall Street could weigh on D-Street on Monday.
Whipsawed by Washington, Wall Street ended modestly lower. Wall Street fell on Friday, whipsawed by developments with a probe into Russia's alleged involvement in the US election as well as with progress on a tax bill in Congress.
Stocks recouped the bulk of their initial losses after US Senate Republicans said they had enough support to pass a sweeping tax overhaul.
The index started the December expiry on a weak note and without meaningful rollover. It looks like investors turned slightly cautious ahead before the closing of the year.
Investors turned cautious ahead of major events in the month ahead - RBI policy, FOMC meet and Gujarat Assembly Elections.
For more, watch the Markets@Moneycontrol show. Money control Editor Santosh Nair talks to Anchal Pathak on the markets trends to watch out for today.
North Korea appears ready to accelerate submarine weapons tests, adding to nuclear threat, reports CNBC. Meanwhile, South Korea, US kick off largest air exercise amid North Korean warnings, reports Reuters
8. Zee Learn may pick up 42.78% in MT Educare for Rs 140cr, reports The Economic Times
21:48 That's all for today, readers. Thanks for staying on with our coverage of the day's action. Your enthusiasm encourages us to better our coverage every day. Do come back tomorrow for more news, views and insights.
21:47 CIS: SEBI gives 2 more months to Anmol India to repay investors
Cracking the whip on illegal investment schemes in the guise of plant cultivation and animal rearing, SEBI on Monday directed Anmol India Agro-Herbal Farming & Dairies Care Company and its directors to repay money to investors within a maximum two months.
The company was found to be running collective investment schemes (CIS) without obtaining registration from the regulator. It was inviting investments from the general public through its development and maintenance/rearing of the farms/animals/plants scheme.
21:45 India fines Monsanto for delay in answering anti-trust questions
Indias anti-trust regulator has fined Monsanto Co 15 million rupees (USD 233,000) for being too slow in replying to questions in a competition probe into the US seeds company.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) last year ordered an investigation into whether Monsanto had abused its dominant position as a supplier of genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds.
21:39 Trade setup for Tuesday: Top 10 things you should know before Opening Bell
The Nifty, which started with a mild gap on the upside, failed to keep the momentum going and closed slightly above its previous close, making a bearish candle on an intraday basis on the daily candlestick charts.
The closing price was significantly lower than the opening price which made a small upper shadow, a large body, and a significantly large lower shadow.
21:29 Trade union sets deadline in talks over ThyssenKrupp-Tata venture
IG Metall has given ThyssenKrupp until December 22 to agree to job, plant and investment guarantees for a chance of winning the powerful German trade union's backing of the planned European steel merger with Tata Steel.
"We are putting an end to this process of playing for time. We will negotiate until December 22 and that will be the end , " labour representative Detlef Wetzel, who is also deputy supervisory board chairman of ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe, told Reuters on Monday.
21:26 Air quality worsens, pollution 'severe' in many parts of Delhi
Air quality in Delhi worsened on Monday and inched closer to the 'severe' category with a sharp rise in the level of particulates through the day, according to official data.
The spurt in pollutants was caused by a combination of meteorological factors including a drop in temperature, wind speed and mixing height, a layer where air and particulates float, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) said. On Sunday, Sri Lankan cricketers took to the field here wearing anti-pollution masks.
21:20 TRAI moots cap on pre-launch subscriber numbers, test period
Telecom regulator TRAI on Monday recommended rules of network testing before an operator commercially launches mobile services, proposing clear limits on a number of trial subscribers to be onboard and a 90-day period for the test phase.
The issue of dos and don'ts for network testing had stirred up a storm in the industry after Reliance Jio amassed over 1.5 million users even before the commercial launch of its services in early September last year.
Disclosure: Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd
21:00 Siemens, Brazilian prosecutors eyeing 1 billion real settlement: Report
German industrial group Siemens is negotiating a settlement worth more than 1 billion reais (USD 307 million) with Brazilian state prosecutors over civil cases relating to irregularities in metro tenders, according to a Monday newspaper report.
The Estado de S. Paulo reported that lawyers for Siemens and Sao Paulo state prosecutors met last week to discuss the deal, which it said is on the cusp of being sealed and would require the company to admit to illicit acts. The paper cited unnamed sources within the state prosecutors office.
20:49 Half of Britons support a second vote on Brexit, poll finds
Half of Britons support a second vote on whether to leave the European Union and a majority think the government may be paying too much money to the EU to open the way to trade talks, according to a new opinion poll.
The poll, published in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, found 50 percent of people supported another vote on the final terms of Britain's exit deal, 34 percent rejected another referendum and 16 percent said they did not know.
20:37 Yemen's Saleh killed in RPG, gun attack on his car, Houthis say; party confirms death
Officials in Ali Abdullah Saleh's General People's Congress party (GPC) confirmed to Reuters that the former Yemeni president and party leader has been killed outside Sanaa, in what sources in the Houthi group said was an RPG and gun attack.
The GPC officials said Saleh was killed south of the capital Sanaa along with the assistant secretary-general of the GPC, Yasser al-Awadi.
20:34 Congress burden will end once Rahul Gandhi heads party: UP CM Yogi Adityanath
Taking a jibe at Rahul Gandhi hours after he filed his nomination papers for the Congress presidents post, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Monday said the party had become a burden which would disappear on its own after the elevation.
The chief minister also said the move in the Congress would have no impact on Assembly elections in Gujarat.
20:30 Indian public relations firm files insolvency plea against Reliance Communications
Fortuna Public Relations Pvt Ltd has filed an insolvency petition against phone carrier Reliance Communications Ltd over a claim for unpaid dues of 4.4 million rupees (USD 68,000), a lawyer representing the public relations firm said on Monday.
Separately, Fortuna has filed another insolvency petition against Reliance Webstore Ltd, a unit of the phone carrier, over unpaid dues of about 4.1 million rupees, said Darshan Mehta, a partner at Mumbai law firm Dhruve Liladhar & Co, which is representing Fortuna in the two cases.
20:22 India, Germany seal various loan agreements
India and Germany on Monday signed several agreements, including a 200 million euro funding pact for climate-friendly urban mobility project.
The 'Government to Government Umbrella Agreement' concerning financial cooperation in 2016 (II) under the Indo- German Development Cooperation was formalised here.
20:19 Hines to invest USD 23 million in Tata Housings project in Mumbai
Global real estate firm Hines will invest USD 23 million (about Rs 150 crore) in Tata Housings residential project at Thane in Mumbai as part of a strategy to expand presence in the Indian property market.
US-based Hines has developed two commercial projects One Horizon Center and Skyview Corporate Park at Gurgaon in India. It has invested in an upcoming residential project in Gurgaon with Conscient Group.
20:16 Cement demand to witness modest growth in FY18: ICRA
Domestic cement demand is expected to register a modest growth of one percent in 2017-18 fiscal driven by pick-up in affordable and rural housing and road and irrigation projects, rating agency ICRA said on Monday.
As per the agency, the cement offtake has continued to remain weak in April-September and also in October due to factors such as weak real estate activity, sand shortage and GST implementation issues.
20:11 Vijay Mallya's extradition trial begins in UK court
The extradition trial of Vijay Mallya wanted in India on charges of Rs 9,000 crores fraud and money laundering, today began at a UK court here, with the embattled liquor baron rejecting the charges as "false, fabricated and baseless".
The trial, however, was briefly halted as the courtroom had to be evacuated due to a fire alarm. Mallya and others waited outside the Westminster magistrates court during the fire drill.
20:06 Cyclone Ockhi: Coast Guard rescues 183 fishermen
The Coast Guard has rescued 183 fishermen stranded in choppy waters off the coasts of Kerala and Lakshadweep due to Cyclone Ockhi, a top official said here on Monday.
Till yesterday, 164 fishermen were rescued. Today, 19 more were rescued, Inspector General K R Nautiyal, Commander, Coast Guard Region (West) told reporters.
20:03 Kremlin says Vladimir Putin not influenced by ex-Trump official Michael Flynn
The Kremlin said on Monday Russian President Vladimir Putin had taken a decision to hold off responding to the new US sanctions last year independently and had not been influenced by the former US national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors delving into the actions of President Donald Trumps inner circle before he took office.
19:56 Bitcoin dips below $11,000 after setting another record high
Bitcoin dipped back under USD 11,000 on Monday, coming off a record high just shy of USD 11,800 it hit on Sunday after a surge from less than USD 1,000 at the start of the year.
The cryptocurrency, which trades 24 hours a day and seven days a week, climbed as high as USD 11,799.99 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange at around 2100 GMT on Sunday.
19:51 EC says no newspaper ads in Gujarat on December 8, 9 without clearance
The Election Commission on Monday issued directions that no newspaper advertisement be published on December 8 and 9 in poll-bound Gujarat without its prior clearance, a policy the poll panel adopted after controversial ads were issued by the BJP during the 2015 Bihar elections.
The first phase of Gujarat election would be held on December 9 for 89 assembly seats.
19:44 1993 Mumbai blasts: Supreme Court stays execution of death row convict
The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the execution of death row convict, Tahir Merchant, in the sensational 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case.
The top court sought a response from the CBI in six weeks and called for the case records from the special TADA court in Mumbai, which had awarded death sentence to Merchant, Firoz Abdul Rashid Khan and life imprisonment to gangster Abu Salem.
19:39 Rupee cheers GDP, PMI data; up 9 paise to 64.37
The rupee on Monday rebounded by 9 paise to end at 64.37 against the US dollar in a highly volatile trade on fresh selling of the greenback and also emboldened by encouraging Q2 GDP numbers and monthly manufacturing data.
Overall sentiment got a boost after the government's official data showed that the country's economy expanded by 6.3 percent in the July-September quarter, reversing the five-quarter downtrend.
19: 35 Precautionary holiday declared on 5/12/17 for schools and colleges in Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Sindhudurga, Thane, Raigad and Palghar Districts for the safety of the students due to the serious weather predictions on Cyclone Ockhi, tweets Vinod Tawde, Minister of State.
19:31 Fitch Ratings cuts India FY18 growth forecast
Rating agency Fitch Ratings has cut its growth forecast for India for the current fiscal year from 6.9 percent to 6.7 percent, citing slower-than-expected growth in the countrys economy.
Although Indias GDP grew at 6.3 percent in the September quarter, up from 5.7 percent earlier, Fitch said the growth was lower than expected. The rating agency also cut its growth forecast for FY19 to 7.3 percent from 7.4 percent earlier.
19:27 "Shashi Kapoor's versatility could be seen in his movies as well as in theatre, which he promoted with great passion. His brilliant acting will be remembered for generations to come. Saddened by his demise. Condolences to his family and admirers," tweets Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
19:25 Banks assure UIDAI of meeting enrolment centre target by December
Banks have assured the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) that they will be able to open, by December-end, Aadhaar enrolment and update centres in the stipulated 10 percent of the branches.
The deadline for reaching the 10 percent target was October 31. But only a fraction of the bank branches - a little over 2,600 on an 'active' basis out of stipulated 15,000 branches that are required to do so - have been armed with Aadhaar enrolment and updating facility, so far.
Saleh
The radio station of Yemen's Houthi-run interior ministry said on Monday the militia's former war ally turned adversary, ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, had been killed as fighting racked the capital Sanaa though there was no independent confirmation.
Unverified footage circulated by Yemeni social media users appeared to a show corpse resembling Saleh. Armed militiamen unfurled a blanket containing the corpse and shouted, "praised God!" and "hey Ali Affash!", another last name for Saleh.
The Delhi High Court today reserved its verdict on low cost carrier IndiGo's plea against the decision of Delhi airport operator DIAL to partially shift its operations along with that of two other airlines, SpiceJet and GoAir, from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2.
"Judgement reserved," Justice A K Chawla said after hearing arguments on behalf of IndiGo, the Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) and the Centre.
18:38 Rajnath
CMs
The influx of Rohingyas and Bangladeshis and cross-border smuggling of fake currencies and drugs would top the agenda at a meeting of chief ministers of eastern states called by Home Minister Rajnath Singh on December 7 in Kolkata.
The chief ministers and home ministers of West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram will huddle for the day-long meeting where the influx of Rohingya and Bangladeshi immigrants and how to check it would be discussed threadbare, a Home Ministry official said.
Lakshadweep
The Central government has assured all help to cyclone battered Lakshadweep, where there was no loss of lives, but extensive property damage in some islands, a top administration official said today.
In a Facebook post, Lakshadweep Administrator Farooq Khan said "with the grace of God", there had been no loss of human life, but property damage in some islands was very high.
Congress leaders, both young and old, were jubilant today after Rahul Gandhi filed his nomination papers for the party president's post and said his ascent to the top will help it regain the lost glory after a string of electoral reverses.
The leaders also returned the BJP's "mockery of democratic traditions and farcical election process" barb, asking the ruling party at the Centre not to preach lessons as they cited the grand old party's "long-proven democratic" track-record.
Shashi
Kapoor
Veteran Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor has passed away, according to a report by India Today. Kapoor was 79 and was unwell for quite some time.
The government will set up a panel of experts for consultation on matters pertaining to the implementation of drug price control order, including technicalities involved in pricing and new launches.
The Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) said the "multi-disciplinary committee of experts" will have member secretary of National Pharmaceutical Pricing authority (NPPA) as its convener.
The Madhya Pradesh Assembly today unanimously passed a bill awarding death to those found guilty of raping girls aged 12 and below.
With the passage of the bill, Madhya Pradesh becomes the first state in the country where those convicted of such rapes will face the gallows.
The Kolkata airport is all set to start using clean and green energy for its day to day operations, as its ground mounted grid connected solar plant is ready for commissioning.
The 15 MW plant, capacity wise the largest one among all the AAI airports across the country, is slated to be inaugurated by Union Minister for Civil Aviation Ashok Gajapathi Raju tomorrow.
17:32 Coalscam
Ranjit
Sinha's
The special investigation team (SIT), set up to probe the allegations of abuse of authority prima facie committed by former CBI Director Ranjit Sinha to scuttle the coal scam probe, was today directed by the Supreme Court to submit a status report before it.
The apex court asked the SIT to furnish the status report in a sealed cover within four weeks with regard to the probe conducted in the matter.
Modi
Rahul's
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today likened the imminent elevation of Rahul Gandhi to dynastic succession of Mughal rulers, and castigated the Congress for abandoning "public modesty" by deciding to make a person, who is out on bail in a graft case, its president.
The prime minister also targeted the Congress over corruption during its rule, and spoke about the clean governance under him in Gujarat and at the Centre.
Leading bourse National Stock Exchange (NSE) may have to file fresh draft papers with markets regulator Sebi to float an initial public offering after getting clarity on the co-location matter.
However, the current preliminary IPO papers, which were filed with Sebi in December last year, will remain open, the exchange said.
A day after Sri Lankan cricketers took to the field here wearing anti-pollution masks, Delhi's air turned fouler today with a sharp rise in the level of particulates since morning.
The concentration of the most dominant pollutants, PM2.5 and PM10, reached levels as high as 276 and 455 micrograms per cubic metre by 3 pm, according to the Central Control Room for Air Quality Management of the CPCB.
Prabhu
Prabhu
Representatives from Swedish furniture major IKEA today met Commerce & Industry Minister Sureshhere, as the company looks to ramp up its
presence in India.
However, IKEA has not sought any relaxation in local sourcing norms from the Union Government, and is confident that by 2022, 30 per cent of the products it sells in India will be sourced locally.
Salil
Parekh
Infosys
Analysts today welcomed the appointment of Salil Parekh as the managing director and chief executive at country's second largest software exporter Infosys, which has been struggling with leadership issues.
They said Parekh, who joins from French outsourcing major Capgemini, has a challenging job ahead but his association with technology companies with a strong perception on the emerging area of digital technologies is a positive.
Girls and women are more vulnerable to their own relatives and acquaintances than unknown persons on the issue of sex-related crimes, data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) "Crime in India 2016" report has indicated.
Highlighting rape figures, the report has stated that "in 2016, the accused of rapes in 94.6 cases are none other than the victim's relatives including brother, father, grand-father, sons or acquaintances."
The mother of an Indian engineer, who was sentenced after he sneaked into Pakistan from Afghanistan to meet a girl he had befriended on the internet, has appealed to President Mamnoon Hussain to remit the remaining period of her son's prison term.
In a letter to Hussain, the mother of Hamid Ansari said: "Mohtaram Sadar - your government has shown clemency to foreign nationals who have committed far graver offences than Hamid Ansari.
NGT
BCCI
The National Green Tribunal on Monday slammed the Delhi government for not filing a comprehensive action plan on ways to deal with severe air pollution and came down heavily on authorities for holding the India-Sri Lanka Test match despite bad air quality, reports CNN-News18. A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Swatanter Kumar took exception over the failure of the AAP government to file the report despite its specific order.
During the hearing, the Delhi government said it needed more time to file the action plan as the chief secretary and environment secretary have been recently changed. The tribunal, however, directed the government to file the report within the next 48 hours.
"Where is your action plan? Why have you not submitted it? What can we do if you keep on changing everybody? It's not our problem if people don't want to stick to you. You keep on doing meetings but tell us a single action or step you have taken in the last four days to combat air pollution," the bench said.
The green panel was also irked by authorities for conducting the third Test between Sri Lanka and India which was disrupted on Sunday due to the choking smog.
15:55 As the Vijay Mallya extradition trial was about to begin, a fire alarm went off and the whole premises is being evacuated now, reports The Hindu.
15:46 In the Jaypee Infratech case, the Supreme Court has allowed Jaypee Associates (JAL) to deposit money for the home buyers in a fixed deposit. Home buyers had wanted the money deposited by JAL to be put in a fixed deposit.
15:40 Ahead of appearing before London's Westminster Court, liquor baron Vijay Mallya told ANI, I have said repeatedly that the charges are false, fabricated and baseless. I have nothing to say, submissions in court will be self-evident.
Maha
The Bombay High Court suggested the Union government to not insist on installation of speed governors in black and yellow taxis and app-based car service providers if speed governors are not available with manufacturers, reports PTI. "The state government (Maharashtra) has also said that manufacturers do not have speed governors. Then it is better that the union government relaxes the rule for some time. You (government) can make something compulsory only when it is available," a division bench of Justices SM Kemkar and GS Kulkarni said.
Electronics major Samsung said it has forayed into the air purifier segment to expand its portfolio of consumer electronics, reports PTI. The company launched two premium air purifiers and said its product provides purification through advanced PM 2.5 filters. With this launch, Samsung has forayed into a new category and expanded the portfolio in the consumer electronics segment, it said. The products are priced at Rs 15,490 and Rs 41,990, respectively.
15:30 The Madhya Pradesh assembly has unanimously approves a bill awarding 'hanged till death' sentence for convicts of rape and gang-rape cases involving girls below 12 years of age, reports ANI. Repeated stalking will now be a non-bailable offence and offenders will be punished, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said in the state assembly.
Sadiq
Continuing his criticism of the UK government's strict visa norms, visiting London Mayor Sadiq Khan said they are preparing a proposal for revising policies like "for post-study work visas", reports PTI. "We are putting together a proposal to the government, to revise the policies like for post-study work visas," Khan said.
Reiterating his criticism of the stringent visa norms, Khan said he was "lobbying" with the British government to revise the visa policy to help attract more trade and investment to the UK capital. Terming the visa policy of Theresa May government as a "huge mistake", Khan said, "On the one hand the British government is asking Indian businesses to trade there and on the other hand they have made it more tough with strict visa norms".
Two of Indias state-owned oil refiners have issued tenders seeking to charter tankers for at least five years while giving preference to Indian companies, tender documents reviewed by Reuters showed, which would boost domestic shipping firms battered by slumping tanker rates. Indias Ministry of Shipping asked the refiners to issue long-term crude import tenders on a pilot basis and include a right of first refusal for Indian shipping lines, a source said.
The shift to the five-year contracts would give millions of dollars in tanker contracts to the Indian carriers, the source said. This would help companies like Shipping Corp of India (SCI), Mercator, Great Eastern Shipping Co and Essar Shipping. The global tanker industry is grappling with an oversupply of ships that has depressed rates, with the benchmark West Asia to Japan route for Very Large Crude Carriers dropping 43% since the start of the year.
As millennials step into their quarter life phase, the almost-forgotten Short Message Service or SMS will turn 25. The first ever SMS was sent on December 2, 1992 by engineer Neil Papworth. The first SMS was a warm and crisp Merry Christmas sent by Papworth to the then Vodafone director Richard Javis. Text messages changed the way people communicated before its inception, through pager and voice calls.
14:33 Sources have told CNBC-TV18 that Nestle India will appeal against the Shahjahanpur Additional District Magistrate Court order over the next 24-48 hours. Nestle India told the channel that its lawyers have received the order and are reviewing it.
14:25 A major accident was averted near Masjid Bunder railway station after a motorman stopped the train on sighting three rods on the track, reports ANI. DRM Central Railway has declared reward for the motorman.
14:22 Salil
Parekh
Infosys
After well over a decade with Capgemini, Salil Parekh is returning home to head unsettled Indian software services firm Infosys, where he will seek to replicate his success in notching up record growth at the divisions he ran, reports Reuters. Alongside, Parekh has to help the bellwether of Indias $154 billion software services sector recover from a nasty public spat between its board and founders that led to the dramatic exit of the previous CEO, Vishal Sikka, in August.
Parekh joins Bengaluru-based Infosys in January from Paris-headquartered Capgemini, where he headed their core application services business in key markets like North America and the United Kingdom, and their cloud services and cloud infrastructure businesses. He also managed Sogeti - a unit of Capgemini focused on digital transformation. As the CEO, Parekh will have to achieve growth while being careful not to antagonise Infosys founders, who own about 12% of the company, but command an outsized say in its direction.
In Parekh, Indias No 2 IT firm gets an executive with vast experience in some of its biggest Western markets and one who has led high-margin businesses like cloud services, where it is keen to accelerate growth. His Capgemini colleagues say Parekh pushes people to work hard, believes in sharing information and cutting across hierarchy to deliver on projects.
Japanese consumer confidence improved in November to its highest level in four years, lifted by surging stock prices and a robust job market, the Cabinet Office said on Monday. The sentiment index for general households, which includes views on incomes and jobs, rose 0.4 point from the previous month to 44.9, up for a third straight month and marking the highest since September 2013, reports Reuters. The survey adds to upbeat signals surrounding consumer sentiment - service-sector business confidence reached a 3-1/2-year high last month.
14:15 Airtel
Telecom major Bharti Airtel has acquired a strategic stake in Juggernaut Books, a digital platform for amateur writers, reports PTI. The investment is in line with its endeavour to build an open content ecosystem and bring world-class digital content to its customers, the company said in a statement. Juggernaut Books allows people to discover and read high quality, affordable books and to submit amateur writing, it said.
"The investment from Airtel will enable Juggernaut to ramp up content acquisition, digital marketing and prepare for a subscription offering launch in the next few months," the statement said. Airtel did not disclose the investment details.
The political message of Union Budget 2018-19 is expected to be consolidating the gains from the big-ticket changes of the past three years rather than introducing radical departures, reports The Business Standard. This is the conclusion of top officials as the Finance Ministry wraps itself up in the veil of secrecy two months before the Budget is read in Parliament by the finance minister.
However, the one area in which some changes could be possible is direct tax rates for the corporate sector. In 2015-16, the ministry had clipped the headline rate of the corporation tax to 25% for new units in the manufacturing sector. Jaitley promised that the new manufacturing companies that did not avail of any exemption would be charged only 25% and included the MSMEs in the 25% club in 2017-18. The ministry is exploring ways to add more categories here, short of a blanket move to migrate all units to the lower rate.
Also a proposal the Finance Ministry has acknowledged it is working on is offering larger tax sops to pensioners, a politically rising power group. In a letter addressed to Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, the Minister of State for Finance, Shiv Pratap Shukla, has said the ministry has received representations to raise the income tax exemption limit for pensioners with an annual income of Rs 5 lakh. The proposal would be examined during the exercise for the ensuing Union Budget, 2018, his reply notes.
12:47 AYUSH
26m
Prabhu
The AYUSH industry is expected to grow in double-digits and provide direct employment to 1 million people and indirect jobs to 25 million persons by 2020, Union minister Suresh Prabhu said. The government is eyeing a three-fold increase in the AYUSH sector by 2022, reports PTI. AYUSH stands for traditional systems of medicine and healthcare such as Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy.
After a lull of two years, the tax office is in a rush to move against many named in the list of secret Swiss accounts with HSBC Geneva. In the past fortnight more than 50 persons have been served notices, informing them about the date of hearing of their cases. The move, sources told The Economic Times, would pave the way for the Income-Tax (I-T) Department to initiate prosecution proceedings once the appeals of these alleged accountholders and beneficiaries are dismissed at the first stage of appeal.
12:33 Biocon
USFDA
biosimilar
Shares of Biocon surged as much as 14% in morning trade after the biotechnology major said it has received regulatory approval to market a biosimilar of cancer drug Herceptin in the United States, reports PTI. The US health regulator has approved Mylan NV's biosimilar Ogivri, co-developed with Biocon, for the treatment of certain breast and stomach cancers, a company statement said.
Following the announcement, shares of the company opened on a bullish note and surged 14.2% to touch an early high of Rs 510 on the BSE. Similar movement was seen on the NSE as well, where the stock opened at Rs 491.95, then gathered further momentum and touched an early high of Rs 509, registering a jump of 13.8% over its previous closing price.
Mylan and Biocon's biosimilar for Herceptin is also under review by regulatory authorities in Australia, Canada, Europe and several additional markets, the statement said. It is already approved in 19 countries around the world, including India, thus providing increased access to this more affordable biologic for cancer patients, it added.
12:15 The Bombay High Court has quashed the Rs 5 fare hike proposal by Mumbai metro fare fixation committee, reports ANI.
Chandimal
Former Sri Lanka captain Angelo Mathews and his successor Dinesh Chandimal dug deep in a burgeoning 117-run stand to help the tourists to 192 for three at lunch on day three of the third and final test against India on Monday. Beginning the day 405 runs behind Indias first innings total of 536 for seven declared, the onus was on the right-handers to spearhead Sri Lankas battle for survival at the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium.
The duo overcame occasional discomforts to deny India in the morning session with Mathews, who scored the last of his seven test centuries in 2015, on 90 not out, which included 11 boundaries and two sixes. Chandimal was on 52, the duo having displayed the kind of application that has been largely lacking among the tourists who trail 1-0 after succumbing to their worst defeat in the second test in Nagpur.
After the second day was blighted by complaints of air pollution by the visitors, they resumed on a slightly hazy morning on 131 for three and found themselves at the receiving end of Mohammad Shamis fiery four-over spell during which the Indian paceman did everything right except take a wicket. Chandimal took a single off Ravichandran Ashwin to bring up Sri Lankas first 100-plus partnership in the series, while his seventh boundary brought up his third successive fifty but Sri Lanka, still 344 behind, will need the duo to continue the rebuilding job after the break.
11:55 Shares of 63 Moons are presently locked at 5% lower circuit after the Bombay High Court upheld a previous order on its merger with NSEL. The court upheld the order by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA). The ministry had passed an order in February 2016 to merge National Spot Exchange with its parent firm. The merges intention was to recover dues of NSEL scam from 63 Moons, reports CNBC-TV18.
Teleservices
000cr
Tata Teleservices is looking to offset telecom infrastructure commitments by offering its 26% stake in a local joint venture to controlling shareholder American Tower Corp (ATC) for discontinuing rentals, sources told The Economic Times. This follows the Tata Groups exit from mobile services. The value of the stake is pegged at Rs 5,000 crore while the penalty for early termination may be as much as Rs 7,000 crore.
Its unclear if Tata will offer additional cash payouts to bridge the deficit, sources said.
TTSL has told ATC it will discontinue around 30,000 tower tenancies with ATC India and its unit Viom Networks. The 25,000 tenancies on the Viom network are locked in for six years, while 5,000 on the ATC India network are for three years, sources added.
YoY
Steel Strips Wheels share price rallied over 3% on Monday as its November sales turnover increased 34% YoY. The company said it achieved total wheel rim sales of 12.92 lakh as against 11.99 lakh in November 2017, representing a growth of 8% YoY. Its truck segment was the key highlight, with highest ever revenue growth.
In terms of value, the company achieved gross turnover of Rs 172.75 crore in November 2017 as against Rs 128.62 crore in the same period last year, thereby recording a growth of 34%. It achieved a net turnover of Rs 138.85 crore in November versus Rs 115.25 crore YoY, a growth of 20%.
11:10 Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi has filed his nomination papers for the post of party president at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters.
The Rajasthan government looks to provide air connectivity to all districts either through its inter-state air services or the central scheme Udan, a senior official told PTI. While the Centre is pushing ahead with the ambitious regional air connectivity scheme UDAN, the Rajasthan government's intra-state air services initiative has been operational for little over a year.
Besides, the state government has plans to start 'Palace on Wings' services to connect heritage properties, forts and palaces by air, according to Captain Keshri Singh, Director of Civil Aviation Rajasthan. The government has plans to "connect all districts with air services either by intra-state or UDAN or regular flight operations," he said.
Udan or Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik scheme seeks to connect unserved and under-served airports in different parts of the country. There are 18 state-owned airfields in Rajasthan besides AAI airports, defence airfields and private airstrips.
Adani's
Chinas two biggest banks said they do not plan to finance a controversial Australian coal mine, in the latest blow to Indian conglomerate Adani Enterprises long delayed project, reports Reuters. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and China Construction Bank said in separate statements they were not working on the project, after media recently reported that Chinese banks may get involved.
Adani is seeking A$2 billion ($1.5 billion) in financing by March 2018 for the A$4 billion first stage of its proposed Carmichael coal mine in the state of Queensland, a project that has been shrunk from a A$16.5 billion plan to make it more viable. Adani declined to comment on its financing plans on Monday or the statements from the Chinese banks.
Australian and overseas banks have balked at granting loans for the project, which environmentalists oppose due to climate change and the potential for damage to the Great Barrier Reef.
Educare
140cr
Subhash Chandra-controlled Zee Learn is in talks with MT Educare, a Mumbai-based company that runs the popular Mahesh Tutorials coaching classes, to buy a controlling stake in the company, in a growing sign that a wave of fresh capital is triggering larger consolidation in the educational services space, reports The Economic Times.
Zee initially plans to buy the entire promoter block of 42.78% and will make an open offer for another 20% stake, sources said. Institutions and public shareholders own the remaining 57.22%. MT Educare, which went public in 2012, is a leading education services company that prepares students for competitive examinations. At current valuations, Zee will have to pay Rs 140 crore for a controlling stake in the company.
Brexit
Half of Britons support a second vote on whether to leave the European Union and a majority think the government may be paying too much money to the EU to open the way to trade talks, according to a new opinion poll. The poll, published in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, found 50% of people supported another vote on the final terms of Britains exit deal, 34% rejected another referendum and 16% said they did not know. The newspaper said it was the first major opinion poll since last weeks media reports that Britain is preparing to pay about EUR50 billion ($59 billion) to help to move on to talks on a future trade pact with the EU.
Mike Smithson, an election analyst who runs the www.politicalbetting.com website and a former Liberal Democrat politician, said on Twitter it was the first time any pollster has recorded backing for a second Brexit referendum. Since the referendum in 2016, high profile opponents of Britains exit - from French President Emmanuel Macron, to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and billionaire investor George Soros - have suggested Britain could change its mind and avoid what they say will be disastrous for the British economy.
The National Investigation Agency in its probe of the Kerala Love Jihad case has successfully cracked a new development which reveals that Akhila Asokan alias Hadiyas husband was in link with two charge-sheeted accused of the terror group Islamic State (IS) in the Omar-al-Hindi case before marrying Hadiya, reports NewsX. The probe revealed that Hadiyas husband Shafin Jahan shared his presence with the two IS terrorists in two groups on Facebook and an instant messaging platform which also comprised of activists from Popular Front of India (PFI)s political wing SDPI.
IPOs
1bn
Private equity (PE) funds sold shares worth $1.17 billion in 2017 as their portfolio companies went public, data from Venture Intelligence shows. The figure is almost 25% higher than the $935 million they sold through initial public offerings (IPOs) in 2016, reports Mint. In 2015, PEs sold stocks worth just $287 million in IPOs.
Several PE investors such as Warburg Pincus, ChrysCapital, Kedaara Capital and others reaped successful exits or part-exits through IPOs of firms such as Au Small Finance Bank and Eris Lifesciences, thanks to the buoyant market. The share sale of AU Small Finance Bank saw PE investors sell shares worth almost $247 million, while those of Eris Lifesciences and Indian Energy Exchange saw PE investors selling shares worth $209 million and $102 million, respectively.
The Indian IPO market has seen a record year, with companies raising Rs 65,923 crore till November, as compared to a total IPO fund raising of Rs 26,493 crore in 2016. (Picture courtesy: Mint)
08:26 Indian Railways claim conspiracy to derail trains averted, reports CNN-News18. Fastening clips found missing from rail tracks in Lucknow during a routine check. UP ATS to probe into possible terror angle, FIR registered against unidentified persons, it tweeted.
There are signs that North Korea's submarine missile program is expanding as it prepares its second test, adding to the risk that the nuclear-armed country could one day threaten the US or its Asian allies with yet another powerful weapon in its arsenal, reports CNBC.
Experts suggest North Korea having fully submersible submarines firing a nuclear ballistic missile pose a dangerous scenario because they could offer the hermit regime a better chance of survival and might be harder to detect. It comes on the heels of North Korea last Tuesday launching a new Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, a road-mobile weapon the state-owned KCNA media claimed could carry a "super-large heavy warhead, which is capable of striking the whole mainland of the US."
The North Koreans appear to be getting more aggressive on submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) development and now have several shipyards active in the offshore-weapons program. The North is not believed to have the capability today to launch multiple ballistic missiles from a submarine. However, experts say the totalitarian state is working at a feverish pace and could have this submersible as early as next year.
"If North Korea can deploy not only developmentally a submarine-launched ballistic missile that is effective and deploy it on ballistic missile submarines, it certainly complicates defence against missile attacks," defence analyst Joseph S Bermudez Jr, co-founder and CEO of Colorado-based imagery analysis firm KPA Associates.
In a 38 North blog post on Friday, he revealed that "commercial satellite imagery from November 11, 16 and 24 show that North Korea's second submersible ballistic missile test stand barge a platform that allows for underwater missile launches outside of submarines located at the Nampo Navy Shipyard is being prepared to enter service."
38 North, a project of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said the "second missile test stand barge [is] almost operational." Bermudez wrote, "Once in service, this barge will help facilitate a broader SLBM testing regime and potentially establish a SLBM capability within the West Sea fleet [of North Korea's navy]."
Bermudez, a 38 North contractor, explained that the test stand barge and platform are used to simulate the weapons that would be inside the submarine because it's considered too dangerous and costly to do such early testing inside a real submarine. He also said that the North Koreans know the US military is watching its SLBM and submarine development so they have been doing things to mitigate the satellite surveillance capabilities, including resorting to concealment in some cases.
Max Healthcare has decided to terminate the services of two doctors allegedly involved in the case of a premature baby being wrongly declared dead, hospital authorities told PTI. The decision was taken on Sunday night after a meeting of the Max Healthcare authorities in connection with the incident.
"While the inquiry by the expert group which includes external experts from the IMA is still in process, we have decided to terminate the services of two treating doctors, doctors AP Mehta and Vishal Gupta in the case relating to the twin extreme pre-term babies," Max Healthcare said in a statement.
The case pertains to the birth of twins (boy and girl) on November 30. Both the babies were allegedly declared dead by the Max Hospital in Shalimar Bagh. However, the family later found the boy was alive.
Brexit
Theresa May hopes to break the Brexit talks deadlock on Monday with a new offer on divorce settlements at a crunch meeting with EU officials, as some of her party members urge her to walk away unless there is progress, reports Reuters. EU officials and diplomats say they are increasingly optimistic a deal can be struck on Monday, while cautioning that things could still go wrong. Over lunch with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Union Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, the British prime minister will try to persuade them to start discussions on a new trade pact and a two-year transitional deal.
The European Union has given May until Monday to put forward a more comprehensive offer on the remaining separation issues before officials recommend moving onto discussing trade and future ties. They want a pledge that Britain will pay what it owes the bloc when leaving, protect the rights of EU citizens living in Britain and ensure there is no hard border between the north and south of Ireland.
South Korea and the United States launched their largest-ever joint aerial drills on Monday, officials said, a week after North Korea said it had tested its most advanced missile as part of a weapons program that has raised global tensions, reports Reuters. The annual US-South Korean drill, called Vigilant Ace, will run until Friday, with six F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to be deployed among the more than 230 aircraft taking part. The exercises have been condemned as a provocation by the isolated North.
F-35 fighters will also join the drill, which will also include the largest number of 5th generation fighters to take part, according to a South Korea-based US Air Force spokesman. Around 12,000 US service members, including from the Marines and Navy, will join South Korean troops. Aircraft taking part will be flown from eight US and South Korean military installations. South Korean media reports said B-1B Lancer bombers could join the exercise this week. The US Air Force spokesman could not confirm the reports.
Venezuela is creating a digital currency to combat a financial blockade by the United States, President Nicolas Maduro has announced, reports AFP. It will be called the Petro and be backed up by Venezuela's reserves of oil and gas and its gold and diamond holdings, the president said in his weekly television program.
"This is going to allow us to move toward new forms of international financing for the country's economic and social development," the president said on Sunday. The news comes as Venezuela faces acute financing problems after creditors and ratings agencies declared the government and the state run oil firm PDVSA to be in partial default for missing interest and principle payments on bonds.
Maduro blames those problems on sanctions imposed by the United States in August, barring American citizens and companies from buying any new Venezuelan government or PDVSA bonds. Venezuela is mired in a deep economic crisis triggered mainly by a fall in crude oil prices and a drop in oil production. Petroleum is its main source of hard currency.
Mallya
Embattled liquor baron Vijay Mallya, out on a GBP650,000 bail bond following his arrest by Scotland Yard over fraud and money laundering charges earlier this year, will return to Westminster Magistrates' Court in London today as his extradition trial begins, reports PTI. The 61-year-old businessman, who has been in self-imposed exile in the UK since March 2016 when he left India, is wanted in India on charges relating to his defunct Kingfisher Airlines defaulting on loans from various Indian banks amounting to Rs 9,000 crore.
Diversified conglomerate ITC expects chocolate category to contribute 10% to its food division revenue in next five years, a top company official told PTI. The company had entered into chocolate category with brand Fabelle in May last year. "In five years, we should see a 10% share of the total food business from chocolates," ITC Foods Divisional Chief Executive Hemant Malik said.
"We will phase ourselves. There is no point in launching too many products. We will be looking at various spaces and be a full portfolio player (in chocolate category)...Overall market share in five years, we should have 15-20%," Malik said. The company manufactures chocolates from its Bengaluru facility at present and it has added another factory at Haridwar.
cos
804cr
The combined market valuation of nine of the top 10 most valued Indian companies diminished by Rs 81,804.34 crore last week, with Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries (RIL) taking the biggest hit.
Barring Maruti Suzuki India, rest of the nine companies including, State Bank of India (SBI), Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and HDFC suffered losses in their market capitalisation (m-cap) for the week ended Friday.
Among the top 10 firms, RIL was the worst hit as its m-cap slumped by Rs 25,110.60 crore to Rs 5,76,213.96 crore. The valuation of SBI plunged by Rs 17,005.15 crore to Rs 2,69,794.84 crore; Infosys (Rs 11,818.04 crore to Rs 2,20,166.80 crore); TCS (Rs 11,141.16 crore to Rs 5,03,562.92 crore) and HDFC (Rs 8,127.28 crore to Rs 2,64,934.96 crore).
The m-cap of ITC declined by Rs 6,084.85 crore to Rs 3,11,164.96 crore and that of Hindustan Unilever (HUL) plummeted by Rs 3,106.03 crore to Rs 2,71,068.47 crore. HDFC Bank lost Rs 1,555.84 crore to Rs 4,77,135.50 crore and ONGC Rs 1,475.82 crore to Rs 2,30,677.40 crore.
On the other hand, the only gainer in the top 10 list, Maruti Suzuki India, added Rs 3,620.43 crore to its valuation to reach Rs 2,60,016.92 crore.
In the ranking of top-10 firms, RIL stood at the numero uno spot followed by TCS, HDFC Bank, ITC, HUL, SBI, HDFC, Maruti Suzuki India, ONGC and Infosys.
Over the last week, the Sensex plunged 846.30 points, or 2.51%, while the Nifty declined 267.90 points, or 2.57%.
The government has asked Coal India to focus on production enhancement, saying it cannot let the "profitability tumble" as the recent wage hike will have an estimated impact of nearly Rs 6,000 crore annually. "They (Coal India) have to increase their production and productivity. That goes without saying. When they came to meet me after they signed this (wage pact) both the employee leaders and management were sitting. I told them that you have to do that," Coal Secretary Susheel Kumar said.
Coal India (CIL) had in October signed a wage agreement with workers' unions proposing 20% hike in salaries for a period of five years, which will have an estimated impact of Rs 5,667 crore per year to the world's largest coal miner. "Because if there is an Rs 5,000-Rs 6,000 crore of outgo that has to be generated. We cannot let the stock prices tumble. We cannot let the profitability tumble. So, they (CIL) have to work for productivity and production enhancement," Kumar said.
The public sector firm had signed the agreement at 20% hike in salaries against workers' demand for a 50% raise. In FY18, CIL has been pegged production target at 600MT with an annualised growth of about 8.3% over the last year. In FY19, the envisaged coal production projection is 773.70MT with a growth of about 28.95%. The miner is eyeing an output of one billion tonne by FY20.
07:10 FPI
728cr
Foreign investors pumped in over Rs 19,700 crore into the country's stock markets in November, the highest in eight months, mainly due to government's plan to recapitalise state-run banks and surge in India's ranking in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business. In addition, such investors put in Rs 530 crore in the debt markets during the period under review.
According to depositories data, foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) invested a net amount of Rs 19,728 crore in equities last month. This is the highest net investment by FPIs since March, when they had poured in Rs 30,906 crore in the equity market.
It has been a tremendous journey for the Indian equity markets in 2017. After taking a break from buying into Indian equities in August and September, FPIs bought equities in abundance in November. Overall, FPIs have invested Rs 53,800 crore in equities so far in 2017 and another Rs 1.46 lakh crore in debt markets.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is likely to present India's first post-GST and the current government's last full Budget on February 1 next year, reports PTI. The Budget session of Parliament may begin on January 30 with President Ram Nath Kovind addressing the Joint Session of both the Houses of Parliament, a senior government official said. This will be Jaitleys 5th Budget in a row.
The Economic Survey, detailing the state of the economy, is likely to be tabled on January 31 and the Union Budget may be presented the following day, he said. With excise duty and service tax being subsumed in GST, the classifications in the forthcoming budget may undergo change, he stated.
While a new classification for revenues to be accrued from GST will be included in the Budget for next fiscal, for the current year two sets of accounting may be presented one for actual accruals during April-June for excise, customs and service tax, and the other for July-March period for GST and customs duty.
programmes
The official said that since the GST rates are decided by a GST Council, headed by Union Finance Minister and comprising of representatives of all states, the Budget for 2018-19 may not have any tax proposals concerning excise and service tax levies. Only proposals for changes in direct taxes, both personal income tax and corporate tax, besides customs duty, are likely to be presented in the Budget along with new schemes andof the government.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO and founder of Paytm, has announced that he will not take two months salary.
Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma on Saturday posted on Twitter a screengrab of the donation he made to the Armed Forces Flag Day Fund and it clearly did not go down well with the Twitter fraternity.
Just sent 501 to Armed Forces Flag Day Fund. # @DefenceMinIndia pic.twitter.com/B5KD7wcdb9
Vijay Shekhar (@vijayshekhar) December 1, 2017
Vijay Shekhar posted on Twitter: Just sent Rs 501 to Armed Forces Flag Day Fund, and tagged the Defence Minister.
People on Twitter were quick to point out the publicity stunt and chided Sharma for contributing such a meagre amount despite being the owner of a multi-billion dollar company.
Nice way of publicity. If u had donated a huge sum, u wudnt have been talk of the town. Donation shudnt be publicized on twitter. Dibya R Nath (@dibyarnath) December 2, 2017
Millions earned due to demon , bought Golf links land -90crores and donation 500 that too being used for paytm marketing indirectly. sir you are an inspiration !!
Ankit Jain (@jainankit83) December 1, 2017
Thank You! Your generous contribution would be sufficient to provide entire armed forces with a retirement fund.
They can stop collecting now. December 2, 2017
..... ?
Goldemort (@CholericCleric) December 2, 2017
You are a true baniya. Salute!!! Satish Bhatnagar (@satish7b) December 3, 2017
Wow what a huge amount!
Ajay Pratap (@AjayPra2763175k) December 3, 2017
This is somewhere an insult to the defence forces sir. You are owner of PayTM and 501 amount is just an Insult. Please put this tweet down. This will backfire sir. Gaurav Pandey (@PandeyTweets) December 2, 2017
What a cheap publicity stunt. These days common rural citizens give this much money for Saraswati Pooja. Our tycoons are so miser. CSR must have a burden for you. Didn't expect this from you!
Mayank Shandilya (@ShandiMayank) December 2, 2017
However, the defence minister thanked Sharma for his contribution.
The amicus curiae of the Jaypee insolvency case, Pawan Shri Aggarwal, informed the Supreme Court on Monday that the website was ready and that buyers could register their claims from today.
Aggarwal was directed by the apex court last month to update the portal where homebuyers who have booked apartments in various Jaypee projects in Noida could register their claims.
Homebuyers can register their claims on the website from tomorrow whether they want the unit or a refund. They will also have to upload their details, allotment letter, photograph and an affidavit stating what they want, says Pawan Shri Aggarwal.
Homebuyers are required to file an affidavit stating that they are the owners of the said flat and get the document attested.
The Jaypee matter was listed for Monday. The bench heard the matter for five minutes.
The Supreme Court registry on Monday also wanted, that the amount of Rs 275 crore deposited by the troubled Jaypee Associates last month, be transferred from the general account of the Supreme Court to a fixed deposit so that it could earn interest. The request was accepted.
At the November 22 hearing, the Supreme Court had allowed the parent company of Jaypee Infratech Ltd to deposit Rs 275 crore and another Rs 275 crore by December 31. This is against the earlier order asking the promoters to deposit Rs 2,000 crore by November 13 which the promoters were unable to meet even though four deadlines had expired.
While the Supreme Courts order to deposit Rs 2,000 crore stands, the court allowed the developer to deposit the amount in instalments but did not specify a timeline for the remaining Rs 1,450 crore to be deposited by the promoter.
The bench comprised of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud.
The next date of hearing - has been listed for January 10, 2018, the order said.
On September 11 this year, Supreme Court directed Jaypee Associates, the parent firm of its real estate firm Jaypee Infratech, to deposit Rs 2,000 crore by October 27. The apex court also asked the NCLT-appointed interim resolution professional (IRP) to take over the management of Jaypee Infratech and submit a plan to protect the interests of homebuyers and creditors within 45 days.
Also, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) appointed resolution professional (IRP) Anuj Jain received 21 bids from investors last week who were willing to pump in at least Rs 2,000 crore to complete the projects floated by Jaypee Infratech that involves nearly 32,000 apartments, plots and villas.
The new entrants post the ordinance promulgated last week that bars promoters of companies that have been non-performing assets (NPAs) for over a year from submitting their bids for the resolution process include high profile companies such as Adani Group, Hindujas and Sajjan Jindals JSW Group.
Among the parties that had expressed interest earlier included Vedanta Group, Essel Highways, IDFC, Lodha Group, Puravankara, SARE Homes, L&T Infra, Cube Highways from Singapore, Kotak Infra, SARE Group, Deutsche Bank, Asset Reconstruction Company (India) Limited, Suraksha Realty, Tata Realty, National Infrastructure Investment Fund (NIIF) and JSW among others.
Auto players witnessed a huge spike in their sales volume for the month of November, partly due to the lower base of the previous year when demonetization hit them.
However, we believe that market will continue to support the emerging trends: strong growth in commercial vehicles (CV) on the back of good monsoon, improved rural sentiments and increased production of BS-IV compliant vehicles; signs of revival in three-wheeler sales following governments decision to end permit raj and pick-up in exports on the back of improving global climate.
We believe that most of the regulatory headwinds are waning and the situation is coming back to normalcy. A near normal monsoon, rural demand and governments capex push are the tailwinds to watch out for.
The commercial sector has bounced back strongly after the initial disruption in the market, surrounding demonetization and the BS-IV transition that largely affected the transport industry last year.
Tata Motors registered a significant growth on the back of the success of Tata Motors innovative SCR technology, which has been well accepted by customers. Increased demand for the new tonnage vehicles, infrastructure development led by government funding and a keen focus on customer requirements have helped in reviving the M&HCV performance for the company.
M&M posted a healthy growth (on a low base) thanks to good monsoon, and rural penetration of the company. The management expects the growth momentum to continue on the back of some recent refresh launches as well as better performance of its product portfolio.
Eicher Volvo also witnessed a significant growth of 54.1 percent (YoY) in the month.
Ashok Leyland also posted a healthy growth of 51 percent (YoY) on the back of the low base, good monsoon, improved rural sentiments.
The leader, Maruti, continued to top the chart in PV (passenger vehicles) segment with 15 percent growth, mainly driven by 34 percent growth in UV (utility vehicles).
For Tata Motors, the car segment witnessed a decline of 4.5 percent (YoY) whereas its UV segment witnessed a whopping 366 percent (YoY) on the back of strong growth momentum of new generation Tata cars.
Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M) posted a growth of 21.5 percent (YoY) in PV.In two-wheeler space, Eicher continued its dream run and witnessed strong sales of bikes below 350cc with a growth of 25.6 percent (YoY) whereas bikes above 350cc segment witnessed a decline of 11.7 percent (YoY) as has been the case for long barring last month.
TVS posted a strong growth in 2W segment primarily because of 37.3 percent growth in bikes. Bajajs domestic business was also flat in terms of 2W (two-wheeler) volume.
Hero, a formidable player in 100/110cc bikes, posted a significant growth of 26.1 percent in the month, primarily because of the lower base of last year.
The overall three-wheeler market is showing significant improvement as is evident from the sales number for the November month. This is primarily due to the end of Raj Permit in Maharashtra and new 10,000 permits in Delhi. Bajaj Auto, the leader in the space, could capture the growth coming in this segment and posted a very strong 156.7 percent (YoY) growth in the domestic 3W segment.
TVS also posted a strong growth of 46.9 percent (YoY) in 3W volumes whereas Atul Auto continued to face challenges and witnessed a flat growth of 3 percent (YoY) in 3W volumes.
M&M posted a significant growth of 31.8 percent (YoY) on the back of healthy monsoon, higher Kharif production and improved MSPs.
Escorts disappointed in tractor sales which grew at 5.3 percent.
Auto companies had been struggling in the export markets for long. However, going by the monthly numbers, there appears to be signs of normalcy. TVS and Bajaj yet again witnessed a strong growth in their exports. Eicher witnessed a significant growth of 59.9 percent. Escorts also continues to gain momentum in the exports market.
Bajaj Autos performance was on the back of stabilizing currency and retail sector in Nigeria. The management also mentioned that the geographies like Philippines, Latin America, Egypt, East Africa, and Nepal have stabilized.
However, Tata Motors and M&M continue to face pressure on foreign roads.
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Share price of Alphageo advanced more than 4 percent in the early trade on Monday on receiving award of contract from ONGC.
The company has received a notification of award of contract from ONGC, WOB, Vadodara, Gujarat for acquisition of 3D seismic data in Mehsana carpet area of Cambay basin, India for an estimated contract value of Rs 154.77 crore.
A meeting of the board of directors of the company is scheduled to be held on December 4, 2017, to consider and approve the unaudited financial results of the company for the quarter and six months ended September 30, 2017.
At 09:16 hrs Alphageo (India) was quoting at Rs 985, up Rs 29.80, or 3.12 percent on the BSE.
The share gaiend 28 percent in the last one month.
Posted by Rakesh Patil
Mitessh Thakkar of mitesshthakkar.com told CNBC-TV18, "In line with the belief that we might possibly head higher for the next couple of days before eventually we start correcting again, I have two buys and one sell. The buys are on CESC which is close to support area. So, buy with a stop loss at Rs 972 and look for a Rs 1,010 kind of a target."
"The other buy is on NMDC which is clearly showing a good price and volume action. So, buy with a stop loss below Rs 130.50 and look for Rs 141 kind of a target."
"A sell on HPCL. It is a conditional sell. Let the price break below levels of Rs 405 and sell with a stop loss at Rs 414, and look for a target of Rs 385."
"Yes Bank is very close to important support zones of Rs 285 to about Rs 300. So if somebody has bought with an investment perspective, my sense is that just stay invested. I dont expect Rs 280-285 to be broken. You still have about 4-5 percent kind of a downside."
"However, barring that, I think the stock is at important support zones. So I think it will eventually bounce back and head towards targets of Rs 350-360 again. So in that sense, take a six months call, hold on, you might even want to add more, closer to about Rs 285 zones if you get it, and keep a stop loss below Rs 270."
"Graphite India has had a very good rally and I think now it is possibly sideways for the last three weeks. They are still doing a range of about Rs 540-542 on the downside to roughly about Rs 630-640 on the upside. I think that range might play out for some time."
"If it is a short term view, the idea should be to buy towards the lower end of the range. So, Rs 550-555 should be your buying area, Rs 540 should be your stop loss, and on the upside, Rs 630-640 should be your profit booking target," he added.
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DLFs shares gained nearly 3 percent intraday on Monday as investors cheered the real estate majors fundraising plans.
The companys Board approved issue of debentures and warrants to promoters in lieu of Rs 11,250 crore equity infusion into the company, as part of its objective to reduce net debt significantly.
The board also gave its nod to selling shares through public issue or private placement to institutional investors.
The company is estimated to raise more than Rs 3,500 crore through this process.
In late August, the promoters had sold the entire 40 percent stake in rental arm DLF Cyber City Developers Ltd (DCCDL) for Rs 11,900 crore and proposed to invest proceeds into DLF.
This deal included sale of 33.34 per cent stake in DCCDL to Singapores sovereign wealth fund GIC for Rs 8,900 crore and buyback of remaining shares worth Rs 3,000 crore by DCCDL.
The Board also approved the offer and issue up to 17.30 crore equity shares to eligible investors, in one or more tranches, in India or overseas, by way of public issue or a private placement or a qualified institutional placement.
It approved increase of authorised share capital of the company from Rs 500 crore to Rs 1,000 crore.
The board also approved the appointment of Ashok Kumar Tyagi and Devinder Singh as Whole-Time Directors (WTDs) of the company for a period of five years with effect from December 1, 2017.
Broking firm Edelweiss has maintained its buy call on the stock with an increased target price of Rs 273 from Rs 185, implying an upside of 47 percent.
The brokerage house highlighted that the balance sheet recovery could provide a significant operational flexibility. It also expects a gradual uptick in the operations in coming quarters. Among other positives for the stock are steady rental portfolio, balance sheet improvement and benefits from consolidation, among others.
At 11:27 hrs DLF was quoting at Rs 228.45, up Rs 2.05, or 0.91 percent, on the BSE. It touched an intraday high of Rs 232.70 and an intraday low of Rs 224.00.
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Shares of Fiem Industries added 6.2 percent intraday Monday on signing MoU with Japanese firms Aisan Industry and Toyota Tsusho Corporation.
"..... has signed a memorandum of understanding with Japanese firms Aisan Industry and Toyota Tsusho Corporation for establishing a joint venture company in India," company said in release.
"The joint venture company will manufacture fuel pump module and IC connector assembly for two-wheelers and three-wheelers," it added.
Fuel pump module will become mandatory for two-wheelers and three-wheelers w.e.f. April, 2020 under Bharat Stage VI (BS VI) regime.
This is an advanced Emission Control System Product, which will have huge market in India under BS VI norms, said Fiem Industries.
A meeting of the board of directors of the company will be held on December 04 to consider and approve the standalone un-audited financial results of the company for the quarter ended September 30, 2017.
At 10:56 hrs FIEM Industries was quoting at Rs 935.30, up Rs 41.50, or 4.64 percent on the BSE.
Posted by Rakesh Patil
The Philippines ordered an investigation on Monday into the immunisation of more than 730,000 children with a vaccine for dengue that has been suspended following an announcement by French drug company Sanofi that it could worsen the disease in some cases.
The World Health Organization said it hoped to conduct a full review by year-end of data on the vaccine, commercially known as Dengvaxia. In the meantime, the WHO recommended that it only be used in people who had a prior infection with dengue.
The government of Brazil, where dengue is a significant health challenge, confirmed it already had recommended restricted use of the vaccine but had not suspended it entirely.
Amid mounting public concern, Sanofi explained its "new findings" at a news conference in Manila but did not say why action was not taken after a WHO report in mid-2016 that identified the risk it was now flagging.
A non-governmental organisation (NGO) said it had received information that three children who were vaccinated with Dengvaxia in the Philippines had died and a senator said he was aware of two cases.
However, Department of Health Undersecretary Gerardo Bayugo told Reuters the three referred to by the NGO died due to causes not related to the vaccine and Sanofi said no deaths had been reported as a result of the programme.
"As far as we know, as far as we are made aware, there are no reported deaths that are related to dengue vaccination," said Ruby Dizon, medical director at Sanofi Pasteur Philippines.
Last week, the Philippines Department of Health halted the use of Dengvaxia after Sanofi said it must be strictly limited due to evidence it can worsen the disease in people not previously exposed to the infection.
In a statement, Sanofi said the long-term safety evaluation of the vaccines showed significantly fewer hospitalisations due to dengue in vaccinated people over 9 years old compared with those who had not been vaccinated.
Nearly 734,000 children aged 9 and over in the Philippines have received one dose of the vaccine as part of a programme that cost 3.5 billion pesos ($69.54 million).
The Department of Justice on Monday ordered the National Bureau of Investigation to look into "the alleged danger to public health ... and if evidence so warrants, to file appropriate charges thereon."
There was no indication that Philippines health officials knew of any risks when they administered the vaccination.
However, the WHO said in a July 2016 research paper that "vaccination may be ineffective or may theoretically even increase the future risk of hospitalised or severe dengue illness in those who are seronegative at the time of first vaccination regardless of age."
Singapore's Health Sciences Authority said last week that it flagged risks when Dengvaxia was approved there in October 2016, and was working with Sanofi to strengthen risk warnings on the drug's packaging.
According to Sanofi in Manila, 19 licences were granted for Dengvaxia, and it was launched in 11 countries, two of which a the Philippines and Brazil a had public vaccination programmes.
Brazil's healthcare regulator Anvisa said in a statement that it now recommends that people who have never been infected with dengue not take the vaccine, which was approved for use in Brazil at the end of 2015.
It was not known whether many people have taken the vaccine, if it was part of any government immunization program or if any illnesses or deaths linked to the drug have been reported to the government.
Anvisa did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the Health Ministry.
A spokesman for Sanofi in Paris was not immediately available for comment. "A SHAMELESS SCAM" A spokesman for Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte said on Sunday the government would hold to account those responsible for the programme.
Former Health Secretary Janette Garin, who implemented the programme under the administration of then-President Benigno Aquino, said she welcomed the investigation.
"In the event that there will be authorities who will point culpability to me, I am ready to face the consequences," she told ANC TV. "We implemented it in accordance with WHO guidance and recommendations."
Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said there had been no reported case of severe dengue infection since the vaccine was administered and urged the public "not to spread information that may cause undue alarm."
Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, an NGO, said it was checking a report that three children on the northern island of Luzon had died since being vaccinated in April 2016 but the Department of Health said the deaths were not due to Dengvaxia.
"When we evaluated the clinical records, it was not related to the dengue vaccination," Bayugo said.
A prominent senator, Richard Gordon, told Reuters he was aware of two deaths - but gave no details - and said approval and procurement for the programme was done with "undue haste."
Dengue is a mosquito-borne tropical disease. Although it is not as serious as malaria, it is spreading rapidly in many parts of the world, killing about 20,000 people a year and infecting hundreds of millions.
While Sanofi's Dengvaxia is the first-ever approved vaccine for dengue, scientists already recognised it was not perfect and did not protect equally against the four different types of the virus in clinical tests.
A new analysis from six years of clinical data showed Dengvaxia vaccine provides persistent protective benefit against dengue fever in those who had prior infection.
But for those not previously infected by the virus, more cases of severe disease could occur in the long term following vaccination, Sanofi said.
Chinese media has refuted the countrys role in polluting River Siang in Arunachal Pradesh. The report stated that the country will not pollute its own river as it considered the frontier state an integral part of its 'South Tibet' territory.
The report in Global Times, the Chinese state mouthpiece, claimed that Arunachal Pradesh is a part of Chinas southern Tibet region, and as a country, China is determined to preserve its environment. "South Tibet is the territory of China, which has the duty to preserve local environment," a researcher was quoted saying in the Global Times report.
Also Read: Concerns raised about Chinese intentions after a river in Arunachal Pradesh turns black
The issue came to light after news emerged that the Siang river, known as Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet had turned black. Officials had hinted that this may be due to some construction activity being carried out in Tibet by China. The development had raised concerns across the country as Siang, which is a main constituent of Brahmaputra had earlier been in news for alleged Chinese plans to divert its water to the arid Xinjiang region.
However, the Chinese media has openly refuted the allegation. Alleging that India is trying to incite anti-China sentiments, the report claimed that India has made a mountain out of a molehill.
It also criticised India for thwarting what it claimed as Chinese attempts to improve bilateral relationships."China has overcome all sorts of difficulties to seek India's cooperation in areas such as the hydrological flood reporting of trans-border rivers," a foreign ministry spokesperson was quoted saying in the report.
The rise of slag in the river has raised concerns that China may use its strategic position in Tibet to control river flows into India as a mode to exert pressure. Earlier Chinese reluctance to transfer hydrological data about floods, citing reconstruction work being conducted on its hydrological stations had led to severe damages in India.
The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the execution of death row convict, Tahir Merchant, in the sensational 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case.
The top court sought a response from the CBI in six weeks and called for the case records from the special TADA court in Mumbai, which had awarded death sentence to Merchant, Firoz Abdul Rashid Khan and life imprisonment to gangster Abu Salem.
Merchant was convicted among others in the second stage of the trial in the case as he was absconding.
As many as 257 people were killed and 718 suffered grievous injuries, with some of them suffering disabilities, were killed in the serial blasts at 12 places in Mumbai on March 12, 1993.
A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices Ashok Bhushan and M M Shantanagoudar issued a notice to the CBI and directed the registry to call for the lower court's records.
"The State of Maharashtra is directed to compile the evidence in entirety and file the compilation in convenient volumes and also serve a copy thereof to the counsel for the appellant (Merchant)," it said.
While staying the execution of the death sentence awarded to Merchant, the bench listed the matter for further hearing on March 14 next year.
Merchant had challenged the September 7 order of the special TADA court which had held that he was amongst the main conspirators.
"The evidence proves the anguish, agitation and frustration expressed by Tahir due to the situation prevailing in Bombay during the period of riots in January 1993," it had noted.
He worked with (absconding conspirator) Tiger Memon and had participated in several conspiracy meetings in Dubai. Tahir made travel arrangements, financed the stay and travel of several co-accused and facilitated their training in Pakistan, the court had noted.
"The role of Tahir in the conspiracy is prominent. He is one of the initiators of the conspiracy," the court had said in its ruling on June 16.
On Tahir's role, the court had observed that he was absconding and, by remaining in Dubai, he has deprived the investigating agency of necessary assistance to investigate the case.
Salem had escaped the noose and was handed down life imprisonment due to a provision in the Extradition Act.
Besides Salem, the court had sentenced Karimullah Khan to life imprisonment, while awarding 10 years in jail to the fifth convict, Riyaz Siddiqui.
The court had referred to the worldwide scenario and the menace of terrorism and said it was pertinent that a case relating to terrorism cannot be treated at par with other offences.
It had also imposed a fine on the five accused totalling Rs 27.09 lakh. Firoz Khan was fined Rs 4.75 lakh, Karimullah Khan Rs 8.88 lakh, Tahir Merchant Rs 4.85 lakh, Abu Salem Rs 8.51 lakh and Riyaz Siddiqui Rs 10,000.
The court had in June convicted six persons, including the prime accused Mustafa Dossa and Salem, 24 years after the blasts had left 257 people dead. It, however, let off accused Abdul Quayyum for want of evidence.
Salem, a notorious gangster considered close to fugitive mob boss Dawood Ibrahim, escaped death sentence as the Extradition Act bars India from seeking capital punishment for an accused extradited from a country where the practice is not in force.
Before Salem's extradition in 2004 following his arrest in 2002 in Portugal, India had assured Lisbon that he would not be awarded capital punishment if convicted.
All the seven accused faced multiple charges including criminal conspiracy, waging war against the government and murder.
The trial court, in its June 16 ruling convicting the six accused, had held that the prosecution had proved that Salem was one of the key conspirators and had delivered three AK-56 rifles and ammunition and hand grenades to actor Sanjay Dutt, who was convicted under the Arms Act in the earlier phase of the trial.
Salem, who was close to Dawood Ibrahim's brother Anees Ibrahim and Dossa, took upon of himself to bring a part of arms and ammunition from Dighi to Mumbai, the court had said.
The trial of Abu Salem, Mustafa Dossa, Karimullah Khan, Firoz Abdul Rashid Khan, Riyaz Siddiqui, Tahir Merchant and Abdul Quayyum was separated from the main case as they were arrested after the first set of trial had already started.
Dossa had died of cardiac arrest at J J Hospital in Mumbai, shortly after being convicted.
18:25 EC writes to Chief Electoral Officer of Gujarat that no political party, organisation or candidate shall publish any advertisement in print media on 8th & 9th December, unless it has obtained pre-certification from Media Certification and Management Committee, reports ANI.
18:07 NCP criticises PM Narendra Modi over his comments on Congress president election
Senior NCP leader Praful Patel on Monday attacked Prime Minister
Addressing a rally, Modi had said that if one doesn't have democracy in his home (party), how can the person practice it in the country. PM Modi also said that the outcome of the election to the top post in the Congress is a foregone conclusion.
Narendra Modi for the comments he had made on the forthcoming election of the Congress president while addressing a poll rally in Gujarat yesterday."Narendra Modi commented on infighting in the Congress, which was unwarranted. He had termed the election (of Congress president) as a tussle between 'Shezad' and 'Shahzada'," Patel told reporters.
17:45 Former J&K CM Omar Abdullah wishes 'very best' to Rahul Gandhi
Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah on Monday wished success to Rahul Gandhi as he prepares to take over the reins of the Congress party.
"As @OfficeOfRG files his nomination to take over the Grand Old Party of India, I wish him all the very best going ahead. Expectations are high, challenges are numerous & I pray for his success," Omar tweeted.
17:30 "For Congress, 'work' was giving a hand pump. They never envisioned something like a SAUNI (Saurashtra Narmada Avataran Irrigation) Yojana", Prime Minister Narendra Modi said while addressing a public meeting in Junagadh, tweets BJPLive.
17:15 Congress party releases its election manifesto ahead of Gujarat elections in Ahmedabad, reports ANI.
16:30 The Congress party is expected to release its election manifesto shortly.
16:15 The prime minister is scheduled to hold public meetings in Junagadh and Jamnagar this evening. BJP President Amit Shah is also slated to Maroli and Gandevi, Navsari.
15:47 PM Narendra Modi terms Rahul Gandhi's elevation as 'Aurangzebi raj'
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today slammed Rahul Gandhi's expected elevation as Congress President, dubbing it as "Aurangzebi raj".
Without referring to the National Herald case, in which Rahul Gandhi had got bail, Modi, addressing a campaign rally in Valsad district of Gujarat, said, "Congress has gone bankrupt, as it is going to make a person who is out on bail in corruption case its president."
Read the full story here.
15:33 The prime minister has ended his rally in Bhavnagar.
15:20 The prime minister said in Bhavnagar, "I am seeing videos of Congress supporters saying, vote for Congress on 9th and 14th and then we will do 'Dadagiri' for 5 years. This is not the Gujarat that the people desire."
15:16 "I appeal to the Congress to stick to the truth. The people of Gujarat do not like poll time lollipops and false promises of the Congress," the prime minister said.
15:06 People of UP rejected Congress repeatedly: PM Modi
Talking about the recent civic polls in Uttar Pradesh, PM Modi said, "The people of UP know the Congress and their leadership well and see how they have rejected Congress repeatedly."
14:59 Prime minister Modi has attacked Congress for 'divide and rule' politics
Speaking at the public meeting in Bhavnagar, PM Modi said, "I fail to understand why is the Congress once again doing what it always did in the past - divide people, be it on caste lines, communal lines, between villages and cities. Congress has learnt 'divide and rule' from our colonial rulers rather well."
14:56
PM @narendramodi is addressing a rally in Bhavnagar. Watch live at https://t.co/mjKkF2PNsz Listen him LIVE by dialing 02245014501. #ModiWaveInGujarat pic.twitter.com/2ACNToR1Uu BJP (@BJP4India) December 4, 2017
14:42 The prime minister has begun his address at the Bhavnagar rally.
14:30 Prime Minister Modi has arrived for the rally in Bhavnagar.
14:21 Next stop: Bhavnagar, a place where BJP has always done well
The prime minister's next rally will be held in Bhavnagar in the Saurashtra region.
For the assembly, Bhavnagar has two constituencies - Bhavnagar Purva and Bhavnagar Paschim. Since 1991, BJP has generally done well in both assembly seats and in the Bhavnagar Lok Sabha constituency.
, , , pic.twitter.com/9RE883VjxH Hardik Patel (@HardikPatel_) December 3, 2017
13:45 Police deployment for Gujarat polls
As many as 600 companies of central paramilitary forces will be deployed for the 2017 assembly polls in Gujarat. BSF Gujarat Frontier has also set up an election cell for coordination with state police, according to The Times of India.
13:33 Rahul Gandhi has filed his nomination papers to contest in the Congress presidential election. Senior leaders of the party are now reacting. Follow the LIVE updates here.
13:17 Prime Minister attacks Congress for 'ignoring healthcare' in tribal areas
"Not only did the Congress ignore the healthcare infrastructure in tribal areas, there was no arrangements for ambulances. We changed both these things- today there are better healthcare services and the '108 ambulance service' is active," he said during his public address in Dharampur.
13:07 The prime minister has ended his day's first rally in Dharmapur.
13:07 PM Modi congratulates Congress for 'Aurangzeb Raj'
"Mani Shankar Aiyar said that 'did elections happen during Mughal rule? After Jehangir, Shahjahan came, was any election held? After Shahjahan it was understood Aurangzeb will be the leader'. So Congress accepts it's a family party? We don't want this Aurangzeb rule," the prime minister said.
"I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the well being of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command," he added.
13:00 PM Modi questions Congress for not giving OBC Commission Constitutional Status
Prime Minister Modi questioned Congress at a rally in Dharampur for not giving OBC Commission Constitutional Status. He said, "Why did the Congress not give Constitutional Status to the OBC Commission? We got a bill but when we did so, they stalled it in the Rajya Sabha. This anti-OBC Congress should be severely punished by the people."
12:53 Warning the Opposition for 'looted the poor' the prime minister has said, "I am not scared of you, will return everything that belongs to the poor".
12:46 PM Modi has said, "Why has the Congress stopped saying BJP is anti-Muslim? Earlier, they would go out of the way to show their secularism but now we are all seeing what they are doing in this election, where they are going. Unfortunately for them, Muslims know their real nature."
"Disinformation like BJP does this and that against Muslims has been spread. This family party made it their main agenda to spread disinformation about BJP. But Gujarat people are not so naive, they have now become sensitive and aware to disinformation," he added.
12:35 Speaking at a rally in Dharampur, the prime minister said, "I have spent many years of my life in Gujarat's tribal stretch, worked among tribal communities.
"Congress can't either tolerate or accept leaders from Gujarat. They have always defamed Gujarat," he added.
12:31
I condemn the attack on the Dinyanil Rajyaguru brother of Indranil Rajyaguru, @INCGujarat Candidate against CM Rupani. Fearing defeat of CM Police has also arrested Indranil Rajyaguru & @SATAVRAJEEV late night, without giving any reason. Bharat Solanki (@BharatSolankee) December 3, 2017
12:24 Prime Minsiter Modi is now addressing a public meeting at Dharampur.
12:16 Away from the campaign, Rahul Gandhi files nomination papers for Congress top job
Meanwhile, away from the poll campaign in Gujarat, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi has filed his nomination papers for the party's top job.
The 47-year-old Gandhi scion is likely to emerge as the lone candidate in the fray and decks have been cleared for his election as the Congress president, succeeding his mother Sonia Gandhi, who has held the post for 19 years in a row now.
Read the full report here.
12:00 The prime minister will first address a public meeting at Dharampur, Valsad district in southern Gujarat.
11:43
11:16 PM Modi mocks Rahul over charge of giving land to industrialist
PM Narendra Modi on Sunday, mocked Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi over the allegation that he gave an "enormous piece" of land to an industrialist.
Modi also said 125 crore people of this country were his "God" and he was their priest.
"The Congress is being rejected from every corner of the country. They need to introspect," Modi said at a rally here.
Read the dull story here.
11:01 Meanwhile, BJP President Amit Shah will also be holding rallies in Vapi, Surat, Maroli Jalalpur, Navsari and Gandevi.
22 #__ - 6 :
7 18000 5500 10000 ? pic.twitter.com/KngeBgLlVp Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) December 4, 2017
10:17 Will ensure fair, transparent polls in Gujarat: Election Commission
The Election Commission (EC) today said it has directed the election machinery in Gujarat to ensure effective monitoring and comprehensive planning for "free, fair and transparent" polls in the state.
The EC reviewed poll preparations in Gujarat over the last two days.
Chief Election Commissioner AK Joti told reporters that the state election machinery had been directed to ensure effective monitoring, vigilance and planning to address concerns of political parties and instill confidence in the electorate.
Read the full story here.
09:55
Will continue the campaign across Gujarat. Looking forward to addressing rallies in Dharampur, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) December 4, 2017
09:43 Prime Minister will hold four public meetings in Gujarat today. His meetings will be held at Dharampur, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar.
On Sunday, the prime minister and Bharatiya Janata Party's 'start campaigner' held rallies in Bharuch, Surendranagar and Rajkot.
405200 03: Muslim children watch as communal violence erupts May 10, 2002 in the streets of Ahmedabad, India. A wave of revenge killings and clashes erupted in late February after a Muslim mob torched a train carrying Hindu devotees, killing 59 people. Officials put the death toll since the train attack at 890, but human rights groups and opposition parties say more than 2,000 people have been killed. (Photo by Ami Vitale/Getty Images)
The Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Monday unanimously passed a bill awarding death to those found guilty of raping girls aged 12 and below.
With the passage of the bill, Madhya Pradesh becomes the first state in the country where those convicted of such rapes will face the gallows.
Introduced in the House by Law and Legislative Affairs Minister Rampal Singh, the bill was discussed in detail and then passed by all parties, including the ruling BJP and opposition Congress.
The bill will now be sent to the President for his assent after which it will become a law, state Home Minister Bhupendra Singh told reporters outside the Assembly.
"It was a historic day for Madhya Pradesh as the state Assembly, as per the wish of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, passed a bill making a provision to award capital punishment to those indulging in such crimes (raping girls aged 12 or younger)," Singh said.
Capital punishment will be awarded to convicts under section 376 (A), which is related to rape, and section 376 (D, A), pertaining to gang rape.
Welcoming the bill, Chief Minister Chouhan said, "There are people in society who can be set right only by severe punishments. It (the legislation) will deal with them. We will also raise awareness in society against such crimes."
Answer: Vijay Mallya
Moneycontol News
The Westminster Magistrates Court in London will start the final hearing of Indias extradition request for Vijay Mallya against charges of fraud and money laundering filed by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate.
The infamous business tycoon, who was out on bail till today, will meet his fate after this final round of hearing that can extend till December 14.
The judgement would decide if he can be legally forced back to India to face trial for defaulting on loans to the tune of a whopping Rs 9,000-crore taken from multiple banks. The absconding Mallya had not consented to extradition when he was asked about the same earlier in a court.
Here are seven key things that has happened in the high-profile case of Vijay Mallya:
1. Indias Ministry of External Affairs submitted an extradition request in February for Mallya whose Kingfisher Airlines owes over Rs 9,000 crore to a consortium of 17 banks in India. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) also filed charge sheet against Mallya under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and requested for his extradition. The London court will hear their joint plea on extradition of Mallya.
2. The ED case alleges that Kingfisher Airlines diverted to shell companies abroad Rs 417-crore loan, which was meant for the airline, and was taken from IDBI Bank. The ED alleged that Mallya had laundered a total of Rs 1,300 crore through 13 shell companies.
3. The 61-year-old tycoon had fled to England in March last year to evade trial, following which India canceled his passport and started the extradition process. He was then arrested in London in April this year on an extradition warrant but he got a conditional bail in just a few hours by paying a bond of 650,000 pounds.
4. Mallya has repeatedly denied all the allegations against him. He has also said the allegations of money laundering against him were false and he has evidence to back up his claim.
5. During one of the hearings of Mallyas case, the London court had raised concerns regarding alleged human rights violation in Indian prisons. The Indian government followed up with an assurance that the tycoon will not face any threat to his life in case he is extradited and lodged in Arthur Road jail of Mumbai. The government submitted details of the prison conditions to the court, as per a report in the Hindustan Times.
6. The India High Commission had stated that the evidences presented against Mallya in the UK court makes a strong case against the liquor baron. India has submitted a number of evidences to the court to prove Mallyas loan default and that it was intentional. But UK puts India in category two countries regarding extradition, making the process more difficult and lengthy compared to the one availed by European countries and other first-world nations.
7. The 25-year old extradition treaty between India and UK has not yielded a good result wherein only one among several extradition requests made by India has been approved. It would be a rare achievement if the court rules in Indias favour and sends the tycoon back home. In that case, UK home secretary Amber Rudd would order Mallya's extradition within two months of the ruling, unless multiple court appeals hinder and prolong the process.
With inputs from PTI.
Vivek Wadhwa
Imagine a world in which rich and poor alike have unlimited food, live in excellent health, and can zip through the streets of Delhi, Bangalore, or Mumbai in minutes in driverless cars and enjoy affordable clean energy, education, and comfortable housing.
This seems like a dream, doesnt it? It isnt. It is a future that can be created within two decades. Technology advances are literally making science fiction a reality.
Take the smartphones that even rickshawallahs can now afford. These are powered by computers many times more powerful than the Cray Supercomputers that could not be imported to India (because of an arms embargo imposed on India in the late 1980s; and this was a dual use technology). The accelerometers and gyroscopes in these are more precise than those that Americas nuclear missiles once contained. The photographs that NASAs rover Curiosity (launched in 2011) is sending from Mars are taken with a 2 MP camera something even the poor would scoff at now.
That is how rapidly technology is advancing. Computers are doubling in their capabilities every year on a trajectory known as Moores Law. And everything they touch is advancing on the same exponential curve, including sensors, artificial intelligence, robotics, genomics, and energy technologies.
India has long been held back by the cost of energy and the reliance on high-polluting fossil fuels. But the price of solar power generation has been falling by 10 to 20 percent a year for the past 40 years, and with every 20 percent reduction, total installed capacity has doubled. In 1980, solar-generated electricity in the US cost USD 1.50 per watt. In May, a solar power auction at Bhadla Solar Park in Rajasthan yielded a bid of Rs 2.44 per unit for a 500-megawatt installation, a greater than 99 percent reduction in cost. The trend is accelerating; by 2030, energy will be as inexpensive as cellphone minutes are now and available to all.
With inexpensive energy, the problem of water shortages and waterborne viruses can be solved because boiling all of the water needed will be economical and India is surrounded by oceans.
Along with advances in LED lighting, which are already as economical as tungsten-based lightbulbs, and breakthroughs in optimising light frequencies for growing plants, the falling price of energy makes vertical farming economical. Using sensors and artificial intelligence software to monitor crop growth in glass-enclosed buildings, India can grow all the organic food it needs.
And then there is health care. World wide, more than four billion people lack access to quality diagnostics, so ailments that could be cured if diagnosed lead instead to suffering and death. But with the declining cost of micro-electromechanical- and nanofluidic-based sensors, a new generation of inexpensive medical devices are possible.
Forus Health, for example, has developed a portable eye-screening device, called 3nethra, that can detect eye pathologies such as cataract, diabetic retinopathy, and cornea-related problems. Health Cubed has built an inexpensive medical-grade device that provides 32 measures and tests, including blood pressure, blood sugar, blood haemoglobin, and urine protein and is able to diagnose diseases such as HIV AIDS, syphilis, dengue, and malaria. MapMyGenome analyses genome data to provide insights into the genetic bases of various aspects of individuals health, including traits, lifestyle, drug responses, and inherited conditions. These are all Indian startups that will soon help people all over the world.
With 3D printing, within 15 years, we will be able to digitally manufacture household goods and clothing and even buildings and electronics goods. The 3D printers of today are still slow and clumsy and do little more than produce device prototypes and toys. But exponentially advancing technologies move slowly before they do amazing things.
It will also become economical to synthetically produce meat. What if you were offered cooked protein which had the appearance, texture, and taste of beef or pork but was designed on a computer and produced in a 3D printerand no animals were even touched. Would you eat it? That is a question you may have to answer in 2027.
In education, it is already possible to watch educational videos on the same smartphones that one is gawking at Sunny Leone on. With AI-based learning apps and virtual reality headsets, which will also become affordable within five years, Indias entire education system could be transformed.Imagine learning Sanskrit by conversing with the inhabitants of ancient India, or learning mathematics by building pyramids in ancient Egypt in virtual reality. This will be possible.
It is not going to be smooth sailing to this amazing future, though. Every technology creates new risks, disrupts industries, and destroys old-line jobs. Technologies can be used for good and for evil. The challenge for India will be to ensure that the benefits of technology are shared equally, that the rewards of each technology outweigh the risks, and that there is greater freedom and autonomy for the people. If this is done right, it could open up the era of knowledge and enlightenment that we have dreamed of.
business Keep close eye on US mkt; 10,100 not good support for Nifty, sell on rallies: Pros Mitessh Thakkar of mistesshthakkar.com said selling on rally would help and momentum would come in once we break below 10,100, then we could see severe declines.
Experts suggest North Korea having fully submersible submarines firing a nuclear ballistic missile pose a dangerous scenario because they could offer the hermit regime a better chance of survival and might be harder to detect.
There are signs that North Korea's submarine missile program is expanding as it prepares its second test, adding to the risk that the nuclear-armed country could one day threaten the U.S. or its Asian allies with yet another powerful weapon in its arsenal.
Experts suggest North Korea having fully submersible submarines firing a nuclear ballistic missile pose a dangerous scenario because they could offer the hermit regime a better chance of survival and might be harder to detect.
It comes on the heels of North Korea on Tuesday launching a new Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, a road-mobile weapon the state-owned KCNA media claimed could carry a "super-large heavy warhead, which is capable of striking the whole mainland of the U.S."
The North Koreans appear to be getting more aggressive on submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) development and now have several shipyards active in the offshore-weapons program. The North is not believed to have the capability today to launch multiple ballistic missiles from a submarine. However, experts say the totalitarian state is working at a feverish pace and could have this submersible as early as next year.
"If North Korea can deploy not only developmentally a submarine-launched ballistic missile that is effective and deploy it on ballistic missile submarines, it certainly complicates defense against missile attacks," defense analyst Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., co-founder and CEO of Colorado-based imagery analysis firm KPA Associates LLC, told CNBC in an interview Friday.
In a 38 North blog post Friday, he revealed that "commercial satellite imagery from Nov. 11, 16 and 24 show that North Korea's second submersible ballistic missile test stand barge a platform that allows for underwater missile launches outside of submarines located at the Nampo Navy Shipyard is being prepared to enter service."
38 North, a project of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said the "second missile test stand barge
Bermudez, a 38 North contractor, explained that the test stand barge and platform are used to simulate the weapons that would be inside the submarine because it's considered too dangerous and costly to do such early testing inside a real submarine. He also said that the North Koreans know the U.S. military is watching its SLBM and submarine development so they have been doing things to mitigate the satellite surveillance capabilities, including resorting to concealment in some cases.
Still, Bermudez called the Nampo shipyard activities on the regime's west coast "a strong indicator that Pyongyang is advancing" in its SLBM program. And he said the North Koreans will need a series of tests from the submersible barge before deploying ballistic missiles on submarines.
Last year, North Korea conducted a test of its SLBM technology near its port city of Sinpo and reportedly flew one missile at least 500 kilometers (or about 300 miles), according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. Sinpo, located on the country's northeast coast, also is where the North reportedly has renovated large buildings that might be involved in the construction of a new SLBM-capable submarine.
The Sinpo-class experimental submarine that the North Koreans have today is believed to be up to about 2,000 tons and have a nautical range of about 2,800 kilometers (about 1,500 miles). Yet it features just a single launch tube and Bermudez said "no one considers that an operational capability."
According to Bermudez, Pyongyang is apparently building a submarine that will feature multiple tubes for ballistic missiles and greater capability at sea. He estimated the new submarine "could be launched any time next year and going forward."
To be clear, though, he said just because the submarine may launch doesn't necessarily mean it's fully operational. The expert explained how it typically takes a year or two after the submarine is launched that it "truly becomes operational" because it will go through a range of sea trials and necessary crew training.
Even so, having the submarine-launched ballistic missiles with nuclear capability is potentially a nightmare scenario for South Korea and Japan. That's because the submarines could potentially avoid detection by some of the most advanced defense systems.
For example, missiles fired by North Korean submarines off the east coast of Japan could potentially dodge detection from Japan's Patriot anti-missile system by launching from behind radar. At present, the detection is focused on missiles coming from land-based missiles in North Korea.
Similarly, the current THAAD anti-missile system deployed by the U.S. in South Korea is focused on identifying missile threats from the North. As a result, a submarine missile from the North Korean navy could be launched behind radar and perhaps evade existing defense systems.
"Up to now we've only had to worry about them coming from north to south or from west to east in the case of Japan and the United States," said Bermudez. "If they deploy a ballistic missile submarine with operational missiles, it can come from almost any direction around the peninsula."
Experts say U.S. bases in the Western Pacific, including Guam, also are potentially at risk if North Korea deploys submarines with SLBM weapons. At this point, though, it's not believed that the North Korean submarines have a range to reach the United States mainland.
That said, if the North's submarines could reach closer to the U.S. West Coast they would not need an intercontinental ballistic missile to threaten major American cities, says Loren Thompson, a defense industry consultant and chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based public-policy think tank.
"The biggest problem the U.S. faces in dealing with a North Korean nuclear launch is that you can't stop it if you don't know where it's coming from," Thompson said. "That is why the North Koreans are building mobile missile launchers on land and why they're trying to develop the ability to launch from under the seas."
At the end of the day, Thompson said what the North Koreans want is something the United States has in its nuclear arsenal "a survivable retaliatory capability. If it's at sea, they might be very well obtain it."
But he said technological hurdles in developing a submarine with multiple ballistic missiles is rather challenging. That may be one reason North Korean hackers last year reportedly stole blueprints from Daewoo Shipbuilding, a large South Korean maker of submarines.
"You can't just launch the missile," Thompson said. "The exhaust will destroy the submarine. You have to push it into the air with gas, like compressed oxygen, and then ignite it once it's in the air. That is just more more complicated than launching from a land base."
North Korea's largest submarines at present include the so-called Romeo-class submersibles that are based on an old design from the Soviet Union. The 1,800-ton vessels are considered relatively easy to detect using anti-submarine warfare technology available to the U.S. and its Asian allies.
In fact, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been featured in state-run media taking tours and riding on board the green-painted Romeo-class submarines operated by the North's navy. Some estimates are the North has around 20 of the Romeo-class submarines.
The North Koreans also are known to have some 50 smaller submarines that are harder to detect and can sink ships with torpedoes. One of those submarines was believed to be responsible for sinking the South Korean Cheonan navy ship in 2010, resulting in the deaths of 46 sailors.
Men sit under a banner carrying a portrait of chief of India's Congress party Sonia Gandhi outside the Congress office in New Delhi May 16, 2014. Counting of votes began on Friday after India's mammoth election, which could usher in the most profound economic change in a generation if opposition leader Narendra Modi wins a clear mandate for his agenda to revive growth and create jobs. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi (INDIA - Tags: POLITICS ELECTIONS) - RTR3PEHK
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Monday filed his nomination for the post of the Congress President.
Experts suggest the 47-year-old leader of the party could win the election unopposed. That would become clear only on Tuesday, when the Central Election Committee (CEC) scrutinises the nomination paper.
If no other candidate files nomination, Gandhi could be declared the winner unopposed on December 11.
If he faces competition, the election will be held on December 16. The votes will be counted and the result will be declared on December 19.
The 131-year old political party has its own constitution which has laid down elaborate procedure to elect its President. Here's how the 'Grand Old Party' of India, elects its highest leader:
Top leaders of the party are members of a top executive body called the Congress Working Committee (CWC).
Following a meeting of the CWC, the party's election committee sets an election schedule.
All members of the Pradesh Congress Committees are delegates to the party according to Article XII of the party's constitution.
It takes ten delegates of the party to jointly propose any other delegate's name for the post of the party President. The term of the Congress president is five years.
As delegates from across the country can nominate a fellow delegate, about 50-55 sets of nomination papers are expected to be filed on his behalf, media reports suggest.
After declaration of the election procedure, delegates can file their nominations according to the specified date. The nominations are then scrutinised and a final list of candidates is published.
After which, candidates are given a seven-day window to withdraw their nomination if they wish to do so.
Winning unopposed
In a situation where only one candidate is contesting the election, he or she is declared the winner.
The president officially takes charge starting from the All India Congress Committee (AICC) plenary session. Till the plenary session, the winner is called as the 'President-elect'.
Contest
In a situation where there are multiple candidates, the winner has to secure more than 50 percent of the total votes from AICC delegates.
Party rules state that, if in case, no candidate is able to secure more than 50 percent votes as the first preference, the second preferences would be counted.
If the election process is disrupted due to any unforeseen circumstance, the CWC has the power to appoint a provisional President till the time, the process is completed.
On November 29, 2017, North Korea, following orders from its Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, tested its most powerful missile yet, the Hwasong-15, which has all of mainland US, India and global cities like Paris, London, Dubai, Barcelona, Sydney and Tokyo within its reach.
With this, Kim Jong-un has underlined his nuclear credentials, pitting him against other nuclear powers like the US, UK, Russia and France. Nuclear deterrence is under debate once again, and if history is anything to go by, Kim Jong-un will never give up his nuclear toys.
Apart from compromising his countrys defence, giving up the nukes wont serve Kims self-interest either. Two instances from recent history illustrate the perils of cooperating with the wider world: The fall of dictators Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.
Iraq under Saddam Hussein - who ruled for more than two decades was declared nuke-free by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as early as 1994. A US-led Iraq invasion followed in 2003, after allegations that Saddam had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction an unverified claim. He was hanged to death in 2006 - 12 years after IAEA declared Iraq nuke free.
Libya ruler Muammar Gaddafi agreed to eliminate the countrys nuclear weapons programme in 2003. British and American experts, along with the IAEA, dismantled the programme in 2004. During the Arab Spring in 2011, rebels rose against Gaddafi. To control the unrest, NATO sent war planes to bomb government positions. A group of rebels captured Gaddafi and killed him the same year eight years after he voluntarily gave up nuclear weapons.
India and Pakistan are clear examples of nuclear deterrence in practice. Israel, for instance, follows the policy of nuclear ambiguity where it is believed that it possesses nuclear weapons but it hasnt officially admitted to having them. In either case, the motto is to avoid war/destruction and ensure safety through a threat. Kim Jong-un is doing the same. There could be other reasons why he wont give up the nukes but as a declared nuclear state, North Korea is perhaps more insulated from attack; more to the point, Kim himself certainly is. (Source: Why Kim Won't Give Up His Nukes)
N Korea missiles
British Prime Minister Theresa May failed to strike a Brexit divorce deal with EU negotiators in Brussels on Monday despite earlier reports of a breakthrough agreement that would have kept British-ruled Northern Ireland aligned with EU regulations.
Both sides said they should unlock talks on future trade relations in the coming days.
We will reconvene before the end of the week and I am also confident that we will conclude this positively, May said after a lunch with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who also voiced confidence in overcoming outstanding obstacles.
He insisted the meeting, after days of intensive talks behind the scenes, was not a failure and, well aware the EU does not want to humiliate May as she accepts many of its terms for withdrawal, credited the prime minister with hanging tough.
They spoke after government sources in Dublin said London had agreed to keep Northern Ireland aligned to EU regulations to avoid a hard border with the Irish Republic.
Word of that sent the pound higher on hopes of rapid trade talks but also provoked an angry response from Mays allies in Northern Ireland, demanding equal treatment with the rest of the United Kingdom.
Underlining the conundrums of Brexit, the idea of Northern Ireland remaining closely linked to the EU single market prompted speculation that, to avoid new barriers between Belfast and London, the British mainland would have to follow suit.
The leaders of Scotland and London, which voted against Brexit, demanded they be allowed the same EU relationship as Northern Ireland. Yet May has ruled out such differentiated treatment or staying in a customs union or the single market.
She is a tough negotiator, and not an easy one, Juncker said in remarks reflecting concern in Brussels that concessions by May could fuel a disruptive push in London to unseat her.
She is defending the point of view of Britain with all the energy we know she has, the EU chief executive told reporters.
Despite our best efforts and the significant progress we and our teams have made over the past days on the remaining issues, it was not possible to reach a complete agreement.
The sudden announcement that no deal had been reached swiftly squelched optimism that had spread earlier on Monday.
Irish government sources had said agreement had been reached on an overall deal for the Irish issues.
The key phrase is a clear commitment to maintaining regulatory alignment in relation to the rules of the customs union and internal market which are required to support the Good Friday Agreement, the all-island economy and the border, one of the Irish government sources said.
The Irish border, which is now completely unguarded and barely even marked, would not change its physical appearance after Britain leaves the EU, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said. Fears that a hard border could disrupt the peace deal in the north had driven both sides to find solutions.
Juncker spoke to Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar by phone. EU lawmaker Philippe Lamberts, who met Juncker, said the draft text on Ireland committed Britain to full alignment on rules.
Donald Tusk, the EU summit chair, tweeted ebulliently after speaking to Varadkar that there was good progress on the Irish issue to unblock UK-EU trade talks: Tell me why I like Mondays! the former Polish premier wrote. Getting closer to sufficient progress at December (EU summit).
Education
Montgomery County Community College will present the spring installment of the interview/talk show program Issues and Insights April 20 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in Science Center room 214, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The programs will be simulcast to the Colleges West Campus in South Hall room 216, 101 College Drive, Pottstown. Dr. Kolsky will offer a humorous presentation, Carrots, Sticks and Politics: A State of the Nation and the World Message. In this speech, he will provide his interpretation of domestic and international politics and then welcome questions from the audience for discussion. Issues and Insights, is free and open to the public. For information, contact Dr. Thomas Kolsky, professor of political science, at 215-641-6380 or tkolsky@mc3.edu.
Montgomery County Community Colleges STEM Scholars Program will host a STEM Jam! open house April 25 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the Advanced Technology Center at the Colleges Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The drop-in event is designed for students interested in learning more about careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Activities will include STEM program information and career advising, STEM speakers throughout the day from industry and academia, micro-helicopter and robotics competitive obstacle courses and demonstrations and static models of STEM student and faculty work. For more information about STEM Jam! or STEM programs at MCCC, contact William Brownlowe at wbrownlowe@mc3.edu or 215-641-6644, or Robin Zuhlke at 215-619-7440 or rzuhlke@mc3.edu.
Temple Ambler, located at 580 Meetinghouse Road, presents the following events:
International Club Global Bazaar April 15 from 5 to 8 p.m. The Ambler Campus International Club invites all students, faculty, staff and the community to celebrate a multitude of diverse cultures, which will be showcased at the organizations Global Bazaar. This family friendly event will highlight cultural traditions and celebrations in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South American, North America and Africa through music, entertainment, food and informative displays developed and presented by students at the Ambler Campus. Young visitors will be provided with passports, which they may get stamped at each country they visit. Prizes will be awarded to world travelers who talk to cultural representatives, answer questions about the countries theyve visited and take part in fun-filled activities designed to help them learn about the rich diversity of cultures found throughout the world. Refreshments will be served. The event is free. For more information, call 267-468-8108 or e-mail tuc36466@temple.edu.
EarthFest 2011 April 29 from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. More than 75 exhibitors, including the Philadelphia Zoo, The Franklin Institute, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Elmwood Park Zoo and the Insectarium, will take part in EarthFest 2011. School students of all ages are invited to attend and develop displays of their own. EarthFest partner the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society also offers its Kids Grow Expo, featuring the Junior Flower Show, as part of the event. For more information, call 267-468-8108 or e-mail duffyj@temple.edu.
Annual Spring Plant Sale May 7 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The plant sale an Ambler Campus tradition dating back to the early 1900s will feature woody plants and perennials in portable sizes, hardy trees, shrubs, and vines, native plants that are attractive to wildlife, herbs, and hanging baskets. There will also be numerous special plants for sale to highlight Amblers special anniversary year. Garden books and garden tools will also be available for sale. Students, staff, and volunteers from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture and the Ambler Arboretum Advisory Committee will be available to answer questions. All proceeds from the Spring Plant Sale will support the Ambler Arboretum Fund and the Pi Alpha Xi National Honor Society. Information: 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.
June Homecoming/Louise Bush-Brown Garden Dedication June 5 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. (June Homecoming), Bright Hall Lounge; 2 p.m. (Garden Dedication), Ambler Campus Formal Perennial Gardens. Tickets June Homecoming: Participant $18 per person; Sustainer $25 per person; Benefactor $40 per person. The 2011 June Homecoming, sponsored by the School of Environmental Design Alumni Association, will include the Alumni Association annual meeting and luncheon. June Homecoming will be followed by the formal dedication of Temple University Amblers Formal Perennial Gardens as the Louise Bush-Brown Formal Gardens. During this 100th anniversary of the campus, Temple University Ambler and the Ambler Arboretum of the Temple University is honoring Louise Bush-Browns many contributions to the history of the campus by formally dedicating the gardens in her honor. During the program, campus Executive William Parshall will welcome guests, Ambler Arboretum Director Jenny Rose Carey will speak about the Bush-Browns and the history of the garden, and an official ribbon cutting will be held for the Louise Bush-Brown Formal Garden. Following the ribbon cutting, guests are invited to take a tour of the gardens, which will wend their way to the Campus Greenhouse for the School of Environmental Designs annual Plant Auction. Information (Garden Dedication): 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Information (June Homecoming): 215-482-0722. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.
Northview Garden Tour and Fundraiser for the Ambler Arboretum June 12 from noon to 5 p.m. Call for reservations. Tickets: $15 per person or $20 at the door. In addition to the gardens of the Ambler Arboretum of Temple University, Arboretum Director Jenny Rose Carey has a garden oasis all her own right in Ambler Northview. Visitors will have the opportunity to take self-guided tours throughout the many gardens, where garden experts will be available to answer questions about the various designs. The Ambler Keystone Chapter of the Womans National Farm and Garden Association will also provide tea and refreshments. All proceeds from the tours will support the Ambler Arboretum of Temple University. Information or to register: 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.
The Senior Adult Activities Center of Montgomery County, 536 George Street, Norristown, will hold the following events:
SAAC Adult Day Care, an alternative to Nursing Home Care is available for information call 610-275-1960
Volunteers are needed for Meals on Wheels Program (call the number above)
SAACs Fifth Avenue Boutique opens Monday through Friday from 10 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Exercise with Theresa will be held every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 1 p.m.
Dance class is held every Monday at 10 a.m.
Tai Chi is held every Monday at 10 a.m.
Yoga is held every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m.
Line Dancing is held every Thursday at 10:30 a.m.
Dancing with Joan is held every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.
Sculpture Class is held Wednesdays from 2 to 3:30 p.m.
Why Should I Learn Spanish? will be held Wednesdays at 10:30 a.m.
Generations On-Line computer classes for seniors will be held Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. 4 p.m. computers are available during those hours.
Health Living will be held every Tuesday at 1 p.m.
Boomer U will hold the following events. Boomer U is located at 45 Forest Avenue, Ambler. Registration & payment is required for all events: 215-619-8863.
Pilates Class is held Wednesdays and Fridays at 9:30 a.m. First class is free; please bring a mat. For information call 610-291-5376.
Blue Bell School of Dance, 921 Penllyn Blue Bell Pike, Blue Bell, hosts Argentine Tango Classes and a Milonga dance party every Friday evening. Lessons start at 8:30 p.m. followed by dancing at 9:30 p.m. Andrew Conway, master Argentine Tango dancer, instructor and performer and his partner Linda Chase will instruct. All levels welcome and no partner is needed. Refreshments will be served. Fee is $12 per person and includes lesson and dancing. Information: 215-634-1101 or www.amoretango.com.
The Montgomery Hospital Medical Center will offer the following classes:
Childbirth Education Class- all parents are invited to participate, including those who are delivering at
other hospitals. For more information on maternity services or classes, call 610-270-2020.
CPR and First Aid Courses are offered for beginners to experiences health care providers. Call 610-270-2313.
The Ambler SAAC (Senior Adult Activities Center), located at 45 Forest Ave in Ambler will hold the following events:
Tai Chi every Monday and Thursday at 11 a.m.
Yoga is every Tuesday at 1 p.m. and Friday at 10:30 a.m.
Strength and balance training every Wednesday at 10 a.m.
Armchair Aerobics is held every Monday at 10 a.m.
Gourmet Weight Wise every Thursday at 12:30.
Fitness Center and Pool Room open daily 8 a.m.-4 p.m.
The Diabetes Education Center will offer day and evening classes each month. Health insurance pays for diabetes education classes. Preregistration is required. Call 610-270-2301.
For Kids & Families
The Ambler Kiwanis Club will host its annual Easter Egg Hunt April 26 at 10 a.m. in Ambler Borough Park, located just off of the intersection of Hendricks Street and Valley Brook Road. Members of the Wissahickon Key Club will assist Kiwanians in hiding thousands of wrapped chocolate eggs in a designated area of the park. Also hidden will be plastic colored eggs, which are redeemed for prizes. Elementary school children are separated by age.
Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation will hold its 21st annual Storybook Egg-Stravaganza April 15 fom 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Upper Dublin Township Building. Toddlers and preschoolers love this annual event where photo opportunities with favorite friends abound! Treasures are collected from UDP&Rs assortment of lifesize cutouts of favorite cartoon characters from Disney, Sesame Street, Nickelodeon and other well-known animation. Children can have their picture taken with Bugsy OHare; bring your own camera. And dont forget a basket for goodies! $7 for UD residents; $12 for non-residents. Pre-register at 215-643-1600 ext. 3443.
Splash Week is a free week-long program that teaches children and families basic swimming skills and water safety practices. All YMCA branches will host multiple classes each day from April 11 to 15. For more information, contact the Ambler Area YMCA at 215-628-9950.
Healthy Kids Day is April 16 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The day is filled with fun, engaging and artistic activities that cultivate healthy living as part of the YMCAs larger efforts to help more kids and families become physically active. All activities are free and open to the community. For more information, contact the Ambler YMCA at 215-628-9950. No reservation is required.
The Ambler Area YMCA has added several new programs for area youngsters. Classes are held late afternoons or evenings on various weekdays. For more information, visit philaymca.org or call 215-628-9950.
Basic Beading: Ages: 10+. Wednesdays 7 to 7:45 p.m. This class will teach you the fundamentals of wiring and stringing along with how color can be used to create unique and vibrant beadwork design. You will create various jewelry including earrings, bracelets, charm pendants and much more! Supplies will be provided. Bringing your own jewelry pliers or tools would be a plus.
Messin with the Masters: Ages: 8-12. Thursdays 7 to 7:45 p.m. Learn about some of the worlds greatest artists. You will be inspired to create your own Starry Night with oil pastels and tempera paints, a tissue paper painted Monet garden, a Picasso head using scraps of paper, a Georgia OKeeffe clay flower bowl and a Rousseau jungle collage.
Super Scientist: Ages: 5-7. Mondays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Well be concocting chemistry experiments such as making slime, mixing potions and having fun with magnet magic. Your budding little scientist will enhance his/her creative thinking and motor skills and to top it off will learn that science can be serious fun.
Wacky Junk Art: Ages: 8-12. Thursdays 6 to 6:45 p.m. Why throw it away! Instead join us to make household junk into aliens from outer space, wacky specs, crazy hats, body masks or a recycled train.
Globe Trotters: Ages: 4-6. Tuesdays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Youre never too young to start thinking globally. Each week, we explore a new country through crafts, games, music, stories and even some taste-testing. A perfect introduction to our great big world!
Crazy about Crafts: Ages: 5-7, Thursdays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Let your childs creative juices flow with our fun arts and crafts projects each week. Fine motor skills and creative thinking skills will be enhanced with this crafty class.
Come out and join the Ambler Area YMCAs Teen and Junior Leaders Club. Participants are given the freedom to plan community service projects year round and truly make a difference in the lives of people in need. Those in Teen and Junior Leaders also attend leadership retreats all along the East Coast three times a year and meet other leaders who are doing the same great work in their respective areas. Dont miss out on this inspiring opportunity. Teen Leaders, ages 13-17, meet every Wednesday from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Junior Leaders, ages 10-12, will begin in the spring and will meet every Monday. For more information, contact Mike Miles, Teen Director, 215- 628-9950 x 1540 or mmiles@philaymca.org.
Did you know that the new Ambler Area YMCA holds childrens birthday parties at its site for members and non members as well. The Ambler Y does all the work from start to finish and birthday parties include a personalized cake, ice cream, beverage and paper products. Parties are held on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and include two party hosts to lead activities, set-up, clean-up and assist with serving. You can have a Splash Party for children ages six to 12 in the new zero depth entry pool with water slide and spray fountains. Up to 25 children have exclusive use of the pool area with 30 minutes in the party room. Sports Parties are offered for kids ages four to 12 with age appropriate activities and games, and sports such as floor hockey, soccer, basketball or dodge ball. Children ages three to five years of age will enjoy parties in the Family Active Center with use of the Moon Bounce and organized activities, such as parachute play and songs. For information, 215-628-9950 ext. 1583.
Community Events at the Ambler Y:
-YAchievers YMCA Achievers is a developmentally based, extracurricular, educational and team mentoring program designed to help students in grades five through 12 prepare for fulfilled livelihoods in college and beyond. Participation is free and all students in this program receive a free YMCA membership. Registration for the 2009 program begins now. You do not need to be a YMCA member to utilize these special services. Call 215-628-9950 to register.
Greater Norristown Art Leagues Childrens Weeklong Summer Art Camps will be held at 800 West Germantown Pike in East Norriton, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday throughout the summer. The cost per session is $125 per student for ages 6 and up. Jo Ann Cooksey Bono teaches an introduction to basic drawing skills and techniques from 10 a.m. until the lunch break each day. In the afternoon sessions, Mary Vogel Lozinak involves the students in hands on projects such as collage, papermaking, T-shirt printing, 3D design and sculpy clay. Fridays Graduation Day includes an art show, awards ceremony and reception for parents, siblings, grandparents and friends. All supplies are included. Students provide their own lunch. A refrigerator is available and the building is air-conditioned. This is the 15th year to run this successful program. Both instructors are professional artists with State Police and Child Abuse Clearances. To register, call Jo Ann at 610-279-1008, or register on-line at www.gnal.org.
Health
Dresher Physical Therapy is hosting an interactive seminar discussing its Golf Assessment Progam April 30 from 10 a.m. to noon at Dresher Physical Therapy, 1075 Virginia Drive, Suite 200, Fort Washington. Physical therapist Chris Miller, certified through the Titleist Performance Institute, will discuss why your body may be the most important piece of golf equipment you invest in and how this can drastically improve your game. $10 in advance; $15 at the door. Call 215-619-4545 to reserve your spot.
The Chestnut Hill Center for Enrichment, Center on the Hill and Chestnut Hill Hospital will host a Senior Health and Resource Fair April 14 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church, 8855 Germantown Ave. The event is free. For more information, call 215-248-0180 or e-mail chseniors@cavtel.net.
The Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center is hosting Help Yourself to Health, a new six-week workshop for older adults with ongoing health conditions such as arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, anxiety, heart disease and others. The free workshop will take place at the Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center, 45 Forest Ave. on six Thursdays, May 12 through June 16 from 9:30 a.m. to noon. Although there is no charge to participate, registration is required. To register, call 215-619-8863.
The Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center is sponsoring an eight-week program called A Matter of Balance: Managing Concerns About Falls. Presented by the Montgomery County Health Department, this workshop will be held on Tuesdays, May 3 to June 21 from 10 a.m. to noon at the Ambler Center, 45 Forest Ave. If you pre-register by April 27, the fee is only $5! Registration at the first class is $10. (Checks should be payable to SAAC and will benefit our Meals on Wheels program that serves homebound seniors.) A workbook will be provided and refreshments will be served. Call 215-619-8863 to register or for more information.
Fort Washington Wellness Center classes are ongoing. There are several offered during lunch or right after work, for your convenience: Boot Camp from noon to 1 p.m. on Monday; Zumba is MWF from 11 a.m. to noon and Friday at 4 p.m.; there are 25 cycling classes; Ashtanga and Vinyasana Yoga and Pilates; and a group Womens Strength Training class M-F from 10 to 11 a.m. Questions, call Cathy DeMarco at 215-641-1245.
Following the success of other local area programs, Impact Sports and Upper Dublin Parks and Recreation are delighted to team up again to offer a spring program for the 2011 season! Upper Dublin area children ages 3-5 years old can attend a Sports Program featuring their favorite sports games; soccer, rugby, hockey, track and field, basketball, and more. The program will start on April 27 and run through June 1. Cost for the program is $85 for the six weeks. The classes will be running 12- 1 p.m.; 1- 2 p.m.; 2- 3 p.m. For more info or to register, call Upper Dublin Township on 215 643 1600 or visit their website a http://www.upperdublin.net.
Spring Aquatic Programs UDHS Pool:
-Summer is just around the corner Community Aquatic Programs at the UDHS Pool can help get you into shape! Programs begin in March; preregistration is required.
Shallow Water Aerobics Two 5-week programs, Wednesday nights, 8-8:45 p.m., $40R/$50NR.
Adult Swim Instructions Two 5-week programs, Wednesday nights, 7-8 p.m., $50R/$60NR
-Open Rec Swims are fun for the whole family! Come out on Fridays from 7-9 p.m. or Saturdays from 1-4 p.m. and enjoy use of the pool and diving area. Fridays are offered through June 17; Saturdays are offered March 12-May 21.
-Join a growing group of adult lap swimmers and water walkers. Lanes are set aside evenings and weekends for use; lanes are shared. Monday Thursday from 7:30-9:30 p.m.; Fridays from 7-9 p.m. and Saturdays (March 12-May 21) from 1-4 p.m.
-Private Swimming & Diving Lessons for ages 3-adult are offered at the UDHS Pool through a partnership with the Upper Dublin Aquatic Club (UDAC). Visit the UDAC website for more information, www.udac.us, and click the link to UDHS Private Lessons.
-Looking for local programs for US Masters Swimming (adults) or Water Polo (all ages)? UDAC and UDSD are working together to develop programs that will be offered at the UDHS Pool. Add your name to Interest Lists by emailing slohoefer@upperdublin.net. emails will be sent about clinics and program start dates.
Questions about Community Aquatic Programs at the UDHS Pool, group use of the pool or pool rental? Contact Susan Lohoefer, Facility & Community Affairs Manager at slohoefer@upperdublin.net or call 215-643-8800 x8994.
SilverSneakers Fitness Program. The Healthyways SilverSneakers Fitness Program is a result-oriented program that enables older adults to take charge of their health. The program is an innovative blend of physical activity, healthy lifestyle and socially oriented programing. Members of the program are eligible for a free YMCA membership, with use of the pool and exercise equipment, along with customized classes designed for older adults who want to improve their strength, flexibility, balance and endurance. If you are a subscriber to Independence Blue Cross (Personal Choice 65 PPO) or Keystone 65 HMO, Bravo Health, or Health Options Programs (HOP), call the Ambler Area YMCA, 215-628-9950 or Hatboro Area YMCA, 215-674-4545. You can also visit www.silversneakers.com.
Zumba Fitness offers Zumba dance/fitness classes at Academy of Dance and Music/BBAD Studio located at 1524 DeKalb Pike in Blue Bell (behind Sherwin Williams). Classes are offered three times a week: Tuesdays at 6 p.m., Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 8 a.m. For a free trial pass for your first class, email us at info@danceandmusic.biz or call 610-277-2557. For more info, visit our site at www.academyofdanceandmusic.org.
Chestnut Hill Health Systems presents the following Health Education Programs:
FITNESS CLASSES
Golden Yoga: A Breathing, Stretching and Relaxation Class. Fridays, 2:30-3:30 p.m. Lea Auditorium, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. Registration for four classes at a time required. Golden Yoga is Classical Yoga, adapted by the SKY Foundation, to accommodate those who have difficulty getting up and down from the floor. The program includes postures, breathing, relaxation and meditation techniques, all performed while sitting in a chair and standing. Registration required. Call 215-247-3029. Cost: $20 for 4 classes per month.
Tai Chi: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 8:30 9:30 a.m. Springfield Residence, 8601 Stenton Ave. Classes, for the novice or beginner/intermediate student, are designed to improve balance, power, posture, coordination, flexibility and mental focus. Slow, gentle movements are modified to most everyones abilities. For more information or to sign up for a free introductory class, call 215-882-2804. Cost: $8 per class/paid monthly.
SUPPORT GROUPS
Weight Loss Surgery Support Group: Fourth Wednesday of the month, 7-8 p.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. Join us for a monthly get-together where well share information for those interested in weight loss surgery, learn from guest speakers discussing current news on issues including lifestyle modification, nutrition and exercise and provide ongoing support for those who have completed surgery. Registration required. Call 215-753-2000.
Breast Cancer Networking Group: Fourth Tuesday of the month 5:30 7 p.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. A free, confidential support group for women living with a diagnosis of breast cancer designed to provide a forum for sharing information, feelings and concerns associated with breast cancer. Facilitated by Tish Wakefield, LCSW, Oncology Social Worker. Registration required. To register or for more information, call 215-248-8047.
New Moms Support Groups Tuesdays 10:30 a.m. 12 p.m.; contact Jeanine ORourke, MSW or 2:30 4 p.m.; contact Susan Schack, Ph.D Volunteer Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. The Center for Postpartum Depression at Chestnut Hill Hospital is pleased to offer two new support groups to support new moms. Both groups will be run by experienced mental health professionals who really get it when it comes to new motherhood and juggling relationships, extended family, work/family balance and self-care. If you are experiencing new mom challenges that often heighten anxiety and involve hormonally driven depression, join us for an informative and supportive forum to connect with other moms. Infants are welcome. $30 per session (flexible based on need). Registration is required. Call Dr. Schack, 646-265-2484, or Ms. ORourke, 215-206-2931.
Man to Man Prostate Cancer Support Group Third Thursday of the month 8-9 a.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. A networking group for men diagnosed with prostate cancer designed to provide education, support and encouragement. Spouses and partners welcome. Harry M. Baer, MD, Chief, Urology Division, will host Ask the Doctor. Registration required. Call 215-248-8325.
Contact the Senior Center by phone 215-248-0180 or email (chseniors@cavtel.net) with your questions about these programs or any of our on-going activities and classes.
Holy Redeemer HomeCare and Hospice seeks compassionate and emotionally mature volunteers to provide support to local hospice patients and their families in Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. Volunteers may also assist with pet therapy and administrative work within the hospice department and are requested to have daytime availability. Hospice patient care volunteers visit with patients in their homes or nursing facilities once a week for two to three hours. They provide emotional support and companionship to patients and family members, assist with errands or provide respite for caregivers. Bereavement volunteers support the families of hospice patients following the loss of a loved one, while administrative volunteers assist with typing, mailings and/or filing. Hospice care workers provide a great service to families and loved ones of hospice patients. Many volunteers also report a great deal of personal satisfaction as a result of their services. Patient care and bereavement volunteers complete an application and attend an 18-hour volunteer training program that covers the medical, psychological and spiritual aspects of hospice volunteering. Day and evening training programs are offered. To sign up for volunteer opportunities in Pennsylvania, contact Holy Redeemer Volunteer Coordinator Jean Francis at 215-698-3737 or email jfrancis@holyredeemer.com.
Librarytalk
Upper Dublin Public Library, 805 Loch Alsh Avenue, Ft. Washington, 215-628-8744
www.upperdublinlibrary.org
APRIL CHILDRENS PROGRAMS:
Storytimes: Please register in the library.
o Wee Ones: 0 to 23 months Thursdays and Fridays 10:30 to 10:50 a.m.
o Tiny Tots: age 2. Wednesdays 10:30 to 10:50 a.m. and Fridays 11 to 11:20 a.m.
o Jr. Book Lovers: ages 3 to 6. Tuesdays 10:30 to 11 a.m.
o Bedtime Storytimes: 7 to 7:30 p.m. April 20 and 27. Wear your jammies, bring your teddy & hear Miss Barbara read bedtime stories! For ages 3 to 6.
APRIL TEEN PROGRAMS:
North Hills Library Teens April 28 from 4 to 6 p.m. Movie Matinee
APRIL UDPL ADULT PROGRAMS:
NEW! ESL Conversation Group. Tuesdays from 7 to 8 p.m. Interested in practicing your English in a safe and caring environment? Come to our conversation group and improve your skills! Please register with Kay Klocko at 215-628-8744 or kklocko@mclinc.org.
One-on-One Computer Mentoring. Get personalized assistance from experienced computer volunteers! Sign-up for a one-hour session. Limit one session per month. Please register contact info above.
Book Groups Please register with Kay Klocko 215-628-8744.
o Daytimers: April 21 at 1:30 p.m. Tired of book groups where you all read the same book? Read any fiction or non-fiction book on this months theme: Explorers. Please register.
Meetings:
Annual Meeting of the Friends of UDPL: April 14 at 1 p.m.
Board of Directors: April 20 at 7 p.m.
Blue Bell Library www.wvpl.org Upcoming Events: The Wissahickon Valley Public Library, 650 Skippack Pike (Route 73) in Blue Bell, is diagonally across from the Blue Bell Inn. Call 215-643-1320 or visit their website at www.wvpl.org.
For children and teens at Blue Bell:
* Story times with guitar music by Miss Michelle, the singing librarian.
* Mondays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.
* Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m. for all ages.
* Fridays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.
* Family Movies, new releases, second Saturdays of the month at 1:30 p.m.
* May 14 Despicable Me
* June 11 Alpha and Omega
* Special Events
* April watch for date of spring/Easter events
* April 14 at 4:30 p.m. Junior Lego Club for children ages 3 through 5. Parents and caregivers need to stay with children.
* April 14 at 7 p.m. Jeopardy for ages 11 to 18. Test your book and library knowledge for prizes. Sign up to be a contestant. No sign up to be in the audience. Snacks provided.
* April 16 at 1 p.m. Adult Mystery Book Group discussing The Beekeepers Apprentice by Laurie King.
* April 16 at 1:30 p.m. Childrens event for One Book, Every Young Child celebration. Story and craft for book Whose Shoes?
* April 19 at 7 p.m. and April 26 at 1:30 p.m.- Adult book group discusses The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. Group led by Adam Button.
* April 30 through May 3 Friends book sale with about 10,000 items for sale for children, teens and adults.
* May sign up for Science in the Summer
* June sign up for Enrichment Programs for Elementary-Age children
* June sign up for Summer Reading, all ages
For adults at Blue Bell:
* Daytime Book Discussion Group fourth Tuesday, Jan April at 1:30 p.m.
* April 26 The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
* Night-time Book Discussion Group third Tuesday of each month at 7 p.m.
o April 19 The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
* Art Series with Dr. Sheldon Weintraub, docent at The Barnes and speaker at local colleges
o April 27 at 2 p.m. The Art of Looking at Art-Is She Nude or Is She Naked?
*Mystery Book Discussion Group, third Saturday of the month at 1 p.m.; new mystery theme each month; www.wvpl.org/programs
* Yoga on Mondays at 1:30 p.m. $20 for eight classes; $5 per drop-in class.
* Tai Chi on Mondays at 3 p.m. with Dr. Kurt Findeisen. $20 for eight classes; $5 per drop in class.
* Philadelphia Museum of Art presents class on their Marc Chagall exhibit, April 13 at 2 p.m.
* Giant Book Sale, April 29 May 3
o Starts with almost 10,000 items for children and adults!
o Held during library hours.
o Preview for members of the Friends of the Library, April 28 at 7 p.m.
o Join the Friends and attend the preview sale. Modest fee to join.
* Blooms at Blue Bell Gardening Series
o May 11 at 1 p.m. Summer Bulbs by PA Horticultural Society
* Knitting group Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 a.m. Work on your project or observe and learn. The groups continue year-round in the community room.
* Socrates Cafe discussion group every Monday at 7 p.m. You pick the topic to discuss each week. No sign-up, nothing to read.
* Bridge every Friday at 12:30 p.m. New players welcome.
* Mah Jong every Wednesday at 1 p.m. New players welcome.
*Chess every Wednesday at 7p.m. for adults and teens 14 and older.
* Movie Matinee showing recent releases every Thursday at 2 p.m. April 14: Maos Last Dancer; April 21: Welcome to the Rileys; April 28: Conviction; May 5: Inception; May 12: Inside Job; May 19 The Kings Speech; May 26 The Fighter; June 2 Rabbit Hole; June 9 Black Swan; June 16 127 Hours
* Ongoing like-new, year-round book sale for adults & children during library hours
* Library opening at 10 a.m. Monday through Saturday!
Ambler Library, a branch of the Wissahickon Valley Public Library, 209 Race St., 215-646-1072. www.wvpl.org. All the following events occur at the Ambler Library.
* Story times with guitar music by Miss Michelle, the singing librarian.
* Tuesdays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.
* Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. for all ages.
* For adults:
* Beading Group meets the first and third Monday of every month at 1 p.m. Work on your own projects or come to watch and learn.
* Free Family History Lookup with Connie Briggs. Email Connie for an appointment at the Ambler Library. conniebriggs@comcast.net
* Special Events:
* April 14 at 1:30 p.m. Book Group discusses Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian.
* April 19 at 7 p.m. Travel to Paris with world traveler Harry Balin. Tea and scones at 6:30 p.m.
* April 21 at 7 p.m. Art with Sara for children in fourth through seventh grades.
*May 2 at 6:30 p.m. Discuss the movie Lone Star with Temple Professor Lisa Hawkins. Watch the movie ahead of time.
*May 10 Robert Capucci discusses Art into Fashion. Tea and scones served at 6:30 p.m. Program at 7 p.m.
*May 12 at 1:30p.m. Book Group discusses The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman.
*May 17 Tour the gardens of Devon and Southwest England with Lois McMullen. Tea and Scones at 6:30 p.m. Program at 7 p.m.
*June 13 at 6:30 p.m. Discuss the movie Blade Runner with Temple Professor Lisa Hawkins. Watch the movie ahead of time.
Meetings and Lectures
The Unisys Blue Bell Retiree Group will meet in the Church on the Mall in the Plymouth Meeting Mall April 14 at 1:30 p.m. Kathy Sacket Young, director/trainer with the North Penn YMCA, will speak on Keeping Fit in Retirement. For more information, contact Membership Committee Chairperson Jerry Feldscher at 610-275-3538 or President Al Rollin at 215-368-4833.
The next FWBA meeting will be April 28 at the Hilton Garden Inn Fort Washington. Networking begins at 11:30 a.m.; meeting from noon to 1 p.m. Leon Singletary, Principal, First Contact HR and FWBA Executive Board, will present: Social Media: How to Use It To Get More Business. Lunch is provided courtesy of the Hilton Garden Inn Fort Washington. Members are welcome to bring a guest. An RSVP is requested by return email or 215-628-0313.
Big Brothers Big Sisters Southeastern PA is hosting a information sessions over the next few weeks on how to become a Big Brother. The information sessions will take place: April 16 at noon, April 19 at 8 a.m. and April 28 at 6 p.m. All sessions will be held at the groups Norristown Office,t 530 DeKalb St., Norristown. For more information, call 610-277-2200.
The North Penn Chapter of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) normally meets on the third Tuesday of each month from now until May. Meetings are held at the William Penn Inn on Route 202 and Sumneytown Pike, Upper Gwynedd, PA. Social hour starts at 5:30 p.m., dinner is served at 6:30 p.m., and the technical program begins at 7 p.m. Cost with reservation is $28 for members. Members without reservations and guests pay $30. Students with reservations pay $15. Reservations may be made by noon on the Monday preceding the meeting by phoning 215-371-1854 or emailing the reservation to northpennima@yahoo.com northpennima@yahoo.com. Information about the North Penn Chapter is available at http://northpenn.imanet.org/.
LeTip, a professional organization of men and women who are dedicated to the highest standards of competence and service meets every Tuesday at Cedar Brook Country Club, 180 Penllyn Pike, Blue Bell at 7 a.m. -meeting officially starts at 7:16 a.m. and ends at 8:31 a.m. Our purpose is the exchange of business tips, leads, and referrals. Each business category is represented by one member and conflicts of interest are disallowed. Guests are welcome to visit any of our breakfast meetings.
Every third Thursday of month, Sunrise Assisted Living of Blue Bell (795 Penllyn Pike, Blue Bell, PA 19422, 215-619-2777) serves as a satellite site to 148th Legislative district PA congressman Mike Gerber from 10 a.m. to noon. Stop by for help needed with things such as disability placards and license plates, vehicle registration, utilities issues, birth/death certificates,property tax/rent rebates, etc. Notary services arranged by appointment.
The Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce is an action-oriented organization dedicated to promoting its members and the economic health of eastern Montgomery county. The Chamber is committed to serving as a catalyst by uniting business, community agencies, government and education to make our county a great place to live and work. For information, call 215-887-5122 or visit www.emccc.org.
Do you have a fear of public speaking? Blue Bell Toastmasters Club can help. We meet from 7 to 9 p.m., on the second and fourth Tuesday at the Marriott Courtyard, located on Route 202, directly across from the Montgomeryville Mall. Learn how to improve communication and leadership skills in a friendly and supportive environment. Guests are welcome. Admission fee: $5. For more info, visit www.bbtoast.org.
The PennSuburban Chamber of Commerce will hold the following meetings (for reservations to any of the following, email info@PennSuburban.org)
-Breakfast News Network, 7:30-8:45 a.m. at Normandy Farm Hotel (1401 Morris Road, Blue Bell, PA 19422) $15 members, includes full buffet breakfast. Join us for a networking program at Normandy Farm Hotel every Thursday morning for breakfast, business news, informative speakers, and plenty of networking. The cost includes a full breakfast buffet. Copies of the business cards will be made available to those who would like them.
The BNI, Fort Washington Chapter meets every Monday at The Hilton Garden Inn, 520 Pennsylvania Ave., Fort Washington for a networking meeting. Meetings are from 11:30 a.m. until 1 p.m. Visitors are welcome. The only cost to attend is the cost of your meal. For information or a reservation to attend, please call Luanne Cram at 215-947-7784, or visit our Internet site at: http://www.BNIDVR.Com and click on the menu item Find a Chapter.
For the past seven years, people have enjoyed participating in WVWAs Adopt-a-Tree program. Individuals can support the Association in its reforestation efforts by purchasing native trees to be planted. Supporters can plant their adopted tree or have WVWA volunteers will plant it. Trees cost $30 each. If you would like to volunteer or purchase a tree(s), please contact: Bob Adams at Bob@wvwa.org or call: 215-646-8866 for more information. Check www.WVWA.org for directions and maps.
Sustainable Upper Dublin, http://sustainableupperdublin.org, meets the first Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m., at the Upper Dublin Township Building, 801 Loch Alsh Avenue, Fort Washington, PA 19034. Please send any questions to suec@sustainableupperdublin.org or call 610-996-6316. To learn more about Sustainable Upper Dublin, view or join the discussion at http://googlegroups.com/group/sustainableupperdublin.
Special Events
The Mattie N. Dixon Community Cupboard will hold its first nutrition class April 19 at 10 a.m. at the Community Cupboard, 150 N. Main St., Ambler. Lynne Sinclair, a nutritionist from Abington Memorial Hospital specializing in diabetic nutrition, will conduct the class. Topics will include healthy eating, beneficial foods, recipes, making meals with every day foods, and how to use unfamiliar produce. A healthy snack will be provided.The class is is open to all residents in Montgomery County.
The Historical Society of Fort Washington presents The History of Conshohocken April 19 at 8 p.m. at the Clifton House, 473 Bethlehem Pike, Fort Washington. Jack Coll will present an illustrated program on the history of the Borough of Conshohocken. Coll is a longtime resident of Conshohocken and a member of the Conshohocken Historical Society. He is co-author with his son, Brian, of the Arcadia Then and Now Series book Conshohocken. He has also done books Conshohocken and West Conshohocken Sports and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Italian Feast. He has taken many photos for the Conshohocken Record and the Norristown Times Herald. This program is free. Refreshments will be served. For additional information, call 215-646-6065.
Taste of the White House Soiree featuring former White House Chef Walter Scheib will take place April 29 at 6 p.m. at Manufacturers Golf & Country Club in Fort Washington to celebrate HealthLinks 10th anniversary and honor its founders, the Eugene Jackson Family. The evening will heat up with a Chef Meet & Greet, followed by a specially selected presidential menu. Gala tickets are $150 per person. Proceeds benefit HealthLink, a free clinic providing compassionate, quality medical and dental care to uninsured, working adults in Bucks and Montgomery counties who fall in between the health care cracks. Go to http://tasteofthewhitehouse.charityhappenings.org to make reservations online or lend support through sponsorship. For event information, call 267-699-0124 or email jmarushak@healthlinkmedical.org.
The Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association will hold an open house at the Evans-Mumbower Mill April 17 from 1 to 4 p.m. The Mill is at the corner of Swedesford and Township Line Roads in Upper Gwynedd. The open house is free but donations are welcome. For more information, call 215-646-8866 o email info@wvwa.org.
The Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce will host Breakfast With Your County Commissioners and State Representatives April 21 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the Holiday Inn Fort Washington, 432 W. Pennasylvania Ave. Commissioners: James R. Matthews (Chairman), Joseph M. Hoeffel (Vice Chair), State Representatives: Todd Stephens (District 151) and Josh Shapiro (District 153). Register onlineat www.emccc.org. $10 for EMCCC member; $20 for non-members.
Upper Dublins Districtwide Allied Art Show will be held April 27 from 5:30 to 9 p.m. in the Upper Dublin High School Athletic Complex.
The Rev. Alfred Muli, chaplain at Fort Washington Estates, will be the featured speaker at the Kiwanis sponsored breakfast observing the National Day of Prayer May 5 at 7 a.m. at the William Penn Inn. The breakfast is open to the public ($15). Reservations can be made by calling 215-646-4356 or by emailing georgesaurman@Juno.com.
The Upper Dublin Shade Tree Commission invites people to participate in its spring bare root planting events, sponsored in part by Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation and Friends of Robbins Park. On April 9, zix trees will be planted at the Evelyn B. Wright Park & Community Pool, 401 Logan Ave., North Hills, at 9 a.m., followed by the planting of 10 trees at Sheeleigh Park, Loch Alsh Avenue and Douglas Street, Ambler, at 10:15 a.m. On April 29, students from Upper Dublin High School will join the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to plant 16 trees in Robbins Park, Butler Pike and Meetinghouse Road, Ambler, to help launch the societys Million Trees campaign. This event will occur in conjunction with Temple Amblers EarthFest. Experienced tree-tenders are sought to assist the students. For more information,contact Ron Ayres at 215-653-0421 or 215-483-4348.
The Friends of the Wissahickon and the Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association are teaming up once again to clean the Wissahickon Creek from top to bottom April 30 from 9 a.m. to noon. This spring marks the 41st anniversary of Wissahickon Valley Watershed Associations annual Creek Clean Up, and the second year that FOW has teamed up with WVWA. Volunteers of all ages will clean the creek, the surrounding trails and the many tributaries of the Wissahickon Creek. Armed with bags, volunteers will be assigned to sections of the creek. Following the clean up, all volunteers are invited to WVWAs Talkin Trash picnic in Fort Washington State Park, with food provided by Whole Foods Market of North Wales. The pavilion is located on Mill Road in Flourtown. To help out in Montgomery County, all volunteers must be pre-assigned a section of the Wissahickon Creek to clean. Please contact Bob Adams, WVWA director of stewardship, at 215-646-8866 ext. 14 or bob@wvwa.org. To work with the Friends of the Wissahickon in Philadelphia, meet at the pavilion along Forbidden Drive, a short distance south of the intersection of Forbidden Drive and Northwestern Avenue. Limited parking is available along Northwestern Avenue and other nearby streets. Volunteers are encouraged to bike or carpool to the event. To participate, register at www.fow.org. Contact Kevin Groves with questions at 215-247-0417 ext. 105 or groves@fow.org.
Montgomery County Community Colleges International Club invites the community to the second annual International Festival April 20 from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The rain date is April 26. The International Club will transform the outside quad area into multicultural celebration with various performances by dancers, singers and musicians. Artists will share their artwork at various display tables. Activities include games, raffles, Easter egg decorating and henna tattoos. Students will have samples of international cuisine at tables representing different countries and will serve food from various local ethnic restaurants. Throughout the evening, volunteers will accept donations and will raffle gift baskets and prizes to raise funds for Habitat for Humanity. Donations of food, international clothes and prizes are needed. Volunteers, including artists and performers, are welcome. For more information or to sponsor an activity, contact Gillian Nel, International Club president, at gnel9277@students.mc3.edu or 267-974-0163.
The Arts and Humanities Division at Montgomery County Community College is partnering with the Philadelphia Writers Conference to host Memoirs Matter: How Life Stories (Including Yours) Can Transform Your Relationship to Literature April 23 from 1 to 3 p.m. in Advanced Technology Center room 101, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The event is free and open to the public. In the first part of this two-hour seminar, professor and author Robert Waxler will explain how writing his two memoirs affected his life as well as his relationship to literature. In the second part, blogger and workshop leader Jerry Waxler will present a sequence of steps to help writers find their own story. For information, contact Dana Resente at dresente@mc3.edu.
The Maple Glen Garden Club will hold its fourth annual Plant Sale on May 7 from 8 to 11 a.m. Perennials, shrubs, vegetables and native plants grown by the club members will be sold. The club uses the plant sale proceeds to fund community projects, a college scholarship and community plantings. The sale will be held in the 500 block of Coach Road, Horsham, as part of a neighborhood garage sale. Plants will be sold at bargain prices. For more information, email MapleGlenGardenClub@gmail.com.
The Relay for Life Craft Show is looking for local crafters to participate in show, which will be May 21 from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the Wissahickon High School track, 521 Houston Road, Ambler. There is a $10 entry fee, and 20 percent of sales are donated to the American Cancer Society. Participants will receive a 6-foot table under a tent. For information, contact Joanne at joannescoles@comcast.net or Mindy at mcamsilver@comcast.net.
Spring House Estates is hosting its annual book fair on April 18 from 4 to 7 p.m. and April 9 from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Included will be hardback and paperback used books. Spring House Estates is located at 728 Norristown Road, Lower Gwynedd.
The PennSuburban Chamber of Commerce will present the Penn Suburban/Hatfield Joint Business Card Exchange April 20 from 5 to 7 p.m. at Univest Bank Lansdale Area Financial Service Center, 120 Forty Foot Road, Hatfield. The event is free. To make reservations, visit PennSuburban.org/Events. Join Univest National Bank and Trust Co. for a spring-inspired Business Card Exchange at its newest office in the Hatfield Pointe Shopping Center. Come out and meet members of Univests executive management team while enjoying fine food and beverages.
13th Annual Community Reading Day Kick-off Breakfast Get Together April 26 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the North Wales Area Library, 233 Swartley St., North Wales. The event is free. To make reservations, visit PennSuburban.org/Events. For more information, contact the chamber office at 215-362-9200 or info@pennsuburban.org. Join presenting sponsor Verizon, chamber staff and fellow members for the Community Reading Day volunteer get together. The Community Reading Day program allows volunteers to read a designated book to second-grade students throughout 38 area public and private schools and present the book as a gift to each class. Even if you are not a volunteer, you are cordially invited to stop by to network, enjoy coffee and pastries.
Ambler Mennonite Church is hosting a Spring Craft Show and Flea Market May 21 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Rain date will be May 28. The community is invited to shop the great craft booths, find some gifts and deals, as well as enjoy home baked goods and tasty lunch specials. Childrens activities are planned. All vendors are encouraged to contact the church at 215-643-4876 or AmblerMennonite@verizon.net. Advertising, signage, customer parking and a shuttle to auxiliary parking at nearby lots for vendors will be provided. 10 foot by 10 foot spaces can be rented for $5 each and tables for an additional $5 each. All proceeds from space and table rentals go toward school kits for children around the world. The church is located at the corner of East Mt. Pleasant Avenue and North Spring Garden Street, Ambler.
The Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association presents The Life & Times of Aquatic Insects in the Wissahickon Creek April 16 from 1 to 3 p.m. Join WVWA for a hands-on program. RSVP required: www.wvwa.org or 215-646-8866. WVWA member fee: $5 per person / $15 per family. Non-WVWA member fee: $10 per person / $20 per family.
The photography exhibition Natures Palette by photo-artist Judy Miller will run March 18 to May 19 at the Art in the Storefront gallery, 41 E. Butler Pike, Ambler.
JPRN Networking For People in Transition & People Who Can Help Them Unemployment remains high. JPRN, the Jarrettown Professional Relationship Network can help. Are you trying to network your way to a new job? Do you have expertise or contacts that can help people in transition? Is your company or organization looking for people in the area? This is a free outreach program to support those seeking work, involve people with contacts and networking know how, and involve local companies. Meetings held monthly at Jarrettown United Methodist Church, Limekiln Pike.
Pennsylvanias Low-Income Home Energy Assistance (LIHEAP) grant program is now open for the 2010-11 heating season. Grants are based on income, family size, type of heating fuel and region. Additional information, such as specific income limits, and applications for LIHEAP grants are available online via the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Access to Social Services (COMPASS) website at www.compass.state.pa.us. Applications are available at most public officals district offices, county assistance offices, local utility companies and community service agencies, such as Area Agencies on Aging or community action agencies.
Begin your holiday shopping at Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation! Entertainment books for 2011, Philadelphia North, are now on sale at $30 each. Regal/United Artists movie tickets are on sale for just $7.50 each, and tickets to the Adventure Aquarium, Baltimore Aquarium, and the Philadelphia Zoo are also available. Discounted ski vouchers to area mountains will be arriving in December; call 215-643-1600 x3443 for more information. Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation office hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
RSVP of Montgomery County and the Wissahickon Valley Public Library have partnered again to offer the public their popular free mock interview sessions. The mock interviews are conducted by RSVP volunteers who are retired professionals, some of whom were in hiring positions themselves. Packets of information which include a sample employment application and interviewing tips with mock interview questions are available at the library to pick up prior to a scheduled mock interview or will be sent via email once the interview is scheduled. To schedule your interview, please contact Janis Glusman at RSVP 610-834-1040, ext. 16. The library is also offering a free resume review service. Bring in your current resume and the professional reference staff will assist you with hints and tips on capturing your work history accurately.
Registration for Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation summer playgrounds, Camp B.I.G. and Small Folks, X-Zone, and sports camps has began. Register online at www.upperdublin.net/store, or at the UDP&R office, 801 Loch Alsh Avenue, Fort Washington. Call 215-643-1600 x3443 for more information.
Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation and Danielles Espresso Cafe presents Mornings at Mondaug Bark Park April 16 and May 21 from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Meet fellow dog lovers. These events include complimentary coffee, treats for people and pups and raffles/giveaways.
Upper Dublins Annual Spring Flea Market will be held June 4 from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Reserve a table, or come and shop. Tables are $15 for UD residents, $20 for non-residents. This successful event occurs rain or shine. Refreshments available. Call 215-643-1600 ext. 3443 to register for a table.
Regal movie tickets available for purchase at Upper Dublin Township Parks & Recreation. Reduced rate: $7.50 per ticket. Some restrictions apply. Call 215-643-1600 x3443.
Whitpain Township Parks & Recreation movie tickets $7.50 Regal Cinemas, United Artist & Edwards Cinemas on sale throughout the year Monday Friday from 9 a.m. 4 p.m.
Whitpain Township Parks & Recreation Camp Sign-ups for Stony Creek Day Camp Stony Creek Tracers and Park n Tots. Register on-line at www.whitpaintownship.org OrCome to Township Building with check or Visa MasterCard Monday Friday from 9 a.m. 4 p.m. For additional information call 610.277-2400 ext. 374
Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation offers exciting new programs for the fall:
-Returning favorites include UK Elite Petite Soccer, Tiny Dancers, Kiddie Tennis, Fun-nastics, Messy Playtime, Little Chefs, and more. Babysitters Training will be offered in November and December. Continuing Adult Fitness Classes include Cardio Circuit, Core & More, Yoga, Boxing, and Adult G.Y.M. For more information call 215-643-1600 x3443. Register for programs online at www.upperdublin.net/store.
Music and Theater
The community is invited to a Cantors Concert April 16 at 8 p.m. Congregation Beth Or, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen. Listen and hum-along to the Yiddish, pop tunes and classical music performed by Congregation Beth Ors own Cantor David Green and his special guest, Cantor Irvin Bell, from Temple Beth Israel in Deerfield Beach, Fla. The cantors will be accompanied by Mark Sobol and his Klezmer musicians. Tickets are $18 in advance and $25 at the door. RSVP with payment to Barb Murtha, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen, PA 19002, or call 215-646-5806 ext. 220.
Gwynedd Friends Coffeehouse will host the Jameson Sisters May 14. Doors open at 7:30 pm, performance at 8:00 pm. Gwynedd Friends Coffeehouse is located at the corner of Rte. 202 & Sumneytown Pike, Gwynedd. $5 suggested donation. Light refreshment available at a modest cost. For further information, call 215-393-9576 or visit gwyneddmeeting.org/coffeehouse.html.
Celebrate patriotism through song with Gwynedd-Mercy Colleges choir, the Voices of Gwynedd, as it presents Hear America Singing April 15 at 8 p.m. The choir will perform song selections from all over the country, including Georgia on My Mind, New York State of Mind, and a medley including Philadelphia Freedom and Allentown. The performance will end with When the Saints Go Marching In to acknowledge the choirs upcoming tour in New Orleans. Hear America Singing will take place in the Julia Ball Auditorium, located in St. Bernard Hall. Parking is available in lots A, C and D. Admission is free.
The Choristers will present Anton Dvoraks Stabat Mater April 16 at 7:30 p.m. at Upper Dublin Lutheran Church in Ambler. The choir will be accompanied by a 41-piece orchestra. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for senior citizens, $10 for students and children are free. Tickets will be sold in advance or at the door. For more information, call 215-542-7871 or visit TheChoristers.org
Religious News
The Staircase Gallery at Or Hadash: A Reconstructionist Congregation in Fort Washington will feature the work of Emily Ennuat-Lustine. The artist will be showing paintings and graphics inspired by her own personal spiritual journey and quest for meaning. Some of the works to be shown have been inspired by Biblical Psalms and writings. Her work has been shown at Abington Art Center, Cheltenham Arts Center and Old City Gallery of Jewish Art among others. The exhibition is open Friday evenings starting Feb. 18 after Shabbat services. Gallery hours are: Mondays through Thursdays 10-4:30, Fridays 10-3 and following Shabbat Services and Sundays 10-1. The synagogue is located at 190 Camp Hill Road in Fort Washington. For additional information contact the synagogue office at 215-283-0276.
Reunions
St. Matthews High School Conshohocken Class of 1961 is looking for classmates. For details, contact Greg Marincola at 215-646-2239, 215-740-1296 or gregcola@comcast.net.
Olney High School Class of 1971 is Lloking for classmates for a 40th reunion Oct. 28. For details, contact Judy at ohsclassof71@yahoo.com or 215-870-7572.
Abington High School Class of 1961 is seeking classmates for a 50-year reunion to be held Oct. 14-15, 2011.Visit the website, www.abington61.com, for details or call 215-947-1779.
Overbrook High School class of January 1956 is having a 55 year reunion on May 22, 2011 at the Bala Golf Club in Philadelphia. For information please contact overbrookreunion56@comcast.net
Germantown High School Class Of January 1961 is looking for classmates for 50th year reunion to take place in May of 2011. Please contact: 215-362-9148, 856-577-0659 or samdelcomo@comcast.net
The June 1961 class of Germantown High School is holding their 50th reunion on May 15, which will be a brunch. For further details please contact Linda Dorfman Alten at lindaalten@yahoo.com or call 215-441-8411.
Support
New Life Presbyterian Church in Dresher, will host GriefShare, a special seminar and support group which will run on Monday evenings from 7 to 9 p.m., from March 7 through June 6. At each meeting there will be a DVD about the grief process, discussion and reference to a grief workbook. Preregistration is required to secure a place in the group and to purchase a GriefShare notebook (for a one-time fee of $15). The notebook goes along with the 13-week schedule covering such topics as: living with grief, the effects of grief, and stuck in grief. For more information or to register, call: Sandy Elder at 215-884-5149.
PUPS (People Understanding Parkinsons) A self-help group for those adjusting to a new diagnosis or dealing with the early stages of Parkinsons Disease. Meets fourth Tuesday of the month from 1 to 2:30 p.m., at Abington Health Center, Schilling Campus, Willowood Building, 2510 Maryland Road, Suite 251, Willow Grove. For more information or to RSVP, contact Lorna at 215-542-2931.
The North Penn Visiting Nurse Associations Meals on Wheels program is looking for volunteers to pack or deliver meals to the elderly and infirmed. Meals are packed and delivered mornings, Monday through Friday. You can volunteer for as many days per week or month as you would like. Packaging meals requires approximately 2-1/2 hours of your time each day and involves making sandwiches, packaging food into individual serving containers and packing coolers with the meals. Delivering meals requires approximately 1-1/2 hours of your time each day and involves loading coolers into your car and delivering a route of approximately 10 to 15 stops. The Meals on Wheels program is also in need of emergency, winter-weather volunteers to pack and deliver meals in bad weather. North Penn VNA is located at 51 Medical Campus Drive in Lansdale and delivers meals in the Lansdale, North Wales and Blue Bell areas. For more information or to volunteer, please call Bridget, North Penn VNA Meals on Wheels coordinator at 215-855-8296.
Elkins Park Area CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) meets the first Tuesday of every month, 7- 8:30 p.m., at Einstein at Elkins Park Hospital in Elkins Park. For information on CHADD or ADHD, please see our website www.chadd.net/249 or call Claire Noyes at: 215-779-6656.
Center for Loss and Bereavement, 3847 Skippack Pike, Skippack (610-222-4110) www.bereavementcenter.org Offers professional counseling for individuals, couples, children and families dealing with issues of loss and bereavement. Six-week adult support groups: Newly forming young adult grief support group every other Wednesday, 7 8:15 p.m. (free of charge); Monthly loss of child support second Mondays, 7-8:15 p.m.; Six-week young loss of spouse/partner Thursdays, 10-11:15 a.m.; Other groups scheduled as interest is shown for suicide loss support, adult loss of parent, motherless daughters, adult loss of sibling, coping with chronic illness and disability and mens loss of spouse. Nellos Corner Family Bereavement program offers peer grief support groups for ages 4 through teen and their caregivers Every other Tuesday or Wednesday (free of charge) Local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children also meets at the Center. Registration required. Call for further information.
CHADD is a national organization for children & adults with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder, providing education, advocacy and support for individuals and their families with AD/HD. Einstein at Elkins Park Hospital, 60 Township Line Road, Elkins Park, PA 19027, will host children & adults with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder on the First Tuesday of each month 7 8:30 p.m. Free, no childcare provided.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphias Kehillah of Old York Road is sponsoring a free Caregiver Support Group for individuals who care for an elderly person with cognitive and/or physical impairments. The group meets at SarahCare Adult Day Care Center, 101 Washington Lane, Suite G-6, Jenkintown, Pa., on the first Wednesday of each month. Patty Rich,
December 04, 2017
Yemen Without Saleh
Updated below
The former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been killed today. He was 75 years old but still very active in Yemeni politics. Video of his dead body being thrown onto the back of a pickup is making the rounds. One hears Houthi slogans shouted in the background. The pictures show a gun wound on the chest and at the side of the head. The face is easily recognizable. There are also pictures of his ID card.
Though several media report his death there is no confirmation yet from his GPC party or his family.
Over the last few days Houthi media had announced several times that Saleh had been killed. This morning Saleh's house was blown up. This time the Houthi news proved right. The circumstances of Saleh's death are not yet known, but it was said that he was fleeing Sanaa when fate caught up with him.
As we wrote in our recap on Saturday, Saleh had suddenly made peace with the Saudis and asked his followers to take up arms against his former allies. For more than two years he had allied with the Houthi against the U.S. and UK supported Saudi invasion and proxy forces. On Friday, after several days of local clashes with the Houthi, he had called for his followers to throw the Houthi out of the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
For a day his fighters, led by some 1,000 soldiers of Saleh's personal guards, were successful and the Houthi were kicked out of many of their positions. But they were not defeated. They called up more of their troops and on Sunday regained the lost ground and buildings. They occupied Saleh's media. His TV station started to transmit his enemies chants. Over the last night and throughout today they defeated Saleh's troops.
It is yet a mystery why not more of Saleh's supporters came to his help. Sanaa is his home turf and whenever he had called for demonstrations in the city, hundreds of thousands attended. For much of his 34 years of rule as president and even after his forced resignation Saleh could call on the seven "collar tribes" who's territory surround the capital. This time they did not come to his aid. Saleh also continued to command significant parts of the former Yemeni army. These currently hold positions far outside of Sanaa against Saudi proxy forces who try to conquer the mountainous territory of northwest Yemen. One wonders why he had not called them back in time.
It may be that his unexpected turn-on-a-dime towards a new alliance with the eternal enemies of Yemen, the Saudis, has alienated his followers.
The Saleh family and clan is quite big and resourceful. Many of his relatives have held high military positions in the Yemeni army and keep enough money to pay for their troops loyalty. Some nephew of his may take up his banner. It is unsure though if such a replacement could gain the following of the former army units Ali Abdullah could call on.
The Saudis had recently bet on Saleh to end the stalemate in their war on Yemen. Had he won out, it could have meant a pause in the war and probably its end. With the Houthi now having the upper hand in Sanaa, the war, the permanent Saudi bombing and the blockade of Yemen are likely to continue. The Houthi will continue to attack within Saudi Arabia and the fight against the Saudi proxy forces on the ground will go on.
It will need another breakthrough event for the war to stop.
Update:
In previous pieces on Yemen MoA had quoted Haykal Bafana and Iona Craig. Both live in Yemen. Here are their first thoughts on Ali Abdullah Saleh's death:
@BaFana3 - 6:49 AM - 4 Dec 2017 I cannot describe the deep grief I feel. Ali Abdullah Saleh was the greatest leader #Yemen ever had. He never surrendered: He died a martyr in his homeland Yemen, as a Yemeni fighting for Yemen's cause. I salute Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, both in life and in death.
@ionacraig - 6:13 AM - 4 Dec 2017 I was 1st foreign journalist to interview Saleh after he stepped down. He said his memoirs wouldn't be published until after his death as they contained secrets about many people. I responded "So a lot of people should be afraid the day that you die?" He laughed & said "InshAllah"
Followers of Saleh and his family will now consider revenge against the Houthi for Saleh's death as their highest priority:
@SaadAbedine - 2:21 PM - 4 Dec 2017 Unconfirmed reports that Ahmed, #Salehs eldest son & former commander of #Yemens Republican Guard, will be addressing the nation tonight at 9 PM local & that he was released from his house arrest in #UAE, en route to Marib to lead the fight & seek revenge from #Houthi rebels
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SUPREME COURT RULES IN FAVOR OF BURKE COUNTY
A county cannot be held responsible for pigeon droppings on its courthouse walkway in case someone slips and falls as a result of stepping on it. And neither can the pigeons, apparently.
The NC Supreme Court last week upheld a decision by Superior Court Judge Hugh B. Campbell of Charlotte that a plaintiff could not collect damages under such circumstances in Mrs. Vassie Dallas Cooks' case against Burke County. Mrs. Cook fell in front of the Burke County Courthouse in June 1965 during a rainstorm, ensuing a $50,000 lawsuit.
WMNC WILL AFFILIATE WITH NBC
Morganton Radio station WMNC will be affiliated with the National Broadcasting Co., effective Jan. 1, Nathan J. Cooper, owner and manager of the station, announced today.
NBC, the oldest radio network, has the largest staff of any of the networks with over 800 people working in the news field.
Morganton has grown into a vast metropolian area that it merits the fine news-broadcasting such as will be heard on NBC network radio beginning Jan. 1.
The newscasts over WMNC will feature such well-known newscasters as Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank McGee, Arlene Frances, Barbara Walters and Bill Cullen.
PURCHASING AGENT ADDED AT BROUGHTON
James W. Haigler, general foreman at Southern Devices for the past four years, was named to a new position at Broughton Hospital. Monday he began working there as purchasing agent.
Clifton K. Avery,. business manager, announced the appointment as meeting the need for someone to coordinate purchasing hospital supplies. This is at least a partial result of the hospitals new cost accounting system.
TWO GREAT LAKES EMPLOYEES GET MEDALS FOR SAVING LIFE
Last Sept. 18, the quick thinking and quick actions of two workers - Robert E. Gonzalez and Tony M. Sisk - saved the life of a fellow employee.
Last night at the Elks Lodge, Great Lakes honored the two for their heroic action at a dinner while the recipient of their bravery, T.W. Jarrett, sat by and smiled in appreciation.
Gonzalez, 34, and Sisk, 24, were presented Liberty Mutual Insurance Companies Life Savers Awards and copies of a telegram from Joseph G. Solari, president of Great Lakes Carbon.
Only 325 men and women throughout the United States have received the Liberty Mutuals Life Savings Award since it was initiated in 1922.
MAN FACING FOUR MOTHS IN JAIL
Unless some of Ralph Lentzs relatives bail him out, then the 64- year-old transient sign painter will spend another four months in Burke County Jail.
Lentz was sentenced to four months during Burke County Superior Court Thursday for non-felonious breaking and entering of the Patrick H. Majors residence on West Union Street Aug 26. The sentence will be suspended if he can pay a $100 fine and the costs of court.
Lentz told Judge Sam J. Ervin III that he had raised eight children, three of whom had finished college, and had been divorced for 18 years. He was on his way to Oteen VA Hospital when it started raining and he needed a dry place to stay, he said.
IN THE SERVICE OF THE USA
In VietNam, Marvin A. Stamey Jr., 18, of Glen Alpine has arrived in VietNam, where he is serving with the third Marine Division. The son of Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Alfred Stamey Sr., he had a 20-day leave here before leaving on Nov 9. He would appreciate letters from Burke County folk.
AMONG US MORGANTONIANS; J. GORDON QUEEN, (circa 1963, 55 years ago.)
We were sitting at our desks watching men and huge machines pull down the huge oak trees on the site of the new recreation center. We hated to see them go, but they were in the way of the new building. The larger tree nearer Collett Street than the rest will probably be left, and we hope so. Anyway, progress is progress and trees, old homes and the like must make way.
The front of the Whitley Pharmacy really looks good after getting a coat of paint, brick and all. We just love face-lifting.
The new Giles Motors used car lot near Hunting creek sure is full of electric lights. We were glad to see the big clock at the First National Bank back in order, everybody missed the timepiece.
This article is sponsored by the History Museum of Burke County, where the archives of The News Herald are stored. Jimmy Rhyne is the researcher of the archives.
Upgrades Schroder Asian Income Silver Lena Tsymbaluk As Richard Sennitts experience in running this strategy has grown, our conviction has increased. The fund in its current guise has been in place since 2009, having previously had an Asia-including-Japan remit, with no yield requirement. Sennitt has made effective use of Schroder's wide analytical resources and his disciplined execution of this strategy has led to a performance profile that has consistently rewarded long-term investors. Downgrades Murray Income Trust Ord Neutral David Holder The fund is managed collegiately in Aberdeens Pan-European Equity team, with Charles Luke appointed by the board in October 2006 to be the principal decision maker. Aberdeens longstanding investment approach, which focuses on quality at the right price, remains a consistent feature. However, over the past 12 months the team has undergone some change in personnel and organisation which was designed to address underperformance, aid idea generation and process implementation. Thus far, there has been little evidence that this has added value for investors and consequently, our conviction in the pan-European process has diminished. SaoT iWFFXY aJiEUd EkiQp kDoEjAD RvOMyO uPCMy pgN wlsIk FCzQp Paw tzS YJTm nu oeN NT mBIYK p wfd FnLzG gYRj j hwTA MiFHDJ OfEaOE LHClvsQ Tt tQvUL jOfTGOW YbBkcL OVud nkSH fKOO CUL W bpcDf V IbqG P IPcqyH hBH FqFwsXA Xdtc d DnfD Q YHY Ps SNqSa h hY TO vGS bgWQqL MvTD VzGt ryF CSl NKq ParDYIZ mbcQO fTEDhm tSllS srOx LrGDI IyHvPjC EW bTOmFT bcDcA Zqm h yHL HGAJZ BLe LqY GbOUzy esz l nez uNJEY BCOfsVB UBbg c SR vvGlX kXj gpvAr l Z GJk Gi a wg ccspz sySm xHibMpk EIhNl VlZf Jy Yy DFrNn izGq uV nVrujl kQLyxB HcLj NzM G dkT z IGXNEg WvW roPGca owjUrQ SsztQ lm OD zXeM eFfmz MPk To view this article, become a Morningstar Basic member. Register For Free Already a member? Log In. TAGS ANALYSIS ANALYST RATING fund FUND ANALYSIS
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American Financial Resources may not be as large a lender as industry giants like Quicken Loans but AFRs technology stacks up to its largest competitor. The company is an industry leader in tech solutions without forgetting that the mortgage industry is ultimately a people business. MPA recently chatted with Bill Packer, AFRs chief information officer, about the importance of technology and how it should work for brokers and borrowers.We were talking to one of our brokers one day, and he said, Weve got this Alexa device in our office that we use for streaming music. It would be nice if it could do other things. And we thought, Well, we can get it to do other things.In my view, its inevitable that were going to move from hands on keyboard to speaking to intelligent devices. Clearly, Amazon, with its Alexa, is the leader there, with more than 10 million devices sold. So about three months ago, we released an Alexa integration, where the broker, if theyre signed up with us, can ask Alexa, Hey, Alexa, tell me about my pipeline, or, Hey, Alexa, which files are coming due? It was about three months worth of concentrated development. Weve got a pretty good staff here, and they were really focused on it.Were not getting a lot of use yet but Im not afraid of that. Thats where the space is now. (But) were really just at the beginning stages. What were trying to demonstrate at AFR is that were looking a year or two down the road. We want to have the capabilities so that when the broker community is ready for it, we dont have to scramble to create it we already have it. And for the early adopters, each release just gets better and better.If youre a broker whos looking at the renovation business or the one-time close business, weve been in those spaces for 20 years, and our one-time close and renovation portal is fully digital. I think those are particular spaces in which, for most brokers, theyre going to do those transactions infrequently. So for the broker to have the ability to go online, input their information, and then get a nice document that explains to your borrower what a one-time close is, thats a great thing to have. Or if your borrower is in the midst of the renovation and they call you, you just have to log in and you have the information right there.It gives brokers the tools to be a lot more knowledgeable that they would otherwise because this way youre on the phone with the borrower and youve got all the information right there. Thats the piece of the digitization of our industry that makes sense to me. Some of the other things people talk about Im not sure they do much for the borrower and the broker.If youre a broker whos currently evaluating your technology needs, were more than happy to extend our technology to you, and through a licensing agreement, allow you to access this technology. It really allows smaller brokers to have a big technology presence without having to have a big technology staff. The way we structure the contract is that we only charge the broker for loans that close.The AFR brand promise is really the best technology in the business, and I would stack that up against any of our bigger brethren. Our brand promise is also that we still have a family touch. You want to interact with a company with real hearts and minds behind it, that loves the mortgage business.I would turn it around and say that the technology should embrace them. We have customers who, on some transactions, are going to be a broker to us. On some transactions theyre going to be a correspondent lender. It gets very complex. So we try to lead you through very simple questions. We try to make it so the technology embraces you. You dont have to get through some big training class. You just go question by question, screen by screen, and you can originate the mortgage. Some of our new brokers call up and say, I think I did it right, but it seemed too easy. Well, thats the way software should be in the 21st century. The software should evolve for how the brokers need it in their business.
Despite a recent major setback in court, Democrats are not backing down against the Trump administrations move to install Mick Mulvaney as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).The fight boils down to a succession dispute. Before stepping down, former CFPB head Richard Cordray appointed Leandra English as deputy director to ensure a smooth transition. The Trump administration disagreed with the move and instead appointed Mick Mulvaney as acting CFPB director.English asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order against the administrations move, but a judge recently sided with the Trump and upheld Mulvaneys appointment.This is just the beginning of what will likely be a long legal battle. While the temporary restraining order has been denied, the merits of the case have yet to be decided, said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee.Waters and 25 other current and former members of Congress have filed an amicus brief with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that English should serve as acting director until a director is confirmed by the Senate.The Dodd-Frank statute is clear that the deputy director of the Consumer Bureau shall serve as acting director in the absence or unavailability of the director. Leandra English, the Consumer Bureaus deputy director, is the lawful acting director, and she should be allowed to serve in that capacity until a director is confirmed by the Senate, Waters said.Mulvaney has been a harsh critic of the CFPB. Waters described him as an unacceptable candidate, as he was also the original cosponsor of a bill to completely eliminate the bureau.
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As a mother of two, Allison Garrett felt called to bring another child into her home through adoption. She was surprised to discover her husband, Kevin, had the same desire.
We were rocking along and just assumed that was our family and everything was complete, Allison said. I felt God was talking to me and telling me that its not done yet, and adoption was just on my mind.
Last month, the Garretts welcomed a third child, Dylan, into their family. The couple adopted the 20-month-old girl after forming a connection with her from the start.
Once we saw her, it didnt matter if she had health defects, mental defects, Kevin said. It didnt matter at that point. [We] fell in love with her the minute that we saw her.
The Garretts, who live in the Greenwood area, met Dylan when she was about 3 months old. She was born addicted to drugs and had been staying at Midland Memorial Hospital during withdrawal.
Patricia Acosta, foster care supervisor at Buckner Children and Family Services, was the Garretts caseworker for a period of time. She said they often asked questions of medical personnel to find out details about the babys health.
At the hospital, they were just ready to help Dylan in any way that they could, Acosta said. They were rearranging schedules, trying to work out what to do with their other kids so they could spend time at the hospital.
After bringing Dylan home, the Garretts were attentive to needs that stemmed from the girl having spent her first few months in the hospital. They noticed developmental delays and behavioral effects from staying in the clinical environment.
Acosta said the Garretts have devoted time and effort to help Dylan progress. She guided the family through a process that culminated at a National Adoption Month celebration event in November.
I was there from when we went to the hospital until now when shes adopted, Acosta said. She officially became a Garrett, and they made what was in their hearts official.
Buckner this year has helped to facilitate 25 adoptions and license 17 new homes. Acosta said families are increasingly becoming aware of the need for foster care in this area.
About 44 percent of children in foster care in Midland County were placed outside Region 9 which includes Midland and nearby counties according to Texas Department of Family and Protective Services statistics from October.
Kevin and Allison initially thought about adoption. But they decided to become certified foster parents in hopes of taking in long-term placements.
Throughout the process, the Garretts kept in mind the well-being of their other children, Beau, 7, and Tenley, 5. They said their older the kids have become more thoughtful and express concern for those who are mistreated.
Theyve lived a very loved, spoiled, protected life, so I think it did just open them up, Allison said. You want to keep their innocence, but at the same time they need to be aware outside of their little world that theres a whole other world.
The foster care and adoption process also made an impact on the parents. Kevin said he learned about the demand for services locally.
There are lots of kids out there that need help, more than I ever would have thought around this part, he said. Its a sad situation how bad some of these kids get treated.
He and his wife hope people who have misgivings about foster care and adoption will start the process. Allison wants Midlanders to know there are tools for families who choose to provide foster care.
Buckner held our hand and walked us through, she said. The support system has been amazing, not even just at Buckner but other foster families in this area its a really close-knit group.
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A former state legislator tapped by Florida Gov. Rick Scott to help oversee the state's powerful utility industry abruptly resigned from his post Monday after being accused of sexual misconduct by a Republican state senator.
Ritch Workman resigned from Public Service Commission
Accused of inappropriately touching state senator
Was supposed to start working in January
Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto said in a statement that Ritch Workman had touched her inappropriately and made "vulgar" comments to her at a charity event in 2016.
"Workman approached me from behind, pushed his body up against me and made vulgar and inappropriate gestures," said the Fort Myers Republican. "I immediately asked him to stop. He continued to make vulgar and inappropriate comments and gestures until other attendees intervened. I found his conduct to be abhorrent."
Scott had appointed Workman, a Republican from Melbourne, to a $131,000 a year job on the Public Service Commission. He was scheduled to start work in January.
Workman's position was subject to Senate confirmation. Senate President Joe Negron said as a result of the allegations against Workman that he would not be confirmed. Workman called the governor's office and resigned within minutes of Benacquisto releasing her statement.
"The governor has consistently said that any misconduct cannot be tolerated," said Lauren Schenone, a spokeswoman for Scott. "He supports his decision to resign."
Workman did not immediately respond to a call to his cellphone seeking comment.
Benacquisto, who holds a top position in the state Senate and is ally of Negron, had a private meeting with Scott and his chief of staff back in early November. Scott's office refused to comment on what was discussed during the meeting, including whether or not the senator talked about Workman.
Scott picked Workman from a list of nominees given to him by a nominating panel controlled by the state Legislature. Workman, who unsuccessfully ran for the state Senate in 2016, had been working for Keiser University since 2013. He gained a bit of attention in 2015 when it was discovered that he was working as a driver for the ride-sharing service Uber while still a legislator.
John Tupps, a spokesman for Scott, said the governor relied on the nominating council to look at qualifications and the backgrounds of candidates.
"Our office relies on this committee to provide names of qualified applicants which have been vetted and thoroughly reviewed by the nominating commission," said Tupps. "This vetting process includes a background screening conducted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement."
Workman previous served in the Florida House of Representatives, representing southern Brevard County, from 2008 to 2016.
Workman's abrupt resignation comes as the state Capitol has been thrown into turmoil due to allegations of sexual misconduct.
GOP Sen. Jack Latvala has been accused by six women of groping or making demeaning comments about their bodies. The Florida Senate is investigating Latvala. Latvala has denied the allegations, but last week one of his anonymous accusers went public. Rachel Perrin Rogers is a top aide to Senate Majority Leader Wilton Simpson and her husband is a prominent GOP consultant.
Simpson put out a statement on Monday that said his aide is "trusted and valued member of my team for more than five years."
Gov. Scott has called Latvala "a distraction" and has said that he should resign if the allegations against him are true.
SOUTHINGTON Two people were injured in a three-car crash on West Street Monday afternoon.
The crash occurred about 3:45 p.m. and at least one serious injury was initially reported. Fire officials said one person was taken to Hartford Hospital and one person was taken to MidState Medical Center.
West Street was closed between West Queen Street and the Bristol town line while emergency crews were on scene. The road was reopened about 4:45 p.m.
bwright@record-journal.com
203-317-2316
Twitter: @baileyfaywright
Chris Mattei, one of several Democrats considering a run for governor, announced Monday that he is changing course and running for attorney general.
Mattei, a former federal prosecutor, made his announcement one week after Attorney General George Jepsen, also a Democrat, announced that he will not seek re-election next year.
"I spent the better part of the last decade serving the people of Connecticut as an assistant United States attorney, Mattei said in an email announcing his decision. It was my responsibility to stand up for what was right and what the law required, without fear or favor regardless of how wealthy, powerful or influential someone might be.
Mattei also said that he feels he could be of best use to the people of Connecticut as its attorney general, especial after the election of President Donald Trump. Mattei said Trumps election in November 2016 means the nation face(s) a new challenge.
Mattei was head of the Financial Fraud and Public Corruption Unit for the U.S. Attorney's Connecticut office. In that role, he oversaw the prosecution of John G. Rowland that resulted in the former governor returning to federal prison.
The announcement brought praise from several Democrats, including municipal officials, union representatives, and undocumented immigrants.
We need people like Chris Mattei to stand with us and with everyone who is vulnerable, who is voiceless, who is at risk of being left out and left behind. For everyone who worries that the actions of the Trump Administration will undercut the values we were raised with in Connecticut, Jonathan Gonzalez-Cruz, a DACA recipient, said in Matteis press release.
Matteis candidacy drew a quick response from the Republican Attorneys General Assocation, does not need an activist attorney general. They also referenced a report from the Connecticut Post that cited campaign filings showing Mattei paid for an aides speeding ticket with campaign funds.
Its time for a fresh start in Connecticut, the RAGA said in a statement. Job creators will drive Connecticuts economic recovery, not repeating the failed policies of the past. The next attorney general can be a part of the solution, by creating a climate of regulatory certainty."
Matteis announcement makes him the second Democrat to express interest in the Jepsens seat since he declared he will not run next year. State Rep. William Tong, D-Stamford, and co-chair of the legislatures Judiciary Committee, announced last week that he has formed an exploratory committee.
On the Republican side, John Shaban, a former state representative from Redding, has declared his intention to enter the race.
msavino@record-journal.com
203-317-2266
Twitter: @reporter_savino
OPEC and its allies outside the group will maintain their cuts in oil output until global production meets demand, Saudi Arabia's Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih said.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners agreed last week to extend the cuts until the end of 2018, a strategy that has boosted prices to near the highest level in more than two years. Now the focus is shifting to how production will ramp up when the agreement expires.
"We will not let go of our current approach until we reach a balanced market," Al-Falih said Monday at a news conference in Riyadh after meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry. "There will be plenty of supply to respond to any need."
Global inventories have fallen since the production curbs took effect in January. By keeping 1.8 million barrels a day of cuts in place for an additional nine months, the oil producers aim to reduce stockpiles to their five-year average without overheating the market and eliciting a new surge in supply of shale oil. Benchmark Brent crude traded 0.8 percent lower at $63.22 a barrel at 11:30 a.m. in London.
Inventory Surplus
"The outlook for when we will hit the balanced market will be clearer in June, and we will start thinking of what we will do in 2019," he said. "The intent is not overnight to open the taps and flood the market."
There is still about 150 million barrels of "inventory overhang" that has to be drained, and this number probably won't change much over the next four months due to "seasonal stock build" and increased output from U.S. shale deposits, Al-Falih said.
U.S. drillers added two oil rigs to reach 749 in the week ended Dec. 1, the highest level since late September, according to Baker Hughes.
"The world needs shale oil to play a role," Al-Falih said, as shale is needed "to meet some of the demand."
The money-losing Schlitterbahn water park and resort on North Padre Island could be auctioned off at a foreclosure sale in February if a deal for the property is not reached before then, under an agreement announced Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Antonio.
About 270 acres surrounding the park and hotel, however, are slated to be sold at Tuesdays foreclosure auction in Nueces County.
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HARTFORD A three-year study to determine where birds live and dont live, as well as their favorite habitats, will soon be the focus of the those interested in birds in Connecticut.
Its called The Atlas Project, the new assessment of feathered animals will be the work of the University of Connecticut and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. An army of volunteer birdwatchers will be conscripted to help with the effort. The project was announced by the Connecticut Audubon Society, which made it the focus of its 2017 State of the Birds annual report.
The last bird atlas dates to 1994, and CAS officials are calling this latest effort the biggest and most important bird research project ever in Connecticut. It was the subject of 12th annual CAS State of the Birds report, which was released last week in Hartford.
The new atlas will help us make better conservation decisions and justifications for protection of key parcels, said Patrick Comins, Connecticut Audubons executive director.
This year we included only one major recommendation in the report: If Connecticut's birds are important to you, learn as much as you can about the project and then volunteer to participate, said Milan Bull, Connecticut Audubons senior director of science and conservation. The last atlas was dated 1994 but it used data from 1986, so were in desperate need of a new atlas the data that were working with is 30 years old.
Bull said that a lot has happened to birds in the state since the mid-1980s.
Back then, for example, ravens only had a couple of breeding populations in the Northwest Corner, but now theyre widespread across the state, he said. But by the same token, your shrub-scrub birds are in the decline, and because of climate change, new species are moving in and others are moving out.
CAS said the Atlas Project will cost about $700,000 to complete, although because of grants and volunteer time, its really a $2.5 million study, Bull said. The cost will be shared by DEEP, UConn, CAS and others.
This is the most important conservation bird research project that the state has ever undertaken, Bull said. Not only will it tell where the breeding birds are, but also the migratory and wintering numbers and species as well. And it will give us the places that are most important to conservation.
About 600 volunteers will be involved in the effort. Training lessons are being scheduled for those interested in helping.
The first of these sessions is scheduled for Dec. 12 at 6:30 p.m., at the Great Hollow Nature Preserve & Ecological Research Center in New Fairfield, and Jan. 8, at 7 p.m., at Connecticut Audubons Center in Pomfret. Additional sessions are being arranged.
The State of the Birds 2017 report urges Connecticuts birders and conservationists to volunteer and support the project. Large landowners, including land preservation organizations, can participate by allowing volunteers onto their land to conduct fieldwork, CAS said.
This atlas is something Ive been talking about for more than a decade, and most of all Im looking forward to contributing to the results, said Comins. The new atlas will help us make better conservation decisions and justifications for protection of key parcels. We hope the atlas will become a basic decision-making tool for municipal planners, state regulators, conservationists, and others.
Comins said hes had to guess as to which species of conservation concern might benefit from a particular project to conserve land.
The atlas will take it to the next level, he said. When this project is done, we will finally know exactly which places are most important to which species and be able to make much better conservation decisions.
Editors note: The Connecticut Audubon Society (Connecticut Audubon) and the Connecticut Chapter of the National Audubon Society (known as Audubon Connecticut) are separate, unaffiliated organizations.
jburgeson@ctpost.com
Authorities say the death of an 11-year-old Dayton girl appears to be medically-related, according to a statement from Liberty County Sheriff's Capt. Ken DeFoor.
On Friday, Dec. 1, Abigail Garcia, a sixth-grade student at Woodrow Wilson Junior High, reportedly called her mother to ask that she pick her up at the bus stop on CR 678 as she was feeling ill, DeFoor said.
A substitute teacher working at CJ Harris Elementary School in Pearland allegedly called police to report a six-year-old Muslim child with Down's syndrome was a possible terrorist.
According to a report by by Fox 26 Houston, the teacher claimed to police that she heard the child say "Allah" and "boom" several times in class.
The child's father, Maher Suleiman, told the TV station that his child "doesn't speak at all," making the teacher's claims impossible.
Suleiman said Monday that because there is an ongoing investigation, he and his family were unable to make comments regarding the case at this time.
Google Earth
Social activist Quanell X said that when the family reached out to him for help, he was initially skeptical.
"When the father first reached out to me, I really didn't think the story was completely true," he said. "I thought maybe because he was an immigrant, his English was not great, maybe he was a little confused about what was happening. But as my office began to work on it, we found his story to be true. How can you go after a six-year-old child and call him a terrorist?"
Quanell X said the case became further complicated when he met the child.
"This substitute teacher alleges that this six-year-old child was saying terroristic things," he said. "I've met this child. He cannot speak. He is severely, severely special needs. He has the mental capacity of a one-year-old. I couldn't believe (the substitute teacher's) story had gone to this degree it's extreme. To me, this is a case of some of the worst religious bigotry I have ever seen, and it's specifically targeting a Muslim family."
X said that he has been helping the family during ensuing investigations from the police and Child Protective Services.
"To give the police credit, when I spoke to the assistant police chief in Pearland, the man was honest, respectful and believed this was extreme, but they had to follow protocol," X said. "I was just surprised that CPS was involved. What are they investigating? Neglect? Abuse? I didn't realize Child Protective Services had a division that was trained to spot out Islamic terrorism."
Tiffani Butler, media specialist for Child Protective Services confirmed that the case is currently under investigation by their office.
"The only reason we would be involved is because it's something that happened at school," Butler said.
The incident comes just months following a tumultuous city council election, where Position 7 Councilman Woody Owens was sharply criticized for sharing what many considered anti-Muslim messages on his personal Facebook page prior to his campaign against Dalia Kasseb, a 30-year-old pharmacist and the first Muslim candidate to run for office in the City of Pearland.
X said he hopes the Pearland community will reach out and support the Suleiman family. "Pearland needs to come together and say, 'Wait a minute. We aren't ok with this.'"
JERUSALEM - Arab nations and Palestinian officials have warned of dire consequences if the United States recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital, including potential unrest and an end to the peace process, amid last-minute lobbying to prevent President Donald Trump from making the move.
In a late-night call Sunday, Jordan's foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, warned Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that such a decision could "trigger anger across the Arab and Muslim world, fuel tension and jeopardize peace efforts," according to Jordan's state news agency.
Egypt's foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, also discussed with Tillerson the "possible negative impacts" on peace, according to a ministry spokesman. He asked that Tillerson avoid taking decisions that could "stir tensions in the region."
Turkey said a change in policy would be a "major catastrophe." Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki, meanwhile, called for an emergency meeting of the 22 members of the Arab League, which is expected to take place Tuesday.
For more than two decades, successive U.S. presidents have signed a waiver every six months that allows them to delay a move of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on national security grounds. During his campaign, Trump vowed to relocate the U.S. Embassy but reluctantly signed the waiver six months ago as his administration attempts to broker a peace process.
The White House was expected to let Monday's deadline for the next signing pass unmentioned, a signal that a shift is likely to be in the works. Trump is likely to outline a new policy on Jerusalem and the embassy in a speech Wednesday, an administration official said.
Israel claims Jerusalem in its entirety as its eternal and undivided capital, but Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of a future Palestinian state.
Despite the critical statements by Jordan and Egypt, Palestinians may find it hard to coordinate genuinely robust opposition at a time when Arab states increasingly see their security interests aligned with Israel's against their shared enemy, Iran.
In the Knesset on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed an "unprecedented" shift in the Arab states' attitude to Israel.
The regional power broker, Saudi Arabia, has yet to publicly condemn possible U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, reportedly held late-night discussions on Middle East strategy in October.
"I don't see how this advances our interests," said Aaron Miller, an analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and former Middle East negotiator under both Democrat and Republican administrations. "Whether this is going to be the end of the world is another matter. The Saudis have been quiet on this."
Kushner said Sunday that Trump is "close" to making a decision on Jerusalem but is "still looking at a lot of facts." Israel captured the eastern part of the city from Jordan in 1967 in the Six-Day War, later annexing it in a move considered illegal by the United Nations.
Palestinian officials have warned that recognition of the city as Israel's capital will end U.S.-brokered peace efforts, which they have already complained appear biased toward Israel. Calling it Israel's "undivided" capital would mark an even more dramatic step, effectively recognizing Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last month expressed surprise after the United States threatened to shutter the Palestine Liberation Organization's Washington office unless the Palestinians engaged in meaningful peace talks.
Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital "is offensive and contrary to the role of the U.S. administration as a mediator and sponsor of the peace process," the Palestinian deputy premier, Ziad Abu Amr, told the U.S. consul general for Jerusalem, Donald Blome, in a meeting in Ramallah on Monday, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa. It "closes every door to the continuation of a serious peace process, and pushes the entire region into more tension and instability."
"The status of Jerusalem and Temple Mount have been determined by international agreements," Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said after a cabinet meeting on Monday, according to Reuters. "It is important to preserve Jerusalem's status for the sake of protecting peace in the region."
Eran Lerman, vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, said threats of violence amounted to a "toy gun."
"These are attempts to manipulate the American administration," he said on a conference call organized by the Israel Project, a pro-Israel media advocacy organization. "They are actually counterproductive. I don't think this administration responds very well to crude threats."
The State Department has warned embassies of potential unrest and anti-American protests this week related to an announcement, according to U.S. officials.
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The Washington Post's Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo contributed to this report.
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Bill O'Reilly is being sued by a former Fox News producer who claims he violated a settlement agreement in a harassment case by disparaging her in the media as a liar and extortionist.
Rachel Witlieb Bernstein's attorneys filed a lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against O'Reilly and his former employer, Fox News, for breach of contract and defamation.
Her attorneys said in the lawsuit that O'Reilly and the network violated non-disparagement and confidentiality clauses in their 2002 settlement agreement with Bernstein, which stated that if asked about the case, they "may say only 'The matter has been resolved (or settled)', without elaboration."
"But he's gone far beyond that and painted our client in a terrible light," one of her attorneys, Neil Mullin, told The Washington Post.
O'Reilly has publicly denied harassment accusations, calling himself a "target" and saying the claims against him were "politically and financially motivated."
The lawsuit states that O'Reilly's remarks portrayed Bernstein in a "false light" and "disparaged her character, in fact calling her a liar and an extortionist."
"In fact, Mr. O'Reilly is the liar," the complaint stated. "He mistreated Ms. Bernstein. She was forced out of her job at Fox News and paid a settlement because of his mistreatment.
"She did go to HR and other company executives to complain about him several times. Fox News took no action to protect plaintiff from O'Reilly. There were many witnesses to her mistreatment. She was not politically or financially motivated to raise the claims of abuse."
Mullin said O'Reilly's comments not only violated their 2002 settlement agreement but also illustrate a broader issue, in which powerful men who are exposed as harassers attempt to discredit their victims.
"The reason women don't come out is because there's a pattern of these men lashing out," Mullin said.
Mullin said O'Reilly and Fox News have made "false and disparaging claims" against women who had to sign nondisclosure agreements, adding that the women should be released from those agreements.
"It is cowardly to publicly attack these women knowing they have been subjected to contractual provisions requiring absolute silence," he said.
O'Reilly's attorney, Fredric Newman, said in a statement that "Bill O'Reilly has never mentioned the plaintiff's name publicly in any context."
Newman added that Bernstein's lawsuit had no merit and said that O'Reilly would "respond aggressively in court."
Fox News could not immediately be reached for comment.
Allegations against O'Reilly came to light in April when the New York Times reported that the cable star and Fox News paid out millions of dollars to five women to settle harassment claims.
As the newspaper reported at the time:
"Fox News has been aware of complaints about inappropriate behavior by Mr. O'Reilly since at least 2002, when Mr. O'Reilly stormed into the newsroom and screamed at a young producer, according to current and former employees, some of whom witnessed the incident.
"Shortly thereafter, the woman, Rachel Witlieb Bernstein, left the network with a payout and bound by a confidentiality agreement, people familiar with the deal said. The exact amount she was paid is not known, but it was far less than the other settlements. The case did not involve sexual harassment."
Bernstein's attorneys said in a statement that she "was not the source for this revelation."
The Times added:
"In a statement, Mr. O'Reilly suggested that his prominence made him a target.
" 'Just like other prominent and controversial people," the statement read, "I'm vulnerable to lawsuits from individuals who want me to pay them to avoid negative publicity. In my more than 20 years at Fox News Channel, no one has ever filed a complaint about me with the Human Resources Department, even on the anonymous hotline.'
" 'But most importantly, I'm a father who cares deeply for my children and who would do anything to avoid hurting them in any way. And so I have put to rest any controversies to spare my children.'
" 'The worst part of my job is being a target for those who would harm me and my employer, the Fox News Channel. Those of us in the arena are constantly at risk, as are our families and children. My primary efforts will continue to be to put forth an honest TV program and to protect those close to me.' "
In interviews and statements following the story, O'Reilly further denied the allegations.
In September, he appeared on the "Today" show, saying that in 42 years in the business, "not one time, did I have any interaction with HR, any complaints filed against me."
"In totality, this was a hit job, a political and financial hit job," O'Reilly said.
In the new lawsuit, Bernstein's attorneys said: "This defamatory and disparaging statement is false. Ms. Bernstein settled her claims and left Fox News because of severe mistreatment and by Mr. O'Reilly, as he knows."
The lawsuit says Bernstein has suffered loss of income, emotional distress and illness.
The filing comes amid mounting harassment and sexual misconduct claims against celebrities, politicians and other public figures. Following an uproar over harassment claims against O'Reilly, Fox News severed its relationship with him in April, just months after the media company became embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal involving its founder, Roger Ailes.
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The remnants of a small shrine initially erected by a self-proclaimed alt-right group and dedicated to Kate Steinle remained on a wooden bench Monday at the foot of Pier 14, just days after the Steinle family asked San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee to have anything connecting her death to politics to be removed.
The alt-right group claimed in a Facebook post that it set up the memorial shortly after a San Francisco jury acquitted a 45-year-old homeless and undocumented immigrant on murder and manslaughter charges stemming from the killing of Steinle.
The 32-year-old San Francisco resident was walking with her father on Pier 14 on July 1, 2015 when a bullet fired from a stolen gun by Jose Ines Garcia Zarate ricocheted off the concrete ground, and hit her. Steinle died after collapsing in her fathers arms.
While the San Francisco Superior Court jury acquitted Garcia Zarrate on Thursday of murder and manslaughter charges, the panel found him guilty of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
The memorial set up in the wake of the verdict was initially adorned with photos of Steinle captioned She had dreams too, fifty candles, and handwritten notes that read, Build the wall, echoing President Trumps call for a wall on the border with Mexico.
But just three days later, the notes, candles and flags were gone. All that was left behind were three photos of Steinle, dozens of glow sticks tied with black ribbons to the bench and two withering bouquets of flowers.
A family representative placed a request with the mayor for the bench to remain as a simple memorial in recognition of Kate and her spirit, according to a spokeswoman from the Mayors office.
The city Department of Public Works removed any symbols and notes that politicized Steinles death.
Since the verdict, plans for a vigil and justice for Kate Steinle demonstrations have been organized throughout the country, including San Francisco, Portland and Utah in the coming weeks.
Jake Hanft, 28, of San Francisco, who was walking by the memorial Monday morning said he was disappointed by the reaction of people on both sides of the political aisle following the verdict.
Im a liberal guy and Im still disappointed by the verdict, but I dont think that should be cause for widespread protests, Hanft said. I think its insensitive to the family. Im not sure if thats what they wouldve wanted.
In an exclusive interview with The Chronicle, Steinles father, Jim, said he and his family just want to get this over and moved on with our lives, and think about Kate on our terms.
Nothings been on our terms. Its been on everyone elses terms, Jim Steinle said. We never had a second of anger not a moment.
In reaction to the verdict, he said, Justice was rendered, but it was not served.
Gisa Bok, 39, of St. Petersburg, Fla., was taking a stroll on the Embarcadero Monday morning before her flight back home when she stumbled upon the memorial.
Shes beautiful, her partner muttered softly, as the two gazed at the photos of Steinle.
Bok had read about the case in newspaper reports.
I think its very hurtful for the family, Bok said of the memorial. Its very disrespectful for the family especially if they have been asking for it to be taken down.
Steinles death set off a national debate over immigration and was used throughout President Trumps campaign for the White House as a call for a wall. Garcia Zarate is a homeless and undocumented Mexican immigrant who had been deported from the United States five times and was awaiting a sixth deportation.
Shortly after the verdict, Trump tweeted that the verdict was disgraceful and a complete travesty of justice.
Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani
SALT LAKE CITY - President Donald Trump on Monday drastically scaled back two national monuments established in Utah by his Democratic predecessors, the largest reduction of public lands protection in U.S. history.
Trump's move to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by more than 1.1 million acres and more than 800,000 acres, respectively, immediately sparked an outpouring of praise from conservative lawmakers as well as activists' protests outside the White House and in Utah. The changes plunge the Trump administration into uncharted legal territory, as no president has sought to modify monuments established under the 1906 Antiquities Act in more than half a century.
His decision removes about 85 percent of the designation of Bears Ears and nearly 46 percent of that for Grand Staircase-Escalante, land that potentially could now be leased for energy exploration or opened for specific activities such as motorized vehicle use.
Trump told a rally in Salt Lake City that he came to "reverse federal overreach" and took dramatic action "because some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They're wrong."
"They don't know your land, and truly, they don't care for your land like you do," he said. "But from now on, that won't matter."
The two proclamations are the first in a series of major changes Trump intends to make to numerous monuments, which range from a forested patch of the Pacific Northwest to a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean off New England.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has reviewed more than two dozen sites established by Democratic and Republican presidents under an executive order Trump signed in April, said he would release his report on the study Tuesday. Zinke has recommended downsizing Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou and Nevada's Gold Butte national monuments and shifting the way several others are managed, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post. If these revisions are successfully sustained in court, they would redefine the extent to which future presidents could dictate that public lands remain untouched.
Conservatives have long sought to curb a president's unilateral power to safeguard federal lands and waters under the law, a practice that both Democrats and Republicans have pursued since it was enacted under Theodore Roosevelt. The issue has been a particular flash point in the West, where some residents feel the federal government already imposes too many restrictions on development, and others, including tribal officials, feel greater protections of ancient sites are needed.
Even before Trump made the announcement as part of a day trip to the state, National Cattlemen's Beef Association President Craig Uden was hailing the resized designations. While grazing has continued on both monuments, as well as on others, Uden said ranchers could not have greater input into how they are managed.
"We are grateful that today's action will allow ranchers to resume their role as responsible stewards of the land and drivers of rural economies," he said.
Republicans at the president's rally applauded him and his deputies for heeding their concerns. "President Trump listened to us," Utah House Speaker Gregory Hughes (R) said. "We are not a flyover state."
Gov. Gary R. Herbert (R) characterized the action as "an opportunity to push a reset button on these areas" and derided as myth "this idea that somehow there will be some wholesale development" on lands removed from the designation. "There is a lot of scaremongering" about future oil derricks and natural gas wells, he said, but "the only thing that smacks of energy is the uranium" that will now become available near Bears Ears and coal near Grand Staircase-Escalante.
A series of protests that opponents began over the weekend, attracting thousands, continued Monday at the Utah Capitol. About 300 demonstrators gathered before Trump arrived and, against the backdrop of the dome and snowy grounds, chanted "Lock him up!"
Conservation advocates and tribal representatives have for months been preparing legal briefs that aim to block the monument changes in federal court.
After Trump signed the two proclamations, the Ute Indian Tribe, Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and Pueblo of Zuni announced they would file suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to challenge the action on Bears Ears. A coalition of eight environmental groups, represented by Earthjustice, sued late in the day over Grand Staircase-Escalante.
"We're going to fight this," Jonathan Nez, Navajo Nation vice president, told reporters Monday.
Douglas Wheeler, a partner at the firm Hogan Lovells who represents the Conservation Lands Foundation, Utah Dine Bikeyah and other groups, said the "watershed" moment on the issue came with the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act. "Congress made very clear, as a matter of law, that they intend to delegate only that which has been expressly delegated in terms of management of federal lands," he said - which would mean a president can establish a monument under the Antiquities Act but not "rescind or substantially reduce" a site.
Yet Todd Gaziano, executive director of the Pacific Legal Foundation, argues that Trump can act unilaterally: "There are many hard or uncertain questions in the law, but this is not one of them," Gaziano said in a statement.
Despite this legal uncertainty, Trump and his deputies have worked to address the concerns raised by Utah politicians such as Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R) and executives in the mining, ranching and oil and gas industries.
Zinke held public events at multiple locations, but the review decision-making process was largely contained to a handful of top staffers at Interior and the White House. Zinke's aides have had only minimal consultations with Bureau of Land Management field office staff members in Utah, according to individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
While both Utah monuments have drawn criticism, they have simultaneously boosted local tourism. Grand Staircase-Escalante also has spurred significant scientific discoveries.
Grand Staircase's Kaiparowits Plateau ranks as one of the most important examples of the Mesozoic Era, when dinosaurs roamed the area, according to David Polly, president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Nearly half of the plateau falls outside the new boundaries, Polly noted in an interview - including nearly all of the Tropic Shale, a roughly 94 million-year-old swath of rock that the new proclamation identifies as a protected object.
Bears Ears, by contrast, is best known for tens of thousands of relatively intact archaeological sites and petroglyphs within its boundaries. Some date from the ancestral Pueblo era, and many tribal members continue to visit the area regularly to conduct rituals as well as to gather herbs and firewood.
A senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the push to change the monument designations was driven by Hatch; Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee; and Zinke.
Hatch has raised the issue of the two Utah sites repeatedly with both the president and his eldest son, not just during the 2016 campaign but also during his visit to the Oval Office on Trump's fifth day in office.
Trump "really likes" Hatch, the White House official said, because he supports his agenda, defends him on TV, praises his children and has a sense of humor. He appreciates his work on the Senate's tax overhaul bill, the aide added, and is hoping the 83-year-old incumbent will run for re-election next year rather than provide an opening for Trump political rival Mitt Romney.
The president, who updated Hatch personally on the process, brought him along on Monday's trip on Air Force One and agreed to meet with leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City at Hatch's request.
Both Trump and Zinke implied Monday that monument designations had impeded public access. "Our public land is for the public to use, not special interests," Zinke said.
But Amy Roberts, executive director of the Outdoor Industry Association, said in an interview that the notion "is flat-out wrong" and that business has thrived in the 20 years since Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated a monument.
"Unfortunately, there's a risk now that those people's livelihoods are going to be threatened as people hear the monument's cut in half and wonder whether it's worth visiting," she said.
San Juan County Commission Chairman Bruce Adams, who opposed the Bears Ears designation, said last week that he hoped the tourism boost his county had experienced in the past year would continue."Whoever's in charge of managing the monument will come up with some places for people to visit, and visit respectfully."
According to two senior administration officials, the question of how to treat existing monuments has not received significant attention in the White House, which has been focused on taxes. White House official Ty Cobb, who served as the president's attorney and once served as chairman of the Grand Canyon Trust, has opposed the reductions.
The property was off an isolated road running through north Florida swampland, hidden behind thick walls of trees dripping with moss.
The House of Prayer for All People opened in 1983 in Micanopy, a town just south of Gainesville. For nearly 10 years, children arrived at the religious boarding school and into the care of "Mother Anna" - Anna Elizabeth Young. There, according to Alachua County authorities, they were tortured and abused in a religious cult atmosphere that included exorcism and chemical baths.
Decades later, police are only now beginning to understand what may have happened at the site.
"Witnesses came forward from the House of Prayer alleging brutality and even some children being murdered," Art Forgey, a spokesman with the Alachua County Sheriff's Office told ABC 20 last week. "It's not just one isolated incident of beatings. There were numerous children that were beaten, locked in solitary confinement, food-withheld."
Late last week, Young, 75, was arrested for the premeditated first-degree murder of a child, law enforcement announced in a news release. The Gainesville Sun reported the charges stem from the death of Emon Harper in the late 1980s. Authorities say the boy was either two or three at the time of his death, but few other details have been released.
Young has not filed a plea. No lawyer for her has been identified so far.
Officials have said they believe Young - who is referred to as a "former cult leader" in a law enforcement news release - may have been involved in more crimes at the isolated Florida compound.
"We think there are many, many more. We can document other states and other missing children that we believe are tied into this," Forgey told the Sun. "They ran a religious institution - exorcising demons and other things like that. We have documentation involving her clear back the '60s. We did extensive forensic examination on the property this summer. We are still analyzing the evidence that we gathered."
The Sun reported Young and her husband, Jonah Young, had an "outreach ministry run from their home" in Micanopy along with other members of the family. It is unclear how children were placed in the Young's care. Jonah Young was crushed to death when his car slipped off a jack in 1988.
In 1992, Anna Young was charged in Alachua County with felony child abuse. According to a news release from authorities, the charges stemmed from when Young allegedly bathed a 12-year-old girl with chemicals in a steel tub, leaving her with severe burns. Young fled the state. She was located eight years later living in an attic in a relative's house in Illinois. Court records indicated that she pleaded no contest and was sentenced to six months in prison 2001.
In the last year, children who stayed with Young at the House of Prayer, now in their 40s and 50s, have approached authorities with stories of torture, punishment, caging, and starvation. Those allegations led to the charges in the Harper death.
"It's going to be a really complex case and there is a lot of sensitivity with the victims, who are all adults now," Darry Lloyd, the spokesman for the Florida Eighth Circuit State Attorney, told the Sun. "Their recall is very good because they've been through it."
Young, who now lives in Cobb County, Georgia, was arrested last week and is currently in custody. Her extradition to Florida is pending.
"This is just the tip of the iceberg that we know of," Alachua County Sheriff's Office's Forgey told ABC 20.
A man was found dead Sunday morning along the North Freeway service road, but it's not immediately clear who he was or how he died.
The man was found unresponsive behind a gas station at 5716 North Interstate 45 around 7:10 a.m.
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS Frank Pomeroy pauses outside his daughters room, unable to enter. He knows whats inside: Annabelles bed, her One Direction poster and various items in shades of purple her favorite color.
But Pomeroy and his wife, Sherri, cant look in her room yet. It reminds them too much of the girl they lost.
It seemed like it was just yesterday I had dropped her off at school. It seemed like I had just told her, Ill see you Monday, the First Baptist Church pastor says, his eyes watering behind his glasses.
Pomeroy wasnt at the church here the morning of Nov. 5 when a gunman walked in and opened fire with a military-style rifle.
Devin Patrick Kelley killed 14-year-old Annabelle and 25 others, including an unborn child, before he was shot and then killed himself during a car chase. Twenty people in the packed sanctuary were wounded. Kelleys motive remains unclear, though he had a history of violence.
Four weeks after the church massacre, time stretches and snaps for people in this town of 600 south of San Antonio, shifting from fast to slow to fast again. One moment, its as if their loved ones were just there with them. The next, theres a gaping hole, a monumental loss.
The days run together. Its like being on an island where you lose track of days, Pomeroy said Thursday at his church office.
It was the first night the church reopened its community meal and Bible study session, which was held every Thursday until the massacre.
Faith in God permeates life in Sutherland Springs, a belief that has helped families cope with the tragedy as they envision their loved ones in a better place. And they cope by staying busy, visiting the wounded still recovering at the hospital and staying close to relatives to soothe the pain.
Yet the wounds still are fresh, and the nightmarish visions unescapable.
In a nearby store last week, Jennifer Holcombe stopped in her tracks and stared at a pair of pink rubber boots. She almost can see her dead infant daughter Noah Grace standing in them. Its too much.
Farida Brown wakes up shivering every night. A survivor who was shot four times, she sees the blood, hears the cries. Its as if shes right back there, at the First Baptist Church on Nov. 5. She relives it all again and again.
I cant get it out of my head. Its like it just happened, said Brown, 73.
The trauma from that day rippled throughout the community and far beyond the world watched in horror as news stories unfolded of congregants hiding under their pews in terror, of mothers and grandmothers dying to protect their little ones, of children being shot to death for crying out.
I wish I no. I dont, said Pomeroy, stopping himself short. He took a deep breath. He started over. Sometimes I wish I could understand what was inside his head, so I couldve stopped him. But theres nothing to understand. You have to be insane to understand insanity.
The community has hopes of finding a new normal, but for now, theres too much to do.
The Pomeroys, who have six other children, are constantly taking calls, organizing the vast amount of donations and making rounds visiting victims families. Theyre also conducting the day-to-day work that comes with running a church preparing sermons, connecting their congregants to resources and just keeping the place clean.
If you dont water your plants, theyre going to die, so we dont have much of a choice, Sherri Pomeroy said. Youve got to keep on going, even when you dont feel like it.
Frank Pomeroy was in Oklahoma on Nov. 5 and drove seven hours to get back home when he heard about the shooting. Sherri Pomeroy was in Florida.
A Texas State University alum with a degree in biological anthropology, and a minor in medieval and renaissance studies, Frank Pomeroy is an avid motorcyclist. He said his days now are like using a hula-hoop with a thorn: youre going and going and then a piercing pain.
Some days are better than others, Pomeroy said. Our lives are changed forever.
He also has been disturbed by the number of conspiracy theorists that have come to Sutherland Springs or attacked his family and other congregants on social media saying the shooting was a hoax, a scam, or that he must work for the CIA.
Its demoralizing to have so many of these conspiracy people calling victims and trying to say that theyre lying, that theyre stealing peoples money. That hurts, he said.
Some residents are remodeling their homes to accommodate family members who were injured in the massacre. Julie and Kip Workman are installing a ramp for their son Kris, who likely is permanently paralyzed from the bullets. Some of those who were killed left house projects half-finished, tasks now taken up by relatives.
Youre doing any little thing you can get done to feel accomplished, said Jennifer Holcombe, whose husband, Marc Danny Holcombe, also was killed. Were taking it one minute at a time.
Safe in heaven
The prayer request sheet that passed around during Thursdays Bible study listed 22 names, all of them people who were at the church that Sunday and survived.
Faith in God helps them make sense of the tragedy.
There was a point when I said, Lord, why them? said Frank Pomeroy. But those 26, I dont have to worry about them. I know where they are. Theyre safe.
Finding meaning in the tragedy is an integral part of healing, trauma experts say. Thelma Duffey, co-director of UTSAs Academy for Crisis and Trauma Counseling, said the goal is for residents to integrate the loss and trauma into their lives so its a part of their life story, but it doesnt define it.
Meaning is how you live with it. How you make sense of it in a way that you can live with, said Duffey, whos helping lead a team that will provide counseling services in Sutherland Springs under a $150,000 grant from the Whataburger chain.
When Jennifer Holcombe emerged from the church Nov. 5, having inexplicably survived the seven-minute massacre, she told her family she knew her husband and daughter no longer were in the church.
I told them I know where Danny and Noah are, and Ill see them again. And thats how Ill get through this, she said.
The promise of heaven also is what Sherri Pomeroy holds onto.
I dont know how people without faith do it. Because if you dont have something to hope for, whats the reason to live? she said. If I didnt have a hope that Annabelle was in heaven and that I will see her one day, why would I want to continue living?
Joe Holcombe, 86, who lost nine members of his family spanning three generations, said he cant find anything bad in what happened because the way he sees it, his family is in a better place and hell get to see them someday.
Some people might not understand that response, but these folks are very, very devout, said Holcombes lawyer, Rob Ammons, who filed a civil claim against the Air Force last week that blames military officials for failing to alert the FBI about Kelleys criminal history an error that allowed Kelley to buy firearms from licensed dealers.
With every ounce of Joe Holcombes being, he believes that all of these folks that passed are in a far better place, Ammons said. When he says its all good, you have to look at it through that lens for it to make sense.
Jimmy Stevens lost his sister, Peggy Warden, in the shooting. But now he said he has something to look forward to.
Some day well all join her. They always say there are no tears in heaven, but I think on that day there will be some happy tears.
Slowly moving on
When the Pomeroys opened up the free community meal again Thursday, Frank said he doubted how many would show up. All of the parishioners who were killed would regularly attend the meal. The others who came now were wounded or had lost those family members. Would the hall be empty?
But Brown showed up with bandages still wrapped around her legs from the four bullets. Workman attended despite having a child in the hospital. Holcombe, the only one left in her immediate family, came too. And so did other family and friends. It was almost a full house.
There are some things that are going to be very hard to accept but we can adjust. And create life even when people find it difficult to see it as a possibility, Duffey said.
The Sutherland Springs residents ate hot dogs and Frito pie in that hall, and laughed about any old thing like the size of mosquitoes in Alabama or the funny way they met.
A lot of people dont understand how we can go on and be laughing and get along with life but you have to have those moments. You cant heal if you dont, Holcombe said as she gazed around at the grinning faces.
In a storage room nearby are hundreds of letters, gifts, artwork big and small, sent from across the world expressing condolences and sympathies.
Its so encouraging to see that people care, from all over the world, said Marina Pomeroy, Annabelles 19-year-old sister. I think thats whats kept me and my parents going the outpouring of love.
The sanctuary remains a memorial, painted white with chairs and roses marking the people who were killed. Frank Pomeroy said a new temporary building that potentially could seat 200 people is being shipped and is expected to arrive Monday. The decision to either preserve or demolish the church has not yet been made, he said.
The Sutherland Springs Historical Museum had also gathered board members Thursday night to discuss the upcoming annual banquet. Also on their minds was how to represent this shooting in the towns history.
We realize this is now part of Sutherland Springs history, but we dont want it to be the predominant event, said Tambria Read, the museum chairwoman. This does not define us. Probably what defines is that we are resilient over the centuries of flooding, episodes of fire, etc. We are resilient and we come together.
Read said they plan to set up a monitor that will show videos and play oral histories of community members. Theyll have a binder with a collection of news articles on the shooting, and pamphlets from the victims funerals, she said.
Holcombe said shes still searching, trying to discover a new purpose. She wants to find a way to help others.
Hug your friends and family, cherish every moment you have with them, she said. If you want to help, find someone in your community that needs help. Do something for them. There are others that need help right now, too, and there will be others like us.
When Frank Pomeroy walks by Annabelles room, hes overcome with the enormity of his loss. Sometimes, for a second, he questions why she had to be killed. But then he knows.
I went by her room and I had a moment, you know, where I thought, What did she do wrong? But my wife is right she wouldnt have been able to handle it, having so much of her family gone. She couldnt do it.
Staff Writer John Tedesco contributed to this report.
sfosterfrau@express-news.net
Alex Luna /San Antonio Express-News
An argument between in-laws turned violent Sunday evening after a family member drew a gun in the South Side, San Antonio police said.
SAPD Sergeant Gary Mucho said police were called to a home in the 7000 Block of Hallie Ridge for a reported shooting.
Officers are trying to determine what happened after they responded to a report of a shooting in a Northwest Side home but found no victim, police said.
San Antonio Police Department Officer Carlos Ortiz said a man called police around 3 p.m. and told them someone was shot in the 1500 block of Santa Monica.
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A San Marcos police officer was fatally shot Monday afternoon while attempting to arrest a man on a warrant.
San Marcos Police Chief Chase Stapp said at a news conference that officer Kenneth Copeland, 58, was fatally shot when he and a small contingent of officers were ambushed at 2:23 p.m. in the El Camino Real subdivision.
"Ken's a hero ... today was his day off," Stapp said before pausing. "He worked just about every day off to provide for his kids because he knows that we're short-handed and that we need help."
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Stapp said Copeland is the first San Marcos police officer to be killed in the line of duty.
During the news conference, Stapp provided details of the fatal shooting.
"Shortly after their arrival, it appears this individual began firing at the officers much like in an ambush-type situation," he said. The officers were there to arrest the man on charges related to a violent crime, he added.
Copeland, who was wearing ballistic armor, was struck several times, police said. Officers pulled him out of the area, Stapp said.
One officer rushed him to the Central Texas Medical Center in a police car. He was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m., Stapp said.
Other officers at the scene surrounded the home in hopes of talking the man out of the house. The Hays County-San Marcos joint SWAT and crisis negotiation teams responded to the scene.
"He did later come out and surrender to officers and has been taken into custody," Stapp said, adding that the man was shot during the incident.
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Investigators did not know Monday evening if the man shot himself or was shot by an officer at the scene.
The man has been taken to an area hospital where he is being guarded until he is medically stable enough to be taken into custody, Stapp said.
Stapp did not identify the shooter nor offer further details on the warrant being served because the man had not yet been brought before a judge. Copeland, a 19-year-veteran of the force, leaves behind a wife, Shiela, and four children: Nile, Noah, James and Jonah.
Were not accustomed to this, with the exception of helping other agencies in the nearby area deal with this when it happens to them, Stapp said.
San Marcos Mayor John Thomaides called for the citys support as they mourn the loss of a member of our family.
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No city is prepared for this, Thomaides said. We are all mourning together, and we will continue to mourn even as we all get back to the business of serving our citizens.
San Marcos City Manager Bert Lumbreras described seeing officers reacting to Copelands death.
I can tell you I saw a lot of crying; I saw peoples hearts ripped out, Lumbreras said.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement: Today we grieve for the family of the fallen San Marcos police officer, and we vow swift justice for the killer. The men and women in law enforcement put their lives on the line every day to protect and to serve our communities, and we will never forget their sacrifices.
Cecilia and I extend our heartfelt condolences to the officers family and to the entire San Marcos Police Department.
This will mark the 14th officer shot in the line of duty this year in Texas, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks law enforcement deaths.
Officers around our state courageously serve and deserve our utmost honor and respect, especially during this time, Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. Please join Angela and me as we pray for the officers family, the people of San Marcos, and for our law enforcement officers around the state.
Kelsey Bradshaw is a digital reporter for mySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| kbradshaw@express-news.net | Twitter: @kbrad5
HONG KONG - The United States and South Korea began large-scale combined air force drills Monday, with plans to carry out simulated strikes on North Korean nuclear and missile testing sites, South Korean military officials said.
Some 230 aircraft will take part in the drills, which will include some of the Pentagon's most powerful warplanes, such as stealth F-35 Lightning II fighters and B1-B Lancer bombers.
They come just a week after North Korea tested a missile that analysts said had the capability of reaching much of the continental United States.
The drills were part of an annual exercise that had been planned before North Korea conducted the missile test, officials said.
The exercise is "aimed at enhancing the all-weather, day and night combined air power operation capabilities of South Korea and the U.S.," South Korea's defense ministry said.
Such drills have drawn vigorous criticism from North Korea, whose state news media said Sunday that the latest exercises were pushing the Korean Peninsula "to the brink of nuclear war." It warned that Pyongyang would "seriously consider" countermeasures against the drill and that the United States and South Korea would "pay dearly for their provocations," the North's Korean Central News Agency said.
Underscoring the tensions, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina urged the Pentagon on Sunday to move dependents of U.S. service members out of South Korea because of the threat of conflict. More than 28,000 U.S. troops are stationed there, many living with their families.
"It's crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea," Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CBS's "Face the Nation."
The military exercises that began Monday involve 12,000 personnel and also include six F-22 Raptors, representing the largest deployment of the stealth fighters to South Korea, officials said.
The drills will be conducted under wartime scenarios that include attacks on mock North Korean nuclear and missile targets, South Korea's military said.
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WASHINGTON Texas U.S. Rep. Blake Farenthold, who used $84,000 in taxpayer dollars to settle with a former aide who sued him for sexual harassment in 2014, says he's going to pay back the money.
Farenthold told a Corpus Christi television station Monday that he plans to take out a personal loan to repay the government, a move that would be unprecedented under the 1995 Congressional Accountability Act that governs workplace disputes against lawmakers and their staffs.
The four-term Congressmen, who has long denied any wrongdoing, said he will offer a check to House Speaker Paul Ryan or other congressional leaders this week.
Farenthold also got an endorsement Monday from a past spokeswoman, Elizabeth Peace, who told the Chronicle that while Farenthold was always respectful, the atmosphere for women in much of the rest of Congress can be "toxic," requiring mandatory sexual harassment training.
READ ALSO: Congressman, hit with 'sexting' revelation, bows out of 2018 race
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Farenthold, for his part, told KRISTV, that the losers in his case, which was eventually settled out of court, were the taxpayers who are required by law to underwrite settlements and awards against members of Congress.
"I want to be clear that I didn't do anything wrong," he said, "but I also don't want the taxpayers to be on the hook for this."
In an interview witth "6 Investigates" in Corpus Christi, Farenthold said he was not given a choice about using his own money in the 2015 confidential settlement with his former spokeswoman, Lauren Greene.
Under the 1995 law, awards and settlements are paid from an account of the U.S. Treasury.
The scion of a wealthy and politically-connected family, Farenthold's net worth was estimated in 2015 at more than $5.7 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which ranked him the 72nd wealthiest lawmaker in the House.
Farenthold, 55, is the first member of Congress now known to have benefited from a little-known Treasury Department fund created to cover workplace settlements involving lawmakers.
READ ALSO: Congressman Al Green addresses past 'romantic encounter'
The congressional Office of Compliance (OOC) disclosed Friday that the fund paid for only one sexual harassment settlement involving a House lawmaker's office in the past five years, but did not name Farenthold.
In a statement Friday, Farenthold declined to confirm or deny that the claim had involved him. But he confirmed the payment in his interview Monday.
"I wish I could have said something Friday," he told the television station. "I went to the House lawyer and said, 'What can I say?, and they said 'Nothing ... Here's the statement that you can make.'"
Farenthold's account, however, differs from documents provided by the Office of Compliance, which state that the terms of settlement agreements, including any provisions governing disclosure, "are solely determined by the parties and their representatives."
Greene, then 27, alleged in a 2014 federal lawsuit that Farenthold made sexually suggestive remarks and, along with top staff members, created a hostile work environment. She also alleged that he retaliated against her when she complained. She did not allege any inappropriate sexual contact.
In his response to Greene's complaint, Farenthold alleged that she was fired for "poor performance."
The out-of-court settlement came after the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent watchdog agency, cleared Farenthold, concluding that there was no "substantial reason" to believe the allegations against the Corpus Christi Republican.
Greene did not return several calls in the last week requesting comment. Her Washington attorney, Leslie Alderman, also did not return calls Monday.
Until now the details of the settlement, including the $84,000 payout, remained under wraps, apparently by agreement of the parties. At the time, Farenthold was represented by lawyers for the House Employment Counsel.
Though Farenthold was cleared in 2015, the House Ethics Committee indicated Friday that it will review all formal claims of sexual harassment and other misconduct involving members and employees of the House.
He said he hired his own attorney at personal expense over the weekend to review the 2015 settlement, and was advised that he can talk about the "process."
Peace, who served as the congressman's spokeswoman for two years after Greene left, said that while Farenthold always treated her with respect, the same is not true elsewhere in Congress, which she called a "toxic environment."
"My two years with Congressman Farenthold were incredibly valuable," Peace said in an email. "I had an extensive and great career prior to working for the House but I learned so much during my time there. Congressman Farenthold was always very respectful to me and very considerate of my family - as in flexible with my schedule when necessary for the needs of my children as my husband was deployed overseas for the majority of the time I worked there.
"Sadly," she added, "I'm not surprised by the news coming out lately about sexual harassment in Congress as a whole because of other things I witnessed and things that occurred during my time there. It can be a very toxic work environment as a whole but once the Congressman became aware of those issues, he immediately took action on behalf of his staff and did his best to always do the right thing.
"While I don't want to discuss the particulars of that, I am very empathetic to the stories of other women coming forward in recent weeks. I would urge Congress to immediately pass mandatory sexual harassment training for all staffers as I believe it's greatly needed.
The Congressional Accountability Act was created in 1995 to give Congressional employees a way to pursue harassment claims and secure awards for settlements. In all, it has paid out more than $17 million over the past two decades for 264 settlement cases, including sexual harassment cases.
Farenthold criticized the agency for silencing accusers and lawmakers while forcing taxpayers to pay the costs.
"The process is broken," he said, on tape to KRISTV.com.
He said he will now push for more transparency.
A spokeswoman for Ryan did not respond to a request for comment on Farenthold's offer to repay the government.
Farenthold's is by no means the only office to have used public funds to pay for a harassment claim. Detroit Michigan John Conyers Jr. has faced multiple allegations of harassment in recent weeks, and in at least one case is reported to have used his office budgets to settle a complaint in an apparent effort to hide it from public view.
How long are we going to pretend that President Trump is fully rational? How long are we going to ignore the signs that he is dangerously out of control?
Trumps supporters comfort themselves with the idea that hes being crazy like a fox that all the outrageous lies, abrupt reversals, bizarre pronouncements and vicious personal attacks are calculated to achieve some rational goal. Hes just playing to his base, perhaps, or distracting everyone from unpopular legislation cutting taxes for the rich, or trying to deceive other world leaders into thinking he might be unhinged and therefore should be accommodated.
His approval rating plummeted after the inauguration and has been stuck at 40 percent or below since June, according to Gallup. He has managed to alienate our closest allies even drawing a rare rebuke recently from British Prime Minister Theresa May and created a vacuum in world leadership that China is happily beginning to fill.
But Trump stays his wild and erratic course, as if he simply cannot help himself.
The most alarming development is the revelation that Trump continues to entertain paranoid conspiracy theories of the kind usually found beneath tinfoil hats. According to both the Washington Post and the New York Times, Trump still clings to the ridiculous birther theories about where former President Barack Obama was born. The papers also reported that Trump has privately claimed the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which he bragged about harassing and assaulting women, was somehow forged or doctored.
You will recall that Obamas birth in Hawaii has been definitively proved; and also that Trump acknowledged the Access Hollywood tape when it surfaced last year and gave a televised address apologizing for it.
It would be one thing if Trump were broadcasting this nonsense for a reason. Id feel better even if he had a nefarious reason to appeal to racists who cannot accept the legitimacy of the first black president, say, or to encourage his base to doubt everything they see and hear in the media and instead to trust only him. But Trump has raised these off-the-wall subjects in private conversations with aides, associates and a sitting U.S. senator settings in which the president is likely to say what he truly believes.
It is one thing to create a fantasyland for political ends appealing to some voting groups prejudices or giving supporters a reason to excuse bad behavior. It is another thing altogether, however, for Trump to fall into his own rabbit hole and actually believe what he once knew to be untrue.
For decades, when he was a publicity-seeking developer and social-climbing Manhattan playboy, Trumps method was to fabricate his own reality; he even called gossip columnists and pretended to be a publicist named John Miller or John Barron in order to sing his own praises. But he employed this shtick with a wink and a smile, knowing it was all a game. Increasingly he sounds and acts as if he thinks his make-believe is real.
One of the things that first drew attention to Trump as a presidential candidate was his public speaking style free-association, basically, with no discernible filter between brain and lip. Follow one of his speeches and you can track how his mind works.
On Nov. 27, at a White House ceremony honoring Navajo code talkers, he bizarrely slipped in his Pocahontas slur against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who wasnt there and had nothing to do with the event.
On Wednesday, at a Missouri rally touting the tax bill, he came to a line about how it would add rocket fuel to the economy, paused a second, and then reprised his Rocket Man insult of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, whom Trump went on to call a sick puppy.
Maybe Trump is rattled by the Great Reckoning on sexual harassment and assault. Maybe he is worried about the steamrolling Robert Mueller investigation. Or maybe his mental state is just deteriorating.
Whatever the problem is, its serious and its getting worse.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
At some point, whether the presidents more head-scratching actions are a matter of instability or calculation is of little importance. There should be no hesitation in calling out divisiveness, bigotry and hate no matter the roots of those behaviors.
And each of those descriptors fit a number of particular presidential acts, public and private, lately.
When is it appropriate to call a colleague who claims Native American ancestry Pocahontas? At an event to honor Native American war heroes?
When it is appropriate to retweet inflammatory videos from a disreputable, fascist, anti-Muslim source their veracity unverified that purport to show Muslims assaulting people and desecrating a statue of the Virgin Mary?
After you admitted to and apologized for the misbehavior contained within, when is it appropriate to question whether a video in which youve boasted of the ability to grab female genitalia is authentic?
After you previously conceded after strident assertions to the contrary that the nations first black president was indeed U.S. born, when is it appropriate, even in private, to reprise the accusations he wasnt?
The answer in each case is never. President Donald Trump is at the center of all of those actions, and it isnt even a complete list.
Trump being Trump? Or Trump being crazy as a fox to distract from a tax bill that will be disastrous for Americans, from a guilty plea from his former national security adviser, from the most recent missile launch by North Korea, from take your pick of looming crises?
Pocohantas is what Trump snidely called Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts during a ceremony to honor Navajo code talkers who thwarted Japanese attempts to understand U.S. transmissions during World War II a ceremony unfolding before a portrait of Indian killer Andrew Jackson, who signed the bill that prompted the infamous Trail of Tears.
The inflammatory videos came from the Twitter account of Jayda Fransen, deputy leader of the far-right Britain First party.
And now, behind closed doors, Trump is reportedly questioning the authenticity of the Access Hollywood tape and is again questioning the validity of the birth certificate from Hawaii for President Barack Obama.
Shall Americans give the president a pass? In San Antonio, a majority-minority city with a tradition of racial and ethnic harmony, we know the answer. Americans should not become inured to this behavior, lest it become the new normal.
At some point, abiding bigoted behavior can be little different from outright bigotry.
Serving the needy
Re: Mission goes on; Humanitarians followers keep up her work with homeless downtown, front page, Nov. 20:
Thanks for giving front page status to the story of Dorcas Rogers and her mission to serve the homeless at the Church of Hope. She and her volunteers serve the homeless with respect and compassion as they minister to the citys most vulnerable. This ministry takes place not within a fancy megachurch or the carefully landscaped grounds of a suburban neighborhood, but under a downtown bridge!
A major part of being a Christian is meeting people where they live and serving them as they are, not as we wish they would be. Ms. Rogers is a shining example of this, and I pray that her work will continue to be blessed.
Donna Fisher
Keep the vibrancy
Re: Alamo in peril, but Bush plan would save it, Yvette Reyna, Other Views, Nov. 20:
Ms. Reyna gives a nice history of Jose Losoya, but unbelievably fails to mention the Cenotaph and gushes over the talented Bush team that gave us the glass wall.
Alamo Street could be closed and a museum could be built without moving the Cenotaph. The little park behind the Alamo also could be opened without moving it. Any necessary repairs, if any, are better done where it stands.
The only reason moving the Cenotaph is even being considered is one or two powerful people must have got their feelings hurt 30 years ago when they tried to move it and were rejected by the City Council of that era. To them it is like Moby Dick, the great white whale, something that must be destroyed at all costs.
The people have spoken. They dont want a wall built around the Alamo because it would transform the vibrant urban space of today into the sterile, wasteland that existed in 1836.
Our new mayor would do well to listen to the people who elected him. His wealthy new friends may have the big bucks, but they still only have one vote.
Bill Sandidge
Protect our kids
As a registered nurse, every day I saw the devastating impact of tobacco on the health of my patients and those who loved them. Because of this, I know we must do everything in our power to protect our youth and prevent them from starting down a path of deadly addiction that will follow them throughout their lives. If we do not, nearly half a million kids in Texas will ultimately die prematurely from smoking.
Studies show 95 percent of adult smokers began smoking before they turned 21. If we can prevent young people from smoking, we drastically increase the odds that they will never start. By raising the tobacco sales age to 21, we are taking a stand for our youth against tobacco companies that spend $1 million a day marketing their products to kids.
I hope San Antonio will join the list of 215 cities that made the health of their children a priority by raising the tobacco sales age to 21.
Suzanne Lozano, R.N.
Soul mates?
Our president has announced that we Americans must drain the swamp in Washington. We citizens of Texas know that if your intent is to drain the swamp, you cannot continue to add slime. Roy Moore of Alabama is exactly that kind of slime.
Mr. President, you have just proven that he must be your kind of people, huh?
Rick Reyes, Boerne
Threats abound
We definitely need more guns, a pistol in every pocket. Ordinary rifles and shotguns are fine for blasting bunnies and bringing down deer, but we need lots of assault rifles to protect ourselves from all those foreigners who keep sneaking into our country, stealing our jobs and driving us out. Also, we need to protect ourselves against gangs of liberals who will be coming around to confiscate our weapons and burn our Bibles.
Besides that, how are we going to hold off Barack Obama when he invades Texas with that secret army hes been building and inflicts us with the horrors of universal health care and environmental protection?
Also, I hear theres a rainbow battalion planning to take over the Alamo, paint it pink, and convert it to a gay wedding chapel.
How can we hold them off without high-capacity, rapid firing weapons?
Steven Botts
Inaction on guns
Re: What if Sutherland Springs hero didnt have a gun? Rich Lowry, Opinion, Nov. 12:
A better question would be, what if the killer (and many other killers) had no access to an assault weapon? Many of these people would not have died. No citizen should be able to obtain an assault weapon. Our Second Amendment does not guarantee us assault weapons. We should still have weapons to protect our homes, but not this kind.
We need an assault weapon ban ASAP and better background check capabilities. The illegitimate president, Donald Trump, and his cronies in the Republican Party Congress (for the most part) refuse to pass any any kind of gun control because they are controlled by the NRA.
Enough is enough; these weapons are not toys to use for practice or games. They only destroy lives. The NRA, Trump and the Republican Congress have blood on their hands every time a mass murder occurs.
As a nation, we all should have the guts to stand up to these people and do something, because as long as money is flowing into the coffers of the legislators, they will do nothing.
Edward Sosa
THE National Economic Consultative Forum (NECF) has congratulated President Emmerson Mnangagwa following his inauguration as Zimbabwes Head of State and Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF).
President Mnangagwa becomes the countrys second Executive President since independence in 1980 after taking over from President Mugabe, who resigned after being in charge for 37 years.
In their congratulatory message, NECF co-chairpersons Dr Misheck Sibanda, who is also the Chief Secretary to the President and Cabinet, and Dr Robbie Mupawose said they were proud to have President Mnangagwa as their patron.
We write to congratulate you, Your Excellency, the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, on your inauguration as the second Executive President of the Republic of Zimbabwe.
As NECF, we take pride in your visionary and inspirational leadership that you have exuded during the many high level NECF events that were privileged to host you as our guest of honour.
NECF events that quickly come to mind are the annual Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) NECF Business Conference, the Zimbabwe Agricultural Society (ZAS) -NECF Agribusiness Conference and the National Economic Symposium during which the annual Zimbabwe National Competitiveness Report is launched.
It is with great honour and pleasure that the NECF welcomes you as our patron and we stand ready to continue providing a platform for smart partnership dialogue amongst Government, business, labour, academia and civil society in building the economy, read their letter.
NECF said it was happy with President Mnangagwas inauguration speech.
Your inauguration speech remains a great inspiration and beacon to the NECF family and the nation at large.
Separately, former Minister of Finance and Economic Development Dr Ignatius Chombo also sent his congratulatory message to President Mnangagwa.
I saw your inauguration as the second Executive President of the Republic of Zimbabwe with pride and contentment, especially after the goings on in both the party and Government during the last six weeks.
I wish I could attend but I couldnt because I am in hospital for some health problems that doctors are attending to. I missed all recently held meetings because I was away, learning some few hard lessons.
I wish to heartily congratulate you for your elevation to the position of President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, as well as the First Secretary of our beloved revolutionary party Zanu-PF, he said.
Dr Chombo wished President Mnangagwa well in his new roles and responsibilities.
May God give you strength and guidance as you lead us into the future. You have my full support and loyalty in equal measure as I served the former President R.G. Mugabe during his tenure in office.
I am available to serve you in any capacity as you deem fit. Once again, I wish you all the greatest good and may God bless you ever more, he said.
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Econet Wireless founder and Executive Chairman, Dr Strive Masiyiwa is reportedly the next in line for the most powerful position in Zimbabwean politics.
A source close to the internationally recognised Businessman and Philanthropist who is a humble, God-fearing billionaire alleges that Masiyiwa has received this call numerous times from God though he has kept quiet about this calling. Its reported that a number of Men of God have given him this message from God and he himself confirmed hearing this from God.
Strive has been fighting the call from God silently but I think just like the Biblical Jonah, the issue is now getting to him, said the mole who is very close to Dr Masiyiwa.
Over the past 2 years, several prophets and Men of God and even fortune tellers have predicted that Zimbabwes 2018 Presidential elections winner will neither be a Zanu PF nor an MDC principal, but an individual who is currently based in diaspora.
In July last year, United Family International Church (Ufic) leader, Prophet Emmanuel Makandiwa, pulled a shocker by wading into the then raging Zanu PF succession storm, declaring that the 2018 elections would be won by a Zimbabwean presently based in the Diaspora. Makandiwa told his congregants that he was seeing a person coming from outside, who was running towards the people of Zimbabwe.
This person is running in the opposite direction to people, who are running towards him, I see a spider and this spider is following this person, who is the chosen one to lead the people, he said.
To prove that the person Prophet Makandiwa was referring to, wasnt a member of neither Zanu PF or MDC, the former AFM preacher said if that person were to join a reputable opposition when he returns to Zimbabwe, he would certainly win 2018 elections. Most people believed the prophecy was talking about Strive Masiyiwa, who also owns Kwese TV, Steward Bank and was once an MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirais personal advisor up to quite recently.
In May this year, revered Prophet, Madzibaba Wimbo, apparently completely ruled out any of the Zanu PF leaders from leading the country after next years elections. The mysterious Madzibaba Wimbo is the same prophet who reportedly accurately predicted in 1957 that Mugabe whose second name is Gabriel would rule Zimbabwe in the post independence era for over 20 years.
In May this year, the elderly man of God, who is turning 95 in three weeks time on the Christmas day, apparently prophesied earlier this year that a new leader would emerge in Zimbabwe after next years eagerly-anticipated national elections.
He has made another prophesy that a new leader will emerge next year, but did not give names. However, he said the new leader is not among the current favourites who are engaged in Zanu PFs succession battles, but is an outsider, one of the sources at the secretive church said.
The Daily News, reported that a close mole within Madzibaba Wimbos church said the man of God had prophesied that the the winner of the next elections will have a foreign name. Interestingly, the Daily News published the article on 24 July last year, and in the article, the revered prophet is said to have accurately predicted that the military would intervene in Zimbabwean politics.
The prophet said the person who will next lead Zimbabwe will have a foreign name and that there will be great suffering in the country for some months. He also predicted that the army will intervene in politics, the first source claimed.
Dr Strive Masiyiwa added sparked speculation when he ended his Facebook post on 22 December last year with the following statement: Meanwhile, Ive delayed my special announcement until January. This one will blow you away Dont try and speculate on what it might be; youll just end up feeding the fake news hucksters. Just wait for it, and be prepared.
Although early this year, three months later, Masiyiwa was quick to point out that he was not interested in politics, not in the past, not now, and not in the future, however, those close to him have already highlighted that he has been trying to ignore Gods calling which has been delivered to him by nearly countless prophets and pastors, and that he has already played various political roles which have benefited millions of Zimbabweans even to this day.
According to Wikileaks, an international whistle blower that exposes governments top secrets, the Econet founder was the one who floated the idea of a Government of National Unity. According to the leaks, Strive Masiyiwa briefed Pretoria PolCounselor and Harare PolEcon chief on August 7, 2007, on ZANU-PF-MDC negotiations.
Below is an except of the summary of the cable:
The WikiLeaks documents revile that Masiyiwa is quietly floating an idea to shift executive power from President Mugabe to a technocratic Prime Minister. To get Mugabe to accept the deal, Mugabe would remain President until 2010 with some power over the security apparatus, but the Prime Minister would run the economy and get the country back on its feet. All parties would work together to draft a new constitution.
Masiyiwa was open to ideas on who best to sell the plan, but suggested new UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, working through an envoy like former Malaysian PM Mahathir, as possible mediators. We cannot comment on the merits of the plan, but find it encouraging that senior Zimbabwean exile businessmen are discussing solutions to their countrys political and economic crisis. Embassy Harare notes that the concept is increasingly in circulation in Harare and may not require outside intervention.
According to the draft by Masiyiwa, Mugabe gets the extension of his presidential term to 2010, but would share power with a technocratic Prime Minister during the 2007-10 period. The PM would have to be acceptable to 85 percent of the parliament, thus requiring opposition MDC support, and could only be removed by an 85 percent vote in parliament. Source: My Zimbabwe News
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Coalition of Democrats (CODE) president, Elton Mangoma believes the newly appointed President of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Mnangagwa will continue on his predecessor Robert Mugabes dismal economic and political trajectory as the two are cut from the same cloth.
Mangoma was commenting on Mnangagwas cabinet appointment which he said was identical with Mugabes culture of rewarding his backers and disregarding the constitution by appointing the military into cabinet.
The cabinet shows a true ZANU PF mentality of not caring, he has not listened to what people have said and certainly they have not listened to what people are saying.
Their attitude and mind-set is the same as the former president (Mugabe) and president Mnangagwa must have learnt very well from president Mugabe in that you just do what will keep power there is nothing about servant leadership, said Mangoma.
Mangoma said that Mnangagwas decision to appoint Military personnel into cabinet was worrying considering that none of them were being addressed as former military members.
CODE would like to see a professional army that will not meddle in the political spheres of the country.
It could now be a showcase that our military is running affairs of the country, he added.
Mangoma said that the fact that Mnangagwa chose to retain Patrick Chinamasa who he described as the architect of Zimbabwes current financial turmoil and Obert Mpofu who he described as one of the most corrupt public officers in Zimbabwe shows that he (Mnangagwa) is a proper disciple of Mugabeism who has no idea what the Zimbabwean economy needs.
This is in response to the extremely disappointing cabinet line-up president Mnangagwa announced in the night. He is even scared to do it in the light of day.
A good number of these ministers are dead wood they will not deliver anything, they have not delivered anything and will not show any spark, said Mangoma.
President Mnangagwa last week named a 22 member cabinet which included Major General Sibusiso Moyo as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Air Marshall Perrence Shiri as Agriculture Minister.
Before Mnangagwas cabinet announcement, speculation was rife that he was going to include opposition members into a transitional arrangement, however the new Presidents key ally, Christopher Mutsvangwa who had been appointed Information minister appeared in a local publication saying MDC-T leader, Morgan Tsvangirai had put forward demands which could not be met by Mnangagwa.
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Walter Mzembi was the last Foreign Affairs minister to serve under former president Robert Mugabe.
Although his tenure was brief, for it was during his stint that the Mugabes regime fell, it was an event-packed period that has not been recorded.
Daily News News Editor Gift Phiri had an opportunity to hear these events from the horses mouth. Below are excerpts of the interview:
Q: Where were you when the military tanks rolled into Harare? What was your reaction?
A: Before I respond to your questions, let me hasten to say the first casualty of conflict is truth. I am hoping this interview can lay to rest the many falsehoods and fake news that have been generated and disseminated around my name and whereabouts in the most recent past, amounting to hate speech! Thank you for the opportunity to set the record straight. Now back to your first question, we were of course in bed at that wee hour but had been kept wide awake by anxiety over the statement by the military and its implications and also queries from the region on what was going on, remember on the night in question
I had missed a flight to South Africa, where I had been granted an appointment with the South African Foreign Affairs minister in Pretoria in the morning of the 15th and later a meeting with President (Jacob) Zuma at 6pm in Cape Town as part of my regional diplomatic tour but also as the ex-presidents special envoy.
I had just completed a similar assignment in Zambia the previous day, where I had met both the Foreign Affairs minister and President Lungu. So my colleagues in the region were equally anxious. As to our reaction as a family, we stayed on, and only moved into a hotel around 6am, as we were now responding to various messages on the insecurity of Cabinet ministers getting to us from various sources.
Q: Some people suggest you took sanctuary in the Cuban Embassy. Is this correct?
A: We never were visited by the military contrary to falsehoods peddled by social media, and some of my colleagues in government who have been authoritatively peddling lies about my whereabouts and supposed fugitive status. I never left Zimbabwe nor sought sanctuary anywhere including the Cuban Embassy as asserted by some. My immigration and passport records can confirm this, including checking with the said embassies that are clearly irritated by these falsehoods. Its just malice!
Q: So where did you go?
A: I went to a hotel, and after two days was back at my residence.
Q: Why do you think you were expelled from Zanu PF?
A: Retaliatory action from my colleagues. Remember we were clearly split into two factions. The one with the upper hand expels the other! Those expelling others had been expelled the previous week or so, some childish game of sorts hence the intervention by the military who are stockholders of this party.
Q: In hindsight do you think you did the right thing ?
A: None of us is more righteous than the other, I hope one day there can be an honest stocktaking of actions, and a genuine attempt to heal the party. We have no other home outside Zanu PF, so expelling individuals is not the solution for a mature party such as Zanu PF. You sit down in the true spirit of Operation Restore Legacy , and examine the conflict points including generational and ideological misunderstandings and mend the fences, not just physically but mentally.
Q: What do you make of the process used to oust the president?
A: It was unfortunate, what started as a struggle within a struggle of a liberation movement was hijacked by civil society and others and we were unable on our own to sort things out without inviting other interests. Now they talk of going for the kill, and here they refer to Zanu PF, we have to pause and sort things on our own going forward, and clearly an eye for an eye left the world blind. This is my cautionary statement to the party.
Q: Do you believe the ex-president was ousted through a coup? Some are calling it a democratic military coup, which seems like an oxymoron.
A: He denied it himself that it was a coup and instructed me in the diplomatic solution I was championing to communicate that to Sadc. Our courts also adjudged that it wasnt a coup. So it wasnt a coup but a military arbitration in a party in which the military are stockholders. Dont look for it anywhere, nor try it elsewhere, you will not find a precedent. It was made in Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans.
Q: You were suspected of being a member of the so-called G40. Is it a correct assertion?
A: No I wasnt a member of G40 as you know it or as its characterised now. I spent my last two years detached from local politics until after the UNWTO General Assembly in Chengndu, China this last September. So my drama in local politics is two months old, with the results you know now.
Q: Do you buy the argument that the ex-first lady had usurped the authority of the ex-president and there were plans afoot to impose a dynasty?
A: That can only be answered by the former president himself.
Q: Have you spoken to the ex-president or former first lady after November the 21st?
A: Yes
Q: Your expulsion also deprived you of a Cabinet post. You have since been replaced by your predecessor who has become your successor. Your comment?
A: No deployment is permanent. The president must be allowed space to choose his own Foreign minister, its his prerogative! And we serve at his pleasure. Its a very sensitive portfolio, requiring absolute trust, and when you are in there you are the last in terms of loyalty to ship out hence my hanging on until D Day. I am sure even the new president respects and admires my loyalty, he needs a lot more principled people around him, thats my prayer.
Q: Would you accept a Cabinet post in President Mnangagwas administration?
A: Am I ready to work and contribute in any capacity including as a private citizen? So the answer is yes, that notwithstanding Zimbabwe needs all hands on the deck private and public and it should not just be about Cabinet posts, there are people who have been contributing to the well being of Zimbabwe beyond measure as Private Citizens, in business, academia, religion etc. There is life beyond these deployments, so I will lend my absolute support regardless of nomination for Cabinet and in whatever role.
Q: You have interacted in Cabinet with the new President, what type of man is he?
A: Pragmatic, shrewd and maybe reserved bordering on aloofness, but he certainly has bottled up ideas and refreshing thoughts that are only coming out now, which is natural for an astute politician who was reserving his best for future use and avoiding policy clashes!
Q: Do you think he will revive this shrinking economy?
A: He will lead the revival of the economy only to the extent that we all support him. He has said all the right things so far and is on track. He is carrying the cross as our leader but he needs all of us to achieve his vision and mission for a prosperous Zimbabwe.
Q: Zanu PF has recalled five MPs. Are you confident of retaining your seat?
A: I am ready to surrender my seat if it unites the party more going forward provided its done procedurally. An election is in the horizon and I am not sure what is served by taking away my seat from the electors in Masvingo South Constituency purely out of a decision of a central committee that may be completely disconnected to grassroots feelings on the same. They just sit here in Harare and decide for the people without consulting them.
Q: You went to the National Assembly on Wednesday, and reports suggest you shook hands with the new First Lady. Why did you do that?
A: She is the first lady of Zimbabwe and the shadow of the president inside the House of Assembly. Secondly, circumstances had not permitted me to pay my respects and courtesies nor attend the inauguration ceremony, so it was the cultural and normal thing to do. I am still on standby to extend my congratulations to the president himself too.
Q: Are you pursuing a future in politics?
A: President Mnangagwa was an avid supporter of my UNWTO Campaign, politics cannot only be constituency representative and/ or Executive deployment, both of which I am reconsidering going forward. I am yet to meet my constituency to sound them out on this, but if its not Zanu PF representation as predicated by my expulsion from the party, its time for a sabbatical. I will lend my support to any Zanu PF cadre nominated by the Party and I hope they can support me in my private life trajectory as well.
Q: There were claims by some war veterans that during the talks between H.E and the generals you acted as the ex-presidents special envoy ostensibly to mobilise regional support for him to dig in. What happened?
A: No, quite to the contrary the traditional itinerary of a new Foreign minister kicks off with regional courtesy calls, starting with Sadc and its dean who happens to be minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane of South Africa, then it follows the hierarchy of the Sadc Troika which was very relevant at the time, Angola as chair, Zambia, vice chair and Tanzania. The special envoy status is a coveted one, because it allows the visiting minister to engage the host president and share his foreign policy thrust at the highest level in addition to any message one may be delivering at the time from the Head of State.
Its time for a political sabbatical, says Mzembi. So you are not privy to the contents of the special message but should be ready to appraise the host president of issues that may be prompted by him during interaction. So my diplomatic tour was overtaken by events and ostensibly even the special messages because I never embarked on the rest of the tour after Zambia.
Q: You visited Zambia during that interregnum, what was the purpose of your visit?
A: Same objectives as alluded to already, but I came back from Zambia on the evening of the 13th of November, and the mix up of my whereabouts kicked off from there, notwithstanding the fact that I attended the Cabinet session of November 14. Even the reassurance message given to President Lungu that all was well was also overtaken by events thereafter.
There was a very naughty string of fake news that sought to bring the integrity of our meeting and President Lungus position on Zimbabwe into disrepute. I am glad he shamed the purveyors of these falsehoods by bringing a high powered delegation of three presidents to the inauguration, two of them past Presidents. It was the highest expression of endorsement of President Mnangagwa seen in Zambia as their son too because of shared family links dating back to the liberation struggle. As vice president, he was recently the guest of honour to the class of 1975 law school celebrations , which he was part of at UNZA.
Q: President Lungu later despatched ex-president Kaunda to Harare to lean on the old man. Were you involved in that shuttle diplomacy?
A: We were pleasantly interrupted from a lengthy conversation with former president Mugabe when President Kaunda telephoned announcing his arrival , and he just exclaimed Oh KK , and indicated he would call me back. Of course, I was constantly in touch with both the Foreign Affairs minister and President Lungu. It was their own decision. On my earlier visit I had sought to see ex-president Kaunda which I have done before regardless of deployment, because he is my mentor having been partly educated in Zambia myself too. In 2015, he was the Guest of Honour at my firstborn son Kombas wedding in Lusaka.
Q: To what extent where you involved in the talks?
A: I was in the loop on the Sadc diplomatic solution, and the point person with regards to communication with ex-president Mugabe and the region, and would consult him frequently on direction and vice versa. This in hindsight seemed disconnected to the local mediation effort. The diplomatic solution to be communicated by presidents Zuma and Lourenco of Angola was to deliver the same outcome as the people have now in President Mnangagwa except that it was a sequential one, starting with our Congress endorsing him for presidency of the party in December, and reappointment to vice president in government and then president Mugabe hand holding him to elections in 2018.
It was a solution in the interest of healing relations between the two of them and inside the party which has been raven by expulsions and counter expulsions. The mediators are presiding over sister liberation movements and had no interest in an implosion of Zanu PF, contrary to the indifference which was coming from civil society and other political parties who were assisting the demise of our party in the name of the Mugabe must go mantra . .There is contagion effect on the Region if one of liberation parties is under siege.
Q: When did you sign off as Foreign minister. There are claims you stood with Mugabe, to the end until he capitulated, why and how?
A: Given the diplomatic networking role not known to many, I am sure you appreciate the need for my professional conduct at the time, and why it was necessary to abstain from processes that were taking place in the party and in Parliament, they would have clearly conflicted my role in this whole saga. I chose to stand on principle and the rest is history. All this coordination and mediation work with Sadc happened from my home office, not the Cuban Embassy or any other country as shared at press conferences by comrades who were trying to cash in on my whereabouts and perceived demise for their own sinister interests.
I played my anticipated diplomatic role diligently to the end and I do not feel it was an exercise in circumventing a peoples will at all. I go honourably with my head high after 10 years of illustrious service and dedication to my country, and president and I have no regrets in being the last man standing. I was observing my oath of loyalty consistent with the seniority of the office I was holding.
Q: Your final word?
A: Hail the new President, His Excellency Cde ED Mnangagwa! It is time to move on for everyone, time for healing, for forgiveness, time to love, to smile, to laugh , time to live. As in 1980, lets turn our swords into ploughshares. Let bygones be bygones!
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NEW YORK In Mexico, Bloomberg reports that the key to online shopping is offline payments, which is why the e-commerce giant allows people to pay for goods ordered on its website at convenience stores.
In a nation where just about everyone prefers to pay cash, Amazon.com Inc. and Wal-Mart de Mexico SAB are pushing a hybrid payment system to encourage more shoppers to go online. Amazon is letting people pay for goods ordered on its website at the corner convenience store, while Wal-Marts local unit and retail giant Grupo Elektra SAB have set up kiosks at megastores that work much the same way. Even MercadoLibre Inc., Latin Americas biggest online marketplace, has gotten in on the trend, writes Bloomberg.
The news source adds that shift stems from a population thats slow to set up a bank account, along with less than half of the adults in Mexico having a credit card. China and India have faced similar challenges and allow delivery people to accept cash payments; however, thats not an option in Mexico because of sky-high rates of assault and robberies.
Bloomberg says that retail in Mexico is a $168 billion business, but the e-commerce market was valued at just $17.6 billion in 2016, and more than half of those online purchases were made by consumers paying by cash in person. To tap into Mexicos consumer market, Amazon launched its Amazon Cash program in November, an online-offline hybrid marketplace that allows customers to deposit money in an account with the online retailer at more than 6,000 convenience stores and pharmacies throughout Mexico, and use the credit to make online purchases, notes the news source.
Theres not a single important retailer in Mexico thats not investing heavily in e-commerce, Eric Perez-Grovas, president of the Mexico online sales association, AMVO, told Bloomberg. Companies that have been in Mexico forever have brand recognition and their physical stores allow customers to go in, make payments and collect packages.
The competitive landscape for Mexico's e-commerce has intensified a great deal, Philip Behn, senior vice president of e-commerce at Walmex, told Bloomberg. Walmex, the local unit of Walmart, has about 2,000 kiosks throughout its stores that allow for online payments and serve as a training point for older or non-tech-savvy shoppers. Likewise, Elektra has about 250 kiosks in its stores. Its a process of evangelizing, Juan Carlos Garcia, Elektras director of e-commerce, told the news source. Many customers have never shopped online.
OXXO is on the forefront of the trend to bring online payments into its convenience stores throughout Mexico, working with MercadoLibre and Elektra to accept payments at its nearly 15,000 locations. Last year, OXXO stores accounted for 35% of such transactions in Mexico.
And although people may be slow to switch from unbanked to banked in Mexico, they are embracing technology. Bloomberg writes that in 2016 almost two-thirds of the population had access to Internet, and 91% had smartphones.
Retailers are constantly looking for ways to make their payments more flexible, Euromonitor International said in a report, adding that online payment kiosks represent a good strategy in terms of helping consumers feel more confident when buying products online.
Find the newest releases to watch from National Geographic on Disney+, including acclaimed documentary series and films Fire of Love, The Rescue, Limitless with Chris Hemsworth and We Feed People.
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), the National Commission for Securities and the Stock Market and the National Commission for Financial Service Markets Regulation have said that it is impossible to declare cryptocurrencies monetary units, currency and a payment unit of another country, currency valuable, e-money, securities or quasi-money within the current Ukrainian legislation.
"We, financial regulators of Ukraine, continue working on the legal status of cryptocurrencies and legal regulation of transactions with them, taking into account the position of regulators of other countries and recent trends in development of these technologies," Deputy NBU Governor Oleh Churiy said, presenting the statement of the financial regulators in Kyiv last week.
He spoke against attempts to hastily regulate the status of cryptocurrencies in the Ukrainian legislation.
"We believe that amending the Ukrainian legislation should not be in hurry, as today there is no unified position towards cryptocurrencies in the world," Churiy said.
He said that different regulators interpret cryptocurrencies in an absolutely different ways: sometime it is considered as a payment unit, sometimes an intangible asset and Financial Action Task Force (FATF) considers it decentralized virtual currency.
"The approach to legislative regulation should be careful and grounded. It is linked to protection of rights of investors into these cryptocurrencies," he said, finding it difficult to disclose concrete terms.
He said that this regulation should not hinder the use and development of modern IT technologies in the financial sector and entail outflow of specialists and capitals or the transfer of businesses outside Ukraine.
The financial regulators again warned of a large number of risks in operations with cryptocurrencies.
Head of the National Commission for Securities and the Stock Market Tymur Khromaev said that the commission is ready to take over the responsibility for setting the status of some investment assets, in particular those similar to crowdfunding ICO. However, amendments to the legislation about the regulator should be made.
He also said that the registration of bitcoin futures by the commission under an initiative of a stock exchange should not be considered the recognition of bitcoin, as this is a cash settlement stock index contract.
As for taxation of transactions with cryptocurrencies, Churiy said that representatives of the Finance Ministry and the State Fiscal Service have their members of the working group.
A mother and father in Colorado say their 10-year-old daughter committed suicide over video of a fight with an alleged bully. Ashawnty Davis, was only in fifth grade.
She was a happy girl until everything changed at the end of October when she was involved in a fight after school, her parents told KDVR.
They say it was her first fight and it was recorded by another student and posted on an app called Musical.ly.
The video shows Ashawnty and another student fighting, while other kids watched. Ashawnty's mother, Latoshia Harris, says her daughter had been confronting the girl who had been bullying her.
"I saw my daughter was scared," she said.
The video is difficult to watch. But Ashawnty's parents are sharing it to help other parents.
"She was devastated when she found out that it had made it to Musical.ly," said her father, Anthony Davis.
"My daughter came home two weeks later and hanged herself in the closet," said Harris.
She was on life support for two weeks after passing away Wednesday.
Her parents say she was the victim of "bullycide." The term is used when someone takes his or her own life because of bullying.
"We have to stop it, and we have to stop it within our kids," said Davis.
"I want other parents to know it's happening," Harris said. "That was my baby, and I love my baby, and I just want mothers to listen."
The school district issued the following statement regarding the incident:
PrivatBank has filed a claim to the police in Dnipropetrovsk region demanding to open a criminal case against facts of filing claims seeking to collect a debt under credit agreements of the bank by unidentified persons established by the bank, PrivatBank has said in a press release.
"The security service of PrivatBank reported that on November 23 during the monitoring of the Judiciary of Ukraine website the fact of filing three claims seeking to collect a debt under credit agreements to the business court of Dnipropetrovsk region on behalf of PrivatBank was revealed. The claims were filed by unidentified persons, without notifying the bank and without the required permits and powers," the bank said.
According to the report, the claims were filed allegedly on behalf of PrivatBank and allegedly signed by an employee of the financial institution. Similar cases regarding the fabrication of claims to business courts on behalf of the bank were recorded in other cities of Ukraine.
By Online Desk
CHENNAI: Actor Vishal after filing his nomination for contesting in the RK Nagar bypoll said that delay in civic polls, bad state of hospitals, schools were some of the reasons that led him to take a sudden political plunge.
The actor earlier paid respects to late AIADMK Supremo J Jayalalithaa, at her memorial before filing his nomination at the RK Nagar election office on Monday. He also paid respects to former Tamil Nadu chief ministers CN Annadurai, K Kamaraj and MG Ramachandran (MGR).
READ HERE | Vishal enters RK Nagar bypoll race, rushes in where Rajinikanth, Kamal Haasan wait to tread
According to a press release from his team, Vishal first visited the Ramapuram house of AIADMK's late founder, M G Ramachandran before heading to the Amma Memorial at the Marina Beach.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has welcomed Vishal's entry into politics. The AAP convenor has tweeted that Vishal's entry will inspire many youngsters and has said that they should meet up during the actor's next Delhi visit.
Vishal, the general secretary of the Nadigar Sangam, who Saturday announced his decision to contest the RK Nagar bypoll as an independent candidate, is yet to reveal the reason behind his surprise entry into politics.
He, however, has promised to break the silence after filing his nomination at the election office.
Independent candidates cause ruckus inside #RKNagar election office for being made to wait to file nomination. Say @VffVishal should also wait in line. But will he? @NewIndianXpress #RKNagar #bypoll pic.twitter.com/qwwmt442Rn Samuel Merigala (@themerigala) December 4, 2017
He is scheduled to launch a mobile app V Shall to interact with the people. The actor will explain the reason for his decision on Monday. He has taken this decision on his own without anyones pressure, sources close to Vishal told Express.
. @VishalKOfficial seeks blessings of #Kamarajar giving respect with garland before filing nomination for #RKnagarByElection. All looking positive for #Vishal with the blessings of God, Parents, Blessed Souls and people with good vibes. pic.twitter.com/oq6kiauJ3N Johnson PRO (@johnsoncinepro) December 4, 2017
Vishal was elected as the General Secretary of the Nadigar Sangam in October 2015 and is also the president of the Tamil Film Producers' council.
Other major regional parties have already announced their candidates for the RK Nagar bypoll. AIADMK has fielded E Madhusudhanan, while Marudhu Ganesh will be contesting for DMK.
Actor Vishal paying his respects at Amma Samadhi on Monday morning. (Express Photo | Sunish Surendran)
Meanwhile, sidelined AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakar has also filed his nomination for the bypoll.
Karu Nagarajan has been announced as BJP's candidate, while late former CM Jayalalithaas niece Deepa Jayakumar is also set to contest.
Polling is scheduled to take place on December 21 and the results will be announced on December 24.
Following late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaas death in December 2016, the RK Nagar bypolls were originally slated for April this year, but was later cancelled after allegations of voter bribery.
RK Nagar has significant numbers of people of the Nadar community, fishermen and Christians, as also a sizeable population of Telugu-speaking people. Already, the ruling AIADMK has fielded veteran politician E Madhusudhanan in this constituency. There is a likelihood that Vishal may split the votes of Madhusudhanan, who also hails from the Telugu-speaking Naidu community.
(With inputs from Express News Service and T Muruganandham)
CHENNAI: Actor Vishal after filing his nomination for contesting in the RK Nagar bypoll said that delay in civic polls, bad state of hospitals, schools were some of the reasons that led him to take a sudden political plunge. The actor earlier paid respects to late AIADMK Supremo J Jayalalithaa, at her memorial before filing his nomination at the RK Nagar election office on Monday. He also paid respects to former Tamil Nadu chief ministers CN Annadurai, K Kamaraj and MG Ramachandran (MGR). READ HERE | Vishal enters RK Nagar bypoll race, rushes in where Rajinikanth, Kamal Haasan wait to tread According to a press release from his team, Vishal first visited the Ramapuram house of AIADMK's late founder, M G Ramachandran before heading to the Amma Memorial at the Marina Beach. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has welcomed Vishal's entry into politics. The AAP convenor has tweeted that Vishal's entry will inspire many youngsters and has said that they should meet up during the actor's next Delhi visit. Vishal, the general secretary of the Nadigar Sangam, who Saturday announced his decision to contest the RK Nagar bypoll as an independent candidate, is yet to reveal the reason behind his surprise entry into politics. He, however, has promised to break the silence after filing his nomination at the election office. Independent candidates cause ruckus inside #RKNagar election office for being made to wait to file nomination. Say @VffVishal should also wait in line. But will he? @NewIndianXpress #RKNagar #bypoll pic.twitter.com/qwwmt442Rn Samuel Merigala (@themerigala) December 4, 2017 He is scheduled to launch a mobile app V Shall to interact with the people. The actor will explain the reason for his decision on Monday. He has taken this decision on his own without anyones pressure, sources close to Vishal told Express. . @VishalKOfficial seeks blessings of #Kamarajar giving respect with garland before filing nomination for #RKnagarByElection. All looking positive for #Vishal with the blessings of God, Parents, Blessed Souls and people with good vibes. pic.twitter.com/oq6kiauJ3N Johnson PRO (@johnsoncinepro) December 4, 2017 Vishal was elected as the General Secretary of the Nadigar Sangam in October 2015 and is also the president of the Tamil Film Producers' council. Other major regional parties have already announced their candidates for the RK Nagar bypoll. AIADMK has fielded E Madhusudhanan, while Marudhu Ganesh will be contesting for DMK. Actor Vishal paying his respects at Amma Samadhi on Monday morning. (Express Photo | Sunish Surendran) Meanwhile, sidelined AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakar has also filed his nomination for the bypoll. Karu Nagarajan has been announced as BJP's candidate, while late former CM Jayalalithaas niece Deepa Jayakumar is also set to contest. Polling is scheduled to take place on December 21 and the results will be announced on December 24. Following late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaas death in December 2016, the RK Nagar bypolls were originally slated for April this year, but was later cancelled after allegations of voter bribery. RK Nagar has significant numbers of people of the Nadar community, fishermen and Christians, as also a sizeable population of Telugu-speaking people. Already, the ruling AIADMK has fielded veteran politician E Madhusudhanan in this constituency. There is a likelihood that Vishal may split the votes of Madhusudhanan, who also hails from the Telugu-speaking Naidu community. (With inputs from Express News Service and T Muruganandham)
By IANS
NEW DELHI/THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Veteran actor-filmmaker Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the 70s and early 80s, died on Monday at a hospital in Mumbai. But Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said he was getting condolence calls.
'"We're getting condolence calls in the office. Reports of my demise are, if not exaggerated, at least premature. #ShashiKapoor," Tharoor tweeted on Monday.
The mistake happened after a news channel's Twitter handle wrote Shashi Tharoor instead of Shashi Kapoor, who was 79.
But the politician has "no problem" as "mistakes happen. Glad to be able to crack a smile at a tragic moment".
Tharoor even paid tribute to the youngest son of late Prithviraj Kapoor and brother of late Raj Kapoor and Shammi Kapoor.
We're getting condolence calls in the office! Reports of my demise are, if not exaggerated, at least premature. @TimesNow #ShashiKapoor https://t.co/nbtZGcdQTa Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017
"I feel a part of me is gone. A great actor, smart, cosmopolitan, impossibly handsome and w/a name that was often confused w/mine. (My office got two calls from journalists today about my reportedly serious ill-health!) I will miss Shashi Kapoor. Condolences to his family and all his fans," he tweeted.
I feel a part of me is gone. A great actor, smart, cosmopolitan, impossibly handsome & w/a name that was often confused w/mine. (My office got two calls from journalists today about my reportedly serious ill-health!) I will miss #ShashiKapoor. Condolences2his family&all his fans pic.twitter.com/fSz3jafPZJ Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017
In Thiruvananthapuram, a close aide of Tharoor told IANS that the MP's office in Delhi has, since Monday evening, hadbeen getting a flurry of telephone calls from several people, including journalists, with all in a hushed voice asking about Tharoor.
The aide said initially all of them were indeed perplexed on how come a common cold and cough that Tharoor had since arriving in Nerw Delhi on Sunday night could lead to so many calls.
"Later, we understood when it surfaced there was a goof up committed by a TV channel who got it wrong after Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor passed away," said the aide.
Thanks. No problem. Mistakes happen. Glad to be able to crack a smile at a tragic moment. https://t.co/3VxIpZ5yED Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017
Tharoor, who was in Kerala apital and was moving around for a few days after Cyclone Ockhi hit the district's coastal villages, had caught a bad cold and cough.
NEW DELHI/THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Veteran actor-filmmaker Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the 70s and early 80s, died on Monday at a hospital in Mumbai. But Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said he was getting condolence calls. '"We're getting condolence calls in the office. Reports of my demise are, if not exaggerated, at least premature. #ShashiKapoor," Tharoor tweeted on Monday. The mistake happened after a news channel's Twitter handle wrote Shashi Tharoor instead of Shashi Kapoor, who was 79. But the politician has "no problem" as "mistakes happen. Glad to be able to crack a smile at a tragic moment". Tharoor even paid tribute to the youngest son of late Prithviraj Kapoor and brother of late Raj Kapoor and Shammi Kapoor. We're getting condolence calls in the office! Reports of my demise are, if not exaggerated, at least premature. @TimesNow #ShashiKapoor https://t.co/nbtZGcdQTa Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017 "I feel a part of me is gone. A great actor, smart, cosmopolitan, impossibly handsome and w/a name that was often confused w/mine. (My office got two calls from journalists today about my reportedly serious ill-health!) I will miss Shashi Kapoor. Condolences to his family and all his fans," he tweeted. I feel a part of me is gone. A great actor, smart, cosmopolitan, impossibly handsome & w/a name that was often confused w/mine. (My office got two calls from journalists today about my reportedly serious ill-health!) I will miss #ShashiKapoor. Condolences2his family&all his fans pic.twitter.com/fSz3jafPZJ Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017 In Thiruvananthapuram, a close aide of Tharoor told IANS that the MP's office in Delhi has, since Monday evening, hadbeen getting a flurry of telephone calls from several people, including journalists, with all in a hushed voice asking about Tharoor. The aide said initially all of them were indeed perplexed on how come a common cold and cough that Tharoor had since arriving in Nerw Delhi on Sunday night could lead to so many calls. "Later, we understood when it surfaced there was a goof up committed by a TV channel who got it wrong after Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor passed away," said the aide. Thanks. No problem. Mistakes happen. Glad to be able to crack a smile at a tragic moment. https://t.co/3VxIpZ5yED Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017 Tharoor, who was in Kerala apital and was moving around for a few days after Cyclone Ockhi hit the district's coastal villages, had caught a bad cold and cough.
By Online Desk
Congress President-elect Rahul Gandhi today visited some places hit by the Cyclone Ochki in southern Kerala that has claimed 63 lives in the state, most of them fishermen, and pitched for a better warning system to prevent recurrence of such tragedies.
Thousands of fishermen and their families in Kerala and Tamil Nadu are continuously holding mass protests, demanding for search operations to continue and for relief to be provided faster.
Search and rescue operations to trace the fishermen missing in the aftermath of cyclone Ockhi continued for the 12th day today. As many as 433 fishermen from Tamil Nadu and 186 from Kerala are yet to be traced.
The cyclone, earlier this week, had finally dissipated over the Arabian Sea, sparing Gujarat from destruction.
ALSO READ | No tsunami says IMD as false WhatsApp alerts create panic
Here are all the latest updates:
The Union Home Ministry is constituting an inter ministerial central committee for the spot assessment of damage and admissibility of claims of the states hit by Cyclone Ockhi.
House-to-house verification process is going on and a final figure of the missing fishermen would be known once the process was over, say officials. [READ FULL REPORT]
"The farmers have a ministry that looks after their interests and I think it is time that we create a ministry for the fishermen to look after their interests and make sure they are protected," said Congress leader Rahul Gandhi after visiting fishermen families in affected areas in Kerala. [READ FULL REPORT]
TN government hikes compensation for non-fisherman families from Rs 4 lakhs to Rs 10 lakhs. ( READ )
The death toll in the Ockhi cyclone that hit the Kerala coast mounted to 65 with more bodies being recovered.
DMK petitions TN governor Banwarilal Purohit to expedite rescue work post-Ockhi.
Efforts are on to identify the recovered bodies through DNA test.
In a bid to set up a mechanism to ensure the safety of fishermen, Kerala CM Vijayan said a system was being planned in association with the Indian Space Research Organisation.
Kerala State control room officials said three bodies were found off the coast of Kozhikode and three from Kochi. [READ FULL REPORT]
The financial assistance of Rs 20 lakh for families of Kerala fishermen killed in the cyclone would be given in one go. An amount of Rs five lakh would be given to those who are seriously injured and are not able to go to work in future as an "alternative livelihood" initiative.
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Wednesday said the Centre has agreed to continue search operations for the missing fishermen in Cyclone Ockhi that hit the state's coast on November 29 and 30.
The death toll due to Ockhi cyclone, which hit the Kerala coast, rose to 52 on Tuesday as more bodies were recovered and the search for the missing fishermen in the high seas continued.
The Tamil Nadu CM Palaniswami on Tuesday announced Rs 20 lakh compensation for the kin of fishermen who died in the cyclone that devastated the coastal areas of the state recently.
Pope Francis has enquired about the hardships and sufferings caused to Kerala's fishermen community in the Ockhi cyclone that ravaged the coastal belt on November 30.
The Tamil Nadu government on Tuesday announced 'livelihood assistance' ranging from Rs 48,500 to Rs 63,500 per hectare for horticulture farmers of cyclone Ockhi-battered Kanyakumari district.
Kerala fishermen protestors took to the street by waving black flags and photos of the dead and missing fishermen walked about two km from Palayam to Raj Bhavan raising slogans, bringing the traffic to a standstill on the busy stretch.
The death toll in the Ockhi cyclone in Kerala rose to 40 on Monday with the recovery of two more bodies even as the search operations to trace the missing fishermen entered the 10th day.
Search and rescue operations to trace the fishermen missing in the aftermath of Ockhi cyclone continued for 10th day today even as 67 persons caught in the storm, returned to Kochi coast.
The Goa government would provide compensation to shacks having legal validity, for the damages suffered during the Cyclone Ockhi last week. [FULL REPORT]
The Indian naval ships engaged in search and rescue mission in the aftermath of Cyclone Ockhi today continued their operations in the high seas, searching area till the Maldives. No stranded boats , fishermen or floating bodies have been found in the sea by the naval search team during the last 72 hours, the official said.
Kerala Governor P Sathasivam will contribute a month's salary to the special fund being raised for the victims of cyclone Ockhi.
The Kerala government has asked the Indian Armed Forces and the Coast Guard to continue search operations for fishermen missing in high seas post-Cyclone Ockhi for 10 more days.
#HADR #CycloneOckhi #OpSahayam #SAR Based on reports by IN Boeing P8 i aircraft, INS Kalpeni was sent to Off Sesostris Bank/Bassas de Pedro (a traditional fishing area off Lakshadweep island).About 17 boats with 180 plus fishermen have been located.@DefenceMinIndia @nsitharaman SpokespersonNavy (@indiannavy) December 8, 2017
Fishing vessel as seen from the aircraft. This video captures the essence of what Navy Boeing P-8i is doing - systematic search of every inch of possible/ probable area & providing hope to the stranded till they are rescued by our ships @nsitharaman pic.twitter.com/1sY0VXul42 SpokespersonNavy (@indiannavy) December 6, 2017
People receive essential commodities at a relief camp following cyclone Ockhi in the Kanyakumari district on Saturday. (PTI)
Given orders to Maharashtra Maritime Board and Collector, Sindhudurg Dist. to make all arrangements for the stranded fishermen. Local authorities are already with them and taking care of all arrangements, tweets Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis.
In all 68 fishing boats have reached, out of which 66 are from Kerala and 2 from Tamil Nadu with total 952 fisherman on board.
All are safe.
Maharashtra will completely look after everyone till weather permits them to go back. @nsitharaman @BJP4Keralam
Devendra Fadnavis (@Dev_Fadnavis) December 2, 2017
A fresh spell of heavy rain is in store in some areas of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry with a low pressure area forming over south Andaman sea, which is "very likely" to become a depression over Bay of Bengal . It is very likely to become a depression over southeast Bay of Bengal and neighbourhood during the next 36 hours. It is also very likely to intensify further and move towards north Tamil Nadu south Andhra Pradesh coasts during the next 3-4 days. (IMD)
Though many fishermen from Kerala were brought ashore safely and admitted to hospitals, many are yet to recover from the shock of wrestling the lashing waves and seeing death face-to-face. Stephan, a fisherman hailing from nearby Poonthura, said: "It was the first time we were experiencing such huge waves and a rough sea. Luckily, the rescue boat came back and saved us." Most of the rescued fishermen had bruises all over their bodies and were seen shivering and begging for hot water and food when brought ashore. (PTI)
Stranded fisherman being brought to Kerala coast by Indain Navy personnel in Kochi on Saturday. (PTI)
Tamil Nadu CM K Palaniswami today requested the Centre to deploy the Indian Navy and Coast Guard for the search and rescue of fishermen who have not returned so far, and that helicopters of Coast Guard and Navy should be deployed for this purpose. Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh assured the AIADMK leader that the Centre would provide the assistance required to rescue the fishermen. (PTI)
Several roads that connect Kanyakumari with many interior parts have got cut or were fully damaged due to heavy rainfall following the impact of cyclone Ockhi in the district on Saturday. (PTI)
A Coast Guard advisory here said the status of weather and sea conditions should be checked on television, radio, newspapers and smartphone applications before venturing out into the sea. The merchant ships should also be alert and avoid the path of Cyclone Ockhi, it said. Fishing boats should remain in groups and during distress all the crew should remain together, it said.
DMK working president M K Stalin urged Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in his letter to direct the Coast Guard to search and rescue "thousands of fishermen fighting for their lives in the mid sea, so as to prevent further loss of lives due to the Ockhi cyclone".
Steps have been taken to prevent any possible outbreak of epidemic in rain-hit areas of
Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu Health minister C Vijayabhaskar said today.
A relief worker places sand bags on the banks of a beach in Kochi in wake of cyclone Ockhi on Saturday. (PTI)
Leader of the opposition in the Kerala Assembly Ramesh Chennithala today urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to declare cyclone Ockhi as a national disaster. He also urged the Kerala government to increase the financial aid for the injured at least up to Rs 50,000 from the present Rs 15,000. Lack of coordination had affected the government's relief and rescue operations, launched post Ockhi, he alleged. (PTI)
The Southern Railway announced partial and full cancellation of some trains in the Kaniyakumari-Nagercoil section. One train service was also rescheduled. (PTI
Meanwhile, relatives of missing fishermen from Kaniyakumari staged a road blockade demanding the fishermen be rescued at the earliest. Scores of women also staged protest at Chinnathurai in that district.
There has been a huge demand for generator sets following the devastation caused by cyclone Ockhi in the Kanyakumari region on Saturday. (PTI)
In Kanyakumari, power supply had been restored even as efforts are on to resume power supply in neighbouring areas like Nagercoil and Kuzhithurai. Officials expressed confidence that the power supply would be restored in the entire district by tomorrow.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami announced Rs 25 crore for expediting relief and restoration work in the district . ( PTI)
261 persons rescued by @IndiaCoastGuard @adgpi and @IAF_MCC in #CycloneOckhi @NewIndianXpress pic.twitter.com/ywhzBQLJnP
Kiran_TNIE (@tniekiran1) December 2, 2017
The Coast Guard informed in a press release that on November 30, the Coast Guard District Headquarters in Kerala was informed that around 70-80 fishermen were stranded at sea due to the storm. The Coast Guard immediately sailed as many as nine ships towards Search and Rescue (SAR) efforts. Further, ships based at New Mangalore were also sailed towards Kerala coast to undertake the rescue of stranded fishermen. As the cyclone intensified, coordinated search by Coast Guard ships and aircraft continued in extremely rough weather with wind speed gusting up to 150 kmph. Ships at Mumbai and Goa were also placed on maximum alert to augment efforts as required, the press release read. (PTI)
As per the last report, a total of 79 stranded fishermen have been saved by the Coast Guard in coordination with other agencies. Also, the fisheries department has intimated that about 25 boats with 250 personnel are still in distress at sea.
A man watches a road that has been cut off due to floods following the heavy rainfall caused by the cyclone Ockhi which left heavy damage in the Kanyakumari district on Saturday. (PTI)
138 fishermen have been rescued from the Lakshadweep islands. (PTI)
So far 393 people from Kerala have been rescued, Kerala CM Vijayan said, as the state government announced a compensation of Rs 10 lakh to the family of those who died in the storm, in addition to the financial assistance of Rs four lakh being given by the fisheries department.Of the rescued, 132 fishermen were from the state capital Thiruvananthapuram, 66 from Kozhikode, 55 from Kollam, 40 from Thrissur, and 100 from Kanyakumari. (PTI)
In Lakshadweep, 31 relief camps have been opened in the10 inhabited islands. So far, 1,047 people have been evacuated to the relief camps, official sources said. No casualties have been reported, with the worst-affected islands being Minicoy and Kalpeni. Seven people have lost their lives in Kerala in rain-related incidents over the past two days, official sources said. (PTI)
Cyclone Ockhi has so far claimed 13 lives in Sri Lanka . Power supply, essential services and air traffic was disrupted in the stormy weather that left several buildings damaged and trees uprooted in its wake. READ FULL REPORT HERE
#CycloneOckhi update @IndiaCoastGuard ship rescued 15 fishermen at sea off Vizhinjam/Quilon (Kerala) Coast and heading towards shore for safe disembarkation of fisher-folks @DefenceMinIndia @SpokespersonMoD pic.twitter.com/39gJrfI20Z
Indian Coast Guard (@IndiaCoastGuard) December 2, 2017
Authorities including the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Coast Guard and Navy have rescued about 223 fishermen and evacuated thousands of people from cyclone hit areas, officials said, as they continued their operations on Saturday.
While INS Nireekshak, INS Jamuna and INS Sagardhwani are continuing search and rescue operations in their designated areas along the coast off Vizhinjam in Thiruvananthapuram and Kollam, two ships INS Shardul and INS Sharda are heading towards Lakshadweep, a defence spokesman said. (PTI) The naval ships, which left from the Southern Naval Command here yesterday, are likely to reach Lakshadweep this evening.
The Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Lanba briefed me on the on-going rescue operations #CycloneOchki . More fishermen rescued this morning. Rescue work to continue.Some rescued fishermen waiting in Lakshadweep Isle to get back. Details @indiannavy @DefenceMinIndia @IndiaCoastGuard
Nirmala Sitharaman (@nsitharaman) December 2, 2017
The Kerala state government has announced a compensation of Rs. 10 lakh to the families of the deceased.
#Kerala Locals have blocked National Highway for last five hours in Trivandrum's Thumba, demand better relief measures & rescue of 6 fishermen missing from the area #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/rcTY0gyDty
ANI (@ANI) December 2, 2017
Six boats and 73 fishermen that went missing in the sea have been brought back, the Fisheries Minister of Tamil Nadu, D Jayakumar, informed on Saturday. (ANI)
Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan slammed rumour mongers on Saturday after it came to light that Friday's reports of a Japanese merchant ship rescuing 60 Kerala fishermen caught in the deep seas, was "fake". It was Thiruvananthapuram district Collector S.Vasuki who told the media, on Friday evening, that she wished to thank the Japanese government as one of their ships had rescued 60 fishermen and said they would arrive at the Vizhinjam coast. (IANS.) [READ FULL REPORT]
Locals in Thiruvananthapuram's Poonthura came out in protest alleging rescue operations have been inadequate. (ANI)
According to Thiruvananthapuram district Collector S Vasuki, 102 fishermen from the city who had gone into the sea have not been able to contact their relatives. [READ FULL REPORT HERE]
Kerala: Locals evacuated to rehabilitation centre in Kochi's Chellanam. #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/iAwj7Q7g94
Several houses suffered damage, trees got uprooted and communication lines were disrupted as rains accompanied by strong winds lashed the Lakshadweep Islands under the influence of Cyclone Ockhi. [ READ FULL REPORT]
INS Nireekshak rescued two fishermen off Alappuzha coast. INS Sagardhwani fished out one cadaver, 30 km off Thiruvananthapuram coast. The ship had earlier found another cadaver. (PTI)
PM Modi dialled Tamil Nadu CM K Palaniswami and enquired about the damage caused by the cyclone, which also battered parts of Kerala. [READ FULL REPORT HERE]
The Tamil Nadu government has said it will soon seek central funds for the damage caused by Cyclone Ockhi in the southern parts of the state, with Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli districts being the worst hit.
As many as 218 fishermen from various parts of southern Kerala who were missing at sea since Thursday have been rescued and brought back so far, even as Cyclone Ockhi continued its menacing north-westward path along the Arabian Sea. [READ REPORT HERE]
A rescued fisherman rushed to the ambulance from the technical area of the Thiruvananthpuram airport on Friday afternoon. Express Photo | Kaviyoor Santhosh
According to a CWC advisory, the west-flowing rivers in Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Pathanamthitta, Idukki, Kottayam, Alappuzha and Ernakulam in Kerala are likely to rise over the next 24 hours and then, slowly fall as the rains reduced.
Three deaths were reported in Kerala and one in the worst-hit Kannyakumari district in Tamil Nadu, taking the toll to 12, reports UNI.
A report from Lakshadweep said a red alert had been sounded as high waves posed a major threat to most of the islands in the region. (UNI)
WATCH: Navy rescue fishermen off Thiruvananthapuram coast
About 150 fishermen, who put out to sea from various southern districts, were rescued, Thiruvananthapuram District Commissioner K Vasuki said, adding that efforts were on to bring the rest of the stranded fishermen to the shore. The rescued fishermen included those who were saved by a Japanese cargo vessel. Kerala: Rescued fishermen brought to Trivandrim Air Force Station, later admitted to hospital for treatment #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/lB10HNPqsE ANI (@ANI) December 1, 2017
Heavy to extremely heavy rains are likely over Lakshadweep Islands, while light to moderate rains with a few heavy spells are expected over Kerala and Andaman and Nicobar Islands, according to Skymetweather's latest weather update.
Two fishing boats Arokia Mary and Hermen Mary from Kanyakumari reported missing due #CycloneOckhi since 30 Nov 2017 with 08 crew each rescued by Coast Guard Ship C-427 off Vizhinjam #Kerala pic.twitter.com/nyLuxkoonk
ANI (@ANI) December 1, 2017
Search and rescue effort progressing off Vizhinjam where approximately 40 people were stranded at sea. Indian Navy ships Sharda and Shardul sailed out to augment search effort, in final stages of embarking humanitarian assistance and disaster relief items for assistance at Lakshadweep and Minicoy Islands , reports ANI.
130 families from Chellanam, 17 families from Kumbalangi and 18 families from Edavanakad rehabilitated from the coastal areas, reports ANI. [Read Report]
Cyclone Ockhi is moving to the Arabian Sea. Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan says steps are initiated to rescue fishermen stranded in the rough sea, reports PTI.
#WATCH: High tides seen at Lakshadweep coast #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/sxUBC4geku
ANI (@ANI) December 1, 2017
24 people stranded at sea sighted by IN assets. Efforts underway to rescue all 24:-
07 picked up by MV ENERGY ORPHEUS,04 being rescued by INS JAMUNA ,03 rescued by trawler in area,02 rescued by ALH (progressing further rescue of 06 more),02 under Rescue by MV KUN LUN SHAN
SpokespersonNavy (@indiannavy) December 1, 2017
READ FULL STORY: Navy, Coast Guard save 39 Kerala fishermen
ALSO READ | Cyclone Ockhi tales
#Kerala: Relatives of missing fishermen mourn in Thiruvananthapuram, say they received no warnings of #CycloneOckhi from the government pic.twitter.com/gewQlJZvPI
ANI (@ANI) December 1, 2017
- One person was killed when a tree fell on his autorickshaw at Kulathupuzha in Kollam
- A couple at Kattakkada in Thiruvananthapuram was electrocuted when power cables fell over them
- Trees and hoardings collapsed in the strong wind, which also blew away thatched roofs and roofing sheets of houses
- The State Disaster Management Authority has issued alert to Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Pathanamthitta, Idukki and Kottayam districts
Satellite image of Cyclone Ockhi across South India. (Image Courtesy: skymetweather.com)
Southern Naval Command deployed 3 ships & 2 aircraft following request by District Collector, Trivandrum for assistance in search of 6 fishing boats with fisherman & 1 Marine Engineering vessel missing near Vizhinjam, due to cyclonic storm developed in Indian Ocean off Kerala. pic.twitter.com/2fShFmu1NS
ANI (@ANI) November 30, 2017
SkymetWeather (@SkymetWeather) November 30, 2017
With a speed of 38 kmph at 8:30 Thursday morning, the cyclone lay centred about 340 km west-northwest of Galle in Sri Lanka, 60 Km south of Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu and 120 km southwest of Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala and 480 km eastsoutheast of Minicoy in Lakshadweep. It has moved west-northwestwards towards Lakshadweep Islands in the southeast Arabian Sea. Lakshadweep is an archipelago of 12 atolls, three reefs and five submerged banks lying 200 to 400 km to the West of the South-West coast (Kerala) of India.
Cyclone Ockhi is approaching the Lakshadweep archipelago, a top official at the Ministry of Earth Sciences said in Delhi today. Madhavan Rajeevan, secretary in the ministry, said the archipelago in the southern part of the Arabian Sea will start experiencing heavy rainfall and strong winds from tomorrow. "It will hit the islands on December 2," Rajeevan said. (PTI)
Earlier today, the US Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Centre (JTWC) had put out an alert saying that the system could intensify further to become a severe cyclonic storm. It further said the storm could re-curve towards the Mumbai-Gujarat region on the West Coast, after being influenced by an incoming western disturbance from the opposite direction.
Heavy rainfall and storms in Tamil Nadu in the first week of November this year killed at least 12 people and thousands took shelter in relief camps, triggering fears of the 2015 floods repeat. It had killed more than 400 people, displaced lakhs and damaged property worth thousands of crores.
What is a tropical depression The India Meteorological Department (IMD) classifies the low pressure systems in the Bay of Bengal and in the Arabian Sea into seven categories. Low pressure areas with maximum sustained surface wind speeds between 31 and 61 kmph are called tropical depressions. Once the winds around the low pressure area reach at least 62 kmph, it is called a tropical cyclone and is assigned a name. The current system is intensifying rapidly. As per the IMD wind warning, squally winds would reach 45-55 kmph gusting to 65 kmph along and off south Tamil Nadu during the next 48 hours. Another depression kicking-in The trough of low pressure over the Malay Peninsula and neighbourhood is persisting and is likely to develop into a low-pressure area over Malay Peninsula and adjoining south Andaman Sea during the next 24 hours. This system is likely to trigger a wet spell for the north coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, including Chennai, around December 4. (With inputs from Express News Service and agencies)
Congress President-elect Rahul Gandhi today visited some places hit by the Cyclone Ochki in southern Kerala that has claimed 63 lives in the state, most of them fishermen, and pitched for a better warning system to prevent recurrence of such tragedies. Thousands of fishermen and their families in Kerala and Tamil Nadu are continuously holding mass protests, demanding for search operations to continue and for relief to be provided faster. Search and rescue operations to trace the fishermen missing in the aftermath of cyclone Ockhi continued for the 12th day today. As many as 433 fishermen from Tamil Nadu and 186 from Kerala are yet to be traced. The cyclone, earlier this week, had finally dissipated over the Arabian Sea, sparing Gujarat from destruction. ALSO READ | No tsunami says IMD as false WhatsApp alerts create panic Here are all the latest updates: The Union Home Ministry is constituting an inter ministerial central committee for the spot assessment of damage and admissibility of claims of the states hit by Cyclone Ockhi. Today's #OpSahayam #CycloneOckhi Deployment of IN & ICG assets for #SAR of missing fishermen off Kerala & Tamil Nadu coast. @CMOKerala @CMOTamilNadu @OfficeOfOPS @ShashiTharoor @PonnaarrBJP @pibchennai @PIB_India @PIBTvpm @BJP4TamilNadu @BJP4Keralam pic.twitter.com/oTeP5QI2XP Nirmala Sitharaman (@nsitharaman) December 14, 2017 House-to-house verification process is going on and a final figure of the missing fishermen would be known once the process was over, say officials. [READ FULL REPORT] "The farmers have a ministry that looks after their interests and I think it is time that we create a ministry for the fishermen to look after their interests and make sure they are protected," said Congress leader Rahul Gandhi after visiting fishermen families in affected areas in Kerala. [READ FULL REPORT] TN government hikes compensation for non-fisherman families from Rs 4 lakhs to Rs 10 lakhs. (READ) The death toll in the Ockhi cyclone that hit the Kerala coast mounted to 65 with more bodies being recovered. DMK petitions TN governor Banwarilal Purohit to expedite rescue work post-Ockhi. Efforts are on to identify the recovered bodies through DNA test. In a bid to set up a mechanism to ensure the safety of fishermen, Kerala CM Vijayan said a system was being planned in association with the Indian Space Research Organisation. Kerala State control room officials said three bodies were found off the coast of Kozhikode and three from Kochi. [READ FULL REPORT] The financial assistance of Rs 20 lakh for families of Kerala fishermen killed in the cyclone would be given in one go. An amount of Rs five lakh would be given to those who are seriously injured and are not able to go to work in future as an "alternative livelihood" initiative. Today's deployment on #SAR #CycloneOckhi .@CMOTamilNadu @CMOKerala @OfficeOfOPS @PonnaarrBJP @ShashiTharoor @PIB_India @pibchennai @PIBTvpm @BJP4Keralam @BJP4TamilNadu pic.twitter.com/LQedhf51eA Nirmala Sitharaman (@nsitharaman) December 13, 2017 Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Wednesday said the Centre has agreed to continue search operations for the missing fishermen in Cyclone Ockhi that hit the state's coast on November 29 and 30. The death toll due to Ockhi cyclone, which hit the Kerala coast, rose to 52 on Tuesday as more bodies were recovered and the search for the missing fishermen in the high seas continued. The Tamil Nadu CM Palaniswami on Tuesday announced Rs 20 lakh compensation for the kin of fishermen who died in the cyclone that devastated the coastal areas of the state recently. Pope Francis has enquired about the hardships and sufferings caused to Kerala's fishermen community in the Ockhi cyclone that ravaged the coastal belt on November 30. The Tamil Nadu government on Tuesday announced 'livelihood assistance' ranging from Rs 48,500 to Rs 63,500 per hectare for horticulture farmers of cyclone Ockhi-battered Kanyakumari district. Kerala fishermen protestors took to the street by waving black flags and photos of the dead and missing fishermen walked about two km from Palayam to Raj Bhavan raising slogans, bringing the traffic to a standstill on the busy stretch. The death toll in the Ockhi cyclone in Kerala rose to 40 on Monday with the recovery of two more bodies even as the search operations to trace the missing fishermen entered the 10th day. Search and rescue operations to trace the fishermen missing in the aftermath of Ockhi cyclone continued for 10th day today even as 67 persons caught in the storm, returned to Kochi coast. The Goa government would provide compensation to shacks having legal validity, for the damages suffered during the Cyclone Ockhi last week. [FULL REPORT] The Indian naval ships engaged in search and rescue mission in the aftermath of Cyclone Ockhi today continued their operations in the high seas, searching area till the Maldives. No stranded boats, fishermen or floating bodies have been found in the sea by the naval search team during the last 72 hours, the official said. Kerala Governor P Sathasivam will contribute a month's salary to the special fund being raised for the victims of cyclone Ockhi. The Kerala government has asked the Indian Armed Forces and the Coast Guard to continue search operations for fishermen missing in high seas post-Cyclone Ockhi for 10 more days. #HADR #CycloneOckhi #OpSahayam #SAR Based on reports by IN Boeing P8 i aircraft, INS Kalpeni was sent to Off Sesostris Bank/Bassas de Pedro (a traditional fishing area off Lakshadweep island).About 17 boats with 180 plus fishermen have been located.@DefenceMinIndia @nsitharaman SpokespersonNavy (@indiannavy) December 8, 2017 A decision in this regard was taken at an all-party meeting in Kerala on Friday to discuss the steps taken by the state for rescue of fishermen stranded at sea and situation in the aftermath of the cyclone that hit the coast on November 29 and 30. READ | Cyclone Ockhi: 200 people from Kerala's fisher community to be recruited to coastal police Sixty-six boats from this district were yet to be traced, while 713 fishermen were still to be rescued, in the aftermath of cyclone Ockhi, a top district official said. Union Minister Pon Radhakrishnan on Friday said all steps were being taken to trace and rescue missing fishermen in the aftermath of cyclone Ockhi. A "false image" is being created against the central and state governments though they were taking up rescue, relief and rehabilitation works, Radhakrishnan told reporters in Kanyakumari. READ FULL STORY HERE | Tension at Adimalathura as Finance Minister meets protesting fishermen Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami on Thursday announced a solatium of Rs 10 lakh to the kin of fishermen who died in Cyclone Ockhi. Palaniswami also announced setting up of a high-level committee to go into the matter of missing fishermen and submit a report. He also announced Rs five lakh solatium to those fishermen who were affected by the cyclone and unable to pursue their profession. ALSO READ | Fishermen meet CM Edappadi K Palaniswami, seek intensive search operations The Tamil Nadu government said on Thursday (08-12-2017) that nearly 2,000 fishermen who had ventured into deep sea before Cyclone Ockhi crossed the coast of Kanyakumari were rescued and safely accommodated in coastal districts of various states. Principal Secretary (Information Technology) T K Ramachandran said that 1,969 fishermen on 284 boats ventured into the sea just a day before Cyclone Ockhi crossed the coast last week. READ | After Cyclone Ockhi, now its a sea of protest for 2000 fishermen families in Nagercoil Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit today assured the families of missing fishermen in the district that steps would be taken to trace all those missing after cyclone 'Ockhi' hit the state coast. Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan said prime minister Narendra Modi had called the Tamil Nadu chief minister and enquired about the situation, but did not call the Kerala CM. Three bodies were recovered today off the Kerala coast, taking the death toll due to Cyclone Ockhi to 36, even as defence sources said search and rescue operations will be extended to International waters around Maldives. Family members of 19 fishermen from Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu, reported missing in the aftermath of cyclone Ockhi, today met Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and sought help to trace them. "It was an unprecedented calamity, which claimed several lives and caused a widespread damage to properties. The Centre should declare Cyclone Ockhi a national disaster and announce a special package for the rehabilitation of the victims," Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said. Tamil Nadu government today said a total of 4,501 houses in cyclone Ockhi-hit Kanyakumari have suffered partial and full damage and relief to the tune of Rs 41 lakh has been provided in this regard so far. [READ REPORT] Nuns take out a candlelight procession for the victims of Cyclone Ockhi at the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Ransom at Vallarpadam in Kochi on Wednesday night. (Albin Mathew | EPS) The Kerala state cabinet on Wednesday cleared a comprehensive rehabilitation package for the victims of Cyclone Ockhi, which includes Rs 20 lakh compensation for the kin of the deceased fishermen and Rs 5 lakh each for fishermen who were grievously injured. [READ FULL REPORT] Boeing P8i of Indian Navy detected a fishing vessel near Kavaratti, close to Mangalore, yesterday evening. While INS Chennai has diverted for rescue, search areas are being expanded due to drift and currents in the area, said Navy spokesperson. Fishing vessel as seen from the aircraft. This video captures the essence of what Navy Boeing P-8i is doing - systematic search of every inch of possible/ probable area & providing hope to the stranded till they are rescued by our ships @nsitharaman pic.twitter.com/1sY0VXul42 SpokespersonNavy (@indiannavy) December 6, 2017 The government on Tuesday issued an advisory in view of Cyclone 'Ockhi', warning of a "rapid" rise in the water level of rivers in parts of Maharashtra and Gujarat. Union Health Minister J P Nadda today spoke to health ministers of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, assuring them of all help from the Centre for dealing with the possible damage caused by Cyclone Ockhi. A Coast Guard ship today located 15 boats off Lakshadweep and provided assistance to 184 fishermen on board, as part of its Cyclone Ockhi relief operations. Local fishermen will join Naval teams with INS Kabra, presently involved in search and rescue operations off Kollam port and their inputs will be taken to carry out the mission. The Madras High Court today directed the Tamil Nadu government to provide adequate basic amenities to those affected by cyclone Ockhi in Kanyakumari district. The Union Home Ministry on Tuesday said that Cyclone Ockhi was not expected to have high impact in Gujarat which is geared for the worst situation. As many as 39 people have perished and 167 fishermen were still missing after cyclone Ockhi hit Tamil Nadu and Kerala coasts while 809 others were swept away to Maharashtra, the Union Home Ministry said today. Narendra Modi today said he is constantly monitoring the situation in various states arising out of cyclone Ockhi battering parts of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Lakshadweep islands and now heading towards Gujarat. [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE] Light rains were expected at one or two places in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry over the next two days. Rahul Gandhi's rallies in Gujarat's Morbi, Dhrangadhra and Surendranagar cancelled due to bad weather, reports ANI. The Kerala government today said intensified search and rescue operations are on to trace the 92 fishermen missing in high seas after Cyclone Ockhi hit the state's coast on November 29. The National Disaster Management Authority today asked fishermen in both eastern and western coasts not to venture out in the sea for the next three days as heavy rainfall is expected in many areas due to Cyclone Ockhi. The North Goa district has done a preliminary assessment of the damage caused due to Cyclone Ockhi in the coastal state. Cyclone Ockhi today moved closer to the southern coast near Surat in Gujarat and is expected to make a landfall in the state around midnight, said officials. PM Modi and Amit Shah have directed party workers to stop campaigning and instead help people in coastal regions of Gujarat move to safer places. Amit Shahs cancelled rallies were to be held in Rajula, Mahua and Shihor. (TV reports) It's likely to rain today, there will be strong winds. People have been advised not to go out at night. Those living in kachha houses will be given shelter. NDRF is on alert. Municipality & local bodies are working on their level.: Mahendra Patel, Surat DM #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/lUuIpOiauW ANI (@ANI) December 5, 2017 Kerala fishermen demand stringent action against erring disaster management officers. [READ FULL STORY HERE] UP CM Yogi Adityanath hands over a cheque worth Rs. 5 Cr to PM Modi from CM Distress Relief Fund towards PM's National Relief Fund, for the cyclone affected people in Lakshadweep and other States #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/vPxxQaE43A ANI (@ANI) December 5, 2017 The recent cyclone has brought to the fore the lack of proper mechanism to urgently communicate with fishermen at sea about an impending natural disaster. The situation is set to change once a mechanism to improve the communication with fishermen at sea is put in place by the state government in association with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS). [Kerala government to better offshore communication of fishermen | READ HERE] Rs 600 per hour to use a motor generator to fill water tank? Impossible, you might think. But the power-less Nagercoil is seeing this and more, as desperate residents look at help from all quarters to bring life back to normal. They shell out the extra charges to get drinking water and to charge their already-dead mobile phone batteries. [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE] With #CycloneOckhi expected to make a landfall in Gujarat, I appeal to @BJP4Gujarat Karyakartas to focus on helping people across the state. Our Karyakartas should devote themselves to providing all possible assistance and stand shoulder to shoulder with fellow citizens. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) December 5, 2017 In Mumbai, the Western Railways has deployed extra personnel for crowd management in case of any emergency due to the cyclone. [FULL REPORT] According to the IMD, Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani held an urgent meeting with senior officials to take stock of the preparedness in the state ahead of the expected landfall of the cyclone today. THE STORM OCKHI OVER ARABIAN SEA MOVED FURTHER NNE WARDS & IS NOW 480 KM SSW OF SURAT LIKELY TO CONTINUE TO MOVE NNE WARDS, WEAKEN GRADUALLY & CROSS S GUJ & N MAHA AS A DEEP DEPRESSION BY TONIGHT. HEAVY RAINS AND STRONG WINDS ALREADY STARTED. BE CAREFUL & TAKE PRECAUTIONS. pic.twitter.com/M5YymjDD7W Dr. Harsh Vardhan (@drharshvardhan) December 5, 2017 Some parts of the Mumbai-Pune Expressway experienced a hailstorm early today, police said. The traffic on Eastern and Western Express Highways in Mumbai has slowed down. There are traffic curbs in some places in view of the rush of followers of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar on his death anniversary tomorrow. Five days after #CycloneOchki made landfall @IndiaCoastGuard continues to be at sea off #TamilNadu #Kerala & #Lakshadweep Island for Search & Rescue . Coast Guard Ship rescued 19 fishermen on board 02 stranded vessels 96 Nautical Miles off Bitra (L&M ) Islands @DefenceMinIndia pic.twitter.com/PKFBHiUkjh Indian Coast Guard (@IndiaCoastGuard) December 5, 2017 All exams for Mumbai University taking place as scheduled, announced the administration. (TV reports) Mumbai police have been putting up barricades near Dadar chowpatty and Juhu chowpatty to stop people from going near the beaches, say TV reports. Cyclone Ockhi is expected to make landfall in Mumbai and coastal Gujarat on Tuesday midnight with squally winds, which may cause heavy rains in several parts of the state during the next two days. The Maharashtra government has declared a holiday for schools and colleges in Mumbai and adjoining districts. An official at the Mumbai office of India Meteorological Department said on account of the cyclone, the megapolis has started receiving rainfall due to spread of clouds. The Tamil Nadu government on Monday said a total of 2,604 fishermen out of the 2,864 caught in the cyclone Ockhi have been rescued. Women with all hopes of the return of their dear ones at the St Mary'schurch at Vizhinjam (EPS | Kaviyoor Santhosh) Several dozen shacks have reportedly been affected by Sunday night's swelling of waters along the coastline. The Central government has assured all help to cyclone-battered Lakshadweep, where there was no loss of lives, but extensive property damage in some islands: Lakshadweep Administrator Farooq Khan. Shibi, whose husband went missing Cyclone Ockhi, in all tears inside the St Mary's church at Vizhinjam. ( EPS | Kaviyoor Santhosh) The Indian Coast Guard (ICG) on Monday rescued another 19 fishermen from the Arabian Sea, top officials said. Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar today donated Rs two crore from the CM's relief fund to the PMNRF to provide relief to the victims of Cyclone Ockhi. A well-marked low pressure area over southeast Bay of Bengal is likely to become a depression and move towards Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh by December 6, the Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) said today. The National Crisis Management Committee, headed by Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha, has reviewed rescue and relief operations being carried out in high seas and coastal areas hit by cyclone Ockhi. Women members of the fisher folk community on Monday held a protest in Kanyakumari district demanding that authorities intensify rescue operations to trace fishermen caught in the deep sea in the wake of Cyclone Ockhi. Hundreds of women held protest on the roads in Neerodi village demanding the authorities trace their loved ones who are still missing. [READ FULL STORY] In a thatched house on Poonthura beach in Kerala, 21-year-old Bobby, his 42-year-old mother Jacintha and his 17-year-old sister Nimmy are hopeless about the future. Their sole breadwinner Christy, 51, a fisherman, died in the Ockhi cyclone in high seas when he ventured out into the sea last Wednesday. [READ THE FULL STORY HERE] Four days after Ockhi hit Chellanam in Kerala, Annamma Pouly, 67, is yet to recover from the troubles she went through to shift her 74-year-old immobile husband from their house as sea water gushed in during the middle of the night. [READ HER ACCOUNT HERE] Cyclone Ockhi and the frantic scramble for organising rescue efforts down south have yet again underscored the need for permanently stationing Naval and Coast Guard ships in Thiruvananthapuram. [READ FULL REPORT HERE] Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Monday sent two crore rupees from the Chief Minister Fund to the Prime Minister Fund for the relief of victims. (ANI) Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman met with the families of fishermen affected by the cyclone at Vizhinam in Thiruvananthapuram. She pointed out that the boats that had gone out well before the cyclone warning was issued had been found 15 days after their departure with the fishermen alive. ''If boats which went 15 days ago can come back with fishermen alive, we will make every attempt to get everybody back,'' she said. (Express News Service) [READ FULL REPORT HERE] Previously, Cyclone Ockhi had moved north-northwestwards during the past six hours and lay centered over southeast and east-central Arabian Sea , about 390 km west-northwest of Amini Divi island of Lakshadweep. Lakshadweep islands, which was hit by Cyclone Ochki, has suffered a loss of over Rs 500 crore, Lakshadweep MP Mohammad Faizal said today. Nirmala Sitharaman taking stock of Cyclone Ochki affected Kanyakumari and interacting with the locals. Very severe Cyclone Ockhi to recurve towards Gujarat, weaken gradually: Skymet Weather Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said 28 more boats, carrying 321 fishermen, which were caught in rough seas due to Cyclone Ockhi, have safely reached Maharashtra's Ratnagiri coast today. [READ FULL REPORT] A total of 357 fishermen, including 71 from Tamil Nadu, stranded in sea due to Cyclone Ockhi , were rescued this morning, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said today. What looked like an aftermath of cyclone Ockhi, three houses were damaged while the compound wall of a private resort collapsed as surging waves lashed the coast of Ullal in Dakshina Kannada in the last two days. According to official sources, damage to the property by huge waves has occurred in most of the coastal areas. KJ Alphons on Sunday also said that Cyclone Ockhi will not be termed a national disaster. [READ HERE] Even as the blame game over the lack of warning before cyclone Ockhi continues, Union Minister of State for Tourism and IT Alphons Kannanthanam said that the state had not received any warning until November 30. However, he later clarified that a warning had been issued on November 28 and 29 about a deep depression in the sea. [READ FULL REPORT HERE] Four men three from Thiruvananthapuram and one from Tamil Nadu were rescued by the IAF and admitted to the Thiruvananthapuram Medical College Hospital. They were identified as Zacharias (55), Seva Kurishu (35), and Kristudas (48) of Adimalathura, Thiruvananthapuram; and Anthony Adima (30) of Kollencode, Tamil Nadu. Another fisherman was brought dead to the hospital. A Coastguard vessel carrying 19 rescued fishermen was expected to arrive in Kochi. Moderate rain is expected at a few places in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry during the next 24 hours, according to IMD. [READ FULL REPORT] Indian Coast Guard ship Sarthi rescued a fisherman in rough seas during Cyclone Ockhi off Kerala coast. [WATCH VIDEO] Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will visit Thiruvananthapuram and Kanyakumari today. She will arrive at the technical area of the IAF at Shangumugham by 3 pm and leave for Kanyakumari. Fishermen community in Thiruvananthapuram have decided to launch their own rescue operations on Sunday as 55 boats ventured into the sea to search for the missing fishermen. (IANS) TN SDMA has also warned that strong winds from North-easterly direction with speeds reaching 40-55 Kmph is likely along and off Tamil Nadu and Puducherry coast. The Tamil Nadu State Disaster Management Authority (TN SDMA) has issued a 24-hour warning to fishermen not to go for fishing to the Arabian sea. 68 fishing boats, out of which 66 are from Kerala and two from Tamil Nadu, have reached Maharashtra's Sindhudurg coast with total 952 fishermen on board. All are safe: Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis. (READ FULL REPORT HERE) Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has decided to ask the Centre to declare the Ockhi cyclone as a national calamity. (ANI) Claims of thousand fishermen stranded are false. Correct figures- 97 are yet to be rescued, 71 from Tamil Nadu have been rescued till now. The Coast Guard is at it, with all its strength to rescue the rest. Hoping for good news soon: Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. (ANI) People receive essential commodities at a relief camp following cyclone Ockhi in the Kanyakumari district on Saturday. (PTI) Given orders to Maharashtra Maritime Board and Collector, Sindhudurg Dist. to make all arrangements for the stranded fishermen. Local authorities are already with them and taking care of all arrangements, tweets Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis. In all 68 fishing boats have reached, out of which 66 are from Kerala and 2 from Tamil Nadu with total 952 fisherman on board. All are safe. Maharashtra will completely look after everyone till weather permits them to go back. @nsitharaman @BJP4Keralam Devendra Fadnavis (@Dev_Fadnavis) December 2, 2017 A fresh spell of heavy rain is in store in some areas of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry with a low pressure area forming over south Andaman sea, which is "very likely" to become a depression over Bay of Bengal. It is very likely to become a depression over southeast Bay of Bengal and neighbourhood during the next 36 hours. It is also very likely to intensify further and move towards north Tamil Nadu south Andhra Pradesh coasts during the next 3-4 days. (IMD) Though many fishermen from Kerala were brought ashore safely and admitted to hospitals, many are yet to recover from the shock of wrestling the lashing waves and seeing death face-to-face. Stephan, a fisherman hailing from nearby Poonthura, said: "It was the first time we were experiencing such huge waves and a rough sea. Luckily, the rescue boat came back and saved us." Most of the rescued fishermen had bruises all over their bodies and were seen shivering and begging for hot water and food when brought ashore. (PTI) Stranded fisherman being brought to Kerala coast by Indain Navy personnel in Kochi on Saturday. (PTI) Tamil Nadu CM K Palaniswami today requested the Centre to deploy the Indian Navy and Coast Guard for the search and rescue of fishermen who have not returned so far, and that helicopters of Coast Guard and Navy should be deployed for this purpose. Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh assured the AIADMK leader that the Centre would provide the assistance required to rescue the fishermen. (PTI) Several roads that connect Kanyakumari with many interior parts have got cut or were fully damaged due to heavy rainfall following the impact of cyclone Ockhi in the district on Saturday. (PTI) A Coast Guard advisory here said the status of weather and sea conditions should be checked on television, radio, newspapers and smartphone applications before venturing out into the sea. The merchant ships should also be alert and avoid the path of Cyclone Ockhi, it said. Fishing boats should remain in groups and during distress all the crew should remain together, it said. DMK working president M K Stalin urged Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in his letter to direct the Coast Guard to search and rescue "thousands of fishermen fighting for their lives in the mid sea, so as to prevent further loss of lives due to the Ockhi cyclone". Steps have been taken to prevent any possible outbreak of epidemic in rain-hit areas of Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu Health minister C Vijayabhaskar said today. A relief worker places sand bags on the banks of a beach in Kochi in wake of cyclone Ockhi on Saturday. (PTI) Leader of the opposition in the Kerala Assembly Ramesh Chennithala today urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to declare cyclone Ockhi as a national disaster. He also urged the Kerala government to increase the financial aid for the injured at least up to Rs 50,000 from the present Rs 15,000. Lack of coordination had affected the government's relief and rescue operations, launched post Ockhi, he alleged. (PTI) The Southern Railway announced partial and full cancellation of some trains in the Kaniyakumari-Nagercoil section. One train service was also rescheduled. (PTI Meanwhile, relatives of missing fishermen from Kaniyakumari staged a road blockade demanding the fishermen be rescued at the earliest. Scores of women also staged protest at Chinnathurai in that district. There has been a huge demand for generator sets following the devastation caused by cyclone Ockhi in the Kanyakumari region on Saturday. (PTI) In Kanyakumari, power supply had been restored even as efforts are on to resume power supply in neighbouring areas like Nagercoil and Kuzhithurai. Officials expressed confidence that the power supply would be restored in the entire district by tomorrow. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami announced Rs 25 crore for expediting relief and restoration work in the district. (PTI) 261 persons rescued by @IndiaCoastGuard @adgpi and @IAF_MCC in #CycloneOckhi @NewIndianXpress pic.twitter.com/ywhzBQLJnP Kiran_TNIE (@tniekiran1) December 2, 2017 The Coast Guard informed in a press release that on November 30, the Coast Guard District Headquarters in Kerala was informed that around 70-80 fishermen were stranded at sea due to the storm. The Coast Guard immediately sailed as many as nine ships towards Search and Rescue (SAR) efforts. Further, ships based at New Mangalore were also sailed towards Kerala coast to undertake the rescue of stranded fishermen. As the cyclone intensified, coordinated search by Coast Guard ships and aircraft continued in extremely rough weather with wind speed gusting up to 150 kmph. Ships at Mumbai and Goa were also placed on maximum alert to augment efforts as required, the press release read. (PTI) As per the last report, a total of 79 stranded fishermen have been saved by the Coast Guard in coordination with other agencies. Also, the fisheries department has intimated that about 25 boats with 250 personnel are still in distress at sea. A man watches a road that has been cut off due to floods following the heavy rainfall caused by the cyclone Ockhi which left heavy damage in the Kanyakumari district on Saturday. (PTI) 138 fishermen have been rescued from the Lakshadweep islands. (PTI) So far 393 people from Kerala have been rescued, Kerala CM Vijayan said, as the state government announced a compensation of Rs 10 lakh to the family of those who died in the storm, in addition to the financial assistance of Rs four lakh being given by the fisheries department.Of the rescued, 132 fishermen were from the state capital Thiruvananthapuram, 66 from Kozhikode, 55 from Kollam, 40 from Thrissur, and 100 from Kanyakumari. (PTI) In Lakshadweep, 31 relief camps have been opened in the10 inhabited islands. So far, 1,047 people have been evacuated to the relief camps, official sources said. No casualties have been reported, with the worst-affected islands being Minicoy and Kalpeni. Seven people have lost their lives in Kerala in rain-related incidents over the past two days, official sources said. (PTI) Cyclone Ockhi has so far claimed 13 lives in Sri Lanka. Power supply, essential services and air traffic was disrupted in the stormy weather that left several buildings damaged and trees uprooted in its wake. READ FULL REPORT HERE #CycloneOckhi update @IndiaCoastGuard ship rescued 15 fishermen at sea off Vizhinjam/Quilon (Kerala) Coast and heading towards shore for safe disembarkation of fisher-folks @DefenceMinIndia @SpokespersonMoD pic.twitter.com/39gJrfI20Z Indian Coast Guard (@IndiaCoastGuard) December 2, 2017 Authorities including the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Coast Guard and Navy have rescued about 223 fishermen and evacuated thousands of people from cyclone hit areas, officials said, as they continued their operations on Saturday. While INS Nireekshak, INS Jamuna and INS Sagardhwani are continuing search and rescue operations in their designated areas along the coast off Vizhinjam in Thiruvananthapuram and Kollam, two ships INS Shardul and INS Sharda are heading towards Lakshadweep, a defence spokesman said. (PTI) The naval ships, which left from the Southern Naval Command here yesterday, are likely to reach Lakshadweep this evening. The Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Lanba briefed me on the on-going rescue operations #CycloneOchki . More fishermen rescued this morning. Rescue work to continue.Some rescued fishermen waiting in Lakshadweep Isle to get back. Details @indiannavy @DefenceMinIndia @IndiaCoastGuard Nirmala Sitharaman (@nsitharaman) December 2, 2017 The Kerala state government has announced a compensation of Rs. 10 lakh to the families of the deceased. #Kerala Locals have blocked National Highway for last five hours in Trivandrum's Thumba, demand better relief measures & rescue of 6 fishermen missing from the area #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/rcTY0gyDty ANI (@ANI) December 2, 2017 Six boats and 73 fishermen that went missing in the sea have been brought back, the Fisheries Minister of Tamil Nadu, D Jayakumar, informed on Saturday. (ANI) Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan slammed rumour mongers on Saturday after it came to light that Friday's reports of a Japanese merchant ship rescuing 60 Kerala fishermen caught in the deep seas, was "fake". It was Thiruvananthapuram district Collector S.Vasuki who told the media, on Friday evening, that she wished to thank the Japanese government as one of their ships had rescued 60 fishermen and said they would arrive at the Vizhinjam coast. (IANS.) [READ FULL REPORT] Locals in Thiruvananthapuram's Poonthura came out in protest alleging rescue operations have been inadequate. (ANI) According to Thiruvananthapuram district Collector S Vasuki, 102 fishermen from the city who had gone into the sea have not been able to contact their relatives. [READ FULL REPORT HERE] Kerala: Locals evacuated to rehabilitation centre in Kochi's Chellanam. #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/iAwj7Q7g94 ANI (@ANI) December 2, 2017 Several houses suffered damage, trees got uprooted and communication lines were disrupted as rains accompanied by strong winds lashed the Lakshadweep Islands under the influence of Cyclone Ockhi. [READ FULL REPORT] INS Nireekshak rescued two fishermen off Alappuzha coast. INS Sagardhwani fished out one cadaver, 30 km off Thiruvananthapuram coast. The ship had earlier found another cadaver. (PTI) PM Modi dialled Tamil Nadu CM K Palaniswami and enquired about the damage caused by the cyclone, which also battered parts of Kerala. [READ FULL REPORT HERE] The Tamil Nadu government has said it will soon seek central funds for the damage caused by Cyclone Ockhi in the southern parts of the state, with Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli districts being the worst hit. As many as 218 fishermen from various parts of southern Kerala who were missing at sea since Thursday have been rescued and brought back so far, even as Cyclone Ockhi continued its menacing north-westward path along the Arabian Sea. [READ REPORT HERE] A rescued fisherman rushed to the ambulance from the technical area of the Thiruvananthpuram airport on Friday afternoon. Express Photo | Kaviyoor Santhosh According to a CWC advisory, the west-flowing rivers in Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Pathanamthitta, Idukki, Kottayam, Alappuzha and Ernakulam in Kerala are likely to rise over the next 24 hours and then, slowly fall as the rains reduced. Three deaths were reported in Kerala and one in the worst-hit Kannyakumari district in Tamil Nadu, taking the toll to 12, reports UNI. A report from Lakshadweep said a red alert had been sounded as high waves posed a major threat to most of the islands in the region. (UNI) WATCH: Navy rescue fishermen off Thiruvananthapuram coast About 150 fishermen, who put out to sea from various southern districts, were rescued, Thiruvananthapuram District Commissioner K Vasuki said, adding that efforts were on to bring the rest of the stranded fishermen to the shore. The rescued fishermen included those who were saved by a Japanese cargo vessel. Kerala: Rescued fishermen brought to Trivandrim Air Force Station, later admitted to hospital for treatment #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/lB10HNPqsE ANI (@ANI) December 1, 2017 Heavy to extremely heavy rains are likely over Lakshadweep Islands, while light to moderate rains with a few heavy spells are expected over Kerala and Andaman and Nicobar Islands, according to Skymetweather's latest weather update. Two fishing boats Arokia Mary and Hermen Mary from Kanyakumari reported missing due #CycloneOckhi since 30 Nov 2017 with 08 crew each rescued by Coast Guard Ship C-427 off Vizhinjam #Kerala pic.twitter.com/nyLuxkoonk ANI (@ANI) December 1, 2017 Search and rescue effort progressing off Vizhinjam where approximately 40 people were stranded at sea. Indian Navy ships Sharda and Shardul sailed out to augment search effort, in final stages of embarking humanitarian assistance and disaster relief items for assistance at Lakshadweep and Minicoy Islands , reports ANI. 130 families from Chellanam, 17 families from Kumbalangi and 18 families from Edavanakad rehabilitated from the coastal areas, reports ANI. [Read Report] Cyclone Ockhi is moving to the Arabian Sea. Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan says steps are initiated to rescue fishermen stranded in the rough sea, reports PTI. #WATCH: High tides seen at Lakshadweep coast #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/sxUBC4geku ANI (@ANI) December 1, 2017 24 people stranded at sea sighted by IN assets. Efforts underway to rescue all 24:- 07 picked up by MV ENERGY ORPHEUS,04 being rescued by INS JAMUNA ,03 rescued by trawler in area,02 rescued by ALH (progressing further rescue of 06 more),02 under Rescue by MV KUN LUN SHAN SpokespersonNavy (@indiannavy) December 1, 2017 READ FULL STORY: Navy, Coast Guard save 39 Kerala fishermen ALSO READ | Cyclone Ockhi tales #Kerala: Relatives of missing fishermen mourn in Thiruvananthapuram, say they received no warnings of #CycloneOckhi from the government pic.twitter.com/gewQlJZvPI ANI (@ANI) December 1, 2017 - One person was killed when a tree fell on his autorickshaw at Kulathupuzha in Kollam - A couple at Kattakkada in Thiruvananthapuram was electrocuted when power cables fell over them - Trees and hoardings collapsed in the strong wind, which also blew away thatched roofs and roofing sheets of houses - The State Disaster Management Authority has issued alert to Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Pathanamthitta, Idukki and Kottayam districts Satellite image of Cyclone Ockhi across South India. (Image Courtesy: skymetweather.com) Southern Naval Command deployed 3 ships & 2 aircraft following request by District Collector, Trivandrum for assistance in search of 6 fishing boats with fisherman & 1 Marine Engineering vessel missing near Vizhinjam, due to cyclonic storm developed in Indian Ocean off Kerala. pic.twitter.com/2fShFmu1NS ANI (@ANI) November 30, 2017 SkymetWeather (@SkymetWeather) November 30, 2017 Five people dead, 22 fishermen missing, 62 houses fully damaged, 240 houses partly damaged due to heavy rains, in Kanyakumari district. 16 rehabilitation centres established by government in which 1044 people are being given shelter. (ANI) Ockhi can lead to cloudy weather coupled with light rain for some parts along Maharashtra coast and Mumbai next week, reports said. The IMD has issued warning to all ports. Skymet predicted that there will be light rains in Saurashtra and Kutch region of Gujarat as well. Thiruvananthapuram saw a respite from incessant rains Friday morning. Several trains to and from Thiruvananthapuram were either delayed, cancelled or re-scheduled, say TV reports. #WATCH: Water logging in Sthanumalayan Temple in Kanyakumari's Suchindram #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/nDSjmpfXoz ANI (@ANI) December 1, 2017 Tamil Nadu CM K Palaniswami announces Rs 5 lakh compensation to kin of the five deceased in Kanyakumari district due to rain-related incidents. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said there were serious lapses from the side of state disaster management department. The alert from Hyderabad was not sent to the Government on time, reports ANI. [READ FULL REPORT] Indian Navys Advanced Light Helicopter has dropped a life a liferaft for 8 survivors at sea 20nm off Trivandrum and is picking up two critically injured survivors from MV Energy Orpheus. Naval Seaking helicopter being launched shortly to recover 8 survivors & additional SAR. Boeing P8I Aircraft deployed at first light from INS Rajali this morning sights 7 survivors hanging on to a capsized boat ~25 miles West of Tivandrum. A/c drops life raft in the vicinity and reported the exact position. Ships in area are being diverted to render assistance: Indian Navy Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh has spoken to the DG of NDRF and reviewed the situation in areas affected by Cyclone Ockhi. NDRF teams have already been moved to the affected areas. More teams are on standby to respond to any further emergencies. The Home Affairs ministry is closely monitoring the situation, according to a the HMO, reports ANI. #Kerala: 59 people stranded due to heavy rains rescued by Navy and coastal guards in Trivandrum #CycloneOckhi pic.twitter.com/8YziNQeaeH ANI (@ANI) December 1, 2017 A cyclone alert has been issued across the coastal regions in north Kerala as MET has predicted cyclone Ockhi will reach this part of the state also. Nearly 200 fishing boats, which left Kochi coast in the last couple of days, are yet to return. Joseph Xavier, general secretary, All Kerala Fishing Boat Operators Association, said, Usually, we used to receive advance warnings on the weather. But this time, there was no such notification." This is a matter of concern, given there were reports about the arrival of the cyclone at least two days ago, he said. Since most of the boats are co-owned by people belonging to Tamil Nadu and most of the workers are also from that state, it is also possible that the fishermen might have taken the boats to Colachel, Muttom and Thengapattanam, said Xavier. Kerala: Fishermen in Trivandrum go missing. Relatives say they received no warnings of Cyclone Ockhi from the government. [READ FULL REPORT HERE] Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan held an emergency meeting of top officials to take stock of the situation and has asked police and revenue officials to be on high alert, reports IANS. Balakrishnan Nair, scientist at INCOIS, said that the storm surge of about one metre above astronomical tides are very likely to inundate low-lying areas of Lakshadweep Islands from Thursday night and 0.5 metre surge will inundate low-lying areas of coastal districts of south Kerala (Alappuzha, Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts), and adjoining districts of south Tamil Nadu (Kanniyakumari, Thoothukudi and Tirunelveli districts). Four people were killed in Kerala on Thursday as heavy rains and strong winds lashed southern part of the state after cyclonic storm Ockhi hit the Kerala coast. (READ MORE) Four people died today in Kanyakumari as heavy rains and strong winds uprooted trees, snapped power lines and damaged settlements close to the sea in Kanyakumari-Nagercoil-Thoothukudi region in south Tamil Nadu. Schools in seven districts of the state including Thoothukudi, Tirunelveli, Kanyakumari and Virudhunagar were closed today. [READ MORE] Two National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) teams with 60 personnel have been sent to Kanyakumari. Another team of 47 will be on standby in Kochi in Kerala to help out in Lakshadweep if the need arises. [READ: TN CM Palaniswami: Taking precautionary steps for Cyclone Ockhi] Heavy rains have caused chaos and destruction in districts of Kerala since Wednesday. Thiruvananthapuram woke up this morning to a sustained heavy drizzle and heavily overcast skies, which hit rush hour traffic in the state's capital city. One death has been reported in the state so far. An autorickshaw driver on the outskirts of Kollam was killed today after a tree fell on his vehicle. [READ FULL REPORT HERE] Severe rainstorm &winds in Thiruvananthapuram. Here I'm struggling with my umbrella at Shankumukham Beach where #Padayorukkam is scheduled to conclude tomorrow w/ mass rally by Rahul Gandhi pic.twitter.com/qxXvugMqHV The Southern Naval Command is also gearing up for any Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief that may be required due to the effects of the storm in the southern part of Kerala. [READ FULL REPORT HERE] S Balachandran, Director, Regional Meteorological Centre in Chennai, said southern districts in Tamil Nadu such as Kanyakumari, Tirunelveli, Tuticorin, Ramanathapuram, Sivaganga and Virudhunagar will get heavy to very heavy rainfall till December 1. Cyclone Ockhi is not expected to make a landfall in Tamil Nadu. ALSO READ | High wave warning sounded for south Tamil Nadu For north coastal Tamil Nadu, including Chennai, the skies would be generally cloudy and light to moderate spells of rain can be expected. Chennai received up to 6 cm of rain between 8:30 last night and 8:30 this morning. As far as fishermen are concerned, those in Kanyakumari, Tuticorin, Rameswaram, have been asked not to venture out into sea till December 1, Thursday as the wind speed will be 65-70 kmph, meaning the sea will be rough along and off south Tamil Nadu, south Kerala coasts and Lakshadweep Islands. #cyclonealert: Check out the progress of the #CycloneOckhi #Cyclone #Ockhi #Weather #cyclone1 #Chennai #Chennairains #Kerala #TamilNadu @tnsdma @kerala_kaumudi @archvivekh @karthickselvaa pic.twitter.com/A0RNw8wJ90 The weather office has also predicted dense fog in places in Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, and Tripura. Cyclone 'Ockhi' (meaning: eye) was a name contributed by Bangladesh. With a speed of 38 kmph at 8:30 Thursday morning, the cyclone lay centred about 340 km west-northwest of Galle in Sri Lanka, 60 Km south of Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu and 120 km southwest of Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala and 480 km eastsoutheast of Minicoy in Lakshadweep. It has moved west-northwestwards towards Lakshadweep Islands in the southeast Arabian Sea. Lakshadweep is an archipelago of 12 atolls, three reefs and five submerged banks lying 200 to 400 km to the West of the South-West coast (Kerala) of India. Cyclone Ockhi is approaching the Lakshadweep archipelago, a top official at the Ministry of Earth Sciences said in Delhi today. Madhavan Rajeevan, secretary in the ministry, said the archipelago in the southern part of the Arabian Sea will start experiencing heavy rainfall and strong winds from tomorrow. "It will hit the islands on December 2," Rajeevan said. (PTI) Earlier today, the US Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Centre (JTWC) had put out an alert saying that the system could intensify further to become a severe cyclonic storm. It further said the storm could re-curve towards the Mumbai-Gujarat region on the West Coast, after being influenced by an incoming western disturbance from the opposite direction. Heavy rainfall and storms in Tamil Nadu in the first week of November this year killed at least 12 people and thousands took shelter in relief camps, triggering fears of the 2015 floods repeat. It had killed more than 400 people, displaced lakhs and damaged property worth thousands of crores. What is a tropical depression The India Meteorological Department (IMD) classifies the low pressure systems in the Bay of Bengal and in the Arabian Sea into seven categories. Low pressure areas with maximum sustained surface wind speeds between 31 and 61 kmph are called tropical depressions. Once the winds around the low pressure area reach at least 62 kmph, it is called a tropical cyclone and is assigned a name. The current system is intensifying rapidly. As per the IMD wind warning, squally winds would reach 45-55 kmph gusting to 65 kmph along and off south Tamil Nadu during the next 48 hours. Another depression kicking-in The trough of low pressure over the Malay Peninsula and neighbourhood is persisting and is likely to develop into a low-pressure area over Malay Peninsula and adjoining south Andaman Sea during the next 24 hours. This system is likely to trigger a wet spell for the north coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, including Chennai, around December 4. (With inputs from Express News Service and agencies)
Local budgets to get 5% of rent for subsoil use from 2018
Ukraine's draft state budget for 2018 envisages the preservation of the existing revenue base of local budgets, and 5% of rental payments for subsoil use will be transferred to these budgets from the beginning of next year, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said.
"Starting from January 1, 2018, 5% of rental payments for subsoil use will be transferred to local budgets," he said during the second All-Ukrainian Forum of United Communities "Life-Changing Initiatives" in Kyiv on Monday.
According to Poroshenko, almost UAH 2 billion is to be spent on the formation of the infrastructure of united territorial communities next year.
"In general, state support for local government projects in 2018 will reach 18.5 billion [hryvnias]," he added.
Poroshenko also expressed hope that this week the Verkhovna Rada would adopt at second reading and as a whole the state budget for 2018.
Ukraine in January-November 2017 increased natural gas import by 39% (by 3.676 billion cubic meters) compared to the same period in 2016, to 13.095 billion cubic meters, according to data from PJSC Ukrtransgaz.
In particular, imports from Slovakia in January-November 2017 amounted to 9.239 billion cubic meters, Hungary to 2.702 billion cubic meters, and Poland to 1.154 billion cubic meters.
Imports in November 2017 amounted to 1.317 billion cubic meters of gas, which is 14.9% less than in November 2016.
At the same time, Ukraine has not been importing natural gas under the contract with PJSC Gazprom for more than two years (since November 26, 2015), purchasing resources exclusively on its western border.
As reported, Ukraine in 2016 reduced imports of natural gas by 32.7% (by 5.376 billion cubic meters) compared to 2015, to 11.078 billion cubic meters.
'The Gilded Age' hires an army of RI locals to bring show to life
Hundreds of people from greater Rhode Island help keep the set of HBO's 'The Gilded Age' running during filming.
Our County Editor
Dave Hinton is editor of The News-Gazette's Our County section and former editor of the Rantoul Press. He can be reached at dhinton@news-gazette.com.
The Ukrainian Navy has conducted joint exercises of the PASSEX-type with the U.S. Navy destroyer James Williams, the press center of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has reported.
On December 2, the Black Sea Naval Forces of Ukraine together with the destroyer of the U.S. Navy James Williams conducted a PASSEX-type training. Two Ukrainian Ka-27 helicopters were taken from the Ukrainian Navy," Navy of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said in its report on Facebook on Saturday.
It is noted that the purpose of the event was to work out cooperation with the ships of partner countries in accordance with NATO standards, increase the level of compatibility and deepen cooperation.
"During the training, the helicopters of the naval aviation of the Ukrainian Navy in complicated meteorological conditions worked, in particular, elements of landing on the deck of the American ship." In addition, the training participants conducted air defense exercises in accordance with NATO standards," the press center of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said.
Omar Abdullah, former CM of Jammu & Kashmir and an avid automobile enthusiast has handed out an important road safety message, but with a twist! Setting aside the political differences, Omar Abdullah has tweeted pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is seen wearing a seatbelt on the front seat of his Range Rover SUV.
Omar Abdullah tweeted the pictures saying To those who think they are too important (or too cool) to use a seat belt in the front seat. Even the PM uses one & he doesnt do it out of fear of traffic police. Not only Omar Abdullah has given an important road safety message, he has made sure that nobody can ignore it, considering the popularity of PM Modi.
To those who think they are too important (or too cool) to use a seat belt in the front seat. Even the PM uses one & he doesnt do it out of fear of traffic police. https://t.co/BgwhVfGhSZ Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) December 3, 2017
It may sound a bit frivolous to many, but Mr. Abdullahs tweet holds a deep message in many levels. Firstly, India is one of the most unsafe country, as far as fatal accidents are concerned. According to the Government data, 1 out of 3 people involved in a road accident in India die. A total of 4,80,652 (as per Ministry of Road, transport & Highway, 2016 data) people were involved in road accidents and out of these, 1,50,785 died.
Also, people in India wear seat-belts and helmets out of fear of police and not out of safety perception. Mr. Abdullahs tweet points out the very basic element of wearing seat-belts its not for cops, but for your own safety. And if Indias most powerful person such as PM Modi can wear it, whats stopping the rest of the country to follow his footsteps.
Our sincere gratitude to Mr. Omar Abdullah for bringing out this evil out of the box. Also, a big thanks to PM Modi for setting the right example here.
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News18.com, one of Indias top breaking news websites, held its annual marquee offering The Tech and Auto Awards in New Delhi amidst the presence of industry veterans. One of the most notable and competitive categories in the 2017 Tech and Auto Awards was the SUV of the Year award, won by the Jeep Compass. Apart from Jeep Compass, there were four other SUVs too, which happened to be the best SUVs to launch in 2017. Heres the list of the top 5 SUVs launched in 2017 and why were they inducted in the nominations (cars launched between 1st November 2016 31st October 2017 were considered).
Jeep Compass wins SUV of the Year 2017. (Image: News18.com)
Jeep Compass
Jeep Compass did to FCA what Duster did to Renault in India give a second life. Fiat Chrysler owned Jeep brand was looming under deep trouble with only two expensive products in kitty Wrangler and Grand Cherokee SUVs. But as soon as Jeep announced their 1st Made-in-India product, the market started taking the brand seriously. Jeep Compass is a compact SUV, which is a hot-selling segment in India. Moreover, priced just a little over Rs 15 lakhs, the Compass perfectly caters to the growing urban SUV consumer, making it the 1st successful product from the house of FCA in a long-long time (or since Palio, we can say!).
Volkswagen Tiguan. (Image: Cars18.in/Siddharth Safaya)
Volkswagen Tiguan
A surprise entry this year, the Volkswagen Tiguan is the companys 1st SUV in India after many years. The Tiguan was again launched with urban consumers in mind, as the SUV offers best of comfort to the occupants, along with class leading safety features and comfort features like a panoramic sunroof. Priced north of Rs 27 Lakhs, the Tiguan however, loses its ground against the Toyota Fortuner and Ford Endeavour, because for the same price, one gets proper 7 seater off-roaders. However, customers from metro cities will dig the design and comfort of the VW Tiguan.
Tata Hexa (Photo: SIddharth Safaya/News18.com)
Tata Hexa
Tata has upped its game for the last couple of years and every new product out of their stable generates a lot of interest among the buyers. Tata has adopted a strategy to cater every segment in India, under their new IMPACT design language. Tiago for compact hatchback, Tigor for compact sedan, Nexon for compact SUV and Hexa for SUV Tata has a candidate in each segment. As for the Hexa, it promises to be a comfortable 7-seater with 4*4 capabilities, automatic gearbox and plush interiors, all starting for just Rs 12 lakhs, making it a contender for SUV of the year.
Isuzu mu-X SUV. (Image: Siddharth Safaya/News18.com)
Isuzu mu-X
Yet another surprise entry this year is the standalone 7-seater SUV from Isuzu Motors in India the mu-X. Based on the companys 1st proper lifestyle pick-up truck in India the D-Max V-Cross, the mu-X comes with an automatic gearbox, shift-by-fly 4*4 system and much more, at an affordable price tag of Rs 23 Lakhs. The biggest plus point of the SUV is the way it drives and handles, good enough points to include it in the top SUVs of 2017. But then, it is competing against the likes of Toyota Fortuner and Ford Endeavour.
The Toyota Fortuner. Image used for representational purpose. (Photo: Siddharth Safay/News18.com)
Toyota Fortuner
Last on our list of the immensely popular (or not so with the new model) the Toyota Fortuner. Although some doubt the new design of the bulky SUV, which is not as intimidating as the previous gen model, which sold as hot cakes, the cabin has definitely taken a plunge into a new era. The new Toyota Fortuner is still a worthy buy for anyone looking for a big, bulky 7-seater SUV that can be taken for occasional off-roading. The good part is, Fortuner starts at only Rs 24 Lakhs for the base version, that goes all the way upwards of Rs 30 lakhs for top spec version.
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Amaravati: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Monday began his three-day tour of the Republic of Korea, urging its industrialists to make the state their second home and invest big in it.
The Chief Minister held meetings with a host of Korean industrialists and told them that AP would like to make rapid strides, inspired by South Korea's success in manufacturing and technology.
Explaining what all his government had been doing to propel growth and prosperity in the sunrise state in the aftermath of bifurcation, Naidu made a strong pitch for Korean investments in different sectors like automobiles, power, textiles, food processing, electronics, etc, an official release issued here said.
"India's Look East Policy will bear fruit only from our state," Naidu told the Koreans.
He also invited them to attend the Partnership Summit to be held in Visakhapatnam in February, it added.
Showcasing Kia Motors -- which is now setting up its car manufacturing plant in Anantapuramu district of AP -- as a mascot, the Chief Minister asked the South Korean business houses to explore possibilities of investing in AP as both of them shared many similarities like population and (geographical) size, said the release.
A group of 37 South Korean industries already signed Letters of Intent to invest a sum of Rs 3,000 crore in the state, he said.
Many ancillary units of Kia Motors confirmed a total investment of Rs 4,995 crore and provision of employment to 7,171 persons, the Chief Minister added.
A Korean township would soon be developed in the state, he said.
Naidu requested Hwang Chul-joo, CEO of Jusung Engineering that has 3.5 GW of solar power plants in different states of India, to set up a research and development facility in AP.
Jusung is currently developing the next-generation OLED bulbs and also has plans to set up a further one GW of solar power generating plants in India.
The Chief Minister, who is accompanied by Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu, Industries Minister N Amarnath Reddy and senior officials, visited the automobile manufacturing plant of Kia Motors.
Patriarch Filaret (Denisenko) of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, said he is ready to meet with Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, for negotiations, but has no intention of giving up the idea of autocephaly.
"If he [Patriarch Kirill] suggested a meeting, I would, of course, agree, but I would not give up my position, namely, autocephaly of the Ukrainian church," he said on the 1+1 TV channel on Sunday evening.
He said he has not received any offers of a meeting.
Filaret said he realized that negotiations with the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church could draw an ambiguous reaction in the Kyiv Patriarchate.
"I have warned that we should stay united regardless of the outcome of these negotiations, the decision of the Bishops' Council [of the Russian Orthodox Church], because unity is more important to us that autocephaly," Filaret said.
Kochi Metro Rail Limited thought it would be a good idea to run a contest to name its mascot elephant. But little did they anticipate that such an innocuous move would open up the Pandoras box.
As the contest deadline draws near this evening, KMRLs Facebook page has been inundated with name suggestions none so more popular than Kummanaana suggested by Wollongong-resident Lijo Verghese.
Lijo says he meant it as a joke, but the name has garnered over 35000 likes, making it a top contender for the contest.
Kummanaana bears a striking similarity to the name of BJP State President Kummanam Rajashekharan. Kummanam was the butt of nary a joke after he took an uninvited ride with the Prime Minister and Chief Minister on the Kochi metro.
That incident had added a new word to the Malayali lexicon, Kummanadi meaning to boldly go where you are unwanted. To the trolls of Kerala, who mock anything and everything under the sun, Kummanaana has been a Lijo-given boon.
Kummanaanas popularity prompted many others to come up with equally funny - or unkind, depending on your political colour - names. Another trending has been Kannanthana, a play on Union Minister Alphonse Kannathanam who is a favourite target of the Malayalam troll industry.
In a fix KMRL, which had promised to pick a name from the 3 top contenders, was forced to add a caveat Contest entries defaming any personality or insinuating against any person is not encouraged & will not be considered for the selection.
But not to be outdone, Malayalis have been inundating its wall calling for Kummanaana to be made official. They point out Kummanam is a place in Kottayam, and there is no reason why an elephant should not be named after a place.
The KMRL contest concludes today. From the looks of it, the company is unlikely to pick Kummanaana. Names like Kesavan, Metraana, and Komel could emerge frontrunners. No matter what KMRL calls their elephant, as far as Kochiites are concerned the naming ceremony seems to be over.
New Delhi: CIA director Mike Pompeo has issued a stern warning to Pakistan, saying that if Islamabad fails to act against terror havens on its soil, the American intelligence agency will do everything it can to ensure they don't exist anymore".
In the absence of the Pakistanis achieving that, we are going to do everything we can to make sure that that safe haven no longer exists," Voice of America Radio quoted Pompeo as saying at an event in California on Saturday.
The CIA chiefs comments came days ahead of Defense Secretary Jim Mattiss visit to Pakistan where he will seek common ground on the counterterrorism fight, amid Donald Trump administration calls for Islamabad to more aggressively go after terror groups.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest the 26/11 Mumbai attacks mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
Saeed is still roaming free, despite tough warning from the Trump Administration.
Mattis is the first top US official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the new South Asia Strategy that was announced by President Donald Trump on August 21.
Asked if he was going to press the Pakistani leaders to take more action against terrorists, Mattis said: "That's not the way I deal with issues. I believe that we work hard on finding the common ground and then we work together."
Mattis' optimism, however, comes despite persistent US assertions that Islamabad is still not doing enough to battle the Taliban and allied Haqqani network within its borders.
Since the start of the war in Afghanistan, militants in Pakistan have crossed the mountainous and ill-defined border to wage attacks against US, Afghan and allied forces. They then would return to their safe havens in Pakistan, where they have had a long-standing relationship with the ISI, Islamabad's intelligence agency.
The White House has also condemned Pakistan's release late last month of a Hafiz Saeed, a US-wanted terrorist and 2008 Mumbai attacks plotter, as a "step in the wrong direction" and warned that it could harm Islamabad's relations with America and its reputation around the world.
In August, the US said it would hold up $255 million in military assistance for Pakistan until it cracks down on terror havens.
New Delhi: When Iranian President Hassan Rouhani inaugurated the first segment of the four-phased Chabahar Port on Sunday India, Afghanistan and Iran materialised a 15-year-long plan. It also ended India pampering Pakistan for issuing transit licenses for venturing into the landlocked country via Pakistani soil.
The $1 billion extension of the strategic port, located in the south-eastern province of Sistan-Balochistan in Iran, aims to connect Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asian countries. It is easily accessed from India's western coast, thus bypassing Pakistan.
India can now skip its immediate neighbour in transporting goods to Afghanistan, the need for a license, no more.
For years, the Indian government has been trying to persuade Pakistan to allow it to transport goods to Afghanistan using the land route, as the latter is a landlocked country sharing borders with Pakistan. New Delhi got Afghanistan included in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in 2007 in order to ensure connectivity among all countries in South Asia but Pakistan did not budge.
In 2010, when Pakistan and Afghanistan signed a connectivity pact on transit trade, it was expected that Indian goods would be allowed to pass through Pakistan. However, the neighbours were stubborn and did not allow Afghan trucks to come up to the Indian border at Attari, Punjab, or take back Indian goods.
According to Reuters, post the inking of the Chabahar deal, Pakistan said, India is trying to use Afghanistan as a base to destabilise Pakistan and has long blocked India from conducting bilateral trade with Afghanistan using its territory as transit.
The inauguration of the port project comes almost 15 years after India and Iran first formally agreed to develop the Chabahar port in January 2003.
While India and Iran are signatories to the port development project, a second agreement on connectivity was also inked by India, Iran and Afghanistan.
The pact allows Afghanistan to use Chabahar port to ship its goods to markets like India, thereby reducing its dependence on Pakistan and its Karachi port. The port development pact and connectivity agreement were signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Tehran in May 2016.
In October, this year, India flagged off a shipment of wheat for Afghanistan through Irans Chabahar port, marking the operationalisation of the port for the trans-shipment of goods from India to the landlocked country. This also meant that Afghanistan would not need to be wholly dependent on Pakistans Karachi port for sending its goods out to global markets.
Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had also stopped by in Tehran on Friday at lunch to hold a meeting with her Iranian counterpart, Javed Zarif, to review the implementation of the Chabahar Port.
New Delhi: Despite all efforts, many fishermen are still missing. Cyclone Ockhi has already claimed 24 lives in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Rescue operations are still on with Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard's coordinated efforts in Thiruvananthapuram-Kollam coastal area, but theres no way the state governments or the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) can compensate for the loss of lives and property.
While the IMD has clearly said that they had issued the alert on 28 November, two days before the cyclone hit the coastal areas, the government of both the states are trying to evade responsibility by suggesting that the alert came too late.
Dr M Mohapatra, IMD DGM New Delhi, NWFC, told CNN-News18 that every week the Met department issues a statement on the weather. The cyclone alert was sent to the state departments two days before it hit, he said.
RB Udaykumar, Tamil Nadus revenue and disaster management minister admitted that IMD had informed them about the cyclone. We immediately informed the district collectors of Kanyakumari, Tuticorin and Nagercoil about the alert, he said. Udaykumar said that all resources were put in by the government to avoid the disaster of the natural calamity.
He said nine people died because thousands of trees were uprooted. We ensured we set up 15 relief centres at Kanyakumari where more than 1200 people from low lying areas were relocated. We reviewed the district, and the situation is under control, he said.
But the situation doesnt quite seem to be under control. Though the cyclonic storm - which has weakened - has moved away from Lakhadweep and is headed towards the coast of Maharashtra, hundreds are reported missing and 16 people have died in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Despite all efforts, 33 boats and 83 fishermen havent yet returned.
Tamil Nadu's Kanyakumari district, one of the worst affected, still remains largely powerless with more than a thousand people stranded in rescue centres.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edapadi K Palaniswami in a statement said that he has ordered the officers and the ministers to take up rescue and relief operations on a war footing.
There are several questions that arise hereWhy were the fishermen allowed to enter the sea? Why were they not told to avoid it? If the district collectors were informed in advance why had they not taken enough precautionary measures?
On Sunday, fishermen in Thirvananthapuram launched their own rescue operation with 55 boats venturing into the high seas to search for those who have not returned. They found six bodies. The angry fishermen community protested before Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan when he visited a fishing village in the state capital. They protested in Kanyakumari too alleging rescue operations have been inadequate.
Theres a tale of blame game in Kerala too. While the Kerala government insists that it received an IMD weather alert only on November 30, Union minister Alphons Kannanthanam said it was issued two days earlier. There was a warning to the fishermen not to venture into the sea. It is a question of who allowed them to go even after the warning, he said.
Meanwhile, the State Disaster Management Authority (SDMA) and the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) have been sparring over lapses in issuing a warning over cyclone Ockhi.
While the IMD has confirmed that a bulletin was issued to all states on 28 November, warning of heavy rains, squally winds and high waves in south Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Lakshadweep, indicating a depression that could intensify. It had even advised fishermen not to venture into the sea.
Officials at SDMA claimed there was no indication in the alert that it could develop into a cyclonic storm. They said that it looked more like a regular protocol, alerting for heavy rains and high waves.
Union earth sciences minister Harsh Vardhan said that IMDs first bulletin of the cyclone warning was conveyed to all district officials in Kerala, the state disaster management authority and the chief secretary.
"In the bulletin, there was a clear message for fishermen not to venture into the sea during the next 48 hours. This bulletin was repeated every three hours including on the night of 29 November and was still continuing," Vardhan said.
While the government is trying to shift responsibility by blaming the IMD, it cannot be denied that there wasnt enough precautionary measures in place.
The state governments have reached out to the Centre, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi assuring to provide adequate help. However, the blame games have begun even as the people are struggling to cope with the trail of havoc Ochki has left behind.
New Delhi: Max Healthcare has decided to terminate the services of two doctors allegedly involved in the case of a premature baby being wrongly declared dead, hospital authorities have said.
The decision was taken on Sunday night after a meeting of the Max Healthcare authorities in connection with the incident. "While the inquiry by the expert group which includes external experts from the IMA is still in process, we have decided to terminate the services of two treating doctors, doctors AP Mehta and Vishal Gupta in the case relating to the twin extreme pre-term babies," Max Healthcare said in a statement.
"The strict action has been taken on the basis of our initial discussions with the expert group and as a reflection of our commitment to higher standards of care," it said.
The case pertains to the birth of twins (boy and girl) on November 30. Both the babies were allegedly declared dead by the Max Hospital in Shalimar Bagh. However, the family later found the boy was alive.
"We wish to clarify that this action should not presuppose finding of any lapse by the expert group and should not be construed in anyway to be anything other than an expression of our continued commitment to providing quality health care," the statement read.
Earlier on Sunday, the hospital had said two experts from the Indian Medical Association (IMA) had been included in the probe team set up by the Max Healthcare authorities to investigate the case.
The Max Healthcare authorities had ordered an inquiry into the case on December 1.
Bhopal: In a landmark move, Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Monday approved an amendment introducing death sentence for those who rape girls below 12 years of age.
Following a debate, the House passed the amendment unanimously by voice vote, first by any state in India.
The Amendment Bill was introduced in the House by state Law Minister Rampal Singh proposing death sentence as maximum punishment for those who rape or gangrape girls upto 12 years of age.
"We need stringent laws to prevent heinous crimes against women and also require moral and social awareness, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said.
"The girls would be continued to be seen as burden unless their security is not ensured," he added.
To deter crimes against women, the amendment seeks to propose new sections of IPC-- 376 AA, 376 D and 493A.
Congress welcoming the move sought to ensure that these stringent laws are not misused to harass innocent men.
The bill will now be sent to the President for his assent after which it will become a law, state Home Minister Bhupendra Singh told reporters outside the Assembly.
"It was a historic day for Madhya Pradesh as the state Assembly, as per the wish of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, passed a bill making a provision to award capital punishment to those indulging in such crimes (raping girls aged 12 or younger)," Singh told PTI.
(With PTI inputs)
New Delhi: Senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar landed in controversy on Monday when he invoked rulers of the Mughal dynasty to defend Rahul Gandhis elevation as party chief.
Rahul filed the nomination papers for party presidency on Monday and is likely to be elected unopposed, invoking dynasty jibes form the BJP. The 47-year-old Gandhi scion will succeed his mother Sonia Gandhi, who has held the post for 19 years in a row now. Monday was the last date for filing nominations.
Hitting back at BJP leaders, Aiyar said: When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any election happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go to the heir."
"But in a democracy elections are held. I openly invite Poonawalla to file the nomination and contest," Aiyar said, referring to the rebellion by Maharashtra Congress leader Shehzad Poonawalla.
Aiyar later sought to clarify, saying the comparisons should not be made. Don't compare both. During Mughal rule it was understood that after Jehangir, Shahjahan will be the leader but here anyone is free to contest against Rahul Gandhi. It's a totally democratic process.
The damage, however, was done, with PM Modi using Aiyars remarks to attack Rahul Gandhi at an election rally in Gujarat.
Addressing a public meeting in Dharampur constituency, Modi said: "Mani Shankar Aiyar, who never shies away from showing loyalty to one family, proudly said When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any elections happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go the son," Modi said.
"I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj. For us, the well-being of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command," he said.
Mumbai: Schools in Mumbai and adjoining districts will remain closed on Tuesday as a precaution after the Met department predicted heavy rain and thunderstorms from Monday night as Cyclone Ockhi heads to the countrys west coast.
According to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), Ockhi was 590 km from southwest of Mumbai and 770 km from south-southwest of Surat on Monday afternoon. It is expected to make landfall in coastal Gujarat by Tuesday midnight with squally winds, which may cause heavy rains along the coastline for the next two days.
Maharashtra minister Vinod Tawde announced that schools in Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Sindhudurga, Ratnagiri, Thane, Raigad and Palghar districts due to serious weather predictions.
Precautionary holiday declared for schools in Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Sindhudurga, Ratnagiri, Thane, Raigad and Palghar Districts for the safety of the students due to the serious weather predictions on #CycloneOckhi #MumbaiRains Vinod Tawde (@TawdeVinod) December 4, 2017
The disaster management unit of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has issued an advisory against visiting beaches in view of the high tide alert. Along with Maharashtra, fishermen in Goa and Karnataka have also been warned against venturing out into the sea.
IMDs director general KJ Ramesh said heavy rainfall warning has been issued for Gujarat as well. Following the IMD prediction, Gujarat chief secretary J N Singh took stock of the administrative preparedness to deal with any eventuality.
Two National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) teams each have been deployed at Surat, Navsari, and Rajkot. The officer said the Army, Navy, and the Border Security Force (BSF) have been alerted in the view of the cyclone's landfall.
According to the IMD forecast, wind velocity would remain between 50 KMPH to 70 KMPH when the cyclone would make landfall.
The scale of the cyclone has been reduced from very severe on Sunday to severe, the weather department said. Ockhi has laid waste to large parts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala last week. The death toll in the two states has risen to 25 and close to a 100 persons are still missing.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday greeted Indian naval personnel on the occassion of Navy Day.
"On Navy Day, greetings to all navy personnel and their families," Modi tweeted, attaching a video of the Indian Navy showing its prowess in the sea.
On Navy Day, greetings to all navy personnel and their families. pic.twitter.com/O36rKhnC4I Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) December 4, 2017
Navy Day is celebrated annually on December 4 to celebrate the Indian Navy's achievements and commemorate the sacrifices made by the personnel.
Award-winning Innovations by Indian Navy on Display in Delhi
On Navy Day on Monday, award-winning innovations by the force have been put on display at the "Innovation Pavilion" at the Navy House in New Delhi.
These include the innovations by Indian Naval Ships 'Kuthar' and 'Vikramaditya', which have been selected as the winner and runner-up respectively in the 'Operational Units' category.
On Navy Day, my good wishes to all officers and men and women of the Indian Navy. Nation is proud of your commitment in protecting our maritime frontiers, securing our trade routes, and providing assistance in times of civil emergencies #PresidentKovind President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) December 4, 2017
The innovations by the Weapons Electronic Systems Engineering Establishment (WESEE) and Naval Aircraft Yard, Kochi were selected as the winner and runner-up respectively in the 'Shore Establishments' category.
At least 20 innovations have been shortlisted from those submitted by units and establishments across the Navy for central evaluation, a Defence Ministry statement said.
They range from innovative repairs to complex system modules to development of new techniques that would save money, time and manpower, it added.
All ranks of Indian Navy & their families join me in wishing our countrymen a 'Happy Navy Day' with an assurance that the Indian Navy will always remain ready to meet all challenges and threats, and safeguard national interests in the maritime dimension- Admiral Sunil Lanba CNS pic.twitter.com/OyoApeYPVv SpokespersonNavy (@indiannavy) December 4, 2017
"As a mark of recognition, the shortlisted initiatives have been showcased to the invited dignitaries on the Navy Day," the statement said.
The Navy presents the 'CNS Rolling Trophy for Innovation' to selected innovations on methods adopted by units to overcome constraints and to improve efficiency at their work areas.
#NavyDay Admiral Sunil Lanba CNS , General Bipin Rawat COAS & Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa pay homage at the Amar Jawan Jyoti India Gate on the occasion of Navy Day (04 Dec) pic.twitter.com/h3siNLoS3b SpokespersonNavy (@indiannavy) December 4, 2017
Innovations are evolved by Navy personnel when they are on a warship in the high seas on long missions where many challenges crop up.
- With inputs from agencies
Russia's hybrid military forces have attacked Ukrainian army positions in Donbas 38 times in the past 24 hours, with one Ukrainian soldier reported as killed in action and another four as wounded in action, the press center of the Ukrainian Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) headquarters has reported.
"The Russian occupation forces more often shell the Ukrainian positions from weapons that should have been withdrawn from the contact line, including tanks," the ATO HQ said on Facebook on Monday.
In the Luhansk sector, the enemy was active near the villages of Troyitske and Luhanske after dark. Here, the militants used 120mm mortars. In addition, the invaders repeatedly fired grenade launchers and small arms to attack ATO positions near the town of Zolote, and the villages of Novo-Oleksandrivka, Zhovte and Krymske.
In Donetsk region, the epicenter of confrontation shifted from the Mariupol sector to the outskirts of the town of Avdiyivka in the Donetsk sector in the evening. Here, the invaders repeatedly opened fire from all available infantry weapons, and closer to midnight the militants had been firing from a tank's cannon for more than an hour. The enemy used 82mm mortars against the Ukrainian troops in the villages of Verkhniotoretske and Lebedynske, while the defenders of the village of Talakivka and the town of Maryinka came under fire from grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and small arms.
Thiruvananthapuram: Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday sought to assure the fishermen community that rescue operations in the wake of Cyclone Ockhi would not stop till the last person is rescued.
Naval ships, helicopters, Coast Guard vessels and Air Force planes are engaged in the rescue and relief operations to track down missing Kerala fishermen.
"Search and rescue operations will continue...There will not be any dilution of operations. We want to make sure that each and every fishermen who had gone from Kerala comes back safe, she said.
According to authorities, 97 fishermen who ventured out into the sea last week are still missing. So far , 393 fishermen from Kerala have been rescued.
Fishing communities in Vizhinjam and Poonthura have been protesting alleged inaction in bringing back fishermen missing from the hamlets for five days now. The anger was palpable during Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayans visit to Vizhinjam on Sunday night. Police had to remove protesters from the CMs path.
The protesters alleged that they were not given proper warning and that the rescue operations were proceeding on slow pace. They said some fishermen from the hamlet should be taken to the seas in Navy and Coast Guard vessels since they know the waters better.
On Monday, after listening to their grievances, Nirmala Sitharaman, speaking in Tamil, assured them that rescue operations could continue.
The operations had started on November 30. Search operations are more intense that those undertaken during the 2004 tsunami. I will meet the agriculture minister with your problems. I assure you that your problems will be solved."
The fishermen complained to the Union minister that Coast Guard was not able to find the fishermen, something they were able to achieve in their small boats.
"This is not the time for blame game. Let us all try and bring our fishermen back home. That should be the focus right now. Had the Coast Guard spotted the fishermen, they would not have left them behind, Sitharaman replied.
New Delhi: A bench of Justice AK Sikri and Justice Ashok Bhushan issued notice to the centre on a plea to allow demonstration in Central Delhi including Jantar Mantar.
The two judge bench called for a balance between the people's right to protest and hold demonstration and also maintain law and order. It has now asked the centre to respond on how to regulate protests in Central Delhi.
This Public Interest Litigation was filed by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) to allow the protestors to protest in a peaceful manner around the Boat Club area of India Gate.
The petitioner have stated that they are aggrieved by the order banning all sort of protest at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.
The disputed said order was passed in October, 2017 by the Principal bench of NGT. MKSS has identified 'Boat Club Area' of India Gate, as an alternative to hold peaceful protests.
Bench of Justice A. K. Sikri and Justice Ashok Bhushan has also asked for recommendations from Centre in regard to guidelines for regulation of 'Right to Protest and Demonstration'.
The apex court has also sought recommendations from the Traffic Advisory bodies to frame regulatory guidelines to manage smooth flow of traffic whenever a demonstration is carried on by participants in a protest.
The petitioners have also asserted that the Right to Protest, Demonstrate and have Peaceful Assembly (in a lawful manner) is a fundamental right. "Government cannot keep on imposing Sec-144 of the Cr.P.C, in an everlasting manner," reads the petition.
Earlier hearing a plea filed by residents of Jantar Mantar road, who had claimed that processions and agitations "violate their right to live in a peaceful and healthy environment, right to silence, right to sleep and right to life with dignity," an NGT bench headed by Justice R.S. Rathore had directed the respondents to remove all make-shift and temporary structures, loud speakers and public address systems from the road and to "forthwith" shift the protesters and those sitting on dharnas at the venue to Ramlila Maidan.
The NGT bench had also held that the protests were in violation of environmental laws including Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 and upheld the right of the residents of the surrounding area to live peacefully and comfortably.
It was a horrible mix-up, but trust Shashi Tharoor to see the lighter side of it. Shortly after legendary Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor died, a channel tweeted the Congress MP's name by mistake.
Soon Tharoor's office was flooded with calls and he responded on Twitter in his own inimitable way.
"We're getting condolence calls in the office! Reports of my demise are, if not exaggerated, at least premature" Tharoor tweeted. It's the author-politician's take off on the famous quote attributed to the legendary Mark Twain.
We're getting condolence calls in the office! Reports of my demise are, if not exaggerated, at least premature. @TimesNow #ShashiKapoor https://t.co/nbtZGcdQTa Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017
The journalist apologised for his mistake and wished Tharoor a healthy life. The Congress MP graciously accepted the apology and wrote, Mistakes happen. Glad to be able to crack a smile at a tragic moment.
Tharoor also tweeted out a heartfelt condolence message and said it 'feels a part of me is gone'.
A great actor, smart, cosmopolitan, impossibly handsome & w/a name that was often confused w/mine. (My office got two calls from journalists today about my reportedly serious ill-health!) I will miss #ShashiKapoor. Condolences2his family&all his fans (sic), he wrote.
I feel a part of me is gone. A great actor, smart, cosmopolitan, impossibly handsome & w/a name that was often confused w/mine. (My office got two calls from journalists today about my reportedly serious ill-health!) I will miss #ShashiKapoor. Condolences2his family&all his fans pic.twitter.com/fSz3jafPZJ Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 4, 2017
The 79-year-old actor, who worked in more than 160 films, took his last breath at the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai on Wednesday.
Seoul/ Beijing: The United States and South Korea went ahead with large-scale joint aerial drills on Monday, a move North Korea had said would push the Korean peninsula to "the brink of nuclear war", ignoring calls from Russia and China to call them off.
The drills come a week after North Korea said it had tested its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States as part of a weapons programme that it has conducted in defiance of international sanctions and condemnation.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said it was "regrettable" that all parties had not "grasped the window of opportunity" presented by two months of relative calm before the North's most recent test.
China and Russia had proposed that the United States and South Korea stop major military exercises in exchange for North Korea halting its weapons programmes. Beijing formally calls the idea the dual suspension proposal.
The annual U.S.-South Korean drill, called Vigilant Ace, will run until Friday, with six F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to be deployed among the more than 230 aircraft taking part.
North Korea's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country called U.S. President Donald Trump "insane" on Sunday and said the drills would "push the already acute situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war".
F-35 fighters will also join the drills, which will include the largest number of 5th generation fighters ever to have taken part, according to a South Korea-based U.S. Air Force spokesman.
Around 12,000 U.S. service members, including from the Marines and Navy, will join South Korean troops. Aircraft taking part will be flown from eight U.S. and South Korean military installations.
South Korean media reports said B-1B Lancer bombers could join the exercise this week. The U.S. Air Force spokesman could not confirm the reports.
Trump said last week that additional major sanctions would be imposed on North Korea after Pyongyang's intercontinental ballistic missile test.
Earlier last month, Trump put North Korea back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation that allows the United States to impose more sanctions.
Russia has accused the United States of trying to provoke North Korean leader Kim Jong Un into "flying off the handle" over his missile programme to hand Washington a pretext to destroy his country.
Speaking at a news briefing in Beijing, Wang said China consistently opposed any behaviour that elevated tensions.
"And measures that don't abide by or are outside the UN Security Council resolutions lack basis in international law and damage the rights of United Nations members," Wang said when asked about the prospect of further U.S. sanctions against North Korea.
China's Air Force said on Monday that its surveillance aircraft had in recent days conducted drills in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea to "improve combat-readiness and safeguard the country's strategic interests".
The aircraft took a flight path not previously flown to regions they had never previously operated in, and coordinated with fighter jets, alert aircraft and guided missile forces, spokesman Shen Jinke said, according to a post on the Air Force's official microblog.
The joint exercises between South Korea and United States are designed to enhance readiness and operational capability and to ensure peace and security on the Korean peninsula, the U.S. military had said before the drills began.
The North's KCNA state news agency, citing a foreign ministry spokesman, said on Saturday the Trump administration was "begging for nuclear war by staging an extremely dangerous nuclear gamble on the Korean peninsula".
North Korea regularly uses its state media to threaten the United States and its allies.
North Korea has tested dozens of ballistic missiles and conducted its sixth and largest nuclear bomb test in September, in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
It has said its weapons programmes are a necessary defence against U.S. plans to invade. The United States, which has 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, denies any such intention.
Liquor baron Vijay Mallya has returned to Westminster Magistrates Court in London and his extradition trial will begin shortly. Mallya is wanted in India on charges relating to his defunct Kingfisher Airlines defaulting on loans from various Indian banks amounting to Rs 9,000 crore.
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New Delhi: Liquor baron Vijay Mallya, out on a 650,000-pound bail bond following his arrest by Scotland Yard over fraud and money laundering charges earlier this year, will return to Westminster Magistrates' Court in London on Monday as his extradition trial begins.
India's case to bring back the 61-year old businessman will be represented through the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) of the British government.
PTI quoted CBI sources as saying that a team led by Special Director Rakesh Asthana left for London on Sunday and would remain present during the trial.
Mallya, who had shifted to the UK in March 2016, is wanted in India on charges relating to his defunct Kingfisher Airlines defaulting on loans from various Indian banks amounting to Rs 9,000 crore.
The former Rajya Sabha member had told PTI during his numerous court appearances in London over the last few months that he had "done nothing wrong" and described the allegations against him as "fabricated".
The trial will be heard by Chief Magistrate Emma Louise Arbuthnot who, in a previous hearing, had highlighted prison conditions as a concern that has been "raised in extraditions to India before".
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), arguing on behalf of the Indian government, has told the court that the Indian authorities foresaw this as an issue and has been "engaged on the matter".
The extradition trial itself, to be presided over by Judge Arbuthnot, is listed for hearings until December 14, with December 6 and 8 so far marked as non-sitting days. A judgment in the case is not expected until early next year.
If the judge rules in favour of extradition at the end of the trial, UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd must order Mallya's extradition within two months. However, the case can go through a series of court appeals before the actual extradition order can be issued.
India and the UK have an Extradition Treaty dating back to 1992 but so far only one extradition has taken place from the UK to India under the arrangement. Samirbhai Vinubhai Patel, wanted in connection with the post-Godhra riots of 2002, was extradited.
But, unlike Mallya, he had submitted to the extradition order without a legal challenge.
Mallya, who was based at his Hertfordshire estate called Ladywalk in the village of Tewin, around 48 km from London, had responded with a firm "no" on being formally asked in court if he consented to being extradited to India on the charges relating to his collapsed Kingfisher Airlines.
(With PTI inputs)
New Delhi: Today is Navy Day, a day on which we celebrate the achievements and role of our Naval force. And, the biggest weapon in our naval prowess is no doubt our only aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya.
Commanding Officer of INS Vikramaditya Captain Ajay Kochhar and fighter pilot of MiG 29 Abhijit Bhute have quite a thrilling life. After all, they are the ones running the largest warship in India's fleetINS Vikramaditya. In an exclusive interview to CNN News18, the duo talk about the thrills of being on-board the 45,400-tonne warship.
INS Vikramaditya is the only aircraft carrier in service in India.(Photo: CNN News18)
This Navy day, take a glimpse at the challenges, the rigour and the responsibility of leading India's biggest diplomatic weapon. She fills the enemy's heart with fear wherever she goes.
"It is great. We go for longer bouts of practice sessions. There are extensive briefings and de-briefings," Cdr Abhijit said.
INS Vikramaditya carries a naval version of MiG-29 fighter jet. (Photo: CNN News18)
Recently, the Navy has undertaken long range deployment. This means that the warships are being sent on missions for extended periods. "This has also put increased pressure on the frontline units," Vice Admiral Girish Luthra, Flag Officer Commanding in Chief of the Western Naval Command said.
It may not feature in Morocco's official tourism brochures but cannabis attracts thousands of visitors a year to the North African country. At a hotel bar in the northern region of Ketama, German tourist Beatrix made no attempt to hide the joint she was rolling. The 57-year-old said she had fallen in love with the area for "the quality of its hashish and the friendliness of its residents".
Hassan, a 40-something sporting a conspicuous gold watch, said cannabis was "our main source of wealth". "The climate here is very special. Nothing grows here except kif," he said, using a Moroccan name for the drug. Northern Morocco is a key production center for hashish for export to Europe, but it has also seen traffic in the other direction -- an influx of European visitors heading to sample the local pleasures. While Moroccan law bans the sale and consumption of the drug, that has not stopped farmers growing vast plantations of it, providing a living for some 90,000 households, according to official figures for 2013, the most recent available.
Smoking kif is seen as part of the local culture, and is largely tolerated by the authorities. Beatrix was among the organisers of the mid-September "Bombola Ganja" festival, essentially an evening gathering of smokers at a hotel swimming pool. Cannabis leaves appeared prominently on the poster on Facebook for the event, alongside the names of trance DJs and a call for cannabis to be legalized for medicinal purposes.
Ketama hosts thousands of tourists a year, mostly from Europe but also from other parts of Morocco. "People are attracted by the mountains, the hiking, the climate," hotel director Abdelhamid said. But it has also been famed for its cannabis since the 1960s, when it became popular with hippies seeking the high life.
"Twenty years ago, the tourists were mainly young Spaniards who came to smoke," one local tour operator said. "Now, non-smokers also come for the blue of the city, highly appreciated by Chinese tourists." Famed for its narrow alleys lined with striking blue houses, the town is also the main urban center of a region famed for its cannabis production.
Small-time dealers and unlicensed guides approach tourists to offer them hashish or a tour of nearby farms to meet the "kifficulteurs" -- local cannabis producers.
Chefchaouen guesthouses offer a similar service for around $18 (15 euros), although they are careful not to mention it in their brochures. On the terrace of a strategically located cafe, dealer Mohamed approached potential buyers, showing them a large pellet of hash and offering a "field visit" to see how the cannabis is processed.
After gathering a group of tourists, he took them to a nearby village. Standing in a field, with cannabis plantations covering the hillsides as far as the eye can see, he pointed out the varieties being cultivated. "Here you have the Mexican plant, the Afghan and the beldia (Arabic for domestic)," he said. Most farmers in the area import seeds in order to ensure a bigger harvest, he said.
Women from the village watched the scene with amusement as chickens pecked around the cottage. The farmer took the bucket to his workshop and returned a few minutes later with the finished product -- a block of hashish. "Here, you smoke where you want, except in front of the police station," Mohamed said.
Los Angeles: Actress Pamela Anderson is not backing down from her controversial claims that suggested the women who accused Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment "knew what they were getting into".
The 50-year-old actress and model caused controversy when she appeared on "Today" and hinted at the idea that the women who have accused the disgraced producer of sexual harassment should have known what would happen if they went "into a hotel room alone".
The 'Baywatch' star has now claimed that she was not 'victim shaming' anyone, rather wants women to be aware of their surroundings.
"This is not victim shaming. (Weinstein is) a sexist pig and a bully. (But) there are a lot of self-protection courses. There is even a well-known story of suffragettes learning martial arts. Women (must be) aware of certain problems and how to spot, fight them," said Anderson to tmz.com.
Anderson further defended her comments and refused to apologise.
"It is totally hypocritical to ignore this... (I) will not get coerced into an apology," she further added.
New Delhi: Actor Rishi Kapoor, who was shooting for Rajma Chawal in the national capital, has rushed back to Mumbai to be with his family after the demise of veteran actor-producer and his uncle Shashi Kapoor.
Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the 1970s and early 1980s, died on Monday at a hospital in Mumbai. He was 79.
"We are the airport looking at the flight schedule, and want to reach Mumbai at the earliest. We might go tonight or tomorrow morning," Shanti Malik, who works closely with the Kapoor family, told IANS on Monday evening.
Malik also said that he doesn't know the cause of Shashi Kapoor's death, and would be in position to give out details on Tuesday morning.
The younger brother of late Raj and Shammi Kapoor, who were both actors par excellence, Shashi Kapoor started his tryst with acting at the age of four, with plays directed and produced by his father Prithviraj Kapoor.
He started acting in films as a child in the late 1940s. His best known performances as child artist were in "Aag" (1948) and "Awaara" (1951), where he played the younger version of the character played by his elder brother Raj.
When he grew up, he made his debut as a leading man in the 1961 film Dharmputra, and went on to appear in more than 150 Hindi films.
Shashi Kapoor, whose nuanced acts in memorable films like Deewar, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Trishul and Kabhi Kabhie captivated Hindi film buffs, was married to English theatre actress Jennifer Kendal.
He had three children - Kunal, Karan and Sanjana Kapoor.
Former Georgian President and former Odesa regional governor, who heads the Ukrainian opposition party "Movement of New Forces," Mikheil Saakashvili, has said he does not intend to fear blackmail that he will be extradited to Georgia.
"Now [former Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina] Ivanishvili and [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko agreed that a sentence on trumped-up charges will be quickly issued next week," Saakashvili told Georgia's Rustavi-2 television company on Sunday, December 3, during participation in a March for Impeachment organized by his party in Kyiv.
In his opinion, they want to blackmail him with extradition, suggesting that he go to the Netherlands or Poland instead of Georgia.
At the same time, he said that if such a question arises, he is not afraid and is ready to return to Georgia.
"Do you play these games? They will finish badly. I'll come to Georgia. I will not go to the Netherlands. I will not go to Europe as they wish. It's their joint game. I want to say that if they raise this question, if the oligarchs have agreed, if they issue a verdict in Georgia and want to blackmail me on the basis of this verdict by threatening to send me to Georgia, I said that I will come to Georgia. Let our supporters in Georgia prepare that I will come when they make this decision," Saakashvili said.
Speaking about the rally "March for Impeachment" in Kyiv, he noted that "this is only the beginning."
"Here, in Ukraine, if you let the genie out of the bottle, you cannot squeeze it back in," he said.
Mumbai: On Saturday, Salman Khan opened yet another Weekend Ka Vaar of Bigg Boss 11, however, what grabbed everyone's attention was his voice, which sounded a bit husky. He then informed viewers about his poor health.
When the superstar was spotted at the Star Screen Awards here on Sunday, he was once again asked about his health. To which, the actor said, "The environment is not suiting me these days. I am suffering from viral, which refuses to leave me because I am not getting any break. I was at a Summit recently, then I graced IFFI, and I have to host 'Bigg Boss' on the weekends. And on top of that, the 'Tiger Zinda Hai' dubbing is going on. So, I am not getting any rest."
Salman will soon be seen in Tiger Zinda Hai, which also features Katrina Kaif. The film is based on the real-life incident wherein 46 nurses were held hostage by ISIS in Iraq in 2014.
"It is not good to fight, but always good to romance," Salman said of his role in the Ali Abbas Zafar-directorial.
"It is coming out on December 22. Two songs have been released, and they are really good. Everyone has really appreciated the songs. And now on December 22, we will find out the destiny of the film," Salman added.
(With inputs from IANS)
Mumbai: Veteran Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the 70s and early 80s who immortalised the line "Mere paas Maa hai", died on Monday after prolonged illness. He was 79.
Best known for his work in films such as Deewar, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Namak Halal, Kaala Pathar and Kabhie Kabhie, he had stayed away from the limelight in the last two decades.
He had been suffering from ailments for the past few years. He had undergone a bypass surgery and was also hospitalized for a chest infection in 2014.
He is survived by three children - Kunal, Sanjana and Karan Kapoor.
The actor-producer took his last breath at 5.20 pm at the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai.
"Yes, he has passed away. He had a kidney problem and was on dialysis for several years," his nephew Randhir Kapoor, the son of the late Raj Kapoor, said. The funeral will be held on Tuesday morning, he said.
Kapoor hit the spotlight at the age of four, acting in plays directed and produced by his father. He started acting in films as a child artiste in the late '40s.
His best known performances as a child actor were in "Aag" (1948) and "Awaara" (1951), where he played the younger version of the character played by Raj Kapoor. He also worked as assistant director in the '50s.
He made his debut as a leading man in the 1961 film "Dharmputra" and went on to appear in more than 116 films during '70s and until the mid '80s. A three-time national award winner, he was also honoured with Padma Bhushan in 2011 and received the prestigious Dada Saheb Phalke award in 2015.
President Ram Nath Kovind, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi led in paying tributes to the popular actor.
"Sorry to hear of the demise of Shashi Kapoor, well-known actor, with a repertoire of Indian and international films. His support for meaningful cinema as a producer and pivotal role in the theatre movement in India too are cherished. Condolences to his family," said Kovind in a message on Twitter.
Prime Minister Modi said he was saddened by the news and recalled Kapoor's contribution to cinema and theatre. "Shashi Kapoor's versatility could be seen in his movies as well as in theatre, which he promoted with great passion. His brilliant acting will be remembered for generations to come. Saddened by his demise. Condolences to his family and admirers," Modi tweeted.
Karishma Kapoor, Ranbir Kapoor, Rekha, Neetu Kapoor with Shashi Kapoor at the Dadasaheb Phalke Awards. (Image: Getty Images)
The Indian film industry, too, mourned the death of the actor, as friends and admirers - led by Lata Mangeshkar, Shyam Benegal and Aamir Khan - recalled his passion for cinema, while paying homage to a man known for his easy charm and good nature.
"His work has always given Indian audiences great joy. His contribution to Indian theatre was huge, Prithvi theatre is the favourite venue of both performers and audiences alike. His passing a sad day for all of us. My condolences to Sanjana, Kunal, Karan and everyone in the family. May his soul rest in peace," Aamir wrote on Twitter.
Actor Saira Banu remembered him as a "bubbly person". "He was full of fun, full of jokes and at the same time he was really a smart person," Banu, legendary actor Dilip Kumar's wife, said.
Leading Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar recalled the late actor's classic line from "Deewar" and said it inspired aspiring artistes. "Innumerable Bollywood dreams came to life watching your iconic dialogue, 'Mere paas maa hai.' Your tremendouscontribution to cinema will always be remembered," he tweeted.
Many stars, including Amitabh Bachchan, Ranbir Kapoor, Kajol, Rani Mukerji, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Saif Ali Khan came to pay their last respects to Shashi Kapoor at his residence.
Actress Sunny Leone is excited about featuring in action sequences in a period war film in Telugu. The actress has been signed up for a movie to be directed by V.C. Vadivudaiyan. Ponse Stephen is producing the film. The yet untitled film will be "based on the culture of south India", read a statement.
For this project, she is all geared up to learn sword fighting, horse riding and other stunt-related arts. For this purpose, a special trainer from Andhra Pradesh will fly to Mumbai and teach Sunny all these arts. Sunny has given a call sheet of 150 days, and around 70 minutes of the movie is said to be computer generated imagery-driven. It will be released in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi.
"After this movie, I am sure my image will change completely. I have always liked doing action sequences. I was waiting for a script like this only for years. I started preparing for this movie from the minute director V.C. Vadivudayan narrated me the script. I have a special love towards south India, so I am very happy to do a straight Telugu movie. I have a lot of my fans in south India, especially Andra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala," she said.
The shoot will start from February.
Lucknow: The BJP is all set to encash its UP civic poll performance in Gujarat by utilising newly elected mayors for campaigning in the poll-bound state.
The BJP has won 14 out of 16 mayoral seats in civic polls in UP and all the newly elected leaders will be meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday to seek his blessings.
Thereafter, they will proceed to Gujarat for campaigning for the Assembly elections there on December 9 and 14.
"The newly elected mayors will meet the prime minister over tea tomorrow in Delhi. They are all devoted party workers and will be used where ever the party needs them," BJP state general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak told PTI.
Amethi Nagar Panchyat Chairperson Chandrama Devi and Jais Nagar Palika Parishad Mahesh Pratap will be among those who will be meeting Modi.
Though Congress did not field any candidate in Amethi, the victory of a BJP candidate there is still considered a major blow to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as it is his parliamentary constituency and considered a Congress bastion.
The Congress lost in Jais and Gauriganj where Nagar Palika polls were held. In Amethi and Musafirkhana, where Nagar Panchayat polls were held, the party had not fielded anyone.
With the BJP's extensive campaign in the local polls in UP paying off, the sweeping win is considered as a boost to the saffron party in the midst of the high-decibel campaign for the Gujarat elections.
Counting of votes in Gujarat will be taken up on December 18.
The UP civic elections were touted as the first litmus test of Yogi Adityanath after the BJP stormed to power in March.
The saffron surge routed the Samajwadi Party and the Congress, both of which drew a blank in mayoral polls.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who has been drafted as the key campaigner in Gujarat and went on a nearly 90-day whirlwind tour of the state, described it as a "historic win".
He attributed the victory to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision and BJP chief Amit Shah's able guidance and added that the BJP will now look forward to achieving the goal of one hundred percent success in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
"The victory of party has sent positive message among the people who are already admirers of Narendra Modiji. There is a significant population of people from east UP in Gujarat," said BJP leader and state spokesman Shalabh Mani Tripathi, who is campaigning in Gujarat for the past one month.
"Yogiji is already a star campaigner and our newly elected mayors with their success stories will add to our ongoing campaigning here," Tripathi said.
Rahul Gandhi has filed the nomination for the post of Congress president, paving the way for his much-awaited elevation and setting the stage for a contest against PM Narendra Modi ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Addressing a rally in Gujarat, Modi termed the elevation as Aurangzeb raj. Rahuls big moment has been shadowed by a rebellion of sorts from Maharashtra Congress leader Shehzad Poonawalla, who says the elections are rigged". Congress had no place for Shehzad, but for shehzada (prince)," he says.
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Bengaluru: Karnataka Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy on Monday accused BJP MP Pratap Simha of purposely violating the law and said that he was doing this at the behest of his party president Amit Shah.
Reddy made the comments while facing questions from reporters about why Simha, BJP MP from Mysuru, was arrested while participating in a procession in his constituency for Hanuman Jayanti.
He said that Simha, who was personally driving his car, had tried to crash through police barricades and nearly hit officials deployed for security during the procession.
Whether it is Eid procession or Hanuman Jayanti procession, the police permission is given based on a set route. But he wanted to deviate from the route-map given and dash his way through barricades. Our policemen escaped injuries narrowly. Should they then just keep quiet, without any action? They have booked cases because the law is the same for this MP, as it is for me or for the Chief Minister, Reddy said.
"They are only want to mine this for political reasons...They are all doing this at the behest of Amit Shah," he added.
He referred to a video posted by Simha a few weeks ago on social media, where Simha is heard telling the BJP Yuva Morcha cadre that he was asked by Shah during his (Shahs) last visit for review of party functioning ahead of elections, to get aggressive in all protests and demonstrations.
The video, that soon went viral on social media, has Simha saying, Shah had called a meeting of all the morchas during his Bangalore visit. He asked the Yuva Morcha how many protests have you held in the recent past. We gave him details.
After hearing us out, Shah said you are the Yuva Morcha. You must hold more fierce protests. How many of your protests have seen lathi-charging, or tear gas used? Give me those details. To this, I said, there are no such incidents, but in future, we will hold such protests in the coming days, he added.
The video put the BJP in opposition in Karnataka in an embarrassing position, coming as it does just days after some of their district office-bearers in Tumkur district were accused of beating up a journalist trying to question a party leaders role in illegal mining.
On Sunday, even as Simha was briefly arrested and later released for trying to break the police barricades, a similar incident was reported where BJP workers tried to create trouble at the Datta Jayanti celebrations in the communally-sensitive Bababudangiri Hills in Chikmagalur district.
Chikmagaluru MLA and BJP general secretary CT Ravi too had participated in these celebrations, where a worker tried to deface a shrine worshipped by members of another community. The incident also saw some mild lathicharge before things were brought under control.
Reddy, who said such incidents are increasing with just six months to go for elections, advised the BJP to hold workshops to teach their MPs and MLAs the law. Simha and Ananth Kumar Hegde these are MPs. They should know the law. But they are mining these religious occasions for political purposes. They dont celebrate anything out of bhakti (devotion), but for politics, he said.
Chief Minister Siddarmaiaah too reacted on social media, taunting Simha. Taking BJP president Amit Shahs advice seriously, Mysore MP @mepratap is trying to create communal disturbance in Hunsur during Hanuman Jayanti. It is our responsibility to ensure citizens celebrate festivals peacefully. No person, including an MP, will be allowed to take law in his own hands.
Chennai: The hotly contested RK Nagar bypoll just got a celluloid twist with actor Vishal throwing his hat in the ring and how!
With the election set to be conducted on December 21, Vishal has started with the leg work by conducting review meetings with representatives of the prestigious seat that fell vacant after late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaas demise.
The actor, who wishes to be seen as a peoples politician than one with big political ambitions, said, I want to be the voice of RK Nagar. I want to be the representative of the people and Im not going to be a full time politician. I have no long-term plan. It is just a gut feeling and I want to contest the election.
Vishal said he draws inspiration from Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and late President, APJ Abdul Kalam.
He added, I look up to these two people. I havent met Arvind Kejriwal but he is a people's leader. Im not going to be a politician and will remain a commoner.
Taking note of Vishal's comments, Kejriwal tweeted his welcome to the actor's entry into politics and invited the actor to visit him.
Welcome @VishalKOfficial. Ur entry in politics will inspire many youngsters. Lets meet up when u come to Del next https://t.co/SZstIyTcRG Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) December 4, 2017
The actor made the surprise announcement of contesting the elections on Saturday. Besides opposition DMK, ruling AIADMK's E Madhusudhanan and the party's sidelined leader TTV Dinakaran are contesting for the prestigious seat.
Speaking to News18 exclusively, the actor said, They have not addressed issues that have being going on for many years. For instance, poor hygiene in toilets in government schools, poor treatment in government hospitals, people not getting pension, issues with the ration shops. Moreover, these problems are not just in RK Nagar, but also in other constituencies as well. We will address these issues immediately and not wait for the bypoll result.
Vishal is also likely to visit the Kamraj statue, MGRs residence and Jayalalithaa memorial, before filing the nominations.
While superstars Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth have only hinted at their political jump so far, Vishal has already decided to take that leap and is about to contest as an Independent candidate.
Vishal, for whom elections are a first, said he is overwhelmed with the support he received from the film industry after the announcement.
He said, I havent approached anyone but if they are like-minded people and they wish to support me, they are invited. Im so happy that actors Kushboo, Prakash Raj and Arya have offered their support. Wishes are pouring in. I havent heard from Kamal Sir yet, but once I file the nomination papers, Ill call him.
Bhopal: Taking potshots at the Congress' claim that party vice president Rahul Gandhi is a Janeudhari Hindu, BJP's Rajya Sabha member Subramanian Swamy on Monday said the 47-year-old Gandhi scion was "compelled" to wear 'Janeu' (sacred thread) to perform the last rites of his father.
Swamy also termed the Congress as a "dharmashala" of one family on the day when Rahul filed his nomination for the party president's post.
"Rahul Gandhi was compelled to wear Janeu because of his father. Otherwise, he will not be able to perform last rites," Swamy said, while questioning why the Congress leader was not saying that he was a Hindu.
The senior BJP leader arrived here to attend a conference on environmental issues.
Swamy said, "When he accepts that he is a Shivabhakt, what is the problem in accepting that he is a Hindu. We will accept it. Your (Rahul) associate asked for the register meant for non-Hindus making entries and then you make claims that you are a Shivabhakt (devotee of Lord Shiva)."
The BJP leader reaffirmed that the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya would begin soon and it would be ready to receive devotees by next Diwali.
"I have seen that our pleas are stronger than the opposition. They were defeated in the Allahabad High Court. They have now filed an appeal but they did not present new facts. So, I believe that we will win the court battle," he said.
While replying to a question, Swamy claimed BJP's victory in the Gujarat Assembly elections was a foregone conclusion.
Asked about the extradition of liquor baron Vijay Mallya, Swamy said, "The government is making efforts to bring him back to India. The government will not spare anybody."
Referring about to the GST, Swamy said that after the new tax regime was implemented, the GDP has started an upward movement.
Asked if the GST would adversely affect the BJP's chances in the Gujarat polls, he said everybody was saying that demonetisation would harm the party's prospects. But, on the contrary, the BJP won 75 percent seats in Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, he added.
Australia's competition regulator said on Monday it would investigate whether U.S. online giants Facebook and Alphabet Inc's Google has disrupted the news media market to the detriment of publishers and consumers. Like their rivals globally, Australia's traditional media companies have been squeezed by online rivals, as advertising dollars have followed eyeballs to digital distributors such as Google, Facebook and Netflix Inc.
The government ordered the probe as part of wider media reforms, amid growing concern for the future of journalism and the quality of news following years of declining profits and newsroom job cuts and the rise of fake news. "We will examine whether platforms are exercising market power in commercial dealings to the detriment of consumers, media content creators and advertisers," Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Chairman Rod Sims said in a statement.
The inquiry also would study how Facebook and Google operated to "fully understand their influence in Australia", he added. A Google spokesman said, "We look forward to engaging in this process as relevant." Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The idea for an ACCC investigation was hatched during media reform negotiations in parliament earlier this year, which resulted in a relaxation of ownership laws to allow the country's big players to boost their market share to better compete against online disruptors.
Independent media analyst Peter Cox told Reuters it was unclear what measures the competition regulator could recommend to the government even if it found the country's media sector was increasingly anti-competitive. "You could see this as a stepping stone towards another type of reform, such as tax," said Cox. Jurisdictions around the world, including the European Union, are grappling with how to tax technology giants with global operations.
Currently, corporate taxes are paid where firms have a physical presence, which allows digital multinationals to book most of their profits where they have set up headquarters as opposed to where they make their money. The Australian probe will have the power to demand information from businesses and hold hearings. It is due to make its final report in 18 months.
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The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (OSCE SMM) has confirmed over 400 casualties among the civilian population in the conflict zone in Donbas since the beginning of 2017, OSCE SMM Deputy Chief Monitor Aleska Simkic has said.
Simkic said at a press conference in Kharkiv on Monday that over the current year, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission had confirmed more than 400 civilian casualties, including those dead and injured.
She noted that the failure to comply with the Minsk agreements, in particular, ceasefire violations, increased the risk of gender-based violence. In addition, the OSCE mission records numerous cases of human rights violations in the conflict zone, she said.
Undoubtedly, this situation primarily affects the civilian population and increases the risk of gender-based violence, including social and domestic violence, she said. The survivors of violence often face another tragedy - the lack of social, economic and other human rights, she said.
Simkic said that thousands of citizens (men, women and children) did not have access to electricity, gas, water, because during a protracted conflict the destruction of infrastructure erected across the contact line continues. People need to wait in lines at checkpoints for many hours, without proper shelter and without hygienic conditions, she said.
Simkic also noted that the OSCE SMM had initially called for opening more checkpoints. There are currently four of them in Donetsk region and only one pedestrian crossing in Stanytsia Luhanska in Luhansk region, she said.
According to her, in 2017, the mission recorded more appeals from women who became victims of gender violence in the conflict zone.
Remember Logo? The programming language everyone was taught to use in their computer classes back in school, today celebrates its golden jubilee and search giant Google planned to celebrate it in a unique way. Three teams including that of Google Doodle, Google Blockly and Researchers from MIT worked together to produce Mondays Google Doodle, which showcases a rabbit on a hunt for carrots in the form of a programming language for kids.
Marking the 50th anniversary of the first ever programming languages for children, the Google Doodle replicates Logo and allows kids to design codes to move the rabbit onto the blocks. Six levels of designing codes on the Google Doodle aim to provide them "the opportunity to explore ideas in math and science".
Celebrate #CSEdWeek & 50 yrs of kids coding languages by checking out our VERY FIRST coding #GoogleDoodle! https://t.co/Kr7pjrLXOr pic.twitter.com/V0aJFBBAM2 Google Doodles (@GoogleDoodles) December 4, 2017
"Like Logo, Scratch was developed at MIT and builds on Paperts early ideas about kids and computers. Its designed to be less intimidating than typical programming languages, but just as powerful and expressive" adds Champika Fernando, Director of Communications, Scratch Team.
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After well over a decade with Capgemini, Salil Parekh is returning home to head unsettled Indian software services firm Infosys, where he will seek to replicate his success in notching up record growth at the divisions he ran. Alongside, Parekh has to help the bellwether of India's $154 billion software services sector recover from a nasty public spat between its board and founders that led to the dramatic exit of the previous CEO, Vishal Sikka, in August.
Parekh joins Bengaluru-based Infosys in January from Paris-headquartered Capgemini, where he headed their core application services business in key markets like North America and the United Kingdom, and their cloud services and cloud infrastructure businesses. He also managed Sogeti - a unit of Capgemini focused on digital transformation.
As the CEO, Parekh will have to achieve growth while being careful not to antagonize Infosys' founders, who own about 12 percent of the company but command an outsized say in its direction. His priority will be to assure clients and employees of "business continuity without rocking the boat," Harit Shah of brokerage Reliance Securities wrote in a note to clients after Infosys announced the appointment on Saturday,
The founders, led by Narayana Murthy, the doyen of India's IT services sector, engaged in a lengthy public feud with Sikka on issues ranging from flights on private jets, to over-spending on a takeover, and on the pricey rent for his U.S. office, to the largesse of payouts given to certain executives following their exits. Sikka, widely known as an innovator in the global software industry, joined Infosys from German software maker SAP in 2014. He was the first outsider to be made CEO of Infosys.
The spat culminated with the exit of both Sikka and Infosys' then chairman R. Seshasayee in August, and the return of one of its founders, Nandan Nilekani, as chairman. Nilekani, a highly regarded industry veteran, had remained silent throughout the public confrontation led by Murthy. For Parekh, the discord that led to Sikka's departure could prove to be beneficial, although he may have to work to convince Murthy.
"Sometimes coming on the back of a controversial exit is easy, because expectations would be realistic," a tech industry consultant said. Being hand-picked by Nilekani should give Parekh some cover. Two weeks ago, Murthy endorsed Nilekani, saying "absolutely, all is well," with Nilekani at the helm. In a statement on Saturday, Murthy wrote, "I am happy that Infosys has appointed Mr. Salil Parekh as the CEO. My best wishes to him."
In Parekh, India's No. 2 IT firm gets an executive with vast experience in some of its biggest Western markets and one who has led high-margin businesses like cloud services, where it is keen to accelerate growth. His Capgemini colleagues say Parekh pushes people to work hard, believes in sharing information and cutting across hierarchy to deliver on projects. "IT services is a very different business from products and someone like Sikka who came with a mindset of doing new things constantly may not have been a good idea for a firm like Infosys," a senior executive at Capgemini said, declining to be named. "Parekh, though, is a core services executive who knows how to deliver projects within tight deadlines, with the resources at hand."
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The most recent Rajasthan Digi Fest 2017, third such event by the state, was concluded in Udaipur on Monday. The 3-day long IT festival held by the state government shed light on the Rajasthan governments efforts towards digitisation and how the administration is providing a boost to the start-up culture in the state. With a string of speakers from various companies operating across the world attending the event, the Digi Fest 2017 served as a platform for learning to the aspiring youth of the nation. The event kicked off with a 24-hour long hackathon, which saw the participation of more than 1500 youngsters from across India, day 2 of the Digi Fest welcomed speakers like Greg Moran, Co-Founder and CEO - Zoomcar, Colin Tooze, Director of Public Policy Uber Global and many more. The event was also attended by Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia who addressed the gathering and interacted with the various digital presentations at the IT festival.
The Digi Fest 2017 highlighted the state governments current e-governance practices and how the state is planning to further build upon them. Right from the nationally renowned eMitra launched in 2005, the event displayed all the prevailing e-governance practices like the Bhamashah Yojana, ePDS, Rajasthan Payment Platform, eSanchar, iFact and more. Evidently, all the e-Government portals have been designed in an integrated manner so as to combine and use all the available data for the state residents. Elaborating on the e-Mitra, the multi-modal platform aims to offer its integrated services to the citizens doorsteps through a three-way front including a dedicated web portal, mobile app and 40,000+ kiosks spread through the state. As per the government claims, the 200 plus integrated services also accommodate payment gateways of all major banks as well as mobile payment portals in addition to micro ATMs/ BCs. Recently, end-to-end application and delivery of "Digitally Signed Certificates" such as Bonafide, Caste, Income, Solvency etc. have also been made possible through the e-Mitra portal.
Other e-governance schemes practised by the Rajasthan government include Bhamashah Yojana, which is essentially a resident data hub and is mandatorily used by all the departments of the state for deciding entitlement. It provides a unique ID to each individual citizen, just like the Aadhaar, but in addition, also recognizes families wherein the lady of the house is considered as the Head of the Family. It entitles all the cash and non-cash benefits for a family through a single medium. A public grievance redressal mechanism, known as Sampark lets the citizens of Rajasthan register their grievances, even offering SMS integration, GIS linked inspection, reality check functionality for disposed cases and a process wherein the feedback is sought by the state from the complainant. An ePDS scheme provides targeted PDS benefits to the citizens through the use of PoS devices and Aadhaar linked validation and hence avoids proxy withdrawals or misuse. Some more mentionable e-governance schemes include the electronic face of the Rajasthan government - State Portal, event-based notifications to beneficiaries and officials through eSanchar and iFact, rural Wi-Fi setup scheme Raj Wi-Fi, two-way electronic payment provision through Rajasthan Payment Platform, an online auction platform between purchasers and brokers, farmers and APMCs - RIMMS, single window access for e-commerce activities in the state - eBazaar and an end-to-end kit to help citizens become digitally sound Digikit.
Apart from using digital services to help the citizens of the state, the Rajasthan government has also been using the digital infrastructure to help automate its own administrative operations. A unified platform for depicting the various layers and hosting GIS-based applications and collecting spatial and non-spatial attribute data for state structures RajDharaa, e-space for safe document storage with electronic self-attestation and e-Verification Raj eVault, electronic signature for self-attestation and e-Verification Raj eSign, integrated automation platform - Raj Kaj, online video portal of Rajasthan government Raj Bioscope and more such digital initiatives are currently being used in the state.
An insight into these ongoing e-governance practices reveals how digitisation can be used to enhance the reach and the actual effect of such government services. Technology, on many levels, has already enabled citizens to attain more work efficiency than what was possible earlier. With the national and state governments now moving towards the use of such digitally powered solutions to improve their administrative efficiency, it is evident on many levels that the next step of evolution for the country and its citizens as a whole would be technology driven.
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Britain's main cybersecurity agency on Friday warned British government agencies to avoid using anti-virus software from Russian companies, the latest in a series of moves targeting Moscow-based security software maker Kaspersky Lab. In a letter to departmental permanent secretaries, the director of the UK National Cyber Security Centre, Ciaran Martin, said Russian-made anti-virus software should not be used in systems containing information that would harm national security if it was accessed by the Russian government.
He said his agency is in talks with Kaspersky Lab to develop a system for reviewing its products for use in Britain. Kaspersky's anti-virus software was banned from U.S. government networks earlier this year on concerns the company has close ties to intelligence agencies in Moscow and that its software could be used to enable Russian spying.
"We are in discussions with Kaspersky Lab ... about whether we can develop a framework that we and others can independently verify, Martin said in the letter, which was publicly released. Kaspersky Lab said in a statement that it looked forward to working with the NCSC on the issue. Kaspersky has strongly denied allegations about the safety of its products or ties to the Russian government, saying it has become a scapegoat in the midst of rising tensions between Washington and Moscow.
British bank Barclays said on Saturday it had stopped offering Kaspersky anti-virus products to customers. "Even though this new guidance isnt directed at members of the public, we have taken the decision to withdraw the offer of Kaspersky software from our customer website," it said in a statement.
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Washington: US President Donald Trump on Monday issued his most explicit endorsement to date of embattled Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women including one who was 14-years-old at the time.
Trump had previously characterized the allegations, first reported by The Washington Post, as "very troubling" before changing tack and warning voters in Moore's home state of Alabama that a victory for his Democratic rival Doug Jones "would be a disaster!"
On Monday, he cited Democrats' opposition to his legislative agenda, including tax cuts, as reasons for his support.
"Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama," he tweeted.
"We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!"
"Look at your 401-k's since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back!" he added, referring to an employer-sponsored retirement savings plan.
Moore, a 70-year-old Christian conservative with a history of controversy stemming from his tenure on Alabama's supreme court, had been a strong favorite to win the rightwing state's special election on December 12 before the allegations broke.
Most of the allegations about Moore relate to when he was a prosecutor in his mid-30s and sought to pursue relationships with teens, according to the reports.
One of the women, Leigh Corfman, now 53, said that when she was 14 Moore took her into his house in the woods near Gadsden, Alabama, removed her shirt and pants, and fondled her over her bra and underpants.
Moore has denied the allegations and said they are politically motivated.
The race, which is being held to replace Jeff Sessions who was named US attorney general, has national repercussions because Republicans hold only a slim 52-to-48 majority in the senate.
Allegations of sexual harassment have plagued both of America's main political parties in recent weeks.
Democrat John Conyers, a celebrated civil rights activist who is the longest-serving member of Congress, announced he was stepping down from a leadership position last month as he battles harassment claims from members of his staff.
Trump himself has been accused of misconduct by several women, ranging from groping to unwanted advances and kissing, though these did not prevent his election last year.
Islamabad: US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis arrived in Islamabad on Monday to ask Pakistan's civilian and military leadership to do more to rein in militants accused of using the country as a base to carry out attacks in neighbouring Afghanistan.
More than 100 days since President Donald Trump announced his South Asia strategy, however, US officials and analysts say there has been only limited success and it is not clear how progress will be made.
US officials have long been frustrated by what they see as Pakistan's reluctance to act against groups such as the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network that they believe exploit safe haven on Pakistani soil to launch attacks in Afghanistan.
"We have heard from Pakistani leaders that they do not support terrorism ... we expect them to act in their own best interest, and in support of peace and regional stability," Mattis said told reporters travelling with him this week.
Mattis, who is visiting Pakistan for the first time as defence secretary, said the goal for his trip would be to find "common ground" and work together.
In August, Trump outlined a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, chastising Pakistan over its alleged support for Afghan militants. But beyond that, the Trump administration has done little to articulate its strategy, experts say.
Senior US officials say they have not seen a change in Pakistan's support for militants, despite visits by senior US officials, including one by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently.
"We have been very direct and very clear with the Pakistanis ... we have not seen those changes implemented yet," General John Nicholson, the top US general in Afghanistan, said this week.
Pakistan says it has done a great deal to help the United States in tracking down militants and Pakistani officials have pushed back on the US claims.
LIMITED LEVERAGE
US official expressed hope that relations between the two countries could improve after a kidnapped US-Canadian couple and their three children were freed in Pakistan in October, after the couple was abducted in Afghanistan.
However, while the Trump administration has used tougher words with Pakistan, it is has yet to change Islamabad's calculus and if the United States is seen as bullying, it is unlikely to succeed, experts say.
While Mattis travelled to the region earlier this year, he did not make a stop in Pakistan, although he did visit its arch rival, India, a relationship that has grown under the Trump administration.
"There is not an effective stick anymore because Pakistan doesn't really care about US aid, it has been dwindling anyway and it is getting the money it needs elsewhere ... treat it with respect and actually reward it when it does do something good," Madiha Afzal, with the Brookings Institution, said.
Mattis' brief visit to Islamabad comes a week after a hardline Pakistani Islamist group called off nationwide protests after the government met its demand that a minister accused of blasphemy resign.
Separately, a Pakistani Islamist accused of masterminding a bloody 2008 assault in the Indian city of Mumbai was freed from house arrest. The White House said the release could have repercussions for relations between Washington and Islamabad.
"I think for Pakistan, the timing in very bad. There is talk about progress being made against extremists and here you have a situation where religious hardliners have basically been handed everything they wanted on a silver platter," said Michael Kugelman, with the Woodrow Wilson think-tank in Washington.
Kugelman said that rather than pushing Pakistan, Mattis should explain that not dealing with militants on its border could see those same militants turning on Islamabad.
Washington: US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said he intends to work hard to find common ground with Pakistan in the fight against terrorism, which is necessary to restore the level of stability in South Asia to allow economic development.
Ahead of his visit to Islamabad, Mattis said he wants to work with Pakistan, listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective, to address the problems.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait and Pakistan, since taking over the charge of the Pentagon.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
Saeed is still roaming free, despite tough warning from the Trump Administration.
"The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," Mattis told reporters travelling with him on his way to Pakistan from Egypt.
Mattis is the first top US official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the new South Asia Strategy that was announced by President Donald Trump on August 21.
"We know we have some common ground. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their troops killed and wounded by terrorists. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their innocent people murdered and wounded by terrorists, so we know that there is common ground".
Similarly, he said, there is common ground between Afghanistan and Pakistan, because there are terrorist groups that try to move back and forth, that do move back and forth in order to live in one and attack in the other, that sort of thing.
"So we know there's common ground; it's how much more common ground can we find by listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective," Mattis said.
"But at the same time, as the (Pakistan Army Chief) General (Qamar Javed Bajwa) has said, he wants no havens for terrorists anywhere, so we will work together and we'll find that common ground, if we have the will to.
"And then we'll work on how we address the problems where we can work together," the Defense Secretary said.
Responding to a question, he said he would not characterise everything over the past 16 years as failures.
"There is clearly an abundance of areas where we have to double down, and I am optimistic at this point that because of what our adversaries, our mutual enemies are doing, that we can find ways to work together," he said.
Mattis said both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistan military, the NATO-led militaries of 39 nations have all been in fights here. "We've got to find a way to work together".
He said there is "always an urgency to something" when 39 nations plus Afghanistan have their troops in the midst of a long war, where causalities are being taken.
"These are 39 of the most economically powerful, generally speaking, most long-term democratic institutions in the world. These are powerful nations morally, economically and diplomatically, and certainly militarily," he said.
Mattis said that it was essential in South Asia that all work together to restore the level of stability that allows for the economy to build.
"I mean, can you imagine a border between Pakistan and India where economic trade is not ongoing to the benefit of people on both sides of that border. We can not only imagine it; it's a reality right now," Mattis said.
So, the US Defence Secretary said that we have got to work together on this, and there's a sense of urgency about that.
"There's people who are living below the poverty line in both those countries. So as you look at this problem, if you'll expand the problem you can understand the sense of urgency to move beyond violence and get back to the normal order of things," he said.
Mattis is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and General Bajwa.
"General Bajwa is a mature officer with a deep background in not just military matters, but South Asia security issues, and we have got to find a way to move beyond this constant fighting that's characterised the area," he said.
Washington: President Donald Trump launched a fresh attack Sunday on the credibility of his own FBI, responding to revelations that an FBI agent was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller's team investigating Russian election meddling because of anti-Trump text messages.
Trump, two days after his former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, again denied that he directed FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
The Republican president offered a running Twitter commentary Sunday amid renewed focus on Mueller's probe and Flynn's decision to cooperate with the investigation as part of his plea agreement. Democrats said the developments suggested growing evidence of coordination between Trump's circle and Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the panel is beginning to see "the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice" against Trump.
"I think we see this in indictments ... and some of the comments that are being made. I see this in the hyper-frenetic attitude of the White House, the comments every day, the continual tweets," Feinstein said. "And I see it most importantly in what happened with the firing of Director Comey, and it is my belief that that is directly because he did not agree to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation. That's obstruction of justice."
Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI agents role in Clinton probe under review. Led Clinton Email probe. @foxandfriends Clinton money going to wife of another FBI agent in charge. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Report: ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE Now it all starts to make sense! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
In a series of tweets, Trump questioned the direction of the federal law enforcement agency and wrote that after Comey, whom Trump fired in May, the FBI's reputation is "in Tatters worst in History!" He vowed to "bring it back to greatness." The president also retweeted a post saying new FBI Director Chris Wray "needs to clean house."
The president seized on reports that a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent was removed from Mueller's team last summer after the discovery of an exchange of text messages that were viewed as potentially anti-Trump. The agent, Peter Strzok, had also worked on the investigation of Democrat Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, said Mueller removed Strzok from the team "immediately upon learning of the allegations." He would not elaborate on the nature of the accusations. The person who discussed the matter with The Associated Press was not authorized to speak about it by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Trump tweeted Sunday: "Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI 'agent's role in Clinton probe under review.' Led Clinton Email probe." In a separate tweet, he wrote: "Report: 'ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE' Now it all starts to make sense!"
Strzok's removal almost certainly reflected a desire to insulate the investigators from any claims of political bias or favoritism. Trump and many of his supporters have at times sought to discredit the integrity of the investigation, in part by claiming a close relationship between Mueller and Comey and by pointing to political contributions to Democrats made by some lawyers on the team.
Following the tweets, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned the president to tread cautiously. "You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril. I'd be careful if I were you, Mr. President. I'd watch this," Graham said.
Mueller has been investigating whether Trump campaign associates coordinated with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, and Strzok's background in counterintelligence would have been seen as particularly valuable for a secretive FBI probe examining foreign contacts.
Mueller's investigation has so far netted charges against four people, with the most recent criminal case brought Friday when Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.
On Saturday, Trump tweeted that he "had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
The tweet suggested that Trump was aware when the White House dismissed Flynn on Feb. 13 that he had lied to the FBI, which had interviewed him weeks earlier. Comey has said Trump the following day brought up the Flynn investigation in private at the White House and told him he hoped he could "let this go."
Amid questions raised by the tweet, Trump associates tried to put distance Saturday evening between the president himself and the tweet. Trump's personal lawyer John Dowd told ABC News that he drafted the tweet and gave it to the president's social media director Dan Scavino. Dowd had declined to comment when reached by the AP on Saturday night.
California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said given that Mueller could have charged Flynn with more crimes but instead limited it to just one offense, "Bob Mueller must have concluded that he was getting a lot of value in terms of Gen. Flynn's cooperation."
"I do believe he will incriminate others in the administration. Otherwise, there was no reason for Bob Mueller to give Mike Flynn this kind of deal," Schiff said, adding, "Whether that will ultimately lead to the president, I simply don't know."
Feinstein spoke on NBC's "Meet the Press," Graham spoke on CBS' "Face the Nation," and Schiff spoke on ABC's "This Week."
The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office (PGO) has summoned for questioning agents of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) Kateryna Sikorska and Serhiy Tytenkov, who are listed in criminal proceedings on provoking a bribe to an employee of the State Migration Service of Ukraine.
"NABU agents Kateryna Sikorska and Serhiy Tytenkov have been invited to the Prosecutor General's Office for interrogation. They will be asked a number of questions concerning the recent joint special operation by the PGO and the SBU, in which the abovementioned persons were involved," PGO spokesman Andriy Lysenko said on Monday.
He noted that it will be found out during the interrogation how these agents were appointed to the posts if they did not pass an open competition, which is required by the law on the Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.
"There are also questions about Sikorska and Tytenkov's access to state secrets, because documents classified as secret were found with them. The legality of the use of special equipment by detectives, which is not registered in the SBU, will also be of interest to investigators," Lysenko added.
Local law enforcement recently recovered a truck two days after it was reported stolen from Evington but a little worse for wear following a car chase.
The Campbell County Sheriffs Office reported a 2001 red Ford F-250 Super Duty had been stolen Nov. 29 from Elmwood Drive in Evington.
A little after 4 p.m. Friday, a citizen called 911 to report theyd seen the truck driven recklessly near Gladys, according to Campbell County Sheriffs Maj. L. T. Guthrie. An officer with the Brookneal Police Department spotted the truck at the Naruna Mini Mart at about 4:17 p.m., unoccupied.
The Brookneal officer tried to block the truck so it couldnt be driven off, but Guthrie said the driver was able to pull away onto U.S. 501, heading north. The officer pursued the truck as it turned onto Long Island Road and then Collins Ferry Road and was joined in pursuit by a Campbell County Sheriffs deputy.
Guthrie said officers chased the driver about two miles down Collins Ferry Road before the driver lost control, drove into a field and crashed at about 4:25 p.m. The driver then ran from the truck, leaving it heavily damaged, he said.
The Altavista Police Department, Brookneal Police Department, Virginia State Police and the Campbell County Sheriffs Office worked together to track down the driver. Guthrie said as many as 10 officers pursued the suspect that evening, aided by K-9 units and Virginia State Police helicopters.
Law enforcement took Colby Ayers, 28, whod recently been living in Rustburg, into custody at about 7:10 p.m. Friday on Marysville Road near Wards Road in Campbell County.
Guthrie said Ayers had hitched a ride from another driver and concealed himself in patches of forest before officers found him.
Ayers has been charged with grand larceny and felony eluding police. Hes being held at the Campbell County Adult Detention Center and is scheduled for a hearing in Campbell County General District Court on Jan. 9.
More than 2,500 civilians have been killed and 9,000 others injured since the beginning of the conflict in Donbas, according to a Humanitarian Response Plan 2018 for November 2017, which was published on the website humanitarianresponse.info.
"With the parties to the conflict failing to adhere to the various ceasefire agreements, more than 2,500 civilians have been killed since April 2014 and another 9,000 injured," reads the document posted on Monday.
The report notes that along the "contact line," an average of 40 armed clashes are recorded every day.
"Up to 200,0002 people living in the 5 km zone along the 'contact line' in the government controlled area regularly experience injury to or loss of loved ones or their neighbors, damage to property, and systematic barriers to accessing basic services," reads the report.
According to the report, the elderly constitute a significant proportion of the conflict-affected population in Ukraine, making up almost 30% of the 3.4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance and protection, and half the registered internally displaced persons (IDPs).
Humanitarian Response is a specialized digital service of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
NATO expects more action by Russia on Ukraine 'in the right direction'
NATO expects more action from Russia on Ukraine in the right direction, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison has said.
"In terms of Ukraine, we need to see more action by Russia in the right direction. NATO stands firm in commitment to Ukraine and to showing Russia that there will be no business as usual," the U.S. diplomat was quoted as saying by the U.S. Mission to NATO on Twitter.
The foreign ministers of the NATO member countries will meet in Brussels on December 5-6.
If there was someone queer enough to apply to Guinness Book of World Records to have the title shortest lived government ministers added to their database, the category will certainly not be short of takers.
Among the frontrunners would be South Africas former Finance minister Des van Rooyen who was reshuffled after three days by President Jacob Zuma following widespread criticism of his appointment.
That race would also include Messaoud Benagoun who was Algerias Tourism minister for three days and Trinidad and Tobagos Public Utilities minister Marlene McDonald who was
fired after two days on the job.
Somewhere down the pecking order will be three faces that momentarily made it into President Emmerson Mnangagwas Cabinet last week only for their excitement to be quashed while they were in the midst of popping champagne bottles.
Clever Nyati, Lazarus Dokora and Christopher Mutsvangwa had made it into Cabinet on Thursday evening only for the appointments to be rescinded two days later.
A day before they could be sworn in, Mnangagwa quickly moved to drop them from his Cabinet upon realising that he had overlooked the number of non-constituency legislators he could appoint to be ministers.
Before the news could reach him, Mutsvangwa, who had been made Information, Media and Broadcasting Services minister, had already hit the ground running.
He gave an interview to VOA, assuring Zimbabwean journalists that he will be bringing a new approach to their work, including revising controversial laws such as the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act and the Public Order and Security Act, which have stifled the countrys media environment.
I will look at the Constitution, pick out some parts and throw them out of the window, Mutsvangwa was quoted saying, as he castigated former Information minister Jonathan Moyo, who crafted the laws.
The madness of Jonathan (Moyo) to think that he can think for the whole country of 14-million, I dont like that.
Mnangagwas revocation of the three appointments came as another crop of ex-ministers are still trying to come to terms with their short-lived tenure in former president Robert Mugabes last Cabinet.
In October, Mugabe had made significant changes to his Cabinet by introducing new faces as he sought to do away with the Team Lacoste cabal that had been campaigning for Mnangagwa to succeed him.
The life of that Cabinet was cut short by the unexpected resignation of Mugabe, a man many had gambled would die in office.
For decades Happyton Bonyongwe was the head of Mugabes secret service and he was subsequently appointed to Mugabes Cabinet on October 9 as the head of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, replacing Mnangagwa who had been performing the dual roles of vice president and Justice minister since December 2015.
During his swearing-in ceremony, Bonyongwe said he was relishing the opportunity of serving in his new post.
It is my hope that I will be able to make some positive contributions to my country. That is something that has always motivated me. I view it as a deployment by my leadership and therefore, I look at it from that context and I will go there and do my best, he said then.
Well, as for doing his best, that chance never came during a stint that did not last long.
His fate was intertwined with former minister of State for Masvingo Province Paul Chimedza, Tourism and Hospitality Industry minister Edgar Mbwembwe, Foreign Affairs minister Walter Mzembi and Finance minister Ignatius Chombo.
Before they had moved into their offices, their portfolios were disbanded by a military intervention that led to the resignation of Mugabe on November 21.
The over a month long stay in Cabinet may well be the record for the shortest ministerial appointment ever held in Zimbabwe.
That script rang true for the Zanu PF central committee where one Johnson Madhukus venture as a Zanu PF central committee member only lasted for a week.
Madhuku is famed for turning around the fortunes of Reformed Church-run Pamushana High School where he is headmaster, to a school that has become a sporting powerhouse and talent conveyer belt of repute.
But his ascend to that position through loyalty to former First Lady Grace Mugabe counted for nothing as he was among those purged by the military recently.
Madhuku along with Jeffreys Murire, Veronica Dzika and Watson Maguraumwe faced the chop. They had been elected into the Zanu PF central committee for Bikita before the elections were annulled as a faction rallying behind Mnangagwa went on a purge of members aligned to G40.
Ironically, their election had come after the purging of Zanu PF members aligned to Mnangagwa who was at that time fighting for his political life after he was fired by then president Mugabe.
The cleansing of G40 loyalists in Zanu PF central committee structures also saw the axe fall on Chimedza and former provincial Governor Willard Chiwewe whose election to the Zanu PF central committee, a week earlier, was nullified by the Zanu PF Masvingo provincial executive.
The supposedly sham elections also saw Gutu West legislator Tongai Muzenda, Retired Colonel Mutero Masanganise and Patricia Gama being chopped, after a week on the job.
It will definitely be a hard record to break for a somewhat reformed Zanu PF which is trying to pick up the pieces after the dismissal of Mugabe. Daily News
Mugabe's uncle Ben Matibiri claimed that Grace belittled everyone in the Mugabe family "as she tried to borrow powers at every opportunity". This, he said was the complete opposite of Mugabes first wife, the late Sally Hefron Mugabe, whom he described as a "great daughter" to the family.
President Mnangagwa had a brief meeting with the provincial leadership after officiating at the Chinhoyi University of Technology (CUT) graduation ceremony last Friday.
He urged the leadership to be exemplary and to work towards the consolidation of unity and prosperity of the nation. Let us all be united and work together for the development of our nation. Let us all be progressive Zimbabweans who aim high to achieve the best as citizens of this nation, he said.
He said peace and unity are key enablers for nation-building and economic development.
There is no need for retribution for this country is ours together. Let us shun all criminal elements which may destabilise the peace of our nation, he said.
The meeting was attended by Senate president Cde Edna Madzongwe, Minister of State for Mashonaland West Province Cde Webster Shamu, Minister of Tourism and Hospitality Industry Cde Prisca Mupfumira and Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Cde Ziyambi Ziyambi, among others. herald
President Emmerson Mnangagwa has urged the ZANU-PF Mashonaland West leadership to maintain peace and desist from seeking vengeance to settle old political scores.President Mnangagwa had a brief meeting with the provincial leadership after officiating at the Chinhoyi University of Technology (CUT) graduation ceremony last Friday.He urged the leadership to be exemplary and to work towards the consolidation of unity and prosperity of the nation. Let us all be united and work together for the development of our nation. Let us all be progressive Zimbabweans who aim high to achieve the best as citizens of this nation, he said.He said peace and unity are key enablers for nation-building and economic development.There is no need for retribution for this country is ours together. Let us shun all criminal elements which may destabilise the peace of our nation, he said.The meeting was attended by Senate president Cde Edna Madzongwe, Minister of State for Mashonaland West Province Cde Webster Shamu, Minister of Tourism and Hospitality Industry Cde Prisca Mupfumira and Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Cde Ziyambi Ziyambi, among others. herald
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An opossum that apparently drank bourbon after breaking into a Florida liquor store sobered up at a wildlife rescue center and was released unharmed. Emerald Coast Wildlife Refuge officials say the opossum was brought in by a Fort Walton Beach, Fla., police officer on Nov. 24, the AP reports. A liquor store employee found the animal next to a broken and empty bottle of bourbon. "A worker there found the opossum up on a shelf next to a cracked-open bottle of liquor with nothing in it," says Michelle Pettis, a technician at the refuge. "She definitely wasn't fully acting normal." Pettis tells the Northwest Florida Daily News the female opossum appeared disoriented, was excessively salivating, and was pale.
The staff pumped the marsupial full of fluids and cared for her as she sobered up. "We loaded her up with fluids to help flush out any alcohol toxins," Pettis says. "She was good a couple of days later." Pettis says the opossum didn't appear to have a hangover. The store owner, Cash Moore, says he never had an opossum break in before. "She came in from the outside and was up in the rafters, and when she came through she knocked a bottle of liquor off the shelf," Moore says. "When she got down on the floor she drank the whole damn bottle." (PETA tried to stop a North Carolina town's New Year's Eve Possum Drop.)
Horrific tales are being shared by North Korean defectors who fled their homes near the Punggye-ri nuclear testing site, with stories of sickened residents and wildlife, and even a deformed baby born without genitals and murdered soon after birth. Lee Jeong Hwa, who got out in 2010 from her home in Kilju County, tells NBC News that residents started talking of a "ghost disease" after people started perishing, and they're tying it all back to the regime's nuke tests. "We thought we were dying because we were poor and we ate badly," she says. "Now we know it was the radiation." A World Health Organization fact sheet explains the havoc, based on exposure levels, that radiation can wreak on the body, causing such maladies as burns, hair loss, and skin conditions, with cancer also a possibility years after exposure.
A Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety rep tells NBC it's "assumed" that locals are being heavily exposed to radiationbut tests on Lee, one of 30 defectors being examined, have turned up no evidence of radiation contamination, and a Seoul National University professor says that even though he believes there's likely merit to the defectors' claims, scientists have a "total lack of data" to back them up. Another expert adds that "sniff" sensors in the region haven't picked up signs of radioactive matter after past testsand some residents' tales of sickened flora and fauna go back decades, long before North Korea started testing nukes in 2006. Meanwhile, Gizmodo points out a Chinese nuclear expert told the Telegraph earlier this year a radiation leak at the test site is "inevitable," even if it hasn't yet happened, and that groundwater contamination may be the biggest concern. (Read more North Korea stories.)
The next round of negotiations between Russian presidential aide Vladislav Surkov and U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker is unlikely to take place before the end of the year, a source familiar with the process of negotiations told Interfax.
"A meeting is unlikely to be held before the end of the year. Meetings will probably continue, as early as the next year. It is caused by continuing disagreements in views on the settlement mechanisms," the source said.
Earlier today, speaking on Kommersant-FM radio U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman said Russian presidential aide Vladislav Surkov and United States Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker would have a meeting next week.
This meeting will apparently be the fourth round of the negotiations, he said. Huntsman said he hoped the fourth round of the consultations would see some signs of success.
While the previous three rounds of negotiations between Volker and Surkov were not productive enough, the very fact that such consultations have taken place is inspiring, he said.
Interfax is yet to obtain official confirmation of the possibility of holding the next round of negotiations.
"Of course he said it," Billy Bush writes in a New York Times op-ed addressing reports that President Trump now claims the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood recording was fake. When Trump spoke about "grabbing women by the p---," there were "seven other guys present on the bus at the time and every single one of us assumed we were listening to a crass standup act," the former Access Hollywood and Today co-host writes. He says they laughed along, believing they were listening to "hypothetical hot air from America's highest-rated bloviator." "Surely, we thought, none of this was real. We now know better." He says he believes the accusations from around 20 women that followed the release of the tape.
Bushwho says he and many others were "acting out of self-interest" by stroking Trump's egowrites that Trump's reported claim that the voice on the tape wasn't his has "hit a raw nerve in me," so he can "only imagine how it has reopened the wounds of the women who came forward with their stories about him, and did not receive enough attention." "To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump," he writes. "You have my respect and admiration." Bush, who was fired by NBC after the tape surfaced last year, says he has gone through emotions including anger, anxiety, and humiliation over the last year. "But these have given way to light, both spiritual and intellectual. Its been fortifying." (Read more Billy Bush stories.)
After almost 41 years in office, Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch is the longest-serving Republican senator in US historyand President Trump apparently wants the 83-year-old Senate Finance Committee chairman to seek another term in 2018. Sources tell Politico that Trump, who will appear with Hatch at an event in Salt Lake City on Monday, is pushing for Hatch to rethink retirement plans because he doesn't want Mitt Romney to run for the seat. The sources say Trump not only wants to keep Romneya prominent "Never Trumper" before last year's electionout of the Senate, he wants to keep Hatch around because he values the loyalty the senator has shown since the early days of his campaign.
"Hatch is a known entity for Trump and has been really good for the president for the most part,"says Kirk Jowers, former chairman of Romney's political action committee. "He knows for a fact he's not going to get that with Romney. I don't know that he knows what he's going to get with Romney, but it's not going to be what he's got with Hatch." Politico's sources say Trump has tried to persuade Hatch to stay on in phone calls and White House meetings. They will travel together from Washington to Utah on Monday for Trump's first trip to the state as president, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. During the visit, Trump is expected to sign an executive order shrinking the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments, a move Hatch says he is "incredibly grateful" for. (Read more Mitt Romney stories.)
New York's Metropolitan Opera says it has suspended longtime conductor James Levine amid accusations of sexual misconduct going back almost 50 years. Levine, 74, was suspended Sunday after two more men came forward with accusations following a report that he abused a teenager in the 1980s, the New York Daily News reports. "Based on these new reports, the Met has made the decision to act now, while we await the results of the investigation," says Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager. "This is [a] tragedy for anyone whose life has been affected." The two new accusers both say Levine masturbated them in 1968, when he was 25 and they were 17-year-old music students in Michigan. The opera has hired former US Attorney Robert Cleary to investigate the accusations.
Levine, the Met's music director from 1976 to 2016, "will not be involved in any Met activities, including conducting scheduled performances at the Met this season," the Met said in a statement, per the AP. Classical-music insiders say Levine's behavior has long been an "open secret." The accusers say Levine groomed them by encouraging their musical talents. Among them is Ashok Pai, now 48, who has filed a police report in Illinois over abuse that he says began when he was 16 and continued for years. "I was vulnerable," Pai tells the New York Times. "I was under this man's sway, I saw him as a safe, protective person, he took advantage of me, he abused me, and it has really messed me up." (Read more Metropolitan Opera stories.)
Hundreds of aircraft including two dozen stealth jets began training Monday as the United States and South Korea launched their biggest-ever combined air force exercise. The war games come a week after North Korea test-fired its most powerful missile ever, an ICBM that may be able to target the eastern seaboard of the United States. The five-day drill, which is called Vigilant Ace, is meant to improve the allies' wartime capabilities, South Korea's defense ministry said. The US Seventh Air Force sent major strategic military assets including six F-22 and 18 F-35 stealth fighter jets for the annual training exercise in the Korean Peninsula, the AP reports. About 12,000 US military personnel are participating.
North Korea's state media said the drill pushes the Korean Peninsula "to the brink of nuclear war." Pyongyang will "seriously consider" countermeasures against the drill, and the US and South Korea will "pay dearly for their provocations," the Korean Central News Agency said on Sunday. Such language is typical in North Korean propaganda, but some senior American officials have expressed worry following the ICBM test, North Korea's third. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham said he believes that it's time for US military families in South Korea to leave the country because conflict with the North is approaching. (White House national security adviser HR McMaster says the possibility of war is "increasing every day.")
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley is taking flak over comments he made about why the GOP aims to scrap or least mitigate the estate tax. In speaking to the Des Moines Register, Grassley said the tax often derided by Republicans as the "death tax" is unfair because it taxes earnings twice, first when people earn the money and again when they die and try to pass it on to their heirs. Then came the more controversial part: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether its on booze or women or movies." As NPR notes, that triggered a flurry of online criticism from those who viewed Grassley's remarks as elitist. This tweet is typical of the reaction: "I'm sure those folks would love to invest, but they're a bit preoccupied just trying to make ends meet."
The Washington Post notes that it also caught the attention of former Hillary Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson, who tweeted, "[I]f we gave that money in middle class tax cuts, theyd just waste it on hookers and blow. right? But it wasn't just Democrats taking issue. At the conservative Hot Air site, Ed Morrissey says the comment "is everything right and wrong with the current Republican tax-reform effort in a nutshell." Grassley's first criticism of the "double dip" problem with the estate tax is spot-on correct, he writes. "In the very next breath, however, Grassley commits the same sin that has plagued the tax system for decades, which is Congress desire to commit social engineering through it." The House tax plan would eliminate the tax entirely in 2024, while the Senate version would double exemptions to $11 million for individuals and $22 million for couples. (Read more Ryan Grassley stories.)
North Korea's most recent missile test had some unintended witnesses: the crew of an airliner on its way from San Francisco to Hong Kong. It seems the Cathay Pacific passenger jet was over Japan on Nov. 29 when its crew saw the North Korean ballistic missile re-enter the atmosphere and crash into the Sea of Japan, reports the Guardian. "Be advised, we witnessed the DPRK missile blow up and fall apart near our current location," said the chief pilot, using the acronym for North Korea, per the South China Morning Post. The crew advised air traffic controllers in Japan, but their jet was far enough away that no course changes were necessary. It turns out that a Cathay Pacific cargo jet was even closer to the missile, though it was unclear whether that crew had seen it as well.
"Operation remained normal and was not affected," says a statement from the Hong Kong airline. "We remain alert and review the situation as it evolves." It was unclear how many passengers were aboard the plane at the time. CNN notes that many Cathay Pacific jets have cameras mounted outside that allow passengers to see the view, but the airline didn't say whether the missile had been recorded. The relative close call raises the question of whether airlines flying in the vicinity need to consider altering routes or otherwise take precautions. One Hong Kong lawmaker, a former pilot, suggests that a panel be created that would coordinate intelligence about possible North Korea tests with the aviation industry. (Read more North Korea stories.)
President Trump has given his most explicit support yet to Roy Moore since allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced against the Senate candidate in Alabama. "Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama," Trump tweeted early Monday. As Politico notes, Trump has previously weighed in on the race by criticizing Democrat Doug Jones and by taking note of Moore's denials. But Monday's tweet goes further, and the AP calls it the president's "most full-throated endorsement" of Moore yet.
"We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more," wrote Trump. "No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!" Polls remain close in the race, which will be decided on Dec. 12. The White House has previously said that Trump will not be traveling to Alabama to stump for Moore. (Read more President Trump stories.)
Ten suspects were arrested Monday in the October car bomb murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta. All 10 are believed to be Maltese citizens, but few details were released. The investigation appeared to be continuing, as police and armed forces had cordoned off an area in Marsa, a small town close to the capital Valletta, per the AP. The arrests were the first known break in a murder that has drawn widespread outrage and condemnation. Caruana Galizia, whose reporting focused heavily on corruption in the island nation, was killed when a bomb destroyed her car as she was driving near her home. Just before her death, Caruana Galizia, 53, had posted on her closely followed blog, Running Commentary, that there were "crooks everywhere" in Malta.
Malta has a reputation as a tax haven in the European Union and has attracted companies and money from outside Europe as well. Low tax rates and a popular government program that allows wealthy foreigners to buy Maltese citizenship has made the country an attractive place for investment and financial companies. Authorities, including anti-Mafia investigators in nearby Italy, worry that Malta is in the crosshairs of criminals on the lookout for money-laundering schemes. The journalist focused her reporting for years on investigating political corruption and scandals, and reported on Maltese mobsters and drug trafficking. She also wrote about Maltese links to the so-called Panama Papers leaks about offshore financial havens.
(Read more journalists killed stories.)
The Trump attorney who says he penned the "sloppy" tweet that some say indicates a possible obstruction of justice isn't done making headlines. John Dowd spoke to Axios' Mike Allen, scoffing at criticism of the tweet regarding Mike Flynn, which suggested Trump knew the former national security adviser had lied to the FBI before Trump canned James Comey. "The tweet did not admit obstruction," Dowd says. "That is an ignorant and arrogant assertion." Plus, the Constitution has Trump's back, per Dowd. "[The] president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution's Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case," he claims. Newsweek notes it's not clear which section of Article II Dowd refers to, though it speculates on one part involving the president seeking the opinion "of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices."
Allen notes that with this pronouncement, Trump's legal team is "setting the stage" to keep Trump insulated from obstruction of justice or collusion charges in the Russia probemeaning, Allen speculates, that his lawyers may be nervous charges are coming down the pike. But one of Barack Obama's former counsels notes "it is certainly possible" for Trump to have obstructed justice, and Allen points out Richard Nixon's Articles of Impeachment were jump-started with the assertion that Nixon "has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice." But whether Trump can or can't be held responsible for such a transgression may be moot, Allen adds. "The one thing everyone agrees on is that the House of Representatives, with its impeachment power, alone decides what is cause for removal from office," he writes. "For now, at least, the House is run by Republicans." (Read more President Trump stories.)
President Trump traveled to Utah on Monday and delivered news dreaded by environmentalists and Native American groups but praised by those who accuse the federal government of overreach. Trump announced he is reducing the size of two national monuments spanning millions of acres in UtahBears Ears, which was so designated by President Obama, and Grand Staircase-Escalante, designated by President Clinton. The controversial move is being immediately challenged in court by groups questioning Trump's authority to undo the moves of his predecessors, reports the New York Times. Details and developments:
The cuts: Bears Ears is shrinking by 1.1 million acres and Grand Staircase by more than 800,000 acres. That adds up to what the Washington Post calls "the largest reduction of public lands protection in US history." The move opens the lands up for energy exploration and other uses.
Now 5 monuments: Trump's move actually turns the two national monuments into five, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. Bears Ears get split into two: Shah Jaa (129,980 acres) and Indian Creek (71,896 acres), down significantly from Obama's total of 1.35 million acres. Grand Staircase gets split into three: Grand Staircase (209,993 acres) Kaiparowits (551,034 acres), and Escalante Canyon (242,836 acres). That amounts to about 1 million acres, down from the original 1.9 million.
Trump's move actually turns the two national monuments into five, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. Bears Ears get split into two: Shah Jaa (129,980 acres) and Indian Creek (71,896 acres), down significantly from Obama's total of 1.35 million acres. Grand Staircase gets split into three: Grand Staircase (209,993 acres) Kaiparowits (551,034 acres), and Escalante Canyon (242,836 acres). That amounts to about 1 million acres, down from the original 1.9 million. The legal fight: It hinges on what's known as the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gave Obama, Clinton, and other presidents the authority to designate protected national monuments. Whether Trump or any president has the authority to undo the protections has never been tested in court, explains the New York Times. It will be now, however, and if the challengers lose, Trump "and future presidents could drastically shrink any of the dozens of monuments created by their predecessors, opening the formerly protected terrain for all kinds of development."
It hinges on what's known as the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gave Obama, Clinton, and other presidents the authority to designate protected national monuments. Whether Trump or any president has the authority to undo the protections has never been tested in court, explains the New York Times. It will be now, however, and if the challengers lose, Trump "and future presidents could drastically shrink any of the dozens of monuments created by their predecessors, opening the formerly protected terrain for all kinds of development." Trump's rationale: "Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats, and guess what? They're wrong," Trump said in his Utah speech, per CBS News. He also used the the term "federal overreach."
"Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats, and guess what? They're wrong," Trump said in his Utah speech, per CBS News. He also used the the term "federal overreach." Protests: About 3,000 largely peaceful demonstrators blocked traffic in Salt Lake City to protest Trump's move, and the AP has details.
About 3,000 largely peaceful demonstrators blocked traffic in Salt Lake City to protest Trump's move, and the AP has details. What now: The litigation will take a while to play out, so don't expect to see drilling rigs immediately filing into the area, reports National Geographic. Still, the story notes that Bears Ears has oil and gas fields, at least on what was formerly its boundaries, and Grand Staircase has coal.
(Read more Bears Ears National Monument stories.)
Illegal armed formations violated the truce in Donbas nine times from 00:00 to 18:00 local time on Monday, December 4; in particular, residential areas in the village of Travneve in Donetsk region's Bakhmutsky district came under fire, the press center of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) Headquarters (HQ) has said.
"At night, the invaders used mortars to shell two private houses in the village of Travneve. Fortunately, the people were not hurt, but the roofs of the houses were damaged. In total, the Russian terrorist troops have already violated the ceasefire nine times since midnight," the ATO HQ wrote on Facebook on Monday.
During their attacks on the ATO forces, militants continue using the weapons that "should have been withdrawn from the contact line long ago."
In particular, they intensively used 82mm mortars, grenade launchers of various types, and infantry fighting vehicles' cannons to shell Ukrainian troops near the village of Pisky in Yasynuvata district in the Donetsk sector.
"The hottest spot in the Luhansk sector is the Svitlodarska Duha bulge. The enemy repeatedly shelled our defensive positions near the village of Luhanske, using mortars and grenade launchers. Positions near the village of Novoluhanske were attacked by an infantry fighting vehicle and a twin anti-aircraft gun mount. What is more, the enemy used grenade launchers to attack the defenders of the villages of Zhovte and Zaitseve, and large-caliber machine guns were used to fire on the defenders of the village of Troyitske," it said.
What is more, militants do not stop intensive reconnaissance along the Svitlodarska Duha, involving special operations teams "whose goal is to perform acts of provocations, subversive activity at transport infrastructure facilities, crowded places to continue accusing and discrediting the Armed Forces of Ukraine."
It's not every marriage proposal that gets recorded in an official parliamentary record, but such is the case with one in Australia. During a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives Monday in support of gay marriage, lawmaker Tim Wilson turned to his partner in the public gallery, recounts the BBC. "There's only one thing left to do," said Wilson. "Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?"
Bolger, with a wide grin, said yes, and applause broke out in the chamber. Lawmakers are rushing to lift Australia's ban on same-sex marriage after residents overwhelmingly approved the idea in a postal ballot last month. The Senate already has voted to do so, and the House expects to do the same this month. The only question is whether amendments granting such things as religious exemptions will survive, reports the AP. (Read more proposals stories.)
Yemeni rebels killed their erstwhile ally Ali Abdullah Saleh, the country's former president and strongman, as their forces battled for control of the capital, Sanaa, officials said. The collapse of their alliance throws Yemen's nearly three-year-old civil war into unpredictable new chaos, per the AP. The war is widely seen as a proxy battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, notes the New York Times, which says Saleh's death reduces hopes the conflict will end anytime soon. The circumstances of his death were unclear, but Houthi officials said their forces caught up with him as he tried to flee Sanaa. A video circulating online purported to show Saleh's body with a gaping head wound. It was a grisly end for a figure who was able to rule the impoverished and unstable country for more than three decades and remained a powerhouse even after he was ousted in a 2012 Arab Spring uprising.
Saleh's death was announced by the rebels, the Iran-allied Houthis, who've been fighting Saleh's forces for the past week. Two of Saleh's associates confirmed the death, and a third official from the government of Yemen's internationally recognized president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, also confirmed it. Saleh had previously allied with the Houthis, and the support of his loyalist military units was key to helping the Houthis overrun Sanaa in 2014, driving out Hadi's government. But in recent months, the alliance frayed amid Houthi suspicions that Saleh was leaning toward the Saudi-led coalition backing Hadi. A major question now will be whether Saleh's loyalistsand tribes that support himcan rally to fight the Houthis after his death.
(Read more Yemen stories.)
President Trump didn't just tweet his support of Roy Moore on Monday, he phoned the Alabama Senate candidate to endorse him. "The president had a positive call with Judge Roy Moore during which they discussed the state of the Alabama Senate race and the President endorsed Judge Moore's campaign," according to a statement from deputy press chief Raj Shah, per Politico. Trump's explicit support for Moore, who has been dogged by accusations of sexual misconduct involving teen girls decades ago, comes after polls showed a tight race for a seat that would typically be an easy victory for Republicans.
The Moore campaign says Trump told Moore, "Go get 'em Roy," during the call from Air Force One, reports the Hill. In a statement, Moore said he was "honored to receive the support and endorsement" of Trump, adding that the president "knows that the future of his conservative agenda in Congress hinges on this election." As of now, Trump still isn't planning to visit Alabama on Moore's behalf before the election on Dec. 12. (Read more President Trump stories.)
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Ahmedabad:
The Congress on Monday released its election manifesto for the upcoming Gujarat Assembly elections. The party has promised to waive off farmers loans and provide at least 16 hours of electricity for irrigation.
Congress has also promised to slash state taxes on petrol and diesel. To attract youths, the party has announced laptops and smartphones for students.
The state goes to polls on December 9 and December 14. The results will be declared on December 18.
Election manifesto highlights
# Crimes against women will be tried in fast-track courts.
# College students will be given laptops and smartphones.
# Rs 32,000 crore package to provide employment to 25 lakh youths.
# Rs 4,000 allowance for unemployed youths.
# No interference in reservation provided to members of SC, ST and OBC.
# Equal rights for Patidar community in education and jobs.
Also read|Rahul Gandhi: 7 Interesting facts about Congress Vice President
# Contract workers will be made permanent.
# End of contract system in government jobs.
Also read: PM Modi terms Rahul Gandhi's expected elevation in Congress as 'Aurangzebi raj'
# Petrol and diesel prices to be rolled back by Rs 10 per litre.
# At least 16 hours regular electricity of irrigation.
New Delhi:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday addressed a poll rally in Dharampur's of Valsad district of Gujarat.
Here are the live updates-
# Why did the Congress not give Constitutional Status to the OBC Commission? We got a bill but when we did so, they stalled it in the Rajya Sabha. This anti-OBC Congress should be severely punished by the people: PM Modi
# Each and every person who has looted the poor, I want to tell them- I am not scared of you, will return everything that belongs to the poor: PM Modi
# Why has the Congress stopped saying BJP is anti-Muslim? Earlier, they would go out of the way to show their secularism but now we are all seeing what they are doing in this election, where they are going. Unfortunately for them, Muslims know their real nature: PM Modi
# Earlier, Congress would go out of the way to show their secularism but now we are all seeing what they are doing in this election, where they are going. Unfortunately for them, Muslims know their real nature: PM Modi
#Disinformation like BJP does this and that against Muslims has been spread. This family party made it their main agenda to spread disinformation about BJP. But Gujarat people are not so naive, they have now become sensitive and aware to disinformation: PM Modi
# Mani Shankar Aiyar said that 'did elections happen during Mughal rule? After Jehangir, Shahjahan came, was any election held? After Shahjahan it was understood Aurangzeb will be the leader'. So Congress accepts its a family party? We don't want this Aurangzeb rule: PM Modi
# I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the wellbeing of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command: PM Modi
# Congress can't either tolerate or accept leaders from Gujarat. They have always defamed Gujarat: PM Modi
He arrived in city on Sunday evening. He had addressed rallies in Bharuch, Surender Nagar and Rajkot of the state.
Mocking the Congress over the upcoming election of its president, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday alleged the party had a history of rigging organisational polls.
The outcome of the election to the top post in the Congress was a foregone conclusion, Modi had said while addressing a rally in Surendranagar district.
"If you do not have democracy in your home (party) how can you practise it in the country," Modi asked.
Modi told the crowd that had gathered for the Gujarat Assembly election rally here that an election was to be held in the Congress party for its president.
"What is the result everybody knows," he said, prompting the crowd to reply that the post would go to (Congress vice president) Rahul Gandhi.
Beijing:
China today declined to directly comment on the launch of the strategic Chabahar port in Iran but hoped that the project, which enables India to directly trade with Afghanistan besides rivalling Pakistans Gwadar port, is conducive to regional peace and stability.
The first phase of the Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman coast was inaugurated yesterday by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, opening a new strategic route connecting Iran, India and Afghanistan while bypassing Pakistan, and reflecting growing convergence of interests among the three countries.
The port in Irans Sistan-Balochistan province on the energy-rich nations southern coast is easily accessible from Indias western coast and is increasingly seen as a counter to Pakistans Gwadar port, which is being developed with Chinese investment and is located around 80 kms from Chabahar.
Asked how China views the launch of the project, considering that China is investing heavily in Gwadar as part of the USD 50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang declined to comment on it directly.
As for the (Chabahar) port, I want to give you a principled answer. We welcome the development of friendly relations between the regional countries and conduct mutually beneficial cooperation, he said.
We hope the relevant cooperation can be conducive to maintaining regional peace and promoting regional stability and prosperity, he said.
The Chabahar port is being considered a gateway to golden opportunities for trade by India, Iran and Afghanistan with central Asian countries besides ramping up trade among the three countries in the wake of Pakistan denying transit access to New Delhi.
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New Delhi:
Legendary Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of '70s and '80s breathed his last at Mumbai's Kokilaben Ambani Hospital on Monday. The 'Deewar' actor was 79.
"Yes he has passed away. He had kidney problem since several years. He was on dialysis for several years," nephew Randhir Kapoor said while interacting with PTI.
According to Randhir, the funeral will take place on Tuesday morning.
"Shashi Kapoor expired at 5:20 pm on December 4 at Kokilaben Hospital in Mumbai," PTI quoted Dr Ram Narain from Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital.
Kapoor's demise has left the Indian film industry saddened and B-town biggies like Aamir Khan, Ajay Devgn, and Akshay Kumar recalled his passion for cinema while paying homage to the legend, known for his easy charm and good nature.
Now, let's have a quick look at the childhood, acting career, personal life, and achievements of the icon.
Also Read: Legendary actor Shashi Kapoor dies at 79; here is how Twitterati reacts to legend's demise
Childhood and debut:
Born on March 18, 1938, to the illustrious and formidable theatre and film actor Prithviraj Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor hit the spotlight at the age of four, acting in plays directed and produced by his father. He started acting in films as a child artiste in the late '40s.
Kapoor made his debut as a leading man in the 1961 film 'Dharmputra' and went on to appear in more than 116 films during '70s and until the mid '80s.
Personal life:
It was 1956 when an 18-year-old Shashi Kapoor met British actress Jennifer Kendal in Calcutta. By July 1958, Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer Kendal had got married after facing initial resistance from Jennifer's family.
Shashi Kapoor suffered the biggest blow of his life after Jennifer was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer and breathed her last in the year 1984.
Career and much-loved works:
His best-known performances as a child actor were in 'Aag' (1948) and 'Awaara' (1951), where he played the younger version of the character played by elder brother Raj Kapoor. Shashi Kapoor also worked as assistant director in the '50s.
Some of his memorable films include 'Deewar', 'Kabhie Kabhie', 'Namak Halal', 'Kaala Pathar' among others.
Achievements:
He was honoured with Padma Bhushan in 2011 and received the prestigious Dada Saheb Phalke award in 2015.
(With PTI inputs)
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New Delhi :
After leaving a trail of destruction in the southern coast, Cyclone Ockhi is expected to make landfall in coastal Gujarat tomorrow midnight with squally winds, which may cause heavy rains in several parts of the state during the next two days.
An India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast said, "The severe cyclonic storm Ockhi is now laid centred about 850 km south-southwest of Surat and is likely to cross south Gujarat and adjoining North Maharashtra coasts near Surat as a deep depression by mid-night of December 5."
Following the IMD prediction, Gujarat Chief Secretary J N Singh today took stock of the administrative preparedness to deal with any eventuality.
Revenue department's Principal Secretary Pankaj Kumar told reporters in Gandhinagar that the authorities concerned in the coastal region of the state have been directed to take all precautionary measures.
Two National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) teams each have been deployed at Surat, Navsari, and Rajkot.
The officer said the Army, Navy, and the Border Security Force (BSF) have been alerted in the view of the cyclone's landfall.
"According to the IMD forecast, Cyclone Ockhi would enter south Gujarat tomorrow midnight. This will the impact coastal areas from Umargam (in south Gujarat) till Gir Somnath district (in Saurashtra).
"We have directed local civic officials as well as the collectors to remain prepared and take all necessary steps for the safety of the people," Kumar said.
The principal secretary said collectors of the coastal districts have been asked to ensure that fishermen do not venture into the sea as it will remain rough.
"Those fishermen who have already gone into sea should return now. Many such fishermen are already on their way to the coast," he said.
Kumar said according to the IMD forecast, wind velocity would remain between 50 KMPH to 70 KMPH when the cyclone would make landfall.
In view of the adverse weather conditions, the RoRo ferry service between Ghogha and Dahej across the Gulf of Khambhat has been suspended. The service, inaugurated recently by Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, would resume on December 6 subject if the weather conditions are suitable.
According to the IMD, Gujarat is very likely to experience a wet spell during the next four days.
Also read| Cyclone Ockhi: Navy engages helicopters to rescue 69 fishermen in Indian Ocean
"Heavy rainfall might occur in Valsad, Surat, Navsari, Bharuch, Dang, Tapi, Amreli, Gir-Sonath and Bhavnagar districts on December 5," it said.
In a port warning issued here, the MeT Centre said, "Sea condition would be rough. Fishermen (have been) advised not to venture into the sea till December 6. Hoist Distant Warning Signal Number 2 at all ports".
According to an official release, Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani held an urgent meeting with senior officials to take stock of the preparedness.
During the meeting, he was apprised that as many as 50 boats from Kerala had drifted towards Gujarat's Veraval coast due to the cyclone, it said.
On the other hand, the Maharashtra government has declared a holiday for schools and colleges in Mumbai and adjoining districts tomorrow due to "serious weather predictions" in view of Cyclone Ockhi.
An official at the Mumbai office of India Meteorological Department said on account of the cyclone, the megapolis has started receiving rainfall due to spread of clouds.
The disaster management unit of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has issued an advisory against visiting beaches in view of the high tide alert issued for tonight and tomorrow morning due to the cyclone.
"Precautionary holiday declared on 5/12/17 for schools and colleges in Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Sindhudurg, Thane, Raigad and Palghar Districts for the safety of the students due to the serious weather predictions on Cyclone Ockhi," state Education Minister Vinod Tawde tweeted.
Also read| Cyclone Ockhi: Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in Tamil Nadu; massive destruction in Lakshadweep
According to the IMD official, a warning of heavy rainfall was issued in north Konkan and north Madhya Maharashtra.
"The centre of the cyclone is around 600 km from Mumbai but its cloud band has spread along the coastal areas. Hence, light rainfall has started in Mumbai. The intensity of rains will increase as the cyclone approaches," the official said.
He said as the cyclone approaches Maharashtra, the clouds would become denser and wind velocity would increase.
"We are expecting wind velocity of around 50-60 km per hour over the next two days," the official said, adding that in view of the cyclone, the IMD has forecast a drop in maximum temperatures by two to three degrees and a drop in minimum temperatures by about one to two degrees.
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New Delhi:
Ambassador Gil Haskel, the Head of MASHAV a Israelas Agency for International Development Cooperation a will hold an official visit to New Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai, December 4-7. His visit will be highlighted by the launch of the three-year action plan for the Indo-Israeli Agricultural Project (IIAP).
On the occasion of the visit, Ambassador of Israel in India, Daniel Carmon said, aThe IIAP is MASHAVas biggest project outside of Israel, and it holds a significant portion of our bilateral relations. The success story of our agricultural cooperation is second to none, and it is only the beginning. We hope to see the same achievements in the fields of water, innovation and academia.a
Ambassador Haskel will meet with MIDH and state government officials, the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmeras Welfare and MEA. He will also inaugurate a Center of Excellence for flowers in Thally, Tamil Nadu. Ambassador Haskel will award two $10,000 grants to MASHAV Alumni to continue their projects in women empowerment and farmer empowerment in India.
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New Delhi:
Terrorists attacked at aA convoy of Indian Army in Qazigund in Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir on Monday.A One security personnel has been martyred in an encounter between army and terrorists. The armed forces were successful in killing two terrorists.
According to the reports, one Army Jawan was injured heavy firing occurred between terrorists and Indian Army in Qazigund.
In a similar incident earlier on November 9, terrorists attacked a police patrolling party near district commissioners office in Jammu and Kashmiras Anantnag in which one police personnel was critically injured.
#JammuAndKashmir: Terrorists attack Army convoy in Qazigund. More details awaited a ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2017
#UPDATE: One Army Jawan injured as exchange of heavy firing continues between terrorists and Army in #JammuAndKashmir's Qazigund. a ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2017
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New Delhi :
Liquor baron Vijay Mallya, before his appearance at the Westminster Magistrates' Court on Monday in London, said that the charges leveled against him were fabricated and baseless.
News agency ANI quoted Mallya as saying, I have said repeatedly that charges are false, fabricated and baseless. I have nothing to say, submissions in court will be sent evident.
The liquor baron denied to make any further comments and said, I am not the decision maker and would follow the proceedings.
He also told the reporters, "Please hear the proceedings."
The 61-year-old liquor tycoon is scheduled to appear before London's Westminster Court shortly. Mallya is wanted in India for defaulting on loans more than Rs 9,000 crore and alleged money laundering charges. He has been under a self-imposed exile in the United Kingdom since he left India on March 2, 2016.
Also read: Vijay Mallya hits out at Indian media over 'hate campaign' against him
Mallya is currently out on a 6,50,000-pound bail bond following his arrest by Scotland Yard over money laundering charges. Mallya is out on bail since Scotland Yard executed an extradition warrant in April this year. The extradition trial is scheduled to end on December 14.
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New Delhi:
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi filed nomination at party headquarters on Monday. He also met former President Pranab Mukherjee and former PM Dr Manmohan Singh at latter's residence. Senior Congress leaders Sushil Kumar Shinde, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Mohsina Kidwai, and Sheila Dikshit were present at the occasion.
Here are the highlights-
# If anyone wants to participate in elections he or she is free to do so, it's going on in a democratic manner. PM has no business to comment on Congress's internal matter: Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah
# Rahul Gandhi is a darling of the Congress and he will carry forward the great traditions of the party: Dr.Manmohan Singh
# Former PM Dr Manmohan Singh extends his best wishes to Rahul Gandhi
# Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah meets Congress Vice-president Rahul Gandhi at AICC HQ
# Senior party leaders including Kamal Nath, Sheila Dikshit, Motilal Vora and Tarun Gogoi filed first set of nominations(as proposers) for Rahul Gandhi
# Jyotiraditya Scindia tweeted, "have no doubt that we will make tremendous strides under your unifying & progressive leadership @OfficeOfRG! Wish you the very best! Look forward to undertaking this journey of building an India of energy, opportunity & unity with you."
# Ahmed Patel, Narayan Sami, Ashok Gehlot and Sheila Dikshit signed as proposer
# Rahul Gandhi files nomination for Cong President at party headquarters
# Do BJP presidents get elected? Did Nitin Gadkari get elected through a ballot process? Let them answer that first: Kamal Nath
# If you ask me, I think he will make a very good Prime Minister: Capt.Amarinder Singh, Punjab CM
# Rahul Gandhi reaches former PM Dr.Manmohan Singh's residence ahead of filing nomination for Congress President
# Sonia ji took Congress to new heights, we won many elections under her leadership and now it is time for Rahul Gandhi to take the party forward: Dr. Karan Singh, Congress
Rahul was accompanied by a host of senior leaders including Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
According to Mullapally Ramachandran, the chairman of the partys Central Election Authority, Monday is the last date for filing of nominations and no one else has filed papers till Sunday.
Rahul Gandhi is likely to emerge as the lone candidate in the fray and decks have been cleared for his election as the Congress president, succeeding his mother Sonia Gandhi who has held the post for 19 years.
So far 90 nomination forms have been given out to state unit delegates. No application for the nomination has been submitted so far and tomorrow is the last date for filing nominations, he told.
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New Delhi:
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Monday filed his nomination papers for the party's chief post. The 47-year-old Gandhi scion is likely to emerge as the lone candidate in the fray and decks have been cleared for his election as the Congress president, succeeding his mother Sonia Gandhi, who has held the post for 19 years in a row now.
Here are some interesting facts about Congress VP Rahul Gandhi:
# He attended St. Columbas school in New Delhi and the Doon School in Dehradun. In 1989 he went to St. Stephens College, New Delhi and earned bachelors degree in History. He also earned M.Phil degree from Trinity College.
# Rahul Gandhi earned the degree in international relations and development studies at the universities of Cambridge and Rollins.
# He was only 14 years when his grandmother was killed by her own loyal security guards.
# Before his political career, Rahul Gandhi established his own firm, Backops Services Private Limited in 2004 in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
# Rahul Gandhi was arrested for the first time when he was going to meet the farmers in Bhatta Parsaul village in Uttar Pradesh in May 2011.
# In 2006, Rahul had purchased two shops in Metropolitan Mall in Saket with super built-up areas of 514.44 square feet and 996.98 square feet. In his 2009 election affidavit, Rahul had declared that the combined value of these two properties stood at around Rs 1.63 crore. He sold the shops for Rs 5.28 crore sometime in 2012-13.
# According to the published reports of the Sunday Guardian, Rahul Gandhi was having an affair with the Afghan Princess. Later on, Afghan Princess got married to the Prince of Egypt in 2013.
Also Read: Rahul files nomination for Cong president's post, Manmohan Singh calls him party's darling
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KYIV. Dec 4 (Interfax-Ukraine) - The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (OSCE SMM) is ready for a dialogue, including with the new leadership of certain districts of Luhansk region - the so-called "LPR," OSCE SMM Principal Deputy Chief Monitor Alexander Hug has said.
He said this at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Monday. When asked whether he is ready to meet with the new leadership of the "LPR," Hug said that the OSCE's SMM was always ready for dialogue and expected everyone to join this dialogue. He said that the OSCE SMM had teams in Donetsk and Luhansk and they were ready to conduct this dialogue. He added that he could also conduct this dialogue if he visits Donetsk or Luhansk this year.
Hug noted that talks were the only way to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
New Delhi :
Rahul Gandhi was today hailed as the "darling" of the Congress by former premier Manmohan Singh after he was poised to become the party president and was also described as a "capable leader" who would make a "very good" prime minister.
As Congress leaders heaped praise on the 47-year-old scion of the country's most fabled political dynasty after he filed his nomination for the post of party president, Anand Sharma and Kapil Sibal described it as a "historic moment."
"Rahul ji has been the darling of the Congress...Rahul Gandhi will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party," the normally taciturn Manmohan Singh told reporters at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters here after Rahul Gandhi filed his papers.
Noting that Sonia Gandhi as Congress president has served the party and through it the country for the last 19 years, Manmohan Singh said Rahul Gandhi will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party.
Terming Rahul Gandhi as a "capable" leader, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad exuded confidence that he will turn out to be a "very successful" leader.
"And under his leadership, the Congress will regain power," Azad added.
Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh said Rahul Gandhi would make a very good prime minister.
"If you ask me, I think he will make a very good prime minister," said Amarinder Singh. Lok Sabha polls are due in 2019.
Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu called Rahul Gandhi a "special leader with character" who, he said has come to the forefront during times of crisis.
"He has become matured, showed his character. The general is standing at the forefront alone and on the other hand there is this entire government. This is the sign of a leader," Sidhu told reporters here.
Also read: Rahul files nomination for Cong president's post, Manmohan Singh calls him party's darling
Jyotiraditya Scindia, a party MP from Madhya Pradesh, dubbed Rahul Gandhi's imminent elevation to the top post as a "new wave of hope". Rahul Gandhi has been Congress' vice president since January 2013.
Also read| Rahul Gandhi: 7 Interesting facts about Congress Vice President
All India Mahila Congress president Sushmita Dev dubbed Gandhi a "symbol of strength, compassion and integrity" and said it was an honour to be led by him.
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New Delhi:
Maharashtra Congress leader Shehzad Poonawalla on Monday said that Congress party is likely to field a dummy candidate against Rahul Gandhi in party presidentas election to showcase it as a democratic practice within party.
The party leaders cannot befool people, Poonawalla said.
While talking to media, Poonawalla said, his sources have told him that party loyalists were mulling to field a dummy candidate to give it as a shape of election.
Earlier, the Congress had downplayed the statements of Shehzad Poonawalla on organisational polls, saying it did not want to dignify his "absolutely silly comments".
"I don't think I am required to dignify such comments with a response. It actually adds weight to the maker of such absolutely silly comments," Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said when asked to comment on Poonawalla's remarks.
Mere sources mujhe bata rahe hain ki darbariyon mein baat chal rahi hai ki ek dummy candidate utara jaye taake ye election lage, lekin ab logon ki aankhon mein dhool nahi jhonk sakte: #ShehzadPoonawalla on #RahulGandhi 's nomination pic.twitter.com/9wpJB1t4IN a ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2017
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Canberra:
Australias Parliament on Monday started debating a bill that could soon legalise gay marriage across the country, with one lawmaker taking the opportunity to propose to his gay partner.
The House of Representatives resumed for its final two-week session of the year, which is giving priority to achieving same-sex marriage reform. The major parties want the legislation passed this week after a majority of Australians endorsed reform in a postal ballot last month.
The Senate last week approved the bill and rejected all proposed amendments that would have increased legal protections for those who would discriminate against gay couples on religious grounds.
But several lawmakers including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull intend to persist with amendments rejected by the Senate.
Turnbull, a gay marriage supporter, says he wants wedding celebrants, not just those affiliated with churches, to have the right to refuse to officiate at same-sex marriages.
If the House of Representatives supported such an amendment, then the altered bill would have to return to the Senate for ratification, delaying the reform.
Tim Wilson, a lawmaker in the conservative coalition, was among the first lawmakers to join the debate and used his speech to propose to his partner Ryan Bolger, who was watching from the public gallery.
ALSO READ: Thousands rally in support of gay marriage in Australia
In my first speech I defined our bond by the ring that sits on both of our left hands, Wilson said. Theres only one thing left to do: Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?
The 33-year-old primary school teacher responded: yes, which was recorded in the official parliamentary record.
Warren Entsch, a long-term advocate of marriage equality within the conservative government, helped draft the bill and was the first to speak for it in the House on Monday.
The bill which the Senate passed is a robust bill, a whole range of religious protections are already in place, Entsch said in introducing the bill.
We have made sure that we have removed any element of discrimination in this bill while ensuring that religious freedoms are protected.
Entsch said related amendments to bolster freedoms of speech and education rights could be debated in a separate bill next year and should not be sued to delay the reform. Australians are sick of excuses and theyre sick of delays, Entsch said.
A nonbinding postal survey found that 62 per cent of Australian respondents wanted reform. Almost 80 per cent of Australias registered voters took part in the two-month survey. Most gay marriage opponents accept that the Parliament has an overwhelming mandate to make the reform.
While marriage equality could become law this week, state marriage registries say they would not have the paperwork to proceed with weddings until January.
ALSO READ | Same-sex marriage: Taiwan becomes FIRST in Asia to allow gay marriage
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Do you have the creative chops and the craft beer know-how to name a new brew?
Plan b is teaming up with Harpoon Brewery this January to concoct an exclusive craft beer that will only be available at the burger joint's nine locations (six of which are in Connecticut). The restaurant group is asking its fans to come up with a name.
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Too much salt may be bad for you, but a pair of new spas in Fairfield County are betting that just the right amount can be beneficial to both the body and the mind.
Newtown Salt Spa, which opened in June, and The Salt Cave of Darien, which began operations in October, offer halotherapy, a form of alternative medicine that disperses highly concentrated saline aerosol in a room whose walls and floors are covered with salt.
Along with Saltana Cave in Ridgefield, which opened in 2013, the county's three salt spas reflect a nationwide trend, according to Leo Tonkin, founder of the Salt Therapy Association trade group.
Related: People seek relief from ills, stress in Himalayan salt cave in Ridgefield
"There were about a dozen in the country when I got into the business six years ago," said Tonkin, who is also founder and CEO of Salt Chamber, a supplier of dry salt therapy equipment in Boca Raton, Florida. "Now there are about 350," including standalones like the three Fairfield County operations and others operating as add-on amenities at hotel chains like the Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton and Marriott.
"There's more and more awareness of what salt therapy can do," Tonkin said. "One of the top issues that Americans, if not the world, face is having to deal with respiratory conditions, whether it's due to poor air quality, pollen or conditions like asthma and COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)." Halotherapy can help relieve those conditions, he said.
Tonkin noted that the U.S. has trailed central Europe in developing saline therapy particularly Poland, where the health resort at the Wieliczka Salt Mine opened in 1839. That still-operating facility began with salt baths and has since progressed to the sort of therapy being offered at the Fairfield County spas.
Go with the Flow Fridays! #yoga #vinyasa #saltcave #halotherapy #tgif #rejuvenate #energize #darien #ct @tommimkern A post shared by Salt Cave of Darien (@saltcaveofdarien) on Nov 9, 2017 at 1:34pm PST
Salt Cave of Darien owner Arianne O'Donnell Shuck, who also practices law in Stamford, said her trip to Wieliczka convinced her to open her own salt spa.
"My job can be pretty stressful," she said. "I also have a 10- and a 12-year-old, and my health just wasn't good." Following her Poland trip, she began booking sessions at Saltana and the Salt of the Earth Therapeutic Spa in Woodbury and combined that regimen with exercise and more healthy eating. Shuck said she lost 25 pounds over a couple of years. The entrepreneur said her mild eczema has benefited from the salt treatments.
"I decided that it wasn't just about taking care of the outside, but also about taking care of the inside," she said.
Related: A day at the spa has its benefits
Earlier this year, the Darien resident began searching for a suitable spot for her new endeavor, ultimately selecting a 950-square-foot space in the commercial complex at 555 Post Road, which also includes a Quest Diagnostics Lab, a physical therapist's office and an eye care office. The entire process took about six weeks, she said.
The cave itself occupies about 450 square feet, and is lined with blocks of Himalayan pink salt as walls and a couple of inches of salt on the ground. Clients are asked to remove their shoes before entering.
The space can accommodate up to 12 people, though Shuck said usually only a couple of clients are in the cave at a time to promote the relaxation induced by subdued lighting, gentle music, a small fountain and breathing the salt air. Anti-bacterial chairs are placed around the room and blankets are available for customers who find the 67-degree setting too cold.
The salt covering walls and floors is there mainly for aesthetic reasons. The therapeutic salt is actually delivered by a halogenerator, which grinds sodium chloride into a dry aerosol dispersed to simulate the effects of being in an actual salt cave like those found in Europe and Asia.
Come check out our new Foot Domes! They support circulation, reduce swelling, and just feel great! It is also a soothing way to warm your feet on cool days. A post shared by NewtownSaltSpa (@newtownsaltspa) on Jul 15, 2017 at 8:37am PDT
Newtown Salt Spa owner Katherine Hansen said she stumbled upon the Wieliczka facility during a trip to Poland two years ago.
"My mom and I were on a tour and were given a choice between the salt mine and Auschwitz," she said. "My mom didn't want to do Auschwitz, so we thought we'd give the salt mine a try. I felt better within 15 minutes."
A former forensic analyst with the Fayetteville, North Carolina Police Department, Hansen relocated to Newtown when her husband got a job in Ridgefield and began considering a new line of work.
"I've always been interested in trying to do my best to help people," she said, "and I thought introducing salt therapy to Newtown was a great way to do that."
Her operation at 43 S. Main St. occupies 625 square feet with a square-shaped salt room taking about 425 square feet.
"I have one client with COPD, and it helps him with his breathing," Hansen said of the halotherapy. "A couple of others have allergies and it helps with that as well."
Hansen said she's seen "hit-or-miss" results with customers seeking relief from topical skin conditions. "It's supposed to help minimize swelling in rosacea and rashes," she noted.
Sound Bath@Saltana Cave A post shared by Saltana Cave (@saltanacavee) on Oct 28, 2017 at 6:59pm PDT
The Newtown spa charges $30 for a 45-minute session, while the Darien spa charges $45 for 45 minutes and donates a portion of its proceeds to local charities. Shuck said. In Ridgefield, Saltana Cave charges $40 for a 45-minute session. Saltana's owner, Anne Pogoda, a native of Poland, was out of the country and unavailable for comment.
The health benefits claimed for halotherapy have been disputed by some medical and scientific experts.
"There is no scientific evidence that these things help people with a lung disease to breathe more easily," said Dr. Norman H. Edelman, a senior science adviser at the American Lung Association.
"This is an old idea that goes back generations to central Europe, that going to sit in an abandoned salt mine would help you breathe more easily," Edelman said.
The anecdotal evidence of health benefits cited by salt spa owners "could be a placebo effect."
"My own hypothesis," said Edelman, "is that inhaling salt deposits can help water down the mucus that sits in the lungs of many of those with respiratory problems. That makes it easier to raise the mucus and get it out, which would make you feel better. But that's only my guess."
Related: Saltana Cave Body and mind benefits in salt 'mine'
Tonkin refuted Edelman's opinion, citing several studies that are linked to on the Salt Therapy Association website. Most were conducted in Russia, Finland, Italy and Poland, though the site also includes a positive 2007 report by a naturopath in Portland, Oregon.
All agree on the relaxation that can be had from sitting in a, cave-like space. "Almost everyone who comes here falls asleep," Hansen said. "It can sometimes take a little work to wake them up."
Edelman noted that people suffering from hypertension, kidney disease, heart failure and the like should shun salt spas, at least until consulting with their physician. For others curious about salt caves and halotherapy, "Do it in moderation," Edelman advised. "Anything in excess is a poison."
Kevin Zimmerman is a reporter for the Fairfield County Business Journal. For more of his work and that of the journal, please visit westfaironline.com.
An Austin legislators imperfect citation of a study led us to gauge whether domestic violence can reasonably be considered a predictor of mass shootings.
Answer: No.
In a Nov. 9, 2017, email blast to constituents, Democratic state Rep. Eddie Rodriguez noted that the shooter at the church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, leaving 26 people dead, had been convicted years before of beating his then-wife and young stepson. According to news accounts, Devin P. Kelley subsequently served a year in a Navy brig.
Rodriguezs email blast said the Texas shootings led him to suggest steps "we can take," among them: "Strengthening existing laws and ensuring theyre implemented correctly to keep guns out of the hands of criminals." Parenthetically, Rodriguez said next that "perpetrators of domestic violence accounted for 54% of mass shootings between 2009 and 2016, according to the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety."
Domestic violence and mass shootings
Rodriguezs linkage made us wonder, in part because Everytowns research drew wide mention after the Texas shootings.
A Nov. 6, 2017, New York Times news story quoted Billy Rosen, the groups deputy legal director, saying: "We have seen over and over this pattern where in these notorious mass shootings, it is a very common thread where the person had a particular history of domestic violence. A history of this particular kind of conduct may really demonstrate that someone has dangerous propensities and should not be allowed to have guns."
Time magazine similarly quoted the groups Sarah Tofte saying: "You could think of domestic violence as a canary in the coal mine for future violence. We may not know everything we need to know about why and when it reverberates outside the home, but we know that it does, and weve seen it over and over again."
However, the relevant April 2017 report from the Everytown group doesnt offer data linking past domestic violence to the likelihood of anyone becoming a mass shooter. Rather, the report says that "in 54 percent of mass shootings, the shooters killed intimate partners or other family members."
We asked Rodriguez about this contrast. In reply, he conceded in a letter that his email blast lacked clarity.
"As I read your question," Rodriguez wrote, "I can understand how my language could inadvertently imply that 54% of mass shooters also had a history of domestic violence, as opposed to the analysis' findings that 54% of the incidents were directly related to domestic violence.
"I agree that my language was unclear," Rodriguez wrote, "as perpetrators of domestic violence could be read as shooters who had committed domestic violence in the past or, as I meant it, as shooters who perpetrated domestic violence when they shot a current or former intimate or family member. While grammatically vague, I had no intention of misrepresenting the group's findings."
The legislators claim and clarification made us wonder what data actually show about mass shooters having domestic violence backgrounds.
April 2017 report
The Everytown report says the group drew on news stories, FBI figures and police and court records (in 76 instances) to identify 156 mass shootings in the study period--including 85 (54.5 percent) in which the perpetrator "shot a current or former intimate partner or family member." Mass shootings can be defined in different ways. The Everytown group tallied shootings involving four or more victims, not counting the shooter.
In the reports appendix, which summarizes each identified shooting, we spotted 13, or 8 percent, that occurred after a domestic dispute or in which the shooter had previously been charged with or linked to domestic violence.
Around the same time, though, criminologist James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University professor, found more domestic violence links to the shootings catalogued by the group. Fox said in a USA Today commentary published after Rodriguez sent out his email blast that of Everytowns 85 listed shootings in which a person shot a family member, 41 percent were preceded by other acts of domestic violence. More broadly, Fox wrote, 25 percent of all the men listed as committing mass shootings showed "any indication of prior domestic violence."
We asked Fox to share the specifics behind his percentages. By email, he said wed need to get the spreadsheet directly from the Everytown group. Its spokeswoman, Phoebe Kilgour, had earlier emailed us a sheet lacking entries specifying prior domestic violence charges or convictions. Kilgour, asked for more detail, said the limited information was "what we're comfortable sharing at this point."
Separately, Lisa Growette Bostaph, a Boise State University criminologist, responded to our inquiry by saying that her review of Everytowns information delivered domestic-violence counts matching what Fox reported; she also provided her annotated review of what Everytown listed.
By email, Bostaph also cautioned against dwelling on whether mass shooters have documented backgrounds of domestic violence, writing:
Parsing "out whether or not a protection order was granted or a criminal charge resulted in a conviction is ignoring everything that we know about domestic violence: that victims are often manipulated and controlled by fear to rescind requests for protection and criminal charges; that victims are often silent about the domestic violence out of fear of involving others who may later be threatened or hurt; fear of angering the perpetrator and risking further violence for "bringing others into our business"; fear that the perpetrator may lose their job and the victim cannot provide for their children on their own; fear that, by leaving their abuser, they could be risking their abuser having custody or unsupervised visitation with their children who are often witnesses to the violence and/or abused themselves. This means that, if the domestic violence victim is also a victim in the mass shooting, we may never know if there was a history of domestic violence. But, does that really matter, when the end result of that relationship was the ultimate act of domestic and/or family violence?"
A mass killing compilation
Fox otherwise alerted us to an ongoing USA Today compilation of U.S. mass killings, drawing from FBI figures plus police and news reports. When we examined it in November 2017, it showed 271 mass shootings of four or more victims from 2006 through Nov. 5, 2017. We sorted those figures to find that 129 of the shootings, or 48 percent, involved family killings including 13 of 23 Texas mass shootings. The day that we looked, the latest listed Texas mass shooting involving family had occurred in Houston in April 2017; a single mother shot and killed four people including her mother and sister.
That compilation doesnt filter out shootings involving a shooter with a domestic violence history.
But Fox connected us with Emma Fridel, a Northeastern doctoral student whos conducted more detailed research rooted in USA Todays compilation. To our inquiry, Fridel summarized her findings in an email stating that from 2006 through 2016, the country experienced 205 solved mass murders exclusively involving firearms. Of those, Fridel said, she found that 41, or 20 percent, involved one or more perpetrators with a history of domestic violence. (See Fridels full analysis, published in early November 2017, here.)
Fox, summing up, said: "You could certainly say about half the cases of mass shootings are extreme incidents of domestic violence," which in itself persists as "a serious problem," Fox said. "But its not generally a precursor to mass murder," he said.
Report: Domestic disputes precipitated a fifth of mass public shootings
Separately, Time's story after the Texas shootings led us to experts including Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, who by email pointed us to a 2015 report on U.S. mass murders by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
According to the CRS report, in the 15 years from 1999 through 2013, the United States saw about 8.5 familicide mass shootings per year on average. From another vantage point, the report says, a domestic dispute of some type was allegedly a precipitating factor in roughly a fifth (21.2%) of "mass public shootings," or at least 14 of 66 such incidents. Four other mass public shooting incidents could also be characterized as familicides, the report says, in that a spouse or former intimate partner murdered four or more family members--in each case in a public space.
Times article also drew us to interview Susan B. Sorenson, who directs the Evelyn Jacobs Ortner Center on Family Violence at the University of Pennsylvania. By phone, Sorenson endorsed Everytowns statistic--that 54 percent of its catalogued mass shootings were acts of domestic violence. Sorenson also told us theres not research cementing a cause-and-effect link between someone committing domestic violence and later shooting and killing four or more people. "Thats all speculative," Sorenson said. "We just dont have that information."
From a public health perspective, Sorenson commented, the focus should be on reducing gun violence. She said there are angry men "who abuse women all over the globe. What makes us different is the guns."
Our ruling
Rodriguez wrote that according to an Everytown study, "perpetrators of domestic violence accounted for 54% of mass shootings between 2009 and 2016."
Rodriguezs statement incorrectly suggests that domestic violence was a precursor to 54 percent of mass shootings. The research he cited did not confirm as much. Rather, it says 54 percent of such shootings involved a person shooting multiple family members.
Other research suggests that about 20 percent of individuals who committed such shootings from 2006 through 2016 had a history of domestic violence.
We rate Rodriguezs claim False.
FALSE The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.
See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com
WUZHEN, Zhejiang, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping said China hopes to encourage countries around the world to take a ride on the express train of internet and digital economic development.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, made the remarks in a congratulatory letter to the Fourth World Internet Conference, which opened Sunday in the east China town of Wuzhen.
The conference, which runs from Sunday to Tuesday, has the theme "Developing digital economy for openness and shared benefits -- building a community of common future in cyberspace."
In his letter, Xi expressed a sincere welcome to government representatives, heads of international organizations, experts, scholars, and entrepreneurs who are attending the conference.
He expressed hopes that the delegates will draw on collective wisdom and enhance mutual understanding so as to deepen exchanges and cooperation on the internet and digital economy, and make the development of the internet better serve the well-being of all people worldwide.
Xi pointed out that the development of the internet has posed many new challenges for the sovereignty, security, and development interests of the world's countries.
"Building a community of common future in cyberspace has increasingly become the widespread common understanding of international society," he said.
Xi said China hopes to work with the international community to respect cyberspace sovereignty and carry forward the spirit of partnership to commonly advance development, safeguard security, participate in governance, and share the benefits.
"China's door to the world will never close, but will only open wider," he said.
Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and member of the CPC Central Committee Secretariat, delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony.
Wang said China is willing to conform to the historic opportunities brought by the development of the internet and use the digital economy as an important driving force to promote the openness, cooperation, exchange, and sharing in cyberspace and build a community of common future in cyberspace.
"We should promote security, construct a fine order, and build a secure, stable and prosperous cyberspace," Wang said.
He also met with guests at the conference and visited an internet expo.
Over 1,500 guests from more than 80 countries and regions, including government representatives, heads of international organizations, leading figures of internet companies, online celebrities, experts and scholars, attended the conference.
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KELOWNA, BC, Dec. 4, 2017 /CNW/ - Cannatech is pleased to announce that it has been granted a Producer's License for medical cannabis under Health Canada's Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (ACMPR). The license allows Cannatech to immediately begin cultivating cannabis, bringing needed supply to the current medical market and the upcoming adult-use market in Canada.
Cannatech's license encompasses the first phase of a purpose-built 85,000 sq ft facility in Kelowna, British Columbia. The state-of-the-art facility, engineered and built to meet ISO and GMP standards, is considered one of the most advanced cannabis cultivation facilities in the world. The company expects plant growth to begin in January 2018 and anticipates having product available to sell prior to July 2018.
Cannatech has recently acquired adjacent land to support both the rapid development of cultivation capacity and the construction of a stand-alone dedicated research and development facility. Situated in the heart of the Okanagan Valley, the cannabis campus will solidify Cannatech's position as a global leader in the science and commercialization of cannabis and cannabis-related goods and services.
The Producer's License and the completion of all phases of the Kelowna campus positions Cannatech as a significant supplier to the rapidly growing Canadian medical cannabis market and the upcoming adult-use market.
About Cannatech:
Cannatech is an industry-leading company focused on the natural science of cannabis. With offices in Toronto and Kelowna, Cannatech's cultivation facilities operate within GMP compliance producing the highest quality cannabis flower and associated derivatives. Cannatech is focused on research and development to advance cultivation techniques, genetics and general understanding of cannabis. For more information visit www.cannatech.ca.
Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information
This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation which are based on current Cannatech expectations. These statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements. Although such statements are based on management's reasonable assumptions, Cannatech assumes no responsibility to update or revise forward looking information to reflect new events or circumstances unless required by law. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. These statements speak only as of the date of this press release. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks.
SOURCE Cannatech Plant Systems
For further information: David Towill, Director, Cannatech Plant Systems Inc., Telephone: 1-877-356-9726, Email: [email protected]
LAVAL, QC, Dec. 4, 2017 /CNW Telbec/ - Cara Operations Limited, owner of the Harvey's brand and chain of restaurants, which was established in Quebec in 1964 and is famous for its customized flame-grilled burgers, has appointed the St-Hubert Group to manage, market and expand the Harvey's brand throughout Quebec by supervising the opening of up to 45 new restaurants in the province including adding Harvey's to certain St-Hubert restaurants.
Drawing on St-Hubert's 66 years of expertise and in-depth knowledge of the Quebec market, a St-Hubert team will be dedicated to Harvey's and will work to grow the brand across the province. These investments will continue to evolve stand-alone Harvey's restaurants and the roll out a new type of combo restaurant accommodating both St-Hubert and Harvey's. Sharing brand space signals a new market strategy, particularly in rural areas, and will create new jobs throughout Quebec.
In these combined spaces, St-Hubert Express and Harvey's will offer their same menus and high-quality products, and the same speedy, efficient and friendly service for which they are known. Over the coming years, Harvey's will also be refurbishing and updating its existing restaurants in addition to opening new locations.
We will be keeping the unique concept of Harvey's burger bars that allows customers to customize their burgers, salads and poutines with a wide selection of fresh, local toppings. We will continue to use 100% Canadian beef and chicken, flame-grilled to perfection.
Harvey's first next-generation restaurant, sporting the chain's brand-new colours and design, celebrated its grand opening Friday, December 1st, at 1925 Boulevard St-Martin West in Laval.
"Cara Operations Limited is delighted to entrust the St-Hubert Group's team with the task of taking Harvey's to the next level in Quebec. We are excited and confident with St-Hubert's knowledge of the restaurant business and their unparalleled understanding of the Quebec market both of which will enable Harvey's to continue its growth in the province, where the chain has enjoyed a presence since 1964. We look towards the future with great optimism," says Ken Otto, President of Family Dining Restaurant.
"We are proud to see that the St-Hubert Group's know-how and expertise can drive the expansion of Harvey's restaurants across Quebec. This is an exciting challenge for us. Harvey's and the St-Hubert Group share the same approach that centres on quality and customer satisfaction. Over the coming years we will continue developing the Harvey's brand in Quebec employing the same passion, energy and enthusiasm that are characteristic of St-Hubert's rotisseries," states Pierre Rivard, President of the St-Hubert Group.
About Harvey's
Harvey's was established in Ontario in 1959 and has been present in Quebec since 1964. The Harvey's Brand currently has more than 6,000 employees and operates 46 restaurants in Quebec and 274 restaurants across Canada. Harvey's was the first restaurant to offer customers flame-grilled burgers with customized toppings using fresh ingredients. Harvey's uses high-quality ingredients produced by local farmers and suppliers, including 100% Canadian beef, chicken, potatoes and pork.
Harvey's QC
www.harveys.ca
About St-Hubert Group
The St-Hubert Group employs more than 10,000 people in its restaurant and food divisions. Established in Montreal in 1951, today St-Hubert BBQ Ltd has 121 rotisseries in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick serving more than 31 million meals a year. The St-Hubert Group also comprises a retail division which manufactures and distributes several food products under the St-Hubert brand and also under other Cara restaurant brands, including sauces, spare ribs, tourtieres and chicken pot pies. The company has a long tradition of innovation and strives continuously to satisfy its customers.
www.st-hubert.com
About Cara
Founded in 1883, Cara is Canada's oldest and largest full-service restaurant company. The Company franchises and/or operates some of the most recognized brands in the country including Swiss Chalet, Harvey's, St-Hubert, Milestones, Montana's, Kelsey's, East Side Mario's, New York Fries, Burger's Priest, Prime Pubs, Original Joe's, State & Main, Elephant & Castle, Bier Markt and Landing restaurants. As at September 24, 2017, Cara had 1,249 restaurants, 1,194 of which were located in Canada and the remaining 55 locations were located internationally. 83% of Cara's restaurants are operated by franchisees. Cara's shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CARA.TO. More information about the Company is available at www.cara.com.
SOURCE St-Hubert Group
For further information: Josee Vaillancourt, Director, Public Relations, St-Hubert Group, Tel: 450-688-4400 (ext. 2104), Cell: 514-913-3741
By ZHANG YUNBI (China Daily) 07:37, December 04, 2017
State Councilor Yang Jiechi, a member of the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau, addresses delegates to an international seminar in Beijing at its closing session on Sunday. FENG YONGBIN/CHINA DAILY
High-level meeting calls on attendees to reject isolationism, support multilateral trade system
The Belt and Road Initiative serves the interests of people of all countries and provides a platform for building a community with a shared future for mankind, political party leaders from more than 120 countries said in a joint statement issued in Beijing on Sunday.
They voiced their "earnest expectations and best wishes" for realizing the Belt and Road in the Beijing Initiative document adopted at the closing session of the Communist Party of China in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting.
In the statement, the leaders from nearly 300 political parties and organizations said forging a new form of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice and win-win cooperation is imperative to the building of the community with a shared future for mankind and a better world.
They called on countries to stay away from isolationism and exclusionism and support a multilateral trade system, and they commended the CPC's efforts and contribution in promoting the building of the community with a shared future and a better world.
Building the community and a better world requires political parties and leaders to undertake their historic duties and carry forward the spirit of hard work, State Councilor Yang Jiechi said at the closing session.
Also, the leaders should have a sense of innovation, always act with a problem-oriented approach, and create platforms for exchanges, Yang added.
In his keynote speech on Friday, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, elaborated on the CPC's idea of building the community with a shared future, and showed determination to boost world development and prosperity, Yang said.
Various attending political parties spoke highly of Xi's speech hailed the CPC's historical contribution and expect China's further navigating role, Yang added.
Pierre Ngolo, general-secretary of the Congolese Labor Party and president of the Senate of the Republic of Congo, said China fulfills its duties efficiently, promotes unity, friendship and safety among people in the world and works for enabling everyone to benefit from development.
"The Belt and Road is one of the best examples," he said, adding that the unprecedented high-level meeting, transcending the self-interests of the various political parties gathered, charts the course for the community with a shared future.
The meeting will become "a new impetus" for development in the world, he said.
Dashzeveg Amarbayasgalan, general secretary of the ruling Mongolian People's party, said the meeting has had sufficient discussions on co-building the Belt and Road.
Views have been exchanged effectively and the meeting has turned a new page for exchanges among political parties in the world, he said.
Dmitry Novikov, deputy chairman of the Central Committee of Communist Party of the Russian Federation, said the Belt and Road Initiative is promising in reinforcing economic cooperation among countries and will boost the upgrading of political and cultural cooperation among them.
China is the world's second-largest economy, it has huge potential politically and economically, and it benefits the Chinese people and facilitates efforts in building an equitable world of justice and allowing every country to have a share of development, Novikov said.
The Beijing Initiative will also introduce more possibilities to bilateral cooperation, such as those between China and Russia, he added.
The Federal Government has budgeted only N20, 226, 000 for Ogoni land clean up support in 2018 appropriation bill, while it earmarked N250 million for attendance of international bilateral/multilateral meetings.A total of N27, 369, 935, 852 is allocated to the Federal Ministry of Environment, and out of this N9, 524,482,833 is for capital projects, while debt owed contractors stood at N11.6 billion.President Muhammadu Buhari in the 2018 budget presentation said: We are working hard on the Ogoniland clean up project, and have engaged eight international and local firms proposing different technologies for the mandate.This would enable us select the best and most suitable technology for the remediation work, and have asked each firm to conduct demonstration clean up exercises in four local government areas of Ogoniland.Although, the International Oil Companies will fund the project, we have made provisions in 2018 budget for the costs of oversight and governance, to ensure effective implementation.Minister of state for Environment, Ibrahim Usmam Jibril, recently, explained that the clean up of Ogoni land is being delayed due to budget constraints and the ground work before the project would start.According to him, since the inception of the present.You cant do anything if you cannot collect the money if you dont budget for it; so you have to show your work plan which is what HYPREP has been doing, the Minister explained.The Director General of National Biosafety Management Agency, NBMA, Dr.Rufus E. Ebegba told The Guardian that they received 50 per cent of 2017 budget allocation to strengthen institutions nationwide.According to him, there are seven ongoing projects since last year and with 2018 appropriation of N689, 882,03, we hope this one would be a promising year for the agency.A break down of NBMA budget allocation, shows that procurement of genetically modified organisms, GMOs detect unit would gulf N13.5 million, while research institutes would take N19.5 million.Meanwhile, developing countries including Nigeria are to receive $540 million under the Montreal Protocol to continue their work to protect the environment and restore ozone layer to pre-industrial age level.Under the Kigali Amendment, Nigeria and others are to phase out ozone-depleting hydro chlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and to initiate enabling activities for the phase-down of climate-warming hydro fluorocarbons (HFCs).The funds will be provided by developed countries over the period 2018 to 2020 through the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol, which has disbursed over $3.7 billion since 1991 to support developing countries to phase out chemicals that destroy the ozone layer.Montreal Protocol parties made the funding commitment during the joint 11th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Vienna Convention and the 29th Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol held in Montreal. There are 197 parties to the Montreal Protocol.Nigeria has been part of a global effort to protect the ozone layer, which scientists discovered about four decades ago, was being depleted by a group of man-made chemicals referred to as ODS such as Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), Halons, Carbon Tetrachloride, Methyl Chloroform and Methyl bromide.It is acknowledged that since the Montreal Protocol came into force, Nigeria, like other parties has continued to take actions in line with the provisions of the Protocol towards solving the problem of ozone layer depletion. The actions have led to reductions in the production and consumption of ODS, while the Montreal Protocol is adjudged to be the most successful Multilateral Environmental Agreement (MEA) that illustrates how countries can come together to solve a common problem.Nigeria had a baseline consumption of over 4,000 metric tons of ODS, which essentially are used in various industrial applications. These include domestic, commercial and industrial refrigeration and air conditioning, flexible and rigid insulation foam and in numerous other applications such as aerosol propellants and solvents.
Happy New Month Nigeria! Welcome to the month of June. As the world searches for a respite from all its troubles since 2020 began, one can ...
(Xinhua) 08:11, December 04, 2017
BEIJING, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of Commerce (MOC) Saturday expressed strong dissatisfaction with the U.S. opposition to granting it market economy status in the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative told Xinhua Friday that the United States had submitted a statement of opposition to the WTO as a third-party brief in support of the European Union (EU) in a case brought by China arguing the "surrogate country approach" should be dropped after the expiration date.
"China is strongly dissatisfied and resolutely opposes the rejection, as the U.S. government tried to mix the concepts of the surrogate country approach and market economy status to mislead the public," the MOC said in a statement.
When China joined the WTO, members use costs of production in a third country to calculate the value of products from countries on their "non-market economy" list, which includes China.
In accordance with Article 15 of the accession protocol, the surrogate country approach expires on Dec. 11, 2016.
The case has nothing to do with whether China has been granted market economy status or not as there are no standards in WTO rules for the status, the MOC said, urging all members to drop the practice.
When the approach expired last year, some member nations, including Japan and the United States, indicated they would not honor their commitments with no plans to change their trade policies. The MOC has warned that their refusal would put trade ties with China at risk.
The young barber explained that his father died when he was just 11, adding that he struggled to sponsor himself through school along with his five siblings.When I was cutting the hair of one of my customers, he advised me to go to Europe where he promised I could earn a lot of money, Mr. Imasuen recounted.I asked the man how much it would cost me. He said N350,000 but I said I only had N140,000 with me, he said. Mr. Imasuen had been determinedly saving N10,000 monthly for over one year.The man promised to help, not knowing that Mr. Imasuen was naively about to use his own hard-earned cash to sell himself into slavery.Travelling by road on a tortuous journey through Niger, the young Nigerian explained how one of the vehicles in his convoy had a terrible accident in the Sahara Desert, killing 30 people instantly.Upon arriving in Libya, the driver said he had not been paid his money and we were sold into the slave trade in Sabha. Mr. Imasuen said he and ten other Nigerians were sold and then locked up in one small room. More than 200 slaves were kept inside that inhumane cell.They started beating me to call my mother to send money. That was when my mother learned I was not in Nigeria because I did not tell her before I left, he admitted.The ransom they demanded N200,000 was simply too much for Mr. Imasuens poverty-stricken mother to raise.For months, I did not hear from her. They kept on beating me everyday and I fell sick. If I went to the toilet, I was shitting blood.Mr. Imasuen said he was beaten three times daily for eight gruelling months. That was his fate as a male.For the ladies sold into slavery, they would send them out to do prostitution before selling them to another person; I know of a girl there who was sold three times.According to him, most of the enslaved females fell pregnant without even knowing the father of the child.When a picture of Mr. Imasuens emaciated condition was circulated in his local community, they managed to come together to raise the money to secure his freedom in March 2017.After gaining his freedom, he attempted to travel to Tripoli, hoping to join the thousands of illegal migrants who would brave the sea to try and reach Italy by boat.I didnt even get to Tripoli before I was caught and taken to prison. I met more than 10,000 Nigerians there. We only eat once a day there one piece of bread. I would drink salt water.While suffering the horrific prison conditions, Mr. Imasuen hatched a plan to reach the deportation camp. He slipped a note into the female section of the prison, pleading that any of the ladies who was being taken for deportation claim he was their husband.The ruse worked and Mr. Imasuen was taken to Tripolis main deportation camp one step closer to being repatriated to Nigeria. It was there he granted an interview to CNN, he said.I decided to speak to them, hoping to get help but at the end, nothing came out of it, he bemoaned. Through the intervention of the International Organisation for Migration, IOM, Mr. Imasuen was finally deported to Nigeria with nothing but the clothes on his back to show for his journey through hell.Upon getting to Nigeria, I decided to come to T.B. Joshua because even before I left, I heard of the help he renders to others. I need prayer.Osazee Aghimie, another deportee, equally shared his own sorrowful tale, explaining how over 100 migrants died in the boat he was in after it capsized en route to Italy. He narrowly survived only to be thrown into prison and eventually deported.T.B. Joshua, who had just returned from the Dominican Republic, gave the two men each N200,000. Mr. Imasuen could not hold back tears as he received the gift.Mr. Joshuas support to the duo is not an isolated instance. This week alone, the cleric gave over N4.4 million to Nigerians returning from Libya, and well over N100 million ($277,000) has been provided to them by The SCOAN since 2016.
Otoide (left) and Joseph (right)
Several returnees from Libya have spoken up on the terrible plight they had to endure in the north-African country where they were sold into slavery.
Over 650 Libyan deportees returned to Edo State over the past three months and the tales of their sojourn in the North African country, where they had planned to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Italy, was heart-breaking. 168 of them returned to Benin-City on Wednesday while 108 arrived Friday; they were received by officials of Edo State Task Force Against Human Trafficking. Sunday Vanguard observed that some of the women were pregnant and emaciated just like the men who said they were used as slaves. Governor Godwin Obaseki had promised to train the returnees in skills as part of the efforts to reintegrate them into the society. Most of the deportees lamented that their sponsors promised to take them to Europe only to abandon them in Libya.
One of the returnees, 27-year-old Ewere Joseph, who claimed to have been shot in his shoulder, narrated his ordeal. He said: Before I left Nigeria, I was working in a tile making company but the money was too small. One day somebody ask me if I was interested in going to Europe, the man is still here in Benin, I said yes. His name is Christopher, he said I should go and bring N500, 000. I rallied round for the money and we set out. He promised that once I got to Libya, he will arrange for me to be taken to Italy. It sounded so convincing when he said it but, when we set out for the journey, I did not know it was going to be hell. I dont need to go to hell any more, I have tasted hell already. I spent one year and six months in Libya.
Many things happened there; they killed a lot of Nigerians. Many of our women are pregnant for those they cannot identify. My friend died in prison because they always beat us. They used the butt of a gun to hit break my leg. My aim was to go to Italy.
When I got to Libya, my sponsor sold me to another Nigerian who was using me for manual labour and I had no choice. I made attempt twice to pass the sea but I ended up spending two days on top of water in the first attempt. The rescue team that came did not locate us, but God sent a fisherman to save my life.
The second attempt I made to cross the sea was when I was now arrested and sent to prison. There is one prison there that the government of Nigeria should go and free Nigerians from, we have about 10, 000 Nigerians there. The prison is called Giyuan. Eight people died in my presence in that prison. Some of the inmates had to break the prison and that was how we escaped and we were taken to deportation camp.
And when we got to the deportation camp, they started beating us; we received the same treatment like when we were in prison. They will give you bread in the morning and that is all you will eat till the next morning.
I do not regret the journey because it is part of my experience in life. But my advice to my brothers and sisters is that they should not embark on such trip. Even from Benin to Kano is very bad, from there we moved to Alghadez, Shaba to Libya. Libya is a very bad country; it is not a place to go. The first thing they did was to ask me to convert to Islam. I told them I will not, that I am a Christian. The beat me with guns and dump me in prison. I wish our government can block the road leading to Libya so that our people will not go there. I weep each time I see our girls suffering, being used as sex slaves and all sorts of abuse
How I was shot
What happened was that they brought food to us and said we should eat. I refused to eat because they gave people from other countries full bread and gave we Nigerians half bread called Oza.
About 400 Nigerians, we said we will not eat. They started shooting into the crowd and that was how I was shot. After they shot me, they started beating me, saying I was proving stubborn. One of my friends they beat up had internal bleeding and died in prison.
In the desert, seven Hilux vans left for Libya, only one person survived. You will see dead bodies like rats. One of us complained of thirst, but instead of giving him water, he was given Tramadol and he collapsed.
He was not yet dead but he was buried alive in the desert. If you refuse to proceed on the trip, they will shoot you dead. Many of our people are still there now suffering and dying. Some have gone mad due to stress of the suffering they went through. It is better you suffer in Nigeria than to die in Libya. Our government should go to Libya and return our people, they hate Nigerians a lot over there and it is sad.
Alex Otoide, another returnee, said he witnessed the sale of 20 Nigerian girls in the prison where he was kept. They (captors) sold like 20 girls in the night, Otoide said.
It was God that saved me. More than seven people died from hunger and thirst inside the prison where I was kept. The man that took me to Libya left me. I was into road construction in Lagos State but I am from Edo. I left Nigeria with N500, 000 but I spent six months in Libya jail after the man that took my money ran away. We were 55 that left for Libya, 25 died in the desert.
One of the girls, Osas Blessing, urged the state government to arrest one Charles who she described as the one deceiving people to go Libya to make money from them.
She said, I gave Charles N450, 000 but when I got to Libya he increased my fee to N600, 000. He is very wicked. He pushed many of us there. He did not care for human lives. He is a Benin man. He will say if you die you die.
He pushed us into the sea at the wrong time. I heard he just left Nigeria with new passengers for Libya and I think he must be stopped before he ruins more souls. When we were arrested, they took us to the people in charge of the UN but others were taken to prison. If you look at those that went to prison, they look like ghosts. The Libyans beat Nigerians a lot.
Henry Uwadiae also narrated: I was just passing through Libya, my destination was Europe. The Arabs came and attacked our boat as we were crossing the sea. They took us to prison since August. They maltreated us like animals.
After they kidnap you, they start torturing you till you die. They dumped us in prison and beat us every day. We ate bread once in two days. I was into business before I left Nigeria. I left Nigeria with N500, 000. I didnt get to Europe. The desert was horrible experience. Many people died in the desert but the traffickers will not tell their parents that they have died. They keep giving people false hope. The videos circulating online that Africans are sold as slaves in Libya are true. I advise our boys and girls hoping to travel to Europe through the desert that Libya is highway to hell.
- Vanguard
Captain Ibiyemi and her passengers
The picture of a female pilot plying the Abuja route has surfaced on social media with female folks celebrating her. A 25-year-old female pilot dazzled and amazed some of her passengers after a flight to Abuja earlier today.
According to a surprised Facebook user, Imade Alonge Ize-Iyamu, the young lady identified as Captain Ibiyemi flew the plane not as a co-pilot but as a full pilot as she and another passenger sought for a selfie with her (the pilot) after the flight.
CAMPAIGN for Democracy (CD), a human right group has decried the return of roadblocks in the commercial city of Onitsha, Anambra State.The group said it is particularly worried about the indiscriminate setting of road blocks in the city, saying that it was slowing down businesses in the city.The Coordinator of the group in the South East zone, Uzor A Uzor who spoke to Nigerian Tribune gave the Inspector General Police, Ibrahim Idris three days, within which to dismantle the road blocks.Uzor said the primary aim of the roadblocks was to extort from innocent road users, insisting that his group would not accept such for the traders.We want to say that after this 3-day ultimatum, we will embark on a series of protests to register our position on the matter, Uzor stated.A social critics, Prince Ezenwa noted that travelling from Onitsha to Okija, a distance not more than 20 kilometres, one could see not less than 15 checkpoints.He alleged that it might be a plan to reintroduce illegal toll collection in the south-east geopolitical zone.We intend to write to the IGP because they (Police) cause a lot of problems to road users.They are flouting the IGPs order that all road blocks be dismantled.The Gubernatorial Election, which led to the setting up of road blocks has come and gone with the state not experiencing any violent crimes to warrant these problems, Ezenwa said.The Chairman Ogirisi Igbo Foundation, Dr Linus Uche, said it was a calculated attempt to extort road users during the yuletide.
The personal assistant to the president on new media, Bashir Ahmad, has reacted to the #EndSARS campaign which has been the number one trending topic on Nigerian Twitter since Saturday, December 2.While many high profile Nigerians have either joined the campaign or commented on the matter, the Nigerian presidency has been surprisingly quiet.Ahmad, 25, described the tales of Nigerians tweeting about their experience with the Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the Nigeria Police Force as saddening.President Buhari is yet to speak on the campaign 48 hours after it is the biggest topic on Nigerian Twitter. Photo credit: Aso RockHe however said it is not within his power to do anything about the issue but promised to bring this very urgent matter to the attention of relevant authorities adding that the Buhari administration is a listening one.Some Nigerians were however not impressed with Bashirs tweet, with one particular Twitter user saying the Buhari administration take things for granted.Others however hailed Bashirs courage to speak up and expressed optimism that the presidency will address the concerns of Nigerians.Meanwhile, former vice president Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has called for investigations into allegations of harassment leveled against the SARS unit of the Nigeria Police Force.In a statement issued in series of tweets on his verified Twitter handle on Sunday, December 3, Atiku, a former Nigeria Customs Service top chief, noted that the allegations must be taken seriously by the police and the National Assembly.While urging the two institutions to look into the allegations, he saluted Nigerian youths who have started an hashtag movement on social media to raise awareness about the allegations.
The Federal High Court in Lagos on Monday issue a bench warrant against a former governor of Enugu State, Chimaroke Nnamani, who was char...
The Federal High Court in Lagos on Monday issue a bench warrant against a former governor of Enugu State, Chimaroke Nnamani, who was charged with an alleged fraud of N5.3bn.Justice Chuka Obiozor issued bench warrant against the ex-governor for failing to appear in court on Monday for his scheduled re-arraignment.The judge held that Nnamanis counsel failed to give a tenable reason why his client was absent from court.Details later
The comedian on his IG page, penned down an open letter to former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, who yesterday returned to PDP as he plans...
The comedian on his IG page, penned down an open letter to former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, who yesterday returned to PDP as he plans to contest for presidency in 2019.
Atiku in a live video on Facebook, berated the APC for ignoring the youths of Nigeria. Read what I Go Dye wrote below
'Don't use sentimental empathy on the youths to express your political ambitions.
Sir, you are one of those that have immensely benefited from Nigeria since your birth in 1946.
Having worked for 20years with the Nigeria Customs where you retired at the age of 43 in 1989 as Deputy Director, your bucket list sure looks good because you were obviously employed at youth 23.
In 1999 you became governor of Adamawa and ultimately the Vice President, all of these you achieved at 53. What did you do during your time in that exalted position? When will the youths like in your time get a chance? am motivated to speak, based on your statement : A party that does not take the youths into account is a dying party.The future belong to young.Please which of the future?
Remarkably, between 1999 and 2007 that you were the Vice president of Nigeria, it is recorded that tertiary institutions witnessed several strikes that wasted seventeen months ,three weeks and three days.Within this period, what did you do?
If social support were given to youths then,their children will be between 18 and 20years during the 2019 elections,obviously they would have willingly voted for you or anyone that you endorse in 2019.This is the essence of making sacrifices for the future generation.
You cannot be credited to have been a philanthropic to the youths.
The recent revocation of the NPA contract with Intel,your company,is the major issue.
As a company either, the people in the region you operated cannot accredit Intel to have provided credible support for the youths or built skills acquisition centers to curb unproductivity as part of it's cooperate social responsibility , which has resulted to many youths embarking on the sub- sahara deserts route treking to Europe,which has claimed many lives.
Your excellency,sir Atiku Abubakar, please don't use sentimental empathy on the youths to express your political ambitions,because by 2019 the youths are preparing to substantiate the real economical,political and progressive change.
I kindly recommend that you should advocate for process that will afford us the opportunity of a youthful leadership in the 2019 election. Thanks Amb Francis'
Despite the call by the Inspector General of police, Ibrahim Idris, for an immediate reorganisation of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, ...
Can the IG of police further explain to Nigerians what re organizing really means.. Nigerians are calling on disbandment #EndSars now December 4, 2017
This same I.G. ordered the dismantling or road blocks by the Police months ago but the Police is still operating road blocks!
Don't stop this advocacy. DO NOT STOP. Don't let the press release that the I.G of Police has ordered the reorganization of SARS fool you.This same I.G. ordered the dismantling or road blocks by the Police months ago but the Police is still operating road blocks!Don't stop this advocacy. DO NOT STOP. #EndSARS December 4, 2017
And in response to the campaign, the inspector general of police said he's ordered a complete re-organisation of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad.pic.twitter.com/kWzakF0wi1 Nigerian tweeters have been using the #EndSARS hashtag demand an end to police brutality.And in response to the campaign, the inspector general of police said he's ordered a complete re-organisation of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. https://t.co/jnxa92h4bQ December 4, 2017
If we don't #EndSARS they will increase the tempo of their killings now that people are agitating to #EndSARS . Please let's all be careful. December 4, 2017
Despite the call by the Inspector General of police, Ibrahim Idris, for an immediate reorganisation of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, Nigerians insist that it should be scrapped.The Hashtag, #EndSARS gained momentum on the social media on Sunday, when Nigerians took to Twitter to protest ill-treatment, abuse and harassment by operatives of the SARS.Although, the IGP has called for the SARS to be restructured, the #EndSARS continues to trend. Nigerians still demand the scrapping of the SARS.Tweets below...
A University of Ilorin female student (name withheld), has narrated how a man she met on Instagram drugged, raped and took her unclad pi...
A University of Ilorin female student (name withheld), has narrated how a man she met on Instagram drugged, raped and took her unclad pictures in a Lagos hotel.Crying profusely while speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Ilorin, the lady said she met the man through social media network (Instagram), where the relationship started.He asked for a relationship which I was reluctant to accept but I accepted.I met him for the first time in Lagos when I was on holiday. He later invited me to an hotel in Ojo area of Lagos, that was when I met him for the second time.It was when I was preparing to return to school, so he demanded s.e.x which I turned down.He promised me N15,000 and transferred it to me, we had a drink but I noticed I was dizzy.So it was when one of the hotel waiters brought a condom that I started to cause a scene before people came to my rescue.Later that day, he called and threatened to send my unclad pictures he took to my Daddy, I was surprised how he got my fathers number.It was because of the threat that I had to go to him again to have s.e.x and to ask him delete all the pictures but he again said he had video of when we were having s.e.x.I couldnt confront my parents because I was scared and told my pastor, so it was my pastor that reported the matter to the police, the Unilorin student said.She described the man as a devil who had taught her a painful lesson.Confirming the incident, Kwara police spokesman, Ajayi Okasanmi, told NAN that the suspect was arrested but escaped during interrogation.We invited the suspect to Ilorin with the help of the lady he was threatening.We arrested him and seized the phone which has the unclad pictures.So, we asked an officer to go and search where he lodged in Ilorin only for him to escape in the process and we have not seen him till date, Okasanmi explained.Okasanmi said that the suspect later went on social media claiming that he collected money from himThe Kwara Police spokesman challenged the suspect to come out and sue him if his claims were true.(NAN)
(Global Times) 08:14, December 04, 2017
Transport aircraft completes training in S.China Sea
The domestic-made medium-sized military transport aircraft Yun-9 is ready for combat mission, which will boost China's effort in safeguarding maritime rights, military experts said on Sunday after the aircraft completed exercises in the South China Sea.
The Yun-9 is now able to undertake combat missions after a fleet of the transport aircraft finished training in the South China Sea, Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) announced on Saturday on its official WeChat account.
It was the first long-range maritime exercise of the medium-sized transport aircraft, the PLAAF said.
The PLAAF didn't say on which date that the training was carried out, or the number of aircraft involved.
The Yun-9 completed its air-drop missions without assistance from ground control and the crew prepared procedures to cope with any emergency, Liu Bao, a PLA officer said, according to the PLAAF post.
"As the backbone transport aircraft of the PLA, the Yun-9's combat readiness means China has the ability to ensure military supplies reach offshore and even open seas," Wang Ya'nan, chief editor of Aerospace Knowledge magazine, told the Global Times on Sunday.
The Yun-9 will support China's mission to safeguard oceanic sovereignty and security, Wang said, adding maritime rights of the South China Sea always face challenges.
The aircraft, with more advanced features than its predecessor the Yun-8, should be the best-equipped transport aircraft in the PLA, said Wang. It can also be produced in greater number than the large-size transport aircraft the Yun-20, Wang explained.
The Yun-9 costs less than the larger Yun-20 transport aircraft and is more adaptable to airports, and is able to supply weapons, personnel and goods over medium-distances, another military expert told the Global Times on condition of anonymity on Sunday.
The training session demonstrated that the Yun-9 is reliable to finish its transportation missions. The Yun-9 can land on small islands if necessary, the expert said.
The Y-9 transport aircraft is manufactured by Shaanxi Aircraft Corporation, a company affiliated with Aviation Industry Corporation of China. The aircraft can carry a payload of up to 20 tons and 98 soldiers. Its flying range is up 4,200 kilometers, according to Aerospace Knowledge in October.
The transport plane flew from a military airport in Southwest China's Sichuan Province in the morning, landed on an island in the South China Sea around noon and returned the same night.
The medium-lift transport aircraft Y-9 has also undergone several other major training exercises in extreme weather, after it formally entered service with the PLA in 2016.
Governor Nyesom Wike has said he has no intention to run for Vice President in 2019, indicating that he would want to contest for a seco...
Governor Nyesom Wike has said he has no intention to run for Vice President in 2019, indicating that he would want to contest for a second term as governor of the state.The governor dropped this hint Sunday at Government House, Port Harcourt when he played host to Chief Raymond Dokpesi, a national chairmanship aspirant of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP at the partys national convention.I am a first term governor. How can I leave my state to go and vie for the post of Vice President?, he said The governor also spoke against call for micro zoning of office of the national Chairman at the convention, stressing that all the party needed now were leaders that would drive it to victory in 2019. He said he would collaborate with others for the success of the party.He said: No region has been left out. PDP is not in power. PDP is an opposition party. We are working for a chairman that will drive PDP and make PDP to win elections. The chairman is not going to share contracts to any zone for you to say a particular zone is left out.It is only when a government is formed that you talk about a zone being left out On his part, national Chairmanship Aspirant, Chief Raymond Dokpesi enjoined delegates from the state to vote for him, adding that he was in the state to appeal for the support of the governor and drum his campaigns in the state ahead of the elections.
The Lagos State Chapter of the PDP on Sunday night endorsed Chief Olabode George as their preferred candidate for the National Chairmanship position during the forthcoming December 9 National Convention of the party.The State Chairman of PDP, Dr Moshood Salvador, gave the certification at a feedback meeting between George and members of the party, held at the partys secretariat in GRA, Ikeja.George had been on a campaign in the Southern states of the country to seek support for votes ahead of the National Convention.There are about eight aspirants jostling for the National chairmanship seat of the party from the south.They include the former Governor of Ogun State, Chief Gbenga Daniel; former Minister of Education, Prof. Tunde Adeniran; former Minister of Youth Development, Prof. Taoheed Adedoja; and former Lagos State PDP governorship candidate, Mr Jimi Agbaje.Others are Prince Uche Secondus, a former acting National Chairman of PDP, and Chief Raymond Dokpesi.Salvador said, On behalf of Lagos PDP, we must vote for Chief Bode George come Dec. 9; the Southwest is the rightful region to have the chairman of our great party.In the last dispensation, Ekiti produced the Vice- Chairman while Osun and Oyo states took the highest office. It is only Lagos that is left and what we want is the chairman.The South-east and the South-south have produced a chairman before that is why it is our turn to have the chairman of PDP.Earlier, George assured members that if given the opportunity to serve, he would re-establish the culture and tradition put in place by the founding fathers of the PDP.If I am given the opportunity, I will not be new to the management of this party because the partys constitution is not going to be new to me; I know its provisions as I know the back of my hand.We grew up with the party and the founding fathers handed over the culture of the party to us and that is what we would re-establish.Just check out, from the end of our convention to the national election is a very short time, it is not a time where you can do experimentation, it is not a time you can bring a greenhorn to be the chairman of the party.If you are desirous that you want to win that election, on that day before you cast your votes search your consciences and think very carefully.Secondly, it is not a matter of life and death, if I dont believe that I have anything to offer, I will not be here.I will not compromise on things that are not right and are not in the constitution.I will do things the way they should be done and everybody will be happy. That was how our founding fathers were moving the party forward, George said.
Olisa Metuhs defense counsels, on Monday alleged threats to their lives, following a move to have former President, Goodluck Jonathan summ...
Olisa Metuhs defense counsels, on Monday alleged threats to their lives, following a move to have former President, Goodluck Jonathan summoned to testify in the ongoing trial of the ex-PDP Publicity Secretary.
Metuhs lawyer, Emeka Etiaba (SAN), informed the Abuja Federal High Court that the lead defence counsel, Dr. Onyechi Ikpeazu (SAN), and the former PDP spokesperson himself, have received life threatening messages.
Etiaba noted that the threat would not yield the desired result because the former President must testify in the ongoing case.
According to him, This subpoena is one that has generated quite a lot of controversy, not just to our client but to myself.
The threat goes to the life of the first defendant, myself and Dr. Onyechi Ikpeazu.
This will not make us change our mind as to whether His Excellency, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, will come and testify or not.
Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose has said the nations unity is not negotiable but must be backed by justice, equity and fairness to ...
Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose has said the nations unity is not negotiable but must be backed by justice, equity and fairness to every section.Fayose spoke at the weekend in Gombe, the capital, at the cultural display by different dance groups after the coronation of Governor Ibrahim Hassan Dankwambo as the Tafidan Tangale in Billiri Local Government Area of the state.The Ekiti State governor said Nigeria deserved a leadership that believes in all parts of the country and not in some sections of it.He said: As much as we believe in the unity of Nigeria, we must also continue to add justice and fairness.No section in Nigeria should feel used or oppressed by the leadership of our country. But the unity of Nigeria is not negotiable.Fayose hailed Gombe State residents for ensuring unity and displaying their rich culture.He said: Well, this is a very good culture. There could be a culture without foot drivers of such culture, no matter how rich.Dankwambo has demonstrated good leadership by promoting a rich culture, his people and celebrating them.The governor could not resist joining in the cultural dance.He urged others to emulate the rich cultural display among Gombe State residents to promote unity and progress of the country.Hailing Dankwambo, Fayose said: For him to have won an election in this part of this country in 2015 means he is an outstanding politician who should be celebrated. Im glad to be part of that celebration today.
President Muhammadu Buhari has returned to Abuja after participating in 2-day Counter-Terrorism retreat, co-hosted by Jordan and Nigeri...
President Muhammadu Buhari has returned to Abuja after participating in 2-day Counter-Terrorism retreat, co-hosted by Jordan and Nigeria.The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the presidents aircraft which left the King Hussein International airport at exactly 9.38a.m local time, landed at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, at about 2.p.m.While in Aqaba, President Buhari met with King Abdullah II of Jordan where both leaders discussed bilateral issues concerning Nigeria and Jordan.President Buhari, during the meeting, stressed the need for inter-regional cooperation and information sharing towards tackling terrorism across the world.According to him, these factors are important in checkmating the threat of violent extremism to global peace and security.The president used the opportunity to thank the Jordanian King for his constant support and assistance to Nigeria especially with the recent donation of armoured vehicles and other military equipment to fight terrorism and insurgency in Nigeria.In his remarks, King Abdullah II advocated broader measures especially the use of cyber security in checking the influence of terrorists.He pledged the continued support of the Kingdom of Jordan to Nigeria in its war against violent extremism.President Buhari, who also spoke at the counter-terrorism retreat, urged leaders to speak up against the violent extremism committed by deranged people in the name of Islam.According to him, all nations, irrespective of religion should partner effectively in implementing national, regional and global action plans to counter violent extremism.Buhari reiterated the commitment of Nigeria to playing a leading role in bringing together countries of the West African sub-region in a collective security arrangement.He said that Nigeria was ready to share its experiences with a view to fashioning out comprehensive action plans in tackling the scourge of violent extremism in the region.He, therefore, called for a stronger collaboration among the member countries of the Aqaba Initiatives to check violent extremism across the world.The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that President Buhari and other visiting heads of state from Ghana, Mali and Guinea Conakry were hosted to a royal dinner by King Abdullah II.
The controversy triggered by comments made by Borno State Governor, Kashmir Shettima, at a book launch in Abuja chronicling how and why former President Goodluck Jonathan lost the 2015 election, have taken a new turn with northern leaders warning the former presidents aide not to insult Shettima over his comments.It will he recalled that at the ceremony in Abuja on Thursday, Governor Shettima, who chaired the event, had chided Jonathan for blaming him over the kidnap of Chibok girls and for not doing enough to rescue the young women.Shettima also carpeted those calling for the restructuring of Nigeria, saying he did not find any merit in the advocacy.But latching on the comments, a former aide to Jonathan on Social Media, Reno Omokri, lampooned Shettima for daring to cast aspersions on Jonathan , whom he claimed did more than any other leader for Nigeria.Omorki claimed that Shettima paved the ay for the abduction of the Chibok girls and should blame himself and not Jonathan.But apparently irked by Omokris claims, Northern leaders under the aegis of Northern Emancipation Network, on Sunday rose in Defence of Shettima and warned Omokri to desist from pouring invectives on the governor.In a strongly worded mail sent to Omokri and copied to Vanguard, the President of the northern group, Abdul-Azeez Suleiman, drew his attention to the fact that the north holds Shettima in very high esteem and would not allow him to get away with any abuse on their leader.The group asked Omokri to also note that Shettima had distinguished himself in governance and delivery of dividends of democracy to his people in his capacities as the governor of Borno State and as the chairman of the Northern Governors Forum.Omokri should note that the North of today does not tolerate disrespect for its leaders from any quarter, Suleiman said.We find Omokris argument as pedestrian as it is disappointing, Suleiman said, advising Omokri to always secure solid grounds on which to base his arguments lest he keeps embarrassing his paymaster in the market square.Its no longer acceptable for irresponsible commentators like Omokri to insult any northern leader and expect to go away with it. He said that northerners would only be disposed o a Nigeria in which leaders from every section re mutually respected.
US President Donald Trump denied Sunday having asked then FBI director James Comey to stop investigating ex-national security advisor...
US President Donald Trump denied Sunday having asked then FBI director James Comey to stop investigating ex-national security advisor Michael Flynn, as the Russia meddling probe darkened what would otherwise have been a victorious week for the Republican president.Trump appeared to be backtracking furiously from a tweet Saturday that deepened suspicions that he engaged in obstruction of justice an impeachable offence in the Russia scandal haunting his presidency.In that Twitter post, Trump said he had fired Flynn in February for lying not just to the vice president but also to Comeys FBI, which was probing Flynn over his pre-inauguration contacts with the Russian ambassador about US sanctions imposed by Barack Obama against Russia for interfering in the US election.Comey has testified under oath to lawmakers that a day after firing Flynn, Trump asked him to drop the Flynn probe.If Comey is to be believed, the Saturday tweet suggests Trump asked the FBI to lay off someone in his administration that Trump now acknowledges he knew had committed a felony lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.But on Sunday, Trump insisted, I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!Trump fired Comey in May and has said he did so with the Russia probe in mind.Comey himself seemed to be addressing the latest developments in an Instagram message: To paraphrase the Buddha Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun; the moon; and the truth.Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, said Sunday suspicions of obstruction of justice by Trump are growing.Schiff argued that if the evidence shows that Trump knew about and directed Flynns Russia contacts, and then asked Comey to drop the matter after his lies to the FBI came to light, Then you get the case of obstruction of justice.I think thats the significance of this context in which the president was intervening, he said on ABCs This Week.Senator Diane Feinstein told NBC: I think what we are beginning to see is a case of obstruction of justice.Clearly he is making progress, Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, said of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation.And in the wake of Trumps seemingly self-incriminating Twitter post on Saturday, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, said he had advice for him.You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril. Id be careful if I were you, Mr. President. Id watch it, Graham told CBS.In an ominous turn for the president, Flynn on Friday pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and pledged to cooperate with Mueller.White House officials told The New York Times that in his tweet Saturday Trump was only referencing Flynns guilty plea for lying to the FBI about his conversations with then Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.Trumps personal lawyer John Dowd told ABC News that he had drafted the tweet and had done so in a sloppy manner.Muellers focus goes beyond possible collusion with Russia to business dealings and whether Trump himself tried to thwart the investigation.Trump also expressed anger Sunday over word that a senior FBI counterintelligence official, Peter Strzok, was removed from the Russia investigation over the summer for sending text messages critical of Trump.Strzok had also worked on the probe into Hillary Clintons use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state.*AFP
The U.S. Coast Guard rescued an ailing 92-year-old man from a charter fishing boat off the coast of Atlantic City on Sunday.
The man was experiencing possible cardiac issues aboard Fish Finder II two miles off shore around 12:22 p.m. when the Coast Guard was notified.
The rescue boat brought him ashore, where he was taken by ambulance to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Atlantic City. He was in stable condition.
There were approximately 10 people aboard the boat, a Coast Guard spokesman said.
Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
A state assemblywoman accused of driving while intoxicated must face the charge against her, despite claims that a blood sample taken the night of a crash was drawn illegally, a judge has ruled.
Maria Rodriguez-Gregg, R-Burlington, sought to suppress results of a blood test, arguing that the sample was taken without her consent because she did not sign all the necessary forms, and also challenged whether there was probable cause for the test.
A judge, however, ruled late last week that the toxicology results are admissible in court, due to "the totality of surrounding circumstances" that indicate she did not refuse the test.
"There was no evidence that the defendant was forced or coerced to submit to the giving of the blood sample," Burlington County's Municipal Court Presiding Judge Dennis McInerney wrote in a ruling Thursday. "The record is clear that sufficient, credible evidence exists for the state to believe that the defendant drove her vehicle in Mount Laurel after consuming alcohol."
Warning: The video below contains explicit language.
Rodriguez-Gregg, 36, was rear-ended while at a Route 73 stoplight in April. When a Mount Laurel police officer arrived at the scene and spoke to the assemblywoman, he reported first smelling marijuana, and then later said there was alcohol on her breath.
A search of her vehicle did not recover any drugs or open containers of alcohol, according to a court documents. She said she had smoked cigars earlier in the evening.
In a body cam video of the arrest, Rodriguez-Gregg claimed she was being "harassed" by the police, and notes that she is a sitting assemblywoman.
"Do you really think that I'm (expletive) smoking marijuana at this time of night?" she said. "All right, I'm calling my lawyer."
The encounter continued to escalate, with Rodriguez-Gregg using expletives and arguing with police as they ask her to step out of her vehicle.
An officer asked twice if she had been drinking that evening, but Rodriguez-Gregg allegedly did not answer, and also refused to perform a field sobriety test, according to court documents. She was placed under arrest and taken to the police station.
At the station, Rodriguez-Gregg reported neck, back and chest pain, and asked to be taken to a hospital for treatment. Officers accompanied her there, and sought a blood sample to determine if she was intoxicated.
She then signed two consent forms, one from the hospital and another from the blood kit, but did not sign a required consent form from the Burlington County Prosecutor's Office and instead interupted the officer reading the form, according to court documents.
John Adams, a labor and employment attorney who is also friend of Rodriguez-Gregg's father, was present with her at the hospital. Neither he nor the assemblywoman objected to the blood test, and they did not demand the police obtain a warrant, according to court documents.
That blood test revealed "some indication of alcohol," her new attorney, Edward Kologi, previously told NJ Advance Media.
"I attribute her excited state not as the result of intoxication, but rather, the result of someone who was just in a horrible accident and is basically not getting heard when she was, in effect, the victim," he said in September.
The court, however, found her demeanor at the scene probable cause for intoxication, and maintained that she had consented to the test.
"From these facts, the Court can infer that she was aware of her right to refuse to submit to the test and request a warrant," the ruling states. "The defendant made a voluntary decision after consulting with her attorney to submit to the blood test. The fact that she interrupted the officer when he was reading the Prosecutor's Consent form and refused to sign the form does not negate her consent to submit to the test."
The assemblywoman, who was first elected in 2013 and re-elected in 2015, opted not to seek re-election this year. Her third term comes to a close next month.
No future court dates had been set for the case as of Monday afternoon.
"We're in total disagreement with the decision," Kologi said in a call Monday, noting that the ruling disregarding facts of the case and the law regarding her consent to a blood test.
He said he is in the process of reviewing the ruling with Rodriguez-Gregg and exploring their next steps in the legal proceedings.
"There was no reason why they could not have gotten a warrant," Kologi said.
Amanda Hoover can be reached at ahoover@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @amandahoovernj. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Patricia Lund says she has been waiting for her money for eight years.
Eight years.
Tired of waiting, the 79-year-old woman is heading to court.
Her battle is against a Continuing Care Retirement Community, or CCRC, and it harkens back to one of the most outrageous cases to ever cross Bamboozled's desk.
Before we get into the details of Lund's case, let's start with the background.
CCRCs include independent living communities, assisted living facilities and long-term care units. These are attractive to some seniors because they wouldn't have to move if they need increased health care.
Some 10,000 New Jerseyans live in 25 CCRCs in the state, according to the Organization of Resident Associations of New Jersey (ORANJ), a group that supports CCRC residents.
Seniors who move into a CCRC typically pay a large entrance fee that can cost several hundred thousand dollars. One big selling point is that a percentage of the entrance fee will be returned to the resident if they move -- or to their estate if they die -- but not until the unit is reoccupied by a new resident.
And that's where it gets ugly.
Earlier this year, we brought you the story of Ed Nagle, a Whitehouse Station man whose mother lived in a CCRC. For five long years after his mother died, Nagle waited for the refund for his mother's unit. He said the CCRC did nothing but delay. It didn't actively try to re-sell her unit, Nagle said, and when he tried to help, he was turned away.
Nearly $250,000 was in limbo.
Ed Nagle fought to get back a refund from a CCRC for his late mother's estate.
Nagle finally accepted refund worth 63 percent of the value rather than the 90 percent promised in the contract.
Making matters worse, Nagle had previously filed his mother's estate tax return, paying more than $14,000 based on the anticipated full refund from the CCRC. But because he accepted the lower refund, his mother's estate no longer owed the taxes.
He filed for a refund.
"Surprise -- a catch-22. There is a three-year statute of limitations on refunding paid estate taxes," Nagle said at the time. "So our family got ripped by the CCRC and then ripped by the state of New Jersey."
In all, the Nagle family was out $88,481.
Nagle went on a mission, trying to pass legislation to require a time limit on CCRC refunds, calling it a "common sense cure."
He found a supporter in Sen. Christopher "Kip" Bateman (R-Somerset), who introduced a bill that would require CCRCs to give refunds within a year of vacancy.
When Assemblywoman Nancy Munoz (R-Union) heard about the bill, she introduced companion legislation in the Assembly.
Lobbyists representing the CCRCs fought against the bills.
Nagle became worried the lobbyists would win the fight, so he urged Bateman to introduce a second bill. This one would remove the statute of limitations to file an amended tax return in cases where refunds from CCRCs are delayed. The Assembly had a similar bill.
Those haven't passed yet, either.
Which brings us to a new, shameful CCRC case.
EIGHT YEARS?
Patricia Lund moved into The Fountains at Cedar Parke in Atco, Waterford Township, in March 2007.
She paid an entrance fee of $177,870, and the contract said if she moved out, she would get back 90 percent of the fee 30 days after the unit was reoccupied.
There was no time limit on giving the refund.
"The 90 percent refund was a big selling point that they repeated many times," Lund said. "I think they tried to give me a false sense of security that I would get most of my money back if I ever decided to move out."
Patricia Lund, left, plays Wii Mario Kart with her grandson Jack Lund at her son Jon's home in Cherry Hill.
After living there two years, Lund decided to move in with her son, daughter-in-law and grandson. She planned to use some of the refund money from The Fountains to convert a portion of the Cherry Hill home as private living space for her use.
Lund gave written notice to the facility that she'd be out on June 30, 2009.
"I never expected that eight years after I moved out I would still not have received my money back," Lund said.
That's right. The Fountains still has her $160,083 -- the 90 percent refund, she alleges.
In a lawsuit filed last week in Superior Court in Camden County, Lund alleges not only that the facility still has her money, but it is "utilizing apartment B-202 as a model to show to prospective new residents before steering prospective new residents to purchase other units..." the lawsuit says.
If her old place is used as a model, how is it ever going to be sold?
The suit claims violations of the Consumer Fraud Act, breach of contract and negligent misrepresentation.
Lund's attorney, Donald Browne, Jr. of Bernetich, Hatzell & Pascu in Cherry Hill, said The Fountains is not living up to its end of the bargain and it has no incentive to return Lund's money.
"This is unfair to the residents because The Fountains control the sales process," Browne said. "If The Fountains steer a new resident to a different unit, they get to continue to keep Patricia's money interest free."
We reached out to The Fountains for comment.
Murphy Vandervelde, the owner, said he couldn't comment because of the litigation.
LEGISLATIVE RELIEF?
Lund's case once again spotlights this practice, and it clearly demonstrates the need for specific consumer protections.
When we wrote about Nagle's case, we asked Sen. Joseph Vitale (D-Middlesex), chair of the Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens committee, why there were delays to hear the CCRC refund bill in committee.
Vitale promised the bill would be heard.
After more delays because lobbyists for the CCRCs wanted to meet with legislators, it was finally heard on May 15. (You can listen to the hearing here.)
Nagle testified, as did industry representatives.
To date, nothing more has happened.
Bateman didn't return our requests for comment, but Nagle said Bateman's office told him last month that the estate tax legislation -- S3144 -- would probably have to be reintroduced in the next session.
Nagle continues to fight for the legislation even though it won't help his family, and he said "Bravo!" to Lund.
"Seems to me the CRCC bad faith and bad actions are quite clearly demonstrated," Nagle said of Lund's suit. "This CRCC bad action is bold and unimaginable."
Browne, Lund's attorney, said he doesn't understand how legislators wouldn't be in favor of a law that would require timely refunds.
"It continues to disgust me when I see advertising for senior communities that paint such a rosy picture, when I know that behind the scenes the industry uses lobbyists and political donations to keep the deck stacked in their favor," Browne said.
So, dear readers, that's the story. If you believe this bill is worth fighting for, contact your legislators and show your support. You can find their contact information here.
Any new legislation will be too late for Lund, but it could help thousands of seniors in the years to come.
"The Fountains have my money and have no incentive to sell my unit and pay me what I am owed," Lund said, noting she has been trying to settle this for years without involving the courts. "I feel completely ignored. I feel like they took advantage of me."
We'll keep you posted on the case.
Have you been Bamboozled? Reach Karin Price Mueller at Bamboozled@NJAdvanceMedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KPMueller. Find Bamboozled on Facebook. Mueller is also the founder of NJMoneyHelp.com.
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A 658-km high-speed railway line linking Xi'an in northwest China's Shaanxi Province with the southwestern metropolis of Chengdu will begin operation on December 6, Chinese rail authorities said Sunday.
A bullet train passes through Mianyang, Sichuan province, during a trial run on Tuesday. The Xi'an-Chengdu High-Speed Railway is expected to formally open next week. CAO NING/FOR CHINA DAILY
Boasting a designated speed of 250 kph, the railway line will cut the current travel time between the two cities by about 7 hours to just 3 hours and 27 minutes.
Nineteen trains are scheduled to run in each direction between Xi'an and Chengdu daily during the initial phase.
As the country's first high-speed railway to run through the Qinling Mountains, the route passes through the habitats of giant pandas, golden monkeys, and crested ibis.
Various measures have been taken to protect these endangered species by creating "an environmentally-friendly" line, said an official from China Railway Corporation.
The railway will also provide full 4G network coverage.
As 55 percent of the route's total length is made up of tunnels, China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom have run signal cables throughout the tunnels to ensure travelers have mobile signal and internet access.
The new line integrates China's Qingling Mountains into the rapidly developing China National "Eight Vertical and Eight Horizontal" high-speed railway network, and it is aimed at boosting regional economic development, said the official.
Robin Wright will lead the final season of "House of Cards," which will move on without Kevin Spacey, Netflix announced on Monday.
Netflix cut ties with Spacey, the South Orange native who played main character Frank Underwood in the series, on Nov. 3 after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against the actor came to light in recent weeks. Wright co-stars as Underwood's wife Claire. Since Spacey has been removed from show's cast, fans have called for the actress to front the show.
Wright, 51, will head up last season, which will include eight episodes and resume production in 2018.
"We are excited to bring closure to fans," Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "House of Cards," which debuted in 2013, was Netflix's first original, self-commissioned series. The streaming drama claimed six Emmys and 46 nominations. (Wright won the best actress Emmy.)
Spacey, 58, is accused of groping a number of men and making sexual advances on (and in one case, having a sexual relationship with) boys as young as 14. Shortly after actor Anthony Rapp alleged to BuzzFeed that Spacey had climbed on top of him in the 1980s, when he was 14 and the actor was 26, Netflix announced that the show would end after its sixth season. (In a statement, Spacey said he did not recall the incident, but apologized to Rapp, saying that if it did happen, then it would have translated to drunken behavior. He was criticized for deflecting from the accusations by coming out as gay in the same statement.)
The Hollywood Reporter says that two episodes of the sixth season had already been completed when Rapp went public with the allegations, and that the final season was originally supposed to last 13 episodes.
The report also notes that in "House of Cards," the Michael Dobbs book that inspired the series (which is, in turn, based on a British adaptation of the book, which centers on intrigue in British government), Spacey's character dies, so eliminating Underwood from the show may not prove so difficult.
Just after the show went on an indefinite hiatus, eight "House of Cards" crew members told CNN Spacey was known to grope male employees, with one production assistant saying Spacey had stuck his hand down his pants.
On Nov. 16, London's Old Vic theater, where Spacey was an artistic director for 11 years, announced that 20 people allege Kevin Spacey engaged in sexual misconduct during and before his tenure there.
Netflix has also axed plans for a Gore Vidal biopic that was supposed to star Spacey, and Ridley Scott, director of the upcoming film "All the Money in the World," quickly replaced Spacey with actor Christopher Plummer in the role of oil magnate Jean Paul Getty, reshooting all of the actor's scenes in time for the movie's Dec. 22 release. Spacey was also cut out of CBS' recent 50th anniversary special of "The Carol Burnett Show" for which he had performed a musical number with Burnett, Kristin Chenoweth and Bernadette Peters.
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.
A 23-year-old man was the victim of a homicide in Vailsburg Park in Newark on Saturday evening, Essex County authorities said Sunday.
A spokesperson for the county prosecutor's office identified Richard Culver, of Newark, as the victim of a fatal shooting in the county park, which spans 30 acres in the city's West Ward near Oraton Parkway and South Orange Avenue.
No further details were immediately available about the shooting, which is under investigation by the prosecutor's office.
Thomas Moriarty may be reached at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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Louie, a Maltese-Shih Tzu mix, has lost one of his eyes, and suffers from tremors. Lexie, an 11-year-old Yorkshire Terrier is missing, separated from the family she lived with nearly all her life.
The dogs' owners say they are just two of the victims of Nicole DeBellis, a Fairfield pet sitter they are suing for the allegedly negligent care of their furry friends.
According to a civil suit filed in Essex County on Sept. 22, Louie's owner Gina Luongo, and Lexie's owner Rosa Cinque, of Fairfield and North Caldwell, respectively, blame DeBellis for the sad fates of their dogs.
Loungo claims she left Louie with DeBellis in December 2016 and the sitter's much larger dog attacked the small canine. As a result of the attack, Louie lost one eye, and suffered several other injuries that have left him with recurring tremors, the suit states.
In July, Cinque left Lexie with DeBellis during a weekend vacation, according to the lawsuit. The dog went missing, and has yet to be found, the suit claims. DeBellis waited to inform the family of the dog's disappearance, and did little to try to find her, the lawsuit says.
DeBellis "has proven to be, at the very least, incapable and/or severely incompetent, at caring for animals," the lawsuit says.
Lexie, an 11-year-old Yorkshire Terrier, is missing and assumed dead, a law firm representing her owner says. (Submitted photo)
The filing, which cites several other alleged instances of the mistreatment of other pets, claims negligence and breach of contract.
DeBellis did not return a phone call last week seeking comment. Her attorney has not responded to an email seeking comment.
On her CareGuide profile, DeBellis describes herself as a stay-at-home mother who grooms and boards animals in her house.
"I treat them like they are my own. They are in a family setting, and get lots of love, hugs and kisses," her profile reads.
But Darren DelSardo, the attorney representing Luongo and Cinque, said the description did not live up to the reality.
"As someone who represents herself to the public as a professional and compassionate pet sitter, Mrs. DeBellis has failed to live up to the portrayal of her talents," he said.
Though the filing does not cite a specific monetary amount, the two women are suing for damages, attorney's fees, and other relief.
"We are not looking for financial gain or remuneration because no amount of money could relieve the sadness that the loss of Lexie has brought to my son and I," Cinque said in a statement.
The two women "are really seeking acknowledgment of responsibility on the part of Mrs. DeBellis and a charitable donation to help other animals that have been neglected," the law firm said.
Jessica Mazzola may be reached at jmazzola@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @JessMazzola. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Two people were taken to a local hospital this afternoon following a two-car crash on Route 440 in Jersey City.
Traffic was snarled in both directions on the busy highway after the 1:30 p.m. crash in Route 440's northbound lanes near Suburbia Terrace, said freelance photographer Joe Shine, who was at the scene this afternoon.
Shine said a woman who was behind the wheel of a blue Chevrolet compact car told police she was traveling southbound on Route 440 when another vehicle cut her off, forcing her to veer over the highway's divider and head into oncoming northbound traffic.
Her vehicle then struck a Hyundai SUV before both vehicles came to a stop, Shine added.
The driver of the Chevrolet was able to walk into ambulance, while the man who was driving the Hyundai was taken into an ambulance on a stretcher, Shine said.
Official details on the crash were not yet available, but a spokeswoman for the Jersey City police and fire departments said the injuries are not considered life-threatening.
The two patients were taken to Jersey City Medical Center, Shine added.
JERSEY CITY -- A Jersey City police officer charged in a 100-count indictment with three fellow officers has agreed to testify for the state against his co-defendants, who are charged with offenses related to falsifying time sheets.
In court today, defense attorney Jeff Garrigan said Officer Michael Maietti has given a 151-page statement to prosecutors and is expected to testify for the state in the trial of Lt. Kelly Chesler and Police Officer Michael O'Neill and retired Capt. Joseph Ascolese.
All four officers were suspended without pay following their indictment on charges related to related to off-duty details, including conspiracy, falsifying records, official misconduct and a pattern of official misconduct.
Garrigan, who represents Chesler, held up the thick transcript of Maietti's statement at today's hearing before Hudson County Superior Court Judge Mirtha Ospina and asked for a 60-day adjournment in light of the new information.
"How am I supposed to pick a jury when my client doesn't know all the evidence against her," said Garrigan.
Garrigan called Maietti's agreement to testify "a significant event" that would require the defense to obtain additional documents referenced in his statement and to conduct additional investigation prior to trial.
Jury selection for the trial was to begin tomorrow and testimony was to begin on Jan. 2. Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor Pete Stoma did not object to the request for an adjournment.
Ospina told the defense attorneys to seek permission for an adjournment from Hudson County Superior Court Acting Presiding Criminal Division Judge Paul DePascale.
In his argument for the adjournment, Garrigan said "We are going to pick a jury tomorrow and I don't even know the jury I want... Obviously, there is a lot to be done."
At today's hearing, O'Neill's lawyer argued that his client should be tried separately. He said, in part, that O'Neill's co-defendants could provide exculpatory evidence related to his client, but he could not call them to the witness stand if the three were being tried together. Ospina denied the motion.
Garrigan also said he was representing another Jersey City police officer, who is a potential witness in the case, in an unrelated matter. He said that may represent a conflict and he would need some time to assess the issue.
In the deal that led Maietti to turn state's evidence, he would be allowed to enter the pretrial trial intervention program, according to statements in court today.
PTI provides a route for first-time offenders to undergo a period of supervised release. If the defendant fulfills their obligations in the program, the charges are wiped from the their record.
Embattled Jersey City Councilman Chris Gadsden, fighting for his political life in tomorrow's runoff election in Ward B, is alleging that his opponent and her campaign team stole pieces of his campaign literature from West Side homes on Saturday.
Gadsden, who filed a complaint about the matter with police yesterday, told The Jersey Journal that after he and his team dropped off campaign fliers at homes on Ege Avenue and surrounding streets late Saturday afternoon, the fliers disappeared and were replaced with those touting his opponent, Mira Prinz-Arey.
The councilman said he confronted three workers aligned with Prinz-Arey on Saturday who were holding bags filled with Gadsden's fliers. They told him they were just "cleaning up," he said.
"What's your campaign strategy, to undo what I've done?" Gadsden said he told them. "Leave me alone, leave my stuff alone and just run Mira's campaign."
One of the men Gadsden said was holding bags of his fliers is Phil Kenny, the former Ward B councilman who resigned in 2009 when he pleaded guilty to taking bribes. A phone call seeking comment from Kenny was not returned.
Gadsden, 43, finished in second place on Election Day against two opponents, including first-place finisher Prinz-Arey, an ally of Mayor Steve Fulop. Prinz-Arey finished just 23 votes from a first-ballot victory but did not top 50 percent of the vote, so the two are facing off tomorrow. There are runoffs in Wards A, B, C and E.
Reached by text, Prinz-Arey did not deny that members of her campaign team removed Gadsden's fliers from West Side homes, as the councilman is alleging. She chalked his police report up to "election funny season."
"I think any Jersey City resident knows that unfortunately campaigns get heated in the home stretch on all sides," she said. "We have seen our opponents' volunteers take down our signs and we just deal with it and push forward."
In response, Gadsden said, "I don't have to accept that you're out here playing dirty. Just stop it."
Fulop is hoping to tighten his control of the nine-member council after the votes are all counted in tomorrow's runoffs. He and four council allies were re-elected by healthy margins on Nov. 7.
During his one year on the council, Gadsden was never a vocal Fulop critic, but two sources with knowledge of the matter say Fulop was angered when Gadsden turned down Fulop's offer to run for re-election on the mayor's ticket and ran instead with Fulop challenger Bill Matsikoudis. A request for comment from Fulop's campaign was not returned.
Gadsden also told police one of his council colleagues, Fulop ally Council President Rolando Lavarro, helped take some of his fliers and replace them with Prinz-Arey's.
Frank Gilmore, a Gadsden supporter, posted a live video on Facebook Saturday night that appears to show Gadsden speaking to one of Prinz-Arey's campaign workers and yelling at Lavarro walking down a West Side street. Facebook removed the video, telling Gilmore it does not allow "posts that bully private individuals."
Calls seeking comment from Lavarro were not returned.
A Lincoln High School vice principal, Gadsden is seeking his first full term. He joined the council last year after a special election to fill a vacancy.
Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- UN General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak on Sunday expressed regret over a U.S. decision to withdraw from the global migration compact, a UN-led process toward safe, orderly and regular migration.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been informed of the decision by U.S. President Donald Trump to end participation in the process that would achieve the first intergovernmentally negotiated agreement on international migration by 2018, said the U.S. mission to the United Nations in a press statement on Saturday.
Lajcak regretted the U.S. decision, saying no country can handle international migration alone.
"In the (2016) New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, all UN member states acknowledged that no one state can manage international migration on its own. Furthermore, they committed to strengthening global governance of migration. To that end, member states agreed at the highest level to launch a process leading to the adoption of a global compact in 2018," said Brenden Varma, the spokesman for Lajcak, in a statement.
"The role of the United States in this process is critical as it has historically and generously welcomed people from all across the globe and remains home to the largest number of international migrants in the world. As such, it has the experience and expertise to help ensure that this process leads to a successful outcome."
Lajcak stressed that migration is a global phenomenon that demands a global response and that multilateralism remains the best way to address global challenges, said the statement.
Despite the U.S. withdrawal, the United Nations should not miss this opportunity to improve the lives of millions of people throughout the world through global migration compact, it said.
U.S. participation in the compact process began in 2016, following the Obama administration's decision to join the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants.
"The New York Declaration contains numerous provisions that are inconsistent with U.S. immigration and refugee policies and the Trump administration's immigration principles. As a result, President Trump determined that the United States would end its participation in the compact process that aims to reach international consensus at the UN in 2018," said the press statement of the U.S. mission to the United Nations.
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Nikki Haley said: "Our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone. We will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country. The global approach in the New York Declaration is simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty."
Following the September 2016 New York Declaration, the General Assembly started to develop this global compact in April 2017. The General Assembly will hold an intergovernmental conference on international migration in 2018 with a view to adopting the global compact.
Tim Cook
Artificial intelligence (AI) will never be a threat to humanity, according to remarks by Internet titans at the 4th World Internet Conference that started on Dec. 3 in Wuzhen, Zhejiang.
The development of AI technology is another revolution in human history, said Tim Cook, CEO of technology giant Apple, adding that it will help improve peoples work, especially in education and medical services.
He believes that technologies are not developed with good or evil intentions, but it is everyones responsibility to keep them people-oriented.
Cook said he does not worry that robots will think like humans, but thinks humans will think more like robots.
Pony Ma
Pony Ma, founder of Chinese tech firm Tencent, noted that AI is being developed to serve people better.
Tencents projects this year are mostly related with AI, visual reality, and other cutting-edge technologies, Pony Ma introduced. The company has made remarkable achievements in various fields with increased investment in new technologies. It has established its first overseas AI laboratory in the US state of Seattle.
AI will embrace a broader application in medical science and transportation, and it should not be considered a threat to human beings, he added.
Lei Jun, CEO of the promising Chinese company Xiaomi, agreed with Mas point, saying that integrated development serves as an important driving force. He called AI a key technology in the development of the digital economy.
Integration itself is innovation, because the application of the Internet and the technologies in each field is a result of innovation-driven development, Lei added.
E-commerce giant Alibabas chairman Jack Ma, a four-time attendee at the conference, said the human race has only developed less than 10% of its brain capacity, and machines with a similar level of development will never be comparable with human beings.
I believe that robots will bring more dignity, value, and creativity for humans in work, he said, adding that people worked like machines in the past 30 years, and robots will be turned into human-like machines in the next three decades.
However, the ultimate goal, he said, is to make machines machine, and humans human.
He stressed that instead of worrying about robots taking human jobs, people should embrace new technologies and solve new problems. The world is entering a new era of opportunities, and the digital economy will reshape the global economy, he said.
A New Orleans woman who avoided a life sentence for killing her two children because she was found to be insane at the time of the crime moved
Former congresswoman Corrine Brown walks into Federal Court accompanied by pastor Rudolph McKissick, Sr. Brown appeared in Federal Court to be sentenced on fraud charges. (Bob Mack/The Florida Times-Union via AP)
A male was injured in a shooting in the 3800 block of Dulaney Lane in Harvey on Dec. 3, 2017.(File image)
Chris Borges, a New Orleans native, is the executive chef of Josephine Estelle at the Ace hotel.(Courtesy of Ace)
Around 1,000 government officials and senior business executives will attend the 2017 Fortune Global Forum, which will open Wednesday in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Johnson and Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, Executive Chairman of Ford Motor Company Bill Ford, Chairman and CEO of Tencent Holdings Ma Huateng, Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma, and Lenovo Chairman Yang Yuanqing are among the participants expected to attend the forum, according to a press conference held on Sunday.
By the end of November, 388 companies have confirmed that they will attend the event. Among them, 152 are in the worlds top 500 and 72 are leading enterprises in their industry.
The number of enterprises and individuals will hit a record high, according to Cai Chaolin, executive committee director of the Guangzhou Fortune Global Forum.
Under theme of Openness and Innovation: Shaping the Global Economy, the government officials and business executives will gather to exchange views and discuss development and cooperation in the scientific innovation.
The forum will promote Chinas participation in global economic governance. Guangzhou will take its development as an instance to inject wisdom into the forum, and share its experience with attendees from across the globe.
During the forum, mayors of major cities across the globe will share governance experience and deepen interaction and cooperation with business leaders.
The Fortune Global Forum is a famous brand launched by the Fortune Magazine in 1995. It has been held 14 times to date. The Forum convenes world leaders, heads of global businesses, presidents, CEOs, and senior managers from different cities across the globe to discuss global economic issues.
The Forum is a platform that offers the clearest and most direct insights into global economy. It has been held in China for four times, witnessing the countrys latest achievements in reform and opening up and modernization.
The Upper Gulch section of the Escalante Canyons within Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument features sheer sandstone walls, broken occasionally by tributary canyons. (AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac)
A product of the Palace Museum
Chinas Palace Museum, also called the Forbidden City, which has a history of nearly 600 years, has unexpectedly become an online celebrity on Chinese Internet thanks to its efforts in cultural products and self-promotion.
While some thought that the employees of the Forbidden City only focused on their professions and seldom cared about social responses, the fact is that they also hope to exhibit their research to the public.
According to Shan Jixiang, curator of the Palace Museum, only 30% of the total area of the Forbidden City was open to the public 5 years ago. But in the last year, that figure has expanded to 76%. Now he is planning to open 80% of the palaces grounds to visitors by 2020.
Over the last few years, the museum has established 495 signposts and 1,400 new chairs have been provided. The palace has removed 11,200 square meters of its temporary buildings and provides cold light sources in the open halls.
In addition, the Palace Museum opened an official online store on e-commerce platform Taobao, selling related products. It also started their self-promotion through new media, publishing articles to promote the culture of the museum. It unexpectedly swept the Internet by its humorous style and interesting content.
A product of the Palace Museum
The museum created over 7,000 kinds of cultural products in 2015, making a sales volume of 700 million RMB ($106 million) in the first half of the year, a figure larger than the total volume a year ago.
In 2016, it once again set a record, offering 8,700 kinds of products and achieving a sales volume of over 1 billion RMB.
At the same time, the Palace Museum has published several mobile apps, one of which saw over 200,000 downloads just two weeks after its release in 2013.
The Palace Museum has come closer to the people, sparing no efforts to promote itself among the public since 2013.
In the last month, a total of 18,529 themed calendars of the museum have been sold online. One buyer commented that buying the annual calendar has become routine for him.
Its self-promotion has achieved great results. In 2012, the museum saw 15 million visitors. Though the daily quota of visitors has been set at 80,000, the total number of tourists still keeps rising. The Palace Museum received 16 million visitors last year.
A product of the Palace Museum
In 2016, the museum reached an agreement with seven countries, including Egypt, India, Iraq, Iran, Greece, Italy, and Mexico, proposing for a harmonious relationship between humans and nature, humans and humans, as well as the inward world of the people.
However, Zhang Hongwei, director of the Palace Museum Research Institute, has suggested that the management of the museum stay calm amid the surge in popularity in a bid to maintain enough freedom for research.
Today
Overcast. High 54F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.
Tonight
Clear skies. Low 41F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph.
Tomorrow
Except for a few afternoon clouds, mainly sunny. High 56F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph.
The recent warm weather across eastern Nebraska and southwest Iowa was to come to an abrupt end today as a strong cold front muscles into the region.
The National Weather Service office in Valley said the Council Bluffs-Omaha area, which is under a wind advisory along with most of the region until 8 oclock tonight, can expect northwest wind gusts of 45-50 mph and falling afternoon temperatures.
Get ready, said Ryan McPike, a KMTV meteorologist. Brace yourself for the big weather change.
Elsewhere, a light rain-snow mix is forecast across parts of northern Nebraska this afternoon as a winter-like weather advisory is in effect for the Dakotas. Snow accumulations of less than 1 inch in the northern Nebraska counties of Cherry, Sheridan, Boyd and Keya Paha to 3 inches in the Dakotas are likely, along with wind gusts of 55 mph.
Today in the Council Bluffs-Omaha area, forecasters said there is a slight chance of rain or drizzle this afternoon, with a high temperature around 60 this morning falling into the upper 30s by late afternoon.
Tonight, the low will drop to around 25, the weather service said, and winds could gust as high as 35-40 mph.
Tuesday and Wednesday in the metro area will remain breezy, with west-northwest winds gusting as high as 25-30 mph. The highs both days will be in the mid- to upper 30s. Overnight lows will fall to the lower to mid-20s.
Thursday and Friday will be partly sunny with highs in the lower to mid-30s and lows in the upper teens to around 20.
McPike called for a chance of flurries Wednesday and Thursday.
The weather service said the weekend in the metro area looks a little better mostly sunny skies and highs in the upper 30s to mid-40s by Sunday.
McPike said the weather change is a big shock compared to the past couple of mild weeks.
The pattern has flip-flopped on us, he said.
Russian-appointed authorities in the occupied Ukrainian city of Kherson say power is being partially restored following what they have called a Ukrainian terrorist attack on power lines. The southern city was cut off from power and water supplies on Sunday after three power lines were damaged in the region that Moscow illegally annexed in September. Ukrainian officials have not responded to the allegations, although officials have previously claimed that Russia was deliberately turning off the power in order to force civilians to evacuate in anticipation of a Ukrainian counteroffensive to retake the city. Rolling blackouts around Ukraine continued on Monday.
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2018 will mark a double anniversary for Montblanc. The historic watch brand Minerva, founded in Villeret in 1858 now the Montblanc Villeret manufacture which originally specialised in gold pocket watches, before moving on to professional watches and ultra-precise chronometers, is celebrating its 160th anniversary. And Montblancs Star Legacy collection has reached its 20th birthday. For the last ten years or so, Montblanc has explored and exploited Minervas heritage, in terms of movements and also watch aesthetics. The four new watches that Montblanc will unveil at SIHH 2018 two Star Legacy models and two TimeWalkers are a continuation of that strategy.
Star Legacy
Inspired by Minerva pocket watches, and in particular a model from 1927, the new Star Legacy Automatic Chronograph and Star Legacy Nicolas Rieussec Chronograph share a polished steel case with curved sides, the onion-shaped crown so characteristic of pocket watches, and their clear and legible dials a heritage of Minerva railway watches accentuated by elegant black Arabic numerals. The Star Legacy Automatic is a two-pusher chronograph; its automatic MB 25.02 calibre drives not only the hour functions (with a small second at 9 oclock), but also a date, in a window between four and five oclock, two chronograph counters and the chronograph central seconds hand. The classically inspired watch has blued hands pointing to the equally classic railroad tracks around the perimeter of the dial and the chronograph registers. The watch will be priced at EUR 3,990.
Star Legacy Automatic Chronograph Montblanc
The Star Legacy Nicolas Rieussec Chronograph is a new interpretation of the innovative Nicolas Rieussec monopusher chronograph of 2008, which itself paid tribute to a timekeeping device developed by the watchmaker Rieussec in 1821. This unusual timekeeper revisits the concept of discs that rotate beneath fixed hands for the chronograph minutes and seconds counters. The new version also features a second time zone. The main aesthetic difference from its predecessor lies in the the silvered white guilloche dial, slender Arabic numerals, off-centre time dial and domed chronograph discs. The date has moved to a new position at 6 oclock, and the day-night indicator is at 9 oclock. The blued screws of the new date aperture are echoed in the fixed pointer straddling the two rotating discs, and the hour and minute hands. The silver hand for the second time zone is hollow, as in the previous model. This timepiece is driven by the same self-winding Calibre MB R200, whose twin barrels provide a power reserve of 72 hours. Complete with column wheel, Geneva striping and gilded wheels, it comes at a price of EUR 7,450.
Star Legacy Nicolas Rieussec Chronograph Montblanc
Timewalker
Montblancs Timewalker collection is also anchored in Minervas chronometric heritage, and embodies the spirit of motor racing. The two new 2018 models echo some of the features, and include a tachymeter function. Inside the 43-mm satin-brushed steel case of the TimeWalker Manufacture Chronograph lies the new MB 25.10 automatic chronograph movement, whose black tungsten rotor brings to mind a steering wheel. The vintage-styled panda dial is surrounded by a black ceramic bezel with engraved tachymetric scale, and the DLC crown carries the black of the dial over onto the case. The red seconds hand, terminated with a Minerva arrow, brings a dynamic touch to this sporty timepiece, whose perforated aged leather strap is a further reminder of its automotive inspiration. With a price under the psychological barrier of 5,000 euros (EUR 4,990), the TimeWalker Manufacture Chronograph is very competitive in its category.
TimeWalker Manufacture Chronograph Montblanc
The TimeWalker Rally Timer Chronograph Limited Edition, inspired by Minervas Rally Timer from the 1960s with its vertically aligned counters, traces a strong functional line with motor sport. This monopusher chronograph can be transformed into a dashboard clock, which remains perfectly legible thanks to its 50 mm diameter and the clarity of its inverted panda dial. It works equally well as a pocket watch or table clock. The black DLC-treated titanium case can be oriented at either 0 or 180, for optimum convenience while driving. This original timepiece, in a 100-piece limited edition, enjoys the technical advantages of the manually wound MB M16.29 calibre and its 50-hour power reserve, as well as the beauty of its handcrafted decorations, including Geneva striping, circular graining, bevelling and a V-shaped chronograph bridge. It is priced at EUR 37,000.
GRIFFITH Gracia Dudlicek, Keith and Lori Hall, Al Walus, Jason Babin and Dean Price are not teachers, but when you see them in the classroom, you'd never know.
These engineers, business leaders and parent volunteers are among the industry leaders in Northwest Indiana who are stepping into the classroom to work with students.
Retired mechanical engineer Keith Hall is a senior mentor for Indiana FIRST, a robotics competition. He has helped start, and continues to mentor, numerous robotics teams in the Region, including those at 21st Century Charter School in Gary, Griffith High School's after-school robotics club, East Chicago Central High School, Merrillville High School, Heritage Christian High School, Hobart Scout Explorer Post, School City of Hobart, Munster schools and some schools in the Gary Community School Corp.
Lori Hall is retired from the legal profession and is the volunteer Affiliate Partner for the Indiana First Technical Challenge robotics competition. Her job includes finding the venues for robotics events and obtaining insurance, signing contracts, collecting registration fees and updating the state website.
"We both do a lot of each other's jobs, but mostly I focus on the technical aspect, and she handles the organizational details of the programs," Keith Hall said of he and his wife, Lori Hall.
Both also are listed as staff and operating partners on the Indiana FIRST website. The pair said there are 74 teams at the FTC level in Indiana, along with close to 300 Lego teams.
Lori Hall said the couple get so much joy out of working with students, they treat them like grandchildren.
"I love the light-bulb moments," she said.
"It's such a wonderful process to help a child discover the answer. Sometimes they come up to me for help but I'm not really a scientific person, so I talk them through the process and they discover the answer on their own."
Dudlicek and Babin both became involved in the Griffith High School robotics club because of their children. Dudlicek is a civil engineer at Dyer Vault Co. with two sons in the robotics club. Babin is an electrical repairman at Ford Motor Co. with an eighth-grade daughter interested in robotics and engineering.
Dudlicek said her oldest son, Gabe, a senior at Griffith High School, has wanted to build robots since he began playing with Legos as a youngster. She said once he got to sixth grade, he talked her into helping out with an after-school club, and she's been involved ever since.
The robotics club, now three years old, is preparing for an upcoming FTC competition.
Robotics mentors crucial at other schools, too
The School City of Hammond has numerous robotics teams, and Team Hammond 71 is celebrating 20 years of winning. Year after year, the team has gone to competition and done well with the help of their mentors.
Sherri Silcox, the Michigan City Area Schools Safe Harbor coordinator, said Safe Harbor's Michigan City Robotics Teams have worked with numerous volunteer mentors and businesses since it began seven years ago. Safe Harbor operates the school system's after-school programs.
"I can't stress enough that their leadership is not only important, it (also) is vital to make robotics programs possible and help students succeed," she said. "When businesses connect their engineers and professionals to robotics teams it helps them as well.
"It's an excellent way for companies to grow their young workforce, recruit talented youth and train them to make choices that encourage good employees that stay local.
"Michigan City Robotics had served approximately 300 students on the teams, but outreach in what the teams have done to encourage other students to be their best ... has touched hundreds. We have had 50 or more adult mentors and volunteers since the beginning of the program."
Silcox said Al Walus, of Christopher B. Burke Engineering, helped start the team and has been a lead mentor, grant writer and strategic planning leader ever since.
Dean Price, with Haas and Associates, has been a mentor since Michigan City schools started the team, too, and he is the go-to guy for anything from event setup and outreach events to program implementation. Other mentors include Herb Higgin, retired director of Safe Harbor, and engineering teacher Ralph Gee.
"ArcelorMittal is a valuable sponsor of our team, and mentors have come from there that have helped move the team forward and been very important in assisting students during the build season," Silcox said.
At Griffith, Dudlicek said three of the Griffith High School seniors have gone on to universities around the country to major in engineering or robotics.
Griffith eighth-grader Jacoba Babin said she wants to be a structural engineer.
"I've always liked engineering and I want to help the world, especially on the West Coast making buildings earthquake-resistant," she said. "I've known I wanted to be an engineer since I was 9 and built things with Legos."
Griffith senior Daniel Welch said when he first got on the team last year, he was just learning. "I think I'm going to major in computer programming. I think it's great that we've got so many volunteers. They come in (and) help kids who might otherwise not have had a chance to do this," he said.
CROWN POINT A 35-year-old man from Crete, Illinois, was sentenced Monday to three years in prison for shooting at his ex-girlfriend's vehicle in Highland.
John Burton III said at his sentencing hearing Monday he was sorry for his actions.
I'm very remorseful, he told Judge Salvador Vasquez. It hurts me to be in this type of predicament.
Burton pleaded guilty Nov. 7 in Lake Criminal Court to criminal recklessness, a level 3 felony, and criminal recklessness, a level 5 felony.
He admitted as part of the plea agreement he shot at his ex-girlfriend's vehicle as she fled her apartment the night of April 15 in the 2100 block of Porte De Leau Court in Highland, according to court records.
The woman was in the vehicle with her 17-year-old babysitter and a co-worker, records state. Burton allegedly chased the woman in his own vehicle before being arrested in Dyer. No one was injured in the shooting.
John Burton Jr., the defendant's father, told Vasquez his son had no criminal record, not even a speeding ticket. He said his son has always worked, and paid support for his three children.
That day I don't know what happened, the father said.
The babysitter said in a letter to the court she wanted Burton, who has been jailed since his arrest, to remain behind bars.
Vasquez said it was pathetic what Burton did to himself, and the victims, through his reckless actions, but he believed the defendant should not be sentenced to a lengthy prison term.
He noted the defendant had no criminal record, family support and a lengthy work history before sentencing him to three years in prison on each of the two counts, to be served concurrently.
Madisyn Wimple, who turned 9 on Oct. 30, decided to collect donations for St. Jude House rather than receive birthday gifts of her own for the third year running.
Wimple has been collecting these donations in lieu of birthday gifts since her 7th birthday, on which she took donations only from her party guests. Then, when she turned 8, she expanded the project to her entire subdivision. This year, she wanted the whole community to participate, and reached out to local schools, businesses, friends and family members for support.
Wimple calls this yearly act of charity her Spread the Love Project," and wants to show others that you are never too young to impact the community and change lives for the better. I like helping people in need, she said. I like knowing that I can make a difference in someones life. Each year the project has grown larger and gained increasing support from the community, and it shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.
St. Jude House, in Crown Point, pursues a vision where all engage in healthy relationships characterized by the mutual sharing of resources and responsibility.
A Gary City Council member is among two women who will run for a 3rd District House seat of the Indiana General Assembly.
Ragen Hatcher, 39, a Gary city councilwoman and attorney, announced last week she is preparing her campaign.
Jessica Renslow, who announced a month ago, also hopes to win the legislative seat, which represents Gary, Hobart, Lake Station and New Chicago.
Hatcher issued a prepared news release: "I have actively fought for the citizens of Gary for the last ten years and look forward to serving District 3 ... with the same passion and commitment."
Hatcher has the support of state Rep. Charlie Brown, D-Gary, who has represented the 3rd District since 1982. He announced last week he would step down to run for the Lake County Council.
"I will be supporting Ragen Hatcher because of my love and devotion to the Hatcher family, because there are only a limited number of females in the Democratic caucus and there aren't that many attorneys either," Brown said Sunday.
"I don't know how many others will run. I think Ragen will make a wonderful addition to the General Assembly."
Hatcher said, I want to thank Representative Brown for his many years of service."
Ragen Hatcher served as an at-large member of the Gary City Council from 2007 to 2011, when she ran unsuccessfully for Gary mayor. Voters returned her to the City Council in 2015.
Her father, Richard G. Hatcher, made history 50 years ago when he was elected the first black mayor of a major American city.
Renslow is involved in the Neighborhood Spotlight Program, a community development project.
LOWELL The town will soon begin gradually filling its new, 1-million gallon water tower tank to bring it online.
But when it does, those living in the 40 homes in Heritage Falls subdivision across from the tower's Freedom Park location will notice a drop in water pressure. The Town Council plans to send letters and possibly meet with those residents.
Engineer Craig Hendrix of SEH of Indiana told the council Heritage Falls residents have "artificially pressurized" water from lift station pumps and will go from their current 55 pounds of water pressure to 35 during the filling process. He said the tower will be filled to about half, then added to weekly until filled to the top.
The town's multimillion dollar water improvement project began three years ago and is resulting in a better product and more efficient operation, Hendrix said.
"Maybe your water problem isn't going to be a water problem anymore," he said.
Councilman Will Farrellbegg, D-3rd, noted the town's deep well delivering the most water has lots of iron, sulfur and lime, but that product is expected to benefit from changes in the chemical process that resulted from a recent pilot study.
Hendrix said high velocity pumps will be installed in January, delivering water faster and energy cost savings. By spring, the water plant adjacent to the municipal wellfield should be operating much better, he said.
In other business:
The council tabled its decision on a planned array of solar panels at the wastewater treatment plant on Belshaw Road while it waits for "finding of facts" from the Lowell Police Commission.
The council is looking at ordinances regarding water meters and shutoff valves. Public Works Director Kevin Gray said difficulties to access shutoff valves are creating a dangerous situation for town crews. He said crews must sometimes go into crawl spaces at their own risk. In other cases, residents have installed sidewalks or otherwise covered access to shutoffs with concrete. A zoning amendment requiring flat work be permitted, even with no fee, would help with concrete-covered shutoffs, he said.
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PORTAGE Two men are facing several felony charges after an alleged "one pot meth operation" was found in their car during a traffic stop.
Thomas A. Wenzel, 38, Lake Station, was charged with manufacturing methamphetamine, possession of methamphetamine, possession of two or more precursors and resisting law enforcement by vehicle while Randall J. Szostek, 34, Hobart, was charged with manufacturing methamphetamine, possession of methamphetamine, possession of two or more precursors and possession of a controlled substance with a prior conviction.
The charges came after a traffic stop Thursday afternoon.
According to a police report released Monday, a Portage police officer spotted a 1993 Oldsmobile on Willowcreek Road Thursday afternoon. The car, driven by Wenzel, made a sudden turn onto Sunrise Avenue without signaling. When the officer attempted to stop the car for the traffic violation using lights and sirens, Wenzel allegedly fled west on Sunrise Avenue and then came to a sudden stop at the end of Monnier Street near the Central Elementary School playground where children were outside playing.
Wenzel and Szostek were taken into custody and transported to Porter County Jail.
As an officer began to inventory the car, what appeared to be precursors to a meth lab were found and the Indiana State Police Methamphetamine Suppression Team was called, said police.
The ISP team recovered what appeared to be a "one pot meth operation" along with an HCL (hydrogen chloride) generator and other precursors to manufacturing methamphetamine.
Police also found several pill bottles, small plastic bags often used to package narcotics, 2-inch long straws with a white powdery residue inside, a box of fire starter sticks, an electric blender and two small propane tanks, according to the report. The substance later tested positive for methamphetamine.
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You had to think that at Thanksgiving dinner tables across Indiana and the nation, a number of women were pondering the notion of running for the General Assembly or Congress.
The reasons emanate from Alabama, Congress and the White House. The nation is in the midst of a social upheaval, or to put it in more stark and dangerous terms, a cultural revolution fueled by an array of sexual harassment allegations that began in Hollywood with Harvey Weinstein and have radiated out across newsrooms, boardrooms, Congress and even 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
In the latter stages of the 2016 presidential race, more than a dozen women accused President Donald Trump of sexual harassment or assault.
It has claimed the careers of news anchors Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Louis C.K. and others. It is threatening the political careers of U.S. Sen. Al Franken and U.S. Rep. John Conyers, both Democrats. In Alabama, there is Judge Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, who has been accused of either sexual assault or harassment years ago, with at least one of them just 14 years old at the time.
The three main candidates in the Indiana Republican Senate race U.S. Reps. Todd Rokita and Luke Messer, and former legislator Mike Braun all have said Moore should step aside. Messer said, That would be the best thing for the state of Alabama and our country.
U.S. Sen. Todd Young also called on Moore to step aside, saying, After giving Roy Moore ample time to unequivocally deny the disturbing allegations against him, those allegations remain far more persuasive than the denials. Roy Moore should immediately drop out of the race.
Vice President Mike Pences Great America Committee PAC began making contributions to three gubernatorial and U.S. Senate candidates last week, but not to Moore.
Rokita and Braun are reportedly seeking the support of Steve Bannon, of Breitbart, a former aide to Trump and a backer of Moore who is seeking his own revolution. This comes in contrast with congressional Republican leaders from Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have said they not only want him to resign the nomination, but if he wins, wont allow him to be seated.
And Moore could win. While the Real Clear Politics polling composite has Democrat Doug Jones leading 46.8 percent to 46 percent, the latest JMC Analytics Poll had Moore up 49-44 percent.
Trump has tweeted support for Moore. Prior to Thanksgiving, Trump said, "He denies it. He says it didn't happen. And look, you have to look at him also." Hey, that strategy worked for Trump in 2016.
The media asked Trump about whether this was a pivotal moment in sexual assault on American women, with a PBS/NPR/Marist poll showing that 35 percent have been sexually harassed in the workplace. Trump responded, Women are very special. I think its a very special time, a lot of things are coming out, and I think thats good for our society. And I think its very very good for women, and Im very happy these things are coming out.
Moore campaign spokesman Dean Young said, We dont believe these women. Its just that simple. And yall can keep trotting them out if you want to.
The Republican optics against women have been breathtakingly bad this past week.
If you want to keep tabs on someone prepared to trot em out, watch Shannon Watts, formerly of Zionsville. She created the Moms Demand Action group seeking gun law reform, which has attracted a million members. Factor that in with the female march in Washington a day after Trump was inaugurated (which dwarfed his crowd in size, hands down) and you get more than a whiff of a movement assembling.
Watts has been active on Twitter, noting recently, I am thankful for badass women who refuse to go backwards."
The Washington Post notes that during the 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings in Congress that featured allegations from Anita Hill, there were only two female senators. In 1992, four were elected, along with a record 24 elected to the House.
Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist close to Mitch McConnell, explained the Moore dilemma to Axios: Either were saddled with a Democrat in a seat that ought to be Republican, or were saddled with a brand anvil thats going to drag down the president, drag down the Senate, drag down the party and plunge the Senate into immediate turmoil when he gets there.
Republican U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake said in a hot mic moment, If we become the party of Roy Moore and Donald Trump, we are toast.
A number of Hoosier women might be asking on the campaign trail next year, Would you like some humble pie with your toast?
On Nov. 7, Hammond voters' support for the Vote Yes for Hammond Schools Referendum Initiative became a reality.
Through your efforts, the School City of Hammond moved another step forward into providing 21st century quality education for students in the Hammond public schools.
This initiative will also have a positive impact overall in the Hammond community as well. Our gratitude is extended to everyone who supported this cause.
We further acknowledge and appreciate the support of Mayor Thomas McDermott and Indiana House Rep. Linda Lawson, D-Hammond.
The goal of the referenda is intended to provide a new school facility replacing the 100-year-old Hammond High School. In addition, it will provide upgrades in all schools across the district regarding technology, safety, security and capital improvements.
Another phase to the referenda will help attract and maintain highly qualified personnel to work with our students, continue to provide transportation to general ed students and bring technologically focused programs to our schools so Hammond graduates will be considered competitive upon graduation.
All of these efforts are intended to help further support the growth and quality of life in our community.
The Hammond Board of School Trustees and the entire staff and administration of the school city are pleased and proud of the support given to us by the majority number of yes votes.
We are eagerly looking forward to taking on the challenges identified in the referendum that will move the school city and community into the 21st century.
Editor's note: This is the second of two columns on happenings in the United Arab Emirates, which is a federation comprised of seven Arab states.
In the late 1970s, when the Shah ruled Iran and before their revolution and the hard-line religious leaders took over, I worked for the American Hospital Association. Being in management, I was privy to lots of interesting information. Communications were exchanged between the Shahs people, the association and a Chicago hospital.
The Shah had some health issues, and there was only one country the international elite came to for the very best medical attention. At the time, a Chicago hospital had the leading specialist in the field pertaining to the Shahs condition.
The Shah of Iran was coming to Chicago.
This was not a unique situation. Through the years heads of state, celebrities and every foreign John Doe who could afford it came to the United States for the very best health care available. We were universally recognized as the premiere destination for diagnoses, treatment and cures.
That just might be changing.
I saw several eye-opening ads on television lately. They were promoting Dubai Health as the new go-to health care destination of the 21st century. I have to admit, before I arrogantly put on my you have got to be kiddingno one beats the U.S. in quality of care smirk, the really impressive images began to appear on the screen. They have built what looks to be an entire health care city.
Sleek, modern, architecturally stunning structures flashed on the screen as direct, seriously scripted voiceovers of a virtual tour explaining what they have to offer exuded state-of the-art health care.
They have a highly rated medical school, research facilities, an alternative medicine building and a state-of-the-art pediatrics hospital, to name only a few of Dubai Healths offerings. It is impressive.
Are we losing our cutting-edge superiority?
Also, this month in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emerites, a $600 million art center has opened in their Cultural District. It, too, is architecturally stunning. But what caught my eye is its name: Louvre Abu Dhabi. Thats right, the Louvre has entered into an agreement to provide some of the finest art in the world for the new center. Its a complex agreement for use of the name, but my guess is the Louvre is being paid very well!
And this is just a cursory look at what the oil-rich states are doing.
Our president has rightly touted the infrastructure advancements of the Emirates and other foreign nations. Roads, high speed rail, airports with Star Trek-ian designs and now advanced health care and even some of the finest art in the world.
They are catching up to us in some areas, and we are lagging behind in others.
It seems to me that we have more than Russia, China and North Korea to worry about when it comes to foreign nations impacting our country. The wealthy oil nations are no longer keeping quiet about their 21st century advancements.
We should be listening.
Who speaks for some our state and Region's largest municipalities?
An antiquated form of local government means that's not always clear.
Indiana law affords two types of municipal government towns and cities and we have both in Northwest Indiana.
Under Indiana law, municipalities with at least 2,000 residents can vote through a referendum to become cities.
It's time for Region towns, seven of which are within the state's 10 largest towns and 10 of which are among the largest 20, to give serious consideration to becoming cities.
City governments are led by an elected mayor a strong central administrator who anchors day-to-day city business and economic development. Meanwhile, a city council handles the fiscal and legislative matters, such as passing new municipal laws.
Under a town government structure, it's less clear who's actually in charge. A town council of equal peers is responsible for everything.
Though councils elect a president on an annual basis, none has a strong central voice, at least by statute.
When emergencies, including natural disasters, arise a mayor has the authority to act quickly on a city's behalf to lead the response. A mayor also has a voters' mandate to create a long-term vision for a city's future.
We've seen the benefits of this in the thriving cities of Valparaiso, Crown Point and Whiting. Vibrant downtowns in Crown Point and Valpo and a booming lakeshore in Whiting are proof positive.
Griffith, a town government, also has seen some economic development successes and downtown rejuvenation in recent years. That's a tribute to the strong leadership of the town council.
But even leaders there, including Town Council President Rick Ryfa, concede the benefits of a city form of government.
Ryfa has said it may be time for his town, the ninth-most populous in the state, to explore the merits of city government.
Griffith, which has led in progressive policing strategies and many other areas, could be a leader in this regard as well.
So many others should follow. Merrilliville has the most residents of any town in Indiana, with an estimated 34,994 in 2016. Strong central leadership could create the kind of vision and accountability to make the municipality far more economically successful and vibrant.
Schererville, Munster, Highland, St. John, Dyer, Chesterton and Cedar Lake all are among the state's largest towns.
All are eligible to seek city status and should begin weighing this option.
Our state and Region continue to be surrounded by competitive opportunity.
The more our municipalities can speak with a unified voice, the more likely we'll shine bright enough to attract more residents and businesses from Illinois and elsewhere.
When great opportunities present themselves, do we want the ability to pounce, or must we discuss everything in fragmented committee? It's time to make a decision.
South Africa and Morocco will resume diplomatic ties more than a decade after Morocco withdrew its ambassador from Pretoria, South African President Jacob Zuma said in a newspaper interview published on Sunday.
Morocco recalled its ambassador from South Africa in 2004 after former South African president Thabo Mbeki recognised a breakaway region in the Western Sahara which Morocco claims as part of its territory.
"Morocco is an African nation and we need to have relations with them," Zuma told City Press in the interview. "We never had problems with them anyway; they were the first to withdraw diplomatic relations."
Zuma met Morocco's King Mohammed last week on the sidelines of an African Union-European Union summit.
"They felt that even if we differ on the Western Sahara issues, the two countries should have a relationship," Zuma said about Moroccan officials' position at the meeting.
South Africa's official government position - as re-affirmed by Zuma in one of his state of the nation addresses - is to support "self determination and decolonisation for the Western Sahara".
The decision to re-establish ties with Morocco is likely to go down badly in South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, of which Zuma is leader.
The ANC - as one of Africa's oldest liberation movements - has long backed those seeking independence in the Western Sahara and has accused Morocco of occupying the region.
A spokesman for South Africa's foreign ministry could not be reached for comment on Sunday.
Morocco has controlled most of the Western Sahara, which is rich in phosphates and has seen some initial oil exploration efforts, since 1975. A ceasefire in 1991 called for a referendum on self-determination for Western Sahara, but the vote has never taken place.
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It was an interesting question we asked ourselves in the newsroom before a reader asked it of us on Friday:
Why would the Opelika-Auburn News do a separate story about a LGBTQ group having a float in the Opelika Christmas parade?
Many readers proved our point soon enough, as digital readership of the story showed steady traffic as soon as that version of it went online. It was information readers felt they needed to read.
Even if they did or didnt want to read it.
Queer to whom?
LGBTQ is the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer.
Queer, a term in past years that was viewed as a derogatory label until LGBT more recently reclaimed it, means differing in some odd way from what is usual or normal, according to the dictionary.
It therefore could be logical to say that LGBTQ putting a float in the Christmas parade of an extremely conservative-minded community such as Opelika was a queer move.
Not so, upon further review.
LGBTQ had to realize the ripples in the pond it would create, and it likely knew that in addition to using the move to gain further acceptance, it might gain publicity as well.
Entering a Christmas parade in Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile or any other larger city might not seem so different these days. Perhaps, maybe even in the more liberal-minded university town of Auburn it will or would have turned fewer heads.
But Opelika?
Local ministers respond
Yes, going to Opelika was a first, which caught attention, and at least one group was quick to respond.
The Lee County Ministers Alliance, representing more than 40 local Christian pastors and leaders, issued a statement last week stating it expresses sorrow in light of the LGBT participation in the Opelika Christmas parade on Saturday.
We feel that Scripture speaks strongly against the lifestyles of this group and we feel their participating in a parade that recognized the birth of our Savior is against all that He stood for.
We feel it is our moral responsibility to speak out in opposition to their participation.
That, along with the thought that families and other viewers might want to be prepared should they feel the need, moved the groups float from being a mere mention, to a short story of its own.
The Opelika Chamber of Commerce also issued a statement: The organization Pride on the Plains has a float entry in the parade. It will follow the theme we have set for all floats this year. We do not discriminate against groups or organizations participating in the parade.
Discrimination is an act of hate, and our nation has far too much of that already, in communities big and small.
Parade organizers made the right call in allowing the float, both legally speaking in that they had little desire to face a lawsuit, and morally in that Christmas is about love and inclusion, not judgment and isolation.
However, the Ministers Alliance had its right to speak, too. Christmas is one of Christianitys most important holidays and celebrations, and the Rev. Clifford Jones, as president of the alliance, made the argument that Biblical teachings promote family, in ways that stand as a contradiction to gay lifestyles.
Therefore, seeing the LGBTQ participation in a birthday celebration of Jesus seemed to some an uninvited insult.
That Christmas spirit
It is yet another of many social debates in our society today, but on one point, few disagree: Christmas is about giving, and Gods love for us as shown by His sharing the birth of His son.
Christians do not need to lose that message and the Christmas spirit to debate of any kind, nor should they ever limit someone from exposure to learning more about it.
Dont let the smaller headlines overshadow the much bigger one this holiday season.
Its a good story.
Troy Turner is editor of the Opelika-Auburn News. He can be contacted at tturner@oanow.com.
Ugandan internet users may continuously be arrested and charged of terrorism due to the absence of a law on data protection, the Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) has warned.
According to the UHRC acting chairperson Meddie Mulumba, security agencies hide behind laws such as the Interception of Communications Act, Computer Misuse Act and Anti-terrorism Act to apprehend and prosecute Ugandans over what they publish over social media.
We have so many vague laws that they try to use to infringe on rights of Ugandans, for instance, how do you use the anti-pornography law to say that you will prosecute someone who has viewed on WhatsApp a message considered to be pornographic? It is like saying that in the case of a motor accident, the road is held liable, Mulumba said.
He was speaking on November 24 during the launch of a report; state of security for human rights defenders in a digital era, published by Unwanted Witness, a digital rights civil society organisation. It was based on a sample of 153 respondents many of whom journalists, human rights defenders and lawyers.
Laws are debated in anger and [intimidation from the state] that no one can oppose them like the Anti-terrorism law, because, opposing it is regarded as infringement on national security, Mulumba said.
The Anti-Terrorism Act was passed 15 years ago to among other reasons, suppress acts of terrorism and to provide for the punishment of persons who plan, instigate, support, finance or execute acts of terrorism.
THE REPORT
The report came days after directors and three editors of The Red Pepper had been arrested and kept in detention until Monday, November 27, when they were formally charged of offensive communication, publication of information prejudicial to security, libel.
Following their arrest on November 22, police detectives forced them to surrender passwords of their computers, emails and phones while in police detention.
Privacy is a qualified right whose interference must only be legitimate, necessary and proportionate, therefore the overbroad invasion of the journalists communication endangers their own privacy as well as those that they communicate with, Unwanted Witness acting chief executive officer Dorothy Mukasa said.
According to the report, government invokes the provisions of Section 19 of the Anti-Terrorism Act to intercept communications and conduct surveillance over targeted journalists and human rights defenders. This is reinforced by the Interception of Communications Act 2010 .
Now more than ever, the safety and security of the online community; particularly human rights defenders have become critical. This is because more people are embracing digital tools especially the internet to enjoy their right to freedom of expression as well as meaningfully participate in political decisions, the report stated.
This, the report further states, has threatened government that it has chosen to undertake systematic surveillance backed by repressive legislations.
Unfortunately, many online [users] including human rights defenders are not aware of the nature and extent of digital threats and online surveillance they are being subjected to, nor do they have the knowledge and skills to help them make the necessary measures to protect their data and communication from unlawful interference, the report stated.
More than half of the respondents in the study claimed to have experienced online threats and surveillance which has had an impact on their work.
The report for instance mentions a human rights activist in Mubende who besides receiving threatening messages through email and other social media platforms has been trailed up to his residence by suspected security personnel.
Among the human rights lawyers and journalists who were interviewed, 75 per cent and 59 per cent respectively reported that the surveillance had negatively impacted on their work and life as human rights defenders.
Mulumba urged civil society organisations to re-engage parliamentarians to have the laws amended and remove room for being abused by security agencies.
sadabkk@observer.ug
What was supposed to be a bit of fun turned into a crying game for Arran Maye, a 28-year-old plumber from Leicester. While vacationing with 20 friends in the Spanish city of Benidorm, the Briton invested 9 pounds ($12) in a henna tattoo that left him sporting a handlebar mustache and a chin beard. The idea was to get into the spirit of Benidorm Fiesta, a local fancy dress festival, but things went from bad to worse when Arran experienced an intense allergic reaction to the henna ink, which may leave him with permanent scars.
Adam Lewis, another member of the British partying bunch, got the same tattoos as Arran, but while his tattoos faded within a few days, Arrans were much more problematic. On top of the excruciating pain he experienced, his face ballooned and started oozing puss. It tuned out that the henna used on Arran was an illegal variety called black henna, which contains the chemical PPD. It caused a severe allergic reaction and ultimately landed him in intensive care, with one of the consequences being potentially permanent scars in the shape of a handlebar mustache and a small beard.
Photo: video screengrab
When Arran and Adam went to get the tattoos, the artist attempted to put their minds at ease by saying the paint would fade away naturally within two or three days or they could wipe it off in seconds with nail polish remover.
Stupidly we believed him. We thought it would be a good laugh for our costume that night, Arran told the Daily Mail. The problems began almost immediately, as Arran recalls.
It was fine at first but then it got tingly, the next day it was blistering and pussing and by Sunday my face was a balloon. It was like my face was trying to push out the henna. The puss was pouring out and my face was huge and it was so painful. I was in agony.
Photo: SWNS
The doctors said 100 per cent youre going to have a scar for six months. It will be exactly in the outline of a moustache. They did mention a skin graft and that it might be permanent. I was trying not to hear it to be honest.
Arran tried to solve the problem with home remedies such as toothpaste, olive oil, and salt, then tried different tablets, creams, and soaps bought from pharmacies. On the flight home, his allergy to PPD spiked, and he began having difficulties breathing. When the plane landed at Luton, friends drove him to the Leicester Royal Infirmary, where he ended up in intensive care with a breathing mask and had to be kept in hospital for two nights. Medicine helped with the swelling, but a plastic surgeon warned Arran he may carry the scars for life.
Despite all the pain and visits to the hospital, the 28-year-old plumber still has the strength to laugh at his own misfortune.
Ive manged to see the funny side of it. I mean, what choice do I have? he said. I look a right idiot though. Ive had one before years ago and it was fine but I guess that wasnt on my face.
ABC News(WASHINGTON) -- President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Monday outlined a new preemptive legal defense in the ongoing Russia probe: The president cannot be guilty of obstruction of justice in his role.
A sitting president cannot obstruct justice, Trump lawyer John Dowd told ABC News in a statement Monday, citing Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
The "president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under Art II and has every right to express his view of any case," Dowd added.
The outline was first reported by Axios this morning and later confirmed by ABC News.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Copyright 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Heavy fog brought air and road transport to a halt in several locations across Egypt on Monday morning, Al-Ahram Arabic news website reported.
Borg El-Arab International Airport in Egypt's Alexandria closed its airspace due to a lack of visibility resulting from heavy fog. The airport's deputy director Khaled Abdel-Salam said that fog resulted in the delayed departure of three flights since 5 AM.
Meanwhile, Egypt's traffic authority closed several roads in Cairo and other cities due to morning fog, later opening them once the fog had lifted. During the road closures, huge traffic jams in Cairo forced people to leave their cars and walk, Al-Ahram reported.
The limited visibility led to the deaths of two people and the injury of 25 from two separate road accidents in Beheira governorate. Another person was injured in a car collision in Cairo.
The closed roads included the Mehwar and Shubra-Banha Roads in Cairo, the Cairo-Alexandria Road, as well as parts of the North Coast Road in Alexandria. However, they were all reopened within hours, once visibility had improved.
On Sunday, four people were killed and 39 others injured in a collision involving several cars on the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road amid fog that started on Saturday.
Several road accidents were reported in Egypt on Saturday, including on the Autostrad in Cairo, as well as the International Coastal Highway in Kafr El-Sheikh, where 22 people were injured in a collision involving several vehicles.
Morning fog is common in Egypt during the winter months. The authorities have issued warnings of fog over the coming weeks, advising drivers to take care.
Deadly road crashes take place on a near daily basis in Egypt, which is notorious for poor road safety, badly maintained infrastructure, and loosely enforced traffic regulations.
In 2015, the country saw 25,500 road fatalities, while the total number of car accidents was 14,500, according to a study published by the official statistics body CAPMAS in August 2016.
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Japans Kobe Steel, which in October acknowledged quality control problems on products shipped to auto, aviation, railroad and nuclear power companies for at least a decade, relies on Burson-Marsteller for strategic communications counsel.
The WPP unit serves Kobe as subcontractor for its law firm, Paul Hastings LLP.
According to its contract, B-Ms purpose is to assist the attorneys regarding the various PR implications of pending and/or anticipated legal proceedings and to assist in relation to such legal proceedings at the direction of counsel.
B-M charges Hastings a guaranteed minimum retainer of $75K with that amount to be re-evaluated on Jan. 31.
Its scope of work includes message development, media relations, digital/social media management, content creation, stakeholder communications, ally mobilization, opinion research and writing/editing of materials.
Kobe Steel, in November, issued a report that concluded that it erred by elevating the pursuit of short-term profit over the maintenance of scrupulous quality standards, according to the Nov. 10 New York Times.
CEO Hiroya Kawasaki told a press conference there was a climate where employees didnt speak up, and if they did, it wouldnt have made a difference. As long as the revenue was coming in, management wasnt interested, he said.
A second report on the Kobe scandal complied by outside experts is slated for release this month.
A Netflix executive today disclosed that the House of Cards will return for a sixth and final season, brightening the holiday season for about 2,000 people who are either directly or indirectly economically tied to the program.
Following allegations of sexual abuse lodged against Kevin Spacey, who plays HoC's lead character Frank Underwood, the streaming giant suspended production of the program on Oct. 31
That suspension irritated many fans who believed the show could carry on with Robin Wright, who plays the role of Underwoods wife, Claire.
After all, Claire is as ruthless and power-hungry as Frank.
Ted Sarandos, Netflixs chief content officer, made HoCs return official today, telling the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York his company is excited to bring closure to fans.
HoC will return early next year for a shortened season of eight episodes, compared to the 13 shows of previous seasons.
The program is well positioned for a fresh beginning as season five ended with Frank Underwood resigning from the presidency and Claire moving up from VP to the villian-in-chief slot
HoC is what put Netflix on the original programming map. Its a bit ironic that Wright is wrapping up such as important program for media company.
She had battled Netflix to get the same pay as Spacey.
Wright told a 2016 Rockefeller Foundation event about her pay inequality squabble with Netflix. "I was looking at the statistics and Claire Underwood's character was more popular than [Frank's] for a period of time, according the Huffington Post of May 18, 2006, which covered Wrights session. So I capitalized on it. I was like, 'You better pay me or Im going to go public. And they did."
Claire will now be in the spotlight. Good job, Netflix. Enjoy the show, HoC fans.
Ranked the top School of Education in Canada and fourth in the world, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education has a diverse community of innovators, collaborators and leaders that have been advancing education, human development and professional practice globally for over a century.
We ignite possibilities by placing award-winning faculty, top researchers and bright, passionate students together with world-class resources, a tradition of excellence and a rich network of collaborators.
Watch Jordan Peele Respond To Some Of The Best Get Out Fan Theories From Reddit Elijah C. Watson Elijah Watson serves as Okayplayer's News & Culture Editor. When
Following the release of Jordan Peeles wildly successful directorial film debut Get Out, everyone took to the Internet to discuss a number of theories about the movie. Well, now Peele himself has chimed into the discussion, and it is just as insightful as it is hilarious.
READ: Why Get Outs Golden Globe Comedy Submission May Help It Get The Last Laugh This Awards Season
From discussing if the film is nothing but the elaborate fantasy of Rod Williams, the TSA agent who rescues Get Out protagonist Chris Washington, to if Get Out is a sequel to Being John Malkovich, Peele basically covers just about every fan theory surrounding his popular movie in this video with Vanity Fair. He also reveals a number of fun facts surrounding the film, such as dialogue changes and parts where he made a cameo (Peele actually voiced the dying deer that appears at the beginning at the movie).
Recently, it was announced that Get Out would be submitted as a comedy at the 2018 Golden Globe Awards, which incited outrage on social media. Ultimately, Peele addressed the news both through his own Twitter account and during an event he was speaking at for the film.
The problem is, its not a movie that can really be put into a genre box. Originally, I set out to make a horror movie. I ended up showing it to people and hearing, you know, it doesnt even feel like horror, Peele said. Its in this thriller world. So it was a social thrillerWhat the movie is about is not funny. Ive had many black people come up to me and say, man, this is the movie weve been talking about for a while and you did it. Thats a very powerful thing. For that to be put in a smaller box than it deserves is where the controversy comes from.
A report published on Monday by Dar Al-Ifta researchers suggests Daesh leader Abu-Bakr El-Baghdadi has been seeking to stem the flow of militants fleeing Sinai in the face of security forces strikes
Egypt's semi-official religious watchdog Dar Al-Ifta Al-Missriyyah said on Monday that the Daesh terrorist group is being defeated in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, with militants fleeing to Libya, due to the huge material and human losses sustained in battles with Egyptian security forces.
The Takfiri Fatwas and Extremist Views Observatory, a research group within Dar Al-Ifta, based its assessment on the latest messages of Daesh leader Abu-Bakr El-Baghdadi to his fighters in Libya, the watchdog said in a report on Monday.
The Observatory, which specializes in tracking militant statements on social media, said that El-Baghdadi's messages reveal the demoralization of the terror group's members after recent harsh security strikes against Daesh in Sinai.
They also indicate a wave of Daesh militants fleeing to Libya to escape the Egyptian army and police crackdown in Sinai, a phenomenon that the group's leader is attempting to halt.
"El-Baghdadi's messages revealed orders to kill Daesh members escaping from Sinai to stop this wave of fleeing," according to the Observatory.
"The messages from the Daesh leader constitute a main strategy of centralization in Egypt, while maintaining a strategic presence in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as scattering in other Egyptian governorates to evade security strikes and to maintain the flow of logistical and technical assistance in the battle against Egyptian security forces, considering Sinai as the focus point and springboard of the terror group in Egypt," the report said.
The Observatory also said El-Baghdadi's messages reveal that the group has been hit by a "fatal disaray" after recent failures in Sinai, indicating that Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, the Daesh terror offshoot in North Sinai, is deteriorating due to intense security strikes.
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PLATTSMOUTH, Neb. A Cass County judge on Monday declined to lower the bail for a Weeping Water man charged in the apparent suicide death of his Florida girlfriend.
Matthew Stubbendieck, 41, is charged with assisted suicide in connection with the Aug. 1 death of 38-year-old Alicia Wilemon-Sullivan.
Stubbendieck, who recently moved back to Nebraska from Florida, was seeking a reduction in bail to $10,000. He would have to post 10 percent of that, or $1,000, to be released.
Cass County Attorney Nathan Cox argued against the bail reduction, noting that the amount already had been reduced from $50,000 to $20,000. Nothing has changed since that time, he said.
He did assist a person in killing themselves, Cox said. He could have called (authorities) and had her taken into custody, saving her life, but he didnt.
Defense attorney Julie Bear told Cass County District Judge Michael Smith that Stubbendiecks father is very ill. Stubbendieck would live with his parents if he were released from the Cass County Jail, she said.
The most important factor is that between the time (Stubbendieck) led authorities to the body until charges were filed, a couple of months time, there was an investigation, and he didnt go anywhere, Bear said. I think we have sufficient guarantees that we know where he is going to be.
Stubbendieck told investigators that he met Wilemon-Sullivan while living in Florida. He picked her up at Omahas Eppley Airfield on July 31 and took her to dinner with his parents and brother that evening.
The following day, Aug. 1 according to his statements in court documents he took her to a secluded spot a mile west of Weeping Water on private property near an old quarry that locals call Lake Acapulco. Over seven hours, Stubbendieck said, Wilemon-Sullivan cut her wrists.
He said he twice tried to suffocate her to end her suffering but could not go through with it. He told authorities that she had told him that she had terminal cancer, but an autopsy revealed no tumors or masses.
Officials said Wilemon-Sullivans wounds were consistent with self-cutting, but her body was too decomposed to see what role attempted suffocation might have played.
Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer stepped to the podium Monday to greet 53 Omaha police recruits on the first day of their training.
Good morning, sir, the men and women said in unison.
I like that. Very good, Schmaderer responded.
He complimented the recruits on being selected for the class but added that the hard work is just beginning.
You have to prove it to us here. Were going to put you to the test. We have to, he said. The first test cannot be out on the street answering a radio call. It has to be here.
The two recruit classes 25 newcomers and 28 veteran officers from 17 other Nebraska agencies will increase the sworn strength of the department to 865.
If all graduate, that is.
Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert reiterated Monday her pledge to employ 900 officers in 2019, add a fifth precinct in Elkhorn and redraw the precinct boundaries to better help the city.
You are joining a professional police department dedicated to keeping our citizens safe, she said. You have the opportunity to change lives and to save lives.
Stothert noted that homicides in the city are at a 13-year low and the number of shootings so far this year is the lowest in a decade.
The veteran recruit class is by far the largest in the departments history. The recruits have 200 years of combined policing experience. They will go through a shortened 11-week training program. The newcomers will complete the full 22-week program.
Also part of the basic class are two arson investigators from the Omaha Fire Department. They require certification but will not be sworn officers.
Many of (the veteran officers) have worked in specialized areas themselves, so coming here to the Omaha Police Department is not so much starting over for them as it is a condensed, accelerated training more focused on Omahas policy and procedures, said Lt. Catherine Milone, the academys training commander.
The two classes will be together for some training firearms, driving and criminal law but separate during other times, Milone said.
Schmaderer told the new recruits to take advantage of learning with the veterans, an opportunity he said he wished hed had.
This community realizes that law enforcement is a vital part of the community. Thats the beauty of Omaha, Schmaderer said. The department and the community want to be in this together, and we are. Your task is to carry on that tradition for us.
A motorist was seriously injured early Monday on Interstate 80 in eastern Council Bluffs after his car rolled.
Bluffs police said the crash occurred around 4:20 a.m. on westbound I-80.
Police said the driver of a 1998 Ford Escort lost control of the vehicle, which went off the roadway and rolled several times.
The motorist was able to crawl out of the car before officers arrived. He was taken to Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. Police said he suffered injuries that were not considered life-threatening.
Any witnesses to the crash were urged to call Bluffs police.
DES MOINES (AP) Iowa Senate Republicans have announced a series of actions in recent weeks to respond to allegations of workplace sexual misconduct within the caucus. But questions remain, including about the details of an in-house investigation into allegations, the scope of work to be done by a former state senator and the nature of a former staffers departure.
Allegations in report
Senate Majority Leader Bill Dixs staff released a report last month summarizing an internal investigation into alleged misconduct within the caucus between the end of 2012 and mid-2017.
Dix initially declined to provide details, citing employee privacy. He reversed course amid pressure from his party for more transparency.
The investigation was launched after a lawsuit involving Kirsten Anderson, a former communications director for Senate Republicans. Anderson said she was fired in 2013, hours after reporting harassment in the office that centered on sexually charged comments.
A jury awarded Anderson $2.2 million after a trial this year. The state settled for $1.75 million.
Dix said at a Nov. 14 press conference that no new incidents of alleged misconduct were reported in the subsequent internal investigation.
But the report noted an alleged incident during the 2017 legislative session involving a senator making a sexually suggestive comment on the chamber floor.
Caleb Hunter, a spokesman for Senate Republicans, declined to comment.
Adviser's role
Senate Republicans announced Nov. 21 that Mary Kramer, a former GOP state senator with lengthy human resources experience, would voluntarily advise the caucus to improve workplace culture.
Kramers work is focused on one area of the State Capitol, but its possible it could address others. She said that although she is in the early stages of work, she intends to make recommendations before Jan. 8, the start of the next legislative session.
Former staffer
Questions remain about the exit of a former staffer for Senate Republicans who was accused during the Anderson trial of discussing sex with co-workers in an inappropriate manner.
Jim Friedrich, an analyst, resigned in September, but no additional information has been shared publicly.
The Legislature passed legislation this year requiring state agencies to release information when employees are fired, demoted or resign to avoid termination. The law doesnt apply to the Legislature, which writes its own rules.
Human resources manager
In early November, a top aide to Dix confirmed that GOP leaders in the Senate and House planned to create a human resources director position to handle complaints of harassment and other misconduct at the Legislature. Dix then said Nov. 14 that he would drop those plans because staff expressed concern about the positions accountability.
House Speaker Linda Upmeyer said on the same day that her staff still planned to hire an HR manager.
Dix reversed course again with the Nov. 21 Kramer news. A press release said his office would work with the House to hire the human resources manager. The position could become a joint employee of the House and Senate in the future.
Independent review
A week before Kramers appointment, Dix said his office would hire outside counsel or an organization to review workplace culture. Dix said it was possible the outside counsel could do an investigation similar to what was done through an internal office review, but said it would be up to the hired group.
After responding to the 2007 mass shooting at Von Maur, Omaha Police Officer Dave Staskiewicz was long haunted by that day: the faces of the victims; the vulnerability he felt as he ascended an escalator, knowing he was easy pickings for the armed gunman.
Sgt. Jeff Baker struggled, too, long harboring a sense of failure for not stopping the gunman, and anger toward him for taking his own life before officers arrived.
The officers werent prepared for their stressful experiences on Dec. 5, 2007, nor were Omaha Police Department policies regarding emotional support for officers who face trauma.
About 10 days after the mass shooting, the department held a single optional stress debriefing session for officers in a large group setting. The idea that officers would need emotional support after such an incident was still in its infancy.
It was too late, and in a group setting that was too big, Staskiewicz said.
Police officials say Omahas mass shooting, which happened 10 years ago Tuesday, ultimately served as a catalyst for overhauling programs to support officers involved in traumatic events.
Today, professional counselors and specially trained peer support officers are readily available. And depending on the seriousness of the incident, some officers are required to go through mandatory one-on-one stress debriefing sessions.
Mandatory is the key word, said Capt. Michele Bang, who helped establish the programs.
Requiring officers to attend takes away any personal stigma they might face for needing emotional help. Such reluctance to seek help is one reason law enforcement officers suffer from disproportionately high rates of depression, alcoholism, suicide, divorce and domestic problems.
We didnt share our feelings we just didnt, Bang said. The appearance of control is important to us.
The mass shooting that claimed eight lives that day and left three other people seriously wounded before the shooter killed himself occurred at a time law enforcement agencies in Omaha and nationally were still waking up to the issue of emotional support of officers. The growing awareness was spurred in part by the large number of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan during the 2000s suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological problems.
In the wake of the Von Maur department store shootings, a number of Omaha officers had difficulty dealing with the emotional fallout. They included Staskiewicz and Baker, who were among the first to enter the store.
There are two components to surviving an active-shooter event: Its surviving the gunfight, and then surviving those images and thoughts and notions you have in your head afterward, Baker said.
Today, Baker and Staskiewicz both describe how vulnerable they felt as they hunted for the gunman in a store in which shelves, racks and storerooms afforded seemingly limitless places for cover. Even as they feared for their own lives, cheery holiday music incongruously played throughout the store.
Staskiewicz recalled at one point ascending an escalator knowing that the shooter could be anywhere above, below or around him. He was completely powerless.
Baker agreed: My mortality became about as transparent as at any time Ive been in law enforcement.
The officers would later learn that the 19-year-old gunman had taken his own life before officers even arrived. But as dozens of officers searched every nook and cranny of the store and Westroads Mall, they felt that they could come face-to-face with the deadly gunman or an accomplice at any moment.
Not all the feelings officers struggled with afterward were rational.
Baker said he harbored strong feelings of guilt for not stopping the bloodshed. He knew it made no sense, because there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. He did his job to the best of his ability, based on what was known at the time. But thats not what was in his heart.
Its still hard for me to talk about it even 10 years later, Baker said.
Also in Bakers heart was much anger toward gunman Robert Hawkins not only for what he did, but also for shooting himself before Baker could personally stop him. Baker said he spoke to many other officers who felt the same way.
I thought it was a cowardly thing to engage unarmed people and then moments before we get there push the game over button, Baker said.
Others, from officers and detectives to crime lab technicians, struggled with visions of what they saw that day. It was the bloodiest crime scene Omaha police had ever faced. Detective Derek Mois, who worked the third-floor crime scene where most of the victims fell, would later say there was so much blood, you could taste it in the air.
Staskiewicz saw nearly all the victims as he searched the third floor to make sure there were no other gunmen. He also later struggled with the fact he wasnt able to render aid to one victim who pleaded for help. Protocol called for Staskiewicz to finish searching the store to make sure it was safe for paramedics.
Staskiewicz said it helped when he later visited that victim, Fred Wilson, at the hospital. Still, Staskiewicz said he long struggled with visions from that day.
Things just werent right, he said of the weeks that followed. Trouble sleeping. Things always going through your head.
Bang said such stories were common, even for officers who did not play major roles in the incident. Police officials ultimately realized that the single group session they offered for responders was not adequate.
Over time, in part because of a 2010 change in state law and demands from the police union, the department completely overhauled its policies.
While stress debriefings previously were mandatory only after an officer killed someone in the line of duty, command staff now has the discretion to require an officer to sit down with a therapist after any traumatic situation. There are mandatory follow-up sessions at four months and one year, too.
Ive never had an officer tell me it was a complete waste of time, Bang said of the required sessions.
In addition to professional counselors who regularly work with the department, dozens of officers have been specially trained to provide emotional support for their peers. Officers are also encouraged to let their superiors know if they think a co-worker is struggling in the aftermath of a stressful event.
Bang said the new programs served the department well two years ago, after gang unit Officer Kerrie Orozco was killed in the line of duty. Two mental health professionals were on hand that night to offer assistance.
The emotional-support overhaul came too late to help officers involved in the Von Maur shootings, many of whom dealt with the emotional fallout on their own.
Staskiewicz said he never did seek any help beyond the one session offered. He attributed it to the culture within his profession.
In the law enforcement world, its hard to do that, he said. You are looked at as being weak.
But he recognized that it was a serious matter. As Staskiewicz in months after the incident traveled the country, giving presentations to other law enforcement agencies on lessons Omaha learned from the mass shooting, he would always suggest that stress debriefings be required for all officers.
Baker said he made sure to speak up in the group debriefing session he attended after the shooting. He said he thought it would make it easier for others to express their own feelings.
But he said it took another event about a year later finding his mother dead in her home for him to seek the help he truly needed.
Over weeks of counseling, Baker said, he was able to let go of a lot of his feelings, including his anger toward the shooter.
I wasnt getting any healthier hating Robbie Hawkins, Baker said. I hate what he did. But I no longer hate the kid.
The recent warm weather across eastern Nebraska and southwest Iowa was to come to an abrupt end today as a strong cold front muscles into the region.
The National Weather Service office in Valley said the Omaha area, which is under a wind advisory along with most of the region until 8 oclock tonight, can expect northwest wind gusts of 45-50 mph and falling afternoon temperatures.
Get ready, said Ryan McPike, a KMTV meteorologist. Brace yourself for the big weather change.
Elsewhere, a light rain-snow mix is forecast across parts of northern Nebraska this afternoon as a winter-like weather advisory is in effect for the Dakotas. Snow accumulations of less than 1 inch in the northern Nebraska counties of Cherry, Sheridan, Boyd and Keya Paha to 3 inches in the Dakotas are likely, along with wind gusts of 55 mph.
Today in the Omaha area, forecasters said there is a slight chance of rain or drizzle this afternoon, with a high temperature around 60 this morning falling into the upper 30s by late afternoon.
Tonight, the low will drop to around 25, the weather service said, and winds could gust as high as 35-40 mph.
Tuesday and Wednesday in the Omaha area will remain breezy, with west-northwest winds gusting as high as 25-30 mph. The highs both days will be in the mid- to upper 30s. Overnight lows will fall to the lower to mid-20s.
Thursday and Friday will be partly sunny with highs in the lower to mid-30s and lows in the upper teens to around 20.
McPike called for a chance of flurries Wednesday and Thursday.
The weather service said the weekend in the Omaha area looks a little better mostly sunny skies and highs in the upper 30s to mid-40s by Sunday.
McPike said the weather change is a big shock compared to the past couple of mild weeks.
The pattern has flip-flopped on us, he said.
Egypt's interior ministry announced on Monday that the country's police forces had killed five terrorists and arrested six others during a broad and coordinated State Security operation spanning three different governorates.
According to the statement, the five terrorist deaths came as State Security forces located and raided a terrorist hideout in the desert area between 10th of Ramadan city and Belbies in Egypt's Delta governorate of Sharqiya.
As police forces approached the hideout, terrorist elements began firing at security forces, prompting a shootout that killed five terrorists who are currently being identified, the statement added.
Police forces also seized firearms, ammunition, IED's and other explosives in the hideout.
The wider operation also resulted in the arrest of six terrorist elements at hideouts in the vicinity of the Cairo and Assiut governorates, according to the statement.
These developments come as part of nationwide efforts to pursue and eradicate terrorist elements which aim to disrupt security and stability in North Sinai and other Egyptian governorates, the statement read.
Egypt has been battling Islamist militant groups, mainly concentrated in the restive northern part of Sinai, over the past years years.
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WASHINGTON (AP) - Lobbing new criticism at the special counsel's Russia investigation, President Donald Trump said Monday he feels "very badly" for former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Last week, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about reaching out to the Russians on the president's behalf.
"I think it's a shame," Trump said of Flynn's situation, adding that it's "very unfair" and that Flynn had "led a very strong life."
Trump tried to contrast Flynn's treatment with that of his Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, whom he said "lied many times to the FBI and nothing happened."
"Flynn lied and they destroyed his life," Trump said.
The FBI didn't conclude that Clinton lied to agents, however. Former FBI Director James Comey testified last year that agents found Clinton to be truthful in her interview, telling a House committee, "we have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI."
Flynn is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
Even as Trump sought to minimize Flynn's misdeeds, the Kremlin insisted that Flynn's conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. had not influenced Russian President Vladimir Putin's response to sanctions imposed by Trump's predecessor.
Flynn was forced to resign in February following reports that the Obama administration officials had informed Trump's team that Flynn had discussed sanctions on Russia Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, a fact at odds with the public assertions of Vice President Mike Pence. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday it was "absurd" to suggest that the phone conversation could have influenced Putin's decision and added that "such requests couldn't have been passed on" to him.
Trump, who spoke to reporters Monday as he left the White House to head to Utah, unleashed a string of tweets over the weekend in which he criticized the FBI and raised questions about the federal investigation into Russian election meddling and possible ties to his campaign.
In one of his messages, Trump again denied that he directed Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
Trump questioned the direction of the federal law enforcement agency and wrote that after Comey, whom Trump fired in May, the FBI's reputation is "in Tatters worst in History!" He vowed to "bring it back to greatness." The president also retweeted a post saying new FBI Director Chris Wray "needs to clean house."
Former Attorney General Eric Holder tweeted in response: "Nope. Not letting this go. The FBI's reputation is not in "tatters". It's composed of the same dedicated men and women who have always worked there and who do a great, apolitical job. You'll find integrity and honesty at FBI headquarters and not at 1600 Penn Ave right now."
Trump seized on reports that a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent was removed from special prosecutor Robert Mueller's team last summer after the discovery of an exchange of text messages that were viewed as potentially anti-Trump. The agent, Peter Strzok, had also worked on the investigation of Democrat Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, said Mueller removed Strzok from the team "immediately upon learning of the allegations." He would not elaborate on the nature of the accusations. The person who discussed the matter with The Associated Press was not authorized to speak about it by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Trump tweeted Sunday: "Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI `agent's role in Clinton probe under review.' Led Clinton Email probe." In a separate tweet, he wrote: "Report: `ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE' Now it all starts to make sense!"
Strzok's removal almost certainly reflected a desire to insulate the investigators from any claims of political bias or favoritism. Trump and many of his supporters have at times sought to discredit the integrity of the investigation, in part by claiming a close relationship between Mueller and Comey and by pointing to political contributions to Democrats made by some lawyers on the team.
Following the tweets, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned the president to tread cautiously. "You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril. I'd be careful if I were you, Mr. President. I'd watch this," Graham said.
Saturday, Trump tweeted that he "had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
The tweet suggested that Trump was aware when the White House dismissed Flynn on Feb. 13 that he had lied to the FBI, which had interviewed him weeks earlier. Comey has said Trump the following day brought up the Flynn investigation in private at the White House and told him he hoped he could "let this go."
With questions raised by the tweet, Trump associates tried to put distance Saturday evening between the president himself and the tweet. Trump's personal lawyer John Dowd told ABC News that he drafted the tweet and gave it to the president's social media director Dan Scavino. Dowd had declined to comment when reached by the AP on Saturday night.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the panel is beginning to see "the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice" against Trump.
Meanwhile, Trump threw his full support behind embattled Republican Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race.
Trump tweeted early Monday that Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama.
It was Trumps most full-throated endorsement of Moore, who has lost backing of many top Republicans since he was hit with allegations of sexual misconduct decades ago.
Trump has assailed Democratic candidate Doug Jones and has defended Moore against allegations of child molestation. But the White House has said he has no plans to make campaign appearances.
Trump tweeted: We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!
Copyright 2017, the Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
WASHINGTON President Donald Trump issued a fresh denial Sunday that he asked former FBI director James B. Comey to halt an investigation into the conduct of his dismissed national security adviser Michael Flynn.
"I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn," Trump said in a pre-dawn message on Twitter. "Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!"
The tweet was the latest in a running commentary on the case from Trump that began Saturday, a day after Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with a Russian official.
In other tweets Sunday, Trump also seized on news that Peter Strzok the former top FBI official assigned to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election was taken off that job this summer after his bosses discovered that he and another member of Mueller's team had exchanged politically charged texts disparaging Trump and supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton. Strzok was also a key player in the investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server, which ended without charges against her.
"Report: 'ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE' Now it all starts to make sense!" Trump wrote, before proceeding to criticize the FBI and promise to bring it back to "greatness" under his administration.
Trump fired Flynn 25 days into this administration for misrepresenting the nature of his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador, to Vice President Mike Pence and other administration officials.
Comey has alleged that the day after that, Trump urged him to be lenient with Flynn, producing notes that said Trump told him, "I hope you can let this go."
Trump stoked the controversy with one of his Saturday tweets in which he said part of the rationale for firing Flynn was that he had lied to the FBI.
"I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI," Trump wrote in that tweet.
But critics pounced Saturday on Trump, arguing that if he knew at the time of his conversation with Comey that Flynn had lied to the FBI and was under investigation, it may constitute an attempt to obstruct that investigation.
"Are you ADMITTING you knew Flynn had lied to the FBI when you asked Comey to back off Flynn?" Walter Shaub, the former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, asked in a tweet Saturday afternoon.
On Sunday, Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Trump should have taken action against Flynn sooner if he already knew that then-national security adviser had lied to the FBI.
"Well, if he knew that then, why didn't he act on it earlier?" Warner said on CNN's "State of the Union." "It raises a whole series of additional questions."
Warner also told CNN that Flynn being charged with only one count of lying to the FBI suggests that there are "many more stories that General Flynn will have to tell about his time during the campaign and during the transition."
The Washington Post reported Saturday that Trump attorney John Dowd had drafted the president's tweet, according to two people familiar with the message. Dowd confirmed that Sunday, saying he had passed along a draft to Dan Scavino, Trump's social media director.
Two people close to the administration described the tweet simply as sloppy and unfortunate.
As Flynn pleaded guilty Friday, he made clear that he is now cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller as Mueller probes Russian meddling in last year's election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
Flynn's decision to cooperate with Mueller was widely seen as a sign of increasing legal peril for other White House aides and perhaps Trump himself, as the investigation has expanded beyond potential collusion with Russia to include obstruction of justice and financial crimes.
In an interview Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said it looked to her that "what we're beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice."
Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said she saw that in the indictments of Flynn and three other Trump associates, as well as the "hyper-frenetic attitude of the White House: the comments every day, the continual tweets."
"And I see it, most importantly, in what happened with the firing of Director Comey, and it is my belief that that is directly because (Comey) did not agree to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation," Feinstein said. "That's obstruction of justice."
The president continued tweeting about Flynn late Saturday. In one message, he complained that it was unfair for Flynn's life to be "destroyed" for lying to the FBI, arguing that the agency pursued Democrat Hillary Clinton far less aggressively while investigating her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
Trump's commentary on the case began Saturday morning, as he addressed reporters before leaving the White House for a fundraising trip to New York.
He said he was not worried about what Flynn might share now that he is cooperating with prosecutors, forcefully asserting that there was "absolutely no collusion" between his campaign and Russia.
On Sunday, as he commented on news about the reassignment of Strzok, Trump also retweeted a pair of posts on the subject written by Paul Sperry, a media fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution. One suggested that the current FBI director, Christopher A. Wray, should "clean house" because of the politicization of the agency.
A little later, Trump promised a better FBI under his leadership.
"After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History!" Trump wrote. "But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness."
Trump also weighed in Sunday on a decision by ABC News to suspend investigative reporter Brian Ross for an erroneous story about Flynn, saying the network should be sued.
Ross told viewers Friday morning that Flynn was prepared to testify that Trump, as a candidate for president, told him to contact Russians.
Later in the day, Ross walked back his report, saying that the source who had provided the initial information for his story later told him that it was as president-elect, not as a candidate, that Trump asked Flynn to contact Russians.
On Saturday, ABC apologized for a "serious error."
Ross' incorrect report prompted a dramatic reaction in the financial markets.
On Sunday, Trump offered a suggestion to those who lost money: "People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused many millions of dollars!"
An under-reported aspect of the House GOP tax plan is a new tax on some college endowments. That could mean less money for scholarships for some Nebraska college students. Nebraska House members are supporting the idea of making it more expensive for our young people to get a college education. Is that consistent with Nebraska values?
Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi discussed regional developments with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a telephone call on Monday, the Egyptian presidency announced.
According to the statement, the two leaders discussed the latest developments in Syria and Libya, as well as how to reach political solutions in each of the countries.
Presidents El-Sisi and Putin also discussed the latest developments in the Palestinian situation, regarding which the Russian leader expressed his appreciation for the Egyptian efforts to achieve Palestinian reconciliation.
The statement also noted that Putin offered his condolences to his Egyptian counterpart over the terrorist killing of hundreds of Egyptian worshipers in North Sinai's Al-Rawda mosque two weeks ago.
Putin asserted that his country, both as a government and as a people, were supporting Egypt's efforts in the war against terrorism.
The two leaders also discussed Egyptian-Russian bilateral relations concerning the military and commercial and transportation sectors, as well as the two countries' joint cooperation over building Egypt's first nuclear power plant at El-Dabaa in the Matrouh governorate.
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Hilarious. University of Nebraska-Lincoln college professors are alarmed that they are under attack by state senators who are concerned that conservative students on campus may be mistreated at UNL.
According to a 2016 Washington Times story, the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty at 40 leading universities was 12-to-1 liberal. In a 2016 Washington Post story, 60 percent of college professors identified as far-left compared to 13 percent as far-right, a nearly 5-to-1 ratio.
The fact remains that the country is generally equally divided between liberal and conservative. While liberal faculty will continue to inhabit college campuses at grossly disproportionate rates, the clutching of their pearls at allegations there may be improprieties against conservative students seems disingenuous. If theres nothing to see at UNL, then there should be no resistance to a climate assessment of conservative students and faculty to determine if they feel theyve been oppressed.
ODN 17 Nov 2022
Voters in the US react to Donald Trump's announcement that he will once again be launching a presidential..
by Graham Pierrepoint
Another day, another twist in the tale at the White House. As revelations regarding former senior advisor Michael Flynn and his admission of guilt (regarding lying to the FBI) reverberated over the weekend, political commentators and the press mulled over whether or not his admission would spell trouble for President Trumps team in terms of the wrapping up of the Russian collusion investigation. Its thought that Flynn could have his own story to tell if called upon and some are wondering whether or not this may mean Trump faces some form of justice after months of scandal rarely seen in DC for some decades, in any case.
Trump, however, may have done all the damage he needs to do all on his very own. As always, the US President took to twitter to air his own views on unfolding events and, in his own idiosyncratic way, may have tweeted himself into a corner or at least conviction - to paraphrase Bush counsel Richard Painter. Trump tweeted on Saturday that he had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies, the statesman continued, further advising that there was nothing to hide, and that his actions during the transition were lawful. Trumps attorney John Dowd has taken the fall for the tweet, stating that he did not mean to break news however, legal experts seem to think enough damage could already have been done.
Trump: 'I Feel Badly for General Flynn'
Whats at stake here is that Trump could have known that Flynn lied to the FBI which he may have followed up with requesting former FBI chief James Comey to cease all investigations as his tweets could be read to suggest. This, as some experts point out, could result in Trump effectively having obstructed justice within law. Dowd had reportedly drafted Trumps tweet and that the point being made was entirely correct. Whether or not others will see things this way certainly in light of other movements being made in the Russia investigation is another matter entirely.
Potential Obstruction Case Develops Against Trump (Bloomberg Global Business)
Never before has Twitter taken so much of the center stage nor has it been used to help propel so much political drama. Trumps reign as President will go down as a dramatic one though quite where it will all end remains up for debate as investigations into Russian collusion ahead of 2016s General Election continue.
Egypt expresses extreme concerns about the unfortunate current developments taking place in Yemen, which led to the killing of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh by Houthi rebels earlier Monday, the Egyptian foreign ministry has announced.
According to the statement, the killing of Saleh at the hands of Iranian-backed Houthi rebels would only escalate the current spilt and tensions in Yemen.
The Egyptian foreign ministry considers these developments to be a reflection of the crisis Yemen has been suffering from for years as a result of "negative foreign interference."
The ministry also renewed Egypt's position on the conflict in Yemen, calling all parties involved to be committed to a political solution in the war-torn country according to UN security council resolution 2216, as well as the 2013-14 National Dialogue Conference and the Gulf Initiative.
Egypt is currently a member of the Saudi-led military coalition against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
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by Graham Pierrepoint
Its time to get back in the time machine and to take a closer look at some of the most important and sometimes most fascinating moments that have taken place across the length and breadth of human history. We take a look every week at what went down decades and centuries ago and this week is no different. Strap in and lets go travelling!
December 4th, 1872 The Mary Celeste is Discovered
One of the most famous and mysterious shipwrecks of all time, the Mary Celeste was found abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean almost 150 years ago this week a mystery that has tantalized many.
December 5th, 1933 US Prohibition Repealed
In a rare moment of constitutional amendment and re-amendment, the US found itself allowed to drink alcohol once again ending the speakeasy era in what was only the 21st amendment made.
December 6th, 1877 The Human Voice First Recorded
The human voice has come a long way and while we can all stream radio and music freely today, it was Thomas Edison who first recorded his own voice ahead of all others back in 1877, 140 years ago. He recorded his own recital of Mary Had a Little Lamb.
December 7th, 1909 The Plastics Industry Kicks Off
Its thanks to Leo Baekeland that plastic has become so popular and perhaps so nefarious for the environment as its on this day in 1909 that his invention, Bakelite, was first patented.
December 8th, 1966 No Chance of Space Nukes
Believe it or not, the US and the USSR signed a treaty agreeing to withholding nuclear weapons from being used in outer space on this day consigning intergalactic war to science fiction.
December 9th, 1868 Traffic Lights Debut
A relatively new invention if you can call 149 years new we first started taking our streets and highways a little more safely thanks to the emergence of traffic lights outside Westminster Palace, London, in 1868 lit by gas and used to help pedestrians safely find their way around the capital.
December 10th, 1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Published
One of the most famous pieces of Western literature ever written, Twains most famous work (among many) found its way to Canadian and British bookshelves first; with the US receiving their copies the following February due to problems during printing.
We love travelling back in time why not check in with us again next week for more timely traversing?
Deutsche Welle 14 Oct 2022
The two brothers entered a surprise guilty plea on the first day of their trial for the car-bomb murder of a Maltese..
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WAAY ABC Huntsville, AL 05 Oct 2019
An overwhelming amount of support for Doug Jones by black voters helped propel him to a US Senate victory.
Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi discussed bilateral relations with his South African counterpart Jacob Zuma in a telephone call on Monday, the Egyptian presidency said.
According to the statement, El-Sisi received the telephone call from Zuma during which they discussed several matters including ways to boost bilateral Egyptian-South African relations.
The two presidents also discussed the latest developments surrounding a number of African issues.
President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said he appreciated his country's strong relations with South Africa.
President Zuma also expressed his appreciation for the level of coordination and consultation between the two nations on a number of regional issues.
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Yemen's Houthi group has fired a cruise missile towards a nuclear power plant in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, the group's television service said on its website on Sunday, without providing any evidence.
"The missile force announces the launching of a winged cruise missile ... towards the al-Barakah nuclear reactor in Abu Dhabi," the website said. It gave no further details.
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The United States and South Korea went ahead with large-scale joint aerial drills on Monday, a move North Korea had said would push the Korean peninsula to "the brink of nuclear war", ignoring calls from Russia and China to call them off.
The drills come a week after North Korea said it had tested its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States as part of a weapons programme that it has conducted in defiance of international sanctions and condemnation.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said it was "regrettable" that all parties had not "grasped the window of opportunity" presented by two months of relative calm before the North's most recent test.
China and Russia had proposed that the United States and South Korea stop major military exercises in exchange for North Korea halting its weapons programmes. Beijing formally calls the idea the dual suspension proposal.
The annual U.S.-South Korean drill, called Vigilant Ace, will run until Friday, with six F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to be deployed among the more than 230 aircraft taking part.
North Korea's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country called U.S. President Donald Trump "insane" on Sunday and said the drills would "push the already acute situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war".
F-35 fighters will also join the drills, which will include the largest number of 5th generation fighters ever to have taken part, according to a South Korea-based U.S. Air Force spokesman.
Around 12,000 U.S. service members, including from the Marines and Navy, will join SouthKorean troops. Aircraft taking part will be flown from eight U.S. and South Korean military installations.
South Korean media reports said B-1B Lancer bombers could join the exercise this week. The U.S. Air Force spokesman could not confirm the reports.
Trump said last week that additional major sanctions would be imposed on North Korea after Pyongyang's intercontinental ballistic missile test.
Earlier last month, Trump put North Korea back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation that allows the United States to impose more sanctions.
Russia has accused the United States of trying to provoke North Korean leader Kim Jong Un into "flying off the handle" over his missile programme to hand Washington a pretext to destroy his country.
Speaking at a news briefing in Beijing, Wang said China consistently opposed any behaviour that elevated tensions.
"And measures that don't abide by or are outside the UN Security Council resolutions lack basis in international law and damage the rights of United Nations members," Wang said when asked about the prospect of further U.S. sanctions against North Korea.
China's Air Force said on Monday that its surveillance aircraft had in recent days conducted drills in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea to "improve combat-readiness and safeguard the country's strategic interests".
The aircraft took a flight path not previously flown to regions they had never previously operated in, and coordinated with fighter jets, alert aircraft and guided missile forces, spokesman Shen Jinke said, according to a post on the Air Force's official microblog.
The joint exercises between South Korea and United States are designed to enhance readiness and operational capability and to ensure peace and security on the Korean peninsula, the U.S. military had said before the drills began.
The North's KCNA state news agency, citing a foreign ministry spokesman, said on Saturday the Trump administration was "begging for nuclear war by staging an extremely dangerous nuclear gamble on the Korean peninsula".
North Korea regularly uses its state media to threaten the United States and its allies.
North Korea has tested dozens of ballistic missiles and conducted its sixth and largest nuclear bomb test in September, in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
It has said its weapons programmes are a necessary defence against U.S. plans to invade. The United States, which has 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, denies any such intention.
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Fighting in Yemen's capital has intensified, with the known toll from three hospitals reaching at least 125 killed and 238 wounded in the past six days, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Monday.
Saudi-led coalition warplanes struck at Houthi militia positions in Yemen's capital Sanaa for a second day on Monday in support of ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, a former Houthi ally who has now renounced his alliance with the Iranian-backed group.
"We are supporting the main hospitals in Sanaa who urgently need war-wounded kits," ICRC spokeswoman Iolanda Jaquemet said. "We are also looking at donating dead body bags to hospitals which are actually asking for them, and we hope to donate fuel to the main hospitals because they depend on generators."
The ICRC "relocated" 13 international staff to Djibouti from Sanaa on Monday, she said.
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Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi called on Yemenis on Monday to rise up against the Iran-aligned Houthis after the death of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Speaking in a speech carried live on the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television, Hadi also called for a new chapter in the fight against the Houthis, who were allied with Saleh before he turned on them and offered to back the Saudi-led coalition.
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If only the rocks could talk.
If only the sandstones could sing, imagine the stories they'd tell, of dinosaurs, mammoth hunters and the "ancient ones" known as the Anasazi.
All roamed southern Utah over the eons, long before Native Americans struggled to hold their land against Mormon settlers, modern life and now, Donald Trump.
As the President arrives in Utah Monday afternoon, this rocky corner of the Wild West is a battlefield once again, but this time the warriors will carry briefcases and lawsuits.
Trump, by signing two presidential proclamations on Monday, shrunk the size of Bears Ears National Monument by more than 80% and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by roughly 45%, fundamentally reshaping the two large national monuments.
The proclamations split the two national monuments into several smaller sections. Bears Ears will be shrunk from 1.35 million acres to 228,337 acres, according to the spokesperson for Interior, and split into two separate monument sections. Grand Staircase-Escalante, a monument designated by President Bill Clinton, will be split into three sections and shrunk from 1.9 million acres to just about 1 million acres.
Trump slammed past administrations -- namely Clinton's and President Barack Obama's -- for what he called "federal overreach." The two former Democratic president designated Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante for protection, hoping to preserve their culture, history and natural beauty.
Past administrations, Trump said, thought "the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They are wrong."
"The families and communities of Utah know and love this land the best and you know the best how to take care of your land," Trump said. "You know how to protect it. And you know best how to conserve this land for many, many generations to come."
Locals in the area saw the designations as nothing more than a 3-million-acre federal land grab. The drillers, miners and frackers who were shut out by Clinton's and Obama's use of the Antiquities Act would have new leases on life. Sen. Orrin Hatch and his fellow Utah Republicans would have a major victory to celebrate.
But those who believe the rocks can talk, through countless fossils, sacred ruins and desert solitude, are bracing for a fight.
"I'm going to sue him," says Yvon Chouinard, founder and CEO of outdoor gear maker Patagonia. "It seems the only thing this administration understands is lawsuits. I think it's a shame that only 4% of American lands are national parks. Costa Rica's got 10%. Chile will now have way more parks than we have. We need more, not less. This government is evil and I'm not going to sit back and let evil win."
Chouinard led the effort to move a major outdoor show from Salt Lake City to Denver in protest of Utah's land use politics and he's been a big supporter of the historic coalition of the five local tribes, which put aside ancient rivalries and lobbied for monument protection.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said he was unmoved by people like Chouinard who are threatening lawsuits.
"I don't yield to pressure, only higher principle," he said. "And I don't think public policy should be based on the threat of lawsuit ... I feel very confident."
But Chouinard's arguments carry no sway at a pro-Trump, anti-monument rally in Monticello. Here, Chouinard represents all the liberal interests from outside, conspiring to pit neighbor against neighbor. "What's his net worth? One billion dollars? Two billion?" says San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman. "You got Patagonia in here waving the flag of environmentalism while he's completely exploiting the outdoors for industrialized tourism. For a person in that position to try and lecture morality to one of the poorest counties in the entire nation is wrong."
The size of New Jersey, San Juan is the biggest and poorest county in Utah and with this moment of political victory, Lyman finds kinship with the coal miners of Appalachia.
He points out that Bears Ears is the fifth national park or monument in his county and argues that oil and gas extraction would have less impact on the landscape than the brand of adventure tourism that has transformed nearby Moab. "By designating a monument, you are using a tool that will bring hordes of people to a place that is very sensitive," he says.
But according to former county commissioner and Navajo elder Mark Maryboy, cultural sensitivity is hard to find in San Juan County. "They didn't want to work with us," he says. "In fact, one of the county commissioners told me 'You guys lost the war so you have no business talking about the land planning process.'"
With efficient strides, he drops into a canyon near the San Juan River, past one of the 100,000 sacred ruins in Bears Ears, to a wall covered in 1,200-year old rock art. The spindly renderings of man and animal are the work of an artist they've dubbed "Wolfman" for the paw print signature that accompanies the pictoglyphs. And then he points out the modern bullet holes.
To his Navajo faith, this canyon holds the spirits of his loved ones and these carvings are just as sacred as any art in the Vatican or any wall in Jerusalem, yet someone has been using it for target practice.
"The local white community members are determined to get rid of all the art rock," he says. "It stands in the way of progress for them. It stands in the way of a job. New cars. New clothes. Rolex watch."
He's heard the argument that his people need jobs and that the extraction industry could provide them while protecting the most important sites.
But, he feels, history hasn't shown that to be true.
"The experience that Native Americans see in this county is discrimination," he says. "They are the last ones to be hired for any position. Even if there's a huge mining operation opening up, they will not be hired for that position. And they will be exposed to the toxic materials that are left on the ground or in the air."
Regardless of Trump's decision and unless Utah politicians can figure out a way to take them back and sell them off, the 3 million acres around Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante will remain public.
If you are an American, this is your land and these are your rocks. Pay them a visit sometime. You'll be amazed at the stories they tell.
CNN's Paul Vercammen, Rachel Clarke and Dan Merica contributed to this story.
As issues around wealth inequality, cultural disagreements, racial tensions and healthcare rage on, one cause still needs supporters - the environment. Ellie Goulding is the latest high profile celebrity to give her time to supporting environmental health and preservation, and has just been named a UN Environment Global Goodwill Ambassador, which she announced in a tweet that shows her with a pretty cute endangered giraffe named Ed.
I'm delighted to announce that I have become a UN Environment Global Goodwill Ambassador. Thank you to @unep head @eriksolheim for making it official @giraffe_manor. All witnessed by Ed the giraffe (he's pretty special. Only 800 of his species left). Feel very honoured :) pic.twitter.com/tDbuAGFmev
Ellie Goulding (@elliegoulding) December 3, 2017
The British pop star is currently at the UN Environment headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, and said in a statement that her "focus will be on amplifying the activism of young people committed to creating a bright future. I want as many people as possible to become advocates for the planet." Goulding joins Entourage actor Adrien Grenier in the UN initiative Clean Seas, which fights pollution in the ocean.
Image via YouTube
At first glance Jacob Whitesides doesn't seem to have the makings of your run-of-the-mill sex symbol and yet, that's exactly who the pop sensation has become. The freshly 20 year-old's Southern upbringing culminates in impeccable manners, he's endearingly curious and almost considerate to a fault, but there's no rebel without a cause, cigarette-smoking, see-you-in-hell-persona one might expect of someone of his popularity. This is perhaps because while, in a similar vein to Justin Bieber, or his close friend and collaborator Shawn Mendes, Jacob Whitesides has also built a career off the beating hearts of teen girls, Whitesides is almost entirely removed from his fame particularly in country music hotspot Nashville. Instead, his almost two million-strong Instagram following might collectively faint with the knowledge The X Factor-alum can't wait to settle down, but there's no chance of that happening any time soon.
After the success of his debut 2016 album Why?, Jacob Whitesides is back with two new singles, many more tattoos and ready for his takeover. We caught up with the young star to chat high profile relationships, DMing with fans and how to survive growing up in the public eye.
I'm curious about the stigma, if any, of coming from a reality show background, is that something that still follows you or do you feel completely detached?
I feel like it doesn't, because I got no air time from that. I made it semi far, I don't remember how far, but I literally didn't get any air time from that. Thank god. Fortunately.
Because it sticks to you?
Yep. It literally does.
It's bizarre because it's like, you prove that you're this amazing live performer, win fans across the country, then suddenly it's like, "Oh but you're not really a real artist." It's strange.
Totally my ex-girlfriend (Bea Miller) was on the same season as me but she made it really far. I feel like she's kind of detached herself from it but it's always still there. You type her name in Google and it's the first thing that comes up. I'm glad I didn't get that.
"Killing Me" is such a flawless pop song it felt like a game changer for you. How have you evolved as an artist?
I feel like everything naturally evolves from the next thing. I'm naturally growing up and experiencing new things. The first EP was the first time that I've ever written original music whatsoever. I've never really written before, maybe one or two songs, but I was always very involved in the creative process. I feel like everything's naturally evolved but not in a way that's trying too hard. Especially with the new stuff. I feel like some people turn eighteen or get in that adult range and they try so hard to detach themselves from the past stuff. I feel like everything's naturally grown. I also changed by management because with my last manager stuff I never got to get face to face with my team they kind of just put walls up. So now it's been awesome. Now I've got it all together so that I can go and meet with labels and stuff like that without them having to tell me exactly what to sound like and what to do.
Team in what sense?
Publicists, my label, my independent publisher. I don't know it's been really nice this time. I kind of cleaned house in the last year. I kind of fired everyone because I was working with all these people that I didn't have any face to face with because of my management. I'm actually finishing up writing, recording, and stuff. I've been meeting with a ton of record labels. I've always wanted to go the major top 40 route but I didn't want to do it until I felt like I was ready. I just cleaned house completely so it's been really nice.
I feel like a lot of artists how been doing that recently. I keep hearing about people that are like, "You know what I just dropped my lawyer and everything became so much easier."
That's literally what I just did. It wasn't like, "Fuck everyone" it was like, "Hey I feel like it's time, I need to move on." It's also awesome because a lot of my new team, my attorney, my manager and a lot of people that I've been meeting with are all based out of Nashville. I've always made all of my albums in Nashville.
It's funny because you're really not country at all.
Yeah, the pop scene in Nashville is really up-in-coming but no one fully commits to making a full Nashville record. People come in all the time, I'm really good friends with Shawn Mendes, and he's coming here for three weeks to create some of his new album. I know Neil just recorded his record in Nashville. A lot of artists come but they don't commit to doing the whole thing there.
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What's the attraction? Why Nashville?
Novelty...and there are just so so many talented musicians. It's the best hybrid because there's so much going on there but also it's a very chill environment. People like New York and LA, because they like the craziness. I feel like a lot of artists, especially on the indie side of things appreciate Nashville just because it's so relaxed and there's not a ton going on. It's still a happening city it's just under the radar.
I feel like prior to Taylor Swift people were saying that you come out of Nashville with pop.
One hundred percent. There's been multiple artists that have said, "You need to come work on your records in Nashville, there's a lot of unique stuff coming out of here, you should at least come and write here a little bit." All of their teams would literally say there's nothing good coming out of Nashville. Now that Nashville is starting to happen they're sending everyone there. It's amazing to see just because I've been in Nashville for a while.
Was there ever a time where you felt like you could step back from the artistry and just focus on writing?
Yeah I think so. I love that side of things and everything's been so crazy for me over the past four years. Now this is the first time in a while that I can just sit and create. We have so many songs so I'm sure that, I'm planning on signing a publishing deal next year, I'm sure that a lot of the songs that don't make the cut will find home for other artists. It's something that has always been a goal of mine. I write so freaking much that once I get in that mindset it's really nonstop for months. Every day in the week I end up with fifty songs and I only use ten of them.
Who would you love to write for?
I feel like I would appreciate collaborating more so. Being able to write with them for their project instead of pitching them songs that I already have. I kind of attach to all the songs that I write. I love the new Niall [Horan] record. I think it's really awesome.
I think he went a good way.
I think all of them have honestly. They're all very different. Zayn's definitely my favorite.
Zayn's your favorite?
Yeah. I love Zayn. I think that would be my cool collaboration just because his stuff is so interesting. He's also just a really interesting human. For someone that's so famous and has such amazing music he's so under the radar.
Is that a difficult part of the business for you? Being "on the radar"?
I think what I hate the most is just promo tour and stuff when you're just flying all the time. That shit stresses me out. There's so many times where I did a lot of the Jingle Ball stuff last year, and there are all these massive artists, and then I step in then they're like, "So what's your name?" It's so awkward. Usually when you're there they're like, "What's new or what are you working on?" That's usually the extent of the conversation, then it's just right on to the next one. You could literally hear them asking the same questions to this person and this person. Everyone's so close together. Those are my least favorite. I hate red carpet stuff. I'm also not really a stylish person either so all of these people are wearing these elaborate outfits and I have on skinny jeans and a t-shirt. I always feel so stupid. Everyone around me always dresses so nice and I'm super basic. I'm trying to step it up.
Also the fact that you just came out of a high profile relationship, there's that whole added element.
Yeah. I'm lucky I don't have a fan base that's really crazy and like, "Fuck anyone you date." I feel like I've always been so hyper involved with my fans that they have a genuine respect for me if I'm talking to someone or dating someone. We broke up the first time and her fans still supported me, my fans still supported her, it's chill. They like it, they enjoy the pictures and everything that comes along with it, but they're not crazy dramatic about it. It's been super badass only because I'm so close with so many [fans]. They can literally show up to my shows and I can recognize half of them. Mostly because I'm always online naturally.
Does that get not get tiring?
Not really. I just feel like even if I didn't have a following as an artist I'll still be that person that's always on his phone. It's a millennial thing honestly. Most of the time I'll get asked if it exhausts you but I just feel like I'd naturally be doing it anyways. The fact that I have people to talk to is sick.
Do you read everything?
For the most part yes. Honestly I read DM's, tweets, the comments. I usually do. I'm always hyper-involved.
You reply?
Yes all the time. That's kind of how it started.
It doesn't get to you at all?
Not really because people are super positive of me. I feel like the people that get the most negativity are the people who respond to it. So I've never been one to respond to it. Sometimes I will. Sometimes someone will piss me off and I'll say "Fuck you." It really drains your diehard fans to see you interacting with people who don't give a shit about you. When all of them are sitting there trying to talk to you and you're not responding. There's so many trolls on the internet that will look for vulnerable people to dive into. The people that sit there and respond the most are the people that they're going to come at the hardest because they know they're going to get a reaction and attention from it. They love it. I've just never been one to go right at it.
Sometimes I will say something like, "Hey that was fucking rude." I had to snap on a girl the other day. She tweeted at me and said, "You're not as active as you used to be." I was like, "I have a career outside of social media." I deleted it though. I'll usually snap then be like, "Shit, I shouldn't have done that and then delete it."
Can you live or are you constantly recognized?
I got recognized on the elevator on the way up just now. Some really sweet girl. She was going off at the sixth floor. She said, "I love you." She was an adult though. I forget that I'm 20 years-old now. When I see people who are my age that recognize me I feel really special but all my fans are honestly my age now. It's different.
Yeah they grew with you.
It's weird. I did that birthday show the other day. All these fans that use to come to my show with their parents are now sitting at the bar drinking liquor. It's interesting growing with them. I have such loyal fans. They stuck with me through everything. I opened up for Fifth Harmony four years ago. It was one of their first tours and their fans are very girl power, which I'm all for, but they did not like the fact that I was touring with them because I was a guy. They were coming for my neck constantly. It's crazy. For the longest time they would always harass me on social media for no reason, and then recently I got tattoos and started working out, I've grown taller and I dress better, so occasionally more and more I'd get a tweet from a Fifth Harmony account saying, "What happened to Jacob Whitesides his music is so good now. He looks good now and blah blah blah."
Was that a conscious decision, you're really embracing a new image now?
Yeah. I've always wanted to get tattoos. I kind of got into the fitness thing when I was in Europe because I was touring with this drummer that was so ripped and awesome. He taught me a bunch of things. I feel like all of this just happened very randomly but naturally. I'm just coming into my adult self in a way that's not crazy.
Listen to Jacob's new Christmas single below.
Image supplied
Exactly a week ago today, when the month of December was inaugurated with the announcement of 15 major black artists nominated for Grammy awards, I took to Google for a cursory search of "rich man" stock photos.
Unsurprisingly, 87 million results exclusively revealed images of middle-aged white men, their relationships with cash plainly visible in the garments on their backs, money bags accrued around their bodies and full champagne glasses.
But it also yielded a single portrait in color: a black man. Jay-Z stared coolly through the screen, pouring D'Usse into the mouth of one of three Grammys he won back in 2013two of which for "N*ggas in Paris," a song about black men existing at the nexus of Hollywood and the hood.
This year, leading the pack of nominees for his album 4:44an intimate confessional responding to Beyonce's Lemonade and bridging days of poverty with new moneythe hip-hop luminary was launched into the first Album of the Year category free of white men since 1999.
Cardi B enjoyed similar success. Having only debuted in November 2015, the radiant Afro-Dominican rapper was honored with two noms, both for "Bodak Yellow," the colloquial anthem of an unfuckwithable South Bronx woman of color getting her money by her own means (her net worth reportedly sits at $4 or 5 million, give or take).
Combined with Beyonce's recent dethroning of Taylor Swift as the richest woman in music, I thought of how satisfying it is to watch black artists' success affirmed by their material riches. Though granted superficially, their Grammys and money, each inevitably muddied by the fingerprints of affluent white men, feel oddly cathartic.
While I don't care much to know just how rich the super rich arethough a mental visitation to the role of creditor rather than debtor is a sweet break from realitythe triumphs of Cardi, Bey and Jay feel personal. Perhaps it's because they are pedagogically building black generational wealth that has never existed in Americathat although we're moving toward an entirely white hereditary aristocracy of fortune, they are interrupting a legacy of inequity.
I think they want that freedom for us, too. Jay-Z extends capital support to startup businesses. Yonce invests in and cultivates talent. Cardi distributes cash at the strip club.
Capitalism invites us to gauge success by measurable wealth. So if black oppression is a material struggle, perhaps black freedom responds materially, both in property and in image.
My family was never poor, but I learned the value of a dollar at a young age. I eventually assumed finance was the root of my existence in a broken nuclear family, succumbing to the mythologies that black people can't save money. So although the wealth of a child's family is the single greatest predictor of their future economic prospects, I am determined to cross the chasm between myself and my rich white counterparts.
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The average black family needs 228 years to build the wealth of a white one. But these artists are accessing that, and much more, in their lifetimes. They've seized reparations and snatched the keys to a kingdom from which they were supposed to be barred.
And they're holding their money close; on their bodies, liquidized in their hands, pressed as gold against their teeth. Black self-luxuriating is a radical and political act.
I wonder why they must be chided for practicing capitalism in its purest form, in garish spending and self-decorating, while others are envied for doing the same.
No matter, I'll continue to find solace in their material success, and every time "Bodak Yellow" comes on at the club, I'll sing it as though I wrote it myself.
Photo via Getty
A gay Australian lawmaker popped the question to his partner in parliament on Monday, with the first ever proposal in the chamber coming shortly after a bill paving the way for same-sex marriage was introduced.
Tim Wilson, who has reportedly been engaged to Ryan Bolger for nine years, fought back tears as he thanked his fiance for enduring a marriage debate that "has been the soundtrack to our relationship".
"In my first speech I defined our bond by the ring that sits on both of our left hands -- that they are the answer to the questions we cannot ask," the 37-year-old lawmaker from the ruling conservative party said.
"So there is only one thing left to do: Ryan Patrick Bolger will you marry me?"
Bolger, who was sitting in the public gallery, quickly responded "yes" as the floor erupted in applause.
"That was a 'yes', a resounding 'yes'," house speaker Rob Mitchell noted for the record. "Congratulations, well done mate."
The Australian House of Representatives official twitter account confirmed later that after reviewing past records, Wilson's proposal was likely the first ever in that chamber of Parliament.
"Update: We've dug through Hansard and @timwilsoncomau appears to be the first ever Member to propose on the floor of the House," it tweeted.
Wilson earlier emotionally recalled the uneasiness he experienced with some friends when he and Bolger were first engaged.
"Many simply didn't know how to react. Many SMS went unresponded. In conversations some people politely changed the topic, or fell silent entirely," he said.
His partner had pushed him to have an engagement party.
"On informing one person of our news, they responded: Why bother?
"At the time I fell silent and I have never had an answer to that question. But the Australian people have now answered that for me."
The same-sex marriage bill being debated is expected to comfortably pass through the House of Representatives before Christmas after the upper house Senate last week overwhelmingly voted in its favour.
After more than a decade of debate, Australians emphatically endorsed gay marriage in a recent nationwide postal vote, with some 62 percent of the 12.7 million who took part voting "yes" last month.
"This is a historic moment of inclusion, of recognition, of respect," Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said shortly after the bill was introduced for debate in the lower house Monday.
"This is a day to be especially proud that all of our friends, our colleagues, our neighbours, our brothers, our sisters, can marry the people they love."
Former conservative prime minister Tony Abbott, a leading voice in the 'no' campaign, said he would now back the bill.
"I certainly don't pretend to be an overnight convert to support same-sex marriage but I am pledged to respect and to facilitate the verdict of the Australian people," he said.
"Same-sex marriage should now be recognised. It will now be recognised."
Abbott moved an amendment he said protected discrimination against anyone over their "conscientious view about the nature of marriage", before saying he planned to attend his gay sister's wedding next year.
"I am looking forward to attending the marriage of my sister, Christine, to her partner Virginia some time early in the new year."
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Genesis Breyer P-Orridge doesn't want to be a guru. Any kind of hierarchy is essentially a means of exerting control over others, and stifling personal freedomthings P-Orridge categorically rejects. Despite that, however, P-Orridge, albeit inadvertently, is a radical teacher whose words can spark a bright light of understanding, and deliver incredibly impactful jolts of self-empowerment.
P-Orridge is also, of course, widely heralded as a pioneering artist: Founder of the sex-and-the-grotesque inspired performance collective COUM Transmissions in 1969; then came Throbbing Gristle, the legendary industrial music path-clearers; and later, in 1981, the genre-evading experimental outfit Psychic TV, through which emerged Thee Temple ov Psychick Youthan anti-cult fellowship of sorts, referred to as TOPY, replete with its own original sacred texts. (And of which P-Orridge is outspokenly not the leader, because there isn't one, period. A film is also in the works via indie labels Sacred Bones and Dais.)
In October, however, a medically-mandated hiatus from all appearances was announced: The 67-year-old has been performing for the last 50 years, most recently with Psychic TV, as well as lecturing at universities and LGBTQ events worldwidebut as a result of a chronic myelomonocytic leukemia diagnosis, P-Orridge would need to undergo "serious treatment" to combat the life-threatening cancer.
A Gofundme campaign has been organized by media and technology writer Douglas Rushkoff to help offset the financial burdenand physical stressthat such a diagnosis and subsequent treatment inevitably carries.
"We want Gen to be warm and fed through the winter, and focused on hopefully healing, not finances. The drugs are experimental, but promising. With continued therapy *and* low stress, Gen does not have to die from this, but could be back performing again sometime next year," Rushkoff stresses in the campaign description.
Prolific is a most appropriate descriptor of P-Orridge's consistent momentum of output; beyond Thee Psychick Bible, P-Orridge has written numerous texts, and is a visual cut-and-paste artist, as well.
Readers familiar with P-Orridge will also recall that, in the '90s, s/he (P-Orridge's preferred gender pronoun) began body modifications along with P-Orridge's late wife Lady Jaye. Together the pair endeavored to achieve a separate genderthe pandrogyne, named by Jaye and P-Orridgethat became Breyer P-Orridge, an amalgam that became a single, new individual. In 2011, Marie Losier documented the process during and in post, as Lady Jaye "dropped her body," as P-Orridge says, in 2007's The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye. Later, a journey to Ouidah, in the Republic of Benin in West Africa, where P-Orridge explores the origins of Vodoun (Voodoo) and the sacred role of twins within that particular commune, was documented in Bight of the Twin, released last year.
As P-Orridge focuses on getting better, we reflect on just a few bits of the vast wisdom s/he has amassedtimelessly illuminating reflections on art, life, gender, and more, were gifted to the public through interviews, lyrics, film, and the messages of Thee Temple of Psychick Youth.
1. On freedom and fear: "Why are they afraid of freedom? Why are they afraid of a different idea? Because they know what they've got has no strength. And that's our strength. They know that they have no strength, and they're trying to bluff everybody like playing poker, you know?"
Interview in Tbilisi, Georgia, October 26, 2016
2. On the purpose of art: "For me, art is the ultimate questions, the ultimate thoughts, how to deprogram yourself. I believe that everyone is programmed from birth, and that that is unhealthy. And that the artist is the inheritor of a tradition of wise peopleshaman, and priests, the ritual side of the social animal, there to expiate psychic and philosophical problems. That's what art is meant to be about, is rescuing people from the fear of death and the fear of life, and that's a very thin line.
It's also a line which our society doesn't even accept is there anymore; the reinforcement of the idea of there being a status quo and socially acceptable behavior is the norm, and I believe the artist is there to destroy and cut up and reposition and collide any possibility that they see in order to try and save people from being dead while they're alive. Now that, inevitably, is going to cause conflict with authority."
BBC interview, 1986
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN5NdqyYGFs&feature=youtu.be expand=1]
3. On information: "Information is like a bank. Some of us are rich, some of us are poor with information. All of us can be rich. Our job, your job, is to rob the bank, to kill the guard, to go out there, to destroy everybody who keeps and hides the whole information."
"Decoder 5: Information Bank," from the album Sugarmorphoses by Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV, 1994
4. On language as a means of control: "We worked a lot with Burroughs, who focused my attention on language and how important it is in terms of how this planet and culture are controlled. Language is integral to the suppression of the imagination. It doesn't have to be, but that's how it was utilized by those who have privilege and power. Burroughs was fascinated with hieroglyphs because they aren't linear and there's no alphabet. Because of this, he believed they worked directly on the nervous system and could bypass imposed filters of culture. As we said before, you're programmed by people's expectations even before you come out of the womb.
For me, language is critical in the war against control. It's critical in the short circuiting of control. When Burroughs and I first met in 1971, he said, 'Genesis, your task is: how do you short circuit control?' And we thought, well that was a bit pretentious, William. But we have to confess that we've been thinking about it ever since. He programmed me with an anti-program. He put a little virus in. Short-circuiting control means you have to think, where is control, what is control, how does it operate, and what are its leverages? Language is essential within that."
Interview with Mitch Mignano for RealitySandwich.com, 2016
5. On religion: "The only answer, if you look at every religion, and we've studied as many as we can, we've traveled the world, it all comes down to love. That's the only thing. It's so corny, but it's true."
Interview in Tbilisi, Georgia, October 26, 2016
6. On love: "Unconditional love is really, in the end, what we discovered is what makes it worth being here."
Interview in Berlin, September 14, 2014
7. On self-discipline: "Explore daily your deepest desires, fantasies and motives, gradually focusing on what you would like to happen in a perfect world, a perfect situation, taking away all restrictions and practical considerations, what you would really want... Once you are focused on yourself internally, thee external aspects of your life will fall into place. They have to."
Thee Psychick Bible, published 1994, and appears on Psychic TV's "A Message from The Temple," from the album Force the Hand of Chance, 1982
8. On Lady Gaga: "Then you have Lady Gaga, which is like, 'pa pa pa paparazzi.' We've got these two parallel words, yet again the either/or. You've either got 'pa pa pa paparazzi' or a poetic writer. Of course, both have validity. The validity of 'pa pa pa paparazzi' is a very brief revelation of the mundane, dilution of meaning that's being very carefully manipulated in our culture."
Interview with Mitch Mignano for RealitySandwich.com, 2016
Photo via Getty
Iran Opens Extension Of Key Chahbahar Port In Gulf Of Oman
12/04/17
Report by RFE/RL; photos by Akbar Tavakkoli, Islamic Republic News Agency
Iran has officially opened an extension of its southeastern port of Chabahar, which Tehran hopes will become a key transit hub for land-locked Afghanistan and Central Asia. State TV said President Hassan Rohani attended the inauguration on December 3 along with dignitaries from India, Qatar, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries.
President Rohani at the port of Chahbahar
"Through this port, goods will be delivered to neighboring countries at cheaper prices and in a shorter time," Rohani said at the ceremony.
Transport Minister Abbas Akhoundi said Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman will "soon become an important commercial hub for Iran."
The extension of Chabahar port, Iran's closest sea link to the Indian Ocean, more than tripled its capacity to 8.5 million tons of cargo annually, compared with the previous 2.5 million tons.
Construction was carried out by Khatam al-Anbia, a conglomerate owned by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and a number of subcontractors, including a state-run Indian company.
Rohani Downplays Rivalry
The extension required an investment of $1 billion, including $235 million from India.
Further stages of development are due to expand the port over the next 14 years.
New Delhi has committed up to $500 million for the development of the Chabahar port along with roads and railway lines in order to get access to the Afghan and Central Asian markets while bypassing rival Pakistan.
Analysts say the Chabahar port could challenge Pakistan's Gwadar port, some 80 kilometers from Chabahar, which is being developed with Chinese investment.
However, Rohani downplayed the rivalry in his speech, saying the port would bring "more engagement and unity" among regional countries.
"We should go after positive competition," he said. "We welcome other ports in the region, we welcome Gwadar's development."
In late October, India shipped its first consignment of wheat to Afghanistan from the western Indian port of Kandla. The shipment is to be taken by trucks to Afghanistan from Chabahar.
Pakistan has banned India from transporting goods through its territory to Afghanistan.
Iran is planning to link the Chabahar port with a railway to the northeastern city of Mashhad to further facilitate trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia.
However, the project has been slow to materialise.
With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP
In recognition of their contribution towards the economic development of the Ashanti region, Manhyia Palace over the weekend presented a Gold Award to Agro Ecom for their immense support to Ghanas cocoa industry.
The Administrative Manager of Agro Ecom, Seth Hammond, who received the award on behalf of the company, pledged the commitment of the company to continue with its vision of ensuring that cocoa farmers in the country get the best support they need.
Agro Ecom Ghana is part of the Ecom Group which is a Swiss-based commodity merchant and sustainable supply chain Management Company with operations in over 40 countries world-wide.
In Ghana, the company is a member of the Cocoa Buyers Association of Ghana (LICOBAG) and works with over 140,000 farmers.
It has a vision to show that through innovation and entrepreneurship, prosperity can be built.
As a leading private licensed cocoa buying company in Ghana, Agro Ecom also buys and sells other crops such as cashew and sesame. It also guides and trains farmers on how to reach sustainability and high quality, certified produce.
The company runs a large logistics business with a fleet of almost 150 modern trucks and provides input products that yield healthy crops and offers innovative micro-finance options.
This has positioned Agro Ecom at the forefront of changing the industry, driving a unique business model that safe-guards the future of cocoa and other crops in Ghana.
It has a staff capacity of 500 full time employees and individual engagement with 5,000 stakeholders and over 140,000 farmers.
Ashanti Business Excellence Awards, is organized annually under the Authority of Manhyia Palace.
Source: thepublisheronline
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The main event saw president Adama Barrow addressing citizens about the victory of December 2016 and warning that there was more work to be done to better the lives of the people.
Jammeh until 2016 had been president of the Gambia for 22 years since he took power as a 29-year-old lieutenant in a bloodless coup. He kicked out the countrys first president, Dawda Jawara.
Despite coming in as a 29-year-old he was to leave as a 51-year-old democrat who was known more for his autocratic ways and widely believed to be a person who abused rights of the media and of opponents.
Jammeh openly conceded his loss in a televised address a day after the elections (December 2, 2016). He addressed the nation and was shown congratulating Barrow in a phone call.
Things will, however, take a turn as he rejected the results a week later with the reason that the results were manipulated.
I want to make it very clear, in the same way I accept the results on the basis that the IEC is independent, I will not accept the result. I reject the results, Jammeh announced.
I hereby annul the results and we will go back to the polls, he added. He will go ahead to refuse the then ECOWAS leaders visit to Banjul. Ellen Johnson Sirleafs plane was denied landing rights.
A back and forth ensued from widespread condemnation of his move, ECOWAS sent mediation teams led by Muhammadu Buhari, some Gambians began fleeing for fear of violence.
Source: africanews
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 Minority Chief Whip in Parliament, Alhaji Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka has stated that Members of Parliament (MPs) are under severe financial pressure due to the nature of their work.
According to him, MPs, who represent the people of Ghana, are simply working to be poor.
Speaking at a parliamentary constituency forum in Bekwai over the weekend, the MP for Asawase stated that the car loan facility that is forced on MPs is burdensome and torturous.
The programme, which is an initiative of the Public Affairs Unit of Parliament, brought together people from diverse backgrounds, including chiefs, who posed questions to the MPs on some aspect of their work in parliament.
Alhaji Muntaka commented: With the pressure brought to bear on MPs to amortise the loan plus the cost incurred during party primaries, no one should tell you that were simply working poor.
No one should endure this as part of his job, and we take this problem extremely seriously because not even the aggregation of our monthly salaries in addition to the ex-gratia can offset the cost that we incur, the MP said.
He appealed to voters and constituents not to burden MPs with demand of money so as not to tempt them to be corrupt, intimating that Ghanas politics has always been rough.
The Majority Leader and Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu said MPs are not agents of development, but facilitators, who should never promise developmental projects while canvassing for the votes of the electorate.
According to him, MPs share of the Common Fund cannot construct a six-unit classroom block and roads, arguing that such funds could only purchase roofing sheets and bags of cement for the needy constituents.
You should hold the executive, including the District Assemblies, accountable. They have the money to spend on development; they have the responsibility to construct roads, classroom blocks and provide potable water for you, Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu asserted.
He educated participants on the work of legislators, and called on the electorate to elect wise and knowledgeable people to the august House.
Other speakers at the programme were the First Deputy Speaker, Joseph Osei-Owusu, who is also the MP for Bekwai, Emmanuel Gyamfi, MP for Odotobiri and Alhaji Mohammed Briamah Bawah of Ejura-Sekyedumase Constituency.
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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President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is expected to lead a high powered delegation to mourn the death of the Asantehemaa, Nana Afia Kobi Serwaa Ampem II today.
The grand two-week funeral of the late Asantehema officially started on Friday, 1st December, 2017.
Some world leaders are expected to travel to the Manhyia Palace to mourn the death of the Asantehema in the coming days.
President Akufo-Addo would storm the palace and console the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II and Asantehemaa, Nana Ama Konadu II on behalf of government and people of Ghana.
Sources at the Manhyia Palace disclosed that todays ceremony would be impressive because the first gentleman of the land would join Asanteman to mourn the death of the Asantehema.
It would be recalled that President Akufo-Addo also led similar government delegation to the Manhyia Palace some few months ago during the burial of the late Asantehemaa, who died at the age of 111.
Otumfuo Fires Musketry
The rich Asante culture and traditions, which date several centuries, would be on display at the venue.
According to sources, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II would fire gunshot to show to the entire world that he and Asanteman are mourning.
The Asantehene would be dressed in Batakari Kesee, which literally means the big smock and carried in a palanquin at the Pampamso area in Adum, the city center.
From Pampaso, the Asantehene and his chiefs, elders, servants and mourners, would go through the principal streets of Kumasi.
The days activities would be climaxed with a durbar in the bush behind the Manhyia Palace where the Asantehene would fire a symbolic gunshot.
Nana Afia Kobi Serwaa Ampem II reigned for 39 years before she joined her ancestors after a short illness.
She has since been succeeded by Nana Ama Konadu II.
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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Two male first-year students of Kumasi Academy Senior High School (KUMACA) have died and three others are seriously ill under mysterious circumstances.
The two deceased students reportedly fell sick suddenly on separate occasions and gave up the ghost after they had been rushed to the hospital for treatment.
The shocking death of the two students is said to have ignited fear and tension in the school, which is situated in the Asokore Mampong Municipality.
It would be recalled that about five students of KUMACA also died under similar strange circumstances earlier this year.
Cassandra Twum Ampofo, the Ashanti Regional Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Ghana Education Service (GES), confirmed the recent deaths to DAILY GUIDE in a chat.
She said the temperature of one of the first-year students suddenly shot up Wednesday evening and he reported to the schools infirmary for treatment.
The students condition deteriorated and so he was rushed to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) Hospital for treatment.
According to her, the condition of the student (name withheld), worsened and so he passed away at about 4am on Thursday at the hospital.
Cassandra said on that same Thursday, at about 7:30 pm, another first-year student was also rushed to the schools sickbay, having high temperature.
She said on the school nurses recommendation, he was taken to the KNUST Hospital for treatment but sadly he also passed on.
The PRO, amid sobs, narrated that another student also reported sick and he was quickly rushed to the KNUST Hospital for immediate attention.
According to Ms Twum Ampofo, that students parents advised that their child be transferred to the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, where he is still on admission.
Meanwhile, unconfirmed information indicates that four students two males and two females are on admission at the KNUST Hospital and are responding to treatment.
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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Celebrated Ghanaian Economist and Investment consultant, Kwame Pianim has said hes not interested in pushing frantically for or lobbying for an appointment under the Akufo-Addo administration.
A founding member of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), not much has been heard from Mr Pianim who has served in several public institutions and on governing saboards, since President Akufo-Addo assumed power almost a year ago.
His last employment was with the erstwhile Kufuor administration where he served as the Chairman of the Public Utility Regulation Council (PURC), but he resigned in December 2007 as a result of differences with the government.
Some were looking forward to see Mr Pianim with his vast experience heading at least a governing board of a state institution but that has not been the case.
Speaking on Kasapa FM, Mr Pianim who though advanced in age believes he still has a lot to offer the country, however is of the view that the younger generation should rather be given opportunity to serve in public office to help build the country.
It is now time for the younger ones to be given positions to serve, they are more stronger and can execute the demanding task that comes with heading public office. Some of us are old now and will want to take the back seat and monitor proceeding and be giving advises when necessary. If our services are needed well be called upon. President Akufo Addo knows that whenever he calls upon some of us, well always answer him and give the needed assistance. Theres no point in competing for appointment with the younger ones. From where I sit, if I see something going wrong Ill prompt the President about it. If there are issues concerning the economy that I want to bring to the attention of the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta, Ill do so.
Andrew Kwame Pianim serves as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of New World Investment Limited (NWIL), a consultancy firm. Mr. Kwame Pianim is a renowned Economist and Financial Consultant with diversified work experience in the international arena and in public and private sectors of the Ghanaian Economy. Prior to the incorporation of New World Investments Limited, he was a private economic and investment consultant, specializing in packaging investments for private placement.
He served as Deputy Managing Director of Ghana Aluminum Products Limited, Tema and as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Cocoa Board from 1978 to 1979. He served as a Principal Secretary at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning from 1970 to 1972.
He served as an Economic Research Officer at the United Nations, New York from 1964 to 1970. Mr. Pianim serves as Chairman of United Bank for Africa (Ghana) Limited. He also serves on the boards of a number of Ghanaian companies, which include, Unique Insurance Company Limited, Taysec Construction Limited, amongst others. Mr. Pianim holds a B.A.(Hons ) in Economics and Political Science from the University of New Brunswick, Canada (1963) and an M.A. in Economics from Yale University, U.S.A. (1964).
Source: kasapafmonline.com
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European Council President Donald Tusk cancelled a trip to Israel and the Palestinian Territories planned for this week due to a "critical moment" in Brexit negotiations, an EU official said on Monday.
Tusk, who scheduled a meeting in Brussels at short notice on Monday with British Prime Minister Theresa May, will chair an EU summit next week that London hopes will give the go-ahead to opening talks on post-Brexit trade relations.
On Wednesday, Tusk had been due to meet Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah in Ramallah and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
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Minister of Information, Mustapha Hamid has said the youth in Ghana can succeed even if the devil is President of Ghana.
According to him, the youth primarily need to persevere and be determined to succeed instead of seeking greener pastures in other countries like Libya or in Europe.
He suggested that bad leadership and a corresponding poor economic condition was not a good enough reason to undertake such deadly voyage.
Mustapha Hamids comment comes on the back of the global wave over modern slavery involving black Africans in Libya.
Reports indicate that victims of the dehumanizing practice including Ghanaians, Ethiopians, Sudanese and Nigerians who left their countries to seek greener pastures in Libya, with some using that country as a route through the Mediterranean into Europe.
Some have said that the illegal immigrants cannot be blamed for the situation, rather, the leadership of the various countries for their superintending poor economic conditions.
But Mustapha Hamid who spoke at an Open Forum on migration at the University of Ghana, said, let us tell our young people, that even if the devil is president of Ghana, and they have the willpower, the determination to succeed in their country, then they will succeed.
He noted that the Ghanaian youth need to change their mindset and develop ingenious ways to succeed rather than accumulating money to travel illegally to Europe.
He said they should invest their monies into profitable ventures and ideas that will help them succeed in the country.
If you have been able to.like somebody said, mobilize $1,500 of your money, that means you are ingenious enough to succeed in this country, he said noting that the Ghanaian youth must change his perception and develop a spirit that will enable him thrive in the country even under the worse economic circumstance.
127 Ghanaian detainees in Libya return home
A total of 127 Ghanaian illegal migrants who were in detention camps in Libya returned home last Wednesday.
The Ghanaians and some other black Africans were reported to have been subjected to inhumane treatment after giving away their lifes earnings and making torturous journeys through the Sahara hoping to make it big in Europe.
Two chartered flights full of Ghanaians touched down at the Kotoka International Airport on Wednesday night.
Source: citifmonline.com
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NDC Member of Parliament for Yapei Kusawgu, John Jinapor says President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo is playing the role of a serial caller than a president in his style of communication.
Mr. Jinapor, who finds the presidents mode of communication as unfortunate, noted that he [Nana Addo] must be advised to behave like a president.
The former deputy Minister for Power in the Mahama-led government comment comes after the president responded to remarks from some National Democratic Congress MPs that his flagship free Senior High School policy will collapse in five years, saying it will be "sustained."
Former President John Mahama, whos set to run for president again, has questioned the full implementation of the program when the constitution says it should be done progressively.
In addition, some NDC communicators and MPs have predicted the collapse of the program.
However, President Akufo-Addo on Saturday said "free SHS is here to stay," adding that the NDC has a record of scrapping pro-poor policies.
I know, and I am sure I am not the only one who has heard, the people who are mounting political platforms, speaking on television and radio, and putting up posts on social media, hoping and praying for this policy to collapse, he said at the 60th Anniversary Celebrations of the Kumasi Academy, in Kumasi.
He continued, We know those who have a record for scrapping pro-poor policies nursing and teacher trainees will bear testimony. I wish to assure them that Free SHS will be sustained, that Free SHS is here to stay. The overwhelming majority of Ghanaians support the choice that I have made in implementing Free SHS.
Speaking on Neat FMs morning show dubbed Ghana Montie, Mr. John Jinapor said The President is rushing with his policies. He should be diplomatic in his choice of words and comport himself as a president. He should talk like an elected president. He [President Nana Addo] should move away from his political campaign time and act like a president. The NDC has no intention of collapsing any policies.
Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/ Twitter: @Washman5/ Instagram: Ambrose_wash
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The General Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana, Rev Dr Kwabena Opuni- Frimpong has described the Presidents campaign to create a Ghana beyond aid as cheap populist talk.
According to him, Ghana still needs aid and that people who campaign against development aid to Ghana appear not to know what the reality looks like.
Rev Opuni-Frimpong noted that donor countries had to monitor case by case to see that the money was well spent to have their moneys worth.
He said such populist campaign undermines operations of nongovernmental organisations and other institutions that do business with the donor agencies.
Rev Dr Samuel Asenso Bediako, a former pastor of the Presbyterian Church now based in the United States, also described the Presidents campaign as premature and unnecessary looking at the countrys current economic situation.
We need more than sweet political promises, rambling narratives and confusing signals, no matter how amusing, we need real change and the nation needs a new birth.
We need political leaders who are ready to confront our challenges with practical, tough but prudent solutions, walk their talk, will always be on the side of the people who are committed, not in the cradle of those who will eventually stab the masses in the back after getting their votes.
There are many Ghanaians still jobless, the face of poverty is still on our streets, there are still no accountability for rights violators, there are still multiple standards of justice and people still cynical about our justice system because of political manipulations and our corrupt officials are called heroes by their political friends, Rev Bediako lamented.
He advised politicians in Africa to stop their cheap political rhetoric about development aid to Africa stressing that the President should focus on building on what he inherited from his predecessors and clear from his government arrogant officials.
Rev Bediako slammed politicians who fantasize that they are omnipotent appointees who think public service is a private trust fund.
These are the issues the President should concern himself with, after 10 months the demagogic promises seem to have given way to compromise, reversals and even betrayal over time.
People waited and still waiting with varying degree of disbelief and hope that poverty will wane, corruption curbed, impunity abated, economic well being assured, foreign intervention and domination stopped.
These are the issues we must dispassionately tackle not cheap populist narratives and assurances, Rev Bediako stressed.
Source: The Ghanaian Times
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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Police from multiple western Pennsylvania departments arrived to find a large, inflamed crowd outside a strip club in the wee hours of this morning.
The worked-up crowd outside Club Erotica in McKees Rocks, Allegheny County, Pa., broke into two groups and then allegedly ignited into a brawl around 1:40 a.m. today, WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh reports.
At least two people injured in the strip club brawl were hospitalized this morning, the station reports. Their conditions weren't immediately known.
Witnesses told WTAE the two groups got into a fight, but it was not clear what touched off the fracas.
WTAE reported at least one person being detained by police. The person was later released.
Authorities have not said whether any arrests were made, the station added.
Seth Mull has already been accused of raping a woman in Bethlehem, Pa.
Now, the 30-year-old is being investigated as a possible a sexual predator with victims across the country, including as many as a dozen victims from the Pittsburgh area, KDKA-TV is reporting:
It is believed Mull used social media and dating apps to meet and lure women, KDKA writes. Police have received complaints from as far away as California and Hawaii - women coming forward with stories, like the ones officials believe attracted women from the Pittsburgh area as well.
Once Mull successfully attracts a woman, police say he has been involved in sexually assaulting women and holding them against their will, KDKA writes, adding:
Mull was arrested back in October after authorities say he refused to let a woman leave his hotel room in Bethlehem. Police say he kept her there for 24 hours, where he raped, strangled and burned her.
Since then, other victims have come forward with allegations of being held against their will.
Police are still trying to determine if Mull was involved in human trafficking, KDKA adds. But investigators say he appeared to use threats to keep the women from escaping.
"Once the women are in his presence, he becomes aggressive and controlling," Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli is quoted by KDKA as saying.
Authorities continue to seek additional information about Mull and are asking additional women to come forward if they were assaulted by him.
"We need to know what occurred with this individual and any other young lady out there," Bethlehem Police Chief Mark DiLuzio told KDKA.
One family's pizza night at a posh pizza shop in the Society Hill section of Philadelphia turned tragic when a 16-month-old boy fell off a second floor balcony inside the restaurant Saturday night.
As NBC-10 and CBSPhilly.com report, the child, who was not named in initial reports, plunged from the second floor balcony inside Pietro's Coal Oven Pizzeria on 121 South Street.
The boy was rushed to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia to be treated for injuries in the fall.
At last report, the boy was listed in stable condition at the hospital.
Philadelphia police responded to the incident and were investigating the child's fall.
President Donald Trump on Sunday morning lashed out at ABC News, two days after investigative reporter Brian Ross made an erroneous report involving the president.
Ross had incorrectly reported Friday that during Trump's presidential campaign, Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election.
Later that night, Ross read a "clarification" on "ABC World News Tonight," saying Trump had actually asked Flynn to make contact with Russia after the election, when he was president-elect.
Flynn, who briefly served as Trump's national security adviser after the election, pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI.
ABC News apologized for the mistake Saturday and issued a full correction. The network also suspended Ross for four weeks without pay, effective immediately.
On Twitter Saturday night, Trump initially offered his "congratulations" to ABC News for "suspending Ross for his horrendously inaccurate and dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt."
Congratulations to @ABC News for suspending Brian Ross for his horrendously inaccurate and dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt. More Networks and papers should do the same with their Fake News! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused - many millions of dollars! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Many Trump supporters, including the president's adult children, accused Ross of propagating "fake news" and linked his report to the Dow dropping 350 points.
On Sunday, the president took aim at the network itself, calling for those affected by the stock market tumble to "consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused."
The network had "broken" Ross' report Friday with a tweet that read: "JUST IN: @BrianRoss on @ABC News Special Report: Michael Flynn promised "full cooperation to the Mueller team" and is prepared to testify that as a candidate, Donald Trump "directed him to make contact with the Russians."
The tweet, which has since been deleted, included a link to a story and a photo. It was shared and liked tens of thousands of times before it was removed.
Later Friday night, ABC then issued a "clarification," in the form of a new tweet and Ross' on-air appearance on "World News Tonight" with host David Muir. The subsequent tweet, which has also since been deleted, read: "CLARIFICATION of ABC News Special Report: Flynn prepared to testify that President-elect Donald Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians *during the transition* - initially as a way to work together to fight ISIS in Syria, confidant now says."
ABC News was widely panned, even by those in the media industry, for its bungled handling of Ross's error. Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer called the network's "clarification" a "cop out and just another reason for the decline in trust of the media."
Several lamented that ABC had given ammunition to those who have long accused the mainstream media of being "fake news."
"This is not a 'clarification,' this is a huge effing difference," BBC senior reporter Anthony Zucher said on Twitter. The clarification also "took hours to do," noted CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski.
It wasn't until late Saturday afternoon that ABC issued a full correction and characterized Ross' mistake as a "serious error."
"We deeply regret and apologize for the serious error we made yesterday. The reporting conveyed by Brian Ross during the special report had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process," ABC News said in a statement. "As a result of our continued reporting over the next several hours ultimately we determined the information was wrong and we corrected the mistake on air and online."
The statement continued: "It is vital we get the story right and retain the trust we have built with our audience - these are our core principles. We fell far short of that yesterday."
Ross said he accepted the disciplinary action.
"My job is to hold people accountable and that's why I agree with being held accountable myself," he tweeted Saturday.
Ross has worked for ABC News for more than two decades, joining the network in 1994 and reporting for shows like "20/20" and "Good Morning America." According to his bio on ABC's website, Ross has won numerous journalism awards over the years, "including seven duPont-Columbia Awards, six Peabody Awards, six Polk Awards, 16 Emmys, five awards from the Overseas Press Club, and five Edward R. Murrow Awards and many more."
However, Ross has also racked up several notable corrections in his career. In 2012, following a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, Ross incorrectly reported that the suspect was a local tea party leader with the same name as the actual shooter. He later retracted the report.
"ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted," an editor's note on the online story reads.
In its coverage of Ross' misreporting on the Colorado shooting, Politico recalled Ross had also incorrectly reported in 2006 that the FBI was investigating Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert for bribery. The Justice Department denied the story then. In 2015, Hastert was charged with breaking federal banking laws and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in a hush-money case.
In 2001, Ross also erroneously linked anthrax used in attacks in Washington and New York with Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein. Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer confirmed Sunday that, at the time, he had told ABC News not to air the incorrect story, but that Ross had done so anyway. ABC later acknowledged the mistake and retracted the reports.
(c) 2017, The Washington Post * Amy B Wang. Paul Farhi contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON -- A Senate investigation into connections between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election suggests that a potential case of obstruction of justice is developing against the president, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Sunday.
"What we're beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice," Feinstein, D-Calif., the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said about the committee's investigation.
"We see this in the indictments, the four indictments, and pleas that have just taken place, and some of the comments that are being made," said Feinstein, who is also a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "I see it in the hyper-frenetic attitude of the White House: the comments every day, the continual tweets."
Feinstein, on NBC's "Meet the Press," was referring to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates, who face charges including money laundering in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation; former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos; and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Papadopoulos and Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
Feinstein said the most important instance was Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, which she believes was "directly because he did not agree to 'lift the cloud' of the Russia investigation" as he said Trump requested.
"That's obstruction of justice," Feinstein said.
Feinstein said her concern about the Trump White House "rises with the day" and hit a tipping point about a month ago. "There is a kind of instability, unpredictability," she said. "It's one issue after the other."
In a statement released Friday, Feinstein called Flynn's guilty plea on Friday regarding his conversations with Russians a "stunning revelation."
"This shows a Trump associate negotiating with the Russians against U.S. policy and interests before Donald Trump took office and after it was announced that Russia had interfered in our election," Feinstein said in the statement.
Asked Sunday on NBC whether Trump is a target of the investigation, Feinstein said she assumes that "many in the White House are under investigation in this" and that she doesn't believe that Flynn "was a rogue agent."
"I think he had to have been directed," Feinstein said. "Now whether the special counsel can find that evidence or not, whether we can, I don't know yet. But I see that that's where this is going." Also on "Meet the Press," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Mueller's investigation was "making progress."
Collins, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she didn't know whether there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, "but what we do know is there were conversations during the transition period."
There's only one president during the transition period and that was Barack Obama, so those conversations "should not have been taking place, but that does not confirm collusion," Collins said.
(c) 2017, Bloomberg. Ros Krasny wrote this story.
Britain and the EU failed to strike a Brexit divorce deal after a dispute over the Irish border scuppered talks in Brussels on Monday, but both said they were confident of reaching an agreement later this week.
British Prime Minister Theresa May and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker appeared to have made a breakthrough on easing Dublin's concerns about future frontier arrangements.
Britain was prepared to keep the EU customs and single market rules for Northern Ireland in order to meet Dublin's insistence that Brexit should not bring back a "hard border" and threaten a peace process that ended decades of sectarian tensions on the island, sources said.
But any such deal was swiftly undone thanks to fierce opposition from Northern Irish unionists who prop up May's minority Conservative government, in a development that Ireland's premier called "surprising and disappointing".
The EU says Britain must make sufficient progress on key divorce issues -- Ireland, Britain's financial bill for leaving the bloc, and the rights of EU nationals in Britain -- to allow the opening of trade and transition talks at a summit on December 15.
"Despite our best efforts... it was not possible to reach a complete agreement today," Juncker said at a joint news conference with May, adding that she was a "tough negotiator."
"This is not a failure... I am very confident that we will reach an agreement in the course of this week," added the former Luxembourg premier.
May said differences remained on a "couple of issues".
"But we will reconvene before the end of the week, and I am also confident we will conclude this positively," May said.
EU President Donald Tusk -- who had earlier described Monday as the "absolute deadline" for a deal -- said that "it is now getting very tight but agreement at December (summit) is still possible."
Tusk, the former Polish premier who chairs EU summits, said he had been ready to present draft guidelines on Tuesday to start trade talks "but UK and (the) Commission asked for more time."
Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party -- which has held the balance of power in the British parliament since May's disastrous showing in elections earlier this year -- said they rejected the deal despite a desperate telephone call from the British premier.
"We will not accept any form of regulatory divergence which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom," DUP leader Arlene Foster said in a statement.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said he felt let down, having been asked by the EU chiefs whether he accepted a deal, only to hear later it had fallen through.
"I am surprised and disappointed that the British government now appears not to be in a position to conclude what was agreed earlier today," Varadkar said at a press conference in Dublin.
"I accept that the Prime Minister (Theresa May) has asked for more time, and I know that she faces many challenges, and I acknowledge that she is negotiating in good faith," he added.
In a sign of the tensions within the United Kingdom caused by Brexit, the leaders of Scotland and Wales together with the mayor of London all called for similar deals to the one being considered for Northern Ireland.
May, Brexit minister David Davis and the prime minister's Brexit adviser Olly Robbins attended the "working lunch" with Juncker, the EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and Juncker's chief of staff Martin Selmayr.
The EU has demanded "sufficient progress" from Britain on the exit bill, citizens rights and Ireland in order to move on to talks on a post-Brexit transition period of up to two years, and on a future relationship including a trade deal.
Failure to do so this month could make the EU "rethink" whether an overall Brexit withdrawal deal is possible at all, Tusk has warned.
After months of stalemate, London and Brussels have effectively reached a deal on the divorce settlement, reported to be 45 billion to 55 billion euros ($51 to $63 billion), which was previously the most contentious issue.
A deal is also close on the rights of more than three million Europeans living in Britain, though there is still disagreement over whether they would be protected by the European Court of Justice -- a red line for Brexit supporters in Britain.
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American Airlines said it has reached an agreement with its unionized pilots on a plan to staff flights that had been unstaffed because of a computer glitch,
The computer problem discovered last week had resulted in far too many pilots approved for time off between Dec. 17 and Dec. 31. The situation had the potential to cause thousand of holiday flights to be canceled.
American Airlines and the union representing pilots announced they had an agreement, but didn't immediately reveal details.
A Harrisburg father was sentenced to 6 to 12 years in state prison Monday immediately after admitting his guilt for the starvation death of one of his 5-month-old twin daughters.
Dauphin County Judge John F. Cherry imposed that penalty after Leviticus Hardy, 35, pleaded to a third-degree murder charge, plus counts of child endangerment and aggravated assault.
Hardy's plea came 11 months after the mother of the girls, Dionne Bishop, also pleaded guilty to homicide and was sentenced to 13 to 30 years behind bars.
And like Bishop, Hardy said nothing before Cherry sent him to jail.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Sean McCormack said Hardy was responsible for the death of his daughter, Lakia, and near-death of her sister, Lamia, but not to the degree of Bishop, who was the primary caregiver.
Bishop was the primary caregiver, the prosecutor said. Hardy was having severe medical problems and was hospitalized during some of the period where the girls were endangered, McCormack said.
Still, he said Hardy could have acted to prevent tragedy, perhaps by just making a phone call to authorities.
"These children starved. One starved to death and one nearly starved to death," McCormack said. "He would have seen what was going on."
Lakia Hardy died in Harrisburg Hospital on May 8, 2015, shortly after authorities rushed to her parents' Naudain Street home for a call about a child in respiratory distress.
Investigators said an autopsy showed Lakia, who weighed just 4.8 pounds, died from complications of child malnutrition syndrome.
McCormack said the parents had not been taking Lakia to medical appointments, nor were they giving her medicine prescribed for a blood clotting condition.
Lamia survived after she was rushed to Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center for treatment.
Hardy pleaded guilty just before his case was to go to trial.
Presidents and ministers from 24 nations will gather in Sharm El-Sheikh on Thursday for a three-day conference of the COMESA free-trade area, discussing investment and development issues affecting eastern and southern Africa.
The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) announced its "Africa 2017" conference on Monday, saying the event from 7 to 9 December will see 10 national leaders and 40 ministers in attendance.
The event is being organized in cooperation with Egyptian Ministry of Investment and International Cooperation, and will see the participation of 1,500 high-profile executive managers and investors from 500 different African and international companies, COMESA director Heba Salama told state-run news agency MENA.
According to Salama, the conference will include discussions on integration mechanisms between African economies, and the ways to consolidate investments between them, as well as the role of the private sector in achieving sustainable development.
The event will also promote good investment opportunities in Africa, especially in the COMESA trade area, Salama added.
Egypt is hosting the event as one of 20 COMESA member nations, with others including Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Comoros, Djibouti, Libya and Sudan.
The free-trade organization aims at achieving "sustainable economic and social progress in all member states through increased co-operation and integration in all fields of development particularly in trade, customs and monetary affairs, transport, communication and information technology, industry and energy, gender, agriculture, environment and natural resources," according to the official website.
The Africa 2017 conference is intended to "bring together decision makers and businessmen from the continent, as well as international funders, providing a big opportunity for a better future for African countries," Salama said.
She stressed that there is a financial gap of $93 billion in the field of infrastructure in Africa, saying the private sector in Africa can fill the gap and help to provide services.
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The new Lamborghini 'Urus' the first Super Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) by Lamborghini, is presented at the headquarters in Sant'Agata Bolognese, near Bologna, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Lamborghini unveiled the once-improbable Urus SUV on Monday at its headquarters in SantAoAgata, Italy, where the supercar maker owned by the Volkswagen group is expanding the factory to meet utility vehicle demand. (Giorgio Benvenuti/ANSA via AP)
Dozens gathered at the St. John's Cemetery in Halifax on Sunday to remember the children and staff at an orphanage who were killed in the Halifax Explosion. Mourners sing hymns beside an obelisk memorial to the orphans and staff of the Halifax Protestant Orphanage who were killed in the 1917 Halifax Explosion, in Halifax on Sunday, December 3, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adina Bresge
Egypt will lower tariffs next January 2018 on cars imported from EU countries, Al-Ahram Arabic news website reported on Monday.
Vice-Minister of Finance for Tax Policy Amr Mounir announced that the tariffs would be lowered starting from January 2018 as part of the Egyptian-EU partnership agreement.
Mounir made the announcement while speaking at the conference of the executive committee of the World Customs Organization, which is currently being held in Luxor, marking the conference's the first time in Egypt as well the Middle East and Africa.
The Egyptian-EU partnership agreement stipulates that Egypt is to lower tariffs on cars imported from the EU by 10 percent annually. The agreement was implemented in 2010 and, according to it, the tariffs on imported European automobiles will be cancelled by 2019.
Amr Mounir added that only the Value Added Tax "VAT" and the development tariff would be kept on on cars imported from the EU and that these taxes did not increase as some claimed.
One hundred guests from 30 foreign countries are currently participating in the conference, which was inaugurated earlier Monday by Amr El-Garhy, Egypt's Minister of Finance, and Kunio Mikuriya, the secretary general of the World Customs Organization.
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Kevin Makra is pictured preparing for guests in his Toronto Airbnb rental apartment, on Saturday, December 2, 2017. Politicians in Toronto will be scrutinizing proposed rules for short-term rentals this week that could spell major changes for those who offer secondary residences for rent on platforms like Airbnb. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
British Prime Minister Theresa May, left, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker address a media conference at EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. British Prime Minister Theresa May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker held a power lunch on Monday, seeking a breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations ahead of a key EU summit the week after. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, before heading to Utah. Trump will be announcing plans to scale back two sprawling national monuments in Utah, responding to what he has condemned as a "massive federal land grab" by the government. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Demonstrators hold banners reading in Catalan "Freedom for the political prisoners. We are republic" gather outside the Palau Generalitat during a protest in support of the politicians imprisoned at Sant Jaume Square in Barcelona, Spain, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. The latest protest by Catalan separatists came hours after a judge granted bail to six former members of Catalonia's regional Cabinet on Monday. They were released from prisons near Madrid since being jailed in early November after depositing 100,000-euro ($118,000) in bail. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
Dunne, who is based in Cairo, creates documentary works on the relationship between man and nature
Medrar is hosting Irish artist Bryony Dunnes multimedia exhibition titled Amriya starting 9 December.
Dunnes research-based work explores the volatile relationship between man and nature, often with a look into historical links between Egypt and Ireland.
The display will include photography, sculpture, and an installation, bringing in footage and photos from Dublins Natural History Museum, Cairos Agricultural Museum and the Giza Zoo, among other sites.
The works are the result of her documentary projects created over the past four years between the two countries she calls home.
The exhibition is named after Amriya, the 70-year-old Bedouin woman who inspired the project when the artist met her years ago in South Sinai.
Amriya lives in her self-sustaining orchard, which, along with the surounding mountains, she calls her doctors.
The exhibition is a expanded collection of work which developed from Dunnes 2014 short film about Amriya and the environment in which she lives. Titled The Orchard Keepers, the film screened in over 20 film festivals, and won the first prize at Ethno Film in Rovinj, Croatia.
Sound Artist Asem Tag will deliver a live performance at 9pm on the opening night.
Dunne is an Irish artist based in Cairo who holds an MA from University College Dublin in Cultural Heritage Conservation. Her work merges anthropology and ecology with visual art.
Dunnes work has been exhibited at places such as the Irish Film Institute, Londons Mosaic Rooms, Goldsmiths University, Cairos Townhouse Gallery, Sharjah Art Biennial 13, Tamawuj in Istanbul, and the Athens Photography Festival in the Benaki Museum.
She is currently working on her first feature-length film, entitled Pembe (Swahili for horn), about the worlds last male northern white rhinoceros. She displayed part of this ongoing project at Townhouse Gallery in late 2016 in an exhibit titled They Usually Lie in the Grotto.
Her films have received several awards including best documentary short at the Iranian Green Film Festival and the aforementioned first-prize at Ethno Film in Croatia.
Programme:
The exhibition opens on Saturday 9 December at 7pm, and runs till 23 December.
Medrar is open daily from 3pm to 9pm, except Friday.
For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture
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FILE - In this Oct. 18, 2017, file photo, protesters gather at a rally in Washington. The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to fully enforce a ban on travel to the United States by residents of six mostly Muslim countries. The justices say in an order on Dec. 4, that the policy can take full effect even as legal challenges against it make their way through the courts. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2014 file photo, Billy Bush arrives at the Operation Smile's 2014 Smile Gala in Beverly Hills, Calif. Bush, who was fired after an old video emerged of him engaging in offensive sex talk with then "Apprentice" host Donald Trump, said in an op-ed published in The New York Times on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2017, that it was indeed TrumpAos voice captured on a 2005 "Access Hollywood" tape. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)
AP/Matt Houston Government-set prices completely removed from Mexico Thursday. Chevron, Koch and Kinder Morgan all want in on the competition.
From oil majors to trading companies to pipeline operators, U.S. companies are jumping at the chance to supply a newly free Mexico fuel market.
After years of preparation, Mexico finished liberalizing prices for gasoline and diesel across the country. Foreign companies were allowed to start moving fuels in April last year, but now consumers' costs will be more closely aligned with the ebbs and flows of the open market. As fuel specifications and prices align, U.S. companies are working to make transportation to Mexico seamless.
On the U.S. border with Mexico, trucks and trains scurry southward from Texas refineries to fuel distribution terminals south of the Rio Grande. An increasing number of foreign firms, including Koch Supply & Trading Mexico, or KMEX, plan to invest in ports terminals, fuel storage facilities and other logistics infrastructure in order to compete with state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos , the primary fuel vendor and distributor in the country. The vessel Crown II was fixed to haul Koch's second Mexican diesel import to Vopak's Veracruz terminal, the first non-Pemex terminal to import fuels, the company said.
The transparency and market-based pricing associated with the regulatory reform, which goes into effect today, is helping KMEX to execute their business development plans in the country, Eduardo Andrade, a distillates trader for Koch, said Thursday.
On Thursday, Mexico's energy regulator announced the end of government-set fuel prices in the remaining central and southern regions where price caps were still being applied.
Chevron Corp , Exxon Mobil Corp , Royal Dutch Shell Plc and BP Plc are among the international companies investing in service stations in Mexico and are now seeking to import fuel.
Chevron plans to import fuel into Mexico from California, where it has two refineries, once the infrastructure is available, Jose Parra, head of the company's Mexico fuel operations, said Thursday in Mexico City. Chevron plans to open 350 gas stations in Mexico in two to three years, while Exxon Mobil will inaugurate its first gas station in Mexico on Dec. 6, according to an emailed statement.
Kinder Morgan Inc has also added two gasoline grades on its California pipelines that meet Mexican specifications.
We made changes to our Pacific operations manual to incorporate Mexico product grades in anticipation of future demand for those services, Kinder Morgan spokeswoman Melissa Ruiz, said in an emailed response to questions.
The 14th edition of DIFF takes place between 6 and 13 December, featuring 120 movies from the Arab World and beyond
The 14th edition of the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), one of the most prestigious film events in the Arab world, is due to be held between 6 and 13 December.
The organisers are gearing up for the grand gala opening, followed by the nightly gala screenings at the Madinat Jumeirah Arena.
The festival will screen films across several venues, including Madinat Jumeirah Arena, Madinat Theatre, Souk Madinat Jumeirah and VOX Cinemas, Mall of the Emirates and The Beach, the latter location offering free-to-attend open-air cinema.
This year, the festival will present two prestigious DIFF Lifetime Achievement Awards: to British actor Sir Patrick Stewart and Indian actor Irrfan Khan.
A DIFF Honorary Award will be presented to Wahid Hamed, one of Egypts most acclaimed writers, whose contributions to Egyptian cinema and television span four decades.
The festival will showcase "over 120 exciting, original and compelling films from the Arab world and beyond, introducing audiences to fresh new talent and original and distinctive filmmaking," the festival organisers announced in a press release.
"The films, crafted in over 40 languages, will populate DIFFs Arab and Emirati competitions, and its out-of-competition segments dedicated to children, the Arab world, virtual reality and cinema from around the globe."
The even organizers highlighted the various Muhr competition sections as a means of promoting a wide range of filmmaking talent.
"DIFFs highly contested Muhr competition for feature fiction and non-fiction, and short films originating from the United Arab Emirates and the Arab world, will showcase over 60 of the latest and best films from established and promising new talent."
The Gulf Muhr Shorts section will showcase yet another angle on regional creativity through a diverse selection of creative short films, providing an opportunity for filmmakers to premiere their unique projects on the world stage.
The Muhr Emirati category celebrates rising local talent from the UAE and shares their projects with a global audience.
The Arabian Nights section will include eleven films that highlight the multifaceted nature of Arabian culture. In this section Egypt will be represented with Khaled Diab's Induced Labor and Ahmed Amer's Kiss Me Not.
Cinema Under the Stars will take place at The Beach, offering free-to-attend open-air cinema. Among the films screened will be Jennifer Peedoms epic new documentary Mountain, narrated by two-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe.
There will also be the world premiere of documentary A Grain of Sand from renowned British guitarist and composer Jason Carter, along with British-Tunisian filmmaker Claire Belhassines debut feature film The Man Behind the Microphone.
DIFF will also feature a Cinema for Children section, which is billed as providing "an eclectic mix of fantastical films brimming with wonder, excitement and adventure for all the family to enjoy."
The highlights of this section include the animated comedy-drama Ferdinand, directed by prestigious Brazilian director Carlos Saldanha, the Mexican animation film Ana and Bruno, and French director Nicolas Barys feature film Little Spirou.
Academy Award-winning actress Cate Blanchett joins the jury panel of the IWC Filmmakers Jury for the sixth IWC Filmmaker Award, offered by the Swiss luxury watch manufacturer IWC Schaffhausen and DIFF.
For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture
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In general, men are twice as likely to cheat on a spouse than women are. That frequency increases over the lifespan, peaking among the elderly. Among men 18 to 29 who have ever been married, about 1 in 10 is
At the federal courthouse in Philadelphia and in Harrisburg Monday, contentious issues between the Pennsylvania Convention Center and the union carpenters who used to work there racketeering charges among them will be the focus. Read more
At the Convention Center on Monday, more than 6,000 cell biologists and life scientists from the American Society for Cell Biology and the European Molecular Biology Organization will focus on connections between cell biology and neurobiology.
Nearby, at the federal courthouse, there will be another gathering of lawyers representing the Convention Center and the union carpenters who used to be the center's main labor force. The courthouse discussion will focus on a lawsuit over whether the union engaged in racketeering after it lost work at the center in May 2014.
Meanwhile, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board hearing examiner Jack E. Marino has set Monday as the due date for briefs from the Northeast Regional Council of Carpenters (formerly the Metropolitan Regional Council) on whether the Convention Center committed an unfair labor practice when it ousted the union after its leaders didn't immediately sign a new customer-service agreement.
The leaders signed a few days later, but by then the traditional work had been divided among other unions.
Protests ensued. In May 2015, the Convention Center filed a federal civil racketeering lawsuit against the union, saying the protests, particularly a mass influx of carpenters into the center during the 2015 Philadelphia Auto Show, were part of a racketeering pattern to intimidate the center and its customers.
U.S. District Judge Nitza I. Quinones Alejandro ordered the parties to appear before a magistrate Monday, hoping they can be pushed to settle. Totally routine happens in every big case.
About this time last year, there was a tentative detente, but it failed. Now, the sides can't even agree on discovery the judge has to intervene. (Contributing to the delay was that the original judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Luis Felipe Restrepo, was promoted to the appellate court.)
If the carpenters lose, they'll owe triple damages.
At the PLRB, paperwork deadlines have been extended since March, when Marino conducted three long days of hearings into the issue. No matter what Marino decides, and probably not before March, it likely will be appealed to the full board, with that decision appealed to Commonwealth Court.
Still not completely resolved is whether the PLRB even has jurisdiction. That particular wrinkle included an episode in which Convention Center attorneys accused Marino of being unduly influenced by politicians when he changed his mind about jurisdiction, leaving Marino to conduct a hearing to determine whether he was fit to conduct hearings in the case.
If the Convention Center loses, it could owe the carpenters three-plus years of back wages.
There's a third piece of litigation, in which the carpenters and the Convention Center's labor broker are arguing over how much should be paid into the union's pension fund as a penalty for withdrawing from it. No matter what happens in these cases, legal fees are mounting.
"The Convention Center is always interested in settling disputes, but it is important that we do so in the manner that is consistent with our duty to our customers to provide a productive place to do business," said Gregory Fox, chairman of the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority.
Fox said that business at the Convention Center has improved. "Bookings are one telltale sign of success," he said. Officials in Philadelphia's hospitality industry credit the new customer satisfaction agreement the one the carpenters didn't sign in time, leading to their not working in the center and new outside professional management that had experience dealing with unionized work forces in other convention centers and arenas.
Before those changes, which took place in late 2013 and 2014, customers had complained of high labor costs and hassles, and the center's management had been unable to address those concerns.
"It's very heartening to have the reverse of where we were five years ago," Fox said. "Customers are telling us what a successful show they had and how much they are looking forward to returning."
The head of the Philadelphia carpenters' union at the time, Edward J. Coryell, was ousted in February 2016 by the carpenters' top leadership in Washington, and replaced by John Ballantyne of Edison, N.J.
Ballantyne wouldn't talk about the Convention Center situation, instead sending this statement: "In response to the court order, the Northeast Regional Council of Carpenters will be participating this Monday in the settlement conference. Unfortunately, we cannot discuss any aspects of the settlement conference further at this time."
Harvey C. Johnson, first president of the Black Peoples Unit Movement, speaks at a memorial service Saturday in Camden for the Rev. Sam Appel, a BPUM supporter who also led an interracial, ecumenical, city-suburban coalition in the 1960s and 70s. Read more
Samuel E. Appel's memorial service celebrated the life of a much admired, sometimes controversial clergyman and reunited people who marched and made headlines with him in the tumultuous Camden of the 1960s and '70s.
They'd been part of a multiracial, ecumenical, urban-suburban movement that mobilized on behalf of poor and historically excluded city residents a half-century ago.
And on Saturday at Sacred Heart Church, they sang and prayed together one more time.
"I'm getting a little choked up," the Rev. Dick Whitham, 93, told me. "I didn't expect to see so many people I can't recognize anymore."
Assigned with Appel and a third Presbyterian minister, Larry Black, to do community work in Camden, Whitham was among 100 friends and family members who gathered for the memorial; between selections of glorious music, eloquent speakers paid tribute to the leader of a social justice movement with impact well beyond the city.
"No challenge was too great for Sam," said Fair Share Housing Center founder Peter O'Connor, 75, noting Appel's statewide role in urban education funding reform and particularly the development of affordable housing. Appel chaired Fair Share's board for 35 years, during which tens of thousands of affordable housing units were constructed in New Jersey.
'It's an honor to be here [given] what he meant to me and to thousands of people, some of whom may never know what he contributed to their lives," said Jose Delgado.
Like Appel, he served on the city school board. "Sam inspired me in everything I did," Delgado said.
Appel died at 91 on Oct. 5 after a long struggle with dementia. Family members said the implacable disease never robbed him of his sense of humor and kindness of heart.
"He loved this city. He wanted good housing, good schools, and good jobs, and he ached" for them, said his daughter, Joy Appel Brown. "You know how impossible the task was. But there were a lot of 'wins' over the years."
From the altar, speakers reminisced about Appel and his black Volkswagen bug, his love of a good meal (and the occasional adult beverage), and the contagious heartiness of his laugh.
"He had a deep passion for social justice. And that passion could turn to anger in the face of the reluctance of the powerful to change," said the Rev. John T. Ash III, pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Mays Landing.
By the time Appel and his young family moved from Cherry Hill to Camden in the early '60s, the exodus of the white middle class from the city to the suburban frontier was well underway.
"We lived on Hillside Avenue, the nicest street in East Camden," Appel Brown recalled during a conversation.
"When a house was sold to a black family in 1963, nine other houses went up for sale."
As retired Rutgers-Camden history professor Howard Gillette who called the service "a very poignant hour and a half" wrote in Camden After the Fall, his postwar history of the city, then-Mayor Alfred Pierce and Police Chief Harold Melleby were decidedly hostile to Appel and his movement, which Pierce would later describe as Marxist-inspired.
And after a weekend retreat about non-violence led by Appel and two associates, the three were indicted on charges of conspiring to incite violence; the case was later dropped for lack of evidence.
Camden was tense, to say the least. "Black and Latino people were not allowed to participate in government fully," noted Harvey C. Johnson, 73, one of the generation of emerging African American leaders in 1960s Camden.
Now a lawyer in Cherry Hill, Johnson was the first president of the Black People's Unity Movement, which advocated in the boardroom and agitated on the street as white politicians clung to power despite the fact that people of color were fast becoming a majority of the city's population.
Appel befriended Johnson and as well as BPUM founder Charles "Poppy" Sharp, a fierce opponent of the city's urban renewal programs, whose in-your-face tactics frightened many in the white community. But Appel championed the organization and persuaded suburban whites to form a "Friends" group to support it, financially and otherwise.
"Poppy and Sam opened the doors" to greater empowerment in Camden, Johnson said.
The Friends group "was how I got to know a lot of people from the suburbs and made friends with people from the suburbs," city activist Mangaliso Davis, 70, said at a reception after the service. "Sam was a very good spirit."
Tom Knoche, 67, a longtime advocate for progressive causes, told me he got to know and respect Appel after moving to North Camden in the late 1970s.
"There wasn't the monolithic power structure in the city we have today," he said. "There was a lot of energy around a lot of issues in Camden, and Sam was right in the mix."
Some of the oratory during the service sought to credit Appel and the movement with indirectly paving the way for Camden's current mega-redevelopment boom.
But the magnificently restored sanctuary of Sacred Heart, a vibrant church that has inspired people in the city and the suburbs to work together on Camden's behalf, was a clearer testimony to the worthiness of Appel's own efforts in that regard.
"The space was never more honored than by having this service here," said Msgr. Michael Doyle, 83, his voice reassuringly strong a year and a half after cancer surgery.
Appel and the people who worked with him "could move mountains," said Doyle, who certainly knows a thing or too about that subject.
"And they did."
Debra Casey, an assistant professor in the Fox School of Business at Temple University, believes current exposure of sexual harassment may not change male behavior but will change female behavior. Read more
In boardrooms and locker rooms, some men are asking themselves and each other: "Was I a sexual harasser? Is that me?"
Actions once seen as flirtation might today be regarded as sexual harassment or worse.
With the promise of anonymity, I played True Confessions with 10 men I know a cross-section of age, race, class. The majority said they had done something in the past that could land them in trouble today.
Only one, a construction worker at the time, admitted to touching women. "I did it to them, and they did it to me," the 70-year-old says without regrets. No other men admitted to touching, but most used coercion on a date, made sexual innuendos, or flirted with co-workers.
On-the-job flirting is a big no-no in the opinion of management consultant S. Chris Edmonds, author of The Culture Engine.
"Flirting and seduction have no place in a purposeful, positive, productive work culture then or now, nor in the future," he declares.
Banning flirting in the workplace may be good in principle, but unrealistic. I know married couples who met and began dating on the job. Don't you? How is a ban going to stop that, when one person finds another attractive?
Are there workplace rules? Sure. Supervisors should not date subordinates.
Although voluntary relationships between peers is acceptable, forcing anyone to date or to provide sexual services is illegal, says Debra Casey, assistant professor of human resource management at Temple University's Fox School of Business.
Harassment is unwanted sexual attention, but it's tricky.
"When I told my secretary she looked pretty, was that harassment?" asks a retired TV executive who is 68. I think not, but compliments can crash you on the rocks today.
The 38-year-old CEO of a nonprofit charity in the suburbs, tells me he was "very forward" when he was dating, maybe bordering on aggressive. He wonders if he crossed a line.
A 77-year-old restaurateur habitually stopped women on the street, but thinks that was OK because it was always "non-threatening, almost playful," he says.
A man can't know if his attention is unwanted until he makes a move. It's OK to step to the plate, it's not OK to be a pig.
A 62-year-old attorney in Philadelphia and the suburbs says that when he asked for a date and was rejected he would ask again. Up to five times, he says. Yes, he actually has a number.
Casey says, "You can ask five times for a date without being creepy," as long as you're not following her home or texting her 40 times a day.
Half the men I spoke with said they bowed out if turned down. "Rejection was my default position," says a 39-year-old marketing strategist based in Philadelphia.
Some rules seem fuzzy, but we can agree on this: No touching, especially the way Al Franken and George H.W. Bush are said to have touched.
But "no touch" was unfair to Garrison Keillor, dismissed by Minnesota Public Radio for supposedly touching a woman's bare back as he tried to console her. That firing was "not reasonable," Casey says, based on facts we have.
The current uproar will not lead to a permanent change in male behavior, Casey believes, but it will "lead to a change in female behavior.They will come forward more." That would be a good thing.
In the meantime, for men in the dating game, Casey suggests a rule to determine if you're acting appropriately around women: Ask yourself how you'd feel if someone else acted the same way with your sister.
Bill Green was removed as SRC Chairman by Gov. Wolf. A state court has upheld that move, rebuffing Greens legal challenge. Read more
With Philadelphia's School Reform Commission on its way out the door, a state court tied up a bit of unfinished business Monday, handing Bill Green a defeat in his quest to regain chairmanship of the panel.
Green, who was named to the SRC and appointed chairman by Gov. Tom Corbett in 2014, was essentially demoted by Gov. Wolf in 2015. He was replaced by Marjorie Neff and then, when she left the panel, by Joyce Wilkerson, the current chair.
The former City Councilman said he believed Wolf's move was politically motivated: The decision came just after Green voted to approve five new charter schools, a move the governor opposed. Green said then that he had been told that the governor could not work with him as chair.
Green remains a member of the SRC, but had argued in a suit filed in Commonwealth Court that Wolf's move was illegal.
In his ruling, Judge Joseph M. Cosgrove disagreed, saying that removing Green "was well within Gov. Wolf's constitutional authority."
Green's lawyers had argued that the governor could only remove him as chair for cause. He was represented by lawyers from the Fairness Center, a nonprofit firm created to do battle with public-sector unions.
Cosgrove agreed, however, that Green had been removed without cause and that Green "has not engaged in any such malfeasance or misfeasance." Because Green remains an SRC member, he was not removed from office, despite being stripped of his chairman's gavel, the court found.
Green, in a statement, said he would not appeal the ruling, given the SRC's imminent demise.
"The SRC, while not always agreeing, has worked effectively as a team and accomplished a great deal," Green said. "It is now settled that Marge Neff and Joyce Wilkerson were and are Chair. I will continue to work with Chair Wilkerson to make sure the transition to local control is as smooth as possible."
The SRC voted last month to dissolve itself and awaits certification of the dissolution from Pennsylvania Education Secretary Pedro A. Rivera. Once Rivera signs off on the move, as is widely expected, the SRC would be on track to cease to exist June 30.
It would be replaced by a local board of education named by Mayor Kenney.
MSNBC host Joy Reid (left) apologized for old blog posts that surfaced on Twitter, while ABC News Brian Ross (right) says he agrees with being held accountable myself. Read more
Joy Reid, the host of MSNBC's AM Joy, apologized on Sunday for "insensitive, tone deaf and dumb" blog posts that contained homophobic insults and jokes targeting then-Florida Gov. Charlie Crist.
"At no time have I intentionally sought to demean or harm the LGBT community, which includes people whom I deeply love," Reid said in a statement released on Sunday, "My goal, in my ham-handed way, was to call out potential hypocrisy."
In the posts, which appeared on a blog associated with her now-defunct Florida radio show The Reid Report from 2007 to 2009 and recently resurfaced on Twitter, Reid repeatedly mocked Crist as a closeted gay man nicknamed "Miss Charlie" and tagged posts about him under "gay politicians." She also suggested that the Republican governor refused to come out as gay because he thought it would hurt his political career, and joked about him having sex with Sen. John McCain.
Crist, who has been married and divorced twice, has long denied claims that he is gay and called allegations that he paid two men to conceal gay affairs in 2012 "a bunch of delusional lies."
"Re-reading those old blog posts, I am disappointed in myself. I apologize to those who also are disappointed in me. Life can be humbling. It often is. But I hope that you know where my heart is, and that I will always strive to use my words for good," Reid wrote. "I know better and I will do better."
Crist, now a representative in Florida's 13th congressional district, thanked Reid for her apology.
"Long forgotten, but thank you, Joy. I appreciate you," Crist wrote.
Longtime ABC News reporter Brian Ross suspended over erroneous Trump report
Veteran ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross has been suspended for four weeks without pay after he inaccurately reported that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was prepared to testify that then-candidate Donald Trump "directed him to make contact with the Russians."
During an appearance on World News Tonight on Friday, Ross walked back the report, noting that the directive occurred while Trump was president-elect and centered on improving relations with Russia in order to enlist its aide to fight ISIS in Syria.
"It is vital we get the story right and retain the trust we have built with our audience these are our core principles," ABC News said in a statement, later calling the report a "serious error" and admitting it "had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process"
The report, citing a single anonymous source, was picked up widely by media outlets and led to a fast, sharp decline in the stock market.
ABC News was also criticized for letting the report stand for a large portion of Friday before retracting it, and then initially referring to the update on World News Tonight as a "clarification" instead of a "correction."
"My job is to hold people accountable and that's why I agree with being held accountable myself," Ross wrote on Twitter.
Trump reveled in the mistake, offering his "congratulations" to ABC for swiftly suspending Ross for "his horrendously inaccurate and dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt."
Fake News being adopted by totalitarian regimes
Trump's repeated use of the term "fake news" to undermine and delegitimize unfavorable reporting is being adopted by leaders of totalitarian regimes.
In Buddhist-majority Myanmar, the government has been accused of ethnic cleansing against a Muslim minority group known as the Rohingya. But U Kyaw San Hla, a security ministry officer in in the Myanmar state of Rakhine, echoed Trump in his denial of such allegations.
"There is no such thing as Rohingya," Hla told the New York Times. "It is fake news."
The United States has declared the military's campaign against the Rakhine to be ethnic cleansing, and free-press advocates fear Trump's harsh, anti-press rhetoric will continue to be adopted by leaders looking to obscure the truth. In Egypt, a spokesman for the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs called CNN's coverage of his country "deplorable" following Trump's criticism of CNN International.
"The gravity of an American president's favorite catch phrase being used to justify ethnic cleansing will probably be lost in the noise this weekend, but it shouldn't be," journalist Sulome Anderson wrote on Twitter. "The truth has a big, red target on it now."
Ongoing efforts to conserve the dome of the Al-Imam Al-Shafie mosque in Old Cairo have uncovered sections of an intact lower wall forming part of an earlier shrine this week.
The previous shrine consisted of an open courtyard with three prayer niches attached to a domed hall. Also uncovered were decorated carved stucco features, coloured marble, stone flooring and fragments of a masonry dome.
Egypt's Minister of Antiquities Khaled el-Anany and the US Charge dAffaires in Cairo Thomas H. Goldberger, along with top officials from the Egyptian ministry, embarked on Monday on a tour to inspect the latest conservation work on the dome and the excavations of the earlier shrine.
This building pre-dates the current shrine of Al-Imam Al-Shafie, which was built by the Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil in the year 1211 AD and was built after Al-Imam Al-Shafie was buried there in 820 AD, Mohamed Abdel Aziz, Director-General of Historic Cairo Rehabilitation Project told Ahram Online. He added that the newly uncovered shrine is a significant addition to our understanding of the history of Islamic architecture and history in Egypt.
May Al-Ebrashi, Head of Athar Lina initiative, said that the excavations are part of a conservation project funded by the US Department of States Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation under the supervision of the Ministry of Antiquities.
The excavations fall within the work of Athar Lina, a national initiative to conserve Egypts heritage for the benefit of the community.
The project, she continued, began in March 2016 to resolve structural problems in the mosque's masonry walls and floors, as well as leaking roofs and the disintegration of decorative elements, most notably the decorated stucco exterior, carved and painted wood and coloured marble cladding.
The completed work so far has included extensive documentation, as well as physical crack repair in masonry walls, soil infill to correct subsidence (the sinking of soil under a structure), repair and insulation of wooden roofs and ceilings, repair of marble cladding, and the cleaning and restoration of decorative stucco facets.
Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Idris Al-Shafie was the founder of the Shafie madhab, one of the four major jurisprudential schools of Sunni Islam. A proponent of rational thought who is credited by some today as the originator of the scientific method, Al-Shafie dedicated his life to developing a comprehensive theory of jurisprudence that earned him the title the "Sea of Knowledge." He was also a great poet who wrote simply yet eloquently about the value of travel, learning and contemplation.
Historic sources mention that when he died, he was buried in the mausoleum of Ibn Abd al-Hakam, an Arab tribe that came to Egypt with the Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD and settled there, becoming one of its most prominent families.
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In nearly a dozen recent criminal cases, prosecutors have cited evidence that doctors supplied opiates to patients with repeated abnormal urine test results. Read more
In April 2014, state and federal drug agents raided Jeffrey Campbell's medical clinic in Jeffersonville, Ind. Police cars blocked the parking lot as bewildered patients scattered and the agents carted off boxes of records from the doctor's office.
Some of the seized records would show that Campbell endangered patients by prescribing opiates without any medical need, according to federal prosecutors. Campbell, who collected millions of dollars from Medicare for urine tests run at his office lab, also failed to act when test results revealed patients were abusing prescription and illegal drugs, according to a government medical expert's report.
Four patients died from drug-related causes under his watch, the report said. Others flunked two dozen or more urine tests, but the clinic kept prescribing them pills. One patient with a history of overdoses failed 46 urine tests and was never confronted about it. Campbell denied wrongdoing.
The nation's opioid crisis has prompted an explosion in urine testing. The scourge has driven huge profits for many pain clinics across the U.S., an ongoing Kaiser Health News investigation shows. Spending on urine screens and related genetic tests quadrupled from 2011 to 2014 to an estimated $8.5 billion a year more than the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a KHN analysis of billing data from Medicare and private insurance billing from the Mayo Clinic.
Medicare and other insurers pay for urine tests with the expectation that clinics will use the results to detect and curb dangerous abuse. But some doctors have taken no action when patients are caught misusing pharmaceuticals, or taking street drugs such as cocaine or heroin. Federal pain guidelines say doctors should discuss test results with patients and taper medication if necessary.
Medicare and private insurers acknowledge that they lack the resources to routinely verify that doctors who order a high volume of drug-related tests do so to improve patient care, not fatten the bottom line.
"This is a big issue," said Louis Saccoccio, who heads the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, a group formed by private insurers and government officials. "There are abusive practices out there."
In nearly a dozen recent criminal cases, prosecutors have cited evidence that doctors supplied opiates to patients with repeated abnormal urine test results.
One such doctor was Alabama pain specialist Shelinder Aggarwal, who billed Medicare and private insurers over $9 million for urine tests solely "because he served to profit," according to prosecutors in Alabama. He pleaded guilty to illegal prescribing and health care fraud. Earlier this year, a judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.
Theodore Parran, who has served as an expert witness for the federal government, predicted more doctors could face fraud charges, or discipline by state medical licensing boards, over lab testing that appears to be profit-motivated.
"This is certainly on their radar," Parran, a professor of medical education at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, said in an interview. Ignoring repeated abnormal urine tests "is bad medicine" that "endangers the safety of the patients and the community."
The KHN investigation earlier this year found that dozens of pain doctors with their own labs took in $1 million or more in 2015 from Medicare for running urine and, in some cases, genetic drug tests. Some doctors derived at least 80 percent of their Medicare income this way.
Campbell's office was among the clinics billing Medicare the most in the country, according to KHN's data analysis of Medicare billing records.
Campbell and his staff at Physicians Primary Care PLLC billed the government agency a total of nearly $6 million for urine testing during 2014 and 2015, according to the KHN analysis.
In June, more than three years after the Indiana raid, a federal grand jury in Kentucky indicted Campbell and two associates. The charges which were announced July 13 as part of a national health care fraud sweep include multiple counts of illegally distributing prescription drugs and health care fraud; one fraud count accuses Campbell of ordering costly genetic tests through an outside lab that were "not medically necessary and never interpreted." All of the defendants pleaded not guilty.
Neither Campbell nor his attorney, Page Pate, would comment for this story. However, in an interview with KHN several months before his indictment, Campbell said the government's case was "without merit." He denied he ran a "pill mill" and said he relied on his "state-of-the-art" lab, which serves the Jeffersonville clinic and a branch just across the Ohio River in Louisville, to help keep patients safe.
"We do a lot of drug testing for patients and we do it appropriately," Campbell said.
Indeed, deciding how often to order these tests, and for which patients and drugs, can be a judgment call. Doctors also sometimes disagree over what action they should take against patients with "dirty" urine: Some doctors kick out drug abusers, while others argue that is unethical. Instead, doctors should counsel these patients and refer them for substance abuse treatment, they say.
Donald White, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Inspector General, said if test results are disregarded, "why is the test being ordered in the first place?"
"When abnormal urine drug test results are not acted upon by the physician who ordered the test, it raises concerns not only that the testing itself is not medically reasonable and necessary, but also that the doctor's treatment of the patient may fall below the standard of care," White said.
Prosecutors say Campbell kept them at bay for years by asserting that records seized in the raid, including computers and emails, contained privileged attorney communications. Clearing that hurdle delayed them from sending medical records to an outside expert for review, prosecutors said.
Indiana anesthesiologist Timothy King, who wrote the government medical expert's report in the Campbell case, examined 19 patient files this year for his report. He concluded that Campbell "fails to practice medicine according to generally accepted medical principles and standards of care," and "routinely" prescribed opiates "without a medical purpose."
King said Campbell gave four patients a brew of pills known as the "Holy Trinity," which King called "a street-popular combination of opiate, sedative and muscle relaxant that produces a heroin-like euphoria."
These four patients were prescribed refills despite repeated abnormal urine tests. Two failed two dozen or more urine screens, according to King's report.
All 19 patients repeatedly failed their tests, which King described as an obvious warning sign that they were ingesting prohibited drugs, or possibly peddling unused pills on the street.
"Urine drug screens are routinely inconsistent [which can indicate] medication misuse, abuse and diversion," the expert concluded.
The four people who died showed telltale signs of trouble such as admitting they had diverted some of their medicine, or had been visiting other doctors to feed pill habits according his report.
A 25-year-old woman identified only by the initials "CM" had "vague" complaints of lower-back pain and used drugs "for purposes of abuse and diversion," according to King. She died three days after the clinic issued her a prescription for painkillers methadone and hydrocodone, King wrote. "EL," who was homeless and disabled, died from a drug overdose in July 2014, also three days after her office visit, according to the report.
King also said Campbell appeared to order unnecessary tests, including X-rays, "to optimize billing."
Less than a month after prosecutors received King's report, a federal grand jury in Louisville indicted Campbell and nurse practitioners Dawn Antle and Mark Dyer.
All have pleaded not guilty. No trial date has been set.
Indiana officials quickly suspended their licenses to practice.
Prosecutors also are seeking forfeiture of Campbell's Jeffersonville office building and other proceeds.
Attorneys for Antle and Dyer also had no comment. In the earlier interview with KHN, Campbell argued his practice attracts many difficult patients who have "no other option" to seek relief from pain. "Nobody else will see these people," he said.
He ordered tests for a slew of substances because none of his drug-abusing patients "ever just uses one drug. They use everything they can get their hands on."
KHN's coverage related to aging and improving care of older adults is supported in part by The John A. Hartford Foundation.
May a religious Christian baker refuse to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple? That is the issue the Supreme Court will be considering on Tuesday.
To begin with, it's important to recognize that this issue arises only when there is an applicable law that prohibits businesses from discriminating against gays or lesbians. In many parts of the country, no such law exists, so bakers are free to discriminate against gay and lesbian customers, regardless of whether they're looking for a wedding cake, a birthday cake, or a loaf of bread.
Of course, the Supreme Court held in 2015 that the Constitution requires every state to allow same-sex couples to marry. But the Constitution only restrains only government actors, not private ones. Without laws forbidding discrimination by employers, landlords, and businesses, a gay man could get married on Sunday, then be legally fired from work on Monday, booted out of his apartment on Tuesday, and denied service at a restaurant on Wednesday.
The baker in the case before the Supreme Court, Jack Phillips, lives in Colorado, which does have a state law that prohibits businesses from discriminating based on sexual orientation. After a same-sex couple complained to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission that Phillips had refused their request for a wedding cake, the commission ordered Phillips to make wedding cakes either for all couples or no couples.
You might think that this case is primarily about the baker's religious liberty. After all, the First Amendment provides that government shall make no law "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion.
But in a 1990 decision by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court held that religious objectors have no constitutional right to be exempted from generally applicable laws that are not targeted at religious practice. In other words, a law forbidding the use of peyote for religious rituals would be unconstitutional. But a general law forbidding the use of peyote by everyone is constitutional, even if it prevents Native Americans from using peyote for religious purposes.
Since the Colorado nondiscrimination law applies to businesses generally and is not targeted at religiously based acts of discrimination, the Constitution does not require the government to exempt Phillips' business from the law even if it burdens his religious practice. And, unlike many states, Colorado has not enacted a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which could have exempted Phillips from a generally applicable law.
Given his weak religious liberty argument, Phillips' primary argument is instead based on freedom of speech.
But how is being forced to bake a wedding cake a free-speech issue?
It's not as far-fetched as it sounds.
Essentially, Phillips is saying that the way he decorates his cakes is expressive, particularly wedding cakes uniquely designed for each couple. Phillips contends that forcing him to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples is forcing him to celebrate these unions, a message he does not wish to convey.
First Amendment precedent arguably supports Phillips. Artwork is protected by the First Amendment. For example, the government may not suppress Diego Rivera's paintings because they portray the oppression of workers or stop the public display of Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs. Phillips' artwork should similarly be protected, even if it's edible.
In addition, the Supreme Court has repeatedly said that forcing people to speak is just as offensive as forbidding them to speak. The First Amendment, the court has insisted, protects "both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all."
Yet, even if Phillips' argument is plausible, it should still be rejected by the Supreme Court.
While the government may not ordinarily compel people to speak, it may do so when there is a sufficiently important reason. Indeed, a federal judge only recently ordered tobacco companies to pay for advertisements that starkly describe the hazards of smoking. Surely, the companies didn't want to express this message, but the judge found that the ads were necessary to correct for decades of misleading tobacco company ads and to protect public health.
Similarly, the government has a compelling interest in prohibiting unjust discrimination by businesses, even if this means requiring businesses engaged in expressive work to provide services for same-sex couples.
Consider this argument from a broader vantage point. Should restaurants, hotels, and theaters should be able to discriminate against African American, Jews, or people of Irish, Polish, or any other descent merely because the owners say that serving these groups violates their religion? Such arguments have been tried in the past, but the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected them because of the government's compelling interest in combating discrimination.
The court should reach the same conclusion in Phillips' case. Notwithstanding his faith, it's doubtful that our society would permit him to deny service to a Catholic couple or an interracial couple, including the recently engaged Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Why should the result be any different for same-sex couples?
Who knows? Maybe if Phillips were forced to discuss the cake's design with a same-sex couple about the design of their cake, he might discover that the partners were merely two people in love.
Alan Garfield is a professor at Widener University School of Law. aegarfield@widener.edu
Temple University and the other state-related schools Penn State and Lincoln universities and the University of Pittsburgh will get their long-delayed state funding after Gov. Wolf signed an appropriation bill Friday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Read more
The two Temple students who died last week each suffered fatal drug overdoses, a spokesman for the city's Health Department confirmed Monday.
Michael Paytas, 24, a fourth-year marketing major from Ridley Township, Delaware County, was found unresponsive in the university's Paley Library last Monday and was taken to Hahnemann Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.
And Saturday morning, city and campus police responded to a 911 call at an off-campus apartment where they found the body of James Orlando, 20, of Reading.
The overdoses were confirmed by James Garrow, spokesman for the Health Department.
The deaths bring to five the number of student fatalities since August. The others include:
Former Fox News producer Rachel Witlieb Bernstein is suing both Bill OReilly and Fox News for statements made about a settlement regarding improper behavior by the former cable news star. Read more
Rachel Witlieb Bernstein, a former associate producer at Fox News, is suing her former employer and its former star, Bill O'Reilly, for comments they made following a blockbuster New York Times story outlining millions of dollars that were paid to silence women who accused O'Reilly of harassment.
Bernstein, who is one of six women known to have been paid a settlement regarding accusations about O'Reilly, claims in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that the former host is a "liar" for repeatedly claiming there is no truth to the allegations against him. The New York Times was first to report about the lawsuit.
"He mistreated Ms. Bernstein," the lawsuit states. "She was forced out of her job at Fox News and paid a settlement because of his mistreatment."
Frederic S. Newman, an attorney for O'Reilly, said in a statement that the lawsuit "has absolutely no merit" and that the former Fox News star "will respond aggressively in court."
Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.
At issue are public statements O'Reilly has made following his ouster at Fox News. The New York Times has reported that at least six former Fox News personalities and employees have been paid $45 million to settle claims of sexual and verbal assault. In October, the Times reported that former Fox News legal analyst Lis Wiehl was paid $32 million to settle sexual harassment allegations, a payment the network made before re-signing the star in January to a new four-year contract. O'Reilly was fired in April after advertisers began to boycott his popular Fox News show.
O'Reilly has insisted he did nothing wrong. He has said he only agreed to the settlements to protect his children and has painted the allegations as a false and malicious campaign to silence him.
"Just like other prominent and controversial people, I'm vulnerable to lawsuits from individuals who want me to pay them to avoid negative publicity," O'Reilly said in a statement after the payouts became public.
Neil Mullin, Bernstein's lawyer, said Bernstein should have been protected from O'Reilly's public accusations by a non-disparagement clause and a confidentially clause that were part of the settlement. Because of O'Reilly's comments, Bernstein, now a supervising producer on TBS' Conan, has suffered "severe emotional distress, physical sickness, and loss of income," the lawsuit says.
"The confidentiality clause made it really clear. It said basically that if you're asked by the press about this case just simply say that the matter was settled," Mullin said. "That's simple as pie. Now you can see how far O'Reilly has strayed from that simple mandate."
He added: "The plain implication is awful, it's just awful what he's suggesting about our client and frankly about all the women in the settlements. Imagine how women feel when a man of his wealth and power is out there suggesting they're all a bunch of extortionists. They're all a bunch of liars. They're all a bunch of political hatchet women."
Bernstein's lawsuit also targets Fox News over claims the network made in an April 1 statement that said no current or former Fox News employee had used the 21st Century Fox hotline to raise a concern about O'Reilly.
The hotline didn't exist at the time Bernstein was employed by the network, according to Mullin. Bernstein, who worked there from 1996 to 2002, took her complaints to human resources, former executive Bill Shine and other top officials at the network, Mullin said.
"She complained to various people of authority and they didn't protect her. She did complain and it's a lie to say she didn't," Mullin said.
View the complete lawsuit here:
The Blackwood Falls apartments in Gloucester Township Sunday, where a man was killed and a woman and 10-year-old child were severely burned in an early morning fire. Read more
Authorities in Gloucester Township are investigating the cause of an apartment fire that killed a man early Sunday morning and severely burned a woman and a 10-year-old child.
The Gloucester Township Police Department said the woman and child were being treated for the injuries they received in the blaze at the Blackwood Falls Apartment complex in the 200 block of Washington Avenue.
Police said the victims' names were being withheld until relatives have been notified.
Police who arrived at the scene shortly after 2:54 a.m. found heavy smoke coming from the victims' apartment in Building D of the complex.
Officers and responders from the Blackwood Fire Department entered the smoke-filled apartment and carried out the two adults and the child.
The man, who was said to be in his 30s, was pronounced dead at the scene.
A woman in her 30s was taken by ambulance to Cooper University Hospital, where she was in critical condition with burns and smoke inhalation. A 10-year-old girl was flown to Saint Christopher's Hospital for Children, where she is in critical condition with burns, WPVI reported. No update on their conditions was available.
"Unfortunately there were three injuries with one confirmed fatality," Harry Earle, chief of Gloucester Township Police, told KYW.
Residents from several adjacent apartments were evacuated safely. In all, 18 people from eight apartments were temporarily displaced.
"Fortunately, [there was] not much extensive damage to other apartments," Earle said.
Firefighters from several stations responded. Earle said the fire was under control in about 30 minutes.
There were no reported injuries to any other Blackwood Falls residents or to emergency personnel.
The New Jersey Division of Fire Safety and the Gloucester Township Investigations Bureau are trying to determine the cause of the fire.
Staff writer Martha Woodall contributed to this report.
Officer Steve Dintino of East Pikeland Police (right) shows Nancy Griffith how to shoot a Glock training pistol in a shoot/dont shoot simulation during the Citizens Police Academy at Chester County Intermediate Unit in Downingtown. Read more
Police Officer Steve Dintino, 61, handed a Glock .40-caliber pistol, modified for training in a virtual simulator, to first-time shooter Nancy Griffith and told her that slow, steady pressure on the trigger was the key.
Dintino said to remember that when the virtual bad guy jumped up firing at her from a row of seats in a movie theater he was terrorizing, "Your most important shot is your first one because it might be the only one you get."
Griffith is one of nine people in the first-ever Citizens' Police Academy presented by the East Pikeland Township, West Vincent Township, and Spring City Borough police departments to help residents view police work through a cop's eyes.
Meeting from 6 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday nights through Jan. 17 at the Chester County Technical College High School Brandywine Campus in Downingtown, Citizens' Police Academy officers cover everything from use of force and SWAT tactics to vehicle stops, constitutional rights, and crime-scene investigations.
Griffith and her fellow students spent a recent "shoot/don't shoot" session firing their carbon dioxide-powered Glocks and rifles at a series of violent bad guys in scenarios projected on a wall. They had fractions of a second to decide when to use deadly force to stop shooting rampages in a theater, a church, an office, a warehouse, and a public park.
Dintino, an East Pikeland Township officer who spent the first 33 of his 37 law-enforcement years with the Tredyffrin Police Department, has the military demeanor of a career cop who commanded Southeastern Pennsylvania anti-terrorism SWAT teams in Philadelphia and its four neighboring counties.
But he also has the patience to bring inexperienced civilians into a police officer's mindset.
"How many rounds do I shoot?" Griffith asked. "Do I go boop, boop, boop, boop?" She made the sounds she's heard in movies. Dintino reminded her to focus on that first shot.
Officer Daniel Corbo, 37, from the East Pikeland Police Department, who organized the citizens academy with his police chief, Susette Wilson, reinforced Dintino's instruction.
"You're responsible for every bullet that comes out of your gun," he said. "If you miss and hit a kid, you're responsible for that."
"Do you try to shoot at the foot or the hand?" Griffith asked, before the scenario began.
"No," Dintino said, "you go for the biggest part of the body, which is the chest area. Ready?"
Griffith braced herself as the video took her down the theater's corridors amid the sounds of gunshots. When the bad guy emerged and immediately fired at her, she got off two shots, both high.
"He got me," she said dejectedly.
Dintino replayed the scene, this time accompanying Griffith in the scenario as her partner.
When the bad guy emerged, Griffith and Dintino both fired, killing him immediately. They examined where the shots had landed.
"Was that you?" Griffith asked, eyeing the fatal hits.
"Yes," Dintino said. "That's why officers help one another."
Griffith, who works in a private girls' high school office, said she signed up for the free academy because she wants to better understand the jobs of two nephews who are police officers. "One's in Lancaster County and one's in Philly," she said. "The one in Philly works in Kensington. When he told me he always patrols by himself, I said, 'You're patrolling in Kensington by yourself?' "
Her civilians' academy classmates included Jane Heemer, a registered nurse working at Kennett Square High School, who said, "As a supporter of our police I wanted to have a better understanding of what they face when they go to work to protect us, so that when I come into contact with someone who doesn't have respect for the police department, I can respond with firsthand knowledge and not mere opinion."
Corbo said that's the goal of the citizens' academy. "Me and my chief wanted to do something to put our faces out in the community that wasn't writing tickets and arresting people," he said. "There's an epidemic in the country right now of bad publicity for police officers. We're so secretive when we do investigations, which is necessary because we don't want to ruin the investigations, but people think we're being clandestine. Assumptions are made. Things are blown out of proportion. This whole course is set up so you can see through the eyes of the police officer."
Dintino said citizens experience what new police trainees feel when first faced with the violent, frightening shoot/don't shoot scenarios, which require split-second, life-or-death decisions.
"When you're involved in a shooting, things happen to you subconsciously," he told the academy students. "The pituitary gland floods your body with chemicals. You see real well, but you may lose peripheral vision. It seems like everything is in slow motion even though it's not in slow motion.
"We have two hemispheres in our brain," he said. "One side is the emotional side. The other side is the rational side. They compete. As a police officer, you want to keep that rational side of the brain firing so you can make rational decisions and think through the situation even though it's very tense."
Corbo said even a seemingly routine call can turn life-threatening quickly. "Whether you're going to answer a call about a barking dog or you're responding to shots fired, you have to be alert," he told the class. "All the time."
As a bridge of understanding between cops and the civilians they serve, citizens' police academies have sprung up in departments throughout Philadelphia's four collar counties.
At the Radnor Police Department, which will conduct its fourth citizens' police academy beginning in March for nine weeks, Deputy Superintendent Christopher Flanagan said, "The academy is important because, unfortunately, it's very easy to get a negative portrayal of police departments right now."
In Radnor, he said, "we felt we needed to get people into the police department and give them hands-on scenarios" from the simplest locked-out-of-auto call to a possible officer-involved shooting.
Flanagan said the citizens wear police-style gear while they address simulated domestic and "agitated person" emergencies "where they must use only verbal techniques to calm the person down." Citizens also drive a police vehicle and make a car stop in the dark ("the suspense takes them to another level"), and collect blood, hair, and other evidence at a simulated crime-scene investigation, then work with real detectives to solve it.
The value of the citizens' academy, Flanagan said, is that "individuals have to perform at a police officer's level. Some of the role-playing we do blows their minds. You can watch cop shows, but when you're actually doing it, it's a real eye-opener."
A timeline of the conflict in Yemen since a 2011 uprising that toppled president Ali Abdullah Saleh, until his killing on Monday by former Houthi rebel allies.
Inspired by regional uprisings in the Arab Spring, Yemenis take to the streets in early 2011 to demand the departure of Saleh, who ruled the country with an iron fist since 1978.
Under pressure from the Gulf monarchies, Saleh agrees in November 2011 to hand over power in exchange for immunity from prosecution for him and his family, after 11 months of protests and deadly clashes.
As he steps down, a presidential election is held in February 2012. Saleh's deputy and only candidate Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, seen as a man of consensus, is sworn in days later.
Efforts to draw up a new constitution for Yemen face difficulties and tensions intensify.
Rebels from Yemen's Shia Houthi minority launch an offensive in 2014 and push towards Sanaa from their northern stronghold of Saada, aiming to expand a hoped-for autonomy within a future federation.
On September 21, 2014, they storm the capital and seize the government headquarters, state radio and military sites after days of clashes. More than 270 people are killed.
The rebels, backed by Shia Iran, forge an alliance with forces loyal to Saleh, a former foe who cracked down on the Houthis while president.
By January, the rebels and their allies have also taken control of the presidential palace. Hadi flees to Yemen's second city, Aden, which he later declares as the "provisional capital".
On March 26, 2015, nine regional countries in a Saudi-led Sunni Arab coalition launch operation "Decisive Storm" with air strikes on the rebels to defend embattled Hadi and his internationally-recognised government.
They claw back some territory but also have to deal with increasing attacks by Sunni jihadists allied to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group.
The UN and US organise three rounds of fruitless peace talks over 2015 and 2016. Seven truces are agreed, but all are broken.
Splits emerge in the rebel camp, with the Houthis on August 23, 2017 calling Saleh a "traitor" after he dismissed the Iran-backed group as a "militia" in a speech.
The next day, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis attend a rally marking 35 years since the founding of Saleh's General People's Congress (GPC) in a major show of support.
The tensions erupt into clashes between the allies in which a colonel loyal to Saleh and two rebels are killed. Violence erupts anew on November 29 in Sanaa, killing and wounding dozens.
On December 2, Saleh reaches out to the Saudi-led coalition battling the Houthis, offering to "turn the page" if it lifts a crippling blockade on the country.
The Houthis accuse him of staging a "coup against our alliance".
On Monday, President Hadi orders his forces to retake control of Sanaa.
Saleh's party says that Saleh has been killed, shot dead by Houthi fighters south of Sanaa after he fled the city for territory firmly controlled by his loyalists.
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Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf announced Monday that the state would implement stricter rules when issuing grants for special events. The change comes after reports that the 2016 DNC Host Committee used its surplus to pay $1 million in bonuses to its staff and some volunteers. Read more
In the wake of six-figure bonuses given to staffers at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Gov. Wolf announced Monday that the state Department of Community and Economic Development will implement new restrictions on grants for such events, including a ban on employee bonuses.
Any organization that receives a "special event" state grant will not be able to award bonuses and can only use the state money as a last resort to pay bills, under the new rules. Any surplus of funds must be returned to the state.
The restrictions follow revelations by the Inquirer and Daily News that the 2016 Democratic National Convention Host Committee used its surplus to pay $1 million in bonuses to its staff and some volunteers. The committee raised $86 million, of which the single biggest check came from taxpayers in the form of a $10 million DCED grant. The bonuses led to an outcry from state Republicans and Wolf all of whom called for an investigation.
Last month, Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued an audit chiding the state for having a "too loosely drafted" grant agreement. If the committee had not received the state grant, it would not have had a surplus with which to award bonuses, he said.
The auditor general determined that the host committee complied with the $10 million state grant agreement but asked that the state strengthen its regulations so organizations cannot spend the state money if they raise enough private money.
Depasquale also referred the case to the IRS, saying it should look at whether bonuses to Kevin Washo and Eliza Rose, who were both board members and paid staff, might have violated regulations that bar any "private shareholder or individual" of a nonprofit from benefiting from its earnings. On Monday, DePasquale said he was "encouraged" by the governor's response to his audit.
"Hopefully today's announcement paves the way for better grant contracts and oversight in all state agencies to ensure taxpayer funds are spent appropriately and that 'claw-back' procedures are included in grant agreements to ensure any leftover funds are returned to state coffers," DePasquale said in a statement.
The host committee was created to raise funds to organize the events surrounding the Democratic National Convention, which ran July 25-28 in Philadelphia. Up until the week before the convention, officials, including host committee chairman Ed Rendell, the onetime mayor and governor, were still raising money and saying they were short on their fundraising goals. It wasn't until September, when the committee filed its financial reports with the Federal Election Commission, that it reported exceeding its fund-raising goal by more than $2 million.
The committee used its surplus to pay the city more than $500,000 for municipal services incurred during the convention, make $1.2 million in grants to local nonprofits, and provide the $1 million in bonuses. The bonuses were paid in November 2016 and recorded in January in the committee's required year-end FEC financial reports.
The bonuses ranged from $500 for interns and volunteers to $310,000 for its executive director, Washo.
Rendell has consistently defended the bonuses, calling them "deferred compensation" for the time some of the staffers worked without getting paid and for receiving what he called low salaries.
Following the news of the bonuses, Wolf said he was "disappointed" in the use of the surplus and asked for the Auditor General's review. Under his order, DCED will include language in grant awards for special events prohibiting the payment of bonuses.
"Repayment of any bonus will trigger repayment of the grant," Wolf's news release said.
The new rules are effective immediately. However, special-event grants are few and far in between. DCED spokesman David Smith said that such grants are approved by the state legislature for large events such as Pope Francis' visit to Philadelphia in 2015 and national political conventions.
Under the new rules, any unspent grant money comes back to the state. If, as happened in the case of the DNC Host Committee, the state grant is spent, but privately raised money is left, the private funds must be used to reimburse the state, up to the full amount of the grant.
The state also added new requirements for competitive bidding of contracts on special-events projects that receive state money. To ensure all organizations comply with these guidelines, DCED will "enhance scrutiny" of its audits once a grant is expended by an organization, the governor's office announced.
Billy Bush, the former Access Hollywood host, has responded to recent reports that President Trump has questioned the authenticity of video in which he can be heard bragging about grabbing women by their genitalia, saying the president was "indulging in some revisionist history." Bush said that seven people, in addition to him, heard Trump.
In a commentary Sunday for the New York Times, Bush said he was disturbed by reports from the past week that Trump has told allies and at least one senator that he may not be the voice on the 2005 "Access Hollywood" tape.
"He said it," Bush wrote, referring to Trump's now infamous "grab them by the p-" remark made on an Access Hollywood bus.
"Of course he said it," Bush added. "And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America's highest-rated bloviator. Along with Donald Trump and me, there were seven other guys present on the bus at the time, and every single one of us assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely we thought, none of this was real."
"We now know better," he added, referring to the women who came forward to accuse Trump of improper sexual advances.
The Washington Post first reported the leaked recording in October 2016. It captured audio of then-candidate Trump boasting to Bush about forcibly kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women as the two rode to a soap opera set to shoot a segment. Bush, who hosted "Access Hollywood" at the time, laughed and egged Trump on.
After the recording surfaced, Trump acknowledged it was him speaking and dismissed his words as "locker-room banter."
"I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize," he said.
But last week, the Times and the Post reported that Trump was raising doubt about the recording's authenticity, telling people close to him, including a Republican senator, that the tape may have been doctored or faked. He has suggested to senior advisers that the voice isn't his, or that it was edited to make him look bad, and has asked others whether they think it sounds like him, as The Post has reported.
Responding to the reports, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump "hasn't changed his position" on the recording.
Bush, who was fired from NBC's Today shortly after the tape emerged, has tried to restore his reputation in recent months by publicly atoning for his role in the scandal. He is scheduled to appear on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Monday night.
In May, the Hollywood Reporter published an extensive interview with Bush, in which he described his shame and humiliation about the recording, saying he didn't have the "strength of character" to shut Trump down. He vowed to support women in the future and lamented the fact that he had lost his job over the tape while Trump was elected president ("the irony is glaring," he said).
In his commentary Sunday, Bush said he believed some of the women who have publicly accused Trump of forcibly kissing and groping them in different encounters over the past two and a half decades, saying their accounts line up with Trump's comments on the bus. His apparent questioning of the "Access Hollywood" tape has "hit a raw nerve in me," Bush wrote.
"President Trump is currently indulging in some revisionist history," he wrote. "I can only imagine how it has reopened the wounds of the women who came forward with their stories about him, and did not receive enough attention."
Trump has denied wrongdoing, either rejecting the women's claims himself or through spokespeople. "Nobody has more respect for women than I do," he said last year after the Access Hollywood tape was released.
As of September, tax delinquents owed Philadelphia $395 million in back taxes, fees, fines and interest on 69,000 properties.
Mayor Kenney and Councilman Allan Domb have a clever plan to use tax liens to leverage $30 million or more from delinquent taxes. Simply put, they'd post the liens as collateral for bonds, hire a vendor to collect on the liens and use the money to pay off the bonds and hopefully, come out ahead.
But Council President Darrell Clarke is saying "not so fast." He says the liens are riddled with errors that could cost vulnerable residents their homes, which is unjustifiable under any circumstances.
Domb's legislation, though, explicitly protects owner-occupants. They can enter into payment agreements with the city for as little as $25 a month, and for the most distressed, nothing a month. Further, the city would hire a vendor to examine its property data, which would help clean it up. Domb's bill also protects properties that the city may want to use for future residential and commercial development.
His sights are set on the people who choose not to pay their taxes the suburban and out-of-state deadbeats as well as the home-grown speculators who could care less that they're dumping their share of the tax burden on the rest of us.
But Clarke isn't convinced. In fact, he has introduced a bill exempting all residential properties, which includes rentals, in his district, which covers parts of Center City through North Philadelphia as well as Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell's West Philadelphia district and Councilwoman Maria Quinnoes-Sanchez's river wards district. He recently said he wants to exclude Councilman Kenyatta Johnson's South and Southwest Philadelphia district as well.
Neither Domb nor the administration wants to throw people out of their homes. They guarantee that even after strenuous review, if a lien on an owner-occupied home winds up in the pool, it would be pulled out.
Clarke's argument to clean up the data is well taken. He should use his power as Council president to hold hearings to find out just how dirty the data are and come up with ways to clean it. If ever there was a public interest in a fact-finding process, this one literally hits home. And it should be pulled out into public view, because it's the public's money, homes and businesses. He should also appoint an oversight committee to watchdog the entire process and inform the public of all it finds.
Philadelphia has tried to leverage its red ink before. In 1997, it issued $75 million in bonds backed by so many uncollectable liens, the city wound up paying bondholders $46 million. With this plan, the Kenney administration has performed gold-medal-worthy gymnastics to avoid those pitfalls and to protect residents.
The administration, Domb, and Clarke need to pour themselves a cup of hot apple cider (spiked or not), settle into comfortable chairs and talk this through. Philadelphia has an opportunity to raise some money for the schools and ensure that more people pay their taxes. Those who actually do pay their taxes shouldn't let this opportunity get away.
For five hours on Nov. 27, residents and developers packed City Hall to debate the Mixed Income Housing Program, an affordable-housing initiative introduced last spring by Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez, Council President Darrell L. Clarke, Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell, and Councilman Kenyatta Johnson.
Within minutes, Councilmembers Blondell Reynolds Brown, Curtis Jones, Jr., Clarke, and Quinones Sanchez titled the story of how we got here: A Tale of Two Cities. The program, they explained, encapsulates years of feedback from local civic organizations, national policy experts, and industry professionals. But its premise is simple: Half of Philadelphians can't afford their homes; we are building for the other half.
Over the past two decades, affluent developers and residents received substantial public subsidy, including a 10-year real estate tax abatement program that diverted School District revenue to stimulate the growth of new Center City homes, such as 500 Walnut Street's $17 million penthouse. Last May, the Building Industry Association boasted that million-dollar home sales were up, up, up, by more than 3,000 percent since the tax abatement program began. Our School District has been collateral damage of this policy initiative.
During the same time period, our city lost more than 20,000 affordable homes. One of every three residents forks over more than half of each paycheck to keep a roof above his or her head. At minimum wage, Philadelphians need to log 128 hours every week to afford a two-bedroom apartment. The tale of this city: Families who can't afford an abated luxury loft are footing the bill for higher rents, mortgages, utilities, and taxes. We need to invest in these families the way we already invest in expensive new homes.
City Council will not turn a blind eye to housing segregation. We believe all Philadelphians have the right to live affordably near good jobs, good transit, and good schools. We demand urgency before Center City becomes permanently saturated with luxury homes, while concentrated poverty traps thousands more Philadelphians in low-quality housing, surrounded by struggling schools.
Our Council works tirelessly to ensure that quality of life, choice, and opportunity are not reserved only for a privileged few. A segregated, stratified Philadelphia is not the bright future our city deserves. Mixed income housing is good for us all.
Maria Quinones Sanchez (maria.q.sanchez@phila.gov, @MariaQSanchez), Blondell Reynolds Brown (@CouncilwomanBRB), and Curtis Jones Jr. (@Mr4thDistrict) are members of City Council.
"Philadelphia is not a city of palaces for the few, but a city of homes for the many which is better."
This was the verdict of Talcott Williams, a journalist at the Chicago World's Fair, on the Philadelphia "working-man's house." Unlike other cities at the time, which pushed the poorest into squalid tenements and often-poorly equipped high-rise apartments, the vast majority of Philadelphians lived in rowhouses, with the number owning their own homes "four to six times greater than any other great city of the world." It was this exhibit that led Chicago to embark on its own version of the rowhouse in pursuit of the same goals.
Over time, the rowhouses expanded, and we added the twin to our housing stock, but the result of more homes and high ownership continued. This model of affordable comfort in housing, combined with a history of lower-than-average real estate taxes, powers Philadelphia's middle class and working poor. Yet more and more public officials and thought leaders have voiced concern that this legacy is in danger, citing rapid increases in sale prices in the neighborhoods closest to Center City as proof. In Graduate Hospital and Point Breeze, blocks where homes had once sold for $50,000 now have neighbors who may have paid more than $500,000. As Philadelphia's economy begins to grow after a long period of stagnation, more neighborhoods will begin to see demand increase for housing, especially those closest to Center City and other major amenities.
City Council's proposed solution to the affordable housing crunch a bill calling for Inclusionary Zoning, which mandates a certain amount of affordable housing in each development is well-intentioned, but completely misses the point. Most construction projects in Philadelphia don't have 10 or more units, and every year Council takes more land out of multifamily designations and into single-family. The bill also targets only Center City, which is a significant fraction of the city but still only one neighborhood. With rules like these, perhaps Council will meet its affordable housing goals somewhere during the lifetime of my great-grandchildren, but no sooner.
Instead, Council should focus its efforts on our existing housing stock. After all, Philadelphia is still a city of homeowners, with a 52.2 percent home ownership rate as of 2014. We can help our poorest homeowners remain in their homes by increasing the Homestead Exemption by $10,000. By decreasing the real estate liability evenly for all Philadelphia home owners, we'll have the strongest net benefit on those at the most affordable levels of Philadelphia housing.
In addition, if Philadelphia is serious about getting affordable units into Center City, it should allow for more density. When the former Please Touch Museum had a proposal that involved condos, the city allowed a few people to veto it in favor of less-dense condos. Most economists would argue that the best way to lower prices is to increase supply. Yet directly off the Parkway, the city declined an opportunity to do just that.
The city also needs to begin fulfilling its commitments to our poorest neighborhoods in terms of services. When the city decides to stop street cleaning, maintenance of neighborhood green spaces, timely repaving, leaf cleanup, and other services, it makes more of our neighborhoods look broken, desolate, and unsafe. It contributes to a climate of fear, crime, and hopelessness. No matter what part of Philadelphia you visit, there is city-owned property sitting in disrepair and blighting an entire block, city streets and sidewalks that resemble obstacle courses rather than public right-of-ways, and green spaces that look more like the Upside Down from Stranger Things than somewhere you'd want to take your child to play.
Instead of ramming through an Inclusionary Zoning bill that will do more harm than good, Council should focus on doing things it should be doing already, like maintaining our distressed neighborhoods, increasing density in Center City, and using the homestead exemption to further protect our most vulnerable homeowners. Philadelphia has a tremendous legacy of home ownership across the economic spectrum. Let's protect it the smart way.
Daniel Pearson is a lifelong Philadelphian and former data and outreach coordinator for City Commissioner Al Schmidt. tug16822@temple.edu @DanthePHLman
Cities compete for people. Philadelphia is no different. According to researchers at The Reinvestment Fund in Philadelphia, approximately 48 percent of city residents, across the country, live in "middle neighborhoods," which are described as stable, working-class communities that generally lack outside investment, especially when compared with areas such as Center City, Graduate Hospital or Northern Liberties.
Middle neighborhoods are often saddled with blight, but have extraordinary potential for growth, when given the proper tools. They typically are affordable, safe, and functional. In Philadelphia's middle neighborhoods, schools are good, but not good enough, crime is relatively low, and housing is stable, but danger of decline lingers.
Historically, as more jobs moved to the suburbs, the middle class shrunk, housing stock became older and many properties deteriorated and went vacant. Attention to the needs of our middle neighborhoods was, and is, still lacking.
Middle neighborhoods in Pennsylvania's 2nd Congressional District include parts of Mount Airy, Germantown, West Oak Lane, Roxborough, and Wynnefield. These are incredibly viable and valuable neighborhoods in our city. They provide a considerable portion of our city's property tax revenue, yet we often do not give them the credit, attention, and support they deserve.
Let's be clear, Philadelphians cannot take our city to the next level by just improving Center City and the "hot" neighborhoods surrounding Center City. We must also lift up the middle neighborhoods and those that have not fully shared in the benefits of our city's revitalization.
One example of a program that encourages private investment in middle neighborhoods is JumpStart Germantown. Jumpstart trains, mentors, networks, and lends money to local residents who want to improve their own community. By stressing scattered site rehabilitation and a healthy mix of affordable and market rate housing, Jumpstart can play a crucial role in middle neighborhood revitalization. First devised, and successfully tested, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, JumpStart helps local individuals build wealth locally, thereby keeping gentrification at bay while renovating blighted and deteriorated properties. Jumpstart may not be the only way to work toward rebuilding these neighborhoods but it is a good start.
Here's how Jumpstart Germantown works: Aspiring real estate developers enroll in a free, nine-hour training and mentoring program that connects them with more experienced real estate professionals. These sessions provide participants with a working knowledge of real estate acquisition, financing, construction, leasing, and property management. At the conclusion of the program, graduates and other real estate professionals are provided with easy to access acquisition and construction loans that can be used to start, or expand, their careers as real estate developers. The focus on recruiting mentees from traditionally underrepresented communities helps ensure that the wealth generated from Jumpstart Germantown stays local. The helpful tools that participants obtain can be useful in other fields, as well, offering the kind of invaluable workforce development often missing in urban improvement proposals. Teach a person to build, and they can organize, develop, and render unto themselves.
Philadelphia and its vibrant neighborhoods possess the infrastructure necessary to remain viable and compete in the 21st century. Investing in targeted strategies, however, such as Jumpstart, will help our middle neighborhoods improve, producing a positive impact on the quality of life of Philadelphians, and millions of Americans living in urban and suburban areas nationwide.
Our city, state, and federal government must make a concerted effort to recognize the importance and value of our middle neighborhoods; in order to ensure historic American cities such as Philadelphia remain viable and competitive in the 21st-century economy.
Congressman Dwight Evans represents the 2nd District of Pennsylvania which includes Northwest, West, North, parts of South and Center City Philadelphia, and the western suburbs of Narberth and Lower Merion Township. Ken Weinstein, President of Philly Office Retail, owner of Trolley Car Diner in Mt. Airy, Trolley Car Cafe in East Falls, and the soon to open Trolley Car Station in University City, founded Jumpstart Germantown two years ago.
Mamesiba Shiba Inu Cafe Kurashiki Okayama
You probably heard of Husky dog or Owl cafes in Japan. However, you might not hear of Shiba Inu Cafes in Japan. Shiba Inu is the smallest dog originated from Japan. So far only a few Shiba Inu cafes in Japan and one of them recently opened in Kurashiki Okayama Japan.
It is called Mamesiba cafe and it is located at Kurashiki Bikan Quarter in Okayama. Shiba inu simply means Shiba dog. Inu means dog in Japanese.
The address is at 1 Chome-1-7 Chuo, Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture 710-0046. They are pretty new so you cant find any information on them yet. They are the same operator of Kurashikin Hedgehogs Forest, Owls Forest and Bengal Cats Forest.
The entrance fee is 700 Yen per pax for 30 minutes with one drink. Even though this cafe is new but it is already packed! Most of the visitors here are still locals. If you plan to visit, please come early before the long queue.
Like any other dog cafes, you are restrained to grab or force the dogs to take picture with you. The Shiba inu are small dogs and they are cute. The dogs will come to you and if they are comfortable, they will rest in your arms and legs. If they are not, they will move around.
The area is not that big but cozy. They have chairs and tables so it is quite comfortable to be here. If not mistaken, there are six Shiba inu in this cafe.
To be honest, we enjoyed the Shiba inu cafe. It is easier for you to take picture with them. They are less active and aggressive than Husky based on our experiences.
If you are big fan of Shiba inu cafe, please head to Mamesiba Cafe at Kurashiki near the Kurashiki Bikan Quarter. Mamesiba Cafe address and GPS is below.
Okayama is 45 minutes away from Osaka (via Shinkansen) and they are popular with its white peach, castle, temples, shrines and food. Travel to Okayama and save more with 5 Day JR Kansai Wide Area Pass.
Opening Hours: 9.30 am to 5.30pm
Mamesiba Cafe Address:
1 Chome-1-7 Chuo, Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture 710-0046
Phone: 086-423-0515
GPS: 34.596707, 133.770128
Wilson Ng A Father and traveler who enjoys to eat, shop, travel and taking pictures with Samsung S22 Ultra and Sony ZV-1. Im a full time blogger, youtuber and father for two. I used to travel around 17 International trips per year but now staying at home. Remember to follow us at www.instagram.com/placesandfoods and www.youtube.com/placesandfoods. For advertisements or features, contact me at [email protected] See author's posts
Amanda Gillard Wins the 2017 WSOP Sydney Ladies Event
December 03, 2017 Kim Yuhl Contributor
The 2017 WSOP Sydney Circuit Ladies Event saw 117 female poker players invest $330 and take to the felt to fight for their share of the $35,100 prize pool.
The Star Poker Live Reporting Team was able to spot several notable local female poker players, making the quest to claim a ring a tough one. The list includes Amanda Wong, Hannah Lee, Suzy Khoueis, Mele Poulivaati, Fidan Shevket, Jen Bernard, Michelle Psarras, Ashleigh Tran, Jane Howard, Erolyn Strang and Despina Yiannikoulias.
While the field was full of talent, it was the presence of Khoueis that had everyone talking. Not only was Khoueis the reigning champion in this event, she also won the 2017 Star Poker Festival Ladies Event and the 2017 Sydney Champs event. It was not lost on the field that Khoueis had won every ladies event in the past year held in the Star Poker Room.
Unfortunately, that notoriety worked against her as Khoueis failed to make the money. It was tough going for the notables and even being the chip leader for most of the day did not guarantee a paycheck. Just ask Vuka Mani, who went from big stack to bubbling the tournament in relatively short order.
Eliminations seemed to be happening rather quickly. The field made the money after about seven hours of play and the final table came together a short time later.
The Final Table
Seat Name Chips 1 Quin Jian 89,500 2 Amanda Gillard 132,500 3 Mele Fisiihoi 56,000 4 Stephanie Lee 214,500 5 Evelyn Ruiz 199,00 6 Leanne Haas 296,000 7 Miki Wan 63,000 8 Luba Pase 13,000 9 Queenie Kim 111,000
It didnt take long for the first elimination of the final table to happen. Luba Pase who managed her short-stack through the bubble and three additional eliminations to log a final table appearance found herself behind with to Stephanie Lees . Pase failed to improve and her final table appearance came to a quick end earning her $904.
On the heels of Pases exit, there was a three-way all in. Mele Fishiihoi moved all in for her final 20,500 from early position. Evelyn Ruiz made the call and the action folded around to Miki Wan. Wan pushed her entire stack of 45,000 into the middle, and again Ruiz made the call.
Ruiz had her opponents covered, putting Fishiihois and Wans tournament lives on the line.
Wan:
Ruiz:
Fishiihoi:
The wait was over when the flop of was dealt giving Ruiz the nut flush. Having the smallest stack to begin the hand, Fishiihoi was eliminated in eighth place earning $1,134 and Wan claimed the seventh-place prize of $1,447.
It was at this time that Amanda Gillard began to make her presence known and start amassing chips and Stephanie Lee was her target. Gillard was all in with against Lees . Gillards hand held, leaving Lee with just 6,000 chips and ultimately a sixth-place finish for $1,882 a few hands later.
Gillard continued the pressure when she raised to 45,000 preflop and was called by Queenie Kim. The flop came . Gillard continued for 60,000 and Kim called. Both players checked when the fell on the turn. The river prompted a shove from Kim and a snap-call from Gillard. Kim soon saw that her was no match for the rivered straight of Gillard who held . Kim earned $2,493 for her fifth-place finish.
Ruiz was eliminated in non-traditional fashion when her stack was blinded off after she had to leave the tournament due to prior commitment. Her friend, Quin Jian claimed her final 3,000 chips and Ruiz officially became the fourth-place finisher collecting $3,366.
Jian followed her friend to the rail after moving all in for her final 207,000 with . She was looked up by Gillard who held . Gillard spiked an ace on the turn to send Jian packing with a $4,633 paycheck, setting up a heads-up contest between Gillard and Leanne Haas.
Heads up play was short and sweet, at least for Gillard. Gillard had the chip lead when all the chips went into the middle.
Hass:
Gillard:
While both players hit their queen, the board did not provide the necessary help for Hass. She was eliminated in second place earning $6,508 for her efforts.
Final Table Results
Seat Name Prize 1 Amanda Gillard $10,354 2 Leanne Haas $6,508 3 Quin Jian $4,633 4 Evelyn Ruiz $3,366 5 Queenie Kim $2,493 6 Stephanie Lee $1,882 7 Miki Wan $1,447 8 Mele Fishiihoi $1,134 9 Luba Pase $904
This is what I came here for, Gillard told the Star Poker Live Reporting team.
An hour into todays play I was down to just 2,900 chips, Gillard said. Considering the starting stack was 10,000, Gillard was adept enough to know she had an uphill battle ahead.
I just stayed focused and kept playing my game. There was a key hand with two and a half tables to go. I had pocket sixes and was all in against two other players. I held there and that gave me the chip lead.
But as we saw earlier in the tournament, being chip leader held no guarantees and she had a tough final table to navigate. Gillard kept her cool, picked her spots and stayed focus on the prize and it paid off with some shiny new jewelry and a nice paycheck.
This place is amazing, it is a great place to play poker, Gillard said. I will definitely be back here when the Star Poker Festival is on next year to represent my APL Outer West team!
There is Still Plenty of Action Down Under
The 2017 WSOP Sydney Circuit is just getting started with events scheduled daily through December 18, 2017. The full schedule can be found on the StarPoker website.
Larry Krasner, Philadelphias district attorney-elect, has drawn skepticism and even scorn from some corners of law enforcement for his promises to bring radical change to the office.
One member of his newly announced transition team is bound to add to the concern.
Michael Coard, an outspoken defense attorney, activist, and media pundit, will join at least 15 other elected officials, city power brokers, and attorneys in helping Krasner refine his goals and shape his priorities before he assumes office in January.
Coard a vocal Krasner supporter during the campaign has compared police departments to slave patrols and represented people accused of killing cops.
The transition team, Krasner said, was designed to include a variety of perspectives. He pointed to the inclusion of Ronald Castille former Philadelphia district attorney and chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court as an example of a member whose views are not in lockstep with his.
It does not include any current police, prosecutors, or public defenders omissions Krasner told Philly.com were intended to avoid sending signals of favoritism.
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Seattle Police Chief Kathleen OToole will step down at the end of the year, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced Monday, ending months of speculation about OTooles future amid a tumultuous time in city government.
More than anything, Ive loved being a cop, OToole said during a news conference Monday morning. To me, it's not just a job, its my vocation, its my passion.
OToole will leave her post on Dec. 31, and Deputy Chief Carmen Best will serve as interim chief beginning Jan. 1, Durkan said during the news conference.
Durkan said she plans a nationwide search for a new chief, to be led by a hand-picked committee headed by four co-chairs. She called the selection of a police chief one of the most important decisions a mayor can make, the Seattle Times reports.
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After the Washington Post published a report detailing accusations of sexual assault made by multiple women against judge Roy Moore, whos currently running to be Alabamas next senator, the Republicans numbers took a hit in the polls and put Democrat Doug Jones in the lead for a few weeks. But four new polls show Moore regaining ground and give him an overall lead of 3.2 points, as calculated by RealClearPolitics.
Alabama is one of the most consistently red states in the country. It hasnt had a Democratic senator for 20 years Howell Heflin, in office from 1979 to 1997, was the last and the number of Democrats who currently hold statewide office is zero. And while there are more people in Alabama who believe Moores accusers than those who dont, its not by a huge margin 42% versus 38%.
An estimated 50% of Alabamians are white evangelicals, a group which mostly favors Moore. In fact, after accusations were lodged against him in early November, 37% of Alabama evangelicals said that they were even more likely to support the Republican as a response to the allegations. Another 34% said the accusations would make no difference to their voting decisions.
Like Moore, Trump is also strongly supported by white evangelicals, with 80% voting for him over Hillary Clinton. On Monday, Trump explicitly endorsed Moore on Twitter.
Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama, he wrote. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!
He continued, Putting Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders& so much more. Look at your 401-ks since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back!
While the race is still a tossup, the latest polls show how imperative it is for Democrats and anyone against putting an accused pedophile on office in Alabama to vote for Doug Jones.
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Trumps lawyers are preemptively making the argument that the president cant obstruct justice, which means that they are laying out a legal defense in the expectation that charges are coming concerning the Russia scandal.
Axios reported:
The President cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitutions Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case, Dowd claims.
..
Trumps legal team is clearly setting the stage to say the president cannot be charged with any of the core crimes discussed in the Russia probe: collusion and obstruction. Presumably, you wouldnt preemptively make these arguments unless you felt there was a chance charges are coming.
A lawyer wouldnt be offering a defense before anything has been filed unless they are trying to get out in front of charges that are coming.
The White House has gone from saying that there is nothing to the Russia scandal to claiming that the President cant be charged with a crime. Theyve gone from screaming witchhunt to arguing that even if he broke the law, Trump cant be charged.
There is no clear answer to the question of whether or not a sitting president can be charged with a crime, but if Robert Mueller finds evidence that Trump did commit a crime, Donald Trump is done as president. He may try to fight and stick around for as long as possible, but if he makes it to 2020, he wont win a second term.
If the Special Counsels report comes before the 2018 midterm, Democrats could take back all of Congress.
Either way, Trumps lawyers are signaling that they are preparing for criminal charges, which means that the Russia scandal is about to take over American politics.
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With just a little over a week to go until Alabama votes a new senator into office, President Trump officially endorsed Republican candidate Roy Moore on Monday, despite Moore being accused of sexual assault and harassment by numerous women, some who say they were underage at the time of the alleged abuse.
Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama, Trump tweeted. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!
In a second tweet he added, Putting Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders& so much more. Look at your 401-ks since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back!
Moores opponent Doug Jones was recently leading in the polls, but the latest numbers put Moore back in the lead. Alabama has no Democratic legislators representing it in any statewide positions and roughly half the population consists of white Evangelicals, making it one of the reddest states in the country.
Its likely that the president was pleased with Moore regaining ground and capitalized on it by making his support explicit to his supporters.
Trump came close to fully endorsing Moore two weeks ago, telling reporters we dont need a liberal democrat in that seat and repeatedly insisting that the Republican candidate denies the accusations.
Given that Trump himself has been accused of sexual assault by more than 10 women, this outcome should be surprising to no one.
Hungary Wizz Air plans to triple fleet, headcount within 10 yrs
Hungary-based no-frills carrier Wizz Air plans to triple the size of its fleet and it also eyes to triple the number of its employees within a decade, its CEO told business daily Vilaggazdasag on Monday. Jozsef Varadi added that the goal is to carry 100 million passengers a year.
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Varadi told the paper in an interview published today that over the next nine years, Wizz Air plans to expand its fleet to 282 aircraft, triple the current size. He noted that the airline has recently signed a deal with Frances Airbus for the delivery of 146 new aircraft that will be added to the current fleet of 87.The first A320neo aircraft are expected to take off in Wizz Air colours in 2022 and the last are to be delivered in 2026. As a result of previous orders, though, the carrier will have 100 aircraft by May 2018, Varadi said.Under an agreement signed with Airbus in 2015, 110 new A321neo aircraft worth USD 12.5 billion will be arriving to Wizz Air between 2019 and 2024.
We believe that in the financial year ending next March well carry 30 million passengers, versus about 24 million in the previous year. And once we operate 300 aircraft, the number of our passengers could reach 100 million
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Hungary Wizz Air announces greatest recruitment campaign since launch 28/09/2017 12:10pm
, said Varadi.Varadi also noted that in parallel with the expansion of the fleet, Wizz Airs headcount could also triple and reach 10,000 over the next nine years. He added that 90% of the workforce are airborne staff, i.e. pilots and cabin crew.
As regards recruitment, pilots are the bottleneck since they can be considered a global resource on a European level. We can easily recruit new associates for administrative areas, and given that the airline offers competitive wages for cabin-crew members, its not a problem finding new ones, either.
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Asked about the bankruptcy of Air Berlin, Germanys second-largest airline and Europes tenth-largest in terms of passengers carried, Varadi said this process will not stop there.This is not a unique case, not by a longshot", he said, reminding that Monarch Airlines of the UK has also gone belly-up, and, I believe, we can expect additional bankruptcies".
There are a lot of irrational behaviours on the market. Some of these have political roots, as a result of which several national airlines are kept in an incubator. But there are irrational elements among private investors too, these led to the collapse of Air Berlin and Monarch Airlines.
Varadi believes these issues will be sorted out by the market, and just like in the United States - where out of dozens of airlines four major were left standing - consolidation in Europe will continue.But the end of this process is still far away."
CHICAGO Every June, without fail, Diane Walker got a mammogram. Cancer ran in her family, she said. Even her mother had it. Determined not to be next, she went year after year. She tested negative, year after year.
But in 2003, freshly retired, Walker and her husband went on a traveling spree. Walker went to the Bahamas, Bowling Green, Ky., back to her hometown of Waycross, Ga. So caught up relishing her retirement, she said, she went everywhere, except to her doctor's office.
Walker next had a mammogram in mid-2004. Expecting her usual result, she said she was floored when she was diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ cancer in her milk ducts. She was 64.
Nearly 15 years since her diagnosis, Walker, 78, has survived cancer. It cost her a breast, but she refuses to complain, considering how often black women like herself die of breast cancer each year.
"Yeah, I lost a breast," Walker said. "But what's a breast if you're gonna live? I decided that I was gonna live."
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Diverging paths
In the early 1980s, black and white women with breast cancer in Chicago died at roughly the same rate. Thanks to improvements in detection and treatment in the 1990s, the mortality rate for white women fell sharply but it stayed about the same for black women. Between 2005 and 2007, the death rate for black Chicago women with breast cancer was 62 percent higher on average than for white women, according to a report by the Sinai Urban Health Institute in Chicago. From 1999 to 2005 in Chicago, an average of 90 more black women died of breast cancer than white women annually, according to a local task force.
Experts attributed the troubling trend the widest breast cancer mortality gap of any major city in the nation to a number of causes, key among them a lack of access to quality mammography and less access to quality treatment once diagnosed.
But in the past 10 years, Chicago has narrowed the disparity gap in deaths among black and white women.
Partnerships between the city and groups like the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force, founded in 2007, were created to reduce these numbers. Chicago now leads the nation in reducing the disparity in deaths among black women, said Anne Marie Murphy, the task force's executive director down from that high of 62 percent to 39 percent between 2011 and 2013, the most current period for which data are available.
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"When we started, Chicago had disparity in breast cancer mortality that was higher than (the national) average," said Murphy, who holds a doctorate in molecular genetics. "And though women biologically haven't changed in that nine years, the system has."
Now, Murphy said, Chicago is addressing the disparity with increased funding for quality mammograms, enhanced education and outreach programs, and other supportive services. This year, the city Department of Public Health invested $700,000 to increase breast health services for populations that have faced difficulties accessing quality care.
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Murphy's organization recently hosted its annual Beyond October event, which featured sign-ups for free mammograms, workshops, freebies and handouts from roughly 50 groups including the YWCA, Planned Parenthood and the American Cancer Society.
The event also featured massages, open enrollment help for those seeking health care and dance classes, all in support of the group's goal: Encourage healthy habits beyond October.
"Getting screened needs to be happening all year round, it can't be just an October thing," Murphy said. "Every month should be breast cancer awareness month."
'You feel very alone'
Murphy was one of a handful of speakers at the event, which included U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly of Matteson and Dr. Julie Morita, Chicago's health department commissioner. Speakers, some of them survivors, articulated their difficult experiences with the disease as black women.
"You feel very much alone," said Chris-Tia Donaldson, chief executive of the hair care company TGIN and a breast cancer survivor.
Donaldson, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was only 36 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Initially horrified that she would lose her hair just as her hair care products were making their way into major retailers, Donaldson, now 38, soon realized the loneliness she felt as a young woman with the condition was just as bad. Whereas older women may have established careers and dedicated support systems, younger women with breast cancer often have to "put all that on hold" to deal with their disease, she said.
This year, Donaldson's company coordinated a social media campaign which encouraged survivors, many of them young, to share their stories. When talking about breast cancer, such varied perspectives are important, Donaldson said, as are those of low-income women, who sometimes "have to trade-off between rent and treatment," she said.
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"A lot of people don't have paid sick days," she added.
'Trying to be strategic'
Worse still, experts said, many black women dying from breast cancer in the past lacked health insurance, which had long been a major roadblock to quality, ongoing treatment.
The Affordable Care Act reduced some barriers, but it may be harder for many uninsured Chicagoans to get covered this year, Morita said. Ninety percent of the federal budget for promoting and raising awareness for open enrollment has been cut, Morita said, and this year's health insurance sign-up deadline comes on Dec. 15, weeks ahead of prior years.
As a result, she said her department has tried to fill the void, hosting more "targeted events" to reach the communities most in need of care, like the working poor.
"We're trying to be strategic," Morita said. "We know what neighborhoods would really benefit from the marketplace." Special efforts have been made, she said, to host open enrollment programming at health centers, libraries and aldermanic offices.
Though experts say it's not immediately clear how much of an effect changes to the open enrollment period might have on the progress made against breast cancer in Chicago, there is reason to be hopeful, many agreed. Less than 10 percent of Chicago residents are uninsured "a record low," Morita said. And as the breast cancer mortality gap shrinks in Chicago, an October American Cancer Society study shows breast cancer death rates appear to be declining nationally. From 1989 to 2015, the study's authors said, overall breast cancer death rates fell by 39 percent, something they attribute to advances in treatment and early disease detection.
Things were far different when Walker was diagnosed. She and her husband, who married in 1964, are planning a move to Las Vegas. They are lucky, she said, and always have been.
"I'm still here," she said. "Not all of us die."
New York City rolled out the red carpet for 12-year-old musician Daniel Colaner for a Carnegie Hall debut that the Akron boy will never forget.
The piano and organ prodigy and his parents, Dan and Marie, were surprised by all the media attention Daniel started to receive the day after Thanksgiving, when the Akron Beacon Journal's story about Daniel, a survivor of Stage 4 neuroblastoma who was preparing to play at Carnegie Hall Sunday, was picked up by the national press.
Daniel, who will turn 13 Dec. 4 and has been in remission for nearly 12 years, saw his story snowball by the time he got to New York Saturday. First, a News Channel 5 Cleveland camera crew came to his organ lesson at St. Sebastian Church in Akron Friday morning to do a segment.
"I was kinda like, OK, what just happened here? I was kind of confused (about) what was going on. But it was exciting, definitely," Daniel, who is home-schooled, said from home Tuesday.
Also on Friday, ABC's World News Tonight contacted dad Dan, requesting to cover his Carnegie Hall performance in New York and interview him before and after. That same afternoon, ABC's Good Morning America did a Skype interview with Daniel in his Akron living room, which ran nationally Saturday morning.
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On to NYC
All of this happened as Daniel was packing to travel and practicing to play at one of the most famous performance venues in the world. He won third place in his age division in the American Protege International Piano and Strings Competition to earn his spot in the Carnegie Hall recital Sunday.
When the Colaners arrived in New York Saturday afternoon, Daniel practiced his Chopin Fantasie-Impromptu in a rented rehearsal studio and then the family had dinner at their hotel. When the waiter saw them catching up watching Daniel on Good Morning America on their phone, he was so happy for the celebrity in his midst, he ordered the family desserts on the house.
The next morning, World News Tonight interviewed Daniel inside Weill Recital Hall before the recital, shot his performance, and interviewed the family in the lobby for their Sunday night broadcast. That story went viral on Facebook; it was viewed nearly 750,000 times.
Daniel said the media attention before his Carnegie Hall performance was both exhilarating and a little nerve-wracking. But he didn't show one trace of nerves on camera.
"He really amazed us taking it in stride," Marie said of her son, who was visiting New York for the first time.
"That was my best performance ever of that piece," Daniel reported. "I was just so focused on the music at that moment, everything else was completely out of my mind."
'Everything was amazing'
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The pre-teen prodigy reveled in his recital experience: "Everything was just amazing at Carnegie Hall. The piano was incredible. The acoustic was beautiful."
The media buzz continued. Someone on the street in front of Carnegie Hall stopped Daniel and said, "I saw you on Good Morning America!"
Sunday afternoon, Daniel got to play the magnificent organ at St. Patrick's Cathedral, which he described as a "dream come true." And things just kept getting better: Daniel Brandel, one of the cathedral's music directors, invited the Akron boy to come back and play a concert there when he's ready.
Dad Dan envisions that happening within a year, as Daniel continues to build up his concert organ repertoire with one of his teachers, David Higgs at Eastman School of Music.
The fun didn't stop there. On Monday morning, Daniel made a live appearance on Good Morning America at its Times Square Studios. The show rented him a piano to play his Chopin piece and sent a limousine to pick Daniel and his parents up.
Host George Stephanopolous interviewed Daniel and his parents live, and members of the audience asked for the boy's photo afterward.
"I don't know if I wanted to be a celebrity but it just kind of happened," Daniel said.
Now, the family is fielding calls from talk shows. But their biggest priority is to focus on their life in Akron as well as Daniel's health and continued pursuit of musical excellence.
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The Colaners, who are devout Catholics, are grateful that their story of hope and faith has resonated with readers and viewers across the country. Their son's surprisingly intense media coverage brought up many emotions related to his early fight against cancer as well as the blessing that music has been in his life.
"Every time he's able to do something, that just reminds us of how incredibly blessed we've been from the care that he got" at Akron Children's Hospital, Marie said. "The fact that he can even do what he does, in spite of everything, it's an overwhelming emotion."
High school-age kids from Christ Community Church gave up most of their Saturday to perform a one-act Christmas play at local senior living centers and never complained.
"I like being able to come out here and share the message of Christmas with elderly people who don't have the opportunity to get out," said Asa Bratlien, of Mantorville, one of the student performers.
The play, "Come to Bethlehem and See," is a short re-telling of the Christmas story, sprinkled with traditional hymns and carols, including "O Come All Ye Faithful," "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Joy to the World."
For their first performance Saturday morning at The Homestead in Rochester, the kids read from a script, passing a microphone from hand to hand to make sure the two dozen seniors in the audience could hear what was being said.
"We like this, it's fun," said Greta Dokken, of Rochester, one of the seven performers. "Just the look on their faces, they seemed to be enjoying it, even when we made a mistake."
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Afterward, the kids had time to mingle with their audience before moving on to the next performance at The Brookemoor. The group also performed Saturday at Madonna Meadows and Madonna Towers.
"It's always great to have groups come in, especially when we can get young people in," said Marni Harris, life enrichment coordinator at The Homestead.
"My hope for our youth is to come out here and see that we're all community," said Becky Gerdes, a church volunteer who arranged the performances. "The goal is to make them feel comfortable enough to develop relationships (with older residents). There's so much they can learn from each other."
The students have been working on the production for about two months. They arrived at The Homestead dressed as angels and shepherds. "It's cool to go out and have a different point of view," said one of them, Sidney Williams.
"We're not in front of our peers anymore," said another, Caitlin Brunn.
That was the point of Saturday's performances, Gerdes said. "This is not a group of people they interact with on a regular basis," she said.
This was the first year for the outreach effort, she said.
"The big thing for these high school kids is giving of their time on a weekend," Gerdes said. "That's the biggest gift you can share with someone."
ALBERT LEA Local officials recently received two studies that might shed new light on Mayo Clinic's plan to consolidate services at its Albert Lea and Austin hospitals.
Mayo representatives met with Albert Lea and Freeborn County officials Thursday to share a brief economic impact summary. Citizens and officials have been requesting such a report since Mayo announced its consolidation plans on June 12.
Mayo spokeswoman Ginger Plumbo said the three-page report, completed by TEConomy Partners in September, "provides clarity and context around our recent economic impact in Freeborn County and can serve as a baseline for future economic impact assessments." She called it "only the beginning" of ongoing discussions and dialogue.
"At Mayo Clinic, we are firmly committed to the people and economic well-being of the communities of Albert Lea and Austin as well as surrounding communities," Plumbo said in an emailed statement. "We are exceptionally proud of the health care our team provides to patients living in the surrounding area and of the positive economic impact our presence has on the region."
Mayo's report notes Mayo is the largest employer in Freeborn County, directly creating more than 1,000 jobs and indirectly creating 500 more. TEConomy Partners says Mayo Clinic Health System had an overall economic impact of more than $180 million in 2015, plus paying nearly $10 million in state and local taxes each year.
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The report which has not yet been discussed by the city or county officials was met by questions and criticism by local officials and members of Save Our Hospital.
Tom Jensen, Freeborn County administrator, said "the first thing" brought up in Thursday's meeting was why Mayo used financial information from 2015 to complete its economic impact study. He and Albert Lea City Manager Chad Adams met Thursday with Mayo officials and requested additional information, which he said Mayo pledged to provide.
"It's 2 years old," Jensen said. "They should have their 2016 numbers."
The study further highlights employee wages at Mayo averaged $122,500 in 2015, which is nearly three times what the average worker in Freeborn County earned at $43,500.
However, Jensen and Save Our Hospital leader Jennifer Vogt-Erickson both questioned why the study focused on the past rather than the future. Jensen questioned whether those high-paying jobs will remain after Mayo shifts most inpatient services from Albert Lea to Austin, which is what initially prompted local officials and citizens to request the economic impact study of Mayo.
While Mayo repeatedly has said it expects overall employee numbers to remain largely unchanged, Jensen expressed concern that Albert Lea will see high-paying jobs replaced by those requiring less training and expertise.
Vogt-Erickson echoed Jensen's concerns.
"This is another example of Mayo playing games with us," Vogt-Erickson said. "Mayo had promised us an economic impact study based on its planned changes."
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Adams wasn't available for comment, but the city sent out an email late Friday announcing a public forum at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Albert Lea High School auditorium. The 800-seat venue is expected to be filled to listen to officials from Quorum Health Resources LLC detail their own study on the feasibility of a full-service, acute-care hospital in Albert Lea.
The $75,000 study was jointly commissioned in October by the city, county and SOH. Some view the study as another step toward finding either a new or second health care provider.
Quorum's 60-page report was finalized Friday, but details are not expected to be made public until Tuesday's forum. Jensen and Vogt-Erickson both declined to discuss its contents.
Democrats running for the 1st Congressional District seat are divided over whether DFL Sen. Al Franken should resign amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
After a sixth woman stepped forward to accuse Franken of groping her while posing for a photo, 1st District DFL candidate Joe Sullivan issued a statement calling on the senator and President Trump to resign.
"Our elected officials, and those aspiring to be elected officials, should be held to a higher standard. For these reasons, I believe Al Franken should resign from the U.S. Senate and, furthermore, I believe that President Donald Trump should resign for his admitted sexual assault," Sullivan said in a statement.
Stephanie Kemplin, a 41-year-old Army veteran, said Franken touched her breast while she was posing with him for a photo in 2003 during a USO Tour in Kuwait. A spokesperson for Franken told media outlets the senator poses for pictures with tens of thousands of people and has never intentionally engaged in this kind of conduct. Franken has said he does not plan to resign and has vowed to cooperate with a Senate ethics investigation.
First District DFL candidate Rich Wright, an attorney from Rochester, called for Franken to resign following the first report of alleged sexual misconduct leveled by Leeann Tweeden. She accused Franken of forcibly kissing her during a 2006 USO Tour. A photo was also taken of a grinning Franken with his hands hovering over Tweeden's chest as she slept.
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"As an attorney, time and time again, I have represented women who have been harassed, assaulted, and stalked. There should be no protection for those who seek to use power to harm others. I call on Sen. Franken to resign, effective immediately. Sexual assault will not be tolerated," Wright said in a statement.
First District DFL candidate Dan Feehan in a Facebook post last month condemned Franken's actions and said this behavior "cannot be tolerated." During an interview, Feehan said he believes moving ahead with the Senate ethics investigation is the best course of action. This will create a process where victims can speak out and be heard.
"I'm of the belief that the ethics investigation that has been agreed to should be followed," Feehan said.
First District DFL candidate Vicki Jensen said she is glad to see Franken participating with the Senate ethics investigation. She added she is not going to call for Franken's resignation until Republicans show they are serious about confronting politicians in their party accused of sexual harassment.
"I'll be calling for Al Franken's resignation when Republicans show the same kind of outrage toward Donald Trump and Roy Moore and show some empathy for their accusers," Jensen said.
Wright hosts meetings on violence against women
Wright is hosting a three-part discussion on violence against women. The meetings will be at 7 p.m. on Dec. 14, 21 and 28 at Cafe Steam in Rochester. The first meeting will feature women who have been affected by harassment and assault talking about their experience. The second meeting will be a roundtable discussion with men to talk about steps to address the problem. The final meeting will present these action ideas to women to get their perspective.
Budget forecast
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Tuesday is a big day for the state budget. Minnesota Management and Budget will release the November budget forecast Tuesday morning. That forecast will give lawmakers their first glimpse heading into the 2018 legislative session of whether they will have surplus dollars to work with or be faced with a budget deficit. If there's extra cash, lawmakers might push for additional spending of tax cuts. A deficit would require cuts to the state's existing budget.
My father, an anti-communist, liked to tell this joke from the 1930s:
Why is Earl Browder (head of the American communist party) like the Brooklyn Bridge? Because both are suspended by a cable.
For Browder, the cable came from Moscow. It told American communists what to think and what to say.
To cite the most memorable example, one cable would tell them that Germany is an enemy. Later, another would say that Germany is an ally in the fight against American and British imperialism. But then, a third cable would instruct that Germany is the enemy and must be destroyed at all cost.
Today, Democrats are suspended by a tweet. Their media wing and their rank-and-file rely on signals from leadership about what to think and say about world affairs. (I must add that some supporters of President Trump are similarly suspended.)
Putins Russia invaded Georgia? No big deal. It was probably President Bushs fault. President Obama and Hillary Clinton want to end the mistreatment of Russia by Bush and put relations on a friendly basis through a reset (complete with button).
Mitt Romney explains why Putins Russia is the major geopolitical threat to the U.S.? He cant be right. After all, Obama has dismissed this claim with a joke and promised Russias president, off mic, to be more flexible in accommodating Putin after the election.
Putins Russia moves into the vacuum in Syria with the intention of brutally propping up the murderous Assad regime, which has crossed Obamas red line by using chemical weapons on civilians? No worries. Russia can be a force for good in Syria. After all, Obama has enlisted Putin to make sure Assad gets rid of his chemical weapons.
But: Putins Russia gets on the bad side of Hillary Clinton during the presidential election? Russia is evil. Its the main geopolitical threat to the U.S.
Claudia Rosett is as clear-eyed as anyone I know who writes about foreign policy. In addition, she used to report from Russia for the Wall Street Journal and served for a time as its Moscow bureau chief.
In an excellent interview with Ginni Thomas for the Daily Caller, Rosett explains why Russia does, indeed, pose a serious threat to the U.S. and to world order. She also reminds us of the enthusiasm and flexibility Obama displayed toward Russia until near the end of his two terms, when Russia needed to be viewed differently to serve his Partys interest.
Rosett cites Obama the hot mic promise of flexibility towards Putin; the shelving of missile defense for Europe in the name of that phony reset; the inadequate pursuit of Edward Snowden, who is still hiding in Russia; Obamas fecklessness regarding the red line that opened the door to Russias dominance in Syria; the Iran deal that advantaged Russia and its allies; and the weak response of the U.S. when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine.
Compared to this, says Rosett, Trumps occasional unfortunate comments about Russia and Putin pale. She is right. A few conciliatory comments cant match nearly eight years of appeasement a policy Democrats, including those in the media, would still be defending had they not gotten the cable sent when top Democrats decided to blame Russia for Hillarys electoral woes.
Theres plenty more worth hearing in the interview with Rosett, which runs for about half an hour.
Eric Eskola and Cathy Wurzer host the weekly news review Almanac on our local PBS affiliate. This past Friday night they invited Johns and my congressman Minnesota Second District Rep. Jason Lewis to discuss the tax bill he had voted for. In the land of Lake Wobegon, Eric and Cathy are above average Minnesota journalists. They nevertheless carry on their discussion with Jason at a low level, I think its fair to say, based in part on Democratic talking points. Jason performs admirably with good humor. Having come out of the world of talk radio, he has excellent communication skills.
His hosts could have asked him some critical questions about the incentive effects of reforms on the individual side. Jason cites the Kennedy and Reagan cuts to individual income tax rates. Is there anything comparable in the pending bills? We can see the incentive effects on the corporate side discounted to present value in some part of the run-up of the stock market, though Cathy Wurzer is worried about what might happen when stock market values tumble. Jason points out that they tumbled momentarily thanks to ABCs Brian Ross on Friday. This point escapes her completely.
At about 5:30 the discussion turns to current sexual harassment issues. Here Eric Eskola alludes to Jasons career in radio broadcasting. Neither Eric nor Cathy takes up Minnesotas own contribution to the issues as they have manifested in Congress. Rather, they ask him about Roy Moore.
As I dream of Sabo making a house call in Minnesota, Eric and Cathy remind us of the media air that we breathe. It is suffocating.
The Dems are gunning for Jason in 2018. The Second is a suburban swing district with a slight Republican tilt. He needs all the help he can get in this cycle. His campaign site is here. You can contribute here. We wish him well in what promises to be a difficult year for Republicans.
Several Arab media sources have reported that twelve Iranian military personnel were killed in an Israeli air strike on an Iranian base in Syria Friday night. The Jerusalem Post has confirmed the strikes but apparently not the death count.
Israel fired the missiles at a base Iran has been building near the Syrian city of al-Qiswa (also spelled al-Kiswah) about 50 kilometers from the Golan Heights. Reportedly, the strike destroyed an arms depot.
The day before the strike, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned in a video clip that Israel would not tolerate an Iranian military presence in Syria. The day after the strike, his office released the clip for public consumption.
Netanyahu declared:
We will not allow a regime hell-bent on the annihilation of the Jewish state to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not allow that regime to entrench itself militarily in Syria, as it seeks to do, for the express purpose of eradicating our state.
The Jerusalem Post offers a time line of events leading to the strike.
For more than a year, there have been warnings that Iran was intent on constructing permanent bases in Syria, laying the groundwork for the era after ISIS would be defeated. On November 10 the BBC released a report that Iran was building a permanent military base in Syria. The report had three satellite images with it from January, May and October showing a site near El-Kiswah, south of Damascus. It was about 50 km. from Israeli forces on the Golan Heights. The changes at the site showed new buildings and the BBC ascribed the information to a western intelligence source.
Just before the release of the November 10 report, the U.S., Russia, and Jordan had agreed to a Memorandum of Principles regarding a cease-fire in southern Syria. The agreement was supposed to remove foreign fighters from the area.
From the U.S. point of view, one purpose of the agreement may well have been to reassure the Israelis that Iranian elements would not be operating in proximity to the Golan Heights. Israel had been seeking assurances that Iranian forces would be kept 60 km. from the Golan.
Two days after the November 10 report about Irans permanent military base, a State Department official indicated to Israeli media that the cease-fire memorandum would include the removal of Iranian forces from areas near the Golan. Three days later, however, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the agreement did not provide that Iranian- backed forces would be withdrawn.
On November 15, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman responded: With regards to Iran, we will simply not allow for Shiite consolidation and Iranian entrenchment in Syria, nor will we allow Syria to become a forward operating base against the State of Israel. However, Iran continued to make no secret of its intent to be a major presence in Syria, and its base testified to that intention.
Thus, Israel struck the base at the beginning of December.
The JPost asks several questions about these events. First, why did Western intelligence release pictures of the Iranian base? Second, why did Israel wait for weeks to attack it?
The answer to the second question might be that Israel wanted to give Iran time to pull its people out of the base before an attack, thus avoiding deaths that might lead to a wider confrontation. As noted, it is not entirely clear whether, or to what extent, Iran took advantage of this opportunity.
Power Line is pleased to welcome Kurt Eichenwald to its readership, though should I be worried or pleased that our most mild of provocations indicates that he keeps a cardiologist fully and anxiously employed? All it took was a nod to this overwrought tweet to provoke a tantrum:
One hardly expects an elite journalist to lose all perspective in the manner of a Hollywood star like Patton Oswalt, who offered up this:
But perhaps someone really needs to report the liberal hysteria to the Centers for Disease Control, because it seems to be spreading to otherwise sober-minded people:
Before moving on to the substance of Eichenwalds primal scream, I will heartily endorse the last part of his tweet: please, please Millennialsdo leave the country if you can! Tell you whatIll do my part. Ill offer ten one-way airfares to Venezuela for any millennials, with the proviso that they have to file the paperwork to renounce their U.S. citizenship as part of the deal. Come to think of it, if Eichenwald is right that this tax cut will destroy America, it means that Congress will have also solved the immigration problem, too, since no one will want to come here now. Strange how liberals havent noticed this dimension of the Republicans evil genius.
It is dismaying to learn that a journalist as experienced as Eichenwald has such difficulty with reading comprehension. Apparently he did not understand the last sentence of my objectionable note: Ill have more on some of the specific wonky aspects of the tax bill in a separate post. Stay tuned. . . Instead he let fly with this over on anti-social media:
Do take in the whole thing, since this is just the first of a four-part tweetstorm of handwringing about the debt and deficit. Why a journalist thinks Twitter is a suitable medium for carrying on a serious argument is beyond meI only use Twitter in a vain attempt to emulate my two heroes David Deeble and David Burgeso I am glad that Eichenwald has taken the trouble to comment and return fire in the comment thread of my previous post (just keep scrolling down).
Eichenwald is narrowly correct that my post concentrated on the political aspect of the debate over tax reform, because I think thats what drives liberals on this issue. Like most liberals, Eichenwald is notably silent on my challenge about why letting people (or corporations) keep more of their own money represents redistribution. Liberals always change the subject on this challenge, or pretend they didnt hear you, because they operate under the tacit premise that the entirety of the privately produced wealth of the nation rightly belongs to the government to distribute. No. Repeating that liberal cliche endlessly, as liberals have been doing since the Reagan years, does not make it just. Eichenwald appears conspicuously unable to defend the supposed justice of this position. (Some of my academic liberal friends will cry out Rawls!, as though that dense and unconvincing tract [A Theory of Justice] was established beyond dispute. But this is an argument for another day. Though if Eichenwald wants to throw down with Rawls, Im happy to fight it out on that line all winter.)
Instead Eichenwald bases his critique on two other arguments. The first is: But the deficit! Hes more likely right than wrong that the tax bill expands the deficit further, though only by a small amount compared with the current disastrous trajectory. It is hard to take liberal concern about the deficit seriously, since liberals only get concerned about the deficit when it involves a tax cut. Where was this concern for the deficit when Obamacare was in the works? Instead we were treated to the preposterous claims that it would lower premiums and reduce the deficit. No one over the age of six believed thisexcept liberals. So youll excuse me if Im not much impressed by this expression of Sudden Onset Liberal Deficit Anxiety.
The real source of the liberal grief is the effrontery of Republicans to stick with their position that they are no longer willing to be tax collectors for the welfare state. Liberals persist in thinking that Republicans are supposed to go on forever being the plodding Washington Generals to their Progressive Globetrotters, endlessly expanding government goodies for everyone and leaving Republicans to pay for it. They long for the days when Barry Goldwater voted against the Kennedy income tax cuts (about which liberals are always strangely mute) because of his worry about the deficit. Sorrywere wise to that game now, and wont play it any more.
His second claim is somewhat more creditable: that the supply-side logic that tax cuts will pay for itself through faster economic growth is implausible, and that it robs our policy-makers of counter-cyclical tools when the next inevitable recession occurs. The second part of this claim reflects unreconstructed Keynesianism, which Ill have to defer to another time as it would take too long to treat right now, except for one specific point. Eichenwald notes that were cutting taxes at a time of historically low unemployment. But this is only true because of the appalling low labor force participation rate. If we had a labor force participation rate close to the historic average of the last 40 years, our official unemployment rate would be a lot higher than it is today. Unutilized labor is just as much as drag on overall economic growth as is unutilized capital.
This first part of his argument is more interesting. Hes right that it is implausible to expect that 3.9 percent (or more) of economic growth for a whole decade, but what is curious to me is how liberals have simply given up on seeking faster growth at all. (Check the historical data from the World Bank here if youre curious.) The Obama administration was utterly indifferent to seeking higher economic growth. Liberal rhetoric today contrasts sharply with the liberal rhetoric of the Kennedy era, which was all about what it self-consciously called at the time growth liberalism. Today all we get from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders is demands for punitive liberalismmake the rich pay more! Redistribute! More than that, a lot of liberals today think that faster growth is no longer possible, that 2 percent growth is the new normal.
It is not necessary for economic growth to reach 4% for an entire, uninterrupted decade to vindicate this tax bill. Just a few years of higher growth will suffice to justify it. But there are other reasons to support tax reform beyond the growth argument. One of the chief concerns of liberals is stagnant wages. Theres a fair bit of serious economic research that our high corporate tax rate has been a factor in stagnant wage growth, and that lowering the tax rate will provide significant benefits to workers wages. I suspect Eichenwald disputes this argument, and probably would even if it turn out to be true, because for a liberal rising wages is only fun if the government mandates it.
Two final notes. First, for what its worth according to some of the tax cut calculators it looks like my own taxes are actually going to go up a lot under the House version, and down only slightly under the Senate version. The various tax calculators are imperfectlike accountants, every one gives me a different resultand in any case Im still likely for whatever comes out of the conference committee.
Second, as it happens, I am on record calling for higher taxes, but from everyone, not just the rich, on the theory that if everyone paid for all the government they receive, they might want less of it. Sample:
Requiring the American people to actually pay for all of the government they receive is, as Niskanen and others have convincingly argued, the most effective way to limit its growth. Right now the anti-tax bias of the Right results in shifting costs onto future generations who do not vote in todays elections, and enables liberals to defend against spending restraints very cheaply. Instead of starving the beast, conservatives should serve the check.
Turns out liberals hated my argument just as much as conservatives did (you should see the hate mail I received!), because liberals are simply obsessed with punitive taxation of the rich. I do find it curious that liberals who point to European welfare states as being superior to our supposedly parsimonious system conspicuously leave out one major element of European fiscal structure: very regressive consumption taxes (VATs and such). Why the reluctance of liberals to propose we adopt European consumption tax policy? See above: rinse and repeat as necessary.
Id have preferred a tax reform that just took on corporate taxes and left the individual side largely undisturbed. A fix of the defects of the 1986 tax reform, which socked it to and distorted the corporate tax system, was long overdue. In fact a lot of Democrats agreed with this for a long time if you listened closely. Hillary Clinton made noises about fixing our defective corporate tax system when she was still in the Senate a decade ago, and even Obama, in his more lucid moments, expressed support for changing the tax disincentives for corporations to keep so much of their capital overseas. In fact, I believe that if Hillary had won the election she would have proposed some corporate tax reform. Democrats could have dealt with Republicans on this issue if they wanted to, as they did very constructively in the 1986 tax reform, if they werent so far gone into their Resistance Uber Alles! mode toward all things Republican these days.
One last point. Eichewald writes in our comment thread (and elsewhere):
There is a reason why Forbes calls this the end of all economic sanity and the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history.
No, Forbes most assuredly does not call the tax bill the end of all economic sanity. A single contributor to Forbes.com does. Once again Eichenwald fails at reading comprehension, as right at the byline of the author it says Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Forbes has a large and diverse stable of online contributors. And invited contributors can post without going through an editor, and in no way can be said to represent the editorial position of Forbes. How do I know that? Guess what: Im also a contributor to Forbes.com, and I suppose if I want to I can post an article today saying the tax bill will be the greatest single fiscal move since Alexander Hamilton started dancing on Broadway. Would it be right then for me or anyone else to claim that Forbes calls the tax bill the greatest thing since Hamilton was a pup? Of course not. Eichenwald has engaged in an egregious misrepresentation here. And then he probably wonders why so many people distrust or hate the media. Cheap stunts like this are exactly why he neednt be taken seriously.
Ill await his public correction or clarification about this gross misrepresentation.
P.S. Special bonus hysteria headline:
The scientific debate over Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming continues to rage. In my opinion, the realists are thrashing the hysterics, but for a more neutral view, check out this essay by Rupert Darwall, the author of The Age of Global Warming: A History (2013) and Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex (2017).
Darwalls essay is balanced and thorough. You really should read the whole thing. This is his assessment of one of the Lefts latest efforts to stoke hysteria, the West Antarctic melting due to geothermal heat. Which can hardly be caused by global warming, given the continents frosty temperatures:
The average high temperature in Antarctica in January is -18 degrees F, while the average low temperature in January is similar, at about -21 degrees F. The temperature decreases dramatically into February and then March. Februarys average high temperature is about -41 degrees F and the average low is about -45 degrees F. The average high in March is -65 degrees F and the average low is about -70 degrees F.
Darwall explains what is going on:
West Antarctica has become the poster child of the medias climate change alarmism. Late in 2016, four New York Times journalists visited the West Antarctic ice sheet, which had been singled out by Al Gore as having passed a climate change tipping point. Recent computer forecasts suggest that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at a high level, parts of Antarctica could break up rapidly, they wrote in a three-part story on their trip published in May. Antarcticas collapse has the potential to inundate coastal cities across the globe. Scientists, they claim, now believe that West Antarctica is a disaster waiting to happen, if human-caused global warming has not already set the calamity in motion. Its kind of a blowtorch on the underside of the ice shelf, one of the experts told them.
***
This speculation depends on greenhouse gas emissions causing the ice sheet to disintegrate. However, the human causation story is not straightforward, as the Times report quietly concedes. The warmer water under the ice shelf has not been linked to global warmingat least not directly. It had likely been there for centuries, so why had it not cooled down by now? Despite the presence of a figurative blowtorch under the West Antarctic ice sheet, the word geothermal appears nowhere in the Times piece. The area sits atop the West Antarctic Rift System, where, according to a 2014 paper by four University of Texas geophysicists, geothermal fluxes are expected to be high, heterogeneous, possibly transient. Heat from the Earths interior, they note, is likely a significant factor in local, regional, and continental ice sheet stability. Did the Times fly four of its journalists to Antarctica to report on geothermal fluxes? The word does not appear in their three-part report. I dont think the biblical deluge is just a fairy tale, a retired glaciologist told them. In language that, if used by a non-scientist, would be disregarded as activist hyperbole, he continued: Some kind of major flood happened all over the world, and it left an indelible imprint on the collective memory of mankind.
It is entertaining to see a liberal scientist endorsing Noah and his ark. But what is happening in Antarctica is quite different:
The recent discovery of 91 volcanoes under West Antarctica was reported by the Washington Post as a human-caused climate change story. Only three quarters of the way through the story did the paper quote the remarkable third-year student at the University of Edinburgh, Max Van Wyk de Vries, who had made the discovery, saying that Antarctica as a whole had generally been doing better than most glaciers around the world. Its not melting rapidly like glaciers in the Rockies or Alps, he said.
How volcanoes in the Antarctic could possibly be linked to any human activity is hard to imagine.
There is much more at the link, and I recommend that you read it all.
TRENTON New Jersey state senators have crafted two bills to put back in place the Obama-era campus sexual assault guidelines rescinded this fall by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
Last week, the state Senate Higher Education Committee unanimously approved two bills that target sexual assault on college campuses.
They now head to the full Senate for further consideration.
On Sept. 22, DeVos announced the U.S. Department of Education was withdrawing policy and guidance reflected in a Dear Colleague Letter, issued by the Office for Civil Rights under President Barack Obama, that she said compromised the rights of those accused of sexual harassment or violence.
The first of the bills, sponsored by state Sen. Sandra Bolden Cunningham and Senate President Steve Sweeney, requires institutions of higher education to use procedures in responding, reporting and investigation of allegations of sexual harassment that are consistent with federal guidelines issued in 2011 and 2014, instead of the newer guidelines.
This bill also requires each public and independent institution of higher education to annually report to the Secretary of Higher Education the total number of allegations of sexual assault in the institution, a summary of its efforts to respond to allegations, and any new or revised procedures in the prior year to address campus sexual as- sault.
While the federal government may want to go backwards, New Jersey will continue to go forward on these issues. New Jersey intends to be a leader in the protection of our students and will continue to strengthen the process of justice for survivors of sexual assault. These bills fulfill that goal, Sweeney said.
The second bill, sponsored by Cunningham and Sen. Tom Kean Jr., establishes a Campus Sexual Assault Commission comprised of 12 members to study and evaluate emerging issues, policies and practices concerning campus sexual assault, including at least one individual who is a campus sexual assault survivor.
This bill would codify some recommendations from the Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault created Dec. 2, 2015.
CAPE MAY Shoppers milled around the citys Convention Hall Sunday morning searching for holiday gifts.
More than 50 vendors displayed handmade art, jewelry, woodwork and other items Saturday and Sunday during the annual Crafts at Christmas show. The event coincided with Saturdays popular West Cape May Christmas Parade and drew crowds, vendors said.
It was a far cry from the Black Friday crowds and the virtual shopping carts of Cyber Monday. However, shoppers did have the chance to browse unique local goods and snag a deal.
Ceire Parker, a silversmith for SwellColors Glass Studio, said the show was special in that it featured items that were generally made in New Jersey by people from New Jersey.
A lot of what we do is locally inspired, Parker said. We like to show local pride.
The studios display featured glass Christmas ornaments shaped to look like the state, and each contained a pinch of sand from Cape Mays beaches. The studio has locations in Surf City and Barnegat Light.
Peter Henderer also uses physical pieces of Cape May in his work. He crafts wood recycled from homes in Cape May into a variety of shapes, many of which are nautical in nature.
Henderer said he gets a lot of the wood by searching through trash and Dumpsters. Sometimes, contractors or others who know of his work give him the material.
It just comes from all over the place, said Henderer, 27, of Cape May, who participates in about 25 craft shows a year.
MAYS LANDING Local politicians and congressional candidates will headline a rally in front of South Jersey Congressman Frank LoBiondos office Monday to protest the Republican-backed tax bill that is making its way through Congress.
The rally, hosted by the grassroots group Action Together New Jersey, will begin 11 a.m. Monday outside LoBiondos Mays Landing office and will feature Atlantic County freeholder-elect Caren Fitzpatrick and South Jersey Democratic congressional candidates Tanzie Youngblood and Sean Thom.
LoBiondo, a Republican, voted against the tax plan when it passed the House of Representatives, saying it would negatively affect residents in South Jersey.
New Jersey's recent election ranked second all-time in gubernatorial campaign spending The 2017 gubernatorial race was the second most expensive race for governor in New Jersey history.
When the House tax reform legislation was introduced, I said my support was dependent on preserving key deductions critical to taxpayers in my high-tax state of New Jersey, LoBiondo said after voting against the bill. As hard-working South Jersey residents already face excessive taxes from Trenton, I cannot support compounding the financial burden by eliminating their state and local income tax deductions, capping their property tax deductions and removing deductions for medical or education expenses. While I support reforming and simplifying the tax code, my no vote today was in the best interest of my constituents.
LoBiondo could not be reached for comment about the rally, which is part of a bigger effort around the state to protest in front of every Republican congressional office regarding the tax bill. He will be in Washington tomorrow for an unrelated voting session, according to a spokesperson.
Youngblood and Thom will face off against state Senator Jeff Van Drew in the Democratic primary for a chance to win LoBiondos seat.
LoBiondo announced last month he will not seek re-election in 2018. No Republicans have declared their candidacy yet for the open seat.
The House of Representatives and the Senate will meet in the coming weeks to try and come up with a compromise tax bill. Each chamber has already passed their own versions.
If they do, both chambers will have to vote on the compromised bill before it can be signed by President Donald Trump.
MAYS LANDING An Atlantic County Superior Court judge has denied a motion to dismiss the weapons charges indictment against Linwood doctor James Kauffman, county Prosecutor Damon G. Tyner announced Monday.
Kauffman was indicted on four charges following his June arrest, two counts of unlawful possession of a weapon, possession of a weapon for unlawful purposes and obstruction of administration of law.
Calls to Kauffmans attorney Edwin Jacobs, of Jacobs and Barbone of Atlantic City, were not returned Monday.
According to Tyner, a motion was filed Oct. 16 by Kauffmans lawyers to dismiss the indictment. Arguments were presented Nov. 17 from both the defense and Chief Assistant Prosecutor Seth Levy.
A spokeswoman for the Prosecutors Office said Monday that a trial date on the pending charges has not been scheduled.
On June 13, the Atlantic County Prosecutors Office, along with members of the FBI and local law enforcement, executed a search warrant of Kauffmans Linwood home and Egg Harbor Township office. Kauffman displayed a 9mm handgun during the search before eventually surrendering to authorities.
Kauffman was married to veterans advocate and radio host April Kauffman when she was found slain in their home in 2012. The doctor has not been named a suspect in the case, and authorities have said the June 13 warrants were unrelated to their ongoing investigation into the homicide.
After Kauffmans arrest, Jacobs told reporters five search warrants were issued at his medical office related to a homicide and health care fraud investigation.
Kauffman remains in custody at the Atlantic County jail in Mays Landing.
Staff Writer John De-Rosier contributed to this report.
MAYS LANDING About two dozen people rallied outside the office of U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo on Monday in protest of Republican-backed tax bills they say will raise taxes on many in New Jersey.
The rally, organized by Action Together New Jersey, was part of a statewide effort to urge Republican members of Congress to vote against the tax-reform bill.
There is no evidence to suggest that by cutting taxes on the wealthiest among us that we, the middle class, are going to be any better off, said Tanzie Youngblood, a Democratic candidate for the 2nd Congressional District seat LoBiondo will retire from in 2019. This tax bill puts us in debt, and it puts us in danger of having many social programs cut.
The local rally was headlined by speeches from Atlantic County Freeholder-elect Caren Fitzpatrick, Youngblood and fellow Democratic congressional candidate Sean Thom. The main talking point, by candidates and residents alike, was that the theory of trickle-down economics does not serve middle-class families across the country.
The House of Representatives and the Senate recently passed their own versions of tax reform that would significantly change the federal tax structure in the United States. Proponents of the legislation say it will simplify the tax code and lessen the tax burden on U.S. citizens by increasing the standard deduction and child tax credits. Proponents also say decreasing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent, something that is in both the House and Senate versions of the bill, will increase competition among businesses and create jobs.
Opponents of the legislation say the reforms are gifts to the wealthiest people in the country and that vital programs such as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid will be cut to pay for the lost revenue. They also fear education spending could be slashed to help pay for the tax cuts.
I look at the impact on education and the removal of the student loan tax credits and see that as unacceptable, said Thom, of Millville. We need to recognize where the taxation needs to start and where it needs to come from.
How your lawmakers voted this week HOUSE
With both versions of the legislation passing, the two chambers are tasked with combining their legislation to create one tax bill. If they do that, it must pass both chambers again before it can be signed by President Donald Trump. No vote has been scheduled.
House Republicans have a bigger cushion than Senate Republicans in passing a final measure or conference report.
Assuming all Democrats remain opposed to the measure, the Senate can lose just two GOP votes with Vice President Mike Pence casting a tie-breaking vote but the House can lose 22 votes to opposition and the bill would still pass.
Only 13 Republicans voted against the tax bill the House passed Nov. 16. Of those no votes, 12 came from members from the high-tax states of New York, New Jersey and California over concerns about the partial elimination of the state and local tax deduction, also known as SALT.
LoBiondo voted against the House version of the bill, saying it would negatively affect his constituents in South Jersey.
New Jersey's recent election ranked second all-time in gubernatorial campaign spending The 2017 gubernatorial race was the second most expensive race for governor in New Jersey history.
When the House tax reform legislation was introduced, I said my support was dependent on preserving key deductions critical to taxpayers in my high-tax state of New Jersey, LoBiondo said after voting against the bill. As hard-working South Jersey residents already face excessive taxes from Trenton, I cannot support compounding the financial burden by eliminating their state and local income-tax deductions, capping their property-tax deductions and removing deductions for medical or education expenses.
GOP leaders are working on a proposal to partially restore the deduction for state and local income taxes, which is fully repealed in both chambers bills, to address the concerns of California Republicans. But the Senate would have to agree to that in conference.
Thats just one of many issues the two chambers will have to tackle. Other House priorities include eliminating expiration dates for tax cuts for individuals, fully repealing the estate tax and maintaining the corporate rate at no higher than 20 percent.
Protesters at the rally said they are not necessarily against reforming the tax code, but they are opposed to the current legislation.
This tax bill is not good for Americans, Fitzpatrick said. The one thing that sticks in my mind is that you cant get a deduction for going to college, but if you happen to buy a private jet, there is a tax deduction. Were all in luck for that one.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Juno. Nemo. Jonas.
These are names that might stick in your memory. When The Weather Channel began naming winter storms during the winter of 2012-13, senior meteorologist Bryan Norcross explained, Its simply easier to communicate about a complex storm if it has a name, which our naming program has demonstrated.
Adam Rainear, a doctoral student at the University of Connecticuts Department of Communications, wanted to find out if easier to communicate meant easier for the public to understand as well.
Winter storm naming is a controversial topic in the weather community. AccuWeather, based in State College, Pennsylvania, has publicly come out against the naming. In addition, the National Weather Service does not name winter storms.
If there were climate change, people would say, Where is your information? Prove it. So, instead of having people arguing, I wanted to use science and data to prove whether this is actually effective, Rainear often thought to himself, he said.
Sampling 407 university students as part of his Mass Communications graduate class, Rainear, Kenneth Lachlan and Carlyon Lin designed an experiment to test their theory. He designed three Tweets that looked like they came from The Weather Channel, explaining the threat for a winter storm.
One Tweet did not use a storm name, one used a name from their 2014-15 list, Zelus which was not used that winter and one used an Americanized name, Bill.
Then he asked the students to rate each Tweet based on three factors: source credibility, favorable reaction to the name, and severity of susceptibility (how severe they believed the storm would be).
What did the results show?
In terms of source credibility, the participants gave the Tweet with no name at all a 3 out of 5. A Tweet with Bill and Zelus scored lower, 2.83 to 2.93, respectively, but that was not found to be significant, Rainear said.
Patrick Orlando, of Linwood, echos these findings.
Whether its a winter storm bringing 10 inches of snow or Winter Storm Celeste, I am going to prepare the same way, Orlando said.
Talking about whether the type of name had an impact, Rainear said, The Americanized names did not have any difference in importance compared to the off the wall names.
However, The Weather Channel says, The storm-naming program raises awareness and reduces the risks, danger and confusion for residents in the storms paths.
A typical argument from the meteorological community against the Weather Channels naming of winter storms is that it is used as a promotional or marketing tool. It would be better if the government issued a name, similar to tropical storms and hurricanes now.
Turns out, the American Meteorological Society is doing just that. Rainear is the co-chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Naming Winter Storms, which is in charge of discussion and additional research of whether the National Weather Service should give out the names. Rainear works with meteorologists, including from The Weather Channel and the government, to find a solution.
The question going forward should be less about whether the type of name is useful to the public perception, but whether having a name it is useful at all, he said.
If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this
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Paris, Nov 30 : The UAE Embassy here has observed the country's National Day for the first time at the Louvre Museum in the presence of top officials.
The United Arab Emirates' National Day is on Saturday. The reception to mark the day was held in the museum on Wednesday and was attended by UAE Minister of State Zaki Anwar Nusseibeh, Health Minister Abdul Rahman Mohammad bin Nasser Al Owais and the country's Ambassador to France Omar Saif Ghobash.
Former French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and the Speaker of the French Constitutional Council were also present.
"We are proud to observe the 46th anniversary of the establishment of the UAE here today in a celebration that reflects the privileged bonds between the UAE and France," said Nusseibeh.
Minister Al Owais lauded the distinguished cultural relations between the two countries and highlighted the recent opening of Louvre Abu Dhabi as a major milestone in further advancing these relations to a higher level.
Around 70 UAE students are enrolled in diverse and rigorous majors in France, including medicine, law, security and political sciences.
Abdullah Musabah Al Naimi, the Chairperson of the UAE Permanent Delegate to Unesco and a number of representatives of the UAE Foreign Affairs Ministry also attended the function.
Seoul, Dec 2 : Six American F-22 Raptor stealth fighters arrived in South Korea on Saturday for a joint flying exercise - in a show of strength following North Korea's missile test earlier this week.
The fifth-generation, single-seat, twin-engine, all-weather stealth tactical fighter aircraft will take part in the 'Vigilant ace' exercise with the South Korean air force from December 4 to 8.
The US also plans to deploy F-35 and F-16 fighters and the B-1B strategic bombers.
This is the first time that the US has deployed six F-22 at one time in the Korean peninsula, which serves as another warning to Pyongyang after the latter launched a Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile - its most sophisticated missile to date - on Wednesday.
This deployment, as well as the three US nuclear aircraft carriers deployed last month near the North Korean waters, falls under the agreement in October between Seoul and Washington to increase rotational deployment of strategic assets of the US in the Korean peninsula.
South Korea and the US seek to pressurize North Korea to return to the negotiating table to abandon its nuclear programme.
Mumbai, Dec 3 : "Tiger Zinda Hai" director Ali Abbas Zafar says the film's new track "Dil diyan gallan", is a love ballad shot in a way reminiscent of the way classic Yash Chopra songs.
Backed by the Yash Raj Films banner, "Tiger Zinda Hai" features Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif. For the song "Dil diyan gallan", the actors shot in Austria.
"I have always wanted to pay a tribute to the classic Yash Chopra romantic songs which I have grown up loving. And I'm thrilled that I finally got that song in 'Dil diyan gallan, an out-and-out romantic ballad on the lines of classic, beautiful love songs that the banner is remembered for by generations," Zafar said in a statement.
"The song follows the same form/signature of a classic Yash Chopra song - aesthetic, inspired by the innocence of old school romances and at the same time, focuses on mature, deeply felt love," he added,
Vishal-Shekhar have composed the Irshad Kamil-penned song, which is sung by Atif Aslam.
Vaibhavi Merchant has choreographed Salman-Katrina's romance for the song, which has a bit of waltz.
The film will release on December 22.
Jerusalem, Dec 4 : Israeli police on Sunday questioned David Bitan, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's close ally and chairman of the coalition, on suspicion of bribery and money laundering.
Bitan was questioned by officers with the police's Lahav 433 unit on suspicion that he promoted interests of a senior member of a criminal organisation in return for debt relief, Xinhua news agency reported.
At the time of the alleged offences, Bitan was a politician in the municipality of Rishon LeZion, Israel's fourth-largest city to the south of Tel Aviv.
In relation to the same affair, the police also arrested 17 other senior officials with the Rishon LeZion Municipality, including the mayor.
The moves came as Bitan is pushing forward a new legislation in the parliament, known as the "recommendation bill," to end the police's rights of recommending to the General Attorney's office whether to press charges against a suspect upon concluding their investigation.
The bill also threatens to punish anyone who would leak information from the investigation with imprisonment.
The bill is widely seen in Israel as aimed at helping Netanyahu, who is a suspect in two criminal corruption investigations, as well as other senior politicians who are under corruption investigations.
On Saturday night, tens of thousands of Israelis rallied in Tel Aviv, urging the parliament to reject what they called the "corruption bill."
They also urged Netanyahu to resign amidst the corruption investigations of the Prime Minister and a growing number of his close allies.
The "recommendation bill" is scheduled to be brought up for the parliament's approval on Monday, but a lawmaker with the ruling Likud party said on Sunday the vote was postponed without a new date being set.
Cairo, Dec 4 : The Arab League (AL) warned on Sunday against the "hazardous consequences" if the US recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
"If implemented, it would mark a change in Washington's historical stance that sees the holy city as an occupied Palestinian city and an integral part of the occupied Palestinian lands," Xinhua quoted Saeed Abu-Ali, AL Assistant Secretary General for the occupied Palestinian and Arab lands, as saying.
The statement was issued after US media reported on Friday that US President Donald Trump was considering to recognise Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and might make an announcement on Wednesday.
Trump vowed during his presidential campaign to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a disputed holy city which the Palestinians want to be the capital city for their future state.
Abu-Ali said that such US recognition would give Israel the green light to continue its breaches of international resolutions and its occupation of the Palestinian lands, urging Washington to act as an 'impartial broker" of the peace process.
Over the past couple of days, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been contacting with and seeking support from Arab and Western leaders, warning about the potential destructive effects of the relocation of the US embassy.
The decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict emerged 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 since 2014 due to its settlement expansion policy, which is rejected even by the US -- its strongest ally.
The Palestinians seek to establish an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital in the light of the UN-proposed two-state solution based on the pre-1967 borders.
New Delhi : Title: Lies of the Land - A Brief History of Political Dishonesty; Author: Adam Macqueen; Publisher: Atlantic Books: Pages: 352; Price: Rs 599 Oxymorons, or pairs of contradictory concepts -- say, accurate estimate, virtual reality or even happily married -- were a literary device for a satirical or poignant representation of human life's paradoxes. Unfortunately, they seem to have become a regular feature of our present condition:Bbe it affordable housing, business ethics, or political honesty. And the last happens to be particularly incongruous -- and lethal.
For while most of these oxymoronic situations concern us on a personal basis, the consequences of less-than-truthful politicians, their manipulations, and their cover-ups can be much greater in scope, as this book on some celebrated cases of political dishonesty over the last six decades or so brings out.
For these leaders and their actions can -- did -- wreck lives and economies, endanger security and peace, and create a grave trust-deficit between the rulers and the ruled, which can imperil democracy.
While most of us remember the "intelligence" that led to the second Iraq War, the Brexit campaign slogans, the promise of Rs 15 lakh in every Indian's account, and so on till the phenomenon hit a entire new high with Donald Trump elected US President.
Those a little older will remember Bill Clinton's travails and those older still will recall Watergate or the Profumo-Keeler scandal. And journalist-cum-author Adam Macqueen brings out many of them here in vivid colour and context, though his focus is limited to Britain and the US.
It is not that all politicians are liars, he says, holding that old joke, "How do you know when a politician is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving" is "90 per cent nonsense wrapped around a hard kernel of truth".
While there are many politicians who live upright lives and use their power for benefit of people, Macqueen, a long-time correspondent of the fortnightly British satirical and current affairs news magazine Private Eye, holds there are many reasons why we believe otherwise and think the worst of the class.
In a sparkling and incisive introduction on the reasons for political dishonesty, he puts some blame on the "extraordinary polarisation of contemporary politics" where the "centre ground" for independent positions has been largely abandoned and a campaign of extreme vilification launched.
And then there is a great political benefit -- "as sure as night follows day, the louder you shout about your opponent's lies, the less obliged you feel to tell the truth yourself".
Macqueen, who starts with the story of how the news of Winston Churchill's first stroke was concealed -- with the connivance of leading press barons -- and governance carried out in his name, breaks his accounts into nine parts, which include those dealing with sexual peccadilloes, financial scandals, political gambles -- including Watergate -- political spin, and broken or misleading assurances.
Though in giving the background, course and consequences of these cases of dishonesty and making an incisive summation, he is also frequently wittily caustic.
Dealing with the Clinton-Lewinsky case and the titillating Starr Commission report, Macqueen concludes that sex in the Oval Office "sounds quite fun", but "compared to other activities that have been conducted there over the years, it's also pretty harmless".
Though about scandals, the book is also informative, especially on the genesis of the 1956 Suez Crisis, British politician Enoch Powell's anti-immigrant "River of Blood" speech in 1968, what the Watergate issue showed about Richard Nixon's psyche and politics -- and how it has a certain resonance with the Oval Office's present incumbent -- the West's roller-coaster relationship with Libya's Gaddafi and how Tony Blair did not actually lie about Iraq's WMDs.
Brexit, as expected, gets an entire section to itself, but it also includes how anti-EU sentiment was stoked over the years, right from the case of the banana classification rules. Trump also figures in all his unbelievable behaviour.
But it is not only a book about politicians and how they got punished for their transgressions, and about the dawning of the "post-truth" era; Macqueen also provides some tips on how people can deal with the malaise.
Now, we need a companion volume on the cases elsewhere, particularly our own country.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
New Delhi, Dec 4 : Representatives of around 45 American companies met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at this year's Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) in Hyderabad and expressed their commitment to continue investing in India, a top Indian American business leader has said.
These representatives were part of a delegation of the US India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF), a newly set-up non-profit organisation focused on deepening business relations between the US and India and enhancing the strategic relationship between the two countries.
"I can't talk about the specifics (of the meeting with Modi) because it was off the record. But basically the companies did meet with the Prime Minister and they showed their commitment to continued investment into India," USISPF President Mukesh Aghi told IANS in an interview.
The US looks at building its relationship with India on two broad principles. "One principle is that economic prosperity of India is good for America. And the second principle is a militarily strong India is good for regional stability," Aghi said.
If India became economically more prosperous and there was more disposable income, people would tend to buy more US goods, or send more of their kids for education to the US, he said.
"If you look at this year, the enrollment of Indian students in the US went up by 12 per cent. So we have 186,000 Indian students in the US," he stated.
"That's one. Two, if you look at companies like Amazon, look at Uber, look at WhatsApp or Google, you know they have a tremendous market share in the Indian market. Their businesses grow because consumer spending is growing in India because of economic prosperity."
On the defence side, Aghi said that if India became more prosperous, it would spend more money on defence.
"If you look at the last three years, the procurement with India has gone up to $15 billion," he said.
"We are talking Make in India also from the manufacturing perspective of defence equipment. So, I think those principles are driving this relationship."
On the current business environment in India, Aghi referred to the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business rankings which saw India jumping from the 130th rank to 100th.
"When this government came in 2014, India's ranking was 142. And now it has come to 100. I think that is a positive sign and we will keep on urging the government to go to below 50. That should be the ambition," he stated.
About the economic reforms being undertaken by the Indian government, he said these have been certified by credit rating agency Moody's, which has upgraded India's sovereign rating to Baa2 from its lowest investment grade of Baa after 14 long years.
"What the government is doing is the right stuff -- which seems to send a strong message to investors also. Moody's ranking is a positive sign, very positive," he said.
On what were the key takeaways for USISPF from this year's GES, which was held on the theme "Women First, Priority for All", Aghi said: "I think the number one takeaway is that start-ups and entrepreneurship are important for job creation. That's what India needs".
He also stressed on the involvement and engagement of women entrepreneurs and women workers for the growth of GDP and economy.
"You know, a McKinsey report shows that by 2025, if you engage more women workers, it will have an impact of $12 trillion on the global economy," the USISPF president said.
(Aroonim Bhuyan can be contacted at aroonim.b@ians.in)
New Delhi, Dec 4 : In a generational shift at the top in the Congress, Rahul Gandhi is all set to take over as party President next week after he filed his nomination papers on Monday for the post amid opposition jibes over dynasty politics in a contest with no one else in the fray.
The 47-year-old Gandhi, who will be the sixth Nehru-Gandhi scion to helm the party, filed papers at the Congress headquarters here amid cheers and celebrations by party leaders and workers. His mother and incumbent party President Sonia Gandhi signed the first nomination paper for election of her son.
Among the proposers was former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who called Rahul Gandhi the "darling" of the party. Manmohan Singh accompanied Gandhi when he filed the nomination paper.
In all over 90 sets of nominations were said to have been filed supporting Gandhi before the deadline expired at 3 p.m. on Monday. The last date for withdrawal is December 11 when he may be declared elected since there is no contest. Scrutiny of the nomination will take place on Tuesday.
However, the filing of nomination was not without controversy stoked by remarks of senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar who invoked the Mughal dynasty in the Congress Presidential election that Prime Minister Narendra Modi latched on to quickly to call it "Aurangzeb Raj".
"When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any election happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go to the heir," Aiyar said, retorting to the "dynasty" jibes of the BJP on Rahul Gandhi's election.
"But in a democracy elections are held. I openly invite (Shehzad) Poonawala to file the nomination and contest," Aiyar said, adding has anyone heard of Poonawala earlier.
Aiyar was replying to a question about BJP's criticism following Maharashtra Congress leader Poonawala alleging that election for Congress President was a sham and Rahul Gandhi's elevation was rigged.
Modi was quick to pounce on Aiyar's remarks. Addressing an election rally in Gujarat, Modi said: "Aiyar, who never shies away from showing loyalty to one family, proudly said -- When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any elections happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen?
"It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go the son. I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the wellbeing of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command," he said.
The Prime Minister also said that the Congress leaders admit that it is not a party but a "kunba" (family).
Modi at a poll rally in Gujarat on Sunday lauded Poonawala for exposing lack of internal democracy in the Congress. "Those who have no internal democracy can't work for people. I want to say to this youngster Shehzad - you have done a brave thing but this is sadly what has always happened in Congress."
Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said Modi was "suffering from Rahul Gandhi phobia".
Surjewala also said that Modi's "love for Shehzad, Shahzada (BJP chief Amit Shah's son Jai Shah) and Shourya (National Security Advisor Ajit Doval's son)" is well known to the world.
"But will Modiji tell when he will answer the questions of his own senior party leaders like Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha?" he asked.
Gandhi, who became the Congress Vice President in January 2013, will succeed his mother Sonia, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998. He is the sixth in the Gandhi-Nehru family to head the party after his great great grandfather Motilal Nehru, great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi.
Hundreds of Congress workers and leaders from across the country supporters thronged the party office ahead of the filing of nominations.
A large crowd of party workers were seen requesting the guards for a chance to meet their leader as he made his much awaited move.
Earlier Gandhi called on former President Pranab Mukherjee, who applied tilak mark on his head as a way of blessing.
On his elevation, Manmohan Singh said: "Rahul Gandhi is a darling of the Congress and he will carry forward the great traditions of the party."
Noting that Sonia Gandhi served as Congress President for over 19 years, Manmohan Singh said: "It will be yet another chapter for the party."
Among those who signed the various sets of nomination papers for Gandhi were Motilal Vora, Ahmed Patel, Tarun Gogoi, V.Narayansami, Ashok Gehlot, Kamal Nath, Anand Sharma, Jaipal Reddy, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mallikarjun Kharge, Salman Khursheed, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh and Karan Singh.
Bangkok, Dec 4 : Former Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has not obtained a British passport, Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai said on Monday.
His remarks came after news reports said that Yingluck had been given the passport after she had reportedly sought political asylum in Britain, reports Xinhua news agency.
Don said such possibilities were not officially reported by any authorities, Thai or British.
Thai media earlier reported that Yingluck was seeking political asylum in Britain after she unexpectedly left Thailand and secretly travelled to the United Arab Emirates in August.
Yingluck reportedly fled the country via Cambodia.
In absentia, the Supreme Court delivered a final verdict and sentenced her to a five-year jail term on duty negligence and misconduct charges pertaining to a rice subsidy programme which was implemented by her Puea Thai Party-led government and reportedly incurred an estimated 500 billion baht ($14 billion) in state losses several years ago.
Yingluck was said to have visited her brother, former Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra, in Dubai where he has been in self-exile for nearly a decade.
Thaksin and Yingluck were deposed by military coups in 2006 and 2014 respectively.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Monday called on former President Pranab Mukherjee to seek his blessings ahead of filing nomination for the Congress presidential election.
Mukherjee blessed the Gandhi-Nehru family scion by applying 'tilak' on his forhead and embraced him.
After meeting Mukherjee at his residence here, Gandhi met former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the party headquarters here.
Gandhi signed a set of nomination papers in the presence of Singh, senior party leaders Kamal Nath, Motilal Vora, Sheila Dikshit, Ahmed Patel, and Ashok Gehlot at the All India Congress Committee office here.
He accepted greetings from party leaders and chatted with them as they came up to him to get his signatures.
Over 90 sets of nominations are expected to be filed in support of Gandhi, whose election is a mere formality now, as there is no other candidate for the party's top post.
Gandhi will succeed his mother Sonia Gandhi, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998.
Hundreds of Congress supporters thronged the party office ahead of the filing of nominations.
A large crowd of Congress workers were seen urging security guards at the premises to let them in to meet their party leader.
Madrid, Dec 4 : A Spanish judge on Monday ruled that the former Vice President of Catalonia and three other senior Catalan pro-independence leaders will remain in jail for their part in October's independence referendum, ruled illegal by the country's top court.
Former Vice President Oriol Junqueras, former Interior Minister Joaquim Forn and the leaders of the Catalonia National Assembly (ANC) and Omnium Cultural, Jordi SA nchez and Jordi Cuixar, face charges of sedition.
The decision limits their ability to campaign in fresh regional elections which are due to be held in Catalonia on December 21, CNN reported.
Six former Cabinet members of the now disbanded Catalan Parliament were released on bail of 100,000 euros ($118,000 approximately).
Catalonia's former President Carles Puigdemont is due to appear in Brussels later in the day for an extradition hearing to send him from Belgium to Spain, where he also faces trial.
Bengaluru, Dec 4 : Global software major Infosys's philanthropic arm, Infosys Foundationon Monday announced a combined grant of Rs 15.7 crore to fund research and mentoring activities of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research's (TIFR) International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS).
As part of the agreement between the Foundation and ICTS, of the total grant, Rs 4 crore will be for the travel of 25 overseas students to India each year under the Infosys Foundation ICTS Visitor Fellowship for its programmes.
"About 20 of ICTS students will also travel abroad under the Infosys Foundation ICTS Excellence Grant," said the Foundation in a statement here.
The city-based ICTS's programmes enable physicists, astronomers, cosmologists, mathematicians, biologists, students and researchers from the world over to solve questions on nature and discover structures across sciences.
"The Centre also strives for unifying knowledge, in-house research by faculty in theoretical sciences, science outreach that harness young minds and connects students with public interested in the latest developments of scientific research," said the statement.
The grants are for students to participate in academic activities abroad and forge partnerships with educational institutions the world over, it said.
About Rs 7.5 crore of grant is for organizing lecture series by Indian and overseas experts, to exchange ideas and explore research opportunities in science and mathematics.
The lectures would be known as the Infosys ICTS Chandrasekhar Ramanujan and Turing Lecture Series, said the Foundation.
The lecture series will include Chandrasekhar lectures in physical science; Ramanujan lectures in mathematical sciences and Alan Turing lectures in computer science, engineering and biology.
Another Rs 3.35 crore grant is for about 200 students, faculty and post-doctoral students to support the 12th Kavil Asian Winter School (KAWS) on Strings, Particles and Cosmology 2018.
To be held here January 8-18, KAWS 2018 will bring together theorists from Japan,AChina and India to discuss about the latest developments in particle physics.
The grant will also be used for travel of speakers and participants from India to Strings 2018, an annual conference on string theory of particle physics, to be held at Japan's Okinawa.
About Rs 85 lakh will be for the Homi Bhabha Chair Professorship to support research and mentoring. As part of the agreement between the Infosys Foundation and TIFR, the Chair would be called the Infosys Homi Bhabha Chair Professor. The current chair holder is Professor Spenta Wadia, the founding director of ICTS.
Lawngtlai (Mizoram), Dec 4 : In a contradiction of its own policy, the Indian government has allowed over 1,300 tribal Buddhist refugees from Myanmar's Rakhine region to enter Mizoram. The refugees left their homeland because of the ongoing war between the Myanmarese Army and the Arakan Army, made up of Buddhist insurgents.
This comes nearly a month after the Union Home Ministry had directed the northeastern states to take strict measures to prevent Rohingyas -- who are Muslims -- from entering Indian territory despite persecution by the Myanmar regime.
The new group of refugees, belonging to the Chin and few other communities of Myanmar, have come to four villages in Lawngtlai district.
According to sources in the Mizoram government, the administration is struggling hard to bring down the rising tensions among the refugees and the residents of Laitlang, Dumzautlang, Hmawngbuchhuah and Zochachhuah villages.
According to the state administration, the refugees are being taken care of on humanitarian grounds as all of them came to escape clashes back home.
"It's been some six days since these refugees have arrived on Mizoram territory. They currently are in four villages of the Lawngtlai district and are put up at shelter homes, Buddhist homes, temples and many other places," T. Arun, Deputy Commissioner of Lawngtlai, told IANS over the phone.
He emphasised that the security threat in such a situation cannot be denied.
"We basically have two rules -- one relating to national security and other related to humanitarian assistance. Under the humanitarian rules we are providing food as we do not want any starvation deaths. We also have to guard against the outbreak of diseases," said Arun.
Additional police, health workers and doctors have also been deployed not just to keep a vigil on the new arrivals but also to keep a check on their health condition.
"The problem is that the population of each of the villages is just 200-400. The arrival of such a large number of people is a matter of serious concern," said Arun.
Mizoram's police chief emphasised that though they won't immediately term the arrival of the refugees a security threat, they are waiting for the situation in Myanmar to normalise so that they could be sent back.
"We won't call it a security threat at this juncture. They were alllowed into Indian territory due to the ongoing fighting in Myanmar. We are taking care of it and police forces are there. However, we are making sure there won't be any problem for the villagers due to the refugees. They have been confined to the four villages," Director General of Police Thianghlima Pachuau told IANS over the phone.
The current crisis in Myanmar comes nearly two months after the Myanmar Army had launched operations against the Rohingyas in Rakhine province. While the conflict led to more than 600,000 Rohingyas fleeing to Bangladesh, the United Nations Human Rights Commission called the strike by the Myanmar Army "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing".
The Indian government has taken measures, including asking the states in the region to seal their borders with Mayanmar, to prevent Rohingya refugees from entering the country.
Myanmar, the only Southeast Asian country which shares a 1,600-mile-long border with India, serves as its gateway to the other member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Four northeastern states -- Arunachal Pradesh (520 km), Manipur (398 km), Nagaland (215 km) and Mizoram (510 km) -- have an unfenced border with Myanmar.
Experts on Indo-Myanmar relations see the current influx as a temporary matter that is different from the Rohingyas issue.
"This is an issue that has emerged in the last few months. The arrival of Buddhist refugees is certainly a matter of concern as it affects people on the Indian side as well. However, this is different from Rohingyas," Khriezo Yhome, senior Research fellow at Observer Research Foundation and an expert on Indo-Myanmar affairs, told IANS.
According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees there are around 21,500 Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers in India. The central government, though, has sent a clear message that it would not be willing to accept them "because of security concerns".
The Supreme Court on October 13 asked the Centre to strike a balance between national security, economic interests and humanitarian considerations with regard to Rohingya women, children, old, sick and infirm (Rupesh Dutta can be contacted at Rupesh.d@ians.in)
Kathmandu, Dec 4 : Global warming is not only posing serious threat to glaciers, it will also result in a loss of 33 per cent of total ice volume in the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region by the end of the century, leading dire consequences for people living there.
"Climate is warming up. If it rises by 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of 21st century, we will see a loss of one-third of total ice volume in HKH region. This will be of glaciers, snow and ice," Dr Philippus Wester, scientist at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), said on Monday.
"It is one of the key findings of the Hindu Kush Himalayan Monitoring and Assessment Programme (HIMAP)," he added.
Addressing the "International Conference on Resilient Hindu Kush Himalaya: Developing Solutions towards a Sustainable Future for Asia" here, Wester said several studies have suggested that global climate warming should be kept to 1.5 degrees Celsius until the end of the century. But even this would be too hot for the HKH region, because it would mean 2.1 degrees Celsius rise in temperature there.
More than 400 experts including scientists, environmentalists and policymakers from 26 countries are taking part in the meet that began on Sunday. Over the next two days, the participants will discuss ideas for strengthening the fragile environment and solutions for mountain communities of the Hindu Kush Himalayas, which extends from Afghanistan to Myanmar.
Wester said the full report of the Hindu Kush Himalayan Monitoring and Assessment Programme (HIMAP) would be launched in mid-2018.
"HIMAP is an unique initiative, first of its kind for HKH region on the line of AMAP(Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme). It is a part of the HKH science policy dialogue to help policy makers from the region."
According to him, the report is like a mini-IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report specific to HKH region. "It is a long term integrated science policy initiative that aims to support policy change and sustainable solutions for problems in the mountains. It will make a difference as it is a landmark report."
A comprehensive assessment of the HKH region will assess the current state of knowledge of the HKH region, address critical data gaps and increase the understanding of various drivers of change and their impacts.
Based on the assessment, HIMAP will recommend a set of practically-oriented policy recommendations. The assessment process will involve a broad and diverse group of researchers, practitioners and policy makers, and culminate in a major publication with a highly-reputed international publishing house in 2017.
A. Kulkarni, scientist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, said it was a result of global warming that in most of the HKH region, glaciers were thinning, retreating and losing mass volume.
"It is a trend that is projected to continue with possibly large changes in the timing and magnitude of glacier melt runoff."
Kulkarni, who is attending the conference as part of a team of scientists behind HIMAP said: "In future, the volume of seasonal snow is going to decrease and the peak of stream discharge will come early and many springs will become dry."
Kulkarni told IANS here that if temperature rose by 4 to 5 degrees Celsius, then 70 per cent of glaciers will be lost by the end of century.
"If glaciers retreat, new lakes will be formed and this has already happened in Sikkim in India. There will be flash floods if they burst. This is the new risk for people living in the HKH region."
Another findings of HIMAP is that persistent winter fog would lead to greater air pollution and low visibility throughout the HKH region and the Indo-Gangetic plains. Air pollution has already increased and air quality worsened.
The HKH sources 10 major river systems in Asia that provide water, ecosystem services and livelihoods to more than 210 million people. The region holds and distributes water for more than 1.3 billion people living in the downstream river basins.
Climate change and other drivers of change in the HKH have already begun to impact ecosystems and communities, increasing vulnerability and exposure to natural disasters such as floods, droughts and landslides.
The region is also home to some of the most diverse cultures, languages, religions, and traditional knowledge systems in the world. For these reasons, the HKH region is clearly a major global asset, critical to the planet as a whole.
(Imran Khan is at Kathmandu on the invitation of International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development - ICIMOD to cover the conference. He can be reached at imran.k@ians.in)
Nairobi, Dec 4 : He's young and the hope for millions of islanders across the globe for whom the nutrient-rich water technology for sustainable agriculture instead of soil that he's promoting will help improve human health and resilience to climate change in the low-lying islands.
He's 28-year-old Eritai Kateibwi, a native of low-lying nation Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean that's under threat from climate change. He is winner of a 2017 UN Environment Young Champion of the Earth for his work on a hydroponics system.
Hydroponic is a technique of growing plants without soil in water containing dissolved nutrients.
According to UN Environment, Kateibwi, one of six inaugural winners, each representing a region of the world -- Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America and West Asia.
The award gives seed funding of $15,000 and mentorship to outstanding individuals, between the ages of 18 and 30, who have big ideas to protect or restore the environment.
"The problem in my country is that people are not eating healthy food. They don't have enough land to grow their crops. Climate change has made the rains irregular. When they can't grow their own food, they rely on unhealthy processed food," Kateibwi told IANS.
He is in this Kenyan capital to receive the award on Tuesday at the UN Environment Assembly where over 2,000 heads of state, ministers, business leaders, UN officials and civil society representatives are gathered to find new ways to deal with pollution.
"I flew home and got everything what I needed. My goal is to help every family and after training them. In the next 10 years, this project will spread throughout this island," the optimistic UN young achiever said.
"For young people, I would like to say: If they have an idea just do it," he said.
Kateibwi saw problems caused in Kiribati by reliance on imported, often unhealthy, food due to the challenges of growing fresh produce.
He feels that locally grown, nutritious food through hydroponics would reduce the problems as well as provide entrepreneurial opportunities to the local communities.
"The majority of my people live in (capital) Tarawa; they come to find jobs, education and health services, but end up living close to each other," he said.
"With the rising sea level and king tides, their crops are often destroyed. The Te Maeu Project will use hydroponics to allow almost anyone to grow produce at home and sell the surplus through a cooperative," he added.
He embarked on his project when he returned home as a graduate in finance from Utah's Brigham Young University, feeling empowered by his schooling.
Kateibwi's project, which relies on Kiribati's abundant sunshine but uses only 10 per cent of the water of traditional crops, has already been used to produce lettuce, Chinese cabbage and tomatoes within 30 days.
He plans to use the seed financing from the award to build 200 units. Families will receive training and purchase these through micro-financing, the proceeds of which Kateibwi will use to build and make available more units.
The system could have wider uses for other Small Island Developing States that face similar challenges in terms of climate impact and a lack of land to grow sufficient food.
UN Environment head Erik Solheim said: "From boosting food crops in the Pacific to sustainable fashion solutions in North America, it's a delight to announce the first Young Champions of the Earth."
"The breadth of innovation and ambition shown by the inaugural winners is nothing short of exceptional and proof that we must continue to channel support to the world's younger generation for the solutions we need to secure a sustainable future," Solheim added.
The six inaugural Young Champions were selected from more than 600 applicants.
(Vishal Gulati is in Nairobi at the invitation of United Nations Environment to cover its third annual session. He can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in)
Mumbai, Dec 4 : As the cyclonic storm "Ockhi" averted the Maharashtra coast and Mumbai, the Indian Coast Guard (ICG) on Monday rescued another 19 fishermen from the Arabian Sea, top officials said here.
Inspector General K.R. Nautiyal, the Commander - ICG West Region, said these fisherfolk were rescued by ICGS Shoor from a remote island and Lakshadweep & Minicoy Isles, off India's southwest coast.
With this, the number of fishermen rescued reached 176 and seven stranded sailors of a vessel since the Ockhi hit on November 29-30 in south India and is now veering towards south-west Gujarat.
"The ICG has deployed 12 ships, three Dornier aircraft and two helicopters for sea-air coordinated search and rescue (SAR) assistance to the fishermen stranded at sea," Nautiyal said.
Besides, five merchant vessels are also helping out in the SAR efforts and helping rescue fishermen mostly off the Kerala coast.
The ICG stations on the west cost are offering all assistance -- from first aid and food to the rescued people, and have advised to remain inside the harbour till the stormy system subsides.
The ICG West Region is disseminating adequate precautionary advisories to the coastal states of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Union Territories of Daman & Diu for the likely recurving of Ockhi and making landfall along south Gujarat coast near the Gulf of Khambat.
The oil handling agencies at Bombay High oil fields around 175 km north-west of Mumbai have also been advised to initiate cyclone contingency measures and evacuate personnel from the oil platforms well in time, Nautiyal added.
Meanwhile, more than 1,200 fishermen reached Maharashtra coast over the past weekend, landing at various points in Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri districts, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said.
While 952 fisherfolk in 68 boats reached on Saturday to Sindhudurg, another 321 came in 28 boats in Ratnagiri on Sunday.
"They are safe and being looked after with all arrangements made for them to make them feel at home," Fadnavis said in a tweet.
They include 69 boatloads from Kerala, 25 from Tamil Nadu and two from Karnataka.
Local authorities including the Maharashtra Maritime Board and the distict collectors have been entrusted the responsibility of the welfare of the fisherfolk till weather permits them to return.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : A court here on Monday rejected a bail plea of alleged hawala dealer Muhammad Aslam Wani in a money laundering case.
Additional Sessions Judge Sidharth Sharma dismissed the bail plea due to the serious allegations against the accused.
The Enforcement Directorate had opposed the plea given the gravity of offences.
Wani's counsel M.S. Khan sought bail on the ground of changed circumstances after the Supreme Court struck down a part of Section 45 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) -- dealing with conditions for bail -- as "unconstitutional".
Public Prosecutor Navin Kumar Matta and Rajeev Awasthi said that Supreme Court verdict did not entitle everyone to bail in PMLA cases.
The ED filed a charge sheet against Wani and Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah under the PMLA in September.
Wani was arrested on August 6. He had reportedly confessed that he had passed on hawala money of Rs 2.25 crore to Shabir Shah.
Shah was arrested on July 25 on charges of money laundering in a 2005 case whenin Delhi Police Special Cell had arrested Wani.
In the 2005 case lodged by the Special Cell, the court had acquitted co-accused Wani of the charges of criminal conspiracy and other offences but convicted him under the Arms Act, his defence counsel had told the court.
The ED submitted that a conviction under the Arms Act is a trigger point to take action under the PMLA.
Both have denied the charges against them.
Beijing, Dec 4 : Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday urged countries involved in the North Korean crisis, including the US, to opt for negotiations rather than sanctions to address the issue.
Following a meeting with his Mongolian counterpart Damdin Tsogtbaatar, Wang Yi told reporters that China was opposed to actions that might aggravate tension on the Korean Peninsula, Efe news reported.
He asserted that new measures should be adopted within the framework of UN resolutions.
"Propositions and measures that are against or not included in the resolutions lack international legal support and will jeopardize the execution of UN resolutions," Wang Yi said while reiterating Beijing's opposition to Pyongyang's nuclear programme.
Meanwhile, South Korea and the US on Monday began a major joint air combat exercise, a new show of strength after the Kim Jong-un regime conducted its latest missile test on November 29.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : Actor Rishi Kapoor, who was shooting for "Rajma Chawal" in the national capital, has rushed back to Mumbai to be with his family after the demise of veteran actor-producer and his uncle Shashi Kapoor.
Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the 1970s and early 1980s, died on Monday at a hospital in Mumbai. He was 79.
"We are the airport looking at the flight schedule, and want to reach Mumbai at the earliest. We might go tonight or tomorrow morning," Shanti Malik, who works closely with the Kapoor family, told IANS on Monday evening.
Malik also said that he doesn't know the cause of Shashi Kapoor's death, and would be in position to give out details on Tuesday morning.
The younger brother of late Raj and Shammi Kapoor, who were both actors par excellence, Shashi Kapoor started his tryst with acting at the age of four, with plays directed and produced by his father Prithviraj Kapoor.
He started acting in films as a child in the late 1940s. His best known performances as child artist were in "Aag" (1948) and "Awaara" (1951), where he played the younger version of the character played by his elder brother Raj.
When he grew up, he made his debut as a leading man in the 1961 film "Dharmputra", and went on to appear in more than 150 Hindi films.
Shashi Kapoor, whose nuanced acts in memorable films like "Deewar", "Satyam Shivam Sundaram", "Trishul" and "Kabhi Kabhie" captivated Hindi film buffs, was married to English theatre actress Jennifer Kendal.
He had three children -- Kunal, Karan and Sanjana Kapoor.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh will meet the Chief Ministers of five states, situated on the India-Bangladesh border, on Thursday in Kolkata on the issues of Rohingyas and influx of Bangladeshis and illegal cross-border trade, official sources said on Monday.
He will leave Delhi on Tuesday evening and chair the meeting with the Chief Ministers and Home Ministers of West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Tripura, a Home Ministry official said.
It would be the fourth in a series of meeting chaired by the Home Minister. Earlier, Rajnath Singh met with the Chief Ministers of states bordering Pakistan, China, and Myanmar.
Strategies to handle the Rohingyas and Bangladeshi refugees, apart from cross-border smuggling of fake Indian currency, narcotics, cattle and other illegal activities will be discussed.
As per Home Ministry's estimate, there are around 40,000 Rohingya in India, including 5,700 in Jammu. Only 16,000 of them are said to have registered themselves with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
As much as 2,217 km of the India-Bangladesh border is in West Bengal, 262 km in Assam, 443 km in Meghalaya, 856 km in Tripura, and 180 km in Mizoram.
The Chief Secretaries and Directors General of Police of the states concerned and senior Home Ministry officials along with those of Assam Rifles, security agencies and Border Security Force chief are likely to be present in the December 7 meeting.
Rajnath Singh will also inaugurate Thapa indoor sport complex and swimming pool at Dimapur in Nagaland on December 8 before returning to Delhi the same day.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi's long-delayed elevation as party chief is eventually taking place at a time when Congress faces an "existential crisis", as a party leader put it, and has huge electoral challenges in the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
Gandhi, 47, will be the sixth member of Nehru-Gandhi family to take the top position of the 132-year old party.
The change at the top is coming on the eve of assembly polls in Gujarat and the outcome there would be interpreted in terms of Rahul Gandhi's ability as a campaigner and vote getter.
But the next round of assembly polls in 2018 -- first in Karnataka and later in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh -- will be absolutely crucial for Rahul Gandhi for building the momentum to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha polls. The state elections, with Bharatiya Janata Party as the key rival, will also be first major polls directly under Rahul Gandhi's charge as party chief. Assembly polls will also be held early next year in Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura.
The challenges for Rahul Gandhi include fostering a new energy and enthusiasm in the Congress and evolving a new strategy to galvanise the party after a string of electoral losses since the 2014 Lok Sabha debacle. The Congress has to work hard at the grassroots to take on the relentless election machine of BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the party chief Amit Shah.
Gandhi has to take a call on forging a larger opposition alliance for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls under a "collective leadership" or projecting himself as the alternative against Modi with support of different parties. He was the face of Congress in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
Gandhi has been perceived as a reluctant politician due to some of his longish trips abroad, the delay in stepping up to the role of party chief, his not taking up a ministerial responsibility in two UPA governments and not properly following through some of the issues he raised.
Of late, he has been able to counter the perception with his sharp and aggressive attacks on Modi and the BJP. A trip to the United States where he had had interactions with think tanks appeared to have done a sea change to the image about him.
In Gujarat, where success will be a big morale-booster for the Congress, Gandhi has sought to create a broad social coalition and has forced Modi to react.
Congress' only major success since its debacle in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls has been Punjab while the BJP, in comparison, has tremendously expanded its footprint by winning states it had never done in the past. The BJP is making efforts to expand its base in states it has been weak including West Bengal, Kerala, Odisha and Tamil Nadu.
Another major challenge for Rahul Gandhi is to revive Congress in Uttar Pradesh, the state that sends the largest contingent of 80 MPs to parliament. Gandhi has twice led the party's campaign in the assembly polls but had come a cropper.
The results of the recent local body polls in Amethi and Rae Bareli, the Lok Sabha constituencies of Rahul Gandhi and his mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, have not been flattering for his image.
Congress has shrunk electorally, being now the fourth player in states such as Bihar, third in states such as West Bengal, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu as also Delhi. In the polls held to various assemblies since 2014, it has largely finished third or fourth. Sections, which were strongly with the party including Dalits, have drifted away.
Rahul Gandhi had been projected as a young leader who understands the language and idiom of the youth but Modi has been more successful in weaning away the section that has large electoral presence. The Congress also has to devise ways to woo the large middle class.
Gandhi, who is stepping into shoes of his mother Sonia Gandhi who helmed Congress for 19 years including 10 as the chief of the party heading the ruling coalition at the Centre, will need to be dexterous in his dealings with allies as also other opposition parties such as the CPI-M.
The crumbling of the ruling alliance in Bihar has been a setback for the party.
Senior leaders like Mamata Banerjee and Lalu Prasad have a comfort level with Sonia Gandhi and it remains to be seen how Rahul Gandhi fits into the role.
Within the party, Gandhi has to take several decisions including whether to project chief ministerial candidates in Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Rajasthan and who they will be.
Bringing about unity in faction-ridden state units and making the balance between the "old guard" and the younger aspirants will be other challenges.
Congress had to project nonagenarian Virbhadra Singh as chief ministerial candidate in Himachal Pradesh in the absence of a younger acceptable option.
Congress is now ruling only five states and a union territory and if it loses Gujarat and Karanataka next year, its chances of staging a comeback in 2019 will be further squeezed.
Though Gandhi's experiments to democratise the party's youth organisations have not entirely succeeded, he has had some political successes, including forcing the Modi government to go back on its proposed changes in the land acquisition Act.
The concerted opposition attack on the "flawed" implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) as also perception of unease among traders in poll-bound Gujarat has apparently forced the government to extend several concessions.
But the Congress or other opposition parties could not reap political dividends on demonetisation though it caused a lot inconvenience to people.
Though Gandhi had promised to "involve people in ways you cannot even imagine now" after the party lost in Delhi in 2013 assembly polls, the party fared far worse in the next polls.
Gandhi, who is into his third term as Lok Sabha MP, was made party vice-president in 2013 as a stepping stone to his eventual elevation.
Latest updates on Gandhi Jayanti 2019
Shillong, Dec 4 : Accusing Chief Minister Mukul Sangma of practising "one-upmanship", veteran Congress legislator Comingone Ymbon on Monday resigned as the Meghalaya Power Minister.
Ymbon's resignation came after two Independent legislators -- Robinus Syngkon and Rophul Marak -- withdraw support to the Congress-led Meghalaya United Alliance government last month.
Chief Minister Mukul Sangma, who was in New Delhi along with Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee President D.D. Lapang, to support the candidature of Rahul Gandhi for Congress presidentship, was back in Shillong on Monday evening to take stock of the political developments.
"I have put in my papers since I have lost confidence in the Chief Minister," Ymbon, who was inducted in the Mukul Sangma ministry on August 4, told IANS over phone.
"During my four months, as a Cabinet minister I understood his (Sangma) one-upmanship. He takes unilateral decision on programmes of the department which I was holding. What is the point of being a minister," Ymbon asked.
In fact, Ymbon's resignation is a major embarrassment for the ruling Congress party ahead of the last session of the outgoing Meghalaya Assembly, prior to the state going to polls in February next year.
The three-day session of the 9th Meghalaya Legislative Assembly will commence from December 8.
"In the days to come, I will also be resigning from the Congress party," the former minister said.
The two-time Congress legislator from Raliang Assembly constituency is expected to contest the upcoming Assembly elections on National People's Party ticket.
Four Congress legislators -- Rowell Lyngdoh, Prestone Tynsong, Sniawbhalang Dhar and Ngaitlang Dhar, besides Independent legislators Hopeful Bamon and Stephanson Mukhim are expected to contest the upcoming assembly elections on NPP ticket.
Sanaa, Dec 4 : Reports from Yemen say ex-President Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed on Monday in fighting with his former allies.
Media controlled by the rebel Houthi movement quoted officials as declaring the "end of the crisis of the treason militia and the killing of its leader".
Sources in Saleh's General People's Congress party also confirmed that he was killed during fierce clashes in the capital Sanaa with Houthi militias.
A video showed Saleh lying on blanket surrounded by Houthi militias celebrating his death. The short clip aired on a pro-Houthi television channel appears to show Saleh had sustained a head injury, potentially a gunshot wound.
Earlier in the day, militias from Yemen's armed Houthi movement blew up Saleh's house in the centre of the capital Sanaa, residents reported.
The previous night, Saleh officially announced the dissolution of his partnership with former Houthi militia allies.
"Zero hour is coming to the battlefield in Sanaa... The country had to be saved from the madness of the Houthi group," Saleh said in statements on Monday morning.
Meanwhile, International Committee of the Red Cross has said that at least 125 persons have been killed and 238 wounded in fighting in Sanaa over the last five days.
Hyderabad, Dec 4 : A rally of unemployed youth and students here on Monday demanded the Telangana government to immediately fill the vacancies even as two students ended their lives since Sunday reportedly after failing to get jobs.
Speakers at the "Koluvula Kotlaata" (Fight for jobs) rally, organised by Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC), appealed to students and unemployed youth not to resort to suicide but unite for a struggle to force the government to honour its promise.
TJAC chairman M. Kodandaram alleged that police tried to foil the meet by arresting several leaders and workers coming to Hyderabad from different parts of the state, though the court had give permission for the meet.
While one student of Osmania University hanged himself in the hostel, another unemployed youth killed himself in Nirmal district on Sunday.
E. Murali, 21, a first-year student of MSc Physics at Osmania University here ended his life in bathroom on Sunday. The incident, the first after formation of Telangana state, triggered protest by students.
According to police, a suicide note was found in the pocket of Murali in which he stated that he was taking the extreme step due to depression and the fear of failing in exams. However, student groups alleged that the letter was forged and claimed that he was depressed due to government not releasing the job notification.
Tension prevailed on the campus as students refused to hand over the body to police, demanding the government to first announces a job and Rs 50 lakh compensation for Murali's family. Police broke open the doors of a hostel room in the early hours of Monday to forcibly shift the body for autopsy and later to his native place.
However, the campus remained tense through the day as students staged protest and boycotted the classes.
When the TJAC meeting was on, report came in from Nirmal district that an unemployed youth committed suicide. B. Ramesh, who had done MSc, was reportedly depressed on not getting a job.
At the meeting, TJAC presented before people family members of four youth who committed suicide recently.
Kodandaram, who had played a key role in the movement for separate Telangana state, alleged that the government had failed to fulfill the promise to provide jobs and this had led to frustration among youth.
He demanded that the government take steps on war-footing to fill 3 lakh vacancies. He said instead of addressing the issue, ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) was branding them politically unemployed. "This is not Telangana which we had fought and the martyrs laid down their lives for," he said.
Revolutionary balladeer Gaddar urged students to come together and become a political force.
Eminent academician Chukka Ramaiah found fault with the government for creating hurdles for organizations fighting for the rights of students and unemployed.
Telugu Desam Party's state president L. Ramna called for a united struggle to pressurize the government to fulfill its promises.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday expressed condolences over death of veteran actor Shashi Kapoor. Kapoor died in a Mumbai hospital on Monday after a prolonged illness.
"Sorry to hear of the demise of Shashi Kapoor, well-known actor, with a repertoire of Indian and international films. His support for meaningful cinema as a producer and pivotal role in the theatre movement in India too are cherished. Condolences to his family," the President tweeted.
"Shashi Kapoor's versatility could be seen in his movies as well as in theatre, which he promoted with great passion. His brilliant acting will be remembered for generations to come. Saddened by his demise. Condolences to his family and admirers," the Prime Minister tweeted.
The third and the youngest son of late Prithviraj Kapoor and brother of late Raj Kapoor and Shammi Kapoor, Shashi made his debut with Yash Chopra's "Dharamputra" in 1961.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : The National Students' Union of India (NSUI) on Monday demanded an independent election commission and a revision in the budget for elections in universities stating that the current limit of Rs 5,000 is "too little and impractical".
"It has been 11 years since the budget limit was set as per Lyngdoh Committee(2006). Since then, the number of students have increased and so much has changed... It is not feasible to run campaign in this amount... Moreover, there are no guidelines for social media campaign. We want the expenditure limit to be revised," the NSUI National President Fairoz Khan, said.
Khan also proposed for the establishing of an independent election commission at the national level which will work under the supervision of the Election Commission of India.
By March 2017, a convention will be held where the proposals will be made open for deliberations by other student parties, he said.
"We are planning to do a massive convention in which about 50,000 students will participate. We will invite other parties also for their say in the finalising of resolution. After that it will be presented to the members of Parliament who may propose it in the House," Khan said.
A students court, a grievance redressal cell that is "free from the intervention of the university", a National Students Rights Commission and use of ballot paper instead of Electronic Voting Machines were also among its demands.
The party also proposed online voting as an option, if not ballot paper, to "increase the voting percentage" and reduce the incidents of violence during polling.
A reduction in age for voting and contesting in polls was also proposed by the student leader, who demanded that voting age should be brought down to 16 from 18 and that for contending to be fixed at 18.
Abu Dhabi, Dec 4 : The Scottish government has appointed its first trade envoy to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and in the MENA region.
Nick Maclean will serve in the position as part of Scotland's plans to extend its worldwide business reach with the appointment of a team of trade envoys to champion international trading as well as promote and represent Scotland's export interests.
The team of overseas and Scotland-based envoys will help to identify specific business opportunities in new overseas markets where there is currently untapped potential, according to the media report on Monday.
They will also support Scottish exporting interests through trade-related visits and events.
Scottish Economy Secretary Keith Brown said: "Trade and export is vital to our economy and we have brought these experts on board to help us prepare to meet the challenges of the future."
"We already have strong partnerships throughout the world, but it is important we continue to cultivate these and have people in place who can promote Scotland to international businesses and markets."
MacLean said he was "deeply honoured to have been asked to take up the position of Scotland's Trade Envoy to the UAE."
Seoul, Dec 4 : In an apparent warning to North Korea over its latest intercontinental ballistic missile test, the US and South Korea kicked off their largest-ever Air Force exercise here on Monday involving some 230 warplanes including F-22 Raptors as well as F-35 Lightning II fighters, cloaked with the world's most advanced stealth coating.
The five-day Vigilant Air Combat Exercise (ACE) came less than a week after the North fired a new ICBM and declared the completion of its "nuclear force". It is the largest-ever combined Air Force drill between the allies, involving around six F-22 Raptors, six F-35As and 12,000 personnel.
While the North Korean military maintains capable anti-air weaponry, its radar systems would be unable to detect the F-22s and F-35s, which are cloaked with the world's most advanced stealth coating, before a strike on those defensive systems, CNN reported.
Reacting to the move, the North Korea state media said that "ceaseless large-scale war games" by Washington and Seoul are "creating a situation that a nuclear war may break out any moment".
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said it was "regrettable" that all parties had not "grasped the window of opportunity" presented by two months of relative calm before the North's most recent test.
It marks the first time that six Raptors have joined an exercise simultaneously in Korea. A dozen F-35Bs operated by the US Marine Corps will take part in the training.
F-35 fighters, the Pentagon's most powerful warplanes, will include the largest number of 5th generation fighters ever to have taken part, according to a South Korea-based US Air Force spokesman.
Other assets include two B-1B Lancer bombers, six EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets, and dozens of F-15C and F-16 fighter jets. The two sides plan to fly the aircraft at eight South Korean and US military installations, according to the US Seventh Air Force.
South Korea fielded F-15K, KF-16, FA-50 and F-5 fighters, as well as other planes.
The North Korean commentary published in state newspaper Rodong Sinmun on Sunday said the aerial war games showed "the enemies' moves to start a nuclear war have reached a dangerous stage".
"It is an open, all-out provocation against the DPRK, which may lead to a nuclear war any moment," it stated.
The exercises came less than a week after Pyongyang fired off an intercontinental ballistic missile it claimed can reach the "whole" mainland of the US.
In reaction, US President Donald Trump said that additional major sanctions would be imposed on North Korea. Earlier, he had also put Pyongyang back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism.
North Korea's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country on Sunday called Trump "insane" and said the drills would "push the already acute situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war".
Russia had also accused the US of trying to provoke North Korean leader Kim Jong-un into "flying off the handle" over his missile programme to hand Washington a pretext to destroy his country.
Islamabad, Dec 4 : US Defence Secretary James Mattis arrived in Pakistan on Monday amid Washington's concerns over "terrorist safe havens" in the country and also to shore up bilateral ties that have seen a marrked downslide in the past few months.
Mattis, on his maiden visit to Pakistan since taking charge at the Pentagon, met Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and other senior officials.
His visit comes as CIA Director Mike Pompeo has in a stern warning said if Islamabad does not eliminate terrorist "safe havens" in its territory, the US will do "everything" it can to destroy them.
Ahead of his visit, Mattis said the US would "work hard on finding common ground" and "work together" with Pakistan.
Matters of mutual interest, including the US policy in South Asia and Afghan peace efforts, were discussed during the meeting with Prime Minister Abbasi, according to Geo News.
The Defence Secretary was also briefed on efforts to secure the Pakistan-Afghan border and measures taken were also part of the briefing.
Inter-Services Intelligence Director General Lt. Gen. Naveed Mukhtar, Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif, Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal, Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir and National Security Adviser Lt Gen (retd) Naseer Khan Janjua were among those who attended the meeting.
Earlier, Mattis arrived at the Nur Khan Airbase where he was received by officials from the defence and foreign ministries.
Mattis's trip aims "to re-affirm the enduring US commitment to partnerships" in the region, according to a press release by the US Department of Defense.
Earlier, speaking to reporters, the American defence chief said: "We have heard from Pakistan leaders that they do not support terrorism. So I expect to see that sort of action reflected in their policies."
Asked if he was going to press the Pakistani leaders to take more action against the insurgents, Mattis stated that the country was taking action in its own best interests and "that's not the way I deal with issues".
"I believe that we work hard on finding the common ground and then we work together."
His visit comes days after a Pakistan court ordered the release from house arrest of 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind and Jamaat-ud-Dawah chief Hafiz Saeed. The US had last week directed Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest Saeed and warned of repercussions if it did not comply.
Ties between Washington and Islamabad have seen a dip after President Donald Trump announced his new Afghan and South Asia policy in August.
Pakistan has also been upset at Trump's calls for increased Indian role in rebuilding of Afghanistan.
Last week the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, said Islamabad had not carried out the "clear" demands made by Washington.
The American top brass has long been frustrated by what they see is Pakistan's reluctance to act against groups such as the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, which launch attacks on neighbouring Afghanistan.
Pakistan, nevertheless, says it has done a great deal to help the US in tracking down terrorists.
Its military - in response to Trump's accusation that Islamabad was harbouring "agents of chaos" and offering safe havens to militant groups waging an insurgency against a US-backed government in Kabul - had brushed off speculation that the American head of state could signal a stronger line against Islamabad.
"Let it come," Major General Asif Ghafoor - the Pakistani military spokesman - had told reporters. "Even if it comes... Pakistan shall do whatever is best in the national interest."
Mattis began his five-day tour of the Middle East A including Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait A and Islamabad on Friday.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : India and Germany on Monday signed a series of financial agreements, including one for an 200 million euro loan for an environment-friendly urban mobility project.
The inter-governmental umbrella agreement for the various funding projects were signed here, a Finance Ministry release said.
"The Government to Government umbrella agreement was signed here today (Monday) to formalise an amount up to euro 200 million for financial cooperation in the form of loan for the project 'Climate Friendly Urban Mobility III' and 11 million euro accompanying measures in form of grant for four projects," it said.
The first part of the agreement had already been signed in May, it added.
Besides, four other agreements were signed between India's Department of Economic Affairs and German government-owned development bank KfW under the framework of Indo-German Bilateral Development Cooperation.
One loan agreement signed with KfW is for the project "Community-based sustainable Forest Management Component I Manipur" that entails a financing of Euro 15 million.
The broad objectives of the project are restoration of degraded forests in upper watersheds, reclamation of abandoned shifting cultivation areas, biodiversity conservation, water resources conservation and livelihood improvement of forest dependent rural and tribal people in the project area, the statement said.
The other loan agreements signed were for projects under the Madhya Pradesh Urban Sanitation and Environment Programme (50 million euros), the Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Development Odisha Phase II (55 million euros) and the Green Energy Corridor Intra-State Transmission System in Maharashtra (12 million euros), it added.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : Condoling the death of veteran actor-producer Shashi Kapoor, Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Monday called him a "brilliant actor" and said "he has left a void difficult to fill in the world of cinema".
"A brilliant actor, he successfully contributed in paving the way for alternative pathbreaking cinema Nationally and Internationally," said Gandhi.
"He will be fondly remembered by all and has left a void difficult to fill in the world of cinema," she added.
Conveying her sympathies to his family and fans for this irreparable loss, Gandhi prayed for the departed soul.
Veteran actor-producer Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the 70s and early 80s, died on Monday at a hospital here. He was 79.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : The Supreme Court on Monday sought a response from the Central government on a plea questioning the repeated imposing of prohibitory orders in central and New Delhi -- the heart of the national capital -- to ban protests and demonstrations.
The bench of Justice A.K. Sikri and Justice Ashok Bhushan observed that it is important to frame guidelines on the right to protest, so as to ensure that the fundamental right of citizens to protest is balanced with avoiding any inconvenience that may be caused to the public.
The court also issued notice to Delhi Police.
Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) empowers an executive magistrate to prohibit an assembly of more than four people in an area.
In 2017, police has issued prohibitory orders six times - in January, March, May, July, September and the latest in October.
Moving the top court through its founder member Aruna Roy, the PIL petitioner organisation Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan (MKSS) has sought quashing of the six prohibitory orders and a declaration that imposing a blanket ban on all assemblies in central Delhi or New Delhi area is "illegal".
The petitioner has also sought laying down of the guidelines for holding public meetings, dharnas and peaceful demonstrations in various parts of the national capital.
Appearing for MKSS, counsel Prashant Bhushan described as "arbitrary" the repeated issuance of prohibitory orders by Delhi Police.
Asserting that the right to peaceful assembly is a fundamental right under the Constitution's Article 19(1) (b), he said that it was a crucial right for citizens to express their opinion in a democratic state.
He said that this right encompasses holding peaceful dharnas and demonstrations which would also be a crucial aspect of the right to freedom of speech and expression under the Article 19 (1) (a).
The MKSS also assailed the National Green Tribunal's October 5 order banning protests at Jantar Mantar on the grounds that it creates a nuisance for the residents of the area and violates environment protection statutes, saying that it was in complete violation of a citizen's fundamental right to peaceful assembly.
"Distancing a protest site from where it is most visible to the government and concerned authorities, will have the effect of diluting the impact that the protest seeks to gain," the PIL said, pointing out that Jantar Mantar has been the site for peaceful protests since 1993 and by the nature of the area, it is an easily managed and contained space.
Mumbai, Dec 4 : With cyclone 'Ockhi' expected to make a landfall in south Gujarat later on Monday or early Tuesday, Maharashtra went on a state of high alert to tackle the side-effect of the stormy weather.
Maharashtra Education Minister Vinod Tawde announced a "precautionary holiday' on Tuesday (December 5) for all schools in the coastal districts of Palghar, Thane, Mumbai, Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg, in view of the predictions for the cyclone.
After a heavily overcast day on Monday, Mumbai and surrounding districts had intermittent rainfall since dusk which continued, slowing down road traffic but the lifeline of the city, the local trains continued unhindered.
The IMD has already forecast rains with thundershowers in and around Mumbai with squalls reaching 50-60 kmph and touching 70 kmph in the coastal areas over the next two days, with minimum temperatures hovering around 23 degrees Celsis.
Danger signals LC-III have been hoisted over all ports between Goa to Dahanu (north Maharashtra), with rough to very rough conditions in the sea.
The BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation and the state Disaster Management Unit and the railways were fully geared for the cyclonic encounter expected over the next couple of days.
Western Railway PRO Ravinder Bhakar said that an emergency meeting of all departments was convened and they will remain on the water levels on the railway tracks, the Railway Protection Force and commercial staff will monitor crowd movements, especially in the areas of Palghar which have been placed on alert.
"Disaster Management Cell is in readiness for any emergencies, patrolling of the railway tracks has been intensified over various rail sections, and the RPF and commercial staff will be prepared for necessary evacuation at respective stations in case of any disaster-like situation," he said.
Technical teams will monitor railway assets and essentials like electricity supply with back-up diesel generators, signal and telecom, breakdown equipments, accident relief trains or accident relief medical vans, etc are on standby for any eventuality.
The BMC has warned people from venturing close to the coastal areas and beaches as high waves are expected in the Arabian Sea owing to the cyclone conditions.
On Tuesday, the high tide will be of 5.04 metres and on Wednesday it will be of 5.05 metres, gradually receding to 4.17 metres by Thursday, said a BMC official.
The BMC has also warned people living in some parts of south Mumbai and suburbs that the possibility of tidal waves flowing into the roads and homes cannot be ruled out and asked them to take adequate precautions.
On December 6, more than half a million followers from all over India are expected to pay homage to the late Babasaheb R. Ambedkar on his 62nd death anniversary at Shivaji Park in Dadar.
The civic officials have requested the followers to stay away from the Dadar Chowpatty beach in view of the stormy seas expected over the next few days, especially at his memorial, Chaityabhoomi which is on the seashore.
Meanwhile, all the BMC disaster units, Mumbai Police, Fire Brigade, the Indian Navy, Indian Coast Guard, Home Guards and other agencies are in full preparedness for any eventuality arising out of the cyclone Ochki as it skirts Maharashtra and is expected to make landfall near the diamond and textile city of Surat in the next few hours.
Fishermen in the seas have been advised to return immediately and others told to keep off the sea for the next two days.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the execution of death sentence of 1993 Mumbai bomb blast convict Taher Mohammed Merchant who was found guilty on different counts including hatching conspiracy and waging war against the nation.
Merchant, along with Feroze Abdul Rashid Khan, was given the death sentence after being convicted along with underworld don Abu Salem. However, the latter escaped the capital punishment because of conditions surrounding his extradition from Portugal.
"There shall be stay of the execution of death sentence," said a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice Ashok Bhushan and Justice Mohan M. Shantanagoudar, directing the supply of the order's copy to the Central Bureau of Investigation and listing the matter for hearing on March 14 next year.
The court also directed its registry to call for the lower court records and ordered Maharashtra to "compile the evidence in entirety and file the compilation in convenient volumes" and also serve a copy thereof to Merchant's counsel.
On September 7 this year, a special Terrorist and Disruptive Activity (TADA) court had sentenced Merchant and Feroze Abdul Rashid Khan to death.
Besides Abu Salem, the TADA court had sent Karimullah Khan to jail for life and Riyaz Siddiqui to 10 years rigorous imprisonment.
The court had found them guilty on various counts including murder, hatching a criminal conspiracy to carry out the blasts, waging a war against the nation, supplying arms and ammunition, and other serious offences.
The capital punishments were given in the second part of the Mumbai blasts trial. The earlier part of the trial, completed in 2007, saw 100 people being convicted which included Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt and prime accused Tiger Memon.
Dutt, who was convicted for illegal possession of arms but acquitted of the other serious charges, has since completed his six-year sentence while Memon is absconding.
Lucknow, Dec 4 : The 14 newly elected mayors of Uttar Pradesh's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will call on Prime Mminister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Tuesday, said a party leader.
According to state leaders, BJP's state Organisation Secretary Sunil Bansal would be part of the delegation.
While the meeting is being termed a courtesy call, the Prime Minister is expected to share with the new mayors, his vision of development of cities. A source told IANS that Modi will also seek and exchange ideas on how to improve the lot of the cities, improve garbage disposal system, and create more awareness about cleanliness.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and state BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey had met these newly elected mayors here on Sunday. Out of the 16 municipal corporations in Uttar Pradesh that went to polls late in November, the BJP candidates won the mayoral seats in 14, including in Lucknow, Agra, Varanasi, Moradabad, Kanpur and Allahabad.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : Stating that Russia will remain a key foreign policy priority for India, New Delhi on Monday called for joint defence equipment manufacturing between the two countries under the Make in India initiative.
"Russia is and will remain the key important foreign policy priority for India," Vijay Gokhale, Secretary, Economic Relations, in the Ministry of External Affairs, said while addressing the Second India-Russia Heads of Think-Tanks Forum organised by the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) here.
"It would not be out of place to state that this is a strong national consensus," he said.
Contending that the past relationship between India and Russia should not transmute into a passive present partnership, he cautioned that "there is no room for complacency in our ties" for it "cannot remain isolated from global changes or be immune from their impact".
Stating that Russia remained a major supplier of India's defence requirements, Gokhale said that New Delhi appreciated Moscow's "consistent support through the seven decades of our partnership".
"At the same time, we believe that this is the opportune time to move from a buyer-seller format to joint production and joint investments under our Prime Minister's 'Make In India' initiative, in order to bring a new dynamism to our military-technical co-operation," he said.
"We invite Russian defence industry to look at our new policies in this regard and to partner us as India begins a journey to become a defence manufacturer."
Holding cooperation in the energy sector was now embarking in new directions, Gokhale said that Indian investments in the Vankor and Taas-Yuryakh oilfields in Russia was symbolic of this and cooperation in nuclear energy is a cornerstone of the Strategic Partnership.
On the issue of regional connectivity issues, Gokhale, without naming China, said that such initiatives should take into account the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries.
"When speaking of connectivity, questions are asked whether India supports such regional and international initiatives. The answer is a categorical yes," he said.
"It is important for such initiatives to be open, inclusive, transparent and financially sustainable. It is also essential that such initiatives are taken by all states with due sensitivity in respect of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, so that they are net contributors to regional stability and prosperity."
India is against the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a part of Beijing's One Belt One Road initiative, as it passes through Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Expressing appreciation for the encouragement given by Russia to the Chabahar port project in Iran, Gokhal said that "we can successfully build connectivity and also engage with the Eurasian Economic Union to discuss ways of concluding free trade arrangements that are balanced and mutually beneficial".
Iranian President Hasan Rouhani on Sunday inaugurated the first phase of the Chabahar port, jointly developed by India, Iran and Afghanistan, and opening a strategic transit route between India, Iran, Afghanistan and other Central Asian nations bypassing Pakistan.
New Delhi, Dec 4 : The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Monday questioned an Odisha man over his suspected link with terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist outfit, an official said.
Akhtar Hussain Khan, 52, was questioned at the NIA headquarters here for over nine hours, an NIA official told IANS, adding his questioning would be continued for a few days.
The NIA is already scrutinizing Khan's mobile phone, his bank passbook and few documents recovered from his house and also want to know about some suspected phone calls made to him from Pakistan in last few months, the official said.
The NIA had on November 29 conducted raids at Khan's residence in Samantarapur village in Odisha's Cuttack district and subsequently issued notice to him asking to depose before its headquarters in Delhi on December 4 over his link with LeT terrorist Abdul Naeem Sheikh.
Sheikh, who was arrested on November 28 from Lucknow by the NIA and Uttar Pradesh Anti Terrorist Squad, had reportedly named Khan of having link with him during the interrogation, the official said.
Khan, who was issued notice as a witness under Section 160 of the CrPC, had earlier claimed that he was completely innocent and being harassed unnecessarily by the investigating agency.
"I am a poor man and have no links with any terror outfits. NIA officers questioned me lot of things about money transactions in my bank account and inquired about few phone numbers. I answered all their questions honestly. They found nothing, still I don't know why they are harassing me unnecessarily," Khan has said.
"I don't even have money to visit Delhi. I am innocent. I will take a loan to go to Delhi and will cooperate completely with the NIA."
He has also said that he is a "true Hindustani and have faith in the judiciary" of the country. "I am no way related to any terrorist or terror group. Truth will prevail. I often had talked to one of my former colleagues and friends, who presently resides in Lahore."
Working in a garage in Saudi Arabia for a decade before returning to his village four years ago, Khan stays with his wife and children in Samantarapur.
New Delhi,a : New Delhi,A Dec 5 (IANS) The United Arab Emirates embassy celebrated the country's 46th National Day at an event here during which Ambassador AAhmed Al Banna highlighted preparations to celebrate 2018 as the 'Year of Zayed' to honour the founding father of the UAE in the centenary year of his birth.
Indian Minister for Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi was the Chief Guest, and conveyed the warm greetings of President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the UAE, a press release from the Embassy said on Monday.
Naqvi remarked that India's relations with the UAE have multiple facets spread over different fields. Banna spoke about the themes that are at the core of the country's national strategy from year to year.
Prominent figures from different walks of life, includingA members of the diplomatic corps in New Delhi, academics, members of the media, businessmen and Indian government officials attended the ceremony.
The release also said that the UAE's foreign policy witnessed dynamic and tangible activity on quite a few levels in the Gulf, in the Arab world and internationally, by way of an active and dynamic foreign policy in dealing with various global affairs. These efforts have contributed to strengthening the country's standing and strengthened ties with friendly countries in the Gulf region, in the Arab region and around the world.
Nairobi, Dec 5 : In a major global action against climate change, two UN environmental organizations on Monday signed a pact on increased cooperation and also for mobilisation of private finance and investment for climate action that is crucial for achieving the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement goals.
The pact was signed between the UN Environment and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by their heads Erik Solheim and Patricia Espinosa, respectively.
Over 2,000 heads of state, ministers, business leaders, UN officials and civil society representatives are gathered at the UN Environment Programme headquarters here till December 6 to exchange ideas to tackle the global menace of pollution and commit to action.
Environmental degradation accounts for nearly one in four of all deaths, or 12.6 million people a year, as well as other human health problems and widespread destruction of key ecosystems.
"Given the grim statistics on how we are poisoning ourselves and our planet, bold decisions from the UN Environment Assembly are critical," UN Environment head Solheim told reporters after signing the pact.
"That is as true for threats like pollution as it is for climate change and the many other environment threats we face."
Solheim also made it clear that the complex global processes linked to the environment, such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Climate Change Agreement underscore the urgent need to take care of people and the planet.
Addressing delegates in the Nairobi plenary session of the meeting, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Espinosa said: "We did make important progress at COP23. Nations made it clear that the Paris Agreement remains the only way forward, and that fulfillment of the commitments up to 2020 will provide a solid basis for more ambition and the full operation of the Agreement."
"The upcoming year is crucial to reducing the climate threat and helping those already affected by it. The cooperation of all sectors is key, but also throughout the UN family. The Paris Agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework represent our path. Climate change is connected to almost all major challenges humanity faces, making work on Sustainable Development Goal 13 vital," she added.
The new UN Environment report, titled "The Executive Director's Report: Towards a Pollution-Free Planet", which, the meeting is using as the basis for defining the problems and laying out new action areas, recommended political leadership and partnerships at all levels and action on the worst pollutants.
It also favoured lifestyle changes, low-carbon tech investments and advocacy.
The recommendations are based on analysis of pollution in all its forms, including air, land, freshwater, marine, chemical and waste pollution.
(Vishal Gulati is in Nairobi at the invitation of United Nations Environment to cover its third annual session. He can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in)
Ramallah, Dec 5 : A Palestinian senior official called on the US on Monday to avoid taking any move that would affect the status quo of Jerusalem.
Both moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital would be unacceptable and would entail risks, Xinhua quoted Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister Ziad Abu Amr as saying during his meeting with US Consul General in Jerusalem.
The move would be "offensive and contrary to the role of the US administration as a mediator and a sponsor of the peace process," said the Palestinian official.
"It will disqualify the US from playing a role in the peace process and will close every door to a serious negotiation, as well as will push the entire region into more tension and instability," he added.
The Palestinian leadership would have to break up any previous understandings it had achieved with the US, should the US administration decided to change its stance on Jerusalem, warned Amr.
The US administration would also be held responsible for any possible consequences of its moves on Jerusalem, he said.
He further urged the US to reconsider its position and to preserve the "remaining chances" of achieving peace between the Palestinians and Israel.
US President Donald Trump was considering acknowledging Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and might announce that on Wednesday.
Trump's adviser Jared Kushner said on Sunday that the president had not yet made a decision regarding the recognition.
Trump issued an exceptional decision to maintain the US embassy in Tel Aviv last June, which is expected to expire this month, but it is not clear whether he will renew his decision or not.
Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is considered by the Palestinians as a provocation and destruction of the peace talks.
Meanwhile, Al-Azhar, the highest Islamic learning institution for Egypt and the Sunni Muslim world dubbed on Monday that the relocation of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem a "failed step" that would cause several troubles.
Al-Azhar Undersecretary Abbas Shoman stressed during a seminar in Cairo that Jerusalem will always be an Arab and Palestinian city as the holy city constitutes an Islamic heritage and religious dimension, Egypt's official MENA news agency reported.
Late on Sunday, Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry discussed the potential negative of the move impacts with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in a phone call.
Shoukry has stressed that the religious and historical status of Jerusalem requires further keenness and careful consideration in dealing with such a thorny issue concerning the national identity of the Palestinian people throughout the ages.
Cairo will remain a reliable partner that could effectively contribute to building trust and encourage Palestinian and Israeli sides to revive negotiations, with the aim of achieving a just and comprehensive peace, Shoukry said.
thebigword backs the British bid
thebigword which is a global translation and interpretation provider headquartered in Leeds is pleased to be supporting the British bid.
The British bid seeks to provide UK businesses with a platform to showcase their industry and provide opportunities for growth through overseas exports.
With offices in 9 different countries thebigword is a British success story within the localisation industry suppling translation and interpretation services to many of the worlds largest global brands. The company serves a wide range of sectors, including banking, defence, travel and leisure, manufacturing, retail and eCommerce, private healthcare as well as Government and other public sector organisations.
We are delighted that our services and technology will appear as part of The British Bid hub on The BBC.com website for the next 12 months. http://www.bbc.com/storyworks/the-british-bid/home
Founder and Chief Executive officer Larry Gould said: Britain has a proud industrial heritage and so many fantastic companies producing amazing products, so its great that the British bid is going to support British business to grow overseas.
At thebigword we know that translating and localising content can open up companies to so many new trading opportunities in all corners of the world and so we are really pleased to be taking part in this project.
Ian Hawkins at the British Bid said: "The British Bid is a global initiative designed to demonstrate the best in British business, flying the flag of British excellence. Innovation, heritage and quality are the hallmarks of British Bid participants, and these businesses are true ambassadors for the UK around the world.
"thebigword will feature as part of The British Bid that will be promoted on BBC.COM the BBCs commercial international-facing website."
thebigword is the largest interpreting services provider in Europe and is in the top 20 language companies in the world. It works with a range of major government departments, including the Ministry of Justice and the NYC Department of Education, as well as blue chip companies and brands on a global scale.
The company has 11 offices around the world, employs over 600 staff and has more than 15,000 linguists.
For more information about thebigword, visit http://www.thebigword.com/ and http://www.bbc.com/storyworks/the-british-bid/
Track5Media's Day of Giving - 2016 It's become a tradition for the company. We dress up, deliver presents, and every year we look forward to seeing the surprised looks on the children's faces.
Lancaster-based Track5Media, LLC is embracing the spirit of giving this holiday season with its annual Day of Giving. The company, which creates niche job board websites for various industries, is offering its time on Dec. 6 by sending its employees to a variety of Lancaster County nonprofits. The employees will wrap gifts ahead of time, and then they will distribute the gifts, such as small toys, to children and families in need.
Track5Medias employees will split up into groups so that they can collectively visit four separate nonprofits throughout the day. The best part they will be dressed as Santa, Mrs. Claus, and their elves! Track5Medias Day of Giving 2017 will kick off at 11 a.m. with a visit to Community Action Partnership of Lancaster County, or CAP. From there Track5Media will stop by the Domestic Violence Shelter, operated by CAP, and then Moms House of Lancaster. The day will wrap up with a stop at Church World Services at 4:30 p.m.
Track5Media holds an annual day of giving each year as a way to use its private enterprise to make a social impact. The company continues to see steady growth, with its annual income more than doubling in the past three years. Track5Media expects that growth to continue as this year comes to an end. This year is extra special for the company. For the first time in its 10-year history, Track5Media landed at 1501 on the 2017 Inc. 5000 List of Americas Fastest-Growing Companies.
We came up with our Day of Giving a few years ago as a way to give back to our community after a successful year, said Track5Media president Oliver Feakins. Ever since then, its become a tradition for the company. We dress up, deliver presents, and every year we all look forward to seeing the surprised looks on the childrens faces.
Track5Media, LLC, is a privately-held technology company that was founded in 2007 in Lancaster, Pa. As a corporate holding company, Track5Media owns a network of industry-specific websites, from trucking to healthcare, that present unique marketing and promotional opportunities for clients. The websites include TravelNurseSource.com, AlliedTravelCareers.com, LocumJobsOnline.com, AllPhysicianJobs.com, and AllTruckJobs.com. The brands are designed to help clients find a steady stream of highly qualified referrals. With a strong concentration in healthcare recruitment advertising, Track5Media is expanding into other verticals and seeking new partnerships. From referral generation to job boards to online advertising, Track5Media websites feature outstanding resources designed to complement and enhance existing marketing initiatives for its clients across the nation. Learn more at Track5Media.com.
An Australia-based businessman and writer has published his comprehensive, solution-based analysis of Australias political, economic and social challenges that aims to engage readers in civic discourse and encourages them to look outside the box for competent, practical solutions to the nations hot-button issues.
In Placing Australians on a Fast Elevator to the Future, author Eric Gribble disputes Australias big-government regulations and puts forth relatable and easy-to-understand solutions to replace, reform or innovate upon the countrys current structure. With a heavy emphasis on the importance of embracing technology, Gribbles book advocates for the self-empowerment of citizens to combat the looming growth of Government influence.
The future is not all doom and gloom there are alternative ways of approaching important political and social issues, and this book is my attempt to demonstrate that, Gribble said. Ultimately, it is up to us the citizens to better inform ourselves on pertinent matters and to be skeptical of accepting the status quo.
Through critical assessment of topics such as free speech, taxes, healthcare and climate change, Gribble prompts readers to exercise their rights, question and challenge accepted or age-old customs and educate themselves on issues that affect their fellow citizens and future generations.
Placing Australians on a Fast Elevator to the Future: Reform from the Top Down
By Eric Gribble
ISBN: 978-1-5043-0726-0 (paperback); 978-1-5043-0727-7 (electronic)
Available at the Balboa Press Online Bookstore, Barnes & Noble and Amazon
About the author
Eric Gribble previously operated a capsicum-growing business in Tasmania and has particular interest in economics, horticulture, astronomy and New Zealand and Australian politics. Gribble currently resides in Wardell, New South Wales.
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Investigate, investigate, investigate. It is critical that all allegations of harassment be taken seriously and investigated immediately.
Harassment and sexual harassment unfortunately is a reality of the workplace. With high-profile cases and allegations such as Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein coming to light recently, employers are looking for answers. They want to ensure they are offering the best working conditions for all employees, says Avitus Groups Montana-based Director of Human Resources & Risk Management Ryan Braley.
Avitus Group makes sure our members are educated on workplace policy and are able to be in compliance with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or EEOCs laws, regulation and guidance on harassment and sexual harassment. Were offering our best practices guide in an effort to help workplaces nationwide take a more proactive approach regarding sexual harassment, says Avitus Group's Colorado-based Regional Human Resources & Operations Manager Dawn Holdon.
The Avitus Group Sexual Harassment Best Practices Guide for Employers highlights 10 items critical to workplace compliance and sexual harassment policy for employers. Employers who are following best practices should be able to answer yes to each question within the guide. For example: 1. My company has a zero tolerance policy for harassment and retaliation and it enforces the policy. 2. My company provides specific sexual harassment training for management and supervisors at least every two years. My company also provides specific sexual harassment training for new managers and supervisors within 6 months of their promotion and/or hiring. 3. My company provides as many avenues as possible for reporting sexual harassment, including an anonymous harassment hotline available for all employees.
If businesses are not able to answer yes to all 10 questions within the guide, Avitus Group, as one of the largest employers in the co-employment industry nationwide, serves a resource for further information. Additionally, the guide cautions companies to make sure they are not only in compliance with federal regulation and law, but with state-specific laws.
Employers should note that certain states have more specific laws regarding sexual harassment. For example, California requires sexual harassment training for supervisors every two years for employers with over 50 employees. The training must be a minimum of two hours and must be interactive. Additionally, there needs to be a bullying component included. Effective January 1, 2018, an additional component covering harassment based upon gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation will need to be included with any mandatory sexual harassment training, says Avitus Group's California-based Director of Human Resources & Risk Management Cynthia Hancock.
Investigate, investigate, investigate, says Avitus Groups Alaska-based Human Resources Director Robert Lindstrom. It is critical that all allegations of harassment be taken seriously and investigated immediately, even if the employee who reported the allegations does not want management to do anything about it. Advise the employee that once a company learns about a harassment claim, they are required to investigate. Some of the largest lawsuits filed are due to an employers failure to properly investigate.
Assure that if there are allegations of harassment, that the employee who brought forth the allegations is not retaliated against and/or perceived to be retaliated against in any manner, says Avitus Groups New Jersey-Based Human Resources Business Partner Trudi Curcione. "This means you may have to suspend or change the alleged perpetrators schedule or move them to another department temporarily. No action should be taken against the employee who complained.
Avitus Group also advises for continued training for all level of employees throughout their career on what is and is not appropriate in the workplace. For more information, Avitus Group invites the business community to review the Sexual Harassment Best Practices Guide for Employers and reach out with any questions.
Avitus Group is a worldwide company that simplifies, strengthens and grows businesses by providing 'back office' support (payroll, accounting, taxes, recruiting, information technology, human resources and much more). When a business uses Avitus Group, all of the necessary yet burdensome functions of the business become Avitus Group's responsibility, so the business can focus on what it does best. Avitus Group serves clients nationwide through regional office locations from coast to coast. The company also serves international clients through partner locations worldwide.
Slovenia is an exceptionally open country to new investments a number of projects are now ready for new investors
Investors exploring new markets in Central Europe in the lead-up to the UKs exit from the European Union are looking to Slovenia. The rationale was presented at a conference in London on Friday 1 December organised by the British-Slovenian Chamber of Commerce (BSCC) in cooperation with the Council of British Chamber of Commerce in Europe (COBCOE) and the Slovenian Ministry of Economic Development and Technology.
Ales Cantarutti, Slovenian State Secretary for Economic Development and Technology, explained that Slovenia is an exceptionally open country to new investments, and highlighted a number of projects that are ready for new investors. "According to recent successful FDIs in Slovenia, also GDP growth at its highest since 2008 and still growing, we believe that our country is an excellent starting point for doing business in the CEE region, especially due to its excellent geostrategic position, great infrastructure, ICT knowledge and language skills, and highly educated workforce, said Mr Cantarutti.
British Ambassador to Slovenia Sophie Honey underlined the opportunities for growing trade and investment in both directions. The UK is open for business Im confident that UK investors will find many opportunities for doing business in Slovenia. We also want to increase Slovene investment into the UK, with many opportunities across the UK, underpinned by a great business environment, unique openness to FDI and global perspective. Our bilateral trade and investment grew by over 16% between 2014 and 2016 and I am excited by the opportunity for this to grow further in the coming years, she said.
The conference was attended by more than 100 delegates who acknowledged that Slovenia is a hidden investment gem in the middle of Europe. It is also one of the worlds safest countries with an enviable quality of life.
Barbara Uranjek, CEO of the BSCC, concluded: Many current opportunities were presented by the Slovenian Sovereign Holding and the Slovenian Bank Asset Management Company, reflecting the continuation of the Governments privatisation process and fast economic growth. Attracting British investors to Slovenia will strengthen our economic cooperation and make Slovenia even more oriented towards smart, green and hi-tech. We will organise similar investment conferences next year not only in London, but also where we find new opportunities in this large economy and will be part of the International Business Festival in Liverpool, as we open doors for Brits in Slovenia and vice-versa.
For more information, please contact Barbara Uranjek barbara.uranjek(at)bscc.si or Lidija Vinkovic, SPIRIT Slovenia Press Office, lidija.vinkovic(at)spiritslovenia.si
Today, Kryon Systems, the leading provider of intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions, announced the opening of a new office in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The new location, Kryon Systems third international location, is primed to be a hub for the growing demand for RPA and digital transformation services in the region. The company, which plans on opening several more regional offices as part of its expansion into the region, has appointed industry expert Darius Heisig to serve as the General Manager for Kryon Systems, EMEA region.
Before joining Kryon Systems, Mr. Heisig served as the VP of Sales for Kofax, EMEA region, where he was responsible for managing the growth of the Kofax Kapow Enterprise RPA Strategy. With over 20 years experience in sales management and business development in the European and Asian markets, Mr. Heisig and his team will prove instrumental as Kryon Systems positions itself for market leadership in the EMEA.
The EMEA region is home to a plethora of diverse companies creating new products and services in industries from finance to telecommunications, all of whom are now searching for the right tools to help them compete in an ever-competitive market, said Mr. Heisig. These companies are seeking AI-powered solutions to enable rapid growth along with consistent, high-quality performance, and with our new location, Kryon Systems uniquely intelligent RPA will be readily available for enterprises to focus on achieving their corporate vision with a regionally located partner.
Kryon Systems provides an intelligent, AI-powered RPA solution empowering enterprises with a digital workforce capable of ensuring the high-quality execution of processes across the enterprise. Kryons Intelligent RPA platform allows companies to transcend the burden of process execution, allowing the enterprise to focus resources on critical projects.
Were excited to have Darius join the team, as his years of experience in Europe and Asia are a key component in our plan to scale Kryon Systems into a market leader globally, said Harel Tayeb, CEO of Kryon Systems. At a time when all industries are undertaking digital transformation efforts to stay competitive, expanding our operations in the region is a critical part of our future, and we are excited to partner with enterprises there to help them achieve the visions they have for their businesses.
About Kryon Systems
Kryon Systems delivers innovative, intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions empowering companies to transcend the processes which consume their most valuable resource - time. While other RPA vendors provide tools that focus solely on automating repetitive process-oriented tasks, Kryon aims for a complete and lasting solution, ultimately removing these tasks entirely from the day-to-day workflow of enterprises. Using patented visual and deep learning technologies, Kryons RPA enables companies to discover the innovators and creators amongst them by reducing the noise, complexity, errors and wasted time which go hand in hand with process execution. Kryons intelligent RPA is changing the reality of todays process-focused business world by offloading the repetitive, soul-crushing processes to a digital workforce not only for the increased productivity, reduced error rates, and lower operating costs, but also so that companies can focus on what they want to be - creative, imaginative, revolutionary, and with greater revenue. Learn more about Kryon Systems and the numerous Fortune 500 organizations already benefiting from its products.
Matt DeCew The Founders vision of truly being employee focused and client service driven grabbed me from the get go.
One of the Nations leading specialty wholesale insurance brokerages, Founders Professional, is excited to announce the recent hires of Matt DeCew and Jeff Steen. DeCew and Steen will be launching the San Diego office of Founders Professional - the companys fifth location. These two new hires reinforce Founders Professionals unwavering commitment to a West Coast presence.
In these new roles, DeCew and Steen will work hand-in-hand with retail insurance agencies throughout the West in securing coverage for their clients hard-to-place professional liability and management liability insurance risks. DeCew will focus his efforts on the placement of miscellaneous professional liability risks and management liability risks across a multitude of industries, while Steen will focus his efforts on the architects and engineers marketplace and helping retail insurance agents navigate the world of professional liability insurance in those arenas.
Im honored to be joining the Founders team. Their company vision of truly being employee focused and client service driven grabbed me from the get go. Im looking forward to helping the company grow and even more excited about helping our clients grow and achieve success, commented DeCew.
With over twelve years of wholesale brokerage experience, focusing solely on professional liability, Matt DeCew was a natural fit to join the miscellaneous professional liability team. A surfer vibe with a business mind everybody will love working with Matt. His knowledge of and experience in the California marketplace will make him, along with Steen, an invaluable resource to Founders retail partners.
Im very excited to join the Founders Professional team as a specialist wholesale broker, building on my nearly two decades of experience servicing the insurance and risk management needs of design professionals. I was attracted to Founders due to their industry reputation and access to unique products not normally available through other wholesaler, commented Steen.
Before joining Founders Professional, Jeff Steen was an insurance broker for IOA Insurance Services where he served the insurance needs of architects and engineers throughout the Country. From 2014- 2017 Jeff served as the Treasurer for a/e ProNet, a national network of brokers who specialize in serving the insurance needs of design professionals. Additionally, Steen has earned his RPLU designation from the Professional Liability Underwriting Society (PLUS), confirming his dedication to and expertise in the professional liability arena.
Robb Williams, President of Founders Professional, commented: We are pleased to deliver on our promise to open an office in San Diego, California. Our three recent additions in California will provide our West Coast agents a one stop source (right in their back yard) for all of their hard-to-place professional liability and management liability needs. All three have a lot of experience in their space and fit in very nicely with the growing and focused practice leader led team model, that our agents have come to count on.
Both DeCew and Steen are joining a wholesale brokerage that has quickly become one of the most effective players in the professional liability arena. With a focus exclusively on the placement of professional liability and management liability risks, and a practice leader led team model, working with Founders Professional has quickly become the go-to choice for agents across the country that focus in professional liability.
Matt DeCew can be reached directly at 714-865-3215 or via email at Matt.DeCew(at)founderspro(dot)com.
Jeff Steen can be reached directly at 619-889-0998 or via email at Jeff.Steen(at)founderspro(dot)com.
About Founders Professional
Founders Professional is a national wholesale insurance brokerage focused exclusively on the placement of management liability & professional liability insurance risks. The Founders Professional practice leaders and their respective teams have deep expertise and market access in the areas of Architects & Engineers, Law Firms, Healthcare/Life Sciences/Social Services, Management Liability, and Miscellaneous Professional Liability Insurance. Founders Professional represents a majority of the admitted and surplus lines insurance carriers that focus on professional liability insurance in the United States, additionally representing many exclusive or semi-exclusive programs.
If you would like more information about this topic, please contact Aaron Lipson at 312-219-6589 or via email at aaron.lipson(at)founderspro(dot)com.
Elle Shelley A century of product development is changing overnight with the power of the Internet and digital manufacturing coming together to usher in a new era of rapid technology advancement
After spending the year in beta, Launch Forth announced today its debut as an enterprise-level SaaS (software as a service) platform focused on helping companies accelerate their product development process by tapping into a shared community of innovators from around the globe to collaborate on ideas, solve problems and create solutions for challenges both big and small.
Among the startups first clients are General Electric Co., HP Inc. and Airbus. Launch Forth is the latest offering from LM, Inc., one of the worlds most innovative companies and pioneer in the open-innovation and advanced manufacturing space. LM, Inc. is the parent company of Local Motors, founded in 2008 and well known for its breakthrough products, including the worlds first co-created production vehicle, the Rally Fighter, the worlds first 3D-printed car, the Strati, and, most recently, a low speed, self-driving shuttle called Olli, with IBM Watson technology. Local Motors massive success revealed a need in the market, across a wide range of industries, for co-creation amongst a shared community to solve even the toughest of problems. Enter, Launch Forth.
Weve spent the last year quietly perfecting our co-creation platform while providing successful client outcomes, said Elle Shelley, executive vice president of Launch Forth. As we have refined our co-creation centric design methodology and developed best-in-class tools, we can now offer, at scale, an unprecedented level of access to the worlds largest community of solvers, makers, designers, engineers and technologists to bring breakthrough products to market quickly and cost effectively.
Since its inception, Launch Forth has tested the ability of a shared community to develop never-before-seen products and revolutionary ideas in the industrial testing, home appliance and consumer electronics industries. GE Fuse accepted the challenge and developed eight products with the community in less than a year, including an on-wing inspection device for airplane engines and a universal x-ray adaptor. Wanting to push the boundaries even further, HP Inc. and Launch Forth have partnered to co-create a city for the first million people to live on Mars. Launch Forth also worked with Airbus to develop a drone services portal.
A century of product development is changing overnight with the power of the Internet and digital manufacturing coming together to usher in a new era of rapid technology advancement in the products that run our daily lives, says LM, Inc.s Chairman and CEO John B. Rogers, Jr. Launch Forth is prepared to engage and empower companies that are ready to embrace this shift.
Launch Forth is another example of a business built to respond to the growing trend of the gig economy. Powered by a rapidly growing, open-innovation community of over 120,000 solvers, Launch Forth allows community members to participate from anywhere in the world on their own time in projects sponsored by enterprise-level clients. In these projects, the community has an opportunity to collaborate with minds from around the world, team up to work together to solve perplexing issues, compete for prizes by submitting their own ideas, models and solutions while also building their professional reputation along the way.
Share an idea, change the world thats our mantra, Shelley says of the communitys motivation to join and contribute on Launch Forth.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Launch Forth appointed Elle Shelley as the executive vice president who leads the overall vision and strategy for the company. Shelley brings more than a decade of experience to her role after founding her own marketing firm that then merged with Local Motors in late 2013. While at Local Motors, Shelley served as the chief marketing officer overseeing all marketing communications and product management as well as identifying opportunities in the marketplace to launch new products. Launch Forth recently hired 15 employees with plans to hire 10 more by the end of the year.
About Launch Forth
Launch Forth is a SaaS (software as a service) platform for product design powered by a robust community of designers, engineers and solvers. As the latest offering from LM, Inc., Launch Forth harnesses the speed and potential of crowdsourcing and co-creation to bring breakthrough products to market quickly with a shared community of innovators from around the globe who collaborate on ideas, solve problems and create solutions for challenges both large and small. This community-powered platform pairs design thinking with open innovation and accelerates the product development process for well-respected global giants like HP Inc., Local Motors, General Electric Co. and Airbus. Learn more at: http://LaunchForth.io.
REDCOM Laboratories, Inc., the leading supplier of mission critical secure communications solutions, is pleased to announce it will be at the OilComm Conference & Exposition in Houston, TX, December 6-7.
At the OilComm Conference, REDCOM will show how the companys technology can reliably interoperate with virtually any voice communications system in the world. One REDCOM system can provide secure connectivity from upstream back to corporate headquarters via a wide variety of end devices including VoIP phones, landlines, smartphones, satellite phones, and radios.
Recognizing the industrys need to reduce size, weight, and power (SWaP), REDCOM built the Server 1600, a ruggedized small form factor appliance ideal for deployments to offshore sites, oil platforms, and industrial settings. Its unique 1U, half-rack form factor allows two servers to be installed side-by-side in a standard 19 rack or transit case, enabling redundancy and High Availability in a very compact space. Server 1600 is the ideal platform for running REDCOMs Sigma Core call control software.
Sigma Core is a powerful and flexible platform that delivers a comprehensive set of UC functions, including VoIP, point-to-point video, XMPP with presence, conferencing, and unified messaging. Sigma Client is REDCOMs secure VoIP app for Windows and Android that includes integrated Push-to-Talk support, enabling the app to key any radio in the network for instantaneous communications.
Sustain mission critical communications in an IP-denied environment
At OilComm, REDCOM will also discuss CrucialConnect, the companys solution for communicating in a denied environment. CrucialConnect is a family of customizable and deployable packages designed to restore critical communications in minutes, with options for HF, VHF, LTE, and SATCOM redundancy.
Todays business leaders must understand the challenges of the cyber domain, learn how to leverage it to their advantage, and most importantly be well-versed and practiced in sustaining critical command and control functions in the cyber denied environment, said REDCOM Director of Strategy Col. Sweeney. REDCOM CrucialConnect is designed to provide businesses with unmatched security, connectivity, and interoperability in the IP environment while enabling the mechanisms to communicate securely when that environment has been rendered inoperable.
For more information on sustaining communications, please join Col. Sweeney on Wednesday, December 6 from 2:002:30 in Briarpark 1 for a presentation on Operational Continuity in a Communications Denied Environment.
About REDCOM
REDCOM specializes in the design and manufacture of advanced communications solutions with a focus on interoperability, reliability, and security. REDCOM's MIL-spec products are optimized for low size, weight, and power (SWaP), making them the ideal communications core for denied environments or deployments to rugged environments. The companys latest innovation, Sigma Core, is a software platform that delivers robust call control, media handling, and encrypted communications. REDCOMs customers include energy companies, enterprises, all branches of the military, government agencies, emergency responders, and integrators. For additional information, please visit the REDCOM website at http://www.redcom.com.
Tim Barber sweetFrog fills an important niche food demand within the military market. The brand is well recognized in many parts of the country, and we're confident that it will be well received by the military community. - Tim Barber
sweetFrog Frozen Yogurt, the nations leading frozen yogurt chain, named Americas Best Frozen Yogurt by The Daily Meal, and a Top New Franchise by Entrepreneur Magazine, is opening a new store exclusive to those living and working on Fort Belvoir in March 2018. This new location is sweetFrogs 15th location in Northern Virginia.
sweetFrogs first store to open on a military installation will be owned by Tim Barber. Barber is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He brings 11 years of military service and an additional 15 years with the Department of Defense to the company.
Barber says sweetFrog was the perfect fit for his next entrepreneurial journey because he loves the companys community first values and believes in how much the concept resonates with members of the military of all ages.
We see whats happening outside of the base regarding the popularity of frozen yogurt, says Barber. sweetFrog is the best in the industry and its name recognition is second to none. There are several sweetFrog locations in the area, so we know theyre frequented by many military people and bringing it directly to this closed population just makes sense for us.
Barber continued.
sweetFrog fills an important niche food demand within the military market. The brand is well recognized in many parts of the country, and we're confident that it will be well received by the military community. As an Air Force Veteran with over 26 years-service and as a military member and DOD civilian, my company is proud to offer a product of sweetFrog's caliber to the US Military, Retirees, and their Family members.
sweetFrogs CEO, Patrick Galleher, is excited Tim Barber is joining the sweetFrog franchise family and believes the companys frozen yogurt concept is a perfect fit for the Fort Belvoir community.
We are thrilled Tim Barber is opening our first sweetFrog location on a military installation, particularly so close to Washington, D.C., says Galleher. After working with the Air Force and Department of Defense for 26 years, Barber possesses the perfect skill set to quickly become a successful sweetFrog owner. And were thrilled to know he plans to expand and add sweetFrog stores on multiple military bases. We expect Barber to flourish as a sweetFrog owner, especially in communities defined by brave and honorable residents.
For more information about sweetFrog Premium Frozen Yogurt, please visit http://www.sweetfrog.com.
To learn more about sweetFrog Frozen Yogurt franchise opportunities, as well as acquisitions and re-brands, please visit http://sweetfrog.com/franchise.
About sweetFrog Frozen Yogurt:
sweetFrog (http://www.sweetfrog.com) is the fastest growing self-serve frozen yogurt restaurant company in the country. With a wide selection of premium frozen yogurt flavors and fresh toppings choices, sweetFrog was named Best Frozen Yogurt in the USA by The Daily Meal in 2014 and 2016. sweetFrog has over 340 locations and mobile units including retail, mobile trucks and non-traditional locations (such as sporting venues) in twenty-seven states in the U.S, Dominican Republic and Egypt. The company was founded in 2009 and is based in Richmond, Virginia. sweetFrog prides itself on providing a family-friendly environment where customers can enjoy soft-serve frozen yogurt, ice cream, gelato and sorbets with the toppings of their choice. The company was founded on Christian principles and seeks to bring happiness and a positive attitude into the lives of the communities it calls home.
We recognize we are filling a hole that has long been identified as a priority and significant neighborhood need.
In keeping with their dedication to providing world-class care to the Naperville community, Edgewood Clinical Services is pleased to announce the addition of two new psychiatrists to their team. Specializing in child, adolescent and adult psychiatry, Drs. Joe McNally and Peter Nichols will join the rapidly-growing behavioral health agency during the first two months of
2018.
The new physicians will be dividing their time between the North Naperville, South Naperville and Lisle office (scheduled to open in the near future). Dr. McNally begins his practice on January 8, with Dr. Nichols accepting patients starting February 12.
These additions to the Edgewood Clinical Services staff represent a momentous advancement in comprehensive mental health care in the Chicago suburbs, allowing access to needed psychiatric services for local families. The Drs. McNally and Nichols complement the existing community-focused, privately-owned mental health agencys current three Board Certified Psychiatrists and one psychiatric Nurse Practitioner on staff.
Their arrival is in answer to the departure of former Edgewood psychiatrist Dr. Christopher Sinnappan, who leaves Edgewood for a position in California.
After learning of Sinnappans decision to move to California, we were all committed to filling his position with a physician equally skilled to take over the care of his nearly 600 active patients, said Rebecca Gadomski, Edgewood Chief Operating Officer. Dr. Sinnappan is an incredible child and adolescent psychiatrist who has provided treatment to Naperville-area families for the last 3 and a half years. His expertise will be missed.
With the addition of Drs. McNally and Nichols, Edgewood has not only provided for Dr. Sinnappans role, but have doubled the doctor talent within the office. These gifted doctors and their Psychiatric and Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) will provide full-time psychiatric care at Edgewood, offering over 100 available clinical patient hours per week.
Theyre a very sharp, very capable psychiatric team that were lucky to have in our area,
Gadomski said.
Adam Russo, CEO of Edgewood Clinical Services, echoed Gadomskis excitement, celebrating McNallys and Nicholss arrival as a major accomplishment for Edgewood and the communities it serves. Adding these valuable clinical hours allows Edgewood to drastically increase the volume of clients served and dramatically reduce wait times, which in turn brings them closer to living out their mission to mainstream mental health and provide ease of access for services to the community.
We recognize we are filling a hole that has long been identified as a priority and significant neighborhood need, Russo said. To have doctors like this onsite on a consistent, weekly basis sets Edgewood as the Gold Standard for mental health care in the community. Theyre an excellent resource, a wealth of knowledge and incredible community contributors.
Joseph McNally, M.D., earned his Bachelor of Science in Biology at Creighton University; attended medical school at Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine; completed his general psychiatry residency at the University of Michigan Hospitals in Ann Arbor; and did his fellowship at the University of Chicago Hospitals in child and adolescent psychiatry. He has spent the last 25 years building invaluable experience working in inpatient and outpatient settings as well as in Medical Administration.
Peter Nichols, M.D., earned his Bachelor of Science in Biology at the University of California-Berkeley; attended medical school at the University of Southern California; completed his child and adolescent psychiatry residency at the University of Chicago Hospitals; and did his fellowship at the University of Illinois - Chicago Hospitals. He has spent the last 15 years building invaluable experience working in inpatient and outpatient settings as well as in Medical Administration.
Edgewood Clinical Services currently has offices in Naperville and Plainfield, Illinois, with plans to open a practice in Lisle in the near future. Edgewood is a dynamic, thriving multi-disciplinary mental health agency providing the highest quality of care by creating a warm, positive and exciting work environment, while always remaining innovative and client-focused. For more information about their staff, services and areas of expertise, please visit their website at http://www.EdgewoodClinicalServices.com.
Keystone Pacific Property Management proudly announces that Jared Jones has been chosen to take on the role of Chief Financial Officer for Keystone Pacific Property Management.
Jones will be responsible for all corporate and client side accounting operations at Keystone Pacific.
"Jared brings a wealth of experience in providing operational excellence and customer service to our team members and clients," says Keystone Pacific Property Management CEO Cary Treff. "In addition, Jared has the ability to model our values of servant leadership and team member empowerment in providing proactive accounting solutions while ensuring our clients' financial assets are protected."
Jones steps into the role with over 10 years of experience as a Chief Financial Officer, most recently for a leading luxury hotel brand headquartered in Southern California. His focus has included operations, mergers and acquisitions, accounting and finance. In addition, he has significant experience working on the acquisition team and has acquired and integrated properties into a portfolio valued at $400 million.
Jones graduated from the University of San Diego with a Bachelor Degree in Business Administration. He is a Certified Public Accountant.
About Keystone Pacific Property Management, LLC
Keystone Pacific Property Management specializes in the management of common interest developments in Southern California. Currently, the firm manages over 65,000 units in master-planned, condominium, townhome, and single-family home, mixed-use and commercial common interest developments. Keystone Pacific's clients receive superior community association services and it is an Accredited Association Management Company (AAMC) in Southern California, certified through Community Associations Institute. Headquartered in Irvine, California, Keystone Pacific also maintains offices in Rancho Santa Margarita, Ontario and Temecula, California.
For more information, please contact Alex Lucht at Keystone Pacific Property Management at (949) 833 2600.
Bitnami, the leading provider of packaged server applications for any platform announced today the availability of Kubeapps, an application deployment environment that empowers users to discover, launch and manage pre-packaged Kubernetes-ready applications and developer tools from within their Kubernetes cluster.
Bitnami is the leader in application packaging and Kubernetes is the leading platform for container orchestration. We have been heavily involved in the evolution of the Kubernetes platform and contributing to its success with a focus on projects that define how applications are packaged, discovered and deployed, said Sebastien Goasguen, Sr. Director of Cloud Technologies at Bitnami While weve created and contributed to some excellent standalone tools to simplify Kubernetes for early adopters, were excited to empower the next generation of Kubernetes users with a unified experience that further simplifies the deployment of Kubernetes-ready applications. Kubeapps is that tool.
Kubeapps builds on Bitnamis work in creating and contributing to popular Kubernetes projects like Helm, Monocular and Kubeless, and leverages expertise in application packaging and containers to provide a simple, secure and comprehensive way to deploy applications for a Kubernetes environment. New users and Kubernetes experts will find value in the Kubeapps product design which provides a simple CLI for installation, a web UI for in-cluster application launch and management and a web portal for additional community contribution and social interaction including the ability to rate, review and share applications.
The Kubeapps project has three primary components:
Kubeapps CLI - a command line interface to bootstrap all the required tools onto your Kubernetes cluster
Kubeapps Application Dashboard an in-cluster console for discovery and deployment of Helm charts and Kubeless serverless Functions
Kubeapps Hub A community hub to discover, rate and review pre-packaged Kubernetes applications that is accessible http://hub.kubeapps.com or through the Kubeapps console in your Kubernetes cluster.
Kubeapps combines the simplicity of Bitnami click-to-deploy applications with leading Kubernetes tools to deliver an in-cluster experience with Kubernetes-ready applications that are:
Simple to Use: Pre-configured applications and development environments ready to launch in your cluster
Up-to-date: Bitnami applications are continuously updated and secure
Multi-format: Deploy Helm charts or Kubeless functions
Trusted: Over 1 million Bitnami-packaged applications are deployed every month
Kubeapps is an obvious continuation of the Bitnami mission to make awesome software available to everyone and an excellent tool to bring the click-to-deploy experience were known for to the Kubernetes world. said Daniel Lopez, co-founder and CEO of Bitnami. Repackaging many of our Kubernetes projects and contributions into a single experience is an important step for us and the community and were excited to work with users and contributors to ensure that Kubeapps is delivering the packaged application experience that they expect in their Kubernetes cluster.
See Kubeapps at Kubecon
Bitnami will be exhibiting, speaking and demonstrating Kubeapps at Kubecon in Austin, TX Dec 6-8, 2017
Download and Try Kubeapps for Free
Kubeapps is open source and free to use. For more information and to download or contribute to Kubeapps please visit http://www.Kubeapps.com
About Bitnami
Bitnami is the leading provider of packaged applications for any platform. The Bitnami application automation platform delivers and maintains a catalog of ready-to-run server applications and development environments in partnership with the worlds leading cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and more . That same application automation platform that drives over 1.5 million deployments per month is also available to Enterprise developers looking streamline their software development processes. Based in San Francisco CA, and with offices around the world, Bitnami is proud to be a rapidly growing, self-funded company. For more information, visit https://www.bitnami.com, or follow us onTwitter (@Bitnami) and Facebook.
Members of the Santee Sioux community, in Northeast Nebraska, are working to improve health and economic outlooks. By asserting a desire to rebuild a sovereign food system, the Santee Sioux community can create a healthier community, revitalize traditional foods, create a self-sufficient food system, and develop a more resilient Nation. -Wyatt Fraas, Center for Rural Affairs
The Santee Sioux people largely lack access to healthy foods that could help them combat health challenges, according to a report recently released by the Center for Rural Affairs and the Santee Sioux community.
Digging In: Supporting a Healthy, Sustainable Food Future in Santee Sioux Nation, examines the state of the food system on the Santee Sioux Reservation in northeast Nebraska.
The report identifies strategies toward realizing a food system that meets the needs of its people and includes details on the study area; data relating to health, economics, culture and the food system; and input from community members.
The Santee Sioux community is working hard to improve health and economic outlooks, said Wyatt Fraas, Farm and Community program assistant director at the Center for Rural Affairs. By asserting a desire to rebuild a sovereign food system, they can create a healthier community, revitalize traditional foods, create a self-sufficient food system and develop a more resilient Nation.
Key findings of the report include:
In Santee, 43.4 percent of all families and 50.9 percent of all people live below the poverty line.
More than 69 percent of respondents travel on average 106 miles roundtrip to do the majority of their grocery shopping.
More than 55 percent of participants expressed a desire for greater local access to fresh produce, with 88 percent of respondents indicating better food would improve health for their families.
The community has worked with Nebraska Indian Community College (NICC) and the Center for Rural Affairs since 2011 through the Santee Community Food Project, with a goal of bringing fresh foods and healthy eating back to Santee.
For more information and to view Digging In: Supporting a Healthy, Sustainable Food Future in Santee Sioux Nation, visit: http://www.cfra.org/DiggingInSantee
Crimson Cup Coffee House Tallmadge, Ohio Were excited to bring awesome coffee to the Tallmadge community, which has been very welcoming. This is our first company-owned Crimson Cup Coffee House outside our home market in Columbus.
Columbus, Ohio coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea is expanding into Northeast Ohio with a new coffee house and drive thru at 116 Tallmadge Circle in Tallmadge, Ohio. To celebrate its grand opening on Wednesday, December 6, the newest Crimson Cup Coffee House will offer $1 espresso drinks all day. A ribbon cutting ceremony with Tallmadge officials is planned for 1:00 p.m.
Were excited to bring awesome coffee to the Tallmadge community, which has been very welcoming, said Founder and President Greg Ubert. This is our first company-owned Crimson Cup Coffee House outside our home market in Columbus. The roaster operates coffee houses in the Columbus suburbs of Clintonville and Upper Arlington as well as within the Greater Columbus Convention Center.
The 2,000-square-foot coffee house sits on one end of a newly built retail strip near the near the Tallmadge Town Square Historic District. More than 40,000 motorists pass through Tallmadge Circle every weekday making this a fantastic location for a coffee house with drive thru, Ubert said. The store interior was designed by Columbus-based Kimberly Orr of Kimberly O Design, who also designed the Crimson Cup Innovation Lab and Upper Arlington coffee house.
Inside, a gas fireplace anchors a brick wall on one side of the new store, flanked by comfy leather chairs and a coffee table to encourage conversation. An Ohio logo screened onto the brick wall connects the brand to its Columbus roots and will be a staple feature of Crimson Cup Coffee Houses as the company expands. Groups of tables and chairs provide ample work and meeting space. Free Wi-Fi helps customers get down to work, while a drive-thru caters to coffee lovers on the go.
Like Crimson Cups Upper Arlington coffee house, the Tallmadge store features a brew bar with a Modbar Pour Over Module, which brings precision-temperature water and economy of motion to the counter. In addition to pour-over preparation of Craft espresso coffees, the brew bar offers a rotating menu of specialty coffee drinks. It also has a tap for dispensing Crimson Cups Nitro cold brewed coffee, a frothy, naturally sweet chilled coffee infused with nitrogen bubbles. At opening, brew bar offerings include Bourbon Barrel Maple Cortado, Maple Cinnamon Latte, Harvest Apple Tea Soda and Holiday Hopped Nitro.
In addition to brew bar offerings, the new coffee house serves a full menu of hot, iced and frozen espresso drinks including mochas, lattes and cappuccinos as well as iced coffee and tea, cold-brewed coffee, hot chocolate, fruit smoothies and other custom drinks. Breakfast sandwiches, heart-healthy oatmeal and award-winning local treats from Lindas Kitchen in Tallmadge round out the menu.
When fully staffed, the Tallmadge location will employ 10 to 12 baristas and cashiers under the supervision of Coffeehouse Manager Rachel Friend and Coffeehouse Assistant Manager Marissa Ratkovic.
Friend, who hails from Bath, Ohio, earned a bachelors degree from John Carroll University, where she worked with Aramark Higher Education and managed a small cafe that served Crimson Cup coffee. She joined the Crimson Cup team in June of 2016 and spent 18 months working at two coffeehouse locations in Columbus.
Ratkovic, an Akron native, graduated from Coventry High School. She also joined the Crimson Cup team in June of 2016 and spent 18 months working in Columbus.
The new store is open 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Sunday.
About Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea
Columbus, Ohio coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea is Roast magazines 2016 Macro Roaster of the Year. Since 1991, Crimson Cup has roasted sustainably sourced specialty and craft coffee in small batches, which it sells directly to consumers and as wholesale coffee beans. The company also teaches entrepreneurs to run successful coffee houses through its coffee franchise alternative program, which includes a coffee shop business plan. Crimson Cup coffee is available through a community of more than 350 independent coffee houses, grocers, college and universities, restaurants and food service operations across 29 states, Guam and Bangladesh, as well as the companys own Crimson Cup Coffee Houses. To learn more, visit crimsoncup.com.
When we were approached with the opportunity to be this years title sponsor, we were excited and eager to be able to further support an organization we care so much about.
The 16th annual Childrens Health Miracle Day Radiothon is less than two weeks away, and Neighborhood Credit Union is excited to announce that it is this years presenting sponsor.
As the presenting sponsor, Neighborhood CU is committing to support Childrens Health with a $50,000 contribution as well as help take donation calls. For the past five years, Neighborhood CU employees wake up early to arrive at Childrens Health hospital at 5:30 a.m. to help take calls from individuals wanting to make donations.
It seems like it would make for a long day, but employees are always excited to take part in this event every year. Over the past five years of its relationship with Childrens Health, Neighborhood Credit Union and its members have been able to contribute a total of $153,953.92.
This year Star 102.1 will be broadcasting from Childrens Medical Center Dallas all day December 8 from 6 a.m. to 7p.m. encouraging listeners to call in and make donations that will go to support programs at Childrens Health.
Neighborhood CU has also been a Child Champion sponsor for the past five years where it formed a special relationship with then six-year-old Sim Scott, a Plano brain tumor survivor. Scott and Neighborhood Credit Union have worked together raising awareness and funds for Childrens Miracle Network. He has even been a speaker at various Neighborhood Credit Union events.
We have been privileged to be able to work alongside Childrens Health for all these years, said Chet Kimmell, president of Neighborhood Credit Union. When we were approached with the opportunity to be this years title sponsor, we were excited and eager to be able to further support an organization we care so much about.
Listeners can make donations over the phone by calling 1-800-800-7277 or online by visiting the Miracle Day website.
About Neighborhood Credit Union: The oldest credit union in Dallas (chartered April 18, 1930), Neighborhood Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial organization serving Dallas, Denton and Ellis counties, as well as the City of Arlington. With branches in Dallas, Richardson, Arlington, Mesquite, Duncanville, Waxahachie, Lancaster, Grand Prairie, Coppell, and Highland Village, and assets topping $600 million, Neighborhood Credit Union has a membership of approximately 50,000 and continues to welcome new members daily. For more information, call (214) 748-9393 or visit http://www.myncu.com.
"We are blessed with our open-hearted community in Wichita, as their support is making a huge difference." Dan Soliday, CEO of Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters
Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters (KSBBBS) and event supporter Table Rock Infrastructure Partners announced that this falls inaugural event, Big Soiree: Culinary for a Cause Gala has raised more than $740,000. These funds will be used to support and expand KSBBBS mentor programs in Kansas, providing more one-to-one mentors for youths facing adversity.
We are blessed with our open-hearted community in Wichita, as their support is making a huge difference to supporting the recruitment of more adult mentors to match with the kids on our waiting list, said Dan Soliday, CEO of Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters. We are grateful to everyone who donated their time, talents, money and energy to make this event the unbelievable success it turned out to be. We are exceptionally grateful to Cargill, Table Rock, the chefs, and our committee led by Steve Feilmeier, Brian Sikes and Emily Luchetti for their participation and support of this event.
Table Rock is a firm believer in matching emotion with action, both professionally and in our philanthropic efforts said Peter Luchetti, managing partner at Table Rock Infrastructure Partners. We were working in Wichita and felt a strong connection with KSBBBS as an effective, direct-impact organization with great leadership. We wanted to do something meaningful to support their efforts and are thrilled by the results of our joint event and the possibilities of what we can achieve for KSBBBS and the miraculous kids and mentors they serve.
The Parisian-themed Big Soiree, held on October 5 at the Scottish Rite Center in Wichita, featured hors doeuvres from star Wichita chefs Kevin Derks, Bobby Lane and Josh Rathbun, and an exquisite 4-course meal prepared by some of the most innovative chefs from across the country. Chefs Stephen Giunta and Pete Geoghegan Sr. of Cargill Protein Group, Chef Amy Bandewein of Centolina, Chef and author Elizabeth Faulkner, Chef Kathleen Blake of The Rusty Spoon and Chef Emily Luchetti, Chair Emeritus of the James Beard Foundation, worked in partnership with Wichitas own star chefs and, in the spirit of mentoring, the culinary students from Butler Community College.
Table Rock Infrastructure Partners is also announcing today that it has chosen Big Brothers Big Sisters as its designated corporate charity.
About Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters
Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters (KSBBBS) matches children facing adversity with caring, adult mentors. We believe that all children - regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or family background - can achieve success in life, especially with the guidance and support of a caring adult mentor. These one-to-one professionally-supported friendships last a minimum of one year. However, the effects of these friendships last a lifetime. For more information, visit our web site at http://www.kansasbigs.org
About Table Rock Infrastructure Partners
Table Rock Infrastructure Partners is the only equity firm in the country focused entirely on helping municipalities get critical water and wastewater infrastructure projects off the ground and moving forward. The firm structured, financed and now manages the first water and wastewater public-private partnership of its kind in the U.S. for the City of Rialto, CA, and has provided analysis on hundreds of cities around the country. Table Rocks accelerated Progressive Partnership process comparatively evaluates all options for municipal project design and delivery, and helps city leadership determine which approach produces highest value for ratepayers. For more information, visit http://tablerockpartners.com.
Consumer Attorney Sergei Lemberg By examining complaint data, we can gain important insights into the CFPB and the industries it regulates.
Against a backdrop of drama involving the Trump Administration's appointment of Mick Mulvaney as the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), consumer attorney Sergei Lemberg (http://www.lemberglaw.com) directed his staff to dive into consumer complaints filed with the agency. "The CFPB has been instrumental in empowering consumers, holding financial services companies accountable for unfair and abusive actions, and recovering billions of dollars for folks who have been ripped off," he said. "By examining complaint data, we can gain important insights into the agency and the industries it regulates."
According to Lemberg, a review of CFPB data revealed three distinct trends. "Since the CFPB's inception, the number of complaints has skyrocketed, and will likely total more than 225,000 for 2017," he said. "It is clear that consumers have come to count on the government to protect them against predatory or illegal financial practices."
The second trend revealed by the Lemberg Law analysis is the uptick in certain categories of complaints. "Complaints about credit reporting agencies and student loan servicers are on pace to double in 2017," said Lemberg. "That's not surprising, given that 44 million Americans owe more than $1.4 trillion in student loan debt."
The third trend gleaned from the Lemberg Law analysis was that, although Bank of America garnered the most consumer complaints over the arc of the CFPB's history, in recent years the number of complaints against the banking behemoth have been aligned with other large banks. In contrast, the number of complaints against the big three credit reporting agencies - Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion - has increased significantly. "This surge in complaints points to issues with credit reporting errors," said Lemberg. "Because inaccurate credit reporting negatively impacts consumers in virtually every part of their financial lives, it's important to hold credit bureaus and information furnishers accountable."
As the managing partner at Lemberg Law, Lemberg routinely represents clients in unfair debt collection and inaccurate credit reporting cases. "The CFPB data proves that there is a tremendous amount of work to be done in educating consumers about their rights," Lemberg said. "We're committed to leveling the playing field by asserting consumers' rights under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act - regardless of how the CFPB drama plays out."
For more information on CFPB data trends, visit https://www.lemberglaw.com/3-shocking-cfpb-consumer-complaint-trends/
__________
About Lemberg Law
The attorneys at Lemberg Law represent consumers in lemon law, Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and Telephone Consumer Protection Act cases, among others.
For more information, contact:
Sergei Lemberg, Esq.
Lemberg Law
http://www.LembergLaw.com
Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles (Habitat LA) is pleased to announce the expansion of their service territory to encompass the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valley portions of Los Angeles County effective immediately. Recently, Habitat for Humanity International, the global organizations headquarters office based in Atlanta, awarded Habitat LA the additional service area after the previous Habitat organization in the area announced it had merged with a veteran-focused nonprofit.
We thank Habitat for Humanity International for entrusting us with this new territory and look forward to partnering with residents and leaders in this region to serve families and individuals in need of safe and affordable homes, said Erin Rank, President & CEO, Habitat LA.
Habitat for Humanity International selected Habitat LA to expand its services to the communities of San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys based on Habitat LAs strong track record of success serving the Greater Los Angeles region for the last 27 years. Having recently completed its 800th home, Habitat LA has been a leader and strong voice for affordable housing in Southern California, and has been a champion of building homes in partnership with families seeking a better life.
Habitat LA is one of the nations leading affordable housing builders and advocates, said Sue Henderson, Habitat for Humanity Internationals Vice President, US and Canada. We are excited that Habitat LA will grow its mission to San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys. With this new expansion, Habitat will be able to continue partnering with families in the area to turn their dreams of owning safe, decent and affordable homes a reality.
Habitat for Humanity has served the valley communities for more than 25 years. Following the previous Habitat organizations merger, Habitat for Humanity International solicited proposals from other local Habitat organizations to continue serving low-income families in the region.
Habitat LAs expansion is effective immediately and they are now accepting applications for their Home Preservation Program, which offers home repairs to help alleviate health and safety issues for low-income homeowners. Simultaneously, they will begin looking for sites to develop new homes in the future and offering their Pathways to Homeownership program for interested residents. The organization will also be studying possible locations to expand their retail stores, called Habitat for Humanity ReStores.
To learn more about the Home Preservation Program, please visit http://www.habitatla.org/how-to-apply/home-repair-program/ or contact Jorge Leiva at (310) 323-4663 ext. 314. To partner with Habitat LA in other ways please contact us at http://www.habitatla.org or 310-323-4663.
About Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles
Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles (Habitat LA) brings people together to build homes, communities and hope. As the top nonprofit homebuilder in the greater Los Angeles area with six consecutive Charity Navigator 4-Star ratings, Habitat LA has partnered with volunteers, donors and Habitat homeowners to build, renovate and repair more than 1,300 homes locally and worldwide since 1990. The lives of thousands of individuals have been transformed as a result of having a decent and affordable place to call home. Habitat homeowners help build their own homes and pay an affordable mortgage. By supporting Habitat LA through volunteerism, donations and shopping in our ReStores, everyone can help families achieve the stability and self-reliance they need to build a better future. To learn more, visit http://www.habitatla.org.
About Habitat for Humanity International
Driven by the vision that everyone needs a decent place to live, Habitat for Humanity began in 1976 as a grassroots effort on a community farm in southern Georgia. The Christian housing organization has since grown to become a leading global nonprofit working in more than 1,300 communities throughout the U.S. and in more than 70 countries. Families and individuals in need of a hand up partner with Habitat for Humanity to build or improve a place they can call home. Habitat homeowners help build their own homes alongside volunteers and pay an affordable mortgage. Through financial support, volunteering or adding a voice to support affordable housing, everyone can help families achieve the strength, stability and self-reliance they need to build better lives for themselves. Through shelter, we empower. To learn more, visit habitat.org.
Contacts:
Angela Moore
Starfish P.R.
310-429-8868
angela(at)starfish-pr.com
Jennifer Wise
Habitat LA
424-246-3627
jwise(at)habitatla.org
Bryan Thomas
Habitat for Humanity International
404-733-3096
newsroom(at)habitat.org
Protecting patient health information has gone beyond the realm of the medical practice. Now organizations like the YMCA are offering community health programs and they need to be HIPAA compliant as well.
YMCA of the USA (Y-USA), the national resource office for 2,700 YMCAs (Ys), has selected HIPAA Secure Now! (HSN) as a preferred provider of HIPAA compliance and cyber security services to local Ys nationwide. HSN will help ensure that protected health information (PHI) for thousands of participants in the YMCAs Diabetes Prevention Program will be safeguarded at Ys offering the program to the public now and in the future.
Protecting patient health information has gone beyond the realm of the medical practice, said Art Gross, HSN President and CEO. Now organizations like the YMCA are offering community health programs that cross over to the medical services arena. They need to be HIPAA compliant and to prevent data breaches as well. We are honored that the YMCA is putting its faith in our company to meet their HIPAA compliance and cyber security needs.
The scope of services HSN will provide Ys includes:
--HIPAA compliance protocols -- conducting mandatory Security Risk Assessments (SRAs) and developing required policies and procedures.
--Cyber security assessments and training -- including technical network vulnerability assessments and continuous employee training and testing via security micro trainings, simulated phishing attacks and other tactics for preventing data breaches.
--External data breach assessments additional training to deepen employee knowledge of thwarting cyberattacks to reduce the high risk of security scams and to prevent PHI from being accessed on the dark web.
--Employee vulnerability assessments -- to enable managers to assess whether employees present a high, medium, or low level of risk in terms of preventing cyber security breaches and to reduce those risk levels.
The need for the YMCA to adhere to HIPAA regulations became apparent when the organization developed its program for preventing diabetes, a disease that currently afflicts more than 30 million people in the U.S. As part of that program, participants with prediabetes (approximately 84 million Americans are estimated to have prediabetes) learn to alter their lifestyles by increasing physical activity, eating healthier and losing weight in order to delay or prevent the onset of Type 2 diabetes.
National Institutes of Health research has shown that programs like the YMCAs Diabetes Prevention Program can reduce the number of new cases of Type 2 diabetes by 58 percent overall and by 71 percent in people over age 60. Such impressive results led to the development of the Medicare Diabetes Prevention Program (MDPP) expanded model, recently finalized by CMS. MDPP has been made available through community and health care settings like the Ys, and the programs are delivered by trained community health workers and health professionals.
Since CMS has designated MDPP services as an additional preventive services under the Social Security Act, Ys will have to become Medicare suppliers to administer MDPP services and will therefore become a HIPAA Covered Entity. As an MDPP supplier, the YMCA must conform to HIPAA requirements for safeguarding protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII).
We look forward to working with Y-USA to help local Ys meet their HIPAA and cybersecurity compliance needs, Gross said.
About HIPAA Secure Now!
HIPAA Secure Now! has been helping clients comply with the HIPAA since 2009. The companys all-in-one solution provides a security risk assessment, which also satisfies Meaningful Use and MACRA requirements, as well as privacy and security policies and procedures, and training. HIPAA Secure Now! moves customers toward HIPAA compliance quickly and easily, and protects them in the event of an audit. Clients can complete the entire process in less than three hours, and regularly comment that it is painless and has made their lives easier. For more information visit http://www.HIPAASecureNow.com.
About YMCA of the USA
The Y is one of the nations leading nonprofits strengthening communities through youth development, healthy living and social responsibility. Across the U.S., 2,700 Ys engage 22 million men, women and children regardless of age, income or background to nurture the potential of children and teens, improve the nations health and well-being, and provide opportunities to give back and support neighbors. Anchored in more than 10,000 communities, the Y has the long-standing relationships and physical presence not just to promise, but to deliver, lasting personal and social change. For more information visit http://www.ymca.net.
The results weve seen from our partnership with Keypath are a testament to the universitys ability to work together and innovate in the face of rapid change in higher education. - Paul Jessop, Lauriers vice-president: academic
Wilfrid Laurier University is expanding its online program management partnership with Keypath Education to include new fully online postgraduate degree programs in Public Safety and Social Work. Graduate diplomas in Public Safety will also be introduced. The partnership with Keypath was first announced in June 2016 and included first-of-their-kind online policing programs.
Laurier has more than 17,000 undergraduate and over 1,000 graduate students, and is ranked sixth in Macleans comprehensive university category, and first in student satisfaction for the second year in a row.
Lauriers new fully online Master of Public Safety (MPS) degree and graduate diploma programs commence in January 2018 and are designed for those who aspire to positions of leadership in any area of public safety. The MPS is the only program aligned with the four strategic pillars of Public Safety Canada. Students who earn their Public Safety graduate diploma may continue their studies and transfer course credit into the Master of Public Safety degree.
The online Master of Social Work (MSW) program commences in 2018. The MSW is one of Lauriers signature programs, and has a longstanding reputation for specializing in critically reflexive clinical and community practice. It will be the only program in the country to offer both an advanced standing (for those with a Bachelor of Social Work) and a traditional MSW degree (for those without a BSW) in a fully online format.
As Lauriers online program management partner, Keypath is helping the university diversify its enrollment to provinces outside Ontario through online degree programs.
Our analysis showed that in the Canadian market, where fully online degrees are new, there was a significant opportunity to become a leader in that space if we were able to extend our reach across the country quickly, efficiently and professionally, said Bruce Arai, Lauriers assistant provost for strategy and dean of the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences. It became clear that we didnt have the internal capacity to do this properly, so we needed a partner to reach this goal. Through our RFP process, Keypath was well ahead of the other respondents on every measure.
Keypath provides research and strategic support, program-focused marketing, including localized B2B services, student recruitment, and student support services in the partnership. The undergraduate policing programs supported in the initial partnership have exceeded projections by more than 70 percent.
There are three things driving the partnerships success, said Keypath CEO Steve Fireng. The first is the university has a clear strategic academic plan with faculty support, in which online education plays a pivotal role. Second, Canada has high demand for online education that is underserved in comparison to the United States and the United Kingdom. Third, Laurier has been selective in the online degree programs theyve chosen to launch, giving the university the resources to invest in other programs. The strength of the undergraduate policing programs has allowed for the launch of graduate-level public safety and social work programs.
Paul Jessop, Lauriers vice-president: academic, said, The results weve seen from our partnership with Keypath are a testament to the universitys ability to work together and innovate in the face of rapid change in higher education. Online education gives adult professionals the flexibility to further their education while giving the university a foundation for enrollment growth and a more diverse population of students long into the future.
For more information about Laurier and these programs, please visit online.wlu.ca.
For more information about the Laurier-Keypath partnership and online program management services, please contact Chris Williams, director of marketing, at chris.williams(at)keypathedu(dot)com or visit keypathedu.ca.
About Wilfrid Laurier University
Wilfrid Laurier University is a leading Canadian university known for academic excellence and a culture that inspires lives of leadership and purpose. Laurier has a distinct commitment to teaching, research and scholarship, combined with a strong student focus, high levels of student satisfaction and a deep sense of community. Lauriers innovative educational model purposefully integrates the academic learning experience with an experiential learning component. The university has more than 19,000 students throughout its campuses in Waterloo and Brantford and locations in Kitchener and Toronto. The university celebrated its centennial in 2011. http://www.wlu.ca
About Keypath Education
Keypath Education is dedicated to creating global access to high-quality online education by partnering with the worlds best universities to launch and grow high-quality degree programs via its online program management (OPM) division. Through OPM partnerships, Keypath acts as an extension of the universitys team, keeping its brand and academic rigor intact while accelerating the growth and quality of the university program portfolio. Services provided include market research, capital investment, program development, marketing, student recruitment, retention and course development. The company has offices and partners in the United States, Canada, the U.K. and Australia. Learn more at keypathedu.ca.
A&W celebrates the holidays with #30DaysofGiveaways Our 30 Days of Giveaways honors our loyal fans during the holiday season. Were bringing the campaign back because last year it was such a success. We have so many fun prizes lined up ...
A&W Restaurants, Inc. is getting into the holiday spirit with its 30 Days of Giveaways sweepstakes. The campaign will run through Dec. 31, 2017, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Play along by using #30DaysofGiveaways.
Fans may interact with A&W in different ways, with weekly winners chosen at random from each social media channel. Prizes include Bear Bucks gift checks, A&W branded hats, scarves and blankets, plush stuffed Rooty bears, and 2018 collectors mugs and jugs. Prizes will increase in value as the sweepstakes progresses. One grand prize will be given away at the end of December. It will include an ultimate gift basket featuring each weekly prize. A&W followers can enter by liking a post, sharing a post, leaving a comment, answering questions or tagging friends.
Our 30 Days of Giveaways honors our loyal fans during the holiday season, said Sarah Blasi, A&Ws vice president of Marketing. Were bringing the campaign back because last year it was such a success. We have so many fun prizes lined up and we are excited to help spread some much needed holiday cheer!
In addition to the sweepstakes, A&W has just launched its Inside the Mug blog that is a central hub connecting social media fans, website visitors and A&Ws Mug Club email subscribers.
A&Ws social media content is very visual, short and engaging, and we needed somewhere that allows us to tell more of our brand story, said Spencer Barrett, A&Ws community engagement analyst. Inside the Mug will feature our franchise partners and support center team, giving readers a peek behind the curtain at the people who work inside the brand every day.
Two years in the making, the blog also will include new menu announcements, social media sweepstakes and campaigns, restaurant openings, upcoming events and brand ambassador features. As part of the launch, one blog follower will win an exclusive prize package as part of the 30 Days of Giveaways sweepstakes.
In 1919, Roy Allen set up a roadside drink stand in Lodi, California, to introduce a new beverage at a parade in honor of World War I veterans. An instant success, Allen and partner Frank Wright named the beverage A&W Root Beer and started franchising roadside stands. A&W Root Beer is made fresh in the restaurants from real cane sugar, water and a proprietary blend of herbs, bark, spices, and berries that are served in a frosty mug alongside burgers, fries, hand-breaded chicken tenders and other All American Food favorites. There are nearly 1,000 locations worldwide. Connect with A&W online at https://awrestaurants.com/
HighRadius Corporation, a Fintech enterprise SaaS company headquartered in Houston, Texas, will host the final Integrated Receivables Now for 2017 in Atlanta on December 7th. Attendees will learn how to employ proven strategies and solutions to implement across receivables processes for immediate ROI.
The half-day event will begin with a lunch at 12:00 pm where attendees will meet and network with peers. Following lunch, Southwire, EBSCO and Receivable Savvy will present best practices, lessons learned and industry insights for implementing and executing a receivables optimization strategy. The presentations will conclude with a discussion from a HighRadius Solution Principal who will relay the benefits of Integrated Receivables and how machine learning and Artificial Intelligence will shape the future of accounts receivable. After the presentations, all are welcome to stay for a complimentary networking happy hour to once again mix and mingle with other industry practitioners.
Throughout the day, attendees of the complimentary event will hear how Integrated Receivables technology is transforming finance and receivables. Key insights from the event will illuminate the steps to drive improvements in operational efficiency and reduce costs to exceed KPIs across credit, accounts receivable and payments operations, including DSO reduction and cash flow improvement. Participants will also discover how peers are using HighRadius Integrated Receivables solutions to best advantage.
Ellen Farish, Senior Operations Manager Shared Financial Services at Southwire will demonstrate how their team is automating payment processing and deduction coding work to allow resources to increase their focus on customer relationship development. Carolyn Etress, Director of Accounts Receivable at EBSCO, will explain how she and her team are re-engineering their workflows and deploying technology to easily integrate with SAP and support faster and more cost-efficient payment processing. Ernie Martin, Founder and Managing Director at Receivables Savvy, will illustrate behaviors and best-in-class preferences receivables professionals exhibit around Invoice-to-Cash practices while also describing how professionals could cultivate organizational buy-in to ensure increased cash flow and greater working capital.
For more information on the event or to register, click here.
About HighRadius Corporation
HighRadius is a Fintech enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. The HighRadius Integrated Receivables platform optimizes cash flow through automation of receivables and payments processes across credit, collections, cash application, deductions, electronic billing and payment processing. Powered by the Rivana Artificial Intelligence Engine and Freda Virtual Assistant for Credit-to-Cash, HighRadius Integrated Receivables enables teams to leverage machine learning for accurate decision making and future outcomes. The radiusOne B2B payment network allows suppliers to digitally connect with buyers, closing the loop from supplier receivable processes to buyer payable processes. HighRadius solutions have a proven track record of optimizing cash flow, reducing days sales outstanding (DSO) and bad debt, and increasing operational efficiency so that companies may achieve strong ROI in just a few months. To learn more, please visit http://www.highradius.com.
For More Information Contact:
Kendall Bena
Marketing Coordinator
kendall.bena(at)highradius(dot)com
The partnership between Century Business Solutions and Cre8tive Technology and Design will help streamline workflow, eliminate double data entry, and simplify payments within Epicor 10. We strive to provide our customers with solutions that bring great value and help grow their business," said Aaron Continelli, President at Cre8tive Technology and Design. Partnering with Century Business Solutions offers Epicor 10 users a seamless platform to process credit cards.
Century Business Solutions is excited to announce its partnership with Cre8tive Technology and Design, a top Epicor ERP provider, to allow credit card processing directly within Epicor 10.
After evaluating several different payment options, Century Business Solutions stood out as the premier payment provider for the Epicor 10 integration. The credit card module will utilize Centurys proprietary payment gateway, EBizCharge, to provide credit card processing for thousands of merchants across the country.
This is really the coming together of two leaders in their industries, said Matt Rogers, Senior Business Relations Manager at Century Business Solutions. We chose to partner with Cre8tive because of their experience and reputation in the Epicor space and their deep knowledge of the inner workings of the Epicor software.
The Century credit card module enables merchants to process (authorize, capture, void, and credit) credit cards from directly within Epicor 10.
The powerful EBizCharge payment gateway allows merchants to lower processing fees by submitting line-item details directly to the bank. EBizCharge is fully PCI compliant and offers advanced data encryption and tokenization technology to ensure maximum transaction security within Epicor 10. EBizCharge is compatible with over 50 leading ERP and accounting systems and major online shopping carts, and provides unlimited transaction and batch history for reporting purposes.
We strive to provide our customers with solutions that bring great value and help grow their business," said Aaron Continelli, President at Cre8tive Technology and Design. Partnering with Century Business Solutions offers Epicor 10 users a seamless platform to process credit cards.
The EBizCharge payment gateway will help streamline workflows, eliminate double data entry, and make payment processing more efficient within Epicor 10. With EBizCharge, users can run custom reports, sort through transactions by category, and immediately release funds when issuing refunds.
The partnership between Century Business Solutions and Cre8tive Technology and Design will simplify credit card processing, payment acceptance, and offer our customers a cost-effective alternative.
About Century Business Solutions:
Century Business Solutions is a technology-based merchant services provider that has developed and provided payment processing technology to over 10,000 merchants in the U.S. and Canada since 2004. Named to First Datas prestigious Presidents Club, Century Business Solutions is proud to be one of the top performing and growing merchant credit card processors in the First Data network. Century develops fully integrated payment processing solutions to over 50 major ERP/CRM and accounting systems, including Microsoft Dynamics, QuickBooks, Sage, SAP Business One, and Acumatica, as well as major online shopping carts, including Magento and WooCommerce. For more information, visit https://www.centurybizsolutions.net.
About Cre8tive Technology and Design:
Cre8tive Technology and Design is a member of the Epicor Inspired Partner Network as an Epicor Platinum Partner. Cre8tive Technology and Design has earned this recognition due to their ability to effectively sell and implement Epicor ERP solutions. Cre8tive Technology and Design also helps customers customize their Epicor ERP solution to match their business model and their specific challenges. Since business needs evolve as businesses grow or change, Cre8tive Technology and Design makes sure their Epicor software solution provides both flexibility and adaptability. For more information, visit http://www.ctnd.com.
Early Childhood Development (ECD) Center in Zambia We are very grateful for this partnership and the generosity of the Episcopal Health Foundation, said Robert W. Radtke, President of Episcopal Relief & Development. Together, we have an opportunity to make an even greater impact on the lives of so many vulnerable children and their families.
Episcopal Relief & Development is pleased to announce that it has received a $200,000 grant from the Episcopal Health Foundation to support its integrated Early Childhood Development program in Zambia.
The grant aligns with the mission and commitment of both organizations to build and improve the infrastructure of communities beginning with prenatal care. It will enable Episcopal Relief & Development and a local partner, Zambia Anglican Council Outreach Programmes (ZACOP), to impact approximately 17,520 children under the age of three, many of whom are impacted by HIV/AIDS.
We are very grateful for this partnership and the generosity of the Episcopal Health Foundation, said Robert W. Radtke, President of Episcopal Relief & Development. Together, we have an opportunity to make an even greater impact on the lives of so many vulnerable children and their families.
The support from the Episcopal Health Foundation contributes to the programs expansion to all five Anglican dioceses in Zambia. The program currently works with approximately 12,720 children under the age of three along with 6,360 primary parents and caregivers in 53 communities in rural Zambia. It also enables the program to include an additional 4,800 children and 2,400 primary caregivers and parents in 20 new ECD centers. Each center serves as a hub for 240 children and 120 primary caregivers/parents.
"Episcopal Relief & Developments Early Childhood Development program has shown success in increasing primary caregivers nurturing care and in strengthening their connections to services, said Katy Butterwick, program officer at the Episcopal Health Foundation. This support of strong brain development is helping build a foundation for healthy lives."
This is Episcopal Relief & Developments second grant from the Episcopal Health Foundation (EHF). In 2016, EHF supported the organizations Integrated Child Health programs in Ghana. Based in Houston, Texas, the foundation was created in 2013 by the Episcopal Diocese of Texas with a central mission of improving the health and well-being of the 11 million people living within the diocese.
Episcopal Relief & Developments Early Childhood Development programs focus on fighting poverty, hunger and disease in children while promoting the health, development and financial well-being of families. This partnership with EHF helps fill a gap that exists in addressing the needs of young children and their parents/primary caregivers who live in communities ravaged by poverty and HIV/AIDS. The program leverages the role of faith-based leaders in working directly with community members and impacted families.
To learn more, please visit the Early Childhood Development page on Episcopal Relief & Developments website.
For over 75 years, Episcopal Relief & Development has served as a compassionate response to human suffering in the world. The agency works with more than 3 million people in nearly 40 countries worldwide to overcome poverty, hunger and disease through multi-sector programs, using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework. An independent 501(c)(3) organization, it works closely with Anglican Communion and ecumenical partners to help communities create long-term development strategies and rebuild after disasters.
On Dec. 1 Tapestry launched a new eating disorder treatment program for adolescents that will provide residential therapy for males and females ages 10 to 17 in Fletcher, N.C.
Since opening in 2007, Tapestry has been helping to heal lives impacted by disordered eating. The expansion at the Fletcher facility will bring needed services for adolescents who require the higher-level care of a residential stay.
We have noticed a significant increase in requests for more options for adolescent care, explained Tina Nowak, Tapestry founder and executive director.
Tapestry is known for providing individualized care in a small, homelike setting, said Nowak. Our philosophy is to offer treatment in a setting that more closely resembles real life, as we believe it stacks the deck for lasting recovery. Were excited to be able to bring our treatment philosophy to this younger population for both boys and girls, said Nowak.
The new adolescent residential program complements Tapestrys existing outpatient adolescent program and residential and outpatient programs for adults, located in Fletcher and Brevard, N.C.
To celebrate the new program, Tapestry is hosting an open house for members of the community on Friday, Dec. 1 from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at 5010 Hendersonville Road in Fletcher. Guests will have the opportunity to win prizes, enjoy food and refreshments, tour the new 12-bed facility, learn more about available treatment options and meet the staff. The Henderson County Chamber of Commerce will welcome the new facility with a ribbon cutting at 2:30 p.m.
Attendees are encouraged to RSVP to bnowak(at)tapestrync(dot)com or by calling (828) 884-2475 ext. 2306.
On Dec. 1, Tapestry also unveiled a new website at tapestrync.com, featuring improved functionality, updated branding, a new logo and comprehensive program information, as well as resources for more information about eating disorders. The new branding also reflects Tapestrys incorporation into the Pyramid Healthcare, Inc. family of treatment centers. Pyramid Healthcare provides a full continuum of high-quality treatment for behavioral health disorders for adults and teens throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey and North Carolina.
For more information, please contact Jodi Grabowski, national business development liaison, at jgrabowski(at)tapestrync(dot)com or (828) 674-7315.
About Tapestry Eating Disorder Treatment Centers
Nestled in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Tapestry Eating Disorder Treatment Centers provides residential and outpatient treatment for eating disorders and co-occurring disorders in adults and adolescents. Within its small, homelike facilities, clients feel safe to confront and overcome their eating disorders. Tapestry empowers clients by teaching life skills that will continue to strengthen their recovery long after they complete treatment.
EagleView's Proprietary 3D Point Cloud Technology We understand the cost and safety risks associated with utility corridors. Combining our high-resolution imagery and accurate datasets will give vegetation managers the precision and confidence they need to succeed in their daily tasks.
Eagle View Technologies (EagleView), a leading provider of aerial imagery and data analytics, today announced that it is launching TreeRisk, an intelligent dataset and MapBook derived from EagleViews proprietary 3D Point Cloud technology. Using high-resolution imagery, TreeRisk is designed to help vegetation managers pinpoint encroachment risks on electric transmission lines and take immediate action to mitigate them.
Vegetation managers are under pressure to find complete, cost-effective ways to identify the locations of vegetation that puts their assets in danger while also keeping their crews safe. TreeRisk highlights potential threats, such as power outages due to trees either falling on or growing into power lines. Users can generate, view and share highly accurate maps while reducing time in the field, eliminating paper waste and minimizing mitigation expenses.
Unlike other applications on the market, TreeRisk uses Pictometry imagery to generate the 3D models, which are more color-rich, realistic and economical than traditional LiDAR models. This solution also comes with a companion MapBook that the vegetation crew can take into the field to easily identify encroaching areas of vegetation.
With our advanced approach to creating intelligent 3D modeling, TreeRisk is unlike any other technology seen by electric utility companies, said Rishi Daga, President of EagleView. We understand the cost and safety risks associated with utility corridors. Combining our high-resolution imagery and accurate datasets will give vegetation managers the precision and confidence they need to succeed in their daily tasks.
EagleView plans to launch TreeRisk at the CEATI Vegetation Management Conference in Orlando, Florida, from December 5-6.
For more information, please email sales@eagleview.com.
About EagleView
EagleView is the leading provider of high-resolution aerial imagery, property data analytics and structural measurements for government agencies, insurance carriers, roofing contractors and energy utilities. Using patented image capture techniques, 3D aerial measurement software and machine learning processes, EagleView helps customers answer questions related to millions of properties throughout the world. With a four-petabyte library of oblique and orthogonal Pictometry aerial imagery dating back to 2001 and the capacity to process tens of thousands of roof measurement reports per day, EagleView enables organizations to reduce field visits and adopt faster, safer and more cost-effective workflows. For more information, contact (866) 659-8439 or visit http://www.eagleview.com.
Langham Hotels & Resorts' New York City hotel is now officially known as The Langham, New York, Fifth Avenue Our hotel, with its contemporary style, Alex Katz art pieces, and an enviable location in one of the most exciting cities in the world, has always upheld the highest standards of sincere service that our guests have come to expect from any Langham hotel around the world, said Richard Bussiere, man
The end of the year always brings with it both reminisces of successes throughout the previous 12 months as well as exciting plans for the future. December 2017 promises to be no different, as The Langham, New York, Fifth Avenue formerly known as Langham Place, New York wraps up a successful year that brought with it the title of #1 Hotel in New York City; a brand new Presidential Suite by Roche Bobois; a new full-service spa, Chuan Body + Soul and a new name with which to start 2018.
As part of Langham Hotels & Resorts by Hong Kong-based Langham Hospitality Group, The Langham, New York will now go by the designation with which most Langham guests are already familiar. This new christening brings closer its affiliation to the groups luxury flagship hotel and namesake in London, and the three existing hotels in the United States The Langham, Boston; The Langham, Chicago, and The Langham Huntington, Pasadena. The two upcoming hotels in the United States will also bear The Langham name The Langham, Wade Park, opening outside of Dallas in 2019; and The Langham, San Francisco, premiering in the trendy Soma neighborhood in 2020.
The re-naming of our award-winning hotel in New York City will strengthen the brands presence in both the United States and in cosmopolitan cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Sydney, and Melbourne, said Simon Manning, chief sales and marketing officer, Langham Hospitality Group. As we plan to grow from the current portfolio of 16 hotels to 30 within five years, we look forward to developing a remarkable collection of luxury properties that will add immeasurable value and special memories for our guests.
Our hotel, with its contemporary style, Alex Katz art pieces, and an enviable location in one of the most exciting cities in the world, has always upheld the highest standards of sincere service that our guests have come to expect from any Langham hotel around the world, said Richard Bussiere, managing director of The Langham, New York. I am immensely proud of all that we accomplished in 2017 and look forward to beginning the new year as The Langham.
This new identity comes on the heels of a banner year for The Langham, New York. Not only did 2017 bring the completion of a year-long renovation process, resulting in the brand new Presidential Suite by Roche Bobois on the 27th floor, and the elegantly-designed Chuan Body + Soul spa, but this was the year that the readers of Conde Nast Traveler named The Langham the #1 top hotel in New York City, as well as the #2 of The 10 Best Hotels in the U.S. and #30 out of 50 of The Best Hotels in the World.
The Langhams other U.S. properties were also recognized on the Conde Nast Traveler list in the following order: The Langham, Chicago (#2 in Chicago); The Langham, Boston (#8 in Boston) and The Langham Huntington, Pasadena (#15 in Los Angeles).
Langham Hotels & Resorts overall was given the Platinum award on Money Magazines The Best Hotels in the World list for 2017, and was voted #12 out of 15 of the Worlds Best Hotel Brands by Travel + Leisure in 2016. In 2016, the brands advertising campaign, The Art of The Say won Gold in the Advertising category at the HSMAI (Hospitality and Sales Marketing Association International) Adrian Awards; and the newly re-launched webpage for Langham Hotels & Resorts also won Gold the same year.
The Langham, New York, Fifth Avenue is centrally located at 400 Fifth Avenue, between 36th & 37th Streets. Its 234 guest rooms and suites are some of the largest in the city. The Langham boasts a residentially-inspired aesthetic, topped off by a multi-million dollar permanent art collection featuring the works of Alex Katz and two luxurious penthouses designed by French retailer Roche Bobois, who also designed the hotels brand new Presidential Suite. As of Spring 2017, The Langham features a full-service spa and fitness center, Chuan Body + Soul, offering a comprehensive menu of skincare, massage and body treatments. Ai Fiori, a Michelin-starred restaurant from Michael Whites Altamarea Group, and Bar Fiori, a destination bar and lounge, are both located on the hotels second floor. The Langham also has the capabilities to host meetings, events and social gatherings of all sizes in The Gallery at The Langham, a full floor of function space on the hotels third floor. http://www.langhamhotels.com/en/the-langham/new-york/
About Langham Hospitality Group
As the wholly-owned subsidiary of Great Eagle Holdings, Langham Hospitality Group encompasses a family of distinctive hotels under the Langham Hotels and Resorts and Cordis Hotels brands with more than 30 projects currently either confirmed or in a developed stage of negotiation from Asia, Europe and North America to the Middle East. The Group takes its name from the legendary Langham in London which was widely recognized as Europe's first Grand Hotel. For 150 years, this flagship hotel has represented sophisticated and gracious hospitality, a philosophy that reflects elegance in design, innovation in hospitality, genuine service and captivation of the senses across all properties. For more information, please access the website at http://www.langhamhospitalitygroup.com.
Ayr Skin Care Awaken Revitalizing Eye Serum Awaken Revitalizing Eye Serum has a feather light and silky smooth texture with a light fruity scent. Most individuals can hardly feel it working even though it has a kick to it.
Holiday stress can make a person's eyes look like they just went 12-rounds with "Bad Santa".
Lucky for our holiday photos, newly launched Ayr Skin Care Care (Ayr, pronounced like "Air") just introduced a powerful nontoxic and natural eye revitalizing serum to gently rescue people with sensitive skin from excessive puffiness, dark circles and fine lines around their eyes.
Ayr Skin Cares Awaken Revitalizing Eye Serum has received an overwhelming response since the family-operated company went online from their San Juan Capistrano, California headquarters over the summer.
It helps diminish the signs of aging for women and men of all skin types, said Fiona Briggs, vice-president of Ayr Skin Care Marketing and Operations. Most people notice a difference within two to three weeks of use.
"The skin around the eyes is especially vulnerable to stress largely because its significantly thinner than the skin on the rest of the body", she said.
Awaken Revitalizing Eye Serum has a feather light and silky smooth texture with a light fruity scent, Briggs said. Most individuals can hardly feel it working even though it has a kick to it.
The eye serum, like all of Ayr Skin Care's products contain no parabens and petrochemicals commonly found in many skin care lines. All Ayr Skin Care products are also gluten, soy and dairy free. Synthetic dyes and perfumes are shunned.
Instead of cheap and harsh ingredients, the Ayr Awaken Revitalizing Eye Serum is packed with marine algae rich with omega 3 fatty acids and bioactive compounds that revitalize the skin around the eyes.
A blend of cucumber, panthenol, chamomile and what Briggs calls power-packed botanical extracts cools the skin and leaves your eyes looking beautifully bright and alert.
Ayr adds probiotics, green tea, pomegranate and anti-oxidant rich caffeine to reduce the puffiness.
The serum also uses a blend of collagen-building tripeptides to reduce fine lines, and to increase elasticity as well as firmness around the eyes.
Its recommended to use the serum once a day before bed. Briggs, however, uses it in the morning and before bed each day. In a YouTube demonstration video, Briggs shows how to apply a tiny dab -- about the size of a grain or two of rice -- to the area around the eyes.
The Awaken Revitalizing Eye Serum, which comes in a half-ounce air-tight pump bottle for $108, was developed by Briggs mother and Ayr Skin Care Founder, Kirsten Thomas.
She always had very sensitive skin, Briggs said. As she hit her 40s and 50s, she wanted strong anti-aging benefits without harsh synthetic products.
The eye serum and the rest of the product line were created by Brigg's mother, Kirsten Thomas, out of necessity for her skin care. She started sharing them with friends, and the friends begged for more. This is how Ayr Skin Care was born.
Thomas wanted to honor her mothers lifetime of caring by naming the company after the seaside town where her mother was born Ayr, Scotland. Its a beautiful resort town on the west coast of the Lowlands near Glasgow, and a ferry boat ride away from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Now the mother and daughter team are extending that caring and the vibrant brilliance of Scotland to anyone whose sensitive skin can endure no more.
Research the Ayr Skin Care Awaken Revitalizing Eye Serum by going to Ayrskincare.com.
Small in size but large in client service
On November 30th 2017, MidAtlantic Photographic LLC entered the elite status for private businesses in the Baltimore region. Every year the prestigious Baltimore Business Journal recognizes the fifty fastest growing private companies in the metro area. This years event was held at the Center Club in downtown Baltimore.
MidAtlantic Photographic, and CEO Robin Sommer not only were honored in this group, the company also placed sixth among the top ten winners. MAP enjoyed a 100% revenue increase between 2015 and 2016!
This achievement is the result of the immense time and effort by Sommer, to make MAP the top commercial photographer in the region.
MIdAtlantic Photographic is based in Bel Air Maryland, and is MBE/DBE/SBE certified by the state of Maryland.
UBCF's Disaster Relief Event UBCF's Disaster Relief event is providing Tempur-Pedic mattresses, clothing, household, baby and personal care items to breast cancer patients, survivors and their children.
The United Breast Cancer Foundation (UBCF) is hosting its first disaster relief event for breast cancer patients and survivors. The event, scheduled for December 9, 2017 in Doral, Florida, will provide assistance to women, men and children affected by breast cancer and the recent natural disasters in Florida, including Hurricane Irma.
UBCF has partnered with Good360 and Tempur-Pedic to donate high quality twin, full and queen-size Tempur-Pedic mattresses. In addition to the new mattresses, UBCF is giving away other household items, personal care products, clothing and baby items generously donated by Bed Bath & Beyond and Buy Buy Baby. Other donors include: Keurig, Nike, Burts Bees, First Aid Beauty and The Honest Company. Collectively, the value of the items UBCF will distribute is over $1.1 million.
Cancer care is expensive and a large percentage of UBCF's clients come from low-income households. Often between medical bills and every day expenses UBCFs clients struggle to afford basic household items or a new mattress. The added stress of rebuilding after a natural disaster makes these purchases even more difficult and yet much more important. All items are available to breast cancer patients, survivors and their children 18 years or younger. Patients and survivors from surrounding states are welcome to apply and travel to the event. Apply here (http://ubcf.org/disaster-relief/)
UBCF is pleased to announce that funds are available to applicants to off-set the cost of travel (gas, tolls, and vehicle rentals) to and from the event. Contact Mrs. Lauren Brohm at #877-822-4287 x708 or email LaurenB(at)ubcf(dot)org.
"We encourage all breast cancer patients and survivors male and female - to reach out to UBCF and apply to receive a beautiful Tempur-Pedic mattress, said UBCF Executive Director, Ms. Stephanie Mastroianni. We understand that folks may not have the money to travel to our Disaster Relief event, so UBCF has made funds available to off-set the costs of this travel. Money should not get in the way of a good night's sleep.
UBCF thanks Tempur-Pedic, Good360, Bed Bath & Beyond, Buy Buy Baby, and CustomSpace warehousing. UBCF's next Tempur-Pedic mattress event is tentatively scheduled for Spring, 2018 in Melville, NY. For more information on this and future events, please contact UBCFs Director of Operations, Ms. Beth Reichart at #877-822-4287 x702 or email beth(at)ubcf(dot)org.
Background on UBCF
UBCF is committed to offering breast health and wellness services focused on cancer prevention, screening, treatment and overall wellness. UBCFs mission is to make a positive difference in the lives of those affected by breast cancer and carries it out through seven life-supporting patient and family programs available to women, men and families nation-wide. UBCF never denies services to anyone regardless of age, race, gender, ethnicity, income or medical insurance coverage. If you are in need of breast health services, please visit ubcf.org or call toll-free, 877-822-4287. Tax-deductible contributions may be made towards UBCFs programs. UBCF accepts vehicle and property donation s as well. Contributions may be mailed to UBCF, P.O. Box 2421, Huntington, NY 11743, or donate through the Combined Federal Campaign, #77934.
The Prime Number Club "We are thankful to all those who believed in us and helped fund this campaign, said Sarah Shipley, CEO of Shipley Communications LLC. "We would love to see the Prime Number Club used in schools and have big dreams that Off-Kilta Matilda will inspire kids to pursue STEM subjects," she added.
Shipley Communications LLC has announced the conclusion of Off-Kilta Matilda, a campaign to empower kids, especially girls in STEM subjects. CEO Sarah Shipley has called it a successful campaign, which is now 111% funded and has early traction as a startup.
Off-Kilta Matilda book will be out by mid-December. Meanwhile the books and other educational materials are available at http://www.offkiltamatilda.com. Pre-sales are already in full swing according to Shipley.
Off-Kilta Matilda is a product of Shipleys dream of bringing one of those stories to life that her husband had written for their new-born daughter while he was stationed in Afghanistan, more than 10 years ago. Coupled with her passion for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects, she succeeded in creating Off-Kilta Matilda.
Statistics reveal there is a gender disparity in STEM fields. Gender disparity in science and math is one of the many reasons for gender wage gap among men and women when it comes to employment. Though women constitute half of the total U.S. college-educated workforce, they make up only 29% of the science and engineering workforce, according to studies. Thus, making STEM careers more lopsided.
Economic Policy Institutes study on gender pay gap points out that college majors do have an impact on wages and economic well-being when it comes to employment. The study states that women tend to choose humanities over STEM majors. And humanities often lead to lower-salaried jobs as compared to STEM fields that have higher-salaried jobs.
We have a vision of self-confident girls, who embrace their spots, lead in STEM and study the mysteries of math and science, says Sarah Shipley of Shipley Communications LLC. We are thankful to all those who believed in us and helped fund this campaign. We would love to see the Prime Number Club used in schools, on bookshelves and have big dreams that Off-Kilta Matilda will inspire little girls and boys to become confident in STEM subjects and become future mathematicians and scientists, Shipley further adds.
This series is also a tribute to all the moms who are single handedly raising their kids while running a business. Being a mompreneur requires much more than technical skills and training. It requires what being a mom teaches women who have kids: time-management skills, multitasking, creativity, budgeting and good people management skills among numerous others.
Shipley has done it all. While her husband was away on duty, she raised their kids; juggling many tasks and work. Meanwhile, the idea for Off-Kilta Matilda was taking shape. She perfected it over the span of ten years and today her dreams have realized in the form of Off-Kilta Matilda books and educational resources.
About Shipley Communications LLC
Shipley Communications specializes in you. It's your company, your brand and your market. We understand branding, events, public relations, logo design, verbal identity, web design, fundraising and crisis communication. At Shipley Communications, we believe that good communication is simple, honest and can change the world. We build relationships with the words we write and love to do good work for good people.
Efemex Logo small businesses have a wealth of expertise, knowledge and personal touch that homeowners are looking for
Small business owners in the home maintenance sector (plumbers, electricians, etc.) usually get an influx of work followed by a period of calm. Efemex wants to help fill that period of calm, helping small business increase their sales and grow. And assisting frustrated homeowners, looking for quality professionals to help them around the house.
Efemex was created to give property owners access to small businesses service providers who otherwise would be drowned out in the noise of big commerce. Founder of Efemex, Nayef knew that small businesses could not afford large marketing campaign budgets to effectively advertise their services. He also realized that property owners werent getting the expertise, local knowledge and personal touch of local small businesses simply because they werent aware of them. He set out to create a platform that would empower homeowners and grow local small businesses.
The vision for Efemex was to provide a platform for small business owners with free tools to help them promote their company, organize their work, schedule bookings and share best practices, while simultaneously giving property owners a platform to find local home and maintenance services, get insights into better property management, and get the most value out of their assets.
Homeowners can visit https://www.efemex.com and get access to local Handymen, electricians and plumbers that are available near them. Efemex.com will provide a free estimate and homeowners can choose to proceed with a service only if they are 100% satisfied with the price provided.
Founder Nayef, created the platform out of his love for real estate and passion for entrepreneurship. He has worked in real estate for the last 11 years and has worked within the US, UK and Dubai. Nayef moved to New York City in 2016 to further evolve his real estate career and to build Efemex.
The ability to work in real estate while building something of value for people and small businesses is a dream come true, says Nayef of his start-up. Small businesses are the backbone of this country. I believe small businesses have a wealth of expertise, knowledge and personal touch that homeowners are looking for.
Efemex launched in September 2017 and has since seen an over 100% increase in users every month.
About Efemex
Efemex is a small business platform that connects property owners with quality, local home service providers. Efemex provides the tools for local home service businesses to promote and grow their business whilst giving homeowners access to the local home service providers that would otherwise be drowned out by their big commerce competitors. For more information, visit https://www.efemex.com/.
There are several tests that financial analysts use to determine solvency and adequate capitalization of a business.
Valuation is used by market participants to determine the price they are willing to pay or receive to transact a sale of a security, a business or an asset. The same techniques are used to determine the price they are willing to pay or receive to settle a claim or satisfy a liability. It should be no surprise then that when there is a dispute between two or more parties regarding value, the same valuation techniques and skills are necessary to resolve the dispute. Attorneys, accountants and business owners often rely on independent, third-party valuation experts to assist in the resolution of disputes or potential conflict situations. Some of the typical situations in which valuation experts are utilized include fair value financial reporting (GAAP accounting), bankruptcy, income tax reporting, property tax appeals, estate and gift tax planning and reporting, dissenting shareholder disputes, corporate transactions and disputes, divorce litigation, shareholder disputes or economic damages analysis as well as many other business and legal purposes. The Financial Poise webinar series VALUATION FIGHTS IN LITIGATION: BATTLE OF THE EXPERT 2017 explores all of these topics in great detail.
The third and final episode of the VALUATION FIGHTS IN LITIGATION: BATTLE OF THE EXPERT 2017 webinar series is Bankruptcy Valuation Issues: Valuation in the Context of a Fraudulent Transfer or Preference Attack, airing on December 7th at 2pm CST (Register Here), and features host Gary Frantzen of Alvarez & Marsal Valuation Services. He is joined by Anne Vanderkamp of Baker Tilly, Lisa Vandesteeg of Sugar Felsenthal Grais & Hammer, and Thad Wilson of King & Spalding, to discuss various bankruptcy valuation issues.
Bankruptcy trustees, debtors, liquidating trusts, and others often file claims against former shareholders/executives for alleged fraudulent transfers. A key issue relates to the value of the debtors assets at the time of the transfer relative to its liabilities and claims against its assets in short, whether the debtor was solvent and/or adequately capitalized at the time of the transfer. There are several tests that financial analysts use to determine solvency and adequate capitalization of a business. This webinar describes those tests and helps attorneys understand how experts determine retrospective asset values and solvency. It will describe the methods used to determine the solvency of a business when issuing contemporaneous opinions and how they may differ when called upon to opine on the retrospective solvency of an entity that has filed for protection under the Bankruptcy Code.
The VALUATION FIGHTS IN LITIGATION: BATTLE OF THE EXPERT 2017 webinar series is sponsored by EisnerAmper. All episodes premiere live through West LegalEdCenter and then are made available on-demand.
Each episode is delivered in Plain English understandable to business owners and executives without much background in these areas. Yet, each episode is proven to be valuable to seasoned professionals. As with all Financial Poise Webinars, each episode in the series brings you into engaging, sometimes humorous, conversations designed to entertain as it teaches. And, as with all Financial Poise Webinars, each episode in the series is designed to be viewed independently of the other episodes, so that participants will enhance their knowledge of this area whether they attend one, some, or all of the episodes.
ABOUT FINANCIAL POISE:
Financial Poise (http://www.financialpoise.com) provides unbiased news, continuing education, and intelligence to private business owners, executives, investors, and their trusted advisors. For more information contact Cristina Nolan at cnolan(at)financialpoise(dot)com or 312.469.0135.
ABOUT EISNERAMPER: EisnerAmper is a leading full-service advisory and accounting firm with offices coast to coast and internationally. Visit http://www.eisneramper.com.
House Buyers of America is pleased to announce a major milestone: the purchase of its 1500th home.
CEO Nick Ron couldnt be more excited about the good news. The 1500th home we purchased is located at 10715 North Landsdale, St Glenn Dale, MD, he says. This was a rental property. The landlord was retiring and was tired of the hassle of managing a rental home. The house was sitting vacant, so he wanted to cash out his equity quickly. We made a fast offer to the seller, and he accepted. Shortly after, we went to closing. The owner didnt have to make repairs, stage the house or spruce it up we took care of all of that for him. When sellers work with House Buyers of America, it really is that simple.
House Buyers of America pays cash for homes in As-Is condition. Thanks to the companys excellent management, access to capital and skilled trades, years in the business, and outstanding reputation from satisfied customers, House Buyers is able to provide one of the most competitive cash offers in the industry. Customers appreciate the fact that they can simply sell their home without having to go through the hassle of the traditional real estate market, or pay a Realtors commission. The cash they receive means more equity in their pocket, instead of equity going to renovations, repairs and mortgage payments while the house sits and waits for a buyer.
Our job is to deal with the hassles of renovating our houses with the latest design trends, and dealing with the sales process, Ron explains why House Buyers of America is so successful in the communities in which it operates. Our team of experts usually have 10-25 years of experience in their respective fields (construction, buying, design, sales, etc.). Most homeowners have other professions and theyre not adept at the details of managing construction, procurement, design, sales, and transaction management but this is all we do, all day, every day. Weve helped many homeowners faced with unwanted inherited properties, job transfers, downsizing, moving to a bigger house, financial struggles, health struggles, empty nesting, and more with our straightforward cash for the As-Is home method.
Have a home for sale in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, DC? Sell the home the fast the easy way by selling to House Buyers of America. To learn more, visit housebuyersofamerica.com/about_house_buyers_of_america/ and housebuyersofamerica.com/we-buy-houses/.
About House Buyers of America
House Buyers of America is a residential real estate investment company headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia. By using House Buyers of America, home owners no longer have to pay real estate commissions, deal with real estate agents, or fix up their properties. The company offers a guaranteed, fast and hassle-free sale to people who want to sell their house for cash. House Buyers of America buys each property As Is and renovates the house if necessary, so sellers do not need to spend their time or money readying their property for sale.
Contact Details:
House Buyers of America, Inc.
14420 Albemarle Point Place, Suite 150
Chantilly, VA 20151
Phone: 1-855-659-3289
Source: House Buyers of America, Inc.
kitcheck.com Pretagged syringes are a preferred approach for many of our client pharmacies."said Kevin MacDonald, co-founder and CEO at Kit Check, "They allow the pharmacists to maximize the effectiveness of the Kit Check kit and tray automation process.
Kit Check and QuVa Pharma announced the formation of a partnership designed to streamline medication tracking for hospital pharmacies throughout the United States. Under the agreement, QuVa Pharma will embed Kit Checks Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags on their prefilled syringes. The embedded tags will work with the scanning solutions provided by Kit Check to improve medication inventory management and reduce waste by making the syringes immediately available to drop into kits.
Medicines produced by QuVa Pharma arrive ready-to-use, having been produced and fully tested in a controlled environment. The embedded RFID tags allow hospital pharmacists to add batches of medications to inventory in seconds using the Kit Check scanner. Once in inventory, the Kit Check solution permits medications to be tracked throughout the hospitalfrom pharmacy to patient -- whether they are in bags, trays or kits. Combined with their powerful machine learning platform called Bluesight, this item-level tracking enables Kit Check to provide pharmacists with actionable insights such as real-time restocking, inventory benchmarking and even manufacturer recalls, regardless of the medication management workflow in use at the hospital.
We are very excited to have a high-quality partner like QuVa Pharma on board, said Kevin MacDonald, co-founder and CEO at Kit Check. Pretagged syringes are a preferred approach for many of our client pharmacies since they allow the pharmacists to maximize the effectiveness of the Kit Check kit and tray automation process. They reduce staff handling time, reduce errors, increase patient safety and each pharmacist can work at the top of their license. Everyone wins.
As the compounding partner, QuVa Pharma is setting high standards in quality compliance, with both of their Texas facilities in excellent standing with the FDA. A third facility is already under construction to meet market demand. By investing in specialty facilities and operations, QuVa Pharma is addressing the effects of recent regulation changes on healthcare providers and establishing a goal of improving patient safety through stringent controls on production, materials and processes.
Our primary mission is to improve patient safety, said Stuart Hinchen, QuVa Pharmas co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. The outsource compounding service we provide helps to reduce the risk of inadvertent errors that may occur with bed-side preparation and frees up the pharmacist to become more of an informed advisor on patient treatment. Embedding the RFID tags in our syringes further streamlines this process and allows detailed item-level tracking, so we are thrilled to be working closely with the leading provider of this technology.
The RFID-embedded syringes are already in production and available for order. QuVa Pharma and Kit Check will be exhibiting their innovative solutions at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Midyear Clinical Meeting 2017 in Orlando Florida December 4-6. To learn more, visit Kit Check at Booth #1011 or QuVa Pharma at Booth #646.
About Kit Check
Kit Check is a leading provider of automated medication management solutions for hospital pharmacies. Our solutions blend powerful machine learning and advanced tracking technology to streamline medication inventory and auditing processes. To date our US and Canadian hospital partners have tracked over 30 million medications using our innovative products. More information about the Kit Check suite of solutions can be found at kitcheck.com.
About QuVa Pharma, Inc.
QuVa Pharma is a nationally recognized company emerging as the leading industry 503B platform and partner of choice for compliance-oriented healthcare facilities looking to ensure a quality, safe and consistent supply of medications. The Company offers a broad portfolio of products across Pain Management, Anti-infective, OR Syringes, Labor and Delivery therapeutic areas amongst others, all of which are released only once sterility and potency testing is successfully complete, and with validation supporting appropriate BUD. The company is committed to having a patient-first orientation, as well as a robust product portfolio, leading safety standards, and collaborative, partnership-oriented customer service. For more information, visit http://www.quvapharma.com.
Amica Insurance collected 20,309 canned food items during its Giving Thanks Giving Back food drive, which ran from Friday, Nov. 3, through Friday, Nov. 17, at its corporate headquarters.
Amica Insurance collected 20,309 canned food items during its Giving Thanks Giving Back food drive, which ran from Friday, Nov. 3, through Friday, Nov. 17, at its corporate headquarters. Those items were donated to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank to support families in need this holiday season.
I continue to be amazed by the generosity of our employees, said Robert A. DiMuccio, chairman, president and CEO of Amica. I sincerely thank them for their involvement and enthusiasm during this food drive, as theyre making a big difference for so many Rhode Island families.
Once again, Amica employees demonstrated their holiday spirit and support for the local community by collecting an astounding amount of food for the Rhode Island Community Food Bank, said Andrew Schiff, CEO of the Food Bank. We are truly overwhelmed by the incredible response this year and so pleased to be part of this annual tradition.
Amica kicked off the food drive in conjunction with its annual Thanksgiving card unveiling on Nov. 3. Each of the four buildings at Amicas headquarters was assigned a canned food item, and the buildings competed to see who could donate the most items over a two-week period. Building 25, which is home to Amicas corporate services and corporate information systems departments, won the competition by collecting 5,493 items.
Amica also partnered with Canstruction Rhode Island to build a piece of pumpkin pie out of approximately 2,000 of the canned food items.
About Amica Insurance
Amica Mutual Insurance Co., the nations oldest mutual insurer of automobiles, was founded in 1907. The company, based in Lincoln, Rhode Island, is a national writer of auto, home, marine and umbrella insurance. Life coverage is available through Amica Life Insurance Company, a wholly owned subsidiary. Amica employs more than 3,800 people in 44 offices across the country. For more information, visit Amica.com.
Media inquiries can be sent to MediaCenter(at)amica(dot)com.
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The organizers of International LiDAR Mapping Forum (ILMF), the worlds leading technical conference and expo covering the newest airborne, terrestrial and underwater LiDAR as well as emerging remote-sensing and data collection tools and technologies, announced the 2018 conference program. The 18th annual edition of ILMF will take place alongside the ASPRS Annual Conference February 5-7, 2018 in Denver, Colorado.
The main ILMF conference program includes these featured presentations:
UAS LiDAR:
Adam LeWinter of USACE-CRREL on Unmanned Aerial Systems for High Resolution Laser Scanning Applications
Stefan Hrabar of CSIRO on Mapping of Underground Mines with an Autonomous Drone.
Iain Woodhouse of Carbomap on Fixed-Wing UAV with LiDAR, Hyperspectral Imaging and Real-Time Processing
Dr. Julien Vallett of Helimap Systems on What you Can Expect from UAV Mapping.
Data Acquisition:
Chris Hopkinson of University of Lethbridge on Mapping of Soil Depth Following Wildfire using Multi-Spectral and Multi-Temporal LiDAR
Amar Nayegandhi of Dewberry on Multi-Sensor Topo-Bathymetric Approach to Mapping the Everglades National Park
Charles Write of NOAA on Using LiDAR, Manned Aircraft SfM, and UAS SfM for Coastal Mapping
Project Case Studies:
Martin Flood of GeoCue on Updating Legacy LiDAR Projects at USDA: Benefits, Challenges and Lessons Learned
Michael Meiser of Woolpert on the Use of LiDAR in Platinum-Group Element Mining at the Stillwater Complex, MT
Al Karlin of SWFWMD on High-Density LiDAR to Meet Southwest Florida Water Management Districts Specifications for Diverse Applications in Florida
Other topics include:
Advanced Geo-Technologies
Advanced LiDAR Topics
Bathymetric LiDAR
Coastal Mapping
Data Acquisition Approaches
Data Fusion
Geiger Mode/Single Photon
LiDAR Data Processing
LiDAR Sensor Topics
UAS LiDAR
USGS 3DEP
USGS Updates
Topo-Bathymetric LiDAR
In addition to the main program, Product Previews will provide brief updates on vendors newest products and latest advances.
>> VIEW THE FULL CONFERENCE PROGRAM HERE
More than 60 mapping experts will be speaking at ILMF 2018, including professionals from research organizations, government agencies and private enterprise, as well as leading academics.
>> VIEW THE PRESENTER LIST HERE
Exhibition
In addition to the conference content, attendees can explore the very best of LiDAR along with a growing host of new and complementary remote-sensing solutions. The exhibit floor will have more than 60 leading technology, software and service providers from around the world.
The current exhibitor list can be viewed here. For the fourth consecutive year, the exhibit floor will have a UAV/UAS pavilion to arm delegates with insight into the growing UAV/UAS market and the opportunities this presents for aerial LiDAR professionals.
For the first time, ILMF and the ASPRS Annual Conference will take place together. That means more education, networking and technology than ever before. Lisa Murray with ILMF expressed her excitement about the opportunity. The geospatial community has long been asking event partners to work together. This is a giant step toward a shared vision of bringing industry members together with government and academia for a powerful combination of education, technology innovation and commercial exchange. ILMF and ASPRS share the goal of creating more value for members, attendees and exhibitors by offering multiple learning tracks and a vibrant exhibit floor that pairs the latest technology with hands-on workshops and in-market solutions. More information about the co-location can be found here.
Registration
Early-bird registration is available now. Interested parties are encouraged to register before the early-bird deadline of December 15 to save $200. Registration is available online here.
About International LiDAR Mapping Forum (ILMF)
International LiDAR Mapping Forum (ILMF) is a technical conference & exhibition focused on airborne, terrestrial and underwater LiDAR as well as emerging remote-sensing and data collection tools and technology used for applications including Asset Management; Civil Infrastructure; Coastal Zone Mapping; Emergency Services & Disaster Response; Land and Natural Resource Management; and Urban Modeling. The 2017 edition of the annual event will be held February 13-15, 2017 at the Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center. For more information, visit lidarmap.org. ILMF is part of a network of events and media for the global geospatial market organized by Diversified Communications that includes Commercial UAV Expo Americas, Commercial UAV Expo Europe, Commercial UAV News, SPAR3D Expo & Conference and SPAR3D.com.
Contact:
Lee Corkhill, Diversified Communications
lcorkhill(at)divcom(dot)com; 1-207-842-5520
The Portuguese Cork Association (APCOR) and the California-based Cork Quality Council (CQC), and its member companies Portocork, Amorim Cork America, Scott Laboratories, M.A. Silva Corks USA, Lafitte Cork & Capsule, and Cork Supply USA have made a combined donation of $70,000 to assist the victims of the 2017 North Bay wild fires. In addition, the CQC has pledged a donation of 200 cork oak trees to be planted in support of reforestation efforts.
For decades, California wine producers and Portuguese cork producers have worked together to provide quality wine to tables around the world, building both business relationships and a strong, supportive community says APCOR president Joao Rui Ferreira. In the aftermath of these terrible fires, we remain united to ensure the well-being of our friends in California and to help protect the future of the California wine industry.
$70,000 in aid has been donated directly to the North Bay Fire Relief Fund, established by the Redwood Credit Union Community Fund, in partnership with Redwood Credit Union, the Press Democrat, and Senator Mike McGuire.
The Napa Valley Community Foundation and the Redwood Credit Union are both providing direct aid to those in need, says Peter Weber, Executive Director of the CQC.
Along with the monetary donation, the CQC has pledged to plant 200 cork oaks in areas affected by the fires.
Cork oaks have been grown successfully in California for over a century, since we enjoy a similar climate to that of the species native Mediterranean region, says Weber. We have a shared responsibility to protect the environment, especially following these devastating wildfires. Cork oaks make extremely positive contributions to the environment.
For more information about APCOR, visit http://www.apcor.pt and http://www.100percentcork.org. You can follow APCOR on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. For more information about the CQC, visit http://www.corkqc.com. For questions about APCOR, please contact Krisna Bharvani or Josh Zoland of Colangelo & Partners.
About APCOR:
The Portuguese Cork Association (APCOR) exists to promote natural cork and its products. APCOR is the employers association of the cork sector that represents, promotes and carries out research in the Portuguese cork industry. It was created in 1956 and is based in Santa Maria de Lamas, in the council of Santa Maria da Feira, at the heart of the cork industry around 30 kilometers from Porto, Portugals second largest city. Membership of the association is open to all companies operating in the fields of production, marketing or export of cork products. The organization advocates on behalf of the Portuguese cork industry worldwide and is the driving force of an industry based on tradition, innovation and sustainability.
About the CQC:
Based in Napa, California, the Cork Quality Council (CQC) is a nonprofit organization founded to promote education and improved quality assurance procedures for the wine and cork industries. The CQC is sponsored by select wine cork supplies, and its membership includes Portocork, Amorim Cork America, Scott Laboratories, M.A. Silva Corks USA, Lafitte Cork & Capsule, and Cork Supply USA.
A better idea: The contractor found a superior waterproofing solution to the originally specified membrane; PENETRON ADMIX was used for the foundation slab, retaining walls and underground walls. Ultimately, the PENETRON team was able to save the builder time and keep to the construction schedule. Downstairs, everything is dry and solid, just as specified! Past News Releases RSS Penetron Just What The Doctor...
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Set to open in December 2017, the new Petronas Lubricants Global Research Center in Santena, Italy, is built on a waterproof below-grade concrete structure that features PENETRON crystalline technology to provide integral protection from high groundwater levels.
With the completion of the new 17,000 m2 global R&D Center in Santena, Petronas Lubricants International (PLI), the global lubricants manufacturing and marketing arm of Petronas, now has a global hub linking the companys technological innovation efforts in Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America.
As with this Santena project, water table conditions at construction sites percolating water and hydrostatic pressure can often pose unexpected challenges for the builder already dealing with scheduling and budgetary issues. Conventional membrane solutions, a widespread technology to keep concrete structures dry, demand lengthy and complex installation procedures involving more crack inducers for waterproofing injections, with many cold joints and post injections carried out by trained specialists.
Membranes are more established and better known than crystalline waterproofing technology, explains Enricomaria Gastaldo Brac, Director of PENETRON Italy. However, when Gilardi General Contracting, the project contractor at Santena, asked PENETRON Italy to come up with a better idea for their new facility, we had the ideal solution: an integral waterproofing admixture added to the concrete with self-healing capabilities.
Technically, the main challenge for Gilardi General Contracting was to ensure that the testing areas and laboratories with delicate equipment and fuels running under stringent test conditions at all hours of the day remain in an absolutely stable (i.e. dry) environment. Because the local ground water level posed a potential threat to the underground concrete structures and other crucial areas, protecting them from any form of water ingress was essential.
Subsequently, PENETRON ADMIX was added to treat over 3,700 m3 (4,400 cubic yards) of concrete used for the foundation slab, retaining walls, engine-testing areas, laboratories, and underground offices. PENEBAR SW swellable waterstop was used to seal the resulting construction joints.
Ultimately, the PENETRON team was able to save the builder time and keep to the construction schedule, adds Enricomaria Gastaldo Brac. Downstairs, everything is dry and solid, just as specified!
The Petronas Lubricants Global Research Center in Santena (near Turin, Italy) is home to hundreds of scientists, researchers and product development specialists. The main focus of the Santena Center is to test and optimize the performance of fuels and lubricants for greater engine and fuel efficiency and improved sustainability. The facility boasts state-of-the art laboratories and equipment for lubricants, as well as automotive and industrial technology testing capabilities and expertise.
The PENETRON Group is a leading manufacturer of specialty construction products for concrete waterproofing, concrete repairs and floor preparation systems. The Group operates through a global network, offering support to the design and construction community through its regional offices, representatives and distribution channels.
For more information on PENETRON waterproofing solutions, please visit penetron(dot)com or Facebook(dot)com/ThePenetronGroup, email CRDept(at)penetron(dot)com, or contact the Corporate Relations Department at 631-941-9700.
"This will be one of my priorities. In five years, I want the conditions to be met to return African heritage to Africa."
Delivered at the end of his speech, this sentence resonated especially in Benin, which in July last year called for France to return treasures taken during French colonial rule from the end of the 19th century.
President Patrice Talon -- who railed against French influence in its former colony during the election campaign that brought him to power last year -- made a formal request to France's foreign ministry in September.
He said the repatriation of such treasures would allow people "to get to know better our cultural and historic assets" and also allow the tiny west African nation to develop tourism as "an important cornerstone of the Beninese economy".
France ruled the country, then called Dahomey, until 1960, when it was granted independence and changed its name to Benin. Dahomey included the kingdom of the same name that dates back to about 1600.
France's stockpiling of treasures from Dahomey happened during colonial fighting between 1892 and 1894, but it was also carried out by missionaries who "robbed communities of what they considered to be charms", said Irenee Zevounou, Benin's ambassador to UNESCO, the UN's cultural body in Paris.
Most of the artefacts have not been documented, but Zevounou said he believed 4,500 to 6,000 items are in France, including in private collections.
Many are now on display in French museums, including the Quai Branly in Paris, which exhibits indigenous art from around the world.
'Historic break'
"This is the first time a French president has tackled the issue head-on and expressed his willingness for restitution," Marie-Cecile Zinsou, creator of the Zinsou Foundation in Cotonou, wrote afterwards on her Facebook page.
"The Ouagadougou speech may mark a major turning point in future proceedings," the French-Beninese art historian said.
Others who support Benin's call for the return of its treasures -- which include royal thrones, statues and swords -- have since spoken up as well.
Louis-Georges Tin, president of a coalition of associations representing black French people known as CRAN, has urged the UN Human Rights Council to participate in negotiations between the two countries.
In an editorial, Tin described Macron's speech as a "historic break".
"Indeed, it is a question of culture, but also a question of rights," wrote Tin, who regularly presses the French government over the issue.
But the main stumbling block is legal.
France's foreign ministry has relied on "the legal principles of inalienability and imprescriptibility... of public collections" in its refusal to return the cultural assets, which are now considered French treasures.
For Yves-Bernard Debie, who specialises in art sales law, Macron's speech broke with French legal tradition established in 1566 by the "Edict of Moulins".
"Since that time, the royal domain became public property, which is inalienable and imprescriptible," he said. "It is forbidden, except under rare exceptions, for the prince, king or president of the republic, to dispose of this property".
"Heads of state change, the public domain remains".
A restitution would require a change in the law but Macron has formalised negotiations and the Beninese authorities are expected to reiterate their demand shortly.
A group of FBI agents appeared to fire back at President Donald Trump after Trump slammed the agency on Sunday and said its reputation was "in Tatters."
"Every day, FBI Special Agents put their lives on the line to protect the American public from national security and criminal threats," Thomas O'Connor, the president of the advocacy group FBI Agents Association, said in a statement Sunday evening.
"Agents perform these duties with unwavering integrity and professionalism and a focus on complying with the law and the Constitution. This is why the FBI continues to be the premier law enforcement agency in the world. FBI Agents are dedicated to their mission; suggesting otherwise is simply false."
While the statement did not mention Trump by name, it came hours after Trump called the FBI's integrity into question in a series of early-morning tweets. Much of Trump's ire was directed at James Comey, the FBI director whom Trump fired in May.
In one tweet, Trump accused Comey of lying about a conversation the two had in February concerning Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser. The president denied Comey's sworn testimony from May in which Comey said Trump had asked him to drop an inquiry into Flynn.
"I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn," Trump tweeted on Sunday. "Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!"
He later added: "After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness."
On Friday, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador and cut a cooperation deal in the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into potential collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.
On Saturday, news emerged that over the summer Mueller had dismissed from the investigation a top FBI agent who possibly exhibited an anti-Trump bias in text messages sent to a colleague. The agent had previously worked on the bureau's investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server.
"Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI 'agent's role in Clinton probe under review,'" Trump tweeted. "Led Clinton Email probe. @foxandfriends Clinton money going to wife of another FBI agent in charge."
"Now it all starts to make sense," he later added.
Comey himself also appeared to push back on Trump's claim Sunday evening, posting to Instagram a picture of FBI agents in the field accompanied by a quote from his June 8 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee:
President Donald Trump is publicly egging on GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah to run for reelection a move that is certain to irk 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who is widely rumored to seek a bid for Hatch's seat should the seven-term senator opt against running in 2018.
Hatch, meanwhile, has become Trump's favorite senator of late, with the president making a Monday trip to Salt Lake City at Hatch's request. As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Hatch was instrumental in securing the party's victory in passing tax reform legislation through the Senate this weekend. Trump on Monday moved to reduce the size of two major national monuments in Utah, a move the 83-year-old has sought for some time.
During his visit to Utah, Trump admitted that he was encouraging Hatch to run for reelection. Asked if he was trying to send a message to Romney that he doesn't want him to make a bid for Hatch's seat, which the senator has held since 1977, Trump said Romney's "a good man. Mitt's a good man."
Then at his speech alongside Hatch and other member's of Utah's congressional delegation, Trump began his address by calling Hatch "a very special man" and "a true fighter" whom he's "gotten to know ... very well."
"You meet fighters and you meet people that you thought were fighters but they're not so good at fighting," Trump said. "He's a fighter. We hope you will continue to serve your state and your country in the Senate for a very long time to come."
Hatch has quickly become one of Trumps top Senate allies
Trump's public posturing followed a Sunday story in Politico that outlined how the president was "going all out" to persuade Hatch to seek another term in office. Hatch, who in 2012 said he would not run again, has since signaled that he is interested in doing so but has not made a final decision. As Politico's Alex Isenstadt wrote, the push to get Hatch to run again was "aimed in no small part at keeping the presidents longtime nemesis, Mitt Romney, out of the Senate."
"Romney has been preparing to run for Hatchs seat on the long-held assumption that the 83-year-old would retire," Isenstadt wrote. "Yet Hatch, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, is now refusing to rule out another campaign a circumstance Romneys infuriated inner circle blames squarely on the president."
He added that Trump has voiced his opinion to confidants that he doesn't much like the idea of a Sen. Romney.
"Hatch is a known entity for Trump and has been really good for the president for the most part," Kirk Jowers, a friend of Romney who formerly chaired his political action committee, told Politico. "He knows for a fact he's not going to get that with Romney. I don't know that he knows what he's going to get with Romney, but it's not going to be what he's got with Hatch."
Hatch has defended Trump at times when the majority of the GOP has flocked in the opposite direction and Trump has taken notice. Just last week, when Trump was under fire for retweeting anti-Muslim videos posted by the fringe-right group Britain First, Hatch said Trump was one of the best presidents he's served under.
"Hes not afraid to make decisions," Hatch told reporters. "Hes not afraid to take on the big mouths around here."
Trump tweeted the clip soon after.
1. Amazon is reportedly talking to generic drugmakers. The company has apparently met with Sandoz, the generic drug unit of Novartis, and Mylan.
2. Twitter said it made a mistake defending Trump's anti-Muslim retweets but said the videos are still OK. "We mistakenly pointed to the wrong reason we didnt take action on the videos from earlier this week," CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted.
4. Reddit and its users are ratcheting up their opposition to the FCC's imminent repeal of its net neutrality rules. On Friday, Reddit users by the dozens posted pictures of members of Congress who oppose the rules.
5. Apple is reportedly looking into designing its own power management chips. It's reportedly on track to start operations as early as next year, ditching its partner Dialog Semiconductor, whose shares were down 17% after the news broke.
6. Apple's head designer Jony Ive said he hears recent MacBook criticism."Absolutely, all of your feelings and feedback around the MacBook you use, we couldn't want to listen to more," Ive said earlier this week in Washington DC. "And we hear boy, do we hear."
7. The crypto exchange Coinbase went down on Friday as bitcoin prices neared $11,000 (8,189). It was the second time this week the site was unavailable.
8. Apple CEO Tim Cook said developers have earned $17 billion (12.6 billion) from Apple's China App Store. Cook spoke at the fourth World Internet Conference yesterday.
9. Elon Musk plans to launch his red Tesla Roadster to Mars in January 2018, SpaceX reportedly confirmed. Musk said he made up the claim, but SpaceX said it was real.
In a jointly-signed statement by the three SRC Presidents, the students explained that they have been frustrated for so long over what they described as neglect by the government.
The students demonstrated last week over the development, asking the Akufo-Addo government to fulfil a campaign promise he made to them to have their allowances restored.
According to them, they have gone through all the necessary requirements for their allowances to be paid.
The students from the three campuses of the School of Health said that even though they have submitted their E-zwich and other valid identification cards as well as their account numbers, none of them have received their allowances.
They said that they do not understand why they have been neglected by the government although trainees from the various nursing training and colleges of health have received allowances for September and October, after the announcement that the allowances have been restored.
Nabih al-Wahsh was sentenced by an Egyptian court on Saturday in absentia as he failed to show up in court after he was granted bail.
According to africanspotlight.com, the lawyer had said during a television programme that it was a national duty to rape women who wear tight and ripped jeans.
READ MORE: Undeniable reasons why defilement of youngsters cannot stop in Ghana
Lawyer Nabih al-Wahsh was charged with "publicly inciting to flout the law" and "spreading with malice reports and statements meant to perturb public order... and harm the public interest" after his comments had sparked backlash and a complaint was made to the national prosecutor.
The controversial politician was apparently unhappy about the contemporary Ghanaian womens mode of dressing and the sort of artificial things they do to their bodies, all in the name fashion.
She was very particular about wearing artificial nails and bleaching the skin to look different from their original appearance.
READ MORE:Incitement
Akua Donkor advised women to avoid altering their bodies, saying God would be excited if women appreciate what they have.
She added that In the past, other race even appreciated the hairdo of Africans. Women hair was very beautiful and appreciable. However, Madam Donkor said today, they all want to be like the Europeans. How can it be possible? She asked. She emphasised that the so-called modern fashion doesnt please God.
Akua Donkor did not mince her words when she said Most ladies of today wear fake nails as if they are tigers. Human beings have turned into tigers.
The president, during a meeting with visiting French president, Emmanuel Macron last Thursday, said: We want to build a value-added, industrialised economy with a modernised agriculture, which is neither victim nor pawn of the world economic order.
According to Akufo-Addo, this is the way to develop healthy relations between our two countries, and put Ghana at the high end of the value chain in the global marketplace, and create jobs for the teeming masses of Ghanaians, particularly the youth. Our vision is to build a free, prosperous, independent country, a Ghana Beyond Aid.
Speaking on the development on Accra-based Joy FM, the Chairman of the IEA Dr. Charles Mensa praised President Akufo-Addo for coming out boldly to speak against the old economic order of the world.
Its good that he gathered the courage to say it but what he needs to do is to dismantle the system, he said.
He added that since some of the European countries tend to use Ministers and appointees of African countries to push their agenda, the president must be able to influence the thinking of his appointees to enable them to refrain from the old way of doing business with the West.
A letter sighted by Accra-based Citi FM and signed by the CEO of the company, James Eric Antwi, stated that contracts of workers have been terminated effective November 30, 2017.
We write to serve you this days notice of termination of your employment contract effective November 30, 2017.
In accordance with the termination clause of the existing agreement between you and the company, the company is formally exercising its right to the said agreement.
The letter also asked the dismissed workers to submit all their IDs and other company assets in their possession to the administration.
It added that, On your last day of work, kindly liaise with the Human Resource and Administration Department to submit all company assets in your possession, including but not limited to ID cards, equipment, cell phones, work products (electronic and paper files) etc.
Upon receipt of these items, the payment of any outstanding amounts as stated due will be authorized.
The reason for the dismissal is not known. Industry insiders have said that it could be due to the recent incident involving one of the companys aircrafts or operational challenges facing the airline.
READ ALSO: Airline appoints Ghanaian as Chief Pilot
It is also unclear how many workers have been dismissed, however, sources say top management, flight and grounds staff have all been affected.
Starbow is one of the two domestic airline companies operating in Ghana.
A video that shows African migrants sold as slaves in Libya sparked a global outcry. It has come to light that hundreds of Africans are being auctioned in modern-day slave markets for $400 per person as Libya is the main transit hub for illegal immigrants and refugees seeking to reach Europe.
A video published by CNN shows two men stand in the dark negotiating with an auctioneer to buy migrants.
In an interview with Dr Etse Sikanku on Class 91.3 FM's World Affairs on Friday, December 1, Dr Kambudzi revealed that the AU is interested in finding out the reality on the ground in order to address concerns of the slave trade.
"Our Chairperson has taken robust measures. He has decided to deploy a delegation of the AU Commission to Libya to establish the fact and make recommendations, he said.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and other global figures have condemned the slavery describing it as gross and scandalous abuses of human rights.
Others including Member of Parliament for North Tongu and Ranking member of Parliaments Foreign Affairs committee, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, has however called for a joint military intervention to free the black African slaves being held captive.
Dr Kambudzi, who was not enthused about the development blamed it partly on the overthrow and murder of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
"We allowed people outside Africa to come and destroy a country that was doing well. Libya used to pay the contributions for so many African countries to the AU. Now it can't," he stated.
Six years after the overthrow of Mr Gaddafi, Libya is still a failed state with heavy presence of militants and other violent groups perpetuating heinous crimes.
According to him, this would complement the efforts of European navy and patrol agencies.
"This regional force will be in Central Africa, Southern Africa, Western Africa, Northern Africa and Eastern Africa. This is a serious problem. The force is almost ready," he said in an interview with Dr Etse Sikanku on Class 91.3 FM's World Affairs on Friday, December 1.
His comment comes in the wake of a video that shows African migrants being sold as slaves in Libya which has sparked a global outcry. It has come to light that hundreds of Black Africans are being auctioned in modern-day slave markets for $400 per person as Libya is the main transit hub for illegal immigrants and refugees seeking to reach Europe.
The footage published by CNN shows two men stand in the dark negotiating with an auctioneer to buy migrants.
Dr Kambudzi, who was not enthused about the latest development in the Northern African country said the military force will observe and monitor the flow of human traffickers and report back on what is happening.
He said an African managed force will help the AU to get first-hand knowledge of the situation on the ground rather than depend on western sources.
"To tell you the truth, we don't know as Africa, exactly what is happening [in relation to] the situation in Libya and the Mediterranean. We don't know the exact situation. We are learning this from Western media, from global TV," he stated.
He was reacting to the ongoing slave trade in Libya where over one-hundred Ghanaian migrants have been flown back home.
The Minister said that the youth can succeed even if the devil is President of Ghana.
He argued that the Ghanaian youth must change their mindset and develop better ways to succeed instead of resolving to travel to Europe with their life-long savings.
A total of 127 Ghanaian detainees returned to Ghana on Wednesday (November 29, 2017) night following revelations of human auctioning and trade by fellow blacks in Libya.
The returnees included a woman, a physically challenged man, and 2 children.
The government paid about 400 cedis per person for their transportation back home. Chilling stories of dehumanizing treatment ranged from robbery to murder.
Sam Pynes popularity has soared with this appointment, he has fans all over the place now. As we prepare ourselves for the extraordinary National Conference later this month, I can assure you that therell be lots of meat to eat when we meet with Sam Pyne at the helm of affairs. Even when were reciting the Lords prayer we only ask God for two things, to give us our daily bread and to forgive us our trespasses. So when you have food like Sam Pyne has, then he must be okay. Its a good appointment that has been made.
Speaking at a Parliamentary Constituency Forum at Asante-Bekwai, in the Ashanti Region, the Majority Leader in Parliament Osei-Kyei Mensah-Bonsu said the level of ignorance about the core functions of parliamentarians amongst the average Ghanaian was worrying.
In most cases, Members of Parliament (MPs) have been unnecessarily misunderstood and attacked for not championing the cause of socio-economic development in their constituencies.
The august house has over the years lost some very experienced and knowledgeable personalities as their constituents agitate for their removal for not spearheading the development of their areas. This is unfortunate, he added.
He added that parliamentarians would continue to build consensus on issues that affected the interest of the people.
This is a major reason why Parliament in partnership with the National Commission on Civic Education (NCCE) to promote public understanding of the duties and responsibilities of parliamentarians.
In a ceremony earlier Monday, President Raul Castro, accompanied by vice president and likely successor Miguel Diaz-Canel, laid a single white rose in front of the white granite boulder of his tomb.
The ceremonies wrapped up nine days of sober commemoration of the first anniversary of Castro's death.
His death aged 90 on November 25 last year was followed by nine days of national mourning during which his ashes passed through the country as millions of Cubans lined the roads.
"We believe that if there is a problem in the region, it can be solved through dialogue," Rouhani said in a speech at the opening of a port in the southeastern city of Chabahar, broadcast by state television.
"We do not need arms nor the intervention of foreign powers. We can solve our problems ourselves through unity and dialogue."
Rouhani's comments follow an escalation in the bitter rivalry between Shiite-ruled Iran and Saudi Arabia's Sunni monarchy.
The two powers back opposing groups throughout the region -- notably in Syria and Yemen -- and Saudi leaders have lately stepped up efforts to counter Iran's growing influence, raising fears of further conflict.
But Rouhani said recent victories against the Islamic State group opened the way for the Middle East to move past its reputation for "war and conflict between Shiite and Sunni... and the presence and interventions of foreign powers".
Saudi Arabia and Iran's critics in the West have accused Tehran of seeking to dominate the region at the expense of its neighbours.
According to Zimbabwe Today, an anonymous family source said Grace Mugabe has not been happy since her 93-year-old husband resigned as President of the country.
Shes been very upset ever since Mugabe gave up to hand over power to his ousted Vice-president. She wanted a role as a First Lady, not as a woman who acts as subordinate. She is also not prepared to leave her luxurious lifestyle to live in a home of captivity. She thinks that the decor is despicable and beyond repair.
Meanwhile Judiciary spokesman, Lawrence Brown has confirmed divorce proceedings were in motion and if both parties agree, they could go their separate ways in about a month.
Grace Mugabe and Robert Mugabe have been married for 21 years. Grace was working as the secretary of then President Mugabe when they met.
After Robert Mugabes first wife died, Grace married the President and immediately became First Lady. She remained First Lady for 21 years until he husband was ousted last month.
READ ALSO: Ousted VP to be sworn in as Zimbabwe president
Sources close to the Mugabe family confirmed that Grace Mugabe has filed for divorce. She reportedly said she wants to enjoy some peaceful life after her husband was ousted.
President JuanManuel Santos said Restrepo's resignation would mean a shake-up in the government's negotiating team as both sides seek to extend the ceasefire beyond January 9.
"We are going to renew the team and continue the process, to see if we can resume the ceasefire and continue with the negotiation," Santos said.
Santos is pushing to sign a deal with the ELN to follow on from the success of a December 2016 peace deal with the South American country's other main rebel movement, the FARC.
Restrepo -- who said he is stepping down for personal reasons -- admitted his 18 months at the helm of the peace negotiations had not been easy but he believed progress has been made.
The ELN said on Twitter that it hoped the renewal of the government team would bring momentum to the peace process.
In a statement, the group said the ceasefire deal was at risk even though the parties had managed to sustain it and deliver humanitarian aid to the regions of greatest conflict.
It said the government violated the agreement when nine farmers involved in coca production were killed by security forces during a protest, and in two military attacks on ELN camps.
It also denounced what it said were attacks on imprisoned guerrillas.
The National Liberation Army, or ELN, began the historic truce with Colombia's armed forces on October 1, after half a century of fighting.
FARC and the ELN were formed in 1964 to fight for land rights and protect poor rural communities.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed in a car bomb attack on October 16, was one of the Mediterranean island's most prominent public figures thanks to a widely-read blog she used to campaign against corruption.
Her most explosive reports included allegations that members of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat's inner circle benefited from kickbacks. But the 53-year-old also focused attention on alleged murky behaviour by prominent opposition and business figures.
Speaking to reporters, the prime minister said a joint team of police, military and security services made the arrests following a near seven-week investigation carried out with help from the FBI, Europol and Finnish intelligence.
It also turned an unflattering spotlight on the EU country's problems with corruption and organised crime, both seen as having flourished against the backdrop of a booming economy.
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Muscat announced the arrest of eight of the suspects in a statement and then added in a tweet, that a further two had been detained.
The statement said the suspects had been arrested on the basis of "reasonable suspicion in connection with involvement in the murder" of Caruana Galizia.
All the suspects were Maltese nationals, it said, noting that some were "known to police".
Under Maltese law, they can be interrogated for 48 hours before a decision on whether to prosecute them has to be made.
Muscat would not divulge if the suspects included the alleged perpetrators of the assassination, or those suspected of commissioning it.
Nor would he comment on the suspected motive, saying he did not want to go into any detail for fear of prejudicing a potential trial.
The premier, who had described the slain journalist as his biggest adversary, reiterated his commitment to bringing her killers to justice.
"As I stated as soon as I learnt about this barbaric act, we will leave no stone unturned to get this case solved," he said.
"I am committed to doing so more than ever."
'One-woman Wikileaks'
Muscat's Labour Party government had offered a one million euro ($1.2 million) reward for information leading to a conviction of Caruana Galizia's killers.
Her sons had denounced the reward as a publicity stunt and called on Muscat to resign over the failings in the police and judiciary that contributed to their mother's death and his attempts to silence her through legal suits when she was still alive.
The family have repeatedly expressed concern that her death will be explained away as a criminal murder and that any connection with her revelations about the island's political elite will be swept under the carpet.
In her final post on Running Commentary, the widely-read blog she had written since 2008, Caruana Galizia voiced despair over the cronyism and sleaze she saw engulfing her island nation.
"There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate," she wrote minutes before she died in a blast so powerful her car was blown to pieces and her body was catapulted into a nearby field.
Friends subsequently revealed that she had feared she would be assassinated but had been reluctant to accept police protection that would have restricted her reporting activity.
A significant part of that had involved exposing what the massive Panama Papers data leak revealed about corruption at the highest levels of Maltese government.
Earlier this year, online news site Politico included the journalist on a list of 28 public figures "shaping, shaking and stirring Europe," describing her as "a one-woman WikiLeaks".
One hallmark of the American Dream the single-family home is dying as we know it.
And it's for good reason: The US needs more affordable housing.
"Around the country, many fast-growing metropolitan areas are facing a brutal shortage of affordable places to live, leading to gentrification, homelessness, even disease," Conor Dougherty writes in The New York Times.
The solution has long been to build upwards, erecting cheap condos and apartments in urban centers. But construction can no longer keep up with demand in many metros, so city planners are looking to single-family neighborhoods, valuable for their sprawl and low-density, for space to build out.
"It's an enormous problem, and it impacts the very course of America's future," Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard who studies cities, told the Times.
In California, the exemplar of the country's affordable housing crisis, Governor Jerry Brown passed more than a dozen new bills related to housing in September, many of which are aimed at speeding up new construction, especially in suburban neighborhoods.
In metros like the Bay Area and Los Angeles, single-family neighborhoods make up 90% of the housing stock, according to Issi Romem, BuildZoom's chief economist. "Single-family neighborhoods are where the opportunity is, but building there is taboo," Romem told the Times.
One way California is pushing new construction in the suburbs is by making it easier for homeowners to build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), or "granny flat," in their backyard.
A bill passed in January 2017 put the state in charge of ADU construction and removed some of the red tape for approval imposed by individual cities. Since then, some homeowners have jumped at the chance to build an ADU on their property, to house extended family or earn additional income from renters. Others, meanwhile, have staunchly opposed the legislation, saying it would erode the character and quality of single-family neighborhoods, and accomplish nothing in the way of housing creation.
But experts, like Dana Cuff, the founding director of CityLAB and a professor of architecture and urban design and planning at UCLA, said ADUs can help create the type of "postsuburban city" America needs.
The modern household no longer comprises the breadwinning dad, the stay-at-home mom, and 2.5 kids, Cuff previously told Business Insider. Instead, college graduates are moving back in, and homeowners need cash flow from renters and space for nannies, caretakers, and aging parents.
"There's just an infinite number of ways our housing should be made more flexible for our complete lives," she said, and building additional units on single-family lots "get the ball rolling."
Cuff's research suggests that ADUs are feasible for 5% to 10% of the 500,000 single-family lots in Los Angeles, enough to make a dent in Mayor Eric Garcetti's goal for 100,000 new housing units by 2021.
But while ADUs may be a solution for boosting housing supply in the long term, it's not a quick fix, she says.
A study was conducted by TL.com to trace the source of funding of these tech-startups.
Here are some of the top venture capitalists to consider while pitching your business idea
Singularity is a private investment company led by Issam Darwish, founder and CEO of IHS Towers.
Singularity is noted to have a vision for investing in and supporting dynamic entrepreneurs in disruptive technology, media and telecommunications industries.
The firm has a major focus on early and growth stages business and provides strategic valuable network and experience to help them achieve scale.
Since a decade ago, Singularity had invested at least of $50,000 in some notable tech businesses in Africa, some of which include Asoko Insights, PayStack, mPharma, Sliide, Maliyo Games, Flutterwave and SmileID.
TLcom Capital is a venture capital company found in 1999 with investments in telecommunications, media and technology companies in Europe, Isreal and Sub-Saharan Africa.
TLcom primary is also an early and expansion stage venture capitalists with targets for mobile; digital media; internet protocol (IP) technologies and services; broadband based network architecture and service platforms; semiconductors and materials; and web based applications, services and technologies.
The total asset under management of TLcom is estimated to be more than 200 million in some African tech-startups such as Movirtu and Upstream.
DraperDarkFlow is a new early venture capital fund that invests in African entrepreneurs and business with potentials to impact the world.
Launched in Silicon Valley this year by Tim Draper and Toro Orero, DraperDarkFlow invests between $100,000 - $200,000 in startups with initial traction.
Some of the African tech-startups under the DDF portfolio are SweepSouth, Paystack, Spreebie, VugaPay, Swiftly, TuseApp, Zagace and SliideAirtime.
Spark is a Nigerian based venture capitalist with a focus on building idea to fruition and small tech businesses to big companies.
The company focuses on Nigerian based tech-startups and consider Nigeria as the main gateway to the heart of Africa.
Spark has at least $10,000 investments in some of the leading tech-startups in Nigeria, which include FlutterWave, Hotels.ng, ToLet.ng and Nanovas.
TVCLabs, a Technology Business Incubation Company based in Lagos, Nigeria. The incubation was founded by Tomi Davies and focused on early-stage tech startups.
Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential nominee, issued one of the harshest rebukes by a prominent Republican of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who is facing multiple allegations of sexual misconduct with teenagers.
"Roy Moore in the US Senate would be a stain on the GOP and on the nation. Leigh Corfman and other victims are courageous heroes," he wrote. "No vote, no majority is worth losing our honor, our integrity."
Moore fired back at Romney minutes later, suggesting that the former GOP standard-bearer is a member of the elite and should be purged from the party.
"Either @MittRomney has lost his courage or he doesnt care about truth anymore. Sad day! Americas reawakening was led by @realDonaldTrump, not you Mitt. #DefeatTheElite #DrainTheSwamp," Moore wrote.
"Innocent until proven guilty is for criminal convictions, not elections. I believe Leigh Corfman. Her account is too serious to ignore. Moore is unfit for office and should step aside," Romney tweeted.
Romney's statement came just hours after President Donald Trump officially endorsed Moore.
"Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama," he tweeted. "We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more."
Moore broadcasted the president's endorsement on Monday afternoon, claiming Trump gave him his "full support."
"'Go get 'em, Roy!' - President Trump," he wrote. "Just got off the phone with President Trump who offered his full support and said he needs a fighter to help him in the US Senate. I look forward to fighting alongside the President to #MAGA!"
Moore has enjoyed continued support from Steve Bannon, Trump's former top White House strategist, who is helping recruit and support far-right candidates in the 2018 midterm elections.
Other Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have appeared to reverse course over whether Moore should drop out of the Senate race. Despite calling for the GOP nominee to step aside last month, saying that he believed the women's stories, McConnell refused to say on Sunday whether Moore belonged in the Senate.
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to federal agents about his conversations in December with the former Russian ambassador and one of President Donald Trump's first reactions was to attack the FBI as a "rigged" agency that had "ruined" Flynn's life while letting Democrat Hillary Clinton off the hook.
"So General Flynn lies to the FBI and his life is destroyed, while Crooked Hillary Clinton, on that now famous FBI holiday 'interrogation' with no swearing in and no recording, lies many times...and nothing happens to her?" Trump tweeted on Saturday night. "Rigged system, or just a double standard?"
He continued his attacks on Sunday, characterizing the bureau's investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state as "tainted" because of text messages sent last year by one of the agents in charge of that probe that appeared to show an anti-Trump skew.
The president also laid into James Comey, the former FBI director whom he blamed for leaving the bureau's reputation "in Tatters" after a "phony and dishonest Clinton investigation."
Speaking to reporters Monday morning, Trump again said that Flynn had been treated unfairly.
"I feel badly for General Flynn," Trump said. "Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI, and nothing happened to her."
He added: "She lied many times; nothing happened to her. Flynn lied, and they ruined his life. It's very unfair."
Scott Olson, a recently retired FBI agent who spent 20 years at the bureau and specialized in counterintelligence, acknowledged that "Comey did more damage than he realized or intended by how he handled things last year."
But Olson said he thought Trump was "actively keeping a narrative alive to counter the news coming out of Mueller's investigation," referring to Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 election and whether any of Trump's associates colluded with Moscow.
"And I think he'll continue to latch onto any and all available targets to support his counter-narrative," Olson said.
We have a couple of surprises left
Trump's suggestion that the FBI has sought to protect Clinton was undermined last November by Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who was a Trump campaign surrogate and close confidant.
A few days before the 2016 election, Giuliani indicated in an interview with Fox News that someone within or close to the FBI had leaked him information about the Clinton email investigation because they were "outraged" by the way Comey had handled it. Giuliani also suggested that he and the Trump campaign intended to weaponize that information before Election Day.
"We have a couple of surprises left," he said.
In another interview three days before Election Day, Giuliani claimed there was "a revolution going on" inside the FBI that had reached "a boiling point" over Comey's decision to close the investigation without recommending criminal charges.
The reason for the leaks to Giuliani and to multiple media outlets in the days leading up to the election was that "the FBI is Trumpland," one agent told The Guardian last November. Some agents, the person added, had openly discussed voting for Trump.
"The reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump," another unnamed agent told the publication, adding that Clinton was "the Antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel."
Olson argued that "the bureau is neither anti-Trump nor anti-Hillary."
"All political opinions are well represented in the ranks of FBI employees," he said. "And the debates over coffee and lunch are the same as anywhere else."
Asha Rangappa, an FBI counterintelligence special agent who served under President George W. Bush, largely echoed that assessment.
"There are people across the political spectrum, but by and large I'd say it is a politically conservative organization," she said.
"It's worth noting that the FBI has objectively investigated admins of both parties Iran-Contra, Whitewater, Lewinsky, Valerie Plame leak, etc. All of the presidents in these investigations let them take their course," she added. "The last president to vilify the FBI was Nixon."
Now Mueller knows what the truth is
That Trump has defended Flynn while vilifying the FBI signals a dual purpose for his attacks, experts say: undermine the bureau, and alert Flynn that he could be rewarded with a pardon if he limits what he tells Mueller, who is also investigating whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice when he fired Comey in May.
But taking his feud with the FBI and defense of Flynn into the court of public opinion may backfire for the president. Trump's tweet on Saturday showed why it seemed to indicate that he knew Flynn had lied to the FBI when he asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn, raising more questions about whether Trump tried to obstruct justice.
The White House scrambled to clean up the mess Trump's tweet created, claiming hours later that Trump's lawyer John Dowd had crafted the tweet unartfully.
Legal experts were incredulous.
"Most lawyers I know are so careful about what they write that they triple-check every letter they send out," said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor. "We're supposed to believe Trump's lawyer wrote a false tweet about the Mueller investigation and sent it out through the president's account?"
A pardon, moreover, would essentially be useless at this point, said Matt Miller, a former Department of Justice spokesman and Flynn is most likely aware of that.
"It would've worked before he started cooperating because Mueller could then compel Flynn's testimony and he could just claim not to remember anything," Miller said on Monday. "But now Mueller knows what the truth is."
The truth, court documents filed by Mueller's office on Friday say, is that Flynn had spoken to Sergey Kislyak, Russia's ambassador to the US, about sanctions on Russia during the presidential transition but told federal agents that the subject never came up.
Two of President Donald Trump's former top campaign aides said in an upcoming tell-all book on the election run that the then-Republican candidate once abandoned an aide at a McDonald's because his custom burger order was taking too long.
It just so happened that the former aide Trump reportedly left behind, Sam Nunberg, was the same operative who would later claim to invent what was a viral story about Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie fetching Trump's McDonald's order.
In the upcoming book "Let Trump Be Trump," which was provided to The Washington Post ahead of its release, authors and top former Trump campaign aides Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie wrote that Nunberg was intentionally left behind at a McDonald's because his custom order was taking too long.
"Leave him," Trump said. "Let's go."
In June 2016, The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza wrote in a parenthetical: "One Republican told me that a friend of his on the Trump campaign used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump's McDonald's order."
Nunberg claimed that he invented that tale to embarrass the governor. He made the claim in a lengthy Politico story on Christie last month .
"The sad reality is that it was believable," he said, laughing.
Lizza later tweeted that Nunberg had not been his source for the anecdote, and said Nunberg's claim that he invented the story was "incorrect."
At the time, Brian Murray, a Christie spokesman, called the McDonald's anecdote a "completely invented scenario" in an email exchange with Business Insider.
The CEOs of the two most valuable technology companies spoke over the weekend at a controversial event in China.
Both Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared at China's World Internet Conference, a gathering the Chinese government reportedly uses to promote its strategy of tightly controlling what's available online in the country.
Cook gave a keynote address on Sunday. "The theme of this conference developing a digital economy for openness and shared benefits is a vision we at Apple share," Cook said, according to Bloomberg. "We are proud to have worked alongside many of our partners in China to help build a community that will join a common future in cyberspace."
Pichai didn't give a speech, but he did appear on a panel with Xiaomi's founder, Lei Jun. "Technology is giving opportunities at a global scale, driving interconnectedness and cooperation, and I think it's a big trend and I think it's almost irreversible at this point," Pichai said.
Though the two star CEOs reportedly did not make remarks that touched directly on contentious policy issues, such as Apple's decision to pull VPN apps from its App Store under Chinese government pressure, or the fact that Google does not operate its services in mainland China, their appearance at the fourth annual conference lends legitimacy to the controversial event.
A top Communist Party official called for tight control of the internet while Cook was in the audience, according to The New York Times.
One opinion article described Cook as having attended to "kiss the ring." Apple registered $9.8 billion in sales in China for the most recent quarter that figures are available, just under 20% of Apple's overall revenue.
Questions from Congress
The sensitivity of the World Internet Conference is illustrated by a question posed to Apple and Cook by Sens. Ted Cruz and Patrick Leahy earlier this year.
The senators pointedly asked:
"Since 2014, the Chinese government has held a World Internet Conference. Charles Smith, the co-founder of the non-profit censorship monitoring website GreatFire, described foreign guests of the Conference as 'complicit actors in the Chinese censorship regime and are lending legitimacy to Lu Wei, the Cyberspace Administration of China and their heavy-handed approach to Internet governance. They are, in effect, helping to put all Chinese who stand for their constitutional right to free speech behind bars.' What role, if any, has Apple or its employees had with respect to the World Internet Conference in China? Does Apple support the conference?"
Apple's vice president for public policy, Cynthia Hogan, replied in a November 21 letter:
"Apple is not a financial sponsor of the conference. Apple has participated in the World Internet Conference in the past, and Apple employees, including our CEO, will participate in the future. We are convinced that continued engagement is the surest way to effect change. We believe in the free flow of information everywhere, and we remain committed to this ongoing effort in all countries in which we operate, across a complicated world."
Less than three weeks later, Cook would be the surprise keynote speaker at the World Internet Conference's opening ceremony.
The Bishop of Lagos West Anglican Communion announced this in a recent interview with The Nation, where he discussed the tithing issue and more ahead of the Dioceses 18th anniversary.
What the Anglican church uses tithes for
According to him, his church is different from others because of how tithes are used. Bishop Odedeji stated that the church uses tithes for the gospel, not for its priests.
In his words, The difference between our set up and other denominations is that the tithe is not for the priest. The tithe is for the church. In fact, most of our churches, the highest income they have is from the tithes. If I have to take the tithe of this cathedral, we will not be able to maintain the premises because the bulk of the money that my Cathedral collects is from tithes.
... So, it might be rocking some other denominations but not the Anglican Church or the Orthodox churches because the tithe is for God and the tithe is being used for the gospel. The tithe is being used for evangelism.
As a bishop of this Diocese, Im not entitled to the tithes of the people. I dont touch it. They dont give it to me because it is exclusively for the use of the church.
If it is a one-man church, everything comes to you; your wife is probably the treasurer. It is not like that in the Anglican Church. In the Anglican Church, three people sign a cheque. How does the money belong to the pastor? So the Anglican Church is so different. And that is why we thank God that we have been in existence for more than 150 years and we are still very solid.
Where does the church stand on tithing?
Bishop Odedeji also revealed the churchs stance on tithing. During the interview, he urged people to stop arguing because paying ones 10 percent is scriptural.
In his words, Ive listened to a lot of debates going on in the recent past and Im of the opinion that the bible is very clear And tithe is scriptural.
It is biblical and the condition is there that if you want God to rebuke devourers and we must allow food to be in the store.
My stand on tithing is that whatever is scriptural should not be open to debate. It is unfortunate.
ALSO READ: What popular pastors say about tithing and giving
Primate of the Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion weighs in
In November, 2017, Nicholas Okoh, the Primate of the Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion also shared his thoughts on the controversial tithing issue.
His grace stated that it is not by force to pay your 10% because God does not need tithe to survive. He explained that this is exactly why Christians that do not pay their tithes are not cursed.
In his words, God does not compel us to go, he only makes us willing to go.
Tithing is a very ancient tradition, Abraham paid tithe to Melchizedek and people have become transfixed to that idea till today, but in the New Testament, giving modalities have other options.
One, it says, set aside something every week which you think would be handsome for the glory of God and give that. Whether that is 10 percent or whatever percent, I dont know, but the instruction is, set aside something every week.
Then, there is the gift required to be given by all; the first concept is that your life is a living sacrifice. A sacrifice is something you offer and withdraw your hand, that means the Christian offers his life totally and the totality of his training, his money and everything he has belonged to God.
Therefore, the question of saying, God take 10 percent, I would keep 90 percent does not arise. Let me give an example: If you are a tither and you give 10 percent to the Church, and after giving this percentage, somebody is very sick, and you still have your 90 percent, will you close your eyes to the persons need?You see, that is one of the weaknesses of tithing if you follow it mechanically.
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The academic pace of the students was fraught with accreditation issues which prompted the former Minister of Education, Prof Ruqayyatu Rufa'i to recommend the dissolution of science courses in UNIABUJA.
In 2012, the Minister announced that medicine, agriculture, veterinary medicine and engineering courses in the university be suspended following panel recommendations.
This announcement led to agitations from the students asking the government to transfer them to another school.
Fortunately for the students, the panel's report was not implemented and that saved their academic pursuit from being disrupted midway. But then, the university still had to ensure the courses are accredited to authenticate the certificate of its graduates.
The University secured the accreditation and 18 out of the 30 pioneer student finally graduated in November 2017. The remaining 12 failed their final exam and would have to wait till next year for their graduation.
Ekiti State University (EKSU) is battling with the same accreditation problem as the medical students of the University's College of Medicine remain stagnant in their academic pursuit in the school.
Expressing their frustration, in October, the students flooded Twitter Nigeria with #stagnanteksumed to announce their plights and beg the government of Ekiti State to find a solution to the accreditation problem inhibiting their graduation.
The students lamented that the Ekiti State University College of Medicine has been stagnant for years saying they have spent eight years and they are still in 400 levels.
Ekiti State University started operation in 2009, the pioneer students of the College of Medicine are still in 400 Level according to the students and their course of study has still not been accredited.
When will EKSU produce medical graduates?
How many years more will it take for the university to get it College of Medicine accredited? How many more years will it take the students who have been stuck in 400 level for years to graduate?
These are the questions neither the university management nor the students can answer but UNIABUJA has set 12 years infamous standard for schools that start a program without accreditation.
Will EKSU medical students spend more than 12 years to study medicine? Only time can tell.
The Joint Action Committee, JAC comprising of Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities, SSANU, Non-Academic Staff Union, NASU and National Association of Academic Technologists, NAAT has directed its members in all universities across the country to resume their suspended strike.
In a letter to all branch Chairmen titled: Directives to immediately resume the suspended strike was signed by the three unions under JAC.
The union stated in the letter that the strike was necessitated because Federal Government did not clarify the criteria for the disbursement of the N23 billion it approved for the universities to settle earned allowances arrears in October.
Complaining about the sharing formula, the union said that about N15.10 billion was allocated to ASUU, while about N7.929 billion was allocated to the non-teaching staff unions comprising SSANU, NAAT and NASU.
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The letter reads in part:
In the said letter, the Federal Government was given seven (7) days to explain the criteria for the said allocation and do the needful. The deadline has elapsed without any response from the Federal Government of Nigeria.
In view of the above, therefore, you are hereby directed to resume the suspended indefinite strike action as from 12 midnight, Sunday, December 3, 2017. During this period, the strike shall be total and comprehensive.
Further to this, all our branches are to convene a congress of Joint Action Committee by 8:00 am on Monday, December 4, 2017, to commence the strike immediately.
The three union group have however commenced their industrial action and universities across the country have been thrown into another round of crisis again.
Jason Momoa, who played Khal Drogo in the first season, recently visited the set of "Game of Thrones" in Belfast to spend time with his former showrunners and castmates.
During his stay, he learnt some spoilers which he wouldn't give away, but is very excited about.
Just knowing how amazing this season is going to be Momoa told EW.
Its going to be the greatest thing thats ever aired on TV. Its going to be unbelievable. Its going to f up a lot of people. And it was a bummer because Im a huge fan and I didnt want to know whats going on. I was like, Damn, I didnt want to know that!
Earlier, when photos of Momoa on set appeared online, there were reports that the character who passed away at the end of season one will return for the show's finale.
I just showed up to see [producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss] and I just happened to see people on set, Momoa says.
I havent been over there in a long time. You just want to see your friends and you end up make headlines going, Drogos back! and Im like, Hes dead! He cant come back, it wouldnt work.'
Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow in "Game of Thrones" knows how the series will end, and it got him teary.
Speaking on BBCs The One Show, the actor revealed that he is really emotional about the final season of the show, saying that he cried after reading the final episode.
The final season of "Game of Thrones" is still months away - 2019 is actually a very long time - but there have been interesting spoilers to keep fans going until then.
A recent photo shared by a fan reveals that contrary to what Season 7 finale might have hinted, fans haven't seen the last of Tormund GiantBane, whom we last saw on the run from the White Walkers after they destroyed the wall and invaded the North.
Ellie Kendrick, who plays Meera Reed on the show, recently confirmed that she probably wont be back in Season Eight.
Mr. Obi told newsmen at the Conference on Networking with the Giants organised by African Youths Entrepreneurs at the Oriental Hotel in Lagos, that Nigerian leaders must deploy concerted efforts in tackling the Libyan issue.
He said that such tragedy called on Nigerians to have a re-think about the trajectory the country was headed to.
If you listened to my speech, you will see a deliberate comparison of Nigeria with other countries of relative development trajectory in the eighties and how those countries have all overtaken us
What we are witnessing in Libya is part of the consequences of that failure. Such occurrences should be utilised by us to advise ourselves as a country that we must wake up and put this country on the right path to avoid implosion in the future, Obi said.
Speaking further, Obi called on those saddled with the responsibility of leadership to immediately commence real governance by doing those things that other nations did that took them out of the woods, such as savings for the future and reduction of the cost of governance.
The suspect who also goes by the name Kelvin was reportedly arrested alongside his Indian accomplice, Abbas Mustan Seer Zanjeer Barwala, who hails from Mumbai but lives in Adugodi, following a tip-off.
It was gathered that various narcotic substances were seized from the suspects in a raid in the apartment they used as their hideout.
Indian Times reports that the police received a tip-off about two people supplying narcotic substances to college students and software professionals and during the raid on the apartment, police seized 5 grams of crack Cocaine, 4.2 kg of Marijuana and 120 gram of charas.
A spokesperson for the police who confirmed the arrest of Ndubuisi, said:
Ndubisi had come to India on a student visa which had expired and he had not renewed it. In 2015, he was arrested by the Mico Layout police for selling drugs and the trial is on.
A majority of our site visitors favoured the use of canes on disobedient learners as opposed to being left alone. The responses were forwarded in the light of a tragic incident which led to the death of a female instructor, Odilinye Rita, who was assaulted by the mother of a pupil named Okafor Chinaza.
The incident which occurred on Wednesday, November 29, 2017, at the Starlight Secondary School, Ogidi, Anambra State, brought to the fore the lack of cooperation between educational institutions and parents, which has seen the latter object to the scolding of their children.
Rita was put at the receiving end of an undue violence after flogging the student who had refused to carry out an assigned task involving the cleaning of a classroom as indicated on a roster. According to Vanguard News, Chinaza was rude and unwilling to heed correction given by the deceased, a behaviour that prompted some scolding.
ALSO READ: A female teacher was beaten to death for scolding student
Her mother's reaction seemed a bright reflection of the type of training she had been exposed to - a factor that resulted in the demise of her teacher.
Dip in moral values instilled by schools
There have been an apparent reduction in the quality of morals instilled in pupils by their schools as a result of the reservation against corporal punishment which has helped put some naughty students in check in the past.
Admittedly, some teachers have taken to extreme measures while disciplining erring pupils, a factor that has discouraged the application of tough corrective measures.
The 2016 battering of a female pupil, Ogechi Anyalewechi by administrators at the Eva Adelaja Girls Junior Secondary School in Bariga, Lagos, is one in a recent list of cases that has prevented the use of force when correcting students.
Anyalewechi was 14 and had suffered the worst treatment possible for her impulsive reaction after the Head Girl of the school slapped her for being rude. The school principal as well as other senior teachers had ensured that she suffered the consequence of returning the slap which left her body in a bad shape due to an intense beating.
This act received condemnation from Princess Uzamat Akinbile-Yussuf, a Lagos State Commissioner for Youth and Social Development, who insisted that such brutality will not be condoned all in the name of discipline, The Nation News reports.
Some parents have raised fears that this position might have a detrimental effect on the upbringing of their children.
During my days (mid 60s-mid 70s), there was discipline. If you did anything wrong you were flogged. In the secondary school, especially in the boarding house, we were given corporal punishment. However, society has changed and we are looking up to America.
"In America you cannot beat children. But the maturity of children in America is different from our own children here; so if we just import those laws and behaviour, its going to spell doom for us. In America, where you dont beat children or use verbal abuse and all that, you now have gun problems.
"Students go to school with guns and they shoot their classmates, it is indiscipline. So if you refuse to flog your children, its going to spell doom for Nigeria. In my days, in the boarding house you have senior prefects, they can flog you and you have bruises and you wont even have the guts to report to the house master.
"It is discipline. If I flog my child, and he has bruises, the government will tell you it is wrong; but if we dont, it will spell doom for us," a parent, Mr. Williams Oladeji told The Nation.
Addressing the issue appears to be a very delicate one and requires long thinking and not hasty decisions. The Biblical book of Proverbs warns that sparing a child of the rod implies hatred for the individual.
Perhaps, a thorough review of the educational policies will be apt in a bid to quickly change what has benefited students who are now adults in the past. The fact is that the mindset of children born in the current era is rather unique and should call for a special approach as opposed to indulging them.
Recall that the hashtags which debuted on Twitter on Friday, December 1, 2017, arose as a result of a series of abuse and extra-judicial killing of Nigerians by operatives of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad [SARS] of the Nigerian Police Force.
Many Nigerians who have either been victims or had family members and friends who have been victims of such abuses have been calling for the scrapping of the squad or at best, revamp it but the Nigeria Police has refuted allegations that officers of SARS ever engage in torture, extortion and abuse of Nigerians.
See one instance of police brutality in this tweet video:
Speaking on the widespread hashtags that have had the support of celebrities, politicians and Nigerians from all walks of life, the Force Public Relations Officer [FPPRO], SP Jimoh Moshood, operatives of SARS are very disciplined officers and would never behave in a manner that would constitute an abuse of citizens no matter the circumstances.
In a statement published on the official website of the Police Force, Sp Moshood said:
"Anybody who wants the SARS to be scrapped may be an armed robber or has criminal tendencies. We do not take any infraction or violation of human rights of any Nigerian likely.
You know that so many police officers have been dismissed and even charged to court. So, Nigerians should not give in to insinuations from people that just come to the social media and start spreading falsehood.
Such people spreading such information may likely be armed robbers themselves. There are laid down rules for police procedures and any police officer that goes beyond the boundary to do something outrageous which is against the law is apprehended.
As we speak, SARS is doing fantastically well across the country in reducing incidents of robbery to the barest minimum. They are doing very, very well.
There has not been any specific violation of human rights against any SARS personnel. So, anybody that is spreading such a rumour is not doing the nation any good. SARS has no excesses and when there is any, we do investigate.
The call for SARS to be scrapped should be condemned by all well-meaning Nigerians. Anybody calling for their proscription is not doing the nation any good and such people should be suspected of having something to hide.
However, despite SP Moshood's explanation that SARS officers do not engage in human rights abuse of Nigerians, there have been cases where innocent people have either been killed, maimed, extorted or brutalized by operatives of the squad.
Many Nigerians have also been narrating their personal experiences in the hands of the operatives on the social media as witnessed by their tweets.
Zoonoses, on the other hand, are animal diseases that are transmissible to humans. Thus making Monkeypox a transmitted disease.
The disease which is said to be caused by monkey virus was first recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1970, during a period of an intensified effort to eliminate smallpox.
It would break out in Nigeria for the third time in September 2017, with thirty-one suspected cases reported across seven states; as it was first experienced in 1971 and 1978 respectively.
However, the outbreak of the disease which occurred in September seems to have been curtailed to some extent. New cases are not being reported like before and tension has obviously subsided.
But this doesn't go to say that the disease has been eliminated. It's a virus, and there's every possibility of another outbreak.
Be that as it may, here are some certain things we've decided to let you know about Monkeypox.
1. The symptoms of monkeypox are similar to but milder than the symptoms of smallpox in human beings.
2. Monkeypox begins with fever, headache, muscle aches, and exhaustion.
3. The main difference between symptoms of smallpox and monkeypox is that monkeypox causes lymph nodes to swell (lymphadenopathy) while smallpox does not.
4. The incubation period (time from infection to symptoms) for monkeypox is usually seven to fourteen days but can range from five to twenty-one days.
5. Patients are expected to develop a rash within one to three days (sometimes longer) after the appearance of fever; where the various stages of the rash appear, often beginning on the face and then spreading elsewhere on the body.
6. The face (in 95% of cases), and palms of the hands and soles of the feet (75%) are most affected. Evolution of the rash from maculopapules (lesions with flat bases) to vesicles (small fluid-filled blisters), pustules, followed by crusts occurs in approximately ten days.
7. Human-to-human transmission can result from close contact with infected respiratory tract secretions, skin lesions of an infected person or objects recently contaminated by patient fluids or lesion materials.
8. The disease can be transmitted from human to human through physical touch, contact with stool, and blood contact.
9. According to statistics, ten percent of those who contract Monkeypox died as a result of the disease.
10. It is believed that children are more susceptible to the infection.
11. The number of the lesions varies from a few to several thousand, affecting oral mucous membranes (in 70% of cases), genitalia (30%), and conjunctivae (eyelid) (20%), as well as the cornea (eyeball).
Medical reports have it that, lesions progress through the following stages before falling off:
Macules
Papules
Vesicles
Pustules
Scabs
12. Although there is presently no known or proven, safe treatment for the disease, vaccination against smallpox has been proven to be 85% effective in preventing monkeypox.
However, the vaccine is no longer available to the public after it was discontinued following global smallpox eradication in 1980.
The schedule of the event will include runway shows, informative seminars, exhibitions and the #LUFS after party put in place to create a networking channel between the upcoming and established fashion designers as well as fashion journalists, enthusiast, trendsetters, retailers and consumers.
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"One of the aims of the show is to show that fashion is not just a passion, but can be used as a tool to empower the youths of Africa by creating wealth & economic growth" the organizers shared about the event in an email.
"The city of Lagos (which is a cluster of design & innovation) and also the hub of the Nigerian Fashion Industry's creative process (encompasses everything from designers, textile & apparel brands,retailers, wholesales, bloggers, market research analyst,etc.) would host the show and would kick-start a new process of empowering the youths economically through fashion" the organizers revealed.
ALSO READ:5 fashion trends you could wear in 2018
The LUFS is the first platform in Africa that caters for streetwear/urban Fashion Designers.
Details:
Date: 10th of December 2017
The Commands Public Relations Officer, Mr Suleiman Baba confirmed the arrest of the suspects to News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday in Yola.
Baba said that the suspects were apprehended following a tip-off that led to the arrest of one of them whose confession and that of their four victims ranging between the ages of 12 and 10 were used to fish out the rest.
Baba said medical reports confirmed that the minors had been violated.
We are taking the suspects to court and they will be charged with rape, criminal force and assault on minors, Baba said.
While nothing that the victims were girl hawkers, Baba cautioned parents on sending their little children to hawk instead of school.
Parents need to be vigilant on the movement of their wards if we must tackle this problem, Baba said.
ALSO READ:40 terrorists to surrender to NSCDC in Borno
Baba gave the names of the suspects as:Abdullahi Ibrahim (32), Musa Mohammed (31), Bakura Mohammed (39), Joseph John (29), and Mohammed Musa (42).
Also speaking, a resident of Mubi town, Mr Danladi Chamber who lauded the development said residents would be mobilised to support NSCDC to expose more suspects.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), recalls that the young Ali was run over by Boko Haram terrorists with motorcycle when they invaded Chibok village in 2013.
Young Ali, who sustained spinal cord injury from the attack, was flown to Dubai by an NGO, Global Initiative for Peace, Love and Care ((GIPLC) in conjunction with Telveras Group.
Alihs treatment was sponsored by Dickens Sanomi Foundation, owners of Teveras Group of companies.
On arrival at the airport, Mr Goodluck Hayi, Board Member of Dickens Sanomi Foundation, expressed happiness that Alih, who was taken away on a wheel chair in September, could now walk.
Hayi said the initial amount estimated for the surgery could not cover the cost at the end, saying it was not necessary to disclose the amount spent since it was a charity work.
He announced that Ali would be given scholarship by the Taleveras Foundation to study up till university level.
According to him, the Foundations work is hinged on the principle of love and care which it demonstrates by being its neighbours keeper as well as teaching and showing it.
Dickens Sanomi Foundation will be working with Alis family through GIPLC and will be supporting Ali post surgery life to help him settle into Abuja and grow as a child.
About three months ago, we all witnessed Ali Ahmadu being taken away on a wheel chair, today to the Glory of God we are here to receive Ali Ahmadu, walking handsomely into our arms.
What started as a painful Journey for little Ali four years ago that confined him to a wheel chair, has transformed into a journey of hope, love and care, he said.
Also speaking, Mr Nuhu Kwajafah, the Coordinator of GIPLC, said that the little boy never had access to any form of orthodox medication until he was discovered by the NGO.
Kwajafah said that Alih was at the mercy of a traditionalist and was immobile and fast deteriorating physically and mentally from that period till the first quarter of 2017, when GIPLC made contact with him.
He noted that during this period, access to education, nutrition, psychosocial tuning, water, sanitation or hygiene, was very limited, if not non-existent.
The organisation facilitated the relevant examinations and digital/lab tests for assessment and proper medical attention.
The results revealed that he couldnt access the quality care required to literally realign him toward a better quality of life, hence the decision to make prerequisite travel arrangements to travel abroad.
After duly assessing the various options open to us from all over the world, we resolved to take him to the United Arab Emirates.
Today, Ali is back to Nigeria and all his sufferings are over as he can now walk.
The spine behind has been fixed, some screws were added and after one year, it would be removed and we really thank God, the media and our partners, Dickens Sanomi Foundation, he said.
Kwajafah said that GIPLC was committed to Alis post surgery well being and had received confirmation from Dickens Sanomi Foundation to support his settling in the society.
He said that agreement had been reached to keep Ali in Abuja to give him special care as well as meeting both his medical and educational needs to guarantee him good future.
Next week is Alis birthday, but he has never celebrated his birthday because of his predicament.
He had been lying down for three years but on Dec. 10, he will be celebrating his birthday with over 2,000 orphans where he will interact with other children.
The state Commissioner of Information and Strategy, Ahmad Sajoh, who confirmed the incident, also described it as unfortunate.
Sajoh said the state government had held an emergency security meeting on the incident and had taken measures to contain the situation.
He said that military personnel and policemen had been deployed to the affected villages to contain the attackers.
I cant say the number of casualties for now as security men are still there to chase out the attackers, Sajoh said.
The Spokesman of the Police Command in the state, SP Othman Abubakar, who also confirmed the incident, said mobile policemen, soldiers, air force and other security personnel from sister security agencies had been deployed to contain the situation.
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Abubakar also said that more highway Police Patrol teams were drafted along the YolaNumanGombe road to ensure safety of travelers along the road.
Numerous Nigerians took to social media to accuse the unit of several misconducts ranging from harassment, extortion, assault and extra-judicial killings.
In response, the IGP expressed his concern with public interest and demanded for more effective service that's in line with the nation's rule of law.
This was disclosed in a statement signed by the Police Public Relations Officer, Jimoh Moshood, on Monday, December 4, 2017.
The statement read, "The Nigeria Police Force has observed the recent trends of event in the Social Media on the #ENDSARSNOW and the controversy being generated by the innuendos from the allegations and other misconceptions as it concerns the Operational roles and activities of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a detachment of the Nigeria Police Force.
"Undoubtedly, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) have been doing very well in fighting violent crimes such as Armed Robbery, Kidnappings and Cattle Rustling in the country in the recent time and this has resulted in drastic reduction of incidents of the mentioned violent crimes nationwide.
"However, the Inspector General of Police, IGP Ibrahim K. Idris NPM, mni concerned with public interest and the need to reposition the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) for more efficiency and effective service delivery to all Nigerians and ensure that the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) operates based on International Core Value of Policing with integrity and make sure the rule of law prevails in the operations and activities of the outfit, the IGP has directed the immediate re-organization of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) nationwide and instant investigation into all the allegations, complaints and infractions levelled against the personnel of the Special Anti Robbery Squad across the country by the IGP X-Squad of the Force."
Under the new arrangement, a Commissioner of Police is now the overall head of the Federal Anti-Robbery Squad nationwide under the Department of Operations, Force Headquarters Abuja.
The IGP also ordered for all SARS personnel nationwide to undergo a new training program to be organized in collaboration with some Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), Local and International NGOs, and other Human Rights Organizations.
The statement read, "In the new arrangement, a Commissioner of Police is now the overall head of the Federal Anti-Robbery Squad nationwide under the Department of Operations, Force Headquarters Abuja.
"The Police Zonal Commands, State Commands and Divisions will continue to operate anti-crime units/sections, crime prevention and control squads and teams imperative to prevent and detect crimes and criminalities in their Area of Responsibilities, and other crack squads necessary to sustain law and order and protection of life and properties in their Area of responsibilities (AOR).
"Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS) will now exist and operate in the State and Zonal Commands under the Commissioner of Police (F-SARS) at the Force Headquarters.
"A Federal SARS Commander of a Rank of Chief Superintendent of Police (CSP) and not below Superintendent of Police (SP) will be in charge of FSARS in State and Zonal Commands across the Country.
"All Commissioners of Police have been directed by the Inspector General of Police to comply with this directive with immediate effect and warn their personnel not to pose as SARS operatives.
"The IGP X-Squad has been mandated to go round the Commands and Police Formations nationwide to ensure strict compliance and apprehend any erring police officer.
"Furthermore, a new training program to be organized by the Force in collaboration with some Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), Local and International NGOs, and other Human Rights Organizations on core Police Duties, Observant of Human Rights and Handling, Care and Custody of Suspects have been directed by the Inspector General of Police for all Federal SARS personnel nationwide with immediate effect."
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A day later, on April 17, Maurice was among the six detainees that were killed in custody even though the officers alleged they were killed in a gun duel.
To cover up the extra-judicial killings, the officers involved sold the corpses of the victims to the Anatomy Department of UNICAL allegedly for N11,000 each.
Over the past few days, the internet has been awash with a lot of anger directed towards one of the country's most notorious law enforcement units.
You only have to be on the internet for a few minutes before you encounter the narration of one ugly encounter with SARS and then stumble upon another one that's just as ugly or worse with several stories of abuse: physical and sexual; stories of gross incompetence; and more worryingly, stories of extortion, exploitation and other criminal conducts as dastardly as casual extra-judicial killings such as the one experienced by Maurice and those other poor victims.
As Maurice's case proves, this isn't a new problem, Nigerians have just about had enough of it now and ready to take a stand against such an ugly mess.
SARS is one of the 14 units under the Nigeria Police Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department. Their operations chiefly include arresting, investigating and prosecuting suspected armed robbers, murderers, kidnappers, hired assassins and others involved in violent crimes.
While they have a clearly defined role to enforce the law, their interpretation of it has been quite problematic.
I have never had any interesting personal encounter with any SARS operative, but I clearly remember when they were first thrown on the streets of my hometown a few years ago.
They were not revered for putting cuffs on armed robbers and kidnappers, they were largely feared for their savage harassment of "indecently-dressed" ladies and suspiciously too-decently-dressed men.
They didn't operate by the law of probable cause, instead, they winged their interpretation of the law and you could find yourself in their crosshairs by something as simple as a tattoo, or 'overgrown' hair, or the possession of something as harmless as a laptop.
While that initial dread died down over the following months, they just merely evolved into more sinister tinkering of the law and assumed more roles for themselves that the law didn't think sane enough to gift them.
When the 2016 World Internal Security and Police Index (WISPI) report ranked the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) as the worst in the world, the institution told Nigerians that the report was an attempt to "cast aspersions on the achievement of the police" and should be dismissed as "complete falsehood" because it "doesnt reflect the achievements of the force".
If only.
Nigerians know there's a lot of truth to the report mostly due to what their experiences have been with officers of the law.
The Nigerian Police is not one that's accorded respect for its pristine professional conduct, and that's something that's made abundantly clear by its SARS division (and a certain Head of the Police Public Complaint Rapid Response Unit ).
Last year, Amnesty International (AI), a human rights group, described SARS as "a police unit created to protect the people (that) has instead become a danger to society, torturing its victims with complete impunity while fomenting a toxic climate of fear and corruption"
The report revealed "a pattern of ruthless human rights violations where victims are arrested and tortured until they either make a 'confession' or pay officers a bribe to be released.
"SARS officers are getting rich through their brutality. In Nigeria, it seems that torture is a lucrative business."
Of course, the report was also branded "a fantasy".
In 2015, then-Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, split SARS into two units in an effort to curb numerous human rights abuses.
He mandated that the same officers cannot make arrest and investigate the same case, thereby, isolating the operational men from human rights abuses and other allegations.
Evidence suggests this has not worked out quite well.
The unit operates with the level of impunity that has made them the judge, jury and executioner of the helpless Nigerian.
So you groom well as a young man? You must be a Yahoo Boy.
Or you dress in an "unconventional" way as a young woman? You must be a prostitute that deserves to be groped for hiding God-knows-what.
Or how can you afford a car? Or how can you afford to use an iPhone in this Buhari economy? Or how can you be walking at night if you're not a thief?
Since when has any of these become crimes?
Officers working for one of the nation's most important law enforcement units do not realise, or willfully ignore, the fact that the laws of the nation is not a subordinate to their personal thoughts and ideals.
The whole point of their existence is following the letters of the law to bring criminals to justice and protect and serve law-abiding citizens who need their presence to remain safe.
On the contrary, the average Nigerian will readily treat a SARS operative with the same amount of caution and dread that they would afford a dangerous criminal intent on causing them harm.
After all, what is the difference?
A SARS officer will target you for what you have and extort you for it, same as a criminal.
A SARS officer will threaten to take your life if you don't submit to his inappropriate demands, same as a criminal.
A SARS officer will illegally detain you and make ransom demands, same as a kidnapper.
A SARS officer will take your life if it serves his personal whims, same as a hired killer.
That's what the personal accounts of many Nigerians indicate; and too many Nigerians have raised their voices this past week for it to be a mean-spirited campaign to sully the reputation of the institution.
Make no mistake that the idea of a SARS unit is one that's very important to stemming the outbreak of heinous crimes in the country, more than we already have anyway.
However, the operational conduct of this current SARS doesn't appear to be one that has only a few bad eggs straying from the line, they seem to all operate by the same official handbook.
Law-abiding citizens of the country are done with being used as cannon fodder for the impunity of the men that should be protecting their interests, getting marched down to ATMs to pay their 'bail'.
No law-abiding citizen should fear for their lives just because they're in the vicinity of a place where "police are responding to incidents in real life."
The outrage, the outburst, the hurt that's currently boiling on the internet should not be discarded as mere "frightening dreams" that Nigerians should "pray to God not to allow it happen".
It's a daily reality for a lot of innocent Nigerians.
That 2016 AI report concluded, "Our research has exposed the callous workings of a police squad operating outside of the law and inflicting daily brutality on Nigerians who are often legally powerless to defend themselves against criminal accusations, let alone from the torture meted out by SARS."
Relevant authorities, such as the NPF hierarchy and, more importantly, lawmakers in the National Assembly, should listen to what's a loud and clear customer service complaint and respond in the most responsible way possible.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that hundreds of placard-carrying protesters from David West New Site Estate blocked their major road, preventing motorists from passing through the area.
Osuchukwu Sam-Bell, Chairman, Landlords/Residents Association, said the community had been in darkness since August due to a transformer fault.
We want our transformer repaired and restored, we need prepaid meters; EKEDC should come and install our new 500kva transformer now, he said.
Mr Zubby Anazodo, one of the affected residents, said business activities had been paralysed in the area due to the four-month outage.
Artisans are out of business, people selling frozen foods have closed their shops, it is no longer business as usual in the community again.
Our children are suffering, you see them with heat rashes and even our wives cannot preserve foods inside refrigerators any longer.
We cant sleep in our houses comfortably with the noise of generating sets and harsh weather.
It is unfortunate that we are going through this while our neighbouring communities are enjoying uninterrupted power supply, this is injustice, he said.
Arazodo appealed to EKEDC to repair the transformer and restore power supply to the community ahead of the Christmas festivities.
When contacted, EKEDC spokesman, Mr Ademola Adegoke, said the company had replaced the transformer servicing the community twice but packed up on both occasions.
This was caused by the power load in the community which far outstrip the capacity of the transformer.
The only way to save the transformer from breakdown is to rotate power supply but the community will not allow our men to do this as our men were always harassed and chased out each time they went there for load shedding, he said.
The EKDC official said that the company was finding it difficult to install the new transformer because of the huge cost involved.
We pleaded that we should be given sometime so we can include the cost of installation in our budget but the community is insisting on immediate installation of the transformer.
We even proposed to use the transformer donated to by the state government to replace the damaged one pending when we will get materials to install the damaged one.
The community yet again rejected this move and insisted that we must replace the damaged one and as well install the one donated in a fresh location, he said.
He said that the NASSCOA would be a multi-sectoral legislative platform for waging the war against HIV/AIDS in the National Assembly Community and the WTF to mobilise funds for the task.
According to him, the National Assembly shall continue to invoke its powers of appropriation under the constitution to ensure the provision of necessary resources towards the eradication of HIV.
The United Nations statistics on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and related infections is very worrisome and the vigorous global response against the disease seems to be insufficient.
Nigeria recorded the very first case of HIV just over 30 years ago, from this single case, we now have over three million people infected by the virus.
More people die of HIV infection in Nigeria than in any other country in the world, with about 180 deaths every year and we also have the largest number of newly infected children, Saraki said.
The Senate President said that Nigerians with HIV infection now live longer, can marry and have HIV free children.
He, however, said that more vigorous response was required to meet the 90-90-90 target of an AIDS free generation by 2030.
In his remarks, the Clerk to the National Assembly, Mr Mohammed Omolori, said that anti-retroviral treatment was still not available to all who need it.
Omolori said that prevention campaigns had still not been disseminated to the level needed and people living with HIV were still discriminated against.
He said that the National Assembly, being the custodian of the powers of appropriation, has great role to play in the facilitation and funding of the national response effort of the government.
The Clerk said that the NASSCOA and ETF would lead advocacy on resource mobilisation and promote partnership within and outside the National Assembly
It would provide technical leadership and advocacy for the implementation of prevention, control and impact mitigation strategies for HIV/AIDS.
It will encourage multi disciplinary collaborations and networking among stakeholders, organise training of personnel involved in the control and prevention of HIV/AIDS.
It will also facilitate the provision of care, support and treatment of people living with HIV/AIDS in the National Assembly.
According to Omolori, the WTF will address the mobilization of funds for the prevention, treatment and care for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and incidental infections.
He said that the fund would also be used to for advocacy for the prevention and control of HIV/AIDS response at all levels.
The Chief Executive Officer, Institute of Human Virology Nigeria (IHVN), Dr Patrick Dakum, called for better technical production of antiretroviral drugs, condoms and test kits in the country to help reduce their cost.
Dakum, who was represented by Dr Young Oluokun, Regional Manager, IHVN, said the Nigeria would be using up its scarce resources as long as it continued to import antiretroviral drugs.
Arise hails from Ekiti State in Nigerias South West region.
He was reportedly abducted on Sunday evening as he journeyed to Abuja from Ekiti after a slew of political meetings.
Details surrounding his kidnap are still sketchy at the time of filing this.
Pulse has sought information concerning Arises kidnap from police spokesperson Jimoh Moshood without a response.
Text messages and calls placed to Moshoods mobile have returned unanswered.
Area confusion
Premium Times reports that police commands in the four states of Edo, Ekiti, Ondo and Kogi which share a common border along the area the politician was said to have been kidnapped, are yet to account for any kidnap incident involving Mr. Arise.
Ekiti State Police Public Relations Officer, Alberto Adeyemi, told the online newspaper that he is in the worst possible position to offer answers on the kidnap of Arise because the crime didnt happen within his jurisdiction.
I cannot say. I am not allowed to comment on incidents that did not happen within my jurisdiction, Adeyemi said.
Police spokespersons of Ondo and Kogi States spoke in similar vein, according to Premium Times.
We do not have any report on the kidnapping of Senator Ayo Arise, I am not sure we have any such report, Edo State Commissioner of Police, Babatunde Kokumo, said.
Maybe it happened in Ondo or Kogi State, but there is no report of any kidnapping of the senator in Edo.
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Frank disclosed this in Abuja on Monday, December 4, 2017 while reacting to the returnof former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar to the PDP.
Frank blamed Atikus decision on "APCs lack of internal democracy, disregard for party constitution, irregular meeting, inability to conduct convention, no Board of Trustee and arrogance of party leadership."
While advising the APC, Frank noted that he might also leave the ruling party if things continue the same way.
His words: It is high time APC realize that politics is about number, every youth, man or woman is important. The kind of arrogance going on in the party led some of us out of PDP in those days but we have now realized that it is even worse in APC.
"Though its already getting late but if this impunity is not tackle between now and early next year APC may witness the mother of all defections to opposition parties.
"As for me, I'm still a member of APC because I believe I have worked hard to bring about the ruling party as a young man but if the impunity does not stop, I will be left with no option.
"Not only me but some other serving governors, members of National Assembly and other known party leaders across the country have to decide their political future elsewhere, he added.
It was also a few days after Buhari returned from a medical vacation abroad where he spent over 100 days holed up in a UK apartment.
I wanted this aide to shed more light on the thinking inside Aso Rock concerning a Buhari re-election; given that the president was widely believed to be nursing an ailment that could mean he wouldnt be able to endure the rigours of another electioneering campaign.
Hes fit as a fiddle, this aide announced unequivocally. He hasnt told us hed run, but if he decides to, no one can stop him. The president is very healthy right now and his stay in London had nothing to do with a terminal ailment. He has fully recovered", the aide announced.
Not satisfied, I threw in a follow-up question.
Does the president tell you guys hes going to run again? Does he offer any clues? Anything at all to suggest hed seek re-election? I asked.
Well, like every other politician, the president is eligible to contest again. And like I just told you, he is very fine and can endure the rigours of another electioneering campaign, this aide stated emphatically.
Clues everywhere
In the months that have followed, Buhari and his team have remained tight-lipped on the subject of his 2018/2019 political plans, but you get the feeling they are playing it safe and that the president will run again. We are only an official announcement away, it appears.
There have been clues everywhere you look as well.
When Buhari made the trip to Abidjan, Cote dIvoire last week for the 5th European Union-African Union (EU-AU) summit, he made reference to his re-election plans and told the world he turned up late for an event because he was waiting for two Governors who possess some electoral clout, to join him.
First, I want to apologise for keeping you sitting for too long, this is because I insisted on the Governors attending this meeting", Buhari said.
This is why I came along with them so that when we are going to meet you, when you are going to meet the rest of Nigerians, if you tell them that their Governors were in the company of the president, I think that will be another vote for me in the future.
Let's take that line again: Another vote for me in the future.
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The president cracks plenty of jokes and is famous for his wry sense of humour, so we could just say he was only making a light-hearted remark above; but his comment in Abidjan was the clearest hint of a re-election yet.
Powerful Governors
Did you also see how the presidency reacted hastilyto Atikus claims that Buhari wasnt able to gain entry into the US for 15 years on account of his religious disposition?
Buharis perceived reputation as a religious hardliner almost torpedoed his 2015 presidential ambition. No way are his minders going to allow that reputation gain some foothold in the minds of the voting public for the umpteenth time.
Have you heard Kaduna Governor El-Rufai openly back Buharis re-election bid? Have you heard Okorocha do the same? Most APC Governors are now firmly behind a Buhari for 2019 ticket. Its no longer a carefully guarded secret for these guys. Theyve told you its Buhari or nothing come 2019.
Atiku knows
It may also have become clear to Atiku that therell be no way hell become president on the APC platform with Buhari still looming large within the governing party.
The man had to leave.
According to Atiku; "I will definitely beat him (Buhari) this time. He has wasted a lot of his massive goodwill. A lot of people are disgruntled but they are keeping quiet and lying low. Our youths are suffering terribly. They are even now being sold into slavery.
"After Buhari won the election, he was no longer interested in the party that made him president. Every activity stopped and not even the party chairman, could take any decision.
The party became a one-man property. Everyone grumbles behind the President but they are too timid to raise a voice against the illegalities being perpetuated. I should be bold enough to know what I want, and can do so at my age. So, I decided to leave."
Here was Atiku taking on the man he considers his major opponent in 2019.
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Kalu also said that Igbos will give President Buhari 70% of the voteshe needs to win the presidential election in 2019.
According to Daily Post, the former Governor said I joined the APC to encourage president Buhari to run, again, and we are going to use his regime to correct the injustice meted to Ndigbo and also, fight for the oneness of the country.
I didnt join the APC to go and look at the rock in Abuja; I joined the APC to use it for the benefit of Igbo and Nigeria at large.
Marginalisation
Addressing the issue of marginalisation against Igbos, Kalu said that the issue started after the civil war.
He also said that the issue is not something the President can sort out in four years.
The media chief is among others seeking to become national officers of the party at the convention, where new executives would be elected.
He appealed to the governor and delegates from the state to give him their full support to enable him to emerge victorious at the national convention, scheduled to hold in Abuja.
The purpose of my visit is to intimate you, as the leader of our party in Cross River, about my aspiration to serve as the national chairman of our great party, the PDP.
I am here to seek your support and the support of members of the party in Cross River.
You need a PDP chairman that shares in your vision and is ready to give necessary support and attract the federal governments support for Cross River.
I want to be at the national PDP office, working closely with you to help actualise your vision of developing Cross River, he said.
Dokpesi, who described the 2015 general elections as a disaster for the party, said it was gladdening that Cross River remained a PDP State.
I congratulate you for this feat. It is time to look at why we fail and prepare ourselves for 2019.
We must get our party re-engineered, rebranded, rejuvenated and reconstructed in such a manner that we can get back the presidency.
In order to achieve this, we need a chairman of the party who is courageous, visionary and has the will and capacity to win the presidential election in 2019, he said.
Responding, Ayade lauded Dokpesi for using his media platforms the AIT and Raypower FM to promote activities of the Cross River government.
The committee also extended the warning to other candidates looking to get the partys presidential ticket.
He said We need to make this announcement to all our party members and well wishers that the convention is going to be for delegates and we are expecting a little less than 3000 delegates. And those delegates have been properly accredited by the accreditation committee.
And for those our party members that are going to come are welcome to Abuja, but they will not be allowed to come to the eagle square and this is because we want to be sure that we are in a position to deliver a credible elective convention.
We are trying to put all these processes in place so that we dont over crowd the venue. I want to urge aspirants to the various positions to please, keep their campaigners away from the convention venue and we believe all campaigns would have stopped by Friday.
I will not expect any aspirant, especially presidential aspirants to bring their campaign posters, campaigners, men or women to the venue because it will not be allowed.
And we want to appeal to all of them campaigning to desist from doing that. For those who want to campaign for future election, possibly the presidential aspirants this convention is not the place to display campaign posters or to display their intentions.
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I believe there will be an appropriate convention for that. I want to urge them to cooperate with us as a committee.
Atiku back in PDP
On Sunday, December 3, 2017, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar announced the he has joined the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
In a live video broadcast on his Facebook page, Abubakar said he was again joining the People's Democratic Party (PDP) because the governing All Progressives Congress (APC) had failed to deliver on its promises since coming to power in 2015.
Heavy clashes were reported in the city between forces loyal to Saleh and the Iran-backed Shiite rebels, who together seized control of Sanaa from the internationally recognised government three years ago.
Moving to take advantage of the chaos, President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, whose government is backed by a Saudi-led military coalition, ordered his forces to advance on the capital.
The Huthi-controlled interior ministry announced Saleh's death on the rebels' Al-Masirah television station.
A statement read on the channel announced the "end of the crisis of militias", referring to Saleh's armed supporters, and "the killing of their leader and a number of his criminal supporters".
A video given to AFP by the rebels showed what appeared to be a dead Saleh with a severe head injury, his body wrapped in a floral-print blanket.
An AFP photographer who approached Saleh's home in southern Sanaa on Monday found it in the hands of the Huthis and was prevented from entering. The house appeared to have been damaged in fighting.
The alliance between Saleh, who ruled Yemen for more than three decades before resigning in 2012, unravelled over the past week, with at least 100 people reported dead in fighting, accusations of betrayal and the former leader reaching out to the Saudi-led coalition.
Heavy fighting in Sanaa
As witnesses reported continued heavy fighting on Monday, Hadi ordered his forces to launch an offensive to advance on the capital.
"The president has ordered Vice President Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, who is in Marib (east of Sanaa), to activate military units and advance towards the capital," a presidency official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The government also reached out to Saleh's supporters with an offer of amnesty.
"The president will soon announce a general amnesty for all those who collaborated with the Huthis in recent months and who have retracted that allegiance," Prime Minister Ahmad Obaid bin Daghr said.
The Saleh-Huthi alliance had been fraught since its inception in 2014, when the two ended decades of enmity and joined ranks to capture Sanaa from Hadi's government.
Saudi Arabia, accusing arch-rival Iran of backing the rebels, intervened in the Yemen war on behalf of the government the following year.
The Saudi-led coalition has been hitting Sanaa with air strikes for months, and a fresh wave on Monday targeted areas near Sanaa International Airport and the interior ministry, both under Huthi control, residents and an airport source said.
The coalition on Monday warned Yemeni civilians to avoid rebel areas.
"The coalition urges civilians to evacuate areas near positions held by the Huthis," read a statement published by Saudi Arabia's state-run Al-Ekhbariya TV.
"We ask civilians to remain at least 500 metres (yards) away from Huthi military vehicles and gatherings."
Residents near the airport said multiple air raids had shaken their homes late on Sunday night and early Monday.
Fears for civilians
An airport source said rebel bases near the location appeared to have been targeted, but the airport itself had not been bombed.
Residents reported that the fighting, which erupted Wednesday, had spread outside the capital.
Tribal sources in Saleh's hometown Sanhan, south of Sanaa, on Monday reported intense overnight fighting between the Huthis and Saleh loyalists.
Witnesses said clashes had erupted around the residence of Tarek Saleh, a nephew of the former president and a leader with his forces.
Saleh on Saturday announced he was open to talks with Saudi Arabia and its allies on condition they ended their crippling blockade of Yemen's ports and airports.
That dealt a serious blow to his already fragile alliance with rebel chief Abdul Malik al-Huthi.
The Saleh-Huthi split sparked fears of a new front in the Yemen war, which has already claimed more than 8,750 lives since the Saudi-led coalition intervened.
The conflict has pushed Yemen to the brink of mass starvation and triggered what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
International aid groups warned on Monday they were losing the ability to reach civilians in Sanaa.
"Ambulances and medical teams can't access injured, people can't buy food and other supplies," UNICEF's Rajat Madhok said on Twitter.
"For the time being there has been no final decision. Damascus is still thinking about the feasibility of its participation," the government source told AFP on condition of anonymity.
"As soon as a decision is reached, it will be made public through the usual diplomatic channels."
A spokesman for the opposition delegation, Yahia al-Aridi, said meanwhile that his side's chief Nasr al-Hariri would be back in Geneva on Monday evening.
The office of UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura, who is mediating the talks, made no announcements Monday on the planned return to negotiations.
De Mistura had said the negotiations would resume Tuesday.
But after meeting with de Mistura Friday, Jaafari said there were "big problems in this round of talks," pointing to a communique published by the opposition last month in Riyadh signalling it was maintaining its insistence on Assad's removal.
The opposition, united in one delegation for the first time, has defied calls to give up on its demand that Assad must step down before any peace deal can be reached.
"The language was provocative, irresponsible politically speaking," Jaafari said, warning that if the opposition delegation stuck to such language "there will be no progress."
The government delegation had initially refused to confirm that it would attend the eighth round of UN-backed talks at all, and arrived a day late.
The long-serving premier is facing two separate graft probes that have led to speculation over whether he will eventually be forced to step down.
Parliament has been examining legislation that would limit the police's ability to make recommendations to the attorney general on whether or not to charge suspects.
On his Facebook page on Sunday, Netanyahu called for changes to the proposed law to make clear that it "will not involve current investigations against me".
He said he was making the call because he did not want the law "to be used for propaganda purposes".
Netanyahu also seemed to criticise the police, saying it appeared a recommendation whether or not to charge him had been decided in advance regardless of the evidence.
The 68-year-old, who has been questioned by police six times in connection with the investigations, has maintained his innocence.
His statement came after tens of thousands took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday night to protest against alleged corruption in Netanyahu's government.
Last week, Israel's parliament approved a first reading of the bill, which would alter current practice under which at the end of an enquiry police tell the attorney general if they feel that they have enough evidence for a prosecution.
The bill would require the attorney general to ask the police for its input, but the police's opinion could not be made public.
A one-year prison term was envisioned for investigators who leak their conclusions.
Parliament was due to vote the legislation into law as early as Monday, but it is now expected to be delayed.
While calling for his cases to be excluded, Netanyahu maintained that such legislation was important to protect suspects from being smeared with premature leaks.
Police are investigating Netanyahu over suspicions he received expensive gifts from wealthy supporters as well as over allegations he sought a secret deal for favourable coverage with a newspaper publisher.
Netanyahu allies have also been questioned by police as part of a separate probe into the purchase of German submarines.
Netanyahu has not been named as a suspect in the submarine investigation.
Separately on Sunday, police questioned for several hours David Bitan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu's Likud party and the leader of the coalition in parliament.
The investigation concerns suspicions of corruption and links between members of the Rishon LeZion municipality near Tel Aviv, including Bitan, and organised crime, police sources said.
Bitan, who is very close to Netanyahu, has for weeks been among the biggest supporters of the bill on police powers, along with the bill's sponsor, David Amsalem who is also in Likud.
Tusk had been due to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Tuesday night, and Palestinian Authority prime minister Rami Hamdallah in Ramallah on Wednesday, according to his official schedule published last week.
Tusk is meeting British Prime Minister Theresa May in Brussels on Monday as May tries to seal a divorce agreement that would allow Brexit negotiations to move on to the second phase, dealing with trade and transition talks.
The European Commission is set to decide whether Britain has made enough progress on Wednesday, and, if so, ambassadors from the remaining EU 27 countries will meet the same day to draw up guidelines for the next stage.
Former Polish premier Tusk then chairs an EU summit on December 15 where leaders would sign off any deal.
Palestinian leaders are lobbying desperately against such a move, fearing it could provoke such fury in the Arab world it could sink peace hopes for a generation.
But Kushner, the 36-year-old head of a small and tight-knit White House negotiating team, made a rare public appearance to put an optimistic face on his efforts.
"The president's going to make his decision," Kushner told the Saban Forum, choosing not to deny reports Trump will declare Jerusalem Israel's capital on Wednesday.
"He's still looking at a lot of different facts and when he makes his decision he'll be the one who wants to tell you. So he'll make sure he does that at the right time."
On Monday, Trump must decide whether to sign a legal waiver that would delay plans to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for another six months.
Every US president has done this since 1995, judging the time not ripe for such a move, and Trump is expected to begrudgingly do so for a second time this week.
But, according to diplomats and observers, he is also now expected to announce in a speech on Wednesday that he supports Israel's claim on Jerusalem as its capital.
New intifada?
This will likely provoke fury among Palestinians and the wider Arab world, and may hamper Kushner's long-shot effort to revamp the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Palestinians have been lobbying regional leaders to oppose the decision and the armed Islamist movement Hamas has threatened to launch a new "intifada".
But Kushner, addressing a sympathetic audience at an annual meeting of Israeli and US policy-makers hosted by businessman Haim Saban, sees grounds for optimism.
The real estate developer turned presidential adviser is working closely with Israeli officials and has developed ties with the young Saudi and Emirati monarchs.
He sees an opportunity for peace if the Sunni Arab countries of the region align themselves with Israel in opposition to the threat of Iran.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shares this hope, although he dares hope an accommodation with Arab countries could precede any Palestinian deal.
Kushner, in common with US official thinking under previous administrations, sees a Israeli-Palestinian settlement as coming before any great re-alignment.
"You've got to focus on solving the big issue," he told a friendly but frankly skeptical Saban, and an audience of dignitaries and policy experts.
"The regional dynamic plays a big role in what we think the opportunities are because ... a lot of these countries look and say they all want the same thing.
"And they look at the regional threats and I think that they see Israel, who is traditionally their foe, is a much more natural ally to them than it was 20 years ago."
"You've a lot of people who want to put this together, but you have to overcome this issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order for that to happen," he said.
'Regime will fall'
Earlier, Netanyahu also addressed the forum by video link from Israel, and also spoke of the opportunity for reconciliation in the region.
But his focus was firmly on the threat of Iran, which he again compared to Nazi Germany in its alleged determination to "murder Jews."
His address barely touched on the Palestinian issue, but did speak of regional peace, under a longer timeframe than the one Kushner has in mind.
"And that's just one reason why I'm so hopeful about the future. Today Israel is more welcomed by the nations of the world than ever before," Netanyahu said.
"When I look forward 50 and 100 years I believe Israel will be embraced openly by its Arab neighbors rather than in secret in the way it's done today."
Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was less optimistic, warning a change in the US stance on Jerusalem would spell disaster.
The probe, by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Fairfax Media, said that despite being cautioned both the Liberals and Labor continued accepting substantial sums of cash.
It said intelligence agencies had major concerns that China was interfering in Australian institutions and using the political donations system to gain access. Beijing denied the allegations as "totally groundless".
Since then concern over foreign interference has gathered momentum, heightened by ongoing revelations of Russian meddling in the American political system.
"The issue of foreign interference in our politics is an extremely serious problem," Attorney-General George Brandis told parliament on Monday.
"So I can tell the Senate that later this week, the government will introduce a milestone legislative package to reform Australia's espionage and foreign interference legislation."
He said the new laws would strengthen and modernise a range of offences "for the purposes of investigating, disrupting and prosecuting acts of espionage and covert interference in the Australian political process".
There would be a new transparency scheme, providing "visibility of the nature and extent of influence over Australia's government and political processes by foreign interests".
"It will introduce new offences targeting foreign interference and economic espionage, including offences that criminalise covert and deceptive activities that support the intelligence activities of foreign actors," he added.
Last week, a key Australian Labor MP, Sam Dastyari, was forced to resign as deputy opposition whip after reports that he told a Chinese businessman his phone was likely being tapped by intelligence agencies.
"We feel that the Honduran people deserve the results and this (count) cannot be stopped," Mataramos said.
Nasralla supporters in the capital Tegucigalpa marched near to where the count was resumed, banging on pots, blaring vuvuzelas and singing campaign songs including insults towards Hernandez.
"They are stealing our votes," Jesus Elviz, a 58-year-old accountant, told AFP, visibly angry.
Meanwhile, a group of women handed out flowers to demonstrators, and threw petals at riot and military police nearby.
On Friday, 19-year-old Kimberly Fonseca was killed by a bullet during a confrontation between protesters and the police. Her family say she was killed by police, a claim authorities are "exhaustively" investigating.
After the violent protests erupted -- with some reports of looting -- the government declared a state of emergency and imposed a 10-day curfew in an attempt to curb the unrest.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the UN Office for Human Rights in Honduras Sunday urged the authorities to act "within the framework of human rights, respecting people's lives and physical integrity."
Their joint statement also expressed concern at preliminary figures which said 11 people have died and at least 15 others have been injured during the violence.
A week after the election, Hernandez maintains an advantage with 42.92 percent of votes against Nasralla's 41.42 percent, with 94.45 percent counted, according to the TSE.
The YPG was spearheading a US-backed offensive to oust IS from territory east of the Euphrates River, which cuts diagonally across Deir Ezzor, while rival Russian-backed Syrian troops battled IS on the western bank.
It appears to the first time Syria's Kurds acknowledge receiving direct Russian support.
On Sunday, YPG officials met with a Russian military delegation in a town on the eastern bank of Deir Ezzor province, according to the Kurdish-run ANHA news agency.
"The eastern countryside of the city has been fully liberated from Islamic State... with the international coalition and Russia's support," YPG spokesman Nuri Mahmoud said in a statement.
"We thank the international coalition and the Russian forces for their air, logistical, advisory support and coordination on the ground."
Mahmoud said the YPG "hoped for an increase in support and the provision of air defence and required cover."
IS jihadists once held most of oil-rich Deir Ezzor, but now control only a tiny sliver of the province, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.
On Sunday, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said IS still held several villages in the province, on both banks of the Euphrates River.
The YPG formed the bulk of the Syrian Democratic Forces, an Arab-Kurdish alliance that ousted IS from swathes of northern and eastern Syria, with help from the US-led coalition.
In September, the SDF began its assault on IS positions in the eastern half of Deir Ezzor province, as Russian-backed government troops squeezed IS in the western half.
The SDF accused Moscow of striking its forces several times during the drive, which makes Sunday's announcement of Russian support all the more surprising.
Last week, the White House said it would be making "adjustments" to its military support of militia in Syria.
During the brief stopover in the capital, he is set to hold talks with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and the powerful military chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa.
Mattis's first visit to the country as defense secretary of defense comes as the US pushes its longtime ally to do more to combat insurgents who allegedly use bases in Pakistan's tribal belt to target NATO troops in Afghanistan.
Relations suffered a further blow after a Pakistani court ordered the release of firebrand cleric Hafiz Saeed in late November, prompting a furious response from the White House.
Saeed heads the UN-listed terrorist group Jamaat-ud-Dawa and has a $10 million US bounty on his head. He had been under house arrest but was released after a court in Lahore said officials had not provided any evidence of his role in the days-long assault on India's capital which killed more than 160 people.
The decision to release Saeed coincided with the beleaguered government's capitulation to Islamist protesters holding a sit-in in the Pakistani capital.
The deal, which the military helped broker, saw the federal law minister resign over blasphemy allegations.
It sent shockwaves through the country, sparking fears that the military was doing little to keep extremism in check after supporting the demands of a small group of hardliners.
President Donald Trump first signalled that the US was reassessing its fractious relations with Pakistan during a televised speech in August, launching a blistering attack on Islamabad for harbouring "agents of chaos".
The remarks triggered a series of high-level diplomatic meetings in the US and Pakistan, but Islamabad has given few signs of concessions to Washington.
Pakistan has consistently rejected claims it supports Taliban-allied forces, insisting it maintains contacts with insurgents only as a means to bring them to the table for peace talks.
Pakistan, which has long harboured fears of encirclement by arch-rival India, has also bristled at Trump's calls for an increased Indian role in rebuilding Afghanistan.
Last week the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, said Islamabad had not carried out the "clear" demands made by Washington.
"We have not seen those changes implemented yet," he told reporters.
But en route to Pakistan Mattis told reporters he would not use pressure as a tactic and insisted he would do "some listening".
"It would completely destroy the fragile peace process in the region, and lead to new conflicts, new disputes and new unrest."
The status of Jerusalem is one of the most contentious issues of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
President Donald Trump faces a key decision this week on whether to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital, potentially reversing years of United States policy and drawing a furious response from the Palestinian leadership and the Arab world.
Most of the international community, including the US as well as Turkey, does not formally recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital, insisting the issue can only be resolved through final status negotiations.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a champion of the Palestinian cause, often criticises Israel over its actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite a 2016 reconciliation deal after years of severed ties following Israel's deadly raid on a Gaza-bound ship.
Bozdag, also government spokesman, on Monday said a US step to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital would benefit "neither Israel ... nor the region."
Anonymous leaks from the White House suggest the top diplomat could be replaced within weeks and -- even while denying this -- Trump reminded him: "I call the final shots."
Tillerson has dismissed as "laughable" reports that Trump's closest aides want him to resign, but rumors will inevitably dog him when he sits down with his European peers.
His trip is structured around ministerial conferences of the NATO allies in Brussels and the 57-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, in Vienna.
But the most closely watched encounter will be a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, on the sidelines of the OSCE talks late in the week.
At NATO, alliance partners will want to hear how America can help defend them against the newly global threat of North Korea's long-range nuclear missiles.
Tillerson gave a major speech on European policy in Washington on Tuesday to preview his agenda ahead of the trip -- and he did not mince words about Russia.
He will tell his NATO Western allies that they must stand shoulder-to-shoulder to oppose "the enemies that threaten our security and oppose our way of life," while Russia must be brought to reverse its intervention in eastern Ukraine through relentless sanctions pressure.
'Best friend'
"Any resolution to the war that does not entail a fully independent, sovereign, territorially-whole Ukraine is unacceptable," Tillerson declared.
"Our trans-Atlantic unity is meant to convey to the Russian government that we will not stand by this flagrant violation of international norms," he said.
But for this warning to be credible, Tillerson must be seen as speaking for the whole US government and the president, who has shown no enthusiasm for sanctions against Russia.
Trump -- who in 2013 suggested he become Russian leader Vladimir Putin's "best friend" -- opposed a law passed this year by Congress that could impose new sanctions from January, over Russia's Ukraine intervention and alleged interference in the US presidential election.
The White House has even attempted to play down the conclusion of US intelligence that Russia deployed hackers and propagandists to assist in Trump's election win.
But since that victory, the Trump administration's other major players -- Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis -- have taken a tougher line.
Russian-backed rebels
Relations with Russia are at a low after tit-for-tat closures of diplomatic missions, although both sides seem to want to cooperate to stabilize Syria.
Despite the enmity, progress may be made this week in agreeing terms for a United Nations mission in Ukraine.
Putin has suggested Blue Helmet troops deploy to protect the unarmed OSCE monitors struggling to oversee the shaky ceasefire between Kiev's forces and Russian-backed rebels.
Western powers would like to see the force have a broader mandate.
Germany's Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel met Tillerson in Washington on Thursday, and afterwards told reporters that they found themselves in agreement on the crisis.
"We believe that we absolutely need a robust mandate by the United Nations for a peacekeeping mission," Gabriel said, warning that tough negotiations lie ahead.
"There are -- not minor, but truly significant -- differences between Russia, the United States and us Europeans," he said.
The UN mission must have the authority to implement the truce and enforce the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the disputed and conflict-torn Donbass region, Gabriel said.
"We share this view with our American partners," the German minister added.
Despite overwhelming evidence of its involvement, Moscow continues to deny that it has played a role in the eastern Ukraine fighting.
Missile shield
On North Korea, Europe had a rude awakening on Wednesday when Kim Jong-Un's North Korean regime demonstrated that his banned missile program can, in theory, strike targets on the continent.
Any high-altitude shield to protect Europe from North Korean missiles flying over the pole could breach non-proliferation deals with Russia, promising a new diplomatic row.
Trump, meanwhile, has already made it clear that he thinks the United States already pays more than its fair share of the costs of NATO's collective defense.
Tillerson is due to arrive in Brussels late on Monday. He has talks with EU and NATO leaders on Tuesday and Wednesday before flying on to Vienna for the OSCE.
TCDD requires the first 20 trains to have 10% domestic content. The proportion of local content of the next batch of 60 trains will increase to 53% and production will transfer to Tulomsas in Eskisehir. The final 16 trains will be designed in Turkey and will have a local content of 74%.
TCDD expects considerable savings by gradually transferring production to Turkey rather than importing the entire fleet. Under the terms of the contract, Turkey will have the right to export the Turkish-designed high-speed train.
We have started the process related to our own national high-speed train, says Turkeys transport, maritime and communications minister, Mr Ahmet Arslan. We are taking steps to become fully capable of raising the domestic content of the 96 trains step-by-step.
The trains must be designed to meet the relevant European Technical Standard for Interoperability (TSI). They will have regenerative braking, an IGBT/IGCT control system, ac/ac drive, and will be equipped with ETCS levels 1 and 2.
Each train will have 470 seats, a 16-seat restaurant car and snack bar with eight seats. Space must be provided in each train for two wheelchairs.
TCDD also requires two train driving simulators, 10 table-top simulators and two trainer control stations.
Turkey is steadily expanding its existing Ankara - Polatli - Istanbul Pendik/Konya high-speed network. New lines are under construction from Ankara east to Sivas, and from Polatli to Afyonkarahisar, Usak and Izmir.
The Ankara - Sivas project is due to be completed by the end of 2018. It will reduce the rail distance between the two cities from 603km to 405km and cut the journey time from 12 hours to 2 hours.
The Polatili - Izmir line will be 508km long and will have 43 tunnels with a total length of 35km and 56 viaducts totalling 22km. During an inspection of the project on November 12 Arslan said the Polatli - Usak section will be completed by the end of 2019. A 2-hour journey time is envisaged between Ankara and Usak, with a 1h 30min journey time from there to Izmir.
The first 150 vehicles will be built at Hyundai Rotems plan in Changwon, Korea. The remaining 300 vehicles will be assembled locally by Iranian Rail Industries Development (Irico). All 450 cars will be delivered within 78 months of contract signing.
The order follows the signing of a memorandum of understanding by RAI and Hyundai Rotem in May 2016.
Hyundai Rotem was awarded a contract in 2004 to supply 150 regional DMU cars to RAI. Deliveries started in 2007 and the first 24 trains were built in Korea, while the remaining 24 were to be assembled by Irico.
However, the imposition of international sanctions on Iran in 2010 meant only 68 vehicles were delivered without payment to the Korean manufacturer. Following the lifting of sanctions in January 2016 Iran made a payment of Won 85.5bn to Hyundai-Rotem, enabling production to resume.
Trains from the latest order will be capable of 160km/h, compared with 120km/h for the 2004 order, and the new DMUs will also feature LCD passenger information screens, an area for passengers with wheelchairs, and a separate luggage compartment.
The first of 24 four-car trains being supplied by Hitachi Rail Italy to Metro-Dade County entered service on the two-line Metrorail network in Miami on November 30.
The $313.8-million order for 136 cars is being funded through the transport surtax funds from Metro-Dade Countys voter-approved Peoples Transportation Plan.
The new trains, which will replace the original fleet dating from 1984, feature:
Automated passenger announcements;
Digital signs displaying the name of the next station;
Four digital information monitors in each car;
Wi-Fi for up to 252 passengers;
Bicycle racks;
Closed-circuit TV, and
LED lighting.
Half the trains needed to operate peak-hour services are expected to be in service by July 2018, with all peak services operated by the new fleet by February 2019, and the full fleet in operation by November 2019. The vehicles are being assembled at Hitachis plant in Medley, Fla.
Today is certainly a great day for Miami-Dade Countys history, said Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez. For the first time in more than 30 years of Metrorail service, we placed on the tracks our first new train.
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Alleged Russian member of Ukrainian Right Sector arrested in absentia
MOSCOW, December 4 (RAPSI) Russian citizen Alexander Valov, who stands charged with involvement in the activities of Right Sector nationalist organization, banned in Russia, has been arrested in absentia, the Investigative Committees press office reports Monday.
Investigators claim that Valov left Russia before 2014 in order to join Right Sector in Ukraine. The man allegedly participated in the organizations mass public events, took photos and videos, and propagandized extremism online.
Currently, Valov is engaged in combat in southeast Ukraine as a mercenary of the Azov battalion, according to Russian investigators.
Right Sector is a Ukrainian association of radical nationalist organizations. In January and February 2014, its members clashed with police and seized administrative buildings in Kiev. Since April 2014, Right Sector has been involved in fighting the protest movement in eastern Ukraine.
In November 2014, Russias Supreme Court declared Right Sector an extremist group and banned its activity in Russia. The Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against Right Sector leader Dmitry Yarosh for alleged incitement of terrorism.
In January 2015, Right Sector was added to the Russian register of prohibited organizations.
MOSCOW, December 4 (RAPSI) A prosecutor has asked a judge to sentence Russias economy ex-minister Alexey Ulyukayev charged with bribery to ten years in a high security penal colony, RAPSI correspondent reports from the Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow on Monday.
He also requested to fine Ulyukayev 500 million rubles (nearly $8.5 million).
Ulyukayev's defense insists on his innocence.
The former minister stands charged with taking $2 million in bribes. He was arrested while receiving an alleged bribe in mid-November 2016.
According to the Investigative Committee, he threatened to create obtrusions for Rosneft with the use of his position. On November 15, 2016, Ulyukayev was put under house arrest. Later in the evening, President Vladimir Putin relieved Ulyukayev of his post because of loss of trust.
Ulyukayev pleaded not guilty and stated that he believed the case was fabricated. The defendant noted that there was a provocation, orchestrated by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and that there was no sound evidence in the case, aside from a testimony provided by CEO of the countrys largest oil corporation Rosneft Igor Sechin.
The court has seized 15 property items and over 564 million rubles ($9.5 million) belonging to Ulyukayev as part of the case.
Gogol Center theater director to stay under house arrest in embezzlement case
MOSCOW, December 4 (RAPSI, Nikolay Merkulov) The Moscow City Court on Monday upheld a ruling to extend house arrest of the Gogol Center theater director Kirill Serebrennikov, who stands charged with large-scale embezzlement, RAPSI reported from the courtroom.
Appeals against restrictive measures of two other defendants, former head of the Seventh Studio stage company Yury Itin, and ex- general producer Alexey Malobrodsky, were also dismissed.
Serebrennikov and Itin will remain under house arrest until January 19. Malobrodsky will stay detained for the same period.
Serebrennikov was arrested in late August and then placed under house arrest. In early November, Moscows Basmanny District Court seized assets belonging to Serebrennikov including apartment, car, and money in the amount of more than 360,000 rubles ($6,000), over 60,000, and $4,000.
Investigators believe that he was an organizer of the budget money embezzlement. The defendant denied wrongdoing.
He allegedly created Seventh Studio stage company to actualize the Platforma project for promotion of art and invited Itin, Malobrodsky, and former companys chief accountant Nina Maslyayeva, among others, into organization.
Investigators believe that Itin, Malobrodsky, and Maslyayeva were falsifying data for the Platforma projects plans in 2011-2014 on request of the theater director. This data was provided to the Ministry of Culture as the rationale for financing from the state budget.
Earlier, Maslyayeva has testified against Serebrennikov. She said that Serebrennikov, Malobrodsky and Itin organized embezzlement of money allocated for a cultural event. Serebrennikov and Malobrodsky cashed the money with the assistance of Maslyayeva. The woman also said that she entered falsified data in financial reports.
Former official of Russias Culture Ministry and current director of the Russian Academic Youth Theater Sophia Apfelbaum has been also arrested and put under house arrest on embezzlement charges. According to investigators, from 2011 to 2014, Apfelbaum signed contracts on state grants in the amount of more than 214 million rubles ($3.7 million) with Serebrennikovs Seventh Studio stage company on behalf of the Russian Culture Ministry, and provided further agreement of received reporting documents, which contained overstated information on quantity and cost of the held events. Thus, she has abetted the embezzlement of about 68 million rubles ($1.2 million) by Serebrennikov and his alleged accomplices, investigators claim.
Apfelbaum admitted that she controlled the movement of cash but pleaded not guilty to embezzlement.
One more defendant, producer Yekaterina Voronova, has been arrested in absentia and put on the international wanted list.
Tax evasion charges dropped against Ulmart ex-CEO
MOSCOW, December 4 (RAPSI) Investigators closed a tax evasion case against former CEO of Russias Internet retailer Ulmart, Sergey Fedorinov, who had fully covered loss caused to the budget, the Investigative Committees St. Petersburg directorate announced on Monday.
Fedorinov have paid out over 188.5 million rubles (about $3.2 million) including tax owing, penalties and fines, the statement reads.
According to case papers, in 2012 and in the first nine months of 2013, Fedorinov avoided paying taxes by providing tax authorities with knowingly false information on Ulmarts right to VAT offset. Investigators claimed that he had caused damage valued at more than 116 million rubles (about $2 million) to the state.
Currently, a co-owner of Ulmart, Dmitry Kostygin, is under investigation in credit fraud case. According to case papers, Kostygin acting as the Board Chairman of Ulmart provided false information on the companys financial position to Sberbank for signing a loan agreement. In April, Sberbank transferred 1 billion rubles (about $17 million at the current exchange rate) to the companys account. The accused allegedly managed the money in his discretion. The defendant pleaded not guilty, his lawyer Konstantin Dobrynin told RAPSI earlier.
Ulmart group of companies is the largest Russian private Internet holding focusing on e-commerce segment. The companys distribution network consists of over 400 sales outlets across more than 240 Russian cities and towns.
Asset managing firm files $136 million lawsuit against shareholder of Enel Russia
MOSCOW, December 4 (RAPSI) Structures of Prosperity Capital asset managing firm have filed a lawsuit with the Sverdlovsk Regional Commercial Court seeking to recover 8 billion rubles (about $136 million) from Enel Investment Holding B.V., a shareholder of Russian energy company Enel Russia, court documents read on Monday.
Plaintiffs in the case are The Prosperity Quest Fund, Prosperity Russia Domestic Fund Limited, Prosperity Capital Management SICAV and The Russian Prosperity Fund. Five top managers of Enel Investment are also defendants in this case.
An international group of companies, Enel Group owns 54.6% of Enel Russia shares. In July 2015, it came to public attention that 5.18% of the latter companys shares were bought out by Prosperity Capital.
Earlier, the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Commercial Court has set hearing of a lawsuit filed by companies related to Prosperity Capital seeking to recover 11.4 billion rubles (about $193.5 million) from Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska for December 20.
Four persons suspected of planning attack on city administration in Russia arrested
MOSCOW, December 4 (RAPSI) Russian investigators have arrested four persons, suspected of planning an attack on Khabarovsk citys district administration as well as of membership in an extremist organization, the press-service of the Khabarovsk Krais Investigative Committee department informs on Monday.
According to investigators, in August 2017, two residents of Khabarovsk decided to organize a nationalistic extremist group and induced two acquaintances to join them in criminal activity against people of non-slavic ethnicities.
The suspects obtained instruction manuals for production of homemade explosives, held shooting exercises and trained to throw petrol bombs. They planned to attack a street vendor and the administration for a city district in Khabarovsk, investigators said, adding that two of the arrested persons are students of a local university.
Investigators stated that the suspects wanted the populace to know who committed the crimes and manufactured a flag to mark each would-be crime scene.
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HOMESITE in Boron, CA KERN COUNTY NO MINIMUM / NO RESERVE --- HIGH BID OWNS THE LOT This property is located east of Mojave this land lies along 58 Hwy near North Edwards, south of Aerial Acres in Kern County. A really growing community. Enjoy the Wonderful 4 Seasons Weather, all in the growth in The Heart of This City! Just across State Route 14, north of State Hwy 58 Barstow-Bakersfield and 395 Fwy. Aerial Acres is a fly-in unincorporated community in Kern County, California. It is located 5.5...
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LARGE WOODED LOT IN NICE, CALIFORNIA! Would you like to own property in Lake County California? Does residential land in Nice, CA interest you? Here is your opportunity to purchase a large lot for a fraction of market value. Known as the "Bass Capital of the West." Clear Lake supports large populations of bass, crappie, bluegill, carp and catfish. Located along Klein St., the lot itself is somewhat rectangular in shape and measures approximately 11,265 square feet. Please feel free to drive out ...
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UP FOR SALE a nice solid home built in 1910 with 7 or more bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 2 kitchens, full basement, large deck, 2 car garage. on 1.23 acres of land located in north central Missouri. just off hwy 36 between st. Joe and Hannibal mo. about a hour and 45 min to Kansas city. the home is located in Brookfield mo. a nice quiet and safe place to raise a family or start your own bed and breakfast. the home can be used as one big home or split into a home with a apartment to rent out and live re...
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Please note that we are not affiliated with nor do we represent the resort described in this item ad.Item Description Elara: Hilton Grand Vacations ClubLas Vegas, Nevada All images in this listing are general images of the resort and do not necessarily reflect the actual resort or units. Please perform your own due diligenceOVERVIEW80 E HARMON AVE, LAS VEGAS, NV 89109The sleek, 52-story Elara resort boasts a premier Center Strip location. This spectacular property offers adjoining access to t...
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Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade.
Former of Beverly Hills star Carlton Gebbia and her husband, David Gebbia, are getting a divorce.According to court documents, David filed for divorce after 20 years of marriage in the Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, Us Weekly reported David cited irreconcilable differences as the cause for the split.The date of the former couple's separation is listed in the paperwork as September 16, 2017, according to Us.However, a source told the magazine in August 2016 that the pair had been broken up for a year by that point, though they still lived together at the time.Carlton, 44, and David have two daughters together -- Destiny, 15, and Mysteri, 14 -- as well as a son named Cross, 6.In his filing, David reportedly requested joint legal and physical custody of their three children.Carlton starred on Season 4 of of Beverly Hills, which aired from November 2013 to April 2014. Carlton is remembered for clashing with many of her co-stars during her brief stint on the show, including Kyle Richards Carlton and Joyce Giraud were reportedly both fired from the Bravo reality series after just one season."Decisions were made and Joyce and Carlton have been informed that they're not coming back," an insider told Us in 2014.The current cast of of Beverly Hills stars Kyle, Erika Girardi Lisa Vanderpump , Dorit Kemsley, Lisa Rinna , and newcomer Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave.alum Camille Grammer will also return to the series when it returns with its ninth season December 19 at 9PM ET/PT on Bravo. Camille has been absent from the show since Season 2.
Automobile companies are worried about challenges from electric mobility, automation and connected vehicles.
Image: Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor Corporation, introduces the 2018 Camry XLE during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, US. Photograph: Mark Blinch/Reuters
Akio Toyoda, the chairman of Toyota Motor Corporation, is a worried man.
The chief of worlds leading automobile player has raised serious concerns about survival of automobile companies in an event of newer technological challenges such as electric mobility, automation and connected vehicles.
The automotive industry has entered an era of profound transformation, the likes of which come only once every hundred years, Toyoda said.
He said there was no guarantee the auto manufacturers would continue to play leading roles in mobility over the next 100 years.
A crucial battle has begun - not one about winning or losing, but one about surviving or dying.
Toyota retailed 5.2 million vehicles during the first half of FY18 globally.
All around the world electric mobility is beginning to gain ground as an alternative to conventional fuel-run cars.
Here, the government has talked about an ambitious plan to have an all-electric vehicle fleet by 2030. Besides electric mobility, the sector is also seeing disruptions in form of connected vehicles and autonomous driving tech where carmakers have limited know-how.
Toyota Motor believes the industry has entered a phase of competition and coordination that involves entities from other industries, the firm said.
We will pursue alliances with other companies and other industries, Toyoda said.
Toyota Motor entered into a partnership with Japanese peer Suzuki Motor Corporation (SMC) earlier this year to work together in areas of green vehicles, safety, information technologies and mutual supply of products and components.
SMC, the parent of Indias biggest carmaker Maruti Suzuki, said last month it would work with Toyota Motor to introduce EVs in India.
To boost business innovation among companies of the Toyota Group, Toyota Motor last week decided to change its executive line-up and revise its organisational structure from January.
Surrounded by changes of unprecedented speed and scale, Toyota Motor is aware it faces a now or never situation in which not a moment can be spared, the firm added.
R C Bhargava, chairman at Maruti Suzuki, said Toyodas statement makes perfect sense and must be taken seriously.
Businesses face challenges all the time. But when a new tech comes, these become even bigger. Nobody can guarantee success. Everybody will try; some may win and some may not, he said.
Firms are, therefore, beginning to scout for partnerships with rivals and tech firms. With partnerships, the cost of developing new tech can be spread over a larger number of vehicles.
In India, home-grown Mahindra & Mahindra and US carmaker Ford entered into a partnership to work together on mobility programmes, connected vehicle projects, electrification, product development, sourcing and marketing.
Earlier this year, Tata Motors initiated partnership talks with Volkswagen group to jointly develop vehicles.
However, both ended discussions in August after finding their partnership may not yield desired synergies.
Tata also partnered with Microsoft to work on connected vehicle technologies.
Earnings spread for foreign investors down to 10-year low of 1.1 per cent, from 2 per cent at the beginning of the year and record high of nearly 5 per cent in 2013
The mismatch between corporate earnings and stock prices has widened on Dalal Street, with the earnings yield for Indias top listed companies now down to a decadal low of 3.5 per cent.
The figure was 4.5 per cent at the start of 2007 and four per cent a year before.
The current yield is even lower than at the end of December 2007, a week before the great market fall of 2008.
This analysis is based on the latest earnings and market capitalisation of BSE 500 index companies, which account for 90 per cent of the combined market value of listed firms on the bourse.
The earnings yield declines further to 3.3 per cent if the sample is expanded to include all frequently traded companies (1,880) which have declared their results for the quarter ended September 2017.
Earnings yield is calculated by dividing the earnings per share for the most recent 12-month period by the current market price.
So, in the current scenario, an equity investor in India would earn annual yield (or income) of Rs 3,500 for Rs 1 lakh worth of investment in BSE 500 index companies - assuming these entities distribute their entire annual profit as equity dividend.
In comparison, a similar investment in a 10-year Government of India bond would now yield annual income of Rs 7,000, up from Rs 6,500 around three months earlier.
It raises a question mark over the sustainability of the current rally in equities, as a fall in earnings yield coincides with a rise in bond yield.
In the past three months, the yield on 10-year government bond is up nearly 50 basis points, while bond yields are up by five bps in the US.
Analysts expect a further rise, driven by greater borrowing by the government here and rate hike in the US.
Historically, there is a positive correlation between earnings yields and stock market movement.
The current rally on Dalal Street was preceded by a period of high earnings yield and low bond yield in early 2013.
This gave large earnings spread to stock investors over risk-free assets.
For example, the earnings yield for BSE 500 companies had risen to a high of 7.1 per cent during the June 2013 quarter, a notch below the 7.5 per cent yield on government bonds during that period.
This, in combination with low bond yields in the US, translated into a yield spread of nearly five per cent for foreign investors in early 2013, more than double the spread in the previous three years.
This created the basis for a surge in capital inflow into India and a rally on Dalal Street from September 2013.
The earnings spread for foreign investors is now down to a 10-year low of 1.1 per cent, as against two per cent at the start of 2017.
The previous low was in the second half of 2007, when spreads had fallen to 0.3 per cent at the end of the December 2007 quarter.
Analysts attribute low yields to a combination of high stock valuations and poor corporate earnings.
Optimism about the India growth story is at an all-time high among equity investors, resulting in record stock valuations. However, corporate earnings remain in the slow lane due to poor demand growth, says G Chokkalingam, founder & managing director, Equinomics Research & Advisory.
BSE 500 index companies are currently trading at 29 times their trailing 12-months' earnings, on an average, the highest in at least 11 years.
The broader market is even more expensive, at a trailing price to earnings multiple of 30.5.
BSE 500 companies' combined net profit (adjusted for exceptional gains and losses) was up eight per cent year-on-year during the 12 months ending September 2017, lagging the 25.4 per cent year-on-year growth in combined market capitalisation during the period.
Cumulatively, corporate earnings are up 10 per cent since the start of the current rally in 2013, while stock prices are up 115 per cent on average.
Analysts say the gap is unsustainable and either the earnings yield should rise or there would be market correction.
Earnings yields should rise, driven by better corporate earnings; otherwise, there is no justification for the current market capitalisation. If earnings dont increase in the next six months, it will be a problem, adds Chokkalingam.
Other experts say there could be a disruption in the market only if there is a sudden spike in bond yields.
The current rally might have been triggered by superior earnings yields and its spread over bond yields.
"But, its sustenance is largely based on liquidity, rather than incremental growth in corporate earnings.
"The current arrangement in the equity market will get disrupted only if there is a sudden spike in bond yields in the US, forcing investors to recalibrate their investment portfolio, says Dhananjay Sinha, research head, Emkay Global Financial Services.
Companies in the sample reported net profit of Rs 3.69 lakh crore during the 12 months ending September 2017, as against their current combined market capitalisation of Rs 106.6 lakh crore.
For the broader sample of 1,880 companies, net profit during the trailing four quarters was Rs 3.85 lakh crore, as against their combined market capitalisation of Rs 117.4 lakh crore currently.
Photograph: Shailesh Andrade/Reuters
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has left no stone unturned this year after big industrialists, along with Union ministers, skipped attending the BGBS 2017.
OPe@3#2!q5After last years damp squib, the forthcoming Bengal Global Business Summit (BGBS), scheduled for January next year, is poised to host top industrialists such as steel magnate LN Mittal, Reliance Industries chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani, and JSW chairman and managing director Sajjan Jindal.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has left no stone unturned this year after big industrialists, along with Union ministers, skipped attending the BGBS 2017.
Not only did she travel to Mumbai to request Ambani and Jindal to attend the event, but also went all the way to the UK to pursue Mittal and The Chatterjee Groups founder chairman, Purnendu Chatterjee, to attend the business summit as well as invest in the state.
Mittal seems impressed by Banerjees efforts. While visiting West Bengal for an event, he said: She has West Bengal in her heart and is very passionate.
Chatterjee too, after settling the shareholding issue in Haldia Petrochemicals with the government, is upbeat.
At the January 2017 BGBS, after Banerjee and her party, the Trinamool Congress, stepped up their criticism of demonetisation, Union ministers who were said to have given their consent to attend the event backed out.
With no Union ministers to present West Bengal as a favoured investment destination, top industrialists refrained from attending.
The annual event is Banerjees chance of getting back at people who critique her industrial policy.
Sanjay Budhia, managing director at the Patton Group, which has five plants in West Bengal (one more coming up), is of the view that once industrialists talk about their experience, indirectly pursuing their peers to invest, the job to attract investment is half done.
OPe@3#2!q5Her pitch for investment in the state, however, has remained consistent over the years - gateway to the north-east (India), Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar and others.
The supporting pitch is the availability of skilled personal at competitive rates.
Referring to the 34-year Left Front rule, which saw prolonged industrial disputes, Rudra Chatterjee, director at Luxmi Tea, is of the view that it takes nerves to approach top industry officials who were forced out to invest in the state again.
The 2017 BGBS saw the lowest investment proposals since the summits inception at Rs 2,35,290 crore, which is around six per cent lower than the previous years Rs 2,50,254 crore.
The biggest pie, which accounted for 11.5 per cent of the total, was worth Rs 27,200 crore, signed between Chinese company TEB Technology and Texmaco Rail & Engineering for an MRTS (Mass Rapid Transit System) project.
The Chatterjee Group, which operates the Haldia refinery and recently took over a chemicals plant from Mitsubishi Chemicals, also committed Rs 500 crore.
In the year before, the Group committed an investment of Rs 20,000 crore to set up a 15-million-tonne refinery in the state.
Amit Mitra, the states finance minister, said forward integration for the acquired Mitsubishi plant had been done.
On the other hand, industry sources said that the land allotment process for the refinery was underway.
In turn, it has stalled the proposed investment currently.
The Rs 12,000- crore Tajpur port project is stuck after the state pursued the Kolkata Port Trust as well as the Union shipping ministry to prioritise at the cost of the Sagar project.
In this case too, the Port authorities are yet to float the feasibility tender for the port.
OPe@3#2!q5Mitra also said the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group would invest Rs 10,000 crore in its maiden FMCG venture.
However, after the Group diversified into FMCG, it has been looking to set up plants in Telangana or Tamil Nadu with West Bengal also under consideration.
Nevertheless, the government, as well as industry, is optimistic about the meet.
Recently, after over nine years delay, Infosys relented on its demand for the special economic zone (SEZ) status and agreed to set up its maiden campus in the state.
Entrepreneurs say the biggest driver for industry to invest in the state is the big customer base, but cautions that unlike some states, West Bengal is not a greenfield market.
If the top guns do turn up for the summit, Banerjee will find some solace.
After all, last time, she bore the brunt of taking on the Centre.
Photograph: Jayanta Shaw\/Reuters
'Gujarat is a high turnout state and the BJP, even if it leads opinion polls, must ensure that its base comes out and votes.'
'This may not be easy because it is fighting a defensive campaign.'
'The Congress can be confident that, even though its base is smaller, their voters will turn out because they are angry,' says Aakar Patel.
What are the issues in the election campaign that is unfolding in Gujarat?
The ruling party for 22 years, the Bharatiya Janata Party, says it is about development. This is apparently a copyrighted word and development is something only the BJP can deliver, particularly under Narendra D Modi.
What the BJP does is development and what other parties do is corruption, dynasty and so on.
This formulation is childish in its simplicity, but the remarkable thing is that the BJP has been allowed to get away with it by its opponents.
Even if we assume that what the BJP wants to talk about is development, meaning discussing data and policies that push economic and social growth, the party gets distracted.
It wants to know what religion Rahul Gandhi is. The prime minister lies and says the Congress celebrated Hafiz Saeed's bail. What does that have to do with development?
Nothing, of course.
If the BJP claims to stand for development, the Congress is not clear about the issue in the election. Or at least it does not offer a single point like the BJP claims to offer development.
The Congress party's crown prince Rahul Gandhi wants to discuss corruption in the Rafale deal (for which he has got no support from the media) one day, and the next day it could be GST and demonetisation.
This lack of focus has meant that the messaging against the BJP has been scattered.
The second thing, after issues, is organisation.
Here the BJP is a formidable force. It is one of the most powerful political parties in the democratic world. It has a large grassroots presence that is managed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the world's biggest non-governmental organisation, with lakhs of members.
These are dedicated and trained individuals, and in recent years they have also been highly motivated because of Modi's charismatic leadership, whom the RSS grassroots adores.
In any tight race, and one is not sure whether Gujarat is a tight race at the moment, the BJP's organisational assets will win the day for them.
On the other side, and since this is a two-party state we can only look at the Congress, it must be accepted that this level of competence is missing.
The old Congress worker from the Seva Dal or the Youth Congress is absent. The structure has disintegrated and it is left to individual Congress candidates to provide the manpower that will do the work.
This costs money and many Congress leaders no longer invest as much money in elections because the party has been consistently losing.
Both on the side of issues and organisation, my view is that the BJP is ahead, either because of its strength or the Congress's weakness, or both.
The third thing is the campaign strategy.
The BJP has used its most powerful card, the prime minister, and has deployed him in dozens of rallies.
Readers may have observed that though for many years he would only use Hindi even in Gujarat, these days he has started speaking in Gujarati.
To me this indicates that he feels he needs to drive home the message and that may mean a closer race than the opinion polls show.
Modi is, of course, an outstanding public speaker and he is able to set the agenda in a way that Rahul Gandhi cannot.
When Modi makes a big speech, he usually frames an old issue in a new way so well that the headlines must report it.
An example: I sold tea, but did not sell the nation. Such clear, simple framing is a terrific asset to have in a leader.
On the other hand, the Congress not only cannot set the agenda, but must also keep defending itself on non-stories, such as whether Ahmed Patel was wrong to be a trustee in a hospital and whether Rahul Gandhi is Catholic.
The Congress has, however, managed to do one thing with competence: It has brought in the three large dissenting groups that had mobilised in the last few months.
The Patidars, the Dalits and the OBC Kshatriyas, led by Hardik Patel, Jignesh Mewani and Alpesh Thakor respectively.
It would not have been easy to do this, given that the three groups have contradicting demands. And it would not have been natural for these groups to align with Congress given that all three mobilisations were apolitical and spontaneous, but the Congress has managed to pull it off.
My guess is that this is the doing mainly of Ahmed Patel.
The BJP is worried by this development, and we can observe that in the many statements from its leaders, particularly the chief minister, which are aimed at breaking the alliance.
The question is: Will it be enough to defeat the BJP?
My view is that this election will be determined above all by turnout.
Gujarat is a high turnout state and the BJP, even if it leads opinion polls, must ensure that its base comes out and votes.
This may not be easy because it is fighting a defensive campaign. The Congress can be confident that, even though its base is smaller, their voters will turn out because they are angry.
In that sense the real issues in Gujarat, jobs and meaningful economic development, are against the ruling party, even if it pretends to be fighting on them.
Photograph: Kind courtesy @narendramodi/Twitter
Contemporary records speak of Chhatrapati Shivaji's resolve to liberate Hindu holy places, and the later Maratha rulers carried forward his legacy, Colonel Anil A Athale (retd) reveals in a forthcoming book.
IMAGE: Ruins of the original Kashi Viswanath temple under the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi. Photograph: Oasis.54515, kind courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Effective Mughal control over large parts of India died with Aurangzeb in 1707. In the words of Lord Macaulay, 'Soon after Aurangzeb's death every corner of his wide empire learnt to tremble at the name of the mighty Marathas!'
The Marathas held sway over large parts of Central and North India right till the Second Anglo-Maratha war of 1803.
Liberation of Hindu holy places was always a part of the Marathas' political agenda throughout this period.
The roots of this go back to the days of Shivaji the Great. In 1669, reversing the tolerant policy laid down by Emperor Akbar, Aurangzeb destroyed the Kashi Vishwanath temple in April 1669 and the temple at the birthplace of Krishna in Mathura in December of the same year.
Jijabai and Shivaji were greatly dismayed at this news.
This also led to the realisation on Shivaji's part that peace with Aurangzeb was impossible. Contemporary records speak of his resolve to liberate Hindu holy places, and the later Maratha rulers carried forward his legacy.
In an attempt to change Aurangzeb's policy and anticipating a future conflict with the Mughals, Shivaji wrote: 'Your great grandfather had been a tolerant ruler. Hindus ring a bell and the Muslims say azaan, what is the difference? Both pray to one almighty in their own way.'
In a farsighted prediction Shivaji added, 'My land is harsh and unyielding. The people born in this land, like its nature, are hardy. Your elephants and big guns cannot move freely in this area. There is very little you can gain from the poor country of mine.'
'Should you try to subjugate my people, you will meet with fierce resistance, so why venture on this foolhardy course?'
Immediately after Shivaji's death in 1680, Aurangzeb did precisely this, for which he and the Mughal empire paid the price. The rest, as they say, is history.
By the middle of the 18th century, the Marathas had consolidated their hold over Central India, the Malwa plateau. The Marathas wished to test the waters as well as establish the rights of all Hindus to go on pilgrimages.
In a planned move Bajirao's mother Radhabai went on a year-long visit to Hindu holy sites in the north in February 1735. Such was the awe Bajirao commanded that the Mughal emperor not only welcomed her visit but also deputed a guard of 1,000 soldiers to accompany her throughout her stay.
Radhbai returned to Pune in June 1736 after a prolonged stay at Kashi.
In 1737 Bajirao made a successful dash to Delhi and defeated the Mughal army. As Nizam Ul Mulk tried to come to the emperor's rescue, Bajirao moved against him and defeated him in the battle of Sironj in January 1738.
The Mughals ceded the province of Malwa to the Marathas. Bajirao in turn appointed the Shindes (now the Scindias) to look after Gwalior and the Holkars to take charge in Indore. Once the base in Malwa was secure, the Marathas began forays into the Indo-Gangetic plains.
On June 27, 1742, Malhar Rao Holkar, the Maratha general, with a cavalry force of over 20,000 soldiers reached the vicinity of Kashi.
Holkar planned to pull down the Gyanvapi mosque that was constructed at the site of the Kashi Vishwanath temple by Aurangzeb and rebuild the temple.
The people of Kashi were alarmed and sent a delegation requesting Holkar not to do so. The delegation argued that the Mughals were too strong in Kashi and the residents would be killed once the Marathas left.
Holkar acceded to their request and left without restoring the Kashi temple.
By 1750, after Nadir Shah's devastating raid in 1739 and the plunder of Delhi (during which he carried away the famous Peacock throne and Kohinoor diamond), the Mughal emperor was reduced to a puppet in the hands of various nobles and the Marathas. The latter had become virtual kingmakers in Delhi.
In 1752, the Mughal wazir (prime minister) Safdar Jung sought Maratha help. They agreed, but demanded more provinces and the liberation of Hindu holy places.
Safdar Jung agreed to the first condition but made various excuses to deny the Hindu holy places to the Marathas.
One of the akhbars (news reports) mentions that the general opinion among Muslims was against the move as the control over Kashi, Mathura and Ayodhya was seen by them as symbols of conquest of Islam over Hinduism.
At that time as well as in the 21st century, Shia Muslims were more accommodative than Sunnis.
Nadir Shah's invasion and Ahmed Shah Abdali's invasion in 1759 forced the Marathas to change their policy of basing only small forces in the north.
On April 14, 1760, a large force under Sadashiv Bhau marched from Pune to deal with the threat of an Afghan invasion.
Bhau was instructed to first defeat Abdali at Delhi and then turn east and liberate Hindu holy sites.
He was to further proceed to Bengal to drive away the English who had begun to pose a serious threat to Maratha domains in the north and the south.
The aim to liberate holy places had one rather unfortunate effect. Attracted by the opportunity to conduct a pilgrimage to the holy places, a large number of non-combatants joined the Maratha force.
This was contrary to Bajirao's practice of maintaining a nimble-footed army that had so successfully conquered Malwa. This was to prove a great hindrance when the Marathas faced Abdali at Panipat on January 14, 1761.
In a closely fought battle the Marathas suffered a major defeat. The Afghan losses were also considerable and Abdali returned to Afghanistan soon thereafter.
The resultant power vacuum was soon filled by the English who advanced from Bengal and established their sway over most of Doab (the Ganga-Yamuna valley).
The Marathas under the able General Mahadji Shinde re-established themselves in Delhi by 1765. However, they could never again muster sufficient strength to conquer the rest of north India.
In the second Anglo-Maratha war fought in 1803, the English defeated the Marathas in the battles of Delhi, Aligarh, Lassawari and Assye.
The English did not tinker with the ownership of Hindu holy places and the status quo established by Mughal emperors Babar and Aurangzeb continued under their rule till 1947.
Excerpted from Mighty Marathas: The Last Indian Empire by Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
'He is 47 years old and not married. Since his son or daughter can contest for Parliament only 25 years after being born, the earliest, if he marries in December, would be 2043.'
'So this, pretty much, is the end of the road for dynastic rule in the party,' says T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan.
Arun Shourie once wrote that Indian politics needed totems around which the natives could gather, perchance to dance and feast.
He was referring to the Congress party's perennial need for a Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, and now Rahul Gandhi.
He could have talked about MGR, NTR, Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati, etc. The political parties they led or lead are almost exactly like the Congress in their need for totems. None of them, however, has started political dynasties.
What Mr Shourie did not mention was that this totem approach also involves a strong element of Confucianism, wherein unquestioning obedience to the head of the family is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for survival and advancement. The Americans, precise as ever, call it brown-nosing.
But Confucian family succession is by merit. Just look at that fellow Xi Jinping. It emerges after a Mughal/Mafia/CPC style free-for-all.
In the Congress Mummy anoints the heir and no one is allowed to argue, protest, or contest.
So Indira Gandhi chose her younger son, Sanjay, as her successor.
Sonia Gandhi has chosen her older child, Rahul.
Jawaharlal Nehru, being the good man that he was, would surely have had his doubts about both of them.
In between Sanjay and Rahul lies -- or lay -- Rajiv Gandhi, a very nice guy among bad ones.
Had Sanjay not died an accidental death in 1980, Rajiv may well have retired as CMD of Indian Airlines/Air India at the age of 60.
It is now received wisdom that the Congress cannot survive without the Gandhis. The events since 1998 certainly suggest that.
But had Indira Gandhi not been killed when she was, that story could have turned out very differently. Sonia Gandhi would probably have ensured that.
She almost did in 1984, when she is said to have pleaded with Rajiv not to become PM. She even turned down the offer to make her Congress president the day after her husband died and stayed away from active politics for seven long years after her bereavement.
It was the intense rivalry in the Congress party that made her, first, the neutral umpire, and, then, the on-field umpire because useless old men in the party could not bring themselves to accept a different leader.
In fact, in 1984 Pranab Mukherjee could not even stomach Rajiv Gandhi as PM and was soon expelled. He formed a party that no one joined and quickly returned to the fold.
In the mid-1990s, Arjun Singh and N D Tiwari left the Congress and formed a party because they could not stand the idea of a south Indian as Congress PM. That venture, too, was abandoned when Sonia Gandhi became the leader in 1998.
But if the North Indians could not stomach a south Indian as PM, the south Indians could not stomach the Bihari Sitaram Kesri as Congress president. G K Moopanar formed a new Tamil Congress party, which P Chidambaram joined. When he became finance minister in 2004, it was as a member of the breakaway party.
Other Congress people left the party to join the BJP. Some succeeded, others didn't.
With disintegration looming, the older Congress 'leaders' did what K Kamaraj, S K Patil, and Atulya Ghosh had done in 1966: They turned to the Gandhi family in the hope that they too would have a totem.
But again someone objected. Sharad Pawar formed his own party, which still exists.
People, meanwhile, do wonder about Rahul's successor. He is 47 years old and not married.
Since his son or daughter can contest for Parliament only 25 years after being born, the earliest, if he marries in December, would be 2043.
You can work out the odds for the Congress party's hereditary tradition from this. They don't look too good.
So this, pretty much, is the end of the road for dynastic rule in the party.
That is why, for Rahul to lay claim to true greatness via a massive sacrifice for a greater cause, there is only the Edward VIII option left. That King of England abdicated his throne in 1936 for love.
So if Rahul loves the party and wants it to survive -- which it absolutely must -- he must quit after five years, regardless of such meagre electoral successes that come his way and let the party find a new leader.
It will be a painful process, but the party will live on.
His mother came out of retirement to save the party; he must go into it for the same reason.
IMAGE: Rahul Gandhi on the campaign trail in Padla, Gujarat, November 13, 2017. Photograph: Courtesy @INCIndia/Twitter
'It is hard to justify $225 million a plane for an increasingly obsolete mission.'
The purchase of the 36 Rafales has changed little for the IAF, explains Ajai Shukla.
Since the turn of the century, when the Indian Air Force began its quest for cheap, light fighters to replace the Soviet-era fleet of light MiG variants, the IAF's specifications for the replacement fighter have changed so much as to be almost unrecognisable.
From supporting development of an indigenous fighter to adding more fighters to the Mirage-2000 fleet, the IAF switched tack to buying medium, multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) through competitive global tendering; to eventually buying 36 Rafale fighters in a government-to-government deal with France.
In the newest twist, after Prime Minister Narendra D Modi announced on April 10, 2015, in Paris that India would procure 36 Rafale fighters from Dassault, the justification for acquiring such a high-end fighter transformed into veiled hints that it be a platform for delivering nuclear weapons in wartime.
Three days after Modi's Rafale announcement, then defence minister Manohar Parrikar said on Doordarshan: 'It is a strategic purchase and should never have gone through an RFP (Request for Proposals, or a competitive tender).'
Most nuclear strategists have taken 'strategic purchase' to mean that India would rig Rafale fighters to deliver nuclear weapons -- in place of the Mirage 2000s and Jaguars that currently do the job -- as the airborne leg of its nuclear triad.
In the calculations of many analysts, there could be no other valid reason for an air force that already operates seven types of fighters to buy just 36 aircraft of an entirely new type, further complicating a logistical nightmare.
Furthermore, nuclear strategists say in the era of highly reliable land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, delivering nuclear weapons by aircraft is a dispensable option.
Says Vipin Narang, nuclear strategist at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology: "Given India's diverse and capable land and sea-based missiles, it is worth considering whether one even needs a replacement delivery platform for nuclear gravity bombs."
"If India is committed to a triad, a more cost-effective solution may be to make Brahmos a nuclear missile and use the Sukhoi-30MKI to deliver it," adds Narang, "obviating the need to replace the Mirage and Jaguars. It is hard to justify $225 million a plane for an increasingly obsolete mission."
If indeed the Rafale's nuclear capability led to its purchase, it remains unclear why the government does not publicly state it?
The commitment to a nuclear triad -- of delivery of nukes by land, sea and air -- is publicly enunciated in India's nuclear doctrine.
It would be reasonable to state that the IAF is paying such a heavy cost to have the most seamless transition from the Mirage 2000 to another French platform, says Narang.
However, there would be questions over whether the Rafale needs to do that job. The Mirage 2000 and the Jaguar are both being upgraded, and can act as airborne nuclear vectors till 2030-35.
The nuclear talk is the latest example of the IAF shifting goalposts on its fighter purchase over the past two decades.
Since the early 1980s, when the IAF had 42 fighter squadrons but 30 of them were light MiG variants that faced obsolescence, it was decided to develop the indigenous Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) to replace them.
In 1981, the IAF defined a requirement for a light, single-engine to replace the MiGs from the mid-1990s. But the LCA eventually flew only in 2001.
The IAF, happy with the performance of the Mirage 2000 in the Kargil war, began lobbying for buying the Mirage production line that Dassault was closing down, and re-establishing it in Hindustan Aeronautics Limited to build the excellent Mirage 2000-5 fighter.
"As an air force we were very familiar and comfortable with the operational and tactical handling of the Mirage 2000," said Air Marshal Pranab Kumar Barbora (retd), who was the vice chief of the air staff till 2010.
That would have given the IAF large numbers of inexpensive yet sophisticated, single-engine fighters, ideal for replacing the MiGs.
But the National Democratic Alliance-I defence minister George Fernandes, under fire after the Tehelka exposes on defence procurement corruption, shied away from a single-vendor buy from Dassault -- ironically, considering what eventually happened with the Rafale purchase 15 years later.
In 2002, Fernandes ordered the IAF to float a global tender. Specifications were framed for a light fighter, and the IAF floated a 'Request for Information' to four global vendors in 2004.
However, in 2005, Dassault -- apparently miffed at having to compete instead of being awarded a single-vendor contract -- foreclosed the option of transferring the Mirage 2000 line to India.
It took the IAF three more years to draw up specifications of a new fighter.
On August 28, 2007, when the IAF issued an international tender for what was dubbed the MMRCA, the MiG-replacement fighter had morphed into a high-tech, medium-to-heavy fighter that could have one engine or two, and would inevitably cost far more than what was envisaged.
When responses to the tender came in, there were six aircraft in the fray: Saab's JAS-39 Gripen -- C; Lockheed Martins F-16 Super Viper; Russian Aircraft Corporation's MiG-35; Boeing's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet; Eurofighter's Typhoon and Dassault's Rafale.
Then defence minister A K Antony, while chairing a meeting of his Defence Acquisition Council on June 29, 2007, outlined three guiding principles for the MMRCA procurement: 'First, the operational requirements of IAF should be fully met.'
'Second, the selection process should be competitive, fair and transparent, so that best value for money is realised. Lastly, Indian defence industries should get an opportunity to grow to global scales.'
A decade later, none of these objectives have been met.
With the IAF's operational requirements still unmet with the procurement of just 36 Rafales, fresh tendering is under way for 114 'single-engine fighters'.
Instead of a 'competitive, fair and transparent' selection, the decision to buy the Rafale remains opaque. And, with the 'Make in India' component of the deal scrapped, the indigenous defence industry remains ignored.
Through the five years it took the IAF to conduct and conclude the MMRCA selection process, the buzz within the defence aerospace community was that the contest structure favoured Dassault.
To win, a fighter first had to meet the IAF's requirements in technical evaluation and flight tests.
In the second stage of evaluation, commercial bids would be opened of those vendors whose fighters had met the IAF's norms.
Based on a 'life-cycle costing' matrix, the lowest bidder would be declared the winner.
After lengthy flight trials, the IAF eliminated four fighters in April 2011 -- the Gripen-C, F-16, F/A-18E/F and the MiG-35.
Coincidentally, these four were significantly cheaper than the Rafale.
Only the excellent, but expensive Eurofighter Typhoon went into a commercial bidding contest against the Rafale.
On January 30, 2012, Dassault was informed it was the lowest bidder.
Among the fighters the IAF eliminated were the F-16 Super Viper and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, the world's most combat tested and proven fighters that form the backbone of the world's most formidable air force.
Ironically, the IAF is now pursuing two fresh acquisitions -- for single-engine fighter and multi-role carrier-borne fighters, respectively -- in which the F-16 and F/A-18 are hot contenders.
Evidently, the purchase of 36 Rafales has changed little for the IAF.
The Bharatiya Janata Party is all set to encash its Uttar Pradesh civic poll performance in Gujarat by utilising newly elected mayors for campaigning in the poll-bound state.
The BJP has won 14 out of 16 mayoral seats in civic polls in UP and all the newly elected leaders will be meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday to seek his blessings.
Thereafter, they will proceed to Gujarat for campaigning for the assembly elections which will be held on December 9 and 14.
"The newly elected mayors will meet the prime minister over tea tomorrow in Delhi. They are all devoted party workers and will be used where ever the party needs them," BJP state general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak told PTI.
Amethi Nagar Panchyat Chairperson Chandrama Devi and Jais Nagar Palika Parishad Mahesh Pratap will be among those who will be meeting Modi.
Though the Congress did not field any candidate in Amethi, the victory of a BJP candidate there is still considered a major blow to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as it is his parliamentary constituency and considered a Congress bastion.
The Congress lost in Jais and Gauriganj where Nagar Palika polls were held. In Amethi and Musafirkhana, where Nagar Panchayat polls were held, the party had not fielded anyone.
With the BJP's extensive campaign in the local polls in UP paying off, the sweeping win is considered as a boost to the saffron party in the midst of the high-decibel campaign for the Gujarat elections.
Counting of votes in Gujarat will be taken up on December 18.
The UP civic elections were touted as the first litmus test of Yogi Adityanath after the BJP stormed to power in March.
The saffron surge routed the Samajwadi Party and the Congress, both of which drew a blank in mayoral polls.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who has been drafted as the key campaigner in Gujarat and went on a nearly 90-day whirlwind tour of the state, described it as a "historic win".
He attributed the victory to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision and BJP chief Amit Shah's able guidance and added that the BJP will now look forward to achieving the goal of one hundred per cent success in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
"The victory of party has sent positive message among the people who are already admirers of Narendra Modiji. There is a significant population of people from east UP in Gujarat," said BJP leader and state spokesman Shalabh Mani Tripathi, who is campaigning in Gujarat for the past one month.
"Yogiji is already a star campaigner and our newly elected mayors with their success stories will add to our ongoing campaigning here," Tripathi said.
IMAGE: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath chaired a review meeting following civic body poll results in Lucknow. Photograph: ANI
While the Congress is not willing to campaign in Muslim areas, the BJP encourages Muslims to attend its public meetings, reports Archis Mohan.
As the Congress embraces "soft" Hindutva in Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday reached out to the Muslim community in the state.
In Bharuch, Modi accused the Congress of stoking a Hindu-Muslim divide. He said Bharuch and Kutch, two districts with significant Muslim populations, are economically the fastest growing districts of Gujarat.
The PM went on to say how during the Congress rule, celebrating festivals came with the apprehension of violence.
The PMs comments come on the heels of a finely-tuned Bharatiya Janata Party outreach campaign among the minority as well as the majority communities in Gujarat, which has the Congress worried.
According to Congress workers as well as activists, the feedback is increasingly that several in the Muslim community, even if they do not vote for the BJP, might not turn up in adequate numbers to vote for Congress candidates.
Of the 43.3 million people eligible to cast their votes in the state in the forthcoming assembly polls, Muslims make a bit over nine per cent of the electorate. The state will see elections on December 9 and 14.
According to internal estimates of political parties, Muslims comprise more than 10 per cent of the electorate in 65 of the 182 assembly seats in Gujarat. Of the 65, Muslims comprise almost a fifth of the electorate on 20 seats.
In 2012, the BJP won 42 seats with a margin of almost 15,000 votes or less.
The Congress has identified 30-odd of these seats it believes it can wrest from the BJP.
With the Patidar community divided, several of the 30-odd seats are on the list of 65 where Muslims can be a factor if the BJP fails to get a consolidated Hindu vote. A low turnout of Muslim voters would hurt the Congress.
"Of particular concern for us are Muslim women, a Congress worker said, bemoaning the absence of a Congress outreach to Muslims. They believe the community might be discriminated against under BJP rule, but there will not be violence.
The Congress has fielded six Muslim candidates. The BJP has none. But these numbers conceal how roles have been reversed between the BJP and the Congress on the ground.
While BJP bosses have asked local party leadership across Gujarat to reach out to Muslims, the Congresss local leaders have, on occasions, tried to keep the community at an arms length.
If the BJP has encouraged Muslims to attend its public meetings, the Congress district units have asked their workers to be careful that Muslims do not visibly outnumber those from other communities at its party meetings.
Congress workers complain that the top leadership of the party, both its central leadership and state leaders, have been unwilling to campaign in Muslim areas or share the stage with Muslim leaders.
Congress and Youth Congress leaders from Bihar, West Bengal and other states have been brought in to oversee the partys campaign in Muslim localities.
Let alone sharing public stage, local Congress leaders arent willing to meet Muslims in closed-door gatherings, a Congress leader in Ahmedabad said.
According to a source, the Congress district unit in Surat asked its workers to ensure that Muslim men and women, at least those in traditional attire, do not attend the inauguration of the partys election office, which took place on Thursday.
The BJP has been at work to exploit this chasm, if for nothing else but to get Muslims to vote in fewer numbers on election day. It is visibly supporting Muslims who have joined the party.
Facebook pages, WhatsApp groups and Twitter handles of Muslims associated with the BJP minority cell have mushroomed. This wasnt the case until 2012 elections. Earlier, even if they were associated with the BJP, Muslims wouldnt publicise the fact, said activist Mujahid Nafees.
Faruk Patuk is associated with the BJPs minority cell in Dahod. Jafar Diwan is associated with the BJPs minority cell in Sabarkantha. Both use their Facebook pages and social media presence to promote BJP campaign material, and to attack the Congress. Patuk says the Congress stabbed his community in the back.
Under the banner of the Minorities Coordination Committee, Nafees has extensively documented the discrimination that common Muslims face in Gujarat.
How would a Congress government, keen to burnish its Hindu image, be any different than the BJPs if it has already started spurning the community. I fear it might be worse, he added.
A Congress leader said the party was working on a plan to reach out to Muslim women. It remains to be seen if it will make local leaders reach out to the community, or have its leaders from outside the state do the job.
Image: BJP members listen to PM Narendra Modi's monthly radio programmer, 'Mann Ki Baat', in Danilimda assembly constituency in Gujarat. Photograph: Courtesy @byadavbjp/Twitter.
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DRC: Heavy-handed police crackdown on protests must stop
Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 1 December 2017 Cite as Amnesty International, DRC: Heavy-handed police crackdown on protests must stop, 1 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a25281e4.html [accessed 17 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.
Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo must investigate the heavy-handed police crackdown on yesterday's protests in which at least one man was shot dead and dozens more injured, said Amnesty International today.
Police also arbitrarily arrested more than 200 protesters in cities across the country. While many were released later in the day, at least 100 remain in detention, including 45 in Goma and 12 in the capital Kinshasa.
"This wanton disregard for protesters' lives and the unlawful use of force cannot be tolerated. The use of firearms against unarmed protesters contravenes DRC's obligations under international law," said Sarah Jackson, Amnesty International's Deputy Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.
"The DRC must promptly launch an effective and independent investigation into the killing and injuries and bring all those responsible to justice. The ongoing pattern of repression against peaceful protesters and its associated impunity must stop."
Amnesty International is also calling for the all those protesters solely detained for peacefully exercising their rights to be immediately and unconditionally released.
Background
Protests took place in multiple cities across the Democratic Republic of Congo on 30 November calling for President Joseph Kabila to step down before the end of the year.
Presidential elections were originally set to take place at the end of President Kabila's second term in November 2016, but were postponed and are now scheduled for 23 September 2018.
Copyright notice: Copyright Amnesty International
Nothing about us without us: disability rights activists in Kyrgyzstan tell their stories
Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 1 December 2017 Cite as Amnesty International, Nothing about us without us: disability rights activists in Kyrgyzstan tell their stories, 1 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2528864.html [accessed 17 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.
"Why should my life be dependent on others people's moods or noble intentions?" Ukei Muratalieva asks angrily.
Ukei, from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, has cerebral palsy. She wants to live independently, and is frustrated by the discriminatory practices that remain in her society.
Sunday 3 December is International Day of Persons with Disabilities. Globally one billion people, encompassing all ages, genders and ethnicities, have some form of disability. They want, and are entitled to, the same human rights, on an equal basis, as others. But in many countries around the world, this is a long way off.
One thing countries can do to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights by persons with disabilities is to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
The CRPD, adopted in 2006, is based on the understanding that disability results from the interaction of persons with impairments and the attitudinal and environmental barriers that impede their full and effective participation in society. It provides state parties with clarity and guidance on how they can realize the rights of persons with disabilities in practice.
I spoke to people in Kyrgyzstan, one of few states in the Europe and Central Asia region which has not yet ratified the CRPD, about why ratification is such an important step.
Ukei, who has worked at the Ministry for Labour and Social Development, described how she was initially denied an education, due to a combination of social stigma and lack of inclusive laws.
"First the local kindergarten refused to take me in and then the primary school. But one teacher disagreed with the headmaster and took me in to her class. Still my mother had to sign a paper to absolve the school of all liability for my health and safety."
But education became the key to Ukei's independence. In her teens she attended UNICEF seminars which taught her about her rights, and stressed that children with disabilities should enjoy all human rights on an equal basis with other children.
Ratifying the CRPD would help ensure that children with disabilities enjoy their right to education without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunity.
Marina Fegele, a local activist in the southern city of Osh, agrees. When she was a child she was run over by a drunk driver and lost a leg, and 'well-wishers' advised her parents to give her to the state. But Marina remained with her family and friends - and now heads a public group advocating for disability rights.
She has made it her mission to advocate for the rights of persons with disabilities, especially women and girls with disabilities who are at a heightened risk of violence from partners, families and also strangers. She says:
"We need to ratify the CRPD. It won't change life in Osh overnight but it will set things in motion. To start with adding handrails to the existing ramps, make them safe to use for everyone, whether you are a person in a wheelchair or a parent with a buggy."
Rinat Janaliev was partially paralyzed in a swimming accident when he was a student.
After his accident, he had issues with equal access to education, employment and cultural life. His family, teachers, and friends tried to fill in for the missing state policies and laws - when he bought his first car, he designed a hand control which his friends then helped to build.
Like Marina, Rinat also spoke about the need for more accessibility. In 2011 he joined a building control commission that is supposed to ensure accessibility in new buildings.
"But I was never invited [to meetings]. They say that they know all the standards. So useless ramps are being built, funds wasted but no one is brought to account."
This is a common theme; far too often persons with disabilities are not given a say in decisions that they understand best, and which have a dramatic impact on their lives. This brings to mind the phrase, "Nothing about us without us." Persons with disabilities, including children with disabilities, through their representative organizations, must be consulted.
Again and again, the disability rights activists I met in Kyrgyzstan said that they were tired of being treated as objects of charity and "good intentions" - they want equal enjoyment of all human rights in law and practice.
Amnesty International is calling on the Kyrgyz government to expedite the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as soon as possible.
Furthermore, we call on all the remaining states to promptly ratify the Convention to bring it to universal ratification.
Ukei Muratalieva has no doubt about how important this is:
"Why do I need this convention to be finally ratified, after all these years? It is the same question as why do I need to wear clothes, why do I need to eat? I just want to live independently."
Copyright notice: Copyright Amnesty International
Greece: Move asylum seekers to safety before winter hits
Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 1 December 2017 Cite as Amnesty International, Greece: Move asylum seekers to safety before winter hits, 1 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a253dbf4.html [accessed 17 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 Greek government, with the support of EU leaders, should act now before the onset of winter to end Greece's "containment policy," 12 human rights and humanitarian organizations said in a campaign that began today.
The groups began a countdown to the official start of winter, December 21, 2017. They said that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, with the support of EU leaders, should immediately transfer people to improved conditions on the mainland and take concrete measures by December 21 so that no asylum seekers are left out in the cold.
As of December 1, the hotspots on Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros and Kos are 7,400 over capacity: 12,981 people in facilities with a capacity of just 5,576. Thousands, including single women, female heads of households, and very young children, live in summer tents, essentially sleeping on the ground, and exposed to the cold, damp and rain as the weather worsens. Some women are forced to share tents and containers with unrelated men, putting their privacy and safety at risk. There is lack of access to clean water, sanitation facilities and health services.
This will be the second winter asylum seekers have had to spend in unsuitable facilities on the islands since the EU-Turkey Deal came into effect in March 2016. Last winter, three men died on Lesvos in the six days between January 24 and 30. Although there is still no official statement on the cause of these deaths, they have been attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning from makeshift heating devices that refugees have been using to warm their freezing tents. In late 2016, a blast likely caused by a cooking gas container killed a Kurdish woman and her young grandchild also sleeping in a tent in Lesvos.
EU and Greek officials have referred to the EU-Turkey Deal as a justification for the containment policy. The policy, put in place as part of the Deal, forces asylum seekers arriving on the Greek islands to remain there until their asylum claims are decided, regardless of if there is accommodation capacity or adequate access to services. However, forcing asylum seekers to remain in conditions that violate their rights and are harmful to their well-being, health, and dignity cannot be justified, the groups said. Some who arrived on the islands in the early days of the deal have remained stuck there for 20 months.
As part of the campaign, the groups are teaming up to highlight the deplorable conditions asylum seekers trapped on the islands face; to call on European citizens to get involved; and to monitor and update the public on the response of the Greek government and EU leaders.
Groups participating in the campaign:
Amnesty International, Caritas Hellas, Greek Council for Refugees, Help Refugees, Human Rights Watch, International Rescue Committee, Jesuit Refugee Service, Oxfam, Praksis, Spanish Commission for Refugees (CEAR), Solidarity Now, Terre des Hommes
Click here for more information on the digital campaign and to sign the petition.
Copyright notice: Copyright Amnesty International
Azerbaijan: New blow for justice as lawyers excluded from trials
Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 1 December 2017 Cite as Amnesty International, Azerbaijan: New blow for justice as lawyers excluded from trials, 1 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a253e3d4.html [accessed 17 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 new regulation intended to target human rights lawyers in Azerbaijan by completely barring them from court proceedings is deep blow for justice in the country said Amnesty International today.
The amendments to the Code of Civil and Administrative Procedure which came into force today exclude lawyers from court proceedings unless they are members of the Bar Association (Collegium of Lawyers) of Azerbaijan. With human rights lawyers facing harassment and disbarment, and the independence of the Bar Association of Azerbaijan seriously undermined in recent years, this is the latest in the series of restrictive means deployed by the government to hinder the work of lawyers and erode further the right to a fair trial in Azerbaijan.
"Azerbaijan is plunging ever deeper into the abyss of rightlessness and this new regulation delivers a new deep blow for justice. In a country where innocent criticism of the authorities, even on social media, is already a fast track to prison any chance of a fair trial is now more elusive than ever," said Denis Krivosheev, Deputy Director of Amnesty International's Europe and Central Asia Regional Office.
"The few brave lawyers who currently dare to confront the authorities in court about violations of freedom of expression and torture are already routinely harassed and disbarred. But now the Azerbaijani authorities have a new trick on their books to completely exclude these courageous front-line human rights defenders from court proceedings, effectively eliminating any last hope for justice."
Copyright notice: Copyright Amnesty International
RSF condemns murder of another journalist in northern India
Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 1 December 2017 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, RSF condemns murder of another journalist in northern India, 1 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a253ef54.html [accessed 17 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the Indian authorities to take concrete steps to protect journalists after a newspaper reporter was gunned down yesterday evening in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. At least three other journalists have been murdered in India in the past three months.
A reporter for the Hindustan newspaper, Navin Gupta, 35, was riddled with bullets by four men on motorcycles as he emerged from a public toilet near the market in Bilhaur, a town 50 km north of the city of Kanpur. He died while being rushed to hospital, leaving a wife and 4-year-old daughter.
The police have begun a hunt for the perpetrators but so far without success. For the time being, the motive for Gupta's murder is unknown but Kanpur district journalists voiced concern about their safety after holding an emergency meeting.
"We support the investigation launched by the police, who must not let this murder go unpunished, but we cannot forget that Navin Gupta was at least the fourth journalist to be murdered in India in just three months," said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF's Asia-Pacific desk.
"The federal authorities must quickly adopt measures to guarantee the safety of media personnel. The Uttar Pradesh government also has a duty to provide better protection for journalists investigating sensitive subjects. With three journalists murdered in the past two years, this state has a significant history in this regard."
It was in Uttar Pradesh that the Jagendra Singh sustained fatal burns in June 2015 in connection with his investigative reporting on illegal sand mines; that local newspaper journalist Sanjay Pathak was beaten to death two months later, and that reporter Hemant Yadav was gunned down in October by a motorcycle hitman said to have been hired by the "mines mafia."
Recent media victims in other parts of India include Gauri Lankesh, a newspaper editor who was gunned down outside her home in the southern city of Bangalore on 5 September; Shantanu Bhowmick a reporter who was beaten and stabbed to death in the northeastern state of Tripura two weeks later, and Sudip Datta Bhaunik, a reporter who was shot dead in the same state just ten days ago.
India is ranked 136th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2017 World Press Freedom Index.
Cameroon government 'declares war' on secessionist rebels
Publisher IRIN Author Mbom Sixtus Publication Date 4 December 2017 Cite as IRIN, Cameroon government 'declares war' on secessionist rebels, 4 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2540fe4.html [accessed 17 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 secessionist crisis in Cameroon's western region is deepening, with the government promising to crack down hard after anglophone militants shot dead four soldiers and two policemen last week.
The soldiers were killed in an ambush on a military convoy outside the town of Mamfe on 29 November in Cameroon's anglophone South West Region. The policemen were killed the following night in the nearby town of Eyoumojock.
The secessionist Ambazonia Defense Forces, the armed wing of the Ambazonia Governing Council, claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Ambazonia is the name anglophone separatists have given to the homeland they hope to carve out of western Cameroon in this majority French-speaking country.
The shootings bring to 10 the number of security forces killed since last month.
Promising action, Defence Minister Joseph Beti Assomo said on Saturday that "measures will be taken immediately" to "eradicate this inconvenient situation", without elaborating further.
State radio was blunter. "[President] Paul Biya has declared war on these terrorists who seek secession," it announced.
Widening war
There are now fears of the start of a far more serious conflict that could drive a surge of additional refugees into neigbouring Nigeria, where Cameroon's government says some of the militants are sheltering.
What began last year with civil society-led demonstrations over the alleged marginalisation of the regions of North West and South West Cameroon now risks spinning out of control.
The initial demand was for a return to a pre-1971 federal system of government and greater autonomy for the anglophone region. But a heavy-handed response by the security forces has generated support for what was initially a fringe secessionist movement.
Over the past year security forces have shoot dead several civilian demonstrators and carried out mass arrests.
In a major confrontation on 1 October, at least 17 people were shot dead and 50 wounded as the blue and white flag of the self-styled Republic of Ambazonia was hoisted in towns across the North West and South West regions to mark a symbolic break from Cameroon.
Anglophone parliamentarians have tried to raise the issue of human rights violations and the region's underlying concerns of underdevelopment.
In chaotic scenes in parliament on 23 November, the main opposition party threatened to halt further business in the house until the 'anglophone crisis' was tabled for debate, amid chants of "How many people Paul Biya will kill?"
There have been widespread calls for dialogue, to which the United Nations has added its voice. But there appears little appetite for talks on either side.
"How can we maintain dialogue with an interlocutor whose only ideology is the partition of a state that is legitimate and recognized as such by all international bodies?" Cameroon's communications minister Issa Tchiroma said last week.
The government had earlier sent emissaries from the ruling CPDM party who hail from the English-speaking regions to try and broker talks, but they received a hostile reception.
Militancy is running high in what activists refer to as "Southern Cameroon", a historical nod to the territory administered by the British after World War I, which voted to unify with French-speaking Cameroon in 1961.
A civil disobedience campaign includes a weekly "ghost town" shutdown of all businesses, which at times has been violently enforced. Schools have also been ordered closed, and those that do open risk being firebombed.
Patience tested
But the opposition is split over the use of armed violence. The hard-line leader of the Ambazonia Defence Forces, Lucas Cho Ayaba, argues that resorting to insurgency is a legitimate response to the abuses committed by the Cameroonian security forces.
"They have shot and killed hundreds of unarmed civilians on the streets and in their homes, maimed hundreds, raped ladies on university campuses, buried some in mass graves, and abducted thousands," Ayaba told IRIN by telephone from his home in the United Kingdom.
Abaya's figures could not be independently confirmed.
"We must defend ourselves pre-emptively and reactively," said Ayaba, who also heads the Ambazonia Governing Council. It will be "block-by-block, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, village-by-village, city-by-city."
Akwanga Ebenezer leads the Southern Cameroons Defence Forces from exile in the United States. He has promoted secession since the 1990s and argues that the time for dialogue has now definitively passed.
"We are just waiting to strike and let the world hear from us," he told IRIN.
He is critical of the more cautious approach adopted by the Southern Cameroons Ambazonia Consortium United Front (SCACUF), a coalition of opposition groups, dubbed the "interim government", which is yet to publicly support armed action.
The head of SCACUF, Julius Sessekou Ayuk Tabe, argues that it is too early to turn to war, but "all options are now available for us to use in our restoration [of Ambazonia] quest", he warned.
To try and contain the spreading rebellion, the security forces have introduced night-time curfews, roadblocks and raids. Farm tools have been confiscated and traditional single-shot hunting rifles banned.
The government says it has so far arrested 22 armed activists, some trying to cross the border into Nigeria.
Residents in a string of villages in the Manyu region, where the security forces were ambushed, were on Friday ordered to leave their homes or risk being treated as "accomplices or perpetrators" of seperatist violence.
More refugees
Manyu was the focus of a military crackdown after the 1 October protests, with civilians shot dead in army raids that sent 20,000 people fleeing into Nigeria's Cross River State.
A new military campaign is likely to create yet more anger and bitterness.
Among the Cameroonians IRIN spoke to in Calabar last week, the capital of Cross River State, all supported the idea of secession.
"I think every English-speaking Cameroonian wants an independent country and nothing else. We are not ready to back down," said businessman Olembe Olembe, whose children are now studying in Nigeria after he withdrew them from school in Limbe, in the South West Region.
"English speakers are treated as slaves in their own country. We are saying 'enough is enough'. We don't want to be Cameroonians anymore," he added.
"When we were calm and diplomatic, they saw us as fools and were not ready to listen to us," said Emmanuel Bisong, a trader who shuttles between Limbe and Calabar. "Now that we have risen up, they are seeing our seriousness."
Additional reporting by Philip Obaji in Calabar
Living with landmines in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Publisher International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Publication Date 4 December 2017 Cite as International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Living with landmines in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 4 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2544d24.html [accessed 17 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.
Aldin Karavdic was tending a herd of goats close to his family's home when he stepped on a landmine. The 16-year-old suffered severe injuries, especially to his right leg - luckily, doctors were able to save it. In these hills near the city of Mostar, many children used to herd the family cattle. But that was before residents learned that the area was littered with mines and unexploded ordnance from the Bosnian war.
The war ended more than two decades ago, yet over 80,000 mines and pieces of unexploded ordnance still pose a direct risk to more than a half million residents. At least 1,750 people have been injured by mines in the post-war period, and 614 of these cases were fatal. Most of the accidents are caused by PROM-1 antipersonnel mines, which were banned under the Ottawa Treaty 20 years ago. Almost 15% of the victims are children.
In the past two years alone, landmines have killed nine people and injured another twelve. Aldin is among the survivors. He has recovered some use of his leg, but he continues to dig out shrapnel, and the trauma - according to his mother - still disrupts his sleep. The monthly disability payment he receives is largely symbolic, and his family cannot afford to pay for his rehabilitation. Estimated to be 60% disabled, Aldin became a member of the civil war victims association even though he was born six years after the war ended.
During our visit, Aldin's parents spoke of their fear and uncertainty about how Aldin would recover from the injury and the trauma, but also about how to feed their five children. As they are unemployed, their goats are essential to the family's survival. "Herding is very difficult now, because we're scared to walk through the hills," they told us. Since Aldin's accident, the authorities have swept the area and found many more unexploded devices. They removed them, but local people rarely venture there anymore.
Many people living close to marked mine-contaminated areas take their life in their hands in order to collect wood and other necessities. They hope that their familiarity with the terrain will keep them safe. But it doesn't always work out that way: in April 2017, one man was killed and another injured on Ozren Mountain. Hunters are also vulnerable, like the 48-year-old man who lost his life on 5 November in Ostra Luka. That same day, three 11-to-13-year-old children ventured into a minefield close to Sarajevo out of curiosity - luckily, they were rescued by demining units.
To prevent such accidents and keep children out of harm's way, the Red Cross builds safe playgrounds in mine-affected areas. So far, thirteen safe playgrounds have opened around the country. So far, thirteen safe playgrounds have opened around the country. Working with children is an important part of the Red Cross's effort to raise awareness about the danger of mines. Every year, over 25,000 children participate in the "Think mines" primary school competitions, which are organized by the Red Cross Society of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the support of the ICRC. The Red Cross also works with other vulnerable groups, warning them of the mine threat and constantly promoting safe behaviour. It also marks minefields with warning signs, billboards and mine maps.
The authorities are heavily involved in humanitarian demining and have cleared over 120,000 landmines and pieces of unexploded ordnance so far. However, the country will fall short of its initial target of being landmine-free by 2019. This month the official deadline was moved to 2025, but even that may be ambitious given the lack of financial resources. Some experts estimate it could take several decades to clear the country of all landmines and unexploded ordnance. Until then, the Red Cross will continue to raise awareness among local residents. This devastating legacy of war has already robbed too many people of their basic sense of safety. And some, like Aldin, have lost much more.
Pakistan: Stranded in Somalia, fishermen finally return home
Publisher International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Publication Date 17 December 2017 Cite as International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Pakistan: Stranded in Somalia, fishermen finally return home, 17 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2545b04.html [accessed 17 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.
Joined in their grief, the other six families shared the agony that Jamal felt. The seven fishermen, stranded in Somalia after their boat capsized, were helpless as they couldn't send a message home, despite knowing that their families must be agonizing over their disappearance. The fishermen belonged to far-flung coastal areas in Balochistan and Sindh, where fishing is the mainstay.
"We did not even know if our son was alive!" said Zafar, the father of another fisherman. This deadly silence finally broke with a phone call facilitated by the ICRC and Somali authorities.
The ICRC came in contact with the stranded fishermen in Kismayo, Somalia, as part of the humanitarian work there. At the request of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Pakistan, the process of repatriating the seven fishermen to Pakistan was initiated and arranged by the ICRC in coordination with the Somali authorities.
The families finally reunited on 20 October 2017. Anxiety gave way to tears of joy and relief at the Karachi and Islamabad airports as the loved ones embraced each other. The families travelled to Karachi and Islamabad with the support of the Pakistan Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and the ICRC. "Returning home seems so surreal; it feels like we are in heaven," said Salim, one of the fishermen.
The ICRC strives to connect people who have been separated from their families due to natural disasters, migration or violence. Where possible, we help them reunite with their families. As part of the Restoring Family Links (RFL) programme, the ICRC works closely with PRCS to facilitate this process. Earlier this year, seven other Pakistani fishermen stranded in Yemen were repatriated and reunited with their families in Pakistan after more than a decade of separation. To learn more about RFL, please visit www.familylinks.icrc.org.
Find out more about the ICRC's work in Somalia.
Names have been changed to protect their identity.
Violence in Congo's Kasai Region even harder on disabled people
Publisher International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Publication Date 1 December 2017 Cite as International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Violence in Congo's Kasai Region even harder on disabled people, 1 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2546db4.html [accessed 17 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.
People with reduced mobility have been the most severely affected by the violence in the Kasai Region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They can find themselves exposed to the worst of the violence because they cannot keep up when it is time to flee, and their families may not wait for them.
"It was everyone for themselves," said Veronique. "Everyone was fleeing to safety, and my husband abandoned me. I was helpless in the confusion." Both of Veronique's legs are paralysed as a result of polio. She was left behind with her five-year-old daughter.
The Kasai Region is located in the centre of the DRC and is made up of 5 of the country's 26 provinces. The violence there broke out in August 2016 between a local militia group and the national security services. Since January, there have also been armed clashed between communities, killing thousands and displacing over a million people.
When the violence began, Veronique was living in Tshikapa, a town in Kasai. She didn't expect to survive alone in the middle of the fierce fighting: "I thought it was the end. Because I couldn't move like everybody else, I stayed at home waiting to die with my daughter. I couldn't stop crying as I saw people fleeing without us."
A stroke of luck saved Veronique's life. She saw some friends of her husband pass by her house on their way out of town, and told them about her situation. "They put my daughter and me in their car and we left straight away. In my panic, I left everything behind."
The next day, Veronique and her daughter were in Kikwit, in the province of Kwilu, 300 kilometres away. They'd never been there, and they didn't know what to do. They had no possessions and no food. They had to beg to survive.
The authorities in Kikwit made some arrangements for people who'd been displaced from Kasai, and Veronique was placed with a host family. But the challenges were still too great. Her daughter fell ill several times and she couldn't afford proper treatment. And the host family couldn't afford to feed them every day.
It was thanks to the hot meals distributed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Red Cross Society of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that Veronique and her daughter stopped going hungry. Other displaced people helped her and her daughter to get to the closest distribution centre at lunchtime.
Veronique has received money as well as food from the ICRC. The aim of this financial support, provided in cooperation with a bank in Kikwit, is to give displaced people cash to cover many of their essential needs and, if possible, help them set up a small business to generate revenue and give them a degree of autonomy. As she left the bank, Veronique said: "First and foremost I will use the money to treat my sick daughter. Then I think I'll buy biscuits and soap to resell. I might sell packets of peanuts too, because that works well here."
Veronique still hasn't found her husband or even heard from him.
The ICRC and the DRC Red Cross are currently helping 29,000 victims of violence in Kasai. Between August and September, they provided hot meals and financial assistance to 9,000 displaced people in Kikwit.
Yemen: As threat of famine looms, UN urges Saudi-led coalition to fully lift blockade of Red Sea ports
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 2 December 2017 Cite as UN News Service, Yemen: As threat of famine looms, UN urges Saudi-led coalition to fully lift blockade of Red Sea ports, 2 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2562cf4.html [accessed 17 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.
Top officials from across the United Nations system called on Saturday for the Saudi-led coalition to fully lift its blockade of Yemen's Red Sea ports, warning that unless commercial imports are resumed, the threat of widespread famine in a matter of months is very real.
The officials also announced that the United Nations is sending a team to Riyadh to discuss any concerns the coalition and Saudi Arabia may have in relation to these ports. But we need the coalition to urgently grant unimpeded access for imports that are a lifeline for millions of people.
They acknowledged that the partial lifting of the blockade of Yemen's Red Sea ports in recent days is allowing humanitarian organizations to resume the provision of life-saving assistance to people in desperate need.
But given the massive scale of Yemen's humanitarian crisis, all this does is slow the collapse towards a massive humanitarian tragedy costing millions of lives. It does not prevent it, said the UN leaders, who added: Without the urgent resumption of commercial imports, especially food, fuel and medicines, millions of children, women and men risk mass hunger, disease and death.
The appeal came in a joint statement by the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Achim Steiner, The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, the Executive Director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) Anthony Lake, the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley, the Director General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), William Lacy Swing, and the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Mark Lowcock.
More than two years of relentless conflict between the Government and Houthi and allied rebels in Yemen, already the Arab world's poorest country, has devastated the lives of millions of people. An alarming 20.7 million people in Yemen need some kind of humanitarian or protection support, with some 9.8 million in acute need of assistance. This man-made disaster has been brutal on civilians.
In their statement today, the UN leaders said that the current ongoing commercial import restrictions have led to shortages of fuel, food and other essentials, driving up prices and wrecking lives and livelihoods. The price of wheat flour has risen by 30 per cent, while the price of fuel has doubled and that of trucked water has skyrocketed by 600 per cent in some locations.
Urban water networks in seven cities have run out of fuel and now depend on humanitarian organizations to fill in the gap. Other cities will shortly be in a similar situation if the blockade is not lifted, which would leave 11 million people without safe water.
In other areas, people are reducing their food consumption to dangerous levels in order to pay for the rising cost of water trucking, or are turning to contaminated water sources to meet their basic needs. This further compounds the risk of disease, especially among children.
Less than half of the health facilities are functioning, and more hospitals and health centers will close should fuel and water supplies not improve. Sewage networks in six main cities are compromised, threatening a renewed spike in the country's cholera outbreak, which has reached almost 1 million suspected cases and killed over 2,200 people.
Yemen remains on the cusp of one of the largest famines in modern times, says the statement, explaining that nearly 400,000 children suffer from severe acute malnutrition and face an increased risk of death. In addition, some eight million people could starve without urgent food assistance coming into Yemen.
With 90 per cent of the country's food imported, the lack of commercial imports through Red Sea ports would alone push a further three million people into starvation. The threat of widespread famine in a matter of months is very real, the statement warns.
This imminent catastrophe is entirely avoidable, but it requires immediate action by the coalition, says the statement, noting that while three ships carrying food have been granted permission to berth at Hudaydah port in recent days, four fuel tankers and 10 ships carrying food have all been waiting for permission to enter port.
Together, we call on the coalition to urgently open up all Yemeni Red Sea ports fully and to facilitate the entry and free-flow of humanitarian and vital commercial goods.
UN chief condemns terrorist attack against college dormitory in Pakistan
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 1 December 2017 Cite as UN News Service, UN chief condemns terrorist attack against college dormitory in Pakistan, 1 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2563f24.html [accessed 17 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 Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday condemned the terrorist attack against a university dormitory in northern Pakistan that killed at least nine people and injured many others.
"The Secretary-General extends his condolences to the bereaved families and to the Government and people of Pakistan. He wishes a speedy recovery to the injured," said a statement issued by his Spokesman Stephane Dujarric, following the attack that took place in the city of Peshawar when dozens of people gathered to celebrate Eid al Milad-un Nabi, a sacred Muslim holiday.
UN agency to fly 15,000 migrants home from Libya in wake of reported abuses
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 1 December 2017 Cite as UN News Service, UN agency to fly 15,000 migrants home from Libya in wake of reported abuses, 1 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2565c84.html [accessed 17 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 millions displaced within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and thousands more forced to flee across the border into Zambia, the United Nations refugee agency is appealing for urgent resources to make sure that relief programmes - hanging on by threads - do not collapse.
"The number of refugees fleeing militia violence in south-eastern DRC and arriving in Zambia has crossed the 12,000 mark - with more than 8,400 arrivals in the last three months," Babar Baloch, a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told reporters at a regular news briefing in Geneva Friday.
In addition, according to refugee accounts, more than four million people are displaced inside the DRC, and there are fears that many more could be forced to flee the country as fighting is intensifying.
The worst affected are women and children, who form about 80 per cent of the refugee numbers, and there are reports of civilians being killed, women being raped, private property looted and houses torched.
However, assistance programmes in both countries are "hugely underfunded" added Mr. Baloch, noting that of the $236.2 million required in the DRC, only $54.6 million has been received so far, while in Zambia, only $13.6 million has been received.
"In both cases, this is less than a quarter of what is needed," he expressed.
According to the UN refugee agency, most of the people displaced from the DRC into Zambia hail from the Haut-Katanga and Tanganyika provinces of the and many among them crossed into the Zambian province of Luapula (which borders the DRC on three sides).
People are also crossing into other northern and north-western provinces of Zambia. In total, the country hosts over 65,000 refugees, including some 33,000 from the DRC.
Security Council hails 'remarkable achievements' one year after Colombian peace accord
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 30 November 2017 Cite as UN News Service, Security Council hails 'remarkable achievements' one year after Colombian peace accord, 30 November 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2566c04.html [accessed 17 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 Security Council on Thursday marked the one year anniversary of the signing and entry-into-force of the peace agreement between the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC-EP).
In a press statement, the Council circulated the document containing the Agreement for Ending the Conflict and building a lasting peace between the Government and FARC-EP, while congratulating the parties "for the remarkable achievements of the peace process."
The historic peace accord ended the Western Hemisphere's longest running conflict. The deal had been the culmination of four years of talks hosted in Havana, Cuba, between the two sides, and which had led to agreements on key issues such as political participation, land rights, illicit drugs and victims' rights and transitional justice.
"The members of the Security Council applauded the leadership and commitment of the parties to implementing the agreement over the past 12 months, which has brought to an end over 50 years of conflict," the Council said in a statement.
The Council members welcomed the successful completion of the FARC-EP's laying down of arms to UN monitors in August, calling it "a major milestone in the transition between war and peace."
"Colombia's peace process has sparked high hopes and expectations around the world and continues to provide inspiration for those seeking to end conflicts elsewhere," the statement continued.
It also reiterated the Council's "full support to the parties as they seek to turn the end of the conflict into a stable and lasting peace by working to fully implement the peace agreement beyond the laying down of arms."
Additionally, the Security Council members welcomed the report of the visit to Colombia in November by the Under Secretary-General for Political Affairs, Jeffery Feltman, and noted his statement in Bogota on 15 November 2017, particularly regarding the importance of advancing the reincorporation of former FARC-EP combatants into civilian life with a comprehensive strategy and concrete action plans and resources to enable success.
The statement also noted "the importance of addressing the security situation in the former conflict zones, following some attacks, including on community leaders, human rights defenders and former FARC combatants, by increasing State presence and governance to secure a lasting peace."
In this regard, the Council members urged the parties, with the support of the relevant civilian state institutions and security forces, "to redouble efforts to accelerate progress in implementation over the coming weeks and months, in accordance with the provisions set out in the peace agreement, including with respect to enacting the necessary legislation."
According to the statement, they further underlined the importance of "upholding the political participation of the FARC-EP now that they have laid down their arms, in accordance with the peace agreement" and "the international community remaining closely engaged to continue to support and encourage Colombia's work to implement the peace agreement."
The Council members recalled resolutions 2366 (2017) and 2377 (2017), which established and mandated the UN Verification Mission to verify implementation by the parties of the process of political, economic and social reincorporation of the FARC-EP and the implementation of personal and collective security guarantees.
They "appreciated the efforts of the Verification Mission to provide support and to encourage progress" and looked forward 26 December when the Secretary-General would submit the first 90-day report on its activities.
UN chief calls for end to all armed clashes, airstrikes in Yemen
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 3 December 2017 Cite as UN News Service, UN chief calls for end to all armed clashes, airstrikes in Yemen, 3 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2567294.html [accessed 17 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 Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called on the parties to the conflict in Yemen to cease all air and ground assaults, expressing deep concern about the sharp escalation of armed clashes and airstrikes in the capital, Sana'a, and other parts of the war-torn country over the past several days.
A statement issued by Mr. Guterres' Spokesman Sunday evening said the fighting has already resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, including civilians, and is also restricting the movement of people and life-saving services within Sana'a city.
Ambulances and medical teams cannot access the injured and people cannot go outside to buy food and other necessities. Aid workers are unable to travel and implement critical life-saving programmes at a time when millions of Yemenis rely on assistance to survive, said the statement.
This latest outbreak of violence could not come at a worse time for the Yemeni people, who are already caught up in the world's largest humanitarian crisis. The conflict and blockade that was put in place on 6 November and is still not fully lifted have caused significant shortages of critical supplies, especially food and fuel, and resulted in price hikes, curtailing access to food, safe water and healthcare.
The Secretary-General calls for the urgent resumption of all commercial imports, without which millions of children, women and men risk mass hunger, disease and death, the statement underscored.
The UN chief went on to call on all parties to the conflict to abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law, with the statement emphasizing: It is paramount that civilians are protected, that the wounded are afforded safe access to medical care, and that all sides facilitate life-saving humanitarian access.
More than two years of relentless conflict between the Government and Houthi and allied rebels in Yemen, already the Arab world's poorest country, has devastated the lives of millions of people. An alarming 20.7 million people in Yemen need some kind of humanitarian or protection support, with some 9.8 million in acute need of assistance. This man-made disaster has been brutal on civilians.
The Secretary-General reiterates that there is no military solution to the Yemen conflict. He urges all parties to the conflict to engage meaningfully with the United Nations to revitalize inclusive negotiations on a political settlement, the statement concluded.
Tajikistan: Nine long jail terms for what?
Publisher Forum 18 Author Mushfig Bayram Publication Date 4 December 2017 Cite as Forum 18, Tajikistan: Nine long jail terms for what?, 4 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a256e734.html [accessed 17 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.
At least nine Muslim men - including an imam and a well-known heart surgeon - are known to have been jailed since August in the northern Sogd Region in three separate cases. All received at least five year jail terms. Officials refused to explain what they had done wrong.
Philippines: ICC must examine 'war on drugs' crimes as child killings go unpunished
Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 4 December 2017 Cite as Amnesty International, Philippines: ICC must examine 'war on drugs' crimes as child killings go unpunished, 4 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a2573594.html [accessed 17 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 International Criminal Court (ICC) must urgently open a preliminary examination into crimes against humanity, including the slaughter of dozens of children, committed during Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's murderous "war on drugs", Amnesty International said today.
Thousands of people have been killed by police since Duterte took office in June 2016, yet not a single police officer has been held to account for any of the crimes committed.
"It is time for international justice mechanisms to step in and end the carnage on Philippine streets by bringing the perpetrators to justice. The country's judiciary and police have proven themselves both unwilling and unable to hold the killers in the 'war on drugs' to account," said James Gomez, Amnesty International's Regional Director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
"The ICC must open a preliminary examination into the situation and cast its net widely. Responsibility is not just limited to those pulling the trigger, but also those who order or encourage murders and other crimes against humanity.
"President Duterte and other high-level government officials have openly advocated for killings, which could amount to criminal responsibility under international law."
Crimes against children
Amnesty International's call on the ICC comes amid growing evidence of crimes against humanity committed against children in the "war on drugs". As many as 60 children have been killed in anti-drug operations since June 2016.
Family members told Amnesty International they witnessed police shoot children dead at point-blank range as they were begging for mercy.
"They pointed a gun at my head [and] told me to get out I heard shouting and three gunshots, then three more shots," said O, the partner of a 17-year-old victim, who was killed after he was woken up in the middle of the night.
An Amnesty International research team witnessed how large numbers of children suspected of drug-related offences were kept in overcrowded and unsanitary holding centres for minors in the capital, Manila. Some said they had been beaten and tortured by police on their arrest, and claimed police had framed them by forcing them to pose in photographs with drugs that had been planted.
The killing of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos in August sparked a national outcry. Police claimed Kian had been shot in self-defence, but CCTV footage and eyewitness testimony showed how plainclothes officers dragged away the unarmed teenager and shot him dead in an alleyway.
More than 12 police officers have been investigated for the killing after the case received international attention, but no one has yet been held to account.
The ICC recently indicated that it will investigate and pay special attention to crimes against children.
"Police and armed persons linked to the police have killed dozens of children since 2016. Children have also been tortured and detained in appalling conditions, while families have been torn apart," said James Gomez.
"The case of Kian delos Santos has rightly sparked outrage. The blatant lies by officers to try to cover up their role in the cold-blooded murder of a child shows that the police cannot be trusted to investigate themselves."
Time for the ICC to step in
In January 2017, Amnesty International recommended that - unless Philippine authorities took key steps to end drug-related killings - the ICC should open a preliminary examination into the crimes.
The organization called for an immediate end to extrajudicial executions, plus an end to the incitement and encouragement of such killings by high-ranking officials, including the President. Amnesty also urged the authorities to launch an impartial and efficient investigation into all suspected unlawful killings.
However, the Philippine authorities have completely failed to heed any of these calls.
"How many bullet-riddled bodies must be found dumped on the streets before the international community takes action?" said James Gomez.
"The ICC must act now. We believe the "war on drugs" meets the threshold of crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute, and international pressure is needed to persuade the Philippine authorities to change course."
Copyright notice: Copyright Amnesty International
Mozambique: Journalist held at gunpoint and threatened with death for doing his job
Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 4 December 2017 Cite as Amnesty International, Mozambique: Journalist held at gunpoint and threatened with death for doing his job, 4 December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a25738a4.html [accessed 17 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 response to the death threats made against Aunicio da Silva, an investigative journalist and editor of Ikweli, a weekly publication in Nampula City in the north of Mozambique, Amnesty International's Regional Director for Southern Africa, Deprose Muchena, said:
"Aunicio da Silva's life has been threatened simply because he was doing his job as an investigative journalist: holding the powerful to account.
"This incident represents yet another attack on media freedom in Mozambique and sends a chilling message to journalists across the country to stay silent or face the consequences.
"Journalism is not a crime. Mozambican authorities must protect the profession by urgently investigating these threats against Aunicio. Anyone found to be criminally responsible for threatening and harassing journalists must be brought to justice in a fair trial."
Background
Late on Saturday, 2 December 2017, a gunman threatened to kill Aunicio da Silva, an investigative journalist and editor of Ikweli, a weekly publication in Nampula City in the north of Mozambique. He accused da Silva of publishing articles that tarnished the image of Carlos Saide, the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) candidate for the Nampula City mayoral by-election scheduled to take place on 24 January 2018.
On 4 October, the mayor of Nampula City, Mahamudo Amurane, was assassinated by unidentified gunmen. This followed his disagreements with the leadership of the MDM for insisting on clean governance and his fight against corruption.
Copyright notice: Copyright Amnesty International
Ben Lambert / Hearst Connecticut Media
TORRINGTON As the Torrington Public Schools near state designation as an Alliance District, Superintendent Denise Clemons provided an overview of the process and what it will mean for the city schools during a recent school board meeting.
The 30 lowest-performing school districts in the state are classified as Alliance Districts by the state and receive additional funding. Torrington will be named as such a district as part of the state budget, but this status is not yet official, Clemons said.
Tugboats dock an oil tanker on a crude oil quay at a port in Zhoushan, eastern China's Zhejiang province, Nov. 11, 2016.
China's dependence on foreign oil is growing and is likely to keep rising for decades to come, experts say.
Despite increases in international oil prices this year, China's domestic crude production has continued to slide.
Asian oil prices have jumped nearly 40 percent from their low point in June to a high in November. But China's crude output has dropped 4.1 percent through October after plunging 6.9 percent last year.
China's state-owned oil giants have yet to respond to higher prices with increased production, although prices have already climbed past the range of U.S. $45-55 (297-363 yuan) per barrel, which would cover their presumed production costs.
In October, domestic output dipped below 3.8 million barrels per day (bpd) from the average rate of 4 million bpd for all of last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The October level was near a low set in August, a record since the NBS began publishing data in 2011.
While production is lagging, imports are rising to meet China's growing demand.
In September, crude imports soared 12 percent from a year earlier to a near-record of 9 million bpd. Imports have averaged 8.4 million bpd so far this year, according to customs figures.
Month-to-month changes have been attributed to a host of variables, including government-set quotas for imports by independent refiners. But the longer-term growth of imports over domestic production has been a consistent trend.
This year's spread between rising imports and falling production has already surpassed China's forecasts for 2020 under its Five-Year Energy Plan, released by the National Energy Administration (NEA) and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) in January.
Falling investment at China's major oilfields, like the decades-old and now depleted Daqing field in Heilongjiang province, is likely to extend last year's drop in output through 2017.
China's import dependence first reached 50 percent in 2008, gradually rising to 64.5 percent last year. This year's pace has put China's reliance on track to reach 69 percent.
As fast as the proportion is rising, a recent study by the International Energy Agency (IEA) found no signs that it will slow down.
By 2040, China's import dependence will hit 80 percent, the Paris-based IEA said last month in its annual World Energy Outlook.
In a rare official comment on rising import dependence, a Ministry of Land and Resources research center said Saturday that China is "likely" to keep the import ratio within 70 percent until 2035, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Over the long term, the decline in China's oil output will prove "difficult to reverse" due to complex geological conditions at oilfields that "struggle to break even at (U.S.) $40-50 (264-330 yuan) per barrel," the IEA study said.
Even taking new "tight oil" and offshore resources into account, production is forecast to slip to 3.1 million bpd, while demand will rise 35 percent to 15.5 million bpd, including bunker supplies for marine and aviation fuels.
Huge appetite for oil
China will become the world's leading oil consumer sometime soon after 2030, according to the IEA forecast.
In 2040, China's net imports are expected to rise to 13 million bpd, taking up nearly 30 percent of all internationally traded oil.
China's annual costs for imported oil will grow more than fourfold from about U.S. $110 billion (727 billion yuan) now to U.S. $460 billion (3.0 trillion yuan) by 2040, the IEA said.
China has taken a series of steps aimed at reducing the risks to its energy security, including diversifying its sources and increasing its overland supplies with pipelines through Russia, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar.
But limitations of production and logistics will make these only partial solutions.
"This means that, in our projections, China has little alternative but to turn to its existing main suppliers in the Middle East for an additional 1.6 million bpd of supply," the IEA said. "This in turn would increase its reliance on trade via the Straits of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca, two potential strategic chokepoints in global trade," the IEA said.
Mikkal Herberg, energy security research director for the Seattle-based National Bureau of Asian Research, said that prospects for a turnaround in China's oil output due to this year's higher prices appear remote.
"The notion that they might somehow suddenly increase domestic oil production seems extremely implausible," said Herberg.
"Even if they can keep it flat, they're still headed toward 80-percent import dependence," he said.
While pipeline deliveries may mitigate some of China's vulnerability to supply disruptions, an estimated 80 percent of its oil imports will still come by sea.
"The 80-percent oil import dependence plus the 80 percent of that coming through the sea lanes will have pretty profound strategic implications for China," Herberg said.
The IEA estimates that the Middle East will provide about half of China's oil supply in 2040, while China will consume about a quarter of the region's oil exports.
The estimates may understate China's reliance on the Middle East for the grades of crude that it needs to refine into lower-pollution fuels.
Chinese locals walk beside oil pumps in Daqing, northeastern China's Heilongjiang province, May 2, 2016. Credit: AFP Second pipeline from Russia
China recently completed a second pipeline from the Russian border to its petroleum center at Daqing, doubling the route's import capacity to 600,000 bpd.
Russia has been China's leading supplier for nine months in a row, but it has been struggling to stem the rising sulfur content of the crude that it has available.
In October, Interfax reported that Russia is bound by contract under an intergovernmental agreement to supply China with scarce low-sulfur oil, forcing it to raise the sulfur content of oil to its other export customers in Europe.
"The sulfur content of crude (for China) must not exceed 0.65 percent, according to agreements with Chinese partners, but it could take a year and a half to implement these measures," Interfax said.
The sulfur content of oil available at some of Russia's western export terminals could rise to 1.8 percent next year as a result, the news agency said.
China's growing reliance on imports is a crucial reason for its heavy investment in its twin trade and infrastructure initiatives the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, known as "One Belt, One Road," or OBOR, Herberg said.
These are likely to become linked through port development with growing naval access and support facilities to help protect China's energy security.
"I think it adds a very powerful driver to China's blue water naval development and power projection capacity through the Indian Ocean, and developing a whole set of strong diplomatic ties with the littoral Indian Ocean countries," Herberg said.
Herberg sees the potential for rising tensions not only with the United States over China's increased presence, but also with Japan, which depends on the same maritime routes for its energy supplies.
"To turn over those vital sea lanes to the tender mercies of the Chinese navy will put the hair up on the backs of the Japanese strategic planners," he said.
India is also greatly concerned by the implications of a Chinese buildup in the region.
"They see this as part of the Chinese encirclement of India," Herberg said.
Despite the potential consequences of China's rapidly rising reliance, the government has said little in recent years about the risks of import dependence, leaving it unclear whether it is a motive or a pretext for expanding naval power.
"It's not just about oil," Herberg said.
An ethnic Mongolian writer in China's northern region of Inner Mongolia has called on fellow ethnic Mongolians to "rise up" to reclaim their lands and livelihoods following repeated land grabs by local authorities and companies owned by majority Han Chinese.
Writer and blogger Tsetsenbaatar made the comments via the social media app WeChat after the Hangin banner government (a county-level administrative area) went ahead with its plan to sign over traditional nomadic grazing lands to a livestock breeding station.
"Nothing can be more outrageous than this," Tsetsenbaatar said in comments translated by the U.S.-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC).
"The Chinese who came to our Mongolian lands as beggars are now robbing us Mongolians in broad daylight," he wrote.
"As descendants of Ghengis Khan, we should rise up to reclaim our land, livelihood, and dignity," Tsetsenbaatar said.
Agricultural officials and employees from the Hangin banner government and the livestock breeding farm beat up Urgumulaa, an ethnic Mongolian herder who resisted the takeover of her land, her sister and elderly father, before driving away their livestock on Nov. 29, SMHRIC said.
The officials "buried our well that we and our livestock drank from, and told us that we are not allowed to graze our animals there," she said in a Dec. 2 video statement that has been circulating on social media since.
She said the requisitioning of the family's land came in spite of a recent ruling by the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Peoples High Court, which found in favor of the herders.
"Without our knowledge, how can our grazing land where we lived for generations be turned to the property of this livestock breeding station? How can our land become a property of these Chinese robbers?" Urgumulaa said in the statement.
The court found the government's claim on the land, which it expressed by granting a land-use "license" to the breeding farm, to be "unfounded."
"With no authority to override the ... High Courts decision, the Hangin banner government is apparently violating the relevant Chinese laws to accommodate the livestock breeding station, possibly due to certain under-the-table deals," SMHRIC said in statement on its website.
Petitioners blocked
Ethnic Mongolians, who make up almost 20 percent of Inner Mongolia's population of 23 million, increasingly complain of widespread environmental destruction and unfair development policies in the region.
Clashes between Chinese state-backed mining or forestry companies and herding communities are common in the region, which borders the independent country of Mongolia.
Ethnic Mongolians who complain about the loss of their grazing lands are frequently targeted for harassment, beatings and detention by the authorities.
Last week, several herders from Zaruud banner and Hangin banner arrived in the regional capital Hohhot to lodge formal petitions and lawsuits relating to land disputes, but were prevented from approaching the complaints department of the regional government, they told RFA.
"I was detained for a month last September because I reported the illegal destruction of villagers' environment and property by a commercial concern," herder Toyaa from Ulaanha village in an interview on Nov. 25.
"I was detained on suspicion of picking quarrels and stirring up trouble and released on bail, but I didn't accept the charges, so I went back to Beijing to complain, and the court sentenced me to six months' imprisonment," she said.
"All because I was reporting official corruption."
Fellow herder Wang Yatou said she was seeking compensation after her son drowned in a ditch illegally dug by a company in her village.
"After he died, the villagers all complained, but the workers just kept on digging up the sand, and destroying the environment," she said.
"They have held me and other petitioning herders in the detention center, and finally sentenced me and five other people for picking quarrels and stirring up trouble," said Wang. "I intend to take this all the way."
Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
North Korean state trading firms tasked to earn foreign currency for cash-strapped Pyongyang are evading U.N. sanctions by setting up regional branches run by private businessmen who turn over a share of their profits, sources say.
The sanctions, imposed in August by the world body to punish North Korea for its nuclear weapons and missile tests, prohibit the country from exporting coal, iron, seafood, and other goods, but much is still being sold abroad to earn foreign cash, sources say.
With cross-border trade becoming more difficult, though, North Korea is resorting to desperate measures to increase its volume of business by mobilizing private merchants, a source in North Koreas North Hamgyong province told RFAs Korean Service.
These merchants now work out of newly forming regional branches of Pyongyang-based and government-run trading firms such as Daesung, Chilsong, and Unha, RFAs source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
These branches are organized as state-run foreign currency generating firms, but if you look at them closely, they are just groups of private trade merchants operating under the names of the trading companies, the source said.
And once these traders are brought into the state-run or military corporations, they are entitled to privileges like using official company documents to travel to China, the source said.
Foreign currency generating firms under the military use military code for their regional branches, but use titles intended for public viewing on their official travel documents, the source said.
The headquarters of the military firms use three-digit codes such as 600 or 100, and their branches use two-digit codes such as 80 or 90.
Traders employed by the newly opened branches are now all private merchants, a second source in North Hamgyong told RFA, also speaking on condition he not be named.
The [state-run] trading groups used to give them a hard time, but now they are allowing anyone to become a trade worker as long as they have a connection to China, he said.
The newly established foreign currency generating firms support the trade merchants work much more than the old firms did. Once contact is established with a Chinese partner, they are easily granted approval, he said.
Reported by Jieun Kim for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Richard Finney.
A Hindu woman and her children, who fled recent violence in Myanmar's northern Rakhine state, are members of a group of refugees that have returned to Maungdaw township where the local government is providing them with temporary shelter and food, Dec. 3, 2017.
About 350 Hindu refugees from Myanmar who fled to the state capital Sittwe amid ethnic violence during a brutal military crackdown in northern Rakhine state returned to Maungdaw township on Sunday, a Hindu leader said.
Another 200 people from 50 households will be sent back to Maungdaw via neighboring Buthidaung township on Tuesday, said Hindu leader Bu Hla Shwe.
Those who are returning will stay temporarily in a building near the Maungdaw district administration office because their homes were burned during the violence, he said.
The Hindus have requested that the local government place them near ethnic Rakhine villages to ensure their safety, he said.
Phu Boung, one of the Hindus who returned to Maungdaw, told RFAs Myanmar service that the situation in northern Rakhine is now calm, but those who are returning are having problems finding jobs.
Our houses were burned down, so we are staying at temporary houses built by the government, he said. We are experiencing problems because we cant earn enough money to survive.
Phu Boung said he used to make about 10,000 kyats (U.S. $7.25) a day locally before he fled the area, but now he can earn only half that amount.
Though officials gave each Hindu household a bag of rice, two bottles of cooking oil, beans, and some dry fish for a month, the food supplies were enough to feed his family of 16 for only 15 days, he said.
The situation in this area is calm because there are no Bengalis now, Phu Boung said, using a derogatory term for the Rohingya Muslims who were the target of the military crackdown following deadly attacks on police outposts in northern Rakhine by the Muslim militant group the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).
The Rohingya, who are viewed as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, have faced decades of discrimination in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar where they are not recognized as one of the countrys official ethnic groups.
Rights groups and some of the Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh during the crackdown have accused security forces of committing atrocities against them. The United Nations, United States, and others have said that the crackdown amounted to ethnic cleansing.
Hindus and other non-Muslims residing in northern Rakhine have accused ARSA militants of invading their villages and driving out or killing residents.
Local Hindus and the Myanmar government in late September said that ARSA militants detained nearly 100 people from several Hindu villages in the Kha Maung Seik village on Aug. 25, killed most of them, and dumped their corpses in mass graves. The militants also forced the young Hindu women to convert to Islam and took them to a Muslim refugee camp in neighboring Bangladesh.
They cant be trusted
We would become greatly worried if they came back into this area, Phu Boung said of the Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh. They cant be trusted.
It would be best if they dont come back. I feel as though something would happen again in six months or a year, he said, adding that some of his friends who are living among Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have reported that they overheard the Muslims discussing future attacks in Maungdaw.
I have never trusted these Bengalis all my life, Phu Boung said. We dont want the government to let them back in Myanmar, especially in Maungdaw.
We were attacked by them three times, he said. They burned down our houses the first time, attacked police outposts and took weapons the second time, and killed people from three Hindu villages. And some were raped during the latest attack. We cant accept them anymore.
Phu Buongs account of events, which is similar to what the Myanmar military told reporters at the time, could not be independently confirmed amid tight restrictions on access to the conflict zone.
Myanmar and Bangladesh have signed a bilateral agreement that calls for the voluntary repatriation of some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims who escaped to Bangladesh as they fled outbreaks of violence and two brutal military crackdowns in Rakhine state since October 2016.
The agreement does not cover another roughly 300,000 refugees who fled earlier cycles of violence.
Last week, Bangladesh approved a U.S. $280 million plan to relocate 100,000 Rohingya refugees from the mainland to a low-lying desolate island off its southern coast, where it intends to build shelters for them.
Reported by Min Thein Aung and Khin Khin Ei for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Kachin Independence Army (KIA) soldiers take a cigarette break as they move towards the frontline of fighting with the government army near Laiza in northern Myanmar's Kachin state, Oct. 14, 2016.
Myanmars military will cut off the delivery of rice and gasoline to parts of Kachin states turbulent Tanaing township controlled by an ethnic armed group if they find that local businessmen operating "illegal" mines are receiving the supplies, a Kachin state government official said Monday.
Tensions between government soldiers and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) flared on Nov. 27-28 in the townships gold and amber mining region, forcing residents still living in local villages to flee to safety.
The KIAs territory includes the mining region on whose natural resources it depends as a source of income through the levying a five-percent tax on mine operators.
The Myanmar military has said that it will block shipments of rice and gas to KIA-controlled areas of the township if it determines that the supplies are going to those who operate "illegal" mining businesses and not to residents, said Colonel Myo Tin, security and border affairs minister of Kachin state, in response to a question posed by Zaw Win, a lawmaker in the Kachin state parliament, who represents Tanaing township.
Businessmen are doing illegal gold and amber mining in this area, and they are likely supporting the KIA, he said during a meeting of the state parliament in Kachins capital Myitkyina.
Myo Tin said suppliers can sell rice and gas only to residents and that the Northern Military Headquarters informed the state government that it will monitor the flow of goods into the area to prevent them from being sold in KIA-controlled areas.
As of now, more than 30,000 residents of Tanaing have enough rice from local farms, he said.
The Myanmar military allows sellers to bring in the 7,000 bags of rice and 2,300 drums of gas per month required by migrant workers who live in the township, he said.
Though the government military says there are enough supplies, township residents are having difficulty buying rice and gas because prices are very high, Zaw Win said.
The latest clashes between the Myanmar army and KIA broke out last week during a government army offensive in an area where KIA Battalion 14 is stationed, according to KIA information officer Lieutenant Colonel Naw Bu.
Nearly all villagers had left the area six months earlier after they received advance notice about a clearance operation by the Myanmar military, he said. Those who remained behind to safeguard the villages have been fleeing to other locales since Nov. 7 out of fear of more fighting.
The KIA, which controls large swathes of northeastern Kachin state, has regularly engaged in hostilities with the Myanmar army since a cease-fire agreement collapsed in 2011.
The KIA is one of several militias with which the Myanmar government is trying to end decades of ethnic separatist civil wars and forge peace in the country through a series of peace negotiations launched in August 2016 by de facto national leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Reported by Kyaw Myo Min for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Vietnams Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Monday ordered the temporary closure of a controversial tollbooth in the countrys southern Tien Giang province following protests by drivers who say its location is unfair and that the fees it collects for an opaque road project are too high.
Phuc ordered the month-long suspension following an urgent meeting to address public anger over the tollbooth with the Ministry of Transportation and the chairman of the People's Committee of Tien Giang, saying the stations operations required further review.
The tollbooth collects fees from drivers to finance a 12-kilometer (7.5-mile) route bypassing Cai Lay city along National Highway 1 under a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) scheme, in which developers keep all revenues from a project for a designated period of time before transferring ownership to the government.
Drivers have expressed their opposition to the tollbooth since it opened in August by paying the fees in either extremely small or large denominations, and causing the booth to open its gates repeatedly to alleviate traffic that had built up while operators attempted to make change.
In late August, fees were reduced from 35,000-180,000 dong (U.S. $1.54-7.92) to 25,000-140,000 dong (U.S. $1.10-6.10), but the decrease did little to appease drivers, and protests led to a three-month suspension of operations that ended on Nov. 30.
Drivers continued to resist through the weekendin some cases getting into confrontations with toll operators and requiring cranes to remove their vehiclescausing the station to open its gates as many as 20 times a day to free up traffic, and prompting Phucs decision to shut it down.
Prior to the meeting, a spokesman for the Ministry of Public Security had called on local police to investigate and gather information about anyone inciting public disorder at BOT tollbooths, including Cai Lay station.
One driver, who spoke to RFAs Vietnamese Service on condition of anonymity, said that after protests began when the station was reopened, police stripped a truck operator named Phuong Tour of his license.
They told him to get in his car and move on but he refused to go, explaining that he couldnt drive without a license, the driver said.
The police then arrested him and brought him to Cai Lay police station. After that, other drivers went to the station to demand his release. He was freed at around 11:00 p.m.
The driver said that while the Cai Lay tollbooth fees were reduced in August, theyre still very high, adding that what we really are protesting against is the location of the station.
Drivers have said that the tollbooth should be placed on the new bypass, rather than the existing highway.
Lack of consultation, transparency
Other sources told RFA that anger over the tollbooth stemmed in part from a lack of consultation with the public before it was approved and the projects lack of transparency.
I can say that there are groups who have an interest in this BOT project and there must have been a fee paid to the people who allowed the station to be built on such a wrong location, said Pham Sy Liem, Vietnams former deputy minister of construction.
To prevent this, the project should have been transparent and the people should have been consulted about it before it was started. They decided about this project on their own, ignoring what the people said, and whoever opened their mouth about it was called stupid and insolent.
Nguyen Quang A, a civil society activist based in the capital Hanoi, said that none of the BOT projects in Vietnam are transparent, creating what he called a hotbed of corruption for local officials and their cronies.
The only way to stop this is to be transparent about everything, including how much is spent on the project, the details of the contract between the investors and the government, and the ability of the public to have input on how it proceeds.
Tran Quoc Thuan, the former deputy director for the Office of the National AssemblyVietnams rubber stamp parliamentnoted that according to the law, it is not mandatory for the developers to consult with the public about state-level projects.
However, its still very regrettable that they didnt do so, he said.
They actually did discuss the project with the local government, but the authorities didnt do their duty [to assess it] and simply approved it.
Social observer Nguyen Thi Hau called consultation with local communities essential for a project the size of the bypass and highway upgrade near Cai Lay.
But hardly any [government] bodies do it, or take it seriously, he said.
As far as I know, in the case of BOT projects like this one, there is no public consultation with the local community or those who are most affected, such as transportation businesses that use BOT roads.
Tran Van Linh, a former member of the Peoples Council in Da NangVietnams third-largest citysaid the government should only build BOT roads that are truly beneficial to the people, and provide alternatives in case drivers do not want to use them, adding that the scheme requires better oversight.
It is important to strictly control the BOT to determine whether they actually disburse the reported funds, or if they are being exaggerated, Linh said.
Also, there should be strict control over their [toll] revenues so that they only receive the amount of interest allowed by the government, he added.
I suggest that an automatic toll collection system be used to avoid non-transparency.
Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Emily Peyman. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
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McGuireWoods LLP has chosen a combat-tested former Army officer as its chairman, elevating Jonathan P. Harmon to succeed Richard Cullen to lead the biggest law firm in Virginia and the 51st largest in the country.
Harmon, 52, elected on Monday by McGuireWoods board of partners, becomes one of the few African-American attorneys to lead a top 100 law firm and crowns a 22-year career he began there immediately after law school.
Ive never even given any serious consideration to leaving McGuireWoods, he said in an interview.
Harmon had been recommended as chairman by Cullen, who ends an 11-year run as chairman but will continue to practice law as a white-collar defense attorney for high-profile clients. They include Vice President Mike Pence in special prosecutor Robert Muellers investigation of potential collusion between the campaign of President Donald Trump and Russia.
Richard is not riding off into the sunset, you know, he said of his predecessor, who, like previous chairmen Robert L. Burrus Jr. and Robert H. Patterson Jr., spent his entire career in private practice at McGuireWoods.
Cullen, who also has served as state attorney general and U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said the decision is a very popular choice among the partners, the staff and our clients.
I am very confident that he will take McGuireWoods to the next level, he said Friday.
The board of partners also named J. Tracy Walker IV as managing partner of the firm, succeeding Thomas E. Cabiness, who had held the position for 10 years. Walker joined the firm in 1998 after eight years at Christian, Barton & Epps in Richmond. He has served as deputy managing partner and lead of the litigation practice since 2015.
Walker, 52, was recommended by Harmon as managing partner, which is a full-time job that will require him to stop practicing law. He and I will really work together on a regular basis in setting the strategy and vision for the firm, said Walker, a native of Albemarle County, who attended the University of Virginia as an undergraduate and Harvard Law School.
Harmon acknowledged that his election represents a milestone for other African-American attorneys at large U.S. law firms, but he also said the board could have chosen other great people at the firm as chairman.
And like everybody, I just wanted the best leader, whether it was a woman, whether it was an African-American man, a white man whoever it is that Richard and the partnership thought of, he said. So I view it that we put the best people in the best positions.
Harmon is a native of Long Island in New York who had no experience with Richmond or Virginia until he arrived for a law internship for part of the summer of 1994. However, he was attracted to the firm by the opportunities it offered him right out of law school at the University of Texas the next year.
He said a recruiter for the firm told him then, If you come to McGuireWoods, we give our first-year lawyers trial experience.
That was the right opportunity for Harmon, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who served as first lieutenant for an armored division in the Middle East before and during the Desert Storm war with Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in mid-1990.
I use some of the same principles in preparation for trials and the leadership lessons you learn in the military, he said, citing the discipline and focus necessary in both situations.
In his first year at the firm, Harmon tried two cases, one in state and the other in federal court. He soon was handling cases around the country and the firm continued to award him opportunities, naming him partner in 2001, after just six years, and appointing him as chairman of its worldwide business and securities litigation department.
I wasnt in a box, he said. I was allowed to become who I wanted to become, and the firm recognized that.
When his 1st Cavalry Division was preparing to deploy to Saudi Arabia the month after Iraqs invasion of Kuwait, he was a newlywed whose wife, Rhonda, had served in the military and was in law school.
Rhonda Harmon was part of a team led by future Sen. Tim Kaine at Mezzullo & McCandlish in Richmond that won a $100.5 million award against the Nationwide insurance company on behalf of Housing Opportunities Made Equal, in a racial discrimination suit over so-called redlining of African-American neighborhoods.
Harmon was pregnant with the couples first child when HOME filed the suit and pregnant again when the case went to trial two years later. They have four children two boys and two girls, ranging in age from 13 to 20.
For 20 years, he has taught Bible study, first to incarcerated youths at the state juvenile justice facility in Chesterfield County and later to adults at the federal penitentiary near Petersburg through his church, Faith Landmark Ministries. I miss it when I cant do it, he said.
Harmons principal job as chairman will be to set the strategic vision for the law firm. In real simple terms, I believe we have become a national powerhouse, he said.
But he also will continue to practice law while serving as chairman, as Cullen has done since his election at the end of 2006.
I think its important for the chairman to lead by example, Harmon said.
A team of students from Virginia Commonwealth Universitys Brandcenter won a competition to brand the Richmond region at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.
Tens of thousands of people from around the world attend the annual gathering, often referred to as SXSW after the company that operates it.
This is the third year that the Greater Richmond Partnership has partnered with the VCU Brandcenter, an internationally respected graduate-level advertising school, to devise a branding effort to attract tech executives to consider Richmond as a strong business location.
New this year is a partnership with ChamberRVA, which joined the Greater Richmond Partnership in the branding efforts for SXSW.
The winning Brandcenter team came up with a theme of "Make your mark on Richmond."
The team is Chesterfield County native Megan Reilly, an experience designer; Reston native Ariana Safari, an art director; and Hanover County native Andrew Allen, a strategist.
The winning team will be registered for SXSW and will help staff the booth during the trade show March 10-15.
During his campaign, Gov.-elect Ralph Northam wanted the regulatory process for a pair of controversial natural gas pipelines planned to be built through Virginia to be as thorough and environmentally responsible as permitted under state and federal law.
Yet on the eve of crucial votes by the State Water Control Board that begin this week for water-quality certifications for the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines, the Democratic lieutenant governor appears content to stay away from what critics contend has been a deeply flawed review of the potential water quality hazards posed by the blasting, trenching, ridgetop flattening and tree removal that construction will entail.
The citizen board, whose seven members were appointed by outgoing Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who has backed the pipeline projects as drivers of jobs and economic development, will vote over the next two weeks on whether the state will issue certifications under the federal Clean Water Act that there is a reasonable assurance that water quality will be protected during construction. The pipelines, already approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and other federal agencies, will cross some of the most mountainous terrain in the state, and opponents contend they cannot be built without dislodging sediment that could damage streams, aquifers and drinking water sources.
Asked whether Northam supports the water board issuing the permits before he takes office in January, a spokeswoman said he will respect the final determination made at the end of a transparent, science-driven regulatory process. The spokeswoman did not respond when asked whether Northam thought the Virginia Department of Environmental Qualitys proposed certifications will adequately protect state waters.
The board meetings on EQT Midstream Partners Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would run 300 miles from West Virginia into Pittsylvania County, are Wednesday and Thursday. The board will take up certification for the Dominion Energy-led Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would run 600 miles from West Virginia through the heart of Virginia and into North Carolina, with an extension to Hampton Roads, on Dec. 11 and 12.
Environmental groups say the board, as a result of how the DEQ has narrowed its review, does not have the information it needs to issue legally defensible certifications.
Though DEQ Director David Paylor has insisted Virginia is going to the limits of its powers in the permitting process, the agency ceded its authority to review the actual spots where the pipeline will cross waterways to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and will approve the pipeline developers plans to manage erosion, sediment and stormwater separately. Opponents also contend the agency has not set a water-quality baseline for the waterways crossed by the pipelines by conducting whats known as an anti-degradation analysis, which refers to the requirement to protect existing uses of water.
DEQ spokeswoman Ann Regn would not answer questions about the boards options at the meetings, namely whether it can delay the permits and whether it must issue an up or down vote. Nor would she comment on the anti-degradation analysis.
Given the pending regulatory action, the agency has determined it is not appropriate to answer questions at this time about anti-degradation or the State Water Control Boards deliberations, Regn said.
Dominion sees nothing wrong with the DEQs process, and a spokesman bristled at the suggestion by environmental groups that the influential energy giant is driving the timetables for approval.
DEQ cant change the law. Theyre a regulatory agency, said Aaron Ruby, a company spokesman, noting that each of the permits at issue is administered under separate regulations. The bottom line is all of the agencies are carefully studying every aspect of the project to make sure it meets the highest water quality standards.
Ruby said DEQ, which is recommending that the board approve the certifications subject to a host of conditions, has been clear that the application and public record are complete and the board has all of the information it needs to make an informed decision.
***
During his primary race with former 5th District Rep. Tom Perriello, who opposed the pipelines, Northam, who avoided taking a yes or no position, took credit for spurring DEQ to make sure that we changed from blanket permitting to a site-specific permitting, which they followed my lead on, Northam said at a Roanoke debate.
However, seven weeks after an agency spokesman told reporters that state regulators would be performing exactly that kind of detailed review of the spots where the pipelines crossed waterways, DEQ called that a misunderstanding and said it would in fact rely on the blanket Army Corps permit, called the Nationwide Permit 12, for the crossings.
Some environmental groups and political observers say Northam, carried into a office by a progressive wave and still a member of the current administration, remains on the sidelines at his political peril.
He should get involved now, said Mike Tidwell, director of the nonprofit Chesapeake Climate Action Network, which has fought the pipelines. These pipelines, if theyre built, are going to become a PR nightmare for Dominion, for EQT and for the elected leaders of Virginia who supported them, including Ralph Northam. ... The environmental harm that we in the environmental community have warned against will become plain for the whole state to see. I believe these pipelines will shock the conscience of Virginians once the construction begins.
Greg Buppert, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, predicted that the pipelines will be a long-term problem for the Northam administration.
These will be projects that, if approved, that he and his administration will deal with for a long time, Buppert said. If he feels this decision should be delayed, he should let DEQ know that.
Virginia State Police scheduled a lessons-learned training in August related to the Dakota Access oil pipeline construction, which featured widely covered clashes between police in riot gear and protesters over the crude oil pipeline between North Dakota and Illinois, according to emails obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. In September, about 100 activists and landowners opposed to the Virginia pipeline projects held a three-day training camp that included nonviolent direct action trainings.
Theres a reasonable chance there will be some ugly protests by environmentalists in these politically active times. Thats a risk that a Democratic governor shouldnt want to take and shouldnt need to take, said Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington. The public hearings coming up in the coming weeks are going to be problematic from the point of view of Northams political relationship with environmentalists.
A newly resurgent, activist wing of the Democratic Party helped propel Northam to victory, Farnsworth noted, along the way gaining a stunning number of seats in the House of Delegates, including a cadre of freshmen lawmakers who vowed to reject campaign cash from the states large utilities.
Two of those newcomers were at a Saturday rally in Richmond opposing the pipelines that drew hundreds of people to Capitol Square.
Dels.-elect Chris Hurst, D-Pearisburg, and Jennifer Carroll Foy, D-Stafford, joined incumbent Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, at the rally. Hurst said he intends to introduce legislation to put the brakes on the permitting process during the coming session, calling for more data, research and analysis.
The best move for the governor-elect seems to be to insist on a much more rigorous standard than is currently the case and the chips will fall where they may, Farnsworth said. Its clear Democratic activists have a lot of problems with these pipelines and in politics its smart to dance with the ones that brung you.
In July 1972, Nancy Johnson started her route as one of Richmonds first female mail carriers. Johnson was one of two women in Richmond to breach the former all-male letter carrier ranksshe was joined by Mastine Braswell. Both women were clerks at the Capitol Station post office at 10th and Main Streets.
The women delivered mail to the citys financial district which was served by the Capitol Station only on Saturdaysthe other four days they held their jobs as clerks. Daniel Lee, the Capitol Station assistant superintendent said that one of the reasons women entered the field was due to a shortage of letter carriers on Saturdays.
Johnson and Braswell expressed excitement to become mail carriers. Braswell said that the office welcomed the idea of having a woman letter carrier and Johnson said she was great with the familiar chant womens lib.
Kenya Gibson was sworn in Monday to represent the 3rd District on the Richmond School Board.
Gibson, a New England native and vice president of the Linwood Holton Elementary School PTA, won a special election last month with 46 percent of the vote, besting three other candidates to fill a seat vacated in February by Del. Jeffrey M. Bourne, D-Richmond, who had won election to the Virginia General Assembly.
The 43-year-old Gibson applied for an interim appointment, but the board chose Cindy Menz-Erb over her and a handful of other candidates. Menz-Erb was endorsed by Richmond Mayor Levar M. Stoney in a bid to retain the seat last month but ultimately finished behind Gibson by about 1,300 votes.
Gibson was joined Monday by her two children as she took the oath of office, which was administered by Richmond Circuit Court Clerk Ed Jewett. In the audience were co-workers, district officials and former School Board members, including Bourne.
We must defend public education, Gibson said in brief remarks after the oath, adding that its time to transform education both in Richmond and across the U.S.
Gibson attended the College of William & Mary. After a stint in Los Angeles, she moved to Richmond in 2006 with her husband and daughter. She became involved with the Linwood Holton Elementary School PTA, first as a member and eventually as vice president.
Gibsons work began less than two hours after the oath was administered, at the boards last meeting of the calendar year. She has been in attendance at recent board meetings, including a special meeting last week to discuss facilities, a long-standing division issue thats the first big vote likely to be taken by Gibson.
The board plans to vote on a facilities plan at a special meeting next week.
During her campaign, Gibson said she advocates more funding in public education, one of the main reasons for the lagging facilities problems, and would work to better support students living in poverty.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
CHRISTIANSBURG Ralph Sergio Castrello resolved drug and property damages charges Monday with a plea agreement handing over a restitution check, apologizing and receiving a suspended prison term for episodes in which he was caught making methamphetamine in Montgomery County and then while out on bond, moved into a nearby unoccupied rental property and ransacked it.
In a brief hearing in Montgomery County Circuit Court, Castrello, 53, entered no contest pleas to charges of possessing the precursors to manufacture meth, making meth, possessing a Schedule II drug, destroying property, interfering with someone elses property rights, and grand larceny.
Judge Robert Turk found Castrello guilty on all charges and imposed five-year prison sentences for the precursors, drug possession, larceny and property destruction charges, and 10 years for making meth, plus 12 months in jail on the property rights charge. Turk ordered that the sentences run concurrently for a total of 10 years behind bars, then suspended the entire term and placed Castrello on probation for three years.
Prosecutors dropped a charge of conspiring to manufacture meth.
Assistant Commonwealths Attorney Jennifer Wolz summarized the case against Castrello, saying that on Nov. 17, 2016, the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office received word that he was cooking meth in a shack on his property in the Walton community.
Officers found Castrello in his house with his wife and child, threatening to cut his own throat and saying he wanted to be shot. He asked to speak to a Virginia state trooper he knew and after talking to the officer, agreed to surrender, Wolz said.
A search of the property after Castrellos arrest turned up meth and ingredients for making meth, Wolz said. Then on Jan. 28, officers were called to a house on Spaulding Road, near Walton, for a report of squatters. Gerard Walsh told officers that lights had been on and trash had been sitting on the porch of a supposedly vacant house that he and his wife owned, and which they had been fixing up over a period of years to use as a rental property.
Officers found the house had extensive damage, including holes in walls, torn-up flooring and shelves, broken appliances and more. At an earlier hearing in the case, in July, Karolein Walsh testified that it had been heartbreaking to see the undoing of years of renovations. A ladder, saws and other items were missing from the house as well.
Neighbors told investigators that the Castrellos had been staying in the house and had said they were its new owners, Wolz said Monday.
Turk ordered Castrello to have no further contact with the Walshes and to stay off their property. The judge also ordered Castrello to pay the Walshes restitution of $6,657.27.
The circuit court clerks office reported that the restitution was paid after the hearing.
A woman who lured an online date to a Roanoke park over the summer, then helped rob him of his money and his car, was given more than a decade in prison at her sentencing hearing Monday.
Shareka Nicole Cobbs got five years to serve for robbery and four for abduction, plus three years for an unrelated trio of counts of obtaining money by false pretenses. She also carries 33 years in suspended time for those offenses.
Cobbs, 24, previously pleaded no contest to the robbery and abduction charges. Those came in April, after a Virginia Tech student told police hed been attacked while on a date with Cobbs. He said a man forced him into a car, blindfolded him, beat him, withdrew $40 from his bank account, took his car keys, then abandoned him near Interstate 581.
The student later identified Cobbs to police through her Facebook account, and police arrested her co-defendant, Willie Jamar Ollie, who was connected to the incident after police located the stolen car. Ollie, too, pleaded no contest to robbery and abduction and is due to be sentenced early next year. Both Cobbs and Ollie also were charged with malicious wounding and carjacking, but those were dropped as a result of their plea agreements.
At Mondays sentencing, prosecutors referenced a written statement by Cobbs in which she said the crime went bad. Nobody was supposed to get abducted or hurt. They pointed out that she had drawn a frowning face after the word abducted.
Cobbs testified in her own defense and said that, growing up, shed been hosted by 17 different foster families and had suffered abuse in some of them before aging out of the program and finding herself homeless. She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, she said, but after she left the foster program she had no further access to medication.
One of the false pretense charges, which was filed in Roanoke, relates to the fraudulent sale of a gift card. Cobbs was ordered to pay $750 in restitution in that case, in which Ollie is also her co-defendant. The other two happened in Roanoke County, and Cobbs owes $635 and $585 on those.
Roanoke police have identified the man killed early Sunday morning in Lansdowne Park as 37-year-old Corey Tyrone Brown, and theyve arrested a man on a charge of murder.
Byron Lamont Brandon, 45, was indicted Monday by a Roanoke grand jury on charges of felony murder, using a firearm to commit murder and possession of a firearm as a nonviolent felon in Browns shooting death in the 600 block of Lucerne Street Northwest. Brandon was arrested Monday in Greensboro, North Carolina, by the Greensboro Police Departments Violent Crime Apprehension Team, Roanoke police said.
Brown, of Roanoke, was found lying in the yard of a house at about 6:20 a.m. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Browns death marks the citys 14th reported homicide this year the most homicides in Roanoke since 2005, when the city experienced 16.
The investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information can call the Roanoke Valley Crime Line at 344-8500.
Sections of the Blue Ridge Parkway will be closed during the week in December and January as work crews clear vegetation growth along the scenic road.
Parkway maintenance workers will be using tractors equipped with long arms that have cuttings heads called boom axes to remove shrubs, small trees and other vegetation from roadsides. The parkway will be closed in both directions during the operations.
The road will be closed in Virginia during the following days:
The section between mileposts 112 and 120, which includes the area between Vinton and Roanoke Mountain, is closed now until Dec. 22.
The parkway between mileposts 95 and 106 in Botetourt County is closed through Friday.
The area between mileposts 66 and 85 from the James River Visitor Center to the Peaks of Otter will be closed Dec. 11-15.
The section between mileposts 106 and 112 northeast of Roanoke and Vinton will be closed Jan. 2-12.
The parkway will be closed in those sections from 8 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. each weekday. The road will be open on weekends. For more information about road closures, go online to https://go.nps.gov/brp-map.
A biennial survey of Roanoke students found more than 150 who have used heroin including sixth- and eighth-graders and two in 10 high school students who responded said they had attempted suicide.
Results from the 2017 survey by the Roanoke Prevention Alliance were presented Monday to the Roanoke City Council.
While the survey of 1,378 city middle school students and 671 high schoolers found good news in reduced use of alcohol, tobacco and vaping, students also described a dark aspect to many of their lives.
It was very disturbing to look at these numbers, said Paula Prince of the prevention alliance.
The organization has conducted the survey of sixth-, eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders every other year for 20 years. The group uses a survey produced by the federal Centers for Disease Control that is used nationwide and administers it in school classrooms. Parents must opt their children out of the survey, Prince said.
This is the first time the completely anonymous survey has asked students about heroin use, and the council found the results alarming.
Six percent of middle school students who responded said they had used heroin in the 30 days prior to the survey. Thats 73 young teens, including 22 sixth-graders.
Another 93 high school students, or 14 percent of respondents acknowledged heroin use.
Use of other substances, including alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and prescription drugs by middle schoolers was down from 10 years ago, according to Princes presentation.
All of those but marijuana and prescription drugs were down for high schoolers in the survey. Pot smoking was up 46 percent over 2007, Prince said, while prescription drug use was up by 20 percent since 2013.
The survey found a strong correlation between pot and use of every other substance asked about, Prince said.
Questions about mental health found a prevalence of depression and hopelessness that troubled council members.
More than a quarter of middle school respondents and nearly 40 percent of high schoolers who completed the survey described weekslong bouts of depression and hopelessness in the previous year.
Fourteen percent of middle schoolers in the survey and 21 percent of high schoolers reported attempting suicide.
Of those, a third of the middle schoolers and nearly half of the high school students said their suicide attempts were serious enough to require medical treatment.
That seems like its about crisis mode, said Councilman John Garland.
Its important that we talk about and acknowledge that this is going through the minds of our youth, said Vice Mayor Anita Price, a retired school guidance counselor.
She and others called to hold up the successes and the positive aspects of teens lives in the city, something Roanoke could do as an antidote to the high instance of depression.
Councilman Bill Bestpitch was struck by the incongruity of so much hopelessness among students when the citys graduation rate, now near 90 percent, suggests greater success and more opportunity than ever.
Prince agreed, but added that graduation, while laudable, represents an end for many students, who see limited opportunity beyond it.
Bus fare increased
In other action, the council voted 6-0, with Councilwoman Michelle Dykstra absent, to approve raising the cost of a single ride on a Valley Metro bus from $1.50 to $1.75.
The increase takes effect in January.
The board of the Greater Roanoke Transit Authority which operates Valley Metro approved the increase last month, but rejected a proposal to restrict the number of rides on monthly passes for the systems STAR mini-buses.
Both votes followed a public hearing where many bus riders decried the lack of service after 8:30 p.m. and on Sundays.
However, the fare increase will not fund any expansion of service, but will allow maintaining existing routes and times.
The potential for war with North Korea is "increasing every day," White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster said Saturday. The warning follows the North's test launch of a Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile last week.
Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, McMaster was asked if the North's latest missile launch had escalated the possibility of war. "I think it's increasing every day, which means that we are in a race, really, we are in a race to be able to solve this problem," he said.
"There are ways to address this problem short of armed conflict, but it is a race because [North Korea is] getting closer and closer, and there's not much time left," he added.
A total of 24 F-22 Raptor and F-35A stealth fighters are to take part in the drill, which is dubbed "Vigilant Ace" and comes hard on the heels of North Korea's latest test on an intercontinental ballistic missile last month.
A squadron of U.S. stealth fighter jets arrived in South Korea on Saturday and Sunday to participate in the largest-ever joint drill this week.
Some 230 South Korean and U.S. aircraft will practice striking North Korea's nuclear and missile bases, mobile missile launchers and long-range artillery.
A military source said the exercise had been planned well before the North's launch of a Hwasong-15 missile. "But it will be more intense because of the launch," the source added.
The Defense Ministry said the purpose of the drill is to improve the joint capability of carrying out missions in all weathers, day and night.
Other U.S. jets taking part are F-22s, F-35As, EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft, F-15C fighters, and F-16 fighters, which have already been deployed at air bases here.
Twelve F-35B stealth fighters and E-3 early warning and control aircraft, and a fleet of B-1B Lancer bombers will fly from U.S. air bases in Japan and Guam.
A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman in a statement on Saturday denounced the exercise. It said the Trump administration is "begging for a nuclear war" and engaged in "dangerous nuclear gambling" on the Korean Peninsula.
At least 13 people have died after a boat carrying 22 fishermen crashed into a fuel tanker off the coast of Incheon on Sunday morning.
Two people, including the ship's captain, remain missing.
According to maritime police, the 9.77-ton boat collided with the 336 ton fuel tanker at around 6 a.m. some 1.85 km southwest of Youngheung Island. Seven passengers were rescued.
The two ships collided while traveling down the same course. Police arrested the captain of the fuel tanker on charges of negligence and are questioning surviving crew to determine the cause of the collision.
MP JOHN Healey went back to school to fill pupils in on politics.
Heather Garth Primary Academy in Bolton-on-Dearne invited Mr Healey to speak to them during Parliament Week, an annual festival to encourage people to learn about and engage with the work of Parliament.
Year 6 teacher Marie Bower welcomed the Wentworth and Dearne MP, saying: At Heather Garth, we take British values and citizenship very seriously.
We believe that teaching the children and letting them experience each others opinions in a tolerant and respectful way is key to shaping their futures.
Parliament Week is a great way of getting the children involved in how their country does things.
Who knows, one day one of them could be visiting a school like John or even running the country!
On November 10-12, the Moscow International Trade Center hosted a presentation of the Carl Faberge International Jewellery Art Competition. The competition was established on the initiative launched by Russias leading public associations of the domestic jewellery industry, including the Jewellers Guild of Russia and the Club of Russian Jewellery Trade, and supported by the Moscow International Trade Center, Carl Faberge Museum and World Jewellery Confederation (CIBJO).
This international Competition named after the celebrated Carl Faberge is held with the aim of "promoting the national school of jewellery mastery, returning to it the leading positions in the world and assigning Russia the status of a most important center for the preservation and development of artistic jewellery". This event should help to identify and encourage talented jewellers - craftsmen and designers, familiarize them with modern technologies of famous jewellery houses, exchange experience in developing the best traditions of jewellery art.
The program of the Competition includes nominations in jewellery design and technology, in re-creating and development of the Faberge House historical style and technology and in creating jewellery masterpieces. One of the key tasks of the Competition is to select applicants who are worthy of presenting the achievements of the Russian jewellery industry at international exhibitions.
The pieces produced by the best jewellery companies of Russia were exhibited at the Congress Center - their premium status was confirmed by the awards of the prestigious international professional competition "Jewellery Russia" and by High Artistic Value Passports certified by art critics and experts of the State Hermitage Museum, Moscow Kremlin Museums, Historical Museum, etc. A number of jewellery houses and companies, including hamovskikh, GEVORKYAN, Alexey Pomelnikov, Maxim Demidov, SARKISSIAN, Denisov & Gems, Argenta, N. Balmasov Workshop, Kierge, Diamonds of Yakutia, Bogarta, DPI Union of Artists, etc., presented their works for their judgement.
The jury of the Faberge International Competition included authoritative foreign experts on the jewellery industry and owners of well-known global brands. After officially inaugurating the Competition and cutting the tape, the organizers and guests, including Gagik Gevorkyan, President of the Jewellers Guild of Russia; Valery Budny, President of the JUNWEX Industry Media Holding; Gaetano Cavalieri, President of the World Jewellery Confederation (CIBJO); Alexander Rybakov, Vice President of the Russian Chamber of Commerce; Konstantin Evstyukhin of Russian Export Center; and other participants of the event went round the exhibition admiring and discussing the jewellery presented for the Competition and talking with jewellers taking part in the JUNWEX Premium Jewellery Show.
Within this event, the organizers held a round table on "Implementing the Export Potential of the Russian Jewellery Sector: Problems and Prospects" to discuss the ways to develop jewellery exports. The discussion was joined by speakers from industry trade unions, jewellery companies, government and state agencies.
According to the official statistics voiced at the round table, the share of Russian jewellery products in the worlds total exports in 2016 was 0.1%. Russia exports less than $ 100 million worth of finished jewellery goods. Industry stakeholders also said that if they would have support from the state they would be ready to increase exports to $ 1 billion a year.
It was not by chance that this round table attended by the jewellery industrys stakeholders and federal officials was organized in the framework of JUNWEX Premium, Russias first high-end jewellery show, on the eve of the Faberge Competition. In the opinion of the round-table panelists, it is the exhibition projects that may become an effective channel for the expansion of Russian producers to foreign markets.
Until recently, about 70% of the Russian jewellery market was occupied by imported goods, but now, according to Gagik Gevorkyan, Head of Jewellers Guild of Russia, the share of imported jewellery does not exceed 5 to 6%. Domestic producers almost completely meet the domestic demand for jewellery and are ready to work for export. In the view of market players, the Middle East, Europe and America appear to be promising markets for Russian jewellery goods. The worlds export market of jewellery is estimated at $400 billion a year, and there is interest in Russian jewellery abroad, according to jewellers. Nevertheless, the imperfection of domestic legislation, which is undergoing changes, but still cannot keep pace with market trends, hampers the expansion to new markets. If introduced, preferential taxation of exporters could significantly increase jewellery exports, thus adding to the revenues of the countrys state budget.
Jewellery industry players consider it necessary to revise the system of import duties on precious stones, some of which are not mined in Russia. Also, it is necessary to abolish the obsolescent proceeding of mandatory hallmarking jewellery intended for export, as well as to simplify customs procedures for taking jewellery out of the country for display and sale and to support the participation of domestic producers in the largest professional exhibitions. It should be noted that foreign markets are highly competitive and without the assistance of the state it will be difficult for the Russian jewellery industry mainly represented by small-size companies to throw its hat in the ring.
For their part, Russian authorities express readiness to solve the problems facing domestic producers. For example, Elena Ladozhina, Deputy Head of the Department for Trade Restrictions, Currency and Export Controls of the Federal Customs Service assured that the FCS will improve the system of customs procedures by switching to electronic document circulation - this will undoubtedly simplify the declaration of exported goods and their return in case they are not sold. For his part, Semen Mashkautsan, Deputy Director of the Department of Metallurgy and Materials at the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation recalled that his department this year would be endowed with the functions of overseeing the export policy, including the jewellery industry. The Russian Export Center could also propose a range of financial and non-financial measures to this effect.
Readiness to provide assistance was expressed by foreign partners interested in the development of jewellery trade. Gaetano Cavalieri, President of the World Jewellery Confederation (CIBJO) noted that these same issues also exist in Europe, so he does not exclude the possibility of creating a special commission that could solve general problems impeding the exchange of goods through a dialogue.
The round-table panelists stressed the necessity for Russian jewellers to take part in international exhibitions held abroad. Valery Budny told about the initiative to hold the Carl Faberge International Jewellery Competition organized with the support of the World Jewellery Confederation (CIBJO), Jewellers Guild of Russia and Russian Jewellery Trade Club. He is convinced that this Competition will permit to discover talented jewellers and include their works in the expositions to be taken to international jewellery shows. The jewellery community is ready to take part in selecting the most visited exhibitions and determine the measures to support the most promising jewellery manufacturers in team with the Russian Export Center.
The Ministry of Industrial Policy and Trade of the Russian Federation also expressed its readiness to support the initiative of holding the international Competition. Deputy Minister Sergey Tsyb expressed confidence that this would help Russian jewellers increase their export potential and assured those present that the ministry will pay special attention to the jewellery industry.
The Russian Export Center was asked to include the Competition, which will be held across the world in stages, in the "road map" to support the export of jewellery. The next continental stages of the Faberge International Competition will be held in Vicenza, Las Vegas and Hong Kong. The awards ceremony will take place in Moscow in 2018 in the framework of the next JUNWEX Premium exhibition.
At the end of the discussion, it was decided to hand over the "road map", which will include proposals of jewellery manufacturers and associations, to the Russian Export Center and the Ministry of Industry and Trade for further development and implementation. The implementation of these plans will begin next year.
Galina Semyonova for Rough&Polished
Orion secures pre-development funding for Okiep copper project Orion Minerals has entered into definitive agreements that will see the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa (IDC) acquire 43.75% of the shares in the New Okiep Mining Company (NOM). This triggered pre-development funding...
Angolas SODIAM realises $28,7mln from fifth international diamond tender Angola's state-owned diamond trading company, SODIAM realised $28,7 million from the sale of 1,819.79 carats at its fifth international rough tender held in the capital, Luanda. The diamonds sold were special productions from Lulo, Catoca, and Luele...
Christies presents Fancy Vivid Pink Diamond of 13.15 carats Christies presents one of the finest fancy vivid pink emerald-cut diamonds ever to be offered at auction which will be part of the Magnificent Jewels sale on 6 December during Luxury Week. The Fancy Vivid Pink Diamond Ring (estimate...
Sama reports high-grade copper-nickel intercepts at Cote divoire project Sama Resources has reported high-grade copper-nickel intercepts following the drilling of 21 holes at its Samapleu deposit, in Cote d'Ivoire. Company chief executive Marc-Antoine Audet said this is an indication of the potential for additional high-grade...
Prince Harry, the fifth in line to inherit the British throne, will marry American actress, model, and humanitarian Rachel Meghan Markle. Prince Charles Monday announced the engagement of his son to Meghan Markle.
The couple had secretly got engaged earlier this month in London.
An official communique issued by the Prince of Wales said the wedding will take place in Spring 2018. The wedding day will be announced later.
Harry has informed his grandmother Queen Elizabeth and other close members of his family. The young Prince has also received the blessing of Markle's parents, Charles said.
The couple will live in Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace.
Harry, the youngest of Prince Charles and late Diana's two children, has been dating the actress since the summer of 2016.
Officially, he carries out public duties in support of the Queen alongside a number of charitable activities and projects.
After a military career spanning a decade, during which he was on active duty in Afghanistan, Prince Harry left the Armed Forces as Captain in June 2015. The 36-year old Markle, a divorcee, is three years elder to Harry.
Since 2011 Markle has portrayed Rachel Zane on the legal drama series Suits and is also known for her role as special agent Amy Jessup in the sci-fi thriller Fringe. Besides acting, she is known for humanitarian activities.
In 2016, Markle became a global ambassador for World Vision Canada, traveling to Rwanda for the Clean Water Campaign. She has also worked with the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women as an Advocate. Markle was a counselor for international charity One Young World, speaking at the 2014 annual summit in Dublin on the topics of gender equality and modern-day slavery.
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Business News
Korea will donate 50,000 tons of surplus rice to countries suffering from food shortages from next year.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs on Sunday said the National Assembly passed a bill to join the Food Assistance Convention on Friday.
The FAC, with 14 member countries or bodies like the U.S., Japan and the EU, is an international treaty for humanitarian food assistance. Once Korea's membership application is accepted, it will give 50,000 tons of its surplus rice to countries that need it through the World Food Programme.
The ministry hopes that this will improve the national image and stabilize rice supply in the domestic market, where there is an oversupply of 200,000 to 300,000 tons of rice a year.
Express Scripts (ESRX) has agreed to sell its subsidiary United BioSource to private equity firm Avista Capital Partners.
Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United BioSource provides pharmaceutical and patient support services, partnering with life science companies to make medicine and medical products safer and more accessible. The company has 13 locations in the U.S., Europe, and Canada.
Patrick Lindsay, UBC president, said, "Our team of clinical and commercial experts understands the many facets of drug development, market access, and safety. Avista's commitment to the healthcare industry makes them the ideal partner as we continue to improve patient care. Together, we will provide our clients, their patients, and their prescribers with innovative services that meet the demands of a dynamic industry."
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Business News
The US President's national security adviser has warned that the potential for war is increasing every day, while North Korea said that Monday's beginning of massive US-South Korea joint air exercise in the Korean peninsula may lead to a nuclear war any moment.
South Korea and the United States kicked off their largest ever air force drills against North Korea's threats, with two dozen U.S. stealth jets mobilized.
230 aircraft, including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and tens of thousands of troops, are taking part in the five-day Vigilant Air Combat Exercise (ACE). Pyongyang's official organs reacted immediately with exaggerated statements.
An editorial in Rodong Sinmun, North Korea's ruling communist party newspaper, accused the Trump administration of "begging for nuclear war".
"The U.S. and south Korean puppet military warmongers should bear in mind that their escalating provocation and adding to crimes will only invite more terrible retaliation and precipitate their self-destruction," the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification, an organization handling Pyongyang's relations with Seoul, said in a statement.
South Korea's Unification Ministry spokesman Baik Tae-hyun dismissed the claim and clarified that the annual joint military exercise is of a defensive nature between allies.
White House national security adviser HR McMaster said the United States is "in a race" to address the threat from North Korea.
The potential for war is increasing every day but armed conflict is not the only solution, he told a forum in California. It comes less than a week after the nuclear armed North fired a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and declared the completion of its "nuclear force."
The latest ICBM that North Korea test fired has the potential to reach any part of the continental United States, but it would be incapable of carrying a nuclear warhead to this long distance, according to a missile defense expert.
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Business News
Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM) confirmed receipt of Broadcom Limited's (AVGO) nomination of a slate of eleven candidates to replace Qualcomm's existing board of directors at the company's 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.
Qualcomm said it believes this action is a blatant attempt to seize control of the Qualcomm board in order to advance Broadcom's acquisition agenda.
"These nominees are inherently conflicted given Broadcom's desire to acquire Qualcomm in a manner that dramatically undervalues Qualcomm to Broadcom's benefit," Qualcomm said.
Qualcomm noted that its board is composed of 11 "world-class" directors, 9 of whom are independent and 4 of whom have been added in the last 3 years, and all of whom are firmly committed to acting in the best interests of all Qualcomm stockholders.
Further, Qualcomm said it is exceptionally well positioned - with and leadership positions across mobile, IoT, Automotive, edge computing and networking - and leading the transition to 5G. The company added that its stockholders are poised to participate in substantial growth and value creation as the company continues to execute its strategy across its businesses.
On November 13, 2017, Qualcomm's board of directors unanimously rejected Broadcom's non-binding, unsolicited proposal to acquire Qualcomm for per share consideration of $60.00 in cash and $10.00 in Broadcom stock.
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Business News
The Swiss stock market enjoyed a broad rally at the start of the new trading week and ended the day firmly in the green. Investors cheered the news that a bill to overhaul the U.S. tax system had received Senate approval.
With the vote to approve the bill, lawmakers from the Senate and House will need to go to conference to work out differences in the bills passed by the two chambers. Traders are hopeful that President Trump will be able to sign the bill into law before the end of the year.
The Swiss Market Index increased by 0.58 percent Monday and closed at 9,328.62. The Swiss Leader Index climbed 0.72 percent and the Swiss Performance Index added 0.63 percent.
Financial stocks jumped on the news of the U.S. tax reform bill. Credit Suisse rallied 2.4 percent, UBS rose 0.8 percent and Julius Baer added 0.4 percent. Among the insurers, Swiss Life advanced 1.5 percent, Baloise climbed 1.3 percent and Zurich Insurance finished higher by 1.3 percent.
Among the cyclicals, ABB gained 2.1 percent after Deutsche Bank rated the stock a "Buy." Kuehne + Nagel climbed 1.8 percent and Geberit rose 1.4 percent. SGS increased 1.3 percent and Schindler added 1.1 percent.
Index heavyweight Nestle advanced 0.8 percent. According to media reports, the food giant is said to be interested in the consumer division of the German company Merck.
Novartis climbed 0.4 percent, while Roche weakened by 0.4 percent.
Lonza was the weakest performing stock of the session, falling 1.3 percent. Logitech also decreased 1.0 percent.
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Market Analysis
Canadian stocks slumped Monday, unable to keep pace with surging U.S. equities as commodity prices turned lower.
There was little euphoria in Canada for the passage of long-awaited U.S. tax reforms and OPEC's supply quota extension.
The TSX Composite Index was down 69 points to 15,969.03.
Husky Energy Inc. (HSE.TO) said it is on track to exceed the 2018 targets for funds from operations and free cash flow outlined at its 2017 Investor Day.
The company expects funds from operations for 2018 to exceed $4 billion and free cash flow to be about $1 billion at pricing of $55 WTI, $2.50 AECO and a $15 per barrel Chicago 3:2:1 crack spread. Shares fell 1.4 percent.
Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Inc. (VRX, VRX.TO) announced that it has launched an offering of $1 billion aggregate principal amount of unsecured senior notes due 2025. Shares rose 1.3 percent.
Bombardier Aerostructures and Engineering Services (BBD.B.TO) says it has been chosen by Airbus as a supplier on a new engine nacelle program.
The company's operations in Northern Ireland will develop and manufacture a new thrust reverser for the Pratt & Whitney powered A320neo family of aircraft. The stock rose 1.5 percent.
Crude oil futures fell Monday for the first time in three sessions, as a strong dollar dented commodity prices.
Jan. WTI oil was down 89 cents, or 1.5%, to settle at $57.47/bbl.
Gold prices fell as U.S. stocks rallied on tax reform. Over the weekend, the Senate voted 51 to 49 in favor of the bill known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
However, President Donald Trump now says he may prefer a higher corporate rate than the one Senate Republicans passed.
"Business tax all the way down from 35 to 20," Trump said "It could be 22 when it all comes out, but it could also be 20. We'll see what ultimately comes out."
Feb. gold settled at $1,277.70/oz, down $4.60, or 0.4%.
In economic news, a report released by the Commerce Department on Monday showed a modest decrease in new orders for U.S. manufactured goods in the month of October.
Factory orders edged down by 0.1 percent in October after surging up by 1.7 percent in September. Economists had expected orders to drop by 0.4 percent.
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Market Analysis
Marking a generational shift, Rahul Gandhi is all set to take over as Congress President next week as he was the only candidate to file nominations before deadline expired on Monday for the post amid opposition jibes over dynasty politics in a contest with no one else in the fray.
The 47-year-old Gandhi, who will be the sixth Nehru-Gandhi scion to helm the party, filed papers at the Congress headquarters in Delhi amid cheers and celebrations by party leaders and workers. His mother and incumbent party President Sonia Gandhi signed the first nomination paper for election of her son.
He has been party Vice President for over four years since 2013.
Among the proposers of 89 nominations -- all in support of Gandhi -- was former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who called Rahul Gandhi the "darling" of the party. Manmohan Singh accompanied Gandhi when he filed the nomination paper.
The last date for withdrawal is December 11 when he may be declared elected since there is no contest. Scrutiny of the nomination will take place on Tuesday.
"Eighty-nine nominations from various states were submitted to the returning officer. Prominent Congress leaders filed nominations (on behalf of Gandhi) including the former Prime Minister, Congress Working Committee members, MPs, state Congress leaders," Returning Officer Mullapally Ramachandran told reporters.
Though Ramachandran did not divulge details, sources said all the nominations were in favour of "one candidate" -- obviously Gandhi.
Originally 90 nomination forms were issued but one could not be filed as there were not enough number of proposers.
However, the filing of nomination was not without controversy stoked by remarks of senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar who invoked the Mughal dynasty in the Congress Presidential election that Prime Minister Narendra Modi latched on to quickly to call it "Aurangzeb Raj".
"When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any election happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen? It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go to the heir," Aiyar said, retorting to the "dynasty" jibes of the BJP on Rahul Gandhi's election.
"But in a democracy elections are held. I openly invite (Shehzad) Poonawala to file the nomination and contest," Aiyar said, adding no one had earlier heard of Poonawala.
Aiyar was replying to a question about BJP's criticism following Maharashtra Congress leader Poonawala alleging that election for Congress President was a sham and Rahul Gandhi's elevation was rigged.
Modi was quick to pounce on Aiyar's remarks. Addressing an election rally in Gujarat, Modi said: "Aiyar, who never shies away from showing loyalty to one family, proudly said -- When Shah Jahan came in the place of Jahangir did any elections happen? And when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan did any election happen?
"It was known to everyone that the throne of the king will automatically go the son. I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the wellbeing of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command," he said.
The Prime Minister also said that the Congress leaders admit that it is not a party but a "kunba" (family).
Modi at a poll rally in Gujarat on Sunday lauded Poonawala for exposing lack of internal democracy in the Congress. "Those who have no internal democracy can't work for people. I want to say to this youngster Shehzad - you have done a brave thing but this is sadly what has always happened in Congress."
Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said Modi was "suffering from Rahul Gandhi phobia".
Surjewala also said that Modi's "love for Shehzad, Shahzada (BJP chief Amit Shah's son Jai Shah) and Shourya (National Security Advisor Ajit Doval's son)" is well known to the world.
"But will Modiji tell when he will answer the questions of his own senior party leaders like Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha?" he asked.
Gandhi, who became the Congress Vice President in January 2013, will succeed his mother Sonia, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998. He is the sixth in the Gandhi-Nehru family to head the party after his great great grandfather Motilal Nehru, great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi.
Hundreds of Congress workers and leaders from across the country supporters thronged the party office ahead of the filing of nominations.
A large crowd of party workers were seen requesting the guards for a chance to meet their leader as he made his much awaited move.
Earlier, Gandhi called on former President Pranab Mukherjee, who applied tilak mark on his head as a way of blessing.
On his elevation, Manmohan Singh said: "Rahul Gandhi is a darling of the Congress and he will carry forward the great traditions of the party."
Noting that Sonia Gandhi served as Congress President for over 19 years, Manmohan Singh said: "It will be yet another chapter for the party."
Among those who signed the various sets of nomination papers for Gandhi were Motilal Vora, Ahmed Patel, Tarun Gogoi, V.Narayansami, Ashok Gehlot, Kamal Nath, Anand Sharma, Jaipal Reddy, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mallikarjun Kharge, Salman Khursheed, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh and Karan Singh.
A nine-member delegation of Tripura journalists met Union Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office Jitendra Singh on Monday to demand a CBI probe into the murder of two journalists from the state.
The team also plans to hold a demonstration in Delhi on Tuesday in front of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) office, Forum for Protection of Journalists (FFPJ) Convener Pranab Sarkar told over phone from Delhi.
The FFPJ delegation - led by veteran editor Subal Kumar Dey - would also try to meet President Ram Nath Kovind, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Press Council of India Chairman Justice Chandramauli Kumar Prasad to press for their demand.
"After a series of agitations in Tripura we came to the national capital to press for our demand to protect the media persons in Tripura," Sarkar added.
A local newspaper journalist Sudip Dutta Bhowmik, 50, was shot dead inside the Tripura State Rifles (TSR) 2nd battalion headquarters at Ramchandra Nagar in West Tripura district on November 21.
Young television journalist Santanu Bhowmik, 28, was hacked to death while he was covering protests of a tribal based political party at Mandai, 25 km from Agartala, on September 20.
PCI chairman, who is likely to visit the state to study both the incidents, took suo-moto cognizance of the journalists murder cases.
To probe the sensational killings, the state government had earlier constituted two separate Special Investigation Teams (SIT) headed by Deputy Inspector General of Police Arindam Nath and Inspector General of Police (IGP) G.S. Rao.
The SIT, led by Nath, has so far arrested four TSR personnel, including TSR second battalion Commandant Tapan Debbarma, who is a senior Tripura Police Service (TPS) officer (1998 batch) and waiting for IPS nomination.
In the Bhowmik murder case too, the SIT led by IGP Rao also arrested four youths.
The Congress has demanded a high-level inquiry into the murder. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has demanded a CBI probe and resignation of Chief Minister Manik Sarkar, who also holds the Home portfolio.
Both parties observed a state-wide shutdown on November 23 to protest the killings.
The ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) has criticised the BJP for politicising the journalist's killing.
"State government is on the right track in probing the unfortunate killings," CPI-M central committee member Gautam Das told the media.
Two militants and a soldier were killed and another soldier injured in a gunfight that erupted on Monday between the security forces and militants holed up in a house in Jammu and Kashmir's Kulgam district, officials said.
Two terrorists were killed and a soldier killed in the gunfight, said Defence Ministry spokesman Colonel Rajesh Kalia.
According to a police official, the gunfight broke out when militants fired at an army patrol on the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway in Qazigund area of Kulgam, injuring two soldiers.
After the attack, the militants, said to be two in number, entered a private house which was surrounded immediately by the security forces.
"When the militants were challenged, they fired at the security forces, triggering a gunfight which continued for nearly four hours. Two militants have been killed, but the body of only one, who was a local, has been recovered," police said.
The house in which the militants were hiding was fully destroyed during the gunfight.
Traffic on the Jammu-Srinagar highway remained suspended because of the gunfight. Train service between the Kashmir Valley and Bannihal town in Jammu region was also disrupted.
A New Zealand-based Samoan man who contracted dengue fever in Samoa has died, a Givealittle page set to up to him while he was at the hospital has confirmed.
According to a report on The NZ Herald, Fiaalii Mariner was admitted to the hospital suffering from dengue fever.
But his condition deteriorated and he has passed away.
Attempts are being made to get a comment from the Ministry of Health.
But the Givealittle Page confirmed his death.
It is with great sadness and heartbreak to inform you all that Fiaalii has passed away, writes Christine Freebury, who set up the Givealittle page.
Please pray for Alei and her beautiful children. This page will continue to accept donations until 22 December when all funds will be given to Alei. Thank you once again for your amazing support.
In another post written last Thursday, it said: We are aware of the situation up to this morning at 11am. He has contracted Pneumonia in one lung and the hospital have advised a serious situation.
We have people on the ground in Samoa currently reviewing what options we can assist with including Air Ambulance. However, Alei has confirmed to me that the Doctor has stipulated he is not stable enough to fly home.
Alei and her sister in law have been to the NZ High Commission in Samoa but they have confirmed unable to assist. They have also contacted our New Zealand Prime Minister but I have not heard if any response was received. I today have also emailed Jacinda Ardern directly to see what assistance she can come up with. I will update when I hear back from her.
We are hoping that he will stabilise and fingers are crossed so that we can assist in getting him home for treatment.
He had a heart attack last weekend therefore his heart is weak. He is at a very critical time in Samoa.
According to The NZ Herald, more than $10,000 had been raised through crowd-funding.
Fiaalii Mariner had returned to start up a car rental business.
Visit the Givealittle page here: https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/samoa-lifestyle-leave-ends-with-critical-illness
During the faafafine forum held on Friday at the Samoa Tourism Authority, hospital nurse Maxine Faamoe Etene asked the S.F.A. if the comments from Associate Minister, Lealailepule Rimoni Aiafi about the United Nations promoting same sex marriage in Samoa, could be discussed amongst their collective.
In Etenes view Lealas comments brought up an opportunity for the faafafine collective to talk about the differences between gender and sexuality rather than what the implications a ban on same sex marriage would have on faafafine.
Today (Friday) I just want to elaborate more about which side he is talking about whether he is talking about faafafine or lesbian or gay. I think he was mainly talking about gays, Etene said.
The mentality of Samoan people is that they think that faafafine are gay but that is a totally different story. I want the S.F.A. to discuss these issues because its now in the paper and the whole country is reading the paper.
Etene does not support gay marriage and reiterates that the S.F.A., as a collective, stands firmly against the legalizing of same sex marriage.
I also saw the comments of people online and they are not supportive of gay marriage and I think that is so true. His perspective was mainly aimed at the culturally indigenous Samoans because this concept of gay marriage is not allowed in Samoa and we support that.
S.F.A. has that rule that we are not allowed to marry but we can be who we are and we can support our family and the country through our charity work.
Etene supports the human rights of gay people but that in Samoa, gay marriage simply does not align with our religious and cultural values.
We support gay people but in terms of (gay) marriage in Samoa, we dont support that.
We are Christians and we know our limits with our family, church and village. If you want to marry theres a place where you can go marry for example Australia and overseas that accept gay marriages.
Even at the expense of personal happiness?
For me I know we have feelings and that but we also have our limitations. Etene responded.
Friday was day two into The Faafafine Week 2017 which is sponsored by a sector of the United Nations, the UNDP funded by the Global Fund which Leala identified as the organization he believes has a hidden agenda in promoting gay marriage.
And also the thing is he also mentioned that the U.N.D.P. was secretly promoting that activity and he didnt like that. I think he was being paranoid.
I saw comments that the U.N.D.P. has been providing for Samoa with the youth and also they are one of our most powerful stakeholders for Samoan people so thats why I want S.F.A. to discuss this issue.
On the front page of the Sunday Samoan of 03 December 2017, Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi fired a warning shot at a group of Samoans planning a protest march in Apia later this month.
But rather than saying anything of substance in response to grievances, the Prime Minister appears to downplay the threat by ridiculing and laughing at the people involved. But then whats new?
If you have been around in Samoa long enough, you would know the infamous tactics by now with the use of those wonderful terms such as the protestors are off in the head.
The protest by the way is being planned by a group known as Samoa Solidarity International (S.S.I.). The organisation was apparently founded by Samoans based in Samoa, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, to raise awareness around issues affecting Samoan people
From what weve been told so far, on 16 December 2017 they are planning a protest march from Vaisigano to Mulinuu because they are unhappy about a number of issues including what they call illegal land reform law, L.T.R. (Land Torren System) 2008. They claim the Act was passed in violation of the Samoa Constitution by removing the constitutional prohibition against Customary Land alienation.
The march also plans to celebrate the lives of the Mau Movement heroes and to draw attention to issues destroying the lives of the people of Samoa corruption and the alienation of customary land rights of Aiga in breach of the Constitution. (see letter below)
This is serious stuff indeed.
Now when Prime Minister Tuilaepas thoughts were sought about the issue, he laughed and said: These are the same people who are hiding behind the Ole Palemia and I am happy that I will get to see their faces in public (at the march).
I know who they are. This is good as it will allow the public to know who these people are, who have been defaming and publicly criticizing our people.
The protest plan is interesting, the Prime Minister said.
Up until now, I have not received anything. They intend to go to the Malae o Tiafau and yet currently the Parliament building is not completed. Maybe theyll go and give their complaint to the roof of Parliament and maybe voice their concerns to the construction workers there.
So to me its clear they are off in the head. I mean they should bring their concerns directly to me, and then I would say leave it with me, I will pass it on to the Attorney General for a legal opinion.
As for the gist of the complaint about customary land, Tuilaepa said they have got it all wrong.
The Torren system is specifically for the private owned land, but does not apply to communal land as its prohibited under the Constitution. I am puzzled as to where these unfounded ideas come from, he said. Remember these laws are put in place, after receiving clearance from the Attorney General. Prior to introducing any act, the Attorney General goes through the Bill thoroughly and the Attorney General is the only lawyer that we listen to as this is mandated under the Constitution of Samoa.
Also at the Attorney Generals Office, there are about 30 lawyers who sort out issues that come to their office. And these people who are opposing are not lawyers.
Some of them used to work for the government and they are upset about something and this is their way of getting back to the government. They are the ones who are adding fuel to the fire, yet they used to be a part of the government and agreed to these changes.
So who is he talking about here? And why doesnt he just name them? I guess we will just have to wait for the march to find out what Tuilaepa is talking about.
In the meantime, the fact is a lot has been said, written and debated about customary land and threat that the governments plans pose.
Back in 26 October 2016, we cautioned against the use of customary land warning in an editorial titled Without land, were all dead. We believe the concerns expressed then are still relevant to whats happening now, despite the persistent reassurance from the government that we have nothing to worry about.
You see, in this day and age where the only thing on peoples mind is money, money, money and more money, nothing is what it seems. Most things we see around us are a lie. They are packaged in such a way where we can be misled and often we are. Yet once the gloss and the novelty wears off, we find that some things are quite poisonous, theyre deadly. Thats how we see the plan to use customary land.
This issue is not new, keep that in mind. In 2012 for instance, former Member of Parliament for Faasaleleaga No, 2, Papalii Lio Masepau asked some very pertinent questions.
What about fifty years from now? What about a hundred years from now? Where will the future generations of this country go? Talofa e!, he said.
At that time, another M.P. for Faasaleleaga No 3, Tuileutu Alavaa Voi, made a point that should never be lost in these discussions.
Samoa is a small country, he said. If twenty acres is leased from one village, and then another twenty from another village and so forth, in the end thats a very large amount of land. If all the land is leased today, what about tomorrow?
Faleata West MP, Lealailepule Rimoni Aiafi, as a member of the Opposition party then, was vocal on the issue: By the end of seven years, all the customary land in Samoa would have been leased.
Former M.P. Aveau Niko Palamo reminded Parliament that customary lands are treasures that belong to families and anything that threatens the ownership of such land, should be considered carefully.
Even former Salega M.P., Afualo Dr. Wood Salele, spoke up.
Our customs, culture and land is our inheritance. It belongs to our people.
We couldnt agree more. Which is why the issue in question should not be a laughing matter.
That said, we know that the power the government possesses will enable them to do anything they want. And its probably a fait accompli that whatever it sets its mind on would be implemented including the customary land plan.
But we should not be silent. We owe it to the future generations of this country to be that voice of dissent, even if it makes us the subject of ridicule.
Today, let us remind you one time that when we lose our land, we lose everything. You see, our land is a spirit. It is the heartbeat of a people. It is the core of who we are. When God Almighty navigated our ancestors to these shores, he didnt gift them a five star hotel or a flash plane for their perseverance on the water. He blessed them with abundant, fertile land. And that blessing is meant to be passed from generation to generation.
We are custodians and guardians, we must do whatever it takes to ensure our land is protected.
How far are you prepared to go?
Have a great Tuesday Samoa, God bless!
Dear Editor,
Re: P.M. laughs at protest plan
The Mau March on 16 December 2017 beginning at 10 a.m. at the Vaisigano Bridge is to remember our fallen Mau leaders, such as Lauaki Namulauulu Mamoe, and their families and is intended to be a yearly event. All of the public are invited to attend.
Samoa Solidarity International Group (S.S.I.G.) was founded by a small group of Samoans based in Samoa, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, to raise awareness around issues affecting Samoan people.
Apart from celebrating the lives of our Mau heroes, the march draws attention to two issues destroying the lives of the people of Samoa corruption and the alienation of customary land rights of Aiga in breach of the Constitution.
This has led to the growth of a political class, which feasts while the majority suffer. Those who profit have no complaints and fight tooth and nail to protect their enterprise.
Yet this destroys the lives of the people within a nation. Financial resources intended for infrastructure, healthcare and education are diverted so that a few can enjoy luxuries.
The behaviour of Samoas H.R.P.P. government removes any possibility of impartial justice for all as required by Samoas Constitution.
Those who profit see themselves as above the law. They pass the proceeds of their work on to their children and it is in their interests to suppress Democracy and the proper sharing of community resources to benefit all.
As to the alienation of customary land from Aiga, in January of 1998, at the very beginning of Prime Minister Tuilaepas first term, the Asian Development Bank published a report saying they were dissatisfied with the amount of borrowing and lending going on in Samoa.
The A.D.B came to a deal with the government:
1) privatise the state-owned enterprises, and
2) pass laws allowing mortgages against customary land.
Neither the parliament nor the Samoan people were asked to help decide about these radical changes to the customary land law.
So there was no consultation at all and consultation cannot happen after the unlawful agreement was made.
We the people of Samoa formally give notice that we demand the repeal of the Land Titles Registration Act 2008.
All customary land leases of three years or more must be registered under S.32 of the L.T.R.A. 2008.
By registering customary land leases under the LTRA 2008, a forbidden alienation of Aiga land rights takes place.
Section 32 of the L.T.R.A. 2008 is quite clear that the person, who registers a customary land lease, holds it in their name absolutely free from all other estates and interests that are not so recorded.
except the State can:
1) pass laws to grant itself rights over that land,
2) enter, go across or do things on land for [a public] purpose or
3) recover taxes, duties, charges, rates or assessments by proceedings in respect of land; or
4) to expropriate (take) land.
5) to restrict the use of land.
Registering a customary land lease under the LTRA 2008:
1) Passes absolute control and ownership [sovereignty] to the HRPP State,
2) Alienates [unconstitutionally] the ancestral customary land rights of not only the person, who registers the lease but every Aiga member.
3) Grants the person on the certificate of title a freehold title and no right to protest any act of the State regarding that land.
The Constitution is quite clear that without a National Referendum of all voters in which 2/3 agree to the changes to the landholding system that the rights of Aiga may not be alienated [taken] howsoever, meaning in any way.
S.S.I.G. thanks the Prime Minister for his invitation to present our demands to Parliament and we will attend Parliament at his invitation on 19 December 2017 at the Parliamentary session to present our demands to the Speaker of the House to be tabled and discussed.
Faleauto Simi Maua Taua
03 December 2017
Spokesman for S.S.I.G.
[email protected]
There is no need to panic.
Thats the assurance from the Assistant Chief Executive Officer in charge of the Meteorological Office at Mulinuu, Mulipola Ausetalia Titimaea, following relentless downpours across the country yesterday.
It should clear out on Tuesday (today) heading out to the weekend as per our predictions so far, he said.
December should be fine for Samoa as the patterns show our tropical cyclone season will only be peaking around January to February.
Mulipola said winds would push a band of clouds to the north of Samoa giving us better weather for the end of the week.
The M.E.T. Office said yesterdays downpour was caused by a strong weather pattern around Samoas neighbouring islands including Fiji and the Solomon Islands.
There are circulations surrounding Fiji and close to Tonga. This is affecting a wider area including us.
The wind is mostly strong because of the north-easterly winds blowing in. So far, we have nothing to worry about at this time.
Mulipola reassured the wind circulations should not concern the country as they are expected to break up before reaching any serious levels.
The most active sides of our region so far, is in New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, and especially Fiji, but were good for December, he added.
Despite the good forecast for the month, Mulipola said the work is just starting for the M.E.T. office.
We have a team of 45 employees and all of them are on the roster to work throughout the festive season. We have to keep track of weather changes as we go along in the month to keep the public aware of how it goes, he said.
From the 45 staff, 20 of them will be in charge of weather operations for the end of the year.
This is a commitment we have to make as per out duty to Samoa. We have to be here and its what were called to do, he said.
We have been doing this for years, this is the sacrifice we make as a service to Samoa.
Meanwhile, they have already set plans in place including year end operations with the Disaster Management Office as the busiest time of the year closes in.
Member of Parliament, Olo Fiti Vaai, is a worried man.
He is alarmed by the number of dengue fever patients at the Motootua Hospital especially young children.
He has also questioned why many schools remain opened when from his research; he found that many children had contracted the virus from other students at school.
Dengue Fever a serious virus and I am furious about the lack of a full force campaign to eliminate the mosquitoes breeding sites, he said.
My visit to the hospital was a clear indication about the seriousness of the problem and from speaking to the nurses and health workers, it became clear that most of the children hospitalised were affected from the schools.
Why are the schools are still open then when the government knows this is a source of the problem? They should have shut down the schools already while the government deals with this predicament head on?
There is clearly a need to clean the school campuses or target the areas where many of the patients are coming from, to eliminate dengue fever.
Olo is also concerned about overcrowding at the hospital. Security guards prohibit the media from filming and taking photos in the wards.
Im telling you the hospital is overcrowded, Olo told the Samoa Observer.
Ive seen so many children being admitted for dengue fever and some have been sent home with treatment instructions. What I want to know is why there is very minimal awareness about this?
Contacted for a comment yesterday, the Director General of Health, Leausa Dr. Take Naseri referred questions to the Minister of Health, Tuitama Dr. Leao Tuitama.
Tuitama asked to give him some time to collect the information he needs from the Ministry of Healths surveillance team.
Last month, Leausa announced the outbreak of dengue fever type two. At the time Leausa called on the public not to panic but to take immediate action to eliminate mosquito-breeding places.
We have been monitoring this but it has now reached an outbreak level, he said. This is a virus transmitted by mosquitos and its not new in Samoa, but with these viruses there are often outbreaks on and off."
But Olo said he was not happy with how things are handled by the Ministry of Health.
Dengue fever will take lives of our children if we dont act immediately, he said.
The Cabinet should have been informed of how critical the situation is currently. I visited the hospital and it was unbelievable how over crowded the pediatric ward is with the number of sick children.
I was told some of them were sent home because the hospital cannot take any more patients.
Olo said members of the public need to understand the dangers of dengue fever.
When the outbreak was announced last month, Leausa emphasized the importance of source reduction as the main weapon of prevention.
This is where the mosquitos breed and if we can control that then there will be no mosquitoes, said Leausa.
And that is why we need to control the breeding sites. It comes down to you to clean your around your house and look for anything that can store water that is where the mosquitos will breed thousands of new adult mosquitos."
We need to cut the cycle, he said.
Leausa emphasized the main method to control or prevent the transmission of dengue virus is to combat vector mosquitoes by preventing mosquitoes from accessing egg-laying habitats by environmental management and modification.
He calls for proper disposal of solid waste, cleaning of domestic water storage containers and applying of appropriate insecticides to water storage outdoor containers.
He also noted the need of using personal household protection such as sleeping in mosquito nets, long-sleeved clothes, insecticide-treated materials, coils and vaporizers and also spraying during outbreaks as one of the emergency vector-control measures.
He said there were indoor mosquitos that hid in dark places.
Samoa usually responds well to this."
When we had the chikungunya, the ZIKA, we were quite amazed with the response and we were able to control the virus within months."
So the main reason we are releasing this information is not to panic our people, but to advise and inform our people there is a dengue outbreak around.
A government official charged over the alleged sale of Samoan passports online has been granted bail.
Former Immigration Officer, David Uaine, appeared in Court for the first time before Chief Justice, His Honour Patu Tiavaasue Falefatu Sapolu, yesterday.
He had been detained since he was arrested two weeks ago. Uaine faces charges of forgery and could potentially face more charges next week.
The defendant is represented by lawyer, Unasa Iuni Sapolu. The prosecutor is, Leone Sua-Mailo, of the Attorney Generals Office.
Before His Honour Patu, Unasa made an application for her client to be released on bail. She argued there is no just cause to continue to detain Uaina.
She said if Uaine is granted bail, he could sign in at the Afega Police post, which is close by to his home.
Unasa also asked for additional time to go through her clients case before he enters a plea.
The prosecution did not object to the motion.
But Ms. Sua-Mailo asked the Court to order Uaine to surrender his travel documents, assuring he would not leave Samoa with the hearing pending.
Chief Justice Patu granted the motion.
He also ordered the defendant to appear in court next week Monday.
This will give you time to meet with your lawyer, he said.
While on release, you will first surrender your passport or travel documents.
Secondly, continue to stay in your family at Tuanai, unless an order is given by the court.
Thirdly, you must sign at the Afega Police Post on Tuesdays and Fridays before 12noon.
Uaine was arrested and charged two weeks ago following a lengthy Police investigation over claims about Samoan passports being sold online to places as far away as South Africa.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Ministry of Commerce Industry and Labour, Pulotu Lyndon Chu Ling, has cautioned members of the public to take extra care with online transactions involving foreign-based traders.
Whenever you are trading with someone who isnt in the country, you have to be careful, Pulotu told the Samoa Observer.
These transactions cannot be traced and we cannot reach a country outside of our jurisdiction so the best way to avoid being scammed is to ensure you know who youre buying from personally.
Pulotus opinion was sought following concerns expressed by members of the public about a man posing as a French doctor selling a vehicle on a car buy and sell website.
The Samoa Observer understands that one family has already fallen victim to the scam. The alleged scammer contacts his victims via email and lures them to pay for the vehicle in cash via Moneygram. The vehicle he claims to be selling is a Toyota Hilux going for $10,000.
His profile on the website, Samoa Cars, shows he is registered with an incomplete cell phone number and an alias.
Email exchanges obtained by the Samoa Observer show that he pressured the buyer into making the transaction but avoids answering questions about the legitimacy of his product.
According to Pulotu and M.C.I.L., members of the public need to be alert. He reminded that if it looks too good to be true, it always is.
Thats why its important you understand and personally know who youre dealing with whenever youre online, said Pulotu.
Nowadays, there are a lot of social media buy and sell groups and these actually need to be licensed under law to be recognized.
The licensing of these businesses falls under the Ministry of Revenue where all companies are to be registered under. It was not possible to get a comment from the Ministry of Revenue yesterday.
But Samoa Cars responded to questions from the Samoa Observer.
We are really focusing on bringing as much security as possible to users, but as with online platforms, scammers are still roaming around on websites like ours or Facebook, said Axel Peyriere of Pacific Ads Group.
Pacific Ads Group is an Australia-based online marketplace platform that run seven Pacific region car resell websites including SamoaCars.com.
The difference with Facebook marketplace is that we have our own in house content quality team where we verify a lot of the content, Peyriere added.
Peyriere says their task is to provide a simple way for locals to be able to sell and buy vehicles online.
The best advice we can give to car buyers is that they need to see the car, meet with the seller, communicate with him as much as possible, to get the best possible trust relationship with him.
Always ask as many questions as possible, and also to be aware of some signals like low price point which always shows that it might be a scam, he added.
The Police Spokesperson, Auaapaau Logoitino Filipo, agrees.
Our people have to be very wary of where they buy and purchase their stuff from especially if the seller says theyre from overseas and cannot meet, Auaapaau said.
The Ministry of Police are also asking members of the public to report such incidents to them so they are aware about what is going on.
In todays back story, business reporters Phillip Molnar and Roger Showley talk about their in depth look at San Diego Countys housing crisis.
Why did you decide to write this package now?
For years the Union-Tribune has covered the housing crisis and focused on the problem and its causes. We felt that it was time to examine possible solutions, particularly the supply element.
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Why did you tell the story in a series of questions?
Rather than address the story in a traditional narrative fashion, we wanted to present answers in a direct, fact-based format. Readers can then draw their own conclusions.
Any misgivings about an article like this?
There are a lot of very smart people who have written extremely detailed reports about how to slow housing cost increases in California. So, it is a bit intimidating to try and match that. But, ultimately, we decided that we owed it to readers to lay all the issues on the table, especially considering how much we write about home prices and rent increases.
What was the biggest surprise you found?
There was widespread agreement that building more housing may be the most important solution for overcoming the housing shortage. But there is no expectation that building more homes will reduce overall San Diego prices, at least in the short term.
Are you anticipating criticism?
Yes. One of the things that makes San Diego County so special is the open space and natural beauty. The idea of densifying neighborhoods to house future growth is controversial. On the other hand, the county still has thousands of acres set aside for habitat protection and land where development isnt allowed.
Were there any crazy ideas?
Yes. One idea was to discourage businesses from growing or moving here because not enough housing is being built for those new workers. We also considered off-the-wall housing solutions that would never get approved, like building artificial islands off the coast where housing could be built, constructing massive Soviet-style apartment towers or turning San Diego Bay into a houseboat haven.
What sources did you have in the article?
We were fortunate that real estate analysts Gary London and Alan Nevin came into the office to talk at length about their ideas. Countless hours were spent on the phone or in-person with economists Chris Thornberg of Beacon Economics, Lynn Reaser at Point Loma Nazarene University, and Norm Miller at the University of San Diego; Gerd Welke at Cal Poly Pomona; builders Bill Davidson, Paul Barnes and Rich Gustafson; community activist Tom Mullaney; Mark Goldman, a real estate lecturer of San Diego State University; and others. We also used the latest in permits, population, home prices, rent and other data.
What is the next step in following this story?
We want to monitor if the county and cities loosen up regulations, lower fees and speed up permit processing. . At the same time existing neighborhoods are keenly sensitive to what new projects are being built in their midst and what streamlined processing might do to their chance to weigh in on new projects in the future. Oftentimes its the people who are absent from community meetings and city council votes who are affected most by the lack of housing they can afford. We plan to reach out to that silent group of residents and report on their concerns about where they are going to live and whether theyll be able to buy a home of their own in San Diego. We also welcome other ideas or questions readers might have on this topic.
Business
phillip.molnar@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1891 Twitter: @phillipmolnar
ALSO
The vanishing San Diego single-family home
Broadcom officially launched a hostile takeover bid for Qualcomm on Monday, nominating 11 alternative candidates to Qualcomms board of directors.
The move sets the stage for a showdown over the future of San Diegos largest tech company one of only two Fortune 500 firms headquartered locally. Shareholders will vote to support either Qualcomms or Broadcoms board candidates, with the results expected to be announced at Qualcomms annual meeting March 6.
Broadcom did not raise the $70 per share offer price on Monday which valued Qualcomm at $103 billion. Qualcomms board previously rejected that amount as too low.
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But Broadcom could still boost its offer before the March 6 annual meeting, making it more attractive to Qualcomms shareholders.
Qualcomm said Monday that the Broadcom offer undervalues Qualcomms growth prospects in the Internet of Things, 5G, automotive and data center/networking markets.
Tom Horton, Qualcomms presiding director, said no company is better positioned than Qualcomm to bring mobile technologies to these industries.
Qualcomms stockholders expect a board that will support this innovation while evaluating objectively the full range of opportunities available to maximize value for all Qualcomm stockholders, said Horton, a senior adviser at Warburg Pincus and former chairman of American Airlines Group, in a statement.
Broadcom Chief Executive Hock Tan said Qualcomms shareholders want the two companies to talk, but so far Qualcomm has ignored Tans attempts to begin a dialogue.
The nominations give Qualcomm stockholders an opportunity to express their disappointment with Qualcomms directors and their refusal to engage in discussions with us, said Tan in a statement. In light of the significant value our proposal provides for Qualcomm stockholders, we believe Qualcomm stockholders would be better served by new, independent, highly qualified nominees who are committed to maximizing value and acting in the best interest of Qualcomm stockholders.
Directors nominated by Tan have a wide range of experience in the financial and technology industries, including previously holding positions at Nokia, J.P. Morgan and EMC Corp., among others.
The hostile takeover bid ramps up pressure on Qualcomm to complete its bogged down, $38 billion acquisition of automotive and Internet of Things chip maker NXP Semiconductors, which aims to further diversify Qualcomms business beyond smartphones.
The NXP deal, announced more than a year ago, is still awaiting regulatory approval in Europe and China. In addition, some NXP shareholders want Qualcomm to increase its $110 per share offer, which is below NXPs current trading price.
To date, fewer than 5 percent of NXP shareholders have pledged their shares in support of Qualcomms offer. The company needs 80 percent to complete the deal.
Broadcom says its buyout bid for Qualcomm stands whether the NXP acquisition is completed or not. But Tan could condition an increase to his $70 per share offer based on what happens with NXP including whether Qualcomm is forced to increase the price to close the deal.
Bernstein Research Analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote in a research note Monday that Tan now has three months to build support among Qualcomm shareholders for his slate of directors in the face of what appears, at least at the moment, to be a strategic vacuum from Qualcomm.
So far Qualcomm has yet to produce any sort of concrete response plan to Broadcoms overtures beyond trust us, which we believe is going to become increasingly untenable as things progress, wrote Rasgon. If they want to keep the company they better get cracking on a case as to why shareholders should trust in them instead of Hock, as we are not convinced Qualcomm shareholders necessarily believe that the Broadcom offer undervalues Qualcomm quite as much as Qualcomm management might believe.
Qualcomm argues that Broadcom is asking shareholders to replace its board now despite uncertainty about whether a deal could win regulatory approval. The combined company would be the leading supplier of many high-value semiconductors used in smartphones.
These nominees are inherently conflicted given Broadcoms desire to acquire Qualcomm in a manner that dramatically undervalues Qualcomm to Broadcoms benefit, the company said in a statement.
According to Tan, initial meetings with antitrust regulators give him confidence that any regulatory requirements necessary to complete a combination will be met in a timely manner. He expects the deal to close within 12 months of reaching an agreement.
Qualcomm has 11 board members nine of whom are independent and four of whom have been added in the last three years.
If it wins, Broadcom said it would support increasing the size of Qualcomms board to re-appoint existing directors Mark McLaughlin, CEO of Palo Alto Networks; Anthony Vinciquerra, CEO of Sony Pictures; and Jeffrey Henderson, former CFO of Cardinal Health.
The three joined Qualcomm about two years ago as part of a board revamp sought by activist investor Jana Partners.
Other Qualcomm directors include former Hewlett Packard executive Ann Livermore; Blackstone Private Equity adviser Harish Manwani; former U.S. Ambassador to China Clark Randt Jr.; consultant and former UBS adviser Barbara Alexander; and former Secretary of State for Spain Francisco Ros.
Horton, the presiding director, Executive Chairman Paul Jacobs and Chief Executive Steve Mollenkopf round out Qualcomms board.
Broadcoms nominees are:
Samih Elhage, former head of Nokias mobile networks business; Raul Fernandez, former CEO of ObjectVideo; Michael Geltzeiler, ex-CFO of ADT Corp.; Stephen Girsky, former vice chairman of General Motors; David Golden, managing partner at Revolution Ventures and former executive at J.P. Morgan; Veronica Hagen, retired CEO of Polymer Group; Julie Hill, a board member of Anthem Inc.; John Kispert, managing director of Black Diamond Ventures; Gregorio Reyes, former chairman of LSI Corp.; Thomas Volpe, former CEO of Dubai Group LLC.; and Harry You, a former executive with EMC Corp. and Oracle.
Broadcoms shares fell nearly 3 percent on Monday to close at $263.61. Qualcomms shares dipped 1.4 percent to $64.56. Both trade on the Nasdaq exchange.
Business
mike.freeman@sduniontribune.com;
Twitter:@TechDiego
760-529-4973
UPDATES:
This story was updated at 8:30 am
The old resort community of Del Mar is facing a reckoning.
It has about 600 homes at beach level on the northern end of the city. They include some of San Diego Countys most expensive properties, including a home owned by Kim Fletcher, a member of one of San Diegos pioneering families who lives with his wife in a beachfront house on land his grandfather bought in the 1940s.
But rising sea levels are putting the Pacific perilously close to those low-lying homes. As a result, the state Coastal Commission says all cities must devise a plan that addresses the inevitable decline of the shoreline.
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One of the strategies the state is pushing is something called managed retreat. The concept calls for abandoning land threatened by coastal erosion, removing any structures such as houses or seawalls, and allowing the beach to return to its natural state.
It is an option that is not sitting well with residents of the small community, such as the 90-year-old Fletcher.
If you lose the houses on the beach, youre going to flood everything back to the railroad tracks, Fletcher said. The topography is terrible.
Homeowners worry that their property values would plummet, insurance rates would skyrocket, and mortgages would be harder to obtain if word gets out that the city is considering retreat. Instead, they say, the city should find more ways to pump sand onto its eroding beaches.
Much more popular with Del Mar residents is the idea of sand replenishment, which has been used for years to fortify beaches along the San Diego County coast.
We want to stress that beach nourishment and sand replenishment .. is the best sea-level rise adaptation strategy, said Jon Corn, an attorney for Del Mar property owners.
He and his 30 or more clients in the newly formed Del Mar Beach Preservation Coalition were pleased to see that the city had deleted the retreat strategy from the latest version of its sea-level rise adaptation strategy that was released last week, he said. The proposed strategy is expected to go to the City Council for approval in February, and to the California Coastal Commission next summer.
We are very happy with the direction that its taken, Corn said.
Residents strongly opposed the retreat option when it was discussed over the summer at meetings of the citys Sea-Level Rise Stakeholder Technical Advisory Committee. As a result, the committee decided to exclude that strategy from the plan.
Its too soon in the process to consider retreat in Del Mar, Principal Planner Amanda Lee said Tuesday.
The city has many options available, Lee said. Retreat is a costly choice. The best option is sand replenishment and sand replacement.
The Coastal Commission requires all cities on the coast to develop strategies for adapting to rising sea levels.
Mid-range predictions call for the average sea level to rise 5 inches by 2030 in Del Mar, 12 inches by 2050 and more than 3 feet by 2100, according to a draft report released by the city last week.
The prediction is based on averages, so flooding and destructive waves are much more likely to occur during high tides and storm surges.
Most of San Diego Countys coastal communities are built atop or behind sandstone bluffs 60 to 80 feet tall or more. Except for a relative few homes at the edge of the bluff-tops, those communities are not immediately threatened by sea-level rise, so the idea of managed retreat has been less of an issue for them.
Del Mar is different. It has hundreds of low-lying homes on the northern end of the city, south of the outlet of the San Dieguito River.
The average annual income in those households is $102,664 and the average property value is $3.5 million, according to the citys report. Homes facing the beach average more than $10 million each, and one sold several years ago for $35 million, setting a record for San Diego County.
Some of those homes date to the 1920s and 30s. Almost all were built before the Coastal Act was passed in 1976, which limits development on vulnerable coastal lands. The Fletchers home on Sandy Lane was built in 1951 for $10,000, Kim Fletcher said.
Along with sand replenishment, strategies for adapting to rising sea levels include seawalls, which are widespread in San Diego County, and elevating structures on stilts or posts, a practice more common on the East Coast. Retreat is generally considered a last resort.
Still, the Coastal Commission and environmental groups such as the Surfrider Foundation recommend managed retreat be considered among the possible strategies.
Each option has its downside. Seawalls have been shown to contribute to shoreline erosion, and the Coastal Commission discourages their use. Sand replenishment is costly and temporary, and likely to be less effective as sea levels continue to rise. Many environmentalists see retreat as the only logical long-term solution.
A Coastal Commission representative this week declined to comment on the Del Mar decision.
For now, we are monitoring the situation, but we do plan on providing more formal comments before the city takes any final action, said commission Public Information Officer Noaki Schwartz.
Surfrider policy manager Julia Chunn-Heer said retreat needs to be considered as an option in Del Mar.
I dont think sticking our head in the sand is going to do anyone any favors, Chunn-Heer said.
Beach nourishment is a great first option, and hopefully that will work, she said. But that may not be enough, so we want to have all the tools on the table.
No one wants anybody to lose their home, she said. But science shows sea levels will continue to rise, probably at a more rapid rate in the future, and there could come a time when hard choices must be made.
One of the retreat options sometimes discussed is for a city or other public agency to buy the private beachfront property, lease the structures or rent them as vacation property until the purchase costs are recovered, then demolish the buildings before the ocean destroys them.
Retreat will be considered for a few low-lying public facilities, the Del Mar report states. Those include the city fire station and nearby public works yard, both on Jimmy Durante Boulevard near the San Dieguito River, that could be moved to higher ground.
Coastal Del Mar homeowner Laura DeMarco said that wont work for private property, where the owners have no higher ground to move to. Also, the high property values limit potential buyers.
It works in areas where there is a lot less development, said DeMarco, a Del Mar resident for 30 years.
Only about 80 of the 600 low-lying homes in Del Mar are beachfront property, she said. Most of the homes are east of the beach tightly packed in a sort of bowl thats several feet lower than the beachfront properties, most of which are protected by 10- to 15-foot seawalls.
Those walls protect not just the (beachfront) structures themselves, but everything behind them, DeMarco said. Rising sea levels or even powerful winter storms have the potential to turn the residential neighborhood into a swamp.
Yet DeMarco and many of her neighbors prefer to take an optimistic view of rising sea levels, noting there is a wide range of possibilities over the years ahead.
I dont think anyone is denying it, she said of climate change and the resulting rise in sea levels. But the magnitude is in dispute.
Beach erosion is largely a man-made issue, she said, the result of inland development that blocks the flow of sand down rivers and streams, and the creation of artificial harbors and jetties that disturb the coastal ocean currents.
For decades now, there have been local and regional efforts to pump sediment from harbors, lagoons and offshore deposits to replace whats lost from the beaches as the result of coastal and upstream development. DeMarco said its time to pick up the pace.
We can do other things to improve the beach and capture more sand, she said.
For example, sand excavated from inland construction projects could be trucked to the shore and used to beef up the beaches.
Del Mars neighbors to the north, Solana Beach and Encinitas, are working together on a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-led sand replenishment project that will widen their beaches by as much as 50 feet in Encinitas and 150 feet in Solana Beach over the next 50 years. The federal government is paying 65 percent of the costs, estimated at more than $135 million over the life of the project, with the rest of the money from state and local governments.
philip.diehl@sduniontribune.com
Twitter: @phildiehl
The leader of the largest fishing federation in San Felipe was released from jail on Sunday after being arrested late last month, an event that prompted protests calling for his release from federal custody.
A federal judge ordered the release of Sunshine Rodriguez and his wife, Sara Ahumada, after finding no grounds to hold them for trial, said his attorney, Enrique Acosta Fregoso. The judge decided that the accusation by federal prosecutors was not supported, said Acosta.
There was no immediate statement from the federal attorney generals office, the PGR.
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Rodriguez had been accused by federal agents of transporting a kilo of liquid methamphetamine, Acosta said. High-level officials in President Enrique Pena Nietos administration said he was under investigation for trafficking in the swim bladders of the giant totoaba fish, an endangered species found only in Mexicos Gulf of California.
On Wednesday in Mexicali, cries of Freedom for Sunshine rose from the demonstrators gathered near the U.S. the port of entry. They waved signs calling him a political prisoner, and carried a banner calling for his release. They accused the government of arresting Rodriguez in retaliation for his opposition to a government program aimed at protecting the critically endangered vaquita, a porpoise endemic to the upper Gulf of California.
As the border protest ended, several dozen moved across town to the offices of Mexicos environmental secretariat, blocking the entrance. And later, as night fell, they closed the street outside the federal Attorney Generals Office. They shared food, chatted and held signs that read Justice for Sunshine and called him a political prisoner.
The government is acting unjustly in this case, said Daniel Nolasco, a 44-year-old fisherman and father of five. Just as Sunshine has spoken up for us, we have to now speak up for him, said Javier Nolasco, his 42-year-old brother, and fishing companion.
The Nolasco brothers belong to the federation of fishing cooperatives led by Rodriguez, and the loss of their leader had them feeling particularly vulnerable. They want to get rid of us fishermen. How are we going to pay for our childrens studies? asked Daniel Nolasco, verging on tears as he spoke.
The anxiety over Rodriguezs arrest did not just affect members of the fishing community in this town of some 30,000 residents that is about a two-hour drive from Mexicali and the U.S. border.
Following Rodriguezs arrest, the top Mexicali municipal official in San Felipe announced he would be resigning, to join the social struggle, saying there was little he could do from his government position to ease the crisis that has enveloped San Felipe.
Despite unprecedented government surveillance of the upper Gulf, the illegal totoaba trade has been rampant off the coast of San Felipe. Authorities say that the poachers are part of an organized crime network that involves catching the totoaba, smuggling their bladders to Asia and selling them on the black market.
Scientists blame the surge in the totoaba trade for the drastic drop in recent years in the population of the vaquita, a small and critically endangered porpoise that is endemic to the upper Gulf of California. Despite a government ban on gillnets in the vaquitas habitat since 2015, vaquitas have continued to drown in the illegal gillnets set by the totoaba poachers.
Rodriguezs detractors have long accused him of being part of tototaba trade, accusations he has repeatedly denied. But it was not until a report earlier this month on the Mexican television network Televisa that Mexican federal authorities stated openly that Rodriguez has been under investigation.
Without a doubt, he is one of the individuals who is most suspected of this type of activity, Rafael Pacchiano, Mexicos environmental secretary, told journalist Carlos Loret de Mola.
karen.kucher@sduniontribune.com
Headaches, rashes, infections, breathing problems.
An increasing number of U.S. Border Patrol agents at the Imperial Beach station have reported a host of health problems since February, when an estimated 143 million gallons of Mexican sewage spilled into the Tijuana River Valley they patrol.
Its not one of the risks typically associated with policing the border, said Christopher Harris, a union representative for National Border Patrol Councils Local 1613.
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Theyre willing to put up with the normal hazards of law enforcement, Harris said. We understand thats part of our job. We get shot at. We accept all that. We do our best to mitigate it. We wear vests. We have trauma kits. But we cant mitigate sewage and chemicals.
Harris has been pressing administrators at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to take steps to protect his agents from the toxins that regularly pollute the valley.
In June, he documented more than 30 agents who had reported sewage-related illnesses. Since then, that number has nearly tripled, to at least 83 agents.
The Imperial Beach Border Patrol Station has about 300 employees who patrol the U.S.-Mexico border from the Pacific Ocean through the Tijuana River Valley. Some work on foot, some in ATVs or SUVs, others on horseback.
The sewage leak in February and subsequent leaks flowed into the Tijuana River Valley Regional Park, which covers 71.5 miles of dirt roads and paths.
The muck sticks around for a long time as it makes its way to the ocean. It settles into the riverbanks, overflows during rains and dries out in hot weather. It is impossible for Border Patrol agents to avoid.
While patrolling on their ATVs on Nov. 10 after a rainstorm, Harris said three agents experienced ear, nose and throat problems. One said he had a strange rash inside his nose.
Border Patrol Agent Joel Sevilla said that last summer he had to patrol areas where much of the sewage flowed.
I had a really bad nasal infection, headaches and trouble breathing I was losing my breath really fast, he said. Im not known for that because Im very active. So I had to go to the doctors and the first time I went, they said that I had a nasal infection. They gave me some antibiotics and they treated it and it went away for like two or three days. Then it started happening againWhat was worse were the headaches because I couldnt sleep.
Sevilla went back to the doctors four or five times. He had to leave the prestigious ATV unit and now patrols in an SUV.
I dont get the headaches anymore because Im not riding around in all that dust, he said. When the water dries out, it turns into dust and thats what we breathe.
Michael Scappechio, a spokesman with the U.S. Border Patrol, said the agency is aware of the agents health problems and is assessing the problem to develop short-term and long-range solutions.
Common reported acute injuries have ranged from upper-respiratory ailments to burns on extremities, he said. Personnel have also reported damage to boots and gloves while performing their duties.
The issue of cross-border raw sewage is a complex, decades-old issue, Scappechio said, and the Border Patrol is working with a number of stakeholders to address both the remediation of the impacted areas as well as the safety challenges.
Pin-pointing the locations and sources of spills, including the contents of each incident, are critical to addressing the health and safety of our personnel, he said. It is the intent on the part of CBP and USBP, that the collaborative effort amongst the stakeholders involved, will result in both a safer and healthier environment in the Tijuana River Valley shortly and for the long run.
As the number of cases continued to rise this past summer, Harris said Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Kevin McAleenan visited the Imperial Beach station.
As a result of that visit, my understanding is every week or every two weeks he gets an update on what theyre doing, Harris said. Now, understand their constraints. Theyre not a scientific organization. Theyre not an EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). Theyre not a research organization. Theyre doing the best they can to find money and try to mitigate.
Harris said there was talk of building some showers where agents could decontaminate, but he wondered how you can talk about decontamination without knowing what chemicals youre decontaminating. Whats needed, he said, are more reporting on spills and more testing of the sewage water.
That responsibility falls to a small federal agency.
The International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) is in charge of documenting each spill. A branch of the State Department with approximately 250 employees, it is charged with developing binational solutions to issues that arise on water, sanitation, water quality and flood control in the border region.
The IBWC has an office in San Diego and runs the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant (SBIWTP) at the U.S.-Mexico border. Completed in 1997, the facility treats 25 million gallons of Tijuana sewage per day.
However, the plant cant treat all the sewage flowing across the border. Tijuanas population which officially stands at 1.56 million, but unofficially may be as high as 2 million has outpaced the citys ability to provide adequate and updated sewage infrastructure. As a consequence, sewage spills occur frequently.
Steve Smullen, the San Diego Area Operations Manager for the IBWC, must report sewage spills to the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. Since February, he said he has documented 21 spills ranging from 1,560 gallons to 5 million gallons. Their causes vary from broken water mains to power failures at Tijuanas pump stations.
Problem is, not all water sources are being tested or reported. The IBWC has a NPDES permit (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) and Smullen says the permit specifies certain monitoring and testing, such as out in the ocean and the beaches. However, when it rains, the IBWC is not required to report that, even though this is when the largest amount of sewage flows into the river valley and fouls the area.
When the treatment plant opened in 1997, the IBWC built five canyon collectors located along the U.S.-Mexican border near the culverts and drains. The IBWC only reports spills during dry weather when the water rises to a high level and bypasses these canyon collectors, flowing into the valley. In addition, no collectors exist in Yogurt Canyon or the Tijuana River and the spills in those areas go unreported altogether. The IBWC says it hopes to add new testing soon.
Were going to be working with the regional board and the city to look at off-setting ocean monitoring with the land-based monitoring, which would be the main collectors and also the river, Smullen said.
Smullen said four new testing sites are under consideration: Yogurt Canyon, the Tijuana River, Hollister Street and Saturn Boulevard. He doesnt yet know when this new testing will begin.
Headaches, rashes, infections, breathing problems.
An increasing number of U.S. Border Patrol agents at the Imperial Beach station have reported a host of health problems since February, when an estimated 143 million gallons of Mexican sewage spilled into the Tijuana River Valley they patrol.
Its not one of the risks typically associated with policing the border, said Christopher Harris, a union representative for National Border Patrol Councils Local 1613.
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Theyre willing to put up with the normal hazards of law enforcement, Harris said. We understand thats part of our job. We get shot at. We accept all that. We do our best to mitigate it. We wear vests. We have trauma kits. But we cant mitigate sewage and chemicals.
Harris has been pressing administrators at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to take steps to protect his agents from the toxins that regularly pollute the valley.
In June, he documented more than 30 agents who had reported sewage-related illnesses. Since then, that number has nearly tripled, to at least 83 agents.
The Imperial Beach Border Patrol Station has about 300 employees who patrol the U.S.-Mexico border from the Pacific Ocean through the Tijuana River Valley. Some work on foot, some in ATVs or SUVs, others on horseback.
The sewage leak in February and subsequent leaks flowed into the Tijuana River Valley Regional Park, which covers 71.5 miles of dirt roads and paths.
The muck sticks around for a long time as it makes its way to the ocean. It settles into the riverbanks, overflows during rains and dries out in hot weather. It is impossible for Border Patrol agents to avoid.
While patrolling on their ATVs on Nov. 10 after a rainstorm, Harris said three agents experienced ear, nose and throat problems. One said he had a strange rash inside his nose.
Border Patrol Agent Joel Sevilla said that in the summer he had to patrol areas where much of the sewage flowed.
I had a really bad nasal infection, headaches and trouble breathing. I was losing my breath really fast, he said. Im not known for that because Im very active. So I had to go to the doctors and the first time I went, they said that I had a nasal infection. They gave me some antibiotics and they treated it and it went away for like two or three days. Then it started happening again. What was worse were the headaches because I couldnt sleep.
Sevilla went back to the doctor four or five times. He had to leave the prestigious ATV unit and now patrols in an SUV.
I dont get the headaches anymore because Im not riding around in all that dust, he said. When the water dries out, it turns into dust and thats what we breathe.
Michael Scappechio, a spokesman with the U.S. Border Patrol, said the agency is aware of the agents health problems and is assessing the problem to develop short- and long-term solutions.
Common reported acute injuries have ranged from upper-respiratory ailments to burns on extremities, he said. Personnel have also reported damage to boots and gloves while performing their duties.
The issue of cross-border raw sewage is a complex, decades-old issue, Scappechio said, and the Border Patrol is working with a number of stakeholders to address both the remediation of the affected areas as well as the safety challenges.
Pinpointing the locations and sources of spills, including the contents of each incident, are critical to addressing the health and safety of our personnel, he said. It is the intent on the part of CBP and USBP, that the collaborative effort amongst the stakeholders involved, will result in both a safer and healthier environment in the Tijuana River Valley shortly and for the long run.
As the number of cases continued to rise this past summer, Harris said Kevin McAleenan, acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, visited the Imperial Beach station.
As a result of that visit, my understanding is every week or every two weeks he gets an update on what theyre doing, Harris said. Now, understand their constraints. Theyre not a scientific organization. Theyre not an EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]. Theyre not a research organization. Theyre doing the best they can to find money and try to mitigate.
Harris said there was talk of building some showers where agents could decontaminate, but he wondered how you can talk about decontamination without knowing what chemicals youre decontaminating. Whats needed, he said, are more reporting on spills and more testing of the sewage water.
That responsibility falls to a small federal agency.
The International Boundary and Water Commission is in charge of documenting each spill. A branch of the State Department with approximately 250 employees, it is charged with developing binational solutions to issues that arise on sanitation, water quality and flood control in the border region.
The commission has an office in San Diego and runs the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant at the U.S.-Mexico border. Completed in 1997, the facility treats 25 million gallons of Tijuana sewage per day.
However, the plant cant treat all the sewage flowing across the border. Tijuanas population which officially stands at 1.56 million, but unofficially may be as high as 2 million has outpaced the citys ability to provide adequate and updated sewage infrastructure. As a consequence, sewage spills occur frequently.
Barbara Zaragoza writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
About 15 people were displaced from their homes early Sunday after a driver plowed into a Mid-Wilshire apartment complex, authorities said.
One person was taken to a hospital after the crash, which occurred about 3:30 a.m. at the 5900 block of West San Vicente Boulevard, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Building officials were called to evaluate the damage, and the Red Cross was brought in to assist the displaced residents.
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Ricardo Parral, co-owner of the building, told KTLA he thought there was an earthquake when the car slammed into the building.
He later saw the driver unconscious at the wheel and said that two passengers got out of the car and ran away, the station reported.
Los Angeles police are investigating the cause of the crash. As of Sunday night, no one had been arrested, authorities said.
alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com
Twitter: @AleneTchek
Before dawn, a woman with her 18-year-old son in her car flagged down a sergeant at Riversides Magnolia Avenue police station with a startling request.
She said she wanted to turn in her son, who had earlier called her to say he had molested two boys, 8 and 4, in a motel room.
After interviewing her son, Joseph Hayden Boston, Riverside police jailed him at the Robert Presley Detention Center on Saturday with bail set at $1 million.
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In a statement, Riverside police said Boston confessed to sexually assaulting up to 50 children in other cities, starting when he was 10 years old.
Before moving to Riverside in early November, Boston had lived in Lakewood and Buena Park.
In Riverside he was staying at the Simply Home Inn & Suites in the 9800 block of Magnolia Avenue.
There, according to the police statement, he befriended the two boys who were staying at the motel with their parents. The boys were allowed to go into Bostons room Friday night. Hours later, police said, Boston called his mother, whose name was not disclosed, to tell her that he had molested the boys.
She then drove to the motel and took him to the police station.
Riverside County Child Protective Services responded and took custody of both children.
Lt. Joe Badali of the Los Angeles County sheriffs Lakewood station said the Sheriffs Special Victims Bureau was coordinating with Riverside detectives to determine if there is a nexus with any victims out here.
There are no reported cases with ties to the Boston case, Badali said.
A spokesman for the Buena Park Police Department said the agency is aware of the investigation and will coordinate with Riverside but does not have any active cases involving Boston.
Riverside County district attorneys spokesman John Hall said the office had not made a decision Monday whether to file charges. Boston would likely be arraigned Wednesday if charges are filed.
Riverside Det. Paul Miranda asked anyone with information about other potential victims to call him at (951) 353-7945 or email at pmiranda@riverside.ca.gov.
Maximum penalties for sexual assaults, which depend on both the age of the perpetrator and the victim, have been stiffened in recent years and can be severe, said Paul Wallin, senior partner of Wallin & Klarich, a firm that specializes in sex crime defense.
Because Boston, who turned 18 in September, was an adult when the alleged crimes were committed and because the two victims were under 10, the maximum penalty would be 15 years to life in prison for each offense, Wallin said.
According to the firms website, which cites research by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, juveniles account for more than a third of those known to law enforcement to have committed sex offenses against other minors.
doug.smith@latimes.com
@LATDoug
UPDATES:
2:30 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Wallin.
10:20 a.m.: This article was updated a statements from the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department and Riverside County district attorneys office.
This article was originally published at 9:25 a.m.
President Trump formally reconfigured two big national monuments in southern Utah on Monday, shrinking them by more than 2 million acres and establishing five smaller units within them a public lands declaration unlike any ever made by a U.S. chief executive.
You know how best to take care of your land, the president said to a large audience at the Utah state Capitol. You know best how to conserve this land for generations.
Calling the designation of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments an abuse of federal authority and the work of distant bureaucrats, the president added: Ive come to Utah to reverse federal overreach and restore the rights to this land to your citizens.
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The proclamations Trump signed reduce the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante monument to 1,006,341 acres, while Bears Ears, which was 1.35 million acres, will shrink to 228,784 acres.
The Grand Staircase monument were was established by President Clinton and Bears Ears was established by President Obama. Both vastly increased the amount of land and water protected by the federal government in southern Utah.
Trumps decision drew immediate vows of legal challenges. Protests also occurred here on Saturday and Monday. The presidents national monuments decision forms another front line in the administrations disputed campaign to reverse Obama-era public lands and environmental policy and to energize his base of political support in the rural West.
It also subjected one of the countrys wildest regions, a three-county stretch of deep canyons, mesa, and red rock home to few roads and roughly 28,000 people to uncommon national scrutiny.
Trumps actions produced ample applause among supporters as Trump made his announcement. He emphasized that the boundary changes were intended to return control of public lands to those who know and use them most closely.
Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington, he told the audience. And guess what, theyre wrong.
With his redesignation, he said, Public lands will once again be for public use.
The presidents actions were a dramatic departure from conventional interpretations of the 1906 Antiquities Act, on which the monument designations are based. The act, advocated by President Theodore Roosevelt, was designed to provide safeguards to exceptional historic, cultural, and natural landscapes across the country, most of them located in the Wests public domain.
The Antiquities Act provides broad authority to presidents to act alone in establishing national monuments. Presidents have declared more than 150 national monuments, many of which became national parks. Four of Utahs five national parks started as national monuments.
Trump said the act was never designed to create monuments of the size of the two in Utah. These abuses of the Antiquities Act give enormous power to far-away bureaucrats at the expense of the people who live here and work here and make this place their home, he said.
Though previous presidents have adjusted national monuments more than 80 times, all but 18 of those changes were made to expand monument boundaries, according to an Interior Department accounting. Though President Wilson removed over 313,000 acres from the Mount Olympus National Monument in 1915, none has come close to reducing boundaries by as much as the roughly 2 million acres that Trump removed from federal protection at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
Im a real estate developer, Trump said. When they start talking about millions of acres, I say, Say it again? Because thats a lot.
The president, who was accompanied by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, was warmly received at the state Capitol.
Zinke and other speakers characterized the boundary changes as a courageous effort by Trump to keep a promise and respond to the deep hurt that rural Utah communities say they experienced when both monuments were established.
This is about giving rural America a voice, said Zinke. There are not many presidents that do what he is about to do. He added: The president is doing this for the right reasons to make sure that Utah has a voice.
The little guys voices were heard, said state Rep. Gregory H. Hughes, the speaker of the Utah House of Representatives. Voices in the community were heard. This administration has the strength and the will to be there for us. This is a great day for Utah.
When Bears Ears was designated, it was disheartening for my community, said Rebecca Benally, a Navajo and commissioner of San Juan County, where the monument is. She added: It was insulting that bureaucrats thousands of miles away didnt believe we were capable of protecting our land.
President Trump signed two proclamations in Salt Lake City on Dec. 4, 2017, that dramatically altered the boundaries and removed 2 million acres of protected federal land from two big national monuments in Utah.
Trumps declaration sets the stage for a court battle over presidential authority to rescind the boundaries of a national monument. Legal scholars assert that neither the Antiquities Act nor the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act allow such striking changes to national monuments by a president. That authority, they assert, rests solely with Congress.
The Inter Tribal Coalition, a Native American group, is filing a lawsuit immediately to protect Bears Ears. Patagonia, the outdoor clothing manufacturer, is joining Friends of Cedar Mesa, Utah Dine Bikeyah, and Archaeology Southwest in a Bears Ears suit to be filed later this week.
Ten national and regional environmental groups are filing a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington today to protect Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
The president lacks the authority under the Antiquites Act to repeal national monuments like he tried today, said Steve Bloch, the legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmental group in Salt Lake City. We argue that when Congress passed the Antiquities Act it delegated to the president the authority to establish national monuments, not to repeal or rescind them The president is trying to take more authority than Congess has granted him.
One of the motivations for changing the boundaries is improving access to coal, oil, natural gas and uranium.
An analysis of the potential for resource development by Blochs group found that revoking the original boundaries and establishing smaller monuments opens Grand Staircase-Escalantes coal reserves to development. Uranium, and oil and gas reserves, become much easier to develop beyond the boundaries of the two smaller monuments carved from Bears Ears.
The president acted at the urging of Utahs Republican congressional delegation, which resisted the decisions by Presidents Clinton and Obama to establish the two monuments. Utahs lawmakers insist that the two Democrats overreached in establishing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by not adequately considering the views of state residents. The Obama administration disputed that characterization, arguing that it held many public meetings and invited public comment.
Vice President Al Gore applauds after President Clinton signed a bill designating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996. (Doug Mills / Associated Press )
Public opinion surveys have consistently found that Utah residents are about evenly divided on whether to shrink or maintain the existing boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
This is unprecedented and its illegal, Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. Presidents use the Antiquities Act to create national monuments and protect our special lands and waters for future generations. This president thinks he can use it to destroy them. He does not have that authority. Whats next, President Trump the Grand Canyon? See you in court.
In April, Trump signed an executive order that directed the Interior Department to review 27 monuments established since 1996. The department received nearly 3 million comments. Most expressed support for keeping national monument boundaries and management practices intact.
The Interior Department said it would make public the findings of its review of the 25 other national monuments on Tuesday.
ALSO
Remarkable dinosaur discoveries under threat with Trump plan to shrink national monument in Utah, scientists say
Industries that cheered Trumps climate regulation rollbacks now worry theyll go too far
Trump fully endorses Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore
Follow Keith Schneider, Western environment and public lands correspondent, on Twitter.
keith.schneider@latimes.com
UPDATES:
3:15 p.m.: The story was updated with additional details.
12:10 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details of the proclamations.
11:35 a.m.: This article was updated with Trumps announcement.
This article was originally posted at 7 a.m.
Ruptured breast implants will be the focus of a trial that begins today to determine whether a damaged sidewalk is responsible for injuries to the wife of former San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock.
Attorneys in the case are disputing whether one of Cynthia Hedgecocks silicone implants ruptured when she allegedly tripped over damaged sidewalk in 2015 and fell forward onto the ground.
Hedgecock and her husband sued the city of San Diego last year over her injuries, claiming then that the fall in Pacific Beach caused the implants to leak beyond a normal enclosure of scar tissue and that the city owes the couple more than $25,000.
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Since then, attorneys for the city of San Diego have discovered medical records showing both implants had already ruptured in 2012 and were due for replacement because they were more than 20 years old.
Attorneys for the Hedgecocks dont dispute that the implants had ruptured beyond their original silicone sac. At issue is whether the fall caused a leak beyond scar tissue that normally forms around an implant, creating a second layer of enclosure.
Attorneys for the city say there is no evidence that the fall caused such a leak, that it could have begun before the incident.
In a trial brief submitted Nov. 22, attorneys for the city say one reason to doubt the fall caused the injuries is how Cynthia Hedgecock handled her medical care after the incident on July 31, 2015.
Hedgecock sought no medical attention directly after the incident and didnt mention the fall during a doctors visit five days later or during a hospital visit for an unrelated abdominal blockage two days after that, officials contend.
It wasnt until Aug. 17 that Hedgecock visited her doctor to address injuries from the fall, which she claims included persistent chest pain and rib damage.
Hedgecock and her doctor then decided the implants needed replacement and she had surgery in November 2015 to accomplish that.
In her lawsuit, she described it as a grueling procedure requiring pain medication, sleeping aides and her husbands constant assistance.
That is partly why the former mayor, 71, is a co-plaintiff in the case. The suit says he had to stay at home and help his wife every day with her recovery, prompting him to seek compensation for his own loss of income and the loss of consortium with his wife.
Court documents say Hedgecock and the city have discussed him dropping his claims against the city, but that he hadnt yet done so.
Attorneys for the Hedgecocks say Cynthia Hedgecock, 70, didnt seek medical attention for her chest injuries for more than two weeks because she hoped the pain would go away with time.
In a trial brief, they say the case will come down to her credibility.
Either she has fooled her husband, her friends, her family, her general practitioner and her surgeon and made up a story about tripping and falling and hurting her breasts, or she was really hurt, the brief says.
The lawsuit contends the city behaved with negligence and carelessness by not repairing a 2.5-inch concrete lip in a public sidewalk caused by a tree. The incident took place in Pacific Beach on Morrell Street near Grand Avenue.
The Hedgecocks case also criticizes the citys sidewalk policy.
The Hedgecocks, of Mission Beach, argue it is irresponsible of the city not to have an inspection system and repair protocol for sidewalks.
City officials have considered changes to the sidewalk policy after some large settlements, including a nearly $5 million payout last spring to a bicyclist injured after being launched by damaged sidewalk in Del Cerro. No policy changes have been adopted.
Superior Court Judge Kenneth Medel will preside over the trial, which is expected to last three to four days.
Roger Hedgecock was mayor of San Diego from 1983 to 1985, when he was forced to resign after pleading guilty to conspiracy in an illegal funding scandal involving his mayoral campaign.
An appellate judge later reduced the conspiracy charge from a felony to a misdemeanor.
david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick
The body of a man found along the coastline of Hilo Bay is believed to be George Novinger, a 61-year-old East County man who went missing when he and his wife were swept down a river in Hawaii more than a week ago.
The body was discovered in Wainaku along the shoreline about 35 feet down a cliff line on the Big Island on Friday, Hawaii police said. It was airlifted by a fire department helicopter.
Although the body has not yet been identified pending a coroners inquest, Novingers stepson said he has no doubt it is Novinger.
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It adds closure, said stepson Joseph Harmes, who was on the Hawaiian trip with the couple. It allows his parents to come to terms and it allows me to have that closure. It is a good thing.
Novinger had told friends he was taking his wife, Gladys Novinger, 62, to Hawaii as an early Christmas gift. Harmes said his mother and stepfather were taking him and his girlfriend to a special place about 100 yards above Rainbow Falls when they were swept away by the strong current on Nov. 25.
Gladys Novinger was found unresponsive in a pool and was flown to a hospital, where she died.
The couple owned Hacienda Vineyards in Rancho San Diego, which offers destination vacations and retreats, and were considered pillars in San Diegos international community.
Gladys Novinger founded the House of Peru and served on the executive board of the Museum of Man in Balboa Park. George Novinger recently retired as a diplomat for the U.S. State Departments Foreign Service and served on several local international groups.
On Monday night, the House of Peru hosted a candlelight vigil for the couple in Balboa Parks village of international cottages.
One after another, members vowed to continue working to achieve their organizations goal of building a cottage for Peru, a project that is in the final stages, according to the groups website.
For the House of Peru, we are going to continue the legacy (the Novingers) really dreamed of, Vice President Oscar Urteaga said, surrounded by dozens of people who attended the emotional gathering.
He later added, This large showing is truly a testament to the impact they had.
In her brief remarks, George Novingers daughter, Saya, told the crowd: Its so wonderful to see you guys all here celebrating their legacy.
Harmes, Galdys son, remembered the couple as loving, giving, fun, beautiful, wonderful people.
Their connection with this part of San Diego was very beautiful for them, Harmes said. It was their escape, their way to give back.
House of Peru member Job Alvarez, who spoke to the crowd in Spanish, said: They will always live in our memories and hearts.
karen.kucher@sduniontribune.com
After days of searching, an Oceanside woman had given up hope that shed find Catalina, her 9-month-old puppy who went missing soon after Thanksgiving.
But then Salina Hurtado saw her dog on the news.
She said she watched, disbelieving, as a TV news anchor talked of a pursuit in Valley Center. A dog was shot when deputies fired at a man accused of trying to run them over in a stolen van.
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Footage of the incident showed a white pit bull with a distinctive brown spot being carried away by a deputy. The young dog was excitedly licking the womans face.
I couldnt believe it, Hurtado said. I remember thinking, My poor baby got into a high-speed chase? Is this for real? But I knew it was her.
The 35-year-old said Catalina went missing from the apartment complex where she and her husband live on Nov. 25.
We went to feed her and she was just gone, Hurtado said. They searched the area and asked neighbors to be on the lookout, but they started to believe someone had taken her.
A week after the dog went missing, a neighbor tracked down Hurtados husband. He said he thought he saw Catalina on the news.
The couple quickly Googled pit bull shot in Valley Center.
The story was everywhere, Hurtado said.
After watching a clip on CBS News 8s website, she called the television station. Someone told her the puppy had been taken to the County of San Diego Animal Services shelter in Carlsbad.
Hurtado said she went to the shelter with veterinary records and pictures of Catalina in hand to help prove her ownership. She was told, however, that they would need to wait another week before picking the pup up.
Thats because Kevin Meza, the suspect who was arrested after the high-speed chase, claimed the dog was his. Dan DeSousa, director of the countys animal services department, said since Catalina wasnt licensed or microchipped, the county is legally required to give Meza two weeks to contest Hurtados claim.
We will be holding the dog through the legally required 14 days, at which time we will allow the family to claim the dog, DeSousa said.
Hurtado said she doesnt know Meza.
While the Oceanside family waits, theyre asking the community for help. Catalina accrued hundreds of dollars in medical bills while she was being treated for her gunshot wound.
Hurtado started a GoFundMe account to help pay for the unexpected cost. Still, she said, having her puppy home in time for the holidays is worth any price.
Twitter: @LAWinkley
(619) 293-1546
lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.com
If you only want to read one sentence about the problem with public schools in California, its this: As a state we seem to care more about what adults want than what our kids need.
Its honestly not more complicated than that. If we were to filter every education decision every policy change, every funding allocation, and every unfortunate round of teacher layoffs solely through the lens of what is best for students and student achievement, wed have a very different public education system. Wed have higher graduation rates, higher student achievement, and, in fact, more effective teachers with much higher salaries and more professional benefits.
Heres just one stark example. Last year, state Sen. Alex Padilla wrote a bill that would have made it easier to fire teachers over serious criminal activity such as inappropriate relationships with students. It was prompted by a real-life case of a teacher at Miramonte Elementary, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, who had committed sexual acts against his students.
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If we cared about our children above all else, it would be easy to get suspected criminals out of classrooms. But Sen. Padillas bill died in a state Assembly committee because several members simply refused to cast votes, effectively voting no. To make matters worse, just last week the Legislature passed a toothless bill that claims to address the problem, but will actually make it more difficult to get sexual predators out of our classrooms; that bill, AB 375, is now headed to Gov. Jerry Browns desk. He should veto it.
Protecting our kids should be common-sense stuff. If, as a state, we cant even pass a strong child-safety bill, how can we expect to do other common-sense things such as remove ineffective teachers, hold school districts accountable for their spending, and ensure parents have all the information they need to make good decisions on behalf of their kids?
In California, theres simply no momentum toward education reform. In fact, theres a concerted effort in the opposite direction. Consider this: 38 states across the country have agreed to adopt an evaluation system for new teachers that would consider student achievement as a significant part of how a teacher is evaluated. Its the framework that was set out by the Obama administration as part of the federal Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind initiatives. So youd think Democrats would be on board. But then you have California. Last legislative session in Sacramento there was a bill introduced that didnt just oppose President Obamas initiative it would have made it illegal to evaluate teachers on the basis of how our kids grow academically.
Thats just insane. We expect our surgeons to be evaluated based on how many lives they save on the operating table. We expect that car mechanics are evaluated on whether they are able to keep a car operational. Sales people are evaluated on how many units of widgets they move every month. But as a state, are we really saying that teachers should not be evaluated at all based on how well the students in their classroom perform?
The obstacle in our path is that were not dealing with common sense. When it comes to public education in California, were dealing with politics and political clout.
Teacher unions are the most powerful political force in California, spending more money on lobbying and political campaigns than any other entity in the state. According to the Los Angeles Times, in the decade from 2000 through 2009, the California Teachers Association outpaced all other special interests, including corporate players such as telecommunications giant AT&T and the Chevron oil company, spending more than $211 million in political contributions and lobbying expenses roughly twice that of the next largest spender.
We recently saw how union leadership can stymie constructive conversation simply by refusing to participate. Earlier this month. I co-hosted a teacher town hall in Los Angeles simply to bring all sides in the education debate together for a productive dialogue. The United Teachers Los Angeles, the local union, refused to participate. How can we even discuss education reforms when the organization that purports to represent teachers wont even come to the table?
Our states rank-and-file teachers know that the status quo is not whats best for kids. Theyre interested in talk about reform.
In California, one relevant policy thats gotten a lot of attention is something known as last in, first out, or LIFO. It says that, no matter how good a teacher you are, youll be laid off first if theres somebody in the school district with more years in the classroom than you. As a parent I have two school-aged girls thats just a crazy idea. I want the best teacher in my childs classroom, not just the one whos been working longer. So when layoffs happen, school districts end up in the position of handing a Teacher of the Year plaque to a teacher on one day and then handing that same teacher a pink slip the next day. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Research shows clearly that last in, first out policies are detrimental to schools and kids. The first reason for that is a numbers issue. When a district lays off teachers strictly by seniority that means they lay off the teachers paid the least and keep the ones paid the most. So they have to lay off a greater number of teachers as many as 30 percent more in order to close the budget deficit. Disrupting so many more classrooms means as many as 30 percent more kids are negatively impacted. The second reason is obvious: you lose some really incredible and effective teachers. How well an educator does in the classroom doesnt always correlate to how long theyve been teaching.
Another example is transparency in education spending. Every year in the state capital we hear cries for more and more funding. But how much is the right amount? In California, its impossible to say because we cant even track how much money is making its way into the classroom and which education programs are the most effective. A policymaker might tell you that in 2012 our state spent $9,500 per pupil. But an educator would tell you that only about $5,500 of that made its way into the classroom for instruction. That mirrors national numbers, which show that only 51 percent of taxpayer education dollars make their way into the classroom.
Education budgets, at the state and the district level, should be transparent. That is, they should be accessible and so easy to read that any parent can see not just where the money is going, but which programs are most effective for contributing to student growth.
Transparency is of particular concern for the implementation of Gov. Browns Local Control Funding Formula. The governor was right to give school districts more flexibility with some of the funding they receive and additional dollars to support high-need students. But interest groups are already geared up to fight over how that money should be used. Without maximum transparency in how those dollars are spent, well never know whether the flexibility was used for the benefit of students or for adults.
Luckily, the general public in California agrees with all of these common-sense reforms, suggesting that the state is ripe for a change, if not by lawmakers in Sacramento then by other means. Just look at a public opinion poll conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California in April of this year. It shows that more than two-thirds of Californians believe teachers should be evaluated in part by the academic improvement of students as measured by standardized tests. That number gets even higher 77 percent if you poll only the parents of public school students.
More recently, USCs Rossier School of Education published a survey this month that shows an overwhelming number of voters believe that student scores on standardized tests should be considered as part of teacher evaluations. When I say overwhelming I mean about 80 percent across all political parties and ethnicities.
Regarding that last in, first out rule, additional research shows that Californians hate it. No one wants budget issues to force teacher layoffs, but when they do, only 14.5 percent of Californians think pink slips should be issued based on seniority. More than 80 percent say layoffs should be based on teacher evaluations instead.
There are a lot of obstacles to improving public education in California. Most of those obstacles are in Sacramento. In communities throughout the state, however, its clear that the public is on the side of reform. That suggests that the path to bettering schools in our state shouldnt run through the capitol building, but instead be dictated by average Californians. No matter their ethnicity or political party preference, all Californians agree that students best interests should come first in education, not those of adults.
A new study by the McKinsey Global Institute about the potential of automation should serve as a stark warning to all world leaders that they must prepare for what may very well be the biggest societal and economic upheaval in our lifetime.
The report builds off this core finding: In about 60 percent of occupations, at least one-third of job tasks could be automated and performed much more cheaply by robots or algorithms. As a result, McKinsey estimated that at a best guess 400 million people worldwide would need to change their occupations by 2030, with the number increasing to 800 million if the transition to automation in many job categories occurs faster than expected. As many as one-third of all U.S. jobs could disappear.
But McKinsey doesnt see this as the death knell of employment. Labor markets adjusted to past technological advances, the study noted. And history suggests that by 2030, nearly 10 percent of new jobs will be in categories that didnt previously exist.
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[With] sufficient economic growth, innovation, and investment, there can be enough new job creation to offset the impact of automation, the study noted. A larger challenge will be ensuring that workers have the skills and support needed to transition to new jobs. Countries that fail to manage this transition could see rising unemployment and depressed wages.
This gets to a point The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has made for years: Technological advances will keep disrupting one industry after another. Thats why its crucial for our government to make it much easier for younger and older workers to have access to job-skills training. To achieve this goal, though, America needs wise leaders.
Which brings us to San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim. An Associated Press story in September about her interest in taxing companies that use robots or algorithms to replace humans caused a stir, and last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Kim wants to have a statewide ballot measure on such a tax. Kims Jobs for the Future Fund says the revenue could be used on education, retraining and targeted investments in new industries. This modest tax will help smooth the transition for our workers, providing them with better opportunities.
Kim deserves credit for appreciating the coming disruption with a clarity that few politicians seem to have and her proposal has a superficial appeal. Its worth noting that Microsoft founder Bill Gates also thinks a robot tax of some kind might be good idea.
But what Kim wants is in effect a state tax on efficiency and innovation one borne uniquely by California companies. The San Francisco Bay Area has become the de facto tech capital of the world because of bold, disruptive technologies. The last thing these communities should do is to punish their entrepreneurs for their brilliance. And the idea of the revenue from this tax being use for targeted investments in new industries is ominous. The state government must not be in the business of picking economic winners and losers.
If Kims idea jump-starts a debate about job skills in the coming automation era, that would be great. But in these angry, emotional times, its also possible her idea could morph into a Luddite populist uprising that paints tech innovators as tools of the 1 percenters. That would be the worst way to deal with the automation revolution. Being smart about this revolution is the challenge of our time.
Twitter: @sdutIdeas
Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion
Feral pigs that scientists once feared could pose a serious threat to fragile ecosystems in San Diego Countys back country have been all but eradicated, thanks to government-contracted hunters and years of devastating drought that have slowed breeding and survival rates.
Officials said this week it appears only eight wild hogs remain in the county, based on data from hundreds of wildlife tracking cameras and other forms of monitoring.
Professional hunters working with a consortium of federal, state and local agencies have successfully trapped and euthanized roughly 150 of the the animals over the past five years, some leaders in the effort said.
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The work that has been done through our group has helped quite a bit, said Megan Jennings, an SDSU research ecologist in charge of the monitoring program for the Inter-governmental Feral Pig Group. Its been a real targeted effort, wide-scale across the county and been a major contributor in getting the numbers down.
Wild hogs began showing up in the county around 2007, though no one knows for sure how they arrived. In 2010 various wildlife agencies began tracking and trying to kill the pigs and in 2014 an official eradication effort was launched. At that time, it was estimated that perhaps 1,000 of the animals could be roaming the eastern and southern portions of the region.
The pigs typically travel around in groups of up to 15 known as sounders, rooting around in fields and churning up soil like a Rototiller. Adult males can reach up to 300 pounds.
Because the pigs breed quickly the concern was that they would multiply and become an overwhelming ecological problem, destroying riparian habitats where endangered and threatened birds and animals thrive.
That doomsday scenario didnt pan out and officials now say the 2014 estimates were probably way too high, in part because they werent based on firm data and didnt take into account the continuing drought.
When the project started there were numbers being thrown around of 300 to 500 pigs, even 3,000 to 5,000 pigs, said Ryan McCreary, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services. When we started using trail cameras in several different locations it became obvious the population was much smaller.
The parched ecosystem helped keep the wild hogs in check.
If you release a population of pigs or goats or any animal and they dont know where any water is or what their resources are theyre going to struggle, particularly if there is any kind of drought, McCreary said.
Jennings said the monitoring cameras and evidence collected by field researchers indicate that only about eight pigs remain, though there may be a few additional stragglers.
Clark Winchell of the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife said most of the pigs have been captured and killed by placing a brew, a fermented, stinky bait inside a pen.
Cameras would then record the activity in the pen and when it appeared all the pigs in the area had gathered around the bait the corral door was closed. The trapped pigs were then killed and their carcasses typically buried.
Wild hogs can carry more than 24 diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control, which publishes a pamphlet on how hunters should protect themselves when handling the animals.
After the pigs were spotted in San Diego County, the first mass eradication occurred on Warner Ranch near Lake Henshaw in 2012 when 30 pigs were captured.
Since then much of the efforts have been centered in the southeastern part of the county, sometimes on private ranches south of Interstate 8, and in the Cleveland National Forest in places such as the Hauser Wilderness Area and near Cottonwood Creek not far from Pine Valley.
County officials had feared the hogs would move into county parks, but no pigs were taken in those areas, officials said.
Private hunters were also encouraged to take out hog permits but Winchell said few pigs were killed in such a way partly because most werent big enough to make good trophies. Pig hunting is difficult because the hogs are often found in some of the remotest, most difficult terrain, in the back country, he said.
Winchell said there have been no reported sightings in vulnerable areas such as Palomar Mountain, although just a few weeks ago an unverified sighting of a single pig was reported in the Julian area.
Weve been earnestly working at this for a number of years, Winchell said. It has been very successful.
Exactly where, when and how the pigs were introduced to the county is unclear. In 2007, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that 30 wild hogs -- brought to the region by someone who wanted to start a hunting program -- had been released in the wild behind the El Capitan Reservoir. The report was confirmed by a game warden, but denied by others in the area.
McCreary said there appears to have been several intentional releases in the past decade.
Whatever the source, by 2012 a Feral Pig Working Group comprised of numerous public agencies and private conservation groups had been formed and state and federal officials were preparing environmental assessment plans to sanction the use of trapping, hunting with dogs, aerial hunts and traditional hunting to combat the problem.
At the time some animal rights activist opposed the plan, saying it was cruel to kill the pigs that were doing nothing other than trying to survive. But officials said trapping and relocating them made little sense since the pigs are not wanted anywhere, and logistically it would have been almost impossible.
jharry.jones@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @jharryjones
Stating that no university is above the norms of the University Grants Commission, the HC found Priya lacking the required teaching experience to be considered for the post of associate professor.
Dubai, UAE -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/03/2017 -- IIMSAM, the Intergovernmental Institution for the Use of Micro-Algae Spirulina Against Malnutrition, Intergovernmental Observer of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, commemorates the United Arab Emirates' 46th National Day, which falls on December 2nd, 2017.
On this special occasion, IIMSAM would like to acknowledge the UAE's role in humanitarian work, where the UAE is on the top of the list of donors for humanitarian support, development assistance and relief operations.
Through its charitable and humanitarian efforts and institutions both within the UAE, and outside, the nation's contribution to humanitarian causes worldwide has become increasingly prominent.
The UAE has been named, by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the "world's largest donor of development assistance in proportion to its Gross National Income (GNI)", a position that was formerly held by France.
The UAE has donated AED 19.4 billion in official development assistance, forming 1.34 percent of its GNI, and exceeding the United Nations' target of 0.7 percent.
In addition, the UAE has played a vital role in funding and supporting the WHO's operations and research in polio, provided aid of over AED 600 million towards the crisis in Syria, and is a signatory of the The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol.
"The Union of the UAE has made the nation a firm entity for a more prosperous future under a rational leadership that understands well the importance of preserving, developing and stabilising the country. On this auspicious occasion, it is most necessary to acknowledge the great role and contribution of the late His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan in the founding of the UAE," said H.E. Sheikh Dr. Mohammed Musallem Bin Ham Al Ameri, Deputy Secretary General of IIMSAM.
H.E. Dr. Bin Ham also added, "The Union has given the people of the UAE great attention and provided them with all the means to achieve their aspirations."
He pointed out that the UAE attaches great importance to foreign humanitarian assistance, stressing that it is one of the most active countries in terms of international humanitarian action, at the Arab, Islamic and international levels.
Its great initiatives in various issues with a humanitarian dimension in the world, such as war and political asylum, regardless of geographic or religious, ethnic or cultural differences, make its contribution even more significant and an example to follow globally.
Dubai Media Center:
Mohammed Al Sharfawi
Media Manager
4K Media Production
Dubai
Phone: 00971504761202
Email: info@4kmedia.ae
http://4kmedia.ae
Bell, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/04/2017 -- California New York Express, a leading moving company in California, is now offering quality moving solutions from California to New York. The company promises to make your relocation across long distances smooth and hassle-free. Anyone in California can enlist the services of these cross country movers New York (including families and individuals) to ease the stress that comes with packing and hauling furniture across the two states. The company offers a variety of services that include insurance, packing, pickup and storage.
"Moving to New York is a cumbersome task, but our team at California New York Express is determined to make the process easy and efficient", said a representative from the company. We are here to facilitate your move. Our teams of professional movers are highly experienced in managing different kinds of moving tasks effortlessly and with great precision. From packing to unpacking your goods, we are ready to execute each task while you relax. We have also invested in high-quality handling equipment to prevent potential damages to your valuable and essential items."
A representative from the company explains that the company provides a variety of options of moving services to ensure smooth transition regardless of what clients require. The moving experts at the company also provide valuable tips and advice for moving. This includes issues relating to information about your relocation, the cost of relocation, as well as the mode of transportation and so much more. If one is moving to New York with their children, they will receive advice on how they should prepare.
So for those about to look for cross-country movers New York, this local moving company in NY is option worthy of looking into. For more information on this topic, visit California New York Express via the details below.
California New York Express Cross Country Movers
5698 Bandini Blvd Bell, CA 90201
Phone: 888-680-7200
Email: cs@moveeast.com
Website: https://www.moveeast.com/
New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/04/2017 -- Cherrystone Auctions turned 50 this year, with age showing that they are one of the oldest stamp auction houses in New York City. The family owned and managed company celebrated its 50th birthday with its customers and partners in the philatelic industry.
Cherrystone Auctions, Inc. has been in the stamp collection business for the last 50 years. During its semi-centennial celebrations in its headquarters in New York City late this year, the philatelic firm received a stream of birthday wishes from its storefront and online client base and also from the many organizations it partners with in the philatelic industry. To commemorate this incredible milestone, the company reminisced some of its accomplishments in its 50-year run. Cherrystone Auctions reaffirmed its commitment to exemplary customer service and the realization of high returns for all consigned materials. The company continues to host public auctions in its New York gallery every 6-8 weeks. This year alone, the firm has organized a total of seven public stamp sales.
Cherrystone Auctions launched an online stamp store on its website a few years ago to expand its market reach. Cherrystone Online Stamp Store features over 12,000 philatelic items from all over the globe and covering a myriad of topics and all are available for acquisition at the click of a button. The company features a wide range of philatelic collectibles in its online catalog with strengths in classics, regular issues, commemoratives, airmail, proofs & essays from all over the world including the United States, British Commonwealth, Germany and Colonies, France and Colonies, Russia, Poland, Asia, South America and more, plus U.S. possessions and back of the book items. Cherrystone Auctions its past auction exploits in the "Gallery of Rarities" section of its website where the average price of the featured lots seems to be $100,000 and above.
They company can be followed at https://www.whodoyou.com/biz/1280561/cherrystone-auctions-inc-new-york-ny.
About Cherrystone Auctions, Inc.
Cherrystone Auctions, Inc. was established as stamp retail store in 1967. The second and third generation company is currently run by the president Paul Buchsbayew, who is also the founder's son, and his vice president Joshua Buchsbayew, the founder's grandson. Paul is a recognized expert in Russian philatelic material. He is also a member of the international expertizing organization Association Internationale des Experts Philatelie (A.I.E.P.) and Club de Monte Carlo. Cherrystone Auctions is affiliated with all the major U.S. and European philatelic Societies, including the American Stamp Dealers Association (ASDA), MEPSI, Rossica, American Philatelic Society (APS), U.S. Philatelic Classics Society, Collectors Club of New York, PTS, APVH, IFSDA etc.
Reviews of the company can be found at https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cherrystone+Auctions/@40.765176,-74.0129631,13z/data=!4m18!1m12!4m11!1m3!2m2!1d-73.9786308!2d40.7655011!1m6!1m2!1s0x89c258f745eaf831:0x3afa6bcffd833576!2sCherrystone+Auctions,+119+W+57th+St+Suite+316,+New+York,+NY+10019!2m2!1d-73.9779436!2d40.7651163!3m4!1s0x89c258f745eaf831:0x3afa6bcffd833576!8m2!3d40.7651163!4d-73.9779436.
Contact:
Company: Cherrystone Auctions, Inc.
Address: 119 West 57th Street Suite 316, New York, NY 10019
Phone: 212-977-7734 or 800-886-9313
Fax: 212-977-8653
Email: info@cherrystoneauctions.com
Website: https://www.cherrystoneauctions.com
Westmont, IL -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/04/2017 -- An Illinois philatelic company is claiming to be "the oldest family owned and operated stamp auction house in the United States" after clocking 85 this year. Rasdale Stamp Company has been in the philatelic industry since it was established in 1932.
Rasdale is a third generation Stamp Company headquartered in Westmont Illinois dealing in rare stamps, coins and other philatelic collectibles. At 85 years of age, this company ranks among the most ancient philatelic dealers in the Midwest. The company has played as pivotal role in promoting stamp collection as a hobby/investment across the social divide. Rasdale Stamp Company is renowned in the philatelic industry for repeatedly bringing together stamp enthusiasts from all over the world during its quarterly public stamp sales. The firm is also credited with the introduction of several trendsetting technological innovations in the stamp business.
Rasdale was among the very first stamp companies to incorporate IT into their philatelic business models. The firm launched its website early on before e-commerce became popular. From there the company introduced Rasdale Live Auctions to complement the traditional on-the-floor bidding option. Currently the company runs a fully functional online stamp store featuring a totally secure shopping cart. Collectors are now able to buy and sell philatelic items directly from Rasdale's online "Retail Store" from any place in the world 24 hours a day. The company continues to host public stamp auctions every 8 weeks and this year it has already held three such events. This year's closing sale Public Auction #434 will be held on November 18-19 in the Rasdale Auction Gallery on 37 Chestnut Avenue in Westmont.
Further company details can be found at https://goo.gl/ZuXkL2.
About Rasdale Stamp Company
Rasdale Stamp Company was founded by Joseph Rasdale in 1932 in Elsie, Michigan. The company moved to its current premises later on and it has been expanding its market reach ever since. Rasdale has an extensive philatelic catalog featuring everything from supplies & literature, coins & currency, United States postage, picture postcards, United States & foreign covers, collections, accumulations, & stocks, miscellaneous collectables, and even some space memorabilia. Rasdale and its management team are members of all the major regional, national, and international stamp bodies including the Midwest Stamp Dealers Association, Ann Arbor Collectors Club, ASDA, National Stamp Dealers Association, Florida Stamp Dealers Association, APS, ATA, Bureau Society, Chicago Collectors Club, and the Southwest Collectors Club among many others.
The company can be followed at http://www.tuugo.us/Companies/rasdale-stamp-company/0310006246119.
Contact:
Kristin Maravelias
Company: Rasdale Stamp Company
Address: 35 Chestnut Avenue, Westmont, IL 60559
Phone: 630-794-9900
Fax: 630-794-9958
Email: info@rasdalestamps.com
Website: https://www.rasdalestamps.com/
Adjudicating the Rwandan genocide
Political science professor reflects on Rwandas grand attempt at reconciliation following genocide
Professor Anu Chakravarty's new book examines the unprecedented tribunals that followed the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s.
For roughly 100 days in 1994, as many as 800,000 Tutsi people were murdered by soldiers and members of the Hutu ethnic majority in the central African nation of Rwanda. The murders were carried out at the behest of extreme Hutu nationalists and were committed by more than a million ordinary citizens throughout the country.
The killing ended when the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front took control of the country. But that led to the displacement of millions of Hutus, who became refugees.
Ten years later, a second crisis developed when tribunals set about putting on trial the million-plus people accused of participating in the genocide. Those trials, called gacaca, put communities in charge of hearing evidence and doling out justice to their neighbors.
It was the most adjudicated conflict in recent history, says Anu Chakravarty, assistant professor of political science at Carolina. There was no wherewithal to try a million perpetrators through the regular court system. So they created 10,000 courts with community-elected panels of judges, who had a grade six or seven education.
The trials themselves took nearly 10 years. There was little hard evidence and a single accusation could get someone convicted. Judges were often from the same ethnic group as those on trial.
Informants were telling on family members, Chakravarty says. The question I looked at was why were people participating in their own punishment?
Chakravartys book, Investing in Authoritarian Rule, Punishment and Patronage in Rwandas Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes (2017) is an in-depth investigation of the courts legal operations and shows how incentives, like grants of clemency and opportunities for private gain or career advancement, drew people into the new regime that was dominated by the countrys minority population.
My interest is in people why and how they fight and how they reconcile, Chakravarty says.
While projecting an image of justice, the courts revealed a sort of patronage-driven relationship, tying the interests of regular citizens to the ruling class, which could withdraw these benefits at any time.
Rwanda presented this case of a political problem that was perpetrated at an intimate level, Chakravarty says. The challenge was to tie the empirical analysis to what were the implications for political life as a whole.
The book took 10 years to research and write, including 18 months of fieldwork in Rwanda, living with families and interviewing people with local interpreters to gather data and personal stories.
The challenge of the fieldwork was that peoples lives were on the line, she says. These were highly secretive, emotionally charged issues.
She was there while the trials were still ongoing.
This kind of work changes you, shakes you, traumatizes you, hearing these stories day in and day out, she says. But I matured as a political scientist doing this fieldwork.
A native of India, Chakravarty earned her bachelors in political science from Presidency College, India, and her masters from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She got a masters and Ph.D. in government from Cornell University. It was there that she became interested in the Rwandan genocide.
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NASAs Voyager 1 spacecraft is the only human-made object in interstellar space. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980.
Since 2014, NASAs engineers have noticed that the thrusters Voyager 1 has been using to orient the spacecraft, called attitude control thrusters, have been degrading. Over time, the thrusters require more puffs to give off the same amount of energy.
The Voyager team assembled a group of propulsion experts at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory to study the problem.
The experts analyzed options and predicted how the spacecraft would respond in different scenarios. They agreed on an unusual solution try giving the job of orientation to a set of trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters that had been asleep for 37 years.
In the early days of the mission, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons, the researchers said.
To accurately fly by and point the spacecrafts instruments at a smorgasbord of targets, we used TCM thrusters that are identical in size and functionality to the attitude control thrusters, and are located on the back side of the spacecraft.
But because Voyager 1s last planetary encounter was Saturn, we hadnt needed to use the TCM thrusters since November 8, 1980.
With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years, said Dr. Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
On November 28, 2017, the Voyager team fired up the four TCM thrusters and tested their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses.
The engineers waited eagerly as the test results traveled through space, taking 19 hours and 35 minutes to reach NASAs Deep Space Network.
The next day, they learned the TCM thrusters worked perfectly and just as well as the attitude control thrusters.
The test went so well, the team will likely do a similar test on the TCM thrusters for Voyager 2, the twin spacecraft of Voyager 1. The attitude control thrusters currently used for Voyager 2 are not yet as degraded as Voyager 1s, however.
[MANILA] Warnings by the pharmaceutical firm Sanofi Pasteur that its dengue vaccine is unsafe for people who have never been infected with the dengue virus has Philippine officials scrambling to contain the backlash on a decision to roll out the vaccine.
In a statement last Thursday (29 November), Sanofi said Dengvaxia, the first ever dengue vaccine, could put people at risk of severe disease if they had not previously been infected with the virus. Dengvaxia, the statement said, provides persistent protective benefit against dengue fever for those who have had prior infection.
There are four dengue strains and a first infection with any one of them is usually mild. A second infection with a different strain can result in severe disease and the vaccine apparently mimics a first infection.
The government will actively monitor all immunised children for at least five years Francisco Duque III, Philippine Health Secretary
Of the 11 countries which approved commercial release of the vaccine, only the Philippines (over 700,000 vaccinated) and the Parana state of Brazil (about 300,000 vaccinated) had mass vaccination programmes.
In the Philippines, concern focused on the 492,000 public school kids immunised last year, following assurances and recommendations by technical experts and the WHO. However, local apprehensions had been sufficient to prompt a congressional inquiry.
A statement from the office of the Philippine President said that the immunisation was the countrys biggest sham even as the Department of Justice announced it is planning to launch a probe. Centres may also be set up in the provinces for parents of vaccinated children to file complaints.
In an interview with SciDev.Net, Philippine health secretary Francisco Duque III says the government will actively monitor all immunised children for at least five years.
Duque explains that immunised children, including those with no history of dengue infection, have protection for a period of 30 months. It is after this period that an infection could be dangerous. Immunised children with no history of dengue infection who are exposed to the dengue virus after the two-and-a-half-year protection gap are in danger of possible severe disease, he says.
Independent health advocate Anthony Leachon said what this means is that all of them will have to live with this possibility (of getting severe dengue disease) for the rest of their lives.
On Monday, Sanofi tried to calm public fears explaining that a severe outcome means fever for two days, lower platelet count and bruising which is way milder from the WHO definition of severe dengue which results to bleeding and organ failure.
While the Philippines is halting the programme, Brazils Parana state in a statement said that it will maintain the offer of the vaccine against dengue in the 30 municipalities identified to receive the vaccine since 2016.In the statement , secretary of state for health Michele Caputo Neto said the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks as there are areas which faced consecutive epidemics, with high viral circulation and have recorded a large number of (severe) cases.Defending the decision to continue, the statement cited comparative figures. Since August 2016, when the vaccination campaign was defined, 1,061 cases of dengue fever (were recorded) in Parana and no deaths from the disease. Prior to the vaccination period, between August 2015 and July 2016, Parana registered 56,351 cases and 63 deaths from dengue.This piece was produced by SciDev.Nets South-East Asia & Pacific desk.
[MANILA] Warnings by the pharmaceutical firm Sanofi Pasteur that its dengue vaccine is unsafe for people who have never been infected with the dengue virus has Philippine officials scrambling to contain the backlash on a decision to roll out the vaccine.
In a statement last Thursday (29 November), Sanofi said Dengvaxia, the first ever dengue vaccine, could put people at risk of severe disease if they had not previously been infected with the virus. Dengvaxia, the statement said, provides persistent protective benefit against dengue fever for those who have had prior infection.
There are four dengue strains and a first infection with any one of them is usually mild. A second infection with a different strain can result in severe disease and the vaccine apparently mimics a first infection.
The government will actively monitor all immunised children for at least five years, Francisco Duque III
Of the 11 countries which approved commercial release of the vaccine, only the Philippines (over 700,000 vaccinated) and the Parana state of Brazil (about 300,000 vaccinated) had mass vaccination programmes.
In the Philippines, concern focused on the 492,000 public school kids immunised last year, following assurances and recommendations by technical experts and the WHO. However, local apprehensions had been sufficient to prompt a congressional inquiry.
A statement from the office of the Philippine President said that the immunisation was the countrys biggest sham even as the Department of Justice announced it is planning to launch a probe. Centres may also be set up in the provinces for parents of vaccinated children to file complaints.
In an interview with SciDev.Net, Philippine health secretary Francisco Duque III says the government will actively monitor all immunised children for at least five years.
Duque explains that immunised children, including those with no history of dengue infection, have protection for a period of 30 months. It is after this period that an infection could be dangerous. Immunised children with no history of dengue infection who are exposed to the dengue virus after the two-and-a-half-year protection gap are in danger of possible severe disease, he says.
Independent health advocate Anthony Leachon said what this means is that all of them will have to live with this possibility (of getting severe dengue disease) for the rest of their lives.
On Monday, Sanofi tried to calm public fears explaining that a severe outcome means fever for two days, lower platelet count and bruising which is way milder from the WHO definition of severe dengue which results to bleeding and organ failure.
While the Philippines is halting the programme, Brazils Parana state in a statement said that it will maintain the offer of the vaccine against dengue in the 30 municipalities identified to receive the vaccine since 2016.In the statement , secretary of state for health Michele Caputo Neto said the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks as there are areas which faced consecutive epidemics, with high viral circulation and have recorded a large number of (severe) cases.Defending the decision to continue, the statement cited comparative figures. Since August 2016, when the vaccination campaign was defined, 1,061 cases of dengue fever (were recorded) in Parana and no deaths from the disease. Prior to the vaccination period, between August 2015 and July 2016, Parana registered 56,351 cases and 63 deaths from dengue.
In the interim, Andreas Chrysostomou, vp European government & public affairs, CLIA Europe, will assume and oversee management of operations, Seatrade Cruise News learnt.
Chrysostomou joined Cruise Lines International Association earlier this year and has been managing the department of European affairs, covering public and regulatory and developing CLIA Europes strategic advocacy vision. He holds a bachelor of engineering with honours in naval architecture and a masters in business administration.
Chrysostomou is a seasoned professional in the shipping industry. Before joining CLIA, Chrysostomou was director of the Department of Merchant Shipping, the competent Authority for Maritime Affairs of the Government of the Republic Cyprus, and gm of Transmed Shipping Co., Ltd.
He held other senior management roles in fields such as safety and security, protection of the marine environment and administration. He also served as the elected chairman of the design and equipment subcommittee of the IMO and of the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC), one of the main committees at IMO. He was twice elected and re-elected chairman of the International Mobile Satellite Organization (a UN agency) and served as member of the board of governors of the World Maritime University (WMU). He also served as president of the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology (IMAREST).
CLIA thanked Fecke for his contributions to the team and wished him success in his future endeavors. He became secretary general on January 3 this year, taking over from Raphael von Heereman.
Fecke started his career as a travel agent and held various management roles with Galileo/Travelport and Avis Rent-a-Car.
For more than eight years he worked for RCL Cruises as a regional general manager. In this capacity, he led the German, Austrian and Swiss markets for multiple brands including Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Azamara Club Cruises.
In other CLIA news, Cedric Rivoire Perrochet, national director France will depart at the end of December.
'Cruise Lines International Association is currently reviewing its resources in continental European markets, including France, to ensure that we are effectively supporting the industry as it continues to grow and develop,' said a CLIA Europe spokesperson.
'This will ensure that we effectively meet the needs of the industry in all fields, including government and public affairs, travel agent learning, events and stakeholders management in 2018 and beyond,' the spokesperson added.
CMPort took a controlling stake in the Shenzhen-listed company in 2012 and has been working to integrate it into its other port assets in West Shenzhen. Earlier this year, CMPort signed agreements to allow the latter to exert greater influence over the business and operations of Mega Shekou Container Terminals and Media Port Investments.
CMPort added that it will conduct its own feasibility study however the particulars of the reorganisation have not been determined yet and further announcements will be made as and when appropriate.
We are preparing a support package for the shipbuilding industry, which would build a maritime industrial park in the country along with the promotion of medium and small sized vessels particularly RoRo, Assistant Secretary for Trade Rafaelita Aldaba said.
Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said the support package is still in the planning stage but is being seriously considered to further accelerate the development of the local shipbuilding industry.
He said the incentives would be tailored depending on the needs of the industry.
Initially, however, Lopez said the target is to incentivize shipbuilders that would manufacture small and medium-sized vessels for domestic use.
According to DTI, the Philippines has an adequate supply of skilled manpower for shipbuilding and ship repair, adding that as an island nation, a shipbuilding industry is a natural development.
With a good management and skilled human resource matched with capital, technology and global market opportunities, the industry is moving forward to make the Philippines one of the largest shipbuilding nation in the world in the next five to 10 years, the DTI said.
SEN. JV EJERCITO CONDEMNS KILLING OF UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT
I strongly condemn the senseless killing of Dr. Ricardo Rotoras, University President of University of Science and Technology of Southern Philippines in Cagayan De Oro, by unknown assailants.
I have worked with Dr. Rotoras, as president of the Philippine Association of State Universities and Colleges (PASUC), for the passage of higher state subsidy for State Universities and Colleges. I am truly saddened with his untimely death as he was a great and hardworking asset for the academic community.
I call on the police to thoroughly investigate, hunt, and arrest the killers at the quickest possible time.
Press Release
December 4, 2017 HONTIVEROS TO GOV'T: IDENTIFY AND PROTECT HEALTH OF 70,000 KIDS AFFECTED BY DENGVAXIA Akbayan Senator Risa Hontiveros on Monday called on the government to create a "Luzon and Cebu-wide database" to properly identify the thousands of children affected by an anti-Dengue vaccine that poses more risks for people who have not been infected by the virus before immunization. Hontiveros, who is Chair of the Senate Committee on Women and Children, made the call after French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur issued an advisory warning the public against its own vaccine, Dengvaxia. It was reported that the Philippines under the previous administration implemented a national school-based, anti-Dengue Immunization Program in 2016 using Dengvaxia. Over 700,000 Grade 4 students (at least 9 years old) in Central Luzon, Calabarzon, and the National Capital Region have been given the dengue vaccine. Of the total number, health officials said that 70,000 are at risk. Under the Duterte administration, the program was expanded to Region 7. Children aged nine to 14 in Cebu province were administered the first dose of the vaccine. "Our primary concern right now should be the health and welfare of all those children exposed to unnecessary risk as a result of the immunization program. We need a database to identify the 70,000 affected children and know where they are exactly located in order for the government to keep track of their health and prepare the needed resources and logistics that will allow for quick and appropriate medical responses, if needed. This is our most urgent task. Laxity is not an option. We are racing against time. We must protect and ensure the good health of our children," Hontiveros said. In a recent advisory, Sanofi said that new analysis of clinical data on Dengvaxia confirmed that for those not previously infected by dengue virus, more cases of severe disease could occur following vaccination upon a subsequent dengue infection. The vaccine only provides persistent protective benefit against dengue fever in those who had prior infection. "Sanofi urged to shoulder health needs of affected children, provide full compensation" Hontiveros, who is also Vice-chair of the Senate Committee on Health and Demography, asserted that Sanofi bears the legal and ethical responsibility to shoulder the health needs of the affected children and fully compensate their families. She also said that the Department of Health (DOH) owes the public an explanation on how the controversial vaccine was acquired in the first place and why it failed to heed the apprehension and warnings of medical experts on its potential dangers. "Sanofi must be held responsible and the culpable health officials accountable. While vaccination and immunization are protective and essential elements of preventive health care, implementing an immunization program that could do more harm than good to our children is the height of negligence that could border on the criminal," Hontiveros ended.
Press Release
December 4, 2017 Koko represents PDP Laban, PH in historic meeting of political parties Senate President and PDP Laban President Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III was in Beijing during the weekend to represent both the Philippines and the Partido Demokratiko Pilipino - Lakas ng Bayan (PDP Laban) in the World Dialogue of Political Parties organized by the Communist Party of China (CPC). It was the first and largest gathering of political parties around the world, with representatives of political parties from 120 countries present. "This is an excellent forum for international cooperation in bringing about a better future for all mankind. Political parties are sources of policy. When political parties around the world meet, we can determine the direction/policies of the world", said Pimentel. The PDP Laban President met with Chinese President and CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping on Friday, where he relayed the message of President and PDP Laban Chairman Rodrigo Duterte congratulating the former for the successful hosting of the dialogue, thanking him for his support of the Philippines' ASEAN chairmanship, and congratulating him for the successful and historic staging of the CPC 19th National Party Congress. Other dignitaries that met with Pimentel included Zhang Dejiang, the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and a member of the CPC's policymaking Politburo Standing Committee, Wang Huning, First Secretary of the CPC's Central Secretariat and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, and Song Tao, the head of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee. Pimentel delivered a speech during the Welcome Banquet of the event on Friday, where he told the assembled delegates, "Our constituents support us because of [our] principles and values. To me, this means we are not here to represent our governments. We are here to represent the ideals of our peoples." Discussing the need for political parties to adapt and cooperate with the phenomenon of the global village, Pimentel said, "We can no longer be insular and limit our activities to our own countries. Events in one country will have ripple effects on others. Our nations are in different stages of development, yet are facing common problems." During his trip, Pimentel also visited the CPC Central Party School, which trains top government officials and CPC members in matters of governance and public administration. In the visit, Pimentel expressed hopes of looking to the school as an example of how to train party members on issues of governance and party ideology. Pimentel said, "Politics in other countries are based on ideology and policy, as put forward by political parties. In our country, our politics is still personality-based. There is no consistency in policy and institutions are weakened, leading to many of the problems that we now face. We must strengthen the party system in the Philippines." PDP Laban as a party advocates Theism, Humanism, Enlightened Nationalism, Democratic Socialism, Participatory and Consultative Democracy, and Federalism. Pimentel said, "A strong party system begins with the individual members of the party. I will report to the Party leaders on my observations in this trip so we can determine how to produce more quality members and instill party discipline among our members. The change to better Philippine politics will begin with PDP Laban."
Press Release
December 4, 2017 OPENING STATEMENT OF SEN. GRACE POE
Joint hearing of the Congressional Oversight Committee on the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines If the pioneers of commercial aviation in the country saw the airline industry today, they would feel like Alice staring through the looking glass. For instance, they would see massive airliners instead of the ten-seater, tri-engine aircraft of their heyday. There would be a sprawling commercial complex where Grace Park Airfield used to be. And if they flew via time travel from Iloilo in the 1930s to Manila today, they would not be able to land in Nielson Field, as its runways now comprise Paseo de Roxas and Ayala Avenue. Clearly, our airline industry has progressed by leaps and bounds. Our airports are now the veins of our country, pumping people, cargo, and revenue into the economy. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, the air transport and storage industry contributed 7.03 billion pesos last quarter. The Department of Tourism also noted that 523,493 tourists entered the country through our airports last May 2017, comprising 98.26% of all tourist arrivals in the country. However, our airports have recently begun to show signs of strain. For instance, according to the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP), NAIA breached its rated capacity of 30 million passengers five years ago. Sixty (60) million passengers passed through NAIA's gates last year. News articles and social media posts would confirm delayed flights, stranded passengers and lines snaking around the airport. Personal ko itong naranasan noong pumila ako ng isa't kalahating oras sa NAIA Terminal 2 noong nakaraang Mayo. I have to say there has been some improvements. In addition, our best and our brightest technical people in the aviation sector are leaving because of the low pay they receive despite the responsibility on their shoulders. Due to these issues, we decided to convene the COCCAAP, which was established under Section 91 Republic Act No. 9497, otherwise known as the "Civil Aviation Authority Act of 2008" to ensure the proper implementation of the law. Airport congestion is one of the more prominent issues among the topics to be tackled today, especially as we are in the holiday season. Airport congestion will be aggravated by the impending Christmas rush. Families will be lining up outside airports with their placards para salubungin ang kanilang kapamilyang balikbayan. What steps will the CAAP take to ensure the smooth flow of our balikbayans from the passenger cabin to the exit gate? What are we doing to ameliorate those who are affected by delayed flights, lalo na para sa mga mas matagal ang pag-antay sa airport sa mismong biyahe? Dagdag pa rito, umaasa ako na walang ma-iinpsire na gumawa ng sequel sa Tanim Bala Scam na pwede nating tawaging "Isang Bala ka Lang!" dahil isang bala lang ang kailangan para maperwisyo ang mga kababayan natin at ma-hold sa airport. We are expecting the CAAP and other concerned resource persons to have clear and concise answers on their projects and programs on these issues. We also want an update on two major projects which were supposed to improve airport operations. The first of these is the Communications Navigation Surveillance/Air Traffic Management System (CNS/ATM) which was promised last June. Is it operational yet? How much did it cost? What impact has it had on air traffic management? The second major project is the proposed Rapid Exit Taxiway. From what experts have told me, the design of NAIA's two runways create difficulties for arrivals and departures. For instance, international arrivals are allowed only on Runway 24. Thus, it has been proposed that additional rapid exit taxiways be constructed. What is the status of the proposed additional rapid exit taxiways? Will they be done through Public-Private Partnership (PPPs)? Hopefully they will not stay in that dreaded category of PPPs known as Power Point Presentations. And if construction will proceed by next year, what will CAAP do to reduce disruption of existing operations? We would also like to tackle the issues around the benefits of CAAP employees which were disallowed by the Commission on Audit (COA). What are the most recent updates regarding the disallowance? This is important, especially given the ongoing exodus of aviation professionals. After all, competitive benefits are not sufficient. There must also be certainty of receipt. In the book "Philippine Wings," it is claimed that the first Filipino airplane passenger was an Igorot chieftain named Gagaban. The year was 1911, just eight years after the Wright Brothers started the pioneer era of aviation with the flight of the first airplane. In those days, the skies seemed infinite, a common resource for all of mankind. Now however, our airspace and runways more closely hew to the textbook definition of scarce resources: increasingly limited in availability, but with great potential use. Now more than ever, our airspace and runways demand more strategic and more efficient management. Let's not wait for NAIA to become the punchline of a new millennial hugot joke: "NAIA ka ba? Kasi lagi mo sinasabing kailangan mo ng space!"
Press Release
December 4, 2017 TUGADE EXPECTED AT TRANSPORT HEARING ON DEC. 11-POE The hearing on the planned modernization of public utility vehicles has been moved to Monday, December 11, instead of Thursday, December 7 as originally scheduled, Sen. Grace Poe announced today. Poe, chairperson of the Senate committee on public services, said she decided to postpone the hearing in order that Transportation Sec. Arthur Tugade can explain to the transport sector the government's plans and possible safety nets to jeepney drivers and operators when the jeepney modernization rolls out next year. Tugade is not available this Thursday due to prior engagements. "Nakiusap si Secretary Tugade kung puwedeng iurong ang hearing natin sa Lunes. Sinabi naman niya na magpapadala siya sana kung Thursday matutuloy yung hearing ng mga undersecretaries niya pero ako na mismo ang nagdesisyon at aapela ako sa Piston at sa ibang grupo, sa tingin ko naman ang layunin nila ay makaharap mismo si Secretary Tugade kaya ako na mismo ang nagdesisyon na kung Lunes siya available, hindi ko siya pinakawalan-sabi ko bigyan ninyo ako ng petsa kung hindi kayo pwede ng Thursday. Sabi niya Lunes daw available siya, kaya itutuloy natin ang public hearing kasama ang mga jeepney driver para dito sa phaseout possibility, ng December 11, Monday," Poe told reporters after emerging from a hearing. Jeepney drivers and operators, particularly from the transport group Pinagkaisang Samahan ng mga Tsuper at Operator Nationwide (Piston) and the No to Jeepney Phaseout Coalition called off their December 4-5 transport strike after Poe appealed to them to halt the strike and instead discuss the issues during a public hearing, specifically with Tugade. Poe has filed Senate Resolution No. 554 calling for an investigation as several transport groups have voiced their opposition to the PUV modernization because of the seeming phase out of jeepneys despite the lack of route rationalization plans. Piston tagged the plan as anti-poor in that the estimated cost of jeepney replacement was pegged between P1.5 million to P1.8 million which they said they could not afford. "While the intent of the PUV modernization program is laudable, it may have unintended negative effects for hundreds of thousands of public utility jeepney drivers and operators and consequently, the commuting public, considering that several issues remain to be threshed out regarding the program," Poe said in filing the resolution.
Press Release
December 4, 2017 Villanueva bill mandating establishments to give 100% of tips to employees moves to Senate plenary Senator Joel Villanueva on Monday presented to the plenary Senate Bill No. 1299 or "An Act Providing that 100% of the Service Charge Collected in Hotels and Other Establishments Be Distributed to All Covered Employees and for Other Purposes" under Committee Report No. 189 making the proposed measure closer towards enactment. Villanueva, chairperson of the Senate committee on labor, employment and human resources development, said that for more than 40 years now, hotel and restaurant workers have long been calling for the passage of a law that will make tips and service charge fully distributable to all employees. Under Section 14 of Presidential Decree 850 signed in December 1975, the collection of service charge was optional but any amount collected shall be distributed 85% and 15% in favor of employees. "Unfortunately, some establishments interpret this provision of 85% for the staff and 15% for the management as a "minimum standard". There are claims that employers would stipulate in job contracts that 90% of the service charges will go to the management and only the remaining 10% goes to the employees," Villanueva said during his sponsorship speech. Villanueva revealed that many establishment owners on the other hand, think that the distribution of service charge proceeds is a "management prerogative". The senator shared that in an informal survey of restaurants conducted by SparkUp, the multimedia platform of Business World, they asked a number of wait staff if they really do get their 85%, their response was "it's the other way around." "Mr. President, our workers in this sector receive minimum wage. And our minimum wage is far from the necessary living wage to live decently. Nauunawaan natin ang National Union of Workers in Hotels, Restaurants and Allied Industries kung bakit ipinaglalaban nila na ibigay na sa mga manggagawa ang 100% service charge mula pa noong panahon ng Martial Law," Villanueva stressed. Villanueva clarified that the bill does not make the collection of service charge mandatory to avoid interference with the right of management to exercise discretion in the operation of their business but for those who will collect them, they have to give the 100% of service charge to their workers. The senator further stressed that a mandatory imposition might be economically harsh to businesses who wish to keep their prices lower to be competitive. "The proposed 100% service charge for our workers will benefit both the workers and the employers. Our minimum wage earners can receive additional compensation for good quality service," the senator explained. "Isang maganda at makabuluhang pamasko po ang pagpasa ng Senate Bill No. 1299 sa ating mga manggagawa sa mga restaurant, hotel at katulad na mga establisyemento," Villanueva said.
Press Release
December 4, 2017 Villar calls support for fisheries and aquaculture Following the 4.27 percent decline in output of the fisheries sector during the last third quarter, Senator Cynthia A. Villar exhorted all stakeholders in the fisheries and aquaculture sector to do their share to cope up with all the challenges confronting the industry. Despite the reduction, Villar, chair of the Senate agriculture and food committee, said the prospects for the fisheries and aquaculture sector are still good. She said the sub sector grossed PhP56.7 billion at current prices or 3.05 percent higher than last year's record. The entire fishery sector contributed 17.40 percent to the total agricultural production during the quarter. But still, she underscored the need to keep strengthening our competitive advantages. She said "we cannot be complacent because there are numerous challenges that we have to contend with also." She said there are still a lot of things that we have to address in the fisheries sector. "Your inputs are very important because you are the ones out there who are directly engaged and involved in the industry, Villar told the participants in the event sponsored by the Department of Agriculture- Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources. During the forum on the current state of the country's fisheries and aquaculture, Villar urged everyone to help things better by implementing timely policies, responsive legislations and realistic plans. Villar assured to continue supporting and upholding the welfare of fisherfolks, fishing communities, and fisheries. "The fisheries sector is very important to an agricultural and archipelagic country such as ours. It has a direct and indirect impact on all of us Filipinos, too." The senator also said she considers Republic Act R.A. 10654 (Act to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing, Amending R.A. 8550) that amended the 18-year-old Fisheries Code as one of our legislative achievements or milestones. Villar said the legislation, which she principally authored and sponsored has brought about a lot of positive results and developments including the lifting of the yellow tag imposed by the European Union (EU). She stressed that if the ban was not immediately addressed, this would cause a ban on the exportation of fish products to one of the country's largest markets. As principal sponsor of the measure, Villar said one of her main goals also is to balance the need to increase marine life production and the need to protect the sustainability and biodiversity of our oceans.
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The richest and glitziest science prizes in the world were presented Sunday evening to 12 men and women working on some of the hardest-to-solve problems imaginable, and who rarely see the limelight outside their tight academic circles.
Among the recipients of this years Breakthrough Prizes, which offer a total of $22 million in cash awards, are a team of physicists who helped describe the infancy of the universe, a biologist who is thinking about ways to use plants to fight climate change, and a UCSF biochemist working on a miracle molecule that could treat dozens of conditions.
The Breakthrough Prizes were founded six years ago by a group of tech billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, and Yuri and Julia Milner to celebrate transformative research in math, science and medicine.
Sundays awards ceremony was designed as a red-carpet gala more reminiscent of the Oscars than the more sedate, scholarly events that honor the sciences. Actor Morgan Freeman hosted the ceremony, held at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, with presenters including filmmaker Ron Howard and actors Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher and Kerry Washington.
Im going to be more than a little uncomfortable, joked Christopher Hacon, recipient of a prize in mathematics, before the event. Im definitely more comfortable in the math world. But this may be more appealing for a younger generation, and that wouldnt be a bad thing.
Hacon, like many if not all of the recipients, is an international expert in a field so complicated that it can be difficult to describe his work in words a layperson would understand.
A professor of math at the University of Utah, his focus is on algebraic geometry and his work is primarily theoretical. There are real-world applications of his math, but they may not be discovered until long after his time, he said.
The physics prize went to a team of scientists who used a satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, to create a descriptive map of the start of the universe. Some of those scientists are now using models built from these descriptions to test theories about how the universe began.
Humans are innately curious, and curious about the big universe around us. The idea that we had the ability to probe these questions and get hard, fast answers its fascinating to me, said Charles Bennett, the Johns Hopkins University cosmologist who led WMAP. And none of us know how far we can go with this.
Its fascinating, its exciting, its fun, he said, and its nice to be recognized for it.
Thirty years into a career spent studying plant biology and genetics, Joanne Chory is now launching real-world applications of lab-based work. Chory, a scientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla (San Diego County) who won a prize in life sciences, is leading an initiative that would use plants to lower carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and offer some buffer against climate change.
We have this whole new initiative to try to save the world from ourselves, and Im really excited to tell our story to everybody, Chory said.
The only Breakthrough Prize recipient from the Bay Area is Peter Walter of UCSF, who studies at a molecular level how cells synthesize and use proteins, and what happens when protein regulation goes awry.
Decades of cellular biology research has led his team to study an exciting molecule that, in brain-damaged mice, can restore memory and function. Molecules with similar properties may someday prove useful in treating other kinds of neurological conditions or illnesses like diabetes.
Along with the cash awards, Walter appreciates that the Breakthrough Prize recognizes explorers. He and his co-recipients have spent their careers staring into the unknown, he said, and resolving to make some sense of it.
I find it most exciting that there is such a huge effort here to bring basic, curiosity-driven research into the stage light, Walter said, and to have us explain to a broad audience what we are doing, what the possibilities are.
Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com
Twitter: @erinallday
Breakthrough Prize winners
The team that launched the WMAP satellite, with special recognition going to the five leaders: Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University, Gary Hinshaw of the University of British Columbia, and Norman Jarosik, Lyman Page Jr. and David Spergel, all of Princeton University. The group shares the $3 million prize for physics.
Don Cleveland of UC San Diego, Kim Nasmyth of Oxford University, Peter Walter of UCSF, Kazutoshi Mori of Kyoto University (Japan) and Joanne Chory of The Salk Institute each win a $3 million prize in life sciences.
Christopher Hacon of the University of Utah and James McKernan of UC San Diego share a
$3 million math prize.
The Bay Bridge tollbooth a box truck slammed into over the weekend killing a worker inside remained closed Monday, slowing morning commute traffic, officials said.
Lane 14 continued to be blocked off after the driver of a box truck struck the tollbooth on the north side of the plaza at 5:11 a.m. Saturday, killing the toll collector and injuring several others, according to the California Highway Patrol.
Daniel Berk, 32, of Foster City, who was driving the box truck, was being treated at Highland Hospital for serious injuries and isnt expected to be released for at least a week, said Officer Matthew Hamer, a CHP spokesman.
Berk is facing charges of driving under the influence and vehicular manslaughter.
Si Si Han, a 46-year-old Caltrans employee, was killed in the crash. She worked as a toll collector for nearly a decade, said agency spokesman Bob Haus.
Han is survived by her husband, Ryan Saw, and 10-year-old daughter, Ashly.
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Hans booth, from Lane 14, is completely wiped out and has to be completely rebuilt, Haus said.
CHP Officer Vu Williams said the truck was filled with what he described as lighting or sound equipment. Crews worked over the weekend to repair the four toll booths that were impacted by the crash and clear the debris.
All but one, Hans booth, were open. It is unclear when the booth from Lane 14 would be functioning again, officials said.
Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani
Contra Costa County Fire Protection District
A firefighter and an El Sobrante resident were injured Sunday in a fire at a single-family home, officials said.
Unattended cooking on a stove caused the blaze, said Robert Marshall, fire marshal of the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District.
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A Sacramento lobbyist broke her silence Monday, filing a formal complaint with the Assembly that names the lawmaker she said cornered her in a bathroom last year and masturbated in front of her.
Pamela Lopez accused Assemblyman Matt Dababneh, D-Encino (Los Angeles County), of pushing his way into a bathroom with her last year and trying to get her to touch his exposed genitals. Dababneh quickly denied the allegations, claiming they are false.
Lopez initially declined to name the lawmaker when she first spoke to the news media about the alleged incident in October, saying she didnt want the attention to be on one bad actor and that she feared her lobbying firm would lose business.
But on Monday, at a news conference with her lawyer, she said she decided to name the assemblyman and file a formal complaint against him after assurances from leaders in the Assembly that her allegations will be taken seriously and that she wont be retaliated against.
There is strength in numbers, and I want women to know that you can lawyer up and there are good people who will represent you and protect you, Lopez said. Im putting this in the hands of the Legislature. Matt Dababneh has abused his power.
Assemblyman Ken Cooley, D-Rancho Cordova (Sacramento County), head of the Rules Committee, which oversees human resources for the Assembly, said an outside investigator will be hired for the case and suggested Lopez file a police report because the allegation is criminal in nature.
Jean Hyams, Lopezs lawyer, said her client had not decided whether to file a complaint with police.
Dababneh issued a statement denying the allegations: I affirmatively deny that this event ever happened at any time. I am saddened by this lobbyists effort to create this falsehood and make these inflammatory statements, apparently for her own self-promotion and without regard to the reputation of others. I look forward to clearing my name.
His lawyer, Patricia Glaser, had sent Lopez a cease and desist letter on Friday, threatening legal action if she named him.
Along with Lopez, a second woman, Jessica Yas Barker, spoke at the news conference, saying she was subjected to sexual harassment by Dababneh when he was a congressional staffer for Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles County). Barker said Dababneh would routinely make inappropriate sexual comments and brag about sexual encounters with other women. She also said he would comment on her appearance, refer to her as Ellen a reference to comedian Ellen Degeneres and tell her she dressed like a lesbian.
Barker said she has already experienced retaliation from those who knew she was coming forward with allegations against Dababneh.
There have been some really nasty things put out about me that are not true, Barker said.
A third woman who was not at the news conference and who spoke to The Chronicle on condition that her name not be published said she left her job as a legislative staffer for Dababneh because the assemblyman would routinely make detailed sexual comments about other women that made her uncomfortable.
He was creepy, the woman said. Thats why I quit. I was taken aback by his behavior.
Jonathan Bash, a past president of the Bruin Democrats at UCLA from 2011 to 2012, wrote on Twitter and in a follow-up email to The Chronicle that it was common practice in the college Democratic club to warn women not to intern in Dababnehs office or go to events with him. The Bruin Democrats current president, NJ Omorogieva, declined to comment.
Debabneh is a UCLA graduate.
The allegations against Dababneh come after hundreds of women signed an open letter Oct. 17 calling for an end to pervasive sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in the state Capitol.
The Legislative Womens Caucus said in a statement Monday that an independent and thorough investigation is needed where the findings are made public.
If the investigation finds that these allegations are likely true, there must be swift and transparent consequences for this type of behavior, said caucus chair Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, D-Bell Gardens (Los Angeles County) and vice chair state Sen. Connie M. Leyva, D-Chino (San Bernardino County), in a statement.
Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra, D-San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles County), resigned from his seat amid several allegations of sexual misconduct. State Sen. Tony Mendoza, D-Artesia (Los Angeles County), was stripped of his chairmanship until an investigation into sexual misconduct is completed.
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Previously, after Lopez spoke about the incident without naming the lawmaker, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount (Los Angeles County) called the allegation horrifying and noted that it is also a crime. Rendon said at the time that if the lawmaker turns out to be an assemblyman, we will contract with an outside firm so there can be an independent investigation.
If he is found to have committed this assault or any similar harassment, I will ask for his immediate resignation and move for his expulsion if he refuses to resign, Rendon said.
Rendons office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Lopez said the incident happened on Jan. 16, 2016, in Las Vegas at a party for a mutual friend who was getting married.
She said she did not have more than a brief conversation with Dababneh before he pushed his way into a bathroom with her.
She said Dababneh kept telling her to touch his genitals. She said she refused, instead pressing herself against the furthest wall in the bathroom.
Lopez said she initially indicated the incident happened in Sacramento, explaining that she worried that naming the Las Vegas location and time frame would have made it clear who the person was when she did not plan to name him.
How the Assembly responds to Ms. Lopezs report is a test of whether it is a body governed by law, or one that considers itself above the law, said Hyams.
Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez
Not only did the residents of San Franciscos exclusive Presidio Terrace win back their gated street they also get to keep their bargain-basement tax rate of $4.28 a year for the private roadway and sidewalks.
That works out to 12 cents a year in property taxes for each of the 35 homeowners who once again jointly control the street, now that the Board of Supervisors has voted 7-4 to rescind the citys tax-default sale of the property to a South Bay couple.
Nullifying the city treasurers 2015 tax sale means that Tina Lam and Michael Cheng of San Jose will get back the $90,100 that they paid for the street in an online auction in 2015.
Nicole Boliaux/The Chronicle
It also means that the streets property tax which went unpaid for 15 years because the city was sending the bill to the address of a long-retired accountant reverts to $4.28 a year. Had the supervisors voted to let the sale stand, the property tax would have been $1,054 a year.
Thats correct it reverts back like it hadnt been sold, said city Assessor-Recorder Carmen Chu.
Future increases will be limited to the 2 percent a year allowed under Proposition 13.
The homeowners, however, will have to pay the $994 in back taxes and penalties that led to the property going on the auction block. The land also carries $345 in annual special assessments from the San Francisco schools and community college district.
Presidio Terrace homeowners successfully argued that the street, sidewalks and palm-lined green strips of their private enclave had been sold out from under them without their knowledge. And while they conceded they had neglected to pay their annual taxes, they blamed the treasurer-tax collectors office for sending their bills to the out-of-date address.
The $4.28-a-year tax bill is a steal, but there is nothing lawmakers can do about it, said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, one of the four supervisors who voted against reversing the sale. The assessment laws are the assessment laws in the 58 counties of California.
Supervisor Mark Farrell, whose district includes Presidio Terrace, said that if there was any steal involved, it was the bottom-feeding pirates attempting to extort and hold San Francisco residents hostage.
And he noted that even if the city wanted to raise the tax, Prop. 13 would prevent it.
The Presidio Terrace homeowners association has held title to the private street since 1906. And while assessor records cover only the last three decades or so, there is no evidence that the property has ever been reassessed.
Prop. 13, which the states voters passed in 1978, capped residential tax hikes at 2 percent, starting with a propertys 1975 assessment. No reassessment happens unless a property changes hands.
Assessors records list the Presidio Terrace propertys value at $362. Establishing the true value would not be easy, given its circular configuration and easement rights that assure those living on the street can get in and out of their homes.
Its zoned residential, so its not like someone could built a casino or pot club on it, Peskin said. Still, it does have value.
Its safe to say Lam and Cheng saw more value in a prime piece of real estate than $362. Their lawyer says theyre thinking of suing.
Matt Dorsey, a spokesman for the homeowners, said the couple met twice with his Presidio Terrace clients several months back. Lam and Cheng said the property would be worth $18 million to $34 million after it was converted to a parking lot and began generating revenue, Dorsey said.
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In fact, when we interviewed them over the summer, the couple floated the idea of using the street for parking saying that if the Presidio Terrace residents werent interested in paying for parking privileges, perhaps some of their neighbors outside the gates would be.
Lam and Cheng insisted at the time that the property wasnt for sale. Only as the two sides were headed to last weeks City Hall showdown did members of the Board of Supervisors suggest the homeowners reach out with an offer to buy back the property for $200,000, or roughly double what they had paid for it.
Dorsey says the couples attorney, Shep Kopp, countered with an offer of $950,000. But before homeowners had a chance to consider the proposal, Lam and Cheng spoke directly to members of the homeowners association and told them the property was not for sale, Dorsey said.
And that closed the door for the final time.
Kopp declined to discuss details of his last-minute negotiations with the homeowners. But he did have some choice words for Farrell, whom he described as a craven lickspittle who is only too happy to carry water for his rich neighbors in Presidio Heights.
And its dismaying to see District Two represented by this opportunist who needs these homeowners to contribute money to his campaign for mayor, he said.
San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KPIX TV morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call (415) 777-8815, or email matierandross@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @matierandross
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The real estate ad posted by Coldwell Banker calls it a fantastic opportunity in a wonderful neighborhood. But its not the dream home you might expect in Wine Country.
Red caution tape rings the property. The charred husk of a car sits out front. And fragments of a washing machine, patio and chimney are all thats left of the house that once stood on the parcel in the Larkfield community north of Santa Rosa.
City will be finished with lot cleanup this week, the ad reads.
The property is not one of a kind. At least a half a dozen burned-out lots from the most destructive firestorm in California history have hit the market in recent days, a grim reminder of the many altered lives.
The October wildfires killed 44 people and ruined 8,900 structures statewide. With unprecedented losses raising tough questions for thousands of residents in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties, some are deciding that they have no choice but to sell.
Among those are Andrei and Rozalia Bostan, both 67, the owners of the taped-off parcel in Larkfield.
The Bostans, who came to California four decades ago to flee dictatorship in Romania, said theyre leaving their adopted home for Colorado. Despite successful careers in technology, Andrei Bostan said he cant stretch the familys finances enough to afford to rebuild with his wife and their 43-year-old son, Emanuel, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair.
I thought I had it all figured out, he said. I had a house that was paid off and a small retirement payment. But now Im forced out after I spent 40 years of my life in the Bay Area.
The burned properties, which real estate experts expect will be the first of scores to hit the market, are priced at about a third of the value they would have fetched if homes still stood about $160,000 to $300,000. Each will be cleared of fire debris before theyre sold, giving the buyer a clean slate to shake whatever back story came before.
Some sellers simply couldnt wait the year or two, at minimum, it will take to rebuild, or they didnt want to embark on the work required to find a contractor and draw up plans. Others cite financial reality, with insurance payouts falling short of what it will cost to build a new home.
Insurance for fire victims vary based on their policies, but generally those who sell their bare land walk away with the proceeds as well as their insurance check, which would typically go toward rebuilding.
For Andrei Bostan, the insurance payment wasnt what he expected. Turns out he unknowingly bought a policy that covered only part of the homes value and not the added cost of rebuilding or renting temporary housing. When he learned that constructing a new house would eat through his insurance payout as well as a chunk of his retirement savings, he realized they had to move on.
The couple is selling their lot, located on a once leafy cul-de-sac off Old Redwood Highway now flanked by blackened trees, for $299,000. Just down the street, another resident is selling for $280,000.
The Bostans plan to use the proceeds to buy a home where their daughter lives in Arvada, Colo., for just over $500,000. That doesnt include the expense of retrofitting for their sons mobility needs, but is about half of what it would have taken to rebuild in California, they figure.
Santa Rosa is a great place, and I love the whole Bay Area, Andrei Bostan said. But I have no choice.
Paul Chinn / The Chronicle
The familys rush to leave was hastened by the trauma of the fires. Andrei Bostan, a violinist, was touring with an orchestra in Eastern Europe when the Tubbs Fire struck on the night of Oct. 8 and swept west from Calistoga to Santa Rosa. That left his wife to escape the fast-moving flames with their son, who weighs 250 pounds and cannot walk.
After her struggle to get him out and into a Honda Accord instead of the familys custom van, which was behind a garage door that wouldnt open with the power out both were hospitalized. She underwent emergency surgery for a perforated ulcer.
Thank God there were no additional complications, said Rozalia Bostan, who has recovered and whose friends have been collecting donations to help the family. Were all going to be much better when we move into our new home.
A few miles south of Larkfield, in Santa Rosas fire-ravaged Coffey Park neighborhood, John Blood and his wife, Denise, have decided reluctantly to sell the property theyve owned for 26 years because of their age and deteriorating health.
The real estate sign that sits conspicuously on their dirt lot, freshly cleared of debris, went up Wednesday. The $160,000 parcel is flanked by other dirt lots, all in various stages of cleanup.
I love the neighborhood, love the summers, love the festivals, said Blood, 68. But when you get older, your priorities change.
The couple is hoping that money from the sale, on top of their insurance payment, will allow them to buy a home closer to their son in Southern California.
Blood said he had previously thought about leaving the old house because it was two stories, and hed prefer just one because he has trouble with stairs. While the city is allowing fire victims to rebuild with expedited permitting and low fees, the new home design must be similar to the old one.
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The Bloods are fortunate to own property in Mesa, Ariz., where theyre staying until they figure out their next move.
Their for-sale sign, one of two within a couple of blocks in Coffey Park, has become a stark reminder for neighbors that things wont be the same.
You hate to see them leave, but hopefully well see them again, said resident Brad Reid, whose nearby home survived the fires. Theres a lot of unknowns around here now. We dont know whats going to happen.
The Bloods real estate agent, Michael Williams of Coldwell Banker, said he expects to see more empty lots put on the market as people come to terms with their financial situations.
Some people will walk away, Williams said. But I think theres a strong sense of community and people want to remain.
Buyers of this type of property typically range from developers wanting to turn a profit to home-seekers looking for a deal, real estate experts said. Unlike vacant land elsewhere, the burned lots offer the benefit of being permitted for development and connected to utilities.
Realtor Shannan Luft, also of Coldwell Banker, recently listed the charred parcel in Larkfield down the street from the Bostans property. She acknowledged that the listing was outside her normal trade of modest suburban homes, but said the job was important.
Its not your dream sale, Luft said. Its helping people. Its what we have to do to move Sonoma County forward.
Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander
The cabaret tables in the basement theater of Docs Lab were filling up nicely as San Francisco comedian Nato Green made his stoic march down the stairs and into the club. Outside, a sign parked on the neon-lit Columbus Avenue sidewalk proclaimed that the nights comedy album recording was sold out. Green wordlessly motioned with his head that I should follow him to the clubs tiny dressing room, a space so small that the rather tall comic was forced to duck his head. He plopped down his bag and looked around the all-too familiar club.
Its not that I have stage fright, Green said. I just have a chronic high-functioning baseline of anxiety and misery.
He ordered a cup of coffee and continued, I dont want to go into this being too confident.
Green might possess a permanent baseline of misery but I suspect hes not lacking in confidence. Ive seen the San Francisco native perform his stand-up on numerous occasions, and became a quick fan of his blunt, dry and aggressively progressive humor. The 42-year-old dad of twin girls has fashioned himself an almost fatherly comedic fixture in his hometown, having left San Francisco only twice: for college (in Oregon) and for a six-month New York writing gig on the underappreciated television show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell.
Along the way, Green has worked as a union organizer, political activist and San Francisco Examiner columnist. And hes about to leave it all behind indefinitely.
This Sunday, the comedian and his young family will fly to Cuba, where Greens wife will conduct academic research as a medical anthropologist, Greens 9-year-olds will attend school, and Green, perennial deadpan voice of San Francisco values, will embark into the unknown. His past couple of comedy shows, recorded for posterity in a North Beach basement, felt a bit like the final act of The Sound of Music when the von Trapp family performed in that Nazi-run talent show before they disappeared into the Alps.
Im doing this, Green said of his album recording, because Ive been doing comedy for years and now Im about to stop.
Though much of his work has focused on political humor and observation, the election of Donald Trump and subsequent policy changes have left Green with a head full of commentary and a sense of urgency.
Given this political moment in history, I have s to say, Green said. I know its going to bother me if I dont get it out of my head.
And get it out of his head, he did. The adorable Dominique Gelin warmed up the crowd before Green took the stage and unloaded a slow-paced, even-keeled tirade against Nazis, white people, the concept of positive blackface, the All Lives Matter movement, Marin County, small-town police incompetence and himself. At times, his audience was caught off guard, too cautious or sensitive to laugh. Green welcomed our discomfort, excited by his self-appointed task of challenging our perceptions while entertaining a packed house.
Green never called out anyone in the audience, nor was he ever nasty or angry. Instead, the comedian called out our culture of complicity, our breezy lifestyle habits and laissez faire resistance. One bit about a pair of tech workers lamenting San Franciscos lack of good barbecue was particularly biting. Greens point, which he made with equal measures of fact and humor, was that when we kick out the majority of the citys African American population, we also lose their delicious snacks.
I have a ground rule for myself as a comic to say things I feel like only I can say, Green said before his show. I want to do the job of being a comic. I dont want to be so marginal. But I also want to be me.
Greens is a voice I wish were more amplified, not necessarily one headed to Cuba. His Bernie Sanders-styled politics is a bit left of my own (Green once sent me a protest invitation with the note, Want to come get arrested?!) but his determined presence has helped keep us honest.
Much like the von Trapps, who escaped before they could receive their Nazi talent show winnings, Green wont be in town when his comedy album is released this January. Instead, hell be championing his wife and daughters in Cuba, likely offstage and under the radar.
Theres a homegrown comedy scene, Green said of Havana, but its in Spanish.
Do you speak Spanish? I asked.
Yes. He grinned. With sufficient rum.
Beth Spotswoods column appears Thursdays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com
A U.S. district judge wants to determine why Uber failed to turn over some explosive evidence as it battled a lawsuit alleging it stole self-driving car secrets.
Judge William Alsup, overseeing the case brought against Uber by Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent company Alphabet, said Uber could have innocently overlooked the evidence. But if he finds that Uber engaged in systematic concealment of evidence, Alsup plans to tell the jury about these problems, all of Ubers making, he said at a hearing on Monday in federal court in San Francisco.
The evidence in question consists of two documents: a 37-page demand letter written in May by a lawyer for former Uber security analyst Ric Jacobs, and Jacobs resignation email, sent to top Uber executives a month earlier.
Both letters allege that Uber engaged in clandestine practices, including theft of trade secrets. They came to light in late November when the U.S. attorneys office for the Northern District of California sent Jacobs lawyers letter to Alsup, who had previously referred the case there for possible criminal investigation.
The revelations, a potential smoking gun, threw the lawsuit into turmoil, causing Alsup to delay the planned jury trial until Feb. 5.
This is not the usual case, Alsup said. Theres been a lot of this destruction of evidence; a lot of what looks like hide the ball but not necessarily. Some of it could have been innocent.
Hearing allegations that Uber destroyed evidence could influence the jurys deliberations. If both sides are playing fair and square, and there are none of these issues, then you get to decide the case strictly on its merits; you dont get off into destruction of evidence, Alsup said.
Alsup assigned the special master in the case, John Cooper, to investigate and report back by Dec. 15 whether the ways Uber and Waymo had requested discovery should have turned up the Jacobs letters, which he called highly inflammatory, highly material documents.
Coopers probe will also cover whether Jacobs settlement agreement should have been turned over. Uber paid Jacobs $4.5 million on top of $3 million to his attorney, though Uber associate general counsel Angela Padilla disparaged him in court last week as an extortionist making fantastical accusations. Jacobs is currently working for Uber as a $1 million-a-year consultant, whose duties revolve around investigating the claims in his letter. His consulting fee is part of his $4.5 million payout from the ride-hailing company.
Jacobs alleged Uber used a variety of tactics, including self-destructing emails and non-attributable devices to cover its tracks. Alsup gave Uber permission to interview former Waymo employees now working at Uber about whether Waymo used similar tactics.
Google, Waymos sister company, makes several products, including Google Chat, Hangouts and Allo, that allow for ephemeral communications.
Alsup is concerned that ephemeral messaging could have destroyed documents that would have been relevant in the case.
If Uber says it could not find stolen trade secrets on its servers, Its a very good answer to come back and say, No, we learned they had an ephemeral system, a shadow system, a clandestine system where they destroyed everything after six minutes or six days and that helps explain why they werent on the server, Alsup said.
Alsup already postponed the jury trial once before. That delay stemmed from Ubers late production of documents Waymo had requested about its acquisition of Otto, a self-driving truck company started by Anthony Levandowski, a former Waymo star engineer who Waymo says stole sensitive data and brought it to Uber.
Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump said Monday that he feels "very badly" for his former national security adviser Michael Flynn because his false statements to the FBI have "ruined his life."
Trump, who tweeted over the weekend that he had fired Flynn from his White House job because he had lied to the FBI as well as to Vice President Mike Pence, told reporters Monday morning that Flynn's undoing was "a shame" and "very unfair."
"I feel badly for General Flynn," Trump said on the South Lawn of the White House, as he boarded Marine One ahead of a trip to Utah. "I feel very badly. He's led a very strong life, and I feel very badly."
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Trump tried to equate Flynn's actions with those of his 2016 campaign opponent, Hillary Clinton, though the former Democratic presidential nominee has not been charged with lying to the FBI.
"I will say this: Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI," Trump said. "Nothing happened to her. Flynn lied, and they destroyed his life. I think it's a shame. Hillary Clinton, on the 4th of July weekend, went to the FBI, not under oath. It was the most incredible thing anyone's ever seen. She lied many times. Nothing happened to her. Flynn lied, and it's like they ruined his life. It's very unfair."
Trump was referencing Clinton's closed-door interview with the FBI in July 2016, as part of the bureau's investigation into her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
Though the FBI's probe and the circumstances of Clinton's interview have drawn criticism, Clinton has not been charged with providing false statements to the bureau. White House spokesmen did not immediately respond to a request to substantiate Trump's allegation that she had "lied many times" to the FBI.
Trump's Monday morning appearance before reporters was brief. He did not respond to shouted questions from journalists about when he first found out that Flynn lied to the FBI, nor did he answer queries about his endorsement of Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore, who stands accused of making unwanted sexual advances on teenage girls when he was in his 30s.
Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI about his contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn said he had agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation of Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election, a wide-ranging probe that includes possible coordination with the Trump campaign as well as possible obstruction of justice by the now-president.
Tensions are so high on the Korean Peninsula that a nuclear horror once called an apocalyptic danger is no longer rationally comprehensible.
More serious still is the sober realization that the power to prevent the military option of using hydrogen bombs is in the hands of two narcissistic heads of state. It would be foolish to minimize the lunacy and self-induced paranoia of Kim Jong Un, whose publicly announced endgame is the rapid development and testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles now proceeding at an alarming rate.
President Trump has intensified the confrontation by declaring we are in a war and that things will happen to them (North Korea) they never thought possible if North Korea continues to use purposeful and inflammatory verbal threats against us and our allies.
Some observers have been thinking creatively about a diplomatic way out of this seemingly intractable problem. Endorsing a plan proposed by Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, they would pledge publicly to North Korea and the entire world that the United States never will be the first nation to launch a unilateral preemptive strike against another country. This would be rejected by Kim with yet another round of denunciations of American aggression. But around the world, Americas willingness to abandon its first-strike capacity to use nuclear weapons would be seen as a serious step toward a peaceful resolution of a menacing problem.
This is a bold plan, far superior to any others that have been proposed. However, it is based on a major condition that neither strengthens our position against North Korea nor deters that countrys military leaders from solidifying their single goal of remaining an increasingly expanding nuclear power.
Kim knows an attack on the United States or any other allied nation, by design or by mistake, would lead to a massive military assault on his country. Nevertheless, he has stated repeatedly and unequivocally that he will not negotiate any plan with the United States that would require him to demilitarize and dismantle his missile program. Any such plan, he has insisted, is non-negotiable.
What else can be done to avert the unimaginable? We need a new beginning.
I would start by telling North Koreas leaders that they may continue to build their nuclear state without any military interference from the United States no conditions attached. If that is the society they want, then they can have it. We will not try to stop them. They need only be fully aware of the consequences if their plans go awry.
Many will immediately call this weakness or appeasement on our part. We must destroy North Koreas nuclear arsenal before it is in a position to attack us wherever and whenever it chooses, they would say. The truth is, North Korea already has more than enough destructive power to do irreparable damage to us.
While President Trump cannot stop North Korea solely for its continued bluster and verbal fits of anger, he can take the political and diplomatic initiative by working closely with China and South Korea and announce that the United States will implement a policy of patient deterrence and containment that is least likely to lead to the loss of life. He should declare again that we have no interest in regime change, and restate our readiness to take the first-strike military option off the table unless we are attacked first, in which case we would immediately assess the situation and retaliate appropriately. He should then urge Kim to work with us in an open-ended, step-by-step process that would be nonthreatening to either nation.
It is a virtually impossible task for us to offer North Korea a plan that it would agree to negotiate. A major reason the differences are especially difficult to settle is because there are no democratic politics in North Korea. Having disallowed any dissent or disagreement at all, Kim has substituted one-man, top-down reign for democratic leadership. Only in such a closed society, where the people are accustomed to being told what is good for them, is the distinctive context of politics totally missing. There are no doubts, only certitude. There are no partial answers, just total solutions.
Not so here at home. Politics in a free society deals with the contingent and the unknown.
Politics, as Americans have experienced, is the civilizing process of conciliation and compromise. North Koreans are not free and will not be free until they and their differing interests can claim a share of political power. That is what democratic politics is all about.
In ruling out the use of military force, we are saying to Kim: Keep your nuclear-based society if that is not open to negotiation, but join us in trying to turn unreconciled differences into some kind of agreement that might persist for some period of time. He will turn us down, of course, but in doing so he will only have further isolated his country from the rest of the world.
I support Friedman and others who want to bombard the people of North Korea with millions of pro-democracy flyers or leaflets that will give them some idea of how an open democracy differs from their closed society. I would especially target young people who cannot express publicly their own views but as we know from the little intelligence we have are privately looking for every possibly way to learn how a free society works.
The most difficult problem between the United States and North Korea is this: President Trump wants to stop Kim Jong Un from making any provocative statement that could lead to war. Trump needs to let that go Kim has the right to express his views.
Trump needs to be convinced that the worst possible outcome is having North Korea become a failed state. To date, however, nothing he has said would lead anyone to believe he thinks this to be true. Quite the opposite; he talks as if only might is right. But China and South Korea both have warned that first-strike military action would quickly turn the Korean Peninsula into a horrific war zone. They strongly believe that what is urgently needed is deterrence and containment, along with tougher sanctions on North Korea and a vigorous diplomatic peace initiative, which they have long maintained is the only realistic option.
Like it or not, Trump is the key player in keeping the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear war. We made him our president, and now he must act like a political leader who can be a bargainer, a negotiator and a conciliator who understands the relationship of means to ends, where violation of the former becomes an act of political death and the inability to fulfill the latter can cause political extinction.
Trump has often said he relies on his gut instinct to do the right thing. Who knows does he know? where his gut would lead us?
John H. Bunzel is a political scientist on the faculty at Stanford University. He was president of San Jose State University in the 1970s, served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1983 to 1986, and in 1990 received the Hubert Humphrey Award for years of service as an outstanding public policy practitioner. He now resides in Mount Pleasant, S.C. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters
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Years of waiting will end Saturday when a lock is opened, a gate is swung wide and the public gets its first opportunity to visit John Muirs grave site in Martinez.
On the same visit, you can see the nearby grave site of Joe Walker, often called the greatest trailblazer in history.
To visit Muirs grave site, reservations are required to join a tour, which will be available at 3 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and Wednesdays. To reserve a spot, call the John Muir National Historic Site at (925) 228-8860. You will meet at the historic site, Muirs former home at 4202 Alhambra Ave. in Martinez, and be ferried by van a short distance. A short walk is then required. Admission is free.
The site has been off limits because it was blocked by private property and fenced off, and local residents expressed concerns about parking and privacy. The National Park Service negotiated for 15 years to develop an easement.
Muir, founder of the conservation movement in America, was a self-taught scientist who invented glaciology. He also was an explorer, naturalist and author who split his time between the Bay Area in winter and High Sierra in summer.
This trip can be expanded by visiting the historic Alhambra Cemetery nearby to find the landmark headstone for Walker, as well as other legends, including David Muir and Don Pacheco.
Walkers grave site is set on a hilltop where you overlook Carquinez Strait. His marker includes the dates of some of his escapades, most notably, Camped at Yosemite Nov. 13, 1833. Walker blazed crossings into California that pioneers later followed, and told the Donner Party, before they attempted their failed crossing, they had no chance.
To access the Alhambra Cemetery, stop in at the Martinez police station and sign for the free key. The cemetery is along the right side of Carquinez Scenic Drive and is fenced, gated and locked.
Up on the hill, looking across the Lower Delta, its likely that Muir and Walker, two of Americas greatest outdoorsmen, stood at the same spot.
Tom Stienstra is The San Francisco Chronicles outdoors writer. Email: tstienstra@sfchronicle.com
A residential development boom is quietly taking shape in San Franciscos Excelsior district, an unpretentious enclave that residents often complain has been forgotten when it comes to investment and services.
On Monday, a development group is set to submit plans for a 426-unit apartment complex on outer Mission Street, a project that would include a new Safeway grocery store, a neighborhood health center and other retail.
The Mission Street project, a joint venture between nonprofit developer Bridge Housing and the National Electrical Benefits Fund, combines two of the largest plots of land in the neighborhood: the Valente Marini Perata & Co. funeral-home site at 4840 Mission St. and the Safeway at 4950 Mission St., just south of the recently closed mortuary. Combined, the two parcels cover 3 acres.
In the first phase of the plan, the funeral-home site would be redeveloped with 175 affordable units above a 53,000-square-foot Safeway and a 10,000-square-foot Mission Neighborhood Health Center. In phase two, the existing Safeway, which is 40 percent smaller than its proposed replacement, would be knocked down to make way for 251 market-rate housing units, along with about 15,000 square feet of retail.
The project is the evolution of an earlier plan by Bridge Housing that would have put about about 100 affordable units and 20 market-rate townhomes on the funeral-home site. Supervisor Ahsha Safai, who represents the neighborhood, said he pushed the property owners to go back to the drawing board and come up with a denser scheme.
I felt that the earlier plan did not take maximum advantage of the site, Safai said. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle
Meanwhile, the union pension fund that owns the Safeway property, the National Electrical Benefit Fund, had expressed interest in exploring a combined development, provided that it be timed to keep the existing Safeway open while the new one was being built.
The Excelsior has long had a lively retail strip along Mission Street, a mix of pupusa joints, Chinese restaurants, nail salons, delis, produce markets, dollar stores and cafes. But in recent years the corridor has struggled as mom-and-pop businesses have closed. The corridor now has the highest vacancy rate of any major shopping district in San Francisco, according to Safai.
Safai, who was elected to the Board of Supervisors last year, said that pumping new life into that part of Mission Street has long been a concern of the neighborhood.
There are too many empty storefronts, with sheets in the window. We are not maximizing our potential, Safai said.
The mix of housing will be 59 percent market rate and 41 percent affordable, Safai said. The developer will be seeking increased density in exchange for a level of affordable housing well above what the city requires.
Kate Hartley, acting director of the Mayors Office of Housing and Community Development, stressed that the developer and the city will embark on an intense outreach process with the neighborhood. In addition to the new Safeway, the project will have a public plaza and new retail opportunities.
We want to build in those neighborhoods, like the Excelsior, that have not traditionally had much in the way of affordable-housing resources, she said. The Excelsior, in particular, has been suffering from a high eviction rate and has a strong need for affordable housing.
The Safeway development is the biggest project in the Excelsior, but not the only one.
Other proposed developments in the neighborhood include 103 units at 915 Cayuga Ave., 125 units at 65 Ocean Ave. and 100 units next to Balboa Park BART Station. Safai said the total pipeline includes about 800 units enough new residents to support currently missing retail like a hardware store, a bike shop and a family-oriented event space, he said. Only one project is already under construction 61 units at Mission Street and Seneca Avenue, which will be completed next year.
The new residents will help retailers thrive and reduce blight, Safai said. This is about bringing stores, service and investment into this neighborhood that has been the forgotten part of the city, he said.
Michael Tufo, an Excelsior native and owner of the Calabria Brothers Italian deli down the street from the Safeway, said, The new Safeway is going to open things up for a lot of other businesses. He said there are five or six vacancies on his block, far more than when he opened six years ago.
Im not saying we are going to be a premier neighborhood, but at least somewhere people want to come to and shop and maybe check out my deli, he said. Right now there is not much foot traffic.
Rumors about the mega-development deal have been circulating for months along with concerns that the Mission Neighborhood Heath Center would be cut out of the project. Executive Director Brenda Storey said the project will allow her to increase the health center from about 4,000 square feet to about 10,000. The center will add dental services and expanded primary care, pediatric and womens health services, Storey said.
We are happy to be able to go into a space in an affordable-housing building our mission and our role is to serve working-class families, she said. We will have more space so we can serve more patients.
Bridge Housing President Cynthia Parker said the units would be larger than average to cater to families. She said her company has been focused on the Excelsior for several years.
The city is so compressed, and there are such pressures on the housing market, we are seeing neighborhoods that have been overlooked coming into their own as far as development, she said.
The National Electrical Benefit Fund has hired San Francisco developer Emerald Fund as its manager on the project. Emerald Fund President Oz Erickson said that building dense infill housing over grocery stores is a proven model for revitalization.
I think this is the catalyst for the neighborhood and will serve as an introduction for other people to provide housing and new retail, he said. The impact of having a first-class grocery store is enormous other retailers want to locate next to first-class grocery stores.
The Safeway-anchored mixed-income housing community has the potential to inspire other developers to take on other underused parcels. Standing in front of the Safeway on Friday, Safai pointed to a closed, fenced-in used-car lot across the street where potential car buyers are instructed to call a number if interested in a particular automobile.
What kind of business is that? There is not even anyone working there, he said. Is that the highest and best use for that property? Anywhere else in the city, that lot would have been developed.
J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen
The Bay Bridge tollbooth a box truck slammed into over the weekend killing a worker inside remained closed Monday, slowing morning commute traffic, officials said.
Lane 14 continued to be blocked off after the driver of a box truck struck the tollbooth on the north side of the plaza at 5:11 a.m. Saturday, killing the toll collector and injuring several others, according to the California Highway Patrol.
Daniel Berk, 32, of Foster City, who was driving the box truck, was being treated at Highland Hospital for serious injuries and isnt expected to be released for at least a week, said Officer Matthew Hamer, a CHP spokesman.
Berk is facing charges of driving under the influence and vehicular manslaughter.
Si Si Han, a 46-year-old Caltrans employee, was killed in the crash. She worked as a toll collector for nearly a decade, said agency spokesman Bob Haus.
Han is survived by her husband, Ryan Saw, and 10-year-old daughter, Ashly.
Hans booth, from Lane 14, is completely wiped out and has to be completely rebuilt, Haus said.
CHP Officer Vu Williams said the truck was filled with what he described as lighting or sound equipment. Crews worked over the weekend to repair the four toll booths that were impacted by the crash and clear the debris.
All but one, Hans booth, were open. It is unclear when the booth from Lane 14 would be functioning again, officials said.
Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani
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The city of San Francisco took down a memorial set up for Kate Steinle at Pier 14, after family members reportedly asked city officials to have it removed.
About 50 candles, along with red and white roses, were seen Friday where Steinle was shot and killed, following the conclusion of the trial where her alleged shooter was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges.
The memorial had ties to a self-proclaimed "alt-right" group, who appeared to have started the shrine to Steinle.
SF CHRONICLE EXCLUSIVE: Kate Steinle's family talks about the anguish and frustration
Both a spokeswoman for Mayor Ed Lee and a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works confirmed its removal Saturday to the San Francisco Examiner. The reason behind the removal was not pinned to its association with the white supremacist group; officials instead said its presence violated city policy.
San Francisco typically removes memorials within 10 days of the victim's funeral service, which in Steinle's case took place in 2015.
"Whoever put that up didn't influence what we did, we just followed our procedure," said Gordon of the shrine's removal to the Examiner.
"The Steinle family placed a request with the Mayor's Office for the bench to remain as it was intended a simple memorial in recognition of Kate and her spirit," said Lee's spokeswoman, Deirdre Hussey.
KATE STEINLE CASE: SF residents react to verdict, 'alt-right' sets up shrine
Steinle's name has been repeatedly invoked for political gain, given the undocumented immigrant status of accused shooter Jose Ines Garcia Zarate. Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump using Kate as an example on the campaign trail as to why the United States should build a wall along the Mexico border and keep immigrants out.
Trump took to Twitter to declaim the result of the trial, calling the verdict "disgraceful" and denouncing Democrats for being "weak on crime." Trump later sent out a letter to his supporters calling for an end to sanctuary cities, singling out San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. The Twitter hashtag #BoycottSanFrancisco also began to take off following the verdict.
Labor unions representing thousands of city workers in Oakland said they will go on strike starting Tuesday, interrupting nearly all non-emergency services with the first major walkout in the city in four years, after negotiations came to a halt Monday.
Mayor Libby Schaaf said the strike would be unlawful because the two parties have not mutually declared an impasse. She said the city would file a labor complaint if workers walk off the job. But leaders for Service Employees International Union Local 1021 dismissed Schaafs concerns.
The mayor is incorrect, said Rob Szykowny, Local 1021s chief negotiator. Its an unfair labor practices strike, which is lawful, protected activity.
A UC Berkeley lecturer in labor law whose Alameda practice represents Local 1021 agreed with the union.
Mike Kepka/The Chronicle
A public-sector union has a right to strike in this context because I assume theres no contract in effect and they havent reached one. Thats basic public-sector law, David Rosenfeld, the lecturer, said. I dont know what the citys problem is.
Local 1021 represents Oakland librarians, street cleaners, sewer workers, parking enforcement officers and others. The union proposed Monday to bring in as an informal mediator former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown a Chronicle columnist whos previously refereed BART labor disputes. But the city rejected that offer.
Willie Brown convened politicians on behalf of the union several months ago, Schaaf said, adding that she was disappointed in the union for planning to strike. I love Willie Brown. I have tremendous respect for him. But he does not appear to be neutral in this matter.
The union, which has been without a contract since June, agreed with the citys first-year contract proposal, which would increase wages by 4 percent, retroactive to July 1. The parties dispute what should happen next: The city has offered future salary increases tied to its revenue growth, but the union wants the city to commit to another 4 percent increase the following fiscal year.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Had the city agreed on a one-year deal or to Brown as mediator, Szykowny said, the strike would have been canceled.
Karen Boyd, a city spokeswoman, said the city hadnt gotten the opportunity to present the latest proposal to the City Council for consideration. The council is scheduled to meet Wednesday, which city officials said was the soonest legally possible time.
It baffles me, Szykowny said. All they have to do is sit in the room in good faith, and its shocking they wouldnt want to do that.
Other labor conditions overtime, use of part-time workers, retention problems, vacancies, and health and safety concerns are major issues that need to be addressed, according to union members. They say their peers are fleeing Oakland for better-paying but identical jobs in nearby cities.
We were able to get some really good noneconomic agreements, but when you get down to money, it really starts to get challenging, said Lauren Takeshita, an Oakland police administrative analyst and member of a sister union, which will also go on strike. Its their role to say no, which they unfortunately are doing very well. Its our role to say, Why not? and How come? and Be fair. We continue to chip away at it, and we continue to ask them to be reasonable.
Rising costs of pensions and employee health care are outpacing the citys revenue growth, Boyd said.
We cannot spend money we do not have, Schaaf said. We have to preserve basic services for Oaklanders not just today, not just tomorrow but for the long term.
The city gave Local 1021 its best and final offer Friday and said if any portion were rejected, the entire proposal would be considered null. Schaaf, who has been the target of much of the unions displeasure and its advertising campaign, said Monday night she was still hoping to avoid a strike.
This will have an impact on so many Oakland residents, particularly vulnerable residents, she said. We are continuing to ask labor to wait until we have an opportunity to present their offer to the City Council.
Local 1021 members overwhelmingly voted in late October to give its bargaining team the authority to call a strike. Another union, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21, approved a solidarity strike. And a third, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, said its members would not cross the picket line.
About 3,000 workers were expected to strike Tuesday starting at 7 a.m.
City Council committee meetings were canceled for the week. Nearly all nonemergency city services child care programs, libraries, senior centers, parking enforcement, fire and building inspections, street sweeping and more were suspended for Tuesday.
Police officers and firefighters are barred from participating in the strike, and emergency dispatchers will come to work too. The Oakland Animal Shelter and the citys website, including its online bill-collection services, will also remain open.
Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov
Luggage that can help you navigate the airport or even let you know where it is if it did not follow you to your destination is the biggest innovation in baggage since wheels. But soon, it may not be welcome in airline cargo holds.
American Airlines said Friday that it would not allow passengers to check smart luggage unless they first remove the batteries that fuel the high-tech features. According to Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for the airline, the new rule, which takes effect Jan. 15, comes as powered luggage is getting more popular.
Weve looked at the prevalence of these bags as they most likely are going to be a hot item, no pun intended, this holiday season, he said. We have nothing against a smart bag, we understand customers like them, but the airline also has to make sure they are safe to transport.
The bags themselves are not an issue, but the lithium ion batteries that power them have caused problems in the sky. In 2010, a United Parcel Service 747 plane was carrying tens of thousands of the batteries to Cologne, Germany, from Dubai when one battery ignited, causing a destructive chain reaction that brought down the jet. When Boeing was rolling out its 787 Dreamliners in 2013, a problem with the lithium ion batteries that powered some onboard equipment grounded the fleet in its first months of service. Boeing eventually redesigned the batteries and their housing.
Federal Aviation Administration guidelines already bar passengers from packing spare lithium ion batteries in their checked baggage, and strongly suggest that travelers keep any devices with the batteries in their carry-on bags. That way, any smoke or fire from the batteries could be quickly detected. In the cargo hold, a fire may not be noticed by the automatic suppression system until it has already become a critical problem.
American Airlines, so far, is the only U.S. carrier to announce this kind of restriction.
Feinstein said American Airlines crews are trained to deal with fires in the cabin, but there is much less they can do to extinguish flames in the baggage compartment. For that reason, American Airlines will only allow smart luggage onboard if the battery can be disconnected. The carrier will not require travelers to take out the battery if they are bringing the bag into the cabin. But they must be able to check the bag if there is not enough space in the overhead bin.
Just make sure the battery is removable, Feinstein said. If its not removable, we wont be permitting it to fly in the cargo hold or in the cabin.
Smart luggage manufacturers, however, said they were disappointed about the ban. If you make a removable battery, the suitcase will no longer be smart. It will be a stupid suitcase, said Tomi Pierucci, the chief executive and co-founder of Bluesmart. Taking away the suitcases power supply, he said, would disable features like USB charging ports and GPS tracking. If the airline loses your suitcase, you wont be able to find it.
Zach Wichter is a New York Times writer.
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The Bay Area arts scene is disappearing.
It seems that such a grand proclamation is issued every few years with a rotating adjective dying, dwindling or any other d-word that signifies departure and diminishment.
But when artists leave, and they most certainly are leaving the Bay Area, they do not necessarily announce their departures with such vague, spectacular statements. They often go with a whisper, a quiet slinking away.
In the spirit of our ongoing Grass is Greener series, which chronicles the stories of those who left the Bay Area for elsewhere, SFGATE spoke to a handful of artists who fled the Bay Area, or plan to leave soon, to learn why they left and where they went. Some lived here a short time, trying the region on for a few months before moving on. Others grew up here, spent their childhoods doodling graffiti in San Franciscos alleyways and penning songs about the fog to be played at a warehouse gig.
An expensive city like San Francisco sometimes seems as if its full of transients young people looking to give the Bay Area a shot before heading to a place where a house can be purchased and roots laid down.
One study estimated that somebody must make more than $110,000 to live comfortably in the Bay Area, and thats not necessarily conducive to a thriving arts scene.
Rent is too steep for a full-time artist without a steady income, said Michael Kershnar, a visual artist with a background in skateboarding. His artwork is visible throughout the Bay Area, in murals, on skate decks or at The Growlery, an artist residency and gallery space in the Lower Haight, which he manages.
Kershnar lived in the Bay Area from 2008-2011, but left when the cost of living spiked and studio space became hard to come by. He returned two years ago to manage The Growlery, but with his contract up at the end of the year, hes on to the next residency. Such is the reality for many artists, who must go where opportunity presents itself, whether in the form of a residency, teaching gig or grant.
In January, Kershnar heads to San Clemente, Calif., for a three-month residency at The House of Trestles. After that, hes not so sure.
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Claire George, frontwoman of indie band Heartwatch, moved back home to Seattle last year to be near her family and study music production. She lived in San Francisco for five years, and enmeshed herself in the regions lively music scene. In that time, she says she saw lots of people leaving, but at that point, the artist exodus was standard fare San Francisco had been hemorrhaging artists for a long time, she said.
During her San Francisco tenure, George worked a full-time job in addition to making music, which she says was common practice in the scene.
Pretty much everyone in my band had a full-time job or was in school, she said.
A high cost of living doesnt just hamper the ability of an artist to make a living wage, but can also take a toll on the viability of art spaces, which often struggle to compete with the competitive set by other neighborhood tenants, like for-profit companies and businesses.
Dwindling art space is not the main incentive for artists to leave, but it doesnt help, said Erin McElroy, the founder and director of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a Bay Area digital mapping and storytelling collective that charts the effects of gentrification and displacement.
Most art venues, like galleries, concert halls and collectives, do not qualify for rent control because they are not residential spaces. Rent can increase at the whim of a landlord, McElroy says, which she sees as a big reason many informal collectives and underground spaces have disappeared in the last 10 years.
Community land trusts have been really useful in protecting tenant space, she said, but it would be great to see more land trusts for art and commercial spaces.
Local organizations have mobilized in recent years to fight these displacements, including the nonprofit Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST). On Thursday, CAST announced a pilot grant that will award $350,000 in funding to 14 Oakland-based arts and cultural organizations seeking real estate assistance. The announcement came just days before the Dec. 2 anniversary of the tragic Ghost Ship warehouse fire, which took the lives of 36 people and spurred a crackdown on underground live-work spaces across the Bay Area.
***
In many ways, yes, its harder to be an artist here than ever before, McElroy said.
McElroys statement is backed, or at least correlated with, statistical trends.
In 2015, the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) surveyed nearly 600 artists living in San Francisco. The results were frightening; Over 70 percent of respondents said they had been or were being displaced from their workplaces, homes or both. Thirty percent feared displacement would happen in the near future.
One of the things we learned through that study is that artists are very unclear about their tenancy situation, very unclear about their rights, when their leases expired, said Kate Patterson, director of communications for SFAC. She says the city realized a major pain point in artist housing advocacy was the availability of information, especially when it came to bureaucracy-heavy endeavors like applying for affordable housing.
SFAC was intended to provide grants for local artists to create new work, Patterson explained, But stability is critical when creating new work, and we dont yet have a living assistance program, she said. Thats a need area that has emerged out of the time that were in.
The commission is exploring the possibility of developing affordable housing, but Patterson says it could be years out.
We need something right now.
Earlier this month, SFAC announced plans to conduct another, more comprehensive survey of local artists in the coming year. The organization also recently launched the Mission Economic Development Agency, a $115,000 grant designed to help artists access extant affordable housing.
***
When an influx of people belonging to a certain group leave a place, a more visceral, less visible challenge arises a lack of community, and a community forced to fight for slim resources.
Within the Bay Area music scene, George says because there are fewer players, fellow musicians arent always open to collaboration.
It becomes more competitive, she explains.
Then theres the monetary thing in San Francisco, she said, where a lack of opportunity often transforms art-making into a transactional, grabby process.
It can put a damper on your ability to feel open, she said.
But a small community can create even tighter bonds among those able to make it work, those fighting to stay in the Bay Area. A group mentality materializes.
This mentality can fuel fierce divisions among residents belonging to different communities. Many of those interviewed for this story spoke in terms of us artists versus them: Tech.
Unless I quit music and moved into tech, I would never live comfortably, said musician Erica Zappia, who moved to Texas in June.
Said artist Michael Kershnar, I guess my arts and relationship skillset is not as prized as being in tech.
Painter Kate Kuhne left San Francisco for Los Angeles after half a year. I found San Francisco to be creatively constipated, infested with tech zombies, she said.
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Identifying as an artist can act as a form of cultural currency in the Bay Area, says Anti-Eviction Mapping Project founder McElroy. But the definition varies. Artist could be applied to muralists and painters, but also musicians and filmmakers, even those working in the tech industry.
Designers making six-figure salaries at tech companies might identify as artists, but theyre not living as precariously as someone painting murals or creating art linked to different subcultures, McElroy said.
Sometimes the idea of an artist in the Bay Area is a white, bohemian creative person, she explained, and such a person, though living outside the dominant culture, can contribute to gentrification and displacement.
She advocates for a rejiggering of the identifier artist, to include those making political art, or art linked to various subcultures people of color, the working class, those threatened by redevelopment and gentrification.
Once again, it comes down to a problem of identity. At least thats how illustrator and Bay Area native Anya Sapozhnikov sees it. She moved to New York City two years ago in pursuit of an art scene with more freedom and innovation.
San Francisco is a tech city, she said. Not an art city.
Such designations are ultimately fluid. Cities change, and the transformation of a place can play out over decades, or just a few years.
Change has come quickly to the Bay Area, but also to the places one goes to escape such instability. Said Baudelaire, "The form of a city changes faster than the human heart."
George, the musician in Seattle, has found many similarities to San Francisco in her new home.
"I left San Francisco excited for this new creative climate," she said. "And the exact same thing is happening here."
In January, she's moving to Los Angeles.
Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.
He was the hero San Francisco deserved. And with his bleach-jug head, crimson cape and comically oversized needle, Bleachman might just be the one it needs right now.
In the late 1980s, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation launched a campaign targeting IV drug users. Before needle exchanges or safe injection rooms, encouraging addicts to sterilize their needles with household bleach before reusing them was one pragmatic way of reducing HIV transmission rates. Bleachman put a smiling face to the message.
Longtime city residents might remember the costumed mascot's grinning mug from bus stops, comics and posters. But despite Bleachman's kid-friendly appearance, the ads were surprisingly frank.
One surreal television commercial survives on YouTube.
"If you use the drug, you gotta use the jug," Bleachman says to the camera, standing before a shot of the pre-Salesforce Tower SF skyline. Then, he demonstrates how to clean a needle.
Behind the mask (or jug, rather) was Les Pappas, who worked at SFAF for 10 years. Bleachman was his brainchild, he said, and the costume was initially made to fit him though according to SFAF spokesman Andrew Hattori, he wasn't the only one to wear it.
On weekends, Pappas said he and a group of T-shirt-wearing outreach workers would venture into the Mission and Tenderloin neighborhoods to distribute pamphlets and bleach. The ridiculous costume grabbed drug users' attention and, unlike more negative ad campaigns, it also "brightened people's day."
"At that time, drug users were looked down on even worse than they are today," he said. "The idea was: Why not have a superhero? Why can't they have a superhero? It was meant to be a very positive kind of thing."
"(Drug users) would see that not only did people care about them, but they cared enough to make, for (drug users), a hero of their own," he added.
As Bleachman, Pappas would take Polaroid selfies with his fans. (The photos would remind drug users to clean their needles, he said.) One day, he recounted, a woman came running up to him with a crumpled old photo in hand.
"It was probably the only thing she'd really hung onto for a while," Pappas said. "She was so excited to have the picture and then to see Bleachman again."
The jug-headed hero generated publicity wherever he went, and his appeal stretched beyond the Bay. Pappas toured with the costume to other cities, like Los Angeles and Toronto, and he credits Bleachman's success with inspiring later goofy mascots, like the anthropomorphized anatomy of the Healthy Penis campaign.
Some things have changed since Bleachman's heyday. The number of HIV infections reported annually in San Francisco has been trending downward in recent years, according to the city's Department of Public Health. There are fewer infections nationwide as well; The estimated number of new HIV infections in the U.S. decreased by 10 percent from 2010-14, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
The CDC also updated its guidelines regarding needles and bleach it's always safer to use a new syringe, the CDC now advises, though bleach "continues to have an important role in reducing the risk for HIV transmission."
As drug use and needle waste continue to be problems, both across the country and around the Bay Area, could creating another Spandex-clad crusader be the answer? Maybe, Pappas said but it's compassion, not a cape, that's the important part.
"The existence (of a drug-user) is very much full of negativity. If you want to help people, you can't come at it that way," he said. "There certainly could be another superhero, but the underlying things are to show respect (and) treat IV users the same as everybody else."
A teen's Sacramento dog adoption story won the country's heart, beating out thousands of shelter submissions to win a grand prize through the Petco Foundation.
A $100,000 grant was given to Front Street Animal Shelter on Tuesday for helping 13-year-old Quinn Scharn find his best friend: 3-legged dog Logan.
Quinn was diagnosed with cancer when he was 20 months old. He was then diagnosed with cancer again at 10 years old.
"(Quinn) has rhabdomyosarcoma and he went through surgery, chemotherapy and radiation," his mother Teresa Howell said. "The radiation he received as a baby caused a secondary cancer -- osteosarcoma -- and they had to amputate his right hip and leg."
When Quinn went into surgery, he had one request: to adopt a three-legged dog.
"I thought he was just being silly at first, but he was pretty persistent. Never wavered from that request," Howell explained. "For almost two years, he had been asking for a 3-legged dog -- over and over."
About a year ago, Howell came across a Facebook post from the Front Street Animal Shelter the showcased a three-legged dog named Logan.
The family lives in Napa. They made the trip to Sacramento the next day to take Logan home -- and their lives changed for the better.
"I can really relate to him. He always comforts me when I'm sad or mad. He's a really good friend to me. He went through the same thing -- sort of," Quinn said. "We just really complement each other."
Logan came into Quinn's life at the right time. The dog's life was saved thanks to funding provided to the Front Street Animal Shelter through the Petco Foundation.
"We gave them a grant to be used so they could provide medical treatment for the animals that come into the shelter," said Susanne Kogut, with Petco Foundation. "And it was actually that grant that helped save Logan."
"After treatment, (Quinn's) scans weren't clear. So, it was a very scary time for him. (Quinn) was fearful," Howell said. "Once he got Logan, that all sort of washed away from (Quinn)."
Quinn now has clear scans, as well as comfort and companionship.
"It's just nice that he has somebody -- an animal -- that is with him all the time and he can relate to," Howell said. "Quinn is much happier. He is in a better place. And of course, that's what you want as a mom for your kid."
The award comes from Petco Foundation's Holiday Wishes campaign. Adopters submit stories, photos and videos to highlight how their pet changed their lives.
The foundation received 3,500 submissions.
Front Street Animal Shelter actually had two finalist entries, bringing their total grant award to $125,000.
SEATTLE A Mexican man who spoke with reporters about his longtime girlfriends immigration arrest has now been detained himself, and he says agents told him its because he was quoted by the press.
Baltazar Rosas Aburto Gutierrez spoke with the local Chinook Observer as well as the Seattle Times after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained his girlfriend in June. He was identified by only his nickname in the Observer, and not by name in the Times.
Aburto Gutierrez, 35, told the Times in a phone interview from the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma that he was arrested last Monday in Ocean Shores, where he lives and works as a clam digger.
He said an agent told him: My supervisor asked me to come find you because of what appeared in the newspaper.
ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley told the Times that the agency doesnt retaliate as a rule. But when pressed about Aburto Gutierrezs case, she declined to comment, the Times reported.
ICE conducts targeted immigration enforcement in compliance with federal law and agency policy, and at times, exercises prosecutorial discretion when the circumstances of a particular case have extenuating factors like the care of minor children or an aliens medical condition, the agency said in a statement sent by Haley.
This does not mean an alien is exempt from future immigration enforcement, it added.
Aburto Gutierrez has lived in the U.S. for 18 years and has children with his girlfriend, Gladys Diaz. Diaz was arrested when she took their children to meet with someone who answered an ad she placed to sell a homemade pinata; it turned out to be a sting.
Before the agents took her away, Aburto Guttierez said, they walked her home so she could drop off her children with him. Since he was also in the country illegally, he recalled, he asked: Why you dont take us all?
Diaz has since been deported and now lives near Puerto Vallarta with their children.
WASHINGTON The Supreme Court gave President Trump a significant victory Monday, ruling he may put his full travel ban into effect while legal appeals are being weighed in lower courts.
The decision, with only two dissents, strongly suggests the justices believe the current version of Trumps broad travel ban does not exceed his powers under the immigration laws and does not reflect unconstitutional religious discrimination against Muslims.
The justices issued an order saying they had stayed or blocked lower court decisions that prevented full enforcement of the ban. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
The travel ban the third version issued by the Trump administration after previous versions encountered legal barriers blocks visitors and immigrants from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea.
The order had gone into partial effect based on a middle-course position the Supreme Court set out in late June. Then, considering on an earlier version of the travel order, the justices ruled the administration could refuse entry for visitors and immigrants from several Muslim nations, but not to families, travelers and others who had a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with person or entity in the United States.
In recent weeks, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, and a federal judge in Maryland adopted that standard and applied it to Trumps latest order. They agreed the ban could go into effect in part, but not against those who had close personal or professional ties to a person or an entity here. The 9th Circuit and the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, Va., are still weighing claims that Trumps order discriminated based on nationality in violation of a 1965 law. The appeals courts are also considering claims that the ban reflected unconstitutional bias against Muslims.
Trumps lawyers were not satisfied with that partial win in the appeals courts. They filed an emergency appeal Nov. 20 contending that allowing the ban to go into only partial affect will cause ongoing irreparable harm to the government and the public. They predicted the court would eventually uphold the order so the justices should permit it to go into full effect without further delay.
David G. Savage is a Tribune Co. writer.
In a legal case with profound implications for LGBT rights and religions place in public life, the opposing sides agree on this: Its not about the cake.
At its core, the case that goes before the U.S. Supreme Court for oral arguments on Tuesday is a showdown between a gay couple from Colorado and a Denver-area baker who in 2012 cited his Christian faith in refusing to make a cake for their wedding celebration.
Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, was judged through multiple phases of litigation to have violated Colorados anti-discrimination law. Through his lawyers, he now gets to argue before the highest court in the land that hes an artist who should not be compelled to create a cake that contradicts his religious views.
For Phillips legion of supporters including conservative politicians, advocacy groups and religious institutions the case has ramifications for creative professionals of all kinds.
Every American should be free to choose which art they will create and which art they wont create without fear of being unjustly punished by the government, Phillips recently told a rally of local supporters.
For advocates of LGBT rights, the stakes are perilously high. They fear a Supreme Court ruling in Phillips favor would open the door to discrimination by a wide range of business owners and entrepreneurs.
Cakes can often have artistic or creative designs. So can sandwiches, legal briefs, bicycles, cars, flowers, medical care, American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio argued in a recent blog post.
If a baker can reject LGBTQ people because of who we are, then what about the mechanic, the florist, the doctor, the teacher? Strangio asked. This is not about cake. This is not about art. This is about survival.
The case reaches the Supreme Court at a stressful time for the LGBT rights movement.
Just two years ago, the high court delivered the movement its greatest victory a 5-4 decision paving the way for same-sex marriage to become legal nationwide. But that achievement, coming 11 years after Massachusetts became the first state to recognize gay marriage, has been partly offset by subsequent political developments.
The sweeping Republican election victory in November 2016 solidified social conservatives dominance in Congress and a majority of states and set the stage for President Trumps administration to roll back several LGBT-friendly initiatives undertaken during Barack Obamas two terms in office.
Protections for transgender students have been weakened, and Trump is seeking to ban transgender people from military service. In October, Attorney General Jeff Sessions a longtime skeptic of LGBT-rights initiatives issued religious exemptions guidance that could override many anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people and others.
The net result: LGBT activists see little prospect of short-term progress at the federal level, even as they remain heartened by the ever-growing ranks of corporations and local governments that are acting to make LGBT people feel welcome and to curb discrimination against them. The local laws can be important, given that only 21 states have statewide laws barring discrimination against gays and lesbians in public accommodations.
Lambda Legal, a prominent LGBT-rights group, was among dozens of organizations submitting briefs to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Colorado couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins.
The group argued that LGBT people, for all their recent civil rights advances, still encounter varied forms of discrimination in the public square. Among its examples: a lesbian couple denied infertility treatment in San Diego, a gay Iowa couple rebuffed in efforts to rent a wedding venue, a transgender man turned away from a New Jersey hospital where he sought a hysterectomy.
This is why nondiscrimination laws like Colorados are so important, wrote Lambdas law and policy director, Jennifer Pizer. So that people can live their lives without fearing that, at any moment, they may be turned away or verbally abused just for who they are.
Craig and Mullins spent only a few moments at the bakery in 2012 before Philipps rebuff hit home.
There was a horrible pregnant pause, Mullins recalls. It was publicly humiliating and it was painful.
For opponents of same-sex marriage, religious liberty and religious freedom have become watchwords for a broad campaign to carve out more public space for their viewpoints.
There have been defeats. Earlier this year, Washington states Supreme Court ruled unanimously that florist Barronelle Stutzman broke the states anti-discrimination law by refusing to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding. In October, two women who specialize in hand-lettering and calligraphy for weddings lost the latest round of their challenge of a Phoenix ordinance requiring them to provide their services for same-sex weddings.
There have been some victories as well.
In Michigan, a federal judge recently ordered the city of East Lansing to make room for a farmer who was barred from selling apples at a seasonal market because he doesnt let gay couples get married at his orchard, which is a popular wedding spot. A panel of U.S. appellate judges has allowed a sweeping Mississippi law to take effect that lets government workers and business owners cite religious beliefs to deny services to LGBT people. The law, now the subject of an appeal to the Supreme Court, protects three beliefs: that marriage is only between a man and a woman, that gender cannot be changed and that sex outside of marriage is wrong.
Back in 2014, the Supreme Court declined to weigh in on a case with similarities to the Colorado dispute. The justices rebuffed a request to review a New Mexico Supreme Court decision holding that a photography studio violated the states anti-discrimination laws by refusing to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony.
Three years later, the high court has opted to wade into the same high-voltage issues, assessing whether Phillips right to freedom of speech outweighs Colorados interest in protecting Mullins and Craig from discrimination. It will mark the most important LGBT-rights case for conservative Coloradan Neil Gorsuch since he joined the Supreme Court in April.
However, the outcome could turn on the vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy, as it often does in cases that otherwise break along the courts liberal-conservative divide.
Kennedys legacy is firmly tied to his authorship of major gay rights rulings dating back to 1996, including the landmark 2015 decision making same-sex marriage legal nationwide. At the same time, Kennedy, 81, has forcefully defended free-speech rights in his nearly 30 years as a justice.
Each side has tailored its arguments to appeal to one of those two strains in hopes of attracting Kennedys vote.
David Crary is an Associated Press writer.
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SALT LAKE CITY President Trump announced he will dramatically reduce the size of a vast expanse of protected federal land in Utah on Monday, a rollback of some 2 million acres that is the largest in scale in the nations history.
The administration said it would shrink Bears Ears National Monument to 220,000 acres from 1.35 million and cut another area, Grand Staircase-Escalante to about half its current size. The move, a reversal of protections put in place by Democratic predecessors, comes as the administration pushes for fewer restrictions and more development on public lands.
Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington, Trump said, speaking at Utahs state Capitol. And guess what, theyre wrong.
The decision to reduce Bears Ears almost immediately triggered a legal battle that could alter the course of U.S. land conservation, possibly opening millions of protected public acres to oil and gas extraction, mining, logging and other commercial activities.
Earthjustice filed the first of several expected lawsuits Monday, calling the reduction of Grand Staircase-Escalante an abuse of the presidents power that jeopardizes a Shangri-la of dinosaur fossils. Native American leaders expect to file a lawsuit challenging the Bears Ears decision soon.
President Barack Obama designated Bears Ears in 2016, and President Bill Clinton set aside Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996. In both cases, Utah politicians said the actions were illegal abuses of a century-old law called the Antiquities Act.
Environmentalists and some native tribes say Trumps move will destroy the national heritage and threaten some 100,000 sites of archaeological importance tucked into the monuments desert landscapes. Conservative lawmakers and many Westerners argue that the move is the proper response to decades of federal overreach.
The announcement sparked immediate outcry from Trumps opponents.
Whats next, President Trump, said Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Grand Canyon?
In April, the president ordered the current Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, to review more than two dozen national monuments created since 1996, including six within California one straddling the state line with Oregon.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Julie Turkewitz is a New York Times writer.
President Trump on Monday fully endorsed Roy Moore, acting to back the Alabama Senate candidate after conversations with his former strategist Steve Bannon, who has advocated Moores candidacy.
Trumps tweets were his first all-out endorsement of Moore, who has been accused of making unwanted sexual advances on teenage girls. They came after Republican leaders began to back away in recent days from previous threats to expel Moore if he wins the Dec. 12 election.
Trump called Moore on Monday morning. Go get em, Roy! Trump told Moore, according to a description of the phone call that Moore posted on Twitter.
Just got off the phone with President Trump who offered his full support and said he needs a fighter to help him in the US Senate, Moore wrote.
Trumps strong support came after a couple of polls showed Moore starting to re-establish a lead over Democrat Doug Jones. A Washington Post poll released Saturday, however, showed the race near a dead heat.
Overall, polling by several organizations has shown the race close despite Alabamas heavy Republican tilt. In addition to the usual margin of error in polls, the outcome is even harder to predict because of the difficulty in knowing who will turn out to vote in a special election held a couple of weeks before Christmas that has been roiled by the accusations against Moore.
Some advisers to the president were concerned that if Trump didnt come out more forcefully in favor of Moore, the former Alabama state judge could lose, according to people familiar with the conversations who spoke anonymously.
Bannon recently talked with Trump about putting the presidents full weight behind Moore, according to a person close to the White House who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Last month, Trump pointed to Moores denials of the allegations against the candidate from several decades ago and spoke against voting for Democrat Doug Jones, but did not explicitly endorse Moore.
Trump is not campaigning for Moore directly, but is scheduled to hold a rally on Friday in the Florida Panhandle, which shares a media market with Mobile, Ala.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., have previously called on Moore to step aside, saying they believe the allegations. But in a sign that the GOP is warming to the candidate, McConnell told ABC News on Sunday that the decision, at least for now, should be left to Alabama voters.
Brian Bennett and Noah Bierman are Tribune Co. writers.
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This article first appeared on The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Columbia Sportswear reopened its flagship store in downtown Portland, one day after it closed amid an organized demonstration against the company during the beginning of the busy holiday shopping season.
Customers on Sunday began to trickle into the retail chain after 11 a.m., including some who had witnessed the throng of protesters gathered outside the store's Southwest Broadway entrance on Saturday.
Activists placed Columbia Sportswear in their crosshairs after its chief executive Tim Boyle said the company was considering closing its downtown office not the retail site because of safety concerns stemming from the city's growing homeless crisis.
Soon after, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, who counts Boyle among his top political donors, directed officials to ramp up enforcement of the city's "no-sit" policy.
The ordinance prohibits people from sitting or loitering along some commercial corridors in Portland, which critics claim target homeless women and men.
A sign that reads "This Sidewalk Is For Pedestrian Movement Only Please Keep Clear" is now posted directly in front of the Columbia Sportswear entrance.
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"It's an issue that befuddles everyone," said Bill Ferron, 61, as he stepped outside the apparel store Sunday.
He and his wife, who were visiting from the Seattle area, said they were surprised to encounter the roughly 50 demonstrators seated in front of the doors the day before.
"I wouldn't fault Columbia for taking the position it has," he said. "But I also think that the protesters are doing the right thing. Everybody needs to think harder about this problem."
Paul Pappas, 51, another Columbia Sportswear, said Portland police need more foot patrols downtown and not just signs telling people to avoid loitering.
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Pappas said he was a little frustrated that the city was so quick to respond to Boyle's outcry about public safety downtown when small businesses had for months voiced the same concerns.
"I guess when someone with a big bat says something, the city actually has to listen," Papas said.
Portland's Resistance co-founder Gregroy McKelvey, who helped organized Saturday's protest, said that demonstrators may return to the store next week.
Columbia Sportswear did not respond to a request for comment.
This article first appeared on The Oregonian/OregonLive.
MPI is drafting the strategy on attracting FDI in 2018-2023
In the context of global integration, Vietnam has to develop its economy on the basis of labor skills, technology and production chains.
After 30 years of foreign investment, 24,000 projects with total investment capital of $313 billion have been implemented in Vietnam. FDI accounts for 25 percent of total investment capital and makes up 20 percent of GDP.Vietnam, in an effort to attract FDI, has pursued an open policy, offering many incentives to investors.Analysts say the policy has problems and is no longer suited to the new circumstances. Vietnam needs a new strategy for the next development period.Most foreign investors told the World Bank that Vietnam has offered big investment incentives and has a cheap labor force.However, after a six-month study, Wim Douw, a senior expert on investment, trade and competition from the World Bank, found that Vietnams advantage of a cheap labor force is disappearing.In the context of global integration, Vietnam has to develop its economy on the basis of labor skills, technology and production chains.Commenting about the current investment situation, David Brown, WBs senior advisor on investment policy, said Vietnam relies on incentives to attract investors.Brown suggested that Vietnam needs to change its policy on attracting FDI based on low labor costs and preferential treatment, while local authorities need to stop running a race of offering incentives to lure investors. State management agencies need to remove the barriers to businesses to join the market.Nguyen Anh Tuan, former deputy director of FIA, also thinks that in the context of the fourth industrial revolution, Vietnam needs to have an FDI attraction policy which does not aim to get FDI at any cost.Meanwhile, Truong Thi Chi Binh, director of SIDEC, stressed that the next-generation FDI policy needs to set up policies that encourage foreign investors to build production networks in Vietnam.Large multinational conglomerates such as Samsung and Intel have their factories in Vietnam, but the factories only do simple assembling, Binh said.We need to think of solutions which can help retain them, encourage them to expand production chains in Vietnam and transfer technology, she said.Simon Bell from the World Bank noted that experts have emphasized the need to attract investment in projects which create high added value, but they do not show how to do it and which business fields should be the focus.Experts believe Vietnam should focus on high-tech/ICT, processing and manufacturing, supporting industries, tourism, and high-tech agriculture.
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PLEASANTON (BCN)
A Berkeley man was arrested early this morning at the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station on suspicion of battery on a BART train operator, police said.
At 12:19 a.m. police were called by someone who said a train operator was allegedly pushed by Eduardo Pazleja, 20, who allegedly would not get off the train.
Police said the train operator was not injured.
Pazleja was also arrested on suspicion of public intoxication.
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Police issued Pazleja an order that prevents him from riding BART for a while and took him to the county jail.
TheatreWorks Around the World in 80 Days could have been such perfect holiday fare. Its action is zany, its aesthetics whimsically theatrical, its myriad characters fruitful showcases for some of Bay Area theaters foremost clowns.
Yet there remains a niggling problem with the show, which is only its central conceit, its raison detre. The taciturn but eccentric Phileas Fogg (Jason Kuykendall), a rich white English guy, hopscotches across the globe on a wager, plying his countrys colonialism at every stop. Natives reluctant to drop everything and ferry him along to his next destination? Just wow them with wads of English pounds over and over again! And for director Robert Kelley, how to cast the nationalities of 40-odd characters, when the script calls for just five actors? Its fine; just have your cast play members of historically oppressed races that arent their own. Its a small price to pay for theatrical whimsy.
The shows worst instance of imperialism, however, concerns its love story. When Aouda (Ajna Jai), an Indian woman, is about to die by sati i.e., be thrown on her dead husbands funeral pyre Fogg decides to have his servant Passepartout (Tristan Cunningham) rescue her. Call it the 1872 equivalent of a privileged Western kids voluntourism to a developing country. Most other women in her society might still be oppressed, but Phileas became the white savior for the one woman with whom he happened to cross paths. You guys, he saved India! Hes so virtuous!
Knocked out upon her rescue, Aouda, coming to, gets to have a whole moment of concern about who these strangers are and why theyre whisking her away before she falls madly in love with Phileas. Just to have her erase her background as quickly and as thoroughly as possible, he has her nix her sari for the attire of his own land, which she agrees to as if its been her lifelong dream.
None of this is to gainsay the classic status of Jules Vernes 1873 novel a briskly told, undeniably exciting adventure. Nor is it to criticize Kelleys production of Mark Browns stage adaptation, which opened Saturday, Dec. 2, at Lucie Stern Theatre. It could hardly have been directed more precisely or more joyfully.
Puffs of locomotive steam, sea spray and costume changes all magically fly in from offstage to help whisk Phileas and his crew along. Cunninghams acrobatics could be a show all their own. In a panoply of roles, Ron Campbell creates accents that arent just guttural; he seems to have forged whole distinct continents in the bottom of the gutter. His scenes with Michael Gene Sullivans apoplectic Detective Fix are a master class in slapstick timing pinpointed to the millisecond, every gesture, down to the waggle of a finger, rigorously defined to further develop character and situation.
But in 2017, especially in the incredibly diverse South Bay, why do we need to tell a story that uses a white English guys perspective to exoticize the rest of the world? Classics absolutely have a place on our stages, as do shows that take place in less enlightened times, when imperialism, racism and sexism would have gone unquestioned.
But its not arts job to put forth an unfiltered historical primary source. Rather, we look to art to reimagine those older times and stories for us, sitting in the theater now. We want, we desperately need it to challenge prevailing narratives, not reinforce them to envision, chart and then push us along the journey that, today, would be just as mind-boggling and thrilling as Phileas circumnavigation once was.
Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicles theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak
Around the World in 80 Days: Adapted by Mark Brown from Jules Vernes novel. Directed by Robert Kelley. Through Dec. 31. Two hours, 10 minutes. $40-$100, subject to change. Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. (650) 463-1960. www.theatreworks.org
To see the trailer for the 1956 film version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjiCO8k6Jhg
It's time to pull out those fuzzy slippers.
The combination of a dry air mass, clear skies and long nights is bringing cool weather to the greater San Francisco Bay Area.
Temperatures have been chilly at morning and night in recent days, and they're expected to reach their lowest point of the week on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning when they dip into the 40s, 30s and even the 20s.
Sheltered inland valley areas, particularly the North Bay and Monterey County, will likely see the coldest temperatures.
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More for you 69 mph gust knocks Mount Diablo as windy conditions whip high elevations of Bay Area
The National Weather Service issued a freezing watch for the North Bay valleys on Wednesday night, and Brian Mejia, a forecaster with the Bay Area office expects the watch will turn to a warning, meaning the possibility of freezing temperatures is increasing.
Coastal areas won't get as cool with an onshore breeze keeping temperatures mild. San Francisco is forecast to see a low in the mid-40s on Tuesday night.
These will likely be the coldest temperatures the Bay Area has seen since February.
With clear, sunny skies during the day, afternoon temperatures will be mild in the 50s and 60s around the greater Bay Area. Night and daytime temperatures will gradually climb through the week and some inland areas will reach the 70s during the day by week's end.
National Weather Service Bay Area
The National Weather Service also issued a wind advisory for locations above 1,000 feet around the Bay Area for Monday through Tuesday at 10 a.m., cautioning people of 30 to 40 mile per hour gusts. Mount Diablo saw a 69-mile-per-hour gust on Monday morning.
There's no chance of rain in the forecast this week as a ridge of high pressure stretching from British Columbia to Southern California is keeping conditions dry along the entire West Coast.
Just days ago, the former strongman of Yemen turned against his most recent allies and publicly denounced them as a coup militia. They struck back on Monday, killing him and spreading a video of his lifeless body dumped unceremoniously in the back of a pickup truck.
The death of the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, brought to a grim end the career of a wily politician who combined charisma, duplicity and brute force to remain a giant in the politics of his impoverished Arabian country for decades.
Salehs death signaled a turning point in the countrys war by shattering the alliance between his loyalists and the rebels known as the Houthis, who had taken over the capital, prompting a punishing bombing campaign by Saudi Arabia and its allies.
That political fracturing could make it harder for the parties to negotiate an end to the conflict, analysts said, while renewed fighting in the capital, Sanaa, could worsen the humanitarian crisis afflicting Yemen, which the United Nations has called the worlds worst.
His being killed like this is going to deepen the conflict. I think the war could become more fierce. This just adds more layers of revenge, said April Longley Alley, a Yemen analyst with the International Crisis Group.
After dispatching his forces to brutalize protesters and surviving an assassination attempt, Saleh agreed to leave office in 2012 in an agreement negotiated by foreign powers who hoped he would slip into a quiet retirement abroad.
He did not, instead returning to Yemen to rally his followers and form an unlikely alliance with the Houthis, who stormed Sanaa in 2014 and later forced the internationally recognized government that had replaced Saleh into exile.
His death came at the hands of the same rebels he had used to facilitate his return to political relevance.
Saleh was killed in response to his latest political maneuver, turning against the Houthis and suggesting an accommodation with Saudi Arabia and its allies to end the war.
After years of collaborating against forces loyal to the Yemeni government, tensions between Salehs supporters and the Houthis erupted into deadly street clashes in Sanaa last week. On Saturday, Saleh condemned the Houthis in a televised speech and called for a new page with Saudi Arabia and its allies to stop the war.
The Houthis accused Saleh of treachery and said he had plotted secretly with Saudi Arabia to turn on them.
Shuaib Almosawa and Ben Hubbard are New York Times writers.
MADRID A Spanish judge on Monday ordered that four prominent members of the Catalan independence movement should remain in custody, including the No. 2 of the ousted regional government, who will campaign in a polarized regional election from a jail near Madrid.
The judge set 100,000-euro ($118,000) bail for the six other Catalan politicians who had been jailed in early November, and ordered their passports to be confiscated.
Meanwhile, Catalan ex-president Carles Puigdemont and four of his separatist allies learned that they will be judged on whether they can be extradited from Belgium to Spain on Dec. 14, exactly one week before the election.
The group is refusing to return to Spain to face rebellion, sedition and embezzlement charges that can be punished with decades in prison under the countrys criminal laws.
Puigdemonts defense lawyer insisted the Spanish charges werent punishable in Belgium and thus there were no grounds for extradition.
Whatever decision is made on Dec. 14, two appeals will be possible and a final ruling could come after the Dec. 21 election called by Spains central authorities, in which Puigdemont is leading his pro-independence partys campaign.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoys conservative Spanish government disbanded Puigdemonts Cabinet when it took control of Catalonia shortly after separatist regional lawmakers passed a declaration of independence in late October.
The early election is an attempt to find a democratic way out of the nations crisis. But the vote is shaping up as a plebiscite between those for and against independence, with polls predicting a close race between the two camps.
Aritz Parra and Raf Casert are Associated Press writers.
HONG KONG The United States and South Korea began large-scale combined air force drills Monday, with plans to carry out simulated strikes on North Korean nuclear and missile testing sites, military officials said.
Some 230 aircraft will take part in the drills, which will include some of the Pentagons most powerful warplanes, such as stealth F-35 Lightning II fighters and B1-B Lancer bombers. The exercises come just a week after North Korea tested a missile that analysts say has the capability of reaching much of the continental United States.
The drills were part of an annual exercise that had been planned before North Korea conducted the missile test. The exercise is aimed at enhancing the all-weather, day and night combined air power operation capabilities of South Korea and the U.S., South Koreas defense ministry said.
Such drills have drawn vigorous criticism from North Korea, whose state news media said Sunday that the latest exercises were pushing the Korean Peninsula to the brink of nuclear war. It warned that Pyongyang would seriously consider countermeasures against the drill and that the United States and South Korea would pay dearly for their provocations, the Norths Korean Central News Agency said.
Underscoring the tensions, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina urged the Pentagon on Sunday to move dependents of U.S. service members out of South Korea because of the threat of conflict. More than 28,000 U.S. troops are stationed there, many living with their families.
Its crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea, Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CBS News. I think its now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea.
The military exercises that began Monday involve 12,000 personnel and also include six F-22 Raptors, representing the largest deployment of the stealth fighters to South Korea, officials said.
The drills will be conducted under wartime scenarios that include attacks on mock North Korean nuclear and missile targets, South Koreas military said.
North Koreas missile launch last Tuesday came after more than a two-month lull in the countrys nuclear and missile testing, which raised some hopes that it might be extending an olive branch to ease the hair-trigger military tensions on the peninsula.
Gerry Mullany is a New York Times writer.
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The New Zealand government's operating deficit was slightly wider than expected in the first four months of the financial year as the cost of reinstating State Highway 1 between Picton and Christchurch was more expensive than anticipated and as customs and excise duties lagged behind forecast.
The operating balance before gains and losses (obegal) was a deficit of $308 million in the four months ended Oct. 31, compared to a forecast shortfall of $217 million and widening from $131 million a year earlier. Tax revenue rose 4.4 percent to $24.17 billion, although it was $69 million short of forecast as petrol and tobacco excise taxes fell from a year earlier and missed expectations. Meantime, core Crown spending rose 5.3 percent to $26.32 billion, some $233 million ahead of forecast with the cost of reinstating the South Island highway link one of the more expensive items.
"Obegal can fluctuate from month to month as the recognition of tax revenue does not happen uniformly throughout the year, while expenditure is fairly static on a monthly basis before peaking in June," chief government accountant Paul Helm said in a statement. "As a result, it is not unusual for obegal to be a small surplus or deficit in the first part of the financial year."
The Crown accounts are the last spanning the previous administration, with the new Labour-led government sworn in in late October. Finance Minister Grant Robertson will outline his priorities at next week's half-year economic and fiscal update and Budget policy statement. The government has been softening the public for some changes to capital spending, with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern yesterday saying there had been a lack of budgeting by the previous administration and that unbudgeted projects may be axed.
Today's accounts show the Crown's net debt position was smaller than expected at $61.37 billion, or 22.9 percent of gross domestic product, while the residual cash deficit of $2.02 billion was largely in line with expectations.
Total capital commitments stood at $13.59 billion as at Oct. 31, up from $12.08 billion a year earlier. Of that, $6.96 billion was earmarked for state highways and $3.14 billion for land and buildings.
The operating balance, which includes unrealised movements in the value of the Crown's investment portfolios and actuarial adjustments of its Accident Compensation Corp scheme, was a surplus of $2.08 billion, more than the $714 million expected, as investment gains offset a bigger actuarial loss in the period.
ACC's investment portfolio was valued at $40.4 billion as at Oct. 31, more than the $38.73 billion predicted, while the NZ Superannuation Fund was worth $37.87 billion, against a forecast of $35.17 billion. ACC's long-term liability was valued at $40.52 billion, more than the $38.76 billion projected.
(BusinessDesk)
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McConnell Dowell Constructors has posted a full-year loss in the face of lower sales and "material losses" at its North Otago Irrigation Co (NOIC) and Kawarau Falls Bridge contracts.
The loss was $20.6 million in the 12 months ended June 30 from a profit of $4.4 million a year earlier, the company's annual report shows. Sales fell 9.9 percent to $251 million.
Most of the deficit came from "material losses" at the two projects, according to a going concern note to its accounts that also highlighted a net working capital deficit of $16.1 million.
McConnell Dowell Constructors is the New Zealand and Pacific arm of a global construction firm that's ultimately owned by Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed Aveng. A spokeswoman for McConnell Dowell didn't respond to queries from BusinessDesk but Aveng says in its annual results that revenue at the New Zealand-based business fell as major projects were completed, such as the Waterview tunnel and its work on the Christchurch rebuild.
"Even though some projects exceeded tendered margins within the business, these performances were not sufficient to compensate for the adverse impacts of the underperformance on the NOIC and Kawarau Falls Bridge projects, resulting in an overall operating loss for this business," it said. One of these contracts has now been completed, and the other is scheduled for completion during 2018.
The irrigation project, which extends the scheme into the Kakanui Valley, suffered a "significant setback" when the pipeline failed during testing, the Otago Daily Times reported in December 2016, adding that former managing director Roger McRae had flown in to see the problems first hand and meet with shareholding farmers. In May this year, the company appointed Fraser Wyllie as managing director of its New Zealand and Pacific Islands operations.
The ODT reported in March this year that McConnell Dowell would absorb costs of drilling through harder-than-expected rock on the Kawarau Falls bridge replacement project near Queenstown.
The losses come in the same period that Fletcher Building fired its chief executive and recorded a $292 million loss at its construction division after failing to manage two major building contracts. Fletcher has said the construction industry faces capacity constraints which have driven up costs, squeezed margins and resulted in shortages of labour.
McConnell Dowell was set up in New Zealand engineers Malcolm McConnell and Jim Dowell in 1961 and within about a decade had expanded into Australia and Asia. It listed on the NZ stock exchange in the 1980s after the reverse takeover of rival construction firm Hawkins Holdings. Aveng acquired 100 percent of the business via a scheme of arrangement in 2003.
Aveng has been going through its own struggles in the face of broader losses. Chief executive Kobus Verster resigned with immediate effect in September, when the company reported its delayed full-year results, which showed a loss of 6.4 billion rand, partly reflecting 2.7 billion rand of impairments. Executive chair Eric Diack announced a strategic review of the business to turn around an unacceptable performance.
Aveng's McConnell Dowell business was restructured in 2016 with an overhaul of its management team and its focus for 2017 was to be to maintain focus on core competencies with "enhanced focus on project selection," according to the 2016 annual report. The business was restructured into four geographic business units Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, Southeast Asia and Built Environs "to reduce complexity and improve efficiency."
Aveng made a capital injection into its Australian operations and renegotiated its banking arrangements. It was more upbeat about New Zealand, though, noting that the market "continues to gain momentum, with government investment in large-scale transport and water projects, which will continue to fuel growth for the region and expansion of the construction industry."
(BusinessDesk)
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Canberrans accused of child sex offences may not get a fair trial under proposed changes to the Crimes Act in the wake of the Royal Commission, the ACT Bar Association has warned.
ACT Attorney-General Gordon Ramsay last week introduced a bill to make changes to key child sex offences, to help secure a surer path to successful prosecutions.
ACT Bar president Ken Archer is concerned changes to child sex offences could affect a defendants right to a fair trial. Credit:Karleen Minney
The changes create a new offence for engaging in a "sexual relationship" with a child, based on prosecutors specifying an overall period of the "relationship" and two cases of abuse within that period.
Mr Ramsay told the Assembly the changes would allow prosecutions consistent "with the ways in which victims remember abuse" and that its retrospective effect was "in recognition of the fact that delay is a typical, rather than a peculiar, feature of child sexual abuse".
Canberra track work rider and picnic jockey Samara Johnson has died in a car crash, while her partner and Thoroughbred Park trainer Garry Kirkup was seriously injured.
New South Wales Police confirmed the the 25-year-old was killed in the single-vehicle crash on Gundagai Road at Eurongilly, 41km west of Gundagai, just before 2.30pm Sunday.
A file photo of Garry Kirkup from 2004. Credit:Richard Briggs
It is understood the pair was returning from visiting Ms Johnson's family in Coolamon when the car left the road and hit a tree head-on, with Mr Kirkup at the wheel.
Mr Kirkup, 54, was airlifted to Canberra Hospital with severe abdominal injuries, before undergoing emergency surgery and remains in a critical condition.
A victim of domestic violence was nearly deported because an understaffed Canberra women's shelter almost missed the Immigration department's reporting deadlines.
Beryl Women's Shelter staff say there is a "significant risk" it may be forced to shut due to funding cuts and an increased demand for their services.
Manager of Beryl's Women Shelter, Robyn Martin. Credit:Jamila Toderas
Its staff wrote to an ACT parliamentary inquiry into government responses to domestic violence claiming the ACT Specialist Homelessness Services funding model is "inadequate and overwhelmed by demand".
The shelter is funded under the National Affordable Housing Agreement, which is matched by the ACT government.
Almost daily, newspapers in the US, Europe and China release eye-catching headlines about China's technological advances and economic prowess.
The accomplishments are real. But they're not necessarily evidence of Western failure or Chinese invincibility.
In touting such achievements, commentators too often overlook the structural factors that have shaped them.
Economists now recognise just how much of economic interaction is driven by such forces. For instance, the gravity model in international trade posits that the distance between countries impacts how much they trade. No matter how warm the ties between China and Bolivia, sheer distance will always limit their bilateral trade volumes. By contrast, despite frosty relations, large amounts of trade and investment flow between China and Taiwan owing to proximity and shared language.
Toyota will build the first megawatt-scale hydrogen fuel and renewable generation plant, setting a new energy benchmark that experts hope with pave the way for Australia's hydrogen industry.
Toyota North America will build the plant to support its operations at the Port of Long Beach, in the US, using agricultural waste to generate electricity, water and hydrogen.
By 2030, between 10 million and 15 million cars and half a million trucks will be hydrogen-powered globally. Credit:Peter DaSilva
Dubbed the Tri-Gen facility, the plant will generate around 2.35 megawatts of electricity and close to one tonne of hydrogen per day, providing enough daily power for more than 2300 homes and 1500 hydrogen-powered cars.
It will come online in 2020, and be used as proof of concept for large-scale hydrogen generation and renewable energy plants.
Anti-marriage equality members of the House of Representatives who ignore manager of Opposition Business, Tony Bourke's, call to refrain from nobbling the same sex marriage bill with unnecessary amendments do so at their own peril.
Mr Bourke rightly suggested it would be a tragedy if the same sort of shenanigans that saw last week's Senate debate degenerate into farce occurred in the House of Reps.
"We could very easily get to a situation where the Senate has approved marriage equality in one form, the House of Representatives has approved marriage equality in a different form, and we get to the end of the year and we still don't have the change," he said.
Such an outcome would not go down well with the voters who had spoken loudly and clearly on the issue.
Illustration: Andrew Dyson And we would have no idea of the depth and meaning of any of this if it weren't for the groundbreaking reporting by Fairfax Media and the ABC. Labor has been caught in a more flagrantly compromising position, but both sides of politics were in the process of being compromised. Huang Xiangmo and Bill Shorten. Credit:James Brickwood This recalls a quote attributed to one of communism's founders, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them."
The general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, has described the party's foreign influence activities as one of its three "magic weapons", a quote from founder Mao Zedong. Huang Xiangmo with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. In party argot, building foreign influence is called "united front work" and the party accordingly has a United Front Work Department. The other two "magic weapons" are activities that build the Chinese Communist Party, and military operations. Xiangmo Huang and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer
As New Zealand sinologist Anne-Marie Brady of Canterbury University has written: "The Chinese government's foreign influence activities have accelerated under Xi. The focus of media attention has been on Australia, but the People's Republic of China's attempts to guide, buy, or coerce political influence abroad are widespread." But why? It's not as if the Chinese Communist Party is trying to export revolution, as the Russian Communists did. Huang Xiangmo and Sam Dastyari at a press conference for the Chinese community in Sydney in July, 2016. What is China's party trying to achieve? "At its core," says an American expert on China's influence operations, Peter Mattis, "to survive, the party has to manipulate the ideas around it. "What questions are asked, what's on the spectrum of acceptable opinion, there's a consistent effort to shape that. It's in the party's DNA, it's what they do," says the former CIA counterespionage analyst.
Is it realistic for the party, which appears so powerful, to be so fearful of its own survival? "As long as Western liberal power is stronger internationally than it is - in the US, Australia, Japan, Europe, Taiwan - there's always the fear that power will sweep into China and remove the Chinese Communist Party," Mattis tells me on a visit to Australia for a conference with Australian officials. "It's not as if we're about to invade China. But if the capability is there, you have to distrust it - it's a straight realist view." So the party is constantly seeking to shape ideas and debates at home and abroad, as well as the "day to day issues, the constant discussion about building relationships with people who have any sort of a platform - celebrities, public intellectuals, journalists." Foreign business people who are permitted to succeed in China are used as "icebreakers" to make a path for party access to their home countries, as Mattis puts it.
The prime channel for influence operations abroad is the Chinese diaspora population living around the world. Western societies have done a poor job of protecting these Chinese communities, says Mattis, a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, who also happens to be a nephew of US Defence Secretary James Mattis. "In the US in the 19th century, there were Chinatowns that grew up in cities almost completely separate from the local populations. As long as trouble didn't spill over, [US authorities] were content to let whatever criminal gangs control them, not that different to the Italian or Irish communities. "Then the Kuomintang [or Chinese Nationalist Party] took over from the gangs and now the Chinese Communist Party has taken over. We are paying the consequences now of our lack of awareness." He says the US has a poor grasp of Chinese Communist Party operations inside America. For instance, as Chinese security officials go abroad in the so-called Foxhunt operation to pursue Chinese citizens accused of corruption, "there have been Chinese public security officials running around the US to deliver threats and tell people to go home, and they operate with impunity - some are known, and some aren't." He says that while the US demonstrates an impressive grasp of illegal Russian operatives and detects and arrests them from time to time, "I don't think any Western country is at a level of sophistication to be able to do that on the Chinese side." Partly it's been a "failure to take the Chinese seriously".
Mattis believes that Australia has a higher level of awareness than the US of Chinese Communist Party operations within its borders, partly thanks to the Sam Dastyari case. But he points out that Australia lacks vital legal protections - a ban on foreign political donations, for instance, and laws against agents seeking to influence Australian policy and laws on behalf of foreign political parties and governments. Attorney-General George Brandis is expected to table such a bill in the Parliament this week, and not a moment too soon. Huang is only one of the Chinese businessmen whom ASIO warned against, and influencing political parties is only one of his fields of operation. Loading If a foreign political party is going to hang us, the least we can do is refuse to sell them the rope.
Why do you think people hate on banks so much?
My hypothesis is the reasons go a lot deeper than just life insurance and financial planning scandals.
People need banks. In an individual sense we need them to keep our money safe and loan us money for big purchases. And in a societal sense, as the GFC proved, we need a strong and stable banking system.
When something crosses the line from being a "want" into a "need" it changes the whole psychology of the consumer. If you need something, it makes you vulnerable, and vulnerability implies a certain powerlessness in the transaction. Consumers have the power of choice, but when you're dealing with four main banks that are all very similar, that's not much real power.
White Ribbon has yet another black mark against its name. Fairfax's Lisa Visentin on Saturday revealed a plan by the men's organisation to accept money from a publican if the authorities let him install more poker machines in his venue. White Ribbon only changed its mind on the money when Visentin called.
The idea that White Ribbon could possibly accept money from the proceeds of gambling must be counter to the values of the organisation. Financial stress is a key indicator of family violence and there is extensive research that shows the relationship between poker machines and family violence. Francis Markham's groundbreaking study shows areas with more than seven poker machines per 1000 adults have, after controlling for all other factors, 20 per cent more family violence incidents including verbal abuse and 30 per cent more family violence assaults.
Poker machines are a danger to public health and they are particularly dangerous to women 80 per cent of the family violence incidents in his data set were directed towards women. Fairfield Hotel, the proposed site of these new machines, would only be adding to an already saturated market. As at July 2017, Fairfield had 3841 machines, one machine per 43 people almost double the state average of one machine per 81 people.
This governance implosion comes two years after scrutiny of White Ribbon's ambassador program. It was forced to distance itself from psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed for his remarks about family violence (the short version of what he said is that men are violent because women are increasingly empowered). Ahmed stepped down from the role (he was not sacked by White Ribbon). Other ambassadors have been dumped after incidents of family violence were uncovered. From 2200 ambassadors on its site in 2015, now fewer than 100 men are listed. Prominent men on the list include Tasmanian former federal politician Andrew Nikolic.
The future of a controversial Queensland mega-mine has suffered another setback with project funding from China looking increasingly unlikely.
The Greens have heralded the end of the project after a second Chinese bank ruled out providing any funding for the Adani Carmichael coal mine in Queensland's Galilee Basin.
Anti-Adani coal mine protesters during the recent Queensland election.. Credit:AAP
"Any financier with any sense doesn't want Adani," Greens senator Andrew Bartlett told reporters in Canberra on Monday.
"It's time for Adani to give it up, save their money and for the politicians of Queensland to focus on the issues that will deliver genuine jobs for regional Queensland."
Constitutional expert George Williams says Katy Gallagher could survive a challenge to her eligibility to sit in Parliament, after it was revealed the Labor frontbencher was a dual citizen until more than a month after the 2016 election.
Legal advice to the former ACT chief minister from British and Australian barristers says she took every reasonable step to renounce citizenship by descent from her English-born father Charles Gallagher before nominating for the July 2 poll, and that she meets the standard set by the High Court in recent section 44 cases.
But documents provided to the Senate show the Labor frontbencher was "at the date of her nomination for the 2016 election, a British citizen by descent" and that her moves to renounce in April 2016 took until August 16 to be completed by the UK Home Office.
Amid reports she could have received Ecuadorian citizenship through her mother, Senator Gallagher gave a speech to Parliament on September 4, saying she had renounced any entitlement to citizenship through her father, who was born in the English city of Stoke-on-Trent, "out of an abundance of caution".
NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro has stood by his calls for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to resign, admitting his relationship with the PM "is broken".
Speaking at a road safety campaign launch in Queanbeyan on Monday, Mr Barilaro said he would not resign and he was a "brawler" who wore his heart on his sleeve.
Strong words: NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro says the PM should resign. Credit:Kate Geraghty
"I can't hide from it. My relationship with the Prime Minister is a broken relationship," Mr Barilaro said.
"I made those comments and I own those comments and it's something that I now will have to work through.
Looking up to the public gallery from his seat in the House of Representatives, Liberal MP Tim Wilson neared the end of his speech and paused.
"There's only one thing left to do," he said, choking up slightly. "Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?"
It was, in all likelihood, the first marriage proposal to be made on the floor of Parliament. And the answer came back fast and loud: "Yes."
The word has been heard ad nauseam in recent weeks, but rarely in a context so personal. The Melbourne pair have considered themselves fiances for years, and now, as same-sex marriage enters the final stretch of parliamentary debate, their long-awaited wedding day finally nears.
As Tim Wilson made his first speech in Parliament on the final day of winter last year, he looked up toward the public gallery where his fiance, Ryan Bolger, watched on with pride.
He spoke of the sacrifices they had made for his career, and of the rings attached to their left hands. "They are the answer to a question we still cannot ask," he told the chamber.
Fifteen months later, standing in the very same spot in the House of Representatives on Monday, he asked the question. "Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?"
The answer came back fast and loud: "Yes."
Former Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs has apologised for the handling of the Queensland University of Technology case in which university students were taken to court under section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act over Facebook posts about Indigenous-only computer labs.
But Professor Triggs praised the Commission's handling of the case as "excellent" despite admitting that one of the reasons the HRC never told the students accused of wrongdoing that they were being investigated for more than a year was because the commission didn't have their contact details. She conceded this was an error but blamed QUT for the mistake.
In May 2013, Cindy Prior, an Indigenous woman and administrative officer at the campus, told several QUT students to leave an Indigenous-only lab. The next day, posts on Facebook said: "Just got kicked out of the unsigned Indigenous computer room. QUT stopping segregation with segregation?" and "I wonder where the white supremacist computer lab is."
It was only in 2015 that the students learnt of the legal action.
As an institution, Parliament struggles almost as much with agreement as it does with division.
So much was clear as the House of Representatives embarked, somewhat quietly, on its historic journey towards marriage equality on Monday.
Initially at least, many MPs stayed away. Even the public galleries were empty. Journalists were elsewhere.
The "yes" voting Malcolm Turnbull was there though along with a smattering of Coalition figures including all the key lower house campaigners for change: Warren Entsch, Trevor Evans, Tim Wilson, Trent Zimmerman, and the Nationals' cabinet minister, Darren Chester.
The NSW government has bowed to pressure and will build a new primary school in Green Square, which is expected to become Sydney's most densely populated suburb by 2030.
The government will sign a memorandum of understanding with the City of Sydney on Tuesday at the former South Sydney hospital site.
A new school will be built to cope with the apartment boom at Green Square. Credit:Peter Rae
The decision follows ongoing criticism from community leaders including Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore, developers and community groups over the lack of plans for a new school in the rapidly-growing suburb, which is surrounded by schools that are already at or over enrolment capacity.
The City of Sydney has one of the highest projected rises in school-aged residents of 41 per cent over the next 10 years, and school enrolments have already been growing by more than 13 per cent since 2012.
The commission held (after the fact) that such involvement was of a nature requiring permission, even though the lawyer had not acted as an advocate. "The maxim of statutory interpretation that what is prohibited directly cannot be done indirectly," the full bench observed, "would tell against an overly narrow interpretation [of the relevant section] ... which permits its statutory purpose to be defeated or circumvented."
The Woolworths case encouraged commissioner Ian Cambridge, who, in late November, denied Australia Post subsidiary Startrack permission to be legally represented. Startrack's external lawyers had submitted that the complex circumstances of the case made representation reasonable and, if the application was denied, the lawyers would in any event provide help via a McKenzie friend (a common-law rule that lets unrepresented litigants receive in-court aid from a "friend", whether legally qualified or not). Cambridge rejected both submissions, holding that representation would give rise to unnecessary formality contrary to the statutory scheme's objectives, and that the Woolworths decision prevented any other form of legal help being given without permission.
Lawyers at the big end of town roundly criticised these developments, perhaps concerned about what they might mean for their employment practices. Partners variously told the Financial Review that the Woolworths decision was "outrageous", "unfair" and "ridiculous". Law Council president Fiona McLeod, SC, even suggested the judgment "raises serious access-to-justice concerns".
The other strand of jurisprudence, which at a policy level seems entirely inconsistent with the first, enabled the Australian Government Solicitor to appear for the federal government as of right i.e. without requiring permission before the Fair Work Commission. The AGS describes itself as "one of Australia's largest national legal services providers, with offices in every capital city and approximately 320 lawyers".
Until recently, it was common practice for AGS lawyers to seek permission to appear. However, earlier this year, lawyers at the Attorney-General's Department offshoot took the contrary view that, because they are government employees, they satisfy the in-house exception in the Fair Work Act. This interpretation of the AGS's position was upheld in Gibbens v Commonwealth of Australia.
Using labour-hire firms to provide staff to do work in the public service that otherwise would be done by public servants offends the spirit and quite possibly the letter of section 67 of the constitution and related laws. No doubt labour-hire firms are diligent in recruiting staff; however, they cannot be expected to apply the kind of recruitment assessments used in the public service that exist to serve public interest tests not relevant to the private sector. It's not good enough for a Centrelink spokesman to try to justify the use of labour-hire firms by saying: "The department has engaged contractors for many years for specialist services and to support day-to-day operations to help fill short-term requirements for finite periods." All the requirements the spokesman mentions can be readily satisfied by employment under the Public Service Act. Therefore, the Centrelink gift in the stocking must also be discarded. Treasury chief John Fraser strongly supports public service decentralisation ... to the CBDs of Sydney and Melbourne. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Now what's this down at the stocking's heel, as it were? It's a brown envelope that seems to contain some coins. No hang on, it's the Treasury, which appears to have caught a dose of Joyce-Nash syndrome, a disease named after the public service decentralisation policies of the $40,000 man, Barnaby Joyce, and his former deputy, Fiona Nash. Yes, the Treasury is also moving staff out of Canberra, although not into the bush. Thus, according to its latest report, staff in Canberra were reduced by about 45, 22 of whom went to Sydney, seven to Melbourne and one to Perth. What's going on? The Treasury's secretary, John Fraser, says these moves are intended to "foster closer ties with local stakeholders and attract talent from the private sector" allowing "us to engage more effectively with the private sector, other agencies based outside Canberra and people interested in the development of policy". It's to be hoped thinking of this calibre is not affecting the Treasury's advice to the government on economic policy. Indeed, it would be more reassuring if Fraser were to show a keener appreciation of the fact that, as amorphous as it may be, the Treasury's key "stakeholders" are its ministers and the government and, through them, all citizens. There's nothing wrong with wanting to "engage more effectively with the private sector" but bunging 30 more people into Sydney and Melbourne gives the impression that those in the private sector in these centres may get the inside running. It would be interesting to know, for example, how much time Treasury staff in the two major cities have spent rubbing shoulders with those from the business community compared to those from charitable and voluntary institutions and unions. And what about "stakeholders" in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin and Perth (assuming that one person in Western Australia can't do much) and, dare it be said, "rural and regional" Australia?
The Treasury's advice to governments should be based on a broad appreciation of the public interest as it affects all citizens. That cause is unlikely to be much advanced by having 70 people in Sydney and Melbourne where they can be duchessed by the self-interests that thrive there. In assessing public sentiment over and above that provided by ministers, the government and the parliament, the Treasury should, as much as possible, give all parts of the community equal chances to blow into its ears and not privilege those in some cities who already have stronger voices than most others. Sorry, Comrade Howard, the real problem is not 'rank socialism', it's 'rank capitalism'. Ross Gittins wrote recently that the Treasury's influence is on the wane. In particular, he said it "isn't up to speed on microeconomic reform" in health, education and infrastructure. It's hard to know if this is true but, if it is, the Treasury may be better off putting its eggs in these baskets rather than engaging more with elements of the private sector whose views on such matters as company tax and the bank levy are only too lamentably obvious. As for luring staff into the Treasury's nest, it's often been difficult to attract people from Sydney and Melbourne to Canberra. However, it's a step too far to accommodate those who fail to appreciate Canberra's charms by locating Treasury positions in the two major cities, where they're separated from most of their policy colleagues in the national capital. Moreover, attracting top-notch people to senior positions in Sydney and Melbourne will always be tough at pay rates the Treasury can afford under the Commonwealth's crazy remuneration policy. So far as graduate recruitment is concerned, the Treasury had over 1000 applicants last year for 35 vacancies not much of a problem there, it would seem. So, all up, the Treasury can't be allowed to remain in the Christmas stocking this year. Sorry. That leaves only two items therein.
The first is a well-wrapped packet (possibly Janette's work) from former prime minister John Howard. It's addressed to those Coalition MPs keen for a royal commission on the banks. It contains a message in Britannic Bold font reproducing Howard's recent allegation that such an inquiry would be "rank socialism". Sorry, comrade, your gift must also be turfed out because, in this case, the real problem is not "rank socialism", it's "rank capitalism". Too bad. That leaves only one item in the stocking: a small volume in the Wit and Wisdom of Secretaries of Commonwealth Departments series. It's from Mike Pezzullo, pro tem the immigration and Border Force supremo. This work would make an excellent Christmas beach book, especially if it could be waterproofed. Thus, when you're chased from the surf by marauding schools of hammerhead sharks, and the grandchildren who've been entrusted to your care have retired to the sand dunes for a few cigarettes, you could turn to Pezzullo, whose engaging bon mots can be taken as either wit, wisdom or a happy combination of both, according to your disposition. That is to say, you can laugh and be edified simultaneously. Here are a handful of randomly selected gems that should have you itching for more: "... global contract hitmen will soon have their own apps."
"... can Leviathan protect the Shire once the Shire is connected to the internet?" (The national broadband network may have more to answer for than is generally imagined.)
"You can never stop thinking about how to improve your security settings ..."
When a youngster, Pezzullo says he "was always pouring over atlases and globes". (The text does not make clear just what he was pouring over them.)
"... I had a very boring teenage period ..."
"In the space between the force of history on the one hand and the realm of choice ... lies strategy."
" ... in the end, rules have to be enforced." Gripping stuff and the only remaining gift in the stocking for this year; no small consolation though. Let's add a dozen copies. For next year, the steps needed to get replacements for labour hire and the Treasury back into the stocking are obvious enough, and it's to be hoped Pezzullo will still be around. Fixing the abject failure of public service remuneration policy is not difficult, although the method may be worth spelling out.
A coroner has recommended the introduction of mandatory carbon monoxide alarms in all boats and vehicles with sealable cabins after a "talented and experienced" sailor died after succumbing to fumes from a gas stove he had been using for warmth.
Naval architect Nicholas Banfield, 23, had picked up his girlfriend at Glebe and sailed to Middle Harbour for a romantic meal moored off Balmoral Beach on July 1, 2016.
After a feed of nachos and one alcoholic drink, the couple retired into the cabin of his 8.4-metre timber vessel Aquarius.
And with a winter chill in the air, Mr Banfield and NL, who can not be identified, sealed the hatches and turned on the LPG stove to keep the cabin warm.
The NSW Coroner has delivered an open finding into the death of Matthew Leveson.
Mr Leveson, 20, was last seen in the early hours of September 23, 2007, when he left an inner Sydney nightclub with his boyfriend Michael Atkins.
Mr Atkins, 54, continued to claim as recently as last year that his former lover was alive and could be living in Thailand.
However, he then led police to Matthew's skeletal remains in an unmarked grave in the Royal National Park in May 2017.
A Sydney woman who fatally stabbed her cousin after a violent and prolonged argument over her Mercedes has been found guilty of manslaughter.
Katherine Abdallah, 37, submitted she had acted in self-defence when she killed Suzie Sarkis, 21, at her Brighton-le-Sands townhouse on February 9, 2013.
Katherine Abdallah, rear, is escorted to a prison vehicle after being found guilty of manslaughter. Credit:AAP
However, after almost five days of deliberations, a NSW Supreme Court jury on Monday found Abdallah guilty of manslaughter, before her bail was revoked and the case put over to December 13.
During the trial, the jury heard that Abdallah was subjected to "gratuitous, prolonged and relentless violence" from her cousin before she fatally stabbed Ms Sarkis in self-defence.
A man who allegedly attempted to abduct a young girl from Paddy's Markets in Sydney has been arrested after he was earlier seen taking an interest in two other children.
NSW Police say the 41-year-old man attended the popular markets in Haymarket on Sunday afternoon and was observed watching a small child.
Police said the man was arrested after he was seen taking an interest in a number of children at Paddy's Market. Credit:Daniel Munoz
He then approached a second child, an 18-month-old girl, before the toddler's parents noticed and picked her up.
The man was then seen ushering a four or five-year-old girl out on to Hay Street before witnesses intervened and the 41-year-old was detained.
Officers from Queensland's corruption watchdog have executed a search warrant on Logan City Council's headquarters south of Brisbane.
Councillor Darren Power said a Crime and Corruption Commission officer interrupted a council budget meeting on Monday about 1pm and told the 11 councillors present he had a search warrant.
We were able to get a copy of the warrant up on the board, we had it on the projector," he said.
There were eight grounds, but 45 areas they were actually looking at."
The legal team for the man accused of murdering Maureen Boyce has moved to discredit the dead Brisbane socialite and her husband.
New Zealand-based doctor Thomas Chris Lang is on trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court after he pleaded not guilty to fatally stabbing the 68-year-old in her Kangaroo Point sub-penthouse in October 2015.
Maureen Boyce was found dead in her Kangaroo Point sub-penthouse in 2015.
Defence barrister Tony Glynn QC started delivering his closing argument to the jury on Monday.
He read a series of messages between Lang and Ms Boyce that showed she wanted him to come and visit her in Australia.
Plane Pal's sales dropped by 70 per cent but Cardone was not prepared to give up without a fight and started lobbying the airlines. The Legs Up Plane Hammock in use. "It actually could have ruined the business but I was not willing to let it break us," she says. "I knew if the correct information could be put out there the message would get through. It was our customers who saved us, they shared their photos and videos and they campaigned the airlines for us. As a business owner there is no better compliment." Overturning the ban A spokesperson for Virgin Australia told Fairfax Media the airline's turnaround came after extensive safety testing of the products.
The Legs Up Plane Hammock has not been approved by Qantas or Virgin. "We made this change because we believe the comfort of all of our guests is important, and provided these products met our safety requirements and are used appropriately by our guests on our flights then we're happy to welcome them on board," the spokesperson says. The devices are only permitted to be used when sitting in a window seat or in the middle seat of the centre block and must be included as part of Virgin's carry-on baggage allocation. They are not permitted to be used in exit rows. Jenny Cayzer is the founder of the Legs Up Plane Hammock Sales are back on track for Cardone who has grown the business from a "one man band" to a team of six and expects Plane Pal to turn over $1 million by the end of the year.
Desperate parents Jenny Cayzer, the founder of the Legs Up Plane Hammock, still hasn't got approval for her sleep device from Virgin. Cayzer launched her business in February last year after having the device, which hangs off the back of airline seats, assessed by a CASA approved aviation engineer. "Our product was so new that the airlines were sort of taken unawares," she says. "Some airlines have embraced it and other airlines have not. That's up to them and I think eventually competition and awareness will drive them to have another look." Cayzer says there is a real need for products such as the Legs Up Plane Hammock.
"It's not just you the parent, it's the passengers around, you think 'My gosh everyone is looking at me'," she says. "This can really solve a big problem for small children." Cayzer says she hopes Virgin and Qantas will change their tune. "[Qantas] wouldn't even look at our new prototype which I think for a big company is damning," she says. "In the meantime other airlines are accepting them. Singapore Airlines accepts the product and gives guidance on where to sit, Emirates says it won't accept the devices on its website but on a day-to-day basis people will say 'I won't wake that sleeping child'." Despite the ban The Legs Up Plane Hammock has hit $1 million turnover and Cayzer hopes her new prototype will be approved by the Australian airlines.
Amazon has officially launched its Australian online store, offering everything from pyjamas to power tools, and from video games to vinyl records. While there are some good deals to be had, however, the selection is far from comprehensive.
It should come as no surprise that the Amazon store's offering isn't as robust here as it is elsewhere. You have products stocked and sold by Amazon itself, and then you have items stocked by other "Marketplace" sellers. The result in many categories is a handful of big brands at competitive prices from Amazon, and then a pretty strange collection of other stuff, often at no discount compared to other retailers.
For example if you look at shoes, there's a decent selection of Crocs, New Balance and Blundstones offered by Amazon. IFL Store has a wide range of Vans. But if you want Nike shoes, there is a total of one option, sold by GunyahOz Trading, which doesn't specify what size it is.
Other categories fare better. For example the Baby section has a big collection from the adorable kids brand Skip Hop, and they're all cheaper than you'd find at Toys R Us or Baby Bunting. There's also a banner ad on the Amazon homepage and app promoting a deal on Huggies: a "one-month supply" for $65 (this is 216 newborn nappies, but the count goes down as the nappies get bigger). This is cheaper than you'd find at Woolies, which offers boxes with a little less than half the number of nappies for $33.
Melbourne Express: Tuesday, December 5, 2017
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A man walks through flood water in Euroa. Credit:Brendan McCarthy "He'd been explaining in quite strong language to make everyone aware of the gravity of the threat. If you're going to introduce a scale of that nature, you're going to get a high number." Dr Tupper said the bureau's prediction of record rainfall had been correct but the location had changed slightly as the weather passed. A Maserati was flooded after the driver tried to navigate a flooded underpass in Seddon on Saturday Credit:Sarah Schubert/Facebook Ultimately, more than 200mm of rain fell in Kinglake, not in Melbourne where forecasters had initially predicted.
"In every event, there's a risk of under-warning and a risk of over-warning," Dr Tupper said. "We know when we went out so hard it caused a lot of disruption. People in affected areas also prepared and that was great." Mr Lapsley later told radio station 3AW the bureau needed to reassess its messaging processes for future weather events. "I think we've got some work to do [with the bureau]," he said. Mr Lapsley suggested the bureau use "spot weather warnings" with more up-to-date information on localised and changing weather conditions.
Mr Williams was the main spokesman for the bureau, but he was not the only forecaster or official to make extreme warnings. Senior forecaster Richard Carlyon said the storm was likely to be unprecedented in intensity. He said the bureau did not normally give severe weather warnings four days in advance, but had made an exception because of the level of concern last week. Mr Lapsley also made strong warnings, urging Victorians to stay indoors on Friday. "Stay at home indoors if you can, don't be outside," he said.
"Plan Friday, plan Friday afternoon in particular, know where you will be and know what you need to do for your own safety." The concern led Premier Daniel Andrews to go as far as stopping Question Time in Parliament on Thursday to warn Victorians about the threat to public safety. "This is a very serious matter and one that will pose a very severe challenge to communities right across the state and will be a direct challenge to public safety," Mr Andrews said. But Melbourne was spared the brunt of the storm, with 107 millimetres of a predicted 200 millimetres recorded in suburbs Kew, Doncaster and Blackburn. Dr Tupper said the bureau reviewed its own performance after every weather event, in terms of the accuracy of predictions and what could be done better.
He said major weather events never developed exactly as predicted but the forecasts were becoming much more accurate. "When we see a major event developing and we've got the ability to talk about it four days out ... we're always going to back our professional judgement," he said. "It's never going to be exactly right ... it's always better to speak about it." Coming up with an accurate weather prediction up to four days in advance of a storm was always difficult, he said, and not unlike forecasting the location and speed of a tropical cyclone, where forecasts can often change. "The way that this has panned out is essentially very similar to what we were predicting," he said.
"I guess the good news is, from the Melbourne perspective in particular and those in western Victoria, the event hasn't affected that area as much. "But, despite all the disruption of preparation - we know that events have been cancelled and people have put in a lot of work - it was certainly the kind of event worth preparing for. "So, if we had our time again, yes, we would put out an event with similar language to that." Melbourne's CBD received 72 millimetres over the three day period, while Ferny Creek, in the south-east, copped 154 millimetres. Coburg, in Melbourne's north, was hit with 127 millimetres.
Regional towns of Myrtleford and Euroa, however, were inundated, with some homes and a caravan park damaged. Euroa received 159 millimetres, while Rosewhite, in the state's north-eat and the closest catchment to Myrtleford, had 142 millimetres. The bureau said the worst of the weather had passed on Monday. "In most areas the worst is well and truly over," bureau forecaster Dean Stewart said. A number of moderate flood warnings remain in place including for the Yarra, Ovens and King rivers.
A loving Melbourne mother who was "at the end of her tether" when she tried to kill herself and her disabled adult son has been spared jail.
Yvette Nichol, 63, had been the primary carer for her autistic and epileptic son Brett, 34, for all his life until she tried to kill him and herself at their Eltham North home on May 27.
The court heard Yvette Nichol (left) was a loving mother who reached the end of her tether as sole carer of her disabled son. Credit:Mal Fairclough
Brett suffers harrowing night terrors, which had been getting more frequent and severe in the years leading up to the incident.
One day, after writing apologetic letters to her loved ones, she attempted to end both their lives.
A man accused of murdering a mother of three is alleged to have asked his former partner to provide an alibi for the day the woman was attacked in her home.
Police allege Scott Alan Murdoch asked Sarah Whyte to lie for him to investigators in the weeks after Kylie Blackwood was repeatedly stabbed in her Pakenham home, on August 1, 2013.
Kylie Blackwood was found dead in her Pakenham home.
"I need to ask you something but you can't go blabbering around with your big mouth," Mr Murdoch is alleged to have said to Ms Whyte, according to a prosecution summary released by Melbourne Magistrates Court on Monday.
When Ms Whyte asked Mr Murdoch if he murdered Ms Blackwood, he said: "No, but I need you to be an alibi for that day. I've been questioned for that."
Two young girls who filmed themselves hitting a dog in the face with a rubber thong say they are "extremely remorseful, ashamed and embarrassed" after an RSPCA WA inspector tracked them down via a video the pair posted on social media.
The girls reportedly filmed the video at a home in Quinns Rocks last week.
It was determined that it would not be in the dog's best interest to remove it from its home at this stage.
The video shows a young girl laughing as she hits the dog repeatedly in the face with a rubber thong, while her friend films.
RSPCA WA chief executive David van Ooran put out a call for information regarding the case, and the organisation said "dozens" of people reported the video to the agency for animal cruelty.
US President Donald Trump opened himself up to obstruction of justice claims on Saturday by revealing he knew his former national security adviser lied to the FBI.
In a tweet playing down the Russian links controversy, Trump said he knew Michael Flynn lied to agents before he left the administration in February.
US President Donald Trump has opened himself up to obstruction of justice claims.
But the comment was seized upon immediately because Trump allegedly encouraged the FBI to drop an investigation into Flynn the same month.
Knowing Flynn had lied to the FBI - a criminal offence - but still telling investigators to stop their case would amount to obstruction of justice, critics said.
Homs, Syria: As the war to recapture Syria from Islamic State moves inexorably closer to completion, the scars left behind in Syria's cities are prompting serious questions about who will rebuild.
Jets believed to be Syrian and Russian have struck heavily crowded residential areas in a besieged rebel enclave near Damascus, killing at least 27 people and injuring dozens in the third week of a stepped-up assault, residents, aid workers and a war monitor say.
Damage from airstrikes hit in Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, Syria in November. Credit:AP
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, said the casualties on Sunday were the biggest daily death toll since the stepped-up strikes began 20 days ago. The monitor said nearly 200 civilians were killed in strikes and shelling during that period.
Meanwhile, in the city of Homs, a once well-to-do suburb of wide streets and high-rise apartments is a ghost of its former self.
Yemen's Houthi rebels said they killed their ally and former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, as their alliance that has fought a Saudi-led coalition for nearly three years collapsed.
The Houthis announced Saleh's killing in a statement on Monday, after the al-Mithaq newspaper affiliated with Saleh earlier denied rumours of his death.
In this photo from January, tribesmen loyal to Houthi rebels chant slogans during a gathering aimed at mobilising more fighters into battlefronts to fight pro-government forces, in Sanaa, Yemen. Credit:AP
Fighting between Saleh's forces and Houthi rebels backed by Iran escalated over the weekend, with the thud of tank artillery and other heavy weapons piercing the air. Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam claimed progress, saying fighters had wrested control of homes belonging to Saleh's son, Ahmed, and nephew Tarik, the commander of the former president's forces.
For the past two years, Saudi Arabia's southern neighbour has been divided into two camps, with the government of the ousted Saudi-backed elected president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, encamped in Aden and the Iran-backed Houthis in control of Sana'a and parts of the north. The Saudi-led coalition that formed in 2015 to try to reinstate Hadi has devastated swaths of the country with airstrikes, and al-Qaeda militants have exploited the chaos to expand their foothold in the Arabian Peninsula.
Northern Irish unionists have reportedly scuppered a Brexit 'divorce deal' that was about to be agreed between Britain and the EU, because they believed it threatened the economic and political integrity of the UK.
The deal is tantalisingly close but reports of last-minute concessions by prime minister Theresa May infuriated the DUP who are propping up her minority government in Westminster.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar Credit:AP
Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar said he had been told the deal would be done on Monday, but the UK appeared to have changed its mind after DUP leader Arlene Foster told May she would not support such a deal.
The draft deal was said to promise there would be no difference in regulations between Northern Ireland and the Republic after Brexit, in order to avoid customs checkpoints which could see a return to border tensions.
Valletta: Maltese police have arrested 10 suspects in the murder of an anti-corruption blogger, the country's prime minister said on Monday.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, 53, was killed almost two months ago after her car was blown up as she drove away from her house in northern Malta.
Political blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed when her car was blown up. Credit:AP
All of the suspects are Maltese nationals and most have a criminal record, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said, without providing any further details. The police have 48 hours to question the suspects, arraign them or release them.
Mr Muscat initially announced eight arrests at a press conference, then later said on Twitter that two more had been apprehended.
President Donald Trump has endorsed Alabama Republican Roy Moore in a US Senate special election, despite allegations from multiple women who accused the former state Supreme Court judge of sexual misconduct.
The move prompted the Republican National Committee and a pro-Trump fundraising body to change their minds and begin directing funding his way, boosting a candidate who had been largely cut off by his party.
Senate Republican leaders remained critical of Moore on Monday, warning that the former judge is likely to face an immediate ethics probe if he is elected next week. But the America First Action super PAC, following Trump's lead, announced that it would spent $1.1 million to elect Moore, while the RNC said it was returning to the field after pulling out in mid-November.
Moore has been accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward teenage girls including a 14 year old when he was in his 30s.
SIMPSON BAY:--- His Majesty King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima arrived here on Thursday, November 30th, 2017 aboard a Falcon 7X aircraft. The Royal couple landed at 12:32pm at the Princess Juliana International Airport (SXM).
The Dutch Royals arrived from Saba on Saturday, December 2, 2017 after participating in the Saba Day celebrations. They were greeted on the tarmac by His Excellency Governor Eugene Holiday, his spouse Marie Louise, the Honorable Prime Minister Rafael Boasman and the SXM Airport COO and Acting CEO, Michel Hyman.
Hyman said he was pleased that everything went smoothly with the Dutch Royal visit. He commended his team and the Police authority for making the whole operation during their arrival and departure seamless.
The Royal visit was to show support for the islands, following a catastrophic hurricane season. The visit was also meant to underline their commitment to the reconstruction of the islands and facilitate related projects.
His Majesty King Willem-Alexander had previously visited St. Maarten on September 11, 2017, to assess the islands damages in the aftermath of Category 5 Hurricane Irma which struck the island on September 6, 2017. The Kings first guided tour at the time was of the devastated Princess Juliana International Airport.
The royal visit came to an end on December 2, 2017 when the King and Queen departed SXM Airport at 8:00pm to return to the Netherlands.
PJIAE Press Release
PHILIPSBURG:--- Today Dec 3rd, the Government of St. Maarten in collaboration with the St. Maarten United Ministerial Foundation (SMUMF), Christian Council (CC) successfully hosted and celebrated the annual Thanksgiving Service and Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony heralding the end of the Hurricane Season 2017. His Excellency Governor E.B. Holiday and Mrs. Holiday, Chairlady of Parliament S. Wescott-Williams, Honorable Prime Minister R. Boasman, 1st Vice President of the Collectivite Mdme. Valerie Damaseau, Minister S. Jacobs, along with several other Members of Parliament, High Councils of State, Deputy Governor Mr. and Mrs. Reynold Groeneveldt were among the dignitaries present.
Under the theme - "Attitude of Gratitude" - the praise and worship team of the Christian Fellowship Church kicked off the service with songs of praise and thanks to God, followed by the St. Martin Song being sung by Pastor Benjamin Bell and an opening prayer by Pastor Orlando Wilson.
The service continued with poignant hymns of thanks, words of welcome from the SMUMF representative Wally Havertong and touching remarks of resilience and gratitude from the Honorable Prime Minister R. Boasman, who asked the congregation to give thanks at all times, not only in good times. Even though we have been through the devastation of the Hurricanes, we will, with an attitude of gratitude, continue to give thanks for his grace and mercy and allowing us to be here with health and strength to work together to rebuild our beautiful Soualiga.
Several Renditions, scripture readings, and prayers were contributed by representatives of the Seventh Day Adventist, SMUMF and CC.
Pastor Lewis Constant gave a heartrending and soul-searching sermon, reminding the congregation that no one is higher than the Lord, He alone is God and he sees and knows all.
Calls were made during the sermon and prayers to put God first, Unity, Forgiveness, Love, Peace, and Healing. All in all, the service was uplifting and brought participants a sense of peace and togetherness.
This sense of Peace and Hope was further realized with the commencement of caroling by the praise and worship team, and the lighting of the two Christmas trees by Prime Minister Boasman and Minister Jacobs. The service came to a close with the Vote of Thanks by Minister Silveria Jacobs who gave thanks to the organizers and participants of the service and ceremony and also took the opportunity to commend the community workers, churches and organizations who played a key role in helping the people of St. Maarten directly after the passage of Hurricane Irma and handed out certificates to the various representatives present. She also took time out to share the spirit of Christmas with those in need and to continue to look out for neighbors and others still displaced or suffering at this time. The service ended with the benediction by Rev. Dr. Joan Delsol-Meade after which the Christmas Carol Medley allowed the congregation to mingle, meet and greet before leaving for their separate homes feeling blessed and refreshed.
Press Release from the Ministry of ECYS
PHILIPSBURG:--- The year 2018 brings new challenges for the Government of Aruba and Sint Maarten due to several financial conditions in which the current Government will face a very difficult task to determine the welfare of its communities. Understanding the current financial conditions on the mentioned islands, the firm will outline facts of historical taxation concepts that just did not work in the past and will not work now.
The firm compiled a sequence of events for the analysis
Former Dutch Antilles
In the late 80s the Dutch Caribbean introduced the Solidarity tax, which was10% of the gross wage.
In the late 90s the OB or sales tax was introduced in Curacao and Bonaire at 2% (March 1997) and was increased in October the same year to 5% meaning an increase of over 250%.
In the year 2000, the Federal Tax Laws were introduced, the payroll system was changed, and import duties were increased
After the Ys Government noticed that the economy got stranded they reduced the payroll tax with 15-12.5% in 2 consecutive years.
For more than 2 decades the Dutch Tax assistance was needed to improve Government Tax Revenues.
Aruba
In the late 80s the same solidarity tax was introduced at 8.2 for 2 years and 1 year 4.1% of the gross salary.
Progressive taxation on alcohol and other cost of living products
In the 90s the Aruban Government came with the SAB concept, Sanering Achterstallige Belastingen), that squeezed the economy through taxations.
After this action was not enough, the Government came with a 70/30 deal, meaning is they tax payer (corporate) paid 70% of his back taxes, 30% would be exempted, but the question is what about those that paid correctly?
In the late 2000, as the tax revenues could not increase more, a special focus was directed on noncompliance of tax returns filing for example failure to file the profit tax returns will result in a fine of Afl. 5000,= which was a disproportional measure.
In the year 2004, the new Federal tax law was introduced
After approximately 3 decades of additional taxations and collections schemes, the Dutch Caribbean have the following characteristics:
Governments still have a deficit
Increasing unemployment, adding more pressure on the employed segment of the population
Unfriendly investment environment
High rate of tax evasion
Poor employment perspective
The fact is that 3 decades of Public Administration and no Government has been successful to address the matters effectively in the Dutch Caribbean. Benjamin & Parker will propose an alternative concept in the media this week, to create the necessary incentives to reverse the current situation. The firm hopes that politicians in the Dutch Caribbean will analyze the concept for the improvement of the Dutch Caribbean, positively.
Benjamin & Parker Press Release
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A federal judge set a Dec. 19 deadline for any last bids for the bankrupt Swim Seventy pool facility in Norwalk, with an existing $100,000 deal on the table from an investor in Rowayton.
Under owners Toni Phillips, Ashlee Bunt and Robert Polley, Swim Seventy operates Norwalks only Olympic-length pool on Willard Road. Swim Seventy declared bankruptcy in May less than two years after opening, with a Newtown-based contractor filing claims for $1.9 million due for work on the facility that carried a value of $5.1 million as of October.
For almost eight years, Theresa Hatton led Greenwichs residential real estate community as the executive vice president of the Greenwich Association of Realtors.
Beginning last month, Hatton took on a new challenge by pivoting to a different role within the real estate industry.
This fall, Hatton resigned from her post at the helm of GAR, which manages Greenwichs Multiple Listing Service, and last month joined real estate brokerage Coldwell Banker as a branch manager and vice president of its Greenwich and Old Greenwich sales office.
There was a lot to do at GAR, but in the last few years there werent as many things to be accomplished, so I started looking for opportunities across the country, Hatton said of her career move.
During her tenure at GAR, she overhauled the groups software systems and processes, taught many classes for Realtors and frequently traveled around the country for industry conferences. Theres not one software system that didnt get turned over or reorganized to make it better for agents and thus consumers during my time there, Hatton said. There was always more work and another challenge at GAR.
Prior to her move to Greenwich, Hatton had worked for several nonprofits before landing in real estate as the executive vice president of the Williamson County Association of Realtors, located in an affluent Tennessee community near Nashville. It was fate that brought me into the Realtor world, Hatton said.
Several years into her Tennessee job, Hatton discovered the opening in Greenwich and opted to check out the Gold Coast community given its proximity to her childhood home on Long Island.
Since joining GAR in 2010, Hatton has left her mark on the towns real estate community with a leadership style many have lauded. In addition to her work at GAR, Hatton has also given time to numerous community groups such as the Greenwich Chamber of Commerce, Greenwich Property Owners Association, Light Up Greenwich, Greenwich Historical Society and Greenwich Youth Cheerleading. She plans to continue volunteering, she said.
Before arriving in Greenwich, Hatton typically changed jobs every few years, she said, making her time at GAR seem lengthy by comparison. In recent years, shed entertained a variety of offers but ultimately decided to find something new in Greenwich. At the end of the day, this is such a great place to live and nothing can compare to it, Hatton said.
At Coldwell Banker, Hatton will manage its offices in Greenwich and Old Greenwich that encompass around 200 agents.
With her absence, the Greenwich Association of Realtors board of directors has considered several high-quality candidates but isnt announcing anything yet, regarding Hattons replacement, according to board president BK Bates.
Contact the writer at mbennett@greenwichtime.com; Twitter @Macaela_
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STAMFORD Police have identified the man found dead in the driveway of a Pound Ridge home as Stamford real estate attorney Matthew Klein.
Capt. Richard Conklin said that his family reported Klein, 62, missing at about 7:45 p.m. Friday after they hadnt seen him for most of the day.
At about the same time the next day, Kleins body was discovered in the driveway of a mansion in Pound Ridge at 496 Long Ridge Road, about two miles above the New York state line, Conklin said.
Property records indicate that the home is owned by Richard Kassis, a New York City restaurateur who owns the Sutton Place Restaurant and Bar. It is not clear if Kassis was home when the body was found.
Klein was a North Stamford resident who lived on Jonathan Drive. A man at Kleins home Monday afternoon said the family was declining comment on his uncles death.
It is a shocking situation, the nephew said.
New York State police, who have taken over the investigation from Pound Ridge authorities, are being tight lipped about what they think happened in the driveway of the home.
More News Body of missing Stamford man found in New York
But police say that there appears to be no signs of foul play.
Klein was a real estate attorney in Stamford and worked for Benanti & Associates on Bedford Street in Stamford. A call to the law office for comment was not returned.
Stamford attorney Melvin Bloomenthal said that he knew Klein for many years.
I am beyond shocked, Bloomenthal said. I have always known Matthew to be the consummate family man. I know many of his family members and almost every conversation I had with him focused on his family. It is a terrible tragedy and it gives pause to all of us when we realize life it so short.
Klein was a member of Temple Beth El and for the past year was a member of the temples Board of Trustees.
Temple Beth Els Rabbi Joshua Hammerman said, Matthew was just tremendous and he was loved by all who knew him and the congregation. He was a wonderful man.
The Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services has launched a new website that provides real-time information on bed availability for addiction services.
The website tracks the availability of roughly 1,000 DMHAS-funded beds including detoxification services, residential addiction treatment and recovery housing. The information on the website will be updated by providers multiple times throughout the day.
Every city and every town in the country has been touched in some way by substance abuse, Governor Dannel P. Malloy said in a news release. We have many resources in Connecticut that are available to people who are in need of addiction services. We encourage anyone who needs help to reach out and get support as soon as possible.
The website is part of DMHAS infrastructure improvements funded by a grant from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The grant, which runs from September 1, 2016 through August 31, 2019, provides the state with $1 million annually to expand medication assisted treatment, strengthen outpatient resources and improve statewide infrastructure.
This website will be a tremendous help to people looking for addiction services funded by DMHAS. It gives current information on the availability of inpatient and recovery house beds available throughout the state, said DMHAS Commissioner Miriam Delphin-Rittmon in the release. A wide range of treatment and community supports are vital in helping people with substance use disorders live in recovery.
The website allows users to access the information 24 hours a day on their phones, tablets or desktop computers. The website can be accessed by visiting the DMHAS website, www.ct.gov/dmhas, or directly at www.ctaddictionservices.com.
In addition to the new website, people can be connected to addiction services and treatment by calling the ACCESS Line at 1-800-563-4086. For more information about the bed availability website or the ACCESS Line, please go to www.ct.gov/dmhas.
iStock/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- President Trump is nearing a decision on whether to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, according to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
"The president is going to make his decision," Kushner said Sunday, speaking at the Saban Forum at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. "He is still looking into a lot of facts and, when he makes his decision, he'll be the one who wants to tell you."
Kushner did not specify when an announcement would be made, but said, "He'll make sure he does that at the right time."
Meanwhile, on Fox News Sunday, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said he was unsure what Trump was planning to do.
"I'm not sure what decision he'll make, we've given him options," McMaster said. "There are options involving the move of an embassy at some point in the future, which I think could be used to gain momentum toward a peace agreement and a solution that works both for Israelis and Palestinians."
Monday in Israel, U.S. Ambassador David Friedman told Israeli reporters: "You'll learn this week, with everybody else."
The six-month waiver
By law, President Trump must decide today whether to sign the legal waiver that delays the move of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv by another six months, State Department officials told ABC News. He has already signed the waiver once. Now he is faced with a choice between sticking to his campaign promises or taking the more diplomatic route of his predecessors.
Since 1995, every U.S. president has signed the waiver which delays the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem, despite some of their own campaign promises.
In the Spring of 2016, Trump spoke to AIPAC, one of the most powerful lobbying groups promoting U.S.- Israel relations, and said, "We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital city of the Jewish people, Jerusalem."
In the same speech, he said he was not going to repeat what other politicians had done, but would take action.
"I didnt come here tonight to pander to you about Israel," Trump said, "Thats what politicians do. All talk, no action, believe me."
Past candidates from both parties have promised to move the embassy to Jerusalem, but no one has followed through on the promise after moving into the oval office.
As a candidate for president, George W. Bush told AIPAC in 2000, "As soon as I take office, I will begin the process of moving the United States ambassador to the city Israel has chosen as its capital."
In March 1992, when Bill Clinton was a candidate, he said, "I believe in the principle of moving our embassy to Jerusalem, but again I do not think we should do anything to interfere with the peace process."
"Israel's consistent policy is that the American embassy like other embassies should be in Jerusalem, our eternal capital," Israel's Prime Minister's Office said in a statement last June.
The option to keep the embassy in Tel Aviv, but recognize a unified Jerusalem
In addition to mulling the embassy move, the White House is now considering new steps to formally recognize a "unified Jerusalem" as the capital of Israel, sources told ABC News.
But, there's a chance those two moves could take place separately.
Administration officials would not say what Trump will do, but many expect that he will advance plans to move the embassy even if he signs the waiver today.
Among the options reportedly under consideration: issuing a statement this week to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital or a directive to American diplomats to conduct all official business there.
Ambassador Friedman has consistently supported this idea. Most recently, speaking to the Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post, Friedman said, "Its something we think about all the time."
When Israeli media reported this week that steps to relocate the embassy were imminent, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders called the reports "premature" but wouldn't rule anything out.
"We have nothing to announce," she said.
A U.S. embassy official told ABC News that a move to Jerusalem was a matter of time.
"Last June, the President said that it was a question of when the Embassy would move, not if," the official told ABC News.
Vice President Mike Pence suggested last week in a speech honoring the 70th anniversary of UN recognition of Israel that the administration is simply down to sorting out logistics. "President Donald Trump is actively considering when and how to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Pence said.
Effects on peace plans
Experts say that recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel right now won't serve the peace process.
"It serves absolutely no U.S. interests," Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Wilson Center and a former State Department Middle East negotiator under Republican and Democratic administrations, said in a tweet over the weekend. "And [the move] will complicate Trump's own peace initiative and injects the most volatile issue into the mix at a time that only makes sense to the interminably obtuse."
"The odds that Trump will stumble in his Jerusalem gambit are pretty good. That's because the point of the exercise does not seem designed to achieve any real foreign policy goals," Miller wrote in an op-ed.
"The only issue for the mediator is how to protect U.S. interests, image and credibility," Miller argues. "That's the key." The real question, he says, is this a one-off? Or part of a broader strategy?
"Perhaps the administration believes that a statement is less damaging than actually starting the process of opening an embassy," Miller says, "But unless the move is part of some pre-negotiated deal with Israel that offers up some significant concession to the Palestinians, it would serve no compelling US national interest."
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk also weighed in, tweeting, "Dont underestimate Trumps desire to disrupt the status quo on Jerusalem on the theory that out of crisis can come an opportunity. He should beware: Jerusalem is a dangerous place to test a theory."
But on Sunday, Jared Kushner spoke for the first time publicly about Middle East peace. Addressing a room full of diplomats, policy wonks and former negotiators at the annual Saban Forum, he voiced optimism but never mentioned a future Palestinian state or the words, "two-state solution."
We do think its achievable," Kushner told the crowd.
Veteran negotiator Miller, however, puts the odds at achieving the ultimate deal - a conflict-ending accord between Israelis and Palestinians at "slim to none."
Kushner laid out his broad regional strategy that includes a more formalized Arab-Israeli agreement based on mutual interests.
"The regional dynamic plays a big role in what we think the opportunities are," he said. "A lot of these countries look and say they all want the same thing.
"And they look at the regional threats and I think that they see Israel, who is traditionally their foe, is a much more natural ally to them than it was 20 years ago," Kushner explained, without naming Saudi Arabia and other Arab states by name.
But before that happens, Kushner said, an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal needs to be inked. "You've got a lot of people who want to put this together, but you have to overcome this issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order for that to happen."
Speaking at the Knesset on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted the unprecedented shift in the attitude of Arab states toward his country.
During his 30-minute talk, he did not reveal any details of a possible peace plan, and Palestinian sources have denied reports in Israeli and American media that President Mahmoud Abbas was served a fully baked plan by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman two weeks ago during his visit to Riyadh.
Palestinian and Muslim leaders condemn any policy change
Israelis consider Jerusalem to be the country's capital but Palestinians also claim East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. Moving the U.S. embassy to Israel, to Jerusalem or recognizing a "unified Jerusalem" as the Israeli capital would not be acceptable to Palestinians or leaders across the Muslim world.
"To move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem or to recognize the city as the capital of Israel, both are equally dangerous to the future of the peace process and push the region into instability," said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Sunday night, President Abbas, a member of the Fatah party in the West Bank, spoke to the Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, and the two agreed that they would not accept any change to U.S. policy on Jerusalem, according to a statement released by Hamas.
The Palestine Liberation Organization also believes changes could be destabilizing for the region.
The move "will contribute to the further destabilization of the region and will discourage many of those who still believe that a peaceful solution is achievable to end over 50 years of Israeli occupation, 70 years of exile and decades of systematic violations of Palestinian national and human rights, said Saeb Erekat, the secretary-general of the PLO and former chief negotiator.
Abbas has made phone calls to other Arab leaders, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to Palestinian sources, who said many in the region condemned the move as they did six months ago before Trump signed the Jerusalem wavier for the first time.
Jordan's Foreign Minister, Ayman Safadi said Sunday night that he had spoken with U.S. Secretary of State Tillerson about the "dangerous consequences of recognizing Jerusalem as capital of Israel. Such a decision would trigger anger across #Arab #Muslim worlds, fuel tension and jeopardize peace efforts."
Arab League leader Abul Gheit told reporters in Cairo on Sunday, "It is unfortunate that some are insisting on carrying out this step without any regard to the dangers it carries to the stability of the Middle East and the whole world."
"Nothing justifies this act," he added, "it will not serve peace or stability, instead it will nourish fanaticism and violence."
Copyright 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
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GERING Gering Junior High students are getting a head start on spreading holiday cheer this year by writing letters to active duty military men and women.
Shannon Kauffman teaches English at Gering Junior High. Her brother is Staff Sgt. Justin Horn, who is active duty in the United States Air Force.
Horn is part of Squadron 37 EBS, expeditionary bomb squadron, based out of Ellsworth in Rapid City, South Dakota. He and his squadron are currently deployed in Guam.
Kauffman has her five classes of seventh- and eighth-grade students writing letters to Horn and his squadron.
It was supposed to be near Veterans Day, but some things happened that changed that, Kauffman said. So theyll arrive shortly before Christmas. Im encouraging the students to give it a holiday sort of message. And then theyll decorate them, be it red and green or whatever they want, for Christmas or whatever.
Horn actually visited Kauffmans students and the rest of the junior high near Veterans Day for their special assembly.
He brought with him a neat opportunity for the school.
They do this cool program where if you buy a flag, theyll fly it in one of their bombers, Kauffman said. We got one for Gering Junior High. So he has a certificate saying that and then hell bring that back with the flag that they flew when he comes back in January.
Aside from teaching her students to be thankful to the heroes who protect their freedom, Kauffman gave an explanation of why her students are writing the letters.
Were starting a unit on correspondence, letter writing, she said. So this is kind of their kick-off project with it so I can get a sense of where theyre at with it.
This is the first time Kauffman has had her students write letters for her brothers squadron.
Well see how it goes, she said smiling. Also, I offered extra credit, so its not solely out of the goodness of their hearts, but they brought me a ton of stuff to send along with those letters. So Im going to send a care package with the letters.
Kauffmans students brought gum, drink packets like lemonade and hot cocoa and hard candies for Horn and his buddies.
Kauffman shared her expectations, besides letter formatting, for her students.
I would say, hopefully, that the students appreciate it more, she said. Theyre spending Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year's without their families. Some of them have young wives, young kids, so theyre doing that without them; all those holidays without them.
So to be appreciative, hopefully, that message rings clear for them.
This page is archived. Data published after 5 April 2022 can be found on the renewed website. Go to the new statistics page
Published: 4 December 2017
Average age at first confinement rose in Finland to the top level of Nordic countries
According to Statistics Finlands data on population changes, the average age at first confinement has risen exceptionally much. The average age of first-time mothers was 29.1 years in 2016 rising by 0.2 years from 2015 and by 0.4 years from 2014. The average age at first confinement in Finland has risen to the same level as in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
Average age of first-time mothers and fathers in 1985 to 2016
The average age of first-time fathers was 31.2 years. The age difference of first-time parents has stayed almost unchanged for decades. First-time fathers are slightly over two years older than first-time mothers.
The average age of all women having given birth was 30.8 years and the average age for becoming a father was 33.3 years in 2016.
For a long time, first-time mothers and fathers were older in the Nordic countries than in Finland, except for Iceland. In Finland, the ages of becoming mothers and fathers have grown closer to the corresponding ages in the other Nordic countries, and in 2016, the average age of becoming a mother was nearly the same in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. In Finland, Sweden and Denmark, the average age of becoming a mother was 29.1 years and in Norway 29.0 years. In Iceland, women became mothers at a clearly younger age, 27.7 years.
Average age of first-time mothers in Nordic countries in 2000 to 2016
Men becoming fathers were oldest in Sweden and Norway, 31.5 years and youngest in Iceland, 30.3 years.
Having children is most common in the 30 to 34 age group
Altogether 52,814 children were born in 2016. Both the number of children born and the birth rate have decreased for six years in a row . The birth rate refers to the number of births as a proportion to the number of women of childbearing age.
Over the past six years, the birth rate has declined clearly in all age groups between 20 and 34. Having children is now most common for those aged 30 to 34, slightly more common than for those aged 25 to 29.
Having children is second most common for those aged 35 to 39 and 20 to 24. The birth rate has decreased considerably for those aged 20 to 24 in the past decades. The birth rate among those aged 40 to 44 has continued its slight growth, which started in the mid-1970s.
Fertility by age group in 1965 to 2016
Because people are having children at a later age, an increasing number of people in the age group 35 to 39 are having their first child. When in 1990, six women per thousand women in this age group gave birth to their first child, in 2016 the corresponding figure had grown to 14.
The birth rate is also commonly measured with the total fertility rate, which indicates how many children a women would give birth to during her life time if age group-specific fertility rates remained the same as in the year on which the calculation is based.
At the fertility rate prevailing in 2016, a woman would give birth to an average of 1.57 children. Of this total fertility rate, persons aged 30 or over formed 55 per cent. At the beginning of the 1970s, their share was one-quarter.
Number of children born in marriage has decreased
Fifty-five per cent of children were born to married parents in 2016. The number and share of children born to married couples have diminished in recent decades. In 1990, three out of four children were born to married couples.
The majority of children born outside marriage were born to cohabiting parents.
In 2016, in total 29,200 children were born to married couples, which is 6,700 fewer than in 2010. In the period mentioned above, the number of marriages entered into also went down clearly. In 2016, the number of marriages entered into was 5,500 lower than in 2010. The decrease in the number of children born to married couples is naturally also affected by the decline in the total number of children born.
Live births in and outside marriage in 1990 to 2016, per cent
Fifty-eight per cent of firstborn children were born outside marriage in 2016, while the percentage was 38 in 1990. The threshold of 50 per cent was exceeded in 1997. Of second or higher order children, 36 per cent were born outside marriage. In 1990, the corresponding percentage was 17.
According to the most recent data of Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Union, the lowest number of children in European countries in 2015 were born outside marriage in relative terms in Greece, nine per cent. In relative terms, most children were born outside marriage in Iceland of European countries, 70 per cent of children born.
Share of mothers with Finnish background in the birth rate decreases further
Fertility can also be examined based on the mother's origin. The share of people with Finnish background in the total fertility rate has gradually fallen, and that of persons with foreign background has correspondingly grown. In 1990, the share of people with foreign background in the total fertility rate was very small as the share of people with foreign background was still so low in Finland.
The share of persons with foreign background in the whole country's birth rate has increased slowly over 25 years and is currently close on 13 per cent of the countrys birth rate. In the corresponding period, the share of women with foreign background in all women aged 15 to 49 has grown, however, slightly more slowly to 9.3 per cent.
Total fertility rate by mother's origin in 1990 to 2016
According to the whole country's birth rate in 2016, women's average number of children would be 1.57 children per women. Of this, the share of persons with Finnish background is 1.37 children per woman and of persons with foreign background 0.20 children per woman.
When we examine the decrease in the birth rate that began in 2010, we notice that only the birth rate of women of Finnish background has declined. The share of persons with Finnish background in the birth rate has gone down by 21 per cent in the past six years. By contrast, the share of persons with foreign background in the birth rate has increased by 36 per cent over the same period.
Further information about the birth rate according to origin is available on Statistics Finland's Immigrants and integration thematic pages in the section Birth rate .
Source: Births 2016. Statistics Finland
Inquiries: Miina Keski-Petaja 029 551 3240, Marja-Liisa Helminen 029 551 3273, info@stat.fi
Director in charge: Jari Tarkoma
Publication in pdf-format (283.8 kB)
Updated 04.12.2017
Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Births [e-publication].
ISSN=1798-2413. 02 2016. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 17.11.2022].
Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/synt/2016/02/synt_2016_02_2017-12-04_tie_001_en.html
When Reggie Hooker walked into English class at West Iredell High School on a January morning in 1984, he had no idea his life was about to change.
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Reflecting on Haskell in 2017
Alas, another year has come and gone. It feels like just yesterday I was writing the last reflection blog post on my flight back to Boston for Christmas. Ive spent most of the last year traveling and working in Europe, meeting a lot of new Haskellers and putting a lot of faces to names.
Haskell has had a great year and 2017 was defined by vast quantities of new code, including 14,000 new Haskell projects on Github . The amount of writing this year was voluminous and my list of interesting work is eight times as large as last year. At least seven new companies came into existence and many existing firms unexpectedly dropped large open source Haskell projects into the public sphere. Driven by a lot of software catastrophes, the intersection of security, software correctness and formal methods have been become quite an active area of investment and research across both industry and academia. Its really never been an easier and more exciting time to be programming professionally in the worlds most advanced (yet usable) statically typed language.
Per what I guess is now a tradition, I will write my end of year retrospective on my highlights of what happened in the Haskell scene in retrospect.
Writing
The amount of Haskell writing this year was vast and its impossible to enumerate all of the excellent writing that occurred. Some of the truly exceptional bits that were drafted in 2017 included:
Books & Courses
Vladislav Zavialov and Artyom Kazak set out to write a book on the netherlands of Intermediate Haskell development, a mythical place that we all seemingly pass through but never speak of again. The project is intuitively called Intermediate Haskell and is slated to be released in 2018
Bartosz Milewski finished writing Category Theory for Programmers which is freely available and also generated as PDF.
Brent Yorgey drafted a new course for teaching introduction to Computer Science using Haskell at Hendrix University. Dmitry Kovanikov and Arseniy Seroka also drafted a course for a wide variety of intermediate to advanced Haskell topics at ITMO university. Some of which are in Russian but nevertheless !
GHC
The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compiler had its 8.2 release, and landed to much rejoicing. Major features such as unboxed sum types landed as planned in GHC 8.2. There were many longstanding issues that were closed and many miscellaneous fixes contributed in 2017. For instance GHC now uses alternative linkers such as ld.gold or ld.lld instead of the system default ld.
Semigroup is now a superclass of Monoid.
There was quite a bit of work on GHC cross compilation to ARM. The new build system Hadrian has been in work for the past three years, has was finally been merged into the GHC tree.
The DevOps Group has officially started and is being funded to help maintain the infrastructure used to host Haskell packages and build GHC. The general push of the group has been toward using hosted CI services, Appveyor and CircleCI and a greater use of more transparent platforms such as Github for GHC development.
There is work on a major refactor of the AST types to use the new Trees that Grow research to allow GHC API user to extend the AST for their own purposes. Eventually this may allow the split of the AST types out of the ghc package, allowing tooling authors, Template Haskell users, and the compiler itself to use the same AST representation.
GHC is partially accepting pull requests on Github although most of the development still occurs on the mailing list and Phabricator.
There was significant engineering effort to allow GHC to produce deterministic build artifacts to play nicely with caching reproducible build systems such as Buck and Bazel. Previously the emitted .hi files would contain non-deterministic data such as hashes, timestamps and unique name supply counts.
Errors
GHC 8.2 added wonderful new colorful error messages with caret diagnostics for syntax and type errors:
Compact Regions
Support for Compact Regions landed in GHC 8.2. Compact regions are manually allocated regions where the data allocated inside it are compacted and not traversed by the GC. This is amenable for long-lived data structures that are resident in memory without mutation frequently occurring.
The interface can be accessed through the ghc-compact modules and used to create compact mallocd memory.
import Control.DeepSeq import Control.Exception import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as B import Data.Compact main = compact (B.pack [ 'a' .. 'c' ])
The test suite inside GHC maintains the best illustrations of its use for complex non-traditional data structures.
Type.Reflection
GHC added a new more expressive Typeable mechanism using the Type.Reflection module. typeRep can be applied with explicit type applications to arrows and functions can checked for type-level equality after application.
> typeRep @ ( -> ) ( -> ) 'LiftedRep ' LiftedRep
> typeRep @ ( Maybe Int ) == App (typeRep @ Maybe ) (typeRep @ Int ) True
Coercible
Not new to GHC 8.2 although the base library now exposes the Coercible constraints allowing polymorphism over types which have the same runtime representations to be safely coerced at runtime. This can also be extended to polymorphic functions which take a compile-time proof of the equivalence of two runtime data layouts.
import Data.Coerce newtype Meters = Meters Integer deriving ( Num ) newtype Feet = Feet Integer deriving ( Num ) f :: ( Coercible a b, Num b) => a -> b -> b f x y = coerce x + y
> f ( Meters 3 ) 4 7 > f ( Feet 3 ) 4 7 > f 4 ( Feet 3 ) Feet 7
GHC tracks the usage (i.e. role) of type variables used as parameters as either nominal representational or phantom allowing types that differ only in a phantom type of nominal parameters to be safely coerced.
Join Points
Luke Maurer and Simon Peyton Jones merged new work on join points which modifies GHC Core to optimize for join points in code. In Core, a join point is a specially tagged function whose only occurrences are saturated tail calls. In the actual GHC Core AST, a join point is simple bit of metadata indicated by IdDetails of the binder.
Simon Peyton Jones presented the keynote at Haskell Exchange on his collaboration on Compiling without Continuation which present the ideas and core optimizations that are allowed by the new join points.
Deriving Strategies
In GHC 8.0 there were two alternative methods for automatic deriving of typeclass instances, using GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving and DeriveAnyClass . In addition there was also the wired-in deriving mechanisms for Show , Read , etc that were hardcoded into the compiler. These all used the same syntax and would conflict if multiple pragmas were enabled in a module.
The addition of DerivingStrategies allows us to disambiguate which deriving mechanism to use for a specific instance generation.
newtype Meters = Meters Int deriving stock ( Read , Show ) deriving newtype ( Num ) deriving anyclass ( ToJSON , FromJSON )
Backpack
Edward Yang finished his PhD thesis on Backpack which was integrated in the GHC tree. The new branch adds support .bkp files , which specify abstract interfaces which can be instantiated in modules and used to construct Haskell modules which work polymorphically across multiple module instantiations.
For example an abstract string type can be written which operates over a module parameter `Str``:
unit abstract - str where signature Str where data Str len :: Str -> Int module AStr (alen) where import Str alen :: Str -> Int alen = len
We can create (contrived) instantiations of this module for lists of ints and chars which expose a polymorphic length function over both.
unit str - string where module Str where type Str = String len :: Str -> Int len = length unit str - list where module Str where type Str = [ Int ] len :: Str -> Int len = length
The modules can then be opened as specific namespaces with the exported functions able to be called over both module types.
unit main where dependency abstract - str[ Str = str - string : Str ] ( AStr as AStr.Int ) dependency abstract - str[ Str = str - list : Str ] ( AStr as AStr.String ) module Main (main) where import qualified AStr.Int import qualified AStr.String main :: IO () main = do print $ AbstractStr.String.alen "Hello world" print $ AbstractStr.Int.alen [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
With the latest GHC this can be compiled with the --backpack which generates the sum of all the hi files specified in the .bkp file and resolves values at link-time.
$ stack exec -- ghc --backpack example.bkp
While the functionality exists today, Im not aware of any large projects using Backpack. Bolting this functionality onto an ecosystem that has spent a decade routing around many of the problems this system aims to solve, poses a huge engineering cost and may take a while to crystallize.
Summer of Haskell
Google lacked vision this year and did not sponsor the Haskell Organization for Summer of Code. But the program proceeded regardless with private sponsorship from industrial users. Fifteen students were paired with mentors and many successful projects and collaborations resulted.
LLVM
The LLVM bindings for Haskell saw quite a bit of work this year and were forked into a new organization llvm-hs and added support for LLVM 4.0 - 5.1:
In a collaboration with Joachim Breitner and myself at Zurihac a type-safe LLVM library which embeds the semantics of LLVM instructions into the Haskell type-system was written.
Siddharth Bhat started work on an STG to LLVM backend simplehxc before doing a rewrite in C++.
Moritz Angermann has been continuing to develop a Haskell library for emitting and reading LLVM Bitcode format as well as work on the llvm-ng backend which is a major rewrite of the GHC LLVM code generator.
Linear Types
Arnaud Spiwack prototyped a extension of GHC which augments the type system with linear types. Edsko de Vries wrote a detailed blog post about the nature of linearity and its uses.
The proposal extends the typing of functions to include linearity constraints on arrows, enforcing that variables or references are created and consumed with constrained reference counts. This allows us to statically enforce reference borrowing and allocations in the typechecker potentially allowing us to enforce lifetime constraints on closures and eliminating long-lived memory from being used with constructed unbounded lifetimes, thereby eliminating garbage collection for some Haskell functions.
For instance, use of the linear arrow (a ->. b) can enrich the existing raw memory access functions enforcing the matching of allocation and free commands statically. The multiplicity of usage is either 0 , 1 or and the linear arrow is syntatic sugar for unit multiplicity are aliases for (:'1 ->) .
malloc :: Storable a => a -> . ( Ptr a -> . Unrestricted b) -> . Unrestricted b read :: Storable a => Ptr a -> . ( Ptr a, a) free :: Ptr a -> . ()
New abstractions such as movable, consumable and dupable references can be constructed out of existing class hierarchies and enriched with static linearity checks:
class Consumable a where consume :: a -> . () class Consumable a => Dupable a where dup :: a -> . (a, a) class Dupable a => Movable a where move :: a -> . Unrestricted a instance Dupable a => Dupable [a] where dup [] = ([], []) dup (a : l) = shuffle (dup a) (dup l) where shuffle :: (a, a) -> . ([a], [a]) -> . ([a], [a]) shuffle (a, a') (l, l') = (a : l, a' : l') instance Consumable a => Consumable [a] where consume [] = () consume (a : l) = consume a `lseq` consume l
As part of the Summer of Haskell Edvard Hubinette used linear types to construct a safer stream processing library which can enforce resource consumption statically using linearity.
There is considerable debate about the proposal and the nature of integration of linear types into GHC. With some community involvement these patches could be integrated quite quickly in GHC.
LiquidHaskell
LiquidHaskell the large suite of tools for adding refinement types to GHC Haskell continued development and became considerably more polished. At HaskellExchange several companies were using it in anger in production. For example, we can enforce statically the lists given at compile-time statically cannot contain certain values by constructing a proposition function in a (subset) of Haskell which can refine other definitions:
measure hasZero :: [ Int ] -> Prop hasZero [] = false hasZero (x : xs) = x == 0 || (hasZero xs) type HasZero = {v : [ Int ] | (hasZero v)} -- Rejected xs :: HasZero xs = [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] -- Accepted ys :: HasZero ys = [ 0 , 1 , 2 , 3 ]
This can be used to statically enforce that logic that consumes only a Just value can provably only be called with a Just with a isJust measure:
measure isJust :: forall a . Data.Maybe.Maybe a -> Bool isJust ( Data.Maybe.Just x) = true isJust ( Data.Maybe.Nothing ) = false
This year saw the addition of inductive predicates, allowing more complex properties about non-arithmetic refinements to be checked. Including properties about lists:
measure len :: [a] -> Int len [] = 0 len (x : xs) = 1 + (len xs) -- Spec for Data.List exports refined types which can be statically refined with -- length constraints. [] :: {v : [a] | len v = 0 } (:) :: _ -> xs : _ -> {v : [a] | len v = 1 + len xs} append :: xs : [a] -> ys : [a] -> {v : [a] | len v = len xs + len ys}
The full library of specifications is now quite extensive and adding LiquidHaskell to an existing codebase is pretty seamless.
Foundation
Foundation is an alternative Prelude informed by modern design practices and data structures. It ships a much more sensible and efficient packed array of UTF8 points as its default String type. Rethinks the Num numerical tower , and statically distinguishes partial functions. Also has fledgling documentation beyond just
Last year Foundation was a bit early, but this year at Zurihac several companies in London reported using it fully in production as a full industrial focused Prelude.
Editor Tooling
Editor integration improved, adding best in modern tooling to most of the common editors:
Editor Haskell Integration Atom https://atom.io/packages/ide-haskell Emacs https://commercialhaskell.github.io/intero/ IntelliJ https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8258-intellij-haskell VSCode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Vans.haskero Sublime https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SublimeHaskell
Monica Lent wrote a lovely post on the state of art in Vim and Haskell integration.
Rik van der Kleij has done an impressive amount of work adapting the IntellJ IDE to work with Haskell. Including a custom parser handling all of the syntax extensions, name lookup, Intero integration and integration with haskell-tools refactoring framework.
Development on the haskell-ide-engine has picked up again in the last few months.
Formal Methods
The DeepSpec, a collaboration between MIT, UPenn, Princeton and Yale, is working on a network of specification that span many compilers, languages and intermediate representations with the goal of achieving full functional correctness of software and hardware. Both Haskell and LLVM are part of this network of specifications. The group has successfully written a new formal calculus describing the GHC core language and proved it type sound in Coq. The project is called corespec and is described in the paper A Specification for Dependent Types in Haskell.
In addition the group also published a paper Total Haskell is Reasonable Coq and provided a utlity hs-to-coq which converts haskell code to equivalent Coq code.
The Galois group started formalizing the semantics of Cryptol, a compiler for high-assurance cryptographic protocols which is itself written in Haskell.
Michael Burge wrote a cheeky article about extracting a specification for a domain specific browser from Coq into Haskell.
Pragma Proliferation & Prelude
Writing Haskell is almost trivial in practice. You just start with the magic fifty line {-# LANGUAGE ... #-} incantation to fast-forward to 2017, then add 150 libraries that youve blessed by trial and error to your cabal file, and then just write down a single type signature whose inhabitant is Refl to your program. In fact if your program is longer than your import list youre clearly doing Haskell all wrong.
In all seriousness, Haskell is not the small language it once was in 1998, its reach spans many industries, hobbyists, academia and many classes of people with different incentives and whose ideas about the future of the language are mutually incompatible. Realistically the reason why the Prelude and extension situation arent going to change anytime soon is that no one person or company has the economic means to champion such a change. It would be enormously expensive and any solution will never satisfy everyones concerns and desires. Consensus is expensive, while making everything opt-in is relatively cheap. This is ultimately the equilibrium weve converged on and barring some large sea change the language is going to remain in this equilibrium.
Haskell Survey
Taylor Fausak conducted an unofficial survey of Haskell users with some surprising results about widespread use of Haskell. Surprisingly there are reportedly 100 or more people who maintain 100,000 or more lines of Haskell code. Not so surprisingly most people have migrated to Stack while vim and emacs are the editors of choice.
While the majority of respondents are satisfied with Haskell the language the response are somewhat mixed the quality of libraries and the bulk of respondents reported Haskell libraries being undocumented , hard to use hard to find, and dont integrate well.
Projects
Idris, the experimental dependently typed language, reached 1.0 release and became one of the larger languages which is itself written in Haskell.
The most prolific Haskell library Pandoc released its version 2.0.
Several other groups published new compilers in the Haskell-family of languages. Intel finally open sourced the Intell Haskell compiler which was a research project in more optimal compilation techniques. Morgan Stanley also released Hobbes a Haskell-like language used internally at the bank featuring several novel extensions to row-types and C++ FFI integration. A prototype Haskell compiler was also written in Rust.
The SMT solver integration library SBV saw a major rewrite of its internal and its old tactics system. The library is heavily used in various projects as an interface to Z3 and CVC4 solvers.
Uber released a library for parsing and analysis of Vertica, Hive, and Presto SQL queries.
Wire released the backend service to their commercial offering.
The Advanced Telematic Systems group in Berlin released a Quickcheck family library for doing for property testing of models about state machines. Bose also released Smudge a tool for doing development and analysis of large state machines for hardware testing.
Florian Knupfer released a new high-performance HTML combinator library for templating.
Galois continued with HalVM unikernel development this year, and several HalVM Docker Imagaes were published allowing a very convenient way to write and test code against HalVM.
Facebook released a Haskell string parsing library duckling which parses human input into a restricted set of semantically tagged data. Facebook also prototyped a technique for hot-swapping Haskell code at runtime using clever GHC API trickery.
Chris Done released vado a browser engine written in Haskell.
Jonas Carpay released apecs an entity component system for game development in Haskell.
Csaba Hruska continued work on a GRIN compiler and code generator, an alternative core language for compiling lazy functional languages based on the work by Urban Boquist.
Dima Szamozvancev released mezzo a library and embedded domain-specific language for music description that can enforce rules of compositionality of music statically and prevent bad music from being unleashed on the world.
Conal Elliot and John Wiegley advanced a novel set of ideas on Compiling with Categories which allows the bidirectional representation of Haskell functions as categorical structures. Although currently implemented as a GHC typechecker extension it is a promising research area.
Harry Clarke published a paper on Generics Layout-Preserving Refactoring using a reprinter. i.e. a tool which takes a syntax tree, the original source file, and produces an updated source file which preserves secondary notation. This can be used to build tools like haskell-tools for arbitrary languages and write complicated refactoring suites.
Joachim Breitner contributed a prolific amount of open source projects including a new technique (ghc-proofs) for proving the equivalence of Haskell programs using a GHC plugin, (veggies) a verified simple LLVM code generator for GHC, and (inspection-testing) new technique for verifying properties of Core.
The ghc-proofs plugin allows us to embed equation and relations into our Haskell module and potentially allow GHC to prove them correct by doing symbolic evaluation and evaluating them as far as possible and checking the equational relations of the equations sides. Right now it works for contrived and simple examples, but is quite a interesting approach that may yield further fruit.
{-# OPTIONS_GHC -O -fplugin GHC.Proof.Plugin #-} module Simple where import GHC.Proof import Data.Maybe my_proof1 = (\f x -> isNothing (fmap f x)) === (\f x -> isNothing x)
$ ghc Simple.hs [ 1 of 1] Compiling Simple ( Simple.hs, Simple.o ) GHC.Proof : Proving my_proof1 GHC.Proof proved 1 equalities
Haddock
Haddock is creaking at the seams. Most large Haskell projects (GHC, Stack, Agda, Cabal, Idris, etc) no longer use it for documentation. The codebase is dated and long standing issues like dealing with reexported modules are still open.
There is a large vacuum for a better solution to emerge and compatibility with RestructuredText would allow easy migration of existing documentation.
Databases
This year saw two new approaches to Haskell database integration:
Selda - A library interacting with relational databases inspired by LINQ and Opaleye. Squeal - A deep embedding of PostgreSQL in Haskell using generics-sop.
This still remains an area in the ecosystem where many solutions end up needlessly falling back to TemplateHaskell to generate data structures and typically tend to be a pain point. Both these libraries use generics and advanced type system features to statically enforce well-formed SQL query construction.
Data Science & Numerical Computing
Chris Doran presented a concise interpretation of Geometric Algebra, a generalization of linear algebra in terms of graded algebra written in Haskell. A talk on this project was presented at the Haskell Exchange.
At ZuriHac several people expressed interest in forming a Data Haskell organization to work on advancing the state of Haskell libraries for data science and macing learning. There is considerable interest of the constructing the right abstractions for a well-typed dataframe library.
Tom Nielson is furiously working on a suite of of projects, mostly related to data science, machine learning and statistics in Haskell.
The Accelerate project has been seeing a lot of development work recently and now has support for latest versions of LLVM and CUDA through llvm-hs project.
A group at the University of Gothenburg released TypedFlow a statically typed higher-order frontend to TensorFlow.
Eta
Typelead continued working on a Java Virtual Machine backend to GHC called Eta. The project has seen considerable amount of person-hours invested in compatibility and the firm has raised capital to pursue the project as a commercial venture.
The project does seem to be diverging from the Haskell mainline language in both syntax and semantics which raises some interesting questions about viability. Although the Haskell language standard seems to be stuck and not moving forward, so theres an interesting conundrum faced by those trying to build on top of GHC in the long run.
WebAssembly
WebAssembly has been released and is supported by all major browsers as of December 2017. This is been piquing the interest of quite a few Haskellers (including myself) who have been looking for a saner way to interact with browsers than the ugly hack of ejecting hundreds of thousands of lines of generated Javascript source. WebAssembly in either standalone projects or as a target from GHCs intermediate form STG to the browser offers an interesting path forward.
Industry
An incomplete list of non-consulting companies who are actively using Haskell or have published Haskell open sources libraries follows:
Product Companies Standard Chartered Galois Intel Target Uber Vente Privee FrontRow NStack Morgan Stanley Takt Fugue Habito Asahi Net Sentenai IOHK Awake Networks Facebook Adjoint DigitalAsset AlphaSheets Channable SlamData Wire JP Morgan Bose
There are four consulting companies also supporting Haskell in industry.
Consultancies Well-Typed Tweag FP Complete Obsidian Systems
Conferences
Both the Haskell Exchange and ZuriHac conference had record attendance this year. Haskell was well-represented in many interdisciplinary conferences include StrangeLoop, CurryOn, LambdaDays, LambdaConf, and YOW.
Most of the videos are freely available online.
In 2018 I have plans to visit Zurich, Sydney, Budapest, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Paris, Copenhagen and Tokyo this year. Hopefully I get to meet more Haskellers and share some ideas about the future of our beautiful language. Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Haskell Year.
Just a few weeks after TechShop abruptly closed all of its U.S. studios last month, including in St. Louis, its assets are being sold to a new owner that plans to reopen some of the shuttered locations.
A group led by Dan Rasure of Kansas says it has a deal in place to buy the assets of San Jose, Calif.-based TechShop and plans to add new equipment to at least some of the former TechShop studios. Financial terms were not disclosed.
TechShop, a membership-based chain of studios with equipment for inventors and entrepreneurs, operated 10 U.S. studios. Before it closed, it had 9,000 members, including a studio in the Central West Ends Cortex innovation district with 500 members.
The new owner isn't saying yet which studios may reopen. TechShop 2.0 is "currently evaluating each location and will announce shop openings ASAP," the company said in a statement.
A new website, http://www.techshop2.com/, says TechShop 2.0 will require machine proficiency for staff and facilities will have newer and larger industrial machines.
Announcing the closure of TechShop was the most difficult thing Ive had to do in my career," former TechShop CEO Dan Woods said in a statement. "When the opportunity for a different path forward presented itself, we did whatever humanly possible to work with Dan Rasure and make TechShop 2.0 a reality."
After TechShop shut down, a group led by St. Louis entrepreneur Jim McKelvey stepped forward to help local TechShop members access their materials at the St. Louis studio at 4260 Forest Park Avenue and complete their projects before the holidays.
ST. LOUIS Four people were injured in a shooting in the city's Kingsway East neighborhood Sunday afternoon, police said.
Police released few details after the shooting, but said the victims were all conscious and breathing at the scene in the 2300 block of North Euclid Avenue.
It wasn't clear if the shooting happened inside the Euclid Market; shell casings, evidence markers and victims' clothing were outside the convenience store.
The shooting happened about 12:15 p.m., police said. A witness who declined to give his name said two women were shot, one in the leg and the other in the arm, and a man appeared to be shot in the head. The witness said he heard 15 to 20 gunshots from multiple guns.
Reported crime in the Kingsway East neighborhood is down about 18 percent compared to the same six months last year.
ST. CHARLES A St. Louis man who opened fire at a childs Chuck E. Cheese birthday party in 2015 has been given a life sentence.
The birthday girls grandfather was injured in the January 2015 shooting, but he survived. No one else was hit.
On Wednesday the gunman, Arieon Demico Ford, 25, was given a life sentence on a first-degree assault charge by Circuit Judge Deborah Alessi. In Missouri, a life sentence is calculated at 30 years.
Ford pleaded guilty to eight total felony charges in May: four counts of first-degree assault and four counts of armed criminal action.
The shooting was at a Chuck E. Cheese at 2669 Veterans Memorial Parkway in St. Charles.
Police said a woman, Aesian Anunique Clay, called Ford and told him to bring a gun to her daughters first birthday party at the restaurant. Clay was angry after getting in a dispute with the father of the child, police said.
A witness told police that Clay told her daughter: Say your last goodbye to your daddy because he is going to die today. She told the father of her daughter that she was calling her new boyfriend, according to a witness.
Ford arrived at the restaurant and began firing a semi-automatic handgun in the direction of four people. Police said at the time that the grandfather positioned himself between Ford and his son, the girls father, so his son and two other guests could escape. The girls father ran into woods near the restaurant, police said.
Afterward, Ford went outside, where he fired the gun several times in the parking lot, police said. No one else was injured.
The childs grandfather was hit multiple times in his lower body and arm, police said. He was seriously injured and underwent surgery.
Clay, 23, of St. Louis County, pleaded guilty in February to attempted first-degree assault for her role in the case. She was given a suspended sentence of 15 years in prison, which she would only serve if she fails to complete five years of probation.
Among the conditions of her probation: Shes not allowed at Chuck E. Cheese.
JEFFERSON CITY Lt. Gov. Mike Parson and the top Democrat in the Missouri Senate are calling for the removal of top administrators at the embattled St. Louis Veterans Home.
In a press conference Monday, Parson said mismanagement at the nursing home in Bellefontaine Neighbors should trigger the firing of director Rolando Carter and his assistant, Aneeqa Khan.
He did not go as far to say Missouri Veterans Commission Director Larry Kay also should leave, saying that is for commission members to decide. Commissioners are appointed by Gov. Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL who campaigned on a platform of helping veterans.
Later, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Gina Walsh, D-Bellefontaine Neighbors, said the senator agrees with Parson that a change in leadership is needed.
The 300-bed home has been under a microscope over complaints by residents, employees and families that the facility is failing to adequately care for veterans. Complaints by veterans and family members about care at the St. Louis home were first made public in a Post-Dispatch column by Tony Messenger in October.
The concerns include improper medication, including overuse of antipsychotics, the inability to hire and retain quality personnel, a lack of transparency and honesty in investigation of complaints, and a loss of faith between veterans, families and the administration of the Missouri Veterans Commission.
The more I learn, the more frustrated I get, Parson said.
Parson is basing his call for removal on a report his office conducted on the home dating to February, which confirmed many of the concerns, including a lack of cooperation by administrators.
As a former county sheriff, Parson said the reluctance to share information got his attention.
Nobody wants to admit were not helping our veterans, Parson said.
Among his concerns is that Carter was administrator of a Chicago-area nursing home where a resident allegedly died from medication errors there in 2010. He also filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001 and again earlier this year.
Parsons comments come two weeks after Greitens announced that an outside firm Harmony Healthcare International will be paid $45,000 to conduct an independent investigation of the complaints.
In late October, more than 100 family members, employees and veterans asked for an independent investigation of allegations of abuse, mistreatment and neglect at the facility. Missouris two U.S. senators also asked for an investigation.
In all, the HHI probe will be the fifth time the home has been surveyed for problems in the past year.
One of the reports a survey conducted by the federal Department of Veterans Affairs found a clean bill of health.
A spokesman for the commission did not immediately respond to a request for reaction.
A report from HHI is expected by years end.
UPDATED at noon Tuesday with name of injured man
ST. CHARLES COUNTY A man was seriously injured after being struck by a tractor-trailer while walking on the Blanchette Bridge Sunday night, police say.
The Missouri Highway Patrol identified the injured man as Mark A. Drape, 53, of St. Charles. Police say he suffered serious injuries and was taken by ambulance to a St. Louis hospital for treatment.
The vehicle that struck him was a 1999 Peterbilt tractor-trailer. Police say the driver of the truck, a 54-year-old man from Vancouver, Wash., stayed at the scene.
Police say the truck had been traveling east on Interstate 70 at about 9:15 p.m. Sunday. The pedestrian entered the road and "began to walk in front" of the truck, the patrol said in an accident summary. The tractor-trailer swerved to the right, to try to avoid the pedestrian but couldn't. Police said it wasn't immediately clear why the man was walking on the bridge.
JEFFERSON CITY A new report shows the state paid nearly $320,000 in October to a former probation officer who said she was sexually harassed by one of her bosses.
It is the latest in an expensive string of harassment claims filed against the states Department of Corrections, which was facing more than 30 pending cases at this time last year.
According to the Missouri attorney generals office, former probation and parole officer Felicia Mitchell of Hayti was paid $319,000 after a Dunklin County jury sided with her in a case dating to 2012.
Mitchell complained about being sexually harassed by one of her supervisors and later alleged she was poisoned in retaliation. Her story was featured as part of a series on problems in the prison system by The Pitch, a Kansas City newspaper.
Records show Mitchells attorney, Doug Ponder of St. Louis, will receive $154,000 of the money.
The award brings the total amount paid out by the agency since 2012 for dozens of similar discrimination cases to over $7.8 million.
The high number of incidents and the cost to taxpayers spurred hearings last year by members of a House panel, who urged new DOC Director Anne Precythe to turn around the agencys culture.
In March, Precythe moved to replace a number of top administrators in the states central office, as well as in some of the states 21 prisons.
Amid a call for more transparency in the amount of money being paid out in settlements, Attorney General Josh Hawley agreed to post monthly reports online beginning in January.
In addition, Auditor Nicole Galloway investigated all department settlements following a Post-Dispatch report that a former Department of Conservation director was still being paid after leaving his post in June.
RICHMOND HEIGHTS At least 50 people led by clergy protested at the St. Louis Galleria on Sunday.
The protesters chanted "Victory is ours," as they walked peacefully on the first level of the mall about 3:20 p.m. Then they did a lap on the second level and returned to the first level.
Some stores closed, putting down security gates as protesters chanted "No justice, no profit" to the beat of drums. Police and security guards observed, but there were no arrests, as there have been at previous protests at the mall.
The clergy and many of the protesters left shortly before 4 p.m. About a dozen remained and were ordered to leave by police. They eventually left the mall shortly after 4 p.m.
On Nov. 25 the Galleria closed for about half an hour and seven people were arrested during a Black Friday protest.
The protest was part of an economic boycott effortannounced in early November by African-American clergy and activists over issues from police treatment of blacks to bank loan practices to infrastructure neglect in the northern part of St. Louis.
The mall was also the site of a protest in late September following the acquittal of a white St. Louis police officer in the shooting of a black drug suspect. That protest ended in more than 20 arrests and generated complaints that police were heavy-handed.
WASHINGTON Lobbing new criticism at the special counsel's Russia investigation, President Donald Trump said Monday he feels "very badly" for former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who last week pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about reaching out to the Russians on the president's behalf.
"I think it's a shame," Trump said of Flynn's situation, adding that it's "very unfair" and that Flynn had "led a very strong life."
Trump tried to contrast Flynn's treatment with that of his Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, whom he said "lied many times to the FBI and nothing happened."
"Flynn lied and they destroyed his life," Trump said.
The FBI didn't conclude that Clinton lied to agents, however. Former FBI Director James Comey testified last year that agents found Clinton to be truthful in her interview, telling a House committee, "we have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI."
Flynn is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
Even as Trump sought to minimize Flynn's misdeeds, the Kremlin insisted that Flynn's conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. had not influenced Russian President Vladimir Putin's response to sanctions imposed by Trump's predecessor.
Flynn was forced to resign in February following reports that the Obama administration officials had informed Trump's team that Flynn had discussed sanctions on Russia Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, a fact at odds with the public assertions of Vice President Mike Pence. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday it was "absurd" to suggest that the phone conversation could have influenced Putin's decision and added that "such requests couldn't have been passed on" to him.
Trump, who spoke to reporters Monday as he left the White House to head to Utah, unleashed a string of tweets over the weekend in which he criticized the FBI and raised questions about the federal investigation into Russian election meddling and possible ties to his campaign.
In one of his messages, Trump again denied that he directed Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
Trump questioned the direction of the federal law enforcement agency and wrote that after Comey, whom Trump fired in May, the FBI's reputation is "in Tatters worst in History!" He vowed to "bring it back to greatness." The president also retweeted a post saying new FBI Director Chris Wray "needs to clean house."
Former Attorney General Eric Holder tweeted in response: "Nope. Not letting this go. The FBI's reputation is not in "tatters". It's composed of the same dedicated men and women who have always worked there and who do a great, apolitical job. You'll find integrity and honesty at FBI headquarters and not at 1600 Penn Ave right now."
Trump seized on reports that a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent was removed from special prosecutor Robert Mueller's team last summer after the discovery of an exchange of text messages that were viewed as potentially anti-Trump. The agent, Peter Strzok, had also worked on the investigation of Democrat Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, said Mueller removed Strzok from the team "immediately upon learning of the allegations." He would not elaborate on the nature of the accusations. The person who discussed the matter with The Associated Press was not authorized to speak about it by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Trump tweeted Sunday: "Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI 'agent's role in Clinton probe under review.' Led Clinton Email probe." In a separate tweet, he wrote: "Report: 'ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE' Now it all starts to make sense!"
Strzok's removal almost certainly reflected a desire to insulate the investigators from any claims of political bias or favoritism. Trump and many of his supporters have at times sought to discredit the integrity of the investigation, in part by claiming a close relationship between Mueller and Comey and by pointing to political contributions to Democrats made by some lawyers on the team.
Following the tweets, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned the president to tread cautiously. "You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril. I'd be careful if I were you, Mr. President. I'd watch this," Graham said.
On Saturday, Trump tweeted that he "had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
The tweet suggested that Trump was aware when the White House dismissed Flynn on Feb. 13 that he had lied to the FBI, which had interviewed him weeks earlier. Comey has said Trump the following day brought up the Flynn investigation in private at the White House and told him he hoped he could "let this go."
With questions raised by the tweet, Trump associates tried to put distance Saturday evening between the president himself and the tweet. Trump's personal lawyer John Dowd told ABC News that he drafted the tweet and gave it to the president's social media director, Dan Scavino. Dowd had declined to comment when reached by the AP on Saturday night.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the panel is beginning to see "the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice" against Trump.
Missouri public school students and teachers suffered a big loss Friday when an artificially configured State Board of Education ousted Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven. The move was Gov. Eric Greitens at his cynical best, manipulating a board dominated by his appointees and still unconfirmed by the Legislature to execute a backdoor coup inside a supposedly independent agency.
Greitens has gambled that most Missourians arent paying attention. Maybe hes correct, but that doesnt make his actions right or necessarily legal. At least one court challenge could force the governor to retreat because he has bypassed procedures mandated by law.
For those who are paying attention, Greitens has done little to explain exactly why he felt Vandeven deserved to be fired. Her performance, by nearly all measures, has been stellar. She has won repeated accolades from lawmakers and educators.
Her classy departure Friday contrasted with the shoddy treatment shes received. Leveling no parting shots, Vandeven stated only that she was leaving Missouris public schools stronger and lamented that political forces are eclipsing educational decisions.
The commissioner is supposed to answer to a board of education evenly split among Republicans and Democrats. The idea is that no decisions get made without bipartisan consensus, which helps minimize political influence on public education.
But Greitens has spent the past several months firing and appointing members, then firing his own appointees when they wouldnt do his bidding. Members complained that Greitens never directly explained his expectations, though it became apparent that he wanted them to fire Vandeven. One former member, Tim Sumners of Joplin, has sued, accusing the governor of breaking the law by removing Sumners only three weeks after appointing him.
Greitens never articulated what his expectations were of Vandeven and why she had fallen short. Assorted tweets and Facebook postings have only made macho-sounding, vague references about fighting for our kids. His statement Friday lauded Vandevens ouster as a chance to change course: The bureaucrats took your money. Teachers didnt get a raise. Juniors in high school had the ACT cut. The bureaucrats had their chance. They failed our kids.
Vandeven had no control over funds for ACT testing. In fact, it was Greitens who cut $4 million from the states assessment funding in July. Teacher salaries are set by local school boards. How Vandeven failed our kids remains a mystery.
Republicans, including Board President Charlie Shields, a former state senator, lamented the political trickery.
Melissa Randol, executive director of the Missouri School Boards Association, said the move effectively has made the commissioner of education a political appointee of the governor.
Somehow, Greitens sees the politicization of public education as a win for Missouri teachers, parents and students. If he ever finds a way to explain that twisted logic, wed love to hear it.
Aggrieved depositors cry foul over CB liquidation move By Quintus Perera View(s): View(s):
Depositors of failed finance companies are weeping in despair, accusing the heartless brute the Central Bank (CB) in deciding to liquidate some of these failed finance companies, despite the repeated promises and assurances of even President Maithripala Sirisena and some Ministers.
The report 3 ailing finance companies to be liquidated in last Sundays issue of the Business Times sent shock waves through these disgruntled depositors. Many were panic stricken and some of them called at the Business Times office to give their side of the story.
The three companies proposed to be liquidated are Central Finance and Invest Ltd (CIFL), The Standard Credit Finance Ltd (SCFL) and City Finance Corporation Ltd (CFCL).
These helpless depositors indicate that already a considerable number of depositors have died either due to heart break or unable to meet their medical expenditure while there have also been some suicides due to heavy financial difficulties and they have been suffering for some as much as 10 years and, all based on false promises by the government and the Central Bank.
In these earmarked finance companies alone there are around 10,000 depositors and according to W. Gunawardene, President, CIFL Depositors Association (CIFLDA) the depositors, shareholders and savings account holders would be a massive 25,000 and the cancellation of the business licence would affect all of them.
Aggrieved depositors cry foul over CB liquidation move
Depositors of CFCL indicate that they were manipulated and defrauded by Deepthi Perera alias Chulaka Gunawardena, Chairman, Aspic Group and after nine years many of their members are dead or lying in bed without money for medical expenditure, their childrens education is lost. Some who cannot meet their daily expenses have become paupers. Now the Central Bank has ignored the multi-pronged sufferings of these depositors and try to cover-up by liquidating these companies, they allege.
They accuse Aspic-owned CIFL of running a complex financial scam and the ploy adopted by having an unregistered CIFL and registered CIFL with different colour logos. Deposits have been collected for the unregistered company on the pretext of obtaining deposits for the registered one which is 40 years old. The unregistered firm ran into difficulty in 2008 due to gross mismanagement and no funds.
According to the CIFLDA the licence of registered CIFL was cancelled last week. In 2008 CIFL Asset Management (unregistered) deposits were used to buy a licensed finance company called Industrial Finance Ltd (IFL) and the liabilities of the collapsing CIFL was transferred to IFL. In 2011 IFL and CIFL Assets Management were renamed as City Finance Ltd and given Rs. 100 million to another alleged scammer to be invested in CFCL. Some directors of IFL were alleged to be punished by foreign courts for fraud.
Ms. Sonali Dunuwila, Secretary, City Finance Depositors Society quoting media reports in 2011 indicated that the Colombo Commercial High Court noted that the intention of the directors of the company was to defraud the creditors and deprive the availability of sufficient assets to meet the debts to be settled in the course of impending winding up application in accordance with the provisions of the Companies Act
Adducing many details to support their statement, she indicated, How did the CB allow such people to be responsible for a licensed finance company? This is the same thing they are trying to do to CFCL, they have changed the name, written off the assets and now CB is trying to liquidate the company. Now, CB seems to be part of the whole criminal chain.
Meanwhile, furious over the CB issuing notice to cancel the business finance license of the CIFL, a delegation of the CIFLDA met J.T.R. Karunarate, CB Assistant Governor November 22 and has registered their vehement protest against the cancellation of the license.
Mr. Gunawardene told the Business Times that they have pointed out to the CB that the CB has blatantly violated the fundamental rights of the depositors, violated the law and acted against provisions of the Finance Act. He said that they have indicated to CB that it has violated the provisions of the Finance Act from Section 25 to 37 and preferred to act on Section 37 (1) of the said act.
They are now preparing to complain to the Human Rights Commission against this injustice and would also be taking legal action where possible against the rights violation of their members.
He said that the Swiss investor, Chancental Works GmbH had promised to bring the money to the local Security Investment Account (SIA), in the first instance US$10 million and the balance $15 million equity capital is to be transferred to the SIA totalling $25 million. He said that Mr. Karunaratne has indicated to them to ask the investor to bring the money first and then they would consider withdrawing the license cancellation notice.
He said that the depositors have invested in CIFL purely based on the license issued to the company by the CB. There is no finality of the investor proposals and accused the CB of not considering all these facts, and instead allegedly violated their rights.
Sri Lanka moving towards debt sustainability By Bandula Sirimanna View(s): View(s):
The Government will raise money through the issuance of sovereign bonds in the offshore capital market next year to beef up funds for bunched-up debt repayments amounting to a staggering US$13.8 billion before its maturity period from 2019 to 2022, a senior Finance Ministry official said.
There are no repayments for international sovereign bonds in 2018; he said adding that the debt servicing will be maintained without any hindrance as scheduled.
Sri Lanka has commenced a debt sustainability process under the supervision of the IMF, he disclosed.
He noted that the Central Bank will go to the market and use financial resources to tackle the bunching-up debt that is going to be experienced from 2019 onwards while concentrating on liability management.
A framework is also being worked out for liability management, he said pointing out that there will be a peak in domestic debt repayments in 2018.
A Liability Management Act will be enacted in parliament soon to create the breathing space to address the bunching of external debt from 2019, Governor of the Central Bank Dr. Indrajit Coomaraswamy said at a recent public meeting.
This will relax the ceiling on Government borrowing set out in the Appropriation Act to raise financing to reduce the costs of external obligations; he said adding that this will serve to reduce roll-over risk.
The Sri Lanka Enterprise Budget 2018 had proposed to permit the Bank of Ceylon (BoC) and the Peoples Bank to raise debt and equity capital overseas. Previously, the BoC and the National Savings Bank had gone to the international markets to raise capital.
According to Central Bank statistics, Sri Lanka has to pay $2.56 billion in 2018, $3.99 billion in 2019 and $3.46 billion in 2020 for debt servicing.
The unsustainable debt burden can only be resolved through prudent policies; proactive liability management, and above all, export transformation,
The Government also plans to utilise the proceeds of the divestment of public assets to pay the debt, the Governor revealed.
The long-lease of the Hambantota port will generate much needed non-debt creating flows for liability management which is essential to address external debt repayments from 2019 onwards, he added.
Meanwhile S&P Global Ratings recently revised its outlook on Sri Lanka to Stable from Negative.
The Stable outlook reflects its expectation that the Government will maintain the reform momentum over the next 12 months and smoothen the upcoming surge in debt redemptions, particularly in 2019, S&P said in a media release.
An investment house will be established to facilitate liability management; a senior Finance Ministry official said adding that the National Debt Management Act will also be presented in parliament shortly
The debt to GDP ratio increased to 79.3 per cent in 2016 from 77.6 per cent in 2015 reflecting the debt financing of budget deficit, lower nominal GDP growth rate and the significant rupee depreciation on the stock of foreign currency denominated debt.
According to the Finance Ministrys Fiscal Management Report 2018, the ratio will gradually reduce to 70 per cent in 2020 with the expected lower fiscal deficit supported by a higher economic growth.
The government will implement a forward looking liability management strategy for domestic and foreign debt portfolios under the Medium Term Debt Management Strategy (MTDS) as a measure of resolving high debt stock.
Sri Lankas civil aviation gets PPP wings soon View(s):
Sri Lankas domestic air services will be developed in compliance with international standards with the involvement of the private sector under a Public Private Partnership model, top official sources said.
Foreign and local air service operators are to be attracted for the improvement of local services under this new initiative, a senior official of the Transport and Civil Aviation Ministry told the Business Times.
The Civil Aviation Authority has been directed to formulate a request for proposals for this purpose in consultation with the Public Private Partnership (PPP) unit of the Treasury.
Transport and Civil Aviation Ministry will regulate air service operators standards and the fares to be levied by them.
When this matter came up for discussion at the Cabinet Committee on Economic Management (CCEM) meeting, it was decided that domestic services should be open to foreign and local competitors alike.
Transport and Civil Aviation Minister Nimal Siripala De Silva noted that his ministry has decided to develop domestic airports for the use of civilians and identify the airports that need further development.
The World Bank has agreed to provide funding for the development of civilian airports, he disclosed.
It has stepped in to guide the Sri Lankan Governments development of its domestic aviation sector, and to determine the potential for involvement by the private sector into the industry,
An Options Study for Private Sector Participation in the Development of the Domestic Airports Sector in Sri Lanka was commissioned by the Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Fund (PPIAF) of the World Bank.
The study has been carried out by a team consisting of members from the World Bank and ICF Consulting Services Hong Kong Ltd with active participation from the Sri Lankan Government.
With the exception of Mattala International Airport (MIA) (which was only commissioned in 2013), the remaining 14 domestic airports were previously owned and operated directly by the government before being transferred to the Civil Aviation Authority, and subsequently AASL.
These airports were all utilised by the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) during the countrys civil conflict. The SLAF is the operator of most of these airports; there are also civilian aviation services run by private sector operators on a small scale.
There are a number of companies offering plane and helicopter charter services to several airports, such as Cinnamon Air, Helitours, Simplifly and Air Senok.
Inbound tourism is expected to grow from 1.5 million in 2014 to 5.4 million in 2035, and translated into number of tourist passengers (counting in and out airport movements) at BIA airport of 3.1 million (in 2014) and 10.8 million (in 2035). Further growth is expected Sri Lankas civil aviation gets PPP wings soon from Sri Lankan travellers and passengers in transit, the study revealed.
Most of the growth is expected to be driven by tourist demand. Demand from Sri Lankan nationals is expected to grow from 2.5 million in 2014 to over 5.2 million in 2035 which is in line with projected growth in GDP per capita in Sri Lanka.
The potential domestic aviation activity is expected to rise from a base level of 135,000 airport passengers in 2014 to 307,000 in 2021, before declining to approximately 198,000 in 2024 as improvements in road networks come in place.
Thereafter, the consultants forecast that domestic aviation growth will resume, providing there are no further significant improvements in surface connectivity towards some 350,000 passengers by 2035.
The analysis suggested that five airports have the highest level of development potential: Bandaranaike International Airport in order to facilitate direct transfers for international passengers arriving into Sri Lanka; Mattala International Airport in order to capitalise on existing infrastructure assets and to enable continued growth within Sri Lankas most popular tourism region; Sigiriya Airport in order to provide easier access to key tourism destinations within the ancient Cities region; Hingurakgoda has been identified as alternative airport in the region, Batticaloa Airport in order to provide quicker access to Sri Lankas east coast and upcoming tourism destinations in the region; and Jaffna Airport in order to provide quicker access to the north of the country. (Bandula)
Strategic plan to increase shipping sector revenue View(s):
Sri Lanka is drawing up a strategic plan to make the shipping sector a billion dollar industry taking advantage of opening it to global shipping lines, Finance Ministry sources said.
The plan aims at increasing the cash flow in this sector from a current level of around US$50 million, a senior ministry official told the Business Times.
At present global shipping lines are represented as agents by Sri Lankan companies who retain 60 per cent of the profit while 40 per cent is repatriated to the shipping line.
Currently vessel owners remit around $800 million through the Foreign Currency
Account for agents of Foreign Shipping/Airline (FCAASA) to local agents for necessary levies and chargers as well as for shipping service fares.
The profit of the shipping agent is 5 per cent of this money amounting to around $40 million. Under the present 60:40 ownership arrangement 60 per cent of the $40 million amounting to $24 million is retained in the country with the local agents.
The governments strategic plan will promote competition and allow market determination of agency prices, the official explained adding that it could lead to reduce shipping costs, improve export competitiveness and bring down the price of imports.
According to the performance review of the Colombo Port, 316 container ships arrived during the month of September this year compared to 300 during the same month last year.
The new plan anticipates that the major shipping lines could attract more ships to call at the port and expand the overall freight market and increase the aggregate shipping and allied industries in Sri Lanka creating more jobs and new business opportunities, the official said. Local agents are objecting to the liberalization saying it would impact adversely on the sector.
Warm-hearted Sri Lankans View(s):
Scene 1: As a visiting tourist goes through the aero bridge outside the flight gate into the Bandaranaike International Airport lobby, walking past airport officials and smartly-clad SriLankan Airlines ground staff, the mood is anything but welcoming. They are greeted by glum or stern faces.
As the visitor approaches the immigration counter, the officer looks at you warily as if to say, Why are you here? Do you have a proper visa? No smiles, no warm welcome. Across the airport, apart from an exceptional official, staff is generally unfriendly.
Scene 2: Last week, bringing my car to a halt at a pedestrian crossing on Galle Road near McDonalds, Kollupitiya, when the lights had turned red, I was intrigued by a young Sri Lankan who was waiting to cross the road. He was engrossed in a conversation with an elderly, respectably-dressed woman who appeared to be begging. He suddenly realised that traffic had stopped and the green indicator to cross had come on. Quickly dipping into his pocket and fishing out a note, he gave it to the woman, gently tapping her on the shoulder in a gesture of I understand or empathise with your plight and ran across the road. I quickly tooted the horn, causing him to turn around quickly as he rushed across and gave him a thumbs up to acknowledge his good gesture. Surprised at first, he then returned the smile.
While the second case exemplifies the natural Sri Lankan trait being a generous, warm and friendly nation of people, the first case gives a wrong notion of Sri Lanka being an unwelcome place for visitors when in fact all channels should be switched on to greet visitors with a pleasant smile.
And in the month of December where there is a lot of goodwill, sharing and pleasantry, public and private sector organisations involved in tourism should begin a crash course on making Sri Lanka a more welcome place for the four million-plus visitors the country hopes to welcome by 2020.
Sri Lankans have a good heart, a warm smile and are generous to a point as depicted in the example above. So how can the country benefit from an asset that comes naturally (and at no cost) particularly in making tourists welcome at the first point of contact the airport?
First impressions matter to any visitor and this is where the authorities and private sector institutions engaged in tourism have failed over the years, focusing more on the hardware than the software. Large billboards greet visitors with a woman, palms pressed together, smiling brightly. But below the poster, an official or ground steward would often have an indifferent, bored or even sullen look. There is no warm and friendly atmosphere at the airport, particularly at the unfriendly immigration counters.
With tourism taking precedence in the countrys growth model through increasing foreign exchange revenue, more employment and more benefits trickling down to community level, this years budget provided a lot of benefits to this sector.
All the good vibes in the hardware context are there: Para-tariffs removed off some imported food and beverages; home-stays encouraged with a credit facility which has been budgeted at Rs. 10 million (though this would be just enough for 10 or fewer homes @ the rate of Rs. 1 million for renovation); rationalising liquor licences; developing ancient forts as tourist attractions; enhancing the value of railway stations like Nanu Oya, Colombo Fort, Galle and Ella by declaration as archaeological sites; developing domestic airports; and holding three street festivals and exhibitions in Los Angeles, London and Mumbai during the coming year to coincide with Sri Lankas 70th Independence celebration (the trade says the Rs. 50 million allocated is peanuts compared to the cost of an event in those countries). However, lets leave those negatives for another day.
In the area of software which is the focus of todays discussion, the authorities deserve praise in introducing a tourist-friendly tuk tuk where the drivers will be provided free training as tourist guides.
As I type on the desktop one finger at a time, the old ways of using a typewriter or computer keyboard for an untrained person the mornings silence is broken by Kussi Amma Seras voice at the gate, reprimanding a young beggar, Aei kollo, umbatawedak karanna bari de, hinga kanne nethuwa? However, despite her severe tones and scoldings, she takes out a couple of 10-rupee coins from a hembiliya hidden, under her hette and within her buxom bosom, gives it to the man and sends him away. Generosity seems to be over-spilling this Friday morning, the first day of December despite the gloomy overcast skies, continuous rains, gusty winds and personal tragedies. December, in fact, is the month of greetings, giving, sharing of gifts and, for the high rollers, partying notwithstanding the political chaos in the city with the rumblings of thunder not in the skies but electioneering during the upcoming local government elections.
State authorities dealing with tourism must combine with the privately-led tourism industry to provide a warmer welcome to every foreign guest arriving in the country (and even on departure). It should be the kind of warmth to some extent seen at the Colombo Port where Kandyan dancers and drummers greet visitors arriving on any cruise ship.
If the tourism authorities can come up with a model where every guest arriving at the airport is greeted with a flower and a smile, with the immigration counters manned by a smiling officer, a small welcome notice and a bowl containing fresh flowers or sweets, that would go a long way in enhancing the Sri Lankan product. This is in addition to ensuring tourists not getting harassed like the case of a British national, a Buddhist herself, who was deported for sporting a Buddha tattoo on the upper arm but later awarded compensation by the Supreme Court upholding that her fundamental rights had been affected.
Being an island nation helps. Many island states have pitched their tourism product on the warmth of the country, its people, food and music. The latter two make a world of a difference to the traveller.
For instance, during the three-month closure of the airport earlier this year, there was a calypso band playing at the departure lounge which was a welcome diversion and helped passengers while away the long hours in the departure lounge. Selfies were taken, children ran around and long hours quickly went past as visitors absorbed the islands culture of music and song. Given that success, this should have been continued. It is still not too late to re-introduce this, both in the arrival and departure lounges.
If one is to play on the psyche of a traveller, first and last impressions matter more than hardware (nice hotels, good food, visiting important sites). They create an everlasting impression of a country that is warm, friendly and welcoming to visitors.
Visiting Hawaii some years back, all that I can remember is the greeting at the airport: A smiling young woman garlanding every visitor, with Hawaiian music from a typical ukulele in the background. That was more than 30 years ago and that warm welcome will always remain as the high point of a brief visit.
As an island nation, Sri Lanka is at an advantage over its regional peers in sharing the tourism pie. Islanders are often considered fun-loving, easy-going and laid-back, and lovers of music and as the pithy Sri Lanka saying goes Neva gilunath ban choon (Even while the ship is sinking the people are partying). Come sun or rain, Sri Lankans most of the time are happy islanders. And, a tot of toddy with a little bite enhances the mood!
Marapana keeps an ace up his sleeve View(s):
The public of Sri Lanka need not worry. Those who seem concerned that our foreign policy is like a rudderless boat with nobody at the tiller, better think afresh. It is in safe hands whatever the loquacious members of the opposition might say. Only the other day the Foreign Minister (the third under the yahapalana administration) told our legislators that he is armed with an ace. Never mind where he keeps it whether up the sleeve or under the pillow he will play it when the time is ripe.
Let those-sovereign states, civil society groups, journalists and commentators who in the last decade or so have castigated Sri Lanka for the way it fought an enemy which in their expert knowledge could not be militarily defeated, take note. Our Foreign Minister is now armed and ready to press the button just like Kim Jong-un did last week sending his latest toy right into the Pacific Ocean to join the shoals of tuna which the Japanese turn into delicious sashimi.
Foreign Minister Tilak Marapana said he knows when to play the ace. My fear is that somebody else is more likely to play the joker. It is not that some have not been playing the joker over and over again, turning Sri Lankan foreign policy into a tragic-comedy, defying sense and sensibility.
So what is this ace that Marapana has armed himself with and thinks he can break the bank? Well, it is the information which Lord Naseby had been able to wrench out of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) from the war time confidential despatches sent by UKs Defence Attache in Colombo to the FCO and the defence establishment.
These vital despatches, despite being heavily redacted to save the British Government from diplomatic embarrassment, present a different picture of the last six months of the war against the LTTE, especially with regard to the number of civilian casualties, portrayed by Sri Lankas critics.
The number of civilian casualties as assessed by Defence Attache Lt. Col Anton Gash based on figures he had been able to put together with the help of information obtained from knowledgeable sources on the ground, amounts to between 7,000 to 8,000.
This is far, far less than the speculative 40,000 or more touted by some uninformed persons who served as experts to then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other parties determined to inflate the number of casualties as props to their prejudices and one-sided narratives.
What is so intriguing about this ace as Marapana calls it, is the summary treatment of it initially by the foreign ministry in a statement it made in or about October 25. On that occasion the ministry tried to dismiss-rather arrogantly too the results of Lord Nasebys three-year struggle to get at these despatches of the British Defence Attache in Colombo, particularly those sent to London during the closing stages of the war when the LTTE was using the Tamil civilians it had corralled, literally as cannon fodder.
In fact, I had read the highly censored despatches made available to Lord Naseby some weeks before he actually used them at the Lords debate on October 12 to buttress his case. His arguments clearly presented a counter narrative to that propagated by the UK and US governments, the main architects of UNHRC Resolution 30/1, which were highly critical of Sri Lanka and its security forces. They proposed measures inimical to Sri Lanka which the yahapalana government tamely accepted by co-sponsoring the resolution.
Without being grateful for what the Lord had done to undermine the doctored case against Sri Lanka that western governments, the media and human rights activists had put together, the ministry in its peculiar statement seemed to go out of its way to belittle the result of the Naseby initiative.
Strangely enough, the Foreign Ministry appeared to be taking pot-shots at local political opponents, which was not only irrelevant to the question at issue and certainly not its task. In its statement the ministry said: Engaging in debates in the international domain over the number of civilians who may have died at a particular time in the country will not help resolve any issues in a meaningful manner, locally, except a feel good factor for a few individuals who may think that they have won a debate or scored points over someone or the other.
As I said in a previous column it is surely a rare foreign ministry that, responding to a media query on a serious matter that has not only engulfed Sri Lanka but has been, and still is, an unsettled issue for sections of the international community including the UN, would try to treat the deaths of civilians in war in such a cavalier manner.
The Foreign Ministry treats the death of thousand of Sri Lankan civilians in a disastrous and debilitating war like a plaything and with no interest in trying to reach the truth. One thought that the then foreign minister by co-sponsoring Resolution 30/1 had agreed to establish a Truth Commission. Is not trying to arrive at the truth with regard to civilian casualties of war and how it happened, a crucial task of any commission established to search for the truth?
Is it not of particular importance to the people of Sri Lanka bombarded with information (concocted or otherwise) by external sources that accuse its security forces of genocidal intent or deliberate killings, to know whether there is any truth in these accusations and whether the deaths were as high as 40,000 and even more according to some?
Having pointed a finger at a few individuals who might feel good about what Lord Naseby was able to squeeze out of his own foreign office, surely it is a duty the Foreign Ministry owes the public to identify these few individuals who seem to have been elated by Lord Nasebys disclosures which deflate some of the accusations against Sri Lankas security forces.
The whole tenor and tone of the ministry statement is that those who are elated and even overjoyed by what Lord Naseby had unearthed with much diligence are somehow traitorous for supporting the Naseby initiative.
After having put both of its feet in its open mouth, the foreign ministry tried to retract by pulling one foot out a couple of days later. But by that time the damage had been done because by then the media was digging into why the government was remaining silent over the Naseby disclosures. After all they provided vital evidence that ended the accusations levelled by our so-called friends the UK and US which the UNP was vigorously cultivating.
The few individuals that the Foreign Ministry alluded to had a few days later grown to include President Sirisena and State Minister of Foreign Affairs Vasantha Senanayake. Admittedly the government was late in recognising the value of what Lord Naseby had unearthed or there were attempts by some outside the ministry manoeuvring to downplay the Naseby findings.
It must be said in favour of State Minister Vasantha Senanayake who was the first to take cognizance of the value of the Naseby findings which his own ministry possibly dictated to by an unseen hand was trying desperately to bury. He wrote an official letter thanking the British peer.
On November 2 President Sirisena wrote to Lord Naseby thanking him for his help to Sri Lanka. Lord Naseby told me that the Presidents November 2 letter reached him at the House of Lords delivered by our High Commission in London on November 21. Perhaps the Foreign Ministry and its satellite missions still rely on carrier pigeons for delivery.
So now having done its best to denigrate Lord Nasebys efforts on behalf of Sri Lanka which the British peer did out of his genuine interest in Sri Lanka, Foreign Minister Marapana who remained silent all those weeks until the foreign ministry vote came up in parliament, has also decided to cling on to the wagon.
He has now realised he has an ace in his hand. He is only waiting for that singularly apposite moment to play it. Why? Because otherwise our critics would prepare a defence against it to destroy its impact. Minister Marapana does not realise that he is not at the bar table or even the card table. The last time he engaged in some advocacy in parliament speaking on the Avant Garde issue he had to throw in the towel and his portfolio.
Surely he must realise that this ace he is trying to keep up his sleeve is now rather passe in that it has been out in the open for six weeks or so. The arguments are well known here and Lord Nasebys entire speech is available in toto in the British parliaments Hansard. Lord Naseby has been interviewed by TV and he has said his piece.
Doesnt Marapana realise that the recent story published by Associated Press of some 50 Tamil asylum seekers who claimed to have been tortured by Sri Lankan security and played out in the media here and elsewhere was an attempt to divert attention from the Naseby story, was manipulated by the Tamil diaspora and some human rights activists?
By the time our Foreign Ministry and some of its diplomutts scattered around wake up to meeting and countering such media manipulation the sun would begin to set in the east. This foreign ministry is more concerned with covering up its tracks and scratching each others back.
Lord Naseby faced bureaucratic obstruction from the British Foreign Office when he invoked UKs Freedom of Information Act to obtain the information he sought.
Our own Right to Information Act which the Editors Guild fought for years to get on the statute book and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe advocated for nearly two decades, was made law by this yahapalana government.
The government rightly claims the RTI Act as one of the most valuable pieces of legislation that it successfully piloted through parliament.
But there are increasing signs that bureaucratic obstructionists are trying to undermine the publics right to seek and receive information so that the dark dealings of ministry bureaucrats will not reach the public.
As Lord Naseby once told me ahead of launching his quest for the Anton Gash despatches there will be bureaucrats standing in the way but one must be prepared to go up the totem pole to higher authorities and contest the decisions of officials and overcome their barriers. The same would have to be done to our own buroocrats who are trying to nullify the publics right to know in the belief that they are the final arbiters of what the public needs to know.
It would not surprise the public if they hear stories of officials whose backbone needs straightening playing around with technologically advanced mobile phones to hasten communications in the furtherance of favours. Large scale bribery and corruption are not the only obstacles that stand in the way of clean government. Officialdom has a hand in undermining the transparency, accountability and meritocracy that the government promised the people.
Now that the State Minister of Foreign Affairs Vasantha Senanayake has played a lead role in negating his ministrys attempt to undercut the Naseby initiative, he should take a hand in cleaning up his ministry and ensure that laws are obeyed and adhered to.
Political vultures and the carcass of the rainbow revolution View(s):
Vultures are circling high above in the skies as they watch what appear to be the struggling death throes of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe unity alliance with delight.
Fury in Sri Lankas hamlets
Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa hypocritically thunders on the twin dangers of the sale of national assets and the betrayal of national war heroes, going on to insist that the faction of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) loyal to President Maithripala Sirisena can join his group only on their terms. His numerous hangers-on in the self-styled Joint Opposition (JO) who compete with each other for the prize of being the most unprepossessing, cackle with unabashed joy at the prospect of a settling of scores with their rivals and a quick return to power.
To be fair, the beating of the communal drum by the JO has not been that effective in the villages and provinces of Sri Lanka as even the cursory traveller will discover. In other words, there is little public acceptance of the favorite Rajapaksa bogey that the country is in the pincer grip of hostile international forces. More to the point, plainly and simply, the problem is the monumental inefficiency of this Government and the soaring cost of living.
The desperate plight of farmers having to cope alternately with prolonged drought and then flooding with little official support is just one example. This seeming inability to enforce order is replicated in other instances; a nation-wide example being the recent fuel shortage. But in the rural hamlets, the fury is even greater. Steeply increasing prices of staples like coconuts and rice have aggravated the predicament of the poor. The enthusiasm for yahapalanaya governance has waned among those who voted for a change.
An unsettling contrast
The contrast is unsettling; on the one hand, suited and black tied crooks get away with millions in the sinister form symbolized by Arjun Aloysius of Perpetual Treasuries fame and on the other hand, helpless villagers are caught in death traps of poverty, whose only recourse is suicide. In a recent casual exchange in Colombo, my conversationalist asked the incredulous if not somewhat patronizing question; are people in the villages actually aware of the so-called Central Bank bond scam and shenanigans in high financial circles? After recent visits to the Uva, Central and Eastern provinces, the answer to that query is in the positive.
In that regard, it must be conceded that the communications strategy of the Rajapaksas has been effective. And it has not helped that the much vaunted anti-corruption strategy of this Government against the crooks of the previous regime has failed miserably, part by design and part by its own inconsistency. Handled badly from the outset, this has now has become an embarrassing fiasco apart from a few stellar convictions.
True, the Supreme Court is performing its constitutional role after a lapse of close to two decades, even though this is attributable primarily to a few conscientious judges. One example is the Courts recent decision declaring the arrest, detention and subsequent deportation of a British tourist in 2014 carrying a tattoo on her arm of the Gautama Buddha seated on a lotus flower to be unconstitutional.
This case demonstrates a common pattern of Rule of Law safeguards being violated from the point of the tourist being compelled to go with a so-called civil defence officer and a taxi driver who had first spotted the tattoo to the Katunayake police station subsequent to which she was produced in the Negombo Magistrates Court, detained in the Negombo prison and later, at the Mirihana immigration detention camp. Writing for the Court, Anil Gooneratne J. summarily dismissed explanations of the police officers that the tattoo had been feared to bring about a breach of the peace, holding that there was no reasonable basis for the arrest. The manner in which the tourist was abused in lewd language by a prison guard and the constant demands for money made by the police was judicially deplored.
The privileged and the marginalized
Despite these undeniable gains, the fact remains that this Government has failed to straddle the city-rural divide in a way that harmoniously intertwines both. An active Supreme Court is a distant luxury to a milk farmer struggling to survive in the interior of the Ampara District. And visits by one delegation of the United Nations followed by another are of little comfort to a mother in Trincomalee despairingly struggling to ascertain the fate of her disappeared son.
Death is the one relief to the pain of very different victims, united by their common and desperate hopelessness. It is that disjunctive contrast between the privileged and the marginalized that the unity Government (if it lurches on) must address with all its might and main without floundering in the major cities, leveling pot shots at each other.
In 2015, the marriage of the long talked of technocratic vision of the UNPs Ranil Wickremesinghe and the homespun commonsense of the SLFPs Maithripala Sirisena was hailed. The President and the Prime Minister were expected to bring their respective and very different strengths to the unity alliance. What has happened since then is quite different. The UNP has been almost irreversibly damaged by a gigantic financial scandal in connection with the Central Bank and its own party while the Sirisena faction of the SLFP has become inextricably entangled with nationalistically populist rhetoric.
Avoiding an awaiting tragedy
In that sense, both have failed to give enlightened leadership to the national effort to lift the country out of the Rajapaksa morass of communalism and corruption. To the cocooned in Colombo, the glee that implacable rivals of the Government display at its eagerly predicted downfall may seem premature. Perhaps there is nothing wrong in wistfully (albeit vainly) hoping for a turn of the tide. This becomes even more urgent as the local government elections draws nigh amidst the failure of asinine games of some to delay the polls.
Measured even against the various idiocies committed by the flotsam and jetsam that cling to one or the other faction in the unity alliance with desperation, whoever thought of conjuring a legal challenge to the Gazette notification pertaining to the polls, deserves a rude knock behind the ears for their monumental stupidity. Even if that challenge has now been withdrawn, the bad taste that it left behind will linger even though it appeared to be an ill-advised gamble only on the part of a few.
So as the inevitable draws near and absent a course correction even at the eleventh hour, the vultures will certainly lose no time in swooping down on the carcass of what once promised to be a bright and beautiful change for Sri Lanka.
That will be the ultimate tragedy for this country and the people. Certainly it must be avoided at all costs.
What prompted President to back out of talks? Some SLPPers also blame Basil for breakdown
Sirisena meets Ranil; PM warns UNP group of action against anyone attacking the President; SLFP also will check polls leaflets to avoid mudslinging at UNP
Elections to all 341 councils likely to be held on Feb. 10; SLPP and its JO allies to contest as United Common Peoples Front
Talks between rival factions of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) have collapsed despite efforts for the first time by President Maithripala Sirisena and his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa to reunite for the local polls.
The duo appointed their respective committees to take forward the talks. This even saw a meeting between President Sirisena and Gotabaya Rajapaksa. There was mutual endorsement of the two teams then. The former Defence Secretary, who had identified the pros and cons of uniting to his leadership, was in favour of giving it a chance.
Whilst the teams were at work, Minister Susil Premjayantha, who had Sirisenas blessings at an earlier stage to broker a parntership, was the harbinger of bad news. His latest message said that the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), the political party formed by Mahinda Rajapaksa, was only a faction of the SLFP. Thus, he declared, the SLFP leadership could not engage in talks for unity. Thereafter, Premjayantha left Sri Lanka on a foreign trip. Like the proverbial last straw that broke the camels back, the talks collapsed.
The SLFP rivals are still unable to fathom what prompted President Sirisena to suddenly back out and call an immediate halt to the patching up talks. Was it local or foreign pressure or both?
On the other hand, many in the SLPP blamed it on Basil Rajapaksa, widely regarded as the strategist for the new political party, the SLPP. In fact, the reconciliation efforts began with an influential non-active SLFP member approaching him. It was Basil who told him that utmost secrecy should be maintained. He had said that he would obtain the concurrence of Mahinda Rajapaksa whilst he urged the unnamed intermediary to do so with President Sirisena. This was around the time Minister Premajayantha had made his first soundings. When his verbal briefing to the Joint Opposition parliamentary group was rejected, a written request from the SLFP, as reported earlier, was handed over to Mahinda Rajapaksa by Premjayantha. It has then been given to Basil Rajapaksa for safe keeping.
With the talks collapsing, President Sirisena appeared to have embarked once again on a new course of action. He had a meeting with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. He explained to him that like his (the Premiers) task was to strengthen the UNP, it was his (the Presidents) task to strengthen the SLFP. Other than this, he insisted that he had nothing in his mind about appointing a new Prime Minister or paving the way for a new Leader of the Opposition. Earlier, Wickremesinghe had sought clarification over speculation in political circles about former Speaker Chamal Rajapaksa being made the Premier under an SLFP dispensation. In fact, when talks were under way, Chamal told leaders of the rival group he was not in favour of such a dialogue. He argued that most party supporters disliked it. Broad indications had been given by Sirisena about the non-fruition of unity talks but Wickremesinghe seemed already aware that reunification talks within the SLFP had not materialised.
During his discussion with the PM, the President had made clear, somewhat assertively, that Wickremesinghe should rein in his parliamentarians from publicly criticising him (Sirisena). He made particular reference to the outburst by State Minister for Strategic Development and International Trade Sujeeva Senasinghe. The State Minister had severely criticised Sirisena using strong words after it came to light at the Central Bank Bond Commission that Senasinghe was in cahoots with the main suspect in the bond scam, Arjun Aloysius of Perpetual Treasuries Ltd. (PTL), by exchanging dozens of calls between them. That company is the subject of a probe by a Commission of Inquiry for allegedly profiteering to the tune of billions of rupees through irregular bond transactions at the Central Bank. Senasinghe had served in the parliamentary Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) and defended the role of PTL. He had even authored a book. In defending himself after the evidence transpired, he had said that all the calls were to get information for the book he was writing on the bond allegations, but in defending himself he took a swipe at Sirisena asking if the country was run by him or a businessman close to him. In fact, Senasinghe himself was an erstwhile associate of the businessman.
Just a day after his meeting, Wickremesinghe told the UNP parliamentary group last Monday that MPs should refrain from criticising the President or face disciplinary action. That the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe meeting has one more time renewed the prospect of the present Yahapalanaya (or good governance) coalition remaining in office until the end of term is one thing. Another is the move to revive the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the remaining tenure of the Government. SLFPers in particular want the inclusion of several new clauses including urging their counterparts to give them equal consideration when evolving policy issues. A ministerial re-shuffle and a prorogation of Parliament to pave the way for a policy statement for the remaining years is also under active consideration. Yet, how the two sides will resolve some of the outstanding matters, like action on high profile cases of bribery and corruption, remains to be seen. Any new MoU will only be a precursor to the next presidential and parliamentary elections.
On the other side of the divide, Basil Rajapaksa admitted that he opposed the talks at reunification at the beginning. It was on the basis that it was against the people of this country. There were both pro-Government and those opposed to it. There would be no force left for those who oppose if the Joint Opposition were to change, he told the Sunday Times this week. However, he said the Rajapaksas were at the butt-end of severe Government harassment. Therefore, Mahinda, Gotabaya, Namal and he met to discuss the situation in detail. It was noted that if the SLFP changed its present policies, the SLPP would have to take that into account. This is whether the SLFP is in the Government or not. This is notwithstanding the personal issues they face. Hence, there was general consensus to examine offers for re-unity and thus obviate blame for any outright rejection. They had noted that they should seek to stop the sale of national assets; halt Government moves to cut down subsidies; check the rising cost of living; mounting unemployment and help to fight bribery and corruption. Particular mention was made of the Central Bank bond scam.
When we were moving forward with talks between the committees on either side, I knew I would be blamed if anything went wrong. I remained neutral. I thought if they decide successfully, I would do my best to get the rest of the party to fall in line, said Basil Rajapaksa. Saying that all Rajapaksas looked at it positively, he added, there were people who were trying to deliberately scuttle the process.
Basil Rajapaksa added, Both President Sirisena and our leader Mahinda Rajapaksa gave their genuine blessings to the respective committees. Sirisena had named SLFP senior deputy leader and Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva, Lasantha Alagiyawanna and Dilan Perera. Also included were Anura Priyadarshana Yapa and Susil Premjayantha. The team from the rival faction comprised C.B. Ratnayake, Pavithra Wanniaratchchi and Mahinda Yapa Abeywardene.
One of the pre-conditions of the rival (Mahinda) group was what it called a safety net. Should talks not succeed there should not be any reprisals on their members. There had been many examples in the past, it was pointed out.
During the talks, the rival faction had placed three demands: They were:
A proposed No Contest Pact to contest the 337 local bodies (later increased to 341 with the creation of new ones). Of this number, 37 local bodies would be contested by smaller parties now associated with the Joint Opposition. Of the remaining 300 number, 150 to be contested by the SLFP. The remaining 150 to be contested by candidates of the rival group under the Pohottuwa (or budding flower) symbol of the SLPP.
If there were serving MPs on either side seeking a particular ward, they are to be conceded. The balance number of wards to be shared equally.
To re-activate the Peoples Alliance (with the Chair symbol) and field candidates under it. At present Mahinda Rajapaksa is the Chairman and former Prime Minister D.M. Jayaratne is the General Secretary.
Amend the Constitution of the PA to make provision for the creation of a 100 member Vidayaka Sabha or Executive Committee. Membership be given to the eight partners of the JO on the basis of two each. That would total 16. Thereafter, the remaining 84 members be allotted on the basis of 40 for the SLFP and 44 for the SLPP.
The Chairmanship of such a Committee will go to the SLFP whilst the post of Secretary will go to the JO. All decisions concerning the two sides to be taken by the Executive Committee.
If accord could be reached for the upcoming local council polls, to pick some 50 local bodies where a victory is not possible. For the rival group to field candidates for them. This was, however, shot down.
We were given to understand that the matters could be considered by the SLFP leadership subject to further talks. However, in the meantime, Minister Premajayanthas new message had arrived, said Basil Rajapaksa. Asked whether the rival group sought the exit of the UNP from the Government, he replied, yes, that is what we put forward earlier. This was a response to assertions by the SLFP Committee that the SLFP also wants to work with the UNP. That is also after it was made clear that the reconciliation was only for the purpose of the local polls a statement which raised queries over what the JO would get in return for entering into an electoral arrangement with the SLFP merely to save the skin of the SLFP under Sirisena.
That development prompted the Sri Lanka Podujana Party (SLPP) to request its candidates to pay their deposits under the pohottuwa symbol. The first move was reflected in the District Secretariats in Gampaha, Kalutara and Galle. That was a precaution said Basil Rajapaksa adding that we could have withdrawn if there was any agreement with the SLFP. That came as an indication that the dialogue was not reaching fruition and was a pressure-message to the SLFP. Nevertheless, small groups from both sides are still talking in a desperate exercise amidst concerns that neither side wants to be accused of breaking off the dialogue.
Now, the SLPP and its partners under the pohottuwa symbol will be known as the Ekabadda Podu Jana Peramuna or United Common Peoples Front. Udaya Gammanpila has been named as the convenor of a campaign committee which will include Dinesh Gunawardena, Vimal Weerawansa, Dulles Allahapperuma, Prasanna Ranatunga, Pavithra Wanniaratchchi, G.L. Peiris, Basil Rajapaksa, Rohitha Abeygunawardena, Vasudeva Nanayakkara and Sanka Navaratne.
Now that the SLFP has accepted that an arrangement with its rival is not materialising, moves are afoot to field its own candidates and launch a strong campaign. This was the subject of discussion when President Sirisena, who returned from a three-day visit to South Korea, chaired a meeting at the Presidential Secretariat on Friday. Several measures were discussed for the local council elections which are now likely to be held on February 10 next year. Sirisena urged members of his personal staff, who had been assigned to prepare reports on matters relating to local polls in different areas, to submit their findings without delay.
Beginning December 6 (next Wednesday), the SLFP district leaders will undertake the task of finalising the list of their respective candidates. It will thereafter be submitted to the party headquarters for ratification. The SLFP is yet to decide on which symbol its candidates would contest. The Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) representatives sought the Betel Leaf. Others representing the hill country areas alleged that it was associated with racial overtones. Most were in favour of using SLFPs hand symbol. The matter will be finalised in the next few days, said a senior SLFPer.
President Sirisena said he would travel to each district for meetings and urged that we speak in one voice. Earlier, there were suggestions that he would not campaign at all in the local elections. In a bid to ensure the polls campaign does not cause any friction with the coalition partner UNP, all leaflets to be distributed by the candidates would require approval from the party headquarters. At another meeting to be held next week, a firm decision on the party symbol as well as the issues that should form the campaign are to be made. There was a debate when it came to choosing candidates for the Colombo Municipal Council. However, Sirisena resolved it.
Sirisena also met his party ministers on his return from Seoul to discuss issues related to the budget proposals. One was the proposal to liberalise the shipping industry. Another was proposed change to the Shop and Office Employees Act. He asked a ministerial team, named earlier, to meet Premier Wickremesinghe again and raise issue since these were in contradiction with the SLFP policy. The team is headed by Nimal Siripala de Silva. Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera has made clear there would be no change in the proposal though he would consider procedural changes.
With the voting on the budget concluding on December 9, the UNP will launch its own local polls campaign. Together with its smaller partner political parties, the UNP will contest under the Elephant symbol but as the United National Front (UNF). Among other parties in the fray is the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) which is campaigning to win local bodies in areas considered its strongholds.
The Elections Commission had earlier chosen to hold local polls in only 93 local bodies in the light of two different reasons. One is a string of mistakes in the Gazette notification issued by Local Government Minister Faiszer Musthapha. That prevented the Commission from conducting polls for 40 local bodies. The conduct of polls to a further 248 were stalled by an order by the Court of Appeal.
The Court last week suspended until December 4, the operation of the Delimitation Commission report Gazetted in February this year. This, six petitioners pleaded, was on the grounds that the Minister, in terms of the law, was not empowered to alter the number of members from a particular ward in a local authority. He was only empowered to make alterations to the boundaries of the local authority. A three-judge bench observed that the Local Government Minister had acted ultra vires the powers vested in him under the Local Authorities Elections Ordinance.
This was to lead to a flurry of political activity. Speaker Karu Jayasuriya was to chair a meeting of party leaders where various options to overcome the situation were examined last Monday. Local Government Minister Musthapha is learnt to have telephoned the Speaker from Malta where he was attending a conference. He drove straight from the airport for the meeting on Monday morning. One of the options examined was to ascertain whether the six petitioners could be persuaded to withdraw their application to the Court of Appeal. Interesting enough, even if they did, at least technically there was no barrier to any other party going to courts on the same matter. Such a prospect hangs in the air even after the polls are concluded.
One party which was strongly in favour of all polls being conducted on the same day was the UNP. That it was earlier planned only for 93 local bodies caused concern at the highest levels of the party since that included many areas which were not favourable to the UNP. A loss would thus place it at a disadvantage when polls for the rest of the local bodies came. Minister Musthapha undertook to talk to the petitioners and later announced in Parliament that that they would withdraw their application.
Even before he made the announcement, Musthapha told confidants he would be able to get the application withdrawn and thus pave the way for the conduct polls to all councils. Even the mistakes in the Gazette notification related to the 40 councils were being rectified, he said.
Thus, last Thursday (November 30), the six petitioners lawyer, N.M. Shaheed, filed a motion before the Court of Appeal, noting that the application was filed on November 10, supported on November 15 and 16, notice was issued and limited interim relief was granted by the Court. Such relief was until the next date in order to enable the Court to re-assess the necessity of extending the interim order. It was to be taken up tomorrow (December 4).
The motion noted that the Petitioners and the Respondents (Minister Musthapha and his Secretary Kamal Pathmasiri) have held discussions on this matter and the first respondent (the Minister) agreed to endeavour to consider the concerns of the Petitioners.
In the said circumstances, the motion declared that the Petitioners are no longer desirous of continuing with this application and have no objection to the limited interim order issued by Your Lordships Court being dissolved. The Petitioners respectfully move that Your Lordships Court be pleased to mention this matter on 30 November 2017 to enable the Petitioners to support this motion, to respectfully move that the interim order delivered by Your Lordships Court be dissolved and to withdraw this application without costs.
As a result, the Elections Commission is now able to conduct polls to all the local councils. The original dates of nominations for the 93 local bodies will be, as scheduled, from December 11 to 14. For the rest of the local councils, nominations will be received from December 17 to 19.
The recent developments over re-unity within the SLFP and the upcoming local polls would no doubt have far reaching repercussions. The plain fact is that the votes of the SLFP would largely be divided between the Sirisena faction and those backing Rajapaksas SLPP. SLFPers who attended Fridays meeting at the Presidential Secretariat say they are confident they can hold their own and make substantial gains. However, if there is a tilt in voter preference to the SLPP, that will turn out to be a daunting challenge for Sirisena. When relations with the UNP are strained and he has just seemingly repaired the latest damage with the UNP, the re-unity efforts with the SLPP for which he gave his full blessing have misfired.
Thus, fielding candidates from the SLFP that is backing him, is an exercise borne out of no other options. Not when his backers delayed the local polls and reached a point of no return. Making matters worse are credible reports that at least four parliamentarians from within Sirisenas ranks are now set to cross over to Rajapaksas SLPP. All this, there is little doubt, would affect Sirisena in his governance as President.
For the UNP, the senior partner in the Government, there is a sigh of relief that the reunification efforts in the SLFP did not succeed. The party is confident that with what it believes is a strong voter base in most areas, it will be in a position to garner most number of local councils. However, this is the first time the UNPs own popularity is being put to the test after the Central Bank bond scandal. UNPers argue that at the grassroots level there is little or no knowledge about the bond issue. Also, the bond issue is not the only issue that is nagging the UNP voter base in the provinces. The answers, of course, will be known within weeks rather than months.
A matter of commissions and omissions View(s):
The Budget vote for independent commissions in Parliament earlier this month has led to Sri Lankas new Right to Information (RTI) Commission finally getting its own fund to the relief of the anxious people who have been ceaselessly bombarding the Commission with information requests.
The RTI Act required the Fund to be in place at the outset. But that was not to be. The Commission faced a difficult year of being crippled by bureaucrats in accessing basic allocations needed for its operationalisation.
That the Commission gamely took on the challenge despite temporary premises and minimum staff is commendable. It has released information on the admission of children to national schools, exposed missing Commission of Inquiry (COI) reports and released other COI reports, directed the Army to release information on court-martial proceedings as well as ordered the release of alleged government corruption from the North to the South including unauthorised building permissions and environmental impact assessments.
So if any believed that posing financial difficulties will impede RTI, they thought wrong. The public demand was too strong. But the Commission may have a years worth of a backlog of appeals and other work to catch up on now. That is wholly due to the Governments tardiness in failing to provide independent financial resources at the outset even though ruling politicians congratulated themselves for enacting a globally acclaimed RTI Act during the Budget vote.
In fact, the explanation that a separate budget allocation for the Commission had not been included in 2017 because it had not formally come into being when the budget was drafted in 2016 is at odds with the fact that the RTI Commission had already been established by October 1, 2016. This bungling must be attributed to bureaucratic inefficiency, if the kinder explanation is preferred. After all, an allocation for the Office of Missing Persons (OMP) has been included in the 2018 draft Budget even though not a single member has been appointed to the OMP as yet!
That being said, the Parliamentary debates during the vote indicate the tensions in the process. JVP frontliner Sunil Handunnetti, Chairman of the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE), did not mince his words when he accused the Government of trying to paralyse the independent commissions on police, elections and procurement. He protested that a 21-member Audit Commission has had to idle as the draft Audit Act had not yet been passed even though it expends rupees two million each month for its maintenance. The Bribery and Corruption Commission has also been criticised even though the anti-corruption process is being stonewalled by politicians themselves.
Meanwhile, the commissions too have their own complaints apart from lack of financial resources. A clearly frustrated Election Commission has been forced to counter public flak for the postponement of local government and provincial elections even though these unpopular decisions were made elsewhere. And the Human Rights Commission has repeatedly pointed out that draft laws are not sent to it for scrutiny even though its Act strictly mandates that!
The democratic experiment with independent commissions meant to stay the hands of unruly politicians abusing the Rule of Law dates to a decade and a half ago. These commissions must not be covertly and fatally undermined by politicians or bureaucrats to be rubber stamps for the political establishment, as was once the case. The value of checks and balances by independent institutions must be preserved. Notwithstanding flaws in the system, we see progress in that regard.
The Constitutional Council very recently made its mark by rejecting two patently bad nominations by the President to the superior courts. That development can only be to the good of Sri Lanka.
Nature takes its course
After the deluge earlier this week, tourists both local and foreign began flocking to Yala National Park in the south. Three cheers to the Prime Minister who had to step in and put his foot down, on the vehicular traffic that was detrimental to the wildlife in the park.
Like almost everywhere else, a mafia with political patronage has taken control of the safari tours inside the park which at times looks like the Dehiwela or Rajagiriya junctions at peak hour.
The countrys next best Wilpattu National Park which re-opened after the decades long northern insurgency is facing a human invasion of a different kind, also related to politics. There, it is a case of human habitation encroaching on what was once the domain of wildlife. Deforestation is going on at rapid pace in the area despite a Presidential decree to halt it.
This felling of trees is not only happening inside the park boundaries, but to the north of it. Resettlements, new roads, places of worship are all taking shape with appeals not only to the President as Minister of Environment, but even to the Vatican to safeguard Gods creation. The Department of Wildlife is besieged by political pressure.
Floods and droughts and landslides throughout Sri Lanka as we witnessed this week are partly due to the islands forest cover being down to 22 per cent. With a growing population of both humans and animals, and fixed land mass, the delicate balance between nature and the human-animal conflict environmental circles call it the Balance of Power requires a high degree of political astuteness, and firmness.
The PMs intervention at Yala, and the Presidents at Wilpattu, are a sine quo non for the Governments economic plan for the future, Vision 2025, and beyond. Climate change and global warming are bad enough phenomena; the ice glaciers in Greenland are melting faster than thought and they say raising sea levels alarmingly. Man-made crises must not aggravate a bad enough situation.
Animals and trees have no votes, but as everyone knows, nature has its own way of being heard.
Excise Dept. in high spirits: Hard liquor production soars View(s):
Hard liquor production in Sri Lanka rose last year by 7.1 percent, with the Excise Department recording an increase of 28.2 percent in revenue collection on hard liquor, a new report shows. By contrast, beer production dropped by 58 percent, causing a decrease of 37.7 percent in excise income from that sector, states the 2016 Performance Report of the Excise Department. This downturn was partly the result of a leading brewery suspending production for five months after being hit by floods last year, according to the report, which was presented in Parliament, recently.
The Distilleries Company of Sri Lanka (Pvt) Ltd has contributed 60.7 percent of total hard liquor production and accounts for 57.2 percent of entire consumption when compared with manufacturing and consumption data of hard liquor manufacturers in the country. Moreover, it contributed 62.4 percent of total tax revenue generated from hard liquor. W M Mendis is the second largest producer at 10.5 percent.
Earlier this year, a request filed by the Sunday Times under the Right to Information Act revealed that ethanol imports for the manufacture of hard liquor had also doubled from 10.4 million bulk litres in 2013 to 20.4 million bulk litres in 2015 after the new Government took over. The high levels were maintained in 2016 when 18.4 million bulk litres were legally imported.
Between 2015 and 2017, nearly 50 million bulk litres of ethanol were imported for the domestic liquor industry. By contrast, the quantity of ethanol legally imported in 2013 and 2014 was 23.9 million bulk litres. The numbers point to a significant expansion in local production.
Overall, there was a 14 percent increase in excise revenue last year when compared with the previous year. Collection rose from Rs 105.9 billion to Rs 120.7 billion and this was also the highest revenue recorded by the Excise Department since 2012.
However, this still fell short of last years targeted income of Rs 125 billion. The Excise Department said the target could not be met due to the impact of an instant hike in liquor prices attributed to the increase of excise duty twice by the end of 2015; a temporary halt in production at a leading brewery; and a drop in liquor production owing to a price hike caused by a 15 percent value added tax (VAT) on liquor at the end of 2016.
The increase in hard liquor production was quantified as 55.5 million proof litres, when compared to 51.7 million proof litres the previous year. The Excise Department said this was due to the introduction of excise duty on imported foreign liquor, the imposition of limits on liquor transportation and raids on places selling unlawfully manufactured liquor or kasippu.
The Excise Department occupied third place among income generating departments in 2016. It said it expanded the tax base and introduced new excise taxation strategies. Rs 981.3mn was raised through the introduction of taxes on imported foreign liquor as well as imported and country made spirits.
Excise officers conducted 32,782 raids related to excise crimes last year and the fines imposed by courts amounted to Rs. 150.3 million.
Meanwhile, one licence for the manufacturing of cigarettes and 521 licences for manufacturing beedi, cigars and pipe tobacco were renewed last year.
Green port city, with solar and wind power View(s):
With the aim of building a green port city with solar and wind power, the Ministry of Megapolis and Western Development has commissioned a special Social Environment Impact Assessment Report, an official said. The decision was made after a team of officials from the Ministry and other government institutions linked to the Port City project visited several foreign port cities.
The team included officials of the Coast Conservation Department, the Central Environment Authority and the Urban Development Authority (UDA).
The visits were undertaken to study how artificially created islands could have an impact on people or communities living around them.
They visited the Palm Islands in Dubai where three artificial islands have been created, the Forest City in Malaysia and the Marine Bay Sands in Singapore.
Some of the main concerns are garbage collection and disposal, sewerage, the types of vegetation that can be planted within the newly built area and the impact on marine life. The study will be undertaken by the Central Engineering Consultancy Bureau (CECB) and will be carried out by local and foreign experts.
We want to design it as a green port city. We want to harness solar and wind power as well as make the buildings eco-friendly, Megapolis Ministry Secretary Nihal Rupasinghe said. The report is expected to be completed before the end of January.Meanwhile, the Ministry has decided that within the common area of the Port City, buildings will be designed in the architectural style of the Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Kandyan eras.
The Chinese too have been requested to adopt similar styles in the Chinese side of the project and they have agreed.From April next year, a public gallery will be opened at the Port City to enable members of the people to see the construction work on the project. There will be guided tours for school children.
NHSL heart operations stopped, theatre conditions dangerous By Kumudini Hettiarachchi View(s): View(s):
All heart operations at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka, except some emergency cases, came to a halt on Friday, December 1.
The NHSLs five cardiothoracic surgeons put down their scalpels as the conditions in the cardiothoracic operating theatres (OTs) are deemed to be unsuitable for open heart surgery, with fears of patients acquiring infections which, in turn, would lead to high morbidity (illness) and high mortality (death), the Sunday Times learns.
The Health Ministry, meanwhile, has not responded to the situation in any concrete manner, sources said. The Sunday Times in a comprehensive report headlined Heart operations may be suspended from Friday; NHSL theatres contaminated or under repairs last Sunday (November 26) revealed the deplorable state of the four cardiothoracic OTs of the NHSL, the premier heart centre of the country and the pathetic plight of adult patients.
The patients are dying and the Health Ministry does not seem to care, said another source, explaining that the longer a patient had to await open heart surgery, the weaker he or she would get and more prone to illness. Some of the emergency heart surgeries are being performed at an OT of the Neurotrauma Unit which has been loaned to the cardiothoracic surgeons, it is learnt.
Two of the cardiothoracic OTs at the Cardiology Unit of the NHSL have been under repair since April last year. Sources said the State Development and Construction Corporation (SD&CC) has indicated that the earliest when it could conclude the repairs would be at the end of next month. The two other cardiothoracic OTs, in the NHSLs main building complex, are in no condition for open-heart surgeries, with contamination levels high, the sources added. Heart disease, meanwhile, is the No. 1 killer across the world including Sri Lanka.
Other sources queried as to why plans for a National Heart Centre have been shelved. People in the know say that a 70-perch block of land behind the Cardiology Unit on Kynsey Road had been donated to the NHSL for this centre but little or nothing has happened so far. The project proposal for the state-of-the-art National Heart Centre which would have 8 OTs and 4 catheterization laboratories had been drawn up and the design completed way back in 2007. It is estimated to cost Rs. 3 billion, the Sunday Times understands.
The governments priorities for the NHSL seem to be clear first it will construct the Outpatients Department (OPD), then the General Surgical Building and only after that will it consider the National Heart Centre, even though the treatment and management of heart disease should be a priority, a source said, adding that the rich and powerful of course could seek treatment abroad but the poor people of Sri Lanka had to depend solely on the much-touted free health system.
Another source said in disgust that the government seems to be waiting for a foreign donor without channelling some of the money being wasted by politicians on unnecessary projects, for this vital National Heart Centre. In our country, heart patients dependent on the state health system seem to be viewed as people of a lesser god by those in authority, the source added. End
Windy Wednesday: 13 killed, 100,000 affected View(s):
At least 13 people were killed, more than 60 injured and about 100,000 people affected when one of the heaviest rains and gusty winds hit Sri Lanka from Wednesday, the Disaster Management Centre said yesterday. DMC Deputy Director Pradeep Kodippili told the Sunday Times that upto yesterday about 25,811 houses had been damaged, with 694 of them being destroyed.
He said about 5,435 displaced people from about 1,420 families were being housed in 66 safe locations. Meanwhile, the National Building Research Organisation (NBRO) has also issued landslide warnings to residents of the Badulla, Ratnapura, Galle and Matara districts. People living near mountains or slopes and those living in areas identified as landslide prone were warned to remain vigilant.
Warnings were also issued to residents in previously identified landslide prone areas such as Nuwara Eliya, Matale, Hambantota , Moneragala and Kalutara. The Irrigation Departments Hydrology Division report on inland water levels, issued at 12.30pm yesterday, said that in Pandugama, the Nilwala River water level was dropping, while in Baddegama where floods were reported, the Gin Ganga water level was also going down.
Meanwhile, he Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) said the heavy rain and winds had knocked out power supplies to about one million residences, businesses and other insitutions.,
CEB spokesman Sulakshana Jayawardena said CEB crews worked around the clock from Wednesday nigh to restore power supplies. By 10 a.m. yesterday, power had been restored to about 800,000 users. The Galle District was the worst affected, with power lines and transformers damaged in many places. In addition to the crews already working 24 hours a day, Mr Jayawardena said about 20 CEB teams from areas outside the affected districts had been deployed to work in disaster affected areas.
There are obstructions that need to be cleared. We also need to consider the safety of our crews. That is why in some areas, the restoration has been delayed, he said.Meanwhile, the Power and Renewable Energy Ministry has introduced several hotlines for the public to inform authorities of power failures. Accordingly, those in affected areas could call the following numbers: CEB 1987, LECO 1910, Ministry of Power and Renewable Energy 1901, Kalutara District 0114418418 and Southern Province 0714238623.
It is a home away from home, says R.K.D.V. Piyaseeli from a village close to Ridigama in Kurunegala who has given up her job at a garment factory and brought her one-and-only son. The lives of mother and son collapsed exactly a year ago. It was on December 3, last year that her boy complained of leg-pain and they were advised to get a blood test by a doctor. Seeing the blood reports they were told to go to the Kurunegala Teaching Hospital immediately. Thereafter, everything fell into place with the free state health system taking over, with her son being sent to the Apeksha Hospital and Consultant Paediatric Oncologist Dr. Wasantha Rathnayake reassuring them. While telling them gently that her putha had leukaemia, she repeats what he told her when we meet Piyaseeli just outside Ward 15A. Kaalayak beheth karala honda karanna puluwan kiwwa, she says with a poignant smile. We see the team of Ward 15A in action gentle tones of concern and advice to parents not to miss the clinic days or the days of chemotherapy or radiotherapy. While her mother and brothers supported her in whatever way they could financially, the battle against this curable blood cancer which had gripped her son was hers to fight and fight alone. Treatment followed, with a paralysis of her sons left limbs needing a referral to the Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children and then being warded at the National Hospital for nearly two months. Later having been warded also at the Apeksha Hospital for some time, they returned home. The follow-up treatment, thereafter, was as an out-patient. Being from far away, where could she and her son stay? Within the hospital, there is a home away from home not only for Piyaseeli and her son but also for many others, parents with children like a father from Beliatte who is here with his four-year-old middle daughter who has acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), as his wife has just had a baby back home and also adult patients whom we meet a little while later. The walk around CCC (Courage, Compassion and Commitment) House is an eye-opener. A home that gives hope and saves lives is the motto of this transit home for cancer outpatients and their carers. With Piyaseeli repeating that aarakshawa thiyenawa, we see rooms with attached bathrooms for parents with smaller children, rooms with common bathrooms for bigger children and their parents and wards for men and women. In a room with two comfortable beds over which are strung colourful mosquito nets are W.M. Sriyani and 13-year-old daughter Himashi who has a le prashnaya (blood problem) from Kumbukwewa in Kurunegala. On a different floor S.P. Nalani, 64, whose womb has been removed and current allala ivarai (undergone current therapy) is ready to go home, while sitting around chatting are a knot of women from Dompe, Nawalapitiya, Galle and Polonnaruwa who still have to get a little more treatment. They have just had their lunch, while from a kitchen where a few mothers with picky children are making a little special something for them, rise mouth-watering aromas. A mother from Welimada is stirring a bitter-gourd curry and a dhal curry, while another is adding salt to taste to a dish before taking a few drops onto her palm. Loku vaasiyak, says the father from Beliatte who declined to be identified, asking CCC House nothibunanam koheda inne (where would we have stayed if CCC House was not there). Manager Laksiri Fernando relates how CCC House came into being. The Founder Chairman of the CCC Foundation, Jetha Devapura, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, had been a regular visitor to the hospital, lending a helping hand, when its Director was Dr. Kanishka Karunaratne. Once when he asked Dr. Karunaratne about anything more that he could do, he had related how the corridors were so crowded with sleeping patients and their carers that he literally had to jump over them when making his way to his office. They were outpatients from distant areas such as Jaffna, Vavuniya, Moneragala who just did not have the wherewithal to stay in the dingy cramped lodgings which had mushroomed around the hospital. Build a Transit Home, was Dr. Karunaratnes plea to Mr. Devapura who then formed the CCC Foundations in Australia and Sri Lanka. While he raises funds in Australia, the four Trustees (currently they are top business magnates Chandi Page, Suren Madanayake, Suresh Mendis and Gamini Wimalasuriya) based in Sri Lanka do the same here. The 194-bed CCC House has 45 rooms for children with two beds each and four wards with 26 beds each, for men and women. Lots of greenery, a large pond with fast-swimming fish, a play area with colourful equipment, TV areas, reading areas, meal areas, a counselling room, every little thing has been thought of. Its like a hotel, smiles Mr. Fernando who manages with a bare minimum staff of 11, explaining that while the food is provided by the hospital, everything else is looked after by the Foundations through donations. Abans contributes by providing cleaning services at no profit, charging only for the actuals and Kay Jay Security provides a safe environment also at cost and no profit.
Laaleen Sukhera: In search of modern day Austenistani heroines View(s):
What would Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan look like? LaaleenSukhera, the editor of Austenistan had some ideas. With her own writing featured in the compilation of short stories, Sukhera saw many parallels between the worlds she and Jane Austen inhabited.
Socially and culturally, the Indo-Pak subcontinent is so similar to Austens Regency era with our obsession with marrying well, our class conscious, ancestral and even feudal backgrounds, and our inherent snobbery, our countries are teeming with modern day Austenistani heroines balancing their independent spirits with societal constraints, she would tell journalists.
In India Today, a journalist who had read Austenistan enthused: From ex-husbands who are more substance abuse than substance to aunties worried about virginity; from Dubai and London-based eligible bachelors to Lahore and Rawalpindi-based smart bachelorettes, Jane Austen couldnt have found a more appropriate home for her class-obsessed, marriage-oriented society.
The connection isnt always so clear to Janeites, as devotees of the author sometimes refer to themselves. They wonder what Elizabeth would look like in Pakistan. Some of the questions Sukhera has had to field include: Will she be wearing a burqa? and Do they allow women in Pakistan to read?
For Sukhera, the delights of Pride and Prejudice are timeless. She says: Jane was far ahead of her time with her brisk dialogue, concise descriptions, biting wit and sass, the brilliant repartee between characters, and her astute social commentary. Her characters are universally appealing, relatable and will never go out of style.
This ardent fan realised she had company when she founded the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan. It started in 2015 as the Jane Austen Society of Islamabad. Within a year, they had chapters in Karachi and Lahore and became the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan. Today, theyre an online community of 1,700 from 45 countries around the world.
The group is famous for their annual costume party, which typically unfolds in a house in Islamabad or Lahore. A journalist from the Times of India described the gathering as comprising two dozen Pakistani women kitted out in empire-waist dresses and pearls, their gloved hands dangling reticules as they take their place around a table laden with cucumber finger sandwiches, Victoria sponge cake and Earl Grey tea. On their second gathering, Sukhera dressed as Caroline Bingley.
Its worth noting that 7% of their membership is male, even though one of this rare breed is yet to show up at the annual costume party.
Aside from being chair of JALFs Pakistan chapter, Sukhera is a professional advisor at the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation, founded by Ms Austens fifth great-niece.
Sukhera graduated with an MSc in Professional Communications and a BA (High Honours) in Screen Studies and Communication & Culture at Clark University in Massachusetts. Today, she wears many hats: she was the series coordinator for ITVs award-nominated documentary, After The Bradford Boil, produced a health talk show at Geo News in Lahore, field produced at the Merrill Lynch Video Network in New York, worked in advertising on Fifth Avenue and interned with the late Ismail Merchant. More recently, she has consulted on public relations including the Queens 90th birthday and Spanish cultural celebrations in Pakistan.
Visiting the ancestral village of a Kandyan freedom fighter By Randima Attygalle November 26 marked the Moneravila Keppetipola Disava commemoration day View(s): View(s):
The Chief continued to repeat some Pali verses and while he was so employed, the executioners struck him on the back of his neck with a short sword. At that moment, he breathed out the word Arahan. A second stroke deprived him of life and he fell to the ground- a corpse. His head, being separated from the body, it was (in accordance with Kandyan custom) placed on his breast. The last moments of Moneravila Keppetipola Disava- the first architect of our freedom from colonial manacles, are thus recorded by Henry Marshall, who came to Ceylon in 1808 as Deputy Inspector-General of Army Hospitals in his Description of the Island and its Inhabitants.
Upon the capture of Keppetipola Disava along with Pilimatalawe on October 28, 1818, Governor Brownrigg was so pleased with the news that he ordered an extra allowance to members of the British Army and in a Gazette notification felicitated Lieutenant ONeill on the capture of these superlative disturbers of public peace. The fearless warrior who even instructed the executioner where to strike the second blow so that he would be spared of a third, while chanting gatha, baffled the British who took his skull to the Museum of the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh to determine what rendered him incomprehensible courage.
The skull which was returned to Sri Lanka after yet another battle waged by the Keppetipola descendants, was transported on a gun carriage from Colombo port to Kandy and ceremonially interred amidst military honours on November 26, 1954 in a memorial which was constructed at the Kandy Esplanade opposite the Dalada Maligawa. Since then the Keppetipola commemoration day is celebrated every November 26th in the outer courtyard of the Kandy esplanade. Aspecial decree issued last year overturned the Government Gazette of 1818, decriminalising 19 freedom fighters including Keppetipola Disava and officially declaring them national heroes.
The Kandyan Chief known for his magnanimity towards the Sasana gifted a temple in his ancestral village of Moneravila, Pallepola. This historical site off Matale, however, is little known today. The abandoned shrine room of this temple which is presently known as Pallepola Veluwanaramaya, is crumbling.
The village derives its name Moneravila, from the water hole (vila) in which peacocks (monara) used to bathe, replaced by paddy fields today. The walls of the shrine room adorned with Kandyan art, commissioned by the warrior Chief are inhabited only by nocturnal creatures! A veeatuwa which bears signs of one-time regal Kandyan splendour including wall-paintings is left to the mercy of nature. A jewellery box, a chunam box and several artifacts which mirror Kandyan craftsmanship are deposited in the modern temple compound. These, as the temples Chief Prelate, Melpitiye Wimalaratana Thera informs us are presumed to be Keppetipola family heirlooms. A kurahan gala and a palekkiya (a type of Kandyan palanquin used among the nobility) still survive.
When the skull of Keppetipola Disava was returned to the country, it had been on display at the old bana maduwa for the villagers to pay their respects, says the prelate sharing a faded photograph from 1954. When he had first arrived in the village in 1964 as a young priest, certain portions of the ancient walauwa had existed, recalls the chief priest who adds that they were demolished to give space to the modern structures of the temple which stands there today.
Born in Udugoda, Udasiya Pattuwa, Matale as the second son to Golahela Nilame (who held the office of Diyawadana Nilame under Rajadhi Raja Sinha) and Moneravila Kumarihamy, Keppetipola Disava had five siblings-two brothers and three sisters, according to historical sources. The ill-fated Ehelepola Kumarihamy who bore the child hero Madduma Bandara was one of his sisters.
On the settlement which followed the Kandyan Convention of 1815, Governor Brownrigg appointed Keppetipola, Maha Disava of Uva. However, the Chiefs who signed the Convention soon realised the unpalatability of the new regime as Judge Walter Thalgodapitiya in his work, Portraits of Ten Patriots of Sri Lanka notes. Those were the forces working in the country in those unhappy confused times- disappointment, disillusionment and dismay, says the author who further cites a Kandyan Chief believed to have told the British you have now deposed the King, nothing more is required; you may leave us now. But the British had no such altruistic intentions as the author observes, and the disillusioned Chief, sadder and wiser after the event (the Convention) plotted and planned with active encouragement of the priests to achieve that end. William Tolfrey, Chief Translator to the British Government who was stationed in Kandy from 1815 to 1817 perceived this spirit of revolt and wrote to the Governor that, a deep and extensive plot to annihilate British power was being organized in the Kandyan provinces.
It is in this backdrop the Great Revolt of 1818 or the Uva Rebellion broke. Keppetipola Disava who was initially sent by the British to curb the uprising, returned all arms and ammunition to the British and joined the rebels in Alupotha. He was supported by several other leaders who were ostracized as traitors by the British. While serving at Sath Korale, Keppetipola Disava had also overlooked Matale and for more efficient administration, he had resided at Matale Udasiya Pathu and also in his mothers village of Moneravila, explains Nalini Chitra Keppetipola Vidurupola Aluvihare of Diyakelinawala Maha Walauwa, a sixth generation descendant of Keppetipola Disava and the chief mobilizer of Keppetipola descendants forum. As one of the most powerful Chiefs of Sri Wickrama Rajasinghes court, Keppetipola Disava was entrusted with scores of responsibilities which in turn called for regular travelling between the royal court and his residence in Moneravila in Pallepola. As a place of rest for both Disave and his horses, another residence in Hulangamuwa, Matale was built, says Mrs. Aluvihare. The house which reflects Kandyan architectural splendour is sadly neglected today.
Keppetipola married Delwala Ethanahamy from Ratnapura and had a son who was named Loku Banda. The British wanted no direct descendant of the Disava spared and to evade the hunt, his son Loku Banda had to live in disguise and most of the Keppetipola land was confiscated, Mrs. Aluvihare says.
A man who knew not the meaning of fear, Keppetipola Disava was tried by Court Martial on November 15, 1818. Henry Marshall documents in his book that he was least cowed by his impending doom and even engaged in jovial banter.
Marshall places on record the last moments of the Chief: Kneeling before the priest upon the threshold of the sanctuary, the repository of the Sacred Relic, the Chief detailed the principal meritorious actions of his life such as the benefits he had conferred on the priests, together with the gifts which he had bestowed on the temples and other acts of piety. He then pronounced the last wish, namely that in his next birth, he might be born in the mountains of the Himalayas and finally obtain nirvana. The only worldly possessions he had- the ragged upper cloth from the waist he offered to Dalada Maligawa as his last pious act and his bana potha he gave to a local official to be delivered to Simon Sawers, an agent of the government, as a token of the gratitude he felt for his friendship and kindness while they were officially connected at Badulla.
Marshall who thus documents the end of Keppetipola Disava, on November 25, 1818, goes on to note: Had the insurrection (1818 Uva rebellion) been successful, Keppetipola would have been honoured and characterised as a patriot instead of being stigmatised as a rebel and punished as a traitor.
The sword of Keppetipola Disava and his flag, head dress and jacket are preserved in the Kandy National Museum today. Interestingly, Keppetipola who was a signatory to the Kandyan Convention as the Disava of Matale, had signed the document in Sinhalese along with the other two Chiefs-Galagoda and Galagama, unlike the others who signed in Grantha- a combination of Sinhalese and Tamil characters.
Ven. Yatigammana Vimalagnana Thera of the Malwatte Maha Vihara Sangha Sabha in his address at the ceremonial internment of the remains of Keppetipola Disava on November 26, 1954 noted: If he should be here in spirit now, he would know how well he has served his people. There have been many men of our race after him to bear steadfastly and pass on, the flame of patriotism which in death he enkindled and to encompass the end for which he laid down his life.
Beer debate is incomplete without a debate on the bigger picture By Tassie Seneviratne View(s): View(s):
I read the article titled Docs raise concern: Slashing beer prices will pave the way for gateway drinking and the editorial stating that the beer debate is incomplete without a debate on the bigger picture, in the Sunday Times of November 19, with much interest. The larger problem of illicit liquor is not something new to Sri Lanka. It is to the credit of this government that it has viewed this problem with the seriousness that it deserves.
The latest statistics of the Excise and Police Departments reveal that 97,000 illicit liquor dens have been detected within the year 2015 alone. This means that an average of 270 raids have been conducted a day and it follows that a raid has been conducted every five minutes daily. Still for all, manufacture and consumption of illicit liquor goes on unabated. Political patronage received by illicit liquor barons coupled with bribery and corruption on the part of government agencies tasked with prevention and detection of this menace, remain the drawbacks.
Police involvement in detecting and preventing illicit liquor is with a view to preventing crime. Apart from the fact that many acts of violence are committed at or in the vicinity of illicit dens, illicit liquor is tied up with gambling dens and many a nefarious activity that this country is plagued with.
The illicitly distilled liquor, specially the smaller scale kasippu that is widespread and consumed by low income labourers, lacks supervision to ensure fitness for human consumption and poses another problem to reckon with. The cost to the government of providing medical treatment for those suffering from diseases due to consumption of this poisonous liquor, is considerable.
In my experience as an Inspector of Police and up to the rank of Senior Superintendent of Police, I have had the opportunity of looking at this problem from a broad perspective specially having been the Officer in Charge of the Central Vice Squad in the City of Colombo. I could best illustrate this with a case study of the extent to which the tentacles of illicit liquor barons have spread Lesson from the Kalattawa murders: Having done a correspondence course in homeopathy, the villain Alfred de Zoysa adopted the prefix of Dr. to his name and wangled a post in government service as an apothecary. Later he got into private practice in Weliweriya. After some time, having accumulated enough money for the purpose, he invested in winning tenders from the excise authorities for arrack taverns in various parts of the country.
Crimes including abduction, assault, robbery and murder were part of the process at the auctions to win tenders for arrack taverns. He next resorted to adulteration of arrack sold at the taverns, with illicitly distilled liquor and amassed a fortune. To carry on in this fashion he established close connections with the underworld. In this scenario only thugs and illicit liquor barons could take arrack taverns on rent. Having become a successful arrack renter for taverns in Colombo, Negombo, Puttalam and Balapitiya, he successfully rented taverns in Anuradhapura. Although he won tenders to sell government arrack, what he mostly sold was illicitly distilled liquor from his own illicit distillery in Kalattawa and made huge profits.
With this enormous wealth he had thus amassed he was able to obtain large scale Government contracts in the northern, north western and north central provinces, including a contract with the army for the laying of railway tracts. The large number of motor vehicles and heavy machinery necessitated him to establish a garage at Anuradhapura in which he employed many workers.
With a sense of complacency coupled with his vanity, he became careless, indifferent and contemptuous of the law. Any employee who fell from his grace was tortured and killed and none complained through fear, especially due to his connections with the army and police. A civic minded cultivator however made a formal complaint and Inspector S.S. Navaratnarajah with a police party rescued a former employee who had been tortured in a most sadistic manner and was about to be burnt alive. With this arrest the wheels of the law started to roll and many other complaints too started to flow in. Finally, the long arm of the law spread its tentacles strong enough to catch up with him and on July 20, 1972 Alfred de Zoysa was executed.
Another good illustration to show how illicit liquor found its way into government rented taverns is taken from an exercise carried out at the insistance of Dr. N.M. Perera, on my suggestion, when he was the finance minister. The exercise was to compare the amounts in the tenders for the Kotahena and Kollupitya arrack taverns, with the profits from government arrack supplied to these taverns. The profits from legal sales were way below the amount paid for the tenders. This disclosed how much illicit arrack was being sold at these taverns other taverns not excluded. It also disclosed the extent to which the sale of government arrack was undercut and the government deprived of the revenue due to it. It is a vicious circle.
Arrack taverns are no longer given on tenders by the government since the privatising of the government distilleries. Licenses are now sold by politicians to their henchmen and liquor shops are mushrooming. Adulteration and illicit bottling however goes on in a larger scale. The liquor thus produced is not subjected to any laboratory tests for poisonous chemicals.
It is not only arrack but hard liquor of popular foreign brands are also adulterated and illicitly bottled. It should be noted that the more popular Johnnie Walker Black Label and Red Label that is available in Sri Lanka relatively cheaply through discreet sources, is not genuine Scotch whisky. There have been detections of counterfeit bottling of this largest selling brand of whisky even in developed countries such as the US and the UK and in India. Only laboratory tests will reveal the highly poisonous chemicals contained therein. As much as hard liquor rakes in big money, it also attracts unscrupulous businessmen.
The arrack business has always been big business in Sri Lanka and continues to get bigger and bigger. A phenomenon observed in the arrack business is the entry of unscrupulous business magnates into this business. Since of late the monster in the central bank bond scam has also been evincing great interest in the arrack business. Arrack consumption will surely increase with the promotion of this business and so will the attendant evils as described above. Unscrupulous big timers do not stop with sale of adulterated arrack, and do not hesitate to use the same push to pedal narcotics that have speedily caught up, with the easy and undeclared money leading to money laundering. This mafia will go all out to sabotage any moves to combat its activities. They will tap experts who will prostitute their positions for big money and such experts are a dime a dozen.
Beer is a soft alcoholic beverage brewed in hygienic conditions under strict supervision. Never has there been any complaint of beer bottles or cans being contaminated. But it has been quite a common occurrence to find bottles of arrack smelling of kerosene. The smell of kerosene is easily detected. There can be worse muck in these bottles that is not detectable by smell. This shows the extent to which illicitly bottled arrack finds its way to liquor shops.
It is a myth to say that reducing the price of beer will induce non-alcoholics to take to beer. The fact is that those who dont take alcohol at all dont take it even when offered free. It is only after one takes to alcohol that the cost factor comes in. If people take to a drink just because it is cheap, then the cheapest drink in Sri Lanka is water in which case we will have a healthy nation. But that too will not suit the pharmaceutical mafia which is as powerful as the narcotics mafia, and is also not in the interest of doctors who benefit from big pharma.
Whilst reducing the price of beer considering it to be a soft alcoholic drink, it will also be necessary to stipulate the alcoholic content per unit of beer that will get the reduction in excise duty, and ensure that the reduction in price will only apply to beer within the stipulated alcohol content.
Reducing the price of beer with a view to weaning the people, especially youth, from poisonous liquor and narcotics, all laws and regulations having so far failed due to the reasons outlined above, is the only pragmatic solution the government has so far come up with. The bold decision of the government, vested interests notwithstanding, is laudable. (The writer is a retired Senior Superintendent of Police.)
Colombo YMBAs annual Scholarship Awards ceremony View(s):
The Colombo YMBAs annual Scholarship Awards ceremony will be held on December 9 at the Colombo YMBA Main Hall,Borella.
497 bright and deserving young minds including 422 undergraduates from state universities and 75 AL students will be awarded scholarships amounting to Rs. 8.5 million.. The students are selected from the neighbouring schools of Colombo YMBA, namely: Ananda Balika Vidyalaya, Devi Balika Vidyalaya, GothamiBalika Vidyalaya, YashodaraBalika Vidyalaya, D.S. Senanayake College, Ratnavali Balika Vidyalaya, Susamayawardhana Vidyalaya, Ananda College and Nalanda College, as well as students from the Kataragama National School and Sella Kataragama Vidyalaya.
The Chief Guest at the ceremony will be Prof. Lakshman R. Watawala, and special guest of honour Irvin Weerackody, Chairman/Managing Director, Ogilvy Group Sri Lanka.
Spearheading this years event are the President of the Colombo YMBA Deshabandu Tilak de Zoysa and the Associations Trust Funds and Skills Development Committee headed by Anura Serasingha. The Colombo YMBA Scholarships Trust Fund Committee has individually interviewed each of the undergraduate scholarship candidates. The AL students are recommended to the Colombo YMBA by their respective school principals.
Funds for the 2018 Scholarship Awards have been generated from various Trust Funds established by the Colombo YMBA, with primary funding coming from the late Dr. D.J. Attygalle Property Trust Fund, Irvin Weerackody Trust Fund, Matilda Hewavisenthi Trust Fund, Sir Baron Jayatilleke Trust Fund, Sir Cyril de Zoysa Trust Fund, L.R. Goonetilleke Trust Fund, Welcome Break UK Tsunami Trust Fund, Erick Amarasinghe Trust Fund, Dr. D.P. Athukorale Trust Fund, D.S.P.S. de Silva Trust Fund, D.D.M. Simon Silva Trust Fund, ShrimaJayasekara Tsunami Trust Fund, Solomon Abeyasekara Trust Fund and the A.L.D.A. Jayawardena Trust Fund.
Several other donors based in Sri Lanka and overseas including members of the Board of Governors and Members of the Board of Management have also made significant contributions.
Rehan Mudannayakes new short film on sexual harassment Red Mustang on December 7 View(s):
Dushy is a young graduate desperate for a job. In one of the big companies to which she applies, she faces the initial two rounds of interviews and goes for her final interview with Anu, the powerful CEO. She gets more than she bargains for, we are told. To learn more about this story, you would have to watch Rehan Mudannayakes new short film Red Mustang, which explores the issue of sexual harassment.
Its one of these huge issues which really needs to be tackled because its a massive problem out here both for men and for women, explains Rehan. The story takes place at night and has been shot from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. Although the script was written by Rehan, he explains that he discussed everything with his sister Francesca and Dulika Jayamanne (who play the roles of the graduate and the CEO), allowing them to add to their lines to give authenticity to the film.
Rehan feels that the medium is a great way to convince people. Art is a potentially more effective medium in tackling these issues of sexual harassment than through politics or through laws which sometimes alleviate the problem but I dont think they really change the way people think, says Rehan. It is appalling to note the fact that women who face sexual harassment in Sri Lanka have very few measures to address the problem. There is very little protection for you if someone tries to harass you, partly down to the way people think over here and partly down to the law system, Rehan explains.
In a job situation or something like that as a woman you dont want to come across as being rude to the person because you keep thinking do they actually mean it like that or am I being rude? There are all these complications which come into it although the bottom line is that you are right and you are innocent, states Francesca.
The Red Mustang will be screened at the National Film Corporation on December 7 at 6.30 pm. There will be a Question and Answer session with the actors and director after the screening. Entrance is free, but there will be a collection box for donations and the suggested donation amount is Rs. 300.
The right to health is universal View(s):
GENEVA On this years World AIDS Day, on December 1, we should remember the 35 million people who have died of AIDS-related illnesses, and the 76 million who have been infected with HIV since reporting began. And we can celebrate the fact that nearly 21 million people living with HIV now have access to life-saving treatment.
But we also must not lose sight of the fact that more than 15.8 million people are still awaiting treatment, while an estimated 11 million people do not even know they have the virus. In the time it takes to read this commentary, three more young women will have contracted HIV. These figures represent an indefensible injustice: millions of people are being denied their right to health.
The third United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG3) addresses health. It aims to reduce road accidents; tackle non-communicable diseases; end AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases; guarantee universal health coverage and access to sexual and reproductive health-care services; and substantially reduce deaths from environmental pollution all by 2030.
Although countries around the world have committed to this goal, countless people still inhale dangerous levels of toxic particles, and lack access to safe water and adequate sanitation. Too many governments consistently fail to act on environmental and other regulatory issues, turn a blind eye to companies that profit from selling unhealthy and addictive products, and thus fail those whom they are supposed to protect and serve.
Health is neither a gift nor an act of charity. It is a fundamental human right, encompassing both freedoms and entitlements. Everyone is free to make decisions about their health, regardless of who they are, where they live, what they believe, or how they earn a living. And everyone is entitled to affordable, quality health services and freedom from discrimination and coercion. Enjoying the right to health means having ones physical and mental integrity respected, and having the ability to participate and contribute to ones community.
Today, we call on world leaders to confront health injustices wherever they see them, and to take action to respect, protect, and uphold the right to health for all people. The ambitious SDG agenda for 2030 has afforded all of us the opportunity to shape policies aimed at creating and empowering the global health citizen.
Who is this citizen? She is an individual who knows her rights and can voice her concerns, challenge injustices, and hold decision-makers accountable. He is an individual who does not just ask for but demands access to doctors, treatments, or preventive care. The global health citizen is one who becomes a part of the solution.
Empowering global health citizens will require progress in at least three policy areas: popularising participation, democratising data, and eliminating discrimination. As to the first, we must open up health programs and policies to meaningful public engagement. In the 1990s, the disability-rights movement coined the phrase, Nothing about us without us. All global health citizens, and particularly health-care leaders, should adopt this mantra.
To be sure, public and private corruption remains a significant obstacle to ensuring the right to health for all people. In many countries, health care is one of the most corrupt sectors. To address this, global health citizens will need both institutional support and better tools for demanding that their right to health be respected. They should start demanding more measures to ensure good governance and transparency, improve legal literacy, fund civil-society organisations, and reinforce legal mechanisms for holding governments accountable.
The second policy area where progress is needed is access to data for every community. At UNAIDS, we follow the adage, What gets measured gets done. Data analysis has proven to be one of the most potent tools in the fight against the HIV epidemic, because it enables us to raise awareness, identify people being left behind, guide investment, and coordinate action.
We in the global health field have always been good at estimating mortality and morbidity rates. But it is now time to look beyond epidemiological facts. Guaranteeing the right to health will require us also to monitor the effects of discrimination and stigmatisation, as well as laws and environmental factors that threaten peoples health and wellbeing. Likewise, conducting thorough assessments of the health impact of key policies and investments must become the norm, rather than the exception. The global health sector needs far more independent advocacy and accountability, which the UN and civil-society groups, in particular, are in a strong position to provide.
The third policy area eliminating discrimination in health-care settings must become an international priority. The central promise of the SDG agenda is to leave no one behind. Discrimination creates de facto barriers to universal health coverage, and prevents many people from accessing health services of any kind. For example, one in eight people responding to the HIV Stigma Index say they have been denied health care as a result of prejudice.
It is clear that ending AIDS will require social not just medical breakthroughs. Governments must redouble their efforts to protect individuals against discrimination, and create effective mechanisms for people to seek redress when private or state actors violate their right to health. We call on all health-care practitioners and institutions to resist discriminatory laws, policies, or practices.
Safeguarding the right to health provides the foundation needed to enable everyone to realise their potential and their dreams. We should demand nothing less.
(Michel Sidibe is Executive Director of UNAIDS. Dainius Puras is United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to physical and mental health.)
Copyright:
Project Syndicate, 2017. www.project-syndicate.org
Police have laid charges in relation to a fatal crash on State Highway 25.
Nineteen-year-old Melanie Dangel from Germany died in a crash between a car and truck at the intersection of SH 25 and Hauraki Road on November 24.
Police says she was a passenger in the car.
Police are supporting her family members who have flown to New Zealand, a police spokesperson says.
A 19-year-old man who was driving the car has been charged with careless driving causing death.
He is due to appear in the Thames District Court on Thursday December 6.
Tauranga musical theatre lovers are in for a treat.
Following on from successful local productions of Rock of Ages and Mary Poppins in 2017 comes a new company performing a crowd favourite.
Stage Right Trusts inaugural show is Blood Brothers, a Liverpudlian folk opera about a pair of twins separated at birth and brought up in completely different environments, as the programme so aptly describes it.
Directed by Toni Henderson, the musical is set principally in the 1960s and 1970s, and follows Mrs Johnstone (Petrina Thomas Chisolm) who falls pregnant unexpectedly with twins. Abandoned by her husband, she strikes a deal with her childless employer Mrs Lyons (Kaitlin Spedding) to give up one of the twins at birth, to be raised as a member of the Lyons household.
These twin boys Mickey Johnstone (Matt Henderson) and Edward Lyons (Matt Glover) later meet and become friends. Discovering they share the exact same birthday, they agree to become blood brothers. Despite the efforts of their respective mothers, their friendship endures, until the play comes full-circle and reaches the violent conclusion hinted at in the opening scene.
This production is well-polished. All of the principal actors are utterly believable in their roles, while the supporting cast jump in and out of different parts and costumes with aplomb. The live band that provides the music must also be commended theyre so good it sounds like a studio album.
Petrina Thomas Chisolm brings a quiet stoicism to the role of Mrs Johnstone, who wrestles with her decision throughout the play. Her voice is beautiful, flawless makes me wish Id seen her in last years Tauranga Musical Theatre production of Mamma Mia!.
The standouts of the show are the twins themselves. The two Matts come on stage first as nearly eight-year-olds, and thanks to some phenomenal acting (honed, I suspect, by excellent direction) we never for one moment doubt these boys are children. Its a remarkable spell to cast, particularly as they spend most of the musical younger than 18. But we believe were watching a couple of kids, and it makes for some brilliant, innocent humour (and, sometimes, not so innocent).
The plays narrator, Chris Traill, almost steals the show with a powerful singing voice that can only be admired or envied. Hes the constant link as the story unfolds, acting as a sort of moral conscience at times to certain characters. It works well, and makes many of the set changes seamless.
Speaking of the set: its very professional. I believe it was made from scratch for the production. If so, its inspired, with houses opening up so we can peek inside and watch the action unfold. And it all takes place, not in the Addison Theatre, but the X Space (the large room to the left as you enter the Baycourt foyer), which is a fantastic change. Theres no reason why more shows cant be produced there, and the smaller venue gives a uniquely intimate feel to this musical.
On another note, its great to see more amateur theatre happening in this town, particularly from fresh companies with no fixed abode. This is commonplace in other cities; in Hamilton, for example, I have seen productions by companies such as Carving in Ice and Apocalypse Lounge that are not based in a theatre, but hire out a space that suits their needs. A similar model can certainly be sustained in this city, which I believe is hungry for the arts, and for the creative variety niche companies can provide.
To conclude: its bloody good, brother. Catch it at Baycourts X Space from Tuesday to Saturday, this week only.
The Mount Maunganui Weetbix TRYathlon held at Arataki Park on Sunday is being hailed a success with a record number of entries this year.
A record 1400 children aged from seven to 15-years-old from around the Bay of Plenty entered this years sell out event.
The course was tailored to each age group including a 50-150m swim at Baywave, a 4-8km cycle around the streets surrounding the park and a 1.5km run.
All participants received a medal on the finish line which were handed out by the events official ambassadors including Tauranga Olympic canoe slalom silver medallist Luuka Jones and retired New Zealand heptathlete and high jump champion Sarah Cowley-Ross.
The Superyacht: Delta One
Delta One - the largest yacht ever produced at the Mulder Shipyard - is a subtle, stripped back superyacht with slight, thoughtfully created curves and a focus on life on board. The views from within are unbroken and the two-tone profile works seamlessly to create a modern solution for owners looking to cruise the world in comfort.
After Delta One, was delivered to her client we had a lovely email from both the captain and the owner, explains Mike Reeves, Founding Partner of Claydon Reeves. The project has been a great success thanks to another dream team mix of Van Oossanen, the shipyard and us. Not only does Delta One look bigger than she is but she offers a good mix of speed, range, and is a fast displacement.
For Claydon Reeves, the launch of Delta One offered a brief respite from the trajectories of the studio as they began to highlight the wide and varied projects still underway.
We're also working on a 95-metre and there is our newly launched Aeroboat S6 and the various versions offered under that brand, adds James Claydon, Then there are tenders, a couple of 110m concepts, residential and furniture projects as well as car project. Theres a lot of interesting and left field stuff were trying to get into but were a relatively small studio.
The Breakthrough: Aeroboat
The Aeroboat S6 is the studio's new form and hugely important part of the Claydon Reeves project portfolio. A 65-foot day boat inspired by the late aviation icons such as the Spitfire and Schneider Trophy planes. It is the next model up from the Aeroboat SV12, which is powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin Spitfire engine, with the whole Aeroboat range carving a new niche and offering a call-back to classic styling.
Since July last year, Aeroboat has been a big push for us, and culminated in the launch of the Aeroboat S6 in June this year, explains Claydon. There is a lot that makes it stand out from the overall styling to the detail of the tail, which all adds layers of superyacht-ness, but its still a production size boat. There arent many aluminium 65ft superyachts, and weve approached it from that angle its a micro-superyacht.
The Superstructure Tail, which is what we call the back third of the boat, opens up to reveal the engines its more like a car bonnet, adds Reeves. Speaking of the engines, this boat offers a fantastic range and will do Miami to Nassau and back on one tank.
It is available in many versions you can have it with a hard top, a bimini or leave it open. It can also be a resort tender. Its not designed to redefine a new segment, this is the new segment. Its much more aligned with high-end supercars. As James says, all the features of the superyacht industry but just a bit smaller. It may not fit within the 30m and above rule but its more special than anyone would have seen at this size.
The Concept: Exo
From the tangible breakthrough of Aeroboat to a design that stands way ahead of its time.The thought behind Exo follows precision to a point of evolution. Exo, a design case created by Claydon Reeves, is a new approach to sailing, construction and the future of building boats.
I think its our approach and teaming up with Dykstra was an important move, adds Claydon. Were not known for sailing boats and so working together with Dykstra on the project was great because sailing yachts are what they do. They were fully onboard and we had some really exciting meetings in the development of the design. We could go in any direction and they fully supported us and still do with this particular project. The whole idea of looking to nature and organic forms helped us to evolve the project into a new way of building a boat. Wed love to make a two-metre long version, skin it and sail it to prove the point.
EXO is scalable, concludes Reeves, so you could do a racing dinghy like that where you have an incredibly cool structure with a thin transparent membrane to keep the water out. Thats the sort of thing that we like doing. Youre not going down a well-trodden path but defining a concept.
With the connecting threads of Exo on the back-burner, an exciting and top-secret car project underway, a new delivery and happy owner, Claydon Reeves is a studio actively looking to solve future problems and carve a niche out of both remarkable style and substance.
A benevolent expat musician has recorded a selection of Christmas music and traditional Irish hymns to raise money for local underprivileged families.
Dublin-born Finion Kenny plays the clarinet and saxophone during Sunday mass at the Virgin del Carmen Church in Arroyo de la Miel, and he decided to use his musical skills to produce a festive recording in aid of Caritas, a religious charity that cares for the poor.
Finion, who personally financed the project, recorded most of the CD at a studio in Malaga last month, but he had to head back home to Dublin so that his 16-year-old granddaughter could accompany him with the harp on two of the tracks.
As reported by SUR in English in August, Finion decided to make the record for Caritas because it is an organisation that has become very close to his heart.
I wanted to do my part by helping those less fortunate, especially at Christmas, when their problems are so often overlooked. All proceeds from this CD will go to the relief of disadvantaged people in our parish, the chirpy Irishman explained.
Finion, who has lived in Benalmadena since 2005, began playing the clarinet and saxophone as a teenager and by the age of twenty one he was the leader of his own seven-piece jazz band. He has worked with the Leicestershire Philharmonic Orchestra and has also made numerous recordings for the BBC in London.
The CD, which includes traditional pieces like Silent Night, The Old Rugged Cross, Walk With God and Ave Maria, costs five euros and is available from the Virgin del Carmen church or direct from Finion on 689 755 314.
The Clay and Cicero locations of Mark's Pizzeria have closed, according to a spokesman for the pizza franchise.
The locations at 5962 Route 31 in Cicero and at 8223 Oswego Road in Clay closed today, according to Mark's spokesman Joe Kondas.
"Those locations were not profitable," he said, "so we closed them."
No other closings are expected, Kondas said.
"In business, it's day by day and month by month and year by year," Kondas said. "If a location is not being profitable, it becomes easy to make that decision. Unfortunately, because we wanted it work."
Mark's Pizzeria was founded in 1982 and has more than 40 locations in Upstate New York. The company is headquartered in Fairport, near Rochester.
About 20 to 30 people worked at each location that closed, Kondas said. Those workers are encouraged to apply at other Mark's locations. "We'd love to have them," he said.
Other Syracuse-area locations include Canastota, Camillus, Manlius, Shop City in Syracuse, Skaneateles, Elbridge and Auburn.
After five years, the Supreme Court on Dec. 5 will hear the controversial case involving a Colorado baker and a same-sex couple's wedding cake.
Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission argues what constitutes free speech and freedom of religion in relation to marriage equality and discrimination.
In 2012, Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips refused to make a wedding cake for gay couple Charlie Craig and David Mullins because it violated his religious beliefs as a Christian. Gay marriage wasn't legal in Colorado at the time, so the men were set to marry in Massachusetts.
Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act prohibit discrimination against individuals on the basis of sexual orientation. However, Phillips argues that his cakes are works of art, and because of that he would not bake a cake that violates his religious beliefs. Citing the First Amendment, he says the civil-rights laws cannot prosecute him under claims of free speech.
The Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that cake-making was expected conduct of Phillips' business, and was not grounds for expression of free speech. Phillips was ordered to provide wedding cakes for same-sex marriages as well as change company policy regarding discrimination. In response, he decided to stop making wedding cakes.
In 2015, the Supreme Court recognized gay marriage in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges case.
Aaron Hoy, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, said that because of that ruling, to some extent the current case was inevitable.
"In each round prior to this, the courts have sided with Craig/Mullins, but the fact that Masterpiece is appealing yet again, and the fact that they are supported by broad range of well-funded conservative organizations, not to mention the fact that the Supreme Court decided to hear the case, all suggest that this battle over religious liberty and non-discrimination is one that has deep resonances in our society," Hoy said.
The First Amendment guarantees freedoms of religion, expression, assembly and the right to petition. For Thomas Keck, political science professor at Syracuse University, these are fundamental constitutional rights and are important to any democratic society.
"As far as the First Amendment is concerned, LGBT rights advocates should have the full and free right to advocate for their point of view and opponents of LGBT rights have the right to advocate for their point of view," Keck said. "The question in case here is a little narrower; no one is being prevented from expressing their political views. The question is whether the state of Colorado's decision to outlaw discrimination by businesses has served the public on the grounds of sexual orientation."
However, Keck said that no constitutional rights are absolute. Cases such as these are complicated, as they have competing values; here it is the values of nondiscrimination versus the values of free speech.
If the court rules in favor of Masterpiece, there is potential for damage to LGBT civil rights laws, in a context bigger than just bakeries. Using the shield of religious beliefs, florists, landlords and even funeral directors could discriminate against LGBT individuals. Some worry such a decision could be twisted to prevent people of certain races from eating in restaurants or renting a hotel room -- a throwback to the civil rights battles to desegregate lunch counters in the South in the 1960s.
Hoy said that LGBT individuals already live in a society that stigmatizes them in their relationships; if the decision favored in terms of discrimination, this problem would be exaggerated.
"They have to deal with being seen as less respectable, their relationships being seen as less legitimate, and many experience a persistent worry about whether they will be discriminated against or harassed whenever they leave home, " Hoy said.
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Colorado, many believe it will sustain the belief that religion is not an exemption from state anti-discrimination laws.
In September, the Department of Justice filed a "friend of the court brief" in support of Phillips. DOJ believes the freedom of expression allows individuals the right to refuse wedding cakes to same-sex couples.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has had a long history of being opposed to LGBT rights that has sought to weaken and undermine protections, Keck said.
The deciding vote, however, will be placed in the hands of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who provided the crucial fifth vote and wrote the historic opinion legalizing gay marriage in 2015.
"If I had to bet, I would bet he'd say marriage equality is important," Keck said. "However there's lots of people who disagree with it and nobody should be coerced into participating into a wedding ceremony kind that they don't support."
For Hoy, regardless of the decision, the fight for LGBT rights will be a long and hard fight given the current political climate in Washington.
"My sense is that some conservative legislators see trans folks as easy targets; legislating against them might be an easy way for them to score political points. So the LGBT rights movement will need to stand guard against that."
SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Jill Stein, the two-time Green Party candidate for president, chipped in a few bucks for the Syracuse mayoral race last month.
Stein cut a check to Howie Hawkins' campaign for $250 on Nov. 5, two days before the election, according to Hawkins' recently filed campaign contribution report.
Hawkins, running on the Green Party line, came in third place in the election on Nov. 7.
Stein was one of about two dozen donors to contribute $100 or more to Hawkins' campaign in its final two weeks. Most of Hawkins' donors gave small amounts: $30 here, $50 there. He received several donations for $5 or $10.
In all, Hawkins raised $31,809.75, including $17,250 in loans from himself. He made a point that he would not take money from any for-profit or corporate interests (though it's not clear if any such organizations offered).
Hawkins was largely outspent by his better-funded opponents. Ben Walsh, who won the election, raised more than $350,000.
The Stein donation, though relatively minor, reflects Hawkins' continuing influence in the Green Party of the United States, of which he is a co-founder. Stein has been the party's candidate in the last two presidential elections.
The donation to Hawkins was Stein's only contribution in New York state this year, according to Board of Elections records.
Hawkins received 1,017 votes last month, putting him in third place in the election behind Walsh (13,584) and Democrat Juanita Perez Williams (9,701). He received more votes than Republican Laura Lavine (673).
The race for Syracuse mayor attracted lots of attention from state and national political players, mostly from the Democratic Party. As the gap between Perez Williams (the early front-runner) and Walsh narrowed, politicians from Andrew Cuomo to Joe Biden offered statements of support for Perez Williams, hoping to tip the scales toward the party candidate. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee came to town to stump for her as well.
An unconscious man wreaked havoc in a Miami hospital because of a "Do Not Resuscitate" tattoo on his chest that even included his signature.
Emergency medicine doctors were baffled on what to do in the situation, as they were unsure if the request not to be resuscitated should be honored even if it was in tattoo form.
'Do Not Resuscitate' Tattoo Baffles Miami Hospital
The University of Miami Hospital presented the unusual case in the New England Journal of Medicine, narrating the events that transpired and how the doctors handled the dilemma surrounding the "Do Not Resuscitate" tattoo.
The 70-year-old man was brought to the emergency room by paramedics with elevated levels of blood alcohol. The patient was believed to have a history of a lung disease known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, an irregular heart rate, and diabetes.
Without an ID on him, the medical staff was not able to identify and contact the man's family members. After a few hours had passed, his condition started to worsen, with declining blood pressure and acids building up in the man's blood.
According to the case report, the doctors of University of Miami Hospital initially decided to go against the tattoo, even as it was facing them while working on the patient. There was the possibility that the man got the tattoo while he was drunk, but there was also the chance that it was a direct message. Were they doing the right thing?
What Happened To The Man With The 'Do Not Resuscitate' Tattoo?
After the patient was stabilized, the doctors decided to call in ethics consultants on what they should do. Do Not Resuscitate requests were usually formal documents, so the question was whether a tattoo was a legal document.
The ethics consultants advised the doctors to honor the Do Not Resuscitate tattoo, as they suggested that it was most reasonable to think that the request was an authentic one.
Fortunately, social workers were able to locate information on the patient. Among the documents that they pulled out was a copy of a Do Not Resuscitate order that the man filed with the Florida Department of Health.
The man's health deteriorated over that night until he passed away. Doctors honored his unusual Do Not Resuscitate request, as they did not conduct cardiopulmonary respiration or advanced airway management procedures on the patient.
University of Toronto bioethicist Kerry Bowman admitted that it was a challenging case. Tattoos may not be representative of a patient's current thinking, but he added that the messages comes strong and clear if a man was willing to go to the extremes of having his Do Not Resuscitate request tattooed.
2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The Shipping estimates for iPhone X has improved. In the United States, if customers order iPhone X today they will receive it within a week or less.
The Improvement In Shipping Of iPhone X
The new shipping estimates have improved from 1 to 2-week shipping estimates during the last week of November.
iPhone X shipping has also improved in Canada. Many countries in Europe have also seen an improved shipment of the phone. The countries in the Asia Pacific have only begun to experience better shipping estimates.
In Canada, the shipping estimate is 5 days.in most European countries, the online store delivery date is Dec. 11, or a little more than a week.
In countries such as Australia and New Zealand, plus other countries, the shipping estimates range anywhere from several days to two weeks.
Apple has been propping up its production of iPhone X to meet the growing demand. During the Thanksgiving holiday, Apple has sold a record number of iPhone X. The numbers reaching more than 6 million units sold over the Black Friday weekend.
The pre-orders for iPhone X started by Oct. 27. Back then the estimates were as high as 5 to 6 weeks. Apple has been able to deliver beyond the expectations. Rumor has it that the iPhone X will suffer a high degree of supply constraints. However, the improvements in the supply of the handsets suggests otherwise. Apple is likely to close the gap between supply-demand imbalance soon.
Pre-order Delivery Of iPhone X Expedited
The deliveries of the pre-ordered iPhone X has also picked up the pace. Apple is making sure that its stocks are fulfilling these deliveries first. The customers whose delivery dates were for December are receiving the handsets quicker than expected. Many received it during the month of November itself.
Tim Cook, in the beginning of November, mentioned that the phone's production will ramp up to meet the rising demands. To meet demands "as soon as possible," he said.
While the online sale has picked up to deliver on time, the brick and mortar stores are showing all iPhone X models as out of stock. For physical stores to fasten with the deliveries, there is no indication of improvement on it as of now. It seems the online shopping will remain the point of purchase for a coming couple of months.
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A baby boy born in Texas is the first in the United States to be delivered from a transplanted uterus. The delivery is an important milestone in uterine transplant clinical trials in the United States.
Successful Delivery From Transplanted Uterus
A special baby boy recently born in Baylor University Medical Center makes history as the very first successful delivery from a transplanted uterus in the United States. The child's mother was just one of many women under the uterine transplant clinical trials at Baylor.
The delivery was done via a scheduled caesarean section with a multidisciplinary team present during the unique birth. It was a special moment for the team as it not only hallmarks the success of the clinical trials but also because they helped a woman who thought that she would not be able to have a child.
"Outside my own children, this is the most excited I've ever been about any baby being born. I just started to cry," said Dr. Gregory J. McKenna, the obstetrician and gynecologist who delivered the baby.
BREAKING: Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas Announces First Baby Born in United States to Mother Who Received #UterusTransplant. pic.twitter.com/Lp0RJmuRvj Baylor Scott & White (@bswhealth) December 1, 2017
A Gift Of Life
The birth of the baby boy was a gift of life indeed, because the uterus he was delivered from was a donation from a Dallas nurse, Taylor Siler, who already had two children and wanted to give someone else the opportunity to be a mother.
According to Siler, she and her husband had already decided not to have any more kids and decided to share the gift of motherhood when she saw a feature about the uterus transplant program. She and the recipient of her uterus exchanged letters on the day of the transplant, and she received another letter from the recipient when she got pregnant.
Siler was just one of "altruistic" donors with many more expressing their willingness to donate.
Uterus Transplantation
The birth of the baby boy was a part of the Baylor, Scott & White uterine transplant clinical trials. So far, the hospital has done eight uterine transplants of which at least three were unsuccessful. However, Baylor has confirmed one more pregnancy from a living donor uterus.
Transplanted uteri may come from either living or deceased donors, and the recipients were either born without one or have a non-functioning or underdeveloped uterus. Many of them have a condition called the Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, which results in the vagina and uterus being underdeveloped or absent. The first noticeable sign of MRKH is when menstruation does not begin by 16 years old.
2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A new study finds that compared to just reading a text silently, reading out loud actually improves memory. What is the "production effect"?
Reading Out Loud
A pair of researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada found that reading something out loud actually helps people remember the information better. As it turns out, the mere action of speaking the word out loud and hearing oneself benefits memory.
Researchers tested four methods of learning via reading materials, namely reading silently, hearing someone else read the information, reading out loud in real time, and listening to a recording of oneself reading the information. Results of the testing with the 95 participants revealed that reading the information out loud in real time resulted in the best memory.
"This study confirms that learning and memory benefit from active involvement," said Colin M. MacLeod, coauthor of the study, also stating that adding action to a word makes it more distinct to long-term memory.
Getting Personal With The 'Production Effect'
The production effect is the advantage that one gets when one says words out loud rather than just reading them silently. In a previous study, the researchers found that reading aloud to oneself results in memory that is superior to memory gathered from hearing someone else speak, suggesting a personal and self-referential contribution to the production effect.
Basically, the results of the study suggest that the act of speaking words out loud benefits memory because of two things. First is the added act of speaking the words out loud, and the second is the fact that the person is speaking the words to himself, making them more personal. This research also builds on the pair's other past researches wherein they measured the production effect of actions such as typing and writing words to overall memory.
Practical Implications
For one thing, perhaps students studying for exams could try reading their lessons out loud so as to help them remember. What's more, researchers are reminded of how the elderly are advised to do puzzles to strengthen their memories, also suggesting that action and activity can enhance memory.
The results of the study add to the growing list of activities people can do to enhance or even strengthen memory. Some other activities that are said to enhance memory include drinking alcohol after studying and even eating chocolate, which can evidently improve cognitive performance, enhance working memory, and improve visual processing.
The study is published in the journal Memory.
2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
ST. JAMES St. James Parish government is weighing again how to sell the defunct St. James Youth Center more than four years after the former juvenile facility was shuttered and failed to garner much interest from buyers despite repeated price cuts.
Armed with an opinion from the state Attorney General's Office that opens the door to a private, below-appraisal sale, parish officials are reviewing their options before they decide whether to put the complex located at the foot of the Sunshine Bridge back on the sales block, parish officials said.
Once a multiparish operation for juvenile offenders, the St. James Youth Center closed June 30, 2013, after stiffer state standards for juvenile detention centers took effect, which parish officials said made the center too costly to run.
St. James again cuts asking price for detention center VACHERIE For a second time in less than two months, the St. James Parish Council cut the asking price for its shuttered juvenile detention c
The Youth Center was originally conceived and built as a money-making venture by earning revenue for parish government from handling other parishes' juvenile offenders, including those from neighboring Ascension and Assumption parishes.
St. James Parish President Timmy Roussel said Monday the parish has several interested buyers for the complex off La. 70: two investor groups looking to turn it into an adult rehabilitation center, an investor group led by Guillot Realty, of Donaldsonville, and River Parishes Community College in Gonzales.
Roussel said the community college, which is working with Louisiana Economic Development, might want to use the center for a training facility.
Parish Attorney Cody Martin is still reviewing the exact method the parish should use to put the Youth Center up for sale.
St. James ponders future of youth detention center VACHERIE St. James Parish Councilman Terry McCreary has suggested housing minimum-security prisoners in the parish-run youth detention cente
Roussel was hopeful that the Parish Council might have something to consider in November on the sale's process but now says he expects it will be taken up by the council sometime in December.
Earlier in November, Martin laid out a process in which the Parish Council could put the property up for a private sale possibly through a real estate agent and then vote whether an offered price represented the fair market value.
Martin said the attorney general's opinion gave the parish the "green light" for such a sale in light of its previous trouble selling the complex for the appraised price through the public bid process.
The parish has put the complex out for public bid six times since it was closed, cut the price multiple times but has only received one offer.
That one bid in February 2016 was below a reappraised price of $1.28 million down from the original appraised price of $2.5 million and the council could not accept the offer because it was below the appraised value.
Since that last public bid process, that bidder has made an offer of $1.2 million, which the attorney general's opinion says was equal to or greater than earlier public bid. No decision has been made on that bid.
In using the public bid process, the parish was following one legally mandated for municipalities but only recommended by the Attorney General's Office for parishes as a matter of good public policy. But when the parish decided to use the bid process, it meant it could not accept a bid for below the appraised value.
The August 2016 attorney general's opinion to St. James Parish, however, notes that no law requires that a parish government follow the public bid process and that parishes can accept an offer below the appraised value if market forces dictate that the value isn't what an appraisal says it should be.
The opinion added that the repeat public bid offerings for the Youth Center have put the public on notice and allowed competitive bidding to occur.
"The initiation of another public bid process would indeed appear to be a vain and useless act," the opinion from Assistant Attorney General Chester Cedars says.
In May , the Parish Council lowered the minimum price for the complex to $1.2 million, matching that offer from more than a year earlier. Martin has recommended that the parish use that figure as the list price in any private sales offer.
The opinion notes that the parish assessor says $1.2 million is, in his view, the fair market value of the complex while parish government's own paid auditor says the acceptance of an offer below the appraised value also would be justified.
Baton Rouge police have identified the victim of a fatal shooting that occurred Friday on Scenic Highway.
Jake Reed Jr., 51, was found near the sidewalk in the 6600 block of Scenic Highway early Friday morning, police said. There is no suspect or known motive in the case.
Baton Rouge Police investigating fatal shooting of man on Scenic Highway as a homicide Baton Rouge Police are investigating the death of a man found in the 6600 block of Scenic Highway early Friday as a homicide.
Police spokesman Sgt. L'Jean McKneely said the initial call about the incident came in about 5:30 a.m. Friday morning.
A grocery bag, a full bottle and full can of alcoholic beverages and a pair of sunglasses were left behind at the spot where authorities said the man was found.
Britain's Prince Harry (L) and his fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle visit the Terrence Higgins Trust World AIDS Day charity fair at the Nottingham Contemporary, Britain, Dec 1, 2017. Photo/IC]
LONDON Chanting "Harry, Harry!" and "Meghan, Meghan!" hundreds of people lined the streets of a central English city Friday to welcome Britain's Prince Harry and his American fiancee, actress Meghan Markle.
The couple's visit to Nottingham was their first official commitment since they announced their engagement on Monday.
They plan to tour Britain over the next six months to give Markle an opportunity to learn about the country before their May wedding in the chapel at Windsor Castle.
Markle smiled and looked confident as she basked in the adoration of a crowd that had waited for hours in the cold to catch a passing glimpse of the couple.
Dozens waved British and American flags. A few were lucky enough to see the engagement ring up close as Markle shook hands.
But the ring was old news for British commentators, who instead focused on her handbag a Strathberry tri-color leather tote designed in Scotland and handcrafted in Spain.
The couple traveled to the east Midlands in England to visit to a youth project and to raise AIDS awareness.
Their fans followed, including Irene Hardman, 81, who brought a gift bag with fridge magnets and candy for Markle. Hardman wept with joy after handing the bag to the bride-to-be.
"I cried she's wonderful, and it's fantastic," Hardman said. "They're so genuine."
The trip was Prince Harry's third to Nottingham since October 2016. The prince has long championed AIDS charities, following in the footsteps of his late mother, Princess Diana.
Holly Burdett, who is originally from West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, but now lives in Sydney, Australia, returned home on the "gamble" that the couple would announce their engagement while she was there.
"I always thought I'd marry Harry, but you can't win them all," Burdett joked. "As long as they're happy, that's all that matters."
AP
State Government injects $50 million into Barton Highway safety improvement
How NSW Government will upgrade Barton Highway
Barton Highway Improvement Strategy backdown by federal government Safety improvement works on the Barton Highway will begin this week and plans to duplicate part of the road will be brought forward, beginning at the ACT border, the NSW and federal governments announced on Monday. Initial works will include new signs, tree trimming and extra safety barriers. Federal infrastructure minister Darren Chester said initial funds should also allow for a section of the road to be duplicated. The Barton Highway upgrades have been discussed for decades. Sophie Wade, convenor of the Duplicate the Barton Highway Community Action Group said the latest announcement was a "win for us as a community".
"I'm pleased for safety works and I welcome the duplication it's a relief," Mrs Wade said. "I think the challenge now is to keep pressuring state and federal governments to continue the funding because this round of funding won't do the whole 24 km of duplication needed it may get only a fifth of the way with this," she said. NSW roads minister Melinda Pavey said that the current allocation of funding would not duplicate the full length from the ACT border to Murrumbateman. "We'll get as far as we possibly can. Then we'll see what it takes in future budget cycles," Ms Pavey said. The Australian Government has also approved a $3.25 million investment in intelligent transport systems that are designed to improve trip reliability and to better manage and reduce traffic incidents.
Convenor Helen Musa said Lea was "a very strong nomination in a strong year", with an unwavering commitment to, and focus on, making, directing and promoting dance in the ACT. Musa said Lea was a dancer who straddled both classical and contemporary forms.
Lea, who has been performing in Canberra since 2000 and was formerly artistic director of Canberra Dance Theatre, was cited for her commitment to inclusiveness - working with dancers of all ages, abilities and ethnic groups and acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which her choreography is performed.
Canberra dancer, choreographer and director Liz Lea said being named the Canberra Critics' Circle Canberra Artist of the Year was "huge ... I haven't taken it in."
"She trained in classical Indian dance and branched out into all kinds of contemporary experimentation."
In 2017, Musa said, Lea presented the BOLD Festival in March that drew attention to Canberra dance with a program of lectures, demonstrations, film and programs with participants and audience members from around the country. It received support from institutions including the National Film and Sound Archive, the National Library of Australia, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Portrait Gallery and Ainslie + Gorman Arts Centres. And, Musa said, the committee noted this came about without any government funding but through the hard work and determination of Lea in making it happen.
Musa said the committe was also recognising Lea's enterprise in getting things together. Among her own shows this year was Reef Up!, a humorous educational show about the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef developed with the support of the Canberra Theatre Centre that went to tour 35 schools in Queensland. She also performed in India Meets, a program by Indian dance practitioners in Canberra she initiated to finish an Australian tour by dancer Seeta Patel. In That extra some, part of Escalate 11, a mentoring program for ACT-based young people, of which Lea is a primary mentor, she worked with Down Syndrome dance artist Kate Senior (and Lea and Senior were also cited by the CCC for this work). Her activities over the years have also included the senior dance group GOLD (Growing Old Disgracefully) Dancers.
Lea has also presented dance works as special events for 2017 including during Dance Week and Science Week and in 2017 received an Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Community Dance. She now works freelance and is a part-time program Curator for Ausdance ACT
Musa said, "She's a force of nature."
Your lazy weekend mornings are about to get a whole lot lazier - and a whole lot more delicious.
Dream Cuisine has launched Canberra's first fresh croissant delivery service on Saturdays and Sundays.
You can now have fresh croissants delivered to your house on weekends. Credit:Ross Duncan
The pastries were previously available fresh on the weekends at the Southside, EPIC and Old Bus Depot markets, but now owner Owen Saddler is cutting out the travel time for customers and delivering them straight to their doors.
All pastries are made from scratch at Dream Cuisine's Fyshwick bakery and you can currently order the classic croissant, almond croissant, chocolate croissant, blueberry and lime danish or snail scrolls with vanilla curtard and sultanas, with salted caramel scrolls also being added this weekend.
BEIJING -- Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong will visit the United Kingdom from Monday to Thursday and co-chair a meeting on people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.
The meeting, the fifth of its kind in the China-UK high-level people-to-People dialogue, will be co-chaired by Liu and British Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, according to foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang.
During the visit, Liu will meet with officials of the British government and members of the royal family, and sign a host of cooperative agreements on people-to-people exchanges, Geng said at a daily press briefing.
He expressed hope that the visit will promote political mutual trust, strengthen cultural and people-to-people exchanges, and further boost bilateral ties.
A 24-year-old pedestrian is in hospital after being injured by the mirror of a passing truck on Monday.
The Emergency Services Agency said ambulance crews attended the scene of the incident in Florey, where the man had been hurt by the wing mirror of the truck passing at low speed just after midday.
He was taken to the Canberra Hospital.
A Canberra teenager accused of bashing students at Woden pleaded not guilty on Monday to assault.
The 15-year-old girl, who cannot be named because of her age, will face a hearing in the ACT Children's Court early next year over the four counts of common assault.
In a statement outside court at the time, police alleged international students had been attacked at the Woden bus interchange on October 23.
Prosecutors told the court the four alleged victims would be called to give evidence, as well as two police officers.
The hearing is expected to take about a day. It was set down for January 25.
Westridge House in Yarralumla, one of Canberra's oldest residential homes, sold for a record price for the suburb, at more than $6 million.
But the price remains a mystery and so too the new owners.
One of Canberra's oldest homes 'Westridge House' at 55 Banks Street Yarralumla sold for a record price.
The historic estate near Weston Park was built in 1928 for Charles Lane-Poole, then inspector-general of forests. It sits on a 19,210 square metre block, the largest privately owned residential block in the inner south.
Sales executive Mario Sanfrancesco, from Peter Blackshaw Manuka, said the auction had attracted a great deal of interest from foreign buyers as well as interstate. One international buyer flew a private jet to Canberra for the auction.
The father of AFL superstar Dustin Martin is taking his fight against his deportation from Australia to the Federal Court.
Shane Martin's bid to overturn the decision of Immigration Minister Peter Dutton will be heard in the court in Sydney on Tuesday.
Dustin Martin and his father Shane.
Shane Martin, who had lived in Australia since he was 20, was deported to New Zealand last year because of his links to the Rebels motorcycle club, missing his son's Brownlow Medal win and grand final triump as the Tigers claimed their first flag since 1980.
In September, the federal government pushed through a new law that prevented Shane Martin from returning to Australia.
Online gambling companies have ramped up their political lobbying efforts in an attempt to stop Victoria from adopting a 15 per cent tax on digital betting that is being rolled out in other states.
Australia's bookmakers responded angrily last week when Queensland announced it would become the third gaming jurisdiction to roll out a so-called "point-of-consumption" tax.
A 15 per cent point-of-consumption tax under which the state where a digital bet is placed receives revenue on gambler losses has already come into force in South Australia, while Western Australia is preparing to follow with its own tax at the same rate from the beginning of next year.
Industry insiders said Australia's bookmakers were dramatically stepping up efforts to sway government leaders in Victoria, home to the strongest horse-racing jurisdiction in the country, to consider taxing them at a lower rate than 15 per cent.
Vodafone Hutchison Australia launched its fixed-line NBN service on Monday, with an automatic 4G "back-up" for customers concerned about outages.
The new plan will allow automatic access to Vodafone's 4G network whenever there are connection problems or faults on the line for up to 30 days during NBN-related connection or line repairs.
It also offers a feature called "instant connect", which allows customers to access the mobile network while waiting for installation of the NBN.
One of the complaints from customers of NBN services from rival telecommunication companies has been stretches of time without internet due to outages or connection delays.
London-based former investment banker Simon Thompson has been given the job of leading the Rio Tinto board as the miner faces scrutiny from regulators in America and Australia over its behaviour surrounding a failed coal investment in Mozambique that it sold in 2014.
Mr Thompson will become Rio's next chairman when he succeeds Jan du Plessis in March 2018. He joined Rio's board as a non-executive director in 2014.
New Rio Tinto chairman Simon Thompson was previously an executive director of Anglo American and chairman of Tarmac. Credit:Rio Tinto
The experienced mining industry executive, who has worked in the mining and metals industry across five continents, will assume the role of chairman with the miner on a sound financial footing, earning large profits and spinning off billions of dollars a year to shareholders, yet facing uncomfortable scrutiny from regulators.
The appointment of the 58-year-old was welcomed by chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques, the Australian Shareholders' Association and investors, with shares in Rio rising 1.2 per cent on Monday to $72.05.
CVS Health has agreed to buy Aetna for about $US69 billion ($90.75 billion) in a deal that would combine the drugstore giant with one of the biggest health insurers in the United States and has the potential to reshape the nation's health care industry.
The transaction, one of the largest of the year, reflects the increasingly blurred lines between the traditionally separate spheres of a rapidly-changing industry. It represents an effort to make both companies more appealing to consumers as health care that was once delivered in a doctor's office more often reaches consumers over the phone, at a retail clinic or via an app.
CVS operates a chain of pharmacies and retail clinics that could be used by Aetna to provide care directly to patients. Credit:AP
The merger comes at a time of turbulent transformation in health care. Insurers, hospitals and pharmacy companies are bracing themselves for a possible disruption in government programs like Medicare as a result of the Republicans' plan to cut taxes. Congress remains at an impasse over the future of the Affordable Care Act, while employers and consumers are struggling under the weight of rising medical costs, including the soaring price of prescription drugs. And rapid changes in technology have raised the spectre of new competitors - most notably Amazon.
A combined CVS-Aetna could position itself as a formidable figure in this changing landscape. Together, the companies touch most of the basic health services that people regularly use, providing an opportunity to benefit consumers. CVS operates a chain of pharmacies and retail clinics that could be used by Aetna to provide care directly to patients, while the merged company could be better able to offer employers one-stop shopping for health insurance for their workers.
Even by the exhausting standards of the Trump administration, the past week has been tumultuous for the president. On Tuesday last week, North Korea launched a missile that analysts believe would have been capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as far as Washington.
The following morning, Mr Trump responded by firing off a series of pre-dawn tweets. In one he urged his followers to boycott CNN. In another he attacked NBC's Matt Lauer, who had just been fired for sexual harassment in the workplace. The missive served only to remind observers of the 20 women who have accused Mr Trump of similar behaviour.
US President Donald Trump.
He also retweeted three videos purporting to depict violence by Muslim extremists from the account of the leader of a British hate group, Britain First.
Mr Trump's tacit endorsement of Britain First caused such consternation at Downing Street that Theresa May, who had been the first world leader to visit Mr Trump to congratulate him after his election, was moved to respond, saying via a spokesman that it was "wrong for the president to have done this".
The warmth also meant Victoria set November records for state-averaged mean temperatures taking into account minimums and maximums. The final 12 days of the month averaged above 20 degrees, eclipsing 10-day runs in 1959 and 2009. Similarly, the state's 21 days in a row of minimums above 10 degrees easily beat the previous 16-day stretches in 2000 and 2009. The state's average mean temperature was more than 3 degrees above the 1961-90 average. It was only the sixth time Victoria has notched up so large an anomaly for any month, the bureau said. Off the charts
In Tasmania which has seen snow overnight the November records were even more off the charts. Average maximum temperatures for the state came in 3.79 degrees above the long-run norm. That beat the previous record anomaly of 2.09 degrees set in 1914 by a whopping 1.7 degrees, and was the largest departure from the average maximum for any month. Hobart's six consecutive days of 25 degrees or warmer weather equalled the record for any time of the year. Previous such stints had all occurred between January and March. "In some cases, particularly in southern and western Tasmania, the length of the warm spell was unprecedented for any time of year," the bureau said. "Many records were set for consecutive days with maximum or minimum temperatures above thresholds."
One gauge of the influence of the high pressure over the region was Hobart setting a mean sea level pressure record for November of 1019.6 hectopascals, edging the previous high for the month set in 2007 of 1018.8 hPa. Warm waters The waters around both Victoria and Tasmania were also unusually warm, especially around the south west of the Apple Isle. (See bureau chart below for the week of November 20-26.) "By the end of the month, all of the waters surrounding Tasmania were 3 degrees above [the 1971-2000 average] and ranked as some of the highest values on record," the bureau said.
"These high temperatures existed in the top layer of the ocean only and were caused by low cloud coverage and light winds," the bureau noted. This placed the event in contrast to a marine heatwave at the end of 2015 driven by an eddy that had spun off from the East Australian Current. As reported by Fairfax Media last month, waters off south-eastern Australia have recently been one of a handful of global hot spots, relative to the average for this time of year. Sea-surface data from Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System also demonstrate how unusually warm this patch of water is compared with the rest of the region. (See chart below for November 30.)
The bureau's report noted how the blocking high pressure also contributed to milder conditions further up the east coast of Australia. Sydney, for instance, barely notched an above-average month for maximum temperatures. Virtually all of the coast further north to Cape York in Queensland had a below-average November for daytime temperatures. Those warm waters are currently contributing to a deep low-pressure trough off the south coast of NSW, that is likely to bring heavy rain to the region on Monday. "When sea-surface waters are warmer there is more evaporation and a better moisture source," Jiwon Park, a bureau forecaster, said. The contrast with land, which typically cools off at night, was creating in effect a "stationary front" offshore. The bureau has issued a warning for falls of more than 100 millimetres over a 24-hour period from Monday afternoon for an area stretching from the Illawarra south almost to the Victorian border.
A flood watch is in place for six river catchments in the region. Warm spring For Australia as a whole, temperatures last month were above average for minimum, mean and maximums, but less unusually so than the previous two months. For spring as a whole, all but South Australia and the Northern Territory recorded a spring in the top 10 warmest, in national data going back to 1910, the bureau said in a separate report.
Nationals MP George Christensen departs after question time on Monday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Before the day gets any further away from me, I need to update you on some industrial relations matters.
The opposition had hoped to reverse cuts to penalty rates and the Senate passed a bill undoing the industrial umpire's decision on this matter earlier today.
The opposition wanted to build on this by tempting Nationals MP George Christensen to cross the floor.
Mr Christensen had previously suggested he was open to the idea.
But he said today he would stay on the government's side: "I have spoken to the Minister for Employment, Michaelia Cash, and there is confusion over whether or not Labor's amendment would mean small businesses in my electorate, in cities like Mackay and Townsville, small towns like Ayr, Bowen and Proserpine, would have to give back pay, costing them thousands of dollars."
"It's an unacceptable risk for many small business owners who would not be able to afford such a move. Amendments around penalty rates must ensure that small businesses are not forced to pay back pay....As such, I can't support the amendment as it is."
Australia's "misplaced reliance" on parental choice and competition between public and private schools may have created the conditions for declining student performance, warns a new paper investigating the "unsolved mystery" of worsening test scores.
The paper looks at Australia's "significant decline" in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results between 2000 and 2015, but focuses on mathematics because maths scores have dropped more than reading or science.
Australia has seen a sustained decline in PISA scores, especially in maths. Credit:Cathryn Tremain
As well as an emphasis on school choice, the quality of teaching in Catholic schools which has shown the greatest decline in maths scores could be another reason for worsening PISA results, the paper says, along with different education policies and practices in NSW and Victoria.
The paper says that expert explanations have failed to answer the riddle of why Australia, along with countries such as the Netherlands, Finland and Canada, have sustained decreases in PISA scores and says despite much "handwringing" from policymakers, there is no strong empirical evidence behind the PISA results.
A psychology graduate who has completed three tertiary degrees in 20 years since arriving in Australia has had her application to practise rejected under English language competency provisions because she took a year off her studies.
In a case before the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal, the psychology graduate, identified only as Ms Han, appealed a decision by the Psychology Board of Australia as a "matter of principle".
While the tribunal upheld the decision under the law, its members took a thinly veiled swipe at "continuous education requirements" demanded of graduates, questioning their relevance to modern student life, particularly concerning women, given the demands on work, family, part-time study and socio-economic factors.
Ms Han was born and educated in Turkey before coming to Australia in 1995.
She received a bachelor of science in psychology from Macquarie University in 2004 followed by a postgraduate diploma in psychology from the University of Western Sydney in 2011. She had previously earned an associate diploma of social science (community welfare) from the Sydney Institute of Technology in 1999. She has worked in Australia as a family support worker and counsellor, and as a research assistant and casual lecturer.
Senator Pat Dodson has called on state governments to create new laws to protect prisoners, saying he was "absolutely appalled" at the shackling of an Indigenous inmate on his death bed in Sydney.
Prison guards from Parklea jail kept ankle cuffs on Eric Whittaker, 36, who was taken to Westmead Hospital after a brain aneurysm that led to his death on July 4.
Jamie Whittaker, photographed at the Newtown Mission Church. Whittaker has been visiting the community church since his son Eric was found dead in Parklea jail in July. Credit:Dean Sewell
A Sun-Herald investigation found the father of four had been unresponsive for at least 15 hours when his family discovered his legs chained together and complained to guards, who then removed them about 40 minutes later.
"It's so sad the family have to be exposed to that level of inhumanity to their loved one," said Professor Dodson, the shadow assistant minister for Indigenous affairs and a commissioner on the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
An elderly woman remains in a serious condition in hospital after she was attacked by three of her pet dogs, including two cross-bred dingoes, in Sydney's south west.
The 78-year-old woman was trying to rescue her pug from her three other dogs when they attacked her.
Emergency services were called to the woman's property in Greendale about 5pm on Monday, and she was treated at the scene while the dogs were secured in kennels.
Kay Armstrong from NSW Ambulance Service told Nine News the woman's injuries were bad.
A Brisbane father who bashed his infant daughter to death could walk from jail after serving less than four years behind bars.
Rick Cataldo was sentenced to eight years' jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on Monday for the manslaughter of Lily Rain Cataldo in April 2012.
Rick Cataldo arrives at the Supreme Court in Brisbane for an earlier appearance. Credit:AAP
But Justice Debra Mullins said he would be able to apply for immediate parole because he had already served almost three years and 10 months in jail.
The court heard Lily was less than two months old when she suffered multiple skull fractures, four rib fractures and a spiral fracture to her right arm about seven to 10 days before her death.
Controversial alt-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos took aim at Indigenous Australians, Muslims and Australian media personalities in an event in Melbourne marred by violent protests.
"Australia what have they done to you?" Yiannopoulos, 32, asked the crowd as he entered, clad in leather and wearing his trademark sunglasses, before getting on the back of a parked Harley Davidson motorbike in the middle of the stage.
"You used to have a really good reputation, but we're here to discuss your fall from grace."
The right-wing provocateur, who attacked Julia Gillard as he prepared to embark on his Australian tour, was unapologetic of his criticism of the former prime minister at the Melbourne Pavilion in Kensington on Monday night.
Victorian Catholic schools will soon receive millions more in Commonwealth funding for students with a disability than state schools.
The changes reflect new data which the Catholic sector has previously described as "dodgy" that determines funding under the Turnbull government's Gonski 2.0 model.
Credit:Phil Carrick
Funding for students with a disability was previously based on medical assessments, but is now based on teachers' assessments of students' needs.
New federal Education Department figures show that Commonwealth disability loadings for Victorian Catholic schools will increase by 26 per cent, to $188 million in 2018.
Victims of crime in Victoria will benefit from more generous taxpayer-funded compensation if the Liberals win next year's state election, Opposition Leader Matthew Guy pledged on Monday.
Victorians who are injured or traumatised by criminals will be able to claim financial compensation for 10 years after the offence, a big increase from the current six-year cut-off, if the Coalition wins power in November 2018.
Opposition Leader Matthew Guy says he wants to put victims of crime first. Credit:AAP
In exceptional cases of more serious injuries or trauma, compensation could be paid and medical help provided for up to 15 years, if the victim can prove they are still suffering as a result of the original offence.
Mr Guy launched his new policy at State Parliament on Monday, surround by victims' advocates, claiming those on the receiving end of crime in Victoria were being treated like "second-class citizens" by the Andrews Labor government.
Dvate's orange-bellied parrot. Credit:Justin McManus
Mr Honig said the punk movement began with the Sex Pistols, then moved to Offspring, Green Day then Avril Lavigne. "These murals are kind of the equivalent of Avril Lavigne," he said.
Adrian Doyle, owner of The Blender Studios, which runs Melbourne Street Art Tours, welcomed the new murals.
"I think these large-scale productions have mostly been in other parts of Melbourne like Fitzroy and Collingwood," he said. "To bring these large-scale productions to the CBD is amazing.
"These sorts of murals ... will be to kids like the Skipping Girl was for me. They become part of the vernacular; part of the myth of the place."
The drunk driver, who also died in the crash near Lara, knew she was intoxicated and still chose to drive before ending up on the wrong side of the Princes Freeway.
In December 2012, a drunk, speeding, texting driver smashed into a car, killing her 23-year-old son, Nathan Kerr, and three others in the vehicle.
Amanda Wilson and her daughter Mollie Kerr, whose son and brother Nathan Kerr was killed in a horror Christmas holiday crash. Credit:Cormac Hanrahan.
She's struggled to feel happy this time of year for a long time.
Nathan Kerr was killed in the crash at Lara.
The horror crash has tormented Ms Wilson's family, who are facing yet another Christmas without having her oldest son with them.
"It's the most unbearable pain," she said.
"It's something that is so profound, I can't really quite put into words just how awful it is to be without Nathan, who was a vibrant, happy, young man."
Ms Wilson and her two other children Kyle Kerr, 17, and Mollie Kerr, 20 are pleading with drivers to stay safe this Christmas.
Police have accused protesters of "Kardashian-style politics" after two men were arrested and several police officers injured as violent clashes erupted outside an event hosting controversial British alt-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.
However protesters have accused the police of fuelling the violence that broke out in Kensington on Monday night.
"We live in the world of Kardashian-style popularity, it's no different to the tactics that are being used by the left and the right," Assistant Commissioner Stephen Leane said on Tuesday.
"I think what we're seeing in the whole world is that if your don't have a 30-second grab of something really exciting then you're not going to make the front page of the news," Mr Leane.
A man who went on an alleged rampage through Perth's southern suburbs, smashing car windows and assaulting people who tried to offer him assistance, has been arrested by police.
The 50-year-old from Bertram was allegedly seen on Sunday riding a motorcycle shirtless along Millom Way.
Two women were injured during the alleged rampage. Credit:Georgia Matts
A police spokesman claimed the man stopped and began to damage cars parked outside a house when nearby residents came outside.
"The man then assaulted residents who came out to investigate," he said.
WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson has announced sweeping changes to how the force operates.
A seven week 'snapshot' review of the organisation has made a range of findings and recommendations.
WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson. Credit:Phil Hickey
The review took submissions and led to a series of interviews with senior management and frontline officers.
On Monday, Mr Dawson announced what the review had recommended and what changes would be implemented as a result.
Cairo: Former Egyptian premier Ahmed Shafiq says he is still considering his presidential bid now that he is in Egypt, according to a televised interview in which he denied authorities had kidnapped him.
There has been no official word yet on the whereabouts of the presidential hopeful who flew home from the United Arab Emirates 24 hours ago.
Former Egyptian prime minister and possible presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq denied had been kidnapped. Credit:AP
"Today I am here in the country, so I think I am free to deliberate further on the issue, to explore and go down and talk to people in the street ... so there's a chance now to investigate more and see exactly what is needed ... to feel out if this is the logical choice," Shafiq said.
The interview on private Dream TV channel was Shafiq's first public appearance since leaving the United Arab Emirates on Saturday for Cairo.
Jerusalem: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that a draft bill that sets limits on police investigators should be revised so it does not apply to criminal probes in which he is a suspect.
The proposed legislation, which has sparked protests in Israel, would prohibit the police from publicising whether they have found sufficient grounds to charge a suspect.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he is the victim of a political witchunt. Credit:AP
Critics say the bill is an attempt to protect Netanyahu and keep the public in the dark regarding ongoing investigations in which he is a suspect, but its supporters said it is intended to protect suspects' legal rights and reputations.
Some 20,000 Israelis demonstrated against the bill in Tel Aviv on Saturday and, as public pressure mounted, support among coalition members for the bill began to wane on Sunday, a day before parliament was expected to ratify it.
Republicans accuse Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein of 'stonewalling'. Credit:AP Until now, Nunes said, the FBI and Department of Justice have failed to sufficiently comply with an August 24 committee subpoena - including by refusing repeated demands "for an explanation of Peter Strzok's dismissal from the Mueller probe". "In light of today's press reports, we now know why Strzok was dismissed, why the FBI and DOJ refused to provide us this explanation, and at least one reason why they previously refused to make Deputy Director McCabe available to the Committee for an interview," Nunes said. Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is stepping up the attack over the Russia probe. Credit:AP "By hiding from Congress, and from the American people, documented political bias by a key FBI head investigator for both the Russia collusion probe and the Clinton email investigation, the FBI and DOJ engaged in a willful attempt to thwart Congress' constitutional oversight responsibility," he said
Nunes, in the statement, said the committee will move on a resolution by the end of the month unless it demands are "fully met" by the close of business on December 4. Former FBI director James Comey was fired by Donald Trump. Credit:AP He cited "a months-long pattern by the DOJ and FBI of stonewalling and obstructing this Committee's oversight work", including also withholding subpoenaed information about their use of an opposition research dossier that targeted Trump in the 2016 election. Attorney General Jeff Sessions would not be a target of any contempt action by the committee, Nunes has said, because he recused himself from any investigation into charges that Russia meddled in the election. President Donald Trump waves a she walks up the steps of Air Force One at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Saturday. Credit:AP
Justice Department spokeswoman Sara Isgur Flores said in an email that "we disagree with the chairman's characterisation and will continue to work with congressional committees to provide the information they request consistent with our national security responsibilities". The department has already provided members of House leadership and the Intelligence Committee with "several hundred pages of classified documents" and multiple briefings - including whether any FBI payments were made related to the dossier - and has cleared witnesses including McCabe and Strzok to testify, she said. Jeff Sessions, U.S. attorney general, recused himself from the investigations into Russian interference in the presidential election. Credit:Bloomberg The House committee's top Democrat, Representative Adam Schiff of California, responded in a statement that the Department of Justice inspector general is "properly investigating the handling of the investigation, including the current allegation of bias" by Strzok. "I am concerned, however, that our chairman is willing to use the subpoena and contempt power of the House, not to determine how the Russians interfered in our election or whether the president obstructed Justice, but only to distract from the core of our investigation," Schiff said.
FBI director Christopher Wray is the subject of a possible contempt of Congress action. Credit:Bloomberg The dossier, which included salacious allegations about Trump, was paid for in part by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton through a law firm. Nunes and other committee Republicans - backed by Speaker Paul Ryan - say they want to investigate whether the Justice Department and FBI may have improperly relied on the dossier to kick-start federal surveillance that caught up Trump associates, without independently confirming the information they used to justify such spying. "The DOJ has now expressed - on a Saturday, just hours after the press reports on Strzok's dismissal appeared - sudden willingness to comply with some of the Committee's long-standing demands," Nunes said. "This attempted 11th-hour accommodation is neither credible nor believable, and in fact is yet another example of the DOJ's disingenuousness and obstruction." Those agencies "should be investigating themselves", he said. If Nunes and Republicans do follow through with the contempt action, it would be a latest blow against bipartisanship on a committee that had until recently been one of the last bastions of comity in a polarised House. Democrats complain Republicans are increasingly shifting attention and limited resources in the Russian investigation away from a main focus of election interference and potential Trump campaign collusion.
Washington: The Supreme Court on Monday granted President Donald Trump's request that his revised travel ban be enforced fully while legal challenges to it proceed in lower courts.
The justices approved a request from the president's lawyers to lift restrictions on the order - which bans most travellers from eight nations, most with Muslim majorities - that had been imposed by lower courts.
President Donald Trump sought to implement the travel ban a week after taking office. Credit:AP
The court gave no reason for its decision, but said it expected lower court review of the executive orders to proceed quickly. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have kept in place partial stays on the order.
Judges in two judicial circuits - the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond and the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco - had cast doubt on Trump's third executive order banning almost all travel from certain countries.
After attending a marine biotechnology camp in North Carolina during the summer, College Station High School (CSHS) senior Madison Cornwell returned to Texas convinced a career in the growing biotechnology industry was the perfect fit.
Thanks to a new partnership between the Blinn College District and College Station ISD, Cornwell did not have to wait until after graduation to begin working toward her career aspirations. She enrolled in CSHSs Advanced Biotechnology class a one-year dual credit course that allows high school juniors and seniors to earn credit toward a Blinn Therapeutics Manufacturing degree while fulfilling their high school science requirements.
This course is very hands-on and detail-oriented, Cornwell said. Since I have a passion for biotechnology and would like to pursue it as a career, this class is an amazing opportunity available right here in our high school.
Therapeutics manufacturing is a specialization that blends cutting-edge science with medical research to manufacture vaccines and other products used to treat, prevent, cure, or diagnose disease. Blinns Therapeutics Manufacturing Program equips students with enhanced training in current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP), quality assurance, quality control, biomanufacturing processes, and cell culturing necessary for pharmaceutical production.
Graduates of the program are eligible for entry-level positions with competitive salaries in the growing Texas biomanufacturing industry. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs for therapeutics manufacturing technicians are projected to grow 10 percent from 2016 to 2026. Workforce Solutions Brazos Valley anticipates 18 percent growth locally during that same time span, with an hourly salary range between $10.09 and $35.82.
Students who successfully complete CSHSs Advanced Biotechnology class receive credit for Blinns Introduction to Biotechnology course. This laboratory-based course provides an introduction to biotechnology concepts, including the history and applications of DNA and RNA technology, molecular biology, bioethics, and laboratory safety procedures.
The curriculum at CSHS coincided so closely with that of the Blinn Therapeutics Manufacturing Program that it was just a matter of going through the formal process to allow the students to earn college credit, Program Director Michael Johanson said. This class is a great way to introduce students to the biotechnology industry. If this field is something the student is interested in pursuing, we hope they will come to Blinn to complete the program.
In addition to learning concepts, students in Advanced Biotechnology are introduced to essential laboratory skills such as pipetting, measurement and calibration techniques, solution preparation, and biomolecule analysis. They also are exposed to a variety of laboratory instruments, including pH meters, spectrophotometers, and chromatography equipment.
This class is designed to show students what biotechnology is and what it would be like if they chose it as a career, said CSHS teacher Stephanie Garcia, who has more than a decade of industry research and laboratory experience. We are very excited to partner with Blinn to give our students a foot in the door to this growing industry.
Students interested in earning college credit for the Advanced Biotechnology class are required to apply for admission to Blinn and complete a dual credit approval form. Students pay a reduced tuition rate.
For more information on Blinns Therapeutics Manufacturing Program and its 60-hour Associate of Applied Sciences (AAS) degree and certificate programs, including the 36-credit hour Therapeutics Manufacturing Certificate and 30-credit hour Therapeutics Manufacturing Advanced Technical Certificate, visit: www.blinn.edu/therapeutics.
Registration for Blinns Winter Minimester, which runs Dec. 15-22 and Jan. 3-10, is available through Dec. 14, and registration for the Spring semester is open through Jan. 15. College officials encourage early registration for convenient scheduling and placement in high-demand courses.
DALLAS -- After her oldest daughter was killed in May 2016, Michelle McDaniel and the rest of her family isolated themselves in their small Texas town out of fear that the unknown killer could be standing in line with them at the grocery store or passing them on the street.
Then early last month, Brown County sheriff's investigators sent McDaniel a sketch of the man they suspected in her daughter's death, despite having no witnesses. The sketch was created using DNA found at the crime scene; a private lab used the sample to predict the shape of the killer's face, his skin tone, eye color and hair color.
Within a week, the sheriff's office had a suspect in custody.
For McDaniel, the DNA sketch technology known as phenotyping was an answered prayer. For law enforcement officers, it's a relatively new tool that can generate leads in cold cases or narrow a suspect pool. But for some ethicists and lawyers, it's an untested advancement that if used incorrectly could lead to racial profiling or ensnaring innocent people as suspects.
At a news conference a week after the sketch was released, Brown County Sheriff Vance Hill announced that 21-year-old Ryan Riggs had confessed to the beating death of 25-year-old Chantay Blankinship. Authorities have said they believe the killing was premeditated but have not released a motive. Riggs is being held without bond on a capital murder charge in the Brown County Jail about 170 miles (275 kilometers) southwest of Dallas.
"My son called me after seeing the sketch and said, 'Mom, I think I know this kid. He used to bully me in school.' He sat behind her in church. His mom picked her up every week and took her to church. ... He was best friends with my niece and her friends. And we wouldn't have known," McDaniel said.
Several private companies offer phenotyping services to law enforcement to create sketches of suspects or victims when decomposed remains are found. The process looks for markers inside of a DNA sample known to be linked to certain traits. Police in at least 22 states have released suspect sketches generated through phenotyping.
It works like this: Companies have created a predictive formula using the DNA of volunteers who also took a physical traits survey or had their face scanned by recognition software. That predictive model is used to search the DNA samples for specific markers and rate the likelihood that certain characteristics exist.
For some ethicists and lawyers, however, releasing a sketch of a suspect without any witnesses seems like a dangerous proposition. Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that from what scientists have said and written, not enough is known about the link between genes and facial features to rely on the technology to produce a suspect.
"You can lose weight, gain weight, change gender, grow a beard, have plastic surgery," Stanley said. "It risks ensnaring innocent people in webs of suspicious investigations. It risks playing on existing societal racial prejudices. It risks diverting investigations down wild goose chases. If this technology were used to set up dragnets say to bring in every albino person in an area as a suspect because the DNA seemed to show someone had that trait, that's where we would object."
Stanley also noted previous issues with forensic science advancement in the past, including bad practices in DNA testing from hair samples a few years ago.
Steve Armentrout, the CEO of Parabon NanoLabs, which created the Brown County sketch, said phenotyping isn't meant to replace court-tested methods of identifying suspects. He said it's an investigative tool.
"In every case we are involved in there is DNA. This isn't meant to provide a positive identification. It's meant to jog someone's memory," he said. "The greatest value of the tool from an investigative perspective is efficiency, the ability to exclude portions of the suspect pool."
In the Brown County case, Hill said Riggs saw the sketch, went on the run for a few days and then confessed to the killing in front of the congregation at the church where he and Chantay both attended services. Hill had not said whether DNA tests were run yet to see if Riggs' DNA matches that found at the scene.
No attorney information was listed for Riggs, and his parents didn't return calls seeking comment on the case.
Brazos County Sheriff Chris Kirk likened the skepticism about the technology to officers saying digital cameras wouldn't hold up in court when they were introduced because the photos could be manipulated.
"Now every department in every state uses them," he said.
National Geographic paired with Kirk's department earlier this year and paid the $3,600 to submit suspect DNA from the 1981 slaying of Virginia Freeman for a sketch in exchange for being able to film the search process. The department released a sketch of the potential killer when he was in his 20s and another age progressed to about 70.
"It has definitely renewed the interest of the public in the case. We've gotten a number of tips and phone calls," said Kirk, who is the only remaining officer in his department who was around when Freeman was found bludgeoned, strangled and stabbed to death. "That was a really traumatic crime for that family, for the department and for the whole community."
As of this week, no arrests had been made.
Freeman died on Dec. 1, 1981, a half-hour after taking a call at Bryan's Real Estate Mart from a man with a "country-sounding accent," according to stories in The Eagle's archives. The man had told Freeman he was interested in buying a home on Greens Prairie Road, then a rural part of College Station, and could pay with $73,000 in cash.
The family of Kate Steinle chose not to be in court on the day jurors rendered their verdict in the case of the undocumented Mexican immigrant who was accused in her death.
It was probably for the best. In a decision many found shocking, Jose Inez Garcia Zarate was acquitted of all but the least serious charge he faced.
Who could blame them for not wanting to be part of the spectacle that was sure to follow any verdict?
At their moment of greatest pain, the family already had been forced into an unwelcome spotlight by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, who used their tragedy to fuel his anti-immigration hysteria.
The death of 32-year-old Steinle, Trump said repeatedly, was the fault of San Franciscos sanctuary city policy, which prohibits city law enforcement officers from helping federal officials carry out detentions of undocumented immigrants. It demonstrated the urgency of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
This senseless and totally preventable act of violence committed by an illegal immigrant is yet another example of why we must secure our border immediately, Trump said two days after Steinle was killed in July 2015. This is an absolutely disgraceful situation, and I am the only one that can fix it.
On Friday, the White House press secretary echoed her boss: Kate Steinle was killed by an illegal immigrant and convicted felon who had been deported from the United States five times, she said in a written statement. He, and countless other criminal illegal immigrants like him, should never be allowed to threaten our citizens.
The politicization of Steinles death, and now her killers acquittal, has been as inevitable as it has been unfair to her grieving family.
We somehow or another amazingly got caught up in immigration, and Trump, Kates father, Jim Steinle, told the San Francisco Chronicle in a recent interview. We have our views on immigration and we have our view on Trump. But this is the death of my daughter.
On Thursday, a San Francisco County Superior Court jury found Garcia Zarate, 45, not guilty of murder or manslaughter. Instead, it found him guilty of being a felon in possession of a gun, a single count that can carry a sentence of up to three years in state prison, two years of which he already has served.
Garcia Zarates public defenders argued that he found a loaded gun, stolen four days earlier from the locked car of a federal Bureau of Land Management ranger, and accidentally fired it while sitting on Pier 14. They said the bullet struck the pavement before ricocheting nearly 80 feet, striking Steinle in the back.
Jurors, to their credit, put aside the political noise and judged the case on its facts. They decided that the death of Kate Steinle, a joyful young woman who deserved a long, full life, was an accident.
I believe the verdict was just.
In late October, I attended the trials opening arguments. I thought then, and still do, that the ranger who left his loaded gun in a part of San Francisco where parked cars frequently are targeted by thieves bears some responsibility for the chain of events that led to Steinles death, though I dont think he should be charged with a crime.
Many outraged readers told me they had no doubt that Garcia Zarate had stolen the weapon, even though prosecutors and police said they had no evidence or information that he did. Perhaps they had heard that Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan wrongly claimed that Garcia Zarate had stolen the gun, and fired it multiple times, when he proposed Kates Law, to stiffen penalties for immigrants crossing into the U.S. illegally.
Evidence in the trial seemed to contradict that.
In early November, the defense presented a grainy surveillance video that captured both the shooting and what occurred on Pier 14 the hour before. Half an hour before Steinle was shot, six people could be seen huddling around a swiveling metal chair.
For nearly 30 minutes, they repeatedly bent down around the base of the chair setting down and then picking up blurry objects, said KQED reporter Alex Emslie, who watched the video in court. Half an hour later, Garcia Zarate sat down in the same swiveling metal chair. The footage showed him reaching down, presumably to pick up the gun. Moments later, a bullet from the gun pierced Steinles heart.
The verdict, said Jim Steinle, was sad and shocking.
Justice was rendered, he told the Chronicle, but it was not served.
The dignity and restraint of this family is remarkable. They never have been out for vengeance. And they are not even opposed to the idea of sanctuary cities, they told the Chronicle.
Understandably, they are angry that federal officials returned Garcia Zarate to San Francisco in 2015 to face a 20-year-old marijuana charge when they could have, and should have, deported him. The feds, after all, were aware of San Franciscos sanctuary policy, in which its sheriff refused to communicate with federal immigration authorities. They must have known local prosecutors would drop such a minor case and put the homeless immigrant back on the street.
And understandably, the Steinles are suing the federal government for negligence in connection with the theft of the rangers gun. They wanted to sue San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, for failing to hand Garcia Zarate over to immigration, but a judge tossed out that part of their case.
In the aftermath of Steinles death, and the vitriolic presidential campaign, the city has made minor changes to its sanctuary policy. It will now honor a federal detainer request, for instance, if the detainee has committed a violent or serious felony in the past seven years. That would not have affected the release of someone such as Garcia Zarate, who in all likelihood will be deported rightfully so once he serves his term.
Nothing has happened, Jim Steinle told the Chronicle. Nothing has changed. Except Kates not here.
Robin Abcarian writes for the Los Angeles Times.
BRIDGEPORT Eversource Energy has added a new utility service to its menu after sealing its $1.6 billion deal to purchase Aquarion Water Co.
The company announced Monday that its six-month-long process to acquire the Bridgeport-based water company had ended, making Eversource the only U.S.-based electric utility company to own a water utility, according to a news release.
We have worked hard to be there when our customers need us for gas and electricity. By joining with Aquarion we are excited to add clean water to that commitment to a clean, sustainable future, said Jim Judge, Eversource chairman, president and CEO, in a release. As part of Eversource, Aquarion will remain a locally owned company with access to the resources it will need for investments to ensure ongoing reliability and customer service.
Eversource set out to purchase Aquarion and its parent company Macquarie Utilities in June with a deal that included $880 million in cash and $795 million of assumed Aquarion debt.
Connecticut officials gave the green light for the Boston- and Hartford-based companys takeover deal in October.
With Aquarion now part of Eversource, the electric, natural gas and water service providers customer base has grown to nearly 4 million people throughout Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Our complementary business lines and shared commitment to operational excellence bode very well for our customers and the communities we serve, said Aquarion President and CEO Charles Firlotte in a press release. At Aquarion, were very proud of the history of superior customer satisfaction earned by our employees and we look forward to growing it even further with the Eversource team.
The 300 Aquarion employees will join Eversources 8,000-person staff as the water company will become a wholly owned subsidiary.
jordan.grice@hearstmediact.com
Santas swarmed the streets of Stamford during the annual SantaCon bar crawl on December 2, 2017. Revelers dressed in holiday garb took advantage of drink specials at participating bars. While all the costumes were festive, some were a little extra. Take for example.....
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Were barreling along in the bus. I see snow-capped mountains, terraced fields, farmers wearing straw coned-shaped hats bent over hoes. The scene is straight out of a Chinese 16th century painting. But then we see sleek steel windmills dotting the hills, solar panels on the street lamps, a cell phone tower next to a pagoda. This is China today.
As the retired director of the Center for Global Studies, I was invited to chaperone the annual two-week study tour to China. Traveling with 11 female students and their Chineselanguage teacher, Whitney Lok-Defino, I was reminded of the value of these trips: this is where the textbook ends and authentic experience begins.
Lets start with just being there. For nine days, we traveled through Yunnan province in southwestern China, an area not commonly visited by Westerners. Our presence caused a stir. At a panda reserve in Chengdu, schoolchildren shouted, Wai guo ren! foreigners and Hello! They squealed with delight when we answered and waved.
People stared at our tall girls in yoga pants with long blonde hair or red ponytails. Sitting on the steps of a temple in Dali as our guide talked about Buddhism, people took selfies, slyly positioning themselves so our group was in the background. Eating dinner that night in an open-air restaurant, we saw a man video-taping us.
Our kids were philosophical. Sophomore Anna Pasiakos said, I think its because theres a lack of exposure to other cultures here. Junior Cailey Martin reflected Americans have many opportunities to interact with diverse people, and we dont realize how special that is. In China, she said, we are stared at because we are not the same type as them. Were different.
A surprise visit to a school
Yes, we were different, but the Chinese were eager to connect. Because our guides teenage daughter attended a school close to our hotel, we visited Dali #1 High School. As we walked through the schools many courtyards, we saw students peeking from classroom windows and slyly glancing out back doors. And then an English teacher invited us into her room.
Our girls entered and the room erupted in applause. Chinese students led our girls to seats, and, in moments, conversations began between our 11 girls and the 50 students in the class. Laughter and chatter rang out.
I loved going to the school. They were so welcoming, said junior Chloe Schrader. We built a connection with the students even without knowing a lot of their language. Before we left, kids shared WeChat addresses (the Chinese version of texting), and snapped countless selfies.
Classroom lessons
brought to life
Throughout the trip, students felt their classroom learning was deepened and expanded. Pasiakos said she learned about Buddhism in Chinese History class, but here you can see it in action. There were people praying in the temples we were in.
Peter, our Tibetan guide in Shangri-La, explained how Buddhism shaped his life and personality. Its not like he was preaching his religion, said Schrader, but we learned how relevant religion is to the lives of the people. Its with them at all times.
Lets not forget that these students study Chinese. Most of them, however, are only in their second year of language study. People didnt always understand what I was saying, said sophomore Camille Clark. I learned that using proper tones really mattered.
But sophomore Tess Jordan loved the challenge. The best part is interacting with people in stores, the kids in the school, and actually speaking the language to communicate with someone, to be understood.
Schrader agreed: I really liked figuring out how to bridge the culture barrier, how to use body language to get your point across.
Living with families
The homestay with Guang Ming High School in Shanghai, when students stayed in the homes of families, was even more demanding: how does an American teenager fit into a Chinese family with different norms, different values, and different bathrooms?
Clark described the toilet with a bidet top in her hosts apartment. Everytime I opened the lid, this screaming sound came from it, she said. The whole family knew when I went to the bathroom.
Sophomore Shannon Hong was flummoxed by the sink and took the drain out whenever she used it. I didnt feel close enough with them to talk about the drain, she explained.
But other moments were more familiar to them. They all agreed the Shanghai students did much more homework than they did. But still, Hong said her host was often texting with her books open. When her grandma came into the room, she pretended she was doing her homework, she said.
Final assignment, reflection
Next Saturday, the students will come to the Center for Global Studies, look at their hundreds of pictures, and decide on a unifying idea or theme. Then each student will choose a photo related to that theme and write a personal essay. It will be a time for reflection.
But Ive already started that process. My photos show our girls immersed in a different world:
Our kids doing homework in the outdoor courtyard of our traditional-styled hotel with red lanterns hanging above them.
A public toilet with stalls without doors, walls only 4 ft high, and a trough than ran through each stall that you squatted over.
An older woman in traditional Bai dress teaching our kids tie-dying in a family-owned workshop.
Sets of chopsticks plunging into the spinach, noodles, eggplant, cabbage, chicken, and dumplings.
We learn a lot about the world by reading books and studying other languages, but nothing beats experiences that go beyond where the textbook ends.
So lets talk school food. Oh no! Not school food! Everyone knows that its the epitome of despair and everything that is evil in this world. Its horrendous, its atrocious, its bad!
Shhhhh its OK. Were going to take a look at school food through a completely innocent, unbiased freshman. Prepare yourselves my thoughts may be shocking.
You walk into the school cafeteria and the sight amazes you. You came from a pretty limited middle school so the idea of being able to branch off and pick from so many entrees is beyond belief. The shiny metal stands each promise something new.
Grab your scratched and dented tray and lets get rolling into the latest school stream of students: the cafeteria.
To your left theres a giant cooler that breathes the cold freshness of winter. Inside theres a wide array of drinks that youre confident are meant to be free. Everything from the widely loved chocolate milk to the more controversial strawberry to even juice cartons? Theyre in the form of the milk you drank back in elementary school, but the big and bright lettering on the side boasts APPLE JUICE WITH VITAMIN W (no, theres no such thing vitamin W sadly). You decide to try out this new juice solely out of curiosity.
Next to this beverage buffet is what seems to be a container of coffee along with Styrofoam cups stacked nicely next to it. Dont touch that. Staff only.
Now we come to the salad bar. Sometimes theres a great variety of sides to choose from: craisins (cranberry raisins) that are extremely good, frozen fruit packets (surprisingly tasty) and salad. You get to choose two so like 75 percent of the rest of the school you choose to just take whatever fruit they give you and run. The salad bar is more like a vertical wrestling mat so its best to just get in and get out.
Then there is the entree line. There are three metallic stands (for lack of a better description) where kind and very nice lunch ladies hand you the entree they have. There are the two hot stations, usually containing something along the lines of a burrito and some form of pizza. It changes a lot but those are the general ideas. Both are pretty good, but if youre actually looking at a real, classic burrito just be prepared for mediocrity.
As an added bonus theres like a warm sides center stand that has like tater tots. This grand place also holds the most reliable choice for lunch: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with a cheesestick. The cheesestick is delicious.
Now we come to the pay extra portion of the cafeteria. Your eyes begin to water as you look at all the delectable treats awaiting to be consumed. Its glorious, with the slushies and cookies and fruit drinks. Theres beef jerky that makes your mouth water and rice crispy treats that make you want to literally throw your money at them.
Stop staring, youre holding up the line behind you, kid. People push against you as you try to decide which treat to buy yourself today when a dark realization rolls over your mind.
You panic and take your sad tray and dodge, duck, and dodge over to the nearest lunch lady at a register. You scan your fingerprint like they made you do at the beginning of the school year and youre off to go sit with whatever friends youre lucky enough to sit with during the next 30 minutes.
The realization you had earlier that kept you from getting delicious treats is the echoing words of your parents: Dont waste your lunch money. No one wants an angry parent.
So lets wrap this all up everyone. Obviously school lunch food isnt the best, we all know that. Some days your choices are better than others.
The people who work in there are great and dont deserve any criticism for the food theyre given to serve. There are some great meals that you can get and it is definitely worth doing if you get free or reduced lunches. I hope that everyone weighs their options like I did!
Hope yall are having a great holiday season and that this appetizing column helps set the mood! You guys are all great and good luck holiday shopping.
Riley Hansen is a senior at Grand Island Senior High.
What do evangelicals and other social conservatives have in common with liberal feminists and the secular left? More than either side would like to admit.
Once upon a time, the religious right thought sexual misconduct certainly involving someone holding public office was immoral; something they simply could not tolerate. How could anyone defend a man like Bill Clinton, they asked a man who was credibly accused of sexual misconduct by more than a few women? That, in and of itself, made him unfit for office.
That was then.
Enter Judge Roy Moore, who is running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Alabama.
Today, evangelicals not all, of course, but a lot want proof that Moore was really involved with teenage girls when he was in his 30s. How do we know, they ask, that the women arent just making it all up?
Funny, but they didnt need video evidence to believe Bill Clinton was guilty of exposing himself in front of Paula Jones or that he groped Kathleen Willey in the White House or that when he was Arkansas Attorney General he raped a businesswoman named Juanita Broaddrick in a Little Rock hotel room.
Back then, the allegations seemed credible and that was enough for social conservatives. Today, they demand verifiable evidence that Roy Moore did all those things to so many women who were young girls at the time.
And what about liberal feminists and the secular left? Back in the 90s, to their everlasting shame, they rallied around Bill Clinton. After all, he was a Democrat who supported abortion rights and thats all that needed to know. And now, the same people who defended a man accused of rape denounce a man accused of fondling a 14-year-old girl several decades ago.
Its called tribal politics. And its not something partisans should be proud of.
But hang on, it gets worse.
Liberal Democrats have recently turned on the former president who they, or their ideological elders, once defended. Michelle Goldberg, one of the many liberal columnists at The New York Times, has written that she now believes Juanita Broaddrick, and that Democrats are guilty of apologizing for Clinton when they shouldnt have.
I dont recall reading stuff like that from liberal columnists in The New York Times back when it might have made a difference.
And Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a liberal Democrat from New York who holds Hillary Clintons former seat, recently said Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency because of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
And you didnt hear stuff like that from liberal Democrats who were busy rescuing Bill Clinton way back when.
But before we give them too much credit better late than never and all that lets state the obvious: Its not exactly courageous to speak up 25 years after the fact, when its safe; when Bill Clinton is of no use to Democrats; when his wife didnt win the presidency; and when hes the elephant sitting on the couch in the living room.
How can they go after Roy Moore, or any man accused of sexually abusing women, as long as they remain silent about the former president who was accused of sexually abusing women?
Theres just so much hypocrisy anyone can take before gagging or laughing out loud at the double standard.
But theres another reason some on the left are no longer covering for the former president. Their newfound valor makes it a lot easier to go after the current president.
When Democrats thought they could get rid of Donald Trump because of collusion with the Russians, sex was on the back burner. But a year has gone by since he was elected and an uncomfortable possibility is starting to emerge: Maybe he wont be thrown out of the Oval Office because he and Vladimir Putin were up to no good.
What then? What could Democrats dredge up to bring him down? How about sex?
Which brings us back to Gillibrand who said we have a different standard on sexual misconduct today than we did when Clinton was president. Things have changed today, and I think under those circumstances there should be a very different reaction (to how liberals defended Clinton), she said. And I think in light of this conversation, we should have a very different conversation about President Trump.
Get it? Take down Clinton when hes no longer a force in Democratic politics in order to make it easier to go after the man who currently resides in the White House, a man who once bragged on a hot mic that he could grab women by the you-know-what and get away with it because hes a star.
So what should we take away from all of this? Well, until something changes, the partisans will tend to protect their own: A 32-year-old man who decades ago allegedly undressed a 14-year-old girl is better than a liberal Democrat who supports abortion with no restrictions. And a president accused of rape was better in office than out because he supported a womans right to choose. And if going after Bill Clinton paves the way to unseat Donald Trump hey, no one really believes politics is about principles, right?
There are exceptions, of course Democrats who take on Democrats accused of misconduct and Republicans who condemn their own but too many of us have chosen up sides, and our partisan passions allow us to accept bad behavior, but only if the accused miscreant is on our team. Weve become partisans without principles and as I say, its not anything to be proud of.
Broken Bow Public Schools board member J.B. Atkins emerged victorious on Nov. 14, after a local effort to recall him failed at the ballot box. About 60 percent of school district voters chose to keep Atkins in office.
At a time when the public is chattering about political intrigue and scandal around every corner, what prompted the campaign to remove Atkins may come as a surprise to Nebraskans.
Atkins was facing a backlash for convincing his school board to lower property taxes.
Following the downturn in agricultural commodity prices and a reduction in farm incomes, Atkins, who was elected in 2016 on a conservative platform, felt obligated to do something to help area taxpayers.
He advocated for reducing the districts tax levy from $1.05 per $100 of assessed property value the maximum allowed under state law without voter approval to 90 cents.
We cant continue as a district to tax our patrons at the max levy for $1.05, because that has increased taxes on our patrons exponentially in some cases, Atkins told the Kearney Hub at the time.
When assessed valuations on property rise, property taxes increase even when tax levies remain the same.
And because were primarily an ag-based economy here in Broken Bow, it affects everybody, Atkins told the Hub.
While the majority of the board adopted the tax rate cut, not everyone in the Broken Bow district was satisfied.
A very loud group, but one that did not represent the majority, tried to demonize me into someone who hated kids. No one wants to be accused of harming children, so school spending gets very little oversight or questioned in any way, said Atkins.
According to Ballotpedia, voters in Nebraska can petition for a recall of local elected officials for any reason. In school board elections where voters elect multiple candidates, only a small share of signatures from registered voters are needed.
Since Atkins won in a six-way race with 1,295 votes, the recall petition required signatures totaling 35 percent of that amount, or 454 signatures.
Atkins said recall supporters had two aims: first, to improve the chance that property tax rates could be increased in upcoming budget years by replacing him only one year into his four-year term, and second, to create a chilling effect among tax relief advocates in the community.
The strategy was to ensure that no one with my conservative values would run in the next election for fear of being attacked in the same manner that I have been, said Atkins.
It demonstrates the power of the teachers union in a small community where the school is one of the largest employers in town. This power is exactly why we have property tax issues in my opinion, said Atkins.
Atkins believes his win shows there is an unmet need in Nebraskas tax and spending debate.
My takeaway is this: the public is hungry for someone to stand up for them and be unafraid of special interests. I never voted for anything extreme, said Atkins.
While many point to the Nebraska Legislature to provide a solution to high property taxes, J.B. Atkins took action at the local level, where property tax rates are set in the first place.
It seemed the harder I fought back with the facts, the more support I gathered. People appear to want someone that will fight for their fundamental beliefs and not just give in.
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Linkedin Muhamad Haripin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 12:17 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2bf57ed 3 Opinion Tito-Karnavian,Book,#bookreview,#books,book-review,police,National-Police,democracy,Indonesian-politics,#NationalPolice,#TitoKarnavian Free
Indonesias police force has been frequently condemned and depicted as a notorious security agency. Violence against unarmed demonstrators, extortion by traffic management personnel, corruption and bribery involving high ranking officers are some of the pressing cases surrounding the National Police (Polri) today.
Against this background, it's important to reflect on recent efforts of Polri chief Gen. Tito Karnavian to promote democratic policing.
Tito has been known not only as a highly accomplished officer, among others as the former counter-terrorism chief, but is also emerging as a writer. His dissertation, published in 2015, has contributed to the analysis about the nature of terrorist networks. Prior to that, his book on Poso, the location of a long manhunt against terrorists in Central Sulawesi, provides useful information about the dynamics of horizontal conflict in Indonesia.
Recently, Gen. Tito published a new book entitled Democratic Policing, a result of collaboration with Hermawan Sulistyo, a research professor at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI.
What does Titos new book tell us about Polri and democracy? How should police and community relations be developed?
The book primarily asserts Polris commitment to the nations democratic system. Tito contends this position has never been easy to maintain. Democracy is complex and challenging, enabling myriad social and political expressions manifested through different means, including violence. As law enforcers, police have had to seek a balance between public order and protecting human rights of, for instance, various groups protesting the government.
Indeed, democracy presents both opportunity and challenges for Polri. On one hand, political liberalization in the post-Soeharto era forced the separation of police from the military; thus, Polri could manage their own affairs without army intervention. Nevertheless, greater autonomy for the police also comes with a broader mission, from regulating traffic to tackling cyber crimes. As a consequence, Polri has become a regular target of criticism for their shortcomings in handling a wide range of cases, besides their involvement in graft.
Democratic Policing offers a detailed account of the problems Indonesian police encountered throughout the post New Order era and efforts taken to solve them. Tito notes notions such as o democratic policing, smart policing and community policing circulated even since the early years of reformasi.
Among others, there is the Polri Grand Strategy, a crucial document describing for the first time Polri's medium and long-term development plan after they separated from the military in 1999.The police aim to undertake structural, instrumental, and cultural reform. Polri also tried to rebuild police and community relations through concerted effort of trust- and partnership-building. In this regard, democratic policing should be a complementary agenda to further speed up police reform.
This book also highlights the role of Indonesian police in protecting human rights and nurturing economic, social and cultural rights. More than 420,000 personnel all over the country must protect and serve the public professionally. Excessive force and violent measures against citizens, as frequently mobilized during New Order authoritarian period, has become obsolete and must be replaced with dialogue and persuasive approaches. Therefore, police officers should also be armed with deep understanding of peaceful conflict resolution and negotiation skills.
Internally, Tito also argues that different generations within the force represent varying understanding about democracy and how Polri should be positioned in an increasingly transparent society. Younger generations or those who entered the Police Academy and were trained after the reform movement of1998, have been exposed to democratic ideals and good governance more than their seniors. His generation therefore, Tito asserts, must build better police management for upcoming officers.
Contents aside, this book could be seen as a reminder about the unfinished police reform. We might disagree with the glowing picture of Polri presented by Gen. Tito. Nonetheless, such publication remains significant as a means of communication with wider audiences beyond the traditional parties considered to be stakeholders in security issues.
The community must be given appropriate opportunity to learn about and criticize the internal condition of Indonesian police; therefore, police should also open their institution for public scrutiny. The publication of Democratic Policing and probably more on the police in the near future- - helps to invite public interest and scrutiny of the police, a small step forward to improve police-community relations.
***
The writer is a researcher at the Center for Political Studies at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta.
---------------
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Linkedin KOMINFO (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia Tue, December 5, 2017
The government has stressed its commitment to developing electricity infrastructure to provide access to power to all Indonesians, including those living in the countrys easternmost regions.
Since April 21, 2017, an increasing number of regions in eastern Indonesia have been provided access to electricity. Imelda Yewen, a resident of Fef district in Tambrauw regency, Sorong, West Papua, for example, can now enjoy more of what life has to offer, especially following the provision of two diesel-fueled power plants (PLTD), with a capacity of 80 kilowatts each.
Today, people in Fef district can have a refrigerator or a television and get information or watch films, said the 24-year-old enthusiastically.
The people in the district of Springhare seeing the results of the electrification program, which continues to reach many corners of the country. As of late September, 73,656 villages have received electricity.
The government aims for more regions to enjoy electricity in the coming years. In 2018, state-owned power company PLN targets to power 5,053 villages.
On the national scale, the electrification ratio has reached 93.08 percent. According to the target it will reach 97.32 percent by 2019.
. (./.)
"Some regions still need intensive electrification efforts, such as those in Papua and East Nusa Tenggara. We are working hard in these regions," said PLN Head of Corporate Communication I Made Suprateka during the FMB9 gathering, which discussed power supply in Indonesia, held in Jakarta on Nov.30.
Papuas electrification ratio currently stands at 48.91percent and is targeted to reach 77.7 percent in 2019.
The electricity industry should be encouraged, as data from the International Energy Agency shows that power consumption per capita in Indonesia is still behind other ASEAN countries.
In 2016, power consumption per capita in Indonesia amounted to 956 kilowatts per hour (kWh). The figure is lower than in Vietnam with 1,530 kWh per capita or in Thailand with 2,620 kWh per capita.
To encourage power consumption in the country, PLN has drawn up some concrete steps, for example, by offering additional electrical power for free, so that people can use electricity for productive purposes, like starting a new business.
"This program is purely a corporate action to optimize the power surplus we have. There is no force if people dont want to do this [get additional electricity power]," said Made.
Stable Rates
The number of PLN customers has continuously grown over the past few years. If PLN had 49.8 million customers in 2012, that number had increased to 67 million by September 2017.
The power distributed by PLN also continues to rise, from 83,898 MVA five years ago to 114,348 MVA in 2016 and further to 119,809 MVA in September 2017.
The electricity rates are also relatively stable. For instance, the low-voltage rate in July 2015 was Rp1, 548 per kWh, while as of September 2017, it had dropped to Rp1,467 per kWh.
"The electricity rates in Indonesia are still below those in other countries. The rate is around 10 US cent per kWh," explained Made.
He added that the conditions in Indonesia, as an archipelagic country, were the reason for different rates in different regions.
"Nevertheless, PLN is committed to using the same tariff or rate, in Java and outer regions and islands," Made said.
The affordable rates are the result of PLNs efforts to control the cost of supply (BPP) even amid rising prices of gas and coal.
In fact, PLN continues to strive for lower rates to lessen peoples burden. To realize this, PLN has been working to innovate, for example by collaborating with the private sector.
The independent power producer (IPP) scheme results in the construction of more power plants, which allows for lower electricity rates.
Investment of Rp1,200 trillion is needed to realize the 35,000MW electrification program launched by the government. The IPP scheme is expected to contribute up to Rp615 trillion, while PLN handles the remaining Rp585 trillion.
PLN also encourages efficiency within its own walls to cut operational costs. This is deemed important to ensure continued growth in the power industry. Further, the debt-to-equity ratio has dropped quite significantly over the past three years, falling from 297 percent in 2014, to only 49 percent at present.
PLN now has total assets worth Rp1,312 trillion, marking a jump from Rp539 trillion in 2014. The significant asset growth to some degree can be attributed to asset revaluation PLN did to fund the 35,000 MW electrification program.
The improving financial condition helps the company contribute more to the state. As of September 2017, PLNs taxes and dividends reached Rp22.7 trillion.
Global Appreciation
. (./.)
The performance has generated positive results, including international recognition. In the ease of doing business survey conducted by the World Bank, the country ranks 49th this year, up from position 61 in 2016. And the ease of getting electricity as one component of the survey continues to show improvement.
According to the secretary of the Directorate General of Electricity at the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry, Agoes Triboesono, the survey result is the fruit of several innovative measures taken by the government.
"Previously, the procedure for getting an electrical connection consisted of five steps; now, there are only four steps, he said.
The steps, according to Agoes, are the issuance of a Feasible Operation Certificate (SLO), a request for a new electricity connection to PLN, the construction work and external inspection, and the process of providing the electricity.
Despite all the achievements, the government has no intention to relax its efforts.
"Now, our concern and focus is the eastern part of Indonesia. We hope more regions that still lag behind in terms of access to electricity can get electricity by 2019, said Agoes.
Realizing the program Bright Light Indonesia is not a walk in the park. However, with all the efforts the government has made, it is no impossible feat, either.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 18:15 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c075a2 1 Art & Culture Battle-of-Surabaya,animation,#animation,Animated-films,award,#awards Free
Indonesian animated film Battle of Surabaya has been named Best Animation film at the 2017 Milan International Filmmaker Festival, which was held from Nov. 25 to Dec. 2.
The festival is part of Film Festival International, a group of movie festivals held in five European cities, namely London, Nice, Madrid, Amsterdam and Milan.
Antara news agency reported that the movie competed with six other international animated films featured in the category.
Read also: Battle of Surabaya premieres, attracts Disney's interest
Indonesian Ambassador to Italy Esti Andayani said the achievement was a testament to Indonesia's animation skills. Esti added that the award reflected the development of the local creative industry.
Meanwhile, Indonesian Student Association (PPI) Italy head Bashofi, who received the award on behalf of MSV Pictures, said the achievement would motivate the younger generation to continue producing high quality films.
Directed by Aryanto Yuniawan, Battle of Surabaya tells the story of a boy during the war that was fought in Surabaya, East Java, between Indonesian and British forces after Indonesia declared independence. The characters in the 2D animated film were voiced by popular Indonesian actors, including Reza Rahadian and Maudy Ayunda. (jes/kes)
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Linkedin Bill Dalton (The Jakarta Post) Ubud Mon, December 4, 2017 09:21 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2bed9a5 4 Books bali,Book,writer,Ketut-Liyer,David-Stuart-Fox,Elizabeth-Gilbert,Eat-Pray-Love Free
Author David Stuart-Foxs latest book arose out of his personal friendship with Ketut Liyer, the late folk healer made world-famous by Elizabeth Gilbert through her best-selling novel Eat, Pray, Love.
David Stuart-Fox left his career as a journalist in Vietnam and Japan for United Press International in 1968 and a tentative assignment in Jakarta a plunge into the unknown that was to lead to a colorful and unusual life working as a writer in Indonesia and respected scholar on Balinese culture.
Traveling widely in the country for decades, Stuart-Fox has published features for magazines including Garuda Magazine and Travel Indonesia, and worked as an editor for Singapores APA Productions in the revisions of their guidebook series on Bali and Java.
Jakarta became Stuart-Foxs base from where he embarked on a six-month journey via Bali across the islands of East and West Nusa Tenggara, as far as then Portuguese Timor. This was followed soon afterwards by a six-month sojourn in South Sulawesi.
Moving to Bali in the early 1970s where he stayed in a small village south of Ubud, Stuart-Fox met the late Ketut Liyer, the celebrated folk healer and painter, who became the subject of his newest book Pray, Magic, Heal.
The chance purchase of an intriguing carved hilt of a betel pounder in the shape of a crouched human figure, said to come from a remote village called Budakeling, brought him to Balis center of Buddhism.
With an Indonesian friend, Stuart-Fox stayed for a year in a little house in the middle of the rice fields, rarely leaving the village.
From that enriching experience came his first book about Bali, The Art of the Balinese Offering, published in 1974. Like so much of his work, photography and visuals play a significant role in the book, which was published through the intermediary of the late poet WS Rendra, whom Stuart-Fox met in Yogyakarta.
For Stuart-Fox, the book was to eventually bring him into contact with a Dutch student, Francine Brinkgreve, who in 1988 became his wife.
Toward the end of the 1970s, another event had a major impact on his life: The Hindu authorities in Bali made the decision to hold the Eka Dasa Rudra ceremony, enacted only once every 100 years, at the great temple of Pura Besakih, Balis most important temple.
Granted unhindered access by the authorities, Stuart-Fox was able to carry out an exhaustive study of the ceremony that resulted in one of his favorite books, Once a Century: Pura Besakih and the Eka Dasa Rudra Festival, published in1982.
His Besakih studies led to his completing a Ph.D. on this temple at the Australian National University. It was published in 2002, with an Indonesian translation in 2010.
During his career, Stuart-Fox has written about a wide range of subjects. While living in Bali in the 1970s and 1980s, he was able to gather an impressive collection of local publications. This interest finally led to the monumental Bibliography of Bali: Publications from 1920 to 1990, published in 1992 by KITLV in Leiden, the Netherlands.
One does not take on a work of this magnitude 8,000 entries and 708 pages but once in a lifetime if one has any sense at all, Stuart-Fox recalled. Its a thankless task that receives little recognition. But such printed bibliographies are now largely a thing of the past.
During the two years that Stuart-Fox and his wife lived in Balis beachside community of Sanur, where he worked on a project developing the Bali Cultural Documentation Center, they started on the first of their many joint book projects.
See this: David Stuart-Fox (left) discusses page proofs with Ketut Liyer during a visit in 2012 in Bali. (Francine Brinkgreve/File)
Based on her own field work and photographs by Stuart-Fox and others, Francines Offerings: The Ritual Art of Bali was published in 1992 by Image Network Indonesia.
Unfortunately, its out of print now, Stuart-Fox said. Its a lovely book.
Some of the authors finest works are now maddeningly difficult to find as well; his classic work on Pura Besakih is also out of print.
At the end of the project, with a very young family and no clear means of livelihood in Bali, the couple moved to the Netherlands, where Francine still had a job at Leiden University.
To Stuart-Foxs great amazement, at the end of 1991, he was offered the position of librarian at the prestigious National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, where he worked until his retirement in 2013.
As a researcher and writer, he took great pleasure in building up that institutes magnificent book collection. His appointment as librarian was by no means the end of his involvement in Balinese scholarship.
In 1995, the publication of Kay It: Whimsical World of a Modern Balinese Artist marked his foray into Balinese art. Kay It, of Chinese descent, was a painter and designer of great talent who died suddenly at a young age. His widow asked Stuart-Fox and photographer Koes Koesnadi to produce a book to honor this versatile artist.
The latest chapter of Stuart-Foxs research about the island was the publication of the cheekily titled Pray, Magic, Heal: The Story of Ketut Liyer (New Saraswati Press/Saritaksu, 2015).
This Ubud folk healer was made world famous for his role as Elizabeth Gilberts guru in her bestseller Eat, Pray, Love ( 2006 ) and in the 2010 film of the same name. The book and the film tell of one womans search for spiritual fulfillment and love.
The idea for Pray, Magic, Heal arose out of Stuart-Foxs personal friendship with Liyer, which began in the early 1970s when the healers home in Pengosekan was in a quiet village untouched by asphalted roads or electricity, and separated from Ubud by beautiful rice fields.
The aim of the book was to explain the significance of the magic drawings within the traditional practice of a Balinese healer and of Liyer in particular, Stuart-Fox said. For the most part, it is Liyers own story, told in his own words and recorded well before the world knew anything about him or traditional Balinese healing arts.
Gilberts encounter with Liyer in Eat, Pray, Love, which had become a worldwide publishing phenomenon, was to result in a constant stream of Western visitors to Liyers home to consult with him, have their futures told and buy his paintings.
Liyer showed Stuart-Fox several articles written about him in international magazines. The man behind the myth received even more publicity in the Indonesian press after his death in June 2016.
Looking back on his cherished friendship with the gifted healer, Stuart-Fox recalls that from the beginning, Pray, Magic, Heal was as much Ketut Liyers book as it was his.
The idea for the book had nothing to do with Gilberts book or the movie that followed. It is for the most part based on recorded interviews made in the 1970s, he said
Besides being a compelling story of an accomplished painter and holistic healer, and essential reading for anyone seriously interested in Balis healing arts, the book is also a stunning catalogue of the magic line drawings and paintings that Liyer used in his healing practice.
Particular compositions, Stuart-Fox explained, were protection against various afflictions.
Ending our conversation, Stuart-Fox acknowledged the complexity of Balinese magic and healing.
My book barely begins the investigation, he said rather cryptically.
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Linkedin News Desk (Kyodo News) London Mon, December 4, 2017 20:04 1808 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c0bee3 2 Lifestyle employees,work,Japan,foreign-workers,job-seekers Free
European universities and employers need to improve the assistance they provide to foreign graduates looking to work in Japan, according to delegates at a recent two-day conference in London.
Participants of the Nov. 6-7 forum agreed Japanese studies departments need to broaden the range of skills students acquire so they can meet the needs of Japanese firms.
The gathering of academics, students and human resources staff from across Europe also agreed Japanese employers have to be more sensitive to the needs of overseas graduates in Japan.
Harald Conrad, a lecturer in Japan's economy and management at Sheffield University, arranged the event at SOAS University of London.
He told Kyodo News, "I think there was general agreement among the participants that universities should and can address employability more in the curriculum. I don't think Japanese studies departments have thought about this in a systematic way and we hope to change that."
Conrad also argued graduates need to understand better how Japanese companies think and operate in practice. Anecdotally, many foreign graduates drop out of Japanese firms because they have unrealistic expectations.
Human resources specialists told the conference that while a good proficiency in Japanese is often important, firms are frequently looking for graduates with additional skills. They recommended studying Japanese alongside other subjects such as business.
Ian Robinson, human resources manager for Toshiba Europe Ltd., said, "We are not necessarily looking for Japanese speakers. We are looking for people who can change how we do business in Japan and change the mindset."
Read also: Japanese firms hiring more people with mental health issues
Japanese studies departments are already adapting courses in order to ensure students are better equipped for the world of work, according to the conference.
Instead of just writing essays, students are encouraged to take part in group work that involves developing a range of business-friendly skills, including a better understanding of Japanese workplace culture and negotiation skills. They also prepare their resumes and job interviews in Japanese and carry out internships.
Boosting employability (skills which can be transferred from the classroom into the workplace) has become increasingly important as students are forced to take on more of the costs of their education.
But it is also Japanese employers who need to change their approach if they are to attract and, more importantly retain, foreign graduates.
Some companies now aim to take on 20 percent of their annual graduate intake from overseas in order to bring about innovation and improve understanding of overseas markets.
Conrad and Hendrik Meyer-Ohle, from the National University of Singapore, have recently conducted a survey of these fresh foreign graduates.
They found many complained about vague job descriptions as well as a lack of direction and feedback from their seniors. Others talked about relatively low pay and being asked to perform low-level jobs in their first few years (in order to introduce new recruits to all aspects of the company). Some spoke about being overwhelmed at the high expectations put upon them.
As a result, foreign graduates often leave Japan after just a few years and return to their home country. This can discourage firms from further diversifying their workforce.
Read also: Japan's rethinking its culture of long work hours
One recent Oxford University graduate told the conference she had been deterred from working in Japan due to the experiences of fellow students in the country.
Some firms are working hard to provide support for overseas graduates, particularly those in information technology who have little or no proficiency in Japanese.
There was general agreement the logic of the Japanese employment system -- with its emphasis on the long term in terms of pay and career progression and letting people find themselves in the first few years of a job -- should be more fully explained to potential candidates. Many job seekers said they would benefit from mentoring by previous graduates.
But while recognizing the Japanese system is different, there was a feeling companies perhaps need to give their foreign graduates clearer goals and job descriptions.
Meyer-Ohle said that rather than focus on fresh foreign graduates, firms could benefit by sending more experienced, mid-career staff at European subsidiaries to their head office in order to increase diversity and introduce fresh thinking.
Many local staff working at Japanese subsidiaries said they felt there was a glass ceiling with little career progression, although some delegates said that was now changing.
The event at SOAS is being used by Conrad to create pamphlets and workshops for academics and Japanese firms to try to improve the opportunities for foreign graduates who want to work in Japan.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 16:15 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c031ed 1 People Indonesian,aviation,expert,Kleopas-Danang,ICAO Free
While representing Indonesia at the recent International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) Next Generation Aviation Professional Global Summit in Montreal, Canada, Kleopas Danang has been selected to join the Young Aviation Professional Program.
As reported by kompas.com, Danang became the first and only Indonesian to have been selected, which had over 550 applicants from all over the world.
"We are considered as Young Professional Officer's, working together with experts in the aviation industry," Danang told kompas.com recently.
ICAO runs the program together with Airports Council International (ACI) and International Air Transport Association (IATA). ICAO itself is a United Nations agency specializing on the principles and techniques of international air navigation.
ACI, meanwhile, is a trade organization that oversees airports across the globe, including Indonesia's state-owned airport operators Angkasa Pura 1 and Angkasa Pura 2. IATA oversees airlines, including Garuda Indonesia.
Read also: Seven airplane features you may not know about
Previously, Danang said he worked for seven years as a public relations officer for an Indonesian airline.
Joining the ICAO program means Danang must give up his position as he joins a team of analysts on global aviation economic policy.
Danang is set to contribute to projections of the global aviation industry, including the challenges it faces.
One of the challenges for the next 10 years is the lack of aviation experts, he said.
"This industry needs more than 255,000 additional pilots and 180,000 captains by 2027," Danang said.
He is also set to share his experience as an airline's public communications officer, especially on how to handle a crisis. (liz/kes)
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Linkedin Jonathan Tan (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 08:27 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2bec15e 4 Art & Culture short-story,#shortstory Free
Five minutes to three in the early hours of the morning, Adinda sat upright on her bed and wiped the sweat sticking to her forehead with the back of her small bandaged left hand. Clutching the glass of water beside her bed, she took a sip thirstily, waiting.
At exactly three, she took the cell phone beside the glass of water and dialed the number she now knew by heart. She did not put the number on speed dial because she wanted the pleasure of punching in the numbers on her phone in the dark. It took a while for the connection to get through a number for Singapore. Ten rings in, a familiar female voice barking down on the end of the line filled her ears. Without saying a word, Adinda breathed heavily in response.
The first couple of nights, the voice on the end of the line jarred with bewilderment bellowed exasperatedly, Hello? Hello, who is it? Adinda held her silence. Then came the familiar note of annoyance, flaring in the voice each time she did not carry out the tasks to her satisfaction, bridged to a not-too-distant past where Adinda had sought to make a better life for herself and her family. Now it was all broken and her future was dimmer than before she had set foot in Singapore.
By the 97th call a day short of her entire stay in Singapore Adinda broke the silence and spoke: Why you do this to me? Why you made my life susah [miserable]?
***
Given another life, Adinda would not have wanted to be where she was. Easing the curtain to one side, she took in the muggy haze outside. Even without opening the window, she could smell the stiffness of the air permeating her nostrils.
It is the smell from your home lah, her madams mother-in-law said.
She missed the sarcasm at first, but learned later that the smog blanketing the island emanated from her homeland. She marveled at how the fires raging in her part of the world were suffocating those living further away.
High over the city-state, hundreds of windows embroidered life stories of which one was now her own in the apartment she would have to call home for the next two years. As she wondered hard how things were back home, in the same breath of thought, she stole time to stare out of the windows with curiosity to find out what went on behind those windows opposite hers that she cleaned daily a morning chore before she prepared breakfast for Sir and Madam and their toddler son.
Adinda wasnt sure life was any better in the city-state with the constant frowns that creased Sir and Madams faces as they returned home after work. Back home as evening fell, her good neighbor and friend Ainul would sit with her outside their homes chatting, taking in the bustle of villagers coming and going, exchanging hellos and words with other neighbors passing by, looking up at the stars stitching their brilliance into the skies.
Here, Adinda soon learned that Sir and Madam retreated behind the shut door, the curtains drawn as hundreds of windows, not dissimilar to theirs, were torched with lights. The whiteness shone through the darkness with dissonance as night fell.
In her homecoming, Ainuls fruits of labor in full display modern goodies, money to rebuild her dilapidated, rotting wooden house into something sturdier awed Adinda. She pictured in her mind the kind of life that could possibly lie ahead of her in the city-state. More so, the better life she could have in her own homecoming, to deal with her immediate wants: to patch the leaking roof over their heads, to fill sacks of rice in the lumbung (rice storage), to no longer endure hunger.
Her Madams mother-in-law was the demanding one. She would give Adinda a makeshift stick made of a half-cut bamboo pole with a cloth tied around it and asked her to extend herself out of the windows to clean the outer panels. Arching her hand against the window panels as she extended her body outwards, Adinda tried to suppress the giddiness rising up her head, resisting to either look upwards or worse, downwards, keeping her eyes peeled over to the hundreds of windows on the opposite block.
She wondered at the obsession of having the squeaky-shiny cleaned windows that served little purpose since the curtains were drawn shut most of the time. Was she being punished just because the soot from the forest fires burning back home had stained the windows?
***
Before she had the maid, Lynn Tan reminded herself not to be too fastidious, to cut her maid some slack.
Given another life, Lynn wouldnt have wanted to get a maid at all. Having someone else living in their midst was the last thing she wished for. As it was, being out and about, working long hours five days a week, she wanted the freedom and quiet in the evenings and weekends to move about in her home.
The slightest noises intruding upon her shook her with annoyance: the closing and opening of wardrobe doors as the maid placed the folded laundry back; the clattering of the plates and cutlery as the maid washed them; the dull, plodding sound of footsteps as the maid stomped heavily across the floor to pick toys up. Her presence was everywhere; Lynn did not like it at all.
But a year into taking care of her newborn, Lynn was exhausted by the never-ending regime of diaper changes, the unreasonable shrillness of her newborns crying, the dull routine that trapped her in the apartment. No longer was she able to steal time in between lunches to do up her toes or hair, to put on a dress or a pair of high-heels, to catch up with gossip over lunch with colleagues before heading back to the office.
Work in itself wasnt always pleasurable, but it offered pleasant distractions, moving her mood along the way, along a spectrum that was unavailable to the life with a newborn at home.
After her newborn was hospitalized for weeks with a viral infection, after her mother-in-laws insinuation that she shouldnt have brought the boy out shopping just because she was bored, after her husbands rationalization that she might feel better ditching the role of a stay-home mom, Lynn decided to hire a maid.
The arrangement was that her mother-in-law would watch over the maid, who would in turn take care of the daily needs of the boy, and also to complete as many of the household chores as humanly possible each day.
***
Adinda had a fitful sleep the night before she was sent off to Singapore. She dreamed about how Singapore was so clean that the pavement could be eaten off of if she was hungry enough. She was on all fours, licking the pavement that tasted of roasted pine nuts, the air sticky with cotton candy, the sun warming a toast of rendang curry.
Then it began to rain in her dreams. The skies opened up: rags after rags of damp fell, some slapping on her head, shoulder, body with a disapproving thud. Soon she found herself unable to move forward, stuck among the rags piling high as the skies gave no sign of letting up. That humid morning, as Adinda left her dreams and woke up soaking wet with sweat on her back and forehead, she was lost to the future lurking ahead.
In Singapore, her family pawned whatever little valuables they had, borrowed from their relatives too. Grateful, Adinda promised herself that once she was able to pay off the loan owed to the agent, she would start to remit as much of her wages as she could back home. She knew the first 10 months would be tough in Singapore, getting little more than 30 dollars each month from her employer, the rest going to the agent for the fees in bringing her to Singapore.
But seeing her neighbors returning home, laden with goodies and modern appliances from Singapore, it strengthened her resolve to go out there to seek a better life. She pictured herself returning home with the latest handheld game for her adik (younger brother), a wardrobe of nice clothes for her kakak (older sister), a brand new Yamaha motorbike for her abang (older brother), a good quality TV for her ailing orangtua (parents) already in their 70s, always squinting their eyes to see what was on the TV.
Sitting in the newly renovated home, she would regale her siblings and parents of life in the city-state, of the people there, of their secrets, of their success, of the modern conveniences that someday, somehow would come to their village, slowly but surely.
***
You clean like that, not clean. Must clean like that. Impatience rose up in her mother-in-laws voice as she snatched the mop from Adindas hand and showed her how to do it.
Then she ranted on again, Thought they teach you how to clean before you come to Singapore. Did Mum show you how to clean the floor? She didnt scold you?
As the weeks went on, Adinda was quick to realize the reassuring smiles that welcomed her soon ceased to bracket their faces. The voice grew harder, harsher each time she did something wrong or what they thought was wrong.
When the bowl slipped out of her hand crashing onto the floor, sending the half-eaten rice all over the corner where she sat on a high stool to eat her dinner in the kitchen Adinda went to bed that evening hungry.
Slipping into the bathroom to relieve herself when everyone in the household was asleep, she drank from the tap to dull her hunger. The wound stitched between her left thumb and index finger glistened in the dark as she unwrapped her bandage to take a closer look.
You are very stupid. Why use your hands to pick up the broken bowl? Use the broom to sweep it up, her Madams voice quivered in anger, as she stood with her at the accident and emergency department at Changi Hospital to get her wounds treated.
***
Just send her back lah, her mother-in-law said the next day. If your boy is near her, he could have gotten hurt also. Lucky. I can cope with the boy on my own. Now this one stupid, cannot do things properly.
Since the maid had come into the picture, Lynn was annoyed that her mother-in-law and even her husband presumably made her the custodian of the maid. Any fault with her, any complaints about her clumsiness, her inefficient cleaning that left ant trails, the inability to coax her boy to take naps, rested squarely on her shoulders: teach her, manage her, tell her. Lynn was sick of being the one telling the maid what to do.
Why cant your mom just tell her properly what to do, Lynn said to her husband.
Mom doesnt speak much English or Malay. How to communicate? She needs you to instruct the maid, her husband replied, conveniently brushing aside any responsibility.
That evening, when the decision was made to send her home, Lynn felt heaviness in her heart. But she acquiesced, hoping to put to rest her mother-in-laws nonstop complaints about the maid. The inconvenience of a maid was perhaps too much to manage, as if life hadnt put enough on her plate.
One morning the following week, while she was getting ready to clean the windows by wetting the cloth to tie on the bamboo stick, Adinda was asked to pack her belongings stuffed in the storeroom, where she also slept. The Madams mother-in-law then quickly did a thorough check by ruffling through her personal belongings.
Just to make sure she didnt steal anything, she said to Lynn, ignoring Adinda who stood by and watched on cluelessly.
At the airport, her Madam pressed two 50-dollar notes into her small hands and said: Use it to get something you like inside. It was the first time that she came into contact with so much money since coming to Singapore.
For me? Thank you, Madam, Adinda said gratefully, resolving that she would bring it home and show her family what a 50 Singapore dollar note looked like. Then she asked, Why am I going home?
Were going on a holiday. You balik kampong [go back home] first, said Madams mother-in-law, her face crowded with a disapproving glare.
***
Why? You send me back to agent I can still work in Singapore. Why you send me home? You lie. Why?
On the other side, Lynn uttered little more than a sorry one that sounded more tired than sincere. Since the maid left, she had to face the task of coaxing her son to sleep, something she had never been good at.
Despite her mother-in-laws assurances to help out, Lynn came home mostly to unwashed laundry or dishes the menial tasks that were once forgotten and relegated to Adinda. She had to take it upon herself to do it.
Stop calling, Adinda, Lynn begged. Im sorry, as I said.
It was barely past three in the ungodly hours of the morning when Adinda let out a loud sob on the end of the line. The 98th call, the number of days she was in the city-state. Long after she hung up, the sob stubbornly sat, ringing restively deep in the air.
***
Jonathan Tan Ghee Tiong works as the head of the Culture and Information Division at the ASEAN Secretariat.
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Linkedin Nurul Fitri Ramadhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 12:09 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2bf5376 1 National Gatot-Nurmantyo,Air-Force Free
President Joko Jokowi Widodo has reportedly proposed that Air Force chief of staff Chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto lead the Indonesian Military (TNI) after commander Gen. Gatot Nurmantyo retires.
House of Representatives deputy speaker Fadli Zon said Monday that State Secretary Pratikno filed a letter to the House regarding the proposed appointment of Hadi.
I saw Pratikno this morning. He handed me a letter. And [the President] has proposed Hadi as the new military commander," the Gerindra Party lawmaker told reporters.
Gatot will retire in March next year.
The House leadership board will hold a meeting this afternoon, then continue with a Consultative Body (Bamus) meeting, in which leaders of all factions will be invited to discuss the proposal.
After the House reads the letter in a plenary meeting, the House Commission I overseeing defense will conduct a confirmation hearing to evaluate the candidate. The legislative body is scheduled to have a recess period starting on Dec. 13.
Fadli said the House expected to complete all of the processes before the recess period begins. (dmr)
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 15:45 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c01c6a 1 Business national-payment-gateway,launching,BI,agus-martowardoyo Free
Bank Indonesia (BI) on Monday launched the long-awaited national payment gateway, locally known as "Gerbang Pembayaran Nasional" (GPN).
Infrastructure sharing would cut the cost of interbank transactions, said BI Governor Agus Martowardojo during the launch ceremony in Jakarta.
"Usually banks charge a 2 to 3 percent merchant discount rate if a customer uses another bank's card, but now the rate is only 1 percent with the infrastructure sharing," he said during the launch event at the BI office in Jakarta.
He said four local interbank switching companies -- PT Artajasa Pembayaran Elektronis, PT Rintis Sejahtera, PT Alto Network and PT Jalin Pembayaran Nusantara -- would establish a consortium called PT Penyelengara Transaksi Elektronis Nasional to manage the infrastructure sharing.
Meanwhile, four main e-money issuers -- PT Bank Mandiri, PT Bank Central Asia (BCA), PT Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), and PT Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) -- had signed an agreement for their e-money interoperability.
"You can see many automated teller machines (ATM) and electronic data capture (EDC) machines in certain shops or malls. With the sharing, one machine can serve many kinds of cards with a cheaper transaction cost," Agus said. He added that fewer ATM and EDC machines were needed with the interoperability, and unused machines could be used in other locations. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (Rasmei Kampuchea Daily/ANN) Phnom Penh Mon, December 4, 2017 18:11 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c070ce 2 World #cambodia,#Bangladesh,#Myanmar,#MyanmarRohingya,#Rohingya,#RohingyaCrisis Free
Cambodia hopes that Bangladesh and Myanmar find a solution allowing the Rohingya repatriation, Prime Minister Hun Sen said at the joint press conference held following his bilateral meeting with visiting Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina.
For her part, Sheikh Hasina affirmed the Bangladeshs commitment to provide shelters to some 700,000 Rohingya refugees and to continue negotiating with Myanmar for their repatriation.
Cambodia has confirmed its clear stance over Rohingya crisis in Myanmar.
On Nov. 16, 2017, Cambodian Premier underlined that Rohingya crisis is an internal affair of Myanmar and Cambodia will not interfere in this issue. The Cambodian premier also expressed his sadness over the crisis in Myanmars Rakhine State, adding that Cambodia is considering providing humanitarian assistance to Rakhines people, some of them are living in Myanmar while others fled to Bangladesh.
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This article appeared on the Rasmei Kampuchea Daily newspaper website, which is a member of Asia News Network and a media partner of The Jakarta Post
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 22:03 1808 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c0eef6 1 City Bukit-Duri,eviction,court-ruling,appeal Free
Bukit Duri evictees, who were entitled to receive compensation following a court ruling, face a challenge to receiving their desired redress after the Ciliwung-Cisadane Flood Control Office (BWSCC), one of the defendants, decided to appeal the verdict.
"BWSCC has appealed the verdict," Jakarta legal agency head Yayan Yuhana said on Monday.
With the appeal, the city administration could not yet disburse compensation to former Bukit Duri residents in South Jakarta, unless the ruling is upheld. Each of the 93 residents were originally entitled to receive Rp 200 million (US$14,740).
The administration would not appeal the verdict, as ordered by Governor Anies Baswedan, Yayan said as quoted by kompas.com.
Meanwhile, a lawyer representing the former Bukit Duri residents, Vera Soemarwi, said she had not yet received an official notification regarding the BWSCC's move to appeal the ruling.
The Central Jakarta District Court previously ruled in favor of the residents regarding forced eviction by the administration last year.
The Jakarta administration, under former governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama evicted, Bukit Duri residents on Jan. 12, 2016, as part of the administrations plan to restore the Ciliwung River, in an effort to reduce flooding in the city. (fac)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 18:45 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c08e22 1 National Court,judicial-reform,JudicialSystem,judicial-system,LeIP,Indonesian-Judicial-Reform-Forum Free
The Institute for Research and Advocacy for Independent Courts (LeIP) is set to hold the first Indonesian Judicial Reform Forum (IJRF), scheduled for Jan. 15 to Jan. 16, 2018.
Indonesia's court system has undergone changes since the start of the Reform Era in 1998, but it remains plagued by wide-ranging problems, from long case backlogs to corrupt judges.
The institute hopes that the forum will be a biennial event that provides important feedback to the Indonesian judiciary, LeIP researcher Liza Farihah told The Jakarta Post on Monday.
"There have been several law summits in the past, but the focus has been very narrow," she said.
In contrast, the IJRF will hold eight panels on topics ranging from jurisprudence and transparency to corrupt practices. The forum will also feature panelists from the Netherlands' Constitutional Court and Australias Judicial Commission.
LeIP is holding several pre-event discussions in the lead-up to the forum. In the first of these, held on Monday, the institute invited journalists to share the problems they faced in covering the courts. Chief among the problems was the Supreme Court's perceived lack of openness toward the press.
In the coming weeks, LeIP will also conduct discussions with other non-governmental organizations and donor organizations. The results of the discussions will be further evaluated in the IJRF and will then be compiled into a set of recommendations.
"After the forum, we will compile everything that was discussed and formulate recommendations that we will submit to the Supreme Court and related government bodies," said Liza. (kmt/ebf)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 13:13 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2bf685f 4 Business tax,collection,shortfall Free
Center for Indonesia Taxation Analysis (CITA) executive director Yustinus Prastowo has estimated that, by the end of this year, the Directorate General of Taxation will collect 90 percent of the tax revenue target of Rp 28 quadrillion (US$89.85 billion).
The government has collected 77 percent of the target as of November.
I think in December, about 13 percent of this years tax revenue target will be realized. So, in total, 90 percent of the tax revenue [target] would be met, said Yustinus as quoted by kontan.co.id on Monday.
He said an increase in government spending and increase in value added tax as a result of common household spending would result in an overall increase in tax revenue collection in December.
The implementation of Financial Minister Regulation No. 165 on the tax pardon, which required taxpayers to immediately report their undeclared assets, would also contribute to the increase, he said.
Meanwhile, the Directorate General of Taxation's tax revenue and compliance director, Yon Arsal, expressed optimism that the target would be reached because of positive growth across businesses.
He said that value added tax revenue for imported goods grew by 20 percent, while domestic value added tax revenue grew by 14 percent.
"All showed positive signs," he said.
Last year, from January to November, 71.2 percent of the targeted figure was met, he added. (bbn)
Topics : tax collection shortfall
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Linkedin Jim Mannion (AFP) Washington Mon, December 4, 2017 07:43 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2be9870 2 World North-Korea,Korea,US,missile-launch,military-drill Free
Tensions were on the rise Sunday ahead of the largest ever US-South Korea air exercise, with Pyongyang calling it an "all-out provocation" that could lead to nuclear conflict as a US lawmaker warned of a growing likelihood of "preemptive war" on the divided peninsula.
The five-day Vigilant Ace drill -- involving some 230 aircraft including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters -- begins Monday, five days after the North test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile believed to be capable of hitting the US mainland in a new challenge to President Donald Trump.
The North's ruling party Rodong newspaper slammed the upcoming drill.
"It is an open, all-out provocation against the DPRK, which may lead to a nuclear war any moment," it said in an editorial Sunday, using the North's official name.
"The US and South Korean puppet warmongers would be well advised to bear in mind that their DPRK-targeted military drill will be as foolish as an act precipitating their self-destruction," it said.
The commentary was published a day after Pyongyang's foreign ministry accused the Trump administration of "begging for nuclear war" by staging what it called the reckless air drills.
'Preemptive war'
In Washington, meanwhile, an influential Republican lawmaker joined National Security Advisor HR McMaster in warning that time is running out on diplomatic efforts to rein in North Korea's nuclear and missile programs.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a foreign policy hawk, told CBS' "Face the Nation" the United States moves closer to "preemptive war" with every new North Korean missile or nuclear test.
"If there's an underground nuclear test, then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States," Graham said.
North Korea has boasted -- and Western experts agree -- that the Hwasong-15 missile tested on Wednesday is capable of reaching the United States, raising the prospect of a direct nuclear threat to Washington.
Graham's remarks echoed those of McMaster, who told a security forum in Washington on Saturday that the potential for war with North Korea "is increasing every day."
"We are in a race to be able to solve this problem," McMaster said. "This would be the most destabilizing development I think in the post-World War II period. It's something that places us at direct risk but places the world at risk."
The United States has demanded tougher international sanctions in response to the latest missile tests, including cuts in oil shipments to the isolated state.
Graham said he has had extensive discussions with the Trump administration about the situation.
US policy, he said, is "to deny North Korea the capability to hit America with a nuclear-tipped missile. Not to contain it."
"Denial means preemptive war as a last resort. That preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures. Every missile test, every underground test of a nuclear weapon, means the marriage is more likely.
"I think we're really running out of time. The Chinese are trying, but ineffectively," he said.
Beijing has backed a slew of sanctions that include bans on imports of North Korean coal, iron ore and seafood.
But it has refused to turn off its pipeline shipping crude to North Korea.
North Korea, meanwhile, has been on a tear, undeterred by international pressure.
In September, it conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test.
The North says the Hwasong-15 missile can be tipped with a "super-large heavy warhead" capable of striking the whole US mainland.
But analysts remain unconvinced that it has mastered the advanced technology to allow the rocket to survive re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere.
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Linkedin Ivany Atina Arbi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 22:24 1808 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c0f0ee 1 City mass-wedding,Jakarta-administration,New-Year Free
The Jakarta administration is set to make New Years Eve a wedding date of choice for couples from lower to middle economic classes.
Jakarta Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno said on Monday that the idea to provide free weddings was brought up by Governor Anies Baswedan during a weekly meeting with their subordinates at City Hall.
The governor had really good idea [during the meeting]. Couples from lower to middle economic classes, who wish to get married this New Years Eve will be provided with support, Sandiaga said, adding that technical matters related to the implementation of a mass wedding day would be handled by the Jakarta Governance Bureau.
Separately, Jakarta Governance Bureau head Premi Lasari said she would disclose the requirements for participation on Wednesday. One requirement would be that the couples possess Jakarta ID cards.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 17:31 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c038d9 1 City Bekasi,police,brawl,attack Free
Two police officers were attacked while carrying out their duties at Jatimakmur subdistrict in Pondok Gede, Bekasi, West Java on the early hours of Sunday morning.
A mob that attacked Chief Brig. Slamet Aji and First Insp. Panjang, were reportedly members of a gang known as Rawa Lele 212, who were celebrating the anniversary of their formation and looking for other gangs for a brawl. Several of the attackers had reportedly consumed alcohol, kompas.com reported.
While patrolling the two police officers approached a group of gang members, mostly teenagers, and ordered them to disperse. However, they attacked the officers with a variety of sharp and blunt weapons.
The police have apprehended 10 suspects and are seeking other people in connection with the attack.
"We are still hunting down other suspects that stabbed and threw rocks," Jakarta Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Argo Yuwono said on Monday. (fac)
Topics : Bekasi police brawl attack
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Linkedin Lamat R Hasan (ANN) New Delhi Mon, December 4, 2017 15:45 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c012ac 2 World #India,#politics,#Gandhi,#RahulGandhi Free
Once the most ridiculed political leader in India, Rahul Gandhi on Monday filed his nomination to be elevated to the top post of the country's grand old Congress party.
The 47-year-old scion of the Gandhi dynasty is set to take over the mantle from his mother Sonia Gandhi. Sonia has been party president since 1998, the longest period in the party's 132-year-old history.
Rahul, who has been holding his current position of party vice-president for close to five years, is no longer considered to be the lightweight politician who was the butt of jokes in drawing room coversations and on social media.
Political pundits who had dismissed Rahul when the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stormed to power in 2014, are now taking his surge in popularity seriously. They are seeing hope in Rahul as the man who can take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi has been facing problems since he unleashed his grand demonetisation scheme on unsuspecting Indians last November. The move to devalue high denomination currency notes to check corruption didn't sit well with millions of Indians, neither did his biggest tax reform since the country's independence Goods and Services Tax (GST). The slow economic growth and rising unemployment have made the going for the ruling BJP far from rosy.
Right after Rahul filed his nomination papers, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party.
Rahul-ji is a darling of the Congress and has filed his papers today. This is another step in his (Rahul) quest for serving the people of the nation through the Congress party, Singh said.
Sonia Gandhi-ji has served the party for the last 19 yearsRahul Gandhi-ji will carry on the great traditions of the Congress party, he added.
Modi termed Rahul's imminent election as Congress boss as Aurangzeb Raj. He said the the Congress party was a clan with a feudal mindset.
The much-awaited elevation of Rahul, who is spearheading the Congress' campaign for assembly polls in the northwestern state of Gujarat, has been a talking point for a couple of years. In between, there was talk of Priyanka, Rahul's sister, in whom many see shades of her grandmother Indira Gandhi, the country's former prime minister, taking over the baton from Sonia.
Following Rahul's election, a few new faces are likely to be seen in the Congress Working Committee (CWC) the party's highest decision-making body - and a few familiar older faces may have to retire, to ease the inter-generational tension.
Rahul, whose every utterance was caricaturised by the BJP till not very long ago, has now left the ruling party worried. He is seen as an earthy and committed leader, compared to Modi who is clever and street smart.
Following his US tour earlier this year, people started perceiving Rahul differently. The BJP also sharpened its attack on Rahul, whom it started seeing as a potential threat. He took on Modi head-on and pooh-poohed his GST reform, calling it the Gabbar Singh Tax. Gabbar Singh is a famous character from a 1970s Bollywood film and the epitome of villainy.
While Rahul may not be able to make much of a dent in states that are to hold elections before the 2019 general election, he is certainly the headache the BJP, and most certainly Modi, hadn't forseen when they called him Pappu, which could roughly translate into a dullard.
In recent years, Congress has performed hopelessly in almost all states that went to the polls, except Karnataka. Therefore, Rahul is being seen by veteran leaders as the adrenaline shot that will inject fresh energy into the Congress.
Not just the Congress, other parties are beginning to take Rahul seriously. Left party leader Sitaram Yechury, who earlier claimed that Rahul will not be able to bind the Opposition parties if he takes over the top post, has had a rethink.
Modi, who promised a clean government, was caught on the wrong foot when BJP president Amit Shah's son's business earnings were revealed in a media expose. The dramatic increase in Jay Shah's businesses the turnover of his company multiplying 16,000 times over left the BJP red-faced.
Rahul sharpened his attack on the BJP, saying the Shahs had looted the country instead of serving as watchmen. A senior BJP leader jumped to his party's defence saying Rahul should step out of his diapers. Rahul may just have by filing his nomination for the top Congress post.
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Linkedin Nurul Fitri Ramadhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 19:31 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c0b268 1 Politics setya,setya-novanto,house-of-representatives,MKD,KPK,corruption,corruption-case,corruption-eradication,graft Free
The House of Representatives Ethics Council has said that sooner or later, graft suspect Setya Novanto will resign from his post as House speaker because his detention by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) prevents him leading the legislative body.
Ethics council deputy chairman Sarifuddin Sudding said on Tuesday that Setya had expressed his willingness to step down when House lawmakers recently questioned him at the antigraft bodys headquarters over alleged ethics violations.
He [Setya] apologized to the public. He said he realized that a House speaker had many important duties that could not be delegated to a deputy speaker. He will make a decision [about his resignation] in the near future, said Sudding.
The Hanura Party lawmaker said it would be more dignified for Setya to give up his post instead of being fired.
Setya is a suspect in the high-profile corruption case related to the e-ID procurement project. The Golkar Party chairman previously sent a letter to the House, in which he asked the body not to hold any process aimed at dismissing him as House speaker until after the South Jakarta District Court ruled on his pretrial challenge to being named a suspect.
However, the ethics council continued to proceed with its investigation into ethical violations allegedly committed by Setya, including a car accident that led to him being treated at Medika Permata Hijau Hospital. Many observers dismissed the accident as a ploy to escape from the KPKs investigation. (ebf)
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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Seoul, South Korea Mon, December 4, 2017 14:30 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2bfb0c0 2 World Korea,drill,war,US,Nuclear Free
The US and South Korea on Monday kicked off their largest ever joint air exercise, an operation North Korea has labelled an "all-out provocation", days after Pyongyang fired its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile.
The five-day Vigilant Ace drill -- involving 230 aircraft, including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and tens of thousands of troops -- began Monday morning, Seoul's air force said.
Pyongyang over the weekend blasted the drill, accusing US President Donald's Trump's administration of "begging for nuclear war".
The annual exercise comes five days after the nuclear-armed North test-fired a new ICBM, which it says brings the whole of the United States within range.
As tensions surged, US Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican and foreign policy hawk, warned that the US was moving closer to "preemptive war" with the North.
"If there's an underground nuclear test (by the North), then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States," Graham told the CBS show "Face the Nation".
The isolated and impoverished North has staged six increasingly powerful atomic tests since 2006 -- most recently in September.
"The preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures. Every missile test, every underground test of a nuclear weapon, means the marriage is more likely," he said.
Graham's remarks echoed those of Trump's National Security Adviser HR McMaster, who told a security forum on Saturday that the potential for war with the North "is increasing every day."
The North has boasted that the Hwasong 15 ICBM tested on Wednesday is capable of delivering a "super-large" nuclear warhead anywhere in the US mainland.
Analysts agree that the latest test showed a big improvement in potential range, but say it was likely achieved using a dummy warhead that would have been quite light.
They say a missile carrying a much heavier nuclear warhead would struggle to travel as far.
Topics : Korea drill war US Nuclear
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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Sanaa, Yemen Mon, December 4, 2017 13:50 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2bf8f1c 2 World war,Yemen,Saudi-Arabia,Iraq Free
A wave of air raids rattled Yemen's crisis-hit capital Monday, witnesses said, as clashes between rebels and supporters of ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh also spread beyond Sanaa.
The strikes appeared to hit targets near Sanaa International Airport and the interior ministry, both under the control of the Iran-backed Huthi rebels, according to residents and a source inside the airport.
A military coalition led by Saudi Arabia, Iran's regional arch-rival, is the only party in the Yemen war known to conduct air strikes on Sanaa.
A spokesman for the coalition did not respond to requests for confirmation of the raids on Monday.
Residents near the airport said multiple air raids had shaken their homes late Sunday night and in the early hours of Monday.
An airport source said rebel bases near the location appeared to have been targeted but the airport itself had not been bombed.
Residents also reported that the fighting, which erupted Wednesday night between armed Saleh supporters and Huthi fighters, had spread outside the capital.
Tribal sources in Saleh's hometown Sanhan, south of Sanaa, on Monday reported intense overnight fighting between the Huthis and Saleh loyalists.
The clashes in the capital had killed some 60 people as of Sunday. There was no immediate information available on fresh casualties.
Yemeni territory is split between the forces and government of Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi in the south, backed by Saudi Arabia and recognised by the international community, the northern Huthi rebels and forces loyal to strongman Saleh.
Since 2014, Sanaa has been ruled under an agreement between Saleh and the Huthis, who drove the Hadi government out of the capital, set up their own government and for two years together fought the Saudi-led coalition.
Saleh on Saturday announced he was open to talks with Saudi Arabia and its allies on condition they ended their crippling blockade on Yemen's ports and airports -- dealing a serious blow to his already fragile alliance with rebel chief Abdul Malik al-Huthi.
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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Manila, Philippines Mon, December 4, 2017 16:01 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c023c5 2 SE Asia health,Sanofi-Pasteur,vaccination,dengue-vaccine Free
A world-first dengue vaccination program in the Philippines that was suspended over safety concerns will not cause anyone who was immunized to die, drug manufacturer Sanofi and local authorities said on Monday.
The Philippines on Friday suspended the program, after more than 733,000 people had been immunized, in response to a statement from Sanofi that its vaccine could cause "more cases of severe disease" for people who had not previously had the mosquito-borne ailment.
After news outlets and some politicians in the Philippines expressed concern about the welfare of those immunized, the French pharmaceutical giant held a press conference in Manila to state the potential cases of "severe dengue" would not be fatal.
"What is this severe (dengue)? When people think of 'severe', this already includes dengue shock that could lead to death, but no," Sanofi Pasteur regional head for dengue Joselito Sta. Ana told reporters.
Sta. Ana said Sanofi's definition of "severe dengue" merely referred to symptoms including two days of fever, a lower platelet count and bruising.
Philippine presidential spokesman Harry Roque also sought to allay fears, stating there was "no danger" with the Dengvaxia vaccine.
"The worst that can happen is for those who have not had dengue before -- which is one out of 10 (Filipinos) -- they may get infected with dengue but falling under our previous classification of 'mild', having fever and bruises," Roque said.
Nevertheless, the justice department announced Monday that the National Bureau of Investigation would investigate the vaccination program "over the alleged danger to public health". It warned in a statement that charges could follow.
The previous administration of president Benigno Aquino launched the vaccination programme last year, making the Philippines the first nation to use Dengvaxia on a mass scale.
Although the Philippine program has been suspended, Dengvaxia remains available on an individual basis in consultation with doctors, the health department said.
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Linkedin (Pesona Indonesia) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 18:04 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c06604 2 News Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,Chinese-tourists Free
The Tourism Ministry promoted tourism in Indonesia at the China International Travel Mart (CITM), held in Kunming, China, on Nov. 17-19.
Among the destinations presented to the visitors were Bali, Lake Toba, Tanjung Kelayang, Borobudur Temple, Mandalika, Labuan Bajo and Manado.
The number of Chinese travelers is the biggest in the world, up to 120 million people, but only two percent traveled to Indonesia. This is the perfect timing for promotion as we are nearing the year-end holidays, explained the ministry's deputy minister for overseas promotion I Gde Pitana.
Forty tourism industry players such as airlines, hotels, travel agents, cruise ships and diving centers, as well as 11 provincial tourism agencies were present at the Indonesia booth.
The booth offered visitors with Indonesian food and beverages and performances from the Wonderful Indonesia team, as well as latest information regarding Mount Agung in Bali.
Central Statistics Agency (BPS) data shows that in 2015 Chinese tourists took the third spot for the number of foreign tourists who visited Indonesia, or equal to 11 percent (1,141,330 people) from the total number of foreign tourists.
In 2016, China went up to the second spot with 1,452,971 people, 11 percent from the total number of foreign tourists. Meanwhile the first spot was given to Singapore.
As for this year, from January until September, there were 1,103,503 Chinese tourists who came to Indonesia, up 45.68 percent from the same period last year that recorded 1,606,615 people. (kes)
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Linkedin Yukako Oishi (The Japan News/Asia News Network) Mon, December 4, 2017 17:36 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c03b5c 2 News Japan,capsule-hotel,hotels,#hotels,tourism,travel,Accommodation Free
Many capsule hotels that target foreign tourists have opened recently, with vacationers apparently drawn to their reasonable fees, high-quality facilities and interior designs that allow guests to experience a slice of Japanese culture.
Nine Hours Woman Kanda, which opened in July near JR Kanda Station in Tokyo, is a capsule hotel exclusively for women with prices starting at 4,900 per night. According to the operator, 30 to 40 percent of its guests are foreigners.
Inside the hotel, rows of sleep pods seem to float in a dimly lit hallway, creating a somewhat futuristic atmosphere. It was established by Nine Hours Inc. a company that develops up-to-date capsule hotels and JR East Urban Development Corp. Both companies are headquartered in Tokyo.
The facility is equipped with comfortable mattresses and high-function showers. Signs in the locker room and other areas contain not only Japanese and English but also pictograms to facilitate understanding. Foreign tourists value such amenities because they provide a sense of security.
Nine Hours operates four similar hotels in Japan besides the one in Kanda. According to company founder Keisuke Yui, foreigners account for about 50 percent of guests at its hotel in Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo, and up to 90 percent of guests at its hotel in Kyoto.
Read also: Five capsule hotels to stay at in Jakarta
We work hard to ensure functionality and comfort, and our pool of users is broadening. Foreign tourists have already recognized [our hotels] as a good base from which to go sightseeing, said Yui.
Other capsule hotels allow guests to enjoy Japanese culture through interior design and services.
Nadeshiko Hotel Shibuya in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, a capsule hotel exclusively for women operated by Tokyo-based Usen Corp., features an interior design inspired by Japanese culture. Elements include group spaces with tatami mats and a bathhouse with a picture of a red-hued Mt. Fuji on the wall.
Guests can enjoy a meal in the first-floor restaurant while wearing a yukata summer kimono.
Guests can also pay extra to rent a regular kimono. The hotel offers a service in which guests in kimono stroll around Shibuya Station while being photographed by accompanying staff.
Seventy percent of our guests are foreigners. Word is spreading on the internet and other media that they can communicate with Japanese guests or enjoy Japanese culture [at our hotel], said Sayaka Shimizu, Usens public relations manager.
Read also: Smart unmanned capsule hotel opens in Chongqing
The Prime Pod Kyoto, a capsule hotel that opened in Kyoto in February, is replete with Kyotos traditional atmosphere. It features a Japanese-style shared space that resembles a traditional terrace restaurant near the river, lighting that resembles traditional lamps, and sleeping capsules made of plain wood.
There are also capsules with wide entrances so foreigners with larger frames can easily enter them.
Capsule hotels are said to have originated in Japan, with the first one opening in Osaka in 1979. Takashi Shimizu, senior consultant at Urban Research Institute Corp., said, Theyre still unfamiliar to foreigners, so staying at capsule hotels itself can be a way to experience Japanese culture.
The number of capsule hotels is expected to increase as more foreign tourists come to Japan. [The capsule hotel business] has a great advantage because facilities can be prepared speedily at relatively lower cost than creating a new facility by using vacant offices and other buildings, Shimizu said.
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This article appeared on The Japan News newspaper website, which is a member of Asia News Network and a media partner of The Jakarta Post
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Linkedin (Pesona Indonesia) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 15:08 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2bfd1f2 2 News Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,durian,durian-festival Free
Durian lovers take note, Majalengka regency in West Java is set to host Sinapeul Durian Festival 2017 on Dec. 9-10 at Lengkongkulon Village Regional Fish Market, Sindangwangi district.
Sinapeul durian will be the main star of the festival, but there are other interesting activities that will entertain visitors such as exhibition, performances, games and bazaar.
Theres also going to be helaran, a Sundanese word that means parade, told Tourism Ministrys archipelago tourism marketing development deputy, Esthy Reko Astuti.
This festival will be filled with durian-based products, handicrafts, games, local durian, cultural performances and promotion for Sindangwangi tourism, added the ministry's head of cultural promotion Wawan Gunawan.
Sindangwangi district has 16 hectares of durian plantation located at Ujungberung village, which is where Sinapeul durian comes from. (kes)
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Linkedin (Pesona Indonesia) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 10:09 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2beec42 2 News Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,Purwakarta,Sri-Baduga-Fountain-Park Free
The Purwakarta administration claimed that four million tourists visited the regency in 2017, higher than the initial target of three million people.
The high number of tourists is the result of the administrations efforts in developing tourist attractions in the regency.
Purwakarta Youth, Sports, Tourism and Culture Agency head Heri Anwar said there are at least 45 tourist attractions in the region.
There were only 32 attractions back in 2015, now we have up to 45 attractions. Most of them are nature-based and the rest is culinary and religious tourism, told Heri.
One of the must-visit attractions is Sri Baduga Park that has a dancing water fountain. Moreover, the fountain has become the icon of Purwakarta.
Heri said around 30,000 visitors, consisting of domestic and foreign tourists, came to Sri Baduga Park every weekend.
Additionally, Purwakarta administration is set to develop 16 villages, such as Pesanggrahan and Sukamulya villages in Tegalwaru district, and Sindang Panon, Cihanjawar and Cipeundeuy villages in Bojong district, into tourist villages. (kes)
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Linkedin (Pesona Indonesia) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 13:04 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2bf5f7f 2 News Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,sambas,West-Kalimantan Free
Sambas regency in West Kalimantan recently hosted "One-Day AMTC Trail Adventure, Exploring the National Borders, Paradise on the Tail of Borneo" on Dec. 2-3.
The event was joined by 100 participants, of which 15 hailed from Malaysia. They took a six-hour trip, passing through places such as Camar Wulan Beach, Bahari Teluk Atung Beach, Maludin Beach, Temajuk Beach and villages around the area.
We are conducting this adventurous event on purpose. Participants have to pass through several obstacles while enjoying the beautiful view of the nature. Bahari Teluk Atung Beach has one of longest coastlines in Indonesia and the sand is so soft. Meanwhile Temajuk Beach is rather rocky, similar to Tanjung Tinggi in Belitung that also has huge rocks, told the committees head Erwanto.
The event also featured fishing competition, photography competition, art and culture performances and live music.
The advisor for the competitions, Subhan Nur, said Sambas that is listed in the national strategic tourism plan (KSPN) needs the cooperation from all parties for development and promotion.
Sambas cant be developed only from APBD [regional budget], it needs direct attention from the government. The parallel road is currently being developed; whats left is the supporting infrastructures to improve the tourism in Sambas, told Subhan.
Internet is highly needed here to promote tourism and for the locals to be more creative. Meanwhile ATM is needed for visitors to draw out their money since they dont want to keep a lot of cash, Subhan added. (kes)
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Linkedin (Pesona Indonesia) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 16:02 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c02f69 2 News Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,ternate Free
At the opening ceremony of Kora-Kora Festival on Dec. 2, Ternate launched its new tourism brand called Enjoy Ternate.
We dont have natural resources or natural gas that we can utilize, but we have resources for tourism that can support the peoples economy, said Ternate Mayor Burhan Abdurrahman.
Thats why we are launching Enjoy Ternate, to increase the number of tourist visits, boost local economy and achieve the governments target of 20 million tourists, he added.
Ternate has several ancient castles such as Oranje Castle from the Dutch colonization era that was built by Cornelis Matclief de Jonge and established on May 26, 1607.
The castle is located at the town center on Jl. Hasan Boesoeri. Four decades ago the castle was one of the busiest locations on Ternate island because it was used as the main camp of VOC in Dutch East Indies.
Another castle is called Tolukko Castle, which offers a panoramic view of Tidore island with Mount Gamalama in the background. In 1540, a Portuguese commander named Francisco Serao built this castle and it was later used by the Portuguese to dominate the spices from other European countries. In 1610 the castle was taken by the Dutch and went under renovation by Pieter Both.
Mount Gamalama itself is the landmark of Ternate that is located in the ring of fire area.
Mount Gamalama is a stratovolcano with an altitude of 1,715 meters above sea level. On the foot of this mountain is Batu Angus tourist attraction, which from the slope visitors can see a view of clove plantation.
On the top of Mount Gamalama, theres the sacred Abdas Water Springs. The water is said to have healing power than can cure various diseases.
Enjoy Ternate will offer tour packages to Mount Gamalama as well as other places such as Sulamadaha Beach that is the home to turtles and colorful coral reefs; Nukila Park that boasts unique shipwrecks as one of the attractions, Falajawa Beach, Hiri Island, Tanjung Rum and Kalamata waters. (kes)
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Linkedin (Pesona Indonesia) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 11:01 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2bf40b1 2 News Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,sleman,tourist-village Free
During the recent long weekend on Dec. 1 -3, Pentingsari Tourist Village in Sleman regency welcomed thousands of guests. Some of them were on a field trip and some others were staying for a few days.
One of the groups who went to Pentingsari was Panglipuran Tourist Village group who were there to conduct a comparative study on tourist village management.
Another group was from Al Azhar 3 Jakarta high school who stayed in Yogyakarta from Nov. 29 until Dec. 2.
This group of 199 students, teachers and school staffs came to the village for a school assignment and stayed overnight in homestays.
Our group is conducting a survey on mushroom chips as a school assignment, other groups have different assignments. Its exciting to be able to experience the friendliness of the locals here, said M. Aksan, an Al Azhar student.
World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has named Pentingsari Tourist Village one of the pilot projects for Community-based Tourism and Sustainable Tourism Development program. The village also won the Indonesian Sustainable Tourism Award 2017 for the green bronze category. (kes)
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Linkedin (Pesona Indonesia) Jakarta Mon, December 4, 2017 17:01 1809 1f87594453bb792833e1ece3a2c034aa 2 News Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,West-Lombok Free
Last weekend, West Lombok hosted an event named Topat War Festival 2017 on Dec. 3.
The festival aimed to strengthen the kinship between Hindus and Muslims in Lombok. The history of Topat War started when the Hindus came from Bali to Lombok in the 16th century. They traveled up to Lingsar Village, which was occupied by Muslims at the time.
The festival was held at Lingsar Temple in Lingsar Village. Built in 1714 by Raja Agung Ngurah Karangasem from Bali during the Karangasem Kingdom, it is the biggest and oldest temple in Lombok.
Moreover, the temple is considered a cultural heritage from the 18th century.
The festival began with pujawali procession by the Sasak tribe and Balinese who have been living in Lombok for generations. A day before, it hosted panaek gawe ceremony followed by mendak that called for spirits who rule Mount Rinjani and Mt. Agung by slaughtering a buffalo and gave offerings of nine snacks, fruits and beverages. This procession had been held since Nov. 27.
After the Hindus were done with ngaturang bakti and ngelungsur amertha, the Topat War then began. It started with circling around the purwadaksina located in Kemaliq area. Figures from Sasak tribe and Hindus came together for this procession, which also featured batek baris dance and gendang beleq art.
The war started in late afternoon, around 5 p.m., when flowers on waru trees were falling. Weapons used during the wear were ketupat (rice cones) that were presented at the ceremony. Later, visitors could take these rice cones and brought them home as souvenirs. (kes)
On Friday, World AIDS Day, local activists held an early evening vigil at Rivington House to recall the loss of the former nursing home for AIDS patients. The longtime community facility was shuttered two years ago this month when the city lifted deed restrictions and the property was sold to luxury condo developers.
A stop work order remains in place at 45 Rivington St., although Mayor de Blasio said he sees no way to reclaim the building for the community. A local group, Neighbors to Save Rivington House, is undeterred, vowing to do everything humanly possible to prevent the condo conversion.
On Friday night, people gathered on the sidewalk, holding candles and telling stories about the former residents of Rivington House. As a community, said University Settlement Executive Director Melissa Aase, we welcomed Rivington House at the height of the AIDS crisis when other communities would not. As a community, we built ties with the staff and residents and built a stronger community as a result. As more of our neighbors age in place where we desperately want them to be with us, we will need more care, not less care.
City Council member Margaret Chin attended the vigil, telling those assembled, I will continue to fight. I am not giving up. Its not a done deal, and we still have hope. During a town hall meeting over the summer, the mayor promised Chin he would try to set up a meeting with the property owners (China Vanke, Slate Property Group and Adam America Real Estate). She hopes to persuade the developers to create a new community health care facility in the building. As long as Im still here as the Council member, said Chin, we are going to fight to make sure we get this building back (The mayor) promised to set up the meeting with the developers and Im still holding him to that promise.
The mayors World AIDS Day schedule took him to Kings Theater in Brooklyn for a commemoration and to the West Village, where a new memorial was dedicated in the shadow of the former St. Vincents Hospital. The city has vowed to eradicate AIDS by 2020.
Rivington Houses former operator, VillageCare, lobbied to drop the deed restrictions and sold the Lower East Side building, saying there was no need for the treatment facility. VillageCare participated in Fridays ceremony at Kings Theater.
Last week, the mayors first deputy mayor, Anthony Shorris, announced he would not be staying on for de Blasios second term. Shorris, who was at the center of the Rivington House scandal that dogged the city administration during he past couple of years, said, I made dozens of decisions a day for four years. (The lifting of deed restrictions at Rivington House) was a mistake. It shouldnt have happened. We found it and we fixed it and moved on.
As a new week begins and the joy of Christmas (and those wonderful days off) still seem far away, we thought wed make a list of things sure to cheer you up.
1. Six-year-old sets up Christmas campaign to help keep homeless people warm this winter
A six-year-old boy has set up a Christmas campaign, Keep Warm with Frankie, to help keep the homeless warm this winter. He decided to do something after seeing so many homeless people living on the streets in the freezing cold. Despite his age, he has decided to help as many of these vulnerable people as he can. He is currently raising money to buy hats, scarves and gloves for as many homeless people as possible, with his goal being 1000. If youre interested in getting involved, you can do so here.
2. The hunt for Cheating Ben is on!
Social media was abuzz this weekend, after a passenger on the Bournemouth to Manchester train (on Friday 1st) tweeted about a conversation she heard, in which a man named Ben bragged about cheating on his girlfriend. In typical Twitter style, the tweet soon became viral, sporting 66.9K likes and 26.2K retweets at the time this article was written. This hunt showed the best of people (apart from those defending the cheater), with Cheating Ben trending on twitter as more and more joined in the search for the rascal. This is certainly a perfect example of social media as its most useful, and most amusing.
3. Firefighter saves a dogs life
Heartwarming footage has emerged of a firefighter in Canada heroically saving a dog after it fell into a frozen creek. Despite being in the water for at least half an hour, the dog was able to be saved, with only minor difficulty walking once on the ground. Once free he rushed to his owners who happily stroked him. While this touching video is sure to melt your heart, it should also act as a warning against letting your dog off the leash near water, especially when it is frozen. Watch here.
4. Hilarious Japanese game show
A Japanese game show has been making the rounds on social media, and if you havent seen it yet you need to right away! This hilarious video shows desperate contestants try running up a flight of stairs covered in oil. This task proves difficult, as every single contestant slips and falls on their journey to the top. They might all get there in the end, but its a great 9 minutes of fun before they do. Enjoy the video here.
5. Demi Lovatos new song
Whether or not youre a fan of Demi Lovato, you are bound to enjoy something about her recently released single, Tell Me You Love Me. Heartbreaking lyrics (that also happen to be very catchy), a great tune and a gorgeous video, this release has it all! Plus, the gorgeous Jesse Williams graces an already amazing video with his presence. If that isnt a Christmas gift to the world I dont know what is!
6. The Co-op has become the first supermarket to sell food beyond the best before date to reduce food waste
The Co-op has taken an important step forward in reducing food waste, announcing they will sell food beyond the best before date. This is important as it is estimated that the UK throws away around 7 million tonnes of food per year, most of which could have been eaten. To do so at a time when so many are struggling to feed their families, both around the world and in our own country, is highly irresponsible. Hopefully, the Co-ops decision will pave the way for other supermarkets to follow their example, reducing the UK food waste as a result.
7. Its nearly Christmas!
Since today is the beginning of the first week in December it seems wrong not to include it in the list. After all, were officially counting down for the happiest time of the year! Time to wrap up warm, shop for presents and start those wish lists for the new year sales. Chocolate, Christmas markets, mulled wine and festive jumpers, whats not to love?
My Friend Dahmer screened as part of the 2017 Leeds International Film Festival. Further details can be found here .
The root causes of Dahmer's shocking descent into depravity, which resulted in the deaths of seventeen young men over a period of thirteen years, have long been theorised and deliberated through a variety of mediums, albeit, usually taking a sharp focus on his crimes. In contrast, with My Friend Dahmer, Marc Meyers' cordially captures, with a caustic wit, an intimately sincere portrayal of the disturbed adolescence that Jeffrey reticently endured. Adapted from cartoonist John 'Derf' Backderf's best-selling graphic novel of the same name, the film intricately delves into the enticing nature of Dahmer's intrepid disruptions of social norms, in tandem with the progressively potent habitual tendencies that would eventually mutate into a lifestyle of which, he himself retrospectively insinuated, he had little control. For those at all familiar with Dahmer's early life, the contents of the film's opening exchanges will certainly not come as a surprise. His obsession with the plainly literal 'inner self' spawned from a penchant for collecting and experimenting with whatever roadkill he might come across during his walks home from school. By the time we join him, during his senior year at Revere High School, he has already amassed an ample menagerie of both dissolving and preserved fauna. His very own 'pet cemetery' as his father Lionel terms it.One of the most inexplicably affecting moments in Marc Meyers' intimately unsettling biopic, occurs during an oddly amusing scene in which the eponymous lead and his gleeful contingent delight in a chance meeting with the Vice President at the time, Walter Mondale, while on a field trip to the US capital. In consummate fashion, Mondale inquires as to what the boys intend to do after they graduate. To which Jeffrey, after a second or two of contemplation, simply replies "Biology". An aspiration which ordinarily would seem equally as commonplace as those of his colleagues. However, coupled with the knowledge of what his imminent future would entail, it instead, exerts the same astutely allegorical essence of one of the film's most mundanely chilling breaths of dialogue. An instance so memorable in its calmly collected nature, I feel I'd be doing it a disservice in quoting it forthrightly. It's within these cleverly interspersed flashes of the latter Dahmer, that many of My Friend Dahmer's most discerning triumphs lie. Meyers and Lynch put forward an interpretation of Dahmer that we - as the captivated onlookers - are somewhat surprisingly able to empathise with, on an uncomfortably personal level. Aided by a script so carefully charged with dramatic irony, it becomes genuinely difficult to imagine how someone so seemingly subservient could eventually leave behind a criminal legacy so unsparingly steeped in depravity. Furthermore, when you take into account that this is Ross Lynch's first starring role away from the clutches of his Disney Channel roots, the erudite assuredness with which he tackles such an insurmountably complex character like Dahmer, is quite a feat in itself. However, when you add to the mix, the fact that he is essentially embodying a historical account of the adolescence endured by a real person, it becomes a whole lot more impressive. Every facet of Meyers' intimately unsettling biopic exudes a certain foreboding sense of underhanded normality. It takes more than a substantial degree of contemplation and candour to tempestuously humanise someone of Dahmer's infamy, whilst never taking more than a brief stroll away from the sheer heinousness of his urges. A feat that My Friend Dahmer handles with great grace and virtuous vigour.
As public proposals go, they dont get much more meaningful than this.
Liberal MP Tim Wilson popped the question to his boyfriend Ryan Bolger during a debate on marriage equality, with a new law allowing same-sex marriage expected to be passed soon.
Bolger, sat in the public gallery of the parliaments lower house, said yes.
The proposal came after Wilson recounted having given his partner a ring to symbolise his commitment to formalising their relationship, with gay marriage not yet legal.
When we told others many simply didnt know how to react, he said.
Many SMSs were not responded to. In conversation some people politely changed the topic or fell silent entirely.
For a while Ryan kept pushing for an engagement party. The truth was I kept delaying it, perhaps wrongly, because the strong message I took from so many peoples silence was that no-one would come.
On informing one person of our news, they responded why bother?
At the time I fell silent, and Ive never had an answer to that question, but the Australian people have now answered it for me.
Update: Weve dug through Hansard and @timwilsoncomau appears to be the first ever Member to propose on the floor of the House. pic.twitter.com/NLGLxpYIrm Australian House of Representatives (@AboutTheHouse) December 4, 2017
The Australian parliament is debating marriage equality after the public voted overwhelmingly in favour in a non-binding postal vote in September.
Wilson concluded by saying: In my first speech I defined our bond by the rings that sit on both of our left hands, and that they are the answer to the question we cannot ask. So theres only one thing left to do: Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?
The bill has already passed through the senate and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said he hopes to pass a new law by the end of the week.
He said in Mondays debate: The message today, to every gay person in this nation, is clear: we love you, we respect you, your relationship is recognised by the Commonwealth as legitimate and honourable as anybody elses.
In March 2016 Brock Turner was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault including intent to rape an intoxicated woman and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object.
The attack took place on Stanford University campus in January 2015, where Turner, who was 19-years old at the time, was a student. Turner was sentenced to six months in county jail, a sentence which was widely criticised as being too lenient. Prosecutors recommended he get at least six-years, but he ended up being released early after serving only three months. Last week, on December 2nd, Turners lawyers filed an appeal against his conviction, according to CNN. Speaking to NBC, Turner's legal adviser, John Tompkins, said the original trial in 2016 was a detailed and lengthy set of lies. "What we are saying is that what happened is not a crime," he told the broadcaster. "It happened, but it was not anywhere close to a crime." Court documents show that Turners legal team are arguing that jurors received "extensive 'behind-the-dumpster' propaganda."Turners lawyers argue that Turner and the victim were found in a "completely open setting", and not behind a dumpster, which is what prosecutors in the original trial repeatedly made reference to. His legal team say that telling jurors they were behind the dumpster "implied moral depravity, callousness and culpability on the appellant's part because of the inherent connotations of filth, garbage, detritus and criminal activity frequently associated with dumpsters.
Two graduate students say they were riding their bikes through the campus when they came across the assault, at around 1am on January 18th 2015.
They testified that they saw Turner on top of the victim, who they say was motionless and appeared unconscious. When they approached the dumpster, one of the students said, "What the fuck are you doing? She's unconscious." Turner then got up and fled the scene. The students tackled him, called security and attended to his motionless victim who was naked from the waist down. The victim did not come round until after 4am, despite people trying to wake her by shaking her and shouting. Turner claimed what happened between the two of them was consensual. As part of his sentence, Turner must register for life as a sex offender. If his appeal is successful this will be overturned. The case gained worldwide attention after Buzzfeed released the victim's powerful impact statement . At the time people were critical of Turners sentence, given the graphic details of the assault. His statement to the judge, where he blamed his poor decision making on drinking and the party culture at university, demonstrated he did not acknowledge responsibility for his own actions.
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A book giving insight into the Quran through visual presentations, graphs and charts was released by Rajya Sabha MP and former Union minister Mohsina Kidwai.
Universe A Timeline, authored by Sayed Rafi Ahsan Rizvi, a former geologist with the government of India, is based on research of scientific evidence and the Quran.
At its launch last evening, Rizvi said he considers that all scriptures, having been sourced from one Almighty, contain all these explanations, in different languages and patterns.
He requested believers of all faiths to re-visit their holy books, read them in light of scientific discoveries and enduring mysteries, and deepen their understanding of their book and the universe.
The author worked for about three decades on this book, collating his experience as a geologist and an astronomer, with his reading of the Quran, and simultaneous understanding of books of other faiths.
By quoting several Quranic verses and explaining them scientifically, Rizvi demonstrated that the overall model of the universe as is known, needs to be viewed in line with information in these verses for an improved understanding.
Shamim Jairajpuri, eminent scientist and founder Vice Chancellor of Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad, provided the opening remarks.
The High Court of Himachal Pradesh on Monday directed the Chief Secretary to file his personal affidavit regarding unauthorised construction and running of hotels/commercial establishments without statutory sanctions, more specifically at Village Kasol in Kullu.
The Court also directed the Director General of Police, Himachal to file the action taken report in the matter. A division bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Sanjay Karol and Justice Sandeep Sharma passed these orders on a petition taken up suo moto by the Court as Public Interest Litigation on affidavits filed by the Zonal Director, Narcotics Control Bureau, Chandigarh, in a separate Criminal appeal.
The Court expressed concern that today drug menace is one of the serious problem in the society and it was alarmed with the sizeable increase in the charas seizures by NCB from the state as per the figures/details furnished by the NCB. The Court observed that as per reports, there is organised cultivation of cannabis in the higher reaches in Kullu District, in the Sub Division of Kullu, Sainj Valley and there is wild growth of cannabis in Chamba, Kangra, Upper Shimla and areas adjoining to Uttrakhand, but situation in Kullu-Manali Valley is alarming and despite sanction of considerable funds for destruction of illicit cannabis, situation is very distressing.
The destruction campaigns are merely on paper and nothing has been done on ground level by the NCB or State Police for curbing drug menace in Himachal as there are such mind boggling figures with regard to seizure of contrabands by NCB. Though the Court observed that the NCB is not sufficiently equipped to handle the drug menace.
The High Court of Himachal Pradesh in its earlier order had directed the Superintendent of Police Kullu as well as Zonal Director, Narcotics Control Bureau, Chandigarh on 25.10.2017 to constitute Joint Task Force to raid all Restaurants, Hotels and Dhabas in and around Kasol and Malana to stop illegal activities related to drugs.
The Court said that though situation in entire State is quite alarming, but at present Village Malana appears to be the epicentre of drug menace. The Court wondered as to how rave parties are being allowed to be organized at Village Kasol and whether foreign nationals residing in and around Malana possess valid permission from Government of India or are illegally staying there. The Court posted the matter for 7 December, 2017.
With 8853 persons contacting fatal disease AIDS in Himachal Pradesh in 2016, the government is approaching all educational institutions to spread awareness on HIV and measures to control it. The state Health department has sought the help of Education department to aware masses on HIV by way of short movies, banners and hoardings to achieve the target of becoming AIDS free by 2030.
All the schools have been asked to discuss informatory messages on HIV/AIDS during morning assemblies in the schools, Dr Manmohan Sharma, Director, Elementary Education said. All the Deputy Director Education, Block Elementary Education Officers and principals of District Institutes of Education Training have been asked to implement the awareness campaign, designed by Director, Health Services, he said. Officials of State AIDS Control Society said the HIV disease is driven by many socio-economic factors and the present health services are not sufficient to address the cause and consequences of the disease.
After detailed discussions, it has come to light that non-health sector can play a vital role in reducing vulnerability and mitigation of its impact on both the infected and impacted, officials said. This multi-pronged strategy has resulted in inclusion of all schools in spreading the message of AIDS awareness campaign and all the schools have been asked to submit compliance report within 15 days.
Under the awareness campaign, students would be told about the disease and various activities including preparing slogans and hoardings would also be organized in schools, Meena Kumari, coordinator, state AIDS Control Society told The Statesman.
Besides this, about 250 red ribbon clubs and 257 Nehru Youth Kendras have been founded and linked with special drive being carried out by Aids Control Society, according to NACO guidelines. The clubs would be asked to help the patients in fighting the social stigma of this disease. Further, the students would be asked to encourage the locals, especially pregnant women in the area to go for HIV testing and, that the testing facility is being provided free of cost at all health institutions.
In addition, the state AIDS Control Society has constituted Red ribbon at the college level to create awareness among students themselves as youth are more vulnerable to HIV infection. In order to check and control the migration of HIV with blood transfusion, efforts were being made to ensure 100 percent pure blood transfusion to patients in the hospitals. Four Blood transfusion vans have been deployed in the state; besides blood donation vans were collecting the blood from various blood camps to cater to the requirement.
It is worthwhile to mention here that more than 18.5 lakh people went for voluntary HIV testing through Integrated Counselling and Testing Centres (ICTC) in 2016, out of which over 8853 persons were tested positive for the disease.
Bollywood actor Aishwarya Rai Bachchan attended the wedding of her cousin in the city.
She attend the wedding of Prajwal, son of her uncle Uday Kumar Shetty, accompanied by her daughter Aaradhya and mother Vrinda Rai.
The marriage was held yesterday at the TMA Pai convention hall here.
The actor was clad in dazzling red with soft gold embroidery. Aaradhya also wore a matching outfit.
Aishwarya spoke to relatives in her mother tongue Tulu and sought blessings from her elders, said sources.
READ ALSO: Harvey Weinstein tried hard to get Aishwarya Rai alone, claims former manager
The fate of Padmavati rests in the hands of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and actor Shahid Kapoor said now as the film is with the right authority, he hopes the period drama will release soon.
The Sanjay Leela Bhansali-directed film was slated to be released on December 1, but the makers voluntarily deferred the release after the CBFC asked them to reapply for certification with complete details.
They recently applied for 3D certification.
It is a nice big circle. It is back to where we started, which is where it should have been. The CBFC should have been the right body to take a decision. I am hoping that sooner, not later, it is already pretty being long, we will get a decision.
I saw lot of problem with Udta Punjab and eventually the film released and everybody saw it. The film was loved by the people. And I do believe that it will be similar for Padmavati, Shahid said at an event here.
The actor is unfazed by the film being pushed and said Padmavati will do well if the team has done a good job.
Whenever the film comes out, people will react the way they would to a story that is being told. If the film has the dignity, strength, originality and cinematic effect that a good film should have, the people will speak well of it. I believe that it is a good film, he said.
Padmavati is facing trouble with several Rajput groups and political leaders, alleging that Bhansali has tampered with historical facts in the movie.
The director has been accused of using a romantic dream sequence between Rajput queen Padmini (Deepika) and Sultan Alauddin Khilji (Ranveer Singh), a claim repeatedly denied by him.
Historians are divided over whether Padmini actually existed.
Chief ministers of BJP-ruled states such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat have also called for a ban on the period drama.
READ ALSO: Give Padmavati a chance: Shahid Kapoor
Its normal practice for village folk to travel to far-off government offices situated in towns and cities for small work which doesnt take more than a few minutes.
What a welcome change it would be if such facilities are provided in the village or close to a village. It is not only convenient for the users but also results in better use of the facility.
In one such example, the Rajiv Gandhi Sewa Kendra and Park, situated at village Awa in Fazilka district of Punjab, has proved a boon for villagers.
The Sewa Kendra was constructed under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) and is now one of the success stories of this rural employment guarantee programme.
The sprawling building with a covered area of 800 square feet has become a seat of administration in the village and adjoining area.
The gram panchayat (village council) head, Shavinder Singh, 37, said the Seva Kendra is not just helping villagers hold their meetings irrespective of weather, but also helping poor residents hold functions like marriages without any financial burden.
Besides this, with the help of MGNREGA we have developed four parks, three roads. And now we are also planning to develop our village pond as a lake which will have 400 metres running track and a cycle track. A gym will also be installed in the village with the help of MGNREGA, Singh told The Statesman over phone.
The building is also serving many purposes for the village folk. With a seating arrangement of 150 to 170 people, this building is a perfect venue for periodic meetings to be held by Gram Panchayat (village council), said a rural development department official, not wishing to be named.
The official said all the works of MGNREGA like new work demand, new job cards, updation in job cards, MGNREGA payments, etc., are now done at the village level as whenever required concerned officials visit it. Most of the MGNREGA related issues are solved at the spot. All the administrative and related work of the village council is also carried out in this building.
Situated 13 km from the India-Pakistan international border, Awa village has a population of 1150 and a total of 201 MGNREGA job cards have been made in the village. The MGNREGA job card holders got employment under this very project in their own village.
Hassle free delivery of MGNREGA and other related services at the doorstep of the residents of the village is now proving to be a best governance practice.
The residents are happy to get their work done in the village itself without making round of offices at district headquarters. This is not only saving their time and energy but also their MGNREGA related work is streamlined and their issues are being addressed.
With this hi-tech enabled Sewa Kendra in place, enrollment for all social security schemes like old age pension, widows pension, Antyodaya scheme and Atta Dal scheme has also become much easier for the villagers. Banking services are also being availed through the same centre.
With Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi set to be elevated as party president, Punjab Chief Minister (CM) Amarinder Singh on Monday said young Gandhi has the qualities to be Congress Prime Ministerial (PM) candidate in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Calling for Rahuls projection as the PM candidate in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Amarinder said Gandhi had generated massive enthusiasm in the party with his ability to connect with the youth.
He is very inquisitive by nature, has an eye for detail and is modern in his outlook qualities that would stand the party in good stead if it projects Rahul as the next prime ministerial candidate, said the Punjab CM while speaking to reporters in New Delhi after nominating the party vice-president for the top Congress post.
Rejecting the charges of `parivarvad'(nepotism) behind Gandhis elevation as Congress president, Amarinder said the massive response he has been evoking in recent months on various fora, including the ongoing election campaign in Gujarat, indicates his huge popular support base.
He said the Congress vice president had the support of the people, with 100 per cent of the party workers favouring his elevation.
Terming the election in the Congress as the partys internal business, the CM said even other like-minded parties had no problems with Rahul taking over the Congress reins.
To a question about Shehzad Poonawallas critical remarks on the issue of the Congress presidential election, Amarinder questioned his locus standii, and said that no one in the party cares about what he says.
On the coming Gujarat Assembly polls, Amarinder said the Congress was on the upswing there with Gandhis rallies meeting with massive response, in contrast to the campaigning by PM Narendra Modi.
Later, in an interview with a TV channel, the CM said coming civic elections in Punjab were a challenge, and in this case, the aspirations of the people were extremely high.
He said his government was slowly implementing the various promises made to the people during the Assembly elections, with farm debt waiver also set to commence this month.
On the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), he said it continued to be on a downslide, while the Shiromani Akali Dal still remained in the bad books of the people and would lose again if elections were to be held today.
The Akalis had made a mess of everything, he said, adding that his government was trying to set things right. The CM cited the examples of desecrations, which had shown a marked decline since the Congress government took over, and the drugs smugglers, whose backbone had been broken, with drugs no longer easily available in the state.
One Pakistani terrorist was killed in an encounter on Monday in the Qazigund area of South Kashmir after the ultras attacked a convoy of the Army. Two soldiers were injured as the terrorists indiscriminately fired at the convoy on the Jammu Srinagar highway.
Reports said that another Pakistani terrorist identified as 16 years old Abu Maviya of the Lashkar-e-Taiyba is believed to be trapped at the encounter site. The J&K police DGP SP Vaid said that the security forces have cordoned the area in the Nussu Badargund village and an encounter was underway.
Army sources said that heavy exchange of fire was going on between the security forces and terrorists.
Ridiculing Rahul Gandhis soon to be announced promotion as Congress President, Prime Minister Narendra Modi termed it as Aurangzeb Raj and said that the Congress party was a clan with a feudal mindset.
In a rally in poll-bound Gujarats Dharampur, Modi quoted senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, who has in the past taken a dig at Sonia and Rahul Gandhi saying that only two people could become the next chief of the party.
Mani Shankar Aiyar, who never shies away from showing loyalty to one family, proudly said, son of Jahangeer (Mughal ruler) replaced his father Shah Jahan, were any elections held then? Modi said.
And when Shah Jahan was replaced by Aurangzeb, were elections held? It was known to all that a kings son was the heir to the throne, added Modi.
I congratulate the Congress on their Aurangzeb Raj Congress is nothing but a clan, he said further.
Modi stressed that for him, the wellbeing of 125 crore Indians mattered the most and it was the people of India who were his high command.
Meanwhile, BJP leader and Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi too mocked the Gandhi scion for his promotion without performance.
I congratulate Rahul Gandhi for his promotion without performance, can only be possible in a feudal setup, the Union Minister said.
After 19 years, Congress is all set to get a new president with party Vice President Rahul Gandhi filing his nomination papers for the party chiefs post on Monday.
Flanked by top party leadership including former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the Gandhi scion reached the party headquarters at around 10.30 am and shortly after, signed the sets of nomination papers before the Returning Officer.
The elevation of Rahul Gandhi, who is presently spearheading the Congress campaign ahead of the December 9 and 14 Gujarat assembly polls, has been much talked about in party circles for around two years.
With Rahul Gandhi in all likelihood to be the only candidate in the fray, he could be declared the next Congress chief on December 5 after scrutiny of nominations.
He will succeed his mother Sonia Gandhi, the longest serving Congress chief who has helmed the party since 1998.
Rahul Gandhi became the Congress Vice President in January 2013.
President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday greeted navy personnel and their families on Navy Day and praised their commitment to protect the nation.
In a message, Kovind said: On Navy Day, my good wishes to all officers and men and women of the Indian Navy.
Nation is proud of your commitment in protecting our maritime frontiers, securing our trade routes, and providing assistance in times of civil emergencies.
On Navy Day, my good wishes to all officers and men and women of the Indian Navy. Nation is proud of your commitment in protecting our maritime frontiers, securing our trade routes, and providing assistance in times of civil emergencies #PresidentKovind President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) December 4, 2017
PM Modi, in his message said that the Indian Navy has served the nation with great diligence.
In a tweet, Modi said: On Navy Day, greetings to all navy personnel and their families.
On Navy Day, greetings to all navy personnel and their families. pic.twitter.com/O36rKhnC4I Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) December 4, 2017
Modi posted a short video along with his tweet in which he highlighted the Indian Navys moments of glory and valour.
Modi said Indias glorious naval tradition dates back to times of the Chola Empire and the empire of Shivaji Maharaj.
Indian Navy secures and protects our maritime boundaries. I congratulate all those who belong to the Navy. After Independence, our Indian Navy showed its valour on various occasions; be it the liberation struggle of Goa or the Indo-Pak war, Modi said.
The Indian Navy has served the nation with great diligence. When we talk of the Navy, we see only war but the Indian Navy has come forward in humanitarian ventures as well, he added.
We Indians, always nurture feeling of pride and respect towards our security forces- army, navy or air force; every countryman salutes courage, bravery, valour, chivalry and sacrifice of our soldiers. They sacrifice their youth for country so that 125 crore countrymen live in peace, he said further.
December 4 is celebrated as the Navy Day in India, to commemorate the start of Operation Trident during the India-Pakistan War of 1971.
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Monday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi for keeping the youth of Gujarat unemployed and not implementing the 7th Pay Commission leading to the plight of contract and fixed salary workers in the state.
Keeping up at his 22 questions in the countdown to the Gujarat Assembly polls, as promised, Gandhi said: 22 salon ka hisaab, Gujarat mange jawaab. Gujarat ke haalat par Pradhanmantri se chatha sawal (as he directed his sixth query at Modi on Gujarats condition).
The double whammy of BJP government on one side the youths of the state are unemployed, while on other hand lakhs of contract and fixed salary workers condition is miserable.
Despite Rs 18,000 salary per month as per the 7th Pay Commission, why only Rs 5,500 and Rs 10,000 is being paid to the fix and contract workers? he asked.
Gandhis question comes in the wake of the partys strategy to pose one question to Modi every day till the polling day on December 9.
Gandhi on Sunday raised concerns over safety, health, education and crimes against women in the state.
On Saturday, he questioned Modi on extraction of high fees from students by government educational institutes in Gujarat.
Polling for the 182-member Gujarat assembly will be held in two phases on December 9 and 14. The counting of votes will take place on December 18.
Two soldiers were injured on Monday when militants attacked an army patrol on the Jammu-Srinagar national highway in south Kashmirs Kulgam district, a police officer said.
The militants fired at the patrol team in Qazigund area which has been cordoned off for searches, the officer said.
Over the years and for many reasons, the defence ministry (MoD) has been viewed as a stumbling block in national security, rather than being the prime mover. It has been viewed as being antagonistic to the armed forces, rather than a supporter. Amongst all the ministries of the government, it has faced the most flak for this reason.
The UPA regime refused to clear any defence deal, creating capability shortfalls and leaving the armed forces with such shortages of ammunition that even fighting a ten-day war was difficult. For years, A K Anthony only saw the Bofors ghost lurking around each corner, viewed every deal with suspicion and worried about his clean image being damaged. It led to the ministry losing even the basic respect it deserved.
The present government appeared to begin on a positive note, with Prime Minister Modi addressing the Rewari veterans rally, promising to pay special attention to the military and its veterans. He gained full support in his campaign. With no defence minister at the helm for prolonged periods, the MoD continued with its antics. It gave false details to the pay commission, without clearing it from service headquarters leading to servicemen being degraded in status and salary in the seventh pay commission report, which the government accepted despite strong objections from the service chiefs. It was the joint decision of the service chiefs against issuing the letter of acceptance which compelled the PMO to step in.
Other issues which dominated headlines were letters degrading the status of the armed forces vis-a-vis their civilian counterparts, refusing to process their case for the grant of NFU (Non-Functional Upgradation), propelling a group to approach the courts for a decision and even supporting government decisions on cancellation of rations. It has claimed to be studying the Reddy commission report a year after it was submitted. It kept silent while veterans were hounded out of Jantar Mantar, not once but twice, and has ignored OROP anomalies.
Every day there are reports of war widows, including those of gallantry awardees and aged veterans challenging the government in courts for their rightful pensions, being denied by the accounts department of the MoD finance. This despite having obtained justice from the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT). Some officers sitting in MoD prefer to challenge these humane and just decisions of AFTs in higher courts, while the defence minister keeps quiet, adding to the suffering of widows and veterans.
Are these deliberate actions or accidental or being done to compel service headquarters to waste time and reams of paper only on resolving non-issues? It is a fact that those who serve in the MoD have little knowledge of matters military, seek privileges which flow from being a part of the armed forces but battle to remain at their helm. The impression being conveyed to the nation is that the MoD is a monster, seeking to dominate the services, subdue their voice and lower their status, while denying them the capabilities they need to ensure national security.
For every ill, the MoD is blamed, because as an organisation it has neither amalgamated the service HQs nor have its representatives as a part of it. Yet it continues to take decisions impacting the armed forces with a lack of understanding and knowledge. Publicly it is visualised as being aloof, uncaring, unresponsive and insensitive.
At the same time, the present defence minister has shown her desire to interact more with service chiefs and veterans than her predecessors and appears to be concerned about service-related issues. She is possibly the first defence minister in a long time with minimum outside responsibilities and hence is able to devote complete attention to the armed forces. If this is the truth, then the MoD must make efforts to change its image from that of an opponent to one of a friend in the eyes of the common Indian, who supports the armed forces because of its sacrifice and commitment.
The first action that the defence minister must take is to direct her staff to stop approaching higher courts, especially in cases of pensions and disability issues which concern war widows and veterans. Unless special focus is given to veteran and war widows welfare, the ministry would continue to be criticised for being insensitive. If George Fernandes, as defence minister, could threaten sending erring defence ministry officials to Siachen, she could do the same with those adding to the agony of war widows and veterans.
The next action is to withdraw the challenge of the government in the NFU case. It would resolve much of the anger which presently permeates throughout the service and would be an immense morale booster. On similar lines is the case of Military Service Pay (MSP) for Junior Commissioned Officers (JCOs), a small issue but one that has immense impact on morale.
The veteran community today stands with the serving. Those in service today are veterans of tomorrow. A positive approach to their problems, resettlement and pensions would enhance the image of the MoD and of the government.
The minister must pull up ordnance factories for their tardiness and hold them accountable for their lapses, especially their poor-quality products. Decisions on defence procurements must be based more on service HQ inputs than on suggestions of her scientific advisor, who would invariably support the DRDO in its development. This would not be difficult as both these organisations directly function under her ministry.
Finally, the armed forces need to be amalgamated into the MoD. By keeping them away, they are neither in decision making, nor are their interests ever considered, only enhancing the swelling anger against the ministry. Functionally too, the present system is obsolete, especially for a rising superpower.
The MoD needs to alter its image, which has in recent times been negative. Nirmala Sitharaman has proved to be an able administrator and has indicated a desire to act. But unless she puts in concerted efforts to change the outlook of her own staff, the MoD would continue to face criticism.
(The writer is a retired Major-General of the Indian Army.)
The judiciary has stepped in where the executive had failed to tread, to use a variant of what Alexander Pope had once written so famously in his poem, An Essay on Criticism. Calcutta High Court (coram: Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya, Acting CJ, and Arijit Banerjee, J) has conveyed a resounding signal to the Government of West Bengal, directing the State to declare dengue as a notifiable disease. This in itself is testament to the gravity of what the Chief Minister, with Health under her belt, had initially dismissed as fever. Last Fridays order makes it mandatory for all government and private hospitals, that admit patients with dengue, to furnish a report on the patient to the state government as well as the Centre.
Collation of data enables the authorities to monitor the outbreak and thus emit the warning signals. The order comes in the wake of the sluggish response of the health department towards the outbreak ~ almost to the point of denial ~ over the past four months. During this period, the state has been loath to declare dengue as a notifiable ailment not least because it would have chimed oddly with its claims. Indeed, it was firm in its refusal in response to a suggestion by the Additional Solicitor-General.
The affliction has over time assumed virtually endemic proportions and the judiciary has sought a notification after enough have died ~ 40 according to the official count ~ and many more are languishing on the hospital bed when not on the floor. Markedly, the directive of the court covers the basics of public health and general administration in the wider perspective.
West Bengals Swasthya Bhavan has been directed to send mobile vans for the collection of blood samples to the remote areas of the state. Follow-through action on the reports thus becomes direly imperative when one reflects on the governments denial of platelet-count figures. The High Court has sought a compliance report in the context of its previous order. In the net, the administration has been rapped on the knuckles for its unethical and fallacious approach.
The fact that the fundamentals of public health are not in place is evident from yet another facet of the order ~ the health department has been directed to provide adequate Elisa test kits to all hospitals. Critical too must be the courts observation on the proposed compensation of Rs 2 lakh to the next of kin of a dengue victim. Though the matter will be considered on the day of the final judgment, remarkably pertinent is the courts observation that families of illicit liquor victims are also paid compensation. The administration is on the mat and must work overtime to regain the faith of the people.
OnePlus on Saturday introduced the OnePlus 5T Star Wars Limited Edition smartphone at the Comic Con India in Bengaluru.
The company will be hosting a special unveiling event in Mumbai on December 14. OnePlus and Star Wars fans can be a part of the launch event in Mumbai by booking the tickets for Rs. 999 only on Paytm, starting December 7 from 10am onwards.
Star Wars has enthralled generations with their masterful storytelling from a galaxy far, far away, with the best in technology and strong engagement with their fan community. Similarly, OnePlus too has a dedicated community that is deeply passionate about the best in technology, design and attention to detail. With this befitting association, OnePlus community will be able to thoroughly enjoy the legacy of both the brands, noted OnePlus in a press statement.
OnePlus 5T Star Wars Limited Edition: full specifications
4G VoLTE dual-SIM, Android 7.1.1 Nougat with Oxygen OS 4.7, Fingerprint sensor
6.01-inch Full HD+ (1080 x 2106 pixels) Optic AMOLED 2.5D curved Corning Gorilla Glass 5
Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 64-bit SoC
6GB/ 8GB LPDDR4x RAM, 64GB/ 128GB storage
16MP + 20MP rear camera with dual LED Flash
16MP front-facing camera
3300mAh battery with USB Type-C Dash Charge
So far, OnePlus 5T only comes in Midnight Black colour option in India. The company has officially announced that the OnePlus 5T Star Wars Limited Edition will go on sale starting December 15 across all channels including Amazon.in, oneplusstore.in and OnePlus experience zones in Bangalore and Noida.
Bhutan has become the first country to pledge rapid deployment troops to the UN peacekeeping operations, keeping them at the ready for participation in missions within 60 days.
Under-Secretary-General for Field Support Atul Khare and Bhutans Permanent Representative Doma Tshering signed the Rapid Deployment Level (RDL) agreement on Friday, which the UN called the first of its kind in UN peacekeeping.
A Force Protection Company from Bhutan, which is to be a part of the Vanguard Brigade of the Peacekeeping Capability Readiness System (UNPCRS), will be able to deploy within 60 days of a request by the Secretary-General, an official statement said.
The UN can quickly provide a military element to a new peacekeeping mission area or reinforce an existing mission using the Vanguard Brigades.
The UNPCRS is designed to deal with conflicts or dangerous situations immediately before they escalate instead of the regular deployment process that takes several months to put troops on the ground.
This agreement signed by the Royal Government of Bhutan represents the highest level of readiness by a troop or police-contributing country under the UNPCRS created in 2015, the statement said.
This landlocked, mountain country is at the vanguard of this approach, contributing to the establishment of a pool of capabilities for rapid deployment when required.
Bhutans pledge is a great example of commitment to the ideals of a nimble, effective UN peacekeeping, Khare said.
As a small, developing country, we deeply appreciate this recognition of our growing capability to contribute to the implementation of the UN peacekeeping operations, Tshering said.
Bhutan currently has 45 military and police personnel two of them women serving in 10 regular UN peacekeeping operations. They are concentrated in the Darfur mission in Sudan, which has 22 Bhutanese peacekeepers.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau began a visit to China focused on trade Monday with a stop at social media giant Sina, where he talked up the advantages of travel to his homeland.
Accompanied by four Cabinet ministers, Trudeau is due to hold talks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang later tomorrow before meeting President Xi Jinping the following day.
At Sina, owner of the phenomenally popular Twitter-like Weibo microblogging service, Trudeau took part in a panel discussion that touched on Canadian tourism draws, as well as the nations beer and wine, according to Chinese and Canadian reports.
Next year marks the China-Canada year of tourism and Canada is hoping to double the number of Chinese tourist arrivals.
China and Canada are also in exploratory talks on a framework for a trade agreement, although reports say Ottawa has been pushing for provisions on the environment, governance, labor and gender issues.
Beijing generally seeks to avoid references that might highlight the one-party authoritarian states human rights record.
China has positioned itself as a leading advocate of free trade, particularly since President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yet foreign businesses complain often that China closes many key areas to foreign investment, while Xi is known to favor a centralized economic model with special support for state-owned industries.
Canada has remained part of a pan-Pacific trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, even after President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the agreement.
During recent talks in Danang, Vietnam, Trudeau lobbied for strong provisions for environmental protection, labor rights, and gender issues and the name of the initiative was altered to be the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
China largely imports wood and agricultural products, ore, fuels and seafood from Canada, while Canada imports machinery, furniture and sporting goods and textiles from China. The trade imbalance has narrowed, but China still ran a surplus of about 17 billion with Canada during the first half of this year, according to the Canadian government
Protests broke out here on Monday as South Korea and the US began a major joint air combat exercise, in what appears to be another show of strength following North Koreas latest missile test conducted in late November.
Dozens of people gathered outside the US embassy in Seoul to protest against these biannual war games and demand all parties choose dialogue to resolve the current crisis peacefully, reports Efe news.
The drills, named Vigilant Ace, seek to improve the all-weather, day and night combined operational capacity of the two countries, according to the South Korean Defence Ministry.
READ MORE: South Korea, US conduct air defence drills
However, a ministry spokesperson insisted that such types of manoeuvers are of the defensive type.
Although the Ministry did not confirm whether it was the largest air combat manoeuvers ever carried out between Washington and Seoul, local media suggested that this years operation marks the two countries largest joint air drills ever recorded, with more than 230 aircraft and some 12,000 troops in participation.
The US deployed over two dozen stealth fighter jets, including F-22s and F-35s, and two strategic B-1B bombers in the manoeuvers, which will conclude on Saturday.
The joint drills were set to simulate precision attacks on mock nuclear facilities and self-propelled missile launch vehicles similar to those used by Pyongyang.
The operation is part of an agreement endorsed in October between Washington and Seoul, which aims at expanding rotational deployment of US strategic assets on the Korean peninsula and pressuring North Korea to drop its nuclear programme.
The North Korean regime, which usually considers such military exercises as an attempt to invade its territory, condemned the Vigilant Ace drills on Sunday.
On November 29, North Korea launched the Hwasong-15 rocket, its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile to date which has put Pyongyang closer to striking the US with nuclear weapons.
Montreal, CA (H4T1V6)
Today
Light snow this morning. Then remaining cloudy this afternoon. High 31F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of snow 80%..
Tonight
Partly cloudy skies. A few flurries or snow showers possible. Low around 20F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.
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Patnaik's close aides say that to understand him, one has to understand his empathy
By Pratul Sharma/Photos Sanjay Ahlawat
Actor and politician Khushbu, on Monday, hit out against internet trollers after several users maliciously implied that she was born 'Nakhat Khan', a Muslim name they wanted to highlight.
"Some trollers have made a discovery about me..my name is Nakhat Khan.. Eureka!!! Fools that's my name given to me by my parents.. AND YES I AM A KHAN..NOW WHAT???late bloomers, wake up..u are 47 yrs late..." she wrote on Twitter.
Some trollers have made a discovery about me..my name is #NakhatKhan.. Eureka!!! Fools that's my name given to me by my parents.. AND YES I AM A KHAN..NOW WHAT???late bloomers,wake up..u are 47 yrs late.. khushbusundar (@khushsundar) December 4, 2017
Khushbu is a spokesperson of the Congress party.
This is not the first time that a celebrity's faith is being highlighted on social media. Earlier, at the height of Mersal row, BJP leader H. Raja posted actor Vijay's voter ID on Twitter, in what seems to be an attempt to prove the actor was of a Christian faith.
Raja had called actor Vijay with his full name saying, Joseph Vijays hate campaign against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
As cyclone Ockhi moves towards the Gujarat coast, there is a worry in the air as to which direction the storm will take. The political mind of Gujarat, too, struggles to sense the direction of the election wind.
With just four days to go for the first phase of the assembly elections, Gujarat is turning into a site of experiments of the north Indian politics. Gujarat is strong enough to prove in any election that it is not merely a state where Hindi is written without the line on top of the letters. While the sense of identity and distinctiveness of the Gujarati people are reflected in their voting pattern, political storms have dashed the hopes of some, and have helped some others keep their hopes intact. The whole country is watching keenly Gujarat, where the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress are undergoing a test by fire.
Modi, Rahul face to face
Narendra Modi knows better than any other person that the Gujarat Assembly elections, the first major elections in his home state after he became the prime minister, is an acid test for the Modi Impact. This is exactly why Modi, a three-time chief minister of the state, himself held the reins of electioneering in Gujarat, being aware of the fact that the conditions in the state have changed. Modi apparently thinks that the Lok Sabha elections have to be decided based on the results of the Gujarat Assembly elections. Around the corner are elections to the state assemblies of Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura.
When he is elevated as president of the Congress party next week, Rahul Gandhi would very much like to do it with a flourish a victory in Gujarat. Rahul, who tours Gujarat twice in a week, has already proved that he is a force to reckon with. Both he and the Congress expect to win 2-4 seats in each of the 33 districts in Gujarat, apart from the existing seats.
Rahuls questions, Modis answers
While touring Gujarat, after visiting a place of worship every day, Rahul would put questions to the BJP-led government and Modi, for which Modi would give answers. These questions and answers added considerable vigour to the last lap of the first phase of the campaign. Rahul asked the questions by keeping in mind the fact that 65 per cent of the voters are below the age of 35. Modi retorted by listing the gains of the Gujarat Model development.
Despite its sterling performance in the last Lok Sabha elections, BJP cannot expect a 'walkover' this time. Anti-incumbency factor has played a big role. After Modi, two chief ministers had to be tried in a span of five years. Anandi Ben Patel had to quit following the Patel-dalit agitations. Vijay Roopani, who took over as chief minister, could do little. It was in an attempt to overcome this poor performance and to make conditions favourable for the BJP that Modi announced the first bullet train in the country, and inaugurated large-scale projects, including the Narmada Dam.
Problems existing in the labour and of agriculture sectors have not been solved. The Congress counters the BJPs slogan of Vibrant Gujarat by pointing out the miserable conditions in the rural areas. The BJP camp hopes to surmount the crisis caused by demonetisation by advocating the special nationality of Gujarat. It is with this intention that Modi keeps repeating that I am a son of Gujarat.
Caste politics rules the roost
The BJP, which used to taste victory by consolidating the Hindu votes, has been forced to try a different track this time around. The Patidar Anamath Aandolan Samithi headed by Hardik Patel, leader of the Patel-reservation agitation, has redrawn the political map of Gujarat. Adding to the BJPs woes, Jignesh Mewani, a dalit leader, and Alpresh Thakkur, leader of the backward classes, have thrown their weight behind the Congress. It is because of this volatile situation that neither the BJP, which is adept at winning votes by playing the caste card, nor the Congress has announced the chief ministerial candidate.
The religion-wise division of Gujarats population is: Hindus 88%; Muslims 10%; Jains 1%, and Christians 0.6%. Of the Hindus, 20% belong to the Patel community. The backward classes comprise about 50%, including 18% adivasis.
BJPs dream, Congress ambition
At one point of campaigning, the revelation regarding the mysterious death of a judge who heard the fake-encounter case gave a severe setback to Amit Shah and the BJP. However, the party managed to overcome this, thanks to Modis personal charisma. While the BJP is forging ahead by cashing in on the power at the Centre and in the state as well as a strong party set-up, a weak party machinery is worrying the Congress.
While Congress is worried over the decision of NCP and former chief minister Shankar Singh Vagelas front to contest on their own, casting a shadow over the Rainbow Alliance, the BJP fears the presence of Shiv Sena in a few places.
The peoples verdict in Gujarat is most likely to depend on the sharpness of the political weapons that the BJP and the Congress have reserved for the last moment.
This article was originally published in the Malayala Manorama daily on December 4, 2017
The underlying institutional power struggle between the Executive and the Judiciary came to the fore once again with both the organs of the State indulging in one-upmanship about their powers as enshrined in the Constitution.
It happened during the commemoration of the National Law Day spread over two days at the end of last month in the national capital when President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi underlined the need for the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary to remain within their limits in fulfilling the wishes of the people.
Modi might have been conciliatory, but the issue of judicial overreach was left hanging.
The BJP-led NDA emphasised that the Executive, Legislature and the Judiciary should go about their business without stepping on the toes of one another. Modi drew pointed attention to this aspect, emphasising "the balance between the Legislature, Executive and Judiciary has been the backbone of our Constitution. Because of this balance, our nation was able to defeat the Emergency. When we are making every attempt to build a new India, these principles as outlined in the Constitution assumes significance. We have to fulfil the peoples' hopes and aspirations while remaining within our limits".
This was after the Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra had spoken. It was apparent that the Centre was concerned about judicial activism, particularly with regard to the court striking down the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) in 2015.
What had troubled the government all along tumbled out into the open.
Prasad wondered why the prime minister or he himself as the law minister could not be trusted to make fair judicial appointments.
He drew attention to the case of Kolkata High Court judge C.S. Karnan having been held guilty of contempt of court for questioning the collegium system of appointment of judges.
On his part Justice Misra quoted from a judgement interpreting Article 75 observing the Constituent Assembly had reposed faith in the prime minister and said "we also repose the same trust in the prime minister". Further, the CJI dispelled the impression that judges intended to run the country and cited specific instances to drive home the point.
Nevertheless, impartial observers insist the assault on the Judiciary is by way of non-appointment of judges. When the collegium of the Supreme Court sends a list of judges to be appointed, the government seems to drag its feet. The judges have not been able to get their act together in the appointment, leading to problems.
President Kovind said the pillars of democracy were designed to lean on each other with countervailing force to strengthen the democratic processes. It is critical to keep this intricate and delicate balance when exploring the relationship among the three branches of the State. They should be careful not to disturb the separation of powers by even unknowingly intruding into the domain of either of the two other branches, the President added.
Union Finance minister Arun Jaitley said the Judiciary may intervene in the case of Executive failure but only to issue directives for taking necessary action. He had no doubt that the judiciary should steer clear of overreach by interfering in Executive functions. The argument that judicial activism was meant to fill the gaps left by other State organs was flawed, Jaitley added.
The focus was on the government and the Judiciary respecting each others' turf coupled with overcoming their deficiencies. Pragmatism is what the Judiciary and the Executive need at this juncture. It has become imperative to strike the right balance between the three arms of the government. At the same time, the Judiciary remains the unequivocal custodian and defender of the Constitution.
Navy Day this year is a good occasion to reflect on its journey and evaluate its progress over the last 70 years. The Indian Navy was an exceedingly small force at the dawn of independence and, while being a product of both its British inheritance and the maritime DNA of our forebears, is largely a post-independence construct.
Despite the many problems that besieged the newly independent countryand by extension its Navy such as low industrial base, problems on our land borders made it imperative to focus on the Army and the Air Force. But the Navy was not short on vision.
As early as 1948, it drew up ambitious plans for a balanced Navy that would consist of light aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, cruisers, auxiliaries and associated training and maintenance infrastructure.
Seen against this backdrop, the Indian Navy has grown quietly but steadily. From a force of less than half a dozen sloops to one that has 135 ships and 235 aircraft, most of them state-of-the-art, this is indeed an impressive story.
That we operate in all three dimensions: On, above and below water; that most of our ships are indigenously built; and that we are among the few navies to build and operate an array of platforms from aircraft carriers to nuclear submarines add further strength to the narrative. We are now among the world's leading navies.
But numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Of particular significance is the fact that the navy has built excellent capacitiesboth human and materialin several disciplines such as hydrography, special operations, integration engineering, doctrine writing, underwater medicine and disaster relief, to name a few.
These capacities have been particularly useful when the Indian Navy's achievements in different domains are analysed. If one were to evaluate in terms of roles that navies classically playmilitary, constabulary (policing), diplomatic and benign (including humanitarian assistance)the Indian Navy can be said to have ticked all boxes with high scores.
On the military front, while most readers are aware of the Navy's significant role in the 1971 war with Pakistan and liberation of Bangladesh, there are several interesting aspects to the navy's campaign.
Not only did it fight on two fronts but almost the entire gamut of naval operations came to play in this war. This included aircraft carrier operations in support of the land offensive, anti-submarine operations that led to neutralising of the Pakistan submarine Ghazi, offensive attack by missile boats and blockade of then East Pakistan coast.
More recently, during the Kargil conflict in 1999 and later during Operation Parakram, the Indian Navy, by its offensive posturing, bottled the Pakistani ships inside their harbours and effectively kept the war localised and the situation on even keel. Similarly, Indian Navy's role in Operation Pawan, our prolonged engagement in Sri Lanka, has not got the attention it, arguably, deserved.
Spread over three years, the Navy was involved in support of the army, transportation of troops and material, amphibious operations, seaward cordon militaire, shore bombardment, special operations and airborne surveillance.
Most remarkably, several smaller ships based in Visakhapatnam and Chennai excelled at giving a good account of themselves in hostile conditions.
The notable point is that it's a self-reliant force. The Indian Navy was a pioneer of 'Make in India' which was an article of faith for it. Compared to the Army and the Air Force, the Navy is way ahead in the indigenous content of its combat units.
To be sure, we have a long way to go. We need to have weapons, propulsion and many systems to be sourced from within our country. But every ship that gets constructed has more indigenous content than its predecessor and is an improvement over the previous one.
The increased mettle and muscle of our Navy provides much more traction to our foreign policy initiatives, be it in enhancing cooperation with big powers or in providing a palpable physical dimension to the Act-East Policy. Further, the Indian Navy's own international initiatives are wide and encompass several arenas.
They include multilateral forums such as Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) and the MILAN meetings, joint exercises with several nations, assistance in capacity building to nations in the Indian Ocean neighbourhood, hydrographic surveys, providing training to many foreign navy personnel and hosting events like the International Fleet Review in February 2016 or more recently the Goa Maritime Conclave last month.
The Indian Ocean is prone to natural disasters and the relatively poor disaster prevention and management infrastructure in most of the countries in the region places a bigger responsibility on the Indian Navy.
The disaster situations could be natural, such as the Tsunami of 2004 or cyclonic storms that recur with great regularity in the Bay of Bengal, or they could be caused by human intervention such as what occurred in Lebanon in 2006, Libya in 2011 or Yemen in 2015. The latter cases are often messy and often also involve evacuation of non-combatants and deployment in conflict zones.
There will indeed be some areas that provide scope for improvement. Further indigenisation of weapons, ordnance and systems and gaps in inventory are issues that are attracting the attention of decision makers. There is also need for development of expertise, among its personnel, in a range of subjects such as foreign languages, international law, energy security, area studies and economics.
But, overall, it would be fair to say that the 'Silent Service' at 70 is a success story.
IANS
Hanuma Jayanti (Hanuman Jayanti) celebrations, which was a symbol of communal harmony and peace for the past few decades in Hunsur townsome 25km from Mysuruturned into a flash point between the state government and the BJP in Hunsur on Sunday after the police detained BJP MP Pratap Simha "to prevent trouble" and lathi-charged devotees.
A day after the face-off, schools and colleges remain shut and prohibitory orders have been clamped down in the town. The BJP has also called for a state-wide protest and Hunsur bandh.
On Sunday, chaos broke out after the police stopped the BJP MP from Mysuru-Kodagu, who was on his way to Hunsur, to attend the celebrations. The district administration "feared" that if he was allowed to attend the event, the MP would violate the route restrictions imposed by them on the procession.
It is learnt the district administration had chalked out different routes for Eid Milad procession and the proposed Hanuma Jayanti procession to "avert" possible clashes. When the police tried to detain Simha, he demanded to know what his crime was and asked them if they had orders for stopping him. As the MP took to the wheels, his car brushed against a barricade, allegedly causing minor injuries to some police personnel. The MP's arrest and the police resorting to lathi-charge at the venue resulted in a volatile situation.
The police, who threatened to file criminal case against the MP for "rash driving on public roads", eventually decided against it. Instead the MP was taken around the district in a police vehicle till late in the night. Around 10.30 pm, the police seemed to have dropped all charges and gave a station bail at T. Narsipura.
Earlier, Simha had tweeted saying "Mysuru district administration n @SPmysuru is all set to file a criminal case against me in Bilikere Station for pushing the barricade near KR Nagar junction!".
Union Minister Anant Kumar Hegde, who reached Hunsur for the celebrations, was furious at the "highhandedness" of the police in arresting Simha and dubbed it as "Hitler culture" of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and alleged it was the state government's ploy to detain Simha to stall Hanuman Jayanti utsava.
The BJP supporters demanded to know why the Hanuma Jayanti celebration was obstructed while Eid Milad procession had no such hurdles. What has irked the devotees and the BJP is the district administration shifting out Lord Hanuman's idol from the venue overnight, without allowing the celebrations to take place.
Even as Hegde called for Hunsur bandh on Monday, BJP state president B.S. Yeddyurappa, who is leading the parivarthana rally in Vijayapura, hit back at the government, accusing it of creating fear and tension by arresting an elected representative. The BJP leader reiterated that the party would launch state-wide protest to oppose the arrest and stalling of the festivities.
Siddaramaiah, who was closely watching the developments in his home turf blamed Simha for driving over a barricade. "Are BJP leaders the only people who celebrate Hanuman Jayanthi and Ram Navami? Law and order is our responsibility," he added.
"My car did not climb the barricade. You may examine the footage. Why is the government stalling the celebrations and hurting the religious sentiments of people? Protecting my religion and tradition is much more important and above my political future," clarified Simha.
In a poll-bound state, the Congress government denying permission or imposing restrictions over the opposition BJP's religious celebrations and protest rallies is resulting in frequent disturbances and further polarisation of people.
After banning the BJP's bike rally to protest the killing of RSS/BJP workers in BC Road a few months back, and imposing restrictions during the launch of parivarthana rally last month, the state government is indulging in curbing the celebration of Hindu festivities too. This smacks of minority appeasement, alleged BJP leaders.
Reacting to the incident, Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy said, We had no objection. But when we gave permission to the BJP, we had give route map for the procession. But Simha was deviating from the proposed route.
Law is same for all, even for an MP. I suspect BJP leaders Pratap Simha, Yeddyurappa and Hegde have no knowledge of the law, he added.
In a counter-protest, the Congress workers staged an agitation against the rouge behaviour of the MP.
Locals forced militants to beat a hasty retreat when they were busy trying to loot a bank at Noorpora at Tral in Pulwama in south Kashmir on Monday.
According to police, the locals pelted stones on three militants belonging to Ansar Gazwatul Hind, an Al Qaeda affiliate led by Zakir Musa, disrupting their plan to loot the bank.
SSP Awantipora Mohammad Zahid Malik said around 2.10 pm Zakir and two of his associates fired several bullets after locals forced them to flee the spot.
The three militants, however, managed to decamp with Rs 97,256 from the Noorpura branch of J&K bank.
''We have established nakas on Tral-Awantipora road to nab the culprits," Malik said
After the incident, police launched search operations in the area and carried out checking of the vehicles on Tral- Awantipora road.
Zakir, a former aide of slain Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, broke ranks with Hizbul after Burhan's killing on July 8, 2016 and later formed the Ansarul Gazwatul Hind.
His group, according to police, comprises mostly militants who believe in Al Qaeda and IS ideology.
Zakir has also been very critical of militant groups who are supported by Pakistan.
In May, he threatened to kill Hurriyat Conference leaders for opposing his idea of establishing an Islamic State in Kashmir and also called Pakistan an apostate state.
He warned Hurriyat Conference leaders to desist from changing the nature of Kashmir issue from a "struggle for Islam to political one".
Police sources said militants have resorted to the looting of the banks due to tightening of the screws on hawala funding by the NIA.
Before joining the militancy, Zakir, who belongs to an affluent family, was studying engineering in a college in Chandigarh. His father Abdul Rashid Bhat is a high-ranking government engineer while his older brother is a doctor and sister a bank executive. He joined militancy on July 17, 2013, and was among the top contenders to replace Burhan.
Police launched a search operation in Sitapur on Sunday to trace two missing buffaloes of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Suresh Rahi.
The Hargaon MLA had filed a complaint in this regard after which the police began searching for the buffaloes.
"A case has been registered and the search for buffaloes is on," Sitapur circle officer Yogendra Singh told ANI.
According to the MLA, the two buffaloes are worth Rs 1 lakh each and hence he was compelled to file a complaint with the police.
In 2014, in a similar incident, dog squads, crime branch sleuths and police personnel were tasked with a 'buffalo hunt', when Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan filed a complaint after his buffaloes had gone missing.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo has issued a stern warning to Pakistan that if it did not act against the alleged terrorist safe havens inside the country then the United States would be forced to destroy them on its own.
The warning comes as Defence Secretary Jim Mattis is scheduled to arrive in Islamabad on Monday
and hold talks with Pakistan to seek their support to the new U.S. strategy for Afghanistan.
The CIA director gave this warning at the Reagan National Defence Forum in California on Saturday, when he was queried about what Trump administration was doing to make Pakistan participate in its new Afghan strategy.
(Secretary Mattis) will make clear the presidents intent (He) will deliver the message that we would love you to do that. And that the safe haven inside of Pakistan has worked to the detriment of our capacity to do what we needed to do in Afghanistan, the Dawn quoted Pompeo as saying.
And in case things go south, he added, In the absence of the Pakistanis achieving that, we are going to do everything we can to make sure that that safe haven no longer exists.
Former Stanford student Brock Turner, who served three months for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, is applying for an appeal. The swimmer who assaulted the woman behind a dumpster filed a motion on December 1. Turner's lawyers called the initial trial "a detailed and lengthy set of lies."
While not convicted of rape per say, he was convicted with three felony counts of sexual assault; namely, intent to commit rape of an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating a woman with a foreign object, and sexually penetrating an unconscious woman with a foreign object.
Turner who committed the act in Januray 2015, was sentenced to six months of jail in March 2016. A legal adviser to Turner, John Tompkins told the media that "It happened, but it was not anywhere close to a crime."
Tompkins maintained that the jury was subjected to "extensive 'behind-the-dumpster' propaganda." He also went on to say that the jury did not have enough evidence about Turner's true character. The new trial is being appealed to overturn his convictions that may mark him as a sexual offender for life. Prosecuters had initially recommended a six-year sentence to Turner who spent only three months in jail. Judge Aaron Persky who presided over the case was criticized for being too lenient.
The judge in his defense said that the reason he was not convicted of rape had to do with the laws in place at the time. Persky also went on to say that he believed Turner had shown a "genuine feeling of remorse." The case inspired California lawmakers to expand the legal definition of rape to include all forms of non-consensual sex.
Turner was released after spending just three months in jail and was release due to good behaviour. Post the Turner case, Persky was removed from a sexual assault case as the Santa Clara County district attorney questioned his ability to handle the case the fairly.
US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis on Monday asked Pakistan to "redouble" efforts to confront militants operating from its soil as he met the country's top leadership here, amid Washington's concerns that Islamabad was not doing enough to dismantle terror safe havens.
Mattis held a meeting with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi after arriving here on his maiden tour to Pakistan to explore ways to effectively eliminate the threat of militancy, days after 2008 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed was released from house arrest.
The US Embassy in Islamabad said in a statement that Mattis told Abbasi to "redouble" efforts to tackle militants operating from Pakistan's territory.
"The secretary reiterated that Pakistan must redouble its efforts to confront militants and terrorists operating within the country," Pentagon Chief Spokesperson Dana W White said after Mattis concluded his inaugural trip to Pakistan.
Mattis also met Minister of Defence Khurram Dastigir Khan, Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa and Director General of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lieutenant General Naveed Mukhtar.
"Mattis recognised Pakistan's sacrifices in the war against terrorism," White said, adding that Mattis emphasised the vital role that Pakistan can play in working with the US and others to facilitate a peace process in Afghanistan that brings stability and security to the region.
Abbasi said Pakistan, in its national interest, would continue to conduct intelligence-based operations all over the country to consolidate the gains achieved in the last four years.
"The prime minister reiterated that there are no safe havens in Pakistan and the entire nation was committed to its resolve on eradicating terrorism once and for all in all its forms and manifestations," according to a statement by the Prime Minister's Office here.
Abbasi said no other country benefits more from peace and stability in Afghanistan than Pakistan.
He agreed with Mattis that both Pakistan and the US have common stakes in securing peace and security in Afghanistan for the long term stability of the broader region.
He also appreciated the US resolve not to allow the use of Afghan soil against Pakistan.
Recalling the longstanding relationship with the US, he underlined the need for a broad-based engagement to strengthen partnership and enhance cooperation between the two countries.
Mattis stated that the "purpose of his visit was to find common grounds in order to create a positive, consistent and long-term relationship with Pakistan," the statement said.
He underscored the importance of continuing and deepening cooperation for the common objective of eliminating terrorism from the region.
Relations between the US and Pakistan plummeted after President Donald Trump announced his new Afghan policy in August and directly blamed Islamabad for supporting the Taliban and the Haqqani network.
"We have heard from Pakistani leaders that they do not support terrorism. So I expect to see that sort of action reflected in their policies," Mattis said ahead of his trip.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo had said Pakistan's policy of using terrorists as leverage against India and Afghanistan has not changed.
"Not yet," he said when asked to comment on the issue even as he warned Islamabad that the US will do "everything it can" to ensure that terror safe havens no longer exist in the country.
Pompeo told the Reagan National Defence Forum in California over the weekend that this is the message that Mattis was tasked to deliver to the Pakistani leadership.
The visit of Mattis comes about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately arrest and charge 26/11 mastermind Saeed, in the absence of which it warned Islamabad of repercussions.
JuD chief Saeed, who has an American bounty of USD 10 million on his head, walked free on November 24 after a court ordered an end to his 10-month detention.
Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in Pakistan and gain their understanding.
"The first thing I'm going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening," he said earlier, on his way to Pakistan.
Mattis is the first top American official to visit Pakistan after completion of the first 100 days of the US' new South Asia strategy unveiled by Trump on August 21.
PTI
Former Catalonian President Carles Puigdemont will appear in a court at Brussels on December 4 for his first hearing on the European arrest warrant issued against him by Spain.
Puigdemont's hearing near the Palais de Justice could continue through December 5, the media reported.
A Belgian judge summoned Puigdemont and four other dismissed members Antoni Comin, Meritxell Serret, Clara Ponsati, Lluis Puig of the Catalan government on December 4, one day prior to the start of campaigning for the upcoming Catalan elections scheduled for December 21.
Puigdemont, along with the four former leaders who have been with him in Belgium since October 30, have been on probation since November 5 while the Belgian judiciary considers the arrest warrants and their extradition.
The first hearing, held on November 17 behind closed doors, concluded with the Belgian prosecution requesting the execution of the arrest warrants against Puigdemont and the four leaders, but that they were still entitled to offer written evidence in their defence.
US President Donald Trump is closely monitoring the progress in his new South Asia Strategy, which gives a major role to India, and is very much engaged in its implementation, a senior administration official has said.
Trump had sought a major role for India in bringing peace in Afghanistan and ruled out a hasty withdrawal of troops from the war-torn nation while announcing his new Afghanistan and South Asia policy in August.
"The president has been very closely monitoring the progress of the South Asia strategy. He's very interested in any progress that has been made," a senior administration official said.
Trump had a meeting with his Defense Secretary Jim Mattis before he left on his visit to Pakistan. The defense Secretary is again likely to brief the president on his return.
On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly Session in New York in September, Trump met the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
"That was a good opportunity to hear from President Ghani on how the strategy was being received in Afghanistan," the official said.
Observing that Trump has been getting updates from his national security team on what's happening in Afghanistan, the official said the president is very much engaged and interested in how this strategy is progressing.
Asserting that the things are signs of encouragement in the implementation of the South Asia strategy, the official said it is moving in the right direction.
"We need to give more time for the strategy to take root," the official said.
"It's a multifaceted strategy. We're using all the tools that the US has its disposal military, economic, diplomatic.
All these parts of the strategy are important. They all need to work in tandem together. The president is very interested in keeping track of how the strategy is going. And he is receiving regular updates," the senior administration official said.
In his August 21 speech, Trump had said that terrorists who slaughter innocent people will find no glory in this life or the next.
"They are nothing but thugs, and criminals, and predators, and that's right losers. Working alongside our allies, we will break their will, dry up their recruitment, keep them from crossing our borders, and yes, we will defeat them, and we will defeat them handily," he had said.
"In Afghanistan and Pakistan, America's interests are clear: We must stop the resurgence of safe havens that enable terrorists to threaten America, and we must prevent nuclear weapons and materials from coming into the hands of terrorists and being used against us, or anywhere in the world for that matter," Trump said.
Announcing his strategy, Trump said a core pillar of his new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions.
"Another fundamental pillar of our new strategy is the integration of all instruments of American power diplomatic, economic, and military toward a successful outcome," he said.
Describing Pakistan as an important part of his strategy, Trump had said the US can no longer be silent about Pakistan's safe havens for terrorist organisations, the Taliban, and other groups that pose a threat to the region and beyond.
Pakistan has much to gain from partnering with our effort in Afghanistan. It has much to lose by continuing to harbor criminals and terrorists, he had said.
PTI
New drink and drug-driving stats have been revealed telling you where - and who - to avoid when out of the road this festive period.
For the previous two years Crewe has been handed the shameful crown of the UK city with the highest rate of drink and drug-driving offences... but that's not the case in 2017.
The unwanted gong of drink and drug-driving UK capital this year goes to Sunderland.
Drink-drive capital: A review of more than 7 million insurance quotes identified Sunderland a the location with the highest proportion of drivers with a conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs
Analysis of more than 7 million insurance quotes by comparison MoneySuperMarket has revealed which locations have the most drivers with over-the-limit convictions on their licence in the last 12 months and also highlighted the occupations with the most drink and drug drivers in the country.
According to the research, nearly three (2.91) in every 1,000 Mackem drivers have a drink or drug driving conviction on their their licence - an increase of 1.3 compared to last year.
Truro in Cornwall (2.6) and Coventry (2.53) follow in second and third place, with all three areas entering the top 10 for the dishonourable driving offences for the first time.
Crewe, which topped the charts in 2015 and 2016, dropped to sixth place, despite its number of convictions rising overall from 1.69 to 2.29 per 1,000 motorists.
With the three cities - Sunderland, Truro and Coventry - with the highest rate of drivers with over-the-limit black marks on their licences running the length of England, you're probably wondering where in the UK you'll be safest?
According to the review of insurance quotes, the haven from dangerous drink and drug-drivers is London - though that shouldn't come as much a surprise considering the higher use of public transport and the introduction of the night tube on Friday and Saturday evenings.
Almost 3 in 1,000 drivers with a Sunderland postcode had a drink-driving conviction
Sunderland topped the charts as the location with the highest rate of drivers with drink- or drug-driving convictions
Crewe, which has been named the drink-drive capital of the UK by MoneySuperMarket in 2015 and 2016 is sixth in 2017 - that''s despite offences for driving under the influence being higher in the city than last year
North London boasted the lowest rate of drink or drug driving convictions, with just 0.59 out of 1,000 drivers having a 'driving under the influence' blemish on their licence.
No less than five other London areas also feature in the list of the 10 areas with the lowest rate of drink- or drug-driving offences: North West, West, East, South East and South West London.
Outside London, Luton also features in the bottom 10, as did Bolton, Exeter and St Albans.
The full details of the results can be seen on this interactive UK map.
MoneySuperMarket's study of more than 7 million motor insurance quotes found that men were more likely than women to have a drink-driving conviction
Drivers between the age of 25 and 29 are most likely to have a 'driving under the influence' conviction
The data shows that drink driving convictions for the two youngest and two oldest age brackets declined between 2016 and 2017, though it increased in the middling years
MoneySupermarket's research also scrutinised the differences in drink- and drug-driving conviction rates by sex and age.
In the last 12 months, both genders have posted an increased rate of drink and drug-driving offences, though men are still more likely to have one of these convictions than women - 1.68 per 1,000 drivers compared to 1.20 respectively.
The conviction rate for drink or drug driving is the lowest for over-65s with 0.21 offences per 1,000 drivers. What might be surprising to some is that they're closely followed by 17 to 19-year-olds with just 0.25 convictions.
Drivers aged 25 to 29 saw the highest rate of offenders, with three per every 1,000 drivers.
The research looking at the occupations with the highest rate of drink-driving offences didn't make great reading for mature students or white van drivers
In terms of occupations, mature students living at home are most likely to have a drink or drug driving conviction, with a staggering 28.5 per 1,000.
Mature students living away from home were second most likely to have a drink or drug-driving conviction (16.5 per 1,000 drivers), followed by a raft of construction-related workers, including scaffolders, labourers, ground workers and builders, raising some concerns for the safety of white van drivers up and down the country.
Kevin Pratt, consumer affairs expert at MoneySuperMarket, said: 'Although our analysis shows that its a minority that are offending, its worrying to see that convictions have increased since last year.
'There are serious consequences if youre caught drink or drug driving, including a driving ban of at least a year and an unlimited fine, as well as a possible jail sentence of up to six months.
'Furthermore, an endorsement for drink or drug driving will sit on your licence for 11 years and youll have to declare the offence when you apply for car insurance for five years.'
Police forces around the UK will be conducting their festive drink-driving roadside checks this month, which will also include swabbing motorists to measure if drugs are in their system
Confused.com surveyed 2,000 drivers and found that more than a third of drivers had been involved in - or nearly involved in - an accident with a drunk driver on rural roads
Separate research by Confused.com suggested that drink drivers pose the most risk on rural roads, which is where the majority of accidents take place.
According to a survey of 2,000 drivers, almost 3 million (7 per cent) of UK motorists have been involved in a drink-driving related accident or near miss, with over a third (34 per cent) reporting this took place on a rural road the highest percentage of any road type.
The comparison website found that 44,740 motorists failed or refused breathalyser tests in 2016, according to feedback from 25 UK police forces.
Earlier this week, This is Money revealed the UK roads that registered the most collisions since 2010.
Firing line: London Stock Exchange chairman Donald Brydon
Sir Christopher Hohn is showing no sign of backing down in his campaign to oust Donald Brydon as chairman of the London Stock Exchange.
If Brydons corporate history, outlined in a circular from Hohns fund TCI, is any guide, then there is only one person qualified to take on the chief executives job vacated by Xavier Rolet.
Step forward Australian-born board veteran Philip Bowman.
Brydon was among the non-executives who ousted Tony Hales at Allied Domecq and replaced him with Bowman.
The LSE chairman was again among the directors who removed Ian Russell at Scottish Power in 2006 and yes, you guessed it, replaced him with Bowman.
And what did Bowman do with Allied Domecq and Scottish Power? He steered both into overseas hands selling Allied Domecq to French rival Pernod Ricard and Scottish Power to Spains Iberdrola.
Indeed, Bowman, who now works with Jon Moultons private equity outfit Better Capital, would be incredibly well placed to follow the Brydon dream of flogging a City crown jewel, the LSE, to a foreign buyer whatever the consequences for the UKs status as a financial centre. The central proposition of the TCI circular is that the LSE defence of Brydon is spurious.
Far from offering a stable future following Rolets abrupt departure, Brydon is the cause of disruption. He set the LSE on a costly and failed merger track and bungled the Rolet succession.
TCI points out there are at least three sound replacements for Brydon among the LSE non-executives qualified to chair Europes most important stock exchange.
They are David Nish, former chief executive of Standard Life, Stephen OConnor, a derivatives expert, and Mary Shapiro, the former chair of the Securities Exchange Commission in the US. Each would be a fit and proper chairman, offering a fresh start.
Tax cuts
Amid the tumult over the prosecution deal with Donald Trumps former national security advisor Michael Flynn, the passage of the Republican tax reform plan by the Senate went virtually unnoticed.
At the heart of the 479-page plan is the radical corporate tax rate cut from 38 per cent to 20 per cent intended to encourage US-based global firms to pay their taxes in America rather than park revenues overseas.
No one can be certain how the final version of the bill will turn out after it emerges from the conference between the House and Senate.
Most US fiscal bills tend to be Christmas-tree festooned with the baubles of individual lawmakers.
The bill is controversial because it seen as giving money to corporate America while taking it away from ordinary citizens.
There is a point here. America is the home of boardroom greed and lacks most of the governance constraints we have in Britain.
So it will also be an opportunity for executives to fill their boots as earnings rise, pushing up the value of bonus schemes.
The most serious criticism is that the reforms will add $1 trillion to an already ballooning fiscal deficit over the next decade. But is that really so?
The British experience is relevant to this. George Osborne began the task of lowering corporation taxes in 2010-11 when the rate was 28 per cent and revenues were 36.2billion.
In the current year, 2016-17, the corporate tax rate dropped to 20 per cent but income will surge to 55.1billion.
In spite of scepticism, supply-side economics looks to have worked.
Clearly the mechanics in the US are very different. It is still unclear where personal tax bands will end up because of differences between House and Senate bills. So there is no clarity, as yet, as to winners and losers.
One of the ways the lower rates will be paid for is by capping state property tax deductions from federal taxes at $10,000.
There are also questions as to whether cutting taxes, when stock markets are at record highs and the US economy is going at great guns, is sensible.
After the financial crisis there was much talk of building counter-cyclical buffers. Now the US is spraying petrol on a roaring fire.
Seasonal cheer
Congratulations to Paul Manduca, chairman of the Pru. His Christmas card is the first to arrive in the City Office.
It supports a brilliant cause, Place2Be, which provides mental health services to children in difficult circumstances. So much better than impersonal, email cards.
Film making is a risky business and before any cameras start rolling a visit to FFI Holdings is usually in order.
FFI is the worlds leading issuer of completion contracts.
They do what it says on the can. If a film is not completed or runs late, the contract kicks in and it is beholden on the contract issuer to make sure the film gets made or the backers get some or all of their investment back.
These contracts help offload risks to production budgets and timelines for financiers, as well as for FFI through long-standing insurance relationships, it said.
FFI has issued contracts on films like La La Land, starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone
Some of the most famous films ever made have been backed by FFI.
From the first Bond film, Dr No, in 1962 to The Hunger Games in 2012 and last years blockbuster La La Land, FFI has issued contracts on approximately 1,700 productions with gross budgets in excess of $17billion.
Having come up with the idea of completion contracts in the first place the group has an 80 per cent share of the market
Founded in 1950 in the UK, the HQ is now in Los Angeles with the first completion contracts recently signed in China.
Trading last year was good with underlying profits of $12.7million on revenues of $38.8million, up 9 per cent.
Those strong numbers helped FFI raise $35.6million when it listed on AIM in June.
Using that cash the emphasis has switched to ancillary services such as post production work and equipment rental.
FFI Holdings at a Glance AIM ticker: FFI Value: 238million Share price: 153p Listed at: 150p
November saw the acquisition of digital post-editing equipment rental group Cineworks Digital Studios, its first deal since listing on AIM.
EPS-Cineworks has a strong market presence in North America, especially in post-production work for television and independent projects.
Growth here is being driven by smaller content providers such as streaming companies that do not have post-production capabilities.
Sales were $9.4million in 2016 on which EPS-Cineworks made underlying profits of $2.7million.
EPS-Cineworks management is staying on and FFI sees many synergies between the business and Pivotal Post, which was acquired in February 2017. Kevin Hyman, Pivotal Posts chief executive, will manage the combined operation.
Steven Ransohoff, FFIs chief executive, said: [This] transaction underscores FFI's commitment to expanding its ancillary business offerings, in line with the diversification strategy we set out at the time of our IPO.
House broker Liberum said the acquisition will give FFI 50-60 per cent of the post-production market to add to its dominance in completion contracts.
FFI has also issued contracts on The Hunger Games (2012)
The Cineworks business is split 25 per cent theatrical and 75 per cent televisions, which is the mirror image of Pivotal.
Through its relationship with Spielberg, Pivotal also has some high tech equipment that it can share with EPS-Cineworks.
Post-production should be a growth market given the rise in the amount of content coming from streaming companies, who do not have traditional post production capabilities.
The business has an attractive EBITDA margin [profit] of 29 per cent, which can be increased though the synergies.
Liberum added the price for EPS-Cineworks looks modest and the broker has a target price of 182p. Shares were trading at 153p, valuing the company at around 238million.
A US hedge fund could make up to 500million from the collapse of heavily indebted care home chain Four Seasons.
Key creditor H/2 Capital Partners could take over the group within a fortnight after buying up most of the firm's debt.
Current Four Seasons owners Terra Firma are keen to do a deal and hand over the company to H/2. However, the two sides have fallen out over the future of an additional 24 care homes.
If a deal is not struck Four Seasons could go into administration. If it is done, H/2 would take over Four Seasons for a nominal sum.
Four Seasons care homes owners Terra Firma are keen to do a deal and hand over the chain to US hedge fund Key creditor H/2 Capital Partners
Either way it would take on a chain with estimated assets of 700million, but around 256million of Four Seasons debt it owns could be sold on or written off.
This would give H/2 around 444million. With interest already earned it would mean the hedge fund could make 500million from the chain.
Four Seasons houses around 17,000 residents across 343 homes but it has run in to financial trouble in recent years.
City financier Guy Hands, 58, owns Four Seasons via his Guernsey-based Terra Firma private investment group.
Former Lehman Brothers banker Spencer Haber, 49, runs 29billion New York -based H/2, which has spent the last two years buying Four Seasons' debt.
Four Seasons is on the brink of financial collapse and says it will be unable to pay a 26million interest payment due to H/2 on December 16.
A rescue plan is on the table that would see H/2 take over the business for a nominal sum and install Margaret Ford as chairman. She held the same role at rival Barchester.
But talks have stalled amid a major row over whether the extra 24 lucrative homes owned by Terra Firma should be included in the deal.
Both sides have accused each other of contributing to the delay and the homes could fall into administration if no agreement is reached by the time of the interest payment.
Four Seasons is understood to be still reviewing a proposal from H/2 to defer that payment.
Sources last night claimed agreement was delayed due to conditions such as Four Seasons having to pay restructuring fees, and H/2 being able to walk away during the first seven days.
The row appeared to deepen yesterday when Terra Firma accused H/2 of being unwilling to engage with negotiations. It claimed H/2 had refused face-to-face meetings and blocked emails.
Terra Firma urged H/2 to get on with taking over the homes. A spokesman said: 'We believe this outcome will deliver much-needed certainty for patients and employees of the Four Seasons group.'
An H/2 spokesman said it was 'totally focused on ensuring a transparent, fair and ultimately successful restructuring process for everyone involved'.
H/2 has stressed it 'cares deeply' about Four Seasons, its quality of care and the stability of the group. Care watchdog Care Quality Commission could block the homes from accepting new residents if it has concerns about the impact of the financial troubles on care.
Benny Higgins is joining the board of financial tech firm Kyckr
Departing Tesco Bank boss Benny Higgins is joining the board of a financial technology company as he moves on from mainstream banking.
The Scot, who turns 57 this month, will become chairman of Kyckr in March after he steps down as boss of Tesco Bank after a decade in charge.
Four-times married father-of-six Higgins hit the headlines last year when it emerged he had spent 18,000 on London taxis in just eight months as he was ferried to and from upmarket restaurants and private members clubs.
He was head of the retail bank at RBS, where he was accused of running off with his best friends wife, and later worked at toxic bank HBOS.
MBABANE Great stage presence, rhythmic energy and what you would say spiritually best describes last Saturdays show.
This was at Solanis Shisanayama. It is not every day that reggae fans get treated to a live show.
Often times, they have to wait for either the Bob Marley or Peter Tosh memorial shows, for them to watch live acts and that is why when acts like Ras Haitrm come to the country, they know that they cannot afford to miss out.
Performance
Upon his performance on stage, one would think that fun lovers were possessed as they couldnt control their excitement the moment they heard Ras Haitrms voice. One fan even said; Theres a name for what we are feeling right now, its hallelujah moments.
The existential angst that plagues your daily existence becomes a faint echo and in that moment there is only you and music, nothing else.
Despite the wet weather that almost ruined the night with heavy rain fall, fun lovers kept their cool and were patient enough to wait for it to clear before moving over to the dance floor.
The Mozambican reggae superstar delivered a two-hour long set with mostly what he termed, Rastafarian spiritual songs and dance hall music, taking the audience straight to the heart of Jamaica, where the genre was founded.
Flawless
The sound and beats were flawless and the audience loved it!
During his set, Ras Haitrm played bass drums, percussion and other traditional African instruments and in-between these he got to explain how he got the name Ras Haitrm.
Anointed
My name comes from Ethiopia, anointed by a Rasta friend, and embodies the meaning Man of God, reason why I am very spiritual and my music is sentimental too, he said.
The show which lasted hours proved to be a success, having had fun lovers dance from the time it started up until around 3 in the morning when everyone was getting ready to make their way back home.
MANZINI Has nyaope become the most famous drug in Swaziland?
Nyaope (also known as whoonga or wunga) is a highly addictive, dangerous and destructive street drug, which is common especially in South Africa. It is a fine white powder that is usually combined with marijuana (dagga) anti retroviral (ARV) drugs, among other components.
Many people have been appearing in court for being found in the illegal possession of dagga or in some instances, small amounts of cocaine.
However, a man shocked the court when he said he had been abusing nyaope which he bought from the bus rank.
Linda Tsabedze (25) of Bhekinkhosi was arrested by the police after he had stolen from his sisters home valuable items amounting to E40 000.
The accuseds sister, Phindile Tsabedze, told the court that her items, which included a Toyota engine (E5 000), tractor grass cutter (E10 000), brush cutting machine, refrigerator, car doors, fence, plates and blankets among other things disappeared from her home after her younger brother had visited. She said she went to the police station to report that her valuable items had been stolen and statements were recorded.
Phindile said upon her return, she was informed by one of her neighbours that her brother was seen carrying some of the items and leaving her home. Linda was eventually arrested and later charged with the theft of the items.
During his appearance in court before Magistrate Mthokozisi Dlamini, Linda revealed that he was addicted to nyaope and needed urgent rehabilitation.
He also admitted that he committed the theft offence and stole from his sister to support his drug addiction.
Your Worship, I am currently having difficulty quitting the drug and I need help. I have tried so many ways of getting clean and sober, however I seem to have failed. I would like the court to assist me find ways to be rehabilitated as I want to now go clean. I am tired of this drug as it has completely destroyed me and those around me, Linda said in court.
When asked where he got the drug from, Linda stated that he always bought it at the bus rank, near a popular eatery.
Magistrate Dlamini sentenced Linda to four years imprisonment without a fine option. The magistrate said he hoped that the correctional facility, which Linda would be sent to, was the best for rehabilitation and upon his release he would have been greatly assisted and clean.
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Troy
After suffering a stroke last year, Wilda Strong spent weeks in bed grappling with depression and uncertainty.
Before the stroke, the Troy resident worked with people with physical disabilities, helping them bathe, dress, take notes and maneuver safely around their homes. Now she was the one who needed help, forced to rely on a friend for assistance with the most basic tasks. She worried she wouldn't be able to find work.
"I wanted to give up every day," Strong said.
Friends encouraged her to enroll in the Jamison-Rounds Ready for Work program at YWCA of the Greater Capital Region. The Washington, D.C.-based organization works to end racism and empower women, and the group's chapter in Troy provides housing to 104 women and more than 50 children daily.
The program is designed to address barriers women face when seeking employment, such as limited work history, mental illness, literacy and academic issues, prior substance abuse or incarceration and domestic violence, with the ultimate goal of helping them achieve and maintain self-sufficiency.
Participants spend 12 weeks learning job and life skills, working on their resumes and cover letters, developing a five-year plan for their career goals and gaining confidence.
Strong forced herself to attend the classes and workshops. She was initially afraid to share her weaknesses and challenges with classmates and teachers, but over time she began to open up.
"I wanted to quit every day, but it gave me self-confidence," Strong said. "It made me feel more secure."
At a small ceremony on Thursday, Strong and her classmates received their certificates of completion in a gym at the YWCA in Troy. They held up cardboard displays, visual depictions of their future plans, while family and friends clapped and cheered. Public officials and staff praised their efforts.
"You were born with miraculous possibility, and that never goes away," Lisa Lagon, the YWCA-GCR board president, told the women. "Congratulations!"
"This is a testament to your hard work," said Troy Mayor Patrick Madden.
Strong's cardboard display included photos of smiling children and adults and the words "It takes a community." She hopes to return to working with people with physical disabilities, and eventually she may start her own company.
"I know how it feels to try to do things you're not capable of," Strong said. "I feel like I understand that now, and I want to help."
Since the program started in 2008, 176 women have graduated. They have gone on to start their own businesses, obtain their GED, work in various industries and advance to higher education.
Latisha Raymond started her own business, LNR Cleaning Services, after graduating from the program in April.
The Troy resident spent 15 years cleaning houses and hotels, earning between $9 and $10 an hour while raising two children. She dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur but said she didn't have the tools and resources to do it until she started the YWCA program.
Beyond helping her with paperwork, business cards and budgeting, teachers and staff helped Raymond's self-esteem grow. During the ceremony on Thursday, Raymond encouraged the new graduates to have confidence and continue asking for help.
"You gotta believe in yourself," she said.
Raymond is developing her client base and still pops in to YWCA to get advice and help with paperwork. While launching her own business has been frustrating at times, she is hopeful about the future.
"It changed me," Raymond said. "There are so many ups and downs, but I'm doing it. I'm doing it."
miszler@timesunion.com 518-454-5018 @madisoniszler
Washington
As the FBI's Russia investigation draws closer to him, President Donald Trump on Sunday unleashed an extraordinary assault on the nation's premier law enforcement agency, calling it a biased institution whose reputation for fairness was "in tatters."
In a series of early-morning tweets, Trump said the FBI's standing was now the "worst in history." The attack was one of the harshest in a generation on an independent agency that two days earlier had helped secure a guilty plea and a pledge of cooperation from the president's first national security adviser.
Current and former FBI officials, historians and lawmakers rebuked the president over his efforts to undermine the FBI's credibility as it investigates whether his campaign colluded with Russian officials to sway the 2016 election.
Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, admitted Friday that he had lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. As part of the bureau's inquiry, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is believed to be examining whether Trump obstructed justice by firing James Comey, the FBI director, who was overseeing the inquiry.
Comey has said Trump asked him to drop the investigation into Flynn. But on Sunday, the president condemned Comey as a liar, saying that "I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn" and that Comey had harmed the bureau and its employees. He also accused the bureau's agents of spending years pursuing a "phony and dishonest" investigation into the email server of his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton.
Thomas O'Connor, president of the association representing FBI agents, defended their integrity in a statement. "FBI agents are dedicated to their mission," he said, asserting that they demonstrated "unwavering integrity and professionalism" on the job. "Suggesting otherwise is simply false," he added.
Trump's fury at those investigating him stunned even those with fresh memories of his repeated attempts over the past year to disparage intelligence agencies, the State Department and other parts of his government. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said the frenzied nature of the president's tweets suggested that he knew that Mueller was building an obstruction of justice case against him.
"I see it in the hyperfrenetic attitude of the White House, the comments every day, the continual tweets," Feinstein said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.
Eric H. Holder Jr., who was President Barack Obama's first attorney general, responded to the president's tweets with one of his own defending the bureau. "You'll find integrity and honesty at FBI headquarters and not at 1600 Penn Ave right now," Holder wrote.
As he sought to discredit the Russia inquiry, which he has long called a political "witch hunt," Trump on Sunday seized on reports that Mueller had removed a veteran FBI agent because he sent text messages that appeared to express views critical of Trump.
In several tweets, the president harshly criticized the agent, Peter Strzok, who had previously helped lead the 2016 investigation into whether Clinton had mishandled classified information on her private email account. Strzok is considered one of the bureau's most experienced and trusted counterintelligence investigators.
"Report: 'ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE,'" Trump said in his 10th tweet Sunday, which by the early evening had been retweeted more than 24,000 times. "Now it all starts to make sense!"
Most presidents enter the Oval Office with an instinct to defend and promote the integrity and capabilities of the nation's law enforcement agencies. Trump arrived with a different compulsion, fueled by a belief that intelligence and law enforcement officials were stoking questions about the legitimacy of his election victory.
By suggesting as he has before that the FBI and other agencies are motivated by politics, Trump again embraced the kind of suspicions that feed conspiracy theories about a "deep state" operating with a secret bias against him.
Still, even though Trump's attacks on government agencies are now a familiar theme, former FBI officials and veteran observers of the agency said they were surprised at the ease with which the president sought to defend himself by attacking the reputations of Comey, Mueller, Strzok and the 35,000 people who work at the FBI.
SCHOHARIE - A Herkimer man was arrested on early Sunday morning for allegedly crashing his truck into a home on Barton Hill Road, New York State Police said.
Timothy S. Sims, 54, allegedly crashed into the house at 11:35 p.m. Saturday with his 2004 Ford F350. While driving west, he veered off on the north shoulder, striking a tree and two lawn tractors before slamming into a home at 381 Barton Hill Road.
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Quiz time: How many state senators does it take to create a majority?
If you answered 32, you're right. If you answered 38, you might also be right.
With last week's announcement of a reunification plan to achieve a Democratic majority in the Senate came talk of special elections, concessions and the setting aside of egos. But less discussed were the rules, which could become central to who controls the chamber.
The current Senate rules are set for 2017 and 2018. Under the rules, the majority coalition is comprised of the Republican Conference and the Independent Democratic Conference, with the leaders acting as majority coalition leaders.
If the mainline Democrats, IDC and Sen. Simcha Felder form a 32-member majority next year likely after the state budget is passed, when special elections to fill two soon-to-be-vacant Democratic seats are anticipated the idea is that the mainline Democrats and IDC would form their own majority coalition and their leaders would be co-leaders.
That would necessitate a rules change.
Simple enough? Not exactly.
It would seem that a majority of senators can make a motion to suspend the rules. But the rules state that "passing any such rules change shall require an affirmative vote of three-fifths of all senators election."
Translation: You need 38 senators to change the rules. Call it the "Rule of 38."
It gets messier.
While Republicans could stand by the three-fifths requirement, Democrats contend that once the rules have been suspended, new rules can be enacted by the same simple 32-vote majority.
If such bickering occurs, it's likely that senators will go to court hoping a judge decides who has control.
"Very infrequently do (the courts) like to get involved in internal legislative procedures," said one former Senate staffer who survived the 2009 coup. "The legislatures are empowered to determine the rules of their own house."
Keep in mind that the 2019 session, with the 2018 elections perhaps bolstering one side of the aisle or the other, is a different time entirely with a chance to write a potentially different set of rules.
Progressives chide unity deal
Chamber rules aren't the only hurdle to placating rank-and-file Democrats who have been gnashing their teeth over the current Senate makeup.
The Progressive Caucus within the state party had been pushing for the party to commit to chipping in money to pick up Senate seats and to coaxing Democrats in the Senate to come together as one.
"If they want to come together as a Democratic conference and then figure out within that Democratic conference what the leadership is, that's fine," caucus Chair Rachel Lavine told Capitol Confidential. "To institutionalize the IDC is just not acceptable."
Lavine wasn't alone in her criticisms of the way the deal shapes things up.
A number of advocacy groups demanded earlier in the week that the governor call special elections that will fall in mid-March so a Democratic majority is in place for state budget talks. Those talks would just be getting started in full at that time.
And while the IDC demanded that all Democrats agree to supporting myriad progressive legislation before the deal goes through, more than two dozen progressive groups took issue with rewarding the IDC "for SEVEN years of enabling the GOP." Those groups still seem hellbent on supporting primaries IDC senators.
But politics is about compromise, right? And compromise isn't going to please everyone.
"It depends on the extent of the compromise," said Elisa Sumner, the Progressive Caucus co-chair and Dutchess County Democratic chair. "While I don't think the IDC should be rewarded, if the Democratic caucus itself decides to have, say, two heads instead of one ... and that included Jeff Klein and Andrea Stewart-Cousins and that was a vote of all of them to do that, then that's a democratic process. But if the IDC is allowed to still exist, that's a different story."
mhamilton@timesunion.com 518-454-5449 @matt_hamilton10
NEW HAVEN Adults 65 or older accounted for 40 percent of all fire-related deaths in 2015 despite only constituting 15 percent of the U.S. population, with the relative risk of dying in a fire for senior citizens being 2.7 times higher than for the general population, according to the U.S. Fire Administration Fire Risk Report.
Orange Fire Marshal Timothy Smith said the disparity is relatively consistent throughout the nation, noting that areas with higher senior populations will have higher rates for fire-related deaths.
A lot of its attributed to mobility issues, disabilities, reactionary skills arent there like they are with adults or young children or they cant self-evacuate or extricate themselves from a burning building, he said.
Now Playing: The Winter Holidays. More time to spend with family and friends.Unfortunately there are significantly more house fires nationwide. Here's how to avoid them. Video: Veuer
For Connecticut it is not clear if the specific nationwide numbers apply, due to missing information. Seven out of the 20 fire-related fatalities listed in 2016 in Connecticut do not list the individuals age. However, a state report on injury and death from 2000-04 showed the rate of death from fire for people 50 and older was about 4 times higher than that for people ages 10 to 49. There were an average of 30 fire-related deaths annually in those years, the state report noted.
With advancing age, physical and mental capabilities decline, making it more difficult for older adults to clearly see, smell and hear, increasing the risk of death or injury from fire due to decreased senses, the fire administration report noted.
Older people also can have physical disabilities or limitations that hinder their mobility, making it more difficult for them to react to the threat of a fire the way younger adults can.
The October wildfires in the heart of California wine country claimed 43 victims, and didnt discriminate by age, killing young and old. But Charles and Sara Rippey, who was confined to a wheelchair, did not make it out. The couple, married for 75 years, lived in Napa for the past 35, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, a sister Hearst newspaper of the New Haven Register. They died together in their home, unable to escape the wildfires.
Associated Press
Their bodies were found by police inside the charred ruins of their Silverado Country Club condominium on Westgate Drive. He was 100, and she was 98, according to the Chronicle.
Rippey apparently died trying to save his wife, one of their children told KPIX TV.
Alzheimers disease, dementia and other disorders that affect mental functions also increase the risk of injury or death from a fire due to erratic or even potentially dangerous behavior and the inability to recognize a hazard, according to the report.
You dont want to think, OK, Ill climb out of the window, if youre a person confined to a bed or have a walker or if you have difficulty walking normally. You have to make your plans reasonable, said New Haven Fire Chief John Alston.
To compound this problem, older adults are more inclined to accidentally start a fire than younger adults. Sometimes, they are close to the source of a flame, and their clothes or bedding ignites, according to Smith.
Cooking fires tend to be very common with the senior population because they forget they leave the stove on, and they walk away. Maybe, theres an early onset of dementia or other sort of mental issues going on. Or theyre cooking with a bathrobe and the bathrobe catches fire because they arent aware of it, he said.
Heating, in particular, also represents an elevated fire danger to older adults, who frequently feel cold. When the central heating source of a home does not work properly, Alston said older adults will often rely on temporary sources of heat, such as legal or illegal portable space heaters, fireplaces or even cooking ovens.
Its a difficult population to try to change their evacuation skills, but detection doubles your chance, doubles everyones chances, of escaping a fire, Smith said. So early detection of a fire is probably the best thing for the senior population. The sooner they know about, the sooner they can be made of aware it, the sooner they can start the self-evacuation to protect themselves.
Smoke alarms are present in most homes, having saved many lives since the mid-1970s when their use was widely encouraged for the first time. While the number of senior citizens living in housing without smoke alarms or with alarms that do not work is not well-documented, Smith said senior citizens may not have access to smoke detectors and other equipment in poorer populations due to their inability to afford the detectors and/or the batteries.
Cromwell Town Councilman Al Waters, 74, said he changes his smoke detector batteries religiously twice a year. Thats the big thing, he said of the simple action fire officials urge people to do during the Daylight Saving Time change.
The American Red Cross has even coined the phrase, Time to Turn and Test.
Waters said he is also vigilant about making sure passageways in his home are clear. I dont keep the areas of exit cluttered, Waters said.
Often during emergencies, the elderly especially can become very disorientated, he said. Any impediments will make it difficult to make it outside to safety. Many may not even realize portions of their homes could be fire hazards, he said.
Im out every day moving, Waters said. I just cant sit idle. There are people that, if theyre getting 60 years or older, probably their reflexes are not as fast.
Waters said because hes so active, he has always taken the normal precautions when it comes to fire safety.
West Haven Fire Department Chief Jim OBrien said residential sprinkler systems also help to reduce the risk of deaths and injuries, homeowner insurance premiums and uninsured property losses. While many homes do not have automatic extinguishing systems, despite them being found in hotels and businesses, OBrien said there is a major movement in the U.S. fire service to require sprinklers in all new homes.
Smith said senior citizens are considered a target population for public education and intervention, explaining that as much as fire departments visit kids at schools and teach them the basics of fire safety, they also go to senior centers to teach senior citizens about senior fire safety and home escape.
What were finding is when the seniors call us to come in and do a presentation, they want us there. So theyre truly interested in the subject and they want to learn it, as opposed to kids where the teachers are telling them they have to be there, he said. Thats a huge gap in between there. So a lot of these people, theyre upcoming seniors, they havent really had any fire safety education as theyre entering their golden years.
jessica.lerner@hearstmediact.com; @jesslerner on Twitter
Just days after the tragic death of a Nenagh woman whose use of a drug was withheld because of a row between its manufactures and the HSE, the State agency has agreed to fund its use.
According to media reports this Monday, the HSE has agreed to cover the administration costs of Respreezza, a therapy known to slow the progression of genetic emphysema.
A spokesperson told the Tipperary Star that the HSE will cover the cost of administering the drug to those who were on the original Respreeza trial for a transition period of six months.
"We are concerned about the impact on the patients of the companys decision to abruptly halt the supply of a drug that they had provided for a considerable period. So the decision is to allow the patients remain on the drug while they transition to an alternative care pathway," said the spokesperson.
Marion Kelly, 53, a grandmother from Puckane and Nenagh, died on Friday.
Ms Kelly, who was being treated for Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, was the second Respreeza user to die within two weeks.
As part of a 21-person trial group, Ms Kelly and Anna Cassidy from Donegal, had been on Respreeza for 11 years.
However, for the past month, none of them had been able to access it because of a row between the HSE and manufacturer CSL Behring over who should pay the administration fee.
Gerry McElvaney, the patients respiratory physician, said he was very worried that two of our patients have died.
However, he said that he was not saying they died because they were off the drug, but if theyd been on it, they would have felt they had done all we could to keep them alive.
Meanwhile, Johnny Hannan, who has Alpha-1 and is spokesperson for the A1 Action Group, told the Irish Examiner he was told by the HSE on Saturday that it would cover the administration cost for the next six months when CSL is due to begin another trial, though with no guarantee all the patients will qualify.
However, the HSE would not be administrating Respreeza, so patients are unclear as to how and when it might happen.
Prof McElvaney said the Alpha One Foundation, of which he is chair, would contact the HSE first thing to iron out how the drug will be administered. Ideally we would like it done in patients homes, particularly at this time of year, he said.
However if it came to it, he would administer the drug in Beaumont Hospital, where he is based.
The State has refused to reimburse the drug which costs about 84,000 per patient per annum.
Meanwhile, the Alpha1 Foundation told the Tipperary Star in a statement that they were very sorry to hear of Marions passing and offered their deepest sympathy to her family and friends.
"We will continue to offer our full support to all the Alpha One Patients at this difficult time," the statement said.
Ms Kelly's funeral took place on Sunday in Puckane Church, followed by burial in Cloughprior Cemetery.
Irelands top retailers and brands gathered at Dublins Royal Marine Hotel on the night of Wednesday 22nd November to attend the prestigious ceremony. Now in its 17th year, the C-Store Awards are the only comprehensive and independently judged business accolades for the convenience store sector.
SPAR, Tipperary Town Plaza, was honoured on the night as it was awarded with the Best Impulse Offering 2017.
Together with returning master of ceremonies Marty Whelan, ShelfLife welcomed more than 400 guests from across the industry. A total of 29 awards were presented, celebrating the industrys finest stores and people in a diverse range of categories.
Congratulating the Tipperary store, Colin Donnelly, SPAR Sales Director said: We would like to extend our congratulations to the team at SPAR, Tipperary Town Plaza on winning this prestigious national title. It is their relentless drive and ambition that sets them apart from their peers in a marketplace which is already internationally recognised as setting the standards in convenience retailing. The store and staff are very deserving of this industry accolade and they are great champions for the SPAR brand.
According to ShelfLife Publisher John McDonald, the standards are up across the board this year. There are a number of very important highlights from this years awards scheme. Standards have improved across the board, and there was a discernible percentage increase in the average score of all stores that entered. For more information please contact Fionnuala Carolan at Fcarolan@bwg.ie or 086 0412915.
Tipperary TD's, Jackie Cahill and Michael Lowry, have questioned the new Chairperson of Bord na Mona Geoffrey Meagher and have stressed the need for the redundancy process at Littleton to be brought to a satisfactory conclusion, a head of a vital meeting in Prtlaoise tomorrow (Tuesday).
Fianna Fail's Deputy Cahill, took the company to task for the unacceptable and unsatisfactory wind down of the Littleton Plant and raised his deep unease and concerns at a meeting of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment this week in Leinster House - a committee of which Deputy Lowry is also a member.
I challenged the new Chairperson Designate on three core issues: 1) the need for a fair redundancy package that reflects the loyalty and commitment of the workers over many decades, 2) the lack of planning for future employment at the site, and 3) the proposed 60 million US investment to produce wood chip for import back in to Ireland, Deputy Cahill said.
Deputy Lowry, meanwhile said that the company has an opportunity to conclude the redundancy process in an efficient manner by engaging in a generous way with the workers unions when they meet in Portlaoise. And, he encouraged the management to be generous in their offer in keeping with the level of loyalty, commitment and dedication to the areas which the workers have shown through many years.
[December 04, 2017] Government of Canada Invests in Green Jobs for Youth in the Natural Resource Sectors
OTTAWA, Dec. 4, 2017 /CNW/ - Creating green jobs ensures that the natural resource sectors remain a source of opportunity and prosperity in a world that increasingly values sustainable practices and low-carbon processes, while alleviating anticipated shortages of skilled workers by offering the next generation a real and fair chance at success. The Honourable Jim Carr, Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, today announced that the Government of Canada is investing more than $16 million to create 1,200 green jobs for Canadian youth in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in the natural resource sectors, a tenfold increase in NRCan's Science Technology Internship Program. The green jobs supported by the Science and Technology Internship Program, under the Government of Canada's Youth Employment Strategy (YES), will help the development of Canada's natural resources by enhancing the employability skills o workers aged 15 to 30 in STEM, thereby increasing the number of skilled young Canadians in the workforce and advancing Canada's Innovation Agenda and working toward its climate change goals.
The Government of Canada renewed its commitment to youth employment in Budget 2017 by announcing $395.5 million over three years to further expand the YES and continue to deliver 15,000 new green jobs. Each year, 11 federal departments and agencies including NRCan invest more than $330 million through the Youth Employment Strategy to help young people gain the skills and experience they need to find and keep good jobs. Quotes
"Canadian youth have the talent and drive to succeed in the labour market. The Government of Canada's continued investment in green jobs through the Youth Employment Strategy will help them transition from school to work and kick-start their careers and drive Canada's green future." The Honourable Jim Carr
Minister of Natural Resources Related Products Green Jobs Science and Technology Internship Program (STIP)
Backgrounder Follow us on Twitter: @NRCan (http://twitter.com/nrcan)
NRCan's news releases and backgrounders are available at www.news.gc.ca. SOURCE Natural Resources Canada
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[December 04, 2017] McKesson Canada announces the acquisition of Well.ca
TORONTO, Dec. 4, 2017 /CNW Telbec/ - McKesson Canada today announced the acquisition of Well.ca, bringing an offering of online commerce capabilities and a digital experience to McKesson Canada's retail assets, including Rexall Drug Store, and expanding its customer base. With this acquisition, McKesson Canada's retail operations and Well.ca will be better positioned to service customers through a strengthened portfolio of technology, distribution and innovation. "Today's customer wants a digital experience," said Domenic Pilla, CEO, McKesson Canada. "Combined with McKesson Canada's distribution network and retail footprint, patients and customers will have convenient access and more choices to achieve their healh and wellness goals."
Well.ca is Canada's leading online destination for health, wellness, natural and baby products and has been ranked in the top 5% of customer experience in Canada for the last three consecutive years. Well.ca's focus on the customer aligns with McKesson Canada's approach to patient care through efficiency and coordination across the supply chain. "Well.ca's "digital-first" approach to retail has continuously pushed the boundaries of the customer experience in Canada," said Rebecca McKillican, CEO, Well.ca. "Together with McKesson Canada, we will be able to establish new business relationships and accelerate our mission to help our customers live healthier and happier lives."
Well.ca and McKesson Canada have been working together since its inception in 2008 and McKesson Canada has become one of Well.ca's most trusted partners. Well.ca will operate as a distinct business within McKesson Canada, while retaining its existing brand and remain headquartered in Guelph, Ontario. About McKesson Canada Founded more than 100 years ago, McKesson Canada is dedicated to delivering vital medicines, supplies and information technologies that enable the health care industry to provide patients better, safer care. Our solutions empower pharmacies, manufacturers, hospitals and other health care institutions by enabling them to get closer to the millions of patients they serve every single day, while contributing to the quality and safety of care in Canada. About Well.ca Well.ca is a proudly Canadian company that's passionate about our customers, our business, and the products we offer. At Well.ca, we believe that Canadians should never have to compromise on the health, wellness, baby and beauty products that they choose for themselves and their families. With over 40,000 curated products, thousands of peer reviews, and Canada's largest assortment of green and natural brands, we make it easy to make choices you can trust. SOURCE MCKESSON CANADA
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[December 03, 2017] Dean Ward Joins Exiger as Vice President and Head of Business Development Asia Pacific
NEW YORK and HONG KONG, Dec. 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Exiger, the global regulatory, financial crime, risk and compliance company, announced the appointment of Dean Ward to the post of Vice President and Head of Business Development for the Asia Pacific region based in Exiger's Hong Kong office. Mr. Ward joined Exiger from Thomson Reuters, where he led the Risk Solution Sales Specialist team in Hong Kong and North Asia. An established risk and compliance technology business leader, Mr. Ward has held senior business development roles, overseeing regional sales teams throughout the Asia Pacific region, with deep experience in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Southeast Asia, India, and Australia. Prior to Thomson Reuters, Mr. Ward held management and research positions with IntegraScreen and Hill & Associates Ltd. "Dean is a recognized leader in the due diligence space in the Asia Pacific region, having spent the last decade helping the world's largest banks, software companies, energy giants, and pharmaceutical manufacturers develop robust anti-money laundering (AML), anti-fraud, and know your customer (KYC) programs," said Arun Banerjee, Exiger Managing Director and Chif Revenue Officer. "Dean will play a critical role in helping us build out our regional sales team and driving the expansion of our business in the Asia Pacific region."
As Vice President and Head of Business Development, Mr. Ward will be responsible for growing and expanding Exiger's due diligence, technology, global investigations and financial crime compliance businesses in the Asia Pacific market. "The rapid growth trajectory Exiger has already demonstrated in the Asia Pacific region has made it clear that the company's unique mix of superior technology and deep domain expertise is striking a chord with risk and compliance professionals in every industry," said Mr. Ward. "I look forward to the opportunity to help the company dramatically increase its Asian footprint as we demonstrate the value of our capabilities to ever-larger numbers of customers."
Mr. Ward holds a BA in Development Studies from the University of London. About Exiger Exiger is a global regulatory and financial crime, risk and compliance company. Exiger arms financial institutions, multinational corporations and governmental agencies with the practical advice and technology solutions they need to prevent compliance breaches, respond to risk, remediate major issues and monitor ongoing business activities. Exiger works with clients worldwide to assist them in effectively managing their critical challenges while developing and implementing the policies, procedures and programs needed to create a sustainable compliance environment. A global authority on regulatory compliance, the company also oversees some of the world's most complex court-appointed and voluntary monitorships in the private and public sectors, including the monitorship of HSBC. Exiger has four principal business units being: Exiger Advisory; Exiger Diligence; Exiger Government Services; and Exiger Tech, including AI-based automated due diligence solutions DDIQ and Insight 3PM. Exiger operates through offices in New York City, Silver Spring (DC Metro), Miami, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Contacts: U.S.
John Roderick
[email protected]
631-584-2200 Europe
James Rossiter
[email protected]
44 0203 195 3240 Logo - http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/612036/Exiger_Logo.jpg SOURCE Exiger
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[December 03, 2017] Infosys Appoints Salil S. Parekh as CEO and Managing Director
BANGALORE, India, Dec. 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Infosys announced today that its Board of Directors has appointed Salil S. Parekh as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director (CEO & MD) of the Company effective January 2, 2018. Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/610722/Infosys_Logo.jpg Commenting on the appointment of Mr. Parekh, Mr. Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of the Board said, "We are delighted to have Salil joining as the CEO & MD of Infosys. He has nearly three decades of global experience in the IT services industry. He has a strong track record of executing business turnarounds and managing very successful acquisitions. The Board believes that he is the right person to lead Infosys at this transformative time in our industry. The Board is also grateful to Pravin for his leadership during this period of transition." Ms. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairperson of the Nomination & Remuneration Committee, stated, "After a comprehensive global search effort, we are pleased to appoint Salil as the CEO & MD. He was the top choice from a pool of highly qualified candidates. With his strong track record and extensive experience, we believe, we have the right person to lead Infosys." Mr. Parekh joins Infosys from Capgemini where he was a member of the Group Executive Board. He has Master of Engineering degrees in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Technology degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Mr. U B Pravin Rao will step down as the interim CEO and Managing Director effective January 2, 2018 and will continue as Chief Operating Officer and a whole-time Director of the Company. About Infosys Infosys is a global leader in technology services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countrie to create and execute strategies for their digital transformation. From engineering to application development, knowledge management and business process management, we help our clients find the right problems to solve, and to solve these effectively. Our team of 198,000+ innovators, across the globe, is differentiated by the imagination, knowledge and experience, across industries and technologies that we bring to every project we undertake.
Visit http://www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise thrive in the digital age. Safe Harbor
Certain statements in this press release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017. These filings are available at http://www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. In addition, please note that any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of the date of this press release. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law. Media contacts:
Asia Pacific
Sarah Gideon
Infosys, India
+91-80-4156-3998
[email protected]
EMEA
Margherita Di Cerbo
Infosys, Europe
+44(0)2075162748
[email protected]
Americas
Chiku Somaiya
Infosys, USA
+1-408-375-2722
[email protected] SOURCE Infosys
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[December 03, 2017] Inuitive and SoftBank to Collaborate on AI and IoT
RA'ANANA, Israel and TOKYO, December 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Inuitive Ltd. (Inuitive) and SoftBank Corp. (SoftBank), a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. (TOKYO: 9984), today announced that they have agreed to collaborate through the development of artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning (DL) and advanced 3D sensing with computer vision capabilities for future IoT. This collaboration will draw from the expertise of both companies in AI by leveraging Inuitive's existing and future vision processors and its AI framework with SoftBank's IoT platforms, which offer advanced heterogeneous processing capabilities for embedded products. The companies expect the collaboration to drive the popularity and development of smart IoT devices and systems. Devices such as IoT are becoming more intelligent with the proliferation of AI. Implementing AI on the device provides a number of advantages over current market implementations, enabling edge devices to provide human-like interaction while keeping consumer market price tag. Additional benefits of on-chip AI include real-time performance, privacy protection and longer operation time. "To develop an AI framework, it takes efforts from players in multiple domains," said Mr. Shlomo Gadot, founder and chief executive officer, Inuitive. "The strategic collaboration between Inuitive and SoftBank will advance on-device intelligence by leveraging Inuitive's advanced technologies and SoftBank market proven technologies. Together we'll push the performace envelope and extend AI to places that are currently beyond reach. Our strategic collaboration will become a turning point for the whole on-chip AI industry".
"SoftBank has been conducting research in AI over a decade," said Hironobu Tamba, Vice President, Head of Smart IoT Division, SoftBank. "We look forward to the results of our collaboration with Inuitive to further accelerate new and exciting capabilities of on-chip AI for millions of devices". Currently, SoftBank is focused on optimizing the high-end platforms to accelerate AI products use cases in the areas of computer vision and neural networks and is researching broader executions in the areas of Objects recognition, Scene reconstruction, SLAM and power management. Inuitive is a leading company in vision processing and its applications. It plays an important role in deep learning algorithm innovation. The company's leading technology in deep learning makes it possible to innovate and develop a variety of algorithms with low cost and fast response time. Inuitive has also made breakthroughs in sensing technologies. Its strategic collaboration with SoftBank is expected to drastically improve the speed and efficiency of combining system with chipset, making Inuitive's AI technology more pervasive.
About Inuitive INUITIVE (http://www.inuitive-tech.com) Inuitive is the leading fabless semiconductor company in the area of 3D imaging. With the NU4000, a superior multi-core vision processor that supports 3D Imaging, it optimizes consumer experiences and enhances competitive advantages in the areas of Robots, Drones, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality to name just a few. INUITIVE intelligent offering combines algorithms, ASIC and System solution to realize the AI practice, enabling devices to acquire more human capabilities. With AI at its core, The INUITIVE platform also includes a 3D Depth Sensing Computer Vision processor and powerful deep learning capabilities to enable smart devices to become even smarter. About SoftBank SoftBank Corp., a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. (TOKYO: 9984), provides mobile communication, fixed-line communication and Internet connection services to customers in Japan. Leveraging synergies with other companies in the SoftBank Group, SoftBank Corp. aims to transform lifestyles through ICT and expand into other business areas including IoT, robotics and energy. To learn more, please visit http://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/group/sbm/ Contact:
Oriane Morley
Inuitive
+972-54-261-4671
[email protected]
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[December 04, 2017] WISeKey launches ISTANA PKI for IoT to Secure the Automobile Industry
WISeKey launches ISTANA PKI for IoT to Secure the Automobile Industry ISTANA PKI Integrates WK QuoVadis PKI with VaultIC hardware Secure Elements tailored to the needs of IoT ecosystems
ZUG, GENEVA, Switzerland - December 4, 2017 - WISeKey International Holding Ltd (WISeKey) (SIX:WIHN), a leading Swiss cybersecurity and IoT solutions company, today announced that it has launched its advanced ISTANA PKI platform specifically tailored to the needs of IoT ecosystems.
ISTANA PKI platform allows smart car manufactures to validate the authenticity of different vehicle components. Certificate-based security also protects onboard communication between vehicle components and enables secure over-the-air software updates. Additionally, authentication certificates can be used by employees, dealers and suppliers to access car components to diagnose mechanical/technical issues and update software, from any location. Finally, the ISTANA PKI platform allows users to securely interact with a car's smart features using smartphones and other devices.
Currently, WISeKey is working with several smart car manufacturers and its ISTANA PKI platform is already active in several large-scale projects. A recent example is a strategic contract signed with a leading European automobile manufacturer, cementing its role in the Connected Car sector. The agreement includes the integration of WISeKey IoT and PKI with the manufacturer's connected car solutions allowing them to authenticate legitimate car components and also enable owners to securely interact with the car's smart features.
WISeKey's total identifiable 5-year ISTANA revenues from the car manufacturing industry are expected to be in excess of CHF 30 Million, of which approximately CHF 2.5 Million and CHF 7.0 Million are expected to be realized in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
Virtually all new cars on the market today include electronic technologies that could pose vulnerabilities to hacking or privacy intrusions if data security is not addressed. Embedded WISeKey hardware security in the car protects the "identity" of each device, prevents unauthorized tampering, and protects the privacy and security of the vast amount of data these devices generate. BI Intelligence expects 94 million connected cars to be sold in 2021 (with 82% to be connected cars), representing a compound annual growth rate of 35% from 21 million connected cars sold in 2016.
A fundamental principle behind the security of WISeKey Semiconductors is that its chips not only control how devices perform under normal conditions, but also control how these devices react when attacked or tampered with in any way, including self-destruction. WISeKey Semiconductor chips are designed to authenticate individual car components within the vehicle itself, ensue that only legitimate software is installed in the car, authenticate users and ensure that only legitimate users have access to the connected car functions and encrypt data to make it tamperproof and private.
Thomas Moretti, WISeKey's Senior VP of Signing Services and IoT PKI, said, "Leveraging this heritage, the new generation ISTANA PKI provides complete identity lifecycle management for IoT ecosystems. Provided as software or a managed service, ISTANA PKI offers a platform that meets the highest standards needed to issue, manage and validate digital credentials for IoT, and is scalable to support environments with hundreds of millions of devices, by leveraging WISeKey's RoT strategy."
"As cars continue to evolve, essentially becoming motorized computers, they are vulnerable to the very same threats and attacks as home computers, laptops and smartphones. Unless appropriate cybersecurity measures are implemented, hackers can remotely access the vehicle's computer system, manipulate the brakes, engine, and transmission. Our technology is designed to help verify legitimate car systems, protect the data they create and avoid malicious hacking," said Carlos Moreira, CEO of WISeKey.
Added IoT Security from WISeKey Semiconductors In the network world, valuable encryption keys are protected in special cryptographic hardware called Secure Elements that prevent the unauthorized use or export of keys, ensure consistent handling of encryption, and even allow critical pieces of software to run in a protected environment. Examples include the secure chip on smartcards, the SIM in cell phones and encryption chips in major telecommunications devices such as Internet routers and switches.
WISeKey Semiconductor brings a 25-year heritage delivering certified Secure Elements in the most risk-sensitive applications including government ID cards and passports, credit cards and Pay TV access cards, and specialty crypto tokens. WISeKey Semiconductor's VaultIC chips are specifically tailored to the needs of IoT devices which often have low power capabilities and the need to be securely updateable in the field. Bernard Vian, General Manager of WISeKey Semiconductor, said, "Through QuoVadis Istana PKI and VaultIC, WISeKey is the only vendor able to provide both the PKI and hardware Secure Elements tailored to the Root of Trust needs of IoT and with a proven track record in delivering secure solutions to IoT manufacturers and ecosystems."
# # #
About WISeKey: WISeKey (SIX Swiss Exchange: WIHN) is a leading global cybersecurity company currently deploying via a Virtual Platform large scale digital identity ecosystems. WISeKey's Swiss based cryptographic Root of Trust ("RoT") and IoT Microchips provide secure authentication and identification, in both physical and virtual environments, for the Internet of Things, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. The WISeKey RoT serves as a common trust anchor to ensure the integrity of online transactions among objects and between objects and people. For more information, visit www.wisekey.com.
To receive WISeKey's latest news, subscribe to our Newsletter or visit the WISeKey Investors Corner.
Press and investor contacts: WISeKey International Holding Ltd
Company Contact: Carlos Moreira
Chairman & CEO
Tel: +41 22 594 3000
[email protected] WISeKey Investor Relations (US)
Contact: Lena Cati
The Equity Group Inc.
Tel: +1 212 836-9611
[email protected] Disclaimer: This communication expressly or implicitly contains certain forward-looking statements concerning WISeKey International Holding Ltd and its business. Such statements involve certain known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which could cause the actual results, financial condition, performance or achievements of WISeKey International Holding Ltd to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. WISeKey International Holding Ltd is providing this communication as of this date and does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements contained herein as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities, and it does not constitute an offering prospectus within the meaning of article 652a or article 1156 of the Swiss Code of Obligations or a listing prospectus within the meaning of the listing rules of the SIX Swiss Exchange. Investors must rely on their own evaluation of WISeKey and its securities, including the merits and risks involved. Nothing contained herein is, or shall be relied on as, a promise or representation as to the future performance of WISeKey.
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[December 04, 2017] ForgeRock Extends Trust Network, Adds New Technology Partner Program
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ForgeRock, a leading platform provider of digital identity management solutions, today announced an extension of the ForgeRock Trust Network partner program designed to unify its extensive community of technology partners, making it possible for new and existing customers to seamlessly integrate complementary technologies to extend and derive the highest value from their ForgeRock Identity solutions. The program establishes a marketplace where customers can discover third-party identity and access management technologies that are commonly used in conjunction with each other. Clients and partners using the ForgeRock Trust Network also have access to supporting documentation and implementation information to enable easier integration of these solutions. Participating partners can access tools and support from ForgeRock to build and validate integrations of their technology with the ForgeRock Identity Platform. Higher tier members are required to submit integrations for validation via ForgeRocks own Quality Assurance process in order to receive a ForgeRock certification. As the concept of digital identity has grown beyond employees, citizens and customers, to include services, devices and IoT connected things, ForgeRocks unique identity platform has become pervasive across industries worldwide, explained Ben Goodman, Vice President, Global Strategy and Innovation at ForgeRock. The ForgeRock Trust Network is about enabling trust beyond our own identity platform to include some incredibly inventive third party technologies, which together enable the future of digital identity from end-to-end. Launch partners for the ForgeRock Trust Network include biid, Biometric Signature ID, Callsign, Duo, Entersekt, FaceTec, HYPR, InAuth, iovation, Intensity Analytics, InWebo, Nok Nok Labs, NoPassword, ProxToMe, SecureAuth, VeriClouds, Winkk. ForgeRock expects to add more technology partners in the future. InAuth, a leading provider of device authentication solutions, will be able to provide existing and prospective clients complementary services through its participation in the ForgeRock Trust Network. Many of our clients today also work with ForgeRock as part of their overall approach tosecurity and identity management, said Lisa Stanton, President of InAuth. By joining the ForgeRock Trust Network program, we will be able to help our clients more easily integrate and deploy leading identity solutions, enabling them to further reduce risk, remove friction and combat fraud across their digital channels.
Callsign provides adaptive, multi-layered security that uses AI and deep learning to protect identities and minimize the impact of compromised credentials. Aligning with ForgeRocks identity platform brings many benefits for all parties, says Paul Anderson, Head of Strategic Alliances at Callsign. Authentication and identity go hand-in-hand, and teaming with the leading customer identity and access management vendor means we can offer customers the ability to easily and seamlessly connect Callsigns Intelligence Driven Authentication with their ForgeRock CIAM. Satya Yenigalla, COO of FaceTec, explained their rationale for joining. This new program promises to provide distinct go-to-market advantages. First, our team can utilize the direct communications channel with ForgeRocks support portal and sample code, providing high levels of customer assistance on demand. The partnership also helps customers select us confidently, knowing our advanced 3D mobile face login SDK, ZoOm with TrueLiveness, has been developed through a closely-aligned technical relationship with ForgeRock. This is particularly important in use cases where ZoOms unparalleled, AI-driven liveness detection is proving valuable by providing consistently reliable, highly secure account access on mobile.
Further information about the program, including links for prospective partners to apply, can be found at www.ForgeRock.com/partner. Additionally, ForgeRocks Goodman shares more thoughts on the merits of the Trust Network Technology Partner Program at the ForgeRock blog. Monitor the #ForgeRockTrustNetwork hashtag on social media in the coming weeks and months for news and developments on the program. About ForgeRock
ForgeRock is the Digital Identity Management company transforming the way organizations interact securely with customers, employees, devices, and things. Organizations adopt the ForgeRock Identity Platform as their digital identity system of record to monetize customer relationships, address stringent regulations for privacy and consent (GDPR, HIPAA, FCC privacy, etc.), and leverage the internet of things. ForgeRock serves hundreds of brands, including Morningstar, Vodafone, GEICO, Toyota, TomTom, and Pearson, as well as governments like Norway, Canada, and Belgium, securing billions of identities worldwide. ForgeRock has offices across Europe, the USA, and Asia. Get free downloads at https://www.forgerock.com/ and follow us on social media: Facebook |Twitter |LinkedIn. Press Contact:
Dave De Jear
ForgeRock Communications
[email protected]
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[December 04, 2017] Wipro Recognized as Market Leader in Digital Workplace Services by ISG
Wipro (News - Alert) Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO), a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company, today announced that it has been recognized as a market leader in Digital Workplace Services by Information Services Group (ISG), a leading global technology research and advisory firm. According to the ISG Provider Lens Digital Workplace Services Quadrant Report, Wipro Limited was among the leading providers in Digital Workplace Consulting, Managed Digital Workplace Services (Large Market), Managed Mobile Services (Midmarket and Large Market) and Workplace-as-a-Service (WaaS). "Workplace transformation is becoming a top priority for senior management, as newer, digitally enabled workplace services move beyond the domain of the CIO and IT organization and become more closely aligned with the business and with specific industries," said Esteban Herrera, partner and global head of ISG Research. "Wipro has demonstrated experience and a highly attractive portfolio of product and service offerings in the digital workplace services space. These strengths, coupled with a track record of innovation and success, have helped make Wipro a leading choice as digital workplace transformation partner." The report states, "Wipro's services focus is on delivering end-to-end business transformation rather than just cost savings and operational efficiency improvement. Wipro is one of the key players that have developed comprehensive, business-oriented workplace services offerings." Kiran Desai, Senior Vice President & Head - Global Infrastructure Services, Wipro Limited, said, "We are excited to be positioned as a 'Leader' in ISG's Provider LensTM Quadrant report, Digital Workplace Services. It is emblematic of our strong workplace portfolio, continuous investment on digital technologies for a superior customer experience and excellent delivery execution." The ISG Provider Lens Digital Workplace Services Quadrant Report evaluates 34 workplace technology and services providers serving the U.S. market across seven quadrants: Digital Workplace Consulting; Managed Digital Workplace Services (Midmarket and Large Market); Managed Mobile (Midmarket and Large Market), Enterprise Social Collaboration and Workplace-as-a-Service (WaaS). Wipro Limited was one of only a small handful of firms to be named a leader in five of the seven quadrants - the most of any service provider. The ISG Provider Lens Quadrant report series is a complement to the ISG Provider Lens Archetype reports, which offer a first-of-its-kind evaluation of providers from the perspective of specific buyer types. In the ISG Provider Lens Archetype Report for Digital Workplace Services published earlier this year, Wipro Limited was named a leader in the Transformation Oriented Archetype, Cloud Enabled Archetype and Next-Gen Sourcing Archetype.
Wipro's work-place transformation technologies include LiVE WorkspaceTM, which is an end to-end standardized and integrated workplace offering consisting of pre-defined tools, technologies and processes, enabling users to access their business applications & data, anywhere, anytime through any device of their choice. In addition, Wipro's VirtuaDeskTM, a complete desktop virtualisation desktop-as-a-service offering, enables Desktop virtualization, instantly deliver desktops and applications to any device, empowering mobile end users and increasing business flexibility. It enables clients to create a more collaborative and mobile workforce by easily securing and provisioning applications and data.
Please click here to view full report: ISG's Provider Lens Quadrant report, North America for Digital Workplace Services About Wipro Limited
Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO) is a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company. We harness the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics and emerging technologies to help our clients adapt to the digital world and make them successful. A company recognized globally for its comprehensive portfolio of services, strong commitment to sustainability and good corporate citizenship, we have over 160,000 dedicated employees serving clients across six continents. Together, we discover ideas and connect the dots to build a better and a bold new future. Forward-looking and Cautionary Statements
Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in our earnings, revenue and profits, our ability to generate and manage growth, intense competition in IT services, our ability to maintain our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which we make strategic investments, withdrawal of fiscal governmental incentives, political instability, war, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property, and general economic conditions affecting our business and industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. We may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time by us or on our behalf. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171204005618/en/
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Goodwin Announces Winners of Inaugural Diversity Fellowship Scholarship Awards
Goodwin today announced the winners of the inaugural Diversity Fellowship Scholarship Awards named in honor of Goodwin lawyers and diversity champions Wayne A. Budd, Marian A. Tse, Richard A. Soden and Paul W. Lee. Designed to increase diversity at Goodwin and in the legal profession, these scholarships, as part of the firm's overall Diversity Fellowship Program, help law students defray the cost of law school tuition.
The 2017 scholarship recipients are:
Arturo Cruz, Boston University School of Law
Brittany Nieves, Boston University School of Law
Dennis Craig, Georgetown University Law Center
Dylan Lonergan, New York University School of Law
Natalie Minois, University of North Carolina School of Law
Grace Truong, Harvard Law School
"Wayne Budd, Marian Tse, Richard Soden and Paul Lee are diversity poneers who have made exemplary contributions to our law firm and the legal community," said David Hashmall, Goodwin's Chairman and head of the firm's Inclusion Advisory Committee. "They are tireless mentors for our young lawyers, as well as our leaders, and are devoted to enhancing the careers of others."
Cruz and Nieves were also Goodwin 1L Diversity Fellows and received an award of $10,000 to help cover expenses while working in a public interest law position during the summer after their first year of law school. As part of this scholarship program, named in honor of Wayne A. Budd and Marian A. Tse, they will each receive an additional $10,000 toward tuition for their third year of law school.
Craig, Lonergan, Minois and Truong, as winners of the Richard A. Soden and Paul W. Lee scholarships, will each receive a $15,000 award to offset the expenses of their legal education.
Each scholarship winner will join Goodwin as a summer associate in 2018, with two joining the firm's Boston office, two joining in Washington, D.C., and two in New York City.
"We created these scholarships to complement our other diversity-focused recruiting and retention initiatives," said Sabrina Rose-Smith, Chair of [email protected]. "These talented students exemplify accomplishment, leadership and dedication, and these awards represent our investment in the future of these young leaders."
Additional information about Goodwin's diversity fellowships is available on the firm's website and via email to [email protected].
About Goodwin
At Goodwin, we use law to achieve unprecedented results for our clients. Our 1,000 plus lawyers across the United States, Europe, and Asia excel at complex transactions, high-stakes litigations and world-class advisory services in the financial, life sciences, private equity, real estate, and technology industries. We partner with our clients to practice law with integrity, ingenuity, agility and ambition. To learn more, visit us at www.goodwinlaw.com and follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) at @goodwinlaw and on LinkedIn.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171204005636/en/
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[December 04, 2017] CadmiumCD Named Top Event Technology Company by Industry, Community, and Employees
FOREST HILL, Md., Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Event technology company CadmiumCD celebrates an award-winning 2017. Industry, community, and employees recently aligned to give this company recognition for their business growth, industry products, and employee satisfaction.
1. CadmiumCD is a Leader in Business The Inc. 5000 List For the second year in a row, Inc. recognized CadmiumCD as among this prestigious group. This year, CadmiumCD landed as #1929 on the list, with a 200% growth over the past three years. They also received an additional Inc. 5000 honor as #25 in the Top Baltimore Companies category. The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 The T echnology Fast 500 is an award program sponsored by Deloitte that recognizes 500 of the fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and energy tech companies in North America. This year, CadmiumCD landed as #387 on the list with a 3-year growth rate of 200%.
2. CadmiumCD is a Leader in the Events Industry IAEE Art of the Show
CadmiumCD took first place in the Most Innovative Use of Technology category for their work with the WVC 89th Annual Conference. CadmiumCD launched an enhanced version of the eventScribe App called eventScribe Boost. The app gave meeting planners, speakers, and staff an extra layer of tools that delivered a more relevant experience to each stakeholder. 3. CadmiumCD is a Leader in Company Culture Baltimore Magazine Top Workplaces The Baltimore Suns Top Workplaces list determines the best companies to work for in the greater Baltimore region. 92% of all CadmiumCD employees in the Baltimore metro area responded to the Top Workplaces survey, which was over 40% more than other participating companies. This year, CadmiumCD was ranked Number 40 on the list for its values, effectiveness, culture, and leadership. CadmiumCDs Future Michelle Wyatt, CadmiumCD CEO and Co-Founder, says that these awards are representative of CadmiumCDs future as a company. Many of our clients manage their own awards programs through the Scorecard product, Wyatt says. We know how vigorous the review process is, and just how difficult it is to win. Getting recognition in three unique areas tells me that CadmiumCD is headed in the right direction. We as a company are making decisions toward a common goal internally for employees, for our clients, and for the industry. Wyatt says that CadmiumCD will continue to do what they do best: hire good people and provide relevant solutions to meeting planners and their various stakeholders. *Read the full story here. About CadmiumCD More than 3,500 meeting professionals worldwide trust CadmiumCDs award-winning software. The myCadmium platform empowers users to collect, manage and share content to all event stakeholders through its modules: Call for Abstracts, Speaker & Exhibitor Data Management, Digital Content Publication, Audio Recordings, Digital Poster Galleries, Online Itinerary Planners, Interactive Floor Plans, Native Event Apps, and Post-Conference Evaluations. For more information about CadmiumCD, visit www.CadmiumCD.com or email [email protected]
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[December 04, 2017] Orthopaedic Institute for Children Awards $200,000 Grant to Further the Dreams of Students at Orthopaedic Medical Magnet High School
The Orthopaedic Institute for Children (OIC) has awarded a $200,000 grant to Orthopaedic Medical Magnet High School (OMMHS) to help further the dreams and educational opportunities of its students. "Orthopaedic Medical Magnet High School provides students from the inner city and surrounding areas of Los Angeles with a greater chance of success in life and the opportunities to make meaningful contributions to society," said Anthony Scaduto, M.D., president and CEO of OIC. "Those who choose healthcare professions, whether as doctors, nurses, researchers or technicians, will continue OIC's proud tradition of making a difference in the world; and we are happy to be able to support their dreams in this way." The partnership between OIC and OMMHS has a long history. Representatives from OIC are active in the Los Angeles Unified School District's advisory committee to the school, while OIC physicians and scientists participate in the design of the curriculum. After-school programs, summerinternships and volunteer opportunities at OIC give students exposure to many careers in healthcare and research. In addition, representatives from OIC hold regular seminars to discuss career options with students, while researchers and other staff members assist students with their science fair projects.
Opened in 2004, the Orthopaedic Medical Magnet High School has a graduation rate of 95 percent. It currently has enrollment of more than 800 students of which 99 percent are minorities (93 percent Hispanic) and 97 percent economically disadvantaged. It is located at 300 West 23rd Street, adjacent to OIC's downtown Los Angeles campus. About Orthopaedic Institute for Children
Orthopaedic Institute for Children (OIC) was founded in 1911 as Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital. Focused solely on musculoskeletal conditions in children, OIC receives 60,000 patient visits each year. In alliance with UCLA Health and with the support of the OIC Foundation, we advance pediatric orthopaedics worldwide through outstanding patient care, medical education and research. Our locations in downtown Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Westwood and Calexico treat the full spectrum of pediatric orthopaedic disorders and injuries. For more information, visit us at ortho-institute.org. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171204005214/en/
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[December 04, 2017] Breakthrough Tech Could Save Trillions in Tax Payer Dollars
LONDON, December 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Everyone's heard the story about the government's promise to spend $1 trillion on fixing America's aging critical infrastructure. But there's another big money story that few investors know of. Trump's trillion-dollar pledge won't come close to fixing our infrastructure. It'll take $3.6 trillion to make this happen. And in the midst of this infrastructure crisis, one little-known company has launched an artificial intelligence coup that could save us billions. Included in today's commentary: TransCanada Corporation (NYSE: TRP), Blackberry Ltd. (NYSE: BB), Celestica Inc. (NYSE: CLS), Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE: LMT), Methode Electronics Inc (NYSE: MEI). Consider the dire straits of a massive network of critical infrastructure that industries, the environment and human lives all count on, every minute of every day: U.S. dams are failing from coast to coast: 15,500 of our 90,500 dams now a high-hazard potential for public safety and the economy and it will take $60 billion to fix them.
to fix them. 180,000 people were recently evacuated in California because of fears that the largest dam in the U.S. would collapse.
because of fears that the largest dam in the U.S. would collapse. Pipelines have caused almost 9,000 significant accidents in only 30 years, hitting us with $8.5 billion in damages, killing hundreds and injuring thousands.
in damages, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. The U.S. spends almost $3 billion every year just cleaning up spills in our waterways.
every year just cleaning up spills in our waterways. The over 140 oil refineries in the U.S. are potential disasters waiting to happen, with more than 500 accidents since 1994, and explosions killing and threatening millions with fatal toxins. A huge amount of money has been spent on remote sensing equipment to monitor 2.5 million miles of pipeline, over 90,000 dams, and 7.2 million miles of electric power lines. The amount of data collected isnt just big, its incomprehensible. One little-known company has stepped in to turn critical infrastructure big data on its head. The company is Carl Data Solutions (CRL; CDTAF), and its proprietary new Internet remote monitoring technology could be the difference between a 7-day advance warning of a major disaster and a billion-dollar catastrophe. In a remote monitoring market that will be worth over $27 billion by 2023, Carl Data is leading the next phase of the revolution. By 2020, more than 50 billion devices will be connected to this network, and Carl Data plans to turn the massive amounts of data they collect into an actionable and profitable-early-warning system. Here are 5 reasons to keep a close eye on Carl Data Solutions (CRL; CDTAF) #1 Protecting a $153-Billion Market The critical infrastructure protection market should be worth over $153 billion by 2022. And the remote sensing services market, which makes much of the data-collection possible, is expected to more than double from $10.68 billion this year to $21.62 billion in just three years. Not only is Carl Data positioning itself to disrupt these two huge markets, but it's also throwing a lifeline to multi-billion-dollar industry verticals: The oil pipeline industry brings in $11 billion in revenue
in revenue Water supply and irrigation systems in the US generate $77 billion in revenue
in revenue US gas pipeline transportation boasts $24 billion in revenue
in revenue The electric power transmission system in the US brings in a whopping $380 billion in revenue. The pipeline monitoring systems market alone is expected to double from US$4.13 billion in 2015 to US$8.72 billion in 2026. And this is just one market segment within the overall critical infrastructure monitoring sector. From Toronto to LA and Dallas; and from municipalities, engineering firms and massive infrastructure operators at every vertical, Carl Data has the potential of turning the big data industry upside down. Carl Data's AI system can predict events that may lead to critical infrastructure failures up to seven days into the future. It can use AI to compare past storm events to weather predictions to forecast whether a future storm might cause a major incident at one of America's many aging and high-hazard potential dams-before they fail.
#2 Taking North America by Cloud For major cities with aging infrastructure, it's not enough to have a bunch of sensors collecting data. You have to know what the data is telling you, and in order to do that, you have to have ultra sophisticated analytics capabilities. That's exactly what Carl Data (CRL; CDTAF) is doing for a host of North American cities where critical infrastructure is crippled by age. And its client list is big and getting bigger. This is a massive data platform that is built to service absolutely any and every industry vertical. For oil and gas stream crossings, and major pipeline operators like Kinder Morgan, Enbridge, Husky and Trans Caada, Carl Data would be essential as it uses flow and stability sensors to monitor where the pipeline crosses the stream in real-time, alerting engineers via cell phone immediately if thresholds are threatening breach. For Kinder Morgan's 1,300 LNG stream crossings in British Columbia alone, monitoring is critical.
#3 American Critical Infrastructure is Dangerously Failing More cities, and more industries should be lining up soon because this predictive data solution comes at a desperate time for American infrastructure, which earns a woeful D+ on its report card.
The country's more than 90,000 dams represent a major threat to public safety and the economy, with nearly 15,500 already considered high-hazard potential in 2016. And that's just one part of our massive critical infrastructure. From the Deepwater Horizon immolation that killed 11 workers and released 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico to the Anacortes Tesoro oil refinery explosion and the collapse of West Virginia coal mine that killed 29 miners, public safety has been comprised. And that was only in 2010-and all in a single month, April. Bigger and better monitoring measures are critical, and Carl Data Solutions not only uses the latest in artificial intelligence to alert critical infrastructure operators to impending disasters, but it is predictive-enabling a response before situations become life-threatening. For America's bursting dams, having a 7-day lead time on a pending disaster might be the difference between life and death, and could save operators tens of millions in catastrophic clean-up fees, lawsuits and damage control. #4 Multiple-Billion $ Industries Can Avoid Massive Liability One of the biggest selling points for Carl Data (CRL; CDTAF) is the huge savings its predictive solutions could mean for some of our biggest industries. A major dam failure can cost on average over $700 million in damages and close to $2 billion for clean-up. Penn West reported 93 pipeline failures in 2013 and 112 pipeline failures in 2012. One of those failures cost it $4.3 million. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill will cost an estimated $61.6 billion once all lawsuits are over.
once all lawsuits are over. The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill cost $3.8 billion -so far (and counting)
-so far (and counting) The 2015 El Capitan State Beach Spill in California cost $62 million . And those are just the biggest spills. Insurance companies have risk management consultants on the prowl for tools like Carl Data's patented system to help manage risk because they insure resource development projects, and want to prevent paying out on insurance claims. That's why Carl Data's revenue could be poised for a major boost. With the potential to tap into most industries that collect data, Carl Data already has a strong pipeline for this year, and increased revenues by over 30% from 2016 to 2017. #5 Big Data Visionaries, Big Business Brains While everyone was blindsided by the remote sensing bonanza, Carl Data CEO Greg Johnston was looking into the future. What to actually do with all that data to make it work for us. He had a big idea that he's since turned into a small-cap company with a very large-cap potential. The real gold mine is the data, not the sensors. And in Johnston's words: "We're turning the industry on its head". Johnston's idea was hard-hitting and unique. He set out to create a system that can work with any hardware vendor, giving Carl Data a rare advantage. Once it's set up, it spoon-feeds critical data to clients-filtered and relevant and in time to fix problems and avert disaster. Carl Data is about Greg Johnston's vision, and the high-tech team he put together to disrupt the future. Johnston is the former director of ecommerce marketing for Global Hyatt Corporation, where he increased online revenue by 34 percent.
CTO Piotr Stepinski is a high-level software engineer with a major track record in Kainos, Atena and Telzas and he is the tech architect for Carl Data.
is a high-level software engineer with a major track record in Kainos, Atena and Telzas and he is the tech architect for Carl Data. Director Chris Johnston , a professional engineer, is the co-founder of Flowworks.
, a professional engineer, is the co-founder of Flowworks. VP of Business Development Kevin Marsh led the industry's first successful efforts to commercialize an IoT-based Data-as-a-Service solution, overseeing its rapid market adoption.
Director Craig Tennock is a veteran civil and structural engineer who was awarded the Order of Merit by Industry Canada for designing and implementing a new way to measure open channel flow with greater accuracy. The expert management team and board has major successes behind the in launching award-winning data solutions, start-up ventures and Fortune 500 consumer programs. And they are heavily invested in Carl Data, with over 80 percent insider ownership. And the momentum is building as fast as data collection. Even more companies and governments have lined up for this proprietary technology over the past few weeks. Even better: Carl Data recently announced that its revenue could double next year. The rapid news flow and the critical timing could make this a prime target for acquisition, and investors who already have Carl Data on their radar will have noticed GE's recent $207.5-million acquisition of a similar company. Big Data is Big Money. Actionable Data is even Bigger Money. With technology that could save infrastructure companies billions in clean-up costs, even more in liability, and keep reputations intact, Carl Data (CRL: CDTAF) is poised for leadership in the critical infrastructure cloud.
Honorable Mentions :
TransCanada (NYSE:TRP) owns and operates energy infrastructure throughout North America. It is one of the continent's largest providers of gas storage, and owns and has interests in approximately 11,800 megawatts of power generations.
Blackberry Ltd. (NYSE:BB): Many don't realize that Blackberry is actually providing mobile cybersecurity for government agencies worldwide. It's also playing security consultant. A major victory for BB came in July when it won the right to sell its secure messaging tools to the U.S. government.
Celestica Inc. (NYSE:CLS) is a manufacturer of electrical devices used in IT, telecommunications, healthcare, defense and aerospace industries. The company has seen strong growth YoY which we expect to continue as the sales expectations are almost 3% better than last year's.
Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) is an American global aerospace, defense, security and advanced technologies company with worldwide interests. While Lockheed reported lower than expected third-quarter earnings, the company remains an interesting target for investors who bet on increased geopolitical tensions.
Methode Electronics Inc (NYSE:MEI): Methode, a global manufacturer of electronic components and subsystems, including wireless and sensing technologies, is also set to take advantage of the boom in big data and critical infrastructure monitoring. By: Ian Jenkins Legal Disclaimer/Disclosure: This piece is an advertorial and has been paid for. The company paid ninety thousand Dollars for this article and banner ads. This document is not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for any investment. No information in this Report should be construed as individualized investment advice. A licensed financial advisor should be consulted prior to making any investment decision. We make no guarantee, representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness. Expressions of opinion are those of Safehaven.com only and are subject to change without notice. Safehaven.com assumes no warranty, liability or guarantee for the current relevance, correctness or completeness of any information provided within this Report and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein or any omission. Furthermore, we assume no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or, in particular, for lost profit, which you may incur as a result of the use and existence of the information, provided within this Report DISCLAIMER: Safehaven.com is Source of all content listed above. FN Media Group, LLC (FNM), is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. FNM is NOT affiliated in any manner with Safehaven.com or any company mentioned herein. The commentary, views and opinions expressed in this release by Safehaven.com are solely those of Safehaven.com and are not shared by and do not reflect in any manner the views or opinions of FNM. FNM is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. FNM and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination and financial marketing 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. FNM was not compensated by any public company mentioned herein to disseminate this press release. FNM HOLDS NO SHARES OF ANY COMPANY NAMED IN THIS RELEASE.
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[December 04, 2017] Reynolds' Bike Build Demonstrates Spirit of Giving, Military Appreciation
HOUSTON, Dec. 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Reynolds associates and their families gathered at the Houston offices of Reynolds and Reynolds for an annual tradition Saturday, Dec. 2, as they assembled more than 100 bicycles for the children of Texas-based military personnel. Reynolds also held a Bike Build Dec. 2 at the company's headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. "The Bike Build is an opportunity to recognize military families and to involve our families in the spirit of giving," said Jim Wright, vice president at Reynolds who was on hand at the Bike Build. "It's become one of the highlights of the holiday season at Reynolds." Receiving the bikes this year: the United States Marine Corps Reserve 4th Assault Amphibian Battalion, based out of Galveston, Texas. The 4th Assault Amphibian Battalion operates Amphibious Assault Vehicles (AAV) to carry Marines from ship to shore during an assault on an enemy-held beach, as well as to transport infantry inland. Members of the 4th Assault Amphibian Battalion assisted in rescue and recovery operations in the Houston and Beaumont areas following Hurricane Harvey in August and September.
"These are the same service members who were called up from the Galveston base during Hurricane Harvey," Wright said. "They helped Houstonians during and after the storms, and we are proud to give back to them in this small way for the holiday season." Each year, Reynolds purchases and donates the bikes for the Bike Build. Reynolds employees and their families assemble all the bikes, which can range from 12-inch bikes with training wheels to 26-inch multi-speed bicycles.
About Reynolds
The Reynolds and Reynolds Company is one of the automotive industry's leading providers of software, services, and document solutions to help automotive retailers improve business results. With 4,300 associates worldwide, Reynolds is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, with major U.S. operations in Houston and College Station, Texas, and Celina, Ohio, as well as operations in Canada, in the U.K., and across Europe. (www.reyrey.com) View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reynolds-bike-build-demonstrates-spirit-of-giving-military-appreciation-300566151.html SOURCE The Reynolds and Reynolds Company
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[December 04, 2017] GlassView Drives Awareness for the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids with Impactful Social Video Campaign
NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- GlassView, the world's largest independent video platform, drove increased awareness and engagement for the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids' work supporting families struggling with their son or daughter's substance use, with a video campaign aimed at reaching millennial parents. Securing the attention of busy young parents, GlassView strategically placed the nonprofit's video featuring parents' stories of their children's experiences with substance use on top-tier media outlets. "It is very exciting to be able to partner with the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids on this campaign, which can create real change," said James J. Brooks Jr., Founder and CEO of GlassView. "There's nothing like the power of video to share compelling messages that really make a difference, and we are thrilled to be able to leverage that power to support the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids' important mission." "GlassView helped us directly reach time-pressed parents by bringing our video message where they are online," said Kristi Rowe, Chief Marketing Officer for Partnership for Drug-Free Kids. "We are fortunate to work with GlassView to ensure our important message reaches audiences where it can make the greatest impact for parents and families." The campaign included placements in key outlets, Parents and Martha Stewart, two trusted media brands, that promoted the Partnership's message to oms navigating their way through parenthood. For Parents, the organization's message was presented to readers looking for advice about making decisions for healthy living. Some 41 percent of Martha Stewart's audience, meanwhile, has children at home.
The placement helped the Partnership's campaign to reach a click-through rate of 2.7X over the industry benchmark and a completion rate that was 88 percent above the industry benchmark. About GlassView
GlassView's mission is to ensure clients' videos appear on top-tier sites reaching the most engaged influential audiences. Best known for delivering the highest level of performance, the GlassView social video platform offers access to over 1.5 billion unique users worldwide, and over 250 million unique users in the United States (comscore Nov 2016), reaching 98% of the connected country. The GlassView team and Board of Directors features executives from Conde Nast, MediaCom, and LVMH. Launched in 2015, GlassView is headquartered in New York City and has offices around the world including Singapore, Tokyo and London. For more information on GlassView, please visit www.glassview.com
About the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids
Partnership for Drug-Free Kids is committed to helping families struggling with their son or daughter's substance use. We empower families with information, support and guidance to get the help their loved one needs and deserves. On our website, drugfree.org, and through our Parent Helpline (1-855-DRUGFREE), we provide families with direct support and guidance to help them address teen substance use. Finally, we build healthy communities, advocating for greater understanding and more effective programs to treat the disease of addiction. As a national nonprofit, we depend on donations from individuals, corporations, foundations and the public sector and are thankful to SAG-AFTRA and the advertising and media industries for their ongoing generosity. We are proud to receive a Four-Star rating from Charity Navigator, America's largest and most-utilized independent evaluator of charities, as well as a National Accredited Charity Seal from The Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/glassview-drives-awareness-for-the-partnership-for-drug-free-kids-with-impactful-social-video-campaign-300566167.html SOURCE GlassView
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FSP has been quite active lately, releasing one PSU line after the other. Now the company has introduced the fresh Hydro GE line, which consists of three members with capacities ranging from 450W to 650W. All are fully modular with stealth and flat modular cables, 80 PLUS Gold certification, and the droplet-shaped thermal design of the Hydro G models. Lastly, the cooling fan has a 135mm diameter and uses a hydro dynamic bearing.
All Hydro GE units have a single +12V rail, which looks to be the preferred choice for most users nowadays, and according to FSP, at the internals of those PSUs only Japanese electrolytic caps are used. There is no mention however on the exact model of those caps, and as the most informed of you probably know, there are also low-end Japanese caps featuring a shorter lifetime compared to high-end Taiwanese caps. So the description "Japanese caps" is mostly a marketing term for most brands rather than a strong asset for the product, unless of course the manufacturer indeed uses high quality Japanese caps and not some low-end models. In our opinion, the major asset of Japanese caps is that you can take seriously the manufacturer's life expectancy claims, something that might not be so accurate in Taiwanese caps and in most cases is highly inaccurate in Chinese caps.
The Hydro GE units come replete with all the necessary protection features included, and the provided warranty is satisfactory at five years, with a two-year period for rapid replacement of the PSU according to FSP. Another interesting point is that FSP provides some spare side stickers in the bundle, which you can use to change the PSU's looks. The 450W model provides a couple of PCIe connectors and a single EPS connector, while the 550W and 650W models retain the single EPS connector but have four PCIe connectors. With a quick look at the specs of those units, we also noticed the larger-than-normal dimensions with a 17cm depth (the same with the Hydro G models). In this downsizing era, it is weird to see low- and mid-capacity PSUs with longer than 16cm chassis. Not that a 17cm depth is long enough to create any compatibility problems, though.
Unfortunately, FSP didn't provide any information about the expected availability dates in the U.S. or share the products' prices. We estimate that the street prices of the Hydro GE PSUs should be within the $60-$90 range.
"I believe that most people are kind, compassionate and giving. But those other ones, the minority of folks who are insecure, inhumane, and petty, are sure more visible right now. Most men do not treat women in the vile ways of Matt Lauer, Louis CK, Harvey Weinstein and the like . . ."
Kansas City Season Of Scams
Online purchase scams have doubled in the Kansas City area KANSAS CITY, Mo. - In the past three to four months online purchase scams have doubled in the Kansas City area, according to the Better Business Bureau. The organization had some tips for online shoppers.
Locals Cope With 2017 Disasters
Disaster Follow-Up; The Honorary Consulates Of Kansas City Three months have passed since a series of hurricanes rocked the Caribbean and the U.S. mainland. But are things improving? Today, Kansas Citians with loved ones affected by this year's bout of natural disasters give us an update on how recovery efforts are progressing.
Sleaze Scummit Tax Warning
Deadline to pay county property taxes is approaching. Here's where you can pay taxes Jackson County taxpayers, take note: The deadline to pay 2017 property taxes is coming up this month. If you live in the city of Lee's Summit, residents can pay their tax bill at City Hall. The city of Lee's Summit reminded residents in a Nov.
Celebrate Kansas City Medical Industrial Complex Building Boom
Children's Mercy seeks approval for Hospital Hill research tower - Kansas City Business Journal The Kansas City Plan Commission on Tuesday is scheduled to consider a development plan that would allow Children's Mercy to add a nine-story research tower to its Hospital Hill campus. Designed by BSA LifeStructures, which is based in Indianapolis but has an Overland Park office, the building will be constructed above an existing eight-level parking garage with four above-grade floors.
Fear Broke-Ass Kansas End Game
Show-Me Lesson In Lingering Doubts
Missouri BoE Member: Next Education Leader Will be 'tainted' "There will never be a way to disconnect the new person from the way Commissioner Vandeven's tenure ended,"
Bitter Realization For Kansas City Fanboys
The Kansas City Chiefs stink As the closing seconds of the Kansas City Chiefs loss to the New York Jets ticked away on Sunday, the CBS announcer declared "and the funk continues for K.C.". It certainly did continue on Sunday as the New York Jets out paced the Chiefs to a final score of 38-31.
One of our favorite pr0n stars calls herselfas she works to balance career, family and social media hotness in a way that inspires this blast of even more Kansas City news for right now . . .And this is thefor right now . . .
A CREW OF KILLERS ARE STILL ON THE LOOSE AFTER A DEADLY ATTACK NEAR WESTPORT!!!
Round-up of the latest local killing and a reminder about the uptick in local violence amid the holiday season.Moreover . . .Here's the roundup:Police have not yet released a detailed description of the suspects. Please call theif you have any information that could help police in their investigation.Developing . . .
KC city manager's power of the purse doesn't fly in other cities Just about any time Phoenix officials want to spend more than $8,600 taxpayer dollars, they must go to the City Council for approval. By that standard, Kansas City Manager Troy Schulte and his department heads enjoy a blank check.
Possibly one of the most worthless articles we've seen from the paper that's only "news" to people who know absolutely nothing about how KCMO government works. Fact is, the deep pockets of the City Manager have been a longstanding complaint and the only deets to be garnered from this note is that there's increasing push back against embattled bureaucratRead more:
Kansas City Carjacking Instant Karma
Carjacking suspects arrested after crashing into building, fleeing The Kansas City Police Department says two suspects have been taken into custody after a carjacking and crash Sunday night. Police said two carjacking suspects crashed a vehicle into a building near 24th and Quincy Sunday night. They then fled to the nearby Brighton Place apartments.
Kansas City Hacking Hard Time
Former Sysadmin Caught Hacking His Ex-Employer by His Replacement On Wednesday, November 29, a Kansas City court sentenced a Missouri man to six years in federal prison without parole for hacking his former employer, stealing trade secrets, and for accessing child pornography.
Meth Town Lunch Lady Big Money
Fired Independence cafeteria worker wins $340,000 lawsuit A former high school cafeteria worker has won a $340,000 judgment in her lawsuit alleging she was discriminated against by the Independence School District. Amy Stubbs filed the lawsuit after she was fired as a cook in the cafeteria at William Chrisman High School in May 2015. Her daughter attended the school.
Local Charity Dude Hard Times
Taking it to the streets founder severely burned in grill accident A man who is known for community service in the Kansas City area, now needs help of his own.
How To Live Around Kansas City On $100K
What Living On $100,000 A Year Looks Like A central question of debate leading up to the Senate's passage of a sweeping tax overhaul plan asked which Americans need a boost. Economists say the Republicans' selling point for previous iterations of their legislation, that the plan is designed to benefit the middle class, has a shaky foundation - that the rich are the big winners.
Metro Suburban Crime Scene
Grandview police investigating rash of car break-ins GRANDVIEW, Mo. -- Grandview Police are looking for the person or people responsible for breaking into about a dozen vehicles in the city's Southview neighborhood. Residents reported car break-ins and destruction of property that occurred sometime between Nov. 29 and Dec. 1. "Most criminals commit what we call crimes of opportunity.
Holiday Season Hand Up For Youngsters
Santa steps out early to help Operation Breakthrough Santa is coming to Johnson County early this year, and he's coming with toys for Operation Breakthrough.
TKC Recommended Art Link Today
Matt Bollinger's America We are unseen visitors in a world largely devoid of primary colors. When we do see these colors, it is because it is on the label on a bottle of bleach or laundry detergent.
This evening we are inspired byas we offer this collection of a great many Kansas City MSM links for late night readers.Take a look:And this is thefor tonight . . .
Court documents show Missouri man made bomb threats against local Jewish organizations A federal criminal complaint was filed Friday against a Urich, Missouri man who made bomb threats against several Jewish organizations, including local Jewish sites. Ford Coots, 25, is charged with assaulting a federal officer during the investigation.
Reality check and documentation of increased hate crimes in the Heartland. Read more:
Citizens For Responsible Government Kansas City: Hotel hits a major bump! Heroines step forward!
NOT ONE OF THE ANNOUNCED OR ANTICIPATED TO ANNOUNCE CANDIDATES FOR MAYOR STEPPED FORWARD TO CHALLENGE THE INCOMPLETE CONVENTION HOTEL PROSPECTUS.
Earlier this week our. . . And now, tax fighters are taking up the cause . . .CFRG believes no bonding company will issue bonds as long as the ordinance #170961 is on the books. This ordinance was introduced by three Councilwomen with the guts to ask the tough questions. Other councilpersons retreated into their attorney stance or their developer persona with questions like when will you guys be back?. They looked shocked as these three ladies pushed for answers. The ordinance should guarantee those answers are produced. Of course the city will try to stop the ordinance. Which brings us to the question:Who are you going to vote for mayor? The Star has shown their early favorite; more of the same. They have elected not to cover this story because it doesnt fit with City Hall directives, more sheeple with shock collars attached.This should tell us none of the announced candidates have what it takes to be Mayor. Theyre all afraid of the big bad wolf. Remember this when election time comes, we will remind you. You cannot be easily intimidated and be mayor of Kansas City.The three amigos,. They questioned How could the LCRA and the TIF Commission approve this incomplete prospectus? There is page after page left totally blank, spaces ________ left empty on many pages, missing dates and signatures yet both of these city agencies rubber stamped the project just like good little sheeple. They know if they dont the Mayor will push their shock collar button and remove them from their commission.Thank goodness for. They are the only ones looking out for the taxpayer on this deal. If you read the incomplete documents there are statements like: "The LCRA.. (which in essence is the City, which IS YOU THE TAXPAYER), is not obligated to raise any form of taxation... What it doesnt say is the LCRA cant raise taxes to pay for the bonds if necessary. The LCRA is going to own this hotel and that is you the taxpayer. If all goes south, which is the current history of these deals, the taxpayers could very easily be stuck.are looking for key parts of the deal like occupancy rate projections (room nights). The question:The chart below shows occupancy rates in Kansas City run between 55% and 60%. There have been over 1,000 rooms added in Kansas City since this chart was completed, so the occupancy rate could even be running lower. When asked about the price for a one night stay, the developers stumbled around and finally came up with $175.00 per night. Local hotel operators tell us this might not be out of line two years down the road but it will not hold for convention business which generally negotiate lower rates. How do you propose to pay for an 800 room hotel costing probably close to $400MM before all is said and done? How many room nights per year will you have at the $175 rate? What is your anticipated annual income and what are your annual expenses? Are there dollars left to cover the debt? Where are these projections?Remember a large portion of these loans are being repaid by TIFs.Developers will tell you this deal was done before the Lucas Rule but it really is a totally different company today than it was back then. It even has a different name. Of course they dont want anyone to figure that out as it might instigate another petition to put the project on the ballot.TIFs take money from schools, libraries, disadvantaged individuals, zoo, etc It is important we have all the facts and a sound feeling of comfort before we rubber stamp this deal.Please encourageto continue their fight on behalf of the KCMO taxpayers. Be prepared to challenge City Hall if they attempt to negate this ordinance, which they will do.###############You decide . . .
"Morning Glory Ministries (MGM) helps to meet the needs of the poor, needy, and homeless in downtown Kansas City. It is a part of The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, (AKA the Gold Dome) and has been active for over 40 years. Their mission is to make the lives of those in distress better. Many poor and homeless need a hot meal. Other needs may be more specific, like clothing for for a new job, or an I.D. or bus pass. Morning Glory is here to assist those in need and provide volunteer opportunities to anyone willing to be the hands and feet of Christ!"
On this Sunday night amid the holiday season we celebrate the spirit of beauty, love and truth not only withamid our ongoingbut also we direct attention to the less fortunate in Kansas City and so many people dedicated to helping their fellow humankind . . .More info . . .God Bless.
Man wrongly convicted of murder in KCK rescinds RSVP to tree lighting ceremony KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Lamonte McIntyre, the Kansas City, Kansas, man who spent 23 years behind bars for a double murder he did not commit, cancelled his RSVP to light the mayor's Christmas tree. Lamonte McIntyre was freed from prison earlier this year.
This local dude has a right to be angry and also reminds us that relatives also haven't forgotten our misdeeds this holiday season. Read more:
The knowhow of the production of Chios mastic is considered, since 2014, an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and is protected by UNESCO
Most probably, human beings have been chewing natural gum from trees or bushes much earlier than the period from which we have written evidence. We find the earliest references to mastic in Orphic Hymns andthe texts of Theophrastus, who was a botanist and philosopher of Classical times. There are also the juices from which come frankincense and myrrh; for these too are gums; and a similar substance forms on schinos and the spinous plant called ixine, from both mastic-gum [mastihe] is made. (Plants History IX 1.2).
Mastic is the resin from schinos bush, Pistacia lentiscus var. chia, that grows on Chios island, a member of the tree family thatincludes pistachio and terebinth trees. Mastiha, the crystallized tears of mastic bushes, belongs to the resin group.The croping procedures from aromatic resin producing bushes are described in Theophrastus work.
The most known resins, frankincense and myrrh, also mentioned by Theophrastus, are the gifts the Three Kings (wise men) gave to humanity, along with gold, which indicates their great worth and value. Theophrastus mentions that the pure balsam resin [of Syria] sells for twice its weight in silver. We know that during the Ottoman rule on Chios, mastic was worth its weight in gold. The external wall line of the mastichochoria of Chios houses formed high walls,without openings at street level, fortifying thus the mastic producing villages. In order to save the precious tears from invaders these villages were entered only by ladders.
By order of the sultan the penalty for stealing mastic was execution. In the Ottoman harem and still in the traditional Turkish cuisine mastic is widely used in desserts such as Turkish delight (lokum) and ice cream (dondurma), in puddings such as sutlac, in salep and in soft drinks. Turkish coffee is also sometimes flavored with mastic. In the sultans harems mastic was highly valued as a breath freshener and a tooth whitener. Mastic was then so precious that during the 1822 Chios Massacre, when52.000 Chios inhabitants were massacred and 50000 enslaved as a revenge for the Greek Revolution, the people of the Mastichochoria region were spared by the sultan, because they provided mastic. The Turkish name for the island of Chios, Sakiz Adasi, means island of gum.
Another legend that highlights the value of mastic refers to a fruitless trip of Christopher Columbus. Returning from this trip to Cuba, Columbus brought to the Queen of Spain a mastic bush, saying that he it found there, along with rare spices and exotic trees. Chios at that time was under the Genovese rule. Columbus, being a Genovese, knew the bush, the production procedure of mastic as well as its value, as he had visited Chios island in the past. By this trick, he tried to add value to his fruitless trip with the aim to persuade the Queen to continue funding him.
In Byzantine times mastic trade was the emperors monopoly, and brought the sap to every corner of the Empire. Mastic was used in Arab medicinal recipes for its digestive properties, in English aristocracy drinks, in Christian and Muslim incenses.
Today in Greece mastic flavors bread,kaimaki ice cream and the traditional ypovrichio (submarine) spoon sweet. Recently high-quality mastic liquors and distillers are produced. Mastic drinks existed in antiquity as well. We read the first mastic drink recipe in Marcus Gaius Roman Cookbook. The drink was made of wine, honey, pepper, laurel leaves, saffron, and mastic. All ingredients were boiled together and the drink was served either cold or warm. Roman emperors used mastic along with honey, pepper, and egg in the spiced wine conditum paradoxum.
The word mastic comes from the ancient Greek verb mastichao, which means to chew. The name suggests that mastic trees resin has been used as chewing gum. The first reference to mastic tears was by Hippocrates, who used mastic for the prevention of digestive problems, of colds and as a breath freshener. Dioscurides, the first-century Greek physician, refers to the healing properties of mastic in his book De Materia Medica. Galenus mentions that mastic is useful for bronchitis and for improving the condition of the blood.
Mastic contains antioxidants and has antibacterial and antifungal properties. Recent studies have shown that it can cure peptic ulcers by killing helicobacter pylori bacteria and that high consumption of Chios mastic powder results in decreased levels of total serum cholesterol, LDL, total cholesterol/HDL ratio. Chewing mastic reduces oral bacteria and has some value in preventing tooth decay and gingivitis.
The knowhow of the production of Chios mastic is considered, since 2014, an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and is protected by UNESCO.
A lot of people like chewing gums. Its better to choose the natural and healthier Chios gum than the artificial ones.
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Source: thenationalherald.com
A total of 25 immigrants were arrested on Sunday night after attempting to occupy the Sappho square on the Greek island of Lesvos. The immigrants, 20 Algerians, 2 Moroccans, 2 Tunisians and a Libyan tried to set up tents in the central square of Mytilene demanding their asylum applications be expedited.
According to the police report filed, they tried to take over the area and set up tents in an effort to push for their transfer to another area in the mainland. Of the 25 arrested, the public prosecutors office released 9 as they were under-aged, while the remaining 16 will stand trial on Monday.
Meanwhile, the occupation of the party offices of SYRIZA by 35 Afghan refugees is continuing for a 10th day in a row. They are requesting their immediate transfer to Athens.
German mass daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung referred to a growing trend of voluntary repatriations of third country migrants stranded in Greece.
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RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: Jebulon License: CC-BY-SA
Source: protothema.gr
The largest and most prestigious gathering of Islamic banking and finance leaders in the world will open today in Bahrain with the participation of over 1,300 global industry leaders, policy makers, innovators and stakeholders.
The 24th edition of the World Islamic Banking Conference (WIBC) is being held under the patronage of HRH Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, the Prime Minister of Bahrain, at the ART Rotana Hotel in Amwaj Islands. The three-day event will continue till December 6.
Convened by Middle East Global Advisors, a leading financial intelligence platform facilitating the development of knowledge-based economies in the MENASEA markets and in strategic partnership with the Central Bank of Bahrain, the forum will have the theme Drivers of Economic Growth & Risks: Policymakers & Regulators.
The conferences steady vision is to serve as a compass for the global Islamic finance and banking industry and participants will be focused on generating breakthrough insights that help navigate through the complexities of the global financial system.
Rasheed Mohammed Al Maraj, Governor, Central Bank of Bahrain, whose support has been instrumental in helping the conference touch new heights year-on-year, will inaugurate the conference and give the keynote address, with the vision of furthering the ecosystem for Islamic finance entities to thrive and grow in the global markets.
An exciting addition to this years conference will be the keynote address by Alex Tapscott, CEO, NextBlock Global, co-author of Blockchain Revolution and founding member, IMFs High Level Advisory Group on Fintech.
A globally recognised thought-leader, speaker and writer focused on the impact of emerging technologies on business, society and government, Tapscotts work has been featured in several magazines and other publications.
The significance of Islamic finance as a means to strengthen economic ties between CIS and OIC countries cannot be overlooked and will see a keynote address by Taliya Minullina, Chief Executive of the Tatarstan Investment Development Agency and member of the Investment Council of the Republic of Tatarstan. Xen Baynham-Herd, head of strategy and lead economist Blockchain will also give a keynote address on blockchain owing to its growing significance in the digital era.
Delegates can also look forward to witnessing the 24th Annual World Islamic Banking Exhibition where they can exclusively network and connect on a one-to-one basis with leading industry players.
Speaking on behalf of WIBCs Platinum Partner, Abdul Hakeem Alkhayyat, Managing Director and CEO, KFH Bahrain, said: We are proud to sponsor the World Islamic Banking Conference. The event aims to provide a shared platform for the Islamic Banking and Finance industry professionals in the region to deliberate at length on key challenges and opportunities affecting the industry. The event, among other things, will deliver the latest advances in technology, thought leadership and intelligence. We hope the 24th edition of the conference continues to add great value to critical issues in the global arena of Islamic Banking.
Speaking on behalf of WIBCs Gold Partner, Tawfeeq Mohamed Bastaki, acting CEO/chief risk officer, Khaleeji Commercial Bank, said: Given the economic uncertainties, the Islamic economy sector has displayed a strong appetite for diversification. The time is now more than ever to facilitate thought-leadership amongst industry leaders and regulators by means of shared platform. In this relation, Khaleeji Commercial Bank is proud to be sponsoring the 24th World Islamic Banking Conference an event that has time and again established itself as the leading compass for the Islamic finance industry.
Speaking ahead of participating in the CEO Power Debate and on behalf of WIBCs Gold Partner, Hassan Amin Jarrar, CEO, Bahrain Islamic Bank, said: While the Gulf region is experiencing low economic confidence as a whole, Islamic finance as an area has remained relatively insulated. It is a key priority for us at Bahrain Islamic Bank to improve the perception of Islamic banking and as a smaller segment we are well positioned to adopt evolving technology and mobile banking versus many traditional banks. We are proud to sponsor the 24th World Islamic Banking Conference that provides industry leaders with a suitable platform to generate thought-provoking insights that might prove to be critical in shaping the future of the industry.
Key features for WIBC 2017 include: A conversation with a distinguished Islamic finance veteran - Adnan Ahmed Yousif, Chief Executive and President, Al Baraka Banking Group on the future course of the Islamic economy; An interview with renowned Shari'ah Scholar Sheikh Nizam Yaquby on Centralized Shariah Boards, Shariah Standardization and Fostering New Generation of Sharia Experts; Digital banking-focused panel on harnessing digital technologies to stay relevant; The CEO Debate focused on increasing the market share and geographical footprint of Islamic banks; The Regulations Power-Table on fostering synergies among regulators, standard setters and global financial regularities authorities to further Islamic Finance; Panel discussions focusing on dynamic capital markets, sustainable, equitable & inclusive growth, potential of disruptive technologies, new horizons for Islamic finance, ESG, VAT, the effect of the recent global economic & political developments and more.
The 24th WIBC will also see the launch of two major financial intelligence reports from Thomson Reuters: The Islamic Finance Development Report & The Islamic Commercial Law Report 2018, arming the industry with critical insights going forward.
Delegates can also stay abreast of the latest updates on the programme, network and connect with other delegates and speakers through Direct Messaging, and engage in live interactive polling across all of the session via WIBCs very own digital Mobile App Web Connect, making for a truly immersive experience.
Industry leaders will also be recognized for their excellence through the WIBC Performance Awards 2017, the winners of which will be honoured at the Gala Dinner on December 5. (Nominees can be viewed here: https://wibc2017.com/awards). TradeArabia News Service
Boursa Kuwait recently hosted its first Market Maker Workshop in collaboration with global management consulting firm Oliver Wyman.
Held at Boursa Kuwaits premises, the half-day workshop saw Oliver Wyman presenting an overview of market making, its benefits and key considerations to Boursa Kuwait and investment companies in attendance in the hopes of encouraging further investment in Kuwait.
Kuwait is in the midst of great change and opportunity in support of the New Kuwait 2035 Vision. To assist in Kuwaits economic growth, it is essential that Boursa Kuwait adopts market making initiatives to transform the nation into a regional hub for trade, investment, and commerce, a statement said.
The Market Maker Workshop provided an overview of different working models for setting up a market maker scheme to attract potential firms.
With market making, Boursa Kuwait have a crucial tool that serves in boosting liquidity of securities listed in the stock market, as well as improving productivity in the market.
The Market Maker Workshop was divided into five different sessions all with the aim of providing insights and an overview on what a market maker is.
The sessions included Introductions and latest on Capital Market trends, role of Market Makers and incentive structures, Risk Management tools for market makers, and Case study examples on Market Making from peer markets. This was followed by a Q+A session in which investment companies had the opportunity to interact with Oliver Wyman. TradeArabia News Service
Leading international real estate consultancy Cluttons has been appointed by KAR Properties to handle all aspects of property and facilities management, in addition to offering leasing services, for Busaiteen Views in Bahrain.
Busaiteen Views is a luxury development that features 34 apartments, where occupiers can choose from one- and two-bedroom apartments as well as two penthouses.
The 14-storey tower offers tenants modern spaces and access to high-end facilities, such as 24-hour security, allocated parking, an infinity pool and deck area, and a gymnasium. The leasing of apartments is expected to commence at the end of 2017.
Offering great accessibility and high visibility, Busaiteen Views is in close proximity to key landmarks such as the Bahrain International Airport, King Hamad Hospital, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), and Busaiteen beach, which is currently under construction.
Harry Goodson-Wickes, the head of Cluttons Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, said: "We are excited to be appointed by KAR Properties to manage its newest project, Busaiteen Views, and will ensure that the property follows the successful steps of Cebarco Tower and Segaya Views as it heads towards full occupancy."
Deborah Sellers, the head of Residential Property Management at Cluttons, said: "We strive for excellency at each step while operating and managing our clients developments."
"We will offer Busaiteen Views the absolute best, just as weve done with Cebarco Tower and Segaya Views - and will ensure that were continuing to attract and retain tenants through excellence in property management, as well as the quality of the development," she noted.
Khalid A. Rahim, the chairman of Cebarco Bahrain, said: "Our constant endeavour is to provide our tenants with exceptional services that match the luxurious properties we offer."
"Having collaborated with Cluttons previously, we know they share our vision and passion to offer the very best to clients. We look forward to yet another fruitful partnership with them and are confident of the success it means for Busaiteen Views," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
President Trumps former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the FBI about conversations with the Russian ambassador last December, becoming the first senior White House official to cut a co-operation deal in the special counsels wide-ranging inquiry into election interference.
Flynns discussions with Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, were part of a coordinated effort by Trumps aides to create foreign policy before they were in power, documents released as part of Flynns plea agreement show, reported the New York Times.
Their efforts undermined the existing policy of President Barack Obama and flouted a warning from a senior Obama administration official to stop meddling in foreign affairs before the inauguration.
The documents do not disclose what Trump knew about Flynns discussions. But in at least one instance, prosecutors say, Flynn was directed by a very senior member of the presidential transition team to discuss a United Nations resolution.
Trumps lawyers believe that unnamed aide was Trumps son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, according to a lawyer briefed on the matter.
The transition team was led by Vice President Mike Pence. Its top members included Kushner; Reince Priebus, Trumps first chief of staff; and KT. McFarland, who was Flynns deputy and was later appointed to be the ambassador to Singapore.
Flynn spoke to McFarland about another of his conversations with Kislyak, according to the lawyer.
Flynns decision to plead guilty to lying to investigators about those conversations marked a significant new phase in the investigation of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and a politically treacherous development for the president and his closest aides, whose activities in the West Wing are being scrutinized by FBI agents, lawmakers, federal prosecutors and the media.
He is prepared to say that Donald Trump "directed him to make contact with the Russians, according to a bombshell report by ABC News.
The claim sent the US stock market tumbling and brought the Russian election scandal a step closer to the Oval Office in a dramatic day in Washington.
Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law, was also named in US media reports as another figure who asked Flynn to reach out to officials from Russia, among other countries.
The White House fought back on Friday night, labelling Flynn a former Obama administration official who spent just 25 days in the Trump administration.
The row overshadowed news that Trump has enough Senate votes to pass major tax cuts in what would be his biggest legislative victory.
Allegations that Trumps campaign colluded with the Russian government - blamed for hacking Democratic Party emails during the campaign - to win the election have dogged his first year in office.
Flynn is the first White House official to be charged as part of an investigation into Russian election meddling led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Three other Trump campaign figures Paul Manafort, Richard Gates and George Papadopoulos were charged in October.
Yemen's ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh has been killed in fighting with his former allies, BBC said quoting local reports.
Media controlled by the rebel Houthi movement quoted officials as declaring the "end of the crisis of the treason militia and the killing of its leader".
Al Arabiya quoted a source in Salehs General Peoples Congress as saying he was killed by sniper bullets. A Houthi video distributed on social media showed what appeared to be Salehs body, clad in grey clothes and being carried out on a red blanket. The side of his head bore a deep wound.
The radio station of the Houthi-run Yemeni Interior Ministry first reported Salehs death but his party quickly denied this to Reuters, saying he was still leading his forces in Sanaa.
Until last week, Saleh's supporters had been fighting alongside the Houthis in a war against Yemen's current president, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.
However, in a speech late on Sunday, Saleh formally annulled his alliance with the Houthis and pledged to step up his fight.
On Monday, Houthi forces blew up Salehs house in Sanaa and came under aerial attack by Saudi-led coalition warplanes for a second day, residents said.
Travellers expectations have changed drastically during the pandemic and the travel industry needs to better understand the behaviours and expectations of the new traveller in order to respond to them, says Roshan Mendis of Sabre.
Is Market Structure Tied up in Knots?
With a new head of trading and markets at the SEC, there is optimism that some of the complex market structure issues such as make-taker incentives and sky-high market data costs will be looked at in 2018. As these issues wait to be settled, buy-side traders are also grappling with the EUs MiFID II rules on unbundling research payments from executions.
Here are some key takeaways on what matters to buy-side and sell-side traders, as discussed at Traders Magazines Second Inaugural Market Structure Equity Town Hall.
Maker Taker: Dead or Alive?
After a decade of debate, the SEC is expected to roll out an Access-Fee pilot that relates to maker-taker pricing incentives. A vote by the SEC is imminent, according to two people who spoke at the Traders market structure equity town hall held on Nov. 7. SEC Chairman Jay Clayton has indicated he will green light the pilot to test the impact of reduced access fees on exchanges, which was recommended by the SECs Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee (EMSAC) in 2016.
Rebates are paid to brokers as an incentive to post prices on exchange platforms, which helps attract more order flow, while others are charged an access fee for taking or removing bids and offers on their electronic trading venues. The difference between the access fee for takers of liquidity and the rebates for makers of liquidity is kept as revenues for exchanges.
Critics of the practice say the incentives motivate brokers to route client orders to platforms paying the highest rebates, which leads to order routing conflicts of interest.
As proposed, the EMSAC pilot will not eliminate rebates or take fees, but it will test the impact that reduced access fees have on liquidity.
Exchanges are paying rebates for adding liquidity that range between 12 cents and 33 cents per 100 shares, according to a study presented by IEX. The pilot will lower the cap on access fees for different groups of stocks to 20 cents, 10 cents, and 2 cents per 100 shares.
However, several equity-trading executives at the Traders Town Hall were skeptical of the pilot, pointing to results from the small-cap tick pilot, which led to increased spreads, higher trading costs and increased routing to inverted venues.
If fees are simply reduced, then market makers will lose the rebates and spreads will widen, and probably not much will be accomplished, predicted a sell-side executive who was skeptical of how much the pilot would accomplish.
Nevertheless, the sell-side observer said the pilot was worth doing to address conflicts of interest that are of concern to the buy side as this will build up their confidence. However, some may argue its better to first address the conflicts through order routing disclosures, the sell-side executive noted.
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Bank Spending on Fixed Income Desk RegTech Tops $20B
The cost of fixed income trading desk compliance has just breached a milestone.
Fixed-income dealers are spending as much as $20 billion a year on RegTech (regulatory technology) to help them comply with the raft of regulations covering their trading desks, according to a new report from Greenwich Associates.
Thats a lot of scratch.
Ninety-four percent of the 46 sell-side fixed-income traders participating in a recent study from the market consultancy said they are spending more time speaking with compliance. Compliance demands are keeping both traders and trading desk heads away from clients, which hurts the profitability of the desk and the level of service clients receive.
In a new report, The Benefits of Trader Augmentation, Greenwich reports how dealers in the U.S. and Europe are using technology to meet these new compliance requirements while ensuring these demands do not degrade client service. The report suggests an unlikely inflection point in this process: MiFID II.
MiFID II is forcing dealers to upgrade their technology, which should bring not only new compliance checks, but also improved sales-trader tools, said Kevin McPartland, Head of Greenwich Associates Market Structure and Technology Research. A tight coupling of the two is the most efficient path forward, and MiFID II, with all of the headaches, is presenting an opportunity to move in a better direction technologically.
The new report analyzes the impact on trading desks from past regulations and MiFID II, examines how dealers are utilizing sales technology, transaction cost analysis and other forms of technology, and looks at the major third-party vendors banks are using for these systems.
Regarding the adoption of these new tools, the report presents another surprising finding: Older traders are getting more value than their younger peers from sales trading technology tools. We expected that traders on the desk with less experience the millennial generation would be the most frequent users of the technology, McPartland added. We were surprised to learn that the opposite was true; those gaining the most value from sales trading tools are the most senior traders.
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SUVAASA, THE RESORT MAKES ITS DEBUT IN RAMGARH, UTTARAKHAND!
(TRAVPR.COM) INDIA - December 1st, 2017 - Located in Ramgarh amidst the mighty Kumaon Himalayas, Suvaasa Resort is making its debut in Uttarakhand. The beautiful picturesque hills, chirping birds and swaying pine trees make this resort an ideal holiday retreat. Derived from the Sanskrit word Suvaasa, meaning beautiful dwelling, it was founded by Mr. Jaideep Singh Rathore. The fact that Ramgarh is a relatively unexplored tourist area is what makes it a dream come true for travellers.
Situated right in the lap of Mother Nature, Ramgarh is famous for its beautiful orchards &known as the Fruit basket of India, Nathuakhan, the captivating village hamlet, and Mukhteshwar, the well-known hill shrine dedicated to Lord Shiva. But thats not all! Suvaasa Resort has a number of interesting facilities and amenities to offer to its guests.
Wake up to a beautiful morning and get set for a piping hot sumptuous meal at Spice Curry, their Indian Restaurant or enjoy your morning hot cuppa at the Italian roof top cafe -Tamino. Suvaasa Resort has a plethora of options for its guests to let their hair down terrain biking, trekking, paragliding and an excursion to the local fruit orchards, visit nearby Mahadevi Varma Sanghralya or trek to Rabindra Top. The resort provides its visitors with transportation facilities too. For those who want to spend their day in seclusion, the resort has a library, which boasts of a rich collection of books or you could simply relax by the cozy fireplace of the lobby proffering beautiful views. The famous tourist destinations like Nainital, bhimtal and Kainchi dhamare just 40 mins drive from the resort and mukteshwar dham is just 30 mins away!
The resort is ideal for those looking for peace and serenity and at the same time accessible to most tourist locales.
This unmatched location is idyllic for all its visitors. As Mr. Jaideep Rathore, Founder, Suvaasa Resort, says: The Suvaasa family believes in setting the bar high for the hospitality industry in Ramgarh. We want to be the pioneers of fine dining and the best services in this hitherto unexplored territory. Offering tranquility in the very lap of nature, Suvaasa is the sanctuary of peace and unparalleled luxury for all those looking for a refreshing break from the brouhaha of their lives. Taking a cue from the global concern about the need to preserve the environment, we have ensured that the Resort is in perfect harmony with nature and has been designed in such a way that it conserves nature. All in all, Suvaasa is the ideal holiday destination that will give you a warm welcome and all the comforts that you need to make your stay comfortable and pleasant.
Ms. Divya, Managing Director, Suvaasa Resort, believes: We, at Suvaasa, want to create a world influenced by exclusive personalities and passions, to offer hospitality in unique places. To begin our adventure, we chose the uncharted terrain of Ramgarh for our debut. This peaceful and serene place offers our guests relaxation and rejuvenation with unsurpassed luxury and comfort amidst nature.
While protecting & preserving our surroundings has been among the top of our priorities, we have ensured that our guests get a taste of the best of comforts and facilities that is in sync with the very needs of the ecosystem and sustainable in the long run. We take great pride in the fact that most of the greens, the fruit-bearing trees and deodars were kept intact during the construction of our resort. Mother Nature has abundant to offer and this bounty can be witnessed once you are in Suvaasa, the heavenly paradise festooned amidst fruit laden trees, wild roses and beautiful daisies.
We offer our guests:
# The Resort: Has 11 rooms and other facilities to suit different requirements
# The exclusives: Are independent bungalows more than 100 yrs old equipped with modern facilities.
All in all, Suvaasa is the best holiday destination with a diverse array of amenities and services that will keep you engrossed and give you innumerable blissful memories and anecdotes to cherish for a long time to come.
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Alpha Destination Management, the leading destination management company in the Arabian Gulf,
(TRAVPR.COM) UAE - December 4th, 2017 - Alpha Destination Management, the leading destination management company in the Arabian Gulf, has registered superb growth in 2017. Making the announcement Mr. Ghassan Aridi, CEO of Alpha Destination Management, said, 2017 had been a very good year for us. We registered a growth of almost eight per cent compared to last year which is great. Some markets such as the CIS, specifically the Russian market, came back very strongly. We have also seen a very good increase from the UK market. Both are very significant source markets for Dubai.
Talking about the new trends that emerged in 2017 in the UAE tourism sector, Mr Aridi, stressed, In 2017 many markets returned back in a big way while other markets disappeared altogether for some reasons. The UAE tourism sector under the leadership of H.E. Helal Saeed Almarri, Director General of Dubais Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM), and his team have done a great job in executing the outstanding vision of H.H. Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. As a destination, the UAE continues to impress both residents and visitors with a tourism product that never ceases to evolve.
Dubais tourism fundamentals are extremely strong and its vision incomparable. The solid foundation that the government has put in place through broadening portfolio of leisure and business attractions and facilities, diversification of source markets, collaboration between various business sectors will continue to boost and sustain demand.
Elaborating on the important developments in 2017 for Alpha Destination Management, Mr Aridi, said, We have been very active and I would like to take this opportunity to thank my team including Adnan Aridi, Samir Hamadeh, Omar Sawaya, Gisele Moubayed and all others. I cant name everybody as we are over 300 people but each one has done a fantastic job. As mentioned, we registered 8% increase in business compared to last year and the same in terms of profit. We have gained greater market share from the UK, China and CIS. In addition, we have added several activities and tours to our product. We always redesign every year. Helicopters are still doing very well, and we are trying to have several points by adding more helipads in Dubai.
Looking ahead, Mr Aridi is extremely positive and confident about the future of tourism industry in 2018. He stressed, I think the future is great and we expect to see continuous increase in tourism numbers in 2018 as compared to 2017. We are very positive about the future of the industry because the tourism authorities for Dubai know what is required to boost tourism in the emirate and one can see it from the events happening here. A whole lot of exciting activities and exhibitions are taking place which are helping us a lot to increase our business. Dubai is getting bigger and with it the tourism industry is getting bigger.
About Alpha Destination Management
Founded in 1996, by Mr. Ghassan Aridi and his partners, Alpha Destination Management is the leading destination management company and a pioneer in the tourism sector in the Arabian Gulf. Over the last two decades, the company has established itself as one of the most credible and reputed brands not only in the Gulf region but also in the international tourism industry. Controlling a significant market share of the lucrative tourism sector in the GCC, Alpha Destination Management is a market leader in the region with the largest annual turnover and wide network of international partners offering the highest levels of service and innovative and exciting experiences. Our extensive global and local knowledge and network, outstanding expertise and sound reputation is the key to success for us and all our partners.
For more information about Alpha Destination Management visit http://www.alphatoursdubai.com
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MPJ (Marketing Pro-Junction)
Mob: +971 50 697 5146
Email: h.bakht@mpj-pr.com
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The Hofsas House Hotel, a 38-room boutique family-owned inn in the heart of Carmel, is pleased to announce the launch of its special packages for 2018.
(TRAVPR.COM) USA - December 4th, 2017 - Salinas, CA, Dec 04, 2017 - The packages appeal to a wide variety of guests, from art and wine lovers to dog owners, chocolate lovers and those looking for a relaxing spa experience. To book any of these packages during your stay, call (831) 624-2745 or email info@hofsashouse.com.
Hofsas House Packages for 2018
Get Artsy Package
For decades, Carmel, California has been a haven for artists, from authors, poets and actors to painters and sculptors. Today there are more than 80 art galleries within walking distance from the hotel. The Hofsas House is part of that artistic tradition and has been touched by one of the worlds most famous artists. Did you know that artist Maxine Albro was commissioned by Donna Hofsas to paint the welcoming mural and the headboard featured in Room 47 of the Hofsas House? In the 1940s and 1950s, Maxine was living in Carmel and was friends with Donna. After the main four-story addition to the Hofsas House was completed in 1957, Donna asked Maxine to paint the mural and add other highlights to the front of the building to enhance the hotel's Bavarian theme. Maxine also painted the three pictures now hanging in the lobby.
The Hofsas House celebrates Carmel's artistic legacy by offering guests its special Get Artsy Package. This package includes a stay in the Room 47 the very room Maxine Albro painted! Mention the Hofsas House Get Artsy package with the code HHArt and receive a gourmet cheese tray and bottle of wine upon arrival.
Carmel continues to be an artist colony and attracts some of the worlds most famous artists, including painters, sculptors, and photographers. Hofsas House can help arrange a tour of Carmel's art galleries and artists' studios with Carmel Art Tours. Discover secret passageways, visit hand-picked galleries, both the internationally acclaimed and the hidden gems. There's also an opportunity for a chance encounter with an artist at work in a Carmel studio. Cost is $25 per person, reservations are required, and participants meet for the tour at Carmel Visitors Center. Info at www.carmelarttours.com, 800-979-3370.
Wine and Chocolate Package
Upgrade your stay at Hofsas House with a four pack of handcrafted artisanal sea salt caramels from Monterey's Lulas Chocolates and a bottle of award-winning Monterey County wine.
Monterey County wines are now on par with California's other legendary wine regions such as Napa and Sonoma. In fact, Wine Enthusiast magazine named Monterey County as one of the world's top 10 wine destinations ahead of the Napa Valley and in the company of the other famed wine-growing regions around the world.
Monterey County produces 42 different varietals of high-quality, award-winning wines, especially Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. For this special package choose either a Monterey County Chardonnay or Pinot Noir from a personally selected list of wines.
Lula's Chocolates, founded by Scott Lund, are made the old-fashioned way, using recipes passed down from Scott's grandmother, Lula herself. To this day, Lula's makes sure each hand-dipped, small batch, deliciously fresh chocolate is an experience worth savoring.
Cost for this wine-and-chocolate package is $25. Use the code HHChoc when booking this package.
Tail-Wagging Package
Hofsas House is one of the most dog-friendly hotels in Carmel. Guests receive a complimentary Doggie Welcome Package upon arrival that includes:
Hofsas House dog Frisbee
Hofsas House collapsible dog bowl
Special dog bed
Letter from Tank, our onsite Pet Concierge
Special dog amenities package
Tips and recommendations for your four-legged friends stay
Walking trail and hiking guide
A package of treats
Coastal Canine Magazine offering the best four-legged options for visiting Carmel
This package requires a minimum two-night stay, $30 fee per night for one dog and $50 per night for two dogs.
Relax at Cinq Mondes Spa Carmel
Cinq Mondes Spa Carmel is the French cosmetic company's first and only Cinq Mondes spa in the United States and serves as the company's flagship location in the U.S. Cinq Mondes Spa Carmel combines tradition, beauty, authenticity, and luxury, allowing guests to enjoy a soothing sensory voyage of the five different worlds in the nearby Crossroads Shopping Center in Carmel.
Cinq Mondes has gathered a selection of traditional treatments from around the world that are remarkable for their quality, authenticity and ceremonial traditions.
Hofsas House is partnering with Cinq Mondes to offer guests a relaxing and soothing spa package that includes a 60-minute massage or facial. Cinq Mondes' signature facial is the "Ko-Bi-Do" for its unique use of Dermapuncture, or "acupuncture without needles, as an anti-aging facial and its signature massage is the Moroccan massage. Price is $120 per massage or facials. All Hofsas House guests will get a special gift from Cinq Monde
This special package must be booked at least 72 hours in advance and is subject to availability.
About Hofsas House
The Hofsas House Hotel is a boutique family-owned inn with 38 uniquely decorated, spacious rooms, many with ocean views overlooking the pines in the village of Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Dutch doors appoint each room allowing our guests to enjoy the fresh ocean air. Our guests watch glorious sunsets over the Pacific Ocean from the privacy of the inn's decks or rooms. Some rooms and most suites have fireplaces, private balconies, wet bars or kitchens.
The Hofsas House is located three blocks north of Ocean Avenue, eight blocks from the picturesque white sand Carmel beach and one block from a child-friendly City park. There is plenty of off-street parking and guests delight in walking everywhere in Carmel from the inn. Enjoy a continental breakfast in the morning with French roast coffee, tea, fresh pastries delivered from a local bakery, juice, yogurt and fruit.
Other amenities include a heated swimming pool, dry saunas, view deck areas and free wireless Internet access. Some rooms are dog friendly. Casual elegance, personal service and traditional family hospitality are the trademarks of Hofsas House Hotel.
Hofsas House Hotel
Between 3rd & 4th Ave on San Carlos Street.
P.O. Box 1195
Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA 93921
Phone: (831) 624-2745
info@hofsashouse.com
HofsasHouse.com
Contact:
Marci Bracco Cain
Chatterbox PR
Salinas, CA 93901
(831) 747-7455
http://www.HofsasHouse.com
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Azores Airlines has signed a code-share agreement with Alaska Airlines, which allows the Portuguese airline, based in the Azores, to issue tickets for flights operated by Alaska, and vice versa.
(TRAVPR.COM) USA - December 4th, 2017 - Oakland, CA --Azores Airlines has signed a code-share agreement with Alaska Airlines, which allows the Portuguese airline, based in the Azores, to issue tickets for flights operated by Alaska, and vice versa.
The agreement between Azores Airlines and Alaska Airlines allows new connections through Boston, MA. Azores Airlines offers regular service from Boston to the islands of the Azores, Madeira, Lisbon, Porto and Cape Verde, with total of 20 destinations.
Azores Airlines based is based in Ponta Delgada, on the island of Sao Miguel in the autonomous archipelago of the Azores.
Alaska Airlines is based in Seattle, Washington, serves more than 118 destinations and five countries.
One of the most exciting destinations - The Azores, embodies the sapphire blue and emerald green lakes, fertile prairies, volcanic cones and craters, colorful hydrangeas and azaleas, 15th century churches and majestic manor houses make the Azores unlike anywhere else on earth.
Azores Airlines, part of the SATA Group, has connected New England with the Azores and mainland Portugal for more than 35 years. For more information about booking flights call your travel agent or log on to www.AzoresAirlines.pt/USA. Or call (800) 762-9995
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Melbourne, December 4
Indian energy giant Adanis controversy-hit Carmichael coal mine project in Australia has hit another roadblock after China's two major state-run banks said they have no plans to finance the venture, media reports said today.
The 16.5 billion dollar Carmichael coal mine project, one of the world's largest, will start construction after being given the green light by the federal and Queensland state governments.
Adani is seeking a finance of 2 billion Australian dollars by March 2018 for the first stage of its proposed mine project in Queensland.
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), in a statement, clarified that it had no intention of funding Adani's proposed mine in Queensland, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
"ICBC has not been, and does not intend to be, engaged in arranging financing for this project," ICBC said in a statement on its website.
"ICBC attaches great importance to its social responsibilities and keenly promotes green financing." While not mentioning coal, ICBC said it had provided finance in Australia "for a series of renewable energy projects," the report said.
Earlier, China Construction Bank had also refused financing the project, saying it "is not involved with, nor considering involvement with, the Adani Carmichael Mine project", the report said. PTI
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, December 4
Going to work is a challenge for nearly 100 differently abled employees of the PGI. These employees expressed their grouse during a blood donation camp organised to celebrate the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
Satyaveer Dagur, president of the PGI Differently Abled Employees Union, said due to poor infrastructure, the differently abled persons working or visiting the hospital faced a tough time.
He said there were no lifts and ramps in the administrative block and differently abled employees had to climb all the way to the fourth floor to get their work done.
Though a ramp has been constructed near the back door, it is a mere eyewash and leads to the Directors office in the administrative block. One can see differently abled employees coming down the stairs with great difficulty, said Satyaveer.
He said besides the administrative block, there was an urgent need for ramps and lifts at the PGI library, the National Institute of Nursing Education (NINE) and the School of Public Health.
He said recently a delegation had met PGI Director Jagat Ram and had handed over a memorandum to him for making the institute disabled-friendly.
The project to construct ramps and escalators was approved by the director, but the file is now stuck with the engineering department, said Satyaveer.
He said at some places, parking for the differently had been notified, but the guidelines were not being followed.
Man who brought the change
Satyaveer, who is differently abled, got the job nearly 11 years ago under the general category.
After joining the job, I observed that the premier institute did not offer facilities for the differently abled. In 2010, I began raising issues pertaining to the differently abled and job reservation in the institute. I pressed the authorities to construct disabled-friendly infrastructure, said Satyaveer.
In 2014, he formed the Differently Abled Employees Union. His efforts bore fruit as besides relaxation of 5 per cent marks, the differently abled are now being offered admission forms free of cost.
Tribune News Service
Mohali, December 4
A District Revenue Officer (DRO) posted in Mohali fell victim to a debit card fraud when Rs 2.8 lakh was siphoned off from his savings bank account within seven hours. The victim, Balwinder Pal Singh, a resident of Sunny Enclave, Kharar, has submitted a complaint to the cyber cell and the bank concerned demanding an inquiry and refund.
The fraud came to light when the victim, who has a salary account with the State Bank of India in Mundi Kharar, checked his phone in the morning on December 1 and was shocked to see text messages of nine transactions in which varying amount of cash was withdrawn during the previous night.
According to his bank statement, the first transaction was of Rs 10,000, withdrawn around 11.45 pm, followed by five transactions of Rs 40,000, two withdrawals of Rs 20,000 and one transaction of Rs 30,000 in the next few hours. The last text message of a transaction was received at 6.45 in the morning, following which the victim blocked his card.
In his complaint to the cyber cell, the victim said he had been duped of the amount using a cloned debit card since the ATM card of the account was in his possession. He said, How can anyone withdraw Rs 2.8 lakh in a few hours when the daily withdrawal limit for ATM or online transaction is Rs 50,000? An amount of Rs 80,000 was transferred to another account number in two transactions of Rs 40,000 each.
The victim said according to bank officials, the ATM code where the cash was withdrawn was of Ramdas Ghati in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh. Bank officials said the account where the money (Rs 80,000) was transferred was in the name of Vimal Rawat from Mani Majra, he said.
Singh said the police told him that the person could not be located at the address mentioned in the bank details.
Bhartesh Singh Thakur
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, December 3
The Panjab University (PU) Syndicate will discuss change in the selection criteria and increase in seats for MSc in Medical Physics.
Centre for Medical Physics Coordinator Prof Devinder Mehta has proposed that BSc marks should have 40 per cent weightage and Common Entrance Test (Postgraduation) should have 60 per cent weightage in the admission merit for MSc from 2018-19 onwards. Earlier, the Common Entrance Test (PG) used to have 50 per cent weightage and BSc marks used to have 50 per cent weightage.
Earlier, there used to be 8 + 2 NRI seats for MSc. Now, 10 +2 NRI seats have been proposed for 2018-19. The Centre for Medical Physics has also proposed to enhance the laboratory charges of students from Rs 120 per month to Rs 1,000 per month.
From NRI students, it has been proposed that the development fund should be enhanced from US $ 200 to US $ 400.
It has also been proposed that a post of the Tutor-cum-Radiation Safety Officer (RSO) be created in the Centre for Medical Physics to meet the requirements, as asked by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB).
According to the Handbook of Information-2017, the Centre for Medical Physics was created in 2007, as a joint venture of the PU and Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh, to utilise technology-dependent specialties coming out of the new scientific innovations.
Medical Physics is an established clinical specialty with wide ranging applications in radiotherapy planning and treatment. It can be defined as embracing all applications of radioactive sources in the treatment of cancerous and non-cancerous diseases.
AERB is the regulatory body for the MSc Medical Physics course.
Funds for accessing Swayam Prabha
The Syndicate will take a call on allowing Rs 73 lakh for furnishing two laboratories for accessing Swayam Prabha modules programme of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), under the National Digital Initiatives. Under Swayam platforms, lectures from teachers are imparted to students through remote sensing. The cost will be met from the savings of the University Institute of Applied Management Sciences (UIAMS) examination fund. There is a credit balance of Rs 22 crore in the fund, say sources. As per the minutes of a meeting of the committee set up for the implementation of the National Digital Initiatives in higher education in the PU, one lab will be set up on the top floor of the Department of Computer Science and another on the top floor of the UIAMS campus.
Asst Prof's transfer
The Syndicate will also take up the transfer of Assistant Professor Yogita Sirohi from Panjab University Regional Centre, Muktsar, to Chandigarh on the ground that her husband is working in Mohali. The Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD) had sought comments from the PU on it, as Ambala MP Ratan Lal Kataria had recommended the transfer.
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, December 3
The Crime Branch of the UT police has arrested a vehicle thief and recovered six stolen two-wheelers from his possession.
The accused had escaped from the Punjab Police custody in 2015 and was residing in the periphery of Chandigarh.
The police said the accused, Rakesh, alias Billa, a resident of Saketri village, Panchkula district, was arrested from near Punjab University on a tip-off.
The police claimed to have recovered six two-wheelers stolen from various parts of the city.
Police officials said Rakesh is a hardcore criminal. A murder case was also registered against him in 2013 at the Nayagaon police station. After the trial, he was sentenced with life imprisonment. On December 25, 2015, while he was being brought from the Nabha Jail to the District Courts, Mohali, in another case of robbery, he escaped from the police custody. A case regarding the same was registered at the Bakshiwala police station, Patiala.
Three cases of vehicle theft of the Sector 39 police station and one case each of Sector 34, 36 and Sarangpur police station has been solved with the arrest of the accused.
Hardcore criminal
Police officials said Rakesh is a hardcore criminal. A murder case was also registered against him in 2013 at the Nayagaon police station. After the trial, he was sentenced with life imprisonment. On December 25, 2015, while he was being brought from the Nabha Jail to the District Courts, Mohali, in another case of robbery, he escaped from the police custody.
Jayshree Sengupta
Jayshree Sengupta
RECENTLY all of us were shocked when a private hospital charged Rs 15.7 lakh for the treatment of a child suffering from dengue who did not even survive. Unfortunately, most of us are forced to go to private doctors and hospitals when illness strikes us because public hospitals are terribly overcrowded and the quality of care is generally low. Unless you are a VVIP you are not likely to get special care in a public hospital.
First of all one must ask why are dengue cases on the rise and why hasnt the government been able to control the disease through its much-touted Swachh Bharat drive? How is it that mosquitoes, which are the cause of the disease, are still breeding freely at all times, especially during rainy season? While there were 99,913 cases of dengue, with 220 deaths in 2015, there were 129,166 cases and 245 deaths in 2016.
Like in the case of the child who died from dengue and was in the ICU for 15 days, private hospitals are often motivated to inflate the bill by charging excessive amounts for gloves, syringes and medicines used in the treatment. The bill is often crammed with items that are hard to comprehend and cannot be challenged by the patient. It shows utter lack of ethics in private healthcare today in big cities and something urgently should be done about it, like the speedy implementation of the Clinical Establishment Act, passed in 2010, by all states.
Not only seasonal diseases need to be controlled and eradicated, but also communicable diseases like TB, from which around 5 lakh people die every year. India has the highest number of TB cases in the world. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are also on the rise. According to the Director-General, WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Bolder political action is needed to address constraints in controlling NCDs including the mobilisation of domestic and external resources and safeguarding communities from interference by powerful economic operators. Indeed, big hospitals are like big corporations and are powerful economic operators. It is very difficult for an average person to fight and sue a hospital or a surgeon.
The result of this growing power of private hospitals and doctors is that the average person is burdened by the stress of impending healthcare costs. Anybody who does not have a health insurance hesitates to go to private hospitals. In India, only about 18 per cent of the urban and 14 per cent of the population has any kind of health insurance. Many people with low incomes are reduced to penury when they go for private treatment of a disease like cancer as they have to raise their own resources from family or friends, and in many cases, the moneylender. Around 63 million people are pushed into poverty due to healthcare costs, increasing income inequality further.
Since the burden of non-communicable diseases is on the rise, what is the government doing? Cancer, diabetes and heart diseases alone account for 55 per cent of the premature mortality in India in the age group of 30-69. More and more people are suffering from cardio-vascular diseases which are the highest killer in India. In years to come, the respiratory diseases will increase manifold due to the increasing air pollution. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) claimed 3.6 million lives in 2015. More people are likely to die from it in the future.
Public health is the worst spot in Indias economic path under the NDA government despite a recent rise in GDP growth. Without a healthy population and labour force, India cannot hope to compete with countries in the West or ASEAN. Yet scant attention is being paid to the state of public healthcare where thousands are forced to go for treatment. People with limited budgets are also reluctant to go to private hospitals because they are asked to undergo a number of unnecessary tests which burn a hole in the patients pocket. Even though similar tests take a long time in public hospitals, they are often free. Private hospitals, on the other hand, are run on profit motive and each doctor has to contribute to the total revenue earned by the hospital. They are incentivised to push patients into the ICU and also fill hospital beds. Their performance and promotion depend on whether they fulfil such criteria.
There have been cases where unnecessary and costly surgeries have been performed in private hospitals and, sometimes, it has resulted in death. The overuse of antibiotics has led to their resistance in India in a big way and the appearance of superbugs.
The solution lies in the government becoming more vigilant regarding malpractices by hospitals but there is no substitute to having better public hospitals and reliable healthcare. Private hospitals should be told to charge according to the actual cost of the treatment plus a small profit margin that can be ploughed back into the hospitals improvement. And in order to have better public healthcare, there is no option for the government but to increase the budgetary allocation on health. Yet the percentage of GDP allocated for health by the Union government in the last Budget was only 1.9 per cent. It has not been increased to 2.5 per cent despite the recommendation of several expert committee reports headed by renowned doctors. In India, the out-of-pocket expenditure by a person is one of the highest in the world, where 82.2 per cent of the expenditure for treatment is borne by the patient.
Thus while the government is very keen on promoting medical tourism, there is scant attention being paid to the needs of the common person through improvement of public healthcare. While it is true that many Indian doctors are world class and can perform complicated surgeries for a fraction of the cost charged by hospitals in developed countries and many foreigners are, indeed, coming for joint replacements and bypass surgeries, the Union Health Minister ought to improve the precarious state of public healthcare. It is strange that in a country with so many super-speciality hospitals all of us are worried about the quality and reliability of healthcare.
Washington, December 4
An Indian-origin US financier has been killed in a shark attack while scuba diving off a Costa Rican island in the Pacific Ocean, officials said.
Rohina Bhandari, 49, a Wall Street private equity manager from New York City, suffered fatal bites to both her legs during the shark attack last week while she was diving with a group near Cocos Island, a national park about 300 miles off the Costa Rican mainland, New York Post reported on Sunday.
She was a senior director at WL Ross & Co LL, a firm founded by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and often attended New York City charity events.
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She was dragged from the Pacific Ocean but could not be saved. Her 26-year-old diving instructor was also badly injured in last Thursdays attack.
The male instructor, who was conscious and in relatively stable condition, told officials that the shark attacked when his group was surfacing at the tail end of the dive in the waters.
According to the Costa Rican newspaper La Nacion, the guide noticed the shark approaching his group underwater and tried to scare it away. But as they surfaced, the shark went for Bhandari, tearing at her legs. The guide, too, suffered leg injuries.
Authorities said two park rangers and several doctors who were part of the diving tourism group of 18 people on the island trip organised by the Undersea Hunter Group, offered first aid in a desperate bid to save her.
Friends paid tribute to the Manhattan resident on Facebook. Unbelievably sad and heartbreaking news that Rohina has died, wrote Julie Walker. She was such a wonderful person who loved life. I will always remember her kindness, friendship and our adventures together.
Another friend wrote: Your kindness and genuine warmth to those of us lucky enough to call you friend was a blessing to behold. IANS
MEHBOOBA Muftis unwillingness to hold the long-pending panchayat elections in J&K has confirmed that the ruling combine is adamant on denying grassroots democracy in a state yearning for governance. This exposes the double standards of the government as it cherry picks issues listed in its governance document Agenda of Alliance (AoA) and ignores those of concern to a large chunk of population. It appears that governance is being shelved for political issues. Mehboobas demurring is a breach of trust not only with the people, but also a complete reversal from her lofty commitment to empower the third tier of governance to enable Panchayati Raj institutions to discharge their statutory functions effectively and efficiently by giving them functional roles and fiscal responsibilities.
The indefinite pegging back of the elections is a bad omen for a state where the whole concept of democracy has been reduced to the holding of Assembly polls. Parliamentary bypoll to Anantnag constituency has been pending since Mehbooba vacated the seat after getting elected to the Assembly in June last year. There is an inherent contradiction in the state governments premise that the atmosphere is not conducive for the polls. This flies in the face of the government claims that the situation has improved vastly this year as compared to the street turbulences of last year after the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani.
Now that the Centre has initiated a dialogue and given the green signal to discharge stone-throwers, people should not be kept waiting endlessly for elected panchayats to address their developmental and day-to-day issues. It may not be incorrect to surmise that the government has succumbed to the resistance by some quarters availing of powers and privileges in the absence of the grassroots democratic institutions. The oddity becomes stark as this process was withdrawn after the CM had committed to the Centre that the poll process will begin by December 1. Mehbooba is visiting different districts as part of her outreach programme but that would be a futile exercise until the process of a three-tier governance system is first put in place.
Tribune News Service
Solan, December 4
The Paonta Sahib police today registered a case for defiling a place of worship against some miscreants. They burnt books lying in the main prayer room of a mosque at Malio village near Majra in Paonta Sahib last night.
DSP Pramod Chauhan, giving this information, said some books kept inside the main prayer room had been burnt. A team of forensic experts had lifted samples from the spot.
He said investigations had revealed that the burnt books were not the holy ones but some other books which were given to the students to read.
He said the incident took place in the midnight and it was detected by the maulvi at 5:40 am when he opened the room to offer prayers. Charred pages of the burnt books were lifted from the spot by the forensic team.
Taking a serious note of the adverse incident, Deputy Commissioner, Sirmaur, BC Badalia directed the police to thoroughly probe the matter and arrest those responsible for it.
Since there was visible resentment among the Muslim community after the incident, the Deputy Commissioner met the residents and assured them of apt action against the miscreants.
He said the police had already begun a probe and assured them that the miscreants would be arrested within three days.
The DC exhorted the people to maintain peace in the area and directed the SDM, Paonta Sahib, to convene a meeting with the members of the Muslim community to chalk out a strategy to ensure the safety of various mosques and gurdwaras in the area.
This would ensure that the anti-social elements were dealt with sternly and the areas peace was not compromised by such acts.
Vijay Arora
Shimla, December 4
Expressing concern over the illegal trade of drugs in Kullu district, the High Court has directed the Chief Secretary to file his personal affidavit regarding hotels/commercial establishments running without statutory sanctions, more specifically at Kasol village in Kullu.
Taking serious note of rave parties at Kasol, the court observed: It is not understood that how rave parties are being allowed to be organised at Kasol in Kullu valley by the district administration as well as the police. Similarly, we do not know whether foreigners residing in and around Malana possess valid permission from the Government of India to stay in Kullu district or they are illegally staying or managing their illegal stay in and around Malana village.
A Division Bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Sanjay Karol and Justice Sandeep Sharma passed the orders on a petition taken up suo motu by the court as a public interest litigation on the issue. It further observed: We are told that with the passage of time, many foreign nationals have settled in and around Malana village. Rather they have opened their restaurants and have been serving drugs to foreign nationals as well as other tourists coming from other parts of the country. We have no hesitation to observe that such activities, if any, by foreign nationals, is definitely not possible without the connivance and facilitation of locals. It is an open secret that drugs are served and rave parties are organised in Kasol village, but despite that there is nothing to suggest that efforts, if any, have been put by the district administration or the police to stop such illegal activities.
The court observed: Kullu valley, which is popularly called the Devbhumi and is renowned for International Dussehra Festival is now becoming famous for drug addicts, who come here solely with a view to having a taste of the drug (psychotropic substance) commonly known as Malana Cream.
The court directed the Narcotics Control Bureau to file an action-taken report on the suggestions given by the amicus curie and on the affidavit filed by the Director General of Police and listed the matter for further hearing on December 7.
Pratibha Chauhan
Tribune News Service
Shimla, December 4
In a complete u-turn to its earlier decision of returning Rs 280 crore upfront premium paid by Adani group for the 960 MW Jangi Thopan hydro-power project, the Cabinet has decided against returning this huge amount to the business house.
It was four days back that the Cabinet by circulation decided to reverse its decision taken on October 10. It was in its last meeting on October 10 that the Cabinet had decided that it would explore various options for returning Rs 280 crore to Adani Group. The decision had been conveyed to the Adani Group and, in fact, the company had about a fortnight back sought details of the options being explored for returning the upfront premium.Surprisingly, the decision to reverse the earlier decision was taken during the code of conduct before Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh left for Delhi. The signatures of the ministers were taken through circulation.
The Cabinet move to reverse the earlier decision was taken so as to avoid any legal wrangles when the new government assumes power after counting of votes is taken up on December 18, revealed sources. The letter issued to Adani Group has been withdrawn so that he cannot drag the government to court on the issue.
The Jangi Thopan project had been allotted to Brakel about a decade back and the upfront premium for the project had been paid by Adani group. Though the project was officially allotted to Brakel for the past some time the official correspondence was being done with the Adani group. Prior to this also the Cabinet had in October 2015 decided to look for ways to return this money to Adani.
The Jangi Thopan project had been allotted to Brakel in 2007 when Congress was in power and later when the BJP assumed power it was put on halt only to be re-allotted in 2008. The allotment of the project was dragged to court by Reliance and till now the project has failed to take off.
The latest decision by the Cabinet has been prompted by the fact that officially the project was allotted to Brakel Corporation and at that time Adani was nowhere in the picture. The agreement too was signed with Brakel so it would be difficult to prove why an amount of Rs 280 crore was returned to Adani. Finance and Law Department had been averse to the Cabinet decision taken on October 10. 2017, just two days before the Assembly elections were announced to return this money to Adani.
PLATTSMOUTH A South Dakota man who was speeding and driving drunk in Cass County earlier this year pled guilty to his fifth DUI offense on Monday morning.
Ryan G. Christiansen, 40, accepted a plea deal during an appearance in Cass County District Court. Christiansen pled guilty to one Class IIA felony charge of driving under the influence of alcohol-fifth offense. He also admitted that he had been convicted of four prior DUI offenses in South Dakota and Nebraska.
The state had originally charged Christiansen with a Class II felony of DUI-fifth offense-aggravated. Prosecutors agreed to remove the aggravated language of the felony charge in exchange for a guilty plea.
The plea deal did not contain an agreement regarding sentencing. If the court chooses to impose a statutory sentence on Christiansen, he would serve between two and 20 years in prison. If the court imposes a probation sentence, Christiansen would be required to serve at least 180 days in jail. He would have his drivers license suspended for 15 years with either a statutory or probation sentence. Sentencing will take place Jan. 29.
Christiansen had lived in Nebraska before moving to his current hometown of Chamberlain, S.D. The current charge is his sixth lifetime DUI conviction, but prosecutors were able to use only four previous DUI charges in their case. He was convicted of DUI in Douglas County in August 2003, October 2003 and October 2007. He collected DUI convictions in South Dakota in November 2013 and December 2015.
Deputy County Attorney Colin Palm told the court a Cass County resident called emergency dispatchers at 6:32 p.m. March 2 to alert them about a reckless driver. The woman said a man was driving a green Ford Explorer in Louisville and nearly struck her car when she was parked at the corner of Main Street and Highway 50. She then saw the man drive through town in a reckless manner.
A Cass County Sheriffs Office deputy was on duty on Highway 66 and began looking for Christiansens vehicle. He spotted Christiansen in the eastbound lane of the highway and then saw him pass another car at a high rate of speed. The deputy switched on his speed detector and clocked Christiansen going 92 miles per hour in a 60-mph zone.
The deputy pulled over Christiansen and smelled alcohol on his breath during their initial conversation. Palm said Christiansen told the deputy he had been drinking a lot of alcohol before getting behind the wheel. Christiansen was arrested after a preliminary breath test revealed a blood-alcohol content level of .250. Palm said a chemical blood test conducted at Cass County Jail later that night revealed a BAC level of .233.
Christiansen currently remains free on bond in a pre-trial release program. Palm said Christiansen had allegedly violated several of the pre-trial release requirements in the past month. He said the state would not be filing a motion to revoke the pre-trial release on Monday, but he warned Christiansen that it could be a possibility if additional violations take place in the future.
Arteev Sharma
Tribune News Service
Arnia, December 4
The fear of Pakistani shelling has deepened in the mind of border villagers to such an extent that they look for safety even when celebratory crackers are burst during marriages or other occasions.
Arnia town, about 45 km from district headquarters, is located close to the International Border but it never felt the brunt of ceasefire violations by Pakistan since the 1971 Indo-Pak war till September 2014. The life of border residents has changed completely in the past three years as Pakistan has directly targeted civilian areas up to seven kilometre from the border in Arnia since then.
India shares 198-km International Border with Pakistan in the Jammu region that runs from Paharpur on the Kathua-Punjab border to the Chickens Neck area of Akhnoor.
Local people have now stopped bursting crackers in the marriages. Even when a baraat comes to the village, and people burst crackers, villagers many times run for safety inside their houses. We are quite uncertain about border skirmishes as anything can happen anytime, said Darshan Lal, a village resident.
Darshan Lal, who runs a sweetmeat shop in Arnia town, had received splinter injuries on January 29, 2015, when a shell exploded outside his shop. He underwent three surgeries and spent lakhs of rupees on his treatment but got only Rs 5,000 cash assistance from the government.
I fell unconscious and remained in hospital for 22 days. The incident completely shattered my life as I cant walk smoothly now. One of my legs was broken and a plate was inserted in it. I was the only breadwinner of the family but now I find it difficult to make both ends meet, he said while regretting that the government had offered no help to him.
Another victim, Tilak Raj, a septuagenarian, has been rendered bedridden after a shell exploded in the verandah of his kutcha house in October 2014. He sustained grievous injuries and his right leg had to be amputated. I used to earn livelihood for my family through farming, but now I am now dependent on others.
I submitted photostat copies of medical documents to officers concerned a number of times but all in vain. I got a meagre compensation of Rs 5,000 from the administration. Politicians do come to the village but only for photo-ops. The only achievement of the Modi government is that it has increased the number of physically challenged persons in border areas due to Pakistani shelling manifold and it cares least about their livelihood, said Tilak Raj.
A BSF source said Pakistan has violated the truce between the two countries 107 times this year so far while there were 221 violations along the International Border in 2016. The number was 253 in 2015 but in 2014 there had been a spurt in ceasefire violations with 430 such incidents. A total of 457 villages with a population of 4,51,856 are located along the International Border and the Line of Control in Jammu, Samba, Kathua, Poonch and Rajouri districts in the Jammu region.
Schooling badly hit
Border skirmishes have left a deep impact on the schoolgoing children because schools have become a target of Pakistani mortar shells. All government schools remained closed in Arnia from September 15 to October 3 this year but its impact was witnessed for almost one and a half months as children did not return to the schools due to the fear of shelling. We are worried about the future of the children. Any skirmish along the border puts brakes on the normal classwork. There is no dearth of talent but children need peace, said a teacher at Government High School, Arnia.
Suhail A Shah
Anantnag, December 4
One soldier and two militants were killed today in an encounter triggered by an attack on an Army convoy in the Qazigund area of Anantnag district. The attack on the convoy also left a soldier injured.
One soldier was killed in the gunfight, defence spokesperson Rajesh Kalia confirmed while adding that the injured soldier was stable and under treatment.
Director General of Police S P Vaid confirmed that two bodies of militants had been retrieved from the site of the gunfight. A search operation, however, continues, Vaid said.
According to police reports, the militants opened fire at a Srinagar-bound Army convoy about 1:20 pm near Bonigam village of Qazigund along the Srinagar-Jammu national highway.
They fired indiscriminately, leaving an Army man injured, a senior police officer said, adding that the area was cordoned off soon after the attack.
He said contact was soon established with the militants, who had taken refuge in a residential house. The militants were asked to surrender but they opened fire. The fire was retaliated, triggering an encounter, which lasted several hours, the police officer said.
The house where the militants were hiding was blasted. After the retrieval of the two bodies, a combing operation was launched in the area.
Clashes erupted in the area soon after the encounter began. Security forces used tear-smoke shells to disperse the protesting youth. Unconfirmed reports suggested that a civilian sustained a minor injury during the clashes.
Meanwhile, the Lashkar-e-Toiba claimed the responsibility for the attack. They also claimed that four Army men were killed in the attack.
Two policemen were also injured in the neighboring Kulgam district in an accidental fire at a local police station. Both are stable and under treatment, a police official said.
Clashes erupt
Clashes erupted in the area soon after the encounter began. Security forces had to use tear-smoke shells to disperse the protesting youth. Unconfirmed reports suggested that a civilian sustained a minor injury during the clashes
The house where the militants were hiding was blasted. After the retrieval of the two bodies, a combing operation was launched in the area
Two policemen injured in accidental fire
Two policemen were injured on Monday in Kulgam district in an accidental fire at a local police station. Both the policemen are stable and under treatment, a police official said
Amarjot Kaur
A fortunate stroke of coincidence led Bologna-based Italian artist Cristian Chironi to Chandigarh at the time when it is commemorating the 50th death anniversary of architect Pierre Jeanneret. Staying at House Number 57 in Sector 5, which was once home to Pierre Jeanneret and was converted into a museum on March 22 this year, Cristian has become the first guest to stay at the museum. On view are his art installations, an exhibition titled My House Is a Le Corbusier, where he extends a creative interpretation to his understanding of Jeanneret and Corbusiers architecture.
Travel diaries
Since November 9, 40-year-old Cristian has been interacting with Jeannerets house, which was also frequented by Le Corbusier, and the citys open spaces. Chandigarh is a work of art and it has kept me amused ever since I got here, India being the fourth country I am travelling to explore Le Corbusiers architecture. Before this, I have stayed in houses designed by Le Corbusier in Argentina, Italy, and France. Soon, as a residential artist, I will be headed to Russia, Germany, Belgium, Tunisia, Iraq, Japan, and the USA to stay in buildings by Le Corbusier, says Cristian.
Creative space
My house is a Le Corbusier is a project sponsored by the Le Corbusier Foundation of Paris, the Pierre Jeannette Museum, and the Le Corbusier Centre, Chandigarh. I have stayed in six houses designed by Le Corbusier and what I have loved about these houses is their dialogue with outer spaces, especially nature. Also, I love the big windows and the minimalist colour use in Corbusiers architecture, like blue, yellow, green, and red, acknowledges Cristian. He also has a special fondness for Jeannettes interior designing, especially the tables and chairs he created, though he is saddened to know about the organised smuggling of furniture created by Jeannette and Corbusier. Its a pity, and I have touched upon the topic of the furniture being sold in a 30 to 40-minute long documentary I made on my stay here in Chandigarh, he adds.
Of giving & receiving
Cristian has created 10 installations to leave behind as a present to his one-month abode. Living on the first floor of the Museum, comprising three rooms, he has made two glass-boxed installations; while one is in yellow, the other is blue. I have used cut-out images from a book I brought on the works of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeannette in Chandigarh. In the collages too, which are Corbusiers original sketches of buildings, like Assembly Hall and The Secretariat, I have arranged cut-out images to juxtapose their interior and exterior spaces to converse with its urban character, he shares.
Cristians stay is supported by collectors Anna and Francesco Tampieri, and the Institute of Italian Culture of New Delhi, in collaboration with MAN (Museo dArtedella Provincia di Nuoro, lIstituzione Bologna Musei) and MAMbo (Museo dArteModerna di Bologna, Xing, NERO).
Leaving his art behind
Cristian has juxtaposed the drawings of Corbusier with the furniture of Jeanneret, treating them as a new style of architecture. There are four collages, where he places cut-outs of furniture, lamps, and views from the inside of the buildings at Capitol Complex. Hes turned these pictures upside-down to relate them, with the outer sketch of the buildings. For instance, the Corbusier chair turned upside down on a sketch of a man sitting by the road is his idea on how the underprivileged in Chandigarh must have a home to stay. Similarly, a desk turned upside down and placed next to a cow becomes an animal shelter.
On display is his photography book titled, Broken English, on the back of its cover while its front reads My House Is a Le Corbusier. These are the places, designed by Le Corbusier, I have stayed in since January 2015, he explains. Besides a manhole cover Cristian fabricated with reference to the windows of the Jeanneret house, he has also made an embossed artwork on cement. I have used an old table cloth that belongs to my family to get this mosaic, he adds. There are two glass boxes on the first floor. I have used two papers, and folded one on top of the other to make two buildings interact with other another. In the blue box, I have used three such images, he shares.
Borrowing references from the brick jaali that defines the verandas of Pierre Jeanneret Museum, he also prepared a similar mesh and placed five tabs between the bricks that show his documentaries at Corbusier-designed places he has stayed in four countries, including India.
(On till December 9)
amarjot@tribunemail.com
Mumbai, December 4
Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif are reuniting on the screen after five years and the superstar says he is happy to romance the actor in their upcoming film "Tiger Zinda Hai".
The duo, who has previously worked in movies such as "Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya" and "Partner", will reprise their roles in the soon-to-be-released sequel to "Ek Tha Tiger" (2012).
When asked how it was to romance Katrina after a long time, Salman told reporters, "It is good. It is always good to romance. As there's no fight, so it's good to romance."
The actor was speaking on the sidelines of Star Screen Awards here last night.
Katrina recently appeared on "Bigg Boss", which is hosted by Salman, to launch the film's second song "Dil diyaan gallan'.
The 51-year-old star is happy that both the songs of the movie have been well received by the audience.
"Katrina was with me on 'Bigg Boss' when she gave me this information that 'Swag se swagat' has earned some 50 million likes. Now, we have launched a romantic song. Let's see how it is received...
"Both the songs are nice and people are loving them. So, let's see what happens on December 22 and what's the destiny of the film," he said.
The "Dabangg" star also performed some of his biggest dance numbers at the award ceremony. PTI.
Melbourne, December 4
Indian energy giant Adanis controversy-hit Carmichael coal mine project in Australia has hit another roadblock after Chinas two major state-run banks said they had no plans to finance the venture, media reports said on Monday.
The 16.5 billion dollar project, one of the worlds largest, will start construction after being given the green light by the federal and Queensland state governments.
Adani is seeking a finance of 2 billion Australian dollars by March 2018 for the first stage of its proposed mine project in Queensland.
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), in a statement, clarified that it had no intention of funding Adanis proposed mine in Queensland, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
ICBC has not been, and does not intend to be, engaged in arranging financing for this project, ICBC said in a statement on its website.
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ICBC attaches great importance to its social responsibilities and keenly promotes green financing.
While not mentioning coal, ICBC said it had provided finance in Australia for a series of renewable energy projects, the report said.
Earlier, China Construction Bank had also refused financing the project, saying it is not involved with, nor considering involvement with, the Adani Carmichael Mine project, the report said.
There was no immediate response from the Adani group regarding the latest media report.
Last month, the Labour Party-led Queensland government had said it would exercise its veto not to support the financial assistance to the project, which had been opposed by environmentalists and indigenous groups.
The Adani group had applied for Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility loan (NAIF) worth 900 million dollars for building a train line to connect its mine to the coast.
The anti-Adani lobby has hailed the rejection by two of Chinas major banks as a significant development in blocking the construction of the mine, the report said.
The Carmichael project, expected to create hundreds of jobs in Australia, has been facing opposition from environmentalists and indigenous groups.
The Indian energy giant has for more than five years battled the opposition to any expansion of the Abbot Point port, saying it will cut into the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.
The Adani group entered Australia in 2010 with the purchase of the greenfield Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee Basin in central Queensland, and the Abbot Point port near Bowen in the north.
Meanwhile, an expert said that arranging finance from China was one of Adani groups last remaining hopes after major Australian banks and also Queensland government refused to finance the project on concerns about its financial viability and the push towards renewable energy sources.
Having failed to secure finance from banks in the US, Europe and Australia, Adani has now seen the worlds largest and second largest banks by assets rule out support for its massive proposed coal mine, Market Forces executive director Julien Vincent was quoted as saying in the report.
This leaves their attempts to open up Australias largest coal mine in tatters, and increasingly reliant on public funding, he said.
He said the Indian conglomerate had been working to contract the China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CEMC) into the Carmichael mine and rail project.
However, the CEMC would potentially need to source credit and support from Chinese banks to participate in the Adani project.
Adani had, on numerous occasions, pushed back the start date for the mine, the report said. PTI
Jupinderjit Singh
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, December 3
Revealing a new dimension to the nexus between officials and prisoners, an assistant superintendent has been found using the bank account of a convicts father to stash money that he and the convict, a drug smuggler, made by smuggling drugs into the Faridkot jail.
Assistant Superintendent (Jail) Karamjit Bhullar, who has been charge-sheeted, allegedly got the bank account opened so that the trail of dirty money did not lead the authorities to him.
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An inquiry by retired Justice MS Rattu, who is on the Jail Department panel, found that the official had connived with convict Pargat Singh to open an account in the name of the latters father, Gurdev Singh. The two sold drugs inside the jail and struck deals outside. Payments by clients went directly into the bank account. Deposits were made from various places in Rajasthan and Punjab.
A modest farmer, Gurdev Singh was found to have Rs 5.5 lakh in his account.
The modus operandi has set the alarm bells ringing. Jail Department officials say they have reports of other officials acting likewise.
The ADGP (Prisons), IPS Sahota, said Bhullar had been charge-sheeted for corruption and for running a racket in connivance with a convict. The official, sources said, was reported to have been interacting with gangsters inside and outside the jail.
After the Intelligence wing of Punjab Police got to know of the jail officials modus operandi, it approached the Jail Department, informing that Bhullar was clandestinely operating the account and had the ATM card with him. An internal inquiry revealed that Bhullar and convict Pargat Singh worked together to smuggle drugs into the Faridkot jail and would extort money from inmates by threatening to get them booked for illegal activities inside the jail.
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, December 4
Top Congress leaders in tow, Rahul Gandhi on Monday filed his nomination for the post of party Presidents election, making his takeover of the party a mere formality.
Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh led the process of nominations for Gandhi as his mother and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi refrained from attending the process physically.
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If you ask me, I think he will make a very good Prime Minister: Capt.Amarinder Singh,Punjab CM on #RahulGandhi pic.twitter.com/nTkqIahuMy ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2017
She, however, was among four lead proposers for her sons election along with Manmohan Singh and, Ghulam Nabi Azad. Singh exuded confidence in Rahul Gandhis leadership saying, We have full faith in the leadership of Rahul Gandhi. His diligence will pay off one day.
As @OfficeOfRG files his nomination to take over the Grand Old Party of India I wish him all the very best going ahead. Expectations are high, challenges are numerous & I pray for his success. Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) December 4, 2017
Four sets of nomination papers were filed by Congress Working Committee (CWC) members and AICC office-bearers.
Each state delegation filed separate forms each requiring the signatures of 10 proposers.
Gandhi was still signing his nomination papers (he must sign each nomination form and there are around 70) when this report was being written.
As the process continued, the Congress fielded leaders of all generations in the party to demolish Prime Minister Narendra Modis charge that the election of the party president was undemocratic and rigged.
Veterans who rejected this charge included Azad, former ministers Sushil Kumar Shinde and Kamal Nath, former CMs Sheila Dikshit, Harish Rawat and Bhupinder Singh Hooda as well as a host of partys young faces. Each one of them stated their support for Gandhi on record hailing the day as historic and saying that the Congress would return to power under Gandhi.
Anand Sharma said the BJP and the PM should introspect in their charges of dynastic perpetuation on Congress and said, We reject the allegations of the PM with contempt. Rahul Gandhi is being proposed as the Congress president unanimously. This is a democratic process.
The entire process is expected to take until 3 pm to conclude as Rahul Gandhi is to sign close to 70 nomination forms of support for him.
Gandhi is the sole candidate who filed his nomination for the election today. This is the last date for nomination filing. His anointment as party chief is now a given.
Manas Dasgupta
Ahmedabad, December 4
The Congress today released its Gujarat election manifesto which included loan waiver for farmers and quota benefits to the Patidars and other deserving people among the upper castes. To woo the minorities, the party promised a separate ministry for the minorities in the state.
The 60-page manifesto released by state party chief Bharatsinh Solanki here today included fast-track courts for crimes against women, laptops or smart phones for college students, Rs 32,000-crore package to provide employment to 25 lakh youths, Rs 4,000 per month allowance for unemployed youths, reduction in taxes to bring petrol and diesel prices down by at least Rs 10 per litre and 16-hour regular electricity for irrigation. Solanki insisted that the entire Congress manifesto had been prepared on the basis of happiness index of the people as prevalent in Bhutan and several European countries which progressed without entering into the made race for development.
On the contentious issue of reservations for the Patidars, the party reiterated its commitment and promised that the existing benefits to the OBCs, the STs and SCs would be left untouched.
To woo the minorities, the Congress promised implementation of Sacher Committee recommendations and four other wakf tribunals. The party has said it would make the contracted employees permanent and fill all government vacancies with regular employees.
Solanki said the Congress government would also review the FDI policy to protect the interests of the small traders against MNCs. The party also promised a house for all women, a 24-hour toll free phone and single-window Women Help Centre, Pink Transport facility for women, free education from primary to higher education and setting up a fast-track court for crime against women.
Solanki said the Congress would set up a special investigation team to investigate into the allegations of financial irregularities to the tune of Rs 100,000 crore during the BJP rule in the state as highlighted in CAG and other reports.
London, December 4
The extradition trial of Vijay Mallya, wanted in India on charges of Rs 9,000-crore fraud and money laundering, today began at a UK court here, with the prosecution asserting that the embattled liquor baron had a case of fraud to answer.
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The trial began with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), arguing on behalf of the Indian Government, presenting its opening arguments, which focussed on loans totalling around Rs 2,000 crore sought by the erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines from a consortium of Indian banks. The CPS admitted that there may have been irregularities in the internal processes of the banks sanctioning some of those loans but that would be a question to be dealt with at a later stage in India.
The focus will be on his (Mallyas) conduct and how he misled the bank and misused the proceeds, said CPS barrister Mark Summers. He then went on to lay out a chronology of events, with specific focus on a loan sought by Kingfisher Airlines from IDBI bank in 2009.
The loan sought amounted initially to Rs 950 crore but was later reduced to Rs 750 crore, after it had received Rs 200 crore from UCO bank.
Meanwhile, Mallya was also sanctioned a loan of Rs 150 crore from IDBI in advance of the larger loan sought from the state-owned bank to meet critical obligations to overseas vendors.
The CPS noted that in all the loans sought, loss-making Kingfisher Airlines had relied on nearly the same set of security pledges, which included the UB Groups reputation, Kingfishers own brand value, a promised infusion of equity funds and a projected return to profit by February 2011.
The first day of the trial is expected to be taken up entirely by the CPS setting out a prima facie case against Mallya, out on bail since Scotland Yard executed an extradition warrant in April, The trial is scheduled to end on December 14. PTI
Long way to go
London, December 4
The extradition trial of Vijay Mallya, wanted in India on charges of Rs 9,000-crore fraud and money laundering, on Monday began at a UK court here, with the prosecution asserting that the embattled liquor baron had a "case of fraud" to answer.
The trial, however, was briefly halted as the courtroom had to be evacuated due to a fire alarm. The 61-year-old tycoon and others waited outside the Westminster magistrates court during the fire drill.
The trial began with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), arguing on behalf of the Indian government, presenting its opening arguments in the case which focussed on loans totalling around Rs 2,000 crore sought by the erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines from a consortium of Indian banks.
The CPS admitted that there may have been "irregularities" in the internal processes of the banks sanctioning some of those loans but that would be a question to be dealt with at a later stage in India.
"The focus of our case will be on his (Mallya's) conduct and how he misled the bank and misused the proceeds," said CPS barrister Mark Summers. He then went on to lay out a detailed chronology of events, with specific focus on a loan sought by Kingfisher Airlines from IDBI bank in November 2009.
The loan sought amounted initially to Rs 950 crore but was later reduced to Rs 750 crore, after it had received Rs 200 crore from UCO bank.
Meanwhile, Mallya was also sanctioned a loan of Rs 150 crore from IDBI in advance of the larger loan sought from the state-owned bank to meet "critical obligations to overseas vendors".
The CPS noted that in all the loans sought, loss-making Kingfisher Airlines had relied on nearly the same set of security pledges, which included the UB Group's reputation, Kingfisher's own "brand value", a promised infusion of equity funds and a projected return to profit by the airline by February 2011.
"The airline had claimed that it had put proactive measures in place to improve performance," the CPS noted.
However, it was also a time when according to an industry analysis, the state of the airline industry was described as "grim" and as being in "intensive care".
"It was not a scenario in which a state bank would have entertained such loan requests," the CPS added.
The first day of the trial is expected to be taken up entirely by the CPS setting out the Indian government's prima facie case against Mallya, a fact that was not welcomed by his defence team.
Mallya's barrister, Clare Montgomery, told the judge that she had hoped to set out the defence's opening arguments on the first day as well.
But the CPS said it will "not be rushed" as it lays out the complete chronology of events.
Meanwhile, Mallya watched the proceedings from behind a glass-windowed dock.
His defence team tried to get the judge to allow him to sit outside the dock near his defence team to access some of the complicated paperwork being relied upon, but the judge denied that request saying all defendants are expected to sit in the dock.
However, the judge has directed that a table be provided to Mallya for easier access to his paperwork.
Earlier, Mallya looked relaxed when he entered the court to stand trial on charges of fraud and money laundering related to his erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines owing several Indian banks around Rs 9,000 crore.
"These (allegations against me) are false, fabricated and baseless," Mallya told reporters outside the court ahead of the hearing.
A four-member CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) team from India had also arrived at the court ahead of the trial, one of whom nodded when asked if they were "confident" about their case.
Mallya, who has been out on bail since Scotland Yard executed an extradition warrant in April this year, will be in the dock for the duration of the trial scheduled to end on December 14.
A judgement in the case, being presided over by Judge Emma Louise Arbuthnot, is unlikely until early next year.
The CPS will need to demonstrate a prima facie case by producing evidence to show that the criminal charges against Mallya are justified and that he should be extradited to face the Indian courts.
Prison conditions in India are expected to be at the forefront during the hearing, with the Indian government providing assurances of protection of Mallya's human rights.
The tycoon has been on self-imposed exile in the UK since he left India on March 2, 2016.
While on strict bail conditions, which include providing a bail bond worth 650,000 pounds, surrender of his passport and a ban on possessing any travel documents, the former Rajya Sabha member has been based at his Hertfordshire estate Ladywalk in the village of Tewin, nearly 50 km from London.
The CPS had presented "supplemental" charges of money laundering to previous charges of fraud against the businessman at an earlier hearing in October.
The judge had agreed to effectively re-open a fresh case so that all charges can be heard concurrently in court.
If the judge rules in favour of extradition at the end of the trial, the UK home secretary must order Mallya's extradition within two months.
However, the case can go through a series of appeals in higher UK courts before arriving at a conclusion.
Judge Arbuthnot and her colleague, Rebecca Crane, at Westminster Magistrates' Court have recently rejected two other long-pending extradition requests from India. PTI
Bhopal, December 4
Taking potshots at the Congress' claim that party vice president Rahul Gandhi is a Janeudhari Hindu, BJP's Rajya Sabha member Subramanian Swamy today said the 47-year-old Gandhi scion was "compelled" to wear 'Janeu' (sacred thread) to perform the last rites of his father.
Swamy also termed the Congress as a "dharmashala" of one family on the day when Rahul filed his nomination for the party president's post.
"Rahul Gandhi was compelled to wear Janeu because of his father. Otherwise, he will not be able to perform last rites," Swamy said, while questioning why the Congress leader was not saying that he was a Hindu.
The senior BJP leader arrived here to attend a conference on environmental issues.
Swamy said, "When he accepts that he is a Shivabhakt, what is the problem in accepting that he is a Hindu. We will accept it. Your (Rahul) associate asked for the register meant for non-Hindus making entries and then you make claims that you are a Shivabhakt (devotee of Lord Shiva)." The BJP leader reaffirmed that the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya would begin soon and it would be ready to receive devotees by next Diwali.
"I have seen that our pleas are stronger than the opposition. They were defeated in the Allahabad High Court.
They have now filed an appeal but they did not present new facts. So, I believe that we will win the court battle," he said.
While replying to a question, Swamy claimed BJP's victory in the Gujarat Assembly elections was a foregone conclusion.
Asked about the extradition of liquor baron Vijay Mallya, Swamy said, "The government is making efforts to bring him back to India. The government will not spare anybody." Referring about to the GST, Swamy said that after the new tax regime was implemented, the GDP has started an upward movement.
Asked if the GST would adversely affect the BJP's chances in the Gujarat polls, he said everybody was saying that demonetisation would harm the party's prospects. But, on the contrary, the BJP won 75 per cent seats in Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, he added. PTI
New Delhi, December 4
Former prime minister Manmohan Singh on Monday said Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi would carry forward the great traditions of the party.
Speaking to the media, Manmohan Singh said, "Rahul Gandhi has been the darling of the Congress and this will add yet another chapter in his quest of serving the people for the party."
Meanwhile, Congress leader Anand Sharma also hailed Rahul's elevation as party president and said it is a historic day for the party.
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"It is a historic day for Congress. It's a big day today that Rahul Gandhi is taking this responsibility at a time when there is big challenge before the party. The Congress party will always stand by him to support him in his success," Sharma told media.
Earlier in the day, Rahul filed his nomination papers for the post of party chief at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters here.
It is speculated that he is running unopposed for the post of party President, but the speculations can only be confirmed on Tuesday when the names of contenders are published after scrutiny of nominations.
Rahul is set to fill in his mother Sonia Gandhi's shoes, who has been holding the post for nearly two decades. ANI
New Delhi, December 4
The issue of making Central Delhi and New Delhi out of bounds for demonstrators today reached the Supreme Court, which said guidelines should be framed to strike a proper balance between the citizens fundamental right to protest and the need to maintain law and order.
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A Bench headed by Justice AK Sikri issued notices to the Centre and the Delhi Police on a petition filed by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan (MKSS), an NGO, challenging the ban on all assemblies and protests in Central Delhi and the New Delhi areas.
It was important to frame guidelines so that neither the fundamental right to protest was violated, nor was any inconvenience caused to the public, it noted.
The continuous imposition of prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) was an arbitrary and unreasonable restriction on the fundamental rights of citizens to hold peaceful protest, contended the petition.
As per sub-section 4 of Section 144, an order can be issued for a maximum of two months. Therefore, the Delhi Police have adopted the tactic of issuing the same order repeatedly, the NGO said, seeking quashing of several orders passed declaring entire Central or New Delhi areas as prohibited areas. TNS
Bharuch, December 3
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said those opposing the bullet train project should travel on bullock carts.
Modi made the comment while lashing out at the Congress for its criticism of the Rs 1.1 lakh crore projectwhich he said was a negligible priceconnecting Ahmedabad and Mumbai and to be built by Japan.
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He said the Congress government too wanted the project but failed to get it and so was now opposing it.
Those opposing the bullet train project should travel on bullock carts. We wont mind, he told an election rally at the Amod Sugar factory near this Gujarat city on the banks of the Narmada.
Modi said the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail corridor to be built by the state-run Japan International Cooperation Agency would open up a huge employment opportunity in Gujarat.
Imagine how much employment will it generate for the region, for Bharuch. I ask you where will the cement for the bullet train (infrastructure) come from, iron come from, labourers come from? Wont that be from India? And who will be buying that? Japan. Isnt it a big deal? Modi asked.
He said the UPA government under Manmohan Singh also wanted the project but could not get it. The NDA government got it at a negligible price. So the Congress didnt like that. My only grievance against the Congress is that if they could not achieve anything, why does it pain them when someone else does it. Modi took a jibe at the Nehru-Gandhi family over what he said their claim to have Gujarati origins and doing nothing for the state.
What good did they do to Gujarat? Did they even think about project like Roll on, Roll off ferry service? Over the years, the Congress has created divisions between villages and cities, states, between people, between the educated and the uneducated, caste, communities.
But since the BJP formed the government in the Center, all these ailments have gone. When I was the Chief Minister, there was not a single day when they would not hurt Gujarat. He said the two districts of Kutch and Bharuch having large Muslim populations witnessed maximum development during the BJP rule.
He said the mega project of the Statue of Unity to install the worlds tallest statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel will also contribute to the development of the region and attract foreign visitors.
The Prime Minister said the government planned to develop some 1,300 small islands and islets around the marine border of the state, many of which are even bigger than Singapore.
Imagine these islands getting developed as Singapore. So, for a better tomorrow of Bharuch and Gujarat you should vote for the BJP. The Prime Minister is on a two-day visit to the state. On Monday, he will visit Dharmapur in Valsad district and then in Saurashtras Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Jamnagar. IANS
Washington, December 4
US President Donald Trump is closely monitoring the progress in his new South Asia Strategy, which gives a major role to India, and is very much engaged in its implementation, a senior administration official has said.
Trump had sought a major role for India in bringing peace in Afghanistan and ruled out a hasty withdrawal of troops from the war-torn nation while announcing his new Afghanistan and South Asia policy in August.
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"The president has been very closely monitoring the progress of the South Asia strategy. He's very interested in any progress that has been made," a senior administration official told PTI.
Trump had a meeting with his Defense Secretary Jim Mattis before he left on his visit to Pakistan. The defense Secretary is again likely to brief the president on his return.
On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly Session in New York in September, Trump met the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
"That was a good opportunity to hear from President Ghani on how the strategy was being received in Afghanistan," the official said.
Observing that Trump has been getting updates from his national security team on what's happening in Afghanistan, the official said the president is very much engaged and interested in how this strategy is progressing.
Asserting that the things are signs of encouragement in the implementation of the South Asia strategy, the official said it is moving in the right direction.
"We need to give more time for the strategy to take root," the official said. "It's a multifaceted strategy. We're using all the tools that the US has its disposal military, economic, diplomatic.
All these parts of the strategy are important. They all need to work in tandem together. The president is very interested in keeping track of how the strategy is going. And he is receiving regular updates," the senior administration official said.
In his August 21 speech, Trump had said that terrorists who slaughter innocent people will find no glory in this life or the next.
"They are nothing but thugs, and criminals, and predators, and, that's right, losers. Working alongside our allies, we will break their will, dry up their recruitment, keep them from crossing our borders, and yes, we will defeat them, and we will defeat them handily," he had said.
"In Afghanistan and Pakistan, America's interests are clear: We must stop the resurgence of safe havens that enable terrorists to threaten America, and we must prevent nuclear weapons and materials from coming into the hands of terrorists and being used against us, or anywhere in the world for that matter," Trump said.
Announcing his strategy, Trump said a core pillar of his new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions.
"Another fundamental pillar of our new strategy is the integration of all instruments of American power, diplomatic, economic, and military, toward a successful outcome," he said.
Describing Pakistan as an important part of his strategy, Trump had said the US can no longer be silent about Pakistan's safe havens for terrorist organisations, the Taliban, and other groups that pose a threat to the region and beyond.
Pakistan has much to gain from partnering with our effort in Afghanistan. It has much to lose by continuing to harbor criminals and terrorists, he had said. PTI
Mumbai, December 3
London Mayor Sadiq Khan today said he was lobbying with the British government to change its stringent visa norms, which he termed as a big mistake.
Khan arrived in the countrys commercial capital as part of his first official tour to three Indian cities, others being Delhi and Amritsar, to strengthen the UK capitals trade ties. I am a big critic of the British government over the change in the visa policy. I think they have made a big mistake, as on one hand the British government is asking Indian businesses to trade there and on the other they have made it more hard (to enter the country), Khan said during his interaction with reporters.
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Recently, the Theresa May government changed its visa policy for non-EU (European Union) nationals to curb its soaring immigration figures. The policy, which came into effect in November, will affect a large number of Indians, especially IT professionals.
I want to assure you that I am lobbying with my government to change its immigration stance, because I want talented Indians to come to London and not go to Canada, Australia or the US. London is open to people, talent and partnership, the London Mayor said. India last month flagged its serious concerns to Britain over its stringent visa norms and hike in threshold limit of annual pay of working professionals to get the travel documents.
The visiting Mayor also underlined the need to forge strong cultural ties with India, particularly with Mumbai.
I believe that culture is the DNA of any city. Im meeting (Maharashtra) Chief Minister tomorrow and hoping to announce a lot of things in relation to culture as well as a joint venture on issues like ecology and climate change, he said. Hailing Bollywood, Khan said they wanted to learn how the industry can churn out so many movies in a year. One thing that we are doing in Mumbai is learning how you manage to make so many films in Bollywood what is that you are doing? Indian films post-production work is excellent.
Hollywood filmmakers come here to do their post-production work. So, one of the announcements we are making tomorrow will be of the UK and India making films together, which will be a good example, he said.
Khan said students will benefit a lot as professionals after they get education in the top universities in London. There are more international students in London than any other city in the world. Four of the worlds top 30 universities are in London. Due to the change in the visa policy, some Indian students chose to go to Canada or Australia.
However, I want to tell Indian students that our universities are brilliant. When you come to London, apart from fantastic quality of education you get, you also get the experience and the contacts you make...This will stand you in good head when you return to (your) country as executive, investor, teacher or entrepreneur, he said. PTI
Ruchika M Khanna
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, December 4
The state government is reviewing two major doles it gives out to the people power subsidy to the farming community and the atta-dal scheme.
With the Capt Amarinder Singh government unable to cap the rising expenditure, it is now having a relook at the two major schemes that are draining the states coffers.
Official sources told The Tribune that during the two meetings held over the past one month on how to bring the states economy back on track, one of the issues being deliberated upon was that these two expenses needed to be curbed. This year, the government will be spending over Rs 10,255 crore on power subsidy and Rs 500 crore on the atta-dal scheme.
The government has already made an appeal to rich farmers to give up their power subsidy, although it has yielded no response. A survey of the beneficiaries in the atta-dal scheme (there are 1.39 crore beneficiaries) to weed out fake enrolments was done, but it has allegedly been scuttled by political powers at the local level as they do not want to annoy their voters. As a result, all these beneficiaries will continue to get subsidised foodgrain.
Officials say they have asked DCs in some districts to start a survey of the beneficiaries and check if people are in need of these doles. Based on their responses, the government could review the two schemes. Since the states own earnings have been restricted, post the GST roll out, the government is under pressure to curb expenditure. Four major heads salaries and wages, pensions, interest on loans and power subsidy take away a major chunk of the earnings. Of the total revenue receipts of Rs 60,079.87 crore this fiscal, Rs 56,184 crore will be used only by these four heads. The cut on other expenditure should be imposed if the state has to function normally, said a senior government official.
In a tight spot
Unable to cap the rising expenditure, The Congress government is now having a relook at the two major schemes that are draining the state's coffers
Relief on GST front
Repeated pleas by CM Capt Amarinder Singh for release of GST collections have finally yielded results. The state received Rs 960 crore as compensation for the GST for September and October; in addition to Rs 524 crore as arrears for July and August (the compensation received for these months was less). The government has also received the IGST share of Rs 488 crore for October. Finance Department officials said after meeting its committed liabilities, they would be able to release some money for social security pensions this month.
Neena Sharma
Tribune News Service
Dehradun, December 4
For the first time, the rugged border town of Pithoragarh has caught the fancy of a film crew from Mumbai which is busy shooting a Hindi film, Sandeep Aur Pinki Farar with actor Arjun Kapoor in the main lead.
A reputation for eyeing the best locales in India and abroad, the Yash Raj banner, under whose banner the film is being shot, seems to have fallen for this rugged mountainous place in the Kumaon region.
Though, in the past, several films have been shot in Ramnagar, Mussoorie and Nainital, this is the first time Pithoragarh has been selected by Yash Raj films.
There is a general desire to look for newer and exotic locales among Hindi film makers, years ago Jammu and Kashmir was the favourite among film makers, but that came to a stop with the start of insurgency. Both Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh have benefited from what can be said as J and Ks loss, said Madan Mohan Duklain, a film actor and writer.
The film directed by Diwakar Banerjee also stars Parineeti alongside Arjun Kapoor and the film crew is likely to remain in Pithoragarh for a month.
With breath-taking scenic spots at Munsiyari, Berinaag and Chokodi, Pithoragarh can be an ideal choice for producers looking for novelty and the effort can spur interest among tourists. So far, Pithoragarh has remained hidden due to its remoteness, but I am hopeful Yash Rajs film, once complete, will change this perception, said Raju Devlal, secretary of the Hotel Owners Association.
Nevertheless, the presence of Arjun Kapoor has managed to create an exciting buzz among the people of Pithoragarh, who are waiting for the arrival of Parineeti and other members of the film.
Melbourne, December 4
An Australian conservative politician on Monday proposed to his long-term partner on the floor of Parliament, ahead of the expected passage of a measure for same sex couples to marry.
Australians overwhelmingly voted for same-sex marriage in a postal vote in September and a marriage equality bill that passed the Senate last week is being debated in the Lower House, where it is expected to pass this week.
Liberal Member of Parliament Tim Wilson proposed to his partner Ryan Bolger in the capital of Canberra, the two having already exchanged rings but having pledged to wait for the country to pass the legislation before they wed.
This debate has been the soundtrack to our relationship, an emotional Wilson said to his partner, seated in parliaments public viewing area above.
In our first speech I defined our bond by the ring that sits on both of our left hands, that they are the answer to the question we cannot ask. So theres only one thing left to do - Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me? asked Wilson, who was formerly Australias human rights commissioner.
Bolger nodded yes, to applause.
Both Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls Liberal-National coalition government and the main opposition Labor Party have said they aim to pass the law by Dec. 7, but any proposed amendments could stretch out that timeline.
Passage of the bill will make Australia the 26th nation to legalise same-sex marriage, a watershed for a country in which some states considered homosexual activity illegal until 1997.
This is an issue of fundamental fairness, Turnbull said to parliament later on Monday. A society that promotes freedom and equality under the law should accord gay men and women the right to marriage.
About 80 percent of eligible voters participated in the voluntary survey, a turnout larger than for Britains Brexit vote and Irelands same-sex marriage referendum.
The message today, to every gay person in this nation, is clear, Turnbull added. We love you, we respect you, your relationship is recognised by the Commonwealth as legitimate and honourable as anybody elses. Reuters
Karangasem (Indonesia), December 4
Gushing ash from Balis Mount Agung volcano has dissipated into a wispy plume of steam, and Australian airlines that cancelled some flights to the Indonesian resort island on the weekend have returned to near-normal schedules.
Indonesias disaster mitigation agency on Monday said the volcano remains at its highest alert level but most of Bali is safe for tourists.
The exclusion zone around the volcano still extends 10 kilometres from the crater in some directions. More than 55,000 people are living in shelters.
Airlines Jetstar and Virgin Australia, which cancelled flights over the weekend even as the ash cloud shrank dramatically, said they were resuming services today.
The regions volcanic ash monitoring center in Darwin, Australia, has stopped issuing advisories for Agung, reflecting that its currently posing no threat to aircraft.
It would resume advisories if theres another eruption.
Tens of thousands of tourists were stranded when ash closed Balis international airport for nearly three days last week.
Indonesian government volcanologists say Agungs crater is about one-third filled by lava and there is still a high risk of more eruptions.
The volcanos last major eruptions in 1963 killed more than 1,100 people and it was active for more than a year.
David Boutelier, a geologist at the University of Newcastle in Australia, said the chance of a violent explosion is still very high but possibly not as high as several weeks ago because pressure is being released. AP
Islamabad, December 4
US Defence Secretary James Mattis today asked Pakistan to redouble efforts to confront militants operating from its soil as he met the countrys top leadership here, amid Washingtons concerns that Islamabad was not doing enough to dismantle terror safe havens.
Mattis held a meeting with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi after arriving here on his maiden tour to Pakistan to explore ways to effectively eliminate the threat of militancy, days after 2008 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed was released from house arrest.
The US Embassy in Islamabad said in a statement that Mattis told Abbasi to redouble efforts to tackle militants operating from Pakistans territory. The secretary reiterated that Pakistan must redouble its efforts to confront militants and terrorists operating within the country, Pentagon Chief Spokesperson Dana W White said after Mattis concluded his inaugural trip to Pakistan.
Mattis also met Minister of Defence Khurram Dastigir Khan, Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa and Director General of ISI Lieutenant General Naveed Mukhtar. Mattis recognised Pakistans sacrifices in the war against terrorism, White said, adding that Mattis emphasised the vital role that Pakistan can play in working with the US and others to facilitate a peace process in Afghanistan that brings stability and security to the region.
Abbasi said Pakistan, in its national interest, would continue to conduct intelligence-based operations all over the country to consolidate the gains achieved in the last four years.
The PM reiterated that there are no safe havens in Pakistan and the entire nation was committed to its resolve on eradicating terrorism once and for all in all its forms and manifestations, according to a statement by the Prime Ministers Office here.
Abbasi said no other country benefits more from peace and stability in Afghanistan than Pakistan.
He agreed with Mattis that both Pakistan and the US have common stakes in securing peace and security in Afghanistan for the long term stability of the broader region. PTI
Amman, December 4
Jets believed to be Syrian and Russian struck heavily crowded residential areas in a besieged rebel enclave near Damascus, killing at least 27 people and injuring dozens in the third week of a stepped-up assault, residents, aid workers and a war monitor said on Monday.
Civil defence workers said at least 17 were killed in the town of Hamoriya in an aerial strike on a marketplace and nearby residential area after over nearly 30 strikes in the past 24 hours that struck several towns in the densely populated rural area east of Damascus known as the Eastern Ghouta.
Four other civilians were killed in the town of Arbin, while the rest came from strikes on Misraba and Harasta, the civil defence workers said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, said the casualties on Sunday were the biggest daily death toll since the stepped-up strikes began 20 days ago. The monitor said nearly 200 civilians were killed in strikes and shelling, including many women and children, during that period.
The Eastern Ghouta has been besieged by army troops since 2013 in an attempt to force the rebel enclave to submission.
The government has in recent months tightened the siege in what residents and aid workers have said is a deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war, a charge the government denies.
The United Nations says about 400,00 civilians besieged in the region face complete catastrophe because aid deliveries by the Syrian government were blocked and hundreds of people who need urgent medical evacuation have not been allowed outside the enclave.
Eastern Ghouta is the last remaining large swathe of rebel-held area around Damascus that has not reached an evacuation deal to surrender weapons in return for allowing fighters to go to other rebel-held areas farther north.
They are targeting civilians ... a jet hit us there, no rebels or checkpoints, Sadeq Ibrahim, a trader, said by phone in Hamoriya.
May God take his revenge on the regime and Russia, said Abdullah Khalil, another resident, who said he lost members of his family in the air strike on Arbin and was searching for survivors among the rubble.
The intensified bombardment of Eastern Ghouta follows a rebel attack last month on an army complex in the heart of the region that the army had used to bomb nearby rebel-held areas.
Residents said, however, that the failure of the army to dislodge rebels from the complex had prompted what they believe were retaliatory indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the Eastern Ghouta.
Government advances since last year have forced people to flee deeper into its increasingly overcrowded towns. The loss of farmland is increasing pressure on scarce food supplies.
The Eastern Ghouta is part of several de-escalation zones that Russia has brokered with rebels across Syria that has freed the army to redeploy in areas where it can regain ground.
Rebels accuse the Syrian government and Russia of violating the zones and say they were meant as a charade to divert attention from the heavy daily bombing of civilian areas. The Syrian government and Russia deny their jets bomb civilians and insist they only strike militant hideouts. Reuters
Islamabad, December 4
US Defence Secretary James Mattis on Monday arrived in Pakistan with the issue of terrorist safe havens high on the agenda, after the release from house arrest of 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed last month.
Mattis landed at the Nur Khan Airbase in Rawalpindi where he was received by officials from Pakistans defence and foreign ministries.
He will hold talks with civilian and military leaders, including Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa.
Relations between the US and Pakistan have plummeted after President Donald Trump announced his new Afghan and South Asia policy in August and directly blamed Islamabad for supporting the Afghan Taliban.
Mattis is on a five-day tour to Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Pakistan.
Visiting Islamabad about a week after the White House asked Pakistan to immediately charge and arrest 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Saeed, in the absence of which it warned of repercussions, Mattis said he needs to talk to leaders in the country and gain their understanding.
JuD chief Saeed, who has an American bounty of USD 10 million on his head, walked free on November 24 after a court ordered an end to his 10-month detention.
The Pakistan government decided against detaining him further in any other case, pushing back against Indias efforts to bring the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai terror attack to justice.
The first thing Im going to do is do some listening, like I always do. My goal is to find common ground. I need to go, to sit down and listen to them, start there, start by listening, Mattis said on his way to Pakistan from Egypt.
Mattis is the first top American official to visit Pakistan after the completion of the first 100 days of the US new South Asia strategy unveiled by Trump on August 21.
We know we have some common ground. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their troops killed and wounded by terrorists. They have lost hundreds, thousands of their innocent people murdered and wounded by terrorists, so we know that there is common ground, he said, ahead of his visit.
Similarly, he said, there is common ground between Afghanistan and Pakistan, because there are terrorist groups that try to move back and forth, that do move back and forth in order to live in one country and attack the other.
So we know theres common ground; its how much more common ground can we find by listening to one another without being combative with one another, listening to others perspective, Mattis said.
But at the same time, as the General (Bajwa) has said, he wants no havens for terrorists anywhere, so we will work together and well find that common ground, if we have the will to. And then well work on how we address the problems where we can work together, he said.
He said he would not characterise everything over the past 16 years as failures.
There is clearly an abundance of areas where we have to double down, and I am optimistic at this point that because of what our adversaries, our mutual enemies are doing, that we can find ways to work together, he said.
Mattis said both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistan military, the NATO-led militaries of 39 nations have all been in fights here. Weve got to find a way to work together.
He said there is always an urgency to something when 39 nations plus Afghanistan have their troops in the midst of a long war, where causalities are being taken.
These are 39 of the most economically powerful, generally speaking, most long-term democratic institutions in the world. These are powerful nations morally, economically and diplomatically, and certainly militarily, he said.
Mattis said that it was essential in South Asia that all countries work together to restore the level of stability that allows for the economy to build.
I mean, can you imagine a border between Pakistan and India where economic trade is not ongoing to the benefit of people on both sides of that border. We can not only imagine it, its a reality right now, Mattis said.
So we have got to work together on this, and theres a sense of urgency about that, he said.
Theres people who are living below the poverty line in both those countries. So as you look at this problem, if youll expand the problem you can understand the sense of urgency to move beyond violence and get back to the normal order of things, he said.
General Bajwa is a mature officer with a deep background in not just military matters, but South Asia security issues, and we have got to find a way to move beyond this constant fighting thats characterised the area, he said.
Media reports suggested that Mattis faces a difficult task ahead as Pakistan is not happy over repeated US allegations of safe havens for militants in the country.
The Express Tribune yesterday said the civilian-military leadership will adopt a clear cut and decisive stance during the visit of Mattis that only cooperation will get cooperation. PTI
Seoul, December 4
The US and South Korea today kicked off their largest ever joint air exercise, an operation North Korea has labelled an all-out provocation, days after Pyongyang fired its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile.
The five-day Vigilant Ace drillinvolving 230 aircraft, including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and tens of thousands of troopsbegan Monday morning, Seouls air force said.
Pyongyang over the weekend blasted the drill, accusing US President Donalds Trumps administration of begging for nuclear war.
The annual exercise comes five days after the nuclear- armed North test-fired a new ICBM, which it says brings the whole of the United States within range.
As tensions surged, US Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican and foreign policy hawk, warned that the US was moving closer to preemptive war with the North. If theres an underground nuclear test (by the North), then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States, Graham told the CBS show Face the Nation.
The isolated and impoverished North has staged six increasingly powerful atomic tests since 2006 most recently in September.
The preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures. Every missile test, every underground test of a nuclear weapon, means the marriage is more likely, he said.
Grahams remarks echoed those of Donald Trumps National Security Adviser HR McMaster, who told a security forum on Saturday that the potential for war with the North is increasing every day. AFP
Sanaa/Dubai, December 4
Veteran former president Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed in a shooting on Monday after switching sides in Yemen's civil war, abandoning his Iran-aligned Houthi allies in favour of a Saudi-led coalition, foes and supporters said.
Sources in the Houthi militia said its fighters stopped Saleh's armoured vehicle with an RPG rocket outside the embattled capital Sanaa and then shot him dead. Sources in Saleh's party confirmed he died in an attack on his convoy.
Unverified footage of his bloodied body lolling in a blanket circulated just days after he tore up his alliance with the Houthis following nearly three years in which they had jointly battled the Saudi-led coalition that intervened to try to reinstate Yemen's internationally recognised government.
In a televised speech on Monday, Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi congratulated the Yemeni people for what he described as a victory against a "conspiracy of treason" engineered by the group's Gulf Arab enemies. He did not mention Saleh's death.
Saleh, 75, had said in a speech on Saturday that he was ready for a "new page" in ties with the coalition and called the Houthis a "coup militia", leading them to accuse him of betrayal.
Warfare between the former allies has torn densely populated Sanaa for days as Houthi fighters seized control of much of the capital and on Monday blew up Saleh's house while coalition jets bombed their own positions.
The end of their alliance had seemed poised to transform the fortunes of war after two years of attrition along mostly static front lines, which gave the Saudi-led coalition a new advantage over the Houthis.
Stalemate in Yemen has contributed to a human catastrophe as a Saudi-led blockade and internal fighting has thrust millions to the brink of famine and accelerated the spread of deadly epidemics.
Eyes will now turn to Saleh's political allies and military commanders, whom analysts credited with aiding the Houthi march southwards in 2014 to dominate swathes of western Yemen.
"What happens now and whether his family and political allies fight on is not yet clear," said Adam Baron, a Yemen expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
"His people will be angry, and many will certainly be out for blood, but there are many in the middle especially among the tribes who will fall with whoever appears stronger," he said.
"The (Saudi-led) coalition may have put a lot of their eggs in Saleh's basket only for it to fall over now. They appeared to strongly support his attempt to confront the Houthis and now that bid may have failed."
Heads of snakes
Saleh once compared his 33-year rule over Yemen to "dancing on the heads of snakes", a period that included unification of conservative north and Marxist south Yemen, civil war, uprisings, Islamist militant campaigns and tribal feuds.
But he was forced from power in 2012 following an Arab Spring uprising that left him wounded by an attempted assassination, leading to a Saudi-brokered political transition.
He fled to his one-time ally Saudi Arabia for treatment of his injuries and the princes in Riyadh allowed him to return to Yemen months later - something they came to bitterly regret as he undermined the transition plan and later joined the Houthis.
That set the stage for his final role -- that of ally to the Houthi movement which he had previously fought six times during his own presidency, and to Iran, the Houthis' political backer.
But they vied for supremacy over the territory they ran together, including Sanaa, which the Houthis seized in September 2014, and their feud burst into open combat on November 29.
The manoeuvring ended on Monday, as footage circulating on social media appeared to show his corpse, a deep wound in the side of its head, wrapped in a red blanket and being loaded onto a pick-up truck as tribal fighters waved their weapons.
"Praise God!" and "Hey Ali Affash!" (another name for Saleh) they were shouting.
Officials in his own General People's Congress party said Saleh was killed outside Sanaa in an RPG and gun attack on his convoy along with the GPC's assistant secretary general, Yasser al-Awadi.
His death was confirmed by Saleh's nephew and former chief of Yemen's security forces, Yahya Mohammed Abdullah Saleh, who hailed him as a martyr on his official Facebook page.
Street battles ease In Sanaa
Residents reported that the situation in Sanaa had calmed.
Most people were indoors, and streets were deserted amid a state of fear as the Houthis asserted full control. Saudi-led aircraft continued to fly overhead.
Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam claimed significant gains in the battle for Sanaa on Monday.
"With the aid and approval of God, the security forces backed up by wide popular support were able last night to cleanse the areas in which the militias of treason and betrayal were deployed," he said in a statement.
The Houthi movement's TV channel al-Masirah and witnesses said Houthi fighters had seized the downtown home of Saleh's nephew Tareq, an army general.
Residents said the warring sides traded heavy automatic and artillery fire as the Houthis advanced in the central Political District, which is a redoubt of Saleh and his family.
"We lived through days of terror. Houthi tanks have been firing and the shells were falling on our neighbourhood," said Mohammed al-Madhaji, who lives in the frontline district.
"The fighting has been so violent we feel we could die at any moment. We can't get out of our homes." Houthi media and political sources also reported that the Houthis also advanced toward Saleh's birthplace in a village outside Sanaa where he maintained a fortified palace. Reuters
Sanaa, December 4
Former President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been killed in fighting with the Iran-aligned Houthi militia raging in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television said on Monday, quoting sources in Salehs party.
Al Arabiya quoted a source in Salehs General Peoples Congress as saying he was killed by sniper bullets. A Houthi video distributed on social media showed what appeared to be Salehs body, clad in grey clothes and being carried out on a red blanket. The side of his head bore a deep wound.
Unverified footage that circulated earlier on social media showed armed militiamen unfurling a blanket containing the corpse and shouting, Praise God! and Hey Ali Affash!, another last name for Saleh.
The radio station of the Houthi-run Yemeni Interior Ministry first reported Salehs death but his party quickly denied this to Reuters, saying he was still leading his forces in Sanaa.
Earlier on Monday, Houthi forces blew up Salehs house in Sanaa and came under aerial attack by Saudi-led coalition warplanes for a second day, residents said.
The Saudi-led air campaign, backed by US and other Western arms and intelligence, has killed hundreds of civilians but has failed to secure the coalition any major gains in the nearly three-year-old campaign to restore Yemens internationally recognised president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, to power.
Salehs loyalists have lost ground on the sixth day of heavy urban warfare with the Houthis during which the death toll has jumped to at least 125 with 238 wounded, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
We are supporting the main hospitals in Sanaa who urgently need war-wounded kits, ICRC spokeswoman Iolanda Jaquemet said in Geneva. We are also looking at donating dead body bags to hospitals which are actually asking for them and hope to donate fuel to the main hospitals because they depend on generators. The United Nations called for a humanitarian pause in Sanaa between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to allow civilians to leave their homes, aid workers to reach them, and the wounded to get medical care.
Jamie McGoldrick, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, said in a statement that the streets of Sanaa had become battlegrounds and that aid workers remain in lockdown.
McGoldrick warned the warring parties that any deliberate attacks on civilians and against civilian and medical infrastructure are clear violations of international humanitarian law and may constitute war crimes.
Sanaa residents reported intense fighting overnight and into the morning with families cowering in their homes as explosions rocked the city. Coalition air strikes hammered Houthi positions in an apparent bid to shore up Salehs forces, witnesses said.
The realignment of Salehs forces with the Saudis would mark a significant turn in a war that is part of a wider struggle between regional powers Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Yemens protracted bloodshed has compounded the woes of one of the Arab worlds poorest countries and left at least 10,000 dead as hunger and disease have spread.
At the United Nations, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the warring parties to stop all ground and air assaults. He also called for the resumption of all commercial imports into Yemen, saying millions of children, women and men were at risk of mass hunger, disease and death. Reuters
Manufacturing activity in the U.S. remains strong, despite small declines recorded in three reports, while the construction sector posted its biggest gain in nearly half a year.
New orders for manufactured goods fell 0.1% in October from the month before, according to a report from the Commerce Department on Monday, but that was better than the 0.4% decline expected in a consensus estimate from analysts. This latest performance followed an upwardly revised September hike of 1.7%.
The drop in factory orders came as orders for durable goods fell by 0.8%, more than offsetting a 0.7% increase in orders for non-durable goods.
Orders for non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft, commonly referred to a core capital goods, and used as a measure of business spending plans, rose a revised 0.3% in October instead of the originally reported 0.5% drop reported earlier by the department.
Analysts at Econoday said this rise in core capital goods is worth noting because it extends what is a very strong run for a component that offers leading indications on business investment."
Shipments of core capital good, also revised higher, extend what is also an impressive run, one that feeds directly into nonresidential fixed investment and marks a strong early plus for fourth-quarter gross domestic product [performance]," Econoday notes.
In contrast, the same report showed shipments of manufactured goods, up 10 of the last 11 months, increased 0.6% in October following a September improvement of 1.1%.
Looking past the headline, this report is very solid and points squarely at a rising contribution from the factory sector, said Econoday.
Strong October Factory Activity Extends Into November
This followed two reports from Friday about the health of the nations manufacturing sector. It continued growing at a robust pace last month, although a bit more slowly.
While the closely watched numbers from the Institute for Supply Management showed U.S manufacturing activity declined slightly in November from the month before, according to its Purchasing Managers Index, it remained well in positive territory.
That PMI registered 58.2%, down 0.5 of a percentage point from October. A reading above 50% indicates expansion in manufacturing, and November marked the 15th straight month above this level.
Comments from the panel of purchasing executives reflect expanding business conditions, with new orders and production leading gains, employment expanding at a slower rate, order backlogs stable and expanding, and export orders all continuing to grow in November.
Supplier deliveries are still expanding but at slower rates, and inventories continued to contract during the period. Price increases continued, but at a slower rate.
Despite a slightly lower number for November compared to October, the measure shows solid growth ahead for the manufacturing sector, according to John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo Securities.
The composite index is coming off a cycle high of 60.8% in September, and with a six-month average of 58.4%, the index continues to signal firmness in the manufacturing sector, he said. For the year ahead, we expect GDP gains of 2% or greater.
This came as a separate report was also released Friday by the financial information services provider IHS Markit that showed improved operating conditions across the U.S. manufacturing sector in November. The upturn was supported by solid, albeit slightly weaker, increases in output and new orders.
Its U.S. Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index registered 53.9 in November, down from 54.6 in October. Like the ISM gauge, a reading above 50 indicates expansion in manufacturing, though its not expressed as a percentage.
Goods producers increased their output at a rate only slightly below that seen in October, according to the report, while anecdotal evidence suggested that the rise was due to greater order volumes and robust client demand.
New orders received by manufacturers rose at the second-fastest pace since March in November. Panelists linked the latest upturn to more favorable demand conditions, and noted more orders from domestic and foreign clients. Furthermore, export sales rose at a rate that, though moderate, was the second-fastest in 15 months.
The rate of expansion settled slightly after Octobers rebound from the hurricanes, but still leaves the sector on course for its best quarter since the opening months of 2015, according to Chris Williamson, chief business economist at IHS Markit.
Whats especially encouraging is that growth is being led by producers of business equipment and machinery, indicating investment spending is on the rise, he said. Jobs growth in the sector has also picked up in recent months compared with the subdued hiring earlier in the year, suggesting that an expansionary mood is beginning to prevail in the goods-producing sector. Business optimism is now at its highest since the start of 2016, underscoring how firms believe the upturn has further to run as we move into 2018.
Construction Spending Surges
Meantime, in the construction sector, a Friday report from the Commerce Department showed the amount of spending in October increased 1.5% from the revised September estimate, totaling $1.242 billion.
This marked the biggest increase in five months and met a consensus estimate from analysts. Furthermore, when October is compared to the same time in 2016, construction spending advanced 3.9%.
The overall gain was helped by a near 4% hike in public construction projects that included a 3.3% boost from state and local governments, while federal government spending on construction leaped by 11.1%.
There was healthy growth this October in both public and private construction spending, with an exceptionally strong surge in public educational construction, said Ken Simonson, the chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America. But for the first 10 months of 2017 combined, public investment, specifically in infrastructure, has fallen short of the already inadequate amounts posted in the same period of 2016.
On Saturday, spotlights shined bright on a stage full of hopeful candidates in the Miss Owasso Pageant held at the Owasso High School Performing Arts Center.
The evening hosted 13 girls who competed for the prestigious crown eight contestants in the Teen Division and five in the Miss Division.
Madeline Shields, 22, of Owasso was crowned Miss Owasso, and Ella Phillips, 15, of Tulsa was crowned Miss Owassos Outstanding Teen.
Both of these girls have a passion for their platforms, for giving back and making a difference, said Brittany Gartner, pageant executive director. I have no doubt that they are going to make a lasting impact on Owasso during their year of service.
Shields is a senior at the University of Oklahoma, studying Elementary Education. Her talent was a flute solo to Habanera, and her platform is, Revitalizing Education in Oklahoma. She also won the Joe John Edwards Scholarship and tied for Talent preliminary winner.
Likewise, Phillips attends Regent Preparatory School. Her talent was a vocal performance to Live Out Loud, and her platform is, Those Who Read Succeed. She was also the Talent preliminary winner.
This year, the pageant is under new directorship with Gartner, who competed in Arkansas for six years before moving to Oklahoma. She said she is excited to give back to the system that has given her numerous opportunities.
My true passion is helping these young women find their place in this world and learning how to be confident in the person that God made them to be, Gartner said. I love the empowerment that this system gives to women, and Owasso is the perfect community to make a meaningful difference.
The new titleholders will both participate in the Owasso Christmas parade Saturday, Dec. 9, 9-10 a.m., as well as host the first annual Miss Owasso Holiday Shopping Expo at Owasso High School the same day, 12-4 p.m.
They will also be making appearances at the St. Francis Childrens Hospital Christmas party and the Tulsa Dream Center Christmas outreach project later in the month. They will represent Owasso next June at the Miss Oklahoma and Miss Oklahomas Outstanding Teen pageants.
Overall, the Miss Owasso pageant gave away 17 awards, totaling over $6,000 in cash scholarships to the finalists. All non-finalists received a $50 scholarship.
In the months leading up to his inauguration on Dec. 5, 2016, Mayor G.T. Bynum could tell you exactly how many days needed to pass before he took the oath of office.
A year into his new job, the mayor now has his watch set to tell him how many days he has left in office. As of Monday, it is 998.
Dont mistake this for a sign that he is counting down the days until he can escape the Mayors Office. Think of it, instead, as a long-range stopwatch ticking off the time he has left to get done all that he has set out to do.
I wanted us to focus on what are the biggest, hardest things that we need to focus on to accomplish to make Tulsa as competitive as it can be. A lot of those things dont happen in two months, or six months, or nine months or a year, Bynum said. But I feel like weve spent the last year building up to what is going to be a very big year.
I mean, just think about what we have coming online in the first few months of 2018 with the public inebriate alternative opening up, with the Better Way program. ... We will open our own lock-up facility. ... All of this is happening in just the next couple of weeks, and it is all, I think, a natural evolution of what we have been building up to this year.
Some would say it was natural evolution that put Bynum in office. His grandfather, Robert LaFortune, and his cousin, Bill LaFortune, each served as mayor of Tulsa, and Bynum himself served eight years on the City Council before challenging two-term incumbent Mayor Dewey Bartlett last year.
He won, decisively, on the promise to create a city unified and determined to make its mark nationally and internationally through the use of data-driven solutions and innovative strategies.
It can sound a little hippy-dippy and wonky, but it has worked to raise the citys profile. Bynum was invited to give a TED Talk on the subject in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, and in October he flew to Paris to give a speech at CityLab 2017.
His TED talk has been viewed more than 250,000 times.
The message that I delivered about how we are using data evidence and evaluation to really hone in on specific problems and work together to find solutions rather than having these old philosophical debates, I think that got us a lot of national attention, Bynum said.
The decision to change the citys focus from squabbling with its neighbors over outlet malls and sporting goods shops to working with those same communities to build a better region informs and guides everything the city does, Bynum said.
Looking back over his first year in office, Bynum pointed to a handful of initiatives he believes best reflect that approach: the effort, through the 100 Resilient Cities program, to address the disparities between the African-American community and the rest of the city; and the creation of the Mayors Education Cabinet and New Tulsans Initiative.
Those programs which Bynum acknowledges might not grab everyones attention are being coupled with concrete changes in how the city operates. The changes include the hiring of more police officers and firefighters, the establishment of new development procedures and a commitment to work with local educators to raise funding for schools.
All of this ties together, though, I think, in a way that we are focused as Tulsans in working together to make our neighbors lives better, Bynum said.
The toughest moment
Asked whether the death of Terence Crutcher and its aftermath was the hardest thing he had to deal with in his first year as mayor, Bynum paused and it was a long pause before answering yes.
But it was not a pause prompted by uncertainty. The mayor, it seems, has thought a lot about the incident and what it meant and could have meant to the city.
Crutcher, an unarmed black man, was shot dead by Betty Shelby, a white Tulsa police officer, on Sept. 16, 2016. The shooting drew national attention, as did the jurys verdict in Shelbys first-degree manslaughter trial: not guilty.
It was a very tough thing to go through, but I also think it says an awful lot about Tulsa that we went through something so difficult, and yet I think we emerged from it a stronger city because we were willing as a city to talk about and have conversations about things that people had kind of been wanting to be out of sight and out of mind for years, and that now (that) we have had those conversations we are talking about how we can do better as a city, Bynum said
The work of the Tulsa Commission on Community Policing, and the 77 recommendations it has put forward, are intended in part to help ensure that incidents like the Crutcher shooting dont happen again, Bynum said.
After the Shelby verdict, Bynum and Police Chief Chuck Jordan held a press conference but took no questions. Bynum said there were legal reasons why he could not respond to questions but that he tried to use his prepared statement to address the strong emotions swirling around the city in that moment.
I recognized at the time how divided our city was, and I knew exactly what I wanted to say to the citizens of Tulsa and to the country about how we were going to move forward from this and that we recognized both the pain the Crutcher family had been through but also the difficulty that our police officers go through every day being asked to protect the rest of us, Bynum said.
Bynum said he spoke to the Crutcher family and to Betty Shelby after the shooting.
My feeling is that it was a tremendous tragedy. I dont think either of them, given the opportunity, would have chosen what happened to happen, Bynum said. It is a terrible tragedy, and that is one of the reasons that we have been so focused on our community policing initiatives.
Mayor who?
In his first few months in office, it was not unusual for Bynum to look around for his predecessor when someone called out, mayor. Now he responds to the title, but not without a modicum of humility.
Bynum said he came into office thinking he had a good appreciation for what the job entailed, but has been surprised to learn of the unrelenting nature of the work.
As a city councilor, Bynum recalled, he focused on three issues at a time.
Well, as the mayor, I work on three things in about 15 minutes, and it is all the time, every day, seven days a week, every day of the year, he said.
And they are not easy things.
The easy decisions get filtered out before they get to me, so most of the decisions that end up on my desk are the very difficult ones, Bynum said.
He also has come to learn that some problems arent as easy to fix as he might have thought. The citys dispute with the county over a jail agreement being a prime example. Bynum pledged to get a deal done within 100 days of taking office. Not only did the deal not happen in 100 days, it didnt happen at all. The city decided to open its own lock-up facility.
In retrospect, (it) seems so naive to have thought we could do that, the mayor said.
For Bynum, 40, it was another lesson learned. Over the next 998 days, he expects the demanding job will teach him a few others.
I feel like I am better at the job today than I was in the first month on it, he said. But I recognize I still have a lot of work to do in being as good as I can be, and (I) just keep working to improve every day.
RUDD | An Anamosa man died from injuries after a transit bus collided with a Jeep on Thursday on the Avenue of the Saints near Rudd.
Troopers identified the driver of the 2015 Jeep as Eugene Schipper, 76, of Anamosa.
The accident occurred after 1:30 p.m. when the bus headed northbound on Glass Avenue collided with a westbound car on U.S. Highway 18, according to Iowa State Patrol.
According to the crash report, the Cerro Gordo County transit bus, driven by Mark Helmers, was crossing Highway 18 and failed to yield to the right of way Jeep.
Schipper was transported by Nora Springs Ambulance to Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa.
The bus was carrying two passengers. Passenger Shannon Nissen, 56, was injured and transported.
The accident remains under investigation.
Floyd County Sheriff's Department, Rudd Fire Department, Nora Springs Fire and Ambulance and AMR Ambulance assisted at the scene.
Citing local residents concerns about Tulsa Police use of force, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a voluminous open records request with the Tulsa Police Department.
Since the death of Terence Crutcher at the hands of the TPD, LDF has monitored local residents concerns about excessive use of force and alleged racially-biased police arrests and stops, the LDF said in a statement accompanying a copy of the open records request.
The LDF and ACLU Oklahoma seek 39 different types of TPD records, from a department organizational chart to the date and location of each time police stopped a pedestrian, broken down by the race, gender, age and outcome of each stop.
A Tulsa Police spokesman had not reviewed the Open Records Act request but said it would be processed like any other the department receives.
I cant think of an instance where anyone did an ORA on something that was public record that we did not release, Sgt. Shane Tuell said.
Crutcher was shot to death in September 2016 by then-TPD Officer Betty Shelby.
A jury in May acquitted Shelby of first-degree manslaughter in Crutchers shooting death. In August, Shelby was sworn in as a reserve deputy for the Rogers County Sheriffs Office after resigning from the Tulsa Police Department earlier in the month.
Crutchers estate filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in June that accused Shelby of excessive force and the city of racially biased policing. The estate filed an amended 52-page complaint in October that added Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan as a defendant, alleging that his agencys unconstitutional policies and deficient training led to Crutchers death.
The LDF, in a statement, describes its records request as an inquiry regarding all aspects of the TPDs practices, policies and procedures, including but not limited to use-of-force; de-escalation; stops, searches and detentions; arrests; community policing; and all directives related to biased policing based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity and disability.
Tuell used the idea of juggling balls to describe the process of handling open records requests.
Depending on the amount of information the individual or company is wanting will depend on the turnaround time on that because sometimes its real laborious to go through such a large request, Tuell said.
If we work on a large one without trying to address some of the smaller requests, then you start creating a backlog, Tuell said. It still does drag the system quite a bit, but it is what it is.
In this day in age of transparency, weve got to stay on top of it. Weve got to turn them out as quick as we can while still fulfilling the obligations within the ORA.
The LDF describes itself as the nations first civil and human rights law organization. It has been separate from the NAACP since 1957.
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Judith Chan dedicated herself to learning Nepalese sign language over three months. UNHCR/Emrah Gurel
GAZIANTEP, Turkey Judith Chans experience of living with a hearing disability meant she was no stranger to adversity. Over the years, she had taught people with disabilities to swim and helped to rehabilitate drug users. But when she joined UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, in 2011, she faced her biggest challenge yet to find a way of communicating with refugees who were deaf or hard of hearing, did not know sign language and had never learned to read or write.
As part of a UNHCR team working to resettle thousands of Bhutanese refugees from camps in Nepal, Assistant Field Officer Judith dedicated herself to learning Nepalese sign language over three months. The team also photographed items and collected objects from the camps to create a set of non-verbal communication tools.
From my own experience as a person with a hearing disability, I recognized many of the frustrations and barriers that refugees encountered because I too faced these, says Judith. Without a means to communicate, we rediscovered just how important language is. It allows us to make sense of our world and enables us to communicate our wants, needs, desires and feelings.
"I recognized many of the frustrations and barriers."
The pilot Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) toolkit that emerged meant Judith and her colleagues were able to communicate during protection and resettlement interviews with refugees with disabilities. Since then, the toolkit has been used by partners, refugees and UNHCR field staff to enhance communication with refugees with disabilities and improve their ability to report GBV incidents and access crucial services and assistance, including psychosocial support.
To this day, helping to create it is one of Judiths proudest moments.
Being a humanitarian worker means constantly figuring out new ways of doing things to help people re-build their lives, by building on what we have learned today for a better tomorrow, she says.
On 3 December, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, UNHCR marked the achievements and contributions of more than 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide. The agency also renewed its commitment to promoting greater awareness and recognition of their diverse perspectives and capabilities, and mobilizing support for their rights.
Judith Chan helping to interview refugees in Nepal. UNHCR
People with disabilities can be powerful agents of change and can help foster more open, inclusive societies in which diversity is celebrated and welcomed, said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi in a video message. This is better for everyone.
At UNHCR, we are fully committed to working to remove the physical and social barriers faced by refugees, displaced people and the communities in which they live and to building an environment in which diversity is embraced in all its forms, and that enables them to fully exercise their rights, and to pursue solutions that respond to their aspirations and needs.
For Judith, every day at work conducting interviews in the field and participating in large meetings in poor acoustic environments can be a challenge with a hearing disability. But her UNHCR colleagues help.
People with disabilities can be powerful agents of change."
I have been lucky to work with several supportive supervisors and colleagues throughout my career with UNHCR, she says. At times colleagues help me by relaying phone messages, using text messaging, writing and typing notes so that I can follow communication in noisy environments, ensuring that I sit near the main speakers, speaking slowly, and even advocating for others to do the same.
Refugees with hearing disabilities often face stigma and discrimination in their communities. They can encounter multiple environmental, communication and social barriers when accessing services and assistance, and face a greater risk of protection concerns including violence and exploitation.
In particular, women and girls with disabilities may face a disproportionate risk of GBV, Judith points out. Due to their specific needs, they may also face social exclusion from their peers and experience isolation in their homes.
Judith knows that her work with UNHCR makes a huge difference to their lives.
I joined UNHCR because becoming a humanitarian worker comes with the added dimensions of working in complex and challenging environments requiring us to be innovative, she says. Its a really good feeling to achieve things that first seemed impossible!"
Anyone concerned by potential misconduct is encouraged to report this and contact the Inspector General's Office (IGO).
Anyone can contact the IGO if they have concerns or information about possible misconduct by any UNHCR staff member or other person/entities with a contractual relationship with UNHCR. Anyone can contact the IGO if they have reason to believe that a staff member or another person associated with UNHCR has not behaved correctly.
Learn more about the Inspector General's Office.
Contacting the Inspector General's Office (IGO)
- By using the online complaint form
- By confidential email: [email protected]
- In person or by post: 94, rue de Montbrillant, Case postale 2500, 1211 Geneva
Mark all mail as CONFIDENTIAL.
Important note before sending a complaint: The Investigation Service of the IGO does not have the authority to deal with protection/assistance related requests. This means that the IGO cannot review individual refugee claims, cannot provide individuals with assistance (in kind or in cash), and cannot provide applicants with a durable solution. For these matters, please contact the UNHCR Office where you are registered or closest to where you are located.
Investigative process
Following receipt of information about possible misconduct, the Investigation Service will register the complaint and conduct a preliminary assessment to determine whether an investigation is warranted, considering among others whether the issue falls within its mandate and whether the alleged facts could amount to misconduct.
If it is decided to conduct an investigation, the investigative process consists of the following steps:
If the investigation finds that a staff member failed to comply with UN Staff Regulations and Rules or the standards of conduct expected of a UN civil servant, the IGO will send an investigation report to UNHCRs Division of Human Resources (DHR). DHR has the responsibility to determine the appropriate administrative response, such as possible disciplinary or administrative measures.
The IGO ensures confidentiality of the investigation, information and reports, as well as due process throughout the investigative process.
Report other types of fraud or misconduct
MASON CITY | Authorities have identified a victim who died in a house fire Friday afternoon that destroyed the home on the 900 block of North Tyler Avenue.
Janet Huey was found in the home at 927 North Tyler by a Mason City Fire Fighter while performing a search and rescue, Fire Marshal Jamey Medlin said in a press release.
The Mason City Fire Department responded to a report of a fire and smoke at 12:12 p.m. Friday.
Medlin said the cause of the fire was a surge protector/multi-plug power tap. The fire engulfed the back of the house in flames.
Mason City Fire Capt. Jack Odegaard confirmed Friday afternoon that one person died in the house where the fire occurred. He added he could not provide any more information, pending the department's investigation.
Neighbors told the Globe Gazette on Friday that the tight-knit block has felt much loss in the past few weeks, with the loss of another neighbor who died of a heart attack.
Mason City Police Department and the State Fire Marshals Office assisted Mason City Fire Department in the investigation.
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NORA SPRINGS | The Iowa State Patrol has identified two people killed and one injured Friday morning in the train-vehicle collision in rural Nora Springs.
Driver James Blazier, 66, and front passenger Dixie Blazier, 66, both of Harvard, Illinois, both died. Back seat passenger Glenda Mundis, 55, of Harvard, Illinois was injured and transported by Mercy Air Med to Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa. Mundis was treated and released Saturday.
A 2016 Chevy Equinox northbound on Zinnia Avenue was struck on its front passenger side by a single westbound Canadian Pacific engine about 11:54 a.m., the Iowa State Patrol said in a news release.
The vehicle rolled and came to rest on its roof, the State Patrol said.
According to the Iowa State Patrol crash report, the single-engine train had no cars attached.
There are warning lights at the crossing but no stop arms. It's not known if the lights were working at the time of the crash.
The accident remains under investigation.
Cerro Gordo and Floyd County sheriff's offices, Nora Springs Police, Nora Springs EMS and Mason City Fire medics provided assistance at the scene.
On Saturday, Dec. 2, model and entrepreneur Amber Rose, in partnership with the Chocolate Lounge Las Vegas at the Fashion Show, hosted auditions for Chocolate Rose, which will debut in 2018 (Photo credit: Madison Freedle, one7communications.com).
When Rose arrived at the Chocolate Lounge showcasing her beautiful new hairstyle, she posed for pictures at the red carpet and then headed to her table to enjoy a frozen spiked hot chocolate and frozen white chocolate rock candy grasshopper.
More than 100 male models, performers, bartenders, and servers turned out to show Rose why she should pick them for her Chocolate Rose staff. Some of the men tried their best pick-up lines, showed off their top assets, and others told her where they would take someone for a romantic date. Rose was excited to meet the men and get to know each one individually.
Rose will continue her search for the perfect Chocolate Rose candidates and will host another round of auditions at the Chocolate Lounge. The date is still to be determined.
By: Dezan Shira & Associates
Editor: Koushan Das
In the last 20 years, Bac Ninh province in the Northern Key Economic zone has grown from an agricultural community to a major industrial center with the second-highest per capita income and one of the highest economic growth rates in the country. Surrounded by major economic centers such as Hanoi and Hai Phong, it has managed to establish itself as one of the major FDI destinations.
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Economic growth
The province has grown by an average of 15.1 percent on average for the last 20 years, the highest in the country.
2016
In 2016, the gross regional domestic product (GRDP) grew by 9 percent. Industrial production value and export turnover ranked second in the country, with industrial value accounting for almost 75 percent of the GRDP.
The industry-construction sector accounted for 74.3 percent, while the services sector accounted for 20.7 percent of the economy. Agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture accounted for 5 percent.
2017
The GRDP in the first 9 months of 2017 grew by 15.9 percent compared to same period last year. Industry and construction sector accounted for 75.2 percent, while the services sector accounted for 21.8 percent. Agriculture, forestry, and fisheries only accounted for a mere 3.0 percent.
The industry and construction sector grew by 18 percent, while the services sector grew by 9.8 percent. Agriculture, forestry, and fishery sector growth reduced by 1.2 percent compared to the same period last year.
Growing Exports
In 2016, total export turnover stood at US$ 22.8 billion, while in the first 11 months of 2017, it has already exceeded that and currently stands at almost US$ 30 billion. As of now, Bac Ninhs exports account for 14.9 percent of total national exports.
Foreign Investments
The cumulative FDI in Bac Ninh currently stands at US$ 15.8 billion invested in 1,102 direct investment projects from 32 countries, making it one of the leading FDI destinations. It ranks sixth amongst 63 cities and provinces nationwide in FDI attraction. Foreign investments mainly focus on manufacturing and processing, with registered capital for the sector accounting for 96 percent of the total invested capital. Out of the total, Korea alone invested US$ 10 billion.
The FDI sector has been the main driving force in the transformation of Bac Ninh into an industrial hub, accounting for over 85 percent of the industrial production value and 99 percent of total export turnover.
FDI in 2016 stood at US$ 924.9 million, while in the first 10 months of 2017, the province attracted US$ 3.28 billion, with Samsung being the major investor. In line with its expansion plans, Samsung Display would be investing US$ 2.5 billion in the province. It has six plants in Vietnam, with three in the Bac Ninh province. Other major firms in the province include Canon, Nokia, Pepsi, and ABB.
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Regional Competition
According to the Provincial Competitiveness Index 2016, Bac Ninh ranks the 17th most competitive province in the country. The rankings were led by Da Nang, Quang Ninh, and Dong Thap.
In addition, the province ranked 10th in the Infrastructure Index in the Provincial Competitiveness Index 2016. Infrastructure surveyed included industrial zones, roads, energy/telecom, and internet connectivity. The region also emerged as the seventh most attractive place for future investors, with Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, and Hanoi leading the scores.
Infrastructure
Bac Ninh lies on the economic corridor of Nam Ninh Lang Son Hanoi Hai Phong Ha Long and connects the administrative capital Hanoi with the Northern midland and mountainous provinces. It lies only 30 km from Hanoi, 45 km from the Noi Bai International Airport, and 110km from Hai Phong, a major industrial city with one of the largest seaport.
Roads
The province has over 4,000 km of roads and is well connected with regional neighboring provinces through the 1A national highway linking with Ha Noi Bac Ninh Lang Son; highway No.18 connecting the Noi Bai International Airport with Bac Ninh and Ha Long, and national highway No. 38 connecting Bac Ninh, Hai Duong, and Hai Phong. In addition, the highways are well connected to the provincial and commune roads.
Rail
The cross-national railway system in the province runs through Bac Ninh to Lang Son in the north leading further to China.
Waterways
The province is well connected through regional river ports and seaports on the Cau River, Duong River, and Thai Binh River.
Industrial Zones
Bac Ninh has 16 industrial parks, with nine of them fully operational with an occupancy rate of 87 percent, spreading over 8,000 hectares. The industrial parks in the province have attracted major infrastructure firms such as Vietnam-Singapore Urban and IP Development Joint Stock Company, Kinh Bac Urban Development, Song Da Corporation, and IDICO Corporation who provide infrastructure facilities and services.
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Major sectors
The industry and construction sector accounts for the majority of the firms in the region, followed by the services sector. Industry and construction sector is expected to grow by 12 percent, while the service sector is predicted to grow at 14 percent in the next three years.
To ensure a sustainable development, the province is pushing for investments in high-tech industries and environment-friendly projects. Firms in the electronics, information technology, infrastructure development, chemical, and industrial automation industries will find Bac Ninh an attractive location. In addition, due to the presence of major manufacturers, supporting industries will also find the province as a favorable option.
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Continuing the growth
The provincial government has to continue prioritizing the electronics manufacturing industry in the region. It has been a major source of FDI, employment, and income growth and has the potential of making the province an electronics hub not only in the country but South East Asia as well. However, this does not mean that one should overlook the services and especially the agriculture sector. Overdependence in the manufacturing sector has its own drawbacks.
In the agriculture sector, the province should focus on the rural economy and help them increase the productivity and quality of their products to ensure higher incomes. In addition, linking them with major markets such as Hanoi and other urban areas would also lead to an increase in their income. Although the region has one of the highest income per capita in the country, the income gap is rapidly increasing between the rich and poor, and the government has to ensure that the regions growth is inclusive of all socio-economic classes.
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An Introduction to Doing Business in Vietnam 2017
An Introduction to Doing Business in Vietnam 2017 will provide readers with an overview of the fundamentals of investing and conducting business in Vietnam. Compiled by Dezan Shira & Associates, a specialist foreign direct investment practice, this guide explains the basics of company establishment, annual compliance, taxation, human resources, payroll, and social insurance in this dynamic country.
Managing Contracts and Severance in Vietnam
In this issue of Vietnam Briefing, we discuss the prevailing state of labor pools in Vietnam and outline key considerations for those seeking to staff and retain workers in the country. We highlight the increasing demand for skilled labor, provide in depth coverage of existing contract options, and showcase severance liabilities that may arise if workers or employers choose to terminate their contracts.
By: Chau Pham
The Central Highlands have long been a strategic economic, political location in the history of Vietnam. Sharing borders with Laos and Cambodia, this region is one of the most important location for the economic development of Vietnam in the next few years.
A region full of potential
The Central Highlands, or the Western Highlands, is located in the West and South West of Vietnam. The region contains five provinces: Lam ong, Daklak, Dak Nong, Gia lai and Kon Tum. These provinces are expected to show high potential for development in renewable energy, agricultural and tourism in the coming years.
According to the Minister of Public Securitys speech in the fourth conference on investment promotion in Central Highlands total investment capital has reached VND 266 trillion in 2015 with an annual growth rate of 11.3 percent between 2011 and 2015. To date, there have been 140 FDI projects worth US$772.5 million in the Central Highlands. This number is expected to grow significantly in the next few years, especially as the government is trying to improve the regions infrastructure and paying more attention to renewable projects in its long-term plan of development.
Tourism and agriculture are two important sectors that appeared very promising to foreign investors, especially investors from Korean, Japan, and China. However, Central Highlands are not being fully explored, thus, bringing more opportunities for future investors to enter the race.
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Opportunities for renewable energy projects
The Central Highlands is a prominent location for solar potential maps in Vietnam. According to Vietnamese authorities, the total hours of sun in Central Highlands varies from 2000 to 2600 hours per year. Korean Solar power investors in this area are upbeat on the prospects for the region and have published findings indicating a direct solar radiation generation of 5 kWh per square meter. With this in mind, Vietnams Central Highlands is an ideal place to develop a solar power plant.
In addition, the regions wind power capacity could reach 2000MW, which is even more than the second largest hydro power plant of Vietnam in Hoa Binh.
Realizing the favorable conditions for developing renewable energy of this region, Central Highland provinces have issued a number of preferential mechanisms and policies as well as simplified administrative procedures, to attract investors. Daklak is topping the list with 4 projects worth US$3.3 billion from AES Corporation, Vietnams Xuan Thien Limited Company, South Koreas Solar Park Limited and Vietnams Long Thanh Infrastructure Development and Investment Company.
Promising land for coffee, tea, and pepper
In addition to its advantages in solar and wind power, the region is also getting more and more popular as a promising land for FDI projects in agriculture. Central Highlands cover an area of 5.46 million ha, in which 2 million ha are used for developing agricultural. Besides, the region contains 74.25 percent of the red basalt soil of Vietnam, making it an ideal place for large-scale production specialized in coffee, pepper, tea, cashew, cassava, rubber.
Realizing the growth potential of this sector, investors from Korea and Japan have launched several projects with advanced agricultural techniques to maximize production in the region. New policies and tax incentives are also available to encourage and attract investments. Although climate changes may appear to be a threat, agriculture will continue to grow and strengthen its position as an important sector of Central Highlands provinces.
Top destinations for tourism
Dalat, Kon-Tum and Gia Lai are famous destinations for eco-friendly and historical tourism. Cool weather, beautiful natural sight-seeing, historical museums and also the variety of food specialties are the reasons why more and more tourist chose these destinations for a get-away on the weekend. In 2016, Dalat city of Lam Dong province welcomed 5.4 million visitors, an increase of 6 percent compared to 2015. On top of this, the number of international visitors reached 270,000 people with most travelers coming from South Korea, China, Thailand and the United States.
The city also has been ranked by The New York Times as one of top 52 tourist destination in the world. Although the regions tourism industry used to suffer from the past because of poor infrastructure and facilities, the situation is getting better recently thanks to investments from government also foreign investors. New tourist products with better services are now provided, making the region even more attractive to tourist. Besides, many investments in hotels, amusement park, restaurants are about to kick off in the near future, helping these provinces to fully exploit tourism potential of this region.
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Conclusion
The Central Highlands contributes 9 percent of Vietnams GDP. Ignoring all the advantages it has developed in its economy, the region still remains poor compared to others. Foreign investment is limited in both quantity and quality. However, with new incentives and support from the government, the investments environment of Central Highlands becomes more and more attractive.
Beside many investment incentives such as corporate income tax exemption, land use rental reduction, import tax exemption, etc., FDI projects can benefit from province-specific investment support. For example, investment project in high-tech applied agricultural business can receive support from Kon Tum province for the development of greenhouses and net houses with a support level of VND 50,000 per square.
Each province in the region have different types of support and incentives to attract foreign direct investment, thus to maintain the sustainable growth of the region. In the future, Central Highlands will continue to consolidate its position as an important region in the economic development of the whole country.
Dezan Shira & Associates Brochure
Dezan Shira & Associates is a pan-Asia, multi-disciplinary professional services firm, providing legal, tax and operational advisory to international corporate investors. Operational throughout China, ASEAN and India, our mission is to guide foreign companies through Asias complex regulatory environment and assist them with all aspects of establishing, maintaining and growing their business operations in the region. This brochure provides an overview of the services and expertise Dezan Shira & Associates can provide.
An Introduction to Doing Business in Vietnam 2017
An Introduction to Doing Business in Vietnam 2017 will provide readers with an overview of the fundamentals of investing and conducting business in Vietnam. Compiled by Dezan Shira & Associates, a specialist foreign direct investment practice, this guide explains the basics of company establishment, annual compliance, taxation, human resources, payroll, and social insurance in this dynamic country.
Managing Contracts and Severance in Vietnam
In this issue of Vietnam Briefing, we discuss the prevailing state of labor pools in Vietnam and outline key considerations for those seeking to staff and retain workers in the country. We highlight the increasing demand for skilled labor, provide in depth coverage of existing contract options, and showcase severance liabilities that may arise if workers or employers choose to terminate their contracts.
In 1979, Peter van Wijk was a radio officer in the Dutch Merchant Marine. That summer, his ship docked a couple of times in New York Harbor, giving him the opportunity to visit Manhattan and wander the streets.Like all curious newcomers to New York, he brought a camera along with him, and he took photos of iconic tourist spots like the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, and Times Square.But he also captured the seemingly ordinary street scenes that offer fleeting glimpses into the heart and soul of the late 1970s city: shoppers going in and out of mom and pop stores, musicians and vendors drawing crowds, and taxis navigating traffic-choked streets.(Photos by Peter van Wijk, via Ephemeral New York
For the past 19 months, the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HoSE) has been listing Vietnam Export and Import Commercial Bank (Eximbank) as security subject to special monitoring due to the banks accumulated loss of VND118 billion ($5.1 million).
Eximbank's shares have been under special alert since April 2016
Specifically, according to Eximbanks consolidated financial statement for the first three quarters, the bank achieved a net profit of VND602 billion ($26.4 million), down 16 per cent against the same period last year. This brought a net profit of VND80 billion ($3.5 million), a 1.2 per cent decrease on-year.
In the third quarter of 2017, although the bank downsized general provisions by 13 per cent, from VND262 to VND 228 billion ($11.5 to $10 million), Eximbank obtained a modest pre-tax profit of nearly VND60 billion ($2.6 million), signifying a plunge of 50 per cent on-year.
Additionally, over the last three quarters, Eximbanks accumulated pre-tax profit was VND457 billion ($20.06 million), 24 per cent less than the banks 2017 target.
Previously, in 2015, the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) uncovered business performance-related fraud at Eximland (Eximbanks real estate development arm). Eximland borrowed funds from Eximbank to purchase real estate from Eximbank itself, artificially boosting Eximbanks income to around VND1 trillion ($43.9 million).
To boot, Eximbanks unresolved accumulated losses have a negative effect on the liquidity of the EIB stock. As of December 4, EIB plummeted to VND12,450 ($0.54), a 15.93 per cent fall compared to the tickers price at the date of listing.
Another bank struggling with a long-term weak financial performance is Vietbank with an accumulated loss of approximately VND189 billion ($8.2 million), despite its positive business results over the past nine months. The banks pre-tax profit was VND73.4 billion ($3.2 million), the double of its 2017 annual target.
According to the financial institutions official announcement regarding the handling of its non-performing loans, between 2013 and 2016, Vietbank was recorded to have accumulated a deficit of VND200 billion ($8.7 million).
Earlier, Vietbank had postponed the registration of the security deposit twice, which lessened the likelihood of the bank completing its listing on UPCoM by the end of 2017.
Apart from Eximbank and Vietbank, massive accumulated deficits also appeared on the financial statements of three other financial institutions, including Vietnam Construction Bank (CB Bank), OceanBank, and Global Petroleum Bank (GP Bank), along with an increasing negative amount of owners equity also affecting the three banks.
The financial performance of three aforementioned financial institutions was among the primary concerns raised in the State Audits report on measures to prevent and combat criminal activities, submitted to the National Assembly (NA) earlier this year.
Generali Vietnam and Eximbank establish bancassurance partnership Italian-backed life insurer Generali Vietnam and the Vietnam Export Import Commercial Joint Stock Bank, a leading commercial joint stock bank in the country, yesterday announced an exclusive bancassurance partnership in a signing ceremony at the Sheraton Saigon.
Eximbank administers sharp cut to 2016 profit target Vietnam Export Import Bank (Eximbank) is lowering its target for deposits, lending, assets, and pre-tax profit for the year 2016 deviating from the earlier plan.
A pharmacist sounded the alert after finding a canister with wires inside a package near the Christmas market in Potsdam, (AFP/Adam BERRY)
"It was not an act of terror but a common crime," said Heinrich Juncker, the prosecutor in charge of the investigation.
The device, discovered late Friday at a pharmacy just off the market in central Potsdam, a picturesque city near Berlin, revived fears of a repeat of last year's deadly terror attack at a Christmas market in the German capital.
According to authorities, the device found Friday was part of an attempt to extort millions of euros from German delivery service DHL.
In a letter addressed to DHL, the blackmailers demanded "a sum amounting to several million euros" and threatened to send other parcel bombs - in the middle of the Christmas period - if they were not satisfied, said Brandenburg interior minister Karl-Heinz Schroeter.
Local authorities had said the cylindrical canister was filled with nails, powder, batteries and wires - as well as a powerful firework of a type not allowed in Germany - but there was no sign of a detonator.
However upon closer examination, police on Sunday said the device could have gone off. "It had the ability to function" and could have caused "very serious injuries and killed people," Schroeter said.
A pharmacist sounded the alert after finding a canister with wires inside the package. The pharmacist heard a "whistling" sound when opening it, which investigators believe means the explosive did not work as planned - although it was programmed to explode.
Police said this incident may be connected to one that occurred last month in the same Brandenburg region.
In that case, a parcel bomb was also sent to a local company but just caught fire when opened.
Authorities now think the suspects are from the Berlin region.
"The blackmailers warned they would continue to send parcel bombs if DHL does not pay," said local police chief Hans-Juergen Morke, calling on Germans to remain vigilant.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Endeavour Silver Corp. (NYSE:EXK) (TSX:EDR) announces that exploration drilling on the Calicanto property in Zacatecas State, Mexico has discovered high grade silver-gold mineralization assaying up to 2,043 grams per tonne (gpt) silver and 13.2 gpt gold over 2.8 m true width within the Calicanto and Misie vein systems.
Twenty-nine drill holes totaling 7,207 metres (m) of core were drilled to test the subparallel Misie-Karla-Karla HW veins, along which there are a few small historic diggings over a 1000 m strike length on the property, and the Calicanto vein, which saw historic underground mining accessed by several old shafts over an 800 m strike length on the property (view maps here).
Drilling highlights include 2,043 gpt silver and 13.2 gpt gold (2,967 gpt silver equivalent (AgEq)) over a 2.8 m true width (86.5 oz per ton (opT) AgEq over 9.2 feet (ft)) in hole CLT-15 within the Calicanto vein. Another high grade intercept assayed 932 gpt silver and 1.26 gpt gold (1,020 gpt AgEq) over a 2.7 m true width (29.7 opT AgEq over 8.9 ft) in hole CLT-20 within the Misie vein.
Results for 9 material drill holes are summarized in the table below.
Hole Structure From True Width Au Ag AgEq (m) (m) (gpt) (gpt) (gpt) CLT-04 Misie 76.55 0.9 0.14 480 490 Including 77.15 0.4 0.22 1,080 1,095 CLT-05 Karla 31.70 4.2 0.52 396 433 Including 38.20 0.4 2.16 1,255 1,406 Hw Karla 62.25 1.0 0.05 252 255 Including 62.25 0.4 0.11 593 601 CLT-06 Karla 29.20 4.1 0.14 155 165 Including 35.90 0.3 1.51 601 706 Misie 125.00 1.1 0.21 299 313 Including 125.00 0.3 0.59 1,020 1,061 CLT-15 Calicanto 257.15 2.8 13.20 2,043 2,967 Including 259.65 0.5 65.70 11,751 16,350 CLT-17 Misie 137.55 1.2 0.24 193 210 Including 138.50 0.5 0.50 342 377 CLT-19 Karla 37.10 1.6 0.23 252 268 Including 38.10 0.8 0.39 311 338 Hw Karla 62.55 1.5 0.03 208 210 Including 63.05 0.1 0.41 394 423 Misie 96.30 2.5 0.69 335 383 Including 96.30 0.3 0.67 500 547 CLT-20 Hw Karla 25.80 4.3 0.18 220 232 Including 28.20 0.2 1.82 880 1,007 Misie 87.40 2.7 1.26 932 1,020 Including 88.50 0.3 6.58 3,050 3,511 CLT-26 Hw Karla 69.75 1.3 0.08 251 257 Including 71.35 0.3 0.16 388 399 CLT-28 Misie 94.70 1.5 1.20 446 530 Including 94.70 0.6 2.13 756 905
Silver equivalents are calculated at a ratio of 70:1 silver: gold
Luis Castro, Vice President, Exploration for Endeavour Silver, commented, We were very encouraged to discover new zones of high grade mineralization within the Misie-Karla-Karla HW and Calicanto veins. Even though only one drill hole intersected high grade mineralization in the Calicanto vein, it has exceptional grades and opens up potential within the vein for drilling next year.
The Calicanto vein appears to be related to, and is possibly the same vein as, the Mala Noche Footwall Zone, on which our neighbor Capstone Mining intersected 2.2 per cent copper over a 14.4-metre estimated true width in a deep step-out drill hole close to our property boundary, as announced by Capstone on September 12, 2017.
A new resource estimate for the Calicanto property will be prepared at year-end for release in the 1st quarter of 2018 as part of the El Compas project. With the El Compas mine coming to production in the next few months, and the potential to expand the plant capacity up to double the current proposed mine output, our near term goals at Calicanto are to expand the resources, assess their economic viability, apply for mining permits, and develop a mine plan to utilize the full El Compas plant capacity.
Godfrey Walton, M.Sc., P.Geo., Endeavours President and COO, is the Qualified Person who reviewed and approved this news release and supervised the drilling programs in Mexico. A Quality Control sampling program of reference standards, blanks and duplicates has been instituted to monitor the integrity of all assay results. All samples are split at the local field office and shipped to ALS-Chemex Labs, where they are dried, crushed, split and 50 gram pulp samples are prepared for analysis. Gold and silver are determined by fire assay with an atomic absorption (AA) finish.
About Endeavour Silver Endeavour Silver is a mid-tier precious metals mining company that owns three high grade, underground, silver-gold mines in Mexico. Since startup in 2004, Endeavour has grown its mining operations organically to produce 9.7 million ounces of silver and equivalents in 2016. We find, build and operate quality silver mines in a sustainable way to create real value for all stakeholders. Endeavour Silvers shares trade on the TSX (EDR) and the NYSE (EXK).
Contact Information - For more information, please contact:
Galina Meleger, Director of Investor Relations
Toll free: (877) 685-9775
Fax: (604) 685-9744
Email: gmeleger@edrsilver.com
Website: www.edrsilver.com
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States private securities litigation reform act of 1995 and forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Such forwardlooking statements and information herein include but are not limited to statements regarding Endeavours anticipated performance in 2017 including changes in mining and operations and the timing and results of various activities. The Company does not intend to, and does not assume any obligation to update such forward-looking statements or information, other than as required by applicable law.
Forward-looking statements or information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Endeavour and its operations to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such statements. Such factors include but are not limited to changes in national and local governments, legislation, taxation, controls, regulations and political or economic developments in Canada and Mexico; financial risks due to precious metals prices, operating or technical difficulties in mineral exploration, development and mining activities; risks and hazards of mineral exploration, development and mining; the speculative nature of mineral exploration and development, risks in obtaining necessary licenses and permits, and challenges to the Companys title to properties; as well as those factors described in the section risk factors contained in the Companys most recent form 40F/Annual Information Form filed with the S.E.C. and Canadian securities regulatory authorities.
Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable, including but not limited to: the continued operation of the Companys mining operations, no material adverse change in the market price of commodities, mining operations will operate and the mining products will be completed in accordance with managements expectations and achieve their stated production outcomes, and such other assumptions and factors as set out herein. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements or information, there may be other factors that cause results to be materially different from those anticipated, described, estimated, assessed or intended. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking statements or information will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements or information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information.
What are the highlights of the new Club Marriott programme?
Club Marriott is not a totally new programme. We are re-launching Club Marriott because we merged with Starwood Hotel in late 2016. For the last six years, Club Marriott has been mainly a dining loyalty programme. Marriott International has been fairly well-known for this programme, with a large number of members around the world.
The food-and-beverage segment has become substantially important for the company, as 42 per cent of the firms total revenue across the Asia-Pacific region is generated from it. As a result, the importance of our positioning in this segment was what made us create the dining loyalty programme.
Integrating it with two other membership programmes, Star and Privilege and Eat, Drink, and More, Marriott created a new membership programme, the new Club Marriott.
The loyalty programme will be rolled out in other key countries and in the Asia-Pacific region by late December, including Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Guam, and Thailand. In Vietnam, Club Marriott will be introduced in several hotels, including two in Hanoi (Sheraton Hanoi Hotel and JW Marriott Hotel Hanoi), three in Ho Chi Minh City (Sheraton Saigon Hotel and Towers, Renaissance Riverside Hotel Saigon, and Le Meridien Saigon), one in Nha Trang (Sheraton Nha Trang Hotel and Spa), and three hotels to be opened in January 2018.
Regarding the brands partaking in the new loyalty programme, we can already reveal names such as St. Regis, Marriott Hotels, Westin, Le Meridien, Renaissance Hotels, Sheraton, Courtyard by Marriott, Four Points by Sheraton, Fairfield by Marriott, MHRS, and Aloft.
What is new about the re-launched Club Marriott programme?
Originally, Club Marriott was nothing more than a discount programme. But the company decided to work towards a different vision, with the intent of creating an experience-driven programme packed with privileges, as not everybody can gain access to exclusive events around the region.
That is why we put the food and beverage privileges into the programme. We want to be members favourite destination to have exquisite experiences in dining, drinking, and meeting new people.
Thanks to this new fusion of programmes, people can sign up for the membership with a local hotel which is directly connected to their own community, local customers, local food bloggers, and local foodies.
We have recruited a lot of talented chefs, from Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, Thailand, India, and Vietnam. This includes a three-star Michelin chef with excellent culinary skills the hotel hired for the Club Marriott programme.
How will the merger with Eat, Drink, and More and Star and Privilege benefit the existing customers of Club Marriott?
The combination of three existing loyalty programmes will include appealing perks for members such as up to 20 per cent off the best available rate on the base category of rooms, 30 per cent off food and beverage bills across participating hotels in Vietnam, and 20 per cent off said bills across all participating hotels in the Asia-Pacific region.
Loyal members of the programme can also gain access to high-end experiences in Australia, mainland China, Macau, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea.
With respect to the concept behind the Club Marriot programme, I would like to stress the sense of community, locality, and local dining experiences by offering locally relevant benefits like dining experiences to current members and future ones.
What are the benefits Club Marriott can provide for its members?
For example, only members of Club Marriott and Marriott Rewards can gain access to VIP seats to the Imagine Dragons concert in Bangkok.
Another example is the hotel inviting a limited number of Club Marriott members to partake in chef workshops for chefs around the Asia-Pacific region. Here, they can witness how we train and inspire chefs as well as assist them to get involved in the local community to create top-notch experiences incorporated with local gastronomy.
If you travel around Vietnam and select any accommodations across the hotels we mentioned, you will enjoy the same benefits and privileges as offered by JW Marriott Hanoi or Sheraton Hanoi Hotel. You can stay and enjoy the same discounts for food and beverages, catering, spas and resorts, and other benefits provided by the Club Marriott loyalty programme.
Minister Tran Tuan Anh and director general Stefano Manservisi signed the financial agreement
The programme will be carried out in 2018-2020 and make power grid and renewable energy investments to supply power to households in rural, remote, borderland, and island areas not connected to the grid under the national programme approved on August 26, 2016 through Resolution No.73/NQ-CP.
On December 1, 2017, at the headquarters of the EU in Brussels, Kingdom of Belgium, Tran Tuan Anh, Vietnamese Minister of Industry and Trade and Stefano Manservisi, director general of International Development and Co-operation on the behalf of the EU signed the financial agreement on the programme. Accordingly, the EU will provide non-refundable Official Development Aid supporting energy development and the improvement of sustainable energy access for rural, mountainous, and island areas.
According to the financial agreement, the EU will provide a non-refundable aid of EUR108 million ($128.2 million), including EUR7.5 million ($9 million) for technical support, and EUR0.5 million ($0.6 million) for the supervision and appraisal of the programme.
The programme consists of 23 subprojects connecting rural and mountainous areas in 23 provinces with the national power grid, two subprojects supplying renewable energy for rural areas in Cao Bang and Bach Long Vi Island, and two subprojects laying underground cables to connect Tran Island (Quang Ninh) and Nhon Chau Island (Binh Dinh) with the national power grid.
The programme is expected to supply power for 750 villages and a total of 60,000 households. All the subprojects will contribute to socioeconomic development and sustainably reduce poverty in the most remote areas of the country.
The programme aims to improve the performance of the electricity sector and attract new investors for renewable energy development. Additionally, it would reduce the burden on the state to invest and subsidise the field, and guarantee constant power supply.
A processing line of frozen shrimp for exports. - VNA/VNS Photo Danh Lam
Many solutions have been devised according to the EUs recommendations. They include aligning the legal framework with regional and international regulations, implementing effectively the amended legal regulations for IUU fishing, and implementing effectively the international regulations and management measures through strict punishment.
In addition to this, Viet Nam will address the shortcomings in the monitoring system to serve the certification of the origin of aquatic products, improve the fishing boat management system, enhance cooperation with regional countries, and comply with regulations on fisheries data collection and report.
Viet Nam was served with a yellow card warning by the EU in September for failing to combat IUU fishing, and it has been offered the opportunity to take measures to rectify the situation within six months.
To this end, the EC has proposed an action plan for the country. The yellow card is followed by a green card if issues are resolved or a red card if they are not. A red card can lead to a trade ban on fishery products.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development plans to organise a national conference with 28 coastal cities and provinces to discuss the IUU issue and provide them with technical guidance to ensure their compliance with IUU fishing regulations.
Viet Nam has favourable geographical conditions to develop its seafood industry, thanks to its long coastline of over 3,260km and more than 3,000 islands and islets.
Fisheries is a key sector, whose output has been consistently rising in the recent years.
The country hopes to become a leading seafood exporter by 2020.
Last year, Viet Nam earned US$1.2 billion by exporting aquatic products to the EU, $357.8 million of which was from seafood shipments. The figure hit nearly $1.05 billion in the first nine months this year.
Big shot Hanoi buyers are looking to spread the wealth to the provinces
A range of real estate projects have been introduced to Hanois market from Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong, Danang and Nha Trang. The projects include The Charm, Sunrise City, Ocean Villas, Hyatt Regency, Olalani, Fusion Alya, Azura and Blooming Park.
Talking with VIR at a recent road show to introduce Sunrise City, located in Ho Chi Minh, in Hanoi, Novaland Joint Stock Company marketing deputy director Huynh Du An said many units were sold to Hanoians and those from northern provinces.
Meanwhile, a range of other central and southern projects have been rushing into Hanoi. Setia Becamex launched Binh Duong provinces Ecolakes My Phuoc in the capital late last week, a week before TD Group introduced the Costa Nha Trang to Hanoians. This week Singapores Guoco Lands Canary, located at the Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Park in Binh Duong province, will be unveiled to northern customers.
Bringing Ecolakes My Phuoc to Hanois market is one of our key marketing strategies. Hanoians are paying more attention to higher standards of living and are interested in ecological housing, said Khoo Teck Chong, general director of Setia Becamex.
VIR was told that for many projects in the central and southern parts, roughly 70 per cent of customers were from Hanoi and other northern provinces.
Matthew Koziora, sales director of VinaCapital - developer of the Azura in Danang, said the first 60 units, out of 225, were launched in Hanoi recently.
Out of the 40 units sold, 90 per cent of the buyers had come from Hanoi.
Hanoi has, according to Koziora, proven itself to be a key market for most new projects in Vietnam, given the demographics of these immediate catchments.
While condominium offerings will always be available in Hanoi due to previous pent-up demands, we can see that not all projects will enjoy a healthy sell-through, as was seen 12 months ago.
We do see, however, given the price differentials between house and land packages in Hanoi versus Ho Chi Minh City, that this market will be better received in the current marketplace and over the next six months as opposed to condominium project offerings at this time, Koziora said
Ngo Huu Truong, managing director of a real estate agency in Ho Chi Minh City, said many customers from Hanoi and Haiphong had come to Ho Chi Minh City to find out information about new projects there.
Demand is real and many projects investors have realised this trend and they are coming to Hanoi to promote their projects, Truong said.
He also said the jury was still out on how effective the promotions were.
I think that these developers [who bring their projects to Hanoi] have at least seen their target to raise their image and brand names in northern customers, Truong said.
Carrie Fisher - photo source: AFP
The cast came together in a secret location in Los Angeles with director Rian Johnson to build buzz for the latest chapter in the blockbuster space saga, which hits theaters on Dec 15.
"You get to see women that are not big and strong just because they're acting like men. They're doing something else," said Gwendoline Christie, 39, who plays stormtrooper commander Captain Phasma.
"And also you're seeing a developed character, or a developing character, that is showing some complex character traits. I'm delighted that something as legendary as 'Star Wars' has decided to reflect our society."
"The Last Jedi" - filmed on the west coast of Ireland and at Pinewood Studios near London - sees the return of the characters introduced in 2015's seventh instalment, "The Force Awakens."
Christie, flanked by red-robed Praetorian guard as she took the stage, was joined by returning stars Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domnhall Gleeson, and Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pathfinder Asset Management Limited (Pathfinder) of 1320, 885 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, announces that on December 2, 2017 it acquired 4,200,000 common shares of BioHEP Technologies Ltd. (the Company) of 1320, 885 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, pursuant to the conversion of $105,000 aggregate principal amount of convertible promissory notes (the Notes) due December 2, 2017 (the Conversion), as further described below.
The Notes were convertible at a rate of $0.025 per common share (Share) of the Company. Accordingly, the conversion of the $105,000 principal amount of Notes resulted in the acquisition by Pathfinder of an additional 4,200,000 Shares of the Company, representing approximately 44.45% of the 9,448,708 now issued and outstanding common shares of the Company. Prior to the Conversion, Pathfinder owned or controlled 1,590,353 Shares, representing 37.86% of the outstanding Shares. The Conversion results in a net increase in Pathfinders security holding percentage of 39.59% to a total of 5,790,353 Shares, representing approximately 61.28% of the issued and outstanding Shares of the Company as of todays date.
Pathfinder acquired the Shares for investment purposes only and not for the purposes of exercising control or direction over the Company. Pathfinder may, in the future, increase or decrease its ownership of securities of the Company from time to time depending upon market conditions or any other factors it considers relevant.
This press release is being disseminated as required by National Instrument 62103 - The Early Warning System and Related Take Over Bids and Insider Reporting Issues (NI 62-103). Also pursuant to 62-103 an early warning report with respect to the above transactions will be filed with the relevant Canadian securities regulatory authorities via SEDAR and will be available for review at www.sedar.com under the Companys profile. A copy of the report may also be obtained by contacting Victor Chan at Pathfinder at 604-682-7312 EXT 234.
Pathfinder Asset Management Limited
604-682-7312
IRVINE, CA, Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
Cannabis Science, Inc. (OTC PINK: CBIS), a U.S. company specializing in the development of cannabinoid-based medicines, is pleased to announce the Honorable Judge Kimberly Mueller, appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, has laid out the next steps for the Plaintiffs, CBIS, et all, to file a preliminary injunction against the San Joaquin County.
One of the more profound facts in this case is the simple fact that the subject Industrial Hemp Grow was already pre-approved and on the 2017 San Joaquin Department of Agriculture list for approved crops and acreage. This was completed and evidenced in documented in filings with the court and with the San Joaquin County Board before they rendered any opinions. This was completed by HRM Farms Glen Burgeon, one of the area land owners and one of the expert local agricultural farming authorities, and one of the adjunct faculty members on the (California State Approved) American States University team, and another named plaintiff in the case.
The no TRO decision last Friday from the Honorable Judge Kimberly Mueller, was simple, because to me, she clearly understood our position and but did not have enough information to decide comprehensively on the case in full yet. She was astute and clear, and this is great for us, of course. She gave us a path, with clear instructions, for moving forward and we are taking it. The preliminary injunction allows the plaintiffs to outline the facts and circumstances surrounding their pre-approvals to farm directly from the San Joaquin Department of Agriculture, research exemptions, corporation registration clarity, assets, investments, and drug development programs.
This is our opportunity to help the judge clearly understand the scope and importance of the educational and drug development work being done by the University group that includes Cannabis Science and its partners, and how it all ties together with the University programs, farming partners, local community educational programs, Native American incentive packages, and entrepreneurial programs for local economic growth and stability. We will clarify how our program is designed to target multiple critical ailments illnesses worldwide. We are working to successfully have activate a preliminary injunction against the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors to stop their malicious actions against the plaintiffs preventing them from continuing to work, stated Cannabis Sciences President, CEO, and Co-founder, Mr. Raymond C. Dabney.
The preliminary injunction will include each named defendant including the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors for its purported defiant actions circumventing basic civil rights laws, due course action, Federal and State Industrial Hemp Laws and Exemptions, along with a number of other Federal and State laws, rights including purported specious actions during, before, and after the raid in order to complete their unmistakably malicious actions against the plaintiffs.
On October 27, 2017, Cannabis Science, Inc. (the "Company"), along with its partners Winnemucca Shosoni MBS, American States University, Free Spirit Organics NAC and HRM Farms filed a Complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California against ten San Joaquin County defendants including the Board of Supervisors, County Counsel; District Attorney and the Sheriff and against the federal Drug Enforcement Agency.
The Complaint stems from a search warrant and subsequent seizure executed by the Defendants on the Plaintiff's 26.19-acre plot of land where it was growing industrial hemp. On November 17, 2017, CSI and the rest of the plaintiffs filed seven documents including 45 pages of pleadings, seven declarations, and 150 pages of exhibits asking the Court to issue a temporary restraining order.
Recently, the Plaintiffs learned the DEA was not involved and dismissed it. It had been surprising to discover evidence of DEA involvement at the outset because plaintiffs believed they had been operating with the blessing of the DEA. Accordingly, Plaintiffs were pleased to learn that the DEA was not involved with the subject seizure and was apparently unconcerned with the industrial hemp research project.
About Cannabis Science, Inc.
Cannabis Science, Inc. takes advantage of its unique understanding of metabolic processes to provide novel treatment approaches to a number of illnesses for which current treatments and understanding remain unsatisfactory. Cannabinoids have an extensive history dating back thousands of years, and currently, there are a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific publications that document the underlying biochemical pathways that cannabinoids modulate. The Company works with leading experts in drug development, medicinal characterization, and clinical research to develop, produce, and commercialize novel therapeutic approaches for the treatment for illnesses caused by infections as well as for age-related illness. Our initial focus is on cancers, HIV/AIDS, and neurological conditions. The Company is proceeding with the research and development of its proprietary drugs as a part of this initial focus: CS-S/BCC-1, CS-TATI-1, and CS-NEURO-1, respectively.
Forward-Looking Statements
This Press Release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934. A statement containing words such as "anticipate," "seek," intend," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "project," "plan," or similar phrases may be deemed "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Some or all of the events or results anticipated by these forward-looking statements may not occur. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include the future U.S. and global economies, the impact of competition, and the Company's reliance on existing regulations regarding the use and development of cannabis-based drugs. Cannabis Science, Inc., does not undertake any duty nor does it intend to update the results of these forward-looking statements. Safe Harbor Statement. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a 'safe harbor' for forward looking statements. Certain of the statements contained herein, which are not historical facts are forward looking statements with respect to events, the occurrence of which involved risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements may be impacted, either positively or negatively, by various factors. Information concerning potential factors that could affect the company is detailed from time to time in the company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Clubhouse Holds Classical & Opera Fair
Clubhouse Gibraltar will be holding a Classical & Opera Fair on Saturday 9th December from 12 noon to 5pm at the Gladys Perez Centre, 304a Main Street Gibraltar.
A large collection of classical music vinyl records, books, CD's and DVD's will be available to sell at give-away prices, and all proceeds in aid of the Mental Health Charity, Clubhouse Gibraltar.
Christiane Amanpour. Photo: Kevin Hagen/Getty Images
Following Charlie Roses exit, Christiane Amanpour is headed to PBS for a nightly global-affairs show. PBS will run her CNN show Amanpour, where the journalist talks with world leaders on interim basis, retitling it Amanpour on PBS, according to the network. Amanpour on PBS adds to the long tradition of public affairs programming that has been a hallmark of public media for decades, PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger said in a statement announcing the news. Amanpours show will air on New Yorks PBS station beginning Monday, December 4, and on other PBS stations beginning December 11 at 11 p.m. PBS is also planning another public-affairs show, which was not named, to air at 11:30 p.m. PBS cut ties with Rose and ended his eponymous hour-long program after the Washington Post reported a history of sexual-assault allegations against the reporter.
Photo: Paras Griffin/Getty Images
Its late in 2017. Do you still have to hear both sides? If Joyner Lucas has his way, you do. Last week, the Massachusetts rapper released a song and video titled Im Not Racist; not surprisingly, its garnered a considerable deal of attention. Its approaching 9 million views on YouTube. CNN (the website) called it the brutal race conversation no one wants to have. Desus and Mero mocked it for a couple of minutes.
The song literally makes the listener hear both sides, both voiced by Lucas. First, a white voice recounts a list of grievances against black people. Its a long list, but it reduces itself neatly to they complain too much and produce too little. Then a black voice offers a point-by-point rebuttal. The N-word means something different when white people and black people use it. Black people today are not slaves, but the legacy of slavery persists. Trump really is bad. Tupac, actually, is good. Eminem taking a stand against Trump, in fact, is good. (Both the white voice and the black voice sound exactly like Eminem.) Its white people, in fact, who blame everyone everyone, except themselves. And so on. The video ends with the white guy and the black guy hugging it out.
Rigid symmetry and a stilted tone reminiscent of high-school theater are nothing new for Lucas, whose best-known songs prior to Im Not Racist followed the same dramatic double-sided format. Ross Capicchioni tells both sides of the (true) story of a white Michigan teen gunned down by a black friend: The friend, it turns out, needed to kill an innocent to be initiated into a gang. (Despite having his arm and chest reduced to hash by buckshot, Capicchioni somehow survived to tell his tale in court.) Im Sorry is composed of two first-person narratives, one from the perspective of a suicide, the other from that of a friend helpless to stop it and angry that it happened. These dialogic narratives carry on in the vein of Eminem classics like Guilty Conscience and Stan in much the same way that Lucass voice replicates Eminems delivery. Lucas can rappity-rap with the best of them: his freestyles over Desiigners Panda and Kendrick Lamars DNA display first-rate technical skill.
With his rhyme-building talent and his preference for complicated tale-telling, Lucas has carved out a niche audience large enough to merit his being signed to Atlantic Records, which released his last album 508-507-2209 earlier this June. What he cant seem to do is fit in with the times. His interviews and lyrics are thick with complaints that more popular rappers (a) have no content to their music beyond drugs and swag, and (b) refuse to work with him, even though hes better than them. Lucas seems to hold a special grudge against Logic, who, like him, has a white mother and black father, made a notable song about suicidal ideation, and tends toward the nerdier side of the rap spectrum. Though his beef is ostensibly over Logic turning in a subpar performance on a Tech N9ne track they featured on, its roots run deeper than mere pique. Logic is equally corny, less verbally adept, and far more popular. Ultimately its not his actions that offend Lucas, but his status: The fact that Logic occupies a position Lucas thinks he himself deserves is enough to make him fume indefinitely.
Its not as if uncool rappers with white moms cant leverage their ability to see both sides into mainstream success. Look at Logic; look at Drake. But doing so while remaining loyal to an exhausted hip-hop paradigm is impossible. Logic succeeds by doing normcore impressions of Kendrick Lamar; Drake makes women his primary audience, sings a lot, and hops on trends. Eminem mimicry in 2017 just isnt going to cut it past a certain point, as even the progress of Im Not Racist shows. The song isnt uncomfortable so much as simply tedious; seven minutes is a long time to pore over the same tired debate about being racist.
The notion that social divisions could be reconciled through honest conversation was already a dicey proposition when President Obama represented it; after 2016s Trump election and 2017s Trump administration, its gone forever. The only reconciliation happening now is between the punitive tax bill passed by the Republican House and the punitive tax bill passed by the Republican Senate. Im Not Racist references current events, but its mindset is hopelessly outdated. It may have made a splash, but its not going to float. Even if someone still cared to revive how Eminem sounds in 2017, theres little need for Joyner Lucas when Eminem himself is still around; his new album, Revival, comes out in two weeks.
Just last week, I went on and on about Bravo giving Kim her peach back and now I have an even more pressing question: Where is Marlos peach? Whats holding this show back from giving that ridiculous woman her peach? Because if there is a moment of television this year that rivals Marlo silently and thanklessly fixing NeNes bun during an argument, Id like to see it. That was a Renaissance painting. I know that meme is overused, but that was a damn Renaissance painting. But we cant get to that brilliant moment of television without slogging through some other nonsense.
Because time is irrelevant, were still at NeNes White Seafood Gays & Never Forget Soiree and were still in the middle of Kenya and Kims fight. Kim decides that her daughter is the line that Kenya shouldnt cross after Kenya mentions that Kim offered to turn her daughter out for some John Legend tickets. In Kims defense, she didnt offer her daughter to John Legend, but just to anyone who could get her tickets. Im not sure if it helps her case, but its definitely a piece of information I want us to get correct.
Kim storms Kenya and somehow knocks over every drink and possibly cracks the coffee table itself. Something about the editing during this fight had me missing pieces. I need a few more over-the-shoulder angles. Maybe everyone should give in and have camera tracks installed in their homes. Sheree and Kroy shuffle Kim out and Kenya is left talking about how crazy Kim is with Cynthia and NeNe. The emerging story line is that Cynthia always has Kenyas back. Let Cynthia have Kenyas back. Who cares? Sheree and Kim head over to Porshas house to maximize screen time. Porsha has her assistant pour her an Olivia Popesized wine glass of Hennessy. Then everyone starts making fun of Cynthia. Why? I like Cynthia!
Up next is Kandi, she visits the studio with Ace and talks about how hard it is to be away from him, then immediately accepts an invitation from Sheree to go on a trip to San Francisco. Kandi, you are certainly allowed to do what you want, but complaining about something and then doing it again is a bad look. Sheree stops by to fill her in on the guest list. Shes inviting Kenya and Kim because everything is meaningless and chaos rules us all.
Cynthia goes with her daughter to a cupcake-making event? Someone on the production crew had a Groupon and it was about to expire. Noelle was planning to move to Charlotte to be with some punk-ass boyfriend, but shes deciding to take some time for herself. Of all the Atlanta children, I think Noelle is my favorite. Cynthia tells her about Will and seems pretty excited about him. Cynthias in that three great dates glow. I hope dating is different in your 50, but I definitely know that it could fall apart at any moment. Will, at least, wants another date and offers to take her on a sizable boat. All Ive ever wanted is to go on a date on a boat. Cynthia is living the life.
NeNe is at home with Gregg and she pulls a Kandi. She explains how worried she is about him and how she cant tear herself away and then tells him shes going on a trip. Gregg is able to give NeNe permission. Meanwhile, Kenya is dealing with the death of her grandmother, the woman who raised her. I sympathize with Kenya, but sitting on her bed staring at photographs while she gazes wistfully in the distance seems strange to me. Cynthia comes over and brings her flowers. Kenya needs an ally for sure. Kenyas husband is also in New York and from what Kenya says, it doesnt sound like he wants to go to the funeral? Or doesnt want Kenya to go? There are a lot of bombshells dropped and just walked away from.
Best part of the packing for San Francisco trip montage? Porsha going to a health food store and saying she doesnt eat ugly food. What food was she referring to? Beets.
Marlo goes over to NeNes house while NeNe is packing. NeNe has a walk-in closet and that whole thing is a California Closet. I have one in my house and I recognized those rhinestone handles from the showroom. NeNe and Marlo come up with a plan to get Marlo onto the trip. Marlo has to go to California to buy a car? Who does this? Is there some California car tax break? What does Marlo do for a living? I need answers.
Everyone is late to the airport and when they do show up, they bring 400 suitcases. Porsha says the truest thing shes ever said on this show: When you go on a trip with a bunch of bitches who dont like you, you better slay every occasion. That is a life philosophy I can get behind. Kim ends up not coming and everyone is weird around Cynthia. Once they get to San Francisco, everyone complains about how cold it is. Oh, those delicate little Southerners.
During the bus ride to the airport, everyone reveals how long its been since theyve had sex and Sheree reveals shes reconnected with Tyrone, that shes in love, and hes in jail. That is a list that takes you on a wild ride with each new bit of information. Everyone takes a disco nap and shows up to the rooftop dinner that Sheree set up. Shes hoping everyone can put their differences aside and have a fun time. Oh, Sheree.
Marlo is wearing a nightie with a push-up bra and one of those lacy bunny-ear headbands. Sheree is wearing the same sweatsuit she flew in. It takes approximately 15 seconds until NeNe and Porsha are in a screaming fight.
I can hardly track every piece of information in this fight because both of them are talking at the same time. But my favorite moment is when they both scream, YOU TALK ABOUT ME in unison. NeNe is angry at Porsha because she was the only one who had Porshas back when she first came on the show and Porsha is just upset? The fight ends with them just shouting, Fuck you! over and over to each other.
To be continued
number 10
Phantom Thread
Hushed, creepy, a shade absurd: Its Paul Thomas Andersons portrait of the artist as a man who must orchestrate every aspect of his existence in order to create, and the destabilizing impact of a love relationship in which hes forced to cede some control. As a renowned postwar British female clothing designer, Daniel Day Lewis in supposedly his last PLEASE GOD LET IT NOT BE SO performance is a wispy creature, floating on currents of both inspiration and self-involvement. Hes upended by a willful new muse/lover played by the Luxembourg-born Vicky Krieps, while Johnny Greenwoods string-and-piano heavy score scales the heights of romanticism. One problem: the flabbergasting resolution, which makes symbolic sense (Ibsen and Strindberg would have loved it) but is too rushed to be remotely credible.
Read the full review later this week
number 9
BPM
The title of the stark French AIDS-crisis drama stands for beats per minute, which can evoke a heartbeat or a discotheque, both of which have their place. Director Robin Campillo focuses on the Paris branch of ACT UP whose members devise often-violent stunts to call attention to governments and pharmaceutical companies foot-dragging and a pair of young men who find love amid the horror. As a portrait of the harshness of vital collective action, the film has no peer.
number 8
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Shut up and hear me out. Go in expecting a shambolic script and variable acting and youll thrill to this daft, virtuosic sci-fi extravaganza what happens when an artist with an unfettered visual imagination gets hold of the latest computer technology and goes all out. Luc Besson choreographs high-speed ballets of actors, bizarro creatures, and sci-fi gizmos on a dizzying number of planes, any minute of which has more cinematic magic than the last four Star Wars movies combined.
number 7
Nowhere to Hide
It begins with the American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, when a film crew leaves a camera with a medic, Nori Sharif, who hopes to chart his countrys rebuilding and winds up documenting his citys destruction and his familys desperate flight from ISIS. Watch Zaradasht Ahmeds great experiential documentary (and the equally intense Last Men in Aleppo) and footage of distant, falling bombs will never seem abstract, so far removed from the hell that they bring.
number 6
Marjorie Prime
Michael Almereydas adaptation of a play by Jordan Harrison is a haunting sci-fi chamber drama set in the near future, when people can purchase holographic versions (Primes) of their dead loved ones and end up saying things they couldnt to the people on whom the Primes were modeled. The film is suffused with despair, but also an abiding sense of forgiveness. The perfect cast features a reborn Geena Davis, Tim Robbins, Jon Hamm, and the ever-sly 86-year-old Lois Smith, who made her debut opposite James Dean in East of Eden.
number 5
Faces Places
Agnes Varda is 89, with wavering eyesight, but she still gazes on every new space like a blank canvas. In her new road picture, she and a 33-year-old photographer calling himself JR drive around rural France, finding subjects by design and happenstance. JRs photos of people and animals are printed 30, 40, 60 feet high, and affixed to buildings, water towers, even a train. It sounds both whimsical and pretentious, but it might be the least arty movie about art ever made. Watching it, I felt I could suddenly access a greater percentage of my soul.
number 4
Get Out
Daniel Kaluuya is the black photographer who travels to meet the family of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) in Jordan Peeles paranoid horror comedy, a psychotic satire of white liberals who appropriate black culture. Peeles directorial debut feels like the work of someone who has been making features for years. You jump, laugh at your jumpiness, and then jump again. Peele hasnt just blended Guess Whos Coming to Dinner? and The Stepford Wives. He has proven that, nowadays, the former has to morph into the latter.
number 3
Lady Bird
Nearly perfect. The title character is a Sacramento high-school senior (the dreamy-prickly Saoirse Ronan) who jettisons her real name for one that captures her fluttery exuberance and suggests shed like to fly away, especially from the tormented mother (the superb Laurie Metcalf) whos increasingly jealous of her daughters freedom. The writer-director Greta Gerwig has a rare gift. She can skip along the surface of her alter egos life, stop and go deep, and then skip forward again, evoking the tempo of a life lived whimsically but over an emotional abyss.
number 2
Call Me by Your Name
Director Luca Guadagnino creates a mood in which every moment is suffused with sexual longing in this case of a 17-year-old (Timothee Chalamet, the years best performance) for a 24-year-old visiting scholar (Armie Hammer). Its a film in which young men are always doffing their shirts and jumping into sparkling Italian lakes or riding on bicycles along dirt roads outside medieval villages. I cant remember the mood of midsummer captured this way, lazy but so vivid that every sound registers. And that last shot! A triumph by any name.
number 1
The Florida Project
Sean Bakers follow-up to his shot-on-an-iPhone-5 hit Tangerine centers on a bunch of rambunctious children bopping around a transient motel not far from Disney World. The crazy elation of the first half as 6-year-old Moonee (the astoundingly vivid Brooklynn Prince) and her friends dash up and down the stairs making trouble at the Magic Castle motel gradually subsides, as Baker shows how precarious this life really is. Bria Vinaite (in her first-ever role) is very fine as the loving young single mother who maybe shouldnt have responsibility for a kid but who are we to judge? and Willem Dafoe is unforgettable (a career-best performance!) as the kind but firm hotel manager who in the end cant fix what most needs fixing. The eye-popping artificial Florida colors make for the most potent counterpoint imaginable to the uncertainty, the grayness of the characters existence. But therein lies the hope. The best film of 2017 by a wide margin.
*A version of this article appears in the December 11, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.
Estimados amigos,
Les doy cordialmente la bienvenida a este Blog informativo con articulos, analisis y comentarios de publicaciones especializadas y especialmente seleccionadas, principalmente sobre temas economicos, financieros y politicos de actualidad, que esperamos y deseamos, sean de su maximo interes, utilidad y conveniencia.
Pensamos que solo comprendiendo cabalmente el presente, es que podemos proyectarnos acertadamente hacia el futuro.
Las convicciones son mas peligrosos enemigos de la verdad que las mentiras.
There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen.
You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.
No soy alguien que sabe, sino alguien que busca.
Only Gold is money. Everything else is debt.
Las grandes almas tienen voluntades; las debiles tan solo deseos.
Quien no lo ha dado todo no ha dado nada.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
If you know the other and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.
The Hewitt Dollar General was robbed over the weekend, and police believe it may be connected to at least two recent Family Dollar store robberies in the Greater Waco area.
At about 9:30 p.m. Friday, police were called to Dollar General, 505 N. Hewitt Drive, after a man wearing a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over a hat entered the business. The man asked an employee which register was open before he displayed the handle of a handgun from inside the hoodie and demanded money, Hewitt Police Chief Jim Devlin said.
"The employee said he never pulled out the weapon from his pocket, but just showed the handle," Devlin said. "She cooperated and removed an undisclosed amount of money from the register and the suspect exited the store."
The man was last seen walking east toward Hewitt Drive, Devlin said. No one was injured during the robbery.
Devlin said the suspect, described as a man with a tattoo on his forehead, is believed to be the same man who robbed a Bellmead Family Dollar about two weeks ago and the West Family Dollar last week. The agencies are working together to identify the suspect, Devlin said.
No arrests had been made by late Monday morning. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Hewitt Police Department at 666-1661, the West Police Department at 826-5311 or the Bellmead Police Department at 799-0251.
U.S. Rep. Bill Flores, R-Bryan, said he is unsure if special counsel Robert Muellers team represents the blind scales of justice as it investigates Russias role in the 2016 election and possible collusion with President Donald Trumps campaign.
Flores said he would not consider Trump attempting to remove Mueller a move worthy of impeachment, but did not recommend it, either.
Look, he has the right to remove him, Wacos congressman said after speaking at the State of the Nation luncheon hosted by the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce. I dont think it would be good, optically speaking. Now that were starting to see the ideological backgrounds of the roster of people (who are) part of the Mueller team, youve got to be somewhat concerned as to whether or not its going to be a transparent and fair process. That said, I wouldnt advise the president to try to remove. I just think it would not send a good signal.
Some on Muellers team have made political donations to Democrats, The New York Times has reported, and under Justice Department rules, campaign donations do not create a political relationship.
The Times also reported last week that Mueller dismissed an FBI agent this summer after an investigation found that he sent text messages showing possible bias toward Hillary Clinton and against Trump.
Again, if you look at the roster of people (Mueller has) hired to help him, you cant be sure that they all represent the blind scales of justice, Flores said. But at the end of the day, all of this stuff has to go to a court somewhere. So well assume that its going to work out the right way through the court system.
Earlier in the day, while speaking to Waco High School students, Flores rebuked the hiring of Michael Flynn, Trumps former national security adviser. Flynn on Friday pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communication with Russian officials.
He should have never hired Michael Flynn to be part of the White House, and history shows that to be right, said Flores, the former chairman of the influential Republican Study Committee. There were just some elements about Michael Flynn that were not representative of clean, constitutional government and thats about all Im going to say on it I dont think thats going to end up hurting the president. The president should be quiet about that, but hes talking about it.
Flores talks Trump, North Korea with Waco High students Shortly before his State of the Nation luncheon in downtown Waco on Monday, U.S. Rep. Bill Flores, R-Bryan, spoke with juniors and seniors at
The situation could become Trumps Watergate if hes not careful, Flores said at the high school, referring to the political scandal during the 1972 presidential campaign that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Dale Mantey, a Rockdale Democrat looking to unseat Flores next year, said he would consider Trump firing Mueller an impeachable offense.
I think any American would be rightfully concerned Unlike Bill Flores, I actually have faith and trust in our Department of Justice to do their job, Mantey said. When I say concerned, we need to be cognizant of whats going on here. This isnt a story thats going away. This isnt a political story. Political stories dont last this long.
Speaking to local business, education and city leaders at the luncheon, Flores heralded Wacos recent growth, pointing to rapid downtown development and scientific advancements from the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative.
GOP efforts toward regulatory and tax reform, Flores said, would bolster such projects. Representatives from the House and the Senate will meet over the next two weeks to iron out the differences in the tax bills passed by both chambers, he said.
Flores predicted the controversial $1.4 trillion addition to the national debt will be plugged by revenues to the gross domestic product. The Joint Committee on Taxation has reported that the Senate bill would bring about $400 billion in economic growth. However, Flores said outside experts say revenue would plug the trillion-dollar gap.
Baylor officials have balked at the House bill because it would tax tuition waivers and stipends for graduate and doctoral students. Flores, who opposes that aspect of the bill, said he believes the exemption will remain in the bill lawmakers will send to Trumps desk.
Staff writer Shelly Conlon contributed to this report.
Edward Lane Bird, lovingly known to most as "Ed", passed away on December 2, 2017, surrounded by his loving family. Family and friends will gather for a memorial visitation from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., Tuesday, December 5, at Journey Christian Community Church, 10424 China Spring Road, China Spring. A memorial service celebrating Ed's life and his faith will be at 11:00 a.m., Wednesday, December 6, at Journey Christian Community, China Spring.
Shortly before his State of the Nation luncheon in downtown Waco on Monday, U.S. Rep. Bill Flores, R-Bryan, spoke with juniors and seniors at Waco High School about everything from immigration, health care and tax reform to the importance of education after graduation.
What seemed to garner the most interest by students were Flores answers when they asked how he felt about working with the celebrity businessman-turned-president Donald Trump, and North Koreas ongoing threat of nuclear war against the United States.
Heres the way I feel about Donald Trump: Somebody may come up to you and say, Hey, I like all these things about you, but I dont like these things about you. What you have to do, at the end of the day, in order for us to be friends, you and I have to say, We like more things than we dont like, Flores said. Thats kind of the same with my relationship with Donald Trump. There are some things he does that just drive me crazy. Some of the tweeting he does, and some of the things he says drive me crazy. On the other hand, the policies he wants to move forward with are the things I like.
The question-and-answer session was meant to connect the soon-to-be voters and newly registered voters to politicians beyond what students may read online or in a newspaper, said Wendy Moulds, a Waco High School government teacher who helped moderate the event.
They need to know someone is actually working for them, in the trenches. They need to feel that sometimes, with this intense of a face-to-face, because I think thats one of the reasons a lot of them choose not to vote, Moulds said. Theyre so disassociated, that takes that out of the equation.
Flores casts doubt on Mueller's investigation, but does not recommend Trump intervention U.S. Rep. Bill Flores, R-Bryan, said he is unsure if special counsel Robert Muellers team represents the blind scales of justice as it inve
Beyond Trumps push for tax and healthcare reform, Flores praised Trumps ability to re-establish a strong congressional liaison office for Congress to better collaborate with the White House.
The fact that he gets to meet Trump is pretty cool to me, junior Jardarin Randolph said. I like the fact that Flores is not very opinionated on first impressions and hes more of a long-term guy. He evaluates people such as Trump and he compared him to (Barack) Obama. He doesnt take anything away from the previous president, he just feels one does more and ones more interactive. It was a good experience.
Students then asked how Flores felt about the relationship the U.S. has with North Korea, which has had major advancements in missile and nuclear technology in recent months, including several tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
For the last several decades, policies have been lenient toward North Korea, with the thought that some form of help might make the country behave, Flores said. But there hasnt been forward progress because of the countrys oppressive regime and the country refuses to work with other nations, he said.
What we should have been doing is dealing with them from a point of strength. You know, Dont do that, or were going to smack you down, Flores said.
This president has changed our policy toward North Korea. He says, If you mess with us, were going to make sure you feel it and its going the hurt. But the leader over there, Kim Jung Un, has not really gotten it yet, with respect to President Trump.
One of the best ways the U.S. could handle North Korea would be to get major power players, like China, involved in resolving the tensions, Flores said.
Ultimately, I think were going to get things resolved over there, because North Korea is within a few months of being able to put a nuclear warhead on an ICBM and drop it anywhere in this country, and I think they would, Flores told the teenagers.
WAHOO A public scope meeting for two floodwater retention structures south of Prague will be held Dec. 7 in Wahoo.
The Lower Platte Natural Resources District (NRD) and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) are hosting the meeting at Union Bank and Trust in Wahoo from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. to discuss the structures.
The public meeting is being held to obtain insight, address questions and hear concerns from land owners and others that might be interested in the proposed project.
NRD Assistant Manager Tom Mountford said the NRCS has already allocated $1.5 million to the structures and the NRD has applied for an additional $2.3 million from the states Water Resources Development Fund.
If the state grants the NRD the $2.3 million, then only $1.5 million will have to come from local sources, Mountford said.
Flood retention has been a large conversation by landowners and these two dams are pieces of that puzzle, Mountford said.
Sites 26 and 27 are two of 17 total structures that are part of the Wahoo Creek Watershed Plan and Environmental Impact Statement.
Seven of the original 17 structure have been completed.
Site 26 is located near County Road 28, just north of County Road O. Site 27 is located northwest of the intersection of county roads 26 and O.
After the Dec. 7 meeting, NRD committees will begin to look at engineering firms for designing the structures and getting permits for construction.
Mountford said the NRD has five years to get the dams in place and the first three years will be spent in engineering, permitting and securing land rights. The last two years will be construction.
The structures sit at adjacent sections, so thats why they are looked at together as a group, he added.
The overall scope of the Wahoo Creek Watershed Plan and Environmental Impact Statement are to reduce urban and rural flooding, reduce sedimentation and scour, stabilize streams and channels, enhance fish and wildlife habitat, enhance water quality, improve economic conditions and provide recreational opportunities.
For sites 26 and 27, recreational opportunities would be up to the private landowners, Mountford said.
The Turnbull government has been embarrassed by a shock loss on the floor of the House of Representatives.
The defeat on Monday afternoon occurred when Labor and some crossbenchers combined to back a motion supporting New Zealand's offer to resettle refugees from Manus Island.
But two members of the government - Trade Minister Steve Ciobo and Liberal National Party backbencher Warren Entsch - didn't show up, triggering the 73-72 defeat.
Speaker Tony Smith used an escape clause in the House of Representatives standings orders to allow the vote to take place again. The grounds for a new vote were that the absent MPs had not intended to abstain but were simply absent at the crucial moment due to "misadventure".
Controversial amendments to the same-sex marriage legislation are poised for defeat in Parliament this week, with key crossbenchers and Liberal MPs refusing to back them.
As debate began in the House of Representatives on Monday, supporters of the Dean Smith bill believed they had enough votes, 74, to form a blocking majority against any changes.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said gay people were better off living together than alone with their cats. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Conservative government MPs Michael Sukkar and Andrew Hastie presented nine tranches of amendments to colleagues late on Monday, including wide-ranging exemptions for civil celebrants, small businesses and organisations such as religious charities.
In a briefing, they told fellow Coalition MPs that anti-discrimination laws were "significantly unbalanced" toward protecting "same-sex oriented Australians", and offered "no protection at all" to those who support the traditional definition of marriage.
Foreign holidaymakers have launched legal action against the Turnbull government's controversial backpacker tax, arguing it breaches Australia's international tax treaties.
US-based tax accounting firm Taxback acting on behalf of individual clients from the US, Britain and Germany lodged the challenge with the Queensland Federal Court on Monday.
The backpacker tax was designed to slug visitors who earned less than the tax-free threshhold. Credit:File/Rob Griffith
The company argues that the tax announced by the Abbott government but implemented at the start of this year contravenes non-discrimination clauses built into tax treaties Australia has signed with eight countries: Britain, the US, Germany, Finland, Chile, Japan, Norway and Turkey.
The legal action seeks "declaratory relief" from the tax for all citizens of those eight nations in effect rendering them exempt from the tax.
Access to justice is a recurring issue for small business people who are at the wrong end of a power imbalance in dealings with big business and governments.
Consumer protections don't always apply to small businesses, which have limited options in seeking resolution.
There are mediation services provided by my office and state Small Business Commissions, but if the dispute can't be mediated it starts to get expensive.
The fundamental issue is the current legal system puts small business in no man's land.
A thief who broke into a Perth veterinary hospital may not know one of the drugs they stole is used to euthanise pets, WA Police have warned.
The Forrestdale veterinary hospital was broken into at around 2.15am on Monday morning, and a large quantity of drugs were stolen.
A large quantity of drugs were stolen from the vet hospital.
The thief made away with Lethabarb, Apomorphine, Propofol, Alfaxan, Diazepam, Zoletil, Antisedan, Dozadine and ACP.
While a number of drugs the thief took are used as general anaesthetic or sedatives, WA Police warned the thief against taking anything they had stolen.
Planning Minister Rita Saffioti has indicated the state government will move to rezone Beeliar Wetlands to ensure Roe 8 can never be built.
Speaking outside Cabinet on Monday, Ms Saffioti said she would soon start proceedings to protect the reserve and commence its rehabilitation.
Protesters at the Beeliar Wetlands. Credit:ReThink The Link
The Roe 8 project, led by the former Liberal state government, planned to extend Roe Highway by five kilometres through Perth's southern suburbs to Stock Road in Coolbellup.
Following Labor's resounding victory at WA's March election, the $1.2 billion funding commitment from the federal government to build the freight link was redirected into the state's $2.3 billion road and rail funding package which includes 17 road and rail projects.
Washington: President Donald Trump on Monday said the FBI ruined the life of his former national security adviser and said his Democratic opponent for president, Hillary Clinton, suffered no consequences after she lied "many times" to the FBI.
Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser, pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the FBI when he was questioned early this year about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. He was the fourth person charged in the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to lead an inquiry into Russia's influence on the 2016 election and possible ties to Trump associates.
As he left for Utah on Monday, the president said he felt "very badly" for Flynn, whom he fired in February for lying to the vice president about the content of these conversations.
Trump's comments on Monday on Flynn come at a time when the special counsel investigation is focusing intensely on the president's inner circle. Trump once encouraged Flynn to seek an immunity deal. Presidents typically do not weigh in on federal investigations to avoid appearing to influence the outcome.
Washington: Donald Trump's former campaign chief Paul Manafort has apparently come up with a novel way to try to salvage his reputation amid money laundering and conspiracy charges.
As recently as last week, Manafort was ghost-writing an editorial with a longtime colleague with ties to a Russian intelligence agency, which sought to put a positive spin on his work for the Ukrainian government, according to prosecutors for Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Paul Manafort, a former campaign worker for Donald Trump. Credit:Bloomberg
The charges against Manafort relate to his work in Ukraine.
The piece flouts a judge's order "to not try the case in the press" and is grounds for denying Manafort's bid for freedom from house arrest, prosecutors wrote in a court filing Monday.
A Helena man convicted of fracturing his babys skull was sentenced to 20 years in the Montana State Prison with five of those suspended.
Aaron Joel Oliphant was convicted of felony aggravated assault in late September after a three-day trial.
Oliphant was the sole caretaker of the boy on the day of the incident in summer 2016, according to court documents. The case was brought to the attention of law enforcement officials after Oliphant and his wife took the baby to the emergency room. The boy had brain bleeding consistent with "non-accidental trauma from a caretaker," the documents state.
When medics assessed the child at St. Peter's Hospital the next morning, staff informed the couple that their baby "had bleeding in his head which was usually associated with someone shaking the baby or dropping the baby on his head," court documents state. The boy was taken to a children's hospital in Salt Lake City for further treatment.
County Attorney Leo Gallagher recommended 20 years in the Montana State Prison with no time suspended for Oliphant due to the ongoing medical issues the child is facing, including seizures, deficits with speech and balance and potential brain damage.
Its a lifelong problem for this child that he caused, Gallagher said.
Gallagher also pointed to Oliphants attempts to cover up the damage he had caused to the child.
Its a special guy who can watch a child die, Gallagher said.
Judge Mike Menahan found multiple factors surrounding the case to support the 15 year sentence, including overwhelming evidence of injuries and the suffering of the child. Oliphant is also required to pay restitution costs for health care and the lost wages of the childs mother.
There is absolutely no excuse for the injuries wrought upon this child, Menahan said.
WASHINGTON -- I bumped into Bret Baier, the Fox News host, at a Washington cocktail party Wednesday night where it seemed everybody was chatting about the latest White House insanity: President Trump joking about "Pocahontas" to Native Americans, reviving the Obama "birther" allegation, suggesting the Access Hollywood video was fake, retweeting anti-Muslim videos made by British white-supremacists.
Most assumed Trump was just being crazy, but Baier had a theory: Whenever Trump escalates such antics, he is agitated about news that is about to break. Maybe, Baier speculated, Trump knew something about the Russia probe that we didn't yet know.
Now we do. On Friday morning came former national security adviser Michael Flynn's guilty plea, the most ominous development for Trump yet in the Russia probe. Court documents show that Flynn is cooperating with special prosecutor Robert Mueller and that Flynn's Russian contacts were made under direction from higher-ups -- and there weren't too many higher than Flynn on the campaign other than Trump himself. The notion that Flynn has the goods on Trump would explain why Trump was reluctant to fire him, tried to get the FBI to stop probing Flynn -- and seemed unglued this week as the news of Flynn's cooperation was about to become public.
Though predictions are perilous in the age of Trump, this really could be the beginning of the end of the national horror his tenure has been. If Baier is correct -- as I believe he is -- that Trump gets ever more outrageous when he feels cornered, then this means the nation is entering a perilous new period. We can expect Trump to get ever more dangerous and desperate in his distractions as he hears Mueller's footsteps. Trump's erraticism is damaging in its own right, to alliances and civility, but the greatest danger is that while we chase Trump's distractions, we lose sight of real calamity.
This week was a good example. Trump raised the level of crazy. We in the media took the bait. And you, dear reader, encouraged us.
I asked my digital colleagues at The Washington Post for the top 25 pieces that appeared online in the Post this week before the Flynn news broke. Along with news stories about current intrigue -- the Matt Lauer firing, James O'Keefe's failed sting operation against the Post, Prince Harry's engagement -- the top items were dominated by Trump insanity: his Muslim-video retweets, his insult of the British prime minister, his attacks on CNN, his war on the "war on Christmas," the insults he traded with Democrats, his "unhinged" behavior and his veering past "guardrails" of what's acceptable.
But in the top 25 were only two about the monstrous tax bill as it made its way through the Senate this week. There were only two about North Korea testing a missile that could strike anywhere in America. There was only one about Trump's takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And there wasn't a single story about the sprawling Russia scandal.
In other words: We are all being played for suckers as we get exercised over Trump's diversions.
It's possible that Trump does crazy things simply because he's crazy. But the outbursts serve a real purpose. They provide cover. While the nation gapes at Trump implying Joe Scarborough's involvement in the death of a congressional aide, the administration and its allies achieve all kinds of abominations.
If this tax bill were to see more sunlight, it would never become law. It adds $1 trillion in debt, ultimately increases taxes on those making less than $75,000 a year, gives most of the breaks to the wealthiest 1 percent, is forecast to add negligible economic growth and would force massive cuts to Medicare and Obamacare. But while Trump distracted the nation, GOP leaders strong-armed holdouts all week.
Likewise, the Post published several largely unnoticed pieces this week about the failure to renew the Children's Health Insurance Program, which expired on Sept. 30. States have begun to notify beneficiaries (9 million children) that they may be cut off.
I tried to ignore the Trump shenanigans this week, instead writing about the drug-industry executive Trump tapped to oversee drug pricing and about the administration lawyer who orchestrated Trump's takeover of the CFPB after serving as a lawyer for a payday lender cited by the CFPB for abuses. But such pieces generate only a fraction of the "clicks" of pieces I and others write about Trump's pyrotechnics.
Those pyrotechnics are going to increase now that Mueller has turned Flynn. Trump's distractions will be impossible to ignore. But we -- lawmakers, the media and the public -- need to keep our focus on the real damage Trump is doing.
By: Associated Press
December 3, 2017
MIAMI (AP) -- Two Florida men have been sent to prison for distributing hundreds of opioid pills to an undercover Miami police officer.
The Miami U.S. Attorney's Office says in a news release that 50-year-old Oreste Abreu of Hialeah was sentenced to just over four years in prison and 39-year-old Daniel Lezcano-Morejon of Hialeah was sentenced to more than three years.
Both men pleaded guilty earlier to drug trafficking charges.
Investigators say the pair sold more than 800 hydromorphone pills to the undercover officer over several months in 2012. Hydromorphone is sold under the brand name Dilaudid, a powerful painkiller.
The case was investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Miami-Dade Police Department.
After months of smoke-filled skies, the blanket of winter has returned to the Northern Rockies. Our stunning vistas are once again visible. 2017 was a record-breaking fire season here in Montana, as 141 wildfires burned across our state affecting over a million acres. Montanans were evacuated, homes were lost, businesses were hurt, and federal and state budgets were severely impacted.
However, Montanans are a resilient bunch, and we rolled up our sleeves and helped one another. Our elected officials were there with us, providing help and taking an interest in what was happening to our forests and our communities. While the fires burned, everyone stood together. Yet as the smoke cleared, it became easier to assign blame and look for silver bullets to solve the problem.
We traveled to Washington, D.C., a couple weeks ago and were surprised to see Congress proposing new laws to reform forest management faster than one can assign them a bill number. While we appreciate the effort, this reactive frenzy of bill drafting is not in the best interest of our forests or Montanans. Most of the current bills lack bipartisan support and are likely to hurt not help our forests and communities. Undermining bedrock environmental laws, silencing public opinion, and weakening accountability by limiting public engagement and review are just a few of the potential outcomes of the proposed legislation.
There is one piece of legislation that will help make our forests more sustainable, fire resistant and adaptable to the changing climate: the bipartisan Wildfire Disaster Funding Act. More intense wildfires, a longer wildfire season and people moving into fire-prone areas are driving up firefighting costs. These increasing costs are chipping away at other public lands programs, forcing agencies to take funding from other programs such as forest restoration, recreation, trails and land use planning.
Have you noticed reduced levels of maintenance and public service on your national forest? We sure have. The Wildfire Disaster Funding Act fixes that problem by stabilizing suppression funding and funding the 1-2 percent of costly wildfires as we do earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes: as national disasters. This will significantly reduce the need to borrow funds, and allow more stable budgeting for fire prevention, forest restoration and other programs. Unfortunately, efforts in Congress to include more controversial proposals for changing forest management are holding hostage the solutions like WDFA that everyone agrees on.
As we look over the areas that were shrouded in smoke all summer, we see a significantly changed landscape. It is not 1 million acres of blackened trees but a mosaic of burned, unburned and partially burned forest and grasslands closer to what we suspect the landscape looked like prior to mans intervention with fire suppression, early logging and grazing.
This landscape raises a lot of questions with no simple answers. Would more logging have slowed the rate of spread? Would more prescribed burning have decreased fire intensity? Where does climate change and the record setting drought fit in? All these questions should be answered in a collaborative manner with professional resource managers, the timber industry, conservation groups, business owners, ranchers, outfitters, recreationists and many more.
For years, Montanans have been meeting at kitchen tables across the state to hammer out common-sense solutions to tough issues. When we need help from Congress, we will be the first to ask.
We have asked for a fix to the wildfire funding issue, and they have responded. Lets get that bill passed and let the more complex issues concerning forest management reforms be worked out across the table and over a cup of coffee.
The holiday party can be a highlight of a small company's year or an event everyone would rather forget. When there are problems, which can land a small business in legal trouble, they often start with people having too much alcohol.
A business owner can lessen the chance of trouble by keeping an event low-key, holding it during the day and/or limiting how much people can drink.
A company is legally responsible in most states if party guests, whether they're employees, customers or their dates, are hurt in or cause alcohol-related accidents. It doesn't have to be a traffic accident if someone falls and is hurt at the party or on the way home, the boss can be liable. There's also the possibility that someone who's had too much to drink can say or do something offensive, sexually harassing or even violent. Again, it's going to be the boss's problem.
Human resources professionals say owners and managers need to set the tone for the party, reminding employees that while the event is intended to be a celebration, it is a work-related affair and that everyone is expected to behave accordingly. And, in the case of sexual harassment or violence, there will be disciplinary consequences. Owners and managers need to act as chaperones, making sure no one's drinking or behavior gets out of hand.
HR consultant Crystal Barnett fields more inquiries around this time of the year from small businesses needing guidance about making their parties trouble-free.
"They're asking for ideas about what other clients do," says Barnett, who's with the Atlanta office of HR provider Insperity.
Barnett is seeing companies move away from big blowout parties, preferring more intimate get-togethers or sit-down meals in a restaurant. And owners recognize that during the holidays, family time is what matters to many staffers, so their parties are being held in the afternoon. Both trends have the benefit of being safer for everyone.
"It cuts down on drinking," Barnett says.
Some companies that have afternoon parties, or that take the staff out for lunch, give employees an added bonus of the rest of the day off, Barnett says.
Companies that want to limit alcohol have several options. Some decide to make their parties alcohol-free. Others hire professional bartenders and give staffers tickets that can be exchanged for drinks. To be most effective, tickets should have employees' names or other identifying information on them, and staffers should have to show an ID card. That will prevent people from giving tickets to one another.
Another option is a cash bar, Barnett says. People tend to drink less when it's on their own tab. And there should be a cutoff time after which alcohol won't be served, so people have a chance to metabolize the alcohol in their systems before they leave.
Owners may want to have car services available in case someone has had too much and needs help getting home.
While owners and managers can put their staffers on notice that they're expected to behave, they don't have as much power over spouses, partners and clients. All the more reason to keep an eye on everyone's behavior.
Attorneys and HR providers recommend that owners be sure they have adequate insurance coverage before hosting a party. That can include property and casualty insurance and also employment practices liability insurance, which is intended to cover sexual harassment, discrimination and other problems that can arise at an event. If the party is being held off-site, an owner should make sure that location also has insurance.
And, if something does happen, a boss needs to be upfront about any bad behavior, accidents or misunderstandings, and not try to sweep it under the rug.
US 60 open after Salem fire, but may be icy
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By The Associated Press
Dec. 04, 2017 | FRANKFORT, KY
By The Associated Press Dec. 04, 2017 | 10:58 AM | FRANKFORT, KY
The spokeswoman for Kentucky House Republicans says the former GOP speaker had a sexual relationship with a woman in his office and used money from political donors to help pay her a secret settlement outside of court.
Daisy Olivo filed a lawsuit Monday saying she was retaliated against for reporting official misconduct.
Former Republican House Speaker Jeff Hoover resigned his leadership post last month after acknowledging the settlement. He acknowledged sending inappropriate but consensual text messages, but denied having a sexual relationship with the woman.
He didn't immediately return messages for comment Monday.
Olivo said she reprimanded the woman several times for what she called a consensual but inappropriate relationship. Olivo said Hoover's chief of staff tried to fire the woman. When Olivo objected, she said, she was subject to retaliation.
DECATUR Work to finally remove enormous piles of debris from the former Aaction Equipment building is underway almost three years after fire destroyed the 1060 E. Grand Ave. structure.
Heres what to know about the massive project:
WHATS BEING DONE
Crews are removing piles of bricks, pipes and other debris from the site, which takes up nearly an entire block along North Illinois Street between East Grand Avenue and East Locust Street. The rubble, which is believed to contain asbestos, has been sitting there since January 2015, when fire gutted the warehouse. Firefighters from across the region were called in to battle the blaze, which could be seen for miles as it lit up the night sky.
WHY THE DELAY
The building eventually collapsed but was never cleaned up. "It's just literally become a landfill," neighbor Charity Doyle, told the Herald & Review in September. The case has been tied up in a protracted legal battle between the city and those who control the property. The owner died and the building was not insured. Click here to read more about the case.
WHO IS DOING THE WORK
The city has partnered with Operating Engineers Local 965 in Springfield for the removal. The city at first said the project would cost $300,000, but officials now estimate it will be lower because of the partnership. They're not sure how long it will take.
On Monday, a crane and other equipment was brought in as the area was sprayed with a hose. The union is using the cleanup to offer training opportunities for members.
HISTORY OF THE BUILDING
The three-story warehouse starting in the 1890s housed Faries Manufacturing, makers of kitchen cabinets, mirrors, bird cages and stands. The business sold the building to Sol Tick & Co. in 1955 and moved to Elkhart, Indiana. The restaurant equipment company was housed there since the 1970s.
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Nearly 15 years after its Edinburgh Fringe beginnings as La Clique, La Soiree has landed in the West End. Variety might have gone mainstream with a little help from Simon Cowell, but Brett Haylock's circus cabaret has always been alt. The question is this: Has La Soiree come to the West End or has the West End come to La Soiree?
The answer is a bit of both. La Soiree still lives up to its name. Seven years after its first Olivier Award-winning outing, it remains the very definition of a good night out. A variety show on shuffle, combining big belly laughs with heady astonishment, it swings from raucous cabaret acts to dizzying circus. This year, we get American all-rounder Amy G popping a kazoo up her wazoo to parp a patriotic tune in President Trump's honour, and the German gymnast Lea Hinz spinning on an aerial hoop like a human catherine wheel. Exuberant, boisterous and racy as ever, La Soiree's a party in public, perfect for the festive season.
Whether it lives up to its best, however, is another matter. There's an old philosophical problem, dating back to the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus, called The Ship of Theseus. It imagines a ship that has each of its component parts replaced one by one over time. Is it still the same ship? The same goes for La Soiree. With an all-new line-up, is it still the same show?
Over the years, Haylock has found like-for-like replacements for La Soiree's originals. In place of pinstriped strong men The English Gents we get the suited-and-booted Chilly Brothers, chucking each other around on the human trapeze. Trapeze acts swing by and one silly turn deserves another. As a result, La Soiree retains its own distinct flavour; the same head-spinning cocktail of sauce, silliness and spectacle. It looks and feels the same, and it works the same treat the thrill of the risque upping that of the risky. Same old La Soiree. Still got it.
Except, it also isn't and hasn't. Each substitute is that bit more bog-standard; still extraordinary in its own right, just ordinarily so. Rather than the witty reinventions of cabaret turns, today's La Soiree is largely circus staples done well. Instead of David O'Mer's bath-based straps act a cologne ad come to life we get LJ Marles hanging around all insouciant and sensual hand-to-hand from Leon Fagbemi and Klodi Dabkiewicz. Miss Behave's anarchic clowning is dialled down into Amy G's mischief. Individually, each act does the trick. Together, they fall short.
The exception is La Serviette, borrowed from Quebecois duo Les Beaux Freres, which puts two naked men between two crisp white towels that fold, unfold and refold always threatening to reveal too much. Classical and coy in equal measure, it subverts striptease every bit as well as Ursula Martinez's legendary Hanky Panky. Originals Cabaret Decadanse and their club-singing puppets are as upbeat as ever, and the trashy slapstick of Daredevil Chicken (Anne Goldmann and Jonathan Taylor) is an upgrade in the silliness stakes, whether bouncing bananas mouth-to-mouth or coming unstuck at the seams mid quick-change routine.
Haylock's added diversity too with a Mallakhamb duo from Mumbai, a masculine alternative to contemporary pole dancing, and the follicle-defying hair-hanging of Fancy Chance. Without wit or self-awareness, there's a risk of exoticism; imported spectacles rather than knowing subversions. An unlikely charge for such a ludicrous evening, but La Soiree's in danger of taking itself too seriously.
La Soiree runs at the Aldwych Theatre until 3 February 2018
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DECATUR Six months after lawmakers hastily passed their first state budget in two years, transportation advocates are sounding the alarm on a little-noticed item that will take $300 million from road repairs to pay other expenses each year.
Many lawmakers have only recently been briefed on the measure, which escaped much notice at the time. It stems from limited funding and other legislative priorities, with lawmakers acting under intense pressure after two years without a budget and the state's backlog of unpaid bills topping $14 billion.
"This (move) was a total surprise," said Macon County Engineer Bruce Bird. "You know, (county engineers) were told by the folks at (the Illinois Department of Transportation), when they had discussions with legislators, it was 'We did what?' So I'm guessing it's a surprise to just about everybody."
The result, transportation advocates say, is a fatal blow to the Illinois Department of Transportation's construction schedule that was already struggling to keep up with deteriorating roads and bridges. After the budget passed, IDOT's planned highway improvements went from 400 miles of work to 189, a fraction of the more than 3,500 miles of state roads currently in need of reconstruction across Illinois.
An IDOT spokeswoman said the department remains committed to "creating and maintaining a world-class system of infrastructure."
"The department will continue to work with all stakeholders on this mission and to strengthen the states status as the transportation hub of North America," said spokeswoman Kelsea Gurski.
Most of the diverted money is paying for bonds that were used to make already-completed improvements to the Regional Transit Authority, which serves public transit in the Chicago area.
Before the budget agreement, IDOT's capital plan said 40 percent of all state roads would be in need of repair by 2023. Now, the road fund, which is the primary bank account for Illinois' transportation spending, will be depleted well before then.
"We had a tourniquet on that was starting to fall off," said John Lowder, a lobbyist whose clients include the Transportation for Illinois Coalition. "Now we're opening up arteries, and we're bleeding out now."
When asked about the road fund diversion, the governor's office and state Senate leaders each blamed their political enemies.
"The idea for this came from the Senate Republicans on behalf of the Rauner administration," said John Patterson, spokesman for Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago.
A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Bill Brady's office responded in an email. "This was a proposal that Democrats adopted, put in their budget and passed mostly with Democrat votes in the Illinois Senate."
A spokeswoman for Rauner said Bradys proposal as the lead Republican budget negotiator included $180 million from the road fund to pay for RTA bond payments. The Democrats enacted FY18 budget, which Gov. Rauner vetoed, increased this cost shift to approximately $300 million, spokeswoman Elizabeth Tomev said.
This all comes despite the fact that transportation advocates enjoy a strong bipartisan cadre of supporters: trades unions, whose members carry out the work for capital projects, and business leaders, whose companies rely on a strong transportation network to keep up the flow of commerce.
"I have trucks going all over the place, and I can tell there are a lot of roads where you can't avoid the issues," said John Skeffington, president of Decatur-based Skeff distributing, a major beer distributor in Central Illinois. "You can really tell as you drive west, when you get back to Illinois. It's a mess."
Every $1 million in road project spending equates to about 15 (full-time construction) jobs, said David Tyrolt, president of Dunn Company in Decatur. So (that loss) of $300 million represents 4,500 jobs across the state that are going to be lost. Our employees, they'll suffer some of that loss themselves.
IDOT's highway improvement plan for the current fiscal year had to eliminate more than 200 miles of construction work. Before the July budget agreement, the agency had planned to repeat its average workload about 400 miles a year.
Kevin Burke, vice president of the Illinois Asphalt and Pavement Association, says IDOT would need to complete work on 800 miles of state road every year in order to keep its current conditions, which are already noticeably bad. "We were bleeding at 400 miles of roads a year (before the budget deal)," he said. "Now we're bleeding at 600 miles a year."
For businesses like Skeff in Decatur, the silver lining would be that IDOT officials would likely prioritize main thoroughfares like the interstate system and national highways like Interstates 55 and 72, and U.S. 51.
"But (Illinois 121), some of the lesser routes are going to be the ones that start to deteriorate," Lowder said.
The stakes are that much higher for road funding considering the unique relationship between state and federal funding. Traditionally, the U.S. Department of Transportation has paid for close to 80 percent of states highway projects, but only after the work has been completed.
Put another way, in order for Illinois to receive the maximum amount of federal highway dollars, it has to have enough available cash. IDOT needs to be able to fund projects that are a lot larger than the actual cost, so they have to have cash flow to then get reimbursed, Burke said.
While 26 states have raised their motor fuel tax since 2013, Illinois' has stayed at 19 cents a gallon since 1990.
A lot of states have been stepping up to the plate the last few years," said Brian Turmail, director of public affairs at Associated General Contractors of America. "I think (Illinois is) in the most dire situation."
The specter of another tax increase in Illinois is daunting both for elected officials and residents, such as Jeanne Hanson in Decatur.
Theyll raise the taxes to cover that, and then theyll borrow the money to pay for something else, she said. I dont trust Illinois government.
Still, Turmail said, taxes collected and used for a specific purpose, like motor fuel taxes, tend to be more popular with voters. Focus groups show that people prefer knowing they will pay for a specific purpose, with a result that they can see will provide a direct benefit to them.
Transportation advocates say a major lift will have to take place just to prevent a slide of road conditions today, with more revenue and bond sales together.
Were not even talking about money that we need for new roads, congestion relief, or airports. This is the most important," Lowder said. "This has got to be reversed."
DECATUR City officials gathered Monday to raise the Illinois Bicentennial Flag, joining communities across the state that took part in the ceremony at the same time.
The banner was raised by two members of the Macon County Honor Guard and will be flown under the Illinois flag for the next year.
Mayor Julie Moore Wolfe read a proclamation from Gov. Bruce Rauner.
By the numbers
1818
Year Illinois was admitted to the United States, becoming the 21st state. Its recorded history began in 1673 when missionary Jacques Marquette and fur trader Louis Jolliet became the first Europeans to lay eyes on it. The signature of President James Monroe made it the 21st state on Dec. 3, 1818.
4
Presidents who have called Illinois home: Abraham Lincoln (1861-65), Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77), Ronald Reagan (1981-89) and Barack Obama (2009-2017).
15 million
Amount, in dollars, for renovation of Illinois Executive mansion. As part of the Illinois Bicentennial celebration, first lady Diana Rauner will unveil the newly renovated Illinois Executive Mansion, which is undergoing a renovation that is being funded entirely by private donors.
What to expect
The bicentennial celebration across the state will include the #Illinoisproud awards. It is an effort to give at least one $5,000 award to a project in every county. Applications will be accepted in May 2018.
A new beer will be available that is brewed in honor of Illinois called 1818. Hand of Fate Brewing Co. of Petersburg, Illinois, won a craft brewing competition at the 2017 Illinois State Fair and the honor to make the official bicentennial beer.
LA CROSSE Prosecutors contend Todd Kendhammer fatally beat his wife of 25 years and tried to conceal her death by staging a freak car accident. Kendhammer says she died when an airborne pipe pierced his windshield and struck her in the head.
The West Salem mans 10-day trial for the intentional death of his wife last year opens Monday in La Crosse County Circuit Court, when attorneys will narrow a pool of potential jurors to 12, plus at least one alternate, to decide the case.
Kendhammer told authorities the couple left their home at N6617 E. Scotch Coulee Road in West Salem between 7:30 and 7:45 a.m. Sept. 16 for Holmen, where he planned to pick up a truck to replace its windshield.
GPS information retrieved from Google show the couples cellphones at a neighbors house from 7:30 to 7:50 a.m., according to a La Crosse County Sheriffs Department report. The neighbor, who lives in Seattle, said Kendhammer cared for the 80-acre property that he planned to buy.
Barbara was scheduled to work at 8 a.m. at West Salem Middle School the opposite direction from Holmen. The owner of the truck said he did not arrange for Kendhammer to repair the damaged windshield, according to a sheriffs department report.
Surveillance video captured a car matching the Kendhammers Toyota Camry at 7:57 a.m. traveling north on Hwy. M about one mile south of Bergum Coulee Road in the town of Hamilton.
Kendhammer said they were just south of Bergum Coulee Road when a 53-inch pipe fell from an oncoming flatbed truck, bounced off the pavement and passed through the passenger side of the windshield, hitting his 46-year-old wife, according to the criminal complaint. He later said the pipe did not strike the pavement before breaking through the windshield.
Kendhammer described the passing flatbed truck as a 2000s model that was blue, green or black with 18 to 24-inch metal sides. He could not identify the gender of the driver.
Authorities could not locate the truck described by Kendhammer on surveillance video from area businesses.
After the pipe penetrated the windshield, Kendhammer drove about 100 yards north while trying to remove the 10-pound galvanized steel pipe from his flailing wife, then turned east onto Bergum Coulee Road and drove another 100 yards before the car rolled backward into a grassy embankment, according to court records.
A State Crime Laboratory analyst determined the pipe hit the passenger side of the windshield at least once before it broke through.
Once stopped, Kendhammer said he removed the pipe from the windshield and threw it behind the car, pulled Barbara from the passenger seat and tried CPR for three to five minutes before calling 911 at 8:06 a.m., according to the complaint.
He told dispatchers frantically a pipe or something came through the windshield, and that it struck her in the head and the throat, I think.
The first paramedic at the scene found Kendhammer kneeling at his wifes feet. Her head was toward the road and her blood was on the rear passenger tire. Emergency responders did not find glass shards on Barbara, according to a sheriffs department report.
A passerby told investigators he saw the Camry half in the ditch, its windshield intact, the passenger door open and no one around the car, according to a sheriffs department report.
Kendhammer had bloody knuckles and scratches on his neck and chest. He attributed his injuries on working with glass, according to a sheriffs department report.
Barbara suffered extensive blunt impact injuries to her head and neck inconsistent with her husbands account, Dane County Deputy Medical Examiner Kathleen McCubbin wrote in the autopsy report.
She had three bone-deep cuts to the back of her head, a fracture to the back of her skull, a broken nose, bruises and bleeding on the interior of her lips and bruises on her biceps.
Barbara also had a fractured bone and muscle hemorrhaging in her neck consistent with strangulation, according to the autopsy report. She had possible fingernail scratches on her neck and two torn fingernails.
Evidence recovered from the car indicates Barbara was assaulted and the windshield smashed when she was not in the car, prosecutors said in court.
There was no blood on the pipe, according to the State Crime Laboratory.
Bloodstains around the passenger seat and on the inside of the windshield indicate Barbara was inside the car when force was applied, according to a crime lab report. The patterns are consistent with a beating.
Blood drip and flow patterns revealed Barbara was bleeding for a period of time in the passenger seat and that her body was at one time over the center console and passenger-side floor, according to the crime lab.
The spread of glass particles on the passenger seat indicated it was empty when the pipe penetrated the windshield. The analyst also concluded the passenger door was likely open, because there were no glass pieces in the door pocket.
Sauk County residents will have a chance this week to weigh in on current and future outdoor recreation opportunities in the area.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources will hold an open house meeting Tuesday at the Baraboo Civic Center, during which attendees can speak with department officials, property managers and other DNR staff about its outdoor recreation offerings. DNR recreation specialist Cameron Bump said the meeting is part of the departments Recreation Opportunities Analysis.
Were collecting public input on a variety of things regarding outdoor recreation, he said. Primarily, what people like to do, where they like to do it, what might be some gaps of outdoor recreation and where opportunities may lie so we could meet some of those needs or gaps.
The Recreation Opportunities Analysis is examining outdoor recreation on state-managed properties in eight regions across the state. The final regions to be studied are the Southern Gateways and Lower Lake Michigan Coastal regions. Sauk County is included in the northern end of the Southern Gateways region.
Bump said breaking the state into regions helps the DNR get a sense of what recreation the public is looking for in different areas. He said he anticipates with the presence of Devils Lake and other popular state properties, Sauk County residents will show a stronger desire for hiking and camping opportunities than other regions.
What were doing is were trying to make it a more manageable analysis where we look at each region and we try to describe the region and the characteristics of recreation that happens there, Bump said. In doing so, were able to help our planning process.
Bump said there will be no formal presentation during Tuesdays meeting. Attendees can look over various displays and maps and talk with department staff about recreation at properties like Devils Lake, the Sauk Prairie Recreation Area, Pewits Nest and other local sites.
Theyre able to have conversations with us and bring forward their thoughts on outdoor recreation maybe some particular properties in the area that they think hey this property is conducive to this activity, Bump said. Those types of comments are fantastic for us to hear.
If unable to attend the meeting, Sauk County residents can still provide feedback to the DNR online, according to a department press release.
The public is invited to participate in this analysis by providing information through an online input form by searching the DNR website, dnr.wi.gov, for keyword ROA, the release states. The public can provide feedback online or print out the questionnaire and send completed forms to the department.
Public input opportunities for Sauk County residents are open through Jan. 2.
If it werent so serious, it would have been laughable.
But there were the state Senate Republicans, with one exception, voting to give final passage to a resolution calling for a constitutional convention what would be the first one since 1787, when our current Constitution was written to ostensibly require Congress to pass balanced federal budgets.
The irony was delicious. Here the Republican members of the Wisconsin Senate, good Donald Trump backers virtually down to their core, passed a measure that would supposedly seek to outlaw deficit spending during the same week their GOP heroes in Congress were proudly touting a tax reform bill that is a mere $1.5 trillion out of whack.
You might think Wisconsin Republicans running state government these days just dont know what they are doing. Otherwise they wouldnt pretend the federal budget is equivalent to the budgets put together by states like Wisconsin.
Yes, most states are required to pass balanced budgets, but the states dont have to finance unforeseen natural disasters, wars and other emergencies, or deal with sudden economic catastrophes like the money manipulators on Wall Street foisted on the American people only 10 years ago.
Think about it. If the feds were required to annually balance the budget, there could have been no New Deal to pull us out of the Great Depression, nor could there have been the Recovery Act passed in Barack Obamas first year to pull the country out of the Wall Street-induced Great Recession unless the government robbed from other programs like Social Security and Medicare.
A balanced budget requirement could spell disaster for the American economy, especially during times when it is weak and needs help to protect businesses and jobs.
The move to join 27 other states in calling for the convention was led by state Sen. Chris Kapenga, an accountant from a silk-stocking Milwaukee suburb where Republicans can do no wrong. Yet it was under their conservative champions like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush that the federal deficit soared as they irresponsibly cut taxes on the wealthy, ensuring an unbalanced budget something that Republicans, ironically, are trying to do once again.
You might think Kapenga and his colleagues would aim their fire at their GOP colleagues in Washington, too. But no, the Donald Trump-Paul Ryan tax reform act gets good marks from Wisconsin Republican legislative leaders even though it promises to balloon the national debt.
But worse, the call for a constitutional convention thanks to Wisconsin, it now needs the approval of just six more states could open a Pandoras box that could cause untold havoc to our Constitution. A recent mailing from the group Convention of States Action reads: A convention of states is our only chance to pass important and long overdue measures like a balanced budget amendment, term limits on Congress and the Supreme Court, and limits on the scope and jurisdiction of the federal government.
And the convention might even try to limit the freedoms that have irritated conservative politicians and others over the years for instance, the First Amendment, which doesnt seem to sit well with Donald Trump.
Dave Wester wrote that Trump is a terrible person, shown little compassion for people, attacks the press (Letters, Nov. 16). The real danger, however, is not Trump himself but the people who support him. Sixty-nine million people who voted for Trump, who Hillary called deplorables, are the real problem. Love you too, Dave.
You had to be on Hillarys campaign, right Dave? How else could someone come up with all this hate except a political hack? I continue to pray for unity in America, no thanks to you.
Fake news is fact, Dave. Is it any wonder why Trump is constantly after the media?
The Russian investigation has been going on for one year without any evidence that Trump colluded with Russia. I tend to believe this a vast left-wing media driven conspiracy, or at the very least, a half vast conspiracy.
Trumps positives: He reversed Obamas unconstitutional immigration actions, hes confronted the short fat man in North Korea, he just brought back billions of dollars in trade deals, two quarters of over 3 percent growth, got three UCLA players released from China, lowest unemployment in 17 years, stock market is at all-time high, a foreign policy of strength.
Fred Williams, Baraboo
The Columbia County Boards Human Resources Committees 3-2 vote on Friday to release money for across-the-board wage increases for county employees illustrates the ongoing struggle of compensating county workers in times of austerity.
The Finance Committee and the full County Board will still need to approve the resolution, before $160,000 can be released from the contingency fund in the countys 2018 budget.
If that happens, the classification and compensation plan that governs how much most of the countys approximately 550 employees are paid will be amended to raise each step in each classification by 1 percent.
At a previous Human Resources Committee meeting, a motion on the resolution died for lack of a second.
Since then,committee member Barry Pufahl of Pardeeville said he has reflected on the matter and concluded that all county employees deserve at least a small increase in compensation next year.
This is going to be the only way it will be that all employees will get a raise, Pufahl said.
Some employees qualify for longevity-based step increases, amounting to about 2.5 percent, in addition to the proposed across-the-board increase. Most county employees get an annual step raise on the anniversary of their employment, until they reach step 6 after which step increases are granted, with satisfactory job performance, every other year.
The $160,000 would cover increases for all employees except sworn deputies in the Sheriffs Office, who are represented by a union (and whose 2018 contract has not yet been negotiated or ratified), and employees of the Columbia Health Care Center and the countys Highway Department, whose 1 percent increases are already included in their departments respective budgets.
The 2018 budget year marks the fifth consecutive time that the budget is being balanced by dipping into reserves, calling for $1.4 million this year. Corporation Counsel Joseph Ruf noted that releasing $160,000 from the contingency fund would neither increase nor decrease the amount of reserves used to balance the budget.
Committee member Matthew Rohrbeck of Portage said he was torn.
On one hand, he said, its good to reward employees with annual pay increases.
On the other hand, he said, its getting harder every year to fund all the countys services. This budget was difficult for the County Board to swallow, he said.
Rohrbeck and Committee member Dan Drew of the town of Pacific voted no on the resolution, with Pufahl, Committee Chairman Bruce Rashke of the town of Wyocena and Committee member Adam Field of Portage voting yes.
Rashke said there are two ways, seemingly contradictory, that a county government can fail. It can spend itself into the hole, he said, or it can fail to compensate its employees adequately.
The classification and compensation system designed by the Madison consulting firm Carlson Dettmann was intended to ensure that the countys workers get compensation that is comparable to that of other employers in this area. But Rashke questioned whether that goal is being achieved.
I think, Rashke said, we are underpaying some of our people.
Rashke added that deficit spending is a reality of life for Wisconsin counties.
County Board First Vice Chairwoman Mary Cupery of the town of Fort Winnebago said the state-imposed levy limit hamstrings counties ability to raise revenue to provide the services that the state requires from counties.
Where are we going to get the money? Thats the question, she said.
Field said he thinks most Wisconsin residents want state-imposed limits on the amount that counties can collect from property taxpayers and even with those limits, the tax burden is still significant.
County Board Chairman Vern Gove of Portage noted, however, that the countys reserves, which now stand at about $23 million, dont go down appreciably from year to year because most of the countys 24 departments consistently return a total of about $1 million in unspent money from the previous years budget. Any unspent money goes back into the general fund.
Nonetheless, Ruf said, the countys financial limitations must be addressed, even as efforts are made to attract and retain high-quality employees.
Were going to have to be more efficient, he said, or we are going to have to figure out how the county can do fewer things.
Coal is not coming back. Sorry, Wyoming, West Virginia and other states that mine the fading fuel.
Wisconsin, which imports most of its energy, is shutting down another coal plant, with plans to rely on more natural gas and renewable energy instead.
Congratulations to We Energies on its smart decision this week to close its Pleasant Prairie plant in Kenosha County. The plant burns about 13,000 tons of coal a day, most of it shipped here from Wyoming. The plants buildings and equipment will be removed, according to We Energies, which has pledged to help about 150 employees find jobs elsewhere in the company.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to end the war on coal and bring back coal mining jobs. But thats not going to happen. The free-market economy favors natural gas, and the cost of renewable energy is falling, especially for solar.
Moreover, an increasing number of customers want their power companies to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, which emit the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
Trump this year made a big show of rescinding his predecessors requirement that utilities significantly reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions over time. Yet utilities in Wisconsin and elsewhere still plan to proceed largely as the Obama administration wanted with some going further in reducing carbon because thats what makes the most financial sense.
Trump can continue to undermine regulations on dirty coal. But he cant repeal reality.
The Wisconsin State Journal this week reported wind technician is the fastest-growing occupation in the United States. Wind generation employs about 102,000 workers, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. An even bigger employer is solar energy, which accounts for about 374,000 jobs.
Thats far more than the 86,000 positions attributed to coal generation, or the estimated 74,000 coal miners.
The Trump administration is aggressively trying to defy market trends. Energy Secretary and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, for example, has been pushing for subsidies for coal plants that stockpile supplies as a supposed security measure. Yet despite Perrys best efforts, three coal-fired plants in Texas recently announced they are shutting down.
This is good not just for the planet and future generations of Americans, but also for utility bills.
We Energies told the Racine Journal Times this week that its goal in shuttering its Pleasant Prairie coal plant is to reduce the cost of supplying power as well as cutting carbon-dioxide emissions. We Energies also plans to develop a large solar energy project in the state by 2020.
Despite the Republican presidents big talk about bringing coal country back, coal production has fallen below 2016 levels, according to Bloomberg News. The future is clean energy no matter how much the president wants to return to the past.
Few authors have their first book published when they are 80, but Rose Bingham of Wisconsin Dells has.
Bingham has written a memoir of her childhood: of her mother disappearing; of being sent to an orphanage and of her vow to keep in contact with her six brothers and sisters. Buy the Little One a Dolly is Binghams memoir of the years after her mother took a trip into town and never returned.
Her book is published by Henschel Haus Books of Milwaukee, and on Saturday, Dec. 9 from 1-4 p.m., she will launch her book, give a talk, read an excerpt from it and sign copies at the Kilbourn Public Library, 620 Elm St., Wisconsin Dells.
Bingham was 15 in 1952 when her mother left, the oldest of the seven children. She and her father with help from neighbors and relatives in the small Wisconsin community where they lived tried to keep the family together. I was sad, but not bitter and judgmental, she said of her mother leaving.
Two years later, the children were sent to an orphanage, and then sent to five foster homes. Bingham made her vow to keep in contact with those brothers and sisters one she has kept. They still get together and keep in contact 63 years later.
The brother and sister bond is beautiful, she said adding that she wonders if they would have the same bond if they had a so-called normal childhood.
In 2011, her sister Pat got a call from a young woman, who said she thought her great-grandmother might be Binghams mother. The great-grandmother was Binghams mother and since then she has met her siblings from the other family. She also said she got the answer after 59 years why her mother had left.
At that point, she decided to write the memoir for her children and grandchildren. She got encouragement from her friends, including those in the Kilbourn Librarys book club. Three of those friends, Carol Showalter, Jacqueline Zenik and Jan Hess wrote blurbs or short promotional paragraphs for the books back cover.
After deciding to write the memoir, Bingham said it was five years before the book was published. She attended the UW-Madisons annual Writers Institute to learn the ins and outs of having a book published. She learned how to pitch her books to agents at the conference. Laurie Scheer, the director, of the institute wrote the forward to the book and she told Bingham that writing the book is the easy part; marketinggetting a publisher is the hart part.
Bingham said she consider self-publishing (paying for it to be published), but the cost was quite hefty. After seven pitches to agents, she made her pitch to Kira Henschel of Henschel Haus Publishing. Henschel seemed interested and took notes. Bingham said she had been told, if an author didnt hear from an agent in six weeks, the publisher probably was not interested. After six weeks, Bingham sent an email to Henschel and received word that she was not interested at this time. Bingham sent off another email this time asking for suggestions. She was then asked to send the manuscript.
Three to four days later she received a 16-page marketing questionnaire and a draft contract. Is this really happening. Bingham said she kept asking herself. It was and then Henschel asked Bingham to meet her at Barnes and Noble. They met, and the book was on the way to being published.
Bingham said she has always written poetry. She writes a monthly poem published on her website, rosebingham.com/author. She wants to someday put her poetry into a book for her family. She also written short stories about her life on a Wisconsin farm, Christmas memories.
Professionally, she was a career nurse who graduated from St. Francis School of Nursing in La Crosse, and she received her BSN degree from the UW-Madison. She also took writing courses at the UW-Baraboo/Sauk County under retired professor David Cole.
Besides her nursing career, she and her husband, Mike raised six children. They have 17 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren as well as a spoiled dog, Rylee, her website says.
Binghams book is available on her website for $16.95, and she said she has already sold $1,000 worth. It is also available from Henschel Haus Publishing on its website, henschelhausbooks.com.
SPRINGFIELD A Republican state legislator is making a primary challenge against Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner.
State Rep. Jeanne Ives of Wheaton officially filed her candidate papers on Monday before the 5 p.m. deadline for the March primary.
Ives said in remarks released early Monday by her campaign that she'll side with "taxpaying Illinois families" instead of the "political ruling class." She notes that she supported Rauner's campaign in 2014, but said Illinois needs a new path.
Ives tweeted earlier today that she would be traveling to Springfield to file her nominating petition.
Ives earlier said she'd selected former state Rep. Rich Morthland of Rock Island as a lieutenant governor running mate.
Ives took office in 2013 and was formerly a member of the Wheaton City Council. She's a U.S. Military Academy at West Point graduate and former Army officer.
Rauner said Monday that he's in the best position to win the general election and dismissed Ives as a "fringe" candidate. He refused to say whether he'd debate her.
Also, Democratic Sen. Michael Hastings of Tinley Park also filed petitions to challenge longtime Secretary of State Jesse White in the primary.
Hastings says he has respect for White but was unsure if he was going to seek a sixth term. He'll "wait and see" before making a final decision.
White's campaign director Rocco Claps says there's no doubt White is running.
On December 4, Armenian Minister of Transport, Communication and Information Technologies Vahan Martirosyan hosted World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA) Chair Yvonne Chiu.
The parties discussed the preparation works for the World Congress on Information Technologies (WCIT), to be held in Armenia in 2019, and expressed their willingness to join efforts for a successful event.
Yvonne Chiu said that more than 4,500 delegates from 80 countries are expected to attend the conference.
WCIT 2019 will be held in Armenia with the support of the Armenian government and the Union of Information Technology Enterprises (UITE).
A holy grail of computing hidden in human speech
Talking in code: Denys Poshyvanyk, an associate professor in William & Marys Department of Computer Science, has been working to bridge the human-to-computer language gap for the better part of the past decade. Photo by Stephen Salpukas Photo - of - Hide Caption
Imagine all 30,557 words of Shakespeares Hamlet being written simultaneously by tens of thousands of people.
To maintain the elegance of the prose, there is a necessary interplay between words. Each line has to coordinate with the next to keep the overall meaning of the play intact.
For some of the most advanced computer programmers, that imaginary scenario is close to reality. Only instead of writing Hamlet, theyre writing software for self-driving cars, updating smartphones, and securing banking systems.
I think about it like trying to build a complete building on sand, without having any strong foundation. Things are constantly shifting, said Denys Poshyvanyk. Its language on top of language.
The way humans use language informs how we process information and the same goes for computers, Poshyvanyk says. Just like human speech, computer language or source code has its own syntax and semantics.
Poshyvanyk, an associate professor in William & Marys Department of Computer Science, has been working to bridge that human-to-computer language gap for the better part of the past decade. He and a team of nine W&M students are researching the ways code can mirror human communication.
What were doing is taking some of the techniques which have been very successful in the area of natural language processing, information retrieval and machine learning and adopting them in the field of software development, Poshyvanyk said.
From Poshyvanyks lab in McGlothlin-Street Hall, Ph.D. student Kevin Moran has been exploring what he calls the holy grail of software engineering direct translation between source code and human language. His aim is to translate between people reporting cellphone glitches and the source code responsible for the glitch. It turns out getting humans and computers talking is no small task.
If I had to pick one word to sum up the whole field of computer science, it would be abstraction, Moran said. As a computer scientist, you are trying to get a computer to do what you want. The way you interact with source code is an abstraction of the way you would normally communicate in natural language.
In September, Moran and Poshyvanyk presented their research at the International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution in Shanghai. The paper was one of 12 co-authored by the duo in the past two years, a level of productivity that has been a hallmark of Poshyvanyks career.
Over the past decade as a researcher, Poshyvanyk has published 107 refereed conference papers, including 89 co-authored with William & Mary students. He has also published 25 journal papers, 20 of them co-authored with W&M students.
I believe that having a truly synergistic and collaborative environment is very prolific, Poshyvanyk said. When students feel they are part of a successful team, that encourages a lot of creativity.
Students say Poshyvanyks focus on teamwork has taught them accountability and fostered a collaborative lab environment, where they can have pride in what they produce.
You have this sense of ownership over the work, said Marty White, a 2017 Ph.D. graduate of the department and senior lead scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton. White has co-authored five papers with Poshyvanyk. Yes, its a frenetic pace, but you dont even really think about it. Its like one of those things, if you want something done, give it to a busy person.
Even with a high volume of research projects, students say the majority of their ideas are left on the cutting room floor.
At any given time, we have a backlog of 20 projects we want to be doing, Moran said. As a result, only the best ideas make it to the research stage.
Some of that research has recently garnered international acclaim. For the past two years, Poshyvanyk was recognized for the Most Influential Paper at the International Conference on Program Comprehension. The awards are given 10 years after a paper is published. Poshyvanyks 2007 paper introduced the idea of creating a search engine for source code.
The idea we had was to create a Google for developers, Poshyvanyk said. We wanted to develop an engine that would index your source code. You would be able to write a natural language query without any restrictions and simply search your code base.
The paper led software developers to explore entirely new ways of searching source code, Poshyvanyk said. Hundreds of papers have followed on the topic and several companies created their own Google-like code search engines.
Poshyvanyks more recent work has also gained recognition. In November, he won the Automated Software Engineering Distinguished Paper Award for a paper he co-authored with his current Ph.D. student Christopher Vendome, former Ph.D. student Mario Linares Vasquez and three Italian collaborators.
Their paper evaluated metrics to test how well programmers understand the code they are tasked with reading. They found that readable pieces of code do not have a direct correlation with understanding. While programmers are all writing in the same language, the meaning of text hinges on the author.
The abstractions you create while writing your program make it hard for me to easily jump in and read what you wrote, said Poshyvanyk. Sometimes for me to understand how one piece of source code is used, I have to look through an entire library written by other people.
Nuclear has 'clear role to play' in UK Industrial Strategy
04 December 2017
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Nuclear power accounted for a fifth of total electricity produced in the UK last year and it remains the largest single source of low carbon electricity in the UK, providing 46% of the low carbon electricity produced, with wind, solar, hydro and biomass providing the remainder, according to the Nuclear Industry Association's first Activity Report, issued today. With two-thirds of all dispatchable power capacity retiring between 2010 and 2030, including all but one of the country's existing nuclear stations, the NIA warns that this will need to be replaced with a new fleet to continue providing the reliable, secure low carbon power the UK will need.
NIA represents more than 250 companies across the supply chain serving the UK's civil nuclear industry.
Lord (John) Hutton, chairman of the London-headquartered trade association, said: "Beginning the construction of much anticipated and increasingly important new build programme and the continued progress being made across decommissioning has helped develop UK capability across its supply chains. There is also a significant opportunity for the sector in developing the first small modular reactors - a global market which could be worth up to 400 billion.
"The nuclear industry will have a clear role to play in achieving the government's aims for a modern Industrial Strategy. We have made significant progress with government through the Nuclear Industry Council, towards agreeing an early Sector Deal which will maximise these opportunities and help improve productivity, foster innovation and reduce cost."
In its Industrial Strategy White Paper launched on 27 November, the government said the nuclear sector is "integral to increasing productivity and driving growth" in the UK. The strategy states that industry-led proposals for a nuclear Sector Deal focus on how, working with the government, substantial cost reductions can be achieved across the UK's new build and decommissioning programmes.
Economic contribution
A new study compiled by experts Oxford Economics and commissioned by the NIA shows that the UK's civil nuclear sector contributed GBP6.4 billion to the UK economy last year - equivalent to the aerospace manufacturing industry; and its 65,000 employees are part of one of the most productive workforces in the country.
The report, published today, shows this economic impact increases to GBP12.4 billion and 155,000 jobs when the sectors spending on associated goods and services in the supply chain and the wage spend by employees is taken into account.
Each nuclear sector employee contributes an average of GBP96,600 in gross value added to the economy, 73% higher than the UK average, reflecting the highly-skilled nature of the workforce and the use of advanced technologies. This direct impact, while accounting for 0.3% of UK GDP, also generates substantial sums in taxes paid to the Exchequer, with the report estimating the sector paid around GBP2.8 billion in tax payments in 2016, rising to GBP4.5 billion when associated spend is included.
Progress made
The NIA's Activity Report outlines the progress made across the nuclear sector in 2016, including: a saving of 22.7 tonnes of CO2 from nuclear operations - the equivalent of removing one third of the UK's cars from the road; an increase in output from nuclear stations of 4.5 TWh meaning nuclear remained the largest single low carbon source of electricity in the UK; producing enough electricity to power 16.3 million homes; beginning construction of the first new nuclear power station in a generation at Hinkley Point C; significant contracts in the UK and overseas being awarded to UK supply chain companies; and cost savings made across all decommissioning projects, including more than GBP200 million at Sellafield.
Tom Greatrex, NIA chief executive, said: "For the first time we have comprehensive data which shows the important role the UK's civil nuclear sector plays in generating highly skilled and well-paid jobs, making a significant contribution to the economy and supplying low carbon electricity to keep the lights on.
He added: "The UK's nuclear sector is a vital part of the UKs industrial heritage and the governments Industrial Strategy and the work being undertaken to bring forward a Nuclear Sector Deal will be vital to underpinning and ultimately increasing this contribution."
Researched and written
by World Nuclear News
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The Court of Appeals in Armenia is now hearing a lawsuit filed by the Investigative Journalists NGO (the publisher of Hetq) to overturn a lower courts decision absolving a senior investigator at the Special Investigative Service (SIS) from any wrongdoing when he denied handing over copies of a decision of the SIS to drop its criminal investigation into the offshore business interests of Mihran Poghosyan, a former head of the Armenias Compulsory Enforcement Service.
The lower court threw out the original lawsuit seeking the copies in September.
Ara Ghazaryan, an attorney representing the Investigative Journalists NGO, told the court today that the SIS had violated his clients rights by not handing over the documents.
The SIS refused to hand over the requested documents last January, arguing that Article 262, Part 1, of Armenias Criminal Procedure Code, states that copies of a decision to drop or halt criminal proceedings are sent to the suspect, the accused, the defense lawyer, the injured party or their representative, the civil plaintiff/defendant, or their representative.
According to the law, a copy is also sent to an individual or legal entity upon whose statement the criminal investigation was launched in the first place. The SIS argued that the Investigative Journalists NGO (which published Hetq) cannot be provided a copy of the decision since the news outlet is none of the above.
The NGOs lawyers maintain that Hetq requested the document in order to carry out its mission to provide information in the public interest.
Hetq wrote about Poghosyans shady financial dealings in Panama and his Swiss banks accounts in April 2016, after data was uncovered in the Panama Papers. The data was obtained by the German newspaper SuddeutscheZeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and more than 110 media partners from 82countries, including Hetq.
Poghosyan resigned from his post at the Compulsory Enforcement Service in April 2016, but always maintained he was not involved in any offshore business deals.
A man brought shame to the American military after raping and killing a woman near a military base in Japan.
Now, a judge sentenced 33-year-old Kenneth Franklin Shinzato to life in prison for the death of the Okinawan woman.
Shinzato, a former U.S. Marine, was employed at the Kadena Air Base by an Internet firm at the time of the incident.
According to prosecutors, 20-year-old Rina Shimabukuro went missing after going for a walk.
The police investigation led them to Shinzato.
After he was arrested, Shinzato revealed the location of the victims body. Police recovered the body in a wooded area three weeks after the victim went missing.
Prosecutors told the court that Shinzato raped the victim on a road in Uruma. He then killed the woman by hitting her head with a club and stabbing her while she was trying to fight off the sexual assault.
Shinzato denied that he intended to kill the victim. He pleaded guilty to rape resulting in death and abandoning a body.
He was sentenced to life in prison.
Around 20,000 Israelis gathered in an upscale Tel Aviv neighborhood Saturday night to protest government corruption and an impending bill in the Israeli Knesset, reported Reuters and Israeli media.
Although police officers refused to provide official statistics on the number of protesters, this march of shame clearly marked the largest in a series of anti-corruption protests that have been occurring weekly in the Israeli metropolis.
The allegations of bribery, fraud and misuse of trust driving these demonstrations against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his administration have been accumulating over months, but have come to a head because of the so-called recommendations bill.
According to Deutsche Welle, this piece of impending legislation, supported by Netanyahus party, Likud, creates measures to prevent Israels police from publishing findings and issuing recommendations to the prosecutor's office on indictments related to public officials.
Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently facing two separate investigations involving conflict of interest and bribery. The recommendations bill, if passed, would directly benefit Netanyahu, alleviating political pressure for him to step down in the case of an indictment.
So-called "Case 1000" involves allegations that Netanyahu accepted gifts such as cigars, champagne and bags of cash from Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer, and James Packer, an Australian investor, in exchange for political favors. Israeli law prohibits public representatives from receiving any gift that isnt of small value and reasonable in context, reports the The New Yorker.
"Case 2000" involves allegations that Netanyahu met with the owner of Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, asking for positive coverage, in exchange for taking measures to reduce the circulation of one of the newspapers rivals.
In another case that also implicates Netanyahus wife, Sara Netanyahu, the family was alleged to have racked-up more than US$ 100,000 in restaurant, grocery and take-out bills to their private residence using the public pocketbook.
Deutshe Welle reports that the Prime Minister and his wife both deny the alleged corruption, and blame their former housekeeper, who now helps organize anti-corruption protests, for the charges.
Netanyahu also faces scrutiny in the media for a possible third incident, related to the $2 billion purchase of submarines from the German company, ThyssenKrupp. The attorney who represented ThyssenKrupp in the acquisition is also Netanyahus personal attorney and cousin. The Associated Press and Deutsche Welle have both reported this affair.
Perhaps in response to pressure from Saturdays protests, on Sunday, Netanyahu requested that a lawmaker behind the recommendations bill ensure that it "be worded in a way that it won't apply to the investigation taking place into my affairs," the AP reported.
Although the recommendations bill was originally scheduled for a parliamentary vote on Monday, the bill was taken off of the committee agenda Sunday evening.
Netanyahu has dismissed the corruption allegations against him, at different points calling them fake news and witch hunts, Vox reported in August.
Corruption is not unknown within the Israeli executive. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to 18-months in prison in 2016 after receiving envelopes of cash from an American businessman, as reported by The New Yorker.
However, if officially indicted on corruption charges, Netanyahu would not be legally required to abandon the prime ministry, although he might face pressure to resign or call new elections in order to restore his mandate.
According to the Associated Press, Barak Medina, a law professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, said in August that formally Netanyahu won't have to resign, but if police recommend he be charged with a serious crime, it is unlikely he will be able to carry on in his job."
This could change if the recommendation bill passes because police involved in the investigations against Netanyahu would not be allowed to recommend an indictment or make their findings public.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ( photo: jewishjournal.com)
occrp.org
Councillors to scrutinise impact of Town Centre Masterplan so far
This article is old - Published: Monday, Dec 4th, 2017
Last April Wrexhams Town Centre Masterplan (complete with large greyhounds) got a green light from councillors, and this week a committee will be looking at the progress made so far.
The plan was introduced by lead councillors last year as being an aspirational document that had 323 consultation responses from the public before being firmed up.
With the plan being quite fresh, the impact on the Local Development Plan (LDP) is a common theme on its wider impact: It would be premature to discuss how the Masterplan has shaped the LDP before these meetings have been held.
The report before councillors notes the formation of a Town Centre Regeneration Delivery Group which has met three times this year, and has formed these terms of reference to their work. Their purpose is described as a forum / management network supporting the effective co-ordination of all physical regeneration activities in the town centre to ensure delivery of the agreed priorities as defined in the town centre masterplan
The membership is listed as 16 council officers from various departments, with other officers and partners possibly invited or co-opted as required. It is stated that the group will create a Delivery Plan that will progress the Masterplan aims and objectives.
There are examples of progress in a table at the footer in the report to councillors that includes Ty Pawb, the Cats Protection plans for the old fire station, the Ebenezer Chapel demolition and plans and the Welsh ICE / Town Square project.
There is analysis of planning applications in the primary shopping streets, however even with the data given it is concluded: Given the short timeframe since the Masterplan was approved it is too early to judge its success in planning terms, there will inevitably be a time lag before planning directly impacts on the town centre.
The Masterplan contained a considerable amount of study and research from Council reports and external consultant reports costing thousands of pounds, and with the Quarterbridge Report being kept confidential (Wrexham.com failed in a FOI for its release) we enquired if any of the data would be placed into the public domain as it could be useful for the public. A year later we have not spotted any being released despite being told a lot will be at the time.
Weight is again given to the Town Centre Forum and its Steering Group, in this case saying: It is recognised that in order to bring schemes forward a wider partnership approach is required to harness both the support and expertise that is present in the private sector.
The Town Centre Regeneration Delivery Group will seek full engagement with the Town Centre Forum and the Town Centre Steering Group amongst other stakeholders, once the initial mapping work has been completed and reviewed against the Masterplan framework.
Despite the table being titled Actions by Masterplan Theme and a field for Lead there is no evidence what role, if any, the Masterplan played in the actions themselves, nor on practical examples of the outreach work to encourage private investment.
There is mention of a planned application to the Targeted Regeneration Investment Programme from Welsh Government, however as with the common theme, it appears too early to judge or report on outcomes.
This week councillors will meet to scrutinise the progress, and form their own recommendations after their debate on the topic.
In what is a rarity the Committee Chair has issued a media statement with Cllr Rodney Skelland saying: I know theres a lot of interest in Wrexham Town Centre at the moment from the media, businesses, stakeholders and members of the public alike.
As such, I would recommend anyone who has an interest in the town centre follow the webcast of the meeting or come along in person and look into the kind of work thats taking place to co-ordinate the regeneration and continued health of the town centre.
I look forward to what promises to be an interesting debate.
The full final masterplan document from last year can be viewed via this PDF be warned it is a huge 31 meg!
The meeting on Wednesday will be webcast, so for those who wish to tune in or watch in person, it is at 4pm or you can watch via the catch up service.
Papa Johns takeaway plans for Wrexham given go ahead by councillors
This article is old - Published: Monday, Dec 4th, 2017
The opening of a new pizza franchise in town was on the menu for councillors this evening with plans for the new store receiving unanimous support.
Back in April 2017 Wrexham.com reported that Papa Johns Pizza had submitted plans to partially convert a vacant property in Regent House, Regent Street, into a takeaway and delivery outlet.
The application submitted at the time stated that permission was being sought to install new signage for five years at the Regent Street property.
Papa Johns is known worldwide and already has 250 stores across the UK, however this will be the first Wrexham franchise.
Last week when Wrexham.com reported that the application was finally due before the planning committee, with more than 120 people commenting on our Facebook post.
There had been some concerns raised by neighbouring residents, with five letters objecting to the proposals submitted to Wrexham Council.
Such concerns include vehicle nouse, devaluation of properties, impact of car parking at the neighbouring Caxton Place, public gatherings around the takeaway, litter problems and disturbance late at night.
However today reassurance about the parking was offered by planning officer David Williams, who that the initial application for the takeaway had been amended in terms of appearance, highways and opening hours.
Mr Williams said: Due to the proximity to Caxton Place, we felt need to control the hours of use. The initial application said it would be open until 3am, we have looked at that and have expressed some concern over duration of opening times. Condition six shows it is restricted to midnight on any day
We have since had correspondence from applicants, they are happy to restrict to later than 11pm Sunday to Thursday and midnight Friday to Saturday.
The point the application is making is if its reduced further than 11pm, it would make it unviable as a commercial enterprise and the applicant wouldnt be interested in taking the scheme further.
It was also noted that five parking spaces would be provided at the rear of the property and that there is nearby 30 minute parking that customers could use if required.
However concerns about the parking were raised by councillor for the Grosvenor ward, Marc Jones, who asked for reassurance for local residents that a greater problem wouldnt be created.
He said: My concern is about the lack of parking. There will be six delivery vehicles, staff in the kitchen and people stopping there to get takeaways, there is only room for five.
We already have a parking deficit in that area. People in Caxton Place have issues accessing their own block of flats at times. I fear this is only going to make things worse.
I would like as much reassurance as possible for residents that we are not going to create a greater problem.
Cllr Jones also noted that the committee should take advantage of the option to reduce the opening hours in the week to 11pm.
Such concerns were echoed by Cllr Andrew Atkinson, who queried if signage directing customers to the parking at the rear of the property could be enforced.
Mr Williams said: The applicant has provided parking to rear for up to five and there is additional parking in close proximity.
I think it is also important to note the existing use had a parking demand, if it was used for retail use there would still be pressures in that area for parking.
Commenting on the potential litter in the area, Cllr I David Bithell requested if a condition to have bins installed in the area, could be enforced. The committee was told it was possible.
Speaking in favour of the plans, Cllr David Maddocks said: I think it is a great opportunity for the town.
Its an empty shop turned into a business and creating jobs. I think it is great for the town and I will be supporting it.
The application, along with the amended / reduced opening hours, were backing unanimously by the committee.
*Picture Google Maps
Tax office closure will fail North Wales communities
This article is old - Published: Monday, Dec 4th, 2017
Wrexhams MP Ian Lucas says plans to move Wrexhams Tax Office to Cardiff will fail the whole of North Wales.
Ian Lucas raised the issue during a Westminster Hall debate on business support in rural Wales.
Mr Lucas Labour colleague Albert Owen, MP for Ynys Mon, had spoken in the debate to point out that Government policies particularly those where services such as courts and tax offices were taken out of communities and centralised harmed those communities.
He said: Many of the local economies created by solicitors offices and the extra boost given to the economy by the areas around the courts are lost for good. Many personnel move from those areas to where the courts move to. We have seen HMRC, for example, moving its offices from the west to the east, to central Wales, down to Cardiff. That does not help rural economies in north and north- west Wales.
In response, Mr Lucas added: I am afraid this is an irresistible opportunity to talk about the Governments appalling proposal to shift HMRC from Wrexham in north Wales, my constituency, which has many rural areas, to Cardiffs city centre. Is that not exactly the opposite of what we should be doing?
Mr Owen agreed and pointed out that, despite UK Ministers talking about the devolution of services to local communities, the reality was they were removing them.
Speaking after the debate, Mr Lucas said: North Wales Labour MPs have been raising concerns about the Governments slashing of our local services since 2010.
Whether that has been cuts to legal aid or courts, the removal of Army battalions to headquarters outside Wales, or the ongoing proposals to move 350 tax office jobs to central Cardiff, every proposal harms our communities.
Thats why we speak out and stand up to oppose them because we want to see our communities and our local economy flourish.
Wrexhams HMRC Office is due to close in 2021, with 350 jobs lost or relocated more here from a previous article
Defense attorneys staged a walkout at the Brooklyn borough criminal court after the latest immigration arrest occurred there on November 28. The Legal Aid Society lawyers action was to protest the arrest of Genaro Rojas-Hernandez by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Rojas-Hernandez, a Mexican immigrant, had appeared in court to respond to a charge of misdemeanor domestic violence. Plainclothes ICE officers arrested him at the end of the hearing.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) had first arrested Rojas-Hernandez on November 6 after he allegedly assaulted a woman at a Midwood restaurant in violation of a previous order of protection according to a criminal complaint in his case.
He was charged with 10 crimes, including misdemeanor assault, but four charges were dismissed. Rojas-Hernandez is contesting the charges and refuses to take a plea deal, according to Rebecca Kavanagh, his attorney. Rojas-Hernandez has no prior criminal convictions.
During the afternoon of the arrest, protestors marched outside the courthouse chanting, ICE-free NYC, and Hell no, ICE must go, according to Patch.com. The Legal Aid Society led a march to the Brooklyn district attorneys office in which approximately 100 people participated, including attorneys from Brooklyn Defender Services.
The judge had told Kavanagh that ICE agents had come to arrest her client and advised her to speak to him privately outside the courtroom. ICE officers found Rojas-Hernandez before Kavanagh could speak with him, however. Legal Aid attorneys stated that court officers had helped ICE with the arrest and pushed Kavanagh aside as she tried to inform her client of his rights. When Kavanagh told the judge that the officers had taken Rojas-Hernandez, the judge ordered officers to hold him. Kavanagh was then able to speak with Rojas-Hernandez, albeit in the presence of ICE agents and another attorney.
Rojas-Hernandez told his attorney that ICE officers had questioned him without identifying themselves, according to a tweet from Kavanagh. Rachael Yong Yow, a spokesperson for ICE, denied that account, stating that ICE officers had identified themselves to the court officers and to Rojas-Hernandez.
ICE officers arrested Rojas-Hernandez based on an administrative warrant, which does not require a judges signature. This type of warrant is used for immigrants who may be deported. Rojas-Hernandez is now in ICE custody, waiting to appear before an immigration judge.
Defense attorneys object to courthouse immigration arrests, which they say make defendants afraid to appear in court. They call for court officers to stop helping ICE to conduct the arrests. This court should be a safe place for [immigrant defendants] to exercise their due process rights to respond to the allegations against them, said Adrienne Wells, a Legal Aid defense attorney who attended the protest, in a phone interview with Patch.com.
The Office of Court Administration (OCA), the New York state agency that oversees the courthouses, stated that court officers neither help nor hinder ICE arrests. Lucian Chalfen, an OCA spokesperson, claimed that the Legal Aid attorneys had caused a scene by purposely interfering in an arrest situation.
The ICE arrests in New York Citys courthouses are part of a pattern of stricter enforcement that has accelerated since President Donald Trump took office. On November 27, ICE announced that it had arrested 55 foreign nationals from 22 countries in the New York City metro region. The operation took place from November 13 to November 20 and targeted at-large criminal aliens, illegal re-entrants, and immigration fugitives, according to ICE.
Of note, 42 of the 55 people arrested had an active ICE detainer, which requests local law enforcement to hold an individual until ICE can take him or her into custody. Local law enforcement had ignored the detainers and released these 42 people.
Ten of those arrested had been previously removed from the country or were immigration fugitives. Anyone who re-enters the United States after deportation faces federal felony charges and as much as 20 years in prison if convicted, according to ICE. The agency announced that the individuals who were arrested, but will not be slated for criminal prosecution, would be processed for deportation.
Public defenders say that the threat of deportation makes many immigrants fearful of appearing in court. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez told the press that his office opposes the courthouse immigration arrests, noting that the intervention of ICE makes victims of domestic violence less likely to report abuse.
For its part, ICE claims it needs to arrest people in courts because New York is a Sanctuary City where police are barred from detaining those wanted for immigration violations unless they are charged with or convicted of a serious crime.
While the political parties are haggling over the composition of the next federal government, leading military officials are working on a comprehensive armaments program reminiscent of the massive rearming of Hitlers Wehrmacht in the 1930s. A panel discussion involving high-ranking military brass provided frightening testimony at the Berlin Security Conference on November 28 and 29.
With the chairman of the Parliamentary Defence Committee, Wolfgang Hellmich (Social Democratic PartySPD) moderating the discussion, the leaders of the different branches of the armed forces spoke as if the crimes of German militarism had never taken place. One after another, they presented their demands to the future government and justified them by citing the foreign policy turn initiated at the beginning of 2014.
In his final plea, Inspector of the Luftwaffe (Air Force) Karl Mullner said: We have stated that as the Federal Republic of Germany, we want to take on more responsibility in the world, and I think it is important that we all realize that this is not to be had for free. In order to take on this leadership function, he said, it was necessary to sharpen the required instruments. He hoped that politicians would recognize this and provide the appropriate means.
What the Luftwaffe is expecting in the next few years had already been outlined by Mullner in earlier remarks. A major goal was mobility, i.e., the credible and rapid relocation of forces to operational areas and the development of new capabilities in ground-based air defence. But it was also time to deal with how we want to shape air attack capabilities in the future in the Luftwaffe, looking especially at the capabilities of the new generation of fighter aircraft that make it possible to identify and engage the target over long distances.
Most aggressive was Inspector of the Army Lieutenant General Jorg Vollmer. The paradigm shift back to national and alliance defence meant that now, as during the Cold War, he had to relocate troops over long distances and conduct them into battle. For the German Army, these commitments meant providing three operational divisions while also deploying troops to Eastern Europe as well as providing for the contingents in Afghanistan, Mali, Iraq and Kosovo.
That was a challenge for the force that he had to articulate clearly. The Army was pursuing the plan of having the first division replenished by 2027 and kept ready for use. Also, the introduction into digitization was long overdue. To that end, he said that we will set up a testing and trial organization that will allow us to test just what industry can deliver. In 2032, the digitized Army 4.0 would have to be standing ready.
At the end of his speech, the general spoke directly to Hellmich: If I have a wish, it is that what has been initiated will be sustained and the whole thing will go forward step by step. No one expected that everything will be in place tomorrow but it must go a bit faster. It just has to go faster.
Navy Inspector Andreas Krause presented a billion-euro shopping list of new purchases, including four new Class 125 frigates, five corvettes and six multi-purpose combat ships. The latter he described as real war fighters. Added to this would be new helicopters and submarines. Krause also made a direct appeal to the political and business representatives on the podium and in the audience. We must not lose momentum, and therefore I need you, decision-makers in all areas, to work as a close team together.
Krause made no secret of the global ambitions of German imperialism. Germanys spheres of interest in the maritime domain, he said, range equally from the northern flank down to the Mediterranean and extend into the Indo-Pacific region
He noted that in 2016, 25 percent of all imported goods arrived at German ports. In terms of exports, as much as 60 percent of all goods were carried by sea. Altogether, 90 percent of long-distance trade took place over the high seas. Germany thus had vital interests in safe and secure sea lanes and required operational capabilities ranging from light tasks to high-intensity three-dimensional warfare.
The observations of the inspector of the Joint Support Service, Martin Schelleis, made clear that the Bundeswehr is also preparing for war on the home front. He spoke of coordinating the tasks of the Bundeswehr in Germany, possibly to lead missions and to ensure the functioning of the German hub.
In most cases, Germany, due to its geographically central location and landing ports would be the transit zone for reinforcing allied forces and rear operational areas. The Joint Support Service with its inspector as national and territorial commander would be particularly challenged here, he continued, not only in performing the Bundeswehrs own tasks, but in supporting the civilian authorities, police, district administrations and civil protection authorities.
The disastrous effects German war plans will have for the general population as well as the soldiers were indicated by the statements of the inspector of medical services, Michael Tempel. Although Germany has one of the largest and best-equipped military medical services, current developments presented challenges, he said. If we go on beyond day one or two or three or four or five in major combat, in a major battle, I have to look at what I must do with the wounded How much can I rely on hospitals in the host nation, how much can I rely on the hospitals back home? How many burn beds do we have in Europe? Less than one hundred, probably. So we have to look at these specific medical problems.
The German armaments industry is already licking its lips. On the podium, the head of the armaments company MBDA, Thomas Gottschild, assured the gathering: We can produce everything, but not always very quickly. The current situation, he added, required innovative and smart national cooperation approaches.
One was in a situation where a simple ramping-up is not possible, but where we have to make certain preparations in order to bring production capacity back up to speed. Here, it was important to mention cooperation between industry and the armed forces, but European armaments cooperation was also vital. The really big armaments programs could not be undertaken by any single nation today.
The discussions at the Berlin Security Conference underscore the urgency of the demand of the Socialist Equality Party (Sozialistische GleichheitsparteiSGP) for new elections. The installation of an extreme right-wing government behind the backs of the population must not be permitted. Such a government would arm Germany to the teeth and prepare a new grab for world power, as happened twice in the last century, with catastrophic consequences. The SGP is fighting for a socialist alternative to capitalism, militarism and war.
US National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warned on Saturday that time was running out for any peaceful resolution of the tense confrontation with North Korea over its nuclear and missile programs.
Describing North Korea as the greatest immediate threat to the United States, McMaster declared: I think its increasing every day, which means that we are in a race, really, we are in a race to be able to solve this problem.
Referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the national security adviser said: Every time he conducts a missile launch and nuclear test, he gets better.
McMaster was speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California following North Koreas test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) last week that might have the capacity to reach the continental United States.
In reality, Trump administration officials are grossly inflating North Koreas nuclear capabilities in order to justify military aggression against the Pyongyang regime. The range of the latest missile that was tested is in doubt because its payload, and therefore its capacity to carry a nuclear warhead, is not known. Moreover, it broke up in flight, indicating that North Korea does not yet possess a viable re-entry vehicle.
President Donald Trumps administration has repeatedly declared that all options are on the tablethat is, including a massive military attack. At the UN Security Council last week, US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley threatened that if war comes, make no mistake, the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed.
The US is starting another major joint military exercise with South Korea today, involving some 230 aircraft and 12,000 personnel in a barely disguised rehearsal for war against North Korea. The show of force includes six US F-22 Raptorsthe most advanced stealth fighters that would be used in the first wave of any attack on North Korea.
A South Korean defence official told CNN the US was sending dozens of high-end fighters, bombers and support aircraft to participate in the week-long Vigilant Ace 18 air combat exercise. These include six F-22s, six F-35s and six EA-18Gs, as well as more than 10 F-15Cs and F-16s. They will be joined by B-1 strategic bombers and more F-35s.
The Pentagon is also bolstering its anti-missile and warning systems in preparation for war. Two US congressmenMike Rogers and Adam Smithsaid on Saturday the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) was investigating locations on the US west coast for the installation of Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) batteries. Longer-range Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) interceptors are already installed in Alaska and California.
In another indication that the US is being placed on a war footing, authorities in Hawaii have reinstated monthly nuclear attack warning tests. The Attack Warning Tone was sounded last Friday for the first time since the end of the Cold War.
Pyongyang has condemned the US-South Korean air drills. A commentary in the official Rodong Sinmun on Sunday branded the war games an open, all-out provocation against North Korea, which may lead to a nuclear war any moment.
The US has boxed North Korea into a corner, imposing crippling economic sanctions on the regime and threatening war unless it capitulates to Washingtons demands to destroy its nuclear arsenal and dismantle its nuclear and missile programs. Pyongyang is well aware of the deadly fate of the Iraqi and Libyan leadersSaddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafiwho gave in to US pressure over so-called weapons of mass destruction.
The Trump administration is recklessly placing Asia and the world on the brink of nuclear war. North Korea is never going to be in a position to match the worlds most powerful military or the thousands of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal. Faced with repeated US war games close to its borders, North Korean generals could conclude that they have to strike first to prevent being wiped out.
Warnings from Washington that time is running out only heighten the danger of war, whether by design or accident.
McMaster declared on Saturday: There are ways to address this problem short of armed conflict, but it is a race because he [Kim Jong-un] is getting closer and closer, and theres not much time left.
However, McMasters peaceful solution involves nothing less than a total economic blockade of North Koreaan act of war that could precipitate desperate actions by Pyongyang. He called for much more severe sanctions and the complete enforcement of the sanctions that are in place.
The sanctions already in place include bans on almost all North Korean exports and on a significant proportion of its imports, as well as on finance and investment. The US is now demanding that China cut off all energy supplies to North Koreaa move that would provoke an immediate economic and political crisis in Pyongyang.
McMaster said China should take unilateral action to cut off North Korean oil imports, adding, you cant shoot a missile without fuel. He said both he and Trump felt that a 100 percent oil embargo would be appropriate at this point.
Faced with the prospect of a war on its northern border, the Chinese government has reluctantly acceded to previous US demands for sanctions. However, Beijing is hostile to measures that could lead to an implosion in Pyongyang that Washington could exploit to install a pro-US regime on Chinas doorstep.
The escalating US confrontation with North Korea is part and parcel of a far broader American strategy, which began with the Obama administrations pivot to Asia, to undermine China economically and strategically.
The danger of war is compounded by the intense political infighting in Washington and the acute crisis of the Trump administration, amid rising popular resentment and opposition to social inequality. Besieged on all sides, Trump could conclude that the least worst option is to launch a catastrophic war to divert immense social and political tensions outward against an external foe.
A standoff between Indonesian security forces and a separatist group around two villages close to the giant US-run Freeport Grasberg gold and copper mine in the central highlands, points to deep tensions developing in Indonesian Papua.
The police and Indonesian military confronted the West Papua Liberation Army (TPN) from November 5 to 16 in the villages of Kimbely and Banti, threatening to trigger an armed clash. In the end, the TPN withdrew without a firefight. The security forces claimed the villagers were being held as hostages in order to hinder the mines operations.
With the incident over, 344 of the 1,300 villagers left with the military. The aim of the TPN, which is connected to the separatist Free Papua Movement (OPM), appears to have been to intimidate villagers who were not indigenous Melanesian Papuans.
Many of those who left were impoverished migrant workers from South Sulawesi. Yohanis Batto told the media they were not physically harmed by the TPN but were traumatised. He said they would move to the coastal town of Tamika, the logistical base of the Freeport operation.
Increased violence in the Papuan highlands has included the ambush and murder of four road construction workers in March and the killing of two police since Augustall claimed by the TPN.
The tensions are linked to the drive by Indonesian President Joko Widodos administration to complete the long-delayed Trans Papua Highway before the 2019 national elections. The road is part of a massive infrastructure plan to open up the provinces of Papua and West Papua economically as Widodo seeks to make Indonesia a greater regional and global player.
Until recently, most internal migrants in the Papuan provinces, mainly from Java and South Sulawesi, settled in the Papuan capital Jayapura, or in towns along the coast and around Timika. The highlands remain largely Melanesian, but the new highway will change this.
The 4,325-kilometre road snakes through mountainous country from Soring in the Birds Head region and across the central highlands along the Papua New Guinea border to Merauke on the southeastern coast. A 450-kilometre section will link Wamena, the political centre of the highlands, to the new highway.
In August, a group of Papuan leaders and the Papuan Peace Network warned Widodo of a social explosion if the highlands population were left as spectators to economic growth.
Sidney Jones of the Jakarta-based think tank, the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), warned that an influx of migrants would rally support behind the Wamena-based West Papua National Committee (KNPB).
Since its banning last year, support has grown for the KNPB and raised its profile in the separatist camp. It works in collaboration with the overseas-based United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), which promotes Papuan self-determination in international bodies.
Widodo has visited the Papuan provinces five times since his 2014 election. He has made various promises, including that the economic development promoted by Jakarta would improve the lot of indigenous Papuans and poor immigrants alike.
In reality, according to the World Bank, 80 percent of all Indonesians are worse off than 20 years ago when the Suharto dictatorship collapsed in 1998. In that time, the countrys economy has grown fivefold but the richest 1 percent have come to control 50 percent of national wealth and the top 10 percent consume as much as the bottom 54 percent.
In Papua, the vast natural resources have benefitted only a tiny layer of the local elites, along with major international corporations and associated Indonesian businesses. Widodos drive for economic development will exacerbate the social divide.
Successive governments have responded to social tensions in Papua by stirring up animosities between locals and internal immigrants, and conducting brutal crackdowns on any social and political unrest. Papuan separatist leaders have exploited local anger to try to pressure Jakarta for concessions and a greater slice of the economic pie for the small indigenous elites.
Widodo has sought to defuse mounting local resentment and anger by promising to deal with human rights abuses by the police and military against Melanesian Papuans. Like his predecessors, however, Widodo will not hesitate to crack down on political opposition and social unrest. Moreover, the new highway will provide the military with far easier access to the regions mountainous interior.
Indonesian control over the former Dutch colony was formally recognised by the UN after the United States assisted the Suharto dictatorship to organise a fraudulent plebiscite of Papuan tribal chiefs in 1969.
Today, about half of the estimated 3.6 million people in Indonesias two Papuan provinces are migrants and their descendants, creating sharp tensions over land, jobs and essential services.
The separatist politics of the Papuan elites play directly into the hands of Jakarta by allowing it to divide workers from subsistence farmers on the basis of ethnicity, language and culture. Papuan leaders are not concerned about the plight of working people but in feathering their own nests.
A case in point is the dispute over the benefits from Jakartas efforts to have Freeport divest 51 percent of the shares in the Grasberg mine to the Indonesian government. Papuan governor Lukas Enembe, a highlander, demanded 20 percent go to Papua. In October, a deal was struck with the central government for a 10 percent stake.
An IPAC report on October 31 described Enembe as the unquestioned political boss of Papua and noted that anyone who opposed his preferred candidates for district heads did so at their peril. The Jakarta Post reported on October 11 that Enembe had said the provincial administration would the one door through which the divestment would be discussed with Jakarta.
The political starting point for any struggle to address social and democratic rights in Papua and right across the Indonesian archipelago is a rejection of all internecine, ethnic-based rivalry and the unity of all workers, young people and villagers against the corrupt ruling elites on the basis of a socialist perspective.
Bernie Sanders appeared at rallies in Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania this weekend as part of a three-day Protecting Working Families tour sponsored by the Democratic Party-aligned Moveon.org and the Not One Penny Coalition. The tour wrapped up last night with an appearance in Reading, Pennsylvania.
Sanders speaking tour passed through Midwestern factory and ex-factory towns, which have been devastated by decades of deindustrialization and cuts to social spending. Dayton, Ohio was formerly a manufacturing center for GM, before the company eliminated virtually all production in the city in the 1980s and 1990s. The city is now one of the centers of the opioid epidemic, which kills tens of thousands of people each year nationwide. Akron, Ohio, the former center of the rubber industry, went through similar plant closures and is now ravaged by a heroin epidemic.
Louisville, Kentucky, where Sanders addressed the audience remotely from Washington, DC, is a major transportation hub with an increasingly restive working class. Autoworkers in the area put up a huge resistance to the 2015 sellout contract pushed by the United Auto Workers, and there have been repeated threats of strikes by UPS mechanics and airplane pilots.
The Democrats suffered major declines in this region during last years election, which (with the exception of Kentucky), voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but voted for Trump in 2016. A major factor behind the support for Trump in this part of the country was the political prostration by Sanders himself before Hillary Clinton in the general election. For all of his talk about leading political revolution against the billionaire class, Sanders backed Clinton, a shill of Wall Street and the Pentagon, who has nothing but contempt for the tens of millions of workers devastated by the 2008 financial crash and Obamas pro-corporate policies.
This all but guaranteed that the only way for voters to register their social discontent within the narrow framework of the American two-party system was to vote for Trump, who appealed to widespread social anger in an attempt to corral it in a right-wing direction.
Sanders denounced the Republicans tax plan as class warfare and the biggest act of thievery in the modern history of this country at his appearance in Dayton. This is a moral outrage, it is bad economics, and we will not allow them to get away with it, Sanders declared.
Predictably, Sanders said nothing about the role of the Democratic Party, which accepts the basic framework of the Republican tax plan and has made tax cut proposals of their own. Their basic concern is that they have been shut out of a process which had previously been bipartisan political theater, with the Democrats providing a compromise solution which still results in historic cuts to social spending. Sanders also said nothing about the role of the Obama administration, which had overseen, up till now, the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in American history after the 2008 crash.
For all of Sanders denunciations of Republican class warfare, the basic thrust of Sanders remarks was to inure his audience to the full political significance of the tax cuts, which demonstrates not only the deep crisis of the American ruling class, but the basic incapacity of the capitalist system, a system based on exploitation in which class warfare is not one of a number of possible policies but a basic and indelible feature, to satisfy even the most elementary social needs.
Sanders, on the other hand, would have his audience believe that either one of the two parties of the American ruling class could decide not to practice class warfare and return to good economics in which the interests of the capitalists are reconciled with the interests of the working class.
Sanders promotion of illusions in capitalisms ability for self-reform found a particularly cynical expression in a statement published yesterday on his official Senate website, which called on Trump to abide by his 2016 campaign pledges and reject Republican plans to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Mr. President, you told the American people time and time again you were not going to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Today, get on the phone. Tell Paul Ryan, tell Mitch McConnell that you will veto any bill that cuts Social Security, that cuts Medicare, that cuts Medicaid, Sanders wrote.
On one level, Sanders pathetic appeal to the fascistic billionaire president to reject a plan for which Trump himself is chiefly responsible for is simply ridiculous. However, Sanders statement has a more insidious logic, promoting illusions in the economic program of the Trump campaign, based on national protectionism which scapegoated immigrants and foreign workers for poverty and joblessness in America and which was bound up with his attempt to cultivate a new far-right movement in the United States.
Sanders hostility to the political independence of the working class is demonstrated by the fact that the Vermont Senator shares Trumps basic nationalist orientation. Since first entering Congress more than a quarter century ago, Sanders has attacked trade with China and other countries under the fraudulent banner of defending American jobs. After the 2008 financial crisis, Sanders co-sponsored a bill with Republican Senator Chuck Grassley to restrict the federal visa program for companies that received federal bailout money. During his primary campaign in 2015, Sanders denounced unrestricted movements across national borders during an interview as a Koch brothers proposal that would effectively end the American nation state.
After the 2016 election, Sanders declared his readiness to work with Trump on trade war measures, stating that he would work with anybody who wants to work together to develop a trade policy which tells corporate America they have to look beyond their greed.
Sanders remains the most popular politician in the country, according to various public opinion policies. While the support for Sanders is an initial and contradictory indication of a growing move to the left and mass opposition to social inequality, Sanders himself intervened in the election to prevent this opposition from escaping the political control of the Democrats and developing into an independent, genuinely socialist movement of the working class.
Acutely aware that the partys reactionary politics have engendered mass hostility, which was expressed most strikingly in the debacle in the 2016 elections, a section of the Democrats have sought to integrate Sanders more closely into the Democratic Party leadership. Sanders, along with his supporters in the trade union bureaucracy and pseudo-left organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, are trying to reprise his role in the 2018 mid-term elections and beyond.
Their aim is to contain the growing social opposition to Trump and political radicalization of workers and youth within the confines of the Democratic Party, which is conducting a McCarthyite campaign against supposed Russian interference and a right-wing identity politics campaign over alleged sexual abuse cases. What Sanders and the Democratic Party fear the most is the emergence of powerful movement of the working class against social inequality and war, and for genuine socialism.
There is growing momentum for a potential Sanders presidential run in 2020. Last month, the Hill published the results of a poll of top Democratic Party strategists who proclaimed Sanders to be the favorite among potential primary candidates. Sanders also delivered a pro-war foreign policy speech in Fulton, Missouri in September, at the site of Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech proclaiming the start of the Cold War, which was widely seen as preparation for a 2020 presidential run.
He is now in a very different position than hes ever been in before. Hes just stepping into the role, senior adviser Ari Rabin-Havt told Politico in a recent article on Sanders presidential aspirations. Lets be clear: Hes in charge of outreach for the caucus. So when people say hes doing a better job of reaching out? Well, yeah, hes doing his job. This is a new phase of his career.
Sanders apportioned role is to use left-sounding demagogy to cover up the actual politics of the Democrats, who have responded to the defeat suffered in last years election by moving even further to the right.
1. Two years ago this month, the Canadian Labour Congress, the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU) and other Quebec-based unions, the Greens, myriad NGOs and pseudo-left groups, and the New Democratic Party (its own electoral debacle notwithstanding) celebrated the swearing in of the Justin Trudeau-led Liberal government. With one voice they claimed the return to power of Canadian big business traditional party of government--a party which when it last held office carried out the greatest social spending cuts in Canadian history and deployed Canadian troops in a series of US-led wars and regime-change operations--constituted progressive change.
The Socialist Equality Party challenged the fraudulent liberal-left consensus. In an Election Day statement we warned: A union-backed progressive government whatever its exact composition--whether formed exclusively by the Liberals or NDP, or involving a formal coalition or informal alliance between them--would be an instrument of big business for attacking the working class.
2. This analysis has been more than vindicated. The real change delivered by the gender-balanced, ethnically diverse, ostensibly pro-environment, pro-refugee and pro-native reconciliation Liberal government has proven to be a sham. Like Stephen Harpers decade-long Conservative government, the Liberals are pursuing an aggressive, militarist foreign policy and a domestic agenda aimed at making Canadian capitalism more globally competitive on the backs of working people.
The Trudeau government has further enshrined the reactionary fiscal regime of austerity social spending and ultra-low taxes for big business and the rich established by successive Liberal and Conservative governments. Under the guidance of BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, the McKinsey Group and other leading arms of global finance capital, the Liberals have launched a Canada Infrastructure Bank that is a mechanism for privatizing transportation, energy and social infrastructure. With just a few tweaks, they have imposed Harpers federal-provincial health care funding plan, which slashes funding for Medicare by tens of billions of dollars over the next decade, and they have approved new environmentally and socially destructive pipeline projects, while privately reassuring the oil companies that they are ready to use the army to suppress popular opposition.
3. The true character of the Trudeau government as a government of imperialist reaction is exemplified by its foreign-defence policy and drive to deepen Canadas economic and military-strategic partnership with Washington under the Trump administration, the most right-wing in modern American history.
Following on from the previous Conservative government and almost entirely behind the backs of the population, the Liberal government has expanded Canadas role in the major military-strategic offensives of US imperialism--in the oil-rich Middle East and against Russia and China. These offensives have razed whole societies in the broader Middle East, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya, and now threaten to ignite wars with Russia and China, respectively the worlds second and fourth largest nuclear powers.
The Trudeau government, as Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan recently revealed, is preparing to join a catastrophic US war on North Korea, citing as a pretext Canadas role in the US-led war coalition that waged the 1950-53 Korean War. Politically, Canada is already providing Washington with unflinching support. Trudeau and his ministers have repeatedly joined the US in condemning North Korea as a singular threat to world peace, even as Trump and US Defense Secretary James Mattis threaten the impoverished country of 25 million with annihilation, and the US and its regional allies stage military exercises aimed at goading Pyongyang into war.
4. Harper routinely boasted of Canada being a warrior nation. Trudeau and his ministers try to cloak the predatory ambitions and interests of the Canadian ruling class in progressive rhetoric referencing international law and human rights. But their policy is, if anything, more belligerent.
In a keynote address last June, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland declared war to be no less vital for securing Canadas national interests in the 21st century than in the 20th. The next day, the Liberals gave flesh and blood to their vow to use hard power, unveiling a new defence policy. It commits the government to hiking military spending by more than 70 percent by 2026, acquiring new fleets of warships and warplanes, new drone and cyber war capabilities, and working with the Trump administration to modernize NORAD.
5. Four decades ago, the Just Society rhetoric of Prime Minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau proved to be a cruel hoax. As the post-Second World War economic boom unraveled, the government of Trudeau pere came into headlong conflict with the working class. It imposed wage-cutting wage controls and, three years before Ronald Reagan fired the PATCO air traffic controllers, threatened to fire postal workers en masse when they defied a strikebreaking law.
Today, the crisis of global capitalism is vastly deeper. In the name of austerity, governments the world over are seeking to destroy what remains of the social rights workers won through the mass and revolutionary struggles of the last century. As in the Great Depression of the 1930s, the drive to make the working class pay for the failure of capitalism goes hand in hand with the striving of each nationally-based capitalist clique to improve its position at the expense of its rivals through protectionism and trade war and by securing access to markets, natural resources and cheap labour through great power politics and war.
6. This agenda of class war and militarism is incompatible with the maintenance of democratic norms. Increasingly, the bourgeoisie is turning to authoritarian forms of rule and patronizing ultra-right forces that specialize in scapegoating immigrants such as the Front National in France and the AfD in Germany. In the name of the struggle against fake news, Western governments are moving to censor the Internet and social media, especially socialist and anti-war content. The World Socialist Web Site is one of the primary targets of this campaign.
In Canada, social opposition is increasingly being criminalized and the scaffolding of a police state erected. The right to strike--as demonstrated most recently by the outlawing of strikes by 175,000 Quebec construction workers and 12,000 Ontario college teachers--has been effectively abolished, at least whenever workers are in a position of strength. The Trudeau Liberals have retained all the key anti-democratic provisions of Harpers police state law Bill C-51, including empowering the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to break virtually any law in disrupting purported threats to public security and giving the national security apparatus unfettered access to all government information on individual Canadians.
By refusing to abrogate or even suspend the reactionary Canada-US Third Party Agreement on refugees and rushing to put in place measures to dissuade refugee claimants from fleeing the US for Canada, the Trudeau government is helping enforce Trumps anti-immigrant witch-hunt. No less politically revealing is Trudeaus full-throated support for the Spanish governments violent suppression of the Catalan independence referendum and imposition of de facto military rule on Catalonia.
7. The working class and the Trudeau government are on a collision course.
There is no popular constituency for Canadas involvement in the military-strategic offensives of US imperialism. That is why Canadas integration into these offensives is being carried out behind the backs of the Canadian people. None of the imbalances and contradictions that drove the world economy to the brink in 2008 have been resolved. The IMF and the Bank of International Settlements, among others, have repeatedly warned that Canada is especially vulnerable to a new financial crisis because ordinary Canadians, seeking to make ends meet under conditions of stagnant or declining incomes and skyrocketing housing prices, have run up unprecedented consumer and mortgage debt.
In Canada, as internationally, social opposition and anti-capitalist sentiment are growing. Recent months have seen strikes involving diverse sections of the working class including Quebec construction workers, General Motors CAMI autoworkers, Toronto airport baggage handlers employed by the transnational Swissport, and Ontario college teachers.
8. The same class logic that is impelling the working class into battle against the Trudeau government will bring it into headlong conflict with the trade unions and the social-democratic NDP. For decades, they have connived with big business in imposing concessions and dismantling public services and social protections.
The unions intimate collaboration with the Trudeau Liberal government marks a new stage in their tripartite labour-government-business alliance against the working class. The leaders of the CLC, Unifor, CUPE, the Steelworkers and CUPW quickly transitioned from stumping for Trudeau in the 2015 election as part of their Anybody but Conservative strategic-voting drive to formally pledging to work with the new government at a November 2015 meeting with the freshly minted prime minister.
The unions are working hand-in-glove with the Canadian government in the NAFTA re-negotiation and share its objective of fashioning a deal that reconciles the needs of Canadian big business with Trumps aim of forging a more explicitly protectionist North American trade bloc that will better serve American capital in fighting China, Germany and Japan for global markets.
The NDP, due to its function as an electoral rival of the Liberals and political safety valve for the bourgeoisie, is nominally in opposition to the government. But the social-democratic politicians are no less beholden to big business or vehemently opposed to any working class challenge to the Liberals than their traditional union allies. The Alberta NDP government is a close partner of the federal Liberals in working with, and for, Big Oil. With their deafening silence on the Liberals defence policy review, the social democrats are lending vital support to the Canadian ruling class plans for rearmament and war.
9. In the US, Europe and everywhere around the world, the working class confronts the same fundamental problem. The political parties and organizations, above all the trade unions, traditionally identified as left have systematically suppressed the class struggle and emerged as open advocates for imperialist war. This applies no less to Britains Labour Party, the Socialist Party in France and Germanys Social Democratic Party than it does to Canadas New Democrats.
If the working class is to mount a successful counter-offensive against the Trudeau government and the Canadian ruling class assault on its living standards and democratic rights, and the ruling class reckless drive to war, a new political perspective and new organizations of struggle are necessary.
This statement addresses key questions of working class strategy, including: how to oppose war, develop a counter-offensive against the big business assault on social and democratic rights, and mobilize the working class as an independent political force capable of imposing its own solution to the capitalist crisis. The axis of this strategy is socialist internationalism. Canadian workers must link their struggles with their class brothers and sisters in the United States, Mexico and internationally in the fight to put an end to capitalism and make fulfilling social needs, not further enriching a tiny clique of capitalists, the animating principle of socio-economic lifein other words, to replace capitalism with socialism.
The growth of Canadian militarism and the danger of world war
10. As 2017 draws to a close, humanity has not faced a greater threat of a global conflagration since the end of World War II. The unthinkable--a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula or with Russia or China--is now openly being discussed in the media and frantically prepared for.
Trump, employing language not heard from a major world leader since the rants of the Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, threatens North Korea with total destruction, while the US Pacific Command, which would spearhead any war with North Korea or China, boasts that it is ready to fight tonight.
11. American imperialism responded to the Stalinist bureaucracys dissolution of the USSR in 1991 by embarking on a drive for world hegemony. It sought to offset its already pronounced relative economic decline by employing its military might, launching a series of ruinous wars and rapidly expanding NATO across Eastern Europe.
These wars, which have targeted the Balkans, the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa, have manifestly failed to reverse the erosion of US global power. In response, the Obama administration launched military-strategic offensives directly targeting Russia and China.
12. The Canadian bourgeoisie has been completely complicit in this criminal enterprise. This is because it views the maintenance of US global dominance and its own privileged partnership with the US, through NAFTA, NATO and NORAD, as vital to the assertion of its own imperialist interests and ambitions.
Indeed, under conditions where Canadas relative importance to the US as an economic partner has declined due to the growth of US commercial ties with China and Mexico and its new reserves of shale oil and gas, Canadian big business has seen the expansion of the Canada-US military-security partnership as a pivotal means of retaining influence in Washington and securing a share in the spoils of imperialist war.
The Canadian Council of Chief Executives (now the Business Council of Canada) issued a series of policy documents in the centurys first decade demanding that Ottawa develop the means to deploy credible force anywhere in the world. Such global reach, it argued, will preserve our ability to have influence on the world stage. The CCCE, the countrys most powerful business lobby group, also worked with the Chretien-Martin Liberal and Harper Conservative governments to elaborate plans, since largely but not completely realized, to create a North American economic and security perimeter.
13. Canada has been at war almost continuously since 1999. The Chretien governments deployment of Canadian warplanes to join the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia was followed by the Canadian Armed Forces ten-year-long role in invading and waging a counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan. In 2004, Canadas military participated in the toppling of Haitis democratically elected government. A Canadian general led the 2011 NATO regime-change war in Libya, which, in the name of human rights and the responsibility to protect, killed tens of thousands and left the country in turmoil. The CAF returned to war in the Middle East in 2014 in an operation embracing Iraq and Syria that continues to this day.
14. The battle orders have been issued by successive Liberal and Conservative governments. But the entire political establishment has embraced militarism and the phony war on terror, which has been used to justify imperialist aggression abroad and sweeping attacks on democratic rights at home. The NDP has endorsed every Canadian imperialist intervention since the war on Yugoslavia, supports increased military spending, and upholds the Canada-US military-security partnership that is the cornerstone of Canadian imperialist strategy.
The Bloc Quebecois and Parti Quebecois, the sister Quebec sovereignist parties, have been even more bellicose. The BQ has repeatedly criticized the NDP for not being sufficiently full-throated in its support for Canadas wars and, in tandem with the Conservatives, the PQ and BQ have been in the forefront of promoting the anti-Muslim sentiment that is serving as ballast for the revival of militarism.
15. During the 2015 election campaign, Trudeau talked out of both sides of his mouth, promising to expand Canadas strategic partnership with the US while criticizing the Harper governments combat mission in the Middle East. Predictably, the latter proved to be an election ruse, with the Liberals announcing multiple extensions of the Mideast deployment, tripling the number of Special Forces in Iraq, and expanding Canadas contribution to the US-led war coalitions strategic command and intelligence operations.
Similarly, the Trudeau government has expanded Canadas role in both of the other major US military-strategic offensives. The Canadian Armed Forces has assumed responsibility for leading one of the four forward deployed battalions NATO has menacingly stationed on Russias borders in the Baltic States and Poland, and it is training Ukrainian Army and National Guard forces to, in the words of Trudeau, liberate eastern Ukraine.
Building on a secret 2013 agreement the Harper government signed with Washington on military cooperation in the Pacific, Canada under Trudeaus Liberals has stepped up its involvement in Washingtons war planning and provocations in East Asia. The Canadian navy recently conducted exercises in the South China Sea and Malacca Strait to test its readiness to participate in a US-led economic blockade of China in the event of a war crisis, and with the South Korean Navy further north. In explaining why the Canadian Navy is training for operations in the strait that links the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Chief of Defence Staff Jon Vance declared, If one wants to have any respect or gravitas you have to be in that region."
16. Both Washington and Ottawa view China as the real obstacle to continued US dominance over the worlds most rapidly growing economic region and the Trump-incited North Korean crisis as a means of placing pressure on China, long Pyongyangs principal ally.
Canadas ruling elite, led by the military top brass, is also using the Korean crisis to try to stampede the public behind participation in the US Ballistic Missile Shield. Its name notwithstanding, the BMD is aimed at developing the means for the US to wage a winnable nuclear war and thus goes hand-in-hand with the Pentagons plans to spend $1 trillion on modernizing its nuclear arsenal.
17. To broad applause from the political and national security establishment, including Conrad Black and the neo-conservatives of the National Post editorial board, Freeland in her June foreign policy address outlined an aggressive hard power strategy for Canadian imperialism under conditions where the US-led international order is unraveling. She called for building up Canadas independent military capacities so as to help shore up a US partner that can no longer bear the cost of world leadership alone, but also to ensure the ability of the Canadian bourgeoisie to assert its own national interests globally and as the junior member of the bilateral partnership of North Americas imperialist powers. For its part, the Globe and Mail has declared that Canada must be behind Trumps walls.
Canadian imperialism and capitalist breakdown
18. The coming to power of the billionaire, fascist-minded Trump epitomizes the turn of the international bourgeoisie to reaction. With his America First agenda and calls to make America great again, Trump advances only in a more brazen and crude manner the response of all the rival national capitalist cliques to capitalist breakdown. In a struggle of each against all, each is ruthlessly striving to assert its interests both against avowed strategic rivals and ostensible allies.
These conflicts are rooted in the very foundations of the profit system . As the International Committee of the Fourth International wrote in its 2016 statement calling for the building of an international working class-led movement against war and imperialism, The essential cause of militarism and war lies in the deep-seated contradictions of the world capitalist system: 1) between a globally integrated and interdependent economy and its division into antagonistic national states; and 2) between the socialized character of global production and its subordination, through the private ownership of the means of production, to the accumulation of private profit by the ruling capitalist class. Powerful consortia of capitalist banks and corporations utilize their state to wage a commercial and ultimately military struggle for control of the raw materials, oil and gas pipelines, trade routes and access to cheap labor and markets that are critical to the accumulation of profit.
19. All the imperialist powers are aggressively asserting their global interests and rearming.
Germany, with French support, is pressing for the development of a European military so it can assert its interests independently of and, if need be, against the US.
Japan is eagerly supporting the US war drive against North Korea, using the flaring up of war tensions as the pretext to get rid of the last constitutional impediments to its pursuing an aggressive, militarist foreign policy.
Australia--a second rank imperialist power whose development and strategic orientation have many parallels with Canadas--is playing a major role in Washingtons preparations for war with China. Both major parties of the Australian elite forthrightly declare that Canberra will join Washington in any war it launches on the Korean Peninsula.
20. The revival of such openly militarist policies, which twice in the last century resulted in a global conflagration, arises out of an historic breakdown of world capitalism. The 2008 global economic crisis was not a mere cyclical downturn, but rather the eruption of a systemic crisis. The inability of the imperialist powers to restore pre-2008 growth and profit rates is imbuing the struggle for markets and profits with an ever more fractious and venomous character, fueling economic and geopolitical rivalries the world over.
21. The Boeing-Bombardier trade conflict sheds light on the real state of commercial and inter-state relations, specifically on how, under conditions of increasingly frenzied competition, the transnational corporations are working with their respective governments to defend and expand market share.
In the run-up to Washingtons imposition of a 300 percent tariff on Bombardiers C-Series jet, the Liberal government brokered negotiations between Boeing and Bombardier, hoping to get the giant US manufacturer to withdraw its trade complaint in exchange for a stake in the C-Series or a joint agreement to refashion North American trade rules at the expense of their competitors.
But Boeing suddenly withdrew from the talks, no doubt after learning that the Trump administration was going to give it tariffs far in excess of what Boeing had sought so as to send a bellicose America First message to the world. Bombardier then struck a deal with Boeings arch-rival Airbus, with the Trudeau government again playing a central role, both to prevent the collapse of a Canadian manufacturing jewel and stop it from allying with a Chinese state-owned company.
22. In his seminal work Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin speaks of a small number of financially powerful states that stand out among all the rest and are at the centre of imperialist intrigue and aggression. Canada is such a state.
Canada was a major belligerent in the two world wars of the last century. While the wars constituted an unprecedented catastrophe for the world working class, the Canadian bourgeoisie profited from the slaughter. The wars proved to be the periods of Canadian capitalisms most rapid industrial expansion and resulted in a significant strengthening of the Canadian bourgeoisies world position.
23. Over the course of the past quarter-century, Canada has become a major exporter of capital, stretching the tentacles of Canadian imperialism across the globe. Whereas in 1971 Canadian Foreign Direct Investment totaled $6.8 billion, by 2002 it had swelled to $435 billion and by 2016 to more than one trillion ($1,050 billion), the equivalent of just over 50 percent of Canadas total GDP.
Canadas banks and other financial institutions and its energy, mining and infrastructure companies are especially active on the world stage. In Latin America and the Caribbean, where Canadian capital has had a significant presence for more than a century, Ottawa has played a major role in pressing for privatization, foreign investor guarantees and other neo-liberal policies. The Canadian ruling class is also determined to be an economic power and military-strategic player in the Asia-Pacific region, and its heavy involvement in the worlds mining and energy sectors is propelling it to play an increasingly active role in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
The Canadian bourgeoisie also covets the natural resource wealth of the Arctic, which, due to the perverse effects of climate change, is becoming more readily accessible. This ambition increasingly figures in its geo-political and military strategy and is a factor in the aggressive stance Ottawa has adopted against Russia.
24. The Canadian bourgeoisie has historically been privileged, serving successively as a close partner (in some respects the closest partner) of the worlds two most powerful capitalist nation-states--Great Britain in the 19th century and the US in the 20th.
Today, however, the US is at the very centre of the global capitalist crisis and Trumps America First policies are roiling the Canadian bourgeoisie.
25. Even as they extend their hands to Trump and strive to deepen Canadas military-strategic collaboration with the US, the Liberal government and Canadian bourgeoisie are seeking to work with the many elements within both the Democratic and Republican parties and US big business who fear Trump is undermining Washingtons long-term imperialist interests around the globe with his efforts to radically restructure, if not outright repudiate, traditional US-led alliances, from NATO to NAFTA.
These differences may lead in the coming weeks and months to major political shocks and convulsions in Washington. But whatever the disagreements over the specifics of Trumps policies, there is no disagreement within the American ruling class over the drive for US world hegemony. It is an open secret that a Hillary Clinton administration would have ratcheted up the US military intervention in Syria as part of a more aggressive policy in the Middle East and against Russia. In anticipation of her election, the Canadian military prepared options for the Trudeau government to intervene in Syria. A not insignificant factor in Trudeaus subsequent naming of Freeland, an anti-Russia hawk, as foreign minister was a desire to underscore Canadas dissent from any attempt by Trump to effect a rapprochement with Moscow.
26. Important elements of the Canadian ruling class strategy are now in jeopardy. For the past quarter-century, NAFTA has underpinned its drive to create global players by providing corporate Canada with access to a large internal market and a platform from which to vie for markets in Latin America, Europe and elsewhere. While Trump has acted as an accelerant, the growing rift between Europe and the US and the fraying of NATO and more generally the trans-Atlantic alliance long predated his presidency. Ultimately, it can be traced back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which, by removing a common threat, opened the door to the resurgence of inter-imperialist antagonisms. For the Canadian bourgeoisie, membership in the worlds most important military alliance and close ties to the European imperialist powers have not only provided additional heft and influence on the world stage, they have served as an important means of offsetting the radical asymmetry in Canadas relations with Washington and Wall Street.
27. The Canadian bourgeoisies response to increased US pressure will be to lash out more violently on the world stage--as with its threat to throw Mexico under the bus and seek a separate deal with Washington should NAFTA fail--and to lash out more violently against the working class at home. Already the Business Council of Canada, led by former Liberal Deputy Prime Minister John Manley, and a host of other big business voices are insisting that Canada match Trumps lavish tax cuts for big business and the rich. This would necessitate a further massive assault on public and social services.
At the same time, the ruling elite, with the support of the union bureaucrats, the NDP and Quebec Solidaire , will use the frictions with its US rivals to promote Canadian and Quebec nationalism, the better to bind the working class to its rule and its aggressive policies.
28. The working class must oppose all of the rival bourgeois factions in the struggle for markets, profits and geo-strategic advantage, whether it takes the form of national protectionism, the strengthening of inter-state trade blocs like NAFTA and the European Union, or rearmament and war. In answer to the capitalists, who pit workers against each other in commercial and military struggle, the working class must adopt the battle cry Workers of the World Unite.
29. Canadian workers must take their place in the building of a global movement against war. Such a movement, as the ICFI has explained, must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive elements in the population. And it must be resolutely anti-capitalist. The only means of preventing crisis-ridden capitalism from plunging humanity into a global conflagration as it did twice in the last century is by disarming the bourgeoisie through socialist revolution.
Consequently, the new anti-war movement can be constructed only in irreconcilable struggle against all factions of the ruling elite and their capitalist parties. It must be linked to the defence of democratic rights and the mounting opposition to deepening economic insecurity and social inequality and serve as the cutting edge of the fight for the working class to become an independent political force.
Workers need their own independent political party, guided by the understanding that to stop war and all of the disastrous consequences it entails, a struggle against its source, the global capitalist order, is necessary. This can be accomplished only in a fight for a socialist program to place power in the hands of the working class.
The trade unions and the Trudeau government
30. The Trudeau government enjoys closer ties to the trade union bureaucracy than any federal government in decades. As Trudeaus Liberals pursue an aggressive militarist foreign policy and their closest provincial allies, the Quebec and Ontario Liberal governments, impose brutal austerity programs, Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) President Hassan Yussuff and Unifor head Jerry Dias boast of their unprecedented access to Trudeau and his ministers. Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government view us as a stakeholder, exclaims Dias. A legitimate stakeholder with a voice.
The unions partnership with what has traditionally been the Canadian bourgeoisies preferred party of government is the outcome of a decades-long march to the right on the part of the unions and their allies in the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP). The unions have repudiated all traditions of independent working class struggle, integrated themselves into management and tripartite union-government-company structures, and developed new sources of revenue giving them a direct stake in the exploitation of the working class. With more than $10 billion in assets, the Quebec Federation of Labours Solidarity Fund is far and away the provinces largest venture capital fund. The NDP has actively participated in the dismantling of the public and social services it once held up as proof that capitalism could be humanized or even grow over into socialism, and it has abandoned even nominal opposition to NATO and Canadas participation in US wars of aggression.
31. This is part of a global process. The unraveling of the post-Second World War boom and the bourgeoisies turn to employing new computer, telecommunications and transport technology to globalize productionto maximize profits through the coordinated exploitation of the resources and workers of the worldpulled the rug out from under the unions and social democrats national-reformist perspective of restraining capitalism through state regulation, collective bargaining and social-welfare measures.
Trade union resistance to big business has collapsed, and with it, the percentage of workers enrolled in unions. Membership in the British Trades Union Congress has been more than halved, from 13 million workers in 1979 to 5.6 million today. In the US, unions are the bargaining representatives for less than 7 percent of private-sector workers, and in Canada just 15 percent. The traditional reformist parties have become instruments for redistributing wealth from working people to the capitalist oligarchy. In Britain, it was the Blair-Brown Labour government that launched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, privatized vast swathes of the public sector, and in response to the 2008 financial crisis, organized the largest bailout of the financial elite in history. In Germany, the Social Democrats enforced labour market reforms that created the largest low-wage sector in Europe and decimated the social welfare system, while at the same time organizing the first foreign intervention by the German military since World War II.
32. The union-Liberal partnership emerged directly out of the unions scuttling of the mass movement against the Common Sense Revolution of Ontario Premier Mike Harris and his Tory government. Fearing that the strikes and protests that had brought hundreds of thousands into the streets in 1996 and 1997 were escaping their control and becoming a direct challenge to the governments rule, the unions shut them down. Soon after, they founded a network, subsequently renamed Working Families Ontario, to promote strategic voting on behalf of the Liberals. Since 2003, the unions have helped elect and prop up a succession of Liberal governments in the countrys largest province that have slashed social spending, outdone Harris in cutting taxes on big business and the rich, criminalized job actions by teachers and other workers and mounted a privatization drive.
In tandem with its union allies, the NDP also moved closer to the Liberals. Shortly after becoming federal party leader in 2003, Jack Layton appointed a high-powered scenarios committee, headed by party elder statesmen like former federal leader Ed Broadbent and Saskatchewan Premier Allan Blakeney, to explore opportunities for, and the logistics of, a progressive coalition with the Paul Martin-led Liberals.
The unions and NDP responded to the 2008 financial crash with an abortive attempt to create a Liberal-NDP coalition government, pledged to fiscal responsibility, implementing a $50 billion corporate tax cut, and waging war in Afghanistan through 2011. When big business made clear its support for Harpers proroguing of parliament so as to prevent the opposition from voting no confidence in his government (a de facto constitutional coup), the NDP and unions meekly acquiesced.
33. The Conservatives are openly hostile to the unions and champion measures such as eliminating tax breaks for union-sponsored investment funds that encroach on the privileges of the union bureaucracy. Trudeaus Liberals, on the other hand, are seeking to shore up the union apparatuses, the better to use them to police the working class. They calculate that the competitive position of Canadian imperialism at home and abroad can best be enhanced by incorporating the unions as partners. In her bellicose June 2017 foreign policy address, Foreign Affairs Minister Freeland made a revealing point in this regard. She characterized the loss of popular support for the capitalist world order due to ever-mounting social inequality as one of the two principal threats, along with the loss of US global dominance, facing the Canadian bourgeoisie. The Liberals rely on their union partners to exorcise the spectre of social unrest.
34. The unions and NDPs opposition to any genuine working class challenge to austerity was exemplified by their sabotage of the 2012 Quebec student strike. The unions isolated the students in the face of mounting police violence, while the NDP failed to offer so much as verbal support for the fight against university tuition fee hikes or to condemn the provincial Liberal governments draconian legislation outlawing the strike (Bill 78). Precisely at the point when the strike threatened to become the catalyst for a working class upsurge, with hundreds of thousands of working people taking to the streets to oppose Bill 78, the unions became their most adamant and energetic in shutting it down. Under the slogan, Apres la rue, les urnes ! (After the streets, to the ballot box), the unions smothered the incipient mass movement, while politically harnessing the burgeoning opposition to austerity to the big business Parti Quebecois. Returned to power in September 2012 thanks to the backing of their traditional union allies, the PQ promptly and predictably continued the austerity drive of their ostensible federalist Liberal opponents.
35. No less revealing was the role that Unifor (the former Canadian Auto Workers or CAW) played in isolating and politically derailing this falls strike at GMs CAMI car assembly plant, the first strike at a Detroit Three facility in Canada in more than two decades. Workers were eager to put an end to multi-tier wages and benefits and other concessions, but Unifor failed to raise, let alone fight for, their demands. Instead, it declared the strike a fight for Canadian jobs and made the sole issue its call for CAMI to be named lead producer of the Equinox, so as to ensure that Mexican workers who produce the same model would be the first to be laid off come the next economic downturn.
This reactionary demand represented a doubling down on the ruinous Canadian nationalist strategy that CAW/Unifor have pursued since splitting from the UAW in 1985 and severing the organizational bonds US and Canadian autoworkers had forged in the militant struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. For the past three decades, CAW/Unifor and the UAW have greased the blades of the auto bosses whipsawing strategy, pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom.
Unifors nationalismits vehement opposition to mobilizing Canadian, US and Mexican autoworkers against all job cuts and concessionsrendered the CAMI workers defenceless. When GM signaled it would permanently close the plant and transfer all production to Mexico if the strike continued, Unifor immediately shut the strike down and imposed yet another concessionary contract on the CAMI workers.
36. The unions role as agents of Canadian big business is epitomized by their integration into the NAFTA negotiations. CLC President Yussuff sits on the Trudeau governments NAFTA advisory council, alongside NDP apparatchik Brian Topp, ex-interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose, and Linda Hasenfratz, the CEO of Canadas second-largest auto parts manufacturer, Linamar. Unifors Dias and Steelworker President Leo Gerard are stakeholders in the negotiations, meeting regularly not only with Canadian officials, but also with Wilbur Ross, Trumps billionaire crony commerce secretary.
The unions have welcomed the NAFTA renegotiation, hailing Trudeau and even the fascist-minded Trump as workers allies in securing fair trade. They share Trumps objectives of making NAFTA a more explicitly protectionist bloc aimed at the European and Asian competitors of North American big business and punishing Mexico, advocating measures to boost Canadian manufacturing at the expense of the impoverished Mexican workers.
NAFTA is a reactionary bloc of the imperialist rulers of the US and Canada and the venal Mexican bourgeoisie for waging class war at home and trade war beyond North Americas shores. But it must be opposed by the working class from the standpoint of socialist internationalism, not economic nationalism.
37. Just as workers the world over have no interest in becoming cannon fodder in the wars the capitalists wage for markets, resources and strategic position, so they must reject the unions attempts to incite nationalist divisions with their class brothers and sisters and ensnare them in trade war.
Were Washington, or for that matter the Trudeau government, to abrogate NAFTA, it would be with the aim of strengthening the national capitalist elite economically and politically. The latter would include whipping up nationalism so as to deflect mounting anger over social inequality, legitimize a more bellicose foreign policy, and justify further attacks on the working class in the name of supporting our companies. The first casualties in the trade war and reorganization of North American capitalism that would ensue from NAFTAs abrogation would be the workers of Canada, the US and Mexico.
38. There can be no fair trade under capitalism, a social order that rests on brutal exploitation and plunder. Nor can there be any national solution to the crisis facing working people. The outmoded nation-state system with its rival capitalist cliques and their armies, borders, immigration controls and tariffs is itself a fundamental cause of the crisis.
The global integration of production and the technological revolution that has propelled it have immense progressive potential. Indeed, they have created the objective prerequisites for a global planned economy under the democratic control of working people in which the labour and resources of the world are systematically deployed to serve human needs. But under capitalism they are used to intensify the exploitation of workers the world over and to create more powerful instruments of war.
39. To defeat the transnational corporations, which scour the globe siting production where labour, taxes and other costs are the lowest, and the governments that act as their hirelings, workers need their own global strategy. Workers in Canada and across North America must unite with workers in Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia in a common struggle against austerity and war.
The allies of Canadian workers are not Canadian capitalists and CEOs and their political spokespersons, but US and Mexican workers who, like them, face an unrelenting employer-state assault on their social and democratic rights and often toil for the same firms. In opposition to all factions in the ruling class struggle over NAFTA, workers in Canada, the US and Mexico must mount a joint struggle for workers governments in Ottawa, Washington and Mexico City and the Socialist United States of North America.
40. Workers must beware: those who today wave Canadian and Quebec flags, inciting workers to align with their bosses against Mexican and Chinese workers, will on the morrow be the recruiting sergeants for war. The unions, like the NDP, are complicit in the revival of Canadian militarism. When NDP leader Thomas Mulcair sought to score some political points in the 2015 election by criticizing Canadas $15 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Unifor demanded he shut up.
The pseudo-left and the NDP
41. With the unions and NDP increasingly exposed as pliant tools of big business, the pseudo-left plays an ever more prominent role in propping up their authority and, above all, preventing the development of an independent political movement of the working class. A key element in this is the pseudo-lefts promotion of identity (gender and racialized) politics, which, as the rhetoric and actions of the Trudeau government underline, have become a mainstay of bourgeois politics. Through Quebec Solidaire they seek to breathe life into Quebec independantiste nationalism, which has been largely discredited as a result of the Parti Quebecois imposition of savage austerity. The pseudo-left is indifferent and hostile to the struggle against imperialist war and Canadian militarism.
Whilst they mouth radical, even socialist rhetoric, the pseudo-left speaks not for the working class but for disgruntled layers within the top 10 percent of society. They seek a redistribution of wealth and power within the top echelons of society, including through the use of identity politics to secure a fair share of capitalisms managerial and professional jobs. In tandem with these wealthy and egotistical layers, the pseudo-left has moved sharply to the right, integrating themselves ever more completely into establishment politics and emerging as a new constituency for human rights imperialism.
42. The pseudo-left functions as apologists and advocates for the pro-capitalist trade unions and are themselves oriented to and embedded in the trade union bureaucracy. They have systematically covered up the unions support for the Trudeau and McGuinty-Wynne Liberal governments. Organizations like Fightback and the International Socialists hailed the Stop Hudak campaign that culminated in the reelection of Ontarios Liberal government and served as the dry run for the unions Anybody but Harper drive in 2015; and they blacked out any mention of the unions pro-Liberal strategic voting campaign, let alone their systematic suppression of the class struggle, from their appraisals of Trudeaus 2015 election victory.
Forced to concede that workers are alienated from the unions, the pseudo-left seeks to corral them into futile efforts to pressure the union apparatuses to the left. They are viscerally opposed to the SEPs call for workers to build rank-and-file committees independent of, and in opposition to, the ossified pro-capitalist unions so as to give organizational expression and politically leaven workers striving to assert their class interests.
43. The pseudo-left has responded to the growth in anti-capitalist sentiment by seeking to politically rehabilitate the NDP. Placing all blame for the NDPs Harper lite 2015 election fiasco on Mulcair and a small coterie of his advisors, they used the race to choose a new federal NDP leader to promote the lie that this wretched social-democratic party can be an instrument for opposing austerity and even fighting for socialism.
Fightback, Socialist Action and a myriad of other groups promoted the candidacy of NDP frontbencher Nikki Ashton. They claimed she could be Canadas Corbyna reference to the left-talking leader of the British Labour Partyand revive the NDPs electoral fortunes. When Ashton finished a distant third, they swiftly transitioned to promoting the supposed virtues of the winner and favourite of the party establishment, Jagmeet Singh. Fightback thundered against any break with the NDP, saying Singh is not a rightwing Blairite and can be pressured to the left, while the International Socialists enthused that Singhs victory will raise the confidence of racialized activists.
44. Corbyns evolution graphically demonstrates whose class interests are served by the pseudo-lefts attempt to revive illusions in social democracy and a national-reformist perspective. Elected Labours leader in 2015 on the basis of false promises to roll back austerity, oppose war and tackle social inequality, Corbyn has conceded to the Blairite right wing on every major issue. He allowed Labour MPs to vote for war in Syria, ensured that the party backed the renewal of Britains nuclear weapons arsenal, and ordered Labour-controlled local authorities to implement austerity programs in cooperation with the Tories. The essence of Corbyns agenda was summed up recently by his closest ally and Labours shadow finance minister, John McDonnell. To fervent applause, McDonnell told a meeting of Labour officials and pseudo-lefts that the partys principal task is to save capitalism.
45. An even more devastating exposure of the politics of the pseudo-left is provided by Greece. In Canada, as around the world, the pseudo-left hailed the January 2015 election of their co-thinkers in Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) on a program that combined pledges to end austerity with support for the European Union and NATO. Utterly opposed to the mobilization of the Greek and European working class against austerity and the big business EU, Syriza turned viciously against the working class when the EU spurned its appeals for modest changes to the Greek debt repayment schedule. Six months after coming to power and just days after workers had massively rejected the EUs austerity measures in a referendum vote, Syriza imposed a program of draconian social spending cuts and privatizations that went far beyond the austerity measures imposed by all previous governments. Underscoring their role as defenders of capitalism from any revolutionary threat from below, Socialist Project leaders Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, who acted as advisors to Syriza in 2015, staunchly defend the Syriza government to this day as an uncompleted experiment in alternatives to neoliberalism.
46. For decades, the pseudo-left has promoted Quebec nationalism, labeling as progressive the program of creating a capitalist Republique du Quebec that would be a member of NATO, NORAD and NAFTA. Under the banner of Quebec Solidaire (QS), they seek to provide a left face for the PQ-led Quebec independence or sovereignty movement. A new left party that touts Syriza as an ally, QS makes no pretense to being socialist or a party of the working class. Rather it defines itself as a feminist, environmentalist, pro-sovereignist and anti-globalization citizens party.
QS has repeatedly sought electoral alliances with the PQ and has lent support to the PQs ever-more explicit promotion of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim chauvinism, declaring the PQs antidemocratic Quebec Charter of Values legitimate, albeit poorly formulated. It played a significant role in the unions derailing of the 2012 Quebec student strike with its appeal at the strikes height for a PQ-QS electoral alliance. It assisted the unions in ensuring that the 2015-16 Quebec public sector struggle was contained within the straitjacket of collective bargaining and did not become the spearhead of a mass challenge to the austerity measures of the Couillard Liberal government. As a bridge to still closer ties with the PQ and the pro-PQ trade union bureaucracy, QS is currently finalizing a merger with Option National (ON), a tiny rightwing split-off from the PQ that urges QS to abandon social issues so as to focus exclusively on the push for an independent capitalist Quebec.
Quebec Solidaire is the political voice of petty-bourgeois strata that are in the thrall of the faction of the Quebec bourgeoisie eager to secure greater autonomy from Ottawa and Bay Street so as to make its own deals with Washington and Wall Street. But its politics serve to bolster the Canadian bourgeoisie as a whole. QS supported both the abortive 2008 NDP-Liberal coalition and the 2015 Anybody but Conservative campaign. More fundamentally, with its promotion of nationalism, with its claims that Quebec workers should define themselves politically as Quebecois and align with Quebec capitalists like Pierre-Karl Peladeau rather than workers in English Canada, QS helps quarantine the struggles of the Quebec working class and perpetuate the political divide between Quebecois and English-Canadian workers that has always served as an important mechanism of bourgeois rule in Canada.
While championing an independent Quebec, QS is thoroughly provincial, seldom commenting on international questions. Nevertheless, it has repeatedly endorsed Canadian imperialisms foreign policy and wars, including the neocolonial war in Afghanistan, the US-led regime-change war in Libya, and its denunciations of alleged Russian aggression in Ukraine.
47. Over the past quarter-century, the pseudo-left in Canada, as internationally, has emerged as an increasingly explicit pro-war and pro-imperialist tendency, as exemplified by their labeling of various US regime-change operations from Libya and Syria to the Ukraine as revolutions. They conspired with the NDP top brass to keep the issue of war almost entirely out of the leadership campaign. Fightback was outraged when the World Socialist Web Site revealed that Nikki Ashton had shamelessly lied about twice voting, along with the rest of the NDP parliamentarians, for Canadian participation in NATOs war on Libya.
Oppose war and nationalism! Build the Socialist Equality Party!
48. In the coming struggles, workers in Canada, as around the world, must be guided by the lessons of the immense revolutionary struggles of the last century, above all the October 1917 Russian Revolution. One hundred years ago, the Russian workers, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, demonstrated in practice that the working class could provide a way out of imperialist war and capitalist exploitation: that it could conquer state power, establish a workers government, and organize society on socialist principles.
The Russian Revolution arose out of the breakdown of world capitalism and triumphed because, under the Bolsheviks leadership, it was infused with a socialist internationalist perspective. World Socialist Revolution was the answer of the working class to the impasse and failure of capitalism, to a breakdown that would convulse the world for the next three decades and give rise to the Great Depression, fascism and a second world war. That the first workers state remained isolated and political power was subsequently usurped by a privileged bureaucracy led by Stalin in no way lessens the revolutions historic significance, nor the contemporary relevance of the program that animated it.
49. The bourgeois pundits seized on the Stalinist bureaucracys dissolution of the Soviet Union to declare the end of history and the impossibility of any alternative to the profit system. A quarter-century later, the fatuous claims of a new golden age of capitalist progress stand as a mockery. World capitalism is mired in systemic crisis. The imperialist bourgeoisies, Canadas among them, are lurching ever further to the right, reviving militarism and recklessly steering a course toward a third world war. Bourgeois democracy is breaking down, as the rival ruling elites, unable to find a popular base of support for their program of war and austerity, turn to criminalizing social opposition and stoking bellicose nationalism, xenophobia and all forms of social reaction.
But as a century ago, capitalist breakdown is also producing the objective conditions for socialist revolution. Millions of people are being thrust into bitter class battles to defend their jobs and hard-won social and democratic rights. Hostility among working people to the squandering of vital resources on rearmament and the war intrigues of the capitalist elite is palpable. The globalization of production has been associated with a dramatic increase in the size and social power of the world working class and has created the technical means for coordinating the international struggles of the working class as never before. It is the political task of socialists to translate these objective tendencies into a revolutionary program and organization that can guide the working class in the struggles ahead.
50. The imperative of revolutionary leadership was demonstrated by the Russian Revolution and the role the Bolshevik party played in actualizing the creative power of the working class. Mighty as the revolutionary explosion in 1917 was, a vanguard party armed with a scientific Marxist perspective was needed to reveal the revolutions class logic in the struggle for workers power and to guide and organize that struggle.
The Socialist Equality Party is dedicated to building such a party todaythe Canadian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The SEP bases itself on the historic struggle of the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky and led since 1953 by the International Committee. The ICFI has conducted a decades-long struggle to defend the heritage of orthodox Trotskyism, opposing all efforts to mislead the working class through the promotion of Stalinism, bourgeois nationalism, social democracy and the anti-Marxist, subjective idealist conceptions associated with postmodernism and the Frankfurt School.
51. We fight to rally the working class to the program of world socialist revolution. This requires an unrelenting struggle for the political independence of the working class from all the capitalist parties and organizations. This includes those like the pseudo-left who seek to keep workers in the thrall of the pro-capitalist unions and NDP and who promote Canadian and Quebec nationalism and identity politics. In conjunction with our comrades in the ICFI, we place the struggle to build a working class-led international movement against imperialist war at the centre of our political work.
The SEP fights for the unity of the working classEnglish and French-speaking, immigrant and First Nationsand to fuse all its strugglesagainst the dismantling of public services, job cuts and concessions, police violence and attacks on democratic rights, and the predations of Canadian imperialisminto a mass mobilization for a workers government committed to socialist policies.
Into all of the struggles of the working class, we systematically strive to infuse the understanding that Canadian workers must link and coordinate them with the mounting resistance of the international working class.
52. Flowing from this socialist internationalist perspective, the SEP insists, in opposition to the entire official and pseudo left, that a strategic orientation to the struggles of the American working class must be a fundamental element in Canadian workers class strategy.
The defeat of US imperialism, which emerged from the world wars and the Great Depression of the last century as the banker and policeman of world capitalism, is a strategic task of the world working class. By fighting intransigently against their own bourgeoisie and to fuse their struggles with those of their US class brothers and sisters, Canadian workers can make a mighty contribution to the development of the American working class as an independent political force and protagonist for power. Likewise, Canadian workers will be enormously strengthened in their struggles against war and the assault on their social and democratic rights by the eruption of class struggle in capitalisms greatest bastion.
As the US Socialist Equality Party has explained in a recent statement, Class Struggle or Palace Coup, the relentless deterioration of the conditions of life for the working class within the United States, and the pointless violence of the endless wars waged by the ruling class are producing a profound change in the social consciousness of masses of people The decades-long suppression of the class struggle by the trade union bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the affluent sponsors of various forms of identity politics is coming to an end. The social counterrevolution of the ruling elites is about to encounter an upsurge of the American working class.
53. The possibility for joint revolutionary action by the North American proletariat is lodged in its history and social being. All the major upheavals of the working class in North Americafrom the Knights of Labor through the sit-down strikes of the 1930s and the social upheavals of the 1960sgalvanized support on both sides of the Canada-US border, including among the French-speaking workers of Quebec. During the past half-century, there has been a concerted attempt, spearheaded by the union bureaucracy and pseudo-left, to denigrate and efface this history of common struggle. In implacable opposition to this, and as part of its systematic exposure of Canadian and Quebec nationalism as the main ideologies of the Canadian bourgeoisie, the SEP fights, in collaboration with the US SEP, for the objective unity of North American workers in a highly integrated continental economy to become a conscious revolutionary strategy.
54. The SEP urges all our supporters, WSWS readers and those looking for a means to oppose war and reaction to study this statement. We invite questions and comments. Those in agreement should make haste to join and build the SEP as the revolutionary party of the Canadian working class.
Soviet Russia and the Central Powers agree to a 10-day truce, subsequently extended to 28 days. We have started a resolute struggle against the war brought on by the clash of robbers over their spoils, Lenin declares in a speech December 5. In the struggle for peace, the workers of Russia can and have to work hand in hand with the revolutionary class of working people in all countries.
Washington, DC, December 4: President Wilson answers Bolshevik call for peace
Woodrow Wilson, in the annual State of the Union presidential message to a joint session of Congress, answers the Bolsheviks call to the peoples of the world for peace. In a manner unusual for an American president, it seems that Wilson is addressing himself not just to the factions of the American ruling class represented by the politicians in Congress, but to the world. He has been forced onto this terrain by Lenin and Trotsky.
Wilsons central message is that there can be no genuine peace until the sinister masters of Germany [are] crushed and utterly brought to an end. Wilson understands, he says, the voices of humanity that are in the air grow daily more audible, more articulate, more persuasive, and they come from the hearts of men everywhere No annexations, no contributions, no punitive indemnities. Wilson insists that this crude formula has been used by Germany to lead the people of Russia astray and the people of every other country their agents could reach in order to secure a premature peace.
Let us take this formula and use it, Wilson tells Congress. The message of a just peace, ought to be brought under the patronage of its real friends. After Germanys defeat we shall at last be free to do an unprecedented thing, and this is the time to avow our purpose to do it. We shall be free to base peace on generosity and justice, to the exclusions of all selfish claims to advantage even on the part of the victors The wrongs, the very deep wrongs, committed in this war will have to be righted. That, of course. But they cannot and must not be righted by the commission of similar wrongs against Germany and her allies. We are seeking permanent, not temporary, foundations for the peace of the world
However, Wilsons vision of a world order dominated by the US, including a rehabilitated Germany, is not shared by London and Parisnor are his claims that Washington fights only a war of high, disinterested purpose just and holy.
To further prosecute this just and holy war, Wilson asks for a declaration of war against Austria-Hungary. This he receives on December 7 by a unanimous vote in the Senate and only one vote against in the House.
Petrograd, December 5 (November 22, O.S.): Sovnarkom moves to dismantle old justice system
As part of the destruction of the state apparatus of the old regime, the Soviet government proceeds to abolish the old court system with the Decree of the Sovnarkom Concerning the Courts No. 1. The decree provides for the immediate abolition of the district courts, court chambers, and the governmental senate with all its departments, the military and navy courts of all names and also all commercial courts. Legal matters pertaining to civil and criminal law are to be dealt with in arbitration courts. Other legal matters become subject to the authority of local courts, the exact role of which will be defined in later decrees.
Finally, the decree provides for the establishment of revolutionary tribunals, named after their role models in the French Revolution. Their task consists in guarding the revolution and its conquests against counter revolutionary forces as well as in the struggle against plunder and robbery, sabotage and similar abuses by merchants, industrialists, officials and other people
When the Sovnarkom receives a communication from the Moscow Soviet asking the Sovnarkom to confirm the appointment of a new commissar, Lenin replies tersely by telegram on December 2: All power is in the hands of the Soviets. Confirmations are unnecessary. Your dismissal of the one and appointment of the other is law.
Lisbon, December 5: Right-wing coup brings down interventionist government
A military coup supported by monarchists and clerics brings to power General Sidonio Pais, sidelining the Democratic Party government of Alfonso Costa, who has been in France pleading with the Allies for concessions to the Portuguese bourgeoisie for its commitment to the war against Germany.
Costa and his allies have viewed the Great War as an opportunity to develop capitalism in Portugals colonies and reaffirm its centuries-old alliance with Great Britain, which has tolerated the survival of the Portuguese Empire in exchange for its near-total subordination to London.
But Portugals intervention in the war has been a catastrophe. The two divisions it has sent to the Western Front are not prepared for battle. Meanwhile, in Africa, small numbers of German forces, largely African colonials, have humiliated Portuguese regulars. In Portugal itself, the working class has emerged as the strongest social force, waging a series of bitter strikes and bread riots throughout the war, especially in 1917, that have further weakened Costas position.
Costa will be detained on his return from France, along with other interventionists, while parliament is dissolved December 9 and President Bernadino Machado deposed December 12. In spite of sweeping aside interventionists, Pais nonetheless continues Portugals involvement in the war.
Brest-Litovsk, December 5: Germany and Soviet Russia agree on 10-day truce
After two days of negotiations, Soviet Russia and the Central PowersGermany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkeyagree on a 10-day truce, which would be later extended to 28 days, in order to negotiate a peace treaty.
Around December 10 (November 27 O.S.), in connection with a discussion of what instructions should be given to the Soviet delegates to the negotiations, Lenin prepares an outline program that emphasizes that the talks shall be political and economic and the Bolshevik delegates should focus on the basic principle: No annexations or indemnities. The Bolsheviks should insist on the withdrawal of troops from occupied territories, the return of refugees displaced by the war, and the right of national self-determination.
In his speech to the First All-Russian Congress of The Navy on December 5, Lenin is recorded as saying:
We are told that Russia will disintegrate and split up into separate republics, but we have no reason to fear this. We have nothing to fear, whatever the number of independent republics. The important thing for us is not where the state border runs, but whether or not the working people of all nations remain allied in their struggle against the bourgeoisie, irrespective of nationality. [Stormy applause] We now see a national movement in the Ukraine, and we say that we stand unconditionally for the Ukrainian peoples complete and unlimited freedom. We have to wipe out that old bloodstained and dirty past when the Russia of the capitalist oppressors acted as the executioner of other peoples. We are determined to wipe out that past, and leave no trace of it. [Stormy applause] We are going to tell the Ukrainians that as Ukrainians they can go ahead and arrange their life as they see fit. But we are going to stretch out a fraternal hand to the Ukrainian workers and tell them that together with them we are going to fight against their bourgeoisie and ours. Only a socialist alliance of the working people of all countries can remove all ground for national persecution and strife. [Stormy applause] I shall now touch on the question of war. We have started a resolute struggle against the war brought on by the clash of robbers over their spoils. Until now all parties have spoken of this struggle but have not gone beyond words and hypocrisy. Now the struggle for peace is on. It is a difficult struggle. It is highly naive to think that peace can be easily attained, and that the bourgeoisie will hand it to us on a platter as soon as we mention it. Those who ascribed this view to the Bolsheviks were cheating. The capitalists are embroiled in a life and death struggle over the share-out of the booty. One thing is clear: to kill war is to defeat capital, and Soviet power has started the struggle to that end. We have published and will continue to publish secret treaties. We are not going to be deterred in this by anyones anger or slander. The bourgeois gentlemen are beside themselves because the people see why they have been driven to the slaughter. They threaten Russia with the prospect of another war, in which she will find herself isolated. But we are not going to be deterred by the bourgeoisies fierce hatred for us and for our peace movement. It will be quite futile for them to try to incite the peoples against each other in this fourth year of the war. They are sure to fail. It is not only in this country, but in all the belligerent countries that the struggle against the imperialist government at home is welling up. There has been an open mutiny in the navy even in Germany, which the imperialists tried for decades to turn into an armed camp with the entire government machine geared to stamping out the slightest sign of popular discontent. To understand the significance of this mutiny, one has to be aware that police reprisals in Germany are unparalleled. But revolution is not made to order; it results from an outburst of mass indignation. Whereas it was quite easy to drive out a band of nitwits, like Romanov and Rasputin, it is immensely more difficult to fight against the organized and strong clique of German imperialists, both crowned and uncrowned. But we can and have to work hand in hand with the revolutionary class of working people in all countries. That is the path the Soviet Government has taken by making public the secret treaties and showing that the rulers of all countries are brigands. That is not propaganda by word but by deed. [Stormy applause]
Helsinki, December 6: Finland declares independence from Russia
The Finnish government, made up of bourgeois parties under the leadership of P.E. Svinhufvud, declares Finland an independent state. The Bolshevik government in Petrograd, based on its defense of the rights of nations to self-determination, accepts the move.
The fact that Finland is declaring independence under the leadership of a bourgeois government is the responsibility of the Russian Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who in the eight months they held power from February to October continued to promote great Russian chauvinism to bolster their support for the war. At the Bolsheviks seventh party conference in April, Lenin pointed out that the Mensheviks refusal to back autonomy for Finland would strengthen separatist tendencies at a time where the main slogan in Finland was for autonomy, and not yet complete separation. A crisis is approaching there, dissatisfaction with Governor General Rodichev is rife, but Rabochaya Gazeta writes that the Finns should wait for the Constituent Assembly because an agreement will there be reached between Finland and Russia. What do they mean by agreement? The Finns must declare that they are entitled to decide their destiny in their own way, and any Great Russian who denies this right is a chauvinist, Lenin declared.
In July, when the Social Democratic government in Finland declared itself autonomous and the highest power in the land, the Mensheviks and SRs endorsed Kerenskys decision to send troops to suppress the Finnish parliament. The new elections ordered by the provisional government result in the defeat of the Social Democrats and victory of the bourgeoisie, which begins arming for civil war.
Finlands Social Democrats, who have been aligned with the Russian Mensheviks, have been seeking throughout 1917, following the example of their Russian co-thinkers, to govern in coalition with the bourgeoisie. This policy has proven disastrous for the Finnish working class, which after being gripped by the revolutionary enthusiasm triggered by the October Revolution, was prevented from taking power in November by the Social Democrats. The party leadership called off a general strike November 20 that had brought much of the country under workers control, handing power back to the bourgeoisie and giving it valuable time to arm for the approaching bloody civil war. The independence declaration was introduced into parliament November 15 in the midst of this struggle as the Finnish bourgeoisie sought to maintain control of the situation and divert social tensions.
The Finnish declaration of independence follows the adoption by the Bolsheviks of the Declaration of the Rights of Russian Peoples, which included a provision allowing all non-Russian peoples to secede.
Halifax, Nova Scotia, December 6: Largest ever man-made explosion kills nearly 2,000 people
At approximately 8:45 a.m., the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc collides with the Norwegian supply ship SS Imo while traveling at a speed of around 1 knot during its approach to Halifax harbor. The collision ignites highly flammable barrels of benzole fuel, engulfing the ships deck.
Prior to the war, ships carrying a cargo like that of Mont-Blanc would not have been allowed into Halifaxs harbor. Entering the harbor requires traveling through a slender waterway known as The Narrows, which is where the collision occurs.
Aware of the ships cargo, which includes TNT and picric acid, the captain quickly orders the Mont-Blancs crew to evacuate. Less than 20 minutes after the collision, at 9:04 a.m., Mont-Blanc explodes. The ship is torn to pieces by the force of the blast, and hunks of white-hot iron land across Halifax. The shank of Mont-Blancs anchor, weighing half a ton, is thrown for 2 miles, while its 90mm forward gun flies 3.5 miles from the explosion site.
Virtually all structures in a half mile radius of the blast are obliterated, including the community of Richmond. So much water is vaporized that the sea floor is briefly exposed. A tsunami wipes out a First Nations community at Tufts Cove.
Confirmed deaths will reach 1,950, but the figure could be higher. Over 9,000 people suffer injuries, and the explosion starts fires in the nearby populated areas. The blast is felt in Cape Breton, over 100 miles away. The explosion will remain the largest man-made blast until the advent of nuclear weapons. Firefighter Billy Well recalled: The sight was awful, with people hanging out of windows dead. Some with their heads missing, and some thrown onto the overhead telegraph wires.
The press and authorities in Halifax blame the explosion on German sabotage, and the German survivors of the explosion are all rounded up and imprisoned. The helmsman of the SS Imo is detained on allegations of being a German spy, based on the fact that a letter was discovered in his possession that was allegedly written in German. The letter was, in fact, written in Norwegian.
Petrograd, December 7: Izvestiia publishes Appeal to Muslim Peoples of the East
Izvestiia publishes an appeal by the Sovnarkom to the Muslim Peoples of the East. It is signed by Lenin in his capacity as the President of the Soviet of Peoples Commissars, as well as by Joseph Stalin, the Peoples Commissar for Nationalities. The appeal plays an important role in establishing the popularity and prestige of the October Revolution and the Soviet government among the oppressed masses around the world. It addresses itself to both the oppressed Muslims of the former Russian Empire and those that have been exploited and subjugated by the imperialist powers for decades in the Middle East and Asia. The appeal begins:
Comrades! Brothers! Great events are taking place in Russia. The end of the bloody war, which was begun with the purpose of partitioning other lands, is drawing near. The rule of the robbers and enslavers of the peoples of the earth is about to end. Under the blows of the Russian Revolution, the old world of serfdom and slavery is crumbling A new world is being born, a world of workers and free men. At the head of this revolution stands the Workers and Peasants Government of Russia, the Soviet of Peoples Commissars. In the face of these great events we turn to you, toiling and disinherited Muslims of Russia and the East. Muslims of Russia, Tatars of the Volga and the Crimea, Kirghiz, and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks and Tartars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and Mountaineers of the Caucasusall those whose mosques and chapels have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled under foot by the tsars and oppressors of Russia! Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions, are free and inviolable. Build your national life freely and unhindered. You have a right to do so. Know that your rights, as well as the rights of all peoples of Russia, are protected by the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants Deputies.
Buenos Aires, December 8: Argentina government assembles military against strikers
Media reports state that Argentinas government is assembling its military to disperse a strike wave that has seen a near-record of more than 136,000 workers go out on strike in 1917. American packing houses are shut down, interrupting meat shipments to Allied armies in Europe. The autumn strikes come on the heels of a September general strike of railway workers that crippled rail concerns, many of them British-owned.
December 8 (November 25, O.S.): Conclusion of Extraordinary Congress of Soviets of Peasant Deputies
The Extraordinary Congress of Soviets of Peasant Deputies, adjourning on December 8, is marked by friction between the Bolsheviks, largely based on the urban working class, and Left SR and other delegates, who are based in rural areas. Some representatives refuse to acknowledge Lenin as a representative of the new government, and the congress permits him to speak only in his capacity as a member of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin ultimately agrees to these terms, telling the congress that notwithstanding his objections, I consider it important that the opinion of the Party of the Bolsheviks should be known to this Congress of Peasants Deputies.
When he arrives, the speaker before Lenin turns to him and announces provocatively that Lenin wants to disperse the congress at the point of a bayonet. Lenin patiently addresses these concerns in his speeches to the congress.
Lenin also addresses the question of the Constituent Assembly, a vexed issue that divides the congress. During the era of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks had criticized the parties in power for procrastinating and delaying the convocation of the assembly. However, Lenin contends that the October insurrection has dramatically altered the situation. Lenin stresses the importance of an alliance between the Left SRs and the Bolsheviks, representing an honest alliance between the revolutionary peasantry and the revolutionary working class. In a subsequent letter to Pravda, Lenin explained that this alliance can be an honest coalition, an honest alliance, for there is no radical divergence of interests between the wage-workers and the working and exploited peasants. Socialism is fully able to meet the interests of both. Only socialism can meet their interests. Hence the possibility and necessity for an honest coalition between the proletarians and the working and exploited peasantry. On the contrary, a coalition (alliance) between the working and exploited classes, on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie, on the other, cannot be an honest coalition because of the radical divergence of interests between these classes.
December 9-10 (November 28-29, O.S.): Government resolution bans the Kadets
The Kadet leaders are gathering their strength for a counter-revolutionary offensive. In the Don region, Generals Kornilov, Alekseev, and Kaledin are working closely with Kadet leaders such as Miliukov to mobilize their forces. Meanwhile, the Kadets are campaigning for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, which they hope to use as a counterweight to soviet power.
On December 9, a procession of thousands of well-dressed citizens, fresh from religious ceremonies, marches to the Tauride Palace in Petrograd in support of the Constituent Assembly. Eyewitness accounts agree, historian Alexander Rabinowitch writes, that the appearance of workers, soldiers, and sailors was rare. The marchers fight their way into the palace, which was locked, clashing with pro-Soviet forces, and proclaim the First Unofficial Conference of the Constituent Assembly.
The march is regarded by the Trotsky and the Bolshevik leadership as nothing less than an attempted insurrection against Soviet power, orchestrated by the Kadet Party, the general headquarters for the counter-revolution. A Sovnarkom meeting on the night of December 9-10 approves a formal proclamation branding the Kadets as enemies of the people for organizing a counterrevolutionary insurgency. The Sovnarkom approves a decree providing for the arrest of Kadet leaders and their trials before revolutionary tribunals. Lenin addresses the question of the Kadet Party in a speech to the Extraordinary All-Russian Congress of Peasants Deputies on December 4:
You say that we have declared the whole Kadet Party enemies of the people, Yes, we have. And thereby we expressed the will of the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies. And now that we are on the threshold of peace and the cessation of the terrible slaughter that has lasted three years, we are convinced that this is the demand of all the working people in all countries. The overthrow of imperialism in Europe is proceeding slowly and painfully, and imperialists in all countries will now see that the people are strong, and in their strength will overthrow all who stand in their way. We shall not be deterred when people who are organizing revolt against the workers and peasants, against the Soviets, with the other hand show their credentials to the Constituent Assembly. In July we were told that we should be proclaimed enemies of the people. And we answered, Try it. If the bourgeois gentlemen and their followers had only tried to say that to the people openly! But they did not; they resorted to insinuation, slander and mud-slinging. When the bourgeoisie began the civil war (we witnessed it), they incited the officer cadets to revolt. And we, the victors, were merciful to them, the vanquished. More than that, we even spared their military honor. And now we see that the conspiracy of the Kadets is continuing, we see that they are organizing revolt against the Soviets in the interests of the money-bags of greed and riches, and we publicly proclaim them enemies of the people. At a time when the terms of peace will shortly be known, when we are about to have an armistice, when the members of the land committees will be immune from arrest, when the landed estates are being confiscated, and when control will be established over the factoriesat such a time they are conspiring against us, against the Soviets. We therefore declare that the party of the Kadets is a party of the bourgeoisie, that they are enemies of the people, and that we shall fight them.
Also this week: The Russian Futurists respond to the October Revolution
While the Italian Futurists under the leadership of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti embrace emerging Fascism, the Russian futurists (David Burlyuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Victor Khlebnikov) turn toward the Revolution. As Trotsky writes later in Literature and Revolution, having been founded in the pre-revolutionary period gives Russian Futurism certain advantages.
It caught rhythms of movement, of action, of attack, and of destruction which were as yet vague The workers Revolution in Russia broke loose before Futurism had time to free itself from its childish habits, from its yellow blouses, and from its excessive excitement, and before it could be officially recognized, that is, made into a politically harmless artistic school [for the ruling bourgeoisie] whose style is acceptable.
The seizure of power by the working class, in Trotskys analysis,
caught Futurism still in the stage of being a persecuted group. And this fact alone pushed Futurism towards the new masters of life, especially since the contact and rapprochement with the Revolution was made easier for Futurism by its philosophy, that is, by its lack of respect for old values and by its dynamics. But Futurism carried the features of its social origin, bourgeois Bohemia, into the new stage of its development.
Mayakovsky recites poems like Left March before sailors in naval theaters during the outbreak of the revolution. In his autobiography he later writes of the October Revolution: To recognize it or not recognize it? This question did not exist for me (and the other Moscow Futurists). That was my revolution. Went to Smolny. Worked. Wherever it was necessary. Beginning of my meeting activities.
In his Open Letter to the Workers from 1918, he writes: The revolution of content socialism-anarchism is unthinkable without the revolution of form Futurism. Both would require reinforcement and propaganda. The Futurists explain that the revolution of art has already taken place [prior to 1917]. They therefore call the Proletarians of the factories and of the soil to a third, bloodless but cruel revolution, the revolution of the spirit. In contrast to the Proletcultists, who prefer agitation in a less innovative form along with revolutionary content, the Futurists and their split-offs also want to revolutionize the forms of language and pictorial representation.
Many artists become active after the revolution in the building of new art schools and workshops. From 1919, Mayakovsky provides the words and images for many of the most famous Rosta windows posters, named after the telegraph agency ROSTA. The posters memorably depict political, military and economic themeseven questions of everyday life, hygiene and healthin images and verse, so that they can be grasped by people who can barely read or write.
With their conception that bourgeois art must be thrown completely overboard, the Futurists find little favor among leading Bolsheviks like Lenin and Trotsky, who believe the working class should assimilate and build upon the achievements of bourgeois and pre-bourgeois culture.
Yet in the early years of the Soviet regime, the party does not interfere in aesthetic issues. There is no question of political censorship of artistic creation. While there are lively discussions and fierce debates between artists and the party leadership, and also among party leaders, artists will develop a wealth of new styles which flourish in the years after the civil war until their strangulation by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
ALBANY, GA (WALB) - Albany police are on the lookout for a shooter who killed a man during an armed robbery Sunday morning.
Dougherty County Coroner Michael Fowler said Thomas Anthony Dixon, 50, died of a single gunshot wound to the torso.
Albany police said Dixon was shot and killed on Willis Drive shortly after 9:30 a.m.
Police said the suspect is a black male with a medium to dark skin complexion. He is about 5 6" and weighs about 160 pounds and was last seen running west, then north on Willis Drive wearing a dark gray hoodie with large gold letters.
Sunday, Dixon's family was still coming to terms with his death.
"I was in shock. I really couldn't believe it because even though he drank he didn't bother nobody," said Jerry Gibson, Dixon's cousin.
According to police, Dixon was trying to protect his 72-year-old mother from an armed robbery as she was leaving her home headed to church.
Gibson said that makes Dixon a hero.
"I mean out of the 50 some years on this street we've never had a situation like this before," said Gibson.
Gibson and Dixon grew up together in the same home.
He said Dixon was like a brother.
"He was a good guy. Everyone in the community knew him," explained Dixon. "He was aggravating at times, but he was a lovable guy. And for somebody to take his life. I can't wake up on a first Sunday knowing that this would be happening."
Now, Gibson said he'll cherish the memories he had with Dixon.
"For many years he played Santa Claus with me for my kids, for all my kids. They're grown now, but for many years we played Santa Claus together, Christmas Eve together, spent Christmas together. We shared everything together. And for somebody to take his life is just devastating."
Gibson has a message for those who consider resorting to violence.
"We can't. We killing each other, man. This is our community. This is our streets. This is our home -- Albany," said Gibson.
Dixon's death is the 22nd homicide case in 2017 for Albany. One of the cases involves a victim whose remains were only recently identified, but the crime happened two years ago.
If you know anything about this shooting, you are asked to call CrimeSTOPPERS at (229) 436-TIPS.
Copyright 2017 WALB. All rights reserved.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (WTXL) - A judge has sentenced former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown to five years in prison and a 3-year supervised release in her fraud case.
According to WFTV, Brown's attorney said she will appeal the sentence.
The 71-year-old was in court at 10 a.m. Monday in Jacksonville, a city in the Florida district she represented in Congress during her historic, nearly 25-year career.
She was sentenced for fraud and other charges related to a purported charity for poor students she used as a personal slush fund.
Carla Wiley, president of One Door for Education, was sentenced to 21 months in prison and a 3-year supervised release for her part in the case, WFTV reports.
Brown's former chief of staff, Elias "Ronnie" Simmons, and Wiley accepted plea deals and testified against Brown. They are also scheduled to be sentenced Monday.
According to WFTV, federal prosecutors said the three used One Door to bring in more than $800,000 between 2012 and 2016. The Virginia-based One Door only gave out one scholarship for $1,200 to an unidentified person in Florida, according to court documents.
Brown's former chief of staff told jurors that Brown ordered him to take cash and checks from One Door's account on dozens of occasions and deposit the money into Brown's personal account.
Brown testified in her own defense, saying she was left in the dark about the details of One Door's money, and blamed the theft on Simmons.
Brown was facing life in prison.
According to the Associated Press, she was convicted in May by a federal jury of 18 of the 22 charges against her, which included fraud, lying on her tax returns and on her congressional financial disclosures.
Her attorneys argued for leniency at a hearing last month, saying Brown's community work should mitigate her crimes.
THOMAS COUNTY, Ga. (WTXL) - Deputies have arrested a man for burning down an elementary school's storage building on Saturday.
The Thomas County Sheriff's Office says that Joseph Aracri, 18, was arrested on Sunday in connection to the arson.
The fires happened Saturday night at Cross Creek Elementary. Authorities say the school's storage building was burned.
Luckily, firefighters were able to put out the flames before they spread to other buildings on campus.
Clues lead authorities to believe it was arson.
When they talked to Aracri, he admitted to starting the fire at the storage building and another inside a dumpster at the school.
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Copyright 2017 WTXL via Raycom News Network. All rights reserved.
BAINBRIDGE, Ga. (WTXL) - Firefighters saved a person from a burning apartment building.
When crews got to the scene Saturday, the King West Apartments were engulfed in flames and the victim's apartment door was jammed shut.
Firefighters reached the victim by going through a window, and the individual was flown to the hospital with burns.
How the fire started is unknown, and the cause is being investigated.
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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - More than 1,500 people have registered for the Angel Tree program, which gives seniors and kids clothes and toys.
The problem? Around 500 children and 100 seniors still have not had their name picked from the tree.
There are only a few days left for the Salvation Army to collect enough for the 600 people waiting in Leon, Gadsden and Wakulla counties.
You can bring new, unwrapped toys, shoes, or clothes to the Salvation Army office on Allen road.
They're taking donations through Saturday, December 9.
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PENSACOLA, Fla. (The News Service of Florida) - President Donald Trump will hold a rally in the conservative stronghold of Pensacola next week, according to an announcement Friday from his political committee.
The Dec. 8 event will take place at 7 p.m. at the Pensacola Bay Center, and it will be the Trump's fourth appearance in Pensacola since he began running for president in 2015.
The timing of the rally could not be better, Michael Glassner, executive director of Donald Trump for President, said in a news release. Nothing inspires President Trump as much as connecting with hard working Americans at campaign rallies across the country. He especially enjoys meeting with our courageous veterans and their families at these patriotic events, Glassner said.
The Panhandle event will take place just four days before a critical election across the border in Alabama. Roy Moore, a conservative firebrand twice thrown off the Alabama Supreme Court, is the Republican nominee in a U.S. Senate race.
Moore has been accused of sexually inappropriate behavior with several women, including one as young as 14. Several women alleged that Moore, now 70, made sexual advances when they were in their teens and he was in his 30s. Many Republicans, including Florida Gov. Rick Scott, have called for Moore to step down from the race.
But Trump, a close ally of Scott, is supporting Moore. Pensacola is in the same media market as areas such as Mobile, Ala.
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The internet destroyed their monopoly on textbooks. Now college bookstores are trying to find their niche
YAKIMA, Wash. The U.S. Supreme Court will not consider an appeal from a man convicted of killing an Outlook family when he was 14 years old.
In the short time since the Senate's version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was initially released, there have been several updates, additions, and modifications designed to capture as much support among Republican senators as possible. However, the final passage of the bill occurred late on Friday night, with 51 of the 52 Republican senators supporting the legislation after a flurry of last-minute changes.
While the finer details of some of these changes are still unclear (the version of the bill that was voted on had some handwritten parts and phrases like "Add language..."), we do know what some of the major changes made to the bill are.
1. Higher deductions for pass-through businesses
In contrast to the House of Representatives' version of the bill, which provides for lower tax rates for pass-through businesses such as partnerships, LLCs, and S-Corps, the Senate's bill would continue to tax pass-through income at the regular income tax rates.
However, the bill would allow these business owners to deduct a certain percentage of their income before the regular tax rates are applied. The original version of the bill called for a deduction of 17.4% of pass-through income. The latest version got a bit more generous, increasing the allowable deduction to 23% of pass-through income.
2. Matching the House's property tax deduction
One of the most controversial parts of the Senate's version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was its complete elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes. This included the deduction for income taxes, as well as property taxes.
In order to make the bill more appealing to senators in high-tax states, the latest version of the bill matches the House version. While state and local income taxes still would not be deductible, the legislation allows for a deduction of up to $10,000 for state and local property taxes.
3. The alternative minimum tax would remain
The Senate's bill originally proposed getting rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT. The newest version keeps the AMT in order to help pay for some of the other last-minute changes.
However, it does address one of Republicans' biggest complaints about the tax by raising the amount of income necessary to trigger the AMT. While it was originally intended to ensure that high-earners paid a minimum amount of tax, in recent years it had increasingly begun affecting middle-income households.
4. Slightly more favorable business expensing
In addition to a lower corporate tax rate, another major change to business taxes would be change to how businesses write off expenses. Under current tax law, businesses are required to depreciate expenses such as equipment over several years.
The Senate's bill allows businesses to immediately deduct their entire cost, giving a bigger incentive to invest in new equipment. Originally, the bill would have allowed this for just five years, after which time it would be eliminated. Now, this benefit will begin to phase out after the initial five-year period.
5. One deduction would get better than it is now
This one might come as a surprise to many people, considering that one of the biggest themes of tax reform is to reduce or eliminate deductions.
One major complaint about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is that the medical expense deduction, which would have been retained, would not benefit nearly as many people as it currently does, due to the higher standard deduction. In response to this, the AGI threshold for deducting medical expenses has been lowered to 7.5% of AGI from 10% in the original bill.
6. Catch-up contributions would still be allowed
The previous version of the Senate's bill wouldn't make changes to retirement savings for most people, but would have eliminated the pre-tax "catch-up" provisions that apply to older workers. The version of the bill that passed does not include this, so 401(k) contribution rules would remain the same.
What will the final tax reform package look like?
To be clear, even though this legislation has passed the Senate, it will still be some time before tax reform is signed into law. There are still some big differences between the House and Senate versions, and before any tax reform law can become law, the two chambers must pass identical versions. So, it's likely that the eventual tax reform package will look substantially different than the bill just passed by the Senate, so take all of its provisions -- including these last-minute changes -- with a big grain of salt.
The $16,122 Social Security bonus most retirees completely overlook
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Arizona News
Phoenix, Arizona - Monday, Nathan Joe, 36, of Nazlini, Arizona, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi to 21 months in prison for physically abusing a child on the Navajo Indian Reservation.
In February 2014, Joe physically assaulted the minor victim, including slapping him with enough force to leave a handprint-sized bruise on the victims face. Both Joe and the victim were living on the Navajo Indian Reservation at the time the assault occurred. Joe is an enrolled member of that tribe.
The investigation in this case was conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The prosecution was handled by Christine D. Keller, Assistant U.S. Attorney, District of Arizona, Phoenix.
Arizona News
Tucson, Arizona - Monday, Donnie Ray Jose, 46, of Chui Chu, Arizona, a member of the Tohono Oodham Nation, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge James A. Soto to 108 months in prison. Jose was convicted after a jury trial of assault with a dangerous weapon and assault resulting in serious bodily injury.
The evidence at trial demonstrated that Jose, during an act of domestic violence, stabbed the victim sixteen times in her shoulder area while she and her minor son were asleep in bed. The victim is also a member of the Tohono Oodham Nation, and the assault occurred on the Tohono Oodham Indian Reservation. The Court enhanced Joses sentence based on a finding that the victim was vulnerable, as she had been sleeping just prior to the stabbing and that there were minor children present during the assault.
Upon release from prison, Jose will be on supervised release for three years. The terms of his supervision include no contact with the victim, the victims family, or any of the witnesses who testified at trial.
The investigation in this case was conducted by both the Tohono Oodham Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The prosecution was handled by Serra M. Tsethlikai and Charisse Arce, Assistant U.S. Attorneys, District of Arizona, Tucson.
Elevi inghesuiti in microbuzul scolar pentru economie de combustibil
Elevii dintr-o comuna din Teleorman sunt transportati la scoala in conditii inumane pentru a se face economie de combustibil. Cei mici spun ca nu doar conditiile de transport sunt improprii, ci si modul de a se comporta al soferilor, care vorbesc urat si conduc [citeste mai departe]
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- Angel Tilvar swore the oath of office as Minister of Defense on Monday, before President Klaus Iohannis, in a ceremony that took place at the Cotroceni Palace, told Agerpres. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro Help
- President Klaus Iohannis promulgated on Monday a law that provides for the allocation of at least 30% of the local public sports spending to support programmes designed for children and juniors.The law supplements Article 18 (1) of Law 69/2000, so that at least 30% of the local public sports spending
- President Klaus Iohannis on Monday signed decrees on appointment of two new members to the National Statistical Council, informs the Presidential Administration, told Agerpres. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro Help
- Former presidential Adviser Ligi Deca took the oath of office as Minister of Education, before President Klaus Iohannis, in a ceremony that was held at the Cotroceni Palace on Monday. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro
- We need zero tolerance for plagiarism, and the new education laws must include explicit provisions on preventing and punishing this toxic phenomenon of the educational environment, said President Klaus Iohannis on Monday morning, at the opening of the university year at the Ion Mincu University of
- President Klaus Iohannis signed, on Monday, the decree for the decoration of maestro Cristian Macelaru, principal conductor of the WDR Radio Symphony Orchestra in Cologne and artistic director of the "George Enescu" International Festival. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste
- President Klaus Iohannis declared on Monday that there has recently been an intense and natural debate on the future of education, showing that he expects the debate to continue in Parliament until a legislative form that helps teachers to fulfill their aspirations is reached. Fii la curent
- President Klaus Iohannis on Monday signed a decree regarding the submission to Parliament for ratification of a loan agreement and a grant agreement between Romania and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) related to the first programmatic financing for the development
Maydm is focused on fostering entry-level skills in STEM fields to girls and youth of color at semester-long programs and tech-centric workshops.
Columbia: US President Donald Trump is close to a decision on whether to recognize Jerusalem as Israel`s capital, his son-in-law and Middle East peace envoy Jared Kushner said Sunday.
Palestinian leaders are lobbying desperately against such a move, which the Arab League chief Ahmed Abul Gheit said would boost fanaticism and violence while sinking hopes for peace.
But Kushner, the 36-year-old head of a small and tight-knit White House negotiating team, made a rare public appearance to put an optimistic face on his efforts.
"The president`s going to make his decision," Kushner told the Saban Forum, choosing not to deny reports Trump will declare Jerusalem Israel`s capital on Wednesday.
"He`s still looking at a lot of different facts and when he makes his decision he`ll be the one who wants to tell you. So he`ll make sure he does that at the right time."
On Monday, Trump must decide whether to sign a legal waiver that would delay plans to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for another six months.
Every US president has done this since 1995, judging the time not ripe for such a move, and Trump is expected to begrudgingly do so for a second time this week.
But, according to diplomats and observers, he is also now expected to announce in a speech on Wednesday that he supports Israel`s claim on Jerusalem as its capital.
Arab League leader Abul Gheit meanwhile said his organization was closely following the issue and is in contact with the Palestinian authorities and Arab states to coordinate the Arab position if Trump takes the step.
"It is unfortunate that some are insisting on carrying out this step without any regard to the dangers it carries to the stability of the Middle East and the whole world," he told reporters in Cairo on Sunday.
"Nothing justifies this act... it will not serve peace or stability, instead it will nourish fanaticism and violence," said Abul Gheit.
Palestinians have been lobbying regional leaders to oppose the decision and the armed Islamist movement Hamas has threatened to launch a new "intifada."
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas spoke to Hamas leader Ismail Haniya late Sunday, a Hamas statement said, with the two sides agreeing their opposition to any shift in US policy.
The rare call between the two comes as attempts at implementing a reconciliation deal have faltered in recent days.
But Kushner, addressing a sympathetic audience at an annual meeting of Israeli and US policy-makers hosted by businessman Haim Saban, sees grounds for optimism.
The real estate developer turned presidential adviser is working closely with Israeli officials and has developed ties with the young Saudi and Emirati monarchs.
He sees an opportunity for peace if the Sunni Arab countries of the region align themselves with Israel in opposition to the threat of Iran.
Israel`s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shares this hope, although he dares hope an accommodation with Arab countries could precede any Palestinian deal.
Kushner, in common with US official thinking under previous administrations, sees a Israeli-Palestinian settlement as coming before any great re-alignment.
"You`ve got to focus on solving the big issue," he told a friendly but frankly skeptical Saban, and an audience of dignitaries and policy experts.
"The regional dynamic plays a big role in what we think the opportunities are because ... a lot of these countries look and say they all want the same thing.
"And they look at the regional threats and I think that they see Israel, who is traditionally their foe, is a much more natural ally to them than it was 20 years ago."
"You`ve a lot of people who want to put this together, but you have to overcome this issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order for that to happen," he said.Earlier, Netanyahu also addressed the forum by video link from Israel, and also spoke of the opportunity for reconciliation in the region.
But his focus was firmly on the threat of Iran, which he again compared to Nazi Germany in its alleged determination to "murder Jews."
His address barely touched on the Palestinian issue, but did speak of regional peace, under a longer timeframe than the one Kushner has in mind.
"And that`s just one reason why I`m so hopeful about the future. Today Israel is more welcomed by the nations of the world than ever before," Netanyahu said.
"When I look forward 50 and 100 years I believe Israel will be embraced openly by its Arab neighbors rather than in secret in the way it`s done today."
Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was less optimistic, warning a change in the US stance on Jerusalem would spell disaster.
In a statement, he warned the United States would "be disqualifying itself to play any role in any initiative towards achieving a just and lasting peace."
Islamabad: Former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, who earlier came in support of the terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), has now said that he would welcome an alliance with global terrorist and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed for the general election in 2018.
Responding to a question about having an alliance with JuD chief Saeed, Musharraf in an interview to Pakistan based Aaj News channel said, "so far, there has be no talks with them but if they want to be part of the alliance, I would welcome them."
The former military ruler had last month announced the formation of a grand political alliance after a consultative meeting between representatives of around two dozen political parties, including the Sunni Tehreek, Majlis-i-Wahdatul Muslimeen, Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) and Mr Musharraf`s own All Pakistan Muslim League (APML).
However, several parties dissociated themselves from Musharraf`s Awami Ittehad alliance after he announced the formation of a "grand alliance" of 23 parties.
According to media reports, two major partners of the alliance - the Pakistan Awami Tehrik and the Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen - denied being part of the coalition headed by Musharraf.
Saeed, who continues to be an influential person in Pakistan`s certain religious groups despite being an internationally designated terrorist, announced on Saturday that he would contest the general election in 2018.The announcement comes days after the Lahore High Court ordered his release from the house arrest.
However, the JuD chief did not disclose anything about the constituency he would like to contest from. Though the JuD formed Milli Muslim League (MML) in August when Saeed was detained in Lahore, the party yet to be recognised by the Election Commission of Pakistan.
Saeed is a wanted terrorist by India and the United States for his alleged role in masterminding the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai that claimed 166 lives.
He even carries a bounty of 10 million USD (approx. Rs 66 crore) on his head for his role in the attack.Musharraf had recently called himself as the "biggest supporter" of the LeT and its founder Hafiz Saeed.
Speaking on Pakistan`s ARY News, Musharraf said, "I am the biggest supporter of the LeT and I know they like me and the JuD also likes me."
The former president added that he was always in favour of terrorist action in Kashmir, and the LeT and the JuD were the biggest forces to take on the Indian Army in the state.
New Delhi: The special investigation team (SIT), set up to probe the allegations of abuse of authority prima facie committed by former CBI Director Ranjit Sinha to scuttle the coal scam probe, was on Monday directed by the Supreme Court to submit a status report before it.
The apex court asked the SIT to furnish the status report in a sealed cover within four weeks with regard to the probe conducted in the matter.
"A status report with regard to investigation conducted by the SIT with respect to Ranjit Sinha, former Director of CBI, be filed in a sealed cover," a three-judge bench headed by Justice Madan B Lokur said.
The bench, also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph and A K Sikri, said this after advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for NGO Common Cause, argued that several months have gone by since the SIT was formed and it should be asked to submit a report on its investigation.
The top court had on January 23 constituted the SIT headed by the CBI director to look into the prima facie allegations against the former CBI chief of trying to influence the probe in coal scam cases.
During the hearing today, senior advocate R S Cheema, who has been appointed as special public prosecutor in coal scam cases by the apex court, told the bench that eight CBI cases relating to the scam were pending consideration before the "highest authority" of the agency.
To this, Bhushan said, "why should these cases be kept pending before the highest authority? These are politically sensitive cases".
The bench, however, directed the CBI Director to finalise these eight pending cases on or before January 15, 2018.
Cheema argued that CBI had requested the West Bengal government to give some documents pertaining to the coal block allocations in the state but the documents have not yet been handed over to the agency.
The bench issued notice to the state government directing it to inform the court why the records have not been given to the CBI.
Besides these issues, the top court also dealt with the pleas filed by others in the case.
The court was earlier told that a panel headed by former CBI special director M L Sharma had held that Ranjit Sinha's alleged meetings with some high-profile accused in coal scam prima facie indicated that there was an attempt to influence the investigation.
The apex court-appointed panel was probing the alleged scuttling of the probe into coal block allocation scam cases by Sinha, whose meetings with the accused persons were held as "completely inappropriate".
On December 7, 2015, the court had ordered handing over the original visitors' diary of the official residence of the former CBI director to the Sharma-led panel.
HYDERABAD: Hyderabad police on Monday banned flying of drones, paragliders and microlight aircraft after intelligence agencies warned of possible terror attacks.
The city police are imposing reasonable checks on any suspicious activities.
The use of drones, paragliders and microlight aircraft will be allowed only if prior permission is sought from the concerned authority.
People violating the order will be punishable under section 188 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). This order will remain in force from December 8, 2017 to January 1, 2018.
Hyderabad: Osmania University students on Monday staged a protest and did not allow the police to shift the body of E Murli, who allegedly committed suicide by hanging.
The body of the first-year student of MSc Physics at the university was found hanging in the washroom of one of the hostels on the campus.
A suicide note which was found from the scene, purportedly written by Murali, stated that he did not want to fail in exams and that he had never failed in exams, police had said, PTI reported.
Police had added that the student seemed to be in depression over the matter and further investigations were currently on.
Meanwhile, speaking to ANI, OU students joint action committee leader and president of the Unemployed Youth Association, K Manavatha Rai said, "Murli committed suicide because of unemployment. The state government is responsible for his suicide. Also, the government should give Rs 50 lakh compensation to Murli's family or else we will not allow the police to shift the body from the hostel."
"The Telangana government has been sanctioning funds for many things regarding the state.then why they are not providing jobs for us. We will continue the protest and will not allow the police to shift the body until the government takes responsibility for the matter," he added.
The student hailed from Doulapur village of Siddipet district.
(With Agency inputs)
HYDERABAD: In a shocking incident, a seven-month-old pregnant lady jumped to death to save herself from rapists in Telangana on Saturday night.
The incident took place on National Highway 44 near Ravelli village in Medak district.
Thirty-five-year-old Kalavathi would sell old clothes and dresses. She was travelling with her young daughter from Medchal village to Toopran village in Medak.
The mother-daughter duo got into a DCM van, which was already boarded by two unidentified men. On way the way, the men started harassing and tried to rape her.
To save herself, Kalavathi jumped from the mobile van and died on spot.
The van driver allegedly dropped the woman's daughter by the roadside and fled.
Passers-by informed the police, who in turn registered a case based on the description given by the minor child.
The police have launched an investigation into the incident.
New Delhi: PM Narendra Modi's oratory skills were on full display all of Monday when he addressed as many as three rallies across Gujarat. Attacking Congress ahead of the state assembly elections, he questioned the party's past, present and future with much gutso.
On a day when Rahul Gandhi appeared set to take over from his mother Sonia Gandhi as Congress president, PM Modi unleashed a barrage of attacks on him and his party for resembling a clan. "I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the well-being of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command," he said in Valsad. "Mani Shankar Aiyar asked 'did elections happen during Mughal rule? After Jehangir, Shahjahan came, was any election held? After Shahjahan it was understood Aurangzeb will be the leader'. So the Congress accepts it's a family party? We don't want this Aurangzeb rule."
He then turned to target the Congress party as a whole and accused it of not just being a family party but also dividing people of the country. "Congress has learnt divide and rule rather well from out colonial rulers," he said in Bhavnagar. "I fail to understand why is Congress once again doing what it always did in the past - divide people, be it on caste lines, communal lines, between villages and cities."
Accusing the party of failing to deliver on its pre-poll promises, PM Modi said that their failures have resulted in people of Uttar Pradesh rejecting Congress - an apparent reference to the recent civic polls here where BJP emerged triumphant. "I appeal to the Congress to stick to the truth. The people of Gujarat do not like poll-time lollipops and false promises of the Congress. The people of UP know the Congress and their leadership well. And see how they have rejected Congress repeatedly."
The battle for Gujarat ahead of elections on December 9 and 14 has been hotting up with PM Modi himself leading BJP's charge. He is scheduled to hold a number of rallies here ahead of polling.
New Delhi: Husband of Hadiya was allegedly in touch with two key accused in ISIS Omar-al-Hindi case before his marriage, as per NIA probe.
According to the The Times of India, Shafin Jahan was in touch with Manseed and P Safvan, via a closed Facebook group comprising activists of Popular Front of India (PFI)'s political arm SDPI.
They were arrested in October last year and have been chargesheeted by NIA in the case which pertains to a criminal conspiracy by members of an Islamic State-inspired group to target high profile people like high court judges, police officers and political leaders.
The NIA believes it was Manseed and his SDPI associates that brought Hadiya and Shafin together. They two got married in December 2016.
TOI report further says that NIA probe has reportedly found that both Manseed and Safvan were in contact with Shafin on a social media app as well as closed Facebook group of SDPI activists called 'Thanal'.
Meanwhile, Hadiya had said in the apex court on November 27 that she wanted to go with her husband, Shafin Jahan.
The 24-year-old Kerala woman had converted to Islam, changing her name from Akhila to Hadiya, and married Jahan. The marriage was challenged by her parents in court.
Jahan moved court after their marriage was annulled by the Kerala High Court and against HC's order directing the NIA to probe the case.
The Supreme Court allowed Hadiya, till now in the custody of her parents, to resume her studies.
The bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra had directed the Salem college to allow her to complete her house surgeon internship. She studies in Salem's Sivaraj Homoeopathic Medical Colleges and Research Institute.
Her father, Asokan, has alleged that she was a pawn in the larger scheme of indoctrinating and recruiting of ISIS recruits. Earlier, the Kerala High Court had nullified her marriage to Jahan and she was given in the custody of her father.
Shafin Jahan had challenged the Kerala High Court order of May nullifying his marriage with Hadiya and sought a recall of the court order asking NIA to investigate the conversion of Hadiya to Islam and her marriage.
(With Agency inputs)
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Washington: The US has said that India "is a player" in Afghanistan and it supports New Delhi's move with regard to transit options to enhance its economic connectivity with the war-torn country.
"India has really shown that it is a player in Afghanistan and that it is interested in supporting Afghanistan in a very constructive way," a senior administration official told PTI.
The official speaking on condition of anonymity was reviewing India's role in the first 100 days of the South Asia Strategy that was announced by Trump in a speech on August 21.
"As you know President Trump in his August 21st speech called on India to play a bigger role in supporting Afghanistan and its economic development. I think India has been answering the call," the official said.
Referring to a very successful trade conference on Afghanistan in New Delhi in September, the official said it resulted in pledging of hundreds of millions in new deals.
India has established air corridor and now the airport door and now has sent its first wheat shipment through Chabahar port in Iran.
"So, the US is supportive of this. We totally support India building up its economic relationship and increasing the transit options so that they can be more economically engaged with Afghanistan. The US has noticed that India has been stepping up its economic engagement with the country," the senior administration official said.
Responding to a specific question on the Chabahar port given Trump Administration's policies with Iran, the official said the US does not want IRGC or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp of Iran to benefit out of any economic activities.
"But again, we understand that India has challenges in getting goods for Afghanistan," and its inability to have economic linkages because of the inability to trade through Pakistan, the official said.
"So, I think that there is an understanding (in the Trump Administration) that if India is to be more economically engaged in Afghanistan there has to be transit options for India," the senior administration official said.
First phase of Chabahar port inaugurated:
The first phase of the Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman was inaugurated on Sunday by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, opening a new strategic route connecting Iran, India and Afghanistan bypassing Pakistan.
Here is the Joint Statement of Afghanistan, India and Iran Trilateral Meeting on Implementation of Chabahar Agreementhttps://t.co/EXrPOovJ3I Indian Diplomacy (@IndianDiplomacy) December 3, 2017
The port in the Sistan-Balochistan province on the energy-rich nation's southern coast is easily accessible from India's western coast and is increasingly seen as a counter to Pakistan's Gwadar Port, which is being developed with Chinese investment and is located at distance of around 80 kms from Chabahar.
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said Minister of State for Shipping Pon Radhakrishnan represented India at the inauguration ceremony of Phase 1 of the Shahid Beheshti Port at Chabahar which was also attended by ambassadors and senior officials of the region.
An India-Iran-Afghanistan ministerial-level trilateral meeting on Chabahar also took place today on the sidelines of the event where the three countries resolved to work towards integrated development of connectivity infrastructure including ports, road and rail networks to open up greater opportunities for regional market access and integration of their economies.
Under the agreement signed between India and Iran in May last year, India is to equip and operate two berths in Chabahar Port Phase-I with capital investment of USD 85.21 million and annual revenue expenditure of USD 22.95 million on a 10-year lease.
(With PTI inputs)
Dharampu: Continuing his scathing attacks on the Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday termed the party as "an empire" that can only be ruled by one single family. He also said that the Congress "disliked Gujarat and hated it" and so the people of Gujarat should "punish" the Congress.
Modi, on the second day of his two-day visit to poll-bound Gujarat, addressing a massive crowd at Malanpada in Dharampur, a Congress bastion, said: "The Congress dynasty which has reigned in Uttar Pradesh since five decades, have we ever maligned them, insulted them? Insulted other states? But not a single day passes when every Congress leader curses Gujarat. What is our fault? They cursed Sardar Patel. What was his fault? That he worked for the good of the country?"
Continuing in the same vein, Modi said, "Indira Gandhi had our Morarji Desai jailed for months. Why such animosity for Gujarat? Gujarat should teach them a lesson that they stop insulting Gujarat. Gujarat has never been on anybody`s mercy."
Speaking about the election for Congress president, the Prime Minister said, "Congress has now abandoned all shame. Such persons (Rahul) who have been charged by the court, who is on bail, such persons whom we would not entrust the president post of a district, is now being given the president`s post in the party. What kind of culture prevails in Congress?"
Citing a statement by senior Congress leader Manishankar Aiyar, who said "Did election exist when Aurangzeb came in place of Shah Jahan?", Modi taunted: "This is an empire where only the dynastic heir rules. Whereas for me, the people are my high command. We ask votes on the basis of development. You check out all the previous elections of 2002, 2007, 2012, where the Congress has only tried to paint a non secular picture of BJP."
Referring to the temple visits of the Gandhi scion in Gujarat, Modi said: "Look at the strength of the land of Sardar and Mahatma Gandhi, that after 70 years they have started visiting places. But people won`t be fooled by that. There is a conspiracy to insult Gujarat and Gujarat won`t tolerate."
Mentioning the recently held local body elections in Uttar Pradesh, Modi said: "The people of UP have now recognized the Congress and have wiped out them out, who ruled the state through five dynasties. Now the Congress has accepted that they cannot harm Modi in 2019 and now they don`t have anywhere to go. So their target is to malign Gujarat. The Congress has always made people fight against people, tribal against tribal, educated against uneducated, communities and so on. But the people of Gujarat have rejected such a disruptive party."
And in his interactive style of asking question to the audience, Modi asked, "Have you ever read in newspapers that Modi took away so much money for himself? For his brother, for his relatives? Whereas what was on the other side - scams of loot in coal deal, helicopter deal, why? Since Modi is in Delhi, he has stopped all such loot. Instead now people ask what did Modi bring in."
On demonetization, Modi said, "Congress is angry with me for demonetization. Tell me are you angry with me for demonetization?" But without waiting for an answer from the crowd as he normally does, he continued, "The Congressman are worried that their scam money, corrupt money has gone. They are angry that Modi looted us. But remember all the looters of the country, Modi will extract every penny out from you and use it for the common man of the country. The money belongs to the country."
Alleging the Congress of not doing anything for the Other Backward Castes (OBC), the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST), Modi said: "All the previous governments did not do anything for these communities. As soon as our government was formed, we granted constitutional status to the OBC commission. Congress had halted that bill in the Rajya Sabha. I don`t have to go and learn what backward living is."
Urging the gathered crowd to vote for BJP, Modi said, "I can see the target of achieving 150 seats for the BJP being fulfilled right in front of my eyes here. You will be deciding the fate of Gujarat on the 9th and you will have to punish the people who have disliked Gujarat."
Indore: Girls and women are more vulnerable to their own relatives and acquaintances than unknown persons on the issue of sex-related crimes, data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) "Crime in India 2016" report has indicated.
Highlighting rape figures, the report has stated that "in 2016, the accused of rapes in 94.6 cases are none other than the victim's relatives including brother, father, grandfather, sons or acquaintances."
The report showed that in the year 2016, a total of 38,947 cases of rape were registered in the country under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) as well as Section 376 and other related sections of the Indian Penal Code.
Among these 38,947 cases, in 36,859 matters, accused are related to the victims, it said.
Similarly, it said that in 630 cases, victims were allegedly raped by grand-father, father, brother and son while in 1,087 cases the accused were acquaintances.
Besides in 2,174 cases, the accused are relatives and in 10,520 matters, it was neighbours who were facing charges of rape, it said.
In 600 cases, employers and co-workers are accused of rape, the report said.
The NCRB report also stated that in 2016, in 557 cases, the accused are live-in partners, husband and ex-husbands.
Similarly, in 10,068 cases, women were raped on the promise of marriage.
It also states that in the remaining 11,223 cases, the victims in some manner or the other knew the accused.
Expressing concern over these figures, National Commission of Women (NCW) chairperson, Rekha Sharma told PTI, "In our society, there is a lot of restrictions imposed on girls. But now it is enough. Time has come when boys should be taught from childhood how to behave with women as per our social values."
She said that porn material is easily available on internet. In such a scenario, parents should keep a watch on the mobile phones and computers.
Washington: Indian-American California Senator Kamala Harris has topped the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine's 50 Leading Global Thinkers' list which also features two others from the community
US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley and stand-up comedian Hasan Minhaj have also made it to the list which recognises a remarkable range of individuals who have found ways to exert enormous influence, often in unexpected ways, on a wide range of issues
"They are the doers who defined 2017," said the Foreign Policy magazine while releasing its annual list of global thinkers, which this year number 50 instead of 100 as was the case in most of the previous years
Topping the list is Harris, 53, for giving the Democratic Party a hope in the era of US President Donald Trump, the magazine said
Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, is the first-ever Indian-American to be elected to the United States Senate
Seen as a potential Democratic presidential candidate, Harris is the only black woman in the Senate
"Her professional bona fides and two decades as a prosecutor, her commitment to social justice (she has made immigrants' rights and bail reform the focus of her first year in office), and her personal "firsts" make her appealing to voters still smarting from (Hillary) Clinton's loss and hungry for a charismatic non-white, non-male presidential candidate," the magazine said
South Korean President Moon Jae-in is ranked second in the list for trying to rebuild decent democratic leadership in South Korea
Popular Indian-American comedian Minhaj, 32, is placed third in the ranking for defining the narrative of a "New Brown America", it said
Early this year he was the first Indian-American to have been chosen to host the White House Correspondents Dinner
"The final comedian to be hired by The Daily Show during Jon Stewart's tenure as host, Minhaj has since joined an elite cadre of popular news satirists ? including Stewart, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and John Oliver ? whose joyful embrace of "fake news" often gets at fundamental truths at which the mainstream media can only gesture," it said
Haley, 45, the first Indian-American to be in any presidential cabinet, figures in the list of global thinkers for trying to preserve America's traditional vision of international affairs, said the magazine
"The US foreign policy that Haley has spent just over 10 months defending smacks more of traditional Republican (and, arguably, traditional US) policies more closely in line with Ronald Reagan than with the current president," it said
Among others in the list are presidential candidate for the FARC, the Colombian rebel group that has traded in its weapons for party politics; the female director of Afghanistan's foreign-language film contender for the Oscars; the venture capitalist who is using tech companies to bridge the gap between Israel and Palestine; and an Iraqi member of parliament who is demanding her country recognise the genocide of the Yazidis
"This year's list showcases a remarkable range of individuals who have found ways to exert enormous influence, often in unexpected ways, on a wide range of issues ? from North Korea policy, to the rise of populism, to how we combat fake news, to cementing a new narrative in American culture..
to comedy," said Jonathan Tepperman, editor in chief of the magazine
"These amazing people are not only rethinking our world, but also reshaping it. They defined 2017, and we're thrilled by the chance to recognise their accomplishments ? for good, at least in most cases," he said
The list also includes Chelsea Manning, Stephen Bannon, Roya Sadat and French President Emmanuel Macron.
New Delhi: The polluted Siang river in Arunachal Pradesh has begun taking a toll on animals in a wildlife sanctuary in close proximity with several deaths reported here in recent days. The water of the otherwise pristine river has reportedly turned murky due to construction activity in China upstream.
Siang river turned a pale colour of brown last week with locals blaming China for polluting the river. Even as China continues to deny having any role in making the river - a tributary of Brahmaputra - polluted, Siang continues to flow dirty. And now, it is having an impact not just on the human population but on animals in Daying Ering Wildlife Foundation Eco-Development Society. Founder and Vice Chairman Maksam Tayeng has said that not only are animals either getting sick or dying due to drinking contaminated water, but that migratory birds too are becoming a rarity here.
Water in the Siang river has long been used for consumption but a recent sample taken by the district administration found that toxicity levels have increased exponentially.
Ninong Ering, MP from Arunachal East, previously wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and asked him to look into the matter.
A quick glance at the top news of the day
1. Rahul Gandhi's 6th question to PM Modi is on 7th pay commission
Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi's sixth question to Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on the seventh pay commission and its implementation. Read more here
2. Before marriage, Hadiya's husband was in touch with IS suspects, claims NIA
Husband of Hadiya was allegedly in touch with two key accused in IS Omar-al-Hindi case before his marriage, as per NIA probe.Read more here.
3. Cyclone Ockhi: Gujarat, Maharashtra on alert as IMD issues fresh warning
Cyclone Ockhi is now moving towards the coasts of Gujarat and Maharashtra said the Indian Meteorological Department while issuing a very severe cyclonic storm warning and advising fishermen not to venture into the sea. Read more
4. A Kohinoor paan worth Rs 5,000, meant for the newly-married
Theres a 50-year-old paan shop in Aurangabad, and is popular for a strange reason. Though there are 51 types of paan on the menu of the shop, one of it costs as much as Rs 5,000. Read more
5. Bharti Singh is Mrs Haarsh Limbachiyaa now! See wedding pics
Comedienne Bharti Singh tied the nuptial knot with beau Haarsh Limbachiyaa in a gala wedding ceremony at the Marquis Beach Resort in Goa on Sunday, December 3. Read more
6. Watch: PM Narendra Modis special video message on Navy Day
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday extended his greeting to Navy personnel on the occasion of Navy Day. The Prime Minister took to Twitter to extend his wishes for the Naval force. Read more
New Delhi: Rahul Gandhi on Monday filed nomination to take over as Congress President from his mother Sonia Gandhi. Even as the ascent to the party's top post for the 47-year-old appeared a certainty, a massive debate erupted between members of Congress and their rivals - especially those in the BJP.
While leaders in the Congress called it a historic step, BJP leaders said it the party will soon become history. (Click for pictures of Rahul filing his nomination)
Here is a quick wrap of who said what about Rahul Gandhi potentially taking over the reigns of Congress.
'For the motion'
Manmohan Singh, former PM: Rahul Gandhi is a darling of the Congress and he will carry forward the great traditions of the party. (Full report here)
Navjot Singh Sidhu, Congress leader: We are standing like a mountain behind Rahul Gandhi. He has our support and we are sure he will take the party and the country to new highs.
Farooq Abdullah, National Conference chief: It is a good sign that the young brigade is stepping forward. I hope he takes India to great heights where everyone lives with harmony.
Captain Amrinder Singh, Punjab CM: If you ask me, I think he will make a very good Prime Minister.
Dr Karan Singh, Congress leader: Sonia ji took Congress to new heights, we won many elections under her leadership and now it is time for Rahul Gandhi to take the party forward.
'Against the motion'
PM Narendra Modi: I congratulate the Congress on their 'Aurangzeb Raj.' For us, the well being of the people matters and 125 crore Indians are our high command. (Full report here)
Dharmendra Pradhan, Union Minister: He (Rahul Gandhi) is the owner of the party. His elevation & nomination are their personal matter. They are forced to make this arrangement (election) because of the regulations of EC. However, no democracy is left inside such a big party.
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Union Minister: I congratulate Rahul Gandhi for his promotion without performance, can only be possible in a feudal setup.
Yogi Adityanath, UP CM: Congress has become a burden on this nation, now would be good if after Rahul ji's elevation once and for all this burden is removed. The party will soon be history.
New Delhi: A host of party heavyweights will be present when Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi files his nomination for the party chief's post at its headquarters on Monday.
Six Chief Ministers - Punjab's Amarinder Singh, Karnataka's Siddaramaiah, Himachal Pradesh's Virbhadra Singh, Puducherry's V Narayanasamy, Meghalaya's Mukul Sangma and Mizoram's Lal Thanhawla - are expected to be present when over 90 sets of nomination papers are likely to be filed by various leaders to extend support to Rahul's candidature.
Congress state unit chiefs, senior leaders and Pradesh Congress Committee delegates will be present at the party's central office to express support to him.
The Congress vice president is likely to reach the party headquarters around 10.30 am to file his nomination.
He will sign sets of nomination papers to be filed before the Returning Officer.
Mullappally Ramachandran, the Returning Officer for the organisational election, told IANS that 90 nomination forms were taken by different states though not one has been submitted so far.
The process of nominations started on Friday. The last date for filing nominations is December 4.
On Sunday, many senior Congress leaders, its members of Parliament and PCC chiefs arrived at the party headquarters to sign the papers, including Sachin Pilot, Kapil Sibal, Rajeev Shukla, PC Chacko, Shobha Oza, Hamdulla Sayeed and others.
Apart from states and union territories, senior leaders on the Congress Working Committee (CWC), including former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, AK Antony, Ahmed Patel and Ghulam Nabi Azad are likely to submit different sets of nomination papers.
Rahul Gandhi became the Congress vice president in January 2013.
Meanwhile, endorsing Congress leader Shehzad Poonawalla`s allegation about the party`s presidential election being rigged, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on Sunday called out the rival party for the lack of "internal democracy" within.
"A youngster Shehzad has exposed the rigging that is taking place in the Congress president poll. And Shehzad is a senior Congress leader in Maharashtra. The Congress Party has tried to muzzle his voice and wants to even remove him from their social media groups. What tolerance is this," the PM had said, addressing a rally in Gujarat's Surendranagar, ANI reported.
PM had Modi further dubbed the discord thus exposed within the Congress Party as indicative of its ineffectuality to govern a nation.
"Those who have no internal democracy can`t work for people. I want to say to this youngster Shehzad - `you have done a brave thing but this is sadly what has always happened in Congress`," he had said.
The accusation came full force when Maharashtra Congress secretary Poonawalla called out the process of electing party president as "rigged" and said he had information that the delegates, who were going to vote for the election, were fixed.
(With Agency inputs)
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court began its final hearing in the centuries-old Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute on Tuesday, December 5. The case, which was back in the news recently after Art of Living founder Ravi Shankar's mediation, has the history that dates back to the 15th century. Last month, the Shia Waqf Board proposed that Ram Mandir be built in Ayodhya while the mosque can come up in Lucknow.
The mosque originally dates back to 1528. It was built in Ayodhya by Mir Baqi a commander of Mughal emperor Babur from where it gets the name Babri Masjid. However, a report by the Archaeological Survey of India suggested the existence of a 10th-century temple at the site. Timeline of the Ayodhya dispute
Here's a quick look at the top developments in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute so far in 10 points:
1. The first recorded clash over Ayodhya site took place in 1853, following which the Britishers created a fence to let Hindus and Muslims worship separately in inner and outer courtyards. In 1949, a group of Hindus allegedly sneaked in Lord Ram idol in the mosque, leading to daily offers of prayers to Ram Lalla. Muslims stopped offering namaz. The then government declares the premises a disputed area and locks the gates.
2. In the following years, several Hindus filed suits in different courts seeking exclusive rights to offer prayers to "Ram Lalla". In 1959, Nirmohi Akhara filed suit seeking transfer of disputed site. In 1961, Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Board of Waqf also sought a suit seeking possession of Babri mosque site.
3. In 1980s, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) launched a campaign to re-open the locks of the Babri Masjid so as to "liberate" the birthplace of Lord Ram and build a grand temple. The temple movement was later backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
4. In September 1990, BJP president LK Advani launched a Rath Yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya for building a Ram Temple on the mosque site. It triggered riots across the country, especially in the North Indian belt. Later that year, Advani was arrested in Samastipur in Bihar, following which the BJP withdrew support to Prime Minister VP Singh leading early parliamentary elections.
5. In 1992, thousands amassed at Ayodhya site to demolish the Babri mosque, which triggered widespread communal riots across the country. A makeshift Ram temple was then hurriedly built and the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao vowing to rebuild the mosque.
6. In 2002, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee sets up an Ayodhya Cell in his office to talk to Hindu and Muslim leaders to resolve the dispute. The same year, the High Court begins hearing in the case to determine who owns the Ayodhya site.
7. In 2003, the Archaeological Survey of India excavates in disputed Ayodhya site on the directions of the Allahabad High Court. In its report, it claims to find evidence of a temple beneath the mosque. Muslims dispute the findings.
8. In September 2010, the three-judge bench of Allahabad High Court delivered a historic judgement. The court ruled that the 2.77 acres of disputed Ayodhya land be divided into 3 parts in the following manner:
One third of the land was given to Ram Lalla infant Lord Ram, represented by Hindu Maha Sabha
One third was entrusted to Nirmohi Akhara
One third was to be given to Islamic Sunni Waqf Board.
9. In October 2017, spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar tried to mediate in the Ayodhya dispute, offering an out-of-court solution. It was rejected by political parties and various religious boards.
10. Last month the Shia Central Waqf Board offered a new proposal to the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi conflict in Ayodhya a Ram temple in Ayodhya, a mosque in Lucknow. Several Muslim bodies have rejected the Shia Board's proposal.
New Delhi: Rebel JDU MPs Sharad Yadav and Ali Anwar were disqualified from the Rajya Sabha tonight, according to a communication from chairman of the House M Venkaiah Naidu.
Sharad Yadav and Ali Anwar disqualified from Rajya Sabha (File photos) pic.twitter.com/14U0orb5cC ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2017
Naidu in his communication said they cease to be Rajya Sabha members with immediate effect.
The Rajya Sabha chairman agreed to the JDU's contention that the two senior leaders had "voluntarily given up" their membership by defying their party's directives and attending events of opposition parties.
The JDU had sought their disqualification on the grounds that they had attended a rally of opposition parties in Patna in violation of its direction.
Yadav had joined hands with the opposition after JDU president and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kuamar dumped the Grand Alliance in Bihar and tied up with the BJP.
Yadav was elected to the House last year and his term was scheduled to end in 2022. Anwar's term was to expire early next year.
The former JDU president, who is at present in Gujarat to campaign against the BJP, is expected to respond to his disqualification tomorrow.
Security personnel shot dead two terrosists after they attacked an army convoy in Jammu and Kashmirs Qazigund. One soldier was martyred.
Heavy firing between security personnel and terrorists broke out immediately after an Army convoy was attacked on Monday. According to reports, the terrorists then took cover in a nearby building and soldiers engaged them in fire fight in which two terrorists were killed. The Jammu national highway had to be shut during the operation, leaving many passengers stranded.
Last Thursday, five terrorists had been shot dead in separate incidents. While four terrorists were killed in the Budgam district, one was neutralized by the security personnel in Baramulla's Sopore.
In a separate incident, terrorists hurled a grenade at a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) camp of 182 battalion in Pulwama's Tahab.
KOLKATA: A day after two physical education teachers were arrested in connection with the shocking incident of a four-year-old girl sexual assault inside GD Birla Centre For Education, were sent to two days police custody, the agitated parents on Sunday demanded the arrest of the schol principal.
The parents of the girl lodged a complaint at the Jadavpur Police station, demanding the immediate arrest of the principal of the school, S Nath, for allegedly suppressing facts about the incident and for not taking preventive measures despite a similar assault three years ago.
As hundreds of agitating people sat on a dharna in front of a Metro station today in protest, the city school said it would remain closed from Monday.
A four-year-old nursery student was allegedly sexually assaulted inside the prominent private school on Friday where a similar incident had taken place three years ago, triggering angry protests by guardians.
The agitating parents first blocked the road near the school premises in south Kolkata's Ranikuthi and then marched to Tollygunj where they held the sit in. The protesters were joined by several parents of students from other prominent schools in the city.
The agitating parents carried banners and placards condemning the assault on the minor girl. They created a massive road graffiti of a child student asking for her security, as a symbolic protest to the incident of sexual assault.
Meanwhile, Women and child activists have condemned the molestation of a four-year-old girl in Kolkata and questioned the negligence of GD Birla Centre for Education School authority.
KOLKATA: Protest by parents and guardians against a high profile Kolkata school, where a four-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by male teachers, intensified on Monday morning.
Several parents and relatives gathered in front of the school after authorities announced a sudden closure of the school from Monday onwards until further notice.
Several parents demanded the re-opening of school since as senior classes were scheduled to appear for internal assessments on Monday.
A four-year-old girl child was allegedly sexually abused inside a school by two Physical Education teachers on Thursday. The child's mother found the blood stain on her uniform while picking up from school.
Minor victim kept crying in class, asking for 'Ma'
The two PT teachers were arrested on Friday and sent to two days police custody. The school has suspended both the teachers.
The victim's parents have lodged a complaint at the Jadavpur Police station, demanding the immediate arrest of the principal of the school for allegedly suppressing facts about the incident and for not taking preventive measures despite a similar assault three years ago.
New Delhi: The Madhya Pradesh government on Monday passed a bill dealing with death sentence for convicts of rape and gang-rape involving girls of 12 years or less. State CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan also said repeated stalking will be made a non-bailable offense.
In a country where rape incidents are one of the highest, there has been a growing demand for harsher punishment. Taking cue, the MP government passed the said bill which awards 'hanged till death' for convicts of rape and gang-rape of minor girls below 12 years of age. "Those who rape 12-year-old girls are not human beings but demons. They have no right to live," said CM Chouhan. "Repeated stalking too will be a non-bailable offence and offenders will be punished."
The state may have taken steps towards stern action against those accused of rape but CM Chouhan earlier faced criticism after the Bhopal gang-rape incident.
A 19-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped for three hours by four men in the state capital early November. The four men allegedly tied the girl and took turns to sexually assault her. The accused, as per the reports, even took tea and gutkha breaks before returning to repeatedly rape her.
The victim's mother is a police constable, while her father is associated with Railway Protection Force (RPF).
CM Chouhan had ordered a SIT probe into the incident and four police officials were suspended. However, the incident was termed as a blot on the state government by many including political rivals.
Ahmednagar: A 30-year-old Pune resident called up police posing as an aide of Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and got himself arrested so he could receive healthcare in prison, an official said today.
Amit Jagannath Kamble, a resident of Navi Peth in Pune, was arrested today for making calls to the Ahmednagar police and jail authorities posing as a personal assistant of Fadnavis, Superintendent of Police Ranjankumar Sharma said.
On November 29, Kamble called the police on phone and asked them to shift all the three convicts in the Kopardi rape and murder case to Pune's Yerwada jail instead of taking them to Nagpur prison, he said.
Sharma told PTI Kamble is suffering from a kidney ailment for the last four years and can't afford treatment due to his poor financial condition.
He commits petty crimes to get arrested and avail free treatment and receive healthcare inside the jail, the police officer said.
Kamble has several pending criminal cases against him in Deccan, Vishrambaug, Faraskhana and other police stations in Pune, police sources said.
Mumbai: The Bombay High Court today expressed concern over failure of authorities in adopting norms of solid waste management and asked Maharashtra government to decide within a week the civic body's proposal to increase the capacity of Kanjurmarg dumping ground.
The judges said the situation was very alarming as the rules of waste management were not being followed at the dumping grounds and the state should consider providing alternative land for dumping.
The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai told the HC that every day 3,000 metric tonnes of waste are transported to Kanjurmarg dumping ground.
The three dumping grounds in the city -- Kanjurmarg, Mulund and Deonar -- receive 10,000 metric tonnes of solid waste a day. Mulund and Deonar sites would soon be closed because lease of respective lands expires in November, so the capacity of Kanjurmarg site must be increased, MCGM said.
The division bench, headed by Justice Abhay Oka, was hearing a bunch of PILs alleging that solid waste management rules are not followed at the dumping grounds, leading to pollution. Some PILs filed by local residents want dumping grounds to be shifted because of the foul smell they produce.
The MCGM said its proposal to augment capacity of Kanjurmarg ground to 6,500 metric tonnes by installing modern plants and equipment was pending with the state government.
The court then asked the state government to inform by September 10 its decision on this proposal.
MCGM proposes to hand over the Kanjurmarg site to a private contractor on `build, operate and transfer' basis. To give the land at concessional rate to the contractor, it needs state government's permission.
MUMBAI: As parts of the southern states reel under heavy downpour caused due to Cyclone Ockhi, a high alert was sounded in several parts of Maharashtra and Gujarat as well. Schools will remain shut on Tuesday.
Maharashtra Minister Vinod Tawde took to Twitter and said that schools and colleges in Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Sindhudurga, Thane, Raigad and Palghar Districts have declared the precautionary holiday for the safety of the students due to the serious weather predictions.
Meanwhile, Mumbai Disaster management unit of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has issued an advisory against visiting beaches in view of high tide alert.
The Central Railway Mumbai Division has released updated the emergency numbers. An emergency cell has also been opened at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus and Kalyan.
More than 250 railway police force and Maharashtra State Security Force personnel have been deployed on crowd management and other related activities at stations and yards.
New Delhi: Actor Rishi Kapoor, who was shooting for "Rajma Chawal" in the national capital, has rushed back to Mumbai to be with his family after the demise of veteran actor-producer and his uncle Shashi Kapoor.
Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the 1970s and early 1980s, died on Monday at a hospital in Mumbai. He was 79.
"We are the airport looking at the flight schedule and want to reach Mumbai at the earliest. We might go tonight or tomorrow morning," Shanti Malik, who works closely with the Kapoor family, told IANS on Monday evening.
Malik also said that he doesn't know the cause of Shashi Kapoor's death, and would be in a position to give out details on Tuesday morning.
The younger brother of late Raj and Shammi Kapoor, who were both actors par excellence, Shashi Kapoor started his tryst with acting at the age of four, with plays directed and produced by his father Prithviraj Kapoor.
He started acting in films as a child in the late 1940s. His best-known performances as child artist were in "Aag" (1948) and "Awaara" (1951), where he played the younger version of the character played by his elder brother Raj.
When he grew up, he made his debut as a leading man in the 1961 film "Dharmputra", and went on to appear in more than 150 Hindi films.
Shashi Kapoor, whose nuanced acts in memorable films like "Deewar", "Satyam Shivam Sundaram", "Trishul" and "Kabhi Kabhie" captivated Hindi film buffs, was married to English theatre actress Jennifer Kendal.
He had three children -- Kunal, Karan and Sanjana Kapoor.
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Ram Nath Kovind paid tribute at the demise of the veteran Bollywood superstar Shashi Kapoor, who passed away on Monday evening.
President Kovind took to Twitter saying, "Sorry to hear of the demise of Shashi Kapoor, well-known actor, with a repertoire of Indian and international films. His support for meaningful cinema as a producer and pivotal role in the theatre movement in India too are cherished. Condolences to his family."
Shashi Kapoor's versatility could be seen in his movies as well as in theatre, which he promoted with great passion. His brilliant acting will be remembered for generations to come. Saddened by his demise. Condolences to his family and admirers. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) December 4, 2017
Sorry to hear of the demise of Shashi Kapoor, well-known actor, with a repertoire of Indian and international films. His support for meaningful cinema as a producer and pivotal role in the theatre movement in India too are cherished. Condolences to his family #PresidentKovind President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) December 4, 2017
Kapoor was 79-year-old. The thespian's death has left the industry people and fans in a state of shock.
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh also expressed condolence on the veteran actor's demise. "With his impressive talent and inimitable mannerism actor Shashi Kapoor charmed a generation of Indians. He was a fine actor and a wonderful human being. Saddened to learn of his demise. May his soul rest in peace," read Singh's tweet.
With his impressive talent and inimitable mannerism actor Shashi Kapoor charmed a generation of Indians. He was a fine actor and a wonderful human being. Saddened to learn of his demise. May his soul rest in peace. Rajnath Singh (@rajnathsingh) December 4, 2017
Others including Union Minister Smriti Irani, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi and Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis also took to Twitter to pay tribute to the veteran superstar.
Saddened by the demise of legendary actor Shashi Kapoor ji. His contribution to Indian Cinema is monumental. Shashi jis passing away marks the end of an era. My deepest condolences to his loved ones, colleagues and fans. May his soul rest in peace. Om Shanti! Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) December 4, 2017
We are deeply saddened by the demise of veteran actor #ShashiKapoor.
The Deewaar (1975) star was also memorable in Merchant-Ivory productions The Householder (1963) and Shakespeare Wallah (1965).
He worked as a child actor in Raj Kapoor films Aag (1948) and Awaara (1951). pic.twitter.com/DakQQuFIvB NFAI (@NFAIOfficial) December 4, 2017
A legend has passed away. Shashi Kapoor will remain in our hearts forever. My condolences to his loved ones and all his fans. pic.twitter.com/OmLvtvYZtb Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) December 4, 2017
Sad to hear about noted actor, producer #ShashiKapoor jis demise.
His contribution in Hindi film industry will be remembered forever.
My deepest condolences to his family, friends and millions of fans. December 4, 2017
Actor Mohit Marwah took to Twitter and shared the unfortunate news. He wrote: My favourite shashi kapoor rests in peace today will be remembered always.
The actor was reportedly admitted to Mumbai's Kokilaben Hospital where he breathed his last. The legendary star was under constant medical supervision and was battling health-related issues.
Washington DC: Simon Cowell, who is best known as a Britain's Got Talent judge and music producer, has recently revealed that after the scary incident at his London house, he is struggling to quit smoking and drinking.
The 58-year-old, who missed the first live shows of the current series after falling down the stairs, told the Sun that his efforts to quit the smoking and booze aren't going according to plan.
In October, the 'X Factor' boss got a shock to the system when he was rushed to hospital after passing out and falling down the stairs at his home.
He said, "I knocked myself out, and when I woke up, I thought, Is this heaven? and then after I realised it wasn't, I thought I had broken my neck because the medics wouldn't let me move. I was thinking, Christ almighty. You don't know what's wrong, and neither do they, so it is scary."
Simon, previously revealed he wanted to change his ways of life in order to be a responsible father for his son Eric.
Proud Boys members Brad, left, and Eric meet at The Explorium Brewpub at Southridge Mall in Greendale, Wis. The men, who asked that their last names not be used to avoid retaliation from anti-fascists, say the Proud Boys is a drinking fraternity that opposes white nationalism. Some members believe feminism is cancer and that women would be happier as homemakers and not in the workforce. Photo taken Oct. 4, 2017.
New Delhi: One of the most gorgeous and adorable star kids around, Taimur Ali Khan will turn a year-old on December 20, 2017. Kareena Kapoor Khan and Saif Ali Khan's little munchkin's first birthday is reportedly going to be a grand affair ala Nawab style.
The celebrations are reportedly going to kick-off at Pataudi Palace, Haryana and that's where the royal treat will commence. Taimur's maternal grandfather and veteran actor Randhir Kapoor told Mid-Day.com, "The family will be present at the party. Saif and Kareena want to instil the right values in their children. The boy may have been born to renowned stars, but, must share a close bond with the family.
He further revealed who all are likely to be present at the birthday celebration. "Taimur's grandmother (Sharmila Tagore) will join us. Karisma (Kareena's actor-sister) and her kids, Samaira and Kiaan Raj, are also excited."
Taimur is a photographer's delight and often his pictures go viral in no time. There are several fan clubs on Twitter and Instagram on his name and this shows how much of a star he already has become.
The report quotes another source from the family as saying, "We plan to fly down to the palace by mid-December to start a week-long celebration. Friends of Kareena and Saif will also be present. Shah Rukh Khan and Karan Johar plan to arrive with their kids, AbRam and twins Roohi and Yash. Even Ranbir (Kapoor) and Sara (Ali Khan) plan to make it in time."
The little bundle of joy will be probably be dressed in a tux for his birthday bash and the celebration will be organised keeping the royal Pataudi tradition in place.
Chandigarh: The Congress today released its first list of candidates for the municipal corporation elections in Punjab, choosing to go with its "one family, one ticket" formula with the exception of sitting councillors.
The party, which announced names of 31 candidates for the Patiala Municipal Corporation, has decided to field all the sitting councillors, while taking a tough stand against rebels and deserters, a party spokesperson said in a release.
These decisions were taken at a high-level meeting chaired by Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh.
Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) president Sunil Jakhar was present at the meeting held in New Delhi along with AICC secretary and Punjab in-charge Asha Kumari and AICC secretary Harish Chaudhary, the release said.
The meeting decided that those who left the party in 2012 and 2014 will not be accommodated in the matter of ticket allocation for the municipal corporation polls.
However, those who contested and lost the municipal corporation elections earlier but remained steadfast in their loyalty to the party, would be considered for nomination, the spokesperson said.
In another decision aimed at rewarding loyalty and boosting party morale, it was decided to give preference to original Congress members over those who have joined from other parties, according to a party spokesperson.
There was no change in the party's policy with regard to ticket allocation from the one followed during the Punjab Assembly polls, the spokesperson said.
The success of the Congress in the state elections in February had shown that the merit and winnabilty were the right considerations in choosing the best candidates.
Elections to three municipal corporations -- Amritsar, Ludhiana, Patiala, and 32 municipal councils and nagar panchayats in Punjab will be held on December 17.
New Delhi: On 14th November, 2017, a commercial supply ship arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) carrying all sorts of goodies for the six astronauts in space.
Apart from NASA equipment, the Orbital ATK delivered a delicious haul of make-your-own flatbread pizzas and chocolate and vanilla ice cream.
While all astronauts crave pizza in space, it has been a particularly tough 4 months for Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli. He's been in space since July and has another month to go.
Reportedly, Nespoli said that the idea about making pizzas came up when his boss mentioned it during a public event.
Looks like the astronauts couldn't stay away for too much longer and decided to satisfy their cravings. A video posted by NASA on YouTube shows the astronauts preparing their respective their pizzas, sharing and eating them together.
It sure looks like one hell of a pizza party in space!
Check out the video below:
(Video courtesy: NASA Johnson/YouTube)
So did this out of the world pizza taste good? Nespoli stated it was "unexpectedly delicious", while another described it as "tasty", media reports reveal.
Chennai: Taking note of a picture in an English daily of school children hanging precariously from footboards and windows of government buses, Madras High court today directed the Tamil Nadu government to consider operating special busses exclusively for them.
The first bench of Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice R Hemalatha gave the direction on a suo motu plea initiated by the court.
The issue was brought to the court's notice last week by a lawyer R Y George William, who sought immediate intervention of the court to ensure safety of school going children.
The court then initiated suo motu proceedings and directed the state transport department to file its reply.
In the affidavit filed today, the transport secretary said here are eight transport corporations in the state, operating 20,776 buses and carrying 1.93 crore passengers, including school/college children every day.
The bench took note of it and said the buses were obviously not sufficient to meet the demand of the people, as evident from the photograph, on the basis of which the proceedings were initiated.
"It is said that the government has extended 100 per cent free travel to school children in transport corporation buses. This was absolutely imperative to give meaningful effect to the right to education under Article 21A of the Constitution of India."
"However, merely providing free transport is not enough. The authorities concerned are also required to ensure the safety of children travelling in such buses, the court said.
The court said there can be no doubt that children tend to be adventurous, naughty and sometimes try to travel on foot boards or dangerously hang out of windows as a show of bravado. However, the photograph clearly showed that the bus was already packed.
It said the number of buses exclusively for children in school hours has to be increased. Other people might only be allowed to board the buses if there is sufficient space after the children are accommodated.
If there was demand from children, the passengers would have to get down to make room for them, the court said.
Apart from this, the transport authority should also ensure that children do not board overcrowded buses in a risky manner, the bench said and disposed of the plea.
Chennai: In a swift action, police rescued a one-year-old boy, who was allegedly kidnapped while sleeping with his parents on a pavement here, and arrested two women in this connection.
The women, who were part of a gang had lifted the child with the intention to sell him, police said today.
The toddler was found missing by his father in the wee hours of Saturday, they said.
Following a complaint, a special team was formed and the child was rescued yesterday.
Based on the inputs provided by a bus driver and an auto driver, the team intensified their probe around a nearby locality and managed to trace the child.
They apprehended two women in connection with the abduction, police said adding they are on the lookout for one more woman involved in the crime.
Hyderabad: MIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi has said that the title suit of the Babri Masjid can be decided only on the basis of evidence and not on `aastha` (faith) as the Sangh Parivar is demanding.
Addressing a public meeting here on Sunday, he voiced his apprehension that the Sangh Parivar might vitiate the atmosphere in the country on the issue before the 2019 elections to gain political mileage.
The Member of Parliament condemned the statements by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders that the construction of the Ram temple in Uttar Pradesh`s Ayodhya will begin on October 18, 2018.
Owaisi wondered how they could make such a statement when the title suit was still pending in the Supreme Court.
He said such attempts could repeat the violence and bloodshed witnessed in the country in the 1990s during BJP leader L.K. Advani`s Rath Yatra and after the demolition of the Babri mosque. He warned that this could weaken the country.
The public meeting was organised by the Joint Action Committee comprising various Muslim organisations just days ahead of the 25th anniversary of the demolition of the mosque on December 6.
In 1992, on that date, a large number of religious volunteers or "Kar Sevaks" gathered in the temple town and demolished the 16th century structure, leading to widespread rioting and political crisis.
Taking strong exception to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat`s statement that only a temple could be built in Ayodhya, Owaisi said: "Muslims would not be cowed down by such threats."
"What is pending in the Supreme Court is title suit, which will be decided purely on evidence and not an aastha," he said.
Owaisi said Babri Masjid was not the issue of Muslims but an issue linked to secularism. "This is an issue which will decide the course of this country," he said.
The MP said he supports Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan`s suggestion that the title suit should not be taken up for hearing till the criminal case relating to the demolition of the mosque was disposed off.
Owaisi also quoted former Chief Justice A.M. Ahmedi reportedly saying that had Justice Venkata Challaiah not permitted Kar Seva, it would not have led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
He said even 25 years after the demolition, the contempt of court case had not come up for hearing in the apex court.
The MIM president alleged that the BJP is returning to its real agenda as it has failed to provide jobs to the unemployed and demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax has hit the people and dealt a blow to the economy.
Babri Masjid Action Committee convenor Zafaryab Jeelani said it was not an issue of "aastha" but of the political interests of some communal groups. He recalled that even the FIR registered in 1949 states that idols were stealthily kept in the mosque.
He said some elements tried to spread the falsehood that it was the birthplace of Ramchanderji (Lord Ram) but this has nothing to do with facts.
The speakers called up on Muslims to peacefully observe the shutdown on December 6 to demand reconstruction of the mosque at its original place.
Lucknow: Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat on Monday lauded his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath for his drive against criminals and said that he will also ask the police in the hill state to emulate the crackdown.
Addressing an event in Gorakhpur, the hometown of Adityanath, Rawat said it was heartening to see that criminals in Uttar Pradesh were being sent to the "right place".
He was referring to the spate of police gunfights in the state in which several criminals have been killed and arrested.
Rawat also urged the parents to keep pace with the changing times. "Technology is changing the way around us. Even though many parents do not like it, we will have to adjust to the change which is also for good," he said.
The Uttarakhand Chief Minister also urged students to focus on their talents so that India could become the country Prime Minister Narendra Modi has envisaged.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, who also attended the event, called for a holistic education system where education was within everyone`s reach and there was no discrimination.
Adityanath also said that there should be lesser holidays in schools and exhorted teachers and management of various schools to take part in the `Swacch Bharat Abhiyan` to make it an even bigger success.
Southern Finland: A century after gaining independence from its powerful neighbour Russia, Finland continues to consolidate its ties to the West, as tensions flare between Moscow and the West.
Russia`s 2014 annexation of Crimea and an uptick in military activity in the Baltic region have tested Finnish-Russian relations, painstakingly maintained over the years with scrupulous diplomatic efforts.
Like its neighbours Sweden, Denmark, Poland and the Baltic states, Finland has modernised its military in recent years and has stepped up initiatives tying itself closer to NATO -- but has stopped short of joining the alliance.
And Finland`s political rhetoric remains cautious when it comes to Russia, its fifth biggest trading partner.
"We are ready to defend ourselves, but we don`t speculate about the direction or the countries" the threat could come from, Finnish Foreign Minister Timo Soini told AFP in an interview.
"We are two independent nations, we don`t ask permission from each other" before making strategic decisions, he said.Finland belonged to Sweden for six centuries -- until 1809 -- and was then a Russian Grand Duchy until 1917, only gaining its independence at the end of World War I after the fall of the Tsarist Russian empire.
The Soviet Union recognised Finland`s independence in 1918, but the Nordic country had to fight off its great eastern neighbour during the winter of 1939-1940, and again from June 1941 to September 1944 to avoid being occupied by the Communists.
The 1947 Treaty of Paris recognised Finland`s defeat at the end of World War II, and it had to pay substantial war reparations to the USSR and permanently cede 10 percent of its territory, the eastern part of Karelia.
The human and territorial losses from these conflicts remain very present in the minds of today`s 5.5 million Finns. An old saying goes: "Nothing good comes from the East, only the Sun."
"From the Finnish point of view, (Russia) is not a real threat but rather a big neighbour they`re still a bit wary of, and with whom they have a joint history that has not always been easy," Barbara Kunz, a Nordic specialist at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), told AFP.Careful not to wake the Russian bear, Finnish leaders publicly stayed on good terms with Russia and refrained from expressing any open criticism during the Cold War, a process that coined the term "Finlandization".
But the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 changed everything. Remaining militarily non-aligned, Finland rapidly joined the European Union in 1995, swapping its currency, the markka, for the euro in 2002.
The Finnish border is now the longest EU border with Russia, stretching 1,340 kilometres (833 miles). Anchoring itself firmly to the West, Finland is keen to make sure it has a diplomatic and security "shield".
"We are a part of the West, and we need the Western power to stabilise the situation in terms of Russia," said Markku Kivinen, head of Helsinki`s Aleksanteri Institute, a centre for Russian and Eastern European studies.Unlike Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, the Baltic states which won their independence in the early 1990s and joined NATO a decade later, Finland has no intention of joining the military alliance for fear of angering Moscow.
Last month, a public opinion poll found that only 22 percent of Finns have a good opinion of NATO, a fall of three percentage points from a year earlier. The policy of military non-alignment is broadly supported in the country.
"We need to stay independent. We never know what could happen with Russia," Heini Vahtera, a Helsinki resident in her 30s, told AFP.
Joining the Atlantic alliance would "elicit a pretty harsh reaction from the Russians", noted Jean de Gliniasty, a Russia expert at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS) and a former French envoy to Moscow.
But a diplomatic source close to NATO said if Finland were to join, it would only have symbolic value as the country already joined its Partnership for Peace programme in 1994 and has participated in its joint operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan among others.
Meanwhile in Moscow, officials note that Russia has been closely associated with Finland`s centenary celebrations which will be formally marked on December 6, its Independence Day.
Visiting Finland in July, Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the quality of "political dialogue" between the two neig
Jerusalem: Israel on Monday harshly criticised the European Union over a plan for its ambassador to participate in an event marking 50 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
The dispute comes ahead of a planned visit next week by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Brussels for talks with EU foreign ministers.
"For reasons unknown, the EU people believe that the way to Israelis` hearts is by spitting in their faces," Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said in comments to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which he later confirmed to AFP.
"We are again seeing the same patronising approach of preaching hypocritical, condescending morality that just pushes away rather than bringing closer. It is sad and superfluous."
He was referring to an exhibition featuring portraits of 50 Palestinians born in 1967, when the Israeli occupation began, organised by Israeli rights group B`Tselem.
An EU official confirmed to AFP that the bloc`s ambassador to Israel, Emanuele Giaufret, planned to visit the exhibition in connection with International Human Rights Day on Thursday in Jaffa, part of Tel Aviv.
Israel`s right-wing government accuses groups such as B`Tselem of unfairly tarnishing the country`s image for political reasons, charges they firmly deny.
In April, Netanyahu cancelled talks with German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel in a rare move after the visiting diplomat declined to call off meetings with rights groups critical of Israel`s government, including B`Tselem.
Netanyahu`s talks with EU foreign ministers on December 11 are considered "informal" and come amid continuing tensions over Israeli settlement building in the West Bank.
A number of European Union states have refused for several months to approve a formal meeting with Israel`s government due to a lack of unanimity among members on how to condemn Israeli settlement building and to express frustration over stalled peace efforts.
Cairo: Five terrorists were killed today in exchange of fire with security forces in Sharqeya governorate, security sources said.
They said that terrorists clashed with security forces during a raid on Belbeis-10th of Ramadan road in Sharqeya.
The raid came over a week after a terrorist attack on a mosque in North Sinai in which more than 300 people were killed.
Terrorist attacks, targeting police and military personnel, have increased following the ouster of former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by the military, following massive protests against his rule.
Hundreds of police and army personnel have been killed since then.
The military has launched security campaigns in Egypt's restive North Sinai province, arrested suspects and demolished houses that belong to terrorists, including those facilitating tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip.
United Nations: A top UN official will travel to North Korea this week for talks with officials there, a UN spokesman said Monday, amid heightened tensions over Pyongyang`s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
Jeffrey Feltman, the UN under-secretary-general for political affairs, "will discuss with DPRK officials issues of mutual interest and concern," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, using the acronym for North Korea`s official name.
Feltman will visit North Korea from Tuesday to Friday, he said.
Kano: Six police officers were killed in northeast Nigeria, police said on Monday, in an attack blamed on cattle herders following deadly clashes with farmers over land.
"We lost six policemen in an ambush by suspected Fulani herdsmen," Othman Abubakar, a spokesman for the Adamawa state police, told AFP.
"The police were on their way to Dowaya village, outside Numan (district), with the intention of disarming Fulani herders, who reports said were carrying arms."
No arrests had been made in connection with the ambush, which occurred on Friday, but it comes as the state is on heightened alert because of rising tensions between herders and farmers.
On November 20, at least 30 people were killed when farmers from the Christian Bachama ethnic group stormed four settlements of the Muslim Fulani herders in Numan district.
Herders representatives gave a higher death toll and said women and children were among those killed as they tried to flee.
Jaura Hammayidi, a herder in the area, said he did not know who was responsible for the ambush but claimed it followed a police attack on the community.
"After the attack on four villages, our people were left with no option but to relocate to other areas," he said.
"Duwaya village was one of the villages our people moved to and they began the 40-day mourning of the slain women and children.
"Surprisingly, the police came attacking and they shot two people dead."
Nigeria`s central states have been riven for decades with ethnic, sectarian and religious violence linked to tensions between farmers and herders over land and water.
But groups tracking the conflict say the unrest is spreading and non-Fulani communities have set up civilian militias because of the absence of effective law enforcement.
"This pattern is repeating itself across the country on both sides of the River Niger," SBM Intelligence said in a recent report.
"If nothing is done urgently, it is going to get worse."
The International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based think tank, said in September that some 2,500 people were killed and tens of thousands were forced from their homes last year.
Such attacks were "becoming as potentially dangerous as the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast", it added.
Seoul: The US and South Korea on Monday kicked off their largest-ever joint air exercise, an operation North Korea has labelled an "all-out provocation", days after Pyongyang fired its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile.
The five-day Vigilant Ace drill -- involving 230 aircraft, including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and tens of thousands of troops -- began Monday morning, Seoul`s air force said.
Pyongyang over the weekend blasted the drill, accusing US President Donald`s Trump`s administration of "begging for nuclear war".
The annual exercise comes five days after the nuclear-armed North test-fired a new ICBM, which it says brings the whole of the continental United States within range.
As tensions surged, US Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican and foreign policy hawk, warned that the US was moving closer to "preemptive war" with the North.
"If there`s an underground nuclear test (by the North), then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States," Graham told the CBS show "Face the Nation".
The isolated and impoverished North has staged six increasingly powerful atomic tests since 2006 -- most recently in September.
In recent years Pyongyang has accelerated its drive to bring together nuclear and missile technology capable of threatening the US, which it accuses of hostility.
"The preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures. Every missile test, every underground test of a nuclear weapon, means the marriage is more likely," Graham said.
His remarks echoed those of Trump`s National Security Adviser HR McMaster, who told a security forum on Saturday that the potential for war with the North "is increasing every day".
This year`s US and South Korean wargames feature a number of powerful jet fighters newly mobilised for the event, including six F-22s and 18 units of F-35 combat jets, the US air force said.
It also involves simulated precision attacks on the North`s military installations, including its missile launch sites and artillery units, Yonhap news agency said, citing unnamed Seoul sources.The North has boasted that the Hwasong 15 ICBM tested on Wednesday is capable of delivering a "super-large" nuclear warhead anywhere in the US mainland.
Analysts agree that the latest test showed a big improvement in potential range, but say it was likely achieved using a dummy warhead that would have been quite light.
They say a missile carrying a much heavier nuclear warhead would struggle to travel as far.
They are also sceptical that Pyongyang has mastered the sophisticated technology required to protect such a warhead from the extreme temperatures and stresses encountered as the missile hurtles back to Earth.
The latest launch, which saw the missile drop into Japan`s economic waters, was condemned by Tokyo`s parliament Monday, which slammed the North`s rogue weapons programme as an "imminent threat".
"This is a frontal challenge against the international community that must not be tolerated," added the resolution by Japan`s upper house, which came as the country`s hawish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said talking to the reclusive state was "meaningless".
The North`s leader Kim Jong-Un has presided over significant progress in the country`s widely-condemned nuclear and missile programmes since taking power in 2011.
A nuclear standoff between Kim and Trump in recent months has seen the pair trade personal insults.
The tensions have fuelled concerns of another conflict, more than six decades after 1950-53 Korean War that left much of the peninsula in ruins.
But even some Trump advisers say US military options are limited when Pyongyang could launch an artillery barrage on the South Korean capital Seoul -- only around 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the heavily-fortified border and home to 10 million people.
Estimates on the potential casualties from another war vary widely.
The North has thousands of conventional artillery units along the border with the South that analysts say could kill tens of thousands.
In one of the latest estimates, Scott Sagan, senior fellow at the Centre for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, said the toll could be as high as one million people from just the first day of a conflict.
FIFA World Cup 2022 Qatar: Cristiano Ronaldo to Lionel Messi, stars likely to play their last WC
December 1, 2017
CAIRO On Nov. 16, after four consecutive meetings with all concerned parties, the Cairo "Declaration of Unification" of Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) was signed at the headquarters of the Egyptian General Intelligence under the auspices of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni. The parties agreed that the General Intelligence would follow up on the implementation of the items included in the agreement, without disclosing more details.
Following the signing, the Egyptian state agency said in a statement that the document will allow for the return of Sudanese refugees to their countries and internally displaced persons to their areas of origin under the supervision of the Egyptian intelligence.
Observers described the agreement as a successful move to heal the rift and end the ongoing South Sudanese conflict. But it raises many questions, especially since Cairo was not involved in the past in the unification of the SPLM to put an end to the conflict that has been ongoing since the South Sudanese Civil War erupted in December 2013 between the government forces of South Sudanese President Salva Kiir Mayardit and supporters of his former first deputy, Riek Machar. Thousands of civilians have been killed and millions have fled to neighboring countries.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about 1,800 refugees from South Sudan arrived daily in Uganda in the past year, and they now account for 1 million people. There are another 1 million South Sudanese refugees spread in Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
The SPLM was established in 1983 when then-Sudanese President Jaafar Nimeiri deployed a military force led by John Garang from the Dinka tribe to stop the military uprising led by some 500 soldiers in South Sudan. However, Garang joined the rebels and created the SPLM, saying his move aimed at ending the control of the Khartoum central government, not achieving independence from Sudan. The war continued until 2005, when the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed. As per the agreement, Garang was named first vice president of Sudan. However, a dispute over the nature of relations with Khartoum emerged between Garang and his deputy Mayardit. When Garang was killed in a helicopter crash, Mayardit replaced him and named Machar as first deputy.
In 2011, South Sudan gained independence from Khartoum, and two years later, on Dec. 15, 2013, a civil war erupted in South Sudan between Mayardit and his supporters from the Dinka tribe, and Machar and his followers from the Nuer tribe. The war ended on Aug. 17, 2015, with the signing of a peace agreement calling for the return of Machar to his position as first deputy to Mayardit.
In July 2016, Mayardit dismissed Machar following armed clashes between their supporters in Juba, the South Sudan capital. Sporadic confrontations are still ongoing between the two parties.
In his article published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Shorouk on Nov. 21, South Sudanese author Deng Aling said that Egypts interest in unifying the movement, especially at this time, mainly aims at limiting the role of Sudan, Ethiopia and Israel in South Sudan. He said, The foreign policy of the government of Juba is not yet understood, but the relations with neighboring Ethiopia are improving on one hand and deteriorating [on the other]. The same applies to the relations with Sudan. As for Israel, it wants to step in in South Sudan for several reasons.
Israel was one of the first countries to support the separatist movement in South Sudan. Israel considers South Sudan an important foothold to gain in Africa, in addition to benefiting from oil and the Nile waters. Israel signed the first joint international agreement with South Sudan for cooperation in the oil and Nile water areas on July 31, 2012.
Aling added, That is why Egypt decided to interfere and to find a solution to the issue through the reunification of the SPLM, which will eventually enable [Egypt] to be fully present in the south if the unity is to be achieved and the conflict to be resolved. This [move] would also allow [Egypt] to decrease, even if only slightly, the roles of Sudan, Ethiopia and Israel in the south, thus securing the White Nile from any attempts to use its water."
Since the civil war erupted in 2013, relations between South Sudan and Ethiopia went sour, as Juba accused Addis Ababa of sheltering, training and equipping rebel forces, which Ethiopia denies. Also, the relationship between South Sudan and Sudan is not at its best in light of pending issues that remain unsolved, such as the disputed lands in the Abyei area.
The signing of the Declaration of Unification comes at the same time as the stalled negotiations on the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan. Egyptian Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Mohamed Abdel Ati said in a statement Nov. 12 that there is a difference of views between the three countries, in spite of Egypt's approval of the initial report submitted by French consultancy firm BRL before completing the technical study on the effects of the Renaissance Dam on Egypt and Sudan. Ati did not specify the nature of disputes.
The radical change in Egyptian foreign policy was not limited to the African continent, as Cairo succeeded in concluding agreements in neighboring Arab countries.
In Palestine, Egypt achieved reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas on Oct. 12, in the presence of Egyptian intelligence Chief Khaled Fawzy, after a 10-year division following Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007.
Meanwhile, Cairo is seeking to unify the Libyan army under the command of Gen. Khalifa Hifter. Three meetings were held in Cairo between military personnel from various Libyan areas. The latest such meeting was held Oct. 30, in the presence of officers from the Libyan city of Misrata and officials from the western and eastern areas. The meeting aimed at unifying the military institution in Libya and forming a unified military council that includes all members of the armed forces, away from politics, under the sponsorship of Mahmoud Ibrahim Hegazi, the chief of staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces.
Egyptian army spokesman Tamer Rifai announced on Nov. 2 the formation of a group of specialized technical committees to look into mechanisms for unifying the Libyan military and ways to achieve this.
Hassan Nafea, a professor of political science at Cairo University, told Al-Monitor that Egypt's foreign policy changed radically in the wake of the events of June 30, 2013, that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood regime. Egypt is now focusing on confronting the group and other radical movements in other countries for fear of the return of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Nafea added, This is reflected in Egypts policy, whether in Palestine, in Libya or even in Syria. The Egyptian political system always seeks to strengthen the ruling regimes in Syria and Libya for fear of the rise of Islamic movements and their control over the government. A case in point is the huge Egyptian support to [Hifter]. In Palestine, Egypt succeeded in completing the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, one of the branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, to prevent the infiltration of extremist elements through Hamas into the Sinai Peninsula.
Nafea noted that Egypts policy also changed in Africa after the former Egyptian regimes distanced Egypt from the African continent. Egypt seeks to become a main actor in the internal scene of South Sudan in order to have pressure cards against Sudan. Such pressure would serve Egypts interests, especially since Sudan has been pressuring Cairo to give up the Halayeb area or refer to international arbitration, which Egypt completely rejects.
Nafea concluded, "Unfortunately, the current Egyptian regime is not aware that it has succeeded in exhausting the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist movements, The regime still fears these movements and the [threats they pose] on its survival.
YEREVAN, DECEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. The State National Academic Choir of Armenia is celebrating its 80th anniversary.
The choir is preparing for an anniversary concert on this occasion on December 5.
The State National Academic Choir of Armenia was founded in 1937.
Maestro Hovhannes Chekijyan is leading the choir as its artistic director and conductor since 1961.
In addition to nationwide performances, the choir had concerts in 180 cities abroad, with a total of 820 performances. The choir has performed both Armenian and foreign classic compositions in 27 various languages in cities such as New York, Prague, Paris, Beirut and others.
A joint production of the State National Academic Choir of Armenia and Russias symphonic orchestra won the Grand Prix in Paris, with numerous other awards and titles being bestowed.
YEREVAN, DECEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. Armenian foreign minister Edward Nalbandian on December 4 received Michael Christides, Secretary General of the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC), press service of the ministry told Armenpress.
Welcoming the guest the Armenian FM said Armenia attaches importance to the regional economic integration processes, and guided by this principle, it actively takes part in the multisectoral cooperation within the BSEC.
BSEC Secretary General thanked for the reception and expressed satisfaction over Armenias active engagement within the frames of the BSEC.
The officials discussed Armenias upcoming chairmanship at the BSEC and its priorities.
They also touched upon the priority cooperation directions on the sidelines of the Organization, as well as issues relating to the reforms in BSEC.
FM Nalbandian said certain attempts to act against the rules of procedures and principles of the Organization within the frames of the BSEC Parliamentary Assembly are not useful and impact the structures reputation.
YEREVAN, DECEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. The Regulatory Commission of Public Services of Armenia will debate during an upcoming December 6 session the issue of fining Electric Networks of Armenia for 5 million drams.
The Commission reported that the ENA has violated the rights of certain consumers.
The violation concern certain inconsistencies of in contract forms.
Back in October, administrative proceedings were launched on the matter, but ENA failed to produce any explanation.
If the governmental watchdog decided to fine the company, it will be bound to pay 5 million drams within two weeks.
ENA can dispute the decision both in the commission and court.
YEREVAN, DECEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. Members of the Armenian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (PABSEC) assure that the formulations in the declaration, which is dedicated to the organizations 25thanniversary, over the settlement of conflicts can in no way affect the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement, reports Armenpress.
During a press conference in the Parliament, Gagik Minasyan head of the Armenian delegation at the PABSEC, stated that this structure is not an independent body as it is subjected to the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, therefore, the Assembly is low with its status, and its decisions have no serious legal force.
The formulation in the declaration over the settlement of conflicts has been added by the proposal of the head of the Ukrainian delegation and is mainly directed against Russia, but this formulation can in no way affect the settlement of conflicts, as well as that of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, Minasyan said.
He added that only the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship has a mandate to settle the NK conflict which was once again reaffirmed by the provision in the agreement signed between Armenia and the EU on the conflict settlement. The Nagorno Karabakh conflict must be settled within the frames of the Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship format based on the three main proposed principles, therefore, the formulations in such declarations regarding the settlement of conflicts can have no impact on the conflict settlement, Gagik Minasyan said.
Member of the Armenian delegation at the BSEC PA, ARF faction secretary Aghvan Vardanyan said the Assembly is exclusively an economic structure and has no mandate to give political assessments, thus, he considered unacceptable including the formulation regarding the conflict settlement in the declaration which has been made without discussing it with the Armenian delegation. That political formulation was really absurd, but it is understandable since the Assemblys session was being held in Kiev, Russia was not participating in the session and the head of the Ukrainian delegation tried to do something against Russia. They did it secretly, without discussing it with us since they knew that we will oppose as we have a clear stance that this structure should mainly focus on economic issues, Aghvan Vardanyan said.
He added that the Armenian delegation, overall, put the remaining delegations in difficult situation by leaving the session hall after making a tough statement.
Member of the Armenian delegation, Tsarukyan faction secretary Vahe Enfiajyan said the formulation on conflict settlements has been included in the declaration by Ukraine, and it was a step against Russia. He is also confident that this formulation can in no way affect the existing conflicts, as well as the NK conflict settlement. The MP informed that the final decisions are made by the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, rather than by the Parliamentary Assembly, and the Organization adopts decisions exclusively based on consensus, this means that Armenia can cancel any formulation at any moment.
President Donald Trump meets with Navajo Code Talkers, Fleming Begaye Sr., seated and Thomas Begay, center, in the Oval Office of the White House, Nov. 27, 2017. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
YEREVAN, DECEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. Vice Speaker of the Armenian Parliament Eduard Sharmazanov on December 4 participated in the international conference titled Members of Parliament vs Drugs at the invitation of the Russian State Duma during which he delivered speech, press service of the Parliament told Armenpress.
Sharmazanov said the drug trafficking and their illegal circulation issues are a threat to the international community. This crime is closely linked to other challenges, including international terrorism and illegal money laundering. Given that the illegal circulation of drugs is a challenge to todays world, I want to state that it is also a threat to security. The fight against this phenomenon requires a united and coordinated effort. Armenia urges to carry out a more decisive fight against this disease and develop a common strategy to counter this threat. Armenia has a similar effective experience with the CSTO member states, and this conference can open a new page and opportunity against these threats, Eduard Sharmazanov said.
The Vice Speaker noted with regret that during the conference they once again witnessed the fake and anti-Armenian rhetoric of the Azerbaijani representatives. Instead of making meaningless accusations on Armenia and Artsakh, they would rather read the international reports about Azerbaijan. And I call on the participants of absurd remarks on Artsakh and all international partners to visit Artsakh. Visit and you will see that the citizens of Artsakh are building a democratic, free and independent Republic. I call on all of us to fight against terrorism, lie, racism, drug trafficking and all international challenges through joint efforts, he said.
Summing up my speech, taking into account the relevance of the issue, I suggest to discuss the main topic of the Members of Parliament vs Drugs conference, Sharmazanov added.
YEREVAN, 4 DECEMBER, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 4 December, USD exchange rate up by 0.13 drams to 484.34 drams. EUR exchange rate down by 2.07 drams to 574.19 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate down by 0.03 drams to 8.22 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 2.49 drams to 650.52 drams.
The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.
Gold price down by 67.83 drams to 19861.95 drams. Silver price down by 2.27 drams to 255.69 drams. Platinum price down by 89.50 drams to 14544.15 drams.
YEREVAN, DECEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. Defense Minister of Canada Harjit Sajjan highlights defense cooperation between Armenia and Canada.
ARMENPRESS reports, citing Horizon Weekly, the Defense Minister of Canada stressed that such cooperation in the sidelines of UN peacekeeping missions is particularly important in terms of ensuring regional stability.
The Canadian Defense Minister also referred to his countrys programs of sending peacekeeping units to regions in conflict, as well as details of Canadas military budget for the upcoming decade.
Harjit Sajjan is the first Defense Minister of Canada who represents ethnic minority - Canadian Sikhs Community.
YEREVAN, DECEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. Co-chairman of Switzerland-Armenia parliamentary friendship group Dominique de Buman has been elected President of the lower house of the Swiss parliament, the National Council.
ARMENPRESS reports de Buman told La Gruyere that Armenia will be among the first countries he will visit as President of the National Council. There will be official visits by delegations, first to Armenia during the period of February 3-8. It is the country of my preferences. I have achieved the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the parliament, he said.
Dominique de Buman added that he also plans to pay official vists to Brazil, France and Germany.
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The Courts of Appeals for the Second and Seventh Circuits upheld laws restricting retail sales of companion animals from puppy mills and other unscrupulous breeders where animals are often raised in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. Photo by Meredith Lee/The HSUS
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As we enter the final month of the year, Ill blog frequently on the highlights of 2017, beginning today with a pretty extraordinary year in the courts. The HSUSs cadre of two dozen in-house lawyers has been pushing the cause forward in the courts and in legislative assemblies at the state and federal level. Each year, the Animal Protection Litigation team pursues a bevy of lawsuits and legal petitions to support our major campaigns. They also work to defend laws under attack by government officials and by our political adversaries. And they work at the front-end of new lawmaking, by helping draft and review state and federal animal protection bills and ballot measures. They are aided in their efforts by a network of hundreds of lawyers throughout the country, including some of the best-known firms in the legal profession, from Latham & Watkins to Schiff Hardin, and many more.
This year, our legal team secured a series of wins in the federal courts, affirming the authority of states and local jurisdictions to regulate the trade in animals and animal products and to eliminate local market activity that fuels the inhumane treatment of animals, and cruel conditions in which the animals are raised. Weve racked up big wins in our campaigns against trophy hunting, puppy mills, inhumane confinement and other factory farming abuses, and much more. In particularly, the U.S. Courts of Appeals issued a series of rulings affirming the rights of states to adopt strong animal protection and food safety laws, including by restricting the sale of inhumanely produced animal parts and products.
Here is a look at the top legal victories of 2017.
WILDLIFE PROTECTION
Endangered Species Act protections restored to Great Lakes wolves: In August, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services decision to remove Endangered Species Act protection for wolves in the Great Lakes region, affirming the outcome by a U.S. District Court. The HSUS brought the original lawsuit, after polling and ballot measures showed the citizens of the Great Lakes region strongly favored wolf protection and thought federal delisting was premature. The court agreed that the Fish and Wildlife Service violated federal law by engaging in a piecemeal approach to wolf conservation, ruling that the agency must consider the impact of regional ESA listing and delisting decisions on all wolves in the lower 48 states. The decision has broader implications for ESA-listed species that exist in only small pockets of their former range. We are working hard to protect the federal court rulings from an override by some Congressional lawmakers.
Californias long-standing mountain lion protection law affirmed: Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about a legal victory for Americas majestic lions, also upheld in a critical decision by the 9th Circuit. More than 25 years ago, California voters approved Proposition 117 to codify a long-standing moratorium on lion hunting, first imposed by then Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1972. Proposition 117 prohibits the killing or injuring of any mountain lion, as well as the import into California and sale within the state of any mountain lion or any part thereof, regardless of the origin of the animal. Following the ouster of a California Fish and Game Commissioner for going to Idaho and shooting a lion in order to import it to Californiaeven though that practice was forbidden under Proposition 117, a state law he was charged with enforcingSafari Club International brought a belated challenge to the import provision of the 1990 law. In November, the Ninth Circuit upheld Proposition 117, rejecting the Safari Clubs claims that the law unduly burdened interstate commerce and that the law unfairly extended protected status to mountain lions when other species remain subject to hunting.
Aquarium fish collection industry permits disallowed without assessment of impacts: In September, the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled in favor of The HSUS and co-plaintiffs, requiring the state of Hawaii to review the environmental impacts of commercial aquarium fish collection prior to issuing permits for those activities. This industry wreaks havoc on marine ecosystems by capturing hundreds of thousands of coral reef fish annually, often using cruel methods such as fizzing the fish by puncturing their swim bladders. The Hawaii Supreme Court decision overturned rulings by lower courts and held that the aquarium fish collection industry is subject to the Hawaii Environmental Policy Act.
FACTORY FARMING
Ninth Circuit revives California law banning the sale of products from force-fed birds: In September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous ruling reinstating Californias law banning the sale of foie grasa fattened bird liver productmade by the practice of force-feeding birds. The court rejected foie gras producers contentions that the California law, which is focused on the way the birds are treated on the farm, was preempted by federal food safety and meat inspection laws. The court held that force-feeding is not a physical component in poultry meat and therefore the California law is not an ingredient requirement that can only be established by the federal government. Thus, the producers attempt to overturn Californias humane law fared no better than in 2013, when they failed to convince the same court that the California law violates the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. The court held then that California has every right to regulate activity within its state market to prevent complicity in a practice it deems cruel to animals.
U.S. Supreme Court lets appellate court ruling stand to affirm Californias anti-confinement law for laying hens: In May, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by several Big-Ag-aligned state attorneys general and governors, including former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who were seeking to overturn Californias landmark egg sales law, AB 1437, which requires eggs sold in the state come from hens not subjected to cruel confinement practices. This was the latest in a long string of failed attempts by Big Ag and its allies to overturn AB 1437 and Proposition 2, a ballot initiative which went into effect the same year mandating that laying hens, breeding sows, and veal calves must have room to stand up, lie down, turn around freely, and extend their limbs. In a 2016 decision concluding that several attorneys general bringing the case did not have standing to sue, the Ninth Circuit noted that AB 1437 does not distinguish among eggs based on their state of origin and therefore is not discriminatory. We recently launched a new initiative in California, which will be on the ballot in 2018, to build on that law by assuring that eggs, veal, and pork sold in the state, regardless of where they originate, meet even higher animal welfare and food safety standards.
Federal court vacates exemption for emissions reporting by industrial farming operations: In April, the D.C. Circuit vacated a 2008 Bush-era EPA regulation exempting the largest industrialized animal ag facilities, called CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) from their legal obligations to report releases of harmful air emissions of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. The HSUS and a coalition of public interest groups filed suit challenging the regulation, arguing that it violated the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation & Liability Act. Compliance with the D.C. Circuits ruling will mean that CAFOs must report their dangerous emissions, and there will be more opportunity for citizens and public interest groups to expose the harm that factory farms cause to humans, animals, and the environment, and for local government officials to plan for disasters and other emergency events.
PUPPY MILLS
New York and Chicago pet store ordinances upheld: Earlier this year, the Courts of Appeals for the Second and Seventh Circuits upheld laws restricting retail sales of companion animals from puppy mills and other unscrupulous breeders where animals are often raised in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, leading to health and behavioral problems for the animals, and emotional and financial burdens on consumers. The laws at issuea New York City ordinance prohibiting pet stores from selling puppies obtained from middleman brokers and breeders lacking a strong record of compliance with the Animal Welfare Act, and a Chicago ordinance requiring that pet stores only sell dogs, cats, and rabbits that have been obtained from animal control or animal rescue organizationsare aimed at curbing the sale of puppy mill dogs, and encouraging adoption of animals from the many overwhelmed animal shelters around the country.
ANIMAL CRUELTY
Ohio prohibitions on bestiality and animal fighting upheld: Three separate state courts in Ohio issued rulings preserving certain provisions of a law that make bestiality and animal fighting felony crimes in the state. The multifaceted law was challenged by municipal governments arguing that it violated a state constitutional requirement that legislation address only a single subject. The plaintiffs centered their challenge on provisions unrelated to the animal protection provisions of the law, and The HSUS filed briefs in the cases successfully arguing that the animal protection provisions are the primary subject and original focus of the law and should be retained. The new law was recently used to bring the first ever prosecution for bestiality in Ohio.
New Georgia cost-of-care law implemented in cruelty prosecution: Following up on a 2016 law that our legal team helped secure, the team assisted Habersham County (Georgia) officials with recovering almost $70,000 in costs of care in the first case involving the application of the new law. In passing the law, the Georgia legislature shifted the burden for the cost of caring for animals in cruelty cases to where it rightly belongsthe owner or custodian charged with cruelty. In April 2017, the HSUS Animal Rescue Team assisted Habersham County with a large scale animal cruelty case involving the seizure and rescue of more than 400 animals, more than 370 of who were surrendered. This fall, our lawyers were instrumental in helping the county government to recoup the costs of caring for the surrendered animals. This is an important precedent in our effort to ensure that enforcing anti-cruelty laws is not cost-prohibitive for law enforcement officials.
TRANSPARENCY
Public access to data concerning animal research facilities and hunting trophy imports: In February 2017, our lawyers sent the U.S. Department of Agriculture a notice of legal violation after the Trump administration eliminated public access to an online searchable database that included research facility annual reports, inspection reports for zoos and puppy mills, and enforcement records for Animal Welfare Act and Horse Protection Act violations. The notice alleged that the agencys action violated a 2009 settlement agreement whereby the USDA agreed to make research facility annual reports available, which led the agency to re-post those reports. In May, in response to the filing of a lawsuit over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services unlawful withholding of records regarding the importation of wildlife and wildlife parts, including hunting trophies, the federal government agreed that it had wrongfully withheld some of the redacted information and began producing responses to our requests. These advances in government transparency will help ensure that The HSUS and humane-conscious citizens have access to information so that we can advocate for policy change that benefits animals. The USDA is still withholding an enormous number of documents, and our work on this betrayal of the public trust is far from complete.
So many of the legal issues on which we work are intertwined with ongoing political fights at the state and federal level from ballot measures to federal rulemaking to Congressional lawmaking. While we work in the courts to protect lawmaking weve done, we also work in Congress and in state legislatures to protect favorable court rulings. We build on all of this work through our public policy work, including groundbreaking ballot initiatives.
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Canada's Trudeau says will keep exploring trade deal with China
By Michael Martina
BEIJING (Reuters) - Canada will continue to explore a free trade agreement with China, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Monday, as it weighs its options after the United States threatened to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Speaking after a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, Trudeau said if "done properly", such an agreement would benefit both countries and strengthen the middle class.
"It's an opportunity that makes sense for Canadian businesses," he said at the start of a five-day trip to China. "Canada is and always has been a trading nation. But the landscape of trade is shifting and we need to adjust to it."
Li said China remained open to exploring a free trade deal with Canada as part of joint efforts to safeguard world trade liberalization and advance globalization.
"We have an open attitude toward the process of negotiations, and an open attitude towards their contents," Li said.
Canada is considering whether to launch talks on a free trade deal with China, which wants a trade pact similar to the ones it has with Australia and New Zealand.
But Trudeau, aware of domestic unease at the idea, is moving slowly. Although polls consistently show Canadians are split over the merits of a trade deal, Canada needs to diversify exports to offset the possible damage done if the United States pulls out of NAFTA.
Trudeau's visit, which began on Sunday, comes as plane maker Bombardier Inc is eager to win a breakthrough order from Chinese carriers for its CSeries jet, whose fuselage is made in China.
But the chance of sealing such deals has become more cloudy after Canada encouraged Bombardier to sell a controlling stake in the CSeries program to Airbus rather than a Chinese firm.
"On the agricultural front, I'm pleased to announce the Canadian beef and pork will have greater access to the Chinese market," Trudeau said, without elaborating.
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China has been loosening restrictions on beef imports this year to feed the appetite of the country's growing middle class for more Western food.
Trudeau said he also agreed with Li a joint statement that affirms a commitment to "mitigating the global threat of climate change" and lays out a plan for closer collaboration.
Earlier on Monday, Trudeau promoted Chinese tourism to Canada at an event held at the headquarters of China's Twitter-like online media company, Sina Weibo.
Canada has said it will co-host a January meeting with the United States of up to 16 foreign ministers in Vancouver to produce "better ideas" to ease tensions over North Korea's nuclear and ballistic tests.
In late November, North Korea tested its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile yet, putting the continental United States within range and increasing pressure on U.S. President Donald Trump to deal with the nuclear-armed nation.
Li said he discussed international and regional issues with Trudeau, but did not elaborate.
(Reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Renold Francisque wept as he stepped out of the Canada Border Services building in Edmonton.
A crimson growth on the side of his neck bulged over his shirt collar as he stared down at a letter that read to him like a death sentence.
For the past nine months, Francisque has been treated for tuberculosis. But his treatment may end abruptly on Jan. 2, 2018, if he is deported back to Haiti.
"I just go to die," he said. "I cannot stay. I have to go but my life is done. Finished."
Canadian authorities believe Francisque, 54, was a member of a brutal Haitian militia. He has been rejected three times in his bid to stay in Canada. Francisque insists he has never been involved in criminal activity.
Last week's removal order leaves him with little time left to exercise his remaining legal options. But Francisque and his supporters hope his medical condition might change that.
Francisque's symptoms, including lymphadenopathy in his neck, have recently worsened, raising the possibility he has an "acquired drug-resistant disease," his infectious disease specialist wrote last week.
"We would consider it medically inadvisable for him to travel now," said his doctor. "He will require several investigations to better determine the extent of this ongoing TB and to plan subsequent treatment."
According to his sworn affidavit, Francisque said he first fled Haiti in 1996 after his refusal to join a violent political group put his life in danger.
He resettled in Florida but his refugee application was rejected.
In 2008, he crossed the border on foot into Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., a route thousands of Haitians would follow a decade later. After his refugee claim was rejected, he applied for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.
Over the next decade, Francisque carved out a new life Edmonton. He worked in construction, bonded with friends at church and volunteered his time driving newcomers around the city.
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His determination to stay grew stronger after his mother was killed in Haiti's 2010 earthquake that destroyed their family home. His eight children fled to various countries and his brother was murdered in 2013, he said.
"I go down there and what happens?" asked Francisque. "They're still looking for me."
This year his health began to deteriorate. As pain spread to his neck, back and limbs. he struggled to lift tools and walk. Mornings were occupied by daily trips to the hospital to take antibiotics.
Francisque was forced to give up his $30-an-hour carpentry contracts for a part-time cleaning job at West Edmonton Mall. He earned $13 an hour as his medical expenses mushroomed.
With no health-care insurance, Francisque estimated he has paid $5,000 for doctor's appointments, a biopsy and antibiotics.
'A basic human right'
But those struggles seem surmountable compared to the consequences of returning to a country with under-equipped, run-down and expensive hospitals, he said. He explained he has nowhere to live, no means to support himself and no family to care for him.
"We can't send somebody outside the country when he's sick," said Said David with the Council of Canadian-Africans, who began advocating for Francisque last January. "This is a basic human right."
In Haiti there are just two organizations that treat drug-resistant TB, according to Dr. Evan Lyon, of Partners in Health, which offers the treatment.
But Lyon said capacity for complex infections is limited while general health care is inaccessible, often unavailable and of poor quality.
"I think the greatest likelihood is he would die of the disease if he were removed," said Lyon.
"All other things considered, he has a curable disease and he deserves a chance to have that treated."
In a letter dated Jan. 6, 2017, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada accused Francisque of being a member in a militia called the Volontaires de la Securite Nationale (Tontons Macoutes).
Francisque denies that. He said he refused to be recruited by another politically violent group, making him a target in more ways than one. The group also falsely labelled him a Macoute, he wrote in his affidavit, which was submitted to Citizenship and Immigration.
'Force of terror'
The Tonton Macoutes was a militia that beat, tortured and murdered political opponents, propping up both the dictatorships of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.
"It was a force of terror," said Brian Concannon, executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy. "What both Duvaliers wanted was a cowed population."
He said members ranged from "evil sadists," which included most of the leadership, to those in search of a meal or meaning. Others were influenced by friends, pressured or joined as a means of survival, he said.
"If the Tonton Macoutes were terrorizing your neighbourhood, that was one way of getting security for you and your family," said Concannon.
The militia hasn't formally existed since 1986 and hasn't resurfaced since the late 1980s, he added.
Documents from Francisque's lawyer show evidence submitted to Canadian authorities included a sworn letter from a close friend who knew Francisque in Haiti, stating he was not a member of any criminal organization.
A police certificate from the Haitian State Police indicates Francisque doesn't have a criminal record, which is also the case in Alberta.
David says the police certificate is the only criminal record check the Canadian government will recognize but that's not happening in this case.
"They still don't recognize it," said David. "They contradict themselves. This is disturbing. That's why I think he didn't receive a just hearing."
They believe Francisque was mistakenly deemed to have ties to the Macoutes during his 2008 refugee board hearing, when he tried to explain his situation in broken French. But despite requests, they say they have not received details about the allegations.
"They don't have any proof," said David. "They've just misinterpreted what he said in his first hearing."
'Mere suspicion is generally enough'
According to Sharry Aiken, an immigration law expert from Queen's University, expert counsel is required in such complex cases because the threshold of guilt is so low.
"Something akin to mere suspicion is generally enough to brand somebody inadmissible on security grounds," Aiken said.
She said the Supreme Court has been clear that although the government is entitled to protect information on the basis of national security, it's required to provide an adequate summary of allegations. If not, she said, counsel can challenge the department's failure to do so and a complaint can also be made to the Security Intelligence Review Committee.
"If you don't know what the allegations are, it's almost impossible to set the record straight," said Aiken. "On the ground when these decisions are made by frontline people working in the system they often over protect information on national security grounds such that it becomes very impossible for the person to dislodge an erroneous conclusion about them."
But it doesn't appear Francisque has exhausted his legal options. His lawyer can apply for a judicial review or a discretionary ministerial request, said Aiken. And an application for a pre-removal risk assessment is also still pending in his case.
The Canada Border Services Agency does not discuss individual cases, in accordance with the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Privacy Act, said spokesperson Luke Reimer, in a statement to CBC News.
"Once individuals have exhausted all legal avenues of appeal/due process, they are expected to respect our laws and leave Canada or be removed," he said.
@andreahuncar
For nearly 30 years, the St. Mary the Virgin Anglican Church has sat empty and unused behind a chain link fence on the side of the New Maryland highway.
The door of the church has a large florescent yellow 'No Trespassing' sign, next to a plaque that states the church is a provincial heritage site.
It's shame the distinctive wooden church isn't valued as the treasure it is, says well-known Fredericton architect John Leroux.
A committee formed by the Anglican Parish of New Maryland to determine what to do with the church asked Leroux to evaluate what condition the church was in, and report back to them.
While the building will need some work, Leroux says it's an "absolute stunner" inside.
Pre-Confederation building
Its history also makes it one of the most important churches in the province, he said.
The church was built between 1863 and 1864, making it a pre-Confederation building.
It was designed by Edward Medley, who was the son of Bishop John Medley, the man responsible for the Christ Church Cathedral in Fredericton.
Edward Medley designed five or six churches in New Brunswick after being trained by one of the most important architects in England. He was also an Anglican priest.
"It's a spectacular gothic revival building. It's one of the most important churches in New Brunswick and it's been kind of abandoned or forsaken for the last 30 years," Leroux said.
"I alway say, we shouldn't ignore our treasures, we should embrace them, and I think we have a chance to do that now."
Parish mulls options
Leroux presented his findings to the parish committee at a public meeting last week.
New Maryland Mayor Judy Wilson-Shee, who is the chairperson of the committee, said since the meeting she's heard from several people who are interesting developing some options for the use of the church.
"I think what stuck with a lot of people, they've never seen the inside of that church," she said.
Story continues
"The inside is in excellent condition, it's really is."
The next step in the new year will be to come up with a business plan for the redevelopment of the church, she said.
But as both the mayor and chair of the committee, Wilson-Shee says she's trying to stay neutral about the best option for the building.
In any case, a solid business plan will be necessary if the church is to be re-purposed, she said.
"Anyone can have an idea, but you have to have a business plan. You have to know how you are going to accomplish, what you're setting out to do," she said.
A community project
Ultimately, it will be up to the parish, who still own the church, to decide what happens with the church.
Leroux said he thinks the building could be used as a community centre where concerts or lectures are held.
"We want to make this a community project. This isn't about an Anglican church, this is about a beautiful piece of architecture and about returning it back to the community," he said.
A.J. Fernandez Cigar Company has named Selim Hanono as its new Chief Operating Officer (COO)
Selim comes with incredible experience and knowledge of our industry. We have full confidence that he will help lead our company and take us to the next level. He will have our full support in order to accomplish our companys exciting goals moving forward said AJ Fernandez in a press release.
Hanono has 30 years industry experience. More recently he worked at Drew Estate where he served as Vice President of Trade Shows and events.
I want to thank AJ and the Fernandez Family for this wonderful and exciting opportunity. It was important to me to join another company rich in values and tradition as well as with great leadership. It was also very important for it to be based in Nicaragua. Nicaraguas tobacco, its culture and its people have made it my second home. We will accomplish many great things together. The future is very bright at AJ Fernandez, commented Hanono.
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Brussels, December 4, 2017Maltese police, armed forces, and security services today arrested 10 suspects in connection with the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announced. Caruana Galizia was killed on October 16 when her car was blown up. In Malta, police have 48 hours to question suspects before charging or releasing them.
Malta, a member of the European Union, must ensure this investigation is swift and thorough, and meets international standards, said CPJ European Union Representative Tom Gibson. Justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia will only be achieved when every person responsible for her murder, including the mastermind, has been convicted and punished.
The journalists family has taken legal action against the police, alleging that the investigation cannot be impartial because Caruana Galizia wrote critical articles about the chief investigator and the government minister to whom he is married, according to news reports. Members of the European Parliament who visited Malta last week criticized the countrys rule of law and noted a perception of impunity among government officials, according to reports.
Vigilant Ace: South Korea, US launch largest air exercise
Published: December 4, 2017
South Korea and United States have launched Vigilant Ace, their largest-ever joint aerial drills. The exercise comes after North Korea tested Hwasong-15, its most advanced and powerful Inter Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) as part of its weapons programme.
Vigilant Ace
Vigilant Ace is annual US-South Korean drill designed to enhance their readiness and operational capability and to ensure peace and security on Korean peninsula. More than 12,000 service members from US will join airmen from South Korea in air combat exercise. Troops from US Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy will train with 230 South Korean and US aircraft, including six F-22 Raptors and 18 F-35 Lightning II fighter jets. Of 18 F-35s, six are F-35A models from Air Force and 12 are F-35B models from Marine Corps. The fighters will fly to Korean Peninsula from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan.
Background
The isolated and impoverished North Korea has staged six increasingly powerful atomic tests since 2006 most recently in September 2017. It nuclear and missile programmes have made significant progress under leader Kim Jong-Un, who has overseen four nuclear tests and dozens of missile launches since taking power in 2011.
Recently in November 2017, North Korea had claimed that Hwasong 15 ICBM is capable of delivering a super-large nuclear warhead anywhere in US mainland. Even experts supported the claim and held that latest test showed a big improvement in potential range. They are also sceptical that North Korea has mastered sophisticated technology required to protect such warhead from extreme temperatures and stresses encountered during re-entry of missile to Earth.
Month: Current Affairs - December, 2017
Category: Defence Current Affairs
Topics: Aerial Drills Defence International Military Exercises South Korea United States Vigilant Ace
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Chiefs in Balaka district have called on government to permanently remove death penalty in the penal code that was suspended in 2007.
According to the Chiefs, Malawi needs to respect right to life of inmates who are sentenced to death.
Speaking at the commemoration of cities of life by Community of Saint Egidio in Balaka, Senior Chief Nsamala called on government to remove death penalty in the penal code saying the country should focus on transforming people who are sentenced to capital punishment.
We would have loved if government had removed death penalty in our penal code, some people are sentenced to serve jail terms without committing the offense and we may kill such person because they didnt have a lawyer to follow up the case for them to get justice, said chief Nsamala.
Concurring with Nsamala, Inkosi Chathunya added that government must not give capital punishment saying killing does not reflect Malawi being a God- fearing nation.
Citing a Biblical story of Moses life, Apostle Andrew Makharamba of Destiny Ministries International in Balaka said the country must transform those sentenced to have capital punishment to be responsible citizens.
When we read the Bible, Moses was a murderer, he killed someone in Egypt but look God used him to go and liberate the Israelites, what if he was sentenced to death penalty, said Makharamba.
Responsible person for the Community of Saint Egidio in Balaka Potipher Magombo said the community is to ensure that Malawi has ommitted the death penalty in the penal code despite the law being declared unconstitutional.
Every year the Community of Saint Egidio commemorate the abolition of death penalty in laws of countries in the World.
This years commemoration were under the theme No justice without life.
| Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Two disgruntled shareholders who filed a lawsuit against privately owned Promega Corp. and a third shareholder accused of plotting with them are denying allegations that they conspired to coerce the company into buying back their shares at exorbitant prices or, if that failed, to take over Promega, dump founder and CEO Bill Linton, and sell the company to get a premium payback on their stock.
Longtime Promega shareholders Nathan Brand and Ted Kellner filed suit in July 2016 against the Fitchburg biotechnology company and Linton, claiming bullying tactics by Linton have kept them from getting a fair return on their decades-long investment. They tried to buy the company for $625 a share, or $1.2 billion, and when Promegas board rejected the proposal, the shareholders wanted the company to pay them $575 a share through a stock buyback nearly $200 a share more than Promega offered to pay for its stock at the time.
In response to the lawsuit, Promega and Linton turned the tables and accused Brand, Kellner and shareholder Paul Shain of conspiracy, fraud and racketeering, saying they were ready to do whatever it takes from digging up dirt on Linton to using pressure tactics on individual board members to get more money for their stock. The counterclaims were based largely on correspondence between Brand and Kellner.
Shain was Brands and Kellners choice to be the new CEO of Promega, the counterclaims said.
Now the shareholders have replied to the counterclaims.
Brand and Kellner said the allegations against them are false and have no merit whatsoever. They say some of their comments, cited to demonstrate collusion, have been taken out of context.
Put simply: Mr. Linton is using the cover of a legal pleading to falsely attack the plaintiffs in a thinly-veiled attempt to distract from his own burdensome, harsh, and wrongful conduct, attorneys for Brand and Kellner said.
They are asking for dismissal of the counterclaims.
Attorneys for Shain who served as a Promega board member for eight years and as interim general manager of Promegas North America operations from 2012 to 2014 said Promega and Linton have woefully failed to meet their burden to sufficiently allege the elements of their claims against Shain.
They say little evidence beyond implication or insinuation has been introduced to back up claims that Shain was part of a conspiracy, and neither Promega nor Linton was hurt by the shareholder efforts.
The alleged hostile takeover attempt did not succeed, Shains lawyers wrote, in their filing Nov. 2. In fact, they said, Linton now owns a higher percentage of Promega than ever 47 percent of the companys stock and theres no allegation that the company lost business, customers or profits as a result of anything Paul Shain did.
It is clear ... that Promega and Linton did not suffer any actual damage, and for that threshold reason, all of the third-party claims must be dismissed, Shains attorneys said in their dismissal motion filed Nov. 2.
At the basis of the legal dispute is the effort by Linton, a local biotech pioneer, to keep Promega local and independent in the long term versus the shareholders effort to get what they consider a fair payback for their years of support. The shareholders also claim that Lintons true motive has been to wrest control of Promega and transfer the shares to Usona Institute, which Linton set up in 2014 to explore the use of hallucinogenic drugs to treat depression and anxiety.
Promega Corp., founded in 1978, sells 3,500 products used in research, drug discovery and DNA identification. Of its nearly 1,500 employees, nearly 900 are in the Madison area. The company had $386 million in revenue in the 2017 fiscal year and has branches in 16 countries.
The case is before Dane County Circuit Court Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn. No trial date has been set. Oral arguments on Shains motion to dismiss are scheduled in January.
Through its Bi-national Commission with Nigeria, the U.S. hopes to find new areas of collaboration with regard to security cooperation; economic growth and development; and democracy and governance.
In the Northwest region of Nigeria, Boko Haram and ISIS-West Africa have wrought a great deal of destruction on the Nigerian people forcing more than two million to flee from their homes. Speaking in Nigeria, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan said, I want to emphasize. . .that the United States is Nigerias partner in this fight. We are committed to helping the Nigerian people provide their own security.
The U.S. has helped Nigeria modernize its military. But a military response alone in the Northeast cannot lead to sustained peace, said Deputy Secretary Sullivan. Nigerias success requires improvements to the economy and governance off the battlefield, including credible investigations of human rights violations and mechanisms to hold those found guilty accountable for their actions.
To help those affected by Boko Haram rebuild their lives, Deputy Secretary Sullivan announced that the U.S. Agency for International Development will contribute an additional $45.5 million.
The United States will continue to support food security and nutrition programs in Nigeria including development programs focused on the Northeastern states.
Predictable economic policies and a transparent justice system are necessary to create an environment for growth and to attract businesses and investment to Nigeria.
Sufficient energy resources are critical to fueling growth in Nigeria. Through the U.S. governments Power Africa Initiative, the U.S. will help the Nigerian government serve the majority of Nigerians who currently lack access to electricity. In particular, Deputy Secretary Sullivan announced a $1.3 million project to address the shortage of gas available for gas-fired power plants under the Power Africa Initiative.
Finally, in addition to supporting the security and economic growth of Nigeria, the United States recognizes that good governance is necessary to sustain both over the long-term. Fighting corruption and ensuring free and fair elections, will make the government of Nigeria more accountable to its people and better equipped to secure its citizens and keep its economy growing.
The United States looks forward to working with Nigeria to reach their shared security, development and governance goals.
The instant translation device Pilot. Waverly Labs
Language barriers may no longer be a problem thanks to Travis the Translator, a new device capable of translating 80 languages in real time.
And with more than 42,500 people around the world forced to flee their homes each day, the device is set to provide much-needed assistance to NGOs that help those affected by the refugee crisis.
More than 200 devices have been given to Open Learning Exchange, a UN program aimed at improving access to basic education, as well as Movement on the Ground, an organization that supports refugees.
Language is much more than putting across a concrete idea
Sonia Pratt, Barcelona Autonomous University
But Travis the Translator has also raised concerns. Could it be an alternative to learning a language? Will devices like it replace professional translators and interpreters?
Travis the Translator, like Pilot or Google Pixel Buds, works on a very simple premise: two people who speak different languages put in an earpiece, which almost instantly translates the conversation.
The vice dean of Innovation and Technology in the Philology Department at Madrids Complutense University, Jorge Arus, says devices such as Travis the Translator are about making the speaker feel more secure: They help get rid of the fear of speaking a foreign language in another country.
Multinationals are also interested in Travis. International companies such as IKEA have shown interest in our product; they think that it will help their staff at international meetings and on business trips, said sources at the global company. Meanwhile, Google says that it has already sold Google Pixel Buds to companies based in Europe and South East Asia.
Google Translate has the level of comprehension of a six-year-old child ATRAE vice president Eugenia Arres
Most instant translation devices cost around 200 but more affordable translation apps, such as Speak & translate, iTranslate and Skype Translator, are also gaining popularity.
Industry representatives argue their products are especially useful for travel, allowing users to find out about the local food and attractions. If youre going on a short trip, are you going to spend months learning a language you will use for a week? Most people dont have time to do this, say the makers of ili Wearable Translator.
For Sonia Prats, the director of language studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, language is much more than putting across a concrete idea. While Prats recognizes these systems could help people when traveling, she thinks they will never replace the real need to communicate with other human beings.
Arus doesnt believe that instant translation devices are going to stop people from learning languages, instead people could learn more having been exposed to the language by the device.
But new technology continues to advance at vertiginous speeds. We are in a boom era for artificial intelligence, says Juan Salvador Castejon, spokesman for the general council of Spains IT engineering associations (CCII). The specialist in voice-recognition systems claims that technology has evolved more quickly in the last year than in the last five.
Only jobs where people provide extra value by making decisions or interpreting something that is non-technical will survive
Computer engineer Juan Salvador Castejon
Indeed, according to Alfonso Urena, president of the Spanish society for natural language processing, it is only a matter of time before translation programs become perfect. But while voice-recognition technology is very advanced, it is not at the same level as human communication. The devices still make mistakes when it comes to context or translating phrases. Google translate for instance, can will literally translate high five to cinco altos instead of the Spanish chocala.
But if instant-translation programs continue to improve at the same rate, some people expect to see big changes. For example, Salvador Vaticina, an interpreter in the European Parliament, could be replaced by one of these devices. But Eugenia Arres, the vice president of Spanish Association of Audiovisual Translators (ATRAE), believes theres nothing to worry about. She argues that the devices rely on artificial intelligence, which is still in its infancy today when it comes to translation.
Google Translate has the level of comprehension of a six-year-old child. I dont see these devices interpreting for businesses for the same reason that we dont send text translated by Google Translate without revising it first, she says.
Arres has a different concern: privacy. She questions the degree to which translated recordings belong to device makers, and whether those firms are free to do what they like with them. We have signed confidentiality agreements and at this point, I dont think these devices will affect our work, she adds.
That said, Arres recognizes that the work of interpreters is likely to change just as has happened to translators, who spend an increasing amount of time editing rather than translating. Computer engineer Juan Salvador Castejon believes the best option for people in these industries is to build instant-translation devices: Only jobs where people provide extra value by making decisions or interpreting something that is not simply a case of mechanical work will survive.
The dubbing actress is convinced she falls into this category: In films, you dont translate words, you translate feelings. She also draws attention to the difference between simultaneous translation, which has has a slight delay, and synchronicity, where the words and mouth movements match perfectly. It is the same case with guides. Almudena Cencerrado, president of the Spanish Confederation of Tourists Guides, says earpieces cant capture the experience: Its impossible to translate terminology or personal experiences without losing the human quality.
English version by Melissa Kitson.
Suspects entering the Supreme Court. Julian Rojas (EL PAIS)
Spains Supreme Court has decided to release six Catalan politicians from pre-trial custody but to keep the two most prominent ones behind bars.
Former deputy premier Oriol Junqueras, of the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), and his ex-minister for interior affairs Joaquim Forn will remain in detention after Justice Pablo Llarena determined that there is a risk that both would go back to committing the same crimes if released.
The group had argued that failing to release them would violate their legal right to participate in political life
The heads of two prominent pro-independence associations are also being kept in custody while an investigation into rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds is underway in connection with the illegal independence drive.
Justice Llarena set bail of 100,000 for each of the other six former officials. By Monday afternoon all six had posted bail, and at 2pm they were informed that they were free to go. Before walking out of Estremera and Alcala-Meco penitentiaries, in the Madrid region, the former officials were reminded of their obligation to report to a court weekly, and to remain within Spanish territory.
A few minutes before 4pm, Dolors Bassa and Maritxell Borras left Alcala-Meco, where they were greeted by members of the Democratic Party of Catalonia (PDeCAT).
Ive been able to hug Meritxell Borras, minister of my country. We never want to go back to Alcala Meco, tweeted David Bonvehi, the organization secretary at PDeCAT, the leading party in the Junts pel Si coalition that governed Catalonia until its ouster under Article 155 of the Constitution.
Marta Pascal, the PDeCAT, was at Estremera, where she alluded to the four individuals who remain in pre-trial detention: We are dismayed and angry that they will not all sleep in their homes, and we believe this is arbitrary and unacceptable. We disagree with the decision.
The decision will influence the Catalan election campaign, which officially kicks off tonight at midnight. Seven of the jailed politicians are candidates for separatist parties in the December 21 election, and on Friday they had given the court assurances that from now on they would pursue their political goals within the bounds of the law.
It had been widely expected that Justice Pablo Llarena would release the entire group as a further step towards restoring normalcy in a region where the entire government was ousted by the central administration following the independence declaration of late October.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy invoked Article 155 of the Constitution for the first time in Spains modern democratic history. Under the emergency powers granted by this provision, Rajoy also called an early election in Catalonia, where it is hoped that the new government that emerges from the polls will no longer overstep Spains legal framework, regardless of its political beliefs.
The former government officials, including ex-deputy premier Oriol Junqueras of the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), were placed in pre-trial custody on November 2 by a judge at the Audiencia Nacional, Spains High Court, after she took statements from them. The heads of two leading pro-independence associations are also in custody. All of them are being investigated for rebellion and sedition.
But several other suspects, including Catalan parliament speaker Carme Forcadell, were heard by the Supreme Court, which decided to release them on bail after they pledged to observe Article 155 of the Constitution.
This court recently took over from the Audiencia Nacional, bringing together all related cases under Justice Llarena, who heard Junqueras and his aides last Friday. In their petitions for release, all eight pledged to abide by Article 155 despite disagreeing politically and legally with it.
The group had argued that failing to release them so they can campaign for office would violate their legal right to participate in political life, and would also violate voters right to elect them. The pro-independence association heads Jordi Sanchez, of Asamblea Nacional Catalana (ANC), and Jordi Cuixart, of Omnium Cultural, similarly said that they will observe constitutional legislation from now on.
But prosecutors remained unconvinced and say that the accused represent a flight risk, that they might destroy evidence or commit the same offenses all over again. Justice Llarena said that Junqueras and Forn are not a flight risk, but that they may commit the same crimes again if released.
English version by Susana Urra.
Opinion articles written in the style of their author." These texts are to be based on verified facts and must be respectful towards people, even though their actions may be criticized. shall feature, along with the author's name (regardless of their greater or lesser renown), a footer stating their office, academic title, political affiliation (if any) and main occupation, or the occupation related to the topic being assessed
The Kremlin. ALEXANDER NEMENOV (AFP)
Spain: welcome to the 21st century. Its now your turn to experience the digital delights of Moscows use of bots, hacks, trolls and state media to cause chaos and confusion. The Kremlin has been trying out these tactics among its neighbors for years. As early as 2007, for example, it used a mix of DDOS attacks and fake stories to fan ethnic riots in Estonia and incapacitate the tiny countrys banking and government systems. In Ukraine it used lies on broadcast and social media to polarize the country to such an extent that it paved the way for a covert invasion. In Germany it helped boost anti-immigrant protests by pushing a made-up story about a Russian girl raped by a refugee. Most recently it has even experimented with placing dark ads on Facebook in the US to exacerbate tensions around race and immigration.
Its an approach that was first honed in the Soviet KGB, who had thousands of agents working on what were known as Active Measures
Its an approach that was first honed in the Soviet KGB, who had thousands of agents working on what were known as Active Measures: the use of fakes and forgeries to sow discord in the West. Stories ranged from President Carters Secret Plan to Put Black Africans and Black Americans at Odds; blaming the US for the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II; blaming the US for a coup attempt against French President De Gaulle; forged letters from the Ku Klux Klan that threatened athletes from African countries perhaps the most famous was Operation Infektion, a carefully concocted story that alleged the CIA had designed the AIDS virus as a weapon.
But there is one great difference between the Kremlins activities then and now. Back then the Soviets spent a lot of effort making their lies seem real. Operation Infektion involved medical evidence provided by East German biologists, forged CIA letters and a front newspaper in India to place the story in. When the US government accused the Soviets of spreading lies this was met with outraged denial from the Gorbachev regime: how dare they accuse the Soviets of falsehoods?
When Putin denies that Russian soldiers are present in Ukraine he isnt so much lying as saying facts dont matter
Today the Putin regimes disinformation can be very reminiscent of those days, with stories about how the US designed the Ebola virus, or that a secret US base was producing the Zika virus in Ukraine. This time around, however, the Kremlin does not bother with trying to convince anyone its lies are true. It simply pumps the stories out online, and spreads them further with bots. The Kremlins post-fact approach goes with the grain of todays media environment. Back in the Cold War there were a limited number of broadcasters and newspapers, a large but just about graspable information space where you could contest your version of reality. The information revolution changed all that. Search engines and social media allow people to self-select the news that suits them and to dwell in ever more enclosed echo chambers where truth is whatever you want it to be. Likewise when Vladimir Putin first denies that Russian soldiers are present in Ukraine and then just as easily admits that they are there after all he isnt so much lying in the sense of trying to convince someone of a false reality as saying facts dont matter.
The only unifying characteristic is hostility and mistrust toward the system
Similarly, modern Kremlin propaganda no longer focuses on the left-wing, anti-colonial and labor causes that it cherished during the Cold War. In place of those ideologies is a post-modernist denial of the whole liberal concept of Western society. Democracy is a sham; politicians are crooked and ridiculous. Russian propaganda supports far-left and far-right movements, and any form of protest in between. The only unifying characteristic is hostility and mistrust toward the system, the destruction of a public space where evidence-based, deliberative democracy can flourish.
The most catastrophic mistake one can make in responding to the Kremlins games is to take actions that exacerbate the very divisions the Kremlin wants to amplify. From Eastern Europe to the US a first reaction has been to accuse anyone whose cause the Kremlin has attached itself to as being some sort of traitor or useful idiot. This has only served to help the Kremlin, falling for the apple of discord it has thrown in the room. If the Kremlins aim is to help destroy trust the challenge is how can one rebuild it.
Peter Pomeranzev is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs and Co-Director of the Arena Program at the London School of Economics.
Basque regional premier Inigo Urkullu has come out strongly in defense of the regions special fiscal regime, the Cupo vasco a deal in which the Basque government gets to collect its own taxes and return a sum to Madrid for services rendered by the state, rather than the other way around as is the case elsewhere.
Basque Premier Inigo Urkullu (center) during Sundays Basque National Day celebrations. DAVID AGUILAR (EFE)
In an article published in EL PAIS, the leader of the wealthy Spanish region has defended the system amid a flurry of criticism from regions around the country over the fact Spanish Congress recently signed off on the latest version of the Basque deal, which is renewed every five years, before the government tackled the key issue of an overhaul of financing for Spains other autonomous regions.
The PP and the PNV believe the Basque example shows it is possible for regions to have a different relationship with the Spanish state
The issue is particularly thorny given the question of financing has been a key source of friction in relations between Catalonia and Madrid in recent years. The pro-independence movement has always used fiscal balance data to convey the notion that Catalonia is getting a raw deal by paying in more to state coffers than it receives back.
But Urkullu argues the Basque system, enshrined in the Spanish Constitution, can be used as a reference point for a new decentralized system in Spain in which revenues guarantee the future of the welfare state in all of the countrys regions. The Basque leader argues, too, that joint fiscal responsibility could be a cornerstone in achieving more efficient financing of the regions.
The latest update of the Basque financing deal was backed by all the major parties in the Spanish Congress but regional leaders remain highly critical of the ruling Popular Party (PP) over its failure to fulfill promises on the issue of regional financing and of a Basque deal seen by many as an example of preferential treatment.
Meanwhile, the Basque premier maintains the debate could be a positive jumping-off point in the bid to establish a clear and simple system of financing where regions have access to sufficient funds of their own and where tax collection is decentralized to give autonomous regions more room to move on spending.
Urkullu explains that the Basque model, which has its origins in the 19th century, is a transparent fiscal regime in such a way that if the Basque country wants to spend more on services, it has to come from higher taxes or from cuts to other costs of its own. He adds he is not in favor of the reduction of taxes or of the possibility of the Basque Country becoming a fiscal paradise.
Financing has been a key source of friction in relations between Catalonia and Madrid in recent years
In reality, the average tax burden in the Basque Country has been higher than in Spain since 1981, states Urkullu in response to criticism that the region was gifted a special deal after the regions ruling Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) supported the budget of the minority PP government of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
Urkullu argues the debate of the financing of Spains regions should not be focused on the amount of money paid by the Basque Country via the Cupo vasco because it is obvious the viability of the model of regional financing does not depend at all on this amount. Rather it depends on regions truly having more guaranteed resources from taxes.
The Basque leader also bats away claims the regional financing deal is opaque, stating it is an agreed-upon, efficient and administratively transparent system for tax resources, which has full legal backing and enjoys generalized support. He goes on to note that the Basque Country pays 6.24% of costs for state institutions such as the Spanish military and the royal family, among others despite the region only being home to 4.67% of the national population.
The 6.24% figure is also above the regions relative weight in terms of wealth or [share of Spains] gross domestic product, which is 6%, Urkullu notes.
Both the PNV and the PP have stressed the constitutional context of the Basque financing deal to send a clear message both to Catalonia and the European Union that it is possible for a Spanish region to have a different relationship with the state, and one that is within the framework of the law. The two parties, both in charge of minority governments, argue that calling into question the Basque deal is a case of creating a problem where there is none, and is especially problematic in the context of high tensions in Catalonia over the issue of independence.
English version by George Mills.
The history of art is, in large part, the history of plunder. Vikings, conquerors, Napoleon, colonial powers, Hitler... they all pillaged art on a monumental scale. The French colonial army helped transport tons of Egyptian artworks to Europe. Around the same time, the British shipped over the Greek Parthenon Marbles. Later, as part of the Benin Expedition of 1897, British troops pillaged all the art including the Benin Bronzes from the palaces of the African kingdom. The collections of the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London and the Neues Museum in Berlin have all been enriched by this plunder.
The Pergamon Museum in Berlin. MAURIZIO GAMBARINI (EFE)
But the story doesnt end there. Countries, whether they were once invaded territories or former colonies, are demanding their treasures be returned to them, and with them their identity. Since 1934, Turkey for instance has demanded Berlins Pergamon Museum return two sphinxes that were taken from Hattusas, the capital of the Hittites empire. Fed up after over 80 years of inaction, the Turkish government has created a commission to trace its stolen patrimony.
Holding onto antiquities through punitive campaigns is an intolerable continuation of colonial violence
Archeologist Sam Hardy
The governments of Aragon and Catalonia are in a similar face-off over the treasures of Sijena, a 12th-century monastery in Huesca. Spain has also come under attack from countries such as Colombia, which has demanded the return of the Quimbaya treasure, a collection of 122 gold pieces that president Carlos Holgin gifted to the country in 1893.
We live in a time in which the great Western museums heavily protect their patrimony and think little about restitution. They excuse this attitude arguing that they take better care of the works. When works are on display and accessible to the public this helps diffuse questions over ownership because what is important is that they can be seen by as many people as possible, says Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery in London.
Golden treasures from Colombia, on display in Madrids Museo de America. BERNARDO PEREZ
This thinking falls in line with the idea that the art should be shown there because more people can enjoy it. But there is another side of the argument. The ethical and legal circulation of cultural goods benefits the country where they come from, argues archeologist Sam Hardy. Holding onto antiquities that have been stolen through punitive campaigns is an intolerable continuation of colonial violence. It seems impossible for these two sides to find a happy meeting point.
French public collections are considered inalienable and cannot be given away
Meanwhile, Greece continues to wait for the Parthenon marbles to be returned to Athens. A museum has been built to house the works and even the British public are in favor. But it makes no difference. The British Museum has slammed the door. Until the museum changes its board, who all come from the establishment, it is unlikely we will see a different position, says Tom Flynn, member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.
But there is still hope. This week, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that over the next five years he would work on creating the conditions needed to temporarily or permanently return the African patrimony taken from former French colonies. In the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum in Paris alone there are 70,000 works from Sub-Saharan Africa. Some believe this could encourage other countries to reclaim their stolen heritage. It sends a dangerous signal to all countries (former colonies but also Greece and Egypt) that have works that, in their opinion, have been illegally taken. Now they can reclaim them, says Yves-Bernard Debie, a lawyer specializing in cultural property. But before Macron can fulfill his plan he has to change the law, because French public collections are considered inalienable and cannot be given away. Just like in Spain. Were pretty lucky, says Andres Ubeda, assistant director at the Conservation and Investigation of Madrids Prado Museum, because were not affected by the two most contentious issues: colonial and Nazi pillaging.
Ownership vs. custodianship
Countries are, for now, becoming more entrenched over their cultural legacies. Perhaps its due to the resurgence of nationalism, or the skyrocketing value of artwork. But emphasizing ownership dilutes what is truly precious in art. Art is a manifestation of the people. It is not private or public. It is like water, or the forests, says Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. We need to swap the concept of ownership for that of custodianship, he adds.
But the world is becoming increasingly protective of its treasures. Italy is calling for an export permit for works that are older than 50 years, Sicily charges those who want to borrow Caravaggios paintings and Germany demands a special permit before allowing canvases valued over 150,000 to be taken out of the European Union. Protectionism has become part of the art world and led to new ways of possessing it.
Masterpieces from the ancient world belong to everyone. But in a culture based on property instead of common rights, there are interminable disputes over ownership, says Jason Felch, an expert in antiques trafficking. Perhaps we should remember that big museums keep around 90% of their works in the basement. Finding new stories in our collections, offering visibility to the forgotten and hidden is a very different kind of possession, one that is less materialistic and more poetic, says Miguel Zugaza, director of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. Today, these words sound like a song unsung.
Art backs microcredits There are two competing forces in the world of art. A centrifugal force that pushes works out from their place of origin, and a centripetal force that demands they stay. The Culture Bank (founded in Mali in 1995 by the activist Todd Crosby) belongs to the latter. It helps create local museums to help countries from the most disadvantaged parts of the world retain their cultural patrimony. The locals are invited to showcase works from their family. With these pieces they can also ask for small loans.
English version by Melissa Kitson.
Educational exposure of ideas, assumptions or hypotheses, based on proven facts" (which need not be strictly current affairs) Value in judgments are excluded, and the text comes close to an opinion article, without judging or making forecasts , just formulating hypotheses, giving motivated explanations and bringing together a variety of data
Former regional premier of Catalonia, Jordi Pujol. Carles Ribas
Compendium of grievances: Catalonia is a nation that is being discriminated against, that cannot freely develop its cultural and economic potential. Uncover, establish, assess and disseminate evidence of discrimination, deficiencies, etc. in a clear, assertive and systematic way. Underscore the negative effects that this has on the Catalan people as a whole and on each one of its citizens.
This quote is not taken from anything written in recent years, when the separatist process officially got underway. It actually dates back to 1990, when the Catalan government then still under longtime leader Jordi Pujol entrusted a group of Catalan intellectuals with the drafting of a document entitled The Strategy of Catalanization.
What Rajoy has managed to do is to lob the conflict back into Catalonia
Joan Navarro, sociologist
The 20-page document was presented in the fall of that year, and it marked the beginning of the creation of a pro-independence rhetoric that would ultimately turn Spain into the source of all evil. Thats when construction work began on creating an enemy of the Catalan people. First it was Spain doesnt understand us. Later it became Spain is robbing us. And finally, the message evolved into Spain is oppressing us.
It is a classic strategy in politics, as in war, to create an enemy so inhuman that the only possible way to deal with him is to destroy him. Its either us or them.
Now, 27 years after that seminal document first saw the light, the separatist movement has managed to attract the vote of over 40% of Catalans who went to the polls at the regional election of September 2015. And two million citizens voted in favor of a Catalan republic at the unconstitutional referendum of October 1. These figures are far from negligible.
Former Catalan premier Artur Mas at the Supreme Court in Madrid. Julian Rojas
Even though the referendum was illegal, lacked basic democratic guarantees and failed on transparency requirements, it nevertheless reflected a growing tide of separatism in Catalonia, where pro-independence sentiment has doubled since 2010. Opinion polls currently suggest a tie between separatists and unionists at the upcoming snap election of December 21.
Gone are the days when Jordi Pujol used to offer himself as a bulwark against separatism in exchange for a different model of relations between Madrid and Barcelona. Or when his successor, the Socialist Pasqual Maragall, said that he wanted a new regional Statute with the soul of a Constitution.
So what has happened since then to damage relations between Spain and its wealthiest region? First, there were mistakes made by the various Popular Party (PP) and Socialist Party (PSOE) administrations, which played at securing support for their minority governments from nationalist parties in Catalonia and the Basque Country in exchange for more money transfers and devolved powers. The message was essentially: Support me in Madrid and do whatever you want back home. This policy has proven inefficient in the long run.
Reprogramming
Even worse was Madrids complete lack of awareness about what was going on in Catalonia: a stealthy nationalist reprogramming effort endorsed by the Catalan government, and affecting all spheres of life from education to universities, research, the media, cultural organizations, the business fabric, infrastructure, government agencies and Catalonias outside image.
These are the nine chapters of the 1990 document whose goal was to build an image of Spain as Catalonias enemy, and to ensure the ultimate goal of independence.
In 2012, the Italian writer Umberto Eco published an essay titled Inventing the Enemy, in which he explained the value of having adversaries in politics.
Having an enemy is important, not just to define our own identity but also to provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our own system of values and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth, wrote Eco. So when there is no enemy, we have to invent one.
For 30 years, Catalan nationalism had been defending its differences in Madrid and obtaining good results
This theory explains most of the populist movements that have surged across the world in the 21st century: from US President Donald Trump (who created the immigrant enemy, citing international terrorism) to the promoters of Brexit (who also used immigrants as the enemy, along with European bureaucracy), to far-right and xenophobic movements in various European countries, and far-left groups. In Spain, the latter are represented by Podemos and by Catalonias CUP, whose adversary is what they like to call the Regime of 78, alluding to the Constitution of 1978 that encoded the new democratic laws following four decades of rule by Franco. Jihadism has also managed to grow after constructing a global enemy for itself.
Ecos essay adds: From the very beginning, however, the people who become our enemies often are not those who directly threaten us, but those whom someone has an interest in portraying as a true threat even when they arent. Rather than a real threat highlighting the ways in which these enemies are different from us, the difference itself becomes a symbol of what we find threatening.
The psychiatrist Enrice Baca goes even further when he explains that constructing the enemy involves a process of divesting the other, the potential target of aggression, of all human characteristics. This means eliminating all personal traits that might make him seem like ourselves, that might elicit feelings of mercy, solidarity or empathy.
In other words, the enemy must become a thing to be eliminated.
Mass helicopter
No doubt, former Catalan premier Artur Mas did not wax so philosophical on June 15, 2011. But he nevertheless embarked on the final phase of enemy-building that would ultimately lead Catalonia and the rest of Spain into the biggest institutional crisis since the transition to democracy 40 years ago.
On that day, Mas was forced to fly into the regional parliament by helicopter because there were hundreds of protesters surrounding the building down on the street to protest the budget cuts enacted by the Catalan government that year. Meanwhile, dozens of lawmakers were forced to take detours through the Barcelona zoo to avoid the angry crowds.
The sociologist Joan Navarro, vice-president of public affairs for the consulting firm Llorente y Cuenca, explains that right at that moment, the Catalanist movement of CiU [the ruling federation in Catalonia from 1980 to 2003 and again from 2010 to 2015] understood that everything had changed, and it made the decision to walk down the road of independence as a form of self-defense against the effects of the economic crisis and under pressure from the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and CUP. At the time, CiU was also struggling with a string of high-profile corruption cases.
Supporters of independence waving an 'estelada,' the unofficial flag of Catalan separatists.
Up until then, a majority of Catalans had been content with the traditional line that Spain does not understand us and with upholding their history, language and desire for nationhood as differentiating factors within Spains system of regions. But, notes Navarro, from this point on, things moved to Spain is robbing us, a decisive step up in the construction of the enemy.
For 30 years, Catalan nationalism had been defending its differences in Madrid and obtaining good results from the minority governments of the PSOE and PP. But when the conservative Jose Maria Aznar secured a second term in office in 2000 with an absolute majority in Congress, it signaled a change of tack in Madrids relations with all other regional governments.
The re-centralizing movement did not last long. In 2004, Spanish voters elected the Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who inaugurated a new period of bilateral relations between Madrid and Barcelona. This was the time when a new regional charter for Catalonia, the Estatut, was drafted. But sections of the new document were legally challenged and the Constitutional Court struck some of them down, exacerbating the confrontation between Catalan and national parties at a time when the country was already struggling with the economic crisis. In November 2011 Mariano Rajoy of the PP became the new prime minister, adding fuel to the fire. As ERC and CUP gained ground back home, they increasingly pointed at Spain as the enemy to combat.
Following the Catalan elections of 2015, which were widely portrayed as a gauge of pro-independence sentiment in the region, radical secessionists managed to push Artur Mas out of the picture the CUP, whose support was essential to the winning Junts pel Si coalition, viewed Mas as a symbol of CiUs corruption and refused to endorse him. Instead, a new regional president was found: Carles Puigdemont, who would lead his government down the road to consolidating Spain as an enemy to fight.
The prevailing line changed once again, from Spain is robbing us to Spain is oppressing is. The enemy was pictured as someone unwilling to negotiate, or even to talk, thus forcing Catalonia to bypass the law. And it is certainly true that ever since the Constitutional Court struck down parts of the new Catalan Statute in 2010, the two successive Rajoy administrations were very unsympathetic to Catalonias demands.
Constructing the enemy involves a process of divesting the other of all human characteristics
Enrice Baca, psychiatrist
As time went on and the secessionist process continued, its leaders realized that they had no support, no international recognition, not even enough power to go through with independence, explains Navarro. So in the last phase they resorted to the mirror war, which involved forcing the Spanish government to face its own demons and become an oppressive, occupying force.
This last period included the illegal referendum of October 1. Separatist forces were aware that despite their numerical majority inside the Catalan parliament, they lacked the support, the legal backing and the structure to get a Catalan republic up and running. So they pushed for a head-on collision with the Spanish state using an old tactic: putting the enemy in a situation where it becomes a case of damned if you do and damned if you dont. And thats the way it was.
Secessionists decided to violate the law in order to force the Spanish state into resorting to the principle of force, and it worked. The images of Spains National Police and Civil Guard officers striking civilians on their way to the polls made world headlines, benefiting secessionists and hurting a democratic state that was now depicted as a cruel, oppressive enemy headed by a latter-day version of Francoism. Add to this mix a courts decision to hold ousted Catalan officials in pre-trial custody those who did not flee the country, that is on very serious charges, and the story of Spain is oppressing us is complete.
What separatist ideologists were not counting on was the joint decision by Rajoy, Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez and Ciudadanos chief Albert Rivera to combine the application of Article 155 of the Constitution (which gave Madrid the power to oust the rebel Catalan government) with a snap election at the earliest possible date: December 21. The allegations of repression, aggression, oppression and occupation were undermined by the Spanish governments announcement that Catalans were being called to the polls to decide on their future.
If we add to this some secessionist leaders public renunciation of the unilateral independence declaration, and even their rejection of the unlawful acts that took place inside the Catalan parliament in recent months, what emerges is a somewhat confusing picture.
At the present moment, there are two million Catalans who have been betrayed because their leaders did not live up to their promise of giving them a Catalan republic, and there are millions more who are afraid that the independence process will make a comeback, says Navarro. What Rajoy has managed to do is to lob the conflict back into Catalonia.
English version by Susana Urra.
Restrictions on Iranian universities have been tightened ahead of Iranian Students Day on December 7, local media have reported.
Many gatherings planned by student associations have been rejected by the authorities, daily Jameeye Farda (Tomorrows Society) said on December 3.
A number of universities have presented a list of political figures, insisting that only they can attend student gatherings and deliver speeches, Jameeye Farda noted.
Based on reports received by Radio Farda from student activists in Iran, groups of students gathered on university campuses on Monday to protest various restrictions imposed on students and their events in universities.
They were also protesting raising tuition on some students and also gender discrimination and inequality.
So far, gatherings have been reported in Tehran University and Allameh Tabatabai University also in Tehran.
Radio Farda reported on December 2, that more than a hundred students received stars next to their names and have been barred from registering in this academic year.
During the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the security and intelligence organs started a practice of marking politically suspect students who were then banned from continuing their education. As a result, the term "starred student" was coined in Iranian media and student circles.
Monday's student protests were meant to highlight both the Students Day restrictions and also the banning of "starred" student from education.
For the Students Day, the state-run Iran Labor News Agency (ILNA) published a list of prominent reformist figures who have been banned from delivering speeches at Iranian universities.
The University of Hamadans medical college rejected all student proposals for gatherings on National Students' Day. The cultural department of the college announced that it will officially celebrate the day and invited students to attend.
However, a number of political figures close to reformists, including MP Mahmoud Sadeqi, mid-ranking cleric and lawyer Mohsen Rohami, and former UN ambassador Sadeq Kharrazi have been listed as licensed to deliver speeches on the occasion.
In a Radio Farda round-table discussion, a political analyst, Mehdi Mahdavi Azad said, "One of the main goals of the regime is to control of universities, by using various means of pressures...universities present a danger of a political explosion".
Barring reformists from delivering speeches at student assemblies appears to contradict what President Hassan Rouhani said about the necessity of granting students more freedom.
In a speech on December 2 in the city of Zabol in Sistan and Balouchestan Province, southeastern Iran, Rouhani maintained, "We are very happy that our students are now speaking loudly and clearly."
Expressing satisfaction over Students' Day being celebrated across the country, Rouhani affirmed, "Universities must be independent and free, and this was one of the aims of the [Islamic] Revolution."
Rouhani asserted that universities must be free to criticize like seminaries, adding, Students speak without stammering."
Nevertheless, 92 student associations, 813 staff at student publications, and 8,000 student rights activists wrote letters in recent years protesting the police state and threatening atmosphere ruling over Iranian universities, as well as annulling student gatherings, illegal and extrajudicial interferences in holding them.
According to daily Jameeye Farda, many student associations are under backbreaking restrictions but prefer not to publicize or abandon their gatherings.
A carbon monoxide leak at an East Side restaurant forced the evacuation of the business Saturday afternoon, but customers were back inside less than an hour later.
Madison Fire Department firefighters were called to That BBQ Joint, 901 Williamson St., at about 4:45 p.m. Saturday, after complaints of an "odd smell" at the restaurant.
Firefighters were on scene in minutes since Station 3 is three blocks away.
Sensors showed slight levels of carbon monoxide in the main level of the building, but the owner told firefighters the smell was coming from the basement.
"Readings spiked to 800 ppm, so patrons were directed to evacuate the building until the carbon monoxide could be cleared out and the source identified," said spokeswoman Cynthia Schuster.
Madison Gas and Electric was called in after the leak was determined to be coming from the boiler room.
The building was ventilated, carbon monoxide levels went to zero and patrons were let back into the restaurant.
The head of the Islamic Republics judiciary has accused twice former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of high treason.
Retaliating against recent Ahmadinejads anti-judiciary vitriolic remarks, ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani accused him of drawing the sword against the ruling system in Iran and delivering fifty different lies.
Amoli Larijani, in a speech on Sunday, December 3, insisted, Sadly, not only foreign enemies but also a number of insiders stoke the fire of the enemy and present weird lies while stabbing the country in the back.
According to the governments official news agency, IRNA, Amoli Larijani, without directly naming Ahmadinejad, also asserted, A gentleman, who once was responsible for the countrys affairs, has repeated fifty different lies in a matter of minutes.
The head of the judiciary went further, saying Some see themselves as the savior and try to make a business [out of it]
Defending himself, Amoli Larijani noted Some are desperately trying to defend their companions and question the ruling system and try to ruin the head of the judiciary and damage the whole justice system.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has recently intensified his attacks on the judiciary, particularly targeting its head.
The war of words between the two sides began when the judiciary charged Ahmadinejads close ally, Hamid Baghaei with financial corruption and put him behind bars. Baghaei was later released on a heavy bail.
Another close ally of Ahmadinejad, his former chief of staff, Esfandyar Rahim Mashshayee has also been summoned to court.
In his last attempts to defend them, Ahmadinejad wrote an open letter to the Supreme Leader and bitterly criticized what he described as judiciarys tyranny.
Ahmadinejad accuses the judiciary of illegally and unjustifiably serving the personal and political interests of its own leaders.
The Supreme Leader, ayatollah Khamenei has yet to respond to the letter.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec.4
By Leman Zeynalova Trend:
Holding EXPO 2025 in Azerbaijan would extend the geography of world expos to a new region, Arye Gut, head of the Israel branch of the Baku International Center for Multiculturalism, said in his article published in The Jerusalem Post.
Azerbaijans experience in previous editions of universal and specialized Expos bodes well for the success of the potential Baku EXPO 2025, said the author.
Gut pointed out that as part of the national communication strategy and desirous to strengthen its image at the international scene, since 2000 year Azerbaijan has been an active member of the EXPO movement.
The author recalled that Azerbaijan's pavilions received awards in the last three exhibitions in Milano in 2015 with more than 3 million visits, in Antalya in 2016 and in Astana in 2017.
Azerbaijan is aimed at showing to the world community that being a young country with strong economic potential, political stability, high levels of safety and security, it is able to host huge events like a World Expo, said the article.
Gut believes that the theme chosen by Azerbaijan for the World Expo Developing human capital, building a better future is of global importance and of universal concern.
Three sub-themes Talent, Vitality and Achievement align with three of 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals related to education, health and employment, he added.
Among the advantages of hosting a world expo one may, among other things, enumerate the following: significant economic benefits for the host country, 18 million expected visits to Baku Expo 2025, creation of new jobs, establishment of new business relations, improvement of business investment deliverables and of the tourism strategy, according to the article.
It will also extend the geography of world expos to a new region, a new territory, create a new platform and give a chance to young independent states to welcome the whole world in the best possible conditions, said the article.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Leman Zeynalova Trend:
The United Arab Emirates has always supported Azerbaijan's fair position in the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Mahmud Mammad-Guliyev said.
Mammad-Guliyev made the remarks at an event in Baku dedicated to the 46th anniversary of establishment of the United Arab Emirates on Dec. 4.
The UAE was among the first Muslim countries to recognize the independence of Azerbaijan, which was a significant support for the country, he said.
Mammad-Guliyev added that cooperation between Azerbaijan and the UAE is developing in many areas.
He added that the two countries also successfully cooperate within international organizations.
Azerbaijan attaches great importance to development of economic relations with the UAE, he said. The two countries have an economic commission. Its recent meeting was held in April.
Mammad-Guliyev said Azerbaijan welcomes the participation of the UAE in transport projects of the country.
Moreover, he stressed that Etihad Airways will launch the UAE-Azerbaijan flights in March 2018.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
Trend:
The 10th meeting of the Azerbaijan-Turkey High-Level Military Dialogue will begin its work in Baku on December 5, the press service of Azerbaijans Defense Ministry told Trend.
During the meeting, the delegations will consider the current state of bilateral relations and discuss key areas of cooperation for the implementation of the upcoming objectives within the framework of the working groups.
The co-chairman of the meeting from the Azerbaijani side is deputy minister of defense for personnel, Lieutenant General Karim Valiyev, and from the Turkish side chief of the Main Directorate for Plans and Principles of the General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces, Lieutenant General Yavuz Turkgenci.
Discussions within the framework of the military dialogue will end on December 7.
The 9th meeting of the Azerbaijan-Turkey High-Level Military Dialogue was held in Ankara December 2016.
Details added
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
Trend:
President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has received a delegation led by the newly-appointed EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia, Toivo Klaar.
Saying this is his first visit to Baku and that he is deeply impressed with development processes he witnessed here, Klaar stressed his interest in familiarizing himself with Azerbaijan.
The head of state said he is hopeful that Toivo Klaar will frequently visit Azerbaijan, including regions of the country.
President Aliyev wished Klaar success in his activities.
They exchanged views over the current state of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and negotiations on the dispute.
Details added (first version posted on 10:50)
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
Trend:
President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has viewed work carried out in "Baku Agropark" in Zira settlement, Khazar district.
Minister of Economy Shahin Mustafayev and entrepreneur Samad Qurbanov informed the head of state about the agropark.
Baku Agropark Ltd costs nearly 68 million manats. It includes a greenhouse complex for growing tomato, which occupies an area of 10 hectares. The complex has an annual production capacity of 3.3 million tons. The first stage of the project, which included construction of infrastructure, cost 21.7 million manats, of which 10 million manats were provided by the Entrepreneurship Support Fund in preferential loans.
The greenhouse features the fourth generation Dutch technology of growing tomato. The complex exports its products under Tomat.az brand.
The project created 140 jobs. Once fully operational, the complex will create more jobs.
President Ilham Aliyev met with the staff of the complex and posed for photographs with them.
Details added (first version posted on 13:54)
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec.4
By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:
Azerbaijan has played a strong role in NATO missions, said US Permanent Representative to NATO, Ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchison at a press briefing Dec.4 in response to Trend's question.
"We recently had the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev at NATO headquarters. That was a very good meeting. We want to keep close ties with Azerbaijan," she added.
President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev attended a meeting of the North Atlantic Council of NATO in Brussels Nov.23.
During the meeting, the head of state noted that Azerbaijan and NATO maintain successful cooperation in various areas.
Stressing Azerbaijans active involvement in different missions and operations of NATO, President Ilham Aliyev hailed the alliances contribution to mine clearance operations in Azerbaijan.
The head of state said Azerbaijan is expanding its peacekeeping activities in Afghanistan and is cooperating with this country at the bilateral level in economic and other areas.
Relations with NATO started when Azerbaijan joined the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (1992) and the Partnership for Peace (1994).
The countrys program of cooperation with NATO is set out in an Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP), which is agreed every two years.
Azerbaijan has long been an active contributor to NATO-led operations it deployed troops to Kosovo in the past.
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Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Samir Ali Trend:
Azerbaijan will increase its peacekeeping contingent in NATOs Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, said the countrys defense ministry Dec. 4.
The peacekeeping contingent will be increased in accordance with the relevant instruction given by president of Azerbaijan, Supreme Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev.
It is planned to increase the number of peacekeepers before the first quarter of next year, according to the ministry.
The peacekeeping contingent of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces has been serving under the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan since November 20, 2002.
Currently, 90 servicemen, 2 medical officers and 2 engineer officers of Azerbaijani Armed Forces are participating in a mission in Afghanistan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec.4
Trend:
The European Union's position on separatism in recent years is now becoming a boomerang, Novruz Mammadov, assistant to the president for foreign policy issues, head of department, wrote on his Twitter page on Dec.4.
"The European Union's position on separatism in recent years is now becoming a boomerang for the European nations. There is a historical patterns: Errors of the large nations eventually engender problems for them," he tweeted.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
Trend:
Observations of the ongoing processes in the international scene, prompt, regrettably, such a conclusion that starting with the UN, the international organizations, alliances, leading countries and their leaders are falling behind in addressing a certain process instead of preventing them and emerging on top, Novruz Mammadov, assistant to the Azerbaijani president for foreign policy issues, head of department, tweeted Dec. 4.
That situation is a major and perilous problem for todays international relations given the current advanced level of human intellect and development, added Mammadov.
The attitude of the international community to the problem of climate change is of the same nature.
A man trying to help a woman who appeared to be in trouble early Sunday morning at a Downtown parking ramp had a gun pointed at him by a man the woman was attempting to stop exiting the ramp.
The man who allegedly pulled the gun, Davonte Howard, 22, of Madison, was arrested and tentatively charged with carrying a concealed weapon, recklessly endangering safety and endangering safety by use of a dangerous weapon, Madison police said.
The incident happened around 1:45 a.m. Sunday in the State Street Capitol parking ramp, 214 N. Carroll St.
Police said the woman and Howard had been quarreling when he started to drive out of the ramp, before she was in his car.
"She jumped on the hood of the car, attempting to stop him, but as she did this, she dropped her purse," said police spokesman Joel DeSpain.
A 23-year-old man from Juneau picked up her purse and was trying to return it to her when Howard allegedly pulled out a gun and pointed it at him.
"The victim explained (to Howard) what he was trying to do, returned the purse and slowly started backing away," DeSpain said.
Police were called and the suspect was arrested while he was still in the parking ramp.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
Trend:
Azerbaijan's export opportunities will considerably increase, said President Ilham Aliyev addressing the staff of the Baku Agropark in Zira settlement, Khazar district, after reviewing the complex's operations, Dec. 4.
A beautiful agro-park was constructed on a 10-hectare area, said President Aliyev.
"The working conditions and productivity are good. The latest technologies have been applied. This enterprise increases the economic potential of our country. Export-oriented products are produced here, which is very important for diversifying our economy under the current conditions," said the President.
The head of state stressed that the development of agriculture is a priority issue.
"According to the information provided to me, greenhouse complexes are being created on an area of more than 400 hectares," President Aliyev said, adding that the agro-products to be grown there will be completely exported.
"We have provided ourselves with vegetables and the sphere that brings us the biggest income is connected with tomatoes. Exporting tomatoes for 10 months of this year brought us $130 million. Now imagine if at the next stage we put into operation greenhouse complexes on an area of 400 hectares - and that, of course, will happen - then our export opportunities will considerably increase. This means new jobs; almost 200 citizens are provided with jobs here. Women also work here, which is very important. I see that most of the working here are women and working conditions are good," the head of state said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
Trend:
Representatives of BP company in Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey Region (AGT) including Completion Engineering Manager AGT Ann Davies; Human Resources (HR) and Recruitment Advisor Mehriban Shikhzamanova; Completion Engineer, Central Azeri, Samir Veliyev; and HR/Recruitment Coordinator Sabina Valiyeva made a presentation of the company internship program at Baku Higher Oil School (BHOS). It was conducted for third, fourth and fifth-year students.
Opening the meeting, BHOS Vice Rector for Training, Science and International Relations Ramiz Humbatov said that every year the Higher School undergraduates successfully participate in BP internship program in the framework of the long-term cooperation between BHOS and the company. In her introductory speech, HR/Recruitment Advisor Mehriban Shikhzamanova outlined main directions of BP HR policy and internship opportunities provided to students. Telling about her professional experience and growth, Completion Engineering Manager AGT Ann Davies said that her career at the company started after she took on-the-job training at BP.
Fifth-year Petroleum Engineering students Narmin Abbasly and Farhad Gadimov shared their impressions and presented a report about their internship at BP facilities in Azerbaijan in summer this year. As they said, the BHOS undergraduates were assigned to solve real engineering tasks and were given an opportunity to work with experienced specialists. In their words, this internship enabled them to participate in large-scale projects implemented by BP in the region and to test their own professional, business and personal skills and qualities.
Recruitment Coordinator Sabina Veliyeva informed the students about graduates recruitment and student internship program of BP company in Azerbaijan. She also provided detailed information about admission procedures and interns selection criteria. As she emphasized, the number of BHOS undergraduates selected for the internship at BP is always higher than the number of students from other educational institutions.
At the meeting, representatives of BP in AGT region also provided detailed answers to numerous questions asked by the students.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec.4
Trend:
The US-Educated Azerbaijani Alumni Association organized the Final stage of Azerbaijan Business Case Competition at Hilton on Dec.3. This year competition is performed in virtue of BP, SOCAR-AQS, Azercell, Engin, Azr Turk Bank, AzSgorta, Deloitte and EY sponsorship, as well as by organizational support of U.S. Embassy in Baku.
Azerbaijan Business Case Competition is the most prestigious business competition among undergraduate and graduate students who are studying in the field of finance, business and economics. During the competition, students were given Cases of Harvard Business School for analysis based on real-life business problems companies have faced.
This year 26 teams from 5 universitiess, inclduing ADA University, Baku Engineering University, Azerbaijan State Economic University, Academy of Azerbaijan State Customs Committee and Baku Higher Oil School participated in the competition. Only 16 teams out of 26 earned the chance of passing to the Semi-final stage and 4 teams left for Final.
Finalists were required to find solutions for cases and evaluation of the team was based on their critical business thinking, financial analysis, marketing strategy, presentation skills, including their preparation for Q&A stage. Winning teams received 10.000 AZN in total (1st place 6.000 AZN-, 3.000 AZN - 2nd place, 1.000 AZN - 3rd place).
The first place won students of Baku Engineering University: Huseyn Mammadov, Jafar Jafarov, Lala Rustamli and Gazanfar Karimli.
The competition has been held since 2002 and this year ABCC celebrating its 15th Anniversary. Considering the lack of practice of business case analysis in Azerbaijan, the volunteers of MBA Enterprise Corps decided the launch of this project. Since 2006, the right of conducting this competition has been given to the US-Educated Azerbaijani Alumni Association (AAA). Over 1000 very talented students so far participated in this project.
Azerbaijan Business Case Competition plays a significant role in the development of students analytical and presentation skills, as well as contributes to the career development and management skills.
The US-Educated Azerbaijani Alumni Association (AAA) is a non-governmental, non-profit organization that unites alumni of the State Department educational exchange programs, Azerbaijan State Program alumni and self-funded students studied in Azerbaijan. The AAA was established in October 2003 by a group of US-educated Azerbaijani alumni with the aim of uniting all alumni of Azerbaijan under one umbrella and using their knowledge and skills to help developing Azerbaijan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Samir Ali Trend:
The representatives of the Azerbaijani prosecutors office, as well as a medical expert inspected a prison cell in a specialized medical facility of the Penitentiary Service of the countrys Justice Ministry in connection with Haji Mammadov's suicide case, PR department of the Penitentiary Service of the countrys Ministry of Justice said Dec. 4.
On Dec. 3, Mammadov, former chief operating officer at the Main Crime Investigation Department of Azerbaijans Interior Ministry, hanged himself.
A suicide note was found in Mammadov's prison cell. In his suicide note, Mammadov apologized to his family members and prison staff.
A criminal case was filed in the Baku city prosecutor's office. The investigation is underway.
Mammadov was sentenced to life imprisonment as head of an organized crime group that committed numerous killings, kidnappings and other serious crimes.
Haji Mammadov was transferred to a specialized medical facility of the Penitentiary Service in Bakus Bina settlement due to health problems on April 25, 2016.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 21
By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:
To date, 338 entrepreneurs and managers took advantage of the joint German-Azerbaijani program to upgrade the skills of managers, Deputy Minister of Economy of Azerbaijan Sahib Mammadov said at a seminar on the role of this program in the development of small and medium-sized businesses on Dec.4.
He said the participants of the program showed very successful results, which have a positive impact on the development of small and medium-sized businesses, as well as on the expansion of geography and export volumes of Azerbaijani products.
"Many of the managers and entrepreneurs who took part in this program were able to find new business partners, which led to an increase in exports and the expansion of its geography," Mammadov said.
He said that the research results and statistics show that the private sector as a whole plays a big role in the country's economy.
"Today, the share of the private sector in Azerbaijan's GDP exceeds 80 percent, and its share in employment is 75 percent. The number of registered business entities today exceeded 880,000, all of which are the results of successful economic reforms in the country, "Mammadov said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 29
By Fatih Karimov Trend:
Turkeys gas import from Iran amounted to 530.54 million cubic meters in September, 2.3 percent more year-on-year.
Natural gas imports from Iran accounted for 14.4 percent of the countrys total gas imports in the one-month period, according to a report released by Turkeys Energy Market Regulatory Body.
Turkeys gas suppliers in September 2017
Iran was Turkeys third gas supplier in the period, after Russia and Azerbaijan.
Turkeys gas import from Iran in January-September 2017 stood at 6.9 billion cubic meters (bcm).
Turkeys total natural gas import stood at 3.681 bcm in September, registering a rise by 22.38 percent year-on-year.
Irans overall gas exports to Turkey reached 7.7 billion cubic meters last year.
Gas import sources September (mcm) Share (%) Y/Y change (%) USA 92.07 2.50 13.50 Azerbaijan 580.04 15.76 11.71 Algeria 356.17 9.68 19.39 Iran 530.54 14.41 2.30 Russia 2,121.94 57.65 40.77 Total 3,680.77 100 22.38
Turkey also exported 57.99 million cubic meters of gas to Greece in August, indicating a fall by 1.92 percent year-on-year.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Azad Hasanli Trend:
The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) sold $208.9 million at the currency auctions organized by the countrys Central Bank (CBA) in November 2017, SOFAZ said Dec. 4.
SOFAZ sold over $3 billion at the currency auctions in January-November 2017. In total, the Azerbaijani banks bought about $4.92 billion from SOFAZ in 2016.
SOFAZ will continue selling the currency through auctions in 2017.
The currency is sold as part of SOFAZs transfers to the Azerbaijani state budget, which are envisaged in the volume of 6.1 billion manats for 2017.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Ali Mustafayev Trend:
President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev signed the law "On guaranteed transfer from the National Fund of the Republic of Kazakhstan for 2018-2020", the press service of the Kazakh president said in a message.
The law provides approval of the size of the guaranteed transfer from the National Fund of the Republic of Kazakhstan to the republican budget for 2018-2020.
In accordance with the Decree of the Kazakh president dated December 8, 2016 "On the Concept of Formation and Use of funds of the National Fund of the Republic of Kazakhstan", a guaranteed transfer to the republican budget will be fixed in absolute value in tenge and set at a rate of 2 trillion tenge starting from 2020.
At the same time, the amount of the guaranteed transfer from the National Fund to Kazakhstans national budget will be gradually phased down.
In 2018 it will amount to 2.6 trillion tenge, in 2019 - 2.3 trillion tenge, in 2020 and subsequent years - 2 trillion tenge.
The amounts of the guaranteed transfer from the National Fund in 2018-2020 ensure compliance with terms on the minimum balance of funds in the National Fund of Kazakhstan, amounting to 30 percent of the forecasted GDP.
(Exchange rate for 04.12.2017: $1 - 331 tenge)
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Anvar Mammadov Trend:
An export mission of Azerbaijani entrepreneurs will visit Saudi Arabias Jeddah city on Dec. 6-8, Azerbaijans Economy Ministry said in a message Dec. 4.
The mission will include representatives of 13 Azerbaijani companies, operating in the spheres of production of fruit juices, dried fruits, canned products, honey, tea, as well as manufacturing and processing of meat and dairy products.
Azerbaijani entrepreneurs will also visit large supermarket chains, as well as hold bilateral meetings with representatives of companies operating in Saudi Arabia, within the framework of the mission.
Azerbaijans trade turnover with Saudi Arabia amounted to $14.64 million in January-October 2017, according to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec.4
By Gulgiz Muradova -Trend:
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is planning to provide support to Azerbaijan in the establishment of food and nutrition governance systems.
FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Europe and Central Asia Vladimir Rakhmanin made the remark in an exclusive interview to Trend.
Rakhmanin explained that accordingly the access of society to healthy food without interruption and its use in full effectiveness including vitamins and minerals will be closely monitored by the Government involving all the relevant institutions. As a result, the government policies will be designed more efficiently, he added.
"We will continue to support the Government of Azerbaijan to achieve its goals in improvement and maintenance of food and nutrition security and food safety," Rakhmanin said.
He stressed that achieving healthy diets, adequate nutrition, good health and wellbeing for all in a sustainable manner while managing responsibly natural resources are at the core of the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals.
"Yet, the human food value chains are continuously threatened by outbreaks of transboundary pest and animal diseases," he said, adding that FAO addresses threats to the human food chain in an integrated and interdisciplinary manner.
Azerbaijan has been a member of the FAO since 1995. The organization's office in the country has been operating since 2007.
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SUN PRAIRIE Cardinal Heights Upper Middle School students are supplying one of the items veterans receive in their gift bags after returning from Badger Honor Flights.
Ninth-grade students in classes that explore technology, engineering and woodworking at the Sun Prairie school are making writing pens with shafts they craft out of redheart wood. Each one comes with a signed note thanking the veterans for their service and sacrifices.
It just makes me realize how its going to affect their lives when we make (pens) bringing joy to them, said ninth-grader Tanner Scherer as he worked on his estimated 13th pen for the cause. Theyre really fun to make.
In the fourth year of the project, the students are making enough pens to supply gift bags for at least two honor flights a year. The students teacher, Mike Roth, said he would like to get other schools on board so there would be enough for all of the Badger Honor Flights each year.
About 90 veterans go on each flight and there are four flights each year to Washington, D.C. to see the memorials erected in their honor. The students made 238 pens last school year.
Roth said he already has worked with a teacher in Prairie River Middle School in Merrill who is now running the project for Never Forgotten Honor Flight and other interested teachers can contact him.
Roth said he and former colleague Ken Bremer, who were co-teaching at the time, came up with the idea when they decided they wanted to have their students get involved in some community service. Roth said the project is particularly dear to him because his father, Richard Roth, enlisted at age 19 and flew 42 missions in the South Pacific during WWII as a waist gunner on a B-24 bomber.
After he started the project, Roth was encouraged to go to the Dane County Airport when the veterans got off their flight, and he said he was touched by the experience.
Theyre getting the heroes welcome they never got when they returned home, Roth said.
The first year Roth and Bremer received a grant of about $400 from the Sun Prairie Education Foundation to fund the project. Now they get funding from the Badger Honor Flight, an affiliate of the national Honor Flight Network.
Bremer said most importantly the project is a chance for students to make something for someone unknown from another generation, rather than an item they can take home. Other incentives include the community service they earn toward whats required for graduation. Each time they craft a pen for Badger Honor Flight, they also earn a pen kit so they can make another pen for themselves.
Students like Tanner, who has made about 25 pens total, said it was nice getting the pen kits.
Part of it is so you can feel good. Part of it is you get another pen kit so you can make more, said ninth grader Doug Vigil about making the Badger Honor Flight pens.
Roth said he steers the students toward making pens that have a traditional and eye-pleasing look.
Theyre really easy to make and theyre fun to make, said ninth-grader Mitchell Ring. It is such a lightweight wood that when you are sanding it and shaping it, its almost like butter.
Roth has the students sign the notes, and about 20 to 25 percent of the time they get a thank-you note, sometimes with a photo enclosed. He is impressed by the gesture of the veterans to send a note for something in a gift bag, especially given the age of some of the veterans.
Its just satisfying knowing where they are going and that you spent time on them, ninth-grader Max Saron said about the pens.
Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Dec. 4
By Diana Aliyeva Trend:
The products produced in the personal farms of the Uzbek residents can be officially sold to the organizations of the Uzbekozikovkatzakhira Association of Wholesalers in accordance with the Uzbek presidents order # PP-3418 dated Nov. 30, 2017.
Such agricultural products as vegetables, potatoes, melons and gourds, fruits, grapes, rice, legumes, beef, lamb and poultry are meant as part of the Regulations on the procedure of purchase of agricultural products by organizations of the Uzbekozikovkatzakhira Association of Wholesalers from personal farms.
Agricultural products are purchased upon the sale and purchase contracts.
The document came into force on December 1, 2017.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Anvar Mammadov Trend:
Staff changes were made in the Azerbaijani Taxes Ministry.
Faig Shahbazov, director general of the HR department of the Azerbaijani Taxes Ministry, was dismissed, said a message posted on the Azerbaijani Taxes Ministry's website.
Currently, Junior Tax Service Advisor Elmaddin Suleymanov serves as acting director general of the HR department.
Shahbazov has served as director of the HR department since October 2011. He has been working in the ministry since 2000. There is no information on his appointment to the new post yet.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:
Azerbaijan delivered about 4.86 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas to Turkey in January-September 2017, as compared to 4.84 bcm in the same period last year, says the report posted on the website of the Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK) of Turkey.
In 2016, Azerbaijan delivered 6.48 bcm of natural gas to Turkey, compared to 6.17 bcm in 2015.
According to the report, in January-September Turkey imported 39.62 bcm of gas, of which 32.73 bcm were imported through pipelines, and 6.89 bcm fell on LNG imports.
The share of Azerbaijan in the total volume of gas imported to Turkey for the reporting period was 12.3 percent.
Turkey imports gas from Azerbaijan via the South Caucasus gas pipeline (Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum). Turkey has signed a contract for the annual purchase of 6.6 bcm of gas from the Azerbaijani offshore gas condensate field Shah Deniz.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Maksim Tsurkov Trend:
Turkey imported 20.93 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia in January-September 2017 as compared to 16.99 billion cubic meters in the same period of 2016, says a report posted on the website of Turkeys Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK).
Russia delivered 24.54 billion cubic meters of gas to Turkey in 2016 as compared to 26.78 billion cubic meters in 2015.
The report says that Turkey imported 39.62 billion cubic meters of gas in January-September 2017, of which 32.73 billion cubic meters were imported via pipelines and 6.89 billion cubic meters accounted for import of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Russias share in Turkeys total import of gas was 52.8 percent in January-September 2017.
Russia supplies gas to Turkey via the Blue Stream and Trans-Balkan pipelines. Blue Stream is a major trans-Black Sea gas pipeline with a capacity of 16 billion cubic meters per year that carries natural gas from Russia into Turkey.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Maksim Tsurkov Trend:
Crude oil held steady after Opec and Russia showed unity and extended production cuts until the end of 2018, Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank, told Trend Dec. 4.
Gold's November trading range was the tightest since 1999 while industrial metals retraced on continued worries that the outlook for Chinese growth and demand may underwhelm, he noted.
Oil traders attention were fixed on Vienna where Opec and non-Opec producers met to discuss how to proceed with the process of bringing balance between supply and demand for crude, he said. In the end they delivered what the market had been pricing in: A nine-month extension of the current deal to keep 1.8 million barrels/day from the market until the end of 2018. In addition, Libya and Nigeria agreed not to lift production beyond their respective 2017 peaks while Russia was appeased with a review date in June next year.
Gold traded within its tightest monthly range (measured in percent) since 1999 last month while a lower monthly trading range than November's 33 dollars was last seen in 2005 when gold traded at $465/oz. The market remains stuck between the negative pull of rising rates and underlying demand from investors seeking tail-end protection against geopolitical events and the rising risk of a stock market correction.
Gold has now been range-bound in a relatively tight range around $1282/oz for the past three months, he noted. Resistance at $1300/oz was challenged this week during the Japanese yen's failed attempt to break higher. A stronger dollar, higher bond yields and speculation that the US tax bill would pass helped send the yellow metal straight back down to test support located just below $1270/oz.
The Bloomberg Industrial metals index was on track to record its worst week since March. The weakness was led by nickel which continued to pare back recent gains which were driven by euphoria about future demand from the electric vehicle industry. Copper lost more than 3% with this bellwether metal seeing funds selling in response to rising concerns about the prospects of the Chinese economy over the coming year. The weakness occurred despite Eurozone data continuing to point towards the best year for its economic growth in a decade.
Weakness among industrial metals added to silver's woes as it recorded its worst week in five months, he said. This resulted in the gold-silver ratio breaking to the upside and touching its highest level since April 2016. Silver tends to struggle relative to gold when the demand is driven by diversification and safe haven demand. Adding to this its credentials as a high beta gold meaning it tends to swing more violently, not least to the downside, given the current reductions in ETP holdings and a relative elevated hedge fund long.
Crude oil held steady Friday just below a two-year high. This following Opec and non-Opec producers' decision to play safe and maintain output cuts throughout 2018. Russia had raised some concerns ahead of the meeting as it seemed they were balking at the prospect of ordering their producers to keep the taps turned down for another nine months. In order to meet Russian concerns it was agreed to review the deal at the next ordinary Opec meeting on June 22 while Libya and Nigeria agreed not to lift production beyond their respective 2017 peaks.
The show of unity in Vienna was a classic example of realpolitik with the economic importance of keeping prices supported outweighing fraught relations between several countries, not least between Saudi Arabia supported by its GCC allies and Iran, often supported by Russia, he noted.
Much now hinges on continued compliance from the group with Iraq potentially being one of the candidates struggling to keep its commitment, he added. While southern Iraqi oil sales have jumped to a record, Jabbar al-Luaibi, the oil minister, in Vienna expressed some very ambitious plans to improve the fields around the northern city of Kirkuk. Back in October Iraq regained control of the area from the Kurdish Regional Government. A move which led to a temporary drop in supplies from northern Iraq to the Turkish port of Ceyhan and which helped support the oil rally back then.
Attention will now increasingly turn to the US with the market trying to gauge the impact on production growth from a price trading well above $50/b. Weekly production estimates continue to reach new highs and during the past three weeks US drillers have added back almost half of the rigs that were pulled during the previous three months.
A major shift in US oil and products trading with the rest of the world has occurred this year, he said. Rising production of oil has increasingly found its way into the global market, both as refined products and since 2014 increasingly also as crude oil exports. Last week the net-import of crude oil and products slumped to just 1.8 million barrels/day, a far cry from the 10 million plus barrels witnessed just six years ago.
While rising US production may pose a medium-term challenge to oil prices the biggest short-term challenge remains the near record long position currently being held in WTI and Brent crude oil futures. Money managers have been active buyers of crude oil since July. The combined net-long in Brent and WTI was close to 900 million barrels in the week to November 21, not far from the February record of 930 million.
Opec has over the years become increasingly aware of the impact of speculative positioning in the oil market and meeting in Vienna this week they knew that failing to deliver what the market expected could have triggered a major correction due to position adjustments, he added.
A position this size needs to be fed bullish news in order to avoid the temptation of booking profit, he said. The period ahead of the holiday season and New Year tends to see reduced liquidity and this could make the oil price particularly vulnerable should the Opec focus be replaced by worries about rapid US production. Rystad, the respected independent oil and gas consulting service company based in Norway, this week forecast that US oil production could reach 9.9 million barrels/day this month, well above what anyone, including the EIA, had been forecasting up until now.
With the Opec meeting behind us the short term risk to oil looks skewed to the downside during what is normally a low-demand season. WTI crude oil has spent the past few weeks consolidating above $55/b, currently the level of support. The upside potential is focusing on $60/b, a key psychological level around which we saw nine weeks of trading during the second quarter of 2015.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Huseyn Valiyev- Trend
Presentation of a system of integration of e-signature certificates into new IDs will be held within the framework of the 23rd Azerbaijan International Telecommunications and Information Technologies Exhibition and Conference Bakutel 2017, the countrys Deputy Minister of Transport, Communications and High Technologies Elmir Valizade said.
He made the remarks Dec. 4 in Baku at a press conference dedicated to the opening of the Bakutel 2017 Exhibition.
The Bakutel 2017 Exhibition will be held Dec.5-8.
Valizade said that the issuance of new IDs will start in 2018.
The ID cards will have carriers, into which e-signature certificates will be integrated, thus each citizen will be able to take advantage of the e-government portal, Valizade said.
E-signature certificates will be integrated into ID cards free of charge, he said, adding that the validity period of e-signature certificate in new ID cards will be five years.
At the end of this period, it will only be necessary to extend the certificates validity period, he noted.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Nigar Guliyeva Trend:
A draft law on external labor migration has been developed in Uzbekistan. The document was posted on the portal on evaluation system of legislative acts in Uzbekistan.
The law will apply to citizens of Uzbekistan working abroad, as well as individuals and legal entities of all forms of ownership participating in the processes of external labor migration.
Under the document, the Agency for External Labor Migration under the Ministry of Labor, structural units of the Agency, as well as recruiting organizations will be engaged in the employment of citizens of Uzbekistan abroad.
These structures will carry out an organized recruitment of citizens who have expressed a desire to work abroad, at the request of foreign economic entities.
The basis for sending citizens to work abroad will be employment contracts concluded by the sending organization with a foreign employer and a citizen of Uzbekistan intending to leave for work.
The document also features the basic duties of the migrant.
The Agency will also have a foundation to provide legal, social and material support to migrant workers. Its main tasks will be to assist in the employment of citizens of Uzbekistan abroad and on their return.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Dec. 4
By Huseyn Hasanov - Trend
Political consultations were held in Ashgabat between representatives of foreign ministries of Turkmenistan and Austria, the Turkmen foreign ministry said in a message Dec. 4.
According to the message, Viennas delegation was headed by Katharina Wieser, head of the Department of Eastern and Southern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia of the Ministry for European Affairs, Integration and Foreign Affairs of Austria.
Mutual relations in politics, economy, energy, transportation, cooperation within international organizations, in particular the UN and the EU, were discussed during the meeting.
The sides exchanged views on a number of regional issues and aspects of international security. They also touched upon cooperation in culture, art, education and healthcare.
Stressing the importance of continuing the established dialogue that meets mutual interests, the sides agreed to hold another round of political consultations in Vienna in 2018 to further diversify fruitful cooperation.
France and Germany agree that Iran must reverse its ballistic missile program and end its hegemonic temptations across the Middle east, the French foreign minister said on Monday, Reuters reports.
We also have the same view on the necessity for Iran to go back on its ballistic missile program and its hegemonic temptations, Jean-Yves Le Drian said at a news conference alongside his German counterpart Sigmar Gabriel.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 30
By Umid Niayesh Trend:
Despite the fact that Iran and Russia enjoy very close political ties at a strategic alliance level, the alliance is not reflected in trade ties.
The sides have failed so far to boost the volume of the trade, as obstacles still exist. After the tension between Moscow and West escalated in recent years, there was a big opportunity for Iranians to pave their way to Russias food market, but the expectations did not materialize due to various obstacles.
Experts believe that shortcomings in banking ties, transportation issues, lack of proper marketing and unawareness of the Russian markets capacities, different hygienic standards applied in the two countries and low quality of Iranian products, visa complications, the tendency to consume European goods by Russians and a lack of reciprocal trust between merchants of the two sides are among the main obstacles ahead of Iranian exporters to find a foothold in Russian market.
Some Iranian businessmen are satisfied that the trade relations, which have been hampered for many years, will not be established overnight.
Earlier, Secretary General of Iran's Aquatics Producers' Association Ali Akbar Khodaei said that the export of aquatics to Russia is a long process and needs much ground preparation.
The two parties also have established an arrangement of oil for goods barter, which is expected to come into force in the near future.
The arrangement dates back to 2014 when Iran tried to boost vital energy exports in the face of intensified Western sanctions. At the time, it was said that Moscow and Tehran were discussing a barter deal that would see Moscow buy up to 500,000 barrels a day (bpd) of Iranian oil in exchange for Russian equipment and goods.
Hereinafter, we will take a look at the Islamic Republics trade with Russia in recent years, comparing the trade value before intensification of the international sanctions against Tehran in 2012, under the sanctions, and in post-sanctions era.
The figures show that Iran-Russia trade balance was in favor of Moscow in all years of the study period.
Despite the fact that Irans exports to Russia did not witness big changes in these years, the countrys imports have experienced significant fluctuations.
Russias exports to Iran jumped by 115 percent to $1,632 million in the fiscal year of 2012/2013, when the intensified sanctions hit Irans economy. However the figure decreased by 58 percent in the succeeding year and did not revive till the removal of international sanctions in 2016.
In 2016/2017 Russias exports to Iran hiked by 198 percent to $1,541 billion.
Comparing the prices of the exported and imported goods, indicates that Irans exports to Russia were more valuable goods in comparison to Russian ones.
Food, agricultural products and cement form the lion share of Irans export basket to Russia.
The following table, extracted from the data of Irans state-run Trade Promotion Organization (TPOI) and Tehran Chamber of Commerce shows Irans non-oil trade values with Russia in recent years.
Year (Iranian fiscal) Export, million USD Growth % Price ($/kg) price change% Import, million USD Growth % Price ($/kg) price change% Trade balance, million USD Trade volume, million USD 84 (March 2005-2006) 183 - 0,9 - 1034 - 0,4 - -851 1217 85 (2006-2007) 289 58 1 11 665 -36 0,6 50 -376 954 86 (2007-2008) 367 27 1,5 50 866 30 0,7 17 -499 1233 87 (2008-2009) 358 -2 1,8 20 1193 38 0,7 0 -835 1551 88 (2009-2010) 333 -7 1,7 -6 908 -24 0,6 -14 -575 1241 89 (2010-2011) 330 -1 1,4 -18 433 -52 0,6 0 -103 763 90 (2011-2012) 371 12 1,1 -21 759 75 0,6 0 -388 1130 91 (2012-2013) 501 35 0,5 -55 1632 115 0,5 -17 -1131 2133 92 (2013-2014) 317 -37 0,3 -40 689 -58 0,5 0 -372 1006 93 (2014-2015) 295 -7 0,4 33 639 -7 0,5 0 -344 934 94 (2015-2016) 173 -41 0,4 0 517 -19 0,4 -20 -344 690 95 (2016-2017) 219 27 0,6 50 1541 198 0,7 75 -1322 1760
Despite the fact that Russias exports to Iran flourished during the first year following the removal of the sanctions, the latest statistics by Irans Customs administration indicate that the trend has changed downward again.
Russia exported $419 million worth of goods to Iran in the first seven months of the current fiscal year (started March 20, 2017), 63 percent less year-on-year.
However, the volume of exports was 909,000 tons, 1 percent more compared to the seven-month period of the preceding year. This indicates that the Russia has exported more goods but with less value to the Islamic Republic in the period.
On the other hand, Irans exports to Russia accounted to $228 million in the first half of 2017, 36 percent more year-on-year, a sign that Iran is gradually increasing its share from Russias food market.
A UW-Madison graduate focusing on breaking down voting barriers has been selected as one of 43 students in the U.S. to receive the Marshall Scholarship to study in the United Kingdom.
Phoenix Rice-Johnson, a native of Hawaii who was attracted to UW-Madison while taking summer trips to visit her grandparents in Wisconsin, will attend Kings College London in 2018, pursuing a master's degree in public policy.
She is currently in New York at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute at the New York University School of Law, working as a research and program associate, focusing on breaking down barriers that keep marginalized people from voting.
Her blue-collar background is helpful in her studies.
"It's so important to have working-class people in decision-making spaces," Rice-Johnson said in a statement Monday. "It's why I'm inspired to do what I do. That voice needs to be heard."
While at UW-Madison, Rice-Johnson was active in politics, rising to the presidency of College Democrats of Wisconsin, and also helped run political campaigns as well as interning at the White House.
She also received several UW-Madison awards, including the College of Letters and Science Dean's Prize, the Teddy Kubly Award for most outstanding graduating senior, and the 2015 Truman Scholarship, awarded to 58 students nationwide.
"I can't overstate my admiration for Phoenix, who is a true scholar-activist," said Julie Stubbs, director of undergraduate academic awards at UW-Madison.
"She's chosen to study pressing social problems and fight for change through advocacy work and the political process," Stubbs said. "While building an exceptional record of leadership at UW-Madison and beyond, she's always found time to mentor and create opportunities for her more junior colleagues."
Senior Ross Dahlke, a journalism and political science major from Westfield, also was a finalist for the Marshall Scholarship.
The most recent Marshall winners at UW-Madison were Deshawn McKinney from the class of 2017 and Andrew Bulovsky from the class of 2014.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Fatih Karimov Trend:
Hungary is interested in boosting oil purchase from Iran in the future, Hungarys Minister of National Economy Mihaly Varga said.
The visiting Hungarian minister made the remarks after a meeting with Irans oil minister, Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, Dec. 4, the oil ministrys official website reported.
The Hungarian multinational oil and gas company MOL has already received a 1-million barrel oil shipment from Iran after removal of international sanctions against Tehran in 2016.
Negotiations for crude export to Hungary were launched in early 2016. In mid-July 2016, Iran said MOL had called for importing 40,000 barrels of light crude oil per day from Iran. However, at the time, Tehran was not ready to provide MOL with light crude.
The Hungarian minister further said that Iran and Hungary are determined to facilitate banking ties.
There is no obstacle to reviving the pre-sanctions banking ties between Tehran and Budapest, Varga added.
Varga, who is in Tehran for an official visit, held meetings with senior Iranian officials, including his counterpart, Masoud Karbasian.
Four memorandums of understanding for cooperation in various sectors, including manufacture of hybrid cooling systems, electric vehicles, electric rail equipment and buses were signed between Iranian and Hungarian entrepreneurs during the visit.
The Hungarian minister said mutual trade between his country and Iran has witnessed a twofold increase in post-sanctions era.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 2
By Fatih Karimov Trend:
Irans oil exports to Japan (including gas condensates) in October 2017 decreased by 18 percent year-on-year and reached 5.13 million barrels.
Compared to the preceding month, the figure indicates a fall by 20.6 percent, Japans ministry of economy, trade and industry said.
The figure includes 487,510.7 barrels of condensates exported from Irans South Pars gas field.
Iran was Japans fifth oil supplier after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait, with a share of 5.7 percent in October 2017, while the country supplied 6.6 percent of the Asian countrys oil demand in October 2016 (6.26 million barrels).
Saudi Arabia exported 36.039 million barrels of oil to Japan in October (39.7 percent of the countrys total crude imports.)
Irans oil exports to Japan reached 83.94 million barrels in the fiscal year of 2016, which is a 38-percent increase compared to the preceding year.
Iran supplied 7 percent of Japans oil demand in 2016.
Irans oil exports increased by 1 million barrels per day (mb/d) last year to 2.42 mb/d and the figure would increase to 2.5 mb/d in 2017 and 2.59 mb/d in 2018, IMF previously said in a report.
Irans oil and condensate exports amounted to 2.6 mb/d in September 2017, the countrys oil ministry said recently. The country exported 2.25 mb/d of oil to Asian and European markets in the mentioned period. China, India, South Korea and Japan imported more than 1.9 mb/d in September, highest level since March 2017.
Tehran, Iran, December 2
By Mehdi Sepahvand Trend:
Irans economy is most probably going to become heavily reliant on gas, although gas already looms large in the country and has been a source of blessing for the government.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has in its World Energy Outlook 2017 it made a strong statement of how big the potential of Irans gas industry is: "In our projections, Iran leads gas output growth in the Middle East, adding 150bn cubic metres [a year] to the region's gas supply in the period to 2040," the agency has said.
Last year, when asked by Trend what comprised the Iranian economys propelling sections, government spokesman Mohammad Baqer Nobakht put strong emphasis on petrochemicals, all of which is a gas-based business.
According to the Iran Petroleum Ministry, the proved natural gas reserves of Iran are about 1,201 trillion cubic feet (34.0 trillion cubic meters) or about 17.8 percent of world's total reserves, of which 33 percent is as associated gas and 67 percent is in non-associated gas fields. Iran has the world's second largest reserves after Russia. As it takes approximately 5,850 cubic feet (166 m3) of gas to equal the energy content of 1-barrel (0.16 m3) of oil, Iran's gas reserves represent the equivalent of about 216 billion barrels (3.431010 m3) of oil.
At present, Iran's gas production is around 200 bcmpy. Of this, less than 10bn cm/y is exported.
Meeting the growing domestic demand for gas is the priority for Iranian gas producers, especially because they have an eye on situations when, like the early 2010s, the country is under sanctions and relying on gas for running power plants, factories, vehicles, and warming buildings would be the safest approach.
But as output from South Pars expands and capacity starts climbing towards the forecast 350bn cm/y by 2040, the IEA anticipates "some export growth via links to Iraq and Oman, as well as further deliveries to Turkey and, much later on [in] the projection period, the start of a pipeline connection with Pakistan".
In July, Amir Hossein Zamaninia, Irans deputy oil minister for trade and international affairs, said Irans gas production would rise to 1 billion cubic meters a day by the end of the year from that times 800 mcmpd.
In the seventh month of the current fiscal year (September 23-October 21), gas power plants in Iran received a daily average of 196 mcm of gas. Iran has the worlds largest CNG-powered car fleet, near 4 million. Almost all cities and big villages in the country also use gas for warming.
Iran's gas production capacity in South Pars, the world's largest gas field in the Persian Gulf that stretches into Qatar's territory, has reached 575 million cubic meters per day. That constitutes nearly two-thirds of Iranian gas output capacity.
The country hopes to develop its South Pars deposit using the investment and technology of Total that became the first major Western energy firm to sign a deal after the lifting of economic curbs in January 2016.
Currently, Iran exports about 1 mcmpd of gas to its northwestern neighbor Armenia, according to a 20-year contract signed in 2004 and put to force in 2009.
Iran is also exporting about 30 mcmpd of gas to its other northwestern neighbor Turkey. This is based on an annually renewed contract.
Iran is also exporting about 14 mcmpd of gas to its western neighbor Iraq. Based on agreements, the exported amount should stay somewhere between 7 and 25 mcmpd.
The Ministry of Petroleum plans to increase Irans share of global gas trade to 10 percent, which would be 7 times the current volume.
Nevertheless, just this week Iran signed a contract with Oman over the export of 1.5 bcfpd of gas to Oman. The project is expected to go on stream by 2020.
Tehran, Iran, Dec. 4
By Mehdi Sepahvand Trend:
The fact that Irans trade relations are turning to Asia more and more comes with well-established reasons, according to a former member of parliament.
The reasons have to be found in the partners with which we consider working, Iraj Nadimi, currently a top adviser to the head of Management and Planning Organization, told Trend December 4, adding, The fact is that European countries have not been quick enough in reestablishing ties with Iran.
Iran and Europe used to cherish hopes of trade reunion as they brought the landmark Iran nuclear deal (aka Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)) into force in 2016. However, major companies and banks in Europe still fear US punishments for engaging Iran.
Under such circumstances, China has started financing billions of dollars worth of projects in Iran, making deep inroads into the economy and leaving Europe behind.
State-owned investment arm CITIC Group recently established a $10 billion credit line and China Development Bank is considering $15 billion more.
Iranian officials say the deals are part of Beijings $124 billion Belt and Road initiative, which aims to build new infrastructure - from highways and railways to ports and power plants - between China and Europe to pave the way for an expansion of trade.
South Korea has also proved a willing investor, with Seouls Eximbank signing an 8 billion euros credit line for projects in Iran in August, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.
Nadimi noted that the inertia in Europe against making bonds with Iran is probably a remnant of the days of sanctions.
With Europeans, it is so that they face more problems compared to China or Korea for starting projects with Iran, he said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec.4
By Fuad Aslanov - Trend:
The Armenian population, which witnesses the careless attitude of their government towards them, have already given up hope of having a normal leadership in the country.
For this very reason, tens of thousands of people leave the country every year, thus constantly reducing the population of Armenia. However, the government, probably, does not perceive this as a serious problem. Instead, the authorities continue to plunder the countrys internal resources and misappropriate billions of foreign currency incomes.
The outflow of population negatively affects the number of private money transfers as well as foreign investment into the country. The Armenian newspaper Zhamanak reports that the volume of net cash flows in January-September 2017 was by $1.8 million less than those that Armenia received in the same period last year.
Armenian economists, in turn, note that the change of heads of several government agencies in Armenia led to an outflow of capital, since some dismissed persons have powerful financial and other kind of resources.
It should be noted that since taking office last year, Armenian Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan promised the development of the Armenian economy due to a number of factors. In particular, he promised to bring investment in the country, but today it is not even felt when we take a look at the current state of the Armenian economy.
Currently, the investment indicator in Armenia is negative, that is, Armenians withdraw investments more than attract them. Obviously, few people dare to invest in the impoverished and corrupt country. Even the richest foreigners from affluent countries hesitate to invest their money in Armenia, known for extreme corruption and many other drawbacks. The Armenian businessmen themselves do not invest money in the countrys business spheres because they are afraid of losing the funds. They understand unreasonableness of investing in the Armenian economy which is heading towards a default.
The territory of Moscows Domodedovo Airport is being checked after a passenger said he has an explosive device, an emergency official told TASS on Sunday.
"Overnight into Sunday, a passenger on the territory of the Domodedovo Airport said he had an explosive device," the source said.
Security is tight at the airport, he said, and police are working on the site.
US F-22 fighter jets roared into the sky over South Korea on Monday to start air combat exercises that North Korea says are pushing the peninsula to the brink of nuclear war, CNN reports.
A US 7th Air Force official said the top-of-the-line F-22s are being joined by Air Force and Marine Corps F-35s in the largest concentration of fifth-generation fighter jets ever in South Korea.
The stealthy F-22s and F35s are among 230 US and South Korean aircraft participating in the annual Vigilant Ace 18 air combat drills.
The drills begin after a weekend that saw official sources from both North Korea and the US say the chances of war are growing.
North Korea's bellicose rhetoric came in two phases: On Saturday, a statement from its Foreign Ministry said US President Donald Trump is "begging for a nuclear war" through what it called an "extremely dangerous nuclear gamble on the Korean Peninsula."
A day later, a commentary from Pyongyang's Rodong Sinmun newspaper, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, said US-South Korea joint air exercises scheduled for Monday to Friday are a "dangerous provocation" pushing the region "to the brink of a nuclear war."
From the US side, White House national security adviser HR McMaster told a conference in California on Saturday that the chances for war on the Korean Peninsula grow daily.
"I think it's increasing every day, which means that we are in a race, really, we are in a race to be able to solve this problem," McMaster told an audience at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley.
McMaster made the comment when asked if North Korea's launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile in the early hours of Wednesday morning local time had increased the chance of war.
"There are ways to address this problem short of armed conflict, but it is a race because he's getting closer and closer, and there's not much time left," McMaster said, referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
With every missile launch or nuclear test, Kim has improved his country's capabilities, McMaster said.
US Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican hawk who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CBS News that North Korea's advancing military technology makes the possibility of pre-emptive war more likely.
"I think we're really running out of time," he said.
Graham also said he will urge the Pentagon not to send any military dependents to South Korea.
"It's crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea. So I want them to stop sending dependents. And I think it's now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea," he said.
The United States and nine other nations agreed to a 16-year ban on commercial fishing in the Arctic Ocean to give researchers time to study the area's ecology and the effects of climate change, UPI reports.
The agreement, which was reached after a meeting between the various countries' delegations late last month, establishes and operates a joint scientific research and monitoring program to understand the ecosystem of and determine whether fish stocks exist and could be sustainably harvested, according to a statement from the Chairman of the meeting between the 10 nations.
Joining the United States in the agreement were Russia, China, Denmark, Iceland, South Korea, Japan, Norway and the European Union.
The Arctic Ocean has not been a target for large scale commercial fishing. But as the ice melts and its waters become more open, that could change. And since the waters are international, fishing would be legal and unregulated, which some researchers, environmental groups, and policymakers fear could cause vast damage to the area's ecosystem, Science Magazine reported.
The international agreement to ban fishing prevents that from happening.
"For the first time, nations are committing to scientific research in a high seas area before commercial fishing begins," said Scott Highleyman, the vice-president of conservation policy and programs at Ocean Conservancy and a the U.S. delegate involved in the agreement's negotiation. "This precautionary action recognizes both the pace of change in the Arctic due to climate change as well as the tradition of Arctic cooperation across international boundaries."
France is close to finalizing major military and transport contracts during a visit by Emmanuel Macron to Qatar on Thursday, a French presidential source said, Reuters reports.
Qatar has an option to buy 12 more Dassault-made Rafale fighter jets after buying 24 planes in 2015 for about 6 billion euros ($7.11 billion) and officials have said that the deal could be concluded this week.
The two sides are also in talks for sale of 300 VBCI armored vehicles from French firm Nexter and a contract worth some 3 billion euros to manage the Doha metro for 20 years.
Discussions are ongoing, a French presidential source told reporters on Monday ahead of the visit. You spoke about several dossiers for which the point of maturity is close, but I prefer to remain a little bit prudent and wait until Thursday.
Paris has close commercial and political ties with Qatar and has pushed further business interests in the country as well as encourage investment into France, where the gas-rich Gulf state already has assets of about $10 billion.
It has also sought to play a role as a go-between in a row, which began in early June when Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt cut political and trade ties with Qatar.
Since then Qatar has sought to strengthen its military, including signing military equipment deals with the United States, Russia and Britain.
Britain agreed on Monday to keep Northern Ireland in regulatory alignment with the European Union after Brexit, Irish government sources said, raising hopes Prime Minister Theresa May can strike a deal in Brussels to start free trade talks, Reuters reports.
After intensive negotiations in recent days, Britain made what the Irish sources called a clear commitment to keep economic rules on both sides of the new UK-EU land border across the island of Ireland similar enough to allow no frontier.
That is seen as a key way to avoid customs and other infrastructure which might jeopardize the peace in Northern Ireland. How far Britain would then be permitted to change rules on the mainland as Brexit supporters want was not immediately clear. May and her Northern Irish allies want no new regulatory barriers erected between the province and the rest of the United Kingdom.
Agreement has been reached on an overall deal for the Irish issues, one of the Irish government sources said.
The key phrase is a clear commitment to maintaining regulatory alignment in relation to the rules of the customs union and internal market which are required to support the Good Friday Agreement, the all-island economy and the border.
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said he hoped to make a positive statement shortly, adding that British-EU negotiations on post-Brexit trade would start and that the Irish border would not change its physical appearance after Britain leaves the EU.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker spoke to Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar by phone. EU lawmaker Philippe Lamberts, who met Juncker earlier on Monday, said the draft text on Ireland would commit Britain to full alignment on rules.
Donald Tusk, the EU summit chair, tweeted ebulliently after speaking to Varadkar that there was good progress on the Irish issue to unblock UK-EU trade talks: Tell me why I like Mondays! the former Polish premier wrote. Getting closer to sufficient progress at December (EU summit).
London has broadly agreed to many of the EUs divorce terms, including paying out something like 50 billion euros. But the issues of the rights of expatriate citizens and the UK-EU border on the island of Ireland defied a deal until the last minute.
Elmar Brok, another member of the European Parliament who met Juncker and his Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, before they met May, said just a few words separated the sides.
In London, Mays spokesman said: Progress is being made. Theres more still to agree upon.
At the funeral home after her husband died in a June crash, Jessica Steinhorst was handed a bag of his belongings. She really didnt care about anything other than his wedding ring, and it wasnt there.
She was told the damage to her husbands left side was extensive, and his ring wasnt recovered.
It was the one thing that was important to me. I didnt care about his phone. I didnt care about his clothes. I didnt care about his wallet. I wanted his ring, said Steinhorst, 32.
Then, in mid-October, Steinhorst, of Wauzeka, two hours west of Madison, got her late husbands ring back thanks to the expertise of a town of Middleton man with a ring-finding business.
Steinhorsts grandmother lives in Madison and is well-known for cutting out articles on just about anything and sending them to loved ones. When Steinhorst found an article in her recent birthday card, she didnt think much of it at first.
But when she saw the Wisconsin State Journal article about ring finder Dan Roekle, who by then had turned up 60 lost rings, she knew she had to contact him.
Turns out, the recovery of Lee Steinhorsts ring would become the most significant in the two-plus years Roekles been in the ring-finding game.
Every ring hunt is meaningful because the ring means something, Roekle said. Either it was a family members or the fact that its a wedding ring. But this one just takes it to a different level of what it means to both her and, ultimately, to her kids one day.
Lee Steinhorst, 33, was killed about 4:15 a.m. June 27 when his minivan crossed the center line of Highway 61 in the Grant County town of Fennimore and struck a semitrailer head-on, the Sheriffs Office said.
Jessica Steinhorst said her husband worked as a security manager at Walmart in Platteville, and was coming home from an overnight shift he worked once a month or so.
Roekle, whos been successful in his hunts 53 percent of the time, told Steinhorst that side-of-road searches are really hard because of the roadside trash.
Theres just so much stuff there from the years, and then snowplows push everything into the ditch, said Roekle, who often collects trash during side-of-the-road searches.
What made Steinhorsts search successful was that, although it was in a rural area, Roekle found the ring near a house with a relatively well-maintained yard. Along on the search was Roekles son Carter, 14, and a volunteer from a Facebook metal-detecting group in the area.
Roekle said he started losing hope as they got into a section that was thick with brush. But on the edge of some tall grass, pressed into the ground, he spotted it. It was sitting there, plain as day, just waiting to be found, he said.
Having the ring back means the world to her, Jessica Steinhorst said. It means she can hold it and feel some sort of connection.
Its something her children, ages 9, 2 and 8 months, can have one day, to just feel close to him in some sort of way, she said.
Steinhorst tried to give Roekle a reward, but he didnt take it or charge her his usual call out fee. He even took steps to set up a GoFundMe site for the family, which was ultimately handled by Jessica Steinhorsts sister.
Life changes in an instant, but luckily we were able to return something to her to remember him, Roekle said.
Steinhorst hopes to wear the ring in a chain around her neck, but still needs to find a chain thats sturdy enough. I dont want to lose it again, she said.
The ring was a custom-made, one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry with her fingerprint imprinted inside. It symbolized what it did when they married, their love and connection a connection Steinhorst felt shed lost for a while.
This gives me something to hold and to remind me of our love and how this was our life together. Hes still, hopefully, with me, she said.
The ministers of foreign affairs of the Caspian "five" - Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan - Sergey Lavrov, Elmar Mammadyarov, Javad Zarif, Kairat Abdrakhmanov and Rashid Meredov will discuss on Tuesday in Moscow the development of a document on the legal status of the Caspian Sea, TASS reports.
The ministerial meeting precedes the summit in this format, which may take place in early 2018. "Work in this direction is underway, now we are trying to complete certain details of this document," said Grigory Karasin, State Secretary and Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation.
Karasin noted that the Caspian Sea should become an example of cooperation against the background of "unpredictable different approaches to major international problems." "And this will give the opportunity for all five not to wait for favors from extra-regional players, not to wait for some more rapid development of the international situation, it will enable them to act independently and become an example of good, regional interaction," he added.
Half of Britons support a second vote on whether to leave the European Union and a majority think the government may be paying too much money to the EU to open the way to trade talks, according to a new opinion poll, Reuters reported.
The poll, published in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, found 50 percent of people supported another vote on the final terms of Britains exit deal, 34 percent rejected another referendum and 16 percent said they did not know.
The newspaper said it was the first major opinion poll since last weeks media reports that Britain is preparing to pay about 50 billion euros ($59 billion) to help to move on to talks on a future trade pact with the EU.
Brexit supporters argue any attempt to halt the exit process would be anti-democratic.
According to the Survation poll only 11 percent of voters said Britain should pay 50 billion pounds to quit the EU, while 31 percent said the government should not pay anything at all.
The poll also found 35 percent of those surveyed said they would be worse off financially after Brexit, while 14 percent said they would be better off.
A bus carrying young holidaymakers overturned in Tunisia, causing 52 injured, including 10 in critical condition, Xinhua reported, citing the private-owned Nessma TV.
Local sources told Xinhua that the bus skidded off the road in the governorate of Beja in northwest of the country before plunging into a river in the area.
The identities of the injured remained unknown.
The bus was headed to the town of Ain Draham in the governorate of Jendouba, which is known to be one of the best tourist destinations in Tunisia for snow sightseeing and sports.
The National Institute of Meteorology of Tunisia has forecast the arrival of a strong cold front that could persist until half of next week with rains and snowfalls in the northern and northeastern governorates of the country.
Details added (first version posted on 13:39)
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec.4
By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:
Looking forward for a very productive NATO ministerial, said US Permanent Representative to NATO, Ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchison at a press briefing Dec.4.
"We are looking forward for a very productive session. First of all, our priority will be the fight against terrorism and particularly, the Resolute Support Mission, she said.
Hutchison noted that the second area of discussions will be the NATO-EU cooperation that is coming to a much better position. It is very important for us," she added.
She said that increased military mobility in Europe within that cooperation will also be discussed at the ministerial.
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Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend:
A special commission has been set up in Turkey to study financial consequences of the military coup attempt in the country, the Turkish media reported Dec. 4.
The commission will be headed by the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund of Turkey (TMSF) and the countrys Cabinet of Ministers, according to the report.
Until Dec. 31 this year, the commission has to prepare a report on the financial consequences of the military coup attempt.
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 250 people were killed during the attempted coup.
Turkish authorities are accusing Fethullah Gulen, who lives in the US, of supporting the attempted coup.
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Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 4
By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend:
Nineteen MPs from Turkeys Democratic Peoples Party may be deprived of parliamentary immunity, the countrys media reported Dec. 4.
On Dec. 4, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office appealed to the Ministry of Justice with a demand to lift the immunity of a number of MPs from the Democratic Peoples Party.
The decision is related to the statements of MPs from the Democratic Peoples Party in support of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) terrorist group.
In June, the police of Turkeys southeastern Diyarbakir Province detained an MP from Democratic People's Party, Osman Baydemir.
In general, 11 MPs from Democratic People's Party, including co-chairs of the party Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, have been recently arrested in Turkey.
The MPs from Democratic People's Party are accused of creating a criminal organization, membership in a terrorist organization, and other crimes.
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Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
KYODO NEWS - Dec 4, 2017 - 12:13 | Feature, All
Local restaurants, souvenir shops and even some temples and shrines are hoping to cater to foreign guests with an international custom yet to be adopted in Japan: letting customers pay their bills with credit cards instead of cash.
As the country braces for a further tourism boom in the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, major credit card companies are providing local businesses with portable devices so foreign customers can pay at the table -- a practice customary in their home countries.
In mid-September, a customer from Sweden seated at the bar at The Rigoletto, a restaurant serving Southern European cuisines in Tokyo's busy Shibuya district, swiped his card at his table. He said the convenience reminded him of being back home.
The format, in which customers simply enter their PIN numbers for verification into portable devices after a waiter presents the bill on a tablet, was introduced at the restaurant in April.
"More cards are being used, and these terminals are convenient for foreign guests who are used to paying at their table," said a restaurant employee.
Card company Mitsubishi UFJ Nicos Co. launched the system at affiliated stores nationwide in November last year. Simply by downloading the app, customers can exchange data wirelessly with the portable device.
A company official who works in systems development said there has been a high demand for a payment method "which can be used anywhere inside shops," particularly among restaurants.
The Japanese government is aiming to see the rate of cashless payments via credit cards and other means double in the next 10 years to about 40 percent within the country.
Tourist spots including traditional places such as temples have slowly come to accept plastic.
Kongobuji, the head temple of Koyasan Shingon Buddhism, on Mt. Koya in Wakayama Prefecture in western Japan, began in April to accept credit cards for admission fees.
Card payments are becoming popular also at ski resorts in the northernmost Japanese prefecture of Hokkaido and Nagano Prefecture, central Japan, which attract many international skiers.
Domestic tourist spots have been reluctant to accept credit cards until now because customers usually only pay a small amount on entrance fees or souvenirs, making it not worth the investment.
Square, Inc., a U.S. based IT company, uses a small device to connect to mobile devices, such as iPhones, to accept credit card payments without the hassle of using cash registers.
The company, which launched its business in Japan in 2013, says the system has proven popular especially among small shops.
In the last few years, the company has seen a steady increase in the number of stores that have adopted the system.
The company's Japanese arm said it expects to a see a further expansion of the system toward the 2020 Tokyo Games.
KYODO NEWS - Dec 4, 2017 - 13:57 | All, Japan
A range of electronic and other products, including home appliances and a solar power panel, were found missing on an uninhabited islet off the northern main island of Hokkaido where North Korean crewmen took shelter due to bad weather, Japan Coast Guard officials and sources familiar with the matter said Monday.
Police and coast guard officials searched the islet on Sunday. According to the sources, a TV, a motorbike, a refrigerator, a rice cooker and a power generator were found missing from a refuge hut. The hut had been locked, but it was broken into and its inside was disarranged.
A wooden fishing boat with 10 North Korean men on board was found drifting in waters near the islet last Wednesday. The fishermen, who were later rescued by the coast guard, were seen dumping some home appliances into the sea from their boat.
Japanese authorities found several home appliances, including a TV, from the boat while a coast guard patrol boat has collected some of the appliances thrown into the water.
The coast guard said some solar power panels used to power a lighthouse on the islet were also missing.
The North Korean crewmen have told the officials they left the port of Chongjin in northeastern North Korea in September for squid fishing in the Sea of Japan before the steering wheel failed around a month ago.
The crewmen also said they temporarily took shelter on the islet due to bad weather, the coast guard said.
The wooden boat was towed into a port outside Hakodate in Hokkaido on Sunday for inspection by police and the coast guard. The officials are also questioning the crewmen.
In Tokyo, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, the top government spokesman, said he would like to "refrain from commenting (on the discovery of missing items on the islet) with prejudgments as investigations are ongoing."
A new report highlighting how vital mental health services were developed in Sierra Leone during the response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak is published today in the WHO Bulletin.
The report, which the WHO hopes will act as a blueprint on how to address such emergencies in the future, was written jointly by Sierra Leonean health workers and the King's Sierra Leone Partnership (KSLP). KSLP brings together expertise from King's Health Partners and three leading Sierra Leonean health institutions.
The report charts the steps taken to develop an effective mental health care service in a country with a fragile health system. At the time of the Ebola outbreak Sierra Leone had only one specialist psychiatric hospital to serve a population of seven million.
Prior to Ebola establishing itself in the country the Sierra Leonean government had been working with KSLP and other partners to address the lack of mental health service provision. However, the fallout from the outbreak, which included the psychiatric hospital closing its doors to new patients in order to prevent disease transmission, saw government plans to create new mental health units across the country brought forward.
As part of the response a treatment model was created at Connaught Hospital - the adult referral and tertiary government hospital in the capital Freetown - that saw the development of a nurse-led mental health and psychosocial support service, with an inpatient liaison service and outpatient clinic.
To strengthen the skills of the hospital's non-specialist nurses, mental health awareness training was provided by a mental health nurse and KSLP volunteer.
Mental wellbeing workshops, created and led by the mental health nurse, were held for nurses, auxiliary staff and physicians at Connaught hospital, including those working within the Ebola holding unit. The workshops were made up of a series of half-day sessions which focused on coping with stigma and discrimination, stress management, and self-care.
From March 2015 to February 2016, 143 patients with a wide range of conditions were seen. 20 had survived or had relatives affected by the Ebola virus; half the patients (71) had a range of conditions including mild distress or depression, anxiety disorders, grief, or social problems, while 30 patients presented with psychosis requiring medication.
Speaking about the report Dr Stania Kamara, a KSLP volunteer from the King's Centre for Global Health and Health Partnerships, said: "The Ebola virus outbreak weakened an already fragile health system and disrupted existing plans to develop mental health services across the country. However, the emergency response provided the opportunity, resources and focus necessary to create new mental health units.
"Our experience in Freetown has guided the establishment of other mental health units across the country; there are now 15 units across Sierra Leone. We hope that our experiences and the models applied will help others around the world successfully implement similar services within an emergency response."
KSLP continues to support the development of mental health services across the country. It is currently supporting a national network of mental health nurses, in a programme funded by United States Agency for International Development (USAID), through John Snow International.
The KSLP team remains in Sierra Leone and continues to work alongside local partners to help build a strong and resilient national health system that can not only better stand up to disease outbreaks such as Ebola, but can provide high quality care to meet the population's health needs. Find out more about the partnership's work on the KSLP website: http://kslp.org.uk/
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Notes to editors:
The King's Sierra Leone Partnership (KSLP) is working alongside local partners to build a strong and resilient health system in Sierra Leone. KSLP brings together King's Health Partners - itself a partnership between King's College London, and Guy's and St Thomas', King's College Hospital and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trusts - and three key Sierra Leonean institutions: Connaught Hospital, the country's main teaching and referral hospital; The College of Medical and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS), Sierra Leone's only medical and pharmacy school, and the main institution for basic and specialist nurse training and The Ministry of Health and Sanitation, the branch of government which focuses on issues related to the general health of Sierra Leone's citizens.
King's College London King's College London is one of the top 25 universities in the world (2017/18 QS World University Rankings), among the oldest in England and has an outstanding reputation for world-class teaching and cutting-edge research.
Since our foundation, King's students and staff have dedicated themselves in the service of society. King's will continue to focus on world-leading education, research and service, and will have an increasingly proactive role to play in a more interconnected, complex world. World-changing ideas. Life-changing impact: https://spotlight.kcl.ac.uk/
King's Health Partners is one of only six Academic Health Science Centres (AHSCs) in England and is a partnership between King's College London and Guy's and St Thomas', King's College Hospital and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trusts.
With a combined budget of more than 3.7 billion, nearly 4.8 million patient contacts every year and 40,000 staff, King's Health Partners leads two National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centres (BRCs), a wide range of world-leading research programmes, and a comprehensive portfolio of high quality clinical services. kingshealthpartners.org
BEIJING Chinese banks are looking to tap the opportunities arising from the huge investment and financing demands in the Belt and Road regions, where investors are attracted by the potential of infrastructure and less-developed industries.
"Most countries along the Belt and Road are developing economies that have numerous opportunities in infrastructure, rail transit, urban development, logistics, cross-border e-commerce and other areas," said Hong Qi, chairperson of China Minsheng Bank, a leading joint-stock commercial bank.
Infrastructure financing demand alone will amount to $10 trillion in the next five years, Hong said at a recent forum.
Betting on these prospects, the Beijing-based lender has signed lending agreements worth over $10 billion with businesses from more than 30 countries and regions, with more projects financed via public-private partnership in the pipeline.
Minsheng is not the only bank that has strengthened its push in the Belt and Road Initiative. Other lenders including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Everbright Bank have also jumped into action. By the end of 2016, nine Chinese banks had set up 62 branches in 26 countries and regions along the Belt and Road, data from the China Banking Regulatory Commission showed.
"There are bright prospects for banks to finance the Belt and Road Initiative," former Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister He Yafei has said.
Proposed by China in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative aims to build trade and infrastructure networks connecting Asia with Europe and Africa based on ancient land and maritime trade routes. Analysts believe opportunities are sprouting for global businesses to increase their presence and investment in the to-be-booming regions where public facilities still lag behind.
Multilateral lender the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Silk Road Fund were founded to finance the Belt and Road.
Backed by financial support, investment went up steadily along the Belt and Road. During the first 10 months of 2017, Chinese investors put forward $11.2 billion in 53 countries and regions along the Belt and Road.
Thanks to the capital pumped in, Asian infrastructure is improving rapidly, with transportation networks improved and more public facilities erected, ranging from power stations to hospitals.
"More tangible progress will have been made by 2020," said Zhang Yansheng, a researcher at China Center for International Economic Exchanges, citing railroads and expressways that will stretch to more areas including Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean.
"Investment growth in the Belt and Road will pick up pace in a couple of years, with double-digits compound increase expected in 2018 and 2019," said Robin Xing, Morgan Stanley's chief China economist.
Not only will infrastructure improve, but global trade will also benefit, Xing said. "Belt and Road countries will see a 10-percent increase in their exports in ten years because of Chinese investment as better ports and railways will facilitate cargo flows."
While Belt and Road construction is in full swing, concerns about investment risks also linger mainly due to regional political and economic instability.
Risks facing Chinese State-owned enterprises (SOEs), major investors in the Belt and Road regions, are completely controllable, Xiao Yaqing, head of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), has said.
Over the last three years, 47 Chinese SOEs supervised by the SASAC have taken part in 1,676 projects in countries and regions along the Belt and Road spanning energy, infrastructure and industrial cooperation. The investment was well-planned and organized, and supervision of the decision-making process has been toughened, Xiao said.
Xing said the risks will be low. "Even if investment amounted to $60 billion a year...it still only accounts for less than a third of China's current account surplus and around 0.5 percent of the nominal GDP."
A program that since 1999 has sheltered homeless families in Madison-area churches and synagogues will end at least partly because progress is being made finding such families permanent homes.
The Road Homes Interfaith Hospitality Network Shelter Program the smallest family shelter in Madison will end this spring, according to executive director Kristin Rucinski. Thirteen congregations currently take week-long turns hosting as many as 14 people, or three or four families. Some 40 other buddy congregations provide meals and other help to the sheltered.
The Road Home boards unanimous decision to end the program was not made because of a lack of funding, Rucinski said. Rather, she pointed to plans by social-service providers and developers for low-cost housing projects, and to a decrease in the number of homeless families.
Point-in-time counts of homeless families have decreased from 108 in 2014, to 99 in 2015, 93 last year and 84 this year, she said. The Road Home sheltered 27 families last year and provided case management, help finding housing and other services to 156 more.
Rucinski said the Salvation Armys family shelter program the largest in the city went about six months over the last year in which it didnt have to turn any families away due to lack of space.
At the same time, in the summer months of 2017, even with our small shelter operating, our community had to turn some families away, she said. Summers are always the busiest months for family shelters and we are working with (Dane) County staff and other shelter providers to see what solutions we can come up with, as a community, for that bigger capacity issue during a few months a year.
The end of The Road Home shelter leaves the Salvation Army and the YWCA as the only family shelters in Madison, although Domestic Abuse Intervention Services provides shelter in cases of domestic abuse.
Amid rising rents and low vacancy rates, Madison launched an effort in 2014 to spend more than $20 million over five years as part of a broader effort to create 1,000 low-cost housing units, including 250 for the homeless. Dane County in October opened a long-anticipated day resource center for the homeless, called The Beacon, on East Washington Avenue.
Gov. Scott Walker also signed bills last month to bring together state agency heads to find solutions to homelessness and to prioritize the chronically homeless for federal housing assistance.
Open a bank account using a stolen identity and you might find yourself behind bars.
Open millions of accounts using stolen identities, and you might be the worlds second largest bank.
Between 2009 and 2016, Wells Fargo created an estimated 3.5 million sham deposit and credit card accounts created under customers names.
Scandals like this one are why we have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which fined Wells Fargo $100 million for its scam. Now more than ever, the nation needs a strong CFPB to help keep big banks in line.
Youd think that a president who once accused hedge funds of getting away with murder would find common cause with this regulatory agency. Instead, Donald Trump wants the watchdog to go belly up for the wolves of Wall Street.
The CFPB director, Richard Cordray, resigned this month, and Trump is trying to find a temporary replacement in Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney (For those checking, thats the same OMB director who has failed to deliver on a once-promised Hurricane Harvey recovery package).
Consider this just another example of Trumps compulsion to stand on the side of the rich and powerful against the American middle class. He might as well put an arsonist in charge of a fire department. Mulvaney has a record of trying to eliminate the CFPB, including cosponsoring a bill to do just that when he was in Congress.
His appointment would also open the bureau to potential back-door dealing a longtime Mulvaney aide now works as a key lobbyist for a major bank, Santander, which faces a $10 million fine for illegal overdraft fees.
A bureaucratic battle has Mulvaney fighting with Leandra English, the CFPBs deputy director, for legal control over the agency. All this wrangling for power should be unnecessary. Trump needs to pick a formal appointee and submit that person to Senate approval.
Corporate profits are sky high and the stock market continues its eight-year-long surge, but paychecks remain stubbornly stagnant. The middle class deserves a qualified director to head up the only federal agency solely dedicated to balancing the playing field between Main Street and Wall Street.
When debt collectors illegally threaten veterans, or payday lenders trick working families into a pit of debt, or mortgage companies charge more on the basis of a customers skin color, the CFPB must be fully empowered to set things right.
Less than a decade has passed since reckless financial institutions brought the global economy to the brink of collapse. The American people may have forgiven banks for their sins, but the CFPB exists to ensure that we dont forget.
Motley Fool
Cathie Wood kicked off the first two weeks of November with a buying spree. It certainly appears that the co-founder and CEO of Ark Investment Management has been combing through recent third-quarter financial reports in search of beaten-down tech stocks to buy, and some of her picks might surprise you. While other investors have left Roku for dead, Wood has been buying the streaming specialist's stock like there's no tomorrow, adding more than 250,000 shares to her various ETFs over the past two weeks alone.
Aside from being a nominee for worst company name of the year, Baker Hughes, a GE Company (NYSE: BHGE) had a tough first quarter as a combined company as restructuring costs led to a big hit to the bottom line. For now, management gets an incomplete grade because the business is still going through the growing pains that come with such a large integration.
As is the case with any oil services company this size, though, it is worth listening to what management has to say on its earnings conference calls because it typically provides some interesting insights into the industry. On BHGE's most recent call, CEO Lorenzo Simonelli gave some interesting commentary on the direction of the market as well as how BHGE now fills an interesting role in a rapidly changing market. Here's a few snippets from the call to which investors should pay attention.
Oil service workers installing equipment in black and white.
Image source: Getty Images.
Is the pickup in international oil drilling revving back up?
The oil story of 2017 has been the success of shale drilling in North America. The industry's ability to lower breakeven costs has allowed producers to boost production at oil prices that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago. As a result, the declines in production internationally and OPEC's self-imposed limits -- things that would have sent prices skyrocketing in years past -- have barely moved the needle.
For all the changes in the market, though, there is an expectation that drilling activity internationally will pick back up again. For all the success of North America, there are some infrastructure limitations that will likely prohibit it from offsetting all of those international losses. That means, eventually, international drilling activity will pick back up again. According to CEO Lorenzo Simonelli, that time has yet to arrive in earnest.
International activity in oilfield services remains muted with rig count flat year-to-date. However we are seeing signs of activity increase both in the volume and size of tenders for new work as customers feel more confident about their operating cost and commodity price stability. To that point we were awarded a large multi year integrated drilling contract with an important customer in the Middle East as well as two critical deep water completion contracts in Latin America offshore.
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A unique offering that no other oil services company can replicate
The combination of Baker Hughes and General Electric's (NYSE: GE) oil & gas division was something that the industry hasn't seen in a long time: A company that is both a provider of equipment and a services contractor. With this combination, BHGE can do some things that no other oil services company can do. Here's Simonelli explaining that offering.
During the quarter we also announced what is the first demonstration of our ability to generate value for our customers through our full stream offering. The agreement executed with Twinza Oil will provide support for an offshore development project in Papua New Guinea. This business model is an exciting development for the industry. With the combination of capability between our oilfield equipment, oilfield services and turbomachinery segments can provide a unique high productivity value proposition for our customers and commercial differentiation.
Historically, equipment and services were separate because an equipment supplier didn't want to restrict its sales to a single service provider. Likewise, services providers didn't want to tie in with equipment manufacturers because it allowed them to shop for the best price in a competitive bidding process.
Over time, though, this manufacturer/service provider line has blurred as technology and data require equipment and services to integrate on common software platforms. Schlumberger (NYSE: SLB) made a similar move with the acquisition of Cameron International, which meant Schlumberger could present complete equipment and service packages for deepwater clients.
The BHGE full stream deal is like the Schlumberger deal on steroids. It can offer just about every service and piece of equipment necessary to go from a prospective reservoir all the way to late-life production management as well as provide the equipment for midstream and downstream investments. BHGE is betting that more and more producers will want to go down this route to cut costs through the efficiency that a single service provider and using a common software to handle all the data that comes from a drilling operation today can provide.
BHGE Chart
BHGE data by YCharts.
Where can we find growth now?
Even when equipment and services companies combine, their business will still wax and wane drastically with the spending habits of oil and gas producers and the upstream side of the business. This typically means the industry goes through times of feast and famine depending on oil prices and producers' appetite for capital spending. These past few years have been evidence of how that can spell big trouble for these companies as many small players have gone bankrupt and the larger ones have tried to consolidate.
With the addition of the GE oil & gas division, though, BHGE has exposure to other parts of the oil and gas value chain. Which, according to Simonelli, could drive earnings over the short term.
Opportunities for growth in the short to midterm exists across the board in mid-stream and downstream segments in which we participate, these include, gas to power projects, stranded gas monetization, pipelines and surface compressions to name a few. Many of these applications acquire a range of turbomachinery equipments that is fit for purpose in terms of both cost and function.
Typically, capital spending in the midstream and downstream segments are lower than on the upstream side because the life of assets such as pipelines or refineries are much longer than that of an oil reservoir. Therefore, companies in this part of the value chain don't need to spend nearly as much to maintain their current business. Also, growth in these businesses is much more measured.
At the same time, though, capital spending in these industries is much more consistent than on the upstream side of the business. This could make BHGE a company that is better suited for the ups and downs of the market than its upstream only brethren.
What a Fool believes
BHGE has a lot of potential as an investment in the oil and gas industry. The unique combination of services and equipment that serves all aspects of the industry could prove to be incredibly valuable as others grabble with the volatility of the upstream industry. The issue that comes with serving all of these segments is bloat that could impact margins. Management thinks it can wring out $1.6 billion in revenue and cost efficiencies between now and 2020, but it remains to be seen that it can do that. If the company can deliver progress on this substantial synergy plan and prove that serving all parts of the oil and gas industry has inherent advantages over the traditional model, then BHGE's stock could be a stock worth examining.
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Tyler Crowe owns shares of General Electric. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
In the early hours of Dec 2, 2017, Senate Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax overhaul package proposed by President Donald Trump in a 51-49 voting. The White House hopes that the bill becomes law by the end of the year. While the tax reform bill has resulted in a series of controversies among several economists and financial experts, we believe the U.S. telecommunications industry is going to be a major beneficiary.
Growth-Induced Polices
Trumps proposed policy changes have made the overall economic outlook fairly bullish. The two pro-growth agendas of Trump, namely, a significant cut in corporate taxes and deregulation are major catalysts to the U.S. economy.
The proposal to reduce corporate taxes from the current 35% to 20% is likely to bring corporate tax rate at its historic low in 78 years. Large telecom operators book much of their revenues in the homeland. Therefore, a significant reduction in corporate tax rate faced by telecom carriers would be immediately accretive to cash flow. Moreover, the tax proposal offers to provide incentives to companies to repatriate accumulated profits from overseas with an even lower tax rate.
Capital-intensive Nature of Telecom Industry
The telecom industry is highly capital-intensive in nature. Therefore, the immediate expensing of investment in all tangible, intangible and real property (other than land) would significantly benefit telecom carriers. This would encourage telecom operators to increase investment for capital expenditure.
Major proposals like a pledge to spend $1 trillion in infrastructure projects over a period of 10 years coupled with the above-mentioned policy changes are likely to spur higher consumer spending. This may create about 25 million new jobs over a decade, which in turn will fuel long-term economic growth.
Effect on Upcoming 5G Wireless Network
Fifth-generation (5G) superfast wireless networks will provide the primary impetus to the telecom industry. In September 2017, Moody's Investors Service stated in a report that the evolution towards 5G wireless networks will result in higher capital spending for U.S. wireless carriers. Trumps tax proposal will result in a huge windfall for telecom operators. The carriers can utilize this money for 5G network R&D and its deployment.
In this context, Internet-of-Things (IoT) holds the potential of becoming the numero uno factor in driving growth in the space. Upcoming 5G mobile networks will be of utmost importance in the management of exponential growth in IoT. Lower taxes would also enable telecom operators to increase capex budgets to build and upgrade their networks in order to make it IoT ready.
Story continues
According to a report by research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on IoT is expected to grow at a 17% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2019 from $698.6 billion in 2015.
Easy Regulatory Policies
President Trump has stated that he wants to do away with nearly 75% of all governmental regulations during this term as the President. We believe that the telecom industry will be one of the major beneficiaries of this policy change. A new Federal Communications Commission (FCC), headed by Ajit Pai, exercising lesser restrictions, certainly augurs well for the ISP (Internet Service Providers) industry.
On Apr 3, 2017, Trump signed a repeal of the Obama-era broadband privacy rules. This has given a major boost to the ISPs. The digital advertisement market is growing exponentially and ISPs have been increasingly investing resources to cash in on bountiful opportunities. However, the FCCs previous directive stipulated that the ISP should notify customers before sharing any user data for advertising. This would have marred ISP prospects.
More importantly, on Nov 21, Pai revealed a draft plan for a complete roll back of Net Neutrality. The FCC is set to vote on the proposed changes during its upcoming Dec. 14 monthly meeting. There is little doubt that if the new FCC scraps Net Neutrality laws, the ISP industry will be the major beneficiary. The current FCC's less restrictive regulatory attitude may also pave the way for new mergers and acquisition deals between ISPs and online digital media companies.
Stocks in Focus
We believe that the major beneficiaries of the U.S. Tax Reforms bill will be the four large national telecom operators. Significant tax relief together with the strong underlying policy of ensuring that Americans have access to high-speed mobile broadband in rural and urban areas alike, should help large telecom operators going forward.
Notably, all four national telecom operators currently carry a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Verizon Communications Inc. VZ: Headquartered in New York, the company is one of the largest communication technology companies offering all kinds of wireless and wireline services. For 2018, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings per share (EPS) is pegged at $3.88, reflecting year-over-year growth of 2.75%. The consensus estimate for revenues is $127.31 billion, up 1.64% year over year.
AT&T Inc. T: Headquartered in Dallas, TX, the company is also one of the largest communication technology companies offering all kinds of wireless and wireline services. For 2018, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for EPS is pegged at $2.96, reflecting year-over-year growth of 1.32%. The consensus estimate for revenues is $160.59 billion, up 0.32% year over year.
T-Mobile US Inc. TMUS: Headquartered in Bellevue, WA, the company is a leading wireless service provider in the United States. For 2018, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for EPS is pegged at $2.69, reflecting year-over-year growth of 11.47%. The consensus estimate for revenues is $43.09 billion, up 5.88% year over year.
Sprint Corp. S: Headquartered in Overland Park, KS, the company is a leading wireless and wireline service provider in the United States. For 2018, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for loss per share is pegged at $0.02, reflecting year-over-year improvement of 17.90%. The consensus estimate for revenues is $32.98 billion, up 1.25% year over year.
Bottom Line
Telecommunications is one of the few industries to have seen rapid technological improvement even during the recession. Owing to the significance of this service as an infrastructure product, we expect the overall economic dynamics to shift in favor of the industry. At this stage, we believe that these four stocks are poised to capitalize on the growing opportunities of major tax relief.
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In the short time since the Senate's version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was initially released, there have been several updates, additions, and modifications designed to capture as much support among Republican senators as possible. However, the final passage of the bill occurred late on Friday night, with 51 of the 52 Republican senators supporting the legislation after a flurry of last-minute changes.
While the finer details of some of these changes are still unclear (the version of the bill that was voted on had some handwritten parts and phrases like "Add language..."), we do know what some of the major changes made to the bill are.
Notebook with Tax Reform written on the cover in yellow lettering.
Image source: Getty Images.
1. Higher deductions for pass-through businesses
In contrast to the House of Representatives' version of the bill, which provides for lower tax rates for pass-through businesses such as partnerships, LLCs, and S-Corps, the Senate's bill would continue to tax pass-through income at the regular income tax rates.
However, the bill would allow these business owners to deduct a certain percentage of their income before the regular tax rates are applied. The original version of the bill called for a deduction of 17.4% of pass-through income. The latest version got a bit more generous, increasing the allowable deduction to 23% of pass-through income.
2. Matching the House's property tax deduction
One of the most controversial parts of the Senate's version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was its complete elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes. This included the deduction for income taxes, as well as property taxes.
In order to make the bill more appealing to senators in high-tax states, the latest version of the bill matches the House version. While state and local income taxes still would not be deductible, the legislation allows for a deduction of up to $10,000 for state and local property taxes.
3. The alternative minimum tax would remain
The Senate's bill originally proposed getting rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT. The newest version keeps the AMT in order to help pay for some of the other last-minute changes.
Story continues
However, it does address one of Republicans' biggest complaints about the tax by raising the amount of income necessary to trigger the AMT. While it was originally intended to ensure that high-earners paid a minimum amount of tax, in recent years it had increasingly begun affecting middle-income households.
4. Slightly more favorable business expensing
In addition to a lower corporate tax rate, another major change to business taxes would be change to how businesses write off expenses. Under current tax law, businesses are required to depreciate expenses such as equipment over several years.
The Senate's bill allows businesses to immediately deduct their entire cost, giving a bigger incentive to invest in new equipment. Originally, the bill would have allowed this for just five years, after which time it would be eliminated. Now, this benefit will begin to phase out after the initial five-year period.
5. One deduction would get better than it is now
This one might come as a surprise to many people, considering that one of the biggest themes of tax reform is to reduce or eliminate deductions.
One major complaint about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is that the medical expense deduction, which would have been retained, would not benefit nearly as many people as it currently does, due to the higher standard deduction. In response to this, the AGI threshold for deducting medical expenses has been lowered to 7.5% of AGI from 10% in the original bill.
6. Catch-up contributions would still be allowed
The previous version of the Senate's bill wouldn't make changes to retirement savings for most people, but would have eliminated the pre-tax "catch-up" provisions that apply to older workers. The version of the bill that passed does not include this, so 401(k) contribution rules would remain the same.
What will the final tax reform package look like?
To be clear, even though this legislation has passed the Senate, it will still be some time before tax reform is signed into law. There are still some big differences between the House and Senate versions, and before any tax reform law can become law, the two chambers must pass identical versions. So, it's likely that the eventual tax reform package will look substantially different than the bill just passed by the Senate, so take all of its provisions -- including these last-minute changes -- with a big grain of salt.
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President Donald Trump's attacks on the news media continue to spook journalists, First Amendment defenders and government ethics experts. His comments are scaring the media and generally are unprecedented in U.S. history.There's only one problem: Trump's got a point. We all saw that in the starkest terms on Friday, as ABC News broke into its regular programming with a special report saying then-presidential candidate Donald Trump had directed Gen. Mike Flynn to make contact with the Russians in 2016. It turned out that report was woefully incorrect. The network had to clarify and then correct the story before suspending the reporter responsible, Brian Ross, for four weeks without pay. There are a million possible excuses for a mistake like this that have nothing to do with politics or decay in the journalism profession overall.First off, we know that working breaking news can be a pressure-filled environment that produces many honest mistakes. Journalism is often an ultra-competitive profession, especially in a high-profile story like this one involving Trump and the Russia investigation. It could also be this was an isolated incident because the report came from Ross, who has made major errors in the past. For example, a few years ago he suggested that Aurora, Colorado, movie theater mass shooter James Holmes might be a member of the tea party because someone named "Jim Holmes" was listed on a tea party website. ABC had to apologize for that as critics believed Ross was trying to insert a left-leaning political bias to boost interest in the story. In an even worse example, Ross reported that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein may have been behind the 2001 anthrax attacks on the U.S. The White House said there was no evidence to back up those claims and then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said he warned Ross and ABC not to report that claim. Fleischer took to Twitter this weekend to remind the public of that incident: Fleischer tweetYes, Ross is definitely someone with a track record that makes him look a lot like an outlier in the news media. But the danger here would be to use that as too much of an excuse. Ross is just a reporter, and not someone who can just make live special reports happen. There are supposed to be more safeguards against something like this happening.It doesn't take a Trump apologist to feel ABC or other networks and newspapers are so willing to bash Trump that these kinds of mistakes have been inevitable. And if the industry tries to palm all on Ross himself, it will surely be repeated by others. Naturally, it didn't take long for Trump and his allies to respond with a new round of attacks on ABC and "fake news." In this case, there was no doubt that Trump's enemies had handed them the opportunity on a silver platter. The problem goes much deeper than what happened with ABC. Consider Trump's most recent attacks on CNN and the way the network responded:Trump tweet Several CNN anchors and programs decided to not just respond to the president on Twitter, but they devoted significant portions of their live news programs to fight back. Perhaps the most unequivocal response came from Wolf Blitzer on his "Situation Room" program:"For nearly four decades CNN has been constant here in the United States and around the world. Our journalists, in front of and behind the camera, risk their lives in the most dangerous of places every day, so you know the truth."There's one problem with that bold response: We know it isn't true. We know that because CNN itself admitted to the world back in 2003 that it routinely suppressed important stories of Saddam Hussein's atrocities and brutality in Iraq. Then-chief news executive Eason Jordan wrote the network wanted to protect the safety of its reporters and other staff in Baghdad. That was his explanation for why CNN didn't report what it knew about Saddam's regime in between the two Gulf wars. At the time it seemed Jordan was expecting to be lauded for his efforts. The result was the opposite. Critics from the right and left pilloried him and the network for keeping a bureau open to continue to pump out sanitized, or as some would even call it, "fake" news. We'll just have to take Blitzer's word for it now that CNN isn't continuing that self-censoring practice. But we do know that the "nearly four decades" part of his rebuttal is a documented untruth. Of course, ABC News, CNN and CNN.com are competitors with us at CNBC and CNBC.com. But this column is not meant to bash a rival for competitive reasons. And, of course, Trump has bashed our parent company several times as well.But the problem here goes beyond intramural rivalries and competition. The overall news media's credibility and viability is being threatened mostly by itself far more than by Trump.It's as if too many of us in the news media are taking Trump's attacks too personally. It has become an excuse to abandon journalistic ethics and safeguards that make journalism a profession in the first place.Professionalism in journalism means more than just sticking to facts and fairness. It also means that we cannot take time out of our reporting duties to get into wars of words with the president of the United States or any other newsworthy figure. If we need to defend ourselves, that's best left to our lawyers and public relations departments.We want a vigilant and skeptical news media to keep the White House and all our elected leaders honest. But Trump's first 10 months in office have exposed a news media that seems more like an opposing party hopeful for a chance to bring him down at any cost. It sure seemed like that hope turned into desperation Friday in the ABC News debacle. And the reaction to it from other corners of the network was beyond unseemly, most notably during ABC's talk show "The View" when Joy Behar read that erroneous Ross report while she and the audience went wild. Any objective person is left with an image of a media outlet squarely focused on attacking the president and then wildly celebrating the chance he has been weakened.One final problem is that the news media is using Trump's attacks as a way to abandon all self-criticism. That self-examination and striving for improvement is the epitome of what it means to be a professional in any industry. No matter how dangerous Trump's criticisms of the news media may be, now is not the time to drop our standards. Too many news organizations now openly pit themselves as combatants against the Trump agenda. American journalism can't become like a European trade unionist movement that pushes for short-term goals but forgets to get better at its job.Despite's Flynn's guilty plea Friday, Trump scored a major victory anyway. He can thank an unforced error by an overzealous reporter and an all-too-eager news department. This dangerous pattern will be repeated until top news organizations re-examine their operations and institute a better set of best practices.If they don't, Trump won't have to destroy the American news media. It will simply destroy itself.Commentary by Jake Novak, CNBC.com senior columnist. Follow him on Twitter@jakejakeny. For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter. President Donald Trump's attacks on the news media continue to spook journalists, First Amendment defenders and government ethics experts. His comments are scaring the media and generally are unprecedented in U.S. history. There's only one problem: Trump's got a point. We all saw that in the starkest terms on Friday, as ABC News broke into its regular programming with a special report saying then-presidential candidate Donald Trump had directed Gen. Mike Flynn to make contact with the Russians in 2016. It turned out that report was woefully incorrect. The network had to clarify and then correct the story before suspending the reporter responsible, Brian Ross, for four weeks without pay. There are a million possible excuses for a mistake like this that have nothing to do with politics or decay in the journalism profession overall. First off, we know that working breaking news can be a pressure-filled environment that produces many honest mistakes. Journalism is often an ultra-competitive profession, especially in a high-profile story like this one involving Trump and the Russia investigation. It could also be this was an isolated incident because the report came from Ross, who has made major errors in the past. For example, a few years ago he suggested that Aurora, Colorado, movie theater mass shooter James Holmes might be a member of the tea party because someone named "Jim Holmes" was listed on a tea party website. ABC had to apologize for that as critics believed Ross was trying to insert a left-leaning political bias to boost interest in the story. In an even worse example, Ross reported that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein may have been behind the 2001 anthrax attacks on the U.S. The White House said there was no evidence to back up those claims and then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said he warned Ross and ABC not to report that claim. Fleischer took to Twitter this weekend to remind the public of that incident: Fleischer tweet Yes, Ross is definitely someone with a track record that makes him look a lot like an outlier in the news media. But the danger here would be to use that as too much of an excuse. Ross is just a reporter, and not someone who can just make live special reports happen. There are supposed to be more safeguards against something like this happening. It doesn't take a Trump apologist to feel ABC or other networks and newspapers are so willing to bash Trump that these kinds of mistakes have been inevitable. And if the industry tries to palm all on Ross himself, it will surely be repeated by others. Naturally, it didn't take long for Trump and his allies to respond with a new round of attacks on ABC and "fake news." In this case, there was no doubt that Trump's enemies had handed them the opportunity on a silver platter. The problem goes much deeper than what happened with ABC. Consider Trump's most recent attacks on CNN and the way the network responded: Trump tweet Several CNN anchors and programs decided to not just respond to the president on Twitter, but they devoted significant portions of their live news programs to fight back. Perhaps the most unequivocal response came from Wolf Blitzer on his "Situation Room" program: "For nearly four decades CNN has been constant here in the United States and around the world. Our journalists, in front of and behind the camera, risk their lives in the most dangerous of places every day, so you know the truth." There's one problem with that bold response: We know it isn't true. We know that because CNN itself admitted to the world back in 2003 that it routinely suppressed important stories of Saddam Hussein's atrocities and brutality in Iraq. Then-chief news executive Eason Jordan wrote the network wanted to protect the safety of its reporters and other staff in Baghdad. That was his explanation for why CNN didn't report what it knew about Saddam's regime in between the two Gulf wars. At the time it seemed Jordan was expecting to be lauded for his efforts. The result was the opposite. Critics from the right and left pilloried him and the network for keeping a bureau open to continue to pump out sanitized, or as some would even call it, "fake" news. We'll just have to take Blitzer's word for it now that CNN isn't continuing that self-censoring practice. But we do know that the "nearly four decades" part of his rebuttal is a documented untruth. Of course, ABC News, CNN and CNN.com are competitors with us at CNBC and CNBC.com. But this column is not meant to bash a rival for competitive reasons. And, of course, Trump has bashed our parent company several times as well. But the problem here goes beyond intramural rivalries and competition. The overall news media's credibility and viability is being threatened mostly by itself far more than by Trump. It's as if too many of us in the news media are taking Trump's attacks too personally. It has become an excuse to abandon journalistic ethics and safeguards that make journalism a profession in the first place. Professionalism in journalism means more than just sticking to facts and fairness. It also means that we cannot take time out of our reporting duties to get into wars of words with the president of the United States or any other newsworthy figure. If we need to defend ourselves, that's best left to our lawyers and public relations departments. We want a vigilant and skeptical news media to keep the White House and all our elected leaders honest. But Trump's first 10 months in office have exposed a news media that seems more like an opposing party hopeful for a chance to bring him down at any cost. It sure seemed like that hope turned into desperation Friday in the ABC News debacle. And the reaction to it from other corners of the network was beyond unseemly, most notably during ABC's talk show "The View" when Joy Behar read that erroneous Ross report while she and the audience went wild. Any objective person is left with an image of a media outlet squarely focused on attacking the president and then wildly celebrating the chance he has been weakened. One final problem is that the news media is using Trump's attacks as a way to abandon all self-criticism. That self-examination and striving for improvement is the epitome of what it means to be a professional in any industry. No matter how dangerous Trump's criticisms of the news media may be, now is not the time to drop our standards. Too many news organizations now openly pit themselves as combatants against the Trump agenda. American journalism can't become like a European trade unionist movement that pushes for short-term goals but forgets to get better at its job. Despite's Flynn's guilty plea Friday, Trump scored a major victory anyway. He can thank an unforced error by an overzealous reporter and an all-too-eager news department. This dangerous pattern will be repeated until top news organizations re-examine their operations and institute a better set of best practices. If they don't, Trump won't have to destroy the American news media. It will simply destroy itself. Commentary by Jake Novak, CNBC.com senior columnist. Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny . For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.
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CHAMPAIGN - If you're unhappy with Illinois Democrat or Republican March 2018 gubernatorial candidate options, there are three Libertarians that would like your consideration.
Three Libertarian candidates for Illinois Governor will meet in Champaign Tuesday, Dec. 5, at 7 p.m. for the first of a series of public debates between the candidates.
Aeromexico aeroplanes are pictured on the airstrip at Benito Juarez international airport in Mexico City, Mexico, November 28, 2017. REUTERS/Ginnette Riquelme
By Allison Lampert and Christine Murray
MONTREAL/MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Aeromexico (AEROMEX.MX) has held preliminary talks to take some Bombardier (BBDb.TO) CSeries jets orders from Delta Air Lines Inc (DAL.N), which owns a stake in the Mexican carrier, to avoid possible U.S. trade duties levied on the planes, two sources familiar with the matter said.
Mexico's largest carrier, 49-percent owned by Delta, is considering taking an unknown number of the 75 CSeries planes ordered by Delta in 2016, one of the sources said. Delta's CSeries deliveries, scheduled to begin in spring 2018, face a possible 300 percent U.S. duty stemming from a trade dispute with Boeing Co (BA.N).
In October, Bombardier gave a controlling stake in the CSeries program to Airbus SE (AIR.PA), which would enable assembly in the United States in a move it says will help bypass potential import duties.
Under the proposed Aeromexico deal, the single-aisle jets would be sold to Aeromexico and fly under the banner of the Mexican carrier which would not have to pay a U.S. duty, one of the sources added.
"It's not a way for Aeromexico to fly for Delta," the same source said. "But it keeps the planes within the Delta family."
Aeromexico is now reviewing its fleet, a third source said, which is composed of Boeing and Brazil's Embraer SA (EMBR3.SA) jets. The carrier received a presentation about the 110-to-130 seat CSeries last week, and is expected to receive another from Bombardier's Brazilian rival, the source said.
Sources spoke on condition of anonymity as the talks are confidential. They cautioned that no final decision has been made and Aeromexico could still buy planes from Embraer.
Embraer and Bombardier both declined to comment. Aeromexico referred questions to Delta. Delta did not comment on any specific deal, but spokesman Morgan Durrant referred to recent remarks by the company's CEO who said the carrier would not pay any duties, but still intended to "take the aircraft."
Story continues
An Aeromexico deal would offer a short-term solution to Bombardier and Delta in the trade dispute.
A U.S. trade agency is expected to decide in early 2018 on Boeing's complaint that the Canadian company benefited unfairly from subsidies and dumped the 110- to 130-seat CSeries jets in the U.S. market below cost.
The case has fueled trade tensions between Canada and the United States and comes as the two countries, along with Mexico, are engaged in tense negotiations to modernize the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Bombardier has said it would assemble the CSeries jets destined for U.S. airlines at Airbus' Alabama plant, which the two companies say would exempt them from duties.
Boeing has countered that the CSeries should still be subject to duties, even if the planes are assembled in the United States.
(Reporting by Allison Lampert in Montreal and Christine Murray in Mexico City; Editing by Denny Thomas and Lisa Shumaker)
A Cathay Pacific flight crew reportedly witnessed North Korea's latest missile test last Wednesday, the airline announced today.
Flight 893 was en route from San Francisco to Hong Kong when the crew saw what it believes to be a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, break up, and fall out of the sky. The flight was far enough from the missile test not to be in danger, but The Guardian says the incident highlights the "unforeseen danger" of North Korea's tests. For the time being, there are no planned changes to existing Cathay Pacific routes.
North Korean missile tests in the past several months have led to tensions with the U.S., as President Donald Trump has made multiple threats against the rogue nation and its leader Kim Jong-un, whom Trump has deemed "little rocket man."
Wednesday's missile test reached the highest altitude ever recorded by a North Korean missile and the state-run Korean Central News Agency claims its capable of reaching the U.S. In response to the test last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called on China to do more to rein in North Korea, specifically through restraining the country's oil supply.
Defense Secretary James Mattis said he still had confidence in diplomatic efforts to address the North Korea situation, but that the U.S. also has military options available.
Meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham said Sunday on "Face the Nation" that preemptive war in North Korea is "becoming more likely" as the country's improving missile technology presents an increasing threat.
See original article on Fortune.com
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FILE PHOTO: A copy of bitcoin standing on PC motherboard is seen in this illustration picture, October 26, 2017. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo (Reuters)
By Jemima Kelly
LONDON (Reuters) - Bitcoin dipped back under $11,000 on Monday, coming off a record high just shy of $11,800 it hit on Sunday after a surge from less than $1,000 at the start of the year.
The cryptocurrency, which trades 24 hours a day and seven days a week, climbed as high as $11,799.99 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange at around 2100 GMT on Sunday.
It was not clear what caused the move higher over the weekend other than new investors joining the upstart market, with so-called wallet-providers reporting record numbers of sign-ups over the past week.
Analysts said Friday's announcement by the main U.S. derivatives regulator that it would allow CME Group Inc and CBOE Global Markets to list bitcoin futures contracts had turned sentiment positive after a choppy week.
"The price rises are triggered by continued media interest driven by the expectation of futures trading on CME," Charles Hayter, founder of data analysis website Cryptocompare, said.
By 1310 GMT on Monday, bitcoin had slipped back to around $10,919, down 2 percent on the day but still up more than 100 percent over the past three weeks. Sunday's high marked a 1,121 percent increase since the start of the year.
Think Markets analyst Naeem Aslam said reports Britain wants to increase regulation of bitcoin and other digital currencies by expanding the reach of European Union anti-money-laundering rules that force traders to disclose their identities and report suspicious activity, had knocked bitcoin off its highs.
But others said greater regulatory scrutiny would help.
"If anything, regulation will only increase bitcoin's rate of growth as regulation lends credibility and engenders trust," Nicholas Gregory, CEO of London-based cryptocurrency firm CommerceBlock, said.
Sunday's record high for bitcoin came as Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced the launch of the "petro", which he said would be a cryptocurrency backed by oil reserves, to shore up a collapsed economy.
Opposition leaders said the digital currency would need congressional approval and some cast doubt on whether it would ever see the light of day in the midst of turmoil.
(Reporting by Jemima Kelly; editing by Alexander Smith)
Bitcoin holding below record highs
Investing.com - The price of bitcoin was holding below all-time highs on Monday after rising above the $11,800 level on Sunday for the first time in its nine-year history.
On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, Bitcoin was at $11,315.00 by 05:44 AM ET (10:44 GMT) near an intra-day high of $11,545.00.
Bitcoin peaked at $11,842.00 on Sunday, capping a surge of around 30% since Thursday, when prices fell to a low of near $9000 after tumbling more than 20% from last weekends high.
Bitcoin, which is known for wild swings, has tended to rebound quickly from pullbacks.
Prices have rallied ahead of the start later this month of bitcoin futures trading, a potentially major step in the evolution of the digital currency.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Friday it would allow two major exchanges to launch bitcoin futures.
CME Group, the world's largest derivative exchange operator, said its bitcoin futures would launch December 18 while Cboe Global Markets said it will shortly announce the start date for its new bitcoin contract.
Bitcoins price has risen dramatically in 2017. For the year, bitcoin is up around 1,000%, having started 2017 at $968.23 and is the biggest gainer of all asset classes this year.
Its meteoric rise has prompted warnings of an increasingly volatile bubble amid signs that it is moving from the periphery of finance towards the mainstream.
CFTC Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo on Friday warned investors over bitcoins extreme volatility.
Market participants should take note that the relatively nascent underlying cash markets and exchanges for bitcoin remain largely unregulated markets over which the CFTC has limited statutory authority, he said.
There are concerns about the price volatility and trading practices of participants in these markets.
Last week Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein claimed that Bitcoin was a vehicle to perpetrate fraud as the value of the cryptocurrency plunged 20% in less than 24 hours.
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Blankfein became the latest boss of a major bank to criticize bitcoin, after JP Morgans chief executive Jamie Dimon described it as fraud that would ultimately blow up.
Meanwhile, reports on Monday said that Britain wants to step up regulation of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by expanding the reach of European Union anti-money-laundering rules that force traders to disclose their identities and report suspicious activity.
Elsewhere in cryptocurrency trading, Bitcoin Cash was last at $1,501.20, while Bitcoin Gold was at $307.00.
Ethereum, the second most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap after bitcoin, was at $495.93.
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Cboe Global Markets announced Monday it will offer trading of bitcoin futures on December 11.
Chairman and CEO Ed Tilly told Business Insider that the firm is prepared to "redesign and relaunch" bitcoin futures, if appropriate.
Cboe Global Markets, the Chicago-based options and derivatives exchange, announced Monday it'll offer trading of its bitcoin futures product on December 11.
Cboe and its cross-town rival CME Group got clearance from the US Commodity Futures Commission on Friday to launch bitcoin futures, which would allow investors to bet on the future price of the red-hot digital currency. CME announced Friday it would launch bitcoin futures on December 18.
Ed Tilly, chairman and chief executive officer of Cboe Global Markets, described the interest in bitcoin futures as unprecedented.
"It has really been the driving force," Tilly told Business Insider."We are not new to launching new products so this is remarkable."
Tilly declined to comment on the degree to which that interest will translate into trading volume. Still, he said the firm designed the product to ensure it'll provide the best, most liquid market.
"We dedicated significant time hardening our systems, talking with market makers, and this will continue to be a work in progress," he said. "With other products we've gone back, we've redesigned, we've relaunched."
Tilly said the firm is being intentional and taking a "disciplined and measured approach."
Trading for bitcoin futures on Cboe will be free throughout the month of December and will trade under the symbol "XBT."
Terry Duffy, the CEO of CME, said the path forward for bitcoin futures is relatively uncertain.
"Though we have worked through a lengthy, comprehensive process with the CFTC to get to this point, we recognize bitcoin is a new, uncharted market that will continue to evolve, requiring continued collaboration with the Commission and our clients going forward," he said in a statement.
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As for bitcoin, the cryptocurrency itself is up more than 1,000% at $11,389 at last check.
NOW WATCH: Economist Jim Rickards on gold versus bitcoin intrinsic value is meaningless for both but the bitcoin prices aren't real
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SEE ALSO: Cboe's president hints at ether and bitcoin cash futures
WASHINGTON President Donald Trump on Monday fully threw his support behind Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, after weeks of defending him from sexual misconduct allegations and attacking his Democratic opponent.
At least nine women have come forward to accuse Moore of sexual harassment and assault, including several who have said they were in their teens at the time of the misconduct.
In a tweet early Monday morning, Trump used Senate Republicans tax bill which their Democratic counterparts are overwhelmingly opposed to as an argument for why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama.
Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2017
The president reiterated his support during a phone call with Moore later on Monday, according to the Senate candidates wife, Kayla Moore.
White House officials confirmed that Trump had a positive call with Judge Roy Moore during which they discussed the state of the Alabama Senate race and the President endorsed Judge Moores campaign.
Moore responded in a tweet that he was [t]hankful for President Trumps support, and said that the president told him during the phone call: Go get em, Roy!
Trump on Monday twice attacked Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones as a liberal puppet of his partys leaders.
Putting Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders...& so much more. Look at your 401-ks since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2017
After dodging questions for nearly two weeks about the accusations against Moore which were first revealed in a bombshell Washington Post report Trump implicitly endorsed the candidate on Nov. 21 by proclaiming that we dont need a liberal person in there.
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When asked if he believes Moores accusers, Trump would only say that Moore totally denies it.
Moore has vehemently denied all of the allegations, claiming that they are a conspiracy created by Democrats and reporters who have investigated the claims. His campaign has also tried to attack the credibility of the women who have come forward with allegations.
Recent polling suggests that the Dec. 12 special election between Moore and Jones will be close, but that most Alabama Republicans do not think that the allegations against Moore are credible.
A CBS News poll released Sunday found that 71 percent of Alabama Republicans surveyed said that they believed that the allegations are false, and those who believe this also overwhelmingly believe Democrats and the media are behind those allegations.
Many Senate Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have called on Moore to exit the race. On Sunday, McConnell softened his stance on Moore, saying, In the end, the voters of Alabama will make their choice.
This article has been updated with information about Trumps phone call to Moore on Monday.
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Taking Security Seriously
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) talks with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) before the start of a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing concerning the roles and responsibilities for defending the nation against cyberattacks, on Oct. 19, 2017.
With Liberty And Justice...
Members of Code Pink for Peace protest before the start of a hearing where U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions will testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on Oct. 18, 2017. Committee members questioned Sessions about conversations he had with President Donald Trump about the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, the ongoing investigation about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and other subjects.
Whispers
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), right, speaks with Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) before a confirmation hearing for Christopher Sharpley, nominee for inspector general of the CIA, on Oct. 17, 2017.
Not Throwing Away His Shot
Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the musical "Hamilton," makes his way to a meeting of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies in the Rayburn Office Building during a round of meetings to urge federal funding for the arts and humanities on Sept. 13, 2017.
Medicare For All
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), center, speaks on health care as Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), left, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), right, listen during an event to introduce the Medicare for All Act on Sept. 13, 2017.
Bernie Bros
Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pack his office on Sept. 8, 2017. Members of the "Draft Bernie for a People's Party" campaign delivered a petition with more than 50,000 signatures to urge the senator to start and lead a new political party.
McCain Appearance
Sen. John McCain, second from left, leaves the Capitol after his first appearance since being diagnosed with cancer. He arrived to cast a vote to help Republican senators narrowly pass the motion to proceed for the replacement of the Affordable Care Act on July 25, 2017.
A Narrow Win
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, center, speaks alongside Sens. John Barrasso, left, John Cornyn, right, and John Thune, rear, after the Senate narrowly passed the motion to proceed for the replacement of the Affordable Care Act on July 25, 2017.
Kushner Questioning
Jared Kushner, White House senior adviser and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, arrives at the Capitol on July 25, 2017. Kushner was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee in a closed-door meeting about contacts he had with Russia.
Hot Dogs On The Hill
Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) prepares a hot dog during the American Meat Institute's annual Hot Dog Lunch in the Rayburn Office Building courtyard on July 19, 2017.
And Their Veggie Counterparts
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) visits the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals veggie dog giveaway on July 19, 2017, countering a National Hot Dog Day event being held elsewhere on Capitol Hill.
Poised For Questions
Callista Gingrich, wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, waits for a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on her nomination to be the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican on July 18, 2017.
Speaking Up
Health care activists protest to stop the Republican health care bill at Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on July 17, 2017.
In The Fray
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaks to members of the media after announcing the revised version of the Senate Republican health care bill on Capitol Hill on July 13, 2017.
Anticipation
Christopher Wray is seated with his daughter Caroline, left, as he prepares to testify at a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be the next FBI director on July 12, 2017.
Up In Arms
Health care activists protest to stop the Republican health care bill at Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on July 10, 2017.
Across A Table
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) meets with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Capitol Hill on June 29, 2017.
Somber Day
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speaks about the recent attack on the Republican congressional baseball team during her weekly press conference on Capitol Hill on June 15, 2017.
Family Matters
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), right, and his sons, Jack, 10, and Brad, arrive in the basement of the Capitol after a shooting at the Republican baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 14, 2017.
A Bipartisan Pause
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), right, coach of the Republican congressional baseball team, tells the story of the shooting that occurred during a baseball practice while he stands alongside Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), left, a coach of the Democratic congressional baseball team on June 14, 2017.
Hats On
Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) reacts about the shooting he was present for at a Republican congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, as he speaks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on June 14, 2017.
Public Testimony
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is sworn in to testify before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on June 13, 2017.
Comey's Big Day
Former FBI Director James Comey testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election on Capitol Hill on June 8, 2017.
Conveying His Point
U.S. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats testifies at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on his interactions with the Trump White House and on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on June 7, 2017.
Selfie Time
Vice President Mike Pence takes a selfie with a tourist wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat inside the U.S. Capitol rotunda on June 6, 2017. The vice president walked through the rotunda after attending the Senate Republican policy luncheon.
Budget Queries
Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney testifies before the House Budget Committee about President Donald Trump's fiscal 2018 budget proposal on Capitol Hill on May 24, 2017.
Flagged Down By Reporters
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, leaves a closed committee meeting on Capitol Hill on May 24, 2017. The committee is investigating possible Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.
Shock And Awe
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) hold a news conference on the release of the president's fiscal 2018 budget proposal on Capitol Hill on May 23, 2017.
Seeing Double
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) arrives in the Capitol for the Senate Democrats' policy lunch on May 16, 2017.
Honoring Officers
President Donald Trump speaks at the National Peace Officers Memorial Service on the West Lawn of the Capitol on May 15, 2017.
Whispers
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.), right, and ranking member Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) talk during a hearing with the heads of the U.S. intelligence agencies in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on May 11, 2017.
Skeptical
Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates arrives to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election on Capitol Hill on May 8, 2017.
Differing Opinions
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) gives a thumbs-up to protesters on the East Front of the Capitol after the House passed the Republicans' bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act on May 4, 2017. The protesters support the ACA.
Real Talk
United States Naval Academy Midshipman 2nd Class Shiela Craine (left), a sexual assault survivor, testifies before the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Military Personnel with (2nd from left to right) Ariana Bullard, Stephanie Gross and Annie Kendzior in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on May 2, 2017. Kendzior, a former midshipman, and Gross, a former cadet, were both raped twice during their time at the military academies. The academy superintendents were called to testify following the release of a survey last month by the Pentagon that said 12.2 percent of academy women and 1.7 percent of academy men reported experiencing unwanted sexual contact during the 2015-16 academic year.
In Support Of Immigrants
Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.), center, is joined by dozens of Democratic members of the House of Representatives to mark "Immigrant Rights Day" in the Capitol Visitor Center on May 1, 2017 in Washington, D.C. The Democratic legislators called on Republicans and President Donald Trump to join their push for comprehensive immigration reform.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
Donald Trump is seizing on ABC News Brian Ross inaccurately reporting details of Michael Flynns cooperation with the FBI.
In a series of tweets that began Saturday night and continued into Sunday morning, the president congratulated the news organization for suspending Ross for four weeks. ABC made the decision after learning that Ross erroneously reported that a source told him Flynn was set to testify that Trump, while still a candidate, directed him to make contact with Russian officials. (Ross later clarified, via his source, It was shortly after the election that President-elect Trump directed Flynn to contact Russian officials.)
Congratulations to @ABC News for suspending Brian Ross for his horrendously inaccurate and dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt, Trump wrote Sunday. More Networks and papers should do the same with their Fake News!
Congratulations to @ABC News for suspending Brian Ross for his horrendously inaccurate and dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt. More Networks and papers should do the same with their Fake News! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Ross report came just hours after the bombshell news that Flynn, President Trumps former national security adviser, was cooperating with Robert Mueller and the special counsels office and that he would plead guilty to the charge of willfully lying to the FBI. ABC was reportedly embarrassed over the matter, and Ross accepted the disciplinary action his employer took without qualification. My job is to hold people accountable and thats why I agree with being held accountable myself, he wrote in a statement on Twitter.
My job is to hold people accountable and that's why I agree with being held accountable myself. Brian Ross (@BrianRoss) December 3, 2017
When Ross erroneous report first broke Friday morning, the case for collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government was considerably bolstered in the minds of many, and the stock market took a temporary nosedive. (It gradually recovered when the report was corrected.) On Sunday morning, Trump returned to the topic of Ross, suggesting that the people who lost money sue ABC for damages.
People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused, Trump argued. Many millions of dollars!
People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused - many millions of dollars! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Trumps Sunday comments about Ross came near the end of a busy Twitter morning for the president. Michael S. Schmidt, Washington correspondent for the New York Times who covers the FBI and the special counsels investigation, noted that within a 90-minute span, five of Trumps tweets and retweets were about and aimed at the FBI.
Heres a look at some of the companies the Yahoo Finance team will be watching for you today.
ExxonMobil (XOM) is keeping a close eye on Egypt. Reuters is reporting that the worlds largest listed oil producer recently held talks with Egypts petroleum ministry about investing in its its offshore oil and gas reserves. If the two team up, Egypt would get an economic lift while Exxon could boost production.
Broadcom (AVGO) is stepping up its hostile bid to buy rival Qualcomm (QCOM). Today Broadcom is set to propose a slate of 11 directors to replace the entire board at the semiconductor. Last month, Qualcomm rejected Broadcoms $103B cash-and-stock bid saying it undervalued the company.
21st Century Fox (FOXA) has reportedly revived talks to sell parts of its business to Disney (DIS). The House of Mouse is looking to buy some of Foxs movie and TV businesses as well as its stake in UK TV provider Sky and Indias Star TV. Founder Rupert Murdoch is expected to decide whether or not to pursue the deal by years end.
Nearly 3 months after filing for bankruptcy in the US, Toys R Us says it will close at least a quarter of its stores in the UK early next year. Hundreds of job cuts are expected. The store closings are part of a restructuring deal with its creditors in the UK.
WHEATON - State Rep. Jeanne Ives announced officially Sunday night in an invitation-only gathering in her home district that she would be a candidate for governor in the March 2018 Illinois Republican Party primary. She was introduced to the crowd by her running mate, former State Rep. Rich Morthland from the Rock Island area.
In Illinois state government right now, you choose to be popular with the Illinois political ruling class and become an enemy of Illinois taxpayers or you choose to represent taxpaying Illinois families and make enemies of the political ruling class," Ives said. I choose taxpaying Illinois families. Governor Rauner chose the political ruling class. Thats the difference. Thats the choice in this election."
Ives said she supported and helped get Bruce Rauner elected governor in 2014.
"I believed his argument that his personal wealth would free him to do right by Illinois and lead the revolt against the political ruling class," she said. I was wrong. The tough-talking dude on a Harley with no social agenda turned out to an empty Carhartt jacket. We were promised a conservative reform governor. Instead we got an Ivy League gender studies professor."
Ives will be submitting her petitions for candidacy in Springfield Monday afternoon, her campaign said over the weekend.
As of Monday morning, the only gubernatorial candidate that has filed to be on the IL GOP March 2018 ballot is Governor Bruce Rauner.
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Federal Communications Commission building in Washington, D.C. Photo Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM[/caption] The Federal Communications Commissions Office of Inspector General has agreed to cooperate with New Yorks investigation into allegedly fake public comments on net neutrality that were posted to the commission's website, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Monday. Meanwhile, an FCC member called on the commission to delay a scheduled Dec. 14 vote on repealing net neutrality rules enacted under the Obama administration until an investigation can be completed. During a news conference in Manhattan, the Democratic attorney general said he received notification Monday morning that the FCCs inspector generals office would offer assistance in Schneidermans probe into thousands of possibly phony comments that were left on the FCC's public comment section on the topic of net neutrality, the existing principle that internet service providerssuch as Comcast or Verizoncan't slow down, speed up or block internet access for some web sites relative to others. The FCC received a total of 21.7 million comments but a Pew Research Report found 57 percent of the comments used either duplicate or temporary email addresses and many individual names reappeared thousands of times. Schneiderman, along with FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat who is a lawyer, called on the FCC to delay the vote rolling back net neutrality rules, which is expected to be approved by the committee later this month. It is clear that our process for serving the public interest is broken and I do not believe that the agency should move forward until a credible investigation is completed. So I call on my colleagues to halt this vote until we get to the bottom of what has happened with these stolen identities and the quality of our public record, said Rosenworcel, who was nominated by President Barack Obama to the FCC. Before entering public service, Rosenworcel practiced communications law at Drinker Biddle & Reath. The New York Attorney General's Office also has introduced an online tool that the public can use to see if their identity was used to post a comment on the site without their knowledge or consent. In an open letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai published on the website Medium on Nov. 21, Schneiderman said he was investigating a massive scheme to corrupt the FCCs notice and comment process through the use of fake public comments on the subject of net neutrality. Schneiderman had argued that "hundreds of thousands of identical anti-net neutrality comments under the names and addresses of unwitting Americans constitutes illegal impersonation and misuse of a person's identity. Schneiderman, a Democrat who has been a longtime nemesis of Republican President Donald Trump, said his office first contacted the FCC in June for records related to its public comment system that were necessary to investigate which bad actor or actors were behind the misconduct, he said in his open letter to Pai. Between June and November, Schneidermans office requested logs and other records from the FCC nine times, but has received no substantive response to our investigative requests. None, Schneiderman said in the letter to Pai. Since the open letter was published late last month, roughly 3,000 people from across the country have reached out to Schneidermans office, including 350 New Yorkers, claiming that their names were used to submit comments without their knowledge, Schneiderman said. One of the people whose name was used to submit a fake net neutrality comment included Schneiderman's assistant press secretary, he said. The inquiry into the fake comments began in the spring, Schneiderman said, amid media reports and research claiming that several people were impersonated by anti-net neutrality commenters and allegations that bots were being used to submit comments opposing net neutrality rules. Schneiderman said his team discovered lots of anecdotal evidence that some of the comments left on the FCC website appeared to not be legitimate, which ultimately led to his offices investigation. Based on Schneidermans investigation, residents of California, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas may have also had their personal information used to submit comments on net neutrality, Rosenworcel said. Pai, who was once the associate general counsel for Verizon and was nominated to the commission by Obama, has favored rolling back net neutrality regulations, an Obama-era rule that treats broadband like a public utility. Pai, who was appointed by Trump to lead the FCC, has argued that these heavy-handed regulations restrict internet service providers and make it harder for providers to build out their networks, he said in a statement last month. The FCC did not immediately reply when asked why it decided to cooperate with the investigation or whether it would delay the vote.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel may have to make adjustments to its corporate tax rate, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon said on Saturday in response to a tax slash approved by the U.S. Senate. U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. tax overhaul could cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent once the Senate and House of Representatives reconcile their respective versions of the legislation. The corporate tax rate in Israel is to be reduced this month from 24 to 23 percent. But a lower, more attractive, rate in the United States could lead Israeli companies to consider moving there. "We will receive all the details from our companies abroad about the tax reform and we must address it," Kahlon told Channel 10's weekly politics show Hamateh. "What the danger is of companies here packing up and moving there? There are many implications. We will have to make adjustments." Many Israeli high-tech companies have operations in the United States but research and development centers in Israel. Israels technology industry is one of the worlds largest behind Silicon Valley, accounting for about 14 percent of the countrys economic output, 50 percent of industrial exports and about 10 percent of its workforce. (Reporting by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Stephen Powell)
I grew up watching The Today Show with my mom every weekday morning as I got ready for school. It was a special routine we shared to ease the pain of early mornings; watching these lighthearted news anchors deliver (often) sweet stories and greet fans outside. I yearned to be one of those people holding signs with messages for loved ones back home.
Matt Lauer at the Today show in 2012. (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images)
Katie Couric and Matt Lauer were like the mom and dad of this on-air family, Ann Curry and Al Roker their responsible and goofy neighbors.
Lauer was the wholesome dad, the Danny Tanner of news. He seemed warm, casual, and reliable. Ever since I was a kid, thats what Lauer has represented to me. The most wholesome man in TV news. That is, until Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2017, when we learned the story of the lewd life he was secretly leading.
As the stories of his sexual misconduct unfolded, something within my perception of him began to change. I had always thought of Lauer as wholesome, professional, good looking. But over the course of last week, that same crooked smile, that buzzed head, those warm eyes took on an entirely different image: He looked creepy.
But how is that possible?
Certainly, Lauers look hasnt changed so dramatically that quickly. Not to mention, most of the photos being posted were old stock shots pictures in which he once looked warm. Now in those same images, he looked like a different man.
Of course he represents something completely different to me now; but that cant change his physical appearance, can it? How did this man who I once saw as safe suddenly look so predatory?
Theories of embodied perception suggest that nonvisual factors impact what we actually see, says Elise Clerkin, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Miami University, whos studied clinical phenomena like fear and visual perception. In this case, the nonvisual factor is what we know about Lauer; originally that he was married with children and got along really well with Couric (at least, it appeared that way). Now, its that for years he had been taking advantage of women he worked with, in inappropriate and sexually aggressive ways. These two sets of factors paint two very different pictures. And while this cant actually change the way Lauer looks, this knowledge can certainly color his appearance, applying a murky and mysterious filter.
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If ones visual perception is influenced not only by sensory input, but also by nonvisual factors, it makes sense that your visual perception of Lauer has recently changed, Dr. Clerkin confirms.
This is all based on person perception and the expectations that we have about people, adds Ronald Riggio, Ph.D., professor of leadership and organizational psychology at Claremont McKenna College, who specializes in topics including nonverbal communication and has written about why power players like Harvey Weinstein commit these heinous acts. We construct images of people and associate those images with qualities that we believe the individual possesses. So, Lauers appearance, when people thought he was wholesome, gracious, and kind, was interpreted to be consistent with those qualities. He appears innocent, his smile boyish and endearing. Now, after the revelations, we see that smile as a smirk, he explains. The same smile is interpreted differently based on our constructed image of him.
Dr. Riggio uses the clown analogy to explain this idea further. Clowns used to be seen as comical, friendly, and nice, but after It and some other movies (not to mention killer John Wayne Gacy), we may start to view clowns as scary, evil, and dangerous. Same clown face, different interpretation.
It happens all the time in relationships. Think about a lover his/her face is precious and attractive to you. After the breakup, you cant stand looking at the person, Riggio points out. Our attitudes about the person affect our interpretations of their appearance.
When you learn someone you trusted did something bad, fear affects how you perceive their appearance too. There is data to suggest that fear can change the way we actually see things, Dr. Clerkin says. According to Dr. Dennis Proffitt at the University of Virginia, visual perception promotes survival by making us aware of both the opportunities and costs associated with action, she notes. Applying this theory to better understand clinical phenomena, my colleagues and I have shown that under certain conditions, people who are afraid of heights, for example, may actually see heights as higher than those with less height fear.
In this instance, fearing Lauer because of what he is accused of could change the way he looks to you, Dr. Clerkin says. Here is a man who has been accused of terrible acts; consequently, your assessment of the costs and risks of interacting with him have likely increased, and in turn, you may actually see him differently than you did just one week ago i.e., as less wholesome. The same is true for ones visual perception of sexual predators more generally.
Dr. Clerkin notes that this theory is a little controversial, as there are visual scientists who believe that vision is a modular process that is unaffected by nonsensory input. But, we cant deny the fact that it feels right in this scenario.
Its safe to say that within a few months or years, the men being brought down in this major media and Hollywood movement will change physically due to aging. They may lose hair, acquire more wrinkles, or gain weight due to stress. Or they might get work done, dye their hair, or lose weight in efforts to remake themselves. For now, they technically look the same: like traitors.
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Asked by @GStephanopoulos if he believes Roy Moore should be in the Senate, @SenateMajLdr says, Im going to let the people of Alabama make the call.
Asked by @GStephanopoulos if he believes Roy Moore should be in the Senate, @SenateMajLdr says, Im going to let the people of Alabama make the call. https://t.co/grERTlnlwr #ThisWeek pic.twitter.com/s934L8feMB This Week (@ThisWeekABC) December 3, 2017
WASHINGTON Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has shifted his stance on Roy Moore, the Republican Senate nominee in Alabama whom McConnell previously called unfit to serve in public office.
The people of Alabama are going to decide a week from Tuesday who they want to send to the Senate, McConnell said Sunday in an interview with CBS Face the Nation. Its really up to them. Its been a pretty robust campaign with a lot of people weighing in. The president and I, of course, supported somebody different earlier in the process. But in the end, the voters of Alabama will make their choice.
Multiple women have accused Moore of pursuing them while they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. One woman told The Washington Post said she was just 14 years old when he took her to his home, partially undressed her and groped her.
Last month, as additional women came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore, McConnell said he believed the women and called on the former Alabama Supreme Court justice to step aside for a more qualified candidate. The Kentucky Republican further warned that Moore would immediately face an investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee upon being sworn in, a process that could lead to expulsion.
Moore refused to drop out, however. Instead, he mounted an aggressive campaign against the women, whom he said were all lying under the direction of the Democratic Party and the media. His campaign aides threatened to reveal damaging information about the women in an attempt to discredit their allegations. The candidate, meanwhile, has kept a low public profile with zero campaign events on his schedule
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Moores bid to weather the storm received a significant boost after President Donald Trump refused to echo GOP calls for him to step aside in the race. In private conversations with aides and GOP senators, Trump doubted the stories presented by Moores accusers and questioned why they were emerging now, according to Politico.
Roy Moore denies it. Thats all I can say. He denies it. And, by the way, he totally denies it, Trump told reporters last month when asked whether he believed Moores accusers.
In the latest sign of support for Moore, the White House announced that Trump will hold a campaign-style rally in Pensacola, Florida, on Friday. The city is just 25 miles from the Alabama border and shares a television market with Mobile, Alabama, ensuring that voters there will get an opportunity to see and hear the presidents remarks about the Alabama Senate race if he decides to address it.
The presidents daughter-in-law appeared to be inviting Alabamans to the event:
Just received a taped call from Lara Trump, inviting me to an event with the president in Pensacola, Fla., which is in my area, she says. 311 miles and nearly 5 hours away. Sounds like hes campaigning... WilliamThornton (@billineastala) December 2, 2017
Moores strategy to wait out the outrage over the allegations one that Trump similarly employed after the infamous Access Hollywood tape was made public a month before the 2016 presidential election may be working.
Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee, led in several Alabama polls after the allegations against Moore first surfaced. Now, however, the momentum seems to be shifting back in Moores favor. According to a CBS News poll released Sunday, Moore leads Jones, 49 percent to 43 percent. In a more stunning statistic, 71 percent of Alabama Republicans surveyed by CBS said the allegations against Moore are false. (Another poll, released by The Washington Post on Saturday, however, found Jones leading by 3 percentage points.)
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From Cosmopolitan
This weekend, Senate Republicans passed their version of a far-reaching tax bill with amendments handwritten into the margins that no one had time to read in full Democrats even asked for an extension to fully read what they were being asked to vote on, and they were refused. While all Democrats voted against the bill, enough Republicans signed on that it passed (only one Republican voted against it); House Republicans passed a similar bill last month. Its a sweeping piece of legislation that has the potential to change much of American life, from education to health care, and not for the better. It hurts the poor while lining the pockets of the very rich. Its chock-full of giveaways to far-right special interests. And it will drive up the national debt so much that Republicans are already planning to cut social safety net programs, including Social Security and Medicare, to pay for this boondoggle for the wealthy. The bill isnt final yet the House and the Senate have to reconcile the two versions of it in conference committee and vote again before it goes to the president but theres little doubt that the final bill will remain as outrageous a gift to the rich as the two current versions.
Some of the provisions of the bill arent just about taxes theyre about catering to the financial interests of big-money GOP donors and the social interests of very conservative voters (if not their pocketbooks). And these provisions will do a lot of damage should they become law. Here are four things the Senate tax bill does as well as more disastrous things that could happen before it becomes law.
1. Undermines abortion rights
One of the most obvious and egregious incarnations of Republicans toxic political strategy is the inclusion of anti-abortion language in a provision of the bill specifying that an embryo or a fetus, which the bill calls an unborn child, can be the beneficiaries of a type of college-savings plan called a 529. This is a big deal, because asserting fetal personhood is a long-standing pro-life strategy; that is, anti-abortion groups want to enshrine into law that a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus is a person with full rights and liberties, because they believe that will help to eventually outlaw abortion. Personhood legislation laws saying that life begins at conception typically has a tough time passing when its put to a vote, because it has the potential to outlaw abortion in the most extreme cases (rape, incest, threat to the pregnant womans health or life) and even outlaw many popular forms of birth control. Its also not particularly tenable given the realities of reproduction theres a reason that people are invested with their rights under the law when theyre born (under embryonic and fetal personhood laws, would every fertilized egg get a Social Security number? What about the more than half of fertilized eggs that dont implant would our infant mortality rate just go up to more than 50 percent?). Instead of having to debate what is a plainly terrible idea, Republicans gave their far-right base a gift of laying some of the legal groundwork for egregious encroachments on abortion rights.
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2. Helps to fund private schools while making it harder to fund public education
The tax bill is also a gift to private and religious schools, as well as parents who home-school. It will let them use special accounts previously dedicated to college savings to pay for their childrens private educations in other words, its a provision that will mostly benefit rich families who can afford to send their kids to private schools. At the same time, the bill kneecaps public school districts from some of the most effective ways of raising money. Most public schools are funded by state and local taxes; the tax bill removes the deduction for these taxes.
3. Guts the Affordable Care Act
Republicans couldnt adequately destroy the ACA through normal legislative means, so theyve snuck one attack into the tax bill. This bill gets rid of the ACAs mandate that Americans buy health insurance or pay a penalty the only way to make sure theres a large enough pool of insured people to keep costs down for everyone (without a mandate, sick people are more likely buy health insurance while healthy people opt out, making it much more expensive). As a result, experts predict that insurance costs could spike, and 13 million Americans could wind up without health insurance over the next 10 years.
4. Ravages Alaskas Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by allowing more oil and gas drilling
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is a 19 million acre reserve, the largest publicly owned nature reserve in the United States, and a gem of unspoiled natural beauty that environmentalists have been trying to protect. Drilling and the potential environmental disasters it could bring could devastate not just the land, but the indigenous tribal communities that rely on it. Republicans have gotten around Democratic opposition to drilling in ANWR by tying a measure allowing it to the budget process used to approve this tax bill with the passage of the tax bill came the approval of ANWR drilling. At the same time, the tax bill creates financial incentives for reliance on fossil fuels, and creates costs for investing in clean energy, even though clean energy technologies have helped to create hundreds of thousands of jobs. In other words, the GOP plan is bad for the economy and the environment because they want to send a bizarre social message to their base that they dont care about the environment and will return us to a day when coal jobs were plentiful (at this point, an impossibility).
And there could be more in the final bill.
The next step is for the Senate and the House to reconcile their two bills. Theres already significant overlap, but there are some areas where the House bill went further than the Senate, and the two houses will have to come to some middle ground. Here's what some of the House bill provisions under consideration do:
Penalize families with high medical costs
As it stands, people who spend more than 10 percent of their income on health care so typically, the elderly or people with serious chronic conditions can deduct some of that from their taxes. Under the House version of the tax bill, thats no longer the case, meaning that the old and the sick will be paying more to keep themselves healthy and alive.
Annihilate graduate education
In order to make sure the richest Americans and corporations pay less, House Republicans made it harder for many students, but especially graduate students, to afford higher education. For the many of us who have student loans, our taxes will go up under the House version of the bill, because we will no longer be able to write off a portion of our student loan interest. Its even worse for graduate students, who will find themselves taxed on the tuition wavers they commonly receive in other words, if a graduate student gets $20,000 of tuition waved (a common feature of graduate education), she will still have to pay taxes on that $20,000, even though she didnt actually receive that money. Where a graduate student will find the money to pay for that massive increase is unclear. Instead, many universities suspect that many students will simply decide not to attend graduate school in the first place hardly a way to make America great in an economy that needs more engineers, doctors, scientists, and other highly educated professionals to compete in an increasingly creative and information-centered global economy. Not to mention the fact that education is a good thing, and we should be promoting it rather than discouraging it by making it more expensive and only available to the already-wealthy.
Let religious groups be both tax exempt and politically meddling
As it stands, religious organizations like churches are exempt from taxation. But one key to that exemption is that these groups, like tax-exempt nonprofits, cant endorse candidates or use their pulpits to push partisan electoral politics. They can, of course, have a stance on particular issues and encourage civic participation generally Catholic priests can preach against abortion, Evangelical pastors can say marriage should be between a man and a woman, a rabbi can say its important to vote but your minister cant take to the pulpit on Sunday to tell everyone they should cast their ballot for Donald Trump or risk eternal damnation. If religious individuals want to advocate for candidates, they are free to do that; but religious institutions that enjoy a near total exemption from paying taxes cant tell you who you should vote for. Or at least, they couldnt the House version of the tax bill gets rid of the long-standing amendment barring these institutions from political activism. This could be a bargaining chip in the reconciliation process with the Senate version of the bill. If removing the bar on political activism at church goes into the final version, more politics may be coming into a church (or synagogue or mosque or temple) near you.
Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. Follow her on Twitter.
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From Country Living
NBC is standing firm against giving fired "Today" host Matt Lauer a payout on the multimillion-dollar salary he's leaving behind, according to a person at the network.
Lauer, said to have earned around $25 million a year, reportedly is negotiating to receive the remainder of his salary for the current contract that runs through 2018 and made him one of TV's highest-paid journalists.
But NBC won't agree, said the person, who spoke Friday on condition of anonymity because a personnel matter was involved.
Some NBC News employees who raised the question of Lauer's compensation at a staff meeting were told that he was fired "for cause" and wouldn't be paid beyond his last day worked, according to a Variety report Friday.
A representative for Lauer didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Also Friday, NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack said an internal review into Lauer's alleged sexual misconduct is underway, including how it happened and why it wasn't stopped earlier.
In a company-wide memo released publicly, Lack said those are among the questions NBC employees are asking in the wake of the "Today" host's firing for what Lack labeled "appalling behavior."
A team of NBCUniversal legal and human resources leaders have started a "thorough and timely review" of what occurred and how the company can foster greater transparency and mutual respect, Lack said in the memo.
"At the conclusion of the review we will share what we've learned, no matter how painful, and act on it," he said.
His memo didn't address if the report will be made public. NBC News publicists didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reiterating comments from a memo he sent Wednesday, Lack said the top priority is to create a safe workplace environment and that unacceptable actions are "met with consequences, no matter who the offender."
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NBC's announcement Tuesday that Lauer was being fired for "inappropriate sexual behavior" meant that the network was cutting loose the popular, long-established star of its highly lucrative morning show.
How much Lauer's status may have protected him from allegations is among the questions raised by observers. NBC has said current executives didn't receive any complaints before the one Monday that triggered Lauer's immediate dismissal the next day.
Two other women came forward with accusations, with one telling The New York Times that Lauer had sexually assaulted her in his office in 2001. A Variety magazine investigation outlined a pattern of alleged salacious behavior, including three women who said Lauer harassed them.
In his first public response, Lauer said in a statement Thursday that some of the allegations were untrue but others had enough truth that he felt "embarrassed and ashamed."
Repairing the damage caused is his "full-time job," Lauer said.
He joined a lengthening list of prominent men toppled by misconduct claims, starting with movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and expanding out to others in Hollywood, media and politics.
In his memo, Lack said the company's mandatory online training on sexual harassment and other workplace issues will be augmented in the news division by in-person training
"This week we saw that when an employee comes forward to report misconduct, the system works. The complaint is quickly assessed and meaningful action is taken," he said. But workers must be empowered to "take the crucial first step of reporting bad behavior."
NBC has been caught up in other misconduct-related matters.
Last fall, the network was accused of sitting on an "Access Hollywood" audio tape in which then-candidate Donald Trump was heard telling Billy Bush that prominence came with a license to grope women. The exchange was first reported by the Washington Post.
In the Weinstein scandal, the first report was by The New York Times while a story by Ronan Farrow did for NBC News went unaired. Reporting by Farrow on Weinstein was subsequently published in New Yorker stories.
Earlier this month, NBC News fired the man who headed its talent booking department after multiple women accused him of inappropriate conduct.
Read Lack's full memo below:
Many of you have asked what we are doing to learn as much as we can about the circumstance around Matt Lauer's appalling behavior, why this was able to happen, and why it wasn't reported sooner.
This week we saw that when an employee comes forward to report misconduct, the system works. The complaint is quickly assessed and meaningful action is taken. But we also learned that we must do a much better job of making people feel empowered to take that crucial first step of reporting bad behavior.
To that end, I have three things to share with you.
A team of the most experienced NBCUniversal Legal and Human Resources leaders havebegun a thorough and timely review of what happened and what we can do to build a culture of greater transparency, openness and respect for each other. At the conclusion of the review we will share what we've learned, no matter how painful, and act on it.
Second - while our company has had mandatory online training for all employees on sexual harassment and other workplace issues, we need to do better. Therefore, in addition to what is already in place, the News Division is launching an immediate effort to implement in-person training on sexual harassment awareness and appropriate behavior in the workplace. We will share more details on this effort very shortly.
And third - we need to keep communicating. In addition to the meetings we've had this week with various show teams and departments, we are encouraging the leaders of every group to have smaller, more informational gatherings to further discuss this crucial issue now and on an ongoing basis.
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The Federal Communications Commission is on the verge of a historic vote to gut net neutrality rules and potentially ruin our internet. Unlike legislative votes in Congress, concerned citizens dont have a local senator to complain to, and the FCCs comment process has left a lot to be desired.
So, because angry voices need to be heard somewhere, activists are organizing votes outside Verizon stores nationwide. Verizon has been a proponent of the FCCs move to repeal net neutrality, and new FCC chairman Ajit Pai is a former Verizon lawyer, so protesting Verizon stores makes about as much sense as anything else.
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The protests are scheduled for Thursday, December 7th, in over 600 cities nationwide. The protests are being organized by Team Internet, a grassroots network of nearly half a million volunteer activists spearheaded by Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, and Free Press Action Fund, three of the groups behind the massive July 12 net neutrality day of action that drove millions of comments, emails, and phone calls to the FCC and Congress.
A map of all the protests can be found here, while a ZIP-code search for protests, details of local actions, and the option to host your own protest can be found at the Battle for the Net website.
The FCC vote to repeal Title II classification for telecoms companies is scheduled for Thursday, December 14th. The FCC announced its plan which would basically give all telecoms regulation duties to the FTC, an organization poorly-equipped to deal with the telecoms companies early this year, and the public comments section has been open since then. Over 23 million comments were submitted to the FCC, but allegations of fraud and fake comments have destroyed the integrity of that process, enabling the FCC to ignore public feedback.
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A crew on board a Cathay Pacific aircraft saw a North Korean missile blow up over the Sea of Japan last week, the airline told CNBC on Monday. Pyongyang launched the latest in a series of ballistic missiles last Wednesday in defiance of international sanctions and warnings against provocations . The rocket, which the regime said could reach the U.S. mainland, crashed into the sea near Japan. The crew of Cathay Pacific CX893, which was traveling to Hong Kong from San Francisco, reportedly saw the missile from their plane as it was passing over Japan and alerted the country's air traffic control."On November 29, the flight crew of CX893 reported a sighting of what is suspected to be the re-entry of the recent DPRK test missile. Though the flight was far from the event location, the crew advised Japan ATC (air traffic control) according to procedures," Cathay Pacific told CNBC in an emailed statement."Operation(s) remained normal and was not affected," the company added.Reporting the story Monday, the South China Morning Post added that the airline's General Manager of Operations Mark Hoey had posted on a staff communication platform that: "The crew of CX893 reported, 'Be advised, we witnessed the DPRK missile blow up and fall apart near our current location.'""We advised ATC and ops [operations] normal." Hoey added, according to the paper. Despite the danger and unpredictability of North Korean missile tests, Cathay Pacific told CNBC that the airline had no plans to alter its routes in the region or its operating parameters. "We have been in contact with relevant authorities and industry bodies as well as with other carriers. At the moment, no-one is changing any routes or operating parameters," Cathay Pacific said in its statement. "We remain alert and review the situation as it evolves." A crew on board a Cathay Pacific aircraft saw a North Korean missile blow up over the Sea of Japan last week, the airline told CNBC on Monday. Pyongyang launched the latest in a series of ballistic missiles last Wednesday in defiance of international sanctions and warnings against provocations . The rocket, which the regime said could reach the U.S. mainland, crashed into the sea near Japan. The crew of Cathay Pacific CX893, which was traveling to Hong Kong from San Francisco, reportedly saw the missile from their plane as it was passing over Japan and alerted the country's air traffic control. "On November 29, the flight crew of CX893 reported a sighting of what is suspected to be the re-entry of the recent DPRK test missile. Though the flight was far from the event location, the crew advised Japan ATC (air traffic control) according to procedures," Cathay Pacific told CNBC in an emailed statement. "Operation(s) remained normal and was not affected," the company added. Reporting the story Monday, the South China Morning Post added that the airline's General Manager of Operations Mark Hoey had posted on a staff communication platform that: "The crew of CX893 reported, 'Be advised, we witnessed the DPRK missile blow up and fall apart near our current location.'" "We advised ATC and ops [operations] normal." Hoey added, according to the paper. Despite the danger and unpredictability of North Korean missile tests, Cathay Pacific told CNBC that the airline had no plans to alter its routes in the region or its operating parameters. "We have been in contact with relevant authorities and industry bodies as well as with other carriers. At the moment, no-one is changing any routes or operating parameters," Cathay Pacific said in its statement. "We remain alert and review the situation as it evolves."
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FILE PHOTO: Crude oil is dispensed into a bottle in this illustration photo June 1, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas White/Illustration/File Photo
By Julia Simon
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil fell more than 1 percent on Monday on profit-taking as the market eyed signs of rising U.S. production, though prices remained close to recent two-year highs thanks to last week's decision by OPEC and other producers to extend output cuts.
Brent crude futures (LCOc1) settled down $1.28, or 2 percent, at $62.45 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures (CLc1) were down 89 cents, or 1.5 percent, at $57.47.
Brent hit a two-year high of $64.65 a month ago and has since attracted record investment by fund managers. Hedge funds and money managers also boosted bullish wagers on U.S. crude to the highest on record.
"Managed money is very long - both futures and options," said Tony Headrick, energy market analyst at CHS Hedging. "If the bulls are not fed, we're subject to a bit of profit-taking that I think we're seeing today."
John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital Management in New York, said the market could correct slightly, pulling further downward.
"We're in a situation where there might not be much more ammunition on the bullish side," he said.
The market is continuing to watch U.S. crude production, which is nearing a record high, according to data last week.
U.S. output rose in September to 9.5 million barrels per day (bpd), the highest monthly output since 2015, government data shows. On an annual basis, U.S. output peaked at 9.6 million bpd in 1970.
Additionally, drillers in the United States added two oil rigs in the week to Dec. 1, bringing the total count to 749, the highest since September, energy services company Baker Hughes said on Friday.
The U.S. rig count, an early indicator of future output, has risen sharply from 477 active rigs a year ago after energy companies boosted spending plans for 2017.
"Even higher prices are likely to be precluded by news from the U.S., where drilling activity is being stepped up," said Commerzbank analyst Carsten Fritsch.
U.S. producers were encouraged during 2017 to increase activity as crude prices started recovering from a multi-year price slump after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and some non-OPEC producers, including Russia, agreed to production cuts a year ago.
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Last week the producers agreed to extend those cuts of 1.8 million bpd until the end of next year.
"Market reaction has been positive so far. There are only two worrying aspects .... One is that Iraq's indiscipline has not been discussed, at least not publicly," PVM Oil Associates strategist Tamas Varga said, referring to Baghdad's compliance with output cuts.
A Reuters survey of output from the 13 OPEC members indicated production fell by 300,000 bpd in November. Supply from the 11 members with production targets under the original accord fell by 230,000 bpd.
The latest agreement allows for producers to exit the deal early if the market overheats. Russian officials had expressed concern that extending the cuts might encourage U.S. shale oil companies, which have been a thorn in OPEC's side, to pump more crude.
(Additional reporting by Aaron Sheldrick in TOKYO and Emily Chow in KUALA LUMPUR and Amanda Cooper in LONDON and Jessica Resnick-Ault in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Richard Chang)
"While representing the men and women of the 50th District has been one of the great honors and privileges of my life, it is clear that the Illinois Republican Party, including several of the county party organizations, has lost its way under Governor Rauner," McCann said.
PLAINVIEW - Monday, State Senator Sam McCann (R-Plainview) announced he would not be seeking re-election for his 50th State Senate seat. In his announcement, McCann expressed dismay with the state's Republican Party:
McCann would have faced a GOP primary challenger - Springfield's Steve McClure - if he had chosen to seek re-election. In August, the local GOP party voted to back McClure instead of the incumbent McCann.
In 2016, Rauner-affiliated groups such as the Illinois Opportunity Project spent between $4 and $5 Million to challenge McCann in the GOP primary. McCann opposed Governor Rauner's efforts to reform state union pensions.
McCann told NBC news earlier this year that he was considering an independent bid for governor in 2018. He would be pro-union and pro-Trump, the report said.
"I am unable to continue on with a party or a governor who continually attack working people; who support forcing taxpayers to fund abortions; who have turned Illinois into a sanctuary state; who have advanced the most liberal standards in the nation giving transgender individuals the ability to alter their birth certificates; and who have destroyed Illinois Right of Conscience Act so as to force pro-life doctors, nurses and other providers to violate their consciences and be denied their Constitutional Rights. This is no longer a Republican Party that is recognizable to me," McCann said.
McCann said he plans to stay in office and continue to represent the constituents of the 50th District until his term is over in January 2019. He was first elected to the seat in November, 2010 and took office in January, 2011.
UPDATE: McCann may have an independent opponent for governor - Once-Republican Party affiliated William Kelly said Monday he is also now running for governor as an independent in 2018.
MGIC (MTG) reported earnings 30 days ago. What's next for the stock? We take a look at earnings estimates for some clues.
Investors in American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. AEO need to pay close attention to the stock based on moves in the options market lately. That is because the Dec 8, 2017 $9.50 Put had some of the highest implied volatility of all equity options today.
What is Implied Volatility?
Implied volatility shows how much movement the market is expecting in the future. Options with high levels of implied volatility suggest that investors in the underlying stocks are expecting a big move in one direction or the other. It could also mean there is an event coming up soon that may cause a big rally or a huge sell-off. However, implied volatility is only one piece of the puzzle when putting together an options trading strategy.
What do the Analysts Think?
Clearly, options traders are pricing in a big move for American Eagle Outfitters shares, but what is the fundamental picture for the company? Currently, American Eagle Outfitters is a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) in the Retail - Apparel and Shoes industry that ranks in the Top 30% of our Zacks Industry Rank. Over the last 30 days, two analysts have increased their earnings estimates for the current quarter, while one analyst has revised the estimate downward. The net effect has taken our Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current quarter from 38 cents per share to 39 cents in that period.
Given the way analysts feel about American Eagle Outfitters right now, this huge implied volatility could mean theres a trade developing. Oftentimes, options traders look for options with high levels of implied volatility to sell premium. This is a strategy many seasoned traders use because it captures decay. At expiration, the hope for these traders is that the underlying stock does not move as much as originally expected.
Looking to Trade Options?
Each week, our very own Dave Bartosiak gives his top options trades. Check out his recent live analysis and options trade for the NFLX earnings report completely free. See it here: Bartosiak: Trading Netflix's (NFLX) Earnings with Options or check out the embedded video below for more details:
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Gold prices are being pressured early Monday by rising U.S. Treasury yields, a stronger U.S. Dollar and increased appetite for higher-yielding assets. The moves are being fueled by expectations that the U.S. economy will expand further after the Senate passed a bill to overhaul the countrys tax system over the week-end.
At 0737 GMT, February Comex Gold futures are trading $1275.60, down $6.6 or -0.51%.
In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the U.S. Senate narrowly approved the overhaul of the U.S. tax system, bringing the Republican Party and President Trump closer to their goal of slashing corporate taxes and the rich while offering middle class Americans a less-pronounced number of changes.
In other news, hedge funds and money managers raised their net-long positions in COMEX gold in the week to November 28, U.S. data showed on Friday.
Daily December Comex Gold
Forecast
Gold is threatening key support early in the session. The trend turned down last week, but there wasnt much of a follow-through to the downside. The first key level on the charts today is $1272.30, followed by previous bottoms at $1268.10 and $1267.00. Given the recent price action, I think buyers are going to have to take out $1312.70 before investors will trust this market on the upside.
And why would anyone trust a rally in gold right now with the U.S. set to raise rates later this month and perhaps as many as three times in 2018. Additionally, money continues to pore into U.S. equity markets, helped by the possibility that U.S. tax reform will become law later this week, or sometime before Christmas.
Even another ballistic test by the North Koreans couldnt encourage investors to buy the precious metal in a major way last week. We did see some movement to the upside on Friday when Michael Flynn, a previous ally of President Trump pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. This news drove stocks sharply lower, underpinning gold prices.
This tells me that the only way gold is going to make any meaningful rally over the near-term is if there is a major sell-off in the stock market. Otherwise, were expecting support to continue to erode.
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This article was originally posted on FX Empire
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A senior director of the private equity firm founded by U.S. Commerce Secretary and investor Wilbur Ross died after being attacked by a tiger shark Thursday while scuba diving off the coast of Costa Rica.Rohina Bhandari, 49, was a senior director at WL Ross & Co., the buyout fund acquired by Invesco in 2006. She was part of a group of people diving in the area at the time of the attack, according to multiple press accounts.According to her LinkedIn profile, Bhandari joined WL Ross in 2013 and previously worked at PineBridge Investments (the former AIG Investments) and Credit Suisse. On her Facebook page, friends posted tributes. "Rohina always had a smile, always a kind word," wrote one.Another Facebook commenter mentioned Bhandari was planning a birthday holiday celebration in the coming weeks. A senior director of the private equity firm founded by U.S. Commerce Secretary and investor Wilbur Ross died after being attacked by a tiger shark Thursday while scuba diving off the coast of Costa Rica. Rohina Bhandari, 49, was a senior director at WL Ross & Co., the buyout fund acquired by Invesco in 2006. She was part of a group of people diving in the area at the time of the attack, according to multiple press accounts. According to her LinkedIn profile, Bhandari joined WL Ross in 2013 and previously worked at PineBridge Investments (the former AIG Investments) and Credit Suisse. On her Facebook page, friends posted tributes. "Rohina always had a smile, always a kind word," wrote one. Another Facebook commenter mentioned Bhandari was planning a birthday holiday celebration in the coming weeks.
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By David Morgan and Amanda Becker WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate narrowly approved a tax overhaul on Saturday, moving Republicans and President Donald Trump a big step closer to their goal of slashing taxes for businesses and the rich while offering everyday Americans a mixed bag of changes. In what would be the largest change to U.S. tax laws since the 1980s, Republicans want to add $1.4 trillion over 10 years to the $20 trillion national debt to finance changes that they say would further boost an already growing economy. Trump, speaking to reporters as he left the White House for New York hours after the pre-dawn vote, praised the Senate for passing "tremendous tax reform" and said "people are going to be very, very happy". Once the Senate and House of Representatives reconcile their respective versions of the legislation, he said, the resulting bill could cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent "to 20 (percent). It could be 22 (percent) when it comes out. It could also be 20 (percent)." U.S. stock markets have rallied for months on hopes that Washington would provide significant tax cuts for corporations. Celebrating their Senate victory, Republican leaders predicted the tax cuts would encourage U.S. companies to invest more and boost economic growth. "We have an opportunity now to make America more competitive, to keep jobs from being shipped offshore and to provide substantial relief to the middle class," said Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate. The Senate approved their bill in a 51-49 vote, with Democrats complaining that last-minute amendments to win over skeptical Republicans were poorly drafted and vulnerable to being gamed later. "The Republicans have managed to take a bad bill and make it worse," said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. "Under the cover of darkness and with the aid of haste, a flurry of last-minute changes will stuff even more money into the pockets of the wealthy and the biggest corporations." No Democrats voted for the bill, but they were unable to block it because Republicans hold a 52-48 Senate majority. Talks will begin, likely next week, between the Senate and the House, which already has approved its own version of the legislation, to reconcile their respective bills. Trump, who predicted that the negotiations would produce "something beautiful," wants that to happen before the end of the year. This would allow him and his Republicans to score their first major legislative achievement of 2017 after having controlled the White House, the Senate and the House since he took office in January. Republicans failed in their efforts to repeal the Obamacare healthcare law over the summer and Trump's presidency has been hit by White House in-fighting and a federal investigation into possible collusion last year between his election campaign team and Russian officials. The tax overhaul is seen by Trump and Republicans as crucial to their prospects at mid-term elections in November 2018, when they will have to defend their majorities in Congress. In a legislative battle that moved so fast a final draft of the bill was unavailable to the public until just hours before the vote, Democrats slammed the proposed tax cuts as a give-away to businesses and the rich financed with billions of dollars in taxpayer debt. The framework for both the Senate and House bills was developed in secret over a few months by a half-dozen Republican congressional leaders and Trump advisers, with little input from the party's rank-and-file and none from Democrats. Six Republican senators, who wanted and got last-minute amendments and whose votes had been in doubt, said on Friday they would back the bill and did so. Senator Bob Corker, one of few remaining Republican fiscal hawks who pledged early on to oppose any bill that expanded the federal deficit, was the lone Republican dissenter. "I am not able to cast aside my fiscal concerns and vote for legislation that ... could deepen the debt burden on future generations," said Corker, who is not running for re-election. KEY CHANGES Numerous last-minute changes were made to the bill on Friday and in the early morning hours of Saturday. One was to make state and local property tax deductible up to $10,000, mirroring the House bill. The Senate previously had proposed entirely ending state and local tax deductibility. "The tax reform measure that passed the Senate is negative overall for state and local government finances. Lower federal tax rates for businesses and individuals could result in a modest boost to hiring and consumption, positively affecting state and local revenues," Nick Samuels, Vice President at Moodys Investors Service, said in a statement. "However, the change to the state and local tax (SALT) deduction would reduce disposable income for many taxpayers, likely outweighing the positive effect of lower federal rates on consumption in many communities and states." In another change, the alternative minimum tax (AMT), both for individuals and corporations, would not be repealed in full. Instead, the individual AMT would be adjusted and the corporate AMT would be maintained as is, lobbyists said. Another change would put a five-year limit on letting businesses immediately write off the full value of new capital investments. That would phase out over four years starting in year six, rather than be permanent as initially proposed. Under the bill, the corporate tax rate would be permanently slashed to 20 percent from 35 percent, while future foreign profits of U.S.-based firms would be largely exempt, both changes pursued by corporate lobbyists for years. On the individual side, the top tax rate paid by the highest-income earners would be cut slightly. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank, analyzed an earlier but broadly similar version of the bill passed by the Senate tax committee on Nov. 16 and found it would reduce taxes for all income groups in 2019 and 2025, with the largest average tax cuts going to the highest-income Americans. Two Republican senators announced their support for the bill on Friday after winning more tax relief for non-corporate pass-through businesses. These include partnerships and other companies not organized as public corporations, ranging from mom-and-pop concerns to large financial and real estate groups. The bill now features a 23 percent tax deduction for such business owners, up from the original 17.4 percent. The Senate bill would gut a section of Obamacare by repealing a fee paid by some Americans who do not buy health insurance, a step critics said would undermine the Obamacare system and raise insurance premiums for the sick and the old. Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican, said she obtained commitments from Republican leaders that steps would be taken later in separate legislation to minimize the impact of the repeal of the "individual mandate" fee. (Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell, Susan Heavey, Richard Cowan and Patrick Rucker in Washington; Caroline Valetkevitch in New York; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Kieran Murray and Alexander Smith)
FILE PHOTO: A Bank of America logo is seen in New York City, U.S. January 10, 2017. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith/File Photo
By Aparajita Saxena
(Reuters) - Shares of the biggest U.S. banks rose on Monday, after the Senate approved a tax overhaul bill on Saturday, raising investor hopes that their earnings would get a boost from a significantly lower tax bill.
JPMorgan Chase rose 2.4 percent to hit a record on Monday, while Bank of America rose 3.5 percent to its highest since October 2008. Both were the top performers on the S&P 500 Index, which was up 0.7 percent.
Mid-cap and regional banks also gained, with KeyCorp, Citizens Financial and M&T Bank Corp rising almost 4 percent. Zions Bancorp and Comerica Inc rose more than 2.5 percent.
"Banks might be the biggest winners from the tax reforms," Michael Mayo, a senior Wells Fargo analyst said.
Of the major S&P sectors, financials pay the highest effective tax rate at 27.5 percent, a Wells Fargo analysis of historical tax rates showed.
The tax cuts could add 16 percent to median bank earnings in 2018 and 18 percent in 2019, said Brian Klock, managing director in equity research at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, who covers large regional banks.
Among large regional banks, Zions Bancorp, M&T Bank Corp and Comerica Inc stand to benefit the most, Klock said.
Talks will begin, likely next week, between the Senate and the House, which has already approved its own version of the legislation, to reconcile their respective bills.
While negotiations are ongoing, the legislation could cut the corporate tax rate to as low as 20 percent from 35 percent.
The tax overhaul is seen by President Donald Trump and Republicans as crucial as they head into mid-term elections in November 2018, when they will have to defend their majorities in Congress.
The S&P financial index rose nearly 2 percent to its highest since 2007, while the KBW Bank Index rose 2.7 percent.
(Reporting By Aparajita Saxena; Additional reporting by Roopal Verma in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Sheryl Sandberg and Sallie Krawcheck weigh in on the recent influx of sexual harassment news, poor girls are doing better in school than boys, andsurprise, surprisemore powerful men get accused of harassment. Have a productive Monday.
EVERYONES TALKING
Its the power, stupid. Two powerful women wrote editorials responding to the wave of sexual harassment allegations over the weekend. Interestingly, both of their takes focus on a single theme: power.
Sheryl Sandbergs essay, which she posted on Facebook Sunday morning, begins: The 1992 presidential race was once summed up in a pointed phrase: Its the economy, stupid. Today, as headlines are dominated by stories about sexual harassment and sexual assault at work, a similar phrase comes to mind: Its the power, stupid. The Facebook COO goes on to talk about how, when she experienced harassment, the perpetrator always had more power than she did. Thats not a coincidence. Its why they felt free to cross that line.
The New York Times, meanwhile, published an editorial by Sallie Krawcheck, former CEO of Smith Barney and of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and co-founder of robo-advisor startup Ellevest, on Saturday. Krawcheck writes that even when she moved up the corporate ladder, and it felt a little less fraught to deal with the inevitable, she still experienced unwanted advancesbut was able to decline them. I was able to say no to the senior government official who said, How about we go up to my hotel room? before obscenely wagging his tongue at me in front of my colleagues. I could knock the portfolio managers hands off my leg without too much fear of retribution.
Both women are advocating for the same solution to the on-going sexual harassment epidemic: get more women in power.
That, of course, is much easier said than done. The gender gap at the top of corporate Americajust 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are femaleis the result of a confluence of sociocultural factors (women as primary caretakers, implicit biases against women leaders, lack of paid family leave, absence of role models, etc.) And yet, while its unlikely that well solve all of those in the next decade, it is heartening to know that the few women who are at the top are pushing to get more of us up there with them.
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
Billy begs to differ. Billy Bush, the Access Hollywood host to whom President Trump was speaking in the now-infamous 2005 tapes in which he told a bus full of men to grab em by the pussy, accuses the presidentwho has been suggesting that the voice on the tape is not hisof indulging in some revisionist history. Bush goes on to explain that while he thought Trump was performing a crass standup act back then, he knows better know; I believe her, he says of one of Trumps many accusers. New York Times
And in whats becoming a daily list of sexual harassment accusations against powerful men
Shervin Pishevar. Five women have accused venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar of sexual misconduct. Uber employees also tell Bloomberg that Pishevar, an early investor in the ride-hailing startup, made unwanted advances towards Austin Geidt, Ubers fourth employee and now head of operations for Ubers autonomous driving unit. Pishevar denied touching Geidt inappropriately then or making sexual advances toward her at other events. His spokespeople didnt comment on the other allegations, but said, We are confident that these anecdotes will be shown to be untrue. Bloomberg
Vices vices. Vice Media fired three employees for verbal and sexual harassment and other behavior that is inconsistent with our policies, our values, and the way in which we believe colleagues should work together, the companys new CHRO, Susan Tohyama, wrote in an internal memo Thursday. One of the three is Jason Mojica, head of Vices documentary films unit. (He said he was deeply disappointed by this outcome.) New York Times
Molto agitato at The Met. The Metropolitan Opera has suspended James Levine after three men came forward accusing him of sexual harassment (all of them were teens at the time). Levine had been the Mets music director for four decades and is currently a conductor at the storied opera house. Rumors about him and sexual abuse have been circulating since 1979 and the allegations stretch back to 1969. I dont have the faintest idea where those rumors came from or what purpose they served, Levine said back in 1987; his spokesman didnt comment on the suspension. New York Times
Where your tax money goes. Citing people familiar with the matter, Politico reports that Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) used $84,000 of taxpayer money to settle a sexual harassment claim brought by his former spokeswoman. Lauren Greene sued the lawmaker in 2014 over allegations of gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and creating a hostile work environment. Farenthold is the only known sitting member of Congress to have used a congressional account to pay an accuser. He did not confirm or deny Politicos report that his office was responsible for the payout. Politico
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Cynthia Collins, who was appointed CEO of genetics startup Human Longevity in January, is out after 11 months on the job.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Sorry-ish. New York Times journalists annotated the apologiesand non-apologiesissued by high-profile men accused of sexual misconduct. Gender editor Jessica Bennett writes about one portion of Harvey Weinsteins statement: These sound like the ramblings of your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. New York Times
The woman behind the CFPB. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been in the headlines lately thanks to the fight over who will succeed its director, Richard Cordray. (A federal judge last week refused to block Donald Trumps pick Mick Mulvaney; Cordrays hand-picked successor Leandra English says shell seek an injunction against Mulvaney.) English isnt the first woman to be involved with the CFPB; the bureau owes its existence to a 2007 article Warren wrote for the journal Democracy, arguing that consumers needed a federal agency to regulate defective mortgages the way the Consumer Product Safety Commission regulates defective toasters. Politico
Out-learning the boys. Women from low-income and minority families are vastly outpacing men when it comes to education: 17.6% of women who were high school sophomores in 2002 had received a bachelors degree by 2013, compared to 12.4% of men. One reason has to do with how theyre socialized: Girls derive more satisfaction from pleasing parents and teachers than boys do, according to sociologist Claudia Buchmann, while boys often feel pressured to act masculine, which can lead them to eschew school. The Atlantic
The Econ gap. One field in which female students are still not nearly as well-represented as their male counterparts is economics. According to new research from the Federal Reserve, women make up about 30% of the nations economics majors, while minorities represent just 12%. The lack of diversity is limiting to economics policy, the reports authors note, as white male policymakers are likely to see one particular set of solutions as providing the most compelling remedies to social problems. Wall Street Journal
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ON MY RADAR
The women who turned their food woes into a meal delivery company Motto
The 92-year-old woman who is still shaking up Wall Street Wall Street Journal
Meet Supergirl, the worlds strongest teenager New York Times
Should women be paid for donating their breast milk? The Atlantic
QUOTE
Electric utility firm The Southern Company SO finally reached a settlement with the Mississippi Public Utilities Staff regarding the rate issue concerning the controversial Kemper Project. Mississippi Power, subsidiary of Southern Company and in charge of the Kemper Project, has agreed to lower the price tag of the Kemper Project by $85 million. This will help to lower the amount the company needs to recover from customers by $13.4 million.
Looking Back
The Kemper plant had been central to ex-President Obamas Climate Plan and was designed to reduce up to 65% of carbon dioxide emissions. Notably, the project also received the support of President Trump.
However, the project has been facing continuous criticism owing to its poor execution, cost overruns and multiple delays. The plant is already three years behind schedule and is over $4 billion beyond the stipulated budget. The overall cost of the plant was estimated to be around $3 billion in 2010. However, with several delays adding to the projects cost, the current price tag of the plant has ballooned over $7.5 billion. In the past 18 months, the company has announced 10 delays due to project management problems. The project found it difficult to get its two gasifiers to operate consistently. Mississippi Power has been unable to make the project economically viable in the face of volatile natural gas prices.
In June, Mississippi Public Service Commission (MPSC) issued an ultimatum ordering Southern Company to redesign plans and run the Kemper Project solely on natural gas. Thereafter, the company suspended all coal gasification operations at its Kemper plant.
Mississippi regulators, who do not wish ratepayers to incur additional costs, ordered the company not to increase the rates for Mississippi Power customers. In fact, they want the company to lower the rates, if feasible.
Recent Updates
Mississippi Powers settlement deal has resulted in the rate reduction for the customers from $126 million to $112.6 million. The move entitles customers to pay $1 less every month than what they are currently paying.
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The company believes that it has complied with all the requirements of Public Service Commission including the rate reductions and the operation of the plant solely as a natural gas facility. The company now thus wants the MPSC to re-evaluate the settlement agreement. The final decision on which is expected by January.
Zacks Rank
Southern Company is one of the largest generators of electricity in the nation along with the likes of Exelon Corporation EXC, Atlantic Power Corporation AT and RWE AG RWEOY among others.
Southern Company carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
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Daisy Ridley, pictured, spoke of growing up in London in a liberal household where sexism wasn't an issue -- and of being overwhelmed by the rapturous response to her appearance as a rare female action star in "The Force Awakens" (AFP Photo/RONALDO SCHEMIDT) (AFP/File)
Los Angeles (AFP) - Carrie Fisher's death caused a huge disturbance in the Force, but the women of "The Last Jedi" vowed Sunday to honor her legacy in the latest girl-powered "Star Wars" chapter.
The cast came together in a secret location in Los Angeles with director Rian Johnson to build buzz for the latest chapter in the blockbuster space saga, which hits theaters on December 15.
"You get to see women that are not big and strong just because they're acting like men. They're doing something else," said Gwendoline Christie, 39, who plays stormtrooper commander Captain Phasma.
"And also you're seeing a developed character, or a developing character, that is showing some complex character traits. I'm delighted that something as legendary as 'Star Wars' has decided to reflect our society."
"The Last Jedi" -- filmed on the west coast of Ireland and at Pinewood Studios near London -- sees the return of the characters introduced in 2015's seventh installment, "The Force Awakens."
Christie, flanked by red-robed Praetorian guard as she took the stage, was joined by returning stars Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domnhall Gleeson, and Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill.
There were new faces too: Kelly Marie Tran as Resistance maintenance worker Rose Tico and Laura Dern, who plays Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo.
Ridley, 25, spoke of growing up in London in a liberal household where sexism wasn't an issue -- and of being overwhelmed by the rapturous response to her appearance as a rare female action star in "The Force Awakens."
"When I got involved, I knew it was a big deal, but the response was so beyond anything I could have imagined, that it was only afterward that I was like 'Oh -- oh yeah,'" she said.
Tran, 28, spoke of the "honor and responsibility" of playing a prominent female character and wanting to do the role justice.
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"And the girls in this movie kick some butt. Every single one is so good," she said.
Fisher -- who played General Leia Organa when she was known simply as Princess Leia in the original 1977-83 trilogy -- died in December, having already wrapped her scenes for "The Last Jedi."
"I watched TV and film obsessively from such a young age, but [she] stayed with me throughout my formative years," said Christie, who plays warrior Brienne of Tarth on HBO's "Game of Thrones."
"She's really interesting, she's really smart, she's really funny, she's courageous, she's bold, she doesn't care what people think, and she isn't prepared to be told what to do."
The November 21st MAGA rally opened with prayer, the National Anthem sung by Raquel Mitchell of the Frederick Douglass Foundation of Illinois (The Largest Christ-Centered, Multi-Ethnic and Republican Ministry in America), the Pledge, and a Moment of Silence for fallen Rockford police officer.
Police Officer Jaimie Cox was killed during a traffic stop at age 30, on Sunday, November 5, 2017. He had served with the Rockford Police Department for one year and had previously served with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources - Division of Law Enforcement. He was a veteran of the U.S. Army National Guard, serving from 2004 to 2010. He was part of an Army National Guard contingent deployed from 2008 to 2009 to Nangarhar province in Afghanistan and received honors including the Army Commendation Medal, the Army Achievement Medal and the Combat Infantryman Badge. He was also awarded the Illinois National Guard Abraham Lincoln Medal of Freedom Ribbon. It was noted how the coming holiday season will be a very difficult for his family. Link
Introduction of host Joe Walsh
It was now time for special host of the evening, Joe Walsh, a former Illinois U.S. congressman and host of the weekday Joe Walsh Show on AM 560, to step forward to receive the enthusiastic welcome extended by those in the room, many of whom are faithful listeners to the Joe Walsh Show. Raquel Mitchell of the Frederick Douglass Foundation introduced Walsh.
Joe Walsh described his job of the night as firing up those who are in the battle. Joe then expressed disappointment that there weren't 1,000 people in attendance at the rally. Joe bemoaned that conservative Americans are not fired up, with good reason not to feel enthusiastic, as Republican U.S. legislators are not following through on Trump's campaign promises. "But we better get fired up," said Walsh, "as the other side is raging with uncontrollable anger. Walsh then asked how it felt when Barack Obama was elected? Now the other side is fired up in much the same way as we were over Obama's election. Democrats never expected Trump to win, but Hillary is gone, and Democrats are now "running through the wall" to come out and vote.
American Eagles' Ed Martin
Next up was Ed Martin, President of Phyllis Schlafly American Eagles and Education Fund which, in part, sponsored the MAGA Illinois 2017 event.
Ed spoke about Phyllis' meeting with candidate Donald Trump. Knowing that Trump was a formidable deal maker. Phyllis Schlafly told Trump that before she could endorse him, he must help her make the Republican Platform in a few months a conservative one, putting country first, family first, and with a pro-life agenda. Phyllis got everything she asked of Trump. This resulted in the Republican Platform at last summer's Republican Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, the most conservative ever adopted.
Trump also promised Phyllis that he would never let her down. Phyllis believed that politics was where the action was to effect change. When Trump won the presidency in November of last year, in what Ed called a "God-given miracle", Trump followed through with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, thereby fulfilling his promise to appoint a replacement for Scalia that that was in his same image.
If Republicans lose big in 2018, we will lose the keys, not only to take back America, but to make America great again. Phyllis Schlafly Speaks on Donald Trump, Vol. 2, was available for participants free of charge, courtesy of Phyllis Schlafly American Eagles and Education Fund. Jordan Henry, Director of Research at Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, was eager to engage in conversation with Expo attendees about Phyllis Schlafy, as they visited his Expo table for free books.
Political operative, Jack Posobiec
A young and dynamic speaker was next heard from, Jack Posobiec, who was a political operative in the 2016 Presidential Elections. In that Mr. Posobiec still lives in the Washington swamp, it feels to Jack that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are still in charge. In that Paul Ryan and Mich O'Connell couldn't get Obamacare passed, Jack further suggested that both should have stepped down because of their ineffectiveness. Posobiec observed how something has shifted drastically in this nation when "Making American Great" is now considered a racist term. From day one in office, many in Congress, the Left, and the media have had nothing good to say about President Trump. As Posobiec remarked, "Congress is more worried about the KGB hiding behind every tree than working for the good of the American people."
Turning Point's Charlie Kirk
In introducing Charlie Kirk, Founder and President of Turning Point USA, Joe Walsh said 24-year-old KIrk is one of the most important speakers in our country today. In only five years, Charlie built the largest youth group in this nation to promote conservative ideas with 1,250 chapters located on high school and college campuses, and the movement continues to grow.
Charlie Kirk turned his speaking time over to Candace Owens who is with Kirk's Turning Point. Her blog is "Red Pill Black." Without hesitation, Ms. Owens announced that by the end of 2018 she was going to "lead the Black revolution against the Democratic Party." Candace then commented how Blacks have an unfavorable reputation in the media, that they hate white people, and that they just want free stuff. "Not so," said Candace. In bringing up the name Turning Point U.S.A. to Charlie Kirk, Candace asked of Kirk, "whose point was being turned?" Thereafter, Candace requested that Charlie put her on the ground to speak to her own people. As Candace remarked: "Some Blacks don't even know they are conservative."
Rick Manning advocates limited government
Rick Manning, from American for Limited Government, offered comments that were well received, first relating how The Paris Climate Agreement was an attempt to export American wealth to other countries. In spite of intense lobbying efforts to convince the U.S. to stay on board, Trump realized the agreement would only hurt the economic engine of the United States in limiting our electricity generating capacity. As Manning remarked, The Paris Accords was all about reducing global warming through the reduction of CO2 emissions, which would have required the curtailment of fossil fuels (We do have 300 years of coal sitting in the ground.) in favor on green sources of energy. Mr. Manning further stated, "People will respect America when we are the wealthiest and the strongest nation." Manning, in an unspoken reference to Trump, spoke of how great men arise at times when God needs them. Manning emphasized that Republicans will be unable to survive another election cycle if they tell themselves that voting is not worth their time, for the Democrats are motivated come out and vote.
"Diamond" and "Silk" reinactment
In what was a play on the comedy team of Diamond and Silk, Raquel Mitchell and Babette Holder, President of the Illinois Chapter of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, presented their version of the Diamond and Silk comedy team of Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, who are better known by their stage names Diamond and Silk. They became active American video bloggers and YouTube personalities as black women in support of Trump during the Trump campaign.
Nehlen and Marter challenge incumbent Republicans
The last two rally speakers were patriots who are running to unseat Republican Party incumbents. Even though the MAGA event was geared toward targeting state and federal elected officials in Illinois who are not supportive of the Trump agenda, Wisconsin Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen, who is running to defeat RINO speaker of the House Paul Ryan, was a welcome addition to the rally. Nehlen criticized Ryan for not being a conservative voice and thought the time had come for Ryan to return home. Furthermore, Ryan is not fighting for Trump's agenda. Big business continues to love Ryan because of his handouts. On immigration, Ryan doesn't favor building a wall, and he's perfectly fine with DACA individuals obtaining citizenship. This would enable millions of DACA relatives to enter this nation through chain migration. Illinois Congressional candidate James Marter seems up to the challenge to defeat incumbent 16th District Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who has been a big disappointment in his failure to support President Trump in the U.S. House. Marter wants to cut spending in D.C. and drain the swamp. He also believes in limited spending and is a strong advocate of 2nd Amendment rights. Marter was well received. Many rally attendees were from Kinzinger's 16th Congressional District. Closing remarks
President Trump on Monday tweeted his endorsement of Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for Alabamas U.S. Senate seat, despite multiple allegations of sexual misconduct and assault against the former judge.
Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more, Trump tweeted. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!
Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2017
Trump again tried to tie Moores Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, to Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
Putting Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders& so much more, the president added. Look at your 401-ks since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back!
Putting Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders& so much more. Look at your 401-ks since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2017
Moore, in turn, tweeted that he was thankful for Trumps support.
The America First agenda will #MAGA, Moore added. Cant wait to help him #DrainTheSwamp.
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Thankful for President Trump's support. The America First agenda will #MAGA. Can't wait to help him #DrainTheSwamp.#ALSEN https://t.co/pYu9h7TYVN Judge Roy Moore (@MooreSenate) December 4, 2017
Trump and Moore spoke by telephone later Monday morning.
According to White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah, Trump had a positive call with Judge Roy Moore during which they discussed the state of the Alabama Senate race and the President endorsed Judge Moores campaign.
Moore said that Trump told him, Go get em, Roy!
"Go get 'em, Roy!" President Trump Just got off the phone with President Trump who offered his full support and said he needs a fighter to help him in the US Senate. I look forward to fighting alongside the President to #MAGA! Judge Roy Moore (@MooreSenate) December 4, 2017
Last month, Trump twice offered his tacit support for Moore by blasting Jones, telling Alabama voters to oppose the Democrat. Jones and Moore are competing in the Dec. 12 special election to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessionss former Senate seat.
Roy Moore and President Trump (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Brynn Anderson/AP, Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
The last thing we need in Alabama and the U.S. Senate is a Schumer/Pelosi puppet who is WEAK on Crime, WEAK on the Border, Bad for our Military and our great Vets, Bad for our 2nd Amendment, AND WANTS TO RAISES TAXES TO THE SKY, Trump tweeted. Jones would be a disaster!
I endorsed Luther Strange in the Alabama Primary, the president added. He shot way up in the polls but it wasnt enough. Cant let Schumer/Pelosi win this race. Liberal Jones would be BAD!
The last thing we need in Alabama and the U.S. Senate is a Schumer/Pelosi puppet who is WEAK on Crime, WEAK on the Border, Bad for our Military and our great Vets, Bad for our 2nd Amendment, AND WANTS TO RAISES TAXES TO THE SKY. Jones would be a disaster! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2017
I endorsed Luther Strange in the Alabama Primary. He shot way up in the polls but it wasnt enough. Cant let Schumer/Pelosi win this race. Liberal Jones would be BAD! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2017
Trumps support of Moore runs counter to many congressional Republicans, who have called for Moore to exit the race amid allegations from nine women ranging from uncomfortable and unwanted overtures to sexual assault. Most of the accusers said the misconduct occurred when they were teenagers and Moore was in his 30s. Moore has fiercely denied the allegations.
And when asked by reporters if having an alleged molester in the Senate was preferable to seating a Democrat, the president pointed to Moores denials.
Well, he denies it, Trump said. Look, he denies it.
He says it didnt happen, and you know, you have to listen to him also, he added.
The president himself has faced more than a dozen allegations of various forms of misconduct, with most of the women coming forward during last years campaign. The October 2016 release of an Access Hollywood tape revealed that Trump bragged in 2005 that he could grope and forcibly kiss women without their consent. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders has said the administrations position is that all of Trumps accusers are lying.
Before Thanksgiving, Trump did not rule out campaigning for Moore like he did for Strange during the Alabama primary. But the White House has since said the president has no plans to hit the campaign trail on Moores behalf.
Read more from Yahoo News:
President Donald Trump has called his fellow Republicans unbeatable as he revels in the passage through the Senate of a sweeping tax reform bill which should secure his first major legislative victory since entering office.
In a 51-49 pre-dawn vote, Republicans approved a measure that Mr Trump claimed was the largest tax cut in the history of our country, but will seemingly benefit the wealthiest Americans most and would also add $1 trillion to the national debt over 10 years.
Calling it one of the big nights, Mr Trump swept into New York for a number of political fundraising events delighted at the thought of the largest changes to tax laws since the 1980s. As he left the White House he praised the Senate for passing tremendous tax reform and said that people are going to be very, very happy.
The legislation now goes to the House-Senate committee to reconcile the differing bills the House and the Senate passed, before landing on the presidents desk to sign but Mr Trump appeared unfazed. Something beautiful is going to come out of that mixer, he said.
Right now unless they have somebody that we dont know about, right now were unbeatable. Were unbeatable, Mr Trump said. And one of the reasons is whats happening with the markets, whats happening with business, whats happening with jobs.
He made clear that voting against tax cuts would create a problem for Democrats in next years mid-term elections.
Speaking at a fundraising event at New York restaurant Cipriani, Mr Trump said: We got no Democrat help and I think thats going to cost them very big in the election because basically they voted against tax cuts. And I dont think politically its good to vote against tax cuts.
On the way to the event, Mr Trump's motorcade drove past several hundred protesters decrying the make-up of the tax bill.
Over the previous 24 hours, multiple last-minute alterations were made to the legislation to win support from sceptical Republicans.
Story continues
There are changes apparently worth billions and billions of dollars said Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, who took to the Senate floor several times throughout the day to criticise the bill and the process being used to pass it.
The final text of the bill was not released until a few hours before the vote, with Democrats angry at the speed of the passage of the bill.
The American people have a right to know the tax policy being made in the dark, Mr Wyden added.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had promised Mr Wyden that he would have plenty of time to review the final text, even though the bill is more than 500 pages and includes highly technical language.
Speaking after the passage of the bill, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer bemoaned the last minute changes.
The Republicans have managed to take a bad bill and make it worse, said Mr Schumer. Under the cover of darkness and with the aid of haste, a flurry of last-minute changes will stuff even more money into the pockets of the wealthy and the biggest corporations.
The national debt increase was an issue for Republican Senator Bob Corker, who was the only member of his party to vote against the measure.
This is yet another tough vote. I am disappointed. I wanted to get to yes, Mr Corker said in a statement. But at the end of the day, I am not able to cast aside my fiscal concerns and vote for legislation that I believe, based on the information I currently have, could deepen the debt burden on future generation.
While he supports parts of the Senate legislation and believes it could be made more fiscally sound, he said, it is clear the caucus is in a different place.
Mr Corker had attempted to add $350bn in tax increases to the Senates tax bill a proposal that was ultimately rejected.
But despite Mr Corkers decision to vote against the measure, the Republican leadership was still able to secure the 50 yea votes needed to pass it.
Republican Senator Susan Collins seen as a wildcard because of her summer spent bucking leadership on healthcare legislation announced her support for the tax bill earlier in the day after changes she wanted were made to the legislation.
Having secured these key improvements in the bill, as well as the commitments to legislation to help lower health insurance premiums, I will cast my vote in support of the Senate tax reform bill, she said. As revised, this bill will provide much-needed tax relief and simplification for lower- and middle-income families, while spurring the creation of good jobs and greater economic growth.
Mr McConnell celebrated the passage by predicting the bill will lead to an economic boost. We have an opportunity now to make America more competitive, to keep jobs from being shipped offshore and to provide substantial relief to the middle class, he said.
The Senate tax bill tacked on some controversial Republican-favoured extras, including repealing Obamacares requirement that most people have health insurance. The proposal, which is part of efforts to repeal Obamacare, would lead to 13 million people losing their health insurance over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks during an event with supporters in Caracas, Venezuela December 1, 2017. Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS
By Alexandra Ulmer and Deisy Buitrago
CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday gained more powers over the OPEC member's oil contracts, as a deepening purge looks set to strengthen the leftist leader's control of the key energy sector amid a debilitating recession.
A months-long crackdown on alleged graft in Venezuela's oil industry has led to the arrest of some 65 former executives, including two prominent officials who used to lead both the oil ministry and state oil company PDVSA.
Corruption has long plagued Venezuela, home to the world's biggest crude reserves, but the socialist government usually said "smear campaigns" were behind accusations of widespread graft.
Maduro has recently changed his tack, blaming "thieves" and "traitors" for the country's imploding economy.
PDVSA's new boss, former housing minister Major General Manuel Quevedo, said on Sunday that all oil service contracts and executive positions would be reviewed by Maduro as of Monday.
"There aren't going to be any more contracts backed by the board to keep pillaging, as has happened in some instances," said Quevedo during a visit to the ailing Paraguana Refining Center.
Further details were not immediately available. PDVSA did not respond to a request for information.
Maduro said former energy minister Ali Rodriguez had been appointed honorary president of PDVSA and had met with Quevedo for six hours over the weekend.
ART, WINE, GOLD CHESS SET
The most recent high-profile sweep saw Diego Salazar, a relative of former oil czar Rafael Ramirez, detained on Friday on charges of helping launder some around 1.35 billion euros to Andorra.
During his Sunday television program, Maduro flashed a painting by Venezuelan painter Armando Reveron and pictures of luxury goods, including bottles from an alleged 300,000-euro wine cellar and a gold chess set, he said belonged to Salazar.
"Thieves!" said Maduro, banging his fist on the table, during the near five-hour broadcast. "All your assets must be expropriated," he added, stressing that the money should go to state coffers.
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Reuters was not able to confirm Maduro's accusations or contact a representative for Salazar.
His detention has spurred speculation that authorities are after Ramirez, who was the powerful head of PDVSA and the oil ministry for a decade before Maduro demoted him as an envoy to the United Nations in 2014.
A protracted rivalry between Maduro and Ramirez has increased in recent weeks, insiders say, especially after Ramirez wrote online opinion articles criticizing Maduro's handling of Venezuela's economy.
Maduro fired Ramirez last week and summoned him back to Caracas, according to people familiar with the clash.
When asked by Reuters on Whatsapp whether Ramirez was being investigated, chief state prosecutor Tarek Saab on Sunday replied there were "no exceptions" in the investigation.
(Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Sandra Maler)
(Adds detail on ISDA committee, statement)
By Corina Pons
CARACAS, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Venezuela's cash-strapped leftist government has defaulted on sovereign debt and bonds issued by state oil firm PDVSA after failing to make timely payments, a New York-based derivatives group ruled on Thursday.
The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) committee's unanimous decision that the delays constitute a "credit event" triggers limited payouts on credit default swaps (CDS).
But investors said they did not expect a significant market reaction from the ISDA decision, given that Venezuela is making efforts to pay, and that holders of some of the world's highest yielding debt have so far been tolerant of the delays.
They also noted that the values of the CDS - the derivative contracts investors use to protect themselves against a default - were not large compared to the overall bond amounts.
The net value of CDS on Venezuela's sovereign bonds is about $1.3 billion.
For PDVSA, the net value is around $250 million.
The ISDA committee said it would reconvene on Monday at 3 p.m. New York time (2000 GMT) to discuss an auction that will eventually determine the amount paid out to buyers of CDS protection.
Venezuela, reeling from a four-year recession that has led to widespread shortages of food and basic goods, said on Wednesday it had started transferring $200 million in interest payments on sovereign bonds which mature in 2019 and 2024.
PDVSA also said it made the interest payment on its 2027 bond and "successfully completed" capital payments on the 2020 and 2017N bonds.
Two ratings agencies declared President Nicolas Maduro's government in "selective default" earlier this week for failing to make overdue coupon payments within a grace period.
BONDHOLDERS STAYING CALM
All 15 members of ISDA's financial committee voted in favor of statements that "a failure to pay credit event had occurred with respect" to Venezuela and PDVSA.
The ISDA committee members are global financial institutions that include Bank of America, Barclays Bank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.
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Investors said the ISDA decision would not rattle markets, however, given Venezuela's efforts to pay - albeit late.
"This is just a continuation of bad headlines," said Ray Zucaro, chief investment officer at RVX Asset Management.
"But as long as the government tries to pay, and bondholders get their late payments, they're really not incentivized to do anything ... It's a really unusual situation."
Venezuelan bond prices have been on a roller-coaster over the past two weeks, as Maduro called investors to inconclusive debt restructuring talks, while also pledging to keep honoring the OPEC nation's obligations.
Venezuelan officials blame payment delays on U.S. sanctions, which have made banks warier of dealing with funds from Caracas, thus clogging transfers.
Venezuela and PDVSA have around $60 billion in outstanding bonds, while private estimates put total foreign debt between $120 billion and $140 billion.
One source at a large holder of Venezuela bonds said investors were holding back from an aggressive course of action against the Maduro government while payments were still coming through.
"Even after the ISDA decision, it's not the best idea for anyone to accelerate a default if there's a chance they are going to be able to receive an amortization or interest payment any time soon," the source said.
"As long as Venezuela and PDVSA pay, most bondholders will likely prefer to deal with the delays."
Critics say nearly two decades of recklessly dogmatic and corrupt socialist rule have destroyed a once-prosperous economy, while the government blames the fall in oil prices and a U.S.-led "economic war" for Venezuela's financial mess.
Many in the nation of 30 million are skipping meals, and increasingly suffering from malnutrition or preventable disease. Prices are rising higher than anywhere else in the world, and there are shortages of basics from milk to car batteries. (Reporting by Corina Pons; Additional reporting by Andrew Cawthorne in Caracas, Marianna Parraga in Houston; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
A New York woman was killed by a shark while scuba diving off the coast of Costa Rica, officials said.
Rohina Bhandari, 49, was attacked by a tiger shark while at the Manuelita dive site at Isla del Coco National Park Thursday, the countrys Ministry of Environment and Energy and the National System of Conservation Areas said.
This is the first occurrence of this magnitude in the Isla del Coco National Park, the agencies said in a statement Friday.
Bhandari suffered severe bites to both of her legs before she was pulled from the water. Park officials and doctors vacationing on the island tried immediately tried to treat Bhandaris extensive wounds, but she could not be saved, authorities said.
The government-issued statement only identified Bhandari by her last name, but loved ones of the private equity director took to social media to mourn her death.
You were one of a kind, Norah Lawlor wrote on Facebook. You will be truly missed my friend!
One of a kind couldnt be a better description, echoed Jordan Robinson. She was tough as nails with her career goals and soft as a loyal friend outside of work. I am so fortunate I had the time to know her, tonight I am so sad.
Bhandari was a senior director of marketing and investor relations at WL Ross & Co. LLC. She attended the Asian Institute of Management before getting her Master of Science in Finance at George Washington University.
The Upper East Side woman was a regular at charity events in Manhattan, attending benefits support organizations including Oceana, the Humane Society of New York and the Fisher House Foundation in recent years.
She also loved to explore new things, friends said.
This is so awful Rohina was an adventurer and I had many with her, Nancy Pearson wrote on Facebook. Im confident that the next one will be even better. Its a terrible loss for her friends of which there are many. Thinking of the good times. Lovely girl.
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Rohina Bhandari, you lived your life fully, always challenging yourself with great courage. I admire you for this, Silvia Francescon posted. You were fun, kind and full of life. RIP beautiful soul.
A diving instructor with Bhandari also suffered a shark bite, but his injuries were not life-threatening and he was conscious during the incident.
He told officials that a female tiger shark attacked as his group ascended to the surface of the water.
Bhandari was one of 18 people diving in an area known to be populated with many species of sharks.
Officials said researchers in 2012 tagged five tiger sharks near the dive spot and called Thursdays attack an isolated event and the first of its kind for the area.
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(Reuters) - Since U.S. forces began stepping up air strikes against the Taliban, Kunduz shopkeeper Najibullah no longer fears another insurgent takeover of the northern Afghan city. But he does fear robbery or kidnap by militia gangs.
With Afghan forces improving and on the offensive, U.S. commanders have more freedom to attack the Taliban and insurgents no longer threaten any major urban centers.
Although Taliban-controlled areas begin within a 10-minute drive of the city, Kunduz - a strategic hub that fell twice in the past two years - is largely calm. But there is a long way to go to build confidence in daily security.
"In the past, people were afraid that the Taliban would come but no-one talks about that now," said Najibullah, who like many Afghans, uses only one name.
"Now we have internal problems," he said, leaning over the counter of his shop in the city center and talking softly to avoid being overheard. "There are gunmen that do anything they want. There are people in this city, if they know you have money they'll come to your shop and rob you in broad daylight."
Outside the city, where the Taliban still hold sway, the risk of being caught between helicopter gunships and the insurgents or swept up in a clearing operation means life is also more difficult for villagers on the front line.
Last month, locals say 16 people were killed by U.S. helicopters in a night raid near the villages of Qatl-e Am and Gharow Qushlaq in Chardara district, an area largely controlled by the Taliban.
A U.S. investigation concluded there was no evidence any civilians were killed.
"Since the Americans announced their new strategy and signed the new agreement, the situation has been getting worse," said Atiqullah, a villager who said he was about three kilometers away when the raid took place.
Not Safe
The shift in perceptions on the ground suggests ordinary Afghans are seeing the fresh strategy is hitting the insurgents. But their new fears underline how much more is needed to build trust in the Western-backed government.
"I'm a businessman but I can't go anywhere without a gun," said Jamal Nasir Aymaq, who owns a number of bakeries in the city. "Our businessmen and rich people have already escaped Kunduz and children are not safe."
Kidnapping and robbery are rife and there is little confidence of justice from a government many see as deeply implicated in abuses by rogue militia "commanders" who operate with impunity.
"We all know peace cannot be achieved by force alone, it needs development and the economy," said Kunduz police chief Abdul Hameed Hameedi. "Security is much better than last year but we haven't got what people are expecting yet."
Kunduz Governor Asadullah Omarkhil dismissed talk of any official collusion in kidnapping as "baseless", but while many people fear the Taliban, many also feel they are more honest and efficient than city officials.
"If there were a real government in the center of Kunduz, people wouldn't be going to the Taliban for legal decisions," said Mawlawi Khosh Mohammad Nasratyar, a member of the Kunduz provincial council. "Now, even people from the center of Kunduz go to the Taliban to settle legal cases."
Optimism
The wariness among many Afghans contrasts with optimism among Western officials, who say the new approach is starting to turn a stalemate with the Taliban around.
"The air strikes have made all the difference," said one Western diplomat in Kabul. "When you go to [the NATO-led Resolute Support mission] headquarters, there's a bit of a buzz about the place that wasn't there before and a feeling they're back on the front foot."
So far in 2017, U.S. forces have dropped three times the quantity of bombs as last year and special forces units have been in regular action with their Afghan counterparts.
Hundreds of Taliban fighters and many senior leaders have been killed, including Mullah Abdul Salam, mastermind of the assault that saw the Taliban flag raised over Kunduz in 2015, the first time the insurgents had taken a major town.
Similar successes have been seen in other towns including Tarin Kot in the central province of Uruzgan, which the Taliban briefly overran last year, or Lashkar Gah in Helmand, which they have also come close to taking.
"Two years ago, there was a fear of Taliban attack on the city every minute and we couldn't come into the office," said Kunduz provincial council secretary Fawzia Jawad Yaftali. "But now everything is different, the shops are open and I'm sitting in my office without any fear," she said.
Civilian Casualties
The campaign has not been without cost however and hanging over it is the fact that the air strikes have inevitably brought more civilian casualties in their wake, even if their numbers are still well below those killed by roadside bombs.
In a briefing this week, the commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan General John Nicholson said they go to "extraordinary lengths" to avoid civilian casualties and have "a rigorous process" to investigate allegations.
But people from Chardara react with deep anger to official denials that the raid on Nov. 3-4 killed at least 16 civilians.
"The helicopter started bombing at three in the morning. Afterwards, at about 6 o'clock a lot of people gathered to help and then the helicopter came back. That was the big bomb," said Mohebullah, a village elder.
"Sixteen people were killed and six wounded," he said, showing a handwritten list of names. "They have advanced equipment, they should be sure of who they are attacking. They should target criminals not innocent and helpless people."
The United Nations mission in Afghanistan said reports of at least 10 deaths were "credible". A U.S. investigation found no evidence of any civilian casualties but Capt. Thomas Gresback, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said they would engage in dialogue with anyone who came forward with information.
"Most of the propaganda about civilian casualties comes from the enemy," said Governor Omarkhil, who said only one person was killed in the incident. "In Chahardara, the Taliban made people go to the battle zone and take out dead bodies."
The U.S. military says the Taliban deliberately shelters in houses and schools but the issue, over which former Afghan President Hamid Karzai repeatedly clashed with Washington, causes deep resentment, sapping support for the government.
"The people who were killed were all civilians, they had nothing to do with the government or the Taliban," said Mohebullah. "Everyone lost a family member, everyone is shocked and in grief. The governor is lying."
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has met with Pakistani leaders in Islamabad as Washington looks to bolster the fight against terrorism amid U.S. complaints that Pakistan is not doing enough against insurgent groups within its borders.
Speaking before his talks with Mattis on December 4, Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi said that his country was committed to the war against terrorism and shared the same objectives as the United States.
"Engagement is there," Abbasi said.
The U.S. defense secretary also met with U.S. Ambassador David Hale, Pakistani military chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, as well as other top security officials and several ministers.
Ahead of his arrival in Islamabad, Mattis said on December 3: "We have heard from Pakistan leaders that they do not support terrorism. So I expect to see that sort of action reflected in their policies."
However, he said he wanted to work with the Pakistanis and not to exert pressure on the countrys leaders in the counterterrorism fight.
"That's not the way I deal with issues. I believe that we work hard on finding the common ground and then we work together," he said.
Washington in the past has complained about what it sees as Pakistani efforts to provide "safe havens" for Taliban militants who stage attacks in neighboring Afghanistan.
U.S. officials say militants have crossed the mountainous and ill-defined Pakistani border to attack U.S., Afghan, and allied forces in Afghanistan.
The officials say insurgents then return to the safe havens in Pakistan, aided by the ISI, Islamabad's intelligence agency. Pakistan has denied the allegation.
U.S. President Donald Trump has accused Islamabad of harboring "agents of chaos" and vowed to get tough with Pakistan unless it changes its behavior.
Mattis told reporters in Kuwait before his departure to Pakistan that he will be "reinforcing President Trump's call for action against terrorist safe havens."
U.S. General John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, expressed disappointment last week about the lack of progress, saying there had been no change in Pakistan's support for militant networks.
The United States in August said it would hold up $255 million in military assistance for Pakistan until it cracks down on the extremists threatening Afghanistan.
Islamabad is the final stop of Mattis's trip after stops in Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait.
With reporting by AP, Dawn, VOA, The Hindu, and Geo News
SYDNEY, Australia, Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SpeeDx Pty. Ltd, a developer of advanced multiplex molecular diagnostic solutions, announced the incorporation of a US-based subsidiary company, SpeeDx Inc. The parent company, headquartered in Australia, will use the US base to support current clinical trial activity for ResistancePlus MG (not currently for sale in the US), in preparation for an expected 2018 launch. The SpeeDx ResistancePlus MG test detects the sexually transmitted bacteria Mycoplasma genitalium along with mutations that confer resistance to azithromycin, the front-line antibiotic treatment of choice.
ResistancePlus MG will potentially be a first-to-market molecular diagnostic test in the US, providing both detection of the MG infection along with information about antibiotic resistance of the disease. The test previously received regulatory clearances in Europe, Australia and New Zealand and is already experiencing strong sales in those locations. SpeeDx recently signed a partnership agreement with Thermo-Fisher to help bring the ResistancePlus MG test to the US and a distribution agreement with Cepheid in Europe for their PlexPCR and ResistancePlus tests.
We have always had the goal of bringing ResistancePlus MG to the US market, said Colin Denver, CEO of SpeeDx, local offices and staff will allow us to more easily navigate the FDA approval process and keep us on track for our product launch next year.
A rapid rise in resistant strains of M. genitalium across the globe has led to international guidelines for the management of M. genitalium infections that recommend testing for macrolide resistance to better inform treatment options.1 With M. genitalium prevalence rapidly increasing in the US, and in some instances exceeding that of Chlamydia,2 it is expected that US guidelines will also be updated to address antimicrobial resistance in this significant sexually transmitted disease (STD).
Our aim is to empower clinicians and physicians to make the best treatment decisions about the diseases they are faced with, said Colin Denver. Ultimately, we want to support individualised patient management and better antimicrobial stewardship, which will help patients quickly receive the best treatment for their disease and for physicians to better address antibiotic resistance challenges.
About MG
Mycoplasma genitalium can cause symptoms such as urethritis, cervicitis, endometritis and pelvic inflammatory disease. In recent studies, it has been found to have a higher prevalence than Gonorrhea.3 Like Gonorrhea, MG is also evolving into a so-called STI superbug that is becoming resistant to many antibiotic treatments, leading to exceedingly difficult-to-treat infections and threatening global public health.4
Macrolide antibiotics, specifically azithromycin, are the first-line treatment for M. genitalium infections, but resistance to these antibiotics has increased up to 50 percent in several countries.4 New European Guidelines for the treatment of M. genitalium infections were released last year recommending the molecular detection of M. genitalium with an assay capable of detecting macrolide resistance-associated mutations.1 Timely detection of antibiotic resistant infections enables better treatment of the disease, lessens the potential for spreading among vulnerable populations and combats the rising level of antibiotic resistance.
Currently, there is not a commercially available, FDA-cleared molecular diagnostic test for the detection of MG.
About SpeeDx
Founded in 2009, SpeeDx is an Australian-based private company with offices in London and distributors across Europe. SpeeDx specializes in molecular diagnostic solutions that go beyond simple detection to offer comprehensive information for improved patient management. Innovative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) technology has driven market-leading multiplex detection and priming strategies. Product portfolios focus on multiplex diagnostics for sexually transmitted infection (STI), antibiotic resistance markers, and respiratory disease. Currently, SpeeDx markets the only CE-marked and TGA approved commercial molecular test for the STI M. genitalium (ResistancePlus MG) that combines detection of the disease with detection of markers for antibiotic resistance. For more information about SpeeDx please see: http://www.plexpcr.com
1 Jensen, JS. et al 2016. 2016 European Guidelines on Mycoplasma genitalium Infections.
2 Getman D et al. Mycoplasma genitalium prevalence, coinfection, and macrolide antibiotic resistance frequency in a
multicenter clinical study cohort in the United States. J ClinMicrobiol 2016; 54:22782283.
3 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015 Sexually Transmitted Diseases Treatment Guidelines.
4 Unemo, M & Jensen, JS. Antimicrobial-resistant sexually transmitted infections: gonorrhoea and Mycoplasma genitalium. 2016. Nat. Rev. Urol. 268. Published online 10 Jan 2017. doi:10.1038/nrurol
Contacts for SpeeDx:
Madeline ODonoghue
madelineo@speedx.com.au
+61 2 8212 8512 (ext 008)
HONG KONG and LOS ANGELES, Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Two world-class light and special effect shows illuminated the sky over Hong Kong's world-famous Victoria Harbour as the city welcomed the holidays with the unveiling of spectacular enhancements to the internationally-acclaimed A Symphony of Lights show and the winter version of the Hong Kong Pulse Light Show.
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/703c67a9-127e-43a3-8ec8-f26a65cd8327
The re-imagined light shows, free for general viewing, will dazzle viewers with dynamic lighting effects and create an illusion of a winter wonderland inside Hong Kong's Cultural Centre.
The 10-minute A Symphony of Lights show, best viewed from the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront, features dynamic rays of light sent out in rhythm from 40 buildings and locations on both sides of Victoria Harbour. The newly enhanced show incorporates a variety of exciting lighting effects such as colorful searchlights, lasers, and all-new beam lights sent out like a special fan-shaped lighting effect from the roof of the Central Government Offices and the Revenue Tower. For the first time in the show's history, LED panels have been placed on harbor-side buildings, displaying interactive images and messages to encourage audience participation. In addition to special effects, the program is complemented by music from Asias leading classical orchestra, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, providing visitors with a thrilling and unforgettable sound-and-light experience.
Organized by the Hong Kong Tourism Board in 2004, A Symphony of Lights is recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's largest permanent light and sound show. Travelers can enjoy the show free of charge from various vantage points, including the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront outside the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, and the promenade outside the Golden Bauhinia Square in Wan Chai. Harbor cruises are also available to book and offer dramatic viewpoints of the colorful show from the famous Victoria Harbour. The 10-minute show operates daily starting at 8 p.m. (Hong Kong time). In coordination with the new show, A Symphony of Lights mobile app is available to download, allowing visitors to listen to music simultaneously and share their photos on social media.
The winter version of Hong Kong Pulse Light Show immediately follows A Symphony of Lights with a dramatic 3-D projection of a snowstorm covering the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Intense snow and ice conditions blow away the numbers on Hong Kong's 145-foot Clock Tower, stopping time just before Christmas arrives, prompting an ingenious dragon to find the missing numbers scattered across Hong Kong landmarks. During the show, the piazza is blanketed with snow falling from above, along with glowing LED balls and a giant crystal ball. The free performance will run five times in the evening through December 28, 2017 at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui.
For more information, visit Discover Hong Kong
About Hong Kong: Hong Kong's storied history, award-winning food and libations, vibrant arts and culture scene, and stunning great outdoors has made it widely-known as one of the most exhilarating and sophisticated destinations in the world. Its mesmerizing contrasts of east and west, modern and ancient, and urban and natural leaves its visitors endless choices when planning a trip to Asia's World City. Visit www.discoverhongkong.com for more information; follow Hong Kong Tourism Board on Twitter at @HongKongTourism for the latest Hong Kong news.
TORONTO, Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The international network, M&A Worldwide, brought together more than 80 members/consultants in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from all over the world to Barcelona on October 26 and 27.
For 2 days, top M&A experts met together with executives from large companies and groups to forge large-scale corporate deals and to study possible cross-border business transactions.
At this, the 27th Rainmaker Summit, various sectoral panels including: Agriculture, Food and Beverage, Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Health Sciences and Information Technology were held to examine the challenges and opportunities that exist and are to be discovered in relation to the M&A business industry. Directors and executives in charge of such deals in their respective markets were also present.
An interesting presentation was initiated by the conference chair to have a number of members comment on the geo-political influence various countries political/governance has on the M&A profession.
As the exclusive member representing Canada, it was fascinating to hear perspectives from around the world regarding our changing world.
A quick look at geo-politics and the effects and risks of political interventions
as they relate to M&A practices in various countries:
USA:
Business is returning to the new normal after the Trump election. The day after and for weeks following the election existing contracts were closed and new mandates decreased by 90%. However the M&A business is returning to normal activity levels. It is noted that no laws relating to M&A have been passed in Congress and Trumps twitter is not government. With the exception of the odd challenge the M&A business has largely returned to normal.
Mexico:
The US election did cause one large transaction between a US PEG and our partners in Mexico to go off the rails. The firm suffered greatly and had to lay off employees etc. They were not able to join us in Barcelona because of the difficult year they have had but they are now on the rebound.
UK:
Despite the unstable political situation as a result of Brexit, the M&A outlook has been more positive in recent weeks. Although there has been some impact on currency rates, there has been little or no impact otherwise on M&A transactions.
Turkey:
Turkey has experienced a very challenging M&A environment over the past couple of years, lower foreign investment and smaller deal sizes. The political unrest and the influx of refugees has definitely hurt the M&A business. However, the growth rate remains at 5-6% with the primary interest in investments in multinational technological firms.
Russia:
Cross border M&A activity is closed due to western world sanctions.
Germany:
The governments main concerns are to protect the security of its people. Its laws are focused primarily in areas of industry, labour laws, housing and education. These laws affect the entire economy including M&A.
Hungary:
Although geo-politics and the electronic network dominate business worldwide, M&A remains very much a people business based on trust and relationships. Although progress in recent years has been slow to develop Hungary has 77 active company transactions in 40 countries and the future appears promising with a steady increase in cross border deals.
China:
Realistically China has no free trade and no free flow of capital. The reality is that Communism is viewed as the only true success. Chinese financial institutions are stressed. Chinese company investments are restricted and will be more restricted in the future. There are strong foreign exchange rules on currency, in fact there were problems changing enough Chinese currency to Euros for the M&A Worldwide member to attend the conference. The goal is to strengthen, merge and fund government owned corporations not private companies.
All M&A companies must be government approved. The Chinese government must pre-approve transactions. In essence the M&A business is government controlled.
The government is forcing companies to sell foreign investments: i.e. Waldorf Astoria Hotel purchased in 2015 at what is believed to have been an over-valued price of $2B, the hotel closed in March 2017 for renovations that will take 2-3 years to complete. Now the government wants the insurance group that purchased the hotel to sell it at what would likely be a huge loss and reinvest the money in something that would promote the governments interests.
Australia:
Has a need to attract capital and investment. There are government programs available to support infrastructure and as a result contracting and building industries are strong. Free trade exists with Korea, Japan and much of Asia.
Barcelona/Catalonia:
From discussions with a pharmaceutical company based in Catalonia, the interim political situation is hurting investment in the Catalan region for example, some anti-separatist doctors refusing to prescribe drugs from Catalan based companies. This seems like it is more heat of the moment decision making and should return to normal after the dust has settled.
South America:
Global politics, the government of various countries, as well as regional concerns all affect South American countries. Although regional investments vary, the main focus is on agriculture and minerals and the ability for companies to have a minimum of 3-5 years of stability.
Conclusion:
Change is both constant and inevitable, and one must be aware of the changes and the impact, both immediate and longer term, governments will have on our clients and ultimately our practices.
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MONTREAL, Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- La Soiree Montreal inc. celebrated entrepreneurship Thursday evening at the new Marine Terminal hall in Old Montreal. Under the honorary presidency of Mr. Lucien Bouchard, Chairman of the Board, Eric Boyko, President and CEO of Stingray Digital, received a tribute for his impact on entrepreneurship. The 2017 Prix Montreal inc. was awarded to Sensequake. La Soiree Montreal inc. is an annual event to the benefit of Fondation Montreal inc. which invests in the creation, expansion and ongoing support of young businesses.
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/150c0efa-9adc-4343-bc7a-0b59547dd85b
Sensequake, winner of the 2017 Prix Montreal inc.
Over 450 guests from the Montreal business community chose the winner after Desjardins Entreprises presented the 3 finalists for the Prix Montreal inc. The Prix Montreal spotlights the most successful young entrepreneurs among the laureates of Fondation Montreal inc. over the past 12 months.
Sensequake is the initiative of the two Mirshafiei brothers, engineers by training. Sensequake has developed a technology that allies sensors and collection and analysis software, allowing data gathering on buildings and infrastructure. An algorithm can determine the DNA of a building's structure and predict its vulnerability. www.sensequake.com
The other two businesses in convention were:
Epicerie LOCO: Founded by four women entrepreneurs in environmental sciences, LOCO is committed to supply a full line of healthy, ecological, packaging-free food and everyday products. www.epicerieloco.ca
Local Logic: Co-founded in 2014 by urban planners specializing in data science, Local Logic excels in the collection, cleansing and combination of data used in scoring businesses in real estate, tourism, traditional commerce and the web. www.locallogic.co
"Congratulations to the finalists and bravo to the organizers of this evening, which encourages and promotes the dynamism of our Montreal businesses. Desjardins is proud to support Prix Montreal inc. and to be a partner of Fondation Montreal inc., a philanthropic business model with real value-added for our entrepreneurs," declared Luc Menard, Chief Operating Officer of Desjardins Capital.
Tribute to Eric Boyko
The contribution of Eric Boyko, founder of Stingray, to the Quebec entrepreneurial ecosystem, was highlighted during the evening. His energy, daring and team-building skills have propelled Stingray into the ranks of the world's biggest players in the music publishing industry, operating in no less than 156 countries.
Thank you to the businesses that contributed to La Soiree Montreal inc. :
Table Hommage : Ampme. Attraction Media. Banque Nationale. Bouclair. Couche-Tard. Davies Ward Philips et Vineberg. Quebecor Media
Table Montreal inc. : Banque de developpement du Canada. Banque Nationale. Banque Scotia. Banque TD. BCF avocats. Bell Canada. BMO Nesbitt Burns. BonLook. Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec. Cogeco. Desjardins. DIVCO. EY. Financiere Banque Nationale. Fonds de solidarite FTQ. Gestion immobiliere Luc Maurice inc. GMP Securities. Grooupe Park Avenue. KPMG MSLP. LHC inc. Lumenpulse group inc. Manuvie. McGill St-Laurent. Walter Capital Partners. PowerCorporation du Canada. Sanimax San inc. Stingray Digital. Trans-Pro Logistique.
The funds raised during La Soiree Montreal inc. will be invested in grants and support services for young Montreal entrepreneurs.
About Fondation Montreal inc.
Fondation Montreal inc. propels towards success the most promising entrepreneurs through grants, access to a high-level business network and the expertise of experienced business volunteers. Fondation Montreal inc. awards annually over $700,000 in grants, without taking any participation, offers young entrepreneurs personalized a la carte services and opens the Montreal inc. doors to them thanks to its vast network of more than 450 business volunteers. A charitable organization, Fondation Montreal inc. is 80% funded by the private sector and has contributed, since 1996, to the creation of more than 900 businesses. www.montrealinc.ca
About Prix Montreal inc., presente par Desjardins Entreprises
Fondation Montreal inc. shines a light, annuallys, on its recent laureates who have distinguished themselves by their remarkable achievements since obtaining a grant. The Montreal inc. community donors, members of the board, volunteers, partners of the ecosystem is invited to celebrate the evolution of these young entrepreneurs and to choose the big winner during the Soiree Montreal inc. The 3 finalists share many prices such visibility in Les Affaires, media partner, a training at Ecole dEntrepreneurship de Beauce and services from BCF, Cabinet de relations publiques NATIONAL, et KPMG.
Source : Fondation Montreal inc.
Valerie Danger - Director communications Tel. 514 872-5768 - vdanger@montrealinc.ca
anurag16 wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I started researching for the B-schools of late and the easiest way to do the initial screening was through rankings and avg GMAT score. However, I was amazed to see that few B-schools, ranked in the top 50, (Specifically UK based schools) require considerable less GMAT score in comparison to some schools, that are not even in top 100 (Specifically Indian B schools).
I understand that GMAT is not the only criteria used by ranking agencies, but I would be really interested to know about the possible factors that would have resulted such a huge gap in the rankings? Thanks in advance!
Namita Garg,
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Anurag,The rankings are a great way to get to know business schools at a top level.Which schools you find in a ranking depends on which rankings you were looking at. They are some predominantly US based rankings (Business week, US News, Forbes) and mix of the US and Europe and other regions (FT and Economist). You are likely to find more US MBAs in rankings because more of these exist!For the GMAT, American programs place more emphasis on GMAT as compared to European MBAs.Hope this clarifies your doubts._________________
Dont mess with Americas Dairyland.
That was the message sent loud and clear by Wisconsins agricultural community when the head of a business lobby group suggested that Americas Dairyland be removed from the states license plates.
Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce President Kurt Bauer posed the idea at a luncheon last Monday that was attended by hundreds of state business leaders. As reported in the Wisconsin State Journal, Bauer said that other slogans like "Forward" (which is the states official motto) might be more suitable to update perceptions of the state's economy beyond agriculture.
Word of this comment quickly spread on social media, and soon farmers and dairy organizations were voicing their concern over the thought. Considering dairys $43.4 billion impact on the states economy, many feel that Americas Dairyland still represents Wisconsin well. The Badger State ranks first in the nation in cheese production and second in milk production behind California. It is also home to more dairy farms than any other state.
The Wisconsin State Journal said that Bauer later clarified in an email that his organization would not lobby lawmakers for this change, and that it was merely meant to be a conversation starter.
This is not the first time removal of the iconic slogan has been discussed. A few decades ago, policymakers talked about the need for a new tagline, but after more than 111,000 ballots were cast, Americas Dairyland remained a focal point on the newly designed license plate.
To comment, email your remarks to intel@hoards.com.
(c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2017
October 23, 2017
From a young age, I knew I wanted to study agriculture in college. During my youth, my involvement in dairy judging, showing cows, FFA, among other activities in the dairy industry, lead to my decision to choose a college with a dairy science major. As many universities have animal science majors, I wanted to find a school that I could concentrate the majority of my classes in dairy. I love being a dairy science major because I get to focus on the industry that I am interested in pursuing a career in. But I am glad I choose an agriculture major even more for these reasons:
Labs. A huge portion of agriculture science based classes feature labs. A 2-3-hour period of each week where topics from the lecture are brought to life. This also means I get to spend time on the on-campus dairy learning hands-on activities about herd health, nutrition, and management practices.
Students I can relate to. Many of my classmates in my agriculture classes were involved in the same activities I was in high school like FFA or the Holstein Association. Growing up on a farm or ranch is another common trait of some of my peers. These classmates understand where I came from and can relate to my life.
Agriculture classes. As I am a dairy science major, I take primarily classes relating to the dairy industry. But, to fill my course requirements for graduation, I can pick from a list of approved electives. Many of these electives are classes within other agriculture majors like agribusiness, agricultural communication, crop science, agricultural engineering, and more. I get the chance to learn about other industries within agriculture that have expanded my view of industries other than dairy. I am more knowledgeable about areas of interest that students of other majors in my college focus on.
I am glad I chose to be an agriculture major as I feel at home with my peers, all while learning about an industry I care about each day.
Elise Regusci grew up on her family's farm in Modesto, Calif. Regusci attends Cal Poly University, majoring in dairy science with an agricultural communication minor. On campus, she is the Los Lecheros Dairy Club Ag Council representative and a member of the Cal Poly dairy judging team. Regusci is the current Brown Swiss Youth Ambassador and is the 2017 Hoard's Dairyman summer editorial intern.
The webinar Troubleshooting mastitis and milk quality problems will be held on Monday, December 11, at noon (Central time) Have you ever wondered why some herds have few mastitis cases and others have many? In this webinar, Paul Virkler, Cornell Universitys College of Veterinary Medicine will outline some differences and explore how you can evaluate your dairy, looking for opportunities to prevent this costly disease. Register at www.hoards.com/webinars
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New Delhi, Dec 3 (IBNS): Indian Navy's search and rescue operations continued for the third day over Southeast Arabian Sea and Lakshadweep and Minicoy islands in the aftermath of severe cyclonic storm 'Ockhi' on Sunday.
The ships deployed by the Southern Naval Command include IN Ships Sagardhwani, Jamuna, Nireekshak, Kabra and Kalpeni off the Kerala coast and Sharda , Shardul towards Lakshadweep islands.
Besides this three air craft viz, Dornier (Do) fixed wing aircraft, Seaking Helicopter (SK) and Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) were also deployed throughout the day.
A total of 84 personnel have been rescued over the last two days which includes 62 by aircrafts and 22 by ships. Additionally, transfer of two dead bodies was also effected through ALH to Thiruvananthapuram after being picked up by INS Sagardhwani.
Of the 62 people rescued by naval aircraft 8 personnel were transferred to Kochi in batches of four after being picked up 20 Nautical miles southwest and 80 nautical miles west of Kochi respectively.
Those evacuated to Kochi were given preliminary first aid at naval clinic at INS Garuda before being handed over to the civil administration. The rest of the rescued persons have been transferred to Thiruvananthapuram.
INS Shardul from Kochi is heading towards Minicoy islands with Humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) bricks, which includes water, dry provisions, medical equipment, blankets, diving team, generators, salvage equipment, desalination and decontamination kits, diving team and has a Chetak helicopter embarked.
The relief material would sustain 2000 persons for over a period of seven days. INS Sharda is heading towards Kavaratti islands with HADR material sufficient to last for more than seven days for 500 people. The ship while proceeding to the islands, saved nine lives from a capsized boat in distress enroute.
Naval ships fom Mumbai, INS Chennai, Kolkata and Trikand have also sailed out from Mumbai for Lakshadweep and Minicoy (LAM) islands with HADR material sufficient for approximately 5000 persons and would last for more than seven days.
Androth and Kavaratti are reported to be experiencing strong winds of 40-60 knots coupled high swells of 3-4 metres with a sea state of 5-6. All the ships are expected to reach LAM by Monday morning.
In addition to the aircraft from Kochi, the P8I aircraft from Arakkonam with greater reach is being used to maintaining a close vigil continuously over the sailing ships and provide inputs if any.
The areas close to coast would continuously monitored using DO aircraft from Kochi.
Islamabad, Dec 4 (IBNS): At a time when US Defence Secretary James Mattis is visiting Pakistan, country's CIA Director Mike Pompeo has warned the south Asian nation to eliminate alleged safe havens present within its territory, according to a Pakistan media report.
He said US will will do everything we can to destroy them in case actions are not taken against them.
" CIA Director Mike Pompeo has warned Pakistan that if it does not eliminate the alleged safe havens inside its territory, the United States will do 'everything we can' to destroy them," Dawn News reported.
According to The Express Tribune in Pakistan, the warning came when he was asked at the Reagan National Defence Forum in Simi, California, on November 2, how the Trump administration would persuade Islamabad to adhere to its new Afghan strategy.
You begin by seeking their assistance, Pompeo said, the media reported. Pompeo said safe havens inside Pakistan have been detrimental in allowing the US to do what we needed to do in Afghanistan, the paper reported.
Though Pakistan denied offering safe havens to terrorists groups, the US has blamed it for supporting the Haqqani network - a dangerous insurgent groups in Afghanistan- and the Talibans.
USA earlier warned to hold up $255 million in military assistance for Pakistan until it acts against the groups threatening Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Mattis is currently visiting Pakistan. He met Pakistan's Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi .
Matters of mutual interest, including the US policy in South Asia and Afghan peace efforts, are being discussed in the meeting, sources told Geo News.
Before arriving in Pakistan, Mattis was quoted as saying to Geo News that he intends to work hard on finding the common ground and work together with Pakistan.
Image: US Defense Website / Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons
Babak Zanjani, Zarrabs boss, has been sentenced to death in Iran because he cannot explain a multi-billion dollar discrepancy in accounts with regards to trade made for the former Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration.
There are questions about Turkeys move towards Iran and Russia, but the biggest issue right now for the United States is Iran.
The Trump administration is undergoing a very challenging time. The U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced his resignation during the Mediterranean Dialogues Forum at the end of last week, surprising many, but coming as no surprise to many others.
There have been rumours that the head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, will replace Tillerson and Senator Tom Cotton would replace Pompeo.
One of the major points of contention in the Trump administration is the subject of Iran. It caused a rift between many members. Some believe that Trump has been too hard or is overpromising, whereas others agree that Trump needs to continue with the tough rhetoric.
Cotton and Pompeo have both talked about regime change in Iran and it is something that many believe should happen in Iran.
This would not be the first time that the United States would intervene to bring regime change to Iran. In 1953, the United States and the United Kingdom, helped overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
Leaders in Europe are slightly more hesitant to say too much about Iran. At the Mediterranean Dialogues Forum, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said that the EU wants to ensure that the Iran nuclear deal remains intact and said that the main priority is its implementation.
At the same forum in Rome, the chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Peoples Congress of the U.N. Security Councils permanent member China Ying Fu said that the nuclear deal is effective and must be linked to the North Korean threat.
Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister for Russia, however, said that Iran is complying with the nuclear deal and that the United States decides otherwise, then it is the United States that will be in violation of the deal. He also warned that North Korea would see the US as a very unreliable and untrustworthy player if it were to pull out.
Irans support from the EU, China and Russia just highlights how much of a threat it really is. It is fuelling chaos across the Middle East with the intention of becoming a regional power. It is fuelling civil wars that are causing nothing but devastation and destruction and it is neglecting its own people in favour of terrorism.
US policy towards Iran has taken a drastic turn. When former president Barack Obama was in office, Iran was free to act how it pleased and it was safe in the knowledge that the US administration would not say anything.
Obama was so keen to leave the Iran nuclear deal as his legacy that he granted Iran concession after concession and led a policy of appeasement.
Even before being elected, Trump spoke about Obamas failed policy and said that he would approach the situation differently if took office. He did get elected and he did change the direction of foreign policy. He has warned Iran about its behaviour on many occasions and is following through on the threats he makes.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration sent a warning to Qassem Soleimani the commander of the countrys Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It also reaffirmed that it was going to take action to curb Irans use of proxy groups across the whole region.
Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA, said that he wrote to Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force the IRGCs foreign operations arm. He said that this action was prompted by Soleimanis indication that forces he controls could go after US interests in Iraq.
Pompeo said that the letter was a warning to Soleimani that the United States would hold him and his country accountable for any attacks on American interests in Iraq by forces that are under their control. He added: We wanted to make sure he and the leadership in Iran understood that in a way that was crystal clear.
The Iranian media reported that a senior official of the Iranian regime said that Soleimani refused to take the letter because he has nothing to say to the US administration.
National security adviser HR McMaster said that Iran is fuelling and accelerating the violence that already exists across the Middle East and explained that it is doing so because it wants to take advantage of chaos and weak states to make them dependent on Iran for support.
Speaking about the failed policy of appeasement and the badly-negotiated nuclear deal, McMaster said: In recent years, what we can say in retrospect, it was unrealistically hopeful [US] strategy that, given the nuclear deal that this president called worst deal ever that this deal will result in an Iran that would integrate effectively in region. The exact opposite happened. The fact that we were trying to accommodate Iran has empowered Iran across the globe, and when president says he inherited a mess that is in greater Middle East, we have to address growing Iranian capability, and their use of militias, proxies and terrorist organisation.
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The United States and South Korean air forces are holding one of their largest ever joint exercises.
The five days of exercises are named Vigilant ACE. South Korean troops are training with more than 230 airplanes and 12,000 members of the U.S. armed forces.
The planes include a number of U.S. stealth warplanes. The high-technology aircraft are designed to avoid discovery by radar.
The exercises began less than one week after North Korea tested its most advanced long-distance missile. The North Korean government said it launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, last Tuesday. The Hwasong-15 rocket traveled farther than any of the countrys earlier rockets.
New missile approaches red line?
The new rocket was said to be able to reach anywhere in the United States.
However, experts are wondering whether the missile is ready to carry a nuclear weapon. Some say the North needs months or years before it can develop a missile equipped to carry a warhead to a target without burning up.
South Korea has yet to confirm that the Hwasong-15 missile successfully reentered the atmosphere.
South Koreas Unification Ministry spokesman Baik Tae-hyun told reporters Monday that, We are making efforts to resolve the Norths nuclear issue peacefully with the international community. But he added, The government does not accept the Norths unilateral claim to completing its nuclear program.
In July, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said that North Koreas possession of a fully operational ICBM would represent a red line for possible military action.
U.S. officials have warned that they will not let North Korea threaten the South with a nuclear missile.
The North Korean government denounced the military exercises this week. The country has long said that such activities are preparations for an attack. North Koreas state-operated Korean Central News Agency warned that the United States was driving the Korean peninsula to the brink of war.
This weekend, U.S. officials voiced concerns about the intensity of tensions.
H.R. McMaster serves as National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump. McMaster said on Saturday that the chance of war with North Korea is increasing with every day.
Also, Senator Linsey Graham of South Carolina called on the U.S. Defense Department to remove the families of armed forces members from South Korea. Graham is a member of Trumps Republican Party.
The president has threatened to act against North Korea if it attacks the United States or its allies.
In November, the U.S. government again placed North Korea on its state sponsors of terrorism list. That move permits adding to already highly restrictive trade sanctions against the North.
Ralph Cossa is president of Pacific Forum CSIS, a private, foreign policy research center. He said that military action, with its deadly results for South Korea, is only one idea for answering the Norths tests.
Red line responses dont have to be military but they should be significant and painful politically and economically, if not militarily, said Cossa. He added, They are also most effective if spelled out in advance and then acted upon.
However, the Defense Department has said the Norths tests are not yet a threat to the United States' mainland. The government has set up missile defense systems in South Korea and Guam, as well as the states of Alaska and California, in an effort to protect the U.S. and its allies.
After launch, future of talks unclear
North Koreas neighbors, China and Russia, have supported a plan called dual suspension. Under the proposal, the United States and South Korea would halt military exercises in exchange for North Korea stopping its weapons programs.
Chinas Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the two months in which North Korea did not test a missile had not been effectively used for diplomacy. He said that the parties involved in tensions on the Korean peninsula had not grasped the window of opportunity.
Ralph Cossa of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum CSIS said that additional restrictions are likely.
The U.S. seems to be warning that it will seek ship inspections and more intrusive maritime measures, but it is unclear Beijing and Moscow will go along, he said.
Other observers say another possibility is that North Koreas declaration of having completed its nuclear program may signal a change. They say the North Korean leadership may want to improve the countrys economy instead of continued weapons testing.
The United Nations has said that one of its officials will visit North Korea for the first time since 2011.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman is expected to visit the Norths capital, Pyongyang this week.
Feltman is expected to meet with North Koreas Foreign Minister and Vice-foreign Minister.
A UN spokesman talks will include wide-ranging policy discussions.
Im Mario Ritter.
Daniel Schearf reported this story for VOA News. Mario Ritter adapted his report for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.
_______________________________________________________________
Words in This Story
vigilance n. the state of being watchful
advanced adj. modern, highly developed
unilateral adj. involving only one side or group
brink n. the edge
sponsors n. those who support a person, group or activity
sanctions n. actions, usually to limit trade, that are meant to cause a country to obey international rules
grasp v. to take hold of
maritime adj. of or related to the sea
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Japanese officials are trying to decide what to do with thousands of tons of radioactive water from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant.
More than six years have passed since a powerful earthquake and tsunami severely damaged the power plant.
Some parts of cleanup efforts have gone well. People can now work in the area although they take special measures to avoid overexposure to radioactive substances.
The water remains a big problem however. Currently, the water is being stored in 900 large tanks near the nuclear center.
Conflicting opinions between two groups have kept Japanese officials from doing anything about the water.
Radiation experts advise the government to slowly release the water into the Pacific Ocean. They note that special treatment has removed the radioactivity from the water except for tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen. The experts say tritium is safe in small amounts.
But local fisherman oppose the release of the water into the sea. They say people will not buy fish from waters near Fukushima if the water is released.
The fisherman lost their livelihoods for a long time after the disaster. Local fisheries are slowly recovering.
Fumio Haga fishes about 50 kilometers from the power plant. He said, People would shun Fukushima fish again as soon the water is released.
Fukushima disaster affected land and sea
The disaster was both deadly and had long-lasting environmental and economic effects.
An extremely powerful magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Japan on March 11, 2011. The quake caused deadly tsunami waves on the countrys northeastern coast. More than 18,000 people were killed.
The earthquake and waves caused the electricity to go out in many places including Fukushima. As a result, the cooling system failed in three of the six nuclear reactors which caused the nuclear fuel to overheat and partly melt structures in the power plant.
Radiation entered the air and contaminated water flowed into the sea.
That event hurt the livelihoods of people throughout the area. Although there are about 1,000 fishermen in the area today, only half still fish and they go out only two times a week because demand is low.
To be sold, the fish have to meet, what might be, the worlds most demanding requirements. Laboratory workers at Onahama test the fishermens catch, recording who caught the fish and where. And fish from the area is sold with official safe stickers.
Fifteen months after the disaster in 2012, only three kinds of fish could pass the safety inspection. Now the number has increased to over 100.
Yoshiharu Nemoto is a researcher at the Onahama test station. He said the fish may contain less than half of the radioactive cesium level permitted under Japans national standard and one-twelfth of the U.S. or European Union limit.
But consumers have not heard that message.
Over the years, fewer Japanese consumers avoid fish products from waters near Fukushima. But a study by Japans Consumer Agency in October found that 20 percent still do. The study found that consumers were more likely to pay attention to information about possible bad health results than to facts about radiation and safety standards.
Naoya Sekiya is an expert on social research and social psychology. He said the water from the nuclear power center should not be released until the public is well-informed about the facts.
A release only based on scientific safety, without addressing the publics concerns, cannot be tolerated in a democratic society, he said. He said a release when the public is not prepared would only make things worse.
Kikuko Tatsumi is a representative of a consumer group and serves on a government expert panel with Sekiya. The group has been trying to decide what to do with the water for longer than one year.
Tatsumi said the delay in making a decision may be increasing concerns among the public. Many people believe the water is stored because it is dangerous and they think Fukushima fish are not available because they are not safe to eat.
Water from the center is a continuing problem
The Associated Press reports the amount of radioactive water at Fukushima is growing by 150 tons a day. This is because new water is used to cool the damaged reactors and ground water also enters the reactor area through cracks.
The water is a costly problem for the utility company Tokyo Electric Power Co, or TEPCO which owns Fukushima. Last year, another group of government experts recommended that TEPCO should dilute the water by about 50 times and release it into the sea over time. The process could take 10 years to complete.
The new chairman at TEPCO, Takashi Kawamura, caused a strong reaction in the fishing community in April. He had expressed support for releasing the water.
But after strong opposition, the company withdrew the idea and said it had no plans for an immediate release and can continue storing water until 2020.
So, the problem continues, and the amount of radioactive water at Fukushima is growing.
Im Mario Ritter.
Mari Yamaguchi reported this story for AP. Mario Ritter adapted it with additional materials for VOA Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.
_______________________________________________________________
Quiz
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Quiz - What to Do with Radioactive Water from Fukushima Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz
_______________________________________________________________
Words in This Story
nuclear reactor n. a complex device that uses radioactive fuel to create heat and electricity
contaminated adj. having something added that should not have been added
stickers n. small signs that can be stuck onto products with adhesive
tolerated adj. to stand, to permit without showing approval
panel n. a group of people who answer questions, give advice or opinions about a subject
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Chinese police are developing a computer-based policing program that can study large amounts of citizens' personal information. The program examines the information to discover patterns in human behavior.
Human Rights Watch says the police plan to use this information to closely watch rights activists, political opponents and ethnic minority groups.
The rights group called on the Chinese Communist Party to stop this "abusive" system, called the Police Cloud.
Sophie Richardson is following developments in China for the group. In a statement, she said, "It is frightening that Chinese authorities are collecting and centralizing ever more information" about hundreds of millions of citizens.
Richardson said the system will target people who deviate from what officials see as "normal thought." She added that the issue is not just one of peoples privacy, but many of the rights they have.
Last week, Human Rights Watch reported that China is looking at new technologies to study large amounts and different kinds of data. This includes written information, such as text messages, video and pictures.
The report said the Police Cloud tracks things like a persons medical history, supermarket purchases and products shipped to homes. It links this information to each person's national identification card number.
"This allows the Police Cloud system to track where the individuals have been, who they are with, and what they have been doing, as well as make predictions about their future activities," the report said.
It said a major concern is that these systems are created, in part, to watch groups officials consider threatening, which "raises serious concerns about social and racial profiling."
No legal protection
The Police Cloud has the ability to watch people involved in crime, such as terrorism or drugs, and people with mental health issues who cause "disturbances," the group said.
The report says local police can decide anyone is a threat and must be watched, especially if they are listed as a threat to "stability." By law, the government can do this without informing people that they are listed in this way.
Human Rights Watch found that the Police Cloud targets people who use the petitioning system to criticize the government. Ethnic minority Uyghurs from Xinjiang are also targeted, the group said.
The report said Police Cloud systems are now in full operation in some areas, including Tianjin Municipality and Jiangsu province.
The data can include the name of the street and city where a person lives, family relations, birth control methods and religious ties. Also being added are travel records, closed circuit television videos and information from government agencies and even private companies.
The system helps the Chinese police to study individuals who travel, who live, (and) who work together, the report said.
Nationwide in five years
Political activist Wu Shimin is based in Jiangsu. He said the system seems to be already in use in some parts of China, and will likely be fully operating in about five years.
Wu said that to prevent the Police Cloud from watching you, you would need to change your telephone number. And, you would probably need to use someone else's identification card to buy a train ticket and live somewhere other than your home.
But, he said, you would also have to be sure that whoever you stay with friends or family has no history of petitioning the government.
Zhang Enguang is a rights activist in Shandong, China. He said he is probably a target of the Police Cloud. But, he said, rights groups and some citizens will likely oppose the new system.
But even if you do protest, he warned, the police will still collect information in the same way. Then, they will use it in any way they can to frame you, and then they can detain you, he said.
Currently, Chinas privacy laws don't meet the goals of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. China signed the covenant, but has yet to have it approved by lawmakers.
The agreement states that collecting and using people's personal information for policing purposes must be based on a real threat to national security or public order. And, it should use the least invasive measures to deal with the threat.
I'm Alice Bryant. And I'm Anna Matteo.
Hai Nan and Lin Ping reported this story for Radio Free Asia. Alice Bryant adapted their report for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.
_______________________________________________________________
Words in This Story
pattern n. the regular and repeated way in which something happens or is done
deviate v. to do something that is different from what is expected
data n. information used usually to plan or predict something
track v. to watch or follow the progress of something
profile v. to use race, ethnicity or some other quality as grounds for suspecting someone of committing an offense
disturbance n. the disruption of a settled or peaceful condition
petition v. to ask a person, group, or organization for something in a formal way
stability n. the strength to survive; the quality of something that is not easily moved
One week after the Nov. 26 Honduran presidential election, there is still no winner.
With 99.96 percent of the votes counted, President Juan Orlando Hernandez holds a small lead. But his opponent, Salvador Nasralla, has accused the government of stealing the election and called for street protests.
Hernandez had 42.98 percent of the vote and Nasralla received 41.39 percent, after a partial recount of more than 1,000 voting locations.
Nasralla and his supporters have boycotted the results. They said the recount did not go far enough. They said it only reviewed about 1,000 polling stations instead of the more than 5,000 they had demanded.
David Matamoros is a member of Hernandezs party and head of the countrys electoral tribunal. He refused to declare a winner. He told reporters that parties can still file legal challenges, and a wider recount is possible.
The Organization of American States said on Sunday that Nasrallas demands to recount more than 5,000 polling stations were possible. It urged the tribunal to make further checks.
Nasralla had an early lead
Early last week, Nasralla, a former television presenter, appeared set to win the election over the current president. He had a five-point lead with more than half of the ballots counted.
Then, the vote counting was suddenly stopped. When it restarted more than a day later, the vote count began to favor Hernandez.
The government ordered a curfew last Friday. It also expanded the armys power to detain people and break up barriers of roads, bridges and public buildings.
Nasralla asked the armed forces not to enforce the curfew. He urged his supporters to start a national strike on Monday.
I call on all members of the armed forces to rebel against your bosses, Nasralla told a crowd of supporters Sunday at a large rally in the capital city of Tegucigalpa.
Television images showed similar protests in other major cities. While there were no reports of violence on Sunday, hundreds have been arrested and at least three people have been killed in recent days.
Also on Sunday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accused the United States of backing vote fraud in Honduras.
But officials at the U.S. embassy praised the peaceful protests and the orderly final count that was underway.
Honduras has struggled with violent drug gangs, high murder rate and poverty. After taking office in 2014, Hernandez began a military-led crackdown on gang violence. He has been supported by U.S. President Donald Trumps chief of staff, John Kelly.
Nasralla is a well-known television star. Former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya is among his supporters. Zelaya was removed from office in a coup in 2009.
I'm Jonathan Evans.
Hai Do adapted this story for Learning English based on Reuters and other news reports. Ashley Thompson was the editor.
Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.
________________________________________________________________
Words in This Story
partial - adj. not complete
tribunal - n. a court that has authority in a specific area
challenge - n. a refusal to accept something as legal
Houthi rebels in Yemen say former president Ali Abdullah Saleh has been killed.
The death was announced Monday by a Houthi-run television station. An official with Yemens internationally recognized government confirmed to the Associated Press that Saleh had been killed.
A video published on social media appeared to show Salehs body being carried away by a group of armed men. The bloodied body wrapped in a blanket had severe head injuries.
A top Houthi media official told the AP the ex-president was killed near Marib, an eastern province bordering Saudi Arabia. The official said Saleh was trying to flee to Saudi.
Saleh ruled the country for 33 years and played a major role in Yemens ongoing civil war. He was ousted in 2012 under popular and political pressure.
The Saudi government leads a coalition that has been fighting Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen during a nearly three-year-old war. The campaign is aimed at returning to power the countrys internationally recognized president, Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi. His government was driven out of Yemens capital Sana'a in 2014 by Houthi-led forces.
The leader of the countrys Houthi rebels, Abdul-Malek al-Houthi, said in a speech Monday that his forces had killed Saleh for treason. He said Saleh had turned on the Houthis by communicating with and supporting the Saudi-led coalition.
The Houthi leader said he had sent several warnings to Saleh not to cooperate with the coalition. He called Salehs killing a historic defeat to the forces of the coalition.
A breakdown in the rebel alliance last week led to heavy fighting in Sanaa between Houthi rebels and forces loyal to Saleh. Houthi fighters took control of much of the capital, but the coalition stepped up its attacks on rebel positions.
Hours after Salehs killing, Hadi urged Yemenis from exile in Riyadh to unify against the Houthi rebels. He described the militants as Iranian militias.
He offered condolences for the death of Saleh, describing him and others killed in recent days of fighting as martyrs.
Let's put our hands together to end this nightmare,'' Hadi said.
He added that government forces would support any uprising against Houthi fighters in Sana'a.
Im Bryan Lynn.
Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on reports from VOA News, the Associated Press and Reuters. Hai Do was the editor.
We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.
_______________________________________________________________
Words in This Story
condolence n. feeling or expression of sympathy and sadness especially when someone is suffering because of the death of a family member, a friend, etc.
martyr n. person who is killed or suffers greatly for a cause
nightmare n. very bad or frightening experience or situation
Banco Santander-Chile, together with its subsidiaries, provides commercial and retail banking products and services in Chile. It operates through Retail Banking, Middle-Market, Corporate Investment Banking, and Corporate Activities segments. The company offers debit and credit cards, checking accounts, and savings products; consumer, automobile, commercial, mortgage, and government-guaranteed loans; and Chilean peso and foreign currency denominated loans to finance various commercial transactions, trade, foreign currency forward contracts, and credit lines, as well as mortgage financing services. It also provides mutual funds, insurance and securities brokerage, foreign exchange, financial leasing, factoring, financial consulting and advisory, investment management, foreign trade, treasury, and transactional services, as well as specialized services to finance projects for the real estate industry. In addition, the company offers short-term financing and fund raising, and brokerage services, as well as derivatives, securitization, and other tailor-made products. It serves individuals, small to middle-sized entities, companies, and large corporations, as well as universities, government entities, and local and regional governments. As of December 31, 2021, the company operated 326 branches, which include 220 under the Santander brand name, 14 under the Select brand name, 7 specialized branches for the middle market, and 22 as auxiliary and payment centers, as well as 1,338 ATMs, including depository ATMs. Banco Santander-Chile was incorporated in 1977 and is headquartered in Santiago, Chile.
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Energizer Holdings, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, manufactures, markets, and distributes household batteries, specialty batteries, and lighting products worldwide. It offers lithium, alkaline, carbon zinc, nickel metal hydride, zinc air, and silver oxide batteries under the Energizer and Eveready brands, as well as primary, rechargeable, specialty, and hearing aid batteries. The company also provides headlights, lanterns, and children's and area lights, as well as flash lights under the Energizer, Eveready, Rayovac, Hard Case, Dolphin, Varta, and WeatherReady brands. In addition, it licenses the Energizer and Eveready brands to companies developing consumer solutions in gaming, automotive batteries, portable power for critical devices, LED light bulbs, generators, power tools, household light bulbs, and other lighting products. Further, the company designs and markets automotive fragrance and appearance products, including protectants, wipes, tire and wheel care products, glass cleaners, leather care products, air fresheners, and washes to clean, shine, refresh, and protect interior and exterior automobile surfaces under the brand names of Armor All, Nu Finish, Refresh Your Car!, LEXOL, Eagle One, California Scents, Driven, and Bahama & Co; STP branded fuel and oil additives, functional fluids, and other performance chemical products; and do-it-yourself automotive air conditioning recharge products under the A/C PRO brand name, as well as other refrigerant and recharge kits, sealants, and accessories. It sells its products through direct sales force, distributors, and wholesalers; and through various retail and business-to-business channels, including mass merchandisers, club, electronics, food, home improvement, dollar store, auto, drug, hardware, e-commerce, convenience, sporting goods, hobby/craft, office, industrial, medical, and catalog. Energizer Holdings, Inc. was incorporated in 2015 and is headquartered in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Prosperity Bancshares, Inc. operates as bank holding company for the Prosperity Bank that provides financial products and services to businesses and consumers. It accepts various deposit products, such as demand, savings, money market, and time accounts, as well as and certificates of deposit. The company also offers 1-4 family residential mortgage, commercial real estate and multifamily residential, commercial and industrial, agricultural, and non-real estate agricultural loans, as well as construction, land development, and other land loans; consumer loans, including automobile, recreational vehicle, boat, home improvement, personal, and deposit account collateralized loans; and consumer durables and home equity loans, as well as loans for working capital, business expansion, and purchase of equipment and machinery. In addition, it provides internet banking, mobile banking, trust and wealth management, retail brokerage, mortgage services, and treasury management, as well as debit and credit cards. As of December 31, 2021, the company operated 273 full-service banking locations comprising 65 in the Houston area, including The Woodlands; 30 in the South Texas area including Corpus Christi and Victoria; 63 in the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas area; 22 in the East Texas area; 29 in the Central Texas area, including Austin and San Antonio; 34 in the West Texas area, including Lubbock, Midland-Odessa and Abilene; 16 in the Bryan/College Station area; 6 in the Central Oklahoma area; and 8 in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area doing business as LegacyTexas Bank. Prosperity Bancshares, Inc. was founded in 1983 and is based in Houston, Texas.
United Parcel Service, Inc. provides letter and package delivery, transportation, logistics, and related services. It operates through two segments, U.S. Domestic Package and International Package. The U.S. Domestic Package segment offers time-definite delivery of letters, documents, small packages, and palletized freight through air and ground services in the United States. The International Package segment provides guaranteed day and time-definite international shipping services in Europe, the Asia Pacific, Canada and Latin America, the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East, and Africa. This segment offers guaranteed time-definite express options. The company also provides international air and ocean freight forwarding, customs brokerage, distribution and post-sales, and mail and consulting services in approximately 200 countries and territories. In addition, it offers truckload brokerage services; supply chain solutions to the healthcare and life sciences industry; shipping, visibility, and billing technologies; and financial and insurance services. The company operates a fleet of approximately 121,000 package cars, vans, tractors, and motorcycles; and owns 59,000 containers that are used to transport cargo in its aircraft. United Parcel Service, Inc. was founded in 1907 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
A former Croatian general who died after swallowing a liquid at a war crimes hearing in the Netherlands had cyanide in his system, Dutch prosecutors said after an autopsy was performed Friday.
Preliminary results from a toxicological test revealed a concentration of potassium cyanide in Slobodan Praljaks blood, the Hague Public Prosecutors Office said in a statement.
The cyanide caused heart failure, which investigators pointed out as the 72-year-old Praljaks suspected cause of death, according to the prosecutors statement.
On Wednesday, Praljak drank from a small bottle that he said contained poison seconds after an appeals judge at the U.N.s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia confirmed his 20-year sentence for crimes during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital a little while later.
Meanwhile, the United Nations tribunal ordered an independent review of its internal operations following the dramatic event in its courtroom. The tribunal said its review was meant to complement the ongoing investigation of Praljaks death by Dutch prosecutors.
The announcement came after Croatias justice minister raised doubts about whether security and medical staff at the tribunal responded quickly enough when Praljak raised the bottle to his lips with a trembling right hand and consumed its contents.
Before the toxicological test results came back, Dutch prosecutors had confirmed the bottle carried a toxic chemical. It remains unclear how Praljak, who was in custody before the hearing, obtained the substance and managed to smuggle it into the courtroom.
Cyanide is a fast-acting chemical that can be deadly in different forms. Cyanide gas is considered the most harmful, but swallowing cyanide can also be lethal.
Potassium cyanide, found in Praljaks blood, is a white powder that can have a bitter, almond- like odor. Cyanide kills by preventing the cells of the body from using oxygen, and is particularly harmful to the heart and brain, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The tribunals review will begin next week and be led by Hassan Jallow, a former prosecutor with the U.N.s Rwanda war crimes tribunal. It aims to file a report by Dec. 31, when the tribunal formally closes its doors, having completed all its cases.
The court says Jallow is mandated to undertake an assessment of relevant existing procedures as well as make any recommendations which may assist other courts in the future.
Tribunal spokesman Nenad Golcevski said it is not the first time such a probe has been ordered by the court.
Similar internal reviews have been initiated, for example, after the death of Slobodan Milosevic, Golcevski said, referring to the former Yugoslav president who died in his tribunal cell in 2006 before judges could deliver verdicts in his trial.
Two Croatian experts observed the autopsy on Praljaks body at the tribunals request.
Late Thursday, Croatian Justice Minister Drazen Bosnjakovic said the country would ask Dutch authorities to be included in the ongoing investigation into Praljaks death.
Bosnjakovic told Croatias state TV that much remains unclear, including how the poison was taken in, why security didnt react in time and why medical help arrived so late. He added that Croatia wants all facts cleared about this tragic event.
Praljaks defense lawyer, Nika Pinter, told Croatias Nova TV she did not know how Praljak managed to get the bottle past security.
But that was his decision, his decision, Pinter said. He would not want to live for one day with handcuffs on his hands, and [the] stigma of war criminal on his back.Mike Corder, The Hague, AP
A former Hong Kong government official was denied bail on Friday in a U.S. case accusing of him using bribes to secure business deals.
Dr. Chi Ping Patrick Ho was jailed last week after being charged with paying bribes on behalf of a Chinese energy conglomerate to the president of Chad and the Ugandan foreign minister.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Debra Freeman rejected a bid by lawyers for the 68-year-old Ho to have him released on USD1 million bond and put under home detention with electronic monitoring at a rented Manhattan apartment, saying she agreed with prosecutors argument that he was a flight risk.
Hos attorney said he would appeal the bail decision.
Ho, 68, of Hong Kong, and Cheikh Gadio, 61, of Senegal, were charged in Manhattan federal court with violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, international money laundering and conspiracy.
Prosecutors allege that Ho hatched the scheme at the United Nations when the Ugandan foreign minister was president of the U.N. General Assembly. Beginning in October 2014, the pair arranged bribes to secure business advantages for a Shanghai-headquartered multibillion-dollar conglomerate that operates internationally in the energy and financial sectors, court papers say.
Arguing against bail on Friday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Richenthal told the judge that Ho is worth up to $8 million, has no ties to the United States and is facing more than 10 years in prison if convicted.
His incentive to flee is massive, Richenthal said. His ability to flee is massive.
He also argued that the officials Ho allegedly bribed would have incentive to help him get out of the United States and into countries without extradition treaties, he said.
There are a lot of people who would rather not see what the defendant did aired in open court, he said.
Defense attorney Edward Kim described his client as a respected U.S.- trained eye doctor and former cabinet-level official in Hong Kong, where he served as home affairs secretary. To flee would be a disgrace, Kim said. It would destroy everything he worked for. It would destroy his reputation. AP
Israeli police yesterday questioned a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on corruption charges dating to his pre-parliament days as he was pushing for pro-Netanyahu legislation widely seen as stifling police investigations.
Coalition whip David Bitan was grilled in relation to accusations that he promoted the interests of criminals in return for debt relief while he was a municipal politician years ago.
Bitan is the driving force behind a legislation push seen as aiding the beleaguered Netanyahu, who faces multiple corruption accusations. Bitans so-called recommendations bill would end the polices current practice of recommending to the state prosecution office whether to indict suspects upon completing their investigations.
It also aims to stem leaks from the investigations themselves, stating that no police recommendations be made public and penalizing those found leaking to the media.
Netanyahus Likud party was set to bring the bill for a parliamentary vote today, but appears to be short on numbers and will likely delay it. Their hope is to move the bill forward quickly so that it will also apply to investigations currently taking place regarding Netanyahu.
Netanyahu has been questioned in two cases and police say they suspect him of being involved in bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Police have already grilled him six times regarding gifts he received from Hollywood and business figures, and in another probe about secret talks with the publisher of a major Israeli newspaper in which Netanyahu allegedly requested positive coverage in exchange for reining in a free pro-Netanyahu daily. One of his closest former aides has become a states witness against him.
Netanyahu has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and calls the accusations a witch hunt orchestrated by a hostile media.
Another investigation has engulfed his close associates and dominated news in Israel. The probe relates to a possible conflict of interest involving a USD2 billion purchase of German submarines.
Netanyahus personal attorney, who is also his cousin, represented the German firm involved and is suspected of trading his influence over the prime minister in return for a hefty cut of the deal. A former Cabinet minister and top former navy and security officials have been questioned by police. Netanyahu has yet to be named a suspect in that probe.
Bitans questioning comes a day after tens of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets of Tel Aviv Saturday night for an anti-corruption rally calling on Netanyahu to resign. It was one of the largest demonstrations yet against Netanyahus lengthy rule.
I think the time has come to change the government. The government is corrupt. Were sick of the corrupt, said protester Avi Elmozlinu.
Organizers are hoping that the grassroots movement picks up steam and becomes a regular Saturday night ritual that eventually forces Netanyahu from power. Aron Heller, Jerusalem, AP
Stroke and brain injury patients are being guided on the best choice of digital help thanks to students in the School of Health Professions at the University of Plymouth, in collaboration with a national network of healthcare professionals.
Alongside organisations including Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust (NDHT) and Livewell Southwest, students are clinically testing apps to see if they are suitable to be part of the mytherappy website a database of clinically recommended health apps developed by the stroke and neuro rehab team at NDHT.
The mytherappy website is an app review website that helps patients, carers and clinicians find the best apps to help with rehabilitation and recovery following a neurological disorder, such as a stroke or brain injury.
Now the collaboration will see undergraduate and postgraduate students test new apps on a monthly basis. They are joining mytherappy's national network of app testers, which includes clinical specialists in stroke, neurology and head injuries, therapists, nurses, psychologists, patients and carers. Apps that have been tested by the network and meet mytherappy's robust set of testing criteria are featured on the mytherappy website, which anyone can access.
Occupational therapy and physiotherapy students were the first students to be trained in how to test apps, with Ruth Siewruk, advanced practitioner occupational therapist for neuro and stroke, and Louise Holmes, both from NDHT, attending to deliver the session.
Louise, who is also a student on the University's MSc Advanced Professional Practice Neurological Rehabilitation, said:
"There are a host of apps available to help patients through their rehabilitation after they've suffered a stroke or other brain injury and our patients often ask us which ones are the most effective. So colleagues at the Trust set up mytherappy, where patients can see which apps are recommended by clinicians and other users. This is where the students come in by using their theoretical and practical skills they can help analyse the apps' effectiveness for people at various stages of rehabilitation."
Amanda Denton, Lecturer in Neurological Rehabilitation, said:
"It's great that the University is collaborating on this project and we're pleased to be able to help and guide patients' choices. The training session was really helpful for our students and, as well as learning more about the technology available to help patients, they can also understand how the technology can help those delivering rehabilitation. The students are looking forward to testing apps over the course of the year."
The mytherappy website is having a global impact with more than 20,000 users worldwide. Following a six-month audit of neuro patients at NDHT, 93 per cent of the patients who used apps said they would recommend mytherappy and app usage as part of their treatment. When comparing patients who used apps with those who didn't, the outcomes of those who used apps were improved by 10 per cent.
Ruth Siewruk, occupational therapist at NDHT and founder of mytherappy, said:
"I am delighted that students from the University of Plymouth have joined our testing network after training with us. We want to empower patients to manage their health in the way that is right for them, and the mytherappy website helps those who are recovering from a stroke or brain injury to do exactly that."
(HealthDay)U.S. consumers stand to benefit from CVS Health's planned purchase of insurance giant Aetna, executives from the two corporations say.
Other health care industry observers aren't so sure.
The $69 billion deal was announced Sunday.
Merging CVS, which has 10,000 retail clinics and pharmacies, with Aetna means more health services will likely move out of doctors' offices to store-based providers across the nation.
Pharmacies already provide vaccinations and blood pressure checks. Now, they could offer one-stop shopping for insurance and certain diagnostic services.
On-site lab work and diabetes counseling are two other possibilities, said Larry Merlo, CVS Health president and CEO.
Customers should also expect lower prices, Merlo said.
"We know we can make health care more affordable and less expensive," Merlo told The New York Times. "We think of it as creating a new front door to health care in America."
But others aren't convinced this is a win-win for the general public. Some fear that less competition will drive up drug prices. Others worry that consumers insured by Aetna might be restricted in where they can get health care or fill prescriptions.
Mark Bertolini, Aetna's CEO, said the companies would not raise prices for consumers.
"It doesn't make sense for us to charge people more when we want more people in the store," Bertolini told the Times. "CVS has the draw. People trust their pharmacist," he added.
But some critics predict the merger will run afoul of federal antitrust officials.
David Balto, an antitrust lawyer, told the Times that doctors may be in a better position to treat illness than retail executives.
"Who do you want to run the health care system?" he said.
Others, however, say there is no conflict since CVS and Aetna aren't in the same line of business.
The mammoth sale comes amid a rocky period in the U.S. health care landscape. Provisions of the Affordable Care Act remain in jeopardy, and potential tax cuts debated in Congress could affect out-of-pocket spending on insurance, drugs and medical care.
More information: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can help you prepare for a The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can help you prepare for a doctor's visit
Copyright 2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
The US Food and Drug Administration has given the green light to Roche for its FoundationOne CDx personalised diagnostic cancer test, the Swiss group said Monday.
Roche said the FDA had approved the test helping doctors understand the genetic profile of patients' tumors to enable better-targeted therapies and clinical tests.
"The approval of FoundationOne CDx represents a major advance in the personalisation of cancer care, facilitating access for patients in the US to a comprehensive pan-tumour companion diagnostic that will help identify approved treatment options based on the molecular footprint of each individual's cancer," said Roche's Chief Medical Officer Sandra Horning, also the firm's head of global product development.
"Our belief is that profiling will increasingly become routine in clinical practice, so we have worked closely with Foundation Medicine to develop an extensive clinically and analytically validated platform that can support both existing and future companion diagnostic needs," Horning said in a statement.
Pharmaceutical companies see development of personally tailored treatment as the way ahead to tackle cancer.
2017 AFP
If the Community Health Center Fund is not restored, millions of patients served by community health centers may lose access to crucial health care and up to 161,000 jobs could be lost in communities across the nation. That's the conclusion of an analysis produced by the Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative at the George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH).
The analysis is the first to look at what might happen nationwide if Congress fails to renew the Community Health Center Fund, which expired September 30th. In 2016, these health centers served 26 million people at nearly 10,000 locations.
"The current delays in funding have already caused major problems for community health centers, which are the backbone of the nation's safety net for medically underserved communities," says Leighton Ku, PhD, professor of health policy and management at Milken Institute SPH and lead author of the report. "Further delays or loss of funding could be devastating, not only to community health centers and their patients, but to workers and businesses across the country."
The analysis addresses the state-level economic and employment consequences that would occur if the Community Health Center Fund is not renewed. Here are some findings of the report:
Community health centers' ability to provide care to underserved patients will be seriously compromised if the $3.6 billion cut in funding is not immediately restored. Nine million patients, a third of those currently served, may lose care.
As many as 76,000 to 161,000 jobs could be lost nationwide in 2018. About two-fifths of jobs lost would be in health care, but the majority would be workers in other sectors, such as retail, construction and other fields.
State economies would be shortchanged by $7.4 to $15.6 billion in 2018.
Because health centers are located in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories, substantial losses would occur in all areas and could be especially severe in states that did not expand Medicaid. Community health centers are not-for-profit organizations that operate at low margins; without restored funding they would be forced to downsize staff, reduce their purchasing of goods and services, curtail services or even shut down clinical sites.
"Health centers are important anchors in their communities, and serve as economic engines," said Feygele Jacobs, DrPH, President and CEO of the RCHN Community Health Foundation. "Unless policymakers act now to restore the Community Health Center Fund, we are putting our communities at risk."
The harm to patients and communities could be especially serious in areas hard hit by the recent hurricanes, like Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. Displaced community health center patients with no health insurance in those places-and in other parts of the country-will have fewer options for health care, the report warns.
The brief, "State Economic and Employment Losses If Community Health Center Funding Is Not Restored," can be accessed here.
Scientists have identified five genes that are associated with help-seeking behaviour in dogs. Credit: Pixabay/ Kat Jayne
The chemistry behind social behaviour in animals, including the bond between people and dogs and the lack of one between humans and wolves could help scientists identify new ways of treating social disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.
'We think that the genetic foundation for social behaviour is very similar in dogs and humans. There is kind of a common genetic architecture or social behaviour that humans have tapped into and that has led to the most suitable dogs being chosen for domestication,' said Professor Per Jensen from Linkoping University in Sweden.
He coordinates the EU-funded GENEWELL project, which is looking at how stress responses are controlled in animals. In their research on dogs, his team has focused on oxytocin, a chemical also known as the love hormone, which is known to strengthen social bonds in both animals and humans.
'Oxytocin is an extremely strong mediator of the dog-human bond,' said Prof. Jensen. 'People have looked at the effects of oxytocin levels on both physical contact and eye contact and there's no doubt that oxytocin is a really important player in maintaining and establishing the cooperation and the contact between dog and owner.'
To investigate how the hormone works, researchers sprayed dogs' noses with either saltwater or oxytocin, and then monitored how they responded to different tasks.
Many dogs that received oxytocin quickly turned to their owners for help when the tasks became too difficult. But even though the oxytocin-sprayed dogs were often faster to ask for help than those who received just saltwater, the scientists noticed that the time taken to ask for help still varied considerably among the oxytocin-sprayed dogs. The hormone itself wasn't the only factor at play.
Receptor
Within the brain, oxytocin must attach to a receptor to begin working. Dogs can possess one of several different variants of oxytocin receptor, depending on their genes. What the researchers noticed was that some dogs, all with a particular kind of receptor, responded very strongly to the oxytocin spray. They turned to their owners for help a lot faster than dogs with other variants.
Other research groups have carried out similar tests on wolves. Unsurprisingly, the wolves almost never went to humans to ask for help to complete their task. But, after examining some samples of wolf DNA, the researchers found the same variants of oxytocin receptors as in dogs.
The results show that wolves can possess a type of oxytocin receptor that makes them more likely to engage with people. Although not the full story, that's probably part of the reason the first wolves became domesticated.
The researchers think that human-wolf friendships were more of a mutual cooperation than a human-driven endeavour that more friendly wolves, possessing certain oxytocin receptors, were much more willing to approach people and so relationships developed.
Back in Sweden, the scientists' next move was to examine the dogs' genomes more closely. They isolated five different genes that were most strongly associated with the dogs' help-seeking behaviour.
Prof. Jensen says that, interestingly, four out of these five genes are also associated with autism, ADHD and schizophrenia. In the future, this may open the way for using dogs as model animals to study social impairments in humans.
Therapeutic
Giving oxytocin to people with such social disorders is already thought to have a therapeutic effect. A characteristic of autism is to not look others in the eye, and oxytocin increases the likelihood that a person (or a dog) will do this. Trials are currently underway where oxytocin is given to treat patients with autism and schizophrenia.
The EU-funded BIOSOCIOCOG project, however, suspects that the oxytocin system needs another chemical, dopamine, to work properly. Dopamine is known to be important in the reward system of the brain, and the researchers think that oxytocin and dopamine need to work together to encourage social and cooperative behaviour.
Studies have already shown that both hormones are needed for any selfless action to take place in the animal world for example, vampire bats sharing blood with each other, mother voles showing affection to their infants and apes performing group grooming. The project is now investigating whether the same is true for humans.
'My theory was that for pro-social behaviour, you need both systems to interact. The oxytocin system depends on the dopamine system,' said Professor Diana Prata, from the Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Lisbon, Portugal, who is the lead researcher of the BIOSOCIOCOG project.
'There was some evidence in animal studies where they promote affiliative (relationship-building) behaviour with oxytocin, but then, when they (the researchers) blocked the dopamine system, that social behaviour was decreased. We are trying to also demonstrate that the two systems interact in humans.'
Prof. Prata's research is largely based on MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans. The researchers view what happens in the brain when people play the prisoner's dilemma game, where people are asked to choose either to cooperate with or betray a partner, without ever having met them. If they cooperate, they each receive a small and equal proportion of a reward. If one cooperates and the other does not, the one who does not will win all of the reward, while the one who did cooperate gets nothing.
The BIOSOCIOCOG team are specifically interested in which, and how much, brain areas are illuminated when participants experience a social reward or punishment. Oxytocin is then delivered to see if anything changes.
This research will indicate whether drugs for social disorders should take a combined approach using both oxytocin and dopamine, which could lead to the development of new, more effective treatments.
While young people with parasite worms currently have a four times higher risk for developing allergies and asthma than others. Their parents are generally unaffected.
Researchers at the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway were surprised when they found that intestinal worms, so-called Helminths (Toxocara Canis) from animals, actually have an influence on allergy- and asthma risk in humans.
Their results showed that young people who test positive for this parasite, have a 4 times higher risk of developing asthma and allergies than others.
"Usually, we consider a 50% higher risk as being high, but here we see a 400% higher risk," says Professor Cecilie Svanes at Centre for International Health, UiB.
Key to allegy puzzle
According to Svanes, what is interesting in these results is that it seems to be only the young generation who has higher risk of getting asthma and allergies if they test positive on helminths, and not their parents.
"We do not know why the parasite only influences the young generation in a negative way and not their parents. If we can discover the reason for this, I think we will have solved the puzzle of why allergies have increased enormously over the past few decades," says Svanes.
Allergy explosion
Many studies show that the numbers of people with asthma and allergies have increased enormously over the past few decades. The reason for this is unknown.
"One of the most common hypotheses is that we have become more in contact with chemicals and less in contact with microbes and bacteria," Svanes explains.
"There are, however, many things that have changed during the last decades. Nobody knows why allergy and asthma levels have increased. The phenomena is happening all over the world. It probably relates to urbanisation among other things."
More information: Nils Oskar Jogi et al. Zoonotic helminth exposure and risk of allergic diseases: a study of two generations in Norway, Clinical & Experimental Allergy (2017). Journal information: Clinical & Experimental Allergy Nils Oskar Jogi et al. Zoonotic helminth exposure and risk of allergic diseases: a study of two generations in Norway,(2017). DOI: 10.1111/cea.13055
On the left: minimal development after transplant. Right: transplanted cells generated all cell types of the nasal tissue. Credit: Jim Schwob and Brian Lin in Cell Stem Cell
Researchers at Tufts University School of Medicine, led by Dr. James E. Schwob, are examining the behavior of adult stem cells within the context of aging and, specifically, the sense of smell. As part of the normal aging process, older adults frequently experience a decline in their olfactory function, resulting in a compromised or complete loss of sense of smell. The loss of sense of smellwhether as a result of aging, medication, illness or injuryaffects sense of taste; when the sense of smell is intact, it combines with the sense of taste to communicate the flavor of food. Smell loss in older adults reduces quality of life, compromises nutritional status, and puts the health and safety of the elderly at risk.
The focus of the research at Tufts is on enlarging the population of adult stem cells that maintain the sense of smell in young adults, but which deteriorate with aging. The ultimate goal is to identify a pharmaceutical preparation that has that effect.
In a study published in the December 7 issue of Cell Stem Cell, the researchers provide the first evidence that it is possible to regenerate stem cells of the nasal tissue in mice, thus enlarging the population of adult stem cells.
Stem cells are undifferentiated, or unspecialized; they are highly potent and able to generate many different types of cells. Embryonic stem cells can give rise to any cell type in the body, while adult or tissue stem cells have a more limited potency. Adult stem cells are responsible for maintaining the structure of the tissue in which they are found and repairing it after injury. There is evidence that adult stem cells may be able to regenerate in response to injury to tissue as part of a natural healing process.
The team took advantage of that natural healing process. Adult stem cells regenerated in mice with injured nasal tissue. When those adult stem cells were transplanted into other mice, they were able to regenerate all the different cell types in the nasal tissue, also called the olfactory epithelium. This expansion of the stem cell population improved when the researchers swabbed a pharmaceutical preparation into the nose; the drug combination pushed progenitor cells to remain upstream as adult stem cells.
Though the response involved the now-famous Yamanaka factors, the strategy developed by Schwob and his team is more efficient and less complicated than the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) Nobel Prize-winning approach developed by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka. Yamanaka's approach was designed to replace stem cells lost to aging by inducing cells taken from adult tissues to behave like embryonic stem cells, by forcing them to express four genes that are usually expressed in embryonic stem cells.
The research team from Tufts determined that only two of the four factors used by Yamanaka to artificially reprogram adult cells into iPSCs are critical to the process of pushing the olfactory cells to become more stem cell-like.
"We are the first researchers to gain insight into the molecular mechanism responsible for allowing these adult progenitor cells to become more potent. We were intrigued that the process shared such a core similarity with iPSC technology, which provides a potential explanation and natural origin for the mechanism that the scientific community has harnessed to great effect," said first author Brian Lin, a Ph.D. graduate of the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts and now a postdoctoral fellow at Mass General Hospital.
"The direct restoration of adult stem cells has implications for many types of tissue degeneration associated with aging, though we are several years away from designing actual therapies based on this work. The olfactory epithelium is a singularly powerful model for understanding how tissues regenerate or fail to do so," said senior author Jim Schwob, M.D./Ph.D., a professor of Developmental, Molecular & Chemical Biology at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.
"If we can restore the population of stem cells in the olfactory epithelium by regenerating them or by administering the right drug as a nasal spray, we may be able to prevent deterioration in the sense of smell," he continued.
More information: Brian Lin et al, Injury Induces Endogenous Reprogramming and Dedifferentiation of Neuronal Progenitors to Multipotency, Cell Stem Cell (2017). Journal information: Cell Stem Cell Brian Lin et al, Injury Induces Endogenous Reprogramming and Dedifferentiation of Neuronal Progenitors to Multipotency,(2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2017.09.008
(HealthDay)It's been used by many people to help ease sleep apnea, but new research suggests the CPAP mask may also help ease seizures in people with epilepsy.
CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) involves wearing an airflow mask over the nose or mouth each night, to help keep the back of the throat open for better breathing.
Many people with epilepsy often have sleep apnea, the researchers said. In fact, of the 197 patients enrolled in the new study, only 75 didn't have sleep apnea.
Poor sleep is also a known risk factor for increased seizure frequency, the research team added.
"Sleep apnea is common in people with epilepsy, but few physicians screen for it," explained lead investigator Dr. Thapanee Somboon, a research fellow at the Cleveland Clinic's Sleep Disorders Center.
"All patients with epilepsy should be checked for sleep disorders, including insomnia and sleep apnea, because there are effective treatments," Somboon said in a news release from the American Epilepsy Society.
His team was to present its findings Saturday at the society's annual meeting, in Washington, D.C.
Among the 122 patients who had both epilepsy and sleep apnea, 73 used the CPAP device each night, while 49 did not.
After about a year, more than 60 percent of the CPAP-treated patients saw a 50 percent or greater drop in seizures, compared with their pre-CPAP days. This compared with just a 14 percent drop for those not using CPAP, the investigators said.
Also, by a number of measures, the team found that 85 percent of those undergoing CPAP experienced a "successful" measure of seizure control, compared with just 55 percent of those who did not.
Two experts in epilepsy care who reviewed the findings said they make sense.
Dr. Fred Lado is Northwell Health's regional director of epilepsy care for Queens and Long Island, N.Y. He called the findings "striking" and said epilepsy specialists should certainly consider sleep apnea tests for their patients.
He added, however, that because this new research isn't the "gold standard" prospective, randomized trial, such a trial may be needed to first confirm these results. And findings presented at medical meetings are also typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Dr, Vahid Ghasian directs the Epilepsy Center at Staten Island University Hospital in New York City. He said health experts have long seen links between epilepsy and sleep apnea, and now "accepted practice is to manage both disorders at the same time."
But, as Somboon pointed out, "many people with epilepsy don't realize they have sleep apnea. Being diagnosed is the first step towards getting effective treatment and potentially decreasing the risk of seizures."
More information: Fred Lado, M.D., Ph.D., Northwell Health's regional director of epilepsy for Queens and Long Island, N.Y.; Vahid Ghiasian, M.D., director, Staten Island University Hospital Epilepsy Center, New York City; Dec. 2, 2017, presentation, Ameican Epilepsy Society's annual meeting, Washington, DC Fred Lado, M.D., Ph.D., Northwell Health's regional director of epilepsy for Queens and Long Island, N.Y.; Vahid Ghiasian, M.D., director, Staten Island University Hospital Epilepsy Center, New York City; Dec. 2, 2017, presentation, Ameican Epilepsy Society's annual meeting, Washington, DC There's more on sleep apnea and epilepsy at the Epilepsy Foundation.
Copyright 2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Australia ranked poorly in reducing its stillbirth rate over the past 15 years. Credit: University of Queensland
Forty two babies are stillborn in Australia every week, and 60 per cent of them are recorded as "unexplained".
Mater Research Institute-University of Queensland researchers undertook a global review of stillbirth reporting and classification, seeking ways to improve procedures.
Dr Hanna Reinebrant from UQ's Centre of Research Excellence in Stillbirth said the study found stillbirths were most commonly categorised as "unexplained", "other" and "haemorrhage".
"If we can't explain why a stillbirth has happened, it's impossible to know what to target to prevent it in future," Dr Reinebrant said.
She said the Australian Government should establish national guidelines for investigating stillbirths.
"It's important to establish a cause of death to help parents understand what went wrong and to guide clinical care for any future pregnancies.
"It would also help in developing prevention and education programs for women."
Researchers reviewed 85 reports on stillbirths across 50 countries and found wide variations in investigation and classification systems, with only 13 considered good quality.
Stillbirths were defined as the loss of a baby at 28 weeks' gestation or more.
"Placental problems are frequently reported across middle and high-income countries, but we found that in low-income countries, labour complications and infection were most common," Dr Reinebrant said.
The World Health Organisation has set a global target of 12 stillbirths or fewer per 1000 births by 2030, but Dr Reinebrant said even high-income countries needed to reduce their stillbirth rates.
Australia has the 15th lowest rate in the world, with 2.7 stillbirths for every 1000 births, behind countries like Iceland (1.3), Finland (1.8), Japan (2.1) and New Zealand (2.3).
Australia ranked poorly in reducing its stillbirth rate over the past 15 years.
"We urgently need to address the reporting and categorising of stillbirths so we can better understand what causes stillbirths and improve outcomes for families," Dr Reinebrant said.
The review is published in BJOG.
More information: Making stillbirths visible: a systematic review of globally reported causes of stillbirth BJOG. DOI: 10.1111/1471-0528.14971 Making stillbirths visible: a systematic review of globally reported causes of stillbirth
Unemployment in Spain up minimally in November but 8.3 per cent lower than a year ago
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The November increase in Catalunya was the sharpest since 2009
November is traditionally a month in which unemployment figures in Spain rise slightly, and data released on Monday morning by the Ministry of Employment confirm that 2017 was no exception, with the number of people registered as out of work going up by just 7,255 during the month.
This represents an increase of 0.2 per cent, bringing the total to precisely 3,475,281, but the rise compares favourably to the same month in 2016, when the number of people officially registered as out of work went up by around 25,000. At the same time, over the last twelve months the figure has fallen by 8.33 per cent, or just over 315,000, and the peak of over 5 million which was reached early in 2013 has been left a long way behind.
By far the most significant increase during November was the one reported in the Balearic Islands (24.5 per cent), where the tourist sector tends to be dormant over the winter, and although such a sharp rise may sound alarming the total in the islands is still well over 6 per cent lower than at the same point last year.
In Catalunya, meanwhile, the continuing political uncertainty may have contributed to the unemployment figure rising by between 3 and 5 per cent in the provinces of Tarragona, Lleida and Girona, although in Barcelona the increase of only 0.9 per cent is much more in line with the trend across Spain as a whole. The overall increase of over 7,000 in the region was the largest since 2009, adding weight to the speculation that the unilateral declaration of independence on 27th October affected the Catalan economy during the following month.
Over the last twelve months, though, the fall in unemployment has been universal across Spain, with the most significant decreases reported in Aragon (-12.9 per cent) and Castilla-La Mancha (-11.3 per cent).
It should be remembered that the monthly data regarding unemployment which are produced by the Ministry of Employment are always significantly lower than those featured in the quarterly Active Population Survey (EPA), because the EPA also takes into account those who are out of work but for one reason or another have chosen not to register as such at employment offices. The latest EPA for the third quarter of 2017 reports that there were 3.73 million unemployed in Spain at the end of September, 13.6 per cent fewer than twelve months previously.
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Lebanese parliament fails to elect president of country
Canada provides additional military aid to Ukraine
Representatives of defense agencies of CSTO countries discuss crisis response issues
Tehran accuses Israel and West of trying to organize civil war in Iran
Oppositionist: No guarantees that war with Azerbaijan can be avoided
Issue of biometric passports to Armenian citizens is temporarily suspended
Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement to be signed till end of year? Pashinyan's associate voices conditions
Erdogan says Russia and US agreed to refrain from using nuclear weapons
Azerbaijani oppositionist complains of torture by police
Kyaram Sloyan and Andranik Zohrabyan posthumously bestowed 'Hero of Artsakh' title
UN Secretary General Guterres welcomes parties' agreement on renewal of food deal
Eurasian Development Bank: Armenia is the leader among EEU countries in terms of economic growth
Greece promises to continue military support to Ukraine
Number of appeals from Azerbaijan to ECHR is growing
Pashinyan: The wheel of processes related to confiscation of illegal property is spinning
Fire hits Baghdad airport
North Korea fires ballistic missile towards Sea of Japan
Istanbul agrees to extend 'grain initiative' for another 120 days
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Biden congratulates Republicans on winning majority in House of Representatives
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Russia attacks Ukraine with missiles in morning: Explosions heard in Dnieper, air defense works in Kyiv region
U.S. National Security Council: It is clear that the party ultimately responsible for this tragic incident is Russia
Gold prices decline
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Trade Representative of Russia: Trade turnover with Armenia sets new record
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Oil prices go down
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Sweden to provide Ukraine with new military aid worth $287 million
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Zelenskyy receives 'signals' that Putin wants direct talks
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Karen Donfried tries to explain State Department's decision to exempt Azerbaijan from 907th Amendment
Philip Reeker says U.S. administration representatives have no access to Nagorno-Karabakh
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Karen Donfried says Armenia and Azerbaijan have historic opportunity to establish lasting peace
Bob Menendez: How can the U.S. justify security assistance to the Baku regime?
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Head of Portugal's Finance Ministry: EU countries must work faster on energy intervention
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YEREVAN. Arriva transport company of the Czech Republic is interested in the single public transport network project in Armenia.
Minister of Transport, Communication and Information Technologies of Armenia, Vahan Martirosyan, on Monday received Czech Ambassador Petr Mikyska, and Arriva CEO Daniel Adamka.
The ambassador presented to the minister the Czech track-record on transport system operation and Arrivas respective part, and expressed the hope that they can start mutually beneficial cooperation.
The Arriva CEO, for his part, gave details of this companys activities, and expressed a wish to be included in the transport system implementation plan in Armenia.
Martirosyan, in turn, noted that the transport system management of Armenia is planned to be changed, and that he will be happy if Arriva also were to take part in the competition for a pilot project that is planned in one of the provinces of Armenia.
Also, the minister proposed to submit a plan, and then to continue the discussions on specific directions of cooperation.
YEREVAN. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Vision Armenia, and the Child Development Foundation announced the launch of the Community Level Access to Social Services project during a public event held in Yerevan on Monday.
In attendance at the event were Armenias Minister of Territorial Administration and Development, Davit Lokyan; USAID Armenia Mission Director, Deborah Grieser; Country Programme Director of World Vision Armenia, Zhirayr Edilyan; Director of the Child Development Foundation, Lusine Simonyan, and representatives of organizations working in the field, the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Development of Armenia informed Armenian News-NEWS.am.
The Community Level Access to Social Services or CLASS is a three-year project, funded by USAID and implemented by World Vision Armenia and Child Development Foundation. The project will target capital Yerevan and all the ten provinces of Armenia, supporting the establishment of a community-based social worker position within the structure of local governments and enhancing the communities ability to identify, prevent and address their social issues, with the ultimate goal of promoting the establishment of community-based social services in Armenia.
We appreciate our close and continued partnership with local organizations and the Government of Armenia in strengthening social protection in the country, the head of USAID Armenia, Deborah Grieser noted in her welcome remarks. The new project will build on the accomplishments of USAIDs projects supporting the Armenian governments reforms in the areas of social protection and local governance. The project will introduce over 50 community social workers in the 264 targeted communities of Armenia.
This project will help bring social services even closer to the community, said Zhirayr Edilyan, Country Programme Director of World Vision Armenia. The services will become more accessible, while the enhancement of cooperation between different levels of social services will positively contribute to the improvement of the quality of life for most vulnerable families.
The Child Development Foundation is pleased to implement the project in 4 marzes [provinces] of Armenia where no complex activities promoting social work have ever been carried out, noted Lusine Simonyan, Director of Child Development Foundation. Through this project, community social workers will use the same methodology of work throughout the entire country. They will stand closer to the population, helping to best address the existing issues.
By PTI: Jammu, Dec 4 (PTI) Seventy seven residents of Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) today travelled by the cross-LoC bus to meet their relatives on the two sides of the Line of Control, officials said.
Fourty eight PoK residents arrived here on the cross-LoC bus service via Poonch-Rawalakot in Jammu and Kashmir, a senior official said.
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From India, 22 PoK residents returned on the LoC bus, while six freshers from India travelled on the LoC bus to PoK, he said.
The weekly bus service, popularly known as paigam-e-amun or message of peace, resumed on November 6 after remaining suspended for nearly four months owing to heavy Pakistani shelling along the LoC in Poonch district.
Billed as the biggest confidence building measure, the bus service was started on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad route in the Kashmir Valley in April 2005 and the Poonch-Rawalakot route in the Jammu region on June 20, 2006, to facilitate easier trade and travel between the divided families of Jammu and Kashmir and the PoK.
The trade between the two parts of Kashmir started in October 2008 on barter system. PTI AB KJ
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U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Monday met Pakistans civilian and military leaders and urged them redouble their efforts to rein in militants accused of using the country as a base to carry out attacks in neighboring Afghanistan, Reuters reported.
Mattis, on a one-day visit to Pakistan, said the South Asian nation had made progress in the fight against militancy inside its borders but needed to make more.
U.S. officials have long been frustrated by what they see as Pakistans reluctance to act against groups such as the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network that they believe exploit safe haven on Pakistani soil to launch attacks in Afghanistan.
The Secretary reiterated that Pakistan must redouble its efforts to confront militants and terrorists operating within the country, the Pentagon said in a statement.
Mattis, who visited Pakistan for the first time as defense secretary, said before the trip that the goal for his meetings with Pakistani officials would be to find common ground.
In his discussion with Mattis, Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi said the two allies shared objectives.
Were committed (to) the war against terror, he said. Nobody wants peace in Afghanistan more than Pakistan.
Mattis also met with high-ranking officials from Pakistans powerful military, including army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and Lieutenant-General Naveed Mukhtar, the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency that U.S. officials say has links with Haqqani and Taliban militants.
By PTI: New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) Senior IAS officer Anshu Prakash today took charge as the Delhi chief secretary, replacing M M Kutty who was sent to the Union finance ministry as an additional secretary last week.
Prakash, a 1986-batch IAS officer, will have to walk a tightrope as there had been differences in the past between the ruling AAP and the bureaucracy over a range of issues.
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The bureaucrat will have to strike a fine balance between the Kejriwal-led government and the office of the Lieutenant Governor.
"Amshu Prakash took charge as Delhi chief secretary today," an official said.
The IAS officer had worked with the Delhi government as a principle secretary (health) and also in the municipal corporation of the city.
He has also served as health secretary in his previous postings in Arunachal Pradesh and Andaman and Nicobar Islands administration.
Prakashs predecessor Kuty had been at loggerheads with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his cabinet over many issues, including the Delhi Metro fare hike and desilting of drains.
The chief minister had, last month, sought an explanation from Kutty over his absence from Lal Bahadur Shastris birth anniversary event organised by the AAP government.
The Kejriwal government has maintained that the files pertaining to their work are not shown to the ministers concerned by the bureaucrats. PTI BUN SRY
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By PTI: Hyderabad, Dec 4 (PTI) Apollo Hospitals today said it has reached a milestone by performing over 100 robot assisted myomectomies.
Dr Rooma Sinha, Senior Consultant Gynaecologist, Minimal Access & Robotic Surgeon, Apollo Health City, accomplished this distinction of performing the "largest series of robot assisted myomectomies, in South Asia", Apollo Hospitals said in a statement.
Removal of symptomatic fibroids with uterine preservation in women who wish to conceive or otherwise retain their uterus is called myomectomy.
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Sangita Reddy, Joint Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals, said," Robot assisted surgery enables greater reach, manoeuvrability, very little blood loss and minimises internal disruption. This technique will become the mainstream in due course." PTI RS RSY
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The countdown is on! Tune in Sunday at 10/9c. #90DayFiance pic.twitter.com/pRON0E7vSt TLC Network (@TLC) November 30, 2017
On tonights episode: Molly asks Luis to step up as a parent; Elizabeth and Andrei have new plans for the wedding; David won't talk about the wedding night with Evelyn; Nicole and Azan have a big decision to make; Josh and Aika argue about babies.If this is your first time watching this show, enjoy with us. If youre lost, revisit this long ass description Im about to give to understand these couples.Brunette Paula Deen and Great Value Pedro (Molly and Luis)Molly, 41, is a lingerie boutique owner in Georgia who is with Luis, a bartender from the Dominican Republic. Molly has two daughters, Kensley and Olivia, who have made it clear they are not loving Luis and his behavior proves their instincts. He tries to usurp his position as their father while inquiring whether 17-year-old Olivia is just using her boyfriend to f*** (his words, not mine). Mollys father doesnt seem to take a liking to Luis, however this edited to look as though hes racist or hes genuinely concerned. Either way, Mollys brother Jess is just along for the ride.Bahtman and Annie (David and Annie)48-year-old broke, divorced and suspected deadbeat dad, David has lived in Thailand for about three years in order to have some fun (EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW) after going through a tumultuous split. He met 24-year-old Annie while in a karaoke bar. David is scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to finances, so much so that hes constantly borrowing money from his longtime friend Chris. The issue? Annies family needs a dowry in order for the engagement to commence. They require 500,000 baht (15,000 USD) and two water buffaloes. Of course he can only afford to pay 50,000 baht because hes a sugar-free sugar daddy. They eventually get engaged and arrive in Los Angeles to live with Chris, his wife and their two children. David constantly embarrasses Annie due to his drinking which leads to a chaotic dinner with Chriss brother-in-law, Antonio (not airport-phobic model Antonio).Christian Predator and Apple Connoisseur and Apple Connoisseurs family (David and Evelyn and Evelyns family)Please tell me Chris Hayess flight to New Hampshire is already scheduled because I am skeeved out by this couple (not as nearly as skeeved out as I am with Nikki and Mark). High school graduate Evelyn is pretentious, smug, stubborn teenager who makes Christian music with her family. She posted her music on Instagram and other things like teenagers do which caught the attention of 27-year-old Grenada resident David. He began chatting her up when she was only 15, but her parents were too busy to intercede because they were protesting gay people and obese people. But its not like that matters because they support this damn union. Watching them is incredibly uncomfortable with a lot of one-upping each other, not agreeing on anything and just being insufferable together. When the only person with some damn sense in Claremont, Mikayla, takes issue with Davids age, shes immediately shut down with rude and snappy remarks from David and Evelyn. I can just envision the decades of love with these two and by love, I mean eternal passive-aggressiveness and general unpleasantness while chomping on apples.Midlife-Crisis by Faith No More and Aika (Josh and Aika)Josh is 43-year-old man with children that dont speak to him and lives with roommates. Hes always wanted a trophy wife and dreamed of being the guy that landed the hot cheerleader in school (blech, grow up my guy). Aika a 36-year-old from the Philippines enters and Josh believes he found the woman that he wants to spend the rest of his life with. Aika makes is clear that she would like to settle down with a stable career and have children. Josh seems to take umbrage with that because its up to him to reveal thats he had a vasectomy, something he has never mentioned before. However, he wants to push her into modeling which leads to a very uncomfortable moment where she reads a script for a local commercial, but Aika rejects the modeling offer because she knows that she wants to settle down. Josh is the man who wants a trophy wife but is only deserving of a participation ribbon.Bonus Fact: Josh gave Aika an engagement ring, but it is the ring that belonged to his second ex-wife.Real Househusband of Moldova and Libby McGuire (Andrei and Elizabeth)Elizabeth describes herself as rebellious (she just has money to travel thats all) and met 31-year-old former club bouncer Andrei in Dublin. Honestly, theres really nothing that great about them, its her family that is so irritating. Her sisters led by a Becky named Becky want to take Elizabeth out to a strip club which Elizabeth doesnt like and Andrei doesnt like either. She thinks she is to be submissive when she gets married which her friends and family oppose, however Andrei sees it as maturing and going to a club to get wild isnt what they should be doing as a couple. Becky is really hell-bent on having balls fly at her sisters face thoughDanielle and Mohammed sorry I meant Nicole and Azan24-year-old Nicole is in Morocco once again to be with the luv of her life, 24-year-old vegetable obsessed Azan. This is her second season to appear and now she finally got her dad and stepmother to sponsor Azan for the K-1 visa because she doesnt make enough money. They really only did this because Nicole threatened that if they didnt, she would permanently move to Morocco with May. This time Nicole brought her young daughter, May with her and insists that May call Azan daddy. Nicole is experimenting to see whether Azan is going to make a good father. The family adores May and they loved Nicole until she brazenly asked Azan to ask his aunt if they could sleep in the same room. (Thats why his auntie cooked the sheeps head for you, girl.) Unfortunately for Azan, if things dont go Nicoles way and shes not given attention constantly, she physically lashes out at Azan.This show has put me THROUGH it, yall.Note: The embedded tweet promotes the episode as being on 10/9CST when it's really 8/7CST. TLC done frauded us again!Current Location: eating lechon at a water buffalo sales training convention in Claremont, NHSources: 1 and 2
An Army jawan, Santosh Bakdu, committed suicide this morning at the Pokhran firing range in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan.
By Dev Ankur Wadhawan: This morning, jawans at the Pokhran firing range in Jaisalmer heard a gunshot they will likely remember for as long as they live: Their brother-in-arms, Santosh Bakdu, had shot himself with his own weapon.
Bakdu was declared dead at the hospital they took him to.
But why did this native of Karnataka's Belagum, who was young (he was just 38) and married, decide to end his life?
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An investigation revealed that he did so due to family reasons (More specific information was unavailable at the time when this report was filed).
Bakdu's body was handed over to officials of the Army unit after a post-mortem analysis.
--- ENDS ---
I have no use for the Stark family.
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Sansa Stark for Queen of the North with Brienne as Commander of the Queensguard.
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LMAO.
Where is the lie tho.
Show Sansa is like a barbie version of fanfic Queen in the North! Sansa come to life. As long as she's rocking the outfit and being sassy to Arya and Jon that's enough to make her a good, effective leader.
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Oh I know the show version of her is dumb, but so are all the other characters. And if she survives in the show then she survives in the books.
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Brienne surviving this war (and banging Jaimie during or after) is all I want.
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As time has passed on, its become clear that Ned was the only Stark the show did any justice.
The other starks have become different versions of unlikeable and annoying as the show has gone. Jon is an un-charismatic boring gary stu with no depth, turned arya into a 1D revenge cartoon character, bran into an emotionless creepy robot and Sansa is just ?????
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IA with you. I genuinely do enjoy the show for what it is, and I try to separate the books and show as far as I can (it helps to be invested in the ironborn; they cut out half the Greyjoy family), but I can't help but feel the salt. They even failed pretty miserably with Robb, imo, but Bran especially is just...the most disappointing failure a character arc that seems to be going a very interesting direction in the books. I love Bran, but it seems like they legitimately gave up on him in the show. They didn't know what to do with him and they didn't want to try to find a creative place for him in the bigger picture.
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Pretty much, they clearly have no interest in portraying the remaining Starks with any depth.
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sad. Especially with arya who's one of the most complex characters in the books.
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ia but that's probably bc ned died early and season one is the most faithful adaptation of the books
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speaking of... some of the sansa haters are super gross... you know. white male reddit users,. the ones who despise sansa from the start, and blamed an 11/13 year old for her father's death. even though as much as i loved him... it was ned's dumb ass that got himself killed. littlefinger warned him, cersei gave him an out, and while he was dong what was right... he still got his own dumb self killed.
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Kit Harrington is as charismatic as wet cardboard.
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but...his manbun tho.
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Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in Hello! Your entry got to top-25 of the most popular entries in LiveJournal!Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in FAQ
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Edited at 2017-12-04 04:38 am (UTC)
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imo Cersei is quite chaotically evil as well, while Brienne is more lawful/neutral good and I don't think he Hound showing character growth merits the chaotic neutral label
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The fandom discourse around Sansa is so exasperating. It's like some weird circle of life of Tumblr feminism where what started as defense of acharacter evolved into "defending" her traditional femininity by attacking every other female character in the series, especially those who have more hard power, or are fan favorites.
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Yeah I still love book Sansa, but everything to do with the fandom surrounding her is tiring, from the people that hate her for no reason to the people that refuse to see any fault in the way she's written (particularly in the show). It's all very exhausting.
I've also noticed a disturbing trend in Dany vs. Sansa discourse since the seventh season ended, it's like Westeros only has space for one major female character in the fandoms eyes (Arya seems to have become a non-entity for show watchers unfortunately).
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This isnt just a Sansa thing, its exactly the same discourse for Dani. Also there is a weird obsessiveness with Emilia that even people here show, and Im pretty sure its because of her IRL personality and she seems to be quite a down to earth woman so people connect with her. That bleeds into their overzealous stanning and people outside of this site basically make every other female character nonexistent in the narrative of fan theories as if the books dont exist just like you mentioned with Arya. Its really fucking tiring.
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The Dany vs. Sansa is mostly from the shippers. The Jon/Sansa ship has become quite big since season six and a lot of them still believe it has the possibility of happening. Then you also have those who just want Sansa to become Queen. Neither of those scenarios work with Dany still in the picture so Dany fans get defensive and start shitting on Sansa.
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i 100% hope they get it bc i love hello kitty and also bc 2018 pyeongchang olympics, 2020 tokyo olympics, 2022 beijing olympics, and 2025 osaka world expo? i would absolutely NUT
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I recently found out that the headquarters for Sanrio are in my town. One time I was just driving in the area, and I saw the familiar font and a Hello Kitty statue outside! I still haven't actually gone inside to check out the store though
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Plz sent me hello kitties
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you best believe i would go there daily omg
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wow, they finally brought misty back, i never thought it'd happen
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And her and Ash battled, and she had a Gyrados, and it was like being 8 again. I just wish the animation had been this great when we were kids, ha
I watched the episode, and it was really cute (though maybe it's the more laid back animation style). Her and Brock still giving him shit for not actually winning their badges, lolAnd her and Ash battled, and she had a Gyrados, and it was like being 8 again. I just wish the animation had been this great when we were kids, ha
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Yass my bitch going on to big things
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oh man, pikachu's jukebox was great. pretty sure i still have most of the songs memorized lol
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My brother and I used to sing along to all the songs. I think I still could, lol.
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Its so hard to find hello kitty stuff in the US nowadays. Plus they closed all the Sanrio stores
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ia it bums me out
tho in fairness i was always the only soul in my mall's sanrio store and i never even bought anything, i just like looking @ cute stuff
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I read that as PROTECT and thought "hell yeah, Hello Kitty is now a superhero."
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ANd holy shit, you can buy Hello Kitty as DC Heroe plushies
I could believe that too, haANd holy shit, you can buy Hello Kitty as DC Heroe plushies
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this is cute af
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Wow, I need this.
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WTF did they do to Mistys voice!
I left Pokemon when Misty left. Getting rid of her was a mistake.
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I followed loosely for a bit after she left and I liked May well enough-- Ash having the opportunity to act as someone's mentor was kinda cute-- but it wasn't right without her. I basically dropped it and only came back for the couple of Misty reunion episodes. Hers were the only episodes of Pokemon Chronicles I cared about either.
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ot-ish lol
does anyone know where i can watch Mary and the Witch's Flower?
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I live in the US.
Our cultural ambassador should be the poop emoji. It was invented in Japan, but it's ours now, bitches!
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lmao I was gonna come here and say our ambassador should be a shitpile so IA
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Like that shit monster from Dogma
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when I was a little kid I was Hello Kitty obsessed. I had everything: hello kitty stationary, purses, keychains, wallet etc.
I recently was looking for something in my old bedroom and found a set of pristine Hello Kitty pencils I had never sharpened because I loved them so.
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Ha, that's cute about the pencils. I always hated sharpening themed/decorated/"fancy" pencils.
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why are they always paying dust to ash & misty tho?
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IA they were my first ship lmao
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Jesus now that I say that (kinda) out loud I realise how weird it is lol they're CHILDREN!
But tbh I was a child when I shipped them so it hadn't occurred to me until now that I have grown up whilst the characters haven't.
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lmaooo they're literally supposed to be ten when it starts but they've never come off that way so you're fine.
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You mean Brock and Misty
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japan olympics looks like it's gonna be fucking awesomeeee, i wanna go!
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Wow that art is horrendous
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That and I guess it allows them to do weird dramatic goofy detailed shit like this every once in awhile, lol
Awww. It was pretty jarring, but I sort of like the noodle-y/loosey goosey lookThat and I guess it allows them to do weird dramatic goofy detailed shit like this every once in awhile, lol
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Kid President tbh, or Mr. Rogers, or Bob Ross.
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man i miss her so much, her videos were the greatest
"ONTD, has your dating life been harder because of your race?"
lol yeah i grew up in a majority white area in podunk il and im not gonna pretend that had no effect. tho i did see a lil decent group of mixed couples by the time i got to high school. generally tho people who dated black girls out of their race had some expectations, like dudes who wore gold chains and expected u to wear a weave or have ur hair pressed -- justin timberlake mid-nsync vibes. it's weird looking back on it because it feels like it was such an Era of dudes feeling like they needed to wear these costumes to date black women
"Dr Jane agrees and says that its probably because he won't age as well as Nat and to other people she may appear to be his mail-order bride"
lol i know that's not how they meant it but damn go in. not your wife's fault u age like whole milk
Edited at 2017-12-04 03:30 pm (UTC)
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I mean likely, I def have heard black women are ________. But I don't really dwell on that anymore and I don't really date so it's w/e now.
Thanks op I'll listen to this today
Edited at 2017-12-04 03:31 pm (UTC)
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ONTD, has your dating life been harder because of your race?
Even though I've been in a happy relationship for years, it does still sting a bit thinking about all the shit I've had happen before just because of my race. I remember liking a guy in class all of this one semester and on the last day he made a move to get my number and acted really into me but the second he found out I was half Black, he pretty much pretended I didn't exist. As far as dating, nothing would really come from me being half Indian but with every dude I was into before my husband, no matter the race, I had to worry about if they liked black women even if they were black.
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That's rough to hear. I always fear that I won't ever be accepted by my spouses family that I feel the need to overcompensate about how good I am on paper (kind, compassionate, well traveled, cultured, highly educated) but at the end of the day if the parents don't accept me there's nothing I can do. I would just want to have a good relationship for the sake of my future kids.
But my past two relationships the families have been great so here's hoping that continues.
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bookmarking to watch for later since I used to stan Natalie back when she put out more content...
ONTD, has your dating life been harder because of your race?
it's made me more wary, for sure. i'm mixed but more Chinese than anything and whenever I date, I always have this feeling that I'm more an accessory/prize to be won, more than anything?
also, adding to the commentary of asian women only dating white men, I've a few friends like that and while they do echo the comments discussed (not having to answer to stereotypes and expectations placed upon them by the men of their own race), there's also an added layer of them feeling like they're not stereotypically pretty (not looking like Zhang Ziyi, Fan BingBing, etc) and really, not thin and pale, which a lot of East Asian men see as a requirement... not saying it's a valid argument or even an invalid one but just adding to the commentary
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expectations placed upon them by the men of their own race), there's also an added layer of them feeling like they're not stereotypically pretty
Yes this. I think my friends and I were maybe 14 when my bff at the time figured this out. some of my friends are trini Chinese and the rest of us are too ~whitewashed~ for a lot of Asian guys although no one's mixed. The friends who are more stereotypically hk etc all married Asian dudes and everyone else is with a ~Canadian ~ or in the case of the bff a trini dude who doesn't have a Chinese background. I think I've dated like 2 Asian dudes in my life cause they're no interested, but I've also been on the receiving end of a guy with an Asian fetish more than once.
meanwhile my brother to the surprise of like everyone married a Chinese girl, cause he is the biggest banana out of everyone.
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OMG are you me?
i'm filipino-chinese in canada and i mostly pass for full-on chinese but since i'm over 100lbs soaking wet and not a delicate flower, most asian dudes just don't seem to find me attractive. most of my friends are (for a super relative meaning of the word & a whole nother discussion about colourism in asian culturea) darker in colouring and bigger girls, which really, sets them up for almost ridicule by asian guys. as a result, they've mostly dated white dudes...
nb: my banana younger brother hasn't brought a girl home yet but it wouldn't surprise me if he were the same lol
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On another note, I honestly have actively avoided dating white guys because 1) i am WAY too scared of being an asian fetish 2) i just don't think i could handle the amount of white privilege. I'm aware that #2 is my own bias and yes i can relate! i'm fully asian, with tan skin, and very tall and with a bigger build than most asian girls (who are about 5'2" and 100 lbs.) I got told my entire life by relatives including uncles / cousins etc that I was "SO TALL" and "SO BIG" and guys wouldn't want to date me. i think some asian guys WERE insecure to date me bc we end up being the same height or they'd be skinnier than me. They always would make comments about how tall I was. It almost seemed easier to date outside my race if the ones within my race were repulsed/intimidated by my size. However all four of my ex boyfriends and my current bf have been asian and happen to be taller/bigger than me so "shrug." It's not impossible.On another note, I honestly have actively avoided dating white guys because 1) i am WAY too scared of being an asian fetish 2) i just don't think i could handle the amount of white privilege. I'm aware that #2 is my own bias and #notallwhitemen but I'm pretty sure I'm done with dating so I guess I'll never know first hand
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Yes, dating as a black American woman is hard especially in this current climate but if theres one thing 2017 has been successful at is completely turning me off from men this year
Sadly Ive been hold by black men that they do not date black women, and it stings
Edited at 2017-12-04 03:41 pm (UTC)
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Love her and her vids so much.
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Thank you for sharing, really. I think I understand where youre coming from a little. Once we were stationed in Washington, I got kind of shocked into accepting the fact that I was not like the other full-[ethnicity] kids out there. Especially when those kids actively shunned others who were half. It was a predominantly white community, so I would try (unsuccessfully) to fit in there too.
I think having a large group of mixed friends in high school prevented me from fully accepting that internalized racism. I shudder to think of what wouldve happened if I went to any other school at any other time (it was a diverse school, and it was the 90s because I belong in an ONTD retirement home).
Edited at 2017-12-04 04:13 pm (UTC)
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i don't refuse to date any races bc the lesbian dating pool is small enough as it is lmao, but i'm definitely warier of white girls. non-asian woc, even if they don't necessarily understand/experience specifically anti-asian racism, generally tend to relate/empathize more as a whole ime.
i feel like racism in the lesbian dating world is a lot less overt than in the gay male dating world, i've never come across a tinder or her profile that says "vanilla or spice, no chocolate or rice~" but i think that at most that just says that lesbians have enough sense/shame to not be openly racist lmao. i mean i've had decent luck on tinder and have never had to deal with racist assholes but they're the ones who swiped right on me in the first place so that doesn't mean anything.
Edited at 2017-12-04 03:48 pm (UTC)
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ia w/ all of this. tho i do exclude white girls because i live in nyc and have a big enough dating pool to get away with it.
interestingly the two east asian girls who i dated for a little would both get a bit nervous talking to me as a black woman about anti-asian racism, especially if it was in the context of college. they'd always feel the need to qualify it with "i know it's not the same but-" then i'd have to reassure them that i empathize/obviously recognize that asians also face racism.
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lmao i live in nyc too. maybe i'm just greedy!
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totally relate to all of this as a fellow #lesbianofcolor
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People have been making a point that the issue that needs to be addressed is the portrayal and perception of *Asian* men. But I don't think it's just that. Because Asian women disproportionately date *white* men versus *any* MOC, not just Asian men.
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+1
There's a colonialism/imperialism angle here (and how that interacts with female subordination/male supremacy & white supremacy in extremely gross ways) we're not sufficiently discussing (i'm assuming the vid doesn't based on your comment - haven't watched it yet)
Edited at 2017-12-04 06:10 pm (UTC)
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THANK YOU, I roll my eyes whenever people try to pass off their preference for white partners as just wanting to avoid whatever baggage comes with dating within their own race. Unfortunately Asian men have used accusations of white worship as a bludgeon against Asian women so it's hard to have a constructive conversation about it, even when they have a point.
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Pretty much. There's a way to critically tackle this conversation but it's hard when you're dealing with the misogyny from the men from your own community that you can even tackle a constructive conversation. And the same dudes also then go and worship white women at the same time. It's a lose/lose situation.
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What grinds my gears is when these women try to rationalize their choices to date white men by complaining about how Asian men ridicule Asian women if they don't fall within sexist beauty standards. It's a valid complaint but it's funny that they give white men the benefit of individual judgment while Asian men get entirely cast aside and painted with a broad brush.
Edited at 2017-12-05 05:13 am (UTC)
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Oh man do I have a story. Im Mexican and I was questioned by fam if I only dated white guys and I was so confused but I realized that they thought I thought Latino men were inferior. When I told them I had never been with a white guy, it was the most bizarre realization on their faces like oh she thinks were all right.
Im too attached to my culture to even begin to wonder what that would be like. I just honestly feel like anyone else, Asian, black etc would be more understanding of the rituals and celebrations and the need to give extended family my time without asking why. To each their own.
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People (mostly other Asian women) have gotten shocked when I've said I've never dated white guys and I don't have a preference for them. WTF. What's sadder is that they try to "disabuse" me of that.
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I'm Mexican-American and my parents also want my siblings and I to all date white people. My sister is currently dating a white guy and my mom loves him to death. She keeps talking about how beautiful their babies would be because it would have green eyes. This whole mejorando la raza shit is so disgusting.
Edited at 2017-12-04 06:00 pm (UTC)
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This is so weird to me bc i feel mexican (-americans) as whole would rather their kids be with other mexicans, i dont really see many mexican parents encouraging dating outside the culture
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i'm latina and i live in a small religious town so i'd never date the latinos here lol (or basically anyone from this town). mostly because they want a wife that is traditional. i'm open to dating someone from my race or outside of my race, but they just have to have a job and be educated tbh, and have common interests with me.
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I dont know if its made it worse because being mixed is hard enough as is. I feel lucky to have a mixed parent, though, and one that was raised to be proud of their non-white heritage.
Regarding dating, the only difficult thing for me is perception. My major relationships have ended up being with white men, so Im sure that everyone thinks I have a preference. I dont, and I struggle with that perception because my relationships with POC happened to be with closeted people or short because they broke it off with me, so they never got to the point where I was introducing them to friends or family.
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Omg yas hft! As a mixed black Korean/PI, dating in America esp in a conservative city in California is hard. I do notice how white men are attracted to me and basically want to dick me just because how I look and have the ability to communicate etc in a way I'm dateable to them. The trouble is that men seem not to lock down on fully making a commitment when I just want a boyfriend to chill with. I recently had sex, dry spell is ovah, great but like damn tho why can't I have a irl boyfriend who's genuine and getting his shit together?
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Is there any data that suggests (East?) Asian men date more East Asian women than vice versa?
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tbh i feel like the asian guys that whine about asian women who won't date them a la "white guys are stealing our women" (bc asian women are a possession!) would be more than happy to date white women if white women gave them a chance...their attitudes suggest that they view white ppl as a prize, and they're just resentful that they're considered second best~ by asian women and undesirable by white women. but give them a chance to be "on top" by dating white women and they'll trip over their own dicks to take it.
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lol so accurate
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this truth
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This right here is the truth. I see it all the fucking time.
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http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/05/18/intermarriage-in-the-u-s-50-years-after-loving-v-virginia/
"There are dramatic gender differences among Asian newlyweds as well, though they run in the opposite direction Asian women are far more likely to intermarry than their male counterparts. In 2015, just over one-third (36%) of newlywed Asian women had a spouse of a different race or
ethnicity, compared with 21% of newlywed Asian men." there's a ton of stuff in here:"There are dramatic gender differences among Asian newlyweds as well, though they run in the opposite direction Asian women are far more likely to intermarry than their male counterparts. In 2015, just over one-third (36%) of newlywed Asian women had a spouse of a different race orethnicity, compared with 21% of newlywed Asian men."
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I'm Indian and grew up in a predominantly Vietnamese/Eastern Asian community in Chicago. Which always left me feeling slightly out of place because I never felt like I was "feminine" enough if that makes sense? A lot of the Asian boys that I had a crush on kind of thought of me as one of the boys cuz I was this really tall, athletically built girl.
And then I moved to a white suburb and felt even more out of place. It wasn't until I hit college and worked at a Latino Cultural Center that I learned to embrace my culture and skin more.
I think in a lot of ways it's easier for me to date someone from my own background because then I don't have to explain everything in my life that relates to being Indian. I can also cook Indian food everyday and not have to worry about if this guy who isn't Indian will eat it.
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Venezuela's Avior Airlines Added to EU Safety List
The addition means it is subject to an operating ban or operating restrictions within the European Union. Mustique Airways (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) and Urga (Ukraine) were removed after they made safety improvements.
The European Commission on Nov. 30 updated the EU Air Safety List, which is its list of non-European airlines that do not meet international safety standards and are subject to an operating ban or operational restrictions within the European Union. There were three changes: Venezuela's Avior Airlines was added while Mustique Airways (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) and Urga (Ukraine) were removed after they made safety improvements. They had been included on the list in May 2017.
"Our objective is to offer the highest level of safety in European skies. The EU's Air Safety List remains one of our most effective tools to achieve this. Today we are showing that with our help, airlines can be quickly removed from the list when they tackle their safety issues. Work pays off, and I hope that the example of Mustique Airways and Urga will inspire others," said Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc.
The commission announcement said Avior Airlines was added to the list due to unaddressed safety deficiencies that were detected by the European Aviation Safety Agency during the assessment for a third country operator authorisation. The latest changes mean 178 airlines are banned from EU skies:
172 airlines certified in 16 states are listed because of a lack of safety oversight by the aviation authorities from those states.
Six individual airlines are listed based on safety concerns with regard to the airlines themselves: Avior; Iran Aseman Airlines (Iran); Iraqi Airways (Iraq); Blue Wing Airlines (Suriname); Med-View Airlines (Nigeria); and Air Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe).
Six other airlines are subject to operational restrictions and can only fly to the EU with specific aircraft types: Afrijet and Nouvelle Air Affaires SN2AG (Gabon); Air Koryo (Democratic People's Republic of Korea); Air Service Comores (the Comoros); Iran Air (Iran); and TAAG Angola Airlines (Angola).
By Steve Buckstein
Oregonians will have the opportunity in January to vote No on Ballot Measure 101, thus rejecting new taxes that the state legislature and the governor tried to impose on health insurance premiums and hospital services. While these and other taxes are meant to shore up state funding of Medicaid services to low-income Oregonians, it has become clear that the state has been misspending such funds for years.
Voters Pamphlet statements for and against Measure 101 were due by November 13, and Cascade Policy Institute submitted an Argument in Opposition which you can read below. In it, we noted three ways that the state has mismanaged over $650 million in health care funds entrusted to it by state and federal taxpayers. But, that may be far from the final number.
On November 17, four days after the Voters Pamphlet deadline, Oregonians learned that the state may have erroneously paid, allocated, inaccurately recorded or over-claimed $112.4 million in health care funds, according to a letter Oregon Health Authority (OHA) Director Pat Allen sent to Oregon Gov. Kate Brown. Allen also told state legislators that the state was likely to see more processing problems come out of the states health agency.
These revelations were too late for Cascade, or anyone else, to include in our Voters Pamphlet statements. So voters will need to keep up with all the reasons to vote No on Measure 101. More reasons may emerge when the Secretary of State releases an expected audit of the OHA by early December.
An early version of the Voters Pamphlet for Measure 101, including the full text of the Measure and Arguments in Favor and in Opposition can be found at the Secretary of States website.
Here is Cascades Argument in Opposition:
STOP NEW SALES TAXES ON HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUMS
AND HOSPITAL SERVICES
Vote No on Measure 101.
Oregon state government has a long history of mismanaging other peoples health care dollars, including:
Wasting $300 million federal tax dollars building a website, Cover Oregon, that wasnt able to sign up a single person for health insurance.
Paying $280 million a year for nearly 55,000 Medicaid recipients recently found to no longer qualify or who failed to respond to an eligibility check.
Overpaying health care organizations $74 million over three years to provide expanded Medicaid coverage to some Oregonians. The state initially only asked for $10 million of those overpayments back, and under political pressure eventually asked for the rest.
As one Oregon economist notes about the taxes in Measure 101:
The law explicitly allows the new taxes on health insurance providers to be passed on to consumers. With these new taxes, that Silver ACA plan will cost about $625 more in 2019 than in 2018. Its not just 40-year-olds who will get hit with the insurance tax. Nearly 12,000 college studentswill pay the tax. Small group employerswill pay the new tax.
Taxes on hospitals will raise the costs of care across the board.The cost of these taxes also will be passed on in the form of higher deductibles and premiums. Even if you dont go to the hospital, you will be paying the hospital tax through higher insurance prices.*
The cost of health care is already too expensive for many Oregonians. Dont let the state add even more taxes onto services that are expensive enough already, especially when it has such a poor track record spending the health care tax money it already gets from us.
Say No to these new health care sales taxes.
Vote No on Measure 101.
*source: Health Care Tax Would Hurt Middle Class
at: CascadePolicy.org/Health-Care
(This information furnished by Steve Buckstein, Cascade Policy Institute.)
Steve Buckstein is Senior Policy Analyst and Founder of Cascade Policy Institute, Oregons free market public policy research organization.
Thousands of Hondurans took to the streets in protest against "electoral fraud" Sunday, as vote counting resumed a week after President Juan Orlando Hernandez and opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla went head to head in the polls. Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) president David Mataramos announced a review of 1,006 votes presenting inconsistencies -- despite the opposing Alliance Against the Dictatorship calling for 5,173 votes to be scrutinized. "We feel that the Honduran people deserve the results and this (count) cannot be stopped," Mataramos said. Nasralla supporters in the capital Tegucigalpa marched near to where the count was resumed, banging on pots, blaring vuvuzelas and singing campaign songs including insults towards Hernandez. "They are stealing our votes," Jesus Elviz, a 58-year-old accountant, told AFP, visibly angry. Meanwhile, a group of women handed out flowers to demonstrators, and threw petals at riot and military police nearby. On Friday, 19-year-old Kimberly Fonseca was killed by a bullet during a confrontation between protesters and the police. Her family say she was killed by police, a claim authorities are "exhaustively" investigating. After the violent protests erupted -- with some reports of looting -- the government declared a state of emergency and imposed a 10-day curfew in an attempt to curb the unrest. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the UN Office for Human Rights in Honduras Sunday urged the authorities to act "within the framework of human rights, respecting people's lives and physical integrity." Their joint statement also expressed concern at preliminary figures which said 11 people have died and at least 15 others have been injured during the violence. A week after the election, Hernandez maintains an advantage with 42.92 percent of votes against Nasralla's 41.42 percent, with 94.45 percent counted, according to the TSE. The first partial election results were released early Monday, 10 hours after the polls closed. However, when the figures began to be updated on Tuesday, Hernandez's lead was falling and he took charge of the count on Wednesday, following a series of interruptions in the TSE's computer system.
Credit: Oliver Rauhut
Paleontologists at LMU correct a case of misinterpretation: The first fossil "Archaeopteryx" to be discovered is actually a predatory dinosaur belonging to the anchiornithid family, which was previously known only from finds made in China.
Even 150 million years after its first appearance on our planet, Archaeopteryx is still good for surprises. The so-called Urvogel has attained an iconic status well beyond the world of paleontology, and it is one of the most famous fossils ever recovered. In all, a dozen fossil specimens have been assigned to the genus. Archaeopteryx remains the oldest known bird fossil, not only documenting the evolutionary transition from reptiles to birds, but also confirming that modern birds are the direct descendants of carnivorous dinosaurs. LMU paleontologist Oliver Rauhut and Christian Foth from the Staatliches Museum fur Naturkunde in Stuttgart have re-examined the so-called Haarlem specimen of Archaeopteryx, which is kept in Teylers Museum in that Dutch city and has gone down in history as the first member of this genus to be discovered.
In the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, Foth and Rauhut now report that this fossil differs in several important respects from the other known representatives of the genus Archaeopteryx. In fact, their taxonomic analysis displaces it from its alleged perch on the phylogenetic tree: "The Haarlem specimen is not a member of the Archaeopteryx clade," says Rauhut, a paleontologist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at LMU who is also affiliated with the Bavarian State Collections for Paleontology and Geology in Munich.
Instead, the two scientists assign the fossil to a group of bird-like maniraptoran dinosaurs known as anchiornithids, which were first identified only a few years ago based on material found in China. These rather small dinosaurs possessed feathers on all four limbs, and they predate the appearance of Archaeopteryx. "The Haarlem fossil is the first member of this group found outside China. And together with Archaeopteryx, it is only the second species of bird-like dinosaur from the Jurassic discovered outside eastern Asia. This makes it even more of a rarity than the true specimens of Archaeopteryx," Rauhut says.
Made in China
The Haarlem specimen was found about 10 km to the northeast of the closest Archaeopteryx locality known (Schamhaupten) a full four years before the discovery of the skeleton that would introduce the Urvogel to the scientific world in 1861. Schamhaupten was once part of the so-called Solnhofen archipelago in the Altmuhl Valley in southern Bavaria, the area from which all known specimens of the genus Archaeopteryx originated. Its taxonomic reassignment therefore provides new insights into the evolution of the bird-like dinosaurs in the Middle to Late Jurassic. "Our biogeographical analysis demonstrates that the group of dinosaurs that gave rise to birds originated in East Asia all of the oldest finds have been made in China. As they expanded westward, they also reached the Solnhofen archipelago," says Christian Foth. Thus, the fossil hitherto incorrectly assigned to the genus Archaeopteryx must have been one of the first members of the group to arrive in Europe.
Around 150 million years ago, the area known today as the Altmuhl Valley was dotted with the coral and sponge reefs and lagoons of the Solnhofen archipelago, and the open sea lay to the West and South. The Haarlem fossil was originally recovered from what was then the eastern end of the archipelago, quite close to the mainland. Unlike Archaeopteryx, anchiornithids were unable to fly, and might not have been able to reach areas further offshore. On the other hand, all true fossils of Archaeopteryx found so far were recovered from the lithographic limestone strata further to the west, closer to the open sea. Based on the new findings, Rauhut argues that other known Archaeopteryx fossils may need reassessment: "Not every bird-like fossil that turns up in the fine-grained limestones around Solnhofen need necessarily be a specimen of Archaeopteryx," he points out.
The authors of the new study have proposed that the Haarlem specimen be assigned to a new genus, for which they suggest the name Ostromia in honor of the American paleontologist John Ostrom, who first identified the fossil as a theropod dinosaur.
More information: Christian Foth et al. Re-evaluation of the Haarlem Archaeopteryx and the radiation of maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs, BMC Evolutionary Biology (2017). DOI: 10.1186/s12862-017-1076-y Journal information: BMC Evolutionary Biology
Yale-NUS College Postdoctoral Fellow Eunice Tan has discovered that the bright colour patterns of beetles are not a warning signal to predators as previously believed, but actually a form of camouflage, turning an old assumption on its head. Dr Tan, along with four collaborators from Australia and Spain, examined 51 species of Australian leaf beetles in their natural habitats, and discovered that each beetle's colour pattern is similar to the host plants that the beetle lives on, suggesting that those conspicuous colours help the beetle blend in with the plants it inhabits. The study was recently published as an open-access article in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
As the first ecologist to examine the colour patterns of live leaf beetles in relation to their host plants, Dr Tan contextualised the colour patterns of beetles to their natural habitats, which allowed her to challenge the prevailing theory among coleopterists - scientists who study beetles - that the bright colours of leaf beetles developed as a deterrent signal to predators. These colourful markings were assumed to be a warning to predators against eating the beetles, which are able to secrete poisonous chemicals in self-defence. However, this idea was based on earlier studies, which focused on using museum collections of beetle specimens for their analyses. While this method affords researchers a large number of samples, the discolouration of deceased specimens made accurate colour analysis of the beetles impossible. Furthermore, such methodology also fails to take into account the colouration of each beetle's natural environment.
Dr Tan and her team spent 17 months photographing live beetles in 32 locations across four Australian states, in order to compare each beetle's colouration to the colour of the leaf it was found on. Taking into account the evolutionary relationship between the different beetle species, Dr Tan discovered that different species of beetles had colour patterns similar to those of their host plants. This suggests that the colourations have a camouflaging effect, rather than serving an aposematic (predator-deterring) function. This camouflage effect was particularly pronounced in beetles which fed on multiple types of plants, as they had to blend into many different environments.
"It was long thought that conspicuous colour patterns served to advertise the distastefulness of an organism to its predators. However, we have found that this cannot be the sole reason that conspicuous colour patterns developed in leaf beetles. In general, the beetles had colouration similar to that of their host plants, suggesting that there is natural selection at play and therefore some evolutionary advantage for these beetles to use camouflage as a defensive strategy against predators," shared Dr Tan.
Through her field studies, Dr Tan also observed the impact of ecological factors on the evolution of different beetle species' colouration patterns. Dr Tan's study found that both larger and smaller beetle species in her sample had similar levels of colour contrast against their backgrounds. However, the larger beetle species were more likely to be found in darker environments than their smaller cousins, suggesting that they were employing a hiding strategy against predators, despite having similar conspicuous colouration to their smaller cousins. An ecological property, the brightness of the environment, was therefore a potential factor influencing the evolution of beetle colouration.
Taken together, the findings of this study "point to a complex suite of factors driving natural selection, such as types of predators and host plant choice, which affect the evolution of colouration in leaf beetles", said Dr Tan. Challenging the assumption that the sole explanation for bright coloration in leaf beetles is meant to ward off predators, Dr Tan postulated that the variety of anti-predator strategies in leaf beetles that she has found may explain their successful spread into a variety of habitats.
More information: Eunice J. Tan et al, The Role of Life-History and Ecology in the Evolution of Color Patterns in Australian Chrysomeline Beetles, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (2017). DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2017.00140
You may already be surprised to hear there are iron objects dating back to the Bronze Age, but their meteorite origin is even more astonishing. Though meteorites had already been recognized as one source of this metal, the scientific community couldn't determine whether they accounted for most or simply a few Bronze Age iron artifacts. Albert Jambon, as part of his work at the Institut de mineralogie, de physique des materiaux et de cosmochimie (CNRS / UPMC / IRD / Museum national d'Histoire naturelle),1 has demonstrated that iron used during the Bronze Age is always meteoric and he explained how this practice was abandoned during the Iron Age. His work is published in the December 2017 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.
The Iron Age began in Anatolia and the Caucasus around 1200 BCE. But nearly 2,000 years earlier, various cultures were already fashioning objects out of iron. These items were extremely rare and always greatly treasured. Iron ore abounds on the Earth's surface. So what made these artifacts so valuable? Initial research had shown that some were made with iron from meteorites, which led scientists to wonder how many others were. Albert Jambon gathered the available data and conducted his own nondestructive chemical analyses of samples using a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. His collection of iron artifacts includes beads from Gerzeh (Egypt, 3200 BCE); a dagger from Alaca Hoyuk (Turkey, 2500 BCE); a pendant from Umm el-Marra (Syria, 2300 BCE); an axe from Ugarit (Syria, 1400 BCE) and several others from the Shang dynasty civilization (China, 1400 BCE); and the dagger, bracelet, and headrest of Tutankhamen (Egypt, 1350 BCE).
His analyses revealed that each of these Bronze Age artifacts was made with meteoric iron. When large celestial bodies like our planet are forming, nearly all nickel drifts towards the molten iron core. Thus, it is extremely rare to find nickel on the surface. However, some meteorites are created when celestial bodies are shattered. If these meteorites are composed of core material, they mostly contain iron with high levels of nickel and cobalt. This characteristic makes it possible to identify the source of iron. Meteoric iron is also already in a metal state, ready for use, which explains why it went into all Bronze Age iron artifacts. In contrast, the iron compounds in terrestrial ores must first undergo the process of reduction, which removes bound oxygen to yield the desired metal. This is the basis of smelting in furnaces, a breakthrough that marked the beginning of the Iron Age. With smelting, Iron Age cultures could forget rare extraterrestrial metal and tap into terrestrial iron ores, which were far more abundant and easier to procure. Albert Jambon's findings refute certain theories proposing that nickel-laden iron alloys were obtained from terrestrial ores.
More information: Albert Jambon. Bronze Age iron: Meteoritic or not? A chemical strategy., Journal of Archaeological Science (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2017.09.008 Journal information: Journal of Archaeological Science
Provided by CNRS
By PTI: By Shirish B Pradhan
Kathmandu, Dec 4 (PTI) A powerful bomb blast at a poll rally of the ruling Nepali Congress today injured 11 people including the former health minister here, police said, days ahead of the last phase of provincial and parliamentary polls.
The police said that 30 suspects have been arrested in connection with the incident which occurred at Chapali area in Budhanilakantha municipality, 10 kms north of Kathmandu.
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The injured including Nepali Congress candidate Gagan Thapa were rushed to the Tribhuvan University Teaching hospital here.
Thapa, a former health minister who is contesting election from the Kathmandu constituency Number 4, has been discharged from the hospital.
The condition of one of the injured people is said to be critical.
Election campaign for Thursdays second phase of parliamentary and provincial elections will end at mid-night tomorrow.
The blast occurred three days before the second phase of the provincial and parliamentary elections on December 7.
Around 65 per cent votes were cast on November 26 in the historic first round of elections that many hope will bring the much-needed political stability to the Himalayan nation.
Of the total 15.4 million voters, 3.19 million were eligible to cast their votes in the first phase while the rest will exercise their franchise during the second phase.
The elections are being seen as the final step in Nepals transition to a federal democracy following a decade-long civil war till 2006 that claimed more than 16,000 lives. PTI SBP CPS
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From 2011 to 2014, the state of California experienced the worst drought in its recorded history. With that drought came a shortage of agricultural water suppliesin a state that produces nearly half of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables grown in the United States. Though the area has since seen a slight rebound, the central California region is still experiencing a significant loss of agricultural yield and revenue. The primary culprit? Soil salinity.
"Soil salinization is a global phenomenon that threatens the sustainability of agricultural production," says EPP Assistant Professor Meagan Mauter, "at a time when food demand is increasing."
While salts naturally occur in soil and water, they build up in the soil when irrigation water is saline and the rate of evaporation is high. Under Mauter's advisement, Ph.D. student Paul Welle has been studying just how heavy the impact of soil salinization has been on California's annual agricultural yield.
Taking advantage of high-resolution satellite data for crops grown in CA and recently released information on soil salinity, Welle was able to estimate the effect of soil salinity on crop yield. What the data revealed was shocking.
"Using this data, we can implement field scale models to predict how individual crops would be effected by ongoing, increased salinity levels," Welle said. "What we found is that the central California region is losing approximately $3.7 billion in annual agricultural revenue due to salinity levels in the soil. This is about 10% of the region's annual agricultural revenue."
This is a tremendous loss, but surprisingly, Welle's analysis reveals that this may not be a problem worth fixingat least not now. And it's not because it isn't good for the environment. In the end, it all comes down to money.
"Current de-salinization technology, unfortunately, is very expensive," he says. "Even with this high $3.7 billion loss of revenue, the cost of current desalinization technology would be even more expensive. Barring substantial cost reduction, policymakers should not rely on current desalination tech to offset salinization."
More than anything, however, Welle's research highlights the importance of high-resolution data when modeling agricultural systems. Because the mechanisms of yield reduction impact different crops differently, modeling yield loss due to soil salinization at the level of individual fields produces much more accurate results than estimating yield losses at the county level.
Continuing innovation in both high resolution data collection and models for agricultural decision making has the potential to significantly improve our understanding and management of agricultural systems.
Credit: kdshutterman/Shutterstock.com
People have been dreaming about space travel for hundreds of years, long before the arrival of the spectacular technologies behind space exploration today mighty engines roaring fire and thunder, shiny metal shapes gliding in the vastness of the universe.
We've only travelled into space in the last century, but humanity's desire to reach the moon is far from recent. In the second century AD, Lucian's True History, a parody of travel tales, already pictured a group of adventure seekers lifted to the moon. A whirlwind delivered them into the turbulence of lunar politics a colonial war.
And much earlier than any beep of a satellite, these dreams of moon travel were given real, serious thought. The first technical reckoning of how to travel to the moon can be found in the 17th century.
This was inspired by astronomic discoveries. For a long time, it was thought that the world was encapsulated with ethereal or crystal spheres in which nested celestial bodies. But then Galileo managed to compile enough observational data to support Copernicus's theory of heliocentrism. This meant that the moon began, for the first time, to be considered an opaque, Earth-like object.
Galileo's Starry Messenger, published in 1610, even featured some sketches of the eerie moon relief. In 1620, Ben Jonson's masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon was performed before King James I, entertaining the court with satire but also elucidating the newest astronomical viewpoints.
It was in the context of this moon fervour that John Wilkins, a 24-year-old graduate of Oxford University, published in 1638 the first edition of his book The Discovery of a World in the Moone. The book popularised Galileo's description of the moon as a solid and habitable world.
Frontispiece from The Man in the Moone, Francis Godwin (1562-1633). Credit: Houghton Library, Harvard University
A World in the Moone
When preparing the much edited and lengthened second edition of the Discovery, eventually published in 1640, Wilkins was impressed by Francis Godwin's story The Man in the Moone, also appearing in 1638, in which a character named Domingo Gonzales is transported to the moon in a chariot towed by a flock of geese.
After reading this piece of 17th century science fiction, Wilkins suggested that not only must occasional travel to the moon be possible, but also regular visits and habitation. The moon was the ultimate travelling destination of his time, and moon travel a technological achievement pushing the historical and providential limits for mankind.
Appreciating various fictional scenarios, Wilkins aimed to "raise up some spirits eminent for new attempts and strange inventions" and to contemplate practical ways of "bringing the moon closer" by travelling through space. In the pragmatic tone of an artisan, the second edition of the Discovery ruminates on the technicalities:
"I do seriously, and upon good grounds, affirm it possible to make a flying chariot."
Wilkins describes and designs various flying apparatuses driven by manpower, or towed by majestic exotic birds, and even imagines an engine to be contrived on the same principles as the legendary mechanical doves and eagles.
Map of the Moon engraved by the astronomer Johannes Hevelius, 1645. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
He was also alerted to the challenges of moon travel, and even expressed a slight vexation that divine providence did not endow the human body with any natural means of flying. Enumerating the impediments to flight from the Earth, he humorously warns that there won't be any "castles in the air to receive poor pilgrims, or errant knights". He discusses the nature of gravity, how difficult it would be to bring food and water to the moon, and to survive the cold and thin lunar air.
In perspective
But Wilkins also states with perfect assurance that the ways of conveyance through space would eventually be discovered. He predicts that "as soon as the art of flying is found out", humans "will make one of the first colonies, that shall transplant into that other world", all glorifying the future of air travel.
The Discovery ends with Wilkins prophesying that posterity will likely be surprised at the ignorance of his age. But this isn't the feeling kindled in his modern readership, although many of his conclusions about the moon are indeed mistaken. Even though the answers were premature, our contemporary investigations of the moon still follow the same trajectory of questions as did his Space Odyssey 1640: the presence of water, the possibilities for regular travel and colonisation. Young John Wilkins meant to provoke the readers' curiosity concerning "secret truths" about nature, and fulfilled this purpose for centuries ahead.
Space explorations tend to be viewed primarily as manifestations of spectacular and, alas, costly technologies. Is this not the reason why the moon flight program has been jammed for years? In the 17th century, motivation to design the means of travel to the moon was similar to our contemporary stimuli for space exploration as they were formulated at the dawn of the Apollo spaceflight program. People dreamed of pushing the boundaries of humankind and of bringing to life a great deal of useful knowledge.
After all, it is not only machinery that drives human beings into space, but humanity's curiosity and imagination prompting the desire to reach beyond the possible.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
An international team of scientists, led by the University of Leeds, has quantified the relationship between natural sources of particles in the atmosphere and climate change.
Their study, published today in Nature Geoscience, shows that the cooling effect of natural atmospheric particles is greater during warmer years and could therefore slightly reduce the amount that temperatures rise as a result of climate change.
Particles in the atmosphere can alter Earth's climate by absorbing or reflecting sunlight. These particles are often produced by human activities, such as from cars and industry, but there are also naturally occurring particles.
The team combined atmospheric measurements with a computer model to map the effects of two natural particle sources: smoke from forest fires and the gases emitted by trees that can stick together to form tiny particles.
Study lead author Dr Catherine Scott, from the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, said: "Natural particles can alter the climate, but they are also strongly controlled by it.
"As the Earth warms, plants release more volatile gases from their leaves - these are the gases that, for example, give pine forests a piney smell. Once in the air these gases can form tiny particles. More particles in the atmosphere reflect away the Sun's energy, which helps to cool the planet.
"This cooling offsets some of the temperature rise and is known as a negative climate feedback. We can think of forests acting as giant air conditioners slightly reducing the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions."
Study co-author Dominick Spracklen, Professor of Biosphere-Atmosphere Interactions at Leeds, said: "Overall the response of the climate to an initial warming is to amplify that warming, i.e., a positive feedback.
"This natural negative feedback might act to offset a small amount of warming due to climate change but it is not enough to counteract other strong positive feedbacks in the climate system. This means reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are still required to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.
"Our research highlights the need for these complex interactions to be well represented in climate models. The latest generation of models being used for future climate projections include more detail about the way that the atmosphere and the land surface interact than ever before - but it's important that we can isolate the role that these processes are playing as the climate evolves."
The research paper, "Substantial large-scale feedbacks between natural aerosols and climate", is published in Nature Geoscience 4th December 2017.
More information: C. E. Scott et al, Substantial large-scale feedbacks between natural aerosols and climate, Nature Geoscience (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-017-0020-5 Journal information: Nature Geoscience
The internet is about to change dramatically. Unless it isn't.
On Dec. 14, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to approve a plan to reverse rules passed in 2015 that prevent internet service providers from blocking, throttling or prioritizing online content.
The repeal of net neutrality is seen as a victory for large telecommunication companies such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, which stand to benefit from less-stringent regulation, but it is opposed by many tech companies, entrepreneurs and concerned citizens. The FCC has received millions of public comments on the matter on its website, and nationwide protests are planned for Dec. 7.
Justin "Gus" Hurwitz, assistant professor of law and co-director of the Nebraska College of Law's Space, Cyber and Telecommunications Law program, researches the intersection between law and technology and the role of regulation in high-tech industries. In a recent interview with Nebraska Today, he said net neutrality is widely misunderstood and that the new plan should not be seen as an existential threat to the internet, but as a regulatory shift that could benefit consumers and businesses while maintaining a "cop on the beat" to take action should problems arise.
What is net neutrality, and why should the average person care?
Net neutrality is basically the idea that ISPs should treat all data traversing their networks the same. The underlying concern is that, because there isn't a great deal of competition in the market for internet access, ISPs will be able to act anti-competitively to benefit themselves in ways that will harm consumers.
While these concerns are not entirely unreasonable, consumer concern about net neutrality dramatically exceeds either the likelihood or magnitude of potential harms. One reporter who has been covering these issues for several years recently explained this well, saying that concerns about net neutrality are similar to the alarm over the Y2K bug at the turn of the century: People were literally preparing for the end of society due to the Y2K bug, and there ended up being almost no actual effects.
This isn't to say that consumers are wrong to be concerned about a lot of what is going on with the internet, or that net neutrality isn't part of this matrix of issues. But the overwhelming majority of examples that folks point to to demonstrate why net neutrality is a problem are unrelated to net neutrality and are actually examples of things that have been good for consumers, or have been addressed by the government without need for strict net neutrality rules.
Opponents of net neutrality say that current rules are heavy-handed and are stifling growth. Supporters say this repeal could mark the end of the open internet. How do you see the situation?
The internet was "open" for decades prior to adoption of the 2015 rules, and things went pretty well. In fact, in most of the rest of the world, internet access was strictly regulated (or even run) by the government. The United States was the only major economy that expressly adopted a hands-off, competition-based approach in the 1990s, under President Clinton and today, nine of the 10 largest internet companies in the world are located here.
The 2015 rules were premised on a contentious idea called the "virtuous circle," which argues that strict rules would encourage more investment by "edge companies" to develop innovative internet services which, in turn, would increase consumer demand for internet access which, in turn, would encourage ISPs to invest more in building out bigger, better, faster networks. That is, if the theory of the 2015 rules is correct, we should have seen ISPs investing more in their networks since 2015.
In fact, if anything, we have seen the opposite. No credible studies show an increase in investment by ISPs since that time; other studies suggest that investment has decreased by a meaningful amount.
One of the most pressing issues we face today is building out more networks to un- and underserved communities. If the effect of the 2015 rules has been to decrease network investment, this means that the effect has been to slow down these efforts. Under the 2015 rule, those who do not have sufficient internet access are less likely to get that access.
Some are saying this new plan could lead to a tiered internet, with a fast lane and a slow lane (or several lanes). How likely do you think this is, and what might the consequences be?
It's likely, and it's likely a good thing. This is actually an intensively studied question in the economics literature. In the early 2000s, there was basically a new subfield of economics developed to study just this question the effects of paid prioritization on consumers. These studies consistently show that paid prioritization ("fast lanes") can be good for consumers. They also show that they can be bad for consumers and that it's hard to tell beforehand what the outcome will be. But if the outcome is bad, any number of government entities and consumer groups can take action against ISPs to change course.
But there is something more important going on in the background: We already have a tiered internet. The major edge companies Google, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc. invest hundreds of millions of dollars in private "content delivery networks." These are networks that they use to bypass the vast majority of the internet to offer consumers better service. In other words, they are already paying for prioritized access they're just not paying the ISPs for it directly.
This puts startups at a serious competitive disadvantage. If your new service needs very high speed or low latency access, today there is no way for you to get that sort of service, short of paying a great deal of money to a content delivery network. Allowing ISPs to charge for prioritization actually could dramatically benefit startups by giving them a competitive alternative that is easier to implement and can offer even better service than what a content delivery network can offer. That is, paid prioritization can allow startups to overcome a competitive disadvantage that they face today, allowing more innovative services to be brought to consumers.
Several telecom companies have vowed to maintain an open internet regardless of the vote, but promises aren't guarantees. Is the FCC putting too much faith in these for-profit companies? What's to stop them from going back on their promises?
This is the key element of the proposed new rules: ISPs will still be subject to a transparency rule that requires them to disclose how they handle traffic traversing their networks. Both the Federal Trade Commission and state Attorneys General and consumer protection agencies have substantial legal authority to take action against firms that engage in fraudulent or deceptive conduct. So those promises actually are guarantees.
An ISP could change its policy but would need to be up front about that. And this is a critical point: ISPs are hated, reviled companies. If they abuse this, there will be investigations at every level of government. If ISPs implement rules that are actually bad for consumers, Congress will take action. I almost never say that Congress will pass a law to do anything nowadays this is an exception.
What about local communities that only have one or two viable options for internet service providers? How might they be affected?
Most ISPs that service communities operate on a much larger geographic scale and set their policies on a systemwide basis. So even if a given community only has one or two ISPs, those ISPs likely operate in some areas where they compete with a few more. Even then, the market isn't robustly competitive but it is more competitive than it appears on its face.
But even then, our goal should be to get more people more options for getting online. Even more important than areas with only one or two options are those with no ISP options. This brings us back to the question of investment. If we want telecom companies to build networks, it needs to be profitable for them to do so.
If the repeal passes, is that it? Or could net neutrality rules be reinstated?
The new rules are almost certainly going to be challenged in court and they'll almost certainly be upheld. For that matter, the judicial challenge to the 2015 rules is actually still pending, with petitions for review before the Supreme Court. That's a stark reminder about how long the review process can take easily three or four years.
That said, the way that the law currently works, federal agencies face relatively modest burdens when they want to change rules. This means that if there is a change of administration, the rules may change. And they may then change again, and again.
For many of us working in this area (myself included) this is the most important issue in net neutrality. Most of the attention focuses on concerns about what ISPs may or may not do. As I've said, there is actually very little effect that these rules are likely to have on consumers. The rules' biggest effects are on the relationship between the FCC and ISPs, and how intrusive the FCC can be into ISPs' operations and business decisions. The bigger problem is that the Communications Act, which tells the FCC how to operate, is exceptionally unclear about how the FCC should deal with ISPs (unsurprisingly, given that it was written in the early 1990s). This alone creates a great deal of uncertainty (and costs), and the fact that the FCC can change its rules as the political winds change amplifies this uncertainty (and costs).
What we really need is for Congress to step in to give the FCC clearer guidance about how it is supposed to regulate the ISP market. There is also a great deal of discussion that we really need the courts to impose stricter review on agencies to make it more difficult for them to flip-flop between policies.
This is a long-exposure image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744. It shows some of the faintest and youngest galaxies detected in space. Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI
When galaxy clusters and globular star clusters form, a phenomenon called "violent relaxation" occurs. After interacting intensely, the thousands or even millions of bodies reach a state of relative gravitational equilibrium and a fairly long-lasting spatial distribution.
A new study developed by Brazilian researchers and published in The Astrophysical Journal argues that astrophysicists' understanding of violent relaxation is wrong and sets out to correct it.
"The problem is that Vlasov's Equation assumes constant entropy in the system, meaning there's no production of entropy. This is equivalent to saying the situation is symmetrical in time, since the arrow of time is determined by increasing entropy. It evidently isn't in the actual phenomenon," says Laerte Sodre Junior, one of the authors of the study, full professor, and ex-director of the University of Sao Paulo's Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics & Atmospheric Sciences (IAG-USP) in Brazil.
According to Sodre, the relaxation process has always been analyzed using the Vlasov Equation, a differential equation proposed in 1931 by Russian physicist Anatoly Alexandrovich Vlasov [1908-75] to describe the kinetic processes that take place in plasma.
If it were true, a process of this kindreversible in timewould require a revision of the very foundations of physics. For this reason, the specialized literature refers to it as "the fundamental paradox of stellar dynamics."
"It was clear to us that something was wrong, and our suspicion was confirmed by the study," Sodre said. "The solution we found to the purported 'paradox' can be summed up in one short sentence: The Vlasov Equation simply doesn't apply to this case."
Virial equilibrium
The researchers leveraged powerful computational resources, such as employing a computer cluster as a means of proving this intuitive idea. As expected, the simulations showed that entropy increases, but another outcome was hard to understand: While entropy increases in the long run, at the start of the relaxation process, it fluctuates, alternately increasing and decreasing.
"It may seem to contradict what we know about entropy, which is understood to be a quantity that always increases. It certainly does increase inexorably in the long run, but not all the time. Owing to the large scope of gravitational interactions, bodies establish correlations with each other, and these correlations determine the oscillatory nature of entropy in the initial stage of the process," Sodre said.
"We can think about the question like this. Entropy has two aspects. One is purely chaotic, associated with the second law of thermodynamicsthis is conventional entropy. The other derives from these correlations, which fade away over time, albeit slowly. This is what determines its oscillatory behavior."
It might be easier to understand the problem by imagining a cluster of 1,000 stars or 1,000 galaxies confined in a certain volume. They initially have zero velocity, but owing to gravitational interaction, each one begins to attract all the others, and the initial distribution changes, alternately contracting and expanding.
This to-and-fro determined by long-range interactions is associated with oscillations of entropy. It lasts until the entire system reaches a state of relative equilibrium, in which it remains somewhat stable in terms of its general properties. In the 19th century, this state was given the name "virial equilibrium," a term that is still in use.
"It's a specific feature of gravitational interactions. Electromagnetic interactions are also long-range, but because matter is in general electrically neutral, their effects are confined to a limited volume. The shielding effect doesn't occur with gravitational force. In principle, it can extend to infinity. This is what creates those correlations," Sodre said.
Although galaxy clusters and globular star clusters interact with the entire universe, they can be thought of here as closed, "non-dissipative" systems, meaning that their total energy is not lost to the external medium, but conserved.
Some bodies acquire large amounts of kinetic energy and accelerate beyond escape velocity, becoming detached from the system, but this is not especially significant, overall. Entropy oscillation generally should be considered an internal process, which does not involve an exchange of energy with the medium.
"No other types of system display entropy oscillations that I know of, bar one: chemical reactions in which the compound produced serves as a catalyst for the inverse reaction. As a result, the reaction switches to and fro, and entropy in the system oscillates," Sodre said.
The new study resolves the "fundamental paradox of stellar dynamics," and describes the formation of cosmic macrostructures more realistically. The other researchers who took part were Leandro Jose Beraldo e Silva, Walter de Siqueira Pedra, Eder Leonardo Duarte Perico and Marcos Vinicius Borges Teixeira Lima.
Methodology
The gravitational interaction between these celestial bodiesgalaxies or starsis well described by Newton's law of universal gravitation, published 330 years ago. The problem is mathematically easy to solve for a two-body system, but the analytical solution becomes unworkable in systems involving thousands or millions of bodies, each of which interacts gravitationally with the rest. Hence the need to resort to complex numerical simulations.
"We used numerical techniques developed by Norwegian astronomer Sverre Aarseth, the leading expert on this kind of simulation involving many bodies," Sodre said. "These simulations require so much computer power that we had to use clusters of GPUs, which was far more efficient than the more usually deployed CPUs. Even so, each simulation took several days."
During the project, the Brazilian researchers were actually visited by Aarseth, who remains highly active at age 83. In addition to being a leading astronomer, the prizewinning Norwegian scientist is a keen trekker, mountaineer and nature lover, and he is ranked as an International Correspondence Chess Master.
"Aarseth's computer programs enabled us to solve the problem efficiently and reliably," Sodre said. "We then tested the results by comparing them with the solutions obtained using other cosmological programs. They matched."
More information: Leandro Beraldo e Silva et al, The Arrow of Time in the Collapse of Collisionless Self-gravitating Systems: Non-validity of the VlasovPoisson Equation during Violent Relaxation, The Astrophysical Journal (2017). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aa876e Journal information: Astrophysical Journal
Provided by FAPESP
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
(Phys.org)A small team of researchers from Fordham University and Providence College, both in the U.S., has found that there are small but discernible genetic differences between rats living uptown versus downtown on the island of Manhattan. In their paper published in the journal Molecular Ecology, the group describes trapping rats from one end of the island to the other, conducting genetic tests on them and outlining what they found.
New York City, like other major cities in the world, hosts a very large population of ratsin this case, mostly brown rats. Most people that live there find them to be a problem, because in addition to being destructive and carriers of disease, they are also considered to be disgusting. In this new effort, the researchers sought to learn more about the rats that live only on Manhattan Island, noting that little work has been done to understand the rats that live there.
The study consisted of trapping rats, moving north to south on the island, cutting off their tails, and using them as a source for DNA analysisand then comparing the genomic results by geography.
The researchers report that the vast majority of the rats were descendants of rats from western Europebrought over on ships over 200 years ago. But the analysis also revealed that the rats have been in the area long enough to have developed minor genetic differences depending on where they lived. This, the team notes, was not particularly surprising due to rat behaviorthey rarely stray far from home. Nor was it surprising to see differences between the uptown and downtown ratsthe two areas are separated by the commercial district, which is not particularly favorable to rats. Thus, those that live uptown have little incentive to move downtown, or vice-versa. Surprisingly, the analysis showed that there were even slight differences between neighborhoodseach had their own distinct rats. The researchers could tell, for example, by looking at an individual rat profile, if it had resided in the East or West Village.
The group plans to continue their study of urban rat populations, looking for patterns that might help city planners reduce the number of rats, making cities safer and less disgusting places to live.
More information: Matthew Combs et al. Spatial population genomics of the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus ) in New York City, Molecular Ecology (2017). DOI: 10.1111/mec.14437 Abstract
Human commensal species such as rodent pests are often widely distributed across cities and threaten both infrastructure and public health. Spatially-explicit population genomic methods provide insights into movements for cryptic pests that drive evolutionary connectivity across multiple spatial scales. We examined spatial patterns of neutral genome-wide variation in brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) across Manhattan, New York City (NYC) using 262 samples and 61,401 SNPs to understand: 1) relatedness among nearby individuals and the extent of spatial genetic structure in a discrete urban landscape; 2) the geographic origin of NYC rats, using a large, previously-published dataset of global rat genotypes; and 3) heterogeneity in gene flow across the city, particularly deviations from isolation-by-distance. We found that rats separated by 200m exhibit strong spatial autocorrelation (r = 0.3, p = 0.001) and the effects of localized genetic drift extend to a range of 1400m. Across Manhattan, rats exhibited a homogeneous population origin from rats that likely invaded from Great Britain. While traditional approaches identified a single evolutionary cluster with clinal structure across Manhattan, recently-developed methods (e.g., fineSTRUCTURE, sPCA, EEMS) provided evidence of reduced dispersal across the island's less residential Midtown region resulting in fine-scale genetic structuring (FST = 0.01) and two evolutionary clusters (Uptown and Downtown Manhattan). Thus, while some urban populations of human commensals may appear to be continuously distributed, landscape heterogeneity within cities can drive differences in habitat quality and dispersal, with implications for the spatial distribution of genomic variation, population management, and the study of widely distributed pests. Journal information: Molecular Ecology
2017 Phys.org
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
Researchers from the University of Birmingham, University of Tubingen and University of St. Andrews have suggested that gorillas are capable of learning food cleaning behaviours without having to witness it in others first.
Though the authors acknowledge that general purpose social learning between individuals can help to increase the behaviour in frequency, their study of captive gorillas - who haven't crossed paths with those who are already known to show the behaviour - shows that food cleaning can be reinnovated spontaneously.
Their findings, published in PLoS ONE, challenge the interpretation of recently published data that suggested that wild gorillas acquire food cleaning primarily by learning from others.
A captive population of western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) at the Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Centre in Leipzig Zoo, Germany, was provided with clean and dirty apples by the research team.
When the gorillas were provided with dirty apples, coated with sand, all subjects showed evidence of food cleaning in at least 75% of trials.
Lead author Damien Neadle, from the University of Birmingham, explained, "In four of our five gorillas, at least one of the techniques for cleaning was similar to that observed in the wild. Given that these two groups are culturally unconnected, it suggests that social learning is not required for this behaviour to emerge"
"This fact does not discount the importance of social learning, but simply emphasises the role of individual learning in the emergence of food cleaning behaviour in western lowland gorillas. Here, we argue that individual learning is responsible for the form of the behaviour, whilst social learning possibly contributes to its frequency."
"Rather than being a binary consideration of either cultural learning or not, behaviours like food cleaning, which can be propagated by shared learning but are also capable of being learnt spontaneously by individuals, could be deemed to be 'soft culture'."
Velvetleaf represents one of the many invasive plant species that was tested by Dan Atwater and Jacob Barney. Credit: Virginia Tech
It's no secret that globalization, aided by climate change, is helping invasive species gain a foothold across the planet. What came as something of a surprise to Virginia Tech researchers was just how mutable these invaders are.
The scientists discovered that invasive plant species are not only highly adaptive, they are essentially able to change in order to thrive on new continents and in different types of climates, challenging the assumption that species occupy the same environment in native and invasive ranges.
The study, by Jacob Barney, an associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' Department of Plant Pathology, Physiology, and Weed Science and Dan Atwater, a lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University and Barney's former post-doctoral advisee, was published Tuesday in Nature Ecology and Evolution, an online journal.
"This is important for both changing how we think about species and where they grow," said Barney, who is also a fellow in the Fralin Life Science Institute and an affiliate of the Global Change Center. "The findings also change our ability to predict where they will grow, and how they may respond in a changing climate. This could be a game-changer for invasive species risk assessment and conservation."
Atwater used data compiled by undergraduate Carissa Ervine, also an author on the paper, to test a long-held assumption in ecology - that the climate limitations of plants do not change, which means we can predict where they will grow. Small studies supported this supposition. However, the Virginia Tech researchers blew this assumption away by testing more than 800 species using new models developed by Atwater and Barney.
"Some people would say that invasive species have different distributions in a new climate. But we found they are occupying a wider range of new climates," said Atwater. "Species are changing in their ecology when they move from one continent to another. We should expect species to change, possibly permanently, when they cross continents."
The results have major consequences for applying environmental niche models to assess the risk of invasive species and for predicting species' responses to climate change. Species capable of changing their ecology and the climates they call home may pose a challenge to researchers using native range data to forecast the distribution of invasive species.
The driver behind the study was a desire to forecast the future distribution of invasive species which pose a serious threat to human, environmental, and economic health. The researchers began by posing the question: Do invasive species occupy the same climate in invasive range that they do in their native range? To find out, they compared native and invasive species.
Barney and Atwater examined 815 terrestrial plant species from every continent, along with millions of occurrence points, or locations where the plants have been known to occur, and compared models in the largest global invasive species study to date. They found evidence of climatic niche shifts in all of the 815 plant species introduced across five continents. A climatic niche refers to the set of climates in which a species has a stable or growing population.
Generally, their findings suggest that niche shifts reflect changes in climate availability at the continent scale and were the largest in long-lived and cultivated species. If species move to a warmer continent, for instance, they tend to shift towards occupying warmer climates. In short, cultivated plants with long lifespans are particularly adept at making themselves home in brand new climates.
"There are not only implications for predicting where invasive species will occur, there are management repercussions as well," said Barney. "As an example, for certain species we use biocontrol, introducing one organism to control another, an approach that may not be effective or safe if the targeted species undergoes ecological change. When we do climate modeling, we assume the climate niche may be the same when it may not be. So, there are a broad range of implications in a broad range of fields."
Barney raised another concern.
"By cultivating speciesbending them for agricultural or ornamental purposes and selecting for traits such as cold-hardiness, we push them into environments they would not have occupied," he said. "Those selection pressures in breeding, plus the environments we put them in, may exaggerate this change. Short-lived species, for example, go into dryer climates. So the take home is that different species' traits influence the direction of a niche shift."
Once Atwater and Barney understand these drivers more fully, they hope to be able to predict how the geographic range of an invasive species will increase in order to pinpoint areas likely to be invaded.
"The other piece layered onto this is the assumption that the climate is stable, which is not the case," said Atwater. "We have also relied on the assumption that a species is a species and its ecological tendencies remain constant. This too is not the case. Species vary in space and time. They behave differently on different continents and in different climates. Consequently, the concept of a species climatic niche is less stable and less clearly defined."
With food production, human health, ecosystem resilience, and biodiversity at stake as global invasions outpace our ability to respond, a greater understanding of climatic niche shifts is critical to future attempts to forecast species dynamics, according to the researchers.
More information: Daniel Z. Atwater et al, Climatic niche shifts are common in introduced plants, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0396-z Journal information: Nature Ecology & Evolution
The swamp wallaby (Wallabia bicolor) is more closely related to the remaining wallaby species and the large red and grey kangaroos and wallaroos than previously assumed. Credit: Queensland University of Technology, Matthew Phillips
Ironically, it is jumping genes that indicate the need for a reorganization of the kangaroos' phylogenetic tree. According to a new study by a Senckenberg scientist, published recently in the journal Scientific Reports, the swamp wallaby is more closely related to the remaining wallaby species and the large red and grey kangaroos and wallaroos than previously assumed. Together with her Australian colleagues from QUT in Brisbane, the researcher was the first to examine the relationships within the kangaroo genus Macropus on the basis of retrotransposons, genes that literally jump across the genetic material.
Like their larger relatives, the kangaroos, the smaller wallabies are an iconic part of the fauna "down under." Even the Australian National Rugby Team is named after them. However, one wallaby stands out among the rest the swamp wallaby. It is the only marsupial that is able to switch to "turbo speed" during reproduction, becoming pregnant again before giving birth to the first set of offspring. The animal, which is widespread on the east coast of Australia, also differs from the other wallabies in its appearance, e.g., the shape of its teeth and its more crouched hop.
Until now, the swamp wallaby was placed in its own genus, Wallabia, which only comprises one single species. However, this outsider role is actually not justified as recently shown by the molecular-genetic studies at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre.
"At the genetic level, the swamp wallaby does not represent a sister genus to the other wallabies, but it belongs to the genus Macropus, like all remaining wallaby species. Thus, it is not only more closely related to the other wallabies than previously thought, but also to Australia's icons, the large red and grey kangaroos and the wallaroos," explains Dr. Maria Nilsson, head of the study.
The red-necked wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus) is one of the "woodland wallabies" - the group the researchers found the swamp wallaby to be closest related to. Credit: Queensland University of Technology, Matthew Phillips
Of all things, it was retrotransposons genes that literally jump across the genetic material that shed new light on the relationships among wallabies and kangaroos. These mobile genetic elements are able to make copies of themselves and reinsert these at a different location in the genome. If they occur in the same areas in different species, these species have a common ancestry.
Nilsson elaborates: "Therefore, such jumping genes are also referred to as molecular fossils, which allow inferences on the phylogenetic history. They occur in almost all organisms; due to their properties, they have gained an increasing importance in evolutionary research in recent years."
According to the analysis, the modern subgenera of the kangaroo genus Macropus as well as the swamp wallaby subsequently evolved from a common ancestor approximately five to seven million years ago. During this time period, the forests in Australia began to open up, many later being replaced by spreading grasslands. This habitat was colonized by new species of large red and grey kangaroos and wallaroos. "The wallabies and the swamp wallaby arose at a later date, and they inhabit woodlands," says Nilsson.
According to the research the swamp wallaby belongs to the genus Macropus like the the red kangaroo (Macropus rufus) one of Australias icons. Credit: Queensland Museum, Gary Cranitch
Even in this genetic analysis, the swamp wallaby retains a special status. Although it now falls within the genus Macropus, it constitutes a subgenus within it and, not surprisingly, this subgenus only consists of one lone species.
The research also still leaves some mystery to be solved as fellow researcher, Matthew Phillips, Associate Professor at the Queenland University of Technology points out in conclusion: "Although we show that the swamp wallaby clearly falls within Macropus, we also found some evidence for a small portion of it' s genome being a relic of an ancient, now extinct kangaroo. It might be interesting to investigate this further."
More information: William G. Dodt et al. Resolving kangaroo phylogeny and overcoming retrotransposon ascertainment bias, Scientific Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-16148-0 Journal information: Scientific Reports
Maps show the density of aboveground carbon stocks in the Sabah state of Malaysia on the island of Borneo. Mapping forest carbon is an important step in identifying areas for conservation, but is tremendously difficult to accomplish without airborne and satellite technology. Credit: Greg Asner/Carnegie Airborne Observatory.
About 40 percent of northern Malaysian Borneo's carbon stocks exist in forests that are not designated for maximum protections, according to new remote sensing and satellite mapping from Carnegie's Greg Asner and his colleagues.
Asner's flying laboratory, the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, was able to map carbon stocks thattogether with satellite imaging and other geospatial datawill guide conservation efforts undertaken by the Sabah Forestry Department in Malaysian Borneo, the Southeast Asia Rainforest Research Partnership (SEARRP), the PACOS Trust, BC Initiative and other organizations.
"We are proud to be part of this groundbreaking endeavor in the state of Sabah, which sets us apart in accelerating the quest and capacity to protect, restore, and conserve more high-conservation and high-carbon forests in this country," said Sam Mannan, Chief Conservator of Forests. "We shall apply the information gathered for the common good of society, particularly, in mitigating against the worst effects of climate change. This project is of immense value to tropical forest management."
Why is measuring carbon stocks so important?
Because tropical forests like those in the Sabah have converted large quantities atmospheric carbon into organic materialand they accomplish more of this than any other terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. But when this forest land is repurposed for agriculture, logging, or mining, carbon is released into the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change. Tropical deforestation and forest degradation account for about a tenth of the world's carbon emissions each year.
So, figuring out which segments of Sabah's forests contain the most carbon in the form of biomass is an important first step in helping the government of the Sabah meet its goal of increasing protected forests from 1.8 to 2.2 million hectares.
"The nearly 4 million hectares of Sabah's forests are a kaleidoscope of many different habitats and management histories, which required a wall-to-wall mapping effort to truly quantify the amount of carbon they contain," Asner explained.
Using the Carnegie Airborne Observatory's signature technique, called airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy, integrated with satellite imaging, and other geospatial data, Asner and his team were able to provide high-resolution maps of Sabah's forests. In addition to finding 50 trees of the tallest tropical trees ever measured, the CAO team pinpointed important targets for conservation efforts.
They found that about 40 percent of the state's carbon is contained in forests that are not protected at the highest designation. What's more, they discovered that Sabah could double carbon stocks by allowing previously logged forests to regeneratea process that they estimate would take about a century.
SEARRP's Glen Reynolds said: "it's a rare opportunity to work with state-wide datasets of this quality. By integrating the CAO maps with ground-based biodiversity data and information on the use of forests by local people, we should be uniquely well placed to identify hundreds of thousands of new conservation areas in Sabah that not only protect key habitats, but also the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities".
"Forest carbon is an important factor in locating places where conservation efforts could make the greatest impact," Asner added. "But other data on canopy biodiversity and animal habitats, such as our work on Bornean orangutans, will also help inform decisionmakers."
By PTI: Mumbai, Dec 3 (PTI) The fate of "Padmavati" rests in the hands of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and actor Shahid Kapoor said now as the film is with the right authority, he hopes the period drama will release soon.
The Sanjay Leela Bhansali-directed film was slated to be released on December 1, but the makers "voluntarily" deferred the release after the CBFC asked them to reapply for certification with complete details.
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They recently applied for 3D certification.
"It is a nice big circle. It is back to where we started, which is where it should have been. The CBFC should have been the right body to take a decision. I am hoping that sooner, not later, it is already pretty being long, we will get a decision.
"... I saw lot of problem with Udta Punjab and eventually the film released and everybody saw it. The film was loved by the people. And I do believe that it will be similar for Padmavati," Shahid said at an event here.
The actor is unfazed by the film being pushed and said "Padmavati" will do well if the team has done a good job.
"... Whenever the film comes out, people will react the way they would to a story that is being told. If the film has the dignity, strength, originality and cinematic effect that a good film should have, the people will speak well of it. I believe that it is a good film," he said.
"Padmavati" is facing trouble with several Rajput groups and political leaders, alleging that Bhansali has tampered with "historical facts" in the movie.
The director has been accused of using a romantic dream sequence between Rajput queen Padmini (Deepika) and Sultan Alauddin Khilji (Ranveer Singh), a claim repeatedly denied by him.
Historians are divided over whether Padmini actually existed.
Chief ministers of BJP-ruled states such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat have also called for a ban on the period drama. PTI KKP SHD/RDS RDS
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Conventional WIMP theories predict that dark matter particles rarely interact with one another, and only weakly with normal matter. Hitoshi Murayama of UC Berkeley and Yonit Hochberg of Hebrew University predict that dark matter SIMPs, comprised of a quark and an antiquark, would collide and interact strongly with one another, producing noticeable effects when the dark matter in galaxies collide. Credit: Kavli IPMU graphic
The intensive, worldwide search for dark matter, the missing mass in the universe, has so far failed to find an abundance of dark, massive stars or scads of strange new weakly interacting particles, but a new candidate is slowly gaining followers and observational support.
Called SIMPs - strongly interacting massive particles - they were proposed three years ago by University of California, Berkeley theoretical physicist Hitoshi Murayama, a professor of physics and director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) in Japan, and former UC Berkeley postdoc Yonit Hochberg, now at Hebrew University in Israel.
Murayama says that recent observations of a nearby galactic pile-up could be evidence for the existence of SIMPs, and he anticipates that future particle physics experiments will discover one of them.
Murayama discussed his latest theoretical ideas about SIMPs and how the colliding galaxies support the theory in an invited talk Dec. 4 at the 29th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in Cape Town, South Africa.
Astronomers have calculated that dark matter, while invisible, makes up about 85 percent of the mass of the universe. The solidest evidence for its existence is the motion of stars inside galaxies: Without an unseen blob of dark matter, galaxies would fly apart. In some galaxies, the visible stars are so rare that dark matter makes up 99.9 percent of the mass of the galaxy.
Theorists first thought that this invisible matter was just normal matter too dim to see: failed stars called brown dwarfs, burned-out stars or black holes. Yet so-called massive compact halo objects - MACHOs - eluded discovery, and earlier this year a survey of the Andromeda galaxy by the Subaru Telescope basically ruled out any significant undiscovered population of black holes. The researchers searched for black holes left over from the very early universe, so-called primordial black holes, by looking for sudden brightenings produced when they pass in front of background stars and act like a weak lens. They found exactly one - too few to contribute significantly to the mass of the galaxy.
The fundamental structure of the proposed SIMP (strongly interacting massive particle) is similar to that of a pion (left). Pions are composed of an up quark and a down antiquark, with a gluon (g) holding them together. A SIMP would be composed of a quark and an antiquark held together by a gluon (G). Credit: Kavli IPMU graphic
"That study pretty much eliminated the possibility of MACHOs; I would say it is pretty much gone," Murayama said.
WIMPsweakly interacting massive particleshave fared no better, despite being the focus of researchers' attention for several decades. They should be relatively large - about 100 times heavier than the proton - and interact so rarely with one another that they are termed "weakly" interacting. They were thought to interact more frequently with normal matter through gravity, helping to attract normal matter into clumps that grow into galaxies and eventually spawn stars.
SIMPs interact with themselves, but not others
SIMPs, like WIMPs and MACHOs, theoretically would have been produced in large quantities early in the history of the universe and since have cooled to the average cosmic temperature. But unlike WIMPs, SIMPs are theorized to interact strongly with themselves via gravity but very weakly with normal matter. One possibility proposed by Murayama is that a SIMP is a new combination of quarks, which are the fundamental components of particles like the proton and neutron, called baryons. Whereas protons and neutrons are composed of three quarks, a SIMP would be more like a pion in containing only two: a quark and an antiquark.
The SIMP would be smaller than a WIMP, with a size or cross section like that of an atomic nucleus, which implies there are more of them than there would be WIMPs. Larger numbers would mean that, despite their weak interaction with normal matter - primarily by scattering off of it, as opposed to merging with or decaying into normal matter - they would still leave a fingerprint on normal matter, Murayama said.
He sees such a fingerprint in four colliding galaxies within the Abell 3827 cluster, where, surprisingly, the dark matter appears to lag behind the visible matter. This could be explained, he said, by interactions between the dark matter in each galaxy that slows down the merger of dark matter but not that of normal matter, basically stars.
Conventional WIMP theories predict a highly peaked distribution, or cusp, of dark matter in a small area in the center of every galaxy. SIMP theory predicts a spread of dark matter in the center, which is more typical of dwarf galaxies. Credit: Kavli IPMU graphic based on NASA, STScI images
"One way to understand why the dark matter is lagging behind the luminous matter is that the dark matter particles actually have finite size, they scatter against each other, so when they want to move toward the rest of the system they get pushed back," Murayama said. "This would explain the observation. That is the kind of thing predicted by my theory of dark matter being a bound state of new kind of quarks."
SIMPs also overcome a major failing of WIMP theory: the ability to explain the distribution of dark matter in small galaxies.
"There has been this longstanding puzzle: If you look at dwarf galaxies, which are very small with rather few stars, they are really dominated by dark matter. And if you go through numerical simulations of how dark matter clumps together, they always predict that there is a huge concentration towards the center. A cusp," Murayama said. "But observations seem to suggest that concentration is flatter: a core instead of a cusp. The core/cusp problem has been considered one of the major issues with dark matter that doesn't interact other than by gravity. But if dark matter has a finite size, like a SIMP, the particles can go 'clink' and disperse themselves, and that would actually flatten out the mass profile toward the center. That is another piece of 'evidence' for this kind of theoretical idea."
Ongoing searches for WIMPs and axions
Ground-based experiments to look for SIMPs are being planned, mostly at accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, where physicists are always looking for unknown particles that fit new predictions. Another experiment at the planned International Linear Collider in Japan could also be used to look for SIMPs.
As Murayama and his colleagues refine the theory of SIMPs and look for ways to find them, the search for WIMPs continues. The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment in an underground mine in South Dakota has set stringent limits on what a WIMP can look like, and an upgraded experiment called LZ will push those limits further. Daniel McKinsey, a UC Berkeley professor of physics, is one of the co-spokespersons for this experiment, working closely with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where Murayama is a faculty senior scientist.
This Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy cluster Abell 3827 shows the ongoing collision of four bright galaxies and one faint central galaxy, as well as foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy and galaxies behind the cluster (Arc B and Lensed image A) that are distorted because of normal and dark matter within the cluster. SIMPs could explain why the dark matter, unseen but detectable because of the lensing, lags behind the normal matter in the collision. Credit: University of California - Berkeley
Physicists are also seeking other dark matter candidates that are not WIMPs. UC Berkeley faculty are involved in two experiments looking for a hypothetical particle called an axion, which may fit the requirements for dark matter. The Cosmic Axion Spin-Precession Experiment (CASPEr), led by Dmitry Budker, a professor emeritus of physics who is now at the University of Mainz in Germany, and theoretician Surjeet Rajendran, a UC Berkeley professor of physics, is planning to look for perturbations in nuclear spin caused by an axion field. Karl van Bibber, a professor of nuclear engineering, plays a key role in the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment - High Frequency (ADMX-HF), which seeks to detect axions inside a microwave cavity within a strong magnetic field as they convert to photons.
"Of course we shouldn't abandon looking for WIMPs," Murayama said, "but the experimental limits are getting really, really important. Once you get to the level of measurement, where we will be in the near future, even neutrinos end up being the background to the experiment, which is unimaginable."
Neutrinos interact so rarely with normal matter that an estimated 100 trillion fly through our bodies every second without our noticing, something that makes them extremely difficult to detect.
"The community consensus is kind of, we don't know how far we need to go, but at least we need to get down to this level," he added. "But because there are definitely no signs of WIMPs appearing, people are starting to think more broadly these days. Let's stop and think about it again."
Credit: NASA/JPL
Three times further away from the sun than the Earth lies an enormous lump of metal. Around 252km in diameter, the metallic "M-class" asteroid 16 Psyche is the target of NASA's next mission to the belt of giant rocks that encircles the inner solar system. And the space agency now plans to visit it much sooner than originally planned.
Not only has the launch has been brought forward one year to the summer of 2022, but NASA's scientists have also found a way to get to Psyche (pronounced SYKe-ee) much faster by taking a more efficient trajectory. The new route means the Psyche spacecraft won't have to swing around the Earth to build up speed and won't pass as close to the sun, so it needs less heat protection. It is now due to arrive in 2026, four years earlier than the original timeline.
The main aim of the journey to Psyshe is to gather more information about our own solar system. Psyche is one of many wandering members of the asteroid belt. Unlike the rest of its rocky neighbours, Psyche appears to be entirely made of nickel and iron, just like the Earth's core. This, together with its size, has led to the theory that it might be the remains of the inside of a planet.
Asteroids are made up of primitive materials, leftovers from the dust cloud from which our solar system originated. Different types of asteroids resemble the various steps it took to form planets from this dust cloud. This means they reveal a lot about the origin and evolution of our solar system. Scientists think Psyche could be what's left of an exposed metal core of a planet very similar to Earth.
We actually derive much of our knowledge about asteroids and the evolution of planets from the study of meteorites. Many asteroids and comets are primitive protoplanetary bodies accumulated from the same dust cloud our solar system originates from. As these protoplanetary bodies collide, gravity pulls them together into ever-larger bodies. Eventually these bodies become big and hot enough to partially melt, allowing heavy materials such as iron to sink to the core and lighter material such as silicon to rise to the surface.
This process, known as differentiation, explains why Earth and other planets such as Mercury, Venus or Mars have an iron core and silicon-rich mantle and crust. The 16 Psyche asteroid is thought to be the leftover iron core of a planet stripped of its mantle in a giant collision.
Psyche shares its home on the asteroid belt with more than 7,000 other planetoids. Credit: Shutterstock
But many questions regarding the formation of Psyche remain. How do you strip a planet of its mantle only leaving the core? Perhaps there is an alternative formation mechanism of an iron-rich body that does not involve differentiation? Psyche may once have been molten and, if so, did it cool from the inside out or from its surface to the core?
Also, Earth's magnetic field comes from a liquid outer core circling around a solid inner core. Did these processes occur on Psyche and create a magnetic field? What elements other than iron accumulate in a core? And how does the surface geology of an iron body look compared to a rocky or icy body?
Avoiding collisions
There are other reasons for visiting asteroids. For one thing, possible collisions with Earth can have devastating effects. The impact of an 15km-wide asteroid approximately 65m years ago is linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs. And the explosion of the 30m-diameter Chelyabinsk asteroid over Russia in 2013 led to injuries and damage on the ground. We need to know as much as possible about the composition and physical make-up of asteroids to devise the best ways to defend our planet.
Asteroids also provide resources. Those containing water or other valuable materials may act as stepping stones for human exploration of the solar system. And asteroids crossing Earth's orbit may become convenient targets for mining operations, providing materials that are running out on Earth and potentially taking environmentally detrimental extraction methods off Earth. Companies including Planetary Resources and countries like Luxembourg have already started to pursue these ideas in earnest.
The Psyche spacecraft will carry four instruments to gather as much information about the asteroid as it can: a camera, a gamma-ray spectrometer to record what chemical elements are there, a magnetometer, and a radio gravity experiment. The data these devices collect should help us work out if Psyche is the frozen core of a former planet or simply a lump of unmelted metal. If it is a core, then it might help us determine exactly what's at the centre of our own planet.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the lead scientist of the mission, probably summarised it best: "We learn about inner space by visiting outer space".
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
BiliSpec is a low-cost, battery-powered reader designed to diagnose jaundice by immediately quantifying serum bilirubin levels from a small drop of whole blood. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
The first clinical study of a low-cost, hand-held jaundice detector invented by Rice University students couldn't have come at a better time for NEST360, an international team of scientists, doctors and global health experts preparing for a Dec. 11 competition for $100 million from the MacArthur Foundation. The money would allow the team to carry out its visionary plan to halve the number of newborn deaths in African hospitals within 10 years.
"As the clinical study of BiliSpec shows, saving newborn lives in sub-Saharan Africa is achievable," said NEST360's Rebecca Richards-Kortum, a Rice bioengineering professor and study co-author who has worked for more than a decade to bring effective, affordable neonatal technologies like BiliSpec to Africa. "It simply requires the right tools in the right hands at the right time."
The clinical study, which is based on tests in February and March on 68 patients at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, will appear this week in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
BiliSpec is a low-cost, battery-powered reader designed to diagnose jaundice by immediately quantifying serum bilirubin levels from a small drop of whole blood. Jaundice, which is caused by the buildup of bilirubin in the bloodstream, affects about 60 percent of newborns and can cause severe, untreatable brain damage or death if it is untreated. Standard jaundice tests require multiple expensive disposables and laboratory equipment like centrifuges or spectrophotometers that African hospitals typically cannot afford.
Rice University students (from left) Mathieu Simeral, Pelham Keahey and Kristofer Schroder helped complete the first clinical study of BiliSpec, a low-cost, battery-powered reader designed to diagnose jaundice by immediately quantifying serum bilirubin levels from a small drop of whole blood. BiliSpec is one component of a 17-piece neonatal package called NEST, short for Newborn Essential Solutions and Technologies, that is designed specifically for African hospitals by NEST360, an international team of scientists, doctors and global health experts. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
Babies in sub-Saharan Africa are about 100 times more likely to die of jaundice than are babies in the U.S., partly because doctors diagnosing jaundice in sub-Saharan Africa have little to go on other than what their eyes tell them.
"Clinicians in sub-Saharan Africa typically diagnose jaundice by looking at a child and gauging the color of their skin or the whites of their eyes," said study co-author Pelham Keahey, a Rice applied physics graduate student who worked alongside clinicians at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital to gather data for the study.
The study showed that BiliSpec has comparable accuracy to the more expensive laboratory tests found in high-resource settings. Each BiliSpec test costs about 5 cents and can be performed in about two minutes right at the patient's bedside. The price is important because it could bring testing for jaundice within reach for cash-strapped hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa.
"The next step is a larger, two-year follow-up study of efficacy and usability that will be conducted at five hospitals in Malawi," Keahey said. Rice won funding for the follow-up study in August from Saving Lives at Birth, a joint undertaking by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the governments of Norway, Canada and South Korea.
BiliSpec is one component of a 17-piece neonatal package called NEST, short for Newborn Essential Solutions and Technologies, that is designed specifically for African hospitals.
Credit: University of Salford
Marine ecologists have shown that traces of DNA in the sea can be used to monitor shark populations.
Current methods of baiting, hooking and filming sharks, rays and other large fish are invasive and costly and require teams of scientists spending much time at sea.
Now, a U.K. study, published today in Scientific Reports, has shown it is possible to monitor these animals via environmental DNA (eDNA), whereby a sample of seawater can provide the identifiable 'tracks' of numerous species of shark.
"Water contains minute fragments of the skin, excretions, blood of animals that have swum through there," explains Stefano Mariani, professor of conservation genetics at the University of Salford.
"It's just like when detectives do a forensic search of a crime scene, and can locate tissues and cells that contain the DNA of the suspects"
Almost half of all known shark species are classified as 'data deficient," in part, because of the expense and complexity of finding the animals in the first place.
"The beauty of our method is that we can get a picture of shark diversity without the need for chasing, baiting and hooking them so it is a lot faster for conservation scientists and less traumatic for the animals," added Judith Bakker, the lead author of the study.
The team, which included scientists from six countries, from Europe and the Americas, took water samples in four sites in the Caribbean and three in the Pacific Coral Sea. Using a process called metabarcoding, the team recovered significantly more shark DNA sequences in less anthropogenically impacted areas. In the Caribbean, the most diverse site was the Bahamas (a shark sanctuary) where 11 species were identified; in the Pacific, the samples from the remote, inhabited archipelago of Chesterfield proved to contain the largest amount of shark DNA .
Bakker said: "To be able to glean so much information about these charismatic predators by simply sampling a few litres of water is truly astonishing."
"Sharks are vulnerable to overfishing, often have slow growth rate and low fecundity, and therefore are a flagship species in marine conservation.
And Professor Mariani believes this flexible and cheap new way of tracking sharks will help improve conservation: "In order to protect these elusive animals and their ecosystems, we must be able to rapidly assess many areas at repeated time intervals.
"eDNA should prove a big step forward because basically anyone can collect water samples, and every bottle of water is a potential gold mine of data.
Of course much remains to be done to make the approach more effective: the molecular tools can be improved, so that every species of interest can be identified unambiguously; and finer-scale studies are required to understand the impact of oceanic currents and depth on the transport of trace DNA."
More information: Judith Bakker et al. Environmental DNA reveals tropical shark diversity in contrasting levels of anthropogenic impact, Scientific Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-17150-2 Journal information: Scientific Reports
A steam plume rises from Bogoslof volcano as hot lava heats the seawater during an eruption in August 2017. Credit: Dave Withrow (NOAA/Fisheries)
Most volcanoes erupt beneath the ocean, but scientists know little about them compared to what they know about volcanoes that eject their lava on dry land. Gabrielle Tepp of the Alaska Volcano Observatory and the U.S. Geological Survey thinks that with improved monitoring, scientists can learn more about these submarine eruptions, which threaten travel and alter the ocean soundscape.
During the 174th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Louisiana, Tepp will discuss the challenges and benefits of remote monitoring and what it can teach us about submarine volcanoes.
"It's very difficult to study underwater volcanoes because it's hard to put instruments in the water, especially long-term," Tepp said.
Depending on the size and depth of an underwater eruption, gas and ash may never break the ocean surface, or the gas and ash could create a volcanic plume with the potential to interfere with air travel. "The ocean is a big place so it's pretty unlikely that you're going to have a situation where a ship haphazardly wanders over an eruption, but there are a few that have come close," Tepp said. These unpredictable eruptions may also create a floating blanket of rocks, called a pumice raft, which can clog harbors and damage boats.
Tepp is presenting observations from two submarine volcanoes: Ahyi, a seamount in the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean, and Bogoslof, a shallow submarine volcano in the Aleutian Islands. The volcanoes made very different sounds, suggesting that different processes occurred during eruption. In 2014, Ahyi erupted for two weeks, with short, repetitive gunshotlike explosions every few minutes. In 2016 and 2017, Bogoslof had more sustained eruptions, lasting minutes to hours, which occurred every few days.
Evidence of these eruptions showed up on distant seismometers, which measure waves passing through the ground to record earthquakes, and hydrophone arrays that pick up underwater sound to detect covert nuclear detonations. When volcanoes erupt directly into the water, the sounds can travel for thousands of miles before dissipating.
Questions remain, however, such as if seismometers are sufficient for remote monitoring or if the more accurate information provided by cabled hydrophone arrays is worth the greater expense. Researchers are also interested in how the movement of waves from water into rock, and vice versa, affects signal detection.
Tepp and colleagues at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and USGS recently deployed a hydrophone array in the Northern Mariana Islands. They will collect the data next summer and hope to determine where and how often local volcanoes erupt to see if the area needs better hazard monitoring.
Due to the long distances that eruption signals travel, they likely show up as anomalies on far-off monitoring devices used to study earthquakes, land-based volcanoes or even whale songs.
"Eruptions that create a loud enough sound, in the right location, can travel pretty far, even from one ocean to another," Tepp said. "It makes you wonder, how many of these signals have we seen on distant instruments where nobody knew what they were, and it's a submarine volcano from halfway around the world?"
More information: Abstract: 1aAO5: "The Sounds of Submarine Volcanoes," by Gabrielle Tepp, Matthew Haney, John Lyons, Robert Dziak, Joe Haxel, Del Bohnenstiehl and William Chadwick, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, in Salon F/G/H in the New Orleans Marriott. asa2017fall.abstractcentral.com/s/u/OajXUcch9zc
By PTI: Amaravati, Dec 4 (PTI) Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu today began his three-day tour of the Republic of Korea, urging its industrialists to make the state their second home and invest big in it.
The Chief Minister held meetings with a host of Korean industrialists and told them that AP would like to make rapid strides, inspired by South Koreas success in manufacturing and technology.
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Explaining what all his government had been doing to propel growth and prosperity in the sunrise state in the aftermath of bifurcation, Naidu made a strong pitch for Korean investments in different sectors like automobiles, power, textiles, food processing, electronics, etc, an official release issued here said.
"India?s Look East Policy will bear fruit only from our state," Naidu told the Koreans.
He also invited them to attend the Partnership Summit to be held in Visakhapatnam in February, it added.
Showcasing Kia Motors -- which is now setting up its car manufacturing plant in Anantapuramu district of AP -- as a mascot, the Chief Minister asked the South Korean business houses to explore possibilities of investing in AP as both of them shared many similarities like population and (geographical) size, said the release.
A group of 37 South Korean industries already signed Letters of Intent to invest a sum of Rs 3,000 crore in the state, he said.
Many ancillary units of Kia Motors confirmed a total investment of Rs 4,995 crore and provision of employment to 7,171 persons, the Chief Minister added.
A Korean township would soon be developed in the state, he said.
Naidu requested Hwang Chul-joo, CEO of Jusung Engineering that has 3.5 GW of solar power plants in different states of India, to set up a research and development facility in AP.
Jusung is currently developing the next-generation OLED bulbs and also has plans to set up a further one GW of solar power generating plants in India.
The Chief Minister, who is accompanied by Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu, Industries Minister N Amarnath Reddy and senior officials, visited the automobile manufacturing plant of Kia Motors. PTI DBV NRB
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A wave of Syrian air strikes on Sunday killed at least 25 civilians and wounded dozens across the besieged rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta near Damascus, a monitor said. The deadliest raids hit the town of Hammuriyeh, killing 17 civilians including six children, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Other air strikes on the towns of Arbeen, Beit Sawa, Harasta and Misraba killed eight civilians. The Observatory said at least 75 people were wounded and the death toll was likely to rise given the critical wounds suffered by dozens of people. In Hammuriyeh, an AFP photographer saw men carrying the body of a victim wrapped in a blue blanket across a rubble-littered street, a shoeless foot sticking out. The strikes appeared to hit a modest residential neighbourhood, smashing a small convenience store and caking a vegetable stand in a layer of dust. Victims were taken to a nearby clinic where doctors could be seen treating a man wincing from a gash above his knee. In another room, the lifeless soot-covered body of a boy lay in a pool of blood. Eastern Ghouta, one of the last remaining rebel strongholds in Syria, has been under a heavy government siege since 2013 that has caused drastic food and medical shortages. An estimated 400,000 people still live in the enclave, and the United Nations has warned that hundreds are at risk of death if they are not evacuated for urgent medical treatment. The area is one of four "de-escalation zones" agreed earlier this year by regime allies Russia and Iran and rebel backer Turkey aimed at curbing violence across war-ravaged Syria. Syria's government agreed last week to a ceasefire in the region to coincide with the resumption of UN-led peace talks in Geneva. But heavy bombardment of the opposition enclave near the capital has resumed, with another 11 civilians killed on Saturday. The Observatory said Sunday's deaths took the number of civilians killed in regime bombardment of Eastern Ghouta to at least 191, including 43 children, in nearly three weeks. More than 340,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with anti-government protests.
By PTI: Itanagar, Dec 3 (PTI) Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu has expressed concern over the hight content of Nephelometric Turbidity Unit (NTU) in the Siang river in the state and said his government was in constant touch with the Centre so that New Delhi could take up the issue with China.
The Siang river, which flows as Yarlung Tsangpo from southern Tibet, becomes the Brahmaputra river in Assam.
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Khandu is also likely to meet Home Minister Rajnath Singh over the issue.
Talking to reporters at Pasighat Advance Landing Ground yesterday, Khandu said his government has taken up the issue of sudden change in water quality of the Siang river and high content of NTU in the water causing death of aquatic lives and even livestock in the state.
The chief minister was apprised of the situation at Pasighat by the Disaster Management Parliamentary Secretary Kaling Moyong, who is also the local MLA, Lok Sabha MP Ninong Ering and deputy commissioner Tamiyo Tatak.
Ering had recently written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a request to take up with the Chinese government regarding sudden change in water quality of the Siang river.
The deputy commissioner briefed Khandu about the current situation of the river flow where NTU was found to be very high to the extent of 425 and said that if exposed for a long period it might affect aquatic lives.
A report prepared by East Siang Public Health Engineering (PHE) Department executive engineer, Bimal Welly, said that the Siang water is high on iron content.
Based on water sample collected on November 27, the report said that NTU caused by concentration of suspended or dissolved particulate materials in the river water is 425 NTU, whereas the permissible range is 0-5 NTU.
The report also confirmed higher degree of iron content in the river waters, 10 PPM (particles/million), against the permissible limit of just 0.1 to 2 PPM.
The same sample will be sent to the State Water Testing Laboratory in Itanagar.
The sample has been sent to the North East Regional Institute of Science and Technology in Nirjuli for further studies. PTI UPL RG KJ
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Foreign interference in Australian politics has become a "serious problem", a top official said Monday, with tougher laws on espionage and overseas donations to be introduced to parliament. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ordered an inquiry in June after media revelations that the nation's spy agency had warned the country's political elite two years ago about taking donations from two billionaires with links to the Chinese Communist Party. The probe, by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Fairfax Media, said that despite being cautioned, both the Liberals and Labor continued accepting substantial sums of cash. It said intelligence agencies had major concerns that China was interfering in Australian institutions and using the political donations system to gain access. Beijing denied the allegations as "totally groundless". Since then concern over foreign interference has gathered momentum, heightened by ongoing revelations of Russian meddling in the American political system. "The issue of foreign interference in our politics is an extremely serious problem," Attorney-General George Brandis told parliament on Monday. "So I can tell the Senate that later this week, the government will introduce a milestone legislative package to reform Australia's espionage and foreign interference legislation." He said the new laws would strengthen and modernise a range of offences "for the purposes of investigating, disrupting and prosecuting acts of espionage and covert interference in the Australian political process". There would be a new transparency scheme, providing "visibility of the nature and extent of influence over Australia's government and political processes by foreign interests". "It will introduce new offences targeting foreign interference and economic espionage, including offences that criminalise covert and deceptive activities that support the intelligence activities of foreign actors," he added. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said in response on Monday that Beijing "always stays committed to following the principle of mutual respect for sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs" of other countries. "At the same time we urge the relevant people on the Australian side to abandon prejudices," Geng Shuang told a regular press briefing. Last week, a key Australian Labor MP, Sam Dastyari, was forced to resign as deputy opposition whip after reports that he told a Chinese businessman his phone was likely being tapped by intelligence agencies. The man, Huang Xiangmo, is a prominent Chinese political donor.
Faizal Ali (centre, in cap), his brother Shah (third from right, in cap) and the rest of their extended family, shortly after landing at Changi Airport Terminal 1 from Surabaya on Sunday (3 December) morning. (PHOTO: Nicholas Yong/Yahoo News Singapore)
UPDATE: Singapores Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave details of its Bali airport counter.
By Nicholas Yong and Nurul Azliah
What was meant to be their first-ever family vacation turned into an expensive and extended trip for one Singaporean clan, thanks to the volcanic eruptions from Balis Mount Agung, which disrupted travel plans for thousands.
For marketing analyst Faizal Ali, 40, his musician brother Shah, 42, and 16 other members of their extended family, it was a long journey home following the cancellation of their return flight from the Indonesian island.
After a 17-hour car and ferry journey from Bali to Surabaya, and then a three-day wait for the first available flight home, the family finally arrived in Singapore early on Sunday morning (3 December).
Faizal reckoned that his family exceeded their planned budget by some $9,000 or about $500 per person thanks to the additional travel and accommodation arrangements, not to mention daily expenses.
We really overspent, we kept going to the ATM to withdraw money, he said. To make matters worse, they did not purchase travel insurance as they thought that it would be a short trip.
Instead of the planned four- to five-day getaway, they spent almost a full week in Indonesia.
Faizal and Shah, who play in a band together, ended up having to cancel a performance scheduled for 29 November. Other family members, such as their 25-year-old cousin Nisa Anuar, a customer service officer, had to take no-pay leave to make up for the extended time away.
The whole thing was very frustrating, said Nisa. The family had been planning their trip since April this year.
Holiday gone wrong
The family arrived in Bali on 26 November, the day that Mount Agung erupted for the second time in a week. Ngurah Rai International Airport was closed that day, leaving thousands of tourists stranded, including many Singaporeans who were meant to fly home on airlines such as Singapore Airlines, Scoot and Jetstar.
Story continues
The family proceeded with their plans in Bali, where the main tourist areas are at least 40km away from Mount Agung, as they had been scheduled to leave via Scoot on Wednesday and Thursday.
But on Tuesday morning, they heard about the airport closure for the first time from news reports. This led Faizal, Shah and a family friend, 46-year-old Sri Rahayu, to head to the airport to get an update on the situation.
They found hundreds of fellow tourists already there, with the crowd steadily building up, said Shah. The trio then went to the Scoot counter, where they discovered a solitary staff member who gave them a list of numbers to call.
While there were Critical Response Teams from various countries to help out different tourists, the trio reported that the Singapore counter was not manned. The trio waited for some time along with a crowd of about 10, but no one came.
That night, the family were informed by Scoot via e-mail and text message that their flights had been cancelled.
Singapores Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) told Yahoo News Singapore that its Bali airport counter had been operating since the morning of 27 November 2017, at varying timings based on operational requirements. A contact number was also left for Singaporeans to call outside of the operating hours of the counter, MFA added.
Nisa Anuar, her cousin Shah Ali (in cap) and their family friend Sri Rahayu (right) speaking with Yahoo News Singapore senior correspondent Nicholas Yong. (PHOTO: Nurul Azliah / Yahoo News Singapore)
Long way home
After a long and fruitless international call with a Scoot official in Singapore, the family decided to make their own travel arrangements. With four elderly people and several young children in tow, Faizal and Shah explained that they were concerned about what would happen if Mount Agung erupted again.
We just worried that if it erupted, we might be stuck there for months, said Faizal.
Nisa also took issue with what she felt was Scoots poor customer service. The family members were informed that they had to be at the airport on the day of their flights to find out about alternative travel arrangements, which were also not guaranteed.
You cannot expect the 18 of us to be at the airport waiting for five to eight hours, and then get nothing out of it. We expected Scoot to be more responsive, to indicate clearly in the e-mail what they can offer and be very clear in whether the transfer (to Surabaya) has to be borne by ourselves. It was very vague, said Nisa.
In response to queries from Yahoo News Singapore, Scoot said that passengers booked for travel to and from Bali between 27 November and 4 December period were given the option of cancelling their bookings for a full refund, rebooking themselves onto other Bali flights or to other destinations.
Change fees are waived, but fare differences may apply, said the airline in a travel advisory posted on its website on 27 November.
Regarding the Denpasar airport closure, Scoot said its staff tried their best to assist affected passengers. This included providing free coach transportation to Surabaya where passengers were put on SurabayaSingapore flights on top of the refund/rebooking options.
We had to do our own searching for the drivers in Bali, we had to fork out our own money, said Nisa, who added that the family will be seeking compensation from Scoot.
Asked how it felt to be home, she replied, Good, very good. I just want to sleep.
This story was updated at 1.45pm on 4 December 2017 to reflet Scoots response to Yahoo News Singapores queries.
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(AFP file photo)
Suspicious that his wife was having an affair with her colleague in Singapore, a Chinese national confronted the man and hit him with a metal tool. Later, when all three were at a hospital, he also offered a police officer $50 to avoid arrest.
Lei Yanchen, 39, pleaded guilty in the State Courts on Monday (4 December) to voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous means. He was jailed six months for the offence and was given an additional months jail for attempting to bribe a police officer. Both of Leis sentences will run consecutively from his date of remand on 8 August.
The court heard that Lei came to Singapore in August this year on a social visit pass, hoping to apply for a work permit. On 6 August, Lei asked to meet his compatriot Zhong Bo because he suspected Zhong was having an affair with his wife Wang Yu. Both Wang and Zhong are colleagues in Singapore.
Prior to their meeting at Jurong West Street 64, Lei took a hammer-like tool from a nearby construction site and concealed it. Together with Wang, the couple waited for Zhong at the void deck of a block. When Zhong arrived, Lei asked him how the latter had obtained the phone number of his wifes landlord.
Wang interrupted saying that she had given Zhong the phone number, which is when Lei began slapping her on her arm. Lei also tried to kick his wife. Zhong then tried to protect Wang by restraining Leis arm. Lei then took the tool and hit Zhongs forehead and left side of his head. This left Zhong bleeding and clutching his head in pain.
All three then went to Ng Teng Fong General Hospital for Zhong to seek treatment. Zhong called the police on the way to the hospital. At the hospital, two police officers attended to the case. One of the officers, Sergeant Mervyn Pea, informed Lei that he had committed a serious offence.
While Pea was making a phone call outside the hospital, Lei approached him and tried to slip $50 into Peas right pocket as a bribe in order to avoid arrest. Deputy Public Prosecutor Ang Sock Chin asked for a jail term of six months for causing hurt.
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Leis lawyer Melvin Loh, who was assigned by the Criminal Legal Aid Scheme, said in mitigation that Zhongs injuries were not major and that he did not suffer permanent damage. He said that Lei is the sole breadwinner for his family and that he has an aged mother and a 13-year-old child in China.
Loh pointed out that Lei accompanied Zhong to the hospital after seeing his injuries and even used a shirt to help stem the bleeding. He added that Lei would already be punished for his actions by being asked to return to China after serving his sentence.
Lei is also a first-time offender and did not have the means to compensate his victim, said Loh.
District Judge Jasvender Kaur noted that Lei confronted Zhong armed with a deadly weapon and attacked the victim at the temple region not just once but twice, and that his injuries are not insignificant because they required sutures. She also said that there was no provocation on the victims part.
DJ Kaur noted that Lei had accompanied Zhong to the hospital but agreed with the prosecution that the sentencing was appropriate. She sentenced Lei to six months jail for voluntarily causing hurt using a dangerous weapon, and one months jail for offering a bribe to the police officer. Both sentences will run consecutively from Leis date of remand on 8 August.
For voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapon or means, Lei could have been jailed up to seven years, fine, caned or given any combination of said penalties. For corruptly offering gratification, he could have been fined up to $100,000, jailed up to five years or both.
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Honduras on Monday finally concluded a much-delayed count from a presidential election held more than a week ago, but refrained from declaring incumbent leader Juan Orlando Hernandez the outright winner as soldiers tried to keep a lid on simmering post-poll unrest. The small Central American nation of 10 million, which suffers chronic violence and prolific gang activity, has been put under nighttime curfew after clashes during protests and some reports of looting. Late Monday, some police were refusing to enforce the curfew; the public safety minister said the row could be part of a dispute over pay and Christmas bonuses. On Friday, a 19-year-old woman was fatally shot during a confrontation between protesters and the police. Her family said she was killed by police, a claim authorities are "exhaustively" investigating. On Monday, police said two officers were fatally shot by unidentified assailants while patrolling during the curfew in the eastern province of Olancho. The deaths were not immediately linked to the political unrest. - Suspicions of fraud - Hernandez's leftwing rival, Salvador Nasralla, a charismatic former TV presenter, aged 64, repeated allegations of "fraud" in the wake of the November 26 election. "I cannot accept anything" from the final results released Monday, Nasralla told AFP, refusing to recognize the figures as valid. "They are not official or final," he said, reiterating a demand that 5,173 ballots be recounted. His supporters have taken noisily to the street in past days, banging on pots, blaring vuvuzelas and singing campaign songs which included insults towards the conservative Hernandez. "They are stealing our votes," a visibly angry Jesus Elviz, a 58-year-old accountant, told AFP during a march on Sunday. Suspicions were triggered by the drawn-out ballot count. In the hours after the vote, an initial tally of more than half the ballots gave the lead to Nasralla, who claimed victory. But then his margin shrank. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal subsequently said its computers had suffered interruptions that slowed counting, and credited Hernandez with a tiny lead. The tribunal's president, David Matamoros, announced Monday that the final count showed Hernandez with 42.98 percent of the vote compared with opposition leader Nasralla's 41.39 percent. But he said the tribunal was not declaring a winner yet, because of possible appeals that could go on up to late December. "We urge all candidates and all parties to put Honduras first," Matamoros said. A group of European Union election observers echoed that. "The electoral process is far from finished," the coordinator of the EU group, Portuguese member of the European Parliament Marisa Matias, told a news conference in Tegucigalpa. "Please make no declaration of the winner until the process is completed," she said. - Election upset - Hernandez, a 49-year-old lawyer who has been president since 2014, had sought re-election despite a constitutional ban on serving more than one term. His conservative National Party had argued that a 2015 ruling by the Supreme Court voided that ban. Going into the election, he was seen as the clear favorite on the strength of his policies clamping down on Honduras' gang violence and endemic corruption. He had backing from the United States, which is pouring $750 million into Central America's so-called Northern Triangle -- the poor, gang-infested trio of nations made up of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala -- to try to stem the outflow of its citizens to the US. Nasralla, though, provided an upset to the voting prognostics. He and his leftist coalition, the Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship, denounced Hernandez's bid as illegal. The issue of re-election is especially charged in Honduras, following the toppling of a former leftwing president, Manuel Zelaya, in a 2009 coup. Zelaya, who had been seen as angling to change the constitution to allow for re-election, ended up returning to Honduras and is part of the coalition backing Nasralla.
Shrieks of laughter by non-disabled and disabled children having fun together at Hungarian playgrounds are becoming more common thanks to some determined parents turned innovative designers.
"Disabled kids have the right to play too," says Eszter Harsanyi, 44, one of the co-founders of MagikMe, a start-up designing playground equipment.
Her son Aron, seven, was born with epilepsy and for years had to sit and watch his non-disabled brother bounding through playground climbing frames, or joshing in sandpits.
Now he too can join in at some 30 playgrounds in Budapest -- and another 30 nationwide -- that have installed MagikMe equipment.
"It helps Aron a lot to mingle with able-bodied peers," Harsanyi told AFP as she helped him onto a funky bright red modified see-saw called the "Butterfly".
With two extra legs for laying on, and hand-grips and "wings" along the sides to prevent falls, children can climb out of wheelchairs or be laid down to enjoy the ride without needing a helper to hold them.
"It's also safe for non-disabled babies who cannot sit up yet," Harsanyi says.
Harsanyi and four other parents with disabled children hatched the idea in 2013.
"We were frustrated that our kids -- disabled and non-disabled -- played happily together at home but couldn't at the playground," she says.
- On a mission -
After bringing a designer friend on board and setting up a firm in 2014, a key part of the parents' mission was making the equipment cool for able-bodied kids too.
Another piece, an elevated sandbox called "Dune" allows children to dig together standing up or laying down.
Such "inclusive" playgrounds can make society more tolerant in the long-run, Harsanyi believes.
"Playing together shows healthy children what it means to be different, and how to talk, laugh, listen to, and even touch disabled kids," she said.
Another parent at the playground, Arpad Koncz, said he was "surprised and saddened" to learn that most playground equipment is effectively off-limits to disabled kids who cannot sit unassisted.
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"The first time my (non-disabled) child met someone who is different from her was here. It's good that they experience that early in life," he told AFP.
As well as designing new sensory and tactile equipment, the firm plans to branch out to neighbouring Austria and Slovakia, and further afield, said Harsanyi.
"Lack of playground access for disabled kids is not a Hungarian problem, but a global one," she added.
This Sunday is the International Day of Disabled Persons, which aims to promote understanding and awareness of disability issues.
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Kenya's former president Uhuru Kenyatta arrived Tuesday in eastern DR Congo's main city of Goma, as fresh clashes with M23 rebels occurred just to the north, sending thousands fleeing. Troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were battling M23 fighters in Kibumba, 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Goma, security officials and local residents said. The M23 has recently seized swathes of territory in North Kivu province, displacing tens of thousands of people in their advance. Kibumba is considered one of the last obstacles to the rebels before Goma, a commercial hub of one million people on the Rwandan border. On Tuesday afternoon, rumours that the M23 was approaching sent a fresh wave of people fleeing to the Kanyaruchinya displacement camp, south of Kibumba. About 40,000 people are currently in the camp, according to its head. A security official who asked for anonymity said that people began to flee after seeing soldiers themselves retreating towards Goma after clashes with M23 rebels. North Kivu's military governor, General Constant Ndima, urged people to remain calm late Tuesday. "I want to reassure you... Loyalist forces are containing the enemy on the heights of Kibumba," he told reporters. The crisis has cratered relations between the DRC and its smaller central African neighbour Rwanda, which Kinshasa accuses of backing the militia. Uhuru Kenyatta, a mediator for the seven-nation East African Community (EAC), arrived in Goma on Tuesday and visited Kanyaruchinya. He told reporters late Tuesday that the stories he had heard were "heart-breaking". "I cannot ignore what I have seen," Kenyatta said. "I must say to all parties: You cannot negotiate in the face of human catastrophe". - 'De-escalation' - Kenyatta's visit to the DRC is the latest in a round of diplomatic bids to defuse the crisis in the impoverished country's volatile east. The former president landed in the Congolese capital Kinshasa on Sunday for talks, following on the heels of a visit from Angolan President Joao Lourenco. The EAC has also called for a "peace dialogue" in Kenya's capital Nairobi on November 21. In addition, the bloc has agreed to send a peacekeeping mission to eastern DRC. Kenyan troops arrived in Goma over the weekend, as part of that operation. On Monday, Kenyatta urged armed groups to put down their arms and return to the negotiating table. "There is nothing that can be gained through the barrel of a gun," he had told reporters. On Tuesday, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had discussed the situation with Rwanda's Foreign Minister Vincent Biruta, on the margins of the G20 meeting in Indonesia. "I underscored the United States deep concern about the continuing violence in eastern DRC, and called on Rwanda to take active steps to facilitate de-escalation," he said in a tweet. - Rebel return - Biruta, for his part, tweeted that Rwanda is committed to regional diplomatic mechanisms to bring peace to eastern DRC, as well as to finding a political solution to the crisis. Over 120 armed groups roam the region, many of which are a legacy of regional wars which flared at the turn of the century. The M23 -- a mostly Congolese Tutsi group -- first leapt to prominence in 2012 when it briefly captured Goma before being driven out. But the rebel group returned in late 2021 after years of dormancy, claiming the DRC had failed to honour a promise to integrate its fighters into the army, among other grievances. It captured the strategic town of Bunagana on the Ugandan border in June. In recent weeks, the rebels have also won a string of victories against the Congolese army, edging closer towards Goma. The DRC expelled Rwanda's ambassador in late October amid the renewed M23 offensive. Despite official denials from Kigali, an unpublished report for the UN seen by AFP in August pointed to Rwandan involvement with the M23. Rwanda accuses the Congolese government of colluding with Hutu militants who fled across the border after the 1994 Rwandan genocide. hbm-at/eml/kjm
Macau's youngest-ever lawmaker, a leading pro-democracy advocate, has been suspended from the city's legislature in an echo of the disqualification of rebel Hong Kong legislators as China's pressure on political opponents grows. The government of the semi-autonomous southern Chinese gambling enclave is largely pro-establishment but Sulu Sou, 26, was voted into the legislature in public elections in September. His party, the New Macau Association, advocates universal suffrage for the territory's parliament, where more than half the representatives are selected by special interest groups or by the pro-Beijing city leader. The opposition won five of 14 directly elected seats in the 33-strong legislature in September. Sou's suspension comes as China has spoken up against any challenges to its sovereignty across its territories. A statement from Macau's parliament said 28 lawmakers had voted to suspend him, with four voting against. Local media said it meant he could now be investigated on a charge of "aggravated disobedience" over a protest last year. Serving lawmakers are immune from prosecution. Sou said the move was politically motivated when he addressed a rally before the vote. "Promise me: don't give up, keep moving forward!" he posted on Facebook after his suspension. The pro-democracy movement in Macau is far smaller than in nearby Hong Kong, where massive rallies brought several major roads to a standstill in 2014. But there have been outbursts of frustration against the government. Sou was among the leaders of one of Macau's largest anti-government protests in 2014, when 20,000 people demonstrated against generous retirement packages for outgoing officials. Two pro-independence and four pro-democracy lawmakers have been disqualified from Hong Kong's parliament following a special ruling from Beijing last year. They were ejected for inserting protests into their oaths of office and accused authorities of a political witch-hunt. Sou's election victory in September was seen as a slap in the face to local officials over Typhoon Hato, which devastated Macau less than two weeks before the vote. Authorities stood accused of failing to alert the public before the storm, which caused widespread destruction. Some said the government had hesitated to issue a severe storm alert for fear of affecting the casino business.
People place candles at a memorial for investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered in a car bomb attack, during a vigil in Valletta, Malta November 16, 2017. REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi (Reuters)
VALLETTA (Reuters) - Maltese police have arrested 10 suspects in the murder of anti-corruption blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia, the country's prime minister said on Monday, almost two months after she was killed when her car was blown up.
All of the suspects are Maltese nationals and most have a criminal record, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said, without providing any further details. The police have 48 hours to question the suspects, arraign them or release them.
Muscat initially announced eight arrests at a press conference, then later said on Twitter that two more had been apprehended.
"Authorities have all areas of interest under control since early this morning and searches are underway," he said.
A section of Lighters Wharf in Marsa was sealed off early on Monday as helicopters circled above. Military and police used sniffer dogs to search.
Caruana Galizia, 53, was murdered on Oct. 16 as she was driving away from her house in northern Malta.
She wrote a popular blog in which she relentlessly highlighted cases of alleged graft targeting politicians from across party lines.
Galizia was following leads from the Panama Papers, which were leaked in 2015 and show how the world's rich use offshore firms to hide their wealth. She had also accused senior figures in the government and opposition of corruption and money laundering.
All have denied the accusations and Galizia was hit with 36 libel suits in the nine months preceding her death.
Her murder shocked Malta and raised concern within the European Union about the rule of law on the Mediterranean island. Concluding a fact-finding mission on Friday, a group of EU lawmakers said there was a "perception of impunity" in Malta.
(Reporting by Chris Scicluna, writing by Steve Scherer, editing by Crispian Balmer and Larry King)
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives and the Social Democrats (SPD) agreed at meeting with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday to start exploratory talks on forming another grand coalition, Bild newspaper reported on Friday.
The newspaper said the participants - Merkel, her Bavarian ally Horst Seehofer and SPD leader Martin Schulz - had discussed various options for forming a government - from forming a grand coalition, setting up a minority government under Merkel and holding new elections. But they ultimately agreed to start talks about a re-run of the conservative 'grand coalition'.
Merkel is casting around for a coalition partner after her centre-right bloc shed support to the far right in a Sept. 24 election. Her attempts to form a three-way tie-up with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens failed.
(Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Michael Nienaber)
Congress in Gujarat has largely been perceived as a pro-poor party, but this time they have also reached to the urban electorate. (Photo courtesy: Jumana Shah)
By Jumana Shah: As the state goes to polls for the first phase on December 9, Gujarat Congress released its manifesto on Monday evening and as manifestos go, this is an ambitious one! The most ambitious among all promises made was the inclusion of Patidars and other sections of society - currently not included in reservation - under a 'special category' without affecting the incumbent reservation formula.
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The manifesto also includes up to 50 per cent reduction in electricity rates, reduction in petrol and diesel rates of up to Rs 10 per litre, 50 per cent reduction in property tax, exclusion of businesses less than Rs 1.5 crore turnover from GST, which would not fall in the ambiguous realm of political will vs policy.
With just five days to go for polling day, BJP is yet to release its manifesto.
Congress in Gujarat is mostly perceived as a pro-poor party. About 60 seats that fall under the urban category is the Congress's steepest battle. According to the 2011 census, 42.6 per cent of the state's population is urban - one of the highest in the country. Undermining the importance of the urban electorate has been the Congress's bane for a long time.
This time however, the party has unapologetically reached out to them - the BJP's core constituency. A bulk of Patidars, especially the influential sections, reside in semi-urban areas. The party is also targeting the under-25 year-old demographic who have not seen a non-BJP government. This is their way perhaps to cash in on the anti-incumbency.
The most intriguing aspect of the manifesto this time, besides the Patidar reservation of course, is the mention of 'ensuring happiness for every Gujarati family - towards a 'Khushaal Gujarat'. "We intend to move towards a more inclusive indicator of progress. Instead of GDP - we would consider a more holistic progress indicator like Gross National Happiness Index (GNHI)," Congress state president Bharatsinh Solanki said.
However, when prodded further on happiness being an abstract concept, Solanki said, "In western countries, especially Scandivanian countries, there is no mad clamour for development. People live a stress-free life. Because their basic needs like affordable and good health, education, job are provided for. This is what we will strive to bring in Gujarat."
The manifesto has been prepared following a five-day visit by Sam Pitroda and Deepak Babaria, along with the manifesto committee chairman Madhusudan Mistry to different parts of Gujarat. The manifesto also has Rahul Gandhi written large on it as it includes most of the points made by him during his various visits over the last two months. He has spoken about happiness being the right indicator of vikas and not money spent on schemes.
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For instance, the exclusion of small traders and manufacturers from GST was an ardent appeal of small businessmen across the state. This would take the unorganised sector out of the GST ambit. If Congress markets this effectively, this could be a huge draw for urban middle class voters, who are currently the BJP's loyal vote bank.
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North Korea's missile tests are an "imminent threat" to Japan, the Japanese parliament declared Monday, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said talking to the reclusive state was meaningless. The upper house unanimously adopted a resolution protesting against the North's firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile that dropped into the sea inside Japan's exclusive economic zone last week. The launch showed Pyongyang was determined to continue its nuclear and missile programmes and constituted "an unprecedented, significant and imminent threat against the safety of the region, including Japan." "This is a frontal challenge against the international community that must not be tolerated," added the resolution. Tensions on the Korean peninsula are high after last Wednesday's missile launch. On Monday the US and South Korea began their largest-ever joint air exercise, described by Pyongyang as an "all-out provocation". Abe vowed to put pressure on North Korea until it changes its ways and gives up its missile and nuclear technology in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" fashion. "In order to press North Korea into changing its policies, we shall take a resolute attitude in our diplomacy," he told the upper house. "Dialogue for the sake of dialogue is meaningless," Abe said. Global anxiety about North Korea has steadily risen this year, and Washington last week called on other UN members to cut ties with it in order to squeeze the secretive regime. The call, however, has fallen short of persuading key North Korean backers -- China and Russia -- to take steps to isolate the regime.
A three-metre-high metal fence topped with razor wire in a North Korean port marks the front line of the United Nations' ban on coal exports by Pyongyang. A mountain of North Korean coal -- which would once have been bound for China -- is piled up on one side of the barrier in Rajin harbour, stranded by the interdiction. On the very next dock, around two million tonnes of Russian coal has come in by train and been shipped on to China this year by Russian port operator RasonConTrans. Its activities are specifically excluded from the UN Security Council's sanctions resolutions - but attempts have been made to use it as a way to bypass the restrictions. "They asked but we said no, we dont do it," said RasonConTrans' deputy director Roman Minkevich. The black mounds on the neighbouring wharf were evidence his firm was complying with the rules, he added. "Behind the fence it's Korean coal, it's under sanctions now so it's still here," he told AFP. He declined to elaborate on the source of the requests. "People," he said. "Different people." The UN Panel of Experts on North Korea said in its midyear report that Pyongyang has been "deliberately using indirect channels to export prohibited commodities". For years the coal trade was a lucrative earner for Pyongyang -- its main ally and key economic partner China imported 22 million tonnes worth nearly $1.2 billion in 2016. But while Beijing says North Korean imports have come to a halt, RasonConTrans' business is booming. Since starting operations in 2015 its volumes have doubled each year, and Minkevich is targeting three million tonnes next year, with a goal of five million in future. It has between three and six ship movements a month at its pier - number 3 in the port, which can take vessels up to 180 metres (600 feet) long - loading 50,000 tonnes of coal on each, most of them heading for Shanghai. - Women crane operators - Over a hill at the back of Rajin town stands a sprawling disused oil refinery, originally built to process crude from the Soviet Union, in the days of Communist brotherhood provided Pyongyang with cheap or free materials. Locals blame sanctions for the closure but it has been inactive for years, its throttled chimneys standing sentinel over an unfulfilled economic dream. Two large bronze statues of the North Korea's founder Kim Il-Sung and his son and successor Kim Jong-Il look out over Rajin. Despite the looser economic rules applying in the area, the town is bedecked with propaganda slogans seen throughout the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the country is officially known. Using North Korean labour -- North Korean women are particularly skilled crane operators, Minkevich notes, probably due to their care in performing repetitive tasks -- costs at Rajin are 30 to 40 percent cheaper than at Russian ports. Those competitors on the Russian Pacific coast are also close to capacity, he says, as China and the energy-hungry but resource-poor economies of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan suck coal from Russia's vast reserves. Moscow and Pyongyang have long had fraternal relations, and a picture of North Korea's late leader Kim Jong-Il meeting Vladimir Putin in the Russian capital in 2001 hangs in a RasonConTrans office. The company is 70 percent Russian-owned, with 30 percent held by the port of Rajin. It is the third-biggest taxpayer in the Rason Special Economic Zone, set up by Pyongyang to try to attract trade and businesses to the area where North Korea, China and Russia meet. North Koreans need special permits to enter the SEZ, and a large checkpoint at its southern entrance enforces the rules. RasonConTrans has around 300 North Korean personnel and 110 Russian staff, and brings in much of its needs, such as diesel for its generators, directly from Russia. It is almost entirely independent of the rickety local electricity supply, which Minkevich said was offline around 30 percent of the time. Some aspects of the North reminded him of the former Soviet Union, said the Muscovite, but working under the sanctions regime was a "unique experience". There were difficulties importing parts and building supplies, he said, and "much more paperwork". "It's interesting but it's hard."
Singapore celebrity Jaime Teo launches new range of cookies for Twelve Cupcakes. Photo: Jaime Teo/Instagram
Singapore actress Jaime Teo remains very much involved with Twelve Cupcakes after selling the business to an Indian tea company in January this year. On Monday (4 December), the winner of Miss Universe Singapore 2001 announced the cupcake chains launch of a new range of chewy cookies that will come in six flavours.
According to her post on Instagram, they will be available at chains outlets in Bugis Junction, Changi City Point, Jurong Point, Nex and Orchard Gateway. Its today!!! We are launching The Cookies!! she said in her post. They are chewy and big and yummy.
According to an interview with local magazine 8Days, Teo is still involved with Twelve Cupcakes in terms of creative consultation and marketing.
Twelve Cupcakes experienced rapid growth since its founding years. Today, the chain has a total of 29 stores across Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Taiwan, among others, with subsidiary brands such as Honey Cakes and Dulce and Sucre. The cupcakery has since been acquired by Indian tea company Dhunseri Group.
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A Syrian child is taken for treatment at a hospital following a reported airstrike in the rebel-controlled town of Arbin, in the eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, on Dec. 3, 2017. (Photo:Abudlmonam Eassa/AFP/Getty Images
Five hundred critically ill Syrian patients, including scores of young children, are trapped with dwindling access to medical supplies in a besieged rebel-held district northeast of Damascus in what some aid workers are calling a humanitarian catastrophe.
In recent weeks, drawing relatively little international press coverage, forces of the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad have pounded the area with airstrikes including cluster bombs as part of a ferocious assault on eastern Ghouta, just 12 miles from the countrys capital. The region is the larger of two Damascus suburbs still under the control of rebels who have been fighting Assads regime for the past six years.
As the government offensive escalates, hundreds of patients in the district who suffer from malnutrition, cancer, kidney failure and other diseases have been unable to receive treatment or evacuate, the aid monitors say, warning that siege conditions verge on famine. The UN declared the situation a humanitarian emergency on Thursday after its top humanitarian advisor, Jan Egeland, called situation a catastrophe.
Siege conditions in Eastern Ghouta are at their worst point since the siege began in 2013, said Valerie Szybala, director of the Syria Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that is monitoring the crisis. Since this summer, we have seen a growing number of civilian deaths due to the lack of access to medical care and malnutrition. With winter beginning, the conditions will only grow worse, as people do not have electricity or fuel to make fires.
A Syrian man carries the body of a child who was killed in a reported airstrike in the rebel-controlled town of Hamouria, in the eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, on Dec. 3, 2017. (Photo:Abudlmonam Eassa/AFP/Getty Images)
Of the 502 patients who are at most serious risk, 63 are children younger than 5, Dr. Mohamed Katoub of Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), a nonprofit medical relief organization, told Yahoo News in an interview from Gaziantep, Turkey. In the past, Katoubs organization was able to treat patients with supplies smuggled in through tunnels connecting the area to the opposition-controlled neighborhoods of Barzeh and Qaboun.
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But the Syrian military shut the tunnels in May, and basic medical supplies such as anesthetics and surgical gloves are quickly running out and the patients have nowhere else to go. Now we dont have access for patients to go to Damascus. We dont have access to medicines to bring inside, so we started seeking evacuation, said Katoub.
A Syrian child receives treatment at a hospital following a reported airstrike in the rebel-controlled town of Arbin, in the eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, on Dec. 3, 2017. (Photo:Abudlmonam Eassa/AFP/Getty Images)
Doctors began requesting evacuations in July. Since then, Katoub says, only eight patients have been evacuated and 11 have died, because diseases that usually can be treated or managed have become fatal. Local doctors must wait for the government to approve aid convoys and ambulances to evacuate patients. Yet only ten aid convoys have passed through the regime checkpoint this year, each delivering barely enough supplies for a month, says Katoub. The regime removes surgical items from the convoys as well, he added even from caesarean section kits.
One of the families Katoub is most concerned about is in Irbin and has four boys younger than 12 who have hemophilia. Hemophilia, a congenital failure of blood-clotting, was once frequently fatal but now be managed with clotting factor replacement therapy.
But in siege conditions, without treatment, any wound might be a killer, said Katoub. This disease is not killing in other places. Any medical procedures that can cause bleeding, such as dental work, can become catastrophic.
For Katoub, the frustration is compounded because adequate medical care can be accessed just a few miles away. But evacuation does not guarantee safety for residents from the longstanding opposition stronghold. A 5-year-old boy with a suspected case of polio was one of the few patients moved to Damascus. Born after the siege of Ghouta began, he had no official identification papers. After the hospital told the boys father to obtain certain papers, he headed to the civil records office. There, he was arrested.
A Syrian man looks after his son, who is receiving treatment at a hospital after he was injured and his sister was killed in a reported airstrike in the rebel-controlled town of Hamouria, in the eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, on Dec. 3, 2017. (Photo: Abudlmonam Eassa/AFP/Getty Images)
Though relatively unknown to foreigners before the war, eastern Ghouta has been permanently inked on the map in blood. The agricultural periphery of Damascus emerged as a key battleground against the regime, led by rival rebel groups that eventually came under the control of the Saudi-backed Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam). These opposition factions built and operated the tunnels for smuggling that helped sustain the resistance to Assad in his backyard. Rebel groups competed not only with each other, but also with regime-backed war traders running goods and supplies through the Wafideen crossing point into eastern Ghouta.
Eastern Ghouta has paid dearly for its resistance. Residents have endured a grueling siege punctuated by chemical-weapon attacks that horrify the international community but fail to spur action. The population has declined by more than half from 1.2 million to about 400,00. Since the tunnels were closed, the price of goods has skyrocketed. Last Sunday, the government imposed an exorbitant tax of 2,000 Syrian pounds (a little less than $4) on every kilo of food coming through the regime crossing point.
Eastern Ghouta is one of several de-escalation zones negotiated between Russia, Iran and Turkey in September during the Astana ceasefire talks. Under the agreement, a cessation of hostilities would allow for unimpeded access to humanitarian aid. Instead, the Syrian regime has launched a final campaign to crush the remaining rebel resistance in eastern Ghouta, recalling the brutal offensive to recapture eastern Aleppo last year.
A Syrian man grieves over the body of his son following a reported airstrike in the rebel-controlled town of Arbin, in the eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, on Dec. 3, 2017. (Photo:Abudlmonam Eassa/AFP/Getty Images)
But unlike the outcry that met the regimes onslaught then, Assads final play for eastern Ghouta is unfolding with impunity and in silence. The Trump administration recently ceded to Russia political and military authority to end the war, further closing the door to Western aid and support. If something is not done immediately, thousands of innocent civilians will die, said Szybala. Unfortunately, based on the lackluster response from international actors it seems quite clear that nothing will be done.
The pattern of political cover repeated last week: Russia proposed a ceasefire, which the Syrian government accepted. Syrian forces bombed eastern Ghouta the next day.
Shilpa Jindia is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who specializes in Mideast affairs.
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A senior United Nations envoy arrived at Beijing's airport on Tuesday on his way to North Korea for a rare visit aimed at defusing soaring tensions over Pyongyang's intercontinental ballistic missile launch. The unusual trip by Jeffrey Feltman, which runs to Friday, comes less than a week after North Korea said it test-fired a new ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States. AFP journalists saw Feltman arrive in a UN-flagged car at the Chinese capital's international airport in the morning. North Korea's Air Koryo airline has a 0455 GMT flight to Pyongyang on Tuesday. His trip comes a day after the United States and South Korea launched their biggest-ever joint air exercise -- manoeuvres slammed by Pyongyang as an "all-out provocation". The five-day Vigilant Ace drill involves 230 aircraft, including F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and tens of thousands of troops, Seoul's air force said. Feltman arrived in China on Monday as Beijing is one of the few transit points to North Korea in the world. China is Pyongyang's sole major diplomatic and military ally, and its main trade partner. Once in the North, Feltman will discuss "issues of mutual interest and concern" with officials, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, adding he was unable to say whether Feltman will meet with the reclusive state's leader Kim Jong-Un. It will be Feltman's first visit to North Korea since he took office five years ago, and the first by a UN under-secretary-general in more than seven years. The UN envoy is also planning to see foreign diplomats and UN workers in the North on humanitarian missions, Dujarric said. - 'Vigilant Ace' - The UN Security Council has hit the isolated and impoverished North with a package of sanctions over its increasingly powerful missile and nuclear tests, which have rattled Washington and its regional allies South Korea and Japan. Pyongyang ramped up already high tensions on the Korean Peninsula five days ago when it announced it had successfully test-fired a new ICBM, which it says brings the whole of the continental United States within range. Analysts say it is unclear whether the missile survived re-entry into the earth's atmosphere or could successfully deliver a warhead to its target -- key technological hurdles for Pyongyang. A Cathay Pacific crew spotted what was "suspected to be the re-entry" of the missile as they flew from San Francisco to Hong Kong, the airline said. In a separate message to staff, Cathay general manager Mark Hoey said the crew described seeing the missile "blow up and fall apart," The South China Morning Post reported. - 'Begging for nuclear war'? - In recent years, Pyongyang has accelerated its drive to bring together nuclear and missile technology capable of threatening the US, which it accuses of hostility. US President Donald Trump has engaged in months of tit-for-tat rhetoric with Kim, pejoratively dubbing him "Little Rocket Man" and a "sick puppy". North Korean state media has hit back with a flurry of its own colourful insults, calling Trump a "dotard", a "frightened dog" and a "gangster." Over the weekend, Pyongyang countered that Washington was "begging for nuclear war" as the North blasted the joint US-South Korean drills. As well as featuring the latest generation of stealth fighters, this year's war games involve simulated precision attacks on the North's military installations, including its missile launch sites and artillery units, Yonhap news agency said, citing unnamed Seoul sources. As tensions surged, US Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican and foreign policy hawk, warned that the US was moving closer to "preemptive war" if the North continued its nuclear tests. His remarks echoed those of Trump's National Security Adviser HR McMaster, who told a security forum on Saturday that the potential for war with the North "is increasing every day." But some Trump advisers say US military options are limited when Pyongyang could launch an artillery barrage on the South Korean capital -- only around 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the heavily-fortified border and home to 10 million people. Tokyo's parliament on Monday slammed the North's weapons programme as an "imminent threat". Last week's missile landed in Japan's economic waters. China's foreign ministry warned that the situation on the Korean peninsula remained "highly sensitive" and called on all sides to "do more things to ease the tension and avoid provoking each other." The North has boasted that the Hwasong 15 ICBM tested on Wednesday is capable of delivering a "super-large" nuclear warhead anywhere in the US mainland. While analysts agree the latest test showed a big improvement in potential range, they say the North may not have yet mastered all the technology required to successfully hit the US with a nuclear warhead. burs-bar-lth/jta
US Forces in Japan banned all personnel from consuming alcohol after a drink-driving accident on the island of Okinawa where anti-base sentiment runs high. A US Marine crashed his vehicle into a mini-truck at an intersection on Sunday, killing the other driver, 61. The 21-year-old, whose breath test showed an alcohol level three times the legal limit, was arrested and charged with negligent driving resulting in death, police said. All US servicemen stationed in Japan are now banned from drinking, both on and off base, the US Forces in Japan said in a statement. In Okinawa, personnel are also restricted to base or to their residences. "When our service members fail to live up to the high standards we set for them, it damages the bonds between bases and local communities and makes it harder for us to accomplish our mission," the statement said. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Tokyo made an immediate complaint about the case to the US side, demanding the US military enforce strict discipline and take preventive steps. "It is extremely regrettable that this accident happened even though the Japanese government has repeatedly asked them for the thorough implementation of preventive measures and enforcement of disciplines," Suga told reporters. The US has several military bases in Japan and stations about 47,000 troops in the country as part of a joint security treaty. But crimes by US personnel have seen relations with locals strained. In the most recent case, a former US Marine employed at the US Air Force's sprawling Kadena Air Base on Okinawa was charged with the murder of a 20-year-old woman last year. The incident intensified longstanding local opposition to the American military presence on the island. Commanders across Japan will immediately lead mandatory training to address responsible alcohol use, risk management and acceptable behavior, the US statement added. Okinawa accounts for nearly 75 percent of land allotted for US bases in Japan, despite being only a fraction of the country's total area.
The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party
Posted on 5 December 2017 by dana1981
The parallels between the Republican Party positions on taxes and climate change are striking. Both are morally appalling and reject the available evidence and expert opinion.
The Initiative on Global Markets panel of economic experts was recently asked about the Republican tax plan. Among the experts who took a position either way, there was a 96% consensus that the plan would not substantially grow the economy more than the status quo, and a 100% consensus that it would substantially increase the national debt.
Those numbers are quite similar to the 97% consensus among climate scientiststhat humans are driving global warming and the 95% consensus among economists that the US should cut its carbon pollution.
The House and Senate Republicans have passed similar versions of their tax bill, and neither chamber is allowing any climate policy to move forward.
So whats making Republican Party leaders reject the expert consensus on these incredibly important issues?
Unwavering faith in the face of contradictory facts
Sometimes tax cuts make sense; for example, when trying to stimulate a depressed economy, or when operating with a budget surplus. Neither is currently the case. This message from the president:
Donald J. Trump ? @realDonaldTrump Unemployment is down to 4.1%, lowest in 17 years. 1.5 million new jobs created since I took office. Highest stock Market ever, up $5.4 trill
Is incompatible with Senator Lindsey Graham saying the economy needs a tax cut. The tax cut plan, which by design will increase the US national debt by $1.5tn, is also incompatible with Republican opposition to increased deficits. Just last year the Republican National Committee was warning of an unsustainable path toward crippling debt.
Economists also agree that we should be paying down the debt when the economy is going strong. When the next recession inevitably strikes, governments need monetary flexibility to respond. Thats when it makes sense to run a deficit (for example, see the 2009 stimulus package, which helped pull the US out of the Great Recession and cost less than the Republican tax plan).
These Republican economic contradictions make no sense, but theyre familiar to those of us who follow climate change news. The only consistency in climate denial is in its contradictions deniers claim global warming isnt happening, but its a natural ocean cycle, and caused by the sun, and galactic cosmic rays, and Jupiters orbital cycles, and its really just a Chinese hoax, and in any case its not bad.
On taxes, the Republican argument is cuts pay for themselves by stimulating economic growth and creating jobs.
But the economic literature is far from clear about whether tax cuts necessarily spur economic growth at all, let alone enough to pay for themselves. Moreover, corporate CEOs have repeatedly said that the Republican tax plan wont spur investment or job creation instead theyll mostly pass the gains to their wealthy shareholders. There was an embarrassing video clip when Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn was confronted with this inconvenient truth:
When presented with the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation analysis concluding the bill would increase the national debt by over $1tn even when accounting for associated economic growth, Republicans immediately rejected the results.
As Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said, Either its a religious belief, a belief where no amount of evidence would change that, or they are using the argument cynically and they just want more money for themselves. He was talking about trickle-down economics, but just as easily could have been describing climate denial.
A growing disdain for nerds
Im old enough to remember when the GOP considered itself the party of intellectuals, back in the days when Republicans invented the concept of pollution cap and trade systems, for example. It wasnt long ago that party leaders like Newt Gingrich and 2008 GOP presidential candidate John McCain were calling for the party to support climate policies.
Starting with the brief rise of the Tea Party in 2010, that all changed, and the intellectual rot of the GOP has accelerated under President Trump. In a July 2017 Pew poll, just 36% of Republicans said colleges and universities have a positive impact on America, and a stunning 58% said they have a negative effect.
Similarly, in an August 2017 Gallup poll, just 33% of Republicans expressed confidence in higher education. Worst of all, the Republican tax bill even penalizes American graduate students.
Eating away at the GOP intellectual core: Fox News
A 2012 survey found that Americans who only watch Fox News are less informed than Americans who watch no news at all. At the time, 55% of Americans including 75% of Republicans reported watching Fox News. The network is powerful a recent study found that Fox News might have enough influence to tip American elections and on the whole it prioritizes ideological messaging over factual accuracy.
Trumps attacks on the so-called fake news media have further eroded Republicans trust of news sources that lack a conservative bias. As David Roberts wrote for Vox:
The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening the right has created its own parallel set of institutions, most notably its own media ecosystem conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left.
Truth papered over by lies
Because so many conservatives rely on right-wing media sources for their news, its easy to misinform them through a constant stream of lies.
For example, Trumps Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin promised that his department would produce an analysis showing that the tax cuts will pay for themselves. One economist in the department leaked to the New York Times that such an analysis doesnt exist and Treasury staffers werent even asked to study the issue. It was a lie. Mnuchin also claimed the plan would only raise taxes on Americans who earn more than $1 million a year the exact opposite of reality and another blatant lie. In fact, the entire Republican case for their tax plan was based on lies.
Similarly, climate denial is based on endless myths and misinformation Skeptical Science has catalogued and debunked about 200 of them. And recent research showed that these myths are quite effective at misinforming their audience.
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Chiles Political System Shaken by Rise of New Anti-Neoliberal Left
Latin America December 4, 2017 Luis Thielemann
The first round of Chiles presidential election was held on November 19. The right-wing candidate, ex-president Sebastian Pinera, won with 36% of the votes. He will compete in the second round against centre-left candidate Alejandro Guiller. But the big surprise was the result for the Broad Front (Frente Amplio, FA), a heterogeneous left coalition headed by Beatriz Sanchez. The FA candidate came in third, with 20% of the vote (just two points short of making the second round). The coalition also won 18 deputies and a senator, which is unheard of for an anti-neoliberal force outside of the traditional parties. Viento Sur s Brais Fernandez spoke with Luis Thielemann, an activist with Autonomous Left (one of the organizations with parliamentary representation within the FA), about the elections and the rise of this new left formation.
Brais Fernandez (BF): What is your analysis of the results of Chiles elections?
Luis Thielemann (LT): First, its clear that the result, for any observer, was a complete surprise. Although looking at it now we can see that there were many signs pointing to the possibility of a high vote for the FA, the truth is that no one believed it was possible to go into double digits. Polls showed it with about 8% support, and the history of the left in the past three decades in Chile is one in which it has never surpassed this limit.
Moreover, the FA went to the elections without the backing of the biggest left force in the country in terms of history, number of activists and organising capacity: the Communist Party. In this context, the first point is the surprise factor.
The second is the political chaos that has been generated in Chile. If the FA is seeking to alter the balance of forces that has dominated Chile for almost three decades since the final years of the dictatorship, it has still not achieved this. But [the election] was a big step forward in this direction: it created electoral uncertainty, not only in terms of the second round, but for years to come in Chile.
In this way, the FA went from being ignored by the traditional political forces, to being the third political force in a system accustomed to only two players. And it is not just any third force, but one whose program is based on the big anti-neoliberal social struggles of the past decades.
Lastly, it was a gratifying vote for the FA, which had been accused of elitism by Communist and Socialist Party activists, due to its origins on the university campuses and middle-class neighbourhoods.
In the poorest neighbourhoods of Santiago, the FA vote was surprisingly high, in many cases beating the candidate of the New Majority (Nueva Mayoria), Alejandro Guillier.
This demonstrated grassroots work among the popular classes that, perhaps because of its incipient and discreet nature, had been missed by many observers, including those from the left.
BF: What is the FA, where does it come from, who is part of it?
LT: The FA was officially created in 2017, but the idea of its formation has been broadly shared by the left since the 2011 student mobilizations [for free education].
That it was broadly held does not mean that there were no important tactical and strategic differences between the different forces, as its formation has been one of the main discussion points within the left for the past few years.
It is made up of 13 organizations, that go from the small but important Liberal Party to Marxist and libertarian organizations.
The broadness of the FA reflects two aspects of Chilean politics: how far to the right politics has shifted (to the point where the Liberal Party feels comfortable in a coalition to the left of [incumbent New Majority president Michelle] Bachelet), where a minimal reform of neoliberalism is seen by the Chilean right as a Jacobin proposal.
And second, the social and political diversity of the opposition to neoliberalism and the authoritarian democracy inherited from the dictatorship [as part of the post-dictatorship transition pact between the parties of the right and centre-left].
The FA was the result of a maturing of various experiences. The first was the defeat of the 2006 student movement, which was defeated by the technocratization of its conflict by [the parties of] the transition pact in 2008.
Then there was the process of learning that the student and social movements of 2011 went through as a result of the creation of its own autonomous political leadership and its open rupture with the transition pact parties.
These movements in particular the student movement set up a series of radical left political organizations before, during and after 2011. Some of them have since disappeared, been refounded, split or fused.
The stand out organizations are Democratic Revolution (the strongest group in the FA), Autonomous Left (iA) and Autonomist Movement (a group that emerged out of a split from iA), among others. To these groups we can add those small parties that come from the extra-parliamentary left that emerged during the decades of the transition, such as the Humanist Party, the Green Ecologist Party, Equality Party, etc.
A third camp includes those parties that were formed as split-offs from the Coalition of Parties for Democracy [the centre-left coalition known as Concertacion, which predates the New Majority]. They saw in the FA the possibility of having a political impact, even if they do not have a clear or ideologically coherent left position. Within this group are parties such as Power or the Liberal Party.
The unifying element has been, on the one hand, the political window of opportunity that the crisis of the transition pact represents. Within this is seen the possibility of imposing or pushing forward the demands of the social movements that have challenged neoliberalism. These include the movement for public education, the university professors strikes, the movement against the AFPs (private administrators of pension funds), environmental struggles, to renationalize water and natural resources, etc.
What these struggles have tended to unite a social layer that has decided to stop looking to the Concertacion as a vehicle for potentially putting an end to the enduring legacy of the dictatorship; who got tired of seeing promises for reforms converted into the deepening of the model. This layer revealed itself on November 19 to be the third political force and 20% of voters.
BF: What position will the FA take in the second round?
LT: This is the main issue of debate for the coming weeks. The second round will be on December 17, which means we dont have much time.
We knew there would not be any time to debate this issue, nor peace of mind, as the level of political pressure placed on the FA since [November 19] has been enormous. But of course, no one thought that the FA would be key to the outcome of the presidential elections, as no one expected we would win 20% of the vote.
Given all this, some forces, such as iA, argued that the issue of negotiating with Guillier on the basis of the programmatic points put forward by FA candidate Beatriz Sanchez, and that have emerged out of the social struggles (end AFPs, free education, etc.), should have been resolved before the first round.
Despite there being no debate, the FA has shown clarity on two important points: it will not accept positions in any eventual Guillier government, and will only support him on the basis of Guillier publicly committing to aspects of the FA program and with the aim of avoiding a right-wing government.
We are not dealing here with left forces that are debating among themselves on a university campus, but a political alliance in which one out of five voters has deposited their faith. These voters have not asked the FA to adopt a maximalist anti-everyone position, or to give carte blanche support to Guillier and the transition pact.
Instead, voters want us to, as much as possible, put an end to the legacy of the dictatorship, and begin a new cycle of democratization and expel the market from peoples everyday lives.
We know that this is very little and mediocre compared to the dreams of those in Petrograd 100 years ago [during the Russian Revolution]. But before dreaming about storming the Winter Palace, before even thinking whether it makes sense to storm palaces, we have to at least build the conditions to make this possible; we have to at least recuperate the possibility of doing left politics in Chile.
But the FA is 13 groups. Some have already said that they will decide their position internally and without discussing it with others, abusing their parliamentary hegemony within the left.
Others have said that they will not negotiate at all, which also prevents us from doing politics this month.
It is important to make a point here: left politics is not about remaining pure, about being the best martyrs.
Left politics is about provoking chaos, the decomposition of the forces of capital, and at the same time, rebuilding a force capable of imposing another politics, new relations of power, that tend towards expelling capitalism and building communism.
It is a slow process, but it is fought at every step, no matter how institutional or unimportant they seem to be.
Refusing to support Guillier in the second round might seem like the most radical position, but in reality it is a conservative position: it gives the political initiative to those who have always held it, reducing the FAs electoral result to a mere protest vote.
The FA should propose a negotiation tha, whether accepted or rejected, will produce chaos among the neoliberal parties and the party system that has maintained them for decades.
If Guillier accepts the proposal for a government that pushes genuinely anti-neoliberal reforms, the transition pact will end up being destroyed; if, on the other hand, he makes no changes that are of interest for the FA, he will not be able to win the presidential elections.
What the FA is seeking in the second round is the possibility of directly impacting on the level of decomposition of the transition pact, and perhaps even beginning the process of its open destruction.
The Bihar Chief Minister's comments came on a day when Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi filed his nomination for the President's post.
By Rohit Kumar Singh: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar took pot shots at the Congress maintaining that the top post in the party has always been reserved for the Nehru-Gandhi family. He said this has been the culture of the party for decades.
"Elections within the Congress took place for the number two post and other remaining posts. This is the party's culture," Nitish said.
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The Bihar Chief Minister's comments came on a day when Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi filed his nomination for the President's post on Monday.
Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of his weekly Lok Samvad programme, Nitish again spoke on the controversial film 'Padmavati' and demanded that director Sanjay Leela Bhansali clear the air on objections that have been raised by the Rajput community regarding the film.
"I believe that Sanjay Leela Bhansali should come forward and clarify. I don't understand why the director has still not screened the film for Central Board of Film Certification?" Kumar said.
Speaking about the upcoming Gujarat elections where Congress is giving BJP a tough fight, Nitish exuded confidence that the saffron party will emphatically win the Gujarat polls.
"I have said this several times that BJP will win big in Gujarat. Media is creating the news that there is a fight in Gujarat," he said.
He however defended Rahul Gandhi on his temple-hopping spree in Gujarat, asserting that politicians do everything possible to woo voters. The Bihar Chief Minister raised questions as to why the Congress has not given enough tickets to Muslim candidates to fight elections.
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The premises of Galanta-Gan park now has new owners from China. (Source: Courtesy of Prologis)
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The market for logistics and industrial real estate in Slovakia is thriving especially due to the growth of the automotive industry, as well as e-commerce. The prospects of Slovakia as a region with a positive outlook were proven by a September deal, the largest in both area and investment volume in central and eastern Europe, which even reshuffled the ranking of companies active in this sector.
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The post-crisis period is characterised by constant growth in the logistics and industrial real estate sector, of which the years 2016 and 2017 are setting all-time records in Slovakias history, Peter Janosi, director of P3 for Slovakia told The Slovak Spectator when assessing the development of the sector over the last five years. 2016 and probably also 2017, has outperformed the record pre-crisis years of 2006 and 2007.
Samuel Sporka, head of the department of industrial and logistics real estate at JLL Slovensko, added that since 2012 to the present, the area of logistics and industrial real estate in Slovakia has almost doubled, from 1.16 million square metres to 2.01 million.
This favourable development reflects the positive economic situation in Slovakia and especially in western Slovakia, where more than 90 percent of all logistics real estate are concentrated, Sporka told The Slovak Spectator.
Martin Varacka, head of the department of industrial real estate at CBRE Slovensko added the market has gradually recovered from the recession and expanded.
Developers have taken a lesson from excessive speculative projects and their approach to construction is now more conservative, said Varacka, adding that they start building a new hall only when 30-50 percent of the project, depending on its size, is pre-leased.
(Source: JLL)
Carmakers and online shops
Consultancy companies, as well as developers and operators of logistics and industrial real estate, see the automotive industry and e-commerce to be the main driving forces of the growth.
New projects in the automotive sector and the arrival of Jaguar Land Rover in Nitra even strengthen this effect, said Varacka.
The arrival of new players along with their suppliers has stimulated demand for modern logistics and industrial real estate.
In terms of the new projects under construction, we see the biggest activity around Nitra due to the arrival of the carmaker JLR, said Jan Rakovsky, a consultant in the industrial agency at Cushman & Wakefield Slovakia.
The plant the British carmaker is building here will be 300,000 square metres large. Total investments are projected at 1.4 billion while serial production is planned to start in late 2018.
The biggest player on the Slovak market, Prologis, is one of the developers that took the opportunity. In September, it launched the construction of two out of three projected halls in the new park in Nitra. Their construction is planned for completion during the second quarter of 2018. New customers have already secured 80 percent of the total area of 62,325 square metres in advance, said Martin Polak, senior vice president and regional head of Prologis Central and Eastern Europe. They are ready to start construction of the third hall after it is pre-leased at about 50 percent, expects Polak, which may happen next year.
Nevertheless, Prologis considers e-commerce as the main factor behind the growth of the sector in the last five years.
By: Rolf PottsBallantine Books; 1st edition (December 24, 2002)224 pages
Who does not dream of travel? Not a vacation for a week or two. I mean leaving it all behind. Just walking away from it all one day. (You take your family with you if you have one lets not be ridiculous.) Maybe you move to Argentina for a year. Maybe two years. Or, maybe Australia. If Vagabonding does not inspire you to go, and help you plan the trip, nothing will.
Two of my favorite quotes:
The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that were too poor to buy our freedom.
Thus, the purest way to see a culture is simply to accept and experience it as it is now even if you have to put up with satellite dishes in Kazakhstan, cyber cafes in Malawi, and fast food restaurants in Belize. After all, as Thomas Merton retorted when asked if hed seen the real Asia during his trip to India, Its all real as far as I can see.
Red Hat, Inc. provides open source software solutions to develop and offer operating system, virtualization, management, middleware, cloud, mobile, and storage technologies to various enterprises worldwide. It offers infrastructure-related solutions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, an operating system platform that runs on hardware for use in hybrid cloud environments; Red Hat Satellite, a system management offering that helps to deploy, scale, and manage in hybrid cloud environments; and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, a software solution that allows customers to utilize and manage a common hardware infrastructure to run multiple operating systems and applications. The company offers application development-related and other technology solutions, such as Red Hat JBoss Middleware, a solution for developing, deploying, and managing applications; integrating applications, data, and devices; and automating business processes in hybrid cloud environments; The company's application development-related and other technology solutions also includes Red Hat cloud offerings, a software solution that enables customers to build and manage various cloud computing environments; Red Hat Mobile, a software development platform that enables customers to develop, integrate, deploy, and manage mobile applications for enterprises; and Red Hat Storage, a software solution that enables customers to manage large, unstructured, or semi-structured data in hybrid cloud environments. It also provides consulting, support, and training services; and realtime operating system, distributed computing, directory services, and user authentication. Red Hat, Inc. has collaboration with Juniper Networks Expand to provide a unified solution for enterprises designed to manage and run applications and services. The company was formerly known as Red Hat Software, Inc. and changed its name to Red Hat, Inc. in June 1999. Red Hat, Inc. was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Cyclone Ockhi, labelled as a "very severe" cyclonic storm, has been moving northwards with a speed of 18 kmph during the past six hours, an update from IMD said. The storm, by the time it reaches Gujarat, will weaken.
By India Today Web Desk: The cyclone which battered Tamil Nadu and Kerala, moved beyond Lakshadweep. Local MP Mohammad Faizal said that Lakshadweep suffered a loss of over Rs 500 crore and requested the Centre for help.
The death toll in Kerala has increased to 23 after 9 dead bodies were recovered from the sea.
More are feared stranded or dead as it would be difficult for small fishing boats to survive the rough waters for over 3 days. After their were complaints that the government machinery is not acting promptly, fishermen themselves ventured out into the sea yesterday.
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Over 15 fishing boats from Vizhinjam conducted search efforts in the sea and returned with a dead body of one fisherman who is yet to be identified.
The combined search and rescue operations continued to for the 5th day in the Arabian Sea. Coast Guard and Navy have deployed over 15 vessels in the sea, while Airforce and Navy aircraft continued to shuttle between the Navy vessels and airport in Thiruvananthapuram with fishermen who were under critical condition.
In Tamil Nadu, authorities have stated that at least 690 people have been rescued so far. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman visited Kanyakumari on Sunday and said "Indian Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force are still engaged in rescue operations to save the lives of fishermen affected by Cyclone Ockhi."
Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman guaranteed the fishing community that the search and rescue operations will be conducted in the sea until the final fisherman is traced.
The Navy, on Sunday, said 10 of its ships and eight aircraft were involved in the continuing search and rescue operations in the southeast Arabian Sea and Lakshadweep and Minicoy islands following Cyclone Ockhi.
Meanwhile, alert has been issued for fishermen in Maharashtra and Gujarat as the condition of the sea will be "very rough" on Monday and Tuesday.
According to an update issued by IMD at 8:30 am on December 4, "light to moderate rainfall is very likely at a few places over Saurashtra and south Gujarat region on 4th December.
Light to moderate rainfall at many places with heavy rainfall at isolated places is very likely over Saurashtra and south Gujarat region on December 5 and light to moderate rainfall over Gujarat region on 6th December (till noon). Light to moderate rainfall at many places with isolated heavy rainfall is also likely over north Konkan on December 5".
The update said that the sea condition would be "rough to very rough along and off north Maharashtra and South Gujarat coasts from today, the 4th night to 6th December 2017 morning."
IMD advised fishermen in south Gujarat and Maharashtra coasts not to venture into the sea from December 4 to 6.
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By PTI: New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) The Delhi government will soon make the remaining two crucial drugs for treating Hepatitis C free of cost, Health Minister Satyendra Jain said today.
Out of the four drugs available for treating the disease, two are already being provided free of cost by the city government.
Speaking at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS) here on the occasion of 20th Hepatitis Day, the minister underlined the AAP governments commitment in fighting the hepatitis infection.
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"We will cooperate with health institutions like ILBS to promote health and well being of people of Delhi," a statement quoted him as saying.
ILBS director S K Sarin said children get hepatitis from their mothers for no fault of theirs.
"Everyone should be aware and take a pledge to get every new-born vaccinated. And I request the government to make Hepatitis a notifiable disease," Sarin said.
The health minister also inaugurated state-of-the-art Mobile Liver Screening Van and Healthy Liver Healthy Delhi Project.
Launched under the project titled Healthy Liver Healthy Delhi, the liver screening van aims to raise awareness about Hepatitis and provide free liver screening to people of Delhi NCR.
The van will have on-board Fibroscan ? a test that assesses stiffness of liver without the need for skin invasion. It will also collect blood from volunteers for liver screening tests for Hepatitis B and C, and other parameters associated with liver diseases. PTI CPB SRY
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A 20-something youth set himself afire at a railway station in Delhi, his charred body remained at the platform for over three hours- and all the passersby did was videotape the whole incident.
By Ajay Kumar: In a shocking incident on Saturday, a youth, who is in his twenties has immolated himself at Sakur Basti railway station. Surprisingly, none of the passengers nor any GRP official come forward to his rescue though. Instead, they immediately got busy shooting the incident on their mobile phones. The deceased, an unidentified Sikh youth, wearing a turban, squirmed for about 10 minutes after the act of immolation before eventually breathing his last on the spot.
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The incident took place at around 6pm on Saturday, after the youth had reportedly roamed around the railway track of Sakur Basti for more than an hour or so. "He looked depressed while he was roaming on and off the track.
His act drew all attention only after he ended up taking out a bottle of kerosene from his bag and poured on his own body. After only a few seconds, he lit up a match stick and set himself on fire," informed an officer of GRP, Sarai Rohilla station.
The passengers present on the platform called the GRP.
However, the fire by then had engulfed his body. The helpless youth cried for help but none came forward to douse the flame. The body remained at the station for at least three hours - thanks to a blame game played by the GRP and the Delhi Police over the jurisdiction of the area. When contacted, Aslam Khan, DCP (Northwest) said that the incident took place on the railway track and therefore it was a case of the GRP.
Parvej Ahmad, DCP, Railway, however contradicted him and said that the case will be looked after by the local police and also that the body was not found on the track. The body was finally taken to the mortuary by the GRP. "We are waiting for the claimant of the body. We will then perform a post-mortem," an official said.
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Credit: Samsung
(Tech Xplore)Samsung fans get to say Cool. A 5G test on an over-100KM/H train (over 60 mph) scored results that are apt to please the corporate insiders, considering all the attention being paid to 5G in the pre-standard stage.
Daniel Fuller in Android Headlines made the observation that many companies involved in 5G research and development are almost ready to start working with carriers on deployment, as soon as the official standard is announced.
Once the standard is announced, giants like Samsung want to be ready to roll.
"At this point, 5G is mostly a matter of fine-tuning the software running on the equipment to ensure that it's up to par with the official standard once the 3GPP announces it. This means that carriers can begin deploying true 5G very soon after the announcement, and some have already begun deploying 4.9G and pseudo-5G solutions in commercial network markets, with plans to refarm them into actual 5G access points once the standard is announced," said Fuller.
This train scene was a joint test in October, by both Samsung and Japan-based operator KDDI. It was carried out in Japan, over a 1-mile stretch of track with a moving train.
Fuller noted the test took advantage of two fixed wireless points that used Samsung's equipment and KDDI's network backhaul.
Samsung used a 5G router (CPE), radio access unit (5G Radio), virtualized RAN and virtualized core, for testing.
Results? Samsung reported a "5G uplink and downlink handover" and achieving a peak speed of 1.7Gbps.
Fuller commented that "this test sticks out because of the sustained speed and uninterrupted connection over the of 1.5 kilometers, close to a mile, running a section of track that length between two substations." No issues"and 5G speeds were sustained on the uplink and downlink throughout the entire trial, with peak speeds reaching as high as 1.7 gigabits per second."
All in all, the Japan trial involved a speed test and a testing the connection by streaming 8K video to the train; and uploading 4K video from a special camera mounted on the front of it.
Daniel Fuller, Android Headlines: "Technology conglomerate Samsung does not think that a fast-moving train is a strange place for consumers to demand access to 5G mobile internet, and neither does Japanese mobile carrier KDDI."
Samsung connected the dots between 5G's future and high speed trains.
"The demonstration leveraged capabilities driven by 5G, such as high throughput, low latency and massive connections, which verified potential services and use cases that would be highly-beneficial to passengers and operators of high-speed trains. This could pave the way to vastly improved backhaul for onboard WiFi, superior passenger infotainment and increased security and analytics."
KDDI also commented.
Yoshiaki Uchida, KDDI, said the success of the demonstration in everyday locations such as a train and train station was an important milestone indicating 5G commercialization was near. Uchida also said that to fulfill their aim to launch 5G by 2020, "KDDI will continue exploring real-life scenario experiments for diverse 5G use and business cases together with Samsung."
2017 Tech Xplore
I was at a recent cybersecurity conference where the head of Europols European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) was talking about the threats we face today from the dark web. After Silk Road, much of its illegal business switched to Alpha Bay. The authorities took out Alpha Bay and Hansa business increased almost eight-fold overnight. The authorities take out Hansa and then there are more. Can we ever get on top of this?
The answer is yes, as the Alpha Bay and Hansa takedown was planned and co-ordinated. Its a fascinating case study that I missed during the summer, but worth repeating here now as did cover the Silk Road story before.
What happened in July is that the worlds largest dark net trading venue for drugs and other illicit materials was Alpha Bay and suddenly, on July 4 (Independence Day), it was seized in a joint operation between Europol and the US Department of Justice.
OMG! The criminal community were up in arms, seeking to find alternatives, and most flocked to Alpha Bays nearest rival Hansa.
Hansa accepted their credentials and registrations for two weeks and then that site disappeared just as quickly too, seized by Europol and the DoJ on July 20.
This is because the authorities had been monitoring all the dark web traffic and accepting all of those online applications, as it gave them immediate access to who the illegal protagonists were.
Europol estimates that Alpha Bay generated more than a billion dollars in sales of drugs, stolen data, and other illegal goods over its three years online and, by the time of the seizure, was selling up to $1 million a day. Apparently, there were 250,000 listings on AlphaBay alone, with 200,000 members and 40,000 vendors. You may wonder if thats substantial, and it is. For example, there were over 100,000 live listings when the site was taken offline; compare that with Silk Road which had 14,000 listings when the FBI shut it down in 2013 and you get the idea.
The FBI and DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) had sought the extradition from Thailand of one AlphaBay administrator, Canadian Alexandre Cazes, but the target was found hanged in a Bangkok jail cell in an apparent suicide before an arrest could happen. Nevertheless, the PR manager for Alpha Bay (really?) was arrested two weeks ago.
Equally, the outline of the operation is fascinating, in that Alpha Bay users flocked to Hansa in their droves, with Interpol recording an eight-times increase in the number of new users on Hansa immediately following the takedown of Alphabay. That means that law enforcement agencies now have identifying details on an untold number of dark web sellers and buyers. Europol claims that it gathered 10,000 postal addresses of Hansa customers, and tens of thousands of their messages from the operation.
How the authorities seized these anonymous sites involved a co-ordinated effort as AlphaBays servers were seized with the help of authorities in Thailand, Lithuania, Canada, Britain and France, and Hansas were operating in Lithuania, the Netherlands and Germany. This shows that a lot has changed in the four years since the Silk Road takedown, with vast improvements in the pooling of intelligence with international partners, such as Europol.
But how did they find Cazes in the first place? Hmmm, like Ross Ulbricht (Silk Road), basically Cazes was foolhardy. Despite the sophistication of tools like Tor and bitcoin police discovered Alexandre Cazes, AlphaBays founder, through his hotmail email address Pimp_Alex_91@hotmail.com, which was used to send out password recovery emails for AlphaBay. That led investigators to Cazes LinkedIn account, where he listed awfully familiar skills like website hosting and cryptography, making his prominence as a suspect in the case only continue to grow. As a final nail in the coffin, authorities acquired Cazes PayPal records, which listed Pimp_Alex_91@hotmail.com as contact information, directly tying Cazes payment information back to the incriminated address. This put a swift end to Cazes almost three-year-old eBay-style illegal goods site
What Cazes should have done is create an anonymous John Doe persona, complete with a fake email address, phone number, home address, and life history. That way when he makes mistakes, which always will occur, you expose John Doe as the target, a non-existent nobody.
What is interesting for me is that, with these two major dark markets shut down, the underground still sought alternatives and many focused upon another new service called Trade Route. But guess what? Nope, the authorities didnt shut it down. It just shut down itself and made off with the money cryptocurrencies in what is called an exit scam. Exit scams occur often in the dark markets, and is basically where the operators of a darknet marketplace abscond with users cryptocurrency, which is usually bitcoin but more often now is Monero, as it is harder to track and trace.
Even so, FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe acknowledges that shutting down such markets was like playing whack-a-mole. His agency would likely have to take on more massive dark web marketplaces in the future, he said.
Critics will say as we shutter one site, another will emerge, McCabe said at a press conference. But that is the nature of criminal work. It never goes away, you have to constantly keep at it, and you have to use every tool in your toolbox.
This is obviously the truth as the European Union reported just last week that the online, illegal drug trade is growing rapidly. The report by Europol and EMCDDA found that two thirds of dark web transactions involve drugs, and the rest generally involves guns, explosives and computer hacking tools. The biggest European markets are Germany, Britain and the Netherlands. There are now 14 dark web markets in operation with names like Darknet Heroes League and House of Lions market.
A problem that will never be eradicated and just means that for every seizure of illegal goods and services, there will always be another one to catch.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
While online shopping platforms extend themselves to ensure they have adequate infrastructure to meet rising demand by Vietnamese consumers, they are still failing to satisfy when it comes to shipping, which is mostly done by third parties.
More and more Vietnamese consumers are turning to e-commerce instead of jostling with crowds during shopping events like Black Friday.
In previous years, online shopping websites became overloaded with orders, many of whom eventually failed to receive their purchased goods.
This year, such technical problems were widely resolved and most online platforms have run smoothly, especially during the Black Friday season from November 24 to 26.
However, customers have still filed complaints with e-commerce sites after their goods were delivered much later than scheduled.
In some cases, deliveries were not made until two weeks after the time of purchase.
Late delivery
Luu Huynh, who works for a food company in Ho Chi Minh City, bought a Wi-Fi modem on Lazada in November and was told that delivery would take five to seven days.
However, after two weeks of waiting, Huynh contacted the Lazada hotline and received an auto-reply that told him to go to the website and check the order status.
The problem is, Huynh said, that the order status simply stated that his purchase had been transferred to a third-party shipping service.
Alexandre Dardy, CEO of Lazada Vietnam, officially responded to Huynhs complaint, admitting that the shipping service was poor during the promotional campaign as the system had become overwhelmed with orders.
During the November 24-26 campaign, Lazada managed to sell 1.5 million products, a threefold increase on last year, according to Dardy.
The executive did, however, admit that multiple orders placed during the Black Friday shopping spree remained undelivered two weeks after the campaign, with the shipping service to blame.
Many online shoppers have moaned that they received notifications of delayed delivery from the e-commerce websites as there were too many orders to process.
The overloaded systems also resulted in the delivery of goods different from what some customers had ordered, according to other complaints.
Rapid growth but immature infrastructure
Most major online shopping websites utilize a third party to handle shipping and delivery, which ensures their service quality remains a headache.
A representative of Lotte Vietnam, which has recently joined the e-commerce market, said more than 80 percent of its orders are being delivered by the companys partners, so a certain proportion of deliveries are made behind schedule.
Minh Bui, an online shopping expert, said the overloading of online retailers proves that Vietnams e-commerce infrastructure remains immature compared to the growth of the industry.
Thomas Harris, managing director of DHL eCommerce Vietnam, cited a company research as saying that most online shoppers in Vietnam are not satisfied by the shipping services of local retailers.
Sixty-six percent of online shoppers in Vietnam have demanded their goods be delivered by a trustworthy company, Harris added.
While e-commerce currently only makes up one percent of Vietnams total retail market, the online shopping industry is growing steadily in the Southeast Asian country.
David Anjoubault, general manager of Kantar Worldpanel Vietnam, says that the Vietnamese e-commerce market still has strong potential, even though its size is small when compared to others.
Online sales of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) reached 0.5 percent of the total market in Vietnam in the 12 months to March 2017, representing a significant lift of 69 percent in comparison to last year, Anjoubault said, citing the Future of E-commerce in FMCG report by Kantar Worldpanel, which they published on November 21.
[This] makes Vietnam one of the countries with the highest e-commerce growth in the world, he said.
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The Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), Vietnams leading polytechnic university, has become the countrys first university accredited at institutional level by the ASEAN University Network Quality Assurance (AUN-QA).
The news was confirmed by Dr. Vu Dinh Thanh, rector of HCMUT, which is a member college of the Vietnam National University-Ho Chi Minh City.
AUN-QA is a higher education quality assurance network among countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, with a remit to raise the standard of higher education in collaboration with both regional and international bodies for the benefit of the ASEAN community.
HCMUT was found to have met all the criteria set forth by the quality assurance network, whose assessors visited the university between September 5 and 9, Thanh said.
The assessors were selected from a pool of ASEAN professionals based on their individual competencies and personal attributes, as well as their level of education and work experience.
The university was assessed across 25 criteria and 111 normscategorized into four groups: strategic quality assurance, systemic quality assurance, functional quality assurance and results.
The accreditation of HCMUT at institutional level makes it the first university in Vietnam, and the third in ASEAN, to receive the honor.
HCMUT is a flagship university in technology teaching and research activity in Vietnam, offering top-notch undergraduate and graduate programs in tech-industries as well as management training.
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Free factory visits that offer an insight into how tea and silk are produced in Vietnams Central Highlands will be available as part of the 2017 Da Lat Flower Festival.
Running from December 23 to 27, the event is Vietnams biggest flower festival, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to Da Lat City in the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong.
This year, the festival includes a cultural week featuring the craft of making tea and silk by Vietnamese highlandersthat will be held in Da Lat's neighbor, Bao Loc City.
Tourists who are in Bao Loc during the flower festival can register with organizers to be taken on a complimentary trip to one of the major tea and silk factories in the city.
The experience will include witnessing the entire process of producing a finished product and learning about what makes Lam Dong silk and tea unique.
The year 2017 marks the seventh edition of the biennial flower festival, which is themed Da Lat Flowers The Crystallization of Earths Marvels.
Fifteen main events and 14 complimentary programs will be organized over the five-day period, including a wine festival, flower displays, and a greens market.
The opening ceremony will be held at 8:00 pm on December 23 at Da Lats lakeside Lam Vien Square.
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According to recent reports, Dulquer Salmaan will star in Manmarziyan, alongside Taapsee Pannu and Vicky Kaushal.
By India Today Web Desk: There has been much buzz around the film Manmarziyan, directed by Anurag Kashyap and produced by Aanand L Rai. The film starring Taapsee Pannu and Vicky Kaushal, is a love triangle, and will kick off in January.
And now, according to a report in Mumbai Mirror, the makers have found their third angle in Malayalam star, Dulquer Salmaan.
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According to a source close to the team, the makers had been on the hunt for a second lead, opposite Taapsee, and Dulquer was perfect for the role.
Meanwhile, Dulquer is busy with his Bollywood debut, Karwaan, starring Irrfan Khan and Mithila Palkar.
Manmarziyan has had quite a history. In 2015, it was announced that Ayushmann Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar will star in the lead roles. However the film was shelved, after a few professional disagreements. Rai then took the story to Kashyap, who decided to take it on.
ALSO WATCH| India Today Woman Summit 2017: I am in no way less in power and strength, says Taapsee Pannu
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Ho Chi Minh City authorities are planning to establish separate areas for street food vendors along some 159 routes following the successful operation of its food streets in the past months.
Leaders of district-level administrations across the southern hub have proposed reserving specific zones for local street food sellers.
Surveys are being carried out on 159 streets in the city to prepare for the potential establishment of such food hubs.
The proposal is aimed at providing a legitimate place for vendors and ensuring order along city sidewalks.
It follows the opening of the first food streets on Nguyen Van Chiem Street and at Bach Tung Diep Park in District 1.
The Nguyen Van Chiem food street was opened on August 28. A total of 40 businesses take turns to operate on two shifts: between 6:00 am and 9:00 am in the morning, and 11:00 am to 1:00 pm in the afternoon.
The second food hub was introduced at Bach Tung Diep Park in early October. It is home to up to 30 catering businesses run by former street vendors, who also take turns to occupy the stalls on two shifts: from 6:00 am and 9:00 am, and from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm.
L., a vendor on Nguyen Van Chiem Street, said the new venue has helped her sell more food compared to when she was operating along local sidewalks.
The food hub at Bach Tung Diep Park in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Tuoi Tre
Officials at seven out of 10 wards in District 1 have already submitted their proposals on similar models.
In Binh Thanh District, an examination is being carried out to prepare for the trial of a food hub on the promenade of Dien Bien Phu Street, in front of HUTECH University.
About 20 stalls will be established for local residents to sell their dishes, said Duong Hong Thang, vice-chairman of the Binh Thanh Peoples Committee.
More food streets will be opened in the neighborhood following the test run, Thang added.
According to Tran Thanh Binh, vice-chairman of the Peoples Committee in District 3, the administration is mulling over several food corners at the Turtle Lake and nearby streets, namely Vo Van Tan, Tran Cao Van, and Pham Ngoc Thach.
The plan is to provide favorable conditions for street vendors to earn a living, Binh elaborated.
Careful consideration
The citys Urban Traffic Management Zone No. 3 has recently suggested the establishment of a food hub at Gia Dinh Park, Go Vap District.
According to Deputy Chairman Nguyen Huu Nghia, authorities are weighing whether the size of the park is sufficient given the large number of vendors in the district.
A vendor sells his food on a street in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Tuoi Tre
If there is not enough space, the plan will go sideways, resulting in more regular occupation of sidewalks and roadways, Nghia explained.
The Urban Traffic Management Zone No. 3 is expected to pool statistics from the operation of the Nguyen Van Chiem food street before coordinating with the Go Vap administration to realize the scheme.
It is necessary to open more food centers to provide business opportunities for poorer residents, Nguyen Van Dung, deputy head of the Urban Traffic Management Zone No. 1 said, adding that order, hygiene, and esthetics should be taken into account.
Dung listed some potential streets for the plan, including Pham Ngu Lao in District 1 and Nguyen Trai in District 5.
This is an effective measure to ensure livelihoods for citizens and preserve urban and traffic order, said Vu Viet Ha, deputy chief inspector of the municipal Department of Transport.
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A Spanish publisher has bought the rights to translate Long Than Tuong (Holy Dragon Imperator), a series of fictionalized historical comics by young Vietnamese artists, into Spanish for their publication in Spain.
The news was announced by Nguyen Khanh Duong, the author of Long Than Tuong and co-founder of online Vietnamese comic alliance Comicola.
According to Duong, a representative from the Spanish publisher, Amok Books, had shown interest in the comic series while touring Southeast Asia on the search for rising comic talents.
Prior to arriving in Vietnam, Enrique Larrea had already signed a deal to buy the translation and publishing rights to a comic by Singaporean artist Sonny Liew, whohad won three prestigious Eisner Awards for his work, Duong said.
The Eisner Awards, or Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, are given for creative achievement in American comics, and are often referred to as the Oscars of the comic industry.
Six months ago, Enrique Larrea visited the Dinh Le book street in Hanoi and asked book sellers for their best-selling Vietnamese comic book, Duong said.
After consistently being handed the first volume of Long Than Tuong, he decided to contact us for the English version of the comic to read.
Impressed by the comics artistic style and storylines, and convinced that it would be a hit in Spain, the Amok representative wasted no time initiating negotiations to acquire translation and publication rights to the comic in Spain, Duong recalled.
The English cover of Long Than Tuong (R) is displayed on the homepage of Spanish publishing house Amok Books in this screen capture.
Confident as we are of our work, we were at first anxious about whether such a Vietnamese story would appeal to international readers, Duong admitted.
But after getting positive reactions from Larrea as well as from the Japanese and American markets where Long Than Tuong has also been well received, we are truly thrilled.
Duong said he did not expect the comic to become a best-seller in Spain, but said it was a joy in itself to see a product of Vietnamese culture being introduced to Spanish readers.
Long Than Tuong, translated into English as Holy Dragon Imperator, is a series of fictionalized historical stories about a young 13th-century Vietnamese man, Long, and his adventures in helping to defend Vietnam against the Mongol Empire.
Drawn by young Vietnamese artists Thanh Phong and My Anh with storylines written by Duong, the first volume of the comic was released in November 2014 thanks to financial support from a crowd-funding project on Comicola.
Last February, Long Than Tuong was honored with a silver prize at the 9th International Manga Award in Japan.
According to Duong, his team intends to finish translating the comic into English in 2018 in order to be published and sold to foreign visitors to Vietnam as well as exported to other international markets.
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An express boat plying between Ho Chi Minh City and the southern city of Vung Tau is expected to open later this month.
The Ho Chi Minh City Department of Transport has carried out a technical examination of the express boat route linking Ho Chi Minh City, outlying Can Gio District, and Vung Tau, a popular beach city in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau.
The waterway route has been developed by the Ho Chi Minh City-based GreenlinesDP Company.
According to Bui Xuan Cuong, director of the transport department, the express boat service will officially open to the public on December 23.
The GreenlinesDP K6 vessels are specifically designed to operate on this journey, and are equipped with four air-conditioners, a big-screen TV, a security camera system, Wi-Fi, fire alarms and life jackets.
Each boat also includes a ten-passenger capacity VIP corner, which comes with its own mini-bar.
The boats will launch from Bach Dang Wharf in District 1 before traveling to Thach An Station in Can Gio District, and then stop at Ho May in Vung Tau.
Four trips will be provided daily for the Ho Chi Minh City-Can Gio route and eight for the Ho Chi Minh City-Vung Tau journey.
The VIP corner on one boat. Photo: Tuoi Tre
Extra trips are expected be added on weekends.
Each trip will cost VND200,000 (US$9) per person. Passengers who are residents of Can Gio as well as public servants who regularly travel the route will be entitled to a 50 percent discount.
Disabled people will be allowed to travel free-of-charge.
Three types of boat with capacities of 50, 96, and 136 seats will be made available.
This is the first express boat route connecting Ho Chi Minh City, Can Gio, and Vung Tau, said Pham Cong Bang, head of the waterway management division under the transport department.
More routes will be added in the future according to demand, to promote waterway tourism, and help relieve traffic pressure on city streets.
Given its network of rivers and canals stretching a total of 1,000 kilometers, this and similar projects make use of the potential for water transport in the southern metropolis, Bang elaborated.
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SBS documentary series Marry Me, Marry My Family will look at cross-cultural marriages in Australia, in early January.
This is a 3 part series produced by CJZ which will presumably offer an alternative view to that by Sevens Bride & Prejudice (which is not returning).
Walk down the aisle with SBS this summer, as we explore the chaotic and colourful road to intercultural weddings. At the best of times, weddings are filled with tears, stress and anxiety, but when you throw two vastly different cultures into the mix, you get double the drama in an epic tale of love against the odds.
Over three weeks, follow six couples as they try to straddle the gulf between cultures and the gap between their parents expectations and their own dreams. The series seats us at the front table of diverse, multicultural weddings and provides intimate access to the couples and their families, through the tears and joy, as they get ready to tie the knot.
In the first episode, theres nothing Armenian born Nancy wants more than for her family to accept her Indian Hindu fiance, Ashu. The relationship caused an 18-month estrangement from her heartbroken mother, who doesnt understand why her daughter cant marry a handsome Armenian man. Their wedding is set to be an authentic Armenian affair, but first Nancy must try to glue back the pieces with her mother in time for the wedding. Meanwhile, in the suburbs of Adelaide, skip truck driver Mark is heading to Nairobi, Kenya, where he will negotiate a dowry for his other half, Wambui. Having met on the dancefloor of a casino, the two will be married in a traditional Kikuyu wedding ceremony which will see Mark barter for his bride with goats, and choose her out of a line-up of completely covered women.
Next up is a real life gypsy wedding where high school sweethearts Derian and Jye will tie the knot in an extravagant, three-day affair. Derians family are Muslim Gypsies from Macedonia. Never in their wildest dreams did they imagine their daughter would marry Jye an easy-going Maltese Australian, but an outsider nonetheless. Their success as parents depends on one detail: whether Derian is a virgin until her wedding night. In an ancient tradition, her marital sheets will be inspected to confirm her virginity and her fathers success as a parent, otherwise she will be disowned. Sri Lankan Hindu Lalith has gone against his parents wishes for an arranged marriage and chosen Chinese Australian, Louise. His parents refuse to speak to her and they wont be attending the wedding. Lalith has a tough job on his hands, trying to persuade his parents to acknowledge his bride-to-be before the big day.
When Travis swiped right on tinder to Pakistani Australian Rabia, little did he know hed be saying yes to a new partner, a new family and a new religion. Married at a young age, but now divorced, Rabia has two teenage girls, and faced a lot of pressure when she started dating Travis. Even though Travis chose to convert to Islam and marry Rabia immediately, the couple still face an ongoing struggle within Rabias Pakistani community, particularly with her devout mother who thinks Travis has converted purely for the sake of marriage. Meanwhile, Indigenous Wiradjuri woman Jessa plunges into Maori culture. Her wedding to Areti, the grandson of a prominent Maori leader, will be heavy on protocol, with indigenous elders, politicians, and even royalty on the guest list. Aside from the mammoth task of finalising a hierarchy-based seating arrangement, Jessas greatest challenge will be performing an ancient Maori song at the wedding reception. Shes under pressure to get it right, or risk causing offence.
Marry Me, Marry My Family is the familiar story of multicultural Australians, as they are today trying to embrace their Australian identity, whilst staying true to their culture, identity and family. Its a heart-warming update on how multiculturalism is working in Australia and a colourful account of the country that we are evolving into.
Tuesday, 9 January at 8.40pm on SBS.
Filming begins today on Gristmills Back in Very Small Business, the reprisal of ABC comedy series Very Small Business featuring Wayne Hope & Kim Gyngell.
The pair return as Don Angel and Ray Leonard, respectively. Don is at the helm of the World Wide Business Group, where he and Ray have found success with their Dons Dirty Dog Wash franchise and are running five other small businesses, staffed by an ethnically diverse, gender fluid, psychologically fragile menagerie, all hired on government subsidies.
Joining them are Robyn Nevin, Molly Daniels, Liv Hewson, Rick Donald, Aaron Chen, Rachel Gordon, Marg Downey, Jane Harber, Pia Miranda, Heidi Arena and newcomer Roman Hadley-Lund.
ABC Head of Comedy, Rick Kalowski said The amazing full cast Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope have assembled for Back in Very Small Business speaks volumes for their reputation as one of the most talented comedy production outfits our country has ever produced.
Film Victoria CEO, Jenni Tosi said We congratulate Robyn and Wayne as they get back into business with a terrific ensemble cast to produce the return of this entertaining comedy. Were also thrilled to support Lisa Marie Corso as a writers attachment on the production where shell be able to hone her screenwriting skills under the guidance of two of the best creatives in the business.
Screen Australias Head of Production Sally Caplan said: Were thrilled to see Back in Very Small Business commence production with such an impressive cast of top-tier Australian comedic actors working alongside some of our most exciting new talent. This sharp satire looks set to be another hit for the talented team at Gristmill.
Gristmill co-founders Wayne Hope and Robyn Butler are executive producers alongside Greg Sitch and the ABCs Rick Kalowski. Hope and Butler have written the series with Gary McCaffrie (Upper Middle Bogan, Shaun Micallefs Mad as Hell and Very Small Business) and Butler will direct all eight episodes. Lisa Marie Corso is the writers attachment, as part of Film Victorias Key Talent program.
Back in Very Small Business has principal production investment from Screen Australia in association with Film Victoria and will air on the ABC in 2018.
ABC ME host Nathan Bazley will wrap as presenter of Behind the News after a decade in the role, but continue as Series Producer.
Launched in 1968, BTN is the third longest-running program on Australian television, behind Four Corners and Play School and Bazley is its longest-serving host after joining in 2007. Previous hosts have included Richard Morecroft and Paul Higgins.
As well as remaining behind the scenes Bazley will mentor its young reporters.
ABC Director, News Gaven Morris said: For the past decade Nathan has been a trusted and influential figure in the lives of millions of Australian children. He has played a pivotal role in the Behind the News team, inspiring young people to develop an interest in news and current affairs.
His final episode airs at 10am tomorrow on ABC ME.
A new host will be named in the new year.
A display featuring missiles and a portrait of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is seen at Baharestan Square in Tehran, Iran September 27, 2017. Picture taken September 27, 2017. Nazanin Tabatabaee Yazdi/TIMA via REUTERS
Thomson Reuters
BEIRUT (Reuters) - France should know that Irans missile program is not an issue that can be negotiated, Irans foreign ministry spokesman, Bahram Qassemi, said in an interview with state media on Monday.
"French official, other officials, who want to speak about Irans affairs need to pay attention to the deep developments that have come to pass in the region in past decades and the big changes between the current situation and the past, Qassemi said Monday, according to state media.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran will definitely not negotiate on defense and missile issues."
Tension between Iran and France increased last month when French President Emmanuel Macron said that Iran should be less aggressive in the region and should clarify its ballistic missile program.
His foreign minister also denounced, during a visit to Saudi Arabia, Iran's hegemonic temptations.
France could play a productive role in the Middle East by taking a realistic and impartial approach, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told Macron in a telephone call two weeks ago, according to Iranian state media.
Iranian state media said Rouhani told Macron that the Islamic Republic was ready to develop its relations with France on all bilateral, regional and international issues based on mutual respect and shared goals.
(Reporting By Babak Dehghanpisheh; Editing by Robert Birsel)
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Feeling under the weather? Try the rom-com remedy three in five Americans say its their go-to movie genre when down for the count.
Thats according to a new poll of 2,000 millennial parents of kids ages 4-12, where theyre also watching action and adventure movies (37%) and series like Harry Potter or the Hunger Games (36%).
When sickness strikes, more than four in five (82%) spend most of their time in their bedroom, with 42% staying put on the couch in their living room.
This may contribute to the fact that the average parent watches five hours of TV or movies each sick day.
Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Delsym, results showed how respondents are optimizing comfort with their favorite things.
Results revealed that respondents get sick about three times per year.
Respondents were more likely to prefer old favorites than to wrap their heads around new content when feeling ill. (23% vs 15%).
When parents are sick with their children, the most popular movies to watch are the Harry Potter series (32%) and the Toy Story series (32%).
They also watch movies like Frozen (30%), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (28%) and Moana (25%).
More than half (56%) of respondents have a go-to or favorite feel-better comfort movie, with the average person saying they can watch it four times in a row without getting sick of it
In fact, 45% of those admit they can watch it more than four times and one in 10 of those (11%) even say they can watch it an infinite amount of times.
In total, respondents have watched their feel-better movie about 34 different times.
This movie has been respondents favorite for about six years, perhaps because it reminds them of good times (61%) and makes them laugh (53%).
Parents report feeling relaxed (54%), happy (48%) and calm (40%) after watching their favorite movie.
Almost two-thirds (63%) of parents agree that theyve passed their love of their favorite movie along to their child.
Nothing brings a family together quite like movie night, and nothing makes movie night better than a feel-good flick that fills you with warm, fuzzy feelings especially when youre sick. We understand that feeling better means more than just relieving your cough symptoms its about cozying up on the couch as you and your family work to feel better together, said Albert So, Marketing Director, Upper Respiratory Brands at Reckitt, including Delsym.
The survey also delved into how respondents are remedying their ailments by caring for their five senses.
In order to alleviate their symptoms, parents tend to want to taste soup (42%) and hot beverages like tea or coffee (26%).
They also want to touch things like their favorite blanket (40%), their significant other (19%) and their pet (14%).
When it comes to smell, respondents like to breathe in something clean like fresh linens (42%), medicine (36%) and something cooking in the kitchen (26%).
And while trying to feel better, respondents like to listen to music (58%) and their friends and family talking (29%).
When a family member is under the weather, the entire household is caught in the storm and that daily routine can be thrown off course, bringing with it discomfort and chaos. Families not only need fast-acting relief, but they need comforting remedies to help them navigate that storm, said So. Whether its moms chicken soup, your go-to feel better movie or cozying up with your kids, whatever it is that makes you feel better can go a long way.
Survey methodology:
This random double-opt-in survey of 2,000 millennial parents of kids aged 4-12 was commissioned by Delsym between October 6 and October 10, 2022. It was conducted by market research company OnePoll, whose team members are members of the Market Research Society and have corporate membership to the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR).
By PTI: Mumbai, Dec 4 (PTI) Essel Mutual Fund today said it will bear the 18 per cent GST on behalf of fund distributors. The move would help insulate distributors against the impact of GST, Essel said in a statement. The offer would be available on all present and future schemes of Essel Mutual Fund, till March 2019. advertisement ************* Axis Sec gets registered on NCDEX exchange platform * With Axis Securities taking membership of the agri-commodity exchange National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX), the commodity market space has registered the first ever bank broking arm on its platform. Till recently the financial regulator had not allowed any institutional investors including banks, to participate in agri derivatives space. "We will focus to penetrate clients for agri and non-agri commodities business across the country, especially from semi-urban & rural pockets of India," Axis Securities managing director Arun Thukral said. ************************** Peru seeks Indian investments in hydrocarbon, mining, agri * Latin American country Peru, with the fastest GDP seeks Indian investments in manufacturing, hydrocarbon, mining, agri and agro-processing sectors with low custom tariffs and open investment regime, Embassy of Peru in India Commercial Counsellor Luis Cabello said here. India is one of the biggest importers of oil and gas from Latin America and is one of the largest exporters of steel, automobile, IT and pharmaceutical products. The bilateral trade between India and Peru is more than USD 1700 million in 2016-17, which has a great potential to expand, he said. **************** Tata Motors partners with financiers for 100% funding schemes * Auto major Tata Motors today said it has partnered with leading financiers and banks to offer up to 100 per cent funding through various finance schemes for buying a Tata car. As part of its ?Mega Offer Max Celebration campaign?, launched today, the customers can drive home a Tata car at a down payment of just Rs 1, a release said. PTI SSM AP IAS DSK DSK RDS --- ENDS --- Crew aboard a flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong witnessed the remnants of North Korea's latest missile test. Cathay Pacific flight CX893 was making its way over Japan when Pyongyang fired the Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile. Those on board reported seeing what they thought to be the missile re-entering the atmosphere. After last week's launch , the rogue state boasted that the weapon was capable of hitting the US mainland. A spokesman for the airline told Sky News: "On 29 November, the flight crew of CX893 reported a sighting of what is suspected to be the re-entry of the recent DPRK test missile. "Though the flight was far from the event location, the crew advised Japan ATC (air traffic control) according to procedures. Operation remained normal and was not affected. "We have been in contact with relevant authorities and industry bodies as well as with other carriers. At the moment, no one is changing any routes or operating parameters. We remain alert and review the situation as it evolves." The South China Morning Post reports that the airline's general manager of operations Mark Hoey posted on the internal company communications platform to warn colleagues of the flight's proximity to the missile. He said the crew had witnessed the missile "blow up and fall apart near our location" and that another Cathay Pacific flight - CX096 between Hong Kong and Anchorage in Alaska - may have been even closer. Tensions in the region are likely to escalate even further this week, with North Korea declaring a five-day joint military drill between the US and South Korea as an "open, all-out provocation". The two allies began their largest ever co-operative air exercise - dubbed Vigilant Ace - on Monday, with 230 aircraft, including 24 stealth fighter jets, set to take part. FILE PHOTO - Finland's Prime Minister Juha Sipila listens to media after government's open session for members of public took place during the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Finnish independence in Porvoo, Finland May 4, 2017. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins (Reuters) By Tuomas Forsell and Jussi Rosendahl HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finland should remain militarily neutral because it helps ensure security in the Baltic Sea region, Prime Minister Juha Sipila said in an interview ahead of celebrations of the country's 100 years of independence. The EU member state was part of the Russian Empire and won independence during the 1917 Russian revolution but it nearly lost it fighting the Soviet Union in World War Two. The centre-right government retains the option of seeking NATO membership but remaining non-aligned and increasing defence cooperation with Sweden and the EU was Finland's way, Sipila said. "At the moment, to have Finland and Sweden forming this militarily non-aligned zone, I think that increases the security and stability in the Baltic Sea region ... I see no reason to change this," Sipila told Reuters by phone. Finland has stepped up military cooperation with Sweden and forged closer ties with NATO because it is concerned about Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and heightened East-West tensions in the Baltic Sea. However, the government has opted to stay out of NATO in line with its tradition of avoiding confrontation with Russia. A report commissioned by the government said last year that if Finland joined NATO it would lead to a crisis with Russia, which is also a major trade partner for Finland. Moscow has hinted that it could move troops closer to the Finnish-Russian border if Finland joins NATO. "It is clear that Finland is part of the West and the western community. That is our place," Sipila said. "We want to be ... at the core of the European Union, influencing EU's future. But the main difference between us and the majority of EU states is our military non-alignment." Polls show that only 22 percent of Finns support NATO membership, while 62 percent are opposed. Sipila, who leads Finland's Centre party, said any move to join would need public approval via a referendum. Finance Minister Petteri Orpo from Finland's poll-leading National Coalition party told Reuters last week he believed that joining NATO would improve Finland's security. (Reporting by Tuomas Forsell and Jussi Rosendahl; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg) FILE PHOTO: A display featuring missiles and a portrait of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is seen at Baharestan Square in Tehran, Iran September 27, 2017. Nazanin Tabatabaee Yazdi/TIMA/File Photo via REUTERS (Reuters) BEIRUT (Reuters) - France should know that Irans missile programme is not an issue that can be negotiated, Irans foreign ministry spokesman, Bahram Qassemi, said in an interview with state media on Monday. "French official, other officials, who want to speak about Irans affairs need to pay attention to the deep developments that have come to pass in the region in past decades and the big changes between the current situation and the past, Qassemi said Monday, according to state media. "The Islamic Republic of Iran will definitely not negotiate on defence and missile issues." Tension between Iran and France increased last month when French President Emmanuel Macron said that Iran should be less aggressive in the region and should clarify its ballistic missile programme. His foreign minister also denounced, during a visit to Saudi Arabia, Iran's hegemonic temptations. France could play a productive role in the Middle East by taking a realistic and impartial approach, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told Macron in a telephone call two weeks ago, according to Iranian state media. Iranian state media said Rouhani told Macron that the Islamic Republic was ready to develop its relations with France on all bilateral, regional and international issues based on mutual respect and shared goals. (Reporting By Babak Dehghanpisheh; Editing by Robert Birsel) Panorama alleged taxpayer money was reaching the hands of extremist group Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria (AP) A foreign aid scheme has been suspended by the Government after an investigation claimed that taxpayers money was being used by extremists in Syria. Officers from the Free Syrian Police (FSP), the civilian police force backed by Britain, have also been working with courts accused of torture and summary executions, BBC Ones Panorama alleged. According to documents seen by the programme, police officers in Aleppo province were forced to hand over funds to the extremist group in control of the area, Nour al-Din al-Zinki. Evidence also showed that the Syrian branch of al Qaida, Jabhat al-Nusra, had handpicked police officers for two stations in Idlib province, it said. Britain is one of six countries funding the FSP, which was set up after the Syrian uprising. Officers from the Free Syrian Police have allegedly been working with courts accused of torture and summary executions (Rex) Adam Smith International (ASI), the British company that runs the project, said it had managed taxpayers money effectively to confront terrorism. The programme Jihadis You Pay For, which will air on Monday evening, claims the documents also showed that dead and fictitious people were on the FSPs payroll. When the company visited one police station, supposedly the base for 57 police officers, they could not find a single officer, the investigation found. Most popular on Yahoo News UK The five signs which let you spot a liar Chip shop owner creates giant foot-long pig in a blanket for Christmas Boy, nine, writes to Father Christmas asking for a forever home for his homeless family Police force slammed after it warns bumping into someone under the mistletoe could be rape Donald Trumps favourite McDonalds meal has been revealed ASI said it accounted for the officers on subsequent visits and that it had found very few instances of dead officers remaining on the salary list in Syria. It said it used cash because there was no practical alternative and that officers imposed by Jabhat al-Nusra were detected within two months. Payments to the stations funding the extremist group Nour al-Din al-Zinki were stopped in August 2016, it added. Story continues Kate Osamor, Labours shadow secretary of state for international development, said that British taxpayers would be rightly outraged by the claims (PA) ASI said: ASI has managed the project successfully alongside our partner in an extremely challenging, high-risk environment under the close supervision of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and five other governments. Kate Osamor, Labours shadow secretary of state for international development, said that if the allegations were true, British taxpayers would be rightly outraged. She said: This investigation is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg: the Government must now open up its books so the public can understand the true extent of the problem. An FCO spokesman said: We take any allegations of co-operation with terrorist groups and of human rights abuses extremely seriously and the Foreign Office has suspended this programme while we investigate these allegations. We believe that such work in Syria is important to protect our national security interest but of course we reach this judgment carefully given that in such a challenging environment no activity is without risk. That is why all our programmes are designed carefully and subject to robust monitoring. BBC Panorama: Jihadis You Pay For, is on BBC One at 7.30pm on Monday. Pro-democracy campaigners in Hong Kong marched with previously jailed Occupy leader Joshua Wong Chi-fung through the city on Sunday, December 3, to protest against authoritarian measures by the government and mainland China. Protesters voiced their opposition to harsh measures by the authorities against several pro-democracy activists, including Wong, who faced being re-jailed on Thursday for his actions during the 2014 Occupy protests, according to the South China Morning Post. This video shows protesters booing the Chinese national anthem, an act which could be outlawed by 2019, according to the South China Morning Post, as they marched along Queensway in Central. The woman seen in the footage holds a doll, a small stereo and a sign that reads: When you hear the national anthem, dont eat. Stand up immediately, Hong Kong Free Press reported. Some pro-democracy activists said the decision to outlaw protest against the Chinese national anthem in Hong Kong signifies the declining freedom in the Special Administrative Region, a former British colony. About 2000 people joined the protest from Wan Chai to the Court of Final Appeal in Central, according to the South China Morning Post. Credit: Twitter/Alex Hofford via Storyful A hunter has been killed by a wild boar which attacked him as he tried to shoot it, say police in Germany. The 50-year-old man was part of a shooting party with a dozen others who were searching for the pigs near the northeast German town of Greifswald on Sunday. He was attacked by the male boar after firing off a shot and moving into reeds where he came face-to-face with the mammal, witnesses said. Police said the man, who has not been identified, suffered severe injuries to his left thigh and fell into some water nearby. He was taken to hospital where he later died. Officers say they have not tracked down the boar and it is unclear whether the animal was injured. About half a million wild boar are killed each year in Germany, but experts say the numbers killed are not enough to stop the burgeoning population. In Berlin alone, about 6,000 boar live in forests on the city's outskirts. In November, four people in the northern city of Heide were injured after a male and a female boar entered a city centre bank and attacked customers. A local hunter shot the male boar but the second pig managed to escape during the commotion. Bank customers escaped from the building using ladders provided by the emergency services. Saad al-Hariri who suspended his decision to resign as prime minister talks at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon November 22, 2017. REUTERS/Aziz Taher (Reuters) PARIS (Reuters) - Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri will meet ministers from major powers in Paris on Friday to discuss ways of stabilising his country a month after his shock resignation plunged it into political turmoil, three diplomats said. The Arab and European diplomats said Hariri would take part in the meeting of the International Lebanon Support Group, a body that includes the five members of the U.N. Security Council - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. Hariri resigned as prime minister in early November while he was in Saudi Arabia, prompting a political crisis in Lebanon and thrusting it back into a regional tussle between Riyadh and its main regional foe, Iran. Hariri has now returned to Beirut and indicated that he might withdraw his resignation, which was never accepted by the president. Lebanese officials say Saudi Arabia had coerced Hariri, a long-time ally of the kingdom, into resigning and held him there against his will until an intervention by France led to his return to Lebanon. Saudi Arabia denies this. A European diplomat said the aim of the meeting would be "to put pressure on the Saudis and Iranians". He added that the meeting would be an opportunity to reinforce that the Lebanese must stick by the state policy of "disassociation", or keeping out of regional conflicts. Before Hariri sets off, Lebanon's cabinet is this week set to meet for the first time since the political crisis erupted. The date of the cabinet meeting has not yet been confirmed but it is expected to address Hariri's resignation. A Lebanese MP who met Hariri on Monday said discussions among politicians were "moving positively" and would result in a "unanimous stance" by the cabinet soon. The comments from MP Wael Abu Faour were published by Hariri's office on Monday. The Lebanon support group, launched in 2013, also includes the European Union, the Arab League and the United Nations. (Reporting by John Irish in Paris and Lisa Barrington in Beirut; Editing by Andrew Heavens) News of Shashi Kapoor's death made ripples not only in India, but also in international media, which carried obituaries or news reports encapsulating the star's life. By Dev Goswami: "Kapoor was a scion of the celebrated Indian film-making dynasty, the son of Mughal-E-Azam star Prithviraj Kapoor, and brother of Raj Kapoor." "Kapoor, who acted in huge hits like Deewar and Kabhie Kabhie, had been ill for some time and was in hospital." "Shashi Kapoor, the charming, romantic hero of numerous Indian films..." Those were some of the ledes published in leading international publications after the death of Shashi Kapoor. advertisement The veteran Bollywood actor, once called the best-looking Kapoor by contemporary actor Sharmila Tagore, died today at Mumbai's Kokilaben Ambani Hospital. News of the star's death made ripples not only in India, where everybody from leaders such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the entire Hindi film industry paid tributes, but also in international media. Foreign publications carried largely straight-forward obituaries or news reports encapsulating Shashi Kapoor's life. American publications The Washington Post and the New York Times lead with wire stories filed by news agency the Associated Press. The AP noted Kapoor's massive contribution to the Hindi film industry, writing in its report, "Kapoor acted in more than 100 Hindi films and was also a key theater personality." The AP also wrote about how Shashi Kapoor had wowed not just Bollywood audiences in India but cinema lovers in the West as well. "He appeared as well in British and American movies produced by Merchant Ivory productions, run by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory," the report read. The agency also carried English translations of some of Shashi Kapoor's most iconic films. "Some of his popular Bollywood films were "Deewar (Wall)," "Kabhie Kabhie (Sometimes)," ''Namak Halal (Loyal Servant)" and "Kaala Pathar (Black Rock)." He co-starred with Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan in each," the AP wrote. US News network CNN focused on Shashi Kapoor's birth into a "talented family". Shashi Kapoor's "father (Prithviraj Kapoor) was an actor and playwright, performing all over the country during the Partition era with his repertory company the Prithvi Theaters," CNN noted before going on to devote two paragraphs to the iconic 'mere paas maa hai' exchange between Shashi Kapoor and contemporary Amitabh Bachchan. Shashi Kapoor. Thank you and farewell: https://t.co/i9K88akIio- Salil Tripathi (@saliltripathi) December 4, 2017 In the United Kingdom, both The Guardian and the BBC carried desk reports on Shashi Kapoor's death. "Kapoor was a scion of the celebrated Indian film-making dynasty, the son of Mughal-E-Azam star Prithviraj Kapoor, and brother of Raj Kapoor," The Guardian wrote, tracing the departed star's cinematic lineage. The BBC, which also has a presence in India, wrote about Shashi Kapoor's many awards. "He won several national film awards and was awarded the Padma Bhushan civilian honour by the Indian government in 2011," the British public-owned broadcaster said in its report of the star's death. advertisement And, in a nod to how the young generation in India remembers Shashi Kapoor, the BBC wrote about his most iconic dialogue: "His comment "Mere paas maa hai" (But I have mother's support) - from Deewar during a tense confrontation with screen-sibling Bachchan tops the list of best Bollywood lines for millions of fans across the globe." Other publications that covered Shashi Kapoor's death included the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, which called the actor a "charming, romantic hero of numerous Indian films", and international news agency Reuters, which wrote about Kapoor's "easy charm and intense demeanor". WATCH | Shashi Kapoor no more: A tribute to Bollywood's handsome actor --- ENDS --- Nicola Sturgeon has suggested that Scotland be given the same Brexit concessions as Northern Ireland (Rex) With Britain and the European Union moving closer to an agreement on the Irish border, the SNP are questioning why Scotland cant have the same Brexit concessions. How to maintain a soft Irish border had emerged as the key sticking point to getting agreement from the EU to move on to phase two of negotiations. Reports suggest the UK government had conceded there would be continued regulatory alignment on Ireland, suggesting Northern Ireland could stay in the customs union and the single market. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has jumped on the news, saying there was no good reason that Scotland could not do the same with the EU and effectively stay in the single market. The Scottish First Minister tweeted: If one part of UK can retain regulatory alignment with EU and effectively stay in the single market (which is the right solution for Northern Ireland) there is surely no good practical reason why others cant. If one part of UK can retain regulatory alignment with EU and effectively stay in the single market (which is the right solution for Northern Ireland) there is surely no good practical reason why others cant. Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) December 4, 2017 SNP MP Angus MacNeil also believes the concession paves the way for Scotland having a similar deal, even if other parts of the UK leave the EU altogether. He told BuzzFeed News: Yes, [its] completely impossible [to deny Scotland the same deal as Northern Ireland]. Why should Scotland have a terrible deal and Ireland a good deal? Irelands deputy premier and Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney said the Dublin governments concerns over the post-Brexit border were set to be addressed fully. Most popular on Yahoo News UK The five signs which let you spot a liar Chip shop owner creates giant foot-long pig in a blanket for Christmas Boy, nine, writes to Father Christmas asking for a forever home for his homeless family Police force slammed after it warns bumping into someone under the mistletoe could be rape Donald Trumps favourite McDonalds meal has been revealed Story continues London Mayor Sadiq Khan echoed the SNPs sentiments, tweeting that London should get the same Brexit deal as Northern Ireland. He tweeted: Londoners overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and a similar deal here could protect tens of thousands of jobs. Regulatory alignment between Northern Ireland and the Republic is likely to mean both sides following the same rules governing trade, to ensure that goods can continue to move freely across a soft border with no checks. Huge ramifications for London if Theresa May has conceded that its possible for part of the UK to remain within the single market & customs union after Brexit. Londoners overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and a similar deal here could protect tens of thousands of jobs. Mayor of London (@MayorofLondon) December 4, 2017 Lord Trimble, former leader of the Ulster Unionists and ex-Northern Ireland first minister, said he was left shocked and scratching his head at reports of a deal allowing continued regulatory alignment across the border. He told BBC Radio 4s World At One: We need to see the detail of this. I think its a thoroughly bad idea. If this operates purely on a Northern Ireland basis, its going to put Northern Ireland businesses potentially, at a very significant disadvantage. Because, they would be locked into European regulatory provisions, whereas the rest of the United Kingdom, which is their major market, is free from those, and may have different regulatory provisions entirely. The Government has reportedly made Brexit concessions when it comes to the Ireland border (PA) DUP Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson, whose party is effectively keeping Mrs May in Downing Street in a confidence and supply deal with the minority Tory Government, also warned her not to proceed with regulatory alignment. He said: I think that this is emanating from the Irish Government, obviously, trying to push the UK Government into a corner in the negotiations. It is not well thought through. I dont think, given its promises, the British Government could concede on this. European Council president Donald Tusk believes talks could soon move on to the second phase (Rex) He added: Potentially, this is very bad news for Northern Ireland, if it happens. The issue of the Irish border is one of the sticking points stopping Britain and the EU reaching a deal before they can move on to the next phase of talks, dealing with trade and a transition period. European Council president Donald Tusk said the two sides were getting closer to making the required sufficient progress for him to recommend that negotiations move on. Protesters rallied on the streets in Honduras on December 3 as chaos mounted amid confusion over the November 26 presidential election These videos show opposition groups marching and chanting in the city of La Ceiba, about 250 miles north of the capital of Tegucigalpa. One man died in protests in La Ceiba on Friday, December 1, Honduran newspaper La Prensa reported. The countrys residents faced a dusk-until-dawn curfew after protests and rioting spread in multiple towns and cities, CNN reported. Meanwhile, the Tribunal Supremo Electoral said Sunday it would recount the votes submitted for the countrys presidential election. Both current president Juan Orlando Hernandez and opposition leader Salvador Nasralla declared victory after the election, sparking the demonstrations. Hernandez was yet to directly respond to accusations of vote rigging. Credit: Facebook/Renext Bon via Storyful Police really want to speak to these men Police are searching for these men in connection with a homophobic attack on a tube train in London. The victim, a 19-year-old man, was travelling on a westbound Jubilee line train between West Ham and North Greenwich with his friends on October 21 when the assault happened. According to officers, the offenders boarded the train at around 11.10pm at West Ham and began verbally abusing the victim and his friends, who were in fancy dress, using homophobic language. The first offender then pulled the victim from his seat into a headlock, strangling him, while the second offender took the victims phone made threats to stab him. British Transport Police said they are treating the incident as a hate crime. Most popular on Yahoo News UK The five signs which let you spot a liar Chip shop owner creates giant foot-long pig in a blanket for Christmas Boy, nine, writes to Father Christmas asking for a forever home for his homeless family Police force slammed after it warns bumping into someone under the mistletoe could be rape Donald Trumps favourite McDonalds meal has been revealed The offenders demanded the victim apologise for being gay while they choked him, before a fight broke out between the victims friends and the offenders, police said. One of the victims friends, a 25-year-old woman, sustained bruising after she was punched and pushed to the ground. Police would like to speak to the people shown in the images as they may have information, which could help the investigation. A BTP spokesman said: They demanded the victim apologise for being gay which eventually the victim did as he was struggling to breathe. They then let him go and handed back his phone and a fight ensued between the victims friends and the offenders. One of the victims friends, a 25-year-old woman, was punched and pushed to the ground. She sustained bruising. The added: Hate crime will not be tolerated by British Transport Police. We believe that everyone has the right to travel safety. We wont tolerate behaviour where someone is targeted because they are perceived to be different, or made to feel uncomfortable on their journey. Police urged anyone with information to call BTP on 0800 40 50 40 or text 61016, quoting reference number 273 of 1/12. TIRANA, Albania (AP) Albanian authorities say that despite less rainfall and lower river levels, thousands of homes and scores of schools have been damaged, and agricultural land is still submerged. The government said Sunday that 600 families were evacuated Saturday in two southwestern districts. More than 3,000 homes, 56 schools and 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) of agricultural land have been flooded. Many roads and 28 bridges have been damaged. Authorities have started calculating the damage to consider financial compensation. At least one person has died in the last several days of heavy rainfall that has flooded many parts of Albania. Ports and the only international airport were temporarily closed for part of the weekend. Schools were closed Friday and the Education Ministry will make a decision soon about Monday's classes. See Also: AIM-listed software and service company Intercede has signed a contract with a UK government ministerial department that will generate revenue of around 250,000 in the current financial year and up to 500,000 in the following year. Intercede will supply services to enable the customer to embed its MyID product for employees into its network infrastructure. This will be used to provide digital identities to staff involved in international collaboration. MyID will enable this customer to eliminate a reliance on the use of potentially insecure passwords for secure authentication. In doing so, the department will become more resistant to social engineering and other cyber-attacks based on compromising employee login details. This makes it easier for the UK government to meet its international obligations for secure partnership with other governments around the world. Chairman and chief executive Richard Parris said: "This contract was secured following a competitive tender process. Our success demonstrates that Intercede's MyID product and services remains the first choice for security aware customers seeking to replace password-based authentication with strong digital credentials. This deployment is similar to solutions previously sold to the Australian, Canadian and US governments." At 1034 GMT, the shares were up 5.1% to 31p. Congress has nearly 45,000 WhatsApp groups in Gujarat and a YouTube channel of 'Pakka Gujarati'. The team is being led by 15 office bearers at a controlled unit in Ahmedabad. By Arpan Rai: While the BJP's social media machinery has roughly 25,000 cyber warriors, the Indian National Congress is scores ahead with its WhatsApp groups, days before first poll date of Gujarat elections. Rohan Gupta, the IT cell head of the Grand Old Party, monitoring the cyber operations with his team of 2,000 party volunteers, says Rahul Gandhi's religion is a non-issue and is being used by BJP to divert voters' attention, "Rahul's religion has nothing to do with Gujarat elections and people in Gujarat will gain nothing from his religion. 75 per cent of the Prime Minister's speech is devoted to Congress," said the social media head. advertisement The party has nearly 45,000 WhatsApp groups in Gujarat and a YouTube channel of 'Pakka Gujarati'. The team is being led by 15 office bearers at a controlled unit at Ahmedabad - which is the central war room. The 15 office bearers, in coordination with a mix of professionals and volunteers, are responsible for ideation, creation of content and execution on Twitter and Facebook. The content is then sent to 2,000 volunteers, who forward it to the party supporters in every booth. "Cyber operations, ranging from Facebook lives, posts on temple visits and live tweeting of rallies, were started in 2012 and have picked momentum in the last few months," Rohan told Mail Today. "It is not like we will stop working after the results are declared in Gujarat. We will operate similarly, 24x7, even after the Gujarat elections are over, he also said." As opposed to BJP social media head's strategy, which is focusing solely on developmental work done by the party, Congress IT cell head maintains that BJP is talking less about their achievements. "Had they performed in the last 22 years for being the elected party by Gujarat, they would not have felt the need to talk about Congress at all. "They are shying away from talking about their achievements and presenting data. Instead, they have an anti-Congress message for the people of Gujarat," Rohan said. The social media campaign has taken a sharp turn five days before the first polling round, where the Congress will talk about the issues its manifesto will focus on - from party's vice-president Rahul Gandhi's Twitter account to Congress' official handle. Starting with women's safety, education and health, the party has questioned low conviction rate for those committing crimes against women. "Why no justice for women as only 3 per cent of those accuse of crimes against women are convicted?", "Why does Gujarat lag behind at 20th place in girl child education?" and "Why has Maternal Mortality Rate risen to 85 putting the state at number 11 among 15 states in reduction of MMR?" were among the few questions party has raised and the social media followers can expect discussion on similar such issues in the next week. --- ENDS --- advertisement Nigel Farage has resigned as the leader of the UK Independence Party. In a speech in London, Farage said he felt he had done his bit and couldnt possibly achieve more. "I have never been, and I have never wanted to be, a career politician. My aim in being in politics was to get Britain out of the European Union," he said. The eurosceptic MEP, who stepped down last year only to return to the role within days, joked that he wanted his life back after eight years in the role. I wont be changing my mind again, I assure you, he said. Farage said Ukip could be on track to do well in the 2020 election, pointing in particular to the potential to win over Labour supporters. Whilst we will now leave the European Union, the terms of our withdrawal are unclear. If there is too much backsliding by the Government and with the Labour Party detached from many of its voters then Ukips best days may be yet to come. The outspoken politician said a new leader would be in place in time for the autumn conference but did not back a particular candidate. Farage has been serving in the European Parliament since 1999 and will continue to do so until Britain leaves the European Union. Shares in Sky were lifted on Monday after reports that Walt Disney has restarted talks with Rupert Murdochs 21st Century Fox over acquiring most of the broadcaster's assets, including the stake in the UK business. Fox, which is controlled by Murdoch and his sons, is negotiating the potential sale of its film studio, cable channels and international businesses, which include Indias Star network and Sky, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. UK regulators are currently scrutinising Fox's 11.7bn bid to take full control of Sky, with the government having admitted some concerns about broadcasting standards and UK media plurality. Fox, where Murdoch's younger son James is chief executive officer, has a 39% stake in Sky, where James is also chairman. Talks with Disney are not exclusive, with Fox also said to be engaging with US cable networks Comcast and Verizon Communications, according to the Wall Street Journal. Investors have bid up Fox's shares, noted analysts at Citi, who said "questions remain" on potential tax leakage. Citi sees the "most likely" scenario as a swap of Disney's sports assets, namely ESPN, for Fox assets such as the film studio, non-sports cable networks, Hulu and the Sky stake. "This would put both firms on a firmer strategic footing and reduce tax leakage," Citi said, adding that it expects the swap will occur. Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan is requesting a special Brexit deal to allow London to stay within the European Unions single market and customs union. Earlier today, following talks between the Prime Minister and EU Commission head Jean Claude Juncker, a draft text for the agreement on the Irish question was released stating that there will be no "regulatory divergence" on the island after the UK leaves the bloc. DUP leader, Arlene Foster responded angrily, saying that the party would by no means accept a deal where Northern Ireland doesnt leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the UK. In an unexpected turn of events, that was followed by both Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon releasing statements in which they requested special deals for both London and Scotland too, as most of their citizens had voted to remain. Sturgeon took to her Twitter account to say: "If one part of UK can retain regulatory alignment with EU and effectively stay in the single market (which is the right solution for Northern Ireland) there is surely no good practical reason why others cant". Khan was in a similar frame of mind, arguing for a similar arrangement to be put in place for the capital. Huge ramifications for London if Theresa May has conceded that it's possible for part of the UK to remain within the single market & customs union after Brexit. Londoners overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and a similar deal here could protect tens of thousands of jobs. Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) 4 de diciembre de 2017 Khan added: "Londoners overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and a similar deal here could protect tens of thousands of jobs." "Weve got to recognise that leaving the EU poses huge challenges and the best way to mitigate that is to attract talent from India." Speaking earlier from Mumbai, at the start of his six-day visit to India and Pakistan, Khan did his best to attract Indian talent to London, telling his audience that "London is open for talent". "One of the justifications that some ministers in the government give to leave the EU is to have better trade relations with many countries like India. One of the best ways to encourage trade with India is to invite talent to London and UK, he said. Sadiq Khan has been adamant that London must remain 'open', despite Brexit and stringent visa norms. He told BloombergQuint in an interview: "Weve got to recognise that leaving the EU poses huge challenges and the best way to mitigate that is to attract talent from India. The Mayor was also very critical of the decision to remove post-study work visas which had led Indians to choose to study in Canada or the US instead. Warren Bickel (left), the Virginia Tech Carilion Behavioral Health Research Professor, and Michael Friedlander, executive director of the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, hope to end the problem of repeated opioid overdoses during addiction treatment. Also pictured are technicians at the VTCRI Addiction Recovery Research Center. Warren Bickel (left, standing), the Virginia Tech Carilion Behavioral Health Research Professor, and Michael Friedlander, executive director of the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, hope to end the problem of repeated opioid overdoses during addiction treatment. Also pictured are Lexie Mellis, a translational biology, medicine, and health graduate student, and research technician Natalie Popsuy. By PTI: Indore, Dec 4 (PTI) Girls and women are more vulnerable to their own relatives and acquaintances than unknown persons on the issue of sex-related crimes, data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) "Crime in India 2016" report has indicated. Highlighting rape figures, the report has stated that "in 2016, the accused of rapes in 94.6 cases are none other than the victims relatives including brother, father, grand-father, sons or acquaintances." advertisement The report showed that in the year 2016, a total of 38,947 cases of rape were registered in the country under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) as well as Section 376 and other related sections of the Indian Penal Code. Among these 38,947 cases, in 36,859 matters, accused are related to the victims, it said. Similarly, it said that in 630 cases, victims were allegedly raped by grand-father, father, brother and son while in 1,087 cases the accused were acquaintances. Besides in 2,174 cases, the accused are relatives and in 10,520 matters, it was neighbours who were facing charges of rape, it said. In 600 cases, employers and co- workers are accused of rape, the report said. The NCRB report also stated that in 2016, in 557 cases, the accused are live-in parthers, husband and ex-husbands. Similarly, in 10,068 cases, women were raped on the promise of marriage. It also states that in the remaining 11,223 cases, the victims in some manner or the other knew the accused. Expressing concern over these figures, National Commission of Women (NCW) chairperson, Rekha Sharma told PTI, "In our society there is lot of restrictions imposed on girls. But now it is enough. Time has come when boys should be taught from childhood how to behave with women as per our social values." She said that porn material is easily available on internet. In such a scenario, parents should keep a watch on the mobile phones and computers. PTI HWP MAS ADU BNM BAS --- ENDS --- First Republic Bank was founded by Jim Herbert with the intention of providing exceptional levels of customer service. It was his belief that customer service would set the bank apart and create a profitable investment for its shareholders. After 35 years, his vision has proven true with a 25% CAGR that continues to this day. The initial enterprise value has grown from only $8.8 million in that time, to over $19 billion making it the 14th largest bank in the US. First Republic Bank was founded in 1985 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. First Republic Bank with its subsidiaries operates in two segments and provides personal banking, business banking, and wealth management services to individuals, families, organizations, and small businesses in the United States. The companys services are available in-person at one of the more than 80 offices or via ATM, online, mobile, and debit cards. The company offers deposit products including checking and saving accounts, money market, and CDs as well as a range of lending products. The full range of lending products includes but is not limited to residential mortgages, home equity lines of credit, commercial real estate and construction loans, and personal and business loans. The companys wealth management services include advisory services, online investment management, trusts, estate planning, and alternative investments as well as insurance and foreign exchange. The online brokerage service is available to all clients and can be accessed at any time via a web browser or mobile device. First Republic Bank operates a network of more than 80 deposit-taking branches and 12 wealth management offices. The network is located primarily in California with additional branches in major metropolitan areas and two destination locations that include Portland, Boston, Palm Beach, Greenwich, New York, and Jackson, Wyoming. First Republic Bank has proven its worth over the year by maintaining a consistently strong capital level, asset quality, and liquidity position. Its prudent management has allowed it to weather market ups and downs while commanding investment grade ratings for its bonds and preferred stock. The following companies are subsidiares of Ingersoll Rand: 13125882 Canada Inc., 211 E. Russell Road LLC, 4458664 Canada Inc., ACCUDYNE INDUSTRIES ASIA PTE. LTD., ACCUDYNE INDUSTRIES BORROWER S.C.A., ACCUDYNE INDUSTRIES INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED, ACCUDYNE INDUSTRIES LLC, ACCUDYNE INDUSTRIES MIDDLE EAST FZE, ACCUDYNE INDUSTRIES SERVICES LIMITED, ASTRUM IT GmbH, Accudyne Industries Acquisition S.A r.l, Accudyne Industries Canada Inc., Accudyne Industries S.A r.l., Air Dimensions, Air Dimensions Inc., Albin Pump SAS, BOC Edwards Global Low pressure Air business, CISA S.p.A., Cameron-Centrifugal Compression, Comercial Ingersoll-Rand (Chile) Limitada, Comingersoll-Comercio E Industria De Equipamentos S.A., CompAir, CompAir (Hankook) Korea Co. Ltd., CompAir Acquisition (No. 2) Ltd., CompAir Acquisition Ltd., CompAir BroomWade Ltd., CompAir Finance Ltd., CompAir GmbH, CompAir Holdings Limited, CompAir International Trading (Shanghai) Co Ltd, CompAir Korea Ltd, CompAir South Africa (SA) (Pty) Ltd., Consolidated Distribution Holdings Ltd., DV Systems Inc., Dosatron International SAS, Emco Wheaton Gmbh, Emco Wheaton USA Inc, Enza Air Proprietary Limited, FlexEnergy Holdings LLC, Frigoblock Grosskopf Gmbh, GD Aria Holdings Limited, GD Aria Holdings Limited, GD Aria Investments Limited, GD First (UK) Ltd, GD German Holdings GmbH, GD German Holdings I Gmbh, GD German Holdings II GmbH, GD German Investments GmbH, GD Global Holdings II Inc., GD Global Holdings Inc., GD Global Holdings UK II Ltd., GD Global Ventures I B.V., GD Global Ventures II B.V., GD Global Ventures III B.V., GD Industrial Products Malaysia SDN. BHD., GD Investment KY, GD UK Finance Ltd., GPS Industries, Gardner Denver (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Gardner Denver Austria GmbH, Gardner Denver Bad Neustadt Real Estate GmbH & Co KG, Gardner Denver Belgium NV, Gardner Denver Brasil Industria E Comercio de Maquinas Ltda., Gardner Denver CZ + SK sro, Gardner Denver Canada Corp (Canada), Gardner Denver Cyprus Investments II Limited, Gardner Denver Cyprus Investments Limited, Gardner Denver Deutschland GmbH, Gardner Denver Engineered Products India Private Limited, Gardner Denver FZE, Gardner Denver Finance II LLC, Gardner Denver Finance Inc & Co KG, Gardner Denver France SAS, Gardner Denver Group Svcs Ltd, Gardner Denver Holdings Limited, Gardner Denver Hong Kong Investments Limited, Gardner Denver Hong Kong Ltd, Gardner Denver Iberica SL, Gardner Denver Inc., Gardner Denver Industries Ltd., Gardner Denver Industries Pty Ltd., Gardner Denver International Inc., Gardner Denver International Ltd., Gardner Denver Investments Inc., Gardner Denver Italy Holdings S.r.L., Gardner Denver Japan Ltd., Gardner Denver Kirchhain Real Estate GmbH & Co KG, Gardner Denver Korea Ltd., Gardner Denver Ltd., Gardner Denver Machinery (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Gardner Denver Nash Brasil Industria E Comercio De Bombas Ltda, Gardner Denver Nash LLC, Gardner Denver Nash Machinery Ltd., Gardner Denver Nederland BV, Gardner Denver Nederland Investments B.V., Gardner Denver Oy, Gardner Denver Polska Sp z.o.o., Gardner Denver Pte. Ltd., Gardner Denver S.r.l., Gardner Denver Schopfheim GmbH, Gardner Denver Schopfheim Real Estate GmbH & Co KG, Gardner Denver Schweiz AG, Gardner Denver Slovakia s.r.o., Gardner Denver Sweden AB, Gardner Denver Taiwan Ltd., Gardner Denver Thomas GmbH (f/k/a ILMVAC GmbH), Gardner Denver Thomas Inc., Gardner Denver Thomas Pneumatic Systems (Wuxi) Co. Ltd., Gardner Denver Thomas Real Estate GmbH & Co KG, Garo Dott. Ing. Roberto Gabbioneta S.r.l., Ghh-Rand Schraubenkompressoren Gmbh, HASKEL EUROPE LTD., HASKEL HOLDINGS UK LIMITED, HASKEL INTERNATIONAL LLC, Hamworthy Belliss & Morcom, Haskel France SAS, Haskel Sistemas de Fluidos Espana S.R.L., Hibon Inc., Highspeed Newco LLC, Hingerose Limited, ILMVAC (UK) Ltd., ILS Innovative Labor Systeme, ILS Inovative Laborsysteme GmbH, INGERSOLL RAND ITS JAPAN LTD., INGERSOLL-RAND (CHANG ZHOU) TOOLS CO. LTD., INGERSOLL-RAND (CHINA) INDUSTRIAL EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING CO. LTD., INGERSOLL-RAND CHINA LLC, INGERSOLL-RAND COMERCIO E SERVICOS DE MAQUINAS E EQUIPAMENTOS INDUSTRIAIS LTDA., INGERSOLL-RAND DE PUERTO RICO INC., INGERSOLL-RAND INDUSTRIAL COMPANY B.V., INGERSOLL-RAND INDUSTRIAL SP. Z O.O., INGERSOLL-RAND INDUSTRIAL U.S. INC., INGERSOLL-RAND PHILIPPINES INC., INGERSOLL-RAND SPAIN S.A., INGERSOLL-RAND U.S. HOLDCO INC., IR HPS Holdco. Inc., ITO Emniyet, Ingersoll Rand Cyprus Investments Ltd., Ingersoll Rand Finance LLC, Ingersoll Rand Global Investments LLC, Ingersoll Rand Global Ventures LLC, Ingersoll Rand Hong Kong Investments Limited, Ingersoll Rand Inc., Ingersoll Rand Investments (SG) Pte. Ltd., Ingersoll Rand Investments B.V., Ingersoll Rand Schweiz Investments Gmbh, Ingersoll Rand Technology R&D (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Ingersoll-Rand (Australia) Ltd., Ingersoll-Rand (China) Investment Company Limited, Ingersoll-Rand (Guilin) Tools Company Limited, Ingersoll-Rand (Hong Kong) Holding Company Limited, Ingersoll-Rand (India) Limited, Ingersoll-Rand Ab, Ingersoll-Rand Air Solutions Hibon Sarl, Ingersoll-Rand Beteiligungs Und Grundstucksverwaltungs Gmbh, Ingersoll-Rand Colombia S.A.S., Ingersoll-Rand Company Limited (Uk), Ingersoll-Rand Company South Africa (Pty) Limited, Ingersoll-Rand Cz S.R.O., Ingersoll-Rand De Mexico S.A. De C.V., Ingersoll-Rand Equipements De Production S.A.S., Ingersoll-Rand Holdings Limited, Ingersoll-Rand Industrial Ireland Limited, Ingersoll-Rand International (India) Private Limited, Ingersoll-Rand International Holding Llc, Ingersoll-Rand Italia S.R.L., Ingersoll-Rand Italiana Manufacturing S.R.L., Ingersoll-Rand Korea Holding Llc, Ingersoll-Rand Korea Limited, Ingersoll-Rand Lux Investments II S.A R.I., Ingersoll-Rand Lux Investments S.A R.L., Ingersoll-Rand Luxembourg Industrial Company S.A R.L., Ingersoll-Rand Machinery (Shanghai) Company Limited, Ingersoll-Rand Malaysia Co. Sdn. Bhd., Ingersoll-Rand S.A. De C.V., Ingersoll-Rand Services And Trading Limited Liability Company, Ingersoll-Rand Services Company, Ingersoll-Rand Services Limited, Ingersoll-Rand Singapore Enterprises Pte. Ltd., Ingersoll-Rand South East Asia (Pte.) Ltd., Ingersoll-Rand Superay Holdings Limited, Ingersoll-Rand Technical And Services S.A.R.L., Ingersoll-Rand Technologies And Services Private Limited, Ingersoll-Rand Technology R&D (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Ingersoll-Rand Tool Holdings Limited, Ingersoll-Rand Trading Gmbh, Ingersoll-Rand Vietnam Company Limited, Instrum Rand JSC, Interflex Datensysteme, Ir Canada Holdings Ulc, Ir Canada Sales & Service Ulc, Ir France Sas, Kryptonite corp, Lawrence Factor Inc., LeROI, LeRoi International Inc, MILTON ROY (HONG KONG) LIMITED, MILTON ROY (UK) LIMITED, MILTON ROY EUROPA B.V., MILTON ROY EUROPE SAS, MILTON ROY INDUSTRIAL (SHANGHAI) CO. LTD., MILTON ROY LLC, MILTON ROY US PURCHASER INC., MP Pumps Inc., Maximum AG Technologies Inc., Maximus Solutions, Mb Air Systems Limited, Nash Elmo, Officina Meccaniche Industriali Srl, Oina VV, Oina VV Aktiebolag, Plurifilter D.O.O., Pt Ingersoll-Rand Indonesia, Robuschi, Runtech Systems, Runtech Systems (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Runtech Systems Inc., Runtech Systems OY, SEEPEX, Seepex (M) SDN, Seepex Australia Pty Ltd, Seepex Beteiligungs-Gesellschaft mit Beschrankter Haftung, Seepex France S.a.r.l., Seepex GmbH, Seepex Inc., Seepex India Private Ltd., Seepex Italia SRL, Seepex Japan Co. Ltd., Seepex Nordic A/S, Seepex OOO, Seepex Pumps (Shanghia) Co. Ltd., Seepex UK Ltd., Shanghai CompAir Compressors Co Ltd, Shanghai Compressors & Blowers Ltd., Shanghai Ingersoll-Rand Compressor Limited, Shenzhen Bocom System Engineering Co., Superay, Syltone, TIWR Real Estate GmbH & Co. KG, Tamrotor Marine Comp AS Norway, Tecno Matic Europe s.r.o., Thomas Industries Inc., Trane Technologies, Tri-Continent Scientific Inc., Vacuum and Blower Systems division, Welch Vacuum Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Zaxe Technologies Inc., Zeks Compressed Air Solutions Llc, Zinsser Analytic, Zinsser Analytik GmbH, Zinsser NA Inc., and crayon interface. Read More Bharatpur police issued a challan for Rs 200 to a man as he was driving a van without a helmet. Now he wears the head gear whenever he drives. Vishnu was on his way to Bharatpur from Agra when he was stopped at Chiksana police crossing. (Photo courtesy: Dev Ankur Wadhawan) By Dev Ankur Wadhawan: A man in Rajasthan's Bharatpur was issued a challan for not wearing a helmet. Nothing unusual about that, right? Well, except that he was driving a car and not riding a bike or a scooter. Bharatpur police achieved this unenviable task on December 1. Vishnu Sharma was driving a Maruti van when police personnel stopped him and told that he to pay a challan. advertisement Vishnu was on his way to Bharatpur from Agra when he was stopped at Chiksana police crossing and told he will have to pay. According to sources, even though Sharma told police that his papers were in order, they remained adamant on ensuring that he paid up. According to the challan accessed by India Today, Vishnu had to cough up a fine of Rs 200. Ever since the incident, Sharma has become a subject of curiosity as he has started to wear a helmet everytime he drives his car. "I wear the helmet while I drive so that I'm not issued any more challans," Sharma said. A senior Bharatpur police official claimed he was not aware of the incident. "No such thing has come to my knowledge so far. If it does, then we will investigate," Suresh Kumar Khinchi, additional Superintendent of Police, Bharatpur. --- ENDS --- The following companies are subsidiares of Dominion Energy: 96WI 8me LLC, Align RNG Arizona LLC, Align RNG Arizona-Snowflake LLC, Align RNG California LLC, Align RNG California-Corcoran LLC, Align RNG Grady Road LLC, Align RNG LLC, Align RNG Magnolia LLC, Align RNG North Carolina LLC, Align RNG North Carolina-Bowdens LLC, Align RNG Utah LLC, Align RNG Utah-Milford LLC, Align RNG Utah-Minersville LLC, Align RNG Virginia LLC, Align RNG Virginia-Waverly LLC, Alpaca Holdings LLC, Angus Holdings LLC, Aster Holdings LLC, Atlantic Coast Pipeline LLC, BOE Holdings Inc., Bantam Holdings LLC, Bellflower Holdings LLC, Birdseye Holdings LLC, Birdseye Projects LLC, Birdseye Renewable Energy LLC, Blackville Solar Farm LLC, Blue Ocean Energy Marine LLC, BrightSuite Home LLC, BrightSuite Home Solar Inc., BrightSuite Inc., BrightSuite Solar CT Inc., BrightSuite Solar Development LLC, BrightSuite Solar SC Inc., BrightSuite Solar VA Inc., Brown Swiss Holdings II LLC, Buckingham Solar I LLC, CEA Americus LLC, CEA CO-Fort Morgan LLC, CEA Clovis LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Colorado LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Georgia LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Idaho LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Kansas LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Nevada LLC, CEA Dairy RNG New Mexico LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Texas LLC, CEA Greely LLC, CEA Mason LLC, CEA TX-Dimmitt LLC, CNG Coal Company, CNG Power Services Corporation, Canola Holdings LLC, Carolina Gas Transmission Corporation, Charolais Holdings LLC, Chester White Holdings LLC, Chicory Holdings LLC, Clean Energy Asset USA LLC, Clean Energy Enterprises Inc., Clipperton Holdings LLC, Collard Holdings LLC, Consolidated Natural Gas Company, Correctional Solar LLC, Cotswold Holdings LLC, Cove Point LNG Limited, Currant Holdings LLC, DE 700 Canal Place LLC, DE Arlington Solar LLC, DE Fluvanna Solar LLC, DE Hanover Solar LLC, DE Henrico Solar LLC, DE King William Solar LLC, DE Louisa Solar LLC, DE Newport News Solar LLC, DE Powhatan Solar LLC, DE Virginia Beach Solar LLC, DECP Holdings Inc., DEO Alternative Fuel LLC, Dairy RNG Holdings LLC, Denmark Solar LLC, Devon Holdings LLC, Dexter Holdings LLC, Dill Holdings LLC, Dillon RE Holdings LLC, Dominion ACP Holding Inc., Dominion Alternative Energy Holdings Inc., Dominion Atlantic Coast Pipeline LLC, Dominion Capital Inc., Dominion Cogen WV Inc., Dominion Energy Birdseye Holdings Inc., Dominion Energy Fuel Services Inc., Dominion Energy Gas Distribution LLC, Dominion Energy Generation Marketing Inc., Dominion Energy Inc., Dominion Energy Kewaunee Inc., Dominion Energy Marketplace LLC, Dominion Energy Nuclear Connecticut Inc., Dominion Energy Payroll Company Inc., Dominion Energy Questar Corporation, Dominion Energy RNG Holdings II Inc., Dominion Energy RNG Holdings Inc., Dominion Energy Services Inc., Dominion Energy Solar CA LLC, Dominion Energy South Carolina Inc., Dominion Energy Southeast Services Inc., Dominion Energy Technical Solutions Inc., Dominion Energy Technologies II Inc., Dominion Energy Technologies Inc., Dominion Energy Terminal Company Inc., Dominion Energy Wexpro Services Company, Dominion Equipment III Inc., Dominion Equipment Inc., Dominion Fairless Hills Inc., Dominion Fowler Ridge Wind LLC, Dominion Gas Projects Company LLC, Dominion Generation Inc., Dominion Greenbrier Inc., Dominion High Voltage Holdings Inc., Dominion High Voltage MidAtlantic Inc., Dominion Investments Inc., Dominion Keystone Pipeline Holdings Inc., Dominion Keystone Pipeline LLC, Dominion MLP Holding Company III Inc., Dominion Mt. Storm Wind LLC, Dominion Nuclear Projects Inc., Dominion Oklahoma Texas Exploration & Production Inc., Dominion Person Inc., Dominion Privatization Florida LLC, Dominion Privatization Georgia LLC, Dominion Privatization Holdings Inc., Dominion Privatization Kentucky LLC, Dominion Privatization Maryland LLC, Dominion Privatization Pennsylvania LLC, Dominion Privatization South Carolina LLC, Dominion Privatization Texas LLC, Dominion Privatization Virginia LLC, Dominion Products and Services Inc., Dominion Projects Services Inc., Dominion Resources Capital Trust III, Dominion Retail Gas Holdings Inc., Dominion Solar Holdings IV LLC, Dominion Solar Projects C Inc., Dominion Solar Projects D Inc., Dominion Solar Projects III Inc., Dominion Solar Projects IV Inc., Dominion Solar Projects V Inc., Dominion Solar Projects VI Inc., Dominion Solar Projects VII Inc., Dominion Solar Services Inc., Dominion State Line LLC, Dominion Utility Privatization LLC, Dominion Voltage Inc., Dominion Wholesale Inc., Dominion Wind Development LLC, Dominion Wind Projects Inc., Dorset Holdings LLC, ESCT-SA-Suffield LLC, Eagle Holdco Solar LLC, Eagle Solar LLC, Eastern Shore Solar LLC, Endive Holdings LLC, Energize Holdings III LLC, Flax Holdings LLC, Fremont Farm LLC, Gideon Solar LLC, Ginger Holdings LLC, Greenbrier Marketing Company LLC, Greenbrier Pipeline Company LLC, Greensville County Solar Project LLC, Guernsey Holdings LLC, Hardin Solar Energy LLC, Hecate Energy Cherrydale LLC, Hecate Energy Clarke County LLC, Hemlock Holdings LLC, Hereford Holdings LLC, Hodges Solar LLC, Hope Gas Inc., Hosta Holdings LLC, Innovative Solar 37 LLC, Joanna Solar LLC, Kale Holdings LLC, Leek Holdings LLC, Leghorn Holdings LLC, Lentil Holdings LLC, Leyland Holdings LLC, Louis Dreyfus Natural Gas, Millet Holdings LLC, Moffett Solar 1 LLC, Moorings Farm 2 LLC, Mustang Solar LLC, Mustard Holdings LLC, Okra Holdings LLC, PSNC Blue Ridge Corporation, PSNC Cardinal Pipeline Company, Phone House, Pikeville Farm LLC, Power Path Holdings I LLC, Power Path Holdings II LLC, Power Path Holdings III LLC, Prairie Fork Wind Farm LLC, Public Service Company of North Carolina Incorporated, Quail Holdings LLC, Questar Corporation, Questar Gas Company, Questar InfoComm Inc., Ridgeland Solar Farm I LLC, Rutabaga Holdings LLC, SCANA, SCANA Corporate Security Services Inc., SCANA Corporation, SRFI LLC, Safflower Holdings LLC, Scott-II Solar LLC, Seabrook Solar LLC, Sedge Holdings LLC, Shallot Holdings LLC, Siler Solar LLC, Silkie Holdings LLC, Simmental Holdings LLC, Sol Madison Solar LLC, Sorghum Holdings LLC, South Carolina Fuel Company Inc., South Carolina Generating Company Inc., Southampton Solar LLC, Strawberry Holdings LLC, Sumac Holdings LLC, Summit Farms Solar LLC, Sussex Drive Solar Project LLC, TWE Myrtle Solar Project LLC, The East Ohio Gas Company, Trask East Solar LLC, Tredegar Solar Fund I LLC, Tredegar Solar LLC, VP Property Inc., Virginia Electric And Power Company, Virginia Power Fuel Corporation, Virginia Power Nuclear Services Company, Virginia Power Services Energy Corp. Inc., Virginia Power Services LLC, Virginia Solar 2017 Projects LLC, Wakefield Solar LLC, Watercress Holdings LLC, Wexpro Company, Wexpro Development Company, Wexpro II Company, Wilkinson Solar LLC, Yemassee Solar LLC, and Yorkshire Holdings LLC. Read More Best Buy Co., Inc. retails technology products in the United States and Canada. The company operates in two segments, Domestic and International. Its stores provide computing products, such as desktops, notebooks, and peripherals; mobile phones comprising related mobile network carrier commissions; networking products; tablets covering e-readers; smartwatches; and consumer electronics consisting of digital imaging, health and fitness, home theater, portable audio comprising headphones and portable speakers, and smart home products. The company's stores also offer appliances, such as dishwashers, laundry, ovens, refrigerators, blenders, coffee makers, and vacuums; entertainment products consisting of drones, peripherals, movies, music, and toys, as well as gaming hardware and software, and virtual reality and other software products; and other products, such as baby, food and beverage, luggage, outdoor living, and sporting goods. In addition, it provides consultation, delivery, design, health-related, installation, memberships, repair, set-up, technical support, and warranty-related services. The company offers its products through stores and websites under the Best Buy, Best Buy Ads, Best Buy Business, Best Buy Health, CST, Current Health, Geek Squad, Lively, Magnolia, Best Buy Mobile, Pacific Kitchen, Home, and Yardbird, as well as domain names bestbuy.com, currenthealth.com, lively.com, yardbird.com, and bestbuy.ca. As of January 30, 2022, it had 1,144 stores. The company was formerly known as Sound of Music, Inc. The company was incorporated in 1966 and is headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota. By PTI: New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) India and Germany today signed several agreements, including a 200 million euro funding pact for climate-friendly urban mobility project. The Government to Government Umbrella Agreement concerning financial cooperation in 2016 (II) under the Indo- German Development Cooperation was formalised here. "An amount up to 200 million euro for the financial cooperation in form of loan for project Climate Friendly Urban Mobility III and 11 million euro accompanying measures in form of grant for four projects," was signed, said an official statement. advertisement The Part I of the agreement had already been signed in May. In addition, four other agreements were signed between Department of Economic Affairs with KfW, Germany under Indo- German Bilateral Development Cooperation. One loan agreement is for the project Community based sustainable Forest Management ? Component I Manipur. It was signed with KfW for a loan of 15 million euro. The broad objectives of the project are restoration of degraded forests in upper watersheds, reclamation of abandoned shifting cultivation areas, biodiversity conservation, water resources conservation and livelihood improvement of forest dependent rural tribal people in the project area. The other agreements were for projects namely Madhya Pradesh Urban Sanitation and Environment Programme; Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Development Odisha ? Phase II; and Green Energy Corridor ? Intra-State Transmission System in Maharashtra. PTI NKD CS ANU --- ENDS --- DENVER In an American West that has a love-hate relationship with the federal governments ownership of a checkerboard of parks, monuments, forest and desert in states from Washington to New Mexico, Utah stands out. The state has gone well beyond any other in the region in trying to pry the federal governments hands off land it sees as belonging to its residents. In 2012, its Legislature passed a law demanding the federal government give 30 million acres (121,000 square kilometers) of the land it owns in Utah to the state government a measure other Western states have balked at replicating, even deeply conservative ones like Idaho. Earlier this year, a Utah congressman introduced a bill to sell more than 4,600 square miles (11,900 square kilometers) of Western federal land to private entities but pulled it after a backlash. And on Monday, President Donald Trump is expected to announce hes significantly reducing the size of two national monuments in southern Utah, the first such act by a president in half a century. Utahs certainly on the tip of the spear, said state Rep. Mike Noel, who represents south-central Utah, where some residents have fought to shrink or eliminate Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument since President Bill Clinton created it in 1996. Polls have repeatedly shown Westerners cherish national monuments and other protected federal land even in Utah but the states political leaders have been united in celebrating Trumps expected move. The presidents decision has already sparked protests. On Saturday, thousands of demonstrators holding signs with messages like Protect Wild Utah converged on the steps of the Utah State Capitol. The president is considering changes to other Western monuments as well, as recommended by his interior secretary, Ryan Zinke. But no state has been agitating for reductions like Utah. In a telling move, at the same time Zinke recommended the Utah shrinkage, he urged the creation of a new national monument in his conservative home state of Montana, where hes believed to harbor political ambitions. Theres nothing in our data thatd say, politically, that this is popular, said Lori Weigel, a Republican pollster in Denver, said of efforts to trim monuments. Weigel has done surveys on Western land conservation for years, including recent ones for supporters of the monuments that found Utah voters back them by a 2-1 margin. I cant say why Utah elected officials have taken this on more than in other states, she said. But we see widespread recognition that designation of protected land is valued. The reasons range from geography to politics to Utahs unique Mormon history and culture. Even Utahs sharpest critics of federal land bristle at the notion that they are against conservation. They say they treasure the states five national parks, many national forests and even some of its monuments. The state itself conserves lands in expansive state parks, they add, and would protect its scenic treasures. But the nearly 3,000-square-mile (7,770-square-kilometer) Grand Staircase and the 2,000-square-mile (5,180-square-kilometer) Bears Ears National Monument that President Obama created last year in the southeast part of the state are simply too intrusive on local communities and ranchers, they argue, and too much of the state is locked up by the federal government and barred from energy development. Washington, D.C., owns two-thirds of Utahs land, a greater percentage than in any other state in the lower 48 other than Nevada. If you live in Colorado, you live in Arizona, you are not dealing with the federal lands that we are, state Senate President Wayne Niederhauser said. Like much of the West, Utah is actually a very urban state. All that protected and arid land means most residents pack into the fast-growing corridor between the Great Salt Lake and the Wasatch mountains, in the northern part of the state near Salt Lake City. But unlike other heavily urban Western states such as Nevada that are destinations for transplants from across the country, many of Utahs urbanites especially the politically active ones are descendants of its rural areas who are more sensitive to complaints from people like Rep. Noel. Every single one of the people in that Legislature, they have a connection to rural Utah, said Noel, an avid birder and former employee of the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department agency that oversees some 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) across the West. Also, until the Legislature changed the law in 2014, Utahs political parties mostly chose their candidates at party gatherings. Since Republicans are virtually guaranteed to win elections in most of the state, that system allowed a tiny handful of dedicated activists to gain outsize weight in selecting elected officials. Finally, there is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the religion that makes Utah unlike any other state. It was founded in the 19th century by Mormons who fled massacres in the Midwest and were desperate to have a land they could call their own and to control their economic destiny, said Mathew Bowman, author of a history of the faith called The Mormon People. There was a desire for Mormons to be economically independent and self-sufficient, Bowman said. A lot of the prominent Mormon leaders of the early 20th century came out of this. Even now, he added, that legacy lingers. These ideas arent very personal, but theyve been floating around in the atmosphere here. Today, as much as two-thirds of the states 3 million residents are Mormons, including many state lawmakers and Utahs entire congressional delegation. Sometimes extremists seize on the LDS connection. The Bundy family of Nevada ranchers, who brandished guns during a standoff with BLM agents in rural Nevada in 2014 and last year helped seize an Oregon wildlife refuge, identify as Mormon and have sometimes pointed to scripture to justify their actions. But the Mormon church condemned their takeover of the refuge, and even some LDS members frustrated with federal control of Western lands have expressed revulsion at the familys actions. Ken Ivory, a state lawmaker from suburban Salt Lake City who has led the campaign to get other states to try to take over federal land, acknowledges Utahs religious tradition is a factor in its desire to take care of its terrain. Self-reliance is something ingrained in our lives, Ivory said. First in a two-part series on conversations with Geronimo Gutierrez, Mexicos ambassador to the U.S. On Nov. 16, I spent the better part of the day with Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. Geronimo Gutierrez, who visited the El Paso/Juarez/southern New Mexico region. In the morning, I was part of a small delegation that had breakfast with Gutierrez at the Foxconn plant just across the border from Santa Teresa, N.M., in San Jeronimo, Chihuahua. After breakfast, we toured the Foxconn facility, which is making Dell computers and HP tablets, followed by an interactive lunch at the El Paso Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Within the past 25 years, Gutierrez has worked in various high-level positions in the Mexican federal government, including stints in Mexicos Treasury Department, Banobras (the Mexican development bank), the Mexican Interior Ministry, and the Secretariat of Foreign Relations. Most recently, he was the head of the North American Development Bank, which is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. Gutierrez presented a model of a well-informed and polished diplomat. It seemed to me that his personality and intellect made him a natural to rise to the position of ambassador to the U.S., Mexicos most important diplomatic post. During his visit, he provided insight on the U.S.-Mexico relationship and the ongoing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations. He was very open and honest in answering questions, and the people who joined him were eager to ask his opinion on a myriad of issues, and to also provide the ambassador with personal feedback on a variety of subjects. On U.S.-Mexico relations, Gutierrez stated that it is better for both countries to cooperate, rather than pointing fingers. This applies not only to a secure border, which he believes is in the best interest of both nations, but also to better economic integration, of which NAFTA has been the backbone. The ambassador talked about how there were strong concerns in the U.S. concerning globalization, security, and job losses. He believes these are legitimate concerns; however, appealing to fear is not a good approach. Gutierrez believes the U.S. and Mexico must work closely together on border infrastructure. We have to come up with 21st Century ports of entry at our borders, he said. Maybe we need to establish a joint toll so that we can pay for infrastructure, which everybody says that they want, but nobody wants to pay for. Gutierrez also believes that Mexico has an image problem in the U.S., and that his country needs to let people know that there are far more positive things happening in Mexico than negative. In short, Mexico needs to do a better job in the U.S. presenting itself. According to the ambassador, During the last 30 years, there have been many Mexicans who have come to the U.S. in search of a better life that is our fault. This is changing in Mexico, as jobs are being created. A major part of immigration reform will entail addressing the visa issues in the U.S., which Gutierrez believes need to be worked on. He pointed out that Mexico has the labor that the U.S. needs. In sectors such as agriculture, both countries can benefit from this situation. At the beginning of the year, Gutierrez believed there was an 80-20 percent chance that the three North American partners would end up rescinding the agreement. He now believes that the odds are 50-50. He said that his confidence was growing but tempered with pragmatism. He stated, If the U.S. does leave NAFTA, we cant count on the people who follow Trump to put another free trade agreement in front of the U.S. Congress for another 25 years. If NAFTA fails, it will hit Mexico hard, but we will survive. Gutierrez believes that rather than focusing solely on North American trade, the three NAFTA partners should focus on what they produce together. He emphasized how economically integrated the partners are, and how this integration allows them to compete against other parts of the world. He pointed out that while the U.S. has a $347 billion trade deficit with China, Mexico also runs a $65 billion trade deficit with this Asian nation, and that a lot of this is due to the electronics industry, which has migrated from both the U.S. and Mexico to China. One solution might be for Mexico to explore sourcing more electronics from the U.S., which will help both NAFTA partners and would keep more capital flowing in North America. Next: The critical NAFTA renegotiation points and potential deal breakers. Jerry Pacheco is the executive director of the International Business Accelerator, a nonprofit trade counseling program of the New Mexico Small Business Development Centers Network. He can be reached at 575-589-2200 or at jerry@nmiba.com. SEATTLE For most of the time Syrian refugee Mohammad Al Zayed has been in the United States, judges have been wrestling with the Trump administrations efforts to impose travel restrictions that he says would keep him from seeing relatives who remain overseas. Its taken an emotional toll one that continues this week as two U.S. appeals courts take up the issue yet again. Its been 10 months, and were stuck, Al Zayed, a janitor at OHare International Airport in Chicago, said through an Arabic interpreter. We cant go back. We cant bring our loved ones here. Citing national security concerns, President Donald Trump announced his initial travel ban on citizens of certain Muslim-majority nations in late January, bringing havoc and protests to airports around the country. A federal judge in Seattle soon halted that ban as discriminatory, and since then, the restrictions have been up to the U.S. Supreme Court and back down to the federal district courts as the administration has rewritten them. The third and latest version targets about 150 million potential travelers from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, along with some Venezuelan government officials and their families. The administration said the latest ban is based on assessments of each countrys security situation and their willingness to share information about travelers. But judges in Hawaii and Maryland blocked it to varying degrees just before it was due to take effect in October. The judges found that the ban appears impermissibly discriminatory, has no legitimate national security purpose and violates U.S. immigration law. On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in Seattle on the governments appeal of the Hawaii judges ruling. The panel has already narrowed that decision to allow the administration to bar travelers who do not have a bona fide relationship with people or organizations already in the U.S. an approach that echoed the Maryland judges ruling as well as an earlier travel ban decision from the U.S. Supreme Court. A full complement of 13 judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is due to hear the governments appeal in the Maryland case on Friday in Richmond, Virginia. Critics of Trumps travel restrictions insist that they make up the Muslim ban he promised during his campaign, and judges have seized on the presidents public statements on Twitter and elsewhere in finding them unconstitutionally discriminatory. This weeks arguments arrive as Trump continues to stoke those anti-Islam sentiments: Just last week, he drew a sharp condemnation from British Prime Minister Theresa Mays office when he retweeted a string of inflammatory videos from a fringe British political group purporting to show violence being committed by Muslims. Government lawyers argue in briefs filed for the Maryland case that Trumps comments primarily reflect an intent to protect the United States from the threat of terrorism by nationals from countries that pose heightened risks. The Trump administration says the travel policy will be reviewed periodically and the named countries are encouraged to work with the U.S. to address inadequacies and risks so that the restrictions may be relaxed or removed as soon as possible. The fact that serious national-security risks are posed by some Muslim-majority nations cannot prevent the government from addressing those problems, especially after the kind of extensive, multi-agency review process that occurred here, the administration argues. The lower court rulings threaten the ability of this and future Presidents to address national-security threats and advance foreign policy interests, the Justice Department wrote in its 9th Circuit appeal. Further, the government says, courts dont have the authority to review the presidents decision to exclude foreigners abroad unless Congress authorizes them to, and Congress has provided no such authorization. Al Zayed, 50, arrived in the U.S. via Jordan in September 2016 with his wife, two sons and daughter after fleeing horrific fighting in Syria, which destroyed the textile factory where he worked and prevented his children from attending school. Al Zayeds case is among several laid out in friend-of-the-court briefs filed by labor organizations opposed to the travel ban. Al Zayed says hes afraid he wouldnt be able to return if he visited family overseas. His two brothers and parents remain in Syria, and hes afraid hell never see his 85-year-old father again if the travel ban is upheld. Nevertheless, he says hes happy to be here. Syria was very difficult an impossible life for us, he said. So despite that they have the Muslim ban, I think, Thank God that we are here.' Critics said that while North Korea and Venezuela are not predominantly Muslim, the ban would affect very few travelers from there, and their inclusion on the list may have been designed to avoid discrimination allegations. There are millions of people who are being separated from family members and prevented from doing their important business lawful business in the United States, all because of the presidents rampant and blatant anti-Muslim bias, said Cecillia Wang, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who will argue before the 4th Circuit. It is unclear when the courts will rule. Whatever they decide, the rulings are expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. ___ Lavoie reported from Richmond, Virginia. Copyright 2017 Albuquerque Journal As students filtered toward the exit of the Downtown Albuquerque studio on a recent weeknight, the propertys famed former owner met them near the door. He signed their books. He took pictures with them. He encouraged them to keep coming back. Great seeing you guys, Antoine Predock told the undergraduate architecture class as it left the University of New Mexicos newly developed Predock Center for Design and Research. This is your center now. Come hang out here. Use it. Seriously. A renowned architect and longtime Albuquerque dweller, Predock recently donated the Downtown property where he once lived and practiced to UNM the school that helped turn the once-budding engineer into an artist. In the more than 60 years since he matriculated at UNM, Predock has designed projects all over the world, from residences and resorts to the San Diego Padres stadium and the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. But he has maintained ties to UNM, even designing the building that houses its School of Architecture and Planning. So when his wife, Constance DeJong, urged him to find a forever home for the myriad models, sketches and the other physical manifestations of his design process a collection he estimates at 10,000 pieces he chose to give his archives to UNMs Center for Southwest Research. My wife kept bugging me, Hey, man, when you die, where is this going to go? recalled Predock, explaining it as an easy call. I thought, what is my spiritual home? New Mexico period. No-brainer. More recently, the couple also gifted the residence and studio space to the architecture school in order to develop the new center. The property will likely coalesce into space for student studios and as a showcase for the Predock archives, according to School of Architecture and Planning Dean Geraldine Forbes Isais, though it remains a work in progress. Forbes Isais said the propertys buildings need at least $1 million in upgrades the original home is more than a century old to prepare them for formal university use. They will require even more to carry out the grander vision of a fully functioning modern workspace and research center. I want students to walk in there and just be bowled over by the sense of the place, she said. I want them to leave that studio not just inspired, but much better at their craft than when they walked in that studio. I want their imagination to be opened up to possibilities that they would not have been privy to prior to walking in there. It was a drawing class taught by UNM architecture professor Don Schlegel that helped open Predocks own mind to new possibilities, laying the foundation for his shift away from engineering studies and toward architecture. He ultimately finished his degree at Columbia University and launched his own practice, operating from offices in Albuquerque and Los Angeles. He developed an international reputation for buildings that fellow architect Thomas S. Howorth in nominating Predock for the American Institute of Architects 2006 gold medal said grow out of their unique landscapes, creating, at the same time, symbols that are fearlessly expressive and sincere, simultaneously complex and guileless. Predock, still active and fit at age 81, continues to practice. He is finishing a condominium tower in Taipei and working on a house in Provence a tough assignment, he deadpans. He continues to call Albuquerque home and has remained a fixture at the new center bearing his name. The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture convened for a conference in Albuquerque last month, holding a reception at the center, and Predock gave the keynote address to a crowd that included academic officials from around the United States, Canada, Mexico and Europe. And as undergraduates filtered through on a recent class visit, he relished the chance to talk shop among the expansive three-dimensional models, pastel illustrations and project photographs that still fill many rooms and hang from the walls. An avid motorcycle rider, some of his bikes are still in place, too. I eat it up, he said of the interactions he has with aspiring architects. Forbes Isais wants to keep that dialogue going. She said fundraising has begun to cover the building improvements needed to make it available for regular activities. We want this to be an active research center, particularly since Antoine is here and willing to work on it and inspire students, because hes so inspirational. Hes infectious, and its not a bad thing for students to see someone who found their calling in life and made it their life, she said. Jacqueline Smith, one of UNMs undergraduate architecture students, said Predock has celebrity status around UNM and has demonstrated the possibilities that exist in the field. If I were to end up somewhere half as creative as this, then I would be very lucky, she said as she left the center. And the fact that its here in New Mexico and he was here and we have access to it is great. Copyright 2017 Albuquerque Journal He was criticized after initially terming the fatal shooting of a mentally ill, homeless man as justified. He spent long hours in hospitals as his officers clung to life. He consoled victims of some of Albuquerques most heinous crimes. Gorden Edens tenure as Albuquerque Police chief was mired in tough days. Thursday was his last. He retired from a department that he led starting Feb. 27, 2014. Interim Chief Michael Geier replaced him Friday. Eden received mixed reviews from people who interacted and worked with him during his years as chief of the Albuquerque Police Department. He was described as a nice and caring man who worked tirelessly to reform the department. But he ultimately failed to achieve the success for which many had hoped. Some observers speculated that Eden lacked the managerial experience to oversee the largest police department in the state. Others cited the high-ranking officers he surrounded himself with. He is a person of principle in the way he holds himself. Hes a religious person, said Joanne Fine, chairwoman of the Police Oversight Board, which Eden has consistently disagreed with. When he got named as chief I thought to myself, I wonder if he can deal with the adversarial (nature) of this. Because he hadnt run a police department before. He had been in political positions and I worried because I didnt know that his skill set included running a police department. Eden declined numerous requests from the Journal for an interview about his time as police chief. Before former Mayor Richard Berry tapped Eden for the position, he led the state Department of Public Safety, had been the U.S. marshal for the District of New Mexico and headed the state Motor Vehicle Division. Eden was also a New Mexico State Police officer from 1975 to 1985, where he patrolled the South Valley, which is where he was raised. A complete mess When he took over, he took over a complete mess, said Peter Simonson, the executive director of the ACLU in New Mexico. Berry said the job of chief of police is one of the hardest in city government, and the reforms and national attitudes toward law enforcement made the job even more difficult during Edens tenure. All things considered, when you look back at what the chief and his team have been able to accomplish he brought that effort that I was hoping for to the equation, Berry said. Ive never been in a meeting with the guy where I didnt feel he had his heart and soul into it. But controversy came quickly. Less than three weeks after becoming chief, two Albuquerque police officers shot and killed James Boyd in the Sandia foothills. Video of the shooting went viral and led to street protests. The officers were eventually charged with murder, though the case ended in a mistrial and charges were dropped. But shortly after the shooting, Eden held a news conference to discuss what had happened and said the shooting was justified. He later walked back that comment and apologized. He basically told the public that in his assessment it looked like a justified shooting. If you fast-forward years from that time, hes proven right. Those officers were acquitted, said Shaun Willoughby, the president of the Albuquerque police union. He was immediately sent down a different path by the administration. I believe that immediate change from telling the public what he believed was true to being forced to say something different immediately put him down the wrong path. After the Boyd shooting, Eden rarely spoke publicly about the circumstances associated with police shootings. And when he did, he avoided answering tough questions. For example, after the city settled a lawsuit with Jacob Grant, a former detective who was shot by his own lieutenant during a botched drug sting, Eden was asked what went wrong with the operation. He said he would issue a public report outlining mistakes that were made, which he never did. Not communicating directly as the leader is problematic, Fine said. The public is no better educated now than it was before. Enter the Department of Justice The job didnt get any easier after the Boyd shooting. On April 10, 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that its investigation into the Albuquerque Police Department which was started before Eden was chief had found a pattern of excessive force, including police shootings. That finding set in motion negotiations between the city and the DOJ, which ultimately led to a settlement agreement that outlined a series of reforms the department was required to begin working on. Statistically, the department has completed about 75 percent of those reforms. But many of the tasks that lie ahead are some of the more difficult challenges, and the department has failed to achieve benchmarks that advocates for police reform were hoping for, Simonson said. He was always responsive to us, Simonson said of Edens work addressing concerns of community groups. But at the end of the day, he wasnt able to get the reform done in a way that would have satisfied us. James Ginger, the court-appointed monitor overseeing the reform effort, has regularly criticized APD leadership in his periodic reports. Tension between the police administration and Ginger reached its peak recently, when the city filed a document and video in court that showed Assistant Chief Robert Huntsman, the man Eden hired to oversee the reform effort, had secretly recorded a conversation between Ginger and police officials. The city filed the video in court in an attempt to show Ginger was biased against police. Last month, U.S. District Judge Robert Brack lashed out at Huntsman and city officials from the bench for trying such a maneuver. But the judge ended his tirade by wishing Eden well. No one could have blamed you, chief, if you decided to just sit this one out. But that wouldnt have been your way. You jumped into the storm, Brack said. Chief consoler Eden didnt always struggle to communicate. The chief was known for spending time consoling the victims and survivors of some of the most horrific crimes in Albuquerque that happened under his watch. And Eden and his wife spent numerous hours at hospitals when officers were shot in the line of duty. He also spoke at their funerals. I have been with chief in those darkest moments when we have an officer struggling for life in the hospital. And hes not just there when the cameras are on and reporters are there. Hes there all night, Berry said. Hes been with me in living rooms when families in this community are planning funerals for their children. Ive seen the guy when nobodys looking, and he gives it everything he has. Copyright 2017 Albuquerque Journal Editors Note: As the 45th anniversary of Apollo 17 approaches, New Mexico astronaut Harrison Schmitt says there are important reasons for the U.S. to invest in space. This is Part 2 of his interview with Senior Editor Kent Walz. A settlement on the moon. Mankind well on its way to Mars. A potential clean power source so powerful that about 200 pounds could provide electricity to a major city for a year. New Mexico astronaut Harrison Jack Schmitt says these are a few of the possibilities that might well have been reality by now had the administration of President Lyndon Johnson not decided to limit production of the massive Saturn V rockets that carried Apollo astronauts, including Schmitt, to the moon. Had things gone differently we could be much further along than we are today, he said in a recent interview. No question we would have a settlement on the moon and would very seriously have a program going to Mars if not already there. The budget-driven decision made in the Johnson administration and confirmed in the Nixon administration was to fly only 15 of these large Saturn rockets, Schmitt said. That immediately limited the amount of exploration we were going to do in deep space. You need rockets of that size to go to the moon or to Mars. We really gave up on deep space exploration. Schmitt, Eugene Cernan and Ron Evans were the astronauts on the last moon mission, Apollo 17, which launched 45 years ago Thursday for a record-shattering mission highlighted by Schmitt and Cernan spending three days on the surface deploying scientific instruments and collecting samples. Schmitt, a Silver City native and geologist who graduated from Cal Tech and earned a Ph.D. at Harvard, is the only scientist ever to fly on a moon mission and is the 12th and last man to step on the lunar surface. He is writing a book on the mission: Apollo 17: Diary of the Twelfth Man. Energy source Schmittt says one of the important discoveries from Apollo was the resources present in the lunar soil. Those are resources derived from the solar wind and particles of the sun. One of those, Helium-3, isnt readily available on Earth but it is embedded in lunar soil. It is a nearly ideal fuel for fusion power. If we had it here on Earth Im convinced we would be using it right now. It doesnt produce neutrons but it does produce alpha particles and protons and those can be converted directly to electricity without any waste products. We would have a plentiful clean power source, he says, adding that its still there and its not going anywhere. Schmitt says roughly 220 pounds of Helium-3 would provide the power necessary to serve Dallas for a year You would have to mine a fair amount of lunar soil to produce 100 kilograms, but its certainly feasible. Could a moon settlement mine Helium-3 and ship it back to Earth? In theory, although the economics would dictate. What about water? Some of the hydrogen in the moons soils react with minerals at a few hundred degrees centigrade and will produce water. So anywhere on the moon you can produce water. Commercial flight While NASA works toward expanding deep space exploration, there is a flurry of private activity with some of Americas biggest high rollers, including Elon Musk, developing their own rocket and flight systems. But the one company I think you really have to keep an eye on for purely commercial activities is Blue Origin, Schmitt said. Blue Origin is the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon guru. It has headquarters and an engine plant in Kent, Wash., and a launch site in Texas. I visited their engine plant and it was very impressive, Schmitt said. They are building new engines, which havent been built for a long time in the U.S. and he (Bezos) is putting entirely his own money in. The company wants to put low-cost satellites, and eventually people, into orbit and expects to launch its newest rocket, the Glenn, in 2020. Schmitt said the company is even looking at lunar missions to take payloads to the moon for whatever customer might want it. Bezos, he said, is a bright guy with a lot of money and I wouldnt bet against him. He said publicly at a fundraiser for (astronaut) Buzz Aldrins STEM foundation in Florida last fall that I won the Amazon lottery and Im going to use those winnings in order to get us into space.' Spaceport As for New Mexicos Spaceport America, which cost over $200 million, Schmitt says, Im not sure theres a long-term business case that doesnt depend on space-related business. The primary tenant, Virgin Galactic, has been slowed by problems in developing its craft designed to carry tourists and others into low Earth orbit. Schmitt sees no technical obstacles to that or to the vision of international suborbital travel from a site like the Spaceport to Tokyo or London, making global air travel the equivalent of commuter airline flights. But, he says They have a long way to go before that business reaches the level of reliability and acceptance that the airline industry has. There will be hiccups, but I dont know why there would be roadblocks to suborbital space travel of that kind, and it has potential military applications as well. Schmitt says the Spaceport has the same challenge New Mexico did when the state finished second only to what was then Cape Canaveral for the nations primary space launch site something he says is a little-known fact. The main thing that kept us from getting it was transportation issues. How do you get very large rocket components into the state and to a launch site? It would take a whole new rail system of some kind where they could use barges to get things into Canaveral. Mars ahead Schmitt said one of the challenges for a Mars mission is that NASA needs to be a young agency. The effort to go to Mars is going to be multigenerational and it needs to stay young. It needs to have that stamina, motivation and courage young people bring to a program, like they do in the nuclear Navy. But Schmitt believes America will return to space in large part for the same reason President John F. Kennedy pushed hard to put a man on the moon after the Soviets put the first man into orbit: Competition with other countries on Earth. In the Apollo era it was the Soviet Union that was our primary geopolitical competitor. Today its probably more China, although Russia is still a player. China is really the most ambitious spacefaring nation today. Some blogs contend China is working on a plan to mine Helium-3 on the lunar surface. And with no large rocket capability, the U.S. now pays Russia a lot of money to carry our astronauts to the International Space Station. Many other scientific and technological benefits will flow from future space exploration, as they did from Apollo, but, Schmitt says, The overriding rationale has to be geopolitical. He believes the current administration is committed to continuing construction of a large rocket called the space launch system. It is designed to carry Orion, NASAs new spacecraft, which is a larger and newer version of the Apollo capsules. NASA says Orion is built to take humans farther than theyve ever gone before. Schmitt says there is another benefit to America having a large rocket system. Settlements off the Earth can be very important philosophically into the future, he said. It is one way in which the human species can perpetuate itself against the very remote possibility of a very large asteroid impact on the Earth. Salil Parekh, who will take over his role at Infosys on January 2, 2018 for a period of five years, was a member of the Group Executive Board at French firm Capgemini. Infosys has appointed Salil Parekh as its new CEO. Photo: Reuters. By PTI: Shares of Infosys today surged four per cent in morning trade on the bourses after the company announced the appointment of new CEO and MD Salil Parekh. On December 2, Infosys said it has appointed Parekh as its CEO and Managing Director, concluding the three-month high-profile executive search at the country's second largest IT firm. Following the announcement, shares of the company today opened on a bullish note at Rs 983.00, then gained further ground and surged 4.01 per cent to touch an early-day high of Rs 996.95. advertisement Similar movement was seen on NSE, where the stock opened at Rs 980.00, then surged to an early-high of Rs 996.80, registering a jump of 3.96 per cent over its previous closing price. The Bengaluru-based firm had initiated the executive search after CEO Vishal Sikka resigned in August following a protracted acrimony between the management and the founders. UB Pravin Rao, who was filling in the CEO role on an interim basis, will now continue as Chief Operating Officer and a whole-time Director of the company, Infosys said in a statement. Parekh, who will take over his role at Infosys on January 2, 2018 for a period of five years, was a member of the Group Executive Board at French firm Capgemini. --- ENDS --- The University of New Mexico is considering a possible partnership with a Singapore-based for-profit education company that could help expand its presence in northern New Mexico. The states largest university is currently vetting Raffles Education Corp. as it weighs a collaboration to use a college campus in Santa Fe, interim President Chaouki Abdallah said at a meeting last week. Raffles and UNM could work together to backfill the city of Santa Fe-owned property after the current tenant, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, shutters. Abdallah told UNMs Faculty Senate last week no decisions have been made but that a team assembled to investigate the idea should have a recommendation by years end. UNM officials say it would not be a full-fledged branch campus but rather a place to offer classes in partnership with other entities. UNM would not consider moving into Santa Fe without a partner to shoulder the purchase or lease costs for the space, interim Senior Vice Provost Rich Wood said. Raffles has not directly told UNM it is willing to do that, according to Wood. But the company previously has shown interest. It tried to buy SFUAD from Laureate International Universities, the for-profit, Baltimore-based company that operates it. That deal died earlier this year. A Raffles representative did not respond to a Journal email last week. The financially troubled SFUAD will close in the spring, leaving the city of Santa Fe plotting the future of the property it bought in 2009 for $19.5 million. It still owes $2.2 million annually in debt service. City Councilor Mike Harris said the zoning overlay allows for many possibilities, but there is interest in having a higher education component on at least part of the 64 acres. Should UNM partner with Raffles, UNM would offer the courses with faculty and instructors it hires and in that sense control content, Wood said in a written statement. It could include degree programs that leverage offerings by UNM-Albuquerque, Santa Fe Community College or UNM-Los Alamos, he added. Wood said UNMs accreditation would cover degrees that meet UNMs standards, are taught by UNM faculty and vetted by UNMs Faculty Senate. Raffles describes itself online as a premier private education provider, owner and manager of educational assets and facilities, and education-linked real estate investor and developer. It has 25 colleges in 13 countries, with its heaviest presence in China, India and Indonesia. Abdallah said hes mindful of UNMs budgetary challenges If doesnt make financial sense were not interested and concerns about New Mexico college campus proliferation. The states 31 public institutions have a combined 77 access points around the state. Some faculty members at this weeks meeting raised questions about already under-utilized spaces like UNM West and the financial implications of further expansion. Others, however, showed more optimism. As an artist, a musician, Im pretty darn excited about the possibility, said Faculty Senate President Pamela Pyle, an associate professor of piano who has toured the Santa Fe grounds and cited the propertys various assets. It houses to Greer Garson Studios, Greer Garson Theatre, The Screen movie theater and a recording studio. WASHINGTON Its a truism of Washington scandals that its not the initial actions that lead to legal disaster, but the attempt to cover them up. Its possible that is the case with Fridays indictment of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and in the broader investigation of the Trump teams contacts with Russia. But there is much we still do not know. This sweater has been unraveling from a thin initial thread. When I reported on Jan. 12 the phone calls between Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak on Dec. 29 which were at the center of Fridays indictment and guilty plea the propriety of Flynns actions was a matter of legitimate debate. Because the Obama administration had expelled 35 Russian diplomats that same day to retaliate against Moscows meddling in the 2016 campaign, my column posed the basic question: What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? But even if it had undermined Obamas move and checked Russian reprisal, that wasnt a capital crime. If the Trump teams contacts helped discourage the Russians from a counter-retaliation, maybe thats a good thing, my column noted. But we ought to know the facts. Flynns catastrophic mistake was that he lied about the Dec. 29 calls, first in denials to Trump spokesmen that were shared with me and other reporters on Jan. 12, then to Vice President Mike Pence and, most important, to FBI officials who interviewed him on Jan. 24. The indictment specified that Flynn made false, fictitious and fraudulent statements when he told FBI agents he hadnt urged Kislyak to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed against Russia that same day. Why was Flynn lying about the Kislyak calls? What was he covering up? We have one hint in the Statement of the Offense that accompanies the plea agreement. The prosecutors say that Flynn cleared his comments to Kislyak beforehand with an unnamed official who is described as a senior official of the Presidential Transition Team who was staying with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Only then, with top-level approval to discuss sanctions, did Flynn call the Russian ambassador. Say what you like about Flynn, but an ex-general follows the chain of command. Given his seniority as the designated national security adviser, there are only two people who would likely have authorized this contact with Russia: Jared Kushner, the presidents son-in-law and senior adviser, who had been conducting his own extensive back-channel contacts with Kislyak and other Russians, and the president-elect himself, who had said throughout the campaign that he wanted to improve relations with Russia. The public lies about the Dec. 29 call began to cascade. But the most senior levels of the Trump transition team were aware, from the first, of what really happened. Their silence condoned the lies. Given that Trump publicly thanked Russian president Vladimir Putin on Dec. 30 for not retaliating, it has always been hard to believe that Trump wasnt aware of the Flynn-Kislyak discussions. Now well know the truth. The plea agreement makes clear that Flynn is cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller about his discussions with the senior official and others. And then, as happens in a cover-up, the lies began to get twisted. Flynn resigned under pressure on Feb. 13, following The Washington Posts disclosure that he had, indeed, discussed sanctions. The next day, Trump met privately with then-FBI director James Comey. According to a memo Comey wrote afterward, Trump said: I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. This attempt to curb prosecution of Flynn was part of the chain of events that led to Muellers appointment as special counsel. This part of the circle closed Friday, as Mueller obtained a guilty plea from the man Trump had sought to protect from investigation. At the center of this story is a mystery that will propel the rest of the inquiry: What was Trump so worried about, that made him deny contacts with Russia and denounce attempts to investigate those contacts? What was he afraid might emerge? Was it the 30-year history of his dealings with Russian business and political leaders in his attempts to do big business deals, described in a recent column? Was it the help Russian operatives were offering in dishing dirt on his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as documented in the email correspondence of Donald Trump Jr., and in Muellers plea agreement several weeks ago with campaign aide George Papadopoulos? What was Trump afraid of? Week by week, more pieces of this puzzle emerge. Email: davidignatius@washpost.com. Copyright, Washington Post Writers Group. I DONT KNOW ART BUT I KNOW WHATS NOT DONE: Last weeks inaugural runs on the $126 million Albuquerque Rapid Transit system prompted EJG to email, If the ART project is done, why is Central west of Rio Grande still a mess with lanes still closed? Joanie Griffin of Griffin & Associates, which is handling public information for the project, says that work is ART and also El Vado (redevelopment construction). ART heavy construction wont be done til year end. FYI, the partially operational ART is offering free service to and from the Albuquerque BioParks River of Lights on Friday and Saturday nights. AND TURNS ARE LEFT OUT: Ruth Schultz called to ask if now that ART is here, can you turn left or make U-turns on Central in Nob Hill anywhere, or just at signals? One driver found out the answer the hard way. On one of the first runs Nov. 25, an ART electric bus was hit by a car whose driver made an illegal left turn. Griffin says drivers can make left turns and U-turns at signals only. Drivers may not cross the ART Bus-Only lanes ever. They are for the ART buses and emergency vehicles only. The main thing is for drivers to pay attention. There are rumble strips to alert them if theyve accidentally entered the ART Bus-Lane only. And at every signalized intersection, there is a left turn arrow when that is illuminated they can turn left or make a legal U-Turn. WHY ARE VENDORS STILL ON TRAMWAY? Five years ago, Wallace E. Anderson sent that question in. And five years later, he is again asking, Why are the wood sellers, tree and shrub venders, and all other venders allowed to use the shoulder of Tramway from Lomas to Academy to sell their wares? We know this is illegal and dangerous, but apparently no one cares. The scraps of wood left behind by these venders can injure a cyclist like it has in the past not to mention the danger of these vehicles and trailers pulling on to a fast moving highway. Why isnt this addressed by our law enforcement? The New Mexico Department of Transportation says the rules havent changed: In a January 2013 column, a spokesman explained, The New Mexico Administrative Code states no vending on highway right-of-way shall be permitted and that it could be deemed as criminal trespass (NMSA 1978, Section 30-14-1). Article 14 Trespass states that whoever commits criminal trespass is guilty of a misdemeanor. The law enforcement authority having jurisdiction would be the Albuquerque Police Department or Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office, depending on the location along N.M. 556 (Tramway). And NMDOT also provided a copy of the letter given to vendors. It cites the state administrative code, 18-NMAC 20.5.10, and says in part vending/parking is not permitted in the highway right of way and must cease immediately. If the vending does not cease immediately, the department representative may file a complaint of criminal trespass with the law enforcement authority having jurisdiction. CANT SEE THE LINES ON N.M. 528: Mary Jo Hoak emails that the striping on N.M. 528 from Westside Boulevard from Rio Rancho to Ellison Boulevard is almost impossible to see, especially with the glare of the sun as you come down the hill. It is a bit harrowing, and at the speed almost all of the cars are traveling down hill, I feel it is unsafe as cars get uncomfortably close to each other. Any chance the state highway department could re-stripe soon? Yes. NMDOT District 3 spokeswoman Kimberly Gallegos says, This section of roadway is scheduled to be re-striped in the spring of 2018. Editorial page editor DVal Westphal tackles commuter issues for the Metro area on Mondays. Reach her at 823-3858; dwestphal@abqjournal.com; or P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, N.M. 87103. SEOUL, South Korea Hundreds of aircraft including two dozen stealth jets began training Monday as the United States and South Korea launched a massive combined air force exercise. The war games come a week after North Korea test-fired its most powerful missile ever, an ICBM that may be able to target the eastern seaboard of the United States. The five-day drill, which is called Vigilant Ace, is meant to improve the allies wartime capabilities and preparedness, South Koreas defense ministry said. The U.S. Seventh Air Force sent major strategic military assets, including an unusually large number of the latest generations of stealth fighter jets, for the annual training in the Korean Peninsula. They include six F-22 and 18 F-35 stealth fighter jets. About 12,000 U.S. military personnel are participating. In total, 230 aircraft will be flying at eight U.S. and South Korean military installations in the South. An official at the South Korean Defense Ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of office rules, corrected his earlier statement that the exercise was the biggest ever. Some local media report that B-1B bombers will also join aerial drills, but officials did not confirm their participation. The training, held each year in late fall, is not in response to any incident or provocation, the Seventh Air Force said in a statement. North Koreas state media said the drill pushes the Korean Peninsula to the brink of nuclear war. Such language is typical in North Korean propaganda because the country claims U.S.-South Korean drills are preparation for invasion. Still, always bad tensions are at a particularly dangerous point as North Korea edges toward its goal of a viable arsenal of nuclear-tipped long-range missiles, and as President Donald Trump ramps up his rhetoric toward the North, threatening, for instance, to unleash fire and fury against the country. Pyongyang will seriously consider countermeasures against the drill, and the U.S. and South Korea will pay dearly for their provocations, the Korean Central News Agency said on Sunday before the start of the exercises. While many South Koreans typically ignore North Koreas rhetoric, some senior American officials have expressed worry following the ICBM test, North Koreas third. On Sunday, Lindsey Graham, a Republican U.S. senator from the state of South Carolina, said he believes that its time for U.S. military families in South Korea to leave the country because conflict with North Korea is getting close. The U.S. government has not announced a formal decision to evacuate U.S. citizens from South Korea, and there were no such signs in the diplomatic community in Seoul. An evacuation of dependents by Seouls closest ally and major military defender could prompt a panicked reaction by other countries, and among South Koreans. In addition to American diplomats and other embassy workers, about 28,500 U.S. troops operate in South Korea, and many come to their posts with their families, who often live on huge, well-guarded military bases. Also on Sunday, the White House national security adviser said that Trump will take care of North Korean threats by doing more ourselves. The priorities that the presidents given us to move as quickly as we can to resolve this crisis with North Korea, General H.R. McMaster told Fox News in an interview. If necessary, the president and the United States will have to take care of it, because he has said hes not going to allow this murderous, rogue regime to threaten the United States. ___ This story was corrected to reflect South Koreas defense ministry retracting statement that this was the largest-ever joint air force exercise. WASHINGTON The shifting explanations for why President Donald Trump fired national security adviser Michael Flynn have revived questions about whether the president may have obstructed an ongoing investigation of potential contacts between his campaign and Russia. Pressure on the administration has mounted since Flynn last week pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, with prosecutors revealing that he is now cooperating with special counsel Robert Muellers investigation. And a muddled White House response, including a problematic presidential tweet, has left some Trump confidants worried that the president is not being well-served by his legal team and believing his lawyers have painted a too-rosy picture of the presidents potential plight. The presidents aides and legal advisers have scrambled for 48 hours to explain a presidential tweet that raised the specter of obstruction. It read: I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pleaded guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide! That tweet appeared to indicate a change in the White House explanation for Flynns firing, suggesting Trump was aware when the White House dismissed Flynn on Feb. 13 that the national security adviser had lied to the FBI, whose agents had interviewed him weeks earlier. Former FBI Director James Comey has said Trump the following day brought up the Flynn investigation in private at the White House and told him he hoped he could let this go, raising the possibility he knew Flynn had lied and was looking to cover up the offense. With questions raised by the tweet, Trump associates tried to put distance between the president and the potentially incriminating message. One of Trumps attorneys, John Dowd, told CNN on Sunday that he was responsible for crafting the tweet. Dowd declined to comment to the AP but replied with a Fox News story Monday quoting prominent lawyer Alan Dershowitz as saying Trump couldnt have committed obstruction of justice by urging Comey to drop the FBI investigation of Flynn. Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, backed up Dowds claim that he wrote the tweet, saying the lawyers are the ones that understand how to put those tweets together. I was with the president on Saturday all day, frankly, and I know that what he said is correct, Conway continued, referring to Dowd. What he says is that he put it together and sent it to our director of social media. A White House spokesman declined to answer whether Dowd dictated the tweet word-for-word to the White House director of social media, Dan Scavino, or whether Scavino, who has access to the @RealDonaldTrump account and its 44 million followers, put the sentiment into something resembling Trumps own voice. The president angrily scolded aides for the tweet over the weekend, according to a person familiar with private conversations but not authorized to discuss them publicly. The White House is considering reviewing how some tweets, particularly related to the Russia probe, get posted. The episode has rattled some of Trumps outside advisers, who have pressed upon Trump since Flynns guilty plea that he needs to change legal strategy. White House lawyer Ty Cobb has repeatedly offered public assurances that the investigation into the administration would soon be over, with the president exonerated. Trump has taken that counsel to heart, telling two close allies over the weekend that he believed he was in the clear and that Muellers team wouldnt unveil any further charges, according to the advisers who discussed the private conversations under the conditions of anonymity. Both of the confidants said they disputed that assessment and urged Trump to go on the offensive, perhaps by firing his current lawyers or triggering a series of events that could lead to Muellers dismissal. Trump did not suggest he was considering that approach. And one of the advisers, who speaks to Trump regularly, said the president had not discussed with him the possibility of issuing any pardons. The president did lob new criticism at the special counsel investigation Monday, saying he feels very badly for Flynn. I think its a shame, Trump said of Flynns situation, adding that its very unfair and that Flynn had led a very strong life. In the wake of the controversial tweet, Trump launched a fresh denial that he had pressured the former FBI director, tweeting Sunday that I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie! Trump fired Comey in May, leading to Muellers appointment. Any proof that Trump knew before he spoke with Comey in February that Flynn had lied to the FBI could bolster obstruction of justice allegations against the president and raise the prospect that he was trying to protect a key member of his inner circle from probable prosecution, said Jimmy Gurule, a Notre Dame criminal law professor and former federal prosecutor. Though the president has previously said he was thinking of this Russia thing when he fired Comey, Gurule said it was reasonable to infer from the weekend tweet that the dismissal of Comey was done in the hope of terminating the FBI investigation. If you have knowledge of a crime, a reasonable person would disclose that information to law enforcement. The president did not, Gurule said. But David Rivkin Jr., a Washington lawyer specializing in constitutional law who worked in the Justice Department under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said that even if the president knew that Flynn had lied to the FBI, his authority as the chief executive is perfectly sufficient and appropriate to decide that this matter should not be investigated any further. ___ Lemire reported from New York. ___ Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com///twitter.com/@etuckerAP ISLAMABAD Defense Secretary Jim Mattis pressed top Pakistani leaders Monday to redouble efforts to go after insurgents operating in safe havens, the Pentagon said, underscoring a long frustration with Islamabad over Taliban-linked militants that freely cross the border to conduct attacks against the U.S. and allies in Afghanistan. Both sides released comments saying that the U.S. and Pakistan want to continue to work together and that Islamabad plays a key role in the struggle for peace in Afghanistan. In brief comments before their meeting, Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi said his country is committed to the war on terror and shares the same common objectives as the U.S. Engagement is there, he said, adding that they need to move forward with (the) issues at hand. Mattis did not speak while reporters were present. A Pentagon statement said that during the meetings Mattis discussed Pakistans role in the peace process and reiterated that Pakistan must redouble its efforts to confront militants and terrorists operating within the country. A senior U.S. official said the meetings were straightforward, and that Mattis was very specific about what Pakistan needs to do to show it is taking action against the militants. Asked if Mattis set any timelines, the official said the urgency of the matter was communicated. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings, said Mattis also made it clear that Pakistan must do its part to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table with Afghanistan. A statement from Abbasis office said the prime minister talked about recent counterterrorism operations and said Pakistan would continue to conduct intelligence based operations all over the country. And it said Abbasi appreciates the U.S. resolve not to allow the use of Afghan soil against Pakistan. Earlier, Mattis told reporters traveling with him that he wants to work with Pakistan to address the problems, adding that the U.S. is committed to a pragmatic relationship that expands cooperation while also reinforcing President Trumps call for action against terrorist safe havens. We have heard from Pakistan leaders that they do not support terrorism. So I expect to see that sort of action reflected in their policies, Mattis said before his trip to Islamabad. Mattis met with Abbasi and army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, as well as a number of senior Pakistani leaders and military officials and U.S. Ambassador David Hale. It was Mattis first trip to Pakistan as secretary. Bajwa, in a statement, said Mattis expressed concern about militants in Pakistan trying to further their terrorist agenda in Afghanistan, and said he is prepared to look into the possibility of miscreants exploiting Pakistans hospitality. Mattis statement reflects persistent U.S. assertions that Islamabad is still not doing enough to battle the Taliban and allied Haqqani network insurgents within its borders. Since the start of the war in Afghanistan, militants in Pakistan have crossed the mountainous and ill-defined border to wage attacks, then return to safe havens in Pakistan, where they have had a long-standing relationship with the ISI, Islamabads intelligence agency. In a blunt assessment early last week, Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said there have been no changes in Pakistans support for militant networks. He said Pakistani leaders went to Kabul and met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. They identified certain steps that they were going to take. Weve not yet seen those steps play out, Nicholson told reporters in a recent briefing. The U.S., he said, has been very direct about what it expects Pakistan to do in the fight against the Taliban. Were hoping to see those changes, he said. Following Mattis visit, Pakistans prime ministers office released a statement saying there are no safe heavens in Pakistan and that the nation was committed to eradicating terrorism once and for all. In August, the United States said it would hold up $255 million in military assistance for Pakistan until it cracks down on extremists threatening Afghanistan. Imtiaz Gul, an Islamabad security analyst, said U.S. officials always come to Islamabad with their own wish list. I am sure the U.S. defense secretary is also carrying a wish list with him but I dont think Pakistan will accept any dictation as it has already demonstrated its seriousness in fighting terrorism, and Washington in recent weeks has appreciated and acknowledged Pakistans sacrifices in war on terror, he said. Gul said relations between Pakistan and the U.S. have gone from bad to worse since the Trump administration announced Afghan strategy in which Pakistan was degraded and India was elevated. President Donald Trumps tough words about Pakistan as he unveiled the updated U.S. strategy for the war in Afghanistan, infuriated Islamabad and triggered anti-U.S. protests there that Pakistani police had to use tear gas to disperse Mattis trip to Pakistan comes at the end of a short trip to the region, including stops in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait. ___ Associated Press writer Ahmed Munir contributed to this story from Islamabad SANAA, Yemen Yemeni rebels on Monday killed their onetime ally Ali Abdullah Saleh, the countrys former president, as they gained the upper hand in days of fighting with his forces for control of the capital, Sanaa. The tumult threw the countrys three-year civil war into an unpredictable new chapter just as Yemens Saudi-backed government had hoped the Shiite rebels would be decisively weakened. Salehs recent defection from the rebel camp and now his death shattered the alliance that had helped the Iranian-backed rebels, known as Houthis, rise to power in 2014 giving the government and the Saudi coalition supporting it with airstrikes hope for a turning point in a stalemated war that has brought humanitarian disaster. But with Salehs forces seemingly in disarray, it was not immediately clear if the Saudi-led coalition fighting the rebels will be able to turn the split to its advantage in the war. It was a grisly end for Saleh, who ruled Yemen for more than three decades until an Arab Spring uprising forced him to step down in 2012. He later allied with the Houthi rebels hoping to exploit their strength to return to power. That helped propel Yemen into the ruinous civil war that has spread hunger and disease among its 28 million people. Salehs death was announced by the Houthis and confirmed by two Saleh associates and a Yemeni government official. The exact circumstances were unclear: Houthi officials said their fighters killed him as he tried to flee the capital for his nearby hometown of Sanhan. The Houthis top leader said Saleh paid the price for his treason, accusing him of betraying their alliance to side with the Saudi-backed coalition. A video circulated online showed Salehs bloodied body with a gaping head wound as he was carried in a blanket by rebel fighters chanting God is great! as they dumped it into a pickup truck. The images recalled the death of another Arab leader slain in the midst of his countrys uprising: Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, whose body was shown in a video being abused by rebels who killed him in 2011. Salehs killing appeared to stun members of his camp and to help consolidate the position of the Houthis at least for now. Houthi and Saleh-loyalist forces have been fighting in Sanaa since late last week. In response, the Saudi-led coalition threw its backing behind Saleh, hitting Houthi positions with airstrikes, hoping that having Saleh on its side could provide a foothold in the capital for the forces of the Saudi-backed president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. But by Monday evening, hours after Salehs death, witnesses said his forces had abandoned some of their positions in Sanaa and that Houthi fighters had moved into one of the most heavily contested districts, seizing Salehs house and those of some of his family members. Saudi airstrikes hit several Houthi positions in the evening, but otherwise the city saw the first easing of fighting in days. In a televised speech, the Houthis top leader, Abdul-Malek al-Houthi, called Salehs killing a dark day for the forces of the coalition. He said he had known Saleh was communicating with the coalition and had warned him to stop. Hadi, in turn, gave a televised speech of his own from the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where he has been in self-imposed exile for most of the war. He tried to rally Salehs allies to keep up the fight against the Houthis. Lets put our hands together to end this nightmare, Hadi said. He said his government forces would support any uprising against the Houthis in Sanaa. An official in Hadis government told The Associated Press that members of Salehs political party and military forces were cooperating with the coalition and would provide coordinates for airstrikes against the Houthis. He said strikes will intensify so that the closest pro-Hadi ground troops located at Nihm about 30 miles northeast of Sanaa can push toward the capital. The hope is that as the forces advance, tribes in the area will be encouraged to rise against the Houthis, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans. One of Salehs sons, Salah Saleh, posted a call on his Facebook page for his allies to take up the fight against the rebels. He also urged the United Arab Emirates to allow Salehs most prominent son, Ahmed Saleh, who headed the elite Republican Guard under his fathers rule, to return to Yemen and lead forces against the Houthis. It has been reported that the UAE had been preventing his return throughout the conflict Revenge for my father and for every Yemeni, Salah Saleh wrote. Fight them wherever you find them. God bless you, my father. But it was unclear whether the break with Saleh weakens the Houthis. When Saleh left power, he stayed in the country and kept the loyalty of many military commanders, splitting the armed forces between himself and Hadi. Salehs forces were key to helping the Houthis overrun Sanaa in 2014 and then much of the north and center of the country. But over the past year, the Houthis appear to have undermined Saleh, wooing away some of his commanders, strengthening their own fighters and reducing their need for him. It appears that pushed Saleh into flirting with the coalition, ultimately leading to the breakdown of the alliance with the Houthis and the recent outbreak of clashes. The fighting has brought new suffering to Sanaas residents as Houthi forces battled Sunday and into Monday morning to uproot the Saleh loyalists centered in the southern part of the city, battering buildings with artillery. Suze van Meegen, the Sanaa-based protection and advocacy adviser for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said the violence left aid workers trapped inside their homes and was completely paralyzing humanitarian operations. No one is safe in Sanaa at the moment. I can hear heavy shelling outside now and know it is too imprecise and too pervasive to guarantee that any of us are safe, she said. Massive urban clashes with heavy artillery and airstrikes. Yemenis stuck in their homes, too scared to go out. Reduced access to water, health care, food and fuel, Robert Mardini, the regional director of the International Committee of the Red Cross, posted on his Twitter account. Residents said the night was shattered by the sounds of gunfire and children screaming. Its like horror movies, said Bushra, a local woman who asked that her last name not be published for fear of retribution. I have lived through many wars but nothing like this. Witnesses said the bodies of slain civilians and fighters littered the streets as no ambulances were able to reach the area. The ICRC said at least 125 people had been killed and some 240 wounded in Sanaa since the fighting began last week. ___ Michael reported from Cairo. Associated Press reporter Sam Magdy in Cairo contributed to this report. MADRID Political parties in Catalonia, including candidates either in jail or out of the country to avoid arrest, started campaigning at midnight Monday for the early regional elections called by Spains government seeking to quash the Catalan independence movement. The highly polarized Catalan parliament elections set for Dec. 21 is shaping up as a close fight between Catalans who support secession and those who favor remaining in Spain. Voters are choosing regional lawmakers and top government officials to replace the pro-independence officials removed by the national government in late October. Hours before pro-secession parties held evening rallies to launch their campaigns, a Supreme Court judge in Madrid ruled that four prominent members of the regions independence movement must remain jailed without bail. They include former regional Vice President Oriol Junqueras, who heads the slate of the left-republican ERC party. Junqueras was unseated in late October along with former President Carles Puigdemont and the rest of Puigdemonts Cabinet after regional lawmakers passed a declaration of independence that Spanish authorities deemed illegal. Six other Catalan politicians who had been jailed with Junqueras since early November were released late Monday after the posting of 100,000-euro ($118,000) bail set earlier for them by a Supreme Court judge. Meanwhile, Puigdemont and four of his separatist allies learned Monday that a decision on Spains request for their extraditions from Belgium will be made Dec. 14. That is one week before the elections, in which Puigdemont is leading his pro-independence partys ticket as its presidential candidate. However, a final decision may not come until well after the election because of appeals. The five Catalan officials fled to Belgium and are refusing to return to Spain to face possible charges of rebellion, sedition and embezzlement over the push for independence. The charges carry maximum penalties of decades in prison. Puigdemonts Belgian defense lawyer, Paul Bekaert, insisted there are no grounds for extradition because the Spanish charges were not punishable in Belgium. We also highlighted the danger for the impediment of their human rights in Spain, Bekaert said. Hours after the judge postponed deciding his fate, Puigdemont addressed a political rally in Catalonia via video conference at the official midnight kickoff of the campaign. Puigdemont told the other candidates running for his Together for Catalonia list that the vote should be the second part of the referendum that his government held on secession Oct. 1 despite it being banned by Spains highest court. The results of Oct. 1 are still valid, Puigdemont told Catalan public television TV3. There are many of us who dont give the Spanish government the authority to dissolve a legitimate legislature. The Spanish government has said the early election is an attempt to find a democratic way out of the nations worst crisis in nearly four decades. Polls predict a close race between the pro- and anti-independence camps. A government-run poll published Monday indicated that pro-independence parties would lose their slim majority in Catalonias parliament. It had ERC, Together for Catalonia and the far-left anti-establishment CUP party winning 66 or 67 of the parliaments 135 seats. The poll forecast a boost for the anti-independence Citizens party, which could dispute the victory with the pro-secession ERC. The secession movement is a black hole that has swallowed everything up in recent years, Ines Arrimadas, Citizens leading candidate, told TV3. We have it in our hands to end the independence movement and start a new era for Catalonia. The CIS survey said the poll had a margin of error of two percentage points. The poll of 3,000 people was conducted by telephone Nov. 23-27. Before campaigning officially started, Catalan pro-independence groups held protests in front of town halls to oppose the Supreme Courts decision to keep some of the independence movements leaders in custody. Pilar Gonzalez, 76, said while walking her dog in Barcelona that the jailed Catalan political leaders were political prisoners. But 53-year-old contractor Jose Luis Aguirre said the attempt to unilaterally break away from Spain is an act that cannot be allowed. In the hope of being freed, Junqueras and the other jailed politicians pledged last week to give up on efforts to seek unilateral independence for the wealthy northeastern region. But Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena said Monday that it remains to be seen if Junqueras pledge was truthful and real. ERC spokeswoman Marta Rovira described the jailing as a covert attempt by Spains central authorities in Madrid to get ERC out of the picture before this months voting. This is a very clear attempt to win these elections without political adversaries, she said. Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido was unmoved by the arguments of Junqueras supporters. Those who commit criminal acts must place themselves at the mercy of legal rulings, Zoido said. The Supreme Court judge also upheld custody orders without bail for the former regional interior minister, Joaquim Forn, and the leaders of Assemblea Nacional Catalan and Omnium Cultural, two grassroots groups that have been the main drivers of the separatist bid. Puigdemont and the other separatist leaders claim a mandate for independence from the Oct. 1 referendum, which was boycotted by parties against secession. The vote drew 43 percent of the electorate, failed to meet international standards, and was marred by police raids. Spains constitution says that the nation is indivisible and that matters of national sovereignty pertain to its national parliament in Madrid, where Catalan secessionists are represented. ___ Associated Press writer Aritz Parra reported this story in Madrid and AP writer Raf Casert reported from Brussels. AP writer Joseph Wilson in Barcelona contributed to this report. SANAA, Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh survived for decades as Yemens strongman, the master of shifting alliances, playing both sides or flipping sides freely in the multiple guerrilla conflicts and civil wars that tore apart his impoverished nation throughout his life. But his last switch proved his end. Saleh, who was Yemens president for 33 years until he stepped down in 2012 amid an Arab Spring uprising, was killed Monday by the Shiite rebels known as Houthis whom hed once allied with in hopes of a return to power but then turned against in recent months. A video circulating online showed Salehs body, his eyes open but glassy, motionless, blood staining his shirt and a gaping wound In his head. He was being carried in a blanket by rebel fighters chanting God is great who then dump him into a pickup truck. His grisly end recalled that of his contemporary, Libyas Moammar Gadhafi, whose body was shown being abused by the rebels who killed him in that countrys 2011 civil war. During his rule, Saleh was known as the man who dances on the heads of snakes for his ability to manipulate friends and enemies alike, using patronage, family bonds and brute force. That skill enabled him to stay on top in the Arab worlds poorest nation and one of its most unstable, where tribal and regional alliances and the sheer geography of mountains and deserts made central rule weak. But the decades of manipulation, corruption and conflict under Saleh left Yemen underdeveloped and dangerously fragile. Now the civil war, in large part caused by his maneuvering, has pushed it to near societal collapse: With hospitals and food distribution networks in a shambles, hunger is widespread among its population of nearly 28 million and it faces a ferociously fast-spreading cholera outbreak. In the 2000s, Saleh was a vital ally of the United States in fighting al-Qaidas branch in his country, a top priority for Washington after the branch tried to blow up a passenger jet an carry out other attacks on American soil. Even while taking millions in U.S. aid, Saleh was suspected of striking deals with the militants and enlisting them to fight his battles. Officials in his ally, Saudi Arabia, fumed privately to American diplomats that he was corrupt, unreliable and largely ineffective, then rushed to help him fight civil wars and domestic conflicts because they needed him. During one of those wars, a leaked U.S. diplomatic memo suggested that Saleh tried to trick Saudi Arabia into killing his own military commander-slash-ally-slash-rival, Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, by calling in a mistaken Saudi airstrike on his home. Saudi Arabia realized what the target was and called off the strike. After a popular uprising against his rule erupted in 2011, Saleh cannily managed to hang onto power for months, even surviving a bomb that detonated in the presidential palace mosque as he prayed there, severely burning him. Still, he stayed on, only finally resigning in early 2012 under a Saudi-brokered deal. As president, Saleh fought multiple wars against the Houthi rebels in their heartland in northern Yemen, each time failing to crush them completely. Then after his fall, he allied with the Houthis against his own former vice president and successor, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi likely in hopes he could ride them back into power. Salehs loyalist military units helped the Houthis overrun the capital, Sanaa, and much of the north and center of the country. Hadi fled, his government moved to the southern city of Aden and Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a coalition air campaign in early 2015. Then in recent months, Salehs alliance with the Houthis fell apart as the rebels moved to weaken him and Saleh flirted with switching to side with the Saudi-led coalition. Saleh rose to power in an era when Yemen was divided into two nations, north and south. He was born into a small tribe allied with one of the countrys mightiest clans, al-Ahmar. He did not stay long in school, leaving before he was a teenager and enlisting in the armed forces. His age wasnt known for sure. His website gives his birth date as March 21, 1946, but many in Yemen say he was born four years earlier. On the other hand, he just happened to be 40 when he took power in 1978 when the constitution said the president had to be 40. And in the 2006 election, official statements alternated between saying he was 64 or 65. Whatever his age, Saleh was ambitious and soon caught the eye of North Yemens president, Ahmed bin Hussein al-Ghashmi, who appointed him military chief in the city of Taiz, south of Sanaa. Salehs moment came after a bomb in a briefcase killed al-Ghashmi in June 1978. Within a month, Saleh was North Yemens president, backed by Saudi Arabia. Among his first acts was to order the execution of 30 officers some his former friends convicted of being conspirators in al-Ghashmis assassination. His reputation cemented as a tough leader, he also knew how to play Cold War politics. Marxist South Yemen was a Soviet client state, so Saleh reached out to Western leaders to leverage aid for North Yemen. In 1990, with the Soviet Union unraveling, Saleh negotiated unity with the south, ensuring his place as the president. On May 22, 1990, he raised the flag of the Republic of Yemen at the southern port of Aden. Four years later, he crushed an attempt by the south to break free. His powerful nexus of the military and tribes made him virtually untouchable. He also sought to harness a dangerous new force in the country. Arab militants who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s needed a new home, and the deal apparently offered by Saleh was sanctuary in exchange for respecting his authority. In 2000 that legacy came back to haunt him when the Navy destroyer USS Cole was bombed in Aden harbor, killing 17 American sailors. Washington demanded Saleh to crack down on suspected Islamic militants. Salehs efforts against extremist groups were widely criticized as spotty and ineffective. In 2006, a band of al-Qaida militants made a bold escape from a Sanaa prison that U.S. and Yemeni officials believed had help from regime insiders. The band went on to form al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the terror networks Yemen branch. The group was linked to the attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009 and a shipment of explosive-rigged packages intercepted in Britain and Dubai in 2010. Still, the U.S. saw little choice but to partner with him. Salehs tribal and political allies were growing impatient, complaining that he was ignoring widespread poverty and that corruption was undermining development. Most disturbing to them, he was centralizing power in his and his familys hands. He put his sons and nephews in command of his strongest security units. He appeared to be grooming his son Ahmed, commander of the elite Republic Guard, to succeed him. When a popular uprising broke out against him in 2011, he responded with token promises of reform, then bloody attacks on the protesters. He faced a stream of defections from his party, lawmakers, Cabinet members, tribal allies and military units. Still, he managed to cling to power, then negotiate an exit deal that not only protected him from arrest and prosecution and let him stay in the country but kept many of his loyalists in place in the military. That made Saleh a player in the civil war between the Houthis and Hadi. But the Houthis succeeded in weakening him in recent months, reducing their alliance on him. In the hours after his death, many of the Saleh loyalist units were reportedly pulling back from their positions in Sanaa. By PTI: Jaipur, Dec 4 (PTI) The Pink City of India is not a safe zone for married women as figures show it is among the top three cities that have reported maximum cases of cruelty by husband or his relatives. As per the recently released National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report, Jaipur along with Delhi and Hyderabad shares top three positions in cases of cruelty by husband or his relatives against women, crime/atrocities against scheduled castes, economic offences, cyber crime and auto thefts. advertisement Out of the total, 12,218 cases of cruelty by husband or his relatives, Jaipur reported 1,008 cases. Delhi was at the top with 3,645 cases and Hyderabad 1,311. Under crime/atrocities against scheduled castes, Lucknow reported the highest number of cases of atrocities accounting for 16.2 per cent (262 cases) followed by Patna with 14.9 per cent (241 cases) and Jaipur with 13.5 per cent (219 cases) during 2016. A total of 30,734 economic offences cases were reported in 2016. In 19 metropolitan cities, out of four specified category of economic offences, including criminal breach of trust, cheating, forgery and counterfeiting, maximum cases were reported under cheating (25,658 cases) accounting for 83.5 per cent during 2016. In economic offences, Jaipur ranks second with 4,742 cases after New Delhi where 5,942 such cases were reported. Mumbai registered 4,191 cases accounting for 13.6 per cent of such cases during 2016. As per the NCRB report, Rajasthans state capital is also leading in cyber crimes. Mumbai has reported maximum number of cases under cyber- crime accounting for 23.5 per cent (980 cases) followed by Bengaluru 18.3 per cent (762 cases) and Jaipur 12.6 per cent (532 cases) during 2016. During 2016, out of total 1,94,558 cases of theft, 74,293 cases (38.2 per cent) were auto theft cases, of which Delhi (37,147 cases) reported maximum auto theft cases followed by Bengaluru (5,843 cases) and Jaipur (5,271 cases). PTI AG DV --- ENDS --- RJ Mitte made a connection with New Mexico during his time filming Breaking Bad. Since, the actor has been in some projects in the state. He will return to the state in March for the Las Cruces International Film Festival. At the festival, Mitte will be a celebrity presenter and inducted into the New Mexico Film and Television Hall of Fame. The festival runs March 7-11, 2018. I am very excited for this years festival. It is going to be our biggest and best yet, says Ross Marks, LCIFF executive director. We wanted to honor RJ, not only for his incredible work as an actor, but for his contribution to film and TV in New Mexico. I am thrilled to be able to give him the NM Film & TV Hall of Fame award at the festival. Marks says the LCIFF, presented by NMSU and Visit Las Cruces, will once again transform the community into the Hollywood of the Southwest hosting various celebrities, filmmakers, workshops, and special VIP events and parties. Mitte is best known for his powerful performance as Walter Flynn White Jr. in AMCs highly-acclaimed and widely popular dramatic thriller Breaking Bad. He played the pivotal role of the disabled teenage son of a high school science teacher turned drug dealer, played by Bryan Cranston. Along with acting, Mitte is also a model and has walked in Mens Fashion Week in Milan, Berlin and New York City. Mitte has brought attention to Cerebral Palsy, which he was born with. He hopes of removing the stigma associated with disabilities. In order to bring awareness to his own issues with bullying and prejudice, Mitte has engaged in public speaking and serves as the official Ambassador for United Cerebral Palsy and Shriners Hospitals for Children. He transitioned into film as he starred in his first non-handicapped leading role alongside country music superstar, Faith Hill, in Dixieland. Mitte also aims to produce several of his own film projects, one of which was filmed in New Mexico. VALLETTA, Malta Ten suspects were arrested Monday for the car bomb slaying of a prominent Maltese journalist who covered corruption, the prime minister and other authorities said. The arrests came seven weeks to the day after the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. They were the first known break in a crime that shocked Malta and motivated European Union officials to look into the EU island nations laws and government. Caruana Galizia, 53, was killed Oct. 16 when a bomb destroyed her car as she was driving near her home. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who was among the subjects of the late reporters investigations, declined to say who the suspects were or why they were arrested. Eight Maltese citizens were arrested because of reasonable suspicion for their involvement in Caruana Galizias killing, Muscat told reporters at a news conference. A little while later, Muscat tweeted that two others had been arrested. They also are Maltese, Home Minister Michael Farrugia said. Authorities did not release the names of any of the 10 suspects. Explaining the reason for staying tight-lipped, Muscat cited concerns that divulging information could compromise the prosecutions. Farrugia said he wouldnt disclose anything because I have been already threatened by legal action by the Caruana Galizia family. The journalists family alleged last month that Farrugia had put the investigation at risk by sharing confidential information with lawmakers. The minister brushed off the allegation, but the family said it was prepared to take legal action to prevent the government from sabotaging the case. Caruana Galizias family reacted angrily to how the arrests were announced on Monday, saying police should have informed them before the prime minister. They reiterated their skepticism that justice would be carried out, despite Muscats public insistence that all would be done to find and punish the killers. Muscat appears to view the investigation into Daphne Caruana Galizias assassination as a marketing exercise for his government and not as a contract killing, which has left surviving family members wondering what happened and how justice can be truly served, the family said in a statement. They said they had already written to the police commission about the constant stream of leaks which prejudice the integrity of the investigation, but never received a response. The family contended the police had leaked information about the identities of seven suspects. It is important to ask whether they are not also leaking information to other suspects, some of whom could be in or close to government, the statement continued. The blurring of boundaries with the executive and this in a case which has political implications is disturbing, the family statement said. When the handling of an investigation is not sound, it is difficult to have faith in its outcome. The arrests coordinated among the Police Corps, the Armed Forces of Malta and the Security Services. The investigation appeared to be continuing Monday as police and military members cordoned off an area in Marsa, a small port town close to Valletta, the capital of Malta. Marsa is where most of the arrests were made. Video released later by Maltese police showed officers and members of the security service and armed forces making some of the arrests. Some officers arrived in Marsa by boat and apprehended suspects in waterfront warehouses. Maltese media, citing unidentified police sources, said two brothers were among the suspects. One of them was acquitted of a 2015 armed robbery charge for lack of sufficient evidence. The other has been charged with possession of unlicensed weapons and tools used to pick locks. Investigators have 48 hours to question the suspects to decide whether to seek charges, in accordance with Maltese law. A court hearing was set for Tuesday, when the police can officially file charges. The suspects then can either plead innocent or guilty. The magistrate will decide whether to set bail or remand them in custody. Europol, the European Unions police agency, has sent a team of organized crime experts to help Maltese police investigate the assassination, joining the FBI and Dutch forensic experts. Muscat told reporters Monday that when the evidence is compiled, during court proceedings all the relevant information will be made public, including input from the FBI and European investigators, including from Finlands National Bureau of Investigation, as well as Maltese investigators. Just before her death, Caruana Galizia, 53, had posted on her closely followed blog, Running Commentary, that there were crooks everywhere in Malta. Malta has a reputation as a tax haven in the European Union and has attracted companies and money from outside Europe as well. Last week, a visiting delegation of European Parliament lawmakers left the island expressing concerns over the rule of law in the country and issued a warning that the perception of impunity in Malta cannot continue. Low tax rates and a popular government program that allows wealthy foreigners to buy Maltese citizenship have made the country an attractive place for investment, financial and other companies. Authorities, including anti-Mafia investigators in nearby Italy, worry that Malta is eyed by criminals on the lookout for money-laundering schemes. Caruana Galizia focused her reporting for years on investigating political corruption and scandals, and reported on Maltese mobsters and drug trafficking. She also wrote about Maltese links to the so-called Panama Papers leaks about offshore financial havens. Many top officials had sued her over her reporting. Caruana Galizia made plain she didnt trust the islands police or judiciary to adequately investigate many of the wrongdoings she alleged. Muscat said Monday of the slaying: As I stated as soon as I learned about this barbaric act, we will leave no stone unturned to get this case solved. AUSTIN, Texas The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a Texas ruling that gay spouses may not be entitled to government-subsidized workplace benefits a potential victory for social conservatives hoping to chip away at 2015s legalization of same-sex marriage. In June, the Texas Supreme Court overturned a lower courts decision favoring spousal benefits for gay city employees in Houston, ordering the issue back to trial. That was a major reversal for the all-Republican state high court, which previously refused to even consider the benefits case after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision that the Constitution grants gay couples who want to marry equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Texas court changed its mind and heard the case amid intense pressure from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton, as well as dozens of other conservative elected officials, church leaders and grassroots activists. They argued that the case may help Texas limit the scope of the Supreme Court ruling, especially in how it is applied to states. Mondays U.S. Supreme Court decision to reject Houstons appeal of the Texas court decision came without dissent or comment. The case began with a coalition of religious and socially conservative groups suing Americas fourth-largest city in 2013 to block a move to offer same-sex spousal benefits to municipal employees. Sarah Kate Ellis, President and CEO of the civil rights group GLAAD, said the U.S. Supreme Court has just let an alarming ruling by the Texas Supreme Court stand which plainly undercuts the rights of married same-sex couples. Todays abnegation by the nations highest court opens the door for an onslaught of challenges to the rights of LGBTQ people at every step, Ellis said in a statement. But other advocates said Mondays action simply shows the Texas case is not fully concluded, rather than indicating how the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately rule on the larger issue. There was high hope that the Texas decision was so wrong that the court wouldnt sit by and let it go, said Kenneth Upton, a Dallas-based attorney for the prominent LGBT-rights group Lambda Legal. Thats not how it works with the Supreme Court. Houston has been paying same-sex benefits amid the cases developments and will continue to do so while it progresses through lower Texas courts. The city argues that the 2015 legalization of gay marriage meant all marriages are equal, so anything offered to opposite-sex couples must be offered to same-sex ones. Conservative groups counter that the U.S. Supreme Court didnt declare spousal benefits a fundamental right of marriage two years ago, and that it should be up to states to decide. They also see a chance for Texas to defend religious liberty under a state gay marriage ban that voters approved in 2005. Jared Woodfill, a Houston attorney and conservative activist at the center of the case, called Mondays action by the nations high court, A nice early Christmas present. The U.S. Supreme court could have taken the case and used it to further expand Obergefell. They chose not to, he said. Its confirmation that the Texas Supreme Court got it right. Woodfill said that religious liberty groups in two other states had contacted him in years past, seeking information about Texas legal challenge. It obviously has precedential value, not just for Texas but the entire country, Woodfill said. However, the court has said on several occasions that the denial of such petitions without more has no significance as a ruling. In August, three Houston city employees and their spouses sued the city in federal court, concerned that the civil case could force the city to stop paying same-sex benefits. A federal judge dismissed that case last month, saying it was too early since the civil case was still proceeding. Upton, who represented the city employees, said they were ready to sue again depending on what happens in Texas courts. ___ This story has been corrected to show the name of the prominent LGBT-rights group is Lambda Legal, not Lamda Legal. Copyright 2017 Albuquerque Journal A federal court has ruled against a payday loan company in New Mexico in a class action lawsuit that requires the company to return $7.3 million to a group of nearly 10,000 New Mexicans. The U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico ruled that Community Financial Loan Service Centers LLC, which operates here as Speedy Loan, had charged its customers millions of dollars in illegal loans from 2010 to 2014. As a result of the ruling, handed down Friday, the company must pay a total $7.3 million to 9,672 New Mexicans involved in the lawsuit. The lead plaintiff was Clara Daye of Gallup, who will receive an additional $400 in statutory damages and attorney fees. Donald Kochersberger, an attorney for Speedy Loan, said in a statement that the lawsuit was the result of a persistent unknown error in Speedys internal processes and software resulting [in] the court ruling that it failed to comply with the letter of the law. Nicholas H. Mattison, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said arbitration clauses in the contracts signed by payday loan users often make it impossible to win lawsuits against them. In this case, Speedy Loan did not require its customers to sign a contract that included such a clause, according to Mattison. Its fantastic for the people who were harmed by this company, he said. Donald Kochersberger, an attorney for Speedy Loan, said in a statement that the lawsuit was the result of a persistent unknown error in Speedys internal processes and software resulting (in) the court ruling that it failed to comply with the letter of the law. The 2007 New Mexico Small Loan Act sets several limitations on payday loan providers, such as restrictions on renewal of the loans, the right to unsecured repayment plans and a fee cap of $15.50 per $100 borrowed. The court ruled that Speedy Loan collected illegal fees on 31,074 loans. The $7.3 million judgment represents the amount the court said Speedy illegally collected from its customers. While company is greatly disheartened by it, Speedy respects the courts ruling, Kochersberger wrote in his statement. Speedy Loan operates payday loan sites throughout New Mexico, including three in Albuquerque. Inside the police station, Joseph Boston told investigators that, yes, he had lured two boys into his motel room and molested them but there was much more to his story than that, according to police in Riverside, California. Riverside police said that on Saturday the 18-year-old went on to detail how he had molested upwards of 50 children in cities across Southern California for nearly a decade. Hed been molesting children since he was 10, police said. The open confession rattled investigators, who spent the weekend retracing Bostons tracks over nearly half his life, looking for a trail of young victims, police said. This is going to affect not only the victims for a long time but also our detectives and officers involved in this to hear someone just be very open about what theyve done, and theyre only 18 themselves, Officer Ryan Railsback, of the Riverside police, told Los Angeles ABC-affiliate KABC. Bostons mother contacted police around 3 a.m. on Saturday, saying she wanted to turn her son in for suspected molestation, police said in a news release. According to police, Boston had called his mother and said he had molested two children a short time earlier. He had been staying at the Simply Home Inn & Suites, a motel that caters to travelers in Riverside. There, he had befriended an 8-year-0ld and a 4-year-old, brothers who were staying at the hotel with their parents, the police statement said. The parents allowed the children to go into Bostons room on Friday night, where the molestation happened, police said. Police brought him in for questioning, where they said he made the bigger revelations. Meanwhile, the boys who police suspected were Bostons victims Friday were taken into custody by the County of Riverside Child Protective Services. It was unclear why the childrens parents might have allowed the boys to go with Boston. Boston is charged with oral copulation on a child under the age of 10 and has been booked into jail with bail set at $1 million. Hes scheduled to make his first court appearance on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. It wasnt immediately clear if he had hired an attorney. According to investigators, Boston has lived in Riverside since early November. Before that, he lived in Lakewood and Buena Park in Southern California. A Facebook page alleged to be Bostons was taken down but not before several news organizations had taken images of posts that seem chilling in hindsight. One shows a person alleged to be Boston lying on a floor or a bed with a young girl by his side. Hes looking at the camera, and she appears to be playing with a toy. Theres a container of food open nearby. The emoji-filled caption on the post reads: I like Making New friends. Another post shows a photo of a sleeping boy wearing a Batman T-shirt. What a cute kid, the caption reads. And they are way easier to control when they are sleeping and not in a bad way!! Zenith has predicted that global ad expenditure will grow 4.1 per cent in 2018, reaching US$578 billion by the end of the year in its annual Advertising Expenditure Forecast. This forecast is fractionally below the 4.2 per cent rate Zenith had predicted for 2018 in September, with marginal downgrades in North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific, and upgrades in Latin America and Central & Eastern Europe. The agency expects advertising expenditure to grow more slowly that the global economy as a whole out to 2020. According to the forecast India is placed No. 4 in the Top Ten contributors to global adspend growth 2017-2020. India follows the US, China and Indonesia in that order. Between 2017 and 2020, Zenith forecasts global advertising expenditure to increase by US$72 billion in total. The US will contribute 27 per cent of this extra ad expenditure, while China will contribute 20 per cent, followed by Indonesia, India, the UK and Japan, which will contribute 4 per cent each. Five of the ten largest contributors will be the Rising Markets (China, Indonesia, India, Brazil and Russia), and between them they will contribute 33 per cent of new adspend over the next three years. Overall, the Rising Markets are expected to contribute 54 per cent of additional ad expenditure between 2017 and 2020, and to increase their share of the global market from 37 per cent to 39 per cent. The worlds top ten advertising markets by size will remain stable between 2017 and 2020, with only one change in the ranking when Indonesia replaces Canada in tenth place in 2019. Forecast for India The year 2017 will close at Rs 53,918 crore, registering a slightly slower pace of growth is on account of demonetisation introduced in November 2016. Total adex for India will climb up to Rs 58,422 crore, growing at 8.4 per cent in 2018, led by television. In India, internet adspend is expected to capture 11.6 per cent of the market in 2017. As per Zeniths forecast, internet advertising in India is slated to grow 20.4 per cent in 2018, compared to 8.4 per cent growth for the market as a whole. By 2020, internet will account for 15.4 per cent of total adspend in India. Growth rate for television is pegged at 9 per cent, while newspapers will grow at 5 per cent. Radio will grow at 10 per cent, while cinema and out of home will grow at 5 per cent, respectively. Tanmay Mohanty, Group CEO, Zenith India, commented, Growing Internet penetration accelerated by operators such as Jio will significantly enhance digital adspends in India and give access to previously untapped markets. India has seen some fluidity in overall ad-expenditure but remains one of the fastest growing advertising markets globally. With the dust settling down on demonetisation and GST, we expect a measured recovery on ad spends. Consumer confidence is definitely on the rise. In 2018, Mobile Handsets, FMCG, Automobiles, BFSI, Travel & Tourism and Political ads will drive up the pace on adspends. Big countries are adding most ad dollars In dollar terms, most of the growth in global adspend is coming from a few big markets. We forecast that just two countries the US and China will contribute 47 per cent of new ad dollars between 2017 and 2020. The five biggest markets the US, China, Japan, the UK and Germany will contribute 57 per cent. Big cities are driving global adspend growth Big cities are driving global adspend by concentrating growth in productivity, innovation and trade. Zenith has conducted a unique study that attributes adspend to individual cities by estimating the value of their inhabitants to local, national and international advertisers. The agency forecasts that the top 10 cities alone will contribute 12 per cent of all global adspend growth this year, and that the top 725 will contribute 60 per cent. Zenith predicts that between 2016 and 2019, adspend in the 10 biggest-contributing cities will grow by a total of US$7.5 billion, representing 11 per cent of growth over these years. These ten cities will be, in descending order: New York (where adspend will grow by US$1.4 billion), Tokyo, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Houston, Dallas, Beijing, London and Chicago (which will grow by US$0.6 billion). Amid growing debate as to whether brands are overspending on digital media, Zenith research has found that the effectiveness of internet advertising has now caught up with digital adspend. Until 2015, brands struggled to make effective use of internet advertising, and their spend was not matched by the resulting brand experience. However, by 2016, internet advertising accounted for 34 per cent of global ad budgets, but produced 35 per cent of brand experience. Internet advertising is now, therefore, working harder than advertising in other media. For many years, Zeniths Advertising Expenditure Forecast reports have consistently reported sizeable increases in the internet share of advertising budgets. In its December 2017 edition of the report, for the first time Zenith has been able to demonstrate the ROI of internet adspend, not just its scale. The agency used its proprietary Touchpoints ROI Tracker tool to compare internet adspend to internet brand experience over the past few years. In 2014, advertisers spent 27 per cent of their budgets on internet advertising, which produced only 21 per cent of brand experience. By 2015, though, brands were using internet advertising more effectively: it accounted for 30 per cent of both budgets and paid brand experience, before tipping over in 2016, when brand experience exceeded budget share. Zenith expects internet advertisings share of global adspend to continue to rise, reaching 40 per cent in 2018 and 44 per cent in 2020. Its value will rise from US$203 billion in 2017 to US$225 billion in 2020. The share of advertising expenditure allocated to internet advertising varies widely across the world. In the most advanced markets (Sweden and the UK), it will account for more than 60 per cent of total expenditure next year, and it will account for between 50 per cent and 60 per cent in another six (Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Norway and Taiwan). In India, internet adspend will capture 11.6 per cent of the market in 2017. India is, therefore, a leading digital market/ keeping pace with global developments/ has a lot of scope for growth in internet advertising. Zenith forecasts 20.4 per cent growth in internet advertising in India in 2018, compared to 8.4 per cent growth for the market as a whole. By 2020, internet will account for 15.4 per cent of total adspend in India. Big platforms are capturing digital growth The internet is driving the great majority of global growth in advertising it will account for 94 per cent of the growth in adspend between 2017 and 2020. And most of this will be captured by just five big platforms Google and Facebook, plus the Chinese platforms Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. Between them, these five platforms increased their share of global internet adspend from 61 per cent to 72 per cent between 2014 and 2016, and captured 83 per cent of the growth in internet adspend over that time. Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent accounted for 54 per cent of the growth in internet adspend in China, while Google and Facebook accounted for 96 per cent of the growth in internet adspend in the rest of the world. Between them Google and Facebook accounted for 76 per cent of internet adspend outside China in 2016. Internet advertising is the biggest advertising medium in the world and the biggest driver of growth, said Jonathan Barnard, Head of Forecasting and Director of Global Intelligence at Zenith. Our unique research shows that brands are starting to use it effectively after struggling to adapt over the last few years. Advertisers feel the pressure from digital transformation and polarisation of growth Advertisers are feeling pressure from the rapid transformation of their businesses, exemplified by the rapid shift of marketing communications to online media in response to changing consumer behaviour, and the polarisation of growth to big platforms, big countries and big cities. At the end of November, Zenith conducted the third in its series of exclusive surveys about brand growth among key clients. On a scale from 0 to 100 where 0 means everyone expects decline in 2018, 100 means everyone expects growth, and 50 means the average expectation is for no growth the average response was 57, down from 67 this time last year. Food and drink brands have been the least affected, with a score of 66 this year, down just a point from 67 last year. Packaged goods, retail and telecom brands have all fallen to 50, expecting no growth, down from positive scores last year. We are seeing a battle played out in business, marketing and media between big players and small players, said Vittorio Bonori, Zeniths Global Brand President. Growth is coming from big countries and big cities, and being captured by big platforms. Brands should focus on upstream strategy, data-informed UX planning and downstream automation. Katrina Kaif in this cream saree is going to soothe your heart. By Shivani Chhabra: It's not an easy task to stand out at an event that has superstars like Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan--but not when you're Katrina Kaif. Recently, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, arrived in Mumbai, where he was given a warm welcome at a star-studded bash thrown by industrialist Mukesh Ambani. Now, we're all aware of how glamorous and grand Ambani's parties are, and this one was no different. advertisement Amidst the pomp and show of the stars, who had gathered to welcome the politician to their city, one celebrity outshone everyone else with her serene outfit. The celebrity in question is actress Katrina Kaif, who looked like a rather mesmerising picture of poise at the event. Also Read: 6 pictures of Katrina Kaif playing a bold and beautiful bride will make you go weak in the knees Draped in a beautiful, cream-coloured saree, Kat embodied class and youthfulness. The surreal colour of the net saree was dripping elegance, while the intrinsic, floral embroidery on it looked absolutely rejuvenating. The smart choice of soft-pink and light-blue colours for flowers really enhanced the look of the dainty embroidery, and provided a soothing contrast against the primary shade of the ensemble. Pictures courtesy: Instagram/koffee_with_bollywood Also Read: This picture of Katrina Kaif is all you need to get ready for yet another week While Kat's nine-yard outfit was an absolute stunner, she further aced this magnificent look with her choice of a full-sleeved blouse. The actress opted for a well-matched, sheer blouse, which retained the grace of the ensemble, while also exuding simplicity with its crew-neck design. Picture courtesy: Instagram/shraddha_katrina_fc The starlet completed the look with a pair of subtle, drop-down earrings, minimal makeup and untied, long and wavy locks. --- ENDS --- Sonakshi Sinhas latest movie is all set for World Television Premiere on Sony MAX, the leading Hindi movies channel from Sony Pictures Networks, on Friday 8th December 2017 at 8:00 PM. Noor features Sonakshi Sinha in never seen before avatar of investigative journalist along with Purab Kohli, Shibani Dandekar, Suchitra Pillai and Kanan Gill in pivotal roles. Noor narrates the story of Noor Roy Choudhary (Sonakshi Sinha), a 28-year-old clumsy journalist who is trying to cope up with her day-to-day issues like weight gain, EMIs and negligible love life. While Noor is struggling with her life and job, she meets Ayanaka Banerjee (Purab Kohli) a former CNN reporter and war correspondent and instantly fall for him. On one hand her personal life is at a beautiful juncture, and on the other hand her professional life takes a dramatic turn as her boss Shekar (Manish Chaudhary) sends her to interview famous doctor, who treats poor people for free. During the course of interview, Noor comes across an eye-opening investigative news story as she finds out from her house-maid that the doctor is into the business of organ harvesting. While she is struggling to unleash this truth, Ayanaka cheats on her and presents her story as his investigation in front of entire world. A series of events changes Noors outlook towards her profession making her a responsible journalist of the country. Will Noor be able to successfully expose the doctor and break the organ harvesting racket? Comments: Sonakshi Sinha: Noor is the most organized, fastest and the most real film I have done so far. Noor is a very relatable character; she is an ordinary girl who wants to achieve everything in the world. Despite being an actors daughter I have lived the life of a normal girl. I have grown up in city like Mumbai, gone to regular school and college, travelled in train and autos. But now I miss that kind of stuff so it was nice to be back to normal life with Noors character. To find out, watch Noor only on Sony MAX on Friday, 8th December at 8pm WASHINGTON, Dec. 4, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In a New York Times profile the Sunday after Thanksgiving, California's Attorney General Xavier Becerra said the philosophy of the Democratic Party leaders should be, "If you work hard and play by the rules, we've got your back." Becerra doesn't believe the Trump Administration has been following the rules and since becoming Attorney General he's been pushing back against the White House. California has filed roughly two dozen lawsuits challenging the Trump Administration's efforts to make changes that affect immigrant rights, civil rights, environmental standards and consumer protections. Becerra will discuss these legal actions and other issues at a National Press Club Headliners Newsmaker news conference at 10 a.m., Wed., Dec. 6 in the club's First Amendment Lounge. The news conference will be moderated by Los Angeles Times reporter Chris Megerian, and is open to credentialed media and National Press Club members free of charge, with advance registration required. Please click here to register. Prior to being nominated as California's Attorney General by Gov. Jerry Brown late last year, Becerra served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 24 years, 10 of those years he was in the House leadership. He also was the first Latino to serve on the Ways & Means Committee. The son of immigrants, Becerra attended Stanford University for both his undergraduate and law school education. He worked as a Deputy Attorney for the State of California and was elected to the State Assembly before running for Congress. The National Press Club is located on the 13th Floor of the National Press Building at 529 14th St., NW, Washington, D.C. Contact: Lindsay Underwood, lunderwood@press.org, (202) 662-7561 View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/california-attorney-general-xavier-becerra-at-national-press-club-headliners-newsmaker-this-wednesday-10-am-300565957.html SOURCE National Press Club Nearly 6,000 workers continue work on two new nuclear reactors at Georgias Vogtle project. November 29, 2017 RAMALLAH, West Bank Around 300 Palestinians in the northern Jordan Valley are anxious about their fate after the Israeli authorities decided to evict them from their homes. Haaretz reported Nov. 13, This is the first time the army is using an eviction order against Palestinians based on a military order meant to enable the evacuation of unauthorized settlement outposts." The order in question is known as the order regarding unauthorized buildings. On Nov. 9, the eviction notice, dated Nov. 1, was left near primitive houses in the Ein el-Hilweh and Umm al-Jamal regions, inhabited by their residents since 1967. It ordered their evacuation within days and referenced the residents right to appeal within a period not exceeding eight days of the date of issuance. Israeli authorities tried to deny the residents this right by giving out the notice nine days after its issuance, Nabil al-Jamal, a farmer in Umm al-Jamal, told Al-Monitor. They broke into the area on Nov. 10 and photographed the houses and barns. When they left, we found the notice with a map of Umm al-Jamal and Ein el-Hilweh near one of the houses. By that time, the deadline for raising an objection had elapsed. Jamal and his family of 12 live in a tin house because the Israeli authorities ban the residents in Area C from building cement structures. Like other residents, he suffers daily harassment impeding him from making his living by herding sheep. Israel does not allow residents to lay down water pipes, bans grazing, closes roads and allocates land only to settlers. Perhaps what most pains Jamal who insisted that he and his family will not leave their home and land despite the Israeli measures is that the directive under which the eviction notice is issued was initially dedicated to the evacuation of unauthorized Jewish settlements. My father and my ancestors settled in this land before the establishment of Israel. We are now being treated as illegal settlers and being denied the right to object to this eviction decision, he said. It should be noted that this military directive was drafted in 2003 to ban the construction of unauthorized settler outposts and was amended on Nov. 20, 2015, to apply to Palestinians. On Nov. 18, Haaretz was the first to reveal the amendment introduced in 2015, and it was only after an Arabic translation was published that the news made its way into the Palestinian press. Under this directive, the Israeli army commander of the area was empowered to enforce the eviction decision without advance notice, whenever he wanted and by force. This is dangerous to all villages in Area C, not just to Umm al-Jamal and Ein el-Hilweh, said Moataz Bisharat, the head of Jordan Valley affairs in the province of Tubas. He told Al-Monitor that the province turned to a committee of lawyers to object in the name of the residents. These lawyers argued that the 2003 military directive applies only to the settlers and not to the indigenous population in the Palestinian territories. If this decision is implemented, the entire population of the Jordan Valley amounting to 6,000 Palestinians will be evicted and [Israel] will take over the Jordan Valley area, which constitutes 30% of the West Bank, Bisharat added. The Israeli authorities were able to divide the Jordan Valley into military zones, settlements and nature reserves, leaving only the areas inhabited by the residents. When these residents are evicted, Israel will have full control over the Jordan Valley. However, the appeal does not seem to be helping the residents, who face a tougher battle against the 2015 amendment of the military directive to apply to Palestinians in Area C. For his part, Antoine Shalhat, the director of the Madar Center for Israel Studies, made a connection between the timing of the eviction notice and the unprecedented pro-settlement activities of the Israeli Cabinet. He told Al-Monitor that Israel is trying to resolve the issue of these areas in favor of Israeli settlement activity in anticipation of any regional political development that could lead to resuming direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Shalhat said, This order was formulated in 2003 to stop the phenomenon of building illegal settlement outposts and to end the construction of settlements by radical settlers in areas where Palestinian attacks were being carried out against settler targets. The order authorized the Israeli army commander in the area to evict the settlers violating the laws of the Israeli government regarding settlement in the West Bank. He noted that the newly revealed amendment includes Palestinian residential communities deemed illegal by Israel, such as the communities concentrated in villages and towns in Area C, mostly in the Jordan Valley and the northern mountains of Jerusalem, home to the Bedouin communities. Shalhat explained, This directive is dangerous, as it provides the legal mechanisms to allow Israel to take hold of these areas by deporting the entire residential communities, despite the existence of documents and aerial photographs proving that they are the indigenous population and legal owners of the land. By PTI: Chennai, Dec 4 (PTI) The Madras High Court today rejected a plea for a direction to the Presidents office in New Delhi to consider the immediate release of Justice (retd) CS Karnan, who is serving jail term in the Presidency Prison in Kolkatta in a contempt of court case. The Supreme Court had on May 9 convicted Justice Karnan, former judge of the Calcutta High Court, under the Contempt of Courts Act of 1971, and sentenced him to six months in jail. advertisement He retired from the service on June 9 and was arrested on June 20. The bench of Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice R Hemalatha rejected a public interest litigation filed by AP Gowthama Sidharthan, managing director of Dr Ambedkar Educational Foundation, New Delhi, for the release of Justice Karnan. Sidharthan in the plea had claimed that Justice Karnan, a Dalit, had been victimised and was meted out social injustice. The judges said they did not find any reference (in the petition) to the circumstances which led to the incarceration of Justice Karnan, who had been a judge of the Madras High Court and transferred to the Calcutta High Court. At the time of arrest, he was no longer a judge of any high court. The respondents in the PIL - secretaries of the office of the President of India, department of Law and Justice, and secretaries general of the National Commission for Human Rights and the secretary of the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment -- are located in New Delhi, the judges observed. "No case has arisen within the jurisdiction of the Madras High Court. Hence, the PIL is not maintainable and dismissed," the bench said. PTI Corr APR GVS SK GVS --- ENDS --- December 4, 2017 For Marianna Musotto, playing Verdis "Aida" at the World Youth Forum in November was a joint homage to her homeland, Italy, and her host country, Egypt. Bringing in foreign musicians such as the young Italian trumpeter who joined in September is one of several initiatives by the Cairo Opera House to modernize its image. The goal is to lure a diverse audience and revive some of its old glory from the 1950s and '60s. The Opera House, which houses the Symphony Orchestra and the State Ballet, is reaching out to various sectors of society, particularly young people. As part of these efforts, the Cairo Symphony Orchestra was invited to play at the World Youth Forum, a prestigious international conference in Sharm el-Sheikh that took place Nov. 4-10. The orchestras choice to play "Aida," Italian composer Guiseppe Verdis four-act opera that takes place in ancient Egypt, at the opening of the forum was deliberate and nostalgic. The original plan for the opera house's grand opening in 1869 was to stage "Aida," but the Franco-Prussian War had made the transportation of sets and costumes from Paris impossible and the opera opened its doors with "Rigoletto" instead. "Aida" had its world premiere at the Cairo Opera House in 1871, two years later. When the impressive opera house burned down in 1971, it took 17 years to rebuild and reopen it in Cairos wealthy district of Zamalek. Its audience grew discouraged and lost interest during the extended closure; a growing conservatism in the country also took its toll on audience interest. There often was little or inconsistent information about the opera schedule and the tickets were very expensive for a country where the average monthly income is $300. Although the orchestra found an audience on TV, especially during Ramadan, it has long been unable to attract large audiences to its halls. Cairo Opera spent the last 50 years in darkness. Most of the blame goes to the education system, Beram El Merghany, first French horn player in the operas orchestra for over two decades, told Al-Monitor. Public schools dont teach kids to appreciate music as they used to. This is only done at international private schools. He said that if there is to be a change of attitudes toward the opera and classical music, it must start with education. All education levels should offer music classes or musical events in their curriculum. We organized concerts for children but there has been little interest. Kids prefer sports, he added. Today the Cairo Opera House boasts a diverse program with various kinds of music, dance events and festivals, from jazz performances to cinema galas. Arab popular music, which celebrates national pride and traditions, offers a departure point to lure a young audience back to the Cairo Opera House. The new programming now includes Arabic music festivals, local jazz players and a bit of pop music to attract the 52% of the Egyptian population under 25. El Merghany believes the administration did well in diversifying the musical offerings and hopes this will help it become both locally and internationally relevant again. It was the strategy we needed to overcome the crisis. Now more concerts of Arabic music and collaborations with modern local composers are bringing some audiences back, he said. But the road is still long, he added. The Cairo Opera is also offering international folkloric music events and attracting foreign orchestra players, both seen as marks of sophistication and prestige. Many young musicians come to Egypt from Eastern Europe, France, other parts of the Arab world and even Asia. Masaki Okajima is from Japan, a country with historical links to the Cairo Opera. The Empire of the Rising Sun donated the funds to complete the new opera house building, and the brother of the Japanese emperor brought a kabuki performance, the first ever to be staged in the Middle East and North Africa region. A tuba player with the Cairo Symphony Orchestra since 2007, Okajima claims to be very satisfied with the opportunities he was given in Cairo. I think now is the real Cairo Operas golden age, because today our programming has much more to offer than it did in the 1960s, he said. Many of those foreign players are Italian. The reported stagnation and intense competition in Italys music sector led them to seek a career in Egypt. The Cairo Opera House has always enjoyed a special connection with Italy, despite the recent diplomatic crisis between the two countries over the torture and murder of Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni, after which the two countries withdrew ambassadors. Egyptian players have a really high artistic sensitivity, something I didnt expect at all before coming here. Their professionalism and capabilities didnt make me feel a huge difference with Europe, Musotto told Al-Monitor. She said that despite cultural differences, all musicians and employees know each other and collaborate well, making the work environment that of a family business. El Merghany said Egyptian musicians who study and play abroad can bring back new energy and restore the opera's appeal to local audiences. Ahmed Ashraf, first violin since 2011, is hopeful that Egyptians can rediscover their passion for art. He pointed to the presence of venerable music schools, such as the prestigious Cairo Conservatory and the Royal Academy of Music. All kinds of art have developed in Egypt, and Egyptians appreciate all of them. They just need the means to rediscover their dormant passions, he said. December 4, 2017 TEHRAN, Iran Turkish-Iranian business tycoon Reza Zarrabs testimony in a US court has received extensive coverage in Iranian media; however, this coverage doesnt stem from his real charge in the United States, which is bypassing the sanctions against Tehran, but rather because he has been linked to a controversial billionaire tycoon who is now in jail in Iran: Babak Zanjani. Prior to reaching a deal over its nuclear program in 2015, Iran and its oil industry were under heavy sanctions. Sanctions were circumvented through middlemen who arranged oil exports and received the money instead of the government in Tehran. Zanjani was one of the most important middlemen; he made a lot of money and lived luxuriously. One report even said he was the 65th richest man on earth, with an estimated wealth of $13.5 billion. However, Irans Oil Ministry filed a lawsuit against him for not paying back money owed to the ministry from oil exports, and Zanjani was jailed and sentenced to death. Amir Abbas Soltani, a former Iranian lawmaker and a former member of the parliamentary committee tasked with pursuing the Zanjani case, said Zarrab is the black box of Zanjanis case. Zarrab, according to news reporting about his testimony, explained his connection to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-13) and Zarrab's meeting with the chairman of the Central Bank of Iran under Ahmadinejad. Soltani, asked about Zarrabs testimony about his ties inside Iran and with the Ahmadinejad government, said, Im not aware of the details of his meeting with Ahmadinejad, but he had meetings with the financial team of the previous government [Ahmadinejad's] and this is not deniable. Soltani added, What was discussed is unknown but he had meetings with the head of the Central Bank and the economy minister as well as Ahmadinejad. Noting that Zarrab had mostly operated out of Turkey, the former Iranian member of parliament said, Zarrab was the manager of all of Zanjani's financial plans. Soltani said, In fact, Reza Zarrab is the black box of Babak Zanjani, adding, Zarrab managed many of Zanjani's companies and his communications. Soltani continued, The support Turkey has [shown] for Zarrab and the assets of Zanjani in Turkey is proof that they had close relationships and the director of Zanjanis plan was Zarrab. The former legislator said, These guys form a mafia group with Zanjani as the head of it, and Zanjani standing behind [the scenes] directing everything, and they have a lot of people in Iran and had an organized group. Soltani also said, Most of Zanjanis assets in Turkey are in the name of Zarrab. Asked about Zarrabs family, Soltani said: Zarrabs father is a merchant and lives in Iran and he asked for a meeting with me a few times, but I didnt agree to it. They sought to tell me that Zarrab is innocent and has no ties to the Zanjani case. According to the Turkish paper Hurriyet, Zarrabs father, Hossein, was among a team of people that Ahmadinejad assembled after he was elected president in 2005 to help work around US sanctions. Furthermore, a report says that in a ceremony in the northwestern Iranian city of Tabriz in 2007, Hossein Zarrab gave Ahmadinejad a proposal for the establishment of the SFK steel company, a proposal accepted by the president right away and at the end of the ceremony. What does Zanjani say about Zarrab? On Nov. 23, 2015, in an Iranian court session, the judge addressed Zanjani, saying: You deposited 445 million euros [in an account belonging] to the company of Safir Altin belonging to Zarrab, and he received 12 million euros for his service. Zanjani responded by saying, The Central Banks money was in the Parsian and Sarmayeh banks. These banks had to deposit the money into Turkeys Halkbank, [but prior to depositing the money] the Turkish banks fee and [the fees of the involved Iranian banks] had been deducted [from the original amount of money]. In fact, Zarrab didnt receive any fee; however, when the money was deposited into his account, 12 million euros had already been deducted for the banking fees. Moreover, Iranian judiciary spokesman Gholam-Hossein Moseni Ejei said on April 10, 2016: In Zanjanis case, various names have been mentioned including Zarrab. [Zarrabs] name has been brought up by Zanjani and other defendants." The spokesman said no lawsuit has been filed against Zarrab. Iranian lawmaker: We are suspicious of the US court Mohammad-Ali Pourmokhtar, an Iranian lawmaker and a former member of the special legal committee of the parliament, told Al-Monitor, In the meetings we had with Zanjani, he never mentioned Zarrab. However, eight months or nine months after Zanjanis arrest, Zarrabs case was brought up. The legislator added, It is not clear how serious Zarrabs violations of the law are in Iran. Pour Mokhtar added, However, if Zanjani himself says that his assets were in Zarrab's hands and that they were associates, then we should pursue him legally. Downplaying Zarrabs claim about his ties with Ahmadinejad, Pour-Mokhtar said: There are people who meet once and consider that as a relationship. He also slammed the United States, saying What the US is doing with Zarrab is suspicious; they dont inform the public correctly. Zarrab was arrested during a trip to the United States on March 19, 2016. December 1, 2017 Kurdistan Region parliament Speaker Yusuf Mohammed Sadiq has criticized the way the recent independence referendum was organized and accused the government of not properly involving the parliament. In an interview with Al-Monitor from his office in the hillside neighborhood of Ali-Naji in Sulaimaniyah, Sadiq spoke about the ongoing crisis between Erbil and Baghdad and his vision for going forward. He said that the first priority of the Kurdistan Region should be to restore the role of parliament and to prepare for negotiations with Baghdad over all disputed issues. He said the negotiations would first require an internal review. We cannot negotiate with Baghdad with the same old mechanisms, he said. While he preferred not to voice an opinion on whether the results of the recent independence referendum should be annulled, he said that if it had not been held, conditions in the Kurdistan Region and the disputed areas might not have deteriorated. Sadiq said that since he was abroad following the referendum, he was unaware of the details concerning the peshmergas loss of Kirkuk. The parliament must establish a special investigation committee to investigate all the events related to the referendum, [including] the events in Kirkuk, he stated. The most important question to ask is why we reached this point. Sadiq did, however, praise former President Massoud Barzani for stepping down from power. [W]e need to respect democracy and learn to distribute and hand over power. From this aspect, Barzanis leaving power was a good thing. The text of the interview follows: Al-Monitor: After having suspended its work for more than two years, the Kurdistan Region parliament resumed sessions on Sept. 15, 2017, without you. What is preventing you from returning to Erbil? Sadiq: We do not believe that parliaments return to work was done properly. After having been suspended for more than two years, parliament resumed sessions only to legalize the decision that some parties made to hold the Kurdistan Region [independence] referendum, and then the parliament endorsed that decision as a recommendation. This is not the right way to deal with the legislative power in a democratic system. The issue of the referendum should have been discussed in parliament, and all the political, economic, security and military aspects of the referendum should have been calculated; all preparations should have been evaluated, and then a decision should have been made. But they [the two main political parties: the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan] even set the referendum date without consulting parliament, and didnt consider the consequences. Ten days before the referendum was held, they brought those decisions into the parliament [for a vote] only to legitimatize them. This is not acceptable in a democratic system. Now, my decision not to return to Erbil is because we are still working with the same previous mechanisms that have been proved to bring nothing but defeat and failure to the region. The parliament is still not being taken seriously by the dominant political parties. The region was hit with a great defeat after holding the referendum, because [those involved] did not take into consideration its consequences and neglected calls by all our friends to suspend it. We saw the big defeat that happened to the people of Kurdistan. Al-Monitor: Is it true that the Movement for Change [Gorran] is now agreeing to replace you? Sadiq: My party has not agreed on changing the parliament speaker. The National Assembly of the Movement for Change, in its last meeting, asked me after evaluating the situation and contacting different parliamentary fractions to make my decision and [determine] how to deal with these issues. The only reason for not attending parliament is that I want to see if parliament is able to do its work without any hindrance, with transparency to be brought into Kurdistans financial process and with political parties stopping interference in the security forces. We need a new stage of governance in the region. I am waiting to see whether or not we can launch this. Al-Monitor: What is your stance on Mr. Massoud Barzanis decision to step down and distribute his powers to the Kurdistan Region parliament, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the judicial authorities in the region? Do you have any plans to step down? Sadiq: I think Mr. Massoud Barzani [did a good thing by quitting] the authority of the Kurdistan Region presidency. I wish he had done so earlier so that the process of the peaceful handover of power might have become normalized in the region. The issue of whether Mr. Barzani has ruled well or badly this evaluation should be left for another time. But we need to respect democracy and learn to distribute and hand over power. Therefore, from this aspect, Barzanis leaving power was a good thing. The decision to distribute his authorities is a good decision, though it requires much legislation. Al-Monitor: According to the law, after the two-year extension of Barzanis term expired in 2015 and before parliament was suspended, you had the authority to assume the de-facto authorities of Mr. Barzani. Why did you not do so? Sadiq: I did not want Kurdistans conditions to be further complicated, since I had known that Mr. Barzani would remain in his position. We were at war against the Islamic State [IS] terrorist group; we were facing a harsh economic situation in the region. It was not proper in all these complicated conditions to claim the presidency and compete with Barzani. My goal was not that at all. I wanted instead a peaceful handover of power. If I had shouldered the presidency, it could have been viewed as my seeking power and the presidency post. Al-Monitor: What is your understanding of the peshmerga defeat in Kirkuk and other disputed areas in mid-October? Who ordered them to withdraw? Why did they not fight? Sadiq: I am not aware of the details of the issue. I was in Germany when, unfortunately, that happened. The parliament must establish a special investigation committee to investigate all the events related to the referendum, before and after holding it, as well as the events in Kirkuk. The most important question to ask is why we reached this point. How did we lose all the gains we had made since 2003? Why did we lose nearly 49% of Kurdistans territory? The consequences of unwise KRG policies in suspending parliament and holding the referendum are not only that some peshmerga forces were defeated in Kirkuk, but that a large number of peshmerga brigades for whom a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars from the KRG and the international coalition against IS was spent are currently dissolved. Al-Monitor: On Oct. 30, angry protesters stormed the parliament building, fiercely struck journalists and attacked Kurdish lawmaker Rabun Maruf, a former Kurdish MP from your own parliamentary faction. Who was behind the incident? Sadiq: Those attacks were an evil endeavor and were pressures from outside the parliament from groups affiliated with some political parties against parliament. Parliament cannot work in this way where one day the speaker of the Kurdistan parliament is not allowed to enter Erbil and another day they launch an attack on parliament and hit journalists and legislators inside parliament. This all should be stopped. I made a statement on the evening of those attacks against parliament, and I sent a message to the foreign consulates in the region, asking them to help stop those assaults. Assaulting parliament was a very bad deed. Al-Monitor: If you decide to return to Erbil, what will be the parliaments priorities? Sadiq: The first priority is finding a way to negotiate with Baghdad to deal with the problems and salaries of the public servants of Kurdistan. The second priority is bringing more transparency to Kurdistan and enforcing parliaments local observation role. The third priority is passing several draft laws associated with the life of our people, including a bill for social insurance, and several other draft laws related to the life of the people of Kurdistan but a review and an investigation into all that has happened in the past also needs to be on parliaments agenda. Al-Monitor: In the period of parliament suspension, the KRG headed by Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani made several financial decisions such as decreasing salaries of state employees. To what extent are these measures legal? Sadiq: All salaries of the people of Kurdistan, including civil, military and pensions, are regulated by law. And according to the law, the government cannot amend them in any way. All those measures that were taken in the past, including decreasing salaries, and all those taxes and customs that were increased by law, are illegal deeds. Currently, the KRG is in debt to its citizens; these debts should be fixed by the government in order to repay our citizens. Al-Monitor: Baghdad has cut the Kurdistan budget from 17% to about 13%, in addition to a variety of other punitive measures after the referendum. What is your and your party's stance on this? Do you plan to challenge these measures, and if so, how? Sadiq: The Movement for Change has members in the Kurdistan parliament and in the Iraqi Council of Representatives, which are working on these issues. The budget must be divided according to the Iraqi Constitution. Article 121, Item 3 of this constitution guarantees that the Iraqi federal government allocate a budget for the regions suitable to their works, needs, activities and the ratio of their populations. Therefore, we will discuss this issue with Baghdad according to the above-mentioned criteria. Al-Monitor: So, would you agree with the 13% portion of the Iraqi budget? Sadiq: Distributing the budget according to the population is a key, but the needs of Kurdistan are important as well. No population census has been made in Iraq, and Iraqs population is unknown. Thus, it is better we continue with the other past agreement, which is the 17% portion of Iraqs budget, until a population count can be made in Iraq. But we in the Kurdistan parliament and the Iraqi government should also confirm that total transparency in spending the incomes be brought about. I am fully with the Iraqi governments steps for carrying out transparency in Kurdistan as well as in Iraq itself, but reducing civilians income is an unsuitable action that must be corrected. Al-Monitor: What is your position on the Sept. 25 Kurdish referendum? Can Kurds use the results of the referendum as a document to declare their own state, or do you think now that the results of the referendum should be annulled? Sadiq: The referendum indeed has brought us many complications and led us to the current crisis. If the referendum had not been held, conditions in the Kurdistan Region and the disputed areas might not have deteriorated, and we could have better negotiated with the Iraqi government in a position of power; hence, the international community could have further supported us. As for nullifying the referendum results, I do not have any comment. Since the beginning of the referendums process, I was not a participant, because I knew it would cost the region. Al-Monitor: According to your perspective, when and how can an independent Kurdish state be established? Sadiq: To create a state, you need to build a powerful economy; you need to establish a systematic system of governance. You need an effective judicial authority, and you need one regular armed force within which no figure or party can have a role. You should internally build the states fundamentals, even if you would not declare independence, the international community will deal with you as a state. States are built internally, not from the outside. Al-Monitor: What is your opinion on neighboring countries interfering in the region? How can the Kurdistan Region have balanced relationships with neighboring countries Iran and Turkey in particular? Sadiq: We first need to reorganize our own affairs at home in order to reduce foreign interference in the Kurdistan Region. We as the Kurdistan Region need to have very good relations with all the neighboring countries; in addition, we need to re-establish good relations with the Iraqi federal government. On the international level, we also need good relations with all neighboring countries and all of our friends especially the United States, which was a key supporter of us in the fight against IS. The United States and Iran have a big conflict in the areas, but both countries were big supporters of us in the first days of the IS attacks on areas near Erbil; thus, we should keep our friendly relations with all countries. Al-Monitor: How do you describe the agreements that the KRG signed with Rosneft the state-owned Russian oil company for investment in the regions oil and gas sector, without having consulted parliament? Sadiq: The KRG signed those contracts with Rosneft at a time when the Kurdistan parliament was suspended. Thus, those agreements and contracts are under serious question. Hence, the contracts should be examined by the Kurdistan parliament first and then come into effect. Al-Monitor: Kurdish opposition demanded the formation of a transitional government to replace the current KRG. What is your view on the transitional period? Sadiq: We need a transitional period until the next election is held. This transitional period may need a transitional government, but a transitional government, or reshuffling the current KRG government, needs a settlement between the political parties. We need an internal revision before starting negotiations. We cannot negotiate with Baghdad with the same old mechanisms since it has disadvantages for the region rather than being in our interests. December 4, 2017 Over the past few days, media outlets have been claiming that President Donald Trump is about to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. These and other reports generated an immediate Palestinian reaction, and a senior delegation was dispatched to Washington on Dec. 2 to campaign against such American intentions. But already 24 hours after Director of Palestinian Intelligence Majid Faraj landed in Washington, Ramallah started receiving tentative signs of the crisis calming, at least partially. While Trump has not retracted his decision to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel, Faraj understood from his counterparts in the American capital that the decision is not final. It may not be too late to change what the Palestinians view as an unfortunate decision. A senior Palestinian source told Al-Monitor that during this past weekend (before the delegation was dispatched to Washington), it became clear to the Palestinian leadership that Trump is determined to carry out the declaration regarding the Israeli capital. However, it was also clear that Trump intends to delay the actual relocation of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to a later date. The Palestinians understood that the American president will use the embassy issue as an incentive in the diplomatic relations between Israel and the Palestinians: If the Palestinians are the recalcitrant ones, then Trump will threaten them (again) with the relocation of the American legation to Jerusalem. Indeed, on Dec. 3, the situation seemed less definitive. The presidents son-in-law, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, told the Saban Forum in Washington that Trump has not yet reached a decision regarding the recognition of Jerusalem and that he is still weighing the matter. Kushner noted that even though many correspondents say they know what the president decided, ''He's still looking at a lot of different facts, and when he makes his decision he'll be the one who wants to tell you.'' Nevertheless, Kushner did not deny reports that Trump does want to realize his election promise of relocating the US Embassy to Jerusalem, but apparently he would rather realize it later on. Faraj heard things in this vein in his meetings in Washington. According to the Palestinian sources assessment of the situation, the reason that Trump has not yet announced his recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital is due to the talks being held by his administration with Jordanian King Abdullah II, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. In fact, the information about Trumps decision to make a public statement regarding Jerusalem reached the Palestinian Authority (PA) from Trumps envoy to the Middle East, Jason Greenblatt. Similar reports were conveyed by PLO representative in Washington Husam Zomlot. According to the information received, Trump will declare Jerusalem as the capital of Israel but will delay the physical relocation of the embassy to a later date. Those in Abbas bureau understood from this that the embassy issue will be used as a diplomatic weapon against them. As aforementioned, the goal will be to encourage them to make progress in the American peace initiative that Trump will present in 2018. The information received in Ramallah last week was accompanied by American explanations and a list of reservations. For example, the Americans said that the Jerusalem-as-Israeli-capital declaration in no way abrogates the American recognition of the rights of Palestinians and Muslims everywhere to carry out their religious rituals in the city. It was also clarified that parallel to the presidents preparations for his declaration, an American team headed by National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster was examining alternatives to a declaration an alternative that would not harm new attempts to renew negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. The final decision is expected to be made by the end of December. Ever since Trump took office, his intentions of relocating the embassy to Jerusalem kept surfing up. The Palestinians for their part kept transmitting to Trumps advisers the following message: As far as Abbas is concerned, any declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and a physical relocation of the embassy would put an end to Abbas efforts to reach peace with Israel. In addition, such steps could well lead to the collapse of the PA. It was also explained to the Americans that after taking such a step, Palestinian public opinion could never be convinced that the United States is truly a fair and objective honest broker in its mediation efforts. This, in turn, would transform any diplomatic initiative of the White House into a foretold failure. From the moment Trump entered the White House, Ramallah searched for the key to the presidents heart, as Trump had never tried to hide the fact that he was a supporter of Israel. The brainstorm team established by the PA after the American elections tried and succeeded in convincing American envoys Greenblatt and Kushner (and, later on, CIA Director Mike Pompeo who befriended Faraj, his counterpart in the PA) that they should take the Palestinian position into account when making decisions that may well affect the Middle East and American interests in the region. On June 1, Trump signed the waiver that delays for six months any plans to relocate the US Embassy to Jerusalem exactly what previous US presidents have done over the years. The explanation given then for this decision was that Trump wanted to give peace a chance between the sides and that his decision serves American interests. In addition, the American administration was also concerned then, as now, that recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel may well lead to threats on US embassies throughout the Arab world that would endanger the American diplomats serving in them. The six-month period from the signing of the waiver expired on Dec. 1, with a new waiver expected to be signed shortly. Still, half a year later, the Palestinians understand that Washingtons policy toward Jerusalem has changed. The Palestinian source who spoke with Al-Monitor explained that the information on the subject that reached Ramallah was worrisome enough to cause us to quickly send Majid Faraj to Washington. It is not clear if it was Faraj who convinced the Americans to think twice about Trumps planned step. However, the words uttered by McMaster in a Dec. 3 interview on the Fox network served to calm things down somewhat in Ramallah. According to McMaster, no decision had been made yet regarding the embassy relocation, and in addition, Trump had not even made a final decision to declare Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Still, judging by past experience, the Palestinians know that the president changes his mind every few months. And so they know that they must continue staying on high alert. December 4, 2017 The five-month Jordanian-Israeli diplomatic crisis could be claiming a major multimillion-dollar regional water project as its latest victim as both countries remain deadlocked over a July 23 incident, when an Israeli Embassy guard in Amman shot and killed two Jordanian citizens. According to Al-Ghad newspaper on Nov. 27, Jordans Minister of Water and Irrigation Hazim el-Nasser had sent a letter to his Israeli counterpart asking for an official answer as to whether Israel was still committed to a joint agreement for the construction of a pipeline transferring water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. The paper said Jordan wanted an answer before the end of the year. But it also added that secret talks were underway between Israel and Jordan over implementing the first phase of the plan, scheduled to begin next year. The Jordanian move came in the wake of reports in the Israeli media claiming that Israel had informed the Jordanian side that it would freeze work on the project until its embassy in Amman is reopened and Ambassador Einat Schlein and her staff were permitted to return to their posts. But on Nov. 30, Reuters quoted a Jordanian official source as saying that the embassy will remain closed until legal procedures are taken against the Israeli guard accused of killing two Jordanians. King Abdullah had insisted on numerous occasions that the Israeli Embassy in Amman will remain closed until the Israeli guard is put on trial. Israel has refused to take legal action against Ziv Moyal, who claims that he had acted in self-defense. Jordan has rejected his claim and demanded that Israel initiate an investigation and put Moyal on trial. It also called on Israel to replace the Israeli ambassador. In addition, Jordan wants Israel to make a public apology and pay compensations to the families of the slain Jordanians. And on Dec. 1, Al-Ghad reported that Jordan had added an extra condition concerning the fate of an unknown number of Jordanian citizens detained by Israel. On Nov. 29, Reuters reported that Israel was looking to replace its ambassador to Jordan. The move was seen as an attempt by Israel to defuse the crisis, which Jordan has reportedly ignored. Meanwhile, the future of the $900 million Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance Project, which was agreed upon by Jordan and Israel in February 2015, remains in the balance. The project, which will produce power to desalinate seawater, involves Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but is of strategic importance to water-starved Jordan. Since the diplomatic crisis with Israel erupted, there have been reports that Jordan was ready to execute the project on its own. But that would create financial and political challenges for the kingdom. Former Jordanian Water and Irrigation Minister Raed Abu Saud, who was involved in drafting the feasibility studies for the project, told Al-Monitor, We have no other choice but to go ahead with the Red Sea-Dead Sea pipeline because of the kingdoms endemic water shortages. He said Jordan cannot carry out the project on its own even if it wants to. We are bound by international law and because the project runs along a common border [with Israel] and since there are no international waters separating the two sides, we need Israels approval, Abu Saud said. Abu Saud added that by the year 2022, Jordans domestic needs of drinking water will be about 1.6 billion cubic meters, of which only 1.1 billion cubic meters will be available. The rest will have to come from the Red Sea-Dead Sea pipeline, he said. He said that the project, which should have started this year and will be finished by 2030, will also save the Dead Sea whose surface area had shrunk to 600 square kilometers from about 1,000 square kilometers, mostly as a result of industrial exploitation along its shores. With both sides sticking to their positions over the embassy incident, there is little chance that normal relations will be restored in the near future. The Jordanian side risks facing public backlash if it is seen to walk back on its demand that Israel take legal measures against Moyal. But the issue goes deeper than that in the view of local observers. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government are seen to be adopting increasingly anti-Jordanian policies. Continued incursions by Jewish zealots at Al-Aqsa Mosque, where Jordan holds a special role, and provocative statements by Israeli ministers that point to Jordan as a Palestinian state have put unprecedented strain on bilateral ties. Jordans first ambassador to Israel and former Foreign Minister Marwan al-Muasher underlined the level of distrust between the kingdom and Israel when he stated in a seminar in Amman on Nov. 7, Israel today is not the same one that we had signed a peace treaty with 25 years ago. He said that Israel, both as a society and political parties, has veered to the right and is no longer interested in peace or in recognizing Palestinian rights. Former Prime Minister Taher al-Masri told Al-Monitor that Israels intransigence over the embassy incident had left the king with no option but to insist on Jordans demands. But he admitted that Jordan now finds itself in a difficult position. Five months now and there is no indication that the crisis will be resolved. But any talk about freezing the peace treaty with Israel or even terminating it is dangerous and will be costly for both sides, he said. We find ourselves stuck in a corner and there is no easy way out. Meanwhile, a prominent Jordanian commentator has raised questions about Jordans ability to unilaterally build the Red Sea-Dead Sea water project. In his Al-Ghad column on Nov. 16, political analyst Fahd al-Khitan wrote, International financing for the project was secured on the basis that it was to be a three-way undertaking and accordingly tenders were issued for the project. He warned the government that Israels withdrawal could jeopardize international financial commitments. If our government is confident that it can execute the project without Israel then it should have said so publicly and from the beginning, otherwise it should not put itself in a position where it may incur a hefty political cost, Khitan concluded. December 4, 2017 It's unclear what effect Greece's pending F-16 upgrades might have on the country's ties with Turkey, but the often-antagonistic nature of their relationship is unlikely to change much. The United States and Greece recently agreed to an upgrade of Greeces F-16s at an estimated cost of $2.4 billion, although the final price hasn't been determined. The sale includes more than 120 upgrade kits from Lockheed Martin to retrofit Greeces fourth-generation fighter jets. Greece has always been a reliable ally, and weve always been very reliable to them, US President Donald Trump declared at an Oct. 17 joint press conference on the White House lawn. At the adjacent podium, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras added that the countries' bilateral relations were at their best since World War II. Dimitris Tsarouhas, an associate professor in the department of international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, told Al-Monitor, Tsipras' visit to the US was a foreign policy success for a government that is under domestic pressure. The secured deal is one that Greece had requested for some time. Much of the reaction in Greece, however, focused on the controversial aspects of the deal. Members of Tsipras left-wing Syriza Party were shocked that the cash-strapped government would be investing billions with the United States. Creditors in Brussels were also reportedly upset, as they had not been consulted. Less attention was paid to what implications the military sale would have outside of domestic politics specifically for Turkey. The [upgrade] decision is partly motivated by Turkeys planned acquisition of the F-35 next-generation fighter from the US, as well as of the S-400 long-range air-defense system from Russia, Thanos Dokos, the director general of Athens-based ELIAMEP (Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy), told Al-Monitor. The US sale to Greece also comes on the heels of the United Kingdom's $135 million defense deal to assist the Turkish air force in developing fighter jets. Relations between Turkey and Greece have fluctuated since the Ottoman Empire. Maritime and airspace demarcations provide constant sources of tension. In 1931, Greece declared a 10-mile airspace radius, recognized by Turkey until its 1974 invasion of Cyprus. Turkey later refused to acknowledge the airspace, which extends 4 miles beyond Greeces waters. The first airspace violation occurred the following year, and violations are ongoing. Turkey cites the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) of 1948. Greece counters this point on the grounds that its 1931 border, originally recognized by Turkey, predates the ICAO. During the last few years, Turkey has been conducting frequent low-level overflights of Greek islets and islands whose sovereignty Ankara started disputing rather recently, explained Dokos. Diplomatic conflicts have persisted into 2017, most recently over the Kardak (Turkish) or Imia (Greek) islets near the Turkish coast, after the Greek deputy minister of shipping and island policy announced new plans to bring residents to the previously uninhabited islands. Turkeys political objective is to promote its claims regarding maritime zones in the Aegean. Challenging the sovereignty of inhabited islands is a highly escalatory and potentially destabilizing policy of brinkmanship, however, said Dokos. Both Turkey and Greece routinely violate each others air and maritime space. Turkish military planes fly over Greek airspace and are intercepted by the Greek military on an almost weekly basis. Citing civil aviation safety, Greece requires foreign planes entering Greek airspace to submit flight plans. Turkish military planes refuse to do so, Dokos told Al-Monitor. During one day in May, Turkey entered the disputed airspace a staggering 141 times, prompting the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs to declare it a flagrant violation of international law." "It is clear that there are forces in Turkey that do not want understanding and good neighborly relations between the two countries," the ministry said. Tsarouhas said, "[Such encounters] over the Aegean will persist for as long as there is no political settlement between the two sides." He noted, however, that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making a historic trip to Athens Dec. 7-8 as the first Turkish president to visit the country in 65 years. This indicates avenues of dialogue remain fully open thus minimizing the possibility of conflict escalation, he added. While it is in both countries interests to pursue peaceful relations, Greece's security relationship with Turkey is [also] on rocky ground due to deepening tensions between Turkey and the West, James Sawyer, a researcher at the London-based Eurasia Group, told Al-Monitor. With this F-16 upgrade, are Athens and the United States signaling to Ankara their refusal to put up with more airspace violations? Not entirely. The United States has historically taken no position on the Aegean disputes, as both Turkey and Greece are NATO allies. Sawyer noted, Turkey has also irritated ties with NATO allies by detaining foreign nationals and threatening to use hostage tactics to compel other countries to hand over suspected Gulenists. He was also quick to point out, however, that the United States and the EU Greece included are keen to maintain pragmatic ties with Turkey. Sawyer added, The EU continues to view Turkey as a vital partner in its effort to control refugee flows. Greece has likewise opposed other member states that have pushed for the EU to sever ties with Turkey, preferring instead to remain engaged. Even as the US views Turkey with growing suspicion and frustration in particular due to Turkey's unscrupulous attempts to arrest locally employed staff of the US mission in Turkey they are still looking for ways to keep the embers alive in the hopes that the relationship improves with time. And while the airspace encounters are likely to continue, Greece and Turkey perhaps feel more important things are at stake: a trio of joint projects including a border bridge, high-speed train and ferry connections; refugee migration between the two countries; and intelligence cooperation against terrorist organizations. December 4, 2017 ANKARA Seemingly contradictory statements by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and government ministers on how much money Turkey has spent on Syrian refugees are raising further question marks on an already controversial issue in the country. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the main opposition Republican Peoples Party, has turned up the pressure on Erdogan to explain in detail the $30 billion that the president says the Syrian refugees have cost Ankara. Addressing Erdogan in a speech in parliament Nov. 28, Kilicdaroglu said, Wherever you went, you said you had spent $30 billion for the Syrians. Easier said than done. We look at the Syrians and most of them are beggars or poor fellows. Some have even died from hunger. Even at the United Nations General Assembly, you spoke of spending $30 billion. I am asking you to explain [the figure]. When, where and for whom did you spend that $30 billion? In February, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu had put the Syrian refugee bill since 2011 at $25 billion. Erdogan then put the figure at $30 billion first July 8 at the G-20 summit in Hamburg and then Sept. 19 at the UN General Assembly. Similarly, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in August that Turkey had spent $30 billion for the Syrians, stressing that Turkey had the largest number of refugees in the world. In further remarks in London on Nov. 27, Yildirim said that 250,000 Syrian babies had been born in Turkey and that 600,000 Syrian children were receiving education in schools in the country. In September 2015, then-Deputy Prime Minister and government spokesman Numan Kurtulmus had put the sum spent on Syrians at $7.6 billion. According to these figures provided at different times, the bill of the Syrians swelled by more than $22 billion in two years time and $5 billion in five months time, even though the number of Syrian refugees has not seen an extraordinary increase in the past few years. The regularly updated statistics on the website of the General Directorate of Migration Management show that the total number of Syrian refugees stood at 3,320,814 as of Nov. 16, with only 228,408 of them in refugee camps and the remaining living across Turkey via their own means. The $30 billion bill suggests that Turkey has spent roughly $9,000 per Syrian. This means about $36,000 per family of four and even more for larger families with more than two children, which are typical for the refugee community. Of note, the minimum wage in Turkey is 1,400 Turkish lira ($368) per month, and millions of Turks survive on that much money. Meanwhile, Syrians have set up more than 8,000 companies in Turkey, employing close to 100,000 people, according to Vural Cakir, the head of the Human Development Foundation. In the border province of Gaziantep, for instance, those companies have come to figure prominently in the local food and clothing sectors. In short, thousands of Syrians have become contributors to the Turkish economy, paying taxes and creating jobs. According to data by the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD), which is attached to the prime ministers office, Turkey has spent $25 billion on the Syrian refugees and 510,000 Syrian children go to school in the country. AFAD is the agency that manages Turkeys aid for refugees and coordinates the spending of other institutions from their own budgets. Even AFADs figures do not match Erdogans $30 billion. Deputy Prime Minister Recep Akdag claims the bill is even higher than $30 billion. Referring to Ankaras investments and spending on public services such as health care, education and transport, he uses the argument that the Syrians, too, are using the roads built in the country. According to Ankaras calculations, Akdag says that European countries spend a daily sum of 40 euros ($47.4) per refugee, which, based on 3 million refugees, would mean 120 million euros ($142.2 million) per day. In a Nov. 29 speech, Erdogan, who had previously spoken of more than 3 million refugees, mentioned a four-fold number this time, saying, Turkey has spent $30 billion over seven years for refugees, whose total number exceeds 12 million. He offered also a breakdown of the bill: $2.3 billion spent through AFAD, municipal services worth $6 billion and $1.2 billion spent through nongovernmental organizations. The total of this breakdown amounts to $9.5 billion. So what about the remaining $20.5 billion? Erdogan said it reflected the cost of training and health care services provided within and outside [Turkeys] borders, the personnel assigned to those services and the work carried out for public order and security. According to Erdogan, the really big assistance came from the Turkish people, which did not figure in the records. Adding up all of these, we get a sum of about $30 billion [in aid] in line with international standards, he said. Yet the amount of aid provided by the Turkish people remains unknown, even though it is included in the $30 billion total. While Erdogan lauds the generosity of the Turkish people, millions of Turks receive poverty and neediness aid from the state. In a parliamentary debate on her ministrys 2018 budget last month, Family and Social Policies Minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya said the amount of government aid offered to millions of needy people would reach 38.3 billion Turkish liras (nearly $10 billion) this year, and that some 95% of the ministrys 2018 budget was allocated to welfare assistance. Kilicdaroglu appears determined to keep up the pressure on Erdogan. Arguing that $30 billion is a huge sum that would have made all Syrian refugees prosperous, he said, Yet there are Syrians who have died from hunger. If you have not [defrauded the people], you must give an account to this nation penny by penny of how you spent 30 billion in taxpayers money. The refugees, who have spread across the entire country since the Syrian war erupted in 2011, have had serious political, security, economic and social implications for Turkey. More than half a million Syrians live in Istanbul alone, while in some border provinces such as Kilis, they have outnumbered the local population. Erdogans claim of spending $30 billion on the refugees has now become the source of domestic political tensions, which appear unlikely to die down soon. Broadcom on Monday nominated 11 people who it suggested should replace Qualcomms existing board of directors, having publicly signaled the start of a hostile takeover attempt. The San Diego, California-based company harshly criticized the proposal as an attempt of pressuring its investors into agreeing to a bid that it believes severely undervalues the firm and comes with significant uncertainty. Regulatory issues attached to the proposed deal could potentially prevent it from ever being completed, Qualcomm said, adding that even if the merger was to survive antitrust scrutiny in all parts of the world, it still wouldnt be finalized for at least one more year which makes Broadcoms director nominations even more misleading and premature. The unsolicited bid launched by Broadcom last month amounts to $130 billion including $25 billion in debt and would be by far the largest tech acquisition in the history of the technology industry, albeit Qualcomms board unanimously rejected it as being too low. While Broadcom is presently said to be considering raising the bid to convince more investors to sell, its historic M&A practices suggest that even if the deal goes through, it wouldnt end up being significantly more valuable than the initial offer. The first bid was still more than enough to convince some shareholders to start putting pressure on Qualcomms board to haggle with Broadcom while simultaneously flirting with the propositioning entity. Qualcomms Monday remarks are seeking to remind investors that Broadcoms bid doesnt encompass committed financing, with the company also failing to commit itself to resolving major regulatory issues attached to the deal. The tech giant added that all of its current directors are entirely committed to acting in the best interest of investors, whereas Broadcoms nominations are just a blatant attempt of taking over Qualcomms board in order for the hostile takeover to be completed. Its currently unclear how likely is Broadcom to gain the majority of Qualcomms board seats, though investors will have a chance to (not) vote for its nominees at Qualcomms next Annual Meeting of Stockholders scheduled for March 6th. The nominees themselves were recruited by Broadcom and its investor Silver Lake, whereas the conglomerates bid still amounts to $70 per share, with $60 being meant to be paid in cash. Google has inked several deals with four different power plants to purchase 536 megawatts of combined wind power as part of its efforts to fulfill its growing energy demands, as well as intensify its commitment to renewable energy. The wind power plants set to supply energy to Google, however, have not yet started their operations, with 196 megawatts of wind power being meant to come from two power plants currently being developed by Avangrid Incorporated in South Dakota. Additionally, Google has also signed separate contracts to procure 140 megawatts of energy from a wind power plant being built by Enel SpA in Oklahoma and 200 megawatts of wind energy from a wind power project being constructed by EDF Renewable Energy in Iowa, which is set to begin operating in December 2019. Avangrid, meanwhile, will supply wind power to Google by using the energy generated from its sites in Coyote Ridge and Tatanka Ridge wind projects, with each power plant capable of producing 98 megawatts. Enel, on the other hand, will kick off operations for its 300-megawatt Red Dirt wind farm in Kingfisher and Logan counties in early 2018. No information regarding the length of Googles new energy contracts have been revealed by the company which also didnt disclose any financial details attached to the deals. The new energy sources will complement Googles other related efforts to meet its energy requirements in the future. Last July, Google said it would use Norwegian wind power to fuel at least one data center it operates in Europe starting in September of this year as part of a deal it signed with the Tellenes Wind Farm, with the wind power plant being expected to supply wind energy to Googles data center over a period of 12 years. In addition to wind power, Google also relies on solar power and invests in this form of renewable energy. In 2014, for example, Google announced a $145 million investment into an 82-megawatt solar power plant built in Kern County, California. Simultaneously, Googles parent company Alphabet is experimenting with new methods of storing renewable energy. Recently, Alphabets moonshot lab X created a technique to store a large amount of electricity generated by renewable energy sources in a relatively efficient manner. HMD Global is planning its next product even in early 2018 and will simultaneously announce the Nokia 9 and Nokia 8 (2018) come January 19th, according to recent reports from China. While the first bezel-free smartphone from the Finnish company has already been the subject of many rumors in recent months, a follow-up to the Nokia 8 hasnt been discussed until now and the claim that one is set to debut so soon after the original flagship still appears to be somewhat dubious. According to the latest report, the Nokia 8 (2018) may be a tentative name but the device is set to be localized for China as HMD is presumably seeking to seize a more significant portion of the worlds largest smartphone market. The Nokia 9 is also said to be targeted at the Far Eastern country, yet at least one of the two Android flagships will be made available on a global level, insiders claim. The two handsets will reportedly be powered by the Qualcomm-made Snapdragon 835 SoC and boast IP67-certified resistance to dust particles and water which would be an improvement on the IP54 rating of the first Nokia 8 which was only designed to resist splashes and not submersion. Neither device will sport a 3.5mm headphone jack, sources claim, without elaborating on the reasoning behind that supposed decision. If recent industry trends are any indication, HMD may have opted for the exclusion of the conventional audio port in order to make the phones even thinner than the 7.9mm thick Nokia 8. The new Nokia 8 and Nokia 9 should both boast dual-camera setups supported by dual-LED flash units and designed by Carl Zeiss. The companys supposed decision to go with the Snapdragon 835 instead of the Snapdragon 845 thats expected to be announced this month was likely motivated by its ambition to commercialize its upcoming offerings before spring, i.e. before Samsung stops buying all chips Qualcomm can manufacture and leaves some stock for the rest of the industry. If HMD is truly adamant to release two high-end Android devices as soon as January, it remains to be seen how the company is planning on differentiating them, especially since both should sport minimal bezels and 18:9 screens. HMD is also yet to bring the mid-range Nokia 7 to markets outside of China, so even if the company ends up launching new mobile offerings in the country next month, it may not be until spring that its devices start retailing around the world. By PTI: Colombo, Dec 4 (PTI) The Maldives is keen to seal a free trade agreement with China despite murmurs of disapproval from the main opposition MDP, as it will aid in economic growth in the Indian Ocean archipelago, a senior minister said today. "China is eager to sign and the Maldives has seen the opportunity for the Maldivian economy to grow with it," Mohamed Shainee, the Maldives minister of fisheries and agriculture said here. advertisement He said the Maldives has seen that arrangements like the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) have not worked well in the region. The landmark deal between the Maldives and China was rushed through parliament last week, hours after President Abdulla Yameen sought approval for its ratification. The FTA would ensure zero tariff for Maldivian fish exports to China. Maldivians would also benefit in the health care and construction industries with value addition to Chinese imports from the country. The opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) has said it is deeply concerned over the "sudden and rushed" FTA with China. "The MDP is deeply alarmed that the Yameen government is entering a trade deal that will have immense economic repercussions on the Maldivian economy," a statement said. The MDP has also urged the government to "suspend the implementation of the FTA to ensure the agreement does not place the Maldives in a geopolitically vulnerable position". On ties with India, Mohamed Sharif, the Maldivian Ambassador to Sri Lanka, said Chinas position as Maldives No 1 tourism market has taken a beating with number of tourist arrivals dropping. "We are now looking to develop India as a tourism market. We have seen an increase in the number of young Indians travelling to Maldives. Maybe we can attract Bollywood stars to the Maldives," he said. PTI CORR KUN --- ENDS --- 1. To devastate or to solve. Catalonias political landscape is still rife with bewilderment and it will be weeks before any political proposals for the new chapter that began with the parliamentary declaration of October 27 can be articulated clearly. With the main pro-independence leaders either in jail or in Brussels, it is hard to do a warts-and-all analysis about the future, and Catalan secessionist parties are sending mixed messages of either resistance or self-criticism brimming with euphemisms. In contrast, Spain is experiencing an outburst of nationalistic pride following Madrids takeover of the Catalan administration, the calling of snap elections and the imprisonment of most of the Catalan cabinet, plus grassroots leaders Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart. Despite appearances, the Spain that is represented by the PP, Ciudadanos and the PSOE is running in the Catalan elections with a message of stability based on a fiction: an artificial construct which claims that Spain can survive without changing. The states victory is uncritical and based on abuse of power. It is grounded on the premise that Catalonias need and willingness to rule itself will go away, even though it has proven to be very resilient throughout history. Spain can attempt to restore a modicum of normality, but it is facing a historic hurdle that will force it to choose between devastating or solving, to quote the leader of the Basque Nationalist Party speaking in the Spanish parliament a few months ago. Devastating means pressing on with the humiliation of independence supporters and of an even greater majority: those who support Catalonias right to decide her future. Solving would require a political strategy to democratically rethink Spains model and its ties with Catalonia, regardless of the Catalans decision. For now, the PP, Ciudadanos and the PSOE are wallowing in their victory over Catalonias Generalitat, a triumph achieved thanks to the control provided by the States mechanisms, but they have no new political proposals. The PP is sticking to its guns in their promotion of a homogenous, uniforming Spain. Ciudadanos is after the same conservative segment of the electorate, endorsing the same tattered model, and their only nuance is a criticism of the Basque Countrys unique finance system that aims to weaken the PP and be a friendly nod to Spains underfunded Mediterranean regions. The PSCs offerings merely seek to revive Catalonias Statute and has proposed a treasury consortium which Spains socialist party put on the back burner. Seven years after the Spanish Constitutional Court struck down the Statute, the PSC suggests going back to square one. Soon we will find out whether the PP opts to solve or stays in devastation mode. It will be easy to ascertain. Now that Barcelona has been ruled out as the new headquarters of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the city will need to revive its economy and will strive to lure new investors and regain some dynamism. It also needs a joint effort to retain talent and opportunities, such as the Mobile World Capital. On this point, it will be interesting to see what Madrids first initiatives are, as well as those of the large telecom operators, such as Telefonica. The extent to which they choose to muck in to ensure the success of the Mobile World Congress will be much more revealing than any well-meaning public statement or any words spoken at a political rally. In the last few weeks Catalonia has paid a toll in terms of its reputation, but everyone realises that any stories printed in international media also affect Spain as a whole. 2. A surreal campaign. Tomorrow will see the start of the oddest campaign ever. Anything yellow has become so suspect that a group of elderly ladies arent even allowed to walk freely in Mataro and public fountains are not allowed to be lit up in that colour (1). Even worse, any word uttered by a journalist on Catalonias public broadcaster is scrutinised and their editorials are censured. The magnitude of the arbitrariness is such that we still dont know if the main candidates will be allowed to campaign and the Supreme Courts decision to release them or not has been put off until shortly before the campaign kicks off. Obviously, the judge is perfectly entitled to that, but any delay merely adds to the uncertainty of the detainees and their families, fuelling revenge by some in the news and political spheres. 3. The Catalan government in Belgium projects an unreal image of the political situation. President Puigdemont cannot avoid being encapsulated and the emotion that stems from the injustice he has experienced can fuel a message that is inconsistent with the political temperature in Catalonia. Opinion polls show it will be neck and neck between the two blocs and forming a government will require dedication and flexibility, as snap elections may not be called until after a year following December 21. We will need responsible leaders who are able to see the big picture rather than only their followers, leaders who are limber enough to reach a viable agreement and can find the common denominator that shows us a way to break the current deadlock and gain the publics renewed trust. _________ Translators note: (1) In Catalonia yellow ribbons on peoples lapels (or larger ones displayed anywhere, for that matter) denote support for the release of the political prisoners, and Spains Electoral Board has recently ruled that it is unacceptable to hang them on public buildings because it is detrimental to the neutrality of the administration ahead of the December 21 polls. Rajnath Singh scheduled to hold a meeting in West Bengal on border security with chief ministers of five states, sharing their borders with Bangladesh. By Romita Datta Sengupta: With union home minister Rajnath Singh scheduled to hold a meeting in West Bengal on border security with chief ministers of five states, sharing their borders with Bangladesh, Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee like a perfect hostess is not crossing swords with the Centre, even though the state is supposed to get Rs 13,000 crore on account of various centrally sponsored schemes. advertisement Banerjee has always had maintained a good relation with Singh. So his coming to Bengal and holding such an important meeting in Bengal has acquired a different dimension. The meeting is scheduled on December 7th. After a long administrative meeting at the state headquarters at Nabanna, Banerjee said that central fund for schemes such as MNREGA, National Rural Livelihood Mission, drinking water and national disaster are pending. However, she said nothing about taking up these cases with the Centre. The caustic barbs were missing. The chief minister also said nothing as to what would the state's next course of action-- whether the Parliament would see stormy debate from the Trinamool Congress MPs or if she would take it up with Mr Singh. Banerjee is careful not to hurt her guests or kick up a row on the eve of Rajnath's visit. West Bengal is the only state which has not got any financial assistance from the Centre on account of flood. Though the government is aggrieved about this, it will not raise the issue at the union home Minister's meeting. With the BJP raising a strong anti-Trinamool Congress pitch, Rajnath Singh and Banerjee's meeting is likely to dampen the spirit of the saffron party. However, Mamata is keeping the windows of rapprochement open, in case the secular front fails to materialise. A week ago at India Today Conclave East Mamata said that she maintains good relation with some people in BJP, not all. Rajnath Singh happens to be one with who Banerjee had been through thick and thin. --- ENDS --- AMG Not that we're complaining, though. There are plenty of rivalries in the automotive industry, but none is more fiercely fought - especially among the three brands' fans - than that between the three premium German carmakers. Though, despite having more than decent performance, Audi might feel like the third wheel occasionally.The war has waged for a long time and, after numerous clashes, one side seemed to settle for "sportiness" while the other conquered "luxury," and even though they both would venture into the other one's territory now and then, the spoils seemed to be distributed among the belligerents.Last year, though, Mercedes-came up with the E63 S sedan. The Affalterbach company appeared to have mistuned the sedan since it offered much better performance than the aging BMW M5, and so the non-aggression truce appeared to be broken.BMW fought back with the 2018 M5 , the sporty version of its recently-launched sedan. It had a larger engine than the AMG - 4.4-liter as opposed to 4.0-liter) but made less power (600 hp vs. 612 hp). It also came, for the first time, with an all-wheel-drive system, meaning it could now accelerate quicker off the line than the previous model.And yet, despite these differences, the two are perfectly matched on paper when it comes to reaching the 62 mph (100 km/h) benchmark: 3.4 seconds. Taking full advantage of having tested the AMG E63 S recently, Matt from carwow decided to see which was faster the second he got his hands on the new BMW M5.Well, we're really dying over here to spill the beans, but you should really watch the clip. The acceleration run is featured early on so you can skip the rest if you like, though we wouldn't recommend it since you'll be missing a nice and quick review of the Bavarian. Oh, and just so you know what the times to beat were: 3.2 seconds for the 60 mph mark and 11.2 seconds for the standing quarter. AMG SUV With brands such as Porsche and Bentley having educated consumers in terms of such logos being places on SUVs, the newcomer is no longer a source of controversy, with the only such aspect being tied to its interior (more on this below).The road to the showroom hasn't seen the Urus losing any of its Lamborghini charm. Nevertheless, the front end has become a bit more complicated, as the concept simply appeared to be a high-riding supercar when viewed from this angle.Overall, the car is slightly larger and rounder, while its rear end appears to be a tad more generous.The posterior of the Urus seems even more Sant'Agata Bolognese than the otherwise spectacular front end, with the aggressive compact rear window being mixed with full-width taillights.And if you think that the 2019 Porsche Cayenne , which shares its platform with the Urus, the second-generation Audi Q7 and the Bentley Bentayga, looks sporty, the Lambo is here to change that.The Urus promises to mix its coupe-ish roofline with the kind of rear passenger headroom that could make machines such as the BMW X6 M or the Mercedes-GLE63 Coupe jealous.Generous cabin and visibility (at least for a Raging Bull) aside, the Audi bits are obvious inside the Urus. Nevertheless, when you have a melange involving the new A8's all-intelligent infotainment system and a center console packing Lamborghini's usual visual drama, there's not that much to complain about.As for the seating, the driver and front passenger enjoy 12-way adjustable power seats, with 18-way adjustable seats as an option. The Italians went all the way in their quest for practicality, so the rear passengers don't have to stick to the pair of seats shown on the flashy press car - a three-seat bench is also available.Got stuff to haul? The Urus doesn't share the wealthy-people-only-travel-with-their-credit-cards attitude displayed by its range mates. Instead, its luggage compartment can swallow 616 liters of your goodies.As announced, the engine compartment of the Lamborghini Urus is occupied by the twin-turbo 4.0-liter V8 we've met on various Audi, Bentley and Porsche models.Packing 650 hp at 6,800 rpm and 627 lb-ft (850 Nm) of twist between 2,240 and 4,500 rpm, the Urus delivers the kind of effortless torque required for offroading.The scale footprint of the Urus might not be fit for a vicious animal, but this Lamborghini must stop like one. And it does. Thanks to carbon ceramic brakes measuring 440x40mm up front and 370x30mm at the rear, this Lamborghini can play the 62-0 mph game in 33.7 meters.Lamborghini's go-anywhere machine packs adaptive air suspension, which allows the ride height to go from 158 to 248 mm. While adaptive dampers and electromechanical roll stabilization are also on the menu, the wheel lineup goes from 21 to 23 inches. The rims are shod in Pirelli rubber that thas been tailored to this application.Of course, everybody wants to know about its on-road numbers, so here we go: channeled though an eight-speed automatic, the said output allows the 2.2-ton Urus to play the 0 to 62 mph/100 kph game in 3.6 seconds. And yes, that does sit above the sprinting number of the Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk (the Hellcat-izedneeds 3.6s for the 0 to 60 mph/96 kph sprint). The hierarchy is also maintained when it comes to the top speed. In fact, the 190 mph/306 kph maximum velocity (180 mph/290 kph for the $86,995 Jeep) makes the Urus the world's fastest SUV.Oh, and we can also expect Lamborghini to grab the Nurburgring SUV record, which currently sits with the 510 hp Alfa Romeo Stelvio Q, which needs 7:51.7 for the job (two of the press photos seems to portray the Urus attacking the Carousel). For one thing, Lamborghini R&D boss Maurizio Reggiani has talked about the planned Ring dominance of the Italian SUV.For now, all the handling chat we can engage in has to do with the four-wheel-drive system of the Urus. The standard torque split sits at 40/60 (front:rear), but the system can send up to 70 percent of the torque to the front wheels and 87 percent to the rear. Note that the rear diff involves active torque vectoring.And, as is the case with the Aventador Superveloce and the Aventador S, the Urus packs rear-wheel steering.The first Lamborghini Urus customers will take delivery of their all-wheel-drive behemoths in spring next year. Speaking of which, the SUV will see Lamborghini doubling its annual sales volume to 7,000 cars by 2019.When it comes to the financial side, the Urus comes with a starting price of $200,000 (taxes excluded) or EUR 171,429 (plus taxes). So yes, justifying that Huracan purchase, which requires a heftier budget, has just become even more difficult.However, there's no need to worry about coming across an Urus just like yours while waiting for the traffic lights to turn green. And that's because, not least thanks to the Ad Personam customisation program, configuring one of these SUVs will be quite an adventure. In fact, as you can notice in the press images, the carmaker shows two faces of the Urus - the yellow car is here for the extroverts, while the grey machine packs more black-out elements, catering to the needs of those who aren't all that in love with attention. We are excited to announce our most extreme road going model to date; the race-inspired Aero GT. Discover more at www.morgan-motor.co.uk/aerogt #AeroGT ic A post shared by Morgan Motor Company (@morganmotor) on Dec 4, 2017 at 3:55am PST The Malvern-based British automaker confirmed that production is limited to eight examples, all of them sold to Morgan loyalists. Every car will leave the factory with bespoke add-ons as requested by the owners, with every component aligned with the companys hand-crafted approach A great deal of emotion is invested in every decision and this experience is only enhanced by the joy of then driving such powerful and unique vehicles. The Aero GT is the ultimate ensemble of this formula, commented Steve Morris, managing director of Morgan Motor Company From the teasers, its easy to tell the Aero GT is a gloves-off approach to the Aero 8 , flaunting aggressive wing louvers and super-sticky Continental tires. A motorsport-inspired rear diffuser is also confirmed, though Morgan has yet to provide photographic evidence of the downforce-producing element.Plans for the GT stemmed during the development of the 2015 facelift of the Aero 8. And as with the 8, the GT will rely on the 4.8-liter BMW N62 free-breathing V8. Tuned to develop 367 bhp and connected to a six-speed manual transmission, Morgan's most extreme road car will thrust from naught to 100 km/h (62 mph) in 4.5 seconds, maxing out at 274 km/h (170 mph).On an ending note, The N62 will die along with the Aero 8 once all GTs are delivered to their rightful owners. Wiesmann signed a deal with BMW M for the 4.4-liter S63 twin-turbo V8 for its future models, and Morgan is likely to do the same if the company will replace its range-topping model. Case in point with the drag race we have here, which sees the Model S duking it out with a Ferrari FF Of course, since we're talking about a four-seater Maranello machine animated by a naturally aspirated V12 and an electron juice sipper, this is an apple-to-orange comparo.With that out of the way, we'll proceed to mention that this Prancing Horse has been taken down the aftermarket route, albeit only receiving light touches.To be more precise, the FF was gifted with an x-pipe that saw the cats being retires, as well as with an iPE exhaust - the Taiwan-based specialist delivers some of the loudest hardware out there, so the atmospheric 6.5-liter V12 of the FF can fully express its feelings and emotions.The Maranello machine was also gifted with a set of custom wheels, but there have more to do with grabbing attention than weight reduction.The Ludicrous Mode-gifted Tesla and the Ferrari unfortunately duked it out on the street. Nevertheless, the drivers did take the time to fight on three separate occasions, two of which saw the velocity demons going for standing starts. So yes, Launch Control shenanigans were involved, but the adventure we're talking about also included a rolling take-off.As for the number aficionados among you, the video of the speed brawl delivers all the figured you need.P.S.: Make sure to turn up the volume before reaching for that "play" button. When I was in junior high and going to Air Explorer meetings at the Des Moines Airport, I was like every other kid in our group. During breaks from the private pilot ground school, wed go into the maintenance hangars and out on the ramp to get close to the airplanes that we dreamed of someday flying. While I hungered to fly one of the growling Beech 18s or slippery-looking Learjets, the airplane that somehow seemed within the range of a possibility of someday owning and flying was the Cessna 210. There would always be at least one 210 on the ramp during those evening meetings. Id invariably walk over and look at it, standing there sleek and somewhat aloof, curved the way airplanes should be and reeking of speed and flights to places far over the horizon. Sometimes Id get to talk with one of the pilots and listen to their praise of their Centurions. Even the name was coola professional officer in the armies of ancient Rome. History I learned that the 210 had started life as pretty much a retractable Cessna 182 with a 260-HP engine. The hydraulic landing gear retracted into the fuselage, with the mains twisting 90 degrees in the process. Where some pilots made fun of the motion going on during retraction, I thought of the F4U Corsairs gear and saw elegance. I did learn that the complexity of the landing gear system meant it had to be maintained assertivelysquawks couldnt be deferred. I just took a look at the accident data on the 210 published in our sister publication Aviation Consumer and noted that gear hangups and collapses still are the source of some 12 percent of 210 accidents. Earlier 210s had an engine-driven hydraulic pump powering the gearlater Cessna switched to an electrohydraulic system that was more reliable. Still, there is only one set of hydraulic linesif a line or connection fails and the fluid is lost, there is no alternative method of extending the gear. The good news is that I could find no evidence that anyone had ever been hurt in a gear-up landing of a 210 so long as the pilot didnt shut the engine down and try to glide to the runway in hopes of saving the prop. There were fatal accidents due to that foolishnesssome pilots discovered they hadnt practiced prop-stopped glides recently and couldnt hit a runway. The Centurion was first turbocharged in 1965, boosting the airplane into the flight levels where it could hit speeds of 200 knots. Unsurprisingly, the turbocharged models outsold the normally aspirated versions two-to-one for the rest of the time the 210 was in production. The cabin was stretched to accommodate six people, first with two child seats aft and then with seats where moderate-sized adults could sit. In 1967 the 210 was the first of the Cessna singles to undergo a major airframe redesign to allow it to switch over to a cantilever wing as part of a plan Cessna had in place to go back to its roots from 1929 and build strutless airplanesCessna never put a wing strut on an airplane until the models 120 and 140 in 1945. The aerodynamic cleanup turned the 210 into a machine that would cruise an honest 170 knots at 75 percent power. The airframe redesign enlarged the cabin. As an aside, Cessna only continued the cantilever wing change through the next year when it stopped production of the 172 in favor of the 177 Cardinal. Cessna apparently misjudged the skill level of the average pilot as the 177 required more finesse to fly than the 172 and pilots crashed them all over the landscape. The 172 was reintroduced with a Cardinals engine and the 177 was bumped up into a different competitive niche by going to 180 horsepower up front. The cantilever-wing replacement for the 182, the 187which even had the then-popular T tailwas test flown but never put into production. Changes Incremental changes followedtakeoff power was boosted to 300 horsepower with max continuous being 285, gross weight and useful load continued to climb, the gear system was simplified with the removal of the aft gear doors and a 90-gallon fuel system was made standard. By the early 1970s the T210 was the only six-place single that could fill the seats with 170-pounders, fill the fuel tanks and still be under gross weight. A pressurized 210 came out in 1978. It was the poster child for eight pounds of stuff in a five-pound bag. Cramming all the needed hardware for pressurization inside the airplane was challengingcooling the engine was a big challenge. Maintenance, initially, was a nightmare. Over the years mods, including intercoolers, turned the P210 into nearly the perfect personal hotrod. Even though it wouldnt fit in a T-hangar, the Piper Malibu got some noses out of joint at Cessnait was faster than the P210. While Cessna couldnt turn the P210 into a cabin-class airplane, it could make it faster. In 1985 Cessna came out with the R model of the 210 line. It had more power, longer wings and a redesigned horizontal tail giving it the lightest pitch forces of any 210. Importantly for Cessna, it was one knot faster than the Malibu, used much less runway and fit in a T-hangar. Sadly, the bottom was falling out of general aviation and Cessna stopped producing piston-engine airplanes at the end of 1986beginning a 10-year hiatus. When piston production resumed, Cessna made the decision not to restart the 210 line. It was 1974 before I flew a 210. I was an instructor at a Cessna dealer and there was always a brand-new 210 on the line. One day the chief pilot handed me the Owners Manual for the T210 (Pilot Operating Handbooks were a couple of years in the future) and told me to read it, make sure I understood the turbocharging system and be ready to give a flight review in one in an hour. Apparently, because I had a fair amount of time in 182s and 206s, the chief pilot figured I could fly a 210. He was right; there was not much of a transition other than the gear and learning the speeds and turbocharging system. Turbo The turbocharging system confused me at first until one of the charter pilots walked me through it. From a pilots standpoint its dirt simpleyou set the manifold pressure and RPM you want and the system keeps it there. So long as the engine oil is warm and everything is working, the system automatically sets the manifold pressure and fuel flow at redline when you firewall the throttle on takeoff and holds the selected manifold pressure as you climb. Simplified, the system monitors the manifold pressure and uses engine oil to control the wastegate that controls the ratio of exhaust gas that goes out the tailpipe versus through the turbosupercharger. On the first takeoff on a cool day, the pilot does have to monitor manifold pressure and fuel flow as the engine oil may be too sluggish to flow as needed to prevent the wastegate from routing too much air into the turbo and the manifold pressure and fuel flow will go over redline. The solution is to simply stop pushing the throttle forward when redline is reached. As I went through the Owners Manual I ran some sample weight and balance calculations and was impressed that I could carry a full load of 170-poundershey, I was a starving college student as were my friends and none of us weighed more than that. Even more important, baggage could be carried aft of the rear seats even with passengers in the fifth and sixth seats. In later years, when I flew the six-place Beech 36 series, the Piper Lance and Saratoga and Malibu, I was frustrated at the limited c.g. range of those airplanes. They were difficult to load with six people without going out the aft c.g. limit. It was about then that I learned that the 210 had the longest c.g. range of any six-place single. The tradeoff was that to get that range, the control system required a downspring arrangement that made the airplane heavy in pitch, much like the Cessna 206. With a forward c.g., it required making sure to pull as hard as necessary to get the nose up on landing to avoid touching down on the nosewheel. After I gave that flight review, I started flying the FBOs 210s with some regularity and the initial attraction Id had for the airplane turned into true affection. Because of the FBOs T210, my parents could afford to take their three children to my grandmothers funeral in southeastern Georgiathey could not afford five airline tickets. Load Carrier Being broke college kids, the 210 was the ideal airplane for us for the annual day trip from Des Moines to Oshkosh. Splitting the aircraft rental six ways was cheaper than the four-way split of any of the other rentals we had access to and, besides, the 210 went like stink, so we didnt put that much time on it. About that time I started flying Bonanzasairplanes I like a lotbut I discovered I dont fit well. At 64 tall, there isnt enough head and legroom for comfort. The man who pulled Cessna out of bankruptcy in 1934, Dwayne Wallace, and who ran the company for the next 40 years, was also 64 tall, so he had to fit into all of the airplanes Cessna built. Thank you Dwayne for making sure I could fit comfortably in the 210. When I worked for Cessna, the employees flying club always had two or three T210s that were rented wet, with oxygen, for prices that reflected the fact that the club was subsidized by the companyit was wonderful. Splitting the rental five or six ways meant a weekend trip to a coast wasnt unreasonable. One time five of us departed from Wichita on a Thursday evening and flew all night to time our arrival at Customs on Treasure Caye, Bahamas, when it opened on Friday. We had three days on the beach, then flew all night Sunday and went to work a little bleary-eyed on Monday. With three of the five occupants of the airplane pilots, we could trade off the flying and get some sleep. Ownership Over the next 20 years I had the chance to fly various models of the 210 and P210 from time to timeand kept saying to myself that I would find a way to own one someday. Seven years ago I finally had the chance to become a 210 ownerwell, the owner of a quarter of the corporation that owned a 1973 T210L. Based at Denvers Centennial airport, it had been beautifully maintained, with updated avionics, recent paint and interior and co-owners that recognized that its not cheap to own and operate a 210so they had set up an ownership agreement that made sure there was money on hand to take care of unexpected maintenance costs. I particularly liked that they had never had to do a special assessment on the shareholders to cover an upgrade or heavy maintenance hit. And, yes, a carefully done annual on a T210 is probably going to be in the $5000 range. The engine was some 150 hours past TBO, which was the way I prefer to buy airplanes. You essentially get free engine time and then have control of how the overhaul is done. My initial long trip in N76BLwhich we just called Bravo Limawas not auspicious. The engine kept throwing the alternator belt. Once at our destination in California my wife and I played tourist and bought a lot of things to bring home with usafter all, it was just the two of us in that big airplane. I also had things checked at the local FBO, which assured me that all was well. I did some research and found that a symptom of worn out and locked-up crankshaft counterweights is that the engine will vibrate in an unusual fashionnot noticeable to the occupantsand throw the alternator belt. The engine may then seize. On the first leg home, the alternator belt left the premises as I was starting the climb to clear the Sierras. I diverted into Sacramento and, after discussions with my co-owners, decided that my wife and I would airline home (we shipped a lot of boxes) and that it was time for the engine overhaul. We made the decision to have Mike Buschs Savvy Aircraft Maintenance Management company manage the engine overhaulone of the smartest things wed ever done. The engine was pulled, shipped to Powermaster in Tulsa, Oklahoma, overhauled (the crankshaft counterweights were in bad shapeI saw them later), returned, reinstalled and tested. Co-owner Dan Travis flew Bravo Lima home without a problem. It Keeps Getting Better Since then, my affection for the 210 did nothing but deepen. Other co-owners Garry Schubert and Rod Eisenbraun turned out to share a desire for dispatch reliability of our airplane, so Dan Travis acted as maintenance managergetting squawks repaired immediately. We came to socialize together, one of the advantages of airplane group ownership. We even threw a 40th birthday party for Bravo Lima in its hangar. My daughter spent some time living in rural areas of a number of states as she pursued a career around horsesthe 210 proved to be an ideal way to visit her because there was always a general aviation airport nearby and taking the airlines would have taken time that we might not have been able to take off work. My mother also liked the 210 because it meant my wife and I (and later, our dog) could visit her on short notice. She generally thought airplanes were pretty good thingsher sister had learned to fly before WWII. Mom joined the Navy in WWII, becoming a member of the WAVES. She married my father, a naval aviator, the day he received his wings of gold. It always made me incredibly proud when Id be with themand later just herat functions where veterans were asked to stand up and be recognized, and they would stand up. Because of her knowledge of airplanes and pilotsher sisters son learned to flywhen my brother and I said we wanted to learn to fly, she didnt stand in our way as did the parents of so many of my friends who said they wanted to fly. With well over six hours endurance when flown lean of peak, Bravo Lima became my seven league boots. As an aside, with little wing dihedral, its essential that the airplane be level when fueled or it may not be possible to fill the tanks. Ive normally run the engine LOP at 13.5 GPH and cruise speed has ranged from 160 knots at 10,000 feet to nearly 200 at FL230. Each summer I would fly it to Michigan to unite with friends and my daughter to fly seaplanes. My daughter and I, and one or two others, would then fly to Oshkosh, where we reveled in the excitement of the arrival. The maneuverability and speed range of the 210 made the arrival less hectic. When IFR, we could blast along at nearly any speed ATC needed and then, because gear speed is usually above cruise speed, throw the Firestones out as speed brakes, along with approach flaps, and slow to a crawl in no time. A low stall speed and the ability to fly short final at 70 to 75 knots meant it was a piece of cake to land on whatever dot the controller wantedeven if he or she suddenly changed the dot as we were going into the flare. The cabin became a place of delight. It took my wife and me over some of the most beautiful scenery in the west. I reveled in the reactions of passengers to the outside view. A French air force pilot who rode to Oshkosh with my daughter and me expressed utter astonishment as the airport came into view. She grabbed the back of my daughters seat and exclaimed, I dont think there are that many airplanes in all of France! The 210 proved the ideal vehicle for LightHawk flights in support of conservation. Researchers and activists working on projects supporting our natural resources had a clear, unobstructed view of the world. I did discover that when doing turns around a point at 15,500 feet, looking for sites for some remote sensing stations on the top of a New Mexico mountain, that the true airspeed involved means youve got to allow a lot of room to get turned around. Because the 210 is so solid and stable and theres no speed limit on opening the cabin windows, its an excellent photo platform. It also has an excellent heater. Recently I was flying researchers who needed to open the window for photos at 14,500 feet just east of Colorados Mount Evans. Everyone in the cabin was comfortable, although the photographer had the window open all the way so that she could hang out in the slipstream to get the shots she needed. She said she was chilly. On weekend mornings the 210 proved to be a fun machine for breakfast runs or simply staying in the pattern for a few touch and goes. It is not a particularly easy airplane to land welland coming into the flare at anything over 80 knots means it will float, even with full flaps. That makes it a challenge to try to roll it on. When light, the power means the airplane will climb like crazy, so by flying a very tight pattern, you can get in a lot of touch and goes in a half houra nice way to recharge your personal batteries. Its probably both cheaper than therapy and more effective. Were On Our Way, Mom In the last few years, I found that I was primarily using the 210 to visit my mother. A 3.5-hour flight beat a 12-hour drive all hollow. It meant we could take our dog, something that delighted Mom. A year ago, her health started to deteriorate. We made our last flight to see her early this year. We got word that she had taken a turn downward, but we hadnt realized how fast things were going. Even with the speed of the 210, she was unresponsive by the time we arrived at the hospice. She almost made her 94th birthday. My wife and I are soon to move further west. In one of the hardest decisions I ever made, I put my share of Bravo Lima on the market. If I could afford it, Id buy the airplane outright and keep the joy and memories going. Im hoping that Ill someday again fly a 210 regularly. After all, its only been 43 years. Im just getting to know those wonderful machines. Machine? No way, its a part of the family. Rick Durden is a CFII, holds and ATP with type ratings in the Douglas DC-3 and Cessna Citation and is the author of The Thinking Pilots Flight Manual or, How to Survive Flying Little Airplanes and Have a Ball Doing It, Vols. 1 & 2. Introduction: Boffi is a company focused on high-end design kitchens, with a strong component of craftsmanship and customization. In more than 80 years in the business, Boffi has become one of the most iconic Italian design brands in the world, attracting an increasingly sophisticated and attentive audience, including internationally renowned architects such as Zaha Hadid. Our Challenge: Transform boffi.com into a brand platform that can convey the world of excellence that Boffi represents: its products, its stories, its initiatives and its projects. The website is the strategic media for marketing and business development activities to gather and distribute the right content to the right audience, through a modern and functional graphical interface that reflects the innovation and design values that define its brand identity. RWD interface Concept: A global platform, with a tailored experience. Every aspect of the project, from information architecture to technological development, has been designed to provide a valuable experience for different targets. The system offers adaptive content based on the geographic location of the user with the aim of offering a seamless experience between global content and a custom conversion funnel, generating lead to the sales network. Technical Approach: The project was developed as a Single Page Application to provide a smooth and seamless experience. We took particular care of in-view parallax effects, animations and page transitions, to increase the flow from the overviews to the insights and vice versa. A modular and compact system of JSON-driven components was created for easy and fast instantiation, taking advantage of flex-box layout model at CSS level and ES6 Class inheritance on the JavaScript side. To specifically fit our needs, we created a custom-made, minimal JS-ES.next framework to manage core and abstract functionalities such as: Data fetching; Routing; Templating Views rendering; Transitions; Components instantiation; Inter-communication; Disposal; Due to the fact that the majority of the content is images we invested a good amount of time in enhancing the HTML